{
  "exported": "2026-07-19T01:49:22.436Z",
  "count": 935,
  "sources": [
    "substack",
    "gablog",
    "book",
    "pdf",
    "reddit",
    "twitter"
  ],
  "posts": [
    {
      "slug": "desecration",
      "title": "Desecration",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I assume none of us Generative Anthropologists would assert that the “Jersey Girls” are enjoying to an unprecedented degree their husbands’ deaths; or, to take an earlier example, that Timothy Mc Veigh should have targeted the New York Times building. However, a rather prominent Generative Anthropologist did characterize the 2004 Presidential election as a contest between two religions: on the one hand, Evangelical Christianity; on the other hand, the religion of White Guilt. In that case, shouldn’t Ann Coulter’s insight that modern liberalism is in fact a religion, with its dogmas, its rites, its saints, its doctrine of infallibility, etc., not to mention her fearless broaching of decadent liberalism’s reliance upon generating new forms of victimary status (even the poor John Kerry, “swiftboated” mercilessly, is a kind of victim, whose testimony attains a kind of infallibility as the Republicans continue to “swiftboat” others), make her, at least, an honorary Generative Anthropologist? In fact, isn’t she doing fieldwork?\n\nCoulter’s contribution to GA might be to remind us of the continued presence (indeed, the ineradicability) of the sacred–if we don’t explicitly acknowledge it, it will simply continue to morph into heretical and self-denying forms. Even more, though, she reminds us modern rationalists that the real way to fight a religion is not to “argue” with it or provide a more plausible view of the world; far more effective is acts of sustained and egregious desecration. Once you break the most solemn taboo, and nothing happens, what’s left? If you call the victim’s bluff (ultimately, the victim of normative American Christian, national culture), and hordes of suburban Mc Carthyite lynch mobs don’t descend on the homes of gay couples and “peace activists” with “Protect the Bill of Rights: Impeach Bush” signs on their lawn, the weakening of the taboo accelerates with each subsequent violation.\n\nUnless the sacrality at stake has significant reserves in the reliance upon it of crucial social institutions. All liberalism has is the resource of those who can plausibly present themselves as victims in a sustained way, and that resource is running out quickly. A few days ago, on the Today Show, a relative of one of those American soldiers brutally tortured, murdered and desecrated by terrorists in Iraq blamed the U.S. for not paying a ransom for them out of some “ransom fund” we should presumably have been accumulating out of Saddam Hussein’s former assets to distribute to terrorists world wide. I can’t imagine where he got the idea, but it certainly fit the pattern of family members of people killed in the war (Cindy Sheehan, Michael Berg, etc.) becoming walking talking points of the far left. And this was too much even for Matt Lauer. The victimary game, in other words, has become grotesque–Coulter’s timing couldn’t be better.\n\nThe only remaining question for us is whether Coulter’s practice of desecration spreads beyond her initial targets into the egalitarian precepts of the sacred center we ourselves revere. I haven’t read the book, just Chapter 1 on Townhall.com and several reviews, so I can’t really say, even though nothing I have seen or heard concerns me in that regard. It seems to me that part of her purpose is to test conservatives as well–let’s see, in other words, who seeks to dissociate themselves, who says “she makes some good points, but this is just too much!,” etc.? If you read the article by Steyn in the link in the preceding post, you can see that even he is a bit uncomfortable.\n\nIt seems to me that this provides us with a good opportunity to carry out a more minimal mode of desecration. Part of the functioning of victimary discourse is to discredit individuals by parading “outrageous” statements or “lies” that place them beyond some ill-defined “pale.” There’s nothing wrong with such pales, as long as we can explain where we put them and why, but the purpose of the victimary is to stigmatize lines of argument that would otherwise sound quite reasonable. It’s true that we shouldn’t listen to Nazis even when they make reasonable proposals about health care; the victimary exploits this by constantly testing who you can get away with calling a Nazi; and, then, once you’ve applied the label, fighting like hell to make sure it sticks and, further, is applied to anyone seeking to remove it.\n\nPart of the reason for the focus on Bush’s “lies,” for example, is to place a sticker on everything he and anyone supporting him says marked “probable lie”–if other criteria were introduced, it would complicate things. After all, invading Iraq might have been a good idea even if Bush had lied about some things. Discrediting someone from the standpoint of the self-policing norms of the media and the academy cuts off such a line of thought and kills it–the liar is simply altogether unworthy, and allowing yourself to take seriously anything they say is to become a “stooge” or “dupe.” There would be something rather “radical’ as well as “centrist” in calmly sorting out what one agrees with in Coulter’s book, what one rejects, what needs a bit more support, etc. and equally calmly rejecting all demands that one “denounce” her or place her at some “distance” from all good, civil people. For now, at least, let’s raise the standards for ritual expulsion from the public sphere and let future events guide us in adjusting those standards.\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "ga-as-the-thinking-of-the-center",
      "title": "GA as the Thinking of the Center",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Within the originary configuration, we are all located on the margin, sharing our love and resentment toward the center. The effect of the history of de-ritualization, grounded in the Judaic and then Christian revelations, with its unremitting resentment toward the “Big Man” who seizes the ritual center has, in modern democracy, accentuated the resentment at the expense of the love. There is a kind of “center” in contemporary politics, regulated (or perhaps fantasized) by insipid, inoffensive figures like David Gergen and David Broder, or, really, anyone in possession of the latest polling results. And doesn’t every political figure want to be there?\n\nThe problem, of course, is that such a center is a mirage: sitting down with two dozen polls, and choosing all of those positions claiming majority support will yield nothing but incoherence; and any attempt to put such a “center” into practice will see it instantly evaporate. As with the second term Bill Clinton’s focus on “initiatives” like school uniforms, you hedge more and more, do less and less, and hope nothing real ever happens. But some real things have happened since then.\n\nThe prevalence of white guilt as our de facto governing philosophy aggravates this situation. For white guilt, the center is the source of pollution, not sacrality; sacrality is to be found in defending the victims of the center; and the most exemplary victims of the center are precisely those driven to extremes by the extreme violence of the center. It is in confronting white guilt that we will discover what we really need: a genuine resentment on behalf of the center. For white guilt, the center is guilty until proven innocent; and, moreover, the standard of proof is so high that it can never be met: ultimately the center’s very centrality is what is most incriminating. The fact that we can’t prove all we “know” about the center is itself the most irrefutable proof of the center’s insidious and pervasive power.\n\nJust as the center is rightfully obliged to bear the burden of proof in charging individuals, so those of us on the margin should bear the burden of proof in bringing charges against the center. The most profound revolution in political affairs today, in the relation between public, media, political parties and public officials today would be the application of the simple principle that the center must also be innocent until proven guilty. We should have no other choice before we accuse an adminsitration of lying or incompetence; we should be obliged to show that we have mastered the other scenarios which might lend a different interpretation to the evidence we bring forth.\n\nGenerative Anthropology can offer the above as a piece of advice, a bit of lost wisdom which should really be second nature to citizens of a republic. Powerlessness is just as corrupting as power; bringing charges against the center is a bid for power, it should be recognized and welcomed as such, and should be encumbered with some form of accountability, just like we insist upon for elected officials. Such a principle implies a broader approach for addressing victimary discourses and white guilt. White guilt is parasitic upon assymetries in power and resources: it thrives on the assumption, manipulating our originary egalitarian intuitions, that any such assymetry can be traced back to some violence on the part of the stronger or advantaged.\n\nAnd if we search for such violence we will find it, the less visible and more subtle, the more “problematic.” Any attempt to impose reciprocity in terms of obligations and responsibility is then answered with the impossiblity of doing so as long as the extant assymetries go “unaddressed” (with what it means to “address” them defined, of course, by those at the short end of them). And the effects are devastating because the most effective way to address the asymmetries is to establish such obligations and responsibilities, no matter what our starting point is.\n\nThe way out of this logjam is simply to insist on establishing “islands” of symmetry within a broader “sea” of assymetries. Symmetries have much lower “barriers to entry” than reciprocity: even treating someone as an opponent or enemy might be a step in the right direction. The first move is attaching consequences to words and actions as closely as possible: taking people literally and calling bluffs. Since as soon as we do this, we are forced to recognize that we haven’t been doing so up until now, our second move is for us to similarly recognize ouselves in the situation we’ve created and must change. This implies finding new ways of allowing ourselves to be held responsible. We must all pay our debt to the center.\n\nSo, for example, in the current debate on illegal immigration (I think it would be more accurate to say “migration”), those in favor of a continued non-enforcement of our laws are essentially arguing in favor of lawlessness and abolishing all boundaries (not only between countries, but between different legal statuses). In that case, people who take seriously the “Reconquista” slogans brandished at some of the recent rallies opposed to the House’s proposed stringent new law are right to do so. On the other side, those on the “enforcement only” side of the debate refuse to recognize our own complicity in the situation: we could have prevented these millions of people from coming over illegally and staying if we had really wanted to.\n\nFrom a legal standpoint, the position that everyone without legal status should be refused benefits and deported when caught is unassailable; from a moral perspective, much less so. And this tension matches our (conflicting) intuitions, I believe: the very person demanding the borders be shut down and the laws enforced immediately and unconditionally will feel very differently when he sees his grocer, the young man who fixes his car, her child’s teacher, etc., handcuffed, rounded up, placed in detention centers, and sent back to a home which doesn’t really exist for that person any more. And the confusion shown by our much maligned elected officials probably reflects this conflict between (legitimate) legal/nationalistic and moral intuitions, especially since there is really no good way of articulating it right now.\n\nPerhaps it is into such conflicts between legitimate intuitions that victimary discourse steps and offers illusory answers: the center is always both too lax and too harsh. What GA, as a public philosophy, offers here is a way of articulating such conflicting intuitions, which is really a conflict between modes of sacrality, different ways of articulating the center, which have entered into competition. Let’s say that we answer the objections of the enforcement first lobby by, first, attacking the most evident brutalities produced by the current (non)system of migration: perhaps the notorious “coyotes,” who for exorbitant fees bring people over the border under dangerous and often violent conditions. Since we can only break what are in essence organized crime gangs by having their victims “flip” on these criminals and testify credibly against them, we might offer both protection and an accelerated path to legal status and citizenship for those who bravely assist us in this important task (which will simultaneously reduce the illegal migration).\n\nOn the other side, we might address the “illegals rights” lobby by providing for a “sponsorship” program whereby those employing and living alongside illegals agree to sponsor them, whether this involves testifying under oath, or before a notary public, that, to the best of one’s knowledge the said individual has been (otherwise) law abiding and a productive neighbor, student or employee; or, perhaps something more serious, such as agreeing to be “responsible” (whatever that will mean) or a “guarantee” for that person until they earn citizenship. The paperwork might be formidable, but at least those people who insist that we can’t get along without the millions of illegal residents will have a chance to put their money where their mouth is; and in the process the real solidarities that have undoubtedly been forged between illegals and citizens in many communities will be able to take more concrete and en during forms.\n\nAnd we will all be able to recognize that economic processes and mundane desires (such as for lower prices) often override our sense of citizenship, and also that such transgressions can be repaired without simply accepting the diminishment of republican virtues in a market society–things do get out of control and yet we can successfully reassert control, without indulging in the fantasy of a return to the status quo ante, with an acknowledgement of both damage done and unexpected benefits among other consequences which couldn’t have been anticipated and don’t quite fit the shape of our current moral categories.\n\nIn both cases, symmetries can grow over into reciprocities: we begin by treating criminals as criminals, or by insisting that people “own” what they are already complicit with; and then, by placing these more local systems within a broader one (the room to maneuver provided by the criminal justice system; the long history of American immigration, which has often required that some citizen or legal resident guarantee that the new immigrant be capable of supporting themself), the possiblity for more expansive reciprocities emerge. And the center is in the process strengthened: we have shown that it can bend without breaking, and perhaps a new system for bringing immigrants from everywhere will emerge from such experimentation, some way of lining up our “republican” and universalistic ‘moral’ intuitions more adequately.\n\nPerhaps this is a mere thought-experiment at this point: it would be very easy to list all the insuperable obstacles to such a proposal being heard, much less seriously considered, much less adopted. But that’s the point of a thinking of the center: we occupy the position where no one is right now (there is no constituency for the center), and which is not merely an averaging out of the various proposals. Rather, we occupy a possible center–not a Kantian categorical imperative, but a kind of center of gravity where we could show, by engaging in public dialogue (and as a demonstration of the power of originary thinking), all serious thinking, all thinking that makes an effort to disengage from immediate interests, to imaginatively inhabit the actual and possible scenes of one’s own making, must tend. We construct scenes, that is, that become “self-evident” by drawing people closer to the originary scene, which already, in a mediated sense, “touches” their own.\n\nPosted by Scenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "introductory",
      "title": "Introductory",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "By way of keeping up with the times and permitting more permanent contributions than the GA listserv: the GABlog!\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "quantity",
      "title": "Quantity",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "John O. Mc Ginnis’ “Age of the Empirical” in the new (June/July 06 http://www.policyreview.org/137/mcginnis.html ) issue of Policy Review raises some important questions for Generative Anthropology. Mc Ginnis argues that the increase in information available to social science researchers along with the greater efficacy of computing technology are getting us to the point where consensus on good policy will no longer be impeded by partisan interests:\n\nour future politics is more likely to forge consensus than that of the past, because we are on the cusp of a golden age of social science empiricism that will help bring a greater measure of agreement on the consequences of public policy. The richer stream of information generated by empirical discoveries will provide an anchor for good public policy against partisan storms and special-interest disturbances, making it harder for the political process to be manipulated by narrow interests.\n\nArguments over, say, crime prevention policy, poverty reduction, and education will no longer be “philosophical” disputes: we will actually be able to measure the effects of specific policies in ways that will ultimately be impossible to dispute on merely “principled” grounds. Mc Ginnis recognizes that there must be limits to this new empiricism–for example, there is no quantitative measure that can enable us to adjudicate between those who think a fetus is a human baby and those who think it is a clump of tissue. (Although one could imagine empirical studies determining the best way to reduce the number of abortions having significant effects on pro-life advocates.)\n\nMc Ginnis doesn’t expand the list of conflicts resistant to such an approach–he leaves foreign policy and war making, for example, completely out of the discussion. It’s not to hard to see how such approaches could be useful in these areas as well, once we find the best way of quantifying the effects we aim at: for example, changes in the rate of attacks in a particular area in Baghdad. Still, it seems clear that in some areas the new empricism will be of more local use, testing out different ways of implementing a particular policy rather than deciding upon the policy itself. And the very attempt to quantify the presumably unquantifiable, even as a thought-experiment, will often yield provocative, counter-intuitive results.\n\nWhat is even more interesting about the essay is that Mc Ginnis explicitly sees this new method as a model for conflict reduction–in terms of GA, it would be a new mode of deferral, in which we would withhold appropriation of the policy mechanism while we allow a methodological approach beyond reproach and manipulation to work itself out. One could, for example, support the experimental implementation of a policy one finds abhorent on the ground that we can be confident that its destructiveness will be proven once and for all. As Mc Ginnis explicitly affirms, the new empiricism would not, then, banish values from the public sphere: we would simply be obliged to put our values to the test, accepting a common measure between opposing values.\n\nIt would be easy to devise caricatures of this process: should, for example, we be ready to “try out” the extermination of a particular group of people since we will now be able to verify whether they were really a “virus” after all? But such irony would miss the point because, perhaps most interesting of all, Mc Ginnis’ call for a new empiricism is ultimately a policy proposal in its own right, or at least a criterion for acceptable policy proposals: since the new empiricism requires lots of information to be effective, those modes of organizing society that generate the most information are to be privileged: hence, the new empiricism favors transparency, the replacement of “committed” academic research with distinterested inquiry in the academy, decentralization and a high degree of liberty, leaving people to work things out on the ground and thereby generate lots of data.\n\nThe new empiricism, in other words, is most compatible with a Hayekian “spontaneous order,” in which everybody knows a lot more but also a lot less: we have increasing access to all kinds of information but we are all even less equipped to claim to know anywhere near enough to usurp the freedom of others.\n\nThe new empiricism, then, is highly congenial to GA; but we are still in a position to raise some important questions that probably won’t come from elsewhere. For originary thinking, form comes before “matter,” i.e., before the divisible and quantifiable. The world must be constituted before the diverse things in it can be sorted out. We might, indeed, locate the origins of social science in the sparagmos, the destruction and devouring of the central object once the originary sign has been emitted and acknowledged by the group. The object must be divided equally, and some intuition of what “my share” entails, along with the orientation toward any form of power or custom capable of enforcing the symmetry of shares, must be intrinsic to any community.\n\nThe demystifying dimension of even the most conservative social science should not surprise us, then–what could be more demystifying than the sparagmos itself, in which God turns out to be food? Think of the kind of mischievous questions which keep atheism in business: if God created the world, what, exactly, are the cockroaches for? If everything that happened is God’s will, why did he have such a profound desire for cripples? Etc. In other words, once we start to “detail” (quantify, categorize) God’s “characteristics,” we very quickly move toward farce (what material are angels’ wings made of?). These questions are not serious for GA in their literal form, but are of great interest as an originary account of a certain kind of crucial, if cynical and limited freedom of thought.\n\nFollowing the sparagmos on the originary scene is the iteration of the scene in the ritual. Social science is necessarily suspicious of ritual, or, in our de-ritualized age, habit and normalization. Social science wants to stay within the sparagmos, where we can argue about equal shares and how to determine them: the social sciences are at their best and their worst in proposing paths toward modernization precisely because modernization leads to societies which produce the kind of rationalized distribution and hence measurable quantities social scientists are comfortable with. Habits and normalization always have at least a tinge of the irrational–people adhere to customs even when they “obviously” lead to unjust distributions (and even while the same people tenaciously, and often equally irrationally from the point of their own share, insist that the existing mode of distribution be enforced to the letter), and it is extremely difficult to to do more than ridicule people in this regard. “Development” is always from customs and rituals to rationalized distribution; habits are always favored to the extent that they are signs of such a mode of distribution. (Nor do I simply oppose these assessments)\n\nBut social science is most of all suspicious of the transcendent sign itself, which is inexplicable in terms of any social scientific model of the social, a model that will inevitably be drawn from the sparagmos, where the participants on the scene are themselves “modeling” their relation to each other primarily in relation to the divisible object, ignoring while presupposing the formal sign which makes division possible in the first place. What is the centripetal force that holds society together? Faith can explain the emergence and maintenance of the more desirable habits, which in turn lead to more rational distribution, but once faith has thus served as a Ruse of Reason it might as well step off the stage. Once we know what faith is good for, why should (indeed how could) we continue to believe? That the renewal of the transcendent sign will always be incommensurable with the existent and, in the short run, counter to all the “material interests” it must defer, remains beyond the ken of the social sciences.\n\nIt would follow, then, that Mc Ginnis’ argument would hold true for those areas of social life where we find the greatest consensus regarding desirable social ends: higher standards of living, less poverty, students with higher reading and math scores, safer streets, etc. And this certainly covers a lot. His argument is most dubious when applied to those areas where our transcendent guarantees and the constitution of the community itself are at stake–most obviously, perhaps, in matters of war and peace and life and death, but also in areas of national symbolism and individual freedom.\n\nWe could take a step toward Mc Ginnis’ position and simultaneously try to render his position more minimal by searching for ways in which the “new empricism” might extend its sway over new areas of life, which is to say bring new areas of life under the emergent acceptance of spontaneous order. Can we ever really be sure in advance that any particular question is inherently resistant to quantification and measurement in some way that would be truthful and elicit general consent? Why not work under the assumption that it’s always worth trying? At the very least we will understand the dimensions of the conflict in question better by identifying precisely where and why it is thus resistant.\n\nAnd this in turn will serve to indicate where habits are entrenched because the prevailing form of the transcendent has not yet finished its work, and where such entrenchment vaguely points to emergent forms. In this way, the “new empiricism” will be not only an increasingly comprehensive and helpful method but a new sign of our desire for an enhanced consensus–enhanced both in its breadth and its depth, as we provide the social sciences with the elements of a new vocabulary.\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "darkest-just-before-the-dawn",
      "title": "Darkest Just before the Dawn?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The Mac Neil-Lehrer newshour, which I’ve watched over the years as a reasonably fair-minded program, has an interesting way of covering the recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict. They begin with one of those British reporters who must learn their craft in a mortuary–every sentence ends with a fall–showing us the latest results of Israeli destruction; bombed-out buildings, piles of rubble (today one was topped with a dusty child’s toy), interviews with homeless victims… The strongly conveyed implication is that Israel is indiscriminately bombing “innocent people” for no reason except revenge or general frustration. Then we have our Israel segment, much shorter, with perhaps a bit of destruction, but more likely some footage of soldiers preparing for battle, sitting on a tank, maybe evacuating their wounded. In short, the tough military against the helpless civilians.\n\nWell, journalism today is victimary to the core; if it bleeds (and there’s a reporter around to blame it on the US, Israel, or Mother Nature), it leads. But I was a bit taken aback by the following segment, which involved a group of specialists in the Arab media, but no one remotely connected to Israel, discussing the grave problem that, in contrast with the enlightened Middle East, the USA is getting a one-sided account of the fighting–the Israeli side. It appears that “the media” have bettter contacts in Israel than with Hezbollah and are misleading their viewers into thinking that this is just a John Wayner between the good guys and the bad guys; “nuance” is being lost. Ah, those Israeli lobbyists… And it’s nice to know that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is helping to restore the balance by its “nuanced” reporting of Israeli devastation.\n\nOn reflection, I found this little cloud was not without backlighting. If the media elite are suddenly so concerned about nuance , could it be for fear that segments of the population may be slipping away from the victimary perspective? That maybe even Democratic politicians are recalling that FDR, HST, and JFK were not pacifiists?\n\nLet’s not speak of antisemitism. The point of this reporting is to show us that all “war is hell,” but that if one comes down to cases, the winning side is perforce more warlike and therefore more hellish than the losers. This way of thinking has been instilled in the European psyche since the early postwar era; Marguerite Duras/Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour is a beautiful demonstration that the Japanese and the Germans were the real victims of WWII–because they lost. Thinking like this bears no costs when one is protected by “deterrence” that makes the hellishness of war logically inconceivable. But it wouldn’t have worked with Hitler and it’s not going to work with Ahmadinejad. Sometimes you just have to want to win, to be “more hellish” than the other guy because you’re the one with the white hat. Let’s hope that the Hamas-Hezbollah wakeup call is enough to remind us of this.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "no-elephants-around-here",
      "title": "No elephants around here!",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A columnist’s commemoration of the first anniversary of the London subway bombing:\n\nI know, I know. Some of you will be shaking your heads now, saying, “Hey, give the Republican anti-terror strategy a little credit here. After all, we haven’t had another 9/11-style attack, have we?” True. But if you think the lack of another major terrorist attack means the GOP approach to fighting terror is working, remember the old joke:\n\nA guy is throwing sawdust out the window. Another guy comes along and says, “Why are you throwing sawdust out your window?”\n\n“To keep the elephants away,” says the first guy.\n\n“But there are no elephants around here!”\n\n“See? It works!”\n\nRosa Brooks, The Los Angeles Times , July 7, 2006\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "hostages",
      "title": "Hostages",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This will be an experiment in applying originary analysis to an ongoing historical event–that is, the kind where facts undermining the very premise of your analysis might emerge before you’ve completed it; or, to put it another way, before the event is over or “sealed.”\n\nHow should we make sense of Israel’s current campaign to free Gilad Shalit, the soldier taken captive by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza? I ask because there seems to me something that doesn’t “fit” here, because I haven’t seen anyone take note of it, and because it seems to me that this event might illuminate some contemporary trends that Eric Gans has discussed in various Chronicles of Love & Resentment regarding contemporary terrorism, white guilt and the problem of asymmetry.\n\nWhat I find puzzling, at least according to reports I’ve seen so far, is that Israel’s operation seems to be neither a rescue operation nor the initiating of a full scale war on the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. A rescue operation, I assume, would be targeted and secret–it would, for example, perhaps be carried out under the guise of “negotiating,” and would therefore not be aided by this full scale assault (or the threat of one–it’s not that clear). At the same time, it doesn’t seem to be an invasion, because the assumption seems to be that if Shalit is returned unharmed, we would return to the status quo ante–that is, Israel doesn’t seem to be taking the kidnapping of one of its soldiers as a causus belli that could no longer be satisfied by anything Hamas does regarding Shalit (just as a Japanese offer to pay reparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have undone that act or seriously deflected its consequences).\n\nI haven’t seen, for example, the Israelis explicitly bringing the continual rocket assaults on Southern Israel since the withdrawal from Gaza into their justifications for entering Gaza. What it looks like to me is that Israel is using its vastly superior military might to intimidate the Hamas government into forcing the kidnappers to return Shalit unconditionally. So, the means of warfare are used to solve a hostage problem, which is hard to see as anything other than a serious mismatching of means to ends: as if the Israelis had bombarded and invaded Uganda in July 1976 to force them to release the hostages held at Entebbe, or the Americans had done the same in Iran in 1979–and then, say, after having secured the release of the hostages in the Embassy (or having failed to), had simply returned home after destroying a good portion of the country (a lot more of it if they failed to secure the release).\n\nOne could understand this approach if it were still advisable to simply, as some, like John Derbyshire of National Review like to see, bounce enough rubble to shut down whatever threat a particular weak country poses. This is the unapologetic 19th century imperialist approach: we value the life of one Westerner over your entire country; if you want to play in the big leagues by picking a fight with us, expect it to be no holds barred; and, of course, we have no expectation that you will change your morals or mode of government in the slightest, we just expect you to keep your pathologies to yourself.\n\nI’m presupposing Gans’ analysis of White Guilt in this discussion: the event of Auschwitz (revealing the ultimate consequence of violations of the basic egalitarian premises of modernity), multiplied by the event of Hiroshima (intensifying beyond the possibility of human survival the implications of “Auschwitz”) and, finally, rounded off by an admittedly tendentious reading of Vietnam (even the the self-declared democratic countries are not immune to such extremes–even more, their self-understanding as the “Free World” locked in epic battle with “totalitarianism” might very well license such extremes) has become an unescapable political paradigm.\n\nThe left has redefined itself, following the fall of Communism, around the propagation of White Guilt, sustaining and seeking to extend the elaborate system of taboos it requires. And the Israeli invasion and then occupation of Lebanon in the early 80s provided the perfect opportunity to apply the template to Israel tout court, with Israeli intellectuals, always imitative epigones of their American and European colleagues, eager to advance the project.\n\nThe problem is that no diagnosis of White Guilt, however sharp and comprehensive, can exclude the diagnostician for the simple reason that all out war on the part of the West, and certainly the U.S., is, indeed, impossible. As long as we don’t obliterate our enemies with nuclear weaponry we are “holding back,” which is to say tacitly admitting the asymmetry constitutive of any contest. The incentive to present a particular kind of defiance is thereby inherent in any Western war making: the Third World “resistant” can always say, “go ahead, kill me,” knowing that any such killing is selective (we kill a very small number out of all those we could kill) and therefore tainted (since the choice of who to kill is always to some extent arbitrary, it is always possible to frame such killings as a sign of both weakness and brutality).\n\nAn instance of this paradox is in Israel’s decision to arrest the Hamas leadership itself–there was previously the policy (or, perhaps, practice) of targeted assassinations back when Hamas was merely an underground terrorist group (embodied in all kinds of above ground activities as well, of course); Israel seems to be threatening to resume that policy today, but so far they are just detaining Hamas leaders. On the one hand this may seem especially humiliating for members of what is now a “government”; on the other hand, it’s hard to see what deterrence power this entails, since once detained the leaders know they will not be mistreated, much less killed.\n\nAnd if they can be captured and detained, what justification remains for killing them? How long before calls to release them or put them on trial become an international cause celebre? And who else, aside from perhaps Israelis themselves (and not all of them by any means) would be convinced by a trial, no matter how scrupulous? They would still be widely viewed as prisoners of war, leading to more kidnappings of Israeli civilians and soldiers.\n\nThere might be one way out of this stalemate that Israel seems to be unintentionally generating, and that is indicated by the occasional hints that Syria may be held responsible for the activities of Hamas. In other words, even when dealing with suicidal terrorists, those terrorists, at some point along the way, are dependent upon the support of someone who doesn’t want to die–find that weak link and attack it relentlessly. Here, the asymmetry shows up as an advantage, but the risks involved dramatically increase. Without a sustained unity of purpose between, at least, the U.S. and Israel–a unity of purpose which has not yet taken shape and will not as long the U.S. government is still thinking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “peace process” which is crucial to the War on Terror rather than simply another front in that war–such an approach is most likely to get caught in the same tangle of cross purposes: Israel will threaten Syria, giving Syria the opportunity for some credibility enhancing “defiance,” knowing that Israel will not be able to carry through on its threats because as soon as one starts modeling possible consequences the advantages of doing so start to look vaguer and vaguer.\n\nThis seems to be a kind of degree zero of the victimary, leaving the stronger party with the equally untenable alternatives of investing unsustainable resources and moral capital in rescuing single individuals (which might not even be possible–what’s to stop his captors from simply killing him once the rescuers get close?) or initiating full scale warfare without any definition of “victory” that doesn’t simply lead you back to a status quo ante that has already been tried and rejected. (And, of course, the Palestinians are equally trapped, since a condition of this condition is that they can’t accomplish anything either, even on their own terms)\n\nAnd yet this intense focus on the fate of a single individual, so much a part of Israeli morale and morality, must nevetheless be a basis for constructing some kind of new and more adequate approach. We can assume that one consequence of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has been the loss of strenuously (and, no doubt, often, in moral terms, dubiously) constructed intelligence networks which otherwise might have facilitated the rescue of Gilad Shalit. Why not compensate for that loss by announcing that all Palestinian individuals who offer intelligence helpful to the recovery of Shalit will be granted asylum in Israel, with a chance of gaining Israeli citizenship at some point down the road–including, let’s say, immediate family members and anyone else associated with that individual who might be in danger of being murdered as a “collaborator”?\n\nLet’s see how solidly Palestinians are united behind their new, “resistant,” uncorrupt leadership. Let’s find out how much, as individuals, they genuinely hate Israel. On the Israeli side, genuine solidarity with those Arabs who have taken the side of Israel’s right to exist, and, more generally, the side of peace and democracy, would have to now be demonstrated (as, we must acknowledge, has by no means always been the case). Attention would be redirected towards the maintenance of “consensus” among the Palestinians, to the treatment of “collaborators,” and divisions within Palestinian society might open up–not towards civil war, but towards new ways of being responsible for one’s community.\n\nFor example, Palestinians with the courage to provide intelligence, or just speak openly in ways that subvert terrorist plots, might decide to reject the offer of Israeli citizenship as a way of demonstrating solidarity with a community which they would now be daring to protect them. New icons of political courage would emerge.\n\nThis approach would not exclude waging war against the Palestinians as they are currently constituted; however, it would certainly enter into strategic and tactical calculations–but perhaps in positive ways. Rather than calibrating attacks and withdrawals according to the false logic of encouraging and strengthening “moderate” negotiating partners, the calibrations would now be aimed at giving Palestinian citizens the space in which to step forward, and form relationships with Israelis that would match the various theaters of protest in which Israeli leftists and Palestinians periodically participate. And I haven’t touched on how even a trickle of such Palestinian dissidents into Israeli society might lead Israelis to think about citizenship in new ways.\n\nPerhaps not a single Palestinian will step forward. We would be back in a bad situation, back trying to figure out what form of pain could, at this point, have significant influence on either the Palestinian government or people. But we would be no worse off than we are now, and perhaps a little better, morally speaking.\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "how-the-west-was-lost",
      "title": "How the West Was Lost",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A couple of pieces from today’s LA Times :\n\n1. Rosa Brooks’ column is a good place to find an unsubtle expression of what passes for a “progressive” perspective. A few days ago, she suggested that Islamic terrorists in the US were as rare as elephants. No doubt the way the Times reports the news, that might well be true: you had to turn to page 16 to learn that the fellow who shot six people in a Seattle Jewish center was a Muslim. Today’s column, titled “Four Lessons to Make Us Safer,” deserves more than simple mockery: it expresses the same view that Kerry embodied in 2004 and that I think is representative of the foreign-policy views of the Democratic party (with the hopeful exception of Hillary C?)\n\nTo sum up: Lesson 1 is that “The weak will always seek — and find — asymmetrical methods of warfare against the strong.” She gives the example of how we defeated the Redcoats back in 177something. Thus “asymmetric” warfare is unwinnable.\n\nLesson 2, therefore, is the following:\n\nIf you can’t defeat your enemy militarily, you need to take away his motivation to fight. Overly aggressive military approaches only increase the bitterness that caused the conflict in the first place. Unless we want to become the permanent global cop in a permanent global police state, we need to change our approach.\n\nWe want peace in the Middle East? Stability in Iraq? An end to terrorist attacks? We may not achieve any of those things even in the best of circumstances. But we certainly won’t achieve them if we refuse to take seriously the idea that our enemies — like us — consider themselves good people, with legitimate grievances. Eliminate the grievances and you’re on the way to eliminating the conflict.\n\nWhen progressives say things like this, right-wing pundits immediately sneer: “What do you want us to do, sing ‘Kumbaya’ with the bad guys?” No. But you don’t have to love your enemy — or trust him further than you could throw him — to recognize the benefits of talking to him and taking his concerns seriously.\n\nThat’s not being “soft.” It’s being realistic.\n\nYes, this does sound eminently reasonable. Everyone thinks himself a “good person,” and when Jesus sat down with publicans and sinners (serial killers? death camp directors? people who saw off infidels’ heads with rusty knives?) he forbore to judge them. But what if the “sinner” knows in advance that no act of his can be held to prove he is not a “good person”? And what if his “legitimate grievance” consists of … your existence ?\n\nThere were some people like that back in 1940-something, as I recall. Brooks herself seems to be something of a fan of the Dems of those days; I quote:\n\nEven as World War II raged, an engaged and visionary U.S. president took the lead in planning the dense web of international institutions and laws that would help tamp down conflicts, spread global well-being and buttress American prosperity throughout the postwar period. Institutions such as the United Nations were never perfect, but for more than half a century they have kept our world reasonably stable.\n\nBut, as Ms. B doesn’t appear to remember, the United Nations, as conceived by FDR, didn’t sit down with the Nazis and the Japanese to discuss their “grievances.” (How much Lebensraum do you really need? How about that Asian co-prosperity sphere? And all those Jews, they are a problem, aren’t they? Come to think of it, they’re still the problem!) The UN was our side , and we demanded unconditional surrender , with no discussion of terms of any kind, let alone “grievances.” The evolution of the Democratic party is summed up rather well in the contrast between the UN as “the free world” and the UN as the whole world, which is to say, its lowest common denominator.\n\nThe conundrum Brooks poses is not, however, solvable by sarcastic references to her lack of historical perspective. What it really depends on is Lesson 1. If asymmetric war truly is unwinnable, if Hezbollah can never be disarmed by any means and will always keep firing those rockets, and bigger and bigger ones, then indeed we have to negotiate with them.\n\nBut what Ms. B seems not to have noticed is that this is tantamount to saying that we have already lost. Or does she think that it’s just Israel that has lost, and that we can talk with Hezbollah, and Ahmadinejad, and Osama b. L., and come up with a friendly solution to their “grievances”? It’s a shame Mohammed Atta and his friends blew themselves up, because they would have been just the right people to help out; English speakers, familiar with American mores, surely able to persuade us to “take their concerns seriously.”\n\n2. Just in case you thought I forgot, here is the second article . Read the link if you like; the headline says it all:\n\nIsrael Ends Gaza Raid, Leaving a Trail of Death and Destruction\n\nThis is a representative example of “news” reporting from the Middle East. The journalists who agonized over the media’s treating the Israelis as the “good guys” instead of reporting the conflict in a “nuanced” fashion should take heart from this piece. The Times is certainly making sure that Hamas’ “legitimate grievances” are getting a fair hearing.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "postmodernity-as-white-guilt-michael-haneke-s-cach-first-impressions",
      "title": "Postmodernity as White Guilt: Michael Haneke’s Caché (first impressions)",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Michael Haneke’s Caché is one of the more interesting recent French films, even more interesting if you also watch the 20-minute interview with the German filmmaker. If I had more time I’d write a Chronicle on this subject.\n\nMedia intellectual Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) finds a series of mysterious VCR tapes of his house and personal activities along with semi-childish drawings of a man with blood on his throat. (The metaphor of life as a video was a striking if easily missed feature of Haneke’s first and nastiest film, Funny Games , in which a couple of satanic young men torture and kill a family for their own amusement; at one point, the woman grabs a gun and points it at the evildoers, whereupon the film “rewinds” and rectifies the situation to the liking of its subject-author). The trail of the videos leads to Majid, an Algerian man whose farmworker parents had been killed in the bloody suppression of an FLN demonstration in Paris in 1961; Auteuil’s own parents, their employers, intended to adopt the young orphan, but Georges (if I understood the film correctly) cut the head off a chicken and blamed it on Majid, who was sent to an orphanage.\n\nGeorges visits the now grown Algerian in his HLM and accuses him of sending the harassing tapes, of which the latter claims to be totally unaware. But the next tape shows Majid weeping with frustration after Georges’ departure. We meet Majid’s son, who also denies knowledge of the tapes. Finally Majid urgently invites Georges back to his apartment and on his arrival, after swearing he had no knowledge of the tapes, cuts his own throat in front of Georges and dies. Georges steadfastly refuses to feel guilty about any of this; even if he framed the Arab boy, he was a mere six years old at the time and should not be held responsible for the other’s unhappiness.\n\nAfter the suicide, Majid’s son comes to see Georges in his office and insists on speaking with him, but we learn that his only purpose was to discover how Georges was bearing his guilt–which he continues to deny. The final scene takes place in near-darkness; Georges finally levels with his wife (played by Juliette Binoche, who with dark hair looks oddly like Catherine Zeta-Jones), then takes a couple of sleeping pills and retires to his room, shutting out all the light. This leads him to dream of the day at the family farm when Majid was taken off to the orphanage; we then cut to a long take of students exiting a lycee, in which Haneke pointed out that both Georges’ bratty son and Majid’s son were in conversation, al though I could not identify them on my TV screen.\n\nWe never learn who sent the tapes. Haneke suggested it might have been one or both of the sons. But clearly that is not compatible with the content of the film; the only possible explanation is that the filmmaker “sent” them; they are a projection of Georges’ guilt. And indeed, Haneke made clear at the outset of the interview that his film was about bearing and denying guilt. In the rest of the interview, he insistently suggested that it was up to the spectator to figure out what was going on; in the final scene, were the two boys conspiring? was the Beur leading the other astray? Was Binoche having an affair with her friend Pierre? It’s all so postmodern.\n\nYet there is one thing that is not “multicultural” or “undecidable” or “aleatory,” that is not in the film to teach us the “Nietzschean” lesson that truth is whatever we want it to be: white guilt . We don’t know where the tapes are coming from, or even why Majid commits suicide, but we know that Georges is guilty. The Algerian context is projected on the present in a news program that refers to the Iraq war; but even forgetting this overt political analogy, Georges is guilty toward the Arab world, as presumably we all are toward some group of Others. As a German, Haneke has impeccable guilt credentials of his own; the pot that calls the kettle black is well aware of its own blackness.\n\nThe German filmmaker acts as the Frenchman’s conscience. “We” are all guilty, but “we” is not everyone; guilt is not original sin, but sociopolitical domination, what I have called firstness in other contexts. The son’s utter contempt for his parents, which is very nearly par for the course in the French films I have seen recently, is a visceral moral revulsion. The hope for Europe, if there is any, is that its native sons will repudiate their guilty parents and join forces with the sons of immigrants–not exactly what happened recently in France over the CPE proposal. But purgation is a secondary matter; it’s the guilt that counts.\n\nWhence the unexpected absence of violence inflicted on Georges; even Najib’s son, a strapping fellow who could probably whip Auteuil with one hand, suggests that Georges could beat him up because he is the stronger–echoing a similar remark from his father. No burning cars here.\n\nThe intimate connection between postmodernity’s denial of “truth” and its fundamental post-Holocaust affirmation of guilt has rarely been made more explicit. As in a novel by Robbe-Grillet, we don’t know if it’s on tape or real or dreamt, but the fact that it is “there” at all is a reminder of an unambiguous event–the killing of 200 Arabs on October 17, 1961 that gives proof of Our guilt, like the bomb in Hiroshima mon amour . This sounds unhappy, and Haneke acknowleged that this is a “sad” film. But it’s really not so terrible. Georges, the allegorical representative of old Europe, winds up in a dark room, peacefully sleeping while the world goes on. When he finally wakes up, there will probably be a lot more Nabils than Georges coming out of that lycee, and they will be unlikely to express their resentment by weeping. Georges might do better to take a few more pills and not wake up at all.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-9-11-event",
      "title": "The 9/11 Event",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "If we accept the originary hypothesis we accept that, at the most basic level of analysis, there are nothing but events. Speaking of broader social processes, like the extension of the market system, is a necessary shorthand, but ultimately that “process” is nothing but a series of events that reference each other as signs. The market system hasn’t just flowed naturally from more rudimentary forms of reciprocity and sociability; we would have to be able to break it down into a series confrontations, experiments, serendipitous discoveries, seized opportunities, etc.–i.e., events, none of which were inevitable, even if the constitution of one event through its referencing of previous, “precursor” events gives that sense of inevitability. This doesn’t deny that the market system is the best mode of interaction yet discovered for recycling resentments; it just insists that it had to be discovered, and this could have only happened through a series of events which could just as easily have not taken place.\n\nThis methodological claim has a claim upon our attention now in particular because we are living in a period of intensified or compressed history, in which the “event-fulness” of reality is especially evident and the attempt to reduce reality to hypostasized abstractions especially useless. Nothing is happening now because it has to happen, because the next stage of history demands it; everything is happening because of those who are very determined to make it happen, against others determined to make something else happen; in a sense this is always the case, of course, but in compressed history the difference is that none of the agents have a clear or obvious advantage because the institutions established to meet the needs of an earlier crisis, due to the very effectiveness with which they deferred that crisis, no longer channel events in reasonably predictable directions. So, if GA is to contribute to the disclosure of the kinds of signs that will transcend the crisis which we could name the white guilt/victimary axis, this basic methodological principle must be highlighted.\n\nSo, what is an event? A minimal, formal definition: an event is an occurence which cannot be sufficiently accounted for by what has preceded it, and after which nothing can be sufficiently accounted for other than by reference to it. A break, then, which cannot be defined by what came before, while defining what comes after. And the originary scene provides us with a more “internal” or substantive definition: an event generates a sign. An event is over, is “closed,” once it issues a sign which is then iterated within other events, which either remain within the dispensation provided by that sign, or produce a new sign and therefore transcend that previous, epoch-making, event.\n\nWe have adequately analyzed an event, then, when we have located the constitutive mimetic rivalries which led to the crisis, and located them as they have been disclosed by the sign closing the event. What was held sacred by the previous prevailing sign has been disclosed as a source of murderous rivalries, leading to the discovery/invention of a new mode of sacrality, a new center, not to be touched or even approached. Of course, this analytical approach can become enormously complex. For now, it is enough to mention that the meaning of the sign issued by the event can only be gleaned or known within another event, an iterative event, in which the sign emitted in the foundational event is shown, simply, to work, to defer some crisis.\n\nWe knew that the Holocaust was the foundational event of the post-War era not on April 9, 1945, but when (to take one possibility, or one of many iterative events), American students insisted they would not be “good Germans” and fail to heed the testimony of the victims of their own system–and where, at least plausibly, were thereby instrumental in stopping a war, a war which, in turn, could have led to nuclear conflagration. (Is this a plausible account? One could only argue it one way or another within another iterative scene)\n\nI would suggest that in the case of the Holocaust the sign that “closed” the event and made it available for iteration was the emergence, first in a tiny and largely ignored trickle, and finally in the form of best sellers and Oscar winning movies, of victims’ testimony. The testinomy is what revealed something genuinely new–not the content or information it provided, but in the fact that post-War testimony maintained its continuity with attempts to “tell the world” during the War itself; as any reader of these testimonies know, part of the horror was the sense of certainty that no one knew or would ever know what was happening, that the Nazis would succeed in keeping their monstrous crimes secret, as they constantly taunted their victims would, in fact, be the case.\n\nSo, what these testimonies really said to each and every reader, over and above the usually meticulous presentation of the detailed account itself is, “where were YOU”? If the victims didn’t succeed in getting the word out, one must consider that it was also because no one out there was listening very carefully. All this could happen without ruffling the surface of our everyday existence (even, granted, a wartime, crisis existence)–our existing institutions, and our consciences, or moral antennae, must be radically deficient in some way, some way in which we can never allow them to be deficient again, because next time we ourselves might not survive (whether physically or morally can be left open).\n\nThere is, of course, another iterative event consolidating the hold of “Auschwitz” upon the postmodern world, one which complicates it considerably: the foundation of Israel and, perhaps even more importantly, the massive mobilization of world-wide Jewish solidarity in response to the threat posed by the Six Day War in 1967 (and the perceived abandonment of the Jews, once again, to their fate at that critical moment). If it weren’t for that, it would be possible to almost forget the actual identity of the Nazis’ victims–once Auschwitz becomes a frame in which all “othering” can be placed, the specific content of Nazi ideology can become interchangeable with any racializing or “denigrating” ideology–just another “Orientalism,” with the slot of victim filled in accord with the convenience and needs of the dominant groups.\n\nWith the Nazis it was the Jews, with defenders of “compulsory heterosexuality” it’s gays–what’s the difference? The constant reminder Israel represents of the age old desire to exterminate the Jews, to both usurp and erase the specific mode of deferral pioneered by the Jewish understanding of God, makes it impossible to completely de-Judaicize the Holocaust. It might not be too far to say that our present global struggles, between the White Guilt/victimary axis and what I’ll simply call, rather polemically, those of us determined to renew their stake in the West, breaks down into a struggle over the appropriation of the meaning or sign of Auschwitz.\n\n(There is, briefly, yet another series of iterative events organized around the notion of “totalitarianism,” which would articulate Auschwitz with the Gulag; I would simply suggest, though, that with the demise of Communism, the adherents of this version of the event have assimilated to one of the other positions ).\n\nPart of the project of a “public” GA should be to reconcile such equally legitimate positions: there is no reason why the insistence that “civil disobedience” be a permanent part of our democratic lexicon, signalling the ultimate responsibility each of us has for whatever passes through our “link” in the “chain of command” need contradict the centrality of the Jews to the event/sign “Auschwitz”–quite to the contrary, since the conjunction can even deepen our sense of the distinctiveness of the Judaic concept of God “as the declarative sentence.” And a heightened sense of political responsibility only becomes white guilt when the guilty and innocent parties are known a priori, which only results from a kind of mimetic contagion aimed at blurring over the distinctive features of Auschwitz by applying its terms to any asymmetry.\n\nI am now going to suggest that the event of 9/11 supersedes Auschwitz as the foundational event of the period now beginning. This, of course, requires some explanation. First, of course, I don’t mean to suggest any similarity in scale–the al-Qaeda terrorists might have wished they could kill millions of Americans, they might have reasonably hoped to have killed in the tens of thousands (which were, in fact, the initial estimates that morning); but, in fact, there is no comparison. Nor need there be–the question of a “foundational” or “dispensational” event involves an anthropological revelation of historic proportion, nothing more.\n\nNo one, for that matter, actually has to die for this to take place. Second, I don’t mean that “Auschwitz” now becomes irrelevant–we are obliged to remember and extend the ethical gains consequent upon any epochal event; even more, a new foundational event is such insofar as it includes and redirects the previous one. Just like God told the Jews to reject any prophet who tells them to change the law, we should reject any event that claims to invalidate any mode of deferral that in some way represented an ethical advance. We might, in fact, be in a position to discuss more lucidly the lessons of Auschwitz. Or, more precisely, the deferral of the deadly conflict over the sign “Auschwitz” should provide us with a more minimal version of that event in terms of the new foundation.\n\nIf the sign of Auschwitz emerges through victims’ testimonies, then the sign of 9/11 must emerge from within (or, perhaps, be telescoped by) the destiny of United Airlines Flight 93. In the plane that was downed by a passenger revolt we see the ultimate limitations of victimary discourse; we are presented with a situation in which White Guilt is utterly inapplicable. The surprise attack worked because of our lazy, white guilty accommodation to terrorism–the rules were, accede to terrorist blackmail in such situations because, first, that is the best way of keeping everyone safe (implicitly, then, hijackings are less acts of war than safety hazards); and, more profoundly and insidiously, this is simply the tax we must be ready to pay in a world where our comforts have generated so many resentments that we can’t conciliate them all.\n\nOnce word came to Flight 93 that this “compact” had been broken, a new reality was revealed: terrorism had become a conduit for a kind of resentment-for-itself, thereby removing the luxury of rewriting the past so as to speculate about a present in which one wouldn’t have to deal with such things. (If only we hadn’t overthrown that president, or given so much money to Israel, or become so dependent on oil…if only we hadn’t invaded Iraq) Civil society might be transformed into a front line at any time, and at least some of us must be ready to cofnront the terrorists’ love of death with a willingness to face death.\n\nMore simply, the revelation here is that recognizing the legitimacy of the victimary ends up feeding, rather than dissolving, it. This has nothing to do with whether or not we are to support victims–supporting victims, though, does not involve a running physical and ideological assault on the center which presumably produces them; rather, it involves calling upon representatives of the center to devise the means needed to protect victims, whether it be of crime, terrorism or tyranny, and even more, being prepared to represent that center when necessary. The question raised by “Auschwitz” was: are you, in your ethical “equipment,” someone who would relentlessly get the word out of the death camps; even more, someone who would have been attentive to signs that something unprecedented was underway; even more, someone who, if so positioned, would stop the machinery of death in its tracks, regardless of the consequences to yourself?\n\nThe question raised by “9/11” is: does your ethical composition prepare you to refuse to be a hostage by whatever means are possible; even more, to refuse to pay blackmail more generally, which is to say to refuse “standing” to any expression of a grievance which comes attached to the slightest hint that legitimate violence might come in the wake of a failure to address it to the complainant’s satisfaction? This is an extraordinarily difficult pledge to make, as we are discovering, particularly when the terrorist modus operandi is to make us liable for the fate of those they take hostage. But 9/11 teaches us that paying ransom is the beginning of an process, increasingly irreversible as it proceeds, in which our powers become weapons against us; “ransom,” of course, understood in the broadest sense of allowing our responsibility for the fate of innocents to be used to persuade us to cede control over our actions to to those who thus implicate us. If we are strong enough to be blackmailed, we are strong enough to reject it.\n\nHere is where the real relevance of our analysis comes into play. The ability and intention of terrorists to place civilians in the path of our superior means of destruction aims at intensifying the victimary “reception” of Auschwitz–it’s no coincidence that, of all people, Iranian President Ahmadinejad is now accusing the Israelis of being Nazis. “Auschwitz,” we must now first of all say, is about conscience and liberty, which require the defense of the center that the Nazis themselves tried to destroy. The Nazis wished not only to exterminate the Jews and erase the Judaic mode of deferral (conscience); they wanted to implicate the free world in these crimes by presenting them as revenge for the Anglo-American capitulation to Jewish interests, for their willingness to wage a war on behalf of world Jewish domination.\n\n(And if we answer, “but we weren’t fighting for the Jews,” does that not implicate us in another way?–we are either dupes of the Jews or cynically self-interested, in which case we would ultimately do exactly what the Nazis have done if we had to) In the same way, totalitarian Islam wants to commit its murderous crimes and displace responsibility onto us; if we had steadfastly said to the Nazis that a defense of the Jews is a defense of civilization, we would have removed the double bind–rejecting any moral causality between Israel’s existence and self-defense, or even any crimes Israel may have committed in the course of its history, and the resentments being played out today against the very standards of civilization that would make it possible to hold Israel responsible in the first place would have the same effect.\n\nWe should assiduously expose the choreographed responses to and even manufacture of Israeli “atrocities,” and we should be repeatedly insisting that each and every civilian death is the fault of Hamas and Hizbollah and no one else; we should be composing and sending teams of human rights inspectors to Hizbollah and Hamas occupied territory to see if the war crime of holding civilians hostage is being committed; we should set up war crimes tribunals for each and every member of these terrorist organizations who commits these crimes; and all the while we should repeat the answer given to those afraid that the rescue of Jews was neglected by those waging the war, which is that the best way to save the most innocents is to win the war as soon as possible–even while we are now able to add that exposing the moral depravity of totalitarian Islam is the best way to both save civilians right now and win the war quickly.\n\nThe point here is not to make moral declarations that improve our image, for ourselves and others; rather, it is to devise strategies that can unite us (to the extent that we can be united) while dividing our enemies. We must first of all create as many difficulties as possible for the de facto alliance between the “transnational progressive” left (the media, much of the judiciary, the NGOs and human rights groups, the academy), the embodiment of white guilt, and the victimary Islamic totalitarians. What has gone unrecognized is that the vocabulary selected by the Bush Administration has already gone some ways toward undermining the transnational progressives–the human rights groups have all, as the saying goes, “jumped the shark” in their eagerness to condemn the US, leaving themselves vulnerable to fraud and manipulation, causing them to lose credibility among those helped by America and the American people, reducing, them, in short, to fringe groups.\n\nThe liberals have been pushed into the arms of the foreign policy “realists” and the repulsive likes of Brent Scowcroft, whom none of them would have touched with a 10 foot pole before the onset of Bush Derangement Syndrome. The surest way of losing all touch with reality, except the virtual one constructed in the never ending dialogues of the international “diplomatic community,” is to become a Realist. While the media is digging itself deeper into border line treasonous activities in the pursuit of stories of interest only to Pulitzer Prize committees. There is a very outside chance that the Democrats will gain power in the House and/or Senate this November–can anyone doubt that if they do they will govern so disastrously as to lose it again, probably once and for all?\n\nI am not among those who mourn the decline of the media, the Democrats, the human rights groups, etc.–they are all, more and more looking like institutions and organizations created under very specific conditions and limited to those conditions–the post WWII world in which the sign “Auschwitz” called for new modes of scrutiny upon governmental activity and attentiveness to victims’ claims in particular. Their rapid descent into senility can be tracked precisely, I believe, with the degeneration of the “Auschwitz” sign into unmitigated White Guilt.\n\nWith regard to totalitarian Islam, I would hypothesize that hostage taking groups are especially vulnerable to infiltration, defection and disinformation. I suspect–we can’t know of course, because one can still hope that much is going on in secret (but is anything going on that some self-appointed “whistle blower” won’t leak to the NY Times?)–that we are engaging these activities very ineffectively, even though they will all serve as “focre multipliers”: they will not only sow discord and confusion among our enemies but such activites will set up a realm of activity in which intelligence and military professionals can work beyond the reach of the transnational progressives.\n\nThe ideal would be to have the major media outlets reporting on the most superficial and irrelevant things, which they will be fed by the elements of the government (the CIA, the State Department) and the human rights groups that are be rendered obsolete by the turn to smaller, more rigorous and smarter groupings who work below the radar. This won’t create an unaccountable secret government because insofar as these groups work effectively, the effects of their work will show up, indirectly, for those with adequately attuned radar–reporters who are willing to follow subtle trendlines, take risks, find ways of getting inside and gaining the trust of the new type of operative, those who can do serious analytical and interpretive work, will be able to piece things together and present them in ways that don’t endanger those operations. And we can leave the writers and readers of the NY Times to sleep in peace, cuddling their Pulitzers.\n\nWhich means that that other despised element of the “Bush Doctrine,” “pre-emption,” is, in fact, an authentic and central category of the 9/11 dispensation. Refusing to pay ransom means treating blackmail as the crime that it is. It means treating anyone who claims to be our enemy as our enemy (who are we to deny anyone the right to be our enemy?). This would include the not-so-subtle “I denounce violence but if people’s frustrations are not addressed, I can’t be held responsible for the results…” Let every assassination of a Saudi cleric calling for “martyrs” to go into Iraq be accompanied by a packet of sermons he gave, perhaps emailed directly to American citizens, bypassing the media.\n\nLet’s see who denounces this violation of the rights of those who incite to the murder of our soldiers. Let’s experiment–the columnist Diane West recently called for declaring war on specific organizations (like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah) so that, among other things, we could take action against their domestic supporters. Pehaps it’s a gamble–we might make small groups more important than we would like; unlike countries, such groups can always change their names, break off into allied groups, and find other ways to turn themselves into harder targets. If we stay on the offesnvie, perhaps we’ll find ways of turning that to our advantage as well.\n\nIn addition to military tribunals for trying those who deliberately use human shields, why not offer a release to all of our prisoners, under one simple condition–that they offer a full, verifiable, confession detailing all their activities and confederates, signed, and for public distribution? And then they can go where they please! The fact that we are tinkering around the edges of what’s allowed under the Geneva Convention, that we are held hostage by over-reactions to what were ultimately rather minor abuses of government power 30-40 years ago, rather than improvising energetically, even a bit wildly, shows that we have not yet entered the 9/11 dispensation. But we will, or the ransom will keep getting higher, until our blackmailers just come and take it already.\n\nDoes all this sound utterly unrealistic and unreasonable (and perhaps “unconscionable”?) to you? If so, to that extent you haven’t seriously entered the new dispensation either.\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-clash-of-the-clash-of-civilizations",
      "title": "The Clash of the Clash of Civilizations",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We’ve all heard people debate the question of whether Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” applies to the current “war on terror.” As in most dialogues de sourds there is a better answer than either yes or no. This is a conflict between one side that believes there is a “clash of civilizations” and one that does not. To wit, the Islamists believe that modern civilization is evil and that its members should be either annihilated or converted. “We,” to the contrary, don’t believe there is any fundamental reason why even the most extreme forms of Islam are incompatible with the West’s multicultural tolerance. In a word, we want to include them, and they want to kill us. This is not the kind of dispute that can be resolved through academic discussion.\n\nThere is a great deal of poverty in the world, and nature inflicts on humanity much disease and other suffering. But humanity has survived poverty and disease and natural disasters with little difficulty. It has survived “acid rain” and can probably even survive “global warming.” The real danger to our species is the same danger that it came into being to defer: intraspecific violence and the form it assumes in deferral, resentment .\n\nNo religion is entitled to toleration as a vehicle of resentment. The desire, nay, the intention to destroy Western civilization does not become more legitimate when it is expressed in “religious” terms. The Christian dialectic of love has no effect against those whose very culture is a counter-attack on Christian hegemony. Resentment can be recuperated within the social order only if its energy can be harnessed to productive activity. Once the resentful subject devotes himself to destruction, his resentment will end only with his life. That is why wars are sometimes necessary.\n\nThe growth of Iranian power, whose noxious influence in the Middle East is only beginning to bear fruit, is a clear enough indication that Islamic resentment has passed the point where it can be contained by “inclusion.” Kim Jong-il wants to survive; Ahmadinejad wants to kill. It is easy in hindsight to castigate the “cowards” who gathered at Munich in 1938; why should things be different this time? In the contest between those who believe in a clash of civilizations and those who do not, it is the first group that decides for what stakes the game is to be played.\n\nThe West has little stomach for destruction. Even 9/11 has failed to remind it that the refinement of individual justice cannot replace in every circumstance the crude efficacy of collective retribution. Thus we agonize over lapses in fairness to people whose sole aim is to kill as many of us as possible. That World War II was the last “conceivable” total war affords no protection against those whose highest dream is self-annihilation.\n\nThe market and its political support system is humanity’s best hope for survival. But it has no magic formula for the indefinite deferral of violence. It is increasingly hard to see how the non-metaphorical “clash of civilizations” that is war can be avoided. In its absence, one side grows ever more confident in its hatred and the other, ever more craven in its tolerance of this hatred. A Jewish columnist in the Washington Post the other day echoed Ahmadinejad in calling Israel a “mistake”–ah, but an “honest mistake.” Perhaps the lesson of the 21st century will be that the human species too was an “honest mistake.”\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-free-exchange-of-ideas",
      "title": "The Free Exchange of Ideas",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "[Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison] Kevin Barrett told a Milwaukee talk show host in June that he believed that the U.S. government used “controlled demolitions with explosives” on Sept. 11 to bring down the World Trade Center buildings and later said that the idea of a hijacked plane hitting the Pentagon was “preposterous.” He plans to discuss these beliefs over one week of the 15-week course for undergraduate students. …\n\nSchool officials say they have no reason to oust Barrett because free speech protects academic freedom.\n\n“We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas,” said Patrick Farrell, the school’s provost. ( complete article )\n\nThus the most preposterous idiocy is considered an “unpopular idea” if it comports with victimary thought. Once again, postmodern skepticism about truth is not across the board. 9/11 denial and Holocaust denial belong to the “free exchange of ideas” because they reinforce antisemitism and anti-Americanism. An absurdity becomes an “idea” only under such conditions; we cannot trust our “objective” judgment in such cases because we might tend to favor ourselves.\n\nPerhaps the sheer mind-boggling stupidity of Mr. Farrell’s remarks will help persuade a few more people that White Guilt is not a coherent philosophy.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "chronicle-338-the-final-conflict",
      "title": "Chronicle 338 – The Final Conflict",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The latest Chronicle of Love & Resentment , entitled “The Final Conflict,” is now available.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "ending-white-guilt",
      "title": "Ending White Guilt",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans – Chronicles of Love and Resentment 337: Saturday, August 5, 2006\n\nOne of the simplest ways to begin to explain the prevalence of White Guilt in our era is that victimary thought, however “unmanly” and even cowardly it may be from the perspective of action, depends on a reassuring model of the self’s omnipotence. To understand this, let us begin with a controversy involving an Other that is nonhuman and therefore without resentment, that of “global warming.” The scientific data are ambiguous enough for the subject to be a kind of Rorschach test. The peripheral-victimary view is not simply that global warming is occurring but that it is significantly if not exclusively due to human activity. Curtail the use of fossil fuels and global warming will stop, even reverse; keep on the way we’re going and the world as we know it will come to an end. The center-oriented view is the opposite: even if we believe that global warming is occurring, it’s essentially a natural process to which human activity contributes little, and the drastic reduction of emissions of “greenhouse gases” will ruin the economy without solving the problem.\n\nPerhaps science will give an unambiguous answer to this controversy; what is of interest to us is what the parties want to be true. The victimary thinker would find it painful to believe that if climate change is occurring, we are not significantly to blame; the originary thinker, who respects the difference between the scene of human culture and the natural world, finds the assimilation of the natural consequences of human behavior to the scene of culture, with its victims and victimizers, a distraction from his more strictly anthropological focus–a distraction that, perhaps in this case, and certainly in others, is sometimes necessary.\n\nThe victimary thinker sees all sufferers, including the environment, as our victims, and implicit in the victimary configuration is that it is within our power to rectify the situation. To take a human rather than a natural example, if Minority Xers have lower scores than Whites on some test or other, this is taken as a prima facie demonstration that the White population is directly or indirectly victimizing them, which implies that the White population can and should alleviate the problem, if only by adding an “affirmative” bonus to the scores of the Minority X examinees. To claim all responsibility is to presuppose one’s own omnipotence; to affirm one’s guilt is to take charge of causality.\n\nBut White Guilt’s dream of omnipotence is unlike any previous version of this dream. The British colonial “White Man’s Burden” also claimed responsibility and something like omnipotence, at least in its sphere of action, but it saw its contact with the Other as in principle an opportunity for the latter to benefit from the products and ideas of a higher civilization, whereas White Guilt sees this relationship from the side of the resentful Other as inherently exploitative and humiliating. We still have the burden of giving, but no longer the authority to control the process, since giving to the Other is merely returning a necessarily inadequate part of what we still owe him, not a generous transfer from one entity to another but the insufficient righting of a balance that remains far out of line.\n\nA corollary of our guilty omnipotence is the Other’s blameless impotence. His actions, however hostile and even injurious, are not to be taken seriously and certainly not to be replied to in kind; like the acts of a child in a tantrum flailing at his parent, they are something to be smiled at rather than avenged.\n\nFrom the standpoint of the originary scene, the position of human omnipotence is necessarily in disequilibrium. It is that of the center, not however in its pristine state but as usurped by the Big Man who takes control of ritual redistribution. The Big Man has won the potlatch contest; henceforth he will supply the goods for the ritual feast, and his successors are likely to give themselves means to assure this supply by extracting it from some or all of its intended beneficiaries. The Big Man’s victimary successor is aware that he has stolen the Other’s piece of the center; unable to reestablish originary reciprocity, his guilty conscience tells him to take the blame, al though he knows in his heart that his symbolic gestures will never fully assuage the Other’s resentment.\n\n***\n\nPostwar White Guilt has a complex history. After WWII, national liberation movements and the American civil rights movement made demands for equal treatment before the law. Guilt in this context was finite and functional; the guilt a white man was expected to feel for having made Blacks sit in the back of the bus needed to be just sufficient to accept their sitting beside him. But after civil rights were granted and colonies were liberated, de facto equality failed to follow de jure equality. Now the “majority” were asked to be guilty about results rather than about procedures ; on the contrary, the procedures had to be modified to produce better results. Since the results were never sufficient to produce equality, White Guilt became permanent, but it still had a limited effect on the lives of the guilty. Those who were deprived of jobs or college admissions fought back with some success in the political process, and foreign aid was hardly a cause of domestic privation.\n\nThe Cold War made the USSR the nominal champion of the “third world” that was the international beneficiary of White Guilt. Although the Mc Carthy era generated its share of victimary rhetoric (much of which was later revealed to be unwarranted), the Soviet Union itself was not our victim and had only limited success in mobilizing the victimary resentment of its third-world partners. The vast inefficiency of the “socialist” economy was not often imitated; what most of its clients took from it was hostility to the West, which allowed the “unaligned” to pick up advantages by playing politics between the two Great Powers. While this was going on, the sentiment of White Guilt had only a peripheral effect on American foreign policy.\n\nEven the Vietnam war, despite its profound historical effect, was only apparently an exception to this rule. With all the tumult and the shouting, the revolutionaries of 1968 accomplished very little in the political sphere. The virulent after-effects of their activity, which we are only now experiencing in full force, were the result not of their success but of their failure. As they gained the allegiance of the academy, the intelligentsia, and the media, the reality of the Cold War was scarcely perturbed. The loss of South Vietnam to communism, which the New Left hoped would lead to a series of falling dominoes throughout Asia and the world, had no major impact on world history.\n\nBut it was precisely in this lack of consequences that the real damage was done. After Vietnam (and Watergate), the entire intelligentsia now defined its duty as declaring its White Guilt to the world, secure in the tacit knowledge that nothing serious would come of it. This did not prevent a good portion of this class from tacking up Che Guevara posters and sympathizing with the world Communist movement, but ironically enough, they were unaware that the weakness of the movement’s bulwark, the Soviet Union, would prevent it from making good use of its new spiritual allies in the West.\n\nWith the fall of the Soviet Union and the illusion of the “end of history,” White Guilt, which since Vietnam and Watergate had secured its institutional bases in the academic-media world, could now flourish unrestrained. Since there was no other Great Power, we could be blamed for everything ; because they knew that the blame would have no consequences, the blamers voiced their frustration all the more vehemently, secure in the knowledge that however much they carried on, daddy was still in charge.\n\n***\n\nAll the fun and games seemed innocent enough… until 9/11. On that date in 2001, it suddenly became apparent that while we were blaming ourselves for all the evil in the world, there was a large and growing group of people who not merely agreed with this assessment, but who were poised to take advantage of it. The various factions of radical Islamists, who had been carrying out bloody small-scale strikes with near impunity throughout the 1990s, did not care to play the White Guilty’s psychological game; they saw its tacit claim of omnipotence as a sign of weakness, its presupposition of invulnerability as so much whistling in the dark. They interpreted White Guilt’s obsession with taking the blame not as a product of human fellow-feeling but as a fearful attempt to head off the Other’s anticipated resentment.\n\nThe success of Islamist terrorism is based on more than terrorizing people on a local scale. Terrorism in the international arena can only work when the mechanism of White Guilt has become so profound that, even when in imminent danger, but especially when not, we can continue to feel guilty toward the person who wants to kill us. International terrorism reveals White Guilt’s dream of omnipotence to be nothing but a promissory note en blanc to anyone who might be tempted to right the wrongs for which the White Guilty are so ready to take the blame.\n\nThe ever more self-confident swagger of the Islamic radicals is not, however, merely the product of their psychological acumen. It reflects a fundamental human reality, a biological reality that poses a problem for the West that few are willing to turn their attention from false crises such as global warming to face. The Canadian columnist Mark Steyn can be credited with bringing to public attention the basis of Islamic confidence in its growing demographic superiority. No doubt the West can demonstrate its economic and technological superiority by producing economic goods, scientific knowledge, and countless means of individual satisfaction; but Islam demonstrates its human superiority by producing people .\n\nBehind the Islamic contempt for the West that is often traced to the influence of the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) lies the hard demographic fact that while our women are liberating themselves in all sorts of admirable ways, theirs, veiled, burkaed and all, are producing children. While the “Orient” is implementing the r-strategy (what the Québecois in pre-lib days called la politique des berceaux ), the West isn’t even producing enough offspring to maintain the K-strategy. Suicide attacks under these circumstances are a rational use of manpower.\n\nWhite Guilt too may be a rational strategy–for a civilization preparing for eventual defeat and absorption. In the August 8 National Review , Steyn quotes Jens Orback, Swedish “minister of democracy”: “We must be open and tolerant toward Islam and the Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so toward us.” “Because”? Good luck! I don’t think the United States is quite ready to follow Mr. Orback down the primrose path to extinction. But if we do want to defend our civilization, we had better start realizing that White Guilt is not the way to do it.\n\nPerhaps the Lamont ascendancy in Connecticut is a source of hope. In emulation of our Islamist adversaries, the party of White Guilt seems intent on practicing the politics of self-immolation, heedless of the incompatibility of this strategy with blue-state demography. Let us hope that, after the smoke clears, both our major political parties can agree that we are fighting a war with real enemies who will not hate us any less because we show them how much we hate ourselves."
    },
    {
      "slug": "podhoretz",
      "title": "Podhoretz",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I think he passes a little too quickly over some of our present difficulties, but here is a powerful, unconflicted defense of the Bush Doctrine from the godfather of the neo-conservative movement.\n\nhttp://www.commentarymagazine.com/files/podhoretz_0906.htm\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-anti-white-guilt-coalition",
      "title": "The Anti-White Guilt Coalition",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Speaking intuitively rather than statistically, one effect of the recent fighting that gives me some ground for hope is that is has inaugurated a new sense of community among those who become aware of the immense damage wrought by White Guilt’s mindless moral narcissism. It is interesting to see Shelby Steele’s far more widely publicized use of the term come to coincide with my own: “White guilt in the West — especially in Europe and on the American left — confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression” (“Life and Death,” Wall Street Journal , 8/22/06).\n\nNo doubt Generative Anthropology provides the most comprehensive and parsimonious framework for understanding White Guilt, but in the present moment this strikes me as less important than that GA is part of this community, which is only one step from a coalition. White Guilt, as is increasingly obvious, is complicit with Hezbollah and Ahmadinejad in its desire to destroy Israel, and (why not) the Jews in general, not to speak of the United States. The West, and now the entire world that derives from Western civilization, is still working out the paradox raised by the Hebrews in 1800 B.C. or so by being the first to have the chutzpah to claim that “their” God is the only God, the God of everyone.\n\nA further point to consider is the modern, market version of firstness: economic productivity . Because Nazi Germany was a “productive” state, in the victimary mindset productivity itself is not only not admired, it is reviled. Thus a comparison one never sees between Israel and Hezbollah is that Israel has a modern economy that doesn’t just “produce” but creates new products, notably in high tech fields, whereas Hezbollah and Hamas live on charity, which they redistribute to create good will, and basically produce nothing. (When was the last time you used a piece of Hezbollah software?) Considering that our entire social order would fall into disorder absent the kind of economic productivity that Israel, the US, and the “West” in the broad sense embody, it is striking that the only presence of this comparison in the world press is as a demonstration of the terrorists’ moral superiority as “victims” of Israel’s “war machine.”\n\nWhat goes for Israel goes for us. It’s not the “Israel lobby” that links the US and Israel in the hatred of the jihadists; it’s their common firstness.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "white-guilt-meets-the-aztecs",
      "title": "White Guilt Meets the Aztecs",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "As a vacation from the Middle East, this sample of Europe’s historical self-hatred is taken from an interview conducted by the leftish French weekly Le nouvel observateur with novelist and world traveler J.M.G. Le Clézio. See if you can detect what is missing in this picture (hint: obsidian knife):\n\nN.O. – At the time of the conquest of Mexico, in what areas were the Amerindian civilizations ahead of Europe?\n\nJL – Except for the practice of total war (firearms, cavalry, but above all the practice of terror: burned villages, women and children sold into slavery or massacred, the use of bacteriological weapons), the Amerindian civilizations were ahead of Europe in just about all areas: hydraulic agriculture, exact sciences, astronomy, medicine, zoology, anatomy. It is difficult to evaluate the domain of Aztec and Inca philosophy, but the first Spanish chroniclers, who arrived when almost everything had been destroyed, speak with admiration of the moral discourses, literary contests, and metaphysical discussions that enlivened these societies, of which the testimony of the few survivors (the final battle of Mexico-Tenochtitlan left 260,000 dead, most of whom belonged to the city’s elite) gives only an approximate idea.\n\nLe nouvel observateur July 13, 2006 p. 51\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "engaging-the-other",
      "title": "Engaging the Other",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "…by playing in accord with his own rules. More precisely: we demand an apology from every Muslim cleric, every Muslim head of state, every Muslim legislator, editorialist, you name it, who has incited violence against the Pope, being as we see this as a direct attack on our civilization. And if the apology is refused…well, they know better than anyone the consequences. We can just choose at random one of the psychopathic placards from an equally randomly selected “protest” to determine the proper punishment.\n\nThe emerging question among those serious about our enemy (i.e., not liberals and leftists) is whether the view that we are fighting “extremists” who have “distorted” an otherwise “peaceful” or at least “reformable” religion remains sustainable, even as a polite fiction–or, are we simply at war with Islam? My view has been, and remains, that we should defer this question for as long as possible, and meanwhile craft policies which will be effective regardless of what the answer turns out to be; and policies that, furthermore, will supply us with data that will ultimately enable us to answer, when we have no choice. For this very reason we need to take actions that let us see whether your average Imam who screams “Death to America” every Friday does so because he knows there is no price to be paid and a cheaply won popularity to be gained, or whether he indeed wishes to “engage” us. We must begin to force the question, in other words, even as we continue to defer any definitive answer.\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-forms-of-the-war",
      "title": "The forms of the war",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here’s an essay that raises the level of discussion, in many ways; note, also, its call for “anthropology” (even though it means that more in the sense of “ethnography”):\n\nhttp://www.policyreview.org/000/corn2.html\n\nAnd, here, we have a wide ranging, sophisticated discussion that surfaces some friendly disagreements that might have long term consequences among those devoted to renewing their stake in Western civilization:\n\nhttp://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read Article.asp? ID=24274"
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-conversion",
      "title": "On Conversion",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Islam has been making steady headway in increasing its numbers in the West not only through a higher birthrate but through conversion, which has apparently accelerated since 9/11. I would present, as a useful hypothesis, the likelihood that the emergent alliance between the Left and totalitarian Jihad will be “consecrated” at some point by substantial conversions among Leftists to Islam. Why not? Islam is undoubted the stronger, ascendent party and whatever secularist, Enlightenment scruples the Left once had are incompatible with postmodern White Guilt; anyway, the radical left in particular has always been confronted with the dilemma of how to communicate with its “natural” constituency (the “masses”) who, according to leftist (especially Marxist) theory itself are inevitably in thrall to all kinds of “reactionary” (nationalist, sexist, etc.) ideologies–one solution to this dilemma has always been to “speak in the language of the people” and conversion to Islam would simply be a somewhat more consistent version of this strategy.\n\nNot to mention that Islam is in many ways the religion most compatible with various positions of resentment within the West: some sectors of the poor, racial minorities, prisoners, etc., who desire a religion that demands of them commitment, conformity and sacrifice while preserving and refining the intensity of their resentment for the normal bourgeois world.\n\nWhat, then, is the answer on the part of us members of the anti-White Guilt coalition, those who want to make the world safe for firstness? I will suggest here that we should ourselves adopt “conversion” as a model of political and moral communication, one which is far more effective than models of “persuasion” which, to paraphrase Eric Gans on metaphysics, assume that the answer to one declarative statement is another declarative statement which in turn (here is the part generally left unexplained) somehow produces a third, significantly different declarative. If such change takes place, though, it is because the ostensive has entered somewhere, and if the ostensive has entered it means a new sacred object has been indicated, leaving us with the question, how does one represent such an object to someone who embraces another mode of sacrality? This seems to me to be a better, and more originary question, than those regarding which reasons people might find more convincing (which already presupposes a shared sacrality).\n\nThe answer to Islamic conversion, then, is a missionary spirit of our own. I do mean this in the most literal sense: first of all, a primary pivot of our foreign policy should be insisting upon (first of all) the rights of Christians to proselytize and the rights of Muslims to convert. Second, though, we should hope that Christians and even Jews take up (or where appropriate, intensify) the project of converting others–we should all be trying to convert each other, in other words. At the same time, I present this proposal as a thought experiment, to indicate the kind of cultural transformations that would be necessary for us to possess and project a genuine civilizational self-confidence.\n\nTo the rather too obvious (and, of course, true) objection that people trying to convert you are inevitably obnoxious and the urgency invested in missionary activity necessarily subverts personal interaction–if you believe that Jesus and only Jesus saves (or–fill in the blanks), and all boundaries relegating this belief to certain areas of life are removed, what prevents you from becoming terminally intolerable and relations between co-workers, colleagues and even family members from becoming impossible? Well, the answer is new conventions and norms of politeness–what interests me is the general possibility that conversations could at any point turn toward conversion if they attain the right level of seriousness and trust, not that it actually happens according to any preferred schedule or degree of regularity.\n\nThe removal of this taboo, at any rate, need not lead to an orgy of the kind of behavior we fear will raise the level of resentment on both local and global levels. Our ability to sustain relationships which need not take such possibilities off the table will be an index of our freedom and culteral maturity (and a useful reminder that any religion supportive of habits required for modernity will have to be self-consciously chosen–which further helps us to counter the tendency to absorb religion into the “ascriptive” categories like race, gender and ethnicity, a mere source of victimization rather than an argument about the sacred).\n\nEven more, I am contending that the notion of conversion needs to encroach upon secular territory, where it is already far more relevant than we might imagine: think, for example, of how you came by your own political commitments and opinions–if they weren’t inherited from your family, then I would argue that you probably had, at some point, what was in effect a conversion experience: such as being affected by the radiant example of some icon of resistance to injustice, or some violation of sacred principles by members of your own grouping so unforgivable that the principles are themselves irremediably tainted.\n\nSo, I will conclude with three points for further discussion:\n\nFirst, a pillar of our foreign policy must be an open market in faith everywhere, but especially in the Muslim world.\n\nSecond, that conversion be seen as a broader, even privileged way of understanding subjective transformation in GA: we move from one scene to another, drawn by the greater sacrality at its center (which leaves open for inquiry, of course, what makes one sacrality greater than another at a given point in space-time). Not the only way of understanding subjective transformation, of course: in fact, moving toward something like an originary psychology, we should want a catalogue of possibilities (another one, I would suggest, being “seduction”).\n\nThird, we should see our own commitments to market society and constitutional order as something to which one converts, in the wake of being granted a revelation regarding the inadequate deferral capacities (the fragility of the scene) constituted by various “Big Man” models of order, attempts to return to a primitive egalitarianism, and so on: our efforts at persuasion, then, can become the establishment of scenes rendering such revelations more accessible. And this doesn’t mean PR efforts aimed at showing Western society in an unrealistically positive light: rather, its a question of arranging in a spectacle all aspects of our society. And, by the same token, we would thereby be devising tests to determine whether nominal commitments to freedom and democracy are merely that.\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-deferral",
      "title": "On Deferral",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "For a while, when I was first familiarizing myself with GA, terms other than “deferral,” especially “resolution,” would creep into my thinking about the originary sign and scene, and noticing this has come to remind me of how much more minimal “deferral” is, how central it therefore is the specificity of the hypothesis, and to GA’s decisive break with metaphysical forms of thinking. To speak of the originary gesture as “resolving” the situation of mimetic rivalry, or “preventing” violence, would be to view the effects of the sign from the outside, as if the line separating the convergence on the central object and the renunciation of that object could be visible to anyone not participating in trying to detect and draw the line themselves; and if this were possible, then it would also be possible to reduce the renunciation to a formal, generalizable rule in advance of any particular act of renunciation.\n\nIn other words, it would be possible to find a “cause” leading to the act of renunciation, and this cause would then be found in our biological or some other pre-existing “equipment,” in which case the sign would itself simply be a “superstructural” reflection of some more foundational “infrastructural” reality. “Deferral,” meanwhile, perfectly captures the position within the act itself, along with its fundamental contingency, between the convergence heading toward destruction and what will perhaps be no more than the mere delay of that tendency. One can’t know–one can’t know any more than that whatever gesture one puts forth is minimally more likely to subtract from rather than accelerate the momentum dragging us along toward the catastrophe.\n\nInstead of imminent destruction, we have really done no more than make it “imminently imminent,” and that imminence of imminence gives us a little space within which to work. We can’t even think in terms of whether the “problem” has been “genuinely solved,” or “kicked down the road,” trivialized or covered up, or, for that matter, irresponsibly avoided and thereby intensified, to reappear even more menacingly tomorrow–the categories which enable us to make even these distinctions are after the fact, metaphysical accretions, even if we couldn’t really avoid using them to describe what seem to be more or less effective gestures of deferral (and isn’t even this “seeming” taking place on some mimetic scene, upon which the projected “seeming” itself defers some crisis?).\n\nThe most fundamental question for an originary social thought as well as epistemology might be, what is the horizon of any act of deferral? What is its “reach”? It seems plausible to suggest that it impossible to “invest” in any act of deferral while dwelling, or perhaps even entertaining the possibility of, its fallibility–in other words, I have to completely believe my act of deferral will succeed, at least for that period in which I am enacting it; which would further imply that I must exclude from consideration all the indications which suggest that it might not, in fact succeed. I can and must recognize and assimilate those indications, but only in the form of those unavoidable immediate modifications in my act of deferral as I articulate it, not as fully imagined forces which might render it useless.\n\nThe fact that I can look back afterward and note how risky the whole business in fact was can’t, then, provide any knowledge that would be useful in the midst of the next act of deferral except insofar as the very act of looking back, itself, guided by an interest in preserving the sign, sharpens my sensitivity to the immediate appearance of counter-indications. (But it might just as easily dull my sensitivities to unprecedented indications.) Our horizons, though, can be progressively extended insofar as any act of deferral leaves behind it a sign, which can be repeated by someone other than me, and provides a starting point for the next act of deferral: defend that sign.\n\nDefending the sign against attempts to undermine and circumvent it provides for the capacity for ever increasing foresight, especially insofar as cultural signs become increasingly complex, deferring (through a kind of ethical and esthetic economy) a range of rivalries and crises simultaneously. In that case, though, the real threat to the sign is not so much direct attacks on it or attempts to evade its strictures, but the rivalries the sign itself instigates over who represents or embodies it. Monotheism defers a far greater range of rivalries than tribal or “big man” social and cultural forms; but who represents the genuine monotheistic stance?\n\nSo, another act of deferral regarding this overreaching produces the self-governing nation, intellectual freedom, and finally the modern market, which opens up the possibility of positive sum rivalries–competition for Nobel Prizes among scientists leads to cures and inventions for the rest of us, competition for higher profits and entrepenuerial pre-eminence leads to ever more diverse consumer goods, competition for artistic fame (Oscars and Pulitzers) leads to cultural wealth, and so on. Here, though, I would suggest (or hypothesize) that the narrowing of horizons implicit in any act of deferral reaches a point where dangers to the signs generated can no longer be discerned.\n\nI am not disputing the Hayekian point that in a market system knowledge is distributed throughout the system as a whole, in the hundreds of millions of daily exchanges carried out globally, and that such knowledge could never be effectively gathered in a single point. My claim is different–there is nothing in the Hayekian model that says we can’t maintain some knowledge of the value of the market system itself, and the basic intellectual means for defending it against rivals; but nothing in the Hayekian model implies that such knowledge will be widely distributed either. The market system relies upon, and would collapse without, such knowledge as that regarding the sacrality of the individual soul, of the disinterested mind, of the desire to be well thought of beyond one’s immediate circle (to think well of oneself when alone, for example), of the generative power of giving without any hope of receiving in turn, of devotion to some community larger than oneself and capable of preserving a history of exemplary actions (in turn necessary for all the other virtues I just listed), and so on.\n\nThe totalitarian eruptions of the 20th century, which have left as their residue (more deferral) White Guilt, perhaps the closest thing to an overarching theology in today’s world, suggest as much: by itself, the market cannot defend itself against the resentment it inevitably generates, which accumulates and takes shape as social and political movements before the means of deferring it through the market have developed. It might be, furthermore, that the kind of long term, supposedly permanent modes of deferral to which the liberal welfare state aspires (Social Security must never be questioned, because 19th century Dickensian workshops are ready to return at any moment, as soon as we let down our guard–this is itself part of the anti-totalitarian deferral, marked, as any deferral must be, by what it defers), now interferes with the kind of medium term forms of deferral we need to erect articulating the myriad short term forms on the marketplace; modes of deferral we might model on insurance, for example, where each one together with everyone else continually hedges, always improvising while gathering the best information available (and generating that very information in our gathering), against the catastrophes we know must be on the way, and will ultimately, in the really long run, overwhelm our best efforts (while–who knows–perhaps calling forth even better efforts of which we won’t be capable until we are capable); or on “intelligence,” listening to as much as we can, piecing together what we hear into plausible patterns (while remaining aware that we are probably blind to other, equally plausible patterns), finding ways of getting “inside” as many different institutions and communities as possible and finding ways to see beyond the way they self-consciously represent themselves to others and themselves.\n\nBoth “insurance” and “intelligence” are predicated upon the “imminence of imminence,” capable of memory and tradition while resistant to sclerosis and reactiveness, at least when submitted to the forms of transparency and accountability which correspond to the the structure of these modes of deferral (which is to say, when they aren’t mortgaged to “long term” projections which really aim at institutional self-protection). And these are also modes of deferral which rely upon firstness–anyone can set a mode of intelligence in motion (by simply asking the questions no one else is), anyone, along with a few others, can cobble together a way of pooling resources against some of the most obvious and inescapable dangers of life–as opposed to the “all together now” model of modern liberalism which believes it can marginalize risk so thoroughly that it simply ends up demonizing whoever appears as its bearer.\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-coming-sparagmos",
      "title": "The Coming Sparagmos?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "These are not normal times. It would be a mistake, I think, to see the Democrats gaining a majority in the House or Senate as the standard, people-punishing-the-President’s-party-in-the-sixth-year-of-his Presidency. The Democrats offer nothing–indeed, claim to offer nothing–other than a ritualistic tearing apart and devouring of the Bush Administration and all of its works. This will not merely be a question of more aggressive oversight, or a rolling back of some more “extreme” initiatives, or “teaching Republicans a lesson”–it will be non-stop subpoenas, impeachment, dismantling key elements of the War on Terror, an abandonment of Iraq, and a signal sent throughout the world to allies and enemies alike that the US cannot be relied upon, everyone should make their own accommodations in this “Final Conflict.”\n\nThe Democrats are a deeply pathological party, representing broader global forces absolutely inimical to constitutional government, free market economics, Christianity, Jews and Israel and any assertion of cultural boundaries set by a presumed common human origin. Any idea that power will make them more responsible is as reasonable here as it has turned out to be with the Palestinians–there is no way Democrats in power would be able to resist the forces that have placed them there–the anti-war “netroots,” funded by George Soros and crazed by years of flailing against what they see as dark, conspiratorial forces.\n\nI am certainly not predicting such a Democratic victory–in fact, we will learn a lot about how completely the “mainstream media” has “jumped the shark” if, as I suspect, the poll results showing decisive, even overwhelming, Democratic gains are heavily and deliberately skewed for the purpose of demoralizing Republicans and depressing turnout. But we will know about that soon enough–for now, it might be useful to reflect upon what such an upheaval would mean.\n\nFirst of all, it is a very strange time for such ominous clouds to be gathering over the Republican majority. After all, what’s wrong, exactly? The economy seems to be in excellent shape–here in Connecticut, one of the Democratic congressional candidates is running against “Bush’s disastrous economic policies” but has yet to specify wherein the disaster lies. There was the Abramoff scandal, which tainted the Republicans, but, really, how much can that explain? Mark Foley?–you must be kidding. There have been no terrorist attacks on American soil which, for the nutroots, might suggest that the Bush Administration has frabricated the entire terrorist issue to implement its plans to install a fascist theocracy, but one would assume that for most Americans that would be an indication to leave well enough alone.\n\nAnd issues like immigration and out of control spending generates significant resentment among conservatives, but how many people well enough informed to be focused on such issues would take their grievances to the point of wanting to see Speaker Pelosi wielding the gavel in January?\n\nIt must really be all about Iraq, it seems to me, and even here the source and logic of the complaint is not very clear. Can one really doubt that it’s better for Saddam Hussein to be out and us to be in in Iraq? That some 3,000 deaths is a remarkably low number of casualties? That counter-insurgency wars are inherently unpredictable and require patience and an ability to improvise, and hence can’t be referred back to some “plan”? That this is a long struggle and even the worst case scenarios in Iraq might contain a range of silver linings which, if we keep our heads, we should be able to exploit?\n\nObviously these are far from rhetorical questions–many, if not most people are doubting these things. And if we look at the form the doubts take, I think we find something rather interesting. Those who complain about the number of dead in Iraq will not consider themselves obliged to tell you how many dead they think would be “worth” obtaining our goal there–to some extent this is because those generating such resentments think that America asserting its power inevitably makes things worse so that it wouldn’t be worth a single death and they are simply manipulating the fears and compassion of others; but that wouldn’t explain why the argument seems effective beyond a small circle of the ideologically committed anti-Americans.\n\nNor does anyone feel obliged to tell you how long it should take to win (much less how they have “done the math” on these questions); or, to get into some of the more specific complaints, if we had tried to keep the Iraqi army in place after the invasion, what negative consequences might have flowed from our apparent identification with that oppressive force; or if we had not invaded Iraq, how would the sanctions regime we were previously enforcing be doing by this point; or… or…. in fact, hardly anyone seems obliged to construct an alternative scene predicated upon their complaint. Almost everyone, as Victor Davis Hanson has repeatedly pointed out, seems immediately attuned to the “pulse of the battlefield,” reacting to the last crisis, the newly revealed vulnerable point in those actually responsible for making and implementing decisions.\n\nIn other words, the threat to the Republican majority is more of a generalized resentment towards reality–the Republicans represent everything messy, sordid and compromised in our preliminary attempts to create a new world while (inevitably) steeped in the old one. The Bush Doctrine has initiated a process which genuinely threatens established understandings of world order and the U.S. role in that order; for those transnational progressivists who saw history going their way during the 90s, this is all profoundly upsetting, almost a violation of natural law: hence the bizarre alliance between those would would like to reconstruct the whole world order in accord with their own idealized, post-soveriegn, version of international law and the kind of old style “realist” who practically prides himself on his amorality.\n\nNone of these alternatives has any answers to totalitarian Islam, which we would lose little understanding of (and gain much) were we to operate under the assumption that it is tailored from top to bottom to exploit each and every weakness, fantasy and vanity of the transnational progressives and realists alike. And yet the Bush Doctrine has not imposed itself–far from it. Bush’s own hesitations (which, for reasons I hope this post has made clear, I do not remark on with any sense of self-righteousness), especially in the area of personnel, and especially in uprooting the liberal and “realist” cultures in what should be two of our most engaged institutions (the CIA and State Department), are partly responsible; but so is the enormous resistance his initiatives has produced (the insurgency Bush really failed to anticipate is that of the transnational progressive elite) and the paradoxes and unintended consequences intrinsic to those intiatives.\n\nWhat happens when a democratic election brings a totalitarian Islamic party, a devoted practioner of the worst kind of terror, to power? I find it hard to even understand the moral emptiness it takes to pose such questions with a sneer, to discredit democratic transformation–in the name of what, exactly? But it’s a real question, and a practical answer to it requires a more coherent response than the current divisions in our society and throughout the world seem to allow for.\n\nPerhaps the best way to put it is to note that, as yet, we simply have no measure for the effectivity, even meaning, of what we are doing. We don’t have the necessary yardsticks for measuring success, because those yardsticks must be generated by events themselves in any new situation. We are still applying yardsticks from the past: WWII for supporters of the war, Vietnam for opponents (and these yardsticks, and many others, can be applied in various ways, producing varying degrees of real insight). But the further along we go, the less these yardsticks will measure. Whoever wins a couple of weeks from now, we will need to devise such measures, which is to say, we will need to participate in emitting a new sign, a new mode of deferral that can actually be tried out on the ground. It may be that we will have to wait until the passion of the sparagmos–which, once it starts, will not remain limited to partisan Democrats–runs its course. We’ll see what’s left.\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-bush-doctrine-r-i-p",
      "title": "The Bush Doctrine, R.I.P.",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I have been diligently reading the post-mortems by conservatives and Republican partisans the past couple of days and one thing seems to me undeniable: the Republican defeat means the end of the Bush Doctrine in the War against Terror. The resignation of Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement by Bush I crony, CIA connected Robert Gates simply confirms what Bush probably had no choice about anyway–support for the Bush Doctrine even among Republicans could not survive this defeat. Regardless of what anyone thinks the election was really about (Republican corruption and incompetence, a normal 6th year Presidential power trim, failures to halt the orgy of spending, to control immigration, etc.) no politician (especially those running for President in 2008) will gamble his political future on the unknowable possibility that it wasn’t, in fact, a repudiation of the President’s policy on Iraq.\n\nWe have just witnessed an epic battle between a courageous, novel, and, of course, risky strategy for transforming the very conditions that have made us powerless against victimary Islamist blackmail, on the one hand, and the forces of continuity with pre-9/11 policies (I would say “illusions,” but part of my argument here will be in favor of stepping back from these more immediate polemical stances), in particular foreign policy realism and transnational progressivism, the political form of White Guilt, on the other. The forces of continuity have won, and our first task is to process that. (There was always a third possible approach to Islamic terror and totalitarian advance: the approach of what I have recently seen referred to as the “endgame conservatives,” those who–John Derbyshire is a well known example, but there are quite a few others, like Andrew Mc Carthy at NRO, writers at the American Spectator and Claremont Review of Books, and I would include columnist Diana West here–who believe that trying to transform the internal politics and culture of Muslim societies is a chimerical goal, and we should focus on developing unmistakable and reliable responses to their external behavior.\n\nIn short, the massive use of force against very specifically defined transgressions against U.S. or Western interests. Up until a few days ago, I saw the debate between these thinkers and adherents to the Bush Doctrine to be a crucially important one (I was preparing a couple of pieces to address it)–but could anyone really believe that the loss of Republican majorities makes it more likely that the endgamers will get a serious hearing?)\n\nSo, what I will try to do now is give the Bush Doctrine a decent burial, and, even more, to try and articulate its moral, political, historical and anthropological presuppositions, because I believe the three alternatives I have mentioned are, in one form or another, likely to be all that we will have for the duration–since I believe the others will ultimately fail, the Bush Doctrine, in whatever new form it emerges, is likely to get its chance again and next time we should try to provide it with the kind of intellectual “ballast” it will need.\n\nSo, let’s begin with “pre-emption”: first, we will not distinguish between the terrorists and the states harboring them; second, we will not wait for threats to crystallize before acting against them. The doctrine of pre-emption recognizes the way the connection between the structures of blackmail and deniability on the one hand, and the increasingly availability of deadly weapons to even non-state actors, on the other hand, creates a new reality, the outlines of which were revealed on 9/11. Terrorism had been parasitical on the “stability” of the state system from the 70s on: the assimilation of Western instititions to the victimary standpoint means that victimary blackmail is only limited by realist calculations: if the attacks are low level enough, it will be worth paying the blackmail (in the form, say, of the recognition that Palestine is indeed central to any resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict) rather than upsetting the delicate network of corrupt, brutal and ultimately vulnerable (at least according them the strongmen themselves) dictatorships which keep things simmering so as to prevent them from boiling over.\n\nOn the one hand, we know that the various states which provide weapons, propaganda, money, etc., to terrorists (or allow their elites to do so) will keep things under control, and if things get a little out of control, we can focus on a relatively minor player (like, say, Libya), which the other Arab and Muslim states will probably be able to cut loose anyway. The 9/11 attacks destroyed this implicit arrangement, and the doctrine of pre-emption means that we will ourselves impose accountability upon the states which play this duplicitous role, no longer routing our actions through the superstructure of complicit international institutions and alliances, like the UN.\n\nBut pre-emption reveals a broader truth: one has to choose between erring on the side of too much caution (one more round of negotiations while the plot takes shape) or too much risk (attacking a particular country before all the facts are in regarding its capabilities and intentions)–there is no position of perfect knowledge here, especially since very often what we do know and can find out depends upon what we are willing to do. So, a profound shift of attitude is implicit here: we shift the burden of proof from ourselves to those whom we have reason to suspect might be colluding with terrorists or even (depending on how “energetically” we wish interpret the doctrine), say, providing propaganda back-up.\n\nNow, the doctrine of pre-emption could conceivably be installed as policy without the other pillar of the Bush Doctrine, the spreading of liberty as the war against Islamic fascism. But spreading liberty does answer some questions which immediately emerge once one commits to pre-emption. First of, what counts as a successful pre-emption? Let’s say we had invaded Iraq, chased Saddam Huessein from power, scoured the country looking for weapons and material which could be used for weapons, ignoring everything and everyone else, finding (or not) what we were looking for, disarming the country–then what? Saddam was in hiding–should we stay and look for him?\n\nWhy? If we stay, what exactly are we doing while we’re looking for Saddam? Are we looking for Saddam or his helpers as well–his sons, his security forces, etc.? Why–what makes any of that our business? After we’ve done what we came for perhaps Saddam will return to power. Or his sons will. Or one of his generals. Do we care? Let’s say we leave and they immediately start to rearm. We can repeat what we have already done–but since we can’t waste the time and resources (not to mention looking ridiculous after a little while) the next time around we won’t bother to invade and look. We’ll just destroy the country, so that it will take decades to rebuild again as a threat.\n\nCan we be sure of that, though? How much effort and time would it take for a ruthless gang, ruling over a traumatized people living among rubble, to acquire weapons and networks of people capable of doing great damage? There is a bizarre repetition compulsion pattern to such behavior, and it can only really end by just commiting genocide against entire peoples who still haven’t “learned their lesson.”\n\nSo, spreading liberty answers the question of what we do once we have pre-empted. In a certain sense we might consider it a weapon of war against tyranny, designed to use the characteristic weaknesses of tyrannies against them. And we have an interesting precedent for us in this case: the Emancipation Proclamation (as an aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pursue the obvious fact that neo-conservative politics are Lincolnian before they are Straussian or anything else). It is often noted, usually by hypocrisy-spotters, that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed those slaves held in territories which the Union government did not yet control; which is to say, it actually freed not a single one.\n\nThere was a good, legalistic reason for this: Lincoln did not believe he had the authority under the Constitution to free the slaves within the Union, in which case it could only be advanced as a war measure, targeting the rebels. But there was an even better, political reason (and it’s not a coincidence that the legal and political reasons lined up so felicitously–that is what happens when you make sure to double the particular policy you pursue as a defense of some threatened portion of the Constitutional order itself): the Proclamation in one stroke produced a new powerful ally, those, black and white, slave and free, who saw the real meaning of the war in the abolition of slavery.\n\nAt the same time, it radicalized the war precisely when it was necessary to do so, when the slogan of “Union” was no longer quite enough to justify the enormous sacrifices already and yet to be made, and when the unforseen consequences of unjustified Confederate resistance needed to be met with an escalation in the consequences they would confront–in other words, it provided a “no turning back” character to the struggle. And can anyone really believe that, once the war was over and slavery had been abolished in the intransigent states like the Carolinas, Alabama, etc., it could really survive long in the states which had remained loyal (or which abandoned the rebellion)? In which case, the Proclamation provided an incentive for slave states to return to the Union which was ultimately cost-free–and even if no states took up the offer, it certainly introduced divisions throughout the South.\n\nPrecisely the same logic applies to an assessment of the spread of liberty in the War against Islamic fascism. We don’t seek to forcibly democratize Egypt, not because it is less dictatorial than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (it is, but that’s not the criterion) but because the Egyptian government has not ranged itself against us, with our enemies, much less challenged us directly. If it were to consider doing so, it is aware of the consequences. Installing free governments is intrinsically connected to regime change–a punishment for our enemies and an attempt to turn their subject peoples into allies. The hope is that this will break the cycle of installing one friendly dictator after another, until each is overthrown or becomes unfriendly in turn–or, worse, simply wiping out, Carthage style, any society that looks at us wrong (and I will return the question of why we can’t do that later–at this point, nothing should be taken for granted). Meanwhile, while we don’t directly overthrow the Egyptian government, we can be confident that the spread of free societies in the region will increase the confidence of the Egyptian people and the pressure on the Egyptian government.\n\nNow comes the difficult part. Two questions or claims account for the opposition to the Bush Doctrine by conservatives in particular; these objections were never adequately addressed by the Administration, but they deserve to be, and like all good questions answering them will clarify our own understanding of the Doctrine. First, what happens when free elections bring inimical or tyrannical regimes to power, thereby intensifying the problem they were meant to solve? Second, simply because it fits our strategy to transform these societies along these lines, there is no reason to assume that the “human material” comprising them is at all fit for the transformation.\n\nThese are, of course, related questions, touching upon the unreadiness of the Arab and Muslim worlds for liberal democracy, and they also raise more basic questions about the cultural prerequisites of democracy and the actual political conditions (beyond elections) that we are willing to consider genuinely democratic. I will not argue that the claim that Muslim societies are unsuited for democracy is overstated, al though I have seen that argument made, with regard to Iraq and Iran in particular; rather, I will simply stipulate to it, so that we can confront the questions in the most minimal way.\n\nSo, when Muslim countries vote, they elect Islamic fundamentalists, terrorist gangs, and Parliaments which make Sharia the law of the land. Our first question here is, if they were enemies before, are they enemies now?–if we stick to the rule that we only execute regime change upon enemies, this is the initial form in which we confront the question. If they are still enemies, well, the policy has failed in that particular case, but nothing much has changed–we are still at war with them, and the fact that we are now at war with a democratically elected government, i.e., with a people that has chosen to be at war with us, in fact widens our options: we are no longer restricted to the kind of surgical strike that the strategy of spreading freedom would dictate.\n\nWe might have to defer the question of what kind of government we would insist upon in the wake of that war, but we might be in a better condition to impose liberal democracy upon a chastened population–however bitter they might be about it, a new generation raised under the imposed institutions might very well make something of them. If the new, less than ideally democratic government is not an enemy, well, at the very least we have gained something, and we are in a position to exploit that new government’s dependence upon us to insist upon (or support those fighting for) more incremental democratic transformations. At the very least it will be in a poor position to resist the demand that it continue to submit itself to regular elections.\n\nAnd we will have, again, at the very least, brought such societies out of what Lee Harris calls the “fantasy ideologies” which enthrall them–in the Muslim world, in particular, the fantasy of an eternal “resistance” to the West, to the Crusaders, to imperialism, to Zionism, to whatever–a resistance without criteria and without measurable consequences because the West’s dependence upon Middle Eastern oil means that we can neither ignore such victimary resentment (as we might do if it were coming, say–but this is why it is not coming–from Africa) nor settle accounts with it once and for all. The Bush Doctrine would introduce symmetry, accountability, even a structure of causality into our relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds.\n\nAnd regular elections are not a small thing, regardless of the contempt in which many seem to hold “illiberal democracy.” We prefer the liberal kind, of course, but the historically privileged route of gradual liberalization, development of a middle class, extension of the franchise and of civil liberties has pretty much been closed to us in the Muslim World. Perhaps in countries like Jordan or Morocco, the development of a more liberal, and then more democratic culture within the framework of a fairly decent and legitimate monarchy is possible–even in these cases, that possibility is fading, if not gone. Elsewhere, such regimes were destroyed long ago, and so there is no middle ground between autocracy and democracy.\n\nWithout elections, freedoms will never be taken seriously, and the longer you delay (imagine if we had not yet held elections in Iraq on the grounds that the “conditions were not yet ripe”), the greater the suspicion that you will never hold them, or if you do, only when you are assured of the results (which, by now, is also impossible, so that if you do hold out for favorable results you will look incompetent as well as repressive, a deadly combination).\n\nTo accept the result of elections, once, twice, three and then four times, to have one ruler or party voluntarily step down in favor of another repeatedly, is already to exhibit some of the habits of liberalism, which are really simply advanced habits of deferral: if I am capable of letting the other side win and rule for a awhile because I know I will get my chance I will also be ready to let the other fellow speak or practice a different religion because when he is in power he will let me do so as well. So, there is absolutely no reason why the simple act of repeated elections can’t take us quite a bit of the way toward genuine liberalism.\n\nAnd why, after all, would people who have not yet done so, people who are used to dominating or being dominated, habituate themselves to such a regimen of deferral if not for the simple reason that they have experienced the alternatives (or have stepped back from the brink of them), have found those alternatives to be too horrible to undergo again (or contemplate), and are thereby kept on the only path capable of keeping those alternative at bay. Indeed, could the origins of freedom and democracy lie anywhere else than in some pact made by antagonistic tribes which found themselves unable to conquer but capable of destroying each other; or found themselves facing a more formidable foe who could be defeated only with their combined powers?\n\nOnce such a pact, displacing the particular ritual center of each of the tribes or groups involved in favor of the sacralization of the pact itself, is secured and repeated, the details can be filled in afterward. And for countries in the Muslim world today, those alternatives must be, on the one side, the far more horrible damages ethnic groups and states are capable of inflicting upon each other today and, on the other side- us . To put it crudely, what must supplement the deficiency in cultural prerequisites is our giving these countries absolutely no other choice.\n\nAnd here, it seems to me, is the answer to those whose variant on the arguments I have been addressing focuses on Islam and the doctrines of violence, imperialism and intolerance built into it doctrinally and historically. We could, perhaps, quarantine the Muslim world, but if we wanted to set up conditions under which Muslims themselves would be forced to confront the consequences of Islam in the modern world, and to either reform it accordingly or abandon it (and, first of all, to open a space in which Muslims could discuss these alternatives freely), then the Bush Doctrine would provide the best conditions for that as well.\n\nOnly a genuinely political space, even an only partially open one, would make such contests over the fate of of Islam possible: fine, a democratically elected Parliament will implement Sharia, but then they will have to pass laws which actually define its meaning, bringing it into the secular realm; imams may be given a privileged place in the political order, perhaps akin to a Supreme Court, but they will also come under public criticism for their decisions. We must have the patience to allow such processes to play themselves out, while at the same time setting some outer limits regarding, say, the execution of “apostates.” In the meantime, while maintaining some degree of neutrality in supporting the processes established by a given state, we will also be free to express our preferences for the more liberal elements.\n\nThe Bush Doctrine, on a more “originary” level, is, finally, a response to the double bind the most powerful nation is in in a post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima world–a double bind that is aggravated by the end of bi-polar superpower rivalry and, as has already been analyzed extensively, has produced the currently metastasizing White Guilt. This double bind is that we cannot, possibly, fight “all out” (another of the frustrations expressed by many conservative supporters of a forceful anti-terror, anti-Islamist policy): fighting all out would mean completely wiping out any enemy, perhaps even merely potential ones. We are inevitably withholding some of our power: but the problem here is, it is impossible to prevent this restraint from being interpreted as hesitancy and even fear of the consequences, and hence as a victory for whoever simply manages to survive our assaults.\n\nAnd the fact is, this would be the correct interpretation, al though not for the reason usually assumed, that we fear producing further uprisings among the “wretched of the earth”–it can’t be that because such revolts could be settled just as easily if we were ready to go “all out.” Our fear, in fact, is of civil war within our own country and our own civilization: if some of us made others of us complicit in genocide we would no longer be able to live together. Rather than a conventional shooting war among factions in the West, the aftermath of going “all out” would be gradual poisoning of relations as we all look at each other and see reflected our own renunciation of responsibility for our collective “re-barbarization” (to use Mark’s Steyn’s term), or our inability to match the re-barbarization of the world with anything other than a thoughtless mimetic response.\n\nIt is true that if we turned out to be capable of that , there is very little that we could assume (of each other and ourselves) that we wouldn’t be capable of. The power of White Guilt lies, I would suggest, in this implicit threat to withdraw consent and initiate (or, perhaps, accelerate) this process of civilizational suicide–for White Guilt, this is a form of blackmail, applied in perfect harmony with victimary blackmail, which itself aims at inducing this civil war cum civilizational suicide (it might be compared to the strife introduced among a family, one of whose members is being held hostage, with any decision, made by any member, being potentially the fatal one, with no criteria for deciding what that might be–in such a condition of suspense, the maintenance of solidarity would become extremely difficult, the temptation to be ready to displace blame onto another almost irresistible). But this could only be effective to the extent that we recognize the destruction WG continually pre-empts in its own virtual reality as a genuine possibility.\n\nThe Bush Doctrine, then, is most fundamentally a deferral of our own tendencies to devolve into a new mode of civil disintegration over the enormous tension between our need to take the lead in establishing new, workable, symmetries and reciprocities and the actual existence of glaring asymmetries which are continually judged in the light of those very responsbilities we must take upon ourselves. This deferral must take the form of a very radical mode of freedom, what Eric Gans has called “omnicentrism,” the power of each individual to constitute him/herself as a new center, and hence a new beginning: only such a “sign” can effectively defer the temptations of both the ancient tyrannies (the “big man,” now revived by Islamic barbarism) and the modern, “ideological” ones (which usurp human freedom by reducing human action to some kind of controllable process).\n\nThe highest political form taken by this mode of freedom is “civil disobedience,” first made prominent, I suppose, in the passive resistance movement led by Gandhi, but perfected, I would suggest, by our own civil rights movement. Civil disobedience unites the individual’s freedom to resist unjust laws with a very rigorous responsibility toward those laws and whatever legitimacy (and good faith) might be possessed by their authorizers along with a disciplined, exemplary approach to the antagonisms it deliberately instigates: representing, embodying those antagonisms while refusing to allow them to escalate into violence.\n\nThe conception of the world involved in the Bush Doctrine–which it didn’t live up to, and which perhaps can’t be lived up to but, like Christian martyrdom and monasticism, must come to define our culture as a possible space (realized by a few) to be preserved and allowed to shine forth–was best expressed in Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, and it comes down to, we are always on the side of the civil disobedient. Even when he is wrong we can be on his side because he allows himself to be proven wrong and accepts the lion’s share of the consequences of his own actions. The richness of this conception was just barely intimated, and not at all explored, and our tragedy is that now, perhaps, it never will be.\n\nIt would not, I believe, interfere with our need to engage at times with even despicable regimes, but it would at the very least shape the way we did engage them, always finding some way to place their civil disobedients at the center of our interactions. I, at least, will be forever grateful to George W. Bush for the courage to even adumbrate such a conception and will dedicate myself to keeping its meaning out of reach of the jackals and vultures who have been gathering from the beginning and now, I suspect, will not be satisfied until they have paved over all memory of such possibilities, reducing the Bush years to nothing more than a series of criminal adventures, a nightmare from which we can now wake up.\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-little-more-ga-in-the-public-sphere",
      "title": "A little more GA in the public sphere",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The new issue of NER:\n\nhttp://www.newenglishreview.org/\n\nAnd here’s the link to my essay:\n\nhttp://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=4788&sec_id=4788"
    },
    {
      "slug": "for-a-jew-crusader-alliance",
      "title": "For a Jew-Crusader Alliance",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In his just published Chronicle , “Originary Demography” ( http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw339.htm ), Eric Gans concludes that the aging, demographically suicidal cultures of Western Europe\n\ncan renew themselves rather than (as Steyn predicts) breaking down in ethno-religious strife and/or giving way by mid-century to a second Muslim conquest: demographic recovery through the revival of European Christianity. This is not to say that “Islam is the enemy.” But Islam, for better or for worse, remains deeply connected to traditional society. That is the secret of its higher birthrate, as well as of what modern eyes see as oppression of women and tolerance of barbarous forms of violence. The only way to reconcile European Muslims with modernity is by demonstrating to them that European market society is indeed a viable human project–as a society that disdains to reproduce itself is not.\n\nI couldn’t agree more–nor, I suspect, could Pope Benedict. I would like, in fact, to piggyback on Gans’ suggestion by proposing what seems to me the only (albeit radical) political platform likely to promote such a course reversal on the part of the Europeans. First, though, I will issue a minor dissent regarding Gans’ immediately proferred answers to possible objections:\n\nOne need not be entirely pessimistic in this regard. Emerging generations cannot fail to see the bankruptcy of the postwar social-insurance state, both as a demographic entity and as a spiritual one. Nor need this renewed Christianity take the form of fundamentalist literalism. The anthropological understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition that derives from the work of René Girard gives religious faith an ever-clearer unity with fundamental anthropology. Convergence of faith and self-knowledge would make the choice between secularization and fanaticism increasingly irrelevant. The future of European Christianity may well look surprisingly like Generative Anthropology.\n\nFirst of all, emerging generations certainly can fail to see the bankruptcy of the present social order, certainly in the numbers required by the kind of revival this turn around would depend upon; in fact, if they could just see it, why would a revival of Christianity be necessary? Why not just invent the spiritual beliefs which correspond more directly to the current need if one recognizes that need so clearly? And, if only a small (even if significant) minority recognizes the need, they may very well emigrate, leaving the more desperate, violent and nihilistic behind. My second point is related: if we genuinely want a revival of Christinaity, we can’t pretend to desire it in forms we find preferable.\n\nSuch a revival will have to be an event , it cannot be a calculated social policy, and as an event, or revelation, it will be enthusiastic and evangelical, and there is nothing we can or should do about that. (Would we oppose the revival if it indeed began to take shape in some “fundamnetalist, literalist” form? The question of how we Generative Anthropologists might participate and seek to help shape developments is another question.)\n\nOne more, not so much objection, as observation, which will then bring me to my larger argument: Gans’ argument for a renewed, demographically relevant Europe leaves unaddressed the question with which he opens, the political consequences of White Guilt:\n\nThe impact of World War II that dominates the postwar era to this day is embodied in its twin revelations about human violence, epitomized by Auschwitz and Hiroshima: we can no longer use violence to settle ultimate questions of power, and we can no longer tolerate the legally enforced dominance of one group, however defined, over another. The reluctance to accord privilege has led us to the threshold of gay marriage; the fear of all-out violence ties our hands on every battlefield. The most salient fact of American history in the sixty years since Nagasaki is that the United States has not won a definitive military victory: not in Korea, surely not in Vietnam; not in the first Gulf War, where we forbore to defeat Saddam as we had defeated Hitler, nor in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that persist in the aftermath of conventional military victories. Sixty years after we defeated Nazi Germany, a majority of Americans are convinced that we are incapable of securing the metropolitan area of Baghdad.\n\nWould the re-Christianization of Europe help us to secure Baghdad (or, more precisely, help us to realize that there is no way that we can’t secure Baghdad, if we decide to do it)? My answer is that it certainly would, and therein lies the enormous power of Gans’ argument here. A Christian revival would be the antidote to White Guilt, probably the only one available to us; in fact one could trace the emergence of White Guilt to the demise of the post-sacrificial order signified by Jesus on the Cross, which demise allowed the sacrificial function to be “distributed” to the “Other” of the West, with disastrous consequences.\n\nBut if a Christian revival would be an enormous boost to American political power (and not just in the “realist” sense, but in the more “evangelical,” world-transforming, democratizing and liberalizing sense), shouldn’t we take the next step and proclaim that American foreign policy interests are directly tied to such a revival, with the minimal beginning of defending Christians and Christian institutions wherever they are under attack? Christianity is reviving elsewhere–evangelical forms of Christianity (even Mormonism, I understand) are spreading in Latin America, and a continent-wide struggle between Christianity and Islam is underway in Africa.\n\nOne recent commentator (I think it was Mark Steyn, but if it wasn’t, it could have been) noted that if one looks at Latin American social conditions one wonders why the Wahhabis haven’t disseminated some seed money throughout the region–if even 5% of Latin Americans were converted to Islam the balance of power there might be shifted even further away from American interests toward the emergent Left-Islamist alliance. And, could we really expect a resurgent Christianity in Europe if Christianity goes undefended elsewhere? We could even posit the following criteria or “metric” for victory in the GWOT: we will have won once Christians are free to safely proselytize anywhere in what is now the “Muslim World”–whether that is because Islam has changed, or Islam, shown to be incapable of change, has been swept away, is not our problem.\n\nWell, if we are thinking big, how about considering the next step: since new Christians and born again Christians seem to be more sympathetic toward Jews and Israel than just about any other social group (including Jews!), doesn’t it follow that an explicit defense of a world wide Christian revival would lead us to to remove one qualification and restriction after another on our alliance with Israel? To the point where we make what would certainly be the sound decision in purely military terms to carry out joint actions with the IDF and coordinate our strategies in what is after all a common war against shared enemies? I, at least, have never seen, anywhere , anyone draw up, even as a thought experiment, what such coordination might look like–and the reason for that is surely that, on the face of it, the idea is so politically crazy to be unthinkable.\n\nBut, as I have argued before, we are living in abnormal times, when the unthinkable oftentimes becomes the commonplace. A genuine Israeli-American alliance (which would meet resistance on the Israeli side as well, of course–Israelis have historically been extremely resistant to linking their wars to anyone else’s, to agree upon limitations to their freedom of action, or to place Israelis in a position where others are dying for them or they are dying for others) is “obviously” crazy because it would confirm the prevailing Arab/Muslim stereotype of a “Zionist-American” (in whatever formulation) conspiracy to subjugate them and the rest of the world.\n\nBut the post-colonial Left, in its argument for “appropriating” the stereotypes imposed upon one rather than inevitably self-defeating attempts to “disprove” them, has a very good point–the best way to disprove or dispel the stereotype is simply to implement it and show that it has none of the anticipated effects. Drastic measures are needed in dealing with deeply rooted pathologies, and the Arab/Muslim “fantasy ideology” (to use Lee Harris’ term) which reduces the world to continually reiterated acts of heroic if hopeless “resistance” to the “Jew-Crusader” conspiracy is the most dangerous fantasy the world has seen since the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (which, of course, has been folded into this fantasy ideology).\n\nAside from the military conveniences such an alliance would offer (a secure, permanent base in the Middle East, for one thing), it might work as a kind of radical “transference” (in the psychoanalytic sense) for the Arab/Muslim world–in some way, we will have to intervene drastically and surgically in that world before this is all over because they will not leave us alone as long as they are gripped by this fantasy ideology, and any attempts to “ungrip” them without dramatic change simply strengthens the grip; so, why not try and disrupt their projections by working through them?\n\nScenic Politics"
    },
    {
      "slug": "fr-re-jacques-a-chronicle-about-derrida-and-ga",
      "title": "Frère Jacques: a Chronicle about Derrida and GA",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Thanks to the previous post, I don’t have to provide a link to Chronicle 339, “Originary Demography.” Now Chronicle 340 is available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw340.htm . Entitled “Frère Jacques,” it elaborates on the anthropological content of a recently published text by Jacques Derrida that touches on the question of minimal faith .\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "no-enemies-on-the-left",
      "title": "No enemies on the Left",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Although not all academics are radical leftists, all radical leftists are academics, in the sense that they are accepted, and often feted, by the academy. I have long been struck by the extreme political views of many of the most successful academicians, views that, far from acting as a handicap, are a factor in their success. Nothing attracts university faculty as much as being allowed to participate vicariously in an unsparing denunciation of everything their lives really depend on; only then can they enjoy their SUVs in peace.\n\nI was reminded of this the other day when I watched a partial reconstruction of a lost film by Eisenstein entitled Bezhin Meadow , “very loosely” based on a Turgenev story. The film’s plot is far indeed from Turgenev’s characteristic pre-revolutionary father-son conflict. The father, who incidentally has beaten his wife to death, is designated explicitly as a kulak. With a few other reactionaries he attempts to stop collectivization by burning grain and the kolkhoz gasoline supply. He and his friends are imprisoned, but only their evil can supply an appropriate conclusion to the film, so they escape and commit other crimes including martyring the heroic son, whereupon (the shots are a bit obscure) the good guys crush them under Soviet tractors.\n\nMeanwhile, these good people have made a “clubhouse” out of the local church. This is no mere act of secularization. The only thing we see them do there is desecrate its religious symbols; one burly peasant plays Samson in bringing down an altar. Resentment and violence against the church; resentment and violence against the “kulaks”–the new Soviet utopia is defined entirely by hatred. Yet shots abound of smiling youngsters, and the blond hero of the film, who could have stepped right out of a Hitlerjugend recruitment poster, displays some of the most sickening grins in cinema history.\n\nNow for the jacket blurb:\n\nBEZHIN MEADOW would have been Eisenstein’s most beautiful and lyrical film — had it been permitted to see the light of day. In one of cinema’s great tragedies, Eisenstein’s film was banned by Stalinist officials in 1937 and copies of the film were subsequently destroyed in a fire caused by German bombing in World War II. Only individual still images and film frames survived from the original footage. These, along with Eisenstein’s script and production records, guided Soviet researchers who painstakingly produced this 30-minute reconstruction of Eisenstein’s original conception.\n\nBased very loosely on a pastoral tale by Turgenev, BEZHIN MEADOW is set in a Russian village during the Soviet collectivization programs of the 1930s. Eisenstein chose to dramatize that conflicted process by centering his story on a peasant boy who supports the collective and who dies at the hands of his counterrevolutionary father. This tale of martyrdom inspired the most lyrical work of Eisenstein’s entire career. The haunting still images which comprise this reconstruction are meticulously reproduced in this edition and do full justice to Eisenstein’s renowned visual style.\n\nSince Khrushchev’s revelations back in 1956, good leftists no longer number Stalin among their heroes. Thus instead of condemning Eisenstein for this tasteless apology for mass slaughter, our commentator makes him a martyr to “Stalinist officials” who banned the film. My guess is that Stalin did it because even he couldn’t take that grinning kid.\n\nNeedless to say, a similar Nazi film, with the “kulaks” replaced by Jews ( Jew Süss is a work of sublime delicacy next to Bezhin Meadow ), would not have come in for similar praise. Leni Riefenstahl, whose films celebrate Hitler but not Nazi violence, was tainted; Eisenstein, whose films are dominated by images of resentful violence, is a “lyrical” genius hampered by Stalinist persecution.\n\nWhat accounts for this? Why do campuses invite Noam Chomsky but not David Duke or even Pat Buchanan? It is a bit too easy to point to the difference between an ideology that is “essentially” exclusionary (“Germany for the Aryans/Germans”) and one that excludes others only “contingently” (“The kulaks cannot be permitted to thwart the will of the Soviet people”). What this difference really shows is how little all the righteous indignation against Nazism corresponds to any true moral awakening. This moral posturing is the foundation of the victimary world-view that we call “postmodernism”; we need to condemn the Nazis in order to inoculate ourselves against the Western sin of firstness .\n\nWhat really determines the status of our political pariahs is the resentment of the Others in the rest of the world. Now that the Middle East has revived Nazi antisemitism, the latter is becoming once again respectable, but it is still a long way from acquiring the continued viability of communist slogans and icons. Che Guevara posters are found all over the world; I doubt if there is much of a market for Himmlers. The crimes of the Left are no less vicious than those of the Right, but we cannot condemn them without arousing what we fear most, the resentment of the Others at home and abroad.\n\nPostmodernism is a commemoration of Auschwitz for the wrong reasons, a cult of victims that ignores who they were and why they were killed. That is why it so enjoys squeezing tears out of the Holocaust but finds crushing “kulaks” under the treads of tractors “beautiful” and “lyrical.”\n\nReal moral progress is very slow, and it may very well be that it does not occur at all. Systems of exchange improve, but those who inhabit them are never more than a catastrophe away from Hobbes’ state of nature. We rely ever more on the system and ever less on ourselves to defer the violence of our resentment. Let’s hope we never have to find out what would happen if the system failed us.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "post-9-11-epistemology",
      "title": "Post-9/11 Epistemology",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A very thoughtful discussion of scapegoating and reality-avoidance in today’s world.\n\nhttp://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/4884201.html"
    },
    {
      "slug": "where-we-are",
      "title": "Where we are",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2006",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A masterly summary of the divide from VDH:\n\nhttp://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjdhYTI3NWEy MzhkMGVm YjVmZDZk YzFi ZmY1 Mm QzMGM ="
    },
    {
      "slug": "constitutionalism-and-the-global-intifada-an-essay-on-originary-political-thinki",
      "title": "Constitutionalism and the Global Intifada: An Essay on Originary Political Thinking",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=5370&sec_id=5370"
    },
    {
      "slug": "gans-katz-on-white-guilt",
      "title": "Gans & Katz on White Guilt",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This is to announce the appearance of a new Chronicle of Love & Resentment ( 341 ) by Eric Gans (“Victimary Extinction or Religious Survival”). Adam Katz’ response (“The Crisis of Firstness”) is expected on Saturday, March 31.\n\n3/31 Update : Katz’ guest Chronicle ( 342 ) is now available."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-is-originary",
      "title": "What is originary?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I would like to try to clarify what is originary and what is not.\n\nIn one sense, all of culture is originary, in the sense that all of culture can be traced back to the originary scene. But that’s like the night in which all cows are black; the definition gives up what makes the word meaningful and useful. The originary is actually present at the originary scene, and includes the sacred, the sign, the aesthetic, and so on. Narrative is originary (at least implicitly), but literature, it seems to me, is not, since it evolved later. There have been many cultures without literature. (Myth, of course, is not literature.) By the same token, sacrifice is originary, but tragedy, as a form of literature, is not. The originary includes the fundamental anthropological categories, the cultural universals. What is not universal to all cultures everywhere cannot be originary."
    },
    {
      "slug": "chronicle-344-right-and-left",
      "title": "Chronicle 344, ‘Right and Left’",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Chronicle 344 is a continuation of a running dialogue with Adam Katz concerning GA’s relationship to politics. A future Chronicle will deal with the question of freedom .\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "chronicle-345-tragedy-and-christianity-minimal-and-maximal-faith",
      "title": "Chronicle 345: Tragedy and Christianity: Minimal and Maximal Faith",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Chronicle 345 , which explores the relationship between the varieties of firstness, is now available.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "chronicle-346-thoughts-on-originary-narrative",
      "title": "Chronicle 346: Thoughts on Originary Narrative",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This new Chronicle, which elaborates on some of the ideas in the preceding (as well as in “ Originary Narrative ” and The End of Culture ) is now available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw346.htm.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "no-longer-raining-on-the-just-and-unjust-alike",
      "title": "No longer raining on the just and unjust alike",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A headline in my local newspaper today proclaimed “Study finds storm [Katrina] hit blacks harder.”\n\nIs anyone else getting tired of these studies, which seem to be appearing in our news now on a daily basis, that not everybody in America ends up in the same place? A local “scandal” in Utah is that hispanic children in the public schools do not do as well on achievement tests as whites. Public pressure forced the governor to appoint a commission to investigate. Yet there has been no evidence produced of discrimination in the school system, nor even any allegations of discrimination. Aren’t individuals responsible for themselves anymore? I fear we’re going to end up like the futuristic society described in one of Kurt Vonnegut’s stories, in which the smart, talented, and “advantaged” people are forced to wear various torture devices in order to “level the playing field.”\n\nAll we can do is make and enforce the laws against discrimination; after that individuals have to take responsibility for their own outcomes.\n\n~Q"
    },
    {
      "slug": "incarnations-of-evangelicism-avatars-of-a-new-modernity",
      "title": "Incarnations of Evangelicism: Avatars of a New Modernity",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/8375/sec_id/8375\n\nPlus, a brief mention here:\n\nSecular Illusions\n\nby Rebecca Bynum\n\nhttp://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/8727/sec_id/8727"
    },
    {
      "slug": "chronicle-348-the-four-freedoms",
      "title": "Chronicle 348 – The Four Freedoms",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Chronicle 348 deals with the question of human freedom from the standpoint of the linguistic forms discussed in The Origin of Language (UC, 1981). It is available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw348.htm\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "god-s-eternal-word-is-human-freedom",
      "title": "God’s Eternal Word is Human Freedom",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I think all originary thinkers should be interested in this brilliant post by truepeers over at the Covenant Zone blog (I put in the permalink John provided in the comments to this entry for those who may have been confused by my linking to the blog itself–sorry for that):\n\nhttp://covenantzone.blogspot.com/2007/10/gods-eternal-word-is-human-freedom.html\n\nAdam Katz"
    },
    {
      "slug": "victimary-statements-statements-of-the-center",
      "title": "Victimary Statements; Statements of the Center",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Victimary discourse has its own critique of metaphysics, which I would translate into originary thinking as follows. Victimary discourse is fundamentally anti-mimetic: mimesis leads inexorably to violence, and victimary discourse has faith neither in Girard’s Christian transcendence of the scapegoat nor a transcendent sign such as that posited in Eric Gans’ originary scene–the latter, in particular, could be no more than a “cover-up” of the originary violence enacted behind and constitutive of the scene. The primacy of the declarative sentence would, for such a stance, be abhored for its internalization of mimesis: the possibility, constitutive of the declarative, that a “fictional” world could “imitate” the “real” one.\n\nSuch representation as imitation occludes the originary violence and even if the more sophisticated victimary thinker recognizes that the occlusion of violence is simultaneously an at least minimal mitigation of that violence, we can no longer accept that trade-off in good faith: even at the possible price of our own destruction, the forgetting that we have forgotten the originary violence must be resisted.\n\nIt also follows, then, that victimary discourse is just as terrified of the originary ostensive as metaphysics. Indeed, victimary discourse is a kind of heretical, parasitical, sectarian breakaway formation, ever engaged in its shadow boxing with metaphysics. It wouldn’t be quite right to characterize the victimary as “anti-declarative” (they are not about to boycott the sentence), but it does insist on “staining” the “mirror” of the ideal or fictional world of the declarative, which claims to represent “nature.” A sentence can be stained in many ways. Perhaps most obvious is Derrida’s Heideggerean (but quickly abandoned) placing of especially complicit words (above all, the copula) “under erasure.”\n\nAnd there are the compulsory, ubiquitous scare quotes (I just found it impossible to summarize victimary discourse without a whole series of them.). Almost as common, and for my purposes here more interesting, is what we might call the obligatory negation familiar to any reader of either “high” academic theory or cultural and postcolonial studies: locutions like “of course, I don’t mean to suggest…”; “this shouldn’t be taken to support…”; “for readers who wish to implicate my discourse in the common sense, this would be misread as…”, etc. These obligatory negations go well beyond the normal anticipation of misunderstandings and questions and exhibit markedly pathological features: if the declarative makes an absent object present as a sign, the obligatory negation, itself, of course, a declarative of an especially strident type, makes absent an object which one fears is present–the sign itself, which would absorb one, overwhelming all resistance, into the dreaded center.\n\nIn that case, it is worth considering whether we can distinguish between more or less healthy declarative forms, between victimary ones and those of the center. Would more directly political and substantive declaratives like, say, “Capitalism is exploitation” and “America is racist” share an identifiable structure with the obligatory negation, that of a kind of self-cancelling declarative? Could we, in contrast, identify a structure common to “conservative” (or, really, classically liberal or conventionally patriotic) declaratives, like “the free market is the best means for producing wealth” and “America is a good society”? A declarative of the center would include in its formulation a common and ever receding horizon, while the victimary declarative would fix our attention on a rapidly approaching, even if never quite arriving, catastrophic object.\n\nI do think it is possible, and would propose as a kind of proof text a famous declarative of Churchill’s (the brilliance of which I have heard Eric Gans remark upon): “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.” This statement might serve us as a kind of template: any statement that can be translated into this form passes muster as a declarative of the center, and those which can’t are deemed victimary. Churchill’s declarative is genuinely originary because it stands in the midst of while simultaneously transcending competing and potentially deadly terms. You can only attack it by proposing another, better, form of government, which the statement implicitly invites you to attempt, but in so doing have you not demanded a place to speak within the existing democratic order?\n\nSo: “the free market is the worst way of producing wealth except for all the others that have been tried.” That works perfectly well: one need not idealize the market, and this formulation openly invites us to focus on its flaws, inequities, occasional destructiveness and corrosive effects on benign traditions. In the end, none of these claims detracts from the market’s superiority; in fact, any other form of wealth production or distribution you can try will be drawn back into the market, and we can wait patiently for that confirmation. And: “America is an awful society, except when compared to most of the others, real or possible, one could imagine.” That seems to me to hold up pretty well, and Chruchill himself even had a version: “Americans will always do the right thing, after they have tried everything else.”\n\nI don’t think it works at all, though, for our prototypical victimary statements. The singling out of a uniquely virulent perpetrator doesn’t allow for it: “capitalism is an excellent mode of distribution, until you have seen all the others”: “America is a land of racial equality, until you have seen the others”–the statements lose all of their sense in the translation. (A more decent, big government liberalism fares better, I think: “a vigorous public sphere and expansive government intervention in the economy is the worst way of remedying the excesses of the market, except for all the others that have been tried.” This lacks the near-axiomatic status of our pro-market statement, but it at least invites a civil and reasonable attempt at falsification, an attempt which is by no means assured of success.)\n\nThis pathological form, then, could be further defined by the lack of almost any boundary between declarative, imperative and ostensive in victimary discourse: to say, “America is racist,” is to command speaker and listener alike to demolish American racism by “any means necessary” and, further, to find and point out ostentatiously all instances (especially the most hidden and therefore insidious instances) of racism wherever one turns. “Capitalism is exploitation” likewise compels one to devote oneself to denouncing all apparently non-exploitative aspects of capitalism as “ideological” mechanisms, concealing the true nature of the mode of production.\n\nIf metaphysics hopes, by asserting the primacy of the declarative, to maintain some semblance of stability in the wild worlds of ostensives and imperatives by situating them within legitimately procedural and deliberative forms, victimary discourse is a veritable control freak–the declarative must include all possible imperatives and ostensives that might flow from it. The declarative of the center, meanwhile, is content to let us view and consider all other alternatives, secure in the knowledge that the inexhaustibility of the sign in its latest incarnation, and the irreducible event-fulness and freedom constitutive of human existence, will ultimately provide us with the slack and guidance we need to find our way back to the “least worst.”\n\nThe only imperative inherently attached to declaratives of the center is the one commanding us to be ready to see and hear, in the middle of our most tempting resentments, signs that what seems to us the worst might really be least worse, which would simultanously be signs pointing us toward the way in which we might make it lesser still.\n\nAdam Katz"
    },
    {
      "slug": "witness-protection-or-the-post-romantic-individual",
      "title": "Witness Protection, or the Post Romantic Individual",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "To be a modern individual is to court, if only in the most distant, mild, or simulated way, the risk of being scapegoated. This is the legacy of the Romantic stance invented by Rousseau, where, in a revision of the event of the crucifixion, the individual creates himself as a center of attention by claiming to be the victim of universal persecution; and successfully exploits both “defensive” and “offensive” responses to that claim as its confirmation. However necessary and productive this stance may have been in the emergence of the individual on the modern market, it has clearly long since become pathological, starting with its appropriation by collective movements predicated upon their exclusion from the marketplace.\n\nIf modernity is the expansion beyond the strictly liturgical realm of the Christian practice of imitating and witnessing for Jesus, the problem posed by the practice of drawing upon oneself that persecution lies in the formalization of that stance–the abstraction of the scapegoater/scapegoated relationship from any objective markers that the the scapegoat genuinely disseminates differences throughout society beyond the present capacity of the system of deferral to bear. After all, once Jesus has exposed the arbitrariness of the scapegoat function, that function can no longer be arbitrary: it is now he or she who confronts whosoever claims to be today’s “big man” with a broader mode of reciprocity and demands that society, and each individual, choose sides one way or the other.\n\nThe Rousseauian stance, then, would be less authentic–indeed, it would be a throwback to pre-Christian forms of scapegoating, with “markers” of the scapegoat disconnected from moral problematics–than that of he or she who risks scapegoating by speaking and acting openly in defense of others in danger of being scapegoated.\n\nSince acting pre-emptively in defense of possible scapegoats leads to the construction of norms and institutions which would detect and defer such possibilities, the modern individual’s willingness to risk scapegoating would become increasingly mediated and the risk more widely distributed. This might serve fairly well as a definition of “modern civilization.” At the same time, this widened distribution increases the probability that the risks will never be serious; which is to say, it becomes increasingly difficult to describe them as “risks” at all: the decent employee, law abiding citizen, good parent, etc., is, indeed, a product of a series of decisions, however buffered or unconsciously taken, to risk being the scapegoat, but the distance between our analytical appreciation of this fact and the actual experience of it is vast. Hence not only the ever fresh temptation to take the Rousseauian shortcut to genuine individuality, but the ease with which that normal citizen can be scapegoated by the victimary claim that the normal is no more than a conspiracy to exclude.\n\nIn that case, though, might not the victimary scapegoating return the normal citizen to his or her originary (modern) vocation as witness to the modern as the “secularization” of the Christian event? The only problem with this formulation is that the victimary protest is a shell game insofar as those it scapegoats end up testifying, in their victimization, to the truth of the victimary. The reason for this is Auschwitz theology, which has powerfully imprinted upon all contemporary events the inability of all the normal institutions to register the event of Auschwitz–not only did doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, bourgeois citizens, etc., not resist, but they actively lent their skills, unthinkingly and in a sense, then, even more complicitly, to the industrialized slaughter. There is enough truth to this intepretation of Auschwitz that the ranks of the bourgeoisie will produce no new universally accepted (or, we might say, non-ironic) martyrs until another event comes to supplant the Holocaust as the horizon of a new era.\n\nThere is nevertheless a central role for those of us who are more or less comfortably middle class and “protected” in the rejuvenation of modern individuality, and that role lies in the embrace, protection, and “privileging” of the genuinely new form of individuality emerging in our time: that form represented by witnesses to non-modern cultures–whether those cultures be pre-modern, as much of the Islamic world, or (to awkwardly coin a phrase), “de-modernized,” as many impoverished, crime-ridden institution-poor communities, mostly populated by racial and ethnic minorities, in our inner cities. Such witnesses, often scapegoated within their own communities as traitors and “Uncle Toms,” testify, as victims or at least targets of “our” victims, to the truth of modernity and, more specifically, to the devastation wrought by the White Guilt that encourages the substitution of limitless resentment for dialgoue and introspection.\n\nDefending such “informants,” whether they be “dissident” African Americans like Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly or ex-Muslim “infidels” like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, demands about as much courage as one is likely to be expected to demonstrate in the elite institutions of the academy and media. And it also requires the challenging work of repairing the damage done by resentment to the always fragile institutions and norms of modernity–looking at the “Global Intifada” that wages war on the intersection of the free market and the nation-state that sustains modernity from the Islamic world (increasingly in alliance with the resentment of the Left) on one side and the transnational progressives (who hope to subordinate nations to an international law circularly defined as whatever the international lawyers and bureaucrats say it is) we can see how fragile and even improbable modernity remains.\n\nThis alliance, or covenant, between the middle and the informant, would allow us to propose the “marginal individual” as the unit of measurement for social and political thought. I don’t mean “marginalized,” but, in a loose borrowing from marginal utility economic theory, that hypothetical individual whose consent will make or break any regime or policy. The strength of Leftist social and political arguments lie solely in their ability to present typical victims of their opponents’ policies and preferred institutional forms as comprising the majority and hence above the necessary threshold; even an injured child whose parents own several cars and a 300,000$ home can be presented as a victim of the “failure” to adequately insure all citizens.\n\nThe marginal individual would be one who is representable simultaneously as a victim of and as newly liberated and responsible under a given policy–conservatives at their best have sought to define such a marginal individual in their arguments for, e.g., welfare reform and school vouchers–the victim cut off from government largess is empowered to join genuine associational forms which enable her to determine her own fate. This marginal individual will always be the one who must break from the victimary cocoon/prison in which she is enclosed; and those of us defending her must be prepared to face opprobrium and ridicule with equanimity, knowing that the individuals we “promote” might always fall back into “non-modern” conditions or the victimary bubble.\n\nMoral, political and civilizational progress could then be measured in terms of the lowering of the threshold at which the new mode of individuality can be “detected”; that is, the extent to which each successful substitution of “guarantor” for “victim” further increases the difficulty of victimary representations.\n\nAdam Katz"
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-grammar-and-political-transparency",
      "title": "Originary Grammar and Political Transparency",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Continuing the line of inquiry intitated by Eric Gans’ Chronicle, “The Four Freedoms,” we can suggest that the three main linguistic forms correspond to three modes of political accountability. The ostensive, to unquestioned fealty to a shared sacred center; the imperative to the rule of “big man” who runs society as what we might call, depending upon our tastes, a protection racket or a more or less benign paternalist order characterized by the unconditional compliance with privileged imperatives; and the declarative, of course, to an open, liberal order, in which no decision is legitimate until everyone has had their say.\n\nAll this is fairly uncontroversial. What I would like to add, so as to make this a new discussion, is the hypothesis that the higher linguistic forms do not supersede the lower ones but, rather, articulate them in new spatial and temporal configurations. So, the imperative clearly relies upon the ostensive in the sense that compliance must be confirmed: I must be able to point, along with others, at the object produced or act carried out, in accord with the specifications implicit or explicit in the imperative. Similarly, the declarative must include reformed or redirected imperatives and ostensives, and this is a rather more complex matter.\n\nLet’s stick with the ostensive-imperative relation for a moment. If I have given an order to a subordinate, I presumably know what it would mean for that order to be carried out–if I say the “report must be on my desk by 3” I know how to tell time, have a clock available, know what desk is meant, and know what would count as an acceptably completed report; and, my subordinate knows all this as well. Furthermore, I have some idea (perhaps increasingly vague as the work done to complete the report becomes more individualized) of where the subordinate should be at a particular point in the work, and there may be all kinds of good reasons for me to want to check on those intermediate points as well (everyone has heard horror stories about the intrusive means of surveillance that have become commonplace in the contemporary corporation).\n\nThe point is, not only does the imperative rely upon the ostensive for its verification, but it generates a whole series of new ones, that in turn complicate the imperative order itself. The boss is checking on one thing (is the employee embezzling, or just lazy) and finds out something else (he is cheating on his wife) raising new questions about the employer-employee relationship and, in particular, the employer’s authority (it’s easy to say that employees should only be judged by their performance at work, but that already assumes a “declarative” model of justice rather than an imperative order in which the superior’s central concern is the condition of continuing to issue successful imperatives, in which case I may want to know if my employee is committing adultery and will therefore be brining all kinds of other issues into the workplace in ways I can reasonably predict even if the effects have not yet appeared).\n\nI want to suggest that the interaction between ostensive and imperative produces the possibility of something we might call “originary nihilism,” which is to say, a situation in which, due to colliding imperatives, or later imperatives that undermine the earlier ones, or subsidiary imperatives that don’t fit the central ones, there is no longer an “object” the parties involved can point to in order to verify compliance with the imperative. I furthermore want to suggest that we need to hypothesize such a situation to account for the emergence of the declarative in the first place, which is to say that the declarative emerges as the deferral of the impossible imperative and the transcendence of originary nihilism.\n\nThe first “claim” made by the declarative (and here I am working with the basic topic/comment form proposed in The Origin of Language ) is that things can be “otherwise” than proposed by the impossible imperative–which, interestingly, means that things can be both more “realistic” (the declarative offers something “possible”) and otherwise than could have been previously imagined.\n\nI would like to minimize the kind of scene we would have to imagine to thus read the declarative as the result of an event, which is to say a leap to a condition which was not contained in the imperative, or its extension to the negative ostensive. We would have to assume a crisis of the imperative, in which the incompatibility of the various imperatives offered in a given situation (either with each other, with reality, or with the established form of issuing and obeying imperatives) leads to the possibility of collective violence that no imperative, nor the rather weak negative ostensive, could prevent: the “possibility” that is offered by the emission of the declarative is first of all of de-escalating the situation by listening to someone (and then another, and then another…) who is putting two familiar words together in an unfamiliar way.\n\nSo, a formulation like “spear/hut” would at the very least draw attention to itself and be iterable–if it gets repeated enough times perhaps someone runs back to the hut and the crisis is resolved; but before that could happen, the linguistic innovation itself has to become a new center of attention. Insofar as it becomes a new center of attention, it can redirect the imperatives by presenting a new one, which redirection is a condition of “hearing” the declarative as an intelligible sign: the imperative is to be ready for a new kind of object, one which can only be identified ostensively; that new object is the possibility of another sentence.\n\nSimultaneously, the declarative reorders the existing imperative-ostensive nexus by extending the space between an imperative and the ostensives that will satisfy it, precisely by introducing the possibility of intermediate objects, creating in effect a whole world of possible objects, some of which happen to be “missing.” We might say that metaphysics’ elevating of the declarative to the status of primary linguistic form relies upon displacing the generative dimension of the declarative (the creation of the next sentence as the ostensively idenitifed object) by the “packaging” dimension; this displacement reduces the world to a finite set of possible objects, all of which could, in principle, be made present. Metaphysics effects this displacement by treating the infinite series of sentences as nothing more than so many containers of an essentially finite world of ideas.\n\nHowever we imagine such a “declarative event,” the validity of my analysis must rest upon the power with which it enables us to analyze actual sentences and discourses. I believe this power is considerable. To sketch out just a couple of possibilities, it enables us to account in a new way for Roman Jakobson’s famous axes of meaning, the axis of combination (metonymy) and the axis of selection (metaphor). The generative force of the deferral of the impossible imperative accounts for the logic of combination: the topic of the sentence is such an object, however mediated by the discourse in question, of an impossible imperative; the axis of combination (which types of “comments” can be attached to the topic) is determined by the need to represent that object otherwise than as demanded, as a newly possible object.\n\nThe axis of selection, meanwhile, or, which of all the possible comments (or, for that matter, which of all the possible names for the topic) belong (the “poetic” axis) is determined by the running deferral of the series of imperatives, produced by and running parallel to the construction of the declarative itself , that a particular kind of sentence be produced. In other words, each declarative is split between the need to produce more, genuinely new sentences out of its own material and the need to produce materially available objects within an acceptable range of intermediation. Sentences that last are the ones that defer “unreasonable” or impossible instances of this latter demand, which is equivalent to deferring the demand for immediately and transparently operationalizable statements, while incorporating the deferral of this demand itself into their construction.\n\nMore forgettable sentences are those which provide some information (readily verifiable and/or accessible ostensives) which then absorb the attention given to the sentence itself. At any rate, each sentence should be decomposable into the external and internal impossible imperatives (the originary nihilism it responds to and the one it then must simulate) that are its constitutive elements; as well as into the new ostensive-imperative articulations that make it intelligible.\n\nNow, I would like to use this analysis of what I would call “originary grammar” to examine a problem posed by the “grammar” of politics in a free society. David Brin’s (still) neglected The Transparent Society addressed a series of issues and leaves open one serious problem that I would now like to address “grammatically.” Brin starts with the assumption that our society will continue to become more and more transparent–the means of observing others, with or without their permission, will continue to expand beyond the capacity of our current legal or moral systems or inhibitions to regulate–and this will be the case for government, private individuals, and institutions alike.\n\nIf someone down the block, or half-way across the world, really wants to know what goes on in your bedroom every night, they will soon be able to find out, if they can’t already. Brin proposes that we meet this situation “proactively” by giving up on privacy as a core liberal value (which he anyway claims it never really was–liberty he considers the genuine core value, and completely detaches the two concepts) and making transparency reciprocal and linking it to expanded and revised norms of accountability: on the one hand, we would all be well advised not to do anything our reputations couldn’t survive having broadcast to the world; on the other hand, we should raise the threshold of tolerance to include everything that any one of us is likely to be caught doing on some occasion or another.\n\nMeanwhile, if we, as individuals, are to concede that we won’t be able to keep anything from the government, we should in turn impose the same expectations upon the government: if the government will ultimately wrest the right (to match the already existing capacity) to know and see everything about us, we should have cameras in police stations and…here is where the argument gets problematic…and cabinet meetings? special forces undercover operations? When it comes to the police, Brin’s argument is unproblematic and enormously liberating–why not have cameras in interrogation rooms and police vehicles, why not post the evidence used in trials on the internet so it can be inspected by all?\n\nThe main effect would be to raise both the level of police and prosecutorial behavior along with public expectations of what these agencies can accomplish and what should be considered reasonable limits on their powers. When it comes to national security secrets, though, especially those with thousands, perhaps millions of lives, and in extreme circumstances, even national existence, at stake, how can we concede? But, even more to the point, what if it’s not up to us–if Brin is right, the capacity to place means of transmission anywhere, to break into any computer, will soon enough be available–maintaining a low threshold when it comes to classifying information may lead to a situation in which our enemies know more about what is going on than we do.\n\nWhat is terrifying in Brin’s scenario is the dramatically increased possibility that anyone, any time, could be singled out as a scapegoat–the largely lost, and much regretted (and for good reasons) bourgeois norms of civility and reticence served to make it possible to present oneself publically in rule governed ways that enabled one to avoid the most likely marks of difference that could in turn make one a viable scapegoat. In this case, reciprocal transparency serves as a theory of deterrence, ensuring that citizens and the police, as well as the citizens amongst themselves, have the goods on each other and will therefore limit scapegoating to those relatively rare instances where one could not be turned into a target oneself.\n\nThe vast increase in visibility, in other words, opens up a vacuum in which new ostensives will rush to meet the supply of new desires and rivalries, and we would legitimately fear that time dishonored but convenient modes of deferral would fill that vacuum. Brin addresses this argument by pointing precisely to our enhanced post-Christian suspicion of scapegoating mechanisms, admitting the possibility of the scenario I just outlined while asserting that the emergence of higher levels of restraint and tolerance is at least as likely. And we can grant him that argument, at least for the sake of argument.\n\nThe larger problem, though, is that increased transparency would aid liberalism’s century long project of discrediting imperatives; or, to be (a little) fairer, imperatives that are not so engirded by declaratives legitimating in advance and checking after the fact that they are no longer, in any meaningful sense, imperatives. Declaratives cannot in any way translate directly into action in the world, which is to say into imperative-ostensive articulations; only declaratives-with-built-in-imperatives sutured onto imperatives-with engrafted-declaratives can effect such action. This suturing is the imperative I issue to myself and in turn obey, what we refer to colloquially as “putting your money where your mouth is”–declaratives that don’t lend themselves to placing a “bet” should be almost as suspicious as the use of sheer force or the assertion of naked will in social relations.\n\nSo, how do we distinguish declaratives that lay down a bet from those that don’t? If the sentence is founded on the transcendence of originary nihilism, then it completes this transcendence by calling upon us to restore the object of annihilation by defending it against the carriers of such nihilism. The first duty of the declarative, its condition of intelligibility, then, is the creation of a possible object that exceeds or resists the grasp of those gripped by the impossible imperative. The world of possible objects generated by the declarative doesn’t map the world of actual objects; rather, it models ways of forming appropriative relations with actual objects.\n\nThe imperative to oneself that makes action possible involves singling out from the “fictional” declarative world a form of appropriation that might act on a proximal intermediate imperative-ostensive articulation. The intermediate “command” given is to embody and shape that form. Now, it is true that much action is carried out without these explicit thought process (one can even question whether our “decisions” are actually causally related to our actions or are merely the “foam” generated by the general swirl of activity that in the aftermath looks like an “act”); it is also true that we are faced with a problem that I would call “infinite ingress” here: directing our attention toward an intermediate imperative-ostensive articulation that would enable the fulfillment of a larger one of which the one we are attending to is a component part implies that we can further direct our attention to the intermediate instances constitutive of the one we are presently attending to, and so on.\n\nI would propose that originary grammar cuts through all these problems and questions by noting, first, that the problem of infinite ingress really includes the problem of the conscious component of action insofar as when we act we are necessarily attending to some imperative-ostensive articulation that inevitably carries along with a train of other, possible, ones; and that the possibility of attending from the one we are directly engaged in (even in “planning”) to the others that come into view as a result is nothing other than the source of those subsequent declaratives which will retroactively represent the “decision” in a more complete way because it is the center of a new, possible world. The proliferation of the intermediate steps that lead to genuine action, in other words, is the generative source of the yet to be produced sentence as a possible object of the sentence currently in play.\n\nThe metaphysical sentence represents a world in which something is missing. Metaphysics assumes a world saturated by existing objects, material and immaterial, all of which objects can, in principle, be known or made present–if nothing is missing, where does the need for the sentence come from? The “fictional” or possible world created by the declarative is thus turned into the measure of the actual world, and since the Good can be known propositionally, the fictional world in question is already populated by those who act according to knowledge of the Good (hence any new sentence could, in principle, be predicted by someone with complete knowledge of all possible logical and true sentences); since such knowledge is available, only a deficit of will explains one’s unwillingness to pursue or act on it; and since the will is determined directly by perception of the model presented by the Good, deficits of the will are made up for through a kind of forced viewing of the model from which one has so far inexplicably averted one’s vision (how could you not see it!).\n\nThis is the double bind of metaphysical thinking, which thus stabilizes originary nihilism, by at least punishing or excluding those swept up in it, but the problem of the conversion of the declarative into suitable imperatives, the “operationalization” of the declarative, has not been solved. The fantasy of metaphysics, in other words, in one of a self-governing republic of speakers of declaratives, one in which possible worlds are directly mapped onto the actual one with no intermediate space. Which means that the question of meaning has not been answered, because “meaning” is essentially responding to a sign by opening a new world. Originary nihilism emerges in the field of intermediate imperative-ostensive articulations, and it can be transcended only by acting on that field.\n\nTo return to Brin’s problem, the necessary zone of secrecy surrounding the fulfillment of those imperatives demanded by the defense of the center in those arenas where action cannot wait upon deliberation takes on a new appearance in the space created by transparency, or the vastly extended region of unregulated ostensives. Defense against the encroachments of transparency upon the prerogatives of “executive energy” are converted into the call for “auxiliary” forces. Dismantle or at least marginalize the State Department and CIA (for starters) and any other bracnh of the civil service with the will and capacity to distinguish its interests from the agenda of the administration in power.\n\nTransform all the activites and operations carried out by such agencies into directly delegated missions assigned to diplomatic and intelligence teams directly or mediately accountable to the President. Clear lines of delegation and accountability all down the line. Secrets are protected, for as long as absolutely necessary, through dispatch and small group cohesion and loyalty–a team does one thing, it does it as economically as possible, and by the time anyone catches up and finds out what they are doing, they have already done it. The men and women on such teams are outside the law and beyond the purview of public opinion for as long as they can stay there, which will hopefully be long enough to complete the mission, a mission the law might not sanction and public opinion might view with disgust; when exposure comes, they will knowingly face penalties and opprobrium, and they will be scapegoated by the public, or they will be honored, or, perhaps, allowed to remain anonymous so as to circulate onto new teams; the President will then stand by them or throw them under the bus, taking refuge in those acts carried out in pursuit of the mission that (and there will inevitably be such) went beyond its explicit mandate; the President him or herself will, in turn, be supported by the public and Congress or scapegoated as well; sub-cultures, publications, training sites, etc., will emerge to supply the demand for operatives; the media, “mainstream” and independent, will not surrender their independence, nor need anyone ask them to–let them find out what they can and let the auxiliary forces deceive, infiltrate and distract as they must (perhaps new attitudes within the media will emerge, according to which a willingness to eschew the attempt to reveal secrets will be exchanged for fuller access and accounts afterward).\n\nSuch as system, at the very least, would provide us with a continual stream of very valuable and reliable information regarding the health of our institutions and civil society. These auxiliaries would “willingly” subject themselves to the most rigorous regime of imperatives imaginable, but will remain bounded on both sides by declaratives: on the “front” end, by the fundamental principles of reciprocity constitutive of the order they are sworn to protect; on the “back” side, by the judgments and narratives produced by their fellow citizens and the world at large.\n\nA generative declarative, in that case, points toward an arena in which the terms of the declarative could be bound by such a regime of imperativity and retain its meaning. To put it more simply, a generative declarative implicitly proposes a mision on its own behalf and volunteers to go first. I don’t mean that if one argues in favor of war, one should therefore be first at the nearest recruiting station–the criteria I am proposing are immanent to the series of sentences involved, which means “volunteering” to defend the terms of the new, possible, reality created by one’s sentences, and presenting that reality as one to be completed only by others’ sentences. The power of such sentences lies in their focus on, or “indwelling” in the generative intermediate terrain where the “infinite ingress” of possible imperative-ostensive articulations creates new realities, first of all in language, that can stay one step ahead of originary nihilism.\n\nAdam Katz"
    },
    {
      "slug": "tribes-of-terror",
      "title": "Tribes of Terror",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here’s an extremely informative essay from the excellent Stanley Kurtz:\n\nhttp://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/ID.1498/article_detail.asp\n\nAdam Katz"
    },
    {
      "slug": "political-syntax-i-mythical-and-legal-declaratives",
      "title": "Political Syntax I: Mythical and Legal Declaratives",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The most exemplary declarative probably issues from the ideal court when it simply declares what the law is : “statute x violates the First Amendment”; “y has no standing to speak here”; “fact z is legally irrelevant”; etc. Such sentences sustain a world comprised solely of utterances governed by rules of internal coherence; they are situated at the crossroads of demands that can only made commensurable within the legal system; and they correspond to the generative character of social reality (drawing upon precedents and leading to appeals, translating external conflicts into ones internal to the system). The judge as umpire or arbiter ensures the “proper” alignment of deferred imperatives and imperative-ostensive articulations that goes into making a declarative order: facts are only allowed into evidence if a “chain” of custody can be established ostensively at each point along the way, the reliability of testimony is rigorously allowed for, in part through the exclusion of testimony which is intrinsically below a certain threshold of reliability (“hearsay”), those facts must touch directly upon some violation which has been alleged, etc., etc.\n\nThe law itself is somewhat less exemplary as a declarative, insofar as any law verges on the imperative; nor, however, is the law a body of commands. Whether we are speaking of general, constitutional laws, such as “The power of the executive will be vested in the President” or “homocide will be punished by…” or “a Department of Health Services is hereby established pursuant to” some previous statute requiring such a department for its activation, what laws do is authorize someone to issue imperatives within a restricted sphere of activity. But wherein, exactly, does this “authorizing” lie? The law doesn’t create the world of imperatives, even if it adds to it, prodigiously–it takes a prior world of imperative-ostensive articulations as given. The law, as an independent reality, must emerge as a transcendence of some crisis in that world of articulations, a crisis in which the demand that others recognize the same ostensives as oneself becomes impossible. The separation of the imperative and the judgment of its provenance and legitimacy is the result–this separation is “law.”\n\nIn my previous posts on “originary grammar,” I have posited a crisis of the imperative which I have called “originary nihilism”: due to incompatability between imperatives and/or between imperatives which cannot be rescinded and a reality which cannot be adjusted to satisfy them, the interlocutors lose the common object which makes the completion of the imperative possible in the first place–the crisis gets to the point, in other words, where the crisis is intensifying while knowledge of what would count as its resolution recedes. Now, I would like to add to this analysis the assumption that what the impossible imperative ultimately demands is the “total” presence of the one to whom the imperative is issued: the more the imperative goes unfulfilled, the more the “will” and “good faith” of the one expected to carry it out becomes the issue, and the more the crisis-ridden demand swerves into one that the subject of the demand “saturate” the linguistic space with “proof” of his bona fides ; but it is precisely such “proof” that is always impossible to provide in a satisfactory manner.\n\nThis analysis would link, loosely (as part of a long term process of consolidation), the emergence of the declarative with the emergence of the big man in the post-egalitarian community. The declarative event, that is, preserves the memory of the imperative crisis which itself provided the first indication that a crisis of the community tended to single out some member as origin of that crisis. Further, it seems reasonable to assume that the emission of the first declarative would not have been by the focus of the crisis, who would be too busy trying desperately to fulfill the impossible demand and would himself be “saturated” with the expectations flowing his way; rather, it would be some relatively unassociated member of the community who would place the term for the demanded object (or some object singled out among the swirling demands) next to a term for some other familiar element of the community’s common reality and redirect the group’s attention to the possible reality evoked by that articulation.\n\nIf, as Eric Gans contends in his “Originary Narrative,” “narrative is the declarative reading of the originary sign,” the declarative is simultaneously the translation of the originary scene into a narrative, the movement from one center qua site of crisis to another center qua site of transcendence. And this translation is necessarily a “misreading,” or at least a “mythical” reading, insofar as the declarative must locate the source of transcendence in the seamless continuity between the “struggles” of the subject of the impossible imperative and the ostensive verification by the group that the center has been restored as a result of those “struggles,” even if the “verification” can only be in the formation of the declarative “distraction” itself.\n\nTo put it otherwise, the fully originary declarative must align within a single vector all the criss-crossing imperatives: one imperative must be represented as a response to another leading to some concluding fulfillment of an inner or outer demand. At any rate, the division between storyteller and actor, king and shaman/priest, etc., is already implicit in the originary declarative, which is why I associate the emergence of the declarative with the emergence of the minimal conditions for the big man, which, again, need be nothing more than a recognition that crises tend to establish a “force field” in which attention gravitates toward a specific “responsible” member.\n\nSuch “mythical” declaratives constitute narratively an existing but incoherent (from m the new position required by the emission of the declarative) field of imperative-ostensive articulations, primarily by assimilating new articulations into that field. What the law does is destroy the a priori ordering of imperatives that the declarative would initially help to establish and consolidate, so that “judgment” takes over at least some portion of the function of myth. In transcending originary nihilism, the declarative is also modelling the intelligence of the center by enabling a mode of centering within what I would like to call the “field of semblances” opened up by the sign: by “semblance,” I mean any thing that is simultaneously sign and object, something that can be localized, possessed and controlled, while at the same time it (in our very desire to localize, possess and control it) directs out attention elsewhere.\n\nAll objects and signs are semblances, but in varying, even widely varying proportions–all objects, that is, except the originary one which, as the source of all signs, always itself resides at least a little beyond signification. At the same time, there is a certain “signness” that resides slightly beyond objecthood,” in our very freedom to issue new signs. Any thing we might actually confront or point to in the world, though, is a semblance within the field of semblances, with absolute object and absolute sign serving as guarantees of some minimal coherence of the field.\n\nThe field of semblances requires, as I suggested, various centerings, nodal points (what Lacan called “points du caption”) that provide patterns and regularities within the field. The declarative enables us to produce such centerings by registering the impossible demand, which could emerge at any point and, at least as important, could always be anticipated as a result of some shift in the field of imperative-ostensive articulations, and ordering such demands within a new, projected, reality. Any sentence, any string of sentences, is modelling a new way of assembling semblances. The declarative both imitates the chaos of demands it simulates an extrication from and models an appropriate scene upon which such demands would be neutralized because upon that scene the demands would be irrelevant, replaced by new, more manageable and interesting ones. In such imitation and modeling lies, respectively, the “style” and “content” of the sentence.\n\nSo, laws don’t “tell” individuals not to do x or y–the law against murder does not command me, personally, not to commit murder; the laws of taxation do not command me to pay my taxes. The law authorizes the chain of imperatives that would ultimately lead to my incarceration for murder or tax evasion. But, again, “authorize” can’t simply mean to conjure up out of thin air–there have always been, since there have been imperatives, individuals whose suppression of certain activities at certain times and places would not be interfered with, and would in fact receive the necessary assistance. What the law does is separate those authorized functions from specific “imperators,” i.e., those at the highest end of a chain of imperatives.\n\nIf the originary declarative establishes the conditions for the big man by interrupting and ordering the colliding imperatives directed at some proto-big man (or, rather some image, even a “negative” one, of a possible big man); which is to say, if the declarative emerges by speaking of the big man, or speaking the possibility of the big man into being (the declarative formally announces the possibility of a concentration of imperatives–and the line between being the target of the concentrated force of ordered imperatives and being the author of that force is an extremely thin one–precisely by deferring the consequences of the chaos of impossible imperatives)–the declarative order , by contrast, effects a transformation from the symbiosis of “imperator” and “declaimer” in the “mythical” declarative to the convertibility of the two positions into each other.\n\nWhat this convertibility really entails is something as simple, but in a sense as astonishing, as some imperators being willing to act against others without thereby arrogating the entire imperative field for themselves. (By “act against” [or, really, just to “act”] I mean produce a new ostensive sign available to emitter and audience that will “seal” or provide the “content” of a new declarative affirming that that new ostensive can be accommodated within the possible field of semblances opened up by a prior declarative–a prior declarative which in its turn requires these succeeding ones to provide its own, ostensive, content.)\n\nHow important this is is indicated by how difficult it must have been, what a tremendous event it must have required–even now, think of how difficult it is in the most liberal, law governed countries, to get the police or military to police their own. And I don’t mean to refer merely to some “primitive” solidarity on the part of those (in David Grossman’s terms, the “sheepdogs”) entrusted to protect us (the “sheep”) from the “wolves.” Rather, the “sheepdogs” are simply aware as the rest of us, ever tempted to confuse the protective growling of the sheepdog for the genuinely dangerous snarl of the wolf, are not, that a far higher threshold for initiating suspicion is absolutely necessary for the sheepdogs since a far higher degree of trust is required for such institutions to function.\n\nThe law, then, is precisely this point of convertibility between imperatives and declaratives. A lawful imperative is one that can be “translated” into a declarative: “bring that here” is, in other words, only lawful insofar as the linguistic and institutional conditions exist for translating it into something like “for commonly agreed upon purposes it its necessary that that object be moved from its present location to the one I am indicating; and, according to commonly accepted procedures, you are the one with the responsibility to effect that movement.” While we couldn’t really speak of “lawful declaratives,” we could speak of responsible declaratives within a law governed field of semblances, and such declaratives would be those providing for the possibility of a subsequent declarative assimilating the imperative-ostensive content of the sentence in question: “ultimate” responsibility would be determined by those (declaratively established) centers within the field of semblances where the imperative-ostensive articulations circulate.\n\nSuch “conversions” would always be problematic, and here is where politics would enter. Leaving aside for now the political founding event that would have been required to bring a regime of laws into existence in the first place, we could say that within such a regime politics would be situated in between the ongoing processes of imperatives-converting-into-declaratives and declaratives-converting into imperative/ostensives. At any point along the way one could sever some link required for full convertibility. A young man spray painting graffitti on the side of a school is seen by a policeman on patrol–does the policeman pursue relentlessly, using deadly force if necessary against the fleeing perpetrator; does he shrug, or perhaps smile, and let the boy run off; does he apprehend the boy, perhaps a little roughly, and get called up on abuse charges, while the graffitti is celebrated for its authenticity and cutting edge social commentary and its creator given a scholarship to art school from donations by citizens appalled at his treatment?\n\nAny of these scenes, and many more in between, is compatible with the formal prohibition on defacing public property, and whichever is played out will provide us with far more information regarding the quality of the regime than the mere fact of that prohibition. The lines of force go both ways here: the declarative stating that vandalism is a wrong against the public gets rerouted along the way to the implementation of the imperative it authorizes; while the imperator must, in a split second, consider whether the imperative he is charged with enforcing can, under these conditions, undergo conversion to a declarative acceptable to himself and his future judges: can he “justify” the risks of injury to himself, the perpetrator, and bystanders in a pusuit carried out to some degree of relentlessness; will any imaginable enforcement of his charge likely be translated into a widely shared declarative on the order of “this policeman is hereby deemed to have abused his position through the exercise of excessive force”?\n\nAnd this even leaves aside the far from negligible fact that the policeman also has to “live with himself,” which is to say, carry out the translation from imperative to declarative and back again on his own private, perhaps idiosyncratic, moral terms.\n\nSo, we are engaging politically when we produce declaratives that generate regions in the field of lawful semblances that might interfere with declarative-imperative-declarative convertibilities. Legal declaratives (general prohibitions and licenses, whether formalized by law or not) create a space in which the carrying out of imperatives is supplemented by third party ostensive verification; political declaratives propose imperative fields that serve primarily to generate new ostensives, which is to say, show us something new regarding the imperatives people are ready and able to fulfill, refuse and resist (with refusal and resistance being nothing more than the issuance to oneself of an unauthorized imperative, but one more fully convertible–within the field of semblances centered in oneself, at any rate–with legal declaratives).\n\nAdam Katz"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-global-civil-war-of-position",
      "title": "The Global Civil War of Position",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2007",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Assume, as per the Girardian account of human origin, that there can be no originary scene without a scapegoat; further assume, contra Girard, that the crucifixion of Jesus was just one more in a long series of scapegoatings, resolving nothing but rather making the process even more insidious because the victim in this case openly asks for it; and, finally, assume that all of the modern social forms that claim to transcend scapegoating, like the nation state, individual rights and liberties, the modern market, etc., are themselves simply extensions and concealments of the now global, unified process of scapegoating (the nation produces the despised minority, the market the exploited poor, individual rights the culturally othered, etc.).\n\nAdd to this the immeasurable means of destruction available within this system, and the recent demise of the only possible (because sceneless) alternative to scenic liberty, and you have the ideology of the contemporary Left. If you believe all these things, where do you look for political salvation, or at least relief–how, if nothing else, do you throw up some roadblocks to the stampede? Your mission must be to prevent any scene from arriving at closure. Scapegoating requires some “mark” be attributed to the scapegoat–the more that mark singles out the scapegoat as an object of attention, and as dangerous or subversive in some way to the community, the more it would set in motion the stampede.\n\nWhat you must do is prevent any mark from taking shape. You can recognize, in theory, that individuals and even members of groups (at the very least, voluntarily formed groups) might accumulate and call for marks for perfectly legitimate reasons; but overshadowing that abstract recognition is the deeper knowledge that the distinction between legitimate markings and scapegoating will ultimately be made by the same communal mechanism as would orchestrate any scapegoating, so, for all practical purposes, the distinction is irrelevant; even worse, it must be attacked as a distraction, one that the leaders of mobs (the ones with the torches) will predictably deploy.\n\nYou must simply reject any marking–wherever some marking is starting to take shape, you must foreground whatever in the potentially marked group resists such marking. At the same time, there is one exception to your absolute opposition to marking: it is essential that you mark the unmarked markers. Marking the “white” markers, as you have learned from bitter experience, is a question of both sheer survival and justice (they will destroy you if given half a chance; and they deserve it–now all will be marked and a version of original sin put in place); even more, you must do so pre-emptively, because they are experts and it comes naturally to them, while you have to keep reminding yourself to be tough enough.\n\nDoing whatever is required to prevent the consolidation of any “mark,” along with the seemingly contradictory task of marking up the putative markers; inventing entire disciplines and political movements dedicated to nothing more than the invention of ways to disrupt “marking” and bring those responsible into ill repute–this is all of the activity of the contemporary Left–they do nothing else.\n\nThat is certainly enough to keep them very busy, though–it may be necessary to represent the “marked-up” as “resistant” to being marked, as challenging the stereotpye through the formation of their own “agency”; but, then, that “resistant” agency can itself become part of the “mark-up” (the group in question is violent, unruly, or untrustworthy), in which case it becomes necessary to deny that the “group” in question exists in any determinate form (it is just a product of the “marking” itself); it may be necessary to discover all kinds of facts that have been ignored in the process of marking that group and simply repeating them whe never you get the chance–but it might also be necessary to produce wholly fictional versions of the group, which can always be justifable on anti-marking grounds. And there can be all kinds of interesting debates about whether marking proceeds along lines of some kind of material interest or is “constitutive”; over which groups are genuinely in danger of being marked (how about veterans?), the various gradations and combinations of markings, and so on.\n\nIt is important to analyze the Left on two levels. First, as a mode of sacrality, a religion: in this case, the Left could be seen to be worshipping the actual or prospective victim of the normal and we could trace a line from the original victims of the Left (free thinking intellectuals and democrats persecuted by the Church and Absolutist regimes) through the emergence of the “masses” in the Western countries, victims of the gigantic “sparagmos” of the Industrial Revolution, through to women and, especially, the Third World, in the wake of the post-Leninist turn in revolutionary socialism toward oppressed nations as stand-ins for the disappointing Western proletariat.\n\nAt an earlier, more “heroic” stage, the Left claimed a project of social transformation in socialisms which, in originary terms, we could simply define as the fantasy of abolishing scenes altogether in our collective subsumption under natural-technological processes; with the collapse of this project, though, the Left is really a death-cult: the victims of the normal must continually be slaughtered, actually and symbolically, in order for the normal order to be forever marred, forever guilty, incomplete, in need of absolution.\n\nThis does not mean that the Left has no political form, of course: politically, the various currents of the Left have merged into a “transnational progressivism,” in which a post-national international law, with its legitimating roots in the post-War Nuremberg Trials and associated legal innovations, buttressed by the equally transnational, adversarial media and academic establishments, progessively neturalizes all the elements of national and cultural life that might conceivably restart the clash of private and public interests which (on this account) led to the catastrophe of the two world wars (the founding, traumatic scene of modern scapegoating).\n\nBut such a world would be intrinsically static, which is to say the telos of transnational progressivism is as much a fantasy as socialism; insofar as the Left is a movement, which is to say, moves–responds to and generates events–it is currently the Global Intifada, an unsteady but sufficiently coherent conjoining of violence and threats of violence which for the most part stays just below the threshold needed to trigger massive retaliation (mostly Muslim, but drawing in the remnants of the socialist Left, e.g., Venezuala); and the ongoing, mobile international war crimes tribunal/class action lawsuit conducted by the elite media human rights groups, NGOs and educational institutions throughout the West.\n\nWhat this means is that we in the West are in a state of civil war: that is, a struggle between opposing forces or factions within the same society who recognize incommensurable sovereigns. There are those of us who recognize the sovereignty of the U.S. Constitution, and those of us who recognize the sovereignty of international post-Nuremberg law. (I apologize for the American-centric character of my argument; am I so wrong in my assumption, though, that if the United States doesn’t remain on the constitutional side in this civil war, it won’t matter very much what anyone else does?) This condition is disguised by the exaggerated, even cult-like, obeisances the Left pays to the Constitution; but the Consitution they adore is not one that would be recognizable to anyone reading the actual text, along with the debates over its ratification, and with the post-Civil War amendments particularly in mind–rather, it is a Constitution which, over the past half century or so has been reshaped along transnational progressive lines, aimed at liquidating intermediate levels of authority between the sovereign state and the sovereign individual (who is therefore defined more and more against local communities, traditional norms and public opinion) and (more recently) subordinating American policy to international actors and agendas.\n\nOne naturally hestitates to use the term “civil war” not merely because it implies a degree of hostility and division few would wish to concede, but for the more empriical reason that it doesn’t look like a civil war: no one can really picture “reds” and “blues” facing off in military or physical confrontation. But, here, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (an important forerunner of the contemporary Left)’s distinction between a “War of Maneuver” and a “War of Position” is helpful: a war of maneuver is when one actually destroys or dislodges the enemy from some position they hold; the war of position is the struggle to occupy those positions which would give one an insuperable advantage once we get to the war of maneuver.\n\nAnd, of course, if one gains such an advantage, there will be no “actual” war. In that case, winning the war of position is enough, especially if it is won (as wars of position tend to be) gradually, even imperceptibly, and by subtly “re-inscribing” the positions everyone already occupies so that the war appears to be (even to some of those waging it) merely needed reform of an antiquated set of relationships–in that case, only when one looks back after it is over, or finds out that some customary act is suddenly forbidden, some commonsensical sentiment suddenly unintelligible, does one see the real relation between victor, victim, and spoils. It is impossible to go for too long without realizing one is in a war of maneuver; but in an intelligently executed war of position, one can indeed be unaware, giving an enormous advantage to those waging it coherently and determinedly.\n\nJust as it is fairly easy to identify the enemy in this global civil war of position, it is easy to identify the means and goal of struggle: the latter, the restoration where necessary and protection where still possible of commensurability between acts and consequences; which commensurability is the sole guarantee of freedom; the former, the defeat of our “victims” through the defense of their victims, a strategy that works equally well against our jihadist enemies as against our Leftist ones (really, anyone can play: for example, in harping on the racial disparity in those imprisoned for violent crimes, isn’t one obscuring the racial–and gender!–disparity in the victims of those crimes?). “All” that needs to be worked out is the proper mode of doing so in each case, on the battlefield, in knowledge, in the media, the law, diplomacy, and so on.\n\nOne thing we are certainly learning these days is how high are the demands of a free order, and how powerful the desire to submit, already, if we can just have stability, if we can just be allowed to ignore prattle about health care proposals rather than having to hear about threats and destruction. (I, at least, start to look back and wonder: would we have won World War II if the USSR had not been attacked by Nazi Germany, bringing both Stalin and our own domestic Left onto our side?; would our steadfastness in the Cold War have survived one more “hot” episode on the order of Korea or Vietnam?)\n\nWhere are we now? The one bright spot is Iraq, which contains all the pertinent components of the war, in both its “civil” and “foreign” dimensions: we are defeating a powerful form of Islam (after having defeated one of the leading practitoners of a newly resurgent–as in Russia–form of “big man” tyrannical rule) by turning its victims against it and are in the process of creating a new, hopefully responsible member of the community of nation states; a member which we have good grounds to think will be jealoius of its sovereignty, suspicious of the intentions of their “Arab brothers” and international caretaker institutions like the UN, and positively hostile to the calls to join the jihad.\n\nEverywhere else there is backtracking and an abandonment of positions, sometimes hard won ones, as in Bush’s complete reversal on the Israeli-Palestinian front. The general dysfunctionality of our governing institutions, brought to the surface in the demands placed upon them by this new war, have not been addressed at all–the CIA and State Department continue to set their own foreign policy untrammelled, even unmolested; and in 2009, the Democrats, a diminishingly respectable front for the global death cult, might very well control Congress and the Presidency. And, understandably, no one wants to think too closely about what all this means.\n\nEven Republicans, even the Bush Administration, are staying miles away from compelling new evidence that there were, in fact, chemical and biological weapon stockpiles in Iraq in 2003, which were transported over to Syria and buried (and later, in the chaos of the invasion, removed) in Iraq–just challenging the prevailing narrative (“there were no WMDS!”) seems to require too much energy, to involve too much risk. In my view the already small number of people who could take the slightest interest in what I am saying here is certainly shrinking daily.\n\nIt is probably uncomfortable for most to speak of a “global civil war,” even one of “position”–everyone becomes a combatant, and such a characterization introduces the frightening possibility of the politicization of all areas of life. It is precisely the “positional” dimension that makes this war different, though, since victory would involve a complex array of “re” and “de” politicizations–in certain areas, a properly political site would have to be liberated from law and morality; in others, perhaps exchange relations and “culture” (in the broadest sense of the proliferation and dissemination of models for living), what is called for is a liberation from politics; meanwhile, what is often at stake is the relation between political actors and spectators, or between politics in the sense of coercive state action and citizen activity.\n\nThe position I seem to have been coming to occupy is that of the analyst of discourse, in its most essential form, that of the sentence, both literally and as focusing our attention on the “syntax” of all practices–a position that, it seems to me, would at times be overtly and even hyperbolically political and at other times detached and ivory towerish; engaging the daily elements of cultural dialogue, but also high culture, “extreme” esthetic experiments and the realm of sheer possibility. My hope, I suppose, is that simply going about our business as originary thinkers inquiring into the semiotics of reality will be the only global positioning system we require.\n\nOf course, a war of position is simultaneously a deferral of war, but a deferral that creates an interim during which preparations proceed; and, from another angle, war is almost completely preparation–as the saying goes, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. And amateurs talk “ideas” and “images,” while professional talk “models” and “narratives.” The most suitable models and narratives in the middle of our preparatory period will be somewhat counter-intuitive and yet familiar enough; indeed, they will make us wonder what makes them, at least ever so slightly, counter-intuitive. They will be retrieved and modified models: the black conservative scapegotated by the “leaders” of his or her community while, in fact, recovering traditions of self-reliance developed under Jim Crow; the “infidel” who embodies a recognizable pattern of feminist awakening, who nevertheless makes “establishment” feminists extremely uneasy; the Muslim stepping forward in defense of a Christian neighbor in a nascent Arab democracy; veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars stepping forward as a new generation of leaders, remaking both political parties and the media; etc.\n\nAll these narratives, to some extent, resist the force of accumulated demands made by partisans on all sides, at the very least the “demand” that one’s own narrative, especially the doomsday ones, prove true. Such models and narratives are already circulating to some extent; the question for a “cultural politics” as well as a “cultural studies,” then, is what would need to change for any one of these narratives to undergo a quantum leap beyond the circle of those who presently cultivate it, to increase in circulation by an order of magnitude (from 1,000 to 10,000, 100,000 to 1,000,000, etc.)? A precondition, at any rate, is a certain faith in “reality”: when thinking about who is on the “side” in our “civil war” I am calling “constitutionalist,” aside from small cadres of intellectuals, pundits and activists, the answer is all of us, insofar as we buy and sell on the market, sustain basic norms of civility, insist on keeping violence and obscenity out of spaces whose sanctity we are charged to protect, try and get a little bit closer to the truth when it seems important to do so, measure ourselves against others and others against ourselves, seek out options short of scapegoating in dealing with those we oppose or hate, and so on.\n\nAnd when we notice and begin to resent, in the name of those for whom we bear responsibiity, those who undermine these props of reality. When we share such resentments with others, the defense of small things (minor commensurabilities, reciprocities and accountabilities) can snowball, just as the existence of a “democratic enough” Iraq will stick in the sides of the region’s tyrants and terrorists, and become, more and more, an inevitable point of reference and inspiration for its liberators.\n\nIn other words, both sides can play the game of a fully deliberate global war which, paradoxically, we will win by reducing its strictly military component: victory for us would tend towards the narrowing of the confrontation to one between our armed people and theirs, with civilians refusing to act (and effectively assisted in this refusal) as shields; in this case, the war would be over very rapidly. Getting to that point depends upon whether those intermediate figures who, while unarmed, call for our murder and destruction, will be deemed martyrs or criminals against humanity; and determining that denomination will be whoever gains the “high ground” in the post-Auschwitz political, legal and moral order indelibly stamped by the awareness that our fundamental categories of social life could readily render us complicit in the unthinkable, whether through commission or omission.\n\nThat high ground is the unconditional defense of individual freedom as irreducible point of origin and the insistence upon individual accountability as established through freely entered into covenants (the only thing that can genuinely bind up and conclude what a free individual sets in motion): each point of that structure (freedom, accountability, covenant) is a fulcrum enabling us to overturn victimary revaluations as we hold each other accountable for holding our putative victims accountable for the freedom they deny others (through omission and comission) and the covenanting they consider impossible even as they remain parasitical upon every jot and tittle of the terms devised and agreed upon by those more courageous and generous than themselves.\n\nAdam Katz"
    },
    {
      "slug": "chronicle-353-a-new-way-of-thinking",
      "title": "Chronicle 353 – A New Way of Thinking",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Chronicle 353 (“A New Way of Thinking”) is now available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw353.htm It outlines some basic ideas concerning the novelty of GA with respect to other ways of thinking about the human.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "covenant-zone",
      "title": "Covenant Zone",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Another urgent post by truepeers over at Covenant Zone:\n\nhttp://covenantzone.blogspot.com/2008/01/are-you-next-after-me.html#links"
    },
    {
      "slug": "political-syntax-ii-generative-declaratives",
      "title": "Political Syntax II: Generative Declaratives",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "What I called in my previous post (Political Syntax I) “mythical” declaratives I am now going to call “naive” declaratives; what I called there “legal” declaratives, I am now calling “normative” declaratives. Here are the slightly revised definitions: the naive sentence presents as its center a fulfilled imperative; the normative sentence presents as its center a distinction between an imperative violating the sanctity of the center and one affirming the center. (The change from “legal” to “normative,” unlike the one from “mythical” to “naive,” is more than cosmetic, but only slightly so: the normative sentence, by distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable imperatives, does not yet accomplish but lays the necessary groundwork for the reciprocal convertibility of imperatives and declaratives.)\n\nIn either case, order is placed in a whirlpool of “untotalizable” imperatives by placing one name next to another so as to, first, distract attention from the target of the imperative crisis and, second, to produce a object (or entry into the field of semblances) that, in effect, involves the dissolution of the entire imperative arena.\n\nWe can distinguish between the uttered sentence and the intelligible sentence: this distinction would exist for both speaker and listener (the speaker as hearing her own sentence, the listener as repeating it for himself), but it does presuppose that differentiation. The uttered sentence wants to create distance from the imperative arena, or space between any of the imperatives and their (disastrous) enforcement; the intelligible sentence has embedded within it an imperative directing the listener regarding to the new mode of appropriation indicated by the unfamiliar alignment of familiar terms. The naive sentence orders the listener to repeat it when called upon to do so (when intimations of the imperative crisis appear) and thereby situate the fulfilled imperative as a center or “eddy” within the field of semblances; the normative sentence orders the listener to issue, obey, and testify to the fulfillment of, imperatives that confirm the capacity of the declarative to continue to prompt such obedience to that and “similar” imperatives.\n\nA statement of fact would present a fulfilled imperative as its center by offering ostensive verification of the reality proposed by said imperative, the imperative which has subordinated (such is the wager of the sentence, its constitutive “fiction”) and transformed the others: here, the object demanded has been made available. This ostensive verification is offered by the speaker, who stands in for the ultimate availability (its availability, that is, an an entry point into the field of semblances) of the desired object or an approved equivalent, and must be shared by the listener. Similarly, in a simple narrative (“he/bear”–i.e., he found the bear) presents such a transcendence–out of the swirl of imperatives (find the bear, kill the bear, run from the bear…) a seamless “accomplishment” or “victory” (or, for that matter, a defeat, which would in its way similarly cancel and hence “fulfill” the imperative) is attributed to an agent.\n\nMeanwhile, normative sentences would be judgments, whether moral or esthetic: x/good, x/bad, God against/x, etc. Another way of judging the object, or of promising it for possession, is thereby implicitly or explicitly indexed negatively: this speaker, at least, will not assent to those other characterizations. The rejected imperatives can be left aside in the imperative arena from which the interlocutors have escaped, and, meanwhile, some content has been added to the sacred center. The normative declarative ensures that the distinction it draws will have to be drawn repeatedly, which means that the imperatives it authorizes will have to return to the declarative which, in an a priori manner, clears the ground of competing imperatives. Such declaratives might have primarily ritual focus until, in a fully developed legal order, they become the property of each individual, thereby achieving full declarative/imperative convertibility.\n\nThe completion of the taxonomy I am proposing requires a third sentence type: the generative. The generative sentence emerges out of the distinctions between and within the naive and normative sentences, respectively. Whether or not we want to call a given sentence naive or normative can only be determined through the utterence of another sentence, which must itself be naive or normative; indeed, such a classification would only be valuable insofar as creating such sentences distinguishing between sentences were itself an intrinsic component of language use. Furthermore, whether or not a given sentence is naive or normative itself depends upon the articulation of that sentence within a larger discursive and cultural “syntax”–“the dog is brown” might seem like a simple, “naive” statement of fact (and, in our terms, a representation of a fulfilled imperative: here is the brown–not black–dog you asked for; or a brown dog which is better than the black one you asked for and should have been your demand; or anyway a dog, which is more important than the color, even though I remembered what you asked for, etc.) but not if the dog has been presented for sacrifice within a ritual system in which brown has been designated “unclean” (so, the sentence would be normative insofar as the imperative in question has not been fulfilled, which is to say, ostensively verified as completed, and first of all “certified” as calling for fulfillment). What makes a sentence generative is that it occupies the boundary between naive and normative, where the naive merely presupposes that the normative question is settled and the normative unsettles the naive, and thereby calls for more sentences.\n\nThe purpose of the generative sentence is to generative new ostensives; it is intelligible under the condition that one witnesses to the interdependency of naive and normative; more precisely, that one sees, testifies to, the judgment required for the “fact” to be acknowledged and/or the facts that one now sees underlay the judgment. We might say that naive sentences represent a victory or defeat, allows one imperative, that is, to emerge definitively as the strongest or central one, reducing all others to vassalage. The normative declarative, meanwhile, seeks to spread victory and defeat around–somebody wins in the court case or in the determination of the qualifications of an object offered for sacrifice, but the structure of the sentence makes it, more often than not, a qualified victory; and, anyway, it is always the “system,” above all, that wins: the imperative is “certified” to the extent that it confirms a declarative that is, in turn, now even more capable of producing new imperatives.\n\nThe generative declarative resides in the intermediate zone both the naive and the normative declarative must forget: the mutually cancelling imperatives that get linearized in the naive declarative and those imperatives that show up “in between” the declarative and imperative in the normative ones. I must order myself to follow orders; I must see myself seeing the object; and adherence to the declarative extends to infinity the delay in the implementation of the imperative it would authorize–such are the paradoxes that are a source of energy for the generative declarative and such paradoxical states are what the generative sentence “measures”.\n\nThe way out of such double binds is to generate new ostensives, pointing to new possible worlds, or new centers in the field of semblances, in which those ostensives would be embedded. They accomplish this either by decentering the distinction at the center of a normative sentence by juxtaposing it to a naive sentence upon which it would, hypothetically, depend; or , vice versa, by decentering a naive sentence (finding a wedge between different possible impositions of a factual statement or narrative on the imperative arena) by juxtaposing it with a normative sentence the acceptance of which would have (hypothetically) enabled the ostensive verification of the naive sentence in the first place. How did you order yourself to acknowledge that fact; where are you repeating what is in fact a judgment as a “given” linchpin of some reality–these are the kinds of questions the generative declarative has us inhabit.\n\nAs an example of such a declarative I will present (slightly revised) a thought experiment I have used a couple of times. At the start of the Israeli incursion into Gaza following the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit I proposed the following: the Israeli government should offer Israeli citizenship to any Palestinian who offers useful intelligence on the location of Shalit or the identity of those holding him. The purpose of such a thought experiment or “generative declarative,” is to generate meaning; not to accurately categorize a world of objects or make a moral distinction, but to make visible (ostensively) what would, without the linguistic reality, not only not be visible but not even exist.\n\nIn testing how much of a pull the promise of Israeli citizenship would exercise on Palestinians weighing the risks and examining their own consciences and prospects regarding such a radical break with their community, the Israelis would effectively surface and make available for measurment certain crucial faultlines in Palestinian society; in testing whether Israelis (who would also, of course, have to approve of the idea) could offer inclusion to those with nothing to offer but an intrinsically dubious solidarity in a moment of distress, trust their own institutions to make such solidarity genuine and lasting, and, not incidentally, subtley shift the condition of inclusion in the Jewish State, would likewise yield valuable information about the potentialities of Israeli society (and it would even let us see whether the Israeli Left might be willing to adopt a strategy of eliciting dissent on the Palestinian side to match its own dissent, rather than displaying such dissent through the appeasement of internationally approved Palestinian elites).\n\nIn more “grammatical” terms, the possibility of competing self-imposed imperatives (in effect, incommensurable realities) is provided to (or forced upon) the Palestinians; while for the Israelis a new, commonly held field of imperatives (defend Palestinian dissidents) might become possible. As a thought experiment, what is interesting is not only the likely consequences of implementing such a proposal, but disclosing the conditions that make it “discussable” or not–who would say what about it and what would that lead us to say about them? In other words, we are interested less in a proposal, much less a “programme,” than in creating a little center of political discourse, an “eddy,” if you will, within the swirling pools of semblances.\n\nVery literally: what kinds of sentences, obeying what syntax, become possible now? Once we have, in other words, displaced a normative sentence (something like, “the Palestinians should return their captive” or “the Israelis must do everything in their power to rescue him”; or, more broadly, “the Palestinians must negotiate in good faith” or “the Israelis must grant the Palestinians their right to self-determination”) by representing to ourselves some way in which such sentences might be aligned with imperatives and ostensives, or reconciled with each other, many other sentences in which, for example, observations of Palestinian and Israeli behaviors might take on new normative dimensions, and normative judgments lead us to, say, seek out what might be promising exceptions, become possible.\n\nLet’s return to the originary structure of the declarative as the deferral of the impossible imperative and the transcendence of originary nihilism. Pursuing a grammatical analysis further, our focus would be on the kinds of imperatives that might induce such a crisis along with the ways in which the initial declarative would attract, mimic and deflect them; and what new imperatives, freed from impossibility and nihilism, would the declarative open a space for? We would, I would suggest, be looking for demands for a particular kind of loyalty or (to speak grammatically) ostensive (to cite Othello , “ocular”) proof that one unhestitatingly complies with imperatives.\n\nIn other words, the source of the imperative crisis would be located in the absence of such proof and the irremediability of the crisis in the impossibility of the proof one demands; as I said in the first installment of this series on Political Syntax, the only proof that could now be accepted in the wake of such a crisis is the kind of complete saturation of the imperative space by the subject of the demand that could never be satisfying enough. The thought experiment, then, iterates the double bind constitutive of the originary declarative, which changes the subject and proposes new, potentially shared, imperatives.\n\nContinuing the analysis of the syntax of the thought experiment, we can see that the topic of the sentence (Israel) is clearly in an asymmetrical relation to the other party (the comment concerns possible action toward that party)–it is, further, the site of impossible imperatives, and perhaps the focal point of the most intense nihilism in the world today. These conditions would then be central to political syntax, which is not to say that it would be meaningless to ask the Palestinians to change their behavior, simply that the Palestinians have relatively few ways available to them of modifying Israeli behavior, and that in fairly predictable ways–in which case, declaratives placing the Palestinians at the center would simply be less generative.\n\nThe asymmetry we noted on the declarative scene, in which the imperatives come to single out some individual, is reproduced here. We then look for the greatest disproportion between the size of the gesture we are proposing and its potential effects, and we situate that disproportion at what seems to be the site of the greatest crisis. (Hopefully, it’s needless to say that these are all heuristic criteria, meant to generate many declaratives, not simply the “right” one). We try to contrive a possible topic/comment reversal (in which the comment points to some action or presently absent capacity of the more dependent party that would be required to make the declarative fully intelligible–some supplemental fact that would make the adoption of the norm attributed to the agent visible and contingent; some norm that would have to be adopted or enhanced so as to effectively “cover” the field of facts) that might be inscribed in the declarative, while realizing that such a reversal depends upon some unilateral act on the part of the more powerful party that establishes a zone of symmetry, which would be the first step toward a possible reversal.\n\nThe effect of the thought experiment we are examining is to introduce difference into the more “compact” community while simulating a point of unity in the more powerful, pluralistic one; the reversal, though, would simultaneously indicate a new mode of unity for the former (on liberal terms) and a new difference (a new criteria for citizenship) for the latter. And so one generates the comments: one “absorbs” by mimicking the charge that Israeli tramples on the rights of Palestinians while deflecting that charge by framing Israeli’s dereliction as a failure to help individual Palestinians who might wish to express dissent from their own authoritarian regime.\n\nAt the same time, the demand of Israelis that the state keep faith with each and every individual who willingly offers up his or her life for it (a demand whose “impossibility” lies in part with the tension with the international demand that Israel respect Palestinian rights but also in other political and military considerations–for example, that one can’t simply let a few kidnappers determine every time you go to war) but in an innovation that communicates both a desire to de-escalate the conflict and a readiness to escalate in the name of innocents on all sides. In grammatical terms, the field of imperative-declarative convertibilities would be “jostled” and made available for reworking on both sides.\n\nTo take another issue, linked in a different way to questions of obedience and disobedience on the tracks leading back and forth between imperatives and declaratives, I have devised a few thought experiments addressing illegal migration to and residence in the United States. This issue has revealed, in recent years, an enormous gap between elites and popular opinion: while the elite position, from the right to left, with few exceptions, has been to favor some kind of “path to citizenship” for illegals, opinion polls (confirmed by the enormous resistance in the Summer of 2007 to the proposed “Comprehensive Reform”) show at least 2/3 of the American people want the laws on the books enforced before we do anything else.\n\nThere is surely some truth in the analyses suggesting that while the elites (business interests, ethnic lobbies, political parties fighting for Hispanic votes, transnationalists) gain all the benefits from an uninterrupted flow of illegal migrants, everyday citizens bear all the burdens and costs (the drain on services, increased crime, environmental and property damage, especially in border communities, etc.). Still, there is something more at work in the fact that the actions presumably favored, unequivocally, by a substantial majority of Americans have never even been seriously initiated, much less carried through.\n\nWe never see polls asking people, for example, whether they would like to see their neighbors, who have lived alongside them for a decade, have steady jobs, pay taxes (fill in the rest of the details yourself), simply dragged off, along with their American-born children; or whether they would like to see priests in Churches offering sanctuary to illegals arrested for obstruction, federal forces move into cities who are (presumably, at least according to some reasonable construal, illegally) educating and treating medically illegals and their children, with the ensuing conflicts with local law enforcement and political establishment, and many other predictable scenes any of us could call to mind.\n\nIn other words, the elites might simply see the unpredictable results of following through seriously on a demand for enforcement, with some of that unpredictability being that those calling most loudly for enforcement now might be most disgusted by what they see when it is actually done. (To be fair to the enforcement-first position, they claim that this is not what they want to happen, nor what would in fact happen–they claim that serious enforcement in the more egregious cases–like criminals –along with a refusal of benefits and stricter control of the border would lead to a situation where illegals start to leave on their on their own, following which attrition we could speak about what do to with those who remain.\n\nTo be fair to their critics, though, the actual terms, “enforcement first,” can’t preclude more brutal outcomes.) Here, in other words, is a field rife with impossible imperatives, and as a result there is virtually no common “object” we are all “pointing” to–and, not coincidentally, it is a field where references to the letter of the law are especially unhelpful, at least if one wants to understand what might actually follow from one’s acts, and to hypothesize regarding which imperatives will find translation into declaratives and which will fail to do so, thereby initiating the formation of new imperatives more in conformity with perceived normative declaratives and transforming the entire field.\n\nBut for those of us who see the contemporary global political scene as one organized in terms of a conflict between adherents of “international law” on the one hand and those devoted to a republican, constitutionalist nation-state and a world order increasingly friendly to that regime, on the other, the offense to sovereignty in uninterrupted illegal migration cannot be ignored. International law is very rich in declaratives (the great pantheon of human rights documents) and ostensives (“look at that!”; “look at that!”–everything, rightly viewed, yields some kind of outrage), while being decidedly poor in operational imperatives (no one is actually authorized to suppress violations of international human rights laws–unless it be precisely those more powerful nation-states that body of law hopes to subvert) and can only acquire them by grafting itself parasitically onto the legal systems of the nation-states (the EU project might constitute a slight exception, but I doubt it, and anyway that would be a digression here) through, say, a new “right” for migrants. So, one thing worth remembering about a situation made up of impossible demands is that it may be equally impossible to withdraw the demands–one has to think and act some way out of the situation, one can’t simply erase it.\n\nSo, here are the thought experiments which, for me, address this originarily nihilistic condition:\n\n1) Give citizenship to all illegals who offer evidence that would help shut down the “coyote” migrant smuggling networks.\n\n2) Give citizenship to all illegals who can find (what are determined to be) reliable American sponsers, who will testify convincingly to their good character and offer some kind of “bond” for their good behavior.\n\n3) And, more “comprehensively”: allow anyone (minus declared enemies of the U.S., criminals, and health risks) to enter the U.S. on, say, a two year visa, allowing them to work and study. The visa will be renewable at incrementally lengthened intervals, on the condition that the visa holder prove he/she is employed (or studying at an approved academic institution), crime free, and not associated with radical politics; otherwise, the individual is instantly deported and remains ineligible to apply for a visa for, say, ten years.\n\nThe first of these thought experiments is clearly modelled on my Israeli-Palestinian thought experiment; the burden of a shift in policy places the asymmetrically stronger party at the center; while the syntax calls for the establishment of a zone of symmetry and possible reversal (a new center, in which America would honor and unconditionally include the Other) based on reciprocity. The second shares some similarities with this structure as well, extending the logic or syntax to a wider field. At the same time, a rather different syntax is in play here, because the parties involved are not only “Americans” and “foreigners” but the American disputants themselves: we could read this declarative as placing at the center those Americans demanding enforcement (as the asymmetrically stronger party), willing to accede to the demands of those calling for amnesty for illegals, but on the condition that pro-amnesty Americans put their money where their mouth is by “vouching” for one or more of those whose continued presence they insist upon.\n\n(For those who would argue that there is a sense in which the pro-amnesty elites are in fact stronger, I would answer that the thought experiment implicitly rights that imbalance as well, by envisaging a plausible scenario in which defense of the rule of law would in fact regain its deserved pre-eminence; a scenario that requires wider divisions within the elites). At the same time, of course, the possible process of reciprocity between Americans and migrants described in the first thought experiment kicks in as well. And who knows how many “enforcement first” conservatives will jump at the chance to combine charity to individuals with a restoration of the rule of law?\n\nWe find a similar syntax in the third one at yet a higher level of generality. We just keep shifting the time frame and the proposed dramatis personae. The boundary established here is between the American regime, as a whole, and the world as, essentially, a repository of potential immigrants; the assumption is that our present quandary derives from the failure, so far, to frame the issue this way on a policy level (while, ideologically, it has been framed this way for many for quite a while). Instead of demanding individual, sharply defined, acts of reciprocity from individuals, as is appropriate in a crisis, a more general, leisurely arrived at policy hopes to avoid such crises in the first place by building the logic of reciprocity into the system.\n\nThe center, again, is asymmetrically positioned in relation to those who call for the comment or predication, and so the declarative characteristically seeks to formulate an act of openness and generosity on that side along with specifically delineated, verifiable, conditions fulfilled on an individual level on the other side. The impossible imperative (everyone demands their right to come to America and, once here, to stay; and, even more broadly, everyone demands a “piece” of America–one sees complaints, quite often and taken quite seriously, that is is unjust that American elections are so consequential across the global and yet only Americans are allowed to vote in them) is mimicked with the qualification, it’s now up to each and everyone of you to see if you can make it on our terms, that is, the terms that made you want a “piece” of us in the first place.\n\nThe political syntax of metaphysical liberalism substantializes “human” and “equal” in terms that enables the latter to predicate the former (like the possession of the “property” of “reason”): such a syntax leads either to the cynicism that results from finding no ostensives that can verify the description, or the radicalism of demanding an overhaul of the world so that one does. The political syntax of originary liberalism iterates the establishment of islands of equality out of a sea of differences and presents those islands as models. The thought experiments I have presented have “firstness” built into them–they all require that someone go first in order to activate the sequence.\n\nThis, too, is intrinsic to the political syntax I am presenting, because firstness is the preliminary experience of catastrophic asymmetry, while that experience, and its paradoxical asymmetrical placement of the one undergoing it relative to others, is also the first move toward its rectification. The originary declarative takes us from an intensifying focal point, a center of convergence, and iterates the movement on the originary scene through which the central object is transformed into a repellant force as a result of the emission of the sign; the innovation of the sentence is the simultaneity of representation and enactment, in which the sign itself becomes the (re)center(ing) that it represents.\n\nIf the naive and normative declaratives seek to mimic the originary scene itself from the outside (presupposing–narrating and affirming–its completion, the former in possession, projected or real, of the object, the latter in the derivation of a reliable rule from it) the generative declarative undertakes the riskier project of entering the scene in its contingency.\n\nThe enactment and representation of this movement “otherwise” (than the reality proposed by the impossible imperative) then provides us with the grammar of an originary modern politics. Everyone is going first (even those who deny it), enacting (even by rejecting) the freedom to represent the movement from one center to another, that other being the one you are presently occupying as a” comment” upon some central “topic” and an emergent “topic” to be “commented” upon. The political question is how to make that new center transportable and en during, and the only way to do that is to induce others to iterate one’s own gesture (to, paradoxically, imitate you in their own firstness) and establish “precedents.”\n\nSuch a politics aims at producing a particular kind of declarative in the observer, an expanded form of the “judgment” I presented in my previous post as the exemplary declarative. The kind of declarative we would like to inspire, to inhabit, so to speak, is one which minimizes our action, both in the sense of marginalizing it against the background of a much vaster field of semblances and in the sense of reducing it to its “materiality,” whatever makes it distinct, irreplaceable and iterable–in this way, the judging declarative participates in the repairing of asymmetries intiated by my acting on “principle” (on/as a generative declarative).\n\nAdam Katz"
    },
    {
      "slug": "political-syntax-iii-and-originary-thinking",
      "title": "Political Syntax (III) and Originary Thinking",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We will only have moved beyond metphysics once we have inculcated ways of describing thinking as a series of moves with and within language and, more broadly, semiosis. Anything is meaningful to the extent that it is a sign, that is, iterable as an operation on the field of semblances. We can account for the origin of metaphysics in social and historical terms as a partial transcendence of tribal and ritually determined identities under the conditions of the market, the spread of writing, etc., first of all in the Greek polis; but from another standpoint the strength of metaphysics results from its ability to describe the invisible operations of mind better than its contenders.\n\nFor metaphysics, the realm of the invisible we occupy when thinking is populated by permanent ideas (what we seek, what attracts and holds us as we question our daily judgments of what is good, just, beautiful or true); it makes sense to focus upon and even adore those permanent ideas which appear (and, as signs, are) immune to the changes of material things; and, having come this far, it is logical to view any difference between these “Ideas” and the reality we see daily as the result of a kind of deterioration, or obscuring of the real vision we obtain while concentrated on the adored object/sign. This set of assumptions provides a powerful way of describing thinking as the process of striving for an ever clearer view of these Ideas by constantly brushing aside the various contingencies of history, daily life, traditions, passions, etc., that clutter the space upon which the Ideas appear. The declarative would, from this perspective, appear to be the primary linguistic form insofar as meaning is produced by making one Idea permanent by devoting oneself to progessively associating it with ever less inadequate predicates.\n\nIterating the sign as operating on the field of semblances provides a way of talking about the invisible motions of mind in ways that acknowledge the “eternity” of the sign along with the reliance of the sign upon our collaborative sustaining of it. The sign becomes sign through iteration; and yet it must have already been sign if it was to be iterated. This paradox leads one to posit a kind of internal, constitutive iteration, represented on the originary scene by the return of the sign to the first “signifier” so that he simultaneously acknowledges and forgets what he first put forth. The field of semblances is where signs index objects and are indexed by them in turn, thereby both “measuring” and “mapping” themselves as both points and projections of possibilities within the field characterized by fluctuating proportions of “signness” and “objectness”; signs, then, represent lines of force and constellations within the field.\n\nThe reciprocal conversions, incorporations and articulations of ostensive, imperative and declarative provide us with ways of representing while enacting these processes within the mind, where we order ourselves to look at something, where “ideas” appear suddenly and unbidden, where we wrestle with the question of which out of a range of imperatives to ourselves would best comport with a declarative to which we feel we can only think in loyalty to, where the inadequacy of such a declarative forces us into the chaos of examining the consequences of that set of demands to which it has proven inadequate, and so on–indeed, such processes ultimately lead to a new declarative which, if we increase our own self-transparency, we must admit appears to us from God knows where at least as much as we produce it ourselves.\n\nOnce again, what, exactly, would be required so that a new, unfamiliar articulation of familiar terms would defer the impossible imperative that creates the crisis of originary nihilism? I began by thinking that “God” must replace the object of the impossible imperative because only a word that already carried along with it repellant force could do the job in a memorable way (“God is presencing otherwise than as___”). Then, I considered that, at the very least for the purpose of deferring conflict over that admittedly counter-intuitive suggestion and for the sake of staging the analysis of actual sentences along with other inquirers (both within and outside of GA), it was necessary to set aside such specific speculations and focus on the kinds of articulations that would represent an absent object, regardless of what the first declarative or proto-declarative might have been.\n\nSo it is necessary, at any rate, to theorize under the assumption that the basic “spear/hut” type of conjunction might very well serve us as the originary declarative form: even in that case, we would have to account for the fact that someone, somewhere on the scene is saying it, and that built into the declarative in this case as well is the speaker implicitly leaving himself open to ostensive verification by virtue of the utterance. I am also considering whether the orginary declarative might stay much closer to the repetition of the negative ostensive, but changing the “tone” and, at some point the words (in as minimal a way as possible) so as to represent and thereby defer the intensification of some demand–models in fully developed language would be those circular, “meaningless” formulations we resort to when we are acknowleding both the demand and our inability to address it: “first things first”; “that’s just the way it is”; “it’ll be ready when it’s ready,” and so on.\n\nSo, if, on the “declarative scene” the demand, in its “impossibility,” has degenerated to a simple calling on the person or the end point of the demand (“you! you!” or “here! here!”) we might imagine a minimal conversion of that repeated term so as to distance it from the violent outcome it is, so to speak, backing itself into: “him! him!” or “there! there!” would have a certain intelligibility and the necessary distractive force. Finally, we might imagine a doubled imperative as the originary declarative form–either a synthesis of two of the circulating imperatives bound up in the crisis (“there [where the object is now]”/” here [where I am pointing that it needs to be]”) placed in a sequence (leading to the “naive” declarative) or an added, supplementary imperative [“him [the one you are all pointing to]”/”[should be allowed to go] there”).\n\nIt may very well be that we don’t need a punctual origin for the declarative–we need one for the originary sign because we can’t imagine what a “part” or “piece” of a sign would be, so the whole thing must emerge at once, but we can very easily imagine “pieces” or “fragments” of the declarative doing some work on their own, coming regularly to suspend the rush to violence instigated by the impossible imperative, with that iteration ultimately allowing for the introduction of some “content,” or an imperative-ostensive articulation. We might even go further and argue that the exploration of these various possible originary declaratives (and, certainly, others I haven’t considered yet) might in itself be generative–that is, perhaps for heuristic and “disciplinary” purposes it is useful to leave the question open.\n\nAt any rate, I can leave it open and stick with my contention that the relation between “topic” and “comment” must mimic, measure and transcend a dangerous asymmetry in the distribution of attention brought on by a crisis of the imperative; and that this transcendence must involve a recentering of the “object” of that crisis, a recentering that is both enacted and represented in the sentence. That contention gives us enough to work with to see, first of all, if it provides us with a powerful tool for the analysis of discourse. I would also contend, then, that the best sentences to study for this purpose are those that rely as completely as possible on their own “materiality,” their distinction, self-referentiality and openness for the attention they are able to draw–as opposed to sentences that work because they are similar enough to other sentences that have worked, and hence simply set in motion a set of habits (ways of articulating imperatives and ostensives), making such sentences very close to rituals.\n\nSimilarly, if politics involves the activation of new lines of imperative-declarative convertibility other than those secured by current “legal” discourse, politics is going to be most anthropologically revealing when the law recedes from those areas it has been “covering.” If you shelter illegal aliens, you dare the FBI to arrest you and shut down your Church or shelter; if the FBI takes you up on your dare, they are daring you and those associated with you to resist and come to your defense and force a “scene”; if the rest of the community does so, you are daring the Feds to round up the lot of you, and at each point along the way each side is daring wider circles of the society to step in or step back. The “law” has become irrelevant here somewhere along the way–in fact, we are at the point where it would be difficult to resolve the situation without quite a few laws (against unlawful arrest and searches, excessive force, to give a couple of examples) getting bent and broken.\n\nMy account of political syntax reverses the trend in democratic politics toward the victimary, in which policy intitatives start at the margin and end with those at the center competing among themselves to appease more successfully. I am arguing that a genuine politics starts at the center. Those forms of politics that have added something substantive to our stock of political concepts and practices throughout the 20th century, civil disobedience and the “dissident” of the totalitarian world, both started at the margin by presenting themselves to the “gaze” and relying upon the generosity of those at the center. Such politics sought to “scramble” the various declarative-imperative pathways by acting as a wedge between the moral and the legal.\n\nIn looking at the civil disobedient or the dissident (it is certainly significant that in common usage we almost always use “dissident” and almost never “civil disobedient”) one is forced to determine which imperatives can undergo a translation into some shared declarative form and which cannot. But it seems that the “heroic” era of civil disobedience ended with the abolition of legalized racial segregation, and that of the dissident with the fall of Communism (al though perhaps a revival of both is possible in the Muslim world and even against the rise of encroachments upon freedoms by the new global human rights regime) with the power of the victim being transferred to terrorism and its completely instrumental interest in the center.\n\nBut the readiness to disobey “legal” declaratives–in the broader sense I have been giving it, of stabilizations of declarative-imperative convertibilities, not just the law–might also be incorporated into politics in a systemic way consonant with the advanced market order so as to further undermine the remaining distinctions between “marked” and “unmarked” constitutive of White Guilt; and, beyond that, to establish a new regime to replace the decrepit post-World War II welfare state. I have spoken in previous posts of boycotts as such a politics, insofar as it involves a suspension of normal transactions in the name of revising the terms of such transactions (and very rarely for the purpose of destroying them)–furthermore, calling for a boycott will provide you very quickly with very reliable information about where everyone really stands on your “issue.”\n\n(We should not be put off by the currently more popular, and execrable, boycotts of the Left–most notably against Israel–the simplest way to counter that would be to boycott everyone who boycotts Israel. I’m willing to see who gives up first.) To take just one other example, privately organized foreign policy missions, which run against the grain of official policy without overtly opposing or undermining it (and thereby “comment” on it) would also fit this model (say, the private attempt to establish Christian schools in Muslim countries “allied” with the U.S.). Such a politics would gently and gradually, but firmly and inexorably, erode a certain “establishmentarianism” in American politics involving the construction of a whole range of boundaries and maxims regarding the limits on partisan policy differences, the relations between religion, politics and society, the role of political parties, the function of the media, government’s role as guarantor of private risks, even the relationship between the three branches of government (the sacrality of Supreme Court decisions, for example) and so on–an establishmentarianism that has outlived its usefulness and has anyway been almost completely taken over by the Left. At the same time, I of course realize that such an unsettling would affect things that I, as well, might wish to remain remain settled.\n\nDeclarative-imperative convertibility is a semiotic way of talking about “conscience,” and it is essential to human freedom that we don’t force anyone’s conscience out into the open where it is examined publicly beyond what any individual can be expected to bear; or attempt to operate directly on the conscience of any individual. What we can do for each other is point to “blockages” in certain well-trodden pathways between the two linguistic forms and open up some new paths through examples; we can also establish “observation posts” whereby people might examine their own consciences in unwonted ways. This is the role of generative declaratives, “principles” in the literal sense of what must come first, starting right now in the middle.\n\nOnce we cease treating our declaratives as saturated scenes in which all the necessary objects are made present, in which the map is conflated with the territory and we “logocentrically” presuppose that communicability of is equivalent to acquiesence in, our judgments, we resort to our resentments as a starting point and donate them to the center once they no longer adequately measure the actions of others. And how would we know that they no longer measure if not as soon as we become conscious of ourselves as entangled with a chain of consequences which must ultimately be incommensurable with the resentments that initiated (and are now provoked by) them?\n\nThis awareness–or self-appearance, seeing oneself in the middle of incommensurable resentments–is also the starting point of the sentence as the transcendence of the infinite regress of resentment. The forward motion of the sentence enacts a scene (the unfolding of the sentence itself) commenting on another scene (the transformation in the field of semblances in accord with a new centering) and this doubled scene is registered from within a third scene (this one, where we note the distinction and simultaneity of the two scenes and hence the entrance–noted by yet another sentence–of the sentence into the modified field of semblances).\n\nThinking is composed of such scenes, in which we order ourselves to look for some semblance whose existence along with the section of the field it holds together seems to be in peril until you see yourself emerging holding that nodal point at which point the you holding it is no longer the you seeing it and we are left with a sentence which instructs us to place another sentence within a scene of common origin.\n\nMetaphysical sentences synthesize, in a seamless way, naive and normative sentences; they accomplish this by producing naive accounts of the emergence of the normative. For metaphysics, the invisible Ideas are available ostensively like any other object, and one successfully accesses them through a quest which can be reproduced in narrative. The formal coherence of the legal declarative (of declarative-imperative convertibilities), bounded as it is by the finite field of ostensives, can therefore be made visible and universally available through the proper intellectual, ethical and political pedagogy: through, that is, an essentially mythical series of intiations and conquests.\n\nInsofar as the generative sentence emerges out of the distinctions within and constitutive of the naive and normative sentence, respectively, and out of the process of drawing the distinction between them; and, insofar as drawing such complex and always qualified distinctions depends upon a larger discursive and cultural “syntax” (with reversals and redistributions of topic and comment, margin and center) we could say that the very distinction between naive and normative sentences is first of all carved out of the broader generativity of the sentence as such. Indeed, it is precisely the most naive sentences that can be the most generative given only the slightest shifts in context, those shifts which serve to remind us of everything that needs to be in place for sentences, or signs, to work.\n\nThe distribution and overlapping of naive, normative and generative declaratives enable us to account for how declaratives get bundled and thereby protect themselves from the imminence of the imperative crisis which gave birth to them. Such bundling means that the crisis is generalized or indemnified; each kind of declarative can be applied to the sort of crisis specific to it, while also being called in to assist some other declarative type–for example, heroic, mythical declaratives being called in to reorganize some field of legal ones. But there will be a general form to the crises leading to such patchwork: they will be initiated by a series of demands that cannot be met, both singly, each on their own terms, and collectively, as they collide with each other; the crisis will always take on the form of scapegoating, which involves identifying the beginning of the crisis with a figure who can be pointed out.\n\nWhat the sentence teaches us is that mimetic crises (like evil) have no origin and no history–all true beginnings are in the steps, however preliminary, toward the transcendence of the crisis through a willingness to stand where the scapegoat is about to be placed. That is where an intelligible sentence, whether naive, normative, or generative stands; while the naive and normative declaratives can be overtaken by such a crisis this cannot happen with the generative; by the same token, the generative cannot establish anything or hold anything together because it suspends naive undergirding of the normative and the hidden normativity of the naive claim, and a stable reality cannot remian thus suspended. The generative generates new demands internal to the sentence itself, prolonging its composition, making another sentence, decomposable into naive and normative forms, necessary to complete the previous one.\n\nCharles Sanders Peirce spoke of a necessary “vagueness” attendant upon any sign, which is to say some point, due either to minuteness of application or expansion of range, at which the range of possible interpretations of a sign cannot be reduced further; at such points, any use of the sign becomes, in a effect, a new sign. If I ask you to determine what, in this sentence, cannot be reduced to naive or normative form, no single answer will emerge, but, if you take on the request in good faith, you will notice something in the sentence that exceeds the naive and normative, you will name that something, and in construing the sentence in those terms, you will composing a new one, with its own vagueness.\n\nThis vagueness is the generative component of the originary declarative, that which makes it irreducible to any particular ostensive, imperative, or ostensive-imperative articulation–what makes any sentence capable, that is, of generating more sentences, making a conclusive meta-language impossible while making conversations regarding “reasonable” interpretations possible and meaningful. If I announce now that this post is over, I make a simple statement of fact that simultaneously represents a hope that it’s not “really” over, a hope containing the normative statement that you, the reader, should not let it be forgotten or misunderstood; and, already, a statement of fact that is no longer true because, as I continue to write and reflect upon that statement, the post continues. But now it is really over.\n\nAdam Katz"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-post-romantic-individual",
      "title": "The Post-Romantic Individual",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here’s a link to Truepeer’s originary reading of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s review of Lee Harris’ new book, The Suicide of Reason at Covenant Zone :\n\nhttp://covenantzone.blogspot.com/2008/01/ayaan-hirsi-ali-on-lee-harris.html"
    },
    {
      "slug": "chronicles-354-355",
      "title": "Chronicles 354 & 355",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The latest Chronicles , 354 (“Universal Anthropology”) and 355 (“A New Mode of Being”) are now available at\n\nhttp://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw354.htm and http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw355.htm\n\nThese Chronicles deal with GA’s claim of universality and its unique elaboration of a specifical ontology of the human community united by representation around the sacred.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "composition-pedagogy",
      "title": "Composition Pedagogy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here is a paper I presented to a crowd of four people at the College English Association Conference on Thursday in one of my academic “specialities,” Composition Pedagogy:\n\nComposition Pedagogy and Disciplinary Inquiry: Toward a Generalized Semiotics\n\nAdam Katz\n\nQuinnipiac University\n\nConversations about composition pedagogy are, I would suggest, at their best when they sound as if they might, or even should, be overheard by students, the “subject” of said conversations. In the traditional disciplines, that is, the classroom is viewed as a space where the teacher disseminates the results of already completed inquiries while (on the margins, so to speak) recruiting those who will go on to conduct future inquiries and sustain the tradition in question. Conversations in composition, meanwhile, are meaningful to the extent that the (continually revised) vocabularies in which those conversations take place converge with those which we shape and through which we invent classroom practices in collaboration with our students. Could we not formulate it as a rule, then, that we should strive to render whatever distinctions we sort out amongst pedagogies operational in the classroom space: in other words, our questions would be deemed “real” insofar as they can be made visible in textual practices and assemblages of interpretive moves that students themselves can name.\n\nSo, for example, when Nathan Crick re-frames the expressivist/constructivist debate within composition by contending that both sides of the debate “define communication as the act of representing something inside of us that wants to get out” (257), as opposed to a Deweyan pragmatism that overcomes dualisms by viewing intellectual activity as a mode of giving shape to experiences that only exist as such in that very process of “artistic expression, reflection, revision and communication” (272) itself I am happy to agree—as long, that is, as the distinction between “experience[ing] the joy of Becoming in the midst of their own writing” (273) and forms of writing that presuppose mental or physical states outside of language leaves discernable marks, that we could ask students to point out, on a piece of writing.\n\nIn that case, the pedagogue’s question is, what kind of contrivance, or what kind of assignment aligning reader with text and an audience of collaborators within a sequence of assignments, would best serve us in eliciting various forms in which this distinction might become visible?\n\nIf we insist upon re-circulating all of our theoretical distinctions back into the classroom space it follows that students should be reading the very texts through which we would construct these questions ourselves. By constructing the classroom space through the students’ readings of these texts we thereby abolish from the outset the assumption that the texts placed at the center of the class have a correct interpretation and that interpretation is possessed by the teacher and approximated more or less closely by the students. Surely, one wouldn’t want to set up a “Deweyan” class with a pre-established code regarding what will, and what won’t, count as “Deweyan” (even less would one want to set up a Deweyan class and conceal that construction from the students’ view).\n\nIf our elemental assumptions regarding writing are to be made transparent to the students, those assumptions must be as minimal as we can make them. Deconstructing the expressivist/constructivist debate from a pragmatist standpoint might serve to render one’s pedagogical assumptions and their formulations more minimal but on this point David Bartholomae is still more minimal than Crick when he says that in his course\n\nThe real subject is writing, as writing is defined by students in their own terms through a systematic inquiry into their behavior as writers. Behind this pedagogy is the assumption that students must be actively writing and simultaneously engaged in a study of their own writing as evidence of a language and a style, as evidence of real and symbolic action. (158).\n\nStudents are, then, writing about their own experience as writers in the writing classroom. The texts (and, through those texts, the theories and scholarly discussions) made available to students in the composition classroom are pretexts (albeit very carefully chosen pretexts) to produce the kind of “evidence” and hence self-reflexive inquiry Bartholomae points to here.\n\nIf our goal is make our constructions of this self-reflexive inquiry into one’s own practices as minimal as possible, we would have to significantly qualify the claims of “post-process” theorists that no universally valid definition or description of the writing process is possible. Thomas Kent, in the “Introduction” to Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm , challenges the assumption of a generalizable “process” by presenting the following assumptions of the post-process theorists: “(1) writing is public; (2) writing is interpretive; (3) writing is situated” (1). Since “writers are never nowhere” (3) no collection of “codifiable shortcuts” (2) will ever exhaust all of the possible situations and ways out of and through those situations writers might devise or be compelled to improvise in sharing meanings with others.\n\nTrue, but this only indicates that our construction of “process” or “experience” has not yet been sufficiently minimized. As Kent says regarding the construction of ways of making and communicating sense in the infinitely diverse processes writers invent, “[t]his give and take, this hermeneutic dance that moves to the music of our situatedness, cannot be fully choreographed in any meaningful way, for in this dance, our ability to improvise, to react on the spot to our partners, matters most” (5). In that case, attempts to “choreograph” must indeed be abandoned, but in the name of the construction of a classroom space that maximizes the process of writing as a “give and take” in which the norms and requirements of the class make improvisation and instantaneous reaction to the unpredictable gestures of others not only inescapable but visible as a series of moves we could identify, refine and transform into habits that would then indeed be generalizable within that “situation” and as an emergent set of habits to be deployed in hypothesizing any other “situation.” In other words, we can make sure the class is a dance floor, with the shape and proportions best suited to surface and de-familiarize prior, ingrained “movements” and clear a space for the construction of new “steps.”\n\nMinimal pedagogy, in other words, maximizes the responsibility of students to establish the criteria for all the elements of writing (coherence, interpretive rigor, structure, diction, and so on) that are normally assigned to a model academic discourse guaranteed by the teacher: in fact, one test of a genuinely minimal classroom would be that students write papers that you, the professor, have no criteria for in advance of their construction. In other words, we should have to learn how to read the student’s work as they are learning how to compose it. The most basic distinction minimal pedagogy makes is between, in the words of novelist Ronald Sukenick, writing in which “thinking is simultaneous with the moment of composition” and writing which “is largely a report of thinking that’s already been done” (81-2).\n\nThe goal of minimal pedagogy is to keep drawing and redrawing this distinction by maximizing the former, minimizing the latter, and multiplying the signs distinguishing one from the other. Minimal pedagogy certainly overlaps Crick’s proposed pragmatic pedagogy, with the proviso that the class is precisely the open-ended space of inquiry Dewey (and before him, Charles Sanders Peirce) proposes with, as I suggested earlier, the “object” of that inquiry being the student’s own evolving writing practices and self-reflexive inquiry into those practices. The practices produced within such a classroom space are both directly experienced, in the sense that they could only have been produced in such a space (again, in ways that are visible and can be catalogued therein) and generalizable, insofar as what marks the entrance into any discipline is an acquisition of fluency in the language constitutive of that discipline: what students do in the minimally conceived classroom is construct a conceptual vocabulary and, since they are present at its creation, they also acquire insight into the artificiality and malleability of any such vocabulary in the only way one can, by inventing and using it to address intellectual exigencies.\n\nSuch a recasting of the terms and ends of pedagogy would then lead us to reconsider the norms of disciplinarity and the mode of inquiry in the academy at large. Once our guiding question becomes, what makes this text, or this region or mode of semiosis distinctive then we are really asking about the “signness” of signs, the “textuality” of texts, and we are interested in constructing disciplinary events making the signifying difference visible. This would make knowledge in the academy a trans-disciplinary project carried out through inter-disciplinary means: trans-disciplinary in the sense that a minimally consistent object exists across all the fields of inquiry and inter-disciplinary in the sense that the “fields” are inevitably plural and a result of the ongoing composition and hybridization of various vectors of inquiry.\n\nDefining the human as the user of signs and knowledge as the self-reflexive bootstrapping operation of using signs to represent the uses of signs and generate more signs would re-open historical, cultural, sociological and other fields of inquiry along with magnifying the channels of communication across the various, provisionally and pragmatically defined fields. And we ourselves are all signs, as Peirce argued, representing in this case a particular disciplinary intersection and mode of visibility.\n\nProposing a generalized semiotics as the object and means of knowledge making in the academy also re-opens questions regarding the essence, origins and ends of signifying activity. One path into the re-conceptualization of disciplinary inquiry along lines I am proposing here, and, in fact, the one I would propose as most viable, would be that laid by the originary hypothesis of Eric Gans. According to Gans’ hypothesis, the origin of human language lies in an event in which (borrowing from the mimetic theory of Rene Girard) the threat of a catastrophic mimetic crisis is warded off by what Gans calls the “aborted gesture of appropriation” of the central object which has triggered the mimetic rivalry.\n\nThat the first sign—inaugurating the human—would be a sign of deferral is rich in consequences insofar as it defines representation as the deferral of violence and the human as that species which poses a greater danger to itself than is posed by any external threat. On one level, the originary hypothesis enables us to address the formal, systemic, synchronic dimension of signification: the formal unity of the sign, or its autonomy and separateness from the practical environment in which it must function is determined by the requirement that the sign be sustained by the equipoise (the state of arrest which transcends the imminent violence) of the members on the originary scene.\n\nOn another level, the originary hypothesis enables us to account for the endless variety and unpredictability of sign use in the myriad situations in which it takes place: the sign (and, by “sign,” we can, with Peirce, refer to a sentence, a discourse, a discipline, a person) must defer some concretely apprehended threat of cataclysmic violence and it must provide some means of communal appropriation of the object (or world of objects) in question “fairly,” which is to say in some way that ensures the continuity and effectivity of the sign. And, of course, we could have no way of limiting in advance all the ways in which these tasks could be accomplished, which means an irreducible margin of freedom also attaches to such an originary conception of semiosis.\n\nPerhaps most important for our purposes here, the originary hypothesis implies a model of knowledge making that wishes to stay as close to the tacit, the everyday, the contingent and the ephemeral as to the explicit, elaborated, permanent and canonical without being obliged to privilege one over the other as a source of knowledge. All semiosis contains both dimensions, as the disciplinary inquiry into those texts worthy of unlimited scrutiny generates tacit rules of reading and knowing which then in turn open up avenues of attention into hitherto neglected texts and regions of semiosis. Our criterion for knowledge becomes the construction of disciplinary scenes capable of generating disciplinary events as our attending to what has so far remained tacit generates a new (to draw upon Michael Polanyi) tacit dimension that might at any time emerge as our new object of inquiry.\n\nAnd this tacit dimension is of interest not merely because it reveals some new possible vocation of the sign, but because it touches, through an infinite series of intermediate steps, and articulates on new terms, the entire semiotic itinerary of the human being.\n\nTo return to the composition classroom, if our interest is in generating such disciplinary scenes, it would seem to be economical or “minimal” to use texts that themselves simulate such scenes—in others words, experimental works that operate just below the threshold of meaning and therefore require the participation of the reader or audience to bring it into some kind of sense. Our question in approaching such texts—poems of e.e. cummings, Gertrude Stein’s How to Write , Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake , Richard Kostelanetz’s Minimal Fictions , Paul Klee’s line drawings, the poetry of Suan Howe, to name just a few possibilities—is, again, minimal: what contribution by the reader is necessary to “tip” such texts into meaning; this question, in turn, becomes a surrogate for the question of a generalized semiotics, what makes meaning meaningful, what makes signs signify?\n\nIf we take the inevitably plural student readings of these texts, and the self-reflexive turn on the part of students toward their own singular and overlapping processes of making sense as the “object” of the disciplinary event that is the course, then that disciplinary center will serve as a pole of attraction around which will constellate other texts and problematics which will enter into the composition of the course: the various, more explicit, reflections upon the relation between language and knowledge, words and concepts, that comprise the major developments in post-metaphysical thinking: from Heidegger to Polanyi, Wittgenstein to Derrida, Peirce to Rorty, Arendt to Lyotard, the mimetic theory of Girard and Gans, for starters.\n\nWe would, then, be composing our classes as signs—not around subject and topics, or skills, but around “liminal centers,” where new forms of semiosis come into being, along with the ongoing reconsideration of the conceptual means for meditating upon those forms of emergence.\n\nNor would these “experimental” composition classes neglect the “basics” of grammar and syntax. Quite to the contrary, a minimal pedagogy situated within a generalized semiosis provides a way of reintroducing such irreducible elements of writing and writing pedagogy into the substance of the class itself. Transforming the class into a space of inquiry into the emergence of meaning applies equally to that basic element of meaning, the sentence. Syntax becomes an object of study in at least the following ways. The assumption, drawn from the originary hypothesis, that the ostensive sign is the primary linguistic form, with the imperative closely tied to the ostensive as a demand to make the indicated object present, enables us to sharpen our sense of the linguistic role of the declarative sentence.\n\nIf we hypothesize that the origin of the declarative lies in the need to transcend, but first of all simply distract attention away from, a dangerously impossible imperative directed, with accelerating intensity, at some member of the group, we might consider the sentence the generation of a linguistic present sustained by the attention directed to the speaker as the center of discourse (as opposed to directing attention to some central object equally present to all sign users on a given scene). The sentence, also, simultaneous with this linguistic present generates an external reality which the speaker can now share with his listeners, a reality organized around possible centers, and that is presumed to exist even after attention to it is withdrawn (as opposed to an object of immediate consumption, manipulation or ritual worship): the “meaning” of the sentence is that there is a reality other than that proposed by the “impossible” imperative.\n\nThe sentence, then creates the speaker or author as the guarantor of the reality generated by signification and hence of the space where the “meaning” or, simply, certification, of the use of all signs must be situated; and it establishes the permanent tension between the guarantee offered by the speaker and what we might call a “field of semblances” or never completed or known yet independent “reality”—a reality that must be spoken of to be taken to exist and which we nevertheless posit as existing beyond what we happen to say of it. (That we might say that this centering of the speaker as the anchor of discourse and reality is the condition of possibility of the metaphysical illusion of the self-presence of the subject testifies to the linguistic, philosophical and historical weight of the emergence of the declarative.)\n\nThe sentence, then, can be presented as a medium for translating non-normative pieces of text as well as articulations of meaning through other speech forms, whether generated by the texts used in the course or by student writing. In other words, declarative discourse is thereby presented as a language in its own right, and therefore a site for the study of the transactions with the co-existing “dialects” of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives, performatives, etc: on the one hand, we have students translate anything from deliberately produced fragments to gestures, lines on a page and so on into grammatical sentences; on the other hand, we treat student error on these same terms, as an occasion for the “translation” of problematic, but not simply meaningless, pieces of text they have produced. The emergence of the sentence out of the lower linguistic forms as the transcendence of the limits and threat of violence implicit in the imperative is hence enacted and made available for study in the student’s own writing.\n\nOur assumptions about the sentence should be kept minimal as well, though, filtering our theoretical assumptions about language and knowledge into specific tasks from which, in their fulfillment, we can then excavate a range of possible conceptual vocabularies: we simply need to present every sentence in a piece of writing as a possible map and measure of any “sign” in the text that can be represented syntactically. Our (minimal) question is, then, what pattern or process in the work is this sentence iterating? Students are thereby situated so as to generate their own account of syntactic form through the use of sentence mimicry and the production of model sentences which are repeated with different forms throughout their papers and used to represent different fields.\n\nThe deliberate construction of sentences and their deployment as models of thinking is thereby thoroughly integrated into their work: and, since, if the class and each paper has a “topic,” it is something like “the relation between language and knowledge,” reflection upon, dissection and analysis, and evaluation of such sentences (through the use of both traditional and newly invented grammatical terms) becomes not a formalistic duty added on to their “real” writing but central to the generation of concepts and discursive patterns, and the various ways in which we might draw attention to the grammatical features of students’ work are bound up with their own emergent grammar.\n\nAs a result of such a pedagogy, students do not imitate the already completed and canonized work of scholars at several removes—they do the work of scholars, however clumsily and uncertainly. They are present at the creation of the concepts they will use to conduct their inquiry, and the double bind of classical mimesis, wherein the student imitates the teacher and thereby reinforces the inaccessibility of the model embodied by that teacher (leading to the—usually, at least—symbolic slaying of the teacher/father) is replaced by a more productive double bind and paradox: that your own sign brings into being an object that only takes on reality to the extent that others appropriate it in turn and transform it into something you can barely but still unmistakably acknowledge as your own as it returns to you through the cycle of exchange.\n\nAnd I would further say that such a pedagogical practice, while certainly not participating in much of the rhetoric of “critical pedagogy” and the attendant anguish over “agency,” does position students as a kind of “cultural indicator” insofar as the world now appears to them as replete with and constituted by signs, and always in need of more signs, better situated and more convincing gestures deferring mimetic violence—or, if one likes, deferring the foreclosure of individual signifying possibilities.\n\nWorks Cited\n\nBartholomae, David. “Teaching Basic Writing: An Alternative to Basic Skills.”\n\nIn Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching .\n\nBedford/St. Martins: Boston*New York, 157-76.\n\nCrick, Nathan. “Composition as Experience: John Dewey on Creative\n\nExpression and the Origin of ‘Mind’.” College Composition and\n\nCommunication , Vol. 55, No. 2 (December 2003): 254-275.\n\nKent, Thomas. Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm .\n\nCarbondale and Edwardsville: Southern University Press, 1999.\n\n———-. “Introduction,” in Kent, 1-6.\n\nSukenick, Ronald. Narralogues: Truth in Fiction . SUNY Press: Albany, 2000."
    },
    {
      "slug": "latest-chronicles-358-361",
      "title": "Latest Chronicles: 358 – 361",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The last four Chronicles are available on our website:\n\nNo. 361, August 2, 2008: A Minimal Theodicy: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves\n\nNo. 360, July 19, 2008: Qui perd gagne\n\nNo. 359, May 31, 2008: Notes for a History of Transcendence\n\nNo. 358, May 10, 2008: Believing in GA\n\nAll these Chronicles address different aspects of the relationship between GA and religion.\n\n-eric gans"
    },
    {
      "slug": "samples-of-originary-political-thinking-i-habits-and-maxims",
      "title": "Samples of Originary Political Thinking I: Habits and Maxims",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I would like to try out something new for the GABlog: a minimal approach focusing on brief, sometimes enigmatic or paradoxical, sometimes exploratory, always compact “samples” of political thinking which we might call “originary” because they defer sacrifice and propose a political stance predicated upon such deferral. Here is a well known piece by Gertrude Stein, and my own reflections.\n\nGertrude Stein, “Reflections on the Atomic Bomb” (1946)\n\nThey asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it. I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whe never one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them. What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested.\n\nI never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn’t any more than in everybody’s secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it’s the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction. Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.\n\nStein claims that neither she nor anyone else is “interested” in the atomic bomb. “Interest” would seem to attach to events or phenomena that are, on the one hand, below the threshold above which “interest” would be impossible because nothing recognizable would remain and, on the other hand, above the threshold below which nothing would be of interest because nothing would have changed. Furthermore, change that nevertheless occurs within recognizable parameters concerns the living, not destruction and not machinery: no matter how destructive a weapon gets, our interest would always be addressed to what remains, not the destruction itself.\n\nThe implicit question the “reflections” raises, then, is what would count as change in the “living” that would count as “interesting”? Stein’s interest in detective and mystery stories (which are ruined as soon as extravagant sci-fi effects are introduced) suggests that the basic elements of human variety and unpredictability are involved: surprises, secrets revealed, unanticipated consequences, and so on.\n\nSurely, though, all those people asking Stein for her thoughts on the atomic bomb think that there is something new in it for the living: indeed, wouldn’t the fact that total destruction is now a possibility something that the kind of existential and strategic representation Stein finds in the detective story have to account for? Wouldn’t the problem of how to prevent such total destruction be interesting? But how could one figure into our calculations today the possibility that there would be “nothing left”? If that possibility is not representable, because we can’t situate ourselves in a post-apocalyptic space as a possible signifier, then even if we think we are trying to rise to the occasion of this more urgent deferral, we are really just trying harder to do the same kind of thing we have always done in rivalrous situations. When it comes to anything more than trying harder to prevent what would be even worse destruction, we don’t really know what we are doing and hence can’t really be “interested” in it.\n\nBut in that case, the effect of the atomic bomb, as we come to have more of them to the point where “nothing left” is the only plausible outcome of it being put into play, would be to narrow the sphere of human interest. As more and more conflicts are liable to being caught up in a chain of consequences that might lead to nuclear exchange in which no one could have any idea what they are doing, that much human interest is subtracted from our activities. It might follow, then, that increasing the sphere of human interest might be a way of countering that subtraction, giving Stein’s refusal to grant any “interest” to the atomic bomb a strategic dimension.\n\nAll human conflicts would need to be, somehow, pre-emptively deferred, to remove them from the various chains of consequences leading toward nuclear war: but it’s hard to see how human interest stories like detective novels could do anything more than reinforce a primitive logic of deterrence and retaliation. Mimetic relations and rivalries would have to embedded in some mode of deferral that doesn’t rely upon these sacrificial narratives.\n\nSo, what could be these new sources of interest? Stein’s mysteries and detective stories offer the reassurance of the familiar, the reinforcement of habit, and it is certainly Stein’s love of habit that accounts for the political conservatism of this most radical of esthetic radicals. We might assign habit to the imperative sphere of existence–habits start with events, the results or feelings associated with which we wish to repeat or avoid, leading to instructions, as inflexible as need be, designed to guarantee the recurrence or neutralization of such events. After a while we forget the instructions because we forget we might have ever done things otherwise. Habit ends up as a more or less imperceptible rumbling through our daily lives, as in the feeling that accompanies our morning coffee and newspaper.\n\nBut habits, in themselves, are not particularly interesting either: Stein remarks elsewhere that she is against utopianism because while she likes having habits she doesn’t like other people talking about her habits. I take this cryptic remark to suggest that habits can rarely withstand public scrutiny, and insisting that they do so is the key to the violence of utopias–once you start organizing social life in accord with some abstract schema you must arrive at the point where you start scrutinizing habits, which inevitably interfere with such reconstructions, and once you start scrutinizing habits there is no end to it and the further you go the more intractable and “irrational” habits become–and the more violence that would be needed to uproot them.\n\nIf habits are not interesting, then, the unexpected disruption of habits might be: indeed, we only really notice habits in their disruption. Such disruptions might be especially pleasurable and interesting when they lead you to see that your habits have serendipitously enabled you to now see something completely new–an internal disposition is brought into the light along with an external revelation.\n\nThe exposure of the internal disposition, the tacit knowledge deposited in the habit now opened to view, presents that disposition as the implementation of some maxim. At some point, one settled on the maxim, say, that “coffee along with the newspaper makes for a nice morning.” The interruption of the habit–say, through the development of a caffeine allergy–however unpleasant in itself, opens up other possible compositions of one’s morning. In accord with another maxim, inevitably, one, at first at least, less steadily tied to existing habits and more eccentric. As, for example, “air and static [i.e., listening to the radio instead of reading the paper–once one thing is changed why not review the entire routine?] make a morning.”\n\nThis maxim would be as intelligible for the person involved as the previous one, along with carrying with it the pleasure of invention, discovery and ownership; it would only be intelligible to another, though, who has sufficiently entered the life of that person, and for whom the combination of rightness and idiosyncrasy embodied in the maxim would provide the same enjoyment, ramified by the intimacy created between those sharing it.\n\nThose who insist that Stein take an interest in the atomic bomb want to see some habit and its attendant maxim continued–a habit of conventional strategic thinking, newly applied, perhaps; or a habit of denouncing the alienating effects of modern weaponry, modern technology, modern society. What would be interesting, though, is interrupting these habits by not being interested in the bomb. Such subtraction of interest neutralizes the demands pressed by these habits and requires a new composition of the relation between our thinking and the unthinkable. The first maxim I would propose for guidng these practices of composition is: creating idiosyncratic maxims distracts attention from the unthinkable. A second one: entering and disrupting each other’s habits helps us combine common sense and the revelatory.\n\nThe discursive form given to the interrupted habit is “one should always do x except for…” The revelation of an exception is the revelation of a new possible rule. If we are interested in the deferral of sacrifice, even the more sublimated and deferred forms of sacrifice embodied in, among other things, political irony (which is useless in deferring the unthinkable), added attention to our habits might serve us better than arguments about principles. Habits drag us along with them in the path of least resistance, which is always toward scapegoating; at the same time, the active preservation of our habits in all their distinctiveness and idiosyncrasy might prevent us from being dragged.\n\nAnd if we stand still while others are pulled along, everyone else’s movement becomes evident to us while it remains invisible to them. And we will notice anyone else also standing still, anchored by their habits. All the intersections and forms of reciprocal visibility between those standing still would be new and interesting. Maxims helping us maintain our interest in standing still and being unaffected by the latest rush to sacrifice would evolve; perhaps some of them would take on a public form."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-market-and-disinterest",
      "title": "The Market and Disinterest",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Is there anybody who genuinely supports the free market? That is, anyone who supports it when free market principles would forbid the bailout of failing financial institution costing one’s life’s savings or when a protectionist law would prevent the loss of one’s job? I leave aside times when one might balance other priorities against a free market purism: say, in imposing sanctions to contain or bring down a dangerous regime, the protection of public spaces from development, the interference in a free labor market through immigration restrictions and so on. In such cases, one could always argue that the free market itself requires citizens and governments willing to defend freedom and sovereignty and the market can’t do that on its own; but in my opening examples, it is the very consequences of the free market, that which makes it a market in the first place, that are negated.\n\nOf course, we may protect only one industry or bail out one bank–but the point is that if, when push comes to shove, when too many constituencies demand the repeal of market verdicts, we capitulate; which, then, means, that if larger encroachments on the operations of the market were required by an even more pressing emergency, we would surely capitulate more abjectly. Who would stand for economic freedom, in the way in which there would always be quite a few who would stand, at great risk to themselves, against some new form of racial discrimination; and if they stood, who would notice or care?\n\nI am trying to point to a paradox here, which is that the one article of consensus holding together the free world in the post-Cold War era is meaningfully adhered to by almost no one. One might go even further and say the same thing about the Consitution, or the law–how many really “believe ” in either, as opposed to having becoming habituated to the greater probability of advantageously settling disagreement through these means rather than through violence? This, of course, is part of the genuis of modern freedom–that it works without virtue, without making unrealistic demands upon its practitioners and beneficiaries. But the case of the market seems to me to be different, or at least more extreme. We would know “where” to stand in defense of, say, civil rights: there is a courthouse where someone is being tried unjustly, a school someone is prevented from attending. But where does one stand in defense of the market–where “is” the market for that matter. It is also true that it is far more seldom that the market requires this kind of commitment–but when it does, it really does.\n\nPerhaps it’s needless to say that these reflections are provoked by the current financial “meltdown” in the U.S., which demands some kind of response from originary thinkers, even a rank amateur in economics like myself. Part of the fascination in these unfolding events lies in the clarity of the causes behind it; and the other part in the complete impossibility of claiming any real expertise regarding how to correct what has gone wrong. First, the cause: we actually have a victimary financial crisis that, according to some accounts at least, imperils the entire capitalist system. This certainly situates the whole discussion of the victimary on new terrain!\n\nThe stakes had already been raised by the victimary absolute of global jihadist terrorism, but now we have something much more benign and closer to home with potentially far more catastrophic consequences. One would have thought that affirmative action created all kinds of local, but hardly critical, injustices–a white kid who has to go to a state school instead of a more prestigious private university; an employee with 15 years experience given the same seniority as a minority employee with only 5, etc. And, of course, there is the broader, creeping corruption of the whole notion of equal rights and equal opportunity and the associated incremental encroachment of the state upon private freedoms… But this is on another scale entirely: because of the claim, promoted first of all by “community activists” like Barack Obama going back to the 70s and 80s that banks were “redlining” (who would have thought, as a reader of leftist stalwarts like The Nation and Mother Jones in those days, that these tendentious, monotonous, hysterical arguments would bear such prodigious fruit!) and thereby unjustly excluding minorities seeking mortgages, laws were actually passed mandating that such mortgages be extended by banks; mortages which then got caught up in various financial mechanisms and shenanigans which I can’t pretend event to begin to understand so that when the housing boom peaks and all those mortgages go unpaid, enormous sums of money (how much? trillions?) goes poof! Not even real money, of course, but promises of future money, which is now worthless because nobody believes the promises.\n\nBut now, what to do? I, like many others, accepted the initial dire narratives of total, imminent collapse and “got behind” the original “bailout plan.” But now, a few days later, having had a chance to be reminded of the disgraceful behavior of the Democratic majority, which continues to provide no evidence that it has the slightest interest in actually governing; becoming increasingly suspicious, not of President Bush’s intentions but of his “compassionate” tendencies which might be leading him to err on the side of inflating the crisis so as to take responsibility for it; noticing that the sky seems not to have fallen yet (while stipulating that it still might); detecting a somewhat desperate, even “it’s too urgent to explain to you idiots” bullying tone in those urging the bailout; and, finely, have seen among conservative thinkers some other, cheaper, more market friendly alternatives–now, I say no .\n\nAnd then this no reveals a whole new vision of the stakes in the upcoming election (and, yes, all this is happening in the middle of a rather important Presidential election in such a way as to upset all the carefully laid strategies of both campaigns–neither of which, clearly, has the slightest idea of what to do). This election gives us a choice regarding the meaning of the events of 9/11: either that day was the beginning of the end of victimary blackmail, because we now realize that no payoff can ever satisfy the blackmailer, because each payoff simply confirms the original and incommensurable guilt of the the extortee; or, in some hazy, not quite explainable way, all the bad things that have happened since 9/11 (sliding over imperceptibly into 9/11 itself) are the fault of the Bush Administration and therefore, once that scapegoat (and everthing associated with it) has been sacrificed, all will be right again.\n\nBack to the prior status quo in which we perpetually negotiate the terms of blackmail based on the fantasy that a final settlement is just within reach, and less and less incentive remains not simply to jump over to the side of the blackmailers. This is why Obama, in his final, extraordinary and yet unremarked upon, remarks in his first debate with Mc Cain, provided the following criteria for determining the rightness of American policies: prospective immigrants from Third World countries must find them inspiring. That Mc Cain didn’t seem to even notice this bizarre combination of triviality and teachery filled me with the closest thing to despair I have felt in a long time.\n\nJohn Mc Cain seems capable of thinking of himself, as a public figure, only in terms of “saving the country.” That’s fine–a president can have worse ways of imagining himself. But he has to choose between two versions of this attitude: one, “saving the country” from what may very well be exorbitantly inflated claims about the danger we are in, which will mean covering up, in the interesting of brokering a bi-partisan deal, the deep implication of the entire criminal cult that goes by the name of the Democratic Party in that crisis; or, he can join the Republicans who were either immune to or have snapped out of that hypnotic stance in which one simply insists “we must do something,” and have regrouped around the more salutary “no, instead I think we’ll just stand here for a while,” and ruthlessly, obsessively virulently, rub the faces of the Democrats and Obama above all in the consequences of their decades of, in essence, “laundering” the ideological currency of victimary blackmail–and, in that case, he just may have a chance of saving his country from an Obama Presidency and Democratic control of both houses of Congress and what will be a veritable riot of the Left which is still in a scapegoating mood and has been busy painting targets on the backs of their enemies.\n\nOK, I’m not sounding very “disinterested” myself, am I? But I think I may have located where one “stands” in defense of the market–against every law and every employment of governmental power that gives anyone in the government any interest in who wins in the market place or, for that matter, increases their ability to predict who will win. Doesn’t the rush to scapegoating result from the selection and promotion of preferred winners, with the subsequent skewing of the market place, upsetting of values and suddenly visible and unseemly ties btween the winners in politics and the winner in the marketplace. Right now, there is someone out there with an idea for how to get super-rich by cleaning up at least a good portion of this mess and redistributing values more productively.\n\nAnd none of us could have any idea who that might be or what that idea might look like. My own criterion for any governmental action in the meantime is that they not do anything that gets in his (or her!) way. In the meantime, the public itself seems to be on the side of distinerest–let them sink! seems to be the general idea. Some principled and clever politician might use this event to paint all government interference in the market place as being not only against the interest of most of you but a first step towards a calamity. But first the opposition to the bailout must become increasingly determined, unified and articulate.\n\nAdam"
    },
    {
      "slug": "barack-obama-the-greatest-president-ever",
      "title": "Barack Obama, the Greatest President Ever!",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I thought I’d give this post-election commentary game another spin. Two things occurred to me: first, that Barack Obama, for a while at least, will be able to do pretty much whatever he wants (and if what he does is well received, that “while” will become quite a while) and we have no idea what he wants to do (that’s all one thing); second, do we really have comprehensive knowledge of the laws of scapegoating? Maybe sometimes scapegoating really works–it must have, after all, to become such a longstanding human practice. Maybe sometimes the mimetic tensions are genuinely “discharged,” leading to a period of significantly reduced tensions. This wouldn’t make scapegoating any more just or reasonable–the fact that it works sometimes does not mean we could know in advance when it will work, or what the collateral damage will be. But it would be a fact that we would have to acknowledge as theorists seeking the truth.\n\nObama, then, in this new discharged environment, in which he has made a wide range of inconsistent, likely insincere, but never too insistently put forward promises, is pretty much free to ignore his most fervent supporters–until someone undermines his transcendence, what we might call his victimary halo, he is fairly invulnerable. And those who paved the way for his transcendence through their relentless scapegoating of Bush are not well positioned to trip him up–they have already gotten their hands dirty, both as unscrupulous partisan hitmen and as slavish supporters. Obama will have to wager his transcendence on something, and the odds are he will do so on a leftist “surge” in both doemstic and foreign policy–a new New Deal at home, and transnational pacificsm abroad.\n\nBut what if he is independent enough from any particular commitments or interest group to actually observe the effects of his first steps in the direction of advancing such policies? How will this proud man, whose resentments are not that easy to read, respond to a rebuff from Ahmadinejad, Chavez–or, for that matter, Gordon Brown or Nicolas Sarkozy? How will he deal with leftist activists who try to drag him down to their level by trying to cash in on his promises, interfering with his basking in the historical moment? Obama’s sleazy crack at his first post-election press conference about Nancy Reagan’s “seances” reminded anyone who was paying attention of what was already clear–that Obama’s entire political idiom is a hybrid of the leftist activist group and faculty lounge. It is not unreasonable to imagine that he might realize fairly quickly how exhausted and inadequate that idiom is to his purposes.\n\nIn a sense, some of the immediate decisions confronting Obama are very favorable towards any attempt to distance himself from the Left, should he wish to do so. Reversing his position on Iraq, for example, should be relatively cost-free: casualties are way down and stability and security immeasurably improved and likely to stay that way contingent only upon a continuance of present policies. The financial crisis gives him cover to reverse himself on tax increases for the “rich.” Taking a more skeptical stance on the constantly expanding bailout of what is coming to look like the entire American economy would allow him to pivot against both the Bush Adminstration’s haste to help rich Wall Street investors and the Democratic Congress’s lust to nationalize and distribute pork. Everyone knows he has inherited the crisis, so the public will be patient, and the inevitable return to economic growth will redound to his credit. The media is already preparing the narrative of Obama the rescuer, “like” Lincoln and FDR.\n\nIn the end, of course, Obama will have to prove himself by making difficult and unpopular positions–only when he does this will these favorable conditions become favorable conditions. He will have to block some domestic policy proposal with overwhelming Democratic support; and, more important, he will have to initiate and see through to the end some application of American military power for some unequivocal end, against some enemy. The latter imperative is, of course, both more difficult and more important. But if Obama, offended by (say) an Iranian insult, shocked by some display of European cynicism in that same instance, and angered by his erstwhile domestic allies’ willingness to tie his hands in the midst of a decision he is coming to realize is more complex than he had realized–if, in such a situation, his sense of his own “destiny” overrides the Leftist commonplaces upon which he has been suckled, and as a consequence he finds himself a new set of allies willing, in the name of national security, to forget previous affiliations and advise and support him unconditionally in some action that will irrevocably narrow his future options and redefine his political identity; well, we might then have the makings of a remarkable Presidency."
    },
    {
      "slug": "conservative-rule-as-exceptionally-normal-and-normally-exceptional",
      "title": "Conservative Rule as Exceptionally Normal and Normally Exceptional",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Maybe discussions about how the Republicans can climb back into power as soon as possible are the worng ones to be having. Maybe some kind of more or less left-wing rule, antipathetic towards initative and success, sympathetic to those with even mildly plausible victimary claims, aversive to the use of force or risk taking in politics and economics, is the normal state in advanced market societies. Of course, government and public opinion can never be too antipathetic, sympathetic and aversive to these respective features of civilized life–it is enough that we know, when scapegoats are to be chosen, where the pool of possible victims is to be found and what the offenses for which they are to be punished are.\n\nOne of the more interesting statistics I saw following the election was that the proportion of Democrats and Republicans in Congress is pretty much the same now as it was upon Clinton’s election in 1992; even more, if we factor in the further left-wing tilt of this Congress, it looks a lot like pre-Reagan proportions. It’s almost as if things “snapped” back into place, after being “stretched” into some anomalous form for the last quarter century.\n\nWe could use the originary scene as a model for this situation (as, indeed, for all things): the putting forth of the originary gesture constitutes the scene, but if we were to segment the scene into all of its constituent elements–the beginnings of attention paid to the appetitive object; the acceleration of mimetic energy directed toward that object; the approaching crisis and the preliminary apprehension of imminent destruction; the gesture itself; the spread of and obedience to the gesture throughout the group; and, finally, the devouring of the object in unison–how much time would be taken up by the critical juncture of the gesture itself? In a sense, it’s silly to try and quantify it, but maybe 1%?\n\nA genuinely responsible political party wants to be the party that supplies the gesture when needed. Now, this doesn’t mean that conservatives should be content to rule 1% of the time–a party that rules as much of the scene as possible would be better positioned to emit the gesture when required. It does mean, though, that however we position ourselves throughout the rest of the scene, our attention is always directed to what would count as the next gesture, in the next crisis. Norms are established in exceptional circumstances, when they present some renunciation to the consideration of the community that the most powerful forces in that community can see as the only way out of some crisis; and they become normal as the memory of that circumstance becomes ritualized and largely absent from daily life. Those who preserve and clarify the “materials” of such norms are likely to either be unpopular or to be vulnerable to the charge of supporting what is merely normal, i.e., the majority against some more victimized or romantically charged margin.\n\nIt is interesting that while the left offers a wide range of “benefits,” an all inclusive sparagmos–we will make sure you never experience poverty, never go without health care, get all the education you need, always have a job or are able to live without one, free sex, etc.–conservatives have really only offered one over the past few decades: tax cuts. It’s not surprising that, all recriminations aside, the bottom fell out of the conservative movement when we got to the point where there are really no more taxes to cut–well, we could cut capital gains taxes, I suppose, but there are few if any at this point with a strongly felt need to have their taxes cut, at least at the level of national politics.\n\nWhat this may mean is that the conservative path back to power will be the same one pursued by Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1980, Guiliani in 1993 and Gingrich in 1994 (to take just some major landmarks): restoring the norms that have been trampled on by leftist experimentation and dogmatism–law and order, national security and a privileging of the “middle” or “center” (those who work, save, pay their bills, etc.) over those who flout the normal conventions that make such stability possible. If the Democrats now raise taxes significantly, tax cutting can again become a “benefit” offfered by Republicans; but it might be more productive to consider that what we will mostly have to offer are deferral and renunciations. The only “benefit” that comes along with that is an honoring of those who have made such deferrals and renunciations in their own lives, a feeling that the mores of the country reflect their own personal code.\n\nAfter all, even though we know that the free market is the surest way of creating prosperity and more goods for all, in the first instance the free market is experienced by just about everyone (with the exception of the risk-taking entrepeneur) as renunciation: one needs to find a job on one’s own, pay for one’s own health care and education, compete against the rest of the world, accept that there are no guarantees that the stock market won’t dip or worse right when I am ready to cash in my IRA, etc. Arguing, in practice, for the free market is first of all telling people what they can’t have for free, or supplied by the government.\n\nEven arguing against someone else’s protectionism on the grounds that it hurts you is far more indirect than the fear of having the protections you depend upon lifted. And even the benefits brought by the remarkable innovations made possible by the free market are ultimately highly abstract: everyone thinks in terms of holding on to what they have and making incremental additions to same: no one was clamoring for the benefits of the internet or cell phones in 1985, and no one is now clamoring for some invention 20 years down the road that will transform our lives.\n\nConservatives, then, should work to reform the Republican party as the party of deferral, renunciation and normalcy and prepare itself for the exceptional situations in which an argument for these qualities can be heard. I think it is a fantasy to think that returning to the Reaganite values (some of them honored more in the breach even then) of small government, reduced spending, modesty and reticence in things associated with family and sex, increased national defense, etc. will activate some majority already out there and waiting for these principles to be presented in their pristine form by uncorrupted representatives.\n\nIt’s impossible to compete with the promises of Democrats, whether it be for universal health coverage or that a nicer President will make the rest of the world very happy with us. These promises tap into fantasies that can only meet their match in a more powerful reality, a reality that the majority of Americans now feel safe enough to banish from their everyday considerations. The whole era of Bush scapegoating was an attempt to impose a cartoonish representation on a reality that was becoming a little too real: as opposed to a risky world, with dangerous enemies, increasing but unsteady prosperity and cultural conflicts that aren’t going away any time soon–a reality that requires decisions made by imperfect people with limited knowledge–the Left created a fantasy world in which everything Bush touched was falling to pieces (immiseration increasing, skyrocking hatred throughout the “world,” the Constitution in “tatters,” etc.) while simultaneously living in a real world where they went to work, grew their IRAs, spoke their minds and generally went about their business unmolested. Now the fantasy world has grafted itself onto the real one as the anti-Bush promises to make everything right.\n\nThose who protect us from harm also remind us of the existence of such harm and we want no such reminders when the harm appears distant; those who enforce the norms that make civilized life possible remind us of all our thwarted desires, and once civilization appears secured why shouldn’t our desires find an open field of fulfillment–the exceptionally normal then become bad fathers and convenient scapegoats. But as generative anthropologists and originary thinkers we know that the center cannot go undefended long without being cannabilized; as marginalists in politics we can likewise know that the hardest and least rewarded task is to immunize the imperative orders that provide the last line of defense for the center by making it clear when we will disobey them in specific cases. We should have faith in reality, that majorities will come to reocgnize the wisdom in deferral (and then will go again) and we should take honor in standing where reality is sure to present itself and standing with anyone who happens to find him or herself there when it does."
    },
    {
      "slug": "everyone-s-happy",
      "title": "Everyone’s Happy!",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Barack Obama seems to be composing the most generic, centrist establishmentarian cabinet possible. Most conservatives seem to be pleasantly surprised and most leftists seem to be suprisingly pleased. Each side is even crowing at the other’s expense: the right is claiming that the left, hoping for a changey, anti-Bush administration, has been had; while the left is claiming that Obama is the rational, inspiring unifier they knew him to be all along, depsite the right’s smears. Indeed, one could imagine the Obama team carrying out policies identical to those a third Bush or Mc Cain adminstration would have; and one could imagine leftists cheering this on as the coming of a new political millenium.\n\nIf Obama’s transcendent political persona is predicated upon a messianic negation of the scapegoated Bush, then it might actually be that policy and political realities have become irrelevant: if it is an article of faith that everything Bush did was awful and everything Obama does a transcendence of that awfulness, maybe it really doesn’t matter what either of them do at this point. But, then, what would that mean? The more cynical reading would detect a reduction to sheer partisan, party politics: the Democrats didn’t care what was done, they just wanted to be the ones doing it already. They saw an opening in Bush’s various vulnerabilities, mobilized their resources and allies in the media, and just hammered away.\n\nA less cynical account would insist there must be some “content” to the scapegoating: pure scapegoating, with an arbitrarily chosen target, can only be a theoretical abstraction. And what else can that content be but Operation Iraqi Freedom? I remember the few conversations I had with Bush-haters over the years 2004-7, and they would always take a strange turn: I would argue that they were supporting a catastrophic rout for the US and potential genocide for the Iraqi people, and the answer would always be: no, no, of course we don’t want to simply leave Iraq immediately, heedless of consequences. Of course, a withdrawal would be carried out cautiously and deliberately, paying close attention to military realities and the advice of military leaders; of course we could be ready to reverse course if necessary if certain bad actors came in and tried to fill the vaccuum we left behind, etc.\n\nIf one pursued the discussion a bit further, it would turn out that the differences concerned little more than details of implementation, and even those couldn’t be clarified since they regarded an unknown future. It seemed to come down to nothing more than a mere verbal commitment to the claim that the invasion of Iraq was the worst, most criminal, most fraudulent, etc., foreign policy disaster ever.\n\nOr : the cautiousness and deliberateness was the merely verbal commitment, a line the Left was devising in order to reduce the differences to: they screwed up and we’ll get it right (and the proof of that is how intensely aware we are of how they screwed up). Over time, what was screwed up and what it would mean to get it right becomes rather vague, and the question comes down to representation: on one side, a battered, tainted, tiresome administration, on the other side a fresh face. This would seem to fit the less cynical account, if we were to assume that the centrism was the facade, the adamant rejection of the disputed policy the genuine commitment. Maybe not, though–if the invasion itself was the real violation, there would be no contradiction between a genuine horror at that act and a willingness to treat its consequences with moderation, since that after the fact management of consequences could be seen as a necessary act of “healing.”\n\nThere is another possibility, more disturbing, and, indeed, soon to become quite testable. The Iraq War was a kind of irremediable crime, a violation of something sacred, even an unbearable rupture in the texture of reality, which would explain why all the responses I have been describing look more like attempts to achieve some kind of reconciliation between the person holding them and himself and his surroundings than real thinking about what would be the best thing to do, what would be a range of possible consequences, and so on. The verbal commitment was the real one, in other words, because we are working here on the level of oaths and imprecations rather than debate and critical inquiry. In that case, as long as what happens now can be handled by the proper manipulation of verbal formulas, traditional diplomatic manuevering and occasional, “proportionate” military responses, then everything will be fine. But nothing new is possible–this is the real lesson of Obama’s utterly familiar team, and the strong sense that his adminstration will be taking us back to the future.\n\nThe breach in reality which must be healed must be given the name “neo-conservative.” Let’s give a kind of textbook international relations definition of the three contending foreign policy views today: the realists take as the fundamental, indeed only player in international politics to be the state; the transnational progressives take the privileged players to be international institutions and agencies “deputized” by international law; while the neo-conservatives have introduced the radically new concept of addressing individuals, as dissidents and civil disobedients, and in their civic associations under tyrannical regimes, as actors within the international system. It is this most authentic inheritance of both the West’s Christian heritage and the emergent legal regime forged at Nuremberg, that has so frightened the other two tendencies into a hard and fast alliance, committed to the proposition that the reality we knew before 9/11/01 is the reality we shall swear to always and only recognize.\n\nThe neo-conservatives’ startling proposition–so startling, that I can’t really think of anyone “mainstream” who has even described it with the most basic intellectual sympathy needed to present it accurately–is the only new idea to enter international politics for a long time. We are going to find out now if it will be found necessary, or will endure. Don’t confuse the neo-conservative proposition with the general “support” for “democracy,” in unfree countries, or even the use of sanctions to pressure other countries on “human rights” (al though we see, and are likely to continue to see, very little of either in the near future).\n\nOnly when American force is used (or is so credibly promised so as to have the effects its use was intended to have) in defense of the victims of those who would present themselves as our victims do we see the proposition at work. Only when we demand that those claiming recognition of their collective identities in what must be seen as a gradual re-feudalization of the globe (amenable to realist and transnational progressive alike) respect, unconditionally, the basic individual rights to speech, association, worship and property we consider sacred–only when we issue and hold to such demands upon pain of withholding and actively interfering with the desired recognition, will we see this proposition at work.\n\nAnd, far from a wild, crusading interventionist spirit, this proposition will be most authentically applied in situations where it addresses some issue or crisis that the realist and transnational progressive would recognize as well–it will gradually carve space out within that covered by the other tendencies, focusing on those places where the solutions offered are incommensurable."
    },
    {
      "slug": "more-on-the-election-from-an-originary-thinker",
      "title": "More on the Election from an Originary Thinker",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "One conclusion from the election results that conservatives seem to find comforting is that it still appears as if the U.S. is a “center-right” country. The proof of this lies in polling revealing significantly higher numbers of self-identified “conservatives” over self-identified “liberals,” as well as polling revealing majority support for traditionally “conservative” issues like lower taxes, fiscal responsibility, traditional marriage, a judiciary that applies the law rather than creating it, and so on; and, in the need for a leftist like Obama to present himself as a centrist, changing his position on government wiretapping, the death penalty, and other issues.\n\nIsn’t there another way of explaining these polling results and candidates behavior, one which doesn’t require us to ignore the fact that voeters have just elected the most lefist President, two years after electing the most leftist Congress, ever? Couldn’t it be that people like describing themselves in those traditional conservative categories, but also don’t want to be targeted and categorized as racist/sexit/homphobic/anti-environment by the all pervasive victimary disocurse–even by themselves? More generally, that people want to be part of the euphoria promised by the transcendence that follows a successful scapegoating campaign,” and the vagueness of the “ideas” behind the campiagn allows them to deposit whatever content they want into it?\n\nOne result of election exit polling was, apparently, that Mc Cain’s “negative campaigning,” which mostly involved reminding people of what a basic media vetting would have made common knowledge, turned off a substantial majority of voters–what could that mean other than that those voters knew that there was a truth concealed by the cult of deification surrounding Obama and simply did not want their attention drawn in that direction?\n\nWhat this would mean is that voters want to believe utterly irreconciliable things. Or that, like Freud’s pleasure principle, there are no contradictions in the contemporary shared consciousness of the American public: there are simply affirmations. There is probably not anything too new about this. Who is a fiscal conservative when it comes to seeing their own prescription drug benefit cut? But there may be a difference between maintaining such fantasies on the margin along with a core relationship to reality and severing all reliable ties to (at least political) reality. To use the old definition of a neo-conservative, a “liberal who as been mugged by reality,” the criterion for such a “core” relationship to reality might be that there is something you could be mugged by. What if the typical Obama supporter (voter?) is unmuggable? If my previous post is right, and the Obama cultic phenomenon is simply the converse of the unprecedented scapegoating directed towards Bush, then it would make sense to expect a basic detachment from reality to be part of the phenomenon.\n\nI suppose it’s common enough for political losers to levy such insults at the winners as being “detached from reality.” Still, you, reading this, can let me know: if you listen to what leftists say they want to do these days in foreign policy, or the economy, or health care, or anything else–well, there will be the conventional gesture toward some think-tank derived “plan,” but the core rationale behind what they want to do and why, is it ever anything that couldn’t be mapped out in terms of “unlike Bush, I want…”? The whole argument for more “multilateralism” in foreign policy, or for “repairing our alliances,” not to mention Obama’s signature promise to meet with all our enemies without preconditions are all pure negations of the attitudes polemically attributed to Bush. No one can tell you what they mean by any of these things: what would come of meeting our enemies, what, exactly, we would like and could reasonable expect our allies to do that they aren’t doing now… I am sure that such queries will be met with blank stares, followed by a relapse into the scripted diatribe.\n\nMy previous post suggested that a sustained confrontation with reality, now that the Left has no choice but to govern, is sure to burst this bubble, and such bursting will take the form of the disintegration of the Left into infighting, making a coherent simulated reality impossible. There is, of course, a more pessimistic possibility–that forces within the Left will succeed in punishing and expelling its “dissidents” and imposing such a reality, now within the world’s superpower. In this case we will see efforts to, first modify, but then perhaps assault, important elements of the Constitutional order. This would force a large minority of Americans into open rebellion–roughly speaking, the 30% or so who still give Bush favorable approval ratings, thereby producing a new class of enemies/scapegoats.\n\nWhere, then, would the rest of Americans stand? How much of this process would be “processed” as a reality one is being mugged by and how much, if jobs are supplied, massive government intervention stabilizes for a short while the financial system and Obama’s stock as savior increases, would be processed according to the script frantically being produced?\n\nThe only point of adducing such speculations would be to lay down markers which might identify one or another tendency in advance; or to construct practices and arguments that could intervene effectively before it is too late. I believe that if we have to rely upon the sense of limits, restraint, morality or respect for the American constitutional order on the part of the left, we are finished. If the American “middle” is not essentially intact, there will be no countervailing cultural and political forces. What we need to look for is signs of resistance to extreme policies, and the response on the part of the ruling Left to that resistance; and then the response to that response.\n\nLast year, Congress and the President tried to force through an extremely unpopular immigration reform bill–regardless of what one thinks of the bill, the fact that massive resistance forced an almost unanimous governing class to back down was a very healthy sign. If that kind of thing happens in response to, say (everyone can make their own list here), massive new welfare spending, or the kind of disarmament policies Obama is on record as favoring, or the abandonment of an ally in crisis… then that will be a sign that everything should be alright. If such massive resistance is ignored, with the leaders of the movement scapegoated and incumbent politicians paying no or little price (because of overwhelming advantages in funding and media coverage)–then things will not be alright. That would be a sign of reality lost, of the rise of the unmuggables.\n\nI persist in believing that the founding event of our era is 9/11 and that the era is therefore defined by whether we reject, decisively and deliberately, victimary blackmail. 9/11 was a tocsin call for the intensification of what I consider a Global Intifada–an increasingly tight alliance between the transnational progressives on the one hand and the imperial victimary forces spearheaded by totalitarian Islam, on the other hand. The transnational progressives work to create a reality solely defined by international laws and norms, while the terrorist victimary forces carve out a regime of lawlessness enabled by the transnational progressive neutralization of any terms available for thinking self-defense. To put it another, transnational progressiveness insists upon a transactional approach to the victimary: it promises, gives hope that, a sufficiently high ransom will eliminate the system of blackmail once and for all. While the victimary/terrorist forces shrewdly realize that this provides a blank check to keep raising the ransom.\n\nThe trope of blackmail is a very apt one, because isn’t the reality produced by extortion one of utter irreality, a situation in which one swings back and forth between hope and despair based upon intrinsically ambiguous and easily manipulated indicators; a situation in which one vacillates wildly between blaming and consoling one’s fellow victims; a situation in which someone much weaker than yourself holds your fate in his hands; a situation in which one is compelled constantly to make intricate calculations without having any reason to believe that the “data” they based upon are real? A situation, in other words, in which one is reduced to the condition of a child, reduced to blathering “Yes we can!” and other inanities? How in the world does one exit such a condition?\n\nWhite Guilt has a staying power well beyond what I anticipated when I first started analyzing it, following Eric Gans’ seminal discussions in his Chronicles of Love & Resentment . And I’m not sure I completely understand the source of that staying power, much less what would displace it. As a religious cult for a highly advanced, secularizing age, White Guilt certainly testifies to the absolute need for some kind of sacred center. So, the question is, now that White Guilt is implanted in our cultural DNA, what new revelation or series of revelations can compete? Christianity is certainly a source of resistance, but could never conquer the “commanding heights” of the governing and cultural elites of the Western world (I still hold out hope that those elites can be decentered, since we really don’t need :commanding heights” any more, if we ever did–but asking how that might happen would throw us back into this same circle).\n\nPerhaps we will simply have to wait and see what kinds of victims and what kind of visibility for those victims our new, essentially one-party state (encompassing all of government–excluding a sliver-sized majority in the Supreme Court–and the media, entertainment and educational systems) will produce."
    },
    {
      "slug": "one-originary-thinker-s-account-of-the-u-s-election",
      "title": "One Originary Thinker’s Account of the U.S. Election",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "First of all, we just received a very valuable lesson in the efficacy of scapegoating: the singleminded hatred of Bush cultivated by the Left over the past 8 years has translated directly into the deification of Barack Obama. That singlemindedness is to be wondered at: there were no guarantees that the robotic effort to blame every single bad thing that happened in the world on Bush, and to separate him from every single good thing that happened, would work to discredit Bush rather than the purveyors of the myth. On the other hand, it’s not clear what else they had to work with. Bush, in the end, turned out to be vacillating, “compassionate” conservative who simply could not bring himself to believe that his opponents were willing to disable us in front of our enemies in order to defeat him; much less that they were so desperate to defeat him because they hoped to disable us in the face of our enemies.\n\nAt any rate, what struck me in Obama’s victory speech was how one could see almost everything he says and, indeed, his entire persona, as a precise photgraphic negative of the stereotype that has been produced of Bush. That is why, if Bush is the source of all evil, Obama can be the source of all good, of “healing” and transcendence. The power of Obama’s otherwise vapid oratory might be explicable on these terms: from a time of division to a time of unity, from antagonizing the world to inspiring it, from the old (white) guard to the new inclusive order. As a non-threatening (in Shelby Steele’s formulation) “negotiator,” Obama takes upon himself our White Guilt, all of which had been deposited in the person of George W. Bush, and cleanses us of it.\n\nFrom a historical and anthropological perspective, then, the question is whether the mimetic crisis has been deferred, or are its forces merely gathering? On the one hand, the esthetic and sacrificial coherence of singling out Bush (and other Republicans, to the precise extent they could be shown to have been contaminated by Bush), and defeating him decisively in the figure of his assigned surrogate, Mc Cain, might have the desired cathartic effect. The symbolic scapegoating, mediated through the terms of the liberal democratic order’s procedures for succession, would make more bloody or destructive versions unnecessary.\n\nHere, we might have an argument over whether the liberal democratic order does do anything other than provide simulations of scapegoating events so as to protect us from actual ones. I think it has to do quite a bit more, because scapegoating has no epistemological value–it offers no help in providing accounts of reality and preparing for future events. And if the terms of the mimetic crisis have remained unchanged, how can the symbolic scapegoating appease the victimary gods?\n\nIt will perhaps be up to Obama whether those terms remain unchanged. He would have to do at the least the following two things in order to emerge as more than a kind of fertility god springing from the soil manured by the sacrificed Presidency of George W. Bush. First, he would have to stand in between the Democratic majority and one or more of their interest groups as they grab for more than their “fair” share of the spoils of victory (the sparagmos); second, he would have to take actions aimed unequivocally and unapolegetically at one or another of America’s declared enemies–only such actions would position Obama as a genuine defender of the national constitutional order, rather than the idol of those resentfully parastic upon it.\n\nIf Obama chooses to remain at the center of the cult that has brought him to power, what might we expect: who would be the next victims? There don’t seem to be any immediate threats (the Left, of course, will be the first to insist upon the ease with which threats can be fabricated), precisely because the victory seems so complete: the most powerful Republican now in power will be Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mc Connell, hardly a promising bogeyman. The talk radio hosts? They can be easily ignored, at least for a while, and anyway it would be almost too easy to simply cut them off (reinstating the “Fairness Doctrine” won’t easily produce the required sacrificial event). More promising might be show trials for members of the Bush Administration, not excluding Bush and Cheney themselves: that would be red meat for the base in a more than usually literal sense. But one would run out of them fairly quickly as well.\n\nThe question won’t arise for real until Obama confronts genuine obstacles. What might those be, and what would be the appropriate scapegoats? One easy answer is the financial crisis, where Obama could follow the lead of both Roosevelts and seek the heads of various “malefactors of great wealth” (presumably those who don’t donate to Democrats), plus increasingly confiscatory taxes–this might be very bad economics, especially in a recession or depression, but very good politics. Environmental extremism also points out quite a few possibilities, like producers of coal and the oil companies. Obama need not take the lead in any of this, instead simply nodding to supporters in and out of government–by this point, quite a bit of law changing and regulation can be effected through well situated lawsuits in front of friendly judges (and many more of them will now be friendly).\n\nI doubt that there is anything anyone opposed to this agenda could do until it plays itself out. I suppose a bout of scapegoating comes to an end when it has been ritualized and institutionalized: in this case through ritual flagellations of racism, polluting technologies, expressions of “intolerance,” warmongering, and so in, in politics and throughout the culture. Which means a lot more of what we have now, but without even the token resistance and possibility, every four years, of appealing over the heads of the elites to the populace available up until now. (No, I don’t think the Democrats will try to cancel the 2012 elections–but they can arrange things so as to face a severely underfuned Republican will be thoroughly “profiled” and demonized from the beginning.)\n\nBut when these institutions fail to successfully target all the resentment they generate, or generate new resentment through their intrinsically imprecise application, and fail to account for a wider reality unresponsive to them, we can expect the victims to turn on each other. Undeniable failures will call for a reckoning, starting perhaps first of all with the Big Media, for whom continued idolization of Obama will become incompatible with actually reporting on what he says and does. A whole system of taboos have been established protecting Obama from serious questions, and they are all taboos deeply rooted in both victimary politics and Bush hatred (which are really two sides of the same coin).\n\nSomeone will have to break those taboos, some “insider,” who will then be punished; more will come forward, leading to a new sub-system of victimage. With the break-up of the cult, a renewal of a thinking of the center might be possible. The only figures who will emerge with any credibility at that point will be those who managed to avoid all responsibility for what happens in the meantime.\n\nAdam"
    },
    {
      "slug": "subtle-and-irreversible",
      "title": "Subtle and Irreversible",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Wouldn’t the criterion for actions taken by a new Adminstration, bolstered by a solid Congressional majority, which wants to effect fundamental transformation of the American order without tarnishing the transcendence which has been its real program, be that such changes be as subtle and irreversible as possible? Perhaps (to refer back to my previous posts) large scale scapegoating operations can be suspended, and used for more targeted ends when needed–first of all, you would want to sustain the good feelings (treating opponents more with pity than anger) and make the most minimal changes with the most maximal effects.\n\nNow that the adminstrative, regulatory and welfare state has become large enough, and judicial understandings of the Constitution malleable enough, it is possible to make substantial changes simply through staffing decisions. If the “Fairness Doctrine” is resurrected, a couple of appointments to the FCC determine what counts as “fair”; a couple of years of judicial appointments and “gay marriage” will be the law of the land; add to such appointments new “hate speech” laws and anyone who criticizes “gay marriage” (or puts quotation marks around it?) will be criminalized; appointments to the Federal Exchange Commission and of Federal Attorneys can ensure that, probably without even changing the law (as Eliot Spitzer showed, there is already plenty on the books with which to bully and bamkrupt less compliant corporations), corporations on board with the new regime will get along splendidly and those who aren’t–not.\n\nThe same goes for the Food and Drug Adminstration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department and so on–a government that scruples not to blow with the “righteous wind” at its back can make very thoroughgoing “change” without anyone really noticing until it is much too late–and, then, when resistance is mounted, you scapegoat that resistance as opposed to the implementation of the law, opposed to solid legal precedent, in favor of dirty air and water, in favor of unsafe working conditions, etc., etc. This is how a smart and determined transnational progressive regime would proceed and Obama, much more so than the Pelosi-Reid clown Congress, seems to be smart and determined–and well-liked as well.\n\nI haven’t spoken about the Palin phenomenon, but would like to now, because it is linked to a broader point: the absolute need, if we are to extricate ourselves from what seems to me to be a death spiral (the success of the 9/11 attacks), to demolish the Washington “establishment”: there is almost nothing actually existing in Washington, with the exception of Constitutionally mandated institutions, that I wouldn’t include in this imperative. The CIA should be abolished and replaced by human intelligence gathering groups directly accountable to the President; the State Department should be eviscerated; we should bring back the “spoils system,” so that a new Adminstration can be genuinely responsible for the actions it undertakes–I would like to set the major political parties on the road to extinction, first of all by removing any legal forms which elevate them above any other private association; the same for the big media.\n\nAnd that’s just for starters. All this is in the realm of fantasy (and, perhaps, liberating thought experiments) at this point, of course–I raise the issue here not because I necessarily think Sarah Palin would do any of these things, but because there is no doubt that official Washington and its media praetorian guard saw her as a deadly threat to business as usual. The frame-up of Palin revolved around her unfamiliarity with Washingtonese and media-speak–I would agree that she probably doesn’t know much about some foreign policy issues, but neither did Clinton or Bush before being elected, neither does Obama, and Biden knows a lot more that isn’t true than is.\n\nThey have no more brains than she does: the difference, to paraphrase the Wizard of Oz’s speech to the strawman at the end of the movie, is that they have been “certified” by the establishment and she hasn’t. The most remarkable and prescient events of the campaign might turn out to be those disastrous interviews: what a careful and sympathetic viewer saw in Palin’s encounters with the “mainstream” media was someone torn between her lack of familiarity with the terms of a very hostile environment, her loyalty to her running mate which led, in turn, to her exaggerated deference to the standardized “official” discourse with which the campaign advisors tried to inculcate her, and her own, rather precise but largely unwelcome convictions and political instincts.\n\nTorn to the point of incoherence: when, in that cring-producing moment, Katie Couric asked her which newspapers and magazines she reads, and Palin answered “all of them,” as a writing instructor I saw the terror of the student desperate not to be “wrong” and rummaging through her store of commonplaces for a serviceable answer that won’t draw upon itself the dreaded red ink (“what is this essay about?”–“He is making a point about universal human nature”…)–I imagine that, running through her mind at that moment was something like “Oh my God, they didn’t tell me which newspapers and magazines I read!”\n\nIt was very good for us to see it and, I hope, in the long run, for Palin to have experienced it–because it is only those who are untutored in Washington’s ways, but skeptical enough to burst the bubbles of conventional wisdom (and there Palin certainly has some work to do) who can save us at this point. Margins of the political system must be sought where “unregulated” associations and agendas can be formed–there’s no need to ignore the pseudo-center, but no serious political activity at this point can allow itself to be dependent upon it either. My own favorite is a movement organized around constitutional amendments: let’s sit down a formulate the language knocking the media, the judiciary, the universities, and the political parties off of the pedestal they have erected for themselves; let’s see if we can revise the terms of accountability of elected officials for the programs they establish by forcing Congress, not unelected bureaucrats, to set the rules according to which laws will be implemented–I am confident that language in all of these cases, and many more, can be found that would gain the support of the 2/3-3/4 of Americans needed to pass new amendments, and such a campaign would be an unprecedented experience in trans-partisan political self-education. We could then hold politicians accountable to their stand on the amendments. Let’s see if we can be subtle and irreversible ourselves: all ideas conforming to our constitutional order should be welcomed into the discussion."
    },
    {
      "slug": "victimary-modernity-and-covenantal-modernity",
      "title": "Victimary Modernity and Covenantal Modernity",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We could see modernity as a kind of swerve (a “clinamen,” in Harold Bloom’s taxonomy of influence, for all you former English grad students) away from Christianity: the model of Jesus on the Cross, who has willingly taken upon himself the hatreds directed toward the scapegoat and thereby exposed the fundamental fraudulence of scapegoating, making its rejection the signal imperative of universal humanity–this model is made transferable to all individuals singled out by persecutory powers, first of all and most scandalously, those freethinkers scapegoated by the Church. This victimary model precedes all the other attributes taken to be definitive of modernity, whether they be the marketplace, science and/or technology, mass or democratic politics, and so one.\n\nAll of these attributes presuppose the resentment directed toward any attempt to single out for persecution any individual for their speech and thought, that is, for the very things that make them exemplarily human. This victimary modernity is caught up in a never-ending double bind of both denouncing the Church for its “hypocrisy” while borrowing, for the purposes of the denunciation, the basic anthropological model preserved by Christianity.\n\nThere is another modernity, though, and it emerged in response to the question, what kind of social interaction is possible once the hierarchical “big man” model of social relations is discredited by the holiness of the individual? The answer to this question is the freely entered into agreement, which goes by the name of “contract” when applied to relations between individuals and “covenant” when, strictly speaking, applied to relations between people and God but more prosaically, agreements between people that place some sustainable and self-generated mode of community, some permanent “public thing,” in between them. Victimary and covenantal modernity are warring twins, even though I fear that the Esau of the two was the first to be born, and even though we can hope that Jacob can utimately appease Esau wiithout compromising his gift to the world.\n\nThe victimary has certain permanent advantages over the covenantal: for one thing, the victimary can stage events almost at will, as any equality can, upon close examination, be seen to conceal some unbearable inequality (as in the rage of gay activists in being relegated to the second class citizenship of “civil unions” as opposed to marriage), and no satisfactory answer can ever be given to such complaints. For another thing, the victimary can always tap into immediate resentments and desires–it always tells us that we deserve what we want. The covenantal has only one, big advantage: it is the only alternative, once the victimary has painted all of us into a corner, held all of us hostage without any determinate ransom.\n\nThe war between victimary and covenantal modernities is wage mostly in the margins, in the skirmishes over everyday norms and habits–it enters into the broader, public arena after the groundwork has been laid in less visible scenes. Here, again, the victimary has significant advantages: the covenantal requires near unanimity on all kinds of issues, often without any proof (or, if there is proof, it comes too late) that a little transgression or variation here not only won’t lead to devastation, but will even liven things up a bit–why does everyone in the neighborhood have to maintain decent appearances, why do we always have to be minimally polite, why does private desire always have to be cognizant of social consequences?\n\nThe truth is that a couple of houses in disrepair in a good neighborhood does ruin it for everyone, a couple of heedlessly rude or inconsiderate people does make a place of work a site of extreme discomfort, even a kind of terror, and even minimal increases in out of wedlock births do undermine social morality and morale. But the victimary romantic, who sees the “hypocrisy” and “uptightness” behind these demands on the part of all those very flawed people shuttered behind their pleasant facades engaging in who knows what kinds of unseemly behavior themselves, will never be convinced.\n\nEven more, contracts and covenants don’t happen through simultaneous agreement–someone proposes, and the other accepts, someone produces and waits for another to consume. This basic, risky gesture, predicated upon hope and trust, depending upon creativity and initiative, is perhaps most hated by the victimary–quite a bit of the victimary regime currently insurgent aims at little less than demonizing such gestures as either naive or some kind of insidious power play that somehow places us all at risk and upsets the latest arrived at delicate balance of resentments. But even more than that is the arena of imperatives, all around us, the hierarchies and mini-states of emergency, where someone has to take command and others have to obey if things are to come together as needed.\n\nEven contractualists and covenantors don’t like to look too carefully at all that, and tend to be more concerned that the claims of the imperative will spread than that imperatives might lose their credibility when they are most needed. Even in America the military, the model for imperative orders, exists as a kind of isolated sub-culture, honored and despised in equal measure, but most of all alien–I am not the only observer to suggest that John Mc Cain’s appeal to the honor and sacrifice rooted in that culture did him more harm than good. Restoring or perhaps creating friendships between imperative orders and civil orders grounded in contractual and convenantal relationships may be second in importance today only to recovering the Jewish and Christian roots of republican covenanting.\n\nSo, these days, the victimary is ascendant, the winner in its latest asymmetrical battle with the covenantal. We might not get another chance; history provides no guarantees. The only answer is freedom–to act as free men and women, enaging in free speech, free inquiry, free creation, free association, because covenants can only be generated amongst the free. Maybe the most basic thing to do now is distinguish these modes of freedom from their victimary doppelgangers: speech, inquiry, creation and association mired in “resistance” to the “hypocrisy” of “domination.” I won’t surprise any reader of this post by concluding that the unsurpassable instrument at our disposal for pointing out this distinction is the originary hypothesis of Eric Gans."
    },
    {
      "slug": "reality-and-its-constructions",
      "title": "Reality and Its Constructions",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "While commenting on a political blog recently (a habit I contracted during the election campaign and now find it hard to break) I was led to repeat an argument for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that I don’t remember making for a long time: setting aside all the legalistic reasons or the imminence of the imminence of Saddam getting nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, the invasion was a strategic necessity. It’s very simple: we were in Saudi Arabia, bogged down with a large force, policing the sanction regime that had been arranged in concluding the Gulf War in 1991; the removal of our troops from the “Holy Land” of Saudi Arabia was one of the prime demands of a-Qaeda, and the sanctions on Iraq was a demand uniting the Islamists and the international Left; we couldn’t just stay in Saudi Arabia, as we were presiding over a deteriorating situation–leaking sanctions and world-wide condemnation for a purely passive stance that wasn’t accomplishing anything, a stance even more egregious now that we clearly needed a new “posture”; nor could we leave, as that would have looked like a disastrous retreat following the attacks of 9/11. We couldn’t stay and we couldn’t go: invading Iraq and removing the source of the crisis cut the Gordian knot and enabled the history of our involvement in the Middle East to start up again, this time with us setting the pace.\n\nI suppose there are arguments against this strategic analysis, but I have never heard them and for a good reason: I have never seen anyone, other than myself, make quite this argument (maybe I have missed it). I have never even received a response the times I have presented it publicly. The analysis, even though it seems quite elementary and obvious to me (when I want to make claims for originality, this argument is not something I rush to present), is somehow “unthinkable” today, and I have started, once again, to think about why that is. Virtually none of the arguments made for the invasion of Iraq, even those made by the Bush Administration, were grounded in an account of the situation we were actually in when the decision was made, or weighed that decision against other possible courses of actions, courses of action that might have maintained or modifed that starting situation.\n\nIn other words, the most “realist” argument possible (which is not to say it was incontestable) simply didn’t “register” across the entire culture, which was completely caught up in what were essentially contrived debates centered on points of international law whose centrality and even legitimacy was never argued for: why does an invasion of this particular country require authorization from UN Resolutions? And this, in turn, has reminded me that my own refusal to “let go” of Operation Iraqi Freedom results from my conviction that the responses to it signify something fundamental about what we might call the constructions of reality of a “late victimary order.”\n\nOur access to reality is always through signs: the originary hypothesis discredits empiricist claims about the unmediated access to reality through the senses more thoroughly than all the idealisms. The first human reality is granted through the ostensive sign on the originary scene, and all human reality has an ultimately ostensive quality. Nothing can be real to us that we couldn’t in some sense point to along with others, alongside those others. Reality takes on a greater complexity and density with the higher speech forms: there is always an imperative/interrogative level of reality, where reality “answers” the “questions” we put to it or “fobids” us from “violating” its “laws.” And the declarative sentence generates an independent reality that we can represent to ourselves as continuing to exist even when we aren’t pointing to, questioning, or obeying it: this is the “reality” that we are able to “imitate” in our discourse.\n\nHuman reality is also intrinsically scenic and mimetic. “Imitating” reality in discourse and other esthetic forms takes place through the mimicking of possible actions and interactions, and the very forms of our semiotic endeavours mimic that of the originary sign itself, which simultaneously creates, sustains and renders problematical the very “texture” of reality. We can only recognize objects that we are able to mediate: objects for which we haven’t commensurate signs are simply invisible, obscene or abominable. Representation itself requires a scene: what counts as “pointing,” what counts as a viable “question” for reality, what it means to “obey” reality; all this is subjected to some pragmatic “community of inquirers,” however informal, with its own history, norms, and configuration of desires and resentments.\n\nIn a certain sense, the most “realistic” community would be one firmly grounded in scapegoating. In such a community everyone “knows” to whom to point, what reality forbids, and what questions to ask: the “marks” of the scapegoat are well known, and there will always be “specialists” in pointing them out. In more sophisticated scapegoating communities, scapegoating would serve two purposes: first, individuals who are genuinely more likely to be “disruptive” or dangerous to the cohesion of the community can be “addressed” in plenty of time, and even “irrational” forms of testing guilt are probably most often applied to various marginal figures who are most likely to be the “weak links” in the community; and, second, scapegoating would establish clear boundaries those in power could not overstep.\n\nAt the same time, of course, we can point to the limits of such a community, especially when confronted with unknown dangers and unanticipated threats, when inventiveness and improvisation becomes necessary–at those points, the scapegoating community will lose its contact with reality altogether.\n\nThe forms of high culture inherited from the Western synthesis of metaphysics and the Christian revelation are essentially means of deferring scapegoating. Such deferral is necessary if humanity is to move beyond the compact community to one in which relations between “strangers” becomes central to social interaction. High culture, by admonishing us to suspend our suspicions of the Other, at the same time demands that we abstract from the reality that dangers are more like to come from Others than from those in our own group. At the same time, we add another layer to reality, in the form of legal and political institutions and procedures that do the work scapegoating previously did in a much rougher, but perhaps overall (from the standpoint of the community) more efficient way.\n\nThis new layer allows for new precision, and revelations of innocence falsely accused continually refresh the prohibition on scapegoating; but it also allows for more obfuscation and the frustration of basic desires for revenge, justice, and the certainty with which either can be delivered and confirmed. And, so far, no one has created a human community in which the mechanisms of scapagoating have been completely disabled–whether that should be a goal at all would be, in my view, the central question for an originary social theory.\n\nThe reality cultivated by high culture is always a hothouse, fragile reality–whether in the courtroom, the literary seminar, or the Church: the point of law, the implications of a metaphor, the sense of salvation are as real as anything else, however common and mundane, but they are real in their own tightly circumscribed, self-referential space. The role of high culture in moderating social activity is in inspiring individuals to defend the society and culture capable of creating such treasures, which everyone is capable of experiencing, at least in part–and in this way high culture confers upon the rest of society a part of its reality, leading to greater reflexivity regarding scapegoating practices.\n\nVictimary modernity has destroyed this fertile interrelation by both insisting that the norms of high culture–juridical categories and standards of proof, critical methods of inquiry, the search for transcendence and salvation–be made available at all cultural sites; and that “high culture” was itself nothing more than a more sophisticated form of scapegoating. So, corrosive intellectual strategies have been brought to bear upon areas of life where much knowledge must remain tacit, while the authority of high cultural icons to defer violence has been dismantled.\n\nThis process has been devastating to our sense of reality. Suspicion is thrown on everything that must remain habitual, commonsensical and “natural,” while this suspicion has no natural limits, except for its culmination in the dead end of all cynicisms: unquestioning authority is ultimately placed in whoever is most consistently, loudly and brazenly suspicious of what everyone else says and does. In other words, the one who most cynically wages war on cynicism. The old articulation of high and popular culture, though, is gone forever–there is no reconstructing it, since it relied not just upon the beauty of art, the power of faith and the glory of rational thought, but upon specific institutions now infested by the avatars of victimary modernity.\n\nIn that case, a cultural politics today is as much about restoring reality as anything else. The cultural icons we should look for will be those who stand in-between the mob and their victim, but without in turn scapegoating the mob; instead, the iconic figure will establish modes of impartiality in the midst of scapegoating activities while defending the rough forms of justice produced by the scapegoating we seek to “smooth out” against the blanket introduction of the cultic forms of victimary modernity. My insistent defense of Operation Iraqi Freedom, then, and my explanation of the global hysteria it has induced, lies in the way in which geo-political strategic necessities and a post-Holocaust conscience combined to place the harnessed ferocity of Western warmaking in-between the bullies of a quintessential “Big Man,” scapegoating, culture and their victims.\n\nSuch an articulation produces realities victimary modernity is simply incapable of registering, and so it must negate them. A politics of reality these days, then, might be centered on preserving the honor, telling the stories of, promoting to positions of authority, learning the lessons from, those fighting men and women who have been, are and will be at the “Ground Zero” of a global movement of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
    },
    {
      "slug": "taking-the-victimary-measure",
      "title": "Taking the Victimary Measure",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2008",
      "url": null,
      "content": "My first impulse upon reading Eric Gans’ latest Chronicle, “The End of Ideology,” was to take issue with its central claim: “that Obama’s election weakens the power of victimary thinking, both in the US and abroad,” simply on the grounds of why quit when you’re ahead? But then it struck me: how in the world do I know whether or not this true? How, exactly, do we register the power of victimary thinking? And what would be the meaning of such a measurement, if we could take it? For example, if the the victimary party in power could implement everything it wanted to, would it still be victimary? Would it still have to think in victimary terms, or could it simply shift its attention to the administration of a (post-victimary? Surely it would have its own name) new order? To what extent are victimary resentments grounded in real events and conditions (and could therefore respond intelligently to changes in those conditions); to what extent does it produce its own events and conditions (in which case it is in principle insatiable)?\n\nIt does seem to me that implict in the Chronicle, and certainly in my own thinking, has been the assumption of the permanence of the tension between the victimary and the (what? the normal? the originary? freedom? the convenantal?). Maybe not permanence, but the assumption seems to be that there is at present no thinking outside of this tension, which would mean that the victimary measures the normal and the normal measures the victimary, within the context of a broader reality which neither can or perhaps wants to modify significantly. It seems to me that the assumption–maybe true, but certainly plausible–that the normal doesn’t really want to eliminate the victimary would itself represent the triumph of the victimary; but what does the victimary want?\n\nIs it content to live parastically off of the normal? In that case, we don’t have to worry, because it would know better than to devour its host. Does it want to utterly destroy the normal and replace it with something else? Or, is it driven inexorably in that direction by some “inner logic,” regardless of what the cooler and more opportunistic victimary heads might like? For that matter, is some kind of long term, stable, equilibrium viable–if not, then all attempts to arrive at some settlement between the two tendencies or parties will be futile, regardless of our intentions. (What roles do we, as generative anthropologists or originary thinkers, give to “forces” or “laws” that operate regardless of our intentions?)\n\nThese questions lead to other ones. The failure of some of my own prognostications has led me (out of a leveling resentment?) to conclude that our capacities, as humans, in this regard, are minimal. Some individuals get touted as genuises their whole life because they got one call right (probably out of luck). And even with those predictions that seem right after the fact it often turns out that if you go back and look at the original, they were really predicting something quite different, or got 20 things wrong along with the one they got right, or that their correct prediction was actually nestled in a set of conditions and assumptions that in fact invalidate the prediction itself, or that a correct prediction leads to some result that makes its correctness meaningless, etc.\n\nAll that we can really “predict” (model for ourselves) is some cessation of the rivalries and crisis that most bear down upon us at present–this is true both on an individual level and on the level, for those who like to play futurist (which is really everyone at least some of the time–we probably can’t live without preparing, mentally, the groundwork for our own future plans), on the social level as well. And, then, we are strongly predisposed to see our prediction as correct, because we can only act upon faith in the way in which we have contrived to imagine that cessation. But this doesn’t lead to some satire on the “follies of human desire” because human knowledge may be nothing more than the continual shaping and retrospective editing of our predictions (hypotheses we have invested heavily in) by contrary, intractable facts.\n\nAnd is not the economic crisis we find ourselves in a perfect representation of this condition. Who among us is brave enough to predict where we will be 20 years from now, 10 years, 5 years, 1 year? The answer is, probably too many–but we would all be humbled if some omniscient observer were to, in a detached manner, compare our current predictions with the future reality. And yet, we all must find jobs, decide whether to stay in those jobs, buy, sell or retain our homes, invest our pension money, etc., and all these decisions presuppose some faith or lack of faith in a possible future; and, regardless of our futural incapacities, some of our decisions will work out quite well, better than we could have predicted.\n\nIt would be better for everyone if everyone acted with maximal faith in the future, but it would be better for some if they acted with moderate faith in some others’ maximal faith. But there is one thing that we can all have faith in: whatever any individual or collective has done in the past does not exhaust their future possibilities. And this is the case not only because of the native freedom bequeathed us by the originary scene, but simply because new situations themselves can never be completely “covered” by the habits and knowledge acquired through past experience. Even attempts to duplicate past solutions are never exact duplicates. And this is an argument for equipping ourselves with new capacities and a capacity for novelty even as we grant others the ability to be transformed by new responsibilities and by the paradoxically disappointing satisfaction of their desires.\n\nSo, when I try to take our collective temperature to see whether we are still running a victimary fever or not, the discursive thermometer I use is itself adding or substracting a couple of degrees. The best way to cool things down, I think, and yet without missing any relevant indicators, is with the indicative mood. The victimary seems to me largely interrogative (“who do you think you are?”) and infinitive (insisting upon a gnostic apprehension of what is “to be”). A particularly obnoxious slogan I have encountered was one on a t-shirt worn by some students at the university I teach at–a very pleasant institution, with a serious and respectful group of students, but with some desire to move up in ranks which for many means winning your victimary stripes–as follows: “You don’t know me.”\n\nTechnically, a declarative statement in the indicative mood, I know, but in terms of the resentments it seeks to simulate, it should be translated more as “who do you think you are to pretend to know me?” Combining interrogative, imperative and infinitive all in one: the listener is “fixed” in the position of the one who wants to “fix” the Other.\n\nThe indicative mood makes reality a bit more spacious: Obama’s roots are thoroughly victimary as is his manner of thinking and approaching problems; and yet, if our critique of the victimary is right, he will be confronting problems for which his standard issue leftist cliches offer no answer; we have reason to hope that we will want to solve those problems more than he will want to hold onto his cliches; he is larger than his Congressional counterparts and might very well resent their attempts to shrink him to their size; such resentments might lead him to appreciate former opponents and this in turn might further open him up to unaccustomed ways of thinking; he has already shown himself quite cavalier in his attitude toward his campaign promises but that might only mean that he recognizes the contradictions between some of those promises and the distinctive transcendence he bears and which accounts for his authority; the fact that he has recognized this so quickly might suggest that he has a firm grasp of the sources of the transcendence conferred upon him and will work to preserve it; and, in preserving it, he might find that transcendence to be rooted in deeper wellsprings of trnascendence of which up until now he has only had an inkling.\n\nI’m not quite making predictions here, al though there is a kind of expression of futurity in what I am saying. I’m trying to carve out space in the present for as expansive a set of future possibilities as I can imagine, while remaining completely tethered to realities I could, if pressed, actually “point” to. And if someone were to challenge any or all of the claims I have made in this paragraph, on victimary or other grounds, I could make them even more minimal and draw the futurity they express even closer to the indicative realities articulated in these sentences.\n\nAnd there would be a measuring of the victimary in such an indicative mode of cultural commentary–if I am right, the victimary has little patience with the indicative mood. It can’t go very long without either expressing a demand, asking a question that is really a disguised demand (for recognition, at the very least), or fixing its own present resentments firmly in the future (Bush will be–is to be–considered the worst president ever, etc.). And this hypothesis regarding the grammar of politics should even give me a way of measuring my own resentments, as we must all slip out of the indicative mood from time to time.\n\nRegardless of whether the victimary is intrinsically parasitical upon the normal, it certainly has its own originary fantasy: fundamentally resentful toward the distinction any sign must make between “order” and “chaos,” which distinction, as a post-Christian phenomenon, the victimary associates with scapegoating and considers all the more insidious insofar as it pretends to transcend scapegoating, the attention of the victimary is directed toward those preliminary moves toward the emission of any sign–it wishes above all to arrest those preliminary moves that would ultimately coalesce in a shared sign. But arresting one such preliminary move simply leads one’s attention to the preceding one, as anything other than the sheer chaos of violence must represent an array of such moves, at least in potentia.\n\nAnd so the utopia of the victimary is a complete a priori choreography of approved moves on the social scene. But explicitly installing such a choreography would itself be a “move,” and could never be mapped out in advance; it must be inscribed, but never articulated, in the ethical non-subject who has internalized a logic of appropriation in accord with the highest projected form of mediation. You must intuit what is to have been protected: such is the grammar of the victimary, oscillating permanently between sign and non-sign.\n\nIn that case, we might, with the rise to power of the victimary in the context of a global economic crisis which (let’s be honest) no one really knows how to handle, be seeing not only the end of ideology but the end of politics. The only political stance one could take regarding ongoing economic resuce operations is for or against–but that choice will disappear very soon, if it hasn’t already, once the commitments made by the federal government lock us in for the long term. The idea right now seems to be to enter and then shape the political-economic chaos–throw trillions of dollars all over the place and see into whose hands it falls.\n\nThere can’t possibly be any economic or political logic to this–if the government were, for example, to deal with the credit freeze by simply opening a line of credit then we could have arguments over the criteria for extending such credit, and eventually the government could sell its loans off to whatever financial institutions survive the meltdown. The idea would be to de-politicize the process, but there would be a politics to that–a politics of restoring austerity and sobriety while protecting the market system. As it is, the criteria will probably unfold as follows: those institutions will get the most money and the firmest guarantees who are most willing to surrender their freedom of action to the government.\n\nAnd the government will be interested in such surrenders as enable it to satisfy the interests it depends upon. So, the auto companies will get money if they go Green and protect the unions, the financial institutions will be expected to lend and redistribute money in approved ways, and who knows what will be asked of the states now lining up at the trough. Chaos can be turned not so much into order as into a kind of hovering, with possible actions not so much determined as circumscribed in advance by the all the officially recognized injuries they could inflict.\n\nThese giveaways will shape the economic and political landscape for decades–it will be impossible to make any policy proposal, certainly domestic but eventually international as well, that can’t be located on that landscape. Right now it is an ever shifting, chaotic landscape, but this chaos is a kind of simulation insofar as it enables the government to put in place all those regulatory principles that have internalized the most advanced projected modes of mediation. It will become a matter of course that no one can make a move if all of the right boxes in an ever increasing row are not checked (because we now know what heppens if…).\n\nIf you don’t know whether they have been properly checked, there will always be people around you can ask, and people they can ask. You are to do what is already to be done. It’s not hard to see how any pointed or irreverent criticism of the ongoing and all encompassing process of standard creation and enforcement will be greeted. We can imagine that it will leave safe spaces to think, though, and the new order might be socially workable for a few decades if enough potentially bad actors can be drawn into the net. It is certainly the end of something, though. But I fear I have fallen out of the indicative mood somewhere along the way here; if so, only in order to create a space for its continuance, I hope."
    },
    {
      "slug": "assignments-for-president-obama",
      "title": "Assignments for President Obama",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’d like, briefly, to propose a way to think about President Obama. I would first like to summarize or reaffirm (insist upon?) the argument I have made so far regarding Obama’s rise and the wild, cult-like following he has acquired. In my view, Obama is a transcendent figure, a political celebrity/demi-god, whose quasi-divinity, for his believers (right now commanding a sizable majority of American public opinion), consists in his completion of the public ritual of scapegoating George Bush. Whatever the scapegoated Bush is, Obama is the “other”; what Bush is not, Obama incarnates: from biography, to verbal facility, to manners, to associates, and, of course, race, to mention just a few. Nobody speaks about Obama without an explicit or implicit gesture toward Bush (“we finally have a President who…”)\n\nSuch an analysis sufficed (for me at least) to understand Obama’s rise; but it is just a preliminary analysis for engaging his mode of governance. I have also suggested that Obama is aware of his transcendence and has actively cultivated it; which also means that he is aware of the need to preserve, harvest and carefully deploy this transcendence. This awareness, I believe, accounts for the studiousness with which he has distanced himself from the more rabid elements of the Left which facilitated his rise, and made some overtures to conservative figures. Still, all this is just sparring–the bell for the first round has just rung.\n\nThe way in which some of Obama’s policies, rhetoric and appointments appear to be Bush-lite has already captured the attention of some our leading comedians. I don’t share the optimism of “center-right” people, though, that Obama recognizes the success of many of Bush’s (especially national security) policies and will simply continue them in a more rhetorically “effective” form. I think the decisions he has been making are more telling of the kind of moves a well-practiced transnational progressive makes to transform the remaining liberal elements of our order into a bureaucratic, quasi-feudal order based on international law.\n\nThe transnational progressivists are minimalists and in their own way are better anthropologists than the right. If you want to shift more power in society to unaccountable bureaucracies, the judiciary and, more specifically, transnational bureaucracies and legal forums governed by postmodern international law (the traveling war-crimes and human rights tribunals comprised of Western media, lefitst lawyers, celebrities, academics and discarded political leaders), you cannot try to install such an order all at one time. You must pay token homage to the reality in front of you, and find a margin of difference between that reality and the reality that would be revealed under the proper “lighting,” i.e., under the gaze of the Human Rights World Picture.\n\nThe American occupation of Iraq and the government we have nutured there can now, for example, be found to be tied to all kinds of legitimating international forms, forms we should adhere to more obediently; at the same time, those very forms will “tell” us when we need to leave Iraq, and will afterward “tell” us to do or not do many other things as well. That is, one works with events, events which make visible the boundary line between nationalistic, bourgeois, imperialistic, militaristic, racist, etc., motives and actions, and the legitimating frame which now christian those actions anew by attaching them to a new set of motives; or, alternatively, allow for penance to be done for those actions and reparations to be paid and reforms introduced and supervised. And you choose events where popular opinion is already on your side, putting to work figures (“dissidents”) of the ancien regime who are willing play along. Those transitional figures can then be discarded.\n\nSo, that’s my hypothesis: Obama will husband his transcendence by representing himself as the connecting link between American interests and the emerging international order and realities, choosing to focus on those acts and deeds that can simultaneously improve America’s “image” before the “world” and make the world’s judgment seem less intimidating and more inevitable to Americans. All the mythic events of the Bush years will thereby be cancelled out and replaced by new myths. So, here’s what would falsify the hypothesis:\n\n1) As I have suggested before, one way in which Obama could genuinely risk his transcendence and become a real chief executive would be to evince an umistakable willingness to use military force in a situation involving American interests alone, at odds with international opinion and even agreements, and requiring “follow through” past the original phase of popularity or at least understanding.\n\n2) A second way involves the domestic situation. An obvious, but I think relatively easy move for Obama to make would be to defy Congressional Democrats on the “stimulus” package–that is, to rebuke them and send them back to the drawing board to compose a less pork-ridden, more austere bill clearly aimed at the most urgent business. More important, though, would be a recognition that one essential element of lifting ourselves out of whatever we are sinking into is the generation, rapidly, of new sources of wealth; and that the most readily available source lies in energy–while new forms of energy production will simultaneously have very healthy effects upon our relation to the rest of the world.\n\nThere are really only two quick ways of dramatically increasing energy production and changing energy markets: oil drilling in previously forbidden (for environmentalist reasons) and the construction of nuclear power plants. Both would activate the defense of long standing taboos among Obama’s main constituencies. Promoting, unambiguously, a move in this direction would be the second way Obama could spend his transcendence is such a way as to transitioning into becoming a genuine Chief Executive."
    },
    {
      "slug": "new-blog",
      "title": "New blog",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I have been invited to blog at a new blogging site, connected to the on-line theory journal Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (incidentally, a journal which I would imagine might be open to submissions from GA thinkers). I’ll keep you posted on my postings there, for as long as they will have me.\n\nhttp://jcrt.typepad.com/\n\nP.S. I made some overdue responses to comments on previous posts–I apologize–I didn’t know about them, as I hadn’t logged on in a while and they weren’t forwarded to my emai, as was the case previously."
    },
    {
      "slug": "habits-error-assignments",
      "title": "Habits, Error, Assignments",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "When institutions fail, we must direct our attention toward habits–habits are foundation of institutions, which essentially codify and police habits, and which must fail when habits degenerate; but the degeneration of habits really means the interference of one set of habits with another. Thinking in terms of habits adds greatly to our clarity, because there are only positive terms: habits are “bad” only from the standpoint of some other set of habits, and norms are nothing more than the winnowing process of distinguishing what is shared in our habits and which are the idiosyncratic deviations, or errors, each of us imparts to our own enactment of shared habits.\n\nI turn to habits because I can’t find anything to say about politics in the normal sense of public, representative events that transcend resentment. The trajectory of the Obama Presidency and the Democratic congress seems very clear to me: interference in the economy to the point where there is no “economy,” but rather a “political economy” in which one would need knowledge of imponderables–like the way Obama’s wise men are reading whatever tea leaves they are reading these days; or which interest group needs to be stroked by Congress this month–in order to chart out the direction of the economy. This interference will be combined with bouts of scapegoating of the “rich,” who will be blamed for continuing decline.\n\nI have already written pretty extensively on their plans for foreign policy. Finally, I believe they plan to stay in power for as long as they can, regardless of the means (and there are many available to them)–the Democrats had a near-death experience between 2000-2006, when they were shut out of power at all levels of the federal government for what I assume was the first time since the founding of the party, they have never seen the Republican revolt against the New Deal State as legitimate, and they are determined not to go through all that again. The Global Intifada is in the ascendancy and normalcy is on the defensive–who knows, maybe on its last legs.\n\nOf course, it will all crash, but when and how can’t be predicted, not can the precise shape and size of the pieces that will need to be picked up–much less who will be around with the capacity to start putting them back together. So why talk about it?\n\nSo, habits. Habits emerge from the modeling of our behavior in accord with events which have revealed some new sign to us. Imitation of a model is (I don’t have to tell you) a very complicated affair. Taking someone, in one of their incarnations, or in an averaging out of their incarnations, as a model, is in large part tacit–indeed, being impressed by an event is to initiate the process of modeling. At the same time, in order to do something “like” someone else does it I need to derive imperatives from their activity: I need to tell myself, no, he does it this way; more of that ; no, that’s more like the way x does it… In order to derive imperatives from someone’s activity or, more precisely, their being as it is made present in their activity, I must suspend all criticism of that figure–indeed, defending the model against criticism is part of the process of “internalizing” it–his rivals become mine.\n\nA couple of years back, I think, Eric Gans wrote a Chroncle of Love & Resentment on celebrity, arguing for the way in which celebrity functions to limit rivalries by measuring all contestants in a given arena against some model elevated above and hence unattainable to all of them. One kid’s jump shot might be better than another’s while the other might be a better dribbler, but it all gets evened when we keep in mind that they share Michael Jordan as a model. The implication for my discussion here will be that if we want to restore habits, we will need to restore unquestionable models, something which may not be as impossible as it sounds.\n\nWatching children who, as Gans says somewhere else (in a discussion of the Harry Potter phenomenon, I believe) are completely untroubled by the mimetic origin of their desires, is particularly instructive in this regard. Children are simply a melange of habits cobbled together from their parents, friends, siblings, celebrities, fictional characters, and so on. And, as Gertrude Stein says somewhere (as I mix up my own incompatible models), we repeat what we love and we love what we repeat. And cause and effect get confused beyond distinction here–in the end, we love our repeating and repeat our loving and our models become our habits. Others can see the rules we are implicitly following–the results of whatever consistency we have been able to create among all the orders we have been giving ourselves–but to the extent that they have become our habits, we don’t. We love the new habit region we have created.\n\nOf course, our models are not responsible for the habit regions we create, and serial killers love their habits too. By the time they have become our habits they have traveled a long way from our original being taken up as a model. But let’s go back to the beginning, to the originary scene, and to the question, what makes an imitation an imitation in the first place? Who says that what I do is “like” what you do, and how do they know? What would it mean to argue over whether something is a genuine imitation or not–what are we pointing to as the decisive markers of a “real imitation”? Indeed, the more aware you are that you are imitating, the less you actually are because a consciousness of your distance from your model is animating your mapping of that model.\n\nThis is why I believe that whoever first put forward the aborted gesture of appropriation on the originary scene could not have known what he was doing until he saw its imitations come back to him the iteration of others–the gesture probably “improved” as it coursed through the emergent community, which means that the others “mistook” the gesture but in doing so constituted it as gesture. Even more, that first gesturer must have been attending to the especially aggressive grasp of one of his fellows, and that suprised attention led to his own “mistaken,” hesistant imitation in deference to that model.\n\nIn other words, we never get imitation right, and this is the open secret at the heart of all culture. Nothing is more shameful and embarrassing to witness, not to say experience, than a patently failed imitation–whether it is the kid trying to be “cool” or the graduate student mimicking too closely the prose of his teacher or favored scholar. This doesn’t make such attempts any less imitative–to the contrary, it is the accumulation of such errors and the emergence of a norm which the shameful or embarrassing moment then validates that confirms our mimetic being. What accounts for error, and makes it extremely interesting, is that some other habit, deriving from some other model, interferes with the imitation. The kid trying to be cool is still marked by the habits of studiousness; the graduate student is marked by the habits of someone who needs to “prove himself” for some other reason.\n\nThat moment of error, where everyone validates their own belonging to the mimetic space by noting that someone else is doing some other thing, whatever it is, is undoubtedly a major source of scapegoating–once someone finds her self outside of the circle in this way, it is only be the good graces of others that she will find her way back in. But we can also treat error as generative, as the starting point of a new, eccentric habit region that arrests the habits of convergence of the rest of the group and emerges as a new, idiosyncratic model through a series of refinements, defilements, caricatures, and loving revelations.\n\nIndeed, maybe our You Tube, Reality TV culture is making us more open to the generativity of error–but even such regions are careful not to dwell too much on the shame of error which draws us all in, and in public life we see mostly opportunistic reactions to error in the form of pious calls for “competence” which somehow no one is really able to define or describe in a convincing way in any concrete instance–they know it when they don’t see it. There is less and less tolerance for the “gaffe,” however harmless–this is the bullying of the media which everyone complies with for reasons i’m not completely sure I understand.\n\nThe originary scene itself provides us with two models for the construction of habits in the concepts of “firstness” and “lastness”–the two, of course, imply each other: once we reject the simultaneous emission by all on the scene of the sign, then someone must have gone first; and if someone must have gone first, someone, or some several, must have gone last. As I just suggested, the first signifier sees his sign taken up by others and thereby recognizes it as sign, ultimately participating more deliberately in its dissemination–he conceives both his courage and his convictions in the process, and becomes invested in the sign’s successful circulation throughout the group. The scene is fundamentally contingent for him, and the various errors in emission upon the scene are smoothed out or “normed”; nor does he have any thought as to what will come after the scene–he will participate in the sparagmos like everyone else, but he has been assimilated to the group, which can take care of itself, by that point.\n\nThe last, meanwhile, has already watched the scene take shape, and in a sense it pre-exists him. He has imitated an already rather fixed or “standardized” sign, and the stakes of his participation are lower–he joins with the combination of cynicism and fear of exclusion which marks one who does what he “has to” while viewing the rules he must follow as rather arbitrary and probably serving other, mysterious, purposes. His sign is of high value to the group, which will cohere much better in a unanimous gesture; and yet it is rather cheap because the group can after all do without his assent. He feels the power of the sign primarily through the shaping of the scene, the coordinated movements he witnesses, and his own bargaining power is derivative in turn of that social more than divine power.\n\nThe habits of the first, then, involve modeling beginnings in the middle of things–the first works in the midst of error and norming and sharpens canons of recognition, judgment and acknowledgement (what counts as “x”?) that sustain the present itself as a model; the habits of the last, meanwhile, keep extending the completed scene as a model indefinitely into the future–the errors of representatives of the center are deviations from the perfected model for which dependents on the scene must be compensated. The last also expects his own errors to be treated mercilessly, and therefore has no hesistation in using that weapon against others. The last assesses the sign with one eye on the coming sparagmos, since he is never completely sure of his place at the table.\n\nThe first takes risks, but never everything he has except in an emergency, and certainly never what others have–the first needs his credibility so as to see the circulation of the sign through to the end. The last eschews risks, but this might take various forms: the discipline imposed by the poor parent–the unwavering insistence upon the exact imitation of the best models–upon the children who might, in a reasonably open environment, do better, initiate something of their own; or it might be a parasitic set of demands upon “society,” which, after all, is rich enough to support anyone. The most productive errors in an open society where rituals have been mostly replaced by habits (that’s another story, isn’t it?) are precisely those where the lasts make their bid for firstness, and get the model all wrong–thereby transforming it into new models.\n\nMeanwhile, the terror of error is reinforced by the alliance between those legatees of firstness who blame firstness for lastness and the worst habits of the last–both participants in this alliance collude in confirming for each other that their errors are nothing of the sort, but an arbitrary exclusion mechanism deployed by the firsts.\n\nSo, extricating ourselves from the conjoined and mutually reinforcing crises of the Global Intifada and the financial meltdown, and getting the process started without any expectation of help or good models from our mainstream institutions, involves creating sites of generative interaction between the habits of those who are first on the current scene and those who are last but would be first on some future one. The way to set these (or any) divergent sets of habit in productive interaction is to create assignments–minimal tasks and rules in following which the limits of each set of habits opens it to the other set.\n\nA good assignment generates productive errors around which we then gather so as to turn them into a sign. The best way to approach it is to establish a model, transcending both the first and the last, as absolute–our common starting point is then delineating its distinctiveness and establishing a “perimeter” distancing the model from criticism (resentment). We all–first and last alike–then commence to iterate that model, knowing we shall all err, and committing ourselves to the creation of new models out of that array of errors. The beauty of this approach is that we can all follow our own habits slavishly (a key ingredient of happiness) in perfectly good conscience because doing the same thing over and over again (iterating my own eccentric appopriation of the model) keeps making everything different–that is, generating new signs.\n\nTogether we gather maxims–which I am coming to see as the highest form of thinking–from the process: maxims are translations of the interference of one set of habits with another into rules (both in the sense of discerning regularities and in the sense of obeying a series of imperatives) and are generative of new habits in turn–ultimately, what Charles Sanders Peirce called the “deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-grammar",
      "title": "originary grammar",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Anyone interested in what my originary grammar is doing at the moment, here is my latest post on JCRT Live\n\nhttp://jcrt.typepad.com/jcrt_live/2009/03/originary-grammar-part-2.html"
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-grammar-and-post-sacrificial-semiotic-agency",
      "title": "Originary Grammar and Post-Sacrificial Semiotic Agency",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here’s a paper I just read at the American Comparative Literature Assoication conference:\n\nIf the post-colonial is located within the common, if asymmetrical, mimetic space including colonizer and colonized, then we can speak about the post-colonial as the post-sacrificial. Once mimicry rather than violence characterizes asymmetrical social and cultural forces, and the practices of hybridization supplant the absoluteness of violence, neither dominant or resistant forces can coalesce around a single, central figure whose death would provide transcendent meaning. Sacrifice marks the limits of mimesis: some figure can be presented as the origin of mimetic contagion and crisis at the boundaries of the normalizing practices of a community.\n\nBy “sacrifice” I mean, for my purposes here, human sacrifice, that is, scapegoating. For Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, scapegoating lies at the origin of language and the human: in Girard’s originary scene, a mimetic crisis within the group is resolved by singling out, arbitrarily, some member of the group, who is then “lynched” and subsequently deified as the one who has brought peace to the group. According to Eric Gans’ reconfiguration of the originary scene, though, the mimetic crisis Girard identifies need not be resolved violently—in fact, the originary sign which founds the community must be a deferral of violence, even on Girard’s terms, since the lynching itself would only resolve the crisis through some shared sign that could in that case have come in place of the violence.\n\nFor Gans, indeed, scapegoating and human sacrifice is introduced much later, in the wake of the organization of communities around the so-called “Big Man,” who centralizes the distribution of resources. Once the origin of goods is centralized, in other words, so can be the origin of contagion. The Big Man both defers violence by deflecting resentments within the community and becomes a pole of mimetic attraction and hence a more focused violence. This origin of scapegoating accounts for its operation: an intensified attention directed toward some figure, with the more comprehensive mapping of that figure identifying ever more intentional, malevolent, insidious and systematic betrayal of the norms of the community. For Girard’s Christo-centric version of mimetic theory, the sacrifice of Jesus exposes the falsity of scapegoating along with our universal implication in the practice: in an analysis not at odds with Gans’ version, Jesus teaches the primacy of defense of those who would be scapegoated and for this he is scapegoated by all.\n\nModernity inherits, while substantially modifying, this essentially victimary understanding of sacrifice and violence: violence against the “other” is understood as a kind of scapegoating that implicates us all, and that will ultimately destroy us all if not deferred in some way. The anti-colonial theory pioneered by Fanon, Cesaire and others is ambivalent insofar as it calls both for a kind of purifying, sacrificial violence predicated upon an absolute asymmetry and for modes of symmetrical symbolic interaction that would negate the conclusiveness of such sacrificial violence. The post-colonial theory of Bhabha, Spivak and others makes this ambivalence central and constitutive to theory. If we are post-colonial, then, it is because we recognize and resist asymmetries without claiming we can register or transform them in any systemic way; because we are implicated in resentments implying the possibility of what would now be monstrous sacrifices without believing in the apocalyptic or millennial resolution promised by those sacrifices.\n\nThe emergence of writing, while of course not coinciding with the creation of the stark social divisions of colonialism, can nevertheless be usefully mapped onto those divisions as follows. The logocentrism Derrida associated with Western metaphysical modes of thinking, along with all of its distinctions between rational and irrational, civilized and barbaric, and so on, can indeed be predicated upon modes of thinking produced by writing. David Olson, in his World on Paper , contests the commonsensical assumption that writing was invented as a way to record speech. This assumption itself presupposes that speech was already understood as made up of the units—separable sounds, syllables and words—that writing then simply reproduced.\n\nOlson rejects this assumption, contending instead that writing began as a separate sign system of its own—for example, in the use of tallies for record keeping—and then became applicable to the recording of speech once it acquired its own “syntax”: for example, one sign for “3” and another sign for “sheep.” Writing, rather than being modeled on speech, itself becomes the model upon which speech is then understood. The separation of language into discrete and combinable units is, then, the product of the application of writing as a model to speech.\n\nFor Olson, writing is from the start an imperfect representation of speech because it cannot capture the entire speech situation—what Olson refers to as the “illocutionary force” of the utterance. In speech situations, the mutual understanding of the speakers represents the success of the speech act; writing, meanwhile, draws attention to the text. Writing, for Olson, is about managing the illocutionary force of the utterance represented on the page through, for example, the invention of meta-critical terms like “assumed,” “asserted,” “insisted,” “suggested,” “inferred,” the expanded use of connectives and punctuation to distinguish and articulate different utterances, etc.\n\nThe history of writing can then be understood as a series of attempts to successfully manage illocutionary force. The expedient discovered to accomplish this was to anchor the text in the intention of the author, whose illocutionary aims towards his own audience we, as readers, seek to understand—and, by implication, seek to eliminate the effects of other reading practices. According to Olson, the emergence of the Reformation and the scientific revolution and, therefore, modern Europe, can be explained in terms of the logic of this kind of reading strategy. The saturation of the modern world with literacy in turn produced the incomprehension of modes of language use in which, for example, the distinction between literal and figurative, or between syllogistic reasoning and the pragmatic situation of utterances, is not foundational—and, therefore, produced the assumption that intellectual and cultural inferiority attached to those modes of language use.\n\nTo the extent that we can register hierarchies, both within and between societies, in the establishment and enforcement of normative language usage made possible by literacy we can propose the following hypothesis regarding the convergence of writing with sacrifice and scapegoating. As opposed to the speech situation, where the rough edges of claims are smoothed out pragmatically, with the written text the author is source of both truth and error, and so is the interpreter with regard to the truth of the text. The attention we direct toward the author is analogous to the attention we direct to the scapegoat: he or she is the source of meaning and potentially of the destruction of meaning.\n\nThe naïve insistence upon a return to literal scriptural meaning in late medieval Christian Europe and through the Reformation, along with Church’s insistence upon the heretical nature of such efforts, would seem to reinforce this connection. And the martyrdom of such figures, along with the first scientists who insisted upon a “literal” reading of the “Book of Nature,” at the hands of the Church, a martyrdom understood on the model of the Christian sacrifice itself, provides the model for the modern victimary problematic in terms of which we have made sense of the asymmetries of the colonial relation. Once the privileged victim is the one victimized by the forces of superstition and state-Church “complexes,” cultural positions legible as “superstitious” and “theocratic” (that do not recognize the distinction between literal and figurative, factual and speculative) will be designated as “other.”\n\nIn modern pedagogies organized in terms of textual clarity and the literality of meaning, the text becomes a model for pedagogy: the teacher can direct the student toward the features of textuality which traditions of attentiveness have catalogued, and determine the degree to which the student conforms. Error is the mark of the scapegoat, and any organized mimetic practice will produce a lot of it. And this can be error on any level: errant interpretations as well as well as grammatical mistakes and incorrect usage. The class is organized around the convergence upon error—no one is lynched, but ostracism and exclusion certainly result. And writing maintains its function as a sorting system enabling ascension into one or another of the modern elites.\n\nThe point is not to reverse this process and begin privileging error as a kind of populist resistance—which is to say, the point is not to scapegoat in turn the modern pedagogue and treat the students as their martyred victim. Not only have we no power to do this in the classroom, but the association of error with processes of marginalization by no means proves that grammatical and rhetorical norms are simply arbitrary or only oppressive—privileging error would both betray our students by making them pawns in our own intra-elite battles and grossly simplify the process by which the normalization and standardization of language takes place. The far better approach is to follow up on the theory of error pioneered by Mina Shaughnessy and developed further by David Bartholomae. Their basic insight is that error is not merely negative: when the writer violates some rule, it is because they are following some other rule, or some idiosyncratic hybridization of the rule in question.\n\nThis insight directs our attention toward rules and habits, and the reciprocal interference of rules and habits. We can, along with our students, make error into an object of inquiry so that we can ask what rule or habit a particular writer is following, and how following that rule or habit leads to that collision with another rule that we notice as “error.” This would mean that writing itself is constructed as a mode of inquiry into articulation of habits and rules in language. Establishing the composition classroom as a site of inquiry into the workings of writing as a mode of inquiry integrates composition into the university as an institution dedicated to inquiry—composition, even more, is placed in a questioning, critical relationship with the other disciplines, which are always liable to allow received content to trump the mode of inquiry, especially when it comes to pedagogy.\n\nConstructing the classroom as a space of inquiry further requires that our assignments and practices generate the required objects of inquiry in a controlled manner. In other words, we try to set up the reciprocal interference between habits and rules I was referring to before. Setting up the classroom in this way involves, first of all, using texts as models of an alien grammar and vocabulary of inquiry that students are required to construct—and, inevitably to err in the construction of. The students’ habit of making sense confront this unfamiliar way of making sense, and two things happen: first, they normalize the text, reducing it to their own vocabulary and grammar; second, their own vocabulary and grammar is “infected” by the text, and errors that they would not make under ordinary conditions enter their language. Their resentment toward the text and classroom that thus undermines their certainties is deflected by the interest the class as a whole takes in the emergence of new linguistic forms, the starting point of new idioms.\n\nThe text, in other words, becomes a pretext for the process of modeling modes of inquiry into language, rather than a comforting and/or menacing center. Error in such a classroom is produced but not exactly encouraged: part of the inquiry conducted in class concerns the differences between normative and idiosyncratic forms, and students learn the normative forms along with their rationale and limits. But error is no longer a singling out of the student as measured against the model of textuality being violated: indeed, all errors are different, it is hard to tell which are “better” or “worse,” harder or easier to correct, or even what counts as a single error, as opposed, say, to part of pattern of errors which can all be addressed simultaneously.\n\nAttention to error is no longer a form of punishment, or a participation in punitive raids upon other students—rather, it is one’s ticket into the space of inquiry. And the role of the teacher is different in such a classroom—no longer hunting down error, but rather pointing towards innovative ways of accounting for it—ways that exceed one’s own ready vocabulary for discussing such issues. The teacher is inside the space of inquiry, in other words.\n\nAccording to Olson, modern thought is thought attending to the categories which emerge in the history of attempts to manage illocutionary force, or how an utterance is to be taken, which has produced the various gradations distinguishing assertion, hypothesis, inference, suggestion, etc., from each other. In that case, we might take the next step and see the author of the written text as intending to produce models for the modeling of language. This revision would in turn lead us to privilege texts, for pedagogical purposes, which stage anomalies in the habits deployed to manage illocutionary force. Such innovative texts constitute the boundary between originary force and error, and lead us to create new maxims and practices for the remaking of our semiotic habits.\n\nIf the written text is now understood to be a model for representing not only speech but semiotic practices generally, then semiosis can be viewed as most fundamentally an inquiry into its own ongoing emergence, what we might call originary grammar. Originary grammar involves a reading of signs as serving to sustain the semiotic process itself—at the very least we can agree that there would be no point to my saying anything if I didn’t presuppose that someone could iterate my sign: so, we can inquire into signifying practices in terms of their iterability. Furthermore, my sign becoming iterable in fact constitutes it as sign in the first place, which means that the initial sign in any series must both err as a modification of an undifferentiated set of mimetic practices and “norm” those practices, that is situate them equidistant from some center. Norm and error emerge together, that is, along with the iterability of the sign. All signs within the semiotic field can be read in these terms, all are recognizable as deviation and possible norm.\n\nIf norm and error emerge simultaneously along with the sign, then any iteration of the sign produces a field of norming and error. And if the most fundamental social and cultural praxis is the iteration of signs, a greater social and cultural complexity emerges from more deliberate iterations conjoined with more transparent norming practices aimed at detecting and shaping patterns of error. I am describing a more specifically pedagogical practice as well as a broader cultural one, a cultural practice with a claim to be considered post-colonial. The most basic assignment, in the classroom or the culture, is to create a space for the deliberate iteration of models placed at the center of the activity in question. The process of attending to, in ever greater detail and complexity, the model, along with mapping it as an array of moves one could go on to enact and articulate, is analogous to the attention paid to the scapegoat—only in this case, the model undergoes a process of constitution and revision, and can therefore never stabilize as an object of appropriation and violence.\n\nIteration produces error or difference, and the norming process proceeds by integrating those errors and differences into a field where attention oscillates back and forth between the original model to the economy of practices the iteration has issued into. For such purposes, I would propose various “normalization” practices, concerned with explicitly “managing illocutionary force,” and involving the use of “pre-declarative” linguistic practices to surround the iteration with various conditions and consequences: with interrogatives (what question was the original model trying to answer, what problem was it trying to solve; how did these questions and problems get taken up by the iteration); with imperatives (what, insofar as we take either model or iteration as mimetic object, is it telling us to do; what are we telling it to do so as to serve as our model); and with ostensives (what can we point to in the model and then in the iteration that marks the latter as an iteration). Such assignments will direct our attention to the interferences of convergent habits, and integrate error as a series of questions, orders and indexes we can take responsibility for as the materials for new practices.\n\nAnd these new practices, ultimately, are the generation of idioms. As new differences emerge within and among signs, and as these differences in turn get taken up as the resource out of which new signs are elaborated, the threshold of meaning is continually lowered: we notice more differences, which also means we notice more desires and resentments, including those that might turn dangerous; but this lowered threshold also registers as the discovery of new materials for semiosis. The perpetual generation of idioms might then become the cultural norm, a process, once again, we can model in both classrooms and everyday life. A growing attentiveness to the range of grammatical possibilities, produced by the incorporation of error as habit and rule, opens up grammatical innovations as modes of expressiveness. The full range of inventiveness that characterizes the evolution of languages can be transformed into experiments in grammar, as our pedagogical and cultural praxis becomes the generation of idioms of inquiry."
    },
    {
      "slug": "basics",
      "title": "Basics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We are in the steepest economic downturn since the 1930s, in or verging on another Great Depression; and, yet, there are signs daily that we might be starting to emerge from the recession by Spring 2010. I wonder if the Left, now that they are in power, want to play the same kind of game they accused Bush of playing with the War on Terror: it’s a emergency, requiring vast expansions of government power, and yet daily life goes on as normal, aside from the occasional color coded alerts, which I am certain not a single person paid the slightest attention to. And, to tell the truth, they had a point: if the War on Terror, or against Islamic supremacism or radicalism, was indeed the highest calling of our generation, why are the Iranian mullahs not only still in power but about to obtain a nuclear weapon?\n\nWhy is Pakistan likely to become the first nuclear armed jihadist state–or, at least, no less likely now than before 9/11? Why are the Saudis still riding high, receiving obsequious bows from our new President? In the end, did Bush take all this any more seriously than the Democrats take the financial crisis, which is clearly nothing more than an opportunity for them to pass a wish list of Great Society programs along with a lot of good old-fashioned graft which they had kept on hand for the moment when they would finally be free of the dead end of Republican rule. “Subjectively” maybe he did, but wouldn’t that simply mean with all the good will in the world an assertive strategy of expanding freedom throughout the world is simply impossible, for reasons I am not able completely to explain? Even more, one would have to say that things like policies and strategies are really impossible–what is impossible, that is, is anything that would subordinate procedures and the news cycle to some externally determined purpose.\n\nI wonder if I am the only one dissatisfied with the thinness of accounts of the economic “crisis”–it is almost as if no one considers themselves obliged to explain exactly what the “freezing of credit” or whatever is anticipated would mean to billions of people. My own credit is perfect–so, will no one issue me a credit card, or give me a mortgage or car loan? Nobody? Are they sure? How can they be? Will no one loan to any one else? No one? To anyone? I think we really need to ask the questions in this way if we are ever to get straight answers; or, failing the straight answers, awkward, obfuscatory answers that are relatively easy to decode.\n\nBecause I suspect what they really mean is that only people with genuine reserves will be able to lend, and only to people with proven track records of making money and paying back loans; and, who knows, maybe only to those people with a reasonable business plan or documentable source of income. No one, it seems, to me, can prove that such activity won’t continue, and in that case the real “crisis” is that things can’t go on the way they have. To put it bluntly, people will no longer be able to lend money they don’t have to people who won’t be abel to pay it back and people won’t be able to buy, again with money they don’t have, “assets” that represent only possibilities based on speculative accounts of future economic developments. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a blessing, not a crisis.\n\nGA supports, as we all know, the free market as the most effective mechanism for deferring and recirculating resentments yet invented by human beings–indeed, we can’t really see anything beyond the free market, which I imagine is why Eric Gans finds Fukuyama’s End of History Thesis so compelling. But the market GA supports is one in which everyone takes on their share of deferral, participating in the Weberian “Protestant ethic”–only with such ethical support will the market economy not end up generating more resentments than it can bear, in turn calling into being monstrous leftist agglomorations of resentment that will take down the system.\n\nBut the cultural contradictions of capitalism leave their marks on any originary analysis as well: what if the intensification of social antagonisms require that we abandon the Gold Standard, institute the welfare state, lower interest rates so as to artificially sustain growth, etc.–on what grounds can GA argue against any one of those resentment lowering innovations, and in favor of a “pure” market system? People have to defer the rivalries gathering force around them, and they can’t leave those immediate conflicts untended to in the name of the abstract system which we are one day sure to find is best for deferring conflicts.\n\nBut perhaps we can make an argument within GA for a return to beginnings, for periodic refoundings, re-constitutions of our own singular versions of the originary scene. The century of Progressive depradations upon our constitutional order (which have been legitimated through association with the one genuine improvement to that order, the inclusion of black citizens) has given a great deal of credit to the notion put forth most forcefully by Marxism–that capitalism produces social conflicts beyond the capacity of the minimal state and individualist culture to handle–the assumption, that is, that the lower orders will have to be bought off perpetually in the name of social peace. Even now, one can sense the terror in our rulers lest a real recession ruffle the surface of our social life for a couple of years–something, anything must be done prevent that, or at least make its effects tolerable through redistribution or the flat creation of money out of nothing.\n\nSo, who is willing to bet that if unemployment goes up to 10, to 15% or higher, if most of us have to give back our second cars and not buy that third TV set or PC, if many families will have to live on one income for a while, etc., we will, nevertheless, not start slitting each others’ throats or forming militias and laying siege to the capital or the home office of Citibank? Who is willing to bet, indeed, that local lending institutions, mutual assistance organizations, patronage of local businesses, charities, and other spontaneous forms of self and other help, will fill in the gap? This would be a version of the market as well, if a more embedded one. Indeed, could it be that that possibility is just as frightening to our rulers as the nightmarish visions of social collapse?\n\nIn the interest of bi-partisanship, I will apply the same logic to the threat of Islamic terror–why not, as I am forced to conclude that we (the collective “we” of our state institutions) are incapable of addressing victimary blackmail outside of such obeisence to the collective international norms which have been corrupted beyond repair by such blackmail. I must painfully acknowledge that the approach I will recommend won’t work for the Israelis–we may be close to the point where the attitude towards Israel of its friends will take on the character of rescue rather than support. Unfortunately, the Israelis themselves, albeit under enormously difficult situations, have not shown much capacity of late for avoiding the suicidal paralysis we have succumbed to–they can much less afford it, though.\n\nSo, let’s accept Obama’s understanding of the US as one nation among many, with nothing exceptional about it at all. The protection and freedom of others is their problem, not ours. Indeed, perhaps we are returning to the natural state of the American republic, a state interrupted by the exceptional threat posed by world communism. In that case, our political energies should be directed towards a withdrawal of American troops from the rest of the world–let’s begin with the places where they obviously don’t serve any purpose anyway, and where it is not at all clear they are wanted: Europe, Japan and S. Korea, for starters.\n\nWe should work on withdrawing from the UN as well, on having that wretched institution removed from American soil, and on repudiating all international agreements that might infringe on our sovereignty. The world market will no longer have its policeman, and will no doubt fall prey to all kinds of pirates; we, though, can build carefully constructed bi-lateral relations with specific nations–relations outlining very clear reciprocal duties and benefits, both economic and security. Let anyone who does want our protection request it and offer something tangible (not “stability”) in exchange. Similarly, we should outline very clear forms of deterrence, also on a nation-to-nation basis.\n\nPerhaps such nation-to-nation alliances will lead to networks of alliances, new collaborative institutions, with the obligations of all involved to be carefully clarified at each stage. (At the same time, private associations of individuals might form their own alliances with citizens of other lands, friendly or hostile, willingly taking the risk that the US government will not be able to back them if they get into trouble; hoping to convince their fellow citizens to take that risk.) And, since the world will clearly become a much more dangerous place, border security must become an absolute priority, one which we will now have the military resources to attend to.\n\nSuch a political program would intersect with a movement to restore our constitution, and would cut against the grain of the ruling Left’s transnationalism in some very effective ways. We would consistently be on the side of austere, focused, fair and accountable policies against flabby, diffuse, easily corruptible ones. We could constantly be exposing and explaining, very clearly tagging particular policies as in or opposed to some definable American interest–most obviously wealth generating activities that also increase our energy security, like drilling for oil and building nuclear power plants. And we could keep things very simple–for this, against that; for the local, the national, the productive, the friend; against the transnational, the parasitical, anything that fetters free activity, the duplicitous pseudo-ally.\n\nThe market is always tainted by thousands of political decisions, attending to this or that resentment that has emerged through the markeplace or the latest adjustment made in response to a previously expressed resentment. It gets to the point where the sign is obscured beyond recognition–what does it mean to be a participant in the marketplace, once any economic decision is bounded on all sides by government moralizing, hectoring, bullying, helping? At that point politics has to be about clarifying what we are all loyal to: what are our basic signs and events? Certainly individual citizens should avoid at all costs confrontations with Leviathan–but I don’t think that bureaucracies are going to get any smarter, and there must be all kinds of ways of outwitting and neutralizing them, of privatizing what the state would like to control, even in foreign policy.\n\nThe politics I am arguing here is one of going first–asserting the reality of some sign by acting on it and inviting others to gather around it, working on several levels–local self-help, movement for constitutional amendment, lobbies for attacking the most unpopular and vulnerable entangling alliances with transnational bureaucracies and regulations, actual friendships with lovers of freedom abroad, radical and yet reasonable claims for abolishing dysfunction institutions like the CIA and State Department–while being prepared to work small, under the radar, or go mainstream in the midst of the chain of crises that are surely coming, that has perhaps already begun."
    },
    {
      "slug": "representation",
      "title": "Representation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The proper response to any claim we wish to take seriously is to inquire into its possible operationalizations. If you mean wht you say, in other words, what would it mean–construct for me an event, hypothetical or actual, in which the meaning of what you say can be (ostensively) verified, affirmed, or authenticated. Culture is a series of models of operationalization: the way we operationalize claims regarding the value of an object, is to place it on the market; if we want to operationalize a claim about nature we set up an experimental scene in which we can reduce the causal uncertainties to those we wish to study; if we want to operationalize claims about beauty we must draw the attention of others, or ourselves, in a sustained manner to the thing we find beautiful–in the inexhaustibility with which it attracts and enriches attention will lie its beauty; if we wish to operationalize claims about morality, we need to see place moral claims, or see them placed, within individual events, in some proximity to other kinds of claims and see under which conditions individuals will consider something “good’ enough to commit their honor to it; and, perhaps most difficult of all, in the sphere of law and politics, if we wish to operationalize claims about justice, right, and freedom, we must create and incessantly tend to institutions that concentrate, aggregate, display and limit power, and that can generate enclosed scenes in which abstract rules can construct the form under which we assess responsibility for events.\n\nOperationalization is representation, and just as representation is the deferral of violence through the articulation of an event around a sign, when we operationalize some claim we likewise seek to bring sign (law, norm) into accord with an event, and in this way disperse the centrifugal claims that threaten to turn claims into bids for a piece of the sparagmatic pie. In this case, a large part, maybe the major part, of politics and law, and, for that matter, morality and thinking, is bringing claims into the light of day where the can be gathered under signs into events. In this way, one can pursue partisan ends in such a way as to renew the institutions that must transcend partisanship. The naked egotism of “show me the money!” (to quote a popular film from some years back) is simultaneously a way putting the monetary system for determining value to work.\n\nThis all occurs to me in connection with the Obama Adminstration’s release of redacted portions of the memos regarding interrogation practices generated within the Bush Adminstration. Rather than railing against the utter nihilism and destructiveness of this act (alright, I just did that), why not respond with “show me the money!” That is, go ahead, as the Obama Administration has hinted it will consider, and prosecute those you believe not only broke the law but ruined Ameirca’s reputation. Let’s publish all the memos, as Dick Cheney has urged, let’s force the full panoply of responses to the Islamic terror threat during the years 2001-2005 upon the public attention, making it a matter of deliberation and conscience.\n\nLet’s set up commisions before which everyone testifies, including the Democratic members of Congress who knew of and approved, implicitly, explicitly and enthusiastically, of the very methods now denounced as shameful. Even more, if Obama genuinely believes that these interrogation methods were wrong, and constituted an injustice against the people upon whom they were practiced, then we should insist that he apologize–not one of these anemic apologies to the “world” or some part thereof, but to the individuals themselves–to those individuals to whom, in fact, restitution can and should be made. In other words, the operationalization or representation of the attitude Obama has been striking would be a public apology, complete with full health care, pension and damages, to Khalid Sheik Muhammed.\n\nIs the United States the same country it was prior to the election of Barack Obama (I believe that Obama would prefer to think not); or, for that matter, prior to September 11, 2001? I would like to see public pressure upon Obama to operationalize the claims implicit in his release of the memos because the subsequent response will operationalize these more substantional questions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "syntactic-entanglements",
      "title": "Syntactic entanglements",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "My reading of contemporary history places the events of 9/11 as the pivotal event in the postmodern world governed by Auschwitz theology. 9/11 had, broadly speaking, two possible outcomes: an overturning of Auschwitz theology, White guilt, and the capitulation to victimary blackmail it compels; or a resurgence and intensification of that theology and guilt, as its adherents fight, as we all do, to preserve what is sacred to them. I will maintain this reading of history until I see overwhelming evidency of some fallacy disabling it–from that standpoint, it is impossible to deny that the second outcome has, in fact, attained decisive ascendancy over the first one.\n\nUltimately, the overturning of Auschwitz theology required the dismantling of too much that is sacred, everything tied to the general reading of social reality in victimary terms. The radical restructuring of our modes of pooling risk required for civilizational survival are simply unthinkable–no political figure would now suggest even something as moderate as Bush’s proposal for partial privatization of Social Security. And yet the cultic Presidency of Barack Obama can’t solve any problems–if there is a meaningful politics now, it is in holding on to forms of understanding, to narratives, to habits and maxims, that can survive the coming wreck.\n\nMy own attempts to think of such a politics, in my essay on “Marginalist Politics,” in some recent posts, and in my posts on the JCRT Live blog, in terms of originary grammar, of the originary entwinement of norm and error and that I find to be embodied in habits, comprises the focus of my own work now. How could I recommend it to others, though? I have been recommending the courage of our habits, which is to say idiosyncrasy and eccentricity–where error, innovation and freedom overlap.\n\nPerhaps a trivial example: Miss California, Carrie Prejean’s answer to a question about gay marriage at the Miss USA contest:\n\nWell, I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there, but that’s how I was raised, and that’s how I think it should be between a man and a woman.\n\nFor someone who teaches writing, this kind of thing is of the greatest interest (there was a bit of talk about some of Sarah Palin’s syntactical anomalies in impromptu speech during the campaign–I may go back and look through some of that, but I suspect I would find some similar phenomena as I will point out here). “Well, I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same sex marriage or opposite marriage.” Perhaps Americans as a people, governed democratically, can choose one or the other–this would be an axiomatic reference to the terms of self-government.\n\nMaybe it is a reference to state’s rights–the people of each state can choose one or the other. This would be more accurate in terms of the progress of gay marriage through the political system; but it would also have a different resonance, more sinister for the cultural elite by which Prejean is being questioned and monitored here, but therefore also a more overtly political claim. Or maybe it is a reference to the choice of each individual American–this would be an inaccurate claim, but, perhaps drawing upon the hopeful naivete granted to the beauty pageant contestant, it would position her more sympathetically.\n\nAnd the very odd reference to heterosexual marriage as “opposite” marriage would then be either a very canny or completely serendipitous gesture towards the deconstruction of cultural norms she is presumably resisting. The very grammar here resists being nailed down, keeps tailing off into near incoherence–and yet we kind of know what she is saying. “And you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.” If you are going to ask, and we’re just expressing our own personal, non-binding opinions–“And you know what”–in my country (an assertion about American “values”? the imagining of her own, private, America?), in my family (defending the family as the ultimate source of values, a family values supporter; but, at the same time, an implicit recognition that there are many families, many different kinds of families, from each and every one of which would issue a different set of beliefs, perhaps even a different “country”) “I think that I believe” (this is probably just “stuttering,” a nervousness about finally getting to the point here, making sure that a couple of layers of subjectivity buffer her from her interrogators) “that a marriage should be between a man and a woman” (At this point, is her support for heterosexual marriage as the norm anything more than her assertion of her own intention to marry a man?–and yet it still manages to be “controversial”!).\n\nNo offense to anyone out here (precisely her attempts to buffer and defer her expression of her very personal and almost inescapable belief–it’s her family and country, after all–might generate resentment, so the more explicit neutralizing of resentment is perhaps even more necessary) but that’s how I was raised (there are root causes), and then the positively poetic “but that’s the way I feel it should be between a man and a woman.” Probably, “that’s how I feel it [i.e., marriage] should be: between a man and a woman,” but why not take her to be evoking some way of being, some transcendence of these degrading arguments, “between” a man and a woman (what is “between” them, connecting them, separating them?).\n\nThis is an idiosyncratic, even idiomatic “grammar,” produced by the intersecting pressures of the traditional woman in the modernized version of the traditional worship of femininity, beauty and fertility, the hyped, sensationalized, and yet by now strangely antiquated “beauty pageant,” and the virulent, punk, self-ironizing but no less Puritan political correctness by the “celebrity blogger” whose position as a judge is meant as a kind of revenge upon the beauty pageant from within; and/or, perhaps, and attempt to maintain its legitimacy by bringing into accord with the very norms that make the pageant a kind of mini-scandal.\n\nPerhaps it is in such cultural/syntactical anomalies that the possibilities of resistance and change will emerge–perhap Ms. (Miss?) Prejean here is giving us an exemplary model of deferral by defending the traditional through the singular and ambiguous to the point of resisting hostile analysis, and therefore welcoming a sympathetic one."
    },
    {
      "slug": "below-the-threshold",
      "title": "Below the Threshold",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Desiring to educate myself in economics, so as to speak (and think) intelligently about current events, I have subscribed to the Mises email list, receiving a daily column. I’ve been reading Hayek for a while, and I have been moving in an increasingly radical free market direction for some time, and so Mises’ thought is extremely helpful. I’m taking it in small doses now, waiting until I have some time to continue reading Mises’ Human Action . I haven’t been disappointed, as I find the economic analyses very enlightening and congenial. One lesson I have drawn so far, and which I will probably write about soon, is that one source of our present troubles, which is to say one manifestation of our victimary regime, is the taboo on wages going down.\n\nWe–most of us as individuals, and in our policy preferences as a society–would rather see high paying jobs disappear because the companies in question go out of business rather than take pay cuts, leaving jobs intact at what would still be much higher wages than those for the jobs that will come in place of those lost. This is very interesting.\n\nMy interests here are different, though. Along with the economic analyses, I also receive political ones, from the Mises list. “Analyses” is a generous term here–they are mostly diatribes, as virulent and maniacal as any coming from the farthest reaches of the Left–the state (not any particular government), American is particular, is a parasite, a bloodsucker, a mass murderer, all of its enemies justifed in their resentments. In one recent animadversion on “imperialist” American foreign policy, rather sensible statements by American statesmen about the need to keep such policy buffered from (not completely immune to) democratic sentiment, were treated as criminal–and this comes from a tendency within social thought that sees even the most democratically determined encroachment on private property as illegitimate. Here, in fact, seems to be the link to the Left: if the democracy is not on your side, argue fundamental rights; if constitutionally determined decision making is at times unpopular, argue for the absolute claims of the democracy.\n\nThis dichotomy between reasonableness in some areas and craziness in others seems to me increasingly common now, and it leads to a kind of schizophrenia, at least for those of us who see the cultic Presidency of Barack Obama as a perhaps irreversible disaster. For example, in my view, debates over the constitutionality and rationality of the Federal Reserve Board are legitimate and highly interesting–just like I don’t believe that anyone knows what the temperature will be in 2040, I don’t believe any economist can possibly know what the interest rate “should” be. But state such views publicly, and who will you find standing with you? Some solid conservatives, of course, but also lots of conpiracy theorists, racists and anti-semites. Speak forcefully against the weakness of the West in the face of adverse demographics and appeasement of Islamic supremacism and (at least in Europe) you find yourself ranged alongside neo-Nazis. Such positions are, it would seem, dead in the water: even the rapidly disintegrating “mainstream” media finds easy pickings in such a target-rich environment.\n\nIt may be that the standard modern Western political narrative, the people liberating themselves from benighted, tyrannical rule, has been monopolized by the Left. For the narrative to work at this late date, you need a monomaniacal victimary focus–specific, universally recognizable victim-types you can keep in the public eye constantly. Defenders of free markets and individual rights and liberty can’t compete, because you can’t represent the entrepeneur who never was because of hostile regulation, and even if you could, how sympathetic would he/she be? The market doesn’t lend itself to scenic representation–the only people on the right who can make the effort to compete with the Left, in formal terms, are the ones who construct a symmetrical relation with the privileged groups on the Left–i.e., white supremacists, claiming to be oppressed by the Zionist Occupied Government.\n\nAnother example. The popular blog, Little Green Footballs, has taken an interesting turn since the election. Little Green Footballs, run by Charles Johnson, was, as far as I knew, a blog interested in focusing attention on the denial of the rise of Jihad throughout the world. Technologically skilled, Johnson excels in exposing frauds–most famously, the forged documents used in 60 Minutes’ story on George W. Bush’s National Guard service, but also some photoshopped photos of the Israeli war in Lebanon in 2006. Since the election, Johnson has shifted his attention dramatically, while still posting on the depredations and denials of what he used to refer to ironically as the “Religion of Peace,” to exposing creationists and other “extremists” in the Republican party as well as links between self-declared “anti-jihadists” and fascism, neo-Nazism, racism and anti-semitism.\n\nI think Johnson should be seen as sincerely wanting the Republicans to become a party of what he would consider the “center”–that elusive fiscal conservative, socially liberal, national security hawk that would be conservatives embarrassed by the pro-life, “fundamentalist” crowd always dream of. What is interesting here is that no one seems to fit the bill–the creationists seem to be the only ones exhibiting principled opposition to Obama’s plans, to be interested in what the Constitution actually says, or to find a center anyway other than in the latest polls–and, so, Johnson ends up gesturing towards rather pathetic “moderates” like Arlen Specter and Olympia Snowe as the salvation of the Republican party (or, at least, pointing to the marginalization of such figures as the self-destruction of the party).\n\nIn other words, there is no “center”–that is, no set of “actionable” opinions on central questions regarding the continuance of American civilization firmly shared by a solid majority of Americans. For example, Obama can continue the war in Afghanistan and continue Bush policies on prisoners, but what he can’t do is cease scapegoating Bush, which deprives these policies of any principled basis because the implication is that the policies need only continue until Bush’s “mess” has been “cleaned up.” In other words, he can do what needs to be done only under the condition that we fantasize that it never really needed to be done in the first place.\n\nBut leave that aside: everyone knows that Iran is a significant threat; and everyone knows that we will not do anything to prevent the Iranian regime from getting nuclear weapons. We are allowing a fourth rate military power, one deep in various economic and political crises, which could be severely disabled and perhaps tipped over at a fairly low cost, elevate itself to an arbiter of affairs in the Middle East and beyond–what more proof is necessary that we are incapable of acting on basic observations and common sense?\n\nSo, I propose that we operate under the following assumptions: first, that that modern Western political narrative has exhausted itself, and can be left to the husks to the Left, who will run it out through their increasingly baroque parodies; and, second, that there is no available center at present. We might as well connect the two claims as well–there is no center because the only narrative we know has been exhausted, and nothing has been put in its place. Why else would the cultic Obama presidency be almost pathologically determined not to question a single shiboleth of Keynsian economics or Carteresque foreign policy predicated upon the de-centering of America? Without that version of liberation from an imperial, free market, Babbitized American, the world simply wouldn’t make sense to these people.\n\nBut narratives of liberation from obscurantist authorities is the only available narrative, and the one upon which all public discourse is predicated. Try to imagine a political discourse focused solely on strengthening the center: upon an auditing of all institutions based upon their conformity with Constitutionally authorized purposes and the degree to which they remain within the area of their competence. Such an politics would involve arguments and conflict, but the victim card would not determine the victor in these disputes–the idea would be to try out a model of the institution one believes to have drifted from its originary minimality, and others would construct models out of the paradoxes inherent in your model, and these visible paradoxes would center conversation upon the proper version of minimality.\n\nThe problem with such a politics is that if you don’t point to a victim produced by the distortions in question, why should anyone care? And if you do produce victims, not only will you not be able to compete with the more lurid victimary tales already circulating, but you have already lost the argument, because you won’t be able to claim that your approach necessarily offers a shorter path toward the elimination of that mode of victimization, or to the most appropriate recognition of the victim in question.\n\nSo, I must be arguing for a politics that is largely below the threshold of visibility and publicity, and yet can cross that threshold on occasion–more precisely, on those occasions when the threshold itself is lowered so that private activities normally hidden from view become political. A useful way to think about this is in terms of those moments when you see someone you know through carefully framed events–at work, or school, or some recreational activity–in a new context, one in which their behavior can’t help but deviate from the normal script. This new context can one other than the normal one–say, seeing your boss at a sporting event; or, it can be an interruption of the normal one–say, an ordinarily stolid co-worker breaks down in tears at work.\n\nWhat one is seeing in such cases is the eruption of an extrinsic habit into an established frame or reference, and this habit, in its own terms perfectly normal (there’s no reason the disciplinarian, by-the-book boss can’t come to the Red Sox game decked out in colorful and comical team paraphenelia, or the quiet, reliable co-worker shouldn’t be a deeply sentimental individual in his own time; and the proof of that is that we revise our habits so as to incoporate this new way of seeing that person), “scandalizes” the scene into which it erupts. The result is error , that combination of embarrassment and revelation, from which we can’t turn away even as we can barely stand to look on.\n\nI would like to suggest that this errancy–getting into the habit of interrupting others habits by having our own interrupted–is the best model for the present moment in our society and politics, when almost everyone is straying outside of their area of competence and exposing their unthinking habits on a regular basis.\n\nNot only is errancy the best model for contemporary culture and politics, but it is originary, having a critical place on the originary scene. If we accept that there must have been a first “signifier” on the originary scene, then we must also accept that the sign as put forth by this first signifier was merely “potential,” and therefore both sign (it is already iterable, and being iterated) and not-sign (it has not consolidated the scene, and therefore has not yet distinguished itself from the mimetic crisis it is “destined” to interrupt). The most interesting part of the scene to think about, for me at least, is the process–or the wide range of possible processes–by which we could imagine the series of imitations (through fits and starts, through automatic mimetic instinct and through a shared vision of the imminent crisis, through glances at the responses of others present, aborted movements back to the center, etc.) through which the sign would concantenate through the scene, very likely coming out of it looking very differently than it started, and with all memory of that origin (even on the part of first signifer himself) lost, since only now is there a sign and event which makes memory possible. I consider this concantenation an originary grammar of norm and error–each signifier in turn modifies (“distorts”) the sign as it has come to him while at the same time “packaging” (correcting”) it for the next in turn.\n\nI am obviously now going to argue for a politics situated within this instant. An auxiliary politics within an indicative culture. I’ll first make a grammatical observation: what makes a sentence meaningful is the presence of a “commanding name.” The noun, ultimately a name or whatever stands in the place of the name, generates a sentence by commanding us to suspend or withdraw some command or demand (imperative) of our own pertaining to the space covered by the name. In other words, adding the predicate to the noun situates the referent of the noun in “reality” and renders it inaccessible. The noun, then tells us to cease our demands and align ourselves with that reality.\n\nIf the sentence lacks a commanding name, it doesn’t make sense. Think about how many sentences with no nouns, only pronouns and other deictics, you would need before no two people could agree on on what is being said. I would suspect no more than 3 or 4 in most cases. Now, while there can, in some languages (I personally don’t know how many), be sentences without verbs, and the first sentence might have been such, I’m going to (without argument, for here and now at least) insist that we don’t have real sentences until we have verbs. And that verbs are, ultimately, imperatives. So, the verb is the commanding name being commanded to stay in place, hold reality together, and command.\n\nWithout the commanding name, all we have is a chaos of imperatives, interrogatives and ostensives–again, consider the example of a series of sentences without a noun. What would keep it going, what would sustain the presence that we ultimately need to hold the world together–There it is. What? That–look! Which one? The one right there, between them. Show me! Look in between the two that are in between those four… This is that instant where the sign has been put forth but not yet publicly “authenticated”–the “dialogue” can be held together by the shared presumption that there is something to look at, that there might and must be a commanding name, even if it is presently unavailable or withheld. In fact, the more commanding the name, the more immense the reality it brings into being, the more we struggle to point to some part of it that will be verifiable as a part of it .\n\nSo, our culture of errancy is one in which the possible commanding names are presumed to be there but beyond our ken. So, a politics modeled on this condition would involve intense adherence to something floating around as a possible commanding name, along with the attempt to bring others into the process of commanding the name to command, to mistake and norm that commanding name together. This involves the creation of habits of finding “pregnant” names, obeying them, and issuing commands to others to mis-take those names. This would create an indicative culture, a habit of composing sentences that remain very close and sensitve to the world of imperatives while nevertheless just barely transcending them, staying close to the boundary between pointing at something together and not making sense.\n\nThis would include a “chiasmatic” relation to the public discourses, generating maxims through the reversal of existing maxims. For example, I have heard Barack Obama’s favorite phrase, “we must reject the false choice between…” so many times that I would like to create a new habit and guiding maxim out of inversions–say, “we must choose to falsify the rejection of the between” because, in fact, the “between” is precisely what Obama systmatically rejects, his “false choices” always being completely false themselves. So, in choosing to falsify the rejection of the between we open up the between as the arena of choosing. It could use work, but that’s the beginning of a political maxim and habit. Keep promoting and mistaking models as the falsification of the rejection of the between.\n\nAnd I might as well have myself conclude by stumbling into one more thicket of mistakes, and argue for an “auxiliary” politics based upon the contemplation of the magnificent so-called auxiliary verbs. Have, might, will, do, etc.–there are a lot of grammatical arguments here, but at the very least these are the verbs that can be followed by an infinitive without the “to.” I find them intriguing because they are very difficult, if not impossible, to use as imperatives, which to me suggests their origins lie in the interrogative and answers to questions–from expressions like “think you to come?” to “do you think you will come?” and from “fears and worries assail me” to “I am afraid and have been worrying”… The auxiliary opens up a space of freedom–rather than thoughts, fears and worries operating directly upon one, one entertains, considers, distributes those thoughts, fears and worries.\n\nThe auxiliary makes reality somewhat less imperative. And we can create whole chains of them without quite tumbling over into senselessness in some splendid ways–I will have finished considering whether I might still have had something more that could have been said, I might hope, before having done with this sentence. The auxiliaries command us to mistake the space covered by the name, generating a present with ample references to possible pasts and futures. So, I’m not quite saying that we should use a lot more auxiliaries; rather, that the possibilities for vagueness and hence freedom, along with the capacity to sustain a series of switches between tenses, actions and persons embodied in liberal use of the auxiliaries be our model for remaining just below the threshold.\n\nOf course, one would be justified in requesting some examples. I’ll get back to you on it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "competence",
      "title": "Competence",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "For a while, “competence” has been a weapon used by the Left against Republican Presidents. It began with the Dukakis campaign, I think, most immediately as a way of distracting attention from the candidate’s liberalism, and while it failed for a while, it has finally yielded fruit–certainly, the Bush Adminstration was effectively labeled “incomptent,” and the Democrats can present themselves, with lots of Ivy League technocrats who really want to run everything they can get their hands on, as competent. It turned out to a be savvy strategy for a couple of simple reasons: first, any modern administration is doing so many things that one will, at any point along the way, be able to point to dozens of “mistakes,” many of them egregious and harmful; and, second, the mass media, still the liberal, mainstream media even in these, its dying days, is much more interested in recording mistakes made by Republicans than Democrats.\n\nAfter all, what is the measure of such things–according to what “objective,” competently administered criterion of competence could one “rank” the Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Reagan administrations? All one can do in making a case is list a series of mistakes–by the time you get to 15 or 20, it looks pretty bad, even out of thousands of decisions, so it really becomes a question of who wants to make such lists and what you believe belongs on it (not to mention the problem of ranking more and less serious mistakes, mistakes which are repaired to some degree or another, mistakes made out of carelessness as opposed to tough choices that could have gone either way, etc.).\n\nAlong with the rreasons i just mentioned, Leftists prefer these lists because the Progressive philosophy of governing insists upon expert administration as the test of legitimacy–if you see yourself, as an elected or appointed official, as akin to an engineer or doctor, then the number of serious mistakes becomes an important measure of your performance. Conservatives rarely think to make such lists, because they are more interested in having the government do less rather than doing it better–indeed, if the government does things, or can be presented as doing them, better, that provides a ground for having it take on more. You would think this would make Democratic administrations vulnerable to charges of incompetence, but since now one really knows what it means anyway, having lots of plans and being staffed by the type of people the media likes is good enough.\n\nWe could usefully trace at least one central strand of Progressivism to John Dewey’s argument that the scientific method should be applied to public and social life. Rather than being driven by tradition and prejudice and constant shifts in public opinion, let’s explicitly identify “problems,” study the “causes” of those problems, try out “solutions,” and then measure the results of those solutions–exactly the way in which we would test a hypothesis in the laboratory. Democracy, in that case, would depend upon the scientific method coming to replace traditional common sense in the public as a whole. There are quite a few rather obvious problems here–first of all, the inevitable split, which must persist even as the population becomes more educated, between experts and non-experts when it comes to social problem solving; the fact that “failed” experiments in the sphere of social life have lasting effects and can’t just be “scrapped” as in the laboratory; the law of unintended consequences or, perhaps, Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, dictates that the experiment itself will transform, in all kinds of unpredictable ways, the conditions that were to be tested in the first place.\n\nThis is not ancient history–what else does one imagine Barack Obama meant by “restoring science to its proper place” in his Inaugural Address? On the one hand, it is a gesture to environmentalists, the abortion lobby and others; more generally, though, it is an assertion of the Progressivist philosophy of governance–why shouldn’t science dictate the way we organize health care, education, gun control, etc.? There seem to be limits, though–has anyone proposed a “scientific” foreign policy? Has gay marriage been formulated as a “scientific question”–would supporters accept as conclusive a study showing that children raised in gay marriages are less “well adjusted” than those raised in traditional marriages? Of course not, and rightly so–even if one could scientifically determine the meaning of a term like “well-adjusted” one couldn’t scientifically determine what portion of one’s “adjustment” is determined within the family and what portion determined by what is outside, and in the interaction between the two. To put it simply, no one accepts a scientific accounting of their values.\n\nSo, progressivism is meaningless as an actual practice of government, but as an ethos of those who govern it is extremely powerful–what it refers to is not so much scientific practice but the rule of those of us who define ourselves as pro-science. The secular and those who don’t identify themselves in terms of their obligations to any community; those who can comfortably present themselves as victims of religious, ethnic or bourgeois “prejudice”; for all of these, “science” is the default position because in the mythology of modernity the anti-science position of the church and monarchy is what stands in for all the forces of reaction holding back economic, ethical and social progress. Which brings us back to “competence” as a purely political term, similar to a more recently invented one like “reality-based.”\n\nBut a claim like “science is what scientists say it is” is not mere tautology. The real meaning of competence is in performing the practices of some specialized community in a way recognizable by other members of that community. An astrologer who stumbled upon the theory of relativity in 1895 would still have been “wrong,” or, more precisely, “not even wrong,” because no one in the scientific community could have done anything with that claim–it didn’t emerge out of some problem recognized by the community, some unanswered question or unresolved anomaly. To be competent in such a community–and, I am saying, this is the only real meaning “competence” has–is to be able to recognize the relation between problems, questions and anomalies and the ongoing revision of the practices of the community or, as I would prefer, the discipline (a community which focuses on addressing a specific region of reality, a specific set of phenomena).\n\nIn this sense, competence is extremely important, politically. The hijacking of disciplinary authority for short term advantage is scandalous because we rely heavily upon those who set aside immediate questions for the sake of what, in the words of Charles Sanders Peirce, “will prove true in the long run.” But it will always be an ongoing temptation, because there can’t be any extrinsic authority governing the discipline–only those within it are competent to judge its workings; even while the results of work within many disciplines becomes increasingly valuable to the world. Real conservative political thinking, at this point, would best direct its attention to finding ways to ensure that every one stays within their sphere of competence–a concern that would mirror that evinced by the American Constitution for a separation and interaction of powers.\n\nThose within one discipline ask questions of those within another discipline; consumers, voters and elected officials don’t interfere with disciplinary activity but choose the results of such activity that they prefer–that is the proper relationship.\n\nBut disciplines change and overlap with each other–new domain of “competence” emerge all the time, and can take advantage of the time-lag between their “discoveries” and the progress of other disciplines to arbitrarily proclaim upon all manner of things–academic disciplines like cultural studies are perfect examples: they have a fairly sophisticated vocabulary that draws upon serious trends within modern thought, so they are capable of repelling criticism and attracting supporters–very few people are in a position to point out that they are essentially frauds. At their best, disciplines are in between the sheer love of inquiry and conversation without bounds characteristic of the “amateur” and the rigor and accountability of the “professional”–indeed, one might say that disciplines start off amateurishly, pursuing some anomaly or taboo subject within an existing field, or separating an interesting question or problem from some craft or cult that has hitherto monopolized it; and then establish a vocabulary and idiom of inquiry that might some day freeze into jargon but will hopefully generate enough anomalies, paradoxes and antinomies to prevent that from happening.\n\nBut we can open a disciplinary space any time, any place–whe never there is something not immediately visible that we feel could be seen if we had the right instruments or found the right “angle,” and we set aside differing interests and opinions in order to, jointly, see if we can find a way to see it–we have a disciplinary space. In this case, a disciplinary space is an iteration of the originary scene–an iteration in relative safety, but somewhere in the back of the disciplinary foundation there is the sense of danger, the sense that order might give way to violence if we don’t find ways to see the same things.\n\nAnd this lurking danger shows up in error–whe never we try to see something new our old habits keep getting in the way, even if it was a kind of interruption in those old habits that led us to seek something new in the first place. When we point at something together, there is no guarantee that we “see” the same thing, and the only way to check on that is by pointing to something else, which repeats the same problem, etc. There is no guarantee that after several “sightings” in common, having assured ourselves that we see together, some “monstrous” divergence won’t disabuse us of that assumption (in such cases, how do we know which is the error?).\n\nWe revert back from “seeing” to the idiom that enables us to talk about convergences and divergences, and even here there are no guarantees. We simply gamble that the generative is better than the self-enclosed–whatever can produce more of itself, and in varied forms, seems preferable to anything hermetic and repulsive.\n\nIn this case, there can be another discourse of “competence” other than the “progressive” one, which takes the “administration” of “society” as its disciplinary object. We can speak about habits, signs–ostensive and imperative, idioms, norms and error, and overlappings. Any of us can be sufficiently self-reflexive to note where our extant habits are taking on new material; any of us can identify others whom we consider to be competent to judge our practices; and those who are competent to judge the results of our practices, and because they fall into the region covered by their habits; we can position ourselves at the limits of others’ habits and point out–set up a disciplinary space aimed at pointing out–where they exceed their competence; and we can test, at the margins of practices, where norms get fuzzy and error and innovation get entangled.\n\nThe whole idea of a “mainstream” is un-American–far more normative for us is the 19th century conditions, when we were flush with con men, cults and debunkers, and it must have been hard at times to keep them apart. The “mainstream” is an invention of progressives, a way of holding together the welfare state and Cold War belligerency. Let FOX News cultivate some crazies; let the creationists have their conferences and densely argued and meticulously documented pseudo-academic treatises; and let the debunkers have at them . And maybe I was too hard on cultural studies a moment ago–once we see it as a specifically academic cult, with an affinity for other cults (UFO hunters, gay subcultures, conspiracy theorists) we can find a place for it as well.\n\nBut not in state supported academies–a major project, probably far more important than any strictly political activity, over the next few decades, will be circumventing and ultimately undermining the University as a source of authority and credentialing. Employers should decide what they want their employees to be able to do; and then they should train them in those skills specific to that job, while relying upon academies that focus on requested skill sets offering credentials that testify to the student’s ability to do x, y and z. Lots of vocational schools, and lots of on-line education, then–but the Humanities need not suffer, since there is no doubt that advanced interpretive and communication capacities will have an important place in economies of the future.\n\nBut there is a huge gap in that [employers] “should”–no one is competent to issue imperatives here. Only the proliferation of disciplinary spaces on the margins of and outside of the University will fill in that gap. For now, though, we can hammer away at tenure, on all its forms in all institutions–there is no more pernicious habit than that one.\n\nThis is probably not the way in which most participants in the discipline of Generative Anthropology see it, but I would like to practice the originary hypothesis as a source of idioms of inquiry–a habit of prying loose new vocabularies and grammars from the anomalies within existing, especially decaying, disciplines. It is the difference between iterating the gesture on the originary scene and assessing the results of that gesture. Perhaps these are different competencies."
    },
    {
      "slug": "futurity-and-presence",
      "title": "Futurity and Presence",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "For years I have been convinced, and I remain convinced, that there is a simple and infallible way of breaking the victimary spell: for the “dominant” to use their power to defend those who are the victims of those who claim to be our victims. This should involve not merely charity or altruism, but a genuine alliance, however asymmetrical the contributions of each party, against a common enemy, leading to lasting covenants and institutions. This principle can be applied in infinitely varied ways–conservatives who have tried to liberate students from the public school monopoly, or poor inner city blacks from their “civil rights” leadership through enterprise zones and other initiatives have intuited that this is the way forward.\n\nIt demystifies victimary claims as another mode of resentment without the potential for generating much intellectual content besides a few, rapidly aging maxims (regarding the virtues, of which there are certainly some, of seeing things from “below”). It acknowledges the inevitability of asymmetry in human affairs, and that the establishment of symmetrical relationships is not meant to eliminate such asymmetries but to establish arenas with a shared sacrality and prescribed objects of desire that are open to all regardless of those asymmetries or, to put it differently, where resentments are directed towards attempts to introduce the asymmetries into that bounded space.\n\nAnd so that the assymetries that will then arise within that space (we are all free to own property, but we won’t all get equally rich; we are all free to speak but don’t all become equally influential, etc.) reveal new possibilities within that field of human activity, that is, new objects of desire and means of appropriating them (inequalities in propery increases productivity and wealth; differentials in influence lead to models for refining our persuasive capacities).\n\nSo, for me the obvious question is, why hasn’t this happened? To be more precise, why has the one attempt (the “Bush Doctrine”), despite having been launched in response to the most propitious of events (the reductio ad absurdum of the victimary that was 9/11), turned out to be so feeble? What desires and resentments have been more compelling, and why? It’s very hard to get a sense of this from Leftists themselves, who answer questions about what they believe or how they conceive of the results of their actions (still!) primarily with diatribes about Bush–even Obama seems incapable of presenting any policy without framing it as a “new beginning” leaving behind a period of medieval darkness. Everything then, can be described as “cleaning up the mess,” “turning a corner,” “restoring our image in the world,” etc.–i.e., phrases devoid of information, even the involuntary kind one provides when stating a any view, or communicating any sense of where one really sees things going.\n\nHere’s another, more conventionally political, way of thinking about where we are. From 1932-1968, “Progressives” ruled America almost unchallenged, and seemed unlikely to be challenged. They had seen us through–if not actually extricated us from–a depression, and had won the largest and most important war in history. They had managed, in the post-War world, to meld a relatively mild welfare state to a revised version of traditional American, middle class values, and to produce leaders like Truman and Kennedy who could plausibly articulate those values. They ushered in, under quite a bit of pressure, it’s true, a new era of racial equality. They even, after some problematic entanglements, managed to get the question of Communism mostly right.\n\nThe progressive alliance, including the media, universities and most of the political class, then stumbled quite a bit over the next 40 years. The first blow to liberal hegemony came from the Left, in the form of resistance to the Vietnam War and cultural assaults on bourgeois morality. In getting the question of Communism right, the liberal elites ultimately alienated a large chunk of the next generation, which tapped into the tradition of anti-imperialism that had been exorcised during the Mc Carthy period. And the cultural split alienated an important chunk of the middle class. The first political result of this was the election and re-election of Richard Nixon, who completely accepted the welfare state, but represented the resistance of the “silent majority” to attacks on middle class values and patriotism.\n\nA series of blows followed: the election of Reagan, on similar grounds as Nixon, but with the important addition of a rejection of Carterite weakness in foreign policy and with a much more coherent, counter-Keynsian economic agenda. And then, in the 90s, figures like Newt Gingrich, on the one hand, whose Republican majority actually promised to roll back important elements of the welfare state, and Rudy Guiliani, who restored the hope of decent urban governance which had almost been lost. And, finally, Bush’s cooptation of liberal themes of human rights and democratization (following up on Reagan here) and tying it to an assertive foreign policy that involved the first serious use (and ultimately successful) of American military force since Vietnam.\n\nFor a while the Democrats incorporated these themes, moderated their views on things like welfare, the market and regulation, kept their pacifism and tendency to blame America for its enemies in check–while still demonizing their opponents, usually in more coded terms like “competence.” Perhaps most important, cultural transformations in the areas of sexuality, family life and popular culture continued unimpeded–enough common ground here with libertarians and the general desire of most people to stay out of others’ business made any counter-revolution other than verbal unlikely here. But now, perhaps in part because of some of the successes resulted from these counter-revolutions against progressivism–the reduction in crime, the enormous generation of wealth over the past 30 years, the fall of Communism, the prevention of further attacks after 9/11–it seems, like a rubber band that has been stretched to its limits and then released, we have snapped back pretty much to where liberalism was in the 1960s–if you think about what they had in mind, had not the New Left and the debacle in Vietnam not derailed them, even taking into account our specific historical moment and our economic crisis in particular–wouldn’t any good liberal circa 1965 or so see, at least a first glance, today’s government as essentially picking up where they left off?\n\nIndeed, all the complaints that have accumulated about the “Right” over the past 30 years, all the griping in publications like The Nation and Mother Jones , among aging graduate students and community activists–none of it seems to have been wasted. The Obama Adminstration’s rhetoric and plans are all formulated in an idiom intimately familiar to anyone hanging around the (mostly hopeless) Left between 1980 and 2008. In other words, however catastrophic (in my view, of course) the path Obama and the democratic congress have put us on, in some sense it looks like the “natural” condition of post-traditional (post-WWI, really) America.\n\nIn the end, the Left conceded nothing, and the link between Bill Ayers and President Obama represents the return of the New Left cultural and anti-American radicals back into the fold. This is where we have been heading–the Republican revolts were simply detours.\n\nAuschwitz theology has proven so powerful because its roots lie deep in victimary modernity–in the compulsive self-liberation from obscurantist tyranny. If you can’t imagine freedom in any other terms, you will keep imagining yourself enslaved in new ways with each new liberation from previous enslavement and you will keep seeking out previously invisible modes of victimization to abhor. There is a covenantal modernity which displaces the victimary brand, but the US was really the only strong representative of covenantal modernity and, ultimately, the lasting influence of slavery gave victimary modernity a foothold here which it has prodigiously expanded.\n\nBut victimary modernity is impossible as a way of life–its triumph must lead to catastrophe. The best thing to do, as far as I can see, is to stay out of the way as the catastrophe unfolds–predict nothing, don’t gloat, quietly offer alternatives which will be contemptuously rejected. Unobtrusively abstain from the narrative of victimary modern liberation–that would include “tea parties,” references to Jefferson and Paine, etc. (al though, of course, we need not criticize any of that, either, nor exclude the possibilities that some movement will emerge from it). The new narratives will have to emerge out of disciplinary spaces, and they will coelesce around the discovery and invention of modes of symmetry which leave pre-existing asymmetries alone.\n\nAnd symmetry seen not as equalizing liberty but as esthetic freedom–see all the beautiful ways in which we can exist on the same plane with each other! Create spaces that people will want to join once the victimary state starts to go bankrupt, and that will ultimately be able to find public representation by applying its idioms and habits to devising novel compromises. I would think of this as a continuous presence, as opposed to transcendence–transcendence sees some idea embodied in reality, while presence is awareness that only one’s activity sustains reality, with ever-renewed signs rather than ideas. Presence will involve a recovery of imperatives and ostensives for public use–of course, they could never fall out of disuse in private life–and a proliferation of models which are adhered to tenaciously but in very restricted circumstances.\n\nI feel like going on to talk about auxiliary verbs as a model for this kind of activity, but that seems to be a discussion for a discipline that doesn’t quite exist yet. To get it started, though, why shouldn’t language serve us as a source of models for reality–now that we have finally dispensed with the notion that reality must be the model for language?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "obama-s-symmetries",
      "title": "Obama’s Symmetries",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I hadn’t fully realized it before reading the text of Obama’s speech in Cairo but what is certainly most interesting, in my view at least, about Obama’s rhetoric is his sense no issue has been properly represented until it has been satured with symmetries. This seems to be a compulsion on the President’s part or, more productively, a habit . So, I am going start paying attention to Obama’s discourse in these terms–as the construction of a set of symmetries, across a continuum ranging from sensible but obvious, to startling and provocative, and finally to outrageous and obscene. Where and when he crosses over from one “region” to another should be telling; and it is likely that this rhetorical focus will yield insights into not only Obama’s own thinking and likely political direction, but to what he represents for so many–what those many take him to be transcending, and how. And I am happy to start here, with the Cairo speech, because despite the challenging topic and venue, it seems to me that Obama kept the portion of outrageous and obscene symmetries to a minimum.\n\nHere’s the speech:\n\nhttp://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Yj NkOTI5MDIyMTRiZWNk MjFlN2 JkOWU1OGU4ND VjYWU =\n\nLet’s start with the following symmetry, offered as a cause of current “tension” between the United States and Muslims:\n\nMore recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.\n\nThis is a good place to begin. “More recently” seems to cover a large period of time here–and sometimes you need a lot of time if you are going to establish an equivalence. “Colonialism” was not only quite a while ago but also actually very brief and had little effect in the Muslim world–from the middle to late 19th century until the mid 20th, and with the exception of the French in Algeria in particular, the occupation of Muslim lands was not heavy handed. What little constitutionalism ever existed in countries like Iraq and Egypt seems to have been left there by the British–and then swept away afterward. The Cold War is a little more “recent,” but with the famous exception of helping to install (or re-install) the Shah back in 1953, it would be very hard to give an example of a Muslim government that would have been very different if not for America’s insensitivity toward the wishes of the people of that country (perhaps Indonesia, where we supported a very violent suppression of a Communist rebellion in 1965–are Muslims complaining about that?).\n\nBut this broad temporal sweep also enables Obama to put the Islamists’ rejection of modernity in a larger context that would, implicitly, at least, implicate the Muslim world as a whole in that rejection. So, our representation of modernity in the Muslim world has been bullying and hence gave modernity a bad name; while many in the Muslim world, perhaps because they over-generalized from those actions of ours, or because modernity and globalization are hard (for us as well), have failed to distinguish better from worse elements of modernity. Now, if we set aside all questions of truth and fairness, and just think in originary terms of the purpose of such supposed symmetries (on the originary scene, who first reached for the object, who first elbowed another out of the way, etc., is all irrelevant once the sign is extended), we must judge them as follows: can acknowledged representatives of both “sides” sign onto these provisions as a starting point , in which case their truth need not be determined until after we have tried to live up to them.\n\nFrom that standpoint, “we will eschew more aggressive impositions of modernity and globalization if you will determine to embrace some version of modernity and globalization that will get you into the system” seems reasonable. Of course, what will then count as “aggressive” or “destructive” versions of modernity, what it would mean to get inside the “system,” etc, would all bve open to debate, which would also be part of the point here.\n\nSo I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.\n\nBut that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words – within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one.”\n\nHere, on one side, there are “negative stereotypes of Islam” and on the other side the “crude stereotype of America as a self-interested empire.” The President obliges himself to fight against the former “wherever they appear”; it’s less clear who is obliged to contest the latter. In other words, there is an odd asymmetry here, which Obama must have felt was needed for the larger symmetry in which each side opposes stereoytpes of the other. Perhaps the asymmetry lies in the fact that the speaker can make the initial gesture by obliging himself; he can’t oblige others. All he can do is disprove the stereoype held by the other.\n\nThe extent to which this symmetrical formation holds together depends upon whether the main objection to America on the part of Obama’s audience is, indeed, America’s imperialism, or (another odd phrase) its “self-interestedness” (as opposed to disinterested empires?), which I must assume is an oblique gesture to our “materialism.” In other words, the fact that we have always tried to give meaning to our principles “around the world” must be distinguishable for that audience from the “imperialism” itself. Otherwise, Obama’s very words here would confirm the stereotype. On the other side, what will count as a “negative stereotype” of Islam–and in what sense does it fall within the President’s responsibility to fight against them?\n\nThis symmetrical formation is more tenuous than the previous one, insofar as the President might be taken to be pledging to oppose those of his fellow citizens who are critical of Islam. The weakness here may lie in the opposition of “America” to “Islam”–America is a nation and can do good or evil; Islam is a religion which doesn’t “do” anything, so Muslims agreeing to see the US in more complex terms doesn’t really line up with us not saying anything “offensive” about Islam. Why, then, couldn’t Obama here have contrasted the actions and principles of Americans with the actions and principles of Muslims (as he did in the symmetry I just examined)?\n\nHere, we hit a serious obstacle: which liberatory or universalistic actions carried out by Muslims as Muslims could Obama have pointed to here? When he would, by the laws of symmetry, need to point to some complexity (good and evil) in the actions of Muslims, at least in terms of engaging the principles of the modern world, he falls short. So Obama here has to commit himself and us to something both impossible and wrong–to avoid criticizing Islam. The alternative would have been to split the “Muslim World,” and single out proponents of democracy and human rights at odds with their government, and whose existence would therefore enable Americans to arrive at a more complex view of Muslims.\n\nNow, here is a symmetry that has already been generating quite a bit of controversy, and is well worth examining:\n\nAround the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.\n\nOn the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.\n\nFor decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.\n\nThat is in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest, and the world’s interest. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have agreed to under the Road Map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them – and all of us – to live up to our responsibilities.\n\nPalestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.\n\nNow is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.\n\nAt the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.\n\nIsrael must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel’s security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.\n\nThere is a lot to go through here. Obama begins be weighing, not so much Jewish suffering against Palestinian suffering, as the unacceptability of us today denying either suffering. That is, I don’t think he is equating what the Palestinians have gone through to the Holocaust–we need to find the point of symmetry, and not every element of each side of the equation has to line up with some element on the other side. Obama suggests that threatening Israel with destruction today is equivalent to denying the atrocities committed against Jews in the past–actually, a rather subtle and reassuring thought. Now, let’s go to the “other hand.”\n\nThat the situation of the Palestinians is “intolerable” is as “undeniable” as the suffering of the Jews. (Note the way the imperative of formal symmetry works here–what holds this part of the speech together is the equivalence of “undeniability” that pertains to both Israelis/Jews and Palestinians–a rather thin thread, but it forces Obama to make the connection I just noted between “denial” and “threats.”) So, America will not reject the claims of either side. I don’t see what would prevent this from being a starting point: it is undeniable that threatening Israel with destruction or denying the Holocaust will not resolve anything; and it is equally undeniable that ignoring the situation of the Palestinians will not resolve anything. All this seems undeniable. Obama’s reference to the “humiliations of occupation” seems out of date as most of the Palestinians’ territory is presently unoccupied, but this claim is not really necessary to this equivalence, anyway.\n\nSoon after comes the equivalence between the Palestinians and blacks in the American South and non-violent revolts elseewhere. Here, again, Obama is not saying that Palestinians are “like” American blacks, South African blacks, East European dissidents, etc., in every way–the equivalence here is forward looking and projective and therefore one it would be incumbent upon the Palestinians to redeem. That is, the comparison is not between different forms of oppression, but different models of liberation. And, yes, the slaves were freed by the “violence” of the civil war but, again, that doesn’t fall within the scope of the proposed symmetry here, which is between various “sublatern” struggles for liberation against “advanced” nations in the late modern world. In other words, it’s a salutary redirection of anti-colonial resentments toward more “post-colonial” ones.\n\nThe Israeli side of the symmetry seems to me especially weak here. Unlike his account of the Palestinians, there is no distinction between what Israel has done and what they should do; there is no proposal of another model for Israel to follow–Israel is just given orders. “Israel must” is the prevailing locution here and, with the exception of the very vague comment on “continued Israeli settlements,” Obama never acknowledges that Israel might be very willing and may even be trying to do what they “must,” but may need cooperation from the Palestinians. One consequence of the demand for symmetry here is that Obama “must” insist that Israel hold up its end all the more forcefully precisely because the Palestinians can’t or won’t hold up theirs–in other words, if both sides are in place, you can simply apply pressure wherever it’s likely to be effective.\n\nI do like Obama’s assertion that we will say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs –I don’t remember hearing that in a Presidential speech before. I also don’t believe it, but it’s a good thing to say, if only because it provides a standard for judging Obama here (why not aim at symmetry here as well, though, and insist that all sides follow the same logic and say the same things publicly and privately? Would it have been hard to establish an equivalence between Muslims and Israelis on that score, since Israel is already as transparent as any society can be and the divergence between what Muslim governments say to their own people and to others notorious?\n\nSo, is that what places certain topics off limits–their resistance to symmetrical rhetorical formulations?). But, to end this–if anyone wishes to examine other parts of the speech in the comments, I’m game–the biggest problem with symmetries is that they leave out the question, who goes first ? And, in the end, that’s the only question. I can hypothesize, then, that part of the attraction of Obama is his belief that any conflict or dilemma can be framed in a symmetrical form such that the very framing appears to transcend that conflict or dilemma; and, that the other part is that the symmetries need not, indeed should not, lead to any reciprocal action.\n\nIndeed, if we take those symmetries I have portrayed most favorably, as possible starting points, where, indeed, would one go with them? Let’s say we go first and stop imposing our forms of modernity and globalization upon the Muslim world–in fact, we can read Obama’s speech as such a going first. All we will have done is leave the field open for the various competing positions on modernity and globalization to fight it out among themselves–our move ties into no reciprocal action, we can’t point to anyone going in one direction rather than others, someone whom we could join. Obama can’t even point to more productive approaches to modernity and globalization within the Muslim world–indeed, one strange thing about his speech is that he doesn’t praise anyone doing anything right now–all he does is recognize grievances and propose better models for pursuing them.\n\nTo praise some would be to dispraise others, and that would be to impose. One could say that he therefore represents the Muslim World more negatively than Bush ever did, even though his explicit criticisms are usually very mild. Obama’s symmetries, then, require us to believe in mass conversion throughout the Muslim world, a spontaneous conversion, in response to Obama’s presence, with Obama himself as the guarantee that the conversion will be reciprocated (here, his bizarre pledge to commit himself to stamping out steretypes of Islam makes sense). This is the result of the rejection of the attempt made by Bush to split the Islamic world, which ended up splitting the West as well–it is the terror of those entwined civil wars that gives Obama’s symmetries their mystical force, at least for his followers in the West.\n\nFor his Muslim audience, Obama’s speech can readily be translated into homilies on the need for self-improvement, but at our own pace–we are already on the way to becoming what we are supposed to be. Indeed, the proof of that would be that we are addressed by and can appreciate the speech. There is very little Muslims can do–other than support al Qaeda, deny the Holocaust, etc.–that would leave them outside one of these symmetrical formulations. And what is now gone is any sense of being monitored by an other, from within the “system”–the symmetries are reversable and allow one to shift one’s gaze back to one’s interlocutor at will."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-holy-grammar-of-presence",
      "title": "The Holy Grammar of Presence",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans’ talk at the Ottawa GA conference on June 20 ( http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw375.htm ) articulated the problem of victimary discourse in relation to the originary scene in what, I think, is a new way. Gans had already re-situated scapegoating (for Rene Girard the founding moment of the human) within the emergence of hierarchical orders, which themselves emerged as the “big man” centralized distribution as kingly priest thereby transcending the unstable and more egalitarian gifting order. Using the concept of “firstness,” Gans now situates the possibility of hierarchical order on the originary scene itself, well before such firstness could be given any institutional embodiment.\n\nGans can now speak about two paradoxes of the human: the paradoxical relation between God and human, wherein we define ourselves as mortal by reproducing the immortal sign; and the “ethical” paradox, in which hierarchies must be affirmed in language which is itself essentially egalitarian–both the slave and slaveowner understand the words by which the former’s dispossession and domination is affirmed. The advent of victimary discourse in the post-Auschwitz era has, for the first time, subordinated the primary paradox to the secondary one, leading to the widely shared assumption that the elimination of hierarchies between subjects would abolish all conflict, thereby forgetting the need for a mechanism of originary deferral, regardless of the terms of social order. Gans concludes:\n\nBut it is the very excess of victimary thinking in the postmodern era that has provided the impetus for the return to the primacy of the transcendent, understood this time from a minimally anthropological perspective.\n\nThis is true as an account of the origins of GA, but it would be a mistake to take this “return” as one likely to be replicated socially. (Gans doesn’t seem to be suggesting something along these lines in this talk–it is overwhelmingly analytical rather than presciptive.) The victimary order has installed itself not only by reversing the priority between transcendence and inequality; it did so by “implicating” transcendence in inequality–that is, victimary thought scapegoats representations of transcendence as “alibis” for the continuance of social hierarchies. Attempts to reverse the hierarchy of human-divine and intra-human relations once again would be instantly “tagged” as calls to return to traditional, hierarchical orders: even on esthetic grounds, the notion of “elevation” implicit in “transcendence” is too reminiscent of the “heights” oppressors placed themselves upon vis a vis the oppressed.\n\nThe re-prioritization of the human paradox, then, must take on another form. I would first of all suggest that we can stop speaking of the immortality of the sign–first of all, because it’s not strictly true, as human beings could destroy themselves and leave the universe devoid of signs; second, because it leaves the human as a sort of spectator, gazing at the sign–as Gans insists, the transcendent sign is always in some relation to what has been transcended, but nothing in the notion of transcendence implies the dependence of the transcendent upon those “acquainted” with it. But the sign is, of course, thus dependent.\n\nAnd if the fundamental human paradox is to brought back to the center of cultural life it will have to be through an awareness of the way all of us need to contribute to the subsistence of the signs that sustain us. At the end of the event, with all the participants arrayed at the periphery, the sign and object would appear simply to be there; but, if acknowledgment of “firstness” is the initial step towards rooting hierarchy and its discontents back in the scene, we should also note that firstness simply points to the sceneness of the scene, i.e., to the fact that something happens, which means something happens first, then second, then third, and so on, until the last.\n\nAnd along the way each “iterates” and “norms” what the others have done–that is, each puts forth the sign in a way that both highlights the distinctiveness of an earlier emission and adds to its “contours” so as to facilitate its further assimilation by the group.\n\nIndeed, what we can call the “transcendent” quality of the sign can equally be referred to as its iterability. The problem “transcendence” addresses is why the word “dog” is the “same” word when I use it now and when some other English speaker across the world uses it years from now (of course, words change their meanings, but that’s a distraction right now–they aren’t completely changing their meaning at every moment, so the problem I am addressing here remains). The simplest answer to the question is that signs are iterable because they are iterated. I would like to distinguish “iteration” from “imitation” here: you imitate when you follow the rules embodied in another’s activity, but you iterate when you apply the rules another is following to that activity itself.\n\nThis distinction can be articulated with the one Richard van Oort ( http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1301/1301vano.htm ) draws from Michael Tommasello’s study of primates and humans, between “emulative” learning, in which “the disciple focuses not on the model’s particular behavior but on the objects with which the model is interacting” and “imitative” learning where one “enter[s] into the model’s particular intentional stance toward the object.” The difference between imitation and iteration, then, can be put as follows: if imitation enters into the model’s particular intentional stance toward the object (what I just called “following the same rules”), then iteration is the next act in a series initiated by the interaction between the intentional stance and the object (applying the rules to the subject’s behavior).\n\nTo put it in colloquial terms, imitation plays the man while iteration plays the ball — in activities where we must obey the same set of rules but towards opposite ends, and our roles are therefore distinct as well as reversible, I need to be able to act within the “field” your activity is generating. To return to the originary scene, the iteration of the sign is the imitation of the central object , which “attends to” the organization of the group as a whole as its collecting intelligence. By anticipating, facilitating and channeling one another’s moves we simultaneously sustain the game itself; and, since social life is ultimately more open-ended and therefore play -like than game -like, we keep playing by inventing new rules out of the anomalies of the existing ones. We keep things going, and protect the rules not by exclusion but by improvising tactics for inclusion.\n\nSo, in iterating the sign I not only do what you do but I spread what you do–I enter your relation to the object but I also recognize that the object is encompassed by that relation as well. Here the object is the social relation itself, which is constituted by the thing we let be between us, but also by the infinitely varied ways that thing can mediate our relations. Your use of the sign requires my use to be complete–if the first gesture had been ignored in the rush to the center, it wouldn’t have been a sign–and so my sign both completes yours and “requests” that another do likewise for me. The word “first,” indeed, is the superlative form of “for,” in the sense of “before,” ahead of, representative of, holding the place of–the first is the “most for,” the “for-est.” It implies, and only exists as first, if others are coming after, who will be first in a way as well since others will keep coming.\n\nThis sustaining relation towards the sign I would call “presence” rather than “transcendence.” Presence is the open acknowledgement that the central object is amongst us and we part of it. Presence was present on the scene, before its “closure,” but it would have been far too risky to make it explicit in a ritualistic order where claims of human contribution to the center would destabilize it, while introducing it would have introduced conflict into a hierarchical order, since the politics of “presence” under such conditions would be insupportably radical (of course it did emerge in the various known and unknown revolts and heresies through the ages).\n\nBut now that the hierarchical order has been sufficiently pounded by the victimary barrage, while the awareness that the absolute elimination of all hierarchies can only lead to terror is widespread, ways of turning or renaming hierarchies into or as provisional forms of firstness as the inflection of presence can be freely discussed. Each of us, in some sense, has been “delegated” to watch over some region of signification at each moment, and in that region we are the guarantors or “spreaders” of meaning.\n\nThe shift from transcendence to presence, meanwhile, would further involve shifting sacrality or holiness away from specific objects, even transcendent ones, to language itself. The “linguistic turn” of 20th century, post-metaphysical thought was inextricably caught up in victimary discourse, perhaps most forcefully in Derrida’s work, where metaphysical hierarchies are transcribed into social ones, so “logo-centricism” easily flows into “phallo-centrism,” “Euro-centrism,” etc. But this need not be the case–indeed, the understanding of language as constitutive , rather than derivative of something more fundamentally human, true, or permanent, might be the antidote to victimary thinking.\n\nVictimary claims address themselves, perhaps above all to language–the source of “political correctness” is the awareness that language does constitute our shared world, while at the same time the formulation of those claims must, needless to say (or, inevitable to say) take place in that very same language. Perhaps we have a third paradox here, between the expression of resentment and the donation of that resentment to the circulating center.\n\nVictimary thinkers are scandalized by the implication of language in inequalities while universalists are horrified by the recruitment of language for narrowly partisan ends, so as to define, so to speak, oneself into power–perhaps the deferral of this rivalry (which may, in the end, run very deeply through all aspects of at least Western politics) will lie in the shared attention to those elements of language which evade all conscious control. In other words, not simply language, but language’s infinite generativity is holy–the very fact that neither the most “hierarchical” terminology (the universal “Man,” for example) nor the most politically engineered jargon (like, say “homophobia”) can escape the generative processes through which terms get treated ironically, descriptions get mixed up with prescriptions, the boundaries between exclamations, imperatives,interrogatives and indicatives are constantly blurred and redrawn, and so on, might provide us with endless resouces for sustaining presence.\n\nMoreover, attempts to exploit language’s infinite generativity would not exhaust it–quite to the contrary, such attempts would further deepen our sense of it–the more we attend to language, the more of it there is to attend to. Language is separate enough from us to be worshipped, as every utterance becomes other the instant it is “released,” without ever really being separate from us. The creation of idioms, the problem of translation–these are ever-present realities of profound moral, ethical and political import, and into which all, as users of signs, are capable of inquiring and inscribing their situation within the field."
    },
    {
      "slug": "between-knowledge-and-sacrifice-what-to-do-with-michael-jackson",
      "title": "Between knowledge and sacrifice: what to do with Michael Jackson?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I wrote this review essay over a year ago, in hopes of landing a quick publication. The trajectory of my argument was crystal clear to me. I tried Contagion and a few others, but no bites. Among the criticisms was that Jefferson’s book, On Michael Jackson , did not warrant the Girardian analysis I subjected it to. Perhaps. This analysis may be too academic for my blog, and not academic enough for a journal. I thought it might work here. Since MJ has been in the news of late, why not consider his legacy in Girardian terms? To me, MJ is a post-modern sacrificial lamb.\n\nEnjoy!\n\nIt was during an undergraduate seminar on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (of all things!) that I was first introduced to the work of Eric Gans, who arranges all manner of human relationships in a centre-peripheral configuration, where a central god is simultaneously a central victim—the object of both our envy and scorn. Indeed, Gans’ centre-periphery heuristic is useful in understanding, say, the resentments that fuel the mimetic violence behind Rene Girard’s “sacrificial crisis” —whereby a designated (central) victim is sacrificed to the bloodlusts of the (peripheral) mob.\n\nAs I was beginning to get my feet wet, then, with the work of both Girard and Gans, I remember, quite distinctly, being asked in seminar who, if anyone, occupies central (sacred) status in today’s godless world—what sort of figure, that is, is both the object of our admiration and resentment simultaneously? I also remember searching the annals of my mind, voraciously, for an answer—one that was both obvious and pertinent. With all the gusto of a convert, I aimed to make an inner understanding (that is, a then nascent and inner understanding of sacrificial violence) outer. Yet, as often happens in times of extreme metaphysical duress, I balked. The class discussion veered off to the obvious, though not terribly electrifying, example of Queen Elizabeth II, whose formal institutional status can, in a very perfunctory sense, be considered central—worthy of both our scorn and envy.\n\nOf course, when the more obvious and electrifying example finally did come to mind, I spent more time than I should have ruminating over the fantastic but missed opportunity to spearhead a different sort of discussion altogether—one more capable of capturing a greater sampling of the “popular” imagination and contemporary tastes of my peers. Indeed, in thinking about the central object as one of envy, upon whom “all desires on the periphery converge,” who else could we say occupies a status more central in today’s decentralized market society than Michael Jackson?\n\nMargo Jefferson, noted New York Times cultural critic and Pulitzer Prize winning author, puts Michael Jackson squarely at the centre of her careful and admirable cultural critique entitled On Michael Jackson (2006). Rather than rehash or retell new versions of old gossip, Jefferson here attempts to highlight Michael Jackson’s oddities in context of an American public imagination and consumer culture both horrified at freaks and which, simultaneously, promotes freakishness as a legitimate stepping stone in pursuit of the American dream.\n\nIn the Girardian sense, two terms immediately come to mind in light of Jefferson’s essay, and then, specifically in regards to Michael Jackson: differentiation and (monstrous) doubling. Certainly we have, at times, a crisis of differentiation, what Girard articulates as an individual’s “tendency to think of himself not only as different from others but as extremely different,” for the sake, say, of staking his claim in the community.\n\nA young Michael Jackson, that is, had to make his mark in order to stand apart not only from his brothers, but from the other acts Motown was propagating in the sixties. In such a context, the uniqueness any child star takes for granted begins to wane until the child no longer feels special or different at all. Of course, in lacking such differences, says Girard, comes the trauma of similarity, which carries with it the capacity to wipe out an individual’s sense of identity altogether.\n\nMichael Jackson’s need to disassociate himself from his brothers, and then, not by disowning them, but by refusing to be sexualized the way Motown sought to sexualize them, is a point of departure for Jefferson. Focusing for a time on the sexual, she suggests that Michael, in seeking to carve out his place among the original Jackson 5, could only harbour misgivings about sex. She describes how older brothers “Jackie, Tito and Jermaine flirted and fucked to their hearts content in plain sight of [a young] Michael[,] [a]nd [that] he had no way to hold his own.” Hence, Michael’s reasoning being that his salvation could only lie as far away as possible not from a filial loyalty to his brothers per se, but from an imitation of their conventional transfiguration into sexually consumable objects.\n\nSo in fighting to avoid conventional (sexual) pitfalls, Michael was destined to rebel unconventionally, in ways that leave us mystified as to how to categorize this new sort of rebellion (for certainly, which former child star has turned out anything like Michael Jackson?). Indeed, Jackson’s current image projects an\n\nimpression of a disturbing dynamism. It seems to threaten the very system. Efforts to limit it are unsuccessful; it disturbs the differences that surround it. These in turn become monstrous, rush together, are compressed and blended together to the point of destruction. Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying precisely because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, its morality. (Girard Reader, 116)\n\nWe might say that in choosing to forgo his own personal crisis of differentiation, Michael instead initiated a communal crisis, moving himself away from his brothers, but instead ending up on the very fringes of what we take human society to be in the process. Nor does Jefferson suggest that Michael Jackson sought to defer (sexual) desire away from himself entirely. On the contrary, she has it that due to the extraordinariness of the person and his situation, desire could only be deferred in equally extraordinary (even bizarre) ways.\n\n[T]he crotch clutch seems at once desperate and abstract. It is as if her were telling us, “Fine, you need to know I’m a man, a black man? Here’s my dick: I’ll thrust my dick at you! Isn’t that what a black man’s supposed to do? But I’m Michael Jackson, so just look but you can’t touch.”\n\nAvoiding explicit and brazen sexual acts was a means for Michael Jackson not only to stake his own claim against his brothers, but also, to defer the violence he could only associate with sex—as if carrying on in the same fashion as his brothers would encompass the threat (or the possibility) of a conventional monstrousness. Had a later (say adolescent) Michael Jackson chosen to take out his frustrations in a sexual manner, we would be given clearer currency against which to assess his legacy.\n\nSexual failure, or, even, rabid sexual activity, may constitute an altogether conventional form of monstrosity, one in which the line dividing humane versus cruel acts are more readily drawn (as Girard would say, such differences exist within the system itself). However, in choosing to forgo the explicitly sexual, we are free to speculate that the nature of, say, Jackson’s obsession with children must, at the very least, be implicitly sexual. Here precisely is where our fascination with Michael Jackson takes root, for in introducing to society such “unconventions,” the human population is forced to reexamine and redefine the limits of its existing conventions.\n\nIn fact, Jefferson suggests that such bizarre deferral tactics displayed by Michael Jackson (beginning in his late teen years) could only have resulted from an extraordinary resentment, as she reminds us that Michael “has been a sexual impersonator since the age of five,” singing in the 1960s about desire in the manner more reminiscent of a sexually charged adolescent, which served to turn him into “a national sex object—a sex toy, really.”\n\nFurthermore, in growing up around adults he could only mistrust, i.e., where “some of [his] fans [were] old enough to be [his] parents or grandparents,” in “[f]eeling used by every adult [he] knew,” and, in being “blessed” with a mimetic model of masculinity at best disappointing (his father), it really becomes something not so farfetched that Michael Jackson, in choosing to turn away from violence and hatred, had to love the world, and then not all of it, but only a certain segment of it—that is, the segment encompassed by the innocence of children. Here is a particularly perceptive passage of Jefferson’s:\n\nWe’ve all heard the explanations for why Michael is at ease only when he is with children. His reasons make a kind of psychological sense … You can capture your lost childhood in the company of children.\n\nMichael never admits that he is angry as well as lonely and sad. And yet, what better reproach to all grown-ups—family, siblings, fans—than to have nothing to do with them except as business people you can hire and fire. Or as wives you can marry and divorce. Or as surrogate mothers you can pay and dismiss.\n\nJefferson, then, deftly looks at Michael Jackson as a study in the sublimation of “extraordinary” resentment, subtlety addressing those who would attack monstrous ends without a clear and discernible understanding of monstrous origins. Not that this book is an apologia for Michael Jackson (by any stretch). In fact, Jefferson, in carefully choosing how to line up her rhetorical ducks, begins by empathizing first with our resentments of the man, for the sake (obviously enough) of bringing naysayers and fence-sitters along for the ride. Her rhetorical comeuppance is worth the wait, however. The concluding three chapters are both profound and prescient, discussing broader social themes of child celebrity, the subsequent strain on filial bonds, as well as relevant issues of gender and race.\n\nIn the book’s final chapter, Jefferson carefully articulates her unique and convincing understanding of Michael Jackson against an entirely surreal and bizarre social backdrop of the 2003 police raids of the Neverland Ranch, the deleterious Martin Bashir documentary, and the subsequent trial and eventual acquittal of Jackson in 2005. Though it would be tempting to rail on Jackson for having had the audacity to be caught in the middle of one aberrant scandal after another (going back, it could be argued, well into the early 1990s), Jefferson’s critique of events are fierce yet subtle, compassionate yet firm.\n\nIn terms of resentment, any thorough understanding of Michael Jackson inevitably leads to a fork in the road, leading us down two equally productive paths in our examination of this remarkable human being. One forces us to analyze the nature of our own resentments toward him, while the other asks us to understand his resentment, that is, how (or if) we can go about accommodating it, in the name either of accepting Michael Jackson as a productive member of the human community, or of expelling him from the realm of human society altogether, thereby taking his resentment and the ostensible behaviors and images which can only signify them as a genuine testament to monstrosity.\n\nThough Jefferson does not explicitly formulate her analysis in terms of resentment, she does effectively convey to the reader the uniqueness of Michael’s resentments—both those felt by him and those directed at him. Jefferson’s book is fascinating in and of itself for its courageous attempt at proposing the sort of criteria that could be (though, perhaps, are not definitively) motivating Michael Jackson, his career, and our subsequent resentment of him.\n\nDespite the seeming circumstantial nature of her arguments, the rigour of Jefferson’s claims comes in her ability to paint a convincing panorama of American pop culture, from the time of P.T. Barnum, up to and including our more recent fascinations with reality television. She routinely uses the art and design of Michael’s clothes and music videos as suitable points of entry (without relying on them too heavily), while avoiding lengthy quotes from other authors or Jackson himself (she uses these sparingly).\n\nAgainst this backdrop, then, are we invited to engage with Michael Jackson, away from the usual tabloid gossip which often finds itself on either side of the divide, lauding the sorrows of Michael’s childhood when publicly expedient or crucifying him to no end and in equal measure— selling us commercially estheticized versions of either his resentment or ours.\n\nOnce again, in a Girardian light, the most obvious term applicable is one of scapegoating, as though any discussion of Michael Jackson could not help but elicit a discussion of it, especially in thinking about how or why popular society at large is continually pushed to the brink of tolerance in its ability (perhaps inability) to deal, once and for all, with Michael Jackson. Girard, of course, talks about scapegoating in two distinct ways.\n\nFirst of all, in the classical sense, whereby the choice of sacrificial victim goes largely undisputed by the chorus, versus the “counter-mythical thrust” of Bible narratives, which “espouse the perspective of the victim rather than the mythical perspective of the persecutors.” In terms of a Gansian centre-periphery orientation, we could say, analogously, that Oedipus’ guilt is never questioned; hubris is the cost of his centrality. Job’s centrality, on the other hand, as a character in Biblical literature, is predicated on his peripheral position—that is, as the victim of oppression rather than its instigator.\n\nClassical hubris is the result of the central protagonist vying for godlike status. In today’s secular and ultimately decentralized world, we cannot say that any central victim (even Michael Jackson) is blithe enough to assert a claim to divinity. So how are we to say that Michael Jackson occupies a central (if not divine) role in society? If he cannot be a god, then, it seems, he can only be a victim (if only commercially), subject to ceaseless and arbitrary persecution, as if his perpetual ability to land inside a courtroom and our subsequent cultural obsession with the proceedings that follow are themselves the only two adequate criteria attesting to his central (though “non-Classical” and essentially secular) value.\n\nMoreover, it is a position we can choose to resent outright, in true mythical/sacrificial manner, or which we can identify and empathize with, in a more of a Biblical and victimary manner. But must it necessarily be either/or? What would it mean to suggest that if only popular audiences were familiar with the tenets of Girard, Michael-Jackson-like spectacles would somehow dissipate? If we could no longer resent or empathize with Michael Jackson, what else can we (ought we to) do?\n\nGirard himself sheds light on the trickiness of knowledge in regards to mimesis and sacrifice. Commenting on the (decreasing) effectiveness of ritual sacrificial mechanisms, Girard says that “[t]he amazing thing about us is not that so many are still fooled but that many are not and that suspicion, as a whole is on the increase.” I take this to mean that given the current trajectory of knowledge, our grandchildren ought to be spared the spectacle of any future Michael Jacksons.\n\nYet how are we to reconcile this statement with this one that follows: “Victimage is still present among us, of course, but in degenerate forms that do not produce the type of mythical reconciliation and ritual practice exemplified by primitive cults. This lack of efficiency often means that there are more rather than fewer victims”?\n\nPerhaps an answer of sorts lies preciesly in Girard’s espousal of two types of religion (noted earlier), the one more mythical in nature, where we are to identify with the victimizer, versus one more literary, where we are invited to identify with the victim; such a stratification of religion stratifies along with it two types of tragedy. What was once considered tragic about human existence—that mimetic violence had the ability to turn against arbitrary and ultimately innocent victims for the sake of preserving the collectivity—nowadays, gives way to an awareness of the arbitrariness of such mechanisms.\n\nThis tends to entail justifying our predilection to engage in sacrificial crises, as though we rationally “consent” in choosing “legitimate” scapegoat victims (thereby dissolving the terms “scapegoat” and “arbitrary” altogether). Yet, strangely, it does not entail that we overcome or sublimate our human need to engage in sacrificial crisis in the first place. Hence, our consensual agreements become somewhat disappointing rationalizations (encompassing something of, we might say, the “tragedy” of the modern).\n\nThat is, al though a single victim is no longer made to bear the full brunt of sacrificial violence, our resentments are now free to designate a plurality of sacrificial victims (thereby disseminating the full brunt of sacrifice amongst an array of victims). The succeeding violence, then, does not call for their mortal sacrifice outright, but certainly, some measure of public sacrifice (in the form, say, of a loss of privacy, of being made rapidly consumable). Occasionally, certain victims come to the fore whose strangeness is so stark that arriving at a consensus over his/her “worthiness” as scapegoat is taken as a foregone conclusion. Yet even if a unanimous consensus is reached, such consensus does not justify or redeem the fact that we are engaging in irrational sacrificial behavior. Here is Girard:\n\nLet’s look at another example of a condemned person, someone who has actually committed the deed that brings down on him the crowd’s violence: a black male who actually rapes a white female. The collective violence is no longer arbitrary in the most obvious sense of the term. It is actually sanctioning the deed it purports to sanction. Under such circumstances the distortions of persecution might be supposed to play no role and the existence of the stereotypes of persecution might no longer bear the significance I give it. Actually, these distortions of persecution are present and are not incompatible with the literal truth of the accusation … The persecutor’s mentality moves in the reverse direction. Instead of seeing in the microcosm a reflection or imitation of the global level, it seeks in the individual the origin and cause of all that is harmful.\n\nOur knowledge of the arbitrary selection of sacrificial victim does not do away with mimetic violence. Furthermore, our present consumer (ritual) culture offers no social mechanism with which to deal with “popular” resentments in any sort of resolute fashion—at best, we can only focus our attention on more “suitable” victims, ever-ready, nonetheless, to return to our original scapegoat model.\n\nThe arbitrariness, then, is no longer in who we choose to signify as a monstrous, but rather, when and why we choose him, and then, to what degree. Michael Jackson, and those who consume him, are hence whim to the instability and fluctuations of the market’s internal ethical system, one which provides no definitive means of dealing with the victim toward whom our resentments are attuned. Which leads us once again to the perennial ethical question: what, if anything, are we to do with (or about) Michael Jackson?\n\nWe begin to see how and why a faithful dealing of Michael Jackson is difficult to come by; disentangling resentments (his and ours) is tricky business. Although she manages to avoid any formal introduction of Girardian mimesis, I find Jefferson’s critique to be quite effective wholly in Girardian terms. For example, the above quoted Girardian sentiment captures the kernel of truth behind Jefferson’s apt critique of Santa Monica District Attorney Thomas Sneddon Jr., and his somewhat disturbing prosecutorial fixation on Michael Jackson.\n\nMoreover, Sneddon’s self-justifying prosecutorial bloodlust is made evident as Jefferson notes that Sneddon and his office faced eleven lawsuits in 2003 alone: “[t]he best known case involved Efren Cruz, a man accused of robbery who served eleven years in prison before an appeals court ordered his release on the grounds that Sneddon’s office had withheld evidence—a full confession by two other men—that proved his innocence.” Jefferson further documents what Girard calls the “persecutor’s mentality” and tunnel vision when discussing CNN anchorwoman Nancy Grace’s “impartial” handing of the Jackson trial:\n\nGrace treats crime like small-town gossip. She is the last word on everybody’s wrongdoings, an approach heightened by her southern twang, poufed hair and vehemently plucked eyebrows. Grace declares Jackson guilty from the start and shapes all news to that opinion. She scolds and interrupts CNN reporters at the trial. She commiserates with the psychologist who explains why Michael Jackson is a pedophile. The night of the verdict, she interviews one of the jurors, questions his claims to rational judgment and ends by sneering, “How are you going to feel the next time you see him with his new little friend.” She rarely fails to begin sentences with “I know when I was prosecutor…” Unmentioned is the fact that when she was a prosecutor, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit censured her on grounds that she knowingly withheld evidence that was favorable to a defendant.\n\nThough Jefferson concedes that Michael’s strange behavior may be the result of “mental illness,” she is rather unwilling to take the easy sacrificial bait. Here talking about the trial, Jefferson scolds:\n\nThere was no narrative space for real talk about mental illness: what it looked like or feels like; its symptoms and causes; its many shades and consequences. The trial revealed an almost primitive refusal to examine any of this. The defense wanted to call a psychiatrist who would explain to the court why Jackson’s book collection showed he did not fit the profile of a pedophile. But the prosecution threatened to call a psychiatrist who would study the same books and explain why he did. Both sides retreated … There was no reasonable discussion of how Jackson might be innocent of molestation, though not of gross emotional improprieties; how he might not be able to stop himself or take in how he was viewed by the rest of the world. Mental illness distorts and maims, but it does not have to be criminal.\n\nRather than build a case from his possible innocence, Jackson’s defense merely tried to discredit the prosecution’s offence. Both sides acknowledged (whether explicitly or implicitly) that Michael’s behavior could only encompass something of the strange, the monstrous, even the taboo—though Jefferson reminds us that these “improprieties” need not necessarily be “criminal.”\n\nJackson’s defense team, however, was not willing to gamble on the jury’s ability to see past or beyond its own sacrificial tendencies. Though any sensible defense ought to point out holes in the prosecution’s version of events, Jackson’s defense, as some manner of public ritual, did more to conceal taboos out of respect for the sacrificial predilections of juries than it did to expose those taboos in the hope that a jury would not necessarily view them as apriori criminal (i.e., would overcome “irrational” thought). A sensible (and perhaps called for) “gamble” in the heat of the moment (in which both the defense and Jackson found themselves in), but certainly not one worth asserting in cold contemplation of events after the fact.\n\nI appreciate Jefferson’s ability to forgo criminal accusation of Jackson while simultaneously and forthrightly assessing his very real oddities—something of a sterling example of rational hindsight, and a model example of how one ought to go about negotiating through a “postmodern” mimetic double-bind, with an awareness of sacrificial mechanisms and how they operate on the one hand, versus a need to assess the humanity (or monstrousness) of human behaviors which cannot so clearly be assigned “criminal” currency on the other. Jefferson’s refusal to take sides is evident in passages like this:\n\nIs it possible that Michael Jackson sexually engages children? Yes. He compulsively reimagines the violation of his own innocence, then purifies himself with kind, caring acts. Isn’t it just as possible that he is asexual? That he basks in that innocence and shelters it just as compulsively—that he is tempted but resists time and again? He sets the scene of his own violation, repeats the scenario but rewrites the ending. He rescues himself and the child. And yet, he experiences the excitement—the eros—of being tempted.\n\nWhether or not we are scandalized by the above passage or by Michael Jackson in general, this book challenges us to face, and even articulate (rather than blandly descry), what it is we are most thrilled and terrified by about ourselves—our own individual propensities to monstrousness, even if (especially if) such propensities are initiated by a desire to transcend monstrosity in the first place."
    },
    {
      "slug": "idioms-of-inquiry",
      "title": "Idioms of Inquiry",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The originary hypothesis creates a “new way of thinking,” as Eric Gans has so often said. A way of thinking involves a new vocabulary and grammar; it puts words to new use, generates new questions and imperatives. Any new way of thinking would do this; all the more so must one founded upon an account of the origin of language; all the more so an account of the origin of language that sees language as constitutive of the human. It seems worth trying to generate such a vocabulary and grammar through linguistic terms themselves—all discourse must be conducted through ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives, so the way these utterances work in relation to each other must provide us with an exhaustive account of any discourse; and if of any discourse, of all human activity. That we can do it does not necessarily we that we should—but I’m going to proceed on the assumption that it’s worth the effort.\n\nLet’s start with a simple observation: it must be possible to read any sentence as an answer to a question. This is the case insofar as the first predication, the negative ostensive posited by Gans in The Origin of Language , is itself a response to a question. Questions, moreover, are “softened” imperatives, or imperatives cognizant of the possibility that they won’t be obeyed. Think of how far just these observations would already take us: if the sentence is designed so as to answer questions (I don’t think “answer” is quite originary enough for our purposes here, but we can leave that aside for now), then any sentence might be answering more than one—each word in the sentence could be read in terms of the question it is answering, of the anticipated follow up question it is answering; word placement could be read in terms of answers to questions regarding how to answer the question, which would in turn reveal something of the relation between the interlocutors.\n\nWhich imperatives get obeyed, which get resisted, which get mistaken, deliberately or accidentally, and so on; which imperatives get prolonged into the uncertainty of the question? I would suggest that focusing on such questions would teach us far more than all the speculations and accusations regarding “power relations” occupying so much of postmodern discourse.\n\nImperatives, in turn, can be grounded in ostensives: following the cry of “Fire!” (one of Gans’ most used examples) we would expect “Follow me!,” “Head for the exit!,” “Stay close to the ground!,” “Call 911!,” etc. Even more commonplace imperatives (to take another of Gans’ privileged examples: the surgeon requesting “Scalpel!”) could be understood in these terms: if the surgeon needs a scalpel it’s because he realize that “it’s time!” (to start cutting). Moreover, the boundaries between these modes of utterance are fluid, with one mode often “presenting” as another, as with the rhetorical question. If declaratives can be read as, let’s say, presenting a reality (in which other imperatives might be obeyed) in exchange for the desire involved in the question, they can also be read as embedding imperatives.\n\nIf someone says, “The door is open,” maybe they want me to close the door, maybe they want me to leave, maybe they want me to look over in that direction, but the sentence is telling me to do something. Any sentence is—or, if one likes, any sentence can productively and revealingly be analyzed as doing so; such commands, on one level, are those which any sign puts forth, which is to iterate the sign itself, to operate within the space it opens. Aside from the kind of practical imperatives I just suggested, iterating the sign might involve adding an adjective to the noun, suggesting an ostensive that might confirm the subject-predicate relation articulated by the sentence, along with, perhaps, attending to the next sentence, etc.—these are acts the sentence might be “telling” us to perform.\n\nI consider imperatives to be central here because only imperatives can make anything happen beyond the centered attention effected by the ostensive—indeed, we could say that even the ostensive put forth on the originary scene might be considered unique and expansive enough to imply an imperative like “Stop!” I think that the hypothesis that verbs are originally imperatives is an extremely fruitful one, but leave that aside. More pragmatically, I would propose that the world appears to us as the effect of (indeed, created by) imperatives, with things and people telling each other and themselves what to do all the time. If you start paying attention, you can start noticing how deeply embedded imperatives are in ordinary language—it is imperative that, our imperative here is…., etc. So, if someone does or attempts something, we can analyze it as obedience to some imperative, regarding the source, aim and force of which we could hypothesize. We could also re-conceptualize our fundamental categories of thought and action, including those constitutive of GA, in these terms.\n\nSo, to get started, thinking is obeying the imperative to suspend all imperatives: in this suspension, imperatives approach or occur to one, appearing as possibilities which the thinker in his/her detachment follows; ultimately, the emergence of one imperative after another leads us to the founding imperative of thought, to cease obeying commands directing us to efface the ostensive sign. Politics, we might say, is obedience to the imperative to generate declaratives that can harmonize the incommensurable commands with claims upon us—what we might also discuss as the convertibility of imperatives and declaratives.\n\nMorality follows the command to map imperatives onto declaratives—every imperative, to pass the test of morality, must be seen as derived from some declarative (the “thou shalts” rely on “I am the Lord thy God,” or more recently, “x is wrong”). Ethics, meanwhile, follows the imperative to align imperatives with ostensives (treat others fairly is a moral imperatives, but what counts as fair in a given situation—what we will point to, authenticate, as an instance of unfair treatment, belongs to ethics); we are engaged esthetically when we obey the command to attend from one element of a sign to another, indefinitely; and so on.\n\nWe can analyze the most fundamental concepts of GA in grammatical terms. Desire involves taking a command from the object, a command to model one’s activity on the possession of that object; resentment, that refusal to accept one’s barred access to the object, might be seen as taking a command to superintend the object (if one can’t have it, one can keep one’s eyes on it; if it’s going to be distributed, one can make sure that it is done under the authority of the sign). Imitation takes the command from the model to treat that model as a source of imperatives—the model tells me what to do, and the more it tells me the more commands I demand.\n\nIndeed, we can describe the mimetic crisis in these terms: I must command the model to give me commands that would let me bridge the gap between his commanding being and the consequences of my compliance. Such commands to the source of commands create contending imperatives and turn the commanding gestures into an ostensive one indicating a common source of imperatives. Imitation is thereby converted into iteration, as the model is seen to share the same relation to its model as one has just constructed with it.\n\nSuch grammatical analyses could never be exhaustive as it is impossible to describe ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives without orienting oneself towards the world they constitutive—indeed, even in the definitions I have just offered, a whole series of terms, like “object,” “model” and “source” could only be defined circularly, as the origin of imperatives. This circularity would remain even were we to go on and specify the object and model, but this is the point of a conceptual vocabulary—a conceptual vocabulary derived from the originary hypothesis just needs to be aware that if the world appears to us as result and source of imperatives it is because we are commanding and commanded by it to do so. Since commands are both circumscribed and fallible, this circularity is a constant source of idioms. The same is true for these descriptions I am offering, all of which aim at minimality and for that reason require (command) quite a bit of surrounding discussion.\n\nMy argument here for the generation of linguistically and semiotically grounded idioms of inquiry is part of my argument in my previous post for the sanctification of language in the post-millennial era. Using grammatical terms in this expanded way simultaneously places those terms within language, making them generative rather than descriptive. I am proposing a practice of deliberately putting language to work so as to produce novel idioms that are both means and objects of inquiry. Anyone can conduct the kind of analysis I am outlining—anyone could tell you whether the question they have just asked is really meant to function more like a command, or what they would have to see, hear or experience to better understand what you just said, or what they would like someone to do as a response to something they said, etc. And once one’s attention is directed in this way, there is always something to talk about with others, and it may become very interesting. Language itself, after all, is in the end a mode of inquiry into the kinds of representations that might defer violence.\n\nFinally, it seems to me that such an idiom of inquiry helps us to formulate what might be an enlightening way of thinking about the political condition of postmodernity, which we might define in terms of a crisis in the imperative. One of the most significant consequences of victimary modernity, and its intensification under postmodernity, has been a continual shrinking of the sphere of operative (uncontested, understood, grounded in our tacit knowledge of others, immediately complied with) imperatives. To put it simply, no one is sure enough about whom they should listen to. The task of modernity has been to enhance the imperative force of declaratives, but the same assumptions that led “reason” to attack rather than complement “faith” set declaratives at odds with imperatives, compliance with which must contain a substantial “irrational” element.\n\nEvents are always a sure source of imperatives, upon which victimary discourse relies heavily and has come to produce rather than discover, but that can never be enough. The Left is bossy enough, to be sure, but their imperatives are generated by ostensives on one side (“racist!”; “fascist!”, “homophobe!,” etc.) and formulaic declaratives on the other. “Gay marriage is a human right” is a declarative, and a very characteristic one—it presents itself, grammatically, more as a statement of fact than of opinion; it is a declarative that depends upon a long sequence of previous ones of exactly the same type (“gay marriage” simply filling a slot previously filled by other substantives), creating the reality which provides the effect of “facticity”; and its imperative force is absolute for anyone situated within that “reality” (the human rights world picture), while anyone outside of that reality is irrevocably demonized.\n\nThe fetish the Left has come to make of “lying” (as a strategic accusation, at least) makes sense in these terms as well: distinguishing between truth and lies places politics completely on declarative terrain, while charging the declarative with imperative force.\n\nIn that case, the post-victimary imperative would be to create and obey together the imperatives out of which new declaratives might emerge. I don’t know what those imperatives might be or how we will come to obey them—indeed, how could any of us? The absolute and ultimately arbitrary adherence to some irresistible model which I understand Raoul Eshelman’s notion of “performatism” to be identifying as a “post-postmodernism” seems to me one productive line of inquiry. It might also help to inscribe imperatives within freedom, which we might consider obedience to the imperative to prolong the distance between the imperative and its ostensive authentification.\n\nFreedom, in other words, is not the opposite of obedience—it is obedience to an imperative to honor the imperative order by embedding single imperatives in prior, more inclusive ones and making one’s own obedience into a sign that is never completely formed. I have previously defined freedom as nobody, including yourself, knowing what you are going to do next—and isn’t that exactly what is happening as one follows an increasingly impersonal imperative through ever wider circles of consequences?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "beginnings-in-the-middle-presence-and-the-infinitesimal",
      "title": "Beginnings in the Middle: Presence and the Infinitesimal",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Transcendence suggests something outside of us sustaining us; presence involves all of us sustaining the same object of attention. This mutual attending is overlapping and continuous—your attention attracts mine, which takes on a different shape and intent, which attracts a third in some new manner, which finally comes back to you as you take a new look at the object in question. What keeps this attention chain going? We want to keep things going—we occupy a scene jointly, and we want to remain on the scene because if we are not on a scene we are nowhere. This absolute need for scenicity accounts for the ecstasy of the mystic and the teenager driven by boredom to do just about anything.\n\nWe are always complementing a scene, completing it, creating a scene within a scene, entering a meta-scene purporting to include the scene we are on—drawing upon the resources of the scene so as to remedy some felt deficiency. Indeed, any scene requires some feeling of deficiency; otherwise there’d be no need to keep it going. Transcendence has us protect the separateness of the object; presencing is interested in the continuity of the scene—the object, then, would tend to devolve into a series of more or less premeditated pretexts for doing so.\n\nWe keep scenes going by iterating the sign which constitutes it—there are so many ways of doing this that they couldn’t be catalogued in advance; indeed, any iteration only discovers what it is doing in the midst of doing it. Fulfilling an order iterates a sign, as does defying it; answering a question or asking one; redirecting attention from speaker to statement, or statement to speaker; introducing or subtracting irony; shifting the distribution of silence and speech among the participants in a conversations, etc., etc. All that matters is that each element of the scene can be related to every other element in however round about a manner—if there’s cross referencing, there must be something getting crossed in the references, and we could call that something the articulation of sign and object providing the scene’s “texture.”\n\nOf course, all this is extraordinarily complicated, as complicated as we want or need to make it. On the most elemental level, though, one scene is always passing out of existence and a new one coming into being. Indeed, how would we know when a scene has ended if not from within a new scene? How, then, did we transition from one into another? That a scene must be organized around some mimetic crisis—actual, imminent, anticipated, simulated as a kind of rehearsal—which the sign constitutive of the scene frames and defers sharpens the question: how and when do we know when a scene has been closed and what does this knowledge consist of?\n\nWe must posit, I would suggest, a third scene, a disciplinary scene constituted so as to identify the boundary between the two scenes; to identify the boundary is also to identify the transition from one to the other, because it is the transition that creates the boundary. Let’s say any scene has a beginning, middle and end. Our problem is to get from an end to a new beginning. We could say that a scene ends when a sign is generally shared, which will then set the terms for the restarting of mimetic desire and rivalry—we could posit a clean break between any two scenes. Of course, I am proposing an ideal reconstruction here—there are millions of scenes passing through each other all the time.\n\nThat obvious observation doesn’t help us, though, if we consider the scene the basic “unit” of social, cultural and historical analysis. If we want, for example, to treat the Holocaust as a scene, we must assume it began and ended, and we could argue about where to place those dates. Or, we can say that in a sense it hasn’t ended, and that the sign that emerged in its wake is still active, still tenuous, and has not given way to a new one. We could argue over this as well and, for that matter, develop a mode of analysis that compares differing ways of circumscribing the scene; but, again, these arguments and analyses only make sense if we assume it would be meaningful to posit a beginning and end. And we can’t help but do so—it is built into our language.\n\nThe third, disciplinary, scene, then, has its beginning in the middle of the old scene, its middle on the boundary between the end of the old and the beginning of the new scene, and its end in the middle of the new scene. In the middle of the first scene, the sign has begun to circulate and divergences in its emission have emerged, making an inquiry into its modes of iteration possible; the middle of the disciplinary scene is the midst of its own (reflexive) process of iteration and norming, and in that light the boundary between the two scenes can appear as a distribution of sign users normalizing the previous sign and sign users issuing the new one. To put it another way, when we are single-mindedly focused, as artists in making the minutest and most crucial marks or scientists in detecting the slightest shifts, on figuring out what counts as the sign we are ourselves iterating, then we are prepared to see the new sign emerge on its background.\n\nThe point of these “methodological” speculations is to provide a model for dealing with infinitesimals in originary thinking. I know that infinitesimals are an important topic in mathematics, but I don’t really understand any of that. What I mean by infinitesimals is boundaries and thresholds, where we must account for the emergence of something qualitatively different, the emergence of which, then, cannot be completely accounted for in terms of what came before. Between the mimetic crisis and the sign is an infinitesimal—the crisis is itself insufficient to account for the emergence of the sign. The infinitesimal is inexhaustible—if I were to hypothesize, as the boundary between crisis and sign, a relation between figures on the scene, one of whom is accelerating his grasp and the other recoiling, so as to posit a “turning point”—well, within each of those figures we could likewise posit a boundary, locating someone accelerating his own grasping in response to another’s more intense acceleration but nevertheless slowing his rate of acceleration, and so on, ad infinitum .\n\nThe infinitesimal must be felt at the time but could only be represented after the fact; moreover, representations of the infinitesimal keep producing more, including within our representations. I am proposing, I suppose, albeit in a very different sense than some theologians, a God of the gaps. Insofar as our conflicts always involve a relatively stable object of desire at some measurable distance from us, the infinitesimal interrupts our rush towards the object by, in the manner of Zeno’s paradox, always introducing intervening steps conditioning our possession.\n\nIf there is a way of revering the infinitesimal it is through intensified attention to boundaries and thresholds, including viewing all events and objects through their constitution through boundaries and thresholds. Grammatical analysis is especially well suited for such reverence for the infinitesimal. The imperative emerges out of the “inappropriate” ostensive—there’s a boundary; the interrogative emerges out of a margin of uncertainty in the interlocutor’s obedience to the imperative—another boundary; the negative ostensive barely modifies the interrogative—ditto; finally, I believe the verb emerges as an imperative attached to the negative ostensive in the event of the former’s failure and consequent reversion to an imperative crisis—which would mean that all of the aforementioned boundaries reside in the declarative as well.\n\nWe could note the infinitesimal on the boundaries between these different modes of utterance. An ostensive that “presents” as an imperative (or vice versa); an imperative that presents as an interrogative (and vice versa); the same with interrogatives and declaratives; imperatives embedded at different “levels” within declaratives, and so on. Even more interesting is to treat these boundary manifestations as presenting differently for different interlocutors and readers; even more, to treat these different presentations, and the way they would come together to compose a scene, as maximally consequential (the smallest change that would make the biggest difference is always, it seems to me, what we are looking for as theorists). And then we can iterate those sentences, to test out those consequences. The sentences we work with should be exemplary ones, upon which we can hang larger pieces of text, and entire texts.\n\nSo, we can read declaratives as deferrals of imperatives, dangerous, or insistent and impossible, or incompatible; deferrals effected by extending those imperatives into interrogatives (just letting an imperative sit for a moment sets this conversion in motion); the articulation of noun and verb extends the interrogative to the point where a new imperative set is created: an imperative to iterate the noun, or name, generated in this new linguistic event—an iteration that can involve assent to the “proposition,” its modification or qualification, practical implications, etc. All of these processes are reversible intellectually—such reversals are also iterations—and so we have the makings of a very simple mode of thinking for analytical, interpretative and esthetic purposes.\n\nWe can treat a question like an imperative and see what follows; or we can posit and examine a hypothetical array of imperatives assimilated to a declarative. And any utterance would be bracketed by an ostensive-imperative articulation on one end and an imperative-ostensive articulation on the other, each with its own set of boundaries (when, exactly, can we say an imperative has been obeyed?)—in other words, any sentence can be resolved into a kind of “exclamation” that opens it and leads into an imperative and an ostensive that would “verify” or “authenticate” that the imperative to iterate the sentence has been obeyed.\n\nVery often these analyses or iterations will involve little more than minor word additions and subtractions—“He will come here” can be resolved into “Will he come?” “Come!” (but also “Make him come!,” among other possibilities) and “Here!” The imperatives embedded in sentences can, with little more difficulty, be articulated in various ways: “I will wait” makes sense differently if we see it as a command to “stay here with me!” or “Go ahead without me!” or some oscillation between the two.\n\nAs an example of what can be disclosed through the inquiry into the grammatical infinitesimal: much of the leftist turn in the academy (from “ideology critique” to “cultural studies”) can be reduced to the following, simple imperative: reduce declaratives to imperatives. More expansively, reduce the presumably innocent and apparently ennobling declaratives central to bourgeois life to a series of insidiously concealed imperatives—imperatives to accept your lot, do what you are told, blame the wrong people for your problems, etc., etc. It seems to me we could “demystify” a lot of victimary studies in this way, simply by pointing out that of course declaratives embed imperatives, and they operate much more complexly than dominant assumptions about “dominant assumptions” tend to assume.\n\n(On the other hand, Louis Althusser’s notion, from his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” of “interpellation” as a “mechanism” by which we are made recognizable within the social order might become interesting in a new way.) And if we were to treat these leftist theses as the command manuals they also are, what might we reveal? Such an approach can include complex, detached analyses, but also the kinds of performative gestures the Left has gotten much better at than conservatives. And, as I have already suggested, this “method” would rival “ordinary language” and “speech act” theories in drawing upon any language user’s tacit understanding of the way language works: we all know when, to take just one example, in hearing a simple declarative sentence, we feel like we have been given an order or ultimatum. And we are all capable of becoming much more attentive to such things, in ways and with results that would utterly confound any assumptions about “power relations.”\n\nNow, if we convert these terms as I suggested in my previous post, into a conceptual vocabulary capable of registering all social relations, we see the significance of the infinitesimal on another level. If we can see politics as the compulsion to ensure the convertibility of imperatives and declaratives, through the formulation of declaratives that can include incompatible imperatives, then we can scrutinize political discourse very closely in terms of which of our imperatives are convertible and which aren’t—we could assume that any political principle would reconcile only the most urgent imperatives, leaving political discourse frayed around the edges.\n\nThe main tasks of politics—the generation of new declaratives, or “principles”—would involve tying up those loose ends without letting the already established ones come undone. “Health care is a right” is a declarative, and it must bear some relation to the declarative “all men are created equal”—what relation? If we could find exemplary imperatives that could be “backed” by one and not the other, or that could backed by both—we would have answers, or at least sites of discussion. Perhaps new formulations of either or both of these declaratives would embed the imperatives that don’t seem to be indicated by both—we could treat such problems as assignments, very literally: compose a declarative sentence that would lead to this set of imperatives or that would accommodate these several; we can then impose further rules, limiting the length of the sentence, or insisting it include certain words or kinds of words, based upon an esthetics and history of the political sentence, etc. Thus would political discourse meet grammatical analysis, as the “middle” of our grammatical analysis would produce new political “beginnings.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-economic-imperative",
      "title": "The Economic Imperative",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Post-gift economy, there are two ways of organizing economic relations: through the free market, or bureaucratically. Bureaucratic economics, the “command economy,” organizes distribution of labor and resources through a hierarchical series of imperatives; it is either a parasitic excrescence (even if serving otherwise indispensable purposes) upon the market, or it is constructed in the ruins of the market, and leaves nothing but ruin in its own wake. All this is well known by now. But there are some paradoxes to unpack here. The free market emerged as a concept and rallying cry against the privileges of aristocracy, monarchy and Church, as part of the call for universalism against particularism.\n\nThe actually existing market itself has no such unanimous support, though—everyone has some particular interest in manipulations of the market in their favor, in rent-seeking. At a certain point, we could imagine, the competition to achieve rents through government granted privileges, explicit or implicit (say, in the way in which regulations favor larger businesses capable of paying the costs of compliance), would choke off the market altogether. What blocks this outcome, we can further assume, is expansion and innovation—through the 19 th century, the creation and discovery of new markets, in the US West and for European countries imperialism, and increasingly important, technological transformation and the creation of new needs and desires. The rent-seekers obstruct innovation, but could never anticipate all the possible channels it might take, and the innovators will defend their place on the market until competitors emerge and they become rent-seekers in turn.\n\nAt any particular moment, then, even while one producer may use free market rhetoric to chip away at the privileges of another, the consistent and at least partially conscious defenders of the market will be few and not coordinated with each other: some small businesses, innovators with a head start on potential competitors, risk-takers who would like rewards to match risk, migrant or in some way “sub-standard” labor that relies upon enterprises where minimum wage, unions and other labor regulations are overlooked. There is one other “class” with an interest in preserving the market—the consumers. The availability of choices on the marketplace, or the decrease in the number of choices, is an unmistakable marker of the quality of life.\n\nEven here, though, this interest is inconsistently advanced—prices, after all, can be lowered by “command,” choices reduced through regulation and privileges granted to one producer over others, and these privileges are often granted due to the health and safety (and, now, environmental) consciousness of consumers. The benefits of economic command are immediately and intensely felt by very specific economic actors; but we never know what we have lost due to restrictions on freedom. In the end, it is perhaps the pragmatism of politicians, who would know from personal experience how dependent their own pet projects are on wealth creation, who more than anyone else are responsible for us having as much of a free market as we have had so far.\n\nEven more, the generalization of the free market requires a class of “protectors,” located within the imperative order, whose values cannot be squared with the market. Soldiers can’t be given economic incentives to kill more of the enemy. Most social orders probably have a separate class of “armed men,” but in a market order no political superiority can be granted to those who put themselves on the line to protect the rights of everyone else. The reciprocal resentment thereby bred will only in very extreme conditions be a threat to social order, but it is permanent and consequential nevertheless—those living on the market don’t want to think too much about those “rough men” who keep them safe at night and would certainly prefer not to encounter them in their daily lives, while a certain tribalism is probably inevitable for the latter.\n\nThis is worth mentioning here because the values of the imperative order shape attitudes more generally—whatever the economic effects of the loyalty of some to American car companies, or the insistence that no immigrant be allowed in until all Americans have jobs, these are not economic attitudes . And it is also true that one of the most formidable obstacles to the establishment of market relations and its normative supports is the persistence of social relations based on honor and kinship, or residual forms of the “big man”—whether in slums in Western countries or the Muslim world.\n\nIt seems to me obvious, then, that we still need a political economy—we need to think politics and economics in an integrated way, otherwise we are likely to make one of the following errors: one, seeing politics as an arena where we guide, fix, organize, reconcile, etc., an economic system that goes off track, gets broken, and is continually getting caught in its “internal contradictions”; and, two, seeing government intervention as an arbitrary interference with natural economic laws. I’m certainly much more sympathetic to error number two, but my answer to calls for laissez faire is to call attention to how much political action would be necessary to approximate that—there would have to be forms of collective action that in a very sustained, persistent and sophisticated way counter—by getting officials elected, by maintaining pressure on them, through targeted policy proposals, grassroots organization, at times civil disobedience, etc.—the events constantly generated by the rent seekers.\n\nThose who think that the welfare and regulatory state could simply be rolled back through persuasion of our fellow citizens and we could all return to our private pursuits haven’t really thought it through. Even leaving aside the perpetual resentments underlying rent-seeking, a free market politics would have to support ongoing debates over what would inevitably be enormously complex questions regarding the reshaping of contract law as the state’s reach receded. Also, the cultural politics of free marketers will face its own complications: we know very well that certain habits are required for participation in the free market, but if we cede areas of life like education to the private sphere we concede that anti-capitalist forces might be favorably positioned to conquer substantial cultural terrain. (And that’s leaving aside for now the problems of a pro-capitalist, pro-freedom foreign policy).\n\nI would like to see if originary grammar can help us with political economy. I would offer the following formulation: the economic imperative is to arrange the imperatives one obeys so as to maximize ostensivity. On one level, this is a phrasing, in terms of originary grammar, of a basic understanding of “economy” as presupposing scarcity: we must (we are compelled, we are “commanded” to) gather our resources, use our skills, refine our skills, invent modes of cooperation, convert all of our limitations into positives to the extent possible in order to meet our needs, preserve our ability to meet tomorrow’s needs, and so on.\n\nWe have a market economy when others’ actions are inextricable from my assemblage of imperatives—if lots of people want something, that becomes an imperative for me, and it affects the hierarchy of all the imperatives compelling me. Unlike the gift economy, in the market economy the imperatives are impersonal and incalculable; but also more contingent and harder to norm. And we should use the word “imperative” literally—when someone says “I have to have that!” they really mean it, even if it turns out there are other, overriding compulsions. Meanwhile, let’s use the notion of “ostensivity” in its most precise, originary sense—not merely referring to something, but bringing into being a world by deferring some crisis through a gesture.\n\nWealth is a sign—for oneself, for others. My desires model a certain kind subjectivity predicated upon possession—possessing wealth, displaying wealth, viewing the wealth of others, always conveys meanings, in the kind of intuitive, immediate and often unassailable (until it is too late, anyway) sense we associate with the ostensive. What I am calling “maximizing ostensivity,” then, could be considered “ostentation,” and middle class frugality is as ostentatious as the conspicuous consumption of billionaires—it communicates discipline, concern for the next generation, belief in the rules of the game, etc., and the imperatives pressing upon the economic subject are articulated for the sake of ostentation.\n\nLabor is still problematic, insofar as it is driven, for most people, by overwhelming imperatives with limited opportunities for ostentation. For the most part, people have much less choice of the kind of work they do than in their consumption practices. Labor is, literally, “meaningless”: it is rarely set up so as to put forth signs. Hopefully this will change, but only slowly, I suspect—the ideal, probably never to be reached, would be that everyone be entrepreneurial, self-employed, and creative. The abolition of wage labor is an admirable goal, even if making everyone employees of the state won’t get us there. In other words, the more the desire for one job or line of work or another enters into one’s imperative space on other than sheer financial grounds, the better.\n\nOnce all the imperatives are placed in the same space for each individual, we can map economic activity in much more complex ways. Family, habits and location emit pertinent imperatives, but we already knew that (even if economists don’t quite know what to do with it)—so do ethics and morality. A lot of government intervention in the economy is premised on the assumption that it is better for people to choose some commodities over others, and that people don’t always know which are better; this is obviously true, and the only problem is with the assumption is that we can know who will know better. But there are better ways to “politicize” and “moralize” the economy.\n\nHere, I would like to draw upon the notion of “originary advertising” that Chris Fleming and John O’Carroll suggested at the latest GA conference. The only real contribution made by the Left to contemporary politics has been in its pioneering use of boycotts—whether it be the strike, the Montgomery bus boycott, the boycott of South Africa in the 80s, and, more recently (and, of course, far less obviously virtuous), attempts to gin up shunning campaigns against “socially irresponsible” companies like Wal-Mart.\n\nWhatever one thinks of any particular cause, one can’t deny that the boycott is a completely voluntary and non-coercive form of political action—it may be experienced as coercive by its targets, but that just means that a new set of imperative have been introduced into your “table.” If you wish to sacrifice sales in order to continue with practices you consider necessary and justified, that’s up to you. (You can market yourself as a company willing to stand up to unwarranted intimidation—buy our products and stand alongside us!) My point here, though, is that advertising, that practice wherein the seller presents potential buyers with a model of what it would mean to possess the commodity or, to put it another way, where the producer or seller thinks about how its products and organization take shape in others’ self-representations, is where boycotts would show their results.\n\nMore commons and skillful uses of boycotts might lead to all kinds of economic “irrationalities” (according to what model of rationality, though?) but it might be that a richer sense of the assemblage of imperatives one articulates with each new sale and purchase would create a more rational system overall. When some powerful activist group targets a corporation, there appears to be a conflict between the company’s duties to its shareholders and to some notion of social responsibility, but if ignoring the demands of that group ends up reducing sales, those duties are no longer competing. Nor need things end there—other groups are free to weigh down on the other side, and the company itself is free to make its case to the public; others can propose boycotts of companies that cave into the noxious activist group, etc.\n\nBoycotts can get more sophisticated and targeted (new companies would spring up to consult on them), and companies will more and more market themselves as “pro-family,” “pro-community,” or anything else. Of course companies do this now, but given the kind of development I am proposing, these claims would come under closer scrutiny all the time, and branding become an activity carried out by consumers as much as producers.\n\nThe moral imagination might think it needs to discipline the market, but the opposite is likely to be the case more often—we will become more conversant in the economics of morality. Indeed, we could imagine getting to the point where no moral claim for reform will be taken seriously without the proposal, at least hypothetical, as a kind of metric, of a boycott that would likely do more good than harm. And perhaps this is the kind of vocabulary that we would need in order to speak seriously about regulation, including in the financial system. In other words, before we could expect serious answers to the question of what kind of regulation we need to prevent crises similar to the one we are witnessing today from occurring in the future, we should be asking about the moral economy we would have to share, at least minimally, before the other question would become meaningful.\n\nThe moral economy, then, the mapping of our imperative space upon declaratives, would have to become part of economics. (To think about it grammatically, we would be moving from “I want x,” which is technically a declarative but just barely [if x were in view, you wouldn’t need the sentence], to “I would compose myself x-ly,” which might open a multilayered ethical and esthetic discussion rather than prompting a rapid-fire comparison of preferences.)\n\nPerhaps the assumption that certain moral and ethical dispositions (certain patterns in the relations between ostensives, imperatives and declaratives) are required for a healthy political economy would help account for and benefit from exploring the one time and place in history, so far as I know, that genuinely approximated a free market: the 19 th century Anglosphere, the U.S. and Great Britain (and Canada?) in particular. One of the greatest accomplishments of early modern bourgeois culture was the conversion of aristocratic into republican values, as notions like “nobility” and “virtue” came to be attached to action and character as opposed to being markers of social class.\n\nThe “gentleman” and the “lady” were critical results of this process, and these figures eased the transition from status to individuality, maintaining their currency until very recently—only the cultural revolution of the 60s decisively dealt them their death blow (how long before the terms no longer even grace our public restrooms?). The gentleman and the lady domesticated ancient notions of “honor,” directing them away from violence perpetuated in the name of tribal and patriarchal prerogatives and protection towards a harmonious balance between public and private life, centered on the division of sexual roles in the nuclear family.\n\nMy point here is not that we can revive ladies and gentlemen, but simply that no account of free market economics would be complete without them— without the assumptions of upward mobility and generational transmission through discipline and effort, including female responsibility for sexual deferral and “manly” self-reliance, implicit in these “categories,” the daunting rigors of Victorian laissez-faire economics would be unthinkable. An originary political economy today, then, would likewise have to study the novel forms of individuality and family life emergent today. An unsentimental and disinterested observation of today’s children and youth—if we can impose upon ourselves the discipline restraining us from either marveling at their supposedly splendid new qualities or flunking them due to their deviation from a more familiar model—would certainly be a good place to start, especially given the almost absolute independence and simulated internal coherence accredited to the world of teenagers in particular by the contemporary market. Maybe the representation of children holds at least one key towards unlocking today’s political economy."
    },
    {
      "slug": "why-the-law-is-enough",
      "title": "Why the Law is Enough",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "As readers of my blogging (here and at the JCRT Live blog) and my most recent essay in Anthropoetics (“Marginalist Politics, Originary Grammar”), are aware, I have been compelled to address the issue of imperatives—in ethics, in economics, in politics and in thinking. This is part of my project of generating a grammatical conceptual vocabulary, and the next step I would like to take along that line is to make my exploration of the imperative (as exemplary of everything that actually happens within the frame or space constituted ostensively) more complex and articulate; and, at the same time, to bring it more clearly into accord with other terms that have been important to my political thinking, in particular, covenant—which at first glance is located at the antipodes from what I have been calling the imperative order.\n\nFinally, these questions have converged, for me, with the polemic, which seems to me as important and underdeveloped as ever, between the Christian and Judaic revelations, which has in turn become urgent to me due to my growing attention to, and admiration for, Christianity. I hope my framing of that polemic will take my originary grammar in new, productive and hopefully more evidently “relevant” directions.\n\nFirst of all, I confess to have neglected the rich terrain of the imperative itself, which ranges from the brute command—which could be issued to an animal (“fetch!”)—to God’s command to the not yet existing world in Genesis: “let there be…” (really, just “Be…!”). “Have it your way” is, grammatically, an imperative, as are most forms of granting permission; while being “charged” with a task is somewhat different from “obeying” orders. Think, also, about tellingly obsolete words like “heed” and “hearken,” which are used to frame imperatives but call for something much more than “obedience.” So, how to organize this field?\n\nThe distinction that presents itself here regards the relation between imperatives and their accompanying ostensives. Any imperative requires an ostensive signifying the fulfillment of the imperative (someone has to attest that I did as I was bid); but some imperatives require, in addition, an ostensive signifying acceptance of the imperative in advance of its fulfillment—an endorsement or acknowledgement, as opposed to mere a posteriori verification. An imperative requiring acknowledgement presupposes two separate and autonomous persons, whereas as one calling only for verification after the fact implies complete domination, whether of one individual by the other, or both by some exigent circumstances (“let’s get out of here!”—the imperative seems to come from the reality itself, with the individual conveying it the equivalent of a ventriloquist’s dummy, however unjust the comparison to the person with the wits to respond to the emergency).\n\nThe acknowledged imperative implies a minimal equality (even, say in the soldier’s “Yes sir!”), while equality is either absent or beside the point in unacknowledged ones (as it would be as meaningless to speak about the “equality” of scattered masses fleeing a storm or a massacre as to speak of the equality of sheep in a flock).\n\nThere are other important distinctions to be made. For example, among acknowledged imperatives, we might distinguish between those which acknowledge the imperative and those which acknowledge their source. (“Yes sir!” affirms the source of authority, and is the same form used to reply to all particular imperatives, while less formalized responses would limit obedience to the specific task—“I’ll get right on that,” with the emphasis of “that.”) We might distinguish between various periods allowed between imperative and its fulfillment, between different protocols for verification (must someone other than the source of the imperative be involved in the verification of its fulfillment?), and so on.\n\nBut I suspect we would be able to present all these distinctions as differentiations among acknowledged and unacknowledged imperatives—for example, a very prolonged period between imperative and fulfillment would seem to require acknowledgement, and the distinction between acknowledging the source and acknowledging the purpose of the imperative would really be a distinction between affirming a prior acknowledgement of an imperative order (an authority) and an acknowledgment concerned only with this particular imperative.\n\nSo, I have consented when I have acknowledged the imperative before fulfilling it and when such acknowledgment is expected by the giver of the imperative. It seems to me reasonable to assume that the notion of “consent” would have evolved out of asymmetrical situations involving imperatives that could no longer simply be imposed. The broader sense of consent, say in the exchange of goods or promises, breaks with the simple asymmetry of the imperative not by transcending that asymmetry but by introducing a model that all parties are obeying equally: the model of he-who-refuses-to-participate-in-scapegoating, or, even more, who-is-willing-to-take-the-scapegoat’s-place. We can only have freedom, a free society, equality or isonomy, once that model is in place and we are deriving the imperatives of our being from it.\n\nThe Jewish discovery, formulation and resolution of this “problematic” remains unparalleled in its radicalism: it insists upon the minimality of the model of God at the center of the human scene. The Bible provides models of God’s actions and God’s Being—we could write a “biography” of God drawing upon Biblical materials, and hence we could imitate Him—but always as a concession to present human capacities, and always as a way of drawing God’s people closer to that which make specific models of God less important: the law. By following the law, Israel is to become a model to humanity for living without representable models: that is, models so minimal that they offer only general imperatives (do justice, choose life, etc.) that preclude (like the American Constitution’s prohibition on Bills of Attainder) singling out individuals and which each recipient must take upon him/herself. This is only possible through the abolition of human sacrifice or scapegoating, through the felt need of a mode of divinity upon which hands could not be laid.\n\nThe Judaic revelation, then, insists that once the law is revealed, no further revelations are necessary—the working out of the law is the realization and further perfection of the revelation. The Christian objection to this argument, as I understand it, is that the law inevitably loses contact with its source and becomes formulaic, faithless and, in perhaps the most charged accusation in the New Testament, “hypocritical”: your punishment of those outside of the law just reflects your satisfaction at being inside it. In privileging “faith” over law, Christianity obviously isn’t promoting lawlessness; rather, it is arguing that only faith can give “spirit” to the “body” of the law—you must obey the law, surely, but not grudgingly and with an eye towards the approval of others; rather, you should, in your obedience to the law, fully put forth a sign of your acknowledgement of He who stands behind and transcends the law, and transcends your own attempts to fulfill it. Indeed, this means (and here is where it seems to me Christianity is really at odds with Judaism) enacting the limits of the law through “faithful” actions the law couldn’t have anticipated and has no authority to forbid.\n\nThe Jewish counter-argument, it seems to me, lies in its sacralization of language—Hebrew is the holy tongue, while prohibitions against translating the Bible in Christian countries concerned the authority of the clergy and not the authenticity of the original language. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that Christianity’s privileging of the signified over the signifier is almost total.) And this sacralization is inseparable from writing, while the covenant is inseparable from the written text. Written language makes language available as an object, divisible and given to various articulations—it is not only letters that we can only talk about as a result of writing, but syllables, words and sentences as well.\n\nDavid Olsen argues that the logic governing writing in its representation of speech is to control the interlocutionary force of the utterance recorded, which is to say to reduce the utterance’s repetition by readers to the original linguistic event. But it’s easy enough to turn this logic around and suggest that eventually writers would discover that this also meant the possibility of multiplying without limit the linguistic events generated by the text. And the writers of the Talmud certainly did discover this.\n\nThe distinction between “oral” and “written” law in Jewish tradition paradoxically privileges the oral while acknowledging that what has been written down has been most worth preserving, and therefore the core of the oral law itself. This concession to necessity also licenses a writing that mimics orality, in its dialogic and digressive character, while exploiting the full resources of the written text—sight puns, the possibilities of removing a single letter from a word, starting a sentence at various points, the numerical values assigned to letters and so on. This honors the law by continually enhancing it and keeping us within its text.\n\nAnd the other critical distinction of Rabbinic method, between “halakha” and “aggadah,” or law and story, does the same—the aggadah narrativizes the law, not only by playing out scenarios predicated upon one or another interpretation, but by transforming its progenitors, the post-exilic Rabbis, into almost biblical sized heroes, and transforming the actual heroes of the Bible into Rabbis, arguing the finer points of the law. Indeed, God Himself often enters the scene, sometimes in familiar and even homely roles, other times in more menacing forms, but always in the manner necessary to hypothesize an origin of the law that sanctions both the law’s irrevocable nature and the legitimacy of endless discussion of its application.\n\nThe law is sufficient, that is, to continually generate hypotheses of the law’s emergence and revised terms of its evolution, to maintain its divine sanction while reducing that sanction to maintaining the collegiality and accountability of its interpreters and the inexhaustibility of the shared text.\n\nIf consent is when we endorse or affirm the imperative we have received, covenant is when we endorse or affirm the model that serves as a source of imperatives: to treat each other as caretakers of the law. The step from consent to covenant lies in our demand that our imperator and model instruct us in fulfilling his commands subsequent to our own, inevitably failed attempt to do so. In making such a demand upon our model one realizes the inadequacy of the model to the demand, and the need for a formal model we can all share. The model for the shared source of imperatives can’t be a super-imperator, because such a model would shut down the demands that called him into being; the model we are looking for must be one upon whom we have in our turn imposed impossible imperatives, and whom we would destroy in insisting upon their fulfillment. That is, it is a negative model, a potential victim, which regulates all imperatives.\n\nThe argument between Judaism and Christianity, then, involves how to construct this negative model. For Christianity, it has to be someone who exposes our hypocrisy in treating the law as if it were just a set of automatic commands. For Judaism, it is someone who asked for nothing more than the full measure of the law, and failed to receive it—maybe because of the hypocrisy of the law’s guardians, but maybe due to the political “sin” of factionalism, or the lapse into mimeticism the Bible refers to as “wishing to be like all the other nations,” or some other form of idolatry. Christianity would have us embrace imperatives that we have not the power to obey—our sinfulness interferes with the faith we are commanded to have in God and the love we are commanded to live by.\n\nA Christian society would therefore have us honor models that are incommensurable with the compromises of daily life, such as celibacy and monasticism. For Judaism, everyone can attend to the law at least a bit, and that means Judaism allows us to protect ourselves from and direct our anger toward conscious and calculated enemies of the law, an important category of social being that Christianity would easily group with “sinners” more generally or even sympathize with as the victims of “Pharisees.” As models for modernity, then, Christianity proposes Romanticism, also a scourge of hypocrisy and inauthenticity; Judaism proposes constitutionalism, founding as law, writing, power and the limits of power.\n\nIn the end, we need both sides of this polemic—we need for them to remain separate, irreconcilable, and reciprocally admiring. One way of articulating the relationship I am proposing is through an examination of the category of “righteous gentile,” invented to honor those members of “unmarked” groups who risked themselves, their families and their communities to save the “marked” during the Nazi genocide. No doubt many of the righteous were Christians, performing what they saw as their Christian duty, and I obviously have no quarrel with this reading of the Christian revelation (for that matter, many were probably secular humanists close enough to humanism’s origin in the further “universalization” of Christianity).\n\nBut the “logic” of the category , if not the action, seems to me Jewish—what is Jewish, that is, is the codification of this action as a world-changing category of which the law can take cognizance. As a legal and political category which, for example, one nation might recognize in citizens of another, hostile nation, the notion of the “righteous gentile” might support a worldly, even “realistic” politics that would prevent atrocities. At the same time, though, does the centrality of communal self-preservation to the Jewish revelation make Jews qua Jews less likely to put themselves and everyone surrounding them at risk in this way for an Other threatened by some third party?\n\n(I am too ignorant to know whether Jewish law accounts for such a possibility—say, protecting a Christian “heretic” who is seeking refuge from the Inquisition—but I suspect it is ill-prepared for it.) (But what about those secularized Jews who have helped extend Christian principles to public life, thereby accelerating modernity? Would this not have been necessary for the universalization of the “righteous gentile”?) Maybe we need the singularity of Christian actions along with the systematization of Jewish codification.\n\nI’m not sure who would be interested in this argument today. It’s a shame it has never actually been had, except perhaps subterraneously, in the complementary emergence of Christianity and Talmudic Judaism in the early centuries of the Common Era. The Christians demonized the Jews and the Jews pretended to ignore the Christians, but one suspects they were watching and listening to each other a lot more closely than that. At any rate, this polemic would provide a better frame for handling our political and ethical discourse than any that we presently have—and might add some new dimensions to the polemics that have become canonical, like “Athens” vs. “Jerusalem.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "hunters-and-craftsmen",
      "title": "Hunters and Craftsmen",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve just finished reading Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class . Obviously, I can’t claim that this puts me in the vanguard of anything, but I found his organization of economic analysis around the categories of, on one side, “invidious distinction,” and, on the other side, the “instinct of workmanship,” very provocative. Economic life is organized around “invidious” distinctions when human life is predatory: based on hunting, war and conquest. Under such conditions, some men gain possessions and reputations that place them in a superior position to other men, and the way they manifest this superiority is through conspicuous leisure: doing lots of things that serve no utilitarian purpose and, indeed, flaunt their contempt for utilitarian purpose.\n\nFor me, the analysis gets interesting when Veblen associates players on the market, or those driven by “pecuniary” interests, with the class of “predators,” and hence “archaic” by the standards of a “modern industrial” society. He thereby places the entrepreneur, banker, broker, etc., at odds with those driven by the instinct of workmanship, who are interested in working out and applying causal relations: scientists, engineers, etc. The economic figures driven by pecuniary interests are, then, simply hunters and warriors in a new, quasi-peaceful guise. As, of course, are “administrators,” i.e., bureaucrats and the government.\n\nI suspect that a quick look at a transcript of some casual conversation among Wall Street brokers would confirm the plausibility of this classification, as is our use of terms like “robber barons” to describe the great corporate founders of the nineteenth century, idioms like “make a killing,” etc. For Veblen, exchanges on the market are indistinguishable from fraud, an essentially predatory relation to others—all lines separating fraudulent form legitimate exchange are essentially contingent and pragmatic. Are we so sure we could we say he is wrong about that? He also associates gambling with the predatory disposition, and it is easy to wonder how much of our current economic crisis, especially that part attributable to the mysterious “derivatives,” is a result of nothing more than very high stakes gambling (with other people’s money, of course).\n\nWhat is further interesting in Veblen’s account is his classification of Christianity as a religion grounded in the leisure class: in this case, God is king/conqueror, and worship of Him, with its incessant emphasis on His infinite power, is the vicarious leisure of the servant class. Veblen has quite a bit of fun with the clothing worn by priests, the architecture and decoration of Churches, and so on, in the process of establishing this claim. Charity and philanthropy, further, fit into this characterization: they are more conspicuous leisure, dedicated to promoting the honor and value of the benefactor warrior/king.\n\nOf course, those familiar with GA will notice several things here, which might be invisible to others. First of all, we know that all human existence is based on “invidious distinction,” which enables us to reverse Veblen’s hierarchy of the two economic types. Veblen argues that the “instinct for workmanship” is the more originary trait, characterizing human existence at a more primitive and peaceful stage, while the predatory element in human existence comes must later, and is ultimately a mere variant of the former. For us, social relations based on invidious distinction are also based on the shaping of such distinctions into such forms as mitigate the inter-communal violence they would otherwise incite—if there were nothing but invidiousness, there would be no community at all.\n\nThe instinct of workmanship, meanwhile, we can easily locate in the esthetic element of the originary gesture, which is there from the beginning, as the gesture needs to “propose” some symmetry or harmonization of the group in order to take hold, but is nevertheless secondary to the felt need to interrupt the imminent violence itself. This also means that the instinct for workmanship involves, first of all, a social relation between the maker and his/her fellows, rather than the direct relation to his/her materials and the manipulation of the causal relations articulating them, as Veblen would have it.\n\nWe could, further, identify Veblen’s account of the predatory/pecuniary interest with what we can call the “Big Man” stage of history—a stage of history which we have by now means exited (indeed, modern constitutionalist politics and the free market aim at harnessing Big Men more than at eliminating them), as Veblen, along with so many others, fervently hoped. His discussion of Christianity and monotheism more generally is illuminating in this connection, since both Judaism and Christianity are invented as responses to the unimpeded rule of Big Men and the imperial moralities such rule generated. If, as Eric Gans has argued, the centrality of scapegoating to social order only holds true for communities thusly organized, then faiths predicated upon a repudiation of the scapegoating morality of the Big Man presuppose his continued existence (and periodic chastisement).\n\nIf the total replacement of the Big Man as a social phenomenon by esthetic, conciliatory gestures and the reality revealed by norms of scientific inquiry (the instinct for workmanship) were to occur, then it makes perfect sense to assume that the monotheistic faiths would fade into oblivion.\n\nI’m not going to argue for the impossibility of such a development here—I’ll just say that the invention of the Big Man as an occasionally necessary medium of social deferral (albeit elected and subject to recall and liable to criticism and disobedience, or subject to the discipline of the market and the threat of and bankruptcy) can no more be revoked than the invention of nuclear weapons. I’m more interested in the implications of Veblen’s classification of entrepreneurial and financial activity for the mode of economic theory I’m most interested in now, the Austrian theory of Mises and Hayek. I assume that these thinkers, and those of their “school,” would vigorously repudiate Veblen’s claim: for these free market thinkers and advocates, there is nothing more peaceful then the activity of exchange: indeed, exchange is the antithesis of violence, it is what we do once we have successfully suppressed violence as a factor in human relations.\n\nI want to explore the possibility that Veblen is right, and they are wrong—and the plausibility of this hypothesis lies not only in the very structure of competition, in which you can win just as easily by disabling your opponent as by improving yourself, and not only in the enormous destruction which can be deliberately wrought in the financial arena, but also in the very evident attitude of those who operate there, which seems to be one of obligatory triumphalism, machismo, threat, bluff, swagger, etc. (Here, we would have to distinguish between those entrepreneurs who are closer to the workmanlike aspects of the job and those closer to the financial dimension—but no entrepreneur could indefinitely avoid the latter aspect.)\n\n(In a similar vein, the Austrians like to believe that private property rights derive from occupancy and/or use of territory or object—but doesn’t it make more sense to say the property was first of all what one could take, defend, and persuade others to accept as a fait accompli—and that rights then emerged to mediate between property owners?) I also reject Veblen’s assumption that this position is obsolete. So, if the pecuniary/predatory is here to stay, and is inseparable from a proper understanding of freedom, how do we incorporate that into our economic, ethical and cultural analyses?\n\nEvery commercial community must come to terms with the distinction between fraud and fair exchange—it is inevitable that such a distinction be made simply because even dealing among merchants would become impossible otherwise. Even for purposes of fraud, reputation as a fair dealer is essential (Veblen associates “honor” with predatory/pecuniary fields; indeed, of what relevance is “honor” to an engineer, architect, dentist or plumber, except insofar as we confront them as merchants—we can see their work for ourselves); and you can only gain such a reputation if “fair dealer” has some shared meaning. Such a distinction is inevitably rough and relative—there are a lot of things that could interfere with the fulfillment of a contract that couldn’t have been anticipated, whereas the parameters of expectations for the “workman” I just mentioned parenthetically can be much more tightly drawn.\n\nThe levels of required trust and acceptable risk will be drawn differently under different conditions—again, most unlike the standards of good workmanship: the good dentist or carpenter is good in Boston or in Moscow, and their clients will be able to distinguish their work from more shoddy varieties.\n\nThis line will be drawn, like all lines, by events: in the midst of a commercial culture given over, or in danger of falling into, general fraudulence and corruption, someone and/or some group will come to exemplify fair practices. The establishment of fair practices would first of all be negative—we don’t do all the things our competitors do. But it would eventually become subject to verifiable norms, and embedded in relatively transparent practices, and advertised as an intrinsic part of your experience, as a customer, with that business. The fair dealers would seek each other out and, I think, would be genuinely “authenticated” by the business community and circle of customers once they had weathered some storm—once they had, for example, refused the compromise involved in obtaining some government sponsored monopoly, or abstained from participating in some boom or panic that wiped out other businesses, and ended up intact, perhaps even stronger, precisely due to the values implicit in their “fairness.”\n\nAgain unlike workmanship, though, where skills may deteriorate, but in fairly predictable ways, the “capital” of “fairness” can erode rapidly, and often as a result of what seemed at the time to be inconsequential decisions (cutting a corner here, lobbying the government there, when things got a little rough…).\n\nIt further seems to me that the creation of such a capital fund of fairness will be in inverse proportion to government involvement in establishing and enforcing norms. The government’s secondary function, indeed (second only to preventing violent assaults on citizens’ rights), is the prevention of fraud, which violates the sanctity of contracts. But such a task would prove impossible to perform, or at least perform adequately, if standards of fairness had not already evolved within the commercial community itself, so that the government is essentially policing the margins of the community in accord with the norms of the community itself—it’s very hard to see on what basis the government (government lawyers, to be more precise—yet another set of predators who would need to establish a set of internal norms) could generate such norms in a non-arbitrary way.\n\nBut, of course, the government’s role will also be established through events—for example, through its protection of some “fair dealer” in danger of being scapegoated within the commercial community. The relationship between business norms and the legal system, then, is an index of the moral health of the economy; and the moral health of the economy is itself an economic “factor”: certainly, much wealth is lost to corruption and fraud, and gained by fair dealing.\n\nIn this way, the Christian morality that has emerged and sustained itself as a check on predatory Big Men (think of how focused both Judaism and Christianity are on the “haughty”), could become an economic value in its own right—perhaps one we could even learn to calculate. Surely some economist could (or, for all I know, already has) invent a formula for determining the value of the moral economy (of course, we would need to be anthropologists to devise measures for the moral economy). What is x number of people willing to leave cutthroat firms when they cross the line and become, not “community organizers,” but more honest versions of the business they have “exodused” from, “worth”?\n\nOr x number of individuals willing to form companies in which their own money is at stake, instead of playing only with others’? These are challenging questions, because below a particular threshold above which there would be enough of such firms to survive and impact the economy, their worth would be zero. Even more challenging is determining which other, only indirectly economic elements of the culture would comprise a moral economy making such thresholds attainable. We’re not just talking about honesty or altruism here—rather, “fair dealing” involves the ability to create, revise, and continually re-interpret, on the ground, in conjunction with others, sets of rules that are largely tacit.\n\nDistinguishing between those who preserve and adhere to the rules so as to skew them in their direction and those whose actions always preserve a residue aimed at enhancing and refining the rules is a skill acquired, like any skill, through practice.\n\nThe grammar of rules might be sought in a seemingly strange location. Rules are difficult to describe—even the ones we follow flawlessly and thoughtlessly. Indeed, the thoughtlessness is the problem—analytically, not necessarily morally. Rules always have a tacit dimension—if you ask someone (or yourself) how you follow the myriad rules you do follow to mediate all your daily interactions, you must either simply “point” to what you do and rely upon your interrogator’s own intuitions as a rule follower to understand; or, find a way to point to another set of (meta) rules which tell you how to follow the rules in question—but, then, how do you follow those rules?\n\nA few posts back, I defined imitation as the derivation of imperatives from a model. Iteration, meanwhile, derives from the response you get when you issue an imperative to your model in return, demanding that he/she show or tell you how to obey the previous imperative, subsequent to an inevitably failed attempt. That initial attempt must fail because you will still be insufficiently like the model, hence indicating some portion of the imperative left unfulfilled. To demand of the model another imperative, now part of a series (his implicit one to you, yours in return, and now his again), is to now treat the model as him/herself subject to imperatives, which he/she could convey intelligibly. In that case, the two of you share the same source of imperatives; but this further means that part of the imperatives this newly revealed shared center issues involves articulating the imperatives each of you receives with those the other receives. Hence, the birth of rules, which call upon one to act in such a way as to coordinate unknown acts along with everyone else.\n\nOne is always within rules, but one becomes aware of the rules when they become problematic, and they become problematic when one must narrow them down, in a single case, to an unambiguous imperative—what must I do right here and now? It is then that the origin of rules in a center issuing imperatives that must be shared becomes evident because one must then ask the center for guidance. This, it seems to me, is the structure of prayer , which would mean that learning how to follow the “spirit” of rules means learning how to pray. (“God, give me the wisdom to understand your will…”) (For Veblen, this is the kind of situation the “instinct for workmanship” could never lead us into.)\n\nAnd in the monotheistic or, perhaps (I’m not sure where Islam is on this), anti-“haughty” faiths, such prayers would take on the greatest urgency in situations where one’s desire is to abuse the position of the “Big Man,” usurp that position, elevate oneself by discrediting the existing one, fantasize oneself as Big Man, or create a negative Big Man who will serve as the “cause” of some present crisis; but, also, where one’s desire is intertwined with the emptiness of the Big Man space, or the inadequacy of its current occupant—where one may need to help prop it up, in other words, but where such a need edges imperceptibly into these more sinful desires.\n\nHumbly demanding that the center, the iterable source of rules, or the “central intelligence,” come through with a clear imperative at such moments is the heart of the proper creed of our commercial civilization. If we recognize that our entrepreneurial class is comprised, not of pacific servants of others unreasonably harassed by the predatory state but, with all the good they do, of actual and budding Big Men (who, of course, seek commerce with Big Men in other realms), thereby adding a political component to the economy, then we can find the economic value in the prayerful state that seeks a middle between haughtiness and debasement. This middle would also turn out to exist between other poles inevitable in an increasingly sophisticated rule-based culture: between the “letter” and “spirit” of the law; between the rules’ tacit and explicit dimensions; between preservation and innovation, and so on. Such prayer is itself a kind of thinking, and I’m even thinking of considering prayer as the origin of the declarative sentence. In another post."
    },
    {
      "slug": "popular-culture",
      "title": "Popular Culture",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I take Eric Gans’ distinction between popular and high culture as axiomatic: in popular culture, the audience identifies with the lynch mob, while in high culture they identify with the victim. It seems to me, further, that this distinction manifests itself as one between two modes of reading, or “appropriation” or “consumption” of cultural materials: in engaging high culture, one is enjoined to preserve the text or artifact as a whole—this means examining the parts and the text/artifact as a whole “in context,” with an eye towards its unity and purposefulness, as well as the accumulated historical labor expended on its production.\n\nThis also implies a hierarchy of interpreters and commentators and the institutionalization of the materials (museums, literature departments, etc.). With popular texts and artifacts, meanwhile, elements of the cultural product can freely be iterated in contexts chosen by the user, without regard to the “intentions” of the producer. We have no compunction about repeating catch phrases from a sitcom or movie in ways that show no respect at all to the way that phrase functioned in its “original” context.\n\nNow, of course high cultural texts get treated in this way as well, but this just testifies to the dominance of popular culture in the contemporary world—that is, we are talking about ways of treating texts and artifacts as much as (or more than?—that’s part of the issue) about the texts and artifacts themselves; and, of course, putting it that way further testifies to the decline of high culture and the ascendancy of the popular. We can also take as given the convergence of popular culture with the rise of the victimary: the high cultural texts are themselves viewed as oppressors, and by “appropriating” them “violently” we take our justified revenge upon them for their presumption of centrality. And we can also stipulate that the mass market and the “age of mechanical reproduction” have been central to this process. So far, nothing I have said takes us much beyond discussions of postmodernism going back to the 70s and 80s, which also highlighted the collapse of the high/popular boundary as well as the intensified “citationality” and “cannibalistic” nature of contemporary culture.\n\nBut we can go quite a bit beyond those discussions, I believe, in particular in trying to figure out the consequences of these developments. Left cultural theorists have tied themselves up in knots trying to convince themselves of the potentially “progressive” character of the rise of the popular, with results that have been brilliantly lampooned in a couple of essays on cultural studies by John O’Carroll and Chris Fleming. Somewhat more serious, or at least earnest, approaches, like that of Gerald Graff, try another, in my view, equally flawed attempt to find something hopeful in our students’ attraction to popular culture.\n\nFor Graff, instead of trying to get students to engage thoughtfully with the products of high culture that we professors value, in order to develop and put to work their interpretive faculties, their ability to see things from different points of view and in “depth,” etc., we should recognize that students are really doing all these things already when they argue about their favorite sports teams, or the movie they saw last night, or the latest music video by their favorite artist. Get students speaking about what they already know, already interpret, already canonize, already debate in more sophisticated ways then outsiders realize, and they will come to realize that they are already something like “scholars” or “academics” (or “critical thinkers,” or “interpretive agents,” or whatever you like).\n\nWhat happens then seems to me less clear—if they are already engaged in serious discussions over esthetic and moral values, why do they need our high cultural texts, or the means of interpretation that have evolved in the history of responses to them? On the other hand, if those discussions are not genuinely about such values, and the means of interpretation at work in them not comparable to institutionalized ones, then, in fact, they are not really doing what “academics” supposedly (or hopefully) do. Nor do we have any reason to assume that having them attend to what they already do will get them one step closer to that goal.\n\nDefining popular culture as the free iteration of bits of models helps us to account for why these attempts to “redeem” popular culture can’t accomplish what the redeemers would like. High culture is intrinsically totalizing, centralistic or holistic, whether it be the Marxist theory of history or the New Critical sacralization of the literary text—the idea from the start is to resist the fragmentation so celebrated by apologists for the popular. The assumption is that some transcendent reality, embodied, albeit partially, in the most accomplished products of culture, is what militates against the scapegoating of those figures who stand out against ritual, tribal culture, figures utimately modeled on Socrates or Jesus.\n\nNo coherent political ethic can emerge from immersion in soap operas, Madonna videos or comic books; nor can any consistent and arguable esthetic stance be elaborated out of one’s baseball card collection, pornography addiction, or experimentation with shocked hair and body rings, because the entire notion of coherent and consistent ethics and stances derive from a different set of assumptions and practices. At the same time, though, I don’t think there is any way of returning to the notion of high culture that presided up until, say the Second World War—not only has that notion of transcendence been displaced irrevocably, but it was flawed in important ways from the beginning, however great its service to the advance of humanity and however many the staggering accomplishments we owe it. In that case, the problem with the cultural studies people (of whom Graff is one, of course, even if one of the moderate political center), is that they aren’t radical enough.\n\nAfter all, the originary hypothesis confirms the central claim made by avatars of the 20 th century’s “linguistic turn”: human reality, at the very least, is indeed constituted by the way signs reveal relations between us through the things we move to appropriate, and not by the referential relation between language and a higher reality . This must also mean that when we account for the human condition, we must do so in language and are therefore always further and newly constituting it—this “Heisenbergian” reflection irremediably undercuts any pretensions to knowledge of a permanent “human nature.” Mimetic desire, rivalry and crisis will always be with us, and the bet made on traditional high culture is that that permanence renders different modes of deferral secondary, so many “epiphenomena,” if you will—but if we reverse that claim, as I believe we must do as we become more conscious that we ourselves, everyday, are responsible for inventing such modes of deferral, then even those en during traits of human reality are relativized by ever changing sign systems which not only resolve them in limited ways but shape their terms of emergence as well.\n\nAnd yet the paragraph I just wrote was, or so I would like to believe, composed on the terms of high culture—I am certainly aiming for the kind of “density” or “depth” in my discussion here that would mark this argument as one that would interrupt the prevailing modes of scapegoating. And, of course, the theoretical and esthetic rebellions that have provided a vocabulary for the privileging of the free iteration of bits of models took place completely within high culture as well. Indeed, notions of “depth,” “density,” “textual autonomy” and so on refer to our willingness, or our felt compulsion, to take the object on “its own terms,” to assume, as Leo Strauss put it, that its author knew more than us and was providing us with knowledge or an experience that was both valuable and one we couldn’t have procured or even thought to pursue on our own.\n\nIf we approach cultural objects with such an attitude, they become inexhaustible, but we will only do so as long as we believe the inexhaustibility lies in the object, not in our attitude towards it—once we assume there is no “text in this class,” to refer to Stanley Fish’s famous phrase, the sheer proliferation and ingenuity of interpretative strategies that have been accumulated over the past couple of millennia will not be able to sustain our interest for long. The initial burst of enthusiasm deriving from the sudden sense that “hey, we’re really the ones who ‘made’ these texts!” will quickly dwindle into a deflated “you mean, it was just us all along?”\n\nThe initial result of “unregulated iteration,” in both popular and high culture, was the creation of the celebrity—from the modernist writers and painters in the 1920s to the postmodern theorists of the 70s and 80s in the world of high culture, and from newly famed athletes, singers, actors, along with seemingly randomly elevated members of the idle rich, the scandalous, etc., also starting in the 20s, through the movie stars and rocks stars, also into the 1980s. Perhaps this age in retrospect, if the title of Eric Gans’ recent Chronicle on Michael Jackson is correct, will be known as the “Age of Celebrity” as we move on to something else.\n\nMaybe “celebrity” filled the space of sacrality previously filled by the Platonism of both the guardians of culture and the people, and now vacated, most immediately due to the historical catastrophe of the First World War; maybe it also fit an early stage in technological reproduction and the market, where such processes were far more centralized and monopolized then they are likely to be from here on in. It seems to me that the precipitous decline in the power of celebrity which we are witnessing (and is perhaps best testified to by the openly staged, publicly “participatory,” “auditioning” for celebrity in shows like “American Idol”—the aura essential to celebrity cannot survive the public’s freedom to elect and depose celebrities at will, and with such naked explicitness) is more in accord with the logic of unregulated iteration, as well as healthier.\n\n(It is noteworthy that while there may very well be something cultic in the devotion millions of people express towards political leaders like Obama and Palin, the nomination of these figures as “celebrities” was premature, as celebrity cannot survive the harsh criticism on inevitably divisive matters of public substance any political figure must endure—if an author touted by Oprah turns out to be a fraud, she apologizes publicly and has him come on the show and do the same; there is no analogous mode of “redemption” if, say, Obama’s leftist agenda crashes or Palin runs for President in 2012 and is thrashed in the Republican primaries.)\n\nAt any rate, though, one could imitate Babe Ruth’s swing or swagger in the playground, or Jordan’s moves in the gym; one could sing a Beatles tune or mimic some of Michael Jackson’s moves without having to have a “reading” of the “text as a whole”—while the celebrity of these figures, one might say, helped guarantee a unity and hierarchy of focus that could be shared nationally and sometimes globally, sustaining the type of community previously preserved through more transcendent means. If celebrity is on its way out, we will have overlapping and often mutually uninterested, even repellent communities, sometimes aggregating into something larger but not in any predictable way.\n\nIf the generation of models in a period that is both post-transcendent and post-celebrity does not require a focus on “complete,” or “fleshed out” figures (about whom a story could be told, through whom a meaningful sacrifice performed), if they don’t have to conform to existing narratives so precisely (in part because the media, or means of establishing celebrity, are themselves increasingly decentralized and evanescent), it may be that the eccentric and idiosyncratic will come to the fore—not just any idiosyncrasy or eccentricity (and not necessarily the depraved or cartoonish) but, I would hypothesize, those that the make the figure in question just as plausible a figure of ridicule as of emulation.\n\nThose who organize a space around a particular figure would do so with an awareness of this two-sidedness, which would in turn provide a basis for dialogue, friendly and hostile, with other groups—that is, “we” would organize ourselves around emulating a particular somebody and therefore knowingly organize ourselves against those dedicated to his ridicule; and vice versa. (It seems to me that something like this is already happening with Sarah Palin who, despite what I said before, could, if she avoids putting herself in situations where her power of presence must be directly repudiated or ratified, might become an example of this new kind of…well, what would it be?)\n\nWhat looks to one group like an accomplishment looks to the other like a botched job, what looks to one beautiful is grotesque to the other, a pathetic mistake to one is an innovation to another and so on—and, in the best of cases, each side will be able to see what the other is seeing.\n\nIn this case (to continue hypothesizing), popular culture will be performing what high culture might become increasingly interested in—that boundary between error and innovation, where rules get followed in ways that create “exceptions,” where the strictest literalism produces the wildest metaphors, where models get both emulated and mocked and it can be hard to tell which is which, where we find ourselves in the position of figuring and trying out ways of seeing others and objects as beautiful or repulsive, instead of simply being “struck” one way or another, where no one has proprietary rights in the line between “mainstream” and “extreme,” etc., but where one still has to come down on one side or another, at least at a particular moment.\n\nHigh culture, whether carried out in the theoretical or artistic realms, would increasingly become so many branches of semiotic anthropology, interested the way in which avatars of the “human” keep coming to bifurcating paths (do nothing but keep coming before such bifurcations), going one direction or another for reasons we could guess at but with consequences we can identify and judge according to their irenic effects. It’s not too difficult to imagine texts and performances being composed with this problem in mind, and critical and appreciative canons emerging to meet those texts and performances. (Just think of the intellectual challenges imposed by the determination to write a text in which every phrase is a “taking” [an iteration or appropriation] as well as a “mistaking”—and think of how revelatory such an effort might be regarding idiomatic usage.)\n\n(I suspect one could already construct a “genealogy” of such texts that have been classified as “modernist” or “postmodernist” while nevertheless sticking out as an anomaly.) I think high and popular culture would thereby become less hostile to each other, and both might become less sacrificial."
    },
    {
      "slug": "common-sense",
      "title": "Common Sense",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The originary hypothesis can yield for us a phenomenology and poetics of everyday life, and perhaps it can even do so in a manner respectful of reality, which is to say that doesn’t complain about the ways in which people don’t correspond to one or another “model” we have arbitrarily established for them. Now, the sentence I just wrote is a manifestation of resentment (that doesn’t mean I’m taking it back!)—my description of my resentment would be that it is a counter-resentment to the resentment of elites bent on “improving” their fellow humans, i.e., making them more like the improver. But, of course, we’d all like to say our resentments are mere “counter”-resentments, evening out the scales that have been placed out of balance by some previously manifested resentment.\n\nAnd, fortunately, we can all say that, and we would all be right, because all resentments are countering another one, and resentment is nothing more than the imperative to even something out, to give something its “due.” The sentence I just wrote, for example, is a resentful attempt to counter any resentment that claims to transcend resentment, and it anticipates its vulnerability to the same charge because, indeed, that charge will also always be both true and false: Every resentment, insofar as it is given shape, does represent, in however small or imaginary a space, an infinitesimal balancing out that sustains some presence and to that extent can be shared and “transcendent.”\n\nIf we can speak of resentment as an “evening out,” creating “planes” along which other resentments can be lain, then we can also speak about “common sense” as a kind of calculus of resentment—each of us has to figure out ways of “fitting” our resentments within a present configuration that always threatens, however implicitly or distantly, to exclude our own. One of the (in my view) great, and still neglected (toward what and whom is that resentment directed?), modern Western philosophies, is the “common sense” thinking founded by Thomas Reid and sustained and transmuted by American pragmatism (at least Peirce—who at times referred to pragmatism as “critical commonsensism”—and James), the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein and Cavell, and the “personal knowledge” or “tacit dimension” of Michael Polanyi.\n\nReid’s common sense philosophy was arguably the philosophical foundation for the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of “self-evident” truths, because that is, indeed, Reid’s central claim: that our fundamental modes of experiential access to reality are grounded in axioms that cannot be denied, or even questioned, without thereby undermining the experiential basis we would need to question those axioms in the first place. So, for example, one couldn’t deny that we can understand each other when we speak, because, before whom is that denial made? Clearly someone assumed capable of understanding it. And, even referring to the endless litany of actual misunderstandings assumes that we know what it would mean for us not to misunderstand each other.\n\nWe can understand such axiomatic access to reality (which Reid assumed couldn’t be explained, just accepted), which Eric Gans in Science and Faith refers to as “auto-probatory” (something which could not be said without having had the experience it refers to) in terms of the articulation of resentments embedded in language. Indeed, resentment itself is the most immediate auto-probatory experience—everyone has experienced resentment, and everyone can acknowledge anyone else’s resentment (however odd the object of that resentment might appear) and to deny this would be to affirm it because denying one’s participation in the universal experience of resentment would be the most transparently resentful stance imaginable.\n\nSo, we can account for every scene in terms of the interactions between various calculi of resentment—I resent A because he got the job I wanted last year but B outwardly at least admires A (shares some of his resentments) and I can’t bear to have both B and A resenting me so I moderate my resentment toward A into a mild irony that can be recalibrated depending on the possibility of B no longer caring about maintaining appearances, or some C coming along who could absorb some of the resentment directed towards me, or who may take A’s job making it possible for my resentment towards A to be converted to a shared resentment towards C, etc.\n\nInvolved in all of this is a profound, and largely tacit, anthropological knowledge which manifests itself in all the maxims of everyday life that we all iterate constantly, and which are all pragmatic ways of measuring degrees and distinguishing modalities of resentment: “give him an inch, he’ll take a mile,” “what goes around comes around,” etc. Some of us, at least, resent the “clichés,” as there is always some felt sense that they conceal a more differentiated reality that we might attain privileged access to, and that is also true (and also very easily converted into a set of maxims/clichés), but I believe there are very few concrete interactions between individuals that don’t require the buffering mechanism of these anthropological maxims; or, in compensation, the creation of new ones.\n\nIt is very important that resentment keep getting circulated like this because the alternative is the truly deadly resentment against reality as such that is characteristic of Gnosticism. In more linguistic terms, we might see Gnosticism as an uncompromising abhorrence of maxims, of any sign that conceals or moderates rather than fully embodying the infinitely differentiated reality that we all intuit in our “best” or most “intense” moments. This global resentment can’t be countered by more local ones—rather, it can only be dissolved by the most fundamental of all ostensive dispositions, gratitude . A sheer gratitude for reality neutralizes resentment towards reality, and is therefore also a critical component of common sense.\n\nThe syntactic form that corresponds to the ostensive is, I would say, the exclamation : “what a lovely day!” expresses that originary sense of gratitude as does “how awful!” because the latter expression equally presupposes some non-awful condition that allows us all to immediately recognize how awful the one indicated is. And, of course, “thank you!” is an exemplary exclamation, one which simply does what it says, and does it only in that specific instance. I wonder whether one might say that Gnostics are likely to find the exclamation (and above all thanking) especially obnoxious, in its call for immediate assent and suspension of any “critical” sense of, or suspicion towards reality.\n\nIf common sense is composed out of a symmetrical adjustment of resentments grounded in gratitude toward reality and manifested in maxims, then we can point to something universally “self-evident” in common sense. Clearly, the arrangement and dispersal of resentments will vary from place to place and time to time, sometimes widely, sometimes so much so as to be incommensurable. But we have and can devise maxims to account for these variations and to adjust for them, and this may be an expression of faith, but I am certain that anyone would be able to piece together a workable sense of a configuration of resentments bounded by gratitude wherever they go. Anthropologists do it with “primitive” societies, and members of those societies are able to do it when they wind up in ours. We can’t know in advance what will count as abuse or a violation of norms, but we know that something will; the same goes with expressions of affection, vows, promises, and so on.\n\nI am borrowing a bit from Hannah Arendt in this discussion, and one of Arendt’s concerns regarding common sense in the modern world was that it can be obliterated by ideology and, at the most extreme, totalitarianism—manifestations of that resentment toward reality I just associated with Gnosticism. Common sense is strikingly unable to defend itself against charges that it is “naïve,” “irrational,” “hide-bound,” “unthinking,” “complacent,” and, of course, today all that also means “racist,” sexist,” “homophobic,” “fascist” and so on. The only defense common sense has is that of the hedgehog, al though in a somewhat (but not completely?) different context than that in which that creature stands in as a mascot for GA: all common sense can do is roll itself up in a ball and let its needles protect it from the ideological foxes. The “needles” are its maxims, and the most privileged and central of those maxims are what we call “principles.”\n\nHere is Friedrich Hayek on principles:\n\n“From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort, it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable. Though probably all beneficial improvements must be piecemeal, if the separate steps are not guided by a body of coherent principles, the outcome is likely to be a suppression of individual freedom.\n\nThe reason for this is very simple though not generally understood. Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known. The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference.\n\nAnd so, when we decide each issue solely on what appears to be its individual merits, we always overestimate the advantages of central direction. Our choice will regularly appear to be one between a certain known and tangible gain and the mere probability of the prevention of some unknown beneficial action by unknown persons. If the choice between freedom and coercion is thus treated as a matter of expediency, freedom is bound to be sacrificed in almost every instance. As in the particular instance we hardly ever know what would be the consequences of allowing people to make their own choice, to make the decision in each instance depending only on the foreseeable particular results must lead to the progressive destruction of freedom. There are probably few restrictions on freedom which could not be justified on the ground that we do not know the particular loss it will cause.\n\nThat freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages was fully understood by the leading liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century, one of whom (B. Constant) described liberalism as “the system of principles.” Such also is the burden of the warnings concerning “What is Seen and What is Not Seen in Political Economy” (F. Bastiat) and of the “pragmatism that contrary to intentions of its representatives inexorably leads to socialism” (C. Menger).\n\nAll these warnings were, however, thrown to the wind, and the progressive discarding of principles and the increasing determination during the last hundred years to proceed pragmatically is one of the most important innovations in social and economic policy. That we should foreswear all principles of “isms” in order to achieve greater mastery over our fate is even now proclaimed as the new wisdom of our age. Applying to each task the “social techniques” most appropriate to its solution, unfettered by any dogmatic belief, seems to some the only manner of proceeding worthy of a rational and scientific age. “Ideologies,” i.e., sets of principles, have become generally as unpopular as they have always been with aspiring dictators such as Napoleon or Karl Marx, the two men who gave the word its modern derogatory meaning.\n\nIf I am not mistaken this fashionable contempt for “ideology,” or for all general principles or “isms,” is a characteristic attitude of the disillusioned socialists who, because they have been forced by the inherent contradictions of their own ideology to discard it, have concluded that all ideologies must be erroneous and that in order to be rational one must do without one. But to be guided only, as they imagine it to be possible, by explicit particular purposes which one consciously accepts, and to reject all general values whose conduciveness to particular desirable results cannot be demonstrated (or to be guided only by what Max Weber called “purposive rationality”) is an impossibility. Though admittedly, ideology is something which cannot be “proved” (or demonstrated to be true), it may well be something whose widespread acceptance is the indispensible condition for most of the particular things we strive for.\n\nThose self-styled modern “realists” have only contempt for the old-fashioned reminder that if one starts unsystematically to interfere with the spontaneous order of the market there is no practicable halting point, and that it is therefore necessary to choose between alternative systems. They are pleased to think that by proceeding experimentally and therefore “scientifically” they will succeed in fitting together in piecemeal fashion a desirable order by choosing for each particular desired result what science shows them to be the most appropriate means of achieving it. “\n\nI’ll just mention that the contempt for “ideology” here is for “ideology” in a different sense than that in which Arendt sees the danger for common sense—Arendt sees ideologies as “scientific,” totalizing explanations that claim to account for a guide all human affairs, and that mark those outside its terms as “retrograde” and ultimately superfluous. Leaving that aside, the respective arguments of the two great anti-victimary thinkers converge. Common sense can only protect itself by defending, “unreasonably,” its maxims: “keep your nose out my business,” “live and let live,” and, more politically, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” to mention a few.\n\nIf you tell me that you need to mind my business, just this once, because there’s emergency, I might be able to see the immediate benefit or necessity, but I will never know what I have lost by letting you do so —I won’t know, first of all, what immediate solutions I might have improvised on my own and, more importantly, what capacities and possibilities I will have surrendered by losing the habit of minding my own business. Similarly, we will never know what we have lost by letting our fear of unemployment or a credit freeze lead us to give politicians the right to determine terms of trade, to benefit one market competitor over others, to regulate the internal operations if businesses, and so on.\n\nThe relevance of this discussion to, say, the current health care debates, is obvious. Sarah Palin’s warning about “death panels” was simply the stance of common sense: if the state takes more control of health care, then the state will end up making more and more life and death decisions for us, to the point of determining whether saving or improving one’s life fits a cost-benefit analysis established by experts. The defenders of Obamacare, meanwhile claim to be guided by “purposeful rationality,” and to “proceed experimentally” (if you don’t want the “public option,” we’ll try “co-ops”!), realizing, some consciously, others partially, others not at all, that the more the state interferes in the workings of a particular segment of the “spontaneous order of the market,” the more any future “problems” will automatically be framed so that only the state (and its experts) can have the “solutions.”\n\n“Death panels” is just a common sense way of compressing this understanding into maxims—and I, for one, couldn’t care less what the Democratic legislators (or, really, some combination of their aides, lobbyists, assorted activist groups, etc.) really “meant” when they put a particular provision in the 1,000 page long bill (a provision that will, later on, be interpreted by one of their experts). And we don’t know what innovations in the complex relations between patients/consumers, care givers, insurance companies, medical technology, etc., will not take place because of this dramatic shift towards central planning.\n\nThe survival of free citizens depends upon strict, unyielding, “dogmatic” adherence to the fundamental, common sense, maxims of a free society: rewarding failure gets you more of it (no bailouts!); wealth results from production, not expenditure (no stimulus!); enemies are to be fought, allies supported (no appeasement!); rights are what you can do without government interference, not what the government gives you (health care is not a right!), and many more. Notice how different these maxims are from, say “everyone should have health care” or “gay marriage is a right”—the maxims of freedom articulate power and accountability, the slogans of soft tyranny demand provisions and donations without recompense or corresponding responsibility.\n\nNow, needless to say, our elected officials will very often go right ahead and do these things we insist they resist; occasionally, they will be right and responsible to do so (sometimes one really does have to allow for exceptions), and more than occasionally we will, “hypocritically,” re-elect them when they do so, whether they are right or not. But none of that matters—politicians can corrupt themselves and our principles (they have risks and benefits to weigh, and we can’t expect them to have interests higher than their own professional survival, and when they do they also expect to take the hit for betraying principles in the name of our collective survival), and our principles will survive.\n\nWhat our principles can’t survive is the failure of a solid majority of citizens to insist upon their application in undiluted form, spontaneously, reflexively, unambiguously and insistently. And in that way, when our common sense enables us to see that their violation has been a bit more egregious than usual this time, so egregious that maybe common sense will no longer help us to navigate a new world of arbitrary regulations and authorities, that common sense can become revolutionary.\n\nCommon sense is the possession of the man in the middle—not the Big Man, with wealth or power, or those living on the margins of society. The cultivation of common sense requires you to confront limits regularly, but also that you have some capacity to shape and maneuver within those limits; it requires you to see the consequences of your actions, and not be able to project those consequences onto the “long term,” or lose them in the tangled webs of unintended consequences and intersecting intentions. Maintaining your common sense when you get too high or too low calls for extra doses of discipline, and perhaps some continuity with a previous condition (such as friends and family who knew you when you were in the middle).\n\nIn a less grave way then totalitarian rule, I wonder whether today’s victimary popular culture impairs common sense. A critic whom I admire, James Bowman, writes often of the dominance of fantasy in today’s popular culture, and the way this dominance has seeped into public and political life. Bowman finds it disturbing that even science fiction films like the recent Star Wars don’t feel obliged to play by the rules of the “reality” they construct for themselves; one might suggest that the Obama cult has been a result of this privileging of fantasy over reality. The recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama is an example, something I wouldn’t have accepted as a premise for a Saturday Night Live skit, and yet it happened—the award committee has made a lot of mistakes (and worse) before, but this must be the first time the award was granted based on what the committee imagines all of us are imagining the recipient might accomplish (and perhaps it’s the first time a President was ever elected on a similar basis).\n\nIt is also fascinating how the new fragmented media environment allows for large groups of people to see those on the other side though hand-picked fragments aimed at reducing them to familiar stereotypes, but the en during political and economic institutions serve as a check here. Indeed, the widespread opposition to Obamacare, whatever it actually is, suggests to me that when it comes to your own private sphere of existence, the skepticism and shrewdness we associate with common sense is still intact. Still, I can’t help but see some fragility here, simply due to repeated violations of the common sense maxims I mentioned earlier, over many decades by now—so that it actually makes sense to a lot of people to say that the government wasting a trillion dollars will return us to prosperity.\n\nA new reality has been constructed through the articulation of the welfare-warfare-regulatory-media-academic state (even though I think a good bit of the warfare part was necessary), and one while can’t just say that it’s an artificial reality, it is predicated upon the possibility of deferring payment and consequences indefinitely. A Ponzi scheme is also real for the people first in, who do get paid. Popular culture erodes common sense by valorizing Ponzi-scheme models of reality, including the valorization of esthetically appealing and successful (i.e., unpunished) criminals.\n\nStill, it seems to me commonsensical to insist upon the self-evidence of optimism. No matter how much I despair, no matter how unlikely it seems that a disastrous course will be arrested, the very articulation of that despair (even just to oneself) implies the possibility that it will reverberate with another. And if with another, why not yet another? If I bewail the coming fall of this civilization, that very complaint, precisely to the extent that it is true and prophetic, implies that the principles of civilization need not disappear along with this particular one—human beings have suffered such catastrophes and recovered and renewed, and they might do so again.\n\nIf I am speaking, even if I disavow any communication with any of my contemporaries, I implicitly assert the possibility with some kindred spirits yet to be born, maybe centuries hence, maybe mediated by layers of interlocutors and interpreters who understood me only partially, but enough to pass my words along—and why should that communication be any less valuable? To put it simply, putting forth a sign entails faith in someone receiving and disseminating it in turn. Anyone without such minimal optimism (itself a form of “gratitude”) would not bother to speak at all, and anyone who does speak while denying that minimal optimism is to that degree dishonest—indeed, culpably ungrateful—in his or her speaking."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-political-economy-of-freedom-and-sovereignty",
      "title": "The Political Economy of Freedom and Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The far Left and the Libertarian Right converge on the same enemy: the unholy alliance of the State and Big Business. On what victory in the struggle would mean they diverge: the Left, of course, ultimately wants Big Business swallowed up in the rational and humanitarian State, while the Libertarians want the state abolished (they distinguish “state” from “government,” supporting a minimal version of the latter—there seems to be small anarchist contingent, though), in which case businesses might become big but not Big—they would assume their own risks and receive no protection, direct or indirect, from their competitors.\n\nMarx had an explanation for this increasingly intricate and essential alliance: the state never was anything other than a “general committee of the ruling class,” which under capitalism meant the protection of bourgeois private property; so, when capitalism moves into its more advanced stage, and must confront deadly new resentments (the proletariat) and dangers (the threat—and promise—of military competition between capitalist states) the state must itself expand so as to take on these tasks—and the “monopoly capitalists” will be happy to let them do so, even if they grouse occasionally. And the libertarian explanation is… well, other than some vague references to our having forgotten our principles, it doesn’t seem to me they really have one—which would be why someone like Ron Paul exceeds even the most fevered Leftists in his conspiracy-mongering. Someone must have made a dirty deal behind closed doors.\n\nIf entrepreneurs are essentially a predatory class, as I hypothesized in my “Hunters and Craftsmen” post, then the explanation is not that difficult. Indeed, Libertarians are well aware, going back to Adam Smith, that any time businessmen get a chance to receive some privilege or monopoly from the state they grab it, the free market be damned. Of course, entrepreneurs are a very peaceful predatory class, for the most part, and are themselves always vulnerable to expropriation—hence their alliance with the state is fruitful in many ways. But predation within the peaceful space created by stable state power is still predation, and we must distinguish the small marketplaces that spring up when the division of labor has expanded enough so as to make everyone dependent upon others (even allowing for merchants to mediate between communities, including distant ones) and the power of money within a system of trade and ultimately a fully developed market system.\n\nA baker or carpenter who brings his goods to market is still just a baker or carpenter, but moving capital around requires no “instinct of workmanship” at all. The difference is between a stable division of labor and one that is in continual upheaval.\n\nI hope I don’t need to, but just in case I hasten to add that there is no critique of capitalism or the market, or the entrepreneur here, neither explicit nor implicit. “Predator” is just another way of speaking about the “Big Man”; without the Big Man, there would have been no way of centralizing resources needed to move humanity beyond the level of egalitarian hunter-gather tribes; civilization itself is predicated upon turning this predatory figure away from preying upon the weak of his own group toward defending that group against external predators (and this shift is predicated upon a truce between all the contending Big Men within the group); all I am adding is that the Big Man “function” continues to this day and that—this in my view reveals the Libertarian mindset, in all its provocative brilliance, to be utopian—we can’t imagine civilization without it.\n\nFor all our egalitarianism (which, I also hasten to add, is in its own way absolutely real, and a powerful check upon predation), there is almost never (I’m not sure I need the qualifier “almost”) a situation involving a group of people of any size that doesn’t generate a center of gravity—someone dominates the conversation; someone’s words or deed were more memorable afterwards; someone’s judgment was deferred to; someone had to make the “call,” and in the end someone did; someone had to be blamed, and they were, etc. It may be paradoxical, but precisely in free associations, hierarchies, however informal and provisional, become indispensable.\n\nWhe never such hierarchies are made quasi-permanent and ritualized, we have sovereignty . And sovereignty is the opposite of freedom. But we can’t do without sovereignty—it meets some very definite human needs, and is, in fact, what people usually mean when they speak about “human nature.” Sovereignty provides identity, which is first of all self-sovereignty, and, again, is inimical to freedom, as identity is just another set of shackles. Sovereignty also provides recognition, which is impossible if we, as free beings, transmute ourselves continually. Sovereignty is the source of pride and honor. It provides continuity, security and protection.\n\nAnd in its communal function it stabilizes the volatile system of mimetic rivalry. Sovereignty is involved in Isaiah Berlin’s “negative” as well as “positive” freedom—it is the answer to the question of “how far should rule extend” (up until it meets my private sovereignty) and of “who should rule” (those who allot me a piece of their sovereignty so as to help me ensure my own). And property is the form of economic sovereignty. Freedom (freedom “of presence,” to make a conceptual distinction), meanwhile, is the act and process of becoming sign, and that can’t be represented or guaranteed in sovereign terms.\n\nSo, an originary political economy would study the intersection of freedom and sovereignty in the way each of us articulates the imperatives sent our way by every other one of us. I think of the kind of simple account of the workings of the free market as both the best means of satisfying needs and as discovery procedure: I have a certain amount of money, and I invest it in the raw materials and technology I need to produce a certain number of a particular kind of good, continually adjusting the price I ask until I have sold as many of them as I can within the period of time I can allow myself before I must reinvest or, perhaps, repay my creditors.\n\nIf I don’t manage to sell enough to recoup my original investment, or come close enough to reinvest, then I fail, we learn that there is insufficient demand for the product I was selling (there are enough of them out there already, or enough of a sufficiently close version, or it’s simply unneeded and unwanted), and someone else will invest in the technology I had used, ultimately putting it to better use. There is no other way to find out what people want, or how resources should be allocated, than this one.\n\nIf I am successful, then I expanded, however slightly, the social division of labor; or, in more anthropological terms, social differentiation. If consumers are buying my product because it is cheaper than what they have been buying, then resources are freed up to buy other products; if they are buying my product because it is superior technologically or esthetically, then whatever skill or knowledge went into the innovation I have introduced to the world has been affirmed as a source of value, and will inspire various iterations; and, of course, if they are buying it because it does something new, then work that was previously done privately and/or less efficiently is now embedded in the new division of labor, or wholly new faculties and desires have been created, and which are sure to lead to new demands and new innovations.\n\nMy interference in the existing social division of labor stimulates others to take advantage of the possible alignments now opened up, no less than the conquest of a part of a weakened state inspires other states to participate in re-dividing the state and redrawing existing borders—and this process could also be described in “law-like” terms. The difference, and it is a big one, in economic conquest is less in the dispositions of the players than in the fact that social rather than physical terrain is at stake, and social terrain is both inexhaustible and subject to much more limited control. (To extend the idea slightly, doesn’t advertising make perfect sense in these terms, as camouflage, bluff and feint, warnings to a population about to besieged, pronouncements on the current status of operations, announcements of new imperial projects, etc.?)\n\nGeorge Gilder argued in Wealth and Poverty that far from being selfish, we should see the entrepreneur as remarkably altruistic, giving his time, energy and resources to help others. Ultimately, there may not be so much difference between this claim and Ayn Rand’s harangues on the virtues of selfishness. They are both the dispositions of the sovereign, who does favors for whom he will do favors and ill to whom he disfavors. With all the current talk about how much regulation we need and what kind, it seems obvious to me that regulation is almost always beside the point because any new innovation and the subsequent reorganization of the division of labor will render the existing rules obsolete.\n\nRegulations are always attempts to fight the last war, and arguments in favor of more of them are almost invariable obscenely oblivious to the advantages of hindsight—everything that seems to us to be a cause of whatever crisis or scandal occupies us should, as all reasonable people can agree, have been outlawed. It might be more useful to think of entrepreneurship as—as I believe many of them, in fact, do—a kind of war-making, maybe in conventional terms, with large, well-stocked armies with a long-term battle plan; maybe a kind of guerilla warfare; at times even a kind of terrorism. The enemy varies—it may be those representing the existing division of labor, supported by state subsidies direct and indirect; or, it may be those instigating disruptions of the status quo—but I don’t see how one could deny that, in addition to producing, improving and disseminating their products, businesses spend quite a bit of time addressing the various fronts on which they fight: labor, the state, or this or that agency, and their competitors. (And even warriors, in the literal sense, must give quite a bit of attention to the production and distribution of goods, services, and the enforcement of the rights of various officials and “property” owners.)\n\nIf reasonable rules for waging war can’t be composed in the course of the battle itself, the various agreements forged going into and following battles (truces, alliances) can be enforced—that is, contracts. There is even something a little irrational about this, as contracts must always presuppose a continuous state of affairs that makes their fulfillment possible, but promises to abide by such shared hypotheses, even or especially when realities emerge which undermine them, is ultimately far more rational because continuities can only be carved, to some extent arbitrarily, out of discontinuity. In fact, all of the attention of government should be directed towards the strict enforcement of contracts, if only to give the signatories powerful incentives to construct their contracts carefully and make their reciprocal obligations as transparent as possible.\n\nAnd this answers the question of how big the government should be: as big as necessary to arbitrate effectively, indeed, unquestioningly, between the largest of the economic barons. But not big enough to help anyone of them if they lose their fiefdom.\n\nConsumer sovereignty is a nice slogan but unsupportable as an empirical claim. The relation between consumers and companies is analogous to that between voters and political parties: the organizations propose, and the consumers and voters dispose. (Or, more provocatively, between occupied populations and their conquerors, taking into account the desire for an extremely gentle occupation regime, including one that realzies the benefits of recruiting its administrators from the population itself.) That is, the final purchase validates or invalidates a particular use of capital within a generally valid field; consumers regularly bring down empires, but the imperial system itself remains.\n\nIn case it’s necessary, I’ll make it clear that this is not a critique—I see no reason to assume that consumers (or voters) should weigh in any more heavily than this. But the capacity to redirect the channels through which capital flows plays a very important role morally, and in providing the tacit rules under which the system operates. It certainly makes a big difference whether the most unhealthy fast food restaurants or diversified, and increasingly tasty, health food alternatives prevail; or whether the main streets of medium-sized cities are littered with strip clubs. Such redirections of capital in turn depend upon, and register, the degree of thriving of families, churches and other neighborhood institutions. Indeed, I think those political movements likely to produce the most lasting effects will be those which focus on modifying consumer behavior, directly (through boycotts and savvy ad campaigns) and indirectly (by strengthening civil society).\n\nThe tension between the entrepreneur and the “craftsman” so evident in Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class lies, I think, in the way outlays of capital continually upend—indeed, have their very significance in upending—the existing division of labor. Veblen associates the instinct for workmanship with knowledge of causal relations in nature (as opposed to the superstitious nature of the “predatory” classes), which makes sense, but equally important here are traditional methods and guild-style relations and an esthetic sense. The most virulent opposition to capitalism has often come from those pushed out of their artisan status by mass production—much of the rhetoric, if not the reality, of anti-capitalist politics derives from this kind of complaint, with which it is easy enough to sympathize.\n\nBut knowledge of causal relation, that is, the application of science to production, has a more complex relationship to the entrepreneur. For a long time, in Marxist circles, there were arguments regarding the long-term effects of capitalism on scientific “labor”—the most politically appealing argument was that scientists would increasingly be reduced to wage laborers and supervisors of wage laborers, with intensifying specialization making it impossible for them to protect their interests as a group or individuals, leaving perhaps a few very elite scientists who essentially join the “ruling class.” And, certainly, scientists, and especially those responsible for important technological innovations, have been among the most important new members of the economic “aristocracy” over the past few decades.\n\nBut if traditional educational institutions are eroded (or continue in their present course of erosion), can the free market be counted on to produce the number of scientists and engineers needed to keep de- and re-stabilizing the division of labor? The math and science proficiency of American students, and the increasing dependence of American companies upon foreigners for high-tech positions (while we seem to do just fine in producing all the lawyers we need) makes this a serious question.\n\nA good way to start to tie all these issues together is by reflecting upon another issue where the far Left and Libertarian right converge (and where I have come, conveniently, to agree with both)—the illegitimacy and need for abolition of intellectual property. Intellectual property is a state granted monopoly over the uses others can make of their private property—the state can prohibit me from using my own printer and paper to copy something and distribute it, or to use my own raw materials of any kind to replicate a physical or chemical structure. The argument against intellectual property is most potent in dealing with patents, I think, given how arbitrary the distinction between a real invention and some tweak of a method or process that is already well known is; it is most problematic, even distressing, in dealing with copyright, when we know very well who authored, painted or composed that original and irreplaceable novel, painting or symphony and it seems only just that they benefit financially from it.\n\nEither way, I don’t see how intellectual property can possibly be maintained into the future: can all personal computers be checked for illegal downloads? Can we make China protect Disney’s copy rights? Will India deny its poor knock-off medicines based on those created by American pharmaceuticals? So, it may be better to speculate on a world without it. This might be a good time to remind ourselves that the origin of creation lies in freedom, the kind of freedom that has its telos in the “discipline,” or a conversation aimed at soliciting revelations from some shared object or, in more anthropological terms, to make some object an inexhaustible source of signification.\n\nThis is done by iteration for its own sake, and I’ll update my definition of iteration here as obeying the imperative to apply the rule to the infinitesimal—that is, discovering what you are doing in some space where the making of rules and the interchange of tacit and explicit rules is generating transformations and applying the rules of what you are doing to some as yet tacit dimension of it. So, for example, I realize that I organize my thinking into a certain pattern that I hadn’t recognized previously, or that has just emerged as distinct, and I apply the rule constitutive to that pattern to elements of my thinking that run in more established or random routines.\n\nInventions for use follow this logic, but are ultimately incidental to disciplinary habits and desires. If authors and creators are denied the monopoly on the right to use their work for profit (a right more often exploited by entertainment and other corporations anyway, often at the expense of their hired creators), they might use their talents to invite people into unique disciplinary spaces that transcend the reproduction of an object. That is, creation will become more pedagogical, organized around websites, public appearances, and other mediated events that take the created object as a changing center, one which the audience pays for the right to help change and witness in its successive metamorphoses.\n\nNew drugs might come to be invented in hospitals and other health care sites, and be administered as part of a total care experience; new technological innovations in other fields might also become embedded in a holistic set of service relations, as already seems to be happening with computers. This denial of a state monopoly to the giant companies best able to exploit it might, in turn, lead to a push for the government to stay outside of the company-consumer relationship, which would now require constant and far more subtle fine-tuning and communication between the parties, irreducible to external regulation. And the instinct for workmanship might revive as well in such integrated work environments, and the marginalist political activities like civil disobedience and boycotts take on more precise objects—supporting loved and needed “customized” institutions from state depredations. (The laws against fraud, though, might get some creative workouts if more people think they can get away with claiming to be the producer or author of another’s work, as opposed to just using or disseminating it.)\n\nSo, perhaps we can locate a new political economic lawfulness in the degree of faith we find in our society and ourselves that creative activity unsanctioned, unprotected and uncredentialed by the predatory alliance of Big Business and the State (they’ve earned their capital letters!) can thereby generate even more creative activity and social and cultural good. The less faith, the more government regulation, the more business takes on static, administrative, imperial roles; the more faith, the more sovereignty learns to embed itself in, rather than prey upon, freedom—and the more social health and prosperity. We might even develop an appreciation for the contribution to this lawfulness made by the disciplines organized around the praxical study of risk, like hedge funds, and other inquirers into the myriad ways the miracle of making money out of money takes place.\n\n(Yes, the warriors are themselves ultimately driven by freedom, their actions an adventure in exploration and hence a mode of inquiry.) Such scouts in the world of economic warfare are among the most faithful in their own intuitions and abilities, and in the tacit rules of the system to sustain them—and they test out which battle plans are real, and which will dissolve upon contact with the enemy."
    },
    {
      "slug": "political-marginalism-originary-grammar-cultural-generativity",
      "title": "Political Marginalism, Originary Grammar, Cultural Generativity",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A marginalist politics begins with the observation that any situation can be reduced to a binary: do a or b. Even there are, in principle, many choices, as soon as you inch closer to one the world splits into that or not-that—and you are always inching. Self-reflection upon any situation reduces itself to such binary—I am this, not that, here, not there, etc. Similarly, the binary situation immediately confronted is the product of a long series of bifurcations—my choice is now a or b, because previous choices have eliminated c, d, e, and so on. This binarism derives from the binary on the originary scene: to continue reaching for the central object (to pursue the mimetic path of least resistance) or to imitate the newly formed sign and withhold one’s grasp.\n\nSince the right choice was made on the scene, it is impossible for us not to think of ourselves as making the right choice now: even if I egregiously violate the terms of the scene I am on I will reconstruct another scene upon which no such violation took place—yes, I cheated, but everyone cheats; or, my situation was different than others’; or that was wrong but it wasn’t really who I am, etc. And if I fully confess my inexcusable violation, I can only do that because I am now on some other scene, whose terms I can represent my choice to confess (rather than further dissimulate) as confirming. Indeed, I can reconstruct any scene, any time, on the spot, reconfiguring the binary choice, from say, cheating/not cheating to maintaining the harmony of the scene/disrupting the scene by letting my cheating be discovered. But binary there will always be.\n\nEach binary retrojects the series of bifurcations it has emerged out of—if I now determine that effecting change by peaceful means is impossible, I reference and construct a history in which violence has been rejected many times, and earlier choices in which violence didn’t even appear as one of the alternatives, and so the current choice is the distillation of that entire series of resentments (resentment is itself essentially binary—he shouldn’t be there, I should, or someone else more deserving, but first of all him or not-him). Criteria for choosing one way or another are always embedded in the binary situation, but only become explicit after the fact, once the act has disclosed the scene I am on now.\n\nI have “inched” before I realize I have done so. Leading up to the event, the criteria are tacit—I will feel at a certain point that I can’t go on the old way anymore, but trying to explain why I now, all of a sudden, feel that way, could only lead me to reference some other experience whose roots would be tacit—say, for the first time I noticed how demoralized my fellow citizens seem to be, but what changed among my fellow citizens or in my own attentiveness that led me to notice that? There is some threshold that has been crossed—from beaten down but not hopeless to thoroughly demoralized—that I detect before I am able to explain how I detected it.\n\nI could, of course, be wrong, in which case I didn’t “really’ detect it—but realizing that I was wrong must also be an event articulated through a binary point wherein I located that threshold elsewhere, which in turn confirms the possibility of such a threshold, or the real threshold which was concealed behind the one I imagine and has now achieved such a threshold of presence as to be revealed to me. And continuing in my wrongness will simply exemplify that threshold in my own failure to observe it. There must always be such thresholds—for there to be a scene is for the scene to be capable of collapse into the desires and resentments it has deferred; and for it to contain the resources to transition into a new scene that extends the prevailing sign.\n\nAnd, of course, noticing a threshold is part of my being on a scene as well—I am drawn along with others pointing to that threshold, or my identification of that threshold is part of my recoil from others, who seem to me unwilling to notice something, even something they and I know not.\n\nThe politics that follows from marginalism is the creation of new binary “forks” out of any situation. On the one hand, of course any course of action produces new “forks” in the road all by itself; on the other hand, though, one can either continually narrow the area in which forkings become possible, or one can widen the area, increasing the visibility of the series of choices embedded in any event. Even if one chooses violence, schism, or secession, for example, one can fight or sever ties in such a way as preserve conditions for a possible peace and for others to register their own choices in ways that may lead more quickly to a cessation of violence or new associations. The premium, in other words, is on practicing freedom in such a way as to invite others to do the same; to make the consequences of choices as visible as possible, because this is the best way of placing the full range of available resentments on display, and putting that full range on display is the best way of inviting everyone to propose ways of channeling those resentments in the interests of the center.\n\nNow, we have two questions: first, how to describe these bifurcations, or choices; second, how to describe the threshold in which we are suspended, infinitesimally, before each one? My answer is with originary grammar. The basic structure of the declarative sentence, the topic/comment relationship Gans works with in The Origin of Language , is the record of such a completed choice, or branching off: the topic, deriving ultimately from a name, represents the object of a demand, or a proposed replacement for such an object, a demand that, through some possible series of concatenations (refusals and counter-demands), could lead to the unraveling of the signs constituting the community; the comment, meanwhile, places the topic beyond reach, at least for the present, embedding it in some reality that resists our imperatives.\n\nSo, a choice has been made to defer imperatives and a further choice has been made to defer imperatives in this particular way—as opposed to some other sentence which, presumably, would have been more likely to inflame rather than quell the upsurge in “demand” (perhaps by dangling the topic in front of some part of the audience, rather than removing it from the reach of all). A discourse, then, is the articulation of a whole series of such choices and, of course, with political documents, especially founding ones, people will argue over every single sentence, every single word and punctuation mark. The grammar of the sentence, furthermore, iterates the “grammar” of the originary scene, where my choice to imitate the aborted gesture rather than the gesture itself is “predicated” upon everyone else doing the same—in that case, using grammatical terms to structure the scene for us, the one aborting his gesture give us the “topic” and those who imitate him in turn are “commenting.”\n\nSimilarly, “understanding” a sentence means knowing how to restore or maintain a proper relation between declaratives and imperatives: where and how to match the declarative with a symmetrical declarative, where and how to take the declarative as an occasion to reframe the imperative. So, the relation between a sentence and succeeding sentences is itself one between “topic” and “comment.”\n\nComplying, for now, with traditional grammar, we can reduce all sentence types to four: the declarative, the interrogative, the imperative and the exclamatory. The exclamatory is what I propose to represent the ostensive on the grammatical level, so the entire sequence from ostensive to declarative can be represented grammatically, and each sentence analyzed as some articulation of all types. What a beautiful day! How I love you! These are the prototypical exclamations, and I think we could usefully annex to the exclamation on one side what would ordinarily be classified as interjections (oh my God!), and on the other side what might be classified as ostensive or deictic references (in declarative sentences)—there it is! That’s it! It’s a boy! The exclamation calls the attention of the interlocutor to some present object and both embodies and proposes some attitude attached to attending to that object. In that case, “thank you,” “I promise” and other “ostensive” (in the originary sense) expressions can join the category as well.\n\nEach kind of sentence has a range of possible responses and extensions built in: the declarative can lead to other declaratives, it can transition imperceptibly into imperatives (the door is still open… ok, I’ll get it), it can call forth questions and exclamations, and we could analyze any discourse in terms of which possibilities get actualized. Imperatives get obeyed, more or less precisely, more or less sincerely, or they are refused, with greater or less power; imperatives transition into interrogatives, and we could trace any interrogative back to an imperative that has been prolonged, suspended, and converted into a more or less open field.\n\nThe grammar of the exclamation is to evoke a matching exclamation: Yes! And I you! So it is… And, of course, one sentence type can easily stand in for others: “you’re kidding!” is often an exclamation masked as a declarative, while “are you out of your mind?” is one masked as an interrogative—and in each case the masking is possible because the expressions are impossible if taken literally. It also seems to me that the exclamation has a special relationship to the first person, the imperative and interrogative (more obviously) to the second person, and the declarative to the third person. I won’t explore this now, but Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has an analysis of the differences, which can best be called “grammatical,” between the statements “I love you,” “you love her,” and “she loves him” that transcend the fact that all happen to be, formally, declarative sentences.\n\nIn my terms, the disclosure “I love you” functions much more like an exclamation, calling for a matching or symmetrical response confirming the shared reality; “you love her” is as impertinent and intrusive as any unauthorized imperative, and translates easily into “admit it, already”; while “she loves him” is the only properly declarative of the three, with its topic’s presumed distance from either of the interlocutors.\n\nI plan to return to this extremely rich field of speculation, of course, but my point here is that thresholds and bifurcations in the social world can best be registered grammatically. A while back, after mentioning to a friend of mine (with whom, for reasons that will become evident, I rarely stray into political discussions) my admiration for Frederick Kagan (the main intellectual architect of the so-called “Surge” in Iraq in 2007), he responded in the following manner: “if you think it’s ok to send kids to war while you stay safe.” Now, the argument here, such as it is, doesn’t interest me much—it’s the standard “chicken-hawk” accusation (al though, incidentally, the infelicity of so many of the Left’s insults—from “chicken hawk,” which is of course an actual bird that eats chickens, not a chicken that pretends to be a hawk; to the idiotic title of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”—“9/11,” needless to say, can’t be a temperature, and the reference to a book on book burning is oddly connected to a political crisis which had little to do with censorship, etc.; to the current slur, “teabagger,” which “plays” with remarkable clumsiness on “tea party,” while for indiscernible reasons associating those protestors with practitioners of an obscure sexual, usually homosexual, I have heard, practice—would be fascinating subject to study: in other words, what does it say that the Left can’t really work with language, that it seems to rely on a deeply embedded system of allusions that couldn’t really be articulated explicitly if they tried?).\n\nWhat do we make of the grammar, though, which I take to be very typical? On the one hand, it could be a subordinate clause, the with main “I could see admiring him..” elided, but that doesn’t really work since no one actually contemplating such admiration would phrase its precondition in this way; you could say that the subordinate clause comments ironically on the main one, but the accusation is too thick, leaden and literalistic to qualify as “ironic.” The expression strikes me, rather, as an exclamation, but one that can’t present itself as one to an interlocutor who won’t “match” it (to a fellow leftist it would be easy enough to just say something like “sending more kids off to get killed!” at the mention of Kagan’s name).\n\nWhich is to say that it’s a founding exclamation that can’t really take on public, “declarative” form. Nor can it lead to any imperative: “what a beautiful day!” leads naturally into “let’s go out and enjoy it!” or “get out and play!”; “sending kids off to die!” can only lead to an imperative like “let’s stop it!,” but to whom is that imperative addressed, outside of a quasi-ritualized sphere in which it is associated with constant affirmations, dedications, oaths, etc., to “do something”? So, in the masking and grammatical isolation of this particular phrase, its self-cornering, we can identify the shape and position of a corresponding configuration of resentments.\n\nWhich is not to say (obviously!) that such resentments, expressed in such mangled grammatical forms, can’t be highly successful politically—that too would be subject to grammatical analysis. And so would, or could, any counter-analysis to my own. I think such an approach is much more promising than either “logical,” “rhetorical,” or “ideological” modes of analysis.\n\nSo, at the point of any bifurcation stands an exclamation, expressing a revelation of some new reality and its attendant possibilities; then comes the imperative, determining which path to take; followed by the inflection of the imperative into interrogatives, probing the various by-ways of the path; and by the time the declarative comes along, the choice has already been made and the speaker is in the process of inscribing that choice in reality. Of course, how the choice gets inscribed in reality is extremely important—indeed, it is an intrinsic element of reality itself and lays the groundwork for upcoming bifurcations. I would even say that the declarative sentence essentially articulates a series of exclamations and imperatives, presents them after the event of their interference in reality, and thereby packages, preserves and re-circulates what would otherwise have been lost in the event itself. When we argue about a text, we are arguing about what it is asking us to wonder at and what it is telling us to do.\n\n“White guilt is the guilt of the unmarked toward the marked.” I confess that there is a lot in this definition of Gans’s that I haven’t sufficiently attended to in my own thinking on White Guilt—in particular, the notion of being either marked or unmarked, and the relation between the two. To be marked is to be identified as a potential victim, as someone who could be violated with impunity or whose violation may even be the subject of an imperative. In principle, one could be marked either from “above” or from “below”—indeed, if scapegoating originally targeted the “Big Man,” then marking was originally a source of privileges as well as victimage, presumably in some equilibrium.\n\nHow, then, did victimage become exclusively associated with the “lower orders,” even though we still scapegoat our Big Men and Women (celebrities, political and business leaders) all the time? I think the answer lies in the way we have managed to defer scapegoating, and make it less deadly when it occurs, in the modern world. Rather than ritual rules for marking scapegoats, we have devised juridical, administrative and medical procedures for determining who is to be marked. On the one hand, then, the “higher” orders are far better able to avail themselves of these processes of deferral, which in turn tend to add stigma to the lower orders, who are likely to look “guilty,” “sick,” or “unauthorized” in all kinds of ways.\n\nOn the other hand, these procedures make the powerful more predictable and therefore less frightening (indeed, rhetorical attacks on the powerful are celebrated, without necessarily having much effect), while the powerless or excluded, attended to anxiously in all kinds of ways by our institutions, appear even more mysterious and potentially disruptive.\n\nThe scapegoating of the powerless, then, was a result of the modern attempt to unmark everyone—an attempt which paradoxically made the resulting marks all the more indelible. It’s probably a lot harder to resist being marked with “a genetic and environmental propensity to criminal behavior” then the charge of poisoning wells. At least one could disprove the latter—who, though, could so remake the “science” involved in the former as to invalidate the label? The guilt towards the marked thus reflects the realization that any of us could be marked, and that this modern form of deferral could engulf modern society in more hideous forms of violence than we have known.\n\nThe form taken by this guilt is, interestingly, not to continue the thankless and hopeless task of a general unmarking (perhaps we should use the term “bleaching” to describe the goal of a “color-blind” society); rather, it is to seek to establish an orthodox, ritualized system of marking, in which markers of exclusion are both tabooed and assiduously collected and in turn reversed into markers of privilege—the easily parodied and inevitably rough attempts to arrive at a hierarchy of victimage is the result. The consequent scapegoating of the gift of firstness which, in a sense, restores the old scapegoating of the powerful to its originary position, reflects the realization that the capacity for freedom, for starting over, continually threatens to undo what has become a system of insurance (chock-full of mandates, naturally), of reciprocal indemnification from risk: we have almost, in the minds of those self-appointed to construct the rituals of White Guilt, arrived at a new social contract everyone could sign onto (the unmarked are ready to follow the new rules of marking and the marked are willing to accept the payment of victimary blackmail in exchange for a relief from their infinite demands), and only the permanence of the capacity for freedom and responsibility threatens to undermine all that labor.\n\nThe only solution is to mark everyone, over and over again. Not by some kind of essential characteristic (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) but by their idioms. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition of the differend as a claim or contention expressed in the idiom of only one of the interlocutors is of great value to us today. Lyotard yoked this notion to victimary imperatives, but he also knew that it exceeded such easily formulated asymmetries. Idioms are what resist translation—they require that you enter the grammar of another, the characteristic way in which they articulate exclamations, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives.\n\nBut the mistranslations of idioms are just as interesting, and increasingly common in a world made up of niche markets that overlap one another in thousands of ways. “You hit that one out of the park!” is perfectly intelligible to anyone familiar with baseball; I can barely imagine what it would sound like to someone who isn’t, or how it would get iterated further and further away from its point of origin. Idiomatic marking would both enter others’ idioms and mistranslate, or inflect, or, simply, mistake them—make the explicit the imperative implicit in someone’s declarative (by obeying or disobeying it), supply the exclamation missing in someone’s imperative, or the line of questioning that might have led from the embrace of an imperative to its declarative, doxic, forms (and do so by exclaiming, by questioning), render a demand in the declarative form of its fulfillment, etc. Everybody is vulnerable in this way, but not too vulnerable, and in ways that are not easily predictable or controlled; idiomatic marking would also allow for new forms of generosity, as idioms can just as easily be interpreted “up” as “down.”\n\nThe problem with this, as other radical proposals, is who wants to go first? On the one hand, what I am describing already happens all the time—it’s a large part of the way in which friends and family relate to each other: teasing one another about each one’s idiosyncrasies, but in such a way as to make those idiosyncrasies a source of love as well as resentment. But it rarely happens outside of such safe spaces and, indeed, would have to take on very different forms in public life. It seems to me that the rise of the “Tea Party” movement and Sarah Palin will give us a chance to see what that might look like—a commentary which I recently read (one hostile to Palin’s influence with the Republican Party) said (I’m quoting from memory) that the Republicans “need someone familiar with all the B.S. of politics, which Palin speaks like a tourist carrying around a phrase book.”\n\nThis gets both sides of the equation right: contemporary political discourse is all “B.S.”—does anyone really believe that phrases like “he’s going to move to the center, pick up some moderates, and then shore up his base in time for the next election” mean anything anymore? And Palin does, indeed, try to speak it, with an intensified sincerity that exposes it as a patchwork of empty phrases, while at the same time generating the elements of a new idiom. And as much as anything else, Obama’s unspeakably boring (except, I imagine, to listeners of NPR) fluency in a particular set of “progressive” commonplaces is likely to sink his Presidency.\n\nThere is a space here for some rigor as well, though. For those so interested, I would suggest the methods of the Oulipo literary group, the possible applications of which to public life have been so far unexplored (to my knowledge)—al though there is the amusing homophonic bumper sticker, “Visualize Whirled Peas,” and perhaps others I’m forgetting. I would love to see the results of the application of the N+7 method to one of Obama’s speeches—maybe I’ll do it myself. Harry Mathews, the only American member of the group, has invented what he calls “perverbs”—statements created by attaching the second part of a proverb or maxim to the first part of another one.\n\nSo, for example, from the hybridization of “Too many cooks spoil the broth” and “Let the dead bury their dead,” we get “Too many cooks bury their dead.” Mathews then writes a little story that makes sense of the new phrase, which leads to some hilarious results (how could we get from there being too many cooks to those cooks burying someone’s—the cook’s own?—dead, etc.?) but also suggests an excellent way to puncture and disable clichés and, in the process, transform them into the material for new idioms. The Oulipo methods elevate form and rules over substance and thereby make it easy to see how much of “substance” is simply sedimented forms and rules.\n\nJust for fun, let’s try something with this little snippet of President Obama’s speech to Congress on health care, given in September:\n\nWell, the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. (Applause.) Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together, and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care. Now is the time to deliver on health care.\n\nI propose that we borrow another of Mathews’s ideas, his “Algorithm,” in which (I’m simplifying enormously) a particular word or phrase in each sentence is moved down to replace the word in that position in the next sentence. In these remarks of Obama, the key word or phrase in each sentence seems to me to be the objects of auxiliary verbs and prepositions: “bickering,” “games,” “action,” “bring,” “do,” and “deliver”—that’s where the real political distinctions are made. So, let’s give it a try, making the necessary adjustments for grammatical correctness:\n\nWell, the time for delivering is over. The time for bickering has passed. Now is the season for games. Now is when we must act the best ideas of both parties and show the American people that we can still bring what we were sent here to bring. Now is the time to do health care. Now is the time to do health care.\n\nI will just say that this idiomatic marking seems to me truer than the original: the time for delivering is certainly over; leaving the “bickering” sandwiched between the first and third sentences bring outs better what is menacing in that assertion; is it ever the season for games!; “acting” the best ideas is certainly as close as they are coming to any ideas; what, indeed, have they been sent to “bring,” and to whom? (and by now there are plenty of new idiomatic, in particular taunting and boasting, uses of “bring,” like “bring your best game”); and, who can deny they are “doing health care,” with all the rich idiomatic implications, often threatening, of “do”?\n\nIdiomatic markings are perfect for a de-centralized popular culture, and for an intelligent one. A lot of blows will be struck, but very few of them deadly—Obama will survive even much more artfully done and politically biting algorithmic permutations of his discourse than the one I have produced. But some of these permutations will turn out to be very memorable, even if we could never predict which ones in advance. And what we might come to share, what might be a “game-changer,” what might “transcend partisanship” (or “game partisanship” and “transcend change”) is our participation is remaking and rejuvenating our common linguistic material."
    },
    {
      "slug": "reflections-on-political-economy-from-firstness-to-thirdness",
      "title": "Reflections on Political Economy from Firstness to Thirdness",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "All exchanges end symmetrically, but, once they are no longer bound by ritual, they must begin asymmetrically. If the forms of the hunt are prescribed, along with the manner of distribution following the kill, or if the exchange of gifts is inscribed in tradition, then the danger of asymmetry is eliminated. But when something that didn’t exist previously is brought into the marketplace, a breach in the existing division of labor is created: things that had value before will have different values now and new values will be created; even more, new desires will be created. Nobody desired a car before they existed, nobody desires now whatever will be the hottest product in 2025, and no one who is now at work creating that product is going to do so if he or she is concerned with meeting existing desires.\n\nOf course, the one who brings the new product to market can’t know whether it will, in fact, create the corresponding desire nor, therefore, whether the breach in the division of labor has indeed been effected—that too is part of the asymmetry, but also the basis for converting the asymmetry into a new symmetry, wherein producer and consumer recognize each other. Entrepreneurship is a mode of firstness.\n\nAccording to the Austrian school of economics founded by Ludwig von Mises, the creation of money by the state (“fiat money”) benefits those who get it first, while disadvantaging those who receive it later on down the line. This seems to me a very important insight. Obviously, the people who get the money first are the ones the government gives it to, very much like those first in on a Ponzi scheme, who get their money back and can therefore testify to the bona fides of the system to later entrants. The same would hold true for any government intervention in the economy that benefits, intentionally or not, some players over others—for example, an environmental regulation that requires a conversion from a cheaper to a more expensive technology and thereby puts the smaller businessman out of business.\n\nThe government, in such a case, doesn’t exactly give money, but it channels money in a particular direction and, like in the cases where money is given directly, those who are able to make the conversion first have the advantage—not only are they, for a certain period, the only players, but, as partners with the government in the new regulatory regime, they can use their expertise, their role in stabilizing the market and their ability to mobilize external interests to help shape future regulation. Such market interventions lead to misallocations of capital, but it is primarily the later entrants who will notice that, especially since regulation creates a captive market the limits of which will only be revealed later on.\n\nThe introduction of fiat money and regulatory regimes are responses to the asymmetry of exchange, felt above all in the disruptions of the existing social division of labor. These responses are modes of secondness, aimed at restoring symmetry by drawing upon the resentments neglected by the primary entrepreneurial gesture. They are not the only possible forms of secondness—the establishment of contractual regimes and legislation aimed at interpreting contractual language and guiding judicial traditions can even out the scales when resentments start to threaten social order. Either way, though, this secondness must itself be considered an economic fact, and any economic “laws” would have to include these secondary operations.\n\nInsofar as money is the result of a form of deferral—a certain commodity, which originally has other uses, is set aside to serve as a means of exchange, and must therefore be removed from industrial use—and itself makes deferral possible (one accumulates money rather than consuming something now and hence gambles on or, if one like, displays faith in, the future), we could see money as the medium within which these contending tendencies take on a definite shape. When I save or invest money, I am positioning myself within the evolving social division of labor; but I am also betting on the extent to which the government, and the resentments it channels and inflames, will use money for more immediate deferral purposes.\n\nWe can think about this on the model of “matching funds,” the principle grant-giving agencies often use to provide incentives to recipients to raise as much resources independently as possible. When I invest, I can anticipate “matching funds” in the form of the investments and future consumption of others; or I can anticipate “matching funds” in the form of future devaluations which will lessen or eliminate my obligations. We should be able to identify the limits within which the proportions of these respective expectations fluctuate within a given political economic regime, and account for the actions of economic agents, and the probable consequences of those actions, accordingly.\n\nWe also have thirdness, though, the totality of dispositions that allow for the welcoming, circulation and modification of the transformations introduced by the entrepreneur. All the forms taken by everyday resentments and desires comprise thirdness, and originary economic thinking should seek to put some order into this area as well. I would suggest three categories of thirdness: common sense, habit, and idiosyncrasy. Common sense is the ongoing checks and balances of immediate resentments, issuing in maxims of human nature or mimetic regularity. Common sense leads us to establish some balance between spending and saving, short term and long term expenditure, desire and need, and so on.\n\nHabits are far more compelling: they result from self-issued imperatives aimed at compensating for some absence which end up comprising the tacit dimension of presence. Habits are sustaining, but also virulent and automatic—habits, like Freud’s Id, have no reason to explain or justify themselves, or to attend to any reality. Habits account for obstinacy and a strong sense of a continuous self; but they are also the source of addictions and fantasies. Habits get installed through an instantaneous feeling of saturation associated with some experience, and are sustained through the possibility of repeating that feeling, recalling it on demand, and for that purpose obliviousness to the outside world (and ultimately even to the habit itself) is warranted.\n\nThe question to ask about habits is whether they are shaped so as to benefit from intersections with the habits of others: if no, then habits are a source of dysfunction; if yes, habits invigorate and inflect common sense so as to produce a healthy idiosyncrasy—one’s own way of piecing an ultimately shared reality together.\n\nThere is no reason for originary economists to abstain from passing judgment on the various forms of thirdness. I don’t see how one can deny that addictions to drugs, gambling and pornography are harmful to the economy in the long run, even if from a strictly “economic” perspective those expenditures (assuming the legalization of drugs, at least) are no different from money spent on vacations to the beach, bicycles, flat screen TVs, etc. Addictions paralyze common sense by creating a fantasy world in which everything will turn around soon if one can just get that next fix. At the same time there are lesser addictions, or related modes of euphoria that are better called “enthusiasms,” that can be highly productive: we speak about political “junkies” who help keep the various resentments visible, “workaholics,” sports fans (“fanatics”), and so on. The difference is that one wants to spread enthusiasms to others and can do so in the normal world, while addictions close one up in private nightmares.\n\nIf the “law of diminishing returns” is not the agricultural “law” that Malthus perhaps assumed, we can certainly recoup it as a law of mimesis, and therefore an economic law as well. Models get exhausted after a while, and we could probably in most cases trace a pretty predictable path from initial responses, such as astonishment, to a new model, to uncritical emulation, to attempts at reproduction, vulgarization, and all the way to parody and disgust. This is certainly the case for modifications in the social division of labor, which must, it seems to me, inevitably lead to “crises of overproduction”—how can one discover that the public is saturated with jeeps, or new homes, or teen vampire movies without making too many of them and seeing them go unpurchased?\n\nContrary to the Marxist account, though, if left to run their course, there is no need for such crises to be generalized. But until the model is exhausted there is little choice but to act as if it is inexhaustible, and it probably seems more inexhaustible than ever precisely at the moment of exhaustion, when everyone is rushing to squeeze the last bit of juice out of it. And nowhere is this more true than in the financial sector, where it has become especially difficult to distinguish genuine innovations in enhancing the circulation of money and the efficiency of its allocation from ways of more efficiently implicating the government in matching the funds one has advanced.\n\nGM at least knows that somewhere along the line they need to sell cars; but can’t Goldman Sachs focus its attention upon positioning itself favorably for the next influx of fiat money into the economy? And, finally, the acceleration of the law of diminishing terms in the financial sector of the political economy of the welfare/regulatory state feeds upon and encourages addictions lower down the food chain, as otherwise normal people get lost in fantasies of acquiring fantastic wealth merely by mortgaging themselves up to the hilt in a series of homes they will never live in.\n\nIt seems to me we can trace property back to two separate sources, division and conquest. The first is more originary—there must already be an equal division on the originary scene of the common object. I don’t mean that everyone gets an equal piece—I mean that everyone gets enough so that their resentments and desires don’t override the peaceful settlement, and each one calculates that the chances of getting yet a little bit more at the expense of one’s neighbor are less than the chances that the attempt will result in the neighbor getting a bit more at one’s own expense—and that’s all equality can ever really mean, anyway.\n\nAnd we always see this happening in any situation where people must live and cooperate together—people who share the same office at work, members of the same family, outfielders on a baseball team, riders in a jammed subway car, etc., all carve out a kind of “property” regime for themselves, a regime that would ultimately lead to formalized separation into parcels and the possibility of exchange. But from very early on the possibility of simply taking property from weaker parties—individuals and groups—must have presented itself, and the necessary adjustments in the ruling signs and rituals rather easily made. And with the “Big Man” model of social organization, property as conquest and expropriation is explicitly sacralized as the foundation of culture.\n\nI think that these more egalitarian and hierarchical modes of property will always contend with each other in civilized societies, and one can’t simply privilege the egalitarian version: when a new corporation comes to a small town and buys up a company that employs much of the population and goes on to lay half of them off in the name of modernization, it looks a lot like conquest and devastation, but it may be absolutely necessary and ultimately the right thing even for the town itself. But the people of the town might also most effectively see to their own future by fighting against attempts by their local or state government to help the predatory corporation along—such a fight would display cognizance of the consequences of economic decline (the setting in of all kinds of addictions) and in doing so help to defer those consequences, even if they lose the immediate battle.\n\nSo, originary political economy can help us to distinguish addictions from enthusiasms; the firstness of entrepreneurial initiative from the anti-firstness of fiat money and granting through regulation property rights in the existing social division of labor; the exhaustion of an economic model from its illusory inexhaustibility; the spontaneous cooperation undergirding property rights from the right of conquest—and, in this case, we can acknowledge that the latter will ultimately depend upon the former, since even the most arrogant conqueror must depend on his officers and enlisted personnel to divide and share duties and rewards, and even upon the conquered to cooperate in the sustaining of life.\n\nPolitically, this would involve trying to restrict governmental activity to providing rules for ongoing interactions; rules that the participants in those interactions would recognize as representations of evolved shared habits; and rules directed toward places where the “grey areas” and ambiguities inevitable in existing spontaneously evolved habits have created contentions that at least the most significant players realize can’t be settled internally. Perhaps a helpful formulation would go as follows: what, as an elected official, are you doing to make yourself less necessary to the transactions comprising the social order?\n\nOr: what are you doing that would make you replaceable by pretty much anyone, or at least any normal idiosyncratic, in whom enthusiasms crowd out addictions and are tempered by common sense, and who can refrain from treating public office as a feudal privilege? These kinds of questions would ultimately lead to an argument for term limits, for elected officials and bureaucrats alike—this is perhaps the most egregious broken promise of the “revolutionary” Republican “class” of 1994, and perhaps a new class of Republicans can rise to power by reaffirming that promise and then either hold power or make it irrelevant whether they do or not by keeping it.\n\nWe might learn to think differently about laws and reforms if we had to tailor them to a regular rotation of public officials, who would therefore tend to be more normal people: normal people who might have more incoherent views at the margin, who might make more mistakes and be more easily taken in by well prepared lobbyists, but who would also be much less likely to vote for 1,900 page long bills and therefore may be less tempting prey for those same lobbyists."
    },
    {
      "slug": "classicism-romanticism-and-marginalism-problems-in-the-concept-of-imitation",
      "title": "Classicism, Romanticism and Marginalism: Problems in the Concept of Imitation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Classicism is the imperative to refer one’s work to a model; not just any model, but the best model, which represents the heights of human excellence, which is to say a more permanent human reality (human reality, moreover, as embedded in a natural and divine order). Romanticism is the imperative to reject the authority of any particular model, because any model would be finite and therefore arbitrarily close off actual and potential areas of experience and discovery. I would like to inscribe marginalism in the complementary antinomies each position must confront: classicism must impute the imperatives of reality to its models in order to produce its own semiotic authority; while the romantic gesture of overthrowing models must be compulsively repeated, which in turn establishes the most tyrannical of all models. Marginalism finds in the model an imperative instituting the rule one will already have been following, thereby turning the model into a constitutive, inexhaustible, source of rules.\n\nWe follow one model rather than another because it directs us toward the acquisition of a more attractive object. This is a bit circular, though, because how else could we come to know objects, and distinguish between their respective attractions, without models? One model replaces another by offering us a model that is more attractive, even on the terms of our previous model—that’s how we know. A healthy relation to models, then, always places the object in the center, so that some criteria for judging the pedagogical relationship can be generated. But if the object in question is finite and indivisible, the mimetic relationship reaches its limits in the mutual desire for possession. So the object in the center must be infinite and indivisible—in which case it can’t be possessed in any stable way and relies upon one’s acceptance as a model by others, that is, upon one being taken as issuing imperatives that give way to a rule. This is the way the “possession” of attributes like “honor,” “goodness,” and “respect” is established.\n\nBut the attention to such intangible objects, including the ultimate intangible object, God or, perhaps more precisely, God’s blessing, leads us back to the model again. It is precisely in a civilized order, where the central objects are intangible and beyond the reach of ritualized practices, that models confront us as embodiments of abstract norms. This makes the inversion of the healthy relationship between object and model not complete (there are still plenty, and ever more, material goods out there), but inevitable. In other words, how can I know what it means to be a moral, God-fearing, compassionate, loyal, etc., individual, other than by following very closely the example set by those considered such?\n\nAnd following very closely means not only deriving my actions and attitudes from those I see erected as models, but seeking the approval of those models and the circles that have approved of them. Cultural pedagogy, in that case, involves the reversion of the proper relation between object and model: the models must direct attention from themselves to the intangible, invisible objects underpinning their legitimacy.\n\nThis is a complex maneuver, though, because the attention directed toward the model must first of all be used, and the rules emanating from that model reinforced and enforced in very literal ways. I think that one of the attractions of what are essentially enormously popular, millennial-style cults on the Left like Global Warmism and White Guilt is that they satisfy this need for an unproblematic, self-confident pedagogy. They tell you exactly what you have to say on every question, they model the appropriate modes of self-presentation in great detail, they provide a pantheon of heroes, they tell you exactly who the enemy is and how to confront and confound him. Responding to such true believers with the injunction to “think for yourself” is not very effective: alternative modes of thinking are a priori designated as bought and paid for by the oil companies, or mark one as a troglodytic denizen of “far right wing” caves.\n\nA marginalist cultural pedagogy would present the rules founding an idiom. If there is one generalization I can venture regarding today’s “youth,” it is that they are allergic to lectures, in any context. Any insistence that, in order to believe one thing that you say they already have to believe something else you say is met with an iron wall of boredom and suspicion. The exceptions seem to me to be those who see their prospects in succeeding to positions in the dominant forms of victimary pedagogy in the arts, education, politics and media. Needless to say, no privileged or “classical” model of inquiry, creation, or accomplishment, has the slightest chance of surviving beyond very small and protected circles. At the same time, though, I don’t think young people today are particularly “romantic” either—they are very attuned to the demands made upon them and determined to follow the rules imposed, without necessarily “believing” in these demands or rules.\n\nWhat perhaps can be provided by the pedagogue are minimal rules, practices and spaces that allow for the creation of idioms. Working on the production of such rules and practices directs our attention away from both model and object and toward the sign. The model uses signs to direct attention away from himself and toward a world of objects, but the elaboration of signs at a permanent distance from any particular configuration of those objects can become the center of attention. I don’t think there’s much value today in “dialogue,” either interpersonally or in the more cultural sense as postmodern liberalisms would have it—there is rarely any reason to assume that any two or more of us are really speaking about the same thing. What may be valuable is saying “why don’t you try this?” And this, of course, means you need to have something worth trying.\n\nWe can all generate things worth trying, minimal moves that, butterfly-effect like can have unknown reverberations through the world. We are all following and inventing rules, tacitly and explicitly, all the time; we are always following and inventing contradictory sets of rules; and we are always mistaking those rules in ways that we can occasionally notice. Cultural pedagogy authority can be used—it will always have enough capital for this—to present the rules that would account for the legitimacy of that mode of cultural authority. In politics, political entrepreneurs in a possible future in which avenues into public life can evade party filters (or in which parties themselves become different kinds of animals) could present a set of rules, grounded in basic imperatives (which your own experience would quickly teach you), regarding influencing public opinion, deal-making, compromise, the composition of legislation, and also the leveraging of firm principles in various pragmatic situations. In academic settings, in specific disciplinary sites, we can construct minimal rules regarding what counts as inquiry into language, history, biology, etc.\n\nPedagogy then involves putting students on the path to formulate their own idiosyncratic versions of these rules. For example, in the human sciences we can say that a basic move any scholar needs to be able to make is to take a word from one text or context and use it to describe something in another text or context. That’s a fundamental imperative: we recognize a scholar in the human sciences by the fluency with which they effect such transfers of meaning. Indeed, such work with signs reveals the basic object of the human sciences: the human being as source of signs. In that case, one can simply tell students they need to do that: take a text, and, say, use some word or phrase in that text to describe something happening someplace else in that text.\n\nOne could multiply such imperatives and rules simply by looking at the kinds of things we do as thinkers: for example, one very common way in which we create new concepts is by placing “the” before an adjective (“the Good”). So, tell students that they have to place “the” before x adjectives in a particular text, and then use the resulting concept to describe something they see in the text, or something they are doing in reading the text. Never mind the results, for a while at least—you will get, obviously, mistakes, clumsiness, barbaric formulations rather than Platonic dialogues. But the mistakes, subjected to inquiry, can become the source of new idioms—what is important is that the invented concepts be expanded, multiplied, intertwined, and applied.\n\nAs long as texts and ever-mutating rules are placed at the center, and students are obliged to assess and rework one another’s idioms, the things students are learning they can do with language will enable them to see the very odd things the texts we honor in the academy have done with language. (We can perhaps come to see how texts and artifacts “succeed” precisely by wrenching the present constellation of signs out of their habitual slots—something our fluency in such texts and artifacts blinds us to.)\n\nPerhaps the culture as a whole is ready for such practices—the degree of self-reflexivity has so intensified that discussion, even in the most popular media, is increasingly about how something can be taken in one way or another. What are the rules one is following when one seeks fame in a particular manner or area of endeavor; what are the rules that underlie genuine excellence and accomplishment? Any consumer of popular culture can answer the first question in detailed and savvy ways. The second question, of course, is the harder one, but it’s not a fundamentally different one: real, lasting accomplishment is the result of discipline—discipline not just in the sense of managing passions and desires and establishing the habits that allow one to marginalize distractions (resentments that will lose their object tomorrow but can absorb all your energies today), but in the sense of exploring and inventing the rules of the activity and doing so along with others—competitors and collaborators—in unpredictable fields.\n\nWhat are the most basic things political organizers need to do? Reporters? Poets? There are a lot of ways of answering these questions, and each answer will yield different rules and then different idioms. Inventing catchy puns might be just as important, at this point, as crafting complex policy positions—and I don’t think this is a bad thing, as inventing catchy puns can not only be an equally demanding discipline but can do something far more valuable than policy positions, which is create channels of spontaneous exchange."
    },
    {
      "slug": "more-problems-in-the-concept-of-imitation",
      "title": "More problems in the concept of imitation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "To imitate is to take imperatives from the actions or another—this first of all must be taken in a very literal and local sense: you see the other smashing a coconut with a stone and you are told by that to “do this.” This kind of imitation of individual moves would lead to local rather than cataclysmic conflicts.\n\nI understand the anachronistic, anthropomorphic nature of my vocabulary here: I am describing imitation in terms of imperatives before there are any, but any vocabulary that would enable us to “enter” the process of imitation would be anachronistic and anthropomorphic.\n\nImitation becomes more dangerous when it involves taking the other’s activity as a rule—that is, in Michael Polyani’s terms, when you attend from his moves to the intended result of those moves. In this case, action aims at some kind of privileged access to the object.\n\nAt this point, then, one attends from the model’s attention to the object to the object as attended to by the model, but insofar as you see the model you don’t see the object and insofar as you see the object the model must be eliminated from the scene. So, there are conflicting imperatives: do this (move toward the object); look at that (eye the object)—but this second imperative, precisely in proportion to the model’s interest, would better be formulated as look at me.\n\nThe question then concerns the relative power of the imperatives issuing from the model and the object, respectively—once the desire for the object, the imperative to model oneself on its possession, attains ascendancy, the imperative to destroy the other follows, since one can only imagine such possession if the other no longer exists. To destroy the other’s relation to the object is to enter the entirety of his relation to the object, to inhabit his tacit and explicit tendency toward the object.\n\nWhen the destruction of the other proves more difficult then imagined, one returns to the object for another imperative, elucidating the first one; the imperative returned is now in the form of a rule: keep the other away from the object, the object commands you, but in imitating the issuer of this command you become the guardian of the object and must obey that same command yourself: keep the other away as you yourself refrain from seeking to possess the object—imitate the issuer of this command, the presence superintending the object, and preserve the object as that presence does.\n\nNow this attitude of deferral and solicitude towards the object can be imitated, as the other members of the group attend from the power of the presence guarding the object transmitted to the bearing of the first signifier—but here, imitation is insufficient, because the gap between what you attend to and the range of moves you could attend to from that cannot be closed; each must iterate the gesture, apply the rule to the infinitesimal; i.e., find a way to signify that they have signed on to the gesture.\n\nThese relations between immediate imitation and mediated imitation, between imitation and iteration, and between imperative and rule, are permanent features of the human condition. Even in the most mediated mimetic relations, say, where I model my scholarly activity on a teacher’s, and must therefore have studied the style in which that model poses questions, pursues lines of inquiry, distinguishes implicitly between more and less important observations, etc., there will be those occasions where I ask myself, in trying to solve some very specific problem or address a very specific challenge, “what would x do,” right here and now—as if all distance were abolished and we occupied the same frame.\n\n(Perhaps it is precisely at those moments, when one thoroughly incorporates one’s teacher, that one leaves a bit more of that teacher behind—with all the possible violence that implies, or simulates.) However playfully I treat my model, taking it as an occasion for all kinds of inventive iterations across various genres and social domains, in the end I must be able to line up what I am doing with something my model could have been observed doing in a one-to-one manner—that is, I am still imitating. And, however sophisticated a set of rules, and however complex the interaction between their tacit and explicit dimensions, in the end rules are only rules if they issue imperatives when needed—the rules “tell” me that this one is allowed to stay and that one must go.\n\nAt the same time, more advanced forms of mediated imitation, iteration, and regulation have transformed what will count as immediate imitation, imitation, and imperatives, respectively. The judge’s order that someone be removed from the courtroom for unruly behavior can be issued in the simplest imperative imaginable (“remove him!”), but that simplicity relies upon the extraordinary complexity of court procedures, understandings of acceptable behavior in civilized settings, the rule of law, and so on. We can recognize the attempts of a graduate student to mimic the stylistic features of an eminent theorist as a very naïve, even comical instance of imitation, but at the same time it’s obviously very different than scratching yourself because someone else itches (and we might as well remember that we still imitate on that level as well).\n\nResentment is the imitation of the central presence, the enactment of the rule that is derived from the object in the midst of the failure to clear the field for desire. I know that Gans situates resentment subsequent to the issuance of the sign, viewing resentment as that of the desiring subject whose access to the object has been barred. There is, certainly, resentment at that instant, but for the sign itself to be issued and iterated by the other members of the group each must not only refrain from appropriation but ascertain that all others are doing so likewise—and I don’t see another disposition with which one could thus surveil the others aside from resentment; and I don’t see where this disposition could be acquired other than by imitating the presence who, rather than beckoning one to come and take, is now insisting that if all can’t partake, none can.\n\nThe first sign institutes this resenting disposition. Since resentment also imitates some model, the sequence of modifications of imitation from immediate through to iteration, and from imperative to regulation, applies here as well: I resent the guy who looks like he’s looking to take my seat on the bus even though I saw it first; I resent the politician who exploits some gray area in the constitutional order to implement a policy that will undermine freedom; I am angry with myself for cutting some corner in my personal relations or intellectual work, even if no one else will ever know about it; I feel compelled to clarify some conceptual distinction which I have noticed in another thinker—in all these cases, I am resenting with the resentment of the center. And insofar as I resent the barred access to the object by the center itself, even that is the resentment of the center: my desire must be more “justified” (more urgent, more deserved, more intensely felt, etc.) than the others’.\n\nDesire could be in “error,” I suppose (obviously it is of the nature of mimesis that we often choose objects that are unattainable or illusory, that cause us more harm than good, that are dissatisfying once we obtain them, etc.), but only as observed by the resenting subject who can see the delusions of desire as a result of the unfairness of the world, or one’s own lack of luck, or as a deserved result of foolishness or selfishness, etc. In itself, desire is just what it is, the imperative power bestowed upon an object through and in proportion to its possession by some actual or possible normative rival (or rivals).\n\nIn the end, it’s not all that interesting. (Perhaps unfortunately, desire is even less interesting when it is carefully channeled, properly mediated, and leads to real enjoyment—but who knows, maybe that’s just a Romantic prejudice.) Resentment, on the other hand, can be misplaced and misdirected in all kinds of ways, as measured and judged by other more mature (or sometimes even just different) forms of resentment. It is extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between resentment that is genuinely of the center and resentment that is a mask and tool of desire—especially since, given the imitative nature of resentment, even resentments of the center generate new desires and rivalries that pervert their origin. This is just another way of saying that I am much more interested in the composition of the scene than in the mimetic crisis impelling its emergence.\n\nNot only must the first signifier compose something new, but the other members of the group who successively repeat it must do so as well, and their task may be the more difficult one. The first signifier need not know what he is doing: he aborts his gesture of appropriation, which is to say he stops or hesitates. Those who come after must show that they know what he “meant”—that is, they must construct his gesture as sign: the aborted gesture becomes the gesture of aborted appropriation. The third must somehow even out the discrepancies between the first and the second, and the fourth must strike the average or norm that is emerging, and so on.\n\nThese emergent humans already had a repertoire of primate gestures (and grunts, and so on)—that entire repertoire must have been available to convey the resentment of the central presence, with each element necessarily put to some use, perhaps the exact opposite of the one it had previously. There is already a preliminary combination, or grammar, but the norm or rule that is coming into being could just as easily be described as a series of mistakes, of the gesture mis-taken over and over, since none could know what their gesture would look like to the others. The constant would be a rough equidistance between the members and between the members as the object; but the variables would be whatever motions each discovered to ensure their fellows that they would maintain those distances—but also step in to insist the others did so as well.\n\nNot all mistakes are iterations, but all iterations look something like mistakes. Iteration involves applying the rule to the infinitesimal: for example, if I’m imitating someone’s style, or following the rules, tacit and overt, constitutive of that style, when I make a tacit rule overt; or apply an overt rule to a portion of the discourse that resists what I take to be the distinctive markers of the style; or turn a style of writing into a style of living—then, I am iterating. Iteration is applying the rule to the unseen boundaries within which the rule operates. Indeed, whether an iteration will work, or take, or turn out to have been a mistake, can only be known after the fact—maybe at an indeterminate distance from the fact.\n\nThe prerequisite of an iteration is positing the equidistance of all the elements and materials on the scene from each other—that is, no combination is ruled out in advance. This is what Gertrude Stein attempted, first on the level of events, emotions, actions, and so on, in her earlier, more representationalist writings (and through her later, autobiographical ones); and then, in later, more innovative ones, with the linguistic materials themselves. And the second move in the iteration is the presentation of a combination that will serve as a rule, while still keeping the elements and materials in their evenly distributed state.\n\nIn this case models can be treated as absolute, as they must be if they are remain models—they are the source of all imperatives and rules. And one could strive to be a model, based upon the productivity of the rules one proposes. But there is no need to destroy such models—they create space rather than monopolizing scarce space. To the extent that the rules, procedures, moves, and so on necessarily produce different results with each user, there is really nothing to attack, or to feel contained by. All we would need to “sacrifice” is the belief that our models are models because they imitate a higher, more real reality.\n\nIn looking for models to iterate, I can deliberately choose those which seem most alien to my own talents and habits; or I can choose a high cultural model and derive rules for the production of popular cultural object from it, or vice versa; I can choose a model based on its most despised or neglected attributes; I can treat a tragic model comically or a comic model tragically; I can rewrite a text reversing the relative proportions of all of its nouns; the possibilities, needless to say, are inexhaustible, and anyone could do and teach these moves with always surprising, often amusing, and almost invariably instructive results.\n\nThis is play, but very serious play—such play generates idioms, and the proliferation of idioms is what is most likely to save us today. The resentment of the center would then be directed towards any attempt to make us all—or any two of us, for that matter—derive the same imperatives from the same names."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-grammar-of-desire-and-resentment",
      "title": "The Grammar of Desire and Resentment",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2009",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It seems to me that Julia Kristeva was on to something important in her Lacanian-Maoist synthesis in the 60s and 70s, a synthesis predicated upon the notion that desire “pulverizes” what Kristeva called the “thetic”—essentially the kind of meaning packaged in propositions, or declarative sentences. The truth is that, strictly speaking, desire cannot coincide with meaning: the purer the desire, the more any interference with that desire must be destroyed, intellectually and physically, if possible. Desire cannot tolerate an independent reality within which the object might embed itself and thereby resist possession.\n\nAnd by possession, I mean absolute, unquestioned, permanent possession—which is what desire aims at. To put it in grammatical terms, desire involves the object issuing imperatives to the subject—come and get me; be who you can be once you have me; protect me from all others, etc.—but insofar as the object then resists possession, or breaks the promises implicit in its beckoning, the subject is reduced to issuing imperatives to the object, with all those commands reducible to some version of “remain exactly what or who you were in that instant when you first drew my attention to you.” These commands are impotent, and their impotence appears as the object’s situation at the intersection of a range of imperatives: the object is calling forth other suitors, and they in turn are (more successfully) commanding the object, making one or more of them its more authentic owner.\n\nMeaning, indeed, in the sense of confirming a community of sign-users sharing a world of objects, cannot be articulated under such conditions—where Kristeva goes wrong, of course, is in valorizing this state of affairs as some kind of primordial freedom that will overturn the bourgeois order and institute utopia. In other words, she completely ignores the violence constitutive of the desiring condition, or justifies that violence as a salutary destructive force. Kristeva herself came to realize this soon enough. What interests me in all this is thinking through the transition from the grammar of desire to the grammar of resentment, which is the process of meaning constitution.\n\nThis instant when the world appears as a grid of intersecting, multiplying and intensifying imperatives seems to me to be where we can locate the interrogative. The interrogative is a prolonged imperative, which is to say an imperative that understands it may not be obeyed. Questions acknowledge the opacity of the other: if I ask you your name, or where some object is, I assume that my desire will be better satisfied by giving you a choice than by demanding you disclose your identity or produce the object immediately. I need something in your possession that only you can provide. The question introduces resentment into the field of desire, because the question manifests not only the subject’s resentment at being denied immediate access to some desired object but also the subject’s conversion of the field of imperatives into a field of resentments, symmetrical to one’s own.\n\nAnd the question is answered, or “settled,” once the object demanded is secure as a sign in the field of semblances, or “reality.” Questions with no real answer are (leaving aside rhetorical questions, which are essentially exclamations) intensified imperatives that tear at the fabric of reality, as exemplified in the well known joke, “when did you stop beating your wife”?\n\nMeaning, then, is the maintenance of the field of semblances, that is, the condition where all signs are objects and all objects signs, in varying degrees and articulations. Once even something so trivial as a piece of food (where there is plenty) becomes only food and not at all a sign of some mode of sharing, meaning collapses; once even the most abstract or stylized articulation of signs can no longer be “inhabited”—converted into a set of practices—the same thing happens. But the way we get through the question to the settlement of the field of semblances is, it seems to me, through the evolution of the imperative.\n\nWhen the desiring subject makes demands upon the resistant object, the demand that the object remain ever fresh, ever enticing, and ever yielding leads to madness—or to another demand, for further imperatives guiding the subject in possessing the object. These imperatives are invocations, and result in new imperatives from the center proposing self-reformation that might make one worthy of the object, or capable of displacing rivals. The invocation is the mediation that makes the question possible, because only the invocation can bring resentment into play, as the invocation already concedes the need for mediation.\n\nThere are plenty of satisfied desires and, even more, desires whose instigation, pursuit and fulfillment has created moral and ethical goods. Must these be less intense, “neutered,” inauthentic desires? It is better to say that they are desires constructed in such a way as to receive the blessing of the resentment of the center. They are desires turned towards the signness of their object, their opening onto infinity—a surrender of absolute possession and the complete displacement of rivals in the name of the continual hearkening of the center to one’s invocations. Such desires are not directed at a single consummation, but at something more sustained, something requiring a rule governed space wherein the object of desire can be continually augmented rather than diminished through enjoyment.\n\nIf the iterated imperative becomes invocation, the iterated invocation—the invocation that draws in an ever wider circle of desires—becomes rule. This transformation as well, though, must take place through the intermediaries whose invocations collide and converge with the subject’s—that is, through events settled by the emergence of new sets of tacit and overt rule following. But all this is just to say that desire can be converted into love: the imperative to support the freedom and signifying power of the object.\n\nThe most basic form of rule following is language itself, in the form of grammar. The rules of grammar vary widely across languages, even if we could at least find exclamations, imperatives and declaratives in all of them—and nouns, verbs and adjectives, keeping in mind, though, that distinguishing individual words, much less word-types, might be problematic in societies without writing. The diversity in rules of grammar as well as in the specific forms taken by other social and cultural rules, along with the possibility of anthropological generalizations and, more pragmatically, translation, suggests that language evolution is driven by the grammar of desire and resentment—which are also both given to broad generalization while being highly contingent in their articulations.\n\nWe could say, though, that rules come into existence simultaneously with mistakes—the first rule would be ruling something out, straightening some “deviation.” That rule, then, would be the work of resentment, the resentment of the center, however limitedly conceived, resentment countering some use of language taken (or mistaken) to provide an opening to, or to be a sign of, unregulated and unlimited desire—in this case conducted through an improper invocation.\n\nThe resentful grammarian’s stance might be mistaken in what it takes to be mistaken, but it is correct in intuiting the specter of unlimited desire in grammatical anomalies, improprieties and infelicities. Nobody makes grammatical errors in the idiom within which they learned to speak—errors are made in some linguistic community one is trying to enter. They are the visible results of failed attempts at imitation, of attempts to speak from the center, and thus they stand out as markers of mimetic desire. Anyone can see that the desire on display in the solecism is potentially unlimited and so the resentment (the resentment of the center towards attempts to mock and subvert that center) countering it must be unyielding.\n\nThere is so much that is arbitrary in grammatical rules and so much for which there is no substitute for prolonged immersion in the culture of the linguistic group in question—especially if we expand our notion of “grammar” to include rules governing propriety of phrasing, intonation, acceptable degrees of repetition and redundancy, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, widely used clichés and commonplaces, and any other conventions aiding reciprocal intelligibility—that mistakes easily serve as markers of the fragility of the community. (Last year, in my writing class, we looked at a student paper written by an English as a second language speaker.\n\nIt was easy enough to understand what she was trying to say, but it would also be easy enough to find, in a single paragraph, at least a dozen mistakes that would be unthinkable coming from even the most mediocre elememtary school graduate native speaker. Even more, it was easy to notice how “irrational” many of the violated rules were, which is to say how little obeying those rules contributed to conveying the meaning of the sentence. Not surprisingly, those are often the rules whose violation is the most distracting: no information is conveyed by having verbs in the third person singular conjugated with an ending s—why “he walks” instead of “he walk,” as long as we are keeping the pronoun?—but the error here is grating to the ear of the Standard English speaker. I doubt that more than one or two of the students experienced my sense of what a house of cards the entire structure of grammatical regulation is.)\n\nAs I suggested in my previous post, then, desire threatens to reduce the entire composition of the community to a disarticulated assemblage of gestures and “pieces” of language. The more that is invested in the particular forms of such composition, the more challenging the desire, which is also to say the more subversive cultural power to be accessed by divesting from the grammatical order. I neither valorize nor denounce such subversive power, as it can be used for either nihilistic and Gnostic purposes or for the ends of esthetic and cultural renewal—the difference, it seems to me, most often lies in what kind of resentment lays claim to exploiting the desire detectable in the mistake: whether the subversion places the desire it is drawing upon in opposition to some scapegoated form of normal resentment, or the cultural agent in question simply carries out his or her project in the spirit of playfulness, experimentation and workmanship, leaving the leading forces of resentment to recoup and reconfigure the results as they will.\n\nIn the former case, the resentment is toward the very composition of the normal, while in the latter case the resentment is directed towards the margins and therefore the overreach of the normal, acting in the interest of the emergence of new idioms, with new expressive powers, which might otherwise never have come into existence.\n\nSo, as desire—the desires of new members of the community, including those new entrants into our culture we so carelessly and ceaselessly generate within our families—in wave after wave pulverizes the language (usually in very localized ways), we can point to the most entrenched form taken by the imperative as both the most resistant to and most complicitous with this ongoing erosion—habit. Habits are those rules that have become so tacit that it requires special acts of attention to notice their very existence. Habits are idiosyncratic sets of orders we give ourselves and rules we set for ourselves, while at the same time intersecting with the habits of others in myriad ways—the modes of intersection are themselves habitual.\n\nHabits are both scandalously libertine (the special pleasures of that afternoon walk in one’s favorite place, of that coffee with newspaper in the morning…are indescribable) and strangely ascetic (our habits preserve us from all kinds of temptations, which, as violations of the habit, appear to be taboo). And habits are deeply rooted in language—language is unthinkable without it (I know just how habitual some of the stylistic gestures I have made in the last couple of sentences are—the parallelism of “scandalously libertine” and “strangely ascetic,” with the accompanying parenthetical remark in each case, the short sentence connected by the dash to the quasi exclamatory intensification of the statement, etc.) The most profound cultural innovations are ones that work on the level of these and other habits.\n\nRegulated habits of linguistic innovation then becomes a—I would like to say the most—ethical stance in today’s victimary world. One way of thinking of becoming a practitioner of such regulated innovation is consider oneself an anthropologist at one remove from the mimetic crises and holy wars going on around one—at one remove precisely so as to be able to simulate esthetically the contending and evolving imperatives and rules at stake in such crises and battles but without being drawn in. You can’t innovate while in the midst of a struggle for your life, soul, or sanity, but you also can’t innovate without giving idiomatic expression to such struggles.\n\nIt seems to be plausible to hypothesize that the first signifier on the originary scene was not himself in hand to hand combat with his rival, because withdrawal from the battle could hardly be meaningful in that case—it would simply be surrender to the animal higher in the pecking order. Much more likely, it seems to me, is that the first signifier saw the deadly combat begin somewhere at the margins of the scene (the signifier, then, is on the margin of the battle) and it was his refusal to enter the field of combat (his visible resistance to the impulse common to all to rush in) that was meaningful. Similarly, it seems to me productive to assume that the declarative sentence, emerging out of the negative ostensive and also various combinations of ostensives and imperatives, and imperatives with counter-imperatives, was generally the work of interested “bystanders” and mediators in disputes—and, probably, usually not the most contentious and dangerous disputes, but first of all those given to mediation (while bearing a family resemblance to the more ferocious ones), thereby creating the cultural forms capable of being transferred to more central concerns.\n\nOf course, one might say that this little, marginalist, argument on the priority of linguistic inventiveness is just a self-congratulatory account of the way I see myself shaping my own habits at present, so by all means factor that into account in assessing the argument."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-minimal-rule-for-political-discourse",
      "title": "A Minimal Rule for Political Discourse",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Exclude from your discourse all imperatives, implicit and explicit, to third parties. No “x must realize,” or “y needs finally to understand,” or “we have to demand that z…” Nobody really has to do anything, and stating that they do simply establishes a fantasy scenario in which others come to occupy the same scene as you and recognize the same center. Note that imperative directed towards the second party, i.e., the reader or interlocutor, are perfectly acceptable under this rule—as long as the imperative is fulfilled in actions that can be taken by that interlocutor alone, like “exclude from your discourse…” Think about how ridiculous so many of those implicit imperatives would be if stated in the first person singular—if, say, “we must hold the Democrats accountable for their unconscionable over-spending” were to be imagined as someone standing (where?\n\nIn front of “the Democrats”? who have been lined up to hear this proclamation how?) and saying “I hold you accountable”—but what is a performative, like an imperative or judgment, that can’t be stated in the first person before the intended recipient? An imperative to the reader, on the other hand, can remain within the bounds of the imperative: try speaking in this way. It can, of course, be rejected. The other alternative is to write or speak in indicatives, implicit as well as explicit, and lay down some chain of events that might articulate the thing being said or written with someone else doing something else.\n\nI think this constraint would be very helpful—it seems to me that we hardly ever hear, from either politicians or journalists, “if…then…” chains which can sustain the insertion of indefinite “if… then” chains between each “if” and “then.” If the Democrats pass the health care bill they will alienate those who would have their health care and/or insurance arrangements put at risk (in the following ways…) along with those whose taxes would be raised and those who could not afford to sustain their businesses under such mandates; the Republicans would then have a constituency for running on overturning the health care bill which would in turn alienate those who would find the accusation that they have thereby taken away coverage from x number of people persuasive, meaning that the Republicans would weigh these respective constituencies, which might, in turn, “present” differently to different Republicans, who would therefore negotiate amongst themselves.\n\nNo one “must” do anything in this kind of discourse—everyone is simply confronted with choice after choice, with each choice generated a new series, which we can anticipate and formulate as mimetic, speaking beings. Even with larger questions, phrases like, “we must defend the basic principles of the American constitution” or “Western civilization” collapse in the same way under closer inspection. In a sense, what I am arguing is that the legal notion of “standing” is far more important than “logic”—I can speak to an injury done me, I can answer an accusation made against me, and while I can’t “defend Western civilization” (like my example of “holding Democrats accountable,” try to picture “defending Western civilization”), but I can certainly shore up a concept or exemplify a way of thinking that might give some others an imperative to repeat to themselves when they have the chance to speak to an injury done to themselves or another, or to answer an accusation, including one addressed to one of their corporate identities."
    },
    {
      "slug": "oupopo-a-preliminary-political-combinatorial",
      "title": "Oupopo: A Preliminary Political Combinatorial",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The Oulipo group has already spawned a variety of spin-offs: oubapo (comics); oupeinpo (painting); oucuipo (cooking); oumupo (music); outrapo (drama), and at least several more. All one needs to found a new ou-x-po is the realization that the activity in question (the “x”) is governed by rules, some explicit, more tacit, and that the explicit rules can be formed more deliberately and the tacit ones made explicit. A infinitely wide field of activity then opens up, as the self-reflexive gaze we turn upon our own activity is made productive—the first rule would be that any rule that comes into sight—either becomes visible, or takes on a noticeably new character or produces discernably new effects—is deliberately reinforced or countered (with another rule, a sub-rule, or a meta-rule).\n\nEven looking back over this paragraph, for example, I could note that the rule I am following is to point to small changes that lead to large changes—that could, then, become a rule for writing the rest of this post: each sentence, or each paragraph, needs to name a small change along with the larger changes it might lead to. One could make the rule more precise—each paragraph needs to increase the disproportion between the “small” change and the “large” change, etc.\n\nIn order to transform any activity into a procedural, rule governed one, it must be broken down into discrete and, ultimately, irreducible “moves.” In order to begin testing out the uses of “potentialism” for political thinking, I will here try to indicate certain basic political “elements,” certain rules of “combination” and “conversion,” and thereby institute an ou-po(litics)-po. The founding or meta rules must be the following: the rules must be universalizable enough to hold for any social setting: from totalitarian to free order, from normal political situations to emergencies, from international politics to the local school board; second, any rules must, to follow the imperative Eric Gans, in my view rightly, asserted in his most recent Chronicle (385) regarding the “globalization of the human conversation”: “For the first time in history, every non-intimate assemblage must consider itself as virtually including every human being.” And this latter would be an imperative, naturally, that I must follow in writing this post.\n\nHannah Arendt, in fact, gave us a minimal definition of the public sphere which can allow us to compress the two meta rules into one: the public sphere is where what is done and said is seen and heard by everyone. Of course, this can also sound a lot like the sphere of celebrity, and it’s no coincidence that those respective spheres have come to approximate each other, so let’s mark the difference by completing Arendt’s definition: the public sphere is generative and infinite, while celebrity is monopolistic: public displays of defiance on the part of Iranians to their regime doesn’t detract from our ability to engage publically here—quite to the contrary, in fact; while there is only so much attention to be paid to celebrities and some must get more of it than others.\n\nSo, politics is maximum visibility that solicits further exposure—the need politics meets is to have resentment displayed openly and in such a way that various ways of ensuring the reconciliation of one resentment with others can be tried out and, when deemed successful, instituted. The resentments themselves are changed in the process of giving them form—in particular, the claim of each resentment to speak from the center must accentuated, and in this way the actual terms of the center are brought into view. Politics, then, becomes a discovery procedure, aimed at making present the resentment of the center.\n\nSince politics is inevitably a partisan activity (always an “us vs. them” configuration), an honest politics that avows its partisanship (its resentments) while at the same time proposing rules that would not a priori privilege any resentment over those of others who are willing to play by the rules, would aim at, not so much reconciling as “customizing” or “commensurating” resentments within its own camp while surfacing and rendering incongruous resentments among its opponents, with the ultimate goal of bringing members of the other camp into your own. If you are pro-abortion rights, you try to drive a wedge between different factions among the pro-life camp, if you oppose the health care bill you seek to drive a wedge (and, clearly, the most disabling wedge) between the various factions supporting it. And one similarly fends off the reciprocal attempts on the part of one’s opponents, not by suppressing factionalism but by establishing protocols that allow factionalism to be played out openly and with finality.\n\nIf each camp, then, is both unity and a set of factions, both to the other camp, and to itself, we can deduce the following political “syntax”: If we leave aside the content of the particular camps, i.e., remain within the grammar of politics and put aside its semantics, we could say that any move you make as a political agent either offers or refuses some terms of agreement put forth by another faction within your camp or a targeted faction in the other camp. So, you can represent yourself as a faction within your camp offering/refusing terms of agreement to the other faction(s), with those terms of agreement in turn involving the establishment of a unified camp offering/refusing of terms of agreement with (targeted faction[s] within) the other camp(s). Then we would simply have a series of combinatorial possibilities: for example, your faction refuses terms of agreement put forward by another faction which would offer terms of agreement to the other camp taken as a unified whole, etc.\n\nLet’s further say that every group (faction or camp) is constituted by a set of rules, partially tacit and partially explicit. Offering new terms of agreement would change, however slightly, the explicit rules, add a new, shared layer of explicit rules, and set in place a mode of interaction that will change the tacit rules in ways that can’t be controlled or predicted. Oupopo procedures, as a kind of political pataphysics, would start with the most unlikely combinations: say, offer a shared rule with a faction in the other camp that has refused an agreement with a faction in its camp proposing an agreement with your camp that would include your faction—in other words, propose an agreement with the very faction that stakes its factionalism on excluding you.\n\nSo, the task before, say, the most extreme pro-life faction (say, one that rules out abortion even in cases of rape and incest) would be to propose some shared rule to, say, the most extreme pro-abortion rights faction (one that insists upon federal funding, opposes parental notification, etc.). It might simply be a shared rule for placing their respective propaganda side by side in a particular manner—perhaps both could agree to do so in a way that heightens the differences, each gambling that being placed next to the extremism of the other will strengthen their own position.\n\nStarting with the most unlikely agreements not only intensifies one’s sense of the full range of possible interactions and communications, but also provides a more independent sense of the terms which one would agree to with those much closer. Of more interest to me, though, is the effectivity of these combinatorial possibilities as a formal device that leads to the articulation of a whole range of concrete possibilities—if the extreme pro-life and pro-abortion rights factions were to arrive at such an agreement, what would be the ramifications regarding agreements that would then become impossible or possible, more or less likely, with all the other factions and camps? What terms would the more moderate pro-abortion rights faction offer or refuse once the more extreme camp has become entangled in this way? We could, at the very least, say that possibilities that wouldn’t have existed otherwise would now become visible.\n\nThe formulation of such rules would, further, take on a “what if…” quality, because in order to offer terms to another faction or camp you would already have to be acting in such a way as to display possible accord with those terms—so, the extreme pro-lifers, preparatory to offering the aforementioned terms to the extreme pro-abortion righters, would already begin to instantiate those terms. And this is where the formulation of oupopo procedures comes into it: in your literature and propaganda, in your demonstrations, in your negotiations, act as though the offered terms were already in place, so that offering the terms would merely be asking the other to join in and try to reshape what you are already doing.\n\nAnd the further refinement of the rules would involve bringing into play various permutations—offer terms for an agreement with the extreme faction in the other camp that would at the same time be a refusal of terms with the more moderate faction in your camp and at the same time an attempt to factionalize that moderate camp by offering terms to a previously neglected possible faction within it, etc. And, of course, there are always factions within factions and, in the end, each of us is faction of one (in many different camps)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "rendering-is-the-stay-of-frenzy-ou-ga-po",
      "title": "Rendering is the Stay of Frenzy: Ou-GA-po",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past few posts the literary group Oulipo (the Workshop for Potential Literature), which devises rules and procedures for composing literary texts. I have situated my growing interest in Oulipo in terms of the way I have been thinking about rules and habits, rules and imperatives, rules and models, and so on. Most of the rules devised by Oulipo are arbitrary—like the lipogram, they are meant to take away some of our habitual uses of language and thereby force to think in unwonted directions. I consider that extremely useful and interesting, but in proposing a Ou-GA-po (Workshop of potential GA—noting that Oulipo has already spawned several spinoffs in other disciplines) it seems to me that knowing what language is should enable us to create more purposeful rules, rules that facilitate a desired line of inquiry or enact a particular element of the originary scene.\n\nI’ll be working on some possible potential GA “workshops” in upcoming posts, but for now I’ll start with something more universally applicable to modes of inquiry, or theoretical vocabulary. The rule I have constructed is to gather together the key terms of a theory and replace them all with synonyms (a sub-rule here might involve how the synonyms are chosen, but I haven’t done that, even if patterns of choice might be detectable—one way of choosing a rule, incidentally, would be to identify a pattern or habit and make it explicit by formalizing it as a rule to be followed deliberately; or, formalizing resistance to that habit as a rule). Then there are a couple of possibilities: one might rewrite a passage in the original vocabulary using the new terms (and then, depending upon the results, other possible procedures might be invented and applied); or, one might conduct an analysis using the new terms. I’ll be doing the latter.\n\nThe interest in this procedure, for me at least, lies in the act of thinking along with language. As we all know, first of all tacitly as language users, words aren’t simply the labels of “meanings”—rather, they exist in a field with other words with which they can be replaced and combined more or less reliably under various conditions. Furthermore, the construction of a theoretical vocabulary itself creates a new field, in which words are drawn to each other with a new gravity: once you use the word “subject,” for example, the word “object” can’t be far behind, even though these are far from being the only ways of referring to people and things.\n\nSo, my synonymizing procedure is to bring into adjacency with theoretical fields new aggregations of very different neighboring fields. The potentialities of language, in particular what I take to be its fundamentally iterative character, can then be drawn upon to complement our expansion and revision of the theoretical field at stake. In other words, questions about new possibilities for the theory, possibilities we would not have uncovered otherwise, might be generated.\n\nSo, here are my synonyms:\n\nDesire=want\n\nResentment=wrath\n\nDefer=stay\n\nSign=mark\n\nObject=thing\n\nRivalry=match\n\nCrisis=mess\n\nImitate=liken\n\nMimetic=likening\n\nViolence=frenzy\n\nScene=setting\n\nRepresent=render\n\nFirst, it seems to me a good rule to say one thing (and just one thing) about the likely effects of each replacement. So: want, it seems to me, is generally associated with more physical requirements than desire (it seems closer to “need,” in other words), but it nevertheless lies closer to the notion of “lack” so central to more theoretical uses of “desire” (for want of a…); wrath certainly seems closer to violence than resentment, more the feeling of the “strong” rather than “weak” man (Gans translates what is translated as the “wrath of Achilles” as “resentment” in his reading of the Illiad), and it also is more readily attributable to the center (God has wrath, He doesn’t resent); stay (as in “stay of execution”) seems to me to be both enacted and effected, whereas deferral is something you bring about, even in yourself (I will note by the way that a further interesting and unpredictable feature of synonymizing is that synonyms often work very differently in sentences and as parts of speech—“stay” is both verb and noun, “wrath” has no verb form, etc.); mark we associate with something we inscribe on objects, whereas signs direct our attention to objects; things seem freer from our mapping of them, whereas objects are defined by the more specialized attention paid them, but things are also more simply whatever we talk about, in the sense of “topic”; crises precede resolutions, for good or for bad, while messes can get cleaned up as much as desired or needed while remaining a bit messy (and a situation can’t be “crisisy”); I was delighted to find, in my very minimal research for this post, that the word “like” derives etymologically from the notion of “form,” in a way that we can still feel pretty forcefully, while providing us with the sense of being attracted to something, delighted in something, that could only add to our understanding of mimesis in all its forms; violence contains some sense of “violation,” but frenzy might be closer to the pre-signifying beings we were entering the originary scene, where it seems to me an anachronistic anthropomorphism to suggest that the pre-human pecking order was “violated”; setting is very close to scene, but it is suggestive of the acting of putting things in place whereas a scene seems all made up already (of course we lose the possible plays on “making a scene”); render is perhaps the most distant of the synonyms here, but it brings in a very promising field of associations concerning giving the other his due (“render unto…).\n\nHence, the title of my post is a “translation” of “representation is the deferral of violence.” A bit of violence is done to “rendering,” which I think is rarely used as a gerund, much less with the copula—indeed, it remains a bit of verbness in this formulation. A similar operation could, of course, be performed on “represent” as well, but “representing is the deferral of violence” doesn’t quite work, does it? “Render” is a transitive verb and so is “represent,” but the option of “representation” clouds the intransitive sounding “representing” (even though the word is actually used that way now), while there is no noun form for “render”.\n\nI think there is more to it, though: “rendering” and “stay” could both be verbs, so the real parallel would have to be “representing is deferring violence,” but the rendering and the stay can be simultaneous (if we compress “render” as “give” with “render” as “depict”) while there must be some time delay, however infinitesimal,, between representation and deferral. Meanwhile, “to represent is to defer violence” tilts towards the description of an action rather than a definition and is hence a better re-translation of my translation, but the two infinitives sounds more stilted and static than the “original.” In brief, it seems to me that this sense of simultaneity in action gives us the most to think about.\n\nNow, I will see what happens when I put this new vocabulary to work in addressing an issue, the treatment of which in my previous post I am dissatisfied with. In considering the conversion of desire into love through the “blessing” of that desire by resentment, I neglected a crucial transformation—that of the object of desire, whose beckoning imperative is taken over by the desirer who in turn issues imperatives to the object (remain what you were in that moment I was first consumed by desire for you) itself becomes subject—in grammatical terms, commences to issue imperatives of its own. In other words, what converts desire into love is that the object breaks out of the vicious circle of desire by giving promise of continual mystery and by making the desirer such an object him or her self. The lover, in short, is encircled by questions, and is himself or herself transformed into a question—the question is the grammatical marker of the resentment that blesses the conversion of desire into love.\n\nSo, the thing issues imperatives to the—subject? If object is gone, why keep subject? I will indulge myself with a substitution I would like to make anyway, and draw upon the rich resources of available pronouns and simply say that the thing issues imperatives to anybody, and that somebody in turn issues imperatives to that thing. So, here we can mark a transformation that “subject” doesn’t note, from anybody to somebody—anybody is called, but only somebody hearkens; and this raises the question: who loves? Perhaps this one. This one is anybody who by becoming somebody has been converted into a question for himself.\n\nNow, as the relation between a body and the thing undergoes these transformations, what is happening to the relation between anybody and the model who has directed anybody’s attention to the thing in the first place? The fatal attraction to the thing is a way of evading the likening match with the model—rather than contend with the model, somebody tries to extort fealty from the thing itself. This shift in attention makes it possible for a new set of imperatives to issue forth from the thing, imperatives that call upon somebody to remake themselves, so as to partially liberate somebody from the model at the risk of destroying the object. But this new status of the thing sends new imperative out to new competitors, with the difference now that somebody can save the thing and become this one by taking the thing as guide or, to substitute a synonym for model that can apply to the competitors in the likening match as well as to the thing, this one can take the thing as measure. This one loves, or worships, the measure.\n\nThis one worships the measure by adopting its wrath toward the participants in the likening mess, toward those commanded by want. This one renders the measure to the crowd by rendering the measure among the crowd while being that one amid the crowd—that one who arouses wrath while dispersing it by breaking up habitual, commanding approaches to the thing. Anybody can now try to take the thing by presenting a body in the middle of its measure, that is, by applying its measure in a way everybody can render to themselves. In order to become a this one worthy of the thing everybody worships, the somebody must wrathfully submit the likening matches to that thing’s measure by setting the increasingly frenzied motions toward the thing within a grammar of itemized and interchangeable gestures.\n\nAnd, indeed, the grammatical element of language—the distribution of a finite number of phonemes and morphemes along with the rules governing their infinite possible combinations—is the work of this wrathful one, of resentment dispersing desire by norming it and construing infinite desire as error."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-grammar-of-the-political-economy-of-media",
      "title": "The Grammar of the Political Economy of Media",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We all know Marshall Mc Luhan’s catchphrases: “the medium is the message,” “global village,” “the content of one medium is another medium,” etc. I don’t know of any theory of media that has superseded Mc Luhan’s, a vulgarized version of which has become a kind of cultural commonsense; and yet it’s hard to take Mc Luhan completely seriously. I suspect that the problem lies in the prophetic rhetoric—a similar problem interferes with my taking someone like Emerson (undoubtedly an influence on Mc Luhan) completely seriously either—which almost never ages well. You read Mc Luhan and expect the world around you to change almost instantaneously; then you realize that the text you are reading is half a century old and maybe things haven’t changed all that much after all.\n\nOr, maybe they’ve changed so much that you don’t notice the change since the reference point against which you might measure it has vanished (I find it hard to imagine not doing all my writing on the computer and gathering all my news over the internet even though I know actually did work and live otherwise, and not all that long ago). One thing I am certain of, though: to the extent that the global village Mc Luhan saw coming into being exists it is constituted by hatred of the U.S. and Israel. In other words, desire and resentment lie deeper than any media, and so does the difficult historical work of channeling and shaping them through institutions; in yet other words, the problem with Mc Luhan is that if he has any anthropology it is a kind of mystical, Gnostic one: to say that media are the extensions of our organs and senses is to imagine a single “Man,” in relation to whom all the individual men and women and the relations between them are mere epiphenomena.\n\nOnce we allow for that, though, it seems to me that Mc Luhan is a perfectly good starting point for an originary theory of media. Instead of saying that the media are extensions of the senses and organs, why not modify that to read extensions of the originary gesture? We could then give some precision to Mc Luhan’s vague notion of the content of one medium being another medium—that sounds right, especially when we throw in a few intuitive examples (the content of writing is speech; the content of movies is the novel, etc.), but I think that notion would break down if we tried to burden it with the tasks a serious theory of media would have to take on.\n\nWhat do we mean, after all, by “content”? Mc Luhan doesn’t say, leaving us with a commonplace of literary criticism. But what if “content” is simply those objects, or more broadly, “fields” (what I call fields of semblances) that have been produced in tandem with a particular medium but that draw upon mimetic tensions that can no longer be deferred within that medium? We would then be able to set aside the teleology and utopianism of Mc Luhan’s account: writing may not have been invented to defer rivalries that speech no longer could, but once it had been invented in some form, for whatever purposes, it could be put to work serving the new hierarchical orders that needed not only bureaucracies but forms of legitimacy that the permanence of writing and the exclusiveness of its knowledge could provide. And, of course, there need not be only one set or kind of rivalry involved—the more the new medium spread, the more uses that would be found for it.\n\nPart of Mc Luhan’s point, though, is that we don’t simply use media—they transform us. In originary terms, though, this means they create new arenas of desire and resentment. What Mc Luhan calls “cool” and “hot” media need, I think, to be reconsidered in these terms. The hot media are those that provide a lot of data and hence produce passivity in the audience—like a Rembrandt painting, for example; the cool media provide little data and hence require extensive audience participation—like a Klee drawing. And Mc Luhan doesn’t apply the terms simplistically—he realizes that “heat” and “coolness” depend upon the total media environment—so, radio is much “hotter” when introduced into the largely oral world of post-colonial societies than in the literate West.\n\nBut it is nevertheless very strange to hear TV described as a cool medium, since it has for as long as I know (and this must have been the case when Mc Luhan was writing) been caricatured as the most passive medium around, producing nothing but couch potatoes. Perhaps Mc Luhan could have dismissed this as a literary prejudice, but looking back at TV from the 50s to the 90s—with its extraordinarily limited genres, conventions and formulas—from the standpoint of today’s world of interactive and interfolding media, isn’t that “prejudice” amply confirmed? Didn’t TV shows succeed by saturating their viewers with “data”—the data of its narrative conventions and stereotypes, but also that embodied in the invariably maintained stage/spectator point of view?\n\nIt seems to me, rather, that “cool” and “hot” name different types of desire, desires that are conducted by media entering societies at give historical junctures. “Hot” desires are those for exclusive control over precisely delineated objects, “cool” desires are for sharing and communion with others. For Mc Luhan, the hot media are the ones that lead to specialization (print leads to the heightening of vision, and a very specific kind of vision, closely linked to interiority), while the cool media are more eclectic. But books can play into pedagogical relations in various ways, can be tied to various forms of orality and collectivity more or less closely, and so on.\n\nI suppose War and Peace would be as hot as you can get within the hot medium of print, but only for those who can perceive all the levels of data the book organizes—for a semi-literate reader today, it might not be very different from reading Finnegan’s Wake—the intense interiority and desire to leave the village and family and enter the market as an individual has given way to a vast array of possible linkages and desires within an advanced market. Nor does Mc Luhan seem very interested in the market—along with work, and money (which he does see as an important medium), he seems to take for granted that the market will disappear in the instantaneity produced by the new media.\n\nBut I can’t see that media studies, however privileged a field in today’s academy, has advanced much beyond Mc Luhan’s propheticism—it has been taken over by victimary forces on one side (and annexed to “cultural studies”) and by the arid discourses (highly specialized and hence crippled forms of literacy, we might say in Mc Luhan’s terms) in the social sciences on the other side. It has probably become an excuse for not advancing an anthropology, because, after all, what would be the content of an anthropology if “man” is nothing more than his extensions or various forms of “outering”? So, one is left with descriptions, either impressionistic or positivistic (through the use of polls, surveys, etc.) of the various “effects” of various media on something like “ideology,” “social roles” or “power relations.”\n\nSo, let’s turn inward, first, and apply Mc Luhan’s terms to originary grammar, and move outwards penetrating his analysis of the media with originary thinking. The content of the ostensive is some dangerous mimetic convergence; the content of the imperative is the inappropriate ostensive; the content of the declarative what we might call a suspended imperative—the imperative which is not fulfilled, which is prolonged into the interrogative, which is not enforced but nevertheless not retracted, which is held in reserve pending the presentation of a reality in which the resentment of the center can disperse the desires concentrating in that imperative.\n\nIn each case, “material” would be a better word than “content,” since nothing is simply contained here—something is not only reshaped, but reshaped so as to reverse or divert its original aim; nor is the form contained in the content—that is, the ostensive did not “inevitably” give rise to the imperative, nor the imperative to the declarative; rather, in each case we see a improvisation, an invention, or even simply an error that serendipitously gives rise to the new form.\n\nA more promising approach to thinking about the media, then, might be to correlate different articulations of media with different articulations of grammar—so, not print and radio, and TV and the internet, but print, say, as it restructures its environment in the move to the computer keyboard, in a space bounded by the migration of visual media to the computer, a still vibrant radio, and so on. The author Ronald Sukenick did a lot of thinking and experimenting with the implications of writing in a multi-media environment, for example in terms of breaking with the Gutenbergian convention of straight lines of homogeneous print going straight down the page.\n\nThe question for writing, then, would be how to import ostensive elements into a primarily declarative medium, and to do so in order to strengthen rather than vitiate its fundamentally declarative character. Rather than a new unified sensibility, we would have the spontaneous organization of competition and reciprocal appropriation between and within the media, which originary thinkers could speak about in terms of interpenetrating ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative fields.\n\nOf course, what we would most wish to bring such analyses to bear upon would be the electronic media—how primitive the TV now appears in this new world of constantly circulating video and print, how ineffectual its traditional organization through the large “networks” now appear! I suppose most of us will continual to watch TV, and there is still a huge gap between the shows produced by professionals and what amateurs would be capable of (there are some very good shows today, probably better than there have ever been), but it’s hard to see how long the current system of production and distribution can continue, now that you can watch pretty much any show you want whe never you want and for free. It seems hardly worthwhile to waste the energy on analyzing TV shows in terms of their cultural “meaning” or “impact”—“Seinfeld” was probably the last “important” show, or at least the last important scripted one.\n\nIn the political economy of signs, then, we would perhaps look for which entrepreneurs can conquer territory within the division of labor by introducing an ostensive or imperative dimension to a primarily declarative medium; or a declarative overlay to a primarily ostensive or imperative medium. The conservative media seems to me particularly advanced in this regard, with its dense network of TV (FOX), talk radio, blogs, websites like Pajamas Media, Hot Air, and Breitbart’s sites, which all interact and intersect with each, deploy all the media and all the resources of all the media, are populated by a core of personalities and thinkers who move from one site to another while continually bringing on board new voices.\n\nIt is tight enough to be coherent and open enough to allow for lively debates and to prevent the creation of a “bubble” that would filter out unwelcome or unanticipated news from the world. It is an enormously effective way of producing events, and the content of events is nothing other desires given enough scope to make a shared object visible, resentments organized so as to make that object divisible and available, and at least the possibility of love for an inexhaustible source of presence embodied in a sign.\n\nThe media today interact with each other at an unprecedented rate and under the control of individual users to an extent unimaginable even ten years ago: I can watch a cable news show, down load a clip, set it to music, change the words of the song so as to make the modified song a parody of the figure discussed in the news clip, place that remixed video on You Tube and have hundreds of commentators discussing it and thousands of users circulating it—all within a couple of hours. (Well, I can’t do it—but plenty of people can.) And the whole sequence may very well end up a topic of discussion on that very news show the next day.\n\nThe content of one media event, then, is another media event, and the most eventful events are the ones that do the most translating of the terms of one media into another. Circulating last year was a video which somehow had Congress members singing their speeches (the voice was maintained and the words kept the same—they were somehow “made” to sing), giving the debate the appearance of an opera; right now “The Day Obamacare Died” “Sung by Barack Obama” is making the rounds—just about any of us could think of a dozen examples. What is privileged in such productions is a particular characteristic of sign use—the ability to stretch one form so as to accommodate an unfamiliar content, or to modify a set of rules so as to lead to a very different set of results, to let one domain of culture comment upon another.\n\nI think these are the aspects of sign use most closely tied to human freedom, or, perhaps, those aspects that guarantee freedom’s ineradicability. This is not to deny that more traditionally “real” events (a terrorist attack, a financial crash) can break through these intricate intermedial “ecosystems” and redirect the attention of those systems beyond the power of media entrepreneurs to interrupt. But we may have gotten to the point where those who have not acquired fluency in “intermedia” will be increasingly ill-equipped to address those crises when they break through and must, in turn, be assimilated to the ecosystem."
    },
    {
      "slug": "gasc-2010-website",
      "title": "GASC 2010 Website",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The website for the 4th annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference, 2010 is now available:\n\nhttp://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/pgoldman/GASC_2010/index.html\n\nOur conference this year is being held in Salt Lake City, Utah, June 24-26, at Westminster College and Brigham Young University.\n\nIf you are planning to present a paper, we encourage you to submit an abstract soon. More details are available at the website.\n\nWe’re delighted to announce that on-campus lodging will be available for only $25 a night. This is a single bed in a private room, with a shared bath and kitchen. Very modern, new rooms. There are also regular hotels rooms available nearby for $80-90 a night including kitchenette.\n\nPlease contact Peter Goldman- pgoldman@westminstercollege.edu -with any questions or comments."
    },
    {
      "slug": "marginalism-as-minimal-secession",
      "title": "Marginalism as Minimal Secession",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "At a certain point in thinking through the question of “gay marriage” I realized that there was a way out of the double bind the victimary continually, and usually successfully, impose upon the normal. I am far from being the only observer who has recognized that there is much more to the demand for gay marriage than its proponents claim. The argument proceeds on two levels: one, the privileges granted to married people, with regard to inheritance, joint property, sharing of insurance plans, visitation rights should one partner be hospitalized, and so on; two, the implicit denial of recognition in the refusal to grant “full equality” to gays.\n\nBut the privileges could be addressed through changes in contract law—changed more quickly and easily, and in a way that would benefit lots of other people who might like to create less conventional arrangements with non-relatives. It is, then, the “recognition” that is really at stake here, but (here comes the double bind) the problem is that recognition of “full equality” of gays brings along with it a whole panoply of “rights” that cut deeply into private spheres of life and the liberties we still take for granted: to mention just two, the rights of religious institutions to privilege traditional marriage can now be read in terms identical to the refusal to allow black members, treat black patients, etc.; second, and even more ominously, with the creeping advance of “hate speech” laws (and let’s keep in mind that they have already crept along much further in much of the West than here), it will conceivably become possible to criminalize dissent from gay marriage, make promotion of gay marriage (and relationships more generally) mandatory in educational institutions, and so on. Gay marriage, it is easy to conclude, is more about this totalitarian agenda than any marginal benefits it will provide a few gay people.\n\nSo, the way out: take marriage out of the hands of the state altogether—return it to the religious institutions and private contractual arrangements. If a church, synagogue or mosque wants to marry gay couples, let them; and let anyone else who distributes benefits or provides access to goods based upon marital status recognize what they want to. In that case, the victory of gay activists (which seems to me, if not quite inevitable, extremely likely) would be a Pyrrhic one—in other words, just abandon the fort, take the supplies, and set up camp elsewhere. So, the question this conclusion raises is whether the same approach is possible in other institutions or all institutions—given that the entire Leftist project depends upon capturing national and global institutions and re-engineering them so that they can penetrate ever more deeply into all areas of life, could we just leave the victimary Left a shell which it is unable to make any use of?\n\nLet me pursue this from another angle. A discussion with a friend of mine about the recent Supreme Court decision on corporate political spending reminded me that if one had to identify the single issue most important to the Left, in the US at least, it might very be campaign finance reform—more specifically, public financing of campaigns (leading, inevitably, to the exclusion of all private financing—i.e., the closing of “loopholes”). I always found it interesting, when I myself was on the Left, that discussions about other policies always seemed to go back to discussions about campaign finance, but the reason is not hard to find.\n\nThe people would really support equality, redistribution of wealth, the socialization of “essential” services, the destruction of traditional values, etc., if they really understood what these ends would do for them; but they can never come to understand that as long as their thinking is muddled and distorted by “corporate” influences, who are (presumably) advantageously positioned so as to advance their ideology. Hence, leveling the playing field of political speech comes first—even more, any failure on the part of the people to accept the agenda of the Left can be interpreted as evidence of insufficient leveling—corporate influence must still be sneaking through, there must be more loopholes to close, etc. From arguments over principles and policies the Left can thereby situate itself on the more comfortable terrain of the infinitely regressive tainting of our entire political arena.\n\nBut that’s not what I want to talk about now. In the wake of these reflections, I asked myself: what, if I could narrow it down to one single issue, would I most want to change now, as a way of opening up the possibilities I would like to see flourish? What could it all come back to on my side? When I had my answer, I felt the need to start writing this post, and the answer is: the abolition of the IRS. The IRS is the single most tyrannical and unaccountable institution in our society, and the tax code it enforces the single most powerful support of virtually all the deviations from genuine republican government we suffer from: corporate handouts and Congressional pork and loot for lobbyists and government micro-management of our decisions regarding health care, housing, schooling, the elevation of experts as authorities, etc.\n\nGetting rid of the IRS, whether by radically simplifying the tax code, or by abolishing the income tax altogether, would immediately and dramatically increase our freedom. So, public financing of campaigns vs. the abolition of the IRS—these seems to me a helpful pair of dueling icons, reducing the Left-Right struggle to its basic components.\n\nBut abolishing the IRS would itself involve passing laws, and therefore garnering public support, lobbying, overcoming other lobbyists, working the media, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the idea (or fantasy) of abolishing the IRS is about the maximal generation of spaces free of the government (and the consequent reduction of government and politics to essentials). Is there a way to cut out the middleman, and start building sustainable institutions independent of government and capable of resisting the encroachments of the government? If the answer is no, it seems to me unlikely that constitutional republics (and, more broadly, the market order) has any future; so why not proceed as if the answer is yes?\n\nPerhaps abolishing the IRS could be seen as a by-product or index of this other work of circumventing the government—unlike the Left, which must continually legitimize the centralization of power while turning that power to its own purposes, constitutionalists can represent the resentment of the center by dispersing themselves outside of and to some extent within institutions tied to the government.\n\nHere is the question, put bluntly: could we build schools or networks of schooling drawing completely upon private donations and tuition and therefore capable of rejecting government dictates tied to government funding—not only on the elementary level, but all the way through university and even graduate and professional study? And would the graduates of those schools (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.) get hired by private businesses or clients, who would in turn be willing to sign waivers exempting their transactions from government interference? Could private courts be established to adjudicate disputes that might otherwise spill over into the public court system?\n\nWhat about hospitals? Pharmaceutical companies that eschew FDA approval and only deal with customers who waive said approval, accepting internal studies and agreed upon third party investigations in their place? New forms of currency? To what extent could lawsuits insisting upon the rights to such arrangements help to create the necessary space for their emergence, and to what extent would stealth and civil disobedience be necessary? Once a critical mass of such institutions emerged, it would be possible to negotiate with the government over, for example, the right to withdraw tax dollars to institutions which no longer have one’s consent—including, I would be willing to say, the military.\n\nThe days of the US as a superpower and world police are coming to an end, and we might as well start to think about the military as more of an expeditionary force, focusing, if we retain enough collective sanity, on deterrence and protective measures like missile defense and stricter controls on visa issuance.\n\nAt a certain point, as state governments and ultimately the federal government go bankrupt, as victimary discourse makes free speech ever more impossible in the dominant social institutions, as the police, as suggested by a prescient ad in the recent Super Bowl, come to find it more appealing to harass those who buy the wrong light bulbs, drive insufficiently green cars, fail to separate their garbage correctly, exceed their allotted portion of monthly energy, etc., than chasing and combating actual criminals—at a certain point the effort will have to be made. In fact, I see the current rebellion of the Tea Partiers, as encouraging as that is, and as much as I enjoy the discomfiture of the Democrats and the interruption of their sparagmos, less as a vehicle for turning us back to genuine constitutionalism and more as the beginning of the realization that there’s no longer any point to asking the government to let us be free men and women.\n\nThe Democrats over-reached, and placed their entire agenda, in all its hideousness, before the public, which understandably recoiled; but there is no constituency for reversing the welfare state, and no means of resisting the gradual creep of socialism through the judiciary and bureaucracy. And, if I’m wrong, the marginalist politics I propose could easily enter the “slipstream” of a new constitutionalism—I am suggesting, though, that if we are even to be ready for that, we must operate under the assumption that that won’t be an option. One way or another, the many tens of millions of Americans who will find it imperative to resist the new order—which they will now be able to recognize in more subtle, post-Obamian forms—will find some way of doing so.\n\nNew ways of living would be accompanied by new ways of thinking and speaking. And they would be new—the idioms of traditionalism would likely enter the new idioms, but they wouldn’t dominate them. Predicting the form and content of new idioms is impossible, but we can expect and contribute to new vocabularies of exchange, contracting, covenanting, gifting and pledging: new indicators of trust and reciprocity. We can present our difference from what our rulers would have us be as the default position, and try to formalize any act of consent to one or another dictate—as if a choice on both sides of the transaction is being made (and if I refuse, a choice would have to be made whether to arrest me, to pursue prosecution—a series of choices none of them pre-dictated).\n\nWe can remove from our discourses all assumptions of a “mainstream” or “consensus,” assumptions which are deeply rooted in the most casual conversations. Whatever is living, enjoying and loving is interesting, and resentment is interesting as well because it disperses and distances and thereby creates new spaces; what is not so interesting is desire, which is characterized above all by its impatience with the difference between signs and things and, finally, its hostility to the very scenes which make it possible. Mistakes are very interesting, because they provide the opportunity to forgive, instruct and be instructed, and to discover, over and over again, what kind of normal we inhabit and wish to sustain.\n\nMistakes are the deepest sources of innovation—we might catch the habit of treating desires that grab hold of their objects themselves as mistakes, as if the Gnostic revolutionaries just got lost on their way to some new idiom and stumbled into the conflation of desire and reality, as any of us might in our more child-like moments. And if White Guilt is the guilt of the unmarked towards the marked, we can let ourselves be marked by our mistakes and wait for others to come along and unmark us by locating our mistake within a new idiom."
    },
    {
      "slug": "more-thoughts-on-minimal-secessionism",
      "title": "More thoughts on minimal secessionism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The thinking behind my most recent post was that the possibility of a systemic collapse of the contemporary market/democratic system can’t be discounted; that if such a collapse takes place life will nevertheless continue: people will need food, shelter, power, etc., and they will enter into economic relations in order to meet those needs, and political and cultural relations so as to define and preserve the relationships they enter into; and that, therefore, it is helpful to think about the kinds of dispositions and capacities that might be exercised in anticipation of that possibility, and exercised in such a way as to simultaneously minimize said possibility but to restore some new normalcy as quickly as possible afterwards. In others words, I was proposing thinking on the margins of the current system, in the shadow of its possible demise, for both diagnostic and prescriptive purposes.\n\nThere is another reason to take up the question, though, and that is the growing difficulty the differing factions in American life will have living together. Some kind of separation, embedded in differing ways of life, of the factions from each other, might be the best alternative to civil war. The story of 20th century American society and politics has been the rise of Progressivist assumptions—i.e., the assumption that modern life was too complex to allow for its management by private agencies and spontaneous forms of order and needed, therefore, to be turned over to scientific experts. Freedom was a source of chaos and conflict on a level incompatible with an advanced technological civilization and must give way to a largely planned (and ultimately transnational) order.\n\nThe attempts by an insurgent conservative movement, through the 80s-00s, to resist the installation of this order (based upon the alliance between big government and big business), have only succeeded in slowing it down, and that only temporarily. It seems to me clear, though, first, that Progessivism has reached its limits, that is, it generates more resentments than it can recirculate, and it now threatens to swallow up the market order upon which is has been merely parasitic so far; second, that its adherent are nevertheless determined to continue pushing through to the definitive and irreversible establishment of that order, by any means necessary—indeed, they can’t imagine a life worth living under any other order; third, that a majority of Americans wish to retain the benefits, real and perceived, granted to them by that order, without supporting its continued expansion; fourth, that the wishes of this majority cannot be met, since progressivism must continue to grow or wither away; and, fifth, that a growing minority of Americans are coming to feel that they can’t live under the Progressive order at all, even in its present form, and that they must resist, at all costs, its further expansion.\n\nIt is that last observation that decisively changes the equation. I would estimate the number of hard core progressives in the U.S at 15-20%, but they are very heavily concentrated in high influence arenas (media, education, many sectors of big business and, of course, government) and are in close contact with and receive significant support from their international equivalents. I would estimate the number of Americans who will have had it with progressivism by the time this President and this democratic majority will have shown us everything they have at something like 20-25%. If the majority interested in some version of current arrangements could constitute a genuine center, those rough edges could be smoothed out; but if they can’t, then it is the polarity that will drive events. That is the way things look to me.\n\nIt would be easy to dismiss talk of civil strife, much less civil war, as hyperbolic, but I have a very specific scenario in mind: the progressives must institute their agenda nationally and internationally, and it must do so through a solid phalanx of laws and bureaucracies, and those laws must ultimately be enforced. In the end, it doesn’t matter if this is done by an overtly progressive administration and legislature or covertly and gradually through the armies of unelected and permanent judges and administrators who are controlled by no administration and have only the most distant relationship to laws (which, increasingly, do little more than empower those very administrators to enforce some “mandate”)—it will be seen through even in the latter case.\n\nWe are already almost at the point where progressives insist upon arresting citizens for actions that the latter consider to fall wholly within their legitimate rights (perhaps we passed the point a while ago, but I don’t want to enter into too many controversies here); we are almost certain to get to the point where constitutionalists feel compelled to make a point of forcing them to do so and progressives will in turn feel compelled to make a special point of complying—and resistance will be organized, fairly rapidly and surprisingly effectively, I think. (I’m still thinking of that remarkable “Green Police” commercial during the Super Bowl!\n\nBut also of the harassment of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant by the Human Rights commission in Canada, the current trial of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands—and much else.) It’s hard to say how the police and army (the men with the guns) will fall out in the event—nagging grandmothers who don’t want gay pastors rather than battling violent criminals might seem awfully tempting to a lot of them, but many will feel ashamed and wish to return to defending the innocent against the violent. And we should also consider that all this will be taking place in the context of what I assume will be an extended and increasingly grave recession, perhaps depression.\n\nThe secessionism I am exploring, then, is also aimed at providing an alternative to such a confrontation, and at ensuring that such a confrontation, if it turns out to be inevitable, is resolved as quickly, peacefully and, of course, successfully as possible.\n\nTo put it yet another way, I am practicing what the theorist of nuclear warfare (and how will that play into all this?) Herman Kahn called “thinking the unthinkable”—perhaps that’s the most authentic mode of originary thinking, since the unthinkable is what must have first of all have been glimpsed for our first ancestors to have put forth the life-saving sign."
    },
    {
      "slug": "that-80s-left",
      "title": "That 80s Left",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Obama is from the 80s Left, not the 60s; I’m not sure how much difference that makes, but it makes some, and seems to be worth a brief post.\n\nThe 60s Left was actually quite diverse, unpredictable, and free—it was also plenty sexist and “homophobic,” and was much more opposed to the liberals in power than to the then negligible conservative opposition. Someone like Alexander Cockburn is a remnant of that Left—Marxist, always ready to defend to Stalinism and attack capitalists venomously, but also virulently opposed to any kind of elitism and therefore ready to dismiss the Global Warming cult and tweak critics of Sarah Palin. Similarly, Camille Paglia is someone who explicitly wants to expand the cultural revolution of the 60s, in part by adamantly refusing to obey any taboos of any sect whatsoever—Paglia has forcefully defended Palin, while remaining an Obama supporter.\n\nBut there are very few such figures left—the 80s Left has gobbled them up, with their own consent for the most part. The 80s Left is the consolidated Left: reunited with establishment Liberalism as a result of the wars on Nixon and then Reagan, doctrinally unified around the notion of “diversity,” and safely ensconced in the liberal institutions of the media, entertainment and academy. Here’s what the 80s Left sounds like: Obama, during the campaign, was asked about the possibility of military intervention to stop the genocide in Darfur; he responded (I’m quoting from memory here) that “that’s not what the people who care about Darfur think needs to be done.”\n\nThat marks the idiom perfectly—first, the deference to those who have their bureaucratic bill in the water and have appropriated the issue; second the reference to those who have made what is in essence a successful political land grab as “those who care about…” The 80s Left got all of reality covered: there are people “caring” about everything now, and they can issue the authoritative word on the environment, race, peace, the UN, and so on. Look at Obama’s repeated, casual and presumably definitive references to “experts” in his exchange with House Republicans last Friday—those are people who care about health care, and have the last word.\n\nThe 80s Left was unified by its feigned terror at a single boogeyman: the “backlash.” That was its political innovation: to define all resistance to, and the minimal rollback of, its political agenda as the result of a (white, male, homophobic, redneck, etc.) backlash. That the “backlashers” had not, in fact, changed their views but were simply resisting reckless and mindless innovations of the last couple of decades was irrelevant—the point was to situate the Left as the new “Reality,” against which all resistance was a bitter, destructive and imminently violent assault on “History.” The backlash is by definition illegitimate, even when they control the Presidency and Congress—the “mainstream” press should, if at all possible, not even pay attention to their doings, except in the manner of a police blotter; if their words are to be quoted, they must be thoroughly smothered in “commentary” and placed in the proper “context.”\n\nThis is all worth mentioning because it accounts perfectly for Obama and his supporters’ reflex reaction to the massive opposition that has emerged over the past year: their response, whether it be to FOX News, the Republican Party, or the Tea Partiers, has been governed completely by the logic of the backlash to the backlash. Obama still seems incapable of granting reality to these forces—they are nothing more than noise which is interfering with the clear transmission of his message. It seems to me that this explains their extremely limited and self-defeating political strategy, and suggests that they are unlikely to become more flexible in the future. What worked for graduate students bullying their less ideologically belligerent fellow students and professors won’t work for a country of 300 million (still) free individuals."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-mistake-of-liberal-democracy",
      "title": "The Mistake of Liberal Democracy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Liberal democracy is constituted by the severing of equality and freedom, which become incommensurable “values” which need to be balanced and one of which must be given priority at any instant. This has been a serious, perhaps fatal error, because the balancing and prioritizing is inevitably done by the state, which develops an interest in privileging those forms of freedom that are as distant as possible from equality (like, say, transgressive sexual practices) and those forms of equality that have nothing to do with freedom (like, say, government run health care). Under such conditions, equality and freedom become pathological, and so does the state—any mode of freedom that threatens to trample on any mode of equality needs to be pruned, but that’s any mode of freedom, and the our sensitivity to the threat can only increase.\n\nThe notion that equality and freedom are competing values is false to the core. I defy anyone to name a mode of equality that can exist in the absence of freedom, or vice versa. At best, you could name the equality of the slave, or the invalid, or the incompetent—but that, of course, presupposes the absolutely inequality of the master, the therapist, the expert. If you are to speak freely and trade freely with whom, precisely, are you to do so, if not your equals? Liberal democracy, in this sense, is a new phenomenon, radically different than the constitutional liberalism it supplanted (while, of course, developing potentialities within its predecessor); nor does it exhaust the potentialities of freedom and equality—it is not a “higher” level or more “advanced” form of anything.\n\nThe only difference between equality and freedom is that equality tells us who is covered by the rules, who is protected by them, who is expected to play by them, who will support their enforcement if necessary, and who can be penalized by them. Freedom is whatever you can do within and with the rules. Rules emerge in any space where violence has been sufficiently deferred so that it can be kept out of mind, and they are as thick (exclusive and prescriptive) as they need to be in order to keep it out of mind. The thinner the rules, the more violence is proscribed implicitly, and the less the violation of any particular rule or action which is ambiguous under the existing rule-set will trigger broader contests over the rule-governed space as a whole—and, therefore, the more freedom.\n\nIf I can barely hint at my disagreements with you without leading to a break of relations, our conversations will be to that extent unfree, and our equality constantly in question; if I can tell you that I think you are completely wrong and you can respond in kind and both of us end up remaking our views and deepening our friendship, we simply take our equality for granted and our conversation will be freer in proportion to that unconstrained assumption of equality. This structure holds for economic as well as political spaces, so the issue of public vs. private freedoms also seems to me to miss the point. Finally, the formulaic contrast between “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome” simply presupposes the split between freedom and equality—equality of opportunity is shared freedom, and so defending it is a rearguard maneuver against liberal democracy in the latter’s idiom.\n\nThere are, then, two questions: first, how did the wedge between equality and freedom get installed and, second, how can it be removed? In answer to the first question, it seems to me the guilty parties are those modern elites who appointed themselves guardians of the newly proletarianized masses—the Social Democrats in Europe and the Progressives in the U.S. They assumed society would become unmanageable due to its material inequalities and the irrationalities of the market, and the only way to make it manageable would be to “thicken” the rules, i.e., dole out rights in separate parcels—a bit of equality here, a bit of freedom there.\n\nIt was not very difficult to bring big business on board, as the new administrative state gave them a seat at the table and protects them from competition. Resistance was bribed and suppressed when necessary, and, to be fair, there was no interest in taking away more freedom than necessary—I suspect the mistake had a lot to do with the need to package constitutional government for export, but this history has been written many times and does not need recounting here.\n\nThe second question is the hard one. It is also unavoidable if you believe, as I do, that liberal democracy has reached its limits—it has run out of slush funds to buy off opposition, and I suspect its power of repression would be found wanting as well. But the vast majority has bought into it, and will not come anywhere near the sensible option of cutting its losses before it is much too late. The incentives and disincentives can’t be rewired in time and, indeed, who would do that? Who would know how?\n\nThe only answer I can think of now is to insist upon and embody the indivisibility of equality and freedom in all our actions. If someone wants to engage us with strict and all encompassing rules, and you find it nevertheless advantageous to enter the relationship, insist that they be bound to the letter of those rules as well, while perhaps trying to maximize freedom within them. Meanwhile, seek out those willing to take the risks in exchange for the pleasures of more minimal rules and expanded modes of freedom. Refuse as much as possible duplicitous situations, where the tacit rule book contradicts the explicit one, or where the status of the “referees” is unclear. Avoid rigged games and replace them with transparent ones whe never you can. Anyone can do these things privately and publicly—we can all identify, expose and denounce rigged games—rights without responsibilities and responsibilities without rights.\n\nA portion of American conservatism has begun to think through the legacy of Progressivism—the audience of Glenn Beck and the followers of Ron Paul in particular, and this is by no means a marginal group. What I refuse to do (without necessarily accusing anyone) is to treat that legacy as monstrous, rather than mistaken, as requiring repudiation rather than correction. To do otherwise is make another, potentially disastrous mistake, and to indulge oneself in scapegoating. We have all indeed bought into liberal democracy, we are all invested—it wasn’t a mere few who foisted it upon us, nor was the history of the U.S. through the 20th century irrevocably “tainted”—the foreign policy views of the libertarians are as crazed as anything coming from the Left, and are stamped with the illicit pleasures of scapegoating, wherein the other side becomes more guilty and you more innocent, the more you look into matters. The victory over the two totalitarianisms was a remarkable accomplishment, and so was the creation of a vast middle class, and we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation without it.\n\nWe can also recognize the fantasy of an equality without freedom as an attitude derived from the originary scene—such a fantasy confuses desire with the resentment of the center so that one’s own deserts can continually be recalibrated to one’s own advantage. The best dissection of this fantasy I know interesting comes from Karl Marx, and his Critique of the Gotha Program (focusing on the defects of the first stage of communism):\n\nBut one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only — for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.\n\nFurther, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.\n\nIn other words, the quest for equality of results requires the continual creation of new categories of victimization, of unfairness built into the nature of things. Human judgment measures according to a standard, but the standard (insofar as it’s not a sheer defense of some privilege or order) is an attempt to maintain the articulation of equality and freedom. The inhuman fantasy of an external canon of judgment (that will naturally come down on your side) is itself universally human, and the only way to defuse it is probably by spinning out its implication until it reaches its absurd logical conclusion. The problem is that we have come to let such fantasies govern our public life and dignified them with their own political category, to be “balanced” against another: “equality of outcome.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-brief-addendum-to-the-mistake-of-liberal-democracy",
      "title": "A Brief Addendum to “The Mistake of Liberal Democracy”",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Substituting the notion of “sovereign equality” for “equality of outcome” would complete the articulation of liberty and equality I argued for in “The Mistake of Liberal Democracy,” and clarify the implications of their severing by liberal democracy. An obvious question regarding my claim for the indivisibility of freedom and equality is, “Could you really claim that Bill Gates and a homeless person are unequal in no meaningful way, as long as they could both be said to be playing under the same rules?” It’s a good question, and my first answer is the unsatisfactory for many “yes, that is precisely what I am claiming”; but I can also give a more satisfactory (to many) answer: “no, they are unequal in a meaningful way, and the meaning given to that way comes from the belief that there should be some general power superintending and weighing all resentments so as to ensure they don’t obfuscate the resentment of the center.”\n\nThat superintending power is the sovereign power, which is coeval with freedom and in constant tension with it. Sovereign power stakes its claim where equaliberty demands too much rigor from its participants, and that there are many such sites our current crisis testifies. Sovereign equality, then, is public recognition of each one’s resentments, displacing the general adoption of the resentment of the center. And if one were to say that, in effect, Bill Gates plays on a different field and according to a different set of rules from the homeless person, that would be true, but largely due to the massive sovereign incursions into freedom, bought by the wealthy who felt that competition had outlived its usefulness once they had won, but also sanctioned by the claims of sovereign equality."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anti-humanism",
      "title": "Anti-humanism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I fell a bit behind in my reading of the Chronicles of Love & Resentment , and so I just got to the extraordinarily interesting Chronicle # 388, “ Ecriture from Barthes to GA,” and wanted to make this brief comment on one small part of the essay:\n\nThe sacred is not a mysterious, otherworldly quality; it measures the human community’s sense of the danger posed to it by the mimetic desire aroused by different phenomena. What we call secularization is the process whereby these dangers come to be assessed within their concrete historical context rather than by reference to originary history as preserved in religious traditions. Pace the militant defenders of atheism, the progress of secularization over the past three centuries is far from having demonstrated the ability of modern societies to provide a rational basis for these assessments.\n\nThe difference between the sacred and secular is presented in very minimal terms here, to the disadvantage of the secular, because, presumably, the “concrete historical context” doesn’t provide the measure of danger that originary history does. That would be why modern societies have been unable to “demonstrate the ability” to rationally assess mimetic dangers—and, if they can’t do it “rationally,” than how? This seems to me a contention that is remarkable, rich in implications, and irrefutable. But I would like to probe it a bit further. First of all, “concrete historical context” doesn’t seem to me to be establishing the necessary sacred/secular distinction here, because such “contexts” must themselves be the result of secularization.\n\nIn other words, it’s not as if there was previously a choice between assessing dangers in terms of an originary history or of concrete historical contexts, and only now did people choose the concrete context as their reference point. Furthermore, Gans here speaks in the idiom of modern secularization itself, which is perhaps inevitable but without some mitigation this idiom will not help us with our risk assessments. What I have in mind is the very general character of the narrative of secularization implicit here, while the only real process of secularization we can point to is the one issuing from the break with a very specific originary history, that provided by Christianity.\n\nConcrete historical contexts are produced because this particular “religious tradition” came to be seen, on its own terms, as producing scapegoats—the various “heretics” that emerged once Europe emerged (in large part thanks to Christianity itself) as a more bourgeois, inquisitive, urban society later in the Middle Ages. Since these heresies, when capable of defending themselves, could produce no new consensus, but only civil war, the only way of making mimetic dangers present was through the construction of a system of signs with the human subject (like Jesus, without the divine origin) as its origin—the human subject can in this way present itself as the sign of deferral of sacred violence, the creation of new Christs in the name of deferring violence carried out in the name of Christ.\n\nModernity is then driven by the replacement of one constitutive human figure, around which “concrete historical contexts” constellate, after another—from the elevated (heroic scientists, artists, liberators and philosophers) to degraded (the various class, racial, sexual, and other others of the victimary period).\n\nThe linguistic turn comes into its own as a possible ideological replacement for these humanisms when the violence committed in the name of all these figures in succession leads to the deferral of the human figure itself; and the only way of doing that is by presenting the human as constituted by something else; language, a self-contained system that couldn’t have come before but doesn’t in any clear way seem to have come from humans. This is what makes possible the originary hypothesis: in its initial—scientistic, anthropological and ultimately victimary political—incarnations, the linguistic turn forbid any originary scene even more than previous modes of thought, as the originary is itself perceived as the source of violence—no mode of originarity other than those grounded in some human figure seems possible, and those have all been exhausted; but the insistence on language as a self-contained system is also what made it possible to think its origin: in considering language as a self-contained system constituted by its own internal relations, it is counter-productive to presuppose some pre-existing “content”—in this way lots of very mystifying ways of thinking about the origin of language (as a mere extension and improvement of indexical signs) are cleared away and it now becomes possible to think about language as such emerging all at once in an event."
    },
    {
      "slug": "gasc-2010-update",
      "title": "GASC 2010 Update",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Dear Colleagues,\n\nThe deadline for paper submissions for the 4th Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference (GASC 2010) has been extended to March 15th. We still have room in the program, and we encourage all interested parties to submit an abstract or panel proposal. The theme this year is “The Anthropology of Modernity: the Sacred, Science, and Aesthetics.” The conference will take place on June 24th-26th at Westminster College and Brigham Young University.\n\nThe conference this year is shaping up to be a very exciting event, with Keynotes from Prof. Vincent Pecora from the University of Utah and Prof. Eric Gans from UCLA. We are meeting this year in Salt Lake City, Utah, nestled up against the beautiful Wasatch mountains. Accommodations are available on campus at Westminster College for very reasonable rates, or there are nearby hotels that also have affordable rooms. Please see our website for more information:\n\nhttp://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/pgoldman/GASC_2010/index.html\n\nWe look forward to hearing from you and hopefully seeing you at the conference!\n\n~Peter"
    },
    {
      "slug": "imperativity",
      "title": "Imperativity",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The JCRT Live Blog no longer seems interested in my posts, so I figured I’d post here the last one I wrote for them:\n\nImperativity\n\n“He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favorable hearers; because they know the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regime is subject, but the secret lets and difficulties, which in public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable, they have not ordinarily the judgment to consider. And because such as openly reprove supposed disorders of state are taken for principal friends to the common benefit of all, and for men that carry singular freedom of mind; under this fair and plausible color whatsoever they utter passeth for good and currant.\n\nThat which wanteth in the weight of their speech is supplied by the aptness of men’s minds to accept and believe it. Whereas on the other side, if we maintain things that are established, we have not only to strive with a number of heavy prejudices deeply rooted in the hearts of men, who think that herein we serve the time, and speak in favor of the present state because thereby we either hold or seek preferment; but also to bear such exceptions as minds so averted beforehand usually take against that which they are loth should be poured into them. ”\n\nThat this opening paragraph of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594) could almost be describing the canonical stance of the radical student, staging ritualized confrontations with his/her elders, whether professors or administrators. Hooker’s is a remarkable diagnosis of the double bind into which the victimary stance places its targets: if you oppose, or pose as an opponent of, the existing order, all of the “innumerable and inevitable” “defects” of that order are accredited to your honesty, bravery and concern for the common good while, naturally, taking and seeking no responsibility for the sustenance of that order itself, along with its perhaps no less numerable if less inevitable benefits, you need give no credit to those who take upon themselves such responsibility because, after all, they wouldn’t do so if their own interests weren’t bound up in the “establishment.”\n\nIndeed, anyone who speaks in defense of “things that are established” can easily be presumed guilty of doing so only as a result of their own “complicity” in its manifold defects and unavoidably unevenly distributed benefits. Even if what such defenders say is true, it is an irremediably tainted truth, one which needs to be rigorously inspected for the exclusions and marginalizations by which it constitutes itself.\n\nEngaging Hooker’s seminal analysis of an emergent modern political sensibility would mean we would have to extend our analysis of the victimary stance well beyond the self-conscious and strategic organization of grievances and identities along the familiar lines of “race, class, gender, sexual orientation” in the post-Auschwitz world, and even beyond the conceptual model for such organizations in the representation of the “proletariat” by Marxism. We would have to look at the victimary stance constitutive of the modernity upon which Hooker’s defense of established things stands on the threshold. In fact, I know of Hooker because he is a primary source upon which Eric Voegelin, in his The New Science of Politics, relied in his analysis of modernity as a continuation of the Gnosticism that sustained itself in opposition on the margins of Christiandom since antiquity.\n\nVoegelin sees Hooker as analyzing, in the Puritan radicals, an early instance of what was to become the prevailing form of modern, revolutionary resentment: for Voegelin, the figures of this resentment are driven by the desire to replace the “uncertainty,” which “is the very essence of Christianity,” with “a certainty about the meaning of history, and about their own place in it” (122) They achieve this certainty by treating apocalypse and redemption as immanent to human knowledge and practice. This resentment is directed at the very ambiguities and necessary limitations of public power as much as towards those who wield it, because those ambiguities and limitations must interfere with the universalization of the self-transparency of the “saved” (or vanguard) to the yet benighted.\n\nI take Voegelin’s account to suggest that assertions of liberty in modernity are always assertions against someone who has always already usurped one’s liberty, and such usurpations always shadow even the most expansively enjoyed modes of freedom. We are by now very familiar with the consequent antinomies, which it has been the virtue of postmodern, victimary thought, to pursue ruthlessly to the end: freedom bounds us ever more tightly to those others within and without, above and below, against whom we define ourselves, whose counter-strategies we unknowingly incorporate in our quest for originality, the patterns of repetition of which parody our most “authentic” gesture, etc.\n\nIt’s reasonable to assume that a lot of people are tired of all this already, but it seems to me that strictly political discourse is still completely locked into this discourse, on both Left and Right, and pretty much everywhere in the world. In my view, the belief or even willingness to entertain the possibility that 9/11 was an “inside job” is far more vicious and pathological than the current obsession among some American conservatives with Obama’s birth certificate, but both resentments are equivalent in the following sense: they represent a desperate desire to identify a “real” source of malevolent power “behind” the apparent, necessarily complex, multiple and ambiguous sources—a source of power that has, or constantly threatens to, take up residence in the place where we constitute ourselves as free individuals.\n\nModern freedom cannot have other than an extremely ambivalent relation to what I will call the “imperative order”: all those situations where we give and obey imperatives, overwhelmingly “automatically” and “unthinkingly”—most obviously, in institutions like the family, the military and law enforcement, but also in our places of employment, in the classroom, in our relations with bureaucracies, in emergency situations, and in our self-disciplining, i.e., the commands we issue to ourselves, taking shape ultimately in habits, which we might see as self-imitations of which we have forgotten the model. The modern tendency has been to mediate, even saturate, these sites of imperativity, with indicatives—just consider the elevation of “consent,” especially of the “informed” kind, to the highest of values: to consent is to present the imperatives one follows and issues as deriving from shared indicative sentences.\n\nBut this can never solve the problem of “legitimating” imperatives—after all, the more specific and urgent the imperative (that is, the more imperative it is), the less they can be referred to the justifying indicative. The dominance, in a liberal order, of indicatives, what we call the “rule of law,” can only guide us in assigning spheres and limits of imperatival responsibility; the more indicatives interfere in the substance of the imperatives themselves, the more the rule of law is replaced by bureaucracy.\n\nIndicatives do, of course, issue imperatives, but not single and univocal ones—rather, indicatives create for us a reality that embeds a set of possible commands. “All men are created equal” commands us to combat inequality, but not everywhere, all at once, with unremitting urgency, to the exclusion of all other considerations and until the extirpation of every last residue of it. It would be better to read the imperative it issues as one, when we are forced to choose between competing posts of imperative issuance, to choose the one whose occupancy relies upon markers produced internally to the space and not transmitted to it from some external point.\n\nI left off my list of sites of imperative order what is probably the most significant and originary of such sites: prayer. The supplicant in prayer acknowledges God’s commands and that those commands come prior to, and bound, any indicative (“God created the heavens and the earth” sums up a series of imperatives; the “I am that I am/will be” with which God addresses Moses out of the burning bush—for Gans, the locus of the Judaic revelation of the name of God as the declarative sentence—is bounded by a pair of imperatives: God tells Moses what to say to the Hebrews when they demand of him that he tell them God’s name; in the most central of Jewish prayers, the “Shema,” “the Lord our God the Lord is One” is preceded by “Hear O’Israel”); and the supplicant issues commands to God in return (give me strength, sustain me, make my choices wise, etc.).\n\nHere I will appeal, as usual, to the extraordinary power of the originary hypothesis, which asserts the impossibility of signification without a sacred center, or the Name-of-God—we can speak, we can understand each other, because we inhabit the world of representations that has “always already” deferred violence. To speak is to already have obeyed the imperative not to appropriate some object, or to eliminate some obstacle to its appropriation, without passing through the appropriate representational mediations.\n\nI will, then, reframe the modern crisis of the imperative as follows—as the centrality of prayer to social order recedes, imperatives become increasingly untenable. Prayer is the anchor of the imperative order—if we are not obeying God, and commanding God to keep making his commands more audible and legible, then all other commands are correspondingly vitiated. This is a rather unsettling suggestion, and not just because of all the uncertainties surrounding any prospect of a revival of traditional religiosity (uncertainties regarding both its possibility and the shapes it might take). More important is that the tension between the imperative and indicative orders is endemic—those committed to the triumph of indicativity have good reasons for wishing that imperativity would go away quietly—the ideal would be that every imperative be directly read off of some indicative.\n\n(I am leaving out of account the kind of imperative most characteristic of the victimary, or the Left, which is the demand that some imperative not be enforced: that someone be released from jail, not be fired, not be searched, etc. Such demands, obviously, can be more or less justified, more or less concerned to improve rather than weaken the imperative order. For my purposes here what is important is that demands are far less essential to the imperative order than commands—they presuppose the subordinate or outsider position and never receive tacit or spontaneous obedience.) Indeed, we are in the situation I have described because there is no obvious way of resolving this tension.\n\nVoegelin speaks of two different kinds of “representation” in politics. One is “elemental”: the articulation of institutions so as to produce representatives who can speak for the society; or, in the terms I am working with here, issue the imperatives that are regularly obeyed. The other is “existential”: the “principle” (in the sense of both origin and idea) by which society constitutes or re-constitutes itself in a crisis and through which it effects the articulation of its institutions. The existential representation is a model of reality that is (or will be seen to have been) articulated in the founding of society. As I suggested in my previous post, the victimary (in the expanded sense I am giving it here) demolishes any transcendental existential representation, while remaining parasitical upon the representations it has canceled.\n\nBut there is one resource for existential representation that can’t be done away with, or even impaired in irreparable ways, and that is language itself. We have created and incessantly recreate language, but it does the same to us and always remains outside of our reach while being internal to all and each and every one of us. The boundary between error and innovation, for example, might be seen to bear a minimal holiness, insofar as such determinations are undecidable because dependent upon the contingencies of subsequent usage; and, as undecidable, they are sites of deferral, where our claims to command the “existential” forms of representation must be suspended.\n\nNow, this boundary might be essentially undecidable, but its appearance sets in motion chains of imperatives when someone decides—not so much on what something “really means” but on the crystallization of a model of reality out of that manifestation of the boundary. Raoul Eshelman, in a series of essays in Anthropoetics (start here: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/perform.htm) and now a book (http://www.amazon.com/Performatism-End-Postmodernism-Raoul-Eshelman/dp/1888570415/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249694352&sr=1-1) has argued for a “post-postmodernism” he calls “performatism”: “subjects present themselves (or are presented) as self-sufficient wholes impervious to the demands or responsibilities emanating from the social context around them.”\n\nThey constitute themselves unconditionally as models, and “[o]ut of these self-presentations arise new freedoms which… serve to renew human relationships through love.” Eshelman focuses primarily on idiosyncratic and “defective” characters in narrative art forms in particular (he has addressed architecture and other arts), but has not yet explored the political implications of this “retrogade self-fashioning of the subject” that “has something profoundly sacral about it, for every successful act of establishing selfhood implies a transcending, context-disrupting act of sacrifice which can exhaust or destroy the subject.”\n\nWhile Eshelman doesn’t put it in these terms, it seems to me that what characterizes the performatist agent is their willingness to occupy the center and thereby risk scapegoating while at the same time displaying no sense of their proximity to a social center or real interest in or desire to be scapegoated—indeed, ignoring their centrality and prolonging the recourse to scapegoating as much as possible, and minimizing it if it occurs. “Defects,” such as mild autism, help to construct characters in fictional works who can straddle this boundary because they cannot be fully aware of the implications of the risk they willingly take—they simply follow an idiosyncratically constructed set of rules.\n\nIn social and political terms, though, the “context-disrupting” acts covered by Eshelman’s concept might best be thought of as the assertion (based upon a naïve belief) that what appears to be an “error” is in fact an emergent idiom, with this claim dependent upon others accepting your act unconditionally as a model for their own. The error that disrupts the context makes one a target, and one’s insistence on advancing the idiom affirms that intensified attention; still, the new idiom is other than the idiom of sacrifice, and its inventor must find the language of sacrifice (which always calls for “correctness”) dissonant—and this might intensify the scapegoating mechanism or interfere with it, but would at any rate disallow its having the last word. Such idiom bearers can be sources of imperatives—we can reject their idiom, but if we accept, or iterate, it, we must accept being enclosed within in it, taking it as the origin of a new configuration of habits.\n\nOur relationship to these idiomatic models wouldn’t be prayerful, exactly, but we would have to command them to continue issuing and clarifying the commands they propose as a model. And our worship would be directed less at the figure him/herself then at the miraculous generativity of language, which gives us to create novelties out of our endless erring. So, we have a kind of originary relation to holy models, in which an asymmetrical relation of reciprocally commanding agents constitutes the imperative order—much more tentatively, of course, but what could one expect? Rather than a post-postmodernism, though, I think the proliferation of idiomatic models would be a new bend in modernity, one that embraces and extends the Christian recognition of both the pervasiveness and bankruptcy of scapegoating, but rejects definition through victimhood. I can’t say I see many such models in the political world at present—the media and contemporary canons of celebrity are still far too heavily invested in strip-mining the narrative of victimary modernity. But we can certain await their coming."
    },
    {
      "slug": "new-blog-1",
      "title": "New Blog",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "For anyone interested, I have a new blogging locale, on the Zombies Contentions blog (under Adam K). It’s more directly political, with only a hint of GA (but perhaps I’ll be able to thicken the hints as I go).\n\nAnyway, here’s the link, for anyone who’s interested:\n\nhttp://ckmac.com/thewholething/"
    },
    {
      "slug": "pre-existing-conditions",
      "title": "Pre-existing Conditions",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I have wanted to write an originary account of the health care debate for awhile, but perhaps this piece I wrote for the Zombie Contentions blog can stand in for it until I get arround to writing it:\n\nhttp://ckmac.com/thewholething/2010/03/29/pre-existing-conditions/"
    },
    {
      "slug": "some-thoughts-on-the-democrats-victory-on-health-care-with-obama-s-intifada-agai",
      "title": "Some thoughts on the Democrats’ victory on health care (with Obama’s intifada against Israel in mind as well)",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "“It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate them. Such turns of speech do not solve the riddle but only formulate it differently. It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered without resistance into captivity by three knights of industry. “\n\nKarl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte\n\nReplace “French” with “Americans,” “thirty six with three hundred million,” and “three knights of industry” with “the leadership of the Democratic Party,” and Marx’s commentary serves as a perfect epitaph for the American social order, as we have known it.\n\nAmericans, as far as I can tell, voted the Republicans out of power because they were tired of such a demonized representative class—and so they voted into power the ones who had been demonizing them. Anyone can say they didn’t realize the Democrats would wreak such destruction, but, really—who did you think they were? Anyone can say they thought Obama was moderate, calm, intellectually cool, with well-creased pants; but no one ever explained what led to such assumptions, beyond his seemingly natural haughtiness and a few phrases repeated a few times in absolutely formulaic manner during the 2008 campaign. Enough people thought this adventurer was a savior, and we will not be forgiven for delivering our birthright into his captivity.\n\nEven worse, 2008 was a vanity election, perhaps the first one in American history: in the middle of an assault on democracy and liberalism by jihadist terrorism, in the midst of a global financial crisis, on the brink of an equally global entitlements debacle—enough Americans thought it was a good time for a “historic” President; that is, thought it was a good time to trivialize the electoral process to the same extent as the Academy Awards, where every year some “marginalized” group or issue must be represented. I doubt such a delusional fantasy can be forgiven.\n\nThe fight against “Obamacare” is just getting started—there is a large popular movement ready to do battle, and the Republican party has become increasingly laser-like in its focus on this catastrophe. Despite the claim that health care bills “can’t” be repealed, the claim is obviously false—this is a hybrid, confused, maybe impossible law to implement, its provisions don’t kick in for years, while the taxes appropriated start immediately; the Republican party seems poised to make huge gains in November’s election; it is vulnerable on various constitutional grounds and can be resisted in myriad ways by states and individuals alike.\n\nAnd yet, at the end of the day, the American people elected the Democrats and Obama. There’s no point to being “pessimistic” about the struggle against American socialism, but only a deep sickness or, to use a word associated with one of Obama’s predecessors, “malaise,” can account for that—a very deep desire to check out of history, to set up one’s own schedule of “significant” events (2008, the first black President; 2016, the first woman; 2024, the first gay; perhaps by 2032 we can get back to electing real Presidents again). I’ve seen little discussion of this facet of our contemporary crisis—it seems to me extremely difficult to uproot such fantasy worlds (9/11, in the end, seems to have simply reinforced it), and even a substantial minority (I would guess about 35% involved in or sympathetic to the Tea Party movement) trying to return us to reality can be easily scapegoated if that basic desire remains entrenched.\n\nNor is that minority itself free of some of those fantasies—much of the Tea Party movement seems to want a return to the normal welfare state of a few years ago, but I believe that any swing in that direction will go well beyond its mark, towards something we have thought little about: freedom. Who is not terrified of that at this point?\n\nUPDATE: I notice that William Kristol has also used Marx’s text to describe the “farce” of Obamacare: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/eighteenth-brumaire-barack-obama . Interestingly, he doesn’t cite the words I use as an epigraph to this post. Kristol is an endearingly persistent optimist."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropoetics-spring-issue-15-2-now-available-http-www-anthropoetics-ucla-edu-ap",
      "title": "Anthropoetics’ Spring issue 15:2 now available! http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1502/index.htm",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The latest issue of Anthropoetics , Spring 15:2, is now available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1502/index.htm .The table of contents is listed below.\n\nTable of Contents\n\nAnthropoetics XV:II\n\nJean-Loup Amselle – To Count or Not to Count: The Debate on Ethnic and Diversity Statistics in France Today\n\nPeter Goldman – The Meaning of Meaning in Kafka’s The Castle\n\nKyle Karthauser – Popular Culture after Postmodernism: Family Guy , Borat , The Office , and the Awkwardness of Being Earnest\n\nAdam Katz – From Habit to Maxim: Eccentric Models of Reality and Presence in the Writing of Gertrude Stein\n\nMarina Ludwigs – Three Gaps of Representation / Three Meanings of Transcendence\n\nAndrew Mc Kenna – Art and Incarnation: Oscillating Views\n\nEmma Peacocke – “A novel word in my vocabulary”: Laughter and the Evolution of the Byronic Model into Don Juan\n\nSimon Watson – Review Essay: Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Atheist Fundamentalism\n\nFollow Anthropoetics on"
    },
    {
      "slug": "gasc-2010-update-1",
      "title": "GASC 2010 Update",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Hi Everybody,\n\nThe 2010 Generative Anthropology Summer Conference Website has a tentative schedule available online. A couple of late submissions are not on there yet, but be assured that they will be included in the final program. If you see any errors, please let us know.\n\nhttp://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/pgoldman/GASC_2010/program.html\n\nSee you in Salt Lake City, Utah in June!\n\nBest,\n\n~Peter"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-right-of-the-idiom-continued",
      "title": "The Right of the Idiom, continued",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We could say that De Soto’s argument for formalizing the informal economy (see my discussion in the first installment of “The Right of the Idiom”) is an argument for integrating the gift economy into the money economy. It’s a bit more complex, though: the informal economy is not a pre-capitalist economic order “transcended” by capitalism; rather, it emerges on the margins of capitalism, in particular in the urban areas ruled by what De Soto calls the “bell jar,” or the legal order that applies to and protects only the property of the elites—the masses, in De Soto’s account, abandon the countryside and crowd into the cities as the market economy offers promise of a better life, a promise which is frustrated by the inadequate legal order.\n\nBut, it might be better to say, as Gans did in his talk at the Ottawa conference last June (see Chronicle #376), that the gift economy is itself rather complex, and continues to exist within a capitalist economy. In that case, not everything need be monetized: even more, while just about anything can be, new gift economies will emerge in the way of each new conquest of capitalist legality.\n\nIt seems to me that there are some pretty important political consequences that follow. One devastating vulnerability of classical liberal political theory (that of Locke and his successors) is that it identifies the rights-bearing, property owning individual with the state of nature. We know, of course, that property ownership and the attendant rights are not pre-existing in nature, only to be “baptized” by the social contract. This fiction made what Hannah Arendt called the “right to have rights” excessively abstract and filled with contradictions. Political theory got caught up in endless debates over what, exactly, made human beings worthy of rights: was it reason?\n\nWas it productive labor? In that case, what about the rights of children, the disabled, the mentally ill? What about the rights of those whose labor does fit the model of productivity in Western society, as that of the Native Americans or Africans, who could therefore be dispossessed on the grounds that they don’t really “labor”? Moreover, the notion that property exists in a full blown form prior to the existence of government and law creates the sense that the government and the law are ultimately necessary evils, leading to the perpetual libertarian-anarchist fantasy of making them unnecessary—and the complementary fear and hatred of government, no matter how limited.\n\nWe could say, instead, that rights are rooted in one’s participation in a gift economy. One’s participation in a gift economy makes one, by definition, capable of entering the money, market economy, because the possibility of converting gifts into commodities is inherent in the juxtaposition of the two economies. In that case, the right to own property is a basic right, but one is not caught in the double bind of withholding such rights from anyone who doesn’t already own property in such a way as would be recognized by the capitalist legal system. Furthermore, everyone is involved in gift economies in some way, even the most disabled individual or a fetus, because any form of human life can be symbolized or represented, and the exchange of representations is the most basic form of the gift economy.\n\nHere I would propose a “right of the idiom”: anyone’s way into language and self-representation is distinctive, and in that case presentable in some way as a gift in some formal exchange with others. To put it another way, anyone who speaks can tell a joke, or laugh at one, in a way no one else can; or can be spoken about, and be a source of others’ desires and love—occupy a place in the world of signs, in short. I am not saying that idioms are intrinsically gifts—rather, in a modern society, in which the gift economy and the money economy exist side by side, any idiom could conceivably cross over the boundary and become property, and in that case it must have been (to use a Derridean idiom, it will have been) a gift in the first place. And, of course, if we root rights in the gift economy, on the margins and in the interstices of the market economy, we can also grant the right to remain within the gift economy and refuse entrance into the world of the market.\n\nRooting rights in the idioms circulating within the gift economy also allows us to address another blind spot of political economy: those pre-marketized relationships (education, family, neighborhood, etc.) and dispositions (loyalty, love, courage…) which must be pre-conditions of the market economy but have no place within economic thought itself. First of all, though, it raises some interesting questions regarding actors or beings also included within discursive or idiomatic circuits: what about animals? The planet? The dead? Future generations? They can all be imagined, and more vividly within a gift than a money economy, and hence can all become bearers of rights.\n\nBut rights would be more or less metaphorical, more or less enforceable, to the extent that the representation of those rights could conceivably give way to self-representation at some point. So, it is possible imagine calling upon the law to defend the rights of a fetus, or someone in a coma; the rights of future generations can be defended politically, insofar as they will, we hope, come along, but no individual has been delegated responsibility for them; the rights of the dead might, perhaps, be defended culturally, in arguments against abandoning what they tested out and sacrificed for; animals, in a familiar argument, have the right not to suffer more than necessary, because we certainly know they can suffer, and so on.\n\nAll of this would be endlessly discussed and debated, of course. I believe we could get much more specific in tying idioms to rights: who, for example, can issue binding imperatives upon us? The dead, I think, but not the planet. From whom can we imagine receiving an exclamation or ostensive (say, an exhortation): from future generations, I think, but not the planet, or animals. Who could be included in our prayers, on whose life could we swear an oath? Rights, in originary terms, are a modern mode of sacrality: some possible encroachment upon the existence, movement, well-being or freedom of others from which we forbear. There are many degrees and modes of such forbearance, and the way to understand our obligations to things and to people past and present is to look carefully at how we talk about them.\n\nTo return, then, to the economics of the non-marketized elements of life: what an originary political economy would study are the ways in which one or another mode of education or family or communal life, provide avenues back and forth between gift and money economies. A mode of life which provides the necessities of life outside of the market beyond some threshold to be identified would be inimical to a larger society based on rights. The group might have means of representing itself and thereby accessing rights, and individuals representing the group might have means of doing so as well, but their relations to each other would be largely outside of the economy of rights.\n\nThat might be the way they prefer it, and that is their right. At the same time, though, we would be obliged to defend the rights of any individual within that group who stepped outside of the gift economy into the market, even if it’s a very small step. Gift economies might be very egalitarian but they also might be sites where strict hierarchies (“big men”) flourish; in a certain sense the big man and woman are constitutive of the family. We can defend a wide range of organization within the various gift economies, as long as we develop an agreement as to what would count as that “step” outside of it.\n\nWhat I hope to contribute next (the blog, and intellectual exchange more generally, is ultimately most at home within the gift economy) is an way of talking about idioms in the way I have suggested above—how can we talk of the commands, the revelations, the prayers and oaths, the promises, and so on, that are formed within the gift economy but prepare us to enter the money economy and bear and respect rights? What kind of politics can help preserve these idiomatic preconditions on rights? And no consistent reader of this blog will be surprised when I suggest that the devastation wrought by victimary discourse lies largely in its assault upon these idioms, and upon gift economies (which interfere with bureaucracy) more generally."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-right-of-the-idiom-part-1",
      "title": "The Right of the Idiom: Part 1",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I have been reading Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital , and a striking convergence with Eric Gans’ Chronicle #388 on writing suggests itself; and this articulation further intersects with a little discussion a while back on the GAList on GA as a theory of self-ownership. And, finally, of interest perhaps to no one but myself, this little package helps me advance my originary grammar.\n\nDe Soto’s argument is by now fairly well known: the seemingly intractable poverty outside of the Western world results from the lack of a stable system of property. According to de Soto, the poor throughout the world actually possess trillions of dollars worth of assets, but since these assets are only possessed physically, without any legal title, they can only be exchanged locally and, more important, cannot serve as capital. Capital is property that can be borrowed against and therefore generate more wealth than it contains itself—but that’s impossible if legal titles are not available, especially if much of this “property” is held not only extra-legally but illegally. So, it is writing, which turns what is possessed into “property,” by documenting all the features of those possessions deemed relevant by potential buyers, lenders, and the existing legal authorities.\n\nDe Soto’s book was published in 2000, and it was the culmination of a years’ long research project in which de Soto and his collaborators studied the various forms of undocumented property held by the poor in various countries along with the legal systems in those countries, with an eye on what would be involved in obtaining the proper documentation. Even more, de Soto presents this as a political project aimed at transforming legal and property systems in these countries so as to bring them in line with the capital systems that have worked in the West. I don’t know where this project stands right now, but I think I’m safe in saying it hasn’t been marked by astonishing progress.\n\nDe Soto addresses the puzzling fact that this very basic reason for the success of Western capitalism has never been a part of the foreign aid processes through which many billions of dollars have been flushed down the global toilet (that’s my expression, not de Soto’s). He concludes that this is because the West itself has never penetrated to the secret of its own success, since the defense of individual property rights and not the creation of capital per se was the goal pursued in the development of Western legal systems through the 19 th century. We can read de Soto in terms of the originary hypothesis here very effectively, and perhaps add to our understanding of the transition from Maussian exchange to the market system: written legal documentation confers a new mode of generativity upon things by deferring violence in the short run and thereby creating a “medium run”—that is, making it possible to rely upon the expanding division of labor stored in property.\n\nIf the West has not deciphered the reasons for its success, it makes sense to ask whether it might squander that success. Property rights are still understood, both by its proponents and critics, in terms of their connection to individuals as their source, rather than as the foundation of a system of economic generativity articulated through signs. Through a kind of cunning of history, the insistence on property as, in Lockean terms, an extension of the body and labor of the individual, sufficed to build an economic system unanticipated by those who first formulated and defended those rights. But property rights defended on those traditional terms have proven vulnerable, because in the theory of the state predicated upon that theory of right, the state is obliged to defend individual property rights while at the same time being viewed as the major threat to those rights.\n\nThere is an extreme and unresolvable ambivalence implicit in this stance—you must want the state to be big enough to defend your property while renouncing any designs on that property, you must want the state to be imbued with the assumptions of universal rights and individual responsibility while at the same time being completely instrumental. The bigger and more complex the threats to individual property become and the more special interests inevitably seize upon the instrumentality of the state, the more untenable this position becomes. Consider the kind of ideal “public servant” who must administer such a state: he must be impartial and decisive, have no ambition to expand his power while using that power assertively and confidently, and be content to suffer the suspicions and accusations of those who start from the assumption that only near-paranoid levels of scrutiny can hope to control him.\n\nThe American constitutional system brilliantly takes into account the essential anthropological dimensions the more austere libertarian doctrine ignores—the American founders, sharing that same Lockean understanding of property, understood that diversity in abilities and starting points would lead to diversity in property and therefore diversity in interest; they also understood that people seek power because they like power (and that there is nothing wrong with liking power, which can be used for good or evil), and they will therefore act to preserve, expand, and find new avenues to manifest that power. So, the various checks and balances are put in place in order to prevent any single interest, including the majority interest, from trampling the others, or any site of power from suppressing the others.\n\nBut the basic relation between property right and government remains the same: there is no reliable way of distinguishing between government actions that protect property rights from those that encroach upon them especially since those actions might have one effect on one set of property owners and the opposite effect on another set. The reciprocal negation of the property right of the slaveowner, and the property right the slave presumably has in his own body and labor, is an extreme example of this tension, and one that found no resolution within the Constitutional order.\n\nIf the role of the government in a free, constitutional order is understood to be that of documenting and preserving the records of private property owners, protecting property as thus recorded, adjudicating claims made by property owners against each other, and, most fundamentally, framing conflicts as anomalies in the existing property arrangements to be normalized, we could perhaps resolve or at least minimize these tensions. The method of framing conflicts is what is new here: libertarian economists have suggested that issues such as pollution could be framed as property right violations, but in order to do so consistently more things would need to be owned privately.\n\nEvery contract produces a property right. One has private property in a promise made by an insurance company to provide coverage under certain conditions—that is, the insurance company, in contracting with me, would be granting me that property right as one that could be adjudicated if the insurance company comes to disagree with me about the boundaries of my “property.” If the streets of a neighborhood were owned corporately by those who own the houses, crime could be addressed by voting, as shareholders, to expel law-breaking neighbors, or forbidding entrance to specific individuals; of course, such property rights could be used to exclude members of particular racial or religious groups—but couldn’t that be dealt with by boycotts exercised by other neighbors and neighborhoods and other means of marginalizing the explicitly bigoted community?\n\nOr, we would learn to live with pockets of bigotry as the price of freedom. Could we reduce all disputes to ones akin to one I might have with my neighbor who, for example, has erected an antenna that reaches over my roof, so that first the court, but ultimately the legislature, would have to decide how high up my property goes? Political arguments would then come down to questions of partitioning aspects of our existence into forms of property that could be recorded and fixed into law. It would be a nightmare of alienation for certain kinds of humanists, left and right, but such networks of property would ultimately get woven into our identities, personalities and interactions in complex and unpredictable ways, and new forms of wealth might get created as well.\n\nMeanwhile, along with this work of creating new configurations of property would continue the work of suppressing the crimes of those whose short term interest in parasitism or resentment towards civil society outweigh their interest in participation. Explicit agreements with the police, granting them special kinds of access to private spaces—giving the police, in effect, a property right in their ability to protect themselves so as to protect others—might eliminate the pathological relations between high crime and minority communities in particular and the police, wherein the former demand (and, indeed, need) higher levels of service while simultaneously insisting (often, admittedly, with good reason) upon higher degrees of scrutiny of police behavior.\n\nWhy not lay out an agreement in advance: this is what we want you to do, and this is what we will let you do in order to accomplish it? So, there would be property rights in the ability and responsibility to protect property rights and in the expectation of receiving such protection, and such property and the predictability it results in could serve as a kind of capital drawing people and businesses into a community.\n\nThe idiom of “owning” or having “property” in some institution, practice, or relationship is already a very common: teachers speak about students having “ownership” in their work, we speak about have “stakes” in relationships, about someone “owning” an issue, and so on. I think such idioms should be expanded and deepened, and made more formal when possible—in an example that is familiar to me, universities are already very comfortable treating course syllabi as “contracts” between teacher and students, and it is a very effective way of allocating and enforcing rights and responsibilities on both sides. Another interesting connection is how popular the notion of “appropriation” has always been in critical theory—that is, in the most victimary and leftist regions of contemporary thought and culture, “resistance” is thought of as making a claim to ownership.\n\nLet’s now turn to Eric Gans’s discussion of writing, in which he notes the following:\n\nNeither Derrida nor Lévi-Strauss appear to be aware that the primary social function of writing is the production of documents . When Lévi-Strauss describes the Nambikwara chief after the leçon d’écriture as producing and “reading” a scrawled piece of paper to his people as a guarantee that the white explorer would provide them with certain requested items, he speaks of the paper as containing a “list,” but its primary function is as a contract . That Lévi-Strauss’ promises are supposed to be written on it makes it documentary proof that he made these promises and can be held to them.\n\nThe practice of writing is normally thought to originate with marks or icons included as a manifest listing the contents of a shipment so that the recipient can verify these contents on receipt. The “supplement” added by the document to the speaker’s absence objectifies his “speech” so that it can be maintained through time and verified not merely by his interlocutor but by any third party. This makes it possible for the transaction , which in contrast to Maussian gift exchange is essentially punctual, to be prolonged like the latter over time. This is a prerequisite for any kind of complex economic relationship, and it is easy to conceive that the expansion of such relationships would lead to the extension of writing to the recording of such things as laws and regulations. No doubt the societies in which writing emerged were hierarchical, but this does not imply that writing any more than speech is hierarchical in essence.\n\nIt’s not just that writing creates the contract, and hence a public form for ratifying possession (i.e., property); the need for such a public form, one that could be examined in the absence of either participant in the exchange, created writing. The implications of this are, of course, enormous. On the economic level, exchange can be extended over time and distance, and third parties can be employed to adjudicate between the parties to the exchange, leading, as Gans notes, to “such things as laws and regulations” along with the authority to enforce them, authority which itself comes more and more to take on written forms (as in our own constitution, every word of which scholars pour over for its original meaning and possible interpretations).\n\nBut writing also changes language as well—if, in de Soto’s terms, written property deeds direct our attention to the economically relevant features of some physical property, writing more generally directs our attention to those elements of language most relevant to communication in the absence of the speaker. According to David Olson, it is writing that presents language to us as an object in the first place—the division of language into sounds, words, and sentences, with the rules of grammar regulating the relations between those different levels, is all made available through writing. I don’t think it would be quite right to say that writing creates those features of language.\n\nAccording to Olson, once writing, as a means of itemizing the elements of a manifest, is provided a syntax—for example, the icon for “sheep” is put next to an icon for “3”—it is fit to represent speech. In that case, speech must have had those features previously, but without objective representations of speech they could never have been noted, much less analyzed and exploited. Language can now be normalized, and it must be, to enhance its usefulness for contractual purposes, for the creation or rules, regulations, laws, treaties, constitutions, and so on, to produce religious and literary texts that can be preserved and enjoyed over extended periods of time, and to serve as an ingredient of education.\n\nBut the normalization of language also provides a means for presenting and intensifying the singularity of the language user. Again, the analogy with property holds, and ultimately it is more than an analogy—once we have standardized forms for determining relevant differences between properties, those forms equally serve to distinguish one property from another. Features that would not be noticed, would not be so sharply defined, would not be recognized as especially relevant, would not, therefore, have been attended to more carefully, now can be. Speech is similarly changed by writing—Olson identifies a series of words that come into existence following the development of writing which serve the purpose of identifying the attitude of a speaker in the absence of that speaker and the “comprehensiveness” of the speech situation.\n\nFor example, he identifies “insist” as such a word—in referring to someone else’s speech in speech, I could repeat what they say in an insistent tone of voice, but in writing I need to be able to say “he insisted.” Once we have the word, though, it becomes part of speech, and I can now say “I insist,” and, even more, I can say I insist in a non-insistent tone of voice, which means I have new means for introducing various layers of possible sense into my discourse, oral and written. New means for creating singular styles, in other words.\n\nWhat I am getting at here is the suggestion that rather than positing a right in one’s body and its extensions as the basis of individual rights, we posit a right to one’s idiom as that basis. First, though, a little detour back through grammar.\n\nNext will come the detour through grammar."
    },
    {
      "slug": "victimary-progressivism",
      "title": "victimary progressivism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Not much new here for GAniks, but here’s my latest post over at zombies contentions:\n\nhttp://zombiecontentions.com/2010/04/18/how-about-victimary-progressivism/"
    },
    {
      "slug": "anti-semitism-and-the-victimary-era",
      "title": "Anti-semitism and the Victimary Era",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here is my proposal for that International Conference on Anti-semitism I mentioned on the GAlist a while back. We’ll see what they make of it.\n\nThis paper will offer an account of contemporary anti-semitism in terms of Eric Gans’s “originary hypothesis” regarding the origin of language and culture. The originary hypothesis extends and revises Rene Girard’s analysis of mimetic and rivalry: according to the originary hypothesis, the first sign emerged in a single event, a mimetic crisis in which the (proto) human group arrested their common and self-destructive convergence upon a common object by putting forward what Gans calls a “gesture of aborted appropriation.” Representation, then, is the deferral of violence, as is, therefore, all of culture. History is the ongoing process of preserving and, where necessary and possible, replacing such means of deferral (languages, rituals, beliefs, moralities, art, and so on) which are intrinsically fragile and under constant threat from mimetic desire, rivalry and violence.\n\n“Generative Anthropology” (the mode of thought based upon the originary hypothesis) provides us with two ways of thinking about anti-semitism. First, the kind of anti-semitism which ultimately led to the Holocaust is predicated upon the paradox of the Jewish discovery of monotheism: the Judaic revelation presented knowledge of a single God beyond the means of control of totemic religions and a single humanity whose knowledge of God is most profoundly revealed in the reciprocal relations between humans; at the same time, this very revelation is granted to a single people, “chosen” to work out before the world the implications of this understanding of the divine.\n\nThe spread of monotheism, already inscribed in its universalistic origin, could hardly take place other than through resentment towards those who both gave this God to humanity and “selfishly” claimed an exclusive relation to Him. This resentment, evident in both Christianity and Islam, is modified in modernity, which completely separates the divinized individual from his/her bond with God: the Jewish “principle,” in this case, is what binds humans to tradition and their narrow ethnicities and outmoded loyalties. Finally, the reaction against modernity (and especially those radical reactions that reject Christianity as well) removes the exemption for individuals enacted by the modern contempt for the Jewish people: it is the Jewish principle of universal morality and individual freedom that has corrupted and dissolved all legitimate forms of community and authority, while Jewish “exclusiveness” turns this process into a deliberate conspiracy against the “nations.”\n\nThe ultimately omnicidal potential for human violence revealed by the Holocaust introduces something new into this equation. The Holocaust marks the beginning of the victimary era, in which we are now living. The virulent hatred of the Nazis towards the Jews drew the world into a cataclysmic struggle, the like of which we will not survive again in the nuclear age. The eschewing of such hatred must be the center of the new system of deferral constructed after the war: whatever “looks like” the Nazi-Jew relation must be uncompromisingly proscribed. This, of course, creates an incentive to make one’s own grievance fit that model: post-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and so on struggles are all cast in terms of the perpetrator/victim/bystander configuration extracted from the Holocaust.\n\nThe Jews are once again placed in a paradoxical position. First of all, the response on the part of the Jews to the consequences of their utter defenselessness in the Holocaust is to create and, with growing unanimity, support a Jewish nation-state. But the nation-state, with its ethnic exclusivity and narrow self-interest, is one of those things that “looks” very much “like” Nazism. Second, the victimary principle can only be universalized if the Jewish monopoly on Holocaust guilt is broken—the best way to do so is to present the Jews as oppressors, at least just like the rest of us, at worst uniquely so, insofar they have exploited the world’s guilt so as to perpetuate the very conditions enabling their own victimization.\n\nFinally, then, the emergence of a new victim, the Palestinians, the victim of the Jews, completes the victimary metaphysics first set in motion by the response to the Holocaust. The victimary system, then, depends upon this new, expanded anti-semitism, in which the Jews are scapegoated for the crimes of the West as well as for the intensifying resentments toward the West, coming now, in particular, from the most bitter if not the oldest of those resentments: that of Islam.\n\nThe originary hypothesis suggests that, on the originary scene of language creation, someone had to have gone first, that is, renounced, and have been seen to renounce, his appropriative relation to the object. This position, the position of “the Jew” (we are not speaking about actual Jews here, even if arguably this configuration enters into Jewish self-representations as well), is intermittently admired and imitated—but more often hated. Only a renewed, and now global, acceptance of “firstness” could enable us to transcend the increasingly irrational anti-semitism that now plagues even a country as traditionally reasonable and liberal as the UK."
    },
    {
      "slug": "gasc-2010-update-2",
      "title": "GASC 2010 Update",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Hi Everybody,\n\nThe 4th annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference (GASC) 2010 is shaping up to be a very exciting event, with presentations from many of the regular Anthropoetic contributors and several first-time attendees. We are all looking forward to Eric Gans’ Plenary lecture on “Haven’t We Always Been Modern,” a lecture in dialogue with Bruno Latour’s book “We Have Never Been Modern.” Vince Pecora, English dept. chair at the University of Utah, is giving the other Plenary Lecture on “Secularism, Secularization, and Why the Difference Matters.” The conference is being held this year at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City. Please check the conference website regularly for the latest version of the schedule and other new information. Anyone with an interest in Generative Anthropology or the conference theme “The Anthropology of Modernity: The Sacred, Science, and Aesthetics” is welcome to attend.\n\nhttp://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/pgoldman/GASC_2010/index.html\n\n~Peter"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-right-of-the-idiom-continued-addendum",
      "title": "The Right of the Idiom continued, addendum",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The relations between the gift, the informal, and the formal, capitalist economy can bear a bit more discussion. It is not quite right to call the informal economy a gift economy—transactions will be carried out regularly with money, often the currency used in the larger society, I would imagine, but there’s no need to assume informal exchanges would be restricted to that currency (other, currencies, maybe more secure international currencies might be used). There is also, probably, a good deal of barter and exchange of services. What is most important to de Sotos, though, is that what is possessed in the marginal, informal economy is legal title to possessions, many of which are held illegally, such as a house built without a title, violating zoning regulations, on state land.\n\nNot only can such possessions not be a source of capital—it can’t be used as collateral for a loan, for example—but the owner’s continued possession of them relies upon the personal knowledge of that owner by others in the community. Everyone knows who owns that house, those tools or stock of materials, who sets up shop on that corner, etc. It is this reliance upon reciprocal personal recognition that seems to me to root the informal economy in the gift economy. As a transitional, or hybrid, form, the informal economy could be seen, as I argued in the previous post, as exemplary of the need to root rights in idioms of local recognition.\n\nIn order to give legal title to the vast wealth held in the informal economy, one would have to, as, indeed, de Sotos and his collaborators have done, go through the neighborhoods in question and not only note this house, this shop, this vehicle, but to speak with the inhabitants to find out who owns what, and therefore to gauge their reliability, assess their own conflicting interests, the norms, resentments and sense of justice; all of which would, in turn, be rooted in local histories and events within the memories of most witnesses. In turn, all that knowledge, all those resentments, those tacit norms, are articulated and made public, subject to a new kind of scrutiny which might both respect and alienate it as a set of idioms. And here we can see a bridge between the gift and money economies."
    },
    {
      "slug": "zombie-post",
      "title": "zombie post",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve got a new post over at zombies contentions, if anyone’s interested."
    },
    {
      "slug": "zombies",
      "title": "zombies",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Another post at zombies contentions:\n\nhttp://zombiecontentions.com/2010/05/11/the-pot-calling-the-kettle-mob/"
    },
    {
      "slug": "zombies-again",
      "title": "zombies again",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’m up again at zombies contentions (a rewriting of my recent post here, without the theory). You can find your way, can’t you?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-right-of-the-idiom-2",
      "title": "The Right of the Idiom, 2",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The elemental form of freedom is that of the discipline: a shared, inviolate and inexhaustible locus of attention. Sciences are disciplines, developing vocabularies and histories, and framing their objects so that another “layer” of understanding can always be sought. But so are congregations around some object of faith or communities of criticism around some esthetic object or domain. All that matters is the collaborative act of sustaining the centered attention, and the capacity of each in the discipline to contribute to new modes of attention on the part of the others. Even when we think to ourselves, we are participating in a discipline, whether it be the discipline of the varied voices in our mind, or the possible discipline of thinkers past and future with whom we engage. The discipline has its original on the originary scene, when we all stand in equipoise before the central object, and attend to the object along with one another’s attention to it.\n\nThe most basic political rights, then, are those associated with participation in the disciplines: speech, association, religion, press, etc. It becomes possible to assert such rights once the originary scene has divided into several scenes, each with its own disciplinary logic. The power of the several scenes will depend upon the power exercised by the ritual center, and the defense of the rights of the disciplines will depend upon the conversion of the imperative space tied to the ritual center into a declarative space, or a public discipline, concerned with identifying the nature of rights and the means of securing them. The emergence of talk of rights, then, will be connected to the right of each discipline to establish and sustain itself, and to publicize itself before others—and the insistence upon such rights will be modeled on the rights which emerge within any discipline, the rights involved in getting a communicable view of the central object.\n\nThe sacred is what holds our joint attention and enables us to attend to each other’s attending to. The profane, then, is whatever can be used, consumed or destroyed in service to the sacred, on terms allowed by the sacred, or in violation of the sacred. All unfolding from the originary scene, then, results from mistakings of the boundary between sacred and profane and takings that inscribe the mistake within a new idiom or exclude it in accord with the existing norm. Politics emerges when the community has to do more inscribing than excluding. That’s when we would start speaking in terms of rights, sacralizing first of all groups and institutions (disciplines as a whole) but ultimately individuals, in their right to join and leave disciplines.\n\nProperty emerges out of the profane—it is the acquisition on the part of the discipline of the means to preserve the discipline, to serve the sacred at its center. I would suggest that the sign continues to be issued in the course of the sparagmos, as each participant presents it to the other whe never the other tries to grab more than his share: property is modeled on this relatively orderly but also competitive division of the object. With the emergence of property comes the asymmetry of the disciplines, an asymmetry which struggles over access to the public disciplinary space will seek to remedy or support. Hence the emergence of parties, which aim at guaranteed access to the state, and turn the spread of disciplinary discourse into the crowding of party discourse. In other words, disciplines disperse and distribute the individuals involved by placing them equidistant from the center; parties draw upon the interest of diverse property holders in access to the state and, on the model of the sparagmos, are concerned with drawing lines, taking parts and dividing to one’s advantage.\n\nIf one is political, there is no avoiding parties and partisanship, but one can establish disciplinary spaces at the margins of parties so as to place limits on crowding and make the public disciplinary space (parliament, congress) genuinely disciplinary itself. What these disciplinary spaces concern themselves with is the political consequence of whatever the disciplines from which they derive concern themselves with. Whatever can be presented as an object within a discipline can be a subject of rights: “nature” (or some portion thereof), things and technologies, the dead and the yet to be born, and more. I am proposing this kind of “rights talk” as a counter to the signal strategy of the Left, which is to supplant individual rights (the rights, as I am presenting them here, to participate in disciplines) with collective rights requiring expanded state activity and, ultimately, severe restrictions on individual rights. I am suggesting, in other words, a metaphorical rights talk, which calls upon citizens, not the state, to expand the range of sacred objects they wish to protect.\n\nTrade itself develops modes of sacrality, and enterprise can be a mode of disciplinarity. At one extreme, economic innovation, as in the high tech firms in Silicon Valley, can be a thoroughly engaged intellectual and ethical enterprise; and economic exchange, especially when conducted at the margins of a given social order, can be so risky as to require explicit signs of trustworthiness on the part of the participants. Most often, though, economic activity conducted through private property is a kind of warfare on the existing social division of labor, and trade seeks and finds the protection of states and laws. I persist in calling the kinds of technological and organizational strategies and transformations we associate with firms like Microsoft and Wal-Mart “warfare” because their focus is not merely on providing a better and/or cheaper product, but upon undermining the competitor’s market position, for which purpose they will make use of any means available.\n\nI’m not making a moral point, in other words, just trying to develop the best description—and the tactics of the enemies and competitors of these firms, such as union organizing drives, “living wage” policies and anti-trust lawsuits are no less modes of warfare than any used by these firms themselves. Those who cannot develop their property within the existing division of labor will directly target weak links in that division of labor; those whose profits are tied to that division of labor will try to reinforce it and treat innovations as usurpation. The free market libertarian theorists are right to point to the monopolistic and rent seeking character of those who profit from the existing division of labor, and breaking up monopolies so that new connections can be places new practices beyond existing state control.\n\nThe victors themselves, though, immediately seek out protection from and alliances with the state. Not only that, but transformations in the social division of labor imply shifts in desires and resentments as well, creating new modes of politics aimed at staging, framing and channeling those desires and resentments. This doesn’t imply any one to one relation between economic and cultural changes: for example, enhancements in medical technologies that enable intra-uterine treatment can make abortion more routine or more horrible. Here is where idioms of rights come into it: how will the rights of the unborn child be articulated with rights of inquiry of the scientist and right to confidentiality of the mother/patient?\n\nThe family is also best seen as an imperatival, normalizing space, protecting society from the consequences of sexual desires and appetites. But the pleasures of family life seem to me to coincide with its political significance: what the family, or familial love, teaches above all else, is resentment on behalf of the other. The child concerned with his or her parents’ dignity; the parent taking up the defense of his or her child against the school or some other establishment; the sibling waging mini-wars on behalf of, or providing tutorials on “life” to, sibling; or, for that matter, the parent or child siding with society, opportunistically or pedagogically, against the more narrow desire of the family member—all this offers a wide field for the nuanced and self-distancing exercise of broadly shared resentments that get played out in less complex forms in the workplace, in friendships and love affairs and in various institutions. A “pro-family” politics, one speaking on behalf of the “rights” of the family, should find ways to speak in these terms of what it is we wish to protect about families.\n\nAt any rate, the most fundamental right, the right to have rights, can be grounded in our capacity for language use and, more specifically, our ability to participate in disciplinary spaces, which are characterized by their distinctive idiom: a vocabulary, a set of commonplaces, a shared set of imperatives and so on. Those who can’t speak, who can’t participate in disciplines—those in “vegetative” states, the unborn, very small children, people with Alzheimer’s, etc.—can be represented within disciplines. Asserting the abstract human rights of people who can’t assert their own has not worked very well: it’s easy enough to claim that the person in a coma would have wanted to die (maybe it’s sometimes true), the rights of the unborn have seemed very faint compared to the demands of the fully fledged human mother, and attempts to humanize stem cells have had, at best, temporary successes.\n\nBut perhaps when the speechless enter a discourse, generated by a discipline demonstrably interested in exploring their possible wants and imposing upon the rest of us a real presence, the contrast between such a discourse and others predicated upon the irrelevance of these figures (all sacrificial discourses which accept the disappearance of one for the benefit of others, or “society” as a whole) will succeed where arguments based on an abstract humanity, life or right has not.\n\nIn its own way, the rights of the idiom takes up sides with those transforming the existing division of labor. If we follow the imperative to minimize, the disciplinary events which shape us increasingly overlap while simultaneously differentiating. I would like to present this as a problem in originary grammar, but I will save that for the next post."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-right-of-the-idiom-3",
      "title": "The Right of the Idiom, 3",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Disciplinary spaces are both open and closed: when you just enter a disciplinary space, a space with a real focus, an evolved vocabulary, and means—both explicit and tacit—for rerouting the attentions of the others within the space; when you just enter such a a space you don’t really know what’s going on. Even more, you read it in terms of what you do know. At the same time, if it’s a genuine disciplinary space, it provides various transitional terms that both de-familiarize what you thought you understood about the shared attentionality demanded and provide you with the means to participate in disciplinary events.\n\nWe can formulate this inside/outside relationship as follows: the probability that anyone will iterate signs put forward within the discipline approach 100% the more they have entered the disciplinary space and randomness the further they are outside of it. We can think about it this way: imagine standing in front of a contained representation, like a painting or photograph, with someone else—you could conduct your discussion almost completely in deictics or shifters, that is, “look at that”; “how close would you say this is supposed to be to that?”; “do you mean him or her?”, etc. You, with your eyes on the same thing, can be completely mutually intelligible to each other; anyone without their eyes on this scene could not even begin to make sense of your conversation.\n\nThat’s what a discipline is—we all know we are looking at the same thing, and can proceed from there. At the same time, we can welcome others into the scene, and welcome the new perspective they bring with it; and, even more, we have to continually refresh and check our sense that we are, indeed, looking at the same thing. Within a discipline, it becomes especially evident when we are not, as we believed, looking at the same thing: the deictics lose their referential power.\n\nWe can contrast disciplinary discourse with what I called, in the previous post, “crowded” (and crowding) discourse—that is, partisan discourse organized around gaining access to the state’s power to protect and divide property. Those inside one crowd and (of necessity) outside the other, understand equally well, but in the opposite manner, what goes on inside the other crowd. In other words, those on the left understand “Obama is a socialist” just as well as those on the right; those on the right understand “Palin is a fraudulent woman” just as well as those on the left—in both cases, the meaning of the statement is saturated, and marks an entire field along with the oppositions that constitute that field.\n\nIt’s as if each crowd has a map that overlaps perfectly with the other crowd’s map, but with all of the places named differently. This has nothing to do with right or wrong, and I’m not claiming that political opponents are morally equivalent with each other—the war against Nazism worked this way, and the struggle against communism even more so, and while this insight into mimetic modeling can help is to identify excesses and distortions that can be curtailed and ameliorated, there is still a substantial difference between democracy and totalitarianism.\n\nI would like to define language as the from which we attend to each other’s attending to. I am using the idiom of Michael Polanyi’s understanding of tacit knowledge, more specifically his The Tacit Dimension. According to Polanyi, we are always attending from one thing to something else, with the thing we are attending to that of which we are aware—what we attend from is essentially invisible. He gives the example of using a stick to stay in contact with the wall in trying to find your way out of a dark place—you are aware of the wall, not the stick. Of course, if the stick breaks, you will become aware of it—but that just means you will be attending from something to the stick—perhaps from your hand, which you now touch the end of the stick with, in order to determine how much of it remains.\n\nIf we attend from language to each other’s attending to, we are attending from language not merely to some object of shared attention, and to others’ attending to that object, but to both: language always implies not only something we are or might be talking about but the others with whom one might be talking about it—the two are bound up inextricably. The implication of my description is that language is ordinarily invisible—we don’t notice ourselves speaking, we don’t think of ourselves as adding one word to another as we speak, much less as making sounds that we could “listen” to by bracketing their meanings. Except for when, as in the example of the stick, language doesn’t work—when a foreign accent forces you to focus carefully on the sounds of the words, or a grammatical mistake forces you to hypothetically reconstruct the other’s meaning, etc.\n\nThat’s when we have to look at language, which we do, of course, with language. Metaphysics is the attempt to rectify language when such events force language into self-reflexive states so that we can continue to look through language; originary grammar tries to articulate looking at language and with language with looking through language.\n\nWe can articulate an account of the originary scene in the Polanyian terms I have just introduced with the theory of “markedness” first constructed by Roman Jakobson and by now a staple of much of contemporary linguistics. I will make markedness theory do a lot of work, but I will also use it in some idiosyncratic ways—as is necessary to make it fully compatible with the originary hypothesis. Jakobson intensified Saussure’s insistence on the constitution of language through a series of differences by arguing that these differences are, most fundamentally, asymmetrical binary oppositions: always an opposition between an unmarked and a marked element.\n\nThis opposition already does quite a lot of work for Jakobson and his followers, enabling them to account for phonetic, grammatical, semantic and other relationships; it can easily be taken even further, as in Eric Gans’s definition of White Guilt, as the guilt of the unmarked toward the marked. As Gans’s definition suggests, to be “unmarked” is to be generic, the norm, the taken for granted, or, in Polanyi’s terms, the tacit, what one attends from. To take a couple of simple examples, the present tense in English is unmarked, the past is marked (we add endings to the word): you look for the word “love” in the dictionary, not the word “loved,” which presupposes that “love” is the normal form of the word and “loved” the modified form.\n\nTo take another, more semantic example, we ask how “tall” someone is, not how “short” they are (someone is 5 feet tall, not 5 feet short)—“tall” is the unmarked term, which means that referring to someone as “5 feet short” would add more information, implying, for example, an ironic stance on the part of the speaker. It would, in other words, be drawing attention to the word chosen, in a way “he’s 5 feet tall” wouldn’t.\n\nWe can locate (un)markedness on the originary scene in the distinction between sacred center and profane periphery. Indeed, the center must be marked first of all, insofar as the participants in the event attend from the sign/gesture to the object; but the effect of this shared attention is to have everyone attend from the object as sacred to each and every one’s profane desire for the object, culminating in the regulated sparagmos. The sign, then, signifies doubly: it refers to the object, but also the Object (everyone else’s blocking of the object) as the possibility of a normative approach to the object. The sign simultaneously marks and unmarks the object and thereby constitutes the unmarked/marked distinction in the first place.\n\nAll that remains to be done is to show how the subsequent development of language, from the ostensive, through the imperative and the interrogative to the declarative, through the development of grammatical categories and rules and so on, is nothing more than the application of this “method” discovered on the originary scene. Once we have a meaningful unit, meaningful units can be combined into new units; and that unit can itself be broken down into units, meaningless in themselves, but meaningful in new combinations—just as the gesture on the originary scene is “analyzed” in the attempt to imitate it “correctly.”\n\nIn this way we would have an originary linguistics and (my preferred term) grammar, which is to say an originary way of thinking through all the possible relationships between linguistic elements, or all the ways we think through, at and with language.\n\nIn every sentence, even every word, one part is stressed in relation to another—we attend from the unstressed to the stressed; or, from the part that would ordinarily have been stressed to the part that is stressed this time. What is stressed in “I didn’t expect to see you here,” for example: the “I,” the “you,” or the “here”—or, perhaps, the “see” (maybe you were expecting a phone call). The stressed is marked, that part of the utterance that provides the most, or most pertinent, information—just as the center itself is empty or silent, while being an inexhaustible source of knowledge regarding attempts to obey, violate or modify its commands.\n\nThe theory of (un)markedness in turn makes the issue of “deictics” especially important: deictics, or shifters, are those words which take on their meaning from other elements of the message or the speech situation—for example, “him” or “that” depend upon what has been referenced in a previous sentence, or someone present who can be pointed to. I doubt I am the first person to observe that we can identify a deictic element to just about every part of any utterance, which is to say that the meaning of any statement has a scenic component—at any rate, attending from the unmarked to the marked pervades every use of language, to the point where one could pretty effectively and thoroughly describe the meaning of any utterance just by following all the ways in which the unmarked, present in the scene or utterance, or implicit in our knowledge as language users, directs our attention to whatever it is the utterance would have us mark.\n\nIndeed, the point of any utterance could be described as follows: to preserve, modify and/or expand the realm of the unmarked by marking whatever most immediately demands others’ attention—because, as those familiar with the originary hypothesis know, whatever is marked is a potential source of rivalry, crisis and violence.\n\nDistinguishing between the unmarked and the marked raises new questions—simply, unmarked and marked for whom, in what setting, according to what criteria, etc.? The distinction is always made in some event, on some scene, and must ultimately lead us to an ostensive gesture—this word, this act, is marked because it is set off from some norm in the following way; “distinctive,” or “distinguishing features,” to use Jakobson’s terms, can always be indicated. In other words, distinguishing between marked and unmarked takes place on a disciplinary scene, however rudimentary and tacit. Whereas Jakobson would, understandably enough, distinguish between the speech situation and the represented scene we can locate in any speech act, and identify the deictics in play accordingly (“someone was standing to the left of John” functions deictically on the represented scene, assuming John has been placed on that scene; “over there” functions deictically in the speech situation, but wouldn’t on the represented scene), I would approach that necessary distinction as follows: there is what can be identified on the disciplinary scene, or what I will also call the scene of presencing; and there is what can be represented by those on that disciplinary scene to those outside of it.\n\nWhat can be represented to those outside of a disciplinary scene are the results of that scene: what emerged in a continuous, spontaneous manner (the disciplinary scene always culiminates in and maximizes deictics—“look at that… now see what happens here… go back to that…) is now represented as completed, in a narrative or conceptual form.\n\nDeictics introduce the marked/unmarked distinction into grammar, because some words, originally meant to accompany a gesture or direct our attention to something on some disciplinary scene, is now redirected so as to draw our attention to something else in the sentence. We attend from relative pronouns like “which” and “that” to a clause we are to place in relation to the previous one. Personal pronouns direct our attention toward someone who has previously been named and commented upon. As we transition or transform our relations from presencing to representational ones, verbal elements that were involved in constituting the scene by establishing symmetrical shared attention are turned to the purpose of reconstructing the scene by placing the names of participants on the scene and the character of events transpiring upon it into grammatical relations with each other.\n\nThe first declarative was an “answer” to an interrogative. This makes perfect sense because any sentence can be read as an answer to a question. Indeed, most sentences can be read as answers to multiple questions, questions implicit in other questions, questions asked by various, perhaps opposed, inquisitors, questions occurring to the speaker him/herself as he/she composes the sentence in response to another question, etc. Questions and types of questions repeat themselves over time, and language economizes—one very important thing grammar does is build types of answers so as to pre-empt a whole series of questions into the structure of the sentence itself.\n\nConjugating verbs packs together the answer to the question what is done with the question who does it. In English, for example, the adjective almost invariably precedes the noun it modifies—on the one hand, we are deprived of a possible marker of style (maybe “hat red” would carry subtle, yet genuinely different connotations than “red hat”); on the other hand, we are saved from what might be an unworkable level of confusion regarding what is modifying what, thereby answering a potential question in advance. Grammatical rules, along with the vast number of linguistic formulas (of greeting, of marking agreement, of providing recognition, etc.) unmark vast swathes of language and can arouse great resentment when violated or mistaken—precisely because such violations open up questions, and through those questions, imperatives and contradictory imperatives thought to have been silenced.\n\nIn all of these cases the same process is at work: words which once had scenic, presencing force, are turned into terms from which we attend to whatever the sentence and larger discourse would have us attend to. The linguist Guy Deutscher, in his excellent The Unfolding of Language, provides a fascinating analysis of the development of the word “going” into an auxiliary verb and ultimately into the phrase pronounced “gonna,” by now an independent grammatical marker (as Deutscher notes, we don’t say “I’m gonna the store”—“going to,” in its original sense of moving toward some destination, still exists, but separately from this other, evolved, form).\n\nConjunctions and prepositions are evolved adjectives, which are in turn evolved from participles and language is dead metaphors all the way down. Ultimately language evokes and constitutes events and the participants thereon by naming and tracking them with specialized means of directing attention: when you represent a scene for someone who was not a participant, the only way of doing so effectively is by using or creating metaphors (say, an imperative become a verb become, via a participle, a condition) from which others can attend to their own disciplinary locales. We can articulate all of language out of ostensives become substantives, imperatives become verbs and decitics with all subsequent complications resulting from the new ability created by the declarative sentence to quell all questions (behind which lurk threatening imperatives) by referring them to a reality subject to its own imperatives which override those with which we presume to approach it.\n\nUsing Jakobson’s distinction between the axis of combination (the relations between words in a sentence, or grammar) and the axis of selection (the choice of one word over others that could go in its place, or semantics), we could say that the conventions of grammar allow us to mark a particular element of the sentence as that which the sentence is most significantly conveying: if I say “I am going home” I can emphasize the “I,” as in you might stay on, but not me; or the home, as in you might have some other destination in mind, but as for me, it’s home. The “I” or the “home,” then, is the marked element. At the same time, selecting “home” unmarks home in relation to, say, one’s address, or as opposed to “out of here,” both of which might be implicitly marked as mocking or excessively provocative.\n\nFinally, the one who hears the sentence, who, in Jakobson’s terms will “decode” it—but I prefer to describe language iconically, as a mapping, which the listener or reader navigates, or fails to navigate—will in turn iterate the act of (un)marking, in what he or she says, does, and doesn’t say or do (in the common tripartite division of the materials of linguistics, grammar, semantics and pragmatics, this final move is the pragmatics).\n\nAt any rate, to conclude this discussion, which I see has not yet gotten to either rights or idioms, our distinction between disciplinary spaces and crowded spaces, scenes of presencing and scenes of representation, can be determined not so much in terms of quantities of marked and unmarked elements as in the extent to which what is unmarked and marked is determined on the scene: more precisely, the more disciplinary, the more presencing, a scene, the more anything might be attended to just as easily as it can be attended from; the more crowdy, the more representational, the thicker the commonplaces and predictable phrases one need merely attend from; the more disciplinary, the more diverse the imperatives flowing from reality and the more intermixed they are with imperatives and interrogatives put, nevertheless, to reality; the more representational or metaphysical, the more unilateral, irresistible and univocal the imperatives flowing from reality. Which is really a way of repeating my first couple of paragraphs, and laying a little groundwork from really getting to the right of the idiom next time."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anti-semitism",
      "title": "Anti-Semitism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Below is the paper I read today at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism’s conference on Modernity.” It was a rather interesting conference, which I will perhaps feel moved to comment on at some point. For, now, though, I’d like to state the central conclusion I arrived at from the proceedings. There are now two terms in play, each seeking to name the source of global violence and possible breakdown: “anti-semitism” and “Islamophobia.” For reasons I will perhaps expand upon, I am convinced that these two concepts cannot co-exist–one will disappear or be significantly marginalized, and one will at least have the chance to organize a new mode of politics. I hope that “anti-semitism” is the survivor, since it names something real and the concept might help us advance the cause of civilization. But I wouldn’t bet on its chances. At any rate, I would suggest that the fate of the opposed terms will serve a a clear index of where things are headed in the years ahead.\n\nAnyway, here’s the paper:\n\nAnti-Semitism and the Victimary Era\n\nAdam Katz\n\nQuinnipiac University\n\nIn this paper I will offer an account of contemporary anti-semitism in terms of Eric Gans’s “originary hypothesis” regarding the origin of language and culture. The originary hypothesis extends and revises Rene Girard’s analysis of mimetic rivalry: according to the originary hypothesis, the first sign emerged in a single event, a mimetic crisis in which the (proto) human group arrested their common and self-destructive convergence upon a common object by putting forward what Gans calls an “aborted gesture of appropriation.” Representation, then, is the deferral of violence, as is, therefore, all of culture. History is the ongoing process of preserving and, where necessary and possible, replacing such means of deferral (languages, rituals, beliefs, moralities, art, and so on) which are intrinsically fragile and under constant threat from mimetic desire, rivalry and violence.\n\nIn a series of books, beginning with The Origin of Language in 1980, through The End of History, Science and Faith, and Signs of Paradox, to mention a few, and his on-line column, Chronicles of Love and Resentment on his Anthropoetics website, Gans’s “new way of thinking” has developed an account of history according to which the market system, and now the world market system, best realizes the reciprocity achieved on the originary scene. History is the liberation of humanity from attachment and “enslavement” to the singular object on the originary scene towards the universal exchange of objects within the market system. It is in the context of the market system that Gans first situates anti-semitism:\n\nThe Jew is not in some undefined sense a scapegoat for the larger society’s frustrations. He serves as a model of the inexistent and unfigurable center of the market system… the Jew, having rejected the incarnation, incarnates the truly unincarnable—mediation… In the postritual world of market exchange, the Jew is a paradoxical construction who regulates the self-regulating market, who fixes the prices determined by the interaction of supply and demand; we must eliminate him to gain control over this “inhuman” mechanism. (Chronicle 74, 1997)\n\nGans’s allusion to the Jews’ rejection of the incarnation already suggests that the suitability of the Jews for such a “model” of the unfigurable center of the market has roots that precede modernity. Anti-semitism, for Gans, is ultimately predicated upon the paradox of the Jewish discovery of monotheism: the Judaic revelation presented knowledge of a single God beyond the means of control of totemic religions and a single humanity whose knowledge of God is most profoundly revealed in the reciprocal relations between humans; at the same time, this very revelation is granted to a single people, “chosen” to work out before the world the implications of this understanding of the divine. The spread of monotheism, already inscribed in its universalistic origin, could hardly take place other than through resentment towards those who both gave this God to humanity and “selfishly” claimed an exclusive relation to Him.\n\nWhat Gans calls Jewish “narrative monotheism” lays the groundwork for the eventual emergence of the modern market not only by de-fetishizing local totems but by separating faith in God and the obligation to follow the law from the national power and success of the Jewish people. If the defeats and even destruction of the nation are given meaning by demands and promises that transcend those temporal events, then moral meaning can be found in the contingencies of history, rather than the maintenance of a closed ritual space. But this contribution of Judaism to modernity collides with the more specifically Christian contribution or, rather, the revision of Christianity constitutive of modernity.\n\nAccording to Gans, “[w]here Jews had understood that the real center was inhabited by the Being of the sign, the Christians realized that this Being was generated, and could be generated anew, by an act interpretable as a victimization.” In other words, while Jewish victimization was already a sign of Jewish chosenness, this was a burden borne by Jews alone; for Christianity, the persecution of Jesus is imitable and identification with it the source of salvation. But this also meant that Christianity provides the model for anti-semitism: “[t]he anti-semite compels the Jew to enter the infernal circle of rivalry and persecution in order to reenact his own Christian conversion: he is the new Paul, and the Jew is the Saul he used to be.” (Chronicle #207)\n\nThe consequence of this privileging of victimization and identification with it as a moral model is clarified by Gans’s account of the role of Romanticism in the development of the modern market. Gans speaks of the “constitutive hypocrisy of Romanticism,” wherein the Romantic individual performs his rejection of the market system and proclaims his persecution by all those situated within that system only in order, ultimately, to create a compelling self capable of circulating effectively within the market. In abiding tension with this individualistic gesture is the formation of nationalism along analogous lines, through the martyrdom of the nation and its heroes at the hands of its oppressors; oppressors that are, of course, simultaneously mimetic models. So, Gans argues,\n\nanti-Semitism intensifies in the bourgeois era because it is at this point in history that persecution, which grants significance, comes to be preferable to indifference… At this point the Jews indifference to Jesus is no longer a veil covering his guilt for the Crucifixion; it is itself the ultimate persecution. To opt out of the theater of national life is ipso facto to operate in the hidden realm of conspiracy. The Jew is the ultimate dandy whose detachment from society—in principle, regardless of fact—is the sign of his omnipotence. The anthropological meaning of anti-Semitism may be expressed in terms of the market, but only insofar as the lesson of the modern market is itself understood as a transhistorical revelation concerning human exchange. The Jew is designated the “subject” of the market because, faithful to the empty center revealed by the burning bush, he remains in principle indifferent to the object—whether of persecution or adoration—that he finds there. (Chronicle #207)\n\nThe fury of the Nazi’s assault against the Jews gathered together all these threads of the anti-market revolt within a desperate attempt to displace the primacy of the Jews and “falsify” their narrative: “[e]nraged at the Jews’ monotheistic equanimity in defeat and disaster, the Nazis hoped to inflict on them a catastrophe so great that it could not be understood as a message of God to His people.”\n\nThe ultimately omnicidal potential for human violence revealed by the Holocaust introduces something new into this equation. The Holocaust marks the beginning of the victimary era, in which we are now living. The virulent hatred of the Nazis towards the Jews drew the world into a cataclysmic struggle, the like of which we will not survive again in the nuclear age. The eschewing of such hatred must be the center of the new system of deferral constructed after the war: whatever “looks like” the Nazi-Jew relation must be uncompromisingly proscribed. This, of course, creates an incentive to make one’s own grievance fit that model: post-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and so on struggles are all cast in terms of the perpetrator/victim/bystander configuration extracted from the Holocaust.\n\nThe Jews are once again placed in a paradoxical position. First of all, the response on the part of the Jews to the consequences of their utter defenselessness in the Holocaust is to create and, with growing unanimity, support a Jewish nation-state. But the nation-state, with its ethnic exclusivity, preparedness for belligerency and narrow self-interest, is one of those things that “looks” very much “like” Nazism. Second, the victimary principle can only be universalized if the Jewish monopoly on Holocaust guilt is broken—the best way to do so is to present the Jews as oppressors, at least just like the rest of us, at worst uniquely so, insofar they have exploited the world’s guilt so as to perpetuate the very conditions that enabled their own victimization, only this time at the expense of others.\n\nFinally, then, the emergence of a new victim, the Palestinians, the victim of the Jews, completes the victimary metaphysics first set in motion by the essentially theological response to the Holocaust. The victimary system, then, depends upon this new, expanded anti-semitism, in which the Jews are scapegoated for the crimes of the West as well as for the intensifying resentments toward the West, coming now, in particular, from the most bitter if not the oldest of those resentments: that of Islam.\n\nIt was the Israeli victory in the 1967 war that made it possible to maneuver the Jews, ideologically, out of the victimized and into the victimizer position. But this maneuvering might have gone no further than the kind standard anti-colonial critique applied to the US in Vietnam or the European powers without the increasing abandonment of nationality on the part of Western Europeans and the rise of radical Islam. In this context, as Gans says, we are, first of all,\n\nstruck by the similarity between medieval and modern Christian antisemitism. In both cases, the Jew is accused of remaining behind in the “old” Israel rather than entering the New Israel of Christianity. It is by this suspicious archaism that he betrays his immoral preference for honoring the historical memory of his monotheistic discovery over its inherent promise of universality. Whether well-poisoner or Protocol-worshiper, the Jew is accused of refusing to “love his [non-Jewish] neighbor” as himself. (Chronicle #301)\n\nEarlier, I suggested that we could attribute to the modern market a “Jewish” and a “Christian” component: the former being the location of meaning in one’s “patient” action within history and the latter in the processes of individual singularization of the player on the market. It would, in that case, be the “Jewish” component that insists upon the regularization of exchange by the rule of law within what would inevitably a national framework—which is to say the same paradox of universality and exclusivity long associated with the Jewish place in the world. Only the U.S. has fully embraced this paradox and the burdens it implies, which accounts for not only the alliance between the US and Israel, but that of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.\n\nIn that case, the contemporary European attempt to transcend nationality is not so much a rejection of the modern market in the manner of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism as it is a rejection of one of the critical elements of the market, the nation-state under the rule of law, and an evasion of the paradoxes and resentments involved in the articulation of nationality and the world market.\n\nWith the most politically influential currents of contemporary Islam, meanwhile, we do most emphatically see a rejection of the market. Gans sees Islam, in its origins and today, as the monotheism of an “excluded majority,” forged out of resentment against the first monotheism and the prevailing, dominant one: “the Hebrews discovered monotheism as the source of communal harmony independent of political power; the Muslims discovered it as a means for mobilizing the margins of the decaying imperial provinces to overpower them” (Chronicle 301, “Anti-Semitism from a Judeocentric Perspective I”). Hence the Islamic notion of the “uncreated Koran,” a direct rebuke to the potential for interpretation and supersessionism (“distortion”) built into the Jewish and Christian scriptures.\n\nToday, though, this resentment places Muslims at the margins of the global market, which they cannot avoid, and, indeed, through the oil producing states participate in substantially, but in such a way as to minimize the transformations in the division of labor that would reflect genuine cultural and ethical integration. The identification of Jews with the Subject controlling the uncontrollable marketplace inherited from modern Western anti-Semitism is in a sense radicalized in the Muslim world, which can create a political identity against the market itself from the outside. In the course of an analysis of a 2004 speech by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Gans contrasts modern European anti-Semitism, which sees itself as occupying the same world as the Jews, with\n\nMahathir’s world [where], on the contrary, the Jews occupy a different world from us, and their hidden domination of that world is that the root of that world’s open domination of Islam. By setting up the Jews as the all-powerful enemy, he is encouraging Muslims to forget their military and economic inferiority to the West and focus on the infinitesimal number of their “real” masters. The only thing our billions need in order to vanquish these few million Jews is a collective will to power. (Chronicle #302)\n\nGans focuses more on the global Muslim “umma” in these reflections I am working with, than Muslims living within the Western countries, but following the line of his argument one could suggest that the convergence of this mutated form of Islamic anti-semitism and the revival of anti-Semitism in the West along with the consolidation of White Guilt is creating a particularly intractable new strain. As Gans says, the anti-Israel contingent in the West doesn’t distribute copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion but they respect the right of Muslims to do so. We might say that the Western Left plays the role of defense attorney to Islamic terrorism: it doesn’t approve, but it is determined to see that the accused receive due process.\n\n“International law,” as the latest supersessionist project of the West thereby becomes a vehicle for this new brand of anti-semitism: as reflected in the Goldstone Report in particular, postcolonial, postmodern international law can readily be interpreted in such a way as to render any conceivable form of Israeli self-defense illegitimate; how else can we translate this project than in terms of a simple imperative: die!\n\nThe conclusion, I think, is that we cannot effectively address this emergent anti-semitism without addressing the pathologies surrounding the global market. On the one hand, the form taken on the marketplace by what Gans calls Jewish “firstness” is that of the centrality of the entrepreneur, who organizes capital, introduces a new division of labor and creates new desires. Despite claims of consumer supremacy, one source of the mysteriousness of the market’s workings is precisely that new products enter the market before anyone has been asking for, or has even thought of them—tales of consumer manipulation take on their plausibility from this fact.\n\nSimilarly, the solicitation of investment capital, from the outside, inevitably looks conspiratorial, especially when heavily regulated markets require political maneuvering before new projects can get off the ground. We can see exploitative and deceptive entrepreneurial practices as exceptions to the rule in a fundamentally beneficial market process; or we can see the honest worker and consumer as, a priori, the victims of malevolent and unaccountable market players: which perspective we adopt will determine the way we think about regulating economic institutions, and only a fundamentally benevolent view will make it possible to accept the basic asymmetry between producers and consumers, capital and labor, and resist the search for scapegoats for our disappointments in the market.\n\nSecond, though, as I suggested earlier, Jewish firstness is represented by a willingness to endure historical contingency, adhere to the moral law (even if no one else does), and ask for no recognition or “proof” of election. I should make it clear that even if this possible relation between law, morality and history was invented by the Jews, it can, of course, be adopted by anyone (as, for example, in “American Exceptionalism”). At any rate, this form of firstness takes the form of an embrace of normalcy—not at the expense of eccentricity, innovativeness or otherness in general, but certainly as a rejection of the a priori victimary stance which artificially inflates the value of alterity.\n\nThe location of cultural exemplars among the upholders of everyday middle class values and common sense patriotism, and the social prioritization of such values might prove even more difficult than rehabilitating the figure of the entrepreneur. Without such a cultural turn in which we come to see entrepreneurialism and normalcy as the modes of deferral they are rather than as exploitation and indifference to the other, though, anti-semitism will continue to attract and direct the resentments generated by the world market."
    },
    {
      "slug": "islamovictimism",
      "title": "Islamovictimism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve opened this post to discussion of Chronicles 399 & 400.\n\nhttp://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw399.htm"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-right-of-the-idiom-yet-again",
      "title": "The Right of the Idiom, Yet Again",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A few months ago I saw a student wearing a t-shirt with the words “Us vs. Them” on solid background (I don’t remember the color of the shirt or the lettering). It seems to me an example of minimalist brilliance. It first of all must be read ironically, as criticizing all the ultimately “arbitrary” divisions in the world, all which would reduce to this single, “irrational” or “primordial” gesture of demonizing some other. But such a critique proves too much—if that is, indeed, what we are doing all the time, isn’t the implication that we can’t do otherwise? Even more, what else is the wearer of the t-shirt herself (it was a young woman) doing other than constructing an “us” (those aware of the arbitrariness of conflicts) and “them” (those who actually believe in the causes of the conflicts)?\n\nI think we can work with the assumption that the irony is meant to bounce back upon the wearer of the shirt in this way, but that doesn’t end things: there is still some marginal difference between the one who stays completely and uncritically invested in his community’s battles and the one capable of stepping back, however momentarily and provisionally, and attaining a more anthropological insight into the sources of those battles. In that case, the second “us vs. them,” that of the anthropologists vs. the merely mimetic human, which is in fact a division within each of us rather than between some of us and others, interferes, however weakly, with the rush toward the center—it is, that is, a kind of originary gesture, all the more meaningful for acknowledging its own implication in the anthropological truth it reveals.\n\nAn idiom is this articulation of group membership, the sharing of a sacred center, and its anthropological “surplus,” or awareness that the signs designating that center might be otherwise and in fact are otherwise, having their equivalents in every other group. The preservation of an idiom, moreover, depends upon sharpening the differences between equivalents rather than ironing them out—the attempt to create more general signs that would smooth out idiomatic differences is really just the process of creating new groups, albeit ones that claim to speak (and may do so more or less meaningfully) in the name of, say, “humanity.”\n\nOne sign of an autonomous idiom is the proliferation of individual styles, as the idiom becomes rich enough to gather influences from a range of other idioms as a way of enhancing its own distinctiveness—a very good example is the copious wealth of Renaissance English, with its avaricious devouring of Latin, Italian and French influence, its engagement with the emergent sciences, and the problems of translating the Bible, establishing national unity and devising a specifically Anglican form of Christianity.\n\nThere are three ways in which human beings share things: we can divide them literally and materially; we can exchange them through a gift economy; we can exchange them on the market through the universal medium of money. Historically, we have moved, unevenly, from the first to the last, but just as Eric Gans acknowledged recently that the gift economy still pervades our market one, we should further acknowledge that we are never done, once and for all, with any of these economic systems. A family sitting down for dinner will cut up a single piece of meat and distribute sections to each member, according to some convention or the urgency of individual requests (no problem if there is enough, but possible problems if there isn’t); a group of college kids will pass around the bong, each taking one “hit” (if people still do this); a baseball team gives each batter a certain number of hits during batting practice (and this may be done on the basis of equal number of chances or need), and so on.\n\nAs Gans noted, if you invite me to dinner this Friday night, I’m expected to invite you, not Saturday night (which would make it look too much like a payback, or like I’m trying to free myself of an onerous obligation) but, perhaps, next Friday night—but gift exchanges go well beyond this into emotional, cultural and intellectual areas of existence: where else but in a gift economy does my writing of this blog entry belong, as the only exchange I can hope for is a comment, a reference on some other blog, or a more general diffusion of my ideas? Within any large company, for that matter, employee survival and advancement depends largely upon the effective calculation of whom and how much one should gift—helping someone else develop an idea, taking someone else’s place when they’re sick, doing a bit of overtime for the boss, etc.\n\nIf material division, gift economy and market all co-exist, it stands to reason that some kind of healthy co-existence is possible and necessary, along with more unhealthy varieties, in which one economy interferes with the workings of another. Indeed, what is socialist economics other than an imposition of the economy of material division upon the market and gift economies, treating the total social product as if it were one big “piece” and distributing it according to some notion of need or desert? Less crudely, Keynsian economics does this by expanding the money supply, which Mises saw as benefiting those who received the money first, and principle which can be applied to all forms of government regulation, which favor, or direct money towards, those currently best equipped to comply with them and hence gain advantage over their competitors.\n\nGifting introduces firstness into economics, as primitive egalitarian division depends upon some kind of ritual principle (even in the modern examples I gave above, where the solidarity of the group is foremost)—someone has to give the gift first and impose an obligation on others, an obligation which can be accepted and converted into a new mode of firstness with greater or lesser grace. The modes of firstness developed within the gift economy are too intense and unstable, and ultimately give way to “Big Man” modes of social organization and tributary mode of social distribution, with the genuine market emerging on the margins of despotic empires and corroding their authority.\n\nThe “Big Man” is, for that matter, still and always will be, with us, and the return to the more primary, “authentic” and “rational” strict division or allocation by need, along with the central bureaucratic authority needed to make that happen, are, in the market context, resentful parodies of the more genuine firstness finally created in the form of the entrepreneur, who creates new desires and thereby transforms the social division of labor, but does so by submitting himself to consumer “sovereignty.” I think we can assume that this resentful counter-firstness, or secondness, will be a permanent feature of free societies.\n\nThe violation of the norms of primitive division produces defilement within the community, and the only response is expulsion and/or some form of ritual purgation—the more modern and less destructive form of this is embarrassment, and which I have situated within what I call originary mistakenness. Within the gift economy and the hierarchies that begin to emerge within it, we start to see honor and shame as governing principles—honor and shame are the only ways of enforcing group norms and the authority of the Big Man without legal sanctions and an impersonal governing authority. As we know, the more interiorizing and individualizing concepts of sin and guilt come later, but we are never rid of defilement, honor and shame either.\n\nIt is fascinating to note how regularly polemicists against the horrors following from Islamic notions of honor and shame (in particular in the form of violence against women) appeal to the honor of their readers as citizens of a democratic society and attempt to shame them out of their passivity—as with the various economies, the problem is always one of articulation and conversion, rather than the elimination of previous cultural forms. An enormous amount of destruction has resulted from attempts to utterly eliminate more primitive norms, and by now we should be able to see that a purely “enlightened” or “modern” notion of reason or rights has nothing to replace them with in the vast majority of everyday social settings. Indeed, how much of contemporary politics is driven by the sense of defilement, shame and honor on the part of the “enlightened” as they seek to impose their own idiom on the rest of us?\n\nParallel to the distinctions I have just explored, historians of literacy like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong and David Olson (Tom Bertonneau, well known to those familiar with GA, has written some excellent essays developing these arguments) have described the invention and spread of writing as a watershed in human consciousness and therefore society. To sum up the point succinctly, what writing makes possible is, first, an understanding of first of language but ultimately reality as something which can be broken down into ever smaller parts (words, syllables, phonemes; molecules, atoms, quarks…); second, a coherent, linear and therefore causal representation of events (one of which follows another just like one word, one sentence, one page is seen to follow the other); third, the distinction between (deceptive) appearance and essence which founds epistemology (and between signifier and signified which founds linguistics, as particular signs can be seen as windows to particular sounds and meanings).\n\nIn this case, even more than in the others, it is clear that any healthy social and intellectual order will find ways of articulating these elements, rather than trying to privilege one over the other—the ways of thinking made possible by writing are, of course, to be preserved, disseminated and enhanced, but who would want to argue that we are not, nevertheless, thoroughly immersed in orality through much of our existence—an orality that has, of course, been shaped by our history of literacy, but which shapes the latter in turn and, in fact, makes it possible in the first place: in the end, even when we read silently to ourselves we are experiencing the words as sounds.\n\nThis account of language, though, is far from complete without taking into account gesture as well. We assume that the first sign was a gesture, which means that it was iconic or self-evident—not only are we just as immersed in gesturality as we are in orality (orality is itself unthinkable without gestures), but gesturality, in the broader sense of the alignment of human bodies with each other, is itself embedded in the physical structures in which we house ourselves and provide access to one another. Gesturality is also embedded in language in some very fundamental ways—most obviously in deictics, but more subtly in our prepositions: we can’t use language which means we can’t think without being inside or outside, above or below, before or behind, near or far, etc., etc.\n\nThese terms all derive from fundamental spatial orientations, and however abstract prepositions become, I would defy any to suggest where else they could come from; and, those of us familiar with GA in particular should be aware of the importance of words like “above,” inside,” central,” and so on in installing a basically scenic human reality within language. Even beyond that, it’s very probable that most if not all words can be traced back to basic experiential distinctions between well and ill, large and small, strong and weak, straight and bent, and so on. The gestural or iconic elements of language pervade writing as well as speech (as the innovative writer Ronald Sukenick once remarked, if you change the traditional Gutenbergian make up of the written page people go berserk—what is, then, the iconicity of that homogenous line of print going predictably from top to bottom of page after page?), and the explosion of new media over the past century should be accounted for as a resurgence of gesturality as well as orality within a world presumably conquered by the printed word.\n\nGoing even further into a specifically originary idiom, the ostensive, imperative and interrogative elements of language are built into declarative culture—I would say no declarative could make sense that didn’t accommodate its conversion into imperatives and ostensives via a series of gradations—in a sense, what else could any statement mean other than some version of “attend to this and that will be brought to your attention”? Obviously such formulations can become extremely complex—after that is brought to your attention you will in turn need to attend to the other thing, and so on, and a very simple sentence may map out such a string of attending to each other’s attending to. An originary “parsing” of a sentence would be breaking it down into the various ostensives and imperatives it might contain, such as the indications, promises, oaths, prayers, and hypotheses (questions) embedded within it.\n\nMy plan, finally, is to treat the notion of “rights,” or the word “right” as a thread going through all these fields. “Right” is a modern notion (more precisely, perhaps, its spread maps the transition of medieval to modern life), but it registers and translates the insistence upon respect and access that constitutes any idiom; “right” began its career as a narrow political concept, but now pervades the language—it is quite common to assert, for example, that “you have no right to speak to me like that,” in which “right” has collapsed back into a more colloquial notion of “honor”; rights are generally asserted in declarative form (we hold these rights to be self-evident) but have a strong imperative and ostensive component—they forbid all kinds of encroachments, and reveal an inviolable integrity; and, to return to the starting point of my discussion of the “right of the idiom,” the integration of rights within a legal and political system presupposes the existence of writing, at least for the keeping of records and forging of agreements, while sustaining a respect for rights as something other than markers of bureaucratic power requires the convertibility of rights (or “rights”) within the gift economy (where claims will be deeply rooted in orality and gesturality) into rights within a market economy.\n\nThis last point is especially important politically: only in this way can we imagine the transformation of those countries with stunted (or worse) market systems succeeding within the global market and, I would say, only in that way will be able to think through the extraordinarily complicated issues of property rights in an information economy that furthermore transforms much that has been natural (like our DNA) into information that could be traded and used.\n\nIdioms distribute rights internally—to speak within an idiom is to have a place to speak within it, and therefore a right to that place; and speakers of idioms insist upon their rights as speakers of that idiom within other idioms. This formulation brings us up against the dilemma Jean-Francois Lyotard called the “differend,” wherein the two parties to a dispute occupy incommensurable idioms and the decision therefore will be made in an idiom alien to at least one of them. One example he gave, not very surprisingly, was that of indigenous land rights claims within a modern settler colonial society, like those of North America or Australia.\n\nThe native can’t produce a land deed or any proof of occupation or ownership—the myths which account for their belonging to the land (the very notion of “belonging” to the land) are “inadmissible” within a modern court of law. There seems to me no reason why a modern legal system can’t address such issues in a way similar to Hernando de Soto’s proposal for legalizing the informal property held by migrants to the margins of so many of the world’s great cities—give credibility to the oral traditions and actual circuits of exchange visible within the community in question. A right, in the end, is others granting you an unmarked position within their idiom, and the way you do that is acknowledging that you might be marked or “markable” in ways analogous to the one asserting the right, making that common markedness a center of joint attention and thereby unmarking it.\n\nMore precisely, proposing a common markedness is to propose a mistakenness that contaminates you both and through you the entire community, even world. Mistakenness implies the violation of some rule, which can be a tacit one. Let’s say that a “rule” is a boundary between a field of ostensives and a field of imperatives—you do these things and you see those things; the doing with an eye to that particular revelation and the observance contingent upon the faithful fulfillment of the prescribed act. (I suppose we might think of this like opening a box in which sunlight enters in a particular angle at a particular time of day and produces a very specific shadow or reflection.)\n\nFailing to follow the rule leads means you obey an imperative but see something unrecognizable; or you see something that seems unmoored from any imperative that might have placed you before it. Such mistakenness marks you as a dangerous site of infinite desire—after all, the channeling of imperatives and ostensives into one another is aimed at checking desires which can’t be contained within the ritual space. Unmarking the other involves finding a way to ostensively verify the imperative they have presented themselves as following, or supplying the imperative which might account for the ostensive they have presented.\n\nMarking yourself, meanwhile, or implicating yourself in mistakenness, involves providing some ostensive sign that one of the imperatives you habitually obey has proven inadequate to this instance. It is always possible to do this, because we are always mistaken and we can always see this if we widen our sense of the scene a bit. And this approach will work with enemies as well as friends, or potential friends—to see the other as mistaken is not to eliminate the idioms of guilt or shame; to see oneself as mistaken is not to surrender one’s power of judgment—rather, mistakenness gives the other the right to speak openly of the imperatives they follow and gives you the right to present your imperatives before them.\n\nAddressing a jihadist as the “infidel” of their discourse, or a rebellious “dhimmi,” while inviting them to convert to what for them is the religious other, for example, might contain more possibilities than the legal and political terms we are currently working with. In other words, it is still us vs. them, but with that minimal anthropological surplus."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-sapir-katz-hypothesis",
      "title": "A Sapir-Katz Hypothesis",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We all know about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (and if you don’t, you can google it)—it’s really Whorf, who was a student of Sapir’s and greatly expanded a couple of much more tentative suggestions from Sapir regarding the relations between language, thought and culture, who is responsible for the notion that grammatical structures influence thought and culture to the extent that incommensurability arises between different languages, and through them those ways of thinking and culture. Contemporary linguists seem to treat Whorf’s hypothesis as a kind of piñata, as if to see who can smash it most decisively, and it’s easy to see how vulnerable the once thrilling idea was: supposedly, the Hopi had no grammatical means of distinguishing tenses, and therefore, rather than sharply distinguishing, as we linearly minded Westerners do, between past, present and future, they see reality as an ongoing “process”—a perspective which, Whorf went on to claim, made their way of thinking marvelously compatible with the space-time of relativity theory.\n\nLinguists, I think, like the fun you can have with this, drawing upon their knowledge of the remarkable diversity of grammatical structures and peculiarities of the world’s languages to suggest various bizarre cultural and intellectual forms by way of refuting Whorf. I can play too: English verbs have no future tense—we “normally” use “will” as an auxiliary with the verb we wish to place in the future but we also often place a time designator in a regular present tense sentence to indicate futurity (I arrive tomorrow; I’m going to be there soon; we meet at 7, etc.)—so English speakers must be incapable of thinking coherently about the future: we are, depending upon your cultural tastes, doomed to be improvident wastrels, or happy-go-lucky live for the present types.\n\nBut, of course, you can reverse all this, and say that precisely because we have no future tense, complacency about the future is forbidden us—we are more mindful of the various ways the future impends upon the present because we must devise all kinds of novel ways of referring to it. Or, how about the fact that in English the present tense doesn’t really refer to the present, that is, to something that is happening right now—at this moment, I do not “write” this sentence, I “am writing” it—that is, we use the present continuous. So, are English speakers more conscious of the incomplete nature of the present, or of the distinction between things we do habitually and what we are doing at the moment? Where would go to even begin to explore such “hypotheses”? While a science fiction writer might be able to do wonders with this kind of thing, it doesn’t take us, as cultural theorists, very far.\n\nBut language must be bound up with thought and culture, and we must be able to describe thought and cultural with linguistic and semiotic vocabularies—what else are thought and culture comprised of if not words, sentences and signs? You won’t get anywhere exploring these relationships if you are focused on what obsessed liberal intellectuals from the turn against imperialism and the (re)discovery of native peoples early in the 20th century (itself a victimary development of Romantic theories of nationality and ethnicity) until today: asymmetrical differences between cultures. But how about differences within languages?\n\nAny idiom creates a new way of thinking, a way of thinking possible only within that idiom—until the idiom is normalized and made readily convertible into other elements within the language. In other words, the point is not the inherent properties of language; rather, it is, first, the possibilities for invention inherent in language, and the certainty that new desires, resentments and loves will demand new idioms of expression; and second, the incessant change undergone by language, which normalizes idioms and idiomizes norms, thereby creating new resources for expression. Slang words like “cool” (amazingly still going strong) and “groovy” (hermetically sealed within the idioms of the 60s and very early 70s, and incapable of revival due to the demise of the technology it was predicated upon) are obvious examples: for at least a cultural moment, in a particular cultural space, these words enabled people to say, and therefore think, something that couldn’t be said or thought any other way.\n\nBut then they become subject to mockery (“groovy” is more likely to make people think of The Brady Bunch than of Woodstock) and extension (“cool” seems to me to have become, in many instances, more or less synonymous with “OK”), and easily translated into other terms. At this point, there’s nothing you could say or think with “cool” that couldn’t be said or thought more inventively or nimbly in many other ways; and you couldn’t speak or think with “groovy” at all.\n\nOnce we say that idioms provide a new way for thinking, we can say the reverse: to create a new way of thinking is to construct an idiom. Ethically and intellectually, this would mean that my obligation in some new situation is to construct an idiom adequate to it: a means of mediating the articulation of desire and resentment especially threatening in that situation. Idioms construct habits: the best idioms what Peirce called the “deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit.” Idioms and habits refine and direct resentments: let’s say that you decide, in a particularly tense social setting that you can’t avoid, that you will counter every expression of hostility you encounter by restating it in literal, atonal indicative sentences: in other words, you will “translate” rude imperatives, hostile rhetorical questions, interjections, sarcasm, etc., into something like: I understand that you would like to take a break now.\n\nThat would be an idiom—it would get noted, ridiculed, admired, imitated (perhaps involuntarily), revised, elaborated, and so on—others would have to respond to it in some way, leading to further developments within the idiom. They may want to speak with you about your idiom—can your idiom handle that conversation? Will you draw them in or will they draw you out? It may not work—it may send resentments spiraling out of control by appearing robotic, or deeply sarcastic itself—but then some other idiom will, or nothing will (some situations are beyond saving). The point is that you would be thinking in terms of inventing and experimenting with idioms, with rules that could be at least tacitly recognized.\n\nThe more deliberately you construct idioms, the more attentive you become to potential materials for such construction: accidents, mistakes, surprises, on the one hand; places where communication and amity seem to be breaking down on the other. After a while an inventory of possible idioms evolves, and the ability to improvise, to redefine an idiom in the middle of things, emerges.\n\nIn fact, I have been experimenting with such an “indicative” idiom for a while—I first discovered its ancestor many years ago, in a situation where I had to provide academically acceptable answers in a highly politicized and hostile (and, for me, rather high stakes) setting—what I discovered is, no matter how snide and sarcastic your questioners are, in the end they need to ask a question; you can then carve out that question out of the fog of vicious innuendo, restate it, and answer it. A primitive version of the idiom has helped me often since, but lately I have been working on systematizing it: writing without interrogatives or imperatives, or even disguised imperatives like those lurking within words like “should,” “must,” and so on.\n\nThis forces you to, then, rewrite a sentence like “we should do that” in a way that commits you to representing an actual event: not doing that will likely involve us in the following difficulties. We can try out other rules, perhaps in controlled ways: staying within the present tense leads us to fold all consequences into their present possibility; eliminating conjunctions takes away additive and oppositional habits of thought; or, eliminating conjunctions turns additive thinking into a search for degrees and thresholds; such elimination simultaneously tends to make opposites mere differences. And every few paragraphs, or according to some other division, suspend all the rules (why not?), because you must let go on occasion and you create a veritable carnival of forbidden terms.\n\nI have referred in previous posts, a couple of times already, to one of Marshall Mc Luhan’s axioms that I find compelling: the content of any medium is another medium. Meanwhile, a reading of G.A. Well’s The Origin of Language: Aspects of the Discussion from Condillac to Wundt (a book I happened to come across in a used bookstore) crystallized for me the assumption that a meaningful world of ostensive gestures must have preceded speech (I am still thinking about whether one can imagine imperatives and even declaratives emerging within a purely gestural world, but for now I am assuming a realm of ostensivity). Language is, then, primarily iconic, as gestures would mostly be, as was the first gesture, aborted actions; and, then, exaggerated actions, simulated actions responding to other simulated actions, and so on.\n\nFrom the beginning, though, we can assume a drift toward the arbitrary, as there are always many ways of conveying an incomplete action, and gestures would take shape in accord with the habits of a community, and groups within communities—outsiders would not be able to treat them as self-evident and would need to be taught how to use the signs. There is even an irreducible element of arbitrariness on the originary scene itself, as the sign that prevails will be the one that works, not necessarily the one that is closest to a Platonic ideal of a gesture of aborted appropriation.\n\nIf human beings are deliberately and increasingly skillfully imitating each other in meaningful ways—ways that create new shared objects and means of appropriating and distributing them—then it seems to me reasonable to assume they will be imitating other things in the world as well. Once we admit this assumption, then all those ridiculous theories of the origin or language that have long ago been dismissed, from onomatopoeia, to imitating the cries of animals or the blowing of the wind, to stylized cries of pain and pleasure, become a lot more plausible—as the origin of speech within an already existing gestural world.\n\nThe sounds that ultimately get combined into words would also, then, have iconic roots, which would support arguments for “phonosemantics,” or “sound symbolism”—the argument made most audaciously by Margaret Magnus (http://www.trismegistos.com/Magical Letter Page/) that the meaning of words is tied to their sounds. Sounds would initially be made to accentuate a gesture, and then to supplement it when the gesture could not be seen—aiming, then, at the same effect as the gesture. In that case, the content of speech is gesture, just as the content of writing is speech. Speech would take over vast domains of human communication first covered by gesture, while at the same time incorporating, embedding itself within and expanding the realm of gesture—and, in the end, only being meaningful in terms of gesture.\n\nBy gesture, I mean all the ways human beings coordinate with each other spatially—architecture is gesture, the fact that we face each other when we talk, and generally stand a few feet apart and never, say, three inches apart (unless we are lovers)—all this, and much more, is gesture. Speech is always about the possibility that we could have something in front of us that we could orient ourselves towards together.\n\nBut what is the relation between form and content other than one of inquiry—in the sense that the “content” of the originary scene is the repellent power of the object, and the “formal” gesture is eliciting that power, which is to say seeking it out, distinguishing it from everything else in the world, and “measuring” and “broadcasting” its effects. Roman Jakobson makes the argument upon which I am modeling this one: he contends (like David Olsen) that the invention of writing reified speech and “language,” turning it into an object of inquiry—in the case of alphabetical writing, an inquiry into which were the smallest representable “units” of language.\n\nJakobson then suggests that this linguistic “atomism” was the source of the scientific atomism that predominated in Greek philosophy—if language, why couldn’t anything be subdivided into it most minimal units? For Olsen, the problem of writing is to supplement all the elements of speech that make understanding possible—gesture, of course, but also intonation and other elements of the speech situation. So, whole new vocabularies emerge as a result of writing—a word like “assume,” for example, as in “he assumed they were lying” would be unnecessary in speech, because there would be other ways of showing someone’s attitude in reporting their speech in a spoken manner—most obviously, imitating the way they spoke (in a questioning manner, say).\n\nThe word “assume,” then, like a word such as “suggest,” are the means and results of an inquiry into linguistic interaction that is prompted by the invention of writing. Speech, then, is likewise a mode of inquiry into gesture, as gesture is itself a mode of inquiry into “elemental” desires and resentments.\n\nI have also applied Mc Luhan’s axiom to the elementary speech forms, and would like to update that account. An imperative, then, is a mode of inquiry into ostensivity—not only that, of course, because if you are issuing an imperative you do want the thing done (just as if you are writing you are writing about something and not just inquiring into the operations of speech)—but an imperative attends from the absence of the object to the possibility of its being made present. An imperative is also an inquiry into the effects of tone and gesture (it needs to be loud enough, but not too loud, “authoritative,” it’s better to be standing or leaning forward, but sitting back in a chair might be a way of testing the intangibles of authoritativeness as well…), all elements of ostensivity.\n\nIndeed, the imperative might be seen as inquiry into the iconicity of the person. And like any inquiry, it originated in some uncertainty regarding the object in question. Similarly, the interrogative is an inquiry into the imperative—it marks the unfilled character of some demand or command, and unmarks the possibility that it will be fulfilled; the question attends from the expectation of a demand supplied to the disappointment of that expectation, and then from the prolongation of that demand to some anticipated location in reality whence the reformed demand might yet be satisfied. Inquiry is a act of marking and unmarking—when we are converging on the object, the object is marked for destruction, but once the sign is issued we attend, first, from the sign to the object, unmarking the formal sign and sharing our marking of the object; and then, second, we attend from the object to each other, thereby unmarking the object (which is to say unmarking everyone’s defense of, resentment on behalf of, the object) and marking our own now evident, because naked, desire for the object and resentment toward the others.\n\nSigns are unmarked insofar as they single out portions of a reality than in turn marks as partial those singling out. Just as portions of reality can be marked by signs, signs can internally mark parts of themselves, which really involves marking some prior use of the sign while unmarking the sign itself. Sign use, language, is always inquiry insofar as it is always prompted by some portion of reality, and the signs which have zoned off that portion, having moved from an unmarked into a marked state, and the need to restore relation of (un)markedness.\n\nThe declarative, then, is an inquiry into the resolution of the state of uncertainty (and “patience”) unmarked by the question, marking its continuance and unmarking what would ultimately be the articulation of imperatives and ostensives that would resolve it. The sentence, then, unmarks whatever the question marks, a reality that exceeds the scope of the question: if this one were to move a bit this way, and the other a bit that way, and another were to look over there and promise not to move, etc., the uncertainty would be resolved—all those acts marked as uncertain by the question are unmarked as embedded in reality, as commanded by reality, in retrievable ostensive-imperative articulations; and the sentence can, in turn, mark and return to the domain of the question any of those articulations, which is to say, who observed and did what to make the event represented in the sentence and the event of the sentence itself possible.\n\nInquiry, then, is the process of allowing anything on the scene to be marked or unmarked; representation is a solid state of un/markedness. The sentence articulates an event by mapping another event: where before there were increasingly marked (or potentially increasingly marked) convergences of desire and resentment, questions in danger of relapsing into commands, commands into the attempt to grab something, even if not what was originally desired, there is now an event with participants upon a scene everyone can identify and inhabit, however tacitly or indirectly. They can attend from their own scene of tribulated conversation to the scene presented by the sentence, and from the scene represented by the sentence to their own participation on the scene of speech, a participation now framed in terms of words that might match desires and resentments.\n\nAn idiom, then, creates a space of inquiry, and spaces of inquiry let things be, and suspend us in observance of those things; an idiom allows us to negotiate its own terms, guaranteeing that we will share the same space as we do so. The fleshing out of an idiom will entail its embodiment in gesture, speech and writing, and allow for certain norms regarding the issuing of ostensives and imperatives. The indicative idiom I have presented may be more weighted towards writing, but for that reason might have striking effects in speech situations; it might suggest minimal gesturality, but minimal gesturality might be maximal in its meaningfulness.\n\nImperatives would be left largely implicit in such an idiom—an overt imperative would be heavily marked—but since the imperative space will be fulfilled one way or another, learning such an idiom would mean deducing imperatives from representations drained as much as possible of all resentments other than those directed against over-invested representations of reality. Above all (an indicative idiom would rule out phrases like “above all,” which tell—command—the communicant how much importance they “should” give to one claim over another) idioms inspire the invention of other idioms, in this case perhaps an imperative centered one that introduces equivocation into explicit imperatives.\n\nA sign presents, bears with it, involves a scene; a sign also represents the results of a completed scene to those who weren’t on it. You might think about the difference between the working out of a shared sign on the spot, and the teaching of that sign to others, once a consensus on its shape and use has been decided upon. Each sign contains both dimensions, but in differing proportions. In presenting, in inquiry, the preliminary marking of the ultimately unmarked is enacted; in representing, that preliminary marking is unremarked upon, and the (un)markedness of the system and its elements appears ready made. The generation of idioms aims to tilt the proportion more towards presenting than is ordinarily the case, to mark more elements of language so as to make them available for future unmarkings.\n\nAlong with formalizing our own incessant idiom generation we can construe others in terms of their tacit idioms. Insofar as you can work with someone’s idioms, obeying and extending its rules, you have granted them a right to speak within a particular discursive space. There is no reason to tamper with the basic rights conveyed to us from Enlightenment politics and, in the U.S., the U.S. Constitution—free speech, free assembly, right to due process, to bear arms, and so on but rather than reducing all political discussions to these rights, which means they either get stretched and distorted or become irrelevant; and, rather than leaving talk of rights behind and allowing bureaucratic expansion to proceed by way of “non-ideological problem solving,” we can grant a kind of pragmatic, subsidiary right to idioms.\n\nInstead, for example, of a Supreme Court delivered “right to privacy” based upon a incoherent reading of the 4th Amendment with the penumbras of a couple of others thrown into the mix, why not recognize the idioms in which women speak with and about their relations with their doctors, bodies and intimates, and identify (and argue about identifying) some boundary beyond which laws shouldn’t pass—and then, rather than forbidding all laws that transgress that boundary, bring that argument into the debate over laws? We would then be using “right” in a more informal way, in the way you say to someone, “you have no right to speak to me like that!”\n\n(like what?: in some idiom, no doubt), but the use of the same word can ensure continuity with more “fundamental” uses of the concept. Such idiomatic uses of “rights” recall the origin of the term in the more medieval notion of “privileges,” which associates rights with honor within a gift and Big Man economy—and something like honor is what is usually involved when we say “you have no right to speak to me/treat me like that!” We can give linguistic if no legal heft to our intuitions that the media, for example, have no “right” to investigate the children or cousins of candidates for office, and we can embed impoverished contemporary shibboleths like “privacy” with articulations of right and obligation implicit in terms like “modesty,” “reticence,” “shame,” “respect” and other terms reflecting our tacit knowledge of social boundaries and the individual attitudes and aptitudes required to preserve them.\n\nThere is a kind of extremism, found in some versions of libertarianism in particular, that sees other modes of exchange as competitors to the market mode, and it is that kind of extremism (reinforcing the leftist extremism that wants a reduction to a bureaucratic reinterpretation of “rights”) that wants to drive out all ways of adjudicating conflicts other than through “rights”—but a healthy free market would be based upon a healthy informal gift economy, and allow for transit back and forth between the two—and even encourage us to go back to the primitive egalitarian distribution found in families and other groupings (like sports teams, for example). People with a complex sense of “their own,” and with sophisticated idioms for parsing “ownness” will be all the better prepared to enter the global market economy.\n\nAnyway, why “Sapir-Katz”? Partly for the symmetrical displacement of “Sapir-Whorf,” but that is only possible because Edward Sapir did, in fact, have a more subtle understanding of the relations between language, thought and culture than Whorf and has helped to suggest, for me, the possibility that the construction, through various means, of idiomatic shifts within the language provide new pathways for thought and culture. But that’s enough for now."
    },
    {
      "slug": "self-evidency",
      "title": "Self-Evidency",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "When we speak about the “arbitrariness” of the sign, someone usually hastens to add that what is meant by that is, of course, its conventionality. “Arbitrary” is the right word, though, for what is assumed: that the sounds we make in speaking the languages we speak could just as easily be any other sounds, with the evidence of this being the obvious fact that words for the same things are different in all the languages, not to mention the enormous differences in grammar. The more you think about it, though, the more problematic the claim is—how in the world could we imagine everyone in a community agreeing to confer meaning upon a particular sound that in itself has nothing to do with the meaning it bears?\n\nThe political implications of “arbitrariness,” which we rightly associate with tyranny, are therefore relevant here: if the sign is indeed arbitrary, it could only be because it was imposed upon everyone by some oppressor. In this assumption about the sign, then, we can see the trajectory from Lockean social contract theory (Locke was a firm believer in the arbitrariness of the sign) to the contemporary Left—the arbitrariness of the sign, starting with medieval nominalism, and, indeed social contract theory itself, were weapons against the assumptions about natural social order and natural law constitutive of Western Christendom.\n\nThe arbitrariness of the sign is liberalism in linguistics and, in the end, liberalism (in the classical sense) has shown itself to share enough genetic material with the Leftism that succeeded it so as to leave it almost devoid of antibodies to fight the Leftist infection.\n\nThere is another liberalism, another Enlightenment, and another way of thinking about social agreement, though, which has been severely marginalized by the line leading from Locke through Hume and then Kant and Hegel (even the individualism of John Stuart Mill is ultimately derived from the German romanticism he imbibed through Coleridge). This other liberalism starts from the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid, and can be followed through the American pragmatism of, at least, Charles Sanders Peirce, and is then strongly represented in the 20th century (in very different ways) by Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Polanyi.\n\nThe basic assumption shared by all of these thinkers is that we know far more than we know we know; that is, our knowledge is to a great extent, to use Polyani’s term, tacit—and not merely because we haven’t yet brought it up to consciousness, but constitutively so. As the novelist Ronald Sukenick once wrote, “the more we know the less we know”—not only because knowledge continually opens up new vistas of possible knowledge, but more importantly because the ways we know what we know cannot be made part of the knowledge we make present to ourselves. Any “language game,” disciplinary space, or idiom takes a grant deal for granted in addressing itself to a particular, emergent corner of reality; if it tries to bring that taken for granted bedrock into sight (and we do this all the time) it can only do so in terms of everything else that is still taken for granted, included some new things that enabled us to turn toward this new corner.\n\nDo you know for sure that you are at this moment present on the planet earth, that you are surrounded by building, streets, other people, etc.? “Know” is a very strange word to use here, which is not to say that we can’t really be sure—rather, what would be taken as “proof” that we are on the planet earth, surrounded by all those things? What would be better proof of this reality than the reality itself, as Wittgenstein liked to say? The question of how we know we are here, that we are ourselves, that we have bodies, that our senses integrate us into our surroundings, etc., is a very artificial one, but it’s that kind of question that modernity (and the dominant strand of liberalism) started with—most explicitly in Descartes, but Locke’s empiricism is ultimately no less corrosive of such self-evidency, as Hume revealed and Reid so forcefully demonstrated.\n\nI have been writing much lately of mistakenness as constitutive of our linguistic and therefore social being, but it is equally true that there can be no mistakenness without certainty. I can only be mistaken in my articulation of an English sentence because I am certain that I am speaking English, not Chinese. If I’m completely out of place or out of line, it can only because there is indubitably a place or line to be out of. Mistakes disrupt a scene because there is a scene to be disrupted, and we are certain that it has been disrupted and while we can’t be certain that it will be restored, we can be certain about scenicity, without which there would be no mistakes.\n\nMy argument has been that rather than evidence of the fragility of our worlds, mistakenness can be treated as evidence of its solidity. Assuming the arbitrariness of the sign intensifies the sense of fragility—if our common use of signs has just been imposed through some kind of force, human or natural, and, therefore, must continually be re-imposed, then of course deviation is dangerous. (For leftists, meanwhile, the consequence is that the arbitrariness of the sign encourages one to see reality as “constructed,” and hence infinitely malleable, in particular by those best at managing signs.) If signs, though, have an irreducibly iconic dimension, an iconic dimension that pervades every level of language, including semantics and grammar, then we just need to uncover the iconic meaning of a given mistake so as to bring it back within a reformed linguistic fold.\n\nIsaiah Berlin, in his study of the determinist theories of history that undergirded socialist and communist politics in particular, made the point that you simply can’t remove the terms referring to human intentionality and, therefore, responsibility, from social and political discourse without making it impossible to refer to anything intelligibly at all. “He killed them” can’t be the same kind of statement as, nor can it be assimilated to, “e=mc2” or “historical development is determined by the force of production.” It’s not just that such ways of talking are immoral or unjust; rather, it’s that they are not really “ways of talking” at all, and therefore can’t sustain themselves without inventing all kinds of crazy agents (like “history” and “society”) which perform “actions” which no one has ever seen and or would recognize if they saw them.\n\nAs originary thinkers, we can now say that this is because declarative, propositional meaning is rooted in the ostensive and imperative domains. We notice mistakes, in fact, because we can notice that our attention has been misdirected, which in turn reminds us that our attention is always being directed by everything we experience in reality.\n\nThe iconicity of meaning can be traced back to the gesture. The originary sign had to be gesture—it couldn’t be imagined as a sound, or a line drawn on the ground. Gesture is embedded in what we call “context,” that catch-all phrase we use when we reach the limits of our capacity to describe why something means how and when it does. A joke’s funniness might depend upon one of the listeners being where he is, and not a couple of steps to the left—that’s the kind of “contextual” effect we sum up with the phrase “you had to be there.” Gestures are also self-evident, in the sense that unlike propositional discourse, they cannot be replaced by their definition or explanation because they require the entirety of their “context.”\n\nThe self-evidency of gestures also means that any normal human, initiated into any linguistic system whatsoever, would be able to make sense, on a gestural level, of the actions of any other human, from any other linguistic system—at least insofar as the gestures of the other are directed toward herself. On the most basic level, even though the meaning of gestures of course varies widely across cultures, we could recognize signs of aggression or good will directed towards ourself, even if those signs could also be used to deceive us.\n\nSelf-evidency, though, provides no support for Enlightenment optimism regarding universal communicability and amity. Indeed, self-evidency is also what radically divides us. The members of another culture who deceive me by exploiting my awareness of the meaning of their signs of peace are able to do so because within their own gestural system, inaccessible to me, they can signify that this naïve hick is ripe for the plucking. That is, to act in concert against me they need no dark conspiracy, no secret agreement—they know each other, and they know when one of them is welcoming an other with an excessiveness that communicates irony to them but not to me; they know how to follow each other’s lead in ways that I won’t figure out until it is too late, they know that anyone who might object to their scheme is far away at the moment, and so on.\n\nOf course, once they are through with me, I will be able to understand what they have done, if I am still around to do so. All self-evidency “proves” is that any attempt to impose a common idiom will generate idiomatic sub-systems resistant to control, understanding, or even detection.\n\nWhat we can do is enhance and elaborate upon overlapping idioms and habits so as to create broader spaces of attenuated self-evidency—the fact that we can do so is what makes human equality self-evident, even while the attenuation of iconicity is what introduces what is called (by Michael Tomasello, among others) the drift toward the arbitrariness of the sign. The self-evidence of human equality lies in our ability to complement the inclusive drift toward arbitrariness with new modes of iconicity, within language and in our social relations. It is such a process that has brought us from the egalitarian distribution of the most primitive communities to the more expansive gift economy and ultimately to the market economy where the need for a single measure for value leads us to the relatively arbitrary universal equivalent of the precious metals—and, yet, what could be more iconic than gold, signifying wealth?\n\n(The arbitrariness of fiat currency, meanwhile, is arbitrary in the bad sense—it measures nothing but the will of the central banker.) It is also such a process through which we can try and move conflicts from the category of exterminationist opposition to war with rules and some notion of honor; from war to arbitration—or from criminality to civil law, and from civil law to friendly disagreements settled informally. And we can engage in such civilizing processes without succumbing to the delusion that any of these categories will ever disappear once and for all.\n\nPeople only support icons, not arbitrary signs—an argument in favor of human equality in general is meaningless; what can be meaningful is a particular example of human equality at stake. (Which is why we will never get past the “distractions” and focus on the “real issues”; but, there’s no need to worry because the real issues get addressed, always imperfectly and so as to produce new, and equally real, issues, through the distractions.) And icons can be incommensurable with each other, which is why there will always be conflict. Successful icons are those that provide a new ground for the struggle between icons, and those icons will have the character of rules in relation to the lower level ones; or, more precisely, they will embody the kind of deferral and intellectual flexibility associated with rule following behavior, while still being exemplified by individuals acting alone and together.\n\nHow can we support egalitarian distribution in sites like the family or other institutions devoted to close bonding and comradeship, while ensuring that any individual within that compact group is free to enter the market society; how can the norms of honor and shame needed to produce individuals ready to protect market societies from the enemies they will always produce in abundance, without nurturing fatal resistance to market society within its very bosom—the answer to such questions will always come, if they do come, in the form of some representative of a provisional, partial solution.\n\nBut let’s come back to the obvious: “dog” is “perro” in Spanish and “calev” in Hebrew; ergo, the word can’t have any intrinsic relation to the referent—the sign is arbitrary, case closed. Things must look this way for the linguist, with single systems of language, and the amazing diversity of the world’s languages, laid out in front of them; and to the naïve language user, compelled by such examples to take the linguistic perspective. The fact that when a speaker of English says “dog” it rather self-evidently refers to the animal in question, that “doggy” seems to “fit” the specific animal we feel affectionately towards, seems to be a pretty slim counter-argument.\n\nBut there could never have been a point at which the word “dog” was imposed upon an acquiescent community of language users; the word was always firmly embedded with all the other words in the English language, and the languages English in turn evolved from, and if there was a first time the word’s ancestor was used (there must have been, right?—we are committed to at least that assumption), then it was used in such a way as to best ensure its referential capacity and memorability; or, if the choice was random, if it worked, it was remembered in such a way as to do so. And there never could have been a time when it exited that orbit of self-evidency.\n\nThe systematicity of language—the fact that words don’t stand alone, but take on their “value” from all their interrelationships with other words (so, “dog” takes on its meanings from its distinction from “cat” and “mouse” on the one hand, from “wolf” and “fox” on the other, and from more specific terms like “poodle” and “German Shepherd” on yet another)—makes the point even stronger—at no time was any word or “lexical unit” outside of the linguistic world experienced as a whole, a linguistic world itself always in direct contact with the real one, via the ostensives and imperatives which embed us in that world—and, anyway, the sound symbolism of language can be every bit as complex as the semantic and grammatical systems: we can assume here as well, not a one-to-one correspondence between single sounds and dictionary-style meanings, but overlapping and interconnected connotations, which in turn interact with semantics and grammar in various ways.\n\nTo address the argument for arbitrariness head on, the claim that linguistic signs would imitate, in their formal character (the articulation of sounds comprising them) those things they refer to or those events they aim at generating doesn’t imply that there should be only one language—why wouldn’t there by as many ways as “interpreting” what “sounds like” “dog” as there are ways of interpreting any complex text? It would be better to speak of a drift towards abstraction, rather than toward arbitrariness: the sign is abstract, even the first one, which had to be normed in such a way as to supplement its self-evidence from the very beginning precisely because there was no single way of conveying the intent to cease and desist.\n\nBut even in this case the abstractions we speak of are marked by the drift, by the disciplinary spaces that have constructed them: in other words, abstraction involves accentuation and abbreviation, which is necessitated by the entrance of outsiders for whom the particular version of the sign current is not self-evident while at the same time making the sign even more difficult for the next outsider to grasp. The abstraction of the sign, then represents the disciplinary space (the shared inquiry into how to modify the sign so as to fit it for its new purpose) iconically, creating privileged and typical (unmarked) users, enabling the sign to attain self-evidency throughout the community.\n\nI feel a strong need for a name for the politics of this marginalized liberal tradition, and the word “liberal” is not worth fighting over any more—especially since you’d have to fight the leftists who still use the term, the rightists who won’t give up on using the term to describe the leftists, and the libertarians who are very interesting but ineffectual semi-anarchists. The term I have been using on and off, “marginalism,” isn’t bad, but it sounds vaguely “oppositional,” and suggests an reactivel rather than comprehensive politics. I would like to derive a name from the rereading of “arbitrariness” I am proposing here, which sees the arbitrariness of the sign as a kind of secondary iconicity, a commitment to the iconicity of the sign that realizes that we can only rely upon the icons generated through the scenes we constitute.\n\nIcons lose their primary self-evidency when outsiders who don’t use the sign properly, because it isn’t self-evident to them, having their own self-evident semiotic system, and because ensuring the self-evidency of the sign to the primary community has made it idiosyncratic, or idiomatic. It is precisely this idiosyncrasy or idiomaticity that is, simultaneously and paradoxically, the ground of self-evidence: the shaped, complexly marked nature of the idiomatic sign is what makes it learnable through immersion in the scene. Common sense is, in turn, the meeting ground of these idioms, the discovery of overlappings.\n\nI have thought about “plurality,” not in the sense of a diversity of ideas and lifestyles (pluralism) but in the sense of fundamental incommensurabilities in any community which tempt to violence but can facilitate rather than interfere with living together. I want the sense of “sampling” that Charles Sanders Peirce associates with inquiry (any knowledge is knowledge of the relation between the proportions in a sample and the proportions in a whole)—the notion one can derive from the icon (not necessarily Peirce’s) of a continuous sampling of possibilities in any event (when you try something the first time what’s the proportion of visible supporters and opponents; and then the second, third and fourth times?) can ultimately lead to the conclusion that the generation of samples is itself the event.\n\nPolitics in this case is about thinking and knowledge, but not knowledge which then guides politics—instead, the politics generates knowledge which can only be used within political action, as the provisional articulation of our tacit knowing. Alongside of “sampling,” I considered “a politics of proportion,” which shares with “sampling” the relation between parts and the whole, while including the word “portion,” which reminds us of politics’ relation to dividing and sharing in some “equal” manner, and suggests a notion of politics as balancing and inclusive while still being interested, inevitably, in one’s “portion.”\n\nBut “plurality” seems like a way of describing politics from the outside, from within thinking, and sampling is too “experimental,” by itself, suggesting the progressive sense of a “scientific” politics; “proportion” has the same problems, while another idea, “partiality,” or particularity,” evoke partisanship and identity politics rather than the notion of a whole that not only exceeds but can only be grasped through the parts which we are.\n\nWhat I have for now, and will try out, is the neologistic (according to Merriam-Webster, neologism is either “a new word, expression or usage” or “a meaningless word coined by a psychotic”) “anyownnness”—any, or “one-y,” evokes (for me, via Gertrude Stein) singularity but also plurality, since anyone is as any as anyone else; “own” replaces “one” (which is redundant here anyway), and can suggest one’s property, one’s ownership of oneself prior to and as a basis for property, the opacity of any’s “ownness” to others; I hope it can suggest that one’s ownness, one’s singularity and property, is (“constitutively”) bound up with that of others, hence maintaining the notions of proportionality, sampling—and marginality, in the specifically economic sense, i.e., that infinitesimal point at which one’s (or anyone’s) “weight” on a particular “scale” tips that scale in the opposing direction. A politics of anyownness, or of the anyown, then, is a politics of motivatedness: nothing is arbitrary, nothing is simply imposed, everything is exemplary and abstract, anyone can be the marginal representative of idiomatic common sense.\n\nSo, Next: The right of the anyown"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-rights-of-the-anyown-1-a-politics-of-redemption",
      "title": "The Rights of the Anyown 1: A Politics of Redemption",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "“Redeem” is word with intertwined economic, political and religious meanings: it means to buy back or to pay off; it means to make up for; it means to buy or recover a slave or hostage; and it means to be delivered from one’s state of sin. It’s easy to see that it’s essentially the same word, in slightly different meanings in each case—to retrieve something that has been lost through some kind of payment. It is very helpful, though, to see the relations in this single word between Christ’s suffering for the sake of fallen humanity and getting back your watch from the pawnshop. And we can bring in, as well, the concept of honor, when we consider, for example, the man who, after some cowardly or unconscionable act in his youth, redeems himself with some act of heroism later on, along with the political resonances of redemption from slavery or, more broadly, oppression.\n\nI’m going to see if it works for describing and hypothesizing the rights of the anyown, the figure I am presenting as the basis of political thinking: the bearer of ownership rights which are yet to be ascertained because, while manifest in the market economy, they are rooted in the realms of egalitarian distribution and the gift economy; and, because the assertion of anyown’s rights automatically reverberates through the rights economy, modifying the value of everything else, which entails the right to have access to a fair measure of values, economic political and cultural.\n\nThe most interesting of the libertarian thought experiments are those which hypothesize ways in which functions currently fulfilled by government, including the most basic and unquestioned ones, such as currency, infrastructure and defense, might be performed just as well, or better, by private enterprises. Any politics that seeks to chip away at the welfare state, first of all its excesses and most unsustainable elements, but ultimately the powers allotted to government which made the excesses possible in the first place, would find itself confronted with the question of how the functions lopped off from the government would be fulfilled.\n\nSome seem to me pretty easy: we don’t really need the Department of Education at all; some, obviously, like those dealing with poverty, sickness and old age are more difficult. Even the easy ones would be instructive, though—the abolition of the Department of Education would not eliminate the need to nationalize educational norms and practices, and in the return to educational localization we would no doubt see an enormous variety of educational practices but also all kinds of efforts at overlapping those practices, generalizing their lessons and establishing some conformity in accreditation (what happens when a family moves from Georgia to Ohio and the schools in Ohio have to determine the meaning of the credentials forwarded by the school in Georgia?).\n\nIt seems to me very easy to imagine private agencies contracting with schools and school districts to establish such norms—such entrepreneurial ventures would provide an essential service, and one which could be very easily judged by the contractee: does the student from Georgia who should be an A student according to the norms established and overseen by that agency in fact perform at that level in her new school in Ohio?\n\nSimilarly with, say consumer protection agencies created, say, in the wake of the dismantling of the FDA. Companies which do their own testing would contract with producers, which would in turn advertise the approval they have been given; companies would provide different levels of guarantee, depending upon the product and the desire of the company (as a consumer you could buy only from companies that have achieved 98% safety level, but if you prefer cheapness to such elevated levels of inspection, you could go with 80%); competition would make sure that dirty deals between inspectors and companies are exposed quickly—this could easily work better than the current system of government inspection. At any rate, once such functions have been won back for the private, voluntary sector, we could speak of the “redemption” of expropriated state functions and their return to society. Private agencies would literally be buying back those functions, and politics would focus on forcing the state to allow them to do so.\n\n“Redemption” might take on even more powerful meanings when it comes to, say, a community buying a river or woods back from the state and, rather than letting the EPA dictate their environmental needs, going ahead and suing the industry that has been polluting the area—property rights, rather than ecological fanaticism, would lead to the right balance between economic and environmental imperatives. Similarly, the houses in a run down, crime ridden neighborhood might be “redeemed” by members of the community, who would all become shareholders, lease and sell according to strict principles, hire private security agents and thereby establish rigorous community standards.\n\nAnd for those who fear the parceling off and selling of the public space and the consequent dystopian nightmare of corporate rule portrayed in every third Hollywood movie, it is well to keep in mind that the collected economic power of middle class Americans, especially in a far more free economy with very low taxes, would overwhelm the power of corporations and all the billionaires in the world (without even taking into account that all those middle class Americans are the consumers and workers those companies depend upon)—that power would just need to be harnessed toward the “redemption” of the poor, the polluted, the corrupt, the unsafe and so on.\n\nI’ve dealt with these issues before, but what brings me back to them in these new terms is an essay I recently read, about the thousandth, I would guess, handwringing over new developments in the biological sciences and the “ethical” dilemmas they pose for “us.” What will “we” do about cloning, genetic engineering, and so on? I long ago stopped taking these arguments seriously because, really, there is no “we,” certainly not in the sense that there are “problems” we will “solve,” “discussions” we will have, etc., leading to decisions “we” will make, together. One person does something, whether it fits some pre-existing moral code or “discussion,” another person reacts, and a third person tries to reconcile the results.\n\nThat’s the way things we work—after it’s over, speaking about what “we” have decided may serve as a useful shorthand. Biological innovation, if left to private initiative alone, might lead to… weapons for rogue states and terrorists—after all, companies will sell to the highest bidder, regardless of morality, won’t they? Well, not if they want to sell to others—but, just as important, why don’t those concerned buy out those weapons themselves or pay even more for antidotes or defenses against those weapons or, even better, redeem the countries ruled by rogue regimes or controlled by terrorists—endow organizations and institutions that will defend rights and provide sanctuary, and exploit corruption in those governments so as to protect what has been established.\n\nThe tremendous asymmetry in power represented by the asymmetry in generated by free as opposed to enslaved societies would make all kinds of redemptive remedies possible. And, on the cultural level, if you don’t want a mosque at Ground Zero, put together a group that buys up the property in the area—each controversy will have its equivalent possibility, in each case requiring some ingenuity and creating new problems for the redemptive agency to address.\n\nOn the one hand, a politics of redemption would be all about money; on the other hand, the money itself would be about all kinds of things—it would be money put where people’s mouths are. If you’re worried about crime, contribute to a consortium dedicated to redeeming the neighborhoods which are its source—such consortiums will have weighted rules for voting, presumably, so the more you give, the more say you have. This would, on the face of it, give more power to the rich—but the rich would also have to put their money where their mouth is, and also where lots of other people are putting theirs—the rich would be mixed in with the rest. Second, a politics of redemption would draw upon people’s readiness to sacrifice, both time and money. The relations within these consortiums would be complex, based upon rules for decision making, division of labor and so on; and their relation to their redeemed properties would be even more complex, including, sometimes, the insistence on traditional hierarchies and ritualistic relationships and at other times experimentation.\n\nThe main role for government in this case would be to establish an arena in which the complicated contractual relations such an order would entail could be conducted with sufficient stability and reliability—I would say that much emphasis would shift to the civil courts, where most disagreements would be sorted out but just as important would be a criminal order, or a politics of redemption on the part of the state which would protect any individual’s right to leave any of the consortiums they have contracted with, as the biggest danger they would pose is new forms of privatized violence against individuals who have entered contracts touching upon important aspects of their lives.\n\nThe cultural conditions for a politics of redemption would include powerful presumptions against state interventions in private matters, and so norms and laws regarding when such intervention is unavoidable would be a constant source of argument. This would, in a sense, throw us back into the same kind of arguments the US was having before the civil war, between the Democrat’s argument for “popular rule” and “diversity” in institutions and the Republican argument that equality and the universal enforcement of rights supersedes those principles. Maybe this is the one “eternal” argument of any modern republic.\n\nAnd the main role for a politics of redemption today is the joint task of evacuating those areas of government which would need to give way for a politics of redemption, and creating the preliminary or embryonic forms of such a politics, ready to fill the vacuums that will be created given either a favorable political environment or fiscal collapse. There is no need to create utopian maps of a fully libertarian order; the idea, rather, would be to target places where the state is failing and voluntary approaches could be tried. As the Left has always done, it is also useful to test the boundaries and antinomies of the existing legal order, through creative forms of disobedience. And it seems to me that, contrary to the favored arguments of the political class, we want to see much more money in politics—unregulated money, anonymous money, money that will prevent the political class or the media from ever dreaming they can again obtain a monopoly on “legitimate” public discourse.\n\nAnother way of speaking about the center-margin relation constitutive of originary thinking is in terms of the “in-between”—what is in the center is in between us. The shift in terms provides for a shift in focus—the center attracts attention, while what is in between us directs our attention toward each other. Arendt placed great importance on such “in-betweens,” and the destructiveness of any politics that seeks to eliminate them and place us “face to face” with each other without mediation—an example she gave was the table around which we sit at a meeting. The table serves various purposes—we write on it, lean on it, put our coffee on it, etc.—but beyond all that it separates and relates us to each other.\n\nIf the table disappeared, there is a sense in which we would be more “naked,” more vulnerable, more self-conscious, and less capable of sharing some “public thing.” It would be strange to think about the table as sacred, though, even though it seems to serve a very similar purpose (of course stories, perhaps apocryphal, about stalled diplomatic processes resulting from disagreements about the size and shape of tables suggest that the table can take on a kind of sacrality). Even more, the notion of an in-between, and the related notion of the “middle” (it is the middle class that has prevented class war between rich and poor in Western societies), suggests the even more subordinate category of the “means.” God surely isn’t a means to some other end—but, we can see how He is, in fact—we use God to prevent us from tearing each other apart.\n\nThe in-between or the middle seems to me to direct our attention to the scene in a different way, perhaps later on than the centralization of the object, but I’m not sure: the object becomes the center of attention as the concentration of our accumulating desires—at that point, we are all marking the object by grasping for it. With the issuance of the sign/gesture, that center of attention is converted into a repellent force—we attend from the sign to the object as the “authorization” of the sign. Also, though, we attend from the authorizing object to one another—everyone on the scene is now in some state of grasping/withholding in the light of the center.\n\nBut the center here has become the in-between or the middle, insofar as we are not looking at it but has it has become unmarked (untouchable) it allows us to see and mark or unmark as the case demands each of our fellows (each of whom is a little bit more tending to grasp or to withhold). It may be that the center represents the experience of the sacred, the certainty and security it provides as we contemplate it, while the middle authorizes the creation of means—first of all, new ways of mediating between persons, but also, increasing, those new ways become means of transforming our tools and physical environment so as to keep placing us in new configurations with each other.\n\nMoney is as extreme a “mean” as you can find—it serves only to mediate exchanges; and yet, it makes sense, as Marx and many before and after him have remarked, to see money as “sacred”—the difference from Marx is that there’s no need to see anything obscene about this. Money is a sacred means—saving it is honorable, wasting it is disgraceful, spending it wisely is an obligation and placing it in the middle of some scene casts light on everyone there—and giving your money to some shared purpose, either a purpose you also supervise the fulfillment of, or one you remain anonymously aloof from, or one which you preside over as a public benefactor, is a mode of transcendence. A politics of redemption is a politics of devotion but no donation could ever be complete without concrete acts of exchanging favors and gestures, which such a politics makes a space for.\n\nIf a politics of redemption is a defense of the rights of the anyown, then it is a defense of the right of the anyown to spend money as anyown sees fit; but, then, that must also be a right to use whatever form of money the participants in an exchange agree to. Regarding the right of the anyown, fiat money is the first expropriation. It’s hard to imagine the titanic struggle that would be required to overturn the regime of fiat money. But it might be much easier to imagine directing attention to all the favors and gestures that we will never know but might have been exchanged, all the means that might have been created, if not for the systematic expropriations that are only possible because of fiat money—because the government can take money away from productive citizens by creating more money to give as largesse to their favored constituents."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-rights-of-the-anyown-2-the-idioms-of-the-anyown",
      "title": "The Rights of the Anyown 2: The Idioms of the Anyown",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Anyone familiar with TV crime shows knows how pervasive the figure of the serial killer has become in American popular culture, and how stereotyped—there is the imputed traumatic foundation of the killer’s addiction to violence, there are the idiosyncratic and extremely regular habits, the fixed idea of grievance, the ideal victim, and so on. And, of course, the serial killer is invariably brilliant and omni-competent—a scientist and artist (and performance artist, as they carefully manage their public image and the police investigation itself—and escape artist—no prison seems capable of holding them). Serial killers are a good match for serially produced entertainment (create an intriguing killer and your season writes itself), but their popularity, even their mythical status, lies, ultimately, in their implications for mimesis, and what we might see as a postmodern crisis in cultural mimetic modeling.\n\nThe show Dexter makes this relation between serial killers and mimesis very clear. The titular character is a serial killer who works for the Miami PD as a blood spatter expert, and whose victims are themselves serial killers. Dexter is compelled to kill, he is presented as completely addicted to the thrill of the hunt and the procedures he has invented and perfected for stalking and killing his prey, but he has harnessed this compulsion to the doing of justice—thanks to his adoptive father, a police officer, he has trained himself in the norms of the super hero, another still pervasive mythical figure in American popular culture, who sacrifices all to fight evil and protect the innocent.\n\nIt has become extremely difficult to imagine such dedication to the good in contemporary culture as anything other than the result of a pathological compulsion subjected to equally pathological self-control, and Dexter simply takes this cynicism or relativism to its ultimate conclusion. But what interests me more about Dexter is the way the show insists on the “inhuman” character of its protagonist—Dexter simply doesn’t feel what others feel. He is, emotionally, but also ethically, autistic, experiencing nothing outside of his compulsion and the rules he has created for managing it. But he must always interact with others, first of all at work and with his sister, but later on with his wife, her children and their new baby.\n\nAnd each interaction brings with it the problem: how would a normal person comport himself here? What you and I know tacitly—how to respond to a greeting, how to recognize when and why someone resents us, how to acknowledge a gesture, whether people around you are tense or relaxed, etc.—Dexter has to negotiate through induction, guesswork and trial and error. Everyday life becomes a never ending series of strategy sessions. At the same time, though, Dexter is very good at strategizing, and to that extent knows the semiotics of everyday life better than anyone else.\n\nWe might imagine this form of pathology as an instance of lastness on the originary scene. If we imagine that the scene takes shape through the de-escalation the dangerous mimetic rivalry, then each person must not only watch the others closely but must “identify” with them—that is, each must anticipate the effects one’s own presentation of the gesture will have on each other’s oscillation between gesture and grasping; and, if one must thus anticipate, one must also experience, virtually, the other’s response. But if we further imagine that the scene has taken shape before all have emitted the sign, then we have a certain number for whom the scene is presented as a fait accompli, and against whom the others would now be organized enough to prevent by force from approaching the central object.\n\nFor the last, the sign is objective but has no subjective component—he sees that it works, but it doesn’t work for him. He therefore sees enough to make it work for him, in the sense of to his advantage, without being “taken in” by it, because the sign must, furthermore, appear to him as an illusion that the others buy into out of their own fear—a fear he has also not experienced. At the same time, he would harbor a resentment unmoored to any desire for the object—he did, indeed, desire the object like all the others, but his resentment has never passed through the resentment of the center, and his resentment is therefore directed at the entire scene. It would be a resentment that produces the desire to prove to everyone that the sense of safety and mutual trust they have acquired through the sign is a deadly fraud.\n\nAt any rate, under such conditions, when the iconic bases of self-evidency utterly sever one person from others, the only way to hold things together is through elaborate and inevitably idiosyncratic rules. These rules can be shared and taught, explicitly and tacitly, but it will never be possible to refer them back to some shared nature outside of those rules and the spaces they regulate. Dexter, and the serial killer as icon, are obviously extreme examples, but it does seem to me that as victimary culture has come to be virtually the only public culture we have, and as victimary culture has itself become an elaborate set of often arcane, constantly changing and mutually incompatible rules, Dexter provides a helpful hypothesis of contemporary conditions, as long as we understand that, just as Dexter comes, in his own way to “love” his wife and child, and to enact and at least minimally experience the responsibilities that come with his new role, our lives within uprooted regulatory conditions are just as authentic as any other once habits and tacit knowing of our way around sets in. It just may be, though, that they never set in all the way.\n\nThis may be the postmodern condition, but it also seems to me the modern one: ultimately we are capable of learning how to mark and unmark one another’s gestures, but the process has become more abstract and less iconic; or, to use Peirce’s term for abstract iconicity, our relations have become diagrammatic. We have always (to draw upon the title of Eric Gans’s talk at the latest GA conference) been modern in the sense that modernity is placing things in-between us, or multiplying mediations, means and middles, but there is a tension between that process and the shared central object that crises refer us back to—I don’t know when the decisive point would have been passed, but by now the claim that the things we place in the middle are proxies for, pieces of, or likenesses to that shared object are rarely tenable.\n\nAt this point, the things we place between us, at least culturally (the technological middle is another discussion), are improvised attempts to unmark oneself, which is to say aborted and simulated attacks on oneself that others might translate into their own terms. In that case, we are always engaging one another across these improvised zones whose borders must be subject to increasingly explicit negotiations.\n\nI’m sure a lot of people like this and a lot of people don’t, but if I’m right it is just becoming the reality and a couple of generations down the line people will speak much more directly about the norms and rules governing everyday interactions than they do now—a TV show like The Office, most of whose comic situations are generated by the mismatch of rules to situations on an individual or collective level, points in this direct, and so did Seinfeld a while back. It also seems to me that my students are never so comfortable as when they have a very clear set of rules to follow, and they don’t concern themselves so much with the rationale or legitimacy of the rules.\n\nStudents of the type that were so common in my youth—romantic strivers for authenticity and full of resentment towards all rules—seem to be an almost extinct species. They show up once in a while but stand out like sore thumbs. And the increasingly exposed and interconnected nature of individuality facilitated by social networking like Facebook and texting pushes things in the same direction, towards elaborate, ever changing and idiosyncratic intersecting rules. (I think that such a condition may make the desire for overarching bureaucratic regulation more intense—if only someone could just set and enforce the rules once and for all!—while subverting all actual attempts in that direction.)\n\nYou can be comfortable talking about “content” only when questions of “form” have been settled. The referential bias of metaphysical discourse, which insists upon the transparency of language and hence the possibility of and therefore responsibility to represent reality (human nature, fact, ideas, feelings—everything resisting complete semiotic representation) in unambiguous, accurate and consensual ways is an understandable attempt to promote deliberately established disciplinary discourses over ordinary speech situations and, further, to raise the qualifications for entering sanctioned disciplinary spaces. Such a bias may have been necessary for the integration of writing and then print into social communicative processes, for the creation of universities and the emergence of modern science and politics.\n\nBut do I really need to cite all the reasons why such a bias is no longer sustainable—it is enough to recognize that while in some areas (like, say, best sellers read by beach goers) traditional representational forms still sell, attentiveness to forms, rules, conventions, and the various possible modifications, mistakes, convergences and so on that they entail prevails in most of the more emergent modes of communication. Young people can still often be startlingly literalistic and sincere—I don’t mean to suggest that we are seeing the world populated by savvy cynics. But they are literalistic and sincere in their relation to a particular set of rules circulating in a given space.\n\nThe alternative to administering CPR to one or another brand of metaphysics is to treat all discourse as disciplinary, as fundamentally engaged in inquiry, which is to say, interested in generating ostensives that might spread. One way of approaching such a project is through conversations modeled on the work of thinkers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and JL Austin, which is to simply ask “what we mean when we say…” or “do we use that word in this way,” and so on—Wittgenstein’s notion of the “grammar” of a word, rather than its meaning, points the way: which verbs or prepositions does a particular word work with, in which situations does its use seem “odd,” and so on.\n\nWittgenstein and Austin are still sparring with metaphysics, though, and are overwhelmingly interested in showing that the way language works in ordinary settings is at odds with the way it works in the artificial spaces of philosophy (and, I would say, the social sciences as well). This is still a worthy project, especially since metaphysics has penetrated ordinary discourse, especially when that discourse is compelled to enter unfamiliar terrain—if you listen to the way in which people use terms (I have students in mind here in particular) like “society,” “closeminded,” “opinion,” “diversity” and so on, you can see the residual functioning of metaphysics as a kind of socially congealing cant.\n\nThe approach I prefer is to create little ripples in language by constructing idioms out of the rules of grammar and language use itself. The anyown advances its rights by pressing such idioms and transforming the way anyone can talk about things. An idiom is created by identifying, within one form or medium, the constituent element of a lower form of medium: writing identifies a constituent element within speech, and speech within gesture (of course, we will have to talk about TV, film, computers, music, visual images, etc., but all of that will be so many variations of gesture/speech/writing articulations). When asked what something means, you can respond by working within the same system, putting forward more familiar elements as substitutes for the unfamiliar ones (like a dictionary definition which uses words you presumably understand to define words you don’t); ultimately, though, the guarantee of understanding is something that could be pointed to or grasped—showing something, or how to do something, or how one would say something. Declarative sentences are best explained in terms of what questions they might be answering, interrogatives in terms of what command or demand they extend, and so on.\n\nThe simplest way of creating idioms is by adding, subtracting or moving one element in a system, one element whose presence, absence or displacement transforms the system, which is to say permits a lower level to present itself within that system. We could talk about the ways in which we question, challenge and ridicule others in those terms—subtract the institutional position from which someone speaks and respond to what they say minus their authority, and a transformation of its meaning in ways unfavorable to the speaker is practically guaranteed. Institutional position and authority are essentially constitutive gestural elements, situating one person closer to the center or more “vertically” than another.\n\nI would propose idioms that generate one such rule, presented on the surface of the discourse, involving the addition or subtraction of (or the addition to or subtraction from) a particular “role” or “post” within that discourse (for example, some modification in a narrative function like “adversary,” or “audience”; or excluding a commonplace distinction like inside/outside); along with second rule that iconically represents the explicit rule within a lower or more tacit system, such as grammar, and then brings that tacit system into the discourse (say, a rule for converting a certain number of declaratives into interrogatives and interrogatives into imperatives, so as to represent the dialogue with authority concealed by declarative discourse; or the representation of the replacement of internal/external oppositions by configurations through the limitation of prepositions to, say, “about” and “around”); and, finally, a more arbitrary rule that reminds one of (that iconically represents) the generative capacity of the tension between the iconic and abstract within language itself. Richard Kostelanetz, for example, has poems made up of additions or subtractions of one letter to the previous word:\n\nBooth Boot Boo\n\nBounce Ounce Once\n\nBramble Ramble Amble\n\nBrat Bat At\n\nBreaker Beaker Baker\n\nCapon Capo Cap\n\nCaret Care Car\n\nChair Hair Air\n\nKostelanetz is exploiting the existence of the letter as the constituent element of the writing system, and the interaction between that constituent element and other constituents at other levels, such as sound (with its complicated relation to letters) and word. In looking at (“reading” might not be the right word) Kostelanetz’s poems one learns to see words within words and sounds and meanings overlapping with each other, and the minimal element of the letter sending possible discourses in one direction or another. New categories would emerge—some words must contain lots of other words within them while I would imagine there are also quite a few upon which the operation wouldn’t work and are therefore something like “irreducible” elements themselves; or one might refine the rules to make it work—I can get from “would” to “old” by dropping two letters, for example—now, we would start to look for new rules so as to uncover words within words.\n\n(An enormous amount of political satire today works in such a way—slightly changing a spelling or the sound of a word, exploiting the orthography of someone’s name, or a pun—and I imagine it has always been that way.) The same goes for Kostelanetz’s “string poems,” in which the final letter, or final two, or three, letters of one word makes up the first, first two, or three letter of the next word: “stringfiveteranciderideafencerebrumblendivestablishmentertain…” This kind of poem iconically represents “overlapping” and teaches us to find the beginning of the next word, and, by implication, the beginning of the next utterance, in the one now coming to completion, and the prelude to what we are now saying in what just was or might have been said.\n\nMore broadly, I would take it to iconically represent our broader social condition which, as Michael Polanyi argued regarding scientific discourses, and as is implicit in Wiggentstein’s notion of “family resemblances,” involves no broader commonality but overlappings and varying degrees of separation and levels of mediation with no totalization.\n\nOne can translate other discourses into the rule bound idiom you invent or you can simply write in that idiom, noticing what kind of work language does when you employ it in such generative terms and reconnecting the highest, declarative and discursive levels of language with their basis in gesture and spacing. This is a kind of work I am going to try, and I think the purpose is more to open up possibilities of composition for others to work out in more popular ways than to be a mode of discourse in its own right—just as the point of poetry is not to have everyone speak that way but to expand the metaphorical resources of language. Adding, replacing and subtracting constituent elements generates thresholds; generating thresholds leads to novelties; and novel signs provide new ways for people to compose themselves.\n\nSo, let’s try translating the final paragraph of my previous post—\n\nIf a politics of redemption is a defense of the rights of the anyown, then it is a defense of the right of the anyown to spend money as anyown sees fit; but, then, that must also be a right to use whatever form of money the participants in an exchange agree to. Regarding the right of the anyown, fiat money is the first expropriation. It’s hard to imagine the titanic struggle that would be required to overturn the regime of fiat money. But it might be much easier to imagine directing attention to all the favors and gestures that we will never know but might have been exchanged, all the means that might have been created, if not for the systematic expropriations that are only possible because of fiat money—because the government can take money away from productive citizens by creating more money to give as largesse to their favored constituents.\n\n—according to the following rule: first, a subtraction of narrative elements; second, a translation of at least 2 complex sentences into sentences including an imperative; third, every sentence must include a word that adds or subtracts one letter from a word in the previous sentence (starting with the second sentence, of course).\n\nA politics of redemption is a defense of the rights of the anyown, it is a defense of the right of the anyown to spend money as anyown sees fit, it is a right to use whatever form of money the participants in an exchange agree to. Expropriate using fiat money—that’s how you violate the right of the anyown, of us. The regime of fiat money is an overwhelming show of force. Direct attention to all the favors and gestures, don’t take your eyes off the disappeared means; resist the systematic expropriations of fiat money. Creating more money, taking money away from our productive citizens, giving largesse to favored constituents—that’s the fiat regime.\n\nThe how is through a show, use is taken from us, of threatens to take off, and your and our must collaborate; we now have a series of imperatives embedded in cumulating, quasi-ritualistic parallelisms. Against a background of conjurations, first of the politics of redemption and finally of its antithesis, orders are given one way and the other, the prominence of the shifters “your” and “our” represents the instability of the situation and the rapid movement between the occupation of different roles. It seems to me that reliance of the existing reality upon everyone’s or anyown’s will comes out more strongly in this revision.\n\nAnd we are now on the threshold of the creation of maxims for political thinking and action, through such means as grammatical inversions and the inversion of marked and unmarked. Fiat money expropriates use and makes violation right; attend to the disappeared means and the favored gestures will direct you. Whatever one thinks of such maxims, that fiat money turns justice upside-down is a “real” idea that we have arrived at; and so is the notion, however paradoxical, that if we look for the means of cooperation that state coercion has disappeared, we will discover new, favorable gestures that might be durable signs of resistance to that coercion.\n\nThe novelist Ronald Sukenick was aware of the techniques of the Oulipo literary group and incorporated some of them into his work fairly regularly, but he distanced himself from “strong” forms of Oulipo by, at least in my reading, deriving rules by marking features of narrative that attending to narrative made distinctive and by following and recursively accentuating the rules discoverable in one’s own mode of work. In other words, if you pay attention to your own writing and thinking, you can identify rules you seem to be following—habits and regular gestures—and make those rules explicit stakes in the discourse. The point of working with Oulipean methods, and developing new methods out of the rules of grammar, is ultimately to get to the point where your own thinking becomes the source of rules for transforming that thinking."
    },
    {
      "slug": "language-inquiry",
      "title": "Language, Inquiry",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Only after reading Eric Gans’s recent Chronicle (#403, “Heuristic Necessity”) did the obvious relevance of Gans’s definition of God as that word whose signified and referent are indistinguishable to originary linguistics and grammar strike me. But, then, since, as Gans also notes elsewhere, ultimately every word (but also, then, sentence, discourse, etc.) is the name of God, then the indistinguishability of signified and referent is definitive or constitutive of meaning as such. This indistinguishability applies, in other words, to ostensivity—which is when our pointing to something, or directing attention to something, right here and now, is what we “mean”—and all meaning is ostensive insofar as it’s impossible to imagine gesturing, speaking or writing without wanting to direct someone’s attention from one’s gesture, speech or text to something else.\n\nThe distinguishability of signified and referent, then, poses the real problem. That distinction must have been necessary for sign use to have moved beyond the ostensive or to create the “portable” and “reassemblable” ostensives that we could say constitute semiosis. My solution to that problem explains, for me, why Gans’s definition of God didn’t connect with my linguistic and grammatical thinking until just now—I haven’t really been using the traditional linguistic terms of “signifier/signified” and “referent.” First, I worked on developing a way of talking about language drawn exclusively from the succession of emergences of the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative speech forms; more recently, I have been trying out ways of using the notion of unmarked/marked derived from the Prague School of linguistics, and to assimilate that distinction to the more originary one of norm/mistake.\n\nBut we can articulate these various distinctions through another one I have worked with on occasion: that between the exchange of signs between participants upon a scene and the exchange of signs between a participant upon one scene and another, a “stranger” to the scene to whom one presents the results of the scene: I call the first scene the scene of presencing and the other the scene of representation. The best example of the scene of representation would be summary, which generally serves the purpose of providing another what they need to know so as to save them the trouble of reading the text itself.\n\nThese two scenes (and a third, constitutive scene that articulates them) are folded into the originary scene itself, insofar as that scene must involve the initial forming of the sign and the iterated circulation of the formed sign, and it is this doubled scene that then mediates the transition to the sparagmos: in the sparagmos the imminently chaotic devouring of the object threatens to overwhelm the agreement established by the shared sign, a tendency which can be mitigated only by the repetition of the sign throughout the consumption of the object at every indication of overreach on the part of a neighbor. In this case, the participants in the sparagmos are essentially summarizing the scene to each other.\n\nIt is this latter use of the sign that distinguishes the signified from the referent: the signified, in other words, is the sign in its capacity to articulate a scene by composing the elements of an emerging scene on the model of and out of the remains of previous scenes; the sign as referent directs one’s attention to an object upon a scene already in place. The signified is the object as deferring and powerful; the referent is the object as available for orderly appropriation.\n\nWhen we “understand” each other, what happens, then, is that the signified and referent coincide for us—if I say “it’s late,” you understand me insofar as you acknowledge my reference to this particular lateness, the one that, say, conveys a shared sense that whatever we have been doing has proven to be more important than something else we had planned to do, and has therefore carried us away, resituated and redefined us, etc., and in a way we can realize right here and now. To the extent that signified and referent don’t coincide, our understandings are overlapping and, of course, that is always the case, even while the overlap implies a zone of coincidence.\n\nYour remark points out the “lateness” to me and then I might make a remark that shows I have observed that particular lateness and that establishes a site of “joint attention,” or “disciplinary inquiry,” or “presencing”—or, what I will try calling an “anythisness agreement.” At the same time the “lateness” is not quite the same, at exactly the same time, for both of us, but we now have some sense of how to identify that signified/referent, how to look for it, how to conjure it: the imperative steps in to supplement the ostensive, as the object now tells us how to go about tracking, appropriating and preserving it, and we tell the object to appear before us.\n\nThese imperatives, emerging from the ostensive, become the rules, or grammar, of the object and the convergences and divergences of the object as signified and referent—rules are imperatives marked by ostensivity. Part of this grammar is the prolongation of the imperatives into interrogatives, as the object doesn’t appear as commanded, and we fail to obey the object, and as we command the object to renew its commands, and extend and mitigate our demands upon it, these interrogatives take on the declarative form of hypotheses—all declaratives, indeed, are intrinsically hypotheticals.\n\nNow, I would like to overlay the vocabulary of “markedness” on this succession of speech forms. Just as I think Gans’s analysis of the succession of speech forms opens up so far unimagined areas of inquiry into grammar, it seems to me that setting the unmarked/marked distinction upon the originary scene helps us to use that distinction to tie together various cultural, semiotic, social and anthropological levels. The unmarked is what you attend from to the marked—it is the water the fish swims in, pervasive, normal, and unattended to. But the originary hypothesis shows, I think, that only through a very extreme form of marking could unmarkedness emerge: first of all, the central object is marked as desirable, as we attend to it from everyone else’s approach to it; this markedness then spreads to the other participants on the scene, as we attend from the object to these obstacles to our possession of it.\n\nMarkedness, first of all, then, has the meaning of targeted, and targeted for destruction. In attending back and forth from object to rivals, the hesitation or gesture is put forth, and we now attend from the sign (unmarking the sign-giver, first of all oneself) to the object, from which we can now attend to the shared cessation constituting the scene, thereby unmarking the object. What is now marked is any break from “protocol,” that is, any slide from gesture back into grasping, including any mistake indicating such a slide—and as I suggested before, the transition back into appropriation is mediated by the “referential” sign, assuring each other that one is taking only one’s share and warning each other to do the same.\n\nEveryone can now attend from the sign to transgressions which confirm it, so the marked now becomes the abnormal, anomalous, transgressive, idiosyncratic. (This, by the way, is why the politics of White Guilt—indelibly marking the unmarked, as in “white male knowledge”—will have so many unanticipated consequences: the unmarking of “knowledge” and, indeed, those European males who constructed the term along with it, saved us all from much worse forms of violence than is represented by the imposition of an unmarked, and extendible, “knowledge.” Once “knowledge,” “truth,” “justice,” “reality” and so on are irremediably marked we will find a catastrophic decline in our ability to talk about all kinds of things.)\n\nSubsequently, the unmarked/marked distinction can itself be unmarked, in this case de-escalated, so as to become a means of generated the distinctions needed by the signifying system—phonetic distinctions, word-type distinctions, tense distinctions, etc., etc. And this can all happen without the originary distinction being overturned—even now, as much as ever, being marked is being placed in some kind of danger.\n\nThe unmarked, or abstract sign, the “version” that has survived the norming process on the originary scene, and has received, so to speak, the full faith and backing of the central object, is the site for what I would call “everythatness agreements” upon the scene of representation: we move from “any,” or singularizing, to “every,” or spreading and eternalizing; and from “thisness,” or presence or firstness, to “thatness,” or reportage or secondness. Both dimensions are present whe never we use signs so as to make meaning, and they are present on the third, or constitutive scene, or semiotic use proper, where one or the other dimension is accentuated in constituting a field of semblances (the population of the world by object/signs).\n\nThe third, or constitutive scene is where we use signs to make a difference by creating a new ostensive, and we do that by marking and then re-un-marking a particular use of an unmarked sign, thereby modifying the field of relationships between the marked and unmarked. To return to the succession of speech forms, we make meaning by turning an ostensive dimension of sign use into an imperative one (shifting register from an anticipated “I see” to “show me”), from imperative to interrogative (“look at this”—“where?”), and so on, or vice versa (treating declaratives as interrogatives and imperatives, etc.). In each case, one marks the unmarked, treating a portion of the scene assumed in any agreement or joint attention as defective, but ultimately not irreparable (even the most radical critique implies the possibility of some other scene, composed out of the elements—out of what else, after all?—of the present scene).\n\nMarkedness provides an excellent frame for conducting inquiry, not only because it allows us to travel from the phonetic way up to the highest cultural levels, but because it combines invariance (we all, all cultures, all individuals, make sense of things by (un)marking them, with plenty of striking cross-cultural similarities) and great variability: to take a simple example, in the word “nurse,” the feminine is unmarked; but that is just another way of saying that “nurse” is marked female. In other words, what is marked and unmarked depends upon the question being asked—meanwhile, even though this means the application of the terms requires judgment and involves disagreements and arguments (good things for any mode of inquiry), proof is often readily available in fairly convincing forms: we will never say “female nurse,” while “male nurse” is so commonplace as to be an easy punchline (especially since “nurse” also tends to be marked not only “female,” but “sexy female” in certain commonplace fantasies—which is why a markedly unattractive nurse also functions as an easy punchline).\n\nAnd, needless to say, all this can easily change rapidly, and undoubtedly already is doing so, as women become doctors in numbers almost equal to men and men (probably, but interestingly this change doesn’t seem so rapid) migrate into nursing in growing numbers.\n\nAny mode of inquiry, then, unmarks some newly marked object, and singles out the rules according to which that object works as a “constituent element” of some structure at a particular level of inquiry. Again, it seems to me as if we can work completely within the terms of the successive emergence of the speech forms here, since the ostensive, the imperative, the interrogative and the declarative comprise distinctly different and complementary elements in the process of inquiry. An object becomes marked because it no longer works according to its normal rules, which means we can no longer attend from that object to others—our attention is now drawn, imperatively, towards the object, as we attend from the now failed rules of its operation within a system to the rules of its own constitution, from one of its constituent elements to another, and so on.\n\nWe see what seems to still fit together—we command the object to compose itself in such a manner that we could against attend from it to other things—and what refuses our command leaves our command prolonged, hanging, so to speak, converting it into a question: what should be re-positioned so as to make things fit again?\n\nAll language is inquiry, and markedness allows us to see the stakes of the inquiry in a way that is made invisible in those spaces we have explicitly set aside and unmarked (made safe) for inquiry—an object that doesn’t work according to its normal rules, for example, might be a good friend or loved one, who is behaving “suspiciously” (to suspect someone is, obviously, to mark him or her). That person has so far acted as a sign for me, allowing me to attend from him or her to a range of other things in the world, a set of habits which the person is him or herself also a part of—that the person is unmarked doesn’t mean I neglect him or her, just that I can unproblematically enjoy the pleasures he or she brings me (and unproblematically soften and contextualize the pains).\n\nOnce he or she becomes marked I will not be satisfied until I have succeeded to unmark her once again, by reducing the intrinsically anomalous “suspicious” behavior to some new set of rules, to which I can assign a formula (“she’s having trouble at work”) which identifies a new constituent element of a modified reality (the relation between home life and work has shifted) and which is in turn accommodated to a modified set of habits, which means I have unmarked him or her once more.\n\nTerms like “constituent element,” “component part,” and “rules” are also, of course, both indeterminate enough to be used in many different ways and on every level of reality, and precise enough to produce the definitions and delimitations we need to hold the things in place long enough to get a good look at them. We seek clarification along these lines all the time (were you referring to x or y?) and often enough get it. I want to conclude by making another point, though, which is in fact what I wanted to get to all along. It seems to me that the mark or measure of a strong language and, by implication, a healthy culture and civilization, is that it allows for the simultaneous existence of varied and incommensurable “constituent elements” (identified within distinct idioms, each with its own “rights”).\n\nThe mistake of modern scientism was to insist upon a single vocabulary to describe all of reality, which leads one to ruthlessly extirpate all other vocabularies, as they can only appear as obfuscating competitors. What I have in mind is a society in which we could analyze the psyche by, for example, breaking it down into “ego,” “id” and “superego,” or even a complex tree of stimuli and responses, without thereby disabling a word like “soul,” which would identify a “constituent element” within an integral structure every bit as real as “ego.” We would, then, be mature enough to live with “soul” being marked as unscientific in some discourses, while, say, “damaged soul” remains operative (unmarked) for marking certain sources of evil in other, moral and spiritual discourses.\n\n(The best example I have of such a richly plural and yet coherent linguistic reality, and which I hope to find a way of exploring in this connection, is the English of Tudor and Elizabethan England, the language of Tyndale, Cramner and Hooker, culminating, of course, in Shakespeare’s language and the King James Bible.) At this point, originary grammar comes into its own as a mode of cultural and social criticism, one which enables us to attend to the unmarked without feeling compelled to mark the unmarked permanently, in revenge for hiding itself. And, finally, the use of constraints or deliberately formulated rules so as to govern one’s own analytical discourse becomes a way of finding and generating new constituent elements, of shaking them loose, so to speak, from the unmarked formulas embracing us."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sarah-palin-anyown-and-the-constitutional-reformation",
      "title": "Sarah Palin, Anyown, and the Constitutional Reformation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2010",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I will lay down a marker right away—for me, the main criterion for supporting a Presidential candidate is that he or she knows what the left is; anyone who thinks that a Republican president will be able to settle into the White House in 2013, put on the green eyeshades, and start balancing the budget in a sober, bipartisan manner is criminally naïve, and I don’t want anyone like that anywhere near the Presidency. Normal America and free America are at war with the Left, and anyone one who is not ready to fire back when fired at need not apply. Sarah Palin seems to know what the Left is, and none of her potential contenders seems to have a clue. At this moment, the ability to create and run a political and economic media empire is more pertinent to presidential aspirations than the ability to balance a budget with your bare hands, which you can hire someone to do anyway.\n\nBut leaving that aside, Palin, and the Palin phenomenon are intrinsically interesting—there seems to be widespread agreement on that, at any rate. She, in her public persona, seems to me an almost perfect complement to Barack Obama, and the Obama phenomenon—she seems destined to be his nemesis, a role she seems to relish and which she plays very well. I think an Obama v. Palin race in 2012 would dramatize all the post-Bush, indeed, all the post-9/11 conflicts; even more, it would finally bring the entire Progressive Era in our politics, dating back to the turn of the 20th century, on the stage—and I think this would be both very healthy and incredibly exciting.\n\nWe desperately need such a polarization now, and it would be nice to deal a blow to the illusions of the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal center” of the country. I don’t doubt that there are many Americans, maybe, depending upon definitions, a majority, who can be described as “fiscally conservative, socially liberal”; nor do I doubt that in a certain sense they are the “center,” picking and suturing together the least antagonistic items of both right and left. It’s an empty center, though, and a campaign that showed as much by forcing the “centrists” to choose would be healthy as well—if you support the kind of judicially driven federal government needed to push through and sustain the “socially liberal” agenda, than you can forget about fiscal conservatism.\n\nFiscal conservatism would mean federalism and expanded property rights, both of which, as the politically savvy know, mean death to “social liberalism,” i.e., abortion on demand, gay marriage and religion out of the public sphere. And I might as well also say that I can’t say the word “gravitas” without, at the very least, smiling. I think that things are going to get rough, especially if the prerogatives of those plugged into the victimary public arena are even mentioned, much less trespassed upon—we need someone whose first instinct isn’t to placate the New York Times.\n\nEven leaving Palin aside for the moment, it seems to me (I would be surprised if no one else has used the analogy) that the Tea Party movement is equivalent to a kind of Constitutional Reformation. The liberal judiciary, like the Catholic Church, has been, for the past 80 years, interpreting the holy text for the rest of us, and according to arcane and esoteric methods that ordinary citizens can’t penetrate. If you were to ask a member of the priesthood what the Constitution said about x or y, they would gesture towards piles of unintelligible commentary which it takes many years of training to navigate. Terms like “the Commerce Clause” have taken on a magical significance, changing the citizens property’s into the state’s.\n\nThe Tea Partiers have simply insisted on reading the document for themselves (unfortunately there was no way of forbidding its translation into the vernacular). But the analogy extends further—just like the return to the biblical text itself, and an insistence on the individual’s right to interpret it himself, has led to more Protestant Churches than anyone can count (unless someone actually has counted them), so will the opening of the Constitution lead to many different, and often idiosyncratic, versions of the same. Not that many—the Constitution is a lot shorter and simpler than the Bible, and there is a tradition of rational argumentation and precedents prior to its appropriation by the advocates of the Living Constitution—but quite a few more than I imagine most originalists imagine.\n\n(Maybe they do imagine it and don’t mind—I certainly hope so.) There is plenty of room for idiosyncrasy, in other words, in this return to the real center, the founding events of the nation, just as there is plenty of idiosyncrasy in Sarah Palin, who also deliberately roots herself in that very center. It is this combination or “simultaneity” of centrality and idiosyncrasy, of the general “any” and the singular “one-y,” that I have in mind when I use the term “anyown.”\n\nThis mixture of the originary and idiosyncratic is best found, I think, in one of our most basic rights as Americans, the right to bear arms—number two, right after speech and religion, but arguably more fundamental, since how could we protect those rights without the right to bear arms? (I know, the order of the amendments was not meant to imply any order of rank—and yet they do often seem to be ranked this way.) And yet, as far as I know the right to bear arms holds a comparable rank in no other national or international charter of rights—it is a distinctively American “universal” right. The centrality of the right to bear arms can be traced back to founding liberal theorists like Hobbes, who considered the right to protect your own life prior to, and unaffected by, your obligations to the state, but for this very reason it is very difficult to integrate it coherently with the more peaceably exercised rights which we expect the state to guarantee for us.\n\nIndeed, the main rationale, at least among its most fervent defenders, of the right to individual ownership of firearms, is precisely that it turns the citizen into an effective barrier to the establishment of a tyranny. How, though, can the state protect such a right unambivalently, since there can be no pre-established or agreed upon rules for what, exactly, would constitute that tipping at which legitimate government turns into tyranny? The best or most convenient definition, I suppose, would be the point at which the government starts rounding up all the guns; but such an action might indicate that, for the government, the tipping point at which citizen vigilance becomes rebellion, has been reached.\n\nAlso, would anyone want to say there is no limit to the right to bear arms? I can own a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun—how about a basement full of dynamite? Anti-aircraft missiles? What about the first billionaire who decides he wants his own nuclear warhead? If the real purpose of the right to bear arms is to deter tyrannical tendencies in government, wouldn’t we insist that citizens arm themselves in a manner commensurate with the power of the contemporary state—the contemporary American state? After all, what good would even “assault weapons” be against the tanks rolling into New Jersey and the planes strafing Manhattan?\n\nYou could say that other rights have their limits in the infringement upon the rights of others—so, my right to free speech doesn’t permit to stand in front of my neighbor’s house with a bullhorn berating him for his leftist politics. But what is the equivalent here? My stockpile disturbs no one, and by the time my basement full of explosives violates your private property rights by blowing up the block on which both our houses stand, it will do you little good to sue me.\n\nBut there is another way of interpreting the right to bear arms that preserves its idiosyncratic centrality. The government can’t be everywhere to protect everyone, and we wouldn’t want it to be; where it can’t be, armed citizens can, and can serve, while protecting themselves, as a kind of informal militia or posse, making it clear to criminals that they are safe to commit their crimes nowhere. This implies complementarity between government and people and, at its outer limits, a near merger of the former into the latter. The deterrence of tyranny can itself thereby be pre-empted by the shared obligation to secure the order whose breaches provide the very invitation needed by the tyrant to exceed constitutional boundaries.\n\nThe right to bear arms in this way involves the citizen in the preservation of ordered liberty, and can be detached from that utopian resentment implicit in indiscriminate “anti-government” sentiments. At the same time, though, the boundaries separating vigilance, vigilantism and criminality are not always bright and clear, and will take different shapes across and within communities, based as they must be upon shared tacit understandings with overlap with other understandings and constantly require adjustment. The more deeply rooted the right, the more inadequate the merely legal attempts to adjudicate it, i.e., the more idiosyncratic.\n\nAnyway, here is Palin’s forceful and borderline incoherent response to Barbara Bush’s patrician cruelty (“I once sat down next to her. Thought she was beautiful. She seems to love it in Alaska. I hope she stays there”) which not only wishes Palin out of Presidential politics but out of public discourse altogether:\n\n“I don’t want to sort of concede that we have to get used to this kind of thing because I think the majority of Americans don’t want to put up with the blue bloods — and I say it with all due respect because I love the Bushes — but the blue bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition to pick and choose the winners.”\n\nShe then invoked the economic crisis to explain her point.\n\n“They [blue bloods] kind of do some of this with the economic policies that were in place that got us into these economic woeful times, too,” Palin said. “So I don’t know if that kind of stuff is planned out but it is what it is. We deal with it, and we forge ahead and we keep doing what we’re doing.”\n\nThe Bushes are blue bloods (ok, so far, so good), but she still loves them—nothing wrong with blue bloods except for when they try to “pick and choose their winners.” Palin has a response to Bush here, but she has cut and pasted into that response her own political “idiom” of the moment—a very helpful idiom, which has put into practice the excellent idea of changing the terms of Republican politics through primary challenges. The idiom doesn’t really work so well here, though, because wouldn’t the Bushes saying who they prefer for President be part of that open, competitive process? After all, that helps those who respect or despise the Bushes sort out their own views of the candidates.\n\nBut Palin doesn’t want to come out and suggest that Barbara Bush is a spiteful old shrew, representing the retrograde wing of the party, and I think she has imposed upon herself the kind of discipline which ensures that you don’t say anything in response to new situations which has been “piloted,” so we see the limits of her repertory here. The connection to “these economic woeful times” (as I’ve mentioned before, Palin’s grammatical choices can be fascinating—recently, she responded to a reporter trying to spring a question on her at a book signing with something like “can’t we get that good enthusiasm” back, in this case using a favorite adjective of hers with a favorite noun with which that adjective just happens not to go) is even more of a reach, but, paradoxically, she is getting at something here because there is a real connection between the “elites” (what Angelo Codevilla calls the “Ruling Class”) and the kinds of political-economic machinations that led to the Wall Street meltdown.\n\nPalin knows this, and has posted cogently on it on her Facebook page, but what I think we can see in this instance is an imperfect intuition regarding how to stitch together the various arguments, slogans and commonplaces at her disposal—especially since in this case getting too explicit would also be getting far more polemical regarding the Republican “establishment” than Palin wants, and can just barely avoid (which means that she is also very aware of the political boundaries she is operating within). We see this all the time with Palin, and it’s why she can, in fact, look stupid sometimes—she doesn’t know how to weave all the clichés together in a seamless manner as do most politicians operating at her level of exposure. But that’s also a way of saying she’s not very good at saying nothing. And in that way, more than any other, she is more grounded than anyone or anyown else in the emergent idiosyncratic center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "obama-and-palin-opposing-anthropologies",
      "title": "Obama and Palin: Opposing Anthropologies",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Two speeches given the same day in response to the shootings in Tucson; one, by all accounts, brilliant, Presidential, conciliatory, the other, by most accounts, petty, small minded and self-serving. And I don’t find too much to object to in President Obama’s platitudinous remarks. But, in each speech there is a certain logical tension worth exploring. Obama says, in the line that has probably received the most attention:\n\n“And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.”\n\nA more civil and honest discourse—either civility and honesty are complementary (if not synonymous) or we would have to choose one over the other, in some cases. The context makes it clear, I think, that Obama would prefer civility, or a particular understanding of civility, over honesty:\n\n“we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American Dream to future generations.”\n\nSo, questions about others’ patriotism are declared out of bounds, even if we honestly come by them. Widening our circle of concern is to be preferred over, say clarifying and performing more diligently our existing duties and obligations, even if we honestly believe that too many people have widened their circle of concern so as to infringe upon others’ rights to determine the boundaries of their own “circle.” We are to “expand our moral imaginations” and “sharpen our instincts for empathy,” even if we think it’s enough to be moral, love our friends and families, and follow, intelligently, the rules of a spontaneous market order.\n\nPresident Obama wants to tell us how to think, feel, and act—we must “thrive together,” as the t-shirt distributed at the speech he gave exhorts. Sarah Palin, meanwhile, unequivocally chooses honesty over civility: “Public discourse and debate isn’t a sign of crisis, but of our en during strength. It is part of why America is exceptional”:\n\n“No one should be deterred from speaking up and speaking out in peaceful dissent, and we certainly must not be deterred by those who embrace evil and call it good. And we will not be stopped from celebrating the greatness of our country and our foundational freedoms by those who mock its greatness by being intolerant of differing opinion and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.”\n\nThis is an extremely defiant repudiation (or “refudiation,” if we like) of the entire left wing argument regarding the sources of violence such as we saw in Tucson, an argument affirmed in general by Obama even if he rejected, at least implicitly, the more obscene particulars that have dominated the media. Obama wants more speech rules, more guardrails; Palin wants more arguments, more debates, more primaries. Her only rule for “civility” is the founding liberal one: “we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.”\n\nThere are opposing anthropologies here. For Obama, speech and violence lie in a continuum, and only carefully composed and tightly monitored speech can be removed from a vicious circle of speech in which marking others in virtually any way intiates the descent into scapegoating itself. “Civility” is the name of the process by which elites do the monitoring. For Palin, speech, vigorous, unregulated, “passionate” speech, unafraid of being “mocked” by the guardians of “civility,” is the antidote to violence. Indeed, it may be that the more the speech draws upon metaphors from violence, the more it models the transcendence of violence: “As I said while campaigning for others last March in Arizona during a very heated primary race, ‘We know violence isn’t the answer. When we ‘take up our arms’, we’re talking about our vote’.”\n\nPalin’s speech reaches its logical paradox in its reference to the assault or, as she says, “blood libel” directed against her:\n\n“Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election…But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”\n\nWell now, how, one might ask, can Palin say that acts of violence begin and end in themselves while, in the very next breath, accusing her opponents of inciting violence? The answer may lie in some implicit distinction between “monstrous” and more “ordinary” forms of criminality, in which case Palin is making a very local point about this particular incident, not about the relation between words and deeds more generally. But that wouldn’t be very helpful—would she then be saying that the Left’s argument about uncivil discourse might hold in other cases? It may be that Palin doesn’t yet have a way of talking about what is central to the kinds of verbal attacks directed most recently against her, but which we can easily recognize as those of White Guilt.\n\nPalin, for the Left, represents all that is unmarked in American society—she must be marked. Her argumentative strategy is to recognize this marking, but doing so in the same terms her opponents are using leaves her open to the charge that she also sees “incivility” as a “danger,” and in that case is not better than the Left insofar as she defines “incivility” as partisan attacks against her. Why isn’t blaming the shootings in Tucson on Palin just as “metaphorical” and therefore harmless as asserting that you want citizens to be “armed and dangerous” when they confront their elected officials with facts and arguments?\n\nWhy isn’t it even beneficial, and to be celebrated as any other discourse driven by what Palin calls our “imperfect passions”? In other words, Palin seems to be tempted (as I think she has at other times) to play along with the Left’s massive inflation of the notion of “incitement” (along with “defamation” and other once strictly legal terms) which has culminated in contemporary hate speech laws.\n\nAt this point, the only answer is to look at her much criticized use of the term “blood libel,” and realize that we have a simple question of fact here. Was it a blood libel, or not? If she was accused of having innocent blood on her hands, then there’s the line at which discourse threatens to pass over into violence, because accusing someone of thereby stepping outside of the boundaries of legality and non-violence does lead to the conclusion that only answering the guilty in kind can restore those boundaries. Scapegoating should not be criminalized, but it is wrong; and, Palin would implicitly be asserting, we can recognize it if we are being “honest” (al though perhaps not if we are merely worried about being “civil”).\n\nIs someone really dishonest enough to say that calling Obama a “socialist,” or that the health care law is “job-killing,” or even questioning Obama’s place of birth or religion, does the same—that is, accuse him of having innocent blood on his hands? I’m sure the answer is “yes”—and that’s a good starting point for vigorous debate that would still eschew the “dueling pistols” Palin refers to in mocking the nostalgia for more civil days. In fact, focusing arguments on what counts as scapegoating, and striving for a minimal account of the same, would provide for an ongoing inquiry into and performance of, “imperfect passion.”\n\nAddendum, 1/15\n\nIt seems to me the concluding argument here can be clarified by applying the distinction between metaphor and reference to political discourse. Whatever plausibility the argument against “heated” rhetoric has derives from the sense that violent metaphors (shooting, killing, targeting, blowing up, attacking, etc., etc.) in political speech have some correlation and, therefore, at least possible causal relationship to actual violence. I can make my position simpler by saying, as I think is already implicit in my post, that I believe there is no such correlation, much less causation: zero. In fact, as I suggested as well, it is more likely that, as I think Palin implies, the relation can be reversed: the transformation of words denoting violence into metaphors referring to political competition defers political violence, by making the political arena a richer and freer “combat zone.” That is, you don’t need to step outside of it in order to express your “imperfect passions.”\n\nIn that case, to return to the example I conclude with, the difference between holding Palin responsible for murder, and calling Obama a Muslim, is that the former makes a referential claim, one which could presumably be proven or disproved evidentially or through a demonstrable causal chain; the latter, meanwhile, as a question of faith and therefore, in American public discourse, an inherently “internal” and private issue, is subject to neither proof nor disproof. Therefore, however vicious the intention behind the claim, however much an attempt to make Obama appear the usurping alien, the claim that Obama is a Muslim functions more as a metaphor than an accusation.\n\nThe only thing that would change if one were to make the metaphorical dimension explicit and say, for example, “it’s like we had a Muslim President,” or, as Rush Limbaugh already does, calling him “Imam Obama,” would be a loss of the sense that he is concealing his true faith. But, while I am no expert in “Obama is a Muslim” political culture, it seems to me that this element, the years long deception which would have to be involved, and which would make Obama’s Muslimness truly scandalous, never seems to be the emphasis. This is why the “charge” against Obama is subject to ideological revision in a way that the charge against Palin isn’t—one could say, how great it is that we have our first “Muslim President” (just as Clinton was our first “black President”) in a way that one could never say, “it’s great that Palin is a murderer.”\n\n(Indeed, other than of dishonesty, of what, exactly, would one be “accusing” Obama the Muslim of?) So, aside from the extremely relevant fact that no major media outlet or elected official has made this claim (unlike the blood libel on Palin), the respective allegations are qualitatively different from one another. Even if Obama were a Muslim, or if he really wasn’t born in the U.S., the proper response would still be voting him out of office or, at most, impeaching him; if Palin has been inciting murder, and in a way that makes her untouchable legally, the commensurate responses are very different."
    },
    {
      "slug": "madison-not-cairo",
      "title": "Madison, not Cairo",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’m much more interested in what is going on in Wisconsin than in the Middle East. The Middle East is the business of Middle Easterners now—America gave up its pretentions as a superpower, or leader of the Free World, or hegemon, or whatever, with the election of Barack Obama. Who knows—maybe it’s for the best. If we get serious at some point and start electing real rather than vanity presidents we’ll have to start from scratch in designating allies and enemies, and maybe we’ll be less bogged down by whatever balancing act the State Department thinks they’ve been performing for the past few decades. Either some unstable, very flawed, but perhaps workable Islamic Republics (with the emphasis probably swinging back and forth between noun and adjective); or straight out Islamic (or, much less likely, secular) totalitarian regimes; or failed states with genocidal militias settling scores.\n\nTotalitarian regimes can stagger along for a couple of decades and sooner or later the scores get settled and everyone gets tired, and things revert back to Islamic Republic or Islamic Republic. In the meantime, it’s likely that the empowered elements in the region will be less capable of waging serious war, certainly against us but even against Israel—al though Israel certainly needs to be ready to go it alone, and to drop the rules imposed by the international media/human rights community, or the continuous simulated Nuremberg Trial directed at Israel. They’ll probably need to sell us oil anyway, and if they want to throw acid on their own faces to spite the Great Satan, maybe it will shock us into seriousness, i.e., drilling and building nuclear power plants.\n\nWisconsin, though—the fate of Western society is at stake there. Public employee unions have the government extract dues from their members; they use those dues to fund Democratic Party politicians who “negotiate” fat benefit packages with those same unions which promise future bankruptcy but long after the politicians who gave away the store can be made accountable for it. Even more, in its most advanced form, public employee unionism creates little one-party states where, even if you elect budget-cutting, tax-cutting Republicans, the public employees have already been given the store, and can shut down the entire government in response to any attempt at breaking those promises.\n\nSo, it’s better to keep electing Democrats, who at least might spread the largesse around. Even more: public employee unions have a monopoly within a monopoly—not only is there no competition for government provided services, not only does the government not have to worry about making a profit, but now the government can’t even exercise its power as monopolist to impose reasonable terms upon its workforce. And there’s even more… But you get the point.\n\nNow, though, after the disappointing collapse of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s governorship at the first serious battle with those same public employee unions, a series of Republican governors have emerged who do seem serious: Chris Christie in New Jersey, John Kasich in Ohio, somewhat more equivocally, Mitch Daniels in Indiana—and, of course, most prominently right now, Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Walker in particular is getting at the heart of the problem, and is not only negotiating the benefits themselves but the conditions that make it possible for the public employees to hold their “employers” hostage. His bill is every bit as radical as his enemies say—it seems to me that it would have been enough to simply make the payment of union dues optional: that in itself would collapse the racket, and the Democrats’ money laundering scheme.\n\nAnd he could have presented such a plan as a pure defense of the right of individual union members, without mentioning collective bargaining at all. But I’m sure he and his fellow Republicans have their reasons for attacking the problem comprehensively, and it does allow for an all-out fight with everyone fully aware of the consequences.\n\nThe Left certainly understands the consequences, and they are enraged and desperate. If the Left can indeed be defeated decisively, even destroyed as a force in modern society, the path lies through Wisconsin. Take away public employee unions and you see a drastic decline in Democrat and left money more generally; you will see far more sparsely populated Leftist demonstrations; you will no longer see the intimidating enforcers at so many demonstrations of both the Left and Right; the Democrats start losing elections regularly, and then who gives them money or votes for them since all their support is predicated upon them being in power and able to give some people other people’s (or imaginary) money. The outcome, in Wisconsin, let alone the rest of the country, is still in doubt—we are at the beginning of the beginning. But the survival of the market economy and its political order right now depends upon what happens in Madison at lot more than on what happens in Cairo."
    },
    {
      "slug": "health-care",
      "title": "Health Care",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Health care, as we speak about it today, is a completely modern phenomenon. Hippocrates aside, if you go back maybe 150 years, doctors had no effect on their patients: your chances of recovery if you did see a doctor were identical to your chances if you didn’t. “Health care,” or the medical profession, emerges along with modern science and the application of the sciences to everyday life in the forms of hygiene and nutrition. And medicine has been a rich source of tropes for the framing of modern dilemmas, as recognized by the very widespread claim that, in our thinking about moral, political and ethical issues, “therapy,” and the associated categories of “healthy/sick,” “normal/pathological,” etc., has displaced notions of sin and guilt, good and evil.\n\nIt makes perfect sense, then, that progressive politics has always seen the incorporation of health care into the cradle to grave welfare system of the modern state as the jewel in the crown of the expert-centered organization of life central to such politics. The nationalization of health care makes state power potentially unlimited: not only directly medical issues, involving coverage, treatment, price of medical services, training of practitioners, research and innovation, etc., come directly within reach, but all questions indirectly bearing upon health do as well. And which questions don’t bear indirectly upon health? Whether it’s what parents tell their children about homosexuality, the hamburger you had for dinner, or the availability of birth control and, increasingly, social situations such as bullying, shyness, etc.—all affect health, all impose potential costs on the system, all sprout new forms of expertise and regulation. To use a medical metaphor, whether health care is centralized or decentralized is a life or death question for the free society.\n\nThe libertarian answer, to privatize medicine and insurance and render them sets of voluntary exchanges, is good as far as it goes. Libertarians rightly argue that what we call health insurance today is not really insurance in any meaningful sense—it is simply a way of pooling costs in government mandated ways, and in ways that makes the real costs of medical procedures inscrutable. Health insurance should be like car or home insurance: a premium in exchange for coverage for specified health care needs. But this analogy is limited—the sum total of bad things that can happen to your car or house is known in advance: if your house is worth 300,000$, then the insurance company knows that no catastrophe can exceed that.\n\nBut there is no such ceiling when it comes to your body—if your insurance company agrees to cover “cancer treatments,” must that include a decade of increasingly expensive treatments with ever diminishing effect? Who decides? A court—according to what criteria? The doctor—which one? It seems that at some point, some irreconcilable disagreement between the parties is very likely, generating enormous resentment and terror as our media-saturated society is flooded with images of beloved parents and grandparents cut off from their treatments either by evil insurance companies or daughters and sons afraid of going broke. Politics is sure to channel such resentments, compromising the independence of independent arbiters of insurance contracts.\n\nSuch a system could only work if a significant majority of the members of society could openly accept the basic unfairness of life chances and death. We would have to be able to look on, with equanimity, as insurance companies withdraw support from dying patients, including those we love and ultimately ourselves; as grown children decide that funding their children’s education is more important than a few more years of life for their own parents, etc. And, of course, such equanimity would have to coincide with an acute awareness of the unprecedented character of all this, including the heart-wrenching possibility that a few more years might have lessened or even eliminated your particular dilemma.\n\nWe don’t have to go back further than the lifetimes of many living today to recall when “health care” involved very few decisions, and certainly not the impossible ethical ones we are constantly confronted with today: you accepted your fate, you made people comfortable as they accepted the inevitable. Even as some reliable treatments became widespread and childhood mortality almost eliminated, aging, sickness and death still provided the proverbial contours of our existence—the problem is, they still do.\n\nHere, it seems to me that the much maligned (especially by conservatives) “therapeutic culture” might come to our aid. Despite the vituperation and ridicule heaped upon the therapeutic, is there any reason to assume that the distinction between, say, “good” and “evil” is any more originary than that between “healthy” and “sick”? If we take the most basic distinction to be the one distinguishing sacred from profane, why is that distinction more adequately modeled on one binary rather than the other? They are just different ways of framing the more inclusive distinction between whole and rent—integrity vs. corruption, working vs. impaired, fixed vs. broken, etc., being other versions. To be healthy is to be whole, to retain one’s integrity, to be articulated, symmetrical—all are near synonyms for wholeness, which means to have a formal reality embodied in your physical one—just like the central object once we have all pointed to it and agreed to let it be.\n\nThe therapeutic culture, by way of its victimary turn, has also created our ability to, it seems, confer healthiness upon ourselves and each other. Perhaps the one product of the victimary culture that deserves to survive is our sensitivity the ways we describe “disabilities” (I, like I suspect most of us, cringe upon hearing—or remembering hearing, since you never do anymore—an older one, the unmarked term of my parents’ generation—like “crippled,” much less the brutal terms for mental disability: moron, idiot, even “retarded,” the more humane replacement for the preceding, and which is currently the object of a vigorous campaign across college campuses to proscribe “the ‘R’ word”).\n\nIt is really marvelous to see what people confined to wheelchairs (and the blind and deaf) are often able to do now, and our Gnostic, often cloying insistence that they can do it has certainly supplemented the prodigious technological innovations we must credit. We have also seen the emergence of an entire culture concerned with ways of coming to terms with disease, decline and death and the ability to turn, once all resources have been exhausted, from attributing responsibility to others (the doctor, the insurance company, the hospital, the state…) to simply seeing to the integrity and dignity of the patient and her loved ones. There is, we might say, a “healthy” way to finally let go.\n\nThe individualization of the sickening, recovering and dying processes thus introduced will not only guarantee our constant chafing at the restrictions and cookie-cutter categories of homogenized health care systems but further facilitate another process which I believe is inevitable, indeed, already well underway: the pluralization of therapies. Why shouldn’t the government or insurance company pay for, say, Native American cures? Because they haven’t been scientifically verified? You would have to have a very naïve faith in public confidence in the modern cult of professionalism and expertise to imagine that answer will hold the fort for long.\n\nThere will be more and more things government and insurance companies will have to and can’t pay for—but, at least, it’s possible to imagine the emergence of insurance companies which cater to the eccentric and desperate. So, as government presence recedes, health care decisions will devolve to the individual, producing more flexible norms of expertise. Does someone really need 6 years of medical school, 10 years of internship and residency, to help me with my aching back or cough? I doubt it and, more importantly, more and more people will come to doubt it, especially when they are the ones weighing costs. In the end it will be obvious that our health care needs are better met in this more differentiated manner, and on the open market, with practitioners, inventers of medical technologies and promoters of new methods engaged in competition with a close eye on the actual costs of skills and procedures.\n\nAt the same time, such a process will generate, in the short term and perhaps longer, inequalities and mistakes that will seem monstrous to many. There will be plenty of cases of people purporting to fix backs breaking them, of con men hawking fake treatments without fear of the regulator or licensing board, of new, prohibitively expensive treatments conspicuously available for a while (a long enough while to count the dead resulting from “health apartheid”) to only the very wealthy. And the question for us, as a civilization, will be: can we abide that? Health problems, today, have come to be experienced less as “acts of God” or the inevitable workings of Nature than as a kind of violence, uniquely, unpredictably and terrifyingly directed at individuals, violence to which we are all ultimately equally vulnerable—violence from private and public greed and callousness (insurance companies, doctors driving Mercedes, companies pumping carcinogens into the environment, pencil-pushing bureaucrats putting rules over compassion, etc.).\n\nThe demand for universal health care, or at least coverage, taps into a kind of originary terror. We would have to be able, to make ourselves whole, to suspend that attribution of violence, and learn to use our greater powers of physical healing as metaphors to enable healing of a more transcendent kind."
    },
    {
      "slug": "post-millennialism-and-originary-grammar",
      "title": "Post-millennialism and Originary Grammar",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans noted a while back that the first “market” was war, insofar as value is established through competition in a public space. According to that criterion the market can be traced further, to the most primitive hunting and gathering societies: one hunter would prove himself more proficient than others and the subsequent recognition, emulation, envy and resentment can be easily imagined. The seeds of the market are therefore planted in the earliest human societies, as Gans elsewhere suggests that private property can be sited on the originary scene itself, as in any scene of shared consumption—at the very least, that bit of food I am about to put into my mouth must be mine. Even more, the rough egalitarianism of the originary scene and early human societies would always have been countered by the marginal inequality that would result from some kind of proficiency, even if just speed and ruthlessness in the process of division.\n\nIn that case, the progression from egalitarian hunter/gatherer societies to the gift economy, via the prolonged and enormously important Big Man stage of social development and ultimately to the modern market economy can be described in terms of a dynamic between domination by the object (with guaranteed access to the object for all members of the community and absolute fealty on the part of all members of the community to the God immanent in it) and differentiation through competition on some public scene—by “public,” I mean no more than some spectator and a judgment. Resentment towards whoever so differentiates himself “too much” would be conveyed in the name of the center, and resentment towards the homogenizing effect of the centripetal pull of the object would be advanced in the name of some site of differentiation.\n\nFor most of human history the market, or public competition, is on the margins of the social order and strictly regulated—even more, such competition is channeled into the devotion to the center constitutive of the order. The gift economy would always be threatening to spiral out of control because competition between rival families and patriarchs would always be on the verge of violent eruptions—the honor/shame moral economy must be maintained so fanatically for precisely this reason. The single attempt to combine in a balance, an open marketplace of goods and ideas, with a slaveholding patriarchal, sacrificial order, the ancient Greek city-state, failed miserably, if spectacularly.\n\nThe solution to the problem of transcending the tribal social order was the Big Man, and its further extension into imperial order. There is still a gifting economy here, but a permanently asymmetrical one—the people pay tribute to the king who, in turn, as god or representative of god, gives life to the people. Society is still sustained by a single, central scene, and the most pertinent competition, actual or potential, would be over occupancy of the center. The splendor of the center overawes any potential rival to the throne—the center is now embedded in a cosmological order: the hierarchal structure of reality guarantees the social hierarchy.\n\nBoth metaphysics and monotheism sustain that central scene by revising it fundamentally: the inquiry into the higher order, for Plato, enables us to so hierarchically order our own souls so as to submit and participate in a social order ideally governed by the best; God as king supplants Pharaoh, and the promised apocalypse involves the establishment of theocracy on earth. Of course, earthly kings are abolished or substantially downgraded, but the entire world remains a single scene—the only possible resistance to what Heidegger called the onto-theo-logical order is existential rebellion along with the forces of evil.\n\nThe “aristocratic” and tribal values—striving for glory, for greatness, but also revenge and recognition by inferiors—are sharply restricted and, by now, close to extinct. (Part of the historical task of feminism was to chase these values out of the few communal and private spaces where they still flourished.) Keeping these values down has required the assertion of the single central scene—first of all, in each nation-state, but more generally in the scene of “history,” in which “great deeds” had their meaning extracted from them, becoming part of a process that would make further such acts unnecessary. The project of transnational progressivism, to subject all of humanity to a single (anonymous, as the in the EU) global authority under international and human rights law, should be seen, at least in part, as an attempt to make the recrudescence of the martial values unthinkable. We would have, at that point, less a single scene than a single scenelessness. Fortunately, that’s not possible.\n\nThe modern market emerged under the protection of the modified, singular, central scene, and it needed it, resented it, and revised it. The great sweep of the unfettered market in the Anglo-Saxon world proceeded under extremely minimal central governments, but also in close association with equally grand imperial projects—the subjugation of a large part of the world in one case, and the conquest of a continent in the other (or “others,” including Canada, Australia and South Africa). The creation of great fortunes looked very much like new monarchies, and the political economy justifying the great economic expansion spoke, up until the end of the 19th century at least (when the marginalist school of dissenters emerged), of “society” as comprised of a massive accumulation of “wealth” created by the totality of social “labor”—I think that Hannah Arendt was essentially right when she claimed that Adam Smith’s political economy was already implicitly communist, assuming as it did that the total social product could be calculated in terms of the total social labor—and Marx thought so too, turning Smith, Ricardo and the others back “on their feet” like he did with Hegel’s dialectic of “history” (wherein the Communist revolution would be the final singular scene).\n\nIn that case, when the totalitarian upheavals of the 20th century licensed themselves with scientific and technological tales of an inevitable historical process, they were not essentially at odds with the theoretical cover under which the free market became dominant in its 19th century heyday. The often vibrant competition in the political realm has long been firmly subordinated to debates over how to grow the total social product or distribute it more equally—no politician, in an actual election campaign, would let the electorate know that a particular proposal might lower our standard of living a bit for a while, but it’s the right thing to do.\n\nEven more, I think it is a universally shared tacit assumption that, however honest, open, non-intrusive our governments might be, the consequence of even the tiniest decline in living standards would be a complete delegitimation of the political system, unless all involved declared the unequivocal moral equivalent of war against said decline. In other words, the Western ruling class has long shared with Marxists the assumption that politics is just a reflex of economics, and with vulgar Marxists that economics is a question of who get how much.\n\nThe post-millennial would mean that we don’t any more believe in an event to end all events. That would also have to mean no more singular central scene, no more “history,” and no more total social product. Instead, society would be comprised of a vast array of overlapping scenes, some of them provisionally elevated above others—those that, for the moment, are getting more “hits.” We already have the makings of such an order, but the obstacles to its free development are formidable: if there is no more total social wealth, then we can’t demand that someone give us more of it, or guarantee that there be more of it; if there is no central government, we would have to rely upon each other in our daily transactions; who would make sure that new dictatorships won’t emerge, new enemies of market society empowered, and new tribal wars break out; and, moreover, we would all have to live peacefully with very different people, free to express abhorrence of your own way of life—all these possibilities are simmering right underneath the placid surface of liberal democracy, and releasing our grip on the central scene and the object at its center might be just as likely to set them loose as to render them obsolete once and for all. At any rate, how could we know one way or another, and the stakes are as high as they get.\n\nIt would be counter to the entire idea of the post-millennial, though, to have a grand strategy for accomplishing it. Rather, helping to usher in the post-millennial would have to mean learning to attend to the kinds of practices, attitudes and relationships that would render the total social product and history unreal. These practices, attitudes and relationships would involve the firm, even absolute, assertion of binary oppositions (true/false, good/evil, friend/enemy, etc.) while simultaneously highlighting the paradoxical character of all such distinctions and the extreme contingency of any consequences we can imagine descending from any particular choice at a particular fork in the road.\n\nFor example: I am pretty certain that we in the US will not resolve our current debt crisis, that our system of entitlements will become unsustainable, that neither our political class nor our citizenry is anywhere near capable of addressing these issues and therefore preventing a social collapse within a couple of decades, and that long term demographic trends will overwhelm us regardless. My thinking on all this is, in other words, apocalyptic—to quote John Derbyshire, we are all doomed. And I am willing to take the extreme political stance commensurate with the assumption that only the slightest sliver of possibility can prevent such doom: no increase in the debt limit, no way. Let’s decide right here and now what we really want to spend the money we actually have on.\n\nOf course, having said this, there’s not much more to say. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s thoughts on the atomic bomb, either this social collapse will just be a somewhat worse version of the economic recessions and depressions, and the social crises (e.g., increases in lawlessness, etc.) that we are already familiar with; or it will be something totally different. If it will be the same, only worse, well, then, we will manage to muddle through it (well, maybe not all of us), in ways that we couldn’t predict or prepare for right now anyway; if it’s totally different, then we can’t have anything to say about it. Either way, it’s not “interesting.”\n\nWhat’s interesting is what we can only prepare for by ceding imaginary control over any central scene: how goodness will emerge out of evil, how the truth will assert itself amidst falsehood, how enemies will become friends, how small, marginal, neglected possibilities will create new centers, and so on. So, the assertion of good against evil slips into solicitation of good out of evil, which also means exploring the ways good turns into evil and evil into good—but this is essentially a grammatical problem, or at least can be treated as such. Pursue good and flee evil>Evil pursues and good flees you>Flight is good, pursuit evil>Good is the flight from your pursuits.\n\nThat’s one line of grammatical inquiry, anyway, leading to potentially interesting questions. Flight from your pursuits to what? Do your pursuits in turn pursue you? What is involved in the literalization of these metaphors? What would be yielded by reversing the terms, designating flight as evil, pursuit good? These questions could only be answered in specific situations—originary grammar can only give us the form.\n\nIf metaphysics is the belief in the primacy of the declarative sentence (over the more dangerous and sacrificial ostensives and imperatives); while the God of Judaism adopted by the Christian world is named by the declarative sentence (a generic template of such a sentence, as Gans has recently noted), then the culture of the West created by the convergence between Athens and Jerusalem could be seen as a sustained defense of the declarative: “dedicated to the proposition,” to truncate a sentence from one of the greatest products of this convergence. In Western culture, nothing is acceptable or legitimate that can’t be “deduced” from a shared proposition. But while the metaphysical culture that prevailed through the early to middle stages of market society wishes to deduce all imperatives and ostensives from declaratives, a more modest post-millennial “indicativity” is content to be able to translate all other speech acts into the indicative mood.\n\nI’d like to push this a bit further. Why this intrinsic connection between the declarative sentence and the cultural preliminaries of market society: the God who cannot be summoned by name and the space of open discussion? The connection, I think, is between the declarative sentence, which creates a reality resistant to our respective imperatives, and the spectacle created by the public competition I earlier suggested can be traced all the way back to human origins and which is the basic cell of the marketplace. One wouldn’t have needed a declarative sentence to indicate, affirm and name the central object, but you would to point out who won a competitive event.\n\nPeacefully concluded contests between “champions” would be the first events to direct our attention away from the central object and set us on the road to secular narrative. The power of Western—onto-theo-logical—culture lies in its assertion of a central stage and event that transcends such contests while bestowing meaning upon them: the struggle for holiness, to spread the gospel, to accomplish freedom and equality, or whatever; but this is because it recognizes the destructive force of rivalries, between bearers of absolute truths and gods who are absolute rulers. If we just take one step further and directly sacralize the creation of unique sentences, rather than the God or Truth named by such sentences, we can simply accept that everyone is following ostensives and imperatives they could hardly identify, much less “justify,” making the work of cultural pedagogy not the extirpation of unacceptable ostensives and imperatives but their framing as indicatives we could work on.\n\nIf there is no singular central scene, no historical unfolding, but rather a lot of “diagonal” movement in different directions, then we can’t recognize any scene that we don’t enter and constitute with our own words and gestures. I enter a scene you have started by following some ostensive-imperative chain and rendering the ostensive-imperative I see you following in a declarative form that can include the one I am following. To put it simply, I put what is incommensurate in our respective volitions into a sentence including them both and invite you to add another incommensurable and include that. If there is no total social product, no measurable accumulation of material wealth, but rather an ever changing global division of labor to which we attune ourselves, then economic productivity will migrate increasingly to enhanced social interactions—to people getting better at distinguishing themselves from each other and reading each other.\n\nHere I’ll conclude in an anecdotal manner by noting that young people today seem to me to be highly self-reflexive, in a way consistent with the constant self-reference imposed by the various social media. You can call this “narcissism,” but why? Or, rather, so what—or then what? You will hear college and high school students say things like “can we get to the point where we… already”? Or: “this is the part where you…” In other words, directly framing their actions in terms of formulaic narrative structures. They are constructing themselves as potentially shared centers. They are also, I think, compensating for the radical absence of legitimate social models—they are constructing models for themselves out of the material—the debris, if you like—of a now centrifugal Western culture.\n\nWe could describe this absence of models in ways that could allow us to blame a lot of people if we like, all of us who should have been better models, I suppose (we mocked the establishment, undermined authority, broke up families, etc., etc.)—but, again, so what? Maybe the models we have inherited have just exhausted themselves; maybe the only models are the ones we now construct, partially retroactively. And through language, as we are certainly in the middle of a sea shift in the linguistic possibilities of English unlike any we have seen for centuries—you just need to look at text-messaging, or consider the globalization of English, to see that.\n\nAll these new means for distinguishing themselves, for making themselves the center of narratives they live and recite and pass on to each other, remains a dedication to the proposition. The best thing to do, as far as I can see (which is not very far, I admit), is to keep generating new sentence templates, and templates for generating templates (which, I suppose, would then be algorithms). It might be the only road away from serfdom."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-little-social-theory",
      "title": "A Little Social Theory",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "There are a few categories central to originary thinking: center-margin, vertical-horizontal, sign-object. We can multiply such categories, adding rather obvious ones which are probably already there, like inside/outside, and others, as necessary, perhaps less obvious: concealed/open, before/behind, amongst/amidst, visible/invisible, whole/rent, and so on. These are all very basic experiential categories, deeply embedded in language, often rooted in metaphorical extensions of human body parts and basic physical orientations to the world, and therefore rooted in the world of gesture. They are all extraordinarily rich in their conceptual possibilities—we can only face one way at a time, and as I face “forward” someone could be “backing me up” or “sneaking up from behind me.”\n\nIn their metaphorical extensions, these categories can all be made to cover different ground, and will overlap each other in various ways: we can draw a line between those inside and those outside, but we will do so while we, on the margin, are facing the center. It might be that language is little more than such combinations and extensions. My first suggestion is that social thinking have recourse to these basic experiential terms, since these are the terms in which we necessarily think already.\n\nThe basic experiential terms are our only source for describing the sacred and transcendental realm, and consequently the terms in which we sacralize and describe reality. If it makes sense to speak about God as “high” (on the vertical/horizontal axis), then it makes sense that metaphors or height, elevation, and so on will be used to talk about value hierarchies (“hierarchy” itself, of course, a metaphor of “height”) and social ones—and spiritual, value and social hierarchies will all overlap, refer to, and reinforce each other. These terms also become the coin of public dialogue and discussion: you can point out, for example, that those who are “highest” socially are not the highest ethically, and this will inevitably appear scandalous.\n\nIt is also the case that the creation of new social hierarchies will generate new ethical and spiritual vocabularies—the creation of vast empires, with extensive gradations, was likely necessary for it to become possible to think of God as the “most high,” the “King of Kings,” etc. And if the king is the highest, then whatever qualities can be attributed to the king can be applied to others who are thereby king-like, and elevated above their apparent status. If external or visible elevation can conceal internal or invisible degradation, then external or visible degradation can conceal internal or invisible elevation.\n\nSo, the highest of the high can be within the lowliest. And we can seek out, look for visible signs of, that highest, as a way of ordering our souls (our invisible portion) and as a means of palliating, external, visible disorder (the distinction between order and disorder itself derivative of the distinction between “whole” and “rent” or “broken”). All these discussions are carried out by moving these different experiential categories around in relation to each other, and I don’t think that anything has or can change in this regard. What Eric Voegelin called “differentiation” as opposed to “compactness” is, I think, nothing more than this continual involution and articulation of these categories, creating new levels of reality.\n\nWe would then speak about any social or intellectual change in terms of some transformation in one of these categories, and in their relative prominence in discourse. To stick with the example I have just given, the various terms involved in verticality would become more important in an imperial order, and new possibilities of “heights” would become imaginable. And post-imperial societies would be especially sensitive to the abuse of “heights,” as are the “anti-haughty” religions of Judaism and Christianity, both of which took shape under imperial orders and the crisis of such orders (the same is true of Greek philosophy, an indispensable component of Christianity). Contemporary victimary discourse follows in this tradition, “heightening” our sensitivity to any “elevated” figures. Such sensitivities probably account for why those who occupy the “heights” economically (the rich, corporate executives) are almost always assumed to be “lower” ethically—as if we cannot accept that too many heights should be so close, reinforcing and “legitimating” each other.\n\nThis hypothesis, that our social relations are bound up with the various metaphorical extensions and articulations of the basic experiential categories, can be tested by anyone, in daily discussions about anything. Are we actually so concerned with “heights”—do notions of elevation work their way regularly into our hopes and complaints, do we argue about what should be seen as high or low, do we follow these terms across various levels of metaphoricity, do they impinge upon other terms, like boundaries between inside and outside, and so on? You can easily check for yourself, by paying a bit more attention to the way you and others speak and write. (Are “softness” and “flexibility,” as opposed to “hardness,” derivative of the inside/outside distinction, with a bit of whole/broken mixed in?) And I think it is an advantage for social thinking if we can trace our more theoretical discussions back to, and present them as modifications of, the ways society already “thinks itself.”\n\nA test of this theoretical approach would be seeing how it helps us to describe the transitions from the egalitarian primitive community to the gift economy and, finally, the market economy. I have already pointed to a way of doing so in my previous post, where I suggested that we can see the emergence of the market economy in the not quite basic experiential category of actor/spectator—not quite basic, since even if the participants on the originary scene are watching each other (and therefore performing for each other), the categories certainly don’t differentiate themselves there. But the actor/spectator differentiation does build upon the center/margin distinction, perhaps using that experiential category to further differentiate the reciprocal observing on the originary scene—maybe the emergence of the actor/spectator distinction further differentiates the inside/outside boundary which is the concern of those looking at each other on the originary scene.\n\nThis differentiation out of the actor/spectator distinction would first of all happen on the margins of the single “compact” scene; it would then get bounded (those permitted in, those kept out) or institutionalized; then there might be lesser scenes and “higher” ones; all the while new and unauthorized (eccentric, invisible to the center) scenes emerge which prove to be more inclusive. Essential to the actor/spectator set up is the affirmation on the part of the spectator of a winner and a loser, a better and a worse, a more or less preferable. (One is left standing, hand held up, the other falls, is in the dust, dejected, etc.—could we talk about winning and losing, success and failure, with metaphors of standing erect, kneeling, and lying?) On the compact scene, meanwhile, no such distinctions are allowed—the object attracts and commands all equally.\n\nIn that case, we have a tension between two scenes: the originary scene, upon which the entire community acts in relation to a single object, both whole and transcendent, on the one hand, and divisible among the members, on the other hand; and the platformed scene, where some act in competition with each other, and others observe and judge. These two types of scene persist until now: when we speak of the “public interest” or the “common good,” we are referring social wealth and the sources of social decision making as a single thing, which constitutes us as a “public,” and which is divisible in some “fair” way. It might be that society is impossible, that we can’t think or speak intelligibly, without being able to make such a reference or gesture—this tacit mapping of “it” and “us” upon one another might be the unmarked condition enabling language.\n\nThose located upon the “it/us” scene would resent those on the platformed scene for introducing division or, more precisely, interfering with the symmetry of “us” and “it.” And those on the platformed scene would resent those on the it/us scene taking away from individuals the opportunity to represent unique values. But those on the it/us scene would also desire the liberation of the platform, and those on the platform the security of it/us. Finally, of course, it should hardly be necessary to mention that we are all always on both scenes, at certain moments committing ourselves a bit more one way or the other.\n\nThere is an ambiguity in the platformed scene itself, where, from the very beginning, there is both a performance and a product. This would also go back to the very beginning: the better hunter brings back more prey, more food for the community, but he also probably puts on a better show, is a better source of stories, a more sought after pedagogue and mate, etc. We can see this split in the development of the market, showing the common root of warriors and entrepreneurs, and also the common origin of celebrity and consumer culture. We could hypothesize that in the gift economy and the honor/shame moral economy that goes along with it, it is competition among the performers, whose reliability is at stake at every instant, that is the issue; in a fully fledged market economy, it is competition among objects, and we don’t even have to see the performers.\n\nThese are tendencies: what we now we refer to as “branding” directs our attention to reliable actors in the marketplace, and even the most honor-besotted warlord had to make sure the goods got home; still, there is a fairly radical break between the predominance of one or the other tendency. We also see a split in politics, between the tendency to emphasize and publicize performers, and even to produce, within a free society, simulacra of the monarchs and aristocracy of the previous political economy, on the one hand, and the tendency towards sortition, or the rotation in roles among essentially anonymous individuals, which gets resolved in the rights to speech and assembly and the selection of ruling elites.\n\nThe relation between these two types of scenes would generate the transformations in the basic experiential categories—the two scenes would have to be adjusted to each other regularly, and those categories would provide the resources for doing so. Performances get integrated on the primary ritual scene concerned with reinforcing the it/us. The goods procured by the “champion” are, of course, brought back to the central scene. It is much easier to accept the extravagances of the super-rich and their implication of all of us in their risk-taking if we believe that they thereby add to the total social wealth, and are following their “human nature” (the “us” in perfect conformity to the “it”).\n\nBut the platformed scene will be perpetually available for localizing conflicts within a rule governed arena and thus used to frame the it/us scene, and differentiated itself—elevated in a hierarchy of scenes, with rules for ingress and egress at each level, with further differentiations between and amongst actors and spectators, respectively: the knowledge of the spectator might by the “highest,” accessible to only a few; or action might be the highest, especially when associated with insights (unconcealments) possible only on the spot, or when being first on the scene constitutes the scene. Social inquiry treats all of society as a set of reciprocally embedded and referring scenes, ultimately bounded by the imperative to maintain the it/us scene in some form. And, when we think, we might be said to be internal spectators of our own external and internal actions.\n\nOn the it/us scene, language is the attempt to map us onto it—there is a premium on transparency, that is. We want to be able to follow each other’s gesture to the object and back from the object to the gesture, and to ensure that the other can do the same with our own gesture. The sign, ideally, is the effluvium of the object, and the notion that the object is in some sense the product of the sign would be extremely dangerous. The shift from an object centered to a sign centered reality would follow the emergence of the various market scenes: if, as spectators, we can judge performances, as sign users we can perform as well, first of all in imitating and reporting the performance we judge.\n\nRhetoric in the sense of persuading is present on the originary scene, but not the possibility of rhetoric as deception, distraction, or invention. The centralizing of individuals on the successive and ramified market scenes would set eloquence in tension with transparency. Signs and language themselves become part of the economy, i.e., a site of competition and exchange: as soon as we are doing more than affirming some shared attention, what each of us says provides some value added to the audience—that is, it is an object on the market, and storytellers will of course be in competition. When what I have to say provides you with access to a unique scene, it is a gift; when it provides you with a means for circulating among other scenes, it is more of a commodity; when it repeats a commonplace, it refers us back to common belonging on the ongoing originary scene.\n\nAs language enters and permeates the market, the object, the it, itself becomes language, our shared linguistic being: an explicitly shared linguistic being, the acknowledgement that we are mutually creating reality by breaking up language and restoring it through linguistic exchanges would be the epitome of a marketized existence. Transparency in language would never go away, but it would now take the form of our playing on the same field, however contingently any particular ludic interval might last.\n\nWhat “History” does is map the emergent political economic scenes onto the originary scene: that is, the actor/spectator platforms are modeled on the it-us scene. Every new scene can be placed in a sequence of scenes or within a hierarchy of scenes that “manifests” or “embodies” the originary condition in which mankind stands collectively before a single object—they are all just examples of the originary it-us scene. That the object is both material and transcendent, that mankind is both desiring and deferring allows for change, but it’s always change that further realizes or falls away from the initial conditions. Once you have packed all the diverse scenes recorded and imagined onto a single model scene you have your theory of history. This is the residue of imperial history, and the longstanding, dialectically entwined, resistance to it. (Imperial history is motivated by the desire to have the contest over and the winner declared; anti-imperial history by the desire to have that decision overruled, equally decisively.)\n\nFor a different way of looking at history, we can begin by examining the final sentence in the previous paragraph: “This is the residue of imperial history, and the longstanding, dialectically entwined, resistance to it.” That right there is the basis of a theory of history, and maybe the resentment towards theories of history is the source of theories of history, as the resentment towards imperial orders seems to generate new, more encompassing and monstrous ones. But there is plenty that escapes these centralizing scenes, and a way of attending to those other scenes might be to adhere to the simple rule that all historical innovation results from being situated on more than one scene simultaneously.\n\nI may have no choice, I may be obeying the imperative, to resist imperial scenes, especially in the deceptive forms in which they have come down to us today, but perhaps a still small voice, or a little social theory, also tells me that on other scenes life goes on without reference to the succession of imperial orders (or, for that matter, that on occasion the imperial position will remain the default one and can be sufficiently and even benevolently blended with other orders). So, the scene I am now impelled to construct is one which I offer as a gift to all those wishing to enter the space I am trying to open up, and anyone else entering pays me back in kind by “fleshing out” the scene or adding to the maxims governing it.\n\nThese scenes get constructed as pragmatic paradoxes, which is the way that mistakes (breaks in the originary body of language) get re-set and incommensurables commensurated. “The meek will inherit the earth” just replaces the extremely counter-intuitive “meek” for its opposite; “the last will be first and the first will be last” just reverses the two terms by implicitly positing two scenes: the visible one, on which the first will be first and the last last; and an invisible one, where the seemingly impossible, indeed, definitionally impossible, will take place. We can generate such paradoxes all day long: not until you reach the depths will you find yourself in the heavens; only among enemies will you discover your real friends, etc.\n\nI don’t believe that the philosophical paradoxes are made up of anything more than such transitional scenes or events. A pragmatic resolution of, for example, the Cretan liar’s paradox would be to say that the Cretan has renounced his Cretanness, has converted to some more truthful identity, by exploiting his identity as a Cretan to confirm the difference of Cretans from the group to which his interlocutors belong (we can assume that he isn’t saying this to an audience of Cretans). We might see this resolution as self-deluded or opportunist—it would have a lot in common with, say, medieval Jewish converts to Christianity who then acted as experts on the Talmud for their new Christian colleagues—but it’s a good example for that very reason.\n\nThe paradox lies in the terms of inside/outside relations: you can’t be an insider if every attempt to acquire the signs of belonging mark you as a mere imitator, i.e., even more starkly as an outsider; the resolution of the paradox lies in converting the markers of outsiderness to markers of an even deeper insiderness than those possessed by the insiders: as markers, for example, of one’s closeness to a newly discovered center or newly reached height, of obedience to the unity of symbolic and social verticality, of one’s skill in policing the border between inside and outside. Whether you happen to like a particular resolution or not, the fact remains that it is through such means that vagueness in the relation between symbolic and social verticality, the implementation of the imperatives of symbolic verticality, the precise border between inside and outside, and so on, gets clarified or exploited.\n\nThe resolution of pragmatic paradoxes, which is all we ever do as thinkers, are the products of inquiry, of disciplinary spaces, which emerge any time we find that what some of us are attending from can in fact be attended to (we are on different scenes, even if we are in the same location) and that we therefore can and must create a new medium for joint attention.\n\nSo, expanding the fully marketized political economic order entails restoring the originary it-us scene in terms of language and originary mistakenness; and restoring originary mistakenness implies the creation of pragmatic paradoxes that issue in maxims offered as gifts upon new, hybrid scenes. Now, not all paradoxes and maxims have the same relation to reality: the Keynesian “spend in order to save” has the same look as the maxims I just tried out, and has probably been attractive for that reason and we might simply say it is false nevertheless. Still, Keynesianism was an attempt at a leap in being, perhaps following the failure of certain forms of the gift economy to back up the market economy.\n\nAnd maybe it had to be tried out in order to discover its limits, within the battle of maxims within history; while, perhaps, it still has some local, limited validity. All such leaps of being, formulated through paradoxes, concern boundaries and thresholds between the different interdependent political economic forms. If the market economy fails it is indeed because the market, the gift and primitive egalitarian elements of the political economy are at odds with each other in some way. To frame the problem in linguistic terms, each level of the political and moral economy must be robust enough to provide a vocabulary and grammar for the other levels: family life needs to be unproblematic enough to provide ways of speaking about the budget, habits of self-reliance (people “standing up” for themselves) within neighborhoods sufficiently shared so as to leaven our discussions of challenge and response in foreign policy, and so on.\n\nOn the more pragmatic level, if people are not willing to take complete responsibility for a particular parcel of earth, for a specific organization of people, that is, to stake their honor and be willing to suffer shame on behalf of, that parcel and that group (what we often call “families”), the market economy won’t work either; if people are not willing to volunteer, to offer gifts that might not be reciprocated, things would collapse pretty quickly.\n\nAnd the same is true if people are not willing to use each others’ words. The surest sign today that we all participate in shared being, upon some it-us scene, is the use and misuse of language in common use—linguistic cannibalism, to put it simply. The more rapidly and energetically we gobble up, spit out, digest, expel, chop up, vomit, etc., each other’s words, the more we have such a scene. I don’t know how one would prove or dispute this, but it seems to me that phrases and statements circulate through all the media—from politicians to pop stars to reality stars to newscasters, to facebook pages to everyday discourse and back again—far more rapidly and with much greater shifts in meaning, perspective, including irony, parody, from literal to metaphor, from metaphor to literal, than ever before.\n\nEffective discourse finds a way inside this circulation and takes a phrase hostage so as to reveal some boundary or threshold by manipulating the basic experiential concepts in a new way. (The notion of hostage taking, which rightly evokes so much horror today—except when leftists accuse Republicans of doing it to the economy—is actually a central part of the gift economy and, more broadly, the gift/honor/shame moral and political economy. The reason is the same as the centrality of other horrors, like honor killings of girls who have been raped. In the gift/honor/shame economy everyone is responsible for everything, regardless of the intentions behind any act, while unlike the primitive egalitarian community, individualization (big manness) has proceeded far enough so that the contagion can be localized and a single individual or part made to bear it.\n\nThis is part of the gift economy that we can’t do without, even if we can eliminate every part of it at odds with justice under the law—we are beyond ambivalent by now about phrases such as a “credit to his race,” which of course implies he could have been a discredit, and Jews in particular I think still worry about whether the actions of Jews like, say, Bernie Madoff, will “rub off” on them. The unease is easy to understand, since any such hostage taking—for that’s what it is, when I reserve judgment on an entire group pending my assessment of one person’s character—violates the sanctity of the individual; but if we can’t find ways to preserve this form of hostage taking, which is still intact in some clannish immigrant groups, we will lose a necessary support of the market economy.)\n\nOf course, this process is also a highly competitive one, but without final winners and losers—the best re-engineering of a phrase for a very specific situation might exclude all other possible inventions for that situation, but it will inspire others for other, even very similar, ones.\n\nIn this way, we keep moving at diagonals from each other, moving forward, but in such a way that any future scene is unthinkable within any present one, in a negative theology of history which simply negates any populated future scene by acting in such a way as to not fit on it. I might mistake Freud’s terms and call this dispersal of the dots “parapraxis.” My resistance to a uni-scenic humanity might seem to counter the fundamental insight into our shared origin offered by GA, but any scene could only branch off of another, which in turn branches off of another, and no scene could be outside of this vast ramification of overlappings. Anyone else out there could attend to something I am attending from, and vice versa—what is transparent to one is opaque to the other, what is means for one is an end for the other, what is explicit for one is tacit for the other, and we could reverse these relations for each other. And that’s all the common humanity we need."
    },
    {
      "slug": "exodus-from-the-dead-end-of-history",
      "title": "Exodus from the Dead End of History",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Liberal democracy is predicated upon the severing of liberty and equality. For liberty and equality to be sustainable, they must be reciprocally defining and supporting: I can only be free together with my equals; I can only be equal with others within a reciprocal respect for each other’s freedom. The supposed tension between liberty and equality is a fabrication of liberal democracy, which has the state protect individual pursuits and equal outcomes, thereby limiting one in the name of the other. The outcomes must become ever more equal and the pursuits protected ever more marginal and inconsequential—economic freedom long ago dropped out of sight as a fundamental freedom, leaving sexuality as the main arena of protected freedoms (there will never be a law against “hate sex”).\n\nThe unsustainability of liberal democracy is becoming more evident, almost daily. It seems to me a good idea, then, to begin explore what might come after liberal democracy and, more broadly, the single-scenism of modernity—and to do so with as few prejudices (and, hopefully, resentments) inherited from that historical project as possible. I would begin by conjoining, once again, liberty and equality, under the following principles: the basic individual right is to leave a community, and the basic communal right is to determine whom to allow in. The terms of entrance into a community in turn define the specific rights that will be protected within that space.\n\nAll cultivated or occupied land, any established institution, actual or virtual, is owned by someone—even if ownership is shared and informal, in the end some will be let in and others kept out. Within any such space, there’s no point to speaking about free speech: I can throw someone out of my house or fire from or refuse entrance to my business because I don’t like what they say. They are free to speak on the street, but that’s because the street is owned by the government, which has committed itself to the defense of certain rights within spaces it owns. The same goes for, say, voting rights, which are granted on the agreed upon terms of the establishment of the community and its political institutions: a corporation can establish voting rights based on the number of shares you own. But the principle that I can’t force any person to stay in my house or business or country can be universally defended.\n\nDefended by whom? If egress from any space is a fundamental right, it is because anyone hopes that leaving one space will enable entrance into or creation of another space, in agreement with others. Postmodern communities, then, will ultimately trace themselves back (in the best Western tradition of the Exodus and the Aeneid) to exiles and refugees who have left one place to establish a new order, and which will be competing for the best immigrants; and communities will also be distinguished between the more dynamic and static—that is, those that want more and those that want fewer, immigrants—with perhaps, some communities wanting none.\n\nThe communities that want fewer immigrants are more likely to be those that imprison their own population or some portion of it. Precisely because freedom of movement is essential to the more dynamic communities, communities that so imprison those unfortunate enough to find themselves there will be treated with hostility: run your internal affairs however you like, but we consider your refusal to let individuals leave a threat, or at least an inimical act, to us. And making things very uncomfortable for the imprisoning communities will probably be enough to lead them to repudiate their emigration practices which, in turn, is likely to open up those communities.\n\nA relatively closed community might still be very attractive for some, and emigration can be strongly discouraged by, say, education practices that make the citizens of that community unsuited for life elsewhere, but such barriers will always be relative and, of course, any adult individual from even the most closed community can, with sufficient talent and effort, assimilate into more open ones.\n\nWe can use the word “community” very loosely here, to include neighborhoods and federations of neighborhood (and federations of federations, etc.), schools and school systems, businesses and networks of businesses, on-line and intellectual communities, military alliances, and so forth: any grouping with terms of membership. The terms of association would constantly be subject to negotiation, and each community might allow for various levels of citizenship and rights, as individuals decide where they would like to commit the most resources. A neighborhood might permit families to buy homes and offer them basic property rights (otherwise who would buy homes there?) but only allow voting rights to those who join some association that helps keep the neighborhood running (neighborhood watch, PTA, volunteer fire department, etc.)\n\n(Free speech rights may have to defer to the increasingly difficult to control communicative capacities of individuals—but the right to speak in specific, consequential, ways could certainly be calibrated.) A federation of neighborhoods and the businesses operating in them might establish various categories of aliens, for those whose work is valued but have families and friends in other communities established upon different value and whom those individuals don’t wish to disown, and who therefore can’t be completely trusted. Federations can be as large as they need to be, as large as today’s nation-states or larger, and the issues of self-defense, military establishments and war might not be all that different from now, except that the demands and conditions different political entities seek to place upon each other are likely to be much more minimal and transparent.\n\nBoundary disputes will involve conflict between competing plausible claims, or between those with claims to a particular property and those who, for whatever reason, have come to occupy it—as always, there will be those interested in aggravating those conflicts just as there will be those interested in resolving them—but as long as it is possible to impose upon aggressors the principle of non-imprisonment (if that’s where we’re all ready to make a stand, even if against the odds), then aggression will be ineffective or irrelevant, because the more peaceful and productive communities will always exercise a gravitational pull upon communities that wish to live parasitically off of others. The rules regarding federations and rights would constantly be subject to negotiation, including the rules regarding who can participate in such negotiations, how often they are to take place, where, etc.\n\nThe only dilemma I see confronting such an order is what to do with the misfits, those who are unable or unwilling to abide by the terms of membership in any community and will therefore be unwanted by all. We could say that if you don’t allow misfits from other communities into your own, you tacitly consent to their own treatment of them, in which case the problem must be solved in its own way by, presumably, living communities, where the misfits happen to be found, perhaps most often where they happen to have been born and raised. But those who are misfits in one place might flourish elsewhere, and one could imagine great cooperation among communities in trying to address this issue: perhaps communities would offer grants to other communities to take in misfits, maybe on a trial basis, maybe some communities would specialize in the treatment or accommodation of certain kinds of misfits, etc.\n\nWe would have to imagine overlapping communities negotiating procedures for discovering the truth regarding alleged transgressions, means of enforcement and modes of punishment without any overarching structure of rights, nothing more than the pragmatic needs and conscience of the community, and the example of other communities, to guide them. That is, it’s easy enough to imagine someone who refuses to do the kind of work the community demands, to live in accord with the norms of any of the available neighborhoods, and yet hasn’t committed any crimes—on my account, the communal order would be free to expel him (or simply refuse him access to any necessary means of life), even if no other community wants him, and no one in the community would be obliged to take responsibility for him. Perhaps the leadership of the community will set aside some land, building, and minimal subsidies, for the hopefully very few who simply can’t or won’t fit in—sort of like ancient sanctuary cities.\n\nIn order to create what I would call practices of minimal civilization that might, as peacefully as possible, enable us to transition to such a new order, we will need innovative defenses of and uses for private property. A small example of what we will be up against was given during Rand Pauls’ Senate campaign in 2010, where his critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made him vulnerable to the charge of wanting to return to the segregated order of yesterday—the gravest political sin in the church of American politics. Indeed, if we argue for the right for any community to define terms of entrance and membership, we have to accept that some communities will determine what we consider to be unsavory terms.\n\nThe main political task for advocates of a post-liberal democratic federated order would be the development of a political vernacular within which very unfamiliar ways of speaking about rights, responsibilities, obligations, and tolerance are created. More bluntly: we would need to remove the sting from victimary thinking, with its roots all the way down to the bottom of liberal democracy—less, I think, by arguing against it than by refusing to participate in it, by circumventing it through the means of taking up residence in all those literal and metaphorical locations where victimary rhetoric loses its hold on reality to such an extent that even its adherents must recognize it, in their deeds if not their words.\n\nIt might help to consider that any community must be modeled on disciplinarity, i.e., a scene of joint attention, itself ultimately modeled on the originary scene: to use Michael Polanyi’s terms, we attend from something to something else—we place something on the margin, unnoticed, and see the center which the margins are all pointing toward. But when the center fails to hold our attention, we notice those margins, which are us—that is, we now attend to what we were attending from. Whatever gesture from the margins redirects our attention in some shared way establishes a new center, and that’s the disciplinary space: the scene of worship, or of inquiry, or love—all different sides of the same thing.\n\nThe margins will be where new actor/spectator scenes emerge as sites of contest and sources of value interpreted in terms of the founding center. The global market might be seen as such a founding center, emerging from the ruins of the epic battles of the 20th century, but values can only be created, tested and secured on marginal scenes which refer indirectly to that center. Community can only be sustained if people who participate in common practices daily also see most of the same contests and performances as being about the same thing, and often enough share the values disclosed by those performances and contests.\n\nSo, for the mini-secessions I am proposing, what is necessary is that new performances and contests, as independent as possible from existing forms of authority, be created that refer in positive and illuminating ways to the global marketplace—bypassing as much as possible the noisy and acrimonious contests that obscure the global market, place it in doubt, and generate hostility towards it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "exodus-from-the-dead-end-of-history-2",
      "title": "Exodus from the Dead End of History, 2",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In the interests of minimalism and dropping extra weight as we try to stay above water I would suggest that all the morality that we need can be summed up in the injunction not to feed your fantasies and addictions. Everything else, all the Judeo-Christian stuff, everything essential in modern ethics, would follow from that. Fantasies are the intellectual, addictions the physical, sides of losing oneself in a single feeling, which one is determined to repeat over and over again, with ever greater intensity and ultimately ever more desperate attempts to stave off vitiation and impotence. Fantasy is the deformation of the imagination: as the novelist Ronald Sukenick said, if you don’t use your imagination someone will use it for you—fantasy is someone using it for you, even if that someone is yourself.\n\nThe imagination constitutes reality by providing the unseen background to some visible foreground while fantasy imposes the unseen on the seen, forcing the latter to conform. Addiction is the deformation of habit, which provides the continuity, fabric and rhythm of reality while addiction swallows reality up in the habit. Both fantasy and addiction are founded upon the conviction that one can be alone on the originary scene and have the object, unsullied, all to oneself.\n\nFeelings can’t be maintained because they are here and gone—the same feeling never returns. You can attend to some feeling from some desire that the feeling intensifies, confirms, modifies and/or satisfies but then attend from the fading feeling back to the world from whence the desire emerged, at which point the feeling becomes a sign, part of what I call the “field of semblances.” The feelings we want to preserve intact are those which we can’t bear to allow contact with that world, and ultimately with ourselves as representatives of that world. Immersion in what is actually a pseudo-feeling wards off the terror of examining that feeling.\n\nEveryone has feelings like this and everyone feels the tug of fantasy and addiction; theories that are not so much evil but intent on ridiculing our belief in evil, like certain variants of post-structuralism, see fantasy and addiction as liberating subversions of metaphysical totalitarianism—there are probably always theories like this. Losing oneself in singular feelings complements the fear that one will be lost in the world, and the way to resist submersion in fantasy and addiction is to keep bringing one’s feelings out in the world where they can enter the field of semblances, which no one sign can dominate.\n\nI don’t mean confessing those feelings regularly—confession outside of carefully constructed sacramental constraints will usually be a kind of fantasy and will easily become addictive, because feelings can’t simply be transported in speech—if they are gone when they are gone, the feeling one confesses to having had is not the feeling one actually had. Rather, the point is to attend from the feeling to the world, to inflect the world with that feeling—whatever the feeling, because even frightening feelings can be balanced against a world modified to contain them. This implies a kind of transparency, through which whatever you do you show that it is yourself doing it. This is what keeps you in the world.\n\nAside from providing for a firm and easily explained basis for personal morality, the injunction not to feed your fantasies and addictions seems to me a way of getting at cultural and what the left used to call ideology critique. It’s silly to say that we are addicted to oil, since filling our cars only in very rare cases provides a “rush”; but it certainly makes sense to say that some people, or many people, or a representative sample of an entire society, are addicted to certain amusements or, more broadly, certain formulas, narrative, imagistic, ritualistic and verbal. I would hypothesize that fantasies and addictions fill the space left by the decline of what R.G.\n\nCollingwood (a reading of whose Principles of Art has helped inspire these reflections) calls “magic,” or the use of representations to produce certain feelings. Magic, as an organized, public practice, can be used to produce feelings that can be judged as harmful or helpful, but the God whose name is the declarative sentence, in his unfolding in Christianity and modernity, has ensured that magic is no longer an option for us, except in some very marginal and disreputable settings (the disenchantment of the world and all that). Magic corresponds to a gift economy and moral economy of honor, where individuals and groups structure their feelings and subsequent actions in direct response to those of other individuals and groups rather than in accord with abstract rules.\n\nFantasy and addiction are readily fed by the market, and if the space they take up is not filled by some other way of organizing feelings, some other forms of experience, the market will not be sustainable. Those forms of experience must be disciplinary ones, sites of joint attention, where that joint attention can be further shared, restructured to welcome others, and for its most devoted practitioners at least, a site of the sacred, more valuable than life itself.\n\nSuch disciplinary spaces I would imagine as the first detachments of the exodus from the dead end of history I outlined in my previous post. They can take very simple forms. Imagine a town which has gone bankrupt and can no longer borrow money, and further assume that state and federal governments are similarly unwilling or unable to intervene. Let’s say some of the town’s citizens look into buying out their local government, and create a legal argument to the effect that the town as a whole is really the property of all its citizens, held in trust by the elected officials. They will organize a corporation that will take over and renegotiate the debt with the town’s creditors; as part of the package, the group of citizens arranges for various exemptions from state and federal mandates (environmental, labor, regulatory, etc.), on the model of those “free enterprise zones” we no longer hear about.\n\nAll the citizens may not want to buy in, but now the town is private property (literally—the sidewalks and streets, the lakes and woods)—those others will be brought out, or will have no choice but to live in accord with the new rules. What would those new rules look like? There are more possibilities here than we can imagine, but we can assume they will emerge out of love for their town, and will elicit the cooperation of lawyers, architects, city planners and others driven by love for their professions and a desire for experimentation and exploration. The town will be studied by others, an object of new disciplinary sites, and a pole of attraction for others, who will begin questioning their arrangements. History, which perhaps would not have come to end after all, would be of interest as a set of alternatives to anyone’s conditions.\n\nThe chase after the singular feeling might also provide us with a new way to speak about that other old topic, nihilism. Nihilism sets in once public battles seem to be about nothing—a combat with no real victor, because victories that are muddied, or dissipate, or are endlessly re-litigated , can no longer be appreciated as a contest. Everything that goes into making up a contest—the carefully honed skills, the ups and downs, the strategies—is similarly deprived of any significance. The First World War is the model here, but that just revealed an existing condition. The Second World War was certainly “about” something, which is why every conflict since then has been framed as a replay.\n\nThe Cold War wasn’t about anything for enough people. Victimary discourse is the clutching to that feeling of absolute identification with people absolutely victimized by unquestioned evil. There’s no rush like it. The exodus from the dead end of history will first of all have to restore a human scale to genuine combat—intellectual, political and moral combat. It will have to bring back a balance, a complementarity, between effort, risk and outcomes, along with commensurate canons of judgment."
    },
    {
      "slug": "save-the-pretzels-for-the-gas-jets",
      "title": "Save the Pretzels for the Gas Jets",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I think this item is worth a little blog post. Indeed, that people spend their time doing things like this is what sustains my faith in humanity:\n\nOulipo for the masses! This video of Rick Perry, made by a website called Bad Lip Reading, was a big hit on the conservative website Hot Air, where I found it, and understandably so. The “rule” apparently being followed here is, as far as I know, original, and inspired: turn off the sound and read the lips of the speaker as best you, as an amateur, can. Seeing people’s lips move must have something to do with the way we understand them when we are speaking face to face, but I have no idea what, and it’s hard to imagine how you would factor that into a theory of language or speech. In this case, the first sound you “see” must tilt the rest of your “reading” as you simultaneously watch the lips and try to articulate the “sounds” that keep coming into intelligible semantic and syntactic packages.\n\nLittle islands of sense emerge (I’m bored by famine”; “I cannot wait for a medieval cookie”) that, like the sentences in a Gertrude Stein poem, sound like they might refer to some internal language, unknown idiom or private joke, and that we can get maybe half-way towards understanding. If you scrupulously balance actually looking at the lips with your attempt to compose, though, the sense will never coalesce beyond a certain point. Meanwhile, the same thing happens on the side of the listener: your own tacit insistence that lip movements match sounds (we all get distracted, at least a bit, I assume, by dubbing in foreign language movies) leads you to “see” Perry saying what the translation has him say (even though, obviously many other “readings” were possible) and to line up what he does say with his “character” with all kinds of ironic results (as when he asks the construction workers, in a moment aimed at highlighting his masculinity, to build him a doghouse). And it also seems to me that it gives you a fresh look at Perry’s gestural idiom, as his gestures, postures and movements are detached from the specific words that always subsume one’s gestural idiom.\n\nI mentioned the video’s popularity at a conservative website where Perry is as popular as any of the other candidates or prospective candidates (excepting Palin, probably) for the Republican nomination to make the point that this is not just a way of making fun of Perry. How could it be—it’s not the kind of pointed, tendentious and (to me at least) tedious satire directed that way by Jon Stewart and others. We all know full well that any of us would come out this way if the same operation were carried out on a video in which we were figured. It might highlight vulnerabilities and incongruities in Perry’s character or campaign that one might not have noticed otherwise—it is a mode of inquiry, or a discovery procedure in that sense. But it might also show up potential strengths, and even moments of beauty that one would there after associate with Perry, as with the title of this post, a line which for me endearingly combines the down home informal, macho and fighter pilot elements of Perry’s persona.\n\nI feel, then, a bit vindicated in my arguments for the anthropological and political importance of “originary mistakenness.” Maybe we will get to the point where no candidate for public office would even consider not having one of these made and where privately made versions will be obligatory on our facebook pages—where, that is, they become a kind of post-millennial signature, marking our shared dependence on linguistic indeterminacy."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-note-on-ows",
      "title": "A Note on OWS",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "By now there can be no doubt that the Occupy Wall Street movement represents the opening of a new strain of American terrorism. There’s no way of knowing how extensive, effective and destructive it will be, but OWS is promoting, very forcefully, the idea that no means are out of bounds if your demands aren’t met. I haven’t seen anyone, even among conservatives, devote any attention to the name chosen by this group or “protestors”—why “occupy”? I have to assume it’s an allusion to the tactics of the student movement of the 1960s, whereby one “occupied” the President of the University’s office until one’s nonsensical demands were met.\n\nOr until you got yourselves forcibly removed. The point is to leave your antagonists with only those two alternatives: capitulation or the use of force, with the latter revealing one’s intrinsic, if often so well concealed, fascistic nature. It’s a bizarre model for a society wide protest movement, because while a university is a strictly delineated institutional space, how do you “occupy” a city? Or even a street? Such a movement must both fizzle out and spiral out of control, simply because it can have no sense of what its objects or objectives are—it is both absolutist and utterly confused. And we see both fizzling and spiraling going on right now, but the example has been set and it will be iterated—the going underground characteristic of the student movement of the late 60s, whereby the SDS became the Weather Underground, is likely to happen now in a much quicker and more stereotyped way.\n\nThe OWS participants already assume that they are in the posture typically assumed by anarchist and terrorist movements: representing a vast (99%) but quiescent majority against a deeply entrenched and cynical (1%) minority. Obviously no dialogue can take place among the oppressors, oppressed and somnolent—the sleepers must be woken up by provoking the minority and their lapdogs (the men with arms and badges) to commit spectacular acts of violence upon the vanguard. Etc. The removal of what James Taranto has been calling the “Obamavilles” from American cities will simply prove once again that mere protest is irrelevant (and forget about electoral politics, given the betrayal of Obama and the big city liberal mayors). There is no way of knowing whether OWS presages a wave of domestic terrorism, but there is no doubt that it provides a rationale and template for one."
    },
    {
      "slug": "economism",
      "title": "Economism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Economism has always been associated with reductionism—in the case of Marxism with the assumption that all social and cultural practices could be read directly off of the class position of the agents, or a particular moment in the development of the productive forces, disregarding the mediation of politics and ideology and so on. Similar critiques are easy to make and are therefore often made of what is often derisively referred to as “free market fundamentalism”—a decontextualized, one size fits all, academic application of theories that arrogantly ignore local conditions like bribery networks—and so on. The extension of a single conceptual framework to reality need not empty already active descriptions of their meanings, though—theory can dwell in and enrich the terms already in play and suggest new uses for them.\n\nEconomic terms, in particular, are economical: there is always scarcity, no matter how much we have, an insight reflecting the mimetic and constitutive nature of desire. Economies are always economies of attention: we exchange signs, like glances in the romantic cliché, and the point of exchanging signs is to sustain joint attention in a human world where the alternative to joint attention is not, ultimately, mutual indifference, but violence. If mutual indifference concerns us, it is because the other’s attentions are not brought within the purview of my own, thereby depriving the world I inhabit of some of resources it needs to keep some space, populated by meaningful objects, in between us.\n\nThe problem with economism is when one economy is proposed as the model for all others, as when one analyzes the gift economy or the primitive egalitarian economy in terms developed to account for an advanced market economy—terms like self-interest and calculation. We similarly reduce reality when we assume that, in actuality, the more advanced economy subsumes the others—such reductionisms ultimately prove violent, because the continuing reality of other economies appears as a threat to one’s social order and, perhaps even worse, one’s theoretical model. There are many economies and they supplement and supplant each other in many ways.\n\nAside from the ones I just mentioned, there is the Big Man economy, eventuating in the imperial economy, in which the margins pay tribute to the center which, in turn, paves the way for all sites within the imperial economy to turn toward the center. I think that today’s nation-state inhabits the vocabulary of the imperial economy in its more fully developed, but also decadent, ecumenical form, in which the central power represents a form of universalism in which all margins are invited to join, so long as they render their local economies innocuous. More precisely, the modern nation-state is situated in between the ecumenical economy and the Judaic resentment of that economy, a resentment which reconstructs that ecumenical economy as one under the sovereignty of God and looking forward to world conquest of the spiritual rather than territorial kind.\n\nThe Judaic economy is a gift economy internally and a market economy externally. The ecumenical economy involves a gift economy between center and margins, while allowing for the emergence of market relations among the margins—most simply, in such ways as coining money and ensuring the safe and easy passage of merchants. Jewish law enacts within the Jewish community the donation of the world by God to humans, and donation of the torah by God to the Jews, and of Jews to humanity. This last gift is knowledge of our common human descent from a single act of creation, knowledge which ultimately dissolves—not all at once, but potentially from the start—all boundaries to exchange between strangers, the antithesis to the gift economy, which operates among friends and rivals. Nations are powerful, meaningful, resilient and lasting to the extent they mediate in their inner and outer relations to these different economies.\n\nIt is clear that we can’t survive without an active and, in a sense, unsurpassable, gift economy. If the world is not simply given before we parcel it out and calculate the value of the rest, all that parceling and calculating is baseless, and reduces to sheer power. Within Lockean theory, the wealthy man deserves his wealth by virtue of having labored, organized the labor of others, showed more shrewdness and determination within a free system in which everyone else had the opportunity to join; in reality, if the wealthy man doesn’t know and show that he has been given more than he deserves and give to others in acknowledgement of that awareness, others will not respect and protect his property—he may as well have stolen it.\n\nAt the risk of over-generalizing, it seems to me that modernity—or, its most effective propagators—got something terribly wrong here. From the start, the emergent market economy was opposed to the gift economy, including its more specifically moral component, organized around the concept of honor. These more local and differentiated economies were to be extirpated. There may have been very understandable reasons for this approach, at least in practice: those local communities were likely those where practices which, from a citified, market-oriented perspective could only appear abhorrent, were most concentrated—where one found the most unjustifiable forms of inequality, superstition, and so on.\n\nI think the larger reason, though, is that, due to the fact that the gift economy had, due to the relatively advanced state of European, Christian social development, been incorporated within a new imperial and ecumenical economy—it was that imperial and ecumenical economy that was both the target and the model for the European secular revolutionaries, and they could only see the still vital (it’s still vital, for that matter) gift economy as a subordinate bulwark of those reactionary forces. Michel Foucault was right to say that the French Revolution took the absolutist monarchy it destroyed as its model, setting up the same kind of center-margin relationship (and De Tocqueville saw it in essentially the same way).\n\n(The Anglo countries tried a different, if also flawed, path to modernity, but it seems to me clear which model has had the momentum over the past three quarters of a century.) Indeed, the entire panoply of modern rights is composed of demands made upon the center, in the form of the state, to both protect citizens from each other and to restrain itself. The balance between the acquisition of the power needed to protect us from each other (and, increasingly, ourselves) and self-restraint in the use of that power was always a chimera, and in the meantime we have deprived ourselves of less fantastic and less resentful means of exploring the ways in which we would like to engage, converse, exchange, decide jointly, allow the other to lead, watch each other and be watched, and leave each other alone.\n\nThe only way that I can see to begin to restore the givenness of reality is to cease speaking in imperialese and ecumenicalese. Get into the habit of imagining solutions to problems through the clarification of private property rather than increasingly complex citizen-state relations; and of realizing that the state itself can be considered a bit of private property, held through some combination of conquest, delegation and, above all, the economy of the protection racket (which, to be fair, likely do often protect). It is very good to speak in terms of rights, but rights we can trace to a source in agreements we have made and realities we have tacitly accepted.\n\nI am suggesting that we learn to speak in ways so as to set in motion the withering away of the state. I completely reject the leftist resentment of most radical libertarians, who hurl charges of imperialism, oppression, atrocities, etc. at the U.S. government (and indirectly its complacent citizens) as readily and recklessly as Noam Chomsky. What I reject is the assumption, again, shared with the left, that the world would be a peaceful and harmonious place without us going around rearranging it to our liking. It’s not enough for Ron Paul to say that our foreign policy has become incoherent and often un-Constitutional and that it’s time for us to withdraw and address our own crises while letting others leave their dependency upon us behind—I might agree with that, if only out of the resentful desire to let the anti-Americans throughout the world get what they say they want.\n\nNo—the Paulites need to claim that the only reason we have been in so many conflicts is because of our own illicit desire to meddle in the affairs of, dominate and exploit others—we get what we have coming, or, in the leftist vernacular used by Obama’s spiritual advisor, we shouldn’t be surprised if our chickens come home to roost. In the leftist resentment of the Paulites there is obviously a very attractive utopianism, this one based on the U.S. Constitution—the fear, I believe, is that if the world is simply full of evil or even just people with opposing interests, and as the most powerful player in that world we can’t help but be drawn into it, supporting some against others and thereby inciting the enmity of those others; in that case, we will never be able to come home once and for all and restore our constitutional order. If we are the guilty party, the snake in the garden, then restoration is solely in our hands.\n\nBut none of that matters very much. No more can sense of our world be made by assuming that the state can serve as a stable center holding us in place at the margins. There is no deliberation among citizens, which is then refined within our governing institutions, issuing in legislation serving clear, if controversial purposes, and putting forth transparent means for doing so. There are, rather, negotiations among the various cannibals of the common wealth—special interests constituted by the regulatory bodies of the state which in turn lobby to turn those regulatory bodies ever so slightly in their favor; a media machinery for spotlighting crises which require yet more state intervention; and citizens confronted with the choice between the promise of greater security now (and the implicit threat of greater insecurity) in exchange for less freedom later.\n\nLaws are no longer laws, but palimpsests of calculations by political parties, political donors, bureaucracies and lawyers—laws are designed to keep them all in business, the only business which is good right now. That’s the bureaucratic economy. The rights of citizens entail the ability to attach ourselves to one or another interest and have our complaint embedded in yet another regulatory layer. We could see all this as a deviation from the basic principles of liberal democracy, or a constitutional republic, but these pathologies could also be seen to follow, with great probability, from the reciprocal resentment between state and citizen built into the modern notion of rights.\n\nFor me, the first presupposition, something of an intellectual revolution for me, is that nothing done by the state needs to be done by the state—either it doesn’t need to be done at all, or it can be done by a private agency, hired by clients, or run by its stockholders. Social security and health coverage can be turned over to insurance agencies; defense and policing to private security firms, in conjunction with the insurance agencies. Hans Hermann-Hoppe lays all this out pretty well. I, at least, find the task of re-imagining state functions, especially the most entrenched ones, as privatized services, intellectually invigorating.\n\nFor me, the hardest question has been what will replace the need we have for public displays, on a vast scale, of heroism, tragedy, responsibility or, more generally, representation—the need to see our collective relations to each other acted out in a coherent space, to be more than just strangers to each other. The need to have something we can call “history.” But, it seems to me that the answer here lies in what Jacques Godbout, whose World of the Gift has helped me to draw a lot of my thinking on these issues together, refers to as the “gift to strangers” he finds characteristic of the career of the gift in modernity.\n\nThe traditional, or archaic, gift, excludes strangers; the market economy connected strangers, which is why the carriers of the market were strangers to all. But in modernity we gift to strangers all the time, through charity, blood and organ donation—even, as George Gilder argued thirty years ago in Wealth and Poverty, entrepreneurialism can be seen as a gift to others, one which one can never assume in advance will be reciprocated. In a post a while back I explored what I called a “politics of redemption,” drawing upon the notion of redeeming, or buying others from slavery. This politics of redemption, in turn, seems to me to overlap the “exodian” politics I have argued for more recently, in which one buys out one’s owner (the state, the ultimate owner of us all) and thereby lays the precedent for buying out others, redeeming them from less free communities.\n\nSeeing our social relations as a sum of gifts made to friends circling and encircled by gifts made to strangers generates a world that is given, but that must be accepted by each in his or her own manner. The extraordinary innovation of the modern market, the ability to benefit from exchanges with billions of strangers, need be impaired by this not one bit. Since there is no “logic” behind it, the politics and culture of redemption might leave us with no more History (the desire for which seems to entail a desire for its end), but with lots of little, less brutal, but nevertheless very engaging histories.\n\nMost radically, at least for me, is the acknowledgement that such a world is a fundamentally pedagogical one. Both metaphysics and modernity, it seems to me, are highly suspicious of an originary, constitutive pedagogy, preferring the mania for equality in speech while the overt hierarchy of the pedagogical relationship is confined within institutions dedicated to a narrow understanding of “instruction.” But we are only equal in speech insofar as inequalities rotate—if I show you something now, that might enable you to show me something in turn. There is no act of communication that doesn’t involve such showing, and waiting your turn, and the at least momentary inequality it entails.\n\nPedagogy generates economies of attention: it is the act of directing someone’s attention to what they have been attending from. It can be a tennis coach showing the novice something in his stroke that he wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, attending, as he normally does, from the racquet to the ball; it can be a critical theorist showing a colleague how the concepts they attend from to the portion of reality concerning them at the moment closes out other, potentially more interesting, ways of parceling out reality. Pedagogy is what preserves scarce joint attention as it lapses, takes on more participants, or shades into renewed appropriative desire.\n\nIt is the gift of the scene itself, a scene the teacher establishes, or carves out of another, shaken, scene—and which the teacher in turn enters, with unknown results (what Freud called “counter-transference” is operative here, as our own tacit ways of knowing, what we attend from, might be exposed as well). Teaching is always a gift to a stranger, even if the teacher and student are close friends, because we are meeting on a yet to be generated scene of joint attention, and on that scene we will become different from what we are. Learning is to incur a debt that can only be paid forward, to other strangers, even if one of those strangers is the teacher himself.\n\nThe pedagogical relationship points outward to what Charles Sanders Peirce called the “unlimited community,” as each practice learned is mistaken and modified along the way, and our faith that one’s contribution to the world of signs that will support human life indefinitely is as justified as it is unverifiable."
    },
    {
      "slug": "futher-reflections-on-occupy-wall-street",
      "title": "Futher Reflections on Occupy Wall Street",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The OWS movement has staked its existence on the issue of inequality of wealth, as evidenced by the “we are the 99%” slogan. The issue of equality goes very deep; the most powerful political movements of the modern era are based on the rhetoric of equality. Indeed, our sense of equality is originary and constitutive of human consciousness as mediated by language. We have a virtually instinctive sense of reciprocity; when our contribution is not reciprocated, we do not need anyone to teach us to feel upset. Eric Gans is the first thinker to place a solid anthropological foundation under this basic human intuition, by recourse to his originary hypothesis.\n\nA 30-something member of my family suggests that OWS is a generational movement, but it is supported by many of the older generation, including, notably, the leaders of the Democratic Party including President Obama, even if they don’t themselves camp out in the public square. The differences between the two political parties have thus perhaps never been so starkly set out. The Democrats have become the party of the government redistribution of wealth, while the Republicans still believe in the free market (“capitalism” in the idiom of OWS) as a valid means for the production and just distribution of wealth.\n\nThe Democrats have quite explicitly defined themselves as the defenders of Medicare and Social Security—which no one can deny are forms of welfare, a redistribution, moreover, which generally benefits the more wealthy at the expense of the less wealthy—as well as public employee unions and union “rights,” large and powerful special interest groups which have cannily skewed the government budget process and burdened our children with debt for generations to come.\n\nThe pernicious influence of public employee unions upon the political process makes the lobbying efforts of large corporations look amateurish. Public employee unions are by definition monopolies, and the union fees which are automatically deducted from each employee’s payroll check serve to feed a huge political machine. Those public employees who negotiate with the public employee unions have no incentive to drive a hard bargain, since the government has no bottom line of profit to worry about, and the ability to tax is virtually unlimited.\n\nThe Democrats also position themselves as the thoughtful and educated party who care about the environment and the rights of minorities. One thing the Democrats cannot do is claim any larger economic benefit to their program, since unemployment has remained high despite the enormous power Obama wielded during his term, especially the first two years.\n\nYet unemployment is and should be the main issue of this campaign, since it is the direct result of the government redistribution of wealth, not only by Democrats but also Republicans more eager for re-election than for making hard choices that require time to bear fruit.\n\nThe problem is that the government does not itself produce wealth; it can create a limited number of jobs; but such job growth is not sustainable, not efficient in actually producing anything, and must be paid for by the taxpayers. All the government can really do, economically, is to take money from one pocket and put it in another, or borrow against younger generations and ransom our future to the foreign nations who are our largest creditors. Economic growth is created by people and businesses which produce items or services for consumption. The government’s role in this process is to protect private property and prevent monopolies.\n\nThe Government must also, of course, protect individual rights; and this is what the OWS movement has staked its claim upon. Rights lead us into the realm of justice. For OWS, inequality is prima facie evidence of injustice. But equality of rights, it bears repeating, is not the same thing as equality of outcomes; inequality of wealth is in fact no evidence of injustice. When the Government intervenes in order to redistribute wealth it violates its own “prime directive,” which is to protect private property. By breaching this essential function, it actually discourages the creation of jobs and wealth. Until America is willing to make some hard choices that may be painful for a great variety of special interest groups, then job growth will suffer.\n\nWhat the Democrats are banking on is that virtually everyone today belongs to a special interest group that benefits from government spending. But we have apparently reached the tipping point in our economic evolution, when Government intervention becomes ever-more-clearly counter-productive, benefiting a disproportionate few at the expense of the productive many. This is the irony of OWS; the redistributive policies they advocate can only produce further economic stagnation and suffering.\n\nI should clarify that I am not opposed to welfare as such. An economically and morally advanced society like the US has an obligation to help its citizens from abject poverty and suffering. The vast majority of government largesse, however, does not fall into that category. Attempts to help the so-called disadvantaged encourage not only corruption, they also end by “enabling,” to use the language of psychology, the behavior or condition they are designed to change."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-problem-and-possible-necessity-of-politics",
      "title": "The Problem and Possible Necessity of Politics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2011",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Politics is the establishment of an arena in which actors compete perpetually, but with distinctly marked victories and defeats determining the power to make and implement laws, before a qualified audience (qualified in the sense of allowed seats in the arena, so to speak, and in the sense of being the arbiter of victory), and without violence. The space in which politics is set is sacred, in being both commonly held and inviolable—state houses, houses of presidents, public squares, etc. Sovereignty is the defense of the line qualifying the actors and audience. Politics can be distinguished from rule, or tyranny, by the competitive nature of the struggle and the actor-audience relation.\n\nPolitics is most effective when the actors represent cleavages within the audience and reflect upon the meta- or constitutive rules governing the political space itself. Politics evokes other spaces or stages where members of the audience who consider themselves insufficiently represented can impinge upon or even swamp the central political space, as in civil disobedience and protest; the central political space can be overturned by revolution, which aims at instituting a new space; or destroyed by mobs, consumed by hatred towards any center. Politics presupposes the estrangement among social members and groups created by a market economy, while also drawing upon pre-political constituencies (and, therefore, gift economies) which, under pre-political conditions, might have resorted to other forms of score-settling.\n\nMy question is, do we need any or all of this? Politics provides a center for a market society that generates no center of its own—is that center a needed supplement or an obstacle to the free development of the market order? Politics provides representation to ethnic groups, economic groups, religious groups that might otherwise be unable to negotiate with each other over social rules of interaction—does politics, then, provide a necessary safety valve for resentments felt by these groups, or does it maintain them and their reciprocal antagonisms in an artificial way? Have we committed some unpardonable sin condemning us to French Revolution re-enactments in perpetuity?\n\nWhat are the issues that everyone in some more or less arbitrarily delineated territory all have to discuss in such a way that even the disappointed can ratify the final decision made? Can we be sure there are any such issues, or does the central political institution itself generate them? Does, or can, politics even work this way anymore: does politics effectively aggregate the beliefs and assumptions embedded in various social divisions so that the majority of citizens can imagine their views and interests are addressed? If not, is the weakness of politics endemic to the institution, either in general, or at this point in history; or is this ineffectiveness something that can be fixed?\n\nObviously no answer to these questions will in itself recommend a particular course of action—even if one concludes that politics should be abolished, that wouldn’t tell one what to do next—for one thing, you would then have to ask whether we “can” do what we “should” or even “must.” At any rate, pursuing these questions should have some diagnostic value.\n\nWe could better formulate these questions by asking what kinds of spaces analogous to the political one a completely voluntaristic order would generate, and how they would parallel and differ from political spaces. Maybe I should consider it ominous that Marx’s observation that we should aim at making it so that social evolution no longer requires political revolution, on the one hand, and Trotsky’s Promethean portrait of a communist order in his Literature and Revolution seem to me helpful guidelines here, but I don’t. Trotsky, answering Nietzsche’s charge that communism would level all individuals to the egalitarianism of farm animals contended that, among other things, citizens of a communist society will stage heated, society-wide debates over systems of pedagogy—in a fully marketized order, in which we choose our own security service, our own insurance company, our own means of seeing to our children’s instruction, the legal forms of our own neighborhoods, so that titanic arguments over education, environmental, labor, foreign policy, etc., policies are irrelevant, then “social evolution” would likely involve things like demonstrations of different pedagogic methods and different methods of inquiry into all manner of things which would be made fully public for the sake of inviting people to sign up. The only difference between my approach and Trotsky’s is that he doesn’t say how the decisions about which systems are to be favored will be implemented and how people are to choose while I can assign such decisions and choices to the marketplace.\n\nMore challenging than the claim that we need to continue having such tedious discussions over the rules to be followed by unaccountable bureaucracies is the civic republican, Aristotlean argument that, due to our nature as social and political beings, we need to discuss in common the nature of the things we have in common (of course, this notion of politics is also the most distanced from and least descriptive of our current political institutions and habits). This is the same critique that worries about the market as enclosing each of us within private worlds, with our own TV shows, video games, two children and one dog, etc.—what else, other than politics, extricates us from these closed worlds and enables us to resist the tendency to view others as only strangers of more or less utilitarian value?\n\nI think this critique of the market and privatization can be turned back by saying that the concerns adduced are less the result of the generalization of the market economy and more the result of the efforts made by the state to, on a generous reading, cushion the effects of that economy on all, and especially the most vulnerable, members of society. By introducing social security, universal education, socialized medicine, environmental, safety and labor regulation and so on, the state pre-empted efforts, already under way, to address these needs within civil society. If the citizens of a market society had to establish their own mutual aid societies, buy into private companies ascertaining the safety of consumer objects, deal with pollution as a property violation to be adjudicated in local courts, determine what form of education would best prepare their children to grow up and do all this themselves—well, then, it seems to me that we would have a great deal to do with each other and would be very far from isolated in impermeable private worlds.\n\nWe wouldn’t have to argue about “education policy” because we could send our children to whatever school we wanted, but I would still be very interested in knowing what goes on in your school, probably much more so than I would be now because I could easily shift my children over to it. And your school would advertise its virtues, invite third party assessors in, offer free trial semesters, and so on—and we would establish newspapers, newsletters, webpages and so on discussing the virtues of the various schools, the pedagogical theories they employ, whether or not they favor one or another way of teaching history or biology, and so on.\n\nWe would have to understand more about education than standardized test scores, since there would be no one to impose those, and institutions of higher education and employers might be more interested in finding out what students can actually show they know. And the discussions would extend far beyond the particular location—someone half a continent, or half a world away could get very interested in the pedagogical experiments we are engaged in. This would clearly be a better school of public virtue than what we have now.\n\nSo, what, if anything, would be lost of what we now think about as the “national community”? Is the drama of social life somehow vitiated? To put it more bluntly, is there anything to die for in such arrangements, and, if not, would that be intolerable? Is there some mode of freedom intrinsic to public life that would be lost forever? All these things, or our sense of these things, seem to me to be dependent upon a mandatory central stage, one which we are all obliged to attend to—one that makes decisions out of which we cannot opt out, passes laws we are obliged to obey, sends young people off to fight for all of us, etc.\n\nSuch a mandatory central scene is modeled on the ecumenical empire: a central scene which flattens out or contains gift economies and local big men by giving all sites and ultimately all individuals a symmetrical relation to the administrative and symbolic center. If such a scene has a genuine nation as its content, why need we worry: all the overlapping institutions and exchanges which replace it will be imbued with the same national substance as the state, only with greater spontaneity. And if it doesn’t, then why should we be concerned lest some other communal content come to fill up the space? Because something will fill it up: exchanging knowledge of different schools and educational strategies, different ways of arranging for sickness and retirement, shared norms for the management of property in particular areas, plus everything we already have (clubs, children sports leagues, block parties, yard sales, parades, etc.) will certainly be given shared symbolic forms.\n\nAnd when, without the police and army to protect us, we have to arm ourselves and negotiate together with various security agencies (whom, we might insist, employ members of our community who will fight out of love and not as mercenaries), it will, in some as yet unknowable sense, be our homeland. Overlapping spaces will replace concentrated, centralizing ones, but the relationships they generate might be even denser.\n\nIndeed, the notion of “overlapping,” which finds powerful expression in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, as well as in Michael Polanyi’s conception of scientific knowledge, provides a model of reality that undermines the imperial and metaphysical models organized around the experiential terms of inclusion/exclusion and transcendence/mundaneness. The center of one scene might provide the audience on the margin of another scene; being higher and having the broader view might not provide knowledge of the junctions between different scenes, which might be where the real action is. Anyone could have knowledge of and influence on others anywhere, but only as the signs of those other places or your own activity ripple through a whole series of mediating scenes.\n\nThe traditional notion of dialogue, as a model for thinking and citizenship, also presupposes an enclosure—we might jettison that in favor of more unpredictable modes of communication, like Derrida’s dissemination or Jesus’s sowing of seeds; we might imagine our connectedness more along the lines of the children’s game of “telephone,” interested less in being understood and addressed directly than in the surprising twists and peregrinations taken by our words and actions as they pass through overlapping spaces. Such a conception need not be naïve or utopian at all—having a dense network of antennae sensitive to viral and parasitical elements identifiable by their demand that we all participate on their mandatory scene, should make us quick in detecting and forceful in meeting threats."
    },
    {
      "slug": "elitism-in-zuccotti-park",
      "title": "Elitism in Zuccotti Park",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg MwUV1wn Yo\n\nThis segment from the Daily Show records how the Zuccotti Park occupation was geographically divided by class into “uptown” and “downtown”; a division exemplified by the split between those who owned i Pads and those who didn’t. When the TV journalist challenged one of the Protesters to share his i Pad2 with those on the other side of the Park, he affably refused, saying that his i Pad was a “personal possession,” and that he was only opposed to “private property.” (See 4:40 of the video) The show also discovered that the OWS leaders were holding their decision-making meetings in the lobby of the Deutsche Bank! away from the hoi polloi .\n\nThe segment demonstrates nicely that the OWS movement is essentially elitist, despite its socialist facade. Who has the leisure to spend months camping out (with expensive camping gear) in the park except modern aristocrats? The socialist opposition to private property, apart from its moral self-righteousness, is really only the desire to appropriate the private property of others. When my students start proclaiming the justice of socialism, I can only wonder, where are the angels who will govern and inhabit this utopia? (I was informed that the state will “wither away,” magically leaving no need for government.)\n\nAre we really willing to trust the government to distribute wealth fairly and produce an “ideal society”? Who will get to decide what exactly constitutes the “ideal”? And who will pay for it? The latest issue of The New Criterion has an important article by Kevin D. Williamson (“Everybody Gets Rich”) in which he comments:\n\nThe welfare state isn’t a very good buy. The average Social Security benefit runs just over $1,100 a month—peanuts, hardly enough to keep you in cut-rate butter once your median rent of more than $800 has been paid. For that, you’re taxed 12 percent of your take- home pay. Compare that to this: A married couple, each earning the minimum wage, investing only 10 percent of their earnings at a modest 7 percent return, retires with an annual income of more than $100,000 a year—even if they never touch the $1.5 million principle they’ll leave to their children. President George W. Bush was mocked for calling his proposal to cultivate such minimum-wage millionaires the “Ownership Society,” but it was the most important initiative of his presidency.\n\nAnd even the entitlement system we have now is unsustainable for more than a few more years at most. Ultimately, people vote their self-interest. Government union employees and welfare recipients will vote Democratic because they hope to benefit financially. But that’s actually short-sighted, because our attempt to create an ideal society of wealth and equality is leading us to a financial crisis of epic proportions. Read Williamson’s article. Government exists to protect our liberty, not to enslave us to a socialist pipe-dream that’s more elitist than the aristocracy we left behind in Britain so many years ago.\n\nThe problem with liberalism as it exists today and political correctness in particular is that it truly is a slippery slope. As Eric Gans has pointed out, there’s no conceivable reform that could satisfy the OWS protesters. And it’s the same with multiculturalism, feminism, animal rights, environmentalism, and gay rights. The great advances we have made in the last 50 years have only resulted in more discontent and escalated demands. Modern liberalism is an existential condition that will suffer no remedy. Samuel Beckett’s comment about the “syndrome known as life” applies well:\n\n“I greatly fear,” said Wylie, “that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-day-of-the-locust",
      "title": "The Day of the Locust",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust , he poses the serious question, whether modern society is capable of deferring the violence that it provokes. Describing a mob scene at a Hollywood movie premiere , he writes,\n\nTheir boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.\n\nThe ensuing riot scene in West’s novel, as well as the protagonist’s painting-in-progress titled “The Burning of Los Angeles” suggest that West is not optimistic about the fate of America, exemplified here by Hollywood. The anthropological insight of the passage above is first of all that their violence is provoked specifically by representation (as opposed to simply things, facts, or any particular state of events), and especially the mass media. He also points out that ” Nothing can ever be violent enough” to satisfy the desires of the mob. The expectations raised by consumer society are so grandiose that no satisfaction, within its own terms, is possible. West is an acute psychologist of group dynamics, and various scenes in his novel demonstrate a fine understanding of desire as mimetic, that is, competitive.\n\nWest’s novel provides us with one of the best models for understanding Occupy Wall Street and other leftist movements. First of all, their (admittedly inchoate) desires are created by the mass media, which is dedicated to finding “scandals” everywhere. Second, that no reform can possibly satisfy their demands. This becomes virtually conscious with OWS, whose members admit that their purpose is primarily “occupation” or protest itself, rather than any particular reform. Third, that political correctness is essentially a competition for the moral high ground. As we saw in Zuccotti Park, PC has a tendency to fragment, because any particular position is subject to a more radical critique, and one’s PC “credentials” are likewise vulnerable to attack. It’s not an overstatement to say that national and international politics have become largely a battle for the moral high ground. How and why this is so deserves further consideration."
    },
    {
      "slug": "one-two-three-many-modernities",
      "title": "One, Two, Three, Many Modernities",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "According to Jacques Godbout, in his The World of the Gift, the distinctive form taken by the gift in the modern world is the gift to strangers—everything from philanthropies to blood and organ donations. The specifically modern gift, in other words, to quote the title of a bad movie, based on a good idea, from several years back, pays it “forward” instead of “back.” Rather than reciprocate directly, modern giving prefers acknowledging a gift by giving to someone else with the same needs or potential as that gift enabled one to realize in oneself. This helps avoid the competitive gift giving and compulsory reciprocations which leads the traditional gift economy into the debacle resulting in the seizure of power of the Big Man, who imposes an asymmetrical gift economy on everyone. And giving it forward may also provide the basis for supplanting the modern state behind which, however free and democratic the guise, the contours of the Big Man imposing not only his rule but his inevitability remain visible.\n\nThe modernity which has actually become dominant, and led in turn to the romantic and victimary reactions of postmodernism is the one which deployed the emergent market model of early modernity against the gift economy. The best way to bury the gift economy is to insist upon self-origination—anything in the past which has determined what one is now must be some gift demanding repayment; if we are all originators of ourselves, including the past we choose to acknowledge, then there are no gifts from the past—no one has paid forward to us. There are just nagging importunities and unjust exactions demanded by hysterical ghosts, and we must summon up the courage to reject those claims, and accept only those obligations we, like players on the market, have explicitly and voluntarily agreed to.\n\nBut history is no more than the gifts we accept from those who have come before—if we reject some it is because we have accepted others. The reason why we need to ground ourselves in some kind of gift economy stretching back in time is suggested by Hermann Lotze’s observation, cited by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on History,” that “One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.” I think this is absolutely true, and while it applies to the present’s attitude toward the past as well, it is especially remarkable in our attitude to the future, which we have every reason to believe will have be better than the present.\n\nWe simply don’t share the same scene as other time periods, are incapable of desiring the same objects—we can therefore love those who came before and those who will come after unreservedly. We can also, therefore, accept the gifts from the past freely and give freely to those to come after us. And, finally, this gifting relationship across time periods is, as Benjamin goes on to say, an index which refers us to redemption: it is this continuum creating by the gift that enables us to stand back while everyone else is rushing towards the present object of desire and exemplify a possibility not immediately visible.\n\nWe could, much more modestly, see modernity as simply the condition in which our relations with strangers outweigh our relations with kin, friends and confederates. The market relation comes to the fore under such conditions, and helps to create them in the first place, because the exchange of commodities for money is ideally suited to maintain the relations between strangers. Modernity in this case would also mean many things we like to associate with it—an openness to the new, to differences, a pleasure in anonymity and privacy, and so on. But modernity in this sense would also allow for acknowledging the gifts we accept and pay forward to some of those strangers, gifts that often circulate centrifugally from more traditional gifts circulating among family and friends—like the use of family wealth to establish charitable foundations. The market and economy could then proceed in concordance with one another, each enriching the other. As soon as we find a way to displace the imperial/ecumenical Big State, which increasingly demands all gifts flow to and from it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "property-and-pedagogy",
      "title": "Property and Pedagogy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We can concentrate all the modern, liberal freedoms and rights into the right to own property: that is, the granting of exclusive use to that which cannot be used without depriving others of its use. If you have the right to property, you can obviously say whatever you like on your property, and others can listen to what you have to say on theirs. The same goes for worship. If you have property, you can exchange parts or products of that property with the parts and products others offer from their own property. Needless to say, you can possess firearms on your property, if you genuinely have a right to it. And property owners can invite others to assemble on each others’ property all they like, along with pooling their resources to buy or rent more property for larger assemblies.\n\nI’m leaving out the rights specifically granted against the state (to a jury trial, against unreasonable search and seizure, self-incrimination, etc.) because I am determined to think property outside of the state, so as to look forward to the possibility of a libertarian order (the way there is through what I go back and forth between calling a “marginalist” and an “exodian” politics). If one does so, one also discovers that the supposedly natural rights to speech and religion become redundant and meaningless, even unnecessary causes of conflict—if I can refuse to allow anyone I choose onto my property, I can obviously refuse to let someone speak there, which means that the right to free speech has no one obliged to defend it.\n\nWho, for that matter, defends property rights, if we can no longer count on the state to do that either? On the one hand, each property owner defends his own property; but without any shared respect for one another’s property, reified in recognized legal titles, this would just be Hobbes’s war of all against all. The real answer must be that the various property owners respect one another’s property and have recourse to agreed upon judicial or other mediating institutions in settling disputes. These institutions, along with the private security and insurance companies individuals would surely hire would simply be other uses of property, services offered on the market.\n\nWe would, though, have to account for the possibility that someone might surrender one’s right to the acknowledgement of one’s property rights on the part of other owners. This seems to me highly problematic. Let’s take an extreme case: someone who tortures his children, keeps slaves, murders kidnap victims, etc., on his property. Of course, we can easily say that he is violating their property rights, with the body being the most unshareable thing around and therefore the most basic form of property—fine, then: we have impeccable theoretical language with which to condemn in no uncertain terms such doings. Still: who, exactly, enters the house, saves the victims, and renders the perpetrator harmless? And on what grounds? Who has the “right”? (I am now, I suppose, introducing the neo-conservative snake into the libertarian garden.)\n\nThere would have to be some combined formal and informal means by which other property owners would, first consider, then discuss, and finally decide, to withdraw their support for that property owner. They might, before forcibly intervening, draw up charges and invite the individual to answer them, proposing a forum for the purpose. Then, finally, they would decide to act—and so inform that individual’s insurer and security agency: it would be made clear to the insurer that this individual was about to become a very bad risk, and to the security agency that it was about to lose some other customers if it insisted on retaining this client, if it was a security agency shared by others in the community; or it was about to be met with overwhelming force by the combined security agencies of those determined upon the “invasion.”\n\nNeedless to say, such a system would be open to all kinds of abuses (al though I don’t see why more so than any other system)—right now, though, I just want to satisfy myself that we can imagine it. The kind of solution proposed above implies—once we start walking it back to less extreme cases—that the society of property owners can, in principle, judge that another’s misuse of his or her property can endanger the system of property itself, even indirectly (the abuse of one’s child, for example, doesn’t seem to have any impact on others’ property—but it is abhorrent enough to bring the entire principle of autonomy in disrepute, if the will and means can’t be summoned to abolish such a condition). Which uses of property pose such a danger would necessarily become a very common and lively topic of discussion in a libertarian community—much of the “politics” of such a community would be so comprised. Everyone would be acutely aware of the dangers of any precedent.\n\nWhat follows is that each property owner would have an interest in signaling to the society that he is using his property properly, in putting forth the signs indicating uses that are productive for all. At the same time, each property owner would have to construct those signs, since the meaning of one or another architectural or landscaping “gesture” would change over time. In other words, each property owner would be teaching and learning from all the others how to be a better property owner—each would be trying to control the relevant precedents and create best suited to ensure the recognition one needs. I wouldn’t assume that in a libertarian order each individual would suffer perpetual anxiety concerning the possibility of losing the community’s sanction—such an order couldn’t survive if this question was constantly raised about most of the owners.\n\nBut it might happen often enough regarding some of them—and it seems to me that such a community, so reliant upon the self-reliance of all its members, would have a very low tolerance for behaviors that strained the norms of the society. (I get the sense that some libertarians—perhaps the College Libertarian variety—believe that libertarianism means you can smoke a joint in the morning, visit a prostitute in the afternoon and go to a casino in the evening, without ever becoming a junkie, a pervert or a gambler. You might do all that, but the effects would be evident in your behavior, and no one would be obliged to give you a job, rent or sell you a home, provide you with security or insurance, or let you on their property.)\n\nEveryone would have to be clear about what he thought a “real” property owner was, and how he was embodying that ideal type. Especially since even the surveillance and communication devices we have now, let alone what might be invented in the coming decades, already mean that without the state in between us all, life would be transparent beyond our present imaginings. As David Brin argued more than a decade ago in his Transparent Society, liberty and privacy are parting ways: each of us will have all kinds of ways of attaining information about anyone else, and we will each have strong reasons to attend not only to signs we “give” to others, but those we “give off,” to use Erving Goffman’s terms.\n\nEveryone would also be able to realize that resentment against the system of property, whether it takes the form of hatred towards the biggest property owners, or indignation at the exclusionary norms of associations of property owners, should be pre-empted to the greatest extent possible. Libertarian logic will not head off the rampages of the propertyless once the reach a certain critical mass—only a restored and enlarged gift economy, in its specifically modern form—gifts to strangers, without any possibility of reciprocity—can accomplish that. All kinds of philanthropic activities would be undertaken in a successful libertarian order, and each one would have the stamp of its founder(s) and given a specific meaning, for society at large and its beneficiaries. “Giving back” to a community which has given you something is always a “reading” of that community, a commemoration, a hypothesis about future possibilities—all unilateral acts of pedagogy.\n\nFor these reasons, the attitude of each member toward all the others would be fundamentally pedagogical, albeit in a reciprocal way: you teach me something and I teach you something, not only explicitly, much less pedantically, but through every use of my property I make evident to others. Even more, though, since such a society would be in a constant state of innovation, and no one could count on tenure, we would all be going back to school all the time: not necessarily formal schooling (who would care about degrees in such an order—you would just want to know what someone could do), but various kinds of tutoring, mentoring and apprenticeship relations.\n\nOnce the state gets out of the way, then, and we are left only with ourselves and fellow owners, we would have to be far more aware of the ways we show each other things all the time—at each encounter, I would say. And showing is the fundamental pedagogical gesture: first of all, showing another the meaning of what lies embedded, unnoticed, in their own practices and habits (best of through some modification in your own attitude that directs the other’s attention back at himself). It seems to me to follow, if I’m not just grossly blinded by my own professional interests here, that a generally pedagogical attitude, one that gets each of us thinking about how others read us, and one that seeks to refer actions to possible consequences in the reactions of others, would, in turn, be conducive to the gradual prioritization of property rights in our public discourse.\n\nTeaching and learning—showing, pointing—is the most basic element of any iteration of the originary scene upon which we find ourselves, even if part of a successful lesson is enabling the learner to see that, in the end, he has taught himself and can therefore now teach in turn. So, I much prefer pedagogy to, say, “dialogue” or “communication,” much less “solidarity” or “compassion,” as the proper mode of engagement for free men and women."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-terror-of-the-given",
      "title": "The Terror of the Given",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "At least one form of modernity, and arguably the dominant form, the one in which the winners in the marketplace become indistinguishable from the state players who determine winners in the marketplace, is driven by a hatred of the given. The given, first of all, in the sense of what is, what is simply there, what remains after all theory, analysis, experimentation, transformation, construction and production. You can listen to progressives rage against any suggestion that some differences, including those that generate inequalities, might simply be there, and, for that matter, be no big deal; and that all the attempts to eradicate said differences might just shift the pieces around on the board a bit, with some resentment added to the mix.\n\nThe progressives and leftists will rage against such suggestions, but I’m not sure that much of the right, or most conservatives are any different—at the very least, they are extremely anxious to inoculate themselves against any suggestion that all differences can be rendered irrelevant and all inequalities removed. We see such a rage against the given both in the desire to make every single aspect of life a partisan political question and every topic a subject of some polemic, and in the tendency to try and eliminate risk and mistake, or at the very least to inflate the consequences of risk and mistakes to the benefit of those whose job it is to detect and uncover them. The old communist (I think) slogan, “Nothing is accidental,” covers all this. (In other words, I am endorsing, without saying how much, Heidegger’s complaint that the tendency of modernity is to turn everything and everyone into “standing reserve.”)\n\nBut given just as much in the sense of what has been given, that is, reality and everything in it as a gift. The two senses are really one—data is an array of gifts. A gift economy in the strict sense might spiral out of the egalitarian distribution on the originary scene, but it’s on the scene already in the form of the gift of life and peace given by the God object to the newly human community. When we divide amongst ourselves, we are merely dividing the gifts of God. When we give gifts, we are imitating God, when we accept gifts we are honoring God and freedom is really nothing more than the capacity to reject or accept any particular gift—just as language is, ultimately listening, sifting through a lot of noise and ordering the given, and then passing along, as faithfully as we can, what we have heard. Even the market economy can be conceptualized as a mere adjunct to the gift economy, as the entrepreneur first of all packages up his gifts for strangers, each of whom asymmetrically returns a bit of the gift of continued existence as a producer.\n\nFor the leftist intellectual, the fact that something is “taken for granted” by “everyone” is about as certain proof as you can have that the idea or claim in question is both wrong and pernicious. Even while we need not go that far, where else would thinking depart from if the not sense that what is “merely” given is unsatisfactory? But if you set yourself in opposition to the “granted” or “given,” the alternative is to trust only what you have “taken,” or, in more theoretical terms, “appropriated.” Even for Locke, only what one has appropriated through labor is genuinely one’s own “property.” But the powers with which you are able to “appropriate” must have been “given,” your proximity to the land and materials must have been given (even if you had to move quite a ways it was still in reach, as proven by the fact that you got there), the land’s own productive powers and the “laws of nature” enabling you to transform nature were all given, and so on.\n\nEven more, the work done by previous generations, and the unintended consequences of your own work and your collaboration with others is constantly adding new givens as quickly as you can make the givens takings. And in the end, your property is only yours because others grant it, as long as you take theirs for granted as well.\n\nWhat, then, is so terrifying about all this? Whence the desire for a completely “constructed” reality, in which we can determine who put every piece in place, when and where? The gift economy, in the narrow sense studied by Marcel Mauss, and the honor society (with its vendettas and sacrifice) needed to be transcended, and the elaboration of the market economy which first took shape on it margins, was clearly the path of least resistance to doing so. But the market order didn’t, as it could have, present itself as a supplement to, and “appropriate” the language of, the gift economy—for example, by describing itself as a way of extending the gift relationship to strangers and by giving its increasingly asymmetrical forms more institutionalized recognition.\n\nAt a certain point the advocates of the market order, if not its actual participants, set themselves against the gift economy, seeing it as an enemy to be uprooted. It seems to me that the best explanation is the alliance of the new, vulnerable, but potentially revolutionary market order with the absolutist state—the imperial state, in other words, which is really nothing more than a permanently asymmetrical gift relationship (is there anything more “given” for us today than the state?). Gift economies proliferate centers of power and diverse local relationships, formal and informal, which interfere with the state’s need to give each individual a single, unobstructed relationship with the state, the giver of all things necessary and the recipient of the obedience of the subject.\n\nThe participants on the market could provide the formal arguments for the equality of the citizen and the rights to be protected by the state through the force of law; and the state could provide the market participant with unfettered and protected access to the domain it controlled. Once each imperial order finds itself in competition with all the others, an irreversible dynamic is set in place.\n\nThinking outside of the terror of the given means thinking in terms of plurality and incommensurability—or, in more grammatical terms, idioms. But it also means dropping the resentment towards totalizing discourses central to deconstruction and postmodernism—in the end, the totalizing discourses are also idioms, from which anyone might learn something (just like the state is ultimately just an increasingly inept giver and claimant of donations). If I kick a ball straight ahead past the other players, and I happen to be on a soccer field, I’m advancing the ball downfield; if I’m on a basketball court, it’s a violation and my team gives up the ball.\n\nLikewise in reverse: bouncing the ball down court is fine in basketball and a violation in soccer. The exact same physical movement has radically opposed meanings in the two settings. That’s all that “incommensurability” means. It doesn’t mean that if I play either soccer or basketball I can never play the other; it doesn’t mean that there aren’t skills that transfer from one sport to the other, or that observations you might make regarding, say, team play, in one or the other won’t provide insights into the other sport; it doesn’t even mean that one sport can’t be better than the other according to a particular scale of values: if you want a sport that maximizes jumping ability, then basketball is better.\n\nAll “incommensurability” means is that you can’t play basketball and soccer at the same time; and that if you are going to play “sports,” it is going to be one of those sports or another—there is no sport in itself, or idea of sport, even though we might very well be able to construct a definition of “sport” that would distinguish it from, say, “crafts,” “musical performance” and other activities.(Indeed, I will do something like that in a moment, as a move in the theory game.) It’s just that one couldn’t play the definition.\n\nHuman life is like that, which means that the originary hypothesis demonstrates both the singular origin and the irreducible plurality of human being. As Hannah Arendt once said, in summarizing a key idea of Augustine’s, there was a beginning so that man would be a beginner. One can only identify beginnings after the fact—what makes you most likely to be first is not remaining tense on the starting line waiting for the gun to go off—that will only lead to more false starts; what makes one more likely to be first is a devotion to other beginnings, which come to one as a gift and which you would like to pass down, undefiled, to others, ultimately strangers.\n\nRevering beginnings rather than pre-empting or forcing ends is post-millennial thinking. According to Bernard Suits, “playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles,” which would mean that playing a game is simulating the originary event, wherein the sign was created as an “unnecessary obstacle” (to simply taking the object) that everyone voluntarily accepts as a necessary mediation. The game, of course, must also involve a forgetting of the origin, since the obstacle is at the same time very necessary. We necessarily create unnecessary obstacles in order to make the necessity as minimal as possible—which is to say, to move things along from prisoners’ dilemmas to elaborately rule governed interactions to freely entered and exited conversations and improvisations which reveal something new in the participants.\n\nAn entry point into what I have taken to calling “marginalist,” “exodian” and, now, “secessionist” thinking is integrating “rights” into specific centerless games (with, if necessary, referees) which define those moves which place you inside or outside of the game—rather than locating rights in the human being as such. This reduction is only possible if every game takes place on a particular piece of property with a generally recognized owner, and if the players are allowed to use their own currency. In relation to the state, then, politics today should work towards more precise definitions and protections of property and freedom from imposed state issued currency (there would be no need to try and overthrow the state—free currency would take care of its withering away, and if I’m wrong about that it must be because the state that would remain would be perfectly benign).\n\nBeyond this, though, this thinking beyond metaphysics also takes us beyond monotheism, which is itself bound up with resentment towards empire, essentially the defining the individual’s relationship to the salvational God as that which transcends the relationship between the individual and the imperial center; and history as the gradual, universal revelation of that God through the successive pride and fall of the empires. (I don’t mind making myself ridiculous by declaring the obsolescence of monotheism—my only concern is that the declaration could be taken to involve or encourage the slightest resentment towards believers.)\n\nThis certainly doesn’t imply atheism, polytheism or paganism. It implies, rather, a God of the gifts—whatever, after all of our makings and takings, turns out to simply be there and something we could share with others, is a divine gift. Whether it’s always the same God, whether we could imagine His characteristics, whether he has plans for us (other than living up to and sharing His gifts)—those seem to me questions that might be taken up by those who wish to play the theology game, and who might gift the rest of us with helpful insights.\n\nThe game analogy is limited because games are closed off from reality in a way that reality never can be. We’re never playing quite the same game in reality, almost as if my basketball interferes with your soccer. But in any scene we can converge, or can imagine ourselves converging, upon clear sentences. At any moment, I can and implicitly do hypothesize an utterance-gesture-posture complex that will obtain a desired, if only dimly imagined, response—I will piece together the complex that is most likely to elicit that response. When it doesn’t, I adjust my desire and recalibrate my signifying, while everyone else does the same. The process can only continue given the assumption that sign and interpretation could coincide—even though, even if I imagine such a coincidence in advance, it would never be identical to what I would recognize after the fact as one. The movie cliché of two people looking into each others’ eyes and realizing simultaneously that they are in love is a model of this experience, which never really happens but is the presupposition of all that does.\n\nThe version of this experience at the level of the declarative is the clear sentence. The clear sentence (I am claiming that this is what we really mean by “clarity”) is one that is exhausted by its truth function. That is, once you have decided, to the satisfaction of all concerned, that a sentence is true or false, the sentence can be discarded—to the extent that it’s clear. The way we make a sentence more clear is by situating each of its elements securely within the truth function: “that dog is mine” is clear insofar as we have a consensus on what a dog is, on the concept of ownership and what would validate it in our cultural context, and on whether we referring to the same dog.\n\nBut, of course, there is, in principle, no end to the layers of implicit claims and assumptions that might require the ostensive verification that must be obtained or stipulated to for the sentence to be made clear: an agreement on what a dog is on one level might turn into a disagreement on another level, and that other level might become relevant for the context in which the truth function of the sentence needs to be determined; we might have different conventions for pointing at something; our concepts of ownership might turn out to have significant incompatibilities, and so on—moreover, clarifying one term in the sentence might obscure another.\n\nSo, to return to the game analogy, we would have to imagine that I could be playing basketball and you soccer, with enough common elements in the two games so that with sufficient good will and willingness to overlook anomalies it would only be in event of an egregious discrepancy that we would ever notice it—and such events would be rapidly transformed into an mere accident, one that we now know how to avoid in the future. But what if we don’t want to—what if we actually come to like this basketball-soccer hybrid we have discovered ourselves to be playing? If we prefer to circle around and keep revising a provisional set of rules and have the discipline and mutual regard to overlook the momentary unfair advantages such an activity will always be giving one side or the other?\n\nTo return to language, this would mean that our desire for clarity need not be abandoned, but that it could be accented or punctuated by the networks of diverging idioms revealed precisely by that insistence on clarity (it is only the insistence on clarity that would lead us to explore the different possible understandings of “dog” and “mine”). With Godelian undecidability, there is a statement that is true but cannot be proven within the system, and the system depends upon such a truth. With the undecidability or incommensurability I am proposing, whichever truth we set ourselves to secure within the system of the sentence pries open different systems pivoted upon that truth.\n\nThe act of taking—taking something to be the case, taking each other to be symmetrical to one’s self—unveils a world of givens: different definitions of dog, of property, of proper pointing out. And, these givens need not have been “in” any of us, or “suppressed” in the name of communication—they may not have existed outside our convergence on the clear sentence, but there they are now. We can work our way analytically to such presents lying and waiting in our presuppositions; or, we can take to producing them directly by, instead of repelling grammatically incorrect sentences, taking those parts of the sentence that have no grammatical place idiomatically so as to fill the needed grammatical slot, thereby opening up a whole new “grammar” for the word(s) in question.\n\nThe deliberate production of givens out of our takings—that is what the civilizational openness we need to survive now depends upon."
    },
    {
      "slug": "after-all",
      "title": "After All",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "My reading of the event of 9/11 was that it would either lead to the abolition of victimary discourse or accelerate the unraveling of American and Western society. My reasoning was that the only viable response to the unlimited victimary claims inherent in the attack was to defend the victims of the victims, which could in turn only be done in the name of liberal principles. In this way, victimary discourse would be exposed and discredited as the greatest producer of victims of them all, while the credibility of a more classical version of liberal principles would be restored.\n\nThis possibility ended with the election of a Democratic congress in 2006 and this was further confirmed by the election of Barack Obama in 2008. So, I had the second possibility to consider: unraveling. The election of Obama, our first hologram-American president, was a bizarre event, one that will intrigue historians: a majority of Americans opted for a kind of vague racial absolution and the fantasy that our international and domestic furies could be appeased through a symbolic repudiation of President Bush, and this at a time when there were actually somewhat serious issues on the table. I think there is quite a bit of regret about this now, but, as Marx said, “Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate them.”\n\nIf we could forgive Marx’s sexism, I think the point holds: America has repudiated its responsibilities as a guarantor of a liberal world order, which has led, on the one hand, to a metastization of victimary thinking and, on the other hand, to the Tea Party movement, which I see as wholly salutary but also completely uninterested in American leadership.\n\nIf Americans are to be more interested in saving themselves from unceasing governmental encroachments upon their lives and predations upon their livings than in protecting Europe from Russia, Taiwan and Japan from China, Israel from the Muslim world, etc., then we will see devolutions across the board—those countries, communities and individuals best able to free themselves from victimary thnking will have a chance of flourishing, but in forms and articulations we can’t anticipate now. Since there will be unchecked tyrannies and terrorist producing failed societies the world will continue to be interested in us, so our present desire to unshackle ourselves from responsibility for it will likely be revealed as a fantasy, but this will lead us to one of two possibilities: either surrender to victimary thinking on a global scale (we will take orders from the UN or some other representation of the “international community”); or we will simply target our enemies, large and small, and adopt the principle: we will feel free to hold anyone who expresses a desire to harm us responsible for all actual attempts to harm us (which would represent a repudiation of victimary thinking, if without much enlargement of ethical capabilities).\n\nHow will it all turn out? Who knows? I prefer to take the theoretical perspective, which sees all this as interesting, with the most interesting question always “What is really happening?” How do we get a view of things that isn’t just a litany of the various ways people are out there conforming to and—much more often—violating our expectations and desires? How do we wrench ourselves outside of the limitations imposed by our resentments? Maybe by sharpening those resentments and shaking off the habits of thought which normalize them—that way, at least, a possibility worth exploring or using as a measure might crystallize.\n\nI think a good place to begin is with a radical simplification—the complexities can always be let back in as we go. Here’s the simplification: victimary thinking is a heretical form of liberal democratic ideology; liberal democratic ideology is just a heretical form of Christianity; while Christianity is itself a Jewish heresy. What is Judaism, in that case? The displacement of universal empire by the Big Man with the universal empire of God, another, and the true, single center from which we are all equidistant. The impotent prophetic discourse of Jeremiah, Isaiah, et al is still the way we think today, whether we are denouncing the 1% or Big Government for interfering with our right to stand in direct relation to God and/or the egalitarian community. Modern society provides no way out of the perpetual resentment toward some illegitimate higher authority which has always already usurped the rights which supposedly ground it.\n\nThe concluding simplification: victimary discourse marks the exhaustion of what we can call the “anti-haughty” revelations. The last time as farce, after all. I will, then, simply disregard victimary discourse, no matter how powerful it is or is yet to become: it is not interesting, because either it will emerge triumphant, in which case all our thinking and social practice will end up on new, presently unthinkable terrain; or, it is, however ferocious, in its final thrashings about, in which case why not re-orient ourselves to whatever remains outside of it. This helps me to take a step toward resolving my ambivalence toward the anti-semitism project I had embarked upon, as he has mentioned a few times, with Eric Gans.\n\nIt has recently struck me, and I had this intuition confirmed by Philip Reiff’s Fellow Teachers, that, if the basic archetypes of anti-semitism were created by the early Christians, then they were in fact created by Jews—non-Jewish Jews, to use Isaac Deustcher’s term. But weren’t those early Christians simply continuing an internal Jewish accusation advanced by the Hebrew prophets, targeting the vast majority of their fellow Jews for insufficient fidelity to their vocation to testify to the one God—for giving in to the imperial temptations (such as, for example, preferring to fight for corrupt kingdoms over exemplary exile).\n\nI can’t see it as a coincidence that the 19th and 20th century world struggles similarly had a substantial intra-Jewish component. I wonder whether it could be shown that those intense and intimate battles between Stalinists and Trotskyists in Jewish neighborhoods in 1930s Brooklyn looked something like those battles, 2,000 years earlier, between the Jewish “Christists” and those who would create Talmudic Judaism. One victimary reviewer on the Amazon.com page for Reiff’s Life Among the Deathworks refers to Reiff’s “heady admixture mixture of preening Jewish narcissism” and it seems to me that he/she both has a point and is the point: anti-semitism involves the assumption that Jews believe they have a monopoly on exemption from capitulation to the imperial, civilized, order, we must all submit to.\n\nBut I don’t think that anti-semitism is the belief that Jews believe this, especially since the dialectic of arguments over anti-semitism of necessity point out the uniqueness of the Jews as a target and this uniqueness can easily be taken to imply some kind of monopoly of the aforementioned kind. It only becomes anti-semitism when this presumed monopoly is taken to signify a Jewish plot to establish a more inclusive and horrific empire than any that has yet existed.\n\nAt any rate, the point is that we might simply be feeding anti-semitism by directing attention to it so insistently—what might happen if we leave the after-effects of all those internecine Jewish wars behind and let the unproductive spin their wheels? Israel can be a testing ground for this possibility, because in Israel Jews can focus on recreating Judaism, by picking and choosing and reconstructing from among its enormous riches, treating the global opprobrium towards and ostracism of Israel as a mere nuisance, while going about covenanting with all those who prefer relations with a thriving, advanced society over the pleasures of joining in the sacrifices of the victimary Palestinians.\n\nSo, what, then, outside of all prophet and metaphysical frames, is happening now? Reiff’s own prophetic discourse identifies the “therapeutic” as the replacement of the faith in founding interdicts which has taken us this far. He thereby identifies something central to all the historical and cultural “posts,” but I don’t see the therapeutic in as threatening terms as does Reiff. He claims that the therapeutic does away with all interdicts by not only giving us permission to transgress them but by setting us against them as an illegitimate authority, inimical to our spontaneous freedom. In this case, I’m not sure if the victimary is mode of the therapeutic or vice versa; or, on the contrary, the victimary has taken its force from the vacuum left open by the rise of the therapeutic, insofar as the victimary is nothing if not interdicts, albeit unevenly applied.\n\nBut there are always interdicts, insofar as we continue to speak—after all, we don’t engage in continuous orgies and lynchings. So where, and what, are they? How enforced, and revised in practice? To what extent are we living on borrowed capital, drawing upon the habits of renunciation and deferral created by faiths in which we no longer believe, as opposed to new, as yet unnamed signs, creating new, perhaps more idiosyncratic sacralities? Much of what is valuable in contemporary thinking—Gregory Bateson and his followers come to mind—is indebted to a kind of therapeutism: the notion of a double bind, which is certainly consistent with the originary hypothesis and a source of Gans’s thinking about the paradoxes intrinsic to the originary scene, derives from interpretations of therapeutic situations. And there are powerful interdictions built into the “interactionist” standpoint deriving from Bateson: to see our speech as saturated with paradox is to identify and seek to minimize the basic sources of violence and not just out of fear but so as to free ourselves to think and create.\n\nEven the insistence that one not confuse the “map” with the “territory” reflects perhaps the most ancient interdictions, against idolatry, and taking the name of the Lord in vain. We can now know that any map is in the territory, and not just an imperfect, tentative representation of it; even more, the map is nothing more than our analysis and composition of the territory from within. We model the territory as we take a step in one direction rather than another; we receive feedback; and we revise the map in taking another step. Google now does this at the speed of light, more or less. At any time on the Yahoo homepage there is a list of the top ten searches at that moment; sometimes, the top entry drops off the list in a couple of minutes.\n\nIn this economics of attention, anomalies and mistakes stand out—those things that are so bad that they’re good, for example. Standing out is one thing—being incorporated into a new, more or less evanescent, idiom, is another. It’s easy to see the ways in which this happens—a particular image is repeated over and over, in subtly and drastically different ways; a particular phrase or sentence is repeated over and over, with a single word replaced each time, or a different referent, or the context rendering it slightly more or less ironic. Anyone can do it—anyone can be taught to (or maybe just learn) to do it.\n\nAs far as I can tell, that’s what is happening outside of the metaphysical, prophetic and imperial frames: the analysis and composition of mistakes and anomalies into new idioms and grammars. New rules, without any meta-rules, are difficult to follow and violations are hard to assess but precisely the lack of meta-rules makes it urgent to try and follow them to the letter, so people make lots of mistakes but just keep going, tacitly revising the rules, with the boundary between insistence upon compliance and authentification of compliance difficult to discern. In that case, there is no more room for metaphysical mapping or prophetic hysteria.\n\nI naturally think this development supports my own hopes for a far more minimal social order, with all institutions ultimately reducible to explicit agreements with equally explicit modes of accountability. Everything get ironized, post-ironized and de-ironized fairly quickly through this process of analysis and composition, leading to the kind of skepticism, transparency and pluralism that keeps any authority within very strict limits. But I could be wrong—maybe such play depends upon a complacent belief in the stability of what exists (politicians come and go, recessions, come and go, etc., but nothing can ever really change, can it?).\n\nMy guess is that such play is inevitable once we realize we don’t share the same map and accept that we never will—that all we can do is follow one another’s lead and make up the details and patch together the shared terms as we go. Some, perhaps a remnant, could then rebuild around the prohibition on presuming a shared model without the creation of some joint attention. Such a prohibition can be enforced with minimal resentment because you can always simply treat any such presumption as erroneous, so as to open up a new play-space. At any rate, this new period of transparencies and overlappings is what I would like to be interested in right now, however marginal it might be."
    },
    {
      "slug": "why-not",
      "title": "Why not",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "say a few words about the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding “Obamacare”? I’m somewhat detached from it, more so than I would have expected, since I though the Court would overturn the law—I’m as surprised as anyone that it was Chief Justice Roberts who not only cast the deciding vote but did so in a decision that is convoluted enough to be a Borges story, a work of conceptual art or, more simply, a joke (and not a bad one, at that). He actually gave me a new way to think about the word “tax,” which one doesn’t expect from a Supreme Court ruling. So, the government can’t impose a mandate requiring you to buy a product, but they can fine you for not buying that product, as long as that fine is considered a “tax”; nor does the fine or penalty actually have to be called a tax in order to be a tax—indeed, those who passed the law can have, and can continue to, vociferously insist that it is not a tax.\n\nI would not be at all surprised if a new lawsuit charging that the “tax” is invalid because it didn’t originate in the House of Representatives were to be rejected, again in a decision authored by Justice Roberts, on the grounds that, for the purpose of this new lawsuit, it was not, in a fact a tax. In other words, what we might actually have here is a “nonce” tax.\n\nAnd there’s even more! There is a trap for Democrats and, more broadly, the Left built into the decision: Roberts agreed with the dissenters that the Commerce Clause would not have permitted the mandate, hence, presumably, embedding some limits upon federal over-reach. But, one might say (and I would agree with one on this), that over-reach can continue, as long as Congress just says it is introducing new taxes. But there’s the brilliantly laid trap!—the whole point is to tax without admitting you are doing so.\n\nThere’s also a trap for Republicans, who have gotten themselves a bit entangled in their eagerness to rid us of this monstrosity—they began by insisting that the mandate was, in fact a new tax (this insistence lay behind the famous interview wherein George Stephanopolous pressed the President on precisely this question) but, then, for the sake of the lawsuit, were quite happy to deny its “taxness” in finding the quickest route to its overturn; and, now, seem thrilled to take the Supreme Court (which did decide wrongly, didn’t it?) at its word and run against this enormous new tax of Obama’s. This game might not end well either.\n\nI am grateful to the Chief Justice, though, and not only due to my love of word play, self-reflexivity and arbitrary constraints in writing—in trying to decide for myself whether it is, indeed, “fairly possible” to see the mandate as a tax I had to construct the following, intriguing, analogy (which I assume Roberts himself relied upon). The government provides all kinds of tax breaks for activities it would prefer us to engage in more of: having children, winter-proofing our homes, sending our kids to college, and, really, God knows what else. So, in that case, why can’t we say that the government is taxing those who don’t have children, don’t winter-proof, don’t send kids to college, etc.; or, if we want to follow the Mobius Strip around the other side, that the government is “mandating” having children and all the rest? Sure, we can define “tax” and “mandate” in such a way as to answer these questions, but does anyone really believe in such fixed definitions anymore?\n\nIn other words, Roberts’ final trap is for us—all of us who have accepted the continual growth of government and its extension into every area of life, every choice we make, bribing, blackmailing and manipulating us at every turn, with our approval. And I think he knows it. Roberts has written a little postmodern play, in which the audience has to perform the denouement. That’s not such a bad legacy."
    },
    {
      "slug": "living-on",
      "title": "Living On",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It seems to me that the desire for fame and the corresponding resentment towards others for one’s anonymity that Eric Gans identified as “the fundamental human value” and the source of the “radical evil” motivating the mass murderers of our time must, in turn, be rooted in more originary desires. Interesting, Gans doesn’t posit an opposing form of the desire for fame—rather, he contrasts that desire with moral responsibility and human solidarity. But there is a very clear contrast with the radical evil, demonic desire for fame, and one that I think would have been foremost in the minds of practically every person up until a couple of hundred years ago at most, and that David Goldmann (the online “Spengler”) places at the center of his political analyses: the desire for the soul’s immortality.\n\nThe motivation for resisting the temptation to do evil has, historically, been the fear of eternal punishment and the hope of eternal reward. The desires circulating around celebrity are a substitute for that fear and hope—the tawdriness of much celebrity and the periodic outbursts of this radical evil might suggest that this substitute is a pathological one, but I would agree with Gans that it is very difficult to tell for sure—aside from Gans’s reasoning in his “Aurora and ‘Radical Evil’” (Chronicle #428), there is no lack of atheists out there who will recount to us all the blood that has been spilled on behalf of behalf of this or that favored version of immortalization.\n\nMaybe the costs of celebrification are lower. But there have been other alternatives to the orthodox modes of immortalization in modern times: living forever in the nation one belongs to, in great works and, perhaps, most accessibly, in ones descendants—all of these modes, indeed, long co-existed with belief in eternal damnation and salvation, while being capable of existing without such belief. The first two are certainly of receding credibility, having been associated with violence (of nationalism, war, the megalomania of the tyrant), while few are capable of unambiguously benevolent great works (like curing diseases).\n\nAnd families are smaller, more individuals are without them, tensions between the generations make the pleasures of seeing one’s self carried on in the next generation more problematic. If immortality is a basic need for we sign users, whence can we reasonably hope to receive it?\n\nWe certainly don’t need to be nostalgic for presumably more certain guarantees of immortality: the promises of the Church and other religious authorities in this regard were clearly extravagant and, fortunately, so were the threats. People must have always noticed, regardless of whether they would discuss or reflect upon it, that no one could really know about any of these things one way or another. Furthermore, nations dissolve and leave the stage of history; family lines die out; with very few exceptions, great works change their meaning over time, as no one has any way of knowing whether he will end up a Herostratus or, say, a… well, who—would anyone like to venture to name an individual whose legacy has been received with en during and unambiguous adoration?\n\nAll that endures is language, and whoso would seek out immortality today would best do so therein. Indeed, as Gans has argued on many occasions, the eternity of the sign is the model for all our other understandings of immortality. So why not cut right to the chase? The only guarantee of immortality is some discernable, irreversible change to the language—we need only think in terms of some minimal shift, a “style,” which one cannot help but have, and of which one can, with only a slight introduction of self-reflexivity, identify the markers. This really is a sure thing, because even if one, near the end of one’s life, were to discover that one’s style was completely derivative, even parasitic upon some precursor or mere repetition of the deadening formulas of everyday life and common sense—well, even carrying a copied style forward into new domains constitutes something new, and the latest iteration of the formulaic or commonplace communicates something extra, whether it be a charming naivete or unwitting parody.\n\nOf course we are lowering the bar here—we surrender the power to direct sinners netherward, to nominate heroes to adore and villains to abominate. But styles are subject to judgment as well, and a kind of posthumous punishment, and all the paradoxes of faith are activated here as well—it is precisely the most scrupulous, those who attend to their style, those who seek to bound up style with substance, to familiarize themselves with so as to distinguish themselves from a range of styles, who will be most tortured with the fear of the irrelevance, harmfulness, or fraudulence of their contribution to the language, while those who just absorbed some off the shelf style that “worked” for them will exhibit that style most blithely (and, who knows, maybe with greater approval).\n\nBut this just means that such judgments are out of our hand, as they should be—our inability to force the issue, to ensure that our style enter the language in a particular way, or ripple out with ascertainable effects, signifies the absence of violence from this form of immortalization. At the same time, though, we could always reasonable hope that some little bit of our style, especially now that we can record and make universally available the most trivial of our experiments in style, will resonate sufficiently, even if in a mediated or marginal way, with some, a few, down the road, perhaps even so much that someone will take the time to find their way back to the “original.” And since it would be like that person is conversing with us, it is also like I or anyone else is conversing with that person right now. Perhaps that is, or can be, immortality enough."
    },
    {
      "slug": "jewish-social-theory-and-anti-semitism",
      "title": "(Jewish) Social Theory and Anti-Semitism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We know that we can reach agreements with people, because we all the time act in accord with others’ tacit and explicit consent. We know that there must be some explicit dimension to our agreements with others—each of us must know that each is letting the other pass on the street, sticking to our respective places on line, etc. We also know that however explicit our agreements—even in the most elaborately constructed and sophisticated contract—there is a tacit dimension which makes it possible for us to understand what we have agreed to explicitly.\n\nFrom this self-evident knowledge, I would further propose that we are led to seek the basis of our agreements when our explicit agreements become problematic in some way and that when that happens the best place to look for those foundations is in those tacit understandings, rather than, say, in concepts like natural law, natural right, and so on. The fact that we have agreed reveals us to be the kind of people capable of reaching and maintaining, to the extent that we do, those agreements. We are people with certain common needs, which those agreements tried to meet, with some kind of shared past and language which enabled us to meet and shape the agreement, and with certain capacities which our adherence to those agreements and responsibility to the exigencies consequent upon them have placed on display. We are also people with a certain relation to each other—we have agreed so far and no further, we have shored up and repaired the agreement where it has frayed in particular ways, we have let slip this or that obligation, kept an eye on each other in some particular way, and so on.\n\nFurther: a social theory starting from these minimal particulars can enable us to look forward: a thriving community will be one which can construct meta-agreements allowing for consensual revision or discarding of existing explicit agreements; which can allow for tacit agreements to become explicit in such a way as to enrich the existing body of explicit agreements while simultaneously re-sedimenting new layers of tacit agreement; and that can generalize existing agreements so as to welcome outsiders without diluting what we might call the “density of the tacit” embedded in the current world of contract and covenants. Instead, then, of talking about imaginary constructs like “progress,” we can study the visible forms of communication and cooperation in terms of the degree to which they reveal forms of rooted openness.\n\nJudaism, and Christianity after it, is rooted in the repudiation of human sacrifice. Human sacrifice enters history with the asymmetric gift relationship established by the Big Man become tyrant become emperor/god: the Big Man gathers the resentment of the community upon himself, and can therefore be the “emissary victim” for the community; the Big Man continues to stand in for or represent the community, but the bigger he gets the less likely he is to allow himself to be victimized, in which case substitutes need to be sought; once it becomes possible to supply substitute victims (what kind of conceptual leap and what kind of event must have been necessary for this transformation?), the appetite for victims will expand.\n\nThe power of the empire will be devoted to seizing victims, which introduces war on a massive scale (the conquest and incorporation of entire communities and even smaller empires) and then slavery as a utilitarian by-product. The one God, the God whose name is the declarative sentence, calls for the repudiation, at least in principle, of this entire system, and it seems to me it does so on the following grounds: first, an observation of history (and it is succession of empires and emperors, the dramas of their successes and failures, their over-reachings and usurpations that is, first of all, “history,” i.e., a discernable pattern to events) teaches us that kings come and go while the king who is greater than all kings, the God greater than all gods, endures and gives sustenance to those who hold fast to Him despite conquest and defeat; second, what they hold fast to is a rejection of scapegoating, of the arbitrariness of victimage, in the name of law and the truth—a wrongdoer can be punished, but only insofar as he violates a pre-existing law and is known to have done what he has been accused of.\n\nThe hubris, the haughtiness, which leads inevitably to the fall of the great, is rooted in this endless search for victims, this belief that arbitrary deaths can feed the life of the community, of which the victimizer himself ultimately becomes a victim.\n\nWe know that the social contract theories of the origin of the state are liberal myths—the state, in its origins, was the empire, with its subjugation of all communities and, actually or potentially, all individuals, to a common center, which in turn required a large bureaucratic apparatus, infrastructure, massive armed force, and a transcendental gift relationship between center and margins: the emperor gives life to the people who must in turn be ready to give their possessions and if necessary their lives to the emperor. Along the way, empires came to depend upon legal structures providing regularity and predictability in managing the relations between center and margins, which in turn would secrete minimal notions of fairness and mythologies of cosmic order which the earthly empire mirrored: the monotheistic religions drew upon, while polemicizing against, the more enlightened versions of imperial mythology.\n\nAll subsequent states, including our liberal democratic ones, are carved out of the ancient transnational empires, through a variety of processes: national liberation, which replaces a large, distant imperial order with one closer to home and therefore easier to confront and control; the creation of norms and contracts, enforced through threat (quite often acted on) of rebellion and/or regicide, making leaders accountable to the ruled; and, finally, the actual staffing of the state apparatus through participatory selection processes. (This last development, and I am sure the others as well to some extent, drew upon modes of accountability already available, indeed in more robust forms, in smaller, more primitive communities, such as selection of leaders by lot, the gathering of supporters ready to wage war behind contending leaders, and so on.)\n\nWhat hasn’t changed is the relation between politics and history, which is to say the establishment of the state as a stage upon which the destiny of the nation is performed before a critical audience. How else could we account for the celebration of Obama’s election as some kind of triumph over our racist past if the political arena was, far from the neutral, problem-solving technocratic arena imagined by progressives, or, for that matter, the issue-oriented, debate-club style with an ideally informed public fantasized by another version of liberalism, if the political arena were not still imagined in basically dramaturgic terms?\n\nBut dramaturgic means: still sacrificial. Through Obama we will transcend our racism, either through his willing self-sacrifice to the still powerful forces of racism or through his summoning of our “better angels” to deliver us from racism once and for all; or his sacrifice will be in vain and we will descend once more to our racist roots. These are, of course, the leftist versions, reiterating once more the leftist contradiction between heightening the historical contradictions toward the decisive confrontation and transcending the irrational passions, grounded in unjust social relations, that have driven history.\n\nOn the conservative side, there are certainly dramatic constructions in play as well—overcoming the usurper, restoring the constitutional order and the transparency of rule by the people after the century long Progressive transgression. The conservative script (I’ll let others decide whether my own bias interferes with my analysis here) seems to me a more contained, less apocalyptic, and therefore less sacrificial one, but it is vulnerable to the objection that there is no true Constitutional order to be restored.\n\nWhat is on trial now is that modern confection of Politics as the Center Stage upon which the Drama of the People’s Self-Liberation is Enacted. Local communities resisted empire because the asymmetrical gift relationship with the imperial center became onerous, but extracting concessions from, which is to say, entering agreements with and creating reciprocal obligations with the center had the effect of giving the people a share in the crimes and follies of empire. The only other choice would have been to withdraw altogether from the imperial order, which would have led to extinction, one way or another—so, there was really no choice.\n\nIndeed, though libertarians will dispute it, I consider it quite likely that commerce could only have expanded under the protection of empire and, even more, that modern science and technology could not have developed outside of the cosmological picture generated by the imperial incorporations of Christianity. Still, the distribution of responsibility between rulers and ruled has never been worked out, which is why war was transformed from an affair of monarchical and aristocratic elites, with restricted ends and carefully constructed rules (even if, of course, civilian populations in the way often suffered) to exterminatory assaults upon civilian targets (in World War II)—after all, from a democratic perspective, shouldn’t we hold the people responsible for the policies of their rulers (and even if the Nazis usurped power from the democratic state, the people must have been complicit in that usurpation, and hence still guilty) and assume that they can affect them?\n\nAnother very serious problem has not been solved and, unlike the problem of democratic war, this one has not even been addressed by the modern political machines. The ancient resentment between rulers and ruled has never been resolved—one reason for this is that the contending elites have an interest in keeping this resentment going insofar as each wants to represent itself as the popular party; but an equally important reason is that institutional separation between rulers and ruled is almost as stark as ever—we really do have a “ruling class” of Washington governmental and media elites and the corporate elites tied up with and favored by them.\n\nThis resentment is stoked in a paradoxical way: by continually ratcheting up the asymmetrical gift relation between rulers and ruled, which is to say by extending more and more government largesse. The people resentfully assert on this on the assumption that the rulers live at their expense and this is just payback; the rulers give it through partisan competition but also through fear, never far from the minds of the rich and the politicians during the long period of Communist global terror, and, going even further back, the roots of the civilizing empires in slavery and conquest, of popular uprisings or some kind of leftist or rightest putsch; even more, such largesse must be concealed under democratic forms so as to include the middle class—so, while our finances would probably be in better shape with straightforward redistributions from, say, the top 1/3 to the bottom 1/5, it becomes politically necessary to insist that the entitlement programs are really social “insurance” so that we only get back what we paid in.\n\nIn this way, the government grows in power by capitulating to public demands, while the public can remain in an infantile state of rebellion, with “grass roots” partisans on each side exposing the dirty deals of the other, as the government becomes more powerful. The most binding long-term explicit agreements are more and more made by government bureaucrats amongst themselves and with their clients, with mere, and increasingly formulaic, ratification by the people; and these explicit agreements are more and more distant from the tacit agreements formed in companies, institutions and communities, which remain much closer to their traditional character: each is responsible for self and family, individuals who can be relied upon are trusted and rewarded, breaches in trust are scandals, good will is presupposed in most interactions, etc.\n\nVictimary thinking, and its apotheosis in the hysteric swell of support for Obama as transcendent figure in 2008, while an authentic religious response to the event of the Holocaust, in its hostility to the normal (re-coded as a source of unthinkable violence) has been redirected towards the effort to bring our tacit agreements and arrangements into alignment with those constructed at the top, but such attempts are becoming increasingly strained, to the point of desperation. At the same time, those more local attachments, grounded in an unself-conscious “oikophilia,” have no other external orientation beyond the central political stage while that stage has alienated itself from those local, familiar “affections.”\n\nThe rule for discourse under a democratic regime (and by “democratic,” I mean the resentment against everything imperial except for what is constitutive of the imperial: a single center from which each is equidistant) is that every agent and interest be represented as equal in relation to a presumed center; to put it another way, no one’s resentment is to be left out or left unbalanced by a complementary resentment. This process of balancing resentments holds for any community, but in the implicitly unlimited democratic community (which by now extends well beyond the nation via international human rights law, institutions and activism, incorporated into diplomatic discourse) in which the repudiated yet rights bestowing center must be distanced ever further, the balancing, increasingly, is driven by the most formulaic of explicit agreements (as if one’s feelings towards, say, same sex marriage, should be determined by the latest finding on civil rights law by a particular court), with no attention to the tacit realm.\n\nThere have always been and still are many things (peoples, vocations, habits, dispositions) that democratic discourse cannot deal well with, and Jews are among them, and whatever can’t be framed in democratic terms must be framed in “meta-democratic terms,” as a usurpation of the center—perhaps foundational, perhaps salvational, but ultimately totalitarian, as the center, whe never evoked, must enforce the equidistance from itself. Anti-semitism, then, places Jews at the center—not, though, at the center of a centerless market society as Eric Gans once argued, but at the evacuated center of a democratic society that has constituted itself through its resentment towards imagined attempts to re-occupy that center.\n\nAnti-semitism, in other words, is a “meta-democratic” discourse: it represents what cannot be balanced out within the chain of equivalences within democratic discourse but yet what is required to account for the uni-directional change metaphysical thinking requires: the evacuated and hated center (that from which we have liberated ourselves, which should only give, but yet insists on taking). The best way to identify anti-semitism, I think, is simply to look at how someone speaks about Jews and Israel—what is important is not the degree of hostility expressed, or whether Israel is singled out among nations, but whether in that discourse Israel or the Jews is the only agent.\n\nIf someone is telling a story and Israel or the Jews is the only actor, with all other figures represented as passive victims or dupes, then we have an anti-semitic discourse. What “the Jews,” “Israel,” “Zionism” or, now less often, “neo-conservatism” is then being used to explain is why the resentments don’t all balance out, with the people thereby made collectively aware of its real interests and general will. There is really an imperial order, more hideous and insidious than any that has previously existed, even in the imagination, and that makes us all equal, but as slaves. It is such a discourse that makes interaction with Jews unthinkable, and their elimination correspondingly thinkable, because Jews operate on a different plane than everyone: getting rid of the Jews will restore the people.\n\nAnd this holds true for thoroughly undemocratic regimes like Nazi Germany and the contemporary Arab and Muslim dictatorships, which even more than liberal democratic regimes insist upon the homogeneity of the people’s will and the treachery implicit in any deviation from it. As modern societies, at least politically (insofar as any country needs a presentable government), these are totalitarian democracies (as was Communism). (The supposedly hopeful admonition that the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy suggests, in this context, a continual expansion of the most formulaic terms of explicit agreement to every single area of life—an expansion which, of course, will always encounter obstacles, which will always be some kind of unregulated initiative, and which must be named and targeted.)\n\nThe Jews can be imagined on this “other” plane because the tensions between Jews as a people, Judaism as a religion, and Jews as an ethnic group; between actual Jews and the Jews of the Christian and Muslim theological imaginary (and the Jews of the Western literary and philosophical imagination more broadly), have not been resolved, not any more that the tensions between ruler and ruled I discussed earlier, and not any more for Jews themselves than for others. Here, I’ll make the point that I am simply supplementing, and not at all trying to replace, Eric Gans’s analysis of anti-semitism as resentment of firstness: most specifically, resentment at the Jews for discovering/inventing the One God, while resisting and exempting themselves from the Christian and Muslim universalizations of that discovery/invention; more broadly, though, as initiators of and within the European market economy and modern political and cultural institutions; even more, as pioneering, through the socialist and communist movements, the critique and dismantling of that modern, market society before a majority of citizens, even in the West, had had a chance to acclimatize themselves to it.\n\nThe simple addition is that Jews must be resented within democracy, or any polity predicated upon a general will implicit in each citizen and recoverable through either through unfettered dialogue amongst the citizens or through revolutionary events, just as much as they must be resented within Christian and Muslim polities. Democracy cannot assimilate the Jews because it cannot assimilate firstness which, by definition, upsets the established balance of resentments and initiates some new form of agreement, something one can “sign on” to without prior permission or authorization. “The Jews” will always be a serviceable answer to the question, “why don’t the people see their way clear to their own best interests,” and that will always be the question of democratic discourse because that discourse presupposes that only the usurped center can interfere with our convergence upon shared understanding of our common interests. Democratese, in other words, is intelligible under the assumption that, presented with the relevant facts and freed from whatever ideological manipulations blind them, everyone would say what I am saying now.\n\nI would conclude, then, that opposing anti-semitism within democratic discourse is a futile exercise: you can’t refute it, because the absence of evidence of Jewish control and manipulation is, of course, the best evidence of it. By now, charges of anti-semitism have been pre-emptively marked as disingenuous attempts to silence critics of Israel, and therefore more proof of Jewish manipulation, control, malevolence, etc. We can no longer assume some “mainstream” protocol by which well intentioned people recognize anti-semitism and shun it—the post-War victimary discourses which enabled the establishment of such a protocol have mutated into the most virulent source of anti-semitism, in the resentment of those whose victimary centrality has always already been pre-empted by the Jews.\n\nBut, I think, it might be just as well to have less coded and more overt expressions of resentment, especially since those codes have constrained the speech of us Jews and those philo-semites who do and might stand with us, as taboos on “singling” out elements of Jewish singularity, for good and ill, have impinged upon all discourse.\n\nIt’s silly to tell other people what they should say, but my own preference is for speaking bluntly, as a Jew, about Jewish accomplishments as well as Jewish blunders and instances of genuine irresponsibility within modern Jewish history, such as the rush into the Communist movements, especially in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, and especially in the Bolshevik revolution—movements which could never have gained the power they did without massive Jewish participation. Yes, Jews were oppressed under Czarism, indeed Czarist Russia was a dead end for Jews, they saw Communism as a liberation, etc.—but enough of such rationalizations!\n\nThis is a key pathology of democratic discourse—any wrongdoing of which I am accused must be traced back to a wrong done to me so as to even things out, and I imagine the hope of many Jews was that tracing the ultimate wrong to the “ruling class” oppressors would mean it wouldn’t be traced back to them—but why not just acknowledge the wrong, assess the damage, repudiate the sources in one’s own experience that were evidenced in these events, rethink and create new practices? Yuri Slezkine, in “The Jewish Century,” traces the modern Jewish trajectory along three lines: Communism, with its fullest expression in the USSR; Zionism, leading, of course, to Israel; and the “therapeutic state” which he asserts Jews created in 20th century America—with this latest perhaps the furthest reaching, intellectually and socially, of them all.\n\nWe can afford to reject the Communism, and Leftism more generally, while embracing Zionism and the flourishing of Judaism and Jewish culture, along with the remarkable example of a free, market society under construction in Israel, and untangling the complex legacies of the “therapeutic,” which I believe has done more good than harm in contributing to the self-understanding of modern society. In other words, there are many good reasons to be disgusted, to renounce and condemn anti-semitism, and I don’t say that Jewish repudiation of Leftism is a precondition of such responses; I do say, though, that Jews and their defenders will only be able to engage this battle fully through such a repudiation, which will enable us to frankly acknowledge our admittedly outsized contribution to the world and make the perhaps unsatisfying but undoubtedly true claim that we are more sinned against than sinning—but, in the end, who wants to keep score? We are strong enough to do this, and not simply adopt a victimized stance in relation to anti-semitism.\n\nTo return to social theory: the basic social model bequeathed by Judaism is one of a covenant formed through the revelation of a divinity external to any social center; implicit in this model is a law, both oral (given in the event of revelation itself and transmitted pedagogically and in practice) and written (with simulated reluctance, because the law can account for the dispersal of the people and the cutting of threads of tradition insofar as we supplement these losses with the sacralization of the very language in which the revelation took place); implicit in the law—actual statutes, governing everyday life and ethical experience, debated and implemented by specialists but visible to all—or Halacha, are the store of examples, embodied in stories, high and low, tragic and comic, constantly undergoing revision and accreting commentary, or Aggadah, in which the kind of people who discovered/invented, expanded, exemplified and violated the laws can be disclosed along with the kind of world in which such people would have been born, grown and struggled.\n\nImplicit in all of the above is a people capable of living in a world of strangers, of switching back and forth between explicit and tacit, extending the benefit of God and the Law to those who wish it while defending themselves against those who don’t—at any rate, there is never any social relation outside of some covenant, some mutual pledging, some willingness to be taken hostage or stand in for one’s fellow. This is pretty much the social model I proposed at the opening, which means we can now answer Marx’s implicit accusation and say, yes, we want to make all of society Jewish, and this is what it means.\n\nClearly, we need a radical break with victimary culture, which exacerbates what I have called “meta-democratic” discourse, has no intrinsic limits and in the near future might make basic economic activity and the maintenance of social peace problematic. Since the last radical break with victimary culture was that effected by the Nazis, people will understandably be cautious. I think that only the sacralization of agreements, tacit and explicit, will suffice—even unfair agreements, agreements entered into rashly, agreements undermined by changes in the conditions which first underlay them, agreements we have discovered we must have made in order to cooperate as we do now—a fetishization of agreements, and engagements which foreground what we must have already agreed upon simply to make the engagement possible.\n\nThis would not replace a “victim” culture with a “victor” culture, but with a culture which privileges those who stick with commitments they have made and offer themselves as examples of the agreements we must have made simply in order to make sense of the example. The fight against anti-semitism might put forth those elements of Judaism that represent the human as subject to agreements already made, those yet to be made, and those we are to discover we have always already made. In seeking ceaselessly to covenant with our fellow men and women we earn the right to make explicit the covenant with God whose promise underlay that quest in the first place—even if we are at the point where we can eliminate the name “God,” if need be, and just treat every word as containing a solemn agreement with whomever cares to repeat, embody or mistake it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "jewish-ga",
      "title": "Jewish GA",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The Jewish revelation establishes the principle that all humans are created equal because and insofar as they are created in God’s image. We are all like God because God is equidistant from all of us and from Himself: the “I am that I am/I will be what I will be” removes from God the self-sameness that would enable us to figure out how to get Him to do what we want him to do. But God did make a covenant with a people, in which He promised to protect them and have them prosper if they would obey His law. Judaism has an account of how that came to be. The immediate presence of God to man, from Adam and Eve to the generation of the flood, was a failure, as God Himself acknowledged.\n\nGod cannot walk among men: His presence becomes the source of murderous envy, and tyrannical and mob-like emulation, until God is finally utterly repudiated and the world filled with violence, necessitating the destruction of His creation. I imagine that we see here a history of humanity subsequent to the emergence of the Big Man, the patriarch, the tribal leader and ultimately the emperor, which would have been the first forms in which the human being was divinized. Maybe Christianity’s re-divinization of man is predicated upon the judgment that Judaism had not settled that question in its absolute separation of God and man.\n\nSo, we could ask whether Judaism might, in fact, have settled it, if only there had been sufficient patience and ingenuity to spread its more rigorous word of God throughout the world; or whether Christianity re-opened the question only to make it worse; or, whether both have failed, or reached their limits, which is to say have not exhausted the possible models through which we can think the originary scene. The means by which God proposes the separation of God from humanity is the covenant that founds a people governed under the law. Already subsequent to the flood this approach had been introduced as God imposed a code of 7 laws on Noah and his descendents (the “Noachide code”) as means of distancing the divine from the human while leaving the latter with an “image” of the former (God, then, is conceived less as a source of sustenance than as the origin of our capacity to covenant with each other and live under publicly shared laws).\n\nAt any rate, we end up with the paradox that Eric Gans and others have noticed: the universal principle of human equality under God can only be proclaimed and instantiated in a single, small, weak people, in the midst of imperial orders predicated upon man creating himself as God. Judaism later (mostly powerfully in the thought of Maimonides) devised a perfectly plausible theory of how this paradox was to be resolved: the Jews, by living a well-ordered and holy life in observance of God’s law would be a “light unto the nations,” living propaganda for the superiority of living under God’s word over the merely man-made laws of other nations.\n\nPerhaps some peoples would convert to Judaism, but for the most part one could readily imagine other peoples treating the Bible’s history of humanity as their own and revising the law it provides according to their own national peculiarities and, finally, their own “oral law.” But this seems like a recipe for anti-semitism, doesn’t it? The Jews would still be at the center of this monotheistic world, they would still be responsible for preserving and exemplifying the law, any success they enjoyed would be taken as a sign that they were still god’s privileged children, and any catastrophes suffered by others blamed on the false promises of the Jews.\n\nIn other words, the same problem of God’s too present presence because Judaism cannot shed the signs of its birth in a world of violent God men. It can’t be originary enough. As Eric Gans argued (or I, at least, took him to be arguing) in Chronicle 432, we should have some respect for our egalitarian ancestors, and not only because of their blissful lack of knowledge of fixed hierarchies but because of their richer and more diverse experience of the divine. All contemporary attempts, most egregiously through the UN, to create a global law under which we could all live as equals, can only lead to monstrous tyrannies or, perhaps, disorder.\n\nEven national systems of equality under the law are seriously fraying, as no one has yet found a way to resolve the twinned freedoms of economic initiative and of generating resentment towards the results of that first freedom. We then end up with endless, fruitless and acrimonious disputes over the real “meaning” of the law, our founding principles, freedom and equality and so on. The only spaces in which we can be free and equal are those where we multiply endlessly rather than withholding the names of God. I don’t expect colloquies with insects and mountains, or that every spring will have its own nymph, or that we will “Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”\n\nThe gods are already separate from humanity under the original egalitarian order—the entire problem posed by the Bible doesn’t exist in equality under the sign rather than under the law. The gods are in language—any possibly meaningful utterance at least slows down our rush to appropriation, enough to make sense before proceeding. We can always pry open utterances and the materials of language so as to hear from the divine—struggle with a mistake, pretending that it makes sense, and miraculously, it will; add or subtract a letter from every other word from a sentence and you create a new sentence, in an oddly revelatory dialogue or argument with the original; the same if you reverse elements of a sentence—the declarative sentence is still the name of God, albeit in infinite manifestations.\n\nAnd maybe this is Jewish after all—the Judaism, most famously of the Kabbalah but certainly going all the way back to the Rabbis and no doubt beyond, to the very beginnings of the divinization of God’s word through the alphabet—the Judaism which contends that God looked into the Torah and created the world out of its linguistic materials."
    },
    {
      "slug": "after-democracy",
      "title": "After Democracy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "If the determinist hypothesis were true, and adequately accounted for the actual world, there is a clear sense in which… the notion of human responsibility, as ordinarily understood, would no longer apply to any actual, but only to imaginary or conceivable, states of affairs. I do not here wish to say that determinism is necessarily false, only that we neither speak or nor think as if it could be true, and that it is difficult, and perhaps beyond our normal powers, to conceive what our picture of the world would be if we seriously believed it; so that to speak… as if one might… accept the determinist hypothesis, and yet to continue to think and speak much as we do at present, is to breed intellectual confusion.\n\nIf the belief in freedom—which rests on the assumption that human beings do occasionally choose, and that their choices are not wholly accounted for by the kind of causal explanations which are accepted in, say, physics or biology—if this is a necessary illusion, it is so deep and so pervasive that it is not felt as such. No doubt we can try to convince ourselves that we are systematically deluded; but unless we attempt to think out the implications of this possibility, and to alter our modes of thought and speech accordingly, this hypothesis remains hollow; that is, we find it impracticable even to entertain it seriously, if our behavior is to be taken as evidence of what we can and what we cannot bring ourselves to believe or suppose not merely in theory but in practice… it is not much easier to begin to think out in real terms, to which behavior and speech would correspond, what the universe of the genuine determinist would be like, than to think out, with the minimum of indispensable concrete detail… what it would be like to be in a timeless world, or one with a seventeen-dimensional space.\n\nLet those who doubt this try for themselves; the symbols with which we think will hardly lend themselves to the experiment; they, in their turn, are too deeply involved in our normal view of the world, allowing for every difference of period and clime, to be capable of so violent a break. (Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty , 71-72)\n\nGertrude Stein mentioned that she likes having habits, but she’s not a utopian because she doesn’t like other people talking about her habits. This seems to me a better starting place for inquiring into basic human rights than those grounded in either natural law (God given rights based on the divine image in each of us and contingent upon the use of the protected liberties to serve God) or natural right (the most basic right to protect oneself, as a lone, rational beast, against threats to one’s life). First of all, Stein’s observation is just as universal as those of natural law or natural right; second, it doesn’t require belief in the utopian fictions of a divine image or a lone, pre-social proto human.\n\nWe all have habits, regardless of “period or clime,” and it is a fact well worth noting—animals certainly have repeated patterns of behavior but habits shape a human reality. Through our habits we carve out a space; you could probably learn more about a person through sustained study of their habits than sustained exposure to their speech, much less a recitation of their beliefs; indeed, one’s speech is itself a set of habits, replete with variations on widely shared formulas, chunks and grammatical constructions, accent, intonation, gesture and so on; and beliefs are just more specialized habits of speech, the way we answer certain kinds of questions when others need to know whether to include or trust us.\n\nAnd we do observe each other’s habits, with the same range of deliberate and focused to deeply unconscious attention as constitute the habits themselves. Habits are, on one level, private rituals, the creation of sacred spaces; on another level they are the internalization of the complex set of traumas (which habits apotropaically ward off) and moments of ecstatic bliss (which habits seek to recall in the manner of a cargo cult) which shape us all. Habits range from the highly intimate, even shameful, to the broadly public and contagious. We all like having habits—the notion of a free, rational individual on the Enlightenment model is utopian insofar as we would have to imagine beings without habits, habits which we can only with great effort wrench ourselves out of by giving ourselves repeated imperatives to construct practices which directly and usually painfully counter some habit until the point where the new practice becomes a habit itself. The “symbols with which we think will hardly lend themselves to the experiment” of imagining a single individual freely and rationally making it through a single day, or even a single hour, rational choice by rational choice.\n\nEven more, none of us like others speaking about our habits—or, at least we would each get to our own point where direct reference to and examination of our habits would generate enormous, even panicky, resistance. That is, most of us (who knows, maybe Stein as well) would have little problem with playful satirizing of our insistence on a particular dish being made just right, or our over-reliance upon a particular expression, our “addiction” to some TV show or (in more intimate relations) lovemaking script—but it will not take very long before such probing will make further conversation simply impossible. Even more unbearable is other people talking amongst themselves about our habits, even more if their talk involves reforming our habits, even more if such reformation is to be carried out insidiously, by working on those habits themselves and, most of all, is it is to be attempted on a large scale, by authorized pseudo-expert elites, with the aim of making us fit into some scheme of social betterment.\n\nAnd that is the essence of utopianism, along with the source of social determinisms which, as Berlin notes, are both impossible to imagine or live while being real enough to wreck entire societies and hundreds of millions of lives during the 20th century. To plan a utopia you need exact knowledge of the human material you need to rearrange, knowledge of what has made it what it is and how it can be remade. For making the revolution, vaguer knowledge of how large social masses move in response to certain events and processes may suffice; to sustain the revolution once made you need knowledge of habits. Knowledge which you can never have, because habits will evolve in response to your attempt to track and re-train them.\n\nBerlin’s (and not only his) critique of determinism and its link to totalitarianism is well known, and so, thanks especially to George Orwell, is his insight into the need for deterministic totalitarian movements to directly assault the common language shared by humans. But I don’t know of anyone who has grounded that common language in habit, or stated the corollary that not liking others’ talking about your habits is a basic, let’s say the basic, human right. Now, habits, like language, change, in superficial and more wide-ranging ways. But that you have a right to interrupt others when they speak about your habits wouldn’t change.\n\nAnd, unlike abstract rights to life, speech, property, religion, etc., which tacitly and, ultimately fantastically, presuppose some third agency who will be there to prevent someone else from taking your property, burning down your house of worship, threatening your life if you don’t shut up or, for that matter, just taking your life already, the right not to like others talking about your habits presupposes something much more realistic: people will, after all, talk about your habits but you won’t like it and the only way that talking about your habits can continue despite your interruptions is by shutting you up or you shutting up.\n\nThere are all kinds of ways of shutting up and being shut up: establishing an independent board empowered to determine whether, say, allocating resources depending upon whether treating diseases characteristic of a particular demographic with identifiable life-styles is cost-beneficial is a way of shutting you up. And that marks such a board as utopian, which means that we can’t imagine, in ordinary language, the world that would match its deliberations any more than we could imagine a world with “seventeen dimensions.” The right to not like others talking about your habits doesn’t and can’t mean that some super-agency will prevent that board, established by some hypothetical health care law, from doing a cost-benefit analysis of your habits—it just means that you don’t recognize a political world in which that happens as anything other than a violent imposition on you.\n\nWhat that means practically is as hard to say as what it means to insist upon free speech rights under a tyrannical regimen, but your defense of your right not to like others taking about your habits (and it’s a right that can only exist in its defense) would speaking, and continually learning to speak, and learning how to only speak with others in a language presupposing freedom and responsibility and, to add to Berlin’s analysis, idiosyncrasy and mistakenness. Obviously, I could not consider giving a set of speech rules for freedom, but the reason why that can’t be done is rather interesting—as soon as anyone were to say that anyone who speaks in such and such a way speaks in a way inimical to freedom we would realize that someone speaking in that way in order to parody it would be speaking in a way that epitomizes freedom, and that one could never establish meta-rules for distinguishing one way of speaking from the other.\n\nThis is just to say that the margin of freedom lies in the possibility that one might be mistaken—another might take my parody of totalitarian speech as threatening, or vice versa. The way that margin works in ordinary language is to open up language onto, not so much the abyss post-structuralism liked to invoke as a different rail. Habits of speech are idioms, and all habits require ongoing tending because habits are intimately dependent upon some parts of the environment while being highly resistant to other parts and there can’t be a general theory that will determine which is which for any particular habit and environments are always changing—language goes off one rail an onto another when idioms are dislocated and there is a discrepancy among the interlocutors over which presuppositions must be true for a particular statement to be understood.\n\nYou say you really need a cup of coffee and the context and everything I know about you leads me to assume that you are struggling with your attempt to give up caffeine, while you are in fact mimicking what I would expect you to say and thereby signaling your transcendence of that craving and foiling of my expectations. You can triumphantly laugh off my gesture of sympathy. I can then join in your laughter or be offended because the joke seems to be on me, while if I join in you can leave it at that or tease me for my gullibility and if I take offense you can try to appease me or get offended in turn by my elevation of my own vanity over your life changing accomplishment.\n\nAnd so on—that is the rule for speaking freely and responsibly: each meeting of intersecting habits opens up ever ramifying binary choices, each of which is ultimately whether to more fully engage the scene and continue the ramifications, on the one hand, or to withdraw and put them to an end, on the other. That is normal speech, what human beings do, and what political and cultural theorists can do is expand our sense of the possible bifurcations by pointing out where habits lead anyone to see a straight, pre-determined path instead. When you make visible anyone’s habits in this way they won’t like it, which is their right, but attentiveness to the ethics and esthetics of the situation will make it possible for their resentment to be complemented by gratitude; if you are really attentive, even their expression of resentment will get incorporated into a learning habit and once speaking about your habits becomes a habit then you won’t want to give that up.\n\nAnd once we get the habit of not liking others speaking about our habits of speaking about our habits then all the other rights—speech, property, religion and so on—rights which presuppose an individualized world worthy of protection—will come firmly into place.\n\nThis is all after democracy because democracy, with its ever growing pantheon of rights, is utopian. Once the rage against hierarchies begins it will race right past the hierarchies you happen to dislike and not stop until it’s attacking the hierarchies you are unknowingly implicated in—in the end, there is no criterion other than the appropriation of signs of antinomic agency, also known as “cool.” The endpoint of liberal democracy is that the satisfaction of the rights of one require a great deal of talking about the habits of everyone. Putatively racist, sexist and homophobic impulses need to be programmed out of the population, but what counts as racist, sexist or homophobic is resistance or even indifference to the need for programming.\n\nWe are all collectively responsible for everyone’s health, so we must all be concerned with everyone’s taking care and being insured. It isn’t often noticed how much can’t be discussed within liberal democracy, and it would be hard to tell how much that we can’t discuss goes unnoticed—and more will go unnoticed, since that of which we can’t speak can’t be noticed. The most obvious example to me is gender difference—everyone knows that there are differences between men and women, important and trivial, always with plenty of exceptions, capable of misunderstanding and misuse, but undeniably there—yet, except for the pervasive, smug, maternalistic assumption of female superiority spread through the advertising and entertaining industries it is virtually impossible to discuss them, especially in mixed company.\n\nAnd this in spite of the fact that the topic is very interesting in sheer intellectual terms (especially given women’s now extensive participation in all areas of social life, which reveals all these differences in very diverse ways as well as removing the issue of distorting, imposed social roles from the equation) as well as being of vital interest in everyone’s personal life. Equally obvious is the taboo on discussing racial differences, which genetic science is sure to disclose in years to come, probably in ways that bear little resemblance to the stereotypes that terrify us. In short, any expression that might by any chain of events conjurable by the imagination bear upon anyone’s exercise of their rights is beyond discussion.\n\nAlso unspeakable is the fact that immigrants to the US have always brought the socialism and cronyism from their native countries and implanted them here—not just the Hispanics today but the Italians and Jews of yesteryear—the only difference is that previously the culture of Anglo-Saxon liberty was robust enough to contain the damage for a while and allow for at least a sizable proportion of those groups to expend their energies more productively. Anyone saying such things now would find himself banished to the far reaches of crankdom. What can be discussed are the supposed pathologies inimical to rights and what can be analyzed and dissected are the bearers of those pathologies—white racists, male sexists, heterosexual homophobes, Christian “haters,” the 1%, etc.\n\nUtopianism breeds irreconcilable contradictions and makes it impossible to discuss them: the rights of seniors to free health care and undiminished pensions, health care coverage for everyone, increased spending on education, increased workplace, financial and environmental regulation, promises of jobs or some type of perpetual support for all can’t all continue forever, and it was fascinating to see the Republican candidate for President this year go out of his way to avoid giving the impression that he would infringe upon any of these “rights.” The left can at least claim that government will give all this to you—since they want to run the government, at least you can imagine them doing it.\n\nConservatives, though, have to make the more counter-intuitive and equally utopian claim that the free market will provide all of these goodies, and its easy to see why people would be skeptical since on some level they know that getting these things on their own on the free market requires hard work and risk taking, and even then can’t be guaranteed. To say that no other way of life is remotely plausible than one in which our habits brush up against the rough edges of others’ habits, that a social order in which some rough relation between desert and outcome is discernable is the only endurable reality, is to mark oneself as consumed with hatred for those who, according to your own model, will fall short in some respects.\n\nIt’s at least as bad when it comes to foreign policy, but why bother going into that, since the U.S. will not have any coherent foreign policy for some time to come. The point is that the most basic observations about undeniable social realities are unspeakable and any hint of them simply calls forth a barrage of aspersions on the habits of those who make the observations. Liberal democracy is not totalitarian, so we can of course speak about such things amongst ourselves (as long as we carefully choose “ourselves”), and write about them in marginal arenas like this blog. But the safeguarding of public discourse from such discussions is made ever more complete.\n\nThis utopianism cannot be attacked from within, so we will have to wait until it collapses, due to the contradictions I just pointed out and even more profound and unspeakable reasons like the demographic ones often discussed by Mark Steyn (rising aging population, declining birthrate, the need to import foreign workers to support the increasing benefits those workers have no reason to expect to see and therefore no reason to work to support for long—and, yes, Steyn is a fairly well known writer and so these ideas are not censored, but outside of conservative circles Steyn is demonized as a racist, war-mongering madman, to the extent that he is taken note of at all).\n\nWhen it does collapse, I think that “not liking others talking about my habits” or something close to it (I wouldn’t quibble over the wording) will provide a “remnant” with a way of restoring normal speech to public and even private discourse. There is no better way of refreshing one’s relation to reality than committing oneself to recognize, work around, subtlely re-shape, occasionally comment on and refrain from too openly examining others’ habits. And this can only happen publicly when people join together by explicit agreement to accomplish something, where they all have something to gain and something to lose, where the success of the work depends on them alone, and where they therefore allot to everyone specific responsibilities and rights while developing an “oral law” or set of idioms (normal, infinitely ramifying speech, sedimenting tacit agreements in the explicit ones) that keeps the project open. And that can only happen when enough people accept, to quote Gertrude Stein again, that “the most important thing is knowing what is your business and what is not your business.”\n\nFor now, though, it is at least possible to stop speaking democratese, predicated upon the supposedly compatible faiths in the individual and the people and the concomitant hatred of everything undermining such faith. A good starting point is the default assumption that no one can have any idea of what another might be capable of, for good or evil; but anyone right away puts forth signs that break that unknown “anything” down into two broad possibilities, to which one can tentatively assign probabilities; each new engagement leads to adjustments in the probabilities and further bifurcations within the original possibilities.\n\nYour own habits and idioms converge and diverge with theirs in particular ways, as you read your habits and idioms off their response to you and you assume they are doing the same—this is the establishment of joint attention. Entering any discourse involves alienating one’s desires and resentments, otherwise every conversation would involve each interlocutor simply listing things he/she loved and hated. The problem with democratese is that it cuts off the pathways from desires and resentments, which, cumulatively, are habits and idioms, to the shared public discourse. For some people this is certainly liberating—rights talk, like theory talk for academics, can be very empowering.\n\nOthers see too many things they might like to say or hear said be denied utterance. If you are one of those “others” then I would propose taking sides with the lesser probability at each bifurcation because if you inculcate that pataphysical habit you will at the very least create a lot of new ways of having your habits and idioms intersect with others’.\n\nIn more straightforward political terms, that means looking for the signs of secession and nullification—for the free associations liberal democracy can’t digest. Obtaining exemptions and waivers for alternative markets and even currency will be the most worthwhile expenditure of political energy in the coming years. Instead of speaking democratese, it is possible to push back the frontiers of the state by imagining private ways of performing many, most, eventually all state functions, until references to statist abstractions are resolved into descriptions of possible yet denied agreements, tacit and explicit."
    },
    {
      "slug": "victimocracy",
      "title": "Victimocracy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "For a while I have tried to figure out how to define Barack Obama politically. “Socialist” is not quite right—he and his party are much more likely to coopt corporations than to take over ownership (and responsibility) for them. But he’s not a typical European social democrat either—how could he be, given that he only barely includes the industrial working class as part of his coalition? He’s not a New Deal liberal, or even a Mc Governite either—he’s not just to the far left of particular American concerns like racial justice, individual liberty, civil rights, social welfare, etc.—he is too interested in seemingly odd cultural issues, like sticking it to the Catholic church, gay marriage and defending Mohammed from “defamation.”\n\nThe problem is that Obama is ushering in a new form of rule, which we can call “victimocracy.” Rights, under this regime, are defined by one’s claim to victimization, or by having oneself deemed an honorary victim, and legitimate arguments are those which defend some approved victim (not, for example, Coptic Christians in Egypt) against an officially designated oppressor group. The “race, class and gender” mantra that has been parodied for decades now as a symbol of the excesses of the academic left has been completely and unironically mainstreamed—indeed, the President’s successful re-election campaign was run according to that template and had no other content.\n\nThe victimocrat regime is currently holding in jail Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a man who has committed no crime, for the sole purpose of committing the US to a victimary narrative of the Islamic war against the West—well, against everyone other than them. An organ of the mainstream left, the Washington Post, has gotten on-board with the “argument” that all criticism of Susan Rice, the UN Ambassador and possibly next Secretary of State is racist and sexist, perhaps unless proved otherwise, and, by extension, the views of white men (especially from the South, that land of quintessential white maleness) are a priori discredited.\n\n“White male” (or “old white male”) is code for conservative—George Soros and Warren Buffett have exemptions from white maleness, because they have (I hope I am remembering the phrase correctly) “renounced their privilege.” But the code is interesting as, unlike other demonizations, like “bourgeois,” or even “Jew,” this one takes in the whole of what has been taken as normal and normative in our social order.\n\nThis seems to be the “revenge” that Obama offered his voters and, in truth, it might, for a while, provide for a very focused and consistent style of governance. Fiscal policy (to which groups and industries to direct loans, bailouts and subsidies) foreign policy (do I need to specify?) and law enforcement can all easily be run victimocratically. It might be a stable and somewhat less than totalitarian rule—the government need only appoint (many are already in place) official guardians of the interests of each and every designated victim group. As for who will guard the guardians?—asking such a question, I imagine, would just be a sign that your white maleness is showing.\n\nWell, I’m working on another post now, and I just wanted to unveil this new category for the political scientists to mull over. I would assume that on some level, the American people have come to realize that victimary discourse must be allowed to play itself out until the end, which may or may not match the 70 years it took Communism. There is no resisting victimocracy—in the name of what—equal rights? Patriotism? Social peace? American interests? Prosperity?—only the white males/whales of the left’s Ahabist imaginary could possibly imagine that any of these categories contain other than victimary content. Whose interest? Whose prosperity? Whose peace (sans justice, no less)? Etc. In the end it must all crash, but in the meantime and in the aftermath, there is only one plausible response (actually, it’s just the least implausible): exodus."
    },
    {
      "slug": "after-memory",
      "title": "After Memory",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2012",
      "url": null,
      "content": "“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made, every serious and significant decision ever reached, was reached and made by divination. The soul stirs, and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery.” D.H. Lawrence\n\nThe notion of having God’s will, ideas, or natural law “engraved” or “inscribed” on the heart or mind has been a constant of Western thought from the Hebrew scriptures through the founders of modernity like Locke and Kant. (There may be nothing inscribed on Locke’s “blank slate,” but where did the notion of a blank slate, prepared to take inscription, come from?) The metaphor obviously depends upon writing, and presupposes a process of inculcating a sense of duties radically at odds with those of an oral culture. In an oral culture one’s primary obligation is to know all the names (of ancestors and divine beings) constitutive of the web of existence, or to know who knows them.\n\nSuch ostensive knowledge has an imperative component—one tries to find out what the named beings want, and then one does it. With writing comes a transcendent voice that says the same thing to everyone and comes from everywhere or nowhere. Anyone can repeat the Word over and over again, inscribing it internally. While it exists objectively and can be checked when needed, the written word is only effective if memorized—while the prodigious feats of memory of the epic poets of oral cultures are no longer necessary, the book could not stay with one without at least some degree of memorization, of key passages, of general themes, and so on—after all, the written word was not readily available (who could afford to possess books?) and was often accessible only through public readings and sermons, and in educational settings.\n\nGod’s word is then written on the heart through constant oral repetition, and is embedded in culture through its transformation of the language—in the same way in which our own contemporary English is still, unknown to most English speakers, saturated with phrases from the King James Bible and Shakespeare.\n\nEven as books became readily accessible this relation between the written word and its “inscription” on our minds and hearts has remained remarkably constant, I suspect. I remember, as a graduate student, even though I could have dozens or hundreds of books, privately owned and borrowed from the university library, constantly trying to inscribe on my mind passages from books I had read and, even more, cross references from one book to another. If a critic I happened to be reading made a reference to, say, something D.H. Lawrence said about Christianity, I would try to call to mind what I had read by or about Lawrence that might frame that reference, and chastise myself for, inevitably, not having “inscribed” on my mind what I now needed; I would then inscribe what that critic said and draw upon whatever traces of my previous reading of Lawrence might enable me to locate that framing reference.\n\nIndeed, even finding a passage that I wanted to quote for a paper required some prior inscription—it was somewhere in chapter 2, or sandwiched in between two other discussions which I had inscribed in broad strokes. Ultimately, what marks one as a worthy scholar is being able, much like the first users of texts, to take a written text, available to all, as a prompt for a dialogue with others or an internal dialogue with oneself that, in the end, would produce a new text—a process that requires some ongoing retention.\n\nJoshua Foer, in “The End of Remembering,” explores one central consequence of the displacement of print by electronic culture—the fact the one needs to memorize less and less. One striking example he gives is phone numbers, even one’s own (I don’t, in fact, remember my cell phone number). For me, and I am sure for many others, a critical rite of maturation was being able to remember my phone number—it meant I could be trusted to go out on my own. Now, a small child can have a cell phone but doesn’t need to remember his home number. I think that electronic culture is having a related effect on scholarly work and education as well—you don’t need to remember where a passage in a text is, or where to go back and find a particular comment by D.H.\n\nLawrence on Christianity, because all you need to do is compose a search term, which I suppose still requires some memory but very little since you can try out a whole series of search terms (D.H. Lawrence critical Christianity… D.H Lawrence hate Christianity… D.H. Lawrence Christianity eternity…) in all of 20 seconds. There are lots of accounts of the changes of consciousness in process as a result of the emergence of electronic or digital culture (inquiries generally modeled on the studies by Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Jack Goody and other on the transition from oral to literate culture). I think that Foer is right that we might advance such inquiries considerably by focusing on this singular fact of the obsolescence of memory.\n\nWell, you still need to know why you would be looking for that Lawrence passage, and what to do with once you retrieve it—but we can imagine such search and deploy missions taking on a very different character from traditional scholarship. If I am working with a text—and, as a student, when we first learn to work with texts, I am working with it because I have been told to, or because it’s the test everyone is working with (and, in fact, for the vast majority of working scholars, this changes very little—one reads what is read)—and I encounter a name or word that I don’t know, and I feel I need to know to make sense of that sentence or paragraph, I can do a quick Google search that tells who the name refers to or a definition of the word, taking, perhaps, the first several items—the answers I get won’t provide me with the kind of context that having inscribed texts in my heart and mind would have done, but how would I know that?\n\nIf I then have to write about that text, I will use the names and words I have retrieved in what would look to a traditional scholar like semi-literate ways (probably both overly literal and a bit random), but the more people do it that way, constructing hybrid figures and meanings, the more that will be the kind of work done in the academy and elsewhere. One would simply fill in the gaps in one’s knowledge as they appear, and they would be considered “filled” insofar as they enable you to get to the next gap. Better work would be distinguished from worse in the patience that has been taken to construct links across a range of texts and the consistency with which one has used and cross-referenced those links—and, in exceptional cases, the ingenuity with which one has provided unexpected links for others to follow up on.\n\nYou really wouldn’t have to remember anything—you would only need to have acquired the habit of searching and articulating links whe never confronted with a text and a task. It is quite possible to imagine a whole new kind of intellectual work emerging out of the process, one which applies across the disciplines, including the sciences, which are probably already closest to this model—after you’ve put together all the links everyone you have “read” has read, there will be certain gaps in knowledge (possible but unmade links)—you just go ahead and fill in one of those gaps.\n\nIndeed, college instructors should be avoiding standard topics like “D.H. Lawrence and Religion” precisely because of the ease with which one can patch together a series of passages and critical comments through the internet. Instead it might be better to imagine unprecedented topics, like, for example, selecting a particular word or phrase that recurs in an author’s work or a particular text, gathering up all the instances of that word or phrase, checking the rate of its recurrence across the writer’s work and in comparison with its occurrence in other authors, and use the findings to challenge some established critical views of that writer (one could make such tasks increasingly complex, as necessary—one could form new search terms for the use of the word or phrase in specific contexts, in proximity to other words and phrases, etc.).\n\nCulture, in that case, will tend to be experienced as the distribution of probabilities with which commonplaces and differing modes and degrees of variants of those commonplaces appear. More conservative interventions would seek to stabilize the most relied upon commonplaces, while radical ones would seek wider distribution of more “deviant” variants. Entertainment would continue on its current path of arranging in different but not too different ways common scenes, narratives, catchphrases, etc. We would almost literally be going with the flow—the flow of information regarding how distant from the norm our current array of ready to go phrases and gestures is at the moment; freedom would involve determining how distant we want it to be.\n\nThe features of digitality more commonly discussed, like social networking, seem to have the same effect of rendering memory obsolete. If someone puts photos of himself with his girlfriend on Facebook, he has no need to remember the experiences recorded in the photos—here, the public nature of the exposure is what makes the difference: the photos represent his relationship to her for those have access to his page, and that is their meaning. If they break up and he changes his status, the pictures can come down and be disappeared. Maybe such an individual, today, has the same regrets, nostalgia, hopes for reconciliation, reconstructed memories and so on that a normal modern person, who has inscribed his feelings upon his heart and mind—but I don’t see any need to assume that this will continue to be the case.\n\nLoves and friendships may be more and more reduced to the needs of public display, and more and more people will be their Facebook page (and whatever networking forms emerge in the years to come) and therefore memoryless. Some form of sexual desire can be taken for granted, but romantic love centered upon monogamous long-term relationships, relationships dependent upon both memory and forward looking narratives, certainly cannot be. Emotional life might take on shapes drastically unfamiliar to us.\n\nWhat kind of people would these memoryless, or “dis”-membered beings be? It’s easy to assume the worst. With the obsolescence of memory, what would promises be worth? Would anything we (“we” being traditionally humanist thinkers) recognize as “thinking” be possible? If the past is constantly disappeared how would the future be conceptualized? Would people save money? Have children? Be capable of any kind of sustained attention whatsoever?\n\nMarshall Mc Luhan, of course, raised these kind of questions half a century ago, and his notion of a “global village,” meaning both instant connection across the globe but also a return to the kind of oral culture, focused on spectacular events, driven by rumor, gossip, moral contagions and celebrity (a kind of mini-divinity) seems as relevant as ever. As does Jean Baudrillard’s vision of a society of simulacra, in which we are ourselves the models out of which we construct ourselves. The viability of such a society, with minor as well as major powers possessed of nuclear weapons and the rise of a global Islamic fanaticism, not to mention the problems involved in managing a complex global economy, would be dubious.\n\nIf signs are not to be inscribed in hearts and minds, what does understanding signs amount to? Nothing more, maybe, than the most originary of understandings—the capacity to iterate the sign, to maintain and extend the joint attention (to follow a line of attention) it has initiated and which has drawn you in. The capacity to iterate the sign involves the knowledge of the difference between a broken scene and an intact one—which is to say, knowledge of what kind of gesture is likely to get the desired response—or, at least, a response one would know how to respond to in turn. I would think about this as a kind of sincere pretending in which individuals try not so much to be like other individuals, as to approximate a kind of projected or imagined norm. But it is not easy to imagine and approximate such a norm, especially since its formation is constantly in flux, and what is normative or average in one site might be on the fringes in another. There will always be cases in which the projected norm is in fact an extreme anomaly or, to put it positively, sheer possibility.\n\nThis is the form thinking may take, or already is taking, as we move into the order of electronic communication: the generation of possibilities, the more sheer, the more barely possible, the better. Start with the assumption that anything is possible, anyone is capable of anything, and modify that assumption as the scene takes shape. Quite a few postmodern thinkers have already pointed in this direction. I will put it this way: modernity continues metaphysics, which sought out the ultimate reality in a higher, hierarchically organized, intellectual and spiritual order, by shifting our attention to the ultimate reality to be found in lower, unseen forces: material interests, sexual drives, the unconscious, etc.\n\nWhat comes after modernity is “patatiquity,” with the “pata” from the pataphysics, the science of the exceptional invented by Alfred Jarry and “tiquity” a temporal suffix modeled on “antiquity.” Patatiquity is the age in which possibility is more real than reality. Research conducted through Google constructs a possible array of links; social interaction carried out through networking online constructs a possible community. In both cases, the possibility is “real” insofar as others iterate the signs of possibility one puts forth, and these iterations in turn generate new possibilities (like a new hierarchy of Google links).\n\nSo, is patatiquity sustainable? On the face of it (and both conservative and postmodern critics, with differing evaluations, agree here), patatiquity seems to herald an era of irresponsibility and carelessness we can ill afford—isn’t the Obama cult exemplary of patatiquity, with its investment in the sheer possibility of hope and change; isn’t endless debt, both personal and national, equally patatiquital (or, perhaps, continuing with the model of antiquity, “patacient”)? Maybe—that’s certainly one possibility. But it might also turn out that the most avid explorers and investors in possibility will insist on the kind of minimal reality that makes possibility possible: to take just one example, real money.\n\nThe modern attempts to control the economy and regulate habits through the monetary supply just inhibit possibility by governing according to the norm extracted by experts. The more we insist on unequivocal laws governing distinctive areas of human actions taken as literally as possible, the more is left over for possibility. In fact, Gertrude Stein’s political conservatism seems to based on a similar line of thinking: in a series of articles written for The Saturday Evening Post in the 1930s she argued for the necessity that money be “real” (i.e., not fiat) and for the government’s approach to requests for further spending to be that of the stingy patriarchal father (a stock figure Stein otherwise tended to despise); more generally, the intersection of habits that generates infinitely varied human interactions and idioms can only do so if minimal, but strict, rules are taken as given.\n\nUnder such conditions, the law can function more as constraint than restraint: restraint seeks to hold back while constraint seeks to channel, like the rules of a game that enable a wide range of moves displaying an equally wide range of intellectual and/or physical capacities. Out of a set of constitutive rules—those rules that make the game a game—emerge all of the regulative rules determining strategies. But patatiquity suggests something more: the regulative rules reveal more constitutive ones. The right to property is a constitutive rule of a free society, but there are many ways of enforcing that right, and each one of them—protecting one’s property oneself through arms and security systems, a public police force, a private security force, etc.—reveals something about the right to property itself (what kinds of ethics and capacities it requires and evokes, where it stands in relation to other rights).\n\nJust so does the elevation of possibilities involve an ongoing revelation of a community’s constitutive rules. Agreements would be made explicit and their limits clarified, and norms and assumptions about rights would emerge from those agreements; more long term institutions, most importantly family, that transcend individualized, explicit agreements, might very well change dramatically, becoming, as is already the case, more contingent and mixed—how to ensure the care of children will be a real problem. On the other hand, there will probably be far fewer of them, but, contra Mark Steyn, that may not be socially fatal—at the very least it will impose some very difficult choices: for one thing, it will become increasingly obvious that we can’t have both commitments to our present day middle class entitlement programs and regulations and tax policies that cripple the kind of productivity required to provide the excess wealth needed to subsidize those ever more bloated programs..\n\nIn patatiquity the sheerly possible can reveal constitutive rules that a more normative, declarative culture conceals. Imagine writing according to the following rule: each word aims at being the least predictable, given the surrounding words, for the normal reader. Your writing, then, is first of all a study of your possible readers, in an attempt to give those readers an opportunity to study themselves. Following this rule (which will not be easy) you will produce the sheerest of possibilities, the possibility left after all the other have been exhausted. And to read such a work would be to start exhausting those inexhaustible possibilities—all the clichés, commonplaces, formulas, chunks and constructions in one’s linguistic inventory.\n\nIf the first word of the sentence is a personal pronoun, the next is most likely a verb, and a verb referring to an action carried out by humans, and then adding in the context, your own personal proclivities and some guess work you anticipate with a 63% probability one “kind” of word and with 37% probability another “kind”; given that next word, the same process starts up for the next one, and so on all the way through; and you could do this backwards and forwards or starting in the middle, and over and over again. This is the way we always use language—someone starts to speak, or to gesture, or we starting reading the first line, and each sign plugs into an array of constructions and possible relations between constructions we are familiar with in varying degrees.\n\nSo, pataphysical writing makes visible the constitutive rules of language use, precisely by loosening those rules as much as is humanly possible. And now you can read anything in those terms, as a certain degree off-center, as containing anomalies, as even the most predictable text will, then, embody pure possibility—perhaps especially the most predictable text if we consider what an odd thing that is.\n\nDe-memorization would then leave us with nothing but memory of the constitutive rules, and a desire to rediscover those constitutive rules over and over again through “acts of pure attention,” or “divination.” So, if we return to my first example, of thinking as linking, then the most compelling texts, scholarly, popular, or esthetic, would be those that articulate the most probable links in the most improbable ways, grounding them in sheer possibility. Elaborate, counter-productive rules like those promulgated and incompetently enforced by government bureaucracies would be discarded as requiring too much “self-inscription”—too much remembering of specific rules and their normative “meaning.”\n\nVery simple things, like acquiring the most useful skills, and saving as much money, or real wealth, as possible, would be preferred—you could always check the status of those things daily on the market. The future can be divined in signs of the present, while the firm fact that (real) money will always be useful allows for the future to be otherwise completely open, populated only be sheer possibility that one need barely adumbrate.\n\nOnce we realize that our selves are possible, not actual, our energies will be devoted to the creation of plausible possibilities and spaces where implausible ones can be safely engaged; even more, our assessment of institutions will turn on our assessment of their ability to enhance our creation of possibilities. One’s own economic possibilities—and more and more professions—will focus on creating possibilities for others—helping others be imagined as they imagine themselves being imagined. PR will become the queen of the sciences. If you want to construct a representation that will have effects on a particular audience in a particular way, you must study the desires and habits of that audience; even more, you must treat those desires and habits as malleable, within limits.\n\nYou will game it out—someone who says x will be likely to want to hear or see y; someone who does x everyday will be happy to be given a chance to do y; someone who has bought a, b and c will like something like d (note that in each case there is no reason to assume that the audience actually wants, or has ever imagined, the y or d in question—the marketer is filling an imagined gap in their experience, a gap opened by the inquiry itself). Already, more and more selling of products involves selling such simulated images, filling such gaps, and telling the consumer of the gap and that it is being filled. This is objectionable from various enlightenment and romantic perspectives assuming the uniqueness of the individual and the integrity of the thought process, but if we set those objections aside we can see that a mode of “critical” thought and “high” culture is already implicit in this very model: opening up new spaces or gaps between the normalized experiences and those experiences which yet lie immanent in them.\n\nFinally, this turn toward the trivial, or a continual lowering of the threshold of significance (more things becoming less significant) would lead to a very strong desire to reduce violence. We already see increasing distaste for sustained confrontations and enmities—maybe they require too much memory. There is a preference for constructing defenses that make confrontation unnecessary. The free and more advanced societies will be able to create sophisticated defenses that make them impregnable vis a vis the failed, resentful societies surrounding them, while sparing them the pangs of white guilt involved in retaliation—Israel’s missile defense, which costs far more than an all out war to destroy their Palestinian enemies would, is an obvious example here.\n\nA premium will be put on keeping people out, except under precisely defined circumstances—once someone is in, you need to deal with them, so a lot of intellectual energy will be invested in determining who can be let in. If governments don’t defend their borders, communities and businesses will do their job; and people will shape themselves so as to be acceptable members of the communities they wish to enter (as I suggested earlier, much business will be generated in helping them to do so). These strategies of avoidance might impoverish social interactions by ruling out a wide range of possibilities from the start; but it might enrich the relations that remain by making them more meaningful in the literal sense of causing all signs among those who have been properly vetted and therefore already give forth much information to contain layers of significance.\n\nAnd, anyway, no one will remember what they are missing—there will be students of history, but I think the idea that there are lessons to be learned from it will disappear, and rightfully so because history is nothing but the history of struggles to own the asymmetrical gift economy centered on the state, and patatiquity can only come into being by putting all that aside."
    },
    {
      "slug": "notes-on-cool-not-cool-notes",
      "title": "Notes on Cool (not cool notes)",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2013",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Our understanding of victimary thinking cannot be considered complete until we have accounted for the category of “cool,” which has proven to be extraordinarily en during and generative. I wonder how far back the term goes—there must already be histories of “cool,” but the wikipedia page, at least, is no help—it traces the attitude of “cool” back to the Renaissance, but no actual uses of the term in its current slang sense going back more than a few decades. I assume it entered our vocabulary in the 1950s (al though I’d be glad to be corrected by anyone whose personal memory or historical knowledge can date it earlier), which would situate it squarely within the emergence of post-war victimary culture.\n\nHannah Arendt observes somewhere that the German romantics of the early 19th century referred to their cultural antagonists as “squares,” in the same sense which is by now uncool usage but was pervasive in the 1960s. So, we can trace coolness, as an attitude, if not the word itself, back to romanticism—in which case, “cool” would be the synthesis of romanticism and victimary thinking.\n\nThis is important because without “cool,” victimary culture is shrill, desperate and ultimately unconvincing; with “cool,” victimary culture can produce iconic figures that offer alternatives to the cultural center. I think that Obama’s coolness and Romney’s squareness played a significant role in our recent election, and that the power of the “cultural issues” like abortion and gay rights have nothing to do with the effects of such issues on peoples’ lives and everything to do with cool.\n\nCool represents a pole of attraction on the margin, opposed to the center. Cool is not, at least first of all, antagonistic towards the center—it is simply uninterested in it, except as a source of amusement. Coolness embodies an attitude of deferral, which might account for the term—as opposed to those who are “hot,” i.e., worried about social expectations and judgments, always trying to influence or preempt them, the cool position themselves outside of that space of judgment. In distinction from cynicism, or “coldness,” cool separates itself from the center in order to make space for a kind of authenticity disallowed there: the cool are passionate, usually regarding some singular relationship or project. In defense of that space, the cool are ready to confront the center—that defense takes the form of the protection of some victim of the mainstream, an exemplary victim whose plight the cool, from his marginal perch, is qualified to identify.\n\n“Cool,” as a word, has moved to the center—middle-aged women use it to refer to a clothing purchase or new flavor of coffee. It is used as honorific, often by adults to counter the exclusionary uses of cool among teenagers in their charge. And coolness might be disassociated from the victimary as, for example, with the high schooler who can initiate his fellows into forbidden pharmacological and sexual experiences. Ultimately, though, since cool is always a potential target of the center, its deepest alliances are with all those other potential victims, against which the center is seen to define itself. So, the coolness of jazz and now hip-hop frames the black victimary stance; the coolness of rock the youth victimary stance; while homosexuality has come to be marked as cool in various ways over the past couple of decades, generally as the uninhibited, joyful, stylish and honest amidst a swarm of hypocrites.\n\nInterestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any distinctly feminine cool—the cultural commissars have been working overtime for years to lay a patina of cool over Hillary Clinton but I don’t think it has taken. Among celebrities, perhaps Angelina Jolie, who cultivates the distance and the absence of neediness necessary for coolness, and also consistently plays the lead in action movies, is cool. Jewish humor—say, Lenny Bruce—was cool at one point, but that has dissipated as Jews have lost their victimary credentials. At the same time, it doesn’t seem to me that a form of Muslim cool has been forged—perhaps in Europe?\n\nThat might mean that women and Muslims must become constituents, so to speak, of other forms of coolness, which speak for them. In Lena Dunham’s online ad for Obama, in which she notoriously (but for whom was it notorious?) compared voting for the first time to losing one’s virginity, it was not the women appealed to or Dunham herself who was cool (on the contrary, they are dependent, insecure and needy)—rather, the ad bears witness to Obama’s coolness, as the kind of guy you would want to be your first. This perhaps leaves women free or, depending on your perspective, obligates or even compels them to be the conscience of the victimary. The Muslim incorporation into coolness still seems to me highly problematic—perhaps that will be a cultural faultline in the coming years.\n\nWhat cool adds to the victimary so as to complete it is marketability. Cool, of course, is unthinkable without what Eric Gans has called the “constituent hypocrisy” of romanticism—by setting itself apart from the center, the cool becomes a trendsetter, or mimetic model, determining styles across the culture. As I suggested earlier, the relation is symbiotic—without its victimary affiliations, the cool would drift into coldness, i.e., cynicism and cruelty (the territory that David Letterman, for example, often veers into).\n\nIs there a viable alternative to coolness, then? Certainly not goodness—if goodness were an effective counter, a competing mimetic model, to coolness, we would know it by now. (Tim Tebow, alone among conservative and Christian NFL quarterbacks in recent decades—from Roger Staubach to Kurt Warner—has approached a kind of celebrity based on coolness through an explicitly religiously grounded “goodness”—alas, he doesn’t seem to be good enough to put this hypothesis to the test.)\n\nOne would assume that conservatism couldn’t be cool, insofar as cool defines itself as conservatism’s other, but one of the interesting phenomena of the 2012 election campaign was the emergence of a movement, largely youthful, around Ron Paul—old, cranky and starchy, obsessed with constitutional rectitude, holding unfashionable opinions on abortion with a checkered history regarding racial issues—somehow, Paul became cool. Freedom might be cool, then, when linked to an uncompromising rejection of all the corruptions and compromises of freedom wrought by the “establishment.” But Paul never threatened the establishment, and only made trouble for the Republican wing of it, so he was indulged by the traditional media—we didn’t get to see whether his coolness would survive the kind of full-scale assault launched against Sarah Palin (who also had some markers of cool). A libertarian like Paul (maybe we will see this with his son) would need to devise a strategy for turning such attacks into the elements of his cool. I suppose supporting drug legalization helps here.\n\nBeyond such speculations, the problem here is whether positions on the margin can be made into mimetic models without rejectionist gestures toward the center—the historical center, or firstness (initiative, responsibility, representativeness), if not the political or cultural center. In other words, what kind of generative margin (a margin that produces new centers) could run on other than victimary fuel? Coolness, presently, is confronted with the problem of having won the political and cultural centers through a demonization of the historical one (Western culture’s insistence on equality versus the imperial—the very premises, in other words, that make sympathy toward the victim possible).\n\nIn power, cool figures like Obama become extremely tiresome, not to mention incompetent (we now have a government, part Ponzi scheme, part protection racket, part victimary theater, that is utterly uninterested in what were once considered the defining responsibilities of government, like defending borders, passing budgets and distinguishing friends from enemies). On the other hand, that historical center has been, probably irremediably, sapped by its appropriation by the victimary. The parasite has destroyed the host.\n\nThe only alternative, I think, is a kind of originary ‘pataphysics, the science of the exceptional invented by Alfred Jarry, and carried on through a series of avant-garde aesthetic and cultural movements until today. (Jean Baudrillard, apparently, considered himself a ‘pataphysician, something I will have to explore further.) Of course the roots of ‘pataphysics lie in romanticism, and ‘pataphysics tself could plausibly be seen as precursor of cool. But ‘pataphysics is a program for thinking and learning, activities which interest cool not at all. One way of thinking about ‘pataphysics is via the famous Seinfeld episode in which George “does the opposite,” i.e., the opposite of what he would normally do in that situation; except here, one does not the opposite (an ultimately incoherent approach, as not everything has an opposite, there may be more than one opposite, etc.) but the least probable, and not as opposed to what one ordinarily does but in relation to the probabilistic frame implicit in the discourse one inhabits.\n\nSo, when you address me, you hope for and expect a certain response, based upon social conventions, the present context, and your knowledge of me and our shared past; perhaps you also fear other possible responses, the probability of which you have sought to reduce in your mode of address. As a ‘pataphysician, my interest is in surprising you, but in some recognizable way—I can only undermine your expectations if I display some awareness of them. In this way I create an event, a happening, and make it possible for us to recognize each other on the margin and affirm the signs and tacit agreements we share. Clearly, carrying out such performances across the field of culture is not easy, but, like coolness, it’s not something everybody would have to do—just enough create viable mimetic models. ‘Pataphysics must be rigorous and disinterested—its only politics must in defense of its own possibility, which is to say against anyone who wants to remove events and happenings from social life.\n\n(I have assumed that with the fall of East Bloc Communism, the work of talented and absurdist [i.e., ‘pataphysical] dissidents like Vaclev Havel had become irrelevant, but maybe we have much to learn from them.) Originary ‘pataphsyics, as an overtly marginal position shares the field with cool but it is not itself cool because it seeks to find and refound rather than stigmatize the center; maybe the other of cool can just be “firstness.”\n\nWell, one might say, wouldn’t, say, a vicious or violent response to an amiable greeting be “doing the improbable”? Maybe, but only once—nothing is more monotonous (and therefore predictable) than violence (and the means taken to restrain it), once it has upset some space based on trust. Violence, or any kind of violation of already achieved forms of civility, would not, that is, open the field of possibilities, or lower the threshold of significance, which is the point of ‘pataphysics. The most valuable effect of originary ‘pataphsyics would be what the left has promised (or, for that matter, what modernity has promised), with unsatisfying results: the recovery of excluded voices and the creation of new ones.\n\nIf I, say, improbably take you literally when you ask me how I am, unburdening myself of an exhaustive account of my current state, I remind you of several things: the kind of shared beliefs, commitments and experiences that must have once been necessary to put those standard greetings in place; the fact that we no longer share those beliefs, commitments and experiences and yet still need the greetings; that sustaining those greetings and civility, then, might not be guaranteed; that we might need to discover means (not necessary my current, excessive, gesture) to restore the foundations of civility; and more. I thereby make it more likely (another shift in the field of probabilities) that you will notice further fraying of standardized modes of civility, and be attuned to new refreshments of those modes.\n\nThere is no reason why we can’t have forms of art that gently intervene in everyday life, turning us self-reflexively upon our habits, without the implicit or explicit condemnation of middle class lifestyles which makes so much performative art so annoying. I think most people would enjoy losing a couple of seconds here or there with little installations that might play off of the constant surveillance now characterizing our lives. (How often do we now see ourselves entering and leaving places? What if we saw ourselves upside down once in a while? Or, looking up to see ourselves, see a celebrity walking out instead?)\n\nOr that play with our expectations of impeccability in business establishments—like an installation inviting customers to clean up a little mess, with each customer contributing to a new arrangement? We always think of little things that might go wrong, or awry, in carefully organized settings—little bits of art that fulfilled those possibilities, perhaps giving them surprising happy endings, would be appreciated. There might be a place for the victimary here—little bits of feminist or anti-racist theater that show people how it feels to be viewed as “other”—but they would have to reward the viewer/participant/customer.\n\nNone of this would be cool (even if those who see such works emit one of those soft, clipped “cool” s which have become so popular and hopefully weaken the power of cool), because these would not be ways of drawing attention to a potentially volatile margin—rather, they would be collaborative ways of remaking the center. Perhaps we can break up and reform the word “perhaps” to give it a name: “per”+” hap,” or through/by chance/event: firstness, then, creates perhaps (the plural), or perhaps (third person singular). Maybe we could set aside the more provocative “firstness” and simply say that after cool comes perhapsness. With text messaging and twitter, that would get reduced right away to PHPNS, and maybe rebranded as “pappens,” making it only slightly more verbally cumbersome than “cool.” Well, as Proust had his narrator say about a fantasy, that I have just imagined this means that it can’t possibly happen this way. But maybe that itself is an instance of perhapsness.\n\nCool can overpower goodness because moralities predicated on human equality want the scene without the scene—as if everyone could be arranged before the central object without the disturbance of everyone having to present his position to the others and interpret theirs in turn. Morality can only be thought in very limited ways in terms of abstract rights, obligations, fairness, rules of behavior, thou shalt nots, etc. The most basic morality is entering the language of the community, working with its terms, its tropes, its idioms, even its rhythms, and at least respecting and trying to learn them to the extent one is an outsider; somewhat more demanding is to speak the language of some specific other, the more differentiated the other the more demanding the obligation; more challenging yet is exposing the limits of the community’s or the other’s idiom, opening the possibility to accommodate as yet unrepresented desires and resentments; highest of all is the invention of those new idioms that will indeed represent those desires and resentments.\n\nThat, in fact, is what the moralities predicated on human equality have done, so I am not dismissing them—it is just that they will serve us better if read as innovations in language to be revised rather than transparent principles to be defended against “illiberal” attacks. Cool exposes the limits of “bourgeois” morality, and can only be replaced by a mode of discourse that does it the same favor in turn.\n\nAnother way to think about it: when a civilization collapses, what is happening is that the immense architecture of tacit agreements, everything that has been agreed upon and settled long ago, so that we could go on and forge more practical and immediate agreements, turn out, after all, or by this point, to be or to have been, disagreements merely misunderstood as agreements. Naturally, at this point, those more practical and immediate agreements evaporate as well. We’re human, so we’ll need some kind of agreement, some mode of joint attention, just to get through the days, and those provisional agreements can emerge out of the frayings of the disintegrating ones—for example, in shared irony towards what was once taken for granted.\n\nWhat might become possible in such circumstances is what has not been possible for a long time—foundings, which can be found among the ways we just happen to be together, as a result of the intersecting trajectories that have brought us where we are. If have agreed to do something together, and the project falls apart, then we are released from the terms of the agreement, and yet there we are—we might as well do something. All of the habits, literacies, and implements we had gathered for that project are still lying around as well. Why not just begin by agreeing to do something, this or that, anything, making use of the now unfamiliar materials in a new way?\n\nThe more arbitrary the better, because that places the agreement itself at the center, rather than the pretension that we are just doing what reality tells us to do—and because uses and potentialities of those materials which were otherwise hidden now become prominent through new articulations. Arbitrary, oulipo-style constraints will enable us find rules to our agreements, and to discover who we are coming to be through those regulated interactions.\n\nI have been troubled by the sense that a cultural project interested in widening the field of possibilities might be taken as an evasion of reality—as fantasy, at best, or totalitarian attempts to remake the human condition at worst—until it occurred to me that reality itself is nothing more than the compilation of present possibilities. Nothing is fixed and set—as soon as anyone makes a move reality has already been adjusted. All originary ‘pataphysics would do is widen the field the possibilities in any present, not obscure the fact that at every moment a wide swath of possibilities is cut down. And that’s all we need in order to be realistic: be willing to accept that, whatever our threshold for acknowledging a possibility, some things, lots of things, maybe most things, at any moment, will still fall beneath it. For originary ‘pataphysics, the rush of new possibilities will be matched by the discarding of old ones, creating “reality,” or conditions under which the consequences of choices can be accounted for."
    },
    {
      "slug": "notes-on-equality",
      "title": "Notes on Equality",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2013",
      "url": null,
      "content": "“The Muslim position is a powerful attraction for the marginal (collectively and individually) and the disaffected. What it lacks, in its obliteration of the anthropological connection between God and humanity, is a way of theorizing the deferred equality inherent in firstness. The Islamist insistence on Sharia is a clear demonstration of the non-reciprocal nature of Islam. Sharia demands submission; ‘Islam’ means submission. We have all heard conservative complaints that feminists in the West find every straw in our own eyes but ignore the beam in that of Islamic societies. But there is a reason beyond political expediency for the difficulty in attacking, for example, Islam’s unequal treatment of women.\n\nWhatever the disparities in Islamic society between men and women, or even free persons and slaves, they exist on a base of firstness-free equality. Sharia is ‘the same for everyone,’ as though Islam effectively imposed the ‘veil of ignorance’ that defines John Rawls’ ‘original position.’ Sharia’s defender might well say: ‘Yes, Sharia distinguishes between men and women. But we all obey it equally. I obey Sharia as a man, but if I were a woman, I would submit to its rules in the same manner.’” Eric Gans, “Abraham’s Three Firsts,” Chronicle 435\n\nEffacing the deferred equality inherent in firstness produces equality in the face of Sharia, which is to say, equality in the face of the destruction of deferred equality. With regard to both deferred equality and its demolition, there is a kind of inequality: in the first case, an inequality compared to the equality yet to come; in the second case, an inequality due to the arbitrary nature of the rules needed to abolish deferred equality. The equality, in both cases, though, is not an “objective” one, based upon some (which?) universally shared measure (the impossibility of which cannot, I think, be demonstrated any more effectively than Marx does in his Critique of the Gotha Program)—rather, in each case, equality means equality before God, or, more generally, some sacred center.\n\nThis equality is reciprocally constitutive with whatever inequality it seeks to mitigate or reframe. Think of how easy it would be, in Gans’s example, to replace “men” and “women” with “king” and “subject,” or “master” and “slave”—given the right sacred center, these could also be seen as instances of equality—“I obey as a master, but if I were a slave I would submit to its rules in the same manner.” Master and slave, monarch and subject, would, indeed, be equal, if the sacred center established so as to defer some more terrible violence decreed the necessity of such positions. Any affirmation of equality singles out that feature which positions each one equidistant from some sacred center (with the measuring rod being a product of the center itself), and that form of equality defers the violence implicit in the remaining inequalities by providing some kind of access to some fundamental social good and meaning—including on the originary scene, where relations of leadership of some kind or another will be generated out of the results of the scene.\n\nThat is why what often look to us like astonishing inequalities are enshrined in religious doctrines and rituals predicated upon equality before God without any sense of incongruity (even if such always exists somewhere o the margin)—what some mode of “framing” presents as inequities must be reframed as instances of the central equality. Otherwise, would good would that mode of equality be doing?\n\nThe first conclusion I see following from this formulation of (in)equality is that the modern notion of equality, which seeks equality outside of and even against any sacred center is both incoherent and insatiable. It will always be possible to identify some new form of inequality and render it intolerable, and there is no reason to assume that a corresponding and mitigating form of equality will always be imaginable. It might be simpler to say that the modern view of equality is simply insane. The American, not quite modern, understanding of equality in classical Christian and Judaic terms, as all men being created equal by God, is far less so, but the boundary separating equality before God from unbounded equality is not all that thick.\n\nAll men (and women) can only be equal before the God who displaces a global (at least in principle) imperial center: without some God-man claiming a right to the lives, possessions and devotion of his subjects the one God before whom we are equal evaporates, and with it our equality. All modernity did is take the anti-imperialism of Judaism and Christianity seriously and direct its attention to overthrowing emperors. But the unanimous anti-imperialism (in the broader sense of anti-state) constitutive of revolutionary modernity requires a new empire, a more terrible empire claiming the right to shape its subjects and eliminate the misfits who unsettle that unanimity.\n\nAll political talk now, on the left and the right, presupposes such a unanimous rejection of some form of tyranny with which the opposing party is complicit—the notion that liberal democracy has ushered in a new era of decision by open discussion is not only an illusion but conceptually incoherent because, in the end, one is modern or not, democratic or not, free or not. Liberal democracy absorbed the civil wars constitutive of the entrance into modernity and is now dissolving back into them—anyone who listens closely to even the more moderate Democrats and Republicans, and even when they are speaking to the center, can see that in the end neither side can really grant the legitimacy of the other.\n\nYou can’t enter a discussion with those who will not change their views via that discussion, or who believe that the discussion itself is not decisive, and presenting your opponents as those who fit precisely that profile has proven irresistible and, ultimately, reasonable. The fit between democracy and the rule of law was always a rough one at best, but in the end why should the people accept the rule of law if it interferes with their desires?\n\nThe only sane alternative is to say that we are equal with those whom we reciprocally treat as equals. Each of us is then equal with many others, in many different senses, and at many different levels—I am equal with the friend with whom I share confidences, his and mine; I am equal with my children insofar as I fulfill the role of “father,” in which I deposit a certain sacrality that binds me to them as “children”; I am equal to my coworkers insofar as we all expect more or less defined fair treatment from our employer, who will not treat any of us as either slaves or cronies; I am equal to the vendor on the street from whom I buy a giant pretzel insofar as we each part with something we desire less for something we desire more and thereby better each other’s condition; and, beyond that, I feel a kind of liminal, potential equality with anyone whom I might someday encounter and try to engage in some way.\n\nAnyone can embrace a democratic spirit and seek to expand the circles of equality in which one participates, and the intensity of the equalities one already enjoys, but to pretend to equality beyond those circles, where there is no shared center, is utopian, savage, or both. Sometimes equality emerges out of the clash of incommensurables, and/or the decisive defeat of one by the other, as has happened with the warring parties of WWII, but that doesn’t mean one can elevate that possibility into a rule or method.\n\nOnce one form of equality is established, it is likely that others will be forthcoming—economic exchange can lead to political alliance and vice versa. But it is just as likely that one form of equality will reveal barriers to further engagement. At any rate, there is a problem of inequality, but it lies in some violation of the rules articulating all in relation to the shared center. Inequality is essentially a question of cheating—the rules are the “deferred equality inherent in firstness.” In that case, though, the solution is to rework the rules and/or their enforcement, or to accept that that particular form of association has been exhausted; it is also the case, then, that to foreground inequality as such as the problem is to poison the rules because then the rules become nothing more than a means to reduce or eliminate inequality, which is to say that the rules become nothing more than a weapon used by one side against the other, which is by definition outside of the rules.\n\nThe only possible politics in the ongoing self-dismantling of modernity is one that seeks to clarify the rules according to which we are playing. If the rules can’t be clarified in a way that satisfies all parties, then there is no “game” and the only reasonable and honorable alternative is to leave. The other side will do what they can to you and you will do what you can to stop them. I would be very curious to hear anyone try to clarify the rules according to which our federal government currently plays—I don’t think it can be done. The government simply rewards its friends and, if they are lucky, ignores its enemies, like any powerful patron or protection racket.\n\nReferring to the rules, like the law or constitutional principles, is futile because all of those rules have been weaponized. All that can be done is to avoid drawing the attention of the state, and, more importantly, to maintain the games one plays and the rules they rely upon, while preserving as much of their autonomy from state and society as possible. Study those rules, and divine the tacit agreements in which they are embedded—those tacit agreements, our idioms, will in turn reveal other possible agreements. One’s chosen equalities with others is simply external to the state—seeking to use them as levers to overthrow the state would reinstate the same totalitarian anti-imperialism that has brought us here.\n\nThe state has not usurped some position of originary justice which it is now up to the people to retrieve and restore—the state is just the largest property owner, like the kings were, and even if it now invites a few citizens to help in the management of that property that doesn’t change the fact that your property is ultimately on loan from the state and that you are equal until it’s your property that the state sets its eyes on. Getting rid of the people presently managing the common realm will not solve the problem of how to manage or distribute it afterward. It’s better to prepare for that time when it might be possible to buy up bits and pieces of the state, maybe at bargain prices, when it starts to fall into pieces. Nothing, that is, prevents us from creating alternatives to the state, much less picking up the pieces of the relationships it destroys. And there will be a lot of pieces."
    },
    {
      "slug": "paulmania",
      "title": "Paulmania",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2013",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The almost unanimous conservative euphoria over Rand Paul’s filibuster the other day seems to me an odd thing. More precisely, it seems to me delusional, and therefore demanding understanding. Much of the excitement seems to result from the sheer novelty of a real filibuster, requiring the speaker to hold the floor (and hold it in) for hour upon hour; part of it is the hunger for someone with the “balls” to finally “stand up” to the Obama administration; part of it is the entrance into public life of the libertarianism that has been percolating for years around the margins of the conservative movement and Republican party, which takes its rhetorical power from a fetishization of the US constitution (by which I mean not adherence to its terms, but the belief that the defense of the constitution defines our political imperatives and priorities, and that the constitution contains the answers to political questions, even to questions regarding the best mode of public life); part of it is a sense of stealing the left’s issue and their thunder, and even gaining the grudging support of the more honest among them; and part of it is, I assume, genuine concern over the immediate issue at end—the question of whether the President is constitutionally empowered to assassinate (or is it only to assassinate using “drones”?) American citizens on American soil.\n\nBut if we start with that issue, without which the entire event is really nothing more than catharsis, it seems to me there is much less there than meets the eye. I have noticed that on conservative websites, discussions of the general principle get met with indictments of the Obama administration’s duplicity, opportunism, cynicism, and treachery, most of which indictment I share, but now tipping over into the further claim that if we can’t put it past them to demonize Tea Partiers, gun owners, Christians, veterans, etc., as potential terrorists, then we also can’t put it past them to start assassinating them. This slippage into left-wing style paranoia (the indulgence of which I would add to the above list as reasons for the euphoria) both misses the supposed “real” point and unwittingly demonstrates the emptiness of Paul’s entire exercise: such an administration would have no problem acknowledging they have no right to do something and then going ahead and doing it anyway; and whether the government might misuse the powers at its disposal tells us nothing about whether it legitimately possesses those powers.\n\nAnd on that question, the answer seems to me obvious: the President would have to have the power to put down a rebellion organized on American soil; such a rebellion, by definition, would exceed the powers of law enforcement and put us on a war footing; part of putting down a rebellion that, on this assumption, controls part of US territory, might very well involve assassinating its leaders, even those who are involved in political and propaganda rather than strictly military operations, something well within the laws of warfare; since it is conceivable, even likely, that, say, a portion of the Southwest in some combination socialist/Mexican nationalist Chiapas style revolt would include American citizens, those American citizens would be making themselves targets—so, yes, obviously, the President would have the right to kill them, using drones, poison, exploding cigars or any other available lethal technology.\n\n(I notice in rereading this that victimary thinking would exclude even the hypothetical construction of such a scenario, since one must in some way “stigmatize” some specific group in order to do so—I could have imagined an Islamist revolt in some part of Michigan, a white supremacist revolt in Idaho, etc.—in any case, names must be named—so, denying the very possibility of such an event feeds one’s self-congratulatory White Guilt or self-righteous victimary stance.)\n\nDisposing of that question leads me to conclude that the roots of the euphoria lie even deeper than the causes I have given so far: the assertion that no American President could ever have the right to assassinate an American citizen on American soil silently assumes and therefore reassures us that it will never be necessary to do so—that we are as inviolate here, on our own land, as the 9/11 attacks may have led us to believe we no longer were. Any war on American territory would be for causes both left and right are well equipped to diagnose and combat, at least in their own imaginations: the home grown tyranny that our political doctrines have always warned us against.\n\nTo put it bluntly: Paul’s filibuster allowed conservatives to join in the fantasy, which began 9/12/01 and has grown steadily in strength ever since—the fantasy that 9/11 didn’t really happen, and that there is no enemy out there that we don’t create by violating our own principles in some way, through some original sin of our own. On my reading of the evidence, those who enter this fantasy don’t leave it—indeed, why should they, as its terms are idyllic, combining in equal measure victimary resentments, an orientation towards one’s own, familiar, domestic political opponents, and an inexhaustible justification for romantic and populist posturing against the state.\n\nA state that they all, in the end, know will not really take them out with a drone as they sip their latte. This simply confirms what I concluded following the November elections: that Americans, having gotten on the victimocracy train, and will not get off until it has high sped to its destination, whatever that might be."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-loves-that-will-dare-not-speak-their-names",
      "title": "The Loves that will Dare not Speak Their Names",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2013",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The United States is a pathetic joke of a country. Our political class (but who put them in office?) is paralyzed when it comes to crafting budgets, controlling debt, defending borders, developing coherent relations with friends and enemies abroad-but, for a non-issue like same-sex marriage, we are capable of moving rapidly toward self-righteous unanimity and policy clarity. Only those issues of concern to the victimocracy get addressed expeditiously, but the only issues of concern to the victimocracy are those pseudo-inequalities that allow them to conduct unending simulated Nuremberg-style show trials of stereotyped victimizers.\n\nIt’s worth saying a few words about the same-sex marriage question, nevertheless—not because it is a serious human or political question, but because one of the desperate (but what kind of resistance to the left isn’t going to be a bit desperate these days) counter-proposals allows us to follow a thread through the unraveling. That counter-proposal comes from a strain of libertarianism, which says, just get the government out of marriage. Let individuals of any size, shape, number, dimension, mode or degree of intimacy create whatever contracts they like regarding the sharing and disposition of property, reciprocal obligations, the terms of contract termination and post-termination settlement, etc.; let the government remove all reference to marriage from tax codes or anything else; let churches, synagogues, mosques, etc., marry who they will, and, perhaps, agree to supplant the state as arbiters in cases of divorce (with the consent of the married parties, of course); and, let adoption agencies, schools, home sellers and renters, employers, etc., recognize whatever form of marriage suits their own interests and conscience.\n\nThis proposal should be put in play, because, obviously, once marriage can be same-sex, it can be anything—perhaps anything the government says but, ultimately, anything anyone says. But there are problems. Who, after all, enforces contracts? The government, which is to say the façade behind which the victimocracy conducts its crusades, would be far more involved than marriage then ever before, with the responsibility to sort out a whole array of confused, complex, and misconceived contractual arrangements, with, undoubtedly, extremely incompetent, unacceptable and easily evaded modes of enforcement, leaving tens of millions in legal limbo regarding crucial issues like child custody.\n\nWell, as someone has said, when you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it—that is, let’s radicalize further. Let’s shift over to private courts: we would have to get into the habit of signing our contracts before mutually agreed upon arbiters and, presumably, of conferring upon those arbiters agreed upon powers of enforcement. This new system would put an enormous social division in place: between those who would continue to rely upon state courts or simply exit any system and create informal, loose, polygamous family structures, as is already the case in many American inner cities and among the under classes generally, on the one hand, and those who would opt into the new system of private courts; and, two, within the new system of private courts, between those with discipline to work within a system relying heavily upon a willingness to abide by verdicts that will undoubtedly be difficult to enforce (will a private court really be able to impose a judgment on a husband to takes the kids, in opposition to prior agreements, from Tennessee to Oregon?) and to avoid recourse to the courts in the first place.\n\nThe old system, especially once abandoned by the responsible and self-sufficient, will devolve into some combination of quasi-totalitarian nanny state rule, in which the state regularly steps in and regulates parents and cares for children, on the one hand, and renewed clan or gang systems, on the other, as women will have to rely on their male kin (or any other vehicles of male violence they could enlist, through whatever degradation to themselves) to avenge and rectify their violations and abandonment by promiscuous men.\n\nWould 50% of the population be capable of migrating into the new system? 1%? How many would be necessary to make it sustainable? Whatever the answers to these questions, the point of this thought experiment (I don’t mean to suggest I think it couldn’t happen) is that if such a migration, or exodus, were not to be possible, then our current system isn’t possible either, because the ability to reciprocally promise and fulfill such promises necessary for such a system is exactly what we would need to hold on to what we have, because the government no longer supplements and shores up the values and commitments required for a nuclear-family centered society but actively undermines them.\n\nOne last question. When a woman has a baby, what makes that baby hers? (For clarity’s sake, let’s leave the father out of it.) Go ahead: justify her “right” to the child. I don’t think you can do it. Childbirth and parenthood are now state-sponsored and regulated activities like any other. Do you not need a birth certificate to authenticate the “provenance” of the child? Are there not myriad laws determining how you must treat and care for and educate the child, along with a full array of government agencies empowered to enforce those laws (would we have it any other way)? In other words, you didn’t birth that: just like the government built the roads and educated the workers and supplies the police and fire fighters that make it possible for you to do business, and so you didn’t build that, so the government (at least) funded the hospitals, gave loans to the doctors, had the FDA approve the pain killing drugs, vaccinations, etc.\n\n(and you usually need a road to get to the hospital as well) that made your giving birth and then raising your child possible. You will have no argument once some government bureaucracy, armed with a plenitude of studies regarding the needs of children, goes from house to house determining which children are better off where they are and which ones would be better removed to some more approved environment. One more term in office and Mayor Bloomberg will no doubt get to this. The difficulty you will have arguing against this without some presumption of the pre-state naturalness of the mother’s relation to her child is exactly the same difficulty we have arguing that marriage simply is a sanctified union between a man and a woman, the “joining of their flesh into one,” or whatever equivalent liturgical phrase it is sheltered under. The very fact of having to argue it makes us bereft.\n\nIn the privatized system I am imagining, what would make the baby the mother’s from another, equally disturbing standpoint—that is, what recourse would there be if mothers starting abandoning their children and taking off beyond the reach of whatever jurisdiction they inhabit? (We can no longer assume anything. Why, indeed, care for a child that just happened to pass through your birth canal?) A genuinely private system of civil law would only be possible among people who understood that such questions cannot be answered via an impeccable sequence of declarative sentences: marriage is marriage, children are children, parents are parents, and so on. People do terrible things, like abandoning babies, but only those who know, without necessarily being able to say how they know, what marriage is and what mothers and fathers are, are capable of knowing that such things are terrible and that we must step in to remedy them by taking in children, setting up orphanages and foster parenting institutions, restraining parents who become dangerous to their children, and so on.\n\nPermanent damage to the language is probably harder to inflict than such damage on institutions. You can erase “husband” and “wife,” “mother” and “father,” even “son,” daughter,” “sister” and “brother” from official documents, but it will be more difficult to uproot them from people’s minds and our overlapping heritages. And the words themselves, which will exist not only in people’s conversations but in books written more than 10 minutes ago that some people will still read, will be found appropriate to experiences, and will serve as a rebuke to those see them as little more than slurs (if you think I am exaggerating, I don’t think you have worked through the logic of “same-sex marriage”—an examination of the implications for entire vocabularies of love, affection, intimacy, and so on would itself require a lengthy discussion, as would the inclusion of the totality of the effects of the therapeutic state). For quite a while, anyway, there will be ways out for people who want them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "flipping-the-conference",
      "title": "Flipping the Conference",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2013",
      "url": null,
      "content": "According to a new pedagogical technique, called “flipping the classroom,” instead of using class time to provide the educational content (the lecture) with out of class time (homework) used to fulfill some assignment aimed at reinforcing what was heard in class, students learn more from providing the lecture online, so that students can listen to it at home and class tome then used to raise questions and probe the student’s understandings. I have seen the same approach proposed for the academic conference, where it seems to me to make even more sense: instead of sitting and listening to a complex paper, which one can hardly process and formulate pertinent questions for on the spot, with a meager 10-15 minutes left for discussion, why not post the papers in advance so that they can be read and the conference time used for more advanced and productive discussions?\n\nAt any rate, I thought I would give it a try, and I invite others to do the same in this space, or to begin any discussions now, to be continued at the conference. Of course, I don’t preclude the possibility of further revisions, but here it is, in what seems to me a pretty much finished form:\n\nAttentionality and Originary Ethics\n\nAdam Katz\n\nHowever paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading – the acts which relate men to their works, and to those works thrown in their faces, their “absences of works.”\n\nLouis Althusser, Reading Capital, 1968\n\n“In all the years in which I have attempted to explain GA in writing and in speech, I have tended to place the major emphasis on representation, and in particular on “formal representation” or language. One of the points I have insisted on is that human language is qualitatively different from animal “languages”; the researches and insights of such as Terrence Deacon have essentially ended the debate on this point. But it follows from my very “definition” of the human as the species that poses a greater problem to its own survival than the totality of forces outside the human community that the primary transformation of the proto-human into the human was ethical.\n\nLanguage and more broadly, representation emerged, per the originary hypothesis, to defer conflict, not to provide a cognitive or ratiocinative tool. But in the configuration of the originary event, the moral model of the reciprocal exchange of the sign is just as indubitably unique a human creation as language, and indeed more essential to the success of the event—and to the consequent emergence of our species. The urgent need that the event fulfills is to find a model of behavior that can defer violence within a community for which one-on-one animal hierarchy no longer provides an adequate solution.” Eric Gans Chronicle 431, “Originary Ethics.”\n\nThe distinction Gans posits here, between the sign as a formal representation of a transcendent object, on the one hand, and the sign as a result or manifestation of reciprocity seems to me one that the originary hypothesis itself transcends. In other words, “formal representation” is itself ethical, is indeed the origin and resource of any ethics, so that ethics cannot be thought outside of it. At the same time, formal representation cannot be thought outside of ethics, since the “formality” of the representation lies in the shared attention it effects, and in this shared attention lies any ethics. In shared, or joint attention, is the fundamental equality that constitutes the human. All the resources we need for thinking about ethics lie in joint attention, in our ability to point to something, and approaching ethics in this way might enable use to create more minimal, more pared down, ethical vocabularies.\n\nTo start with, if we can fold moral reciprocity into the shared attention constitutive of the scene, couldn’t we say that what is immoral and a denial of reciprocity is whatever interrupts that shared attention? There are two ways shared attention can be interrupted: first, through some kind of distraction; second, through some kind of fixation. Distraction (distracting others; allowing oneself to be distracted) tears us away from the scene of joint attention and thereby demands a renewed, necessarily risky effort to redirect attention in the object—that is, distraction raises the threshold of significance; fixation involves tearing oneself away from the scene and, ultimately, turning the other participants into objects of rather than participants in, that singular attention.\n\nBoth distraction and fixation abort the scene, but both are also complementary possibilities of the originary structure of joint attention: the actuality or fear of distraction favors the formation of fixations. If we consider that anyone enters a scene by following a line of attention—by looking at what someone else is looking it and deferring appropriation as the other does in order to continue looking—one has not fully joined the scene until that line of attention has passed through oneself, and has been seen to do so. In other words, attention is not joint until all the participants show, through signs, that they are letting the object be so as to see what it has to show—in which case, each participant must be inspected, so to speak, or credentialized, by having the sign they put forth validated.\n\nFor one’s joining of the line of attention to become evident and thereby accepted as legitimate, that attention must first land on oneself making oneself its object—in other words, each new participant on the scene represents a potential interruption of shared attentional frame. At this crucial point upon which one’s entry into the scene depends, one can only avoid becoming a distraction and potential source of fixation in others by doubling that attention back on oneself by joining it, becoming a sign and hence invisible, insofar as others are redirected back to the scene through you. In that case, you will have shown others that the line of attention passes through your own eyes; unless, of course, your self-referentiality simply intensifies your distractiveness.\n\nWhether a distraction has taken place will depend upon whether those attended to or, in Louis Althusser’s term, “interpellated,” as potential objects of resentment or desire can restore the line of attention by incorporating the interruption into the scene’s founding sign. I would call this the “loop” in the line of attention, and undergoing this looping is what I would call “ostentation,” which is where ethical being is located. Whether one can undergo or go through the loop depends upon the group’s ability to see you as restoring the line of attention as well as your ability to do so—ethics involves both ostentation and conferring a completed ostentation upon others, or the conversion of attentionality into intentionality. And this means that whether one has distracted or patched together the continuity of the line of attention, or fixated or proactively identified a break in that line can only be known in the aftermath on a new, converted scene of joint attention.\n\nWe keep the line of attention going by language learning—every loop in the line of attention involves an encounter of idioms. While it would be absurd to say that each of us speaks our own language, I think it makes perfect sense to say that at the margins we all differ in the emergent idioms we speak and that it at such margins that real ethical questions emerge: when I think I’m following your discourse and taking the next “logical step” but you think I am falsifying your most basic intuitions then a difference in language has emerged. Michael Tomasello, along with many others has made the argument that we learn language not as collections of single words with discrete meaning that then get combined in sentences, or as a series of grammatical rules applied to single instances of language use, but as pre-packaged chunks of discourse—phrases, formulas, commonplaces—that we can repeat appropriately insofar as we occupy scenes of joint attention with our elders.\n\n(I remember, for example, when I was very young, hearing “next door neighbor” as “neck store neighbor,” without it impairing my understanding of the phrase at all. Why should “neck store” refer to “proximal”? Who knows? How many other phrases couldn’t be made sense of through a strict following of the literal meaning of the words? If asked, perhaps I could have come up with an improvised etymology—I certainly would have believed one told to me.) Over time our language base extends through discovering iterable patterns in and analogies with those chunks, noticing similar contexts, mixing chunks, exchanging elements of the chunks we are familiar with, and so on.\n\nThis process never ends, continuing, say, for we academics, when we read the sentences of one thinker through the sentences we have assimilated from another. We can identify patterns because we can arrange center-margin relations on scenes and still recognize them as the “same” scene (when I am done speaking and someone else takes “center stage,” it will still be the “same” scene); and we can identify analogies because the materials of one scene can be “plugged into” other scenes. Iterating (repeating differently) chunks, patterns and analogies, that is, is the ways we follow the sometimes bumpy line of attention.\n\nThe ethical stance is not so much learning the language of the other, or teaching the other one’s own language, because “language” is not a static entity that can stand still long enough for it to be the same language once it has been learned as it was when it began being taught. Rather, ethics involves learning the emergent language that arises at the margin or rough edges of the convergent idioms. Joint attention is always liable to lapse, prey to distraction and fixation, must always be checked and re-engaged—when we mistake ourselves and each other we realize that we have not been attending to the same thing after all, and our recourse is to attend to what we normally attend from: language.\n\nWe have to check our use of words and expressions, to inform one another that I meant this word in that sense, or that I meant it figuratively or ironically rather than literally, or that I was alluding to what I thought was a common reference, or even just to pronounce the same word with a slightly different emphasis so as to distinguish it from a homonym, and so on. And from there attention can perhaps be redirected back to some signified. Explaining and justifying our actions to each other—the traditional content of ethics—is itself such an engagement with signs (our actions and bodies along with words) that threaten to fray some shared attention.\n\nA useful model for the mode of ethical thinking I am proposing is the transference relation in therapeutic situations, in which the therapist allows himself to be interpellated by the patient, who projects upon the therapist scenes that have nothing to do with the therapist, transforming the therapist into a screen upon which repressed fantasies can be displayed and made available for analysis. While, as Philip Rieff has argued, the “triumph of the therapeutic” has eroded moral discourse by undermining the balance of interdictions and remissions constitutive of traditional culture, tipping the balance decisively toward remissiveness (the therapist is always trying to help the patient liberate himself from some social inculcated inhibition) the therapist’s own position comes with a strict set of ethics, one deriving from the ethics of disinterest and transcendence cultivated in the monotheistic and scientific traditions. To the extent that we are all, if not therapists to each other, inevitably objects of transference for each other, then transference provides a way of describing the way through and out the loop of attention issuing in ostentation.\n\nIn that case, the transferential relation restores the fraying joint attention, the center, by adopting the assumption that the interpellative attention paid one is essentially random, indicative of some crisis on the scene rather than revelatory regarding oneself. One first takes on responsibility by rendering oneself interchangeable with anyone else on the scene. This assertion of a very fundamental form of equality is ethical work, rather than a presupposition, involving the neutralization of any naturalized link between the source of attention and its object. The similarity between the scene of transference and the Girardian scapegoating scene is obvious, and the ethical stance I am describing seeks to centralize the same resentments Girard theorizes, with the difference that the transferential relation aims at restoring the center by recuperating the process of interpellation within a revised set of rules, or language games.\n\nSo, while Girard’s model is complicated by the question of the actual guilt or responsibility of the target, that is not the case here: even if I am guilty as charged, my ethical obligation would be to minimize the attentional space my guilt takes up and toward the redirection of attention to the repairing of the joint attention I have myself broken—of course, a precondition of accomplishing that will likely be a full confession, acceptance of the normally imposed sanctions, and laying open my actions to further inspection by the community. In this way, the resentments aroused by the attention I have drawn on myself is less likely to be a distraction, continuing to fray the semiotic texture of the community, than a restoration and enrichment of the shared attentional space. The rule of such a practice of transference is that the more attention is directed towards me the less it is about me.\n\nJean Francois Lyotard introduced the concept of the differend, which he distinguishes from a “litigation” in that the litigants share a common language of negotiation and adjudication, while the differend involves a double injustice done to the “claimant” insofar as the language in which she would put forth her claim is incommensurable with the language of the respondent. Lyotard used as examples, predictably if appropriately, the Holocaust victim in the face of the Holocaust revisionist (who imposes a double-bind by treating the victim’s very survival as proof of the falsity of her claim) and the Aborigine subject to expropriation via the settler’s system of property which has no way of recognizing the native’s. There is no reason not to generalize the concept, though, to include the more radical transferential relation I am proposing, in which a deliberate incommensurability is introduced at the margins of divergent idioms so as to examine the limits of those idioms in relation to something outside each of them.\n\nDifferends are found in sentences that work incommensurably in different idioms. A sentence constructs a reality, immune to imperatives, by deferring other possible realities—realities that, in the judgment of the composer, would less effectively defer those imperatives (perhaps by falsifying or fragilizing reality so as to make it more compliant towards the imperatives; perhaps by constructing a reality so distanced as to not address the imperative at all). But one, or some, of those other possible realities would work just as well if we trace the deferred imperative back further to a longstanding, unfolding one, or up closer, to a more urgent one.\n\nA differend emerges when a speaker allows an interlocutor to join him in any of the realities, but only one, and in view of the others. Imagine that the same statement would be decisive proof of the speaker’s insanity, or of his surpassing wisdom, depending upon the frame (or would require urgent action, or infinite patience, depending upon the frame); and then imagine that one has to act on one or the other frame while acknowledging the undecidability between them. And then the other, likewise, keeps both frames in play while acting within one. Both participants would be generating and sustaining the threshold between the two frames—that is what I am proposing as an ethical model.\n\nWe create differends by learning the language that is other to everyone involved, which has the paradoxical result of restoring iconism to language. The declarative sentence takes on the iconism of the originary gesture, which means what it does, insofar as the differend constitutes not only the event represented by the sentence but the sentence as event—an event in which, rather than assuming a shared reality, the participants must stipulate to a provisional reality. Under such conditions, reality must be gathered together out of signs shaken loose from normalized reality so as to realign the relation between tacit and explicit.\n\nThis realignment involves rendering all elements of the speech act—gesture, tone, sound/meaning correspondences, all the scenes trailing along the signs we bear with us, everything “chunked up” in any effort to keep up with the novelty of any speech act, everything that spills out when commonplace meets event, and everything banished by the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign—vouchers for the reality one attests and redeems. Language is what we attend from to each other’s attending to; language learning involves attending to what we have been attending from. Attending to the tacit knowing enabling any signification recuperates distractions by using them to break up the fixations that interfere with our attending to the overlapping margins of our idioms that make language learning possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "violent-imaginaries",
      "title": "Violent Imaginaries",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2013",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Violent Imaginaries\n\nPerhaps it has occurred to other members of the GA discipline that the negative pole of the event issuing in the originary sign, that is, the collapse of the proto-human community into universal, chaotic violence, is extremely implausible. In other words, even if we assume the most heightened mimetic fervor, it’s hard to see how the violence consequent upon the breakdown of the animal pecking order could actually lead anywhere near the violent death of all members of the community. How could they all tear each other apart limb from limb? They would exhaust themselves well before such a result. At most, such a breakdown in the hierarchical order would lead to some serious injuries, maybe a death or two, followed by a perhaps more fragile restoration of the pecking order.\n\nWhat is extremely plausible, though, is that such an all-consuming storm of violence is what that breakdown would look like to the members of the proto-human group—and that it would need to look that way in order prompt the invention of the sign. In other words, the intuition or, perhaps, unconscious, constituting the sign is not a reasonable expectation of devastating violence but a violent imaginary. An imaginary gives rise to fantasies, but it is not the same thing. A helpful way to think of the concept “imaginary” is through R.G. Collingwood’s definition of “imagination.” Collingwood gives the following example: suppose you are looking from a window out on a lawn with a wall that one cannot see beyond.\n\nYou will have no difficulty “imagining” the continuation of that lawn beyond the wall—in that case, “imagination” is the continuation or completion of what one perceives. In that case, though, imagination must make perception possible in the first place: I can only see the field of grass as a “lawn” insofar as I can see it as bounded, as a whole in itself and a part of larger wholes. This constitutive capacity of the imagination is an “imaginary,” a supplement to perception that makes meaningful perception possible. Needless to say, the imaginary need not be true—in the case of Collingwood’s example, the lawn may not, in fact, extend beyond the wall.\n\nThe violent imaginary on the originary works in the same way—as soon as the beginnings of this new form of confrontation becomes visible to the participants on the scene, those participants must continue and complete it—“must” in the sense that that is what an advanced, highly mimetic animal would do. And this continuation and completion would be, not an attempt at an accurate portrayal, but a sharpening of what is new in this configuration. What is new is the absence of discernable limits on the confrontation, readily imaginable as an uncontrolled, accelerating melee, with no exterior. It is, then, this violent imaginary that is both revealed and concealed in the sign—the symmetry of the shared sign on the scene must match the negative symmetry of the unbounded imagined violence. We can even assume that the form of the sign is shaped by its complementary violent imaginary—the sign would be effective to the extent that it conveys everyone’s awareness of the extreme “thought experiment” implicit in the violent imaginary.\n\nAll signs, and all of culture, then, would have to be constituted by some violent imaginary, one we could read negatively off of the signs of culture themselves. No human society, even in the midst of the most brutal war or total social breakdown, ever approaches “chaos”—society can be dissolved into clans, gangs, militias, tribes, but never into a “war of all against all.” Again, though, this doesn’t make the imaginary false—even in those gangs and clans, conflicts raise the specter of a breakdown of that order, and that breakdown, even for the most realistic, can only be viewed as a “breakdown” against the imagined background of “chaos.” And it is from such an imaginary that we derive our intuitions regarding the best way to ward off all consuming violence.\n\nPerhaps such an originary theory of the unconscious can make psychoanalysis interesting for GA. Psychoanalysis has been swept, often derisively, from the stage of history, replaced by neurobiology, the cognitive sciences and more practical, localized forms of psychotherapy. Freud’s claims regarding the Oedipal Complex, castration fear, penis envy, etc., have been widely ridiculed as arbitrary and (Victorian) culture bound. Maybe. But at least Freud put desire, violence and deferral at the center of his psychology, and saw the central problem of humanity as relations between humans, rather than greater proficiency in the relations between humans and nature, or assuming the problem of reciprocity to already be solved.\n\nAnd Freud was also aware that the way we represent our experienced traumas to ourselves and others are related to those actual traumas only in very mediated ways—which is to say, he understood that reality is scenic, and the psychoanalytic session was one more scene or event in a long series of them leading us back to the original scene. If I am right to posit a violent imaginary as constitutive of any sign, than GA shares all this with psychoanalysis (including important post-Freudian figures like Lacan, Winnicott and Kristeva)—and not with what might be much more scientific, useful and, in their own domains, accurate representations of the human mind.\n\nReconstructing the constitutive violent imaginary through the continuing and completing of the scene by a sign would in turn enable the reconstruction of that sign so as to take more account of that violent imaginary. Bringing more of the violent imaginary into representation would not necessary quell the terror lurking within it, because such further elaboration of the representation would simply shift the terms of the violent imaginary. In other words, the violent imaginary can never be made fully conscious—as Freud realized, the patient who came in familiar with his works and proceeded to spill his guts about his passion for his mother and desire to kill his father had simply rearranged the unconscious material under a new repression.\n\nWhat can, perhaps, be done, though, is to invest the violent imaginary more fully in dialogue or disciplinary space established so as to examine it—in other words, the violent imaginary cannot be represented as such (we can’t paint a picture of it and look at it together) but it can be made the imaginary of the scene of representation itself, rather than of some represented scene. The value of this is to make our responses to each other direct, ostensive, framings of the violent imaginary that can provide suitable, matching signs, rather than explanations and diagnoses that subserve the power of the violent imaginary by keeping it out of our hands, so to speak, and rendering it, paradoxically, “fictional,” insofar as it has been made over some conventional narrative form.\n\nCultural analysis, in this case, would involve mapping the features of a representation onto some violent imaginary which is, to borrow Saussure’s image of the signifier/signified distinction, are like two sides of the same sheet of paper. One violent imaginary would be all in the group converging on the strongest member, and then the second strongest, and then the third, and so on. Another violent imaginary would involve all converging on the weakest, and then the second weakest, and so on. Another would have equally powerful subgroups facing off in an endless and increasingly bitter stalemate. And each of these imaginaries could be further modified by the positions one can occupy within them—seeing oneself as the third weakest in an imaginary in which the weakest is the target would be different than imagining oneself among the strongest in that scenario—one’s fear would be calibrated differently and ones responsibility and capacity to affect the scene assessed differently.\n\nAnd, then, the sign one puts forth would be correspondingly different, and we could read levels of confidence vs. diffidence, caution vs. recklessness, patience vs. panic, appeals to the entire group vs. appeals to more specialized constituencies, among other features of one’s sign, in these terms, reading them back to a hypothesized violent imaginary. Different violent imaginaries might map better onto particular historical events, and may thus provide us with a way of accounting from changes in historical interpretation. And cultural remediation would involve fleshing out and making more present those violent imaginaries, creating new positions within them and creating tactics and strategies for those positions available within and so as to further defer that violent imaginary."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-brief-note-on-terminology",
      "title": "A brief note on terminology",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2013",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I have always been dissatisfied with the use of the term “ostensive” to designate the originary sign. Yes, the sign is ostensive—it involves, necessarily, some kind of pointing—but it is not only ostensive and, more importantly, “ostensive” is a commonly used concept in linguistics and cognitive psychology and in those contexts has a much more narrow meaning. “Ostensive” in those contexts means pointing to an object under conditions where sign users already know what it means to point, and in discussions of language in particular it gives the misleading impression that the originary hypothesis is vulnerable to the critique of Augustine’s model of language learning advanced by Wittgenstein in the opening pages of his Philosophical Investigations.\n\nThe distinction Wittgenstein makes there, between language as designation of objects, and language as following a set of mostly tacitly understood rules is foundational for contemporary thinking about language and much else. The term “ostensive” makes it sound like GA is on the wrong side of this divide when in fact we are most certainly not: that signs only make sense on a “scene,” within an “event,” means that central to sign use is the configuring of complex scenes and events, whose ultimate constitution lies beyond the comprehension of any participant. Language is a tacit, open-ended, rule governed activity for GA no less than for any Wittgensteinian derived mode of reflection or inquiry. We just insist that the rules have an origin in the urgency with which human beings must defer the ever-present potentiality of violence.\n\nIf not “ostensive,” then what? Well, the originary sign is also iconic—it represents because it is “similar” to the act of appropriation it aborts; it also, in its completion, imitates the object (qua God) itself in urging that renunciation. But it is also not just iconic, because “iconic” as some of the same problems as “ostensive”—what counts as “resemblance” is itself culture bound and therefore can’t unproblematically account for the origin of culture. The originary sign is iconic and ostensive, because it is constitutive—that is, it establishes the very conditions under which iconic and ostensive signs are possible; but it does so ostensively and iconically.\n\nSo, we need all three of these concepts to grasp the originary sign in all its paradoxicality. Fortunately, there is much overlap between the three words, making a portmanteau possible. “Icon” contains the “con” with which “constitutive” begins, and “constitutive” contains the “st” near the beginning of “ostensive” (with an “o” separated from the “st” by a rather unobtrusive “n”), allowing us to compose the following: the “iconstitensive” sign. (The “ut,” as far as I can determine, does not comprise part of the root of “constitute,” so we can lose it.) The stuttering “ostensive” one might hear in “iconstitensive” reflects, we might say, the hesitation that is also an essential ingredient of the originary sign, and one can hear all three words in this new one out of many without that new word being unduly difficult to pronounce, it seems to me."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-does-hedgehog-know",
      "title": "What does Hedgehog know?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2013",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I understand that there is a spy movie in which one of the spies is codenamed “Hedgehog” and his fellow spies ask, “what does Hedgehog know?” If anyone knows the movie, please share the title with us.\n\nI have a printed copy of the Anthropoetics motto webpage on my office door: “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog, one big thing,” with a photo of a cute European hedgehog. http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/hogb.html\n\nVisitors often ask about the motto: what does it mean? What is the “one big thing?” Depending on who is asking, and what mood I’m in, I might say something about the ancient Greek origin of the saying and Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on it, or something about Generative Anthropology, or I might just try to say something funny. When people ask what the hedgehog knows, I’m tempted to say, “the deferral of violence through representation,” but that phrase doesn’t have any meaning for most people, so I usually say something about Generative Anthropology’s focus on the origin of the language. The importance of asking that question is, in one sense, what hedgehog knows.\n\nIn my view, the fox is superficial, obsessively collecting details without understanding the larger meaning. The hedgehog is not necessarily a “big picture” thinker, but he knows one thing for sure, he stays with that one thing, and he builds on it slowly to construct something more lasting.\n\nThe relationship between the fox and the hedgehog is an interesting issue. The hedgehog, of course, by simply curling up into a ball is able to defeat the fox in all his cunning. But many people don’t see that the hedgehog is really any better or smarter than the fox. And the hedgehog certainly can’t afford to ignore all the data that has been so cunningly collected by the fox. So I think the best answer to the question, “what does hedgehog know?” is “one thing more than the fox.” In other words, the hedgehog knows everything the fox knows, but he puts a foundation or cornerstone under it, so that it all coheres into a meaningful whole."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-memory",
      "title": "Originary Memory",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In my latest essay for Anthropoetics, I argued for a language or semiotic based notion of ethics, piecing together the concepts of joint attention, language learning, disciplinarity, and what I called “upclining,” or the retrieval of the signs of more originary events through the signs of the present. All of that is fine, but it now strikes me that an even simpler, more fundamental way of grounding all those concepts, and of proposing an originary ethics, is right at hand. What is ethical, and all that really matters, is remembering the originary scene. This may seem hard to understand, and even impossible: the originary scene is a theoretical construct, derived from a synthesis and transformation of recent thinkers (Girard and Derrida in particular), and while we GA-niks take it to be true, we do so because we believe it provides the most compelling theoretical and analytical account of culture, religion, society and anthropological phenomena more generally, and not because we experience any bond to an actual originary scene (the way in which Christians may experience a identification with Jesus, or Jews with the revelation on Mt Sinai). The originary scene is not peopled for us in that way.\n\nBut how could we understand a sign without remembering other scenes upon which we understood signs, or use a sign without commemorating all those other scenes. And any sign bears with it the traces of the scenes upon which it was performed before it found its way to us—a proper care for the sign is a tribute to those earlier scenes, and through them the scenes before those. A sign well used is a sign that defers violence, even violence several or many degrees removed from the scene upon which the sign is used—using a sign to defer the first stirrings of resentment so as to potentially marginally replenish the social store of civility is iterating the sign’s use on the originary scene.\n\nBut what kind of sign use will do that? We’re not talking about being nicer to people. Sometimes the proper care of the sign involves confrontation, sometime bluntness, sometimes subtlety, sometimes a strong line of BS—the only way we can know is by drawing upon our intuitions as sign users, and since our intuitions as sign users ultimately derive from the originary scene, sharpening, honing and sensitizing those intuitions take us back through the past, following the trail of auto-probatory signs to the first one.\n\nIt follows that any future-oriented ethics will be shallow, self-serving, and even fraudulent—none of us knows the slightest thing about the future, or of the way any of our actions will play out in the vast networks of activity comprising our world so doing something “to make things better” requires an unethical degree of arrogance. Similarly, acting according to some “principle” (even “freedom”) is an attempt to evade attunement with originary intuitions, to stop listening to the imperatives that would have us turn our head back to the ostensive from whence they originate. In both cases, we are dealing with escapism and fantasy.\n\nOriginary memory is taking care of language—by which I don’t mean trying to maintain it as a transparent vehicle of communication, or ensuring that words be used in their proper meaning; what I mean is that everything anyone says makes it possible to say something else that couldn’t have been said otherwise, and that in articulating one of those things that couldn’t have been said otherwise one remembers by carrying forward the very first utterance that made everything said since then possible. It is by thus heading back into the past, enriching the originary scene with everything that has happened since and therefore, in a sense, happened there, is still happening there, that we open up possible futures."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-victimary-bambina",
      "title": "The Victimary Bambina",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I don’t have many good things to say about Woody Allen. For about 35 years now (starting with “Manhattan”) he has, with very few exceptions, in what seems to me the most embarrassingly self-occluded manner, exposed to the world in his films his creepy fantasies of beautiful young women falling in love with him. And there is far more, including his apologias for evil, which Eric Gans has dissected in a couple of Chronicles.\n\nBut what is far more disturbing even than Woody Allen is the victimary theology that insists on faith that we must believe unreservedly in whosoever presents him or (especially) herself as a victim of sexual violence. You would think that after the Tawana Brawley, Mc Martin preschool and Duke Lacrosse team hoaxes the hold of this pillar of victimary theology would be somewhat weakened; but you would be wrong, as any glance at discussions online of Dylan Farrow’s accusations of Allen demonstrate.\n\nEveryone knows that accusations are only accusations, that they need to be vetted according to specified procedures, that even if in public judgments a strict presumption of innocence is not necessary, at least some skepticism and modesty regarding what can be known is called for. Everyone, in short, knows that people can lie, forget and misremember. But at the same time they don’t know it, because knowing it would “reinforce conditions under which victims fear to come forward with their stories,” “protect the perpetrator,” or something along those lines.\n\nI wonder how many people have thought through this logic to its totalitarian conclusions. Should Brawley’s story have been questioned? Or the accuser of the Duke lacrosse players? If so, when would it have been acceptable to start doing so? If at some point—say, in conducting an investigation regarding the possibility of a criminal prosecution—it does become acceptable to point to non-corroborating evidence, why? Why not at an earlier point, then? What does it mean to conduct an investigation in which a questioning of the complainant’s story is prohibited? Is the point, perhaps, that mere criminal prosecutions are too this-worldly to address the transcendent horror of the victimary condition? The logic of faith in the self-proclaimed victim is that nothing but a perpetual, unremitting hounding of the presumed perpetrator, his expulsion from public life and the ruination of his private life, will suffice. Let’s call it “unctuous totalitarianism.”\n\nFurthermore, the theology of the victim further compels us to accept the victim’s definition of her victimization; even more, to identify this victimization in the very asymmetry “positioning” her in relation to a world of victimizers. Sexual abuse of children is a criminal offense that must defined in specific ways, but faith in the victim can hardly rest content with such a narrow, juridical frame. The law itself, in demanding that the victim recount her victimization, that she be “credible,” that she endure cross-examination and perhaps hostile media representations, just means that she is victimized again, and her deepest injury left unacknowledged.\n\nThis passion yet relies upon the juridical frame—we are not yet at the point where random women are accusing random men of being the Gestapo of the patriarchy (largely, perhaps, because hard-core members of the victimary cult are still a small minority, however far its penumbras reach). But the juridical frame, with an ever expanding body of ever more amorphous sexual harassment law, is stretching prodigiously, and even that may not contain the craving for unqualified recognition of absolute harm inherent in the theology of the victim.\n\nOf course, the victim, in accepting saint-like status, turns herself over to the same victimary church, implicitly agreeing to undergo a perpetual process of “healing” and exemplifying the universal condition of trauma. Just as it is now dogma in the addiction industry that once an addict, always an addict, and that a single beer will send the addict back into the death spiral of self-abandon, the dogma of sexual abuse is that the trauma last forever and that trauma and one’s struggle to transcend it forever defines the core of one’s being. (Another, not obviously related dogma, that homosexuals are born homosexuals and remain so through out their lives, with all attempts to change that transparent, and vicious, frauds, serves a related purpose: as the Eagle’s song, “Hotel California” has it, you can check out of the victimary condition, but you can never leave.)\n\nI suppose if there is a victimary end game, it would have to be the world as universal sanatorium in which we are all each other’s infection and each other’s nurse. The oppressors are welcome if they acknowledge that they, to, are victims of the racist patriarchy, and stand unqualifiedly with the victims—in reading over quite a few comment threads on stories dealing with the Farrow letter, I have seen many men cleansing and redeeming themselves in this manner. They must also take the lead in purging the irredeemable—the stream of abuse directed toward non-believers (those who don’t think that, with all his flaws, this sounds like something Allen would do; or those who balance Farrow’s claims with evidence of Mia Farrow’s introduction of various dysfunctions into her children’s lives; or those insisting on a proper juridical framing of the claims; or simply those who say we can’t know for sure) is unrestrained.\n\nI’ll make a final, perhaps predictable observation. The political equivalent of the church of our child of sexual abuse is the international cult of Palestine, for whom the most horrific actions are merely proof of how all-encompassingly horrific Israeli oppression must be—who would strap a bomb to a teenager and send him or her into a crowd of civilians to self-detonate except for those who have be traumatized beyond all reason themselves? But if all they can do is act out their trauma in escalatory ways, how can they then be considered negotiating partners capable of concessions and respect for agreements they have reached?\n\nThere is no way to stand outside of these discourses without sounding callous, as I’m sure I do here. I think it’s important to resist the usual qualifications people making arguments similar to mine usually feel compelled to introduce—that, yes, sexual abuse of children is horrible, that it takes place far too often, that we must oppose it wherever we see it, that in this case Dylan Farrow may indeed be telling the truth, etc. To run through these qualifications (even though I suppose I just did it) is to concede the point that rejecting victimary arguments unconditionally renders one suspect. I would like to argue that victimary arguments are terrible for actual victims because they encourage people to define themselves in terms of insults and injuries received, which is to say in terms of resentments.\n\nBut, like the argument some conservatives will always try to make that leftist policies are worse for blacks than for anyone else, trapping them in dependency and dysfunction, I don’t believe these arguments can stick now. The victimary has to run its course, and there’s no way of knowing when, if, or how it will exhaust itself. Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address seems to me more prescient than ever:\n\n“Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”\n\nVictimary thinking is based on the conviction that if there were a God He would will it that all the wealth produced through any asymmetrical relation whatsoever be sunk, and that whatever looks to us like a humiliating experience in the past must be repaid by equivalent humiliation in contemporary coin."
    },
    {
      "slug": "back-to-nature",
      "title": "Back to Nature",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Proponents of the originary hypothesis find themselves arguing for the discontinuity of humans with non-human animals far more often than we find ourselves arguing for the continuity between the two realms or levels of reality. The reason for this is a good one, but also purely contingent: the most powerful obstacle to a careful consideration of the originary hypothesis by humanists and scientists (social and natural alike) is the “materialist” or “atheist” dogma that the quintessentially human capacities, such as consciousness, or ethics, are either illusions or versions of capacities shared with other animals. This dogma, in turn draws its strength from the anti-religious origins of modern thought, as well as more recent victimary elements, meaning that originary hypothesists (to coin a phrase in order to avoid tiresome repetition) are in turn are compelled to defend religion as “good anthropology,” at least, if “bad ontology.”\n\nI have no quarrel with this argument, but the terms of this polemic have obscured from view, I think, the fact that coinciding with the originary leap out of “nature” must have been a very determined, even compulsive, effort at re-fitting ourselves back into nature. The sounds and rhythms of spoken language, the structures of dwellings, the forms of tools and weapons, the enactment of rituals and, finally, the original forms of the written word, would all be motivated by attempts to either imitate or blend into the surrounding environment.\n\nAll of these efforts would, of course, involves specific abstractions from (the singling out of and articulation of relevant features) and therefore interpretations of those surroundings—such interpretations would depend upon the surroundings themselves as well as what the sign system and way of life of the community as a whole would lead them to notice. This is why a “cratyllian” theory of language, which would argue that the sounds of words derive from the object of representation (that is, contain a significant and irreducible “non-arbitrary,” iconic, dimension), need not be surprised at the vast diversity of languages. The re, or retro, fitting back into nature would always be done in specific events, and would always coincide with the development of the sign system (that is, would simultaneously involve a further differentiation from nature), but it would always be done.\n\nThere is no reason to assume that anything has changed for humans in this regard—even the most advanced technologies, enabling us to fly, light our homes, analyze our DNA, devise complex algorithms are all (re)trofittings into nature, mediated through previous (re)trofittings, as we use the air and wind to elevate and transport ourselves, “download” our minds and brains into machines, find our language inside of the mechanisms of transmission of heritable material from generation to generation. All these devisings are, as Marshall Mc Luhan asserted, extensions of our senses and more, broadly, our semiosis. And, needless to say, language always situates us firmly in space, behind, above, underneath, in front of, moving or standing still, feeling, and so on. This is why I think the “naturalistic fallacy,” that is, appeals to nature as arguments for what is good, is hardly a fallacy at all—unless “nature” is reduced to a strictly physicalist account.\n\nThe question then, is, why is it that people can feel—as they undoubtedly often feel—as if they have lost touch with nature, been alienated from it, been denatured themselves? This seems to be a perpetual complaint of civilized societies in particular, as the continuing power of the pastoral demonstrates. Part of it is certainly that whatever has become habitual, and therefore unconscious and “given” is easily conflated with the natural, and so any disruption of habits is experienced as a denaturing. But, beyond that, a sense of being denatured is really a sense of being decultured—of having lost a shared naturalization or “fit” between a people and their surroundings. In other words, since the (re)trofitting back into nature takes place on a scene, being alienated from nature is really being de-scened.\n\nIn that case, appeals to nature can be persuasive to the extent that they direct attention to the fraying of shared attentional scenes; and they can be effective and salutary to the extent that they restore shared attention in new and sustainable scenes. But such appeals must genuinely find a “fit”—they cannot just be “rhetorical.” How is it possible to know what “fits,” and for whom the fit fits? No one really can, and extreme suspicion should alight on anyone claiming to know how “we” can restore some lost value, virtue, perception, or mode of expression that was more in accord with nature. But what can be done is singling out elements, and relations between elements, in any surrounding, and transforming those relations into constraints that allow for indefinite iteration.\n\nNo new technology can denature us or take away our humanity—not genetics, not information technology, not virtual reality, or robotics, not nuclear weapons. The capacity to, and fantasy of, manipulating our basic components, of being a conductor rather than intentional users of signs, of utterly destroying ourselves, has always been with us. Those capacities and fantasies are what take shape within and tear apart shared intentional scenes and therefore eliciting them in relatively protected spaces and making them visible is the way to restore those scenes.\n\nThose who devote themselves to displaying whatever is anomalous in any utterance or scene therefore perform the greatest service to humanity. One of the funnier and more memorable episodes of “Seinfeld,” I think, was the one where George finds (after realizing that “every” decision he has made in his life so far has been wrong) great success in “doing the opposite” of his immediate impulses and habitual responses. Whether or not the writers of that episode were familiar with the esthetic practices of pataphysics, performance art, happenings, conceptual art, and Oulipo, the idea was in their spirit. The first “opposite” thing George does in that episode is, instead of “being intimidated by women,” he goes boldly up to an attractive woman and, in another instance of “doing the opposite,” instead of giving her his usual line of BS, announces that he is unemployed and lives at home with his parents.\n\nThe woman responds warmly (and they commence a relationship), perhaps suggesting that she herself is “doing the opposite”—the anomalous generates the anomalous. The lesson is that even the most uncreative among us can generate a constraint to live by, since anyone can find something in their daily practices to negate—anyone knows what they feel like doing, or feel like they should do, what is expected of them, in a given instance, and can therefore “do the opposite” (not that it is always obvious what the “opposite” of something is). Negation is deferral and the start of discipline, and even the most arbitrary negation can get the ball rolling.\n\nGenerating an anomaly opens a space of uncertainty, awkwardness and anxiety, and a space that will undoubtedly be quickly closed, since humankind cannot bear not to feel part of a scene. But the closure will also be a disclosure, as the boundary between fit and misfit becomes momentarily visible. Technology is imperative—what we become capable of doing becomes what we have no choice but to do. But imperatives can be disobeyed, or obeyed too well. There should be rules for the esthetico-ethical practice I am proposing—all violence and compulsion should be avoided, and even discomfort should not be pushed beyond a certain threshold (which is obviously difficult to measure).\n\nThe point is to produce examples or, better, yet, “samples,” which are drawn from and can be examined for their conformity with, a larger “population”; and, “sampled” in turn as one pleases. This is a practice of “cynicism,” in the Diogenean sense that Peter Sloterdijk explored in his popular, yet anomalous (not really left or right, kind of, but not quite “theory”) when it appeared in the 1980s, Critique of Cynical Reason. Perhaps the fool of Lear is another “sample.” The ancient cynics were the original critics of civilization, calling for a return to nature, which is to say what is needful and no more, and leading to Stoicism. Pataphysics (really the origin of those esthetic movements I just mentioned along with it) might lead in any number of directions but always, I think, back to nature.\n\nTwo questions: first, why should anomalies be preferred to the normal?; second, are all anomalies created equal—can’t one be anomalous, “do the opposite,” for evil as well as good? Number 1: it is not so much that the anomalous is to be preferred to the normal as that the anomalous is what we notice, while the normal is invisible. In other words, we attend from the normal to the anomalous. Furthermore, the anomalous precedes, logically and temporally, the normal: the first sign was an anomaly, and one can only determine normalcy by averaging out anomalous instances. Even more: there is no normal, just various efforts at and processes of normalizing the anomalous.\n\nNone of which, of course, means that the normal isn’t real or desirable—it just means that we generate the normal by modeling ourselves on one or another anomaly. And that brings us to the second question, which concerns which anomalies we model ourselves on. And here, indeed, there can be no a priori principle that sorts out the good anomalies to be imitated and the bad ones to be shunned. Any attempt to propose such a principle simply and arbitrarily declares a particular version of the normal anomaly free. Furthermore, if my immediate move is to negate what is immediately expected, then doesn’t that mean I slip from one negation to another, doing the opposite of the opposite thereby spinning in circles or ending up where I started?\n\nLet’s start with the second part of the second question—doing the opposite of the opposite and so on does not lead one in a circle or back to the starting point because there is more of a rough diagonal than a circle and there is no starting point to return to because that has already dissolved in the initial negation. The expectations generated by the first negation or deferral will be different from the expectations deferred, and so their opposite will not be the original position. The only question left, then, is that distinguishing between good and bad anomalies. Let’s try out an example: let’s say the normal position in a particular cultural setting is to favor the death penalty.\n\nOne “opposite” of this would be “eliminate the death penalty”; another opposite might be to replace today’s efficient, antiseptic death penalty (the constant search for more distanced, neat and technologically refined means) with the old-fashioned hanging, drawing and quartering. Is arguing for one position better, ethically, than arguing for the other? If you’re an Enlightenment rationalist like Steven Pinker, I suppose so—the less violent the better, so if we could move “forward” towards the elimination of the death penalty than would be an ethical advance like the move from cruder to more refined forms of punishment.\n\nMy own answer is that I don’t know. Or care. Who can know all the consequences of distancing ourselves from our ever more lethal forms of homicide? Or of brutal, terrifying, spectacle style punishments? Or of striving to punish less and less? But, some originary demon might ask, surely we can say that random punishment, of whatever kind, is worse, more evil, than attempts to make punishment correspond to some act that has been determined, by some more or less freely created consensus, to be wrong? “Random punishment” would be another “opposite,” in this case to the juridical norms we take for granted. The idea of random punishment is not evil, because ideas can’t be evil; quite to the contrary, this like any idea is productive because we are then able to imagine what it would mean to attempt it.\n\nI suppose Shirley Jackson’s famous story, “The Lottery,” is one attempt to do so, but even there the punishment is very confined and localized—we’d have to imagine some much more elaborate mode of generating random outcomes—if it were genuinely random, punishment could come to anyone, anytime. But would it still be “punishment”? Is “random punishment,” perhaps, simply a contradiction in terms? Maybe, but maybe not if we were to imagine some originary and unlocalizable criminality that constitutes the human and that transcends the rather petty and irrelevant acts we carry out every day. From that standpoint, what we do now is “random punishment.”\n\nIf we imagine some random punishment generator, and work through the implications, would the outcomes actually turn out to be random when they came out? (What, continues the originary demon, about someone who decides to enact random punishment, in a kind of perfectly senseless terrorism—he would be doing the opposite of something, wouldn’t he? I know you laid down a rule prohibiting violence, but the senseless terrorist is just doing the opposite of that rule, isn’t he? Well, I might answer, if he wants to be a character in a hack pseudo-Dostoevskian novel, who could stop him—but there are a lot of opposites between the concept of “senseless terrorism” and its enactment, and those digressions would be more revealing than the playing out of the terrorist act, which would actually have fairly predictable consequences.)\n\nEnough of that. In the end, one would simply have to trust the scenicity of human being to average out the anomalies—to arrive at modes of punishment that could be recognized as legitimate, i.e., as generating the most diffused, distributed and composed forms of resentment possible under the circumstances. What else could we trust to? At this point in history, does anyone really think that they can devise a universal rule for determining what counts as a just system of punishment? (Or at least a universal rule shared by anyone else, starting with one’s book reviewer.) In other words, back to nature! But I would like to make a more important argument here.\n\nWe are, each one of us, composed of such negations, constraints and anomalies, doing the opposite in all kinds of major and minor, planned and spontaneous ways. We average ourselves out in order to “fit,” but in doing so we can try to fit into “culture” or “nature”—by “culture,” in this case, I mean approved and standardized models (which, by definition, have banished anomalies); by “nature,” I mean the reduction to the lowest possible threshold of meaning: what do any or all of us turn out to mean by “punishment” (or anything else) when the question is imposed upon us in the way that it comes to be imposed once it has crossed the threshold of questionability? If “culture” works, it’s probably the safer alternative; I don’t think it works anymore—so, once again, back to nature!"
    },
    {
      "slug": "property",
      "title": "Property",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A simple way of distinguishing Left from Right: the Right believes in property and the Left doesn’t. What does it mean to believe in property? That there are things that can only be used and enjoyed by one individual, insofar as they are not used and enjoyed by another—and that social order is only possible if that reality is recognized. Let’s say we were to establish the principle of communal property—nothing is owned by anyone individual, but, rather, food, clothing, housing, entertainment is provided in a regulated manner according to shared rules. Food is distributed at regular intervals and consumed in a common area, implements are made available accordingly, even if you sleep in the same bed more than one night in a row a change in collective priorities (leaving aside for now how they are established) can have you rousted from it at any time, and so on.\n\nIt may be that some Israeli kibbutzim actually came closest to realizing that principle. Even under such conditions, though, private property will reassert itself: I might want to try your dinner, and you mine, and so we trade—each of us would have to recognize a certain informal title of ownership in the other to make that possible. One could imagine the kind of totalitarianism needed to make that impossible: mealtimes (and every other time, because food could be saved and shared elsewhere) would have to be supervised with panoptic comprehensiveness and punishments severe enough to deter such “traders” (or you could make sure everyone has the same meal—which wouldn’t so much abolish property as make differences in property irrelevant, which means one would be working backwards, frantically negating the reality of property while recognizing that reality—could all the meals really be identical, even if that were the intention?).\n\nThe same for, say, books or magazines—they could only be read in libraries (and there would have to be enough copies for all, otherwise one could have at least momentary possession of a text desired by another—which I suppose leads one to consider universally required and scheduled reading). Perhaps you could imagine stamping out or rendering impossible all exchanges (“exchange” and “property” being reciprocally constitutive concepts), but such an incorruptible system would be impossible and unlivable, if for no other reason than they depend upon a cadre of established or informal enforcers who themselves have a kind of property in the means of enforcement at their disposal—someone, somewhere, will take a cigarette or piece of chocolate so as to allow another to share another with a friend.\n\nJames Madison summarized it very succinctly in Federalist # 10: different capabilities and interests distributed across humankind lead to different results and products and, hence, property, and diverse forms of property. As Eric Gans has noted (in The End of Culture?), war is the first market, where one differentiates oneself from others through performance and receives corresponding rewards—but if war, why not hunting and gathering, or rearing children, or any activity in which one could distinguish oneself? Imagining what it would take to stamp all that out would be an interesting exercise in imagining the most minimal forms of human being and becoming.\n\nThe Right, understanding the resentments that have on occasion actually led to attempts to construct such leveling systems, focuses on making the right to private property “sacred,” that is, beyond political caprice. This has had some unfortunate effects—for example, the blurring of lines that enabled many conservatives to accept slavery as a form of property, fearing that allowing the state to expropriate the slaveowners would legitimate further expropriations. However unjustified slavery is, that worry was not without foundation. But the Right has a language within which slavery can be delegitimated, insofar as the slaves’ right to property can also be asserted (and in fact would be evident in their interrelations with each other), and seen to be incompatible with their being slaves. Only theories of racial superiority, which go from questions of property to questions of biology (and race theories might care about “territory,” but not property), could definitively override that argument.\n\nThe Left, meanwhile, sees all property as being held by the grace of the community—reasoning backwards from the communal recognition and regulation of property, the Left figures that the community creates property, and can therefore recreate or abolish it according to whatever means of communal decision making are in play. Very few leftists today argue for expropriating all private property, but that doesn’t mean they believe in it—it just means that they assess that, under current conditions, given the available options, a certain (never to be precisely defined) amount of private property provides for the best way of producing and distributing wealth.\n\nIf they determine that there are better means within their grasp, they will take them. The Left’s starting point, though, is always with illegitimate uses and users of private property—with who uses their wealth improperly, or who doesn’t really deserve it. They want the presumption of guilt to color our view of private property owners, even if they allow for some to be exonerated, for now. Indeed, for the Left property is never free of the taint of theft (rewards from the community for services rendered is another matter, of course.)—even if they were to accept the argument for the inevitability or “naturalness” of property I gave above, and acknowledged that the desire for property and some mutual recognition of it will always emerge, they could never endorse the fact that it has emerged in the particular way that it was—there is always a perspective from which it can appear that someone elbowed someone else aside to get a larger share, and then conspired with other elbowers to protect it.\n\n(Ultimately, we’re dealing with calibrations of resentments here, not arguments.) Which is really a way of saying that the Left could only accept an originary scene as a kind of conspiracy, whereas the Right could accept such a scene, even with all the rough edges we might imagine it to have (maybe there would be a bit of elbowing). Our ability to refrain from theft even when it is physically possible and risk-free on the assumption that the other will do the same (and without calculating the ultimate utilitarian value of such restraint) is distinctly human, and makes sense in terms of the originary scene—for the Left, that scenario only makes sense insofar as those involved have their eye on someone else’s property.\n\nThis is why the Right is an inherently limited, and the Left an inherently unlimited, mode of politics: for the Right, a state of things in which theft and violence are relegated to the margins is at least possible in principle; for the Left, whatever looks like enterprise, ingenuity and informed cooperation is really a more sophisticated design on someone less able to defend their own property—and there will always be enterprise, ingenuity and informed cooperation.\n\nAlthough Madison doesn’t say so explicitly, the “factions” he unsuccessfully attempted to preclude from the new constitutional order are always organized against someone else’s property—it is always possible to contend that while property in general and of course one’s own is perfectly fine, that other’s property has been stolen from its rightful owners. And, of course, there is theft, on petty and grand scales. It makes a big difference whether the theft was carried out through fraud or force, though—if by force, or if one insists that it was by force (pure force without at least a bit of fraud is very rare), then violence (civil war) becomes the only remedy; if by fraud, then a revision of the rules governing exchange and the enforcement of those rules (or, perhaps, simply heightened vigilance) can be the remedies.\n\nHere is another dividing line between Left and Right: when the Right cries “force,” it is referring to the state and when the Left cries “force” it is referring to property owners; when the Right cries “fraud” it has a model of just exchange to aid in proposing remedies; when the Left cries “fraud,” it really means “force,” once again. The Right can therefore imagine civil war of property owners against overweening state; the Left imagines perpetual civil war, of the (relatively) propertyless against the (relatively) propertied.\n\nThe Right can agree to limitations on property—limits on how one’s property can be used and disposed of—but only in the interest of enhancing the sacrality of property as a whole. The Right is always vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy—while the Left never has to restrain its own desire to punish and harass private property owners, even (or especially) when such efforts are impotent, the Right often finds itself in situations where, for example, the community might be so invested in the traditional uses of a particular property as to violate the general principle that the property owner can use it as he or she likes.\n\nFor example, the community might band together to prevent a developer from buying a revered Church and turning it into a Mc Donalds, or a strip club. Hence, zoning codes, and various environmental and esthetic restrictions on uses of property. The Right can never adequately square such exceptions with the sacrality of property, and the Left can point out that the ubiquity of such restrictions until very recently demonstrates the artificiality of the sacrality of property as such—property, on this argument, has always been restricted in accord with contingent ethical, esthetic, religious and other concerns. The argument, then, seems to be reduced to semantic chicken-and-the-egg style quibbling best settled pragmatically, on an ad hoc basis.\n\nThe Right will always lose those arguments, though, because abuses, real and putative, by those who have a lot of property can therefore leave a big footprint, are visible and palpable; while the long-term benefits of the unfettered use of property, much less the principles underlying its sacrality, are invisible and abstract—you have to “believe” in property.\n\nHowever effective, the only real argument for the Right is that the preservation of private property requires a community of people who respect each other as people deserving of a presumption of innocence in their uses of property, and it is this necessity that leads to the aforementioned exceptions: for private property to be sacred, other things must also be held sacred in common, and what those must be will indeed be historically contingent: houses of worship, traditional or revered buildings, works of art, portions of nature, and so on. The Left is correct to say that restrictions on private property were loosened drastically through the 19th and into the 20th century—but that simply might mean that the threshold of reciprocal trust needed to have everyone invested in the mutual defense of property lowered as well.\n\nStill, since that threshold has been rising steadily from the mid-20th century on, it might be better to start using the principles of private property to defend those commonly held tokens of reciprocity, rather than relying upon the state, which provides an opening to the Left—so, if a community would like to preserve a park, rather than having it sold to developers who want to set up a shopping mall, let them put in a bid and purchase the land corporately. Some bids will be lost, of course, and the wealth of the community perhaps diminished when they are won. There will be free rider problems, but these can be solved by having voting rights in the newly corporate property be based on stock ownership. Arguments about future uses of the property will surely follow—perhaps that is where political energies will come to reside. If so, those energies will be far more productively engaged than they are at present.\n\nIssues regarding sexuality (marriage, homosexuality, birth control, abortion) and personal morals more generally (intoxicants of various kinds) raise the same problems—on the one hand, many libertarians, who also defend private property as a first principle, have good reasons to be perplexed at the “social conservative” insistence that the community, “society” or the state can regulate what people do with their bodies (presumably the most basic form of property) and how they manage their intimate relations. And this is especially case given the implication of these norms in the infamous patriarchal “property in women.”\n\nBut it’s not that hard to see the effects of promiscuity and a relaxed regime of marriage on the maintenance of a culture in which property can be preserved: divided loyalties, unclaimed and uncared for children (heirs), a lowering of inhibitions in one crucial area of life that can readily lead to their lowering elsewhere all interfere with the clarity and predictability property requires. (As an aside, “women’s studies” could, if it were so inclined, explore the extremely varied relations women have had historically to property, their own, their husband’s, their father’s, their children’s, so as to see how women’s full participation in a restored private property regime could be ensured. [I do assume a certain bias toward men in strict private property arrangements.]) Similarly with intoxication, which even more obviously renders people unreliable and unfit to tend to their property or respect that of others.\n\nLike hierarchies in rank (aristocracy), which also follow logically from a commitment to property (more property translates directly into more social and political power—which may be more orderly than the currently indirect ways in which such translations occur), however, it seems these fences built around the regime of property can no longer be manned. The forces of anti-property (which, ultimately, whatever we choose to call them or they choose to call themselves, means communism) are already inside the fences. A further retreat on the part of “propertarians,” which might turn into a new offensive at some time, would involve converting these once socially established and inherited distinctions and prohibitions into privately and contractually established and negotiated ones.\n\nIf social norms of marriage cannot be maintained, then, insofar as the moral state of those with whom one interacts matters, and insofar as marriage (and family ties) serves as a marker of that moral state, private individuals and enterprises can demand the absolute right to interact with whom they will and therefore to recognize which marriages (and divorces) they will. Winning such a right may be difficult, but it will certainly be easier than trying to turn back the tide of same-sex marriage (much less no-fault divorce) nation-wide. Similarly, if, as seems to be the case, laws against drug use are not long for this world (how the FDA will survive this dismantling of the legal regime governing “controlled substances” is a question I have not seen anyone raise), then property owners would have to demand the right to drug test those whom they hire, or educate, or allow onto their premises (say, a shopping mall).\n\nIn these ways, perhaps the most fundamental lesson of property will be relearned: the premises undergirding property ownership can only be preserved and protected by property owners themselves, acting in concert through contracts and covenants; the attempt to slough off such responsibilities—for keeping order and policing its moral preconditions—onto the state was an experiment destined to fail, and in the end nothing more than a Trojan Horse for communism."
    },
    {
      "slug": "mimetic-culture-liminal-culture",
      "title": "Mimetic Culture, Liminal Culture",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "There are two kinds of moral innovations: one, upward, in which more distance is created between desire and appropriation; and the other, downward, in which that distance is shrunken by the violation of some prohibition with impunity (the innovation lies in the intimation of unlimited possibility, which mimics the generation of human possibility by the originary act of deferral). The great “axial age” moral innovations upward took place during the period of manuscript culture, where writing (and alphabetic writing, in particular, at least in the West) had been invented and was in use among a scribal elite and/or a small reading public sharing rare texts—manuscript culture was still deeply embedded in orality (texts were used to facilitate oration, or memorization), while making it possible to memorialize oral scenes and confer upon them the prestige and permanence of the written word—it is telling that the figures of Moses and the Hebrew prophets, Socrates, Confucius, Jesus and the Buddha are all very often situated within “quiet” scenes, dialogues with a few participants, or God, bordering on and often entering a silent inner dialogue with(in) the self.\n\nWords are inscribed in one’s heart, and can be recited exactly as they were originally said as many times as desired, enhancing the sacrality of those particular words, enabling the construction of communities devoted to their preservation and effectuation.\n\nPrint culture (Mc Luhan’s “Gutenberg Galaxy”) spreads the results of manuscript culture far more widely, while introducing the capacity and compulsion to fragment and reassemble, and therefore criticize, parody, and re-contextualize those results. Manuscript culture strives to approximate writing not just to speech, but to speech between co-participants in discussions over what is worthy to be preserved; print culture strives to make speech more like writing—normative, widely intelligible, uniform. (Part of the prodigious fertility of the Renaissance period lies in the interplay of the norms of manuscript and print culture, and of expanding literacy and the more varied layers of orality brought within the orbit of the written word.)\n\nCertainty, rather than proximity to the origin, becomes the primary value of reason, actions start to seek out widespread publicity rather than recognition as an en during model, and thought aims at material transformation rather than contemplation. This transformation involves significant moral innovations, in particular those associated with rigors of life in the modern marketplace: punctuality, frugality, patience, politeness, respect for rules, large scale coordination, etc., along with a much less widely shared, but at least generally valued, fearlessness before the unknown and untried. It has also abetted new and unprecedentedly brutal forms of violence and empire, as control from the center was eased considerably, and made difficult to resist by the increasing specialization at the margins.\n\nWhat about our emerging electronic and, especially, transparent and algorithmic culture? The intensified culture of celebrity and publicity thereby generated most obviously privileges the transgressive over the continent, the brash and boastful over the modest—the invisibility of the virtues of manuscript culture is intensified by the demand that everything be made visible, literal and blatant. The brazenness and self-exemption from morality print made available to the inventors and adventurers of the modern period are now available to anyone, and it is hard to see any reason why one should display even the most minimal patience. Most people, whether they realize it or not, assume that every individual is a god unto him (or her) self. At the same time, practical learning and participation are strongly encouraged, and can curb the excesses of self-idolatry. I will return to the question of the actual and possible upward innovations native to our now native culture.\n\nLet’s imagine, as a conceptual baseline, a near absolute mimeticism. That is, imagine that every desire is immediately and comprehensively expressed in posture, gesture and word, and every posture, gesture and word is in turn immediately and comprehensively responded to by whomever it is directed towards, and whoever witnesses it. Such an order would involve constant mimetic contagion and hence aggression and violence; it could build no institutions and have no learning. Not exactly none, though, because insofar as it is a human community, the mimeticism could only be near absolute—our barely human community is at least able to restore if not maintain order through the emergence of spontaneous forms of unanimity, in which mimeticism is transformed momentarily into a stabilizing force, directed at more or less arbitrarily chosen targets of discipline and punishment (a very Girardian model, but I don’t assume that actual scapegoating, in the sense of human sacrifice, is necessarily the primary institution).\n\nSomething of this absolute mimeticism still resides in every human, and we still respond automatically to a smile or frown, a hint of aggression, a subtle offer of reconciliation, etc. But, of course, these spontaneous reactions are already highly mediated, as there would be no “hints” or “subtle offers” in the originary human community I have hypothesized—everything would be directly out in the open. The point of the originary barely human model is to provide us with a way of measuring moral innovation. The first step beyond near absolute mimeticism would have to be someone not responding immediately, repeating the originary hesitation, allowing an aggressor to have his way, while signaling (and having that signal received) that he will not continue to have his way indefinitely.\n\nUpward moral innovations are always of this kind: a new hesitation, but one that organizes posture, gesture and word together in a new way so as to present an imitable mode of hesitation. And downward moral innovations recognize the fragility of such ascents, and recover and display against them the sheer power of a more direct action-reaction cycle. We could see human history as the fluctuation and dueling of upward and downward innovations.\n\nSo, what replaces, in the upward moral innovation, the direct, automatic, spontaneous, full and commensurate response to an other’s expression of desire or resentment? It would be trivial to say, “an indirect response,” as that would beg the question—we must imagine, then, an equally direct, automatic, spontaneous, full and commensurate response, but to the other’s expression of desire or resentment as a sign, rather than appropriative act. A sign is, in the first instance, a truncated act; to treat the other’s act as a sign is to treat it as a truncated version of a larger act, an act that entails consequences signified even if not materialized in the act itself.\n\nTreating an act as such an exemplary sign involves an audience other than the actor himself—the third person we now assume on the scene is part of the shaping of the act, one that the potential respondent, but not the actor, accounts for in his response. The act would set in motion a chain of consequences that would require for its closure the intervention of the third and perhaps other parties; that future closure is what makes it possible to treat the act as a sign. Treating the act as a sign is an attempt to obtain the closure without the consequences. And in turn, the respondent becomes an exemplary sign.\n\nTo paraphrase Aime Ceasire, Western men and women speak all the time of freedom but never cease to stamp out freedom wherever they find it. The current rampage of the victimocracy is no accident—demands for freedom on the liberal and democratic models are really demands for revenge against those who one imagines have expropriated one’s freedom. But the first freedom is the freedom from one’s own desires and resentments, and only in the most extreme instances is the acquisition of such freedom not within one’s own grasp (one just has to stop grasping at something else); at the same time, such freedom is always provisional, always suffused with doubts, always needs to be recovered, and can have no external guarantees.\n\nDemands for economic and political freedom are only sustainable insofar as they aim at the space needed to practice and exemplify that first freedom. Has a single modern political theorist ever said that? Maybe—I haven’t read them all—but it’s certainly not any part of our liberal democratic commonsense—even the awareness one finds in thinkers like de Tocqueville and the American founders to the effect that moral responsibility must attend the individual freedom democracy unleashes see such responsibility as a concession to reality by enlightened self-interest—in other words, a more effective way of getting what one wants (or, in more theological terms, of imposing one’s own law on reality).\n\n(Only high manuscript culture, forged in self-adopted or embraced exilic relation to monstrous imperial orders and broader social decadence [by prophets, monks, small communities of teachers and disciples, self-lacerating disaffected elites], has ever understood this first freedom—which is no doubt the source of its continuing power today.)\n\nEnvironmentalism admonishes us to shrink our “footprint”—they mean carbon, a trivial matter, but the metaphor is a nice one for thinking through the possible moral innovations enabled by the transparent and algorithmic. It does seem to me that a highly moral way of passing through this life is to leave only the slightest traces of footprints, i.e., identifying markers that can be definitively traced back to ones own intentions and efforts. Rather than clearly demarcated and strategically located footprints, better to do something to reveal the world as a world of signs, and oneself as just another one of the signs, one that has lowered the threshold of significance for yet to be revealed signs.\n\nRevealing the world to be a world of signs is to reveal the world as composed of truncated, fractured, fragmented actions unmoored from the desires and resentments that originally motivated them (a radical de-mimeticization) and arriving far away from their intended destinations. Even those bits and pieces of actions can be broken down further—excessive exposure to them would restore their wholeness and render them sentimental and sensationalistic, assimilating them to one or another “classical” model—as can the very act of breaking them down. This is not just a contemplative position within our transparent and algorithmic reality, in which everything already tends to get reduced to a gesture to everything else—it is always possible to withhold the mimetic response and represent the other’s act as an incomplete one and hence a sign, a sign of which one tacitly pledges to be the bearer.\n\nThe algorithm makes it possible to project hypothetical transformations across unlimited, virtual fields—the fall of a sparrow can be aligned with various possible initial conditions to produce mappings far into the future and across vastly divergent causal chains, the point being to facilitate the reduction of any act to a fluctuating data point, and hence radically uncertain in its effects but maximally significant in its articulations with other signs. This moral innovation would install, there where mimetic culture presently is, liminal culture, a culture that continuously lowers the threshold at which we perceive, feel, and intuit emergent meanings.\n\nOld cultural forms like the maxim and the epigram might make a comeback, as such literary forms can be put on a t-shirt, a web page, or tattooed on one’s skin—but maxims and epigrams that subvert and invert some vapid or bullying slogan or public imperative.\n\nSuch a moral innovation would follow in the footprints of the print revolution, with its privileging of what Walter Benjamin called “mechanical reproduction”; but, well beyond that, it reaches back to the originary scene, where the sign was created through the truncation of an act, rendering it available for reproduction, segmentation and new articulations. Remembering forward, further de-mimeticization requires further specializations, specializations that lead, not to the mutilation of the individual but to participation in a culture of overlapping disciplinary spaces. Take, for example, the operative imperative for “Seinfeld,” “no hugging, no learning,” a slogan Eric Gans discusses in one of his Chronicles on the show.\n\n“Seinfeld” is often taken as accelerating a shift towards a more thoroughgoing irony in American popular culture, marking the point at which nothing is free from irony, i.e., the point of “cynicism.” And it is true that if you watch pre-Seinfeld sitcoms, even the “boundary pushing” ones like “All in the Family,” there is always some sentimental, preachy substratum to the humor—in the end, some things remain off-limits to laughter. To see this as a shift toward a general cultural cynicism is to miss the point, I think—it would make more sense to see this development as a form of social specialization. The point of a TV comedy is to make you laugh—it should be judged according to some measure of quality laughs per 23 minutes, not the “lessons” it teaches.\n\nWhy would anyone turn on a TV show to learn about life or morality? If we really did so, that would be an alarming sign of cultural decay. You turn on a TV show (at least a comedy) to get something you couldn’t have otherwise: pieces of the world turned around so that situations that are not ordinarily funny become so. Once you realize that, attempts by the entertainment industry to tend to your character become ludicrous and insulting, and, anyway, the point of gesturing to moral pieties was always to avoid professional death by “controversy,” and was therefore always cynical itself—and, indeed, despite “Seinfeld” and all its would-be imitators, earnestness abounds in American culture.\n\nAnd specializing in comedy is very different than specializing in one stage in the production of pins, as it relies upon anthropological, historical and sociological intuitions—what is funny today is not what was funny 5 years ago, or, often, 5 days ago.\n\nA similar development in higher education would be welcome, particularly in the humanities—rather than going to a literature or philosophy class in order to (at its best) enter the ongoing conversation over which works and ideas should be preserved, wouldn’t it be better for your literature or philosophy professor to provide you with a form of literacy, a way of working with language so as to generate new meanings out of existing ones that you could only with significantly greater labor and a lot of luck acquire for yourself? As with the specialist in generating laughter, the algorithmic (or what I coming to be called “digital”) humanities would enable the student to reveal new fields of signs as mutations of more familiar ones.\n\nOn the level of scholarship, while mimetic theories ask what is “literature,” or “reason,” or “meaning,” or “humanity,” or “society,” and so on, liminal theories would ask, where is the boundary between all of these categories and whatever their “others” might be at a given moment—this kind of inquiry would also involve learning new modes of literacy, insofar as the boundaries are always shifting, in part as a result of the inquiries themselves. (In a sense, this would make all pedagogy and even all scholarship “remedial”—part of the problem with the traditional humanities, or at least an increasingly unavoidable part of the problem, is that students can’t really “read” Plato, Shakespeare, Joyce or any of the other “great books”—they can, at best, mimic their teacher’s reading of the texts as already read, which they must be insofar as they have already been designated “great.”\n\nProviding students with reading practices that would reveal these texts to them in their otherness, with all the messiness and stupidity that is sure to follow, might lead to something interesting, even if it’s not likely that many instructors will know what to do with it.)\n\nI suppose this would mean that originary thinking is itself a new specialization, a discipline focused on revealing the consequences and implications of the maxim “representation is the deferral of violence.” Our project would be to show what difference this maxim makes in all of the disciplines with which ours does or could overlap. What does the originary hypothesis enable us to see that we wouldn’t otherwise? Does that mean that one doesn’t claim that the originary hypothesis is true, or gets us closer to the truth of human being than other ways of thinking? Well, to the extent that we are invested in or converted to originary thinking we have concluded that it is more revelatory than other ways of thinking available to us, which is pretty much synonymous with “truer”; but insofar as there is no neutral set of intellectual standards by which the relative truth of theories in the human sciences can be determined authoritatively, I would say we let the “long run” settle the question of truth and attend to our business of lowering the threshold of human things we can make new sense of.\n\nTo return to the concepts examined in my previous post (“Selfy”), it seems to me that the kind of disciplinary inquiry I am proposing as a moral innovation requires self-control, self-abolition and self-creation: the disciplinary self is a creation of the inquiry itself, much like the “narrator” of a novel, who is neither the author or a character (and where the narrator is a character, most obviously in first person narration, the reader posits another narrator behind the “I”), who exists only so long as the novel does, and is obliged to follow the rules of coherence and consistency constitutive of the narrative.\n\nLikewise, the disciplinary self is created by some boundary question or anomaly, and must remain the “same” insofar as questions raised must be answered or questioned in turn, and rigorous controls must be in place to ensure that the “real self” external to the inquiry, with its resentments and desires, does not interfere—even if those resentments and desires might (again, like the relation between author and narrator), properly treated, inform the disciplinary self. And into what does the disciplinary self inquire: well, among other things, the slippages within and between “identities,” a central cause of “threshold” questions in the modern world; and “personhood,” perhaps first of all the boundary between the constitutive fantasy of personhood (one’s own absolute erotic centrality) and its never completed reality of shared erotic centrality. (I refer, again, to my previous post, and in particular my reading of Andrew Bartlett’s originary analysis of personhood.)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "selfy",
      "title": "Selfy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Everyone is taking selfies, but does that mean that no one is selfy, that is, self-like, anymore? It’s a serious question, even if it is prompted by the hilarious new song (I suppose that’s what it is) titled “Selfie,” which features a young woman, with an attention span of approximately 3 seconds whose only anchor in a stable reality seems to be the compulsion to take a selfie (and announce that she is doing so) every 10 seconds or so. The song, which, like so many other products of contemporary culture is a parody so immersive in its object as to blur the boundary between parody and celebration, seems to suggest a direct correspondence between ubiquity of the external and ultra-literally named marker of “selfiness” and the absence of any inner experience of the same.\n\nFreud’s “Copernican turn” was his claim that human consciousness was on the margin, not at the center—the margin, more specifically, of immense and obscure unconscious processes that we could only ever know very imperfectly, and only affect minimally. Freud used the term “Ego,” which is not necessarily a close synonym for “self,” but we have already introduced the term “consciousness,” and cultural Marxists following in Freud’s footsteps (Lacanianly mediated) introduced the term “subjectivity,” to cover conceptual territory aimed at including and usurping that covered by “Ego,” “self,” “consciousness,” and others, like “individual,” “person” and “identity” (not to mention “soul”).\n\nThe notion of “subjectivity” aims at greater precision, drawing on phenomenology to conceptualize the subject “constitutively” embedded in a world of objects and inter-subjectively mediated intentions, but also contains an implicit taunt in its allusion to subjection. No theorist of subjectivity will admit to being only a subject herself. All these terms, except for subjectivity, are used so widely and have been used for so long that it would be ridiculous to dismiss them as “mystifications” (and not only would I not dismiss “subjectivity,” either, but I will further explore the term’s implicit argument that modern society has progressively marginalized, impaired, diminished and even shattered what was once taken to be the human center). The task for originary thinking is explore the overlapping terrains covered by this sprawling vocabulary, and make sense of them as so many ways of being signifying beings.\n\nAndrew Bartlett gets us off to a very good start in his “Originary Human Personhood” in the Fall 2011 issue of Anthropoetics. I will be more interested in the “self” than the person in this discussion, but Bartlett’s originary analysis of personhood, and the distinction he draws between “person” and “self,” suggests a way of starting to see these concepts in relation to each other. Starting from Eric Gans’s contention that the originary “person” was God, Bartlett proposes that the appropriation of a kind of derived divinity in the constitution of the human “person” takes place through the mediation of the private, erotic center. To be a person is to be lovable and to love (to confirm the lovability of another)—to be an inexhaustible source of desire for another who is in turn such a source for oneself; to be aligned with another as reciprocally orbiting centers of meaning and concern capable of shutting out the world. Meanwhile, Bartlett distinguishes the “person” from the “self” as follows:\n\nTo be a self is not quite yet to be a person. The self designates rather a denuded, anesthetic entity lacking both the concrete bodily vulnerability and the power to create meaning that belongs to the person. “He is a wonderful person” sounds fine; “he is a wonderful self,” awkward. “She is a giving person” makes sense; “she is a giving self” rings oxymoronic. The undesirability of the reputation of “selfish person” tells all: the self is not the person. To have achieved personhood and to have personality, to be personable, to have personal relationships–those are goods. But to have a self–well, we all have one of those, it takes no work to have one of those; having a self makes no distinction–what can one do with oneself?\n\nThe erotic self–especially–knows that what it can do with itself is limited. (The erotic person, however, may seem limitlessly beautiful.) In the originary event, the moment of consciousness of self is the moment of resentment. In resenting the sacred center, we first experience ourselves as violently dispossessed by it. Originary selfhood would thus be resentfully but not interpersonally human. In naming the sacred Object only as object of resentment, we are not yet naming God as a person: the sacred Other whom we selfishly name in resentment is not the divine Person whom we name in love. By contrast, to love God as originary Person is to love something of the way the sacred central Object has moved and moves us.\n\nLikewise in human exchange, the self-dispossession of resentment opposes love. We cannot have true love for the one against whom we feel real resentment. These contrasting associations of the self with resentment and the person with love, it seems to me, are worth preserving.\n\nAnd yet there is value in owning the mere originary self as a kernel of sign-using consciousness prerequisite to personhood. Individual agency, free will, moral responsibility: several founding texts of Generative Anthropology affirm the value of the contributions made by these categories to the project of our self-understanding. Acclamations of even a resentful free will are a valuable counterweight to the post-structuralist denials of agency that would sever the connection between our internal scenes of representation (i.e., our imaginations), and the many external worlds, local and global, where exchanges of signs and things produce concrete results and where ethical performances have often incalculable consequences for good and evil.\n\nAnybody who uses language is a self endowed with free will; to use the sign on the scene of representation is to be a human self. My first qualification aims simply to spotlight the fact that a self consumed by resentment militates self-defeatingly against the openness to exchange of others’ personhood, and therefore against its own. Resentfulness is parasitic on love. The totally resentful self is not yet a person because such a self must abolish without loving the otherness of the center, and the desire to abolish the center makes exchange with others as centers, as persons, impossible. Distinguishing between selfhood and personhood may, therefore, illuminate the boundaries between originary resentment and originary love.\n\nIf I am consumed by resentment of the other, I have not stepped back from myself to recognize the otherness in myself. I have not learned to imitate the sacred central Other withdrawing itself in the founding move of erotic activity from which human personhood is derived.\n\nBartlett’s analysis explains (to follow in the tracks of his own linguistic observations) why “selflessness” is praised, and why the extinguishing of the self (as in Buddhism) can be transcendent project—none of which would apply to “personhood.” If the self is a “prerequisite” of personhood, then the purely resentful, self-protecting self must be a kind of “skeleton” supporting the fully “embodied” person. Implicit in this argument seems to me a couple of other consequences: first, that the self can survive the obliteration of the “person” (Bartlett does not say, but how could we deny, that one’s erotic centrality could be demolished under certain conditions); and that as long as the self persists, the reconstitution of the person remains possible, while the pulverizing of the self, if we imagine that to be possible, would make any such restoration impossible.\n\nThis identification of the self with resentment also provides insight into the grammar of “self,” in particular its use in reflexive pronouns, which itself derives from the ancient identity of meaning of “self” with “same”—when we say “itself,” we mean the same “it” that was just referred to. In that case, the self is sheer sameness of the individual, that whatever it is that makes the individual that individual from moment to moment, year to year, decade to decade. Originary resentment is what makes us our“selves,” while I suppose the originary love of the person is ecstatic, taking us outside of the continuous flow of the self-same.\n\nWould that then mean that feelings of guilt and shame (i.e., conscience) are attributes of the self, insofar as those emotions are experienced when we have not been self-same, have broken the line of continuity (maintained through promises to self and others) that makes commitment possible? And the “sovereign subjectivity” so despised by post-humanist theories would, then, also reside in the self, or would rather be the self which, like an ever-vigilant government is constantly policing its own borders, keeping out intruders and keeping intact the needed defense mechanisms. Paranoia would also be an attribute of the self, and schizophrenia its breakdown.\n\nMore interesting even than all of that is the light shed by Bartlett’s analysis on the particular vulnerabilities of both person and self in a decentered, centripetal modern world. I have wondered for a while why the sexual revolution has been such an obsession of liberatory movements (political and artistic) from the Romantic period on, and why modern means of mass manipulation target the erotic so relentlessly. In other words, if Bartlett is right, then a possible strategy of assault and domination becomes visible. The specific articulation of self and person Bartlett outlines would be the basis for an individual who can think for him/herself, resist illegitimate demands, live within his/her means, recognize human limitations, and so on.\n\nIf the erotic can be plugged into broader circuits of desire driven by commodity production, then personhood can be kept under constant pressure—the fantasy Bartlett outlines in his essay as the basis of the erotic imaginary (“You find yourself surrounded and alone in the center and you notice that all the people on the periphery–who knew? — suddenly “want” you erotically. They all want consummation with you, the person…”) only to dismiss as unrealistic and undesirable would be the source of one’s vulnerability to mass produced erotic fantasies, only in this case without any place to withdraw to (such withdrawal being, in Bartlett’s model, the way one transitions to a more mature eroticism).\n\nAnother prong of this assault would target the self. We could see all the normalization processes of modern societies, in which disciplines like medicine, psychiatry, sociology, economics and so on become disciplinary practices aimed at homogenizing and regulating millions of individuals circulating through modern institutions (first of all teaching them reading, writing and arithmetic) as directed at the self first of all. All these practices can be reduced to devising and enforcing the procedures needed to maintain “sameness” across a bewildering array of institutions, situations, obligations, norms, etc. We could see the early modern period studied by Michel Foucault in which these institutions were set up and given their legal and political foundations as excessive, often brutal, ad hoc and easily exploited by charlatans and power-hungry psychopaths and yet, for all that, necessary and largely successful.\n\nBut with the myriad tentacles of the marketplace (most obviously, the massive explosion of pornography in recent years) undoing the erotic foundations of personhood, the processes of self-regulation may be getting more desperate and haphazard, drawing upon the new bio-political disciplines (drug therapies, gene research, etc.). It may be that more and more selves can only remain the same insofar as they adhere to increasingly arbitrary and rigid regimes of regulation.\n\nObviously, it would be impossible to quantify or be certain about any of these claims—what would it mean to say fewer people are less completely persons or selves now than was the case, say, half a century ago? Maybe what looks (inevitably) as disintegration to those embedded in a particular meditated mode of being is simply a transformation to terms of personhood or selfhood we are not able to recognize. Maybe, more radically, the entire vocabulary of human self-reference is being remade, to the point that somewhere down the road people won’t really understand what we once meant by things like persons and selves.\n\nTo take just one example, the fact that the genre of romantic comedy in the movies is just about defunct suggests that certain key elements of erotically mediated personhood are no longer operative—the movie critic James Bowman associates the esthetic power of the genre to the belief on the part of the couple (and the audience) that the two people were “made for each other,” were “destined to be together.” Such a belief seems to me a “necessary appearance” (to use Arendt’s term for beliefs about reality that survive all attempts at demystification) for the closed erotic circle Bartlett identifies as the source of personhood—if such a belief is becoming as alien to our sensibilities as tragedy has long been, then we are indeed witnessing a sea-change in the self-person configuration.\n\nAt this point I don’t want to pursue this analysis further; I just want to suggest that originary thinking should pursue such questions as the contemporary state (or states) or the “person,” the “self,” and other originary elements of the human; and we should do in a way that is as divested from, or defers any desire for, any particular outcome as possible. That is, no apotropaic invocations of the preferability of market society to other forms, or of the superiority or inevitability of liberal democracy—or, for that matter, any denunciations of the market or prophecies of doom regarding liberal democracy. I would recommend refusing the use of a particular historical form of personhood or selfhood as an invariant model against which we find contemporary forms to be degraded versions; or using an idealized model of the self or person in order to condemn contemporary institutions for “distorting” that model.\n\nOf course we must be interested in the outcome of any moment in the unending process of hominization; but the clarity of analysis will benefit from our keeping that interest as minimal as possible, at simply identifying the threshold at which new modes of signifying emerge. What are the new modes of attentionality; how are we seeing and giving ourselves to be seen (and heard and felt and imagined) in new ways?\n\nOK, I’ll pursue it just a little further. It seems to me that what is central to modernity is something that Marshall Mc Luhan associated with print culture—the capacity and compulsion to analyze phenomena into to ever smaller fragments that can in turn be recombined and disseminated in new ways that bear less and less trace of their origins. To the extent the person and the self can be reduced to a set of fragmented, stereotyped gestures that can be turned into esthetic formulas and models of imitation aimed at directing the “subject’s” attention in pre-programmed ways (what Judith Butler, following Derrida, once called “citationality,” referring to the fact that we are always citing and quoting others, even or especially when we believe we are most “ourselves”), the less we are persons and selves.\n\nRestoring, re-imagining or instituting new forms of personhood and selfhood, or imagining forms of individuality or “agency” irreducible to those terms (we could just become indeterminate processes of semiosis, for example) would then depend upon entering, interfering with and commandeering when possible that process of analysis and composition of the elements. The skeptical, suspicious resentment of the self would be needed here, as would the ecstatic, even if fleeting, enthusiasms of the person. The problem would be to acknowledge that one is always taking on others’ words, down to one’s most inmost being, while remembering that they are, even when most our own, in the end still others’ words."
    },
    {
      "slug": "psychogeography",
      "title": "Psychogeography",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The line of inquiry, which I suppose could be called “psychological,” but perhaps would better be called, using a term I have come across in some radical writers, “psychogeographical,” I have undertaken in the past few posts seems increasingly important to me. I find myself in a position analogous to those Western Marxists following the failure of proletarian revolution in Western Europe during the 1920s—in response to the failed historical logic, according to which the proletarian would inevitably be propelled into revolutionary confrontations with the ruling class, theorists like Lukacs, Gramsci, Horkheimer and Adorno directed their attention to culture, aesthetics, and the unconscious.\n\nMy own analyses of victimary discourse post-9/11 led me, not to a revolutionary, but a restorative hypothesis: now that we were at war with a privileged victim class, victimary assumptions could be made self-cancelling by conducting that war in the name of the victims of the putative victims—oppressed women and religious minorities in the Muslim world, peaceful Muslims, and freedom seeking democrats in majority Muslim countries, for starters. This is an idea continually pursued by the right in various arenas—anti-abortion as defending the victim of the victimized woman; school choice and enterprise zones in the inner cities to defend the black poor against the immiseration caused by their own leftist leadership; anti-union policies defending the individual worker against the authoritarian union bosses, etc.\n\nThe idea is very good, but it almost never works—one could take the classical revolutionary position and insist that it just hasn’t been done the right way yet, but I prefer to cut my losses and proceed under the assumption that it can’t be done. (Of course, all the policies I just mentioned could be pursued on their own merits—my only point is that it’s an illusion to expect them to break the stranglehold of victimary thinking on our politics.) The reason for the impotence of such an approach is clear—only the victims of the center register for victimary discourse, while, first, victimizations carried out by the victims of the center only further indict the center (now for so brutalizing its victims as to turn them into oppressors), and, second, any victims who support the center (breaking solidarity, in Uncle Tomish manner, with their fellow victims) only prove the corrupting effects of the center—thereby more decisively disqualifying representatives of the center for any liberationist credentials.\n\nThis further means (as perhaps should have been obvious all along) that the victimary goes well beyond politics, striking deep roots in the culture and the psyche. Ultimately, it raises questions of fundamental “scenicity,” which is to say of the sacred. I have often thought about and discussed the victimary in terms of the sacred, but always in terms of a public, political sacred, or in terms derivative of Voegelin’s analysis of modernity as “Gnostic.” I don’t repudiate any of those arguments, but they simply raise the question, why are so many in the modern world vulnerable to gnostic faiths? Voegelin’s answer is, essentially, that the differentiations introduced by Christianity into the West are simply too demanding for too many—which is not a bad analytical starting point, but simply raises another question, i.e., how to make the needed upward moral innovations possible?\n\nI have worked, recently, on two concepts that, in conjunction, seem useful here. Most recently, in my “Selfy” post, I introduced the notion of a “constitutive fantasy,” a concept which has a history in psychoanalytic and postmodern discourse that I wouldn’t be interested in tracing (it has been important to Slavoj Zizek, for one), but that I think can be given an originary meaning in a fairly precise way. I used the term in the process of working through Andrew Bartlett’s exploration of the erotic dimension of “personhood”—Bartlett starts by imagining someone imagining their own erotic centrality, as the sole and unwavering object of desire of every other individual on the scene.\n\nBartlett goes on to say that this situation in reality would not be desirable (and to analyze the more realizable retreat of the couple who accord each other reciprocally exclusive erotic attention), but that would of course be the case for many fantasies, and this does not derogate from its power as fantasy; indeed, what makes a fantasy constitutive is that it is its unrealizability that provides the measure for every actual experience. Let’s think about this in scenic terms—desire does not aim just at possession of the object, but at the occupation of a position on the scene. If I’m just hungry and go into my kitchen, open a can of beans, scoop the beans out with my hand, and eat them right out of the can, there is no desire involved worth speaking of, just the brute satisfaction of appetite; if I go out to a restaurant, I want to see and be seen, and not just satisfy my appetite (even if only in the negative sense of not drawing unwanted attention to oneself).\n\nIn the latter case, joint attention is involved, and one wants to shape and direct that attention in specific ways. It follows that the convergence of attention I am aiming at has a “vanishing point” at which desire would be satisfied because all attention would be distributed in the optimal way. In the case of the restaurant, that might mean all eyes on my companion and myself, with my companion noticing that attention, joining and basking in it, while further noticing my own Olympian indifference to (and which intensifies) it, etc. That would be my constitutive fantasy of the scene, and its relation to the actual scene may take many different forms—a source of frustration, of ironic amusement, of pleased surprise at how many elements of the scene seem to be in place, of self-skepticism as to whether my fantasy is in fact projecting those elements into the scene, and so on.\n\nThis is the “reality testing” Freud saw as the source of the “Ego,” and which I would now speak of in terms of “ostentation,” another concept I have been using to denote binding up the various vectors of attention into self-presentation on a scene. The constitutive fantasy must have had its place on the originary scene, as desire multiplied by the desires of others, and is in implicated in any scene, and is both individual (no one else can have quite my place on the scene, or my history of participating in relevant scenes) and shared (the “vectors” of attention one’s desire retrojects back to the origin are necessarily drawn from the scene, and the previous scenes mapped onto this one, itself).\n\nIn an earlier post, I developed the concept of a “violent imaginary,” to account, first, for the fact that the collective self-immolation the originary hypothesis assumes is averted by the sign could only be imagined by the participants on the scene, being in fact very unlikely (the melee following the rush to the center would be disorganized, flailing and aimless, and would probably break up quickly with little permanent harm done anyone); and, second, to suggest that any subsequent scene is similarly informed by a more or less dimly apprehended “worst possible scenario” that grips what Coleridge called the “primary” imagination and thereby shapes the meaning that will be conferred on the scene.\n\nThe worst case scenario can take various forms, as many as all the possible configurations of the scene and its breakdown—into a many on one assault, into group clashes, into one on one stand-offs, etc. As new configurations of the scene are evoked with historical developments violent imaginaries are varied and enriched in new ways—antisemitism would involve a particular violent imaginary (clever operators behind the scene, etc.), and anti-communism another (and I use these examples to make the point that justified as well as unjustified fears all have their violent imaginaries woven into them). Modern violent imaginaries seem to oscillate back and forth between fear of a monstrous Big Man and fear of a monstrous anonymous mob.\n\nIt follows that the constitutive fantasy would itself evoke a particular violent imaginary, as the idealized alignment of vectors of attention also produces the target around which the violent imaginary is articulated, with the subsequent sign or ostentation including the deferral of the specific mode of violence imagined. This would in turn involve the abandonment, but not forgetting, of the constitutive fantasy. One could only access the constitutive fantasy/violent imaginary through the signs put forth, through the ostentation—you have to learn the language by which the fantasy/imaginary is conveyed. I think this analysis can generally take the form of a kind of reverse engineering through negation—for example, if one argues for “discipline,” we can assume that “indiscipline” is central to one’s violent imaginary, and an orderly allocation of the object to one’s constitutive fantasy.\n\nConstellations of fantasy/the imaginary are extremely difficult to recognize (especially one’s own) and even more difficult to dislodge or modify. One could only do so by locating oneself within the narratives through which the fantasy/imaginary is played out. The constitutive fantasy and violent imaginary can be synthesized into what I called in my latest essay in Anthropoetics (“Attentionality and Originary Ethics: Upclining”) the “attentional loop,” or that moment in any scene in which the participant draws the attention of the others and must put forth his/her version of the sign that will redirect attention back to the center.\n\nThe attentional loop is resolved into ostentation, which results from the submission of the originary fantasy and violent imaginary to constraints, or deferral—when these constraint break down phenomena like paranoia and sociopathy, or the reduction of all scenes to one’s own, result. If we are to speak of an internal scene of representation, it must be composed as any scene—by means of a sign of deferral of some appropriation that would, if attempted, destroy the scene. That appropriation would be the attempt to realize the closed circle of one’s constitutive fantasy/violent imaginary.\n\nI will now try to move these abstract concepts closer to contemporary cultural experience by pointing to what seems to me an interesting and increasingly important problem in contemporary narratives: how do you construct a compelling narrative when the decisions and actions of the characters involved are determined by officially (i.e., expertly) labeled pathologies, rather than desires and resentments one could imagine to be universally shared, even if accentuated and articulated uniquely in the narrative agent? The movie critic James Bowman points to an interesting example of this phenomenon in his review of “Silver Linings Playbook”:\n\nIn order to like David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook as it ought to be liked, it helps to see it as a movie about jealousy, even though that’s not quite the obvious way to see it. We learn in flashback that, when Patrick Solatano (Bradley Cooper) came home unexpectedly one day and found his wife, Nikki (Brea Bee), in the shower with another man, he beat the guy so severely that he had to be sent away to a mental hospital for eight months, as he was deemed to be suffering from “undiagnosed bipolar disorder.” The movie doesn’t make a big deal out of it, but it tells you something significant both about Pat’s subsequent history and about the state of our culture that the obvious cause of his behavior was seen as something to be ignored or rejected in order that it might be dignified, or made more socially and legally more acceptable, as a clinical condition — and that Pat himself accepts this medicalization of a moral matter as the only feasible way for him to make sense of his life.\n\nWe can readily understand a narrative logic by which a man who commits a violent act while overcome with jealousy might, say, refuse to recognize his own moral flaw and continue on a downwardly spiral path towards greater violence, the repetition of the same pattern with other women, etc.; or, on the contrary, learns to distinguish between genuine love and possessiveness. Either way, we remain within a scene that anyone can imagine sharing. But if the character is “suffering” from a diagnosed “disorder,” he is by that fact segregated from scenes upon which anyone might participate, and narrative alternatives seem to be limited to him either following the approved therapeutic instructions towards greater health (as has been the potted plot of many edifying films on alcohol and drug abuse), or ignoring them—only in the latter case do we have the chance for an interesting narrative, because the protagonist might be rebelling, noir-style (or Cuckoo’s Nest style), against some repressive authority.\n\nBut the interest of such a narrative depends upon the audience’s suspicion (at least) of the therapeutic order that is being challenged, which would in turn require some residual “humanism”; what, though, if the therapeutic order is completely accepted (which would really just signify the complete victory of the victimary order—racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., are already understood to be pathologies, and as more and more attitudes and actions—as is the case now for more and more male-female attraction—are grouped under these categories, there will be nothing but pathology, trauma and healing)? As Bowman says, this particular film doesn’t make a big deal out of it, but no doubt more and more films, novels, TV shows and so on will.\n\nAnd the difficulty is further complicated once we take into account all the mood transforming (legal) drugs now available—in what sense do their alterations of one’s character affect our understanding of and identification with another’s weaknesses and strengths, faults and merits, responsibility for actions, and so on? Is one deemed “flawed” for becoming dependent upon a substance that, according to “objective” measures, “improves” one’s “performance” in important areas?\n\nIt may be that the universalization of the therapeutic provides a kind of solution: the division of the world into therapists and patients and, indeed, each individual into therapist and patient, might create a new kind of scenicity. This would be Freud’s revenge upon us for having reduced him to the status of a crank or fraud in recent years, because this is pretty much how he envisioned the long term impact of psychoanalysis. But the process of coming to realize that what one took to be a normal desire is in fact a virulent pathogen infecting the social body might be of considerable interest (“shame” would clearly not be the appropriate response to such a discovery—rather, we would expect the protagonist to gradually come to replace his native vocabulary with one or another normalizing procedure through various social mismatches); as might the process of resisting the “mimetic” impulse to respond in kind to another’s actions and coming to adopt the proper therapeutic response.\n\nThese would be the kinds of disciplinary shifts we would all be undergoing all the time; more complex narratives would have characters taking on the “patient” role in one disciplinary setting and the “therapist” role in another, the diagnostician (ironically?) becoming the one most in need of diagnosis, etc.\n\nThis transformation would redeem the post-humanist argument against any human essence residing “in” each individual, in favor of the claim that we are all constituted by historically specific discourses, power relations and so on. Post-victimary thinkers can contemplate such a change without the fantasy of “resistance” that still clings to what remains of “cultural studies” style analyses—Foucault did eventually come to realize that to point to “uneven power relations” is not the same as identifying self-evident injustice, and we can certainly further that recognition by distinguishing, in any normalizing order, between those drawn into the normalizing whirlpool and those on the margins who, whether they call it “resistance” or not, define themselves not as outside of those normalizing systems but as the other of those systems.\n\nThe best example I can think of is one I have seen on social media and public discourse: the young woman who is exquisitely aware of all the “strategies” used by the media to normalize women’s bodily appearance (thin models, photoshopping, ads for dieting, “fat-shaming,” etc.) and not only nevertheless “inhabits” those implicit models (judges herself as inadequate at every point in relation to them) but acquires and maintains her critique of them by doing so. The next step is to forge a new style that rewards those sophisticated enough to dis-identify with the model one cannot help but inhabit—a style that then enters and is (to use a perennial term of radical frustration) “domesticated” by those normalizing systems. (A mediating step here is probably to inhabit some therapeutic discourse encouraging positive body image, and then to dis-identify with that discourse through a recognition of its own normalizing paradoxes.)\n\nIn the terms I set up earlier, this would mean that meaningful cultural and political communication requires that we inhabit one another’s originary fantasies and violent imaginaries, and work with our interlocutors towards reciprocal dis-identifications. To return to my “Selfy” post, it seems to me that in this context the “self” is more important than the “person,” or the “soul” (the immortal part of one’s being)—“personhood,” in Bartlett’s account, involves the withdrawal of the lovers from the social into a private scene; the self, which I suggested is best understood as the reflexive assertion of sameness in the semio-social flux can more easily be seen as something one shapes and deploys in various ways.\n\nWe find it very easy to speak of having various “selves”—a work self, a family self, a being with friends self, etc. It is a short step from there to think of the self as a kind of “probe” that one uses to elicit and frame the violent imaginaries and originary fantasies of others by positioning it at the convergent lines of the fantasy and imaginary. At the same time, the materials of one’s own fantasies and imaginaries would necessarily be put to use—the problem is one of finding a line of symmetry between the emergent scenes the interlocutors, respectively, bear. Sometimes it will be my unconscious scene that fails the reality test and needs your intervention to find another avenue towards the construction of a mode of ostentation; sometimes yours will rely on mine.\n\nAt the same time, we can operate on varying scales, from the intimate to the global, from the highly idiosyncratic scene to those seized upon, exaggerated and intensified through refined and cynical propaganda techniques. Freedom would result from the study of the means of normalization/subjectification, a study that frees one, provisionally, from submitting to the violent imaginary of being normalized out of existence, and from indulging the originary fantasy of possessing a self outside of those processes.\n\nThe therapeutic order supersedes the victimocracy, but what supersedes the therapeutic order is the disciplinary-bureaucratic order. One thing that has been noted, but not often enough, is that the modern administrative state represents a gradual abolition of the liberal democratic order. Equality under the law is meaningless when there really is no law, but only grants of bureaucratic power to intervene without limits in the most private domains of everyday life; nor do elections mean anything if the permanent bureaucracy rules anyway; nor can basic freedoms of speech, worship and assembly be guaranteed (or even taken seriously) when any action carried out individually or collectively can be deemed a threat to some bureaucratic agenda (maybe those who now treat Presidential elections as a festival for celebrating our victimary bona fides have a prescient understanding of the increasingly symbolic meaning of such rituals). The boundary between speech and action has been abolished—there is no way to distinguish a protest against some EPA agent commandeering your backyard from a threat to him.\n\nEven more, the post-humanist understanding of the self as constituted by a constitutive fantasy and violent imaginary demolishes the philosophical foundations of the liberal democratic order, which presupposes a kind of blank slate equality in all individuals. Liberalism and modern democracy wish to represent the individual as he or she enters the market, or the ballot box, with no relevant pre-existing characteristics that might qualify one’s status or right to enter either. But if we come to read any individual as marked by some distinct form of normalization and counter-normalization, as having a constitutive fantasy and violent imaginary that the therapeutic/corporate/consumerist order always already has designs on and, in fact, has to a great extent designed, we cannot help but assign and constantly revise probabilities of dangerous or costly action to each individual as they enter any institutions (nor will there be any way of reversing the obsolescence of any institution that doesn’t allow for a sufficiently thorough and expeditious risk-benefit analysis of any individual).\n\nIn other words, we could play pretend at a kind of originary equality as long as shared norms regarding morality, law and political legitimacy were intact (at least among social elites, and those who aspired to be such), but no longer. The victmocrats are so afraid of profiling because they know what an obviously effective practice it is, how closely it parallels their own violent imaginary, and how their own attacks on a justice system aimed, above all, at deterring victims from enacting their own private revenge makes it the only remaining plausible means of self-protection. At any rate, if everyone is to be profiled constantly, each must carefully self-profile, and since strict adherence to normalizing discourses is by definition more available to those in the fat part of the curve, many will need to compose self-profiles, or, simply, selves, that promise to maximize benefits over risks in new ways—and hence to refer more explicitly to the constitutive fantasies and violent imaginaries, to figure them so as to figure out new ways of deferring them.\n\nThe only viable political response to these developments that I can imagine is to form disciplines (for our purposes, let’s take this to mean any kind of association that people form in order to explore something, get good at something, or identify themselves in a particular way) and use the antinomies of the bureaucratic state to defend those disciplines and render the repressive vehicles of central power more incoherent. The victimocracy, by definition, chafes at constraints—it is driven by increasingly urgent resentments. The impatience of those who must have same-sex marriage, or have the Washington Redskins change their name, right now, resembles nothing so much as the temper tantrum of a 3 year old.\n\nDiscipline means constraints—it means we don’t seek to realize our constitutive fantasies, or treat our violent imaginaries as realities. Discipline is a commitment to reality testing. The therapeutic is part of the emergence of the disciplinary order, but its outsized prominence up until now can be attributed to its ability to usurp the disciplines concerned with countering social pathologies, making its usefulness undeniable. There are disciplines other than the therapeutic, though—the therapeutic itself can be annexed to a wider disciplinary order concerned with our scenic nature, and therefore with pedagogy and the perpetual orientation of human interaction around some center, which is to say some kind of property.\n\nAnd disciplines give way to bureaucracy—a bureaucracy is nothing more than a discipline that must account for itself in relation to some public, or other disciplines—those of us in the academy might like to do nothing but inquire and teach, but we have to concern ourselves (our we have to siphon off resources to those who so concern themselves) with accreditation, student admission, maintenance of the grounds, federal anti-discrimination laws, etc.; the entrepreneur might just want to invent, innovate, and spread the results of his inventions and innovations, but he must deal with tax codes, employment law, all manner of federal regulation, etc.—in both cases a substantial bureaucratic exoskeleton is secreted.\n\nAt a certain point the exoskeleton becomes too heavy and crushes the body; meanwhile, less encumbered disciplinary forms emerge to recover the original impulse to create and build. But the bureaucratized institutions have all the political advantages, as they can pressure the government to make demands that favor their own strengths, and they can make gifts to a wide array of constituents (unions, suppliers and distributors, local governments, etc.).\n\nPerhaps the above account exposes something of my own constitutive fantasy and violent imaginary. Even so, it seems to me that the relation between highly formalized, politicized and risk-averse bureaucracies on the one hand, and various “nomadic” figures (lone entrepreneurs, but also various “rogue” disciplines, artistic and political, that mock and subvert the bureaucracies from within) on the other, provides a more accurate accounting the contemporary socio-political field than the categories of liberal democracy (equality, voting, rights, freedom, etc.). To allude too briefly to Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle on the Cartesian iteration of the Hebraic Declarative Sentence-as-the-Name-of-God in the foundation of the modern internal scene of representation, the “self” seems to me to be this nomadic figure: if the “I” is because it thinks, the self is because it was, with each self-reference iterating and distancing the self from prior iterations.\n\nThe self can inhabit the marvels and pathologies of the surrounding world without claiming to have any substance outside of those marvels and pathologies; the self can process the normalizing discourses and institutions that average out while reproducing those marvels and pathologies; and the self can replicate or clone itself in novel forms that elicit and display the fantasies and imaginaries those discourses and institutions and the selves inhabiting them seek to manage. At any rate the hierarchies are not going anywhere for the forseeable future, even though both left and right have their respective fantasies regarding how they might be mitigated or even abolished; the best we can do, and perhaps the basis of a kind of left-right alliance broached by both Glen Beck and Rand Paul, is to force the corporate order off its dependence on state largesse and for the absorption of its socialized costs, so it has to stand on its own, without exceptional legal protections or economic subsidies (what the state should be doing, once its umbilical cord to the corporate order is cut, reopens the right-left abyss). The self as brand/anti-brand/re-brand is probably the most productive assumption for now.\n\nIt is best to remember, though, that the self is a scavenger, gathering nourishment for the person and the soul, and whether nomadic self I am describing here can find such nourishment is an open question."
    },
    {
      "slug": "after-liberalism",
      "title": "After Liberalism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "If we can’t distinguish between defending, or at least accepting, someone’s right to say something, on the one hand, and agreeing with them, on the other, then liberalism, in the classic Enlightenment sense, no longer exists. This seems to be, increasingly, the case—marxists and other antiliberals have long argued that the “bourgeois” freedoms are disguises for the bourgeois privileges (the poor and the rich equally forbidden to sleep under the bridge, etc.), but it seems to me that something a little different is happening now. It’s not so much that people argue against the distinction (while implicitly acknowledging that under new, more just conditions, it would be legitimate), but that it is simply unintelligible to more and more people.\n\nIf you say that those opposed to same sex marriage should have the right to voice their opinion, or that people who have expressed views that many or a majority would deem racist do not thereby surrender their property and other rights, the increasingly likely response is: why do you hate gays? Why do you support racism? There are many reasons for this development, which, not surprisingly, seems especially common among the young, and is complemented by the libertarian inability to distinguish between what is permitted and what is good (if, for example, you wonder about the effects of excessive consumption of pornography, the most likely response will be an indignant insistence on one’s right to do what one wants with one’s computer screen and body, along with aspersions about one’s own presumed puritanism, etc.).\n\nIn short, more and more people want to do what they want to do, and to (not) have done to them what they (don’t) want done to them, and the whole question of grounds for doing one or another thing and of legitimate grounds for doing or not doing, is something we no longer seem to have the language for. The problem, as always, is that what some want to do is what others don’t want done to them, and the always largely fictional discourse of “rights” was there to adjudicate the competing claims—or, at least, establish an equilibrium as both sides use right-talk to entrench their interests within the state apparatus.\n\nIf the means of adjudication collapse, and it’s too tedious to try and retrieve them from the 19th century, what happens? We have a standoff between the victimary and the libertine (I know that not all libertarians, maybe not most, are libertine—but the libertines have the most powerful cultural and political presence, since arguments in favor of drug legalization and against the regulation of various pleasures draw far more supporters than arguments about the evils of central banking), both equally plausible and legitimate children of modernity.\n\nLet’s further factor into this Eric Gans’s most recent Chronicle (#463: More on the Victimary), which advances the discussion into what Gans seems ready to concede is likely the predictable result of the market system: a polarization in wealth that doesn’t produce immiseration at the bottom, but rather eviscerates the “middle” where normal forms of recognition (“respectability) can reasonably be expected. With the respectable middle cut out, what are left are pathological forms of “theater”—mass killings and other forms of cheaply and/or viciously acquired celebrity. The victimary, in this context, seems less a driving force in history than a rather feeble “sacrificial substitute” for this more devastating form of inequality that is beyond repair. To continue my own discussion, one might say that the victimary symbolically rebels against this polarization while the libertines vicariously identify with it. Both sides live in fantasy worlds.\n\nBut even if Picketty’s analysis, referenced by Gans, to the effect that today’s polarization is more representative of the trajectory of the market economy than the rough equality of the post-War years, is accurate, the two questions, distribution of wealth and distribution of recognition, can be delinked. It is not the emergence of billionaires that has destroyed “Fishtown,” or the “middle.” Even the much bemoaned decline in manual labor has been exaggerated—plumbers, roofers, contractors, carpenters and others employed in improving and fixing up can still make a very good living. In fact, there seem to be too few of them. Government enforced unionization destroyed Detroit, not the greed of the Big Three automakers. The welfare state’s assault on the family and victimary eruptions in the inner cities that crippled law enforcement and education destroyed wide swathes of black America (and ever larger pockets of white America), not the desire of corporations for cheaper labor overseas.\n\nBut there’s a limit to such socio-economic and cultural explanations, a limit evident in the problem of explaining the explanations. Things were gradually improving on all fronts during the 1950s and into the 1960s, and yet the 1960s proved the most disruptive period in American history since the Civil War. Nor is this anomalous—the same was true of the years leading up to the French Revolution. Why were the massive social experiments of the 1960s deemed necessary? The steady, if uneven and unbalanced, improvement of living conditions wrought by the expanded market has been unsatisfactory for many people—and, in particular, for those people who make things happen, the politically astute, the “cool,” the ambitious, the well-connected.\n\nWhy? What is missing? The editor of the conservative journal The American Spectator, Emmett Tyrell, often says, perhaps tongue in cheek, that we tremendously underestimate the effect of boredom on world affairs. Serious or not, he has a point—boredom, what as sociologists we might call “anomie,” or as theologians “despair,” must be given its due. Boredom is part of the structure of addiction that is so prevalent in (not only) contemporary life—the addict wants to recover a novel and exhilarating experience, and rather than realizing that such experiences must be granted by immersion in reality, seeks it out, and seeks to secure it, in the identical form in which it was first experienced.\n\nAs we all know, larger and larger doses are needed to attain a less and less satisfying approximation of that original experience. And in the ever more vast in-between, there is nothing but boredom, an itching for the next, inevitably disappointing, fix.\n\nAn important element of illiberal critiques of liberalism has been the observation that liberal rights—to speech, religion, association, etc.—really imply reciprocal indifference more than reciprocal recognition. The peace of the late medieval religious wars turned into the grave of meaning—without the (exhilarating) possibility of martyrdom, without the urgency of universal salvation, “belief” doesn’t amount to much. In that case, maybe the battle between the victimocracy and the libertine will have salutary effects. There might be a real stake in the libertine’s insistence, against feminist objections, on his right to play a sociopathic pimp in Grand Theft Auto.\n\nThe libertines can try to secede from the victimocracy, and they may succeed, certainly to some extent (e.g., the “man-cave”). But insofar as they must operate on victimocratic terrain, they will have to subvert it from within, thereby revealing victimocracy’s many antinomies and anomalies. Perhaps the question of recognition can be addressed in new, fresh ways. (The victimocracy is of course inherently paradoxical—what they do with more power can’t possibly be what they want to do.) One thing we can thank the victimocrats for is intensifying the question of the relations between representation and reality. The victimocrats have not answered it and, indeed, it is one of those great questions that can never be answered definitively.\n\nKevin Williamson, the National Review columnist that Gans has been referring repeatedly to recently, had an article lately on transgenderism, in which he insisted “Laverne Cox [a well-known “transgender” actor] is not a Woman.” On latest count, the number of comments is 8,195. The most interesting passage, for we Generative Anthropologists is, I think, the following:\n\nThe phenomenon of the transgendered person is a thoroughly modern one, not in the sense that such conditions did not exist in the past — Cassius Dio relates a horrifying tale of an attempted sex-change operation — but because we in the 21st century have regressed to a very primitive understanding of reality, namely the sympathetic magic described by James George Frazer in The Golden Bough. The obsession with policing language on the theory that language mystically shapes reality is itself ancient — see the Old Testament — and sympathetic magic proceeds along similar lines, using imitation and related techniques as a means of controlling reality.\n\nThe most famous example of this is the voodoo doll. If an effigy can be made sufficiently like the reality it is intended to represent, then it becomes, for the mystical purposes at hand, a reality in its own right. The infinite malleability of the postmodern idea of “gender,” as opposed to the stubborn concreteness of sex, is precisely the reason the concept was invented. For all of the high-academic theory attached to the question, it is simply a mystical exercise in rearranging words to rearrange reality. Facebook now has a few score options for describing one’s gender or sex, and no doubt they will soon match the number of names for the Almighty in one of the old mystery cults.\n\nWilliamson’s position is the classically modern, Enlightenment one: the point of language is to represent reality accurately. We can see here the privileging of the declarative sentence over the ostensive and imperative that Gans has associated with Western metaphysics. (Williamson even alludes to the displacement of pagan polytheism by the one “Almighty” discovered/invented by the ancient Hebrews.) One’s genitals, and, perhaps, one’s hormonal and chromosomal structure, which can be observed by everyone according to shared clinical and experimental criteria, determine one’s gender—not more amorphous and “unfalsifiable” criteria like what one feels fated to be.\n\nOf course there are anomalies—the rare individual with an extra-chromosome, extremely unusual hormones, or un or over-developed genitals. But these don’t upset the basic classification, which can be justified by reference to broader biological assumptions: the anomalies can be safely sequestered because they don’t contribute to the reproduction of the species, the meta-criterion for biology. (But, of course, the discipline of biology evolves—some of the commenters on Williamson’s article make biological claims, with what plausibility I can’t say, for the “reality” of transgenderism. Even if they’re right, though, the cultural and political consequences are not obvious, or unambiguous.)\n\nBut the originary hypothesis allows us to at least entertain the possibility that these modernist assumptions are the anomaly, and perhaps not relevant beyond the specific disciplines whose ongoing inquiries they support, since we know that language has, in fact, created the most astounding reality of all—the human reality. We can, in fact, argue about how many genders there are, what they should be called, how they should be represented, what the possible relations between them are, and such arguments will change the way we live, love and reproduce. At the very least, such discussions focus our attention unwaveringly on signs, not on some utopia beyond representation—even if utopian fantasies got the discussions started in the first place.\n\nThere is no ultimate transcending of biology, or other “material” realities, but all this means is that biology will always resist and deflect our attempts to represent it. In the end, maybe we will find ourselves with a comfortable middle or norm of the familiar two genders, with a bunch of unmolested, more or less interesting or annoying outliers; maybe not. Once tacit assumptions get excavated, they cannot be made tacit again—the historical function of the libertines may be to exaggerate and caricature and in this way, paradoxically, re-normalize the traditionally normal, this time as play and games (It’s worth keeping in mind that feminism, and certainly gay liberation, have had their libertine factions, now largely kept under wraps in the interest of political unanimity and momentum).\n\nAnd in the reciprocally aggravating chafing at constraints into which the victimocrats and libertines will hurl each other (the libertines wanting to express all the possibilities of a polymorphously perverse nature, the victimocrats demanding the uprooting and revision of all spontaneous desires) there may be space for the originary thinker to reflect upon a reality replete with examples of why we need constraints in the first place.\n\nInstead of adjudication, and the increasingly encumbered and arbitrary discourses of “rights,” maybe there will be a space to treat culture as play and games. Back in the 80s, Jean-Francois Lyotard extended Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games” to propose an ethics of political culture, guided by the principle that one doesn’t try to eliminate a fellow player from the game. We certainly can’t count on such comity now, and, to be honest, I would not agree to play by such rules myself—nor do I think they can be made coherent, as cultural “pieces” are not as stable as those in chess. But we can certainly think in terms of “moves” rather than positivist, metaphysical or historicist truths, and of provisional, emergent rules that don’t presuppose some kind of transhistorical Truth Commission that in the end is sure to ratify one’s own truth claims.\n\nPlay presupposes a field, a constitution of a portion of reality, or reality itself, that is to be governed by the rules of the game. A good player doesn’t want to “win” (any victory being very temporary anyway) so much as to keep remaking the field so as to multiply the number and variety of moves that might be made (first of all by the player himself, but how could opening avenues for oneself not do the same for others as well?). The minimal ethics governing the field is that we all take turns going first, as going first almost inevitably confers an advantage in any game—sometimes you speak in my terms, sometimes I speak in yours. Unless we’re really bent on mutual extermination, we should be able to manage that. We’ll see what the libertines and victimocrats make of each other’s playbook and field position.\n\nIn the end, I think both sides will undergo significant shock and stress, because, in the end, I think that the Jewish revelation is right in one crucial respect. The Jewish name of God, revealed to Moses at the burning bush, “I am/shall be that I am/shall be,” cannot be said by the believing Jew because you can’t say it without claiming to be God. This is my one, marginal, addition to Eric Gans’s extensive analyses of this revelatory event—if the name of God explicitly defers the desire to proclaim oneself God, I take this to be because that desire must have emerged in a powerful way in the ancient world of God-emperors.\n\nIt is an en during desire, manifested in the belief that following nature or reason will provide moral truths no less than in totalitarian attempts to remake the entire fabric of human relations. Indeed, the ideology of modernity is that we are all gods to ourselves. Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” is another manifestation, and so I am much less ready, I think, than Gans, or than I once was, to celebrate the centering of each individual in his own desires. Only shared revelations, on particular scenes, of our reciprocal being-hostages-for-one-another (to borrow a term important to Emmanuel Levinas, and then Derrida), or what I have been calling “disciplines,” can create legitimate centers.\n\nNo one can know how many such centers, or of what duration or quality, are necessary, but once there are enough of them, “inequality” won’t matter. And if there aren’t enough—well, the catastrophes that will result will make the symbolic holocausts of the victimocracy seem so much windmill tilting. But getting enough of them can only be a learning process and, as the pedagogical cliché has it, you have to start with where the learner is."
    },
    {
      "slug": "further-reflections-consciousness-free-will",
      "title": "Further Reflections, Consciousness & Free Will",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "On one hand, nothing is more familiar to us that our own consciousness, which can we safely assume is essentially similar to that of other humans. It seems equally obvious that we have free will. I make decisions constantly, and I change my mind just as frequently. And I can see that others are not able to predict, reliably, what I will do or say next; nor can I predict what others will do. Furthermore, we can observe very clearly that animals share many if not all of the same characteristics of human consciousness. We may never know what it’s like to be a bat, but more familiar animals like deer or cats are obviously aware of their environment in basically the same way that I am aware of my environment. Humans are aware of different things than other animals (notably, right and wrong), but animals may be aware of things that I can’t perceive, like the cat who refused to board the ship destined to sink (as I learned about at the Victoria Maritime museum).\n\nIn any case, we are surrounded by living organisms capable of more or less degrees of consciousness. Life is almost omnipresent on this earth, even in places that might seem very inhospitable. So consciousness is the plainest empirical fact in the world, perhaps, as Descartes observed, the only indubitable fact, the one thing we can’t doubt. There is nothing we know better. And we see conscious beings being born, growing, developing, reproducing, and eventually dying all around us. From this perspective, there is no mystery of consciousness, nor of freewill. Consciousness is simply the nature of my existence. Arguably, then, “the burden of proof,” so to speak, should be on those who wish to question the possibility of consciousness. It’s an artificial question without any pragmatic consequences. If the sciences can’t explain the physical basis of consciousness, then so much the worse for them. They either aren’t posing the right question, or their methodology is inadequate.\n\nOn the other hand, consciousness and free will are completely anomalous in our universe. The physical sciences tell us beyond any reasonable doubt that our planet is 4.5 billion years old, while humans have only been around for about 2.5 million. And for at least a billion years, earth harbored no forms of life at all. Multicellular forms appeared only in the last billion years. Furthermore, there is no evidence of life on other planets, within or without our solar system. Given the vast size and age of our universe, it is more economical to assume that we are not unique; but the fact remains that as far as we can see or recover, life on earth is anomalous, and human life even more so. From this perspective, the existence of life on earth appears nothing less than miraculous. That, by some completely random process, some mud should get up and start walking around appears highly unlikely, even impossible. We can only wonder, with Blake,\n\nTiger, tiger, burning bright\n\nIn the forests of the night,\n\nWhat immortal hand or eye\n\nCould frame thy fearful symmetry?\n\nIn what distant deeps or skies\n\nBurnt the fire of thine eyes?\n\nOn what wings dare he aspire?\n\nWhat the hand dare seize the fire?\n\nAnd what shoulder and what art\n\nCould twist the sinews of thy heart?\n\nAnd when thy heart began to beat,\n\nWhat dread hand and what dread feet?\n\nWhat the hammer? what the chain?\n\nIn what furnace was thy brain?\n\nWhat the anvil? What dread grasp\n\nDare its deadly terrors clasp?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "reflections-on-reading-raymond-tallis-aping-mankind",
      "title": "Reflections on reading Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The basic problem addressed by Tallis, it seems to me, is how matter becomes subjectively conscious. I say “subjectively” because we can’t directly observe the consciousness of another living being, and as Tallis points out, even the most advanced brain scans do not help us to understand human consciousness.\n\nThere are two basic approaches to the problem of consciousness. First is to say that consciousness is only possible for soul or spirit. This approach may or may not rely on a creator God, and it may or may not insist on a sharp dualism between matter and spirit. They can also be understood as two aspects of one living being.\n\nThe second is evolutionary. Once life develops, organisms evolve nerve responses that allow them to find food and mates and avoid predators. These responses are programmed into the DNA and are comparable to computer programs. In the case of extremely simple organisms, the nerve responses involved are also simple. The responses of more advanced animals are more complicated but directed to the same goals.\n\nFor some animals, notably the hominid line, flexibility in behavior, presumably involving some choice between alternative ways of responding to events, is an adaptive strategy. Consciousness can be understood, in Darwinian terms, as the ability to evaluate alternatives and adapt one’s behavior to different circumstances. While the neuro-biological basis of ape and chimp consciousness is still not well understood, this is arguably a problem of complexity. The principles are well-known; and their behavior, while more flexible than other species, is still, arguably, wholly the product of their instincts, conditioning, and learning (by imitation); and as a result is very predictable. Some chimps are presumably smarter than others, and thus better able to evaluate alternatives or invent solutions to problems, but intelligence is a genetic variable within the scope of an evolutionary paradigm.\n\nIt’s not clear that chimps have what we call free will. Significantly, everyone, even animal rights activists, recognizes that we can’t hold animals morally responsible for their behavior.\n\nHuman consciousness is in many ways comparable to chimps’—subject to instinct, conditioning, and learning—but in addition we have the subjective experience of free will. And objectively, humans are much more unpredictable than any other species. So in addition to consciousness, we have the philosophical problem of how a material organism, whose atoms and molecules individually are subject to all the laws of physics, is capable of free will, acts which seemingly cannot be explained in terms of physical causation, even given the vast complexity of the human body.\n\nTallis and others observe that humans are conscious of other humans in ways that other animals are not of their fellows. Human consciousness is somehow tied up with our relations with other humans—relations which by definition are not contained within the brain. They are relations, not physical objects or neural events. This approach fits in well with Generative Anthropology and the Originary Hypothesis. But the question still remains: is the resistance of human consciousness to scientific explanation basically a problem of complexity? If so, then the mystery of human consciousness and free will are in principle capable of scientific explanation, and existing studies of human evolution and neuro-phenomena are at least on the right track, even if still largely unfruitful, as Tallis argues.\n\nEven when the dimensions of social relations and language are added in, we are still dealing with beings composed of molecules subject to the law of physics. While this adds a layer of complexity, it doesn’t refute the proposition that human behavior and the subjective experience of consciousness are ultimately reducible to physics, in the form of evolutionary processes and the neuro-phenomena of individuals in groups. It doesn’t make sense to say that consciousness is not a physical phenomenon, since the only place it’s found is with physical bodies. We should also remember that neuro-phenomena are already well-recognized as responsive to the environment, so the social nature of non-human consciousness is a given.\n\nIt’s also possible that the problem is somehow not ultimately reducible to physical processes. But if human consciousness is not so reducible, then the philosophical problem of explaining how material beings can experience consciousness and free will remains. Saying that human consciousness and free will are a function of our unique cultural/social “nature” may well be true, but it doesn’t seem to answer the philosophical problem of how exactly this is possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-few-thoughts-on-gaza",
      "title": "A Few Thoughts on Gaza",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It is a marker of the deadening of thought, not increased moral sensitivity, that it is now commonplace to condemn or support one side in a war based on which side suffers the greater number of casualties, military or civilian. If one side wins by having the most civilian victims, then an incentive is created for that side to generate as many civilian victims as possible. As is often the case, what looks like scrupulousness is really a justification for barbarism.\n\nWars have aims—generally the surrender of the other side, and its agreement with your terms, or, if necessary, the destruction of the other side. Proportionality in war means that you use the amount of force needed to attain those aims, and no more—if a certain amount of force is needed to bend the other side to your will, you shouldn’t use more than that for reasons, say, of revenge. The notion that “proportionality” refers to the proportion of force used by, or available to, the respective sides, is degradation of thought to the level of imbecility.\n\nThose critical of Israel’s response to Hamas’s rockets and tunnels might be asked what kind of response they would find legitimate. If the response they would allow is one that would leave the rockets and tunnels in place, they are arguing that no Israeli self-defense is permissible. If no Israeli self-defense is permissible, then the only conclusion to be drawn is that Israelis should allow themselves to be slaughtered. In other words, the critic of Israel is a genocidal anti-Semite.\n\nWar is obviously not the answer! Israel bombs and invades Gaza and then in a few years Gaza rebuilds its means of violence and Israel has to do the same thing all over again. Clearly, the problem is not being solved, and we need another approach. Maybe, but we keep putting murderers and rapists in prison and, nevertheless, people continue to rape and murder. Do we need another approach here as well, to stop the cycle of violence between violent criminals and civilized society? Or could it be that, for the forseeable future, the Palestinians will find no way out of their resentments other than fantasies of Israel’s destruction, just like people will continue to murder and rape and that, nevertheless, in both cases forceful responses can prevent things from getting much worse than they might otherwise be?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "after-liberalism-2",
      "title": "After Liberalism 2",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The left’s propaganda offensive in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision affirming the religious rights of business owners to not subsidize forms of birth control that violate their convictions involves arguing, as blatantly as they feel they can, that the Supreme Court (or, better: 5 men; or, even better, bleaching Clarence Thomas: 5 white men) has outlawed birth control. It’s easy to treat this as crazy, or breathtaking brazenness, a desperate bid to boost voter turnout amongst the stupidest elements of the Democratic base. The 2012 election, though, after months of assuring myself that no one, of course, could be stupid enough to believe that “War on Women” actually means something, much less that the Republicans were waging one, has taught me to take such assertions very seriously because, clearly, many others do.\n\nThe assertion that “5 guys” have outlawed birth control is very similar to the insistence that, not only must “marriage equality” be immediately, universally and uniformly imposed, but that no decent person could bear to be exposed to anyone whose attitude towards it is anything other than acclamatory (dissenting opinions seem to have the status of second hand smoke in such discourses). The logic is the same in both cases: I am only allowed to do something only if everyone supports and celebrates my doing it.\n\nAnd that is not, in fact, illogical at all. Only liberalism finds it outrageous. By “liberalism,” of course, I mean the traditional variety, which starts political reflection with the assumption that there is something pre-politically inviolable in the individual, that this inviolability implies a series of rights that the individual bears with him or her in entering political society, and that the main business of politics is cataloguing those rights, setting up hierarchies amongst them, figuring out how best to protect them, to prevent their exercise from leading to one colliding into another, and so on. Only a liberal in that sense can say “I may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it,” even if very few liberals have ever gone anywhere near death defending ideas they consider obnoxious (even the ACLU tends to protect only those ideas that the middle class finds obnoxious).\n\nBut maybe liberalism is wrong. Or was right, for a limited time, in certain places, among certain sectors of the population. And maybe is no longer. The abstract freedoms advanced by liberalism suited the rising middle classes in their struggle against feudalism (and slavery and absolutism) perfectly, and then gained new life in the struggle against Communist and fascist totalitarianism. Liberalism’s victory in these struggles enabled it to be sold as a set of eternal principles (and to disguise its basic emptiness), but maybe these enemies were very contingent and time bound. I’m not sure that the “great debates” of the liberal order ever amounted to more that liberal ridicule of, and conservative prudential or sentimental defense of, some element of pre-modernity that persisted into modernity.\n\nPre-modern elements having been thoroughly routed, liberalism no longer seems to provide a frame for the main disagreements in today’s social order. This would mean that liberalism has done its work. But the work of liberalism would, then, have been a very localized one, which was to fend off outmoded and especially dysfunctional alternatives to capitalist modernity—absolutism, slavery and the varieties of totalitarianism, which can be shamed merely by being brought into open debate among mobile, self-reliant people. Once all the pre-modern forms have been abolished and the more genocidal forms of totalitarian rule discredited, what, exactly, remains of liberalism? Does anyone close to power today propose a model of governance beyond local technocratic fixes to increasingly dysfunctional systems?\n\nThe issues that we have today don’t seem to lend themselves to the debating society model of liberalism. We don’t, for example, seem to have a vocabulary for discussing the rights and wrongs of the kind of statistical surveillance the NSA has been conducting since 9/11: on the one hand, developing algorithms for determining that certain individuals should be probed more closely (e.g., someone who has called Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia hundreds of times over the past few months, to numbers that dozens of other people have called hundreds of times) seems reasonable; on the other hand, it’s very hard to fit this practice into any traditional notion of a court sanctioned search and, on the other hand, accepting it requires a reservoir of trust in the government’s genuine interest in protecting us from attack and nothing more, a trust which few feel and fewer will admit—in large part because the government itself has abandoned even a show of liberal neutrality.\n\nBut, of course, when there is a terrorist attack, most people will blame the government, the pendulum will swing wildly in the other direction, and objections will be vehemently dismissed, at least until the attacks become a distant memory (which seems to happen increasingly quickly). Or, maybe, we will stay steadfast in our libertarian and victimary convictions and absorb attack after attack, continuing to demonize anyone who suggests even the most general connection between Islam and terror. Either way, we have nothing resembling a traditional liberal “conversation” (and one starts to wonder to what extent we ever really did) over great questions of freedom and authority, war and peace, and so on.\n\nIn the case of the NSA surveillance, it seems that either the government will do what it needs to do in order to fulfill responsibilities it claims have been delegated to it, regardless of how such actions can be squared with rights talk; or, there will be sufficient pushback, which will simply mean that “we” have rejected the government’s assertion of responsibility and have chosen to distribute it in a new way, or to just be irresponsible. In the end, more precisely, the government will find a way to operate in secrecy because bureaucrats and elected official prefer the fleeting obloquy of exposure to the delegitimation and loss of power actual attacks will bring; or, on the other hand, hackers and leakers and their friends in the media will make secrecy impossible—either way, these decisions are not being made in any recognizable liberal or democratic way.\n\nOther issues regarding privacy, innovations in health care and the biological sciences more generally, and intellectual property, for starters, seem equally immune to classically considered “debates”—these differences over the ambivalences of what is usually blandly called universal “interconnectedness” but might better be considered universal contagion or hostage-taking, seem more likely to be decided by unilateral initiatives which create irreversible facts on the ground, followed by ratcheting effects of one kind or another. For individuals and groups the choice will be stark: be inside or outside, and if you want to be inside play by the rules or find yourself outside; and you’d better not be caught outside unless you can manage to create a new inside.\n\nThat there is only approved behavior and disapproved of behavior seems much less counter-intuitive than the liberal claim that there is disapproved of behavior that we nevertheless allow, i.e., approve of. Less counter-intuitive and undoubtedly far more universal. The problem is that liberal society has upended the clear boundaries between approved and disapproved. What we are seeing now may be an attempt to restore those boundaries, which might be necessary, in the sense that human life is ultimately untenable without them. The difficulty lies in the lack of any consensus over what is to be approved. The solution is simple, if difficult—secession, partition, into smaller communities which can arrive at such a consensus.\n\nThe only meaningful conversations we might be able to have in the near future will be over the terms of such a partitioning, and if there is anything to hope for it is that the last act in the liberal order will be to partition out of it into a new anti-federalism with some modicum of grace and a minimum of violence. (The problem of maintaining the viability of overlapping local communities would presumably then generate a new politics.) (I am encouraged by the news that California will be voting this year on a proposition to break the state up into 6 states. I assume it will fail, and Congress has to approve any such move even if Californians vote for it, but I believe once the idea is out there, and secession is de-stigmatized, we will see much more of it.)\n\nCapitalist modernity! I used the term with ease a couple of paragraphs back, as a convenient other to feudalism, absolutism, slavery, communism and fascism. Capitalism has really only been tried in a few places, for brief periods, and most people seemed to have found it terrifying—what we have had mostly is corporatism. As soon as one starts to say that capitalism is the true way, we just haven’t gotten it right, one starts to hear echoes of identical arguments made in the name of socialism and communism. The free market is real, grounded in the reciprocity constitutive of the originary scene, and we can study its operations and promote its spread, but it would probably be realistic to resign ourselves to the fact that there is only sufficient popular support for the free market in carefully regulated and administered doses (and, regardless of popular imagination, it more often comes arbitrarily and crookedly regulated and administered doses), even though, fortunately, important innovations sometime sneak through before the bureaucrats have a chance to figure out what happened.\n\nMaybe what we have come to call modernity is the less grandiose fact that, for some time, there has always been some faction (and sometimes several at cross-purposes) that finds it in its interest to support the free market to some degree. The end of liberalism might also be the end of at least “Enlightenment” modernity, whose slogans were always just a battering ram to use against feudalism, and which has gradually lost its legitimacy as the self-proclaimed moderns continued to find more and more “pre-moderns” to denounce, hector and, when possible, outlaw. The only thing, though, that would prevent the upcoming partitioning from becoming a new dark age would be sufficient (define “sufficient”!\n\nI confess, I can’t, not sufficiently) recognition within and between communities of the need for free markets. But while some modernities have touted markets as vehicles of freedom and prosperity, the disciplinary order would equally stress the market as disciplinary agent, inculcating practically the realization that nothing will come from nothing. Indeed, an index of the health of any social order is the number of people who oppose restrictions on free exchange even if doing so benefits neither them nor anyone in particular as far as anyone can tell. If you want a genuine “veil of ignorance,” there you have it, and a very practical one available at any time: no one can tell who will benefit beyond the very short term by removing obstacles to free trade. Those who willingly reside behind that veil are the ballast of social order.\n\nThe way to act within the new, “disciplinary,” order, then, is as the representative of a discipline, which one advances unwaveringly and unquestioningly, at least to those outside the discipline; guarding the boundaries of the discipline, though, makes one a better participant in the market by leading one to respect all the other disciplines, which is to say to withdraw behind the veil of ignorance of the broader conditions of possibility of one’s disciplinary activity—a veil of ignorance which is also the condition of possibility of the local knowledge of surrounding disciplines constitutive of one’s own. Of course, anyone participates in several disciplines, which overlap and perhaps antagonize each other in varying degrees.\n\nThis will be the source of ethical dilemmas in the disciplinary order. But it will be silly to complain of violations of rights which are not simultaneously rights of the discipline, just as it would be ridiculous for a doctor to complain that his free speech rights are violated by the fact that no hospital will allow him to carry out an unvetted form of surgery that strikes his colleagues as bizarre—the doctor proposing something new only has the right to complain that members of the profession fail to follow or reasonably revise their own protocols for approving new procedures. Disciplines are radically different from tribes, insofar as they are less exclusivist, make variable claims on the individual’s loyalty and make claims to knowledge and institute procedures for arbitrating and encouraging such claims, but they are more like tribes than they are like the polity of the liberal modernist imaginary insofar as they recognize no rights that are not constitutive of the discipline itself. And that, in fact, is the only coherent way of thinking about rights."
    },
    {
      "slug": "brain-as-computer",
      "title": "Brain as computer",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The basic premise of much current brain research seems to be that the brain is a biological computer and evolution is the programmer. Theoretically, then, we should be able to find the codes and understand the working of the brain. According to a 2010 article on CNET:\n\nResearchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, penetrated and navigated. Their work appears in the journal Neuron this week. To test their model, the team took tissue samples from a mouse whose brain had been bioengineered to make larger neurons in the cerebral cortex express a fluorescent protein (found in jellyfish), making them glow yellow-green. Because of this glow, the researchers were able to see synapses against the background of neurons.\n\nThey found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study: One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth. (Elizabeth Armstrong Moore CNET ).\n\nA high end computer chip such as the Intel Quad i7 has 731 million transistors, which act as switches. The human brain, on the other hand, has an estimated 86 billion neurons and 1000 trillion synapses “In a related finding there was a new article that suggests the difference between human and other primates is the space between neurons in the prefrontal cortex, with humans having more space, which is speculated to allow more connections.” (Ward Plunet Link )\n\nThe fact that the brain is many times more complicated than a computer does not, by itself, refute the analogy. It does seem significant, however, that no computer yet devised has any degree of consciousness.\n\nScientists have been very succssful of late in manipulating living cells, especially in tinkering with the DNA, to create new plants and so on. But they are not yet been able to create life in the laboratory, starting with non-living compounds."
    },
    {
      "slug": "thought-experiment",
      "title": "Thought Experiment",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "First, imagine a computer which includes complete monitoring of every internal electro-magnetic event, the transistors and memory and so on. We can see the physical arrangement and what happens in the circuits, and, initially, we can compare it to what is shown on the screen. Our task is to predict what is being shown on the computer screen simply on the basis of the computer’s internal activity. The idea here is that we can see all the switches going on and off, the ones and zeros, and we have to find the code to translate that activity into what is visible to the user. I would guess that this would be a fairly easy task for someone with the right skills. One would start by figuring out the basic ASCII computer code and then working up to the higher level codes.\n\nNow imagine that we could somehow monitor every electro-chemical action of the human brain at any one moment and over time. The latest issue of MIT Technology Review (July/August 2014) describes some remarkable advances along this line. A new technique calls “optogenetics” provides a much more detailed view of cell activity than the fMRI. We’re still far from a complete picture, of course, and I doubt that it’s even possible to provide a complete picture of all significant brain activity in time. This is a thought experiment. Note that initially we also have access to everything the person reports is going in their consciousness. So, for example, when he or she remembers a particular event, we could compare the reported memory with the specific brain activity. Our problem then would be to try to figure out what was going on in the person’s consciousness from observing the neuro-chemical action of the brain alone.\n\nFirst of all, we should note that comparing brain activity to what the person is doing, their health, and so on, would be enormously helpful for doctors trying to find cures, especially for mental health or brain-centered health problems like autism. Existing brain research, neuromania aside, has already generated valuable medical results.\n\nBut the larger question is whether we would be able to reach the point where we would be able to look at the brain activity by itself and say exactly what the person is thinking or feeling or doing. Would we be able to actually predict what the person is going to do next?\n\nDavid Talbot reports on some experiments by Gabriel Kreiman which suggest that brain activity in key areas of the brain actually precede conscious decisions by “anywhere from hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds” (“Searching for the ‘Free Will’ Neuron” in MIT Technology Review July/August 2014: p.65). These results allow scientists to claim that brain events actually cause so-called “free will” choices. We should note, however, that the test results rely on the time difference between when the subject presses a button and when particular neurons “related to decision-making” fire. There is the problem that an electrical impulse from brain to finger takes time, time which might account for the supposed lag between brain activity and conscious decision. There is also the problem of identifying which particular neurons actually “cause” a decision.\n\nGoing back to our thought experiment, I assume that we would be able to learn a lot from knowing the correlation between brain activity in specific areas and conscious thoughts and feelings and perception. First of all, we could nail down specifically which parts of the brain are responsible for exactly which functions. We would be able to correlate certain patterns of brain activity with specific emotions and memories and perhaps even ideas. Eventually we would be able to predict, purely on the basis of recorded brain activity, what the person is feeling or thinking—but only, I would guess, in a general way, not precisely.\n\nMy understanding is that the brain doesn’t operate according to a fixed code like a computer. The brain is, in effect, constantly reprogramming itself. Of course, all inputs from the environment have the effect of reprogramming the brain—a la Pavlov’s dogs, and in much more sophisticated ways. But I would suggest that the brain, in effect, “consciously” and unconsciously programs itself in various ways. There’s what I call an “X-Factor” which would make it impossible to correlate brain activity precisely to the contents of consciousness.\n\nExisting research suggests that everything that happens in consciousness (and unconsciousness for that matter) has correlated brain activity—which is not to say that this correlation operates in any predictable way. The existence of the unconscious, btw, complicates the attempt to sort out cause and effect in decision making and brain activity. It’s not clear that the unconscious operates by any kind of deterministic process. Our dreams, for example, are creative and unpredictable. In sum, I don’t think we can ever break the code that correlates brain activity to consciousness.\n\nIn evolutionary terms, consciousness is a way for an organism to negotiate its environment. I think we have to content ourselves with a functional explanation or have recourse to a spiritual one. The function of the brain in terms of the organism as a whole might help explain why we can’t break the brain-code: we have to deal with the unpredictable, and perhaps an unpredictable organ is best capable of doing so.\n\nFinally, it’s not clear that human consciousness is qualitatively different from animal consciousness. We have a peculiar social awareness that makes for conscience and self-consciousness, but this is arguably only an expansion of consciousness to new contents."
    },
    {
      "slug": "civilization-and-its-end-s",
      "title": "Civilization and Its End(s)",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The paradox of civilization is that renunciation leads to benefits. This must be true even of earlier social forms, what our forefathers insensitively called “barbarism” and “savagery,” to some extent—among hunter gathering communities, for example, the man capable of exhibiting patience and discipline on the hunt would surely acquire “followers” and hence prestige and power. But only in a civilized order does this relation between renunciation and benefit become an open ended dialectic—starting with the rise of the ‘Big Man,” that precursor of civilized order, the possibility of accumulating wealth through renunciation becomes ever more unlimited.\n\nFor a civilization to get off the ground and then sustain itself, this relation between renunciation and benefit must be generalized: most everyone must believe that their own renunciations will yield corresponding benefits. But there is another paradox here, one related to the moral problem Kant tried to solve through his “categorical imperative”: for Kant, if you did good in order to be rewarded in heaven, you weren’t really good; goodness was only goodness if pursued for its own sake. This conception has its own perversions, which become evident if one reflects on what would be involved in assuring oneself (first of all) that one only loves goodness and not any praise or love or wealth that comes from its exercise.\n\nFor the civilized order, though, those pioneers in renunciation who founded the order were not looking for benefits: they were renouncing forms of desire that they perceived led to self-defeating violence including violence to self; their renunciations are acts of liberation in their own right, which others are welcome to follow. Hence the paradox of the charisma emanating from such moral innovators, and the power, wealth and prestige that accrues, if not to them, than to those who most credibly “inherit” their “kingdom of ends.”\n\nOnce the model is generalized, though, the relation between renunciation and benefit is subjected to a much more hard-headed cost-benefit analysis. And here two things go wrong. First, once people start asking themselves how much renunciation is strictly necessary for the potential benefits, it is likely that some will decide that the renunciation isn’t worth it, and others will seek out easier ways to the benefits. (They will often be the same people.) This unraveling becomes more likely the wealthier the civilization in question, and the more it can tolerate transgressors and support deadbeats. Second, the relation between renunciation and benefits among those with the most benefits becomes more obscure—to those who have shall be given seems to be the principle, and it makes sense to ask, if they have benefits, and far more than I ever will, without any signs of renunciation, why shouldn’t the rest of us? There is a threshold at which this cynicism breaks the articulation of renunciation and benefit altogether, and that is the point at which civilization becomes impossible, regardless of how long it takes before it collapses.\n\nThe only thing that can fend off collapse or, failing that, make regeneration possible in its wake, is renewed commitment to renunciation. On the part of some—how many is impossible to say in advance. This doesn’t necessarily mean that people should start building monasteries (al though that wouldn’t hurt!)—there can be many forms of renunciation, and to be politically and civilizationally meaningful, they will need to have a public side. Every renunciation begins with an imperative—a resounding, overwhelming imperative that cannot be refused: the individual who engages in even the simplest renunciations (quitting smoking, going on a diet) hears a voice, more or less literally, saying “you must stop!” The imperatives that found civilizations are more imposing, but take the same form (“you must no longer sacrifice your children to Moloch”).\n\nIn a fully developed civilization, these imperatives evolve into multilayered interrogatives, the basis for religions, philosophy, art, and culture (there can be many ways of “sacrificing” one’s children, for example)—but the original imperative remains active underneath, or the questions themselves would not be meaningful. The imperatives that take must emanate from within some crux in the pre-civilized or existing, but decadent civilized order: it is not too hard to see how the Judaic and then Christian imperatives involved renunciations of participation in the depraved violences of Middle Eastern and then Roman imperial civilizations.\n\nIt follows from these reflections that politically redemptive activity today (and no other political activity makes any difference now) must be located at the nexus of the victimary (where benefits are demanded and renunciation, seen as a sham, is replaced by denunciation) and a largely rigged globalized political and economic order, where benefits accrue out of any proportion to renunciation. The two poles are in fact closely connected, as the global elite freely uses victimary hysteria to deepen control of economies and the everyday life of people. It’s not for any person to pronounce on what these new renunciations might be (and, to be honest, I don’t have any idea), but one imperative I can take upon myself is speak and write in such a way as to confer responsibility all around, and to resist the corrosions of language that lead us to absolve “victims” of responsibility, to attribute the decisions of the elite to “social forces” presumably beyond their control, and to treat the middle class as itself nothing more than a victim of these pincers squeezing it on both sides. If we lose this civilization, we will all play our role in losing it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "civilization-violence-oblivion",
      "title": "Civilization, Violence, Oblivion",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Humanity presupposes the deferral of violence; society presupposes shared norms enhancing and regularizing the capacity to defer violence; civilization further presupposes entire zones of existence in which the deferral of violence can be taken for granted, which is to say that means of deferral and rules for their deployment, need not be posited, even tacitly. This is the way most of us live now—for almost anyone reading this, if you were to invite me to your home, there would be absolutely no need for either of us to be aware that certain motions, phrases, or expressed desires, would trigger a physical confrontation. This is extraordinary, even though we take it for granted; indeed, its utter unremarkableness is part of what makes it extraordinary, and also part of what makes it fragile.\n\nIn order to create such violence free zones, the most pervasive form of human violence needed to be so thoroughly uprooted that we have become unaware of its existence. That form of violence is that characteristic of honor societies: the vendetta. The vendetta is far more intuitive than our everyday peaceful interactions, even though most of us feel spontaneous disgust at exposure to it—much like the disgust we would feel at seeing the cow whose flesh we are to eat as “steak” slaughtered and carved up at the dinner table. When someone transgresses against you, the obvious response is to answer that transgression in kind; a further development of this principle is to answer in kind “plus” so as to defer by deterring the next violent act in advance.\n\nBut which side can out-deter the other? This can’t be known in advance, since it depends upon non-quantifiable factors like anger, courage, shame, patience and so on. So, social organizations emerge that oscillate between bouts of tit-for-tat violence and periods of peace once all sides agree that the price to be paid for continued escalation is too high—until someone decides, once again, to try their luck. The periods of peace, though, involve their own forms of violence, perhaps in their way even more disgusting: for example, each side is obliged to take care of its own transgressors, or to turn them over, so as to demonstrate their commitment to maintaining the peace; each side must control its own so as to limit the possibilities of potentially uncontrollable provocations—I assume that the most horrific manifestation of honor society, the honor killings of young girls who have transgressed the strict sexual norms of honor societies, even by being raped—follow from this need to demonstrate that possible disruptions will not come from one’s own side, whether through weakness or carelessness.\n\nUnder such conditions, everyone’s protection is bound up through family ties to the honor system in such a way that it is very difficult to see how change is possible. And, indeed, change is only possible through much greater violence, that exercised by the “Big Man” who rises from the pack of petty lords and overawes all the rest, destroying those who resist and subjugating and defanging those who submit. From this process emerges “courtesy,” the beginning of “manners,” which doesn’t so much defer violence as involve us all in a shared pretense that violence is so far from our minds that we experience only those desires that can be satisfied without risking it.\n\nThe kind of human subjectivity that emerges can be understood by analogy to the distancing of eating from the processes of slaughtering I just alluded to—just as we eat our meals, and can only eat our meals, without giving any thought to millions of penned up, systematically slaughtered, chopped up, chemically preserved, shipped, packaged, etc., animals, we freely interact in our violence free zones on the condition that rather massive forms of violence lie in wait for those who cross certain boundaries, not only of legality, but of normality—and that it will never be me who is caught in those traps.\n\nI don’t really need, I think, to tout the virtues of civilization, al though a brief expression of gratitude is appropriate—without civilization, trade, art technological innovation and all the rest of our human created cocoon would be impossible. Only breaking what we can now see as the “addiction” to tit-for-tat violence has made our world possible. But the work of civilization is never complete (international relations, for all the efforts of internationalists and pacifists, still works largely on various systems of deterrence), and civilization generates its own resentments (what Freud called its “discontents”), along with fantasies of a thoroughly completed civilization and the return to a carefree, egalitarian primitivism (with the two seemingly opposite fantasies often synthesized into one—modern views of “free love” being such a synthesis, I think).\n\nMost dangerous of all, though, is the oblivion induced by civilization, an oblivion much explored by Lee Harris, which, as Harris has argued, makes the category of the “enemy” seem a pathological symptom of the diseased thinking of some of our less civilized compatriots.\n\nI have one question: can we imagine a form of civilization without that oblivion? To do so, we would also have to imagine a civilization without the state, which, for all its democratization, liberalization, and taming through human rights protocols, is still the direct descendent, and still shares the cultural DNA, of those absolutist monarchies that first established civilization throughout Europe. The state, going back to the absolute monarchs of early modern Europe, civilizes and barbarizes, displacing violence from the center to the margins, the imperial margins then and the biological margins now (as the state increasingly deploys health policies to distinguish between more and less worthy forms of life) and, most importantly, imposes oblivion upon us by claiming to have always already (through its control of intelligence, military, financial, punitive, scientific, etc., levers) made us safe.\n\nAt this point, it would be hard to imagine the results if the state were to simply turn to us, its citizens, and say, “here are the kinds of security I can directly and measurably provide; the rest is up to you”—such straightforwardness would induce massive panic.\n\nThere is a libertarian anarchist argument to the effect that the state has always been an agent of barbarism, and that civilization has always been the result of free exchange within and between peoples—free exchanges that the state has always interfered with and exploited. There is a grain of truth to this argument, but I believe it is ultimately wishful thinking—what would have protected peaceful traders from the whims and rivalries of the various honor societies, if not a monarch interested in the wealth of the realm (to, yes, of course, wage war on his fellow monarchs, and to commit other barbarisms we might not like to think about too much)? It would be nice to think that in transcending the state we would be returning to a more natural human existence, one that has been deformed by the state. In fact, a civilized society, especially one as advanced as ours, without a state, would be an innovation, or the result of a series of innovations, as significant and improbable as human history has seen.\n\nA series of innovations, in the social realm, means a series of renunciations. Here, what would need to be renounced is the invocation of the state on one’s side in conflicts with others (without, needless to say, regressing to the level of the vendetta). This would place the onus of keeping peace on all of us, all the time, a thing that is only possible if the responsibility we, and we alone, would bear for failure were to be present with us constantly. The difficulty of such a renunciation should not be underestimated, now that the state has interposed itself in every conceivable human conflict: between husband and wife, parents and children, school and parents, doctors and patients, etc., not to mention within the human conscience itself, that is, our quarrels with ourselves.\n\nSuch a renunciation would be the moral equivalent of the early Christians’ self-extrication from the debasements of Roman society, involving the establishment of new institutions, including legal ones. It would be far more difficult than the veganism that results for many from the shattering of our oblivion regarding our uses of animals. There would be no point in predicting the likelihood of such a development (even if it is worth pondering which conditions might make them more or less likely), but that doesn’t change the fact that there is no other way of abolishing the oblivion that civilization can no longer survive, because both the enemies of our civilization, and those who aid those enemies because they consider us not civilized enough, are preying upon it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "system-s-theory",
      "title": "System’s Theory",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Whoever first started talking about “society” as a “system” has a lot to answer for. The notion that society functions automatically, that dysfunctions can be repaired, externalities absorbed and crime and corruption recycled seems perfectly suited to put people to sleep, precisely when system failure starts to set in. After all, nothing that seems to be happening (whether it’s a decline in productive investment, an uptick in crime, outrageously irresponsible political posturing, riots, protestors calling for dead cops, politicians warmly greeting those protestors, dead cops) can really be happening—it all really is being blown up by the media (itself a familiar part of the system), or activates some reparative mechanism in the system that will restore some pre-determined balance. This way of thinking encourages more irresponsibility—after all, if nothing can really go wrong, what difference does it make how I go about getting my piece of the action?\n\nThere is no social “system.” What “system” can, on occasion, serve as a useful shorthand for, and more often serve as a misleading obfuscation of, is the ever emergent articulation of millions of agreements, tacit and explicit, long-term and short-term, some firm and some flexible, between individuals and communities (usually represented by selected individuals). This also means that there is really no such thing as “individuals,” except insofar as individuals are created by those agreements, as a partner in them. Modern individuals are simply those who participate in so many different agreements that they can’t be reduced to or made utterly dependent on any one or few of them. Every gesture any one makes, any word any one speaks, affirms, revises, subverts, rebels against, opts-out of, disputes the terms of, one or more of those agreements.\n\nAll that is fairly obvious. Much less obvious is how high faithful participation in social agreements must be in order to ensure that the more fundamental, tacit and long-term of all those agreements remain in force. To take a simpler question, just to use as a model: in a single neighborhood, containing, let’s say, 50 families in 50 houses, how many of those houses must become sites of criminal activity before a critical threshold is reached at which families begin abandoning, irreversibly, the neighborhood, leaving it to be taken over completely by criminals and those with nowhere else to go? How many houses would have to be given over to immoral, if not criminal, activity (parties going all night long, female led households with revolving door boyfriends, a strip club opening up, etc.)? It is very hard to be precise here, but the answer is certainly: very few.\n\nI’d say that 3 houses gone bad is enough to get the ball rolling. On the other hand, the second makes the third more likely. We’re dealing with a version of what philosophers call the “heap paradox” here—when does a few of some item become a stack, become a pile, become a heap? Which pebble started the avalanche? It’s easy enough to see that thinking in these terms would lead to a very “Puritan” approach to social relations. Now, think about how much of the popular culture of the West of the past 60-70 years has busied itself with protecting the inhabitants of those first few houses gone bad, presenting them as victims of a hypocritical puritanism.\n\nI too imagine that I prefer today’s hedonism, but that doesn’t change the fact that the wager upon which consumer society depends might very well be a losing one: We (i.e., those who make consequential decisions) can release more and more people from their tacit and explicit obligations, thereby benefiting from the subsequent wealth generation and upward flow of power, because enough consumer goods will be spread around to keep enough people working and enough people passive.\n\nThe wager seemed reasonable enough at first: people can now have things they never had before, like homes, and things that never even existed before, like cars and TV sets. All they need to do is show up to work 40 hours a week. Most people accepted the deal. But here we are confronted with the heap paradox: how many is enough? New possible arrangements appear as alternatives: work less, live with less; demand more, hold the system hostage; exploit grey areas in the new set of agreements; make work out of undermining other industries (class action lawsuits, environmentalism, etc.). It doesn’t take much for things to start to fray. It’s no coincidence that, even setting victimary discourses aside, the most consistently stereotyped figure in contemporary culture is the middle class white guy who goes to work, tries to satisfy his wife, get some respect from his kids, and enjoy some leisure. What a sucker! A buffoon—a loser. It’s starting to look like fewer men are signing up—how many would be enough to make a difference? The heap paradox again.\n\nHere’s another paradox, one that I think could be considered a sociological law (I wish I could run it past Durkheim): by the time enough people agree that the more fundamental, tacit and long-term agreements can no longer endure to begin to restore those agreements it will be too late to do so. Maybe this is just a law of civilization, which requires that we not look too closely that those fundamental, tacit and long-term agreements. But that agreement will still be worth arriving at—something always has to come “after.” Those who have arrived at that agreement can, at least, accustom themselves to a bluntness that will seem a bit barbaric to those who think their local agreements guarantee civilization because they are the people who really count.\n\nIn other words, if the game is over, there’s no point to playing it. Those no longer playing can recover old vocabularies and generate new ones. To refer to my previous, maybe somewhat barbaric, post, a little (mostly indirect) debate on National Review over how far responsibility spreads for the murder of two police officers in Brooklyn is interesting. The more libertarian and “moderate” want to insist that it would be very wrong to consider anyone other than the killer himself responsible. Even if everyone is shouting “kill him,” that is, at a cornered man, only the man who throws the first stone is guilty. (A terror of mimetic contagion motivates this attitude: the same fear upon which modern leftism is based, that the normal is really a barely repressible insatiable appetite for scapegoats.)\n\nBut Andrew Mc Carthy made some fairly obvious counter-arguments, using terms that people don’t seem to be very comfortable with anymore, like “incitement.” If you lie (or acquiesce in lies) about specific events (say, what happened in Ferguson) in order to create a bigger lie (that whites in general, and white cops more specifically, are deliberately targeting young black men), and people draw the obvious conclusion that we need to “fight back” against the police, and then, at the end of the chain, a few people shoot at actual police officers, I will say you have blood on your hands. And I will say that anyone who associates with you has a little bit of that blood on their hands.\n\nAnd I will refuse to have dealings with anyone with that blood on their hands (thereby doing my little bit to restore some frayed social agreements). And if that proves impossible—i.e., if there aren’t enough people to vote for, work for and with, listen to, learn from, be friends with, etc., who haven’t signed onto the blood libel—well, what we have then is a heap."
    },
    {
      "slug": "victimary-terrorism-or-the-brinsley-left",
      "title": "Victimary Terrorism; or, the Brinsley Left",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2014",
      "url": null,
      "content": "There have been debates, going back to the 90s, at least, over whether ideologues and political figures should be held responsible for violent acts with which they can more or less plausibly be associated. Clinton strongly suggested that right-wing talk radio bore some blame for the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing; more recently and preposterously, many on the left tried to blame Sarah Palin for the shooting of Gabby Gifford (and many others). Of course, people on the right advance this kind of argument as well, for example, holding anti-war protestors responsible for the strength of the Iraqi resistance to US occupation and hence the loss of many lives, Iraqi and American (I plead guilty to that one).\n\nIt’s a real question, and the standard rejoinder that only the individual himself is responsible for his actions, while true in a legal and narrowly moral sense, avoids the issue of the discursive environment we are all responsible for creating. Perhaps some people fear the possibility that free speech rights will be threatened by too close a focus on the relation between words and deeds.\n\nLouis Farrakhan recently asserted that the way to fight back against the supposed rash of white police killings of black men is to kill “one of them” for each one of “us”–then, they’ll have to talk. Protestors in NYC, demanding “justice” for Eric Garner, chanted that they wanted dead cops. The very framing of the accusations, in which systematically racist police departments murder black youth regularly and with impunity, is a short step from declaring open season on police. No doubt, most of the protestors and race grifters like Jackson, Sharpton, Holder and Obama, are just “playing”–make some trouble, get some concessions, ensconce your self as “leaders” of the black community, etc. These people thrive on some local, calculated, chaos, but they don’t necessarily want the real thing. But they are playing with fire.\n\nThe protestors–who can now apparently take over malls without been stopped or arrested–are following in the footsteps of, and have already been far more successful than, the Occupy Wall Street mob. No doubt many of them are the same people. Maybe there are professional protestors now. I pointed out a couple of years ago that the concept of “occupy” was intrinsically terroristic: the idea is that we are going to shut things down until our demands are met. As Obama himself recently reiterated, people need to be “inconvenienced” a bit in the name of justice. Well, once you say that, the next question is how severe and chronic must the inconvenience be?\n\nA severe and chronic as the injustice, presumably; or, more simply, as severe and chronic as “necessary.” Why stop at killing two cops in Brooklyn? We will find out in the coming days, I suppose, how representative Ismaaily Brinsley, the murderer of officers Wenjin Lui and Raphael Ramos, is, but it certainly seems as if he conceived of his attack as revenge for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. And why not? Aren’t we all, and especially NYPD cops, “complicit”? If you think of what you are doing as asymmetrical warfare, police officers are certainly legitimate targets. And why shouldn’t occupiers and inconveniencers think of themselves in this way?\n\nWhat moral principle restrains them? Much chatter on Twitter in the wake of the murders expressed glee and ostentatious indifference, along with some sleazy pronouncements along the lines of “I’m very sorry this happened, but if you are going to let cops gun down black kids indiscriminately, you can’t be surprised…” No justice, no peace, after all–people are just starting to figure out what these cliches really mean, if you take them seriously.\n\nLeading figures in the NYPD have recently declared that they don’t want Mayor Di Blasio at any of their funerals. Unfortunately, they will now be put to the test. I hope they stand by their promise; I further hope that police throughout the country start fighting back against the steady stream of slander and incitement that has been directed at them. The Left relies on the civility of its targets as a cover for its own incivility, and for the police to engage the politics of “policephobia” risks the professionalism they depend on. At a certain point, though, professionalism has to defend itself against forces that wish to make that very professionalism impossible.\n\nPerhaps they should themselves bring posters of Lui and Ramos to the anti-police demonstrations they must police. Those of us who prefer the police, with all their human, all-too-human, flaws, to the legitimation of perpetual victimary terrorism implicit in the occupy and inconvenience movement, should at any rate strive to make Brinsley the icon of their movement. They have declared war on the legal system, and the agents of that system, they have insisted that its illegitimacy requires constant pressure from below and forceful intervention from above. So, could they explain why, exactly, killing cops isn’t a perfectly acceptable part of their social justice toolkit? I don’t believe they can, but I’d like to see some of them given a chance to try.\n\nThe Brinsley Left supports officially designated victims when they shoot the police."
    },
    {
      "slug": "barbarian-within",
      "title": "Barbarian Within",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The law of mimesis dictates that what another does you do, and what another does to you you do to them. For originary thinkers, the iconic form of this law is manifested on the originary scene—one reaches, then another reaches, and another, until one confronts another, then another… The initial interruption of this process, the originary sign, represents a deferral of the kind of violence that participants imagine would culminate in the unimaginable. We can assume that lesser, manageable forms of violence were immediately distinguished from more engulfing, cataclysmic kinds, similar to what is likely to take place in a bar fight: the two combatants will often be surrounded by the rest of the patrons, converted into audience and potential referee. If this doesn’t happen, if other patrons start taking sides, a uncontrollable melee might take place, with no outside intervention possible.\n\nThe process of civilization involves generalizing this distinction: containing local forms of violence in the interest of preventing a larger outbreak. Rules must come to govern those local forms of violence. We have become civilized when those rules become extensive and internalized enough so that we can all assume that our free actions (speaking our mind, having fun at some else’s expense, criticizing another, etc.) are buffered from any violent consequence. This also means that those free actions themselves follow the rules—there is a line between criticism and insult, between toleration of an offense and disgraceful acquiescence in one.\n\nStill, the basic mimetic law remains intact: if someone shows you a kindness, you respond in kind, you answer insult with insult. What changes is that we accept that those responses that “slide” toward certain dangerous forms of violence are to be mediated: we can answer insults with insults but we “answer” a mugging with a call to the police. We can assume that the most dangerous forms of violence will be those that threaten to activate the forms of violence characteristic of the honor society directly supplanted by civilized order: violence upon a member of one group answered by violence against members of the other group.\n\nNeedless to say, elements of this barbarism continue under civilized order, most obviously in organized crime and gang violence. But it continues in more fundamental ways. The legal system is so important to a civilized order because if it turns out that there’s no point to calling the police in response to a mugging, eventually recourse to other sources of satisfaction will be sought. In other words, we still, barbarically, demand our pound of flesh from the offender: we suspend our barbarian inclinations in deference to the controlled, more reliable barbarism of the state. To be thoroughly civilized would be to forego satisfaction for the offense committed against us individually in favor of the invention and dissemination of practices that would reduce the level of offense more generally.\n\nThis, of course, is the classical mid-20th century liberal position: the liberal as he who is too broad-minded to take his own side in a fight. The problem with that form of liberalism is that it encourages its own subversion by implicitly licensing offenders who now know there will be no answer to their transgressions. Which really means we can never be thoroughly civilized: we can only suspend our barbarism, which also means we must preserve it.\n\nNor is there any need to stop at barbarism—prior to barbarism there is what used to be called “savagery.” These terms were used consistently in the 19th century (I have some familiarity with them through my reading of Marx and Engels, who had no problem distinguishing between the stages of “lower” and “higher” barbarism). I think we can fit them rather easily into originary thinking: barbarism is an order organized around competing “Big Men,” while “savagery” refers to the more egalitarian, collective society prior to the emergence of Big Men, where we must assume violence was much less mediated (even by fear of an assault on one’s tribe) and therefore more common, more random and less consequential.\n\nAs a barbarian, you would brutally assault your boss for not giving you the promotion you deserve; as a savage, you slap a clerk in the store for telling you that an item was more expensive than you assumed. For the barbarian, violence is preserved and concentrated; for the savage, freely dispensed, easily forgotten. We are all, I think, familiar with these kinds of resentment: a desire to lash out at petty irritations, on the one hand, and slow, burning anger at more sustained refusals to recognize what we take to be our value. All this is rooted in mimetic law. Indeed, civilization multiplies the possibilities of these resentments.\n\nCivilization also makes these resentments, our inner barbarian and savage, very unpleasant to behold. If a savage wants his fellow tribesman’s wife, he is deterred by the resistance he imagines she might put up and the revenge her husband might exact (along with whatever divine punishment he might imagine follows); but he has no reason to deny that that is what he wants, or to stop looking out for an opportunity. I imagine most of us would find such overt recognition of desires, even to ourselves, a hindrance to everyday intercourse. Hence “repression” and “sublimation.” Hence the periodic revolts against, in particular, civilized sexual norms (including prohibitions on profanity and obscenity), that we have witnessed since the early 19th century, revolts that with each iteration modify those civilized norms, ratcheting them further towards violation, until we get to the point where there’s not much left to violate.\n\nThe only remaining norm is “consent,” but we now get to see how problematic that norm is, as new rules regarding sexual relations on college campuses turn “consent” into something very complicated indeed: if power differentials make consent impossible, then consent might very well be impossible.\n\nOne important part of the civilizing process over the past 50 years has concerned the treatment of children. Here, I consistently encounter testimony that matches my own experience: middle class children are far less free now than they were in the 60s and 70s (the 80s is when the change started to set in). Moral panics regarding sexual predators have often been the pretext for the tightening of restrictions on children, but I think what lies behind it is a squeamishness regarding the patent barbarism of children left to their own devices. This is what lies behind the campaigns against bullying: bullying is the “Big Man” form of rule among children.\n\nChildren inflict suffering on each other fairly casually; they incite one another to risky behavior. This used to be tacitly accepted, on the grounds that children needed to learn to take care of themselves under free conditions—to learn how to defend yourself, to deal with hurt feelings, to resist the pull of the crowd, to learn from the occasional broken leg or nose. Serious injury, much less death, was obviously very rare—a risk that could be accepted. At a certain point, I think, adults just couldn’t look at this any more, a moral turning point analogous to the disgust that must have ultimately obsolesced gladiatorial contests and will perhaps do the same for football before too long.\n\nMaybe today’s culture wars are between opposing views of the civilized/barbarian/savage spectrum. On one side are those consumed with uprooting and extirpating all that reeks of barbarism and savagery within the already civilized and therefore safe institutions (and to a sensitized nose, a great deal reeks); on the other side are those content to try and sustain a workable balance of our barbarian and savage inclinations with our civilized order. Those determined to civilize all they see are trapped in the paradox I identified before: to thoroughly civilize oneself is to encourage outright barbarism and savagery in others.\n\nEven more, and even more paradoxically, it licenses a kind of barbarism in oneself, the barbarism of hatred towards those who interfere with your slightest inclination. But those who see that we can only balance out all the consequences of mimetic law are unable to defend themselves effectively against charges of archaic barbarisms and savagery (they don’t get offended at ethnic jokes so readily, they will remark un-self-consciously on manifestations of gender difference, they will jokingly advocate harsh, even gruesome punishments of criminals, and retaliation against foreign enemies, etc.)—they are treasure troves of gaffes just ready to go viral.\n\nIt seems to me that there is a fairly interesting anti-civilizational revolt that has almost disappeared in the process. I recently saw a pretty good movie called The Chatterly Affair, a movie centered on the obscenity case in 1960 against the publication of Lady Chatterly’s Lover. It seemed pretty true to the trial, from other accounts I had heard, and one thing that was interesting about it was that all the arguments were on the side of allowing publication (and, by implication, overturning laws that would forbid it)—aesthetic arguments, cultural arguments, moral arguments, sociological arguments. On the other side there was really nothing but, as a famous Supreme Court decision had it, “I know it when I see it.”\n\nOnce that layer of tacit agreement was broached, it proved impossible to reconstruct it verbally and intellectually, and we all know what rushed through. But even more interesting is that that whole cultural vein, from Lawrence and Henry Miller, through comedians of the 60s like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, and even including important tendencies in feminism, seems to have completely dried up. The only contemporary example I can think of is Trey Parker and Mark Stone, the makers of South Park. (There are some very interesting–to me, at least–literary developments along these lines though, even if they are still marginal.) But that massive cultural revolt has been replaced, precisely among those demographically identical to its original constituency, by “trigger warnings.”\n\nIt would be good to see a revival, beyond left and right (as it would have to be), of this cultural tendency, because, beyond the anti-civilizational resentment lay something more valuable: a sacrificial willingness on the part of the artist or thinker to bear and make visible the forbidden and the abject, to enact a kind of discovery procedure of our inner savagery and barbarism. Even more, it has represented a play element in culture, beyond the rather narrow games that we usually play—maybe there is a connection between the marginalization of this kind of cultural practice and the clamping down on childhood. Interestingly, it would take cultural practitioners willing to be demonized, censored and punished by the left, and being willing to take that on would require a drastic remaking of the inherited cultural identity such practitioners would start off with.\n\nIt would be lonely, because they couldn’t really be conservatives, either (even if some conservatives might cheer them on), and the kind of fearlessness needed to liberate oneself from established cultural roles is very rare. But they would be performing a great service—and might even become marketable before too long."
    },
    {
      "slug": "digitality-and-civilization",
      "title": "Digitality and Civilization",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I would like to use Eric Gans’s most recent, and for me extremely illuminating, Chronicle of Love and Resentment, to continue my series on civilization. (And, following Gans, I hope this will contribute to conversations we will have in High Point in June.) Gans makes three central (for my purposes, at least) claims: first, that the emergence of the “digital humanities” enables us to reflect upon the originary digitality of humanity: the sacred/profane distinction being the original 1/0 binary upon which all culture is built. Second, that the digital humanities draw out what is essential to the project of abstract or conceptual art, which is that (iconic, analog) content is ultimately secondary to simply positing the work or text as an object worthy of attention—indeed, taking this a step further, one might say that analog content (a picture looking like a landscape, a novel recording socially recognizable persons and events, etc.) is really nothing more than a Hitchcockian “Mac Guffin,” meant to convince the reader, viewer or listener that something of moral or intellectual value justifies the attention one pays to the text.\n\nIt is, then, really the text or work “about nothing” that we watch (to continue the Seinfeld reference) “because it’s on TV” that exemplifies the paradoxicality of the originary sign’s positing of the reality it purports to represent. Third, that the digital humanities derives its appeal from the exhaustion of academics from decades of being hammered with increasingly simplistic victimary discourse. The importance of this desire, in the process of finding satisfaction, to not confront but simply avoid or neutralize victimary thinking, could hardly be overstated, since it implies the possibility of post-victimary models of cultural politics well beyond its current academic applications.\n\nCivilization, like any cultural form, is founded on a binary: civilized vs. uncivilized (with the distinction between barbarism and savagery pertaining to the latter term probably not that central to our understanding of the constitution of civilization, which first of all distinguishes itself from barbarism—the honor/gift/shame culture). The installation of civilization requires replacing one set of binaries, organized around the honor/shame one, with another, organized around the distinctions between civility and honor, and guilt and shame. This process is effected by a recoding of terms denoting obligations and virtues, transforming very literal and material understandings of concepts like “debt,” “violation” and “penalty” (involving the extraction of pain and blood, and/or the transference of resources) into more nuanced and polysemous understanding of these terms that distance them from their material consequences.\n\nHonor, for example, shifts from the ability to avenge, and therefore the ability to deter, any offense to one’s power or possessions, to a reputation for playing by the rules. The Renaissance was essentially such a process, carried out in the fields of representation (from two-dimensional to three-dimensional), religion (from ritual to individual conscience), politics (the absolute monarchy dispelling the archaic honor culture, which had led to uncontrolled violence among contending nobles) and the shift from orality to literacy.\n\nRenaissance thinkers were both sharply aware of the cost and difficulty of constructing civilization out of barbarism (and hence the need to remain vigilant against the recrudescence of barbarism) and distant enough from the culture that had been overcome to study it and see it as a kind of originary model for a naturalness and spontaneity against which civilization could appear artificial, brutally calculating and corrupted. Perhaps this tension accounts for the greatness of so much Renaissance art, and the sense since the Renaissance that such greatness could not be surpassed or duplicated. The forgetting of the price of civilization sets in during the Enlightenment, when it became possible to imagine an originary humanity constructed on the model of the rational man of property (the figure of the Enlightenment itself).\n\n(This forgetting, incidentally, could be seen as the source of that “dissociation of sensibility” bemoaned by T.S. Eliot, and which Eliot identified with a shift in the language during the 17th century—in English, anyway—a suggestion that the digital humanities could perhaps explore more productively than Eliot’s more intuitive, albeit highly cultivated, approach allowed for.) This model then legitimated, on the left, destructive assaults on the social institutions that obscured, through civilizing accretions, that rational man. Here, in the fusion of Enlightenment and Romanticism, we see the origin of the victimary narrative in the distinction between a state of nature, exemplified by marginalized, even disappearing, groups, such as peasant farmers and the “savages” of the New World, and an oppressive civilization.\n\nBut for supporters of civilization, rather than the romantic reversal of the civilization/nature binary, civilizational binaries went in a more therapeutic direction. Let’s take a step back and acknowledge the enormous energy involved in replacing one cultural form (one founding binary) with another. This process requires ruthless fanatics (who may be conveniently demonized or forgotten once they have completed their work)—it requires a hunt for every last place where the binary to be extirpated still displays some life, and it cannot be too selective about the means of uprooting employed. Civilization is indeed founded on what a civilized society must recognize as terrible crimes.\n\nAt a certain point, the cultural conflict emerges between those who continue that fanaticism past its necessity (like English teachers today who drill their students with grammar) and those who recognize the possibility of a relaxation of the new norms. (Of course, this conflict could be framed in the opposite way, as one between those who have forgotten what those norms are for, and how fragile the boundaries of civilization ultimately remain, and those who remember. Maybe civilization requires that its citizens never entirely surrender their civilizational fanaticism.)\n\nOnce the work of uprooting one binary and implanting another has been completed, the problem emerges of what combination of residual and emergent binaries needs to be taken up next. The real problem of some kinds of cultural conservatism is that they remain stuck in an older “fanaticism” when it’s necessary to move on, perhaps with equal vigor, to a new one. The work of civilizing is never done, human beings can never be thoroughly civilized once and for all, because desires and resentments remain rooted in savagery and barbarism (the fantasy of a thoroughly civilized being is currently invested in the fear of and desire for Artificial Intelligence).\n\nSo, while Enlightenment intellectuals and Romantics inverted civilizational binaries, the “disciplinary” functionaries of modern civilization (of whom Foucault was perhaps right to take Jeremy Bentham as the model) got to work extending the fundamental civilized/uncivilized binary into new territories, now under the distinction between the normal and the abnormal. These new fanatics built penal and legal systems, schools and pedagogies, pathologies and therapies, organized around perpetually ginned up fears that we have come to call (thanks to the left, I must admit) “moral panics.”\n\nA yet untold story of post-Auschwitz victimary movements is the way such movements have nestled themselves within a broader critique of the disciplinary culture—which has really been an argument within therapeutic culture between its normalizing wing, which (Freud being the main example here) realized that one must treat the injuries of normalization, and a new wing which saw the possibility of reclaiming a pre-violated self from those injuries as an indictment of normalization. It was easy enough to take the model of the normal man, woman, child, life-cycle, broken down into normal sexual relations, normal human interactions in public and private, normal emotional fluctuations, and so on, and identify that normal subject as white, male, Western, heterosexual, and middle class.\n\nThe now seemingly exhausted theoretical movements of “critical theory” (originating with the Frankfurt School) and the “cultural studies” critical theory, via post-structuralism flowed into, found a very rich vein of normalizing binaries to be inverted here. Victimary thinking merely needed to step into the shoes cobbled together by critical theory. The current propaganda campaign against micro-aggressions continues to draw upon these riches, which makes it easy to attack the most minute elements of civilized manners and, further, to turn the charge of pathology back on the presumably normative model (the homophobe is the pathological one, not the homosexual, etc.).\n\nWhat the digital humanities help to make clear, though, is that anyone can play this game. There is a real civilizational justification for inverting the binaries upon which civilization is founded—a justification for the Enlightenment, Romanticism and even, if diminishingly, victimary culture. How else could one challenge the overreach of civilizational fanaticism better than with a counter-fanaticism that, to quote Seinfeld once again, “does the opposite”? (Mid-twentieth century diagnoses of, say, “juvenile delinquency,” Elvis’s hips, etc., do seem comically fanatical now. Of course, we might still be wrong about that.)\n\nSince, contrary to metaphors we like to use regarding civilizational or cultural “dialogue,” there is no “table” at which “we” all sit down and work out, consensually, the terms of the coming stage of civilization. It’s all push and shove. The pushing of victimary culture has become a civilizational fanaticism in its own right, an incredibly ambitious normalizing project that even wants to determine how men sit on the subway (“manspreading”) or whether they stand up to urinate. The resentful barbarizing of some strains of libertarianism (“South Park libertarianism”) is a shove back, and there is no doubt more to come, once the new counter-culturalists realize that rather try and confront, attack, dismantle, etc., victimary culture directly, they would be more effective by simply iterating the victimary culture’s civilizational fanaticism in so many forms that it becomes inseparable from its parodies and make equally parodic reversals (female oppressing male, black oppressing white, gay oppressing straight, perhaps within utopian and dystopian settings, at least at first) intelligible and acceptable.\n\nEven more, the shift from iconic representations to statistical distributions facilitates the dispersion of the iconic victimary representations (the rape, the lynching, the Crusade) into a vast field of probabilities filled with exceptions and various possible “framings.” (Not to mention how developments in genetic science will enormously complicate our understandings of the relations between group genetic endowments and cultural accomplishments and failures.) In the process, esthetic representations can become less didactic and more abstract and conceptual (i.e., more civilized), simply displaying to us over and over again that it is we who are constructing the binaries we then defend or rebel against.\n\nCertainly this “shoving” requires some courage, but rarely in heroic quantities, especially given the room for anonymity in digital culture. That might lead us back to the real work of constructing new boundaries of “normality,” on more subtle, dispersed and reciprocally transparent terms. And that work might involve a remembering of the price of civilization, as we become more aware (there is an oscillation, characteristic of the civilized individual, between naivete and a cynicism involved here) that “all” we are really doing is marking the distinction between civilization and that form of violence (internal or external, physical or intellectual) currently threatening it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-future-must-not-belong-to-those-who-slander-the-prophet-of-islam-president-b",
      "title": "The Future Must Not Belong to Those Who Slander the Prophet of Islam (President Barack Obama)",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Of course not–that’s why insults to the prophet need to be avenged.\n\nNow, I’m not saying that Obama wants insults to the prophet to be avenged, just that his way of thinking perfectly complements those who do. Catering to Muslim sensitivities, being careful to avoid any perceived insult, policing ourselves for the slightest inkling of a “backlash”–all this encourages terrorism. That most in our political, academic, and cultural elites don’t see how obvious that is is an index of the level of civilization we have attained. It is precisely the most civilized among us who can’t imagine anyone having recourse to barbarism and savagery without having suffered unspeakably and thereby warped not just at the hands of the so-called civilized world, but as a result of the hypocrisy of that world.\n\nAccording to that logic, the more barbaric they are, the more barbaric and hypocritical “we” must really be–“we” being, in fact, “they,” those whom the ultra-civilized wish to distinguish themselves at all costs, the middle class barbarians who have really only retained a patina of civilization. In order to make this distinction absolute, reality must be inverted, and the victims of terrorism must be its cause.\n\nSomeone for whom the mass murders in Paris are yet another one of those events about anything but Islam has probably already pointed out how much more likely the average citizen of the Western world is to die of an auto accident than a terrorist attack. What today’s attack reminds us, though, is that no one will ever refuse to publish a story, or a cartoon, or make a movie, or write a book, because they might be in an auto accident one day.\n\nThe media of the Western world should do this anyway, but one positive effect of every media outlet publishing the cartoons over which the editors and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were killed is that it would test the proposition that such attacks are carried out by a few “extremists,” or even lunatics, who represent nothing in Islam. If Muslims genuinely want to be full participants in the modern world, they would urge on such a universal snub of the “prophet,” precisely so that they can show that they can respond to it in a civilized manner. And they would set up “watch” sites “outing” every Muslim leader who said anything that could construed as encouraging violence, working with police and intelligence agencies to have them expelled, their citizenship revoked, etc.\n\nBut, then, they would be doing that already. (Would we be able to recognize them as anything but “Uncle Ahmeds,” though?) American leftist Jews agonize constantly and publicly over what Israel does, purportedly “in their name.” From their perspective, they’re right: regardless of the fairness of it, your complicity in the acts of others is not completely up to you, and so it’s best to be safe and disown actions which might implicate one. For that matter, American leftists in the academy, media and culture industry who are ashamed of their fellow Americans’ barbarous behavior throughout the world are right to make it clear that they would like to see a different America. But that means the supposed vast majority of innocent Muslims would be right to do the same.\n\nEric Gans and I engaged in a dialogue a few years ago over the relative weight of physical fear and white guilt in the cringing attitude of Western elites to Islam. This seems like a good time to revisit the question. The conclusion I arrived at after further reflections on that dialogue is that for those having to decide what to publish, produce and disseminate, the overriding factor is certainly fear; but white guilt is the reason that fear is the only response available to them. People are afraid in all kinds of circumstances, but they don’t always let fear control their actions. When they don’t, the reason (leaving aside extraordinary cases of individual bravery) is the shame they would feel in the face of those people with whom they have exchanged promises (tacit or explicit) to have one another’s back. Those consumed with white guilt have no one’s back and would be ashamed if someone had theirs–that (necessarily exclusionary) solidarity is the very source of the guilt.\n\nOne of my own renunciations (imperfectly practiced, no doubt) is the use of the word “should,” especially in the context of some kind of criticism. It seems to me intellectually lazy, like relying on a standard plot point to finish up a movie–the West should stand up for itself, etc. It’s also an admission of impotence–if they’re not doing it, obviously they don’t think they should, so what does saying they should add, exactly? It’s better to simply lay down markers to determine what things mean. It is to his great credit that Bill Maher speaks openly about the difference and danger of Islam. I hope he has a good security detail.\n\nBut he doesn’t expose the political and cultural leaders who exempt “moderate Muslims” from the task of cleansing themselves from association with their barbaric co-religionists. The only really meaningful response to the implication of Islam (not “radical Islam,” not “Islamism”) in contemporary barbarism and savagery is to insist as a condition of residence, much less citizenship, Muslims be required to forswear allegiance to organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and articles of faith that are habitually implicated in that savagery and barbarism. (Maybe, airport security style, we should demand this of everyone requesting a visa.)\n\nThe analogy here is to Europeans coming after World War II who were required to swear that they were not members of the Nazi or Communist Party. Here, as well, moderate Muslims would be happy to help draw up the lists, and eagerly take the opportunity to put the weight of social sanction and public opinion in the balance in reforming their religion. Needless to say, this is not very likely. It’s still worth proposing it, though, as a marker of how diametrically opposed prevailing Western habits are to the qualities needed to resist barbarism and savagery."
    },
    {
      "slug": "victims-perpetrators-bystanders-remarks-on-the-70th-anniversary-of-the-liberatio",
      "title": "Victims, Perpetrators, Bystanders: Remarks on the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Victims/Perpetrators/Bystanders was the mapping of the world produced by Auschwitz, as represented by the historian Raul Hilberg. This mapping has become canonical, even for those unfamiliar with it, and it is enormously powerful and, I believe, the basic structure of White Guilt and victimary thinking. The extremity of victimization produced by Auschwitz (as synecdoche of the Shoah as a whole), drew all social institutions into its orbit and implicated everyone. Why is everyone implicated? Because the Nazis aimed not just at killing all the Jews, but at ensuring that the world would never know; that we know is due to those few courageous witnesses, during and after the event; if we don’t become witnesses ourselves in response to their testimony we collude in the Nazi project by burying the event—an event that, even while now well attested to, is always in danger of being smothered by indifference and losing its monitory power, and in that sense being “buried.”\n\nThus, the acquisitions of Western civilization, making it possible for any individual to be an impartial observer—whether of esthetic products or events calling for moral judgment or judicial impartiality, or through scientific detachment—were shattered. The term “bystander” is deeply sardonic here—the bystander is, indeed, by definition, “innocent,” but in this event such innocence involves guilt, even for those as far away as American citizens, who, for example, voted for representatives who refused Jews the right to seek refuge in the US as they were being massacred. No doubt the Nazis aimed at such a universal implication—“if you love the Jews so much, why don’t you take them?”\n\n(And if you don’t take them, doesn’t that mean you don’t want them, in which case are we not just doing the dirty work on your behalf?) In that case, the category of “bystander” can connote innocence no more (indeed, there is always a little bit of doubt about the bystander—if you were there, surely you could have done something, if your indifference or cowardice or even some secret pleasure in the act had not held you back). The victim/perpetrator/bystander triad overwhelms figure of the citizen who stands equal with all other citizens within a binary opposition to some actual or potential tyranny that would oppress them all.\n\nThe bystander places the taint of guilt on the citizen, and that guilt leads the citizen qua bystander to seek out a victim to bear witness to—hence the compulsory character of White Guilt. (It is, first of all, witnessing, i.e., spreading the implication, which enables one to bear the burden of bystander guilt.) The moral and political question is whether this should (and could) be resisted. I think the answer is “no” in both cases: the transcendence or abolition of White Guilt will not be brought about through a return to the impartial observer in morality, politics, science and art—too many events still conspire to re-position one as bystander (too many events are not different enough from the Shoah for us to be certain in advance that we will not be implicated).\n\nMoreover, the universal implication of the bystander entails no particular political stance, and certainly not the vicious victimary politics that has emerged in recent decades. What it does entail is an acknowledgement of our role in constituting social reality as witnesses, or an ostensive modification of the civilizational acquisitions of objectivity and impartiality. Where we stand when we point at something for others to see is part of the pointing (in which case there is always a self-reflexive pointing back at ourselves), and that “where” need not be some identitarian political stance (race/gender/orientation/etc.); rather, it can be a position within some genre of discourse or some cultural or civilizational category. What we would ultimately be bearing witness to in that case is the tentative and fragile conditions of such acquisitions, as part of our promise to preserve them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-note-on-civilization-and-periodization",
      "title": "A Note on Civilization and Periodization",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Retrieving the category of “civilization” as a central term in the human sciences provides us with a way of revisiting familiar historical periodizations and, ultimately, answering the most important question: what is happening right now? If the period known as the Renaissance involved the completion of the civilizing process that had been ongoing since Europe began to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire and the initial Islamic invasions, it also involved an awareness of what had been accomplished, a vivid remembrance of the recently suppressed barbarism, and the beginnings of the figuration of the civilization/barbarism distinction in terms of varied speculations on “Nature.”\n\nThe subsequent period, known to us as “modernity,” could then be understood as a dual process in which the fruits of civilization were reaped while the civilizing process was gradually forgotten. The two sides of this development complement each other: constitutive of a fully developed civilization is the distancing of its denizens from the systematic “addiction” to violence civilization had to transcend, and the naturalizing of civilized habits. The “originary” reflections of the Enlightenment, which project the modern bourgeois citizen back to a pre-social state, provide a perfect example of this forgetting (as does the very term “modernity,” suggesting, as it does, the possibility of a new beginning ex nihilo).\n\nThe final forgetting of the civilizing process is the emergence of the normalizing process in the 19th century, in which all the obstacles to civilization are internalized, made into therapeutic and educational issues rather than moral questions or problems of manners.\n\nWe can, then, shed the following light on “postmodernity”: in response to the stirrings of barbarism in class warfare in the Western world and renewed experience with it in imperialism across the globe, Westerners resistant to normalization (a very imperfect process, one must grant) cultivated the following resentments towards their civilization: first, the insistence that Western civilization was really nothing more than a disguised barbarism, a criticism that targeted (especially in the wake of World War I) the failure of the West to suppress “atavistic” forms of violence once and for all—a critique that then inevitably directs attention to a wide variety of other barbarisms hidden behind a civilized “veneer’”; and, two, an outright defense of the suppressed barbarisms and savageries as modes of freedom more worthy of preservation than the unsatisfying and “uptight” freedoms of civilization—for a while, this defense of barbarism and savagery was a kind of play (in certain kinds of Romantic and avant-garde “decadence,” in the championing of sexual liberation, the hippies of the 1960s, etc.), al though even much of that took a devastating toll, but now we have the real thing with the renewed Islamic war against the West, which our rulers and elites are completely incapable of addressing.\n\nThese two anti-civilizational resentments are logically contradictory but politically complementary. This analysis would explain why no one has come up with a better term than the feeble “postmodern”—these contrary impulses, which civilization has been absorbing with decreasing resistance, and which make civilization unsustainable, also make a coherent account of this historical “period” impossible. If civilization is restored and those resentments marginalized, we will have our new period; if civilization is destroyed, who will care?\n\nSo, what is happening now is the sharpening of the anti-civilizational pincer movements, which have lost their play character and the inhibitions that accompanied it; the defense of modernity, under the assumption that attacks on it are mere parasites, rather than an auto-immune breakdown; and the search, more or less conscious, for a new rhythm of civilization, in which a renewed civilizing process can simultaneously keep the perennial threats of barbarism and savagery in view. Civilization replaced hostage taking, which presupposes, like the prisoner’s dilemma, that we are locked in together, as a mode of agreement, with the protection of spaces (property) that allowed for a diversity of exchanges, or agreements.\n\nEnsuring that no individual must enter the gift circle with one, and only one, specific individual, served as an enormous lever, deferring manifold forms of violence. But this new space of property locks us in together in a new way, creating new interdependencies that make hostage taking possible again. Victimary politics is as effective as it is because a few individuals can make enough of the assumptions of civilization problematic to extract concessions in the hope of return to normalcy. We have just barely begun to get a glimpse at what forms of hostage taking politicized hackers might invent. This is the central problem of any re-civilizing process: to neutralize these proliferating new forms of hostage taking."
    },
    {
      "slug": "bio-politics",
      "title": "Bio-Politics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This is a term generally credited to Michel Foucault, to describe what comes after the “disciplinary society,” when social institutions no longer just normalize subjects but intervene in the production of the population from birth (and even before) on up—when all politics becomes concerned with the health of the population, considered as a source of wealth. Foucault’s The Birth of Bio-Politics is almost completely concerned with historical and contemporary liberal and neo-liberal thought, including Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Gary Becker—there is currently a little debate among leftists over whether the later Foucault went over to the dark side (i.e., conservatism, or at least free marketism), and this book gives grounds for such suspicions.\n\nFoucault examines these thinkers in detail, sympathetically, without the slightest hint of animadversion—a Foucauldian leftist could console herself that he simply laying bare the obvious horror of these ideals, in a style very familiar to readers of Foucault (never once, in his famous “Panopticism” essay, does Foucault explicitly condemn the phenomenon in question). Maybe, but it reads to me more like Foucault is approaching these ideas with a real sense of discovery and even common interests. The main question he poses is, once we see the “self” as “marketable,” and society as composed of as the infinitely complicated interplay of all these selves on the market, what is left for the government to do.\n\nIt doesn’t seem to me that Foucault arrives at a very clear answer, other than “not very much,” but, implicitly, the real answer is to intervene when these selves make “irrational” decisions that will interfere with both the market chances of those individuals and the smooth functioning of the market as a whole; but, since the government can no longer operate vertically, with explicit decisions that are obeyed by subjects and enforced by the police without destroying the economy, these interventions must operate on incentives—through what Cass Sunstein calls “nudges” (the government doesn’t tell people what to choose; rather, it influences the “choice architecture”).\n\nThe interventions are very indirect, then, but very thoroughgoing, as there is no end to irrational choices that will impair the individual’s marketable and increase costs to society—diet, exercise, mold in one’s house, driving habits, sexual practices, gun ownership, etc.—assign a few bureaucrats to make up a list and you’ll see that nothing of our lives is off-limits. A very different kind of thinker, Mark Steyn, in essence agrees with this point when he regularly points out the inverse proportion between the importance given by a government to healthcare, on the one hand, and national defense, on the other: once the government takes primary responsibility for the health of its population, there will be no resources or will remaining for traditional state functions—in a sense, to sound another Foucaudian theme, health becomes the primary security concern (and security concerns become health concerns, with terrorist attacks and even—why not?—foreign invasions posing health risks to be measured against cancer, traffic accidents, planetary warming, suicides caused by bullying and gender confusion, etc.).\n\nWe could add to this form of bio-politics ongoing (and sure to intensify) debates over the private and public uses of medical information, the genetic engineering of food (and people), changing legal regimes regarding drug use, the proliferation of pharmaceuticals, itself tied to questions of intellectual property—all of which at least suggests that bio-politics can be contentious rather than dystopian and totalitarian.\n\nI would like to use the term a little differently, perhaps in an even more disturbing sense (or, perhaps, I am simply including more under the concept). In the United States, over the past 15 years, voting patterns have so stabilized as to leave no more than 5% or so of the population as the “swing vote” that will decide the Presidential election. We can be pretty sure that the 2016 election will come down to who wins, at most, 4-5 states—Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado. There are a couple of others, but too small to matter much, and we can really reduce it to Florida and Ohio. This means that we know whom everyone votes for, and I’m going to tell you right now:\n\nDemocrat:\n\nBlacks\n\nHispanics\n\nJews\n\nGays\n\nSingle women\n\nGovernment employees (excepting police officers and the military—but not necessarily prison guards)\n\nPeople on welfare or disability\n\nUnion members\n\nAcademics\n\nTrial lawyers\n\nMembers of the “helping professions” (social workers, nurses, teachers—not necessarily doctors)\n\nRepublican:\n\nWhites\n\nChurch going Christians\n\nMarried couples with children\n\nThose employed in the private, non-unionized sector\n\nNow, there is plenty of overlap here, and we could put together a very interesting Venn diagram showing which category prevails in the case of a conflict (married black couples with children still vote Democrat, for example; as do white academics and government employees—which is really to say that the categories in the Democratic column siphon off votes from those in the Republican column—otherwise, Republicans would get 70% of the vote); there are some demographics that fall out of these categories and are less “reliable” voting blocks (who knows about unemployed single men in their 20s, for example; Asians lean Democrat but still seem to be wavering, among other, minor, anomalies); and, needless to say, lots of exceptions.\n\nBut I think these categories hold, for anywhere from 70-90% of the groups in question. And the tendency is for them to harden, for reasons of political pragmatics: if you are a Democrat candidate in a tight race, which is going to seem the better bet: trying to convince 5% of married evangelical women to vote for you, or trying to push your share of single women from 70% up to 80%? The latter is the path of least resistance, requiring the least in terms of compromise or antagonizing other parts of your “base.” From such calculations is the crazed rhetoric of the “War on Women” born.\n\nThe point is that politics is becoming “bio” in the additional sense of becoming “demographic.” It would be very interesting to chart changes in the use of the word “demographic” over the past 15 years. I believe such a study would show a shift from referring to “demographics” as something that “is,” as referring to a mapping of the entire population, to “demographic” as something one “has” and does things with—I now regularly see, especially in younger commentators, the use of the phrase “a demographic,” or “their demographic,” as a way of distinguishing one group from others (“demographic” as noun, that is, rather than adjective, as in “demographic composition”… ), thereby replacing older terms like “ethnicities,” which then slides into seeing them as agents, as having moral qualities (the “white male demographic” is, of course, especially reviled), or being possessions that might be deployed in certain ways.\n\nThis is an important shift because ethnicities (like races) are seen as “natural” groups which, in a mobile, modern society like America get diluted and may shrink, but are beyond the control of politicians—one could speak of winning over the Italian vote, but one would never think of producing more Italians, much less trying to reduce their numbers. But the term “demographic” suggests just such an “elastic” possibility, and it is only a matter of time before the political parties direct their attention away from trying to encroach on the other side’s “demographic “and towards the more basic problem of transforming the demographic make up of the country itself—i.e., adding to its numbers and subtracting from the other’s.\n\nIn fact, for the Democrats, that time has come, as it is widely acknowledged that their passion for legalizing and naturalizing the tens of millions of illegal aliens presently in the country (and how many more to come?) is a result of a shift in focus from the “white working class” “demographic” lost to the Republicans to the “emerging Hispanic” one. Welfare and related policies, including those dis-incentivizing marriage, can also be seen as bio-political in this sense of producing more of one’s demographic. It is also no coincidence that friends of the left have become comfortable proclaiming the need for certain demographics (elderly whites) to die off so that we can finally pass a crucial threshold in our racial and sexual politics. (Not to mention Islam’s demographic strategy in Europe; or that Israel and the Palestinians have engaged in demographic politics for a long time.)\n\nWe’re all familiar with the most infamous 20th century case of trying to increase favored and decrease disfavored “demographics,” so there are still some inhibitions to be overcome here. But we live in an age where inhibitions tumble like dominoes: we look, for the most part untroubled, upon mini (so far) genocides in Africa and Mesopotamia committed by murderous Muslim groups; we have a President who eggs on racial rioters, and takes counsel from a supporter of pogrom-like mob activities; we have protestors who call for the killing of cops, and much more. The inhibitions for the most part hold on the Republican/conservative side, but those may be weakening as well, first of all through a growing obsession with government surveillance, the heroicizing of law-breaking “whistleblowers,” and some cheap anti-cop rhetoric (on the other side of the question, the open contempt recently displayed by the NYPD toward Mayor Di Blasio suggests a lowering of inhibitions regarding civil/police distinctions and lines of command—can it be too long before members of the rank and file military display such contempt for a leftist Commander-in-Chief?).\n\nAnyway, it is in the nature of things that one side alone cannot bear the burden of the inhibitions comprising civil society. It is hard to see how, other than through the unlikely prospect of restrictive (and enforced) immigration laws a conservative demographic politics would work on the national level (a “natalist” policy, for example, would seem to come up against too many constitutional and ideological obstacles; one could support pro-marriage policies so as to increase the married “demographic” but marriage requires deferral and discipline so it’s much easier to create policies that increase the single “demographic”), but there is much more promise on the local level.\n\nThe demographic wars are underway here as well, as the Obama administration pushes policies aimed at breaking up the suburbs and imposing upon them the “demographics” of the cities. Here, though, it is the Left that has the uphill struggle. There is nothing more sacred to the middle class than the “demographics” of their neighborhoods, and people will clear out at the least sign of demographic shift. And they have plenty of tools to fight with. A right-wing demographic politics would involve the creation of enclaves in which demographic balances are assiduously maintained, first of all in subtle ways so as to avoid running afoul of civil rights laws and social consensus, but ultimately less so, through transformation of or defiance of the laws and consensus.\n\nWe would see the return of something like the restrictive covenants outlawed after World War 2, not necessarily focused on race, but on other demographic markers: criminal background checks, the exclusion of the unmarried, the favoring of those expected to join one of the local congregations, etc. Along with other measures, such as a tight control of school boards and therefore curriculum, it would be possible to produce and maintain the desired demographic. Within this context we could then see overtly natalist policies, or at least social pressure in that direction. Right now pro-life politics makes a point of not distinguishing among “demographics,” to the extent of insisting that the post-Roe abortion regime has entailed a veritable black genocide.\n\nOnce the prospect of changing national policy and culture on this issue fades, it is likely that pro-lifers will turn their attention to the “demographics” they are most able to influence, and the demographic war will be more fully engaged: one side increasing its demographic through immigration and state subsidization of enlarged “demographics,” and the other through enclaves, even, shall we say “no-go zones,” in which abundant life is celebrated and an armed citizenry (an ascendant “demographic”) makes it difficult for an increasingly bloated and incompetent state to impose its rule. It will not be long before eugenics adds fuel to the fire, with wealthy state and corporate elites and gay and lesbian couples, concerned with distinguishing their own demographic from some of their allied ones, demanding access to the latest in reproductive technologies, and the possibility of healthier, smarter and stronger children will surely entice the more affluent in the suburban enclaves.\n\nBio-politics in the Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian senses I opened this post with would be drawn in as well, given the intense interest in managing life at each step along the way, that is, and creating the behavioral set must likely to reproduce one’s demographic.\n\nAt the very least, this “prophecy” involves a hypothesis that we can, in a rough way, test—how strong are those inhibitions on, first, speaking of, and then acting on, “demographics” as malleable objects to be transformed and, if necessary, eliminated. What would it take for us to start speaking of the relative worthiness of life of various forms of life? (Perhaps the current particularizing and spiteful slogan “#blacklivesmatter” will, paradoxically, push us along this path.)\n\nI haven’t explicitly addressed the morality of these possible developments, because it doesn’t seem to me clear-cut. Genocide is an evil form of bio-politics, but trying to distance yourself from, out-reproduce and out-health those who wish to control and exploit your lives is not necessarily so, however uncomfortable it makes the liberal in each of us. It would simply mean that we no longer see conversation and persuasion as the currency of modern civilization, but isn’t that, in the end, an empirical question? Maybe in the next stage of civilization we will let our DNA do the talking."
    },
    {
      "slug": "random-political-indexes",
      "title": "Random Political Indexes",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It is becoming clear that a country can have Muslims, or it can have Jews, but it can’t have both. It may be when Muslims reach a certain percentage of the population, or when the Jewish/Muslim ratio hits a certain point, but (my hypothesis would be) every country does get to the point where, along with the virulent antisemitism imported by Muslims, the host population finds it too annoying, exhausting, and/or dangerous to bother defending the Jews against them. Indeed, when it gets to that point, it becomes convenient, and even obvious, to blame the Jews for the Muslims’ hatred towards them, and other, sedimented forms of antisemitism re-emerge.\n\nThis is distressing, of course, but what is interesting is that such a hypothesis is unthinkable in liberal (in the broader sense) terms. To imagine that different categories of citizen, different “demographics,” are simply incompatible within a given national society, is confess the failure of multiculturalism (of course) but also the notion of a modern political order as such. Which would leave us without the barest beginnings of a shared political vocabulary and grammar.\n\nMany American blacks will long remember that, not only did a majority of American whites vote against the Obama (a substantial majority the second time around), but they voted in a Republican congress capable of frustrating Obama, and turning the first black President into the abject failure he will surely be seen as. Many American whites, meanwhile, will long remember that we would not have been saddled with the most destructive President in American history without the virtually unanimous support of African-Americans. How many? Enough to show Abraham Lincoln to be the greatest political prophet in history?:\n\nYet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”\n\nLincoln, of course, is referring to the war itself, but perhaps it has never really ended, however much the sides, and their respective moral stature may have changed, perhaps that 250 years of ill-gotten wealth has not yet been sunk, or perhaps we have to account for all the wealth made possible by that piled by the bondsman; perhaps the blood drawn by the lashes must be paid by that drawn from guns and bombs and who knows what else—but it is perhaps fitting that an idiotic attempt at racial redemption on the cheap should re-activate the sinking and drawing.\n\nThe idea behind the sexual revolution was that once fear of pregnancy and all the surrounding social norms and moral rules tying sexuality to marriage and procreation were overthrown, the pleasure taken in sex would be uninhibited, unobstructed and frequent. But maybe, as reported declines in sexual interest in Japan (for example) suggest, that’s not the case at all. If there’s no desire to have children, there’s no inclination to get married; if there’s no inclination to get married, dating seems pointless; if dating is pointless, all the preparatory activity (flirting, gossiping, going to parties and bars, shopping, attending to personal appearance, etc.) becomes uninteresting.\n\nThere will always be the random hook-up, but once you get past the point where lots of young and men and women are in close and constant contact with each other (i.e., college), that probably becomes too much trouble to be worth it as well. So, while Heather Mac Donald has made a plausible case that the draconian new sex codes on college campuses represent a round about, if unconscious, way of restoring a workable sexual morality, it might just as well be the case that these codes are a way of making sex high-stakes once again, and therefore dramatic and interesting. At least for a certain segment of the younger “demographic,” sexual enjoyment relies upon the thrill of creating a new sexual morality—more explicit, micro-consensual, mappable in all of its moves and experiences. In that case, these rules would be nothing more than an attempt to impose a single, fairly idiosyncratic sexual fantasy on everyone else—a particularly noxious form of tyranny.\n\nIt is very possible to reduce politics to the conflict between those who save and those who borrow. Those who borrow have an interest in inflation, money printing, government growth, and bailouts, while those who save have an interest in more minimal institutions that do little more than protect people and property and stable currency. Beyond these direct conflicts, borrowers are likely to be more libertine or “socially liberal,” savers more continent and “hung up.” The two, moreover, are interdependent—from whom else are borrowers to borrow, if not savers? At the most minimal level, savers are not necessarily dependent upon borrowers, but the greater the discrepancy between savers and borrowers the greater the interest (literally) the savers have in lending—this is what has been known as “usury,” like “price gouging,” a concept completely devoid of all content aside from resentment toward its referent.\n\nBut lenders must rely upon some agent of force to collect from their debtors, and unless they are to rely upon private security forces (which they do, of course, to some extent), that means the state—at the very least, they rely upon laws that allow for coercion to be used in the collection of debts. Savers had the upper hand politically for quite a while, playing a central role in the emergence and consolidation of civilization: for quite a while debtors were imprisoned, and countries with debts to civilized countries and banks occupied. Saving money, after all, is a most basic form of deferral, and one from which many others flow.\n\nToday, lenders are deeply plugged into the circuits of power, but that’s not the same thing as a politics favoring savers: now, those who lend money function as distribution and redistribution mechanisms of the state, getting the new money before anyone else does and when it is worth a bit more. They are the conduits of a political order, one that draws wide support across all classes, aimed at increasing borrowing and keeping later borrowers sufficiently afloat to generate enough money for the earlier borrowers and their political facilitators. The contemporary left struggles mightily to frame politics in terms of the struggle between lenders and borrowers, but are themselves part of the postmodern politics aimed at mocking, demonizing, subverting, and ultimately fleecing savers.\n\nThe notion of “pump priming,” used to describe Keynesian spending measures aimed at goosing the economy, really better describes the production and reproduction of the borrower class, which comprises a set of historically new psychological types: worshipful of celebrity, resentful of limitations and therefore contemptuous of externally imposed norms, entitled, conspiratorial, terrified of being out of step. When there is a flood, they will loot the store owned by the guy who had the foresight to buy and stock lots of water pumps, their political representatives will denounce him as a price gouger, and their flatterers in the media will immortalize their fist-pumping as they splash through the broken glass. Saving provides the ballast of civilization—how much of it do we still have in the bank?\n\nForeign policy bureaucrats, and the pundits who feed them their lines, like to say that we should only go to war “in defense of a vital US interest,” or something along those lines. But they never say what we are supposedly interested in, much less vitally, and why. You could make a list: maintaining global free trade, sustaining the flow of relatively safe energy, protecting democracy, etc. But on what grounds could one ever say that some other country’s participation in trade, or accessibility as a source of oil, or another country’s freedom, is a vital interest? Approaching things in this positivistic, ultimately nihilistic, way is incoherent and destructive.\n\nWe are interested in supporting our allies and weakening or destroying our enemies. (We are all hostage to each other.) How vital the interest depends upon how much that ally can help us fight our enemies, and how much it is willing to risk to do so, and how much harm the enemy can do us or our web of alliances. How do we choose our enemies; or, how do they choose us? That’s another way of asking who we are, which is in turn defined by who is attracted and repelled by us. But, of course, our allies and enemies are always already given (however we might trace back their conditions of possibility), revealing us to ourselves, and we can always start by simply cultivating those alliances and, in confronting those openly committed to doing us harm, clarifying which alliances are worth cultivating.\n\nThe really difficult question is when to treat non-state actors—private citizens and associations—as allies or enemies. We can answer that question only when we have answered a previous one: do we want to destroy our enemies (and take responsibility for the resulting systemic confusion) or weaken then but keep them in the game. How good a game is it?\n\nOne can always deal with evildoers, and sometimes one must. It should be possible to deal with evildoers while continuing to be honest about them—we would only deal with them out of some very compelling interest and we can assume they must see us similarly to how we see them and therefore only deal with us out some compelling interest of their own—an interest that would override any insult our honesty might occasion. In other words, we should be able to say, “you’re a bunch of thieving, murdering, raping SOBs, but we’ve got to go through that pass and if you let us do so we’ll send you enough food to tide you over this famine”—and they would presumably respond in kind, if they really don’t want to starve.\n\nWe become abject when we assume that dealing with evildoers requires that we not call them what they are—first of all because we thereby communicate that dealing with them must be of greater value to us than dealing with us is to them. We are further compelled to treat as a “problem” anyone who exposes the lie we tell to cover our cravenness—and that means not only anyone who speaks honestly about the evildoers but, even more and especially, their victims, whom we must then discredit, slander, and trivialize. But the first lie is the one we tell ourselves, that there is not so much difference between us and the evildoer. But once we tell that lie it becomes true, and thus easier to believe."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-rhythm-of-civilization",
      "title": "The Rhythm of Civilization",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Civilization represents a break from the hostage-taking mode of agreement constitutive of barbarism. Not necessarily a complete break, and never a permanent break, but “enough” of a break. Enough for what? For other forms of agreement to germinate. What other forms of agreement? Those you are ready to let a third party adjudicate. Hostage-taking is radically one-on-one—something dear to you (a loved one, your peaceful existence, your peace of mind) is held by the other, who is ready to destroy it. The threat of hostage-taking must be as terrible as it is if that threat is to keep the peace (indeed, you must be ready to pre-emptively take your own people hostage in order to prevent “rogue” players from implicating you)—but the problem is that the point will come when one side feels strong enough to blackmail the other with impunity (and if they are wrong it is even worse than if they are right).\n\nTo acknowledge the authority of a third party, both sides must agree that there is some shared “substance” and shared space—there is room for both sides, and a roughly equal allocation of goods that exists “objectively,” beyond the desire and will of either side, is imaginable. Such a possibility is already implicit on the originary scene, but actualizing that possibility in relations between closely related groups, rather than individuals within a single group, poses new historical problems. The actual third party will probably emerge from the party that rightly feels strong enough to blackmail others with impunity, and who can therefore impose his will on all concerned. Once this party has established pre-eminence by suppressing all rivals, he will want order, which means he will want resentment toward himself and amongst his newly acquired subjects neutralized (since recourse to simple repression risks disorder). Such neutralization requires procedures, and once such procedures start to work, we have the makings of civilization.\n\nBut what makes the procedures work? From what I have said so far, all we have is the fear of the subjects toward the hostage-taking power of the sovereign (and fear of each other, if the sovereign were to fall). But that wouldn’t be genuine neutralization (even if we have never yet had a civilization without that fear lurking somewhere in the background–ultimately, all we ever do is defer the order of hostage-taking)—everyone would still be looking for that next chance to re-arrange things more favorably. That the procedures are “fair”? That begs the question of how the subjects arrive at a sense of fairness. Only obedience to a sacred imperative, to a divine interdiction on hostage-taking, can account for that sense of fairness.\n\nSomething like the monotheistic revelation, or a philosophical disclosure (more or less widely spread among the communities involved, or the elites of those communities), is needed. Possible resentment toward the sovereign is then recouped within a measure of the sovereign, and each subject carries around a “third person” (what Adam Smith called an “impartial spectator”) rather than a set of commands backed by terror. Such an interdiction on hostage-taking is wide ranging from the start, bearing on ritual practice, political order, and family life (monogamy, for example, will sooner or later be discovered to be essential), but it deepens and extends even further over time (centuries), as we discover all the ways in which we have been engaged in hostage-taking without realizing it. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” has virtually unlimited ramifications—indeed, when this humble blogger and generative anthropologist hypothesizes the end of our (sinful?) civilization, is he really saying anything else?\n\nSome vanguard of the new sacred, then, sets out to propagate and enforce the interdiction against hostage-taking. What uprootings of traditional practices must this involve! And only those whose communities are already embroiled in some crisis of their own sacred order will be open to the new order. Far more than persuasion will be required—only civilizational fanatics will have the stomach for it. At a certain point, they will find themselves taking hostages themselves, or getting the sovereign to do it for them. It’s not quite a return to the “old ways” (al though according to some measures it might be “worse”), but it will generate resentments that take the form of a “heresy” (or that accuse the propagators of heresy), re-activating the need for a third party. Eventually a period of relaxation sets in—the diastole to the systole of civilizational fanaticism. The interdiction is loosened, reinterpreted—“remissions,” to use Phillip Rieff’s term, are introduced.\n\nRemissions make the subjects prey to doubt, skepticism, cynicism, exhaustion, dissolution, nihilism. If the interdiction need not be obeyed in its original, rigorous, sanctified form, then how? Why at all? The period of relaxation is one of limit testing and boundary inquiry. Assuming the elasticity of the interdiction is discovered, and the order it inaugurated not irrevocably broken, a new form of the “third person” emerges—now that the civilizational fanatic has been “exposed” as insisting upon an unnecessarily strict form of the interdiction, his desire is now included among those that lead to dangerous forms of violence.\n\nThe civilizational fanatic becomes a subject of satire and is ultimately reduced to the epithet “hypocrite”—his pleasure is really in denying others theirs. The new urbanity might be historical wisdom, and it might provide a model for leaving off defense of civilized standards. Now the benefits of civilization can be reaped in earnest, and the forgetting of the civilizing process is underway. Much freer forms of speculation, inquiry, artistic experimentation—along with wealth production and power acquisition—become possible. In theory, we are now free enough, disciplined enough, and informed enough to tighten the reins where necessary, and loosen them where possible.\n\nIn practice, sometimes as well. The problem is how to draw the line between loosenings and re-barbarizations, between inquiries into that boundary and attempts to subvert it, and between new forms of civilizational fanaticism and re-barbarization. The 20th century saw all kinds of grotesque articulations of hyper-civilization and the depth of barbarity. The solution to the problem lies in whether one takes those positioned as third persons hostage, or presents issues to those potential third persons to adjudicate. Perhaps that requires a discussion of the “grammar of civilization,” which I hope to get to next."
    },
    {
      "slug": "victimary-feudalism",
      "title": "Victimary Feudalism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The recent dust-up between transgender activists and what I suppose we would have to call “paleo-feminists” (who are retrograde enough to believe that to be a woman is to have a vagina) brings to the fore, in real time, the question of hierarchies in victimage. Is it a question of who is more “oppressed” (according to what measure)? Is it a question of who is able to leverage some blind spot in another’s victimary claim (so, to the extent that an anti-Islamophobia activist could point out that a black American really, in his defense of the primacy of race, shares assumptions with straight white Christian males devoid of all victimary credentials, Muslim would trump black in that case)?\n\nIs it a question of sheer political utility, on the part of leftist political groups (from the Democratic party all the way down through the splinter queer groups on a college campus)? Is it a question of being the latest on the scene? The most aggressive, or pathologically uninhibited? Surely the answer is “yes” to all of these questions, so we have not yet succeeded in putting order into the current victimary scene.\n\nI’d like to bring to bear my recent inquiries into “civilization” and see if that can help. Part of being civilized is being tacitly aware of the fragility of the boundaries protecting civilization, and therefore being trained in the detection of transgressions of those boundaries. The boundaries are fluid because in distinguishing our own level of civilization from that of others (whether to learn from or elevate ourselves above them), we introduce new gradations (I think most college instructors can point to a process of learning how to point to student errors or deficiencies over time, as we come to feel the barbarism implicit in criticisms that emphasize the institutional rather than functional authority of the teacher. To learn how to say something like, “let’s try another way of looking at this” instead of “no, you’re misreading it,” is to introduce a civilizational gradation—even while “no, you’re misreading it” introduces a civilization gradation from a rap on the knuckles.).\n\nBut this means that one can always find something barbarous in what passes as civilized behavior, and that this capacity will be subject to (barbaric) mimetic law, i.e., competition. It’s not so hard to look around at what people do and imagine there’s no way anyone will still be doing that 20 years from now. The policing of civilized behavior contains the elements of new forms of barbarism, in the form of competitive displays of moral exhibitionism (a form of conspicuous consumption). To one caught up in such competitive displays, what is to be avoided at all costs (what makes one a loser) is to be exposed as naively accepting some civilized norm as unproblematically present.\n\nThink of the liabilities one opens oneself up to with a naïve outburst like “We treat women pretty well in this society—look at what things are like for them in the Islamic world!” One includes oneself in a “we” that presumably has the prerogative to treat women well or not, one claims, complacently, to be overlooking all of “us,” as if mistreatment of women in many places may not be much worse than one thought, one scores points for oneself through an invidious contrast with an other (and how did they come to be “other”?) rather than looking to better oneself, etc., etc. Anyone involved in the oneupsmanship of moral exhibitionism instantly sees someone resting on the laurels of civilizational gradations others have introduced, rather than introducing a new one himself.\n\nThis game is a source of endless conflict because in order to introduce a new civilizational gradation one must take for granted the whole mass of gradations already sedimented within our civilized way of life—we are all, at some point, like that guy who says “We treat women pretty damn well!”; and there will always be someone who can acquire moral capital for himself by locating that vulnerable spot. What, most fundamentally, one accepts tacitly, and can never completely root out, is the basic premise of civilization, one embraced by the most radical academic, with the lifelong marriage, single child brought painstakingly from elite daycare through the Ivy League so as to acquire the cultural capital of the 1%, a nest egg to last decades of austere retirement: deferral and discipline, in particular self-restraint regarding being a judge in one’s own cause, brings prosperity.\n\nThis is both the most fundamental and the most vulnerable claim of the civilized order, because in actual fact it is very often false; it may even be false more often than not. Plenty of people work hard, play by the rules, and fail; plenty of times they never really had much of a chance in the first place. Indeed, civilization could only have been installed under conditions where its premise could only be true for a small minority. And yet the bearers of civilization (parents, teachers, rulers, thinkers, professionals, etc.) must insist that everyone act as if it’s true—even if, in their own individual case, it wasn’t.\n\nThis is where civilization, at its most basic, qua civilization, produces its victims. The roots of victimary thinking lie not just in the Shoah, but in an appropriation of that event as the irrefutable demonstration of the reversibility of all civilized norms in the name of exceptions licensed by the norms themselves. The victimary claim, in other words, is that the extreme barbarism of the Nazis was carried out in the name of the precepts of civilization, reduced to their essence: the white, heterosexual, Western, bourgeois, etc., man’s “burden” to civilize the world. The Nazis just saw this required measures more extreme then, but not conceptually incompatible with, European imperialism, or the American conquest of North America.\n\nWhat rouses the victimary ire, then, most elementally, is the demand by one party claiming to have achieved the discipline of civilization that another take that discipline upon him or herself. References, even when mediated through impersonal, institutionalized practices, to the “irrationality” of women, the promiscuity of gays, the higher crime rates among blacks, and so on, are advanced from the position of one demanding that another submit to the discipline whose acquisition is, tautologically, demonstrated by one’s demand that the other submit to it.\n\nSo, I can now propose the following hypothesis: any victimary position will be accorded greater protection to the extent that counter-attacking on its behalf exposes the vulnerability of the civilizational demand for discipline to further civilizational gradations that defer that very demand for discipline. This hypothesis accounts for the vulnerability of normal, civilized, people to those more skilled at creating civilizational gradations, i.e., to the white guilt purveyed by the competitive moral exhibitionists, and the receptivity of the hyper-civilized White Guiltists to the actual (if often self-appointed) victim groups, who intuit that the former have no source for their civilizational gradations other than their grievances.\n\nIt also accounts for the paradox of a cultural development that on one level loads us up with deferral, the material of civilization (more refined “rules of engagement” in everyday life), while more fundamentally releasing the most destructive desires and resentments. Once the demand for discipline is seen as the source of violence (once the civilizing process has been completely forgotten), there is no way out of this paradox. The ultimately, largely unacknowledged, goal of the victimary revolution is the totally therapeutic order, in which all desires and resentments undergo an incessant process of absolute exposure, universal recognition and reciprocal adjustment. The fantasy is that the results of civilization can be preserved without the discipline.\n\nSo, we can see the various victimary grievances orbiting a single center of imperious commands to submit to discipline, and each becoming, under specific conditions, the center or periphery of the constellation of victimary grievances mobilized to counter-attack—grievances that are potentially unlimited if not necessarily practically so. (I wonder, in fact, if the heavy investment in the Pickett’s Charge of the transgender movement—which cannot really get much popular traction, being so obviously marginal and idiosyncratic—won’t turn into a kind of Waterloo—to mix military metaphors. Certainly not a fatal defeat, but perhaps a debacle sufficient to slow the momentum and dent the perception of inevitability—not coincidentally, the same thing we are waiting for with the Islamic State.)\n\nInsofar as this constellation coalesces and acquires some stability, it take the form of a kind of fluctuating early feudalism, with everyone scrambling around to see which of the lords of victimage can actually grant the protection one needs to navigate daily life. As with any system of fealty, it is essential that you ostentatiously attribute all your successes to the grace conferred by your victimary protector. Whatever one has been able to do is due to the courage of those victimary revolutionaries who have broken this or that boundary. Perhaps we will find out next year if victimary feudalism has thoroughly infested the American political system as well."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-modest-really-proposal",
      "title": "A Modest (Really) Proposal",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "47 US Senators just did something unthinkable: they sent an open letter to Iran’s Ayatollah-led government pointing out that the agreement said Ayatollahs are (apparently) about to conclude with the American President will be meaningless without Senate approval (which Obama has shown no signs of seeking). (The Ayatollahs wrote back, purporting to tutor the Senators in the “nuances” of the US Constitution and, more importantly, the overriding importance of international law in determining the obligations of nations. That part of the story is tangential to my interests here, but this is undeniably fascinating stuff.) But, of course, the President forging ahead, mostly in secret (with the occasional lie), in such negotiations without any consultation with the Senate, even Senators of his own party, despite widespread skepticism (to put it mildly) about the details of the agreement as they have become publically available, is also unthinkable. But that’s the funny thing about the unthinkable—it’s unthinkable until someone does it, and then it becomes eminently and irresistibly thinkable.\n\nThe rules of American political order are fracturing. No one who is at all familiar with my thinking will be surprised that I hold the Left, and more directly, Obama, responsible for this breakdown, but that doesn’t matter any more. The question is, what now? The Left has tried to keep the game going by applying the rules with increasing rigor and Jesuitical zeal to their political enemies, while holding themselves, in victimocratic fashion, exempt from those same rules (which would unjustly constrain them in their attempts to hold the “privileged” accountable). But that’s obviously not sustainable—the Republican party can play along in the hopes of maintaining their share of political power without having to pay close attention to the people who vote for them, but no one outside of government has any incentive other than sheer fear to do so—and, as this letter demonstrates, there are now quite a few Republicans who don’t want to play anymore, at least when the stakes are high enough.\n\nWhen the rules break down, we have resort to the tried and true method of tit-for-tat. Tit-for-tat is essentially hostage taking, and hence barbaric, but there are rules and rules: these are still second or third order rules that are breaking down, and tit-for-tat is not about to spread to all of our social practices. That is, we are not on the brink of a hot civil war, but we are in the middle of the beginning of a cold one, with unforeseeable consequences. Tit-for-tat is kept within civilized bounds according to Kant’s maxim that wars should be fought in such a way as to make peace possible afterward, which in this case means gesturing to the meta-rules as possible means of adjudication when the daily rules break down.\n\nSo, senators interpose themselves prominently in the middle of head of state to head of state negotiations in such a way as to essentially promise the nullity of the results of those negotiations, but they do so by simply reminding the other side’s negotiators of the Constitutional provisions for treaty-making that, by implication, our own negotiator seems to have forgotten. The bankruptcy of the administration’s position here, as in the wake of Netanyahu’s speech, is evident in its response and that of its allies, which is to accuse the senators of breaking the meta-rules, i.e., calling them traitors—which thereby proves the viability of this method.\n\nWe are sure to see new forms of tit-for-tat emerge across the broad as social rules break down under the pressure of victimary obsessions. This is the way front lines in cultural (and other) wars take shape. Most immediately, though, this Gang of 47 has provided an opening to the Republican candidates for President, none of whom so far give the impression that they really want to win. Rather than go dutifully down the checklist of “positions” one needs to affirm in order to satisfy the “base,” telling fairy tells of restoring the American Dream and complaining that the media isn’t interested in the “real issues” of economic growth and whatever, the candidate who wants to break out should make a list of actions carried out by Obama that only Presidents can carry out (executive orders, “prosecutorial discretion,” etc.), starting with the blatantly illegal and proceeding to the merely harmful and promise to undo each and every one immediately upon taking office.\n\nAt the same time, promise a series of previously unthinkable, but now quite thinkable, actions that would match Obama’s egregious rampage through our economic and political order. And from then on, stalk the President—remind others of the list as new events bring reminders of his actions, and add new ones when necessary. The media will pay attention to that, and whoever takes this approach will take all the other candidates hostage, forcing them to affirm or add to the list, ultimately producing a united front among the serious candidates, giving the voters the opportunity to dismantle the entire Obama regime, declaring before the world the anomalous nature of the that regime, and forcing the Democratic candidate to defend each and every piece of it. Even better, such an approach could turn into a genuinely public way of thinking through all these questions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "lgbt-is-for-vendetta",
      "title": "LGBT is for Vendetta",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "As are all victimary movements. The articulation of hyper-civilized sensibilities and the barbaric lust for vengeance could not be made more evident than in a comment on a column by relatively conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat raises the following questions in the wake of the victimary temper tantrum over Indiana’s new Religious Freedom law:\n\n1) Should religious colleges whose rules or honor codes or covenants explicitly ask students and/or teachers to refrain from sex outside of heterosexual wedlock eventually lose their accreditation unless they change the policy to accommodate gay relationships? At the very least, should they lose their tax-exempt status, as Bob Jones University did over its ban on interracial dating?\n\n2) What about the status of religious colleges and schools or non-profits that don’t have such official rules about student or teacher conduct, but nonetheless somehow instantiate or at least nod to a traditional view of marriage at some level — in the content of their curricula, the design of their benefit package, the rules for their wedding venues, their denominational affiliation? Should their tax-exempt status be reconsidered? Absent a change in their respective faith’s stance on homosexuality, for instance, should Catholic high schools or Classical Christian academies or Orthodox Jewish schools be eligible for 501(c)3 status at all?\n\n3) Have the various colleges and universities that have done so been correct to withdraw recognition from religious student groups that require their leaders to be chaste until (heterosexual) marriage? Should all of secular higher education take the same approach to religious conservatives? And then further, irrespective of leadership policies, do religious bodies that publicly endorse a traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic view of sexual ethics deserve a place on secular campuses at all? Should the Harvard chaplaincy, for instance, admit ministers to its ranks whose churches or faiths do not allow them to perform same-sex marriages? Should the chaplaincy of a public university?\n\n4.) In the longer term, is there a place for anyone associated with the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic view of sexuality in our society’s elite level institutions? Was Mozilla correct in its handling of the Brendan Eich case? Is California correct to forbid its judges from participating in the Boy Scouts? What are the implications for other institutions? To return to the academic example: Should Princeton find a way to strip Robert George of his tenure over his public stances and activities? Would a public university be justified in denying tenure to a Orthodox Jewish religious studies professor who had stated support for Orthodox Judaism’s views on marriage?\n\n5) Should the state continue to recognize marriages performed by ministers, priests, rabbis, etc. who do not marry same-sex couples? Or should couples who marry before such a minister also be required to repeat the ceremony in front of a civil official who does not discriminate?\n\n6) Should churches that decline to bless same-sex unions have their tax-exempt status withdrawn? Note that I’m not asking if it would be politically or constitutionally possible: If it were possible, should it be done?\n\n7) In the light of contemporary debates about religious parenting and gay or transgender teenagers, should Wisconsin v. Yoder be revisited? What about Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary?\n\nAnd here is the comment:\n\nReligious views about sexuality are inconsistent with the reality that gay people are human beings who deserve the same rights and privileges as other people. The fact that they are sexually attracted to their own gender is clearly biologically based. Gay people have been abused for centuries because of ignorance of biology, and because the majority of straight people, unable to imagine not being straight, assumed that the gay minority was in diabolical cahoots with the prince of darkness, or some other such theological nonsense.\n\nWhen the religious view of the world congealed centuries ago, it did so based on many wrong assumptions that were the result of profound ignorance of the true origin and nature of human beings. We now know better, and a tipping point has been reached in which people suddenly realized that gay people were not perversions, but were our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and our families.\n\nThe answer to every question that Mr. Douthat asks is the same. No person, no gay person, no black person, no female person should be treated with disdain because of their biology. Those who might do so are acting out of ignorance. They will now have to experience the social pain and rejection they they’ve inflicted with impunity on others. They will lose their relevance, their dignity and their tax exemptions. They will become what they have abused and hated. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I will enjoy their pain. But I’ll get over it.\n\nThe comment is interesting in several ways. It begins with an attack on “religious views about sexuality,” which quickly becomes an attack on religion itself: “when the religious view of the world congealed centuries ago, it did so based on many wrong assumptions that were the result of profound ignorance of the true origin and nature of human beings.” There is nothing inevitable in this leap: the religious view of sexuality could have been wrong, but correctable through a further elaboration of the founding event constitutive of the “religious view.” Presumably for this writer, that would be impossible, or would just lead to more error, because the correct view of sexuality requires knowledge of biology, which religion could never provide.\n\nBut it is not knowledge of biology that discloses “the reality that gay people are human beings who deserve the same rights and privileges as other people.” Sorting out deserts and rights requires a different kind of knowledge, and we might agree with this writer that this knowledge would be of “the true origin and nature of human beings.” But the true origin and nature of human beings seems to be biological here, to be acquired by a rejection of “theological nonsense” and I suppose some form of biological inquiry. But wouldn’t biological inquiry keep disclosing new knowledge as it proceeds? And how could that accumulating knowledge include knowledge of who should be treated with disdain, and who should not be?\n\n(Isn’t the fact that the human race, or any community, could only be propagated through sex between males and females a kind of biological knowledge? Why shouldn’t that have consequences for social arrangements?) Indeed, it is the writer’s final lines that reveals the source of such, genuinely humanistic, knowledge: it is our resentments towards those who have kept us (or those we identify with) from access to the center, our desire to make them experience exactly that same marginalization and the consequent suffering, that can give us access to the knowledge of who should be disdained and who should not be. Only, though, on the condition that it becomes self-knowledge.\n\nThe embarrassment the writer admits to anticipating while enjoying his revenge simulates such self-knowledge, but his own (why am I certain that this is not only a man, but a heterosexual man?) overwhelming disdain for those he knows deserve nothing but reflects the choice to reject such self-knowledge. Perhaps it would anyway only yield a map of the sector of neurons that fire when experiencing the pleasures of revenge."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-zionism",
      "title": "Originary Zionism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Are you now, or have you ever been, a Zionist?\n\nThat, today, would be the most likely form of that “infamous” inquisitorial query—there are many situations today in which very few people would be comfortable identifying themselves as Zionists. I certainly consider myself one, but have always had a problem with Zionism, so much so that my own willingness to affirm my Zionism has been as much due to the need to contest those who would demonize Zionism as to assert a belief in any particular theory of Jewish national liberation. In fact, intellectually speaking, Zionism is quite a mess—there’s nothing like a shared, coherent version of it, like we would find with “Marxism,” “liberalism,” or even “nationalism.”\n\nThe idea that Jews scattered throughout the world constitute a single “nation” in anything like the modern sense is a stretch, to say the least; the idea, further, that they should all pick themselves up and move to Israel is arbitrary and ridiculous to the vast majority of Jews; and the assumption that the gathering of all these Jews should take place in the ancient land of Israel splices religious messianism with modern political notions of self-determination in a way it would be hard to justify within any theoretical framework. Add onto this the assumption that Jews from the “Galut” needed to be transformed into “new Jews” (on the model of the Socialist “New Man”), which presupposes a kind of virulent self-hatred behind the entire enterprise, the very scant consideration given to the existing inhabitants of the land where this national project was to take root, and the impossibility of resolving the problem of non-Jewish citizens of a Jewish state other than through formulaic references to “equal rights” and feeble relativizing allusions to the by now mainly vestigial remnants of ethnic privileging in some other countries, and we have a mode of political thought someone with intellectual integrity can hardly feel comfortable with.\n\nBut here is Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the sites of vicious antisemitic attacks in Europe, attacks that are merely the tip of a cresting wave of hostility toward the beleaguered Jewish minority in the countries that not that long ago (with very few honorable exceptions) gave them up for slaughter, calling on the Jews to “come home” to Israel. And he’s getting a response from European leaders—grudging, resentful responses, but the leaders of countries like France, Germany and Denmark feel compelled to reiterate (unconvincingly) their commitment to making their countries safe for Jews. This actually points to another problematic element of Zionism (noted, like all the problems I mentioned above, long ago, most of them soon after the initial formulation of Zionism, and in internal Zionist debates)—the appearance of an interest, on the part of Zionism, in diminished safety for Jews in the Diaspora (those who wish can find some confirmation in the infamous “Transfer Agreement” between the Zionist leadership in Palestine and the Nazis, or in the charges, the truth of which I cannot assess, that Zionist agents in Iraq exacerbated the perceived peril Jews of that country were in following the founding of Israel by planting bombs in synagogues).\n\nThe worse things are for Jews elsewhere the better for Zionism and, its successful institutionalization, the State of Israel. I don’t say this is true—just that it’s consistent with Zionist theory. But this particular double bind (the movement to make Jews safe depends upon increased dangers for Jews) also gets us to the heart of Zionism which, in fact only makes sense on the worst case scenario constructed by the more fatalistic of the Zionists—that, ultimately, antisemitism is so deeply rooted, or will take such deep roots, wherever Jews are going to be, that Jews will in the long run never be safe anywhere but in their own homeland (but if they are so hated everywhere, won’t they be just as hated all gathered together in one place—and, in an age of weapons of mass destruction, much easier to finish up once and for all?\n\nHence the “normalization” theory, which inflects the antisemitic claim that Jews don’t fit in anywhere by explaining this misfit in terms of historical distortions in Jewish life that a Jewish state will rectify. But what can more inescapably mark one as abnormal than striving for normality?).\n\nIf that claim is true, none of the inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities matter all that much—on the most basic level, as the Revisionist (the trend embodied in Netanyahu’s Likud Party), and most minimalist version of Zionism has it, Zionism is ultimately a life raft, albeit an armed one. In a sense, while being the most embattled, even paranoid version of Zionism, it is also the most open one: Zionism is not to transform the Jews, create a utopian society, or usher in the Messianic Age, it is just to keep the Jews out of the grasp of their executioners (even if we acknowledge that this can only ever be a deferral).\n\nAll the problems created by Zionism, most obviously the displacement of the Palestinians and enmity with the Arab and Muslim worlds, can be addressed provisionally and pragmatically, within that broader framework. The same with relations with the Diaspora, with which a fairly traditional relation, going back to antiquity, whereby Jews in Israel represent an eternal Jewish possibility while Jews elsewhere lend support, can be maintained, while Israel remains ready to transform that relationship into a rescue mission at any time. Questions of political and economic institutions—socialism or capitalism, parliamentary democracy or some kind of Presidential system—can be debated on their own merits; the crucial and ultimately unresolvable secular/religious question can likewise be left to the ongoing cultural push and shove and demographic transformations.\n\nZionism, then, is utterly unlike other political theories, and all of its contradictions and confusions come from attempts to model it on those theories (socialism and national liberation in particular). Maybe it’s not even a theory, but rather more of an mood that accompanies one at times (for some, very often, enough to institutionalize it). You are a Zionist insofar as you support the efforts of those Jews operating under the assumption that Jews can rely on no safe haven other than what they can create for and defend by themselves. I call this a “mood” because there’s no provable or falsifiable proposition here: we can’t know whether Jews will, in fact, always be driven, sooner or later, out of any place they have made their home as a vulnerable minority.\n\nIt’s also a mood insofar as it has a kind of “shading” to it—dark. Zionism is a depressive mood, a paranoid one—it leads one to see duplicity in Gentiles even when there are no signs of it, it gives weight to the burdens of the past over the possibilities of the future. It is therefore a mood that long predates the founding of Zionism as a political movement, and extends beyond its explicit adherents. Above all, it’s a desperate mood, one that spurs to action—it has glimmers of hopefulness, but those never encroach upon the alertness to impending catastrophe. It is a profoundly ironic mood, because it must occur to the thoughtful Zionist that thus prejudging the possibilities of Jewish-Gentile relations might very well, by generating mutual distrust, contribute to the feared result.\n\nPart of this irony (and, in fact, part of the longstanding bill of indictments against Zionism) is that, from a sheer propositional standpoint, there is no one with whom the Zionist agrees more than the anti-Semite, who also believes that Jews can never live peacefully among non-Jews. Only mood really separates the Zionist from the anti-Semite, as a very different range of feelings would naturally associate themselves for each regarding their shared diagnosis of the “Jewish Question.” (I say only mood, because even the ethical distinctions can be blurred—it is hard to imagine an emergency for the sake of which Zionism exists in which the possibility of collaborating with anti-Semites wouldn’t have to be seriously considered.)\n\nInsofar as Zionism is a mood rather than a theory, it need not be pervasive—it is perfectly reasonable that comfortable American Jews will feel Zionism only weakly, perhaps punctuated by sharper pangs in response to troubling events and evocations of communal memory.\n\nIsrael must be Zionist, but insofar as it is Zionist it is dangerous (its enemies must know it to be dangerous). Insofar as it is nationalist (“Israeli”), or liberal, or democratic, or Jewish, the danger is mitigated. This interplay of the Zionist mood with more familiar political ideas and feelings should be kept in mind in assessing the aspect of Zionism that most blackens its reputation in world opinion: the settlements in the territories captured in the 1967 war. Certainly the settler movement, like the Zionist movement in general, bears a strong family resemblance to Western colonialism and perhaps especially the settlement of North America by Europeans, and this accounts for a great deal of the hysterical hostility to them. But we can go deeper than that, and to do so I would like to draw upon a perhaps unlikely source: the political theorist, and one time Nazi political theorist, Carl Schmitt.\n\nSchmitt, in his Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, argues that the Greek word “nomos,” often translated as “law,” really denotes a way of social life grounded in an originary land division, out of which, and for the preservation of which, political and legal institutions emerge. Indeed, Schmitt gives the Biblical account of the division of the land of Canaan amongst the Israelite tribes as an example of such a founding nomos. Schmitt’s account is long, penetrating and rich (and no doubt contestable), and includes an account of America’s role in modern history that is not relevant here but well worth familiarizing oneself with.\n\nWhat is important for my purposes is Schmitt’s articulation of the originary land division as a source of nomos with the other contributory elements of political life he considers essential: production and distribution (which comes down to the economy, and politics in its more familiar, mundane operations). For Schmitt, the modern world was founded on a new nomos created by the discovery and division of the New World among the European nations: by placing the settlement and exploitation of the New World (including all the associated violence, against the natives and between the European competitors) beyond the civilized pale, the European countries could “bracket” war amongst themselves on their own continent in order to subject it to rules and prevent it from becoming total in a way that the religious wars consequent upon the Protestant break had been.\n\nThis new nomos, which maintained relative peace from the 18th century to the first World War, began to collapse in the late 19th century, as the boundaries between metropole and periphery became confused. Be that as it may, the point is that following the European catastrophe of the first half of the 20th century, the European powers (brought to this point, according to Schmitt by American priorities and principles) renounced nomos as a basis for political order and sought to found political order on production and distribution alone.\n\nOne can point to the fascist (“blood and soil”) implications of the “nomos of the earth,” but Schmitt is very clear that each new age, at a new level of civilization and technological development, will require a new nomos—the modern nomos included the sea, and the new one Schmitt wonders about in the book would of course include the air (and perhaps one day space—or, for that matter, DNA, or gigabytes). In any case, though, any en during political order must be founded on a concrete division of finite, zero-sum property, both within and between nations. Only a political and legal order that can be traced back to such an originary division can claim legitimacy—in particular because the inevitable transgressions (invasions, revolts, secessions, etc.) will need to be framed in terms of such an order, baptized within it, so to speak.\n\nThe marginalization of nomos in the name of production and distribution is predicated on the fantasy that no originary division, even as a distant reference point, is needed, because actual property—that which cannot be used by one without withdrawing it from the use of another—is part of a global process of production in which any particular property is a manipulable part. (Modern rights, which make the basis of social order the isolated individual that is actually the result of a centuries long civilizing process, is a transitional step towards the integration of humans as elements into the global production and distribution process.)\n\nThe Jews never became part of the nomos of Europe—its constitution could not accommodate them, which is another way of saying there was no room for them—and their only hope for freedom and safety lay with the displacement of nomos by production and distribution, which Jews overwhelmingly and enthusiastically supported. (That there could be no room for a particular people makes perfect sense if we are thinking in terms of a nomos; it is utterly mystifying if we are thinking in terms of production/distribution because, after all, couldn’t any human capital be put to some use?) But the loss of the nomos of “European civilization” made Europe mad and the Jews were held responsible.\n\nZionism is the attempt of Jews to found a nomos for themselves that would enable them to fit into the nomos of the world constituted by nation-states and the emergent post-Nuremberg international law. But that nomos has turned out to be a pseudo-nomos, held together for a time by the stabilizing enmities of the Cold War, but ultimately failing at its main imperative: to integrate as equal nations the postcolonial world. Into the void has rushed a vitalized Islam and the victimary.\n\nIsrael relied upon the post-Nuremberg order that shared with Zionism a sense of the vulnerability of the Jews as a hinge of social order, but that can no longer be relied upon. The internal nomos of Israel society will probably become central, as in fact it was before the founding of the state and for its first few decades. That internal nomos is what Zionism has always called “facts on the ground,” perhaps the concept most diametrically opposed to the production and distribution networks that can be imagined. Controlling land, building on land, using land to continually reshape borders with the other, to implicate the less committed in the nomos of the social order by requiring shared defense of land acquisitions and construction—this is what Zionism needs now more than anything else.\n\nOf course, this—settlement activities—is the most pressing source of friction between Israel and the post-European world order, but friction is necessary for the foundation of a new nomos. And that friction might take less hysterical forms as the world order becomes increasingly post-American, with China, Russia and India competing to fill the many vacuums American leaves behind. Only an Israel firmly grounded in the Zionist nomos will be prepared for the emergent Islamic nomos (or failure to establish such) of the Middle East\n\nLeftists and liberals (including libertarians), then, are right to feel uneasy, at least, about Zionism. Israel is a mostly liberal society (in some ways as liberal as any place on earth), but Zionism is illiberal. Of course, the foundations of any social order are illiberal—liberalism can never be anything more than the ripest fruit of an order that has already been highly civilized and by other than liberal means: liberalism is constituted by a carefully cultivated capacity to ignore that. But Zionism cannot be kept out of sight—it has perpetual, and urgent, imperatives to press upon us. Your ability to resist the power of the civilized, liberal impulse to turn away is an index of your immunity to the metastasizing victimocracy."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-grammar-of-civilization",
      "title": "The Grammar of Civilization",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Pursuing my distinction between hostage-taking, as the form of politics characteristic of barbarism (or the gift economy, or honor society), on the one hand, and submitting to the third party, as the form of civilized politics, I note an imbalance. Hostage-taking absorbs whatever form of “political” interaction that we can imagine having preceded it amongst “savages,” or “primitive” cultures, or “hunter-gather” communities (characterized by egalitarianism, insufficient accumulation to introduce hierarchies, and intermittent violence due to naked resentments controlled through communal mechanisms and references to a local sacrality)—by deterring in advance and punishing overwhelmingly spontaneous expressions of desire and resentment.\n\nCivilization, I have hypothesized, meanwhile, can never do away with barbarism once and for all—it marginalizes it, represses it, simulates it, neutralizes it, but never eliminates it. The formulation I have proposed would explain why: if the civilized individual is willing to submit his resentments to a presumably, hopefully, impartial arbiter, what, exactly, is he willing to submit? Surely those very resentments that, under barbaric conditions, he would have settled himself, or through his protector. Someone has taken hostages at my expense—violated my property, my freedom of movement, some agreement to which we have “sworn” more or less formally and solemnly—or is charging me with same, and we follow the monumentally world transforming path of letting someone obligated to neither of us decide whether a violation has taken place, and if so, what the remedy is to be.\n\nTo put it simply, the civilized justice system still exists to prevent private revenge from plunging society into chaos—if you doubt that, transform the legal system in accord with the therapeutic assumption that rapists, muggers and murderers are merely acting out some former trauma and need treatment rather than punishment, and see how their victims respond. Civilized self-restraint runs deep, and most civilized people are ill-equipped to plot and execute revenge successfully, so we might see nothing more than some angry political rhetoric for a while; and, who knows, maybe in some places (Scandinavia? The UK?) civilization has been so thorough that the population would be too enfeebled to rouse themselves to self-defense against an emboldened criminal and terrorist class—but wouldn’t that prove, even better than the more predictable emergence of Charles Bronsons and Clint Eastwoods the dependence of civilization upon barbaric impulses?\n\nOnly people who want revenge can defer it through provisional trust in a justice system that will supply a more legitimate and effective equivalent. (This is all so obvious that I feel silly laying it out, but we have constructed an entire political world predicated on the denial of everything I have said.)\n\nThe civilized world mediates the myriad, if more metaphorical, acts of hostage taking we all engage in regularly. Relations between men and women, and between parents and children, are certainly far better described in terms of more and less subtle instances of hostage-taking, which laws against domestic violence and, more broadly, moral and therapeutic vocabularies of reciprocal understanding keep within bounds. Barbarism simply involves a more “gripping” economy of attention than does civilization. To take a hostage effectively (especially when we get to the more sophisticated and metaphorical forms, like White Guilt) requires that you have paid very close attention to what is most dear to your victim.\n\nA lot of things matter to us—material things, spiritual things, mental, emotional, etc. But what matters most, and how can you get a hold of it so as to compel the victim’s complete attention to you, and what you want? Within such an attentional economy, one’s attention is always trained on one’s own and other vulnerabilities (which, furthermore, shift around, become “available” in different ways, etc.), which is very riveting—look away for a moment and all might be lost, because you will have lost track of what the score is. Paying attention to a third party—whether an actual one, like a judge, teacher, supervisor, etc., or the internalized voice within, our conscience—validating their credentials, following the logic of their judgments, weighing that against any escape routes we have semi- or unconsciously prepared for ourselves from said judgments, etc. is only possible once the hostage-taking attentional economy has been interrupted and we have been wrenched out of its grip—most likely because its dense richness of motivations and possibilities has, at a certain point revealed an abyss (some consuming physical or psychic violence) to which our own actions are leading us.\n\nIf the abyss is wide enough, which is to say if the consequences of not only actions undertaken or planned, but of the very inclinations and most distant desires we are capable of representing to ourselves, reveal trails leading to that abyss, then one might come to enter the world of third parties more permanently, and to discipline oneself according to the terms of that world.\n\nThere are gradations, minute degrees of civilization, each one of which reiterates the distinction between civilization and barbarism. For most of us, most of the time, eating cooked meat with silverware is enough to draw the line, but if you are at a party with three different forks, each one for a different dish, using the wrong one marks you, ever so slightly, as barbaric. The same holds for things like grammatical errors, working class and ethnic accents, and much else of daily life: pretty much all resentments in the modern world can be framed in terms of someone being less civilized, or trying to pretend to a civilized condition they haven’t earned.\n\nThis might be a good time to acknowledge that I am, of course, aware, how unlikely is my attempt to retrieve the concept of “civilization,” one of the most white guilty of all social theoretical concepts: the term has been stained irremediably by its use in the justification of Western imperialism. But maybe there’s another reason for the implicit ban on the term—its use presupposed a very broad consensus among Westerners regarding the vast gulf between their own social order and those of other peoples, along with a casual and unapologetic acceptance of social hierarchies within that social order. Given our far thinner skins regarding internal hierarchies, simply using the concept of civilization, refining it, clarifying it, testing and applying it, arguing over it, perhaps even quantifying it, but at any rate accepting its legitimacy, would likely make us far more aware of distinctions among us that could be and perhaps are leveraged in various ways than we could be comfortable with.\n\nWe can’t talk about civilization because we can’t bear being exposed to judgments of where we are on the scale. But if we see civilization as an experiment, as it surely is, one we are working on together, we can perhaps defer the resentments that would flow from an attempt to impose a particular civilizational content. In other words, we could accept that, for the most part, we are all distributed differently across a wide range of civilizational registers in ways that could never really add up to judgments on specific individuals or groups.\n\n“Grammar” emerges as a category and marker of social distinction within a civilized, which means literate, order. The power of correct grammar as such a marker continues unabated, regardless of the complaints (repeated in each generation) regarding the new generation’s deficiencies—students note each others’ grammatical mistakes (granted, not always correctly) and usually respond with a mixture of (feigned?) horror and self-satisfaction. The terms they tend to use to describe writing marked with pervasive error is “unprofessional,” which is a near enough synonym for “uncivilized.” If “good grammar” is needed for acceptance within a literate community, a grammar of civilization, more broadly conceived, is necessary to participate in a civilized order—and, even more, to commence the necessary thinking of that order.\n\nGrammar most immediately refers to the maintenance of the boundaries of the declarative sentence. Organized around the basic subject-predicate articulation, every word in a grammatical sentence is related to another word (or element) in the sentence. The sentence as a whole can be denied or affirmed, which also means it can be turned into a question that can be answered either “yes” or “no.” Maintaining sentence boundaries requires that the speaker or writer can distinguish consistently between declaratives, imperatives and ostensives (grammatically speaking, exclamations). Any speaker can do this for simple sentences, requiring the provision of basic information about location, presence or absence, opinion, feelings, etc.\n\nIt gets more complicated when the results of a dialogue or conversation need to be represented, and even more complicated when concepts or judgments, which is to say, re-engineered words, that have been established within a given community are implicit in sentences. At a certain point, for most writers, grammar breaks down, and the writer latches onto isolated words as clues to what kind of response (something to agree or disagree with) to the sentence might pass muster—those more familiar pieces of the sentence are then copied and pasted into simpler sentence templates. The amount of “slack” one’s grammatical capacity has marks civilizational gradations, one’s ability to participate in the “general intellect” of civilization.\n\nWhat happens when one’s grammar reaches its breaking point is that one no longer knows what question a sentence might be answering, and, therefore, what imperative the sentence is deferring (by deflecting that imperative onto a reality resistant to the imperative), and what ostensive, or, we might say, “revelation” or constitutive insight, generated the imperatives. To use a simple example, a new concept of God will generate demands that “God” solve certain problems, and then questions as to the conditions under which we might make such demands upon God and then, finally, alternative answers to those questions. One will not be able to “read” a sentence presenting one such alternative answer, or distinguishing one from another, without sufficient immersion in the concept of God in question. Such a reader will be able to use and rearrange the words in these sentences, but will bring them into reference to some other concept of God, and some “wrenching” of the words out of their relationships within the sentence is bound to occur.\n\nAccording to Elizabeth Bates (a precursor to and collaborator with Michael Tomasello’s “usage-based” understanding of language), in her Language and Context: The Acquisition of Pragmatics, the traditional tripartite division of language into “semantics,” “pragmatics” and “grammar” entails grammar articulating semantics (the meaning/use of words) with pragmatics (the speech situation and the effects one aims at within it). Grammatical conventions, the ways words work in sentences, provide an economic mechanism for articulating words scenically. Her analysis lines up very well with the progression of speech acts analyzed by Eric Gans in The Origin of Language: grammar (the declarative sentence) articulates ostensives (semantics, or words understood as embodying the possibility of some joint attention) and imperatives (what we want others to do, what they want us to do, what we want regarding what they want, etc.—all the demands, commands, requests, pleading, suggestions, hints, etc. which we use to get people to join us on a scene).\n\nIndeed, Bates goes so far as to treat the early declaratives of children as a kind of imperative, as those early sentences are not interested so much in conveying information or gaining assent as in directing attention to a particular claim about the world. Moreover, such an originary grammar finds support from Terrence Deacon’s perfectly parallel use of Peircean semiotic concepts to account for the emergence and maintenance of the “symbolic”: for Deacon, indexes are means of aligning and rearranging icons, while symbols are means of aligning and rearranging indexes. What a sentence does, then, is present a world in which imperatives, of various urgencies, intensities, and probabilities of being obeyed, and which, in turn, are formed out of desires consequent upon novel revelations (sites of joint attention), are “poised” in relation to each other. When one is in an intellectual space where one doesn’t know what would count as doing this, then one’s grammar, in the more conventional sense, meets its limits.\n\nSo, what are the most insistent imperatives the civilized order needs to defer? Most directly and commonly, the desire to take hostages in one’s relations with others—here, furthermore, there are gradations from literal hostage taking (e.g., gang warfare, or even the desire for revenge of a crime victim) to more figurative varieties (e.g., passive aggressive forms of manipulation, harping on the faults of others, etc.—much better than honor killings, of course, but not as civilized as we can be). Even more important, though, if far less common, is the imperative to become, or to submit to, the biggest man imaginable.\n\nThe servility indistinguishable from early forms of civility imposed by the all-powerful monarch upon hostage taking subjects is tightly bound up with the boundless forms of ambition some men and women feel licensed to indulge and imposes a limit on the civilizing process that it nevertheless made possible. In other words, the fervor with which one might struggle to overturn the entire social order (something only imaginable in the highly artificial civilized world) is the flip side of the desire to have a more perfect, encompassing order imposed upon one and all. These are imperatives in the most literal sense: one feels compelled to resist this or that injustice uncompromisingly, or to throw oneself at the feet of the hero who promises to destroy it once and for all.\n\n(Moreover, these imperatives exacerbate more common revenge fantasies by providing them with a global arena.) The difficulty of deferring them, and disciplining oneself so as to remain bound to that deferral, cannot be overestimated. (The abstract notion of “equality” is the consequence, or dim reflection, or forgetting of the immense energy put into these deferrals—Freud’s remark on the primary resentment of the child provides a helpful formulation: if I cannot be the favorite, there shall be no favorite. Someone with an unstrained “democratic disposition” is someone who has inoculated him or herself against the desire for victory in the “final battle.”)\n\nSo, the civilized sentence will defer these imperatives. But clichés and canned sentiments about democracy, equality, fraternity, liberty, etc., don’t do it. To defer a desire or imperative requires that the thing to be deferred be made present, that its power be felt, its more insidious operations registered, the limits of any provisional constraints on it gestured towards, the fragility of one’s own discipline in resisting it acknowledged, and that it therefore be deferred in full awareness of what is entailed in doing so. We could say that a well formed, or “grammatical” (in the originary sense) sentence is a kind of invented or improvised ritual, in its enactment of the desire and fear to be warded off.\n\nBut, of course, we couldn’t ask every sentence to do all of these things at once—quite often one of them is enough, as long the possibility of performing the others in another sentence is not impaired. But, at the very least, we should have a suitable measure for a civilized sentence (and one thing that characterizes civilization is that it is overwhelmingly about how we are able to speak with each other in various ways, on various levels, moving from irony to literalism, implicit to explicit, etc.): what dangerous imperative does it place in equipoise with the civilizational imperative to be worthy of the judgment of the third party?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "digital-civilization-slouching-from-silicon-valley-to-be-born",
      "title": "Digital Civilization, Slouching from Silicon Valley to be Born",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A semiotic history of the world would trace the gradual process of distancing from the ostensive and imperative via the declarative, along with the efforts, within new forms of declarative culture, to re-embed ostensives and imperatives. Insofar as we are humans, all signs must point the way to an eventual ostensive, but the pathways are continually elongated and intersected. If the first declarative was a negative ostensive, both interlocutors would presumably be a turn or a glance away from the demanded object. The “statement” that one hasn’t the object could hardly be sustained or remembered unless an alternate route to its procurement (and hence the completion of the imperative that initiated the sequence) was readily accessible.\n\nThe development of the declarative through discourse would involve a gradual shift from conceptual scenes anchored in a setting of familiar material objects to conceptual scenes strung through other possible conceptual scenes to conditional ostensives of varying degrees of probability of realization. To understand a sentence is to understand the probability of one possible world amongst a range of other possible worlds, and to be capable of identifying sufficient distinctive features of that world. In other words, a space within other spaces where we could imagine pointing at something along with others, whether these spaces are fictional worlds or carefully constructed laboratory settings.\n\nEven if all we are dealing with are numbers generated by instruments registering the slightest movements of the tiniest particles, that data is something we can point to so as to distinguish between more and less expected outcomes of the experiment. Even the densest, most allusive poetry presupposes a reader who once spent time in front of the same page of obscure poetry as the writer, and can be startled into a shared recognition (or illusion thereof) of the experience of immersion in that page and the way that experience might be displaced if set next to another, equally distant page that we some sense might look at together.\n\nWe could see digital civilization as a qualitative shift in our relations to ostensivity. Vast swathes of social interaction that, within living memory, required sustained manipulation of objects or interpersonal (F2F) interactions, have been brought online. This is not just an advance in automation, al though it is that as well. We will soon have driverless cars, and in a generation people will be astonished that fallible people (who drink, get distracted by music and conversation, suffer erosion of their eyesight and reflexes—and are vain about such things) were once allowed to operate these primitive, dangerous machines.\n\nThe government doesn’t need wiretaps on specific people’s phones, and grizzled detectives sitting in a room across the street with headphones on eating pastrami sandwiches and drinking coffee all night—all you need is universal phone records and an algorithm to search for relevant patterns. The implications, to take one of many examples, for traditional notions of justice, are clear: if we once moved from barbaric means of determining guilt by “trial by ordeal” to the method we have now, the flaws of which are becoming increasing evident and intolerable, of collecting and weighing “evidence,” presenting that evidence before an ‘impartial” jury, with both “sides” represented by an attorney, we are now likely to move to the use of algorithms to search and analyze the official records of anyone you are considering hiring, selling a home to, letting into your place of business, etc.—who cares about such arcana as guilt and innocence if we can know, within “reasonable” limits, that the gentleman looking around the store is 8x more likely than average to commit some violent act?\n\nBut such developments coincide with our increasing ability to decide on questions of fact, through DNA testing, omnipresent cameras, etc.—but if the basic facts will be so readily available, wouldn’t the whole rigmarole of arguments, legitimizing evidence, cross-examining witnesses, etc., along with philosophical considerations regarding just punishments just get replaced by the attempt to figure out either the best medical and therapeutic way of “curing” the criminals or the least repugnant ways of removing them from our sight? Just as the development of exotic new digital currencies might bring to the fore our continuing ultimate dependence on the precious metals. The ostensive can’t just be deferred and distanced—it must be resituated, bracketed, distributed.\n\nIf the history of your actions cannot bear algorithmic scrutiny you will be excluded from digital civilization—not necessarily convicted, but exiled. We couldn’t predict how sharp this dividing line will turn out to be—we don’t have the algorithms to do so yet. What roles will forgiveness and the notion of second chances have in digital civilization? Perhaps there will be algorithms for them. So far, we can see some perhaps minor paradoxes. For example, there is an increase in rigor within the more disciplined digital arenas (real R & D), along with an informality of dress and speech—as if, once we all know what we’re doing, and it’s not stuff that any literate person could do with a little training and supervision, the various proxies of “professionalism” (suit and tie, titles) can be dispensed with.\n\nDigital civilization will be far more enveloping than the industrial one preceding it—individuals within digital culture will be carefully shepherded from institution to institution, and the enhanced means and protocols for reducing dangers along the way will be vigorously implemented. Freedom and privacy, we could assume, will take on very different meanings (much less physical, which is to say, ostensive, and much more “semiotic”—or, perhaps, not so much there, either—the days where anything can be done anonymously may be over, except for those willing to break radically with the grid, and can survive that break, but that doesn’t exhaust the meaning of freedom), and personal responsibility will be enforced much more comprehensively (we won’t need debt collectors and repo men chasing deadbeats around if their appliances and cars can simply be disabled and located remotely, or bank accounts accessed when they swipe a debit or credit card).\n\nThe need for all kinds of direct human contact will be minimized considerably, which in turn makes all kinds of human contact newly uncertain and risky, inspiring new protective counter-measures—this is already well under way. All this distancing and compartmentalizing and concealment of what disgusts and frightens us is well within the broad mainstream of civilization; indeed, it’s almost constitutive of it. But will there also be, drawn to those exiled to the margins of civilization (earthy, sensuous “primitives” like in Huxley’s Brave New World, and in some many sci-fi dystopias? Nomads, scavengers, raiders, more or less violent?\n\nIntrepid hackers? Sanctuary cities? Vast masses or manageable few?), some from among the civilized who will take up slumming with them, so as to distinguish themselves from their straightjacketed peers? Perhaps flouting civilization by disrupting its boundaries is equally constitutive of civilization.\n\nHow much freedom digital civilization allows and provides for and, indeed, how functional and en during it will be, will depend heavily upon whether the victimary vendetta makes the transition and manages to install itself within the digital, or is kept out. So, far, the victimocracy is very much at home in the digital—the most cutting edge companies are the most insistently pro-gay (which, of course, helps to explain how gay rights, of direct concern to maybe 3% of the population, has shot to the top of the victimary agenda), victimary activists (I’ll use “SJW,” now that I know what it stands for) are extremely skilled in organizing online lynch mobs and manipulating the new media and, most importantly, much of the victimary agenda depends upon the continual distancing of the declarative from the ostensive that characterizes each new gradation in civilization.\n\nThe struggle against oppression used to be richly ostensive, as the exclusion of and violence against blacks, the backbreaking conditions of workers, the seclusion and limitation of women, were all obvious for all to see. One could rationalize them, or counsel patience, or compare existing conditions to less plausible alternatives, but one couldn’t deny them. Today, claims that these groups are oppressed require sophisticated legal theories and the manipulation of data—of course, the victimocrats can’t resist the occasional (or more than occasional) hoax, but the real strength of the victimocracy is the ability to argue that barely detectable attitudes and actions and unseen biases within complex institutions generate devastating, widely dispersed and somehow measurable effects.\n\nBut this strength is balanced by the fact that, ultimately, the ostensive can be delayed but not denied: the left still relies upon standard and fairly crude notions of “justice” that really only make sense in pre-digital terms where specific actions by people in authority could be observed having direct effects upon the victimized (a lynching, a strike crushed, etc.). If blacks, on average, earn 75% of what whites earn and have 35% of the property whites own, but also commit more violent crimes and engage in more behaviors that can be statistically correlated with lower earnings and savings, then one might accept responsibility and see a problem worth addressing but hardly an obvious injustice calling for outrage and immediate action. Which is why, perhaps, the hoaxes are necessary after all.\n\nThere is an extremely intense mode of ostensivity constitutive of the victimocracy, but it is also a very fragile one. It is commonly noted how uninterested in, and even hostile to, debate, the contemporary left is. The left of the 60s and even through the 80s loved to argue—they felt they had the facts, i.e., the ostensives, on their side. Today’s left sees ostensive truths that are made available, vivid and undeniable by the participants in their own self-created “disciplinary” spaces where they teach each other how to “see” what remains invisible to the naked eyes of the oppressor majority (the brief flourishing of a more traditional anti-war movement in reaction to the post-9/11 wars was an exception).\n\nThey can only bring over converts through the perpetual generation of events made of simulated outrage and involving intoxicating feelings of generational solidarity and individual moral courage—this is basis of both the “Occupy” movement and the recent race rioting over police killings. They are able to present those ostensives to those, like, journalists, Democrat politicians and university faculty and administrators, who already define themselves in opposition to the presumably less civilized pragmatic majority and delight in having ready made voter blocs and rabble rousers delivered to them. But while those outside of these circles can be caught off guard and made defensive, or have their desire for peace exploited, they can’t really believe.\n\nThe Austrian economists (intellectual descendants of von Mises) speak of how the introduction of fiat money into circulation benefits those who receive the money first, because they can spend it at its previous, unadulterated value; the same is true here: those who identify a new form of injustice modeled on and seemingly supporting more familiar ones have a form of moral currency that passes for valid. But like the bad money, the bad morality goes through a boom and bust period.\n\nBut where are the constituencies of the SJWs and the body of the victimocracy in relation to the digital? And where are the “normals,” or those satisfied with small, gradual and widely shared gradations in civilization, but repelled by attempts at great leaps? The major media and the universities (very much in that order) are in real danger of being swept away in the digital flood. Even now, who reads newspapers or watches the evening news? Efficient on-line educational “delivery systems” can’t be too far away either (anyone at a small, private university can smell the desperation). We are the repealing of a few licensing laws and noxious regulatory obstacles away (and in some cases not even that) from opening up whole new mini-industries in the fields of health, computer technology, beer brewing, education, home design, etc.\n\nAll people who won’t want to pay high taxes or be forced to provide their employees with expensive health insurance or exorbitant minimum wages. None of whom need to be particularly skilled in the use of computers—the digital in fact lowers the threshold of knowledge needed to use the latest technology. You don’t need to be a computer genius to set up a functioning, attractive, interactive website. But, also, none of whom have the slightest political representation, or immediate chance of getting it. The real political scandal is the union of the victimocracy and the corporate oligarchy, of the bio-politics of immigration (in the broadest sense of bringing to bear the needs and resentments of the Third World upon the politics of the First) with the digital politics of cool (the ever more granulated set of possible self-distinctions from the awkward, the stupid, the brute, the literalistic, the outdated, etc.). The Democratic Party relies upon this (very much transnational) union, and the Republicans, with very few exceptions, just want a piece of the action.\n\nAny enthusiasm for the emergent entrepreneurs enabled by the digital should be tempered, of course. Part of the reason for their political impotence is the fact that they are a tiny minority who generate resentment when they achieve a certain level of success, join the victimocracy/oligarchy axis when they achieve yet more success and, anyway, are resented simply for receiving political attention when that actually happens. There are the other victims of the victimocracy/oligarchy: the privately employed, Church-going, married-with-children “middle class.” They have nominal political representation, since the Republicans depend on their votes, but no real representation.\n\nThey are not obvious allies of the entrepreneurs, so the two groups can be kept marginalized. They rely on inherited pathways back and forth between the ostensive and declarative, and are alienated by the enveloping algorithms of the digital world, which are hard to process through traditional notions of Constitutional order and liberty, much less Christian notions of goodness. But they are certainly online, and informed, and despite their being caricatured as bumpkins, the Tea Partiers have generated and inspired some savvy political and media entrepreneurs—which explains the Republican takeover of local politics throughout the country.\n\nWe will find out soon enough how civil warfare is waged with digital weapons. But bio-politics, the battle of demographics, the nomos of the earth, will also have its say—the digital brings this huge arena of ostensivity (masses of bodies, swarms of nanobots, universes of DNA) into micro and macro view for the first time. A decentered, de-escalated, horizontally and vertically differentiated digital civilization with some margin for error, fences but also doors and a secure place for the pleasures of ostensive discovery will be the stake."
    },
    {
      "slug": "flouting-civilization",
      "title": "Flouting Civilization",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The basis for critiques of civilization (in general or in any particular incarnation) has always been “nature.” Conventions and culture, if not ritually prescribed, could be other than what they are, and are therefore time bound and contingent, but nature is what is always true, and what we discover through reason, rather than via tradition. If we can know what is natural, we can judge the civilized order, its customs and conventions, in terms of how closely they correspond to nature. Nature is simple, essential, en during, intelligible, universal; civilization is given to artificiality, fashion, vanity, sophistication. Nature is a newly discovered post-ritual sign; civilization remains mired in rivalry and the compulsion to attain distinction.\n\nOf course, “nature” is itself a category of civilization, a way of deferring the new conflicts the civilized order generates. It emerges because civilized citizens are more or less dimly aware of the radical transformation, the deferrals and disciplines, that made civilization possible and distinguished civilized orders so dramatically from barbaric and savage ones: it is this absolute distinction between civilization and everything that preceded it that produces the blanket category of “nature.” Due to the leisure afforded a class of thinkers, relatively freed from ritual imperatives and material need, and their capacity to survey a range of uncivilized orders (to record them, discuss them, interview them, collect “samples”), it becomes “natural” to inquire into the many similarities and differences observed, and to generalize regarding what they all might have in common.\n\nPrecisely for this reason civilized orders are able to convince themselves that they are, or could be, arranged more in correspondence with nature than the more primitive and seemingly irrational and arbitrary social orders—while also being equally capable of convincing themselves that they might try to model themselves on the simplicity, courage, strength and other virtues of the uncivilized.\n\nThe role of “Nature” during the civilizing process is a regulatory one, rather than a foundational one. “Civility” didn’t need so much to be justified or explained as protected from the excesses inherent in this as yet untested mode of social life—satires of civility (marking its deviation from nature) are part of civility. With modernity, and the forgetting of the civilizing process, “Nature” is presented as the basis of social order, the source of rights and legitimation, including the principle of a revolutionary re-founding if the existing order were discovered to be opposed to nature, or usurping the natural rights upon which its legitimacy depends. The assertion of individual natural rights was first deployed against the monarchies of Europe, but, since they have no intrinsic limiting principle, the notion of natural rights is a way of generating and directing resentment toward any government seen to be tyrannical in any sense.\n\nThe modern notion of “Nature” implies equality before a sovereign center, which is posited as constituted by what it in fact constitutes: the assertion of natural rights only makes sense as a polemic against some central figure that has always already expropriated them. The many antinomies of this structural assumption have been exhaustively explored, in what has perhaps been the greatest service provided by “postmodern” social and political theory. The more natural rights are presumed to constrain the sovereign center, the more sovereignty constructs, shapes, redefines, analyzes and recomposes, those minimal rights (to property, self-protection, movement, speech, worship, etc.) into “components” of a policed social order.\n\nThe ludicrous notions of a “compelling state interest,” or “rational test”—self-evidently arbitrary concepts established as standards the government must meet (and, through the courts, decides whether it is meeting) in limiting some natural right—make this fairly obvious. Even more, as the natural and social sciences develop and become increasingly central to social life, the “nature” founding society becomes one to be manipulated through those sciences—diagnosis and prescription easily replace persuasion as the constituents of political discourse, as we continue to install the therapeutic order Philip Rieff analyzed decades ago.\n\nHere’s a prediction, which exemplifies the inversion of natural rights that is simultaneously its culmination: we will see, perhaps within a decade, children removed from religious homes deemed “unhealthy” and “abusive” because children are being taught the “homophobic” lessons of their parents and tradition, and transferred to same sex “married” couples whose equal right to raise children will thereby be vindicated. The current legal and political strategy of many conservatives, to argue against “relativistic” leftist politics through recourse to “natural rights” is futile because the various components of natural rights can be pulverized and recombined at will—the grotesque notion of a “protected class” (making it, presumably, open season on everyone else) both contradicts and corresponds to “natural right.”\n\nAt the extreme, if the citizen’s rights are defined in terms of a pre-social nature, their expression can be reduced to pre-social venues (you can believe and say what you like as long as no one is around to see or hear or be offended by you—it can even be generously granted that you probably can’t help yourself), with violations of such strictures resulting in one’s removal from society. (All that is coming from “above”—we have known for a long time that, from “below,” any assault on customs and conventions can be justified in the name restoring some natural right or freedom.)\n\nI have been arguing in recent posts that the only possible anti-victimary politics today would involve setting aside all these modern concepts and debates and simply arguing for civilization against barbaric and savage recrudescence. Civilization does not require a notion of universal right, much less endless cynical and acrobatic reinterpretations of supposedly fundamental and self-evident rights. A politics of civilization can focus on the praxis of individuals constitutive of the institutions and practices to which all must habituate themselves. In a university you treat everyone as a scholar and teacher; in business you treat everyone as a competent practitioner of their specialty; in economic transactions you include your partners in a zone of trust constitutive of a voluntary exchange; in neighborhood you treat everyone as—a neighbor.\n\nIn some cases, specific institutions or spaces will want to codify what such treatment entails, always keeping in mind that such codification indicates, not a heightened moral awareness, but an attempt to defer potential or actual conflict (and hence a weakening of the consensus upon which the shared practice depends). Such conflict might be necessary to make it possible to see others in unaccustomed ways (and might indeed lead to higher moral awareness), but the point is always to expand and improve the civilized order that the excluded are, after all, demanding entrance to—the inclusion of new participants should be an occasion to re-fortify civilized institutions, to subordinate grievances to norm-governed work.\n\nCivilization depends upon deferral to the judgment of the “third person” I have discussed in recent posts, and it depends upon every individual inculcating the attitudes, dispositions and mentalities of the “third person,” and the desire to be take as such a person by others.\n\nTo talk about rights, and distribution, wealth and markets, participation in universal exchange, etc., outside of the defense of the fundaments of civilized order, tends to undermine that order. There can be no universal reciprocity because there is no global scene—even if there can be global spectacles. Exchange can only take place among participants on a scene, established and governed by a shared sign—to grant full membership on a scene without accession to that sign is to make the scene hostage to the marginal grievance, or the grievance that needs to be appeased to make whole the fantasy of a scene that could map the territory controlled by the sovereign.\n\nThe originary scene bequeaths to us not an ever more inclusive scene, but infinite scenes, overlapping and articulated in infinite and always provisional ways—moral advances, always fragile, come through new ways of mediating between scenes that were previously incommensurable. Even the free market presupposes a civilized order, and then becomes a marker of that order insofar as it represents a mode of exchange no Big Man could usurp. But defenses, in principle, of the free market that would undermine the basics of civilized order (like the demand for a free market in labor that would allow unlimited immigrants from less civilized countries, unvetted by the civilized order, to enter the country) must themselves be resisted, if not through centralized state power than by communities organized through schools, neighborhoods, businesses, main streets, hospitals, social services, etc.—i.e., by the bulwarks of a civilized order.\n\nSo, what is a politics of civilization? It is, I think a politics of flouting civilization. I take the notion of “flouting” from the philosopher of language Paul Grice, who developed the notion of “maxims of conversation”—what originary thinkers could really consider an ethics of the declarative sentence. Insofar as we speak to each other, we presuppose certain shared obligations (the “cooperative principle”): what you say will be true, it will be relevant, it will be sufficient (you will give no more and no less information than is necessary). These are more constitutive than descriptive—much, perhaps most, actual conversation proceeds in violation of these maxims.\n\nBut that’s the point—it is precisely through meaningful violations, or flouting, of the maxims, that meaning is generated (through what Grice calls “implicatures”). So, if you ask me how Jim’s new job at Wall Street is going, and I say, “terrific—he should be able to stay out of jail for at least another few years,” I am flouting the cooperative principle in several ways: I have given no reason to believe Jim has committed a crime, or is planning to do so, so the information I am giving is irrelevant and perhaps false, nor am I providing you with the information you requested which, according to convention, would concern itself with whether Jim is satisfied with his salary and working conditions, has been promoted in a timely manner, is respected by his co-workers, etc.\n\nBut, I am giving you all that information and more if we share some empirical and ethical assumptions about what it means to “work on Wall Street”—that it involves activity that has lately involved well publicized criminal (or presumed criminal) activity, or that others, or the interlocutors themselves, believe much of that activity should be criminalized—and some shared assumptions about Jim (that he himself seems primed for such activity, or, perhaps, is an exception, an honest man, and that is why he should avoid jail in the hypothetical scene we must jointly construct, in order to remove Jim from it, in which Wall Street employment is a fast track to a prison cell). The more such assumptions we share, the more my flippant statement is telling you about not only whether Jim is fitting in at his Wall Street firm, but what such “fitting in” entails and, by implication, what we should think about Jim.\n\nLikewise, very little civilized behavior is actually comprised of individuals directly presenting themselves as the disinterested “third person”—we are all much more likely to refer to pretensions to objectivity, broadmindedness, and altruism ironically and disparagingly even, or especially, when we ourselves could be seen as entertaining such pretensions, or if we are acting in a way that would earn us such a description. A respected judge will, if adequately self-aware, gesture towards the feebleness of his attempts to meet what are also admittedly inadequately understood norms. Indeed, there wouldn’t be that much for us to talk about otherwise—if we didn’t question one another’s and our own credentials as civilized beings in innumerable ways.\n\nCivilized beings very often mean what they say, but in very indirect ways, intelligible only to those schooled in such indirection, which is to say, other civilized beings. Modesty, almost by definition, flouts the cooperative principle, but no trait is more attractive in a conversationalist; similarly, the most civilized beings are those who gesture to all the ways in which they are not.\n\nIn other words, most of civilized behavior consists in flouting civilization. Civilization is the continuous work of distancing our interactions from the possibility of violent combustion, and that means concealing all kinds of impulses, reactions, and desires that present a visible pathway to the feared violence. All the things that we hide, and would be utterly humiliated to have uncovered, and that pre-civilized orders are untroubled by—to take a most obvious example, what we do in the bathroom—aim at maintaining the needed degree of distance and compartmentalization. And we don’t talk about these things, other than with people we are very close to (even then…) or doctors.\n\nThe simplest way of flouting civilization is to stage the collapsing of these distances, which is what most of our jokes, entertainment and art are about. Most of the radical, avant-garde art of the past century has been a sustained flouting of civilized conventions of private and public life. (Even the modest judge of the previous paragraph lets his defenses down, makes himself vulnerable, invites attack—thereby testing the civility of others on the scene.) All this is healthy—as with Grice’s implicatures, such flouting makes visible the norms we are flouting, tests them, stretches them, gives them a workout, provides them with new applications, abstracts from them, reminds us of what we have forgotten, teaches us to navigate them, and reinforces the deeply embedded assumptions underlying the principles of cooperation we adhere to.\n\nBut civilization has its enemies as well. The jihadis at war with us are not flouting. The Left, for some time, perhaps to some extent since there has been a Left, is doing something other and more than flouting (and this is true of some of the avant-garde as well, which overlaps significantly with the left—but the more an individual’s concerns are artistic, even if the goal to abolish art, the less he or she is an enemy of civilization). The whole business of a politics of civilization, then, is to distinguish flouting from enmity—or, more precisely, to treat all transgressions of civilized principles of cooperation, to the extent possible, as flouting one could participate in.\n\nWhere it becomes impossible—where we can’t imagine a joke that would follow up on the one just made, or an artistic innovation that would deepen the implications of a previous one, or a style of personal appearance that could signal reciprocity with some new one that seems offensive—then we have intuited the boundary between flouting and enmity. On the other side of the boundary we find either the utopian/totalitarian desire to engineer the center of a global scene or, more prosaically, the vendetta—indeed, the former usually “presents” as the latter. It is worth considering the extent to which the Left is one long vendetta against civilization, nursing a grudge against each and every injury inflicted by the civilizing process.\n\nIn a vendetta, one doesn’t really want to destroy the other side—one just wants to even the score. But since there are no scoreboards or referees, the compulsion to even the score can easily lead to mutual destruction. Vendettas can be deflected and thereby treated as mere “flouting,” but only if one is familiar with and ready to deploy all the means of civilization, which comes down, as my previous post argued, to delaying and reconfiguring the paths back and forth between declarative and ostensive.\n\nDe-naturizing discourse on civilization can make it possible for “nature” to subside as a political category, retreating, perhaps, to one of its more innocuous meanings (which can nevertheless do some heavy duty ethical work): “natural” as unstrained, in sync with one’s setting, familiar enough with conventions and trusting enough in one’s fellows to play around a bit with both, in accord with what one’s habits and history have prepared one for, without pretense or self-coercion, happy to share whatever attention one receives or one has cultivated. A thoroughly civilized nature, in other words. Of course, appreciation of the awkwardness of the learner, and admiration for that of the innovator are intrinsic to a civilized disposition, but a sense of naturalness is what enables us to tell when something has actually been learned, or an innovation has actually “took” (or is that “taken”?)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sea-change",
      "title": "Sea Change",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Let’s stipulate that the kind of thinking representing in the letter below (in response to an article critical of “safe spaces” on college campuses), which I found on Mark Steyn’s website, is an “emergent” mode of thinking—that is, growing and capable of finding institutional and conceptual support in the broader culture. How many young people today think in terms of this treacly mixture of therapeutic and victimary categories? 10%? 50%? It’s always hard to answer such questions, and it depends upon your standards of measurement. What we can see is how seamlessly it intersects with a wide range of contemporary assumptions and postures. And we can also see how radically unlike any way that any people has ever thought or spoken before it is—a veritable sea change in language, morality, manners and psychology. Let’s take a look.\n\nTo the Editor:\n\nJudith Shulevitz’s article about safe spaces on college campuses is a direct assault on my generation and what we find important. My generation has embraced the ideas of safe spaces and safe language. Without these, many victims of trauma or discrimination would be excluded from campus discussions that seek to cultivate and strengthen campus intellectual life. Truly open-minded intellectual growth desperately needs the participation of these groups.\n\nNot all ideas are created equal. Some ought to be unreservedly condemned; consideration of such ideas is not at all helpful in bolstering campus intellectual life. The current generation of college students has denied validity to the failed ideas of the past. We have embraced the knowledge and empathy of the present. We are shaping the wisdom of the future.\n\nANDREW MEERWARTH\n\nStony Brook, N.Y.\n\nThe writer is a senior at Stony Brook University.\n\nLet’s first note that someone capable of writing this letter would be incapable of using words like “truth,” “justice” and “freedom” competently. You can’t make sense of the notion of truth if you divide the world into ideas that have been “embraced” and those that have been “denied validity,” much less if you think it is a “generation” that has done these things. Instead of “truth,” we have “open-minded intellectual growth,” which is here virtually defined by the extent to which “victims” (the most unstable among us) are protected from any ideas that would re-traumatize them. This “open-minded intellectual growth,” therefore, would also be impossible without those ideas it “unreservedly condemn[s]”—it is the refusal to consider such ideas, which is to say their constant ritual denunciation, that protects the victims.\n\nInstead of “freedom” we have “safety,” with an extremely low (and constantly lowered) threshold for what counts as a threat. Instead of “justice,” which requires a kind of abstraction from the concrete features of contending parties to focus on their deserts under a shared standard, we have “empathy” and, even though the word is not used here, the ubiquitous “inclusion.” There is the same kind of double talk here, insofar as including some implies excluding others—in this case, at the very least, those who “assault” the new “generation” with the “failed ideas of the past.”\n\nThe gnostic, self-righteous deification of the new generation and complementary demonization of the old is familiar to us from the 1960s, but it’s interesting that Meerwarth refers so vaguely and blandly to those “failed ideas of the past.” Presumably he could name some of those ideas, but which ones? Racism, sexism, homophobia? But are those really “ideas”? For the victimary thinker, they are more inbred, ontological features of the inherited social landscape—the possibility that there were ever ideas there, that there were ever arguments in favor of the social arrangements now described in these terms, cannot even be imagined.\n\nThe 60s radical would do much better here: he would mention capitalism, militarism, imperialism and even liberalism, and would at least be able to lampoon the defenders of these views. And the 60s radical, while certainly capable of complacent paeans to “my generation,” also knew that there were conflicts within the generation, that the emergence of the generation was marked by events (the Beatles, Vietnam, Selma, etc.), and didn’t just embrace things spontaneously experienced to be revelatory break from everything humans had previously believed. What are the events to which this new generation could refer? Who are the thinkers who created and disseminated these salvific new ideas of “safe spaces and safe language”? There’s no Marx, or C. Wright Mills, or Herbert Marcuse here—these ideas seems have been secreted out of the very institutions now incapable of thinking outside of their miasmic fog.\n\nAll of which means it’s very difficult to imagine initiating a conversation with Mr. Meerwarth and his cohorts. There are no canonical texts to argue about. The “events” one might refer to are marginal, mass-produced, hysterical hoaxes, designed precisely so as to make conversation impossible: Ferguson, Eric Garner, the girl with the bed strapped to her back, now Indiana, in the misty past the legend of Matthew Sheppard (reenacted on campuses throughout the country in “The Laramie Project”). Aside from being frauds, these are all stories of pure villains and victims (degraded, unsalvageable past, untainted future), without the kind of rational, if rejected, motivations of, and differentiations within, both that the opponent of segregation and the Vietnam War could still acknowledge.\n\nWe seem to be witnessing a thoroughly self-contained, self-referential, self-inoculating, self-healing mode of being. Maybe we are headed toward a future in which the civilized world is comprised of competing cults, like Scientology. Certainly the current generation of 20-some things has a lot more than the Meerwarths, despite his imperial claims, but there are a lot of Meerwarths as well, they will be moving into a lot of influential positions (the State Department comedy team of Jen Psaki and Melanie Harf are a couple of Meerwarths), and when war, depression or serious civil unrest comes their crack up will produce devastating secondary tremors throughout the culture."
    },
    {
      "slug": "revised-version-of-high-point-paper",
      "title": "Revised version of High Point paper",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In particular the last paragraph and the discussion of what might be involved in programming a computer to write novels (a very engaging question which I have decided, for now at least, to keep very minimal), but a few other things as well:\n\nPressure on the category of the “human” comes from two directions, what we might call the “analytic” and the “synthetic.” What I mean by the “analytic” dismantling of the human is our capability and propensity to break the human down into a set of probabilities, with ever more subtle gradations: physically, we are all aggregations of DNA manifesting itself through interactions with an environment whose effects we are rapidly acquiring knowledge over—it will soon be, if it isn’t already, to treat a single individual as the predictable result of a history of activity, diet, genetic predispositions, places of residence, etc., and as a body whose future is equally predictable, given the known, and to some extent chosen, variables.\n\nThis analytical dismantling is analogous to the replacement, in the digital humanities, of the individual text or art object with the database search as the object of inquiry: a particular text, or, for that matter, a particular sentence, is nothing more than the winnowing out of all the other possibilities generated by the preceding history of all cultural texts and practices. By the “synthetic” “remantling” of the human I mean our growing ability to engineer the body, first of all prosthetically, through the replacement of natural limbs and organs that have been damaged or lost, but, more consequentially, through the creation of new capabilities, through drugs, hormones, surgeries and, eventually, the prompting, manipulating and stimulating of the body’s own natural processes.\n\nThese two processes converge, as greater analytic prowess opens up new synthetic possibilities, while new synthetic inventions pose new analytic questions. Also, our deconstructive inheritance enables us to see that such developments reveal, not some unprecedented encroachment on a human domain that was once known and secure, but a more originary prosthetic being that constitutes us as human—with the first prosthesis being the human sign. Still, it may be that the “always already” deconstructive gesture serves as a kind of narcotic, comforting us with the assurance that what seems unprecedented has always already been with us.\n\nMaybe this time really is different, and something fundamentally human is at stake. At the very least, we have a definition of the human that allows us to test the hypothesis: does the advent of “transhumanism,” or the commitment to a fundamentally improved humanity (the ability to run a two minute mile, to live 300 years, to score 350 on an IQ test, etc.) through technological and medical advances render obsolete the originary understanding of the human as that species that poses a greater threat to itself than is posed to it by any external danger? Does a posthumanism theoretical perspective, which works to undermine the traditional conceptual boundaries separating individual from society, human from technology, and culture from nature, obviate the need for that understanding?\n\nAnswering these questions will simultaneously enable us to bring the concepts of technology and nature into originary thinking more thoroughly than we have so far. I would suggest the following hypothesis as an initial approach: the originary gesture aims at separating us from “Nature” and simultaneously takes “Nature” as a model for doing so. The separation from Nature is the creation of non-instinctual desire and of a community that transcends the animal pecking order. This we are all familiar with. The imitation of Nature is less explored, and more tacit. I don’t refer mainly to tribal rituals associating the members of the tribe with a totem animal, but to the much more pervasive adoption of natural constraints in the construction of tools, dwellings, weapons and, al though this would require further exploration, the sounds and rhythms of human speech and the structures of human gesture and posture. Indeed, where else could early humans have derived models for these activities if not the natural world around them?\n\nAt the same time, such a concept of “Nature” could only have emerged much later, under civilized conditions. Like Jewish monotheism, or Western metaphysics (of which it is a part), the concept of “Nature” implies a thoroughly “declarative” culture, that is, a culture in which the declarative sentence is taken as the primary linguistic form. The history of the concept of “Nature” is obviously extraordinarily complicated, and I am not qualified to provide an authoritative survey—I will just venture some thoughts of some of its uses most pertinent to the question of the “Human.” It seems to me that a very productive way of understanding the valence of “Nature” as a cultural concept is as denoting a realm, in which humans participate, that is free of desire (that’s why imitating Nature would be a way of transcending desire).\n\nThe separation of “Nature” as a non-desiring sphere of inquiry was obviously necessary for the emergence of the physical sciences, but just as importance is the notion of “Nature” in Stoic thinking, or the pastoral tradition, as a simple field of human activity enveloped by custom, tradition, and simple virtues, embedded in the natural world, and free of the “artificial” desires created by civilization. Even the “nastier” concept of Nature introduced by Hobbes is really more the basis of a calculus of social order, and hence a pacifying abstraction from actual social desires and rivalries.\n\nSo, Nature is something we seek to return to and restore; but Nature can also be the means of doing so, as the laws of nature discovered through science, mediated through the natural order of liberty established by the free market, leads to the technological transformations in nature that make prosperity possible. Up until fairly recently, it could be argued that all this was in accord with human nature: human nature as rational, as desiring, as toolmaking, as trading. The fully civilized order would then be the fully natural one as well. But it has proven impossible to keep the unnatural out. The primal victimary critique is of the notion of human nature, and for a very good reason: once you define human beings in terms of what they are or have (rationality, free choice, what have you), you provide a basis for excluding or conditioning the belonging of vast swathes of perhaps merely apparent humans from or to the class: those who are less rational, slavishly bound up with traditions or more instinctual desires, and so on.\n\nOnce one accepts the perspective of the ontologically conditional human, it is the very positing of the human that becomes an unnatural, partisan, coup–d’etat—but against what, if not a more natural nature, posited as a truer equality in a more tight-knit community, in which rights and obligations are indistinguishable. In that case, those who have seized the category of human nature torment and dispossess those living genuinely human lives, closer to nature.\n\nLet’s begin with where transhumanism and posthumanism agree—that this vein of thinking, predicated upon a fixed and definable human nature, supported by a metaphysics that sought to turn agreement about nature into a way of deflecting disagreements among humans, has run its course, with the further implication that the category of the “human” is, indeed, historical, contingent and contested. That still leaves open the question of whether the category can be abolished, though—historical, contingent and contested institutions as well as categories can persist precisely by virtue of being those things; and there must be some reason why the category changes in meaning and cultural positioning, and is struggled over, rather than simply dropped.\n\nI would return us to our originary definition of the human as the species that poses a danger greater to itself than any external threat, which is tied to our understanding of the human as the being that defers violence through representation. I think this definition survives posthuman questioning, and is in fact better suited to a more “emergent” sense of the human as never quite completed (a human “condition,” as Arendt had it, rather than a “nature”) than to a traditional notion of the human as a being with a fully installed nature, outfitted with a presumably impenetrable armor of rights. The danger that we face is never entirely predictable, the forms of representation needed to defer it never certain, and our capacity to find the means to discover the needed signs is always in doubt.\n\nWhat we are as humans is never “there”—all our signs could be rendered inoperative in one moment in the face of some unprecedented humanly generated threat. Of course, if that were to happen, all the boundary questions regarding the human and its others would also cease.\n\nTranshumanism sees itself as extending the Enlightenment tradition. Once illegitimate, unnatural forms of domination have been eliminated, human beings can get to work addressing the externally imposed dangers and ills of humanity: producing sufficient food, fortifying shelter, curing diseases, and so on. All of these activities presuppose a human nature to be protected and enhanced: it is interesting, for example, that while we have for some time had the capacity to enhance eyesight to a remarkable extent, that capacity has been reserved for the laboratory and the observatory—no one seems to have considered offering, or demanding, eyeglasses or contact lenses providing even 20-5 vision for everyday use.\n\nBut there’s no reason to assume that such things won’t be offered and demanded, and ultimately to be implanted in the eye, perhaps at an early age. There is no fixed line between the “natural” desire to remove an evident deformity like a cleft lip and the “artificial” one to make one’s lips look more like an admired movie star. Or between extending life in the sense of enabling us to live much longer with heart disease or curing cancer, and slowing or even reversing the molecular process of aging. Or developing a cure for Alzheimer’s, whether through neurologic advances or brain prosthetics, and providing the average person the ability to memorize Homer’s poems in one reading.\n\nIs there a certain point at which we would no longer be human? Only, we could say as originary thinkers, if such developments were to remove desire and resentment from our relations to each other, and it seems easy enough to imagine all kinds of ways in which the effects might be just the opposite—not only because the satisfaction of these desires would proceed at uneven pace, or because the desires might vary so widely, or even because even the most perfectly satisfied desires will be riddled with unanticipated side effects, but above all because the meaning of such transformations and their implications for questions of reciprocity will never be settled.\n\nSimilar questions are raised by the issue of Artificial Intelligence, addressed by Eric Gans in his recent Chronicle of Love & Resentment on the Digital Humanities. There is very little we can’t imagine programming computers to do: playing chess, of course, but why not writing novels or poetry, about any subject and in any form or genre one chooses? Certainly there will be computers capable of passing various versions of the Turing test. In the process, as Jaron Lanier, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and others have pointed out, we are likely to come to view our own mental processes and even emotional states in terms of computation, as the most advanced models in cognitive science already propose. Indeed, isn’t any declarative sentence a little algorithm, generating a finite series of differentially probable utterances by excluding (through negation and replacement) an infinity of other sentences that might, in a hierarchy of probabilities, have been uttered at that moment? At the very least, one can see the theoretical gains in seeing things this way.\n\nBut a funny thing happens on the way to the singularity. If we could imagine computers writing great poetry, we should consider it a matter of course that they could do something much simpler, something you really only need to be able to speak two languages to accomplish: translation. And yet they can’t do this, as anyone who witnessed the earlier hilarious attempts of google translate can testify. Or, at least, they couldn’t, when working according to a strictly computational model—that is, if you replace all the words, in the source language, one by one with words from the target language. Even allowing for grammar correct, which a computer can, of course, do, we end up with a mess—there is no way of accounting for the enormous variety and unpredictability of idioms in every language.\n\nBut now it can be done. The way to solve the problem of computer translation is to amass an enormous database of existing translations (say, English to Italian)—then, for every phrase or sentence in the source text, the computer can search all the ways it has been translated previously, and then be programmed to choose from among various (presumably not that many) alternatives.\n\nIt seems to me that programming a computer to write novels, at least, would follow a similar, albeit far more complex, process: one would have to treat novels as “translations”—but of what? Other novels, for one thing. All forms of social texts, for another. A translation into what? Other novels would be translated into a different field of discourse: perhaps a historical field (translating a 19th century novel into 21st century social discourse), but perhaps a different field within the totality of contemporaneous discourse (a novel set in a psychiatric institution into one set on a beachfront resort); while social discourse would be translated into novelistic discourse, or “novelish”—or a dialect of novelish, of which there are many.\n\nProtocols would have to be established for translating (say) some segment of 19th century social discourse into some segment of 21st century, and a version of 19th century novelish into a version of 21st. This would involve determining rules for establishing equivalencies between these different fields of discourse: a chunk of 19th century political journalism into a chunk of 21st century (if we even choose to assume that these categories are equivalent, just because they both have the phrase “political journalism” in them). “Novelish” would have to be defined in terms of vocabulary and grammar, but also in terms of plot and character “codes,” perhaps involving the creation of templates that could serve as “attractors” for chunks of discourse. And the two different levels of translation would have to be articulated according to some rule.\n\nThis densely layered process, however it would ultimately be worked out, would require that multiple operations be applied recursively to the discourses drawn upon, meaning that every problem we solve along the way generates new problems, each decision branches off into multiple other decisions—the composer of such a text, computer or human, would need to articulate, through a series of constraints, a hierarchy of algorithms that would furthermore, be constantly “learning” and hence rearranging the entire series. At each point along the way we would find decisions that would necessarily be made more randomly if made by the computer, which would mean that the human composer would, by definition be “better”—unless, that is, we prefer the random decisions because they are more distant from the commonplaces and clichés that even the best writers cannot completely free themselves of—but in that case, it would be better for some reader, with a certain understanding and experience of the relation between familiarity and novelty in language and narrative.\n\nWhat this means is that the googlization of the world, were it to reduce all objects and texts to search prompts to discover what that object or text was “translating” or transforming would not be in the slightest bit dehumanizing in any way that matters to our originary understanding of the human. There are infinite ways to derive target texts from source texts through a search process, and that process in turn will keep revising itself recursively. Each search decision is deeply embedded in body, history, biography, discipline and community. And any search will still be a discovery procedure for the signs that will defer, in however mediated a way, that potentially cataclysmic violence that will still be at the origin of our species.\n\nStill, this notion of the sign as a prompt for a database search has ramifications for our understanding of the originary sign, which we would see now more as a constraint on future iterations, bearing the marks of the asymmetries and symmetries of its production than a single meaning apprehended by all: an emergent event rather than a completed state. What I mean can be illustrated by Johanna Drucker’s account of the sign understood materially:\n\nMaterial conditions provide an inscriptional base, a score, a point of departure, a provocation, from which a work is produced as an event. The materiality of the system, no matter how stable, bears only a probabilistic relation to the event of production, which always occurs only in real time and is distinct in each instance.\n\n… In each case, the performance constructs meaning as a result of engagement, the text is performed, rather than received. Materiality provokes the performance, and this is true whether we are talking about the workings of distributed systems in which resistance, voltage, and allocation of resources perform in accord with other processes and decisions, or whether we are referring to the reading of a poem.\n\nI take the materiality of the sign, in Drucker’s sense, to suggest that we think of the originary gesture as a mark, mnemotechnic and prosthetic, on the natural world, including humans as part of that world. The effect of this mark on nature is to begin the process of transforming it into the materials for signs, tools, ritual objects, arenas and meals. Each new sign is constrained by the aggregation of previous markings, while inflecting the existing constraints, only thereby making it possible to see them as constraints. A constraint is a mapping of Nature, somewhere on the continuum between almost completely arbitrary imposition on one side and a nearly perfect iteration of a constraint imposed by Nature, on the other. Constraints, then, are an originary engagement with Nature, from which we are never quite extricated and in which we are never quite immersed, much like a preliminary search term, yet to undergo refinement."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-digitized-prefixed-being-humanization-and-rehumanaturization",
      "title": "The Digitized, Prefixed Being: Humanization and Rehumanaturization",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I finished it much more quickly than I anticipated, so, here’s my paper (with a very slight, but significant change in the title) for this year’s conference at High Point. If you all read it in advance, I can dispense with the actual reading at the conference, and we could just talk about it. Or, for that matter, if anyone wants to start arguing about it, maybe it’ll turn out that I have some revisions to do. Anyway, here it is:\n\nPressure on the category of the “human” comes from two directions, what we might call the “analytic” and the “synthetic.” What I mean by the “analytic” dismantling of the human is our capability and propensity to break the human down into a set of probabilities, with ever more subtle gradations: physically, we are all aggregations of DNA manifesting itself through interactions with an environment whose effects we are rapidly acquiring knowledge over—it will soon be, if it isn’t already, to treat a single individual as the predictable result of a history of activity, diet, genetic predispositions, places of residence, etc., and as a body whose future is equally predictable, given the known, and to some extent chosen, variables.\n\nThis analytical dismantling is analogous to the replacement, in the digital humanities, of the individual text or art object with the database search as the object of inquiry: a particular text, or, for that matter, a particular sentence, is nothing more than the winnowing out of all the other possibilities generated by the preceding history of all cultural texts and practices. By the “synthetic” “remantling” of the human I mean our growing ability to engineer the body, first of all prosthetically, through the replacement of natural limbs and organs that have been damaged or lost, but, more consequentially, through the creation of new capabilities, through drugs, hormones, surgeries and, eventually, the prompting, manipulating and stimulating of the body’s own natural processes.\n\nThese two processes converge, as greater analytic prowess opens up new synthetic possibilities, while new synthetic inventions pose new analytic questions. Also, our deconstructive inheritance enables us to see that such developments reveal, not some unprecedented encroachment on a human domain that was once known and secure, but a more originary prosthetic being that constitutes us as human—with the first prosthesis being the human sign. Still, it may be that the “always already” deconstructive gesture serves as a kind of narcotic, comforting us with the assurance that what seems unprecedented has always already been with us.\n\nMaybe this time really is different, and something fundamentally human is at stake. At the very least, we have a definition of the human that allows us to test the hypothesis: does the advent of “transhumanism,” or the commitment to a fundamentally improved humanity (the ability to run a two minute mile, to live 300 years, to score 350 on an IQ test, etc.) through technological and medical advances render obsolete the originary understanding of the human as that species that poses a greater threat to itself than is posed to it by any external danger? Does a posthumanism theoretical perspective, which works to undermine the traditional conceptual boundaries separating individual from society, human from technology, and culture from nature, obviate the need for that understanding?\n\nAnswering these question will simultaneously enable us to bring the concepts of technology and nature into originary thinking more thoroughly than we have so far. I would suggest the following hypothesis as an initial approach: the originary gesture aims at separating us from “Nature” and simultaneously takes “Nature” as a model for doing so. The separation from Nature is the creation of non-instinctual desire and of a community that transcends the animal pecking order. This we are all familiar with. The imitation of Nature is less explored, and more tacit. I don’t refer mainly to tribal rituals associating the members of the tribe with a totem animal, but to the much more pervasive adoption of natural constraints in the construction of tools, dwellings, weapons and, al though this would require further exploration, the sounds and rhythms of human speech and the structures of human gesture and posture. Indeed, where else could early humans have derived models for these activities if not the natural world around them?\n\nAt the same time, such a concept of “Nature” could only have emerged much later, under civilized conditions. Like Jewish monotheism, or Western metaphysics (of which it is a part), the concept of “Nature” implies a thoroughly “declarative” culture, that is, a culture in which the declarative sentence is taken as the primary linguistic form. The history of the concept of “Nature” is obviously extraordinarily complicated, and I am not qualified to provide an authoritative survey—I will venture some thoughts of some of its uses most pertinent to the question of the “Human.” It seems to me that a very productive way of understanding the valence of “Nature” as a cultural concept is as denoting a realm free of desire.\n\nThe separation of “Nature” as a non-desiring sphere of inquiry was obviously necessary for the emergence of the physical sciences, but just as importance is the notion of “Nature” in Stoic thinking, or the pastoral tradition, as a simple field of human activity enveloped by custom, tradition, and simple virtues, embedded in the natural world, and free of the “artificial” desires created by civilization.\n\n“Nature” also, for Hobbes in particular, took on a very different sense of a kind of elemental, untamed, destructive, but also pre-social (and therefore really also pre-human) desire, one that needs the strong arm of the state to be turned towards productive enterprises. Even here, though, Nature is the source of rights and the basis of a contractual order, so it is not surprising to see Natural Right take on a much more benign meaning in Western, especially Anglo-American thought, one that is much closer to the Stoic understanding: a basis for testing and checking the powers and legitimacy of government, in terms of whether it exceeds its mandate to oversee the natural workings of natural liberty; or a more malevolent understanding, in Romantic revolutionary thought, as the basis for overturning social order in the name of a return to the natural rights which had been obscured and transgressed.\n\nSo, Nature is something we seek to return to and restore; but Nature can also be the means of doing so, as the laws of nature discovered through science, mediated through the natural order of liberty established by the free market, leads to the technological transformations in nature that make prosperity possible. Up until fairly recently, it could be argued that all this was in accord with human nature: human nature as rational, as desiring, as toolmaking, as trading. But it has proven impossible to keep the unnatural out. The primal victimary critique is of precisely the notion of human nature, and for a very good reason: once you define human beings in terms of what they are or have (rationality, free choice, what have you), you provide a basis for excluding or conditioning the belonging of vast swathes of perhaps merely apparent humans to the class: those who are less rational or irrational, slavishly bound up with traditions or more instinctual desires, and so on.\n\nOnce one accepts the perspective of the ontologically conditional human, it is the very positing that becomes an unnatural, partisan, coup–d’etat—but against what, if not a more natural nature, posited as a truer equality in a more tight-knit community, in which rights and obligations are indistinguishable. “The Europeans speak constantly of Man, but go around killing men wherever they find them,” as Aime Cesaire put it. Those who have seized the category of the human destroy those living genuinely human lives.\n\nLet’s say we being with where transhumanism and posthumanism agree—that this vein of thinking, predicated upon a fixed and definable human nature, supported by a metaphysics that sought to turn agreement about nature into a way of deflecting disagremeents among humans, has run its course, with the further implication that the category of the “human” is, indeed, historical, contingent and contested. That still leaves open the question of whether the category can be abolished, though—historical, contingent and contested institutions as well as categories can persist precisely by virtue of being those things; and there must be some reason why the category changes in meaning and cultural positioning, and is struggled over, rather than simply dropped.\n\nI would return us to our definition of the human as the species that poses a danger greater to itself than any external threat, which is tied to our understanding of the human as the being that defers violence through representation. I think this definition survives posthuman questioning, and is in fact better suited to a more “emergent” sense of the human as never quite completed (a human “condition,” as Arendt had it, rather than a “nature”) than to a traditional notion of the human as a being with a fully installed nature, outfitted with a presumably impenetrable armor of rights. The danger that we face is never entirely predictable, the forms of representation needed to defer it never certain, and our capacity to find the means to discover the needed signs is always in doubt.\n\nWhat we are as humans is never “there”—all our signs could be rendered inoperative in one moment in the face of some unprecedented humanly generated threat. Of course, if that were to happen, all the boundary questions regarding the human and its others would also cease.\n\nTranshumanism sees itself as extending the Enlightenment tradition. Once illegitimate, unnatural forms of domination have been eliminated, human beings can get to work addressing the externally imposed dangers and ills of humanity: producing sufficient food, fortifying shelter, curing diseases, and so on. All of these activities presuppose a human nature to be protected and enhanced: it is interesting, for example, that while we have for some time had the capacity to enhance eyesight to a remarkable extent, that capacity has been reserved for the laboratory and the observatory—no one seems to have considered offering, or demanding, eyeglasses or contact lenses providing even 20-5 vision for everyday use.\n\nBut there’s no reason to assume that such things won’t be offered and demanded, and ultimately to be implanted in the eye, perhaps at an early age. There is no fixed line between the “natural” desire to remove an evident deformity like a cleft lip and the “artificial” one to make one’s lips look more like an admired movie star. Or between extending life in the sense of enabling us to live much longer with heart disease or curing cancer, and slowing or even reversing the molecular process of aging. Or developing a cure for Alzheimer’s, whether through neurologic advances or brain prosthetics, and providing the average person the ability to memorize Homer’s poems in one reading.\n\nIs there a certain point at which we would no longer be human? Only, we could say as originary thinkers, if such developments were to remove desire and resentment from our relations to each other, and it seems easy enough to imagine all kinds of ways in which the effects might be just the opposite.\n\nSimilar questions are raised by the issue of Artificial Intelligence, addressed by Eric Gans in a recent Chronicle of Love & Resentment. There is very little we can’t imagine programming computers to do: playing chess, of course, but why not writing novels or poetry, about any subject and in any form or genre one chooses? Certainly there will be computers capable of passing various versions of the Turing test. In the process, as Jaron Lanier has pointed out, we are likely to come to view our own mental processes and even emotional states in terms of computation, as the most advanced models in cognitive science already propose. Indeed, isn’t any declarative sentence a little algorithm, generating a finite series of differentially probable utterances by excluding (through negation and replacement) an infinity of other sentences that might, in a hierarchy of probabilities, have been uttered at that moment? At the very least, one can see the theoretical gains in seeing things this way.\n\nBut a funny thing happens on the way to the singularity. If we could imagine computers writing great poetry, we should consider it a matter of course that they could do something much simpler, something you really only need to be able to speak two languages to accomplish: translation. And yet they can’t do this, as anyone who witnessed the earlier hilarious attempts of google translate can testify. Or, at least, they couldn’t, when working according to a strictly computational model—that is, if you replace all the words, in the source language, one by one with words from the target language. Even allowing for grammar correct, which a computer can, of course, do, we end up with a mess—there is no way of accounting for the enormous variety and unpredictability of idioms in every language.\n\nBut now it can be done. The way to solve the problem of computer translation is to amass an enormous database of existing translations (say, English to Italian)—then, for every phrase or sentence in the source text, the computer can search all the ways it has been translated previously, and then be programmed to choose from among various (presumably not that many) alternatives.\n\nIt seems to me that “teaching” a computer to write novels or poetry would follow a similar, albeit far more complex, process: one would have to identify iterable elements (of plot, character, trope, syntax, vocabulary, etc.), using, perhaps some of those old structuralist studies that no one reads any more and calculate the probabilities of any element being articulated with others, in particular orders and combinations, and so on. One could, further, at least with more recent databases, calculate the crossover between such literary, semantic, grammatical features of texts in the “target” text (the novel or poem) and varied source material (journals, newspapers, medical journals, memoirs, and so on).\n\nThe difference from translation here is that one would also have to determine a desired level of variability between source and target material—the elements or, if you like, “memes,” from previous novels or poems and broader cultural reserves would need to be differentiated from their “average” usage: a metaphor used regularly in psychiatric discourse to describe the insane would have to undergo some transformation, in itself, or in its combination with other elements, in its placement in a poem or prose narrative. And, finally, while here as well composing would provide pleasures of its own, such a generator and arranger of texts would presumably have readers in mind, and, in fact, that would be his primary criteria in terms the degree of variability or difference the composed text should have.\n\nCould a computer determine which degree of homage, parody, surprise, familiarity, playful subversion of expected tropes, plot twists, and so on, is most likely to please that particular audience most in mind of an individual or collective human composer? Only, I think, if we imagine a La Placian demon that knows where all the atoms in the universe are at a single moment, plus all the thoughts in all the individual minds of possible human audiences. And, even then, as a member of that audience, the computer’s prediction of my response could not be as pleasing as a composer’s solicitation of my approval and admiration.\n\nWhat this means is that the googlization of the world, were it to replace all objects and texts with search prompts, would not be in the slightest bit dehumanizing in any way that matters to our originary understanding of the human. There are infinite ways to conduct any search in response to a prompt, and that search in turn generates innumerable unprecedented search possibilities. And each search decision is deeply embedded in body, history, biography, discipline and community. And any search will still be a discovery procedure for the signs that will defer, in however mediated a way, that potentially cataclysmic violence that will still be at the origin of our species.\n\nStill, this notion of the sign as a prompt for a database search has ramifications for our understanding of the originary sign, which we would see now more as a constraint on future iterations, bearing the marks of the asymmetries and symmetries of its production than a single meaning apprehended by all: an emergent event rather than a completed state. What I mean can be illustrated by Johanna Drucker’s account of the sign understood materially:\n\nMaterial conditions provide an inscriptional base, a score, a point of departure, a provocation, from which a work is produced as an event. The materiality of the system, no matter how stable, bears only a probabilistic relation to the event of production, which always occurs only in real time and is distinct in each instance.\n\n… In each case, the performance constructs meaning as a result of engagement, the text is performed, rather than received. Materiality provokes the performance, and this is true whether we are talking about the workings of distributed systems in which resistance, voltage, and allocation of resources perform in accord with other processes and decisions, or whether we are referring to the reading of a poem.\n\nI take the materiality of the sign, in Drucker’s sense, to suggest that we think of the originary gesture as a mark, mnemotechnic and prosthetic, on the natural world, including humans as part of that world. The effect of this mark on nature is to begin the process of transforming it into the materials for signs, tools, ritual objects, arenas and meals. Each new sign is constrained by the aggregation of previous markings, while inflecting the existing constraints. A constraint brings some configurations to the foreground while leaving others in the background; each performance of a semiotic configuration somewhat changes the distributions of foregrounding and backgrounding. Each redistribution locks us into a particular location along the human/non-human continuum, which we can only see as a location from within a new location, a new spread of possibilities wherein we can only be certain of the unrefined search term we bring to it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "civilizational-hide-and-seek",
      "title": "Civilizational Hide and Seek",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The more deferral of desire leads to prestige and wealth, the more civilized the community. The result is a infinitely extendable chain of actions leading to measurable results: in the degree zero of civilization, you eat what you gather or catch, you wear what you make, you sleep where you make a bed for yourself. This immediacy of result can be individual or collective—we eat what we catch, etc. Divisions of labor are the first steps towards civilization: one group hunts, another group cooks, then all eat. The chain continues to grow: one group raises the livestock, another slaughters it, another distributes it, others cook it, etc.\n\nAnd we know how it ends up: with a market society, in which no one knows what anybody else is doing, how the food got on your plate, how the clothes got into the store, how the transistors got into your iphone, and so on. This process allows for larger communities and more connections between communities, both developments dependent on the suppression of violence, first of all within communities: as long as each of us is focused on no one getting a bigger piece of an item on which all have equal claim, we will all insist on being present through the entire process. Civilization implies a faith that the end result of distribution will be roughly fair, but without anyone being able to say for sure (or even being able to say for sure what “fair” means).\n\nThe continually extended chain generates two contradictory and complementary desires. The first, directly civilizing, desire, is to conceal the chain. To take an example from Norbert Elias that I have used before, if eating the food in a separate location from where it has been prepared is a civilizational advance (just as is preparing it in a different location than where it has been slaughtered), then a marker of one’s awareness of this advance would be keeping the preparation out of sight. Food preparation, and, even more, the slaughterhouse, becomes “disgusting.” There is no doubt that the civilized individual of today finds sights and smells completely unbearable that our ancestors would not have even noticed (including, for example, the myriad body odors we make sure to conceal).\n\nWe can see how whole systems of manners and discourses comprised of euphemisms arise out of the civilizational hiding: in one place (say, the dinner table) you don’t do or say anything that might be a reminder of what is done in another place (the field, the workplace, the bathroom, the bedroom, etc.). Of course, this would exclude much of human life from dinner table conversation, but it does leave accounts of encounters and conversations that don’t rely on the specifics of these other settings (say, a discussion one had with a co-worker about a restaurant or movie) and, at least as important, all kinds of indirect references to the forbidden topics.\n\nThe acrobatics of such indirect references, making the references in a way that distinguishes those initiated into civilization from the novice, is what makes one a “polite” and “civilized” dinner companion.” You might think this is a parody of the decadent aristocracy of the 18th century, but I think if you pay close attention to how people (at least those who are not very close friends, or people intensely engaged on a common enterprise) speak at shared meals today, you will see that the same constraints are in place.\n\nThis desire for concealment of the conditions of civilization generates the contrary desire to expose them. This counter-desire emerges from a couple of sources. First, there is the imposition of the originary moral model on the civilizational scene. Civilization is predicated upon a particularly refined model of the moral reciprocity of the originary scene, but for that very reason is destined to violate it in many respects. Somewhere in that long chain of actions that has led to the dinner being on our table is an injustice. Some underpaid farm worker picked those berries, some sweatshop worker stitched that beautiful dress, etc.\n\nThat worker is “here,” but not here—it seems morally relevant, maybe even imperative, to make their presence felt. Civilizational distancing generates the appearance and certainly quite a bit of the reality of “hypocrisy”—proclaiming one’s adherence to the highest standards of moral reciprocity while relying upon practices that transduce those standards. A related imperative is to take responsibility for the results of one’s actions, a desire that motivated anti-civilizational thinkers like Thoreau, who wanted to build his own house, make his own clothes, grow his own food, simply so that he could account and be accountable for it all. Here, again, anxiety about the terms of the morality of the scene is involved: precisely as a civilized person, with an awareness of the intricate consequences of one’s actions, one wants to be able testify to those consequences.\n\nThe second, and perhaps more important desire (and infusing the moral imperatives), derives from the simple fact that what has been hidden away becomes fascinating for that very reason. Such concealment is drawn into the moral arena insofar as it is reasonable, even if wrong, to assume that things are hidden because people with an interest in doing so have hidden them, but the feeling that one is “off-center,” alienated, purposeless, anomic, precedes morality insofar as it derives from an intuition that unsettled violence lies within both the social order and the individuals it has created. In synthesizing these moral imperatives and undirected intimations of disorder, civilization creates sensationalism and sentimentalism: sensationalism being a premonition that seeing what others, presumably for no good reason, want to keep hidden, will yield some inarticulate revelation; and sentimentalism the determination to impose the narrative of the civilized individual on people living in less civilized conditions.\n\nI once saw an interview with Gayatri Spivak where she chastised global do-gooders trying to do away with child labor in the underdeveloped world by asserting that the reaction on the part of most of the child laborers themselves is “why do they want to take away my job?” Maybe Spivak was herself flouting the civilizational assumptions of her leftist academic interviewer (this used to be, at least, one of her favorite pastimes), but she had a very good point. Until very recently, children have always worked, and the very notion of childhood as a protected space of play and learning is a product of the civilized order that, it may very well be, only a period during which the productivity of entire populations is significantly increased will establish.\n\nSentimentalizing the efforts and sufferings of people trying to get there will not do them any good. At any rate, it seems that there is a clear order here: first one sensationalizes (generates outrage) and then one sentimentalizes (persuades us that the problem has been solved and we can avert our eyes again).\n\nSensationalism and sentimentalism are, of course the most prominent markers of “popular culture,” and popular culture is nothing if not a mode of concealment (of the tangle of resentments and deferrals pop culture represents as battles between good and evil), bringing us full circle. Civilization is an ongoing game of hide and seek, with the same people involved in overlapping modes of exposure and concealment. Today’s campus sexual culture, at least as administratively represented, is as perfect an example as one could hope for: with the installation of “affirmative consent” (“yes means yes”) as the new criterion for determining the “legitimacy” of a sexual encounter, each physical piece of the sexual puzzle, all that would have not long ago been unspeakable in “mixed company” (where the partners touch each other, what manner of touch, in what order, etc., logically, at least, requiring the precision and detail of a porn flick or medical examination) must be explicitly stated; on the other hand, all the tacit understandings of the erotic encounter, the hints, the suggestions, the hesitations, the play—all of that must be whited out as markers of a barbaric inequality between the sexes.\n\nI think the insatiable desire for “transparency” in government is similarly complemented by a code of silence regarding the basic dispositional components of social order (could you imagine a politician today running [much less governing] on the “populist” platform of straightforwardly and unapologetically supporting law abiding citizens, with a right to be in this country, who follow moral traditions, defer gratification, work and pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits—against those who don’t fit those criteria? As recently as Ronald Reagan, that was possible—but if you listen carefully to even the most conservative politicians today, you will see that they speak a very different language, one formed so as to say as little as possible about what people actually do with their lives).\n\nWe could probably establish a precise law here: for every exposure there is an equal and opposite concealment. It is the task of high culture to take us inside the civilizing process (to expose those hidden chains of action) while remembering that exposure itself is just another link in that chain, exercising its own concealments, invariably in the interest of self-exemption from the difficulties and incommensurabilities of civilization through advocacy of the moralizing simplicities of one part of it.\n\nCivilizational hide and seek is bound up with all questions of ethics and politics. The concept of “progress” implies that we will always find more areas of barbarism and savagery hidden within civilization, that these areas must be brought into the light, which is to say sensationalized and sentimentalized so that they can be reformed on familiar terms. And “progress” is intrinsically bound up with civilization—but this also means that there is something mechanical and compulsive about our insistence on progress: rather than accept that the barbaric must civilize themselves and that the civilized can do no more than offer incentives to do so (and protect themselves and their civilization in the meantime), the civilized seem unable to refrain from remaking any instance of barbarism in their sight in their own image; which also implies they cannot refrain from seeing anything that does not conform to their own image as barbaric.\n\n(Not to digress, but the supposed “relativism” of the Left is really an absolutism towards those elements of its own society it considers “barbaric”—the Left doesn’t really care about Islam or “Muslim extremism” one way or another—it cares about exposing the barbaric belligerence and backward racism of the nearer enemy.) This is all part of the dialectic of exposure and concealment: the civilized automatically, involuntarily, recoil from the slightest barbaric blot, while also being irresistibly attracted to uncovering/projecting them so as to bury them more irretrievably. I will refrain, for now, from explaining leftist, victimary, politics in these terms, but it can very easily and extensively be done (and the emergent right-wing “counter-counter-cultural” politics found on websites like Beitbart, PJMedia and Frontpage, have also seeped themselves in sensationalism, in a tit-for-tat manner).\n\nA responsible politics of civilization, then, must resist sensationalism and sentimentalism while inevitably entering the game of hide and seek. This involves transgressing boundaries (differentiations), like, for example, between “art” and “life,” or “domestic” and “foreign” issues, but doing so in order to restore or replace those boundaries. Transgression involves exposure, bringing something that usually remains unseen into a space predicated upon its exclusion: in doing so, one obeys the imperative issuing from the moral order but also the need to refresh our ostensives (the underlying attraction of sensationalism and sentimentalism), to see new things in new ways, to replace dead signs with ones that can represent emergent resentments; restoring boundaries refrains from using the violation of moral order that has been spotted behind some wall as a battering ram to demolish other, presumably equally “hypocritical” boundaries.\n\nThe restored or renewed boundary, then, must provide a way of arranging the newly revealed ostensives so as to make all those who accept that boundary more likely to detect that species of moral disorder. (But the bigger question, today, as I suggested in the previous post, is how to convince people to take up the burden of civilization in the first case. We all resent civilization because it is demanding and frustrating, and its benefits are evident only to those equipped to grasp them analytically—why not allow oneself to be overcome with those resentments and seek out those increasingly available pleasures indulgence in which disqualify you from an order in which you may not fit, and which may not even admit you?)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-memory-and-delight",
      "title": "Originary Memory and Delight",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Once you begin retrieving the concept of “civilization” as a core concept of social thought you start to suspect that most of the theoretical discussions of civilization, and many of the more interesting ones, come from those opposed to civilization. (There are exceptions, of course, but outright defenders of civilization tend to not want to look too closely at how the sausage has been made, vitiating their analyses.) I have come across the work of the anti-civilization thinker John Zerzan. Zerzan defines “civilization” very broadly, it seems to me, including any social order above the most primitive, egalitarian, hunter-gatherer communities.\n\nHe also gets at the heart of civilization in deferral of desire and the division of labor. He even considers the invention of language to be destructive, introducing the abstract, distancing, thought that makes the road to civilization possible, if not inevitable. Zerzan is uncompromising, and therefore clarifying in his attack on civilization, to the point of contending that its much to be desired demolition, and the emergence of a “future primitive,” is possible, and something worth working towards.\n\nCivilization, for Zerzan, is alienation, inequality and violence. Each step along the way in the civilizing process involved new innovations imposed upon an enslaved majority by an expropriating minority. As for what kind of human existence preceded civilization, that can be summed up in terms of “presence” (the very experience metaphysics has sought out and imagined, artists have tried to recreate, and ordinary humans try to recapture through sex, drugs, and other time-suspending absorbing activities). Prior to civilization, there really was Eden: food was plentiful and easily obtainable, conflict was minimal, desire never needed to be deferred, time was non-existent, and each individual was thoroughly in the present moment at all times.\n\nInterestingly, Zerzan contends that the first use of language was probably to lie. He mobilizes copious anthropological evidence in what seem to me selective ways, but the more important question is whether, from an originary perspective, we have any reason to dispute his claims; and, following up on that question, would it make any difference to a civilizing politics which I would assume, in some minimal form, to be shared by all originary thinkers?\n\nMy answer to the first question is “no.” Nothing in the originary hypothesis is affected by the anti-civilization creed. The originary hypothesis assumes an increase in the mimetic proclivities of the advanced hominid that was our immediate predecessor. This corresponds with the account given by Merlin Donald in his Origins of the Modern Mind. We assume this mode of existence was ended by the originary event, but it may very well be that it was, for the most part, Edenic. With the increase in mimetic capacity and activity must have come increased conflict, but maybe the order maintained by the alpha male was fairly benign, and violence was a rare occurrence.\n\nMoreover, the very increase in mimetic activity would have cast an entirely new light on the world, made it come alive as it never had before—the desire of everyone around you multiplying your own might have given objects a kind of halo. This transitional period (of course, calling it “transitional’ already presupposes the inevitability of its demise, but on what grounds?—perhaps pre-humans lived like this for longer than we have lived as humans) might have been one best characterized by perpetual delight.\n\nThe originary hypothesis assumes an event in which the general convergence upon the central object injected a new kind of fear into the proto-human community, but it does not assume (or at least it need not) that this fear was justified. Indeed, as I have argued previously (in the post, “The Violent Imaginary”), it is hardly likely that the struggle over the central object would have led to a melee resulting in the death of most of the population. It would certainly break up well before that happened, probably with minimal injury, reinstating the rule of the alpha (I suspect Zerzan would reject the assumption of the need for an alpha—maybe in a plentiful environment there wouldn’t be much need for one).\n\nThe implication would be that the originary sign was a brilliant solution to a problem that didn’t exist. The reign of earthly delights need never have come to an end (at least by the species’ own hands). If we take this analysis one step further, and consider that the sign might very well have been discovered in an even less consequential (for the group as a whole, at least) encounter by just a couple or a few members, and then brought back to and “imposed” on the rest (something which is much more obviously true with the later emergence of big and ever bigger men, and probably with monotheism and metaphysics as well), then the correspondence between the anti-civilizational argument and the originary hypothesis is complete—and without the least harm or distortion done to either. The originary hypothesis could take on the anti-civilizational argument without modification of either that argument or itself.\n\nNo obvious implications for either ethics or the theory of history follow from this. One could argue that humanity is the result of a mistake, or a long series of mistakes, without concluding that those mistakes could be corrected, or could have been (deliberately) avoided in the first place, or that the alternative pathways our species might have taken wouldn’t have consisted of more devastating mistakes or vulnerabilities. We live and think under the authority of the sign, and can’t imagine living and thinking otherwise. But we might have the memory of earthly delight inscribed in our language (language in the broadest sense, including gesture and shared feelings—issues that Rene Harrison started to raise for us at our recent conference), even if that might be a mistaken memory as well, constituted by the resentment of the central object on the originary scene.\n\nResentment of civilization, with the deferrals and discipline it demands, would draw heavily on this originary memory, as would the apparently inextricable utopian fantasies that resentment generates. As I argued in the first of these posts on civilization, the basic principle of civilization, that deferral yields returns in increments proportionate to the deferral, is itself an article of faith that may be often or rarely true—it is hard to imagine what the “metrics” would be by which we could settle this question. It’s easy to see why someone might want to go back rather than continue to trudge forward, seeing such “trudgery” as rather Mac Bethean: “I am in blood/Stepped so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as to go o’er.”\n\nWe arrive at an incommensurability here: any argument I might make for “going o’er” would only be convincing for someone already steeped in the hope of receiving the bounty of civilization—some who finds returning to be less tedious will consider such hopes to be nothing more than an ideological scam, meant to keep the masses slaving away. We could say going back is unrealistic, but that is becoming the weakest of arguments—who among us could with any confidence predict the shape of the world 50 years from today? We don’t know what’s “realistic” and what’s not. Those who would like to go back think our current civilization is unsustainable—I couldn’t, in good faith, try to refute them.\n\nThere is an anarcho-primitivist politics, and it is global. It overlaps with the left, and with victimary politics, but is irreducible to it. It is probably more intransigent than the victimary, which operates exclusively on civilized terrain (and would make no sense otherwise), while also capable of doing less harm at the moment. It is probably evident from my discussion that I am far more sympathetic to anarcho-primitivism than I am to the vindictive bio-politics of the victimary (anarcho-primitivists would presumably consider me, a civilized drone trudging along, as much a victim as anyone else), even though I am well aware that the former is capable of violent outbursts—Zerzan is supportive of the Unabomber, Ted Kacynski, (he has published his manifesto, anyway).\n\nBut more important to me than any of that is the possibility that a kind of aura of a pre-violent mimetic garden of earthly delights is a part of our basic constitution as sign using but also biological beings. This would be a pre-human feeling (with, probably, many shades of feeling) that is part of what makes us human. It seems to me that such a concept would illuminate a great many anthropological issues, such as our vulnerability to various addictions, what Freud called the “death drive,” what Julia Kristeva once called “jouissance,” fantasies of immersion in a thoroughly natural or thoroughly technological environment (or a natural environment thoroughly technologized), the “Question of Being,” a “cratylian” feeling about the fit of words to their meanings, the feeling of being “in” love, the Garden of Eden story (in all its variants across cultures) and perhaps much else.\n\nIt may very well be that in our use of signs we are really doing nothing more than attempting to approximate and correspond to the “continuous present” (to use Gertrude Stein’s term—for which she was indebted to William James, who was in turn indebted to Charles Sanders Peirce) of delight. Our tacit knowledge of how to arrive at the equipoise between converging desires might rely upon our originary memories of delight, in a place where things shone forth, lit up by desires cascading back and forth.\n\nThis raises one more issue for originary thinking. If we can trace a resentment toward civilization back to the emergence of the sign, we can also trace it forward as a resentment renewed and sedimented with each forced march to more civilized conditions. It’s easy enough to imagine what destruction must have been wrought on small primitive communities in the construction of the ancient empires; the Bible provides us with some clues regarding what it must have taken to root out those inveterate tendencies toward “idol worship.” The wars and pacification of honor communities in the creation of the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe are also well known; nor does there seem to me any reason to believe that the modern market order was embraced by the agricultural communities swept into it.\n\nAt each point along the way the vanguardist “firstness” of the pioneers of a new set of constraints required the expenditure of vast quantities of disciplinary force. Again, nothing obvious follows from all this civilizational overkill (which may, in fact, have been necessary)—I remain firmly in favor of trudging forward and resisting those who want to pull us back. But, in ways and with consequences we couldn’t wholly account for, each and every one of us “remembers” all this. Those of us committed to the civilizing process might keep this in mind instead of wondering why the civilizing project that seems to us so obvious rarely goes according to plan. Perhaps the civilizing process must find ways to indulge originary memory—maybe that will turn out to be the civilizing contribution made by hedonistic modern art."
    },
    {
      "slug": "queering-the-normal-norming-the-queer-taking-thought-before-the-lights-go-out",
      "title": "Queering the Normal, Norming the Queer: Taking Thought before the Lights Go Out",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "What is a man? What is a woman? What is marriage? It might very well be that asking these questions, much less trying to answer them, now counts as a micro-aggression in the University of California system. The recent innovations in the gender system introduced by the LGBT, or, better, queer, movement would seem to open up these questions for scrutiny; on the contrary, they lock them down and throw away the key. The lock-down is a desperate attempt to evade the incoherence of the implicit answers proposed by proponents of same-sex marriage and defenders of the transgendered. After all, if the only differences between men and woman are culturally constructed, and if those differences exist only to perpetuate inequality between the sexes, what does it mean to “become a woman” (or man), and why is that act to be celebrated—after all, doesn’t the claim that becoming a member of the opposite sex, or realizing that one has been one all along, involves a fundamental and liberating transformation, further imply that the differences between the sexes are significant, after all?\n\nEven more, doesn’t the desire to “present” as the opposite sex imply that there are reliable markers of sexual difference? Judith Butler, back when she set Queer Theory in motion with her book, Gender Trouble , back in the 80s, made the very prescient, provocative, and to a great extent true observation that sex roles are “performed,” that such performance always involves a set of normative assumptions, while any given performance also varies from and hence destabilizes those norms. In that case, the norms can be deliberately destabilized, and in this possibility Butler saw the radical potential in what, long, long ago, was known as “cross dressing” and “drag queens.”\n\nBy performing “femininity” in non-normative ways, these practices destabilized gender difference by showing off the arbitrariness and, “therefore” (this presumably logical connection is never made) oppressive character of the norms keeping them in place. Much of the left laughed at Butler’s arguments, but she has certainly been vindicated.\n\nStill, all this might be true, and we could still imagine a biological basis for gender differences. The “reformist” version of Butler’s theory would acknowledge the claims I just worked through, and still go on to say that chromosomal, hormonal, brain, genital, etc., differences between the sexes still provides a kind of center around which all these variations of gender norms revolve and constellate. Yes, there are many ways of “being a woman” and “being a man,” and there are plenty of manly women and womanly men, and we are better and freer if we accept and even rejoice in this play of differences, and those performance artists who act out and parody what have come to be seen as unnecessarily restrictive versions of these roles are doing us a service by liberating us (in a non-coercive manner) from them.\n\nBut none of that would change the fact that, left to their own devices, boys and girls and men and women will cluster around certain “male” and “female” characteristics, even if we may occasionally be surprised at what they turn out to be. Perhaps boys will someday come to enjoy feeding their dolls with bottles, and girls will become obsessed with massive toy truck collisions, but this has not happened yet, even with the best, or at least most determined, of intentions of a generation of liberalized parents. I suspect, though, that even this attempt at a compromise in the ongoing gender wars would be shot down with extreme prejudice if floated on Twitter—the cultural vandals of the left are in a take no prisoner mode, which might itself be a sign of desperation—but desperate measures are sometimes successful.\n\nThe problem is that even the slightest possibility that a gun-toting, barroom brawling, alpha-male harem seeking model of masculinity, on the one hand, and a cradle rocking, stay at home, cooking and cleaning, obey your husband model of femininity, on the other hand, would in the end retain even a sliver of legitimacy presents too great an obstacle to the ambitions of the queer movement. All normative identities must be put through the victimary blender, with no exceptions, because if there is one exception, there could be another, and another, and then (as deconstructing queer theorists know very well) before long you have no rule.\n\nAs I composed the caricatures of masculinity and femininity in the previous paragraph, I noted an asymmetry—the masculine model is much more of a caricature than the feminine model. This is another way of saying that a more biologically grounded masculinity is much easier to parody, mimic, deconstruct, and so on, than a similarly grounded femininity. The norms of masculinity that have become objectionable, or obsolete, are those grounded in territorialism and the honor of the Big Man—those norms, involving boasting, bluster and intimidation, when transplanted into peaceful occupations, become ridiculous (even if not completely ineffective).\n\nBut a woman completely devoted to her children, family and home can’t become ridiculous because the activities involved in such devotion still need to be performed. (Mocking such women always involves measuring them according to criteria secondary to those central to their chosen role: they are stupid, prejudiced, slavish, animal-like, etc.—in other words, they are, in a circular manner, not like the professional woman mocking them.) (The complementary male role is supporting the family economically, but that role is ambivalent, and hence an easy target of ridicule, because it often requires emasculation outside of the home, such as en during the bullying of a boss, demeaning menial tasks, etc.)\n\nEven the modes of femininity that are more easily mimicked and caricatured (especially by the transgendered), those associated with attracting a mate precisely by exaggerating the physical features distinguishing the sexes, tend to be lovingly embodied, rather than ridiculed, by their mimics, male and female alike—because the function of attracting a mate cannot become obsolete either.\n\nSo, there are many ways of being male and female, and yet the transgendered seem to zero in on a few very specific ways. The female-to-male transgendered (who have garnered almost no attention in the current storm of interest in the matter) tend, almost invariably, to be austere, vaguely intellectual, self-contained, quiet, let’s say “nerdish”—the kind of man who mostly goes unnoticed anyway. The far more common male-to-female version, meanwhile, seems to tend toward the extravagant, adopting the most stereotyped version of a “pin-up girl” femininity. Bruce Jenner wants to dress up like a starlet and have girls’ nights out—there is no talk of a deeply rooted desire to nurture small children.\n\nHe doesn’t want to be fitted out with breast pumps so he can nurse infants. This is all incredibly interesting but also, I fear, falls under the category of “micro-aggression,” because if we look too closely at these decisions and transformations we can see that they ultimately confirm, even as “exceptions to the rule,” the general “clustering” view of sex traits I presented above. Male-to-female transgenders seem to want liberation from the constraints of masculinity into a fetishized femininity focused on clothes, make-up, jewelry and theatrical flourishes—that is, the most attention grabbing features of femininity.\n\nFemale-to-male transgenders, meanwhile, seem to want liberation from the intense scrutiny given to a woman’s appearance into a kind of nondescript maleness that can neutralize attention to external features. None of this is “inauthentic” or dishonest: indeed, negotiating the ways others attend to you, controlling that attention as best you can and accepting all the ways you can’t control it, is one of the fundamental and most difficult problems of life—and these solutions may be the best ones for at least some of the individuals involved. But they don’t solve the problem fundamentally, since the problem can’t be solved fundamentally—indeed, by making such dramatic changes one has made oneself an object of attention in a new way (and much depends here on how much one publicizes one’s transformations—again, it seems to me that the male-to-female variant is far more interested in the drama of the transformation itself than the female-to-male variant—which is probably why we hear so much more about the former, along with the fact that entrance into the workforce already has woman taking over many “male” characteristics, so the further transformation is not as astonishing.\n\nOf course, that would also mean that there is something inherently “reactionary” about male-to-female transgenders; perhaps something inherent victimary as well, even if it is the transition that is the central victimary category here, not the femininity). Maybe I’m wrong about much, or even all of this analysis. But that would just mean that there are better analyses, that there is more worthy of notice than I have noticed, in which case these questions of gender identification are, as I began by saying, inherently open ones.\n\nWhat this would mean is that it will be impossible to police the way people speak (and therefore think) about the transgendered—since the questions are open by their nature, lashing out at those who, for example, insist on using the masculine pronoun when referring to Bruce Jenner (as far as I know, he has not yet legally changed his name, al though it is perhaps a micro-aggression to note that), will simply drive the questions underground, leading them to be asked and answered in coded forms. In fact, it is very likely that we are going to see a revival of the method of writing that Leo Strauss called “writing between the lines,” and claimed characterized all philosophical writing up until the modern era.\n\nOne would, for example, write an essay excoriating the retrograde refuseniks who continue to hold their ground on matters of sexual morality, and one would make a point of lampooning and attacking each and every repugnant element of their beliefs; along the way, one would give details about those beliefs that are normally not provided, one would almost unnoticeably lower the tone of one’s diatribe at strategic points, one would find ways of showing the weakness of one’s own stated or presumed beliefs, perhaps by deploring disagreements among the “transies” that highlight the incoherence of the thinking as a whole, and so on—all in order to preserve your livelihood (or even, possibly at some point down the road, avoid civil or criminal charges) while communicating with those fellow dissidents out there who know how to decode.\n\nIt might be a very good discipline to recover and master. Perhaps modern openness (the principles implicit in our freedoms of speech, religion and association) was really a temporary phenomenon, more limited than we realize, and one that relied on common hopes and enemies that are no longer widely shared. Maybe the need to carve out a space of thinking against both the “people” and the “elites” is the more permanent civilized condition. And maybe it will encourage other subversive lines of thinking regarding sacrosanct categories like “democracy” and “equality.”\n\nSo, what is marriage? Part of the purpose of eliminating all relevant differences between men and women (either by eliminating the difference or declaring them irrelevant) is to quell any disquieting questions about the new definition of marriage. Which is what, exactly? The question is posed in all seriousness. Marriage used to be union between a man and a woman, implicitly (there wouldn’t have been any need to spell it out) for the purpose of grounding the link between sexuality and procreation in the shared and publicly recognized responsibility of the parties involved. So, if that understanding is now the equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws, what is the new understanding?\n\nAs far as I know, a new one has not been forthcoming. In a rare highly civil conversation I recently had with an individual supportive of same sex marriage and well versed in GA and its critique of victimary politics, the following was proposed (I hope I will be representing this person’s view accurately): aside from the link between sex and procreation, marriage serves to take people off of the sexual marketplace, and explicitly signal that they are off, so as to reduce the tempestuous of that marketplace, thereby reducing the incidences of disease, licentiousness and potentially dangerous jealousy that follow from an “unregulated” sexual marketplace.\n\nThis seems to me the best rationale for same sex marriage that I have seen, and the only one that I can think of that is not grounded in resentment towards the “benefits” married couples receive or the implicit condemnation of non-normative sexual practices still intrinsic to the traditional understanding of marriage. But it is problematic. The most obvious problem, one I pointed out in the conversation, is that this argument has not, in fact, been advanced by those pushing for the legal and political enforcement of same sex marriage, and for a very good reason: in leaving the firm legalistic ground of “equal rights” and wandering off into the realms of psychology and anthropology, one is left with an argument that can be accepted, rejected, or contested; and, furthermore, that can be tested over time and found wanting; or weighed against other consequences of undermining traditional marriage. In other words, it would slow the momentum of the queer movement and make it dependent upon the vagaries of civil discussion, which sometimes doesn’t go your way.\n\nBut the problems with the proposed rationale go even deeper. If marriage does indeed serve the proposed purpose, it already does so for something like 98% of the population. Are the disturbances to the social order from the sexual proclivities of that other 2% so unsettling as to require that they, as well, be incorporated? If the answer is “no,” then the argument depends upon the 98% being more concerned than we can expect them to be for the sexual morality of the other 2%. But if the answer is “yes,” that in turn raises disturbing questions, and requires us to make some distinctions. There are male homosexuals, and female.\n\nDo I really need to ask where the sexual “turbulence” comes from? Lesbians have, for a very long time, managed to arrange for relationships akin to marriage, living together for decades as “spinsters” in a manner that, to the rest of the world, seemed sisterly and unobjectionable, carving out a space of privacy and freedom while respecting the opinion of their neighbors. Such relationships have no doubt been formed among respectable “confirmed bachelors” as well, but the norm for male homosexual habits is very different. Same sex marriage, according to the rationale we are considering, is meant to solve the problem of male homosexual promiscuity.\n\nBut it could only do so if the traditional understanding of marriage as monogamous and lifelong were to remain intact. Not only has this traditional understanding of marriage been steadily eroded through the sexual revolution, but it stands to reason that if we can revise the terms of marriage in one respect, we could do so in others. Indeed, why should gays conform to the terms of marriage, rather than marriage being reformed to fit the preferences of gays? In other words, same sex marriage is at least as likely to make promiscuity acceptable within marriage more generally as it is to reduce the promiscuity of male homosexuals.\n\nSo, same sex marriage does not, in fact, propose a new understanding of marriage even while it eviscerates the traditional understanding. It is easy to see how individuals wishing to form relationships would find same sex marriage beneficial, but under conditions of civil discourse it would also be recognized that the problems same sex marriage would solve could be approached and solved, or at least minimized, in other ways. So, the only rationale is the resentful one of destroying an institution and a moral tradition that excludes and demeans one. What is at stake in same sex marriage is the so far undiscussed (and, if its proponents have their way, it will remain undiscussed until it is too late, which is to say when it has become undiscussable) demand that all social discourse recognize same sex attraction as equally normal as opposite sex attraction.\n\nThe feelings of a tiny minority must not simply be tolerated, respected or accommodated, but explicitly and on every occasion upon which the question arises, validated. If a parent is disappointed upon learning that his/her child is attracted to members of the same sex, that feeling must be ruthlessly uprooted, and certainly never expressed, except, perhaps, in a therapeutic setting entered into for the sake of uprooting it. Any suggestion that it is better that children be raised in a home with a mother and father must be extirpated—indeed, we must speak of “spouses” and “parents” exclusively, and not “husbands and wives,” “ mothers and fathers.”\n\nWhat has been taken to be the “normal” way of “acquiring” children must be given no “privileges” over any other way of “acquiring” them, which means that there is no longer to be a presumed relation of parentage between the “natural” mother and father and the child. Since marriage is no longer a natural relationship merely sponsored and regulated by the government but, rather, is a government created relationship, the relationship between parents and children is likewise to be presumed to be legitimate only upon the sufferance of the government. Of course, the state can already remove children deemed to be mistreated from the home of their parents, but the presumption remains in favor of the parents.\n\nNo longer. There will be no obstacle to looking at any household, examining the options, and asking, “what is in the best interest of the children”? Is it in the best interest of, say, a sexually confused 12 year old to remain in the care of a male and female parent who not only cannot model the kind of relationship best suited (according to expert advice) to that child’s sexuality but are still evil enough to believe that gender has a basis in nature? Rather than in the home of an enlightened and welcoming gay couple who are even better able to support the child economically? Such questions will answer themselves, and our imaginations are currently far too limited to imagine what other questions will emerge.\n\nSo, there is my hate filled, homo- and transphobic diatribe. One can still say what I have written here, if one stays under the radar, that is below the threshold of the continual sweeps carried out by the social media mobs. But that threshold will continue to lower, to the point where such arguments as I have made will be unintelligible (perhaps it’s naïve to think they are still intelligible) to the vast majority of citizens of Western countries. That development will mean not so much a change in public opinion as a collective insistence upon living with lies, and stamping out any hint of the truth. And the effects will reverberate—the truth in one area of discourse threatens the lies imposed elsewhere.\n\nWe can already see what similar lies on questions like race and the environment look like. But one useful lesson we have learned from the Communist devastation of Eastern and Central Europe is that people remember or re-member (piece back together) the truth, even out of the pastiche of lies they are told and forced to repeat. Those of us committed to thinking will have to draw upon the reserves of civilization available to us, upon the genres of writing and artistic production, the skill of “double-talk” a rich vocabulary and discursive equipment affords us. And we will have to get very good at it, because the victimocrats are far better at sniffing out heresy than the Catholic Church ever was.\n\nThat addresses the “1984” dimension of the cultural revolution. The “Brave New World” dimension will entail recovering and inventing ways of speaking about “Nature,” as a horizon that always lies beyond technological, cultural and therapeutic interventions. In the end, we would have to believe that things have their own way of being regardless of what is done to them (and even as a result of what is done to them), and that limits what we should do to them, even if we could never state in advance what those limits are. Only if we believe that about things will we also believe it about people; and realizing that desire, resentment and an originary mistakenness informs our interventions into people will help us to mind the nature of things."
    },
    {
      "slug": "toward-a-unified-field-theory-of-the-left",
      "title": "Toward a Unified Field Theory of the Left",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve tried this before, and perhaps will have to again, but this is worth doing, even if it takes a few drafts.\n\nMost definitions of the Left focus on their obsession with equality, and that’s certainly a good place to start. The drive for equality is endless, allowing the Left to remain in constant motion: there are always some respects in which people are treated equally and others in which they’re not. It is impossible to treat people equally in one way without treating them unequally in other ways. Equality, despite the common disclaimer, does mean “the same”—citizens are equal, that is to say, the same, insofar as they can all vote. But this sameness now foregrounds differences: citizens with money have more influence beyond their single vote, some citizens are more knowledgeable than others, some find it easier to get to the polls than others, they are equal politically but unequal economically, etc.\n\nIf sameness/equality is what we want, it makes sense to treat differences as suspect, and that, indeed, becomes the most economical approach to leftism, as we have seen in the current sex wars, where the furious attempt to make one of the more obvious and permanent differences among individuals, that of sex, irrelevant, has no end in sight. We will not have sexual equality until all differences, or at least any difference from which one might draw and invidious distinction in any area of human existence whatsoever, between men and women, and between hetero- and homo-sex are eliminated. As I suggested in my previous post, since this can never be accomplished, the inevitable result is continual violence against reality that just re-surfaces the differences in new ways. It would be easy enough to show that the same holds for racial and economic equality. But it makes for permanent employment for activists.\n\nThis is all true, and it explains a lot, but still seems to me to remain within “Newtonian physics”—it takes a homogeneous social space, in which individuals circulate and collide, for granted. Things, including people, can only be the same in relation to some common measure, and someone we imagine applying that measure. The source of the measure in question is that of the modern notion of “rights,” which makes all individuals equal in relation to the government. (Victimary thinking is, ultimately, only an intensification of this longstanding process.) So, it is the state, the heir to the ancient empires, which first reduced all members of the governed population to equidistant margins from the imperial center; or, more precisely, citizens erected such a state to encode and enforce their own resentment of it.\n\nThe only way to remain immune to leftism is to bind equality of treatment up with shared obligations within forms of cooperation serving specific purposes (which provide the measure in those spaces)—business, schools, trade associations, spaces of inquiry, neighborhood associations, and so on—within a pluralist frame in which no form of cooperation has authority over any other. In other words, a society with endlessly proliferating, non-hierarchical centers—garlic to the vampirism of the left. The state is a necessary precondition for the left, then—it is only possible to imagine endlessly reducing the entire population to sameness once a sovereign bureaucracy cataloguing and accounting for everyone is in place.\n\nThe imaginary of the Left is intrinsically bureaucratic, constantly on the hunt for unclassifiable differences and anomalies. Even so, for the Left, bureaucracy is always a sign of failure: once the oppressive differences have been abolished, people should spontaneously arrange themselves symmetrically in relation to the center—the abolition of the state still haunts the state soaked imaginary of the Left. Bureaucracy is always called into being when those differences have resisted elimination, or when new, and even more egregious, differences emerge out of the wreckage of the first attempt at differencide. Leftists start off as enemies of the state (historically, the absolutist monarch), which simply means they model themselves on the state that has reduced them to equidistant peripheries as well as on their resistance to that state.\n\nBut, still, why do those people comprising the Left want these unachievable, even insane, things? You can never get a straight answer to this question—if you pose the question, what would be a “good society,” you just get a list of hate objects, which are preventing us from doing all kinds of unspecified things, in response. The most coherent answer was probably Marx’s—the equalization of all individuals corresponds to the development of the productive forces, which in turn benefits virtually everyone. But the coherent answer is obviously false, and therefore ultimately incoherent—technological developments generate more differences, differences in human abilities, human desires, and available modes of representation.\n\nEric Voegelin sees modernity as a whole as a post, even anti-Christian gnostic faith: in the terms I have been using here, that would entail a belief that the existing social world, in all of its details, is a product of an evil imperial center that has made us all equal in destitution, material and spiritual; behind that evil existing world is another world, governed by a good imperial center, in which those who see and cleanse themselves of the evil world participate. This explains a lot, as well, especially if we identify modernity with Leftism, in which case the seemingly irresistible progress of the Left would simply follow from the unmoored, post-Christian civilization set in motion by the Reformation and then Enlightenment. The decisive dividing line is the separation of rights from embedded obligations in all the modern republics, real and aspired to. But, still, why the fatal deviation?\n\nBy “modernity” I would mean the forgetting of the civilizing process within civilization (postmodernity would be the remembering of the forgetting, but a deeper forgetting of the civilizing process itself). The common association of modernity with the emergence of the market provides us with a good example of this forgetting. Impersonal exchanges carried out through money can take place between communities or within communities—presumably the former developed first, and pre-existed by millennia the latter. Traders moving between communities would always be vulnerable to raiders; exchange could only take root within communities under the sovereignty of some empire, which treats property owners as equal in relation to itself.\n\nThe same is true of the modern market, which emerges under the protection of, first, the monarchical state and, then, the republics that emerged precisely to protect the newly formed markets. In other words, not “the,” but a particular kind of market emerged—one on which, for one thing, the participants could pretend to disembeddedness relative to the surrounding communities, a pretense which took the form, for example, of the state eliminating and/or replacing forms of property and exchange that didn’t suit the “modern” model. When we speak of “the” market, we evince forgetting of the process that produced this network of markets. Indeed, the development of “the” market might be an index of forgetting, just as it is an index of a more advanced, more tumultuous, deeper and internally vulnerable form of civilization.\n\nEric Gans, meanwhile, sees the difference between Right and Left in terms of the tension between firstness and reciprocity. The right supports the process of innovation and differentiation while the left tries to ensure that the results can be made compatible with the moral model of reciprocity. This analysis implies the permanence of the Left/Right distinction, and supports the assumption that the Left will always be at an advantage, since innovations and differentiations are difficult to create and even more difficult to control, while finding failures of reciprocity is like shooting fish in a barrel, since any innovation can only spread more or less gradually, exacerbating old asymmetries and creating new ones.\n\nBut once you have inscribed the Left within the originary configuration, you can only hope to appease it, rather than abolish it; and the only way one can really hope to appease it is by addressing its most reasonable and realistic claims. This entails treating leftist complaints as if they are ultimately about the distribution of goods and resources, with perhaps a bit of recognition of formerly excluded identities. But this can never succeed if the Left’s most reasonable and realistic demands are really distractions from its real concerns—hooks for new recruits and camouflage for political warfare.\n\nIt is not necessary to ascribe originariness to the Left/Right configuration. The right exists only because of the left—the left is what set “modernity” in motion; the right has always been reactive. There are other possible relations between founders and inheritors, donors and recipients, creators and disseminators. The relation between Judaism and Christianity is certainly not analogous to the relation between Right and Left. Nor is the relation between the founders of disciplines and those who labor in the spaces they have founded. Or between inventors, producers and consumers. The Left/Right configuration is parochial and contingent.\n\nThere is no originary reason for the existence of a large numbers of people who will never stop denouncing existing institutions until all individuals, in all respects and all areas of their lives, can be subjected to a common measure—which is to say, never. Reciprocity is built into firstness (the donor presupposes a recipient), and resentment (always conjoined with gratitude) is built into reciprocity, and the moral model is always active, but never on the left—it is in our daily interactions within institutions that we work on evening out the discrepancies between our shared projects and the way those projects are marred by desires and resentments they have been supposed to have transcended.\n\nIf a male scientist continually remarks on a subordinate female colleague’s appearance, or takes advantage of relations of physical proximity to grope her, the problem is really less one of male-female inequality than of a failure to adhere to the norms of the discipline. Scientists can only work together if they are all, while in the lab, absorbed in their shared attention to the work. The relation of subordination, which has a purely functional meaning within the workplace, is being mapped onto a male-female dynamic imagined to be in place elsewhere—it may not even be a relation of inequality, strictly speaking; rather, it might just be the convention whereby men pursue women, who are presumed to be deferring the advances of men for the sake of testing and selecting possible mates.\n\nWhether that form of male-female interaction (which does distribute power between the sexes and does not sanction sexual assault) should be reformed in some way cannot be a problem for the pair in the laboratory—their business is simply to keep it out where it doesn’t belong, whether in a crude or more refined form. Indeed, the very importation of that male-female dynamic to this inappropriate space, a transgression in itself, encourages the transgressor to adopt its cruder forms. The only real answer here is for scientists to act as scientists should—and that will take care of other issues, such as women being treated fairly when it comes to pay and promotions (and it might facilitate more acceptable forms of the romantic attachments that will inevitably form when men and women share the same workplace—there is an eros to shared devotion to some transcendent object).\n\nThere will, indeed, be times, where the mapping of various male-female dynamics over the personnel in the labs is so powerful that the real qualities of the women scientists are obscured, and attention must therefore be paid to that mapping. In such cases, the disparity between disciplinary norms and imported conventions may need to be “performed.” But this is still just another way of getting at the problem of scientists adhering to the disciplinary norms they have tacitly committed to.\n\nBut how is it possible for scientists to act as scientists should, for business people to act as business people should, teachers to act as teachers should, police to act as police should, and so on? Asking the question presupposes the conquests of civilization: as I have been arguing in recent posts, the result of the virtuous circle of deferral and reward (material, intellectual and spiritual). Only the suppression of barbarism (honor culture and the vendetta) and savagery (nomadic raiding of the products of incipient civilization) makes it possible to slice society up into different “functions,” each with its own purpose, its own ethics, its own rules and forms of association—in short, its own discipline.\n\nBut a crucial part of civilization is the forgetting of the civilizing process—the desires and resentments that have been curbed are also placed out of sight, producing things like an “unconscious,” where fantasies of, say, killing those who have interfered with your reception of the rewards you so richly deserve, can be deposited. And yet civilization is hard, and it remains hard. It’s hard to be in a room full of attractive people and not respond to their attractiveness. It’s hard to see a counter full of food when you’re hungry and not just reach for what you want. It’s hard to have power over people and not use that power to avenge slights, or satisfy fantasies of domination.\n\nIt’s hard to be berated and humiliated in front of a room full of people and not lash out, or even allow one’s facial expression to betray anger. Of course, once you are able to do these things, they are routine and no longer hard, because your commitment to something more important, to the discipline, along with long years of elementary training in sitting still, sharing with your neighbor, leaving a room in an orderly manner, etc., makes self-restraint possible—but for this to happen those “barbaric” desires and resentments must also disappear as objects of sustained attention. If you are constantly reminding yourself you can’t take a swing at the department head as he details your failure to meet production quotas, you aren’t quite “there” yet.\n\nAnd there are and probably always will be lots and lots of people in any civilized order who aren’t quite “there” and never will be—that is, who will never stop mapping the savage and barbaric, in a sense “natural,” responses to physical attraction, a range of unsatisfied appetites, insult and frustration onto civilized, disciplinary spaces. They cannot stop carrying out vendettas and forming raiding parties on the representatives of civilization, even if they do so in more or less veiled and hesitant ways. Civilization can never be complete, in part because it can never rest upon its past accomplishments—there are always residues and recrudescenses of savagery and barbarism to mop up (relaxing civilizing restraints, which inevitably happens once they have become successful and therefore seem to have lost their purpose and become rote and mean, will also encourage these reversions).\n\nI suppose this is a way of saying that civilization is always on a war footing, even though war, for the civilized society, is the worst form of barbarism, which civilization only recognizes the necessity for war as a last resort, even while engaging in an endless series of internal and metaphorical wars. Even in war, though, civility, which is to say discipline, is possible.\n\nNo civilization has ever entirely freed itself from its imperial origins. The West has come the closest, which is part of the reason why the West has a Left (thousands of years of Chinese civilization doesn’t seem to have produced one). Empire is civilizing and decivilizing, and this ambivalence haunts Western civilization, in particular through its monotheistic faiths. The Left inhabits this ambivalence, finding hideous empires everywhere while fantasizing its own to eliminate the others. The Left presumes itself constitutively civilized, insofar as it obeys the hidden imperial imperative to reduce all beings to the primal condition of equality to which they are (paradoxically) progressing; the Left is in fact engaged in a constant vendetta and piratical raid on civilization, insofar as civilizing discipline is the main source of the differences that must be destroyed to usher in the reign of the center of centers.\n\nIt is in this double bind that we can see not just in the Left’s obsession with equality, but its choice of targets and means of attack. To be on the Left is to be perpetually outraged that actual empires obscure the real one to which we would spontaneously adhere if it were visible. It is pointless to focus on what the Left claims to support (science, the environment, a living wage, whatever)—the only thing worth examining is what it uses these shibboleths to attack. And what it always attacks is some form of deferral and discipline that must be adopted by all for civilization to be possible (what most infuriates today’s left is the suggestion that the victimary demographics be held to the same standards of discipline as the victimizers).\n\nThose who are disciplined and display self-restraint and thereby generate a center (or what Philip Rieff calls “charisma”) are attacked for having stolen that centrality; those marked as lacking deferral and discipline are defended so as to undermine claims to centrality based on discipline. Deferral and discipline are a sham, constructed only to generate a false charisma, so meticulous rules excluding spontaneity are to be imposed on the privileged (if whites behave in a non-racist manner towards people of color [something which only under great duress will be granted], it must be either because of the successful “resistance” of the latter, encoded in various rules regarding discrimination and harassment, or because the whites in question are ritually cleansed “allies”), while the victims are encourage to behave naturally, which of course includes therapeutic expressions of resentment.\n\nThe civilized spontaneously seeks to model civilized behavior for the less civilized, so the Left incites the less civilized to chastise the relatively civilized (this often involves encouraging decivilizing tendencies among those who have come later to and are therefore closer to the borders of the civilizing process, and for whom civilization is more likely to be a gift to be cherished but also more likely to be hypocritical imposition to be rejected.) So, yes, “equality” is the weapon of choice in these raids and vendettas, but the constant attack on the actual source of inequality, the deferral and discipline of civilization, an attack, which, if successful, would destroy the Left as well, is the object.\n\nEveryone has reasons to hold a grudge against civilization, so what leads one to pursue that grudge consistently, using civilization’s own means, and become a leftist? It must be a desire to see oneself as exempt from the never-ending, grueling, always uncertain civilizing process—this desire could involve simply abandoning civilized restraints and succumbing to some form of debilitating desire, such as drugs or sex. But that hardly puts you on the left (even if there is quite a bit of crossover). What draws you to the left is the desire to be presumptively civilized and thereby distinguish yourself from those who are just fumbling around—from the heights of the presumptively civilized position, the manual laborer who is uneasy around homosexuals can be just as barbaric as the Muslim terrorist.\n\nThe presumptively civilized often come by their civilized behavior easily, which is why the demands placed on others to adopt it seems a scam—this is why so many leftists come from the wealthier classes, families with a couple of generations of professionals, and other forms of “privilege.” But, ultimately, it is a revelatory event that brings one to the Left: one sees the barbarism concealed behind the civilized forms (the boss or teacher as bully, the police as gangster, etc.), which is indeed always there to be seen and which guarantees both one’s presumptive civility and demonstrates the fraudulence of the established civilized forms. For such a revelation to take, though, there must be others with whom to share it, and a quasi-discipline to give it form. The unsolvable metaphysical complications of “equality” provide the basis of such a quasi-discipline.\n\nThe Left is obedience to the imperative to expose the products of discipline as stolen centrality . It’s not e=mc2, but maybe it will help."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-kind-of-government",
      "title": "What kind of government?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The King v. Burwell decision affirming the constitutional and legal rectitude of the federal government’s application of Obamacare provides official confirmation of what some of us have known for a while: we no longer live in a constitutional republic, or under popular government, or in accord with the rule of law. The contempt for common sense and the demands of serious legal reasoning in John Robert’s majority opinion speaks volumes: Congress was trying to do a good thing, the executive branch and federal bureaucracy tried to do that good thing in a goodly way, and so let’s get rid of any language in the actual law that gets in the way of providing the goodies.\n\nAccording to the logic of this decision, it’s impossible to see why Congress would have to do anything more than pass laws that say things like “make America safer,” or “overcome racial divisions,” with the executive and bureaucracy then free to “interpret” these mandates in the “spirit” in which they were intended. If you object to a particular use of power to advance these good intentions, the Supreme Court can simply direct your attention to the good intentions specified in the law—can’t you read—what part of “make America safer” don’t you understand?!\n\nFor a while now, Congress has been passing not so much laws as grants of power to unaccountable federal bureaucracies. Charles Murray, in a recent essay in The New Criterion and, presumably, his new book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission , explains very clearly and irrefutably how deeply rooted and longstanding this development is, and why it’s impossible to reverse or even slow it within the normal political channels. This is really the original meaning of “bureaucracy”—rule by anonymous “bureaus.” What we can add to this analysis is the natural convergence between the bureaucracy and the victimocracy.\n\nDe Tocqueville already noted, in his prevision of the administration state, the relation between that kind of “soft tyranny” and the centrality of meeting “needs” (as opposed to protecting property) to governance. Once the job of government is to meet needs, it tilts toward the needier. Even more, since most of the bureaucracies rely either on a clientele or an activist constituency, enhancing the power of that clientele or constituency enhances the power of the bureaucracy. The neediest, the clients, the activists=the victim base. The growing role that civil rights law is playing in this development further detaches the state apparatuses from anything resembling popular governance or legislative intent or accountability, essentially identifying “the people” with the victims of “the people”—in a case that got less attention (Texas Dept of Housing and Community Affairs v.\n\nInclusive Communities Project, Inc.) the Court ruled that racism is completely separate from racist deeds or intentions: “racism” is what the government uses to micro-manage communities as it sees fit. That regulators also get “captured” by the industries they regulate, and those industries in turn use the regulatory apparatus to build monopolies for themselves binds the big business community to the victimocracy and bureaucracy alike.\n\nBureaucracy works through inertia, gradually accumulating power by finding new “problems” that only it can “solve,” but victimocracy works as an accelerant, which simply means an Argus-like attentiveness to previously unseen problems. It makes sense that the bureaucracy would eventually realize that it need not depend upon its own tiny militia of investigators, but could, rather, draw upon a vast army of victimocrats to widen the scope of its power. The role of the media is to turn all the new problems turned up by the victimocrats into moral panics that must be addressed yesterday, because that’s who we are as a people.\n\nThere’s no way of stopping or slowing this process within the system, and there is no evident way of getting outside of the system. Murray’s proposal for mass civil disobedience that would overload the system is intriguing, but that assumes the government won’t simply start killing dissenters or rounding them up into concentration camps. A very problematic assumption, since there is no political ethic intrinsic to either bureaucracy or victimocracy that would interfere with such solutions. Both forms of government are remorseless and voracious, driven only by political appetites.\n\nI, of course, have nothing in particular to propose by way of resistance. In a way, the destruction of liberal, popular government is liberating, though, because as long as you feel yourself to be part of a democracy you feel bound by the rhetoric of democracy—a rhetoric of conciliation, compromise, and appeasement, which gets even worse the more popular government becomes a pretense. If we are confronted by the equivalent of a political eating machine and nothing more, well, we need to be careful about what kind of bait we might be throwing out, even inadvertently, and we don’t want to simulate the movements or coloration of the beast’s favored prey, but we can carve out a space where we can start to develop a more truthful, which is to say less democratic, kind of language.\n\nHere’s a thought experiment: how would an intelligent alien, who just looked at the interactions between state and society in the US, without any familiarity with liberal democratic pieties, describe things? Keeping that thought experiment in mind might help us to a new political language, one to be advanced between the lines. I remember, a few years ago, thinking that, regardless of the virtue, courage and ingenuity shown by Soviet and East bloc dissidents, their example had lost its relevance with the fall of European Communism—that their revolutionary politics was sui generis . I was completely wrong: the notion, in particular, of “living in truth” in a world not just of lies, but lies that deliberately insult one’s intelligence and therefore one’s dignity, might very well become the most important political concept in the near future."
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-the-necessity-and-modes-of-desecration",
      "title": "On the Necessity and Modes of Desecration",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A little kerfuffle in a tiny corner of the art/literary world seems to me to bear some significance worth exploring. The conceptual writer Vanessa Place has been removed from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs committee for refereeing the panel presentations for the 2016 AWP Convention. This is as a result of her latest project, which is the gradual tweeting of the entirety of Gone With the Wind , on a Twitter page with a picture of Hattie Mc Daniel (the “Mamie” of the film version) and an image from the cover of a sheet of music for a late 19th century “coon song” on it. Place’s removal was the result of a petition initiated by AWP members, on the grounds that her project was racist and caused pain to people of color (henceforth “POC”).\n\nMeanwhile, another conceptual artist (one of the best known), Kenneth Goldsmith, has been under attack for the presumed racism of a recent project of his: a public reading of the autopsy conducted by the police medical examiner of Michael Brown, the young man shot in a now globally known incident in Ferguson, Missouri. Here, a new actor enters the scene, a group calling itself the “Mongrel Coalition.” The Mongrel Coalition demands, forcefully and obscurely, immediate “decolonization,” and, with strategic wisdom, chose the soft targets of Place and Goldsmith (as a synecdoche of white dominated innovative literature and art more generally) to denounce the exploitation of black bodies by white aesthetes (“gringpo”): http://gringpo.com.\n\nThe Mongrel Coalition seems comprised of graduate students; at the very least, they know all the white guilty vulnerabilities of the academic literary elites, and are familiar enough with the discourses of said elites to establish the double bind: one the one hand, innovative literature is formalistic play that ignores and, by implication, is complicit with, the oppression of POC; and, on the other hand, innovative aesthetic devices were invented by POC and stolen (and tamed) by white people. As you can see from the mock titles on the website, the indictment of these cultural black body snatchers is that they want to keep their “white privilege” while (by) gesturing towards an alliance with POC. How would one actually align oneself with POC? Presumably by finding ways of implicating others in that double bind, which keeps you one step ahead of those who might implicate you.\n\nPlace, as we can see from her Artist’s Statement in response to the dust-up (https://www.facebook.com/notes/vanessa-place/artists-statement-gone-with-the-wind-vanessaplace/10152841235969212?pnref=story) and, no doubt, Goldsmith, want very much to be exemplary leftists and allies of POC (Goldsmith has, in response to the unexpected and vehement criticism of his performance, requested that the transcript and video be suppressed). Place, in particular, sees her project as a kind of performance of White Guilt, in which case she might (but doesn’t seem to) see the ferocious attacks on her as a part of the performance itself—if you volunteer yourself as a scapegoat so as to cleanse the community, you shouldn’t be surprised if others take you up on it. She acknowledges the “cruelty” of what she has done, in iterating a history of cruelty, and so the “cruelty” of the response to her would seem to affirm her intentions. At any rate, if not paralyzed by White Guilt, that’s how she could easily take up the consequences of her action—and then things might actually get interesting.\n\nThe kind of conceptual art Place and Goldsmith does is very much in the tradition of Duchamp’s “Fountain,” aimed at transgressing and confusing the boundary between what is art and what is not art. Goldsmith’s previous books have mostly been transcriptions, for example of 24 hours of traffic reporting in New York City, or, more recently, his Seven American Deaths and Disasters , which transcribes reports of JFK’s assassination, RFK’s assassination, John Lennon’s murder, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the Columbine massacre, 9/11, and Michael Jackson’s death. Place has done some more “modernist” (surrealist, stream of consciousness) type writing, but quite a bit of transcription as well—of court documents of sexual offense trials, for example. To put it simply, the idea is that if you read these texts within a frame reserved for “literature,” you read them differently, and they resonate in surprising ways.\n\nWhether one enjoys or is interested in conceptual art or not, it is useful to consider why it might be a target for victimary fanatics—especially when it tries to be “politically relevant.” The purpose of conceptual writing is to de-authorize texts, to treat them as floating discourses that no one controls and therefore no one should own (part of the point of Place’s Gone With the Wind project is to bait the Margaret Mitchell estate into a copyright lawsuit)—and in which we are also therefore all implicated—any text is just part of our language, and cannot be contained within the circumscribed fields of authorship, genre, etc.\n\nTo de-authorize is to de-sacralize, and to de-sacralize, for those invested in that version of the sacred, is to desecrate. For the victimary activist, iterating, without comment, without credit, descriptions of violence done to black bodies, is a desecration of those bodies just as much as drawing an image of Muhammad is a desecration of the prophet for some Muslims. The experience of POC (and, perhaps LGBTETC, as honorary POC, but the Mongrel Coalition doesn’t seem to me so certain about that) is sacred, in other words, and only an authorized priestly caste can perform the rituals sanctifying it. Reading over the website of the Mongrel Coalition, I wouldn’t expect violence from its members—if anything, we can see this as an extremely savvy career move, which is sure to open up publishing and job opportunities (situating it firmly within the tradition of the avant-garde and Romanticism more generally).\n\nBut the logic has already, and will continue to, seep out into the broader culture, and its implications are violent. If certain modes of experience become sacred, their sacrality can and must be defended with all means necessary, and “argument” will not be a very effective means. Only anathematization will suffice, and anathematization requires the support of various means of intimidation—to defend something sacred to you is to show that you are willing to go to lengths to which those who might desecrate it are unwilling to go. This little incident (from which I’m sure Place and Goldsmith will recover, a bit tarnished, perhaps) is a useful reminder that to engage the victimary is, necessarily, to engage in desecration; indeed, that desecration must be the main means of struggle in the attempt to neutralize the victimary, in particular since if the much desired (by the left) hate crimes legal (and moral) regime is to work, it must rely upon the sacrality of experience (otherwise, how would you know when a Confederate flag is being displayed in a “hateful,” as opposed, say, to a satiric or scholarly, way?\n\nOnly a POC priest[ess] is duly authorized to tell you). And it is best to understand what that implies. For me, at any rate, the possibilities of conceptual (and procedural) writing and art have just risen a bit in my estimation as potential cultural weaponry."
    },
    {
      "slug": "victimary-perfect-storm-the-five-big-lies",
      "title": "Victimary Perfect Storm: The Five Big Lies",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In no particular order I list here, not the only lies spread by the Left (far from it!), but the ones that, it seems to me, have attained total coverage, i.e., that guarantee swift, coordinated, thorough and effective responses when questioned:\n\nOne: There are no real differences between men and women.\n\nTwo: Same sex attraction is as normal as opposite sex attraction.\n\nThree: Blacks are always and only victims of white supremacy.\n\nFour: Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.\n\nFive: Illegal aliens are just American citizens who haven’t yet received the proper documentation.\n\nAny facts contrary to these assertions are evidence of actual oppression or reactionary lies.\n\nWith the exception of number four (regarding which the public has far less first hand evidence), the Left is never foolish enough to assert these lies; rather, it just goes ahead and acts as if they are self-evidently true (there is a lesson for us all in that).\n\nWe are already beginning to see the extraordinary destruction that must be wrought to civil discourse and civil society to sustain these brazen lies: Christians who believe in traditional marriage must become cynosures of hate, any Islamic group or state marginally less psychotic (“moderate”) than the most demented (“extremist”) is to be empowered, all attempts to defend American borders or preserve the distinction of American citizenship must be dismantled, criminals must be given an ever larger space in which to destroy; even more: anyone who points to health or safety issues resulting from unrestricted migration, who points to actual crime statistics, who directs our attention to longstanding Islamic doctrine and practice, to the benefits offered by one family form over another—that is, anyone pointing to a vast range of obvious truths, which you only have to pay the faintest attention to the real world to see, is evil.\n\nBig Lies require All Lies All the Time. The large digital corporations, like Yahoo, Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook (along with many more traditional corporations), are all clearly ready to get on board with a campaign to keep these Big Lies hermetically sealed.\n\nWe have not yet begun to see the large scale violence that will be needed to ensure these lies remain the ruling doctrine. But therein lies the only possibility of resisting the victimary perfect storm. There is another compulsive Lie of the Left, which surfaces periodically but which we must call “aspirant,” rather than “Big” because it has not yet prevailed nearly to the extent of the five above: self-defense is the source of violence. This is the argument of the gun control fanatics, and it has been conveyed by the usual furious and grotesque demonization of guns and gun owners (the type of propaganda so successful in installing the other lies).\n\nThe reason push back against this lie has had considerable success (the right to gun ownership is more firmly established in law than it was 50 years ago, running counter to left wing victories on virtually every other front) is simply the existence of tens of millions of Americans who are determined to maintain their own guns and right to self-defense, forming a compact lobby to help them do so. Still, why has Obama not tried to override gun rights through executive action—isn’t this another area where Congress has failed to act, so he must? I think the only reason is some dim awareness that an attempt at gun confiscation would lead to a blood bath.\n\nStill, so what? Does the Left not have the stomach for the massive bloodshed of their enemies? Would they really have a problem with a few more Wacos? On the contrary—they would cheer it on; indeed, there have been indications for years that Obama and his gang would relish the chance for a showdown with some fat target within the bitter clingers community. It must be, then, that they are not sure that they would win, which is to say they are not sure that the men (and occasional woman) with guns under their command would obey the order to use force to take the guns away from those who have them by right (or at least not enough to avoid a fiasco).\n\nBut if the bodies of armed men (Engels’s excellent description of the state) would hesitate there, perhaps they would hesitate elsewhere. Perhaps they would also refuse to act against thousands of Churches refusing to pay their taxes, against parents whose homeschooling does not conform to new “marriage equality”-friendly NEA dictates, or to enforce millions of dollars in fines against counties and cities refusing to issue same sex marriage licenses, or against local police officers or citizens practicing self-defense framed by mobs, or local authorities and citizens enforcing the border on their own initiative, etc. Slowly at first, for sure, but given the persistence of the dissidents, perhaps over time there will be more refusals—and it might not take many to set in motion a cascade.\n\nIt is easy to see that conservative pundits and politicians have been paralyzed in the past few days, suffering shell shock from the hammer blows of the recent Supreme Court rulings, and reluctantly awakening to the realization that we now live in a different country. The usual proposals—win more elections, go back to court, take back the culture, come up with cleverer appeals to the youth, etc.—all ring hollow and smack of denial. No one knows the next move in the game because all the rules have been suspended. We all know that leftists in power will do whatever they want and no one will stop them. (We also know that much of what they want to do is crazy.)\n\nThe right is already splintering between those who want to accept the devastation and “move on” (usefully revealing their contempt for their “base”) and those who realize there’s something more at stake here than whether the Republicans gain a few points now that they can avoid the issue of “marriage equality,” while those ready to fight have no unifying program or manifesto. Leftist penetration has been very deep and there are few normal people who would not be loath to surrender at least some part of at least one of the Big Lies that they have bought into. Opinions changed and convictions abandoned after years of resisting and sustaining psychological battering for years (yes, I must be complicit somehow in racism; ok, I guess homosexuals can marry) are the hardest to revisit and reconsider.\n\nSo, here’s a minimal proposal. Refuse assent to any of these lies or any of their corollaries (refuse the entire network of lies)—openly if possible, “between the lines” if necessary. Caution is called for—ultimately, the Big Lies are instances of Leftist trolling, that is, laying out bait to get a response they can use to draw their enemies out into the open and make them easy targets. (To ask whether the Left “believes” its own lies is to make a category error—the Left has nothing to do with belief, only with the exposure of the presumably fraudulent beliefs of others—Leftism is OCD, obsessive compulsive debunking, with complete faith deposited in the most tireless and unrelenting debunkers.)\n\nTruth bearers will, indeed, become targets—that’s the point of the whole enterprise, as the Left has no real “positive” agenda, no better version of civilization, no model of social order. But people can try to be massive and dispersed targets rather than isolated and concentrated ones, and targets engaged in cultivating the practices of civilization in the face of social disorder. To get their way, the victimo/bureaucrats will have to take children out of their homes, arrest those responsible for the physical defense of vulnerable communities, shut down houses of worship and expropriate businesses, and at each point along the way men who have sworn to uphold the Constitution and who share much with their targets will have to decide if they can really, in good conscience, do that.\n\nThis truth bearing approach is the only way to test the weak link of the Left: the likelihood that the demands for enforcing the Big Lies will eventually strain the loyalties of the men with guns (we can easily imagine how many in the military are filled with disgust at the current regime’s alliance with our enemies, how many in the border patrols chafe at the refusal to let them do their job, how angry police must be at the opportunistic race baiting—I don’t know about the FBI or ATF, though). Once upon a time the Left could recruit its own militant cadres, ready to handle weapons, wield clubs, bust up a meeting; they could even set up parallel quasi-state institutions where civil society was weak enough.\n\nOther than their dwindling union ranks, form where could they recruit a steady supply of thugs—gay pride parades? (Well, there are historical examples, but the numbers just aren’t there.) They are stuck the forces they have been demoralizing for years. It follows that, more important than taking back the academies or Hollywood or the courts is making sure that the force available to the regime is lacking in the numbers and/or reliability needed to apply effective violence against those who only defend their own right to bear witness to subversive truths. This certainly implies that overt partisan appeals should be to law enforcement, but whether it further means those forces should be joined en masse or, on the contrary, starved of personnel replenishment by people who would rather defend their communities, must be left open for now.\n\nIndividuals will ultimately have to make up their own minds about that, but, either way, the natural right to self-defense in bearing witness to truths in danger of being lost can be the basic unifying principle around which resistance can gather. And, this, incidentally, is also the only way of ensuring that there will be enough trained, organized and moralized people to fight the Caliphate, when it comes to that. Ultimately, these new centers will have to attract the younger, digital crowd to help construct new economic and security networks—the only way to do that, though, is to allow them to do their jobs in a way that the politicized incompetence of government-linked corporations doesn’t, and that’s more of a long term matter (there are probably quite a few libertarian hacker types, though, just to get things started).\n\nThe starting point, though, is constant questioning on the most basic topics whe never we are confronted with the Big Lies—elementary, even childish questioning, which might start to drive the Leftists mad like a buffalo under attack from a swarm of mosquitos. I suggested a few questions a few posts back: what is a man? What is a woman? What is marriage? Things which everyone knew without thinking not too long ago, but which raise storms of controversy now. We can add many more questions: what is “law”? What is “government”? What is a “right”? What is “equality”? “Democracy”? “Liberty”? What is a “judge”? In their ferocious deployment of these terms, the Leftists have forgotten that someone might ask, given all that seems to depend on these terms, what sorts of entities, exactly, we are to take them to be, and why? We would be returning to a kind of Socratic naivety (or irony, if that’s your reading of Plato). We might even start a “national conversation.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "deconstructing-the-victimary",
      "title": "Deconstructing the Victimary",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Why did Bernie Sanders acquiesce in the commandeering of his recent speech in Seattle by a few Black Lives Matter brats? The BLM actions were clearly unpopular with the crowd, and from the commentary I’ve read since, with otherwise sympathetic leftists reflecting on the event. And yet Sanders surrendered completely and unconditionally, while incorporating BLM rhetoric and personnel into his campaign. It’s hard to see what kind of hard-headed electoral or fundraising calculations could have gone into these decisions; we’re dealing more with the spontaneous obedience to the voice of the sacred.\n\nWhy has no conservative politician commented on the utterly disgraceful fact that George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson will obviously never be allowed to return to normal life? It is shameful that two innocent individuals, who did nothing more than defend themselves successfully against criminal assailants, having been vindicated by lengthy and highly publicized judicial processes, are nevertheless treated like internal exiles, condemned to a virtual Siberia. This indicates a deep corruption of political life—a preference for lies over truth. Isn’t it clear that a “rogue” conservative exposing the systematic and specific lies on display in the Zimmerman and Wilson cases would generate the same thrill among tens of millions of Americans as Donald Trump’s unadorned references to the illegal alien crime wave? Yet not a single Republican will expose the racially targeted incitement to riot and attack police officers from the White House on down, and throughout the entire media.\n\nPublic opinion and electoral advantage clearly cede to victimary imperatives. But there is still the relation between the two. The Leftist agrees with the goals of BLM but still believes that if you go to see a speaker you should be allowed to see the speaker (he rejects some of the “means” of BLM); the conservative politician knows very well the fraud attempted in the Zimmerman and Wilson cases and knows that there is near unanimity on the right to defend oneself, but on some level feels he doesn’t want to “touch” this. It looks like cognitive dissonance, but that’s only if we translate what is an imperative into a declarative: very few people actually believe that black bodies are maimed from birth to death, in all of their worldly relations, by white supremacy, or that being disappointed in your child’s same sex attractions makes you the moral equivalent of a member of a KKK lynch mob, and yet on a level deeper than “opinions” a substantial majority of Americans act as if they do believe such things.\n\nAs originary thinkers, we shouldn’t have any difficulty understanding this. Those who repeat the originary event through ritual don’t know and can’t say why they do so, but eventually they arrive at explanatory myths and other discourses. But the explanations don’t affect the ritual—they just reconcile two domains within the mind. And we have our hypothesis regarding what the originary event in this case is: the Holocaust. All victimary actions are ritual re-enactments of—what, exactly? The answer to this question is very difficult, because all kinds of declaratives suggest themselves, but must be wrong by virtue of being declaratives; only performatives, with a declarative component but also a promissory one, can provide adequate answers. There are so many different features of the Holocaust that might have made it the signal event it became; and there might be all kinds of other events that constellate around or are triggered by the Holocaust, thereby explaining its centrality. We have no grounds for assuming that a uniquely terrible event will have commensurate moral consequences.\n\nMy view is that we must see the effects of the Holocaust in its revelation, not in its intrinsic character (al though, of course, much of its intrinsic character likely comes through in its revelation; even more, much of its intrinsic character may lie in its “revealability”). An act that we have nothing to do with does not transform us morally—a brutal murder by a psychopath confirms our moral assumptions, it does not cause us to reflect upon them. Unless something about the act renders us complicit—if that psychopath lived among us, for example, giving off signs of his psychopathy that we ignored because he was respectable and pleasant company in other respects. In that case, the discovery of the true life he led can become revelatory.\n\nThe Holocaust made its “spectators” complicit on several levels. Those who didn’t know could have and should have—the Nazis hid their crimes, but crimes so massive can only be hid from those who don’t really want to see them. Those who knew and could have helped didn’t, and for reasons that “verified” the Nazi’s own war logic: the governments of America and other countries in a position to rescue Jews or interfere with the extermination process didn’t want it to look like they were fighting a war for the Jews, thereby accepting (or assuming their populations accepted) to a great extent the Nazi’s claim that this was a Jewish-inspired war. It follows that we didn’t help the Jews because we were different from the Nazis in degree, not kind. Finally, and I think most importantly, the mobilization of the entire industrial economy in the slaughter revealed a moral bankruptcy at the heart of modernity: nothing in being a conscientious doctor, engineer, bureaucrat, worker, professor, good middle class citizen, etc., would enable one to resist recruitment into atrocities.\n\nThe victimary, then, is a pre-emptive resistance to such complicity. It is a refusal of “spectatorship,” thereby re-enacting the rare refusals to participate scattered throughout the Holocaust, embodied first of all in the always tenuous and never believed in time testimony to the ongoing event. But victimary thinking enacts this resistance and refusal as a resentment of firstness: Nazism’s extremities are just the extension of the striving for pre-eminence among nations, among firms in the economy, among ideological and religious claims, and so on. (This is the mythic, discursive, dimension of victimary thinking.)\n\nThis is why victimary thinking ultimately comes full circle to antisemitism. There is a moral bankruptcy constitutive of modernity, and it is on display in the Holocaust, but this moral bankruptcy involves an abandonment of the work of differentiation in favor of the faith in generating endless equivalences. Differentiation is the work of spinning off distinctions from the fundamental sacred/profane distinction: distinctions between good and bad, noble and base, worthy and unworthy, beautiful and ugly, and so on. But just inheriting and reproducing these distinctions is itself a sign of moral exhaustion. The distinctions themselves can only be the result of new modes of deferral and discipline that generate new spaces and objects of attention. But the victimary version of events represented the democratic path of least resistance: one can always imagine resolving a conflict by making people equal in some new way.\n\nIn the short term, the only genuine resistance to the victimary is exposure of its Big Lies. In the long term, that resistance must entail restoring a civilization of differentiation through dialogue and performativity. The short term is part of the long term insofar as the most direct and intuitive way of exposing the Big Lies is through constant, unflappable questioning. I suggested in a recent post a line of questioning regarding the abolition of differentiations in the field of sexuality. More pertinent here is the question, what is “race”? This is surely an even less comfortable question than the ones regarding gender and sexuality; it is the ur-question of the victimary; or rather, the ur-forbidden question.\n\nBut all the talk of racism and white supremacy can’t avoid attributing all kinds of characteristics to whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc., even if those characteristics are deemed to be “constructed.” The main tenet of victimary thinking on race is that the only characteristics to be attributed to whites qua whites are undesirable ones but, of course, in any attribution of the undesirable we can read the resentment towards something desired and envied. We don’t need to get into discussions of IQ scores and the relative achievements of different civilizations (al though far be it from me to recommend holding back on such topics—why, indeed, must one be bothered if there do turn out to be all kinds of group differences in capabilities?\n\nWhat is assumed about our capacity for self-discipline here?): the differences posited within the victimary itself already give us plenty to work with. If, for example, for Ta-Nehisi Coates blackness is real, grounded in the aesthetics of the body and the ethics of solidarity, while whiteness is fake, imaginary, constructed, parasitical on blackness (I am working with Christopher Caldwell’s reading of Coates in the Weekly Standard), well, ok—but, far from this fabricated racial identity being a kind of “blood-sucking subhumanity,” isn’t the inventive transcendence of the immediate and empirical dimensions of group belonging the prime marker of an unparalleled civilization predicated upon the never certain, never completed, ever adventurous differentiation of the human from the natural? Deconstruction might be quite conservative now that it is the victimary that is most insistent upon unquestioned closure.\n\nAnyone, even in the riskiest situations, can do at least a little of this. All that is necessary is a deferral of the Big Lie, a refusal, which can be gentle, subtle, apparently befuddled, to sign onto it. Sure, a man can really be a woman (I’ve heard about those brain scans that make the science settled), one might say, but, in that case, what does it mean to “really be a woman”? What does that man who wants it imagine it to be? Can you run down for me the different ways American blacks, Haitian blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Pakistani- Americans, Koreans, Lebanese, Palestinians, Chinese, and the Hmong are all constructed racially in America (in the South, in the Northwest…), how those constructions change, and what role the groups in question have regarding their own and each other’s construction? Let them talk about it all—all kinds of things are bound to slip outside of victimary categories. One might see this as a return to the Socratic roots of Western civilization: what do you mean by…\n\nOne final point. I have become convinced that, despite all the complications and difficulties it entails, the only anti-victimary response to same sex marriage is, indeed, the privatization of marriage. Here, of all the victimary fronts, without the givens of the state, the victimary argument collapses. For the supporter of SSM, marriage literally becomes nothing without the state. But the same holds to varying degrees across the board. Victimary thinkers are fundamentally incapable of imagining how the oppressions and, to use a term of Gans’s, “discriminatory ontologies,” they see at work would be remedied or even properly identified without assuming the state as omnipotent arbiter (this is what makes it the quintessential anti-imperial imperial mode of thought).\n\nBut they must be made to imagine it. There is no more productive line of questioning at this point than to ask, let’s say everything you say about race in America is true—now, if we left these groups to their own devices, without the deux ex machine of the civil rights establishment, how would it all play out? The question—if you could get any victimocrats to play along (but, anyway, in public spaces you are never really doing any of this for the victimocrats themselves)—will utterly confound them. Would they still exist as groups? In what senses? What would sources of conflicts be, and what rules of engagement would be created?\n\nWhat would be sources of strength and weakness in the different groups? How would different forms of belonging criss-cross each other? How would reciprocal constructions proceed without some legally defined (and still to be redefined) concept of “equality” in the background? Victimary thinking will not be able to sustain the discussion—we would find ourselves in another place. We would weaken, even a little, the hold of one of the Big Lies. It is this persistent questioning, committed to the civilizational work of extending and deepening differentiations, that can bring an end to the victimary. Sometimes, say in confronting a twitter mob, you’ll only get one question in—best to make sure it’s a good, perplexing one. As with all things, it’s a question of practice. And, when possible, this approach can get ratcheted up into much more confrontational postures."
    },
    {
      "slug": "dismantling-the-victimocracy",
      "title": "Dismantling the Victimocracy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here’s the trick: you need a term of anathematization, like “racism.” You start with some act, group or individual that is rejected virtually unanimously (like the Holocaust and Nazis, or lynching and the KKK) and you attach the term to that. Once the anathematizing term is in place, you turn it into a shell game: “racism” becomes the shell that we keep finding the pea under, with the pea being some act, group or individual that was never considered racist before, but can be by analogy to what we have all already agreed to call “racist.” Convincing people of the analogy might seem difficult, but it really isn’t if we consider the long term. Of course there will be many failures—analogical constructions will be rejected, ignored, and ridiculed. But things can only move in one direction. Insofar as our common rejection of “racism” has elevated us morally and protected us from some violent cataclysm (like a civil war) we can never raise the threshold for “racism”—we can only lower it, as new antagonisms that are “like” the ones we have transcended will generate the needed analogies.\n\nIn that case, it is clear that the only way of breaking up the victimocratic order is by neutralizing the power of anathematization at its root. It is impossible to argue about what should really count as “racism,” as if we were establishing a proper system of weights and measures—each participant in the argument can only locate a moment in history where his preferred definition was prevalent. The term itself is tied to whatever danger it warded off, and its use will continue to correspond to whatever danger is felt, or simulated. Many people on the right wish to polarize the term and throw it back in the face of the victimary left, e.g., by referring to blacks as being on the Democratic “plantation,” or to the left’s atrocious treatment of “dissidents” from victimary groups.\n\nIt’s worthwhile trying all kinds of things, but that approach seems to me more likely to entrench the term of anathematization that, as I have pointed out, is unidirectional. To put it bluntly, the victimary will not be destroyed until the response of the vast majority of people to charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., is, simply: “I don’t care.” The way there will not be comfortable to people whose cut off date for the use of “racism” and related terms falls somewhere between 1960-1984 (the latter date marking the birth of the Rainbow Coalition and a new racialization of politics).\n\nIt’s worth considering these matters now because resistance to the victimary is starting to take shape. Quite a few contemporary pundits, of varying ideological affiliations, have attributed Donald Trump’s popularity to the emergence of a white nationalism in American politics (modeled on anti-immigrant political parties in Europe), even while acknowledging that this is not Trump’s intention. There is a fairly intellectually powerful white nationalist politics that I do think is starting to take a more public form, in part in response to Trump’s very explicit and forceful repudiation of our bipartisan pieties about immigration.\n\nYou can find this politics in places like the VDARE website and the online magazine Taki’s, and elsewhere, no doubt. A white nationalist position, or, at least, a white privileging position, is articulated very forcefully by writers like Steven Sailer, John Derbyshire and, most prominently, Ann Coulter. Their arguments for privileging a white America are, in fact, far more thought out than the arguments for continued high immigration levels and, more generally, “diversity.” They have been displaying (and far more lucidly) a Trump-like bluntness on questions of ethnic group interests, race and crime, race and intelligence, and much else, for many years now.\n\nThere is no doubt that their response to being called “racist” would be “I don’t care.” And, after years of attacks on normal Americans (attacks that have intensified throughout the Obama administration, at an increasing rate) simply for being white, it seems to me inevitable that people will feel they have no choice but to counter-attack on the same basis. The logic will be that your attack on me just for my whiteness exposes you as a loser, parasite, terrorist, and so on. A very simple and easily learned and sustained logic.\n\nMeanwhile, I have just come across a science fiction writer and blogger called “Vox Day” (his blog is Vox Populi) who has written a war manual for combatants in the victimary wars, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police . From what I’ve seen (for example, The SJW Attack Survival Guide , an excerpt from the book, available on the website), it is very good. He outlines the stages of the SJW attack, and lays out a plan of defense. If you are subject to a SJW attack, don’t apologize and don’t resign. Force them, whe never possible, into a prolonged administrative and/or legal process to purge you and don’t give them any ammunition.\n\nFind ways to expose and undermine your attackers. All excellent advice, sure to be put to use more and more often. And there is a simple principle to base such counter-attacks on (this is me, but it seems to me that both Vox Day and the white nationalists make similar assumptions): the principle of difference. There are differences between social groups, including racial ones; there are differences between men and women; there are differences between same sex attraction and opposite sex attraction; there are myriad individual and group differences in terms of capability and effort. We cannot know in advance what ramifications these differences should have when it comes to ethics, politics, esthetics, and social and economic institutions.\n\nThe victimary antagonist (the SJW) must deny all these differences, or at least their relevance (other than as signs of victimization) and attack any expression of them; they must be forced to issue this denial explicitly and repeatedly, in the face of the most recalcitrant evidence and the most disturbing events; if they concede difference, one must pursue them through all the consequences of that concession. The counter-attacks should be personalized: how would you advise your daughter to behave at a frat party? Which neighborhoods would you prefer to live in, or walk through on a pleasant evening? Etc.\n\nOf course, though, the first term of anathematization, in the history of the victimary, was not “racism”—it was “antisemitism.” Certainly there are vast reservoirs of anti-Jewish resentment among the white nationalists, much of which (how much is hard to tell) veers into blatant, occasionally Nazi-style antisemitism. But I will reiterate my previous assertion in this new context: the response to being called an anti-Semite will have to be “I don’t care” (and, of course, many of the anti-Semites one routinely sees on, for example, articles on Yahoo, are already there—indeed, already back in the 80s it was already fairly easy to repel, as crude pro-Israel politics, accusations of antisemitism). This will clearly be a very new terrain, but we sworn enemies of the victimocracy must accept it. Jews are different as well, and so is Israel, and we will not be able to guarantee (why would anyone want to?) that those differences are always “celebrated.” (If I’m wrong about the Jews, show me how—if all you can do is call me antisemitic, I have to assume you can’t…”)\n\nBut we hardly know how to think any more outside of a post-Holocaust, civil rights, which is to say an emergent victimary, framework. What is good and what is evil if “racism” is no longer assumed to be the evil pole? I have my answers. Civilization is good, barbarism—well, if not necessarily evil (barbarians have their virtues, there are rules of the game), then to be fought. Discipline and disciplines are good; bureaucracy is, if not evil, then an evil. Converting violent antagonisms into legally adjudicated ones is good—reducing the legal realm to an arena of group vendettas is evil. Converting legally adjudicated antagonisms into economic competition, artistic exploration and leisurely engaged in arguments is good; allowing the legal sphere to colonize public discourse by using it to shut up or coerce your political enemies is evil.\n\nThat’s for starters, anyway. Perhaps there will be some other answers. At any rate, our terror at any sign of “racism” reflects a primitive state of public life—it operates on the assumption that the only response to noticeable group disparities will be violence. But from whom do we expect that violence, and why? There are group differences, and plenty of differences within groups—there are plenty of ways of blocking scapegoating and demonization without a priori anathematization. The reliance upon anathematization leads to atrophy in our signifying and ethical capacities, which must be regularly refreshed. I certainly see no problem engaging with Steve Sailer who asks why American Jews are so pro-immigration when it comes to America while, as Zionists, supporting Israel’s rather… miserly immigration policy.\n\nA very good question! And very answerable—yes, there’s some hypocrisy and group narcissism here, along with some over-reaction to historical traumas resulting from the nativism of the 1920s and the exclusion of refugees from the Holocaust; still America’s dilemmas are not quite Israel’s; but perhaps America’s immigration dilemma is graver than we realized, maybe some reconsideration is in order; maybe even Israel is a model for a new approach to immigration in the US (as Sailer himself, I can’t tell how ironically, sometimes suggests). The question is often posed in a very leading, hostile way (not so much with Sailer, it seems to me), but so what?\n\nWe’ll find out soon enough if the interlocutor is interested in real answers (and if we are!); if not, if some violence is intended toward us, well, we prepare for that, then, by strengthening the supports of civilization. But we desperately need to widen the sphere of possible discussion, regardless of the risks. The liberal democratic order has become like one of those crab shells taken over by secondary user, so we’re going to need to go shell-less for a while."
    },
    {
      "slug": "dismantling-the-victimocracy-2",
      "title": "Dismantling the Victimocracy 2",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In my previous post, I discussed two forms of rebellion against the victimocracy: the anti-SJW strategy of the blog Vox Populi (by Vox Day) and American white nationalists. I thought afterward that I might be giving the impression, without intending to, that Vox Day was himself a white nationalist. So, then I got curious—aside from his asymmetrical anti-SJW warfare, what does Vox Day think of nationalism, white nationalism, and, of course (where all such questions lead), the Jews?\n\nHe is a realist on all such questions—nationalism is on the rise, which means that multiculturalism is a failure, which further means the Jews, who were the first beneficiaries of the loosening of the insistence upon ethnic homogeneity in European cultures, and then (a disproportionate number, acting explicitly as Jews) agents advancing an ever more thorough loosening, will have no place in national communities that will with good reason blame them for undermining their national cohesion and culture (and will, furthermore, be filled with brand new minorities who hate the Jews far more than, at least in America and the UK, the Anglo majority ever did—minorities whose immigration, once again, Jewish political activism was instrumental in accelerating).\n\nThis process is well underway in Europe, where it is already widely conceded that the Jews have no future, but Vox thinks it is happening more slowly in the US as well. Vox declares himself pro-Jew and pro-Israel, and by his lights (and my own) I grant that—he is telling Jews the truth, including the truth that demonizing all critical comments about Jews and Israel as “antisemitic” long ago entered the time of diminishing returns. He admires Israel, its self-reliance and unapologetic self-defense, and strongly encourages Jews to move there. He is a libertarian, which also means that his discussion of social groups is generally qualified phrases like “a large majority of Americans will reasonably, if not completely accurately, see…”—that is, he tends to speak through large scale probabilities and decisions made through mimetic contagion in the heat of events, rather than of Jews, Europeans, Muslims, or anyone else as “objective” groups with “essences.”\n\nHis discourse is, as one would expect, cleansed of victimary hand-wringing—if you (a Jew or anyone else) don’t like what people say about you here, then leave—it’s insane to think you can regulate the speech and thought of others. That will just make them hate you more (people have a right to hate, and to say they hate, whomever they like). He’s no Holocaust denier, but he also gives the Holocaust no weight in considering ethical questions of contemporary politics. He assumes it is obvious that people would prefer to live amongst people who look, believe, speak, and act more or less like themselves, and can be expected to be welcoming to others only under very limited conditions.\n\n(I should also say he doesn’t pay any particular attention to Jews—I had to do a search on the blog to gather together his scattered posts discussing Jews, Israel and antisemitism.) I suspect he would qualify as a white nationalist, but I don’t recall him adopting the label—at the very least, he must accept them as fellow fighters against the SJWs.\n\nAll this confirms my conclusions in the previous post: this is what genuinely post-victimary discourse looks like. If you don’t like it, you’re better off making your peace with the victimary. I like it, so it presents no difficulties for me. It is a language that draws upon evolutionary thought, von Mises’s “praxeology” (simplistically put, the application of free market principles to all human activity), game theory and military strategy. The abstract principles of liberalism and democracy and Judeo-Christian morality barely figure at all. Of course all this misses something, including the reason why Western society has installed the incredibly dysfunctional victimary software in the first place.\n\n(It’s not because of the diabolical cleverness of the Jews.) Mainstream Western society has lived in terror of antisemitism for 70 years because antisemitism was projected back to the origin of a war of such cataclysmic dimensions that we would not (so we assume) survive another like it. Of course, this means that the fear of antisemitism, and victimary thinking far more so, is essentially a cargo cult. We really have no reason to believe that more frank discussions of racial differences and hostilities, or freer expression of preferences for one group over others, would lead to some terrible global catastrophe. But human culture as a whole is a bit of a cargo cult—the communal destruction envisaged in the mimetic crisis we hypothesize at the origin of humanity wasn’t going to happen either.\n\nBut some cargo cults are better than others—more generative of lasting peace (perhaps the crisis they imagine is more plausible). Vox Day refers regularly to (and prides himself on his mastery of) “logic” and “dialectic,” which seem to be foundations for him—a guarantee of social order. He would include, I assume, the libertarian insistence on reciprocal respect for private property. Of course, such things are part of any civilized order, but by themselves they generate hierarchies that the less logical and less or unpropertied will feel no obligation to respect. Nor are they much of a basis for the nationalism that Vox seems to consider intrinsic to human nature. It may be less multiculturalism than democracy and popular rule that must deemed a failure.\n\nThere’s no need to pronounce or speculate on any of that, or to expect this or that pioneer into the thickets of the post-victimary to have all the answers. Insofar as we (that is, myself, and anyone else who wants to join in) consider the victimocracy a suicidal cargo cult, we must roll the dice. We can’t imagine that the post-victimary will be a restoration. We can’t yet imagine what open discussion of inter- and intra-group differences will look like, with all the biological, anthropological and historical knowledge now in, and with all the interventionist political and therapeutic technologies coming into, our possession. But I, at least, prefer finding out to the alternative."
    },
    {
      "slug": "meritocracy-yes-but",
      "title": "Meritocracy, yes, but…",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "without the sparkling clean conscience. I certainly agree with Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle that the emergent post-victimary tendencies, indeed, any post-victimary tendency, would have to re-privilege “performative criteria” over “ascriptive” ones. Indeed, that is the point of Vox Day’s, in my view irrefutable, axiom: “The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.” But what I am seeing, and what I think we must expect to see, is quite a bit rougher, and more raw, than the hopefulness with which Martin Luther King Jr. asked for us all to be judged on the “content of our character.”\n\nFor those urging the meritocracy in the emergent post-WW II American order, the argument for meritocracy was completely consistent with the argument against using ascriptive categories to judge people. It was possible to believe (bliss it was to be alive in that dawn, but to be young was very heaven!) that once all the legal restrictions and inherited prejudices were eliminated, everyone would, indeed, be judged on the content of their character and—most importantly—everyone would be happy with the results. Good intentions seemed perfectly aligned with good outcomes—and with historical “momentum.”\n\nWe can no longer hold to such naïve Enlightenment blank slatism. We know to a logical certainty, that even in a completely free system, with no external restrictions on anyone’s mobility, we will not have an equal mixture of all ethnic and sex groups in all occupations. Some ethnicities will be more heavily represented in brain surgery, others in street cleaning, still others in organized crime. And we already have a pretty good empirical sense of how the proportions fall out. It matters very little whether the asymmetries are the result of biological or cultural differences, as cultural differences are equally beyond the power of government to transform. We can even say that the more free the social order, the more those differences will increase the asymmetrical outcomes of different groups. Even more: these differences will be transmitted from generation to generation: on average, it will be easier for a child of a doctor to become a doctor than it will be for the child of a janitor, no matter how many medical school scholarships we set up for children of janitors.\n\nNow, if we add to all this the greater comfort people have with others of the same group, and their greater ability to notice merit in those more similar and familiar to themselves, and, finally, add in the inevitable nepotism that would ensure that certain professions are, if not dominated by, weighted heavily in favor of, some groups over others, we can conclude that two things. First, that a free society is a highly stratified one; second, it is impossible to prove that a society is really free. The very disproportions that must emerge provide prima facie evidence for the belief (and it will be a very comforting belief for many) that the “so-called” meritocracy in fact veils the domination of society by privileged minorities.\n\nEven more: disproportion in the professions in a modern society means more than some groups benefiting more than others, or at the expense of others—it gives the appearance (irrefutable, even if false) of disproportionate influence, control and domination by those groups over others. And, of course, this means more in some areas than others. Can anyone really believe that a particular minority could represent, say, 60% of the teaching profession and professoriate, the entertainment industry, and the financial sector, without distorting those institutions so as to serve their own interests?\n\nI repeat: when someone comes along and does the math (and livens it up with a vivid collection of anecdotes and stereotypes) and accuses groups a, b, and c of using their controlling share of crucial institutions to screw over, economically, culturally and even spiritually, groups x, y and z, there will be no way of proving them wrong—not to the satisfaction of an objective observer, much less to the satisfaction of members of groups x, y, and z. And the same will be true of members of groups a, b, and c telling the others to stop whining, get off their fat posteriors, and engage in some self-reliance—or speculating on the bad habits, cultural backwardness or deficient gene pools of x, y, and z. The greatest attractive force holding people within the gravitational sphere of the victimocracy is precisely the intuition that this stratification and the consequent acrimony would be the result of its abolition, and we can’t be sure that things won’t be much worse.\n\nThat’s why another faith will have to replace the cult of the victim. There’s no way to predict the details of this faith—most likely, it will be a convergence of several, old and new—much less “produce” it. But of one thing we can certain: for this faith to be genuinely post-victimary, it must be centered on a belief in the possibility of what I have elsewhere called the “third person,” i.e., the person who can set aside his own interests and decide impartially between contending positions. Regardless of how we see the reality, a large majority would have to believe that it is possible for a boss to promote the best person, for a university to hire the most promising researcher, for a Hollywood studio to “green light” the best movie, etc.\n\nIn other words, that all these figures are capable of acting in the best interests of the institutions they are responsible for. I think this faith has declined dramatically in the West, so much so that it has become impossible to say what the “best” is, or that there is a “best.” Still, anyone who is good at anything must have such a faith, otherwise how could they practice and hone their skills? But the victimocracy has successfully squeezed this faith out of the public arena. As with any faith, there is always counter-evidence for the faithless to draw upon in the indictment they draw up.\n\nIf we are to be avatars of such a faith, we must be prepared to make a case for the “better,” if not the “best.” But I don’t think we can rely on inherited judgments here—it’s not a question of defending the classics, because if it was, there would still be better and worse defenses of the classics, and most of those defenses that take received cultural hierarchies for granted are pretty feeble. Even if Shakespeare is the best, the one injecting Shakespeare into the cultural bloodstream has to be better than the one doing the same for Jay-Z. In the sciences and technological fields, hierarchies of value are still preserved, if for no other reason than that poor countries like China and India are in such a rush to exploit them.\n\nBut in the moral, esthetic and political spheres, the ability to reason is in free fall (try sometime to get a 20-something “marriage equality” fanatic to explain why there should be an institution like marriage in the first place and you’ll see what I mean), and those arguments (through environmentalism, in particular) impinge directly and disastrously upon the science and technological institutions.\n\nThis is where I think originary thinking can make an unparalleled contribution to human flourishing. Originary thinkers are the only ones who can know that what is really the “better” is whatever defers the most immediate threat of violence (or violence indicating disruption) while preserving and enhancing our capacity for deferring potentially greater violence in the future. Appeasing those who threaten violence now may work, for now, but makes things worse by depleting our “stock” of discipline; retreating into the certainty of “eternal” principles may preserve a cultural heritage but only until the violence overwhelms the few who still remember it. Deferring violence now while/by enhancing disciplinary reserves is the source of cultural creativity and civilization. There’s no formula for doing this, but thinking of how to do it is what will actualize our commitment to and manifest our faith in the better."
    },
    {
      "slug": "nationalist-cybernetics",
      "title": "Nationalist Cybernetics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A large part of the problem with victimary thinking is that it, like any tyranny, prevents the system from receiving the feedback it needs. The more things that can’t be said, the more things people are thinking but hardly anyone knows they are thinking—but they go on thinking it and when they act on it, everyone is surprised—and the response is usually to clamp down more forcefully on that mode of expression. At the same time, there are always things that shouldn’t be said, things that, if said, create alienation and thereby generate a new kind of silence and blocking of information channels. A good way of distinguishing among political systems might be in terms of which provide, or can be designed so as to provide, sufficient feedback from the margins. Liberal democracy no longer seems to do that, perhaps because it is neither very liberal nor very democratic.\n\nThis is in large part because liberal democracy has anathematized nationalism. There is certainly a spectrum of nations, from those forged artificially out of diverse ethnicities subjected to a single regime to more natural nations that really are more like a collection of interrelated tribes. In any case, a nation defines itself by its external others—allies, enemies, would-be subjugators—and its internal others (often defined in conjunction with the establishment of external others)—those of a minority ethnicity, religion, ties to other countries, etc. Nationalism cannot be defined other than by othering, which is why it so horrifies the victimocracy; indeed, nationalism is perhaps the original sin against which the victimary defines itself.\n\nIf 20 million people in widely dispersed and overlapping communities come to view themselves as like each other and loyal to each other in a way they aren’t like and loyal to anyone else, it is inevitable that those likenesses and loyalties will be more densely concentrated amongst and across some communities and sub-communities than others. In other words, some will be more genuinely representative of the nation than others.\n\nNations, in their modern form, began as national markets and to a great extent remain that, despite the vast globalization of markets—at the very least, most of our daily exchanges are with our fellow countrymen. They also, even in autocracies, presuppose at least some form of equality among citizens. In other words, they embody universal principles in exclusionary ways, modeled, especially in their promise of eternity and redemption, on the Israelite national community portrayed in the Bible (an argument I owe to David Goldman, aka “Spengler”). The exclusionary structure penetrates the nation itself, as I have just suggested, while the universality of exchange and citizenship moderates that structure.\n\nInsofar as a nation considers itself more civilized than its neighbors, it must put its exclusionary, or discriminatory, practices before the interest in spreading the principles of the market and citizenship. If it doesn’t, outsiders claiming to belong in the national community will exploit those principles while sapping them of substance, which is the “quantum” of civilizational discipline constitutive of the nation. The more a civilized nation dwells among other civilized nations, the more markets can be freed of exclusionary practices, and the more the rigors of citizenship can be relaxed.\n\nNationalism is highly unpredictable and therefore risky and therefore particularly frightening in a world comprised of delicate balancing acts between widely disparate international forces and crisis prone economic systems. But for this very reason it is superior to any other political form in generating information and feedback regarding the relations between center and margins. Nationalism certainly disallows identification with another nation, and the boundaries between explicit and implicit identification can never be drawn once and for all, but the insistent repetition of phrases like “for the good of the nation” “my nation above all” channels discourse into the oscillation between the civilizing tendencies of exchange and citizenship and the more barbaric, because belligerent, distinction between self and other.\n\nThe real problem with nationalism today is that it is ugly, according to contemporary political esthetics. It includes by excluding, even if the exclusions need not be violent. The exclusions based on the principle that the other is not me is, in fact, more limited and less violent than exclusions based on the other’s being on the wrong side of some putatively universal principle, but it deprives us of that quintessentially modern promise of final reconciliation. Nationalism works according to stereotypes: the representative national character (expressed through propaganda but also through consumption patterns and mass entertainment) is a stereotype, and the various margins are stereotyped, sometimes viciously.\n\nThis is unbearable for those raised in a “victimhood” culture—indeed, even those committed to a “dignity” culture tend to flinch when presented with overt stereotypes. The question, then, is whether stereotyped minorities can bring themselves to resist the temptation to parade their dishonor before the all embracing post-dignity government and demand reparations. (I think that big government is a post-nationalist phenomenon, because relations between a dominant majority and minorities capable of leveraging their own sources of power are self-regulating; it is the attempt to stifle such processes that requires the heavy hand of government.)\n\nThe alternative is to turn the stereotypes, which, of course, always misfit or mis-take their object, into sources of information by flouting the expectations and double binds they establish. This, no doubt, puts an added burden on the minorities, but it is now possible to see that even greater burdens might result from insisting upon an untrammeled minoritarian culture. And there are pleasures in marginality—the pleasure of being able to lapse into a certain kind of spectatorship before some political battles; the pleasure of, through solidarity and the insights of what W.E.B. called “double consciousness” and Hannah Arendt called, in relation to Jewish marginality, the “conscious pariah,” cultivating fields of culture left fallow by members of the majority; among others.\n\nWe can perhaps learn enough from history to resist some of the virulent—racialized, imperialist, ideological—forms of nationalism while there can, of course, be no guarantees. Indeed, accepting the primacy of nationalism as a principle of social organization involves surrendering the fantasies of institutional guarantees providing by the transnationalisms based on universal rights and international institutions.\n\nFirst of all, though, let’s see how many people can learn how not to flinch at the ugliness."
    },
    {
      "slug": "social-knowledge",
      "title": "Social Knowledge",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "One of the sponsors on Glenn Beck’s radio show (a show filled with fascinating, idiosyncratic sponsors) is in the “food insurance” business. You can imagine what that is, and you can also grasp the absurdity of it—if we get to a point where food is not readily available through supermarkets, delis, diners, etc., where will the people insuring us against such an eventuality be getting their food? It’s akin to an attempt to sell “social collapse” insurance, or “money insurance,” as if the insurance company will survive the social collapse that leaves us all reliant on it, or the dollars with which our money insurer indemnifies us will not have suffered the same fate as the now worthless dollars we have in the bank.\n\nNothing could be more human than to grasp at such absurdities, where we hope for a restoration in the imagination that is really just a way of figuring what we fear to lose in a manageable way. From where else could we stock our imaginations other than from our memories (in whatever composite and revised form), and what prompts our imagination more urgently than the present’s repudiation of those memories?\n\nI suspect that most, if not all, of the political hopes of the present are not all that different than attempts to sell or buy “food insurance.” There is some part of the social order that one likes, and there are other parts one doesn’t like. The parts one likes are authentic, or progressive, grounded in something natural or in some law of history; the parts one doesn’t like are parasitic grafts on the whole implanted by some special interest at odds with the general interest. It’s not always or even, necessarily, often, wrong to speak in these terms: we can certainly distinguish between the core and peripheral, the healthy and the sick, in our institutions.\n\nWhat is almost always wrong is to assume the evils, the parasitic, the sick, can be excised in such a way as to leave the original body intact and restored to its natural form. Ultimately, parasites prey on some weakness in the host. I think the originary hypothesis is in agreement with the foundational deconstructive argument that what we designate as marginal, unnatural, evil, and so on is constitutive—or, rather, the act of designation itself is constitutive—of the center, the natural and the good. Imagining a restoration of the social order is always an attempt to forget the event of founding.\n\nWhat are we citizens of the Western world made of these days? We really don’t know, and we can’t know—part of the structure of a civilized order is to occlude such knowledge. Part of the morbid fascination with exceptional regimes, in particular authoritarian and totalitarian ones, or even everyday emergencies, is that we find out who people “really are” behind the “façade”—which really isn’t a façade until it proves inadequate to circumstances. Ultimately what we want is some kind of fit between our signs and the world, but signs never quite fit the world so a primary moral decision is whether to expose the misfit and appear as an attempt to approximate fittingness, or to participate in illusions of an a priori fit.\n\nIt is those who attempt the latter who are most severely disabled when signs can no longer be stuck on the world. So, let’s say the government of the US spends and inflates itself out of its currency, and the Medicare, social security and other entitlement checks stop coming; nor can infusions of cash created ex nihilo prop up the downwardly spiraling economy. Some people, I am certain, would apply themselves to the task of creating alternate economies, new systems of security, new commensurations between discipline and reward, and communities to go along with them. But how many? Your answer to that question will also be an answer to the question opening this paragraph.\n\nFriedrich Hayek’s assertion of the superiority of free, open, decentered market societies when it comes to producing knowledge of social needs is, I think, irrefutable. And representative democracies, far less effectively, but perhaps more effectively than autocracies, provide knowledge of the range and relative power of social resentments. But economies bring needs and capabilities into alignment, while information provided by vote totals bears no similar relationship to political capabilities. Someone will ultimately get around to selling what lots of people want to buy, but there’s no reason to assume that some president will come along and “make America great again” no matter how many people want that.\n\nThere’s not even any reason to assume that far more modest accomplishments will result from displays of majority, or even super-majority, public desires. And while buying a product can lead to unpleasant surprises, for the most part you get what you pay for; in politics, nobody really has any idea of whether getting what they now want will satisfy them when they actually get it. The unintended consequences are simply too consequential and diffuse. The discrepancies become wider as the democratic system is swallowed up by a new form of administrative state, run along victimocratic and therapeutic lines. How many people today really expect the policies they have voted for to be implemented? The more savvy work through the courts and bureaucracy. The Roman Senate remained until the end, didn’t it? So will our Congress, and the state governments.\n\nEven more important, neither the free market nor the democratic political system provides reliable knowledge of the second most important kind: the kind of knowledge that enables us to distinguish between friends and enemies. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that both systems, modernity as a whole in fact, makes such knowledge harder and harder to secure. In economics, an enemy is someone whose needs you haven’t properly framed yet; in democratic politics, the enemy is a constituency one hasn’t yet effectively reached out to. That the enemy simply doesn’t care about your flat screen TV or your jobs plan is unintelligible.\n\nThe only enemies you can really imagine vividly are those who insist on telling you such things about the enemy—they are war-mongers. Which means this penultimate knowledge may not be lost after all—it can be turned inward, towards the small differences inflaming your narcissistic feeling of being in the front line of the march of history. In this way you build a system of lies to protect your belief in food insurance. You will not, for example, publicize attacks committed by migrants from barbaric societies, much less stop the migration itself, because you don’t want to give “ammunition” to the opponents of migration. So, the one who denounces or tries to stop the rape of children becomes evil—they’re the real enemy.\n\nKnowledge of friends and enemies can only be acquired through a social order in which loyalties are constantly formed and potential defenders of the community are given space for friendly competition testing courage, endurance, leadership, teamwork and fighting skill. Creating protected, virtual, spaces for such testing, and allowing for the free invention of such spaces so that we don’t have to periodically engage in mass slaughter to know what our young men are made of, is essential to civilization. If egalitarianism were deliberately created in order to destroy such spaces, it couldn’t do so any more effectively than it has been. And if you destroy this penultimate knowledge, you drive the ultimate knowledge, of how to bring signs into an approximate, shared relation with reality, into exile.\n\nWhat I have been in recent posts calling “nationalism” is simply the most likely way of restoring these forms of “natural” knowledge. Only spontaneously formed loyalties, developed through shared experience and drawing upon a shared past, and then tested through confrontations with outsiders of one kind or another, can provide for these fundamental forms of social knowledge. Of course such knowledge is in a sense tribal, and nations are in a sense tribes, but they are civilized tribes, which allow for the formation of thinkers who can turn their loyalty to the tribe into disinterested anthropological and historical inquiries into the inevitable ironies and paradoxes that will beset that nation, and thereby form its “conscience.”\n\nBut the constitution of the nation itself proceeds through a series of inclusions and exclusions (school vs. school, town vs country, region vs. region, ethnic group vs. ethnic group, religion vs. religion, the hostilities swirling around certain professions, like the law and finance, various articulations of majority-minority confrontations, etc.) that are ultimately but never completely transcended by the belief that the nation constitutes a form of civilization either co-equal with or at least marginally more civilized in at least some ways than one’s neighbors. (In this sense, every nation is a “proposition nation,” motivated by the belief that it has its own special “calling.”)\n\nOne of the more interesting things about the Trump phenomenon (which has been an amazing source of information on so many topics) is that Trump’s support of a heavily managed regime of international trade and for universal health care, in both cases flouting central points of conservative doctrine, doesn’t seem to be hurting him at all (yet). It seems that people object to managed international trade in the name of transnational goals, according to international law and through arcane negotiations—in that case, “free trade” is a powerful shibboleth. When it’s a question of managing trade nationalistically so as to no longer let the Asians and Mexicans get the better of us—that’s a different matter entirely, and protests in the name of free trade are muted.\n\nEven universal health insurance, an anathema to the right for many years now, seems acceptable if it is done in the name of American community and not vague progressive imperatives (al though we do still need to see about this as, of course, about Trump’s candidacy as a whole). The hunger for straightforward, unapologetic nationalism is palpable, here and in Europe. Nationalism will never quite be what it wants, but, then, it doesn’t make claims about its meaningfulness within a historical process, so it doesn’t have to. (It’s also worth noting that while nationalism implies some degree of popular political participation and feedback, other than the fact that it tends to lean more “democratic” than “liberal,” it is compatible with a spectrum of regime forms from near autocratic plebiscitary to normal representative.)\n\nCertainly Jews and other minorities have good reason to be ambivalent about these developments, but it would be wrong and foolish to resist them—rather, potentially threatened minorities should go about the business of making as many friends and as few enemies in the nation as possible (as opposed to invoking “universal” principles so that you can represent your opponents as criminals). We may be on the receiving end of some unwelcome information as (if) nationalism displaces the victimary order and administrative state (its natural enemies), and it’s better to be prepared to make use of such information than to try and pre-empt those who would bring it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "up-from-victimhood",
      "title": "Up from Victimhood",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "From the Reason website (https://reason.com/blog/2015/09/08/the-rise-of-the-culture-of-victimhood-ex):\n\nOver at the Righteous Mind blog, New York University moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt is signposting a fascinating article, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” by two sociologists in the journal Comparative Sociology. The argument in the article is that U.S. society is in the midst of a large-scale moral change in which we are experiencing the emergence of a victimhood culture that is distinct from the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past. If true, this bodes really bad for future social and political peace.\n\nIn honor cultures, people (men) maintained their honor by responding to insults, slights, violations of rights by self-help violence. Generally honor cultures exist where the rule of law is weak. In honor cultures, people protected themselves, their families, and property through having a reputation for swift violence. During the 19th century, most Western societies began the moral transition toward dignity cultures in which all citizens were legally endowed with equal rights. In such societies, persons, property, and rights are defended by recourse to third parties, usually courts, police, and so forth, that, if necessary, wield violence on their behalf. Dignity cultures practice tolerance and are much more peaceful than honor cultures.\n\nSociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning are arguing that the U.S. is now transitioning to a victimhood culture that combines both the honor culture’s quickness to take offense with the dignity culture’s use of third parties to police and punish transgressions. The result is people are encouraged to think of themselves as weak, marginalized, and oppressed. This is nothing less than demoralizing and polarizing as everybody seeks to become a “victim.”\n\nThere’s nothing all that new here for GAnicks, even though it’s good to see such discussions become more “mainstream.” We can add to and clarify the above in a few ways (perhaps Campbell and Manning do so in their essay). First of all, there is such a thing as “honor” for women, which involves preserving their chastity (and all external “signs” of chastity) until marriage (and fidelity to husband there after). More importantly, we can clarify the continuity, and not just breaks, between honor, dignity and victimhood cultures that the final paragraph seems to presuppose. “Dignity” is a reciprocal granting of presumptive honor, or a universalization of the right to be free of insults and to have offenses against oneself avenged.\n\nThe dignity culture delegates the responsibility of avenging insults to a third party, endowed with “impartiality” (something unthinkable in honor cultures, but ultimately predicated on something like the honor of God and a state stronger than the contending Big Men). So, the dignity culture is really an objectified or formalized form of the honor culture, with the new ingredient being the crucial but inherently vague notion of “impartiality” or “justice.” But the transition from dignity to victimhood is most interesting for us. To prove that one has indeed been offended before an impartial arbiter is to be compelled to construct a convincing case that one is a victim.\n\nParticipating in the dignity culture is, then, already sustained training in victimhood—you learn to present yourself as having been helpless in the face of some malicious attack, which ultimately involves really becoming helpless. All this, so that, like in an honor culture, the offense to one can be unmistakable, and can be given unqualified recognition. (It’s interesting that representatives of honor cultures, like the Greek heroes in the Illiad, always seem to be moaning and whining about the pettiest slights, just like today’s victims, even if they are prepared to commit violence in their name.) We can see the Holocaust as the trigger for the rapid acceleration of the development of the victimhood culture, and as providing its particularly melodramatic and hysterical forms, but the dignity culture (which is to say, civilization) is just a way station to victimhood.\n\nAll that has to happen to tip the dignity culture over into victimhood is for “impartiality” and “justice” to be debunked as disguised forms of victimization—this is not that hard, as the standards of judgment necessarily rely upon common sense notions of “reasonableness” which support those closer to the normative center. The excerpts from the article included at the link suggest that the “benefits” of victimhood include “raising their moral status”, but we can flesh that out as well: victimhood generates a therapeutic culture in which we are all victims of repressive social norms (even the oppressors, ultimately), and within a therapeutic culture, victimhood is redemptive insofar as naming your victimization is the first step towards reclaiming whatever in one’s identity has been dishonored. One can thereby present oneself publicly as (in another Holocaust reference) a “survivor.”\n\nOf course, civilization may be a way station to cultural forms other than victimhood. Or, at least, we must assume, if civilization is to have a future (and if we don’t assume that, there’s no point to writing this post, or doing much of what any of us does). But that’s the question, and simply tearing down victimary thinking and institutions (the focus of my last two posts), however necessary, won’t supply an answer. The centrality of nationalism to the post-victimary discourses I have been looking at is suggestive, though. Nationalism emerges within the nation-state form, first of all under the absolutist monarchies (and then in rebellion against the monarchies, in which the “true” nation threw off the shackles of their own representative of a continent-wide ruling elite).\n\nIt is therefore post-tribal (the monarchs broke up the great families, i.e., tribes, of Europe) and post-honor. But the nation defends its honor on the international stage, so even while extirpating the honor culture within its own borders it must promote the values that add to national strength, such as wealth creation, martial valor and physical vigor, fertility and scientific and technological prowess. The lessons of the phantasmal character of nationalism will presumably have to be learned again—the nation, as that which is denied by today’s transnational elites, national minorities and victimhood culture, is one thing; the nation as a real actor with a determinate ethnic content is something else entirely.\n\nNations are always defined by their external and internal others who are always imagined others—none of which means that nations and nationalisms aren’t real, just that they’re constituted by fantasies in a variable relation to the reality principle. In particular, the dangerous mimetic modeling that leads to international antagonisms is difficult to control without some shared sacrality (like “Christendom”)—for a while, the nationalisms of the anti-immigrant European parties and a possible American variant would be united in their shared resistance to the global “ruling class,” but what if they win? And any American white nationalism will be even more phantasmal—where is the cut off date for real Americans: the 1960s, when Mexicans started to come?\n\nThe early 1900s when Jews and Italians were arriving? Why not the 1840s, with the Irish? When were “whites” ever a “nation” in the first place, if not through resentment towards some minority aggression? What about all the people with mixed heritage? Etc. White nationalism might provide a focal point of resentments that need expression and resolution, without necessarily providing a program for that resolution.\n\nThe problem is that the victimhood culture prevents us from discussing the most basic and urgent issues of civic and political life: immigration, crime, war and terrorism, to name a few. We are completely paralyzed in these areas, so the victimary position becomes the default one. To talk about crime is to talk about blacks; to talk about immigration is to talk about Mexicans; to talk about war and terrorism is to talk about Muslims; and once we start talking about blacks, Mexicans and Muslims you can be sure that we will end up talking about Jews. This is necessarily the case because the advocates of victimhood culture will give us no choice by demonizing open discussions on crime, war and terrorism, and immigration as racist. The demonization works, because everyone is terrified by even tiptoeing up to the line of violating deeply embedded norms against racism. We will only start speaking out once the alternative, our current paralysis and delusion, becomes even scarier to more people.\n\nIn other words, the method of keeping peace in the modern, post-World War II, rights based nation-state has been for the Lilliputian minorities to tie up the majority Gullivers in a pre-emptive manner. Certainly, in a post-victimary order, the actual power differentials among groups would have to be expressed and negotiated openly (what those power differentials are, and even which groups might emerge, may very well surprise us). Doing so peacefully and even productively would have to involve prioritizing neither honor nor dignity, al though both motivations will surely continue to be important. We need a political thought and practice aimed at institution preservation over individual rights—as Vox Day says, “The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.”\n\nWe need to recommit to “primary functions”—but what modern political theory comes anywhere near doing so—other, perhaps, than Foucauldians, negatively? It’s remarkable how uninteresting the question of the construction of massive institutions of health, education, policing, the military, etc., has been to political theorists of the 19th and 20th centuries, who have focused mostly on petty questions of satisfying increasingly implausible grievances. What must be more important than the fragility of the individual and her grievances must be discipline, the ability and readiness to place yet another mediation between one’s desire and its realization.\n\nThis also means the consecration of desire, and the building of a world in time—a kind of temporal canopy, we might say. A culture of discipline would defend the honor of “impartiality,” but without the support of God or State, by introducing mediations based on the study of the relative danger of different resentments. But there must be some truth in the name of which one defers, some possible ostensive—otherwise, one ends up like the officer in Kafka’s “The Penal Colony.” Let’s not make things easy by imagining the deus ex machina of a Christian revival. The civilizing process must be seen to lead back to, to be a gift from, an origin, an origin that is further revealed in disciplinary increments.\n\nIn pointing to what one is not appropriating, one points to the possibility of a shared non-appropriation, a possibility that is a source of dialogue. Even a nihilist or psychopath cannot deny desires that have been deferred, and so this is something we can all talk about at any time. Cultural practices that foreground such discipline, that enact, maneuver us into, mimic, even mock, novel acts of non-appropriation, would be the acts of faith a post-victimary order needs. In the past, discipline cultures relied on traditional faiths and modern, scientistic assumptions about progress. Today, I think it would entail a more demanding faith in one’s unseen future fellow sign users—a faith that, while the signs anyone puts forth will unfold in ways that could not have been foreseen, and therefore cannot be controlled, at least some of those successor signs will register the peace giving intentions of their originator. The increased margin of discipline one signifies is a needed gift, even if you can’t know what the gift actually is, who will receive it, or what use they will make of it. Faith, in the end, must involve sharing in the immortality of the sign."
    },
    {
      "slug": "addendum-to-groups",
      "title": "Addendum to “Groups”",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I suppose I assumed that it goes without saying, but in discussing groups it should be remembered that every group has a more or less mythicized founding event, involving a “nomos,” in Carl Schmitt’s terms: an originary division of a property cleared away for the “settlement” of the group. This “property” can be, and has been for most of history, land, but can take on other organizational and institutional forms (activist groups “own” a particular constituency and will battle other groups for it). There will always be land, though, so such groups must be considered the most fundamental—other groups exist at the sufferance of the group that “owns” (through some mutual defense covenant) the land.\n\nAttempts to reaffirm the group’s identity are always restorations of the imagined nomos, including a defense of territorial boundaries and form of internal allotment—and such attempts presuppose some disorder in the nomos, which will most likely be attributed to some betrayal on the part of some portion of the community (which presumably has misused its allotment, or manipulated the rules of allotment). Members of groups must imagine themselves in their groups in these terms, whatever violence to reality must be done—but we need not assume that the imagined allotment always does violence to reality, anymore than we assume that such violence is done by the originary hypothesis itself."
    },
    {
      "slug": "groups",
      "title": "Groups",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "An exchange I have been having with someone very familiar with GA regarding issues of antisemitism, victimary thinking, etc., raised the question of how we account for group belonging in terms of the originary hypothesis. Are Jews a group, or just a phantasm in the anti-Semites imagination? If they are a group, how so—do they act together in some meaningful way, participate in shared institutions or practices, have common characteristics or interests? The same, of course, applies to any group—what makes a nation a nation, an ethnicity and ethnicity—religions at least have shared belief systems and rituals (not that there aren’t plenty of difficulties here as well)?\n\nThe answer is, I think, simple, while requiring subtle gradations in actual analyses. Groups are bound together by honor systems, more or less tightly. If you are Irish, and you take pride in the accomplishments of your “fellow” Irish, are ashamed by their misdeeds, feel compelled to defend them against accusations, are concerned with how their actions reflect on you, then you are a member of the genus “Irish.” Of course, these compulsions can be felt more or less strongly, depending on how dependent you are on the group for protection (or how much you fear its reprisal for perceived betrayal). To put it in more fundamental terms, you are a member of a group to the extent that you participate in the redemption of its hostages—both literal hostages, in the sense of coming to the aid of threatened members, and figuratively, in the sense of trying to lower the threshold of what will count as an “attack” in the first place—and are a potential hostage yourself.\n\nWhat this means is that “groupness” is intrinsically barbaric—there is nothing “modern” or “enlightened” in the defining element of group belonging. Which is why the most modern and enlightened among us tend to despise or deny the reality of groups. The whole point of a “culture of dignity” (to refer to the analysis by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning I have been using in recent posts) is to make it possible to treat individuals outside of groups, i.e., as other than hostages. A culture of dignity creates the optical illusion that individuals can exist outside of groups because it develops (political and economic) mechanisms for isolating individual actions against a background from which group entanglements have been erased, but this is only possible because we are all now part of a new type of group in which we find honor in protecting all individuals from being taken hostage, and by a wider (if vaguer) range of dangers.\n\nModern nations are cultures of dignity overlaid on honor cultures, in some mixture—if a space for dignity is not carved out, we have a tribe, not a nation, and a tribe certain to degenerate in its encounters with nations due to its addiction to violence; if dignity is interpreted and practiced in such a way as to treat honor as inimical to the dignity of the individual (if it, for example, takes seriously claims that displaying the national flag at public events “offends” some marginalized group), then it won’t be long before that culture fails to protect anyone’s dignity either. (And it also follows that anyone who tries to be a member of the national group without displaying loyalty to more local groups—the South, Italian-Americans, Midwesterners, Bostonians, etc.—is likely to be considered less completely a member of the national group as well. National loyalties are tested less often, so without the proving grounds of more local loyalties, one’s trustworthiness will always be in question.)\n\nPolitical parties and activist groups, which is to say groups founded within modern nations, fit this model perfectly—they preserve the dignity of the individual at the very least in allowing any individual to leave the group (which is a reflection of the national dignity culture), but, otherwise, insofar as one acts or allows oneself to be identified as a member of that group, one is a potential hostage and committed to the redemption of hostages. We could obviously analyze all the other groups in which people participate—they would all exhibit the same unsavory defensiveness on the part of group members, whose first response to any accusation against the group will be denial and counter-accusation, to be succeeded either by a more or less traumatic break with group, continued denial, or a reconciliation with these newly discovered vulnerabilities with the protection one finds the group still offers—whether that protection be from physical attacks or, as is much more common in modern groups, from some form of moral contagion caused by the compromises of civilization. (The point of being in one group, then, is largely to assert you are not like that other group.)\n\nSo, what of individuals? Are they, rather than groups, the real illusion? Has anyone ever seen one of these individuals of whose existence we have heard rumors? What we recognize as individuals are initiates in some discipline—to commit yourself to some moral or intellectual discipline is to have in reserve the capacity to resist the importunities of groups for reasons other than shame or fear. Even so, the individual exists on the margins of groups, not outside of them: an American who can examine, and criticize, as if he weren’t an American but a “historian” or “cultural theorist,” the various events, doctrines and figures making up American history and culture, is still a potential hostage and recipient of protection from fellow Americans, even if he eschews participation in the common American culture.\n\nUnless his disciplinary vocation involves a resentment towards that culture that not only makes the critical distancing easier but exceeds the boundaries of the discipline—in that case, the critic has simply joined, more or less explicitly, some other, perhaps internationalist, group. Disciplines can become groups—one can feel compelled to defend the honor of the profession after a well known historian has been caught plagiarizing—but only to the extent that it becomes less of a discipline (rather than the defending the profession, the true historian should root out all forms of “groupiness” that might lead members of the profession to place loyalty over the rigors of inquiry).\n\nNaturally, I don’t mean to imply that disciplines must be institutionalized—there are all kinds of disciplines, which is to say ways of establishing one’s dignity. Indeed, almost everyone has at least some discipline in this sense. Another source of individuality might be those liminal conditions so common in modernity—being a foreigner, being associated with foreigners, being a minority whose membership in the larger group is not certain (perhaps you wouldn’t be redeemed from captivity), associating with such minorities, etc. To the extent that such conditions constitute more than confusion and uncertainty, though, it is because those thereby situated make a discipline out of their anomaly, perhaps a discipline in the study of the group in relation to which one stands somewhat askew.\n\nSeeking to integrate that discipline as a kind of gift into the knowledge of that larger community ultimately confirms one as a member; using that discipline to discredit (bring shame upon) that group indicates an attempt to find some other, most likely political, group to join."
    },
    {
      "slug": "laws-of-probability",
      "title": "Laws of Probability",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "There are statistical disparities between groups in all areas of life: educational accomplishment, mental aptitudes, physical ability, and so on. We are now capable of measuring these disparities in ever more nuanced ways, holding constant whatever variables we wish to isolate particular causal relationships. We couldn’t stop getting better at this if we wanted to, and we can’t stop talking about if for no other reason than that such disparities are proof, for the victimocracy, of the oppressions whose exposure and remediation justify its own existence. Such talk makes normal people very nervous, because we all thought we were done with it, and had all agreed to pretend to believe in a kind of blank slate equality, under the assumption that such a belief was a precondition of the legal and political equality upon which our civilization is predicated.\n\nBut victimary thinking has shattered that pretension and, now, if you don’t want to accept that the disproportionate number of black men in prison can only be a sign of white supremacy, that the lower number of women in the sciences can only be a sign of patriarchy, and so on, you will have to treat statistical disparities as providing us with information about the capabilities and propensities of the groups involved rather than about the oppression or exclusion they suffer. There is no third way (even to say “it’s a little of both” breaks up the victimocracy’s ethico-epistemological cartel, because the precise proportions are then, unbearably, open for discussion).\n\nThis is a very difficult way. Perhaps too difficult. In theory, exploding assumptions about natural equality (whether we see inequalities as natural, or cultural or historical, makes some difference, but not much in the short or, probably, medium, run—even if we could, say, trace some “disabling” features of femininity back to “patriarchy,” it is now free women who enact those features) need not undermine presumptions of legal and political equality, or meritocratic principles more generally. In practice, it is likely to do so, as just about everyone likes to have proxies for the traits they desire in an employee, student, friend, partner, etc.\n\n(That’s why we’re interested in probability in the first place.) But how theory and practice are mediated will depend solely on how we learn to speak about such things in the only way that we now can, if we are to resist (and put, to quote Lincoln, on the path of eventual abolition) the victimocracy.\n\nOf course, to conform to statistical reality is to entrench and intensify it. More men will see women as alien to science, more whites will see blacks as criminals, and then fewer women may attempt scientific careers and more blacks alienated from society drawn to crime. The only effective counter-statistical measure, though, is discipline—the interest in an enterprise that depends open being open to improbabilities, to the idea or individual no one else expects much from. Such a discipline involves training oneself, while acknowledging broad statistical trends, to see minor counter-trends—perhaps some stereotypically “feminine” characteristic that provides a unique way into the sciences. There will always be sufficient limits to our understanding of human capabilities and their distribution to justify the energy expended in the detection of such counter-trends, which can perhaps serve as a proxy for a kind of hope."
    },
    {
      "slug": "rivalrous-order",
      "title": "Rivalrous Order",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Nationalism is where rivalries internal to a social order meet rivalries between social orders—where the internal rivalries are converted to and transcended by (originally through some more or less explicit, more or less imposed, pact between tribes or smaller kingdoms) the external rivalries, and the external rivalries shape and limit the internal ones. All opposition to nationalism tries to prevent the crystallization of that meeting point: to squelch internal rivalries so that some elite in control of the state can manage external rivalries on its own terms; or, to make external rivalries impossible or invisible so internal rivalries can be squashed in the name of keeping the peace.\n\nThis understanding of nationalism would, I think, explain a lot. First of all, I think it would account for the rivalries between the ancient Greek city-states which, on these terms, could be called “nationalistic”—the Greek city-states promoted internal rivalries to an extent that many of us today would find insane, which might account for the constant wars between them, and it may very well be that a workable balance between internal and external rivalries was never attained—leaving the nationalist communities easy prey for empires. It also explains why the emergently nationalist early modern Europe found it so difficult to remain united in response to the perpetual threat of the Ottoman Empire—the conversion of internal to external rivalries can’t scale up to the size of a civilization or an empire, even if provisional alliances are always possible.\n\nThird, it would explain the hostility of virtually all forms of political theory and philosophy to nationalism—Marxism, liberalism, communitarianism, even fascism all find nationalism to be a troublesome perplexity, because the maintenance and free play of internal rivalries is alien to all attempts to eliminate mediations between individual and state or individual and society (or, in the case of communitarianism, a rather minor affair at any rate, to evade the competitions at the individual and international levels by defining communities in fundamentally cooperative terms); while the acceptance of international rivalries as both “natural” and a beneficial spur to internal strivings explodes all modern utopias.\n\nDoes nationalism have its political theorist? Or has it always been a kind of blot on all political theories? The obstacle to theorizing nationalism past a certain point is that the meeting point where internal rivalries meet external is always shifting and itself a site of rivalry—unlike liberalism’s right of the individual, for example, or socialism’s transformation of the relations of production, we could never imagine subjecting that process to a “law,” or axiomatic definition.\n\nThe need for robust internal rivalries allows for an understanding of “rights” in nationalistic terms. Rivalries must be engaging and exciting; they must be “real” and consequential, both at play and at work—but they must not be allowed to spill into civil war or sheer exclusion of one part of the national community. That means strict rules, tacit and explicit, are required to limit the scope of competition to circumscribed fields—these rules translate into “rights” for individuals. We’re not talking about “natural” rights here, but simply rules protecting the autonomy of fields of play, and the freedom of movement from one field to another.\n\n(So, for example, “free speech” would not be so much about individual rights as about the need to have competition in the fields of journalism, science, etc.) External rivalries generate internal differentiations as fields that help one nation compete with others are promoted—science, economics and technology most obviously, but there is competition between nations in the literary, diplomatic, athletic and many other fields. In this way, transnational communities of scientists, athletes, merchants, writers and artists, etc., are generated, in (usually) harmless, productive tension with national loyalties. Nations engaged in such rivalries become more like each other, which, as we know from the laws of mimesis, can make their rivalries more deadly, but also makes possible the creation of a body of law and custom regulating interaction.\n\nNone of this is possible with transnational institutions like the EU or UN, or transnational progressive organizations committed to chimeras like “international human rights”—or, needless to say, with empires, whether established on ecumenical or religious terms. Even the liberal, rights-based, state ultimately finds nationalism to be an irritant, or worse, and such states, insofar as they flourish, must set out to break up nationalist inclining institutions and weaken the majoritarian tendencies needed to convert internal rivalries into external ones. A certain kind of radical libertarianism, though, which seeks to abolish the state while accepting the stratifications of a free society and the autonomy of all institutions from any center, can easily be compatible with a kind of ragged, perhaps intermittent, nationalism.\n\nA healthy nationalism has no tolerance for outright treason, of course, but it has plenty of room for idiosyncrasies, abstentions, dissidence and even plural loyalties, at the margins—after all, there’s no way of knowing for sure what cultural innovations will become a genuine possession of the nation and source of national honor, while having some citizens with relatives, friends and commitments in other countries can be converted into access to and intelligence regarding those countries (like American German and Japanese speakers during WWII). More embattled nationalisms, though, may need to withdraw some liberties, and keep citizens in the established channels of competition; without taking advantage of opportunities to open up a bit, however, it is unlikely that second and third tier nations will be able to elevate their standing. And this is why, as I have emphasized in my previous nationalistic posts, nationalism is ultimately more of a civilizing than a barbarizing force—and, when it comes to civilizing, two steps forward and one step backward is probably the best we can do."
    },
    {
      "slug": "immunology",
      "title": "Immunology",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "If politics is no longer “declarative” but, rather, increasingly ostensive (the initial move of the SJW is “point and shriek”[Vox Day]), our inherited political vocabulary of “principles,” “convictions,” “beliefs,” “opinions” and so on needs to be retired, or at the very least sharply restricted. All of these terms presuppose that we conduct civil discourse in answerable sentences, that is sentences whose relation to reality and whose own inner relations can be assessed. But if, as Zaweena Grewal, summing up victimary conventional wisdom, put it in a Washington Post Op-Ed a few days ago, “the unquestioned freedom to mock the powerful is qualitatively different than the freedom to, effectively, bully the most vulnerable members of our community,” then we no longer operate under those assumptions.\n\nGrewal’s assertion—a declarative to put declaratives out of business—applies well beyond the question of “mocking.” Jelani Cobb in the New Yorker puts the principle in more general terms (or, at least as general as they can get, since all speech for the SJW must be violence or resistance): “The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered.” In both cases, the statement only makes sense if it is the same speech act that is designated “mock” and “offend” in one case and “bully” in another. It follows that any statement, whether it be the sheer recitation of facts and statistics, detailed descriptions of events, attempts to adjudicate conflicts, moral criticism—must be qualitatively different when addressing the powerful, on the one hand, and the most vulnerable, on the other.\n\nThis obviously sets up two classes of citizens: those who can uninhibitedly vilify and insult the privileged, and those can speak only in the most circumscribed way about the powerless. Indeed, even arguments over who is powerful and who is vulnerable must be qualitatively different, and therefore impossible—such determinations are embedded in the victimary movement itself, insofar as that movement emerged against an unfolding hierarchical litany of illegitimate centers (Western, white, male, straight, etc.) that are frozen in the victimary imaginary. One has victimary immunity so long as one affirms the binaries implicit in that imaginary (as a white, one confesses to white privilege; as a person of color, one accuses whites of privilege, etc.).\n\nIf you start to question whether a wealthy black student attending an elite school her grades and test scores would not have qualified her for is “powerful,” and an impoverished young white man “vulnerable,” or even whether a white gay man beaten up by a group of black teenagers deserves victimary-style commemoration, you are simply be speaking a different language (and it won’t matter so much what color you are). In fact, not the least of the indignities imposed upon us by the victimary is that it tempts us to indulge in such comparisons, thereby drawing us into its orbit. Naively, many conservatives think arguments uncovering various forms of victimary equivalences provide them with “gotcha” moments. (Less naively, some seem to be realizing how much material for satire there is here.)\n\nI’ll draw upon Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life to suggest that it would be better to think in terms of immunology rather than “principles.” We don’t need better arguments against the victimary—we need the political and cultural equivalent of vaccinations. Once sufficient immunity has been developed, the possibilities of fighting to eradicate the victimary plague will suggest themselves. Our immune deficiency comes in two forms. First, as civilized beings we are unequipped to deal with overtly and ostentatiously uncivil behavior (especially when such behavior is calculated to test the limits of civilized norms).\n\nI remember reading somewhere (and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this in some previous post) that Hitler learned from attending upper class affairs that the instinctive reaction on the part of highly civilized people when confronted with the uncivil is to appease it, either by acceding to demands or waving it off as a joke. Most civilized people simply don’t know how to deal with the uncivil, having cordoned it off as something to be dealt with by bands of armed men for so long. Tit for tats with the uncivil are uncontrollable and unpredictable, and there’s no way of knowing whether one will have the physical and moral capacity to see it through—better to do anything to avoid that necessity.\n\nEven more, all of your civilized companions will exert great pressure on your to take this course, as they will inevitably be drawn into any prolonged confrontation. Not only do you risk getting your ass kicked, but everyone will blame you for it. Second, as citizens of a democratic society predicated upon assumptions about human equality, we cringe at any accusation that we are excluding someone from the circle of equals—indeed, doing so is now the thing most likely to get oneself excluded from that circle. Our first impulse is to deny the accusation, and to defend ourselves, but this merely traps one in a double bind: any attempt to prove you are not racist (“I have lots of black friends…”) will merely prove that you see anti-racism as a matter of tokenism rather than uprooting the beliefs we don’t even experience as racist.\n\nYou can go the systemic route, and recite the contemporary anti-racist screed, but that just proves that, in your complacency, you didn’t notice some unchecked privilege. It’s like being investigated by a special prosecutor—if they don’t get you on the “underlying crime,” they will get you for lying to investigators or impeding the investigation. The only way to avoid being cornered is to join in accusing another, but by the time you have been accused, it is too late.\n\nThe only way out is to say, first, “I don’t care,” and, second, “you’re lying” (not about calling me racist, or whatever, because the first move is to render that point moot—but in some material claim supporting the charge—about which the SJW will undoubtedly be lying). If you’re not ready to do that immediately and unflinchingly, for as long as it takes, it’s better to go cower in a corner from the beginning and save everyone a lot of time and energy. That means you have to be able to act without even thinking about it—the first moments might be decisive. Hence the need for immunization. At this point, though, we can target the immunizations very precisely.\n\nWhat we need to be immunized against is being infected by the victimary world of lies. The SJWs now depend not just upon the strategic lie, but a completely fabricated world reminiscent of totalitarianism. The statements quoted above makes this clear: since truth must be “qualitatively different” for the perpetrator and the victim, whatever helps the powerful is to be denied; whatever helps the vulnerable is to be affirmed; whatever the powerful have accomplished has been at the expense of the powerless; whatever the powerless is to be applauded as an accomplishment in the face of virulent hostility by the powerful.\n\nAl Sharpton perpetrated a massive and very damaging hoax in the Tawana Brawley case back in the 80s, but once the fraud was exposed, people stopped talking about Brawley—it didn’t spawn a “movement.” Today, the exposure of frauds, like the one in Ferguson regarding the shooting of Michael Brown, makes no difference. Resisting the world of lies becomes, on the one hand, harder: it is extremely difficult, especially in the academy or media, to avoid lending support to the lies simply by accepting, for example, “the consequences of Ferguson” as a legitimate topic of discussion. Once you accept that what’s important is not what really happened, but what it meant to the “vulnerable,” then you are in and will find it very difficult to dig your way out. The abomination must be rejected in toto. (You have to be ready to say, “oh, you mean the Ferguson hoax?”)\n\nThe lies penetrate because they are advanced by the uncivil (to whom we reflexively and romantically grant a greater authenticity) on civilized terrain (the very difference between civil and uncivil seems to imply, vaguely, some inequality), and because claims that one’s equality has been violated are as a matter of course given deference. This is where the immunological deficiency of modern citizens lies. Building up immunity to uncivil demands for unilaterally defined equality requires (as does any immunity) exposure to the infection. The difference presented as proof of injustice must be immediately, automatically and instinctively treated as proof of qualitative difference.\n\nThe demand itself must be treated as evidence of incontinence and indiscipline. So far, I have been describing more of a practice than an inoculation that makes it the default practice. The inoculation lies in repeated exposure to the differences signifying victimary status and habituating oneself to insisting on the immunological implications of those differences. If members of group A are more likely to commit violence (and, perhaps, specific forms of violence) than other groups, immunological considerations dictate protecting oneself and things and people one cares about from members of group A—this does not necessarily mean a blanket exclusion of A (al though in some cases it might), just different vetting criteria, targeted towards a more or less formal probability assessment.\n\nWith regard to groups that excel disproportionately, immunological considerations are more passive, requiring nothing more than a defense and refinement of criteria for admission and promotion—here, inoculation must focus on insidious attempts to subvert those criteria. Such attempts at subversion usually take the form of insisting on their circularity—they reproduce existing hierarchies because members of dominant groups more readily see virtues in each other than in “others.” Such a claim is as unprovable as it is unrefutable, and therefore should be ignored: demonstrable improvements to the criteria should be demanded as a condition of taking any critique seriously. Of course, this also means you should know why you have the criteria you do—they shouldn’t simply be inherited.\n\nAn automatized defense of the human inclination to notice differences and infer further differences from them; of the natural disposition of any individual or institution to organize reality in accord with the most thorough and finely calibrated apprehension of observable human differences possible; and of the habit of refining and making both more inbred and more deliberate these dispositions and inclinations—this is the vaccine. Not to be pedantic, but it is as if we must invent and then repeat mantras like “differences are our maps to reality, not veils concealing an ultimate gnosis” over and over again. Once inoculated, we are free to discuss at our leisure various possible causes of these differences—such inquiries can be very interesting and productive, once the environment has been freed of victimary pathologies.\n\nAnd, of course, the array of human differences changes, albeit within limits (limits we can never be sure of in advance)—indeed, an enhancement of the immunological resistance of our institutions would itself be sure to induce significant changes. We could then acknowledge counter-tendencies, such as, perhaps, particular forms of gentleness one can find among individual members of disproportionately violent groups. Above all, though, we would be training ourselves to identify the difference of the victimary itself, the signs of the SJW, and devise means of excluding them from, where possible, and marginalizing them within, when necessary, our institutions.\n\nIn fact, we could read off all the differences we need from the agenda and language of the SJWs—everything that they deny can fairly reliably be affirmed, everything they are against can fairly reliably be supported, everything they are for opposed. It’s as if they provide an inverted map of reality. They openly declare their commitments to incompetence, subversion, falsification and wrecking, presenting themselves as the very infection to which we need to develop antibodies. So, for example, we can confidently respond to Grewal and Cobb that indeed there should be differences in how we address the more and less powerful—those accountable to some public must be expected to set an example for everyone else; while those who are in some sense apprentices within civilized institutions should be admonished to work harder to counter the reasonable assumption that a large number of them will fail, or only barely succeed, without much distinction. How to “mock” or “offend” (or advise, encourage, criticize, report on, etc.) will follow from such considerations."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-dialectics-of-nationalism",
      "title": "The Dialectics of Nationalism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "One thing that all the American nationalists I have come across recently have in common is their insistence on non-intervention abroad. The nationalists can often sound like leftists in their denunciations of American “imperialism” and “nation building,” with the crusading neo-conservative coming in for special scorn. It is, of course, logical and Kantian that, if your fundamental political commitment is to national sovereignty, coherence and defense, you would respect with regard to others what you demand for yourself. Since nationalism is intrinsically rivalrous, though, anti-interventionism is also an illusion, one that can be indulged in by the politically marginalized, but will be abandoned quickly if the nationalists ever wield significant political power.\n\nThis illusion is similar to the fantasy of an ethnically homogeneous nation, and both illusions share the same roots. To say that a political imaginary has illusions is not to discredit it—it is almost the same thing as calling it a “political imaginary,” which any political order must have. The more paradoxical and generative the illusions, the more interesting and “informative” the political order—the durability of that order, though, does depend upon managing, limiting and channeling those illusions.\n\nTo be a nationalist is to define your nation in comparison to and competition with other nations. It is to assume that there are more and less successful nations. It follows that the less successful nations will emulate and resent the more successful. This introduces divisions into the less successful nations between those who would like to transform the indigenous culture so as to approximate more closely the successful nation, and those who define national identity in terms of some resentful distinction from the more successful nation (success and failure are redefined). It also introduces a division in the more successful nation between those who would like to cultivate patronage relations and alliances with the less successful nation and those who see the less successful nation’s resentments as harbingers of future hostility, and counsel distance and preparedness.\n\nThis dialectic inevitably takes on geographic and demographic forms. The emulative members of the LSN will often take up residence in the MSN, and the welcoming members of the MSN will promote such a development; patronizing members of the MSN will move to the LSN, taking advantage of whatever advantages have made them more successful. And even the more resentful members of the LSN will feel compelled to move to the MSN to have access to economic, educational and other opportunities which members of the MSN who no longer wish to carry out less desirable functions will consent to yield to the LSN immigrants.\n\nMoreover, since nations never coincide with ethnic distinctions (which are themselves inherently vague and characterized by minute gradations across territories), national boundaries are always imperfect, with people who identify more with one nation being “trapped” within the boundaries of another nation. A nation is a union of tribes, almost invariably created through an alliance against some imperial or monarchical order—the tribes within the union will be connected to tribes that fall out of it through familial, linguistic and other ties, and these connections will be maintained across borders. (This leaves aside ethnically similar demographics that nevertheless identify with transnational faiths or institutions, such as English or German Catholics, or Jews, who pose similar problems—and it’s very common for the religious divisions to overlap geographic and ethnic ones.)\n\nBoth MSN and LSN nations will have an interest in leveraging such fuzzy loyalties, which will entangle conflicts within and between the nations. MSN will usually, but not always, prevail in such conflicts, which will redraw boundaries (national honor cannot allow a victory to go without spoils) and lay the groundwork for future conflicts. Nor is this dynamic restricted to neighboring nations. If a MSN with, say, a developed market and a network of merchants and bankers, is allowed or invited (or even if a few enterprising individuals insinuate themselves through force and fraud) into a more distant LSN for the sake of exploiting or elevating the condition of its people (or even the elite portion of that people), those colonists are potential hostages who must be protected in the name of national reputation.\n\nThe MSN must be willing to use force, which may very well involve long-term occupation of the LSN, or some part of it, or the establishment of “puppet” governments dependent on the MSN. And, finally, more than one MSN might have such interests in LSNs, generating new conflicts between the MSNs (some of whom must be at least marginally more successful than the others, bringing that entire dynamic into play). For the MSNs to behave otherwise would be to allow the LSMs to chip away at their own borders and counter their own advantages through alliances and subversions of their own.\n\nThis last point alludes to the obvious question of what makes a nation more successful—and the equally obvious answer, as libertarian theorist Hans Hermann-Hoppe argues, is the nation that allows for more of a free market within the territory it controls, which generally means the more civilized nation. To add yet another paradox into the mix, as Hermann-Hoppe also argues, this means that the nations with the freest economies will also be the most aggressive conquering nations, not only because their wealth translates into military and political power but also because they will be the nations that cultivate the most wide reaching and entrenched interests in foreign countries, as they will be best able to exploit such interests to enrich and empower itself.\n\nAs the conquering liberal nation comes to bring more and more nations within its direct and indirect sway, it also produces the most cosmopolitan tendencies, becomes the most open to external influences and movement of peoples, and that much less of a nation: generating a new kind of resentment, that of those who once ruled the world but are now being subsumed in and overwhelmed by it.\n\nAll this has been essentially an abstract account of modern European history p until the 20th century, the only history of nations (tribes transcended by their unity and new differentiation into classes) in interaction with each other in the history of the world. It’s easy to see how this dialectic led to the catastrophic “thirty years war” of the 20th century West, and any defense of nationalism today would be advised to offer a credible explanation of why this need not be the inevitable outcome of a world of nations. (Or, more pessimistically, why even this possibility is preferable to the anti-nationalist alternatives.)\n\nDespite the contempt heaped upon the more liberal notion of America as a “proposition nation” by American nationalists, sooner or later any nationalism will settle into some kind of propositional form: the nation has to be “about” something. That something need not be some principle abstracted from (and therefore imposed upon) the people, and that is where critics of American “propositionality” are right. The notion of America as a proposition nation derives from Lincoln, in particular his Gettysburg Address, and it is both justified and historically accurate to trace the proposition, “all men are created equal,” to which Lincoln declared the American founding to be “dedicated,” to an older understanding of “British liberties,” embedded in the traditions of people of British stock—and, therefore, to question whether peoples of other stocks can easily conform to those principles.\n\nThis debate takes us to the heart of the American Civil War—the Southern partisans claimed that by “all men,” the founders really meant “white men,” and there may be something to that, but they did write “all men” rather than “white men” for reasons that are not too hard to imagine. The meaning of propositions cannot be controlled by the contingent intentions of those who assert them—they always transcend the conditions of their utterance because the effectivity of their utterance depends upon them opening up a horizon beyond the immediately local. To refer to my previous post, it is still incumbent upon the guardians of the national proposition to operationalize the sincerity conditions of iterations of that proposition: the national proposition must set conditions for that convergence of rivalries within the nation with rivalries between nations that I have proposed as the definition of nationalism.\n\nThe exemplars of “British liberties” are not required to universalize those liberties so that they map onto the already existing dispositions of new entrants onto the national stage; rather, those new entrants are obliged to adopt and adapt to those British liberties so as to prove that they are not exclusively “British.” (Nearly explicit in Lincoln’s formulation is that the proposition is a hypothesis that might be falsified.)\n\nIn a world of nationalisms, there are no guarantees. There are no guarantees in any world, but at least in a world of nationalisms, defined by its constantly shifting rivalries, this would be explicit. Even the horror of nuclear war between the world’s leading nations and, by now, even some of its second-rank nations, provides no assurance that national rivalries won’t lead us to a brink that some miscalculation or arrogant short-sightedness could tip us over. It may be the best that we can hope for is, first, the shrinking gap between first, second, and third rank powers will prevent the kind of concentration of power into stable imperialist blocs that could focus all attention on each other; and second, a renewed recognition of the fragility of civilization, now threatened by a world wide jihad against paralyzed rich nations, will make common interests among the civilized nations outweigh their rivalries—or, better yet, that their rivalries will get channeled into competitions over the defense of civilization, internally and externally.\n\nThe countries that can best leverage, while making national membership condition of this possibility, their ethnic, religious and cultural minorities and the international interventions (and consequent alliances) they are drawn into will succeed and the set the model for others.\n\nThe post-nationalist political imaginary models a nationalist world unrestrained by international institutions on the originary scene: as all-encompassing imminently violent rivalry just waiting for someone to pull the first trigger. Certainly the configuration of individual nations in competition over resources, power and prestige fits the model. Ultimately the Nazi genocide of the Jews exemplifies this model, as a world war of competing nationalisms ends up targeting the minority (the paradoxical nation, dispersed and extra-territorial) that never managed to fit, unproblematically, into any of them. That’s why even the most normal nationalism—say, the Hungarians’ refusal to allow more than a very small number of “Syrian” refugees—triggers a quasi-allergic response from the transnational progressives.\n\nBut it may be that precisely the more prickly nationalism, which responds in kind to every insult or injury, that will keep the peace, rather than attempts to defer these conflicts to international mediation that will be satisfactory to the extent that it was unnecessary in the first place. The Mexican government provides aid and advice to its citizens trying to stay in the US illegally—that’s no causus belli, but there are plenty of ways of retaliating far short of war. Such tit for tat exchanges may seem childish, and in a sense they are—but they are also the most important way in which we continue to learn from social interactions throughout our lives.\n\nIt may be that the cause of WWI and hence the profound crisis of European civilization in which we still find ourselves was less unchecked nationalism and more the pervasive fantasy of endless enlightenment and progress so ascendant in Europe at the turn of the century—if you imagine that universal comity is transcending all rivalries, you would not find any reason to engage those rivalries, to test the relative strengths and weakness, real and imagined, of the respective parties. And then you will be shocked and disillusioned to discover that mimeticism has not yet disappeared from the planet.\n\nI would recommend watching, if you haven’t already, the video referenced and linked to in this report from Breitbart News: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/11/watch-anti-migrant-video-going-viral-across-europe/. The Breitbart writer’s unease with the antisemitism that emerges at a couple of crucial points in this very powerful video marks a split between the philo-semitic and antisemitic factions within the global right that is sure to intensify in coming years. While among the villains of the piece are European elites making the demographic argument for increased immigration that Mark Steyn has been harping on for more than a decade, it’s not clear that the nationalists have an answer to that inescapable question.\n\nIf your nation stops having babies, the suicide is not exactly “enforced”—even if it can be dramatically accelerated through force and fraud. The real test of a reinvigorated nationalism is whether it generates a new baby boom. Faith provides a compelling reason for procreation, but we don’t know if the kind of immortality offered by the nation still does so. Only a very profound, multilayered revolution will enable one to answer that question confidently in the affirmative. At least the requirements of that revolution converge with those of the anti-victimocratic revolution that is its precondition, insofar as having more than the replacement level number of offspring is a way of engaging in inter-familial, inter-regional, and international rivalry—so, it can all be rolled up into one ball."
    },
    {
      "slug": "theory-of-language-as-theory-of-war",
      "title": "Theory of Language as Theory of War",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "As I survey the field of thinkers and doers determined not just to complain about “political correctness” but to undertake to destroy it (most exemplarily, Vox Day of SJWs Always Lie ) I notice one weakness in their analysis that some of us familiar with academic developments over the past half-century are well equipped to remedy. SJWs lie, they double down, they project; any apology they manage to extract will be pocketed as a confession and used to pursue further prosecutorial actions; they exploit vague “codes of conduct” and appeal to “amenable authorities” to find weak links in the organization; and they have absolutely no concern for the genuine goals of whatever project they infiltrate—indeed, as Vox Day could say, but I don’t think he does, people with genuine “projects” are the favored targets of the SJW because the enemy of the SJW is someone concerned with achievement, success, participating in civilization, and who is therefore indifferent to margins of perceived inequality. All true! All this addresses the SJWs as an enemy in an ongoing civil war (a “cold” civil war, so far), and therefore focuses on weapons, tactics, strategies, weaknesses and vulnerabilities, etc. As befits a fighter.\n\nBut Vox Day doesn’t seem particularly interested in the question of why all this works, and it does need to be explained—we don’t need an explanation for why saturation bombing and an invasion of hundreds of thousands of troops breaks the enemy’s will and leads to surrender; we do need an explanation for why everyone in a corporation cowers when a charge of “racism” or “sexism” is levied. (Of course, part of the explanation is simply that the government can exact a very heavy price for such transgressions, but not only does this just push the question back to another level [why do we comply with government rules that no one ever voted for?], it is far from always the case that complaints which are anxiously addressed rise to the threshold of legal action—the anxiety is more free floating than that.)\n\nWe can pursue these questions through new theories of warfare (e.g., William Lind’s “4th Generation Warfare), which very much interests the SJW slayers, but it seems to me there’s not much there there. Why do guerilla warfare and terrorism work? We require the same kind of explanation for a kind of social and political paralysis in the face of very asymmetrical means for that as for the everyday pastimes of the domestic SJW. Of course, our own understanding of White Guilt and victimary thinking offer an explanation well beyond anything the anti-SJW camp has to offer, but it is ultimately a contemplative view of things, a description which, for reasons I hope to explain here, is not likely to interest those committed to the principle of SJWs delenda est , and for good reasons. Think tanks will not sink the SJWs. Anyway, even on the terms of a “declarative,” objective, social sciency account, references to feelings like guilt and fear tend to be like theories of soporific qualities causing sleep.\n\nHowever we explain it, the source of the power of victimary politics is the assimilation, by now tacitly by most participants, of a post-structuralist understanding of language. Judith Butler tied together Derridean and Foucauldian threads from French theory with the speech act theory of Austin and Searles to provide an effective way of acting on the principle that all language is performative. All saying is a kind of doing. Whoever practices language according to this assumption will have incalculable advantages over people still adhering to what are ultimately metaphysical understandings of a detached, disinterested, objective analysis, to be presented, refined and disputed at leisure.\n\nYou think you’re putting together an interesting, plausible theory that can withstand and benefit from the most rigorous scrutiny and reward the most sustained study—they see that you are building fences, prescribing behaviors, disciplining and organizing masses of people, and will act on that perception. And they can do so because they are not wrong, as adherents to the originary hypothesis should be the first to recognize: putting forth an “idea” is sustaining or undermining institutional arrangements, and establishing protocols for inclusion and exclusion regarding those arrangements.\n\nThe originary hypothesis shares with post-structuralism and speech act theory the same basic post-metaphysical premise: the purpose of language is not to communicate true statements, it is to make things happen. If we ask, to make what happen, we all depart from each other, as post-structuralism has an implicit answer (to subvert the violence of reducing language to true statements) and speech act theory, being more purely descriptive and classificatory, has none, while, of course, GA has a crystal clear one: to defer violence. The power of post-structuralist subversion lies in the antinomy it embraces: it assumes both the “declarative” or “constative” world in which claims about equality reside, and the potential of perpetually undermining that world both to redress its hypocrisies to be liberated from its responsibilities.\n\nAny time an order and therefore any mode of reciprocity is established, it is possible to expose that order as exclusionary—some practices or qualities will not fall with the sphere of prescribed reciprocities. You can thereby implicate everyone who has bought into that mode of reciprocity. There is a kind of shell game going on—you distract people’s attention away from the purpose of that reciprocity to the rules constituting it. But part of a civilized order is the capacity to reflect on rules, which is often necessary (especially once institutions evolve beyond face to face encounters), but which can only be done within the shared good faith (which also means shared purpose) of all involved (the attempt to establish meta-rules to settle disputes over how to apply the rules leads to infinite regress).\n\nThere really is no statement that you can make that will be even minimally immune from such subversions. To put simply, saying that a putatively neutral and innocent claim is exclusionary is something even the most dull-witted can do at will—it’s like using a coloring book. And, stating that police acted reasonably in using force to break up a fight that could have devolved into a riot is, indeed, doing something—defending civilized norms against enemies. But the SJWs are closer to the truth when they say that statement is an act of violence than you are when you say it’s “just my opinion.” But openly defending civilized norms is a slippery slope—do it once, and you draw the enemies of civilization like flypaper, and will never be able to stop doing it.\n\nYou have to play on the same field as your enemies—if they transform the field, you either have to learn how to play on that field or to transform in some other way. The victimocracy creates a performative field, and I think they can ultimately be made much more conflicted about this than the SJW slayers. The power of the originary hypothesis to help us think this problem through has not been explored at all. To say that all language is performative, is to say that all language creates reality. Austin’s example of the wedding vow is still the simplest one to work with: when the couple says “I do [take this man/woman to be my lawfully wedded wife/husband]” they are not standing outside of their actions, describing them—they are transforming their condition.\n\nOf course, ritualistic settings are the most obvious examples of this use of language, but there’s nothing to prevent us from saying that even the most neutral, inoffensive, trivial claim about reality transforms those speaking with each other into participants upon a formalized scene, bound by a promise to continue speaking and acting in ways entailed by the observation in question. In our casual conversations we are also setting and re-setting an order and a mode of reciprocity—and we can therefore always point out that someone else is doing the same, and that the two orders may be incommensurable.\n\nThe vulnerability of the SJWs derives from their strength: their shell games depend upon others’ commitment to a declarative order to which they themselves remain uncommitted. But a crucial condition of a performative utterance is what Searle calls “sincerity conditions”—“I do” only effects the transformation it purports to if it is uttered sincerely, which is a very tricky concept but can be operationalized in all kinds of ways (we don’t need to read the groom’s mind to know that, if he already has a wife, he is not uttering the vow sincerely). The SJWs can always be targeted for their failure to meet sincerity conditions.\n\nThey must fail to meet those conditions for the same reason they must always lie: they enter an organization for the purpose of subordinating its operations to the imperatives of “social justice,” but they can never admit this outright to those members of the organization who are sincerely devoted to its mission. Entering any organization is a performative gesture: you promise to adhere to its norms and support its purpose. So, yes, such a promise is an exclusionary gesture: it excludes everyone indifferent or hostile to its purposes. Every intervention by the SJWs can be targeted on these grounds: Black Lives Matter is transparently uninterested in making police work better; sexual harassment law is interested in generating conflicts at work, not amity; those fear-mongering about a “rape culture” on college campuses have no interest in making women safer or improving the relations between men and women on campuses (much less advancing the academic mission of the university).\n\nJust ask them! They won’t be able to give you a coherent account of what needs to be improved, much less how to improve it—to the extent that they have a coherent account, it will be a completely and obviously false one. They see their opportunities and they take ‘em. (And, indeed, they will be driven to undermine the kind of disciplinary space required for an assessment of truth claims—it is helpful to remember that truth claims are never just free floating statements that aim at garnering universal agreement and can be meaningfully confirmed or refuted in a vacuum by “reasonable” people, but resolve themselves into ostensive gestures that can only be assessed on a scene that is performatively constituted.)\n\nA performative approach to the SJWs wars requires a transformation in those who, up until now, have mostly laid back and allowed themselves to be waylaid by the SJWs. Once they have a hook in, they can still be fought, but it’s much more difficult, and one must have certain advantages going in. Institutions and organizations must be immunized against them. Those who would protect their institutions from the SJWs must be performative themselves—they must make the promises and the sincerity conditions entailed in those promises constitutive of the institution explicit from the start, and they must embed them in daily routines and interactions.\n\nEven more, they must pounce on insincerities immediately, and use them to make the claims and acts they guarantee infelicitous. Of course, today this might put one in opposition to federal law in all kinds of ways—which means that an expanded mode of performativity, some combination of changing, weakening, blurring, evading, delaying, undermining and defying the laws must be part of such a strategy. There is no neutral ground—nothing simply is—the law is just one more means to be used in the struggle for civilization. In this way, one is ultimately restoring the law itself to its true purpose of facilitating voluntary agreements and exchanges. A call for the return of sincerity conditions, in some suitable translation, should be a winning slogan. The theory of language becomes a theory of war."
    },
    {
      "slug": "event-al-morality",
      "title": "Event-al Morality",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "There is an issue I have been thinking about, on and off, for about the past 15 years, but that has rarely found its way directly into my writing. My interest in this issue dates to some work I did on the American novelist Ronald Sukenick in the early to mid 00s, and I sometimes wonder whether my interest is real or more of a sense of debt to Sukenick, whose writings I encountered almost at the same time as I discovered, and inflected my understanding of, the originary hypothesis, which in turn helped me to shape some essays I wrote on Sukenick. This issue did find its way into some my writing more indirectly, especially, I think, in an essay for Anthropoetics a couple of years ago on language learning as originary ethics and thinking, as well, perhaps, as my essay on “mistakenness,” but neither essay addressed the dispute Sukenick had set up.\n\nSukenick set up a distinction, which he sometimes framed in terms of “games” vs. “play,” elsewhere as “French” vs. “American,” and yet other times as a “theory” vs. “experience” hierarchy. Most minimally (as a question of modes of praxis), he presented it as a distinction between “virtuosity” and “improvisation.” On one level it is an esthetic question regarding the implications of modernism, but for Sukenick, and here I agree with him, it was ultimately a moral question concerning modern civilization. In the first instance, Sukenick was pushing back against some of the esthetic tendencies that he himself was closest to (and most likely to be conflated with) and which he identified most precisely, I think, with the Oulipo group of (mostly, at first) French writers, while surely having a dominant strain of modernism in general in mind.\n\nFor the virtuoso, the point of the performance is to use all of the materials, and only the materials, specific to that kind of performance in a completely integrated way—to maximize the possibilities of the form. The virtuoso is what Peter Sloterdijk studies (and energetically promotes) in his book on discipline and disciplines, You Must Change Your Life , in which he constantly speaks of “acrobats” and “tightrope walkers,” of climbing “Mount Impossible,” in a life—or, at least, civilized life—defining attempt to sustain the “vertical tension” constitutive of a being capable of distinguishing between “lower” and “higher” selves.\n\nSloterdijk at times passes near the moral questions raised by a privileging of virtuosity, or at least briefly acknowledges that there might be such questions, but at most seems to suggest that more refined and expert performances will displace cruder, more violent ones. So, for example, as part of his disagreement with Nietzsche’s denunciation of the modern “victims’ revolution” initiated by Christianity, Sloterdijk claims that the acrobatics of the Christian performance of martyrdom, a total performance that integrated all the elements (in originary terms, the entire field of resentments) into a meaningful representation of death, was simply superior as a performance to the gladiatorial contests it rendered obsolete.\n\nI certainly wouldn’t dismiss Sloterdjik’s account, given how unhelpful most discussions of morality are, and given what seems to me the oscillation between the esthetic and the moral in Eric Gans’s thinking. It may very well be possible to frame everything we might recognize as “morality” as the inventions of more demanding exercises. Even the reciprocity the originary hypothesis posits on the originary scene is a form of relatively rigorous self-restraint in obedience to a sign rather than reflective of anything like concern or compassion for one’s fellows (empathy, sympathy, etc.), or a sense of justice or equality—the latter is more of a deduction from the former.\n\nIndeed, I think any horizontal understanding of morality predicated upon some presumed symmetry will be fatally flawed and ultimately useless: if I behave morally to others, or treat them “as I would like to be treated” (but what if others prefer a different treatment?), it can’t really be because I see myself in them, or “feel” something towards them, and even if it was, it is the asymmetries, the other’s differences from me, that really require moral reflection (rather than just a projection of my own desires and resentments onto the other)—it must be because my relation to them is bound up with our common (“equal”) relation to some center.\n\nI train myself to raise the threshold at which I take offense to some mistreatment or misrecognition, or to lower the threshold at which I can detect another’s unease, and I do so because such exercises make possible other exercises that allow for the display of yet more practiced capabilities, like those involved in following the twists and turns of an argument, or participation in complex forms of cooperation. And it may very well be that as a result of such sustained training, more simple acts of kindness and courtesy become second nature, even incidental.\n\nSo, virtuosity can, I think, actually take us a long way. And Sukenick never really made a sustained argument against virtuosity and for improvisation—theoretical argumentation was not really his “style.” But I think his preference for improvisation was based, first of all, on a powerful intuition regarding the superiority of open over closed systems. Becoming a virtuoso requires that the performer exclude all kinds of materials as unsuitable because they would distract from the systematic inter-referentiality of all the elements of the performance. A virtuoso performance cannot handle interruption. The virtuoso is infuriated by interruption.\n\nImprovisation welcomes interruptions, readily integrating them into an evolving system. In this way Sukenick shares an esthetic understanding not only with the jazz musicians he frequently referenced but with Allan Kaprow, the inventor of “Happenings,” who conceived of an art that would itself ultimately be nothing more than a subtle interruption of the flow of everyday life, for the sake of introducing a new degree of complexity (a lowered threshold of significance) into that flow. Sukenick was also invested in a reading of the prohibition on “graven images” so central to Hebrew monotheism as sanctioning an artistic practice that refused any complete, coherent representation—anything that sought to represent the human, who, after all, was created in the image of the unrepresentable God.\n\nImprovisation, then, takes on a moral dimension insofar as we realize that at any moment we might encounter an experience, situation, or other, that would render our finest wrought exercises utterly inadequate—improvisation obeys the imperative to be respons-able or “answerable” (to be a bit Levinasian, and Bahktinian) to that possibility.\n\nBut how does one prepare to be unprepared? This is the kind of question my essays on “attentionality” and “mistakenness” were trying to answer. One must, in a somewhat Beckettian manner, keep trying. It certainly involves, for one thing, a more abstract kind of exercise, aimed at practicing the lowering and raising of various attentional thresholds. But it also requires a desire and perpetual search for interruptions (which I, at least, enjoy) as well as (far more unnatural and unpleasant for me) a willingness to interrupt, to break the flow. Here, improvisation converges with the “speaking your mind” I explored in my previous post.\n\nThere is no more powerful interruption than someone speaking their mind, which no one ever really, completely, expects (or could predict). Speaking your mind is necessarily improvisational because it takes place on that boundary or at that moment when the demand to mind your speech threatens to obscure an intuition you live by. You can’t know when that is going to happen, you don’t even know that it is happening until you find yourself speaking your mind, saying things you are hearing yourself say as much as you are saying them. Moreover, speaking your mind prompts others to improvise, to speak their own minds, whether it be because they feel through your speech the exposure of a nearly buried intuition of their own, or they detect in your speech an implicit demand that they mind their own, setting their own internal scenery in motion.\n\nTo the extent that we mind our speech, our fear that the return of our shared attention to the object of our unsettled disputes will inflame and embitter those disputes is greater than our faith that such renewed attention will convert those disputes into a new mode of exchange, or a newly improvised and synchronized social performance. Sometimes that fear is justified, and insisting that everyone speak their mind all the time would have self-cancelling effects. But if the fear is persistently, and to the point of paralysis, stronger than the faith, the community, or mode of shared attention, is essentially defunct.\n\nThe Object to which all members of a civilized community attend is the imperative to become a virtuoso (a specialist, a professional, an expert) while simultaneously becoming improvisational (a generalist, an amateur, a de-differentiator, but, most of all, a broken, always incomplete human being in training). We were virtuosos on the originary scene insofar as putting forth the sign implied a kind of conformity and standardization; we were improvisers insofar as behind that sign was exposure and vulnerability, which must be displayed but never can be displayed “perfectly” because perfection or completeness would refute exposure and vulnerability (and thereby paradoxically enhance them).\n\nCivilization restores this duality, which ritualized and politically sanctioned forms of virtuosity obscure. Now, we expect a return on our disciplined performances, without necessarily being disciplined in our expectations. Virtuosity can easily become a pretext for non-recognition, on the side of the virtuoso, and an arbitrary means of exclusion from the standpoint of the less disciplined (there is always something idiosyncratic, something of the acrobat or tightrope walker, even in the most staid, established professions—the medical profession, for example, could easily be very different than it is without impairing its primary function).\n\nOnly the spreading courage of mind-speaking improvisation (which can itself, no doubt, become an excuse for shoddiness) can re-reveal the center (the unrepresentable model of our shared performances) as, at a minimum, something we could all talk about. The risk is that we discover that we are no longer sure about who that “all” is. The more common and perceptive our performances of each others’ performances become, the more we might find that the other’s exercise, the thing he or she is best at and most applied to, narrows the scope of our own improvisation intolerably (I suppose the virtuoso finds intolerable what he perceives as a lowering of standards).\n\nThe moral response to that is to keep pressing against the limits of improvisation by interrupting, respectfully, virtuosic closure, but at a certain point a threshold is reached where it becomes more moral to preserve the tension between virtuosity and improvisation itself (at such times a certain clownishness might be necessary). What I see as the higher morality of improvisation is that the virtuoso cannot recognize the boundary and dispute as one worth preserving: what falls outside of the accomplished performance is simply failure and incompetence.\n\nThe dispute between virtuosity and improvisation is internal to civilization. Civilization is under assault today, from both Islamic barbarism and savagery and the internal neo-barbarism and decadence of the victimocracy. But the self-defense of civilization cannot entail a mindless unity and conformity; rather, it requires that we sustain and even open further our foundational disputes. This is not a luxury—we need both those committed to aristocratic and acrobatic excellence, the “engineers” of Derrida’s deconstruction of Levi-Strauss in “Sign, Structure and Play,” who both exclude the majority and set an example for them; and we need improvisatory bricoleurs, who study the on the spot conversion of resentments into deferrals and disciplines and thereby more fully embody the originary structure.\n\nThe virtuosos speak their mind from the standpoint of technical rigor; the improvisers speak their mind when expertise is fetishized. It’s only the improvisers, though, who really discover and invent, whether it be vaccines, software, neutrinos or anti-terror strategies. And barbarians and savages virulently oppose both, because virtuosity and improvisation demand a discipline that precludes the perpetual score-settling and hostage-taking they crave. But, one might say, cannot a terrorist be a virtuoso? Does not jihad require a good deal of improvisation, taking one’s chances as they come, getting inside the enemy’s “decision loop”?\n\nI would concede the point, because in these cases they are focused very closely on us, and so this one interface of theirs with civilized order exposes their lack of civilization everywhere else (a similar analysis would apply to the victimocracy, whose concentrated talent pertains to detecting the weak point in civilized institutions)—and makes them extremely vulnerable to the far more comprehensive virtuosity and improvisation of which the civilized are capable. Therein lies a civilized morality—not primarily in denouncing the Muslim terrorists as evil, but in finding ways to expose and exploit their more general indiscipline. At any rate, both the jihad and the victimocracy are major interruptions in civilized life, and as such call more for the present-mindedness of improvisation than the pinpoint precision of virtuosity."
    },
    {
      "slug": "making-a-difference-meta-politics-anti-politics-and-political-ontology",
      "title": "Making a Difference: Meta-politics, Anti-politics and Political Ontology",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The centrality, to our political discourse, of Muslim terrorism based, not just on claims of retaliation for past or present transgressions, but on assertions of the universal jurisdiction of the Caliphate, is the latest of a long history of signs indicating that war is no longer a matter of relations between states. WWII already signaled the beginning of the end of the modern European nomos of the earth (to use Schmitt’s term) and the international norms that accompanied it: trying the leading Nazis for actions committed as members of the German government, on the one hand, and the incorporation of guerilla warfare into the laws of war, on the other, were deviations from the traditional political order that were meant to preserve, but merely accelerated the degeneration of, that order.\n\nIf war is no longer restricted to relations between states, then politics is no longer only, or, eventually, even primarily, a relation between citizens focused on the same state, as the proliferation of NGOs and elite powwows like Davos and other globalist fora makes obvious. Indeed, unless states suddenly get very good at fighting Islamic terror—something the pathological determination most Western leaders to import far more of it makes very unlikely—individual citizens, alone and in self-created associations and alliances, will increasingly take on the task of not only defending themselves against the jihad but at carrying out the reprisals and pre-emptive actions they consider appropriate. This won’t be a war of all against all (as if there ever could be such a thing), but a war, however dirty, of civilization against barbarism and savagery.\n\nOne effect of reducing the world to the war of civilization against barbarism would be to continue the dispersal of politics beyond its modern forms of containment, which ultimately means the utter elimination of politics. I don’t mean that people will no longer assemble, cooperate, confer with each other, argue about the best course to take, and so on, or that they will cease do these things within ever changing constraints—of course, we will continue to do these things, perhaps with a far greater seriousness and effectiveness than we do now. I don’t even mean that there will no longer be elections for various offices.\n\nWhat I do mean is that, assuming the war of civilization is being conducted with any chance of success, all deliberations will be directed to and decisions ultimately made by responsible agents delegated to perform specific civilization supporting and enhancing functions—not to representatives of society as a whole. (Such representatives may continue to exist—they will just become increasingly irrelevant—again, assuming the defense of civilization is taken on seriously.) This is because the ongoing frozen in amber civil war in liberal democracies that we call “politics” is only possible as a leisure activity once the gains of civilization have been secured and appear beyond threat.\n\nThe truth is, the competing political parties in the democratic world have never really accepted each other’s legitimacy, other than perhaps during the brief periods when the parties have represented social classes that are clearly interdependent, but even then only to a limited extent; or, to the extent that the two parties cooperate so well as to become in effect a single, governing, party. The parties were formed in the civil wars that set in once the civilizing process had been sufficiently forgotten, and can always be resolved back into the presumably more elemental social identities (worker vs. merchant, free men granted rights by nature vs. churched beings, etc.) that have resulted from and mask the civilizing process.\n\nBut these civil wars were only possible once external threats to civilization have been eliminated for the foreseeable future—the English and French civil wars (and then the Napoleonic wars, and so on) could not have taken place while the Ottoman Empire remained perched on the doorstep of Europe; by the same token, the ongoing simulations of those civil wars can only continue as long as no new external threat emerges. The party system of the Western liberal democracies barely survived the first half of the 20th century, and it may have only been the extraordinary American pre-eminence following WWII that held things together up until now. Not only has that pre-eminence come to end, but the American system is also no less in crisis than the Europeans’.\n\nThe models of Nature that were taken to precede and predetermine the emergence of society and the state in liberal political theories are derived from abstractions from civilized social relations—perhaps Marx was the first to make this fairly obvious observation. The same is no less true of Marx’s model of homo laborans , abstracted from the factory system emergent in 19th century England. The abstract individual property owner, acting according to reasoned self-interested; the abstract worker acting according to collective interest and self-conscious solidarity; the individual consumer on the marketplace driven by desire—the political theories embedded in our political institutions come down to little more than various combinations of these models.\n\nThe only way to simulate debates is by playing one model off against another, since none of them models a form of legitimate disagreement. (There is no way of differentiating the map extracted from human nature from the territory of social action.) The models, meanwhile, can only function as models if we have forgotten the self-and other-directed disciplining violence that made them possible. Traditionalist theories (like Mac Intyre, Oakeshott, Voegelin, Strauss, etc.) and postmodern theories (Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, etc.) have done a good job of dismantling the liberal ones, but have nothing to replace them with—indeed, they are at their best when they resist the demand for alternatives.\n\nLibertarian theories can serve as a powerful “regulating ideal” on any new social order (it will always be helpful to ask “how would this be done if there were no government…”), but not only have 19th century Britain and America been the only societies even vaguely approximating a libertarian order, not only there is virtually no public support in any contemporary society for anything more than bits and pieces of one, but libertarians have the same problem of accounting for the boundary between civilization and its others, based as it is on the same liberal abstractions.\n\nHannah Arendt made the interesting observation that most political theories are really attempts to eliminate politics. The Western tradition has never really broken with Plato in that respect. Where, indeed, is the space for campaigning, fund-raising, sloganeering, smearing, organizing, and so on, in a society ruled by Hobbes’s Leviathan? All basic problems have been solved. The same is true of Locke’s more liberal version of the same order, which seems to require nothing more than a policing agency that one imagines private citizens could arrange for themselves. Rawls’s veil of ignorance could ultimately be reduced to an algorithm determining which social order (or which tweaks of the existing order) would be most beneficial to the least advantaged within it—that is, his theory also represents a desperate attempt to get rid of the real stuff of politics, that is, irreducible disagreements.\n\nAt the most, historical developments throw up new problems that must be discussed, but even in those cases there must be a right answer (even if technocratic expertise always masks cynical improvisation). The American founders’ desire to avert the formation of political parties (while grudgingly accepting and seeking to neutralize “factions”) represents a somewhat more moderate version of the same desire to eliminate politics: ideally, a virtuous public would elect honorable men to perform clearly circumscribed duties. Post-War pluralist theories are just balancing acts, taking for granted all the parties to be balanced.\n\nIt has become fashionable (first of all, largely due to Arendt herself) to celebrate the give and take, unpredictability, open-endedness and so on of politics against the philosophers, but maybe the anti-political stance can be defended on the terms I am proposing here without sacrificing the human freedom and initiative Arendt wanted to preserve. The cold civil war of politics (leaving aside government as a massive patronage system, in which it resembles feudalism) only pertains to competing models of social order that have in common the assumption that the process of civilization has been completed once and for all. Once the boundary between civilization and its others becomes visible, politics is beside the point.\n\n(As an aside, I’ll mention that the spread and maintenance of free markets is itself only possible on terrain cleared by civilization—the assumption that we can all be free, disembedded actors on the marketplace is a very clear sign of an unchallenged civilizational space and on the utter forgetting of that space. Interestingly, only the openly totalitarian object to the market as such—mostly, it is “distortions” of the market that are resented. Such resentments, then, either fit into the simulacral competition between social models I just discussed, or, in some, probably few, cases, represent resentments on behalf of civilization against barbaric encroachments. )\n\nIt would also make sense to claim that totalitarian anti-politics is actually the origin of modern Western politics, which is to say that the modern left, or “social justice,” is that origin (the French Revolution, amplifying the English one), with totalitarian right-wing politics (Nazism in particular) being mimetically parasitic on left-wing revolutionary politics (Bolshevism). Liberal democratic politics has never been more than an attempt to neuter and contain these tendencies. Politics, in that case, has been invented only so as ultimately to dissolve back up into the economy or race—which is to say, in a new form of bureaucratic savagery; or to successfully neutralize all active social forces and thereby itself as well in an equally bureaucratic and therapeutic hyper/post-civilization.\n\nAll politics are attempts to reduce and exploit the differences that flourish under civilization by insisting that those differences are deviations from a model of justice derived from an anthropological simplification. Resentments are converted into demands for taxes on civilization to pay for deprivations of full anthropological presence, rather than expanded participation in civilization. A civilizing practice of anti-politics would resist all this simply by insisting on the truth that deferral and discipline sustain an upward virtuous spiral.\n\nStill, in a sense a civilizational anti-politics would have to operate or appear as a kind of politics, at least until the totalitarian temptation at the origin of modern politics is extinguished. Civilization is the self-perpetuation and self-enhancement of deferral as discipline—in a civilized order, existing forms of discipline prompt others to invent new kinds. The left, meanwhile, is obedience to the imperative to expose the products of discipline as stolen centrality. All differences for the left, therefore, are instances of stolen centrality (gradations of marginality), while all differences for the civilizational intelligence are markers of disciplinary increments.\n\nThis conflict brings us to the most fundamental or ontological level of politics, where politics is distinguished from non-politics: the distinction between differences as a series of zero-sum games (which ultimately means they are not real, just arenas where death matches are staged) and differences as originary and generative. The struggle between defenders of civilizational intelligence and the stokers of political flames is the struggle to convert politics to pedagogy.\n\nWhy pedagogy? The difference between the more and the less disciplined is manifested as exemplarity: the more disciplined show the less the way. This may be done didactically, in closed spaces set aside for the purpose; or in indirect, suggestive, subtle ways. It includes apprenticeship, parenting, role modeling, forms of leadership and accomplishment. Pedagogy involves the intensified awareness and diversion of mimesis, and therefore makes explicit our dependence on future generations. The maintenance of civilization is therefore completely bound up with pedagogy, on the willingness both to exert it and to submit to it. And we are equal insofar as we are always doing both, because to teach is to learn how to teach, to learn from the student, which we can always get better at. In this way, we can see the hysterics of today’s victimary youth as a demand for more exemplarity—which might explain quite a bit (who wouldn’t want to rebel against such pathetic leaders?). Each difference they decry is for us a sample of the salutary effects of deferral and discipline.\n\nPedagogy directed towards entrance into and contributions to disciplinary spaces would provide us with all the differences we could ever imagine or desire, and space for all the deliberation, hypothesizing and argumentation needed to exercise and engage our intellects. It will always be possible to disagree in productive ways regarding the process of teaching and learning. And pedagogy is nothing more than the directing of attention from the objects we desire to the habits of deferral that make those objects possible, in the course of which new increments of deferral and new objects of desire, tied to what the Austrian economists call lesser “time preference,” are generated.\n\nThe marginalization of the state and national and international law place each individual (in all of our associations) on the boundary line between civilization and barbarism, where politics is converted to pedagogy, at least on the civilized side of the line. It is clear what must be defended on that boundary: difference, as produced by discipline, and the inquiry (intellectual and esthetic) into the boundary itself. And what must be opposed: difference as evidence of victimization and therefore a fraudulent center. But “opposed” less in the sense forcibly removed then converted into hypotheses to which we submit the counter. (Force, of course, may be necessary to protect the spaces in which this procedure is made possible.)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "some-hidden-infrastructures-of-civilization",
      "title": "Some Hidden Infrastructures of Civilization",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Almost all political discussion today focuses on the official categories of liberal democracy—freedom, equality, consent— and, in particular, violations of these principles, which makes all such discussion all but worthless. We have completely forgotten that such political categories never have been and never could be anything more than surface modifications of more fundamental, ultimately more primitive and barbaric relations. Civilization is never anything more than veneer. This assertion doesn’t downplay the importance of civilization; quite to the contrary: the veneer keeps all kinds of human potentialities at bay. But it also allows us to turn away from what lies beneath.\n\nFor example, from a recent blog post from John Derbyshire (dumped by Conservative Inc.’s flagship journal National Review for the crime of peppering his articles [in other journals] with all manner of “hatefacts”):\n\nA lot of people still think of “Left” and “Right” as some kind of difference over economics. There are still some traces of that, but when we talk about “Left” and “Right” nowadays, the real divide is between nationalism and demographic stability on one side, globalism and multiculturalism on the other.\n\nIn all Western countries, well-nigh everyone wants a welfare state, and well-nigh everyone wants a thriving capitalist economy. Those things aren’t controversial. What’s controversial is the idea of a nation as being the home of some one particular people of mostly common ancestry and common culture. The great divide today is between nationalism and demographic stability on the one hand, globalism and mass immigration on the other.\n\nIt used to be, a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, you could get a quick rough gauge of how much you were likely to agree or disagree with someone by finding out how much he hated rich people. Note that the person whose temperature you were taking might himself be rich; the expression “limousine liberal” has been around for a while.\n\nBut nowadays, if you want to take someone’s political temperature, you get a much more accurate reading by figuring out how much he hates white people. Again, there is no bar to he himself being white: the word “ethnomasochist” hasn’t been around as long as “limousine liberal,” but I did once trace it as far back as 1981.\n\nDerbyshire is speaking of victimary thinking and politics, something he understands very well (having realized, for example, that for white Americans, or at least what he calls the “goodwhites,” Blacks are sacred objects), while framing it somewhat more starkly than we are used to. Or, perhaps, he just frames it in reverse, by adopting the standpoint of the targeted victim of the victimary: the main political issue, for Derbyshire, is whether white countries can remain white. Donald Trump’s success proves that Derbyshire, and his colleagues (comrades?) on the “alternative” or “dissident” right are far from alone.\n\nThe question is not being posed so bluntly by Trump himself, who gives no evidence of thinking in such terms at all—but those in hysterics over Trump’s candidacy certainly have started posing the question this bluntly, even if as an accusation that they assume will never answered with a righteous affirmation rather than admission of guilt—how far are we from supporters of Trump, or whoever comes after Trump, saying something like “yes, we want a predominantly white, Christian country—so what?” This emergence of tribal barbarism results from civilization being turned against what it previously covered, softened and intermixed with the specifically modern disciplines.\n\nOnce the government decides its job is to fight discrimination, it goes to war against part of the population it supposedly represents, and with ever more precision and comprehensiveness. You cannot help but induce that part of the population to find itself at war with the government, and also against the beneficiaries of government patronage. Whether whites are really, in some ethnic or racial sense, an “identity” or “collectivity,” is irrelevant—it is much more important that they are a target of a bio-political war of subjugation, which could easily at some point, given present demographic tendencies, become one of extermination.\n\nHere’s something far more amusing, but maybe just as interesting in its own way—a clip of Trump having read to him, by talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, a children’s book in the Dr. Seuss style, composed by Kimmel’s writers in Trump’s name:\n\nhttp://money.cnn.com/2015/12/17/media/jimmy-kimmel-live-donald-trump/\n\nThe “book” is extremely well done, capturing Trump’s idioms and patterns of speech (along with some deft allusions to events in Trump’s campaign), while finding a point where public caricatures of Trump and Trump’s own self-image seem to converge (if Trump felt he was being satirized rather than celebrated—or that there was any meaningful distinction between the two—he certainly didn’t show it). More interesting, for my purposes here, is how unthinkable the tautology of the title is—yes, by definition, winners aren’t losers, but how many today could allow themselves to use a terms like “winners” and “losers” without finding some way to assert that the “winners” are really oppressors (and therefore, at least in the long term historical and moral sense, ultimately losers themselves) and the losers really victims?\n\nThis is certainly part of Trump’s appeal, that he uses terms like “achievement,” “accomplishment,” “success,” “victory,” etc. unapologetically and without irony. Some people are superior, others (axiomatically) inferior, some are stupid, make “bad deals,” are to be “pitied,” etc. Like white Christians liking their country being white and Christian, this idiom of self-assertion, competition, and ranking is something that the founders of civilization (and the founders of liberal democracy more specifically) simply took for granted (while many of them, no doubt, were disgusted by the barbarism, the disguised warfare and systematic humiliation implicit in what we might call “top-doggism”) while hoping to at least prevent it from being institutionalized—and that the contemporary usurpers of civilized institution have declared outright war against.\n\nA final, and related, example. There are now quite a few websites devoted to what Alpha Game , a blog run by Vox Day, calls the “socio-sexual hierarchy”:\n\nhttp://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-hierarchy.html\n\nHere, we have a blatant re-assertion of “Big Man” type hierarchies, explored in great detail and familiar, perhaps painfully so, to anyone with vivid memories of their days on the playground, or high school. As you can see, such analyses can become fairly detailed and sophisticated—and why not, given that these kinds of rivalries have been around for a very long time, are very evident in all kinds of everyday relationships, and, indeed, can only go unseen with the investment of considerable energy into avoidance. Thanks once again to Trump, whom bloggers such as Vox Day have marked as a kind of “super-Alpha,” such discourse is also only just below the surface of contemporary politics (note, too, the recurring meme of contrasting Vladimir Putin’s manliness to Barack Obama’s more “Gamma” persona).\n\n(I am not familiar with any similar analyses of female hierarchies, other than the fairly widespread recognition of female hypergamy, but I assume they exist—at any rate, part of the en during appeal of the 2004 film “Mean Girls” is that it at least gave us a glimpse of such hierarchies.) These kinds of hierarchies were a given in earlier versions of civilized life, which tried to incorporate them into a more benign domestic monogamous patriarchal order, governed by notions of chastity, chivalry and fidelity. But, of course all this is unspeakable as well—one of the fascinating things about contemporary democracy is all of the things so many people are terrified of saying, even, at this point, in the privacy of their own homes.\n\nSo, at a certain point, democracy becomes contingent on people not even thinking such things, not even when they are right in front of their faces—which also means that democracy becomes dependent on persistent vituperation against those who do notice them. But what if people keep noticing them nevertheless? (We are also, I’ll briefly add, on the verge [the gift of Trump keeps giving] of discussing openly the possible incompatibility of Islam with the rule of law—which is to say, of undermining the assumption of the equivalence of all religions, which is the only thing keeping the 1st amendment workable in its modern interpretations.)\n\nOpen and sustained conflict between these hidden infrastructures and the victimocracy is, I think, almost upon us. Of course, the complete victory of either side, along with various possible compromises, is not incompatible with our continuing to staff our governmental institutions through elections, so that’s not really the issue. (Not necessarily, at least—either side might find a suspension, elimination or severe dilution of democratic or liberal institutions essential to waging war.) But the liberal democratic consensus of the post-War West (economic and intellectual freedom, some loose cultural constraints, some redistribution, and an ethos of non-discrimination) is in tatters, and not available as a resolution.\n\nThe victimocracy has repudiated intellectual freedom and cultural constraints while chafing at economic freedom; the new right, meanwhile, repudiates non-discrimination, seeing it as a battering ram aimed at demolishing the rest of the civilized order. (Both sides seem to accept the idea of redistribution, i.e., soaking the rich—which means they share one particularly destructive position, hardly a firm basis for reconciliation.)\n\nAny reader of my posts knows that I don’t consider anything more destructive than the victimocracy—perhaps, under duress, I could consider the possibility that other political movements could be as destructive. And all the alternative right wants to do is return us to some longstanding historical norms, deeply rooted in civilized human nature—even if, inevitably, there will be some “extremists,” in response to whom, following the precedent set by Obama and Clinton, we should say: 1) they have nothing to do with the millions of peace loving civilization restorationists and, 2) we should be very careful of offending those guardians of civilization, so as not to unwittingly recruit more “extremists.”\n\nThe hardest thing, even for those who are firmly on the right (or at least the anti-left), will be the willingness to sacrifice one’s anti-discrimination bone fides. Here is where no moderation is possible—however you want to run your own business or household, you must renounce any social or state project of enforcing non-discrimination norms, because that is the Trojan Horse containing the SJWs who will destroy the city. It is this question that will really decide which side each and every one of us is on."
    },
    {
      "slug": "speaking-your-mind-minding-your-speech",
      "title": "Speaking Your Mind, Minding Your Speech",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’m about a third of the way through Michel Foucault’s The Courage of Truth. It makes me sorry Foucault didn’t live a few more decades—he was getting interested in some quite interesting things. This book is about the Greek concept of “parrhesia,” roughly translated as “complete,” which is to say, bold, open, uncompromising speech. Parrhesia seemed to have its origins in the rough and tumble of democratic Greek politics, where any citizen could speak freely in the assembly, criticizing the rich, the generals, and the rulers, without restraint. Foucault examines the various forms parrhesia takes—“wisdom,” teaching, prophecy—while ultimately being most interested in the philosophical version exemplified by Socrates.\n\nFoucault associates philosophical parrhesia with the “care of the self,” Foucault’s own abiding concern in the last decade of his life, with “care of the self” involving esthetic self-creation out of moral and social, if not chaos, then decadence and disorder. Philosophical parrhesia involves critically examining and distancing yourself from the passions, interests and prejudices that make care for our “self,” or, for Socrates, our “soul,” or immortal part, impossible.\n\nA revival of political parrhesia would not only be very welcome today, it is starting to emerge. Parrhesia is not just a question of speaking the truth as you see it—it is a matter of speaking the truth that needs to be spoken to those whom and in the way that it needs to be spoken. One could say that that is really what we mean by “truth”: truth must resist some pressing falsehood, which means, paradoxically, it must be widely accused of falsehood itself. There is what I consider a still chastening description of parrhesia by Jonathan Swift in the “Preface” to his Tale of a Tub :\n\nBut though the matter for panegyric were as fruitful as the topics of satire, yet would it not be hard to find out a sufficient reason why the latter will be always better received than the first; for this being bestowed only upon one or a few persons at a time, is sure to raise envy, and consequently ill words, from the rest who have no share in the blessing. But satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any, since every individual person makes bold to understand it of others, and very wisely removes his particular part of the burden upon the shoulders of the World, which are broad enough and able to bear it.\n\nTo this purpose I have sometimes reflected upon the difference between Athens and England with respect to the point before us. In the Attic commonwealth it was the privilege and birthright of every citizen and poet to rail aloud and in public, or to expose upon the stage by name any person they pleased, though of the greatest figure, whether a Creon, an Hyperbolus, an Alcibiades, or a Demosthenes. But, on the other side, the least reflecting word let fall against the people in general was immediately caught up and revenged upon the authors, however considerable for their quality or their merits; whereas in England it is just the reverse of all this.\n\nHere you may securely display your utmost rhetoric against mankind in the face of the world; tell them that all are gone astray; that there is none that doeth good, no, not one; that we live in the very dregs of time; that knavery and atheism are epidemic as the pox; that honesty is fled with Astræa; with any other common-places equally new and eloquent, which are furnished by the splendida bilis; and when you have done, the whole audience, far from being offended, shall return you thanks as a deliverer of precious and useful truths. Nay, further, it is but to venture your lungs, and you may preach in Covent Garden against foppery and fornication, and something else; against pride, and dissimulation, and bribery at Whitehall.\n\nYou may expose rapine and injustice in the Inns-of-Court chapel, and in a City pulpit be as fierce as you please against avarice, hypocrisy, and extortion. It is but a ball bandied to and fro, and every man carries a racket about him to strike it from himself among the rest of the company. But, on the other side, whoever should mistake the nature of things so far as to drop but a single hint in public how such a one starved half the fleet, and half poisoned the rest; how such a one, from a true principle of love and honour, pays no debts but for wenches and play; how such a one runs out of his estate; how Paris, bribed by Juno and Venus, loath to offend either party, slept out the whole cause on the bench; or how such an orator makes long speeches in the Senate, with much thought, little sense, and to no purpose;—whoever, I say, should venture to be thus particular, must expect to be imprisoned for scandalum magnatum, to have challenges sent him, to be sued for defamation, and to be brought before the bar of the House.\n\nI’ll leave aside the opening counter-intuitive but very illuminating assertion that “panegyrics” might be more “marginal” and “critical” than satire, other than to note that it might help explain why supporters of “charismatic” politicians may refuse to brook even the most seemingly harmless criticisms of their candidate, allowing for nothing other than panegyrics that implicitly insult all the other contenders. More important for my purposes is the contrast between Athens and England, between parrhesia directed at the people as a whole and parrhesia as directed at individuals. Or, rather, the question here is what counts as parrhesia.\n\nSwift explains very well the paradox whereby the furthest reaching and most inclusive criticisms of a country, a civilization, an “age,” a “generation,” etc., can be applauded by all of its putative targets. Insofar as you applaud the criticism you have “plausible deniability” regarding the accusations. Apparent self-hatred is really self-love, even while it takes its toll. It is inspiring to imagine what public discourse might look like if anyone who dared venture such unaccountable criticism of some “” us” were to be “immediately caught up and revenged upon.” No doubt the author of this blog post, like so many of us (did I just do it?), would have been far more than a few times the victim of such “revenge.” Swift provides us social and political critics, as well as generative anthropologists and mimetic theorists, a useful constraint.\n\nWhile virulent criticism of particular individuals that everyone else also criticizes requires no great courage, that is obviously not what Swift has in mind in his “Athenian” example. He is defining true parrhesia, pointing to malefactors whose misdeeds spread their effects across the commonwealth, and supplying a complete itemization of those verifiable misdeeds. We might identify this with the kind of work associated with investigative reporters, but I think the point here is less discovering what is hidden than speaking of what everyone already knows, or at least senses, but is afraid to say. It has a lot in common with the “emperor has no clothes” phenomenon, but in that tale the emperor is himself hoodwinked.\n\nWhat defines true parrhesia, then, is the thin line between itself and scapegoating: the ostensive gesture present in both cases, meaning that scapegoating can easily, and no doubt often does, mask itself as parrhesia. Even more, the practitioner of parrhesia risks the fingers being turned back on himself and becoming the victim of scapegoating. The line between the two is maintained only by the truth of the putative exposure.\n\nStill this is somewhat unsatisfactory. Think of the fierce debates over some of Donald Trump’s recent statements, which, while no exactly truthful, were not exactly lies either. The Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto has been developing an interesting analysis of these statements, most famously Trump’s claim that he saw “many thousands” of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey. Taranto has pointed out that, strictly speaking, there are no reports, much less video evidence, of the “many thousands,” so taken literally Trump’s account must be deemed false—a mistaken memory, if not a lie. Yet, in their haste to tag Trump as a liar, many media outlets covered up, or were revealed to have earlier concealed, evidence of some celebrating of 9/11 by Muslims in NJ and elsewhere in the US.\n\nIndeed, the more trouble one went through to determine the falsity of Trump’s statement, the more likely you were to stumble on a much more disturbing picture of Muslim responses to 9/11 than we had been provided previously. If you see the media outlets as the more persistent, systematic and dangerous liars, then Trump’s sin is venial, or even no sin at all, because there would have been no other way to expose the dishonesty of those media outlets other than by baiting them as Trump did. In that case, Trump’s false statements are true parrhesia, making it possible for him, his supporters, and others in their wake to (as the current phrase goes) “call out” those media outlets for what really would be virtually treasonous acts on behalf of America’s enemies.\n\nEven more, if we give Trump the benefit of the doubt, and assume a faulty memory rather than deliberate deceit, we can make yet a stronger case for his speech as true parrhesia. His memory would be a kind of “screen memory”: a re-composition of an actual memory out of material provided by an ex posteriori revelation of that memory’s meaning. It has been pointed out that there were some contemporary reports of police in NJ looking into some Muslim celebrations of 9/11; and there were videos from the Middle East, most infamously, I believe, from the Palestinian territories, showing mass celebrations. We can imagine Trump conflated the two in his mind, prompted by the widespread denial in the post-9/11 West that there is any connection between Islam or the vast majority of Muslim people, and the atrocities so regularly carried out in the name of Islam.\n\nTrump responded in the unstudied way of someone whose first response to fabricated claims that violate one’s own experience is to say “no way! I remember it!” What is true in Trump’s statement (is this sounding like a panegyric? If so, should I be concerned, or take comfort in Swift’s implicit defense?), then, is his spontaneous defense of an intuition that is true and under assault and could not, in that moment, be defended any other way. The proof of this mode of truthfulness would be that cutting down Trump’s statement to the size and shape of the actual event would yield up that intuition and restore it to our public memories.\n\nThis unapologetic and artless defense of an embattled and genuine intuition is what, I think, we mean by “speaking your mind.” In opposition I would place the minding of our speech that is so central to victimary thinking. Nothing terrifies the speech minders more than the possibility of people speaking their minds, a fear which, in the US, goes back to Nixon’s “silent majority” and which took caricatural form in the malapropisms of Archie Bunker (to whom Trump has, inevitably, been compared). Of course, what made “All in the Family” entertainment and not (just) propaganda was that Mike Stivic, Archie’s son-in-law and liberal nemesis, also spoke his mind and, to the credit of the show’s creator and writers, was regularly shown to be wrong, stubborn, egotistical and self-defeating.\n\nIndeed, there was a brief moment, in the late sixties and early seventies, when there was public space for both left and right to speak their mind without fear of consequences, and the search for specifically American modes of parrhesia would do well to start there. We might find that much of what was said on both sides looks to us like BS now, but, like Trump’s BS, allowed for the surfacing of fundamental intuitions in conflict.\n\nOne very good explanation for the Trump phenomenon is that in speaking his mind he reminds us of how much we are all minding our speech. The contrast between his way of speaking and normal, “mainstream” political BS is striking. It has become a cliché to say that no politician lets loose a single word that hasn’t been focus group tested and lawyer vetted a dozen different ways, and yet it still seems to be taken for granted that any other mode of politics is simply unimaginable. The reason no other candidate, even the more right wing ones who are “tough on terrorism” and conscious of salient distinctions between Christianity and Islam (like, say, Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee), would have ever proposed a suspension of Muslim travel to the US as Trump has is simply that the received political discourse has no grammar or vocabulary for it.\n\nThere is no way of putting “Muslim” and “come to this country” in the same sentence (much less with a negation in there): the very thought would have to be processed through references to State Department procedures, Supreme Court precedents, gestures to the glory of previous generations of immigrants, etc. The idea would be chopped up into timid proposals for modifications in this or that vetting process. Speech minding goes way beyond the victimary; or, perhaps, the victimary reaches far deeper into our culture than we realize—either way, to return to that passage from Swift, it seems as if everyone (there I go again!) is constrained by a mode of discourse modeled on the universal denunciation with private exemptions for everyone who signs on built in.\n\nWe are destroying the planet, we are insufficiently welcoming of others, we are materialist and consumerist, we have become weak, we are belligerent, we are not democratic enough etc., and by “we” I mean everyone but me and couple of my friends who have this great idea to turn things around as soon as we can get everyone on board. The fright Republicans and conservatives have taken at Trump’s proposal demonstrates their own enslavement to this model: only proposals that single out no one in particular, but point to a general deficiency in our collective institutional consciousness, are intelligible.\n\nNew forms of speaking one’s mind are proliferating, in particular (here and abroad) on the nationalist right, in ways that I have pointed out in many recent posts and so won’t return to here (except to mention that Vox Day, the author of SJWs Always Lie , has now come out the equally “mind speaking” Cuckservative ). Instead, I’ll take up a theoretical point, one I have made previously but not applied to my recent discussions of nationalism and the war with SJWs. The reason we fear speaking your mind is, as I suggested before, its indeterminate proximity to scapegoating. Scapegoating is particularly alarming today, with the weapons of mass destruction at our disposal and the ways instantaneous media facilitate mob-like reactions to events.\n\nThe assumption seems to be that, unlike Archie and Meathead, we will not scream our guts out at each other and then sit down to dinner; rather, the Archies will overwhelm the Meatheads or vice versa, and simply wipe them out, that we will “battle to the end.” Such fears are deeply rooted in our political unconscious, and reflect the kind of anthropological intuition that inhibits speaking your mind. The frankness of the alternative right (and the ever evolving Breitbart website deserves special mention here for very deliberately pushing the boundaries of what kinds of confrontation can be openly engaged) is currently testing this assumption, and I’d like to provide a theoretical endorsement.\n\nI would like to return, in this context, to the notion of the “violent imaginary” I advanced some time ago, and have used intermittently since. The basic claim here is that originary scene, and the sign in which it issues, results from an imaginary extrapolation to an “apocalyptic” denouement to the emergence of rivalries on the scene which is, in fact, extremely unlikely. If we devote to Girard’s or Gans’s analysis of the structure of the originary scene the same scrutiny many have given to Trump’s memory of celebrating New Jerseyean Muslims, we would have to say that while it would appear completely reasonable from the standpoint of each participant in the mounting mimetic crisis that “this is the end,” almost certainly the melee would break up on its own accord with many if not most of the group’s members still standing (even if just barely, due to exhaustion).\n\nAt the very least, one person would have to be left, in which case “total destruction” is unimaginable. The fortunate mistake of the originary scene is that such total destruction seemed imminent, as each sees his fear and aggression mirrored in all the others, making the sign the only apparent salvation.\n\nSpeaking your mind becomes possible insofar as you realize that after the apocalypse will come—tomorrow. There will always be some form of social association impermeable to the latest mimetic break out. Such an insight is itself a mode of resistance to mimetic contagion. The sign is both the invention and the memory of that insight, an insight which must have been available on the scene to someone positioned so as to witness a simultaneous escalation and de-escalation in different “sectors” of the scene. At a certain point, those de-escalating would be able to direct their shared attention to those still escalating, making that escalation a more mundane, treatable, matter. All this would be forgotten with the closure of the scene and the initiation of the sparagmos, in which process the unity of the sign and unanimity of the group would be paramount and hence the most extreme form of motivation (the violent imaginary) necessary, but any event takes on the same structure, and we could always find those who “keep their heads” in even the most frantic situations.\n\nKeeping your head is part of speaking your mind. You do not obey the imperative to mind what you say because anything could happen . Rather, you let yourself be guided by resentment towards everyone’s refusal to say whatever it is they are refusing to say because anything can happen . We can criticize and even insult without lynching; we can argue fiercely without going to war. Or, if it turns out that we can’t, then we were really already at war, so let’s get on with it and find out where we stand. Yes, anything can happen, but in the end it will be some thing. There can always be a “worse,” but you make it more likely by making preventing it your highest priority.\n\nThere are margins of better and less bad right now and that is all we ever have access to and, paradoxically, it is the more open, insistent, unvarnished and exact naming of the violent imaginary making things worse, and its bearers, that make attention to those margins or increments more likely. Someone had to say we have no need for more Muslims in the United States. And someone else has to call that someone a fascist. And that first someone need not back down, meaning that someone else needs to come up with a somewhat different approach. And he will, and will be rebuffed again, and we will all see the world not end.\n\nIn the end, perhaps our intuitions will be more sharply formulated, and brought more precisely to bear on the more pressing threats of violent contagion. Let those who would nominate Islam, and those who would nominate Islamophobia, make their respective cases. Speak your mind so as to provoke others to do the same.\n\nWe do need to think about what is entailed in speaking your mind, in more careful, Foucauldian ways. It’s not just a question of saying whatever pops into your head. Trump, as Eric Gans pointed out in a recent Chronicle , can say what he is saying because he doesn’t need anyone else (unlike every other candidate he need not worry about the donor spigot being turned off once he becomes “unviable”)—that’s one formula for liberating yourself to conduct war against the SJWs, but a limited one. If you spew forth what will be perceived as an outburst at a faculty gathering, or in a letter to the student newspaper, and get fired so that everyone will forget it ever happened, then the restoration of a repressed intuition to public memory will not take place.\n\nWell, maybe the possibilities of such outbursts shouldn’t be dismissed altogether, but it is better to be cognizant of the space one occupies, because you speak your mind in defense of some space. It is faith in the durability of that space that makes speaking your mind possible. In Trump’s case, it’s the national space; in communications with one’s fellow faculty members, it’s a space of free inquiry into the truth that needs to be defended, and such inquiry cannot be defended with Trumpian insults. A subtle, suggestive neutralization of some politically correct commonplace that interferes with reasonable lines of inquiry might be more to the point, and far more unwelcome—but also harder to do anything about.\n\nYou speak your mind in order, to refer to the Eastern European dissidents like Vaclev Havel, to “live in truth,” and, as I said before, the truth is on the borderline where scapegoating is as difficult to resist as it is to carry out, with the emphasis on “live” suggesting that it’s better to make the scapegoating ever so slightly the more difficult . And that borderline is always shifting. A good place to identify it in any particular circumstance, though, is to notice when you start to feel like you should be minding your speech—there is little doubt that therein lies some matter on which you should speak your mind."
    },
    {
      "slug": "with-whom-are-we-at-war-shortest-blog-post-ever",
      "title": "With whom are we at War? (Shortest Blog post ever)",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2015",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It’s the question of the day, and I think I have an answer that is equally descriptive and prescriptive, and will not become less true until we have won the war:\n\nWe are at war with all those Muslims who are not also at war with the Muslims at war with us."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-kind-of-apocalyptic-politics",
      "title": "A Kind of Apocalyptic Politics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "To replace victimary politics, without attempting to resuscitate liberal politics, I would propose a kind of apocalyptic politics. “Apocalypse,” after all, just means “revelation,” which would mean that an apocalyptic politics aims at revealing everything. This is a continual process, since every revelation conceals something else, so there is no “once and for all” revelation, just an ethics of revelation. Reveal what? The only thing worth revealing: the center. Not some object, but whatever some act of naming conceals while disclosing and drawing power from. This mode of engagement holds for allies as well as enemies: it is not intrinsically a hostile gesture.\n\nSometimes people lie for narrow, self-interested reasons; but the more interesting, more “noble” lies are attempts to defer some conflict that the speaker intuits will be accelerated or aggravated by the truth. When such lies work, they become established and sacred—they may even, in a way, become true. The claim that we defeated our enemies through self-sacrifice and the setting aside of petty resentments might be a lie, but might also inspire later generations to just such acts of heroism. But for the lie to become the truth in that way, it must eventually be over-written by some truthful embodiment of the narrative providing a template for the lie—otherwise, the lie becomes a short term solution that generates more long term problems. This is the case because the lie points to an absent center (some other time when people were brave and selfless), a center embedded in other practices and embodied in other events, all iterable; which is to say, a center sustained by some genuine deferral and discipline, which the lie was disseminated precisely in order to avoid attempting.\n\nBut disclosure and concealment are not just about truth and falsehood. A series of truthful statements can be just as obfuscatory as a series of lies. Language is performative, not propositional. On the originary scene, every participant “truthfully” converts his grasping movement into a gesture that “refers” to an actual object; but this “truth” is “communicated” only because each participant exposes himself to the possible violence of others—the gesture “stretches” and “spreads” the one giving the sign; a defensive crouch would not be “meaningful.” One might “translate” the gesture as follows: “I am desisting from what I might have done, and leave myself open to what you might do because what I might have done would have been done to prevent precisely that: what will you now do?”\n\nPerhaps nine out of ten times the other will now do what he can do; it is that one out of ten, or out of a hundred or thousand, that has given us language. The odds are not so different for each new act of disclosure, and correct and accurate uses of the sign after the danger has passed will always be suspect. This is the point of Philip Rieff’s notion of “charisma”: the magnetic effect of a display of deferral and discipline beyond the capacity of the onlooker, in which one oscillates between exploiting the “leader”’s vulnerability and taking him as a model for engaging one’s own inner scene (an inner scene revealed for the first time through the example of the charismatic).\n\nAs soon as I experience an ascension to a level of self-discipline that enables me to see that the other is taking a short-cut (perhaps perceiving the short-cut, and feeling the shame of wanting to follow, induces the ascension), inviting us to use the sign in a way requiring only a minimal show of faith, I want to propose the mode of self-discipline as a model by pointing out that the short-cut is really, from an angle of vision I can now access, a dead end. I want to suggest that the dominant strain of the Jewish and Christian civilizational spiritual machinery took such a short-cut, while recognizing the prodigious civilizational work accomplished as a result of the Jewish and Christian revelations.\n\nOf course, modern liberal democratic civilization has taken a much shorter cut: the gamble on institutionalizing and simplifying those revelations by encouraging the masses of liberated people to accept material abundance, safety, peace and a freer expression of resentments in lieu of deepening the civilizing process that made all this possible in the first place was the shortest of all short cuts. Compared to that, the centuries long work of converting barbarians to Christianity, the long moral plowing and sowing from, say 800 to 1500 CE, was a very patient and meticulous process.\n\nBut the roots of the victimary lie in the centrality of the victim to both prophetic Judaism and Christianity. Certainly, the sacrifice of Israel, victim of imperial conquest and exile; and the sacrifice of Jesus, contain a critical ingredient modern victimary thinking has dispensed with. In both cases, the victimization is subordinated to the disclosure: in the case of the Jews, what Eric Gans has called “narrative monotheism” disclosed history as what today we might call a “learning process,” in which redemption follows from one’s articulation of one’s failure to live one’s own disclosure; in the case of Jesus, what is disclosed is the consequence of disclosing, without compromise, the truth of universal moral reciprocity. A complementary disclosure accompanies the sacrifice of Socrates.\n\nIn both cases, the discrediting of the scapegoat mechanism implies the need to defend the victim of mimetic crisis. But how does one defend the victim of mimetic crisis? There are some material ways of doing so, such as physically confronting the attacker, or hiding the likely victim. But these direct defenses can only delay the unfolding of the crisis. The only real defense is to expose the lie that is the source of the crisis—that the Jews poisoned the wells, or whatever. If there is no lie, then we don’t really have a mimetic crisis, or a “victim” in the proper sense—we have an injustice to which a just response is necessary, even if that just response introduces new injustices.\n\nIn that case, the point is not really the victim. And all the injunctions to care for the poor, the widow, the alien, etc., who are also not necessarily victims of scapegoating, will not address the crisis either. Let’s not forget, as well, that the powerful, in particular, the king, is most likely to be the target of scapegoating (even if he is better equipped to defend himself)—if our real concern is with controlling violence by arresting mimetic rivalry before it enters crisis state, the wealth and power of the victim shouldn’t matter; only the dispositions leading to the assault.\n\nThose dispositions are revealed in the balance between disclosure and concealment in the “indictment.” If the accusations made against the king of betrayal or dispossession are carefully itemized and documented, made by those who renounce any benefit from the prosecution of those crimes, within the framework of a proposed process allowing for either reparation or orderly transition of power—well, then, disclosure likely outweighs concealment. The opposite is the case if the crimes adduced are implausible or unobserved, if the indictment is filled with projected fears of the accuser. Anyone can tell the difference if they really want to, even if specific cases can be tough to judge.\n\nThe same is true of accusations made against the poor or marginalized. The rich will never be prosecuted for sleeping under the bridge and will never need to pick a pocket, but there are plenty of crimes that only the rich or powerful can commit—a mark of self-discipline is that you are willing to point out the crimes committed by either. The charismatic seeks out, or is drawn to those events where concealment crowds out disclosure, regardless of who is victimized, or how historically “important” the event, because it is the act of disclosure in such events that provides the most opportunity for increments of self-discipline as a public actor.\n\nA politics or pedagogy of disclosure will attend to depredations and perversions of the rich and famous as much as to the pandering to the mob’s indiscipline. Even in the latter case, though, there are usually some rich and famous who are pandering to the mob. Victimary politics can very easily, and very truthfully, be seen as a kind of cold intra-white civil war, in which (to use john Derbyshire’s terms) the “goodwhites” struggle to distinguish themselves from the “badwhites” using POC as props—with both groups filled with fairly “privileged” individuals, while far from being wholly comprised of them. It is the goodwhites who are desperate to lie about, for example, Islam and black crime—Muslim spokesmen themselves hardly bother, and I suspect that a brief conversation with some inner-city blacks, whether criminals or those trying to survive them, would yield far more truth and display far more honesty than a host of sociological analyses of race, provided it be conducted far away from the cameras.\n\nThe goodwhites tend to be very disciplined themselves, while encouraging and excusing indiscipline in others—in particular, those worse off. It is right to insist that self-discipline start from the top, but easy to forget that those born into conditions created by generations of self-disciplining find self-discipline far easier, more natural and therefore easier to contemn than those who have never had self-discipline modeled for them, or understood its productivity. In this way, the private self-discipline of the goodwhites issues in a public indiscipline—a refusal to be charismatic, to present that self-discipline as a model, and embed it institutionally.\n\nThis public indiscipline leads them into a pit of lies, as they must continually blame the conditions of the less successful on something other than insufficient discipline. The reason for this, though, is less softness regarding the underprivileged than fear of the cycles of competition set in motion by a culture of self-discipline. Interestingly, the main charge brought by the goodwhites against the badwhites concern the latter’s lack of discipline—their racism, sexism, warmongering, indifference to the environment, etc., are all results of insufficient inhibitions regarding appetites, pride and vainglory. Indeed, the badwhites tend to be those who want to see the immediate effects of discipline, being capable of further increments only once they have reaped some of those benefits.\n\nBut they are capable of waiting, often quite patiently, to see—while being insufficiently confident in themselves as models, or having insufficient leisure, or feeling to resentful towards the less disciplined, to overtly “charismize.” Here, then, is where the contemporary conversions of politics into pedagogy must be undertaken—on the ways anyone with even a tiny increment of self-discipline more than another might model and frame that self-discipline as a self-evident good and as possible but difficult to attain. And this requires the self-discipline to exemplify humbly and implicitly—mostly by pointing out all the ways that, whatever injustices you may have suffered, more self-discipline must always be better (even in resisting injustice) than less.\n\nSteadfast, unwavering charismatic disclosure is the hardest thing today. (Maybe always.) Without it, humans would never have made an inch of moral progress. Charismatic disclosure is therefore “apocalyptic” in the more common sense, insofar as it is always combustible, always raises hackles and induces shrieks. The angry response to disclosure must be used for further disclosure, to further undo the diffusion of concealment. That is extremely difficult. You need to be able to say something like: “I can see that you are very angry. Let me begin by saying I don’t care.” And then continue on, simply reading that anger back for your interlocutor, proposing the discussion that the anger seeks to preempt.\n\nOf course, there is also a righteous anger that pursues disclosure; of course, you have to be ready to have your own concealments exposed. That may be the most difficult part. The test, in the end, is grammatical: can you keep incorporating the other’s sentences into your own sentences in such a way as to account for the proportion between disclosure and concealment in every word? The words that go unaddressed in this manner represent fertile sites for further disclosure.\n\nThe center is what makes any mutual understanding (any joint attention) possible, so disclosure is aimed at interrupting concealment of the conditions of such understanding. The intuitive starting point must be what the other (or oneself) doesn’t want to say or hear, but that must be said or heard in order to sustain a center that is more than collaboration in concealment. In choosing to sustain the center, you make yourself vulnerable to the process of unconcealment as well. This really just involves following the presuppositions—one thing that you say is true, therefore something you have left unsaid must be true as well, and if that’s true… Ultimately, you all get to the center, and the conditions of sustaining attention to (“faith” in) it. The center, and those conditions are not a “final” presupposition but, rather, speech acts that frame possible speech acts in response—if the center is not disclosed in this way, then what gets disclosed is the absence of any center among the interlocutors, which is very useful information, while often being the most frightening discovery."
    },
    {
      "slug": "immigration-and-resentment-of-jewish-firstness",
      "title": "Immigration and Resentment of Jewish Firstness",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The only real fight against the victimary entails dismantling the entire “non-discrimination” regime put in place after World War 2—it means giving up on, and accepting the reversal of, the abolition of what Eric Gans refers to as “ascriptive differences”—which may not be restored in de jure form by the state, but will be restored in in sufficiently explicit de facto form so as to acquire state sanction (the state won’t discriminate, but it won’t stop anyone else from doing it). In the end, you can never really stop ascribing differences—every attempt just leaves more residue of those differences, and reassembles the resentments in new forms.\n\nWe will have to learn to live in a world where people judge each other based on race, nationality, sexuality, religion and so on—that is, if we want a human world at all. There is nothing new in any of that to any one who reads my posts on this blog. Nor is there anything new in my claim, logically derived from the preceding, but also evident in those who actually challenge the SJWs and PC in sustained ways, that these developments will make expressions of resentment towards Jews respectable and common. Anti-antisemitism is the original PC, and cannot survive the overthrow of the victimocracy.\n\nAgainst that background, I’d like to explore a bit further something I’ve mentioned a few times—the form this resentment towards Jews will most likely (is already starting to) take. The charge is as follows: Western, which is really to say, by now, American, Jews have established their identity through a constitutive hypocrisy: while defending ethnic homogeneity for Israel, they promote mass immigration and all manner of “diversity” initiatives at home. Pushed even further, we get the following formulation: the Jews are the only nationality whose national integrity and solidarity is dialectically tied up with their contribution to the dissolution of the national identities of others.\n\nBut, as indictment unfolds, it turns out, given that the Jews have been pursuing this national interest (really, more of a kind of cultural, even biological, imperative) so successfully for so long that it is now their white, Western victims who live a marginalized, diasporic existence. And, as we follow the call to resistance against the spirit of Judaism to its logical conclusion, we find the marginalized whites resorting to the same disintegrative, “critical” strategies that worked so well for the Jews (dissecting texts for hidden motives, depth psychology, etc.). The logical conclusion doesn’t always come, but we can see parts of this argument all throughout the “alternative” or “dissident” right (while many writers of the alt-right do not pursue this logic at all).\n\nPerhaps the best (in the sense of most exemplary and most sophisticated) representative of this antisemitic resentment is Kevin Mac Donald, whose writing is widely available on the internet, and persistently pursues this logic of the Jews are the opposite of what they say they are which is what we really are even though we let the Jews convince us that we really are what they really are.\n\nThe mimetic structure of this resentment is very obvious—the Jews are both model and rival, admired and hated. Equal energy is put into debunking Jewish claims to a higher morality and more universal ethics as to asserting a right to precisely the kind of particularist ethic that would enable us to see the Jews for who they are and act accordingly. Western civilization, in fact, has achieved the kind of objectivity and sympathy for others that Jews claim but have in fact always rejected; while unfortunately, this Western generosity has made whites easy prey for the Jews (which must mean that the only salvation for whites is to practice the same kind of hypocrisy of which the Jew stands accused: universalism in theory, unwavering ethnic solidarity in practice—with the false universalism serving the ethnic particularism). The symmetry is striking.\n\nNow, part of the problem here is that some of this resentment is well-founded. The antisemitic analysis overlaps considerably with Yuri Slezkine’s distinction between the “Apollonian” European nations and the “Mercurian” Jews (of course, Slezkine himself has been accused of antisemitism—indeed, how far is Apollonian/Mercurian from Aryan/Jew?). Israel is, indeed, an ethnically based nation (even if the reality is more complex, insofar as Israeli Jews in fact are comprised of many ethnicities), which will not be letting in Muslim refugees, or allowing for mass (or pretty much any) immigration of non-Jews. And American Jews, in both their corporate forms (the major Jewish organizations) and public opinion has been vociferously pro-immigration, including immigration from the non-Western world, for many decades—and, much of the impulse for this agitation has, in fact, been resentment towards the white, European homogeneity of the American population, and the assumption that Jews would be safer (and more powerful?) in a more ethnically diverse society.\n\nThis is true to this day, as I am reliably informed by the Jewish media that I consume that, of course, as a Jew, I must be enthusiastically in favor of a continual flow of Syrian refugees and find Donald Trump’s proposals to the contrary utterly reprehensible. Even conservative Jews barely dissent, while bleating about “vetting.” The days when one could silence discussion of this issue through accusations of antisemitism are rapidly coming to a close—the more slowing down (at the very least) immigration, and ending illegal immigration, comes to be seen as an existential issue by the American “core,” or the “historic American nation,” the more likely a reckoning, as the aware and enraged will want to know where everyone has stood on the question of the demographic warfare carried out by the globalist elite.\n\nBut American Jewish support for increased Muslim immigration is a sign of a Jewish genius for collective suicide, rather than domination or destruction—predictions are usually off, but what can be more certain than that a critical mass of Muslims in America will make life untenable for the Jews, just as has been the case in Europe? This interferes with the antisemitic narrative. Meanwhile, Israel is heading in a diametrically opposed direction to that of Europe and the US—towards greater ethnic solidarity, and lesser willingness to make concessions that put their citizens’ lives at risk. This allows us to respond to charges of Jewish hypocrisy with the following query: do you genuinely want to adopt Israel as a model to emulate (with the consequence that you’d be ready to endorse their approach to the Palestinians), or do you prefer to hold onto your (culture of) critique?\n\nIn other words, let’s cut the Gordian Knot—what Israel is doing is right (and those, in fact increasingly few, American Jews supporting them unequivocally are also right), while American Jewish support for immigration is terribly wrong—the most generous reading is that it’s a kind of PTSD from presumed American indifference to Holocaust refugees, but in that case it is still pathological. If you are first and foremost an antisemite—if antisemitism is your passion, your addiction—then you want to keep the Gordian Knot tied up, and you will end up with ridiculous pseudo-alliances with the Iranians, the Palestinians, and a host of other anti-Western forces (and with the left, which is already in an odd alliance with the Islamists), and forced to ignore or explain away pretty much everything they say about you as well.\n\nIf, on the other hand, it is really preserving the American nation that concerns you, and your resentment of the Jews derives from that concern, then you will prefer to split off the Zionists from the immigrationists—and, in that case, you might find some Jews willing to add their voices to that critique of “hypocrisy,” and support Israel precisely by encouraging the US to take it as a model. (This raises a whole new kind of question for American nationalism—can Jewish Americans care more about Israel than other countries—would that not give them an interest in encouraging an “entangling alliance”? Of course, it doesn’t end there—can Irish Americans care about Ireland, Ukrainian Americans about the Ukraine, etc.? The anomalies of American nationalism will have to be reckoned with—but are not the Jews the most anomalous ones of all?)\n\nFor Jews, meanwhile, this means engaging what seems to be the permanent (if usually non-violent) Jewish civil war (something else the antisemitic narrative misses). This civil war now takes the form of Zionism vs. secular universalism—the Israelis are culling their secular universalists (and, not coincidentally, realigning Israel’s national “core” around religious Zionism,), just as American Jewry is (more slowly and hesitantly) culling its Zionists. What will the goyim think? It’s a real question, and there is a long history of the denunciation and expulsion of Jewish “traitors” who betrayed, whether under duress, due to venality, or out of conviction the secrets of the “tribe” to a hostile world—with Spinoza being the most famous example.\n\nIn the connected contemporary world, this is a regular phenomenon, with the latest example being the Israeli leftist group “Breaking the Silence” slandering the IDF, and the Israeli government now putting in place a law to expose the foreign funding of such groups (and undercover Israeli amateur journalists exposing these groups’ dirty secrets and American leftist Jewish publications complaining about all this…) It’s all a kind of hostage taking, but rendered non-violent and symbolic by being played out in front of the world. The tendency, as seems to be the case everywhere these days, is towards exposure and revelation, towards speaking your mind when others urge you to mind your speech.\n\nTowards apocalypse, in other words. Let’s create a mode of rivalry whereby we treat our opponents and enemies as models for how to expose them, and through them, us as well, for what we all really are. Eventually, we’ll have to settle things and arrive at a new dispensation, but for now there’s too much that’s volcanically active but still hidden by our anti-discrimination prohibitionist regime. We need to see what’s there. Whoever can find a way to shed light on the resentments while minimizing action on them will save the day.\n\nThe Jews are always the most anomalous of the many anomalies of the nation; as the poststructuralists have taught us, though, the anomalous is the other that is constitutive of the same. The anomalous is normal—or, to put it in simpler terms, any identity involves an exchange (with debts and unrequited gifts), which makes it at least a duodentity. If the Jews didn’t exist, they would invent themselves. The most important kind of civilizational discipline is resisting the urge to eliminate anomalies. It’s often necessary to bracket them, though, or distill them into oppositions—in order to reconstitute and embody them again.\n\nOne reason to support a return to nationalism is that nationalism embodies an acceptance of plurality, imperfection and uncertainty, and a rejection of utopian efforts to unite the world and end conflict forever, whether through some universal free trade regime or a global human rights regime. But nationalism itself doesn’t necessarily know this, caught up as it is with managing the boundary between its internal rivalries and its own rivalries with other nations—indeed, the nationalist is likely to view any disruption of this boundary with suspicion, as if an internal rivalry has been skewed unfairly by the infiltration by someone beyond the border.\n\nThe Jews have obviously always been best suited for this role, while anyone could be the Jew in this sense. The most important role for Jews today in sustaining and elevating civilizational discipline is not to harp on each and every offense (descrying and decrying antisemitism everywhere). Rather, by taking literally the alt-right’s half sarcastic insistence that the West take Israel as a model, Jews should use that model, dispassionately, to delineate and itemize in increasingly detailed ways all the fault and boundary lines separating and associating civilization and barbarism/savagery today. Everything the Israelis are coming to learn they must do to preserve their island of civilization in a sea of barbarism becoming savagery is what the rest of the West that is determined to remain the West will eventually learn they have to do. Then, whoever overly resents that Jewish firstness will be writing their own suicide note."
    },
    {
      "slug": "immigration-and-then-some-other-things",
      "title": "Immigration (and then some other things)",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Is there a single political theory, ancient or modern, that has anything useful to say about immigration? Probably, but I don’t know of it. I suppose it’s because the United States (and then the other Anglo settler colonies) was the first social order in which immigration plays such an important role. Surely there were arguments in the 1840s about (then mostly Irish and German) immigration; and, again, from 1880-1910 regarding the far larger (Italian, Jewish, Slavic) immigration; surely, someone has gathered the records of these debates, someone has written a scholarly monograph on the arguments made for and against over these periods—again, though, if so, I’ve never heard of it.\n\nThis historical forgetting (and I don’t think it’s just me, otherwise we’d see both pro and anti-immigration arguments invoking the various so-and-sos who said x, y or z in 1885, or 1905, etc.) shows in the pathetic state of the ongoing debate over immigration. But it is at least easy enough to grasp a kind of intuitive, common sense anti-immigration argument: immigrants will work cheaper, undercutting wages, they will be from unfamiliar cultures, perhaps lacking the respect for rights, freedom and individual autonomy we value, they may become more like us but, then again, they may not. From a sheer risk assessment or immunological standpoint, it seems prudent to just keep immigration to a minimum.\n\nBut what is the pro-immigration argument? I’m going to construct one here, but I have to confess I can’t remember ever seeing one—the pro-immigrationists seem to have nothing to offer but platitudes about the US being an “immigrant” nation and some of the franker libertarians will assert that we benefit at least from adult immigrants since some other country has paid for their education, from which we get the benefit. But that’s not much—the pro-immigration position seems to rely completely on two things: first, a continual demonization of those skeptical of or opposed to immigration; second, a weird kind of emotional blackmail that goes something like this: if you, the immigration restrictionist, had had your preferred policies enacted in the year xxxx, when your (great) (great) grandfather and mother were preparing to come here, you’d be stuck in some God-forsaken hellhole right now.\n\nNow, you don’t want to leave yourself there, do you? For anyone other than a descendant of pre-Revolutionary Americans, there’s something convincing in this argument (if we could call it that)—it’s a call to keep faith with the past, to “pay it forward” by having the kind of faith in future immigrants that someone else must have had in your ancestors. But, insofar as keeping that faith comes into conflict with keeping faith with your own descendants, and leaving them a country at least as good as the one left to you, the latter faith must prevail. Which brings us back to the need for some argument in favor of immigration.\n\nThe arguments from the standpoint of business are clear enough—a vast reservoir of cheap labor enables, under some economic conditions, economic growth far greater than would otherwise be possible, and this, in turn, again, under certain conditions, benefits the native population, who can move up to less labor intensive jobs and benefit from cheap and readily available consumer goods. The 19th and early 20th century waves of immigration may have met these conditions (al though I have to say I don’t really know—has anyone argued that the American economy would have grown faster or “better” in some sense without all that immigration?), and the cultural differences brought by the Eastern and Southern European immigrants may not have been that disruptive to American traditions (al though here, as well, there is probably a good argument to be made to effect that these immigrants brought enough socialism and anarchism with them to tilt the US to the gargantuan state we now have—who voted for FDR, after all?). But today’s (mostly Mexican but also, increasingly, Muslim) immigrants aren’t rushing into major growth industries that will enhance our position as an economic superpower, are they?\n\nThere is one more argument in favor of immigration that I can think of, one that I don’t remember having seen made, but that must have been in people’s minds, especially around the turn of the 20th century. This is an imperial argument—if you, a second rank power who wants to play in the big game at a time when that game is getting very big indeed, and is drawing in other powers that were second rank not too long ago (Germany and Japan), wouldn’t a good way of doing so be to increase your own population far more rapidly than could be done through natural increase? And, at the same time, you poach from your competitors some of their most energetic and future oriented people.\n\nIt may be the case that the US could never have won WWII (much less become the post-War leader of the “Free World”) without those tens of millions of immigrants (but perhaps they wouldn’t have had to fight it?—that is, we’d have to imagine an alternative history to assess these hypotheses). But it’s interesting that all of these pro-immigrant arguments come from the standpoint of the elites—the tycoons, the corporations, the politicians (and their academic and journalistic hanger-ons) who want a globe-spanning empire. (Has there ever been a majority of the American people in favor of immigration? We probably can’t answer that question but there are good reasons to doubt it—the restrictionist arguments all seem to come from the middle class.)\n\nIt has also been argued that emigration to the US served as a kind of safety-valve for revolution-fearing European states and ruling classes—but that wouldn’t have been America’s problem. Perhaps you need a large immigrant population to settle a new continent—but why? The West was pretty much settled by 1890, and, anyway, without the immigrants, Americans would have surely gotten around, perhaps a bit later, to building up California, Arizona, Nevada, etc. But the difficulty in sorting all this out reveals a basic assumption of modern political theories and assumptions about the nation-state—they all assume a static population.\n\nHow would, say, social contract theory, need to be reformulated to include the assumption of a steady flow of immigration? But something else of great importance—something that, of course, we all know, but never seems to make it into political thinking—is revealed: modernity essentially shuts down the world. What I mean by that is that the migration of peoples is a basic fact of human history—people were always on the move, replacing, displacing and mixing with other peoples. No government until modern times had sufficient control over its territory to prevent this. All the causes of migration still exist—war, famine, drought, etc.—but people can today only migrate either with the permission of some state, or illegally and surreptitiously. We still have no solution to the inevitable problem of stateless populations, over whom some government must have control but for which no government wants responsibility. All we know how to do its try and make it someone else’s problem.\n\nThe American response to immigration during the first half of the 20th century is probably the only one with any chance at all of succeeding. This approach involved forced cultural assimilation, which means treating the immigrant as a kind of colonial subject who must learn the language and adhere to the norms of the dominant society. That also means there must be something to assimilate to—and something that can be assimilated to (unlike, say, ethnic homogeneity). The culture to which the immigrants assimilate must be esthetic and moral, not ethnic or religious. This may also require (at least in the US case it seems to have required) a (specifically political) founding event, reverence for which is assiduously inculcated.\n\nThis combination of cultural elements will necessarily be very rare, and hard to sustain, as the resentment toward “Americanization” that it became safe to express from the 1960s on demonstrates. The ethnic origins and religious faith of the founders may turn out to be more intrinsic to the founding event than assimilationists would like to believe, which means that even apparently successful waves of assimilation may turn out to be less successful than assumed—and, certainly the more distant from those ethnic and religious conditions the successive waves of immigrants, more unrealistic expectations of reverence for them becomes. No one even seems to want to try anymore—the unspoken hope is that a shared social media, celebrity, pop music and video game culture will accomplish what censorious schoolteachers, a homogenous media and wartime solidarity and propaganda once did.\n\nThe Trump phenomenon has raised the question of whether the conventional left/right, liberal/conservative mapping of American politics is ultimately all wrong, or, at least, is less significant than an elite/people, ruling class/country class, globalist/nationalist, victimocracy/normal mapping. From the standpoint of an American nationalism, it’s remarkable to note that of all the items on the conservative checklist (small government, limited powers, free markets, anti-abortion, traditional morality, even gun rights and hawkish foreign policy), none of them intrinsically, necessarily, make the conservation of the American nation a priority.\n\nWho, though, does make the conservation of the American nation a priority? It may be only, or almost only, those workers in direct competition with the current wave of immigrants—those whom the blogger Arch Druid, in a a very interesting post John Gay just forwarded to the Ga List, calls the “wage earning” class. The argument is that of the four economic classes in contemporary America (the “investor,” “salary,” “wage” and “welfare” classes), the investor and welfare classes are left pretty much the same by globalization and mass immigration, while the salaried class benefits (through lower priced consumer goods) and the wage class is devastated.\n\nThat certainly brings things into focus, as the salary class includes government workers, academics, the media (i.e., the major components of the victimocracy) and, probably, most Republican “moderates” (who work alongside of and socialize with leftists). The wage class, meanwhile, are those Eric Gans has referred to several times in some recent Chronicles, drawing upon Charles Murray’s study of the economic polarization of what was once a more cohesive, less abrasive, series of gradations up the economic ladder, as the major “problem” for any contemporary politics that hopes to move beyond the victimary.\n\nArch Druid doesn’t give us numbers, so I can only guess at how many members of each class there are. That guess would be around 10% at the extremes, the welfare and investor class (maybe a bit lower for the latter); and perhaps around 35/45% for the salaried and waged. That would make the wage class a plurality, but not a majority—a coalition of the other 3 classes could always deny them power or, given the sharp conflicts of interest, any remedy or hope whatsoever. But that 45% could certainly make quite a commotion. It seems to be the core of the American nation (and probably, I would imagine, the source of most of our military and police). It seems likely that the only thing that would satisfy this American core is a cessation of immigration, and the expulsion of a very substantial number of the illegals. (They would also probably like victories in some trade wars—tariffs on China, etc.—but that’s more complicated, and the immigration moratorium would probably have enough of an effect to bring about some cross class solidarity.)\n\nThis has been a rambling post (and it’s not the first time in the last couple of months I’ve tried to write something on immigration) but I’m publishing it anyway, because I think I’ve arrived at a useful conclusion: any community, and society, has a core, which might be a substantial minority or an overwhelming majority. What makes them the core is that they resist inter-social merging—either the integration of their society into a larger one (they would be the basis of an anti-colonial revolt), or the integration of members of other communities into their own. There will be cultural and economic reasons for this resistance, or “allergy.”\n\nWhat brings about dangerous social imbalances are social and economic trends that undermine the position of the core, and/or put its interests at odds with the more peripheral (al though perhaps more powerful) social elements. What gives cause for despair of the American polity is the difficulty of seeing why any of the other classes would be inclined to concede anything to the waged—indeed, from the perspective outlined here, we could say that the victimocracy is essentially a war by a large chunk of the salaried against the waged, a war in which the welfare class is used as shock troops and for psyops, with threatening gestures toward the investors serving as an ongoing distraction.\n\nIt’s a war with an economic basis, backed by deeply laid cultural hostilities (by now unconcealed hatred), and a war the aggressors most likely think they are winning (or can even pretend they aren’t fighting). Trump, at last, gives the aggressed against a general—if he doesn’t lead them to some victories, someone else will rise from the ranks. Whatever that might look like, it’s preferable to the continuing destruction of the American core, because that way lies societal suicide.\n\nA final word: it seems to me that a way of supporting the American core (the waged), beyond the absolutely necessary immigration moratorium, is to support the kind of labor that in its very nature cannot be outsourced and, moreover, can only very moderately be transformed technologically. House painters, plumbers, contractors, landscapers, electricians, mechanics and so on—all well paying jobs that require skills and discipline, but not 1300 SAT scores or the piling up of 100,000$ in student loans. All jobs that we will always need—any homeowner can learn to do a lot of these things, but most won’t, because of the law of comparative advantage, and because they won’t get as good at them as someone who does them professionally.\n\nAll dignified jobs, which allow for independence and mobility—your life won’t be destroyed if the plant closes up or moves to the Philippines. I don’t know how many of the waged class are in, or could move into such occupations—but whatever can be done, e.g., through tax policies, the elimination of licensing requirements, the loosening of safety and other regulations, should be done to make these occupations viable. This seems far simpler than trying to change our trade balance with China. It would at least be a gesture of good will, if the salaried can accept paying a bit more for some of their amenities."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-offspring-of-the-progenitor-of-lies",
      "title": "The Offspring of the Progenitor of Lies",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "SJWs always lie. Why? Because they have decided to denounce the differences in civilized capacities (and their fruits) produced by differential discipline as unjust expropriations. It’s not immediately obvious why this is necessary in order to attack “privilege”—after all, there is far from a one-to-one correlation between self-discipline and “success,” by any measure—plenty of hardworking, talented, intelligent people fail through no fault of their own; even more obviously and egregiously, plenty of people seem to get rich, famous and powerful despite not being particularly brilliant or determined or worthy in any discernable way.\n\nIf we wanted to, we might all have some interesting discussions on how to make the match between discipline and wealth and power tighter. But that discussion wouldn’t satisfy the SJWs because it would still leave the central point untouched: self-discipline is better than indiscipline, in any field of endeavor, and discipline must be inculcated, accepted and internalized. And if that’s the case, the first advice you would still want to give to anyone, no matter how unfair their circumstances, is to study and master your impulses, appetites and resentments; which further means you would judge their actions by how fully they display that mastery.\n\nAnd the insistence on demanding open-ended reparations would always, self-evidently, be understood to be subversive of such study and mastery. Victimary thinking is, most fundamentally, resentment towards civilization—a resentment only possible for the civilized, or those in close proximity to them. Rejecting the primacy of discipline and deferral (which, as originary thinkers know, is not just the source of personal success, or even of civilization, but of meaning itself) requires systematic lying. Every story, statistic or benefit demonstrating the link between discipline and world appropriation must be denied.\n\nAll success must be at the expense of others, all failure must be due to injustice. Now, there are some strict rules regarding the application of this principle, and plenty of exceptions. There are big Others and little others, generating a hierarchy of oppression radiating out from the center of Western male whiteness (the description of civilization stripped of everything that makes it civilization), which allows, say, for mistreatment of black women by black men to be blamed on the Big Other of White Patriarchal Racism. And billionaires who benefit the cause are not really exceptions—rather, they are granted exemptions, putting their ill-acquired wealth to a good purpose. White male American soldiers can become victims of the American war machine. Etc. What matters is reducing civilization to a kind of negative image of your own identity politics, and you must say whatever you have to preserve that image.\n\nAn important corollary of this need to lie systematically is the imperative to attack avatars of the truth. Or anyone inclined to sympathize with bearers of the truth. Or anyone considering taking those truthful claims seriously. Or anyone insufficiently ferocious in denouncing those who tell or bear witness to the forbidden truth or “hate facts.” George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson have been confined to a kind of social limbo precisely because their accounts of the events that covered them in infamy turned out to be true. Only on the very margins of the nationalist right do I see anyone daring to say a good word about either of them.\n\nTalk of impeaching Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia started up when he mentioned in the midst of oral arguments the “mismatch theory,” that claims that Affirmative Action policies can hurt their intended beneficiaries by placing them in academic settings they are unprepared for—even though the “mismatch theory” is only basic common sense, unless one wants to argue that admission standards for universities fail to measure academic potential, i.e., are meaningless—in which case, why have them? Ayaan Hirsi Ali, meanwhile, who simply explains what Islam has to say about infidels, women and violence, is persona non grata at universities, and no doubt most other public arenas in the US.\n\nEuropean journalists are losing their jobs for asking whether importing millions of Middle Eastern Muslims is a good idea. Democratic politicians are looking into suing oil companies and others for disagreeing with the ruling doctrine on the “climate change” formerly know as global warming. The list goes on. These truths—or, even, reasonable claims that might be proven more or less true—must be denounced as a priori thought crimes, and anyone referring to them other than to anathematize them must be vilified and, in general turned into what Giorgio Agamben calls the “Homo Sacer,” who can be killed by anybody but not sacrificed (Agamben, I assume, would apply the concept rather differently.).\n\nSo, if SJWs always lie, they also always attack those who tell the truth or those who, even implicitly or indirectly, bear witness to the truth. But, also, then, those who don’t distance themselves sufficiently from those who are tinged by the truth. Those who would be kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind because if the kind are allowed to draw too much attention to their the treatment at the hands of the cruel kindness to the cruel would appear as indecent and untenable as it actually is.\n\nHere, then, is where the apocalyptic politics I proposed in my previous post has its site of emergence—in being told, in sensing, that one “can’t say that,” in seeing others being censored, intimidated and punished for saying something that has at least some truth to it. Because in experiencing that violent concealment, in internalizing that imperative, one feels one’s own powers of expression and articulation being snuffed out. It’s a matter of simple intellectual and moral self-defense (or hygiene) that leads you to speak your mind (and the SJW’s customary virulence results from the violence one must first do to oneself to eliminate the temptation to listen to the truth).\n\nThe analyses, inquiries, and rhetorical and political strategies follow: what, exactly, is that truth, or even that stray observation or remark that might lead one there? For whom would it be devastating to have it heard, and why? What does someone (who?) want to say that would be crowded out by that truth? If you are doing it right, you simply disclose, meticulously, what the discourse of the other has concealed, reading the obverse, so to speak—moral beliefs and political actions will follow and you will exemplify them. I believe that at the end of this line of inquiry you will always find someone who wants to defend or protect evil because punishing or fighting evil conceals the fraudulence of those who claim to be good.\n\nIn other words, a defense of someone who has given in to indiscipline because those struggling with the limitations and paradoxes of deferral are really just as undisciplined themselves underneath it all, and they’re even worse for pretending otherwise. The founding imaginary of the victimary would then be a collective exposure of indiscipline, which would mean peace because only those who insist on discipline out of shame for their real feelings would interfere with this idyllic scene. A peace maintained by unanimous and feral antagonism towards those with pretensions of discipline. The endorsement of discipline is the highest hypocrisy.\n\nBut, I must conclude by insisting that this theology derives from a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the doctrine of universal human equality, because if we are not equal to the extent that we have all recognized the demands of deferral, we can only be equal before we have done anything, before we have been tempted or tested—which is to say, we are equal in indiscipline, in our desires, fears, resentments, and sheer vulnerability to violence. The primacy of the victim (whose discipline or indiscipline can be “bracketed”) in doctrines of human equality is posited in order to conceal this blind spot. A fanatic of human equality (one who demands moves towards its instantiation immediately and denounces its every qualification) must in the end become an SJW."
    },
    {
      "slug": "fighting-pc",
      "title": "Fighting PC",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "David Gelernter , in the course of explaining the appeal of Donald Trump as the anti-PC candidate, offers an excellent diagnosis of what he correctly calls “the biggest issue facing American today.” Gelernter would have us dispense with the euphemistic “political correctness” and refer to the threat as “invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism.” So far, so very good. He goes on to point our the depredations carried out by “invasive leftism” and its devastating effect on our very ability to engage in discourse, and, therefore, ultimately, to think: about the military (because social justice dictate gender equality, regardless of preparedness); about terrorism (because we can’t identify Islam and Muslim as the source); about history (because the past can be seen as nothing more than the depository of today’s hated oppressions, with the few exceptions of those “ahead of their time”).\n\nHe points out how institutions and policies like the IRS, the EPA and affirmative action are informed by vicious and bizarre stereotypes about whites, Christians and traditional industries—that, again, go unquestioned, in any vigorous way, by anyone, including Republicans. Gelernter says a bit more, and could say much more, in particular about crime (racial disparities in the commission of which lead to campaigns to treat punishment as a form of racism) and the uses of gender equality (Title IX) to impose Stalinist style inquisitions in sexual assault cases at colleges across the country. He could have mentioned the real “elephant in the room,” immigration, which cannot be respectably opposed because that would imply a preference for “types” of people already here over those to come (and would then presumably retroactively privilege the earlier over the later comers among those already here).\n\n(Perhaps Gelernter’s own obeisance to PC constrains him?) He even points to the class content of PC, which leaves the “privileged” or salaried and investor classes with plenty of room to maneuver while sharply constraining (and demonizing) the waged, working (especially white working) class.\n\nAfter all this, though, all Gelernter has to say is that the Republican political candidates should “fight” PC. As for what they would be fighting it in the name of, he only gestures towards “the old-time American mainstream.” As he correctly points out, “even Trump has just barely faced up to it.” But the old-time American mainstream didn’t prevent the emergence of “metastasized progressivism” in the first place, and the reason might be that it shared too much with it—indeed, what else could that progressivism have metastasized from, if not constituent elements of that mainstream? The truth is, you can’t argue about abuses of the civil rights legal and political inheritance without being forced to disentangle what from that inheritance is worthy of preservation.\n\nAnd you will then find—and I suspect conservative politicians and pundits recognize this intuitively—that, aside from simply ensuring every American citizen the right to vote, nothing from that inheritance is worth preserving—not the body of law, and not the anti-prejudice, anti-discrimination, blank slatist ideologies that have come to protect that body of law. Once you say that businesses can’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender, etc., you must then answer the question: since, once it’s illegal, no one will tell us that they are discriminating, how can we tell? You can either sort through the minutiae of each individual case, with all the local and personal idiosyncrasies each case drags along with it, or you can simplify things by just saying that if 20% of the population in a specific area belongs to a specific group, if you have only 10% of that group among your employees, the burden will be upon you to prove that you are not discriminating. The choice will be very easy to make.\n\nAll of “PC” follows from this arrangement. The lies, the hysterical denunciations, the atmosphere of terror—everything, because the proportions will never line up according to the non-discriminatory model, so in the end every policy advanced, every word officially uttered, must tend toward an effort to explain that failure, apologize for it, target scapegoats for it, promise to remedy it, prove that it is being remedied, and so on. Who is ready to reject the entire model—in policy terms, to roll back almost all of the “achievements” of the civil rights era? No one anywhere near power today. So, the invasions and metastasizing and thought-policing will continue until more tectonic shifts take place. And they can’t really come from anywhere other than an unlikely alliance between a large, dissident minority with the salaried , professional classes and the white working classes. The working class can fuel the revolt, but only the more “disciplinary” classes can dismantle the legal and ideological apparatus and defend the primacy of the project or the inquiry over social justice."
    },
    {
      "slug": "nationalism-and-biopolitics",
      "title": "Nationalism and Biopolitics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Feminist critiques of liberalism (like, e.g., Carole Pateman’s) hit on a crucial point: by pointing out that the presumed or iconic liberal subject was the bourgeois male property owner, with no wife and children or, for that matter, no parents or previous childhood, to shape his entry into the marketplace, such critiques revealed liberalism’s horror of biology. Indeed, the feminist critique can easily be taken in directions that would make feminists themselves extremely distraught (thereby revealing their own liberalism): the findings of the “manosphere,” which has undertaken a systematic, auto-didactic (because the history of Western social and political thought offers about zero help here, and contemporary educational institutions offer far less except, perhaps, informally) study of sexual relations and hierarchies, shatter the assumptions of equality and rationality undergirding liberalism and feminism alike.\n\nThese critiques of liberalism can easily forget that liberalism didn’t address such issues because there was no need to, as such essentially tribal relations were still visible and, in fact, constituted the tacit background out of which liberalism sought to carve a new space. But the critique becomes even more important once we consider that, at a certain point (already in the Enlightenment, but accelerating dramatically from the early 20th century on) liberalism decided not just to erect a free system of exchange over the more primitive quasi-tribalist relations but undertook to extirpate those relations altogether and install the liberal program at all sites, public and private. At that point, liberalism’s distancing of itself from biology becomes an assault on biology.\n\nThe acceleration of liberalism’s biophobia is certainly in large part due to the biopolitics of Nazism, and the consequent recoil against all attempts to bring racial differences into politics. Liberalism’s autoimmune response to the catastrophic eruption of biological differences that had been assumed marginalized was to transform itself into a self-enclosed, self-reproducing and viral system of rights that automatically excludes any claim tainted by the biological—and, like any good autoimmune system, attacks the carriers of such claims. The anathematization of nationalism and populism in liberal thinking is an expression of this autoimmune response: nationalism is not quite as deeply seeped in biology as race and sex, but there is always a racial component and sexual politics to nationalisms; while populism, likewise, reaches into that amorphous region where emotions, impulses, mimetic contagion, taunts, unspoken commonalities, and so on cannot be kept from contaminating the approved discourse of “policy,” “principles,” “accountability,” and so on.\n\nOnce the biological is let into politics, the liberal (and post/ultra-liberal, e.g., feminist) fears, there is no telling where it will end. The rule of law must be kept free from, while somehow authoritatively regulating, biological matters. The American constitution limits the “executive branch” to certain powers, and only those powers—but what if some surge of nationalism and/or populism demands an override of those limitations? That surge will almost certainly prove stronger than the categorical imperative embedded in the Constitutional provision, and why should nationalism respect such limitations—why should the question, “is it Constitutional” out-rank the question, “what’s good for the American people”?\n\nAlso, biology has been overriding legality for a century already, as the government has made it its business to manage the care of the elderly, the raising of children, marital relations, food and medicine and now all of health care along with the micro-managing of the most intimate of sexual relations. Constitutionalism has apparently found no way—or shown no desire—to resist those developments. So, maybe the problem is liberalism.\n\nWhile we can find no self-limiting principle in the victimary (or on the left more generally), though, we certainly can with nationalism. The nation itself, and its relations with and differences from other nations is the first such principle. Even the most horrific form of nationalism imagined by liberals, the physical expulsion of unwanted (less “national”) populations, would confront the plurality of the world as a limitation: let’s say some American nationalist of leftist nightmares decided to expel the Jews, the Mexicans, the blacks, or even the leftists themselves. Where to? Forcing such groups to simply leave and become refugees would create an enormous burden, first of all on neighboring countries, and thereby poison crucial relations.\n\n(Of course, expelling Mexican citizens who are in the US illegally would be a different matter—in that case, indeed, it is the Mexican government and nation that has acted unjustly by encouraging illegal migration, even while many Americans are, of course, complicit.) Well, maybe that leaves no choice but genocide, one might say—far easier said than done, though, without the context of a hot civil war or a policy of conquest that makes possible the allotment of faraway territories for carrying out such atrocities.\n\nFurthermore, nationalism transcends while incorporating the tribal. At the very least, nationalism entails the free movement of all nationals through the national territory, and the free adoption of any profession by all. In other words, nationalism presupposes at least a minimal market, and that that market is protected from the imperatives of tribal honor. Insofar as the nation remains, at least to some extent, a nation of tribes, but also of cities, towns and neighborhoods, various forms of local patriotisms will ensure resistance to premature or abusive attempts to establish, preserve or restore national unity from some national center.\n\nOf course, such attempts will be made, and sometimes they will succeed, and sometimes to the benefit of the nation as a whole. (I don’t think many Frenchmen and women would prefer [or could even imagine] a France in which French was the language of the educated in the capital, with the rest of the country speaking a few dozen or so different language, even while acknowledging the cultural loss in the “expropriation” of the speakers of those languages.) But the resistance will still ensure that national ‘incorporation” is conducted in such a way as to allow the margins to adopt and inflect in their own ways national imperatives. Anomalies will always remain, though, and it’s good that they do. Nations benefit from a bit of irritation, a touch of idiosyncrasy.\n\nFinally, every nation will have its professions, or its disciplines, and will want to take pride in those disciplines. Every real nation, and, therefore, every real nationalism, is civilized, that is. The nationalism of the nations lawyers, journalists (or bloggers), and academics (or bloggers), doctors, etc., can, of course, allow them to be swept up in pathological nationalist contagions, and lend their expertise and influence to shameful deeds. (One consequence of embracing nationalism is accepting that politics cannot be deployed so as to abolish human sinfulness—there is no ultimate answer to “what about…?” type questions.)\n\nBut they (as can non-experts proud of the disciplines) can also insist that in this nation, among this people, the rule of law, professional standards, and dissemination of the truth will prevail, even in the face of the mob. And this would include, of course, for Americans, an insistence on Constitutional primacy (and the entire system of legal thinking and institutions it entails), insofar as the Constitution has become far more than a legal code, having worked its norms and its language into American discourse and culture at all levels. But American nationalism cannot wait for a constitutional “restoration” before it addresses, in some necessarily rough ways, the biopolitics of immigration in particular.\n\nIndeed, a nationalist restoration (evidence of which would be that more than one presidential candidate would be simply taking for granted in casual utterances that America should be for Americans) is a precondition for a constitutionalism that would be something other than a Trojan Horse for a transnational progressive (“human rights”) legal regime. To take a concept from the cultural left, that restoration would require the “circulation” of nationalist “bodies”: nationalist masculinities and femininities, ethnicized and maybe even racialized nationalisms, popular and elite nationalisms, and so on. The US has some of this—but we had a lot more of it 30 years ago, and even more 60 years ago—and such overt expressions of American pride and uncritical belonging and celebration have been increasingly seen as shameful. It is the attempts to make those expressions shameful that should become shameful."
    },
    {
      "slug": "production-and-consumption-or-modernity-as-civilizing-and-de-civilizing",
      "title": "Production and Consumption; or, Modernity as Civilizing and De-Civilizing",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The question of whether to “privilege” production or consumption seems to have been definitively laid to rest—it was originally a Marxist inspired debate that became tangled and paradoxical to the point of incoherence when even Marx pushed the terms a bit further: the producer consumes in order to produce, consumption is a kind of production (of “labor power”), etc. While as an economic question, there may not be anywhere to go with production vs. consumption, as a political question interest in the question seemed to have faded because consumption has won the argument: who disputes that we live in a consumer society, that the consumer is king, etc.?\n\nBut perhaps there are grounds for reopening the argument. I remember a brief debate on a Sunday morning talk show long ago (in the 90s, I suppose) between Patrick Buchanan and George Will, in which Will made the seemingly airtight case for free trade by pointing to the lower prices it made possible. Buchanan interrupted him with the assertion that “we are not just consumers, George,” but, rather, workers and citizens. And “worker” (producer) does seem to be far more conjoined to “citizen” than does “consumer.” Of course, Will’s point was true for the working class as well—perhaps even more importantly true for those who gained access to all kinds of previously unavailable consumer goods from outlet stores like Wal Mart due to trade with and investment in Third World countries with far cheaper labor.\n\nBut that doesn’t settle things, if that trade and investment costs at least some of those Wal Mart shoppers their jobs, and if the independence, self-respect and community participation that comes from having a job are “goods” to be place in the balance against those purchased at Wal-Mart.\n\nIf we return to the mapping of American classes by the Arch Druid blog I have now referred to a couple of times, the argument for consumption is an argument for the salaried classes, and the argument for production one for the waged class. Of course, plenty of salaried employees are “productive” (engineers, technicians, etc.) while plenty of the waged are “unproductive” according to more Marxian criteria, while also catering more to “consumerism” (say, baristas at Starbucks). We will never be able to make these terms stay in one place. If we accept a little metaphorical stretching, though, we might be able to say that the salaried classes are comprised of those who differentiate themselves from each other and other classes through their consumption, while the waged classes express class solidarity and resentment towards the higher classes through their consumption.\n\nThe consumption of the waged, that is, resists the consumerism of the salaried aimed at generating differences, and references a productive identity grounded in physical labor, or physicality and communality more generally. Other than the massive exception of immigration, and the possible exception (of which I am skeptical but willing to be proven wrong) of rejiggering international trade relations, I don’t think there is much that politics can do to support the productivist consumerism of the waged.\n\nBut, it is easy to say (it must be, because I see leftists saying it all the time), contrary to these sentimentalizing stereotypes of the working class, the waged are more likely to be obese, more likely to have loose morals and living habits (more divorce, more children out of wedlock, more cohabitation, etc.), to be drug addicted, on welfare and disability, and so on. To the extent that this is true, it seems to me to support an argument regarding the destructive effects of consumerism on the waged in particular. The disciplining of the working class over the past couple of centuries in Western societies has been one of the great subjects of the social sciences, the arts, and entertainment: there is no more familiar pop cultural cliché than the closed-minded and repressed majority group (white) worker who ultimately wreaks some kind of terrible destruction on himself and others.\n\nIt doesn’t seem to me that too many people have thought to ask what might happen when the disciplining stopped, or stopped working. Even a rearguard action aimed at restoring this discipline along with even a somewhat, or provisionally, improved employment environment is worth the effort—first, because the more pessimistic analyses might be wrong; second, because it might buy us some desperately needed time.\n\nBut the sidelining of the “productive” or industrial working class is a side effect of much larger developments—if the workers have been shunted aside by the investors and ignored by the salaried, it must be because they were neither particularly indispensable nor a force to be reckoned with in the first place. The overall trajectory of Western capitalism is towards fewer and fewer people producing for more and more people. I have recently seen the proposal for free education made (by whom, I can’t remember—maybe all the way back to Mc Luhan?) on the basis of the following calculation: if you send a thousand children to school for free it will pay for itself because at least one of those thousand children will create something that will support the other 999.\n\nIf that’s not exactly true, it certainly represents the general direction in which we are heading. (Which would mean that the class of “innovators,” too small, apparently, even to rate a mention by Arch Druid, are in a way more important than all the rest.) This means a very high (perhaps very specialized, but the capacity for specialization at a high level itself requires intense disciplining) level of discipline is required for a few but little or none is needed for most. Of course, we can’t know in advance who those few are, so it will make sense to keep up disciplining for most or all, at least until aptitude tests can sort out the probabilities (which is by around first grade already, isn’t it?), but what will be the motivation to sustain the notion of disciplining oneself for a 1/1000 chance of success and usefulness?\n\nIn this context, all the contemporary conflicts over the American worker are a distraction. Here, in fact, we may have one of Marx’s predictions, the one, in fact, that was the basis of his communist optimism, that has come true: if producing goods, even luxury goods, is so cheap and requires so little labor, the only thing that prevents everyone from having plenty without doing much or any work is the system of private property. Wouldn’t a situation in which, say, cars cost 5 dollars to make, but since it is automation and the elimination of workers which makes them so cheap, there are no jobs, even those which pay 1$ a year, so no one can actually afford the cars, be absolutely ridiculous?\n\nAccording to Austrian economics, there can never be “real” unemployment (that is, employment not caused by government imposed mechanisms such as the minimum wage)—in other words, there will always be someone who wants something done for which they are willing to pay that 1$ a year. In the long run, that may be true, but there is no guarantee regarding the kind of jobs we’re talking about—if the only work available is brushing the dust off the shoulders of rich men’s coats, we may have a free and even prosperous society, but not one with much dignity. These are extreme examples, of course, but that’s the best way to bring larger trends into focus.\n\nWe could say that people will get smarter and more will be capable of handling the advanced programming and designing work that will be the genuinely “productive” work in such an order (perhaps it will be considered necessary to employ eugenics), but there’s no reason to assume they’ll be enough of that work even for the highly intelligent. The highly intelligent, though, might at least be expected to find stimulating ways to spend their time—others will have to be provided with ever more stupefying modes of entertainment. Surely many of them will become dangerous—perhaps the tiny productive ruling class would have to live behind high walls.\n\nThe more immediate problem is addressing the resentments that result from bad and often malicious policy making, for sure, but ultimately by economic and technological developments that are beyond anyone’s control and yet might well inflate those resentments beyond any conceivable remedy. When you see assertions like “American manufacturing jobs have been cut to 1/3 of their previous level since NAFTA” it’s easy to forget that many of those jobs would have been outmoded by now anyway. Even granting they were “lost” to China et al, if they had stayed here automation would have just been accelerated, perhaps costing lots of other jobs as well. There’s no reason to assume that “manufacturing” and “industry” were anything more than a couple of centuries transition from agriculture to information.\n\nTo propose solutions to these problems would be to make oneself look like a ridiculous futurist (by 2050, flying cars will shuttle us from our floating, solar-powered dwellings to…). The solutions will have to be proposed and struggled over (and, mostly, staggered towards) by those confronting them. For now, we can try to observant enough to notice everything (all the norms and institutions) that is likely to be shaken loose as we proceed. But we can also stay focused on defending civilization, always a complicated matter, as civilization is itself intrinsically experimental. In any given practice, association, institution or discipline, we are always on the verge of either adding or subtracting an increment of discipline.\n\nWe can resist the subtraction and promote the addition, even if we don’t quite know what for or for how many—the “base” or “constituency” here comprises those, certainly a minority, who find self-discipline intrinsically liberating and a source of other liberations (moral, intellectual, economic, cultural). But this approach involves defending the terms upon which such determinations can be made—that is, it involves keeping “social justice” at bay. Aside from all the reasons we can easily bring to mind for resisting the victimary, a more neglected reason is that only by pulverizing the anti-discrimination ideology can differences emerge and flourish—sexual differences, ethnic, national and racial differences, for sure, but also, simply, differences in style, interest, talent, risk aversion, tolerance for novelty, etc.\n\nAmong the opportunity costs of the victimary are surely all the forms of association and cooperation, and all the ways of designing living and working spaces and communities, including the ways of facilitating the fuller participation of the less intelligent and less talented, that might have been invented if the victimary censorship module had been shut down (and we didn’t have to pretend that differences in intelligence and talent were irrelevant or non-existent). How much energy has been drained by the anxiety over the fear of discovering that one has in fact been (or inadvertently will be) racist or sexist in some hitherto unknown way—and not just over the past 10 years, but over the past 50 or so, because the societal mobilization to hound the “prejudiced” goes back at least that far.\n\n(It’s interesting to look back at what the visionaries of the 60s, like Buckminster Fuller, had in mind for us, plans they expected to come to fruition within a couple of decades. Were they just fantasists, or did social priorities get disastrously misaligned? Perhaps a nationalist, alt-right position can get the best of all worlds—support both civilization and the working class here and now, while opening some space for the transformations that will make these problems disappear—to be replaced by other problems, surely.) Which is, again, to say that destroying the victimocracy is the problem of problems—only by solving that one can we even hope to take on all the others."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-androsphere-or-the-return-of-the-big-man-who-never-really-left",
      "title": "The Androsphere, or the Return of the Big Man (Who Never Really Left)",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve been meaning to continue my discussion of the hidden infrastructures of civilization that the victimocracy has been seeking to suppress all memory of while in fact facilitating their unrestrained resurgence. There is a region within the alt-right that usually refers to itself as the “manosphere,” i.e., an unabashedly phallocentric online community that repudiates the “feminine imperative” dominating modern life. I prefer the “androsphere,” and I would hope that term would catch on—it’s got more of a social sciency rather than pop/therapeutic culture sound to it. The androsphere actually straddles the social scientific and the pop/therapeutic: it is a discipline aimed at helping men discipline themselves so as to restore proper patriarchal relations between the sexes; a form of discipline, though, that in its own way offers a rigorous study of the fundamental, en during structural elements of sexual relations.\n\nI don’t see many footnotes in these discussions, and their discussions don’t seem to rely upon any of the traditions within philosophy and the social sciences that I am familiar with, so I assume that much of this discipline is the work of genuine autodidacts and original thinkers.\n\nIn thinking of how to think through the androsphere in originary terms, I considered Marshall Sahlins’s notion of the “Big Man” whose accumulation of wealth lies at the origin of social inequality, and whom Eric Gans has given a central place in his originary theorization of the succession of social forms from the egalitarian hunter-gathers to the modern market economy (perhaps the most important discussion is in The End of Culture ). I’ve been thinking for a while that the tension between the irrepressibility of Big Manness and the declared equality of modern life was a source of many of our crises. The Big Man is the Alpha, a term central to the socio-sexual hierarchy constitutive of androspheric thinking. As I was thinking about this, just this very morning, I came across the following post on Vox Day’s (the author of SJWs Always Lie and Cuckservative ) Alpha Game blog:\n\nA Portrait in Alpha\n\nIronically, both primitive tribesmen in Papua New Guinea and anthropologists appear to understand the true art of Alpha better than most men in the civilized West today. I came across this in book I was reading today:\n\nThe New Guinea Big Man, for example, gains his status primarily as an organiser of feasts and dances in which his own group competes with others, and as a public orator on such occasions. He attracts followers by his force of personality and his political skills as an organiser and diplomat in dealings with other groups, and can certainly behave despotically to those at the bottom of society, the ‘rubbish-men’. But while he obviously enjoys his status, he is accepted and regarded as a legitimate leader because he is seen as an essential asset by his group of followers, and in my experience tends to be gracious and polite.\n\nIt’s not about being a bully. It’s first and foremost about being an asset to his subordinates and being a man they want to follow. Everything else flows from that.\n\nIt is interesting to note that even primitive societies have developed the concept of the Omega as well.\n\nI believe the book Day is quoting from is Do We Need God to be Good? , by C.R Hallpike, about which I know nothing, but from VD’s brief mention on his Vox Populi blog seems to engage the science/faith (non) dialogue in a way that might be interesting to GAniks. At any rate, this clearly confirmed for me the link I was considering. Needless to say, questions of “firstness” are implicated in this discussion as well. My concluding discussion in Gans’s and my recently published book ( The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism ), which Eric mentioned in today’s email to the GAList, argues that the resurgence of antisemitism (as resentment of Jewish firstness) derives from a crisis in firstness, which is to say an all out attack on and repudiation of decisiveness, authority, a willingness to take responsibility, even to dominate, which is to say an ongoing attempt to kill whatever remains of the Big Man among us. The Androsphere is an attempt to restore and find a proper place for the Big Man, the Alpha.\n\nSperm is cheap, eggs are expensive; women are hypergamous, men are polygamous. These seem to be the founding axioms of the Androsphere. I’m sure they’re not new, but on websites like Alpha Game , Return of King s, Rational Male , Chateau Hartiste and, I am sure, others, the implications of these axioms are explored in great detail, with an inventive, colorful and often profane conceptual vocabulary, and through numerous examples taken from contemporary social life. I’m not going to work through the whole system—instead, I’ll enter it from one particular angle, and suggest its relevance to some of my recent posts.\n\nOne thing the Androsphere makes clear (and these writers seem to be quite aware of this) is what a difficult and monumental achievement monogamy has been. The natural state of male-female relations involves, roughly, women craving sexual relations with the Alpha males (the top, I suppose, 10% of males in terms of—well, in terms of all the things that characterize the Big Man, referenced by Vox Day above) while maintaining long term relations with Beta Males for the sake of raising their children (which is uninteresting to the Alpha) in security. Here, already, we have the roots of all manner of male-female mistrust, misunderstanding and dissatisfaction, cuckoldry, dysfunctional power games, and so on.\n\n(We will leave aside the very interesting categories—employed regularly by Day to discuss politics—the ultra-Alpha status of Donald Trump being a major source of his appeal to this corner of the alt-right—of the Gamma, Delta, Omega and Sigma, familiar to all from high school days and, perhaps, honest introspection.)\n\nWithout monogamy (which must therefore be considered a central category of civilization), and all of its discontents, 10% of the men would possess something like 50% of the women, leaving a very large minority of men with no access to sex and family life at all. This would obviously pose a constant threat to any social order organized around the direct rule of the Alphas, while stalling any ethical, cultural or economic progress by letting the talents and effort of those men (who have no incentive to exert themselves) go to waste. The Republican Party founders knew what they were doing when they raised the banner of opposition to the twin barbarous evils of slavery and polygamy.\n\nIn monogamy, the male sacrifices his polygamous desires, the woman renounces her hypergamous strivings. There are still Alphas, and they are still emulated, followed, and resented, but they must prove themselves to be “legitimate leaders” in the public and economic spheres rather than monopolizing the available women (while, of course, reaping the rewards of possessing the most desirable women). The current fraying of monogamous norms is therefore an event of world historical consequences. The androsphere diagnoses this ongoing event, and tries to teach and train men to resist and, in some cases, it must be said, to exploit it.\n\nFeminism, for the Androsphere, is the attempt to install the “Feminine Imperative” as the dominant social principle. The Feminine Imperative is the repudiation of the woman’s side of the monogamous arrangement, to which men are nevertheless to be held, within even more restrictive terms. The abolition of the sexual division of labor due to the liberating effects of modern technology and civilization is what has made the victory of the Feminine Imperative over Patriarchy possible—but we could add the general advance of victimary logic, on which feminism has hitched a ride and to which it has added an important dimension, that of feminizing men.\n\nThe writers in the Androsphere can be very insightful and hilarious in analyzing the logic of feminism and its pop/therapeutic spinoffs in these terms. You can really see how commonplace the notion that men should defer to women’s desires and judgment in all manners regarding women’s sexuality has become—what, for example, is the campaign against “slut-shaming” if not the insistence that women should have the right to experiment freely with relationships with a series of Alphas without their future (or, eventually, some suggest, even present) Beta husbands factoring that into their marriage “market value”? What is the entire legal and institutional apparatus for continually expanding and more restrictively applying the rules regarding sexual harassment if not a capitulation to the demand that women should never have to suffer the indignity of having to even entertain so as to reject the advances of a man of lesser market value than herself?\n\nAs Vox Day put it in a post on a sexual harassment charge that ruined a male scientist’s career, (I paraphrase) nothing—nothing—not science, not sterling personal accomplishment—is more important than that women not be touched by men they find unattractive. (One can also find some startling socio-sexual analyses of the leading role played by European women in welcoming the current wave of “refugees.)\n\nThe Androsphere is an outright defender of firstness and enemy of the victimary, both symptom and diagnostician of the crisis in firstness, in particular in the sexual sphere. It serves as yet another example of the actual infrastructures underlying all the bleating about “equality.” For the Androsphere, feminism has never been about “equality,” and it’s easy enough to see their point—has feminism, in any of its forms, ever admitted to having won a single victory, and thereby being able to relax some of its demands and reparative asymmetries appropriate for an earlier stage of sexual relations? In demanding equal employment opportunity and equal pay, have feminists also demanded a reform of divorce laws that were predicated upon a woman’s inability to support herself without a husband?\n\nIf, instead of taking feminist resentments at face value, we see the feminist wars as attempts by women and men, all specifically placed within the socio-sexual hierarchy, to seize terrain abandoned with each diminution of the territory covered by the monogamous arrangement. Even more, we can add an important dimension to our understanding of the victimary: its effectiveness in the sexual sphere lies in the greater value any community, necessarily and instinctively, places upon (contrary to feminist complaints) its female members. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap: a community of, say, 100, that loses 40 men in a war could get itself back up to its previous population within a generation through emergency polygamous arrangements; if 40 women are lost, it would take many generations.\n\nFeminism exploits these tacit calculations in constructing a double bind represented as “equality”: men who resist the introduction of protected feminine spaces within male dominated institutions (i.e., the breakdown qua parody of the traditional sexual arrangement) are shamed as, implicitly, failing in their (traditional) role as protectors. Here, therefore, as in issues regarding race, we may find that probing a bit below the surface of discourses of equality we find a very different drama playing itself out. This insight might save us the trouble of trying to figure out how these initially benevolent movements for equality somehow went wrong.\n\nAnd it might aid us in avoiding the debacle of trying to “balance” equality against other “principles,” rather than trying to preserve what is left of the monogamous arrangement and maybe winning back some lost territory. (It would be very interesting, for example, to imagine the possibility of a coalition of beta male and medium sexual value females—probably the majority of the population, and the ones who benefit most from the monogamy deal—for eliminating no-fault divorce.)\n\nThe Androsphere presupposes permanent hierarchies, which it wishes to make more explicit—at its best, in order to provide models for self-betterment. As we can see from the description of the Big Man above, there is a kind of ethics and reciprocity built into the socio-sexual hierarchy: the Alpha, in his own way, serves the community. But the Alphas by themselves certainly wouldn’t have promoted the transition to monogamy—that surely came from some kind of, most probably, gradual revolt of the Betas. What the Alphas, and the writers of the Androsphere, who take Alphaness as a model, lack, is what Gans calls the “ethical monotheism” of the Hebrew Scriptures, which forces an awareness of the ways self-interested actions carried out in disregard of an ethical order can generate unanticipated resentments and thereby self- and other-destructive consequences.\n\nThe Alpha can’t really recognize any source of action other than those set by his own desires and values—he is Nietzsche’s natural aristocrat. So, it’s not surprising that the same kind of casual antisemitism found elsewhere in the alt-right permeates the Androsphere as well. (It should be said, though, that many in the Androsphere are Christians, and my remarks here would not apply equally to all.) After all, if the Jews are resented for their firstness, that firstness is the system of insights that ruins the unself-conscious freedom of the Alpha, i.e., an earlier and equally authentic and durable (and probably co-dependent) form of firstness.\n\nAnd, indeed, modern Jews bear some responsibility for the deconstruction of modes of firstness such as nationality, masculinity, and Western civilization. It might be better if the dialectic between the socio-sexual hierarchy and an ethics attuned to a wider range of possible resentments and that can therefore reach beyond the Alphas and even the Betas were to be internalized within all individuals rather than represented by differing ethnic groups in potential conflict. Maybe that will happen, if firstness is ever restored through a generalized immunity to the victimary. But we don’t get to choose how the dialectics of civilization take shape."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-right-contested",
      "title": "The Right, Contested",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I was very glad to see Kevin Williamson’s article, “ The Buchanan Boys ,” in today’s NRO . At last, we are getting engaged: the “mainstream” right, represented most prominently by National Review, is being compelled to recognize the alt-right—recognize, at least, in the sense of acknowledging they exist and that their “numbers aren’t trivial.” Williamson has noticed the enthusiasm of white nationalists for Trump’s campaign, and his observation that this attachment to Trump represents a continuation of the white working class resentment first advanced by Patrick Buchanan’s campaigns of the 90s is a real and important insight.\n\nAnd Williamson raises some crucial questions about the “economic nationalism” of Trump and those hoping he will be the vehicle of their movement: here, Williamson is on familiar ground, and within his sphere of expertise, and I certainly agree that attempts to rejigger trade agreements with the rest of the world so as to protect the jobs of the American working class are likely to backfire. Indeed, I doubt that anyone has a very clear idea of how to do something like that. Still, if we are just free traders, why do we have trade deals at all? Why not just let American consumers and businesses buy and sell from and to whomever they like?\n\nWell, one might say that other countries won’t reciprocate—but, according to free trade orthodoxy, they’re just hurting themselves, and should be left to their own devices. But we do enter these enormously complex agreements, negotiated with dozens of countries over many years, so those negotiating in our name must be trying to get something out of it—what? Is it so unreasonable to assume that they have the interests of global corporations, along with the pet environmental and immigration (among other) concerns of the participating politicians, or even, perhaps, abstractions like “the stability of the global market” uppermost in their mind, rather than the living standards of American workers?\n\nRather than adopting the libertarian utopianism of eschewing such agreements altogether, why not impose the interests of American wage earners upon them, and figure out the details as we go? Williamson doesn’t seem interested in this line of thought.\n\nWilliamson also has a point, albeit a more tenuous one, when he asserts that\n\nThe Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without en during the stigma of welfare dependency.\n\nAnd\n\nIt is an odd line of thinking: If the government levies a tax on your neighbors in order to fund an earned-income tax credit for your family, then you’re a welfare queen; if the government levies a tax on businesses that is passed on to your neighbors in order to subsidize your earned income through higher prices, then that’s economic nationalism.\n\nIt is true that, by definition, adopting economic policies so as to benefit a particular group (in this case, white working class men), is, in effect, a way of redistributing resources to that group, and you could call that a “subsidy.” Of course, as Williamson must realize, the presumed alternative of subsidizing no one is not exactly on the horizon—indeed, Williamson, who has been writing of late of the great condition conservatism is in, would be hard pressed to identify any progress conservatives in power have made to the de-subsidization of the American political economy. On the simplest, or at least most cynical, level, then, why shouldn’t white male wage earners get cut in on the scam?\n\nBut by distinguishing between the earned income tax credit and the higher prices brought about by protectionism, Williamson skews the question: the earned income tax credit, which also goes to wage earners, has not to my knowledge, been on the economic nationalist hit list. Williamson wants to keep the discussion on secure “free trade” grounds, which precludes establishing criteria for more or less preferable “subsidies.” Are there good grounds, if we are already “distorting” the economy, for distorting it in favor of white male wage earners, compared to some of the ways it is presently distorted? Nothing from Williamson on this question.\n\nMost symptomatic, though, is Williamson’s evident desire to skirt the real question regarding the “Buchanan Boys,’ and Trump, their current “celebrity mascot”: immigration. According to Williamson, the economic benefits of immigration are mixed and unclear; and he acknowledges that immigration is not only an economic issue. And that’s pretty much it. But there has been a real bait and switch in that case, because the only objective correlative to Williamson’s name calling, explicit and implicit (jackboots are evoked), lies in the immigration question. You don’t call people Nazis because they want tariffs on kids’ toys made in China; you call them Nazis because they want to bust into houses in the dark of the night and drag out cute little brown kids.\n\nSo, what is Williamson’s view of, for example, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned the traditional preference given to white and European immigrants—i.e., those immigrants most like the people already living in the country? Is it racist to want a country that maintains its current demographic proportions? (And if it is, should we care? What are the consequences of making not being racist the prime directive?) Can he propose a way of discussing this without overt engagement with the question of ethnic differences? Can he propose such an engagement that won’t bring a hailstorm of denunciation from the Left (and many on the supposed Right)?\n\nWould he like, then, for immigration restrictionists to capitulate or to stand firm and, even, answer insult with insult, tribal banner with tribal banner? Or is the issue not even worth discussing—as seems to be the case, for Williamson, given his silence on these questions.\n\nWilliamson had a chance here to engage with some of the ideas informing the “white nationalists” and “immigration reform patriots”—and the thinkers, people like Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, James Kilpatrick and others who publish regularly on the VDare site; or, someone like Sam Francis, who has been referenced quite often lately in discussions on the alt-right—or, for that matter, the bogeyman informing his entire diatribe, Pat Buchanan himself. Well, he will have other chances—perhaps, eventually, he will have no choice (it sounds to me like he wishes he had a choice not to write this article). This is really not a bad way to get started."
    },
    {
      "slug": "they-must-be-represented",
      "title": "They Must Be Represented",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "According to Marx, in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , the peasants of France, even though they were the vast majority of the population, “cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” The peasants were scattered, barely, if at all, literate, mired in prejudice (“rural idiocy”). It seems to me that we could say something similar about the white working class represented by Donald Trump (indeed, the fact that no one has thought of referring to Trump as a “Bonapartist” shows that we have become illiterate in Marx), albeit for some different reasons: the white working class is obviously quite literate and plugged-in, sensitive to the way they are represented in popular culture and thrown bones by politicians whose real interest is in more affluent or boutique constituencies.\n\nThe problem with the white working class is that their resentments have no clear object, there is no clear way to remedy or defer them; and, at the same time, those resentments are not a particular threat to anyone either—no one needs to be afraid of the white working class. They are pretty well boxed in.\n\nAn article on the subject in National Review on the topic (Trump’s success has led the establishment conservatives to take a fresh look at this strange beast) suggests I should revise my estimate of the percentage of the population represented by the “wage earners” from my “Immigration (and then some other things)” post down to 40% from the 45% I had there. That just reinforces my point that, on any question where all the other classes are aligned against the wage earners (even if through indifference), the wage earners will be powerless to impose their preferences. This includes the more symbolic preferences, because the kind of straightforward, unapologetic patriotism and America-firstism that resonates with the working class requires an overwhelming cultural consensus to be sustained, and we simply don’t have that any more.\n\nMost of those preferences are incoherent, anyway—how is any president, even in conjunction with a sympathetic or compliant congress, going to “bring manufacturing jobs back to America”? Any attempt to keep American companies in the US, or to encourage foreign companies to come here will get mired in even deeper layers of cronyism, incompetence and inefficiency (along with further infringements on the rights of small businesses and independent contractors) than is already considered intolerable by those in revolt against the “establishment.” Also, for decades it has been recognized that the line between American and foreign, when it comes to companies and consumer goods, has become irremediably blurred: is it more patriotic to buy a Toyota built in Tennessee or a Ford built in Mexico?\n\nMaking America a more attractive site for manufacturing means eliminating unions, which, even in their currently shriveled state, are a source of pride and solidarity for millions of American workers. The idea of making more nationalistic trade deals is even more hopeless—I’m fairly certain that the unanticipated consequences will considerably outpace the intended ones. The logical conclusion, which I have seen drawn by one writer on the VDARE site, to the insistence on making preserving American jobs the nation’s primary imperative, is to resist automation altogether, a position I don’t yet find it necessary to refute. In other words, Trump’s promises and bluster in all these areas are pure BS.\n\nBut there are two issues where the working class resentments are directly actionable: immigration and Islam. The government certainly can eliminate illegal immigration, cut legal immigration, and forbid entry into the country by Muslims. Or to put it another way, if it can’t do these things, that is, if it is literally incapable of bringing manpower and technology to bear effectively on these purposes, there is absolutely no reason to believe it capable of doing anything else. But these are precisely the issues that place the working class most directly in confrontation with the salaried and investor classes, represented by powerful forces within both major parties.\n\nMoreover, the welfare class, while not particularly interested in immigration or Islam, is represented by the Democratic party, which is extremely interested in increasing the welfare class through immigration policies. (Polling regularly shows sizable majorities—65-70%—in favor of ending illegal and restricting legal immigration, which is why the amnesty bills regularly floated so hopefully by bipartisan blowhards are always dead in the water, but politicians sympathetic to or hoping to benefit from this majority probably assume—rightly, I think—that the numbers will go down dramatically once the actions needed to expel illegals are set in motion and exposed relentlessly by the national media. Maybe down to about 40% who have the stomach to see it through. There’s good reason to assume, then, that the expulsion of illegal aliens will be another quagmire, this time played out in our major cities throughout the country.)\n\nBut the white working class must continue to be represented, however boisterous, uncouth, vulgar and at times flailing, buffoonish and nasty that representation must be, and not only by Trump, because in the areas of immigration and Islam the vital interests of the working class coincide perfectly with the conditions of survival of the American nation. And this makes perfect sense if, indeed, the white, “Jacksonian,” working class is the core of the American nation. It’s also not surprising that these two issues bear the enormous weight of the central political questions of the day: nationalism vs. globalism and republic vs. empire; freedom vs. statism; the victimocracy vs. the normalization of firstness.\n\nMark Steyn, who often follows these struggles through the prism of the question of free speech, which has been forced upon him over the past decade, has been observing recently how tenuous the default assumption in favor of free speech has become. He chronicles how, time and after time, the once uncontroversial claim that “we all have a right to our opinion” is met with hostility and incomprehension. It has come to seem more obvious that there are all kinds of things people shouldn’t be allowed to say. I think there is even a larger problem behind this capitulation to a regime of speech rules: the absence of credible role models.\n\nParents, however good and caring, are increasingly unable to show children how to navigate a social and moral order that is foreign to them. Politicians, business leaders, sports stars, celebrities and once honored historical figures come virtually pre-debunked. It may be that the current craze for erasing symbols of an unacceptable past is both an attempt to make explicit this state of affairs and establish some set of rules, however bizarre, to replace it. Even apolitical young people seem desperate to have the rules under which they are expected to operate laid out explicitly, as the tacit understandings that once made a looser regime possible have been demolished.\n\nThe white working class, its belligerence, the constant intrusion of a world of manual labor and intractable necessities and the implacable judgment of physical reality it represents, its unreconstructed gender roles, its untutored, spontaneous opinions regarding violence, still grounded in an older idea of “frontier justice,” its blinding, unbearable whiteness, all make it an irresistible depository of all those fears of a world that cannot be bent to a therapeutically approved homogeneity. Which also means it’s a container of all those differences we need to remember in order to continue thinking in such a world."
    },
    {
      "slug": "participation",
      "title": "Participation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Rituals are reproductions of the originary scene, at first aimed at reinhabiting the remembered scene to defer new instances of violence, and then to make the deity appear and bless and strengthen the community. Myth emerges to explain the ritual, and in doing so constructs accounts of the originary scene that devolve more and more responsibility onto the participants on that scene. The more individuals can be responsible, the more likely that differences between individuals will widen, creating the asymmetrical relation of the Big Man, in sole possession of “producer’s desire” (conferring meaning upon the scene) at the antipodes of the rest of the community and its aggregation of “consumer desires” (benefiting from the distribution controlled by the “producer”).\n\nThis asymmetry expands to grotesque lengths, investing new but sharply restricted ethical possibilities in astonishingly brutal social orders (mass slavery and extermination, human sacrifice). The invention of the God whose name is the declarative sentence begins the long reversal of this process, by directing resentment towards the Big Man and Big Man tendencies in everyone. Responsibility again devolves upon everyone, but it is a responsibility both enhanced and truncated: enhanced, because a far wider range of human intentions can now be comprehended and therefore demand recognition (while inspiring caution); truncated, because the resentment toward the Big Man (in all of us) locates morality in the consumer’s desire of the vast majority, leading to the stigmatization of the producer’s desire that is more necessary than ever for the consumer’s desire to be satisfied.\n\nAs far as I know, American society is the only one that has been able to fully value the “producer,” or entrepreneur (where else can billionaires become folk heroes?), and even that idealization is always tenuous, in competition with perhaps more powerful resentments than are found elsewhere as well. This dynamic, perhaps at one time a source of creative tension, has become sterile.\n\nThat was an extremely compact, one-sided, somewhat modified and no doubt inadequate summary of Eric Gan’s history of cultural forms, especially as articulated in his The End of Culture (which I happen to be rereading now). It has always seemed to me that we had never really left the reign of the Big Man behind us, regardless of democratic and liberal pretensions; it has also seemed to me for a long time that the democratic and egalitarian principles that emerged from the monotheistic revelation has never been able to resist dwelling obsessively on every manifestation of the Big Man, or alphadom, with acceleratingly destructive consequences.\n\nThat focus has remained because it is the original one—al though one finds in Jewish, and I would imagine Christian, theology, the notion that the tremendous creativity of God flows through those created in His image, I think that the far more consequential reading of the Moasic revelation has been to set God’s creativity in opposition to the creativity of the Alpha, to whittle the alpha down to size. Modern consumer society is the reign of Big Corporations that stay big by inciting our consumer resentment against all forms of bigness. Gans locates the separation of the esthetic from ritual in the emergence of the Big Man, upon which the artist to whom we willingly subordinate our attention is modeled: hence the masterpiece as the highest form of art, dependent upon a passive and awestruck audience.\n\nAll forms of bigness today—corporations, the political parties, the state, the media, the educational system and academy—all function according to the same logic of the disavowal and denunciation of the producer’s desire that nevertheless is increasingly monopolized and calcified within those very institutions.\n\nA counter-tendency has been emergent for a few decades now, and has been accelerated by the internet and social media. Paradoxically, the antidote to the decaying and self-disavowing culture of anonymous bigness has been the emergence of new, smaller, more mobile, unstable, and readily replaced alphas, epitomized by the self-publishing blogger. The Republican party “elders” are concerned about the future of their party—but maybe we should be looking forward to the obsolescence of all “major” parties. Political parties in the liberal democracies have been means of packaging money, platforms for governing, and voters, but why do we need such gigantic, clumsy and unresponsive institutions to do that anymore?\n\nToday’s “insurgency” campaigns already circumvent and take over (“hostilely”) the parties, but maybe soon they will dispense with the parties altogether. The participatory tendency in the arts goes back to the 60s, at least, with forms of theater, music and literature that could only be completed through audience participation, in stark contrast with the masterpiece that presumably remains identical through the ages. The most advanced form of participatory art, which I have mentioned quite a few times, and the one most capable of spilling over into everyday life, was Allan Kaprow’s “happenings,” which involved creating an actual scene in the midst of everyday life.\n\nEveryone caught up in the scene becomes actor and audience simultaneously. The happening is a ritual insofar as the ritual is a reproduction of the originary scene: by introducing unpredictability into the routines of everyday life the happening makes it incumbent upon the participants to discover the semiotic means of defusing the violent potential in that scene. The esthetic is thereby reabsorbed back into ritual and elicits the millennia long suppressed producer’s desire of all the people. Responsibility can be further expanded, insofar as everyone comes to recognize their unique responsibility, as a sign, to sustain the scene at hand, while the truncation has been abolished.\n\nThe reason this revolution has proceeded in fits and starts is that it is, frankly, terrifying, for virtually everyone. There is the existential fear of taking responsibility for one’s own successes and failures, with no more Big Man (the “system,” “elites,” “ruling class,” “establishment,” etc.) to blame for one’s own indiscipline. But there is also the fear of the conflicts that will be unleashed once the established channels for expressing resentment and desire are removed. There are plenty of people who think that the conflicts between right and left (Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street) are really artificial products of the “system,” which stays in power by turning us against one another.\n\nThat seems to me a transparent anti-Big Man platitude. There will be no single unified “people” once the “corporate state” has been disabled or marginalized—there will be war, which we can aim at making more virtual than material, but which we will not be able to avoid. Everyone is now positioning themselves for that war, which might be a many-sided affair, Balkanizing us while polarizing us globally. The producer’s desire can be an implacable one, demanding and rigorous, not easily pacified and diverted like the consumer’s desire. But the Empty Big Men cannot be propped up anymore—even the most recently established giants, like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter, seem to be approaching senility, as they invest in traditional ideologies and ally with existing forms of political power.\n\nThe best side to take, at this point, is whatever side can bear and even embrace the proliferation of differences that the demise of anti-alpha anonymous alphadom will release. With no settled rights, and no shared inclination to submit to majority rule, what will matter is who can create performative, participatory disciplines and defend those disciplines against rearguard attacks of anti-discimination SJWs—but also, perhaps, of the race-obsessed who might arise in the vacuum left by the rout of the SJWs. I wouldn’t want to be the bookie taking bets on the results—I would have no idea how to set the odds."
    },
    {
      "slug": "playing-the-odds",
      "title": "Playing the Odds",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The world presents itself to us, through our signs, as an array of probabilities and thresholds. If there is a genuinely postmodern mode of thought, that is, one that comes after modernity, and is qualitatively different than modern thought, it is a radical probabilism that is incompatible with thinking in terms of rights, justice, progress and good vs. evil. Probabilism is deeply embedded in the information technologies that now govern our lives, and it may very well be that much of the victimary hysteria we see today is a panic over the irreversible consequences of more readily available probabilities regarding more areas of life. Here is a tweet by someone named John Rivers (which I came across in blog post by Steve Sailer on VDare ):\n\nI dream of a world where a mid-level manager in a mid-level company can accurately quote FBI crime statistics on Facebook and not be fired.\n\nUltimately, the SJWs must try to get the people in the middle fired for transmitting information about probabilities, because such information is devastating in its implications for the anti-discrimination ideology upon which they are parasitic. At a certain point, you’d have to demand that the FBI stop compiling statistics, and then you’d have to demand that police not ask victims and witnesses for identifying information on assailants, because someone would be able to gather such descriptions and create statistics out of them. But, then, you’d have to demand that victims and witnesses not report on crimes at all, even to other agencies than the police, in which case you’d have to focus all your attention on retaliating against those who report crimes, meaning, of course, that you’d have to name and describe them and thereby produce a kind of negative image of the statistics you wanted to suppress in the first place.\n\nLeft unhindered, employers, bankers, schools and other institutions would rely even more heavily on probabilities that they already do. How do you decide to whom you should loan money, whom you should employ, whom you should admit, other than by markers reliably (statistically) associated with paying back loans, competence in the work place, and academic achievement. We all operate this way individually as well: when we meet someone, we do a rough calculation of dangers and advantages, usefulness, interest, etc., associated with markers such as dress, manner, speech, and, to varying extents, demography. These calculations are continuously refined based on new information, information itself elicited by further, more precisely targeted “searches” we perform in our interactions with people.\n\nThey are, furthermore, guided by risk thresholds: the guy I’m talking to might seem very likely to insult me, but I’ll get over that quickly and if he seems otherwise interesting I’ll have a fairly high risk threshold; much less so for walking through a high crime neighborhood during high crime hours.\n\nIt may be that the most radical thing one can do today is act, and proclaim that one acts, upon probabilistic reasoning. On the simplest level it seems one would be stereotyping all the time, but probabilities resulting from more refined searches are highly context-dependent: a member of a group statistically associated with astronomically higher crime rates may be only marginally, if at all, more dangerous in an office or academic setting than anyone else. In that case, it is rather improbable that that individual matches the stereotype one might construct based on mega-data (al though one might leave open the possibility that local probabilities skew towards the global ones).\n\nBut for a probabilistic reasoner, it would be impossible to speak about broader social questions without speaking in group terms, however qualified. One would thereby be generating resentments all the time, and, then, one might ask how the generation of resentments flows into the pools of information we draw upon. Victimary thinking tries to strangle such questions in their cradle: that members of an especially vulnerable group might be well-advised to take added precautions, that members of an especially dangerous and therefore feared group might take measures to advertise their own, individual, harmlessness, is anathema.\n\nThe originary scene itself should be understood as an array of probabilities, differentially grasped by those in the process of introducing the very data they are simultaneously processing. We can speak about the originary sign as creating reciprocity, and it might sound cynical to suggest that each member of the group engages in a cost-benefit analysis predicated upon an assessment of the respective physical attributes of the members, proximity to the object, likelihood of getting a larger chunk of the object post-sign than in a direct struggle sans sign, and all of this as the sign spreads through the group (affecting the probable results of abstention), but the “cynical” approach has certain advantages, both analytical and moral: after all, as a “sign-maker,” we are better off knowing where we are within the circulation of signs, which means having a sense of the differing degrees of deferral and discipline likely to result from the iteration of the sign by varying members. You can at least take responsibility for your own contribution to the information pool, in that case.\n\nPolitical arguments would, in a more probabilistic world, concern refinements of search terms rather than sterile foot stamping over principles. The extension of rights-talk can probably be directly correlated with the increasing precision and availability of data: no one would make bizarre claims about limiting immigration for specified groups being some kind of human rights violation if we didn’t all know which groups an honest disclosure of risk thresholds and assessment of probabilities would dictate we exclude. In a sense the same is true for, say, gun ownership advocates in the US, who insist upon said ownership as a fundamental right in the face of comparative statistics of gun violence in the US and other equivalent countries.\n\nThere is a powerful argument for gun ownership as a self-evident extension of the self-evident right to self-defense, and as long as that argument is the one most likely to succeed, it’s hard to fault it. But against arguments, bolstered by the statistics just referred to, to the effect that we all concede some of rights in the name of social order (an argument with the same natural rights pedigree as the pro-gun one), it might be better to counter with more sophisticated search terms: probabilities of guns being used for criminal violence in some areas, among some demographics, under specific legal regimes, as opposed to others.\n\nIt might very well be that the information generated by such targeted searches flows nicely into larger pools of information generated by crime statistics, statistics regarding family breakdown, regarding resentment towards the inculcation of civilized behavior, and so on. Maybe it will turn out that the most fundamental right, from which all others flow, is the right to note the differences that make the acquisition of knowledge of probabilities possible.\n\nIt is possible to see not only “PC,” and not only liberal democratic anti-discrimination ideology, but the entire edifice of civilized behavior as designed to guard against unrestrained probabilistic reasoning in social life (even if liberal democracy and then victimary thinking involve first an incremental and then an exponential increase in that restraint). Imagine what it would mean to interact constantly on explicitly probabilistic premises: it wouldn’t involve the kind of crude stereotyping I referred to above, but it would involve assuming, acting upon, and announcing the assumption that person A is x% more likely than person B to act in ways detrimental to a particular project.\n\nOf course there are already performance reviews and other assessment procedures that gather such information—but always in ways that separate it from the direct interaction of individuals. And with good reason, because at a certain micro level such assessments come to rely upon tacit information that cannot be made explicit, much less defended publicly. Part of the discipline of civilization is the ability to become aware of and suspend such tacit assessments where they would interfere with a project and hence with the gathering of information that would enable the refinement and sharing of those assessments. (In a sense, then, the suspension of tacit assessments simply involves a higher order mode of probabilistic reasoning.)\n\nBut an equally essential component of civilized discipline lies in refraining from the demand that others disavow their tacit judgments even though we are all aware of being, at times, their targets. The totalitarianism of “social justice” is in its demand for such a disavowal, for the complete replacement of the density, fragility and extensiveness of tacit judgment for ideologically approved and implanted doxa. It is a demand that we not think or even notice things. Which, I suppose, makes it fairly easy to be a revolutionary in these times: just keep noticing things, and give others, however minimally, to notice them as well."
    },
    {
      "slug": "trumpism",
      "title": "Trumpism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans, in his most recent Chronicle , made an argument for considering Donald Trump a “metaconservative,” concerned, albeit perhaps not explicitly, with restoring the structure of compromise and deal-making between left and right by converting the left’s struggle for justice back into a defense of group interests. Until such a structure is restored, formulating the most brilliant conservative policies in the most prestigious think tanks will be irrelevant because, as conservatives themselves may have forgotten, such policy proposals are themselves merely opening bids in the negotiation, a negotiation that by definition requires a good faith partner.\n\nIf this is indeed what Trump is doing, and through “embodiment” more than “articulation,” how, exactly, is he doing it? The flip side of deal-making is tit-for-tat responses to attacks by others—in both cases, a kind of reciprocity is established. And if we follow the logic of Trump’s behavior, he seems to treat tit-for-tat responses to insults and offenses as a principle of virtually religious sanctity. Much of what seems bizarre in Trump’s actions can be explained in this way—as in the recent dust-up, completely ridiculous in any rational terms, over Trump’s and Cruz’s respective wives, makes perfect sense if Trump’s logic is, “ if you attack my wife I’ll attack yours.”\n\nOf course, what counts as an “attack” on Trump’s wife by Cruz is rather subjective—in this case, a photo from Melania Trump’s modeling days was tweeted by an anti-Trump (not, as I understand it, pro-Cruz) PAC, with the suggestion that voting for Cruz would be the best way of avoiding the presumed scandal of such a first lady. Perhaps this hurt Trump in Utah, but probably not much anywhere else—on balance, an attractive wife might be a plus for a Presidential candidate and Mrs. Trump comports herself with dignity. But all these are details—all that matters is that someone, according to some reasoning, wanted this to hurt Trump and help Cruz, so a response was necessary.\n\nWhat kind of response? Here as well, it seems the details get worked out on the fly—first, a threat to “spill the beans” about Mrs. Cruz and then a retweet of matching photos of the two wives, Melania at her sultry best and Heidi at her harried worst. (No beans have yet been spilt, to my knowledge.) How does this help Trump, who may already be fairly unpopular with normal women unlikely to appreciate being reminded of the disparity between them, after a day of work and chasing the kids around, and your average supermodel. But that doesn’t seem to enter Trump’s calculations either—he struck back, however scattershottedly, and that’s an end to it until the next attack.\n\nIf there is no direct counter-attack, all seems to be forgotten, which may explain Trump’s penchant for denying he said things that he said very famously and is, of course, caught on video saying. What he said were not declaratives to be judged according to their truth value but performatives to be judged according to their “felicity” at each occasion.\n\nThe broader, meta-conservative effect of this honor system is to suggest powerfully to supporters that Trump will defend the interests of those supporters the same way he defends his own interests, and will defend the United States in that way as well—if someone screws us, we screw them right back. And the notions of payback and deterrence have taken thoroughly delegitimated under the Obama regime (even though that regime practices retaliation against its domestic enemies far more systematically than any other since Nixon’s), at least as an openly acknowledged principle of governmental and, indeed, human, behavior. What Obama’s supporters celebrate as “cerebral” and “non-reactive” is precisely an unwillingness to demand satisfaction from those who insult America, and therefore to give satisfaction to those who identify with American as an honor seeking entity in the world. Indeed, victimary thinking is predicated upon the suspense of honor as a reciprocal principle, demanding honor for the designated victim but guilt and shame for the oppressor.\n\nTit-for-tat in private and business life is inherently limited, but in public life it’s hard to see where the limits are. Hundreds of claims are made about a political candidate, let alone an office holder, every day that might easily be taken as “insults.” But more specific, formidable, and dangerous opponents emerge, opponents whom it is necessary that one be seen engaging and defeating. That seems to be Trump’s method—make a “provocative” statement, i.e., one that many people will find offensive, and let a hierarchy of enemies emerge in the course of a general taking of the bait. Nor are the provocations random—they generally involve some national point of honor, some instance or relationship in which America has been insulted or exploited by another nation.\n\nThe enemies he attracts, then, are those interested in de-escalating conflicts with other countries (but, also, with others within this country who gravitate toward a transnational economic, political, and/or cultural sphere of activity) but, paradoxically, are willing to be drawn into an escalating antagonism with Trump himself. If my analysis is right, we can expect a kind of stabilization of the Trump phenomenon (assuming his continued success) as those heavily dependent upon transnational progressivism or transnational corporatism and/or finance line up against him with ever more intense paroxysms of denunciation while those more flexible in their affiliations and commitments find ways of coming to terms—either Trump will be swept away by the opposition or we will, as Gans suggests, find ourselves in a new, more unpredictable era as responsible agencies (e.g., corporations and other states) come to the table, and conflicts become more explicit but maybe also more manageable and transparent.\n\nBut I doubt very much that this will be the case with the left. The American left has apparently decided that they are going to try and shut Trump down, as if he were a conservative speaker invited to a college campus—staging riots at his events with the explicit purpose of making it impossible to hold them. A smaller scale version of this practice—sending protestors to Trump rallies and having them disrupt the event—has led to the manifestation of Trumpism that has perhaps made some of his potential supporters most uneasy: the encouragement of physical violence, by both the security and police, and by attendees at the rallies themselves, encouragement which has already yielded some more or less serious scuffling.\n\nThis is bound to continue, as it’s hard to imagine Trump allowing such a provocation to go unanswered. And the left must, as Vox Day in his analysis of SJWs contends, continue to “double down,” and drag the official Democratic party along with it—already, to use Gans’s terms, Democrats treat Trump’s campaign as a blatant instance of injustice , rather than the representation of a legitimate, competing interest . It’s hard to see how they can do otherwise: can they really allow themselves to get into an argument with Trump about the proclivity of Mexican immigrants to rape and murder, or about how severely to restrict Muslim immigration?\n\nWe will see a real crystallization of forces around the question of American sovereignty (tit-for-tat/deal-making on the national level), in all its dimensions. This is a showdown that Trump is initiating and propelling forward through a subjective dynamic all his own, but that Trumpism will continue, without him if necessary."
    },
    {
      "slug": "israel-as-model",
      "title": "Israel as Model",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve mentioned a couple of times before that one of the favorite tropes of the alt-right is the use of Israel, partly enviously, partly mocking, always with some degree of resentment, as a model for what the US should do but is not “allowed” to do. The rich argumentative possibilities of this trope make it worth returning to in more detail, while the trope itself serves as a kind of model for the comparative mode of discourse in which political discussions (maybe all discussions) seem to be trapped. Is it possible to argue, evaluate, distinguish, praise and condemn, without comparison? Maybe, but we hardly ever see it—on the left, the entire discourse of “equality” is, of course, one extended comparison: if you say men can do this, why can’t women do it; you say this about blacks, but what about when whites…; if one form of sexuality is natural, why not other forms, etc.\n\nNoam Chomsky’s entire method of political critique is based on juxtaposing a statement made endorsing some American action with a statement made by the same or similarly positioned (there’s a comparison right there, already) person and pointing out that the same values are “hypocritically” applied differently to the respective actors. “If a Soviet leader said this about the USSR’s relation to Hungary we would be disgusted,” etc. But the right, especially in fighting back against the left, has adopted the same kind of attack on “double standards” and “hypocrisy” (you call use racists but look at black communities under Democratic control; you say we wage war on women but you say nothing about Muslim misogyny, etc.), without realizing that it locks in the very discourse of equality and anti-discrimination that can, ultimately, only ratchet up one way. The arc of emergent margins of discrimination is infinite and points left.\n\nMy theorizations of discipline and civilization have been intended, in part, to forge a path out of these resentful thickets. For example, David Horowitz is currently sponsoring the display of posters on San Diego State University campus that highlight connections between BDS activists and Palestinian terrorism. I have no quarrel with that, of course—it’s a courageous and effective strategy, because it forces people who would prefer to represent themselves as human rights activists defending the powerless to explain their relation to organizations that strap explosives on desperate teenage girls and send them to self-detonate on busses filled with civilians.\n\nWhat I think ultimately limits the effectiveness of such moves is the use of terms like “racist” or “hate speech” or “hate group” to identify the enemy. This is a perfect example of a kind of political jiu jitsu that only flips oneself—the terms are simply not reversible. Even the charges of “antisemitism” are attempts to draw upon some latent social consensus that would automatically de-legitimate the other side. You can’t, on one side, hollow out the charges of “racism,” “hate speech,” and so one by holding up leftist abuses of these terms to obloquy and ridicule and then assume they retain their old power when using them oneself.\n\nIt’s better to transform the discourse altogether. The problem with the war on Israel that BDS helps wage is not that it is racist, hateful, or antisemitic but that it is a war of barbarism and savagery against civilization, with all the lies and lowering of inhibitions such a war entails. A young person asked me a very good, and, in retrospect, very obvious question recently: is it racist if it’s true? Once one realizes that the categories of hate, racist, sexist, antisemitic, etc., are not necessarily co-extensive with the category of “false,” the entire victimary edifice collapses—what we really should be objecting to is lying, “dyscivic” categories and indiscipline.\n\nNow, much of this comes out in Horowitz’s polemics—I’m not really arguing against him in particular. My point is that any civilizational politics must be interested, above all, in a social order immune to the extent possible to the left, and recycling to exploit essentially leftist categories weakens the immune system. To put it another way, rather than competing over who has most thoroughly repudiated firstness, firstness is to be systematically promoted.\n\nSo, if my response to someone who thinks that the economy of North Carolina should be destroyed because they want to keep delusional men who think they’re women out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, and so on, is that you’re waging war on normal people who commonsensically and correctly believe in the irreducibility of sexual difference and that you’re doing so in the name of the principle that the abnormal should trump the normal and incontinent the self-controlled, I don’t have to worry about juxtaposing what the SJWs say about women there with what they say about women here. Indeed, since “anti-racist” politics has become little more than the defense of the right of blacks to spread violence, feminist politics little more than the defense of absolute sexual freedom for women and absolute sexual restriction for men, LGBT politics little more than the imperative to reverse every natural, biological category possible, Palestinian and, more broadly, anti-“Islamophobic” politics nothing more than a defense of the rights of jihadists to go about their business unscrutinized and unhindered, and pro-immigration politics the global entitlement of non-Western peoples to reside in and transform the US, my civilizational, disciplinary approach seems like the intuitively obvious one.\n\nSo, why not toss the “Israel as model” approach as well? I’ve spoken before about how it works: American Jews supported unlimited immigration here and tightly controlled immigration into Israel; American Jews object to an ethnically based state elsewhere but support an unqualifiedly ethnic state in Israel; Israel builds a wall to keep out terrorists but any suggestion of a wall on the Southern border to stop illegal immigration (and drug and human trafficking—and, at some point, terrorism and other forms of violence) is deemed racist and fascist. It’s easy to counter-argue—well, what about the history of the Jews and the therefore special significance of Israel, isn’t Israel far more endangered than the US or other Western countries, what about the various, albeit more subtle ways Western states maintain a basic ethnic identity (apparently Germany, as I have learned from such arguments, has its own equivalent of Israel’s Law of Return, offering expedited citizenship to ethnic Germans who are citizens of other countries—presumably enacted to facilitate the repatriation of German “colonists” in Eastern Europe and Russia), etc.\n\nBut this is all so tiresome and subjectivizing—who is to say how threatened by unlimited immigration Americans (let alone Europeans) should feel; who is to say that a white or Euro-American identity can’t be as authentic and worth preserving as a Jewish (or any other) one? If you accept the basic terms of the discourse and presuppose the argumentative unacceptability of “double standards” and “hypocrisy,” then you can’t endorse when it comes to Israel what you denounce when it comes to the US. What happens, though, if we reject those terms?\n\nI think we best find that out by pursuing, not eschewing, the Israel as model trope. The very prevalence of this trope indicates that we are not, in fact, dealing with pure equivalences. Israel seems to be an untranscendable term in contemporary political logics. I’m never more pleased and grateful when I come across someone who is simply indifferent to Israel, because it seems so unlikely. Moreover, I think it is quite likely that the secular Jews who bore the main brunt, at least ideologically, of Nazi antisemitism, are fading into irrelevance and will hardly be worth worrying about within a few decades: they really only exist in any number in the US, where they are becoming fewer, more diffuse, less powerful, and less distinct from other Americans.\n\nSuch transitions contain their own dangers, of course, but no one is, or will be, speaking of American Jews as a model to be either ironically resented or emulated. Only Israel will have that privilege. The victimary era opened with the racialization and extermination of the assimilating, subversive and vulnerable Jew and has come full circle with the Nazification of the self-differentiating, self-defending, traditional-modern Jew. As with any hermeneutic circle, it is a question of entering it the right way, and ultimately abolishing it by maximizing its presuppositions.\n\nWhat Israel is most fundamentally a model of is the confrontation on the borderline between civilization and its others. As I have written before (without giving due credit to Lee Harris, who slipped out of my mind, as it had been years since I had read or, indeed, heard anything of him, but was still the one who got me thinking along these lines), constitutive of civilization is a dedicated forgetting of the emergence of civilization. No civilized person wants to think of the application of commercial and technological cunning to violence (to both other and self) that enables emergent civilizations to resist and subdue the often far more numerous barbarians and savages in the midst of whom the civilized first carve out a space.\n\nBut this forgetting renders civilizations helpless against both external barbarians and savages and the barbarisms initiated internally by the various forms of decadence that are inevitable concomitants of civilization. Discipline is relaxed precisely when new modes and increments are needed. Israel was long ago identified by the Left as one of the “borderline” states (along with South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, and a couple of others) in what it considered a conflict between the colonizers and the decolonized; that analysis can be embraced wholeheartedly with completely reversed valuations, along with the “pessoptimist” (I’m referencing an old novel by an Israeli Arab, Emile Habiby) assumption that this borderline is coming soon to a country near you.\n\nI would suggest that in its politics, economic, culture, manners, attitudes, Israel is above all a country aware of the need to construct and defend civilization continuously. Violence is ever present, and one’s own violent men must be given free, but not too free, reign to suppress it. Sentimentalities like human rights and ever expanding equality are constant temptations, but never allowed to override brute realities. Ethnic cohesion is maintained, along with respect for more traditional religious forms, even when those forms are rejected and often disdained by the majority—there is an intuitive sense that such “reversions” provide a necessary ingredient of preparedness to act in concert in times of emergency.\n\nThe Left, like some kind of chronic after-effect of a childhood disease, is always there, always painful and debilitating, but it can be pointed to as such, keeping the immune system working. The Supreme Court, the media, the academy and education systems in Israel are even further left and more arrogant than our own, and even the higher levels of the military and secret police are politically corrupted—the lure of international approval and even celebrity for exhibitionist dissidents is very hard to resist. But anyone following contemporary Israeli politics knows that empowered political actors attack this corruption, unapologetically and maybe eventually effectively, in tune with majority sentiment. The possible applications to the politics of other Western countries are fairly obvious.\n\nSo, Israel is a model for us insofar as it is one or two steps ahead of where we need to be very shortly, more, perhaps, as an object of study than one of emulation (but a bit of emulation may be warranted, as well), as test case of the problematics of defending against external threats and rehabilitating from internal disorders of civilization at the same time. The model can be turned, in very different ways, toward both left and alt-right—it would be a fascinating paradox if Israel were to become the first genuinely alt-right (i.e., post-victimary) country. There would be no need to insist upon an Israeli “exceptionalism”—one could hope for the end of Israel as model once what it is modeling becomes more widely distributed, while doubting the likelihood that such dissolution is imminent.\n\nBut we would have moved beyond the resentful comparative discourses of double standards and hypocrisy insofar as we proceed to do (and learn from others) what the defense of civilization requires, rather than continually asking permission from some phantom authority to do what we fantasize some privileged other is allowed to do."
    },
    {
      "slug": "nationalism-globalism-empire",
      "title": "Nationalism, Globalism, Empire",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The alt-right is, as much as it is anything, a call to arms in defense of nationalism against globalism—or, more specifically, the “global elite,” the network of corporate executives, media owners, bankers, politicians, and others who form consensus and strategize through Davos and other formal and informal global institutions. The globalists seek to reduce the world to a single economic and political unit, and whatever their own country of origin, citizenship or residency, refuse to privilege the interests of one nation over any other. If this is indeed the aim and outlook of the global elites, it’s easy to see that, barring a rather extraordinary, even miraculous, success in creating a harmonic convergence of some very divergent interests, such a project dooms the elite to, in the end, become the enemy of all nations. A very formidable enemy, to be sure.\n\nA degree of commitment to supra-national order is inevitable once there are en during international relations and institutions. One could easily imagine that the diplomatic corps of the absolutist monarchs of early modern Europe felt a kind of comradely solidarity with one another regarding the peaceful relations they sought to construct and, even more, felt they had a broader and more insightful view of the demands of keeping the peace than those whose viewpoint was constrained by their narrow, national perspective. And they would certainly have been right, to some extent. The same is undoubtedly true of those scientists and scholars who forge international connections within a “republic of letters,” a tenuous construct continually under threat from the irrational passions of national publics and politicians.\n\nBusinesses and corporations that do business in China, India, Ghana and Chile must take an interest in the internal politics within those sometimes unstable polities; and, insofar as these businesses and corporations are fortunate enough to originate in countries powerful enough to take an interest as well, they will endeavor to ensure that that is the case. It is easy to see why the President and Congress of the United States might take a greater interest in the domestic stability of some faraway country than in the suffering of some relatively marginal domestic constituency. And it is also easy to see how easily they will convince themselves that this set of priorities will ultimately benefit those domestic constituencies as well. And sometimes, according to some measures, they will be right.\n\nJust as any nation has a kind of “core,” a particular group or set of groups with which the national impetus originated and which still holds most tightly to strictly national loyalties and values, any nation will have a kind of “epidermis,” an outer layer mediating its relations to the rest of the world. In a nationalist order, this outer layer is rooted in the nation through the perpetual competition among the most talented of the nation to enter the intellectual and political elites, and through the national pride invested in the triumphs of those elites on the global stage. The globalized outer layer of the nation will certainly have attenuated loyalties compared to the core, but something else seems necessary for a genuine global elite, at odds with the nation, to emerge.\n\nThat something else is imperial responsibility for a global order, which the US undertook following World War II. A kind of national pride can be sustained in such imperial projects insofar as the imperial reach seems necessary to combat some clearly dangerous foe, such as the USSR, derives from military victories over despised enemies, or provides new outlets for domestic energies and constituencies. In the case of the Cold War, which itself resulted from American inheritance of a world broken by two world wars, symmetrical rivalry silenced questions regarding what was essentially US governance of Western Europe and much of East Asia. Nor is there any point to condemning imperialism as such—in any case, the question would have to be whether there was a better viable alternative to imperial rule.\n\nOnce the Soviet Union fell, though, the imperial architecture became pointless. The U.S. should really have dissolved NATO, withdrawn all troops from Europe and Southeast Asia, and renormalized itself as a nation. But what national leadership could possibly give up all that power and influence, especially given all the private interests invested in the global U.S. protectorate, and the linking of the U.S. economy to the advantages accruing to the role of the dollar as global currency? Only a crisis could precipitate such a change of course. In the meantime, profits for US multinationals, cheap goods for U.S. consumers, and cheap labor for domestic American employers are intertwined with the gradual liberalization of China and maintaining the stability of Mexico as purposes of U.S. policy.\n\nThe crisis of the world today is the crisis of the informal U.S. empire, whose fall would have devastating, if also liberating, but above all incalculable effects throughout the world. If we want to grasp the terror of U.S. elites at the rise of Donald Trump, it may very well lie in the possibility that he will bring this crisis to a head, and make clear what has already been the case for some time: that the global elites organized under the increasingly pathetic leadership of the U.S. has completely lost control of developments.\n\nThose who subvert the nation from above will do it from below, as well. There are good reasons, beyond a fear of bad publicity, why most major corporations participate vigorously in victimary politics. It’s easy to think of victimary politics in very local terms, but ultimately victimary politics is, in Carl Schmitt’s terms, “planetary”: international human rights, rules for a global social justice convergence, demolish democracy, privacy, property and all forms of local autonomy. Failure to convincingly repudiate your whiteness makes you an enemy of humanity, anytime, anywhere: the very model of the unprotected class, or what Agamben calls homo sacer, upon whom it is always open season.\n\nIt is a levying of the mob for imperial ends, and a very effective way of creating a terrorized, and therefore pliable, workforce. Even more than the rapidly accumulating economic and safety regulations, “anti-discrimination” (i.e., victimary) rules make it extremely difficult for small businesses and individual contractors to survive on the market: a single lawsuit can destroy years of work. All this means that anti-victimary and anti-imperial politics are one and the same now.\n\nThe Journal of American Greatness, an online journal dedicated to developing the parameters of what we might call a kind of ideal Trumpism, capable of surviving Trump’s candidacy, has drawn upon James Burnham’s notion of the “managerial class” in order to account for specifically globalized interests. The managerial class would coincide with what, drawing upon the blogger “Archdruid,” I called the “salaried” class in an earlier post. Of course, the global ruling class would draw primarily upon the upper layers of the salaried, but making the point that global power derives from knowledge and expertise, in navigating the terms of global power if nothing else, makes the question an especially difficult one (as the writers at JAG are aware). Such power can’t simply be seized like land or other “means of production.” The only way to break up the global managerial class and repatriate its various national sections would be to break up the empire. So, how to do that?\n\nWell, first of all direct opposition at all the international organizations—fire away indiscriminately at NATO, the UN, the EU, SEATO, the World Bank, the IMF, plus a half a dozen others that must be out there that I know nothing about. Oppose, unconditionally, all trade agreements, which are nothing more than a slicing up of the world for the benefits of the corporations. It would be better to just have tariffs tied directly to the tariffs other countries set for us. Start with 10% tariffs for all, and if a country sets a 15% tariff for us, raise it for them; if a country sets its tariff at 5%, lower it. At least everything will be transparent that way, which at this point is more important than efficiencies (not that I concede that the current approach maximizes efficiencies).\n\nIf all these institutions and arrangements are abolished, tens of thousands of ruling class managers will have no choice but to find some gainful employment in their home countries. Oppose all military interventions that don’t explicitly have victory (i.e., surrender of the enemy, along with reparations for any injuries suffered in whatever violation led us to go to war in the first place—and if we can’t clearly state such an injury, perhaps we shouldn’t be at war) as its one and only goal. Start developing a discourse of resistance and disobedience to all interpretations of anti-discrimination law aside from the most commonsensical (i.e., I’m not hiring you because you’re black, give me oral sex for a promotion, etc.). Point out that these, by now insane, laws serve no purpose but to divide us a hundred different ways.\n\nThe truest resistance, though, is “spiritual,” or self-disciplining—or, to put it in grammatical terms, imperative, located in the sphere of habits. To be a true American (or Canadian, or Brit, etc.) to demonstrate what it means to be an American (or…) in the workplace, in family life, in addressing friends and enemies in the world, and so on. To embody and project national honor, in short. Both the Tea Party and Trump supporters have exhibited such a sense of honor, however limitedly (in different ways, for different reasons, in each case). Maybe that smarmy piety, “who we are,” can be retrieved: we are slow to start wars, but quick to finish them; we treat all nations fairly, exactly as they treat us; we look out for common interests and enterprises, but for ourselves and each other first of all; the more you respect our borders and sovereignty, the more welcome you will be.\n\nEtc. For Americans this will really be “nation building,” as it has been a long time since we have just been a nation among others, with our own borders, our own currency, our own classes, our own universities, and so on—not to serve the world, not to convert the world, just to co-exist with them like everyone else.\n\nIt might be helpful to keep in mind that the empire is collapsing anyway—US reliability was already questionable, going back to Vietnam, but Obama’s presidency has thoroughly demolished it. Simply ask yourself: as a leader of another country, would you trust any commitments made by the leaders of a nation capable of electing and re-electing Barack Obama? I can’t believe many will answer yes (and those who would answer yes may be too stupid or irresponsible to make agreements with).\n\nA final word. The end of empire would mean the end of political universalism. Universalism is really the imagining of the world under a single empire—not necessarily under the rule of a single individual or institution (but maybe that as well), but certainly all subject to the same regime of rights and their enforcement. To contend for universalism is to make war on the particulars—that is, everyone less universal than you take yourself to be. There can be no value or, as I would prefer, imperative, that can be equally urgent, legitimate and viable for all people at the same time. To be a universalist is simply to insist that others determine urgency, legitimacy and viability as you have.\n\nInstead of the tiresome debate over “universalism vs. particularism” we could speak of various degrees and modalities of civilization. We could speak more simply about what makes any social order a model others might emulate or from which others might recoil. The civilizing forces within an order are those who defend those shared habits worthy of emulation, or constructed out of emulation of another order, and look for new habits worthy of emulation; at the same time, those civilizing forces will look suspiciously and even hostilely at those orders containing little or nothing worthy of emulation—nothing we would have to elevate ourselves in order to adopt. All of these judgments are, of course, debatable, and a civilized order is one in which they are freely debated and acted upon."
    },
    {
      "slug": "search-term",
      "title": "Search Term",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Are there differences between human groups? A moment’s reflection leads to the conclusion that the question can never be definitively answered in the negative: even if contemporary research showed there to be no differences (assuming it could really show that if we kept adding—so to speak—more decimals), we couldn’t exclude the possibility that some differences would be uncovered by future research. The same is true if we add “genetic” or “biological” to the sentence, to modify “differences,” as it will never be possible to show that whatever differences we do find, and however many cultural and historical causes we can supply for them, there is absolutely nothing irreducible to those causes and that must therefore be deemed of biological or genetic origin.\n\nThe intrinsic openness of the question confronts us with a choice: either insist that no one inquire into such differences, or that no one discuss or draw conclusions from them if some are imprudent enough to inquire, on the one hand; or, find ways to incorporate the findings into our ongoing social dialogues. For about 70 years we in the West have chosen the first option, for understandable social and ethical reasons, but ultimately at great cognitive cost. And even the social and ethical reasons have been exhausted: if the purpose of suppressing discussions of human bio-diversity (from now on HBD, as one now finds it in the blogosphere) is to prevent genocidal designs of some people on others, we can now see that the conflicts engendered by the need to suppress discussions of HBD might have equally explosive outcomes—outcomes which, at this point, are far more real than the merely speculative ones imagined on the Nazi model.\n\nOf course, a more mundane purpose for suppressing HBD inquires (and open discussions thereof) is to smooth out the daily interactions in a diverse social order. In so many cases we need to treat each other in terms of our behavior in specific settings, making the necessary generous assumptions, and coming to social interactions filled with awareness of differences regarding average IQ scores, or propensity to violence, or disinclination to control appetitive or sexual desires, or paranoid fear of persecution, or any number of things we are likely to discover about one group or another, can only make such disinterested openness to the other more difficult.\n\nIt would certainly be unpleasant to work and socialize with people who you know think that the ethnic, religious, or racial group they take you to belong to represents a net minus in terms of their social utility, even if they treat you with perfect civility. But is it really better to imagine that others are approaching you with all kinds of invidious assumptions but are simply afraid to state them? If inquiries into HBD continue and expand, and the results become more broadly known, but prohibitions on public discussions of these results remain in place, that will surely be the situation we face. The pressure will build either to have the discussions, or to suppress even the inquiries. If we are to live with each other, eventually we will have to do so with the growing knowledge of all that we are.\n\nMaybe we will find that the differences between social groups are not great—much less, maybe, than differences within groups. Maybe we will find that most of the differences are cultural and historical, and hence can be eliminated (al though that “hence” may be a leap of faith), rather than biological and permanent. Maybe we will find that the differences are not very significant, entail no real conflicts of interest, and pose no real obstacle to living together as citizens within a modern state. But we can’t count on any of this, and for the reason I gave above, we could never simply arrive at such conclusions once and for all. We will, eventually, need to find some way of speaking openly about HBD, wherever such discussions lead. Whether we can have such discussions without tearing apart the fabric of civil society will be a test of our moral, ethical and cognitive maturity.\n\nThe most important sign of such maturity would be an ability to think probabilistically. If we are frank, we will admit that the real reason for the prohibition on “generalizations” regarding groups is that we assume (not without reason!) that most people are too stupid to refrain from applying generalizations directly to each individual. Real probability theory is advanced mathematics, beyond most of our comprehension, and it’s mathematics, so not directly translatable into language or ethics. But we all work continually with tacit algorithms that do probability calculations in real time in everyday situations: it is practice in this that needs to be encouraged, and the best practice is non-acrimonious discussions of various probabilities.\n\nNo one is always and everywhere afraid of all members of a particular group; or finds it necessary to mistrust every member of a particular group; or excludes a priori a particular group from everything. One fears, mistrusts and excludes, more or less justifiably, under specific conditions. More obvious markers, like those of race, matter, but so do dress, manner of speech, time of day, etc. If we are not to destroy each other, we must be capable of exploring these boundaries, where due to reasonable causes fear and mistrust spike, openly. The discussions will not always be pleasant, but it’s worth keeping in mind that if we don’t know the proportion played by culture and individual discipline in determining habits, we can at least be sure that it’s more than zero, and so efforts to transform oneself and reassure others are not necessarily in vain.\n\nThe real problem with racialized thinking is that it is intrinsically totalitarian—Hannah Arendt was right, in this regard, about the parallel between “race” and “class” as governing concepts of political order. Just as the Bolshevik must always distinguish between the true revolutionary and those who are in some way compromised by or implicated in the class enemy, so the racialist must always find a distinction between the more and less racially pure, and seek to expel or destroy the latter. If we take “white” as a racial category, we will find those who are more and those who are less white—with no real way of settling the question other than war.\n\nBut this very fact makes HBD more worth engaging—the answer to invidious distinctions along race lines is to introduce another search term, to generate a new “sample” to measure against a new “whole.” White vs. black IQ—alright, that’s interesting; what about French vs. Russian? Spanish vs. Lithuanian? English vs. Welsh? No field of inquiry can be restricted to the most immediate and hotly contested political issues. Is IQ the only issue worth inquiring into? Or body size and shape? What is measurable and what is not? What differences between the relative contributions of genes and environment will we find in the various fields of human endeavor?\n\nOf course, none of this means that certain prevalent distinctions (like white/black) won’t have a rough accuracy to them, or be more salient to more people in more situations—the point is how to incorporate these distinctions into social dialogue once their mention can no longer be punished.\n\nCharles Sanders Peirce considered genuine knowledge the knowledge of the relation between proportions within a sample and proportions within the whole. He took the simple example of a bucket filled with white balls and black balls. Let’s say I take 10 balls out of the bucket. There are 7 white and 3 black. The proportion in the bucket as a whole is either different or the same (probably at least slightly different). How can I tell? (Let’s say the bucket has too many balls in it to simply count them all.) I keep taking more samples and I start averaging them out. I start considering factors that might bias the samples, and compensate for them (perhaps, for reasons I don’t or can’t know, the black balls tend to cluster to one side of the bucket).\n\nThings are obviously far more complex in social matters: there can always be different ways of identifying a “whole” and different ways of selecting “samples.” We could say that all of our arguments are about what we consider relevant sample/whole relations—in which case, it would be good if they were more explicitly about this. When we present ourselves to each other, we always present ourselves as a “sample” of some implicit whole to be construed by other participants on the scene. Several samples, of several (overlapping) wholes, in fact. The way to counter stereotyping (the insistence that samples are identical in their proportions to the whole) is to be a sample that differentiates itself in some way from expectations of the whole. In this way, HBD inquiries become more productive than frightening.\n\nThe sample/whole relation translates into the rhetorical trope of synecdoche: taking a part for the whole. This is actually the normal mode of human engagement, where we take a particular statement, gesture, or aspect of the person’s appearance as a proxy for the person as a whole, at least for the purposes of that engagement. If the engagement or person is important enough, we keep selecting different proxies until we imaginatively reconstruct a more complex, fairer “profile” of that individual. What we always do tacitly we may have to do more explicitly, insofar as HBD inquiry will increasingly become central to anthropological understandings—and, as I have argued, that development is the only alternative to the perpetual cultural terrorism of the SJWs.\n\nWhat it means in practical terms is people moving past what I think is the default modern desire to be judged “as an individual,” to an awareness that, in ways we like and in ways we don’t, we are each of us an assemblage of “samplings,” which we manipulate within limits. (It might be that leftist identity politics has helped paved the way towards this mode of social being.) The pervasiveness of social media, which label us and force us to label ourselves in myriad ways and, of course, is central to the emergent algorithmic culture, will probably make such self-understandings matter of fact. Making us all conscious participants in and subjects of the ongoing HBD inquiries that will comprise any post-victimary social order. If we’re going to have biopolitics, it might as well be explicit and informed biopolitics."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-is-happening",
      "title": "What is Happening",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "First, a bit of a review of the alt-right, not in terms of beliefs, ideas or opinions, but as a product of the political field generated by the rise of the victimary. Victimary activists discovered a very neat trick: since we have all agreed that human equality is the fundamental presupposition of a modern political order, pretty much anything actually existing can be denounced as a reactionary violation of fundamental political principles. Income inequality—the rich are stealing from the poor, with the help of bribed politicians. Racial differences in academic success and crime rates—educational institutions incapable of recognizing any forms of intelligence or accomplishment other than familiar, “white” ones; suspicious white citizens and racist police inclined to see blacks as criminals (whether higher rates of black crime are fraudulent rationalizations of racism or products of it is a secondary question).\n\nWomen are more vulnerable physically and more likely to suffer consequences from sexual carelessness—a patriarchal system bent on exploiting women. Etc. Since reality will always generate these and other differences, these denunciations can go on forever (that’s what makes it such a neat trick).\n\nNow, if you as, broadly speaking, a “conservative,” wish to defend the institutions generating (and “legitimating”) these unequal results, you can respond in a few different ways. You can insist that the institutions themselves are neutral, and will, over time, include more and more of the excluded, thereby smoothing out, gradually, the inequalities. In this case, you accept the premises of the victimary, along with its ultimate goal, and even make sure to define worthwhile institutions in terms of their promotion of fairness. But, of course, your projections might be wrong. Or, you can denounce the same inequalities, but blame the victimary movement itself, for “entitling” and thereby disabling women, blacks, and others from participating in modern institutions.\n\nThis argument, to the extent that it is sincere, and not opportunistically seized upon for its polemical advantages relative to the first approach, asks the victimary subject to abandon the political representation that addresses its demands in visible ways for a vague faith that genuine fairness can replace privileged treatment and, even more importantly, that one will be just as likely to succeed under a “fair” order. These are the approaches, respectively, of the “mainstream” and the more “militant” conservative ( National Review on the one hand, and Breitbart and Frontpage on the other—al though Breitbart has been more than dipping its toe in the alt-right stream lately).\n\nThe alt-right has emerged as a result of the realization that there is another possible response. This response is that, however necessary formal equality is for certain purposes, substantive claims of equality are, at the very least, unproven, and observable differences are more likely than not real. There is room for debate here: one might be certain about the relevant differences across groups or one might consider it an open question pending much more research; one might consider those differences biological or cultural and historical. Either way, one’s response to the left can now be based, not on a different wrinkle in the modern ideology of non-discrimination, but in an unrestrained immersion in the busting of lies and the fearless exploration and publication of the truth.\n\nFrom this perspective, the left can be treated, not as overly idealistic, or even as a racket, but as at war with knowledge, reason, truth and the civilizational discipline required to promote all of the above. Their complaints are nothing more than pleadings on behalf of those who find more advantage in parasitizing upon civilization than competing within and contributing to it. No concessions need be made here—indeed, what would be concessions granted by the other approach here become weapons in the counter-attack (isn’t suggesting that such and such a group acts as it does out of mistrust and fear due to historical oppression tantamount to disqualifying members of that group as rational citizens capable of engaging in the search for truth and agreement?)\n\nThe liberatory effect of adopting these premises is palpable: if one makes a claim regarding differences between men and women, blacks and whites, gentiles and Jews, first world and third world, one can respond to the rote charge of “sexism,” “racism,” “anti-semitism,” and “ethnocentrism” with a request that one’s claim, instead, be disproven, if possible. Needless to say, this very civil response to virulent denunciation (why not consider the possibility of human biodiversity?) has its own deeply polemical and polarizing consequences, simply because of the shape of the field it is entering. But it is fundamentally civil, asking for shared discursive terms rather than reactive denunciations of “hate speech.”\n\nNow, where does this all lead: what happens if speaking openly about human differences (how fascinating it is that the alt-right simply realizes the slogan—difference!—that was all the rage in the leftist academy in the 1980s), along with the freedom to act on the conclusions (always provisionally) drawn regarding them becomes the norm. My previous post, “Playing the Odds,” was an attempt to begin speculating along these lines. A decisive alt-right victory would require an essentially revolutionary overthrow of today’s global elites (what Walter Russell Mead has called the “Davoisie”), and that’s difficult to get a complete picture of, but we can think in terms of the ascendancy of alt-right tendencies.\n\nThe alt-right would act on probabilities, which is normal (by definition) but radical in a social order dedicated to denying them and denouncing those who mention them. This tendency would manifest itself in various forms of secession, which only needs to overcome taboos dating back to the Civil War to become legitimate. Already, states have tried to take control of immigration policy (Arizona on one side, “sanctuary cities” on the other), and have and are essentially boycotting states that try to defend themselves against the latest from of cultural warfare (Minnesota, New York and Connecticut banning state funded travel to states with “religious freedom” or, more bizarrely, sex-specific bathroom laws).\n\nSuch outbursts should be encouraged, as they habituate us to the notion that we are really different countries, and perhaps should start exploring ways to arrange for an amicable separation. What we will see more of, whe never and to the extent that it becomes possible (which is to say, to the extent that one doesn’t find oneself in the cross-hairs of one or another federal agency), is people building neighborhoods and founding schools that prefer one type of person over others. To draw upon a very interesting discussion from Nick Land’s monumental “Dark Enlightenment” essay (which I, astonishingly, only came across very recently), this would be an extension of and fight for the right to “white flight.” (A right the Obama administration, through HUD, the Justice Department and Department of Education, is currently seeking to abrogate.)\n\nOne, fairly obvious and moderate, form of secession or exodus will inspire others. New means of protecting property and assets from oversight and taxation (hiding things on the “dark net”; bitcoin, barter, black markets, etc.); new means of evading governmental regulations (perhaps through open bribery as government systems become more corrupt); new means of protecting local determinations of security protocols from federal (or even state) interference (perhaps by coopting sympathetic members of the official security forces); legal strategies for overwhelming the state with lawsuits and practical strategies for draining the resources of government bureaucracies .\n\nA secessionist alt-right is capable of realizing and showing others that the victimary politicization of all that exists can cut both ways: every difference, including differences within the government agencies, can be capitalized upon. In the process there is no need to assume we will see anything nearly as crude and brutal as Jim Crow-style segregation—but no doubt members of readily identifiable groups will be welcomed in varying degrees and subject to varying degrees of scrutiny. At the very least, one can assume such affiliations will be taken as markers of how much loyalty and compatibility can be expected from an aspirant member of some community, albeit in mostly informal, tacit ways.\n\nIt is important to keep in mind that under the polarized conditions I am assuming, high barriers to entry will be essential to maintaining freedom and openness within these secessionist communities. If you don’t look like you belong, you will have to prove that you do—but I see no reason to assume that individuals won’t be given that opportunity.\n\nI do think that some degree of white racial solidarity will be an intrinsic component of alt-right tendencies, and not only because a natural, nativist response to the virulent and frenzied anti-white hatred of the victimary left is the smoothest path to alt-right sentiments. Even more, as I have described it above, the alt-right trends elitist: it would be an assertion of the rights of the “winners” to not be dragged down by the “losers.” Of course, we can define “winners” broadly: it can comprise 70% of the population: we’re not talking about a few Nietzschean supermen or John Galts, simply people who make it over the hurdles life places before us.\n\nBut it will have to be made as inclusive as possible: 50%, for example, might not be enough. If the alt-right cannot include the deindustrialized and demoralized white working class so central to the Trump campaign (many of whom, by most objective measures, are “losers”), which is to say, more mainstream, populist alt-rightism, then its struggle will be much more uphill than it already is. Whatever inclusion might result from enhanced economic productivity by a more ruthless alt-right corporatism, at least some of this inclusion (at least some of the definition of “winning”) will have to be on shared racial grounds.\n\nEven more, if the new secessionists are going to be able to resist state encroachments upon whatever space they acquire, or even just keep the state as much off its back as possible, it will need to have sympathizers within the states apparatuses of coercion, and the most likely ground of solidarity for the lower-to middle class whites who largely staff those apparatuses will be racial. Non-whites and non-Christians (and certainly non-white non-Christians) will have to consider whether they will be more comfortable or, even more fundamentally, more likely to thrive and even survive, in an openly White/Christian society than in a majority minority one.\n\nOf course, if you believe that the advent of a majority minority society will not alter liberal democratic institutions (such as they are) in any significant way, you can defer posing the choice in these terms. If the alt-right is right, you will not be able to defer it for long.\n\nIf the alt-right finds coherence by insisting upon a strictly probabilistic reading of reality, i.e., a full acceptance of “human biodiversity,” then it might turn into the incarnation of the fully algorithmic social order that digital civilization points towards. As more and more safety features and feedback mechanisms are automated, the world will come to “read” each of us as a particular aggregate of probabilities, not only when it comes to insurance, health care and policing, but employment, investment decisions, environmental policies, perhaps even the selection of political representatives and judges can be left to finely tuned algorithms—and perhaps, as biotech advances, sophisticated algorithms will enable some form of eugenics.\n\nThe management of violence will be in much better hands, as violent potentialities will be detected and countered (also in automated ways) well before violent intentions can be brought to fruition. It’s hard to tell what we humans will be doing in this world (which we are already well on the way towards), but one thing many of us will be doing is trying to prove the algorithms wrong in our particular case and thereby revise them. Members of groups marked as relatively dangerous or untrustworthy will have to double their efforts to persuade the algorithm, far more discerning and coldbloodedly neutral than even the most aspergery human—that will be their moral obligation, and the moral obligation of the rest will be question the terms of the algorithm when it contradicts their own sense of a particular individual.\n\nPhenotype can resist genotype, exception norm: rule by algorithm might generate more striving, rivalry and psychological complexity than the traditional liberal order. The transition to such an order, for many on the alt-right, will be fairly seamless."
    },
    {
      "slug": "coming-to-a-head",
      "title": "Coming to a Head",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The 2016 American Presidential election is shaping up to be a remarkable, entirely unanticipated event: it is possible that we will see a direct, sustained and escalating confrontation between the victimary socio-political forces, on one side, and the alt-right, or anti-victimary forces, on the other. They may despise Hillary Clinton, but the victimocrat masses are already treating Trump, not just as your run-of-the-mill despicable Republican, but as the hugest “trigger” in history, who should not be treated as a normal politician who is allowed to make speeches, have rallies, etc., but rather as a conservative speaker invited to a college campus.\n\nMeanwhile, regardless of Trump’s own intentions, he has summoned into existence the disparate elements of what has come to be called (largely as a result of the Trump campaign, which has actually led to communication between strands of the right that were previously unaware of each other) the “alt-right.” Regardless of who wins this election, this confrontation will no doubt shape American, and perhaps Western, politics for the foreseeable future. We are going to be talking about this a lot, so we might as well get started.\n\nLet’s start with the obvious observation that the struggle is highly asymmetrical. The victimocracy unites the high and the low, the corporate and professional elite, what the Journal of American Greatness (ultimately going back to James Burnham) calls the “administrative state” and the blogger Arch Druid calls the “investment” and “salaried” classes, on the one hand, and the (Arch Druid again) “welfare class,” to which we should add the illegal aliens and even most recent immigrants and all the political and bureaucratic interests clustered around them. Why the ruling class or oligarchy should have settled upon the victimary as their guiding ideology or, as I prefer, “imperative,” is an interesting question.\n\nOn the other side is a fairly small band of banished thinkers and activists who can only be mentioned in mainstream culture (very much including the conservative media), or what Mencius Moldbug (I’ve been intensifying my explorations in the vast expanses of the non-liberal democratic rightosphere) calls the “Cathedral” along with some invidious epithet that ultimately translates into “racist.” (The entire faith of the mainstream culture, again very much including conservatism, is that “racist” will forever remain a magic word that makes all badthoughts and badthinkers go away. The most obvious strategy of the alt-right, then, is to make a mockery of this faith.)\n\nThe short-term gambit of the alt-right is that they can rally a sufficient number of those in the middle (most of the wage earners and least many in the lower strata of the salaried) to resist the victimocracy in the name of normalcy. If so, the alt-right will at least get their foot in the door, i.e., become an inescapable part of the “conversation,” with a sizable audience capable of steady growth. Of course, the long-term goals of the alt-right involve much higher stakes, but no particular end game has yet come into focus (we can be sure that it will involve the destruction of the SJWs, though). The diverse array of projects and proposals is dizzying and fascinating. We’ll certainly be talking a lot about all that as well.\n\nThe alt-right, and in particular the up-and-comers among them, adhere to an ethics of “ZFG,” an initialism which, this being a family blog, I cannot clarify (but the reader is encouraged to perform a simple google search). They will gleefully and ruthlessly take what Daniel Greenfield considers the “low road” in combatting political correctness: directly turning every victimary accusation into scandal implicating the victimary utterance itself. Trump seems to find this approach congenial, taking Hillary’s “woman’s card” and throwing it back at her by accusing her of complicity after the fact in her husband’s serial sexual assaults. A deeper insight into feminism is implicit here, and whether or not Trump pursues it his alt-right shadow army no doubt will: any woman who interferes with the victimary narrative (in which feminism functions, essentially, as a kind of ladies auxiliary), must be expelled from womanhood and degraded with all means available, traditional (“slut shaming,” etc.) and progressive.\n\nAccording to Austrian economics, the production and dissemination of fiat money benefits those who receive the money first, before it has been devalued; we can observe something similar within the victimary economy: after all, once we accept “racism,” “sexism,” “homo- and transphobia,” etc., as the only sins of the modern world, immense power flows to whoever is granted the informal copy rights to these terms. That power is generated and sustained by continually identifying new forms of these “isms”—if you adhere to anti-racist norms circa 2010, then, you are irredeemably racist in terms coined in 2016. Your very attempt to present your anti-racist bona fides is proof of your racism.\n\nAt an earlier point in the emergence of victimary politics, the shepherds of major institutions (corporations, universities, the military, etc.) must have resisted this new, destabilizing political agenda. At some point, though, they realized they could harness it for their own purposes, as a way of waging war against the middle, atomizing them, terrorizing them, devaluing them, reducing them to replaceable parts in a global economic machine. It was probably at that point that the coinage of new terms for anathematizing the normal began to accelerate. It is much easier for the “high” to manage a world of “lows” without a middle, as a flourishing middle class is always a problem for tyrannical governments.\n\nBut there is a structure deeper than all this, and one that only the originary hypothesis enables us to elucidate. I have spoken recently of Eric Gans’s distinction, in The End of Culture , between “producer’s desire” and “consumer’s satisfaction,” and I will return now (and no doubt more in the future, as this distinction looms ever larger in my thinking) to that extraordinarly rich distinction, handled by Gans with extreme rigor and power but, as I hope to show, with a blind spot on one critical point. Let’s begin with a recent blog post with one of the luminaries of the alt-right, Mike Cernovich . Cernovich is the author of two books, which I have not read, but which belong to a new genre of self-help books from an overtly androcentric standpoint.\n\nCernovich wants to teach us how to become better, more valued, more positive and more powerful men. Much of this involves forms of self-discipline with ancient pedigrees: learning to control one’s thoughts, emotions and untutored spontaneous reactions. He has cultivated a public persona modeled on these modes of discipline, a kind of calculated minor celebrity that allows him to be heard without trapping him in the need to shape his self-representations to cater to a mass audience.\n\nIn a recent blog post , Cernovich declares that “Your Imagination is Your Reality.” He continues:\n\nYears ago I saw a guy on You Tube and thought, “He’s cool. I’m going to meet that guy one day.” Now Nic Gabriel is among my closest friends.\n\nI imagined myself living off of a laptop. I didn’t know how it would happen. Last year I saw 14 or so countries. I lost count. I did ayahuasca on a farm in South Africa and swam in the Dead Sea.\n\nI never wrote a book. I imagined myself becoming an author. Gorilla Mindset has now sold so many copies that people accuse me of lying about it, as first-time independent authors never have my level of success.\n\nI imagined myself becoming the hottest journalist breaking the biggest stories. Then I went to Hungary to expose the media lies about “refugees.” I busted hoaxes, and then I faced down an angry mob of hundreds of people.\n\nI imagined myself changing the culture through the power of my mind. Now I’m making films and my Twitter receives over 30 million views a month, and multiple stories have gone viral.\n\nYou imagine yourself in a situation (on a scene, we might say), and you determine what stands between you and being on that scene: what skills do you need to develop or hone, which bad habits do you need to eliminate? Then you proceed to construct the exercises and take the risks that you need to develop and hone those skills and erode those habits. In that way your imagination becomes your reality. You begin with a model—and you can see in each of Cernovich’s examples, he imagines himself doing something others have done, and you can identify very specific people and follow them, “imagine” how they did it—and you end up by becoming a model to others. We can get even more precise: you throw yourself into one crisis after another, some public, some private, some actual, some simulated, and you force yourself to devise a disposition, an equipoise, that would defer any fear or self-doubt that would cause you to succumb to that crisis.\n\nThis, I would say, is producer’s desire, and the alt-right is replete with it—just about all of the participants in the alt-right “proper” (that is, leaving aside those, like the “immigration patriots” at VDare and the “race realists” elsewhere, who have been around for awhile and are adopting the alt-right) talk like Cernovich. Don’t complain—identify what you can do to address a problem or combat an enemy and do it. Treat obstacles and limitations as levers for elevating new practices. It is a very imperative mode of being. What, then, is “producer’s desire” in terms of originary thinking? I’m going to summarize, as best I can (and, inevitably, with some of my own way of making sense of it all mixed in), Gans’s discussion from The End of Culture —approaching this in a scholarly way, with extensive quoting and commentary, seems to me far too unwieldy for a post. That will be for an essay in Anthropoetics at some point, but I’ll leave open the possibility for doing some reading together if anyone would like to respond to this post.\n\nOn the originary scene, putting forth the gesture of aborted appropriation creates the divinity informing the central object—that is producer’s desire. It is a god-making gesture. Then, the object is consumed in common, with resentful vengeance visited upon the object in the process. That is “consumer’s satisfaction.” The originary scene is iterated as ritual in the common memory of the group, “triggered,” we might say, by the imminent conflict that becomes possible whe never the conditions that generated the originary scene are reproduced. At the earliest period of human history, ritual creates a kind of ostensive ethics: everyone behaves as they are supposed to behave on the simulation of the originary scene. All members of the group participate equally in producer’s desire and consumer’s satisfaction.\n\nRitual is modified with the emergence of the imperative out of the ostensive. The imperative emerges from an “inappropriate ostensive,” i.e., an ostensive sign made when the object is not available. The interlocutor fetches the object, thereby retroactively turning the ostensive sign into an imperative that can now be repeated in new situations. The imperative introduces a kind of “magic” into the community: rather than being the happening itself, the sign can now make things happen—it can make the imagination reality. The existence of the imperative creates the imagined possibility of issuing requests to the deity—Gans associates the famous cave paintings discovered in France with an imperative ritual culture: the images are meant to make the desired animal appear, to make itself available. At the same time, it becomes possible to imagine commands coming from the deity—implicit here is the assumption of a reciprocal relation between the subject and object: the more humans imagine themselves sending requests to their gods, the more they can imagine receiving commands from them.\n\nImperatives are also asymmetrical, unlike ostensives, which reinforce shared presence. No social hierarchy is implied by the existence of imperatives themselves—we can issue imperatives to each other in turn, and many imperatives, like requests, not to say begging, imply the inferiority of the person issuing the imperative. Nevertheless, the emergence of social hierarchies in the form of the “Big Man” (who must have had myriad precursors—every group must have the best hunter, the most powerful warrior, the most desired mate, etc.) will lead to an asymmetry in the issuance of imperatives: the Bigger Men will issue more and obey fewer.\n\nAs the Big Man acquires divine status and thereby becomes a center through which imperatives circulate with the accumulation of property, more and more intentions can be attributed to him. The attribution of intentions is mediated through the development of myths, which Gans explains as the explanations of rituals: when the members of the group wonder why this figure in the ritual acts this way, the explanations become increasingly sophisticated, suffused with more complex intentions, because what is ultimately being explained are the changing relations within the group itself. In other words, imperatives are sometimes obeyed and sometimes refused, and the reasons why are always being refined.\n\nAs the polarity between the Big Man and the rest of the group intensifies, two things happen: first, more extensive, more hopeful and more frightening intentions can be attributed to the Big Man, who can do all kinds of things no one else can, which means that no one else can really know what he is capable of—he thus becomes a repository of hopes and fears, rational and irrational. Second, other, relatively bigger men can imagine themselves in the position of Big Men, and can—and no doubt often do—plot against him, no doubt often successfully. As the community becomes wealthier, these conflicts would be increasingly dangerous for the community as a whole, and resistance to the Big Man would be proscribed with ever more vigor.\n\nThe desire to be a Big Man would have to be the one desire against which the community is most unanimously ranged. But this desire and its concomitant resentments must still be represented and deferred, and this is done in the form of human sacrifice: the divine becomes more human as a single human become more divine, and only this ultimate sacrifice can satisfy the god.\n\nThe anthropomorphization of the divine is, that is, paradoxically, the anthropomorphization of the human. We are all filled with the desire to usurp, not only the place of the emperor, but also of all of our fellows—we covet the other’s wife, oxen, home, etc., and we are well aware that we do. At the same time, with the rise of empires, it can be observed that empires and emperors do, in fact fall—the most apparently powerful and arrogant rulers are swallowed up by yet more powerful ones, or swept away by invasions from the surrounding, savage plains. A form of holiness that can defer increasingly rich and symmetrical desires and in a durable way becomes an urgent necessity. Judaic “narrative monotheism,” the Jewish God whose name is the declarative sentence, is invented/discovered in response to this necessity. Human sacrifice can be abolished because there is no man-god, whom we resent, envy and hope for succor from to demand it: a “portable,” invisible God, who gives a law under which we can control all of our now evident “sinful” desires replaces all that barbaric carnage.\n\nThe installation of this new mode of holiness requires that producer’s desire, even in its earliest emergence, be unanimously resented and thoroughly proscribed. There is no place for it: God provides, humans are grateful recipients. The desire to see oneself as a creator, as a God-maker, must be extirpated. Monotheism is utterly hostile to producer’s desire, and replaces it with an all-encompassing and more realistic hope for consumer’s satisfaction. We can see how the modern market system ultimately inherits this valuation, while finding a way to incorporate the rather titanic producer’s desires required to bring capitalism into being: producer’s desire can be sanctioned as long as, and only to the extent that, it serves consumer’s satisfaction.\n\nEven the most pro-capitalist libertarians, with very few exceptions, sell capitalism as a social order in which the consumer rules—even though it is patently obvious that no consumer has ever the faintest idea of the object of his satisfaction until some producer imagined and then brought it into being. Now, throughout his account, Gans consistently refers to producer’s desire as “fantasy,” “wishful thinking,” “impotent,” and so on, clearly adopting the judgment he has been analyzing, coming from monotheism and ultimately market society. “Consumerism is humanism” he declares at one point (in French, ironically contesting, I assume, Sartre’s parallel assertion regarding existentialism).\n\nSo, it is on this one point that I differ from Gans: the demonization (a very literal application of the term, in this case) of producer’s desire is not warranted by an originary account of the dialectic of producer’s desire and consumer satisfaction. We need no longer accede to the desperate dogmatism of “declarative culture” on this issue; we can reintegrate the “magical” imperative into our social thinking and our social ethics.\n\nWe shouldn’t do so lightly, however—I hope that my account has made it clear that there were, and are, very compelling reasons for keeping a tight lid on producer’s desire, on insisting that it at least serve the community. The producer, though, knows what will serve the community before the community does. And the community has been usurped by a form of consumer’s desire that has eschewed all reciprocity, with either God, some authoritative representative of the community, or the producers who must, after, provide what the consumer beyond consumption demands, and has become pure and insatiable entitlement. (And, for that matter, even ordinary, non-pathological consumerism doesn’t produce the people who could defend consumerism.) The resurgence of producer’s desire is first of all a refusal to be bound by the demands of that voracious maw.\n\nSo, whatever any of us thinks of the racial or sexual thinking of various strands in the alt-right (Cernovich, while strongly androcentric, is completely uninterested in racial questions, explicitly welcoming all Americans into an American nationalism), I think we can better understand and even welcome it if we understand it as a necessary and inevitable resurgence of the long marginalized producer’s desire. The problem thereby posed to our social and political thinking is, what kind of order can place producer’s desire at the center? Just as the evolution of myth was an evolution of the ability to posit new intentions of the other co-participants in ritual, new thinking about the producer/consumer dialectic will involve retelling events from recent (and maybe not only recent) and contemporary history: identifying and eliciting producerist intentions (both civilizing and dyscivic) we were unprepared to notice before.\n\n(Incidentally, this might be a way of beginning to construct the terms of a shared history, and resisting what seems to be a devolution into increasingly incompatible conspiracy theories—a devolution that follows the same logic I posited at the onset of monotheistic thinking: that is, we are more and more capable of imagining each other capable of more and more, without any shared sense of the unthinkable. The possibilities of global forms of sympathy are, not surprisingly, conjoined with imaginings of unprecedented forms of social chaos.) What allows for the conversion of internal scenes to external ones? How can we train ourselves to create internal scenes free of the consumerist imperative, our own and others’, and that can concatenate into other producerist imaginaries?\n\nIt is a form of originary thinking to imagine new centers, and then target and reshape all the intellectual habits that prevent us from training our attention on them. A good place to begin is by widening the circle of others one can treat as rivals one competes with, emulates, befriends, and from whose mistakes one learns; rather than as recalcitrants refusing to follow one down the rabbit hole of one’s own perceived entitlement. Discipline itself creates the new reality, possibilities that didn’t previously exist but will have always already existed."
    },
    {
      "slug": "consent",
      "title": "Consent",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "From status to contract, from tribe or family to individual, from established hierarchies and dependencies to unrestricted movement—that’s the trajectory of modernity. The logic of this transformation whittles away at all inherited norms and virtues—loyalty, honor, courage, faith—leaving all value distilled to a single one: consent. To do something to someone without their consent is evil; to prevent someone from doing what they want to do is evil. Relationships are valid insofar as they are founded on mutual consent, and wrongs within a relationship involve acting in ways not originally consented to by all involved.\n\nYou can easily develop a theory of historical progress based on consent, as reliance on consent forces individuals to develop their own judgments based on the consequences of their actions thereby making consent increasingly well informed, and contemporary libertarians have developed a sophisticated theory of ethics predicated upon the “no harm” principle—i.e., that everyone has a right to do anything that does not involve the initiation of physical force upon another’s person or property—i.e., complete freedom, limited only by the consent of others (with the same freedom) where required..\n\nWe are in the process of learning, though, that nothing can be more insane than a social order founded on consent. Ground zero here is, of course, contemporary sexual relations. More and more states are now passing “affirmative consent” laws, replacing the original anti-“rape culture” epithet “no means no” with “yes means yes.” “No means no” has its problems (what if the man persists after the first “no” and the woman does not repeat the objection, etc.), but it can be negotiated reasonably—one can analyze an encounter and determine the extent of resistance and coercion. “Yes means yes,” though, is crazy—bound up with unsolvable metaphysical paradoxes, each with enormous potential for manipulation and harm. The absurdity of “yes means yes” is widely recognized, as how could it not be?—and, yet, this doesn’t seem to deter its advocates in the slightest. Indeed, this punitive and vengeful empowerment of a protected victim group and, needless to say, their political and ideological proxies, seems rather explicitly to be part of the point.\n\nRegardless of the maliciousness of contemporary radicalizations of “consent,” that radicalization is inherent in the concept of “consent” unmoored from any other moral or ethical terms. In the first instance, arguments in favor of consent are arguments in favor of specific freedoms from specific restrictions: first of all, regarding the disposal or property and choice in sexual partners. Two people want to engage in an exchange prohibited under current guild or religious law; two people wish to get married regardless of the interests of their respective families. In such cases, the existence of consent is not in question, because if they weren’t already consenting they would not be pushing to have the restrictions lifted.\n\nConsent has an immaculate birth, and can stand as a pristine alternative to the complicated and corrupt machinations of established institutions ruling through force in accord with dynastic and more shameful material considerations. Even a couple of centuries of exposure of the implications of this romantic notion of consent doesn’t seem to have damaged its prestige—perhaps because of a belief that we are learning from these exposures and will not continue to allow our desires to lead us into the same disasters; perhaps because no alternative post-consent norm is thinkable; perhaps because there are always more “arbitrary” restrictions for the new generation of lovers to rebel against, even if just the institutionalization and rationalization of the results of the previous generation’s rebellion.\n\n“Yes means yes” really brings us to the limits of this development, though. Not only the encounter itself, but every “move” in the encounter needs to be assented to explicitly. Can I touch you here? Can I stroke you here? Can I kiss you here? Etc. Leave aside intuitive revolt against this attempt to bureaucratize romantic encounters—in truth, just about anything can be erotized. The problem here is that there is no way of measuring the consent given against the action then taken—not only is there always something in the action that could not have been anticipated or included in the consent (what if while partner A is touching partner B in location X but at the same time moving somewhat on the bed so as to facilitate said touching—was that movement consented to?) but language can never be made “particulate” enough to ensure continued agreement on the relation between sign and referent. It is a parodic nightmare of empiricism, of the idea that all of reality must be grasped, down to the tiniest details (but there are always details within details, ad infinitum).\n\nBeyond even these intrinsic impossibilities (al though also included in them) is the fact that agreements always need to be assessed post facto, and in subsequent reflections upon any event, elements and conditions of the event that were not evident at the time become so. Perfect consent can never, in fact, be ascertained. What kind of pressure did one party bring upon the other—moral pressure (he paid for dinner), emotional blackmail (if you want us to keep going out…), environmental pressure (he brought me to a party where everyone was drinking and making out), and so on. Introduce into that the new bureaucratic and financial incentives created by the law itself to discover new forms of “sexual assault,” and sexual intercourse becomes as impossible as under the most extreme Puritanical regime—and, at least, the Puritans allow for mostly unhindered marital sex, while the standard of “consent” can ultimately maintain no coherent distinction between the marital and non-marital.\n\nPeople, we can assume, will continue to have sex but only insofar as they set aside, i.e., rebel against, the entire regime of “consensuality”—genuine consent will involve overthrowing the entire apparatus of consent. No doubt sci-fi thrillers of young lovers escaping the totalitarian consensual sexual regime are in the making—but this new romanticism will be liable to the possibility of bringing that entire regime down upon an even momentarily disappointing lover.\n\nMany have already noticed the irony of this post-sexual liberation tendency to install a sexual regime that resembles nothing so much as the most clichéd caricature of “Victorian morality.” (Referring to the “legs” of a table was “triggering” for Victorian maidens.) It thereby helps us to understand where such regimes come from—there must be some mighty compulsion to bring the sexual rebels this long way around back to the very thing they were rebelling against. At root is what cannot be discussed openly—the complementary relations between men and women and the asymmetry of the sexual relation. At least the Puritans and Victorians were well aware of such things. Since we refuse to be, we can expect all kinds of further haphazardly generated excrescences upon personal interactions, no doubt with the aid of social media—apps for registering consent in advance, filming of encounters, release forms required by universities, rules about parties and other social events, perhaps new kinds of sex segregation, and who knows what else.\n\nThe alternative to the political theory of consent, then, is a political anthropology of competing imperatives (and not just in the sexual realm). The hypergamic female imperative; the polygamic male imperative; the female imperative to have her children protected; the male imperative to know that he is protecting his own children. And implicit anthropology, that now needs to be made explicit, has through trial and error arrived at monogamy as the best sexual regime for negotiating these imperatives. It was, in fact, through monogamy that the passage from obligation and coercion to consent in sexual matters was navigated—from the “fake” marriages of familial alliances to the “real” marriages based on the mutual love of the partners.\n\nThere is already, of course, an entire therapeutic industry devoted to helping individuals maintain and improve their marriages; there is some, but not much, discussion of the relation between monogamy as an institution and the whole panoply of rights and entitlements that now frame our interactions. Even conservative politicians hardly ever ask anymore, when reviewing a policy proposal, whether it will strengthen or weaken the institution of marriage. The institution itself must be consented to, and can no longer be taken for granted. The imperatives all go underground, and scandalize us when they rear their untutored heads.\n\nWe can’t imagine an entire social order recovering or “rehearing” (reheeding) those imperatives. The scenario I sketched incidentally before, of “new romantics” who must pledge not so much undying love as to refrain from reporting the other to the sex police, provides us with a model for reflection. The discipline of these young lovers, who must learn how to mediate their own desires and resentment unaided by institutions that would love nothing more than to entangle them in its own legal, bureaucratic and therapeutic snares, would then have to be institutionalized, in ad hoc, local, secessionist forms, in communities committed (consenting) to the eternal institution of marriage, subordinating all rights to the preservation of that institution.\n\nGiven the asymmetry of the sex regime, this would depend upon highly virtuous young women, al though perhaps less so as the sex police come to impinge more and more upon the normal desires of normal people, and women come to regret the damage calling upon them to settle their scores has done to them and their own prospects. Such secessionist communities would have to reorder “consent” all along the line, openly and systematically embedding it in institutions that, paradoxically, both precede and are consented to by the participating parties. Refusing to allow oneself to be grinded up in the gears of the sex police machinery would require choosing other friends, those would respect one’s choice and, above all, not report you.\n\nIt would require establishing alternative media so that arguments in favor of one’s secession (“sexcession”?) can be made publicly. No doubt a new legal and political subculture will be needed to protect the sexcessionists from the intrusions of an increasingly totalitarian order which can brook no concessions to outmoded norms of tacit mutual respect.\n\nTo consent is to put forth a sign matching another sign already put forth. The “proof” that the signs match each other can only be in future signs iterating the original ones. That’s why an email sent the morning after a sexual encounter can be used as evidence that the encounter was consensual. The signs given by the consenting parties become public, and thereby institutionalized, as norms inevitably emerge. Radicalized consent seeks to undermine the validity of those future signs because its advocates can sense the limitations on consent once a succession of signs solidifies into something like an institution. The left, in other words, as always, wants to keep all its options open: as long as consent can be questioned, accusations of domination and violence can be made.\n\nAs always, the left provides those of us who would like to be in the social and cultural reconstruction business with a template to work against. It is precisely in these relations between practices and discourses, events and events that reflect upon the previous event, that the intimations of institutionalized consent can be found. You are responsible for your actions on the night of the encounter just as and because you are responsible for your actions when you send that email the next day just as and because you are responsible for your actions when you tell a story to the campus police that contradicts what you wrote in the email, etc.\n\nIn the end, you mark yourself as either someone who wants the institution to do your dirty work (provide formal warrants for your resentments) or someone who defers the siren call of the resentment enforcement mechanisms because you want to sustain a space of consent that leaves open the possibility of desirable modes of personal and social interaction. We are at the point, though, where such deferrals cannot rely upon commonsense—to resist the siren one must be a bit of an anthropologist, at least in the sense of being able to inspect one’s resentments (and resist those seeking to inflame and manipulate them). It’s not easy to be an anthropologist of your own life—one might discover all kinds of motivations, or “revealed preferences” that contradict one’s “declared preferences.”\n\nOne must have faith that the process of revelation (reading the “declared” in relation to the “revealed”), i.e., of a kind of living in truth, will generate the norms that make future successions of signs possible. But once mastered, such acts of deferral create new realities, including new kinds of romance and new kinds of community. It is very interesting that the most dangerous temptation, at least for women, the one most likely to cause you to lose your soul, is to surrender your ability to consent in the name of a utopia of absolute consent."
    },
    {
      "slug": "converse",
      "title": "Converse",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I would like to roll some of my recent reflections on the victimary, the alt-right and related matters into this very fruitful way of thinking about the victimary from Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle :\n\n“PC” suggests political orthodoxy, but it is more useful to understand its root basis in ethical terms, which alone can explain its power even in conservative circles. The fundamental ethical posture of PC is the fiction that, as in the originary event, all humanity is present at every conversation, so that any utterance that can be suspected of predicating something unfavorable, whether factual or not, of a category of people, particularly an ascriptive category, is to be avoided out of consideration for that group’s claim on universal human status. If all political discussion be considered the equivalent of such a universal conversation, then any reference to disparities in competence, however “objective,” violates the moral model in which all humans participate symmetrically, as in the originary event, in the exchange of signs.\n\nAny suggestion of unequal competence is not merely impolite but immoral, the equivalent of denying someone the vote because he or she is less intelligent or well-educated than others. The enforcement of originary equality, on the back burner throughout the long history of hierarchical society al though affirmed in principle by Christian doctrine, was brought to the fore in reaction to the racialism of the Axis in WWII and particularly to the Holocaust. We should not forget that the expansion of the political/voting class in Western countries to include Jews, the members of nonwhite races, persons without property, and finally, women, took place over several generations and ended in most places less than a century ago.\n\nThe notion that the fundamental fiction of “PC” is that all of humanity is present at each conversation is, I think, not only exactly right but a way of thinking about the victimary that is originary, down to earth and commonsensical, and generative. Let’s work through the above the discussion step by step.\n\n…so that any utterance that can be suspected of predicating something unfavorable, whether factual or not, of a category of people, particularly an ascriptive category, is to be avoided out of consideration for that group’s claim on universal human status.\n\nThe so that makes some very specific assumptions about conversation. First, that a conversation can only be sustained among those who make maximal assumptions regarding each other’s shared humanity. Only the most favorable assumptions about all the others can guarantee this shared humanity: if I consider some others stupider than me (or, for that matter, smarter), or crueler (or more compassionate), etc., that would somehow preclude continuing the conversation. (What counts as a favorable assumption? What seems favorable to me privileges my own scale of values while disprivileging that of the other.) This would have to be true of any difference, though, wouldn’t it, since no difference can be declared absolutely non-ascriptive, once and for all, and any noticing of a difference can be considered derogatory (considering the other more creative and imaginative, for example, can be exoticizing condescension). In that case, though, what is there left to talk about in this universal conversation?\n\nIf all political discussion be considered the equivalent of such a universal conversation, then any reference to disparities in competence, however “objective,” violates the moral model in which all humans participate symmetrically, as in the originary event, in the exchange of signs. Any suggestion of unequal competence is not merely impolite but immoral, the equivalent of denying someone the vote because he or she is less intelligent or well-educated than others.\n\nTo the assumptions about conversation we can add some regarding morality. In what kind of conversation could I not offer to someone (and would that person absolutely refuse to listen to) comments regarding their performance in the company softball game, or suggestions regarding how to improve the paper they are working on, or, between lovers or spouses, how requests might be made in a more considerate way, etc.? All such comments can be taken to reflect adversely on disparities in competence in some area—any comment about competence can be taken to reflect some disparity, insofar as how could one comment on another’s competence without implicitly asserting a greater competence in, at least, observation?\n\nCouldn’t we go even further and say that any conversation, insofar as each participant says something that isn’t exactly the same as what the other participant(s) would say, implies the capacity to proffer some insight the other has not arrived at on his own? In that case, what counts here as “symmetrical,” and therefore “moral,” is representing each person to him or herself exactly as that person would like to see him or herself represented. The only moral conversation would then be reciprocal effusive flattery. But in the originary event all participants are reminding each other that each is on the verge of making a dangerous situation far more so—that leads to a very different (and far more demanding) kind of morality than the one Gans finds, correctly, to govern “PC” exchanges.\n\nThe insinuation that the retraction of voting rights would follow close behind any invidious distinction is, indeed, the method of the SJWs, but we can see the slight of hand exercised here, insofar as there is no reason to assume that those questioning others’ competence are ending the conversation—to the contrary, on the assumption Gans’s example provides, that is simply their side of the conversation. In some cases assertions of incompetence might involve exclusion—say, when firing someone—but in other cases it might be tied to pedagogical intent or moral exhortation (“you can do better!”).\n\nThe enforcement of originary equality, on the back burner throughout the long history of hierarchical society al though affirmed in principle by Christian doctrine, was brought to the fore in reaction to the racialism of the Axis in WWII and particularly to the Holocaust. We should not forget that the expansion of the political/voting class in Western countries to include Jews, the members of nonwhite races, persons without property, and finally, women, took place over several generations and ended in most places less than a century ago.\n\nLet’s keep the trope or fiction of conversation in mind here: what has happened is that many others have joined the conversation recently. Whether they were actively trying to interrupt, or were invited in, or, as it turns out, were already part of the conversation without being taken note of, makes a difference but can be set aside for now. I think that the most fundamental moral component of this fiction is the fact of finding others on a scene to the surprise of the veteran or founding members of that scene. Everyone has experienced these kinds of shocks or embarrassments: you are talking about someone, and all of a sudden realize that person is standing right there; you are a part of an informal cohort or cadre, and some new person joins and you realize they don’t know the slang, the anecdotes, the jokes that operate as currency within the group—either they must be instructed (often a tedious or impossible task) or the lingo of the group must be revamped (at great risk to the cohesion of the group) or the newcomer is simply ridiculed and expelled, on no grounds other than the tautological one of not “belonging,” and hence immorally.\n\nIn this way the fiction of a universal conversation is directly relevant and highly revealing of contemporary humanity, especially when we consider the vastly expanded means of communication now available, which, in fact, makes this something more than a fiction—someone in Nigeria really can see someone in China’s retweet of a comment made by some Mexican about Nigerians. There does seem to be a moral conclusion we can draw from this observation: don’t say anything about someone that you wouldn’t be prepared to say to them. This imperative clearly distinguishes our condition from that of early 20th century Westerners (for example), who certainly weren’t thinking that the objects of their conversations might also be participants as they explored the intellectual and moral implications of relative skull sizes of the different races.\n\nBut people are starting to say those same things once again today, aren’t they? Well, yes, but let’s add a corollary to the imperative just adduced: when speaking, explicitly or implicitly, to someone, you should be prepared to hear from them and respond accordingly. This simply derives from the reality that you will hear from them and many, including your own supporters, will expect to hear what you have to say in response.\n\nThis brings us back to our respective models of conversation. On one extreme, we have the extremely stilted, heavily choreographed and strictly policed model of “PC” conversation, the ethical basis of which (or the interpretation or exploitation of the ethical basis of which) Gans has very accurately explicated. On the other extreme, we have an increasingly universal conversation (circulating through Nigeria, China, Mexico, and so on) in which everyone is addressed by or overhears everyone else, but which fact is taken to be a cause to “up one’s game” and be prepared to engage one and all. I have not yet seen anyone on the alt-right refuse a conversation with others, whether on the Left or what they would consider the faux-right; VDare, for example, publishes both anti-Semites and Jews (their one “speech rule,” apparently, is that you can’t express absolute despair regarding the possibility of “patriotic immigration reform”).\n\nThere is no evidence that people who consider blacks on average less intelligent and more violent than whites are unwilling to address what blacks, including critical and antagonistic ones, have to say. And when they are, well, then, the universal conversation will see to their self-marginalization, won’t it? Certainly for now it is in the interest of the alt-righters to take on all comers, and that seems to be their practice. It is the “establishment” types who seem obsessed with narrowing the conversation and issuing entry permits to acceptable interlocutors—and that is what reduces the civility and level of conversation, and makes us less intelligent (it’s possible to imagine, for example, the elementary logical procedure of examining hypotheticals going extinct, insofar as it’s very hard to construct hypotheticals without assumptions about others’ likely behavior).\n\nThe trope of “conversation,” with its suggestion of civility, face-to-face intimacy and mutuality, can be misleading, though. These conversations are not always going to be polite—but name-calling and insults, as long as it keeps going, and something new keeps happening, is as much of a conversation as an Oxford-style debate—and far more so than the bizarre ballets the victimocracy demands we all get trained in. Of course, often, new things no longer happen—but, then, the conversation dies on its own, and there’s no cause for concern. Even more literal conversations work on multiple levels, with, say, overt politeness subtly undermined through dismissive body language or barely detectable irony.\n\nAll these ways of expressing solidarity and opposition can now be dismantled and rearticulated in numerous ways through various media, e.g., through mash-ups on You Tube. In a sense we’re all also talking about each other to our cohorts in full awareness that all the others are listening, thereby allowing for new layers of indirection and implication. One line of attack on the part of establishment conservatives on the alt-right has involved pointing to explicit and often obscene Nazi and racist iconography and verbal expression. I suppose it’s worth a try, but there are enough people who realize that such modes of expression are not necessarily a way of saying “kill all the Jews/blacks” but, rather, a way of saying “you’re telling me I can’t say x but I’m going to go right ahead and say y.”\n\nProhibition and inhibition breaking obscenities are also “conversational”—they make it possible to say other, more reasonable and productive things that were arbitrarily anathematized; they rattle and demoralize the enemy, exhaust their resources and weaken their policing powers; and they serve as bait, eliciting symptomatic responses from potential allies and enemies alike. “But you’re just justifying the unjustifiable, making excuses for the abhorrent!” If you like—but from my side of the conversation, by refusing to disavow those beyond some arbitrarily defined pale, I’m demolishing the SJW’s tactic of guilt by association.\n\nIn this way I believe I am expanding the kind of all-inclusive conversation in which we are all ready to speak both about and to everyone—the kind of conversation that is not only the best chance of saving civilization, but is virtually synonymous with civilization. (And, anyway, if it turns out that there are really enough people who want to kill me to create a danger, I want to know that, so I can prepare to defend myself or make other arrangements.)\n\nThe fiction of new entrants onto a conversational scene provides a helpful way of understanding the historical privileging of excluded participants in sequence. In the US, first Jews, then blacks, then the colonized, then women, then gays (it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the disabled seem to have dropped out of all these discussions and agitations—presumably, they couldn’t be shoe-horned into a “struggle for liberation” narrative). We can also, then, see how the terms of the conversation had to change in each case, and how each change provided a model for the next one. What kinds of invitations, interruptions and revelations were involved in each case?\n\nThere is no doubt that we could target very specific “chunks” of discourse that were once deployed heedlessly about each of these groups that seemed crisis-inducing once taken as addressed to them. The hows and the whys of each case would be interesting to explore. The strategy that ultimately became “PC” was to treat every “about” as a “to,” and, moreover, a “to” that couldn’t sustain itself in the face of a response “from.” In the end you have no choice but to let the other (the third person, in grammatical terms) supply the rules for the “about.” The universal morality of the West was taken hostage here, precisely by accusing it of being a “straight White male” morality.\n\nThis excuses the new participants from themselves responding to this morality that they presumably take to be both inadequate and the basis of a compelling indictment. For a while, through the 80s and maybe the 90s, there were feminists and postcolonial theorists aware of this paradox, and willing to take up the challenge. That all seems like ancient history now, which seems to suggest that there was, in fact, no real response. All that’s left, then, are constant interruptions of the conversation—but, since the others have long been inside the gates, what gets interrupted is the rejiggering of the terms induced by the latest pseudo-crisis.\n\nThis is not only lucrative for the most shameless interrupters, but ensures that we speak about nothing other than how to narrow the discursive terrain even further. It’s all ripe for explosion, and the new interrupters can only laugh when accused of violating some universal ethical norm."
    },
    {
      "slug": "family-resemblances",
      "title": "Family Resemblances",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It’s very interesting to explore forbidden topics—not only is the field wide open, with fundamental questions barely touched on, but there is the added, “meta” topic of all the ways we talk about the forbidden topic without talking about it. Naturally, I’m talking about race again. Here’s the starting point for this reflection: explicit racial politics is noxious, but implicit racial politics is just part, if not much, of politics. Explicit racial politics is always defensive. It is the politics of a group that assumes it can only advance its interests by fighting from within and exacerbating the racial categories to which it has been confined.\n\nSo, white nationalism is very unlikely in the US—most whites see themselves as “white” only in vague terms, and are reminded of it mostly when they have to fill out government mandated forms or hear themselves denounced by some minority activist—I think if you were to ask most American whites to “identify” themselves, they would choose ethnic, religious and regional terms. White nationalism will only be a problem if those government classifications and political denunciations (along with the bio-politics of demographic transformation) become so prevalent and intrusive that there is no other way of protecting a normal everyday life.\n\nThe defensiveness becomes noxious insofar as the transformation of tacit categories into explicit ones inevitably turns those categories into the stake in the struggle within the “movement”—who is the real white becomes the question, as the identification of “race traitors” takes over.\n\nStill, when leftists assert that American institutions and principles (the favoring of free enterprise, the insistence that “all men are created equal,” the expectation of minimal government interference in daily life, etc.) are really “white” institutions and principles, they have a point. We could get even more specific and say they are Anglo institutions and principles, dating back in their most explicit forms to Lockean liberal individualism but even much further back to medieval patterns of land ownership, family formation, and the relative weakness of the British monarchy. And, who knows, maybe even further back.\n\nThings go down the memory hole quickly these days, but I clearly remember lots of talk about the “Anglosphere” a decade or so ago when relations between the US, Canada, England and Australia seemed to establish these countries as a kind of spear of liberty in the war on terror. That seemed a mostly safe, if vaguely problematic, form of “identity politics,” as long as it remained on the “cultural” level—some accidents of history led to certain ideas being discovered by a particular group of people and now, presumably, those ideas can be propagated and implemented deliberately, rather than relying upon chance. I think that very few people thinking along these lines realize that this claim is a hypothesis that might be subject to disproof, revealing, perhaps, the accretion of “accidents” was really essential to the “ideas,” which can’t therefore be easily transplanted or, more disturbingly, that the ideas are products of a specific people in its entirety, including their genetic make-up.\n\nThe Left, in seeking to tar foundational American institutions as “white,” could just as easily be “privileging” whiteness as a source of remarkable and unrepeatable institutions and ideas. The question for opponents of the Left has been, how to respond to this charge—the approach up until now has been to deny the charge and assert the universality of the ideas and institutions; the approach of the alt-right is to reject the whole assumption that it’s a “charge” rather than simple description in the first place. The rhetorical and political advantages of an approach that allow you to turn your opponent’s trump card into your own can’t be denied.\n\nWould “Anglo” nationalism be less frightening than the “white” variety? Probably, because of the differing historical resonances (the KKK didn’t identify itself as “Anglo”) as well as the fact that “Anglos” would, I assume, be perhaps a plurality but certainly a minority of the American population—so, Anglo nationalism would be less threatening than the “dictatorship of the majority” we are enjoined to fear, and far more difficult to even imagine. It’s not all that different, though, if we consider that, if Anglos share a transmittable culture and even (more controversial, of course) a heritable set of character traits, it’s likely that the closest “relatives” of the Anglos, first of all the other Germanic peoples, and then other Western Europeans, would share a bit more with the Anglos than more distant peoples and would therefore be better equipped to conform to Anglo institutions.\n\nThis is no doubt questionable as well: one thing that biological investigations (that, say, tie—so far—a few genes to specific traits, or establish degrees of consanguinity between peoples) can’t tell us is which differences are meaningful, and how meaningful they are. In my ongoing explorations into corners of the internet I was previously unaware of (the vast caverns of the alt-right and Dark Enlightenment), I have seen arguments, for example, to the effect that Germans and Scandinavians who immigrated to the US in the 19th century brought customs and dispositions (too much respect for authority in the case of the Germans, too much power for women in the case of the Swedes) to this country at odds with and corrosive of its foundational Anglo culture. Perhaps people who are more different, and would therefore have to more radically transform themselves, will ultimately fit in better. If such radical transformation is possible, or possible without various deleterious side effects.\n\nThe insistence on conformity to existing institution, ideas and habits is already, then, racial politics, of the tacit kind. The resistance to such conformity is also racial politics, of a somewhat more explicit kind—one complains about the WASPs and belittles the supposedly superior dispositions one is required to adopt (what the WASP sees as proper, a sense of fair play, and respect for the individual is really unimaginative hypocrisy, etc.). The resentment at what appears ingratitude is likely to get yet a bit more explicit. And so on. As long as all this remains on the cultural and interpersonal level, and institutions are not forced to include (and, by now, include “proportionally”) members of groups with whom such reciprocal resentments are exchanged, all this remains on simmer.\n\nWhen it becomes political, and the cultural becomes politicized, and the personal becomes political, it heads toward the boiling point. The anti-whiteness left is playing with fire, but it’s easy to understand why most mainstream conservatives sound as if they should be starting each discussion with “some of my best friends are…”—they themselves have no idea how to either direct or put out that fire. They just don’t want to get burned.\n\nThe anti-whiteness left feels free to play the pyromaniac because they feel sure that there will never, in fact, be the backlash to their activities that they are always ringing the alarm over. This means that they assume that whites are, in fact, more civilized than they themselves are—even in response to significant property damage and physical assault all whites will do is pack it up and go home. This envious contempt for civilization includes the whites among the anti-whiteness left, who de-civilize themselves in order to be good whites—still, the very fact that significant portions of the white population decamp to anti-civilizational forces is a sign of a higher level of civilization, since only civilization contains such ambivalence over the justness of one’s institutions and the limits of one’s more tribal loyalties.\n\nWhite privilege is simply civilization, that is, and so is the attempt to repudiate it. What I am doing here, by the way, is modeling the way in which I think defenders of civilization should answer the anti-whites: just keep flipping their own words, showing how their denunciations of whiteness are really implicit confessions of failure in their own civilizing process. No positive claim ever needs to be made—you just turn their discourse inside out, like a glove. And this is in fact easy when habits like punctuality, politeness, application and objectivity are among those most energetically denounced as “white.”\n\nThis is why the argument I made a while back, in my “Unified Field Theory of the Left,” that the left is fundamentally anti-civilization (determined to discredit the internal relation between deferral and discipline, on one side, and wealth and power, both individual and communal, on the other) is so important. One can not only “decode” all of leftist discourse with this mind (why, for example, due they attack one form of “inequality” but not another?), but one can treat the left fairly and enter into dialogue with less crazed leftists along these lines. There is always much that is arbitrary and unnecessary in the restrictions imposed by civilization, and sometimes one set of impositions in fact interferes with efforts to create higher forms of discipline.\n\nIt’s very hard to tell which elements of civilization are arbitrary or outdated and harmful—very often it’s not the most obvious and irritating ones—but it’s a very worthy topic of discussion. We should always be open to controlled experimentation. There are very good grounds for contending that the extreme marginalization of homosexuality that persisted well into the 20th century is such an outdated and harmful element, even if one understands the likely significance of that marginalization in the process of constructing the family forms required for the expansion of civilization. I also think there are very good grounds for arguing that things are not nearly that simple, and that we are moving much too fast, but the point is it should be possible to argue—that it is not is itself a marker of indiscipline and a de-civilizing trajectory.\n\n(Doesn’t the virulence with which LGBT activists suppress even the slightest expression of disapproval of homosexuality provide some evidence of patterns of concerted behavior that might reveal more than current ideological divides? Could such patterns be part of the reason for “homophobia” in the first place? Just more mischievous lines of questioning for engagements with SJWs.)\n\nRacial politics, sexual politics and migratory politics are all forms of bio-politics, which seems to be the only kind we have these days. One thing my peregrinations throughout the white-o-sphere (“albasphere”?) has enabled me to notice is how common it has become for whites, and especially Christians and conservatives, to tout their bi-racial families and adoptions of Third World children. As the famous Seinfeld episode had it, “not that there’s anything wrong with that!” Still, it’s hard to deny that there’s a bit of trolling going on here—part of the point of publicizing and boasting about these non-traditional families seems to be, not only to inoculate oneself against anti-whiteism, but to draw out the “bad whites,” who will make “snide” (or worse) comments, allowing one to distinguish oneself from them in a great ostentatious burst of self-righteousness.\n\nThey are daring you to notice something that you “shouldn’t” notice. But what are the consequences of training yourself to not notice? What other blindnesses would one be inadvertently cultivating? What are the consequences of noticing but training yourself not to say anything? What else will you deduce you must keep silent about, and what kind of distinctions will emerge between those with whom you can speak freely and those you must deceive because they, contemptibly, are too weak to ask some obvious questions?\n\nThe most interesting HBD (Human Bio-Diversity, remember?) concept I have come across so far is the “hajnal line” from St. Petersburg to Italy, dividing Europe in two according to patterns of marriage. To keep it real simple (for myself, first of all), to the West of the hajnal line there is much more out-marriage (non-consanguinous) than there is to the East. On a cultural level, it is easy to see how this would lead to the extension of trust outside of the extended family (beyond, say, second cousins) thereby promoting what we see as the values of “objectivity,” “altruism,” and “individualism.” We also cannot help but notice that the most successfully modernized countries are on that side of the line.\n\nThe question is whether there is a genetic component to this divergence—that is, do descendants of those who fell out on the “right” side of the Hanjal line have a genetic predisposition to those values? (Causing, or as a result of, the divergence in family forms?) Should we be asking these questions? Should I be interested in the Hanjal line? Should I be harangued, harassed, and chased from the public sphere if I am? Once again, I am modeling forms of dialogue: in response to vague and sulfurous alarm ringing, the anti-whiteist should be asked: do you deny the existence of a field of inquiry here? How would you like to see those pursuing these lines of inquiry punished?\n\nAnd why? No doubt you will encounter many enthusiastic inquisitors—the point of such asymmetrical rhetorical strategies is not to persuade (al though it may do that on occasion) but to confuse the antagonist, defuse the antagonism, and compel the SJWs to openly avow (or disavow) their totalitarian ends and methods.\n\nThe only politics that can transcend the explicit racial one would be a digital civilizational politics. Digital civilization is predicated upon a social order governed by algorithms, which necessarily creates a simulcral reality: what happens is always a particular possibility out of the many continually generated by all the actuarial, marketing, testing and other modeling constitutive of all modern institutions—in a sense, then, whatever happens has “always already” happened. So, a digital civilizational politics first of all wants to allow the algorithms to create order, by letting inquiries into reality guide (and, increasingly, minimize) interventions in reality.\n\nResentments are blunted, disarmed and turned inward to the precise extent that this is accomplished. What happens always exceeds the simulacral, though, insofar as even when the most probable event is the one that occurs, it comes bearing various anomalies that subvert the model that prepared our attention to greet it. The singular deviation from a model is what we notice, and virality is based on this articulation, creating what we could see as a skewed iconicity: the viral phenomenon is the misfitting label on an extremely predictable but ultimately utterly unpredictable conjunction of institutionalized habits and desires.\n\nTo take a randomly selected example from today’s news, “voting pleas in obituaries go viral”—conventional final requests, for example, that mourners give to some charity in lieu of sending flowers, are both extended into new terrain (pleading with one’s survivors and anyone reading the obituary not to vote for Trump or Clinton) and (deliberately or not) satirized, gently, by being swallowed up in the kind of earthly battles and obsessions that the more eternal perspective provided by commemoration should presumably transcend. It’s like putting a political bumper sticker on a headstone.\n\nSo, if all viral phenomena are a bit like campaign bumper stickers on headstones, the discipline required of members of a digital civilization could be likened to finding and placing another sign to complement the bumper sticker on the headstone—that is, to maintain the headstone as an object of commemoration, without erasing its defacement and enhancement (desperately trying to scrub off all evidence of the bumper sticker; placing the opposing sticker on top of it) but, rather, by balancing that defacement/enhancement with another that redirects attention to the headstone as the repository of the dueling and dialoging signs.\n\nThat means slowing down the virality (without trying, futilely, to resist it) by embedding it in a dense network of signs. Similarly, to try to respond to a racialized politics with anti-racist outrage simply accelerates the virality of the racialized meme; while simply going with the flow of that meme will itself produce splits between less and more radicalized stances (which itself replicates the racist-antiracist binary). Better to redirect the meme to the forgotten tacit racial dimension of politics by placing the polarized difference in a field of less polarized differences.\n\nThis would move us away from incommensurable identities toward Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances,” which he saw as providing a better understanding than those provided by a typical dictionary definition or the use of synonyms of the ways words are used and take on meanings. We can gather more and more of those of European descent into the category of “white”; but many of those who might fit that category also overlap with other categories. There will be general identitarian gravitational pulls, which will be pointless to resist, but other affinities will always counter the more “viral” ones at any given moment.\n\nWe will notice more and more group differences, for good and for bad, and we will become less and less afraid of noticing them; but we will also become more interested in exceptions, in surprising counter-trends, and in situating ourselves across intersecting categories. We already see individuals pile a series of cultural and ethnic categories upon themselves—one is half black, quarter Asian, quarter white, gay, male, from the Midwest, etc.—but now this is done in order to bolster one’s victimary credentials, including mitigating one’s inclusion within “victimizing” groups. As we become more digitally civilized, such articulations will counter the predictabilities associated with all of the categories, including the victimary ones.\n\nThe point will be to accept the stereotype (label, bumper sticker) others spontaneously place on you, while working within that stereotype to retrofit it interoperatively with all the other inescapable labels. This is where postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha could never go because they could never leave the victimary reservation, but it follows up on and incorporates into originary thinking his notion of “mimickry.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "proper-politics",
      "title": "Proper Politics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The reason why there is such a thing as politics, which we might define as “consequential disagreements” (that is, disagreements whose settlement is imposed on all parties), is uncertainty about property. There must be some certainty about property for there to be politics, which means that politics is only possible at a certain level of civilization; but there is not complete certainty, which means that politics indicates a still “civilizing” community. Property simply means recognized physical control over things that only one person could control, starting with one’s body. A completely ritual order, which sets rules concerning the use of all things, bodies included, has no property, even if it must have, here and there, elements of property (in shared tasks each person must have some specialized delegation, implying relative control over objects; the food one is placing in one’s mouth, the space one takes up, etc.).\n\nThere is uncertainty over property because the various property owners must acknowledge one another’s property—if I don’t accept where you have drawn your property line, or don’t think you should be allowed to do things I don’t approve of in your home, then I don’t acknowledge your property; or, at least, I only do so within limits; hence the uncertainty. The greater consensus there is within the community regarding the terms under which each acknowledges the property rights of the other, the less uncertainty and the less politics, because what, then, would there be to consequentially disagree about?\n\nThe traditional solution to uncertainty regarding property is the state—the state settles the uncertainty, in a more or less rule governed and orderly manner. The state, though emerges out of the monarchy, which itself capped perhaps the most certain property regime imaginable: the king owned either more land than everyone else, or owned everything; in the latter case there is no uncertainty, and in the former the king’s own power depends upon a high level of certainty, which protects his property above all. But the monarchy left too many without property, and when the various pre-property “elements” were sufficiently distributed among the propertyless, the system of property became too uncertain.\n\nThe monarchy, in a more or less revolutionary manner, transitioned into what we now know as the state, in which the lesser propertied must acknowledge the property of others, most of whom have more, some of whom have much more, than themselves, in order for property to attain the needed degree of certainty. In modern society and democracy in particular, property is held at the pleasure of the lesser propertied.\n\nModern politics, then, is about what concessions must be extracted from the more propertied in order to persuade the lesser propertied to buy in. These categories don’t remain static—it is in the nature of the private property system to generate wealth, and hence more property, so that the lesser propertied often become more propertied and the more even more, sometimes much more. These changes affect the negotiations over the buy in of the less propertied. The state mediates these negotiations, and brokers compromises that erode property in various ways: employers, for example, can be forced to pay their employees specified amounts; employees, on the other hand, are forced to allow the state to extract a portion of their wages for broader social insurance purposes.\n\nThis eats into the property rights of both, but facilitates reciprocal recognition of the other’s property. Political struggles then become concerned with the terms of those compromises, which keeps property uncertain, but, as long as the system works, not uncertain enough to lead any significant party to withdraw recognition.\n\nThe more certain property, the more disciplined the community—this is a maxim that implies reciprocal causality. The more certain property is, the more discipline will be a means of acquiring more of it and holding it more securely; the more disciplined members of the community become, the more they will insist on enhanced certainty. This “conservative” politics emerges in response to the leftist politics that finds it advantageous to keep unsettling property, to make the uses and distribution of property more and more open to debate and state intervention, and does so by denying the connection between discipline and property.\n\nThis is an extremely reliable marker of the left: they will always want to make some use of property which is presently certain less certain, and they will do so by attacking the assumption that the certainty of use corresponds to the consensual interactions of a disciplined, civilized community. No, the left insists—some property owner, no matter how marginal, does not recognize others’ property in their current form on the fraudulent grounds of being less disciplined, and this insistence entails a more or less successful attempt to hold the entire community hostage to that one hold-out, or group of hold-outs.\n\nThe persistence of the left in leveraging the need for property recognition inevitably leads to the question, on the part of the majority of more or less contented property owners, of whose recognition we need, and why? In other words, hostage taking in the name of some minority who rejects not only the current uses of property but the very terms on which our respective uses of our own property are negotiated, must lead to questions regarding the boundaries of the community. Would it be more or less costly to simply cut the complainants loose? Since the state is predicated upon the inclusion of all present members and upon preserving the rules of future inclusion, and benefits from these ongoing negotiations, especially the intractable ones (because only the state could hold together these incompatibles, making it indispensable), the state makes such cutting loose prohibitively expensive.\n\nBut this just raises the possibility of a cost-benefit analysis of the state, at least in its current form. That also raises the stakes, so such considerations only emerge if the pirateering of the left becomes intolerable. Obviously, the whole point of this discussion is to consider what happens if that is the case.\n\nA substantial portion of the community—it need not be a majority, just enough so that the current community would no longer, in any meaningful sense, exist without it—must decide that its relation to the state must be dramatically reformed because the state no longer guarantees the needed degree of property certainty. The state, this one or some replacement, must lower the threshold for allowing complaints over the use of one’s property. Property must be made more certain. There will be disagreements—and therefore politics—amongst this portion regarding how certain is certain enough, how much short-term uncertainty is to be accepted in exchange for what probability of longer-term certainty. This portion must start to define itself as a community in terms underived from those given by the state: its members must carry on their politics “realistically,” rather than “nominally,” to reference the medieval epistemological dispute, which is to say no longer as citizens of the state but as… what, exactly?\n\nThe question is, once the process of recognition intrinsic to certainty in property can no longer be fobbed off onto legal procedures and political machinations, what means of ensuring such certainty can be invented or restored? The answer seems to me obvious: markers of trust and respect that had become secondary to or even prohibited by state enforcement of a kind of simulated trust and respect must be put in place. These will be markers of similarity in forms of discipline, which means similarity in family forms, in forms of shared decision making, in language, in manners, in criteria of “politeness,” in assumptions about rights to self-defense, and so on.\n\nThe more acute the crisis the more markers will be multiplied: if you really need to trust others a lot, a couple of these markers will not be enough: you might insist on all of them. This means that those who have only a few or a couple of such markers will be excluded, and will either join with the state or splinter off into other groups—there may be attempts to retain them, simply in order to find strength in numbers, but with the kind of strength we are talking about here—sustained, civilization preserving strength—numbers become less important. The more markers are insisted upon, the more you can rely on meta-markers, i.e., markers that indicate that a particular person is highly likely to share your assumptions regarding work, property, sexual values, means of social interaction, education, and so one, and can hence be relied upon to engage with you in reciprocal recognition, ensuring the certainty, of, your property.\n\nThe conclusion is clear: as long as the left continues (and why shouldn’t they?) to double down on taking civilizational prerequisites hostage in the name of continually unsettling property so as to increase the value of its hostages and thereby further unsettle property… opposition to the left on the part of the dwindling majority will tend to take ethnic and racial forms—i.e., white solidarity. There are a lot of ways in which that could play out, prior to and following reconstruction of state/society relations, and various ways in which inclusion and exclusion in whiteness can be defined, various ways in which non-whites could ally with and/or co-exist peacefully with whites, but the basic tendency is, I think, indisputable, and we should all be prepared to develop terms of engagement with it.\n\nIt may be possible to imagine resisting the left on the terms of the existing state-property configuration, but the fact that only those already transitioning to a race realist position seem at all inclined to refuse the left’s ransoms makes this more of a fantasy—indeed, the conservatives have responded to the alt-right anti-victimary race realists as leftists, i.e., by pointing and shrieking. Those who take the war against the SJWs as the primary political task, then, will find it necessary to expose, systematically, the gap between nominal citizenship (and the legal and political apparatuses defining it) and real markers of civilizational reliability.\n\nIt is a primary strategy of the left to exacerbate that gap, because the formal criteria for ascertaining rights can be enforced by the state in the face of markers of reliability; the counter-strategy is to expose the resulting entitlements as deliberate repudiations of even gestures of reliability."
    },
    {
      "slug": "you-take-the-high-road",
      "title": "You Take the High Road…",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "An uncharacteristically ambivalent article by Daniel Greenfield on David Horowitz’s Front Page website today: usually, Greenfield charges straight ahead, target always in his sights, exposing contradictions and mercilessly mocking the evasions of his victimary opponent. Today, while openly asserting the need to fight Political Correctness, he proceeds to, rather than commence the fight, distinguish between more and less acceptable modes of struggle. While contending that Republicans need to fight PC on causes that might be uncomfortable for many conservatives, like the right to display the Confederate flag and resisting the replacement of Andrew Jackson by Harriet Tubman on the currency, Greenfield adds the following:\n\nThere are two ways to fight political correctness. There is the low road of populist vulgarity, of political incorrectness for the sake of political incorrectness, mocking and demeaning cultural scolds to make them seem ridiculous. And then there is the high road of challenging them as privileged demagogues who attack civil rights in the name of civil rights, who are not victims but witch hunters aided and abetted by powerful media interests, and whose tactics represent a grave threat to individual freedom.\n\nThe low road is enjoyable, but plays into the portrayal of politically correct activists as victims. The high road exposes them for the totalitarian bullies that they truly are. But it requires fighting for the rights of the politically incorrect people that you may disagree with. And when conservatives fail to fight for fairness and due process, they cede the fight to a class of politically incorrect activists who have no conservative principles and who stand for nothing except egging on the other side to extremes.\n\nI am almost certain that this is an oblique attack on Breitbart, and in particular provocateurs like Milo Yiannopolis closely associated with it and, probably, the alt-right in general. Greenfield is being, again uncharacteristically, but perhaps wisely, cautious here. Greenfield surely shares much of the alt-right’s critique of mainstream conservatism, especially on the point he is addressing here—the seemingly congenital inability of those conservatives to resist the victimary onslaught. At the same time he is no doubt aware that much of the alt-right transgresses the boundaries Greenfield himself observes regarding the norms of liberal democratic political culture, especially regarding issues of race and antisemitism. Greenfield, I assume, wants to distinguish himself from without entering into open combat with, the alt-right. I think Greenfield’s attempt here exposes the limitations of his approach, but I’m not interested in taking sides—I’m far more interested in observing the tiny shoots of new discourses and new conversations on the non-obsolete right.\n\nGreenfield’s caution makes it difficult to tell exactly what he is against, and why. I suppose vulgarity and populism are by definition “low,” but does Greenfield want to withdraw entirely from the “low” field? Should that be left to the left? I suppose political incorrectness for the sake of political incorrectness leaves us no way of distinguishing more and less effective manifestations of un-PCness—but in the very same sentence Greenfield provides the point: making the cultural scolds seem ridiculous. Surely Greenfield is not opposed to the time-honored political activity of demeaning and ridiculing one’s opponents—the truth is, Greenfield himself does this kind of thing all the time, often brilliantly and highly entertainingly.\n\nMaybe he prefers his own brand of cutting word-play to the more physical forms of confrontation evidenced, for example, at Yiannopolis’s, Stephen Crowder’s and Christine Huff Sommer’s recent appearance at the U of Amherst, where they (Crowder and Yiannopolis, anyway) exchanged insult for insult, rant for rant, middle finger for middle finger. But why exclude the latter? Clearly, a key part of fighting the SJWs is being able to confront them on whatever level they choose to attack, giving no quarter. If the more responsible rightist Greenfield wants to be here can defend the Confederate nostalgiacs, on the ground of “process” (as liberals used to, as Greenfield himself notes, used to defend the Communists), surely that same procedural defense can be extended to the more rambunctious anti-PC warriors.\n\nThe “low road,” Greenfield claims, while “enjoyable” (is fun to be completely discounted as an element of politics?), “plays into the portrayal of political correct activists as victims.” Does it, though? When you strike back at the SJWs in such events, they seem to invariably return fire—rather than presenting them as victims, one draws them into an arena of combat, which knocks them of the high road they claim to be on. There are two ways of exposing the SJWs as totalitarian bullies: defend their victims, or bait them into acting on their worst impulses. As far as I can tell, Greenfield wants us to restrict ourselves to the first approach, but that means being always on the defensive, whereas the “low road” suggests all kinds of innovative ways of going on the offensive—for example, I’ve been wondering what would stop whites from simply checking off the “African American” box in their college and other applications, thereby forcing those institutions to account for the way they enforce their racial classifications.\n\nRegarding the current bathroom wars, why not march into a Target, or some other PC-friendly corporate coward’s premises, with a group of men and a group of women, clearly “normal,” with each proclaiming that they feel like a man/woman right here and now, and going into the “wrong” bathroom? Again, you would be forcing them to enforce their own incoherent categories. Why should we wait until some poor woman complains about a man in the bathroom along with her and her daughter, and is subjected to a Twitterstorm, loses her job, etc.?\n\nI don’t believe that Greenfield is really worried about the fallout from such stunts (I use the word “stunt,” I want to be clear, in a completely non-pejorative way). He is similarly tentative in his approach to the issues he chooses to discuss: the Confederate flag and the Jackson/Tubman currency switch. What distinguishes the alt-right is its complete lack of ambivalence or hesitation in addressing these issues: I’m a Union man myself, but a direct line passes from the “Rebels” to the generations of courage and commitment that has sustained the US military to this day, and I have no problem embracing the “Lost Cause” as an integral part of America on those grounds alone (of course, I know that most of the alt-right would be much less hesitant, even, than that).\n\nMoreover, out of respect for the truth, we should vigorously oppose the conflation of the Confederacy with Nazism, which drove the recent “flag wars”—the Confederates invaded no territory, committed no genocide (as far as I know—and I think we would all know—there is no evidence of atrocities carried out against slaves or freed blacks during the Civil War, even though the assumption must have been that they sympathized with the enemy)—in sum, they defended their cause honorably. The case for Tubman, meanwhile, is completely ridiculous, and only conservative pandering to blacks makes this seem problematic. First of all, with very few and mostly failed exceptions (Susan B.\n\nAnthony, Scajawea…) the figures on our currency are all people who served in official capacity in the Federal government—indeed, unless I’m wrong, with the exception of Alexander Hamilton, all the figures who lasted on major denominations are presidents. Andrew Jackson was a heroic and transformative figure, whose deeds are public record and uncontested—and we should defend the Indian Wars, for his part in which he is currently excoriated. (Should Indian attacks on frontier settlers have gone unanswered?) Tubman’s aura, meanwhile, seems largely a product of Communist propaganda, uncritically absorbed within the public education system.\n\nAll this is debatable, of course, but the problem for Greenfield is that he can’t say any of it because he is invested in the argument that the Democrats are the real racists, so, in the end, as far as I can see, he avoids taking a position on Tubman/Jackson, and can only support the Confederate flag on the grounds that today’s Republicans represent today’s southerners, which is pretty feeble, considering that the Republicans presumably would like to represent southern blacks as well. Greenfield refrains from his usual practice of pursuing the SJWs back to their lair, which in this case would lead to the exposure of the ongoing demonization of whiteness.\n\nThere is, at this point, no anti-racist position that is not also anti-White, no feminism that is not androphobic, no support of immigrant rights that is not anti-American, and so on—the old liberal consensus has shrunk so that you can’t stand on it, even on a single tippy toe. To use Greenfield’s procedural terms, there is no choice but to offer an affirmative defense of whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, Christianity and all the rest, within a comprehensive defense of civilization."
    },
    {
      "slug": "nation-state",
      "title": "Nation/State",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The alt-right presents itself as a nationalist revolt against globalism; its most direct target, meanwhile, are the SJWs, or the victimocracy. We can square these claims by replacing “globalism” with “imperialism,” and acknowledging that “victimocracy” refers not to rule by the victims but in the name of victims. Rule by whom, in that case? The empire. I am using the terms empire in the very simple way I have used it in many previous posts: the reduction of all individuals to their relation to a single center. This allows for a very flexible understanding of empire: there can be small empires (any highly centralized institution is to that extent “imperial”) and a social order can be more or less imperial (more or less ruthlessly and comprehensively extirpating all centrifugal relationships), or transitioning one way or the other.\n\nThe furthest extent of imperial ratcheting would be a one world government (tendencies towards and ambitions for which obviously exist), which the singular God of the ancient Hebrews warns us against by similarly but radically differently aligning us all in relation to a universal center. The victimocracy, ruling in the name of victims, is the most efficient empire-building mechanism yet invented. The more local relationships can be defined as “oppressive,” the more the mediation of the center is required in more and more “capillaries” of the social order; to put it another way, to grasp the tautological ratchet effect, the more local relationships are shown to violate the equality of all in relation to the center the more the center intervenes to remedy the violation—and thereby lay the groundwork for new ones.\n\nThe traditional method of empire, to maintain a mediatory relation between different ethnic and national groups and thereby make itself indispensable, is turned into a design principle through the victimocracy: the need to mediate doesn’t just remain a background possibility, but an everyday necessity.\n\nThe nation itself is a mini-empire, orienting all towards the state “representing” the nation. There is always a tension between nation and state—nations were brought into being through monarchies that transcended all the tribes preceding national formation, but were properly “born” through the “patriation” of or revolt against those monarchies. States will always revert to imperial strategies, against which nations will always revolt. One such strategy is the favoring of one region over others, or elevating a minority to a privileged position—that region or minority can always be sacrificed in the event of a revolt.\n\nNations will always have regional differences and minorities, and if they don’t they will invent them—it’s hard today to understand the longstanding antagonism towards Catholics in the apparently ethnically homogeneous Great Britain (all political disabilities were not lifted, I believe, until the 19th century), but such differences and resentments are constitutive, not parasitic, and plausible reasons will always be found (the machinations of Rome, etc.). The need to expel or oppress such groups is a sign of national weakness; a stronger nation deploys its minorities, more or less deliberately, as a source of insights and creations more available to those on the margin than those at the center. These must ultimately be insights and creations suited to inhabit the national “archive.”\n\nThe anti-discrimination regime, which in turn led to the opening of borders, along with the opening of the world to trade from the 1980s on created unprecedented opportunities for imperial actors to liberate themselves from the nations they originated in. How could one blame corporations for preferring the entire world, rather than just a single country, as a source of workers and consumers? Now that resistance to these imperial projects is underway, it is helpful to consider the magnitude of that project—destroying the SJWs is a necessary, but ultimately only small part. Indeed, the problem is to take on the most immediate problem—the SJW wars—with an eye toward the larger ones. We can talk about ending free trade, negotiating tougher trade deals, instituting tariffs, devising methods for encouraging or compelling corporations to keep or increase operations here, and so on—at the very least, these would be fresh conversations—but in the end the only solution is for enough Americans to become the kind of people who wouldn’t have allowed this to happen to them in the first place.\n\nThe empire answers an imperative—order by classifying, categorizing, enumerating—and in turn issues imperatives to imagine ourselves and others and always already classifiable, categorizable and enumerated. These imperatives must be refused, and the imperatives to reverse normalizing hierarchies is only one layer of them. The simplest (and, as we will see, ultimately the only) means of resisting one imperative is to transfer allegiance to another imperative, but the most complete resistance takes declarative form. The declarative resists the imperative by informing the imperator that the object to be produced is unavailable.\n\nIn this case, what is unavailable are the classifiable, categorizable and enumerated selves demanded. Making such “objects” unavailable seems rather difficult, given that data peels off us and is gathered with virtually every act we carry out: if the invention of writing and the creation of a class of scribes and bureaucrats made the early empires possible, the new information technology seems to make ever more monstrous empires not only possible but irresistible. The human is the simulacral.\n\nThe simulacral is also the singular, though. Let’s say I shop on Amazon.com. I buy 10 things, and then Amazon can extrapolate from those 10 purchases enough of a pattern to suggest to me 50 other things I might like. I buy 10 of those 50, and now Amazon offers me a more refined set of recommendations. Soon, I just look at what Amazon recommends to decide what I “want.” They seem to know me, in my social being, better than I know myself, after all—maybe I really do need that appliance I never heard of before. But, of course, this representation of myself is also a representation made to me, and one I can therefore distinguish myself from.\n\nThe data Amazon gathers from my searches and purchases might seem trivial, but we all know by now that such data is unprotected and ultimately available to other companies, the government, perhaps potential employers, or, via the evil works of some hacker, everyone. And there’s no way of anticipating all the uses that data might be put to. The only way to counter this is to become a producer of selves, to create new patterns by involving possible observers into one’s own patterns of activities. Each one of us, in order to survive in digital civilization, will have to be able to convert those who notice and say something about us into those we notice and say things about.\n\nWe could even use Amazon (not to mention Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to spy, in a speculative manner, on those who might spy on us—at any rate, we can acquire the habit of extracting data from our encounters with others. Deliberately making an imprint in the digital world not only provides one with a distributed self capable of asymmetrical cultural warfare, but is also the best way of resisting the paranoia that comes from simply imagining all the possible ways the data you are emitting can be used against you.\n\nThis kind of digital resistance has been anticipated for a long time—Glenn Reynolds wrote a book called An Army of Davids on this very theme back in 2007, and David Brin’s The Transparent Society , anticipating many of these developments, came out in 1999. But the idea never gained much traction within the libertarian frame both Reynolds (leaning right) and Brin (leaning left) assumed. Neither factored in the SJW war, or thought in terms of organized political conflict. Now, we can say that the nationalizing struggle against imperial ratcheting, the collective form the digital resistance might take is the ongoing singularization of data; in ways that are only possible in more or less informal collaboration and solidarity with others, one must make one’s “profile” “anti-fragile”—that is, not only “tough,” but built so as to transform attacks against it into weapons, viruses into antibodies.\n\nThe nation is, as the Marxist linguist Voloshinov once said of the sign, “the site and stake of struggle”: the empire seeks to extract an ever more minimal, ultimately only nominal, to be delivered unto the transnational, nationality, from each; nationalizing seeks to maximize nationality by enacting, rehearsing, discovering, iterating, the transcendence and preservation of every kind of difference within the nation and between nations. Attacks on oneself as racist, sexist, transphobic, etc., then simply become means of defining the richness of the nation with the unwitting assistance of those who hate it.\n\nWe will never be able to eschew the imperial altogether, as the imperial is reproduced by differences between more and less civilized and disciplined nations (and groups within nations). The naïve nationalism of the alt-right advocates for a world of tribes/nations all leaving each other alone—if we’re all nationalists, presumably, there is no need to fear imperial ambitions. But one, weaker, rasher, nation, attacks another, is defeated, and punitive and restitutive measures are imposed as a result. The measures must be enforced, administrators must be imported into the conquered country; settlers follow (merchants, workers, first of all serving the administrators), and a class of foreign oriented natives emerges (perhaps from some persecuted minority, which can be conveniently used against the majority).\n\nAlready our world of nations is a bit more complicated. Moreover, are all peoples capable of nationhood? The Arab world seems to be dissolving into tribal and sectarian groupings—maybe this is a result of the US invasion of Iraq, which, in rare bipartisan fashion, has come to be blamed for all the problems of the world; but, maybe, the only thing holding the Arab states together in the first place was the exigencies of Cold War rivalries and then American imperial oversight. What if there are simply no nations in that part of the world? Either they will be artificially imposed, as was done in the past, or we will accept the world of nations sharing the world with other, incommensurable political forms.\n\nThe existence of the permanent threat of terrorists and pirates, raiders originating in uncivilized regions, complicates the ethics of nationalism as well. Even nationalists might have to tip towards the imperial to keep some shipping lanes clear. The point of nationalizing is to civilize, and the civilizing project easily becomes an imperial one (it’s safer, when possible, to turn one’s defeated enemies into civilized partners rather than letting them remain recalcitrant “natives”).\n\nNationalizing compels us to speak openly of all these complications, whereas civilizing would have us do so more generously. For the foreseeable future, the openness (parrhesia) will be far more important than the generosity. Still, that openness can only benefit from the reminder that we hope to be more generous at some point, and will even be so now when possible. Sustaining and inhabiting these dialectics is what will make for anti-fragiity. The imperial demand is that we become increasingly fragile, and thereby dependent upon state solicitude. We make the “object” of that demand unavailable by heeding a more originary demand, to represent more of the present, denser networks of things calling for our attention.\n\nThe problem of inequality is the problem of the Big Man, the Alpha, producer’s desire. Civilization has diversified this figure (e.g., the tyrannical “genius” film director), but nothing can eliminate him—we can just commit atrocities and cause catastrophes in the attempt. The problem is not that the guy in the cubicle next to me makes 10G more—the “inequality” that causes resentment is only secondarily about distribution—it is primarily about flows of wealth and power to and from a central figure who, whatever his merits, can never completely deserve that position. Of course he can’t deserve it—the entire notion of “desert” is an expression of resentment of the BM, who is where he is simply because there need to be centers, and he, somewhat but not completely tautologically, was more central than anyone else.\n\nDemanding more of the BM—more distribution, more accountability—or seeking to disperse or depersonalize him (the rule of law, not men, etc.) merely entrenches him all the more. These attempts are the cause of empire building: Betas, “seconds,” “marketers” who come along and regularize the Alpha, first, BM, by recognizing, allocating and designating positions along the margins. Modernity is predicated upon the fantasy of having managed the BM once and for all, while our states and interstate institutions grow uncontrollably and we sprout billionaire magnates with cultural revolutionary aspirations like mushrooms (and, in fact, have done so, in somewhat less grotesque versions, for the past couple of centuries).\n\nThe market economy opens up new center-margin flows, it doesn’t eliminate or even mitigate center-margin relations. The more furiously activists revile the latest incarnation of the BM the more they entrench imperial rule, contribute to the imperial ratchet. The alternative, what would be truly as reactionary as revolutionary, is to claim and spread producer’s desire as widely and wildly as possible, thereby laying the groundwork for a new “nomos,” or land/power division, among what will essentially be neo-tribal leaders. The initial gesture of producer’s desire today: turning bait for you into your baiting of the baiters, thereby creating new centers of value.\n\nWhat is disruptive in a consumer is inventive in a producer. Revise whatever narrative you are placed in into a narrative of the renaissance of producer’s desire: examined closely, victimary narratives of the pillaging of the oppressed by the privileged actually tell of the collapse and imminent restoration of that desperately needed “privilege.” Treat the “constructed” as evidence of the natural, and in the process you will make the natural the source of new differentiations, new center-margin flows. Take Gertrude Stein’s advice, “act so that there is no use in a center,” i.e., allow for the possibility that any object in sight might be a worthy object of attention, and you will generate, paradoxically, new centers and new uses for them.\n\nTo follow up, once again, on Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle , perhaps reality TV, especially in its more “game-like” forms, provides a model for the producer’s imagination. “Reality” is currently imposed by imperial diktats, in which one seeks to position oneself more favorably within the prevailing center-margin flows. If we treat “reality” more explicitly as a game, with each of us as contestant, along with an audience of potential contestants, we can think in terms of remaking the rules by exploiting its anomalies. We are always asked to represent ourselves in specific ways, for employees, potential mates, possible partners in enterprises, conversations, and so on—the “Alpha” approach to such demands is to include the request within the rules governing the request by representing oneself as the kind of person that the figure making the request/demand would, if it knew what it was about, would want.\n\nEstablishing such frames, making explicit the rules, initiating discovery procedures aimed at providing feedback all liberates us from the scripted play of resentments and counter-resentments, which all appeal to an implicit center. In this way the rules are denaturalized in order to be renaturalized, insofar as all rules can ever do is establish tributary networks, which means they establish the terms on which one gets closer to the center of the flow. And exploiting the rules for getting closer (for becoming an actual provider) always requires some form of value outside of the rules, a form of value one can practice and make into a discipline."
    },
    {
      "slug": "resentment-good-and-bad-some-reflections-on-eric-gans-s-latest-chronicle-the-tri",
      "title": "Resentment, Good and Bad: Some Reflections on Eric Gans’s Latest Chronicle, “The Triumph of Resentment”",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "What should we do about resentment? Is there some non-resentful position from which we can ask that question? Interestingly, there may be: among the hundred or so flowers blooming on the right these days, one of them, represented by the blog Reactionary Futures and building upon the “ Unqualified Reservations ” of Mencius Moldbug, argues, very cogently, for a new kind of absolutism. The idea is that power divided ultimately leads to chaos: a single, undisputed locus of sovereignty is the only basis for social order. The models for this proposed order seem to be absolute monarchies and corporate CEOs. How to get there, and how to sustain it seem to me unanswered questions (the only answer I’ve seen so far seems to be “virtuous elites and rulers”), but this argument (predicated, how accurately I have not determined, on the thinking of Thomas Carlyle and Bernard De Jouvenel) takes into account (explicitly) Rene Girard’s understanding of the unlimited, envious, rivalrous desire constitutive of the human.\n\nIf all resentment is resentment at another’s centrality, the way to eliminate resentment, or, at least reduce it to manageable proportions, would be to establish a single, uncontested, efficient center that no one could resent effectively. There is certainly enough historical evidence to suggest that human beings have demonstrated a preference for this kind of solution.\n\nIf, that is, we think about resentment in quantitative terms, in which case the point is to reduce it as much as possible. Gans often speaks about resentment in these terms, and he does so in this Chronicle as well, and if there is a basis for doing so, and we can, in fact, identify a non-resentful position from which such “measurements” can be made, it is certainly worthwhile keeping quantitative resentment talk around. But there are other ways to speak about resentment, also present in Gans’s Chronicle: to “restore a general suspicion of resentment” is not quite the same as “reducing” it, because it implies that some resentments can be cleared of suspicion, and it’s also possible that “suspicion of resentment” is nothing more than “resentment of resentment,” which would lead us to choose between more and less legitimate resentments.\n\nThis is difficult because resentment precedes and, in “sublimated” form, is the basis of “legitimation,” “justification,” and so on. So, the transcendence of resentment would be a transcendent resentment, which does seem a fairly accurate description of the Old Testament God. Similar ambiguity seems to attach to the “control” of resentment (rather than just of “violence”), which seems to suggest the establishing of constraints and means of channeling resentment, rather than simply minimizing it. From a “qualitative” perspective, constraining resentment might, in some senses, involve generating more of it, or at least exhibiting some forms of it more overtly.\n\nIf we are to distinguish between more and less acceptable forms of resentment (a qualitative approach which might, if we want to be optimistic, be preparatory to a “quantitative” approach), I would suggest that the thing for our transcendentalizing resentment to target is what we could call “unrestricted, unqualified resentment.” If one resents a lack of reciprocity in general, one’s resentment cannot be addressed, and will always escalate, because it will always be possible to identify some way in which social relations could be more reciprocal, and advances in reciprocity will provide models for otherwise undetectable failings.\n\nResentments on behalf of some historically established mode of discipline, on the other hand—on behalf of monarchy, or monogamy, or church, or property—are intrinsically limited, since resentment of breaches of the institutional norms will subside with the re-secured stability of the institution (at which point the leaders of the institution will themselves rein in resentment on its behalf). In this case one resents attempts to set up new centers at the expense of established ones (to presuppose the very norms that the new center proceeds to undermine), and resenting one center on behalf of another prevents the unlimited destruction implied in an attack on all centers from a presumed centerlessness. It even leaves open the possibility that the new center will turn out to have had a point.\n\nGans’s list of the effects of resentment includes a diverse group: “It was resentment that made Eve give Adam the apple, resentment that made Achilles conduct a sit-down strike against Agamemnon, resentment that motivated the Jews to leave Egypt, that got Jesus crucified…” It’s certainly interesting to see the Exodus on the list, even though, when you come to think of it, it was an extremely risky decision and judgment of the results, even to this day, may remain mixed. Also, from the Moldbugian approach, the rejection of the fairly well perfected God-Emperor system of ancient Egypt might very well be the beginning of all the problems we face today.\n\n(Also some of the non-problems, though, at least from a non-Moldbugian perspective.) Achilles’s resentment at his superior value going unrecognized by the military/political hierarchy of the Greeks leads to a new form of reciprocity, the mutual respect of enemies, in his agreeing to return Hector’s body to Priam. (Although, admittedly, it’s not clear what this does for his relations with Agamemnon.) And the need for the divinized imperial system to suppress (resent?) anthropological insights into its limitations and sources of power beyond its ken seems to legitimate the necessarily risky efforts needed to preserve those insights and activate those sources of power.\n\nThe resentments of the alt-right seem to me similarly limited and productive, insofar as they, like Achilles, resent on behalf of values required but undervalued by the resented institutions themselves, on the one hand, and on behalf of truths placed in danger by their victimary opponents, on the other (there is no claim made by the victimocrats which the alt-rightists have any reason to fear addressing thoroughly and publicly. As Gans’s reference to the rejection of causality by today’s victimary activists makes clear, the same is not true for the other side). The “parrhesia” I have associated with the alt-right may be seen as very resentful (how do we assess the resentment of the cynic Diogenes who, when Alexander the Great asked him what he, Alexander, could do for him, requested that Alexander get out of his sun?), but it resents the decadent suppression of anthropological truths that themselves generate resentment (like Gans’s proposal all those years ago)—and we might see that as initiating a virtuous circle of transcendentalizing resentments."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-marginal-anthropomorph",
      "title": "The Marginal Anthropomorph",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The consequences, for political thinking, of my centralization of deferral, discipline and civilization in originary thinking, are clear, at least in outline: what is politically legitimate and necessary is the leadership, through charisma, of the most disciplined individuals (in economic terms: those with the longest time preference), who will therefore seek each other out, recognize one another, and model modes of deferral for the less disciplined. The most basic forms of “rule” bear out these assumptions: when a group is confronted with some threat or emergency requiring expeditious and unified action, any chance of success depends upon the most capable (those who resist panic and the tendency to find some scapegoat within the group) taking charge, setting an example, and being deferred to in all critical decisions.\n\nThe earliest forms of “government” must surely have taken this form, of those who were coolest under pressure and able to see past the apparently dire immediate circumstance being deferred to. Otherwise, why would such forms have come into existence in the first place? All governments are set up so as to maximize the possibility of iterating this originary form of leadership, and to the extent that governments fail to elevate such figures, it is because of some design flaw and/or decadence. To this day, there is a tacit agreement that genuine legitimacy resides in the leader’s ability to handle the “3AM phone call,” to recall a Hillary Clinton ad from 2008—someone can wield power without such legitimacy, but such power will always be obeyed grudgingly, more out of fear or resignation than devotion—and even in such cases, there must enough people who see that power as legitimate, because, after all, there would have to be some loyalists ready to instill fear in the others. Ultimately, we could imagine ways of quantifying, provisionally, such relations—John Adams once posited as the relevant political question, how many votes does a particular man’s vote carry with it?\n\nUsing this conception as a guide to political thinking in the present (where all political thinking has to take place) is not that simple. Without perpetual, self-evidently and unanimously recognized threats and emergencies occurring on a daily basis in such a way as to provide regular tests, how can we recognize the more disciplined? As we all know, the guy who seems to have to all together might collapse under pressure, while some loser might rise to the occasion. It also strikes me as a potential contradiction that I agree with those who find Donald Trump, a seemingly supremely undisciplined man (at least in some arenas), as the most likely champion of American and Western civilization today. At the very least, the indispensability of Trump’s tit-for-tat semi-barbarism needs to be accounted for; or what seems indiscipline must be shown to be something else. Otherwise, the argument for legitimacy through disciplinary charisma risks becoming a more theoretical sounding label slapped on one’s political preferences of the moment.\n\nTo develop this mode of political thinking, I will return to my discussions of Eric Gans’s analysis, in The End of Culture , of the second most important originary event in human history: the emergence of the Big Man. Gans counters Girard’s theory of myth: rather than a distorted recollection of the originary lynching, myth, for Gans, is an “explanation” of ritual; ritual, meanwhile, is a re-enactment of the originary event, a re-enactment continually modified with the sedimentation of subsequent crises requiring the iteration of ritual on new terms. Myth creates motivations or intentions for the figures on the ritual scene (“backstories,” in Hollywoodese); it is a declarative overlaying of the imperative-ostensive form of ritual. Myths are, therefore, attempts at originary thinking that are simultaneously (as all originary thinking must be) projections forward, as intentions dimly glanced at in one’s surroundings provide the materials for de-sedimenting the unrecoverable scenes and ritual re-enactments constitutive of the inevitable idiosyncrasy of ritual.\n\nThis understanding of myth is not obviously related to the emergence of the Big Man, but the increasingly complexity of intentions attributed to figures on the ritual scene (which, of course, can include animals and the elements) lays the groundwork for making sense of the Big Man’s “usurpation” of the center. Mythical versions of the Big Man will attribute ever more powerful intentions to that central figure, for a while, at least, at the expense of everyone else, who are relegated to some form of servitude. First of all, he gives all; but in that case he must have a right to all. He is the center of gift circulation, so he must be omniscient as well: he must know what everyone needs and deserves, and how to produce and provide it.\n\nHe must, therefore, also be aware of resentments directed his away, and of attempts to bring those resentments to fruition in various plots. He has eyes and ears everywhere, and so on. What this amounts to, in effect, is a continual process of humanization (which, clearly, was not accomplished at one blow on the originary scene—hominization, just like biological evolution, continues), or, more precisely, anthropomorphization: just as in that despised literary trope, the Big Man doesn’t really have those intentions until they are attributed to him—he must grow into them, and in turn project corresponding intentions onto his subjects.\n\nThe intellectual and moral overturning of tributary tyranny (by both metaphysics and monotheism) derives from this anthropomorphized world, ever richer in intentions, actual and possible. The more fully “intentionalized” our world, the more human we are—but there are always tacit practices and habits yet to be “intentionalized” or anthropomorphized. (For that matter, there is certainly backsliding as well—intentions that had been fleshed out explicitly are “de-activated” and return to their tacit state.)\n\nThe sequence and structure—event/ritual/myth—doesn’t change, even under post-ritual, post-mythical conditions. We still all the time, every day, on many levels, instigate crises due to mimetic rivalry; we create practices and habits that defer the worst possible outcome of those rivalries; and we come up with stories, rationalizations if you like, for how we arrived at those habits and practices. In fact, what we call “rationalizations” are just attempts to (as Girard does, in Gans’s account) conflate event and practice/habit, to insist that the way we do things is just, circularly, the way things are done—to conflate our resentments with self-evident justice.\n\nBut in order to rationalize, you need to draw upon “canonical” intentions—in other words, your rationalization will be effective to the extent that you can purport to demonstrate that you (or one on whose behalf you rationalize) only did what anyone would have done. Rationalization is the mode of thought of consumer satisfaction: I deserve what everyone else deserves because no one in my situation could have done any better than I did. So, here we can mark the difference between consumer satisfaction and the proto-Big Man’s producer’s desire: the latter invents/discovers a non-canonical intention, or anthropomorphizes in a new way.\n\nWhat the producer defers is the desire, compulsion even, to reinforce and seek shelter in the most “authorized” intentions—once you defer the incredibly powerful desire to disperse responsibility for your acts you need to find a way to enhance your responsibility for your acts and the only way to do that is by broadcasting your actions as exemplary, thereby in fact creating new forms of intentionality.\n\nSo, the marginal anthropomorph is, first of all, the “producer” who self-exemplifies and allows to be attributed to himself a “human” quality that didn’t exist before, much less reside “in” that producer. But he is not the only emergent anthropomorph. Let’s return to the notion of a “universal conversation” put forth in Gans’s recent Chronicle , and my own discussion of it a couple of posts back. Now, we can’t take this notion of a universal conversation (in a post-colonial, wired, world) literally, if it’s supposed to mean that we are all actually talking to each other simultaneously. Conversations are, as they always have been, limited in scope: anyone who’s spent a bit of time on blog comment sections will attest that there is always a threshold past which additional voices can no longer be included within the conversation (one person can’t really respond to more than 5 or 6 genuinely diverse interlocutors), which, if it continues, splits into several separate conversations.\n\nHowever, we can take this notion absolutely literally if we take it to mean that anyone could eavesdrop on, and interrupt, any other conversation. Indeed, that vague, menacing, sense of always being overheard (which gets projected, somewhat mythically, onto super-competent and malevolent state security agencies) by those who could at any moment enter the conversation and reset the norms so as to discredit and, in effect, eliminate oneself is the quintessential “PC” experience.\n\nNow, in order to engage with each other on the marketplace, we have to anthropomorphize each other, that is, attribute to one another the intentions constitutive of a successful exchange. Much of modern economics is a quasi-mythical explanation of the practices and habits of life in the marketplace, supplementing the intentions that would make sense of it all. For that matter, liberal politics is itself little more than a similar, and far more desperate attempt to anthropomorphize, as if the intentions “evident” in market exchange (respecting the autonomy of the other, weighing options, assessing actual and possible resources, etc.) could be projected onto the process of selecting individuals to staff the government and of engaging in discourse over laws and their enforcement.\n\nBut not all exchanges are successful—indeed, some are bitterly regretted in retrospect—and more or less mythical intentions and narratives are constructed to account for those as well. The more humanity we are capable of attributing to others, the more inhumanity we are capable of attributing. The end of history is a chimera because these two capacities must always progress alongside each other. Without engaging in moral equivalence, or concealing my own interest in the matter (as if I could), it is easy to see the escalating SJW-alt-right battleground as taking shape along these lines, with each side constructing mythical social orders defined precisely by their categorical exclusion of the inhuman other.\n\nAside from the self-exemplifying desiring producer himself, then, the marginal anthropomorph is the figure whom you interrupt and address (or to whose interruption and address you respond) within the universal conversation and to whom you attribute a possible intention that would defer the escalation within the battlespace. This doesn’t involve signaling your virtue to the other side by taking on your own “extremists.” It doesn’t involve purges, or searches for “common ground.” It merely involves opening some reality closed off by the escalation, and asking someone else, even a hypothetical interlocutor, what they would do with it.\n\nEven something like “OK, after you’ve killed them all, then what?” Any course of action which we can attribute (always somewhat mythically) to a “we” breaks down into a (charismatic) relation between the more and less disciplined among “us”: asking what these different parts or levels of the “we” are doing when the “we” acts implicitly invites the interlocutor to adopt the imaginary standpoint of the more disciplined, and that at least makes conversation possible, even if it’s the conversation of opposing generals laying the ground rules for a battle the following day that will leave only one army in existence. It would be a conversation between those have invented and crossed a threshold in the ongoing hominization process; between marginal anthropomorphs.\n\nAnd what about Trump? Suffice it to say that his tit-for-tat approach is exposing tacit practices and habits that will need to be “intentionalized,” and thereby creating the conditions for extensive anthropomorphization."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-brief-addendum-to-originally-leftism-revisited",
      "title": "A Brief Addendum to “Originally Leftism, revisited”",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It is already implicit in my argument, but is not necessarily thereby obvious, that a large part of the attraction of exposing the products of discipline as stolen centrality is that it opens up virtually unlimited fields for the social sciences. We have evidence that discipline leads to benefits, but that evidence needs to be taken on faith, once we consider there is always another way the flow of benefits to that individual or group could be explained. I don’t think we would be going too far to say that the origin of the social sciences—economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, etc.—lies in the imperative to sever the link between discipline and benefit (which would mean all the social sciences are constitutively leftist).\n\nIt’s not a coincidence that the social sciences emerged as the notion of “civilization” disappeared. Once you start speaking in terms of social “structures” and “laws” you are undermining the “naïve” sense that increments in discipline generate increasingly disproportionate rewards. Leftism, then, provides a form of challenging and invigorating intellectual resentment that a civilizational politics cannot match because civilizationism (reaction or restorationism) starts with certain undeconstructable notions to be taken on faith. You can always define and analyze the social laws and structures in more complex ways, you can always challenge some previous definition and analysis and, in particular, you can always show that the previous definition or analysis still presupposed some link between discipline and benefit, and therefore was not sufficiently scientific, failing to explaining apparent discipline and apparent benefit in terms of something impersonal.\n\nI believe, of course, that the intellectual rewards of the approach I take are far greater than those of the social sciences, but, like GA more generally, could probably never be more than marginal, institutionally, granting, as it does, the irreducibility of “faith.” My approach would also be too “personalizing,” insofar as it must reject other approaches as dyscivilizational."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolute",
      "title": "Absolute",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It is only possible to engage in peaceful activity insofar as someone protects that activity from those who would interrupt it violently—to rob or coerce or take revenge on one or more of the participants, or just for the hell of it. The participants can protect themselves, but as the predators get more sophisticated—as they specialize and hone their predatory skills—it will be hard for the participants to keep up, because they are too busy specializing in their peaceful activities to compete as self-protectors in the arms race against the predators. The law of comparative advantage suggests they will eventually farm out protection duties, either to private security or the state.\n\nEven the most primitive communities will probably delegate self-defense, except perhaps in the most extreme circumstances, to the strongest and most aggressive young men. It is probably at least as true to say that, once communities have been stratified, any peaceful activity is not only protected by but has the at least tacit permission of whoever controls, which is to say, owns, the territory upon which that activity is conducted. Much early trading was no doubt carried out between members of different communities, but it nevertheless took place somewhere, and therefore required the sanction of one or both of the sovereigns involved (for example, through treaties).\n\nOnce communities are sufficiently differentiated so that various non-ritual interactions take place regularly within a sovereign territory, the sovereign is primarily distinguishing between the peaceable and the predatory amongst his own people (“his own” in the sense of those he rules over). The sovereign is either capable of doing this, or he isn’t—if he is, then he permits all activities that he does not prevent, because he can prevent any of them; if he isn’t, then he simply isn’t sovereign, which means someone else is, or others are—perhaps some incompletely subdued Big Men are sovereign over at least parts of the territory, perhaps street gangs are sovereign over some inner city neighborhoods, etc.\n\nNow, central to liberal political thinking is that liberty or prosperity or happiness of good government (the emphasis shifts from thinker to thinker) requires limitations in sovereign power. There are certain human or civil rights that can’t be violated, or there is a constitution that prevents the government from using its power in certain ways. The problem with this approach is evident in the operations of our contemporary governments—who, exactly, decides whether the government has violated someone’s rights, or has overstepped limits placed on its exercise of power? Whoever decides is, then, sovereign. In theory, liberalism would like to situate this “ultimate” sovereignty with the “people”—but the people could only exercise this sovereignty through revolution, in which case the resultant sovereign would not exactly be the “people” but whichever party or militia manages to concentrate power in its own hands.\n\nOtherwise, the decision is made by some branch of the government itself, which means there’s a kind of shell game going on here. At higher levels of civilization, the game of ping pong between the legislature, executive and judiciary might preserve a sense of moderation and cooperation on the part of all parties, but there is nothing in this haphazard and informal distribution of powers that helps to preserve that level of civilization—on the contrary, the more power that seems to be lying around unclaimed, the more people will try and figure out how to pick it up. We go from uncertainty to uncertainty, and struggles for power come to permeate the entire social order.\n\nSo, for example, we might say that, in effect, in the US the Supreme Court is sovereign insofar as it has the final word on what the executive and legislative branches do. Maybe—but that only lasts as long as some enterprising President, sensing popular winds at his (or her!) back, decides to defy the Supremes (how many divisions do they have?). Even more, the Supreme Court justices emerge from a broader judicial culture, comprised of the lower courts, the law schools, professional associations, and so on—so, must we locate sovereignty elsewhere? (Should we accept the assertion, made, I think, mostly seriously, by more than one “Reactionary” blogger, that Harvard is, in fact, sovereign?)\n\nSovereignty in this case becomes both highly impenetrable and extremely unreliable and unstable. Maybe, indeed, sovereignty is mobile, taken up by different agencies depending upon needs and circumstance—this is an attractive idea, and I can imagine it working fairly well in small, closely knit communities, where charismatic individuals would step forth and be acknowledged by the community in emergencies. That, in fact, seems to be the model of sovereignty in the Hebrew Bible’s book of Judges, but it hardly seems transferable.\n\nLiberal theory not only fails but fails disingenuously precisely because it allows no one to claim sovereignty even though someone must. Liberalism is extremely hostile to anyone saying something like “alright, I’m going to do what it takes to maintain order here,” even though there are obviously times when someone needs to do that. We could see liberalism as a kind of pathology, a phobia—it is possessed by the idea that if anyone ever does “take over” and impose order they will do so forever, and in unaccountable, inscrutable and terrifyingly destructive ways. I think we can describe this pathology even more precisely and more personally—that guy, that dictator, that Alpha, that Bad Daddy who takes over will stop me from doing something that I very much want to do.\n\nThe fact that in a post-romantic West everyone likes to see his/her deepest desires as “subversive” feeds into this phobia. But that just means you want your deepest desires to be sovereign, and how is that supposed to work? Someone will be sovereign—the question is, is it better that we all know exactly who that is? If you say yes—the more emphatically you say yes—because the more uncertainty there is, the more the purpose of sovereignty is defeated, and the less protection we can expect for peaceful interactions, then you are led inexorably to absolutism, without all the fuzziness introduced by rights, limited and divided powers and the rest of the liberal machinery.\n\nThe biggest problem, then, is how to get someone into that position (whoever chooses that someone, if he is indeed chosen, is, at least for that moment, sovereign—so, how are they chosen)? Democracy is a proposed solution to this problem, probably prompted by the realization that monarchy cannot be separated from an inadequate selection process, far too dependent upon accidents of birth. Democracy is just a way of dividing sovereignty by providing the electorate with a kind of punctual sovereignty on election day; once the elected officials take power they are sovereign, and I am far from the first to note that what the people thought they were voting for may have very little to do with what those elected choose to do with their sovereignty.\n\nAnd, of course, the electorate as sovereign can do what it likes, and there is no reason to assume that what it likes bears any relation to the purposes of sovereignty in the first place. (Your good democrat will bristle at that very formulation—that someone might dare to assert that sovereignty has “essential” purposes beyond what the people would like those purposes to be—but if the sovereignty of the people, such as it is, is simply presumptive, why should the people school themselves in the preservation of sovereignty?) If the sovereign is genuinely sovereign, he can decide on matters of succession, so will we not very soon find ourselves back in a hereditary monarchy?\n\nSince I began playing with the notion of absolutism, the problem the notion seemed to pose for me is how to integrate it with the other political/anthropological concepts I have been taking on board recently: nationalism, parrhesia, and producerism. In principle, absolutism could rule over a multinational empire; for that matter, it could break up a nation and impose some other ordering principle. And, needless to say, the absolute sovereign can quickly shut up any aspiring parrhesiac. And will an absolute sovereign not see imaginative, charismatic producerists as a threat? But I then considered that the problem might, in fact, be a solution.\n\nA successful sovereign would want all of these things. Ruling over a nation is far more likely to provide the sovereign with the “middle” (Cf., my previous post) he needs to govern as minimally as possible—not to mention the ballast a cohesive nation provides in possible conflicts with other sovereigns. (If force of circumstance requires a sovereign to incorporate alien peoples, the wiser sovereign will seek to integrate the new people into the existing one.) The producerists, meanwhile, will be the source of wealth, advice, and political and military leadership. The question of parrhesia is more difficult. It’s a democratic prejudice (confirmed, though, by 20th century dictatorships) that an absolute sovereign will suppress all criticism and deviation from the “party line.”\n\nNothing in the concept of absolute sovereignty requires this (and, for an obvious counter-example, the absolute monarchs of early modern Europe allowed for a very rich and often dissonant artistic and religious culture). Still, some discourses will be marked as heresy and sedition and, at any rate, the sovereign will always have the absolute power to classify them as such. (Some are in even the freest and most democratic countries, but let’s leave that aside for now—these nagging “double standard” comparisons and charges of “hypocrisy” are especially irritating when we are trying to think something through.)\n\nI will try this formulation: the more successful and secure a sovereign, the more he will allow for and embrace public criticisms of his decisions, exposures of corruption, satirical representations of powerful figures and a vigorous intellectual and artistic life. A less successful sovereign will be unsuccessful in other ways, so his oppressiveness regarding open discourse will just be part of a bigger problem; a sovereign who is less secure through no fault of his own might have good grounds for tightening the reins, and a responsible class of artists and intellectuals will tailor their works accordingly and find new ways to speak freely within the imposed limits.\n\nIn the case of the failed sovereign, well, we may get to the point where he needs to be removed—there is nothing more dangerous than the revolutionary abyss of radically uncertain sovereignty than a catastrophically failing sovereign. Given the presumption in favor of absolute sovereignty, we can assume that revolutions will only take place as a last resort, and will not be carried out until the leading figures of the middle, the best judges of the status of sovereign power, have been convinced there is no other way. (Now, along with the failed sovereign we are likely to see a corrupted and compromised middle, but that doesn’t change anything—it just means the situation is worse, and we have fewer leading figures to rely upon.)\n\nConsidering this possibility gives us the solution to the problem of sovereign selection and succession. A successful sovereign, who is successful because he has cultivated the middle and the producerists, and listened to the public conversations of his subjects, can be expected to choose his successor well, even if it is his own child. The leading subjects will support as best they can the less successful sovereigns, and try to shepherd the people through harder times, including reckless choices of a successor. Ultimately the salvation of order will depend upon the sovereign being persuaded by those leading subjects (and first of all allowing them to try, without any fear—al though if they are indeed “leading,” they should also be courageous).\n\nAs for the first post-liberal absolute sovereign—that in fact is the easiest choice, because it will be whoever is brave, resourceful, intelligent and charismatic enough to lead a lot of imperfect people through some very desperate times—and there won’t be an over-supply of candidates.\n\nI will briefly note that I am not just building utopian castles in the sky here—or, perhaps, I should note that the point of constructing utopias has always been to find better ways of talking about what is right in front of us. You can see from my discussion that to speak in terms of absolute sovereignty as a measure of good and true order is necessarily to speak in very different ways about social interaction and order. You end up speaking much less about interests, desires and resentments as the basic elements of social order (which leads to all the liberal problems of “balancing” and the Machiavellean plans to distract through amusements, etc., and gnawing sense that continued social order depends upon a good quarter of economic growth) and much more about deferral, discipline and charisma (in Philip Rieff’s sense of the attractive power “given off” by the more disciplined).\n\nOnce you commit yourself to clear and certain sovereignty, because it’s the only way of preventing resentments from splintering society, you become interested in all the ways we can expect ourselves and others to transcend those resentments through devotion to a center. When I was watching the TV mini-series The Tudors a couple of years ago, I was struck by how most of the people executed (sometimes, especially in the case of Anne Boleyn, for the craziest of reasons) on order of King Henry VIII made a point, in their speech before those assembled to witness the execution, to praise the king and implore the people to be grateful and obedient toward him.\n\nThis seems outrageous to almost any modern—why, they should have declared their innocence, denounced the injustice, railed against the king, called upon the people to rise up against the tyrant (what did they have to lose, after all?)—but I found it very impressive, checked to make sure it was historically accurate, and was very grateful to the producers for including such “counter-cultural” sentiments. (They were only a generation away from some terrible violence carried out in the name of contesting the legitimacy of the king, but that they had so internalized this lesson and translated it into civic and religious terms that it informed their final act is remarkable.)\n\nI would say that overt and sustained renunciation of violence precisely when the desire to give oneself over to it is almost irresistible is the highest form of parrhesia—which means that following the discipline of parrhesia might be especially likely to lead one to absolutism.\n\nI have always insisted that on the originary scene the assembled could not have put forth their respective gestures simultaneously. I have some very good (to my mind) reasons for doing so, but the one relevant here is that the assumption of simultaneity excludes any representation of a threat to social order on the scene itself. If everyone is an equal participant on the scene—equal in commitment, enthusiasm, understanding of the implications of what they are doing—then “anti-social” activity must be secondary and contingent, explicable in terms of specific circumstances, not a perennial threat (at most there will be resentments that are always already contained, at least within the prevailing form of order even if not the specific regime).\n\nWe could assume that, ultimately, everyone really just wants a seat at the table. That’s not necessarily the case, though. If the sign was first put forth (with whatever degree of intentionality) by one, then a couple more, then a majority, then it makes sense to further infer that the final participants, those who came last, did so out of fear of a now imposing group force, or even needed to be restrained by those determined to protect the center. No one can dispute that there are lots of people who behave acceptably for fear of punishment or social approval, and really have contempt for (or simply no comprehension of) the norms in the name of which they would be subject to censure.\n\nThe current relaxation of norms makes this very obvious, and is certainly why the existence of psychopaths and sociopaths has become such an interesting subject (how many are there? How can we recognize them? Where does the boundary lie between psychopathy and sociopathy and normalcy? Do they have advantages over normal people when it comes to acquiring wealth and power?). The political relation between those who live by the sign and those who live in contempt/fear of those who live by the sign is very different than the political relation between those assumed to be bound by roughly symmetrical reciprocity. If you are working with the latter model, you will find divided and uncertain sovereignty much less of a concern (and maybe even a source of social vibrancy) than if you are working with the former."
    },
    {
      "slug": "america-first-but-there-s-no-american-people",
      "title": "America First, but there’s no “American People”",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Most commentators and, I assume, most citizens, are still in the habit of referring to the “American people” as the protagonist in the election drama: will the American people go along with this, will the American people support that, will this alienate the American people, etc. This is a habit that must be broken if we want to think about elections and American political life in general clearly. The reason why the Democrats are so confident that they can continue moving to the left without consequence is that they consider their demographic advantages to be insuperable. They have good reasons to think so. Think about the Supreme Court: on every significant question, everyone knows how the four leftist judges will vote—no one ever even speaks about whether Kagan or Breyer might jump ship on this case.\n\nOn the other side, everyone distinguishes between the invariant and the variable: Thomas and Alito are reliable (and Scalia used to be)—al though even here there have been disagreements—but Kennedy and Roberts are wildcards. The same is the case for the voters for each party. The Democrats will get 90% of the black vote, 70% of the Hispanic vote, 75% of the Jewish vote, 70% of the Asian vote. There is very little room for movement here (except, perhaps, among the very heterogeneous “Asian” vote)—maybe the numbers can go 5% one way or the other. This gives us important information about the number of American citizens who see identity politics, a massive welfare state and the vendetta against their “Amerikaner” (a term of I have taken from the Amerika blog) or “badwhite” enemies as more important than allying with the American middle.\n\nIn fact, now that insistence on the enforcement of immigration laws makes one a “hater,” we can say that these are the voters opposed to America as a sovereign entity. On some level, they rightly realize that according to any rigorous and non-legalistic definition of “American,” they would be excluded, or at least “graded.”\n\nAll appeals to these groups (again, with the very minor exception of “Asians”) are as much a waste of time as making legal arguments to Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Kagan and Breyer—except insofar as some of the white voters you want need to salve their conscience with the recognition that some kind of gesture has been made. But that just underscores that a Trump victory (probably even more than any other Republican victory) relies completely upon winning a white landslide. Everything else is irrelevant: Trump needs something like 65% of the white vote to win. (Of course, the number varies according to turnout—obviously, if more white voters than usual come out, and they vote mostly for Trump, maybe he’ll only need 63% or so.)\n\nWhether he and his supporters say so publicly or not, if they don’t know this they are throwing the election. Now, we can get even more specific about the demographics—of the 2% or so of sexually “other” whites, at least 75% will vote Clinton. Among single women who see themselves as single women (i.e., not young women looking forward to marriage and family), probably 80% at least will vote Clinton. And how many fit that category—I’m not sure there are, or even can be, real assessments of that. (We’d have to factor in those who work for the government in some capacity as well.) But we can probably say that among normal, married with children, or expecting eventually to be married with children, employed in the private sector, with (or reasonably hoping to have) homes, etc., Trump will need something like 75%.\n\nNow, that’s a good way to focus your attention. How many people in this (most unequivocally “American”) category are already likely to vote for Trump, and how many would need to be won over? Whatever campaign masterminds Trump has could not spend their time more productively than on trying to answer that question. In other words, it’s not a question of what the “American people” think; it’s a question of whether there is enough of a constituency (a large enough super-duper majority) among normal Americans for restoring American sovereignty.\n\nNow, Trump and his advisors can (and if they want to win, must) think like this, but it would be extraordinarily risky to speak like that, even in heavily “coded” terms. That itself is a large part of the problem. Last night, at the Democratic convention, a Muslim father of a soldier killed in Iraq attacked Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim entrance into the country. But if mass Muslim immigration, or increased Muslim presence at any level, poses a security risk, then a Muslim who sees himself as an American first of all would agree that we at least need to consider our policy toward further Muslim immigration. All that father was telling us, then, was that he considered his (merely potential) grievances as a Muslim more important than his obligations as an American—and that he was willing to exploit his son’s death to make that point.\n\nEven Trump will not make this uncontestable observation. Nor will he observe that those Hispanic citizens who vote on the basis of their support for leniency for illegal aliens are voting their ethnic interests over their duties as citizens and the good of their fellow citizens, even to the point of endorsing massive, systematic lawlessness. Something similar could be observed regarding every reliable Democrat constituency. But nothing like this will be observed, if for no other reason than that it will make it harder for Trump (or any Republican) to get to that 75% of normal Americans—that is, some margin of that 60% or so of the country must have their ethnomasochism (John Derbyshire’s term, as far as I know) appealed to before they can vote their own interests.\n\nWhich means that we can narrow our election speculations even further, to that tiny margin where the right rhetorical and symbolic balance between white guilt and white interest must be struck. What this also means, though, is that we can tell when the country will really fall apart: when that balance can no longer be struck, or when it no longer matters: when white guilt and white interests are irrevocably, and unmistakably, at odds with each other—at that point whites will have to eschew white guilt or concede the right of non-whites and goodwhites to disregard their interests, even their lives, altogether.\n\nIf we were to begin to speak about the obligations of Americans and their differential attentiveness to their patriotic obligations (rather than endlessly demanding the “details” of “plans”), how would we do so? I’ll provide a sample. I’ve been curious about the inability or lack of interest of the leftmedia in going after Trump’s favorite slogan, repeated quite a few times in his convention speech: “America First!” As I have seen some media figures mention, this is a slogan with a “notorious” legacy, the name of a movement that, briefly, in the late 30s and early 40s, horror of horrors, argued for keeping America out of World War II.\n\nI would very much like to read a history of how the perfectly reasonable and patriotic Charles Lindbergh and his associates came to be tarred as near-Nazis for their efforts—it would teach us a lot about the history of image management and propaganda in the US (I would look for the red thread). For the left, running a campaign based on the slogan “America First!” is rather like running on “Mc Carthyism”—don’t these idiots know that we have banished these phrases and ideas from public life? I suppose that to others, though, it must sound so obvious and positive that, rather than being scandalized, most Americans are trying to figure out why this isn’t the slogan of every campaign—so much so, that the media has not yet been able to find a way to crack it.\n\nAt any rate, here is perhaps the most “notorious” of all of Lindbergh’s speeches for the America First Committee, which lasted up until Pearl Harbor, at which point all its members unequivocally joined the American war effort (without even having to be ordered to do so by the Comintern):\n\nhttp://www.charleslindbergh.com/americanfirst/speech.asp\n\nLindbergh, here and elsewhere, gives plenty of good reasons for America to stay out of the war—all of them debatable of course, which is why Lindbergh is offering arguments—and doing so in an honorable way, pointing out the consistency of his approach to the issue as opposed to the opportunistic propaganda of the pro-War side. He deals with the basic “ideas,” in other words, explaining why the war would, from America’s perspective, do far more harm than good. But he doesn’t stop there (where all of today’s Republicans and “conservatives” would insist we stop), and goes on to ask, who wants the US to enter the war, and why?\n\nGiven that they represent a small minority, what makes their arguments so effective and, from Lindbergh’s perspective, dangerous? So, he lists three groups: the English, the Jews and the Roosevelt administration. Can anyone really disagree that these groups had powerful interests in drawing the US into the war? Lindbergh does not demean these groups (al though he’s highly critical of the administration which, strictly speaking is not really a “group”) or characterize their interests as illegitimate—quite to the contrary, he understands very well why the British and the Jews would want the US to enter the war, and I see no reason to doubt, since I don’t see what he would have gained by it, Lindbergh’s expression of sympathy for the Jewish plight under the Nazis and his condemnation of their persecution.\n\nNor could we refute his claims regarding Jewish influence in the media and entertainment. We could readily question his claim whether American entrance into the war would harm Jewish interests by weakening the tolerance upon which Jews depend—it didn’t work out that way, and Lindbergh is too generalizing here (“war always…”); we could also ask whether there were other groups (German Americans? Italian Americans?) who had a special interest in keeping America out of the war. All that would be fine as a rebuttal to Lindbergh’s argument, but the larger point is that his argument could not even be made today, and to see why, you would just have to see what my above observations on the Muslim father and Hispanics defending illegal immigration would look like extended a bit further along the lines modeled by Lindbergh’s analysis of the British and the Jews.\n\n(“It’s easy to understand why Mexican-Americans would feel closer to their brethren in Mexico, with whom they share ethnic and cultural ties going back many generations, then to their fellow Americans, and would wish to help them enjoy the advantages of life in the US, while increasing their own political influence and maintaining their Mexican roots…”)\n\nWell, it’s not true that the argument can’t be made today—such arguments are starting to be made—it would be more precise to say that they cannot yet be made by a winning Presidential campaign. But the gap between the way political figures must think and what they can say can close—indeed, at a certain point, if it doesn’t, that gap will get wide enough so as to make political survival impossible; to put it another way, closing this gap is part of making sovereignty more certain. Of course, if both the SJWs and the patriotic right were to close the gap, they would make explicit that they no longer live in the same country.\n\nUltimately, “law and order” and “crime” may, in fact, be code words for “white” and “black,” respectively; and “gay rights” and “feminism” may very well be code words for the destruction of monogamy, and “Black Lives Matter” for “kill whitey,” or “off the pigs.” The more people who know they are codes, the less they are codes. All arguments have a demography to them, and part of bio-politics is making the demography explicit, even explicit enough to make the arguments mere tokens. In that way we find out if they are in fact real arguments. Through this bio-political process we arrive at the same choice I have taken these discussions to before: either follow the path of least resistance of virtually any commonsensical line of inquiry and end up speaking in such a way that will transform the “conversation,” most likely catastrophically, or go about systematically eliminating “badthoughts” and “hatefacts” from your mind so as to reduce yourself to imbecility.\n\nInterestingly, if you choose the latter, the former will never occur to you, and so there’s no way to make an argument in favor of one or the other approach. It’s really just a question of what’s involved in living with yourself. At any rate, tracking that white guilt/white interest needle will be a good way of cutting through a lot of noise and measuring our progress or regress regarding sovereignty restoration—the more white interest can be spoken, even in the indirect form of anti-anti-whiteness, and white guilt silenced, the closer we are to restoration."
    },
    {
      "slug": "automated-stratification",
      "title": "Automated Stratification",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle, “The Administrative State and the Victimocracy” raises a set of interrelated questions which GA urgently needs to turn its attention to. I’m going to focus on the following two paragraphs in particular:\n\nI believe that the victimary arrogance of the Left at the present moment is dependent on a factor that I have discussed several times without pretending to be able to calculate its quantitative effect: that of modern, intelligent automation, which as I have claimed is in the process of effecting the first essential separation within humanity by severing the common symbolic link (as expressed in religious and civil ritual) among the social classes. For the first time, a whole segment of the population, more or less the “Belmont” of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, has been detached from the “common folk,” not simply by privilege as in the past, but by the ability to use symbols.\n\nGA takes this more seriously than the workaday anthropologies we live with because GA takes seriously the definition of humans as users of language. In particular the split occurs most sharply in language’s least “humanistic,” most narrowly symbolic function: the pure empty tokens of mathematics, the ability to manipulate which becomes increasingly a qualification for the higher forms of work (“STEM”). Perhaps (true) affirmative action can work to bring the two sides together, but as Murray’s book, which deliberately excludes racial minorities from consideration, suggests, this is certainly not to be solved by attacking “white privilege” or putting (often black) policemen on trial for “racist” brutality.\n\nThe point is to understand that the heat of all these resentful thoughts is meant to make us forget the “cold light of reason,” which tells us that only some as yet undiscovered form of human engineering will make those currently in the (former) “working class” capable of handling the symbolic activities of tomorrow’s industrial society. Without falling into economic determinism, I think one can say that the world’s current ills, from radical Islam to the sclerosis of the administrative state in Europe and increasingly, the US, all in one way or another reflect the persistent inequalities that depend more and more not on “privilege” but on qualifications, and ultimately, on native abilities, albeit enhanced by the more nourishing childhoods characteristic of the Belmont class.\n\nHuxley’s Brave New alpha-epsilon categories, contemporaries of the word robot invented for Capek’s RUR, seem to be proving eerily prophetic. Save, of course, that as bearers of the moral model of reciprocal human equality, we cannot condone a hierarchy of this sort, so that when it manifests itself in some domain of the social order, it must be denied by all means at our disposal.\n\nThis account certainly helps us to address the problem of victimary resentment more dispassionately—there is, in fact, a dramatically new and potentially uniquely intractable form of inequality, even if it’s not the inequality the victimary activists complain about. This stratification within the symbolic function may not explain the gender/sexuality wing of the victimocracy, but, then again, that wing might be largely parasitic on the racial one (with” race” defined broadly to include, as the victimocrats insist, opposing cultures and civilizations, such as the West vs. Islam). The anti-immigration (and, I wouldn’t say “white nationalist” but rather “anti-anti-white,” while I maintain the hope that “albaphobia” might someday catch on) website VDARE has one writer who regularly posts on advances in automation—the immediate point is the lessening necessity for importing cheap labor, but there is also a vague sense in many postings that automation might be as destructive to the native working class as immigration itself.\n\nAnd the increase in assortative mating—doctors used to marry nurses, now they marry other doctors, businessmen and lawyers used to marry secretaries, now they marry their peers, etc.—is leading to a heritable class and even at least quasi-racial stratification corresponding to the stratification between those capable and those incapable of advanced “symbolic analysis.”\n\nWhile this economic stratification is the bigger civilizational problem, I think the furious victimary resentment addresses a different side of automation. Automation has the potential to reduce resentments insofar as it makes it possible to take all kinds of decisions out of human hands (or, at least, remove those decisions to more distant hands). If a police department can have its computer experts do increasingly nuanced mathematical analyses on crimes rates and perpetrators in specific neighborhoods, at specific times, then crime fighting depends less and less upon the judgments and intuitions of police officers—you can stop someone and question him because you can show that he is, according to calculations that can be checked, 7.4x more likely to commit a crime than the guy you didn’t stop—rather than stopping him because he seemed like a “troublemaker.”\n\nThe same goes for banks loans, school admissions and hiring—all these decisions can be taken out of human hands, and “inputs” (measurable capacities) correlated with increasing accuracy to “outputs” (performance). Since everyone can guess that the results will not conform to egalitarian fantasies, it is this component of automation that is intolerable, and must be resisted at all costs. It’s also harder to rationalize resistance, though—rather than the cop on the beat, or the loan officer at the bank, or the manager at the plant, being “racist,” the entire system of symbolic analysis must somehow be racist—and, since you can’t develop a better, “non-racist” mathematical analysis, the racism embedded in the “inputs” must take on an almost mystical omnipresence, a taint which we can’t even really explain much less cleanse ourselves of.\n\nAnd the victimocrats are not the ones developing the COMPSTATS; the victimocrats are those with humanities and social science degrees that enable them to “prove” that the inequities lie deep within reality itself, and the STEM people are not equipped to fight back on this politicized terrain. It is here that the real battle against the victimocracy must be fought, in the name of the liberation of the algorithm and the recognition of human difference.\n\nThe problem of automation has existed since the beginning of industrialization, but it may be becoming more critical. It used to be that each new wave of automation would destroy whole sectors of the economy, laying off large parts of the workforce, but the increase in the size of markets and the entrance of whole new populations to the workforce and market as consumers would create the number of jobs needed to replace those lost. In the end, there would be significant displacement, which would generate some short-term political effects, but since the resentments always came from a “backward” minority of the workforce, those effects were never particularly consequential.\n\nWe have been conditioned to assume it will always work like this, but maybe it won’t. Marx’s main argument for communism was not the injustice of the exploitation of workers, but the projected consequences of the unlimited technological development capitalism makes possible—if all you need to provide everyone with the food, clothing, shelter and entertainment they need is to flip a switch, what would be the logic of paying people to work? In order to maintain the wage-labor system, you would have to, perversely, deprive people of what you could readily provide them free of cost. Buckminster Fuller argued that free education up to the highest levels was cost-effective because if you educated 1,000 people for free, at least one out of those 1,000 would invent something that would pay for the education (and more) of the other 999.\n\nHis colleague, Marshall Mc Luhan, anticipated that we would soon be paying people to go to school, as if the process of learning itself, presumably within a more “rational” educational system, would be wealth generating. The fact that the notion of a guaranteed minimum income for all citizens has been taken seriously by politicians of both the right and the left since the Nixon Administration (which got the idea, I think, from libertarian economist Milton Friedman) demonstrates that belief in the possibility of a “post-work” society persists despite (or because of) the poor performance of the actual economy according to conventional measures. (No doubt it is easy to call those measures into question—why does everyone need to work, in which case why should we worry about high levels of unemployment? Why does the economy need to “grow” a certain amount? Etc.)\n\nBut what renders all such perhaps quite realistic speculation utopian is a good look at our fellow men and women. What would all these people do if they didn’t have to work, or find some way, even illicit, to acquire money? For the Marxists and “visionaries” like Mc Luhan and Fuller it was possible to imagine that what held us back was the “alienation” caused by institutions that were either oppressive or designed for a “scarcity” rather than “abundance” society—redesign the institutions, and hitherto unimaginable human potential would flourish. A more rigorous and sober anthropology would considerably dampen this enthusiasm.\n\nHannah Arendt had the more prescient question: would would happen to a society whose entire economic and moral order is based on “labor” when labor is no longer necessary? What would everyone do if they didn’t have to work? Write commentaries on Plato? Develop Generative Anthropology? Invent new “apps”? Play Pokemon Go? I think Fuller’s numbers might be on the mark—about one out of a thousand would do one or more of the first three, and the other 999 the last. In that case, why go to school—why have schools? (What did Fuller think the other 999 would do?) What if the top .01% decides they don’t want to waste their time providing the necessities of life and amusements to the rest?\n\nYes, it will take “some as yet undiscovered form of human engineering” to answer these questions. In very broad terms, though, the answer is obvious: if we don’t rely upon a division of labor to feed, clothe, house, transport, etc., one another, then we will have to make ourselves useful to each other in new ways. We already see the beginnings of this in the new professions that have proliferated in the therapeutic age—all kinds of counseling and advice dealing with increasingly minute emotional questions and arcane areas of interest. More and more people are becoming what Peter-Solterdijk calls “trainers.” People will discover things they have to offer to others, and things they’d rather let others do for them, and it won’t necessarily depend upon native intelligence or even talent.\n\nIf you managed to lost 100 pounds and get yourself in shape you are “qualified,” through a minimum of self-reflection and narrative ability, to help others do the same. The trainer enables you to construct your reality in a new way: while previously you were a victim of circumstances you can now, by identifying and modifying your own responses to those circumstances, become the master of them. The most famous exemplar of such producer’s desire is Oprah Winfrey, who has always been a punch line for high and even middle brow types while being revered by precisely those most threatened by our increasingly intelligently symbolic order.\n\nSo, the solution to automated stratification is the spread of producer’s desire. (If you’re supporting yourself by making yourself useful to others by doing something you love, why should you care that someone else is making 1000x as much as you?) How far can such desire spread? How far would it have to spread to support a workable social order? Those are things we can’t yet know, but the fact that human nature remains rooted in mimesis and rivalry leaves open the possibility that people will continue to strongly desire to interact with and prove themselves with and against others."
    },
    {
      "slug": "little-big-men",
      "title": "Little Big Men",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It’s convenient and accurate enough to speak about the civilizational war in the West in terms of nationalism vs. globalism/imperialism or alt-right vs. SJW. A more comprehensive approach, though, would explain it as a crisis of the producerist/consumerist split which goes back to the (pre)historical emergence of the Big Man. The “globalists,” the “managerial class,” the “political class,” the “ruling class,” the “transnational elites”—whatever you want to call all those aligned by their sharing interests and therefore outlooks across national boundaries—want nothing more than to create a global subject class defined solely in terms of consumption.\n\nYou get educated in order to get a job in order to spend your life as a consumer and define yourself in terms of your consumption choices. There’s nothing morally or ethically objectionable about such a life—many people are suited for it and are quite happy living it, assuming their income is sufficient to support it. To force everyone into it, though, requires quite a bit of violence and lying—moreover, not everyone who buys into it has read the fine print, and there might be quite a bit of buyer’s remorse. The symmetry of all on the margins in relation to a single center eliminates a lot of smaller resentments, against smaller and overlapping centers, only to concentrate them all into one totalizing one: the all against one (and one against all) of tyranny.\n\nJudaism and then Christianity, realizing that the desire for centrality was not eliminated through the actual seizure of the center but, rather, that everyone on the margin would now define himself in terms of that desire for centrality, posited a King behind the king to whom any terrestrial king was ultimately accountable. Kings suffer, are defeated and overthrown, sin and are punished, die—like everyone else; and that “critique” of monarchy is actually the way “everyone else” comes to be defined, or anthropomorphized. The brilliance of the modern imperative is to off-load the center onto impersonal systems, like democracy, the market, science and technology, in order to remove the bullseye while centralizing beyond the dreams of any ancient pharaoh—the bureaucrats, executives, managers and public servants all act in the name, first, of some transcendent principle, and, then, some self-referential procedure, not their own concentration of power.\n\nBut this strength has turned into a weakness because someone has to take responsibility, and all we have now are “experts” who are expert mostly in deflecting responsibility onto someone else. You could explain the entire Obama administration pretty well by simply imagining them doing little more than, after something happens, asking themselves how can we make the Republicans, Fox News and talk radio responsible for this. It’s trolling and baiting all the way down. The victimary, the SJWs, are just a virus released by the final breakdown of all pre-modern immunological systems—it has taken a long time to extricate the natural sense of responsibility. In what is a confirmation and slight modification of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, the consumerist bureaucracy itself just becomes another horde of ravenous consumers.\n\nProducer’s desire begins in the realization that the world is your construct—you can complain about the “media,” or “ideology,” or whatever (complaint and outrage are just consumerist twitches—the world didn’t serve up what you were promised, and you want some Consumer Protection Agency in the sky to get you a refund)—but what you pay attention to is up to you. You can look at your responses to the bait laid around you, and instead, say, of getting outraged at someone else’s evil, you can see that they are acting purposefully in some way that has been effective in the past for the sake of some stake they are protecting; you can, then, assess your own behavior, and the role it has perhaps played in rendering action you now see to be harmful effective.\n\nAnd then you can act more purposefully, in particular by modeling and encouraging others to train themselves in the discipline you have formed. You can look calmly at the “sh*t tests” (a very illuminating term I have learned from the androsphere) the SJWs put you to, and realize that they really just want someone to draw a line and stick to it. (Is it possible that the SJWs are really shocked that so many take their BS so seriously?) By now we’d have to be really gullible to think that anyone considers allowing transgenders to serve openly in the military (with the costs of the “gender reassignment” therapy and surgery covered by Uncle Sam) to be a “human rights” issue.\n\nThose whom the alt-right call “cuckservatives” take such bait and with Pavovlian predictability go on to write think pieces about how, while of course the army has to maintain discipline and we have to make sure it is not politicized what is most important is that the bigots on “our” side must be disavowed. Surely conservatives will soon get the idea that the Democrats are the real transphobes, the Republicans the true protectors of the trans. They fail the sh*t test. Look at the final paragraph of an essay by David French in National Review that otherwise says some good things about this latest sh*t test:\n\nFortunately the warrior culture is resilient. Infantry platoons aren’t likely to go full PC anytime soon, but the Left keeps chipping away. It will keep chipping away until the horrible reality of the battlefield reminds us all that our military isn’t a social laboratory. Our enemies focus on war while we sidetrack our soldiers with social justice. Not even our immense technical and material advantage can save us forever from the consequences of our own folly.\n\nImplicit here is some narrative of “us” waking up, “snapping out it,” and realizing that “we” have been foolish. Although “we” probably won’t until we lose a war or two. But why would that “remind” us of anything? French imagines some essential American identity—rather than a war, there is a confused “we” (it’s like describing World War II—and of course we do see such descriptions all the time—as some Western “we” considering but finally eschewing suicide). If those infantry platoons can hold out a bit longer, we’re all sure to realize that and get “our” head straight. Constructing and expressing faith in these imagined “we’s” is the quintessential consumerist posture—one waits, Godot-like, for the margins to align symmetrically before a vanishing center.\n\nBut if, as French says (spotting the obvious right away), these new rules are about social engineering rather than military readiness, then those issuing the rules are derelict in their primary responsibility. They are saboteurs. (It’s an easy call—“social justice” is intrinsically sabotage of any institution in which it is advanced.) The duty of every commander is to immediately jail and then dishonorably discharge any soldier who murmurs a word questioning his gender and thereby disrupts discipline. If he is not permitted, he can only continue to be a commander if he resigns, and informs all those infantry platoons that it is their duty to do so as well.\n\nThe preservation of something like a “military” then requires the announcement of the formation of a people’s militia, preparing for war against the saboteurs, with an invitation to all those soldiers to volunteer. (I originally thought to say “traitor” instead of “saboteur,” but “traitor” presupposes the very community that doesn’t exist—a saboteur is not a traitor from his standpoint, and we learn more from studying that standpoint than bewailing the betrayal.) Clearly all this would be unthinkable for French—but what, exactly, is wrong with the argument? Once you, as a consumer, realize you have been suckered, you can either up your dosage of snake oil (we need to return to the true principle of equality, or implement it sincerely for the first time), or you discover a discipline—a mission, a vocation, a cause, a calling, if you like, and then you’ll realize that those principles oddly seem to have no other purpose than to get in your way.\n\nThe commanders and soldiers who acted in this way would be enacting producer’s desire—they would all be Big Men, albeit little big men as there would be a lot of them. Rather than trying to conform to commands issued from the existing center, they would be imagining and constructing new centers, giving shape to their vocation as soldiers and defenders of the people. That is what it means to be a “producer”—to disregard threats, blandishments, attempts at shaming, side issues and chumming, in order to pursue your discipline. If you read the consumerists, you can see that underlying their discourse always is the imperative to stay in line, make sure you keep getting fed, fear social disapproval, defer to those with greater credentials than yours.\n\nThe most courageous among them figure out ways to become troublesome enough so that someone else will consider it cost-effective to appease them—it’s not such a hard scam to run on people who, more than anything else, want no trouble. If you read the producerists, you see a contempt for social approval, ridicule of credentials, defiance of The Narrative, an eagerness to take what they are told not to think as a cue to what they should think about, and an overwhelming desire to stay independent of the institutions (by now, almost all of them) infested by the SJWs. For the first time in the history of civilization, the role of the Big Man or Alpha (desperately suppressed by monotheism and metaphysics until this day) can be openly broached. And that’s what the war of Western civilization is really all about.\n\nPerhaps one could say that I’m just complaining here—even worse, I’m complaining about people complaining. I don’t think so because I don’t expect anyone to do anything other than what they want to do. I don’t really want anyone to do anything other than what they want to do. I don’t accuse anyone of not conforming to some ethical or moral model that I imagine has been inscribed somewhere. I prefer the logic of compensation to moral indoctrination—if there are some who want to rape, loot and murder, there will have to be enough who want to deter, confront and neutralize the rapists, looters and murderers—and there will have to be enough who want to have enough people who want to do that.\n\nAnd those who want those things will do so because they want other things as well. Then we’d all have to figure out how to get what we want, rather than expressing outrage when the world we want doesn’t magically materialize from our own good intentions. I would just have people consider whether they want to study the origins of their wants more systematically, because I think they will conclude that the more their wants entail delegating responsibility to others for the satisfaction of those wants the less what they get will turn out to be what they really want. And to consider that if you are among those who want to discipline your wanting you will want to have as little as possible to do with those who don’t."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-leftism-revisited",
      "title": "Originary Leftism, revisited",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A while back, in a post entitled “A Unified Field Theory of the Left” I concluded with the following definition of the Left:\n\nThe Left is obedience to the imperative to expose the products of discipline as stolen centrality.\n\nI have been relying on this definition, but generally in less rigorous forms, referring to the Left as essentially an anti-civilization movement. But this more precise definition calls for further exploration. In that post, I saw the Left as drawing upon an almost universally shared resentment towards civilization but being based more precisely upon a revelation of the “fraudulence” of civilization and the barbarism it (barely) veils. So far, so good. But what I didn’t consider at the time was that this explanation of leftism grounds leftism in an important truth—which also raises the question of why leftists lie so systematically.\n\nFirst of all, the truth of leftism: the civilizing process makes the implicit claim that increased capacities of deferral (discipline) will increase benefits (wealth, power and enhanced and exemplary flourishing in general). From this claim comes the imperative to buckle down and learn the arts of civilization. Now, the claim, in macro terms, is true: those social orders that have committed to the civilizing process have achieved and flourished compared to those that haven’t. On the individual level, the claim must be assessed much more cautiously: not only is it often false, insofar as individuals who have played by all the civilizing rules often fail and those who succeed often cut a lot of corners but, in principle, it can never really be proven true—how could anyone’s accomplishments be completely or even mostly attributed to their own hard work and discipline, leaving out of consideration things like native ability, luck, “connections,” and so on?\n\nFor that matter, how could they ever be determined to be “accomplishments,” except circularly? From a negative standpoint, failing altogether to comply with civilized norms will almost invariably have disastrous consequences (even here there are some illustrious exceptions), but presenting things that way makes civilization more or a threat than a promise.\n\nNow I, as a proponent of civilization and sworn enemy of the left, can calmly assess the ambivalence of the civilized person and the resentments he inevitably experiences—so, what further revelation is required for one to hear the imperative to expose the products of discipline as stolen centrality—to discredit all claims that wealth, power and flourishing can be attributed to higher levels of discipline? (Keep in mind that the leftist does not feel compelled to deny such a claim categorically—just each and every particular one. You might find a leftist who feels he pays no price to agree that hard work makes success more likely; you will find them much stingier when it comes to admitting that that explains the success of anyone they can’t claim overcame some unjust obstacle.) Here are some reasons, which comprise a preliminary categorization of leftist types:\n\nthe promise of civilization has failed in your particular case: you, in your mind, played by the rules, worked hard, and you still failed according to some relevant measure (this can equally apply to the experience of someone you know or are familiar and sympathize with)\n\nthe promise of civilization has, to all appearances, succeeded in your particular case, but you really can’t be sure: you started off with some of the benefits of civilization in your pocket, so to speak, and you progressed a bit from there, or held steady, but there’s no way of knowing whether you’re living parasitically off of other’s capital; and, if there’s no way of knowing that, there’s no way of knowing whether those others were in fact living off of others’ labor and suffering, perhaps unrewarded and unrecognized labor and suffering—in other words, you have the nagging anxiety that while others might take you to represent the truth of civilization’s promises, on a “deeper” level you represent its ultimate fraudulence and disguised barbarity\n\nyou can see how others are blinded by their faith in the civilizing process—all those people out there doing what they’re told, getting by, believing in their right to their enjoyment of civilization’s fruits but without ever feeling a need to “do the math” and consider how much of their (really, contemptible, if you look at it too closely) “success” is, in the end, attributable to their own efforts; and some others who you can see really just exploited some mechanisms already in place to “get ahead”—you see something all these others don’t, that the closer you look the less connection you see between effort and accomplishment, and between celebrated accomplishments and worthy ones—you might say that this revelation, which in less political orders (or for less reactive characters) might lead one to philosophical reflection and a higher form of self-discipline, resolves the anxiety of the previously described uncertainty by making it a generally applicable dogmatic claim with which you can prosecute others (an enormous amount of youth culture goes into cultivating this sentiment, that everyone who gets ahead either cheats or is secretly miserable, and the only honorable position is the alienated one outside of it all—an extension of Gnosticism and romanticism, of course)\n\nNow, I think it is from this last group that the real leftist leadership is drawn from: all those people who don’t see how fraudulent the whole “system” is must be made to see —none of their illusions can be left undisturbed. This is the source of the fanaticism and systematic lying of the left—nothing is forbidden, morality must be subordinated to the higher imperative of making them see—it is precisely that evidence that seems to justify the system that must be debunked. To feel you’ve glimpsed a crucial truth that everyone else (aside from a privileged few, whom you start seeking out and with whom you cement this sense of superiority to “everyone else”) is blind to, and blind to because too self-satisfied and cowardly to see the underpinnings of their comfortable life—this is an extremely powerful form of motivation because you, the recipient and guardian of this revelation, should be at the center, but all these petty, small minded people think they’re at the center—and “society” seems to agree with them.\n\nThis last group comes from those in the second group who get radicalized (the remainder in the second group are sympathizers and donors), for whatever reason, while those in the first group provide the shock troops of the left. These three groups could, in principle, include everyone in a civilized order, so it’s not surprising that the Left runs up the numbers it does. To resist the Leftist imperative, you would have to understand the rewards of civilization as intrinsic to the discipline itself—that understanding is ultimately truer than the Left’s, but also the most easily forgotten—part of that intrinsic reward is the very power of discernment that enables you to start noticing its intangibility and therefore start questioning it.\n\nI remember reading, many years ago, an interview with Noam Chomsky in which the interviewer asked him how he came by his political convictions. Chomsky traced it back to high school, where he couldn’t understand why everyone in his school cared so much about whether their school teams defeated the other schools’ teams. Why should the mere fact that you happen to go to West Central High rather than East Central High (perhaps because your parents happened to buy a house a couple of blocks away from where they could have just as easily bought one) mean that you should be elated when West Central’s basketball team defeats East Central’s (especially since you’re not even on the team)?\n\nAre West Central’s players more worthy—is there any objective reason to prefer them to East Central’s? Just step back and look at all that idiotic cheering in the stands. Etc. OK—all this is fine—every halfway intelligent high schooler gets this feeling of the absurdity of the loyalties, the groupings, the forced enthusiasms, the cliques, etc., in the name of some vague sense that “we’re really all the same” and “there are much more important things out there.” But most high schoolers have other feelings as well—you’re friends with someone on a team, or you’re friends with someone who is friends with someone on the team, and so you know a bit about what’s going on and maybe it’s interesting; you realize that all this cheering might just be a pretext for getting out of the house Friday night, or having a couple of big parties, but you don’t mind having the pretext; rooting for the team makes the game a lot more exciting; it’s a way to meet members of the opposite sex, and the popular girls and guys don’t like people who just think everything is stupid; and, in general, it’s more interesting and fun to have all this stuff going on.\n\nSo, the Chomskyian intuition is there, but it ends up informing an occasional ironic stance—it consumes you, and you become a Chomskyian, when you feel compelled to preserve that intuition, to elevate it above all other intuitions, and therefore to wage war against all those other feelings suggesting that maybe all the “mindless” rooting isn’t so bad after all. That you have that intuition more sharply or clearly than others, that you have an obligation to increase its sharpness and clarity, to make others see it, turns it into the lynchpin of your identity. You declare eternal war on the kids who are popular through no merit of their own, on the adults who cater to that unearned privilege, and on all the other kids who would like to be like, or be close to, the popular ones—but when you achieve a sufficient degree of political discipline and sophistication, you realize how valuable to the cause it is to “turn” as many of the enemy as you can, and with the exception of those who have remembered the intrinsic value of discipline, they are all potentially vulnerable, so you start to look for weak links—where is the presumed causal relation between effort and reward especially tenuous? Something that seems earned (even something so simple as the right of police not to be killed) can surely be made an example of privilege. And once you’re not doing anything other than looking for those weak links, you are a full-fledged leftist.\n\nSo, it’s not quite accurate to say that leftism is anti-civilization—leftism is opposed to any imaginable civilization in the name of an imaginary civilization cleansed of its discontents. And, in practice, opposing any imaginable civilization means sanctioning and encouraging the most uninhibited rage against existing civilization. There are fewer and fewer leftists willing to compromise the imaginary for the sake of the imaginable, probably because of an end of history sense of invulnerability. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have spoken this way on occasion: we can still nuke them back to hell if we want, can’t we? In that case, nothing can really ever be that serious—we’ve got our ace in the hole. But it’s virtually axiomatic that a sense of invulnerability significantly increases vulnerabilities. There’s no easier target than the guy who thinks no one would ever take a shot at him."
    },
    {
      "slug": "power",
      "title": "Power",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Power has always been a bit of a mystery for political thought—some people do what other people say—why? Maybe because they will be harmed if they don’t obey—but that just means that the person giving the command can also command others to harm the disobedient, which just pushes the question back another step. Maybe because they agree with the command—but in that case, they would agree no matter who issued the command, and their obedience has nothing to do with the person giving the order which means that power is not involved at all. All of this is still true if, instead of speaking of “hard” power (commands) we think of “softer” versions, like the power of an example (why did people follow Martin Luther King Jr., whose opinions and proposals were no truer or more remarkable than plenty of other people’s?).\n\nWe can follow Hannah Arendt in distinguishing “power” from “strength,” insofar as the former involves “acting in common” while the latter is the capacity to have effects—that is, dropping a bomb on a village has nothing to do with power (other than the power the commander has over the bomber), but why do people act in common when they do and why—an element of power Arendt seems to me to have neglected—are some people more capable than others of initiating such action, of directing and sustaining it? Here as well, someone has to go first—but you have only gone first when others have gone after you. So, the question of power is, why do the others go after?\n\nI think that power is simply a display of discipline greater than those impressed by that display consider themselves capable of. I’m drawing here, as I have often done, on Philip Rieff’s theory of “charisma,” the original meaning of which (exemplified by Moses) he took to be obedience to a higher imperative manifested in extraordinary levels of abstemiousness. The individual you see resisting temptations you give way to and controlling impulses you are overpowered by has power over you—you will defer to him because you know that your own indiscipline (revealed to you by this example) blinds you to cause and effect, good and bad, and that the more disciplined individual will have more insight into these matters.\n\nRieff also contended that the notion of “charisma” has been debased and reversed in modern times (he sees Max Weber’s study as the crucial turning point) so that it now refers to the individual willing to transgress against established norms. It is still the same concept, though—for the modern, over-civilized and over-regulated individual, temptations and impulses are channeled into the market system, and it is breaking with that system and its norms that seems to require courage and therefore greater self-control and self-command (in the American context, Ralph Waldo Emerson is probably the central figure here).\n\nTo transgress—quit your job, leave the rat race, have an affair, tell your neighbors what you really think of them, whatever (it has all become clichés by now)—in a sense does call for greater discipline, as the temptation to back down, give in, try and fit back in, recover the benefits one discovers one has thrown away, is very powerful. And this kind of disciplining of the fear response is different from mere criminal activity (criminals also must master fears that would cripple normal people—which is why their activity can be represented as more than “mere” criminality) insofar as it is driven by self-sacrifice rather than self-interest.\n\nThe same logic holds for intellectual power—the founder of a discipline has managed to control, set aside, and think outside of assumptions that everyone else has so far taken for granted and have been incapable of challenging. Such a founder opens up a world others can then move freely within, making the modes of thought previously adhered to constraining by comparison. It takes discipline to take those founding assumptions and, one by one, control for commonsensical ways of accounting for things and replace them with this new way. In the normal operations of power, where we obey fairly uncharismatic (by any definition) people and most resort to familiar ideas in making sense of things, it is the residual power of the founding, replenished unevenly over time, that attracts us.\n\nThe politician is clothed in the dignity of the office, the manager embodies the accumulated capital and knowledge present in the enterprise, the mediocre academic plays by the rules of and takes on a patina of the prestige of, an institution that has been a home for geniuses and site of discoveries and innovations—in which case, power is conveyed by a tacit reference to the founding and maintenance of the institution, which did require degrees of discipline well beyond the capacity of the average individual. The same people who ordinarily obey figures legitimated by past discipline (but also by the disciplinary demands, iterating the demands met in the original founding, required to enter and remain within the institution) can be brought to rebel against them, to follow a new form of power, by a new display of discipline, whether it take the form of exposing what has been hidden by those institutions, including their “mythical” foundings, or by a claim to hew more closely to that founding, or even by a simple show of insolence towards authority figures you yourself would never have considered challenging.\n\nThis approach to power might be compatible with Michel Foucault’s notion of power as all-encompassing, as always involving an interaction with some “counter-power,” and as working through the myriad “capillaries” as much as through the main “arteries” of the social order—as long as we keep in mind the fundamentally qualitative dimension of power I am examining. “Power” is not just what one is capable of doing to others, with those others in turn capable of doing something back in turn—if we ask where this capability comes from, we just go around in circles. But if we follow the reactionary futures blogger in prioritizing power (over culture, morality or economics), then the sovereign power Foucault wanted to make secondary to “micro-power” does indeed work on all kinds of micro levels we’d need to attend to.\n\nBut the real problem is distinguishing between Rieff’s two modes of charisma, evidenced in what we might call the power of deferral, on the one hand, and the power of transgression, on the other. The distinction is not so easy to make—as I have been suggesting, transgression relies upon a certain kind of deferral, while Rieff’s favored form of charisma might take on transgressive forms—can anything be more transgressive than Moses challenging the divinely sanctioned might of the Egyptian empire?\n\nPerhaps, though, we can distinguish between sovereignty clarifying and sovereignty confusing power—it may not always be obvious which is which, but we can improve our analytical perspicuity, and assume that disinterested inquiry over time will settle such questions. We can call the sovereignty clarifying power, defying one of the most popular modern maxims, “absolute” power, and the sovereignty confusing power, “dispersive.” Absolute power models itself on sovereign power, trying for minimal application (issuing orders and using force only where strictly necessary), clear lines of authority and identity of power and accountability (when something is done, everyone knows who wanted it done).\n\nEven more, absolute power seeks delivers its own power to the sovereign power as soon as possible, and seeks out the most likely candidate for sovereignty when sovereignty is uncertain, taking sovereign power itself if no other candidate emerges. Dispersive power tries to generate more power centers, to uncover potential new centers within existing ones so that no one really knows who’s doing things and why and to turn sovereign power itself into an agent of dispersal, an enemy producing machine for eternal civil war. And this brings us back to Rieff’s two modes of charisma: the kind of discipline yielding absolute power knows and even respects the power of transgression, which is an indispensable discovery procedure—but realizes that transgressive, dispersive power is itself ultimately just another temptation, an excuse to lower inhibitions and act barbarically.\n\nTransgression cannot, in the end, produce anything new (it can only disperse), except esthetically, but even there only insofar as the transgression is constrained by some esthetic form and therefore discipline. Absolute power, meanwhile, enhances itself by telling the truth, about itself and about transgression; dispersive power eventually resorts to lies and slanders about any potential form of sovereignty. So, Moses before Pharaoh is not transgressive insofar as he obeys a form of sovereignty superior to that of Pharaoh, even if it’s a form of sovereignty (and here is where Moses is breathtakingly daring, even if not transgressive) that has yet to be vindicated by being housed in an adequate human form (and any form of power must have been so imagined before being realized).\n\nThis line of thinking was instigating by my finding myself making extensive use of the notion of “informal power” in my previous post. Even the tightest, more totalizing sovereign, as understood in “reactionary” terms, will delegate power and rely upon institutions the sovereign has not itself created—even when strict orders are given in a clear chain of command occasions arise where those orders need to be interpreted in light of changed circumstances, and the relationship between the individual charged with the order and his subordinates as well as superiors must have an informal, tacit dimension to handle such revisionary situations.\n\nHow do his subordinates know they should obey? Well, they’ve followed him before, have found him loyal and reliable, and have seen him rewarded by his superiors—in the light of that experience, which cannot be completely formalized, they will interpret this unorthodox proceeding in his favor—no sovereign, however efficient, benevolent and far-sighted could have ordered them in advance to obey in this situation. In that case, ensuring that informal powers—which will always emerge and develop unpredictably, as charisma cannot be planned—reinforce sovereign power is the central problem of reactionary politics. This tacit dimension is, further, rooted in the nomos, and ongoing reformations and deformations of the nomos: new powers emerge when the originary distribution no longer sufficiently accounts for social relations because some members of the community, being more disciplined, have made more of their “part” than others. All social crises, all sovereign uncertainty, can be traced back to such developments, and an assessment of the various forms of power is needed to resolve those crises."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereignty-nomos-and-parrhesia",
      "title": "Sovereignty, Nomos and Parrhesia",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Carl Schmitt took the Greek word “nomos,” usually translated as “law,” but in a broad sense including “norms,” to refer to an originary division of land, a partition, by its first inhabitants. Whether the land has been conquered, discovered, or shared with another people, the nomos grounds the community in a more or less equal distribution and a more or less tacit covenant. The distribution may be according to contributions to the founding, or pre-existing power relations, and the covenant might be retrojected to the origin in order to conceal a more unilateral event, but, either way, the nomos provides a point of reference for all communal events going forward: they can be judged by the degree of their conformity to the nomos.\n\nBut whoever’s judgment is decisive is sovereign, and such judgments are made necessary by either internal disputes or external threats. The nomos, that is, implies the need for judgment and the occasional organization of the community as an armed camp; while judgment and organization are legitimate insofar as they respect and reinforce the nomos. Sovereignty is ultimately exercised by a single individual—by whatever arrangement, there must be a single voice obeyed when one side in a dispute is favored or troops are ordered to fire on the enemy. The sovereign is both inside and outside the system insofar as its decisions constitute the system.\n\nRepublicanism doesn’t dispute this, but considers the nomos to be safer if sovereignty is plural and distributed—one person judges, another decides whether we are at war, another commands the troops, etc. The more undisputed the nomos, the more sustainable republicanism is likely to be, but if the nomos is not shared unquestioningly then there will eventually be situations where the troops are commanded independent of a declaration or war or one side in a dispute is favored but the decision is not enforced, etc. Sovereignty then becomes uncertain, which means undesignated sovereigns, forms of power previously or formally auxiliary to the sovereign will, informally, step into the vacuum thereby created, confusing sovereignty further.\n\nAs sovereignty becomes uncertain, there are several possible responses: some will accelerate the disintegration of the original sovereign forms, believing that doing so will allow for a rearrangement of the nomos for their own benefit; some will gloss over the disjunction between formal and informal power, pretending that nothing fundamental has changed (this is essentially what Americans, who think we still live under the Constitution of 1789 do); while others will direct their attention to rendering sovereignty certain again: now, among this last group, we can distinguish between those who want the original formal power to be restored and those who believe that a new form of power is preferable or necessary—and, among these last, we can make a distinction between those who want to formalize the informal power relations that have emerged and those who see those informal power relations as incommensurable with the nomos, which can in turn lead to attempts to reorder power relations and/or found a new order on a new nomos.\n\nWe could say that the left aims at accelerating the disintegration of original sovereign forms and ultimately dissolving the nomos; the “center” obfuscates the disjunction between formal and informal power while assuming the nomos is more or less intact; the “principled conservatives” want to restore the original formal power (return to the Constitution) but conflate the nomos with that (by now largely imaginary) formal power; the alt-right seeks to restore the nomos in opposition to existing informal power relations (from what I have seen the alt-right is uninterested in Constitutional forms, and has little to say about “regime types” in general); and the “reactionary” position is to make sovereignty certain, whether by dominating, coopting or sweeping away the existing informal powers—this set of alternatives, meanwhile, introduces a large degree of uncertainty into the reactionary project.\n\nThe reactionary project is ultimately the only coherent one, and the one that can assess and contain whatever is valuable in the others, but singularizing sovereignty can only realize that coherence by clarifying the relations between the nomos and the formal and informal powers. Very little thought has gone into this, and the alt-right and resurgent nationalism fall into victimary stances themselves when they rail against the informal powers (from Wall St. firms to Facebook and Google, to the EU and UN) as excrescences upon an otherwise healthy nomos—what kind of power, exactly, exercised by whom, will be brought to bear on global corporations closing down plants in the US, moving them overseas, cutting wages at home, etc.?\n\nYou can speak of tariffs, but that presupposes the intactness of the existing regime of formal power (Constitutional government)—and if that power was really intact, would we be having these problems in the first place? “What is to be done” may have been Lenin’s question, but it is a good one nevertheless. A direct attempt to capture the sovereign power and make it certain would be to attempt to grab the bull by the horns—an expression which, for some reason, is usually used positively, to refer to determined, effective action, even though, literally speaking, it’s obviously insane.\n\nA good way to start thinking about these problems is to pay attention to the way we talk about political matters. When we say we are “for” something and “against” something else, when we outline or approve of one or another policy proposal, we are presupposing a particular model of sovereignty. In fact, most such talk presupposes clear sovereignty, and clear hierarchies of command: if someone says they are “against abortion,” they presumably want a law passed forbidding abortion, complete with penalties and punishments for offenders, an executive who will give orders to law enforcement to, e.g., enter buildings where abortions have been suspected of being performed, and then place in custody those performing them, for a certain period, according to certain procedures, etc.\n\nEveryone along the line, you presuppose, will follow orders—if the local law enforcement agencies refuse to investigate reports that a particular building is housing an abortion clinic, and there are no repercussions from agencies higher up in the hierarchy, then in effect, there is no law against abortion, and, regardless of the changes to the criminal code, the commitments made by politicians, precedents set by the courts, etc., the “anti-abortion” people have not gotten what they want (unless they “really” want something else, some form of informal power, perhaps). And no one says, “I’d like Congress to pass a law forbidding abortion, I’d like the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, and I’d like a President ready to enforce that law, but I don’t really care whether local law enforcement agencies are on board or not.” It would hardly occur to anyone to think in such terms, which is what I mean when I say we all take clarity in sovereignty for granted when discussing political preferences and goals.\n\nSo, most of our political talk only makes sense if we presuppose clarity in sovereignty—if we presuppose that what we “support” can be implemented in such a way that we would recognize it as the thing we support. But all the relations between the nomos and formal and informal powers are neglected in such discussions and, in fact, almost no one really gets what they thought they were supporting. So, meaningful political talk would have to include these relations. To some extent this is the case for more involved partisans, for example, those on the left who target political funding—for the leftist (and, for sure, some rightist) scourges of “money in politics,” being for or against something doesn’t really matter because the big money donors override our opinions by making politicians dependent on them, so before we are for or against any reinforcement of the nomos, we need to be “against” this form of informal power.\n\nThere’s always some truth to such critiques, but they are so tedious, useless and ultimately mendacious because they only target the informal powers the critic in question doesn’t like (that same critic is no doubt very happy to see other informal powers unhindered in their operations) and, more importantly, they invariably presuppose a stereotyped version of the nomos, as if, once all the “Big Money” were removed from politics, our respective civic consciences would automatically vibrate in tune with each other’s movements (and those of of the critic in question, of course), leading to spontaneous unanimity.\n\nThis is what we need parrhesia for. I noticed that Peter Thiel, in an interview he did with National Review , contended that “political correctness” is the biggest problem we face because it prevents us from talking about all the other problems in open and honest ways. No reader of this blog will be surprised to hear that I agree with this completely. The task of parrhesia is to talk about the informal powers when others want to talk about the nomos as a self-contained entity; to talk about the nomos when others are obsessed with informal powers; to talk about formal powers when other complain about how the informal powers run roughshod over the nomos, etc.\n\nIf parrhesia is focused on the misalignment of nomos, formal and informal power, the intelligibility of its discourse relies upon the possibility of their being realigned. The practice of parrhesia, then, is to interject where one element of the total sovereignty package is ignored and point out that the question regarding nomos, formal power or informal power cannot be addressed without it. This involves pressing insistently on the most sensitive political questions: the question of nomos requires free inquiry into, for example, who counts as an “American,” and why; the question of informal power directs our attention to all kinds of interest groups that would prefer not to make explicit their relation to either formal power or the nomos, such as “moneyed” interests but not excluding groups qualifying their relation to America along race, ethnic, gender or other lines; and the question of formal power gets us examining, relentlessly, whether those officially delegated certain powers in fact have those powers and use them (which are really two ways of saying the same thing).\n\nThe telos of parrhesia is showing us the way to make sovereignty more certain, and this practice will be necessary and welcome even as sovereignty is made increasingly certain, because it can never be certain enough. (Perhaps the irreverent parrhesia of the ancient cynics, when directed at rulers, aimed at deflating the sovereign’s pretensions by pointing out all that that exceeds the sovereign’s grasp—taking the point, then, would involve clarifying sovereignty—and remembering that sovereignty in the state required sovereignty of the soul, which politically corresponds to an intact nomos.)\n\nHaving raised the question of “political correctness,” i.e., the victimary, it seems to me that the victimary is almost exclusively concerned with breaking up the nomos. It is the originary distribution, according to family, and therefore a specific family and sexual order, and a system of marriage uniting families into a ethnos, that sets the terms of inclusion for future members, whether they be immigrants or those (e.g., native peoples or slaves) who were excluded from the nomos. The left uses various forms of informal power to “occupy” formal power, and it seems to me their endgame is to hollow out the nomos and make it an adjunct to their own reprogramming of formal power."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-high-low-alliance-toward-a-middlist-absolutist-politics",
      "title": "The High-Low Alliance: Toward a Middlist Absolutist Politics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Steve Sailer speaks often of the alliance of the wealthiest and most powerful with the poor and marginalized against the middle—what he calls the high-low alliance (and sometimes “the coalition of the fringes”—what we could call the victimocracy). The Reactionary Futures blog, which argues for what we might call a kind of political absolutism (in both the sense that it prioritizes power in analyzing social relations and considers centralization and certainty of sovereignty the only means of social stability) also argues strenuously in favor of this analytic framework—indeed, Reactionary Futures takes this very literally, making a case for seeing the foundations (Ford, Carnegie, etc.) as the central political agents of the past 100 years.\n\nThe power and relevance of this framework is pretty obvious, but the reasons for it, and the best way of accounting for it, is not immediately clear. Why would the “highs” (the billionaires, the corporations, Wall Street, the media) prefer an alliance with the lows rather than the middle? On the surface, it looks like the SJWs are driving the agenda—the corporations seem to be scrambling to figure out how to avoid boycotts and protests—but the theory of the high-low alliance complicates this picture considerably. Indeed, Reactionary Futures argues, fairly convincingly I think, that the civil rights movement was not some spontaneous demand for justice, or an inevitable step in the path of social progress but, rather, instigated and funded by the foundations (the blogger makes a similar case for the leading intellectual movements of the later 20th century, from left to right—differences between which RF considers virtually irrelevant).\n\nEven so, why would the foundations support these social movements? Why not get behind the segregationists? Some kind of somewhat objective analysis of the interests of the founders must lie behind these choices. Also, we must be able to distinguish between intended and unintended consequences of the foundations’, or the “highs” in general, historical interventions—unless we want to attribute omniscience and omnipotence to them, which is always just a way of making it easier to get to the conclusions you want. Are the highs against the middle—do they consider the middle a threat or obstacle (to what?)—or do they simply bypass or ignore it for some other reason?\n\nRF seems to see the funding of the lows by the highs as a means of promoting disorder so as to create the need for order—a need the elite can then satisfy, thereby accumulating more power. For RF , this kind of strategy is necessary because modern society has produced a separation between actual power and formal power—real economic and cultural power is not directly recognized as political power, and so economic and cultural (ultimately, according to RF , also political) power has to operate indirectly to reach its actual level of power. A more absolutist approach would eliminate the difference between economic, cultural and political power (making it all directly political), thereby making power coherent and also requiring that those with power also take responsibility for their exercise thereof.\n\nOf course, the best example of such singular sovereignty was the absolute monarchy of the late Middle Ages/early modern period. All property belongs to the monarchy, and all private property is, in fact, “lent” by the monarch (this is ultimately, if extremely indirectly and disingenuously, the case today as well, despite the furious attempts of liberal ideology to deny it—think for a few minutes of all the ways the state could take your property if it found a “compelling,” i.e., any , reason to do so). It was the rise of modern property, liberalism and capitalism that multifurcated property, thereby producing the competing power centers.\n\nThat the relatively autonomous power centers are competing with each other is the key to the solution of the problem—the power center (the progressive billionaire, the media conglomerate, the corporation) that is furthest in advance of generating disorder is also the one most likely to present itself as the most credible candidate to lead the reordering. The highs, then, are recruiting foot soldiers from among the lows to gain an edge against their rivals. To that extent, the “middle” is incidental. But the middle is a problem because the middle is comprised of the participants of the originary nomos, or land apportionment, their descendants, and those who have bought into later reapportionments.\n\nEven if we grant RF ’s absolutism, the sovereign power will (I may very well be departing from RF here) rely upon the middle: the sovereign’s orders must be conveyed, the sovereign must be kept apprised of where his attention is most needed, and, above all, the sovereign must not be lured into governing any more intrusively than absolutely necessary (because that allows it to be captured by various fractional interests)—for all of these lines of political power to remain open, a middle of property owners, intelligently loyal to the sovereign, that disciplines itself far more than it requires external discipline, is indispensable.\n\nA stable, secure sovereign would realize this, and nurture the middle. But for rivals for power among the highs in a decentered system, the middle is an unwelcome hindrance, a drag, because catering to the middle allows some other section of the elite to plug directly into the more volatile and manipulable lows and fringes.\n\nMeanwhile, if the middle is not the center of the sovereign’s attention—if there is not a relation of reciprocal deference between them—and the model to which at least the better of the lows seek to assimilate, the middle itself is bereft and adrift, pulled apart by the more exciting lifestyles of the highs and lows (is white guilt more a fear of not adhering to norms of equality adequately, or envy of the freedom and presumed authenticity of the lows and fringes?). RF ’s political hopes lie in the emergence of great men, or perhaps an enlightened section of the elites, who can seize sovereignty and initiate a process of restoration.\n\nOne can laugh at these ideas, or call them fascist, but such responses would just be the last gasps of a dying consumerism and can be disregarded. My own disagreement with RF is that I think the process would have to work the other way: a restored middle would generate the imperative for sovereign certainty—depending upon what would be involved in the restoration of the middle (an eventuality I really have no more right to be confident in than RF does in his preferred scenario), I can easily imagine a middle that is tired of the endless BS and sh*t tests that pass for democracy, liberalism, republicanism, equality, human rights and all the rest, and is ready for some absolutism.\n\nMaybe the often touted “non-partisanship” of the “radical center” should be taken seriously—it could very well be that the middle just wants reasonable and necessary laws, applied and enforced reliably, fairly, and consistently, and the order that would follow, and doesn’t care so much about the process by which this is accomplished.\n\nFrom a pedagogical, rhetorical and propagandistic standpoint, “absolutism” has a lot to recommend itself in the middlistic struggle against the high-low alliance. In response to just about any complaint of the left it is possible to simply ask whether the laws governing the case are clear, are they— can they be —enforced with transparency and regularity, will proposed reforms increase or diminish such clarity, regularity and transparency, and so on. There are good laws, the need for which is easily understood and which are therefore easily enforced, in which case officials who fail to do so are derelict; and there are bad laws, which are bad because they can’t be easily understood and enforced.\n\nA determined absolutism could demonstrate systematically that what the victimocrats want is lawlessness and disorder. That’s all—not equality, not fairness, not reciprocity, not truth, not recognition, not justice. The attacks on white patriarchal Western heterosexual bourgeoisness are concentrated attacks on everything that stands for order, which is to say a nomos that has proven more capable than others of transmitting and enhancing its founding order. The lows who are dragged in as cannon fodder in the rivalries of the elites can’t, of course, know what they want to result from their endless agitation; but the truth is the highs really don’t either—the convergence of all forms of power among the globalizing ruling class is actually tending towards absolutism (a perfect symbol of that being Mark Zuckerberg’s eagerly assenting to Angela Merkel’s plea that he do something about all that anti-migrant sentiment on Facebook) while, paradoxically, undermining any possibility for sovereignty by building that power on massive infusions of dyscivilizational elements to the societies they wish to rule."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-left-classical-and-contemporary-and-sovereignty",
      "title": "The Left, Classical and Contemporary, and Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In his latest “Civilization in Crisis” Chronicle, Eric Gans addresses, forcefully and generously, the theory of the left I have been advancing in these blog posts. Gans seems to find my definition (“obedience to the imperative to expose the products of discipline as stolen centrality”) to be relevant to the contemporary left but not to the “classical” left, the prototype of which is the anti-Monarchists of the French Revolution, who objected to what we could call the indiscipline in the King’s distribution or rewards according to status rather than merit, and preferred a bourgeois order in which value, and therefore discipline, would be accurately measured and rewarded on the market.\n\nIndeed, these and future generations of leftists encouraged the discipline qua regimentation of the working class, both on the factory floor and in union and political organizations and schools. There certainly doesn’t seem to be any real continuity between those earlier struggles against aristocratic, inherited privilege and today’s Black Lives Matter, “rape culture” feminists and pro-Palestinian BDS groups.\n\nI don’t really want to disagree with any of this as much as I’d like to examine different ways of looking at the right/left dichotomy. Gans distinguishes “institutionalized firstness in the traditional sense” from “discipline,” but that presupposes that “discipline” is solely economic. If “discipline” involves all kinds of deferrals, including the deferral of the desire to overthrow the sovereign in favor of one’s own faction, or committing murder in the name of “honor,” then “institutionalized firstness in the traditional sense inherited from the Big Men, kings and emperors of old” is the first form of discipline—not only historically, but as the mode of discipline which all the others must presuppose.\n\nIt is part of the discipline exercised by the Big Man, and the discipline he imposed upon the rest. The following sentence—“No doubt the essential innovation of the big-man, as we learned from Marshall Sahlins, was precisely his exercise of discipline, both in producing more than the others and in restraining his consumption in order to accumulate a surplus.”—seems to contrast the original big man with the modern European monarch, but that must mean either one of two things: one, that the French monarchy had abandoned the discipline that originally legitimated its institutionalized firstness; or, the institutionalized firstness embodied in the monarchy no longer involved the accumulation of a surplus, in which case the loss of an economic function justified the resentment towards (presumably obsolete) institutionalized firstness.\n\nThe two claims by no means contradict or exclude each other: the monarchy’s decline into impotence could reflect its historical irrelevance. Still, the distinction is important: in the first case, the French monarchy would have, perhaps, lost its right to rule, but the monarchy itself as a legitimate and in fact, at the time, America excluded, the only legitimate form of sovereignty, would be unaffected. In the second case, the monarchy itself is rejected as “unproductive,” based, perhaps, on the assumption that the purpose of sovereignty (at least at that historical moment) was to facilitate the rise of the market order.\n\nIf the problem was a decadent, degraded monarchy, the solution was a rejuvenated, restored monarchy. Insofar as the left rejected this possibility, it clearly rejected monarchism as such, making that the foundational leftist gesture. If it rejected monarchism in the name of a more “productive” or “functional” form of sovereignty that would protect basic property rights and smooth the rise of the bourgeois order, then it is certainly rejecting the form of discipline requiring respect for at least the accumulated results of previous increments of discipline (how else could firstness have been institutionalized if not by, first, establishing local orders and then setting aside feuds and vendettas in the name of national order presided over by the king?\n\nCan we ever be so sure that those problems have been solved once and for all that we need no longer consider the best way to defer them?). The rise of the monarchy, that is, was the civilizing process in Europe, coinciding with a half a millennium of steady moral, intellectual and technological progress. Monarchy brings power and responsibility to a single center by essentially making the king the owner of the country: kings would vary in the extent to which they carefully tended to this property, but the identity of property and sovereignty in monarchy is not necessarily a concept we have since improved upon. The corruption or weakness of a single king is not an argument against the institution, but the left, from the beginning aimed at discrediting and destroying rather than qualifying or reforming a mode of institutional firstness we have never found a replacement for—on the contrary, the founding anti-monarchical gesture gets replayed over and over against obsessively-compulsively in reaction against any attempt to institutionalize firstness in any field whatsoever.\n\nThe protection of property in the new order will still require public discipline: the discipline of the armed forces, but more importantly of the citizen who doesn’t force the sovereign to turn too much of the population into armed forces. So, the claim that the classical left of the French Revolution represented a disciplinary force depends upon whether it did so politically as well as economically. But, politically, did the slogans of the French Revolutionary Left represent, at best, anything more than a release of those social powers best equipped to dominate on the market (that is, Marx’s description of the Jews would have in fact been true of someone); and, at worst, devolution into mob rule?\n\nOnce you introduce the notions of equality and consent of the governed into political life, you embark on an endless career of discovering new inequalities and abuses of the consent of the governed. The brief and devastating career of the French Revolution demonstrates this democratic axiom—Hannah Arendt may have been right that the American Revolution avoided this fate by avoiding the “Social Question” and focusing on attaining public freedom, but those limitations on the applicability of “equality” and “consent” were ultimately arbitrary and sure to be breached—just as was the distinction between the economic right to have the state protect your property and the economic right to have the state provide you with a living.\n\nOne interpretation of “equality” and “consent” is just as valid as the other, which means these concepts themselves introduce extreme indiscipline into public life, however much the new powers they release might benefit from discipline in economic life.\n\nEven the 19th century liberals, the original “leftists,” represented disorder politically, and that is where the continuity from the free marketers of the late 18th-early 19th centuries, to the socialists and communists and anarchists, to the SJWs of today lies. The left’s obsession with equality has been a civil war machine from the very beginning: the concept of “equality,” more than anything else, provides a mechanism for discovering “oppressors.” The genius of liberal democracy seemed to be that it institutionalized this civil war in political parties battling for power through the ballot box. The gamble was that growing and spreading prosperity would make a renewal of actual civil war a bad bet for a substantial majority of the population—but the actual terms remained the same: while Gans sees these terms as firstness vs reciprocity I think they are actually firstness vs. the latest discrediting of firstness (or, as I would say, “lastness”).\n\nFirstness in the fullest sense already includes reciprocity—monarchies and aristocracies have reciprocity built into them, far more so that democracies, which can only construct ad hoc reciprocities and otherwise rely on reciprocal indifference. Firstness involves using inherited or innate advantages for the common good along with renewing the “capital” invested in those advantages, on the one side; and deference to and emulation of those who so enact those institutionalized advantages, on the other side. When this reciprocity breaks down, both sides are likely at fault, while the greater responsibility must lie with those who have misused their power (the responsibility is not abdicate or deny, but to better use that power).\n\nI’m not arguing for monarchy, and I’m also not arguing against it; the same goes for aristocracy—it’s obvious enough how unlikely a restoration of these institutions would be (but why exclude the possibility?); they would only be considered in the midst of a terrible crisis, but such a crisis would no doubt suggest other possibilities as well. I am arguing, much more modestly, for sovereignty: for there being someone within a determinate territory, whose name everyone knows, whose proclamations everyone receives, who publicizes and enforces all laws, and who resents sharply any other power, formal or informal, that aspires to law giving or law enforcing authority.\n\nAnything that happens under the sovereign is overtly or tacitly approved by the sovereign—that might mean lots of laws, lots of police forces, lots of interventions in everyday life; or, it might mean a firm setting of general terms and unremitting enforcement of those terms—such things will depend upon the character of the people and the skill and intelligence of the sovereign. If your question is, why was this done, or left undone, the answer is: the sovereign. If foreigners are pouring over the border, that’s the sovereign’s decision—not “international human rights law” or “labor market imbalances”; if thousands of people are laid off in a small town, that’s the sovereign’s decision, not “the global market.”\n\n(What about a child dying, a descent into addiction, a failed love affair…? If holding the sovereign responsible for a particular event could only lead to unfocused anger, then responsibility must be taken by the individual or attributed to God. The sovereign is responsible, though, for ensuring there is no empty space between his responsibility to his subjects, their responsibility to themselves, each other and him, and God’s responsibility to enable us all to find the proper level of responsibility.) The sovereign redirects all resentments toward himself as either arbiter of those resentments or visible consequence of pursuing them past a certain clearly defined point.\n\nUnlike “popular sovereignty,” where the “people” are guaranteed sovereignty and therefore must do nothing to preserve it, and opportunistically (like their representatives) disavow responsibility whe never convenient, a genuine sovereign knows that his power must be earned every minute. There will always be internal and external powers that would prefer another sovereign (or would simply like to evade the strictures of this one) and know enough of history to know how many other forms of sovereignty there have been—the sovereign must continually act so as to frustrate their designs, to encourage those who find peace, order and freedom under his rule, and to make a sustained case for the elevating character of that rule.\n\nSovereigns might compete for the best people, so each will have an incentive to make his own territory exemplary. Social life certainly obeys “laws” (economic, anthropological, racial, geographic, moral, etc.) that are not reducible to sovereign power: the sovereign must try to understand these laws and make them serve his own rule—again, unlike the “people,” he can have no interest in ignoring or falsifying them. Sovereigns will make mistakes, and may have to ask forgiveness of their people; their actions will have unintended consequences which they will have to “colonize” with new intentions. There will be lots of trial and error, and failed sovereigns are not likely to survive.\n\nIt seems to me that anything other than this kind of sovereignty must be considered “leftist”; or, to put it another way, only this mode of sovereignty will be immune to leftism. Absolute sovereignty will be unaffected by wordplay regarding “rights,” “equality” and “consent”—its only concern will be with preserving its own sovereignty, which will mean leaving no doubt that it says what it means and can do what it says, and only says what it means and only does what it says. Staging, limiting and harnessing rivalries to enhance the common wealth will be its primary means of self-preservation. The kind of present politics that will lay the groundwork for absolute sovereignty will involve pointing to everything happening today as examples of failed sovereign responsibility (things said but not meant, meant but not said, said but not intended to be done, and done without statement of intention) and show how a genuine, absolute, sovereign would deal with it (and how a people worthy of such a sovereign would rise to meet sovereign decisions).\n\nSuch an approach seems to me sufficiently generic to be a banner people rally behind once a crisis causes them to lose their faith in that final false god, democracy, and to give us powerful ways of speaking about things in the meantime."
    },
    {
      "slug": "truth",
      "title": "Truth",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Do we need truth? This may be the most interesting of many interesting questions raised by Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle , “Civilization in Crisis?”: “Today as at the first human scene, the primary purpose of symbols is not to tell the truth, but to permit human survival.” The truth may be necessary for certain scientific and technological purposes, but otherwise “humanistic truth-telling” is something we can hope will survive, but may, we would have to concede, be inimical to human survival. My proposal that “parrhesia” be seen as a fundamental political concept to originary political thinking makes the question of truth unavoidable.\n\nWhatever takes place on the originary scene is not a revelation of truth in a propositional sense—but it’s not a lie, either: presumably, the scene only “takes” because there is actually an object of desire in front of the group. We could all willingly delude ourselves into sharing a belief in something false, as in the “the king is wearing no clothes” fable, or the “gentle giant” Michael Brown legend, but it’s a lot more economical and stable to share a belief in something that’s actually there. Still—there are other possible “economies” of truth. The inner circles of the left presumably know the truth of the Michael Brown case, just as Stalin no doubt knew that Trotsky wasn’t plotting with the Japanese to attack the USSR.\n\nMaybe a lot of leftists know they are spreading lies here, and just don’t care because they believe they are combatting a greater evil, and bigger, more vicious lies, coming from their enemies on the right. Truth still provides a kind of anchor if you know you are deliberately lying—it may even be like telling kids stories about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. The victimary lies we are discussing here don’t seem particularly “noble,” but if they provide the only way of managing the unbridgeable gulf between those secure within and those barred by their own incapacity from the increasingly “symbolic” economy, then they are noble enough. So, truth might be something, and even essential in its way, but not the main thing—not the thing to build a civilizational politics on.\n\nI would add that the alt-right, in taking up the nationalist cause of (in particular) those working class whites displaced by the globalizing economy over the past 35 years ascribe this development to the self-interest of elites to an extent well beyond what the facts merit—there’s a bit of a stretching of the truth here as well. A lot of us remember the late 70s, when we had the national economies, strong labor unions, and relatively high wages for the white working class so many yearn for today, and if we remember it honestly we also remember how unsustainable it was. The unions priced the workers they represented out of business, the collaboration with unions and governments made the giant corporations increasingly inefficient and unprofitable, liberal urban policies (and liberal politicians were not only empowered, but made a single ruling party by default by the union-corporation-government troika) turned America’s cities into dystopian hell-holes.\n\n(The situation was even worse in the UK, which is perhaps why they produced somewhat superior punk rock.) The technological breakthroughs over the past few decades, including those in finance, were more than a ruling class conspiracy to to undermine the “native” middle class and provide the rulers with access to more pliable global sources of labor (even if they have had that effect)—they did, in fact break through the logjam of the late-70s “malaise” while generating, inevitably, a whole new set of problems. Much of today’s “ruling class,” a member of which spoke at the Republican National Convention, was not “to the manor born” but is rather comprised of people (like the founders of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Pay Pal, Twitter and Apple) who actually invented things no one had imagined before and lots of people wanted.\n\nDonald Trump might be able to compel/persuade Apple, say, to produce more of its products in the US, but there’s a good reason he doesn’t make that promise regarding any of the other companies listed in my parentheses, because they don’t (except for the declining Microsoft) don’t really produce much of anything at all in the traditional sense. There is a great deal of disruption here that cannot be blamed on anyone, even while, like any large-scale disruption, creating a huge vacuum that can only be filled with some kind of resentment. For things to have gone this wrong for so many people, someone must be stealing something big.\n\nWe can see the filling of the vacuum created by unintended effects by various resentments as a kind of mythical thinking. All events have an unintended dimension, which is intolerable for us humans—we must saturate that space with intentions. I will here again call attention to Gans’s analysis in The End of Culture of the emergence of myth as an “explanation” of ritual that, as I put it in a previous post, “anthropomorphizes” the early human groups by ascribing intentions and therefore responsibility to more actions and on deeper levels. The figures in the ritual become, to use E.M. Forster’s term, increasingly “round” characters, and so do the people worshipping and imitating them.\n\nThis mythical thinking lays the groundwork for the Big Man, who becomes the roundest character of all (until we get to God, who is so round that His center is everywhere and his circumference nowhere). We still do this—culture still abhors the vacuum of the unintended—but how do we do it? Gans, in The End of Culture and elsewhere, is positing a kind of historical learning process, whereby mythical thinking generates ever more incisive and inclusive anthropological insights—otherwise, we could hardly speak of “mythical thinking” from a presumably “post-mythical” perspective. Even if we can in this way track something like “progress” from early myth to modern social science, insofar as more and more activity can be accounted for and new forms of activity imagined, are we getting closer to some kind of “truth” here or, as many postmoderns would have it, or are we ultimately just mythicizing in ways more appropriate to our own conditions?\n\nThose of us committed to the originary hypothesis, which makes a higher kind of truth claim than the other human and social sciences, must recoil from such a conclusion. But I think we can find grounds for resistance to this “postmodern” conclusion in the very notion of “unintended consequences.” If our most powerful desire as “symbolic” creatures is to saturate historical events with intention, realizing that doing so leads inevitably to conflict (to the attribution to others of so many injuries that we could never be done counting them and seeking to exact retribution) and that therefore we must concede that consequences often, maybe always, outrun the intentions informing the acts that produced them, represents a form of intellectual and moral discipline.\n\nFine, let’s say that—but is it the truth, or just another convenient fiction? Well, in the space of the “unintended,” we can find consequences to which many acts, many of them at cross purposes to each other, have contributed. To say that what person or group X did in 1920 led completely, inexorably, and with full knowledge aforethought to what happened to group Y in 1960 would require deliberately ignoring and suppressing all reference to what anyone else did in those years, including members of group Y. We can always bring more intentions into our analysis, and we can make the inter-play of intentions consistent with our increasing knowledge of events.\n\nIf many groups (and many individuals within these groups) acted in ways to generate the consequences under consideration, then we can try to untangle the various intentions and the ways they all played out in their interactions—we could argue about it, and hypothesize whether the actions of group Z made a “large” or “small” contribution to the outcome. But we could only argue about such things if we assumed we would thereby be getting closer to conclusions we would all be more likely to agree on, and that future inquirers, with more information at their disposal, would be even more likely to agree on (even clarity on what is worth disagreeing on is progress in this respect).\n\nOnce, in such inquiries (which in ancient times it was the purpose of institutions called “universities” to promote), we realize that we don’t even know how our present inquiry would affect the process of saturating the social space with intentions, that is, once we can’t tell whether our conclusions would help “our” side or not, we could only be searching for the truth. At any rate, such epistemological modesty and rigor is appropriate if all we can really do is defer the most imminent crisis caused by our own epistemic pride.\n\nSome notion of the truth goes back to the beginning of language, but it is only with the reframing of the imperial Big Man by Greek and Jewish antiquity that the Truth becomes central to morality and culture. At this point we don’t have true and false claims about specific facts and events, but an assumption that larger and highly consequential Truths lie “behind” such everyday truths. I think that these larger truths are curtailments of the Big Man’s power. Once resources and the means of violence are centralized by the monarchs of the ancient empires, it would seem obvious to attribute all events, human and natural, to the God-Emperor—the God-Emperor brings the sun and the rain, defeats his enemies provides peace and prosperity to his loyal subjects, and so on.\n\nThe emperors no doubt had their own advisors who told them at least some truths, but the bigger Truth, that the sun and the rain come independent of the emperor’s intentions, that prosperity depends upon the efforts of those who will benefit from it, that his enemies might in fact defeat him, meaning the emperor himself might be an instrument of some larger purpose are all truths spoken in defiance of the emperor. If the emperor’s power was thereby curtailed, everyone else’s power and imperial desire might thereby be stimulated—the truths about us all, truths of “human nature” regarding our rivalries and unattainable desires, are then discovered and made a common possession.\n\n“Truth” as we understand it, then, as something worth dying for, is grounded in an understanding of the limitations of our intentions, precisely as those intentions are unleashed. And, of course, the very origin of propositional truth lies in the declarative sentence, which tells someone making a demand or issuing a command that some reality makes the fulfillment of that demand or command impossible. Truth, then, is always about discovering what we can’t completely know or do, what we must discipline ourselves to accept, even if as a precondition for rectifying the situation. We need truth, especially in a world of sovereigns, to resist being consumed by self-destructive fantasies.\n\nIn a sense, the most authentic argument for inquiring into the truth is the one that leaves aside the question of what the truth is good for. Gans’s almost Straussian conclusion, hoping for a space “in the shadow of victimary ‘correctness’” might be all we could hope for and, maybe, as inquirers, all that we really need. But this is all very abstract—we’re not living in monasteries, after all. What do you do when confronted by the lies? You must at least be grateful to those who discover for us that they are lies—the prosecutors and witnesses, for example, in the Michael Brown case, who did their jobs as officers of the court and fulfilled their responsibilities as citizens and thereby exposed the lies.\n\nBut if you’re grateful to them, you must be sorry if they are denounced, if they lose their jobs, become “non-people” (none of that, to my knowledge, happened in this particular case, except, very significantly, to Darren Wilson, the exonerated officer in question, who has been essentially blackballed from American society, but it has happened in many other cases to people who just did their job and told the truth, and will surely happen in many others)—your gratitude must take the form of at least wanting to help them, to expose the lies, built upon the previous ones, that have destroyed them. The SJWs are not really capable of an orderly process of what is in essence a system of human sacrifice—that is, they cannot assure us, as could the Aztec kings (or priests) of old could, that a certain number of victims will slake the thirst of the victimary gods (say, 10 Darren Wilsons a year) and that we could otherwise go about our business with a conscience sullied but not completely charred.\n\nNo—the SJWs are a bringing their show to a workplace, a neighborhood, a TV station, a school, a company, a local government, an institution, near you. You will, or your children will, surely have to decide whether to help spread the lies (and heap slander upon their victims and those who rebut them) or to combat them, and trying to figure out which will be more likely to extend the life of our civilization a bit longer (based on what evidence and analysis?) is at best an evasive way of deciding which to do. It seems to me better to further anthropomorphize ourselves by combating the lies while acknowledging the contribution our own desires for social peace, for an image of virtuousness and feeling of superiority to others, flawed social theory (or mythicizing) and mislaid guilt (all attempts to saturate the intentional space) have made to the lies.\n\nIf we are going to have faith in something, let it not be in idols or BS, but in the possibility that economic gaps will be addressed in ways we cannot yet imagine. (Although we should, of course, make every effort to imagine them, reducing what must be attributed to “unintended” ever further [but also, thereby, paradoxically increasing more of the unintended].)\n\nIt also seems to me that those who combat the lies will be far better defenders of civilization—why should those who consider the West an enterprise indelibly tainted by “ascription” fight against others who also despise the West? Just as little, though, can we expect vigorous defense to come from those who think the West is fine but, for the sake of social stability, we shouldn’t mind all kinds of vicious lies being spread by the disenchanted and those who manipulate them politically. Such cynicism is demoralizing and contagious (that would mean that the truth is energizing, because it either confirms the promise of the sovereign order or frees you you pledge allegiance to a more worthy one).\n\nYou can tell soldiers that you’re sending them to war not to protect the country, or to defend freedom, but because it’s the best way of modulating current levels of global resentment—but don’t be surprised if they come back and vote for someone a lot worse than Trump. (The same goes for telling policemen they are not battling crime, defending the innocent or preserving order, but keeping resentments within the limits we have determined, never you mind how, acceptable.) More simply put, to try and take a “systems perspective” from within the system is epistemic arrogance (no one is in a position to “do the math”)—defending the truth is the only modest alternative.\n\nTelling the truth, as you see it, is the one thing everyone can do. The sovereign should be happy to hear it, but if not, well no one can tease out all the possible consequences. Going along with a bit of this lie here, and that lie there, while trying to sneak in a bit of inoffensive truth here and there, is just too complicated. It may be that a qualified defense of a hypothetically contained Left seems better than the alt-right alternative, and that, indeed, is the choice—but not only is the question of whether the Left is more of a vaccine than an immunological breakdown an open one, but presuming that you have the Left in a box is the very thing, as the folk wisdom of the horror movie genre informs us, that proves that the situation is not under control at all."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-brief-note-on-the-latest-chronicle-of-love-resentment",
      "title": "A Brief Note on the Latest Chronicle of Love & Resentment",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I may be very naïve, but I think (have thought for quite a while) that there is a very simple answer to the question Gans poses here regarding intellectual exchanges with the social science. In fact, Gans, it seems to me, alludes to this answer in the accompanying letter to the GAlist: “The difficulty inherent in the fundamental idea of presenting a radical transition as an event seems to me insufficiently examined.” The way to overcome this difficulty is to treat all transitions, radical or not, as events—which is to say, to insist that in the human sphere there are nothing but events. Ideas, and their reproduction and dissemination, are events.\n\nThere are big events and small events. What’s the difference?—the small events are measured against the big events—that provides us with our “quantitative data.” Social scientists, one might say, would find this approach disorienting, and reject it—most will, but most will reject anything coming from the “Humanistic” side. A dialogue will always be with the insufficiently disciplined within the constraints of a narrow discipline—inevitably a small minority. But, if we like, we can help things along by reading their concepts in originary terms: “society,” “mind,” “structure,” “value,” and all the rest obviously have origins as concepts—such origins lie at the origins of the disciplines themselves, which emerge, like anything human, as events—but even more important is the way these and other concepts lie at the origin of anything one then goes on to attend to.\n\nWe attend from a concept like “ritual” to certain practices that we distinguish from other practices—on that basis, and only on that basis, can we go on to “quantify” ritual (in terms of rates of occurrence, what other events its occurrence “correlates” with, “major” and “minor” rituals, etc.). This gets complex, of course, because a concept like “ritual” emerges as a concept within the ongoing event of distinguishing what “we” do from rituals—from that perspective, we can try to, as Michael Polanyi puts it, “indwell” within the ritual event itself—and, as a result, more fully indwell our own reality as something-other-than-but-derivative-of-ritual.\n\nSince events only occur among humans, the whole point of identifying originary events and transforming them into conceptual frames (the way we mark historical breaks—pre- and post-French Revolution, for example—is the way all concepts originate, in events that carry their concepts with them insofar as those generated as new embodiments of disciplinary power get to name the event). So, our way of engaging the social scientist is simply to ask them to hypothesize the event(s) generating the concept(s) they are using. If they are interested in seeing their concepts in a new way, as a framing (qualitative) that makes the quantitative possible, we are equipped to help them answer the question.\n\nKnowledge comes from creating events of shared observation of those events that made the event of knowledge possible, and in that sense contain, we might say “eventuate,” the event of knowledge. This perhaps implies a tactical shift from the approach I take Gans to be proposing: from singling out for discussion the single event separating human from animal, frame every event, “real” and knowledge-making, as precisely such an event."
    },
    {
      "slug": "an-interesting-moment-in-hillary-clinton-s-speech",
      "title": "An Interesting Moment in Hillary Clinton’s Speech",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This is a central moment, the crescendo of her diatribe against the alt-right, but what, exactly, is she getting at:\n\nThis is part of a broader story — the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world.\n\nJust yesterday, one of Britain’s most prominent right-wing leaders, Nigel Farage, who stoked anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum on leaving the European Union, campaigned with Donald Trump in Mississippi.\n\nFarage has called for a ban on the children of legal immigrants from public schools and health services, has said women are quote “worth less” than men, and supports scrapping laws that prevent employers from discriminating based on race — that’s who Trump wants by his side.\n\nThe godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is Russian President Vladimir Putin.\n\nIn fact, Farage has appeared regularly on Russian propaganda programs.\n\nNow he’s standing on the same stage as the Republican nominee.\n\nTrump himself heaps praise on Putin and embrace pro-Russian policies.\n\nHe talks casually of abandoning our NATO allies, recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and of giving the Kremlin a free hand in Eastern Europe more generally.\n\nAmerican presidents from Truman to Reagan have rejected the kind of approach Trump is taking on Russia.\n\nWe should, too.\n\nAll of this adds up to something we’ve never seen before.\n\nIt looks to me like Clinton is claiming that Vladimir Putin is the leader of a global movement of extreme nationalists, making even Trump a mere agent of “Putinism,” and that this makes Putin’s Russia the main global enemy of the US, as conceived of by Clinton—much like, in a particularly bizarre twist, the USSR was in the post-war period. But in that case, who would “we” be, that find ourselves so absolutely opposed to, on the face of it, a rather odd choice for an arch enemy. It could easily be purely opportunistic—an attempt to make enough out of some Trump-Russian connections the media has been playing up lately so as to portray Trump as a kind of Manchurian candidate.\n\n(Using Farage as the link between them seems unnecessarily cumbersome, though.) It would be incredibly reckless for a potential president to so provoke Putin for such a narrow and dubious political advantage, but that wouldn’t be that surprising. Still, she says what she says, and there is a logic to it. To be anti-Putin is to be pro-immigration, anti-patriarchal, anti-majority, pro-EU, and uncritically bullish on NATO. I’ve heard it said recently that there are really three truly sovereign countries in the world: the US, Russia and China. Clinton’s targeting of Russia makes perfect sense in this regard because all of the features she objects to are markers of Russia’s sovereignty, and its preference for dealing with other sovereign nations.\n\nEven more, Russia has proven more resistant to infringements on its sovereignty than the US has, and this irks Clinton—especially if it means that the US might become more resistant to incursions into its sovereignty that she has planned. Think about how much Clinton must feel to be at stake in the abolition of sovereignty—she is willing to risk exactly what, according to her own words, generations of American presidents were willing to risk in the name of Western freedom: a potentially cataclysmic confrontation with Russia. But Republicans have been very hostile to Putin as well—they have been crowing over how Romney’s warning in his 2012 debate with Obama that Russia would be our main geopolitical rival has turned out to be right.\n\nWhy, exactly? Why did we never try to make Russia an ally, especially post-9/11, once we were at war with Islamic militancy? What do they do that we so object to? Whatever human rights violations Putin can be charged with (as if that’s our business, anyway), China is far worse—and, yet, we are always urged to strengthen our ties with China. It is China that spies relentlessly on us, using students and guests to this country to do so, and hacks us, and makes the more outrageous claims to sovereignty over new territories. Maybe it’s that China is stronger, economically and politically, and so Russia can be insulted with impunity.\n\nBut why wouldn’t we use Russia to balance China, in that case? Well, that would be to play the old game of sovereignty, balancing one great power against another. It must be that the enemies of sovereignty see China as the easier country to integrate into some international system, first of all through investment and trade deals, and then, perhaps, then through regional organizations and finally genuinely transnational institutions and norms. The fact that China sends so many students here is probably seen as a plus in this context. Whether China is genuinely being integrated or is just exploiting Western gullibility is a separate question—my rough and untutored analysis would suggest that there is something about Russia that is resistant even to fantasies of integration.\n\nA much smaller workforce, and one that is neither quite first world nor third world? Russia’s insularity as a land power? Do the subtle differences between Western and Orthodox versions on Christianity somehow, paradoxically, make Russia more alien than China? Lingering Cold War suspicions and intellectual habits? Surely Russia has some responsibility for the less than warm relations between our countries, but my point is that no prominent Americans (until Trump) seemed to think it even worth the effort to improve them. Whatever it is, there seems to be something irredeemably sovereign about Russia, even under the worst conditions, and that irritates the hell out of the globalists (those who want transnational agreements and institutions to supplant sovereignty).\n\nIn fingering Putin as the leader (I suppose by example, as how else could such a thing be led?) of a kind of nationalist international, Clinton shows us the intrinsically and desperately global, anti-national, anti-family, anti-majoritarian needs and ambitions of the class of elites she presently seeks to lead. And whatever one thinks of Putin, it will probably be clarifying, at least, to put some effort into dissecting the reasons given by anti-Russian ideologues for the enmity they believe we should bear towards him."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ancestor-worship",
      "title": "Ancestor Worship",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Killing time on Yahoo a few days ago, I came across an article about the latest development in the (thankfully, seemingly settled) feud between Seth Rogan and Katherine Heigl regarding the 2007 film, “Knocked Up,” in which they co-starred. What seemed to me worth mentioning (hopefully it will be clear why) in the context of this discussion is the following:\n\nWe love you Seth, and we even admittedly love Knocked Up as a whole, but maybe it’s time to re-watch the film with a pair of fresh, 2016 eyes and consider the fact that your movie might (gasp) actually be a little sexist and that Heigl was just voicing what so many women are rightfully feeling. Because this issue is bigger than just one movie!\n\nWhat caught my eye was the assertion that “it’s time to re-watch the film with a pair of fresh, 2016 eyes.” What moral revelation and revolution, one wonders, does this (obviously very young) writer imagine to have taken place between 2007 and 2016? The film was already seen as a bit “sexist” then, and so Heigl may have thought she was simply apologizing to progressives for appearing in a successful “sexist” film, but the implication of this remark is that we were so steeped in sexism back in 2007 that all kinds of sexist implications we were all blind to then would be so apparent now as to make the film unwatchable, except as a historical document to be dissected in a Women’s Studies classroom.\n\n“Moderns” always speak this way, and no doubt any of us could imagine ourselves looking back at a 1950 movie or 1850 novel with “2016 eyes” and seeing all kinds of uncomfortably taken for granted attitudes. So much the worse for us moderns, but my point here is that the rate of acceleration of this process has increased, is increasing, exponentially. (Another, fairly trivial experience confirms this–after watching the Eddie Murphy film, “Beverly Hills Cop,” with my daughter, she asked me whether it was “controversial” to have a black male lead playing a defiant police detective back in the 80s–as if we had barely and tentatively emerged from segregation at the time or, perhaps, up until just right now,) Completely new forms of racism, sexism, and other isms and phobias are discovered daily—no claim to not be “bigoted” or “prejudiced” (it’s amazing that we still use such words) made prior to the latest shift in the Overton Window can expect to be greeted with anything other than mocking contempt (denying you are racist, rather than finding someone else to accuse of racism, is proof that you are racist).\n\nAll of previous history, and that includes yesterday, is beyond the pale, under the ban—one can only appeal to it insofar as it offers up the occasional example of someone whose thinking was ahead of its time, i.e., anticipated ours (and, preferably, suffered for it).\n\nWhat used to be a fairly leisurely, consensus-oriented process of relegating pieces of the past to the irrelevant or embarrassing has now become a remarkably ruthless attack on anything in the past that would stain the eternal presence of the SJW mind. The Stalinists at least respected, even revered, the basic narrative structure of the past, even as they erased individuals and switched around heroes and villains, but why and how people thought as they thought and did as they did now seems to be of no interest at all—one must put it even more strongly: articulating “discredited” perspectives has become indistinguishable from defending them, as if to understand were to be contaminated.\n\nAs a result, it can be quite shocking to discover how little today’s college students actually know. I was a very uninterested and lazy student through high school, and to this day have absolutely no memories of doing any homework or studying through those years, and yet somehow I absorbed a basic sense of the main events of the past two hundred years (the American Revolution and Civil War, Russian Revolution, two World Wars, Civil rights Movement, etc.), including the general “plot,” main “characters,” consensus regarding who was good and bad, etc. This doesn’t seem to me to be the case anymore.\n\nNow, I’m not interested in another jeremiad on the decline of Western culture and Western learning (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but it does seem to me that there is a kind of “war” here—but on what, exactly? People often speak about the “wisdom” of the past in arguing for the importance of studying history and artifacts of the past, but we find that “wisdom” today, and we rarely see an argument for articulating what is genuinely different and alien to us in the thinking of some former era. (It seems so scandalous that women were regarded as “property,” for example, that there is almost no attempt to understand why male-female relations have taken all the different the forms they have.)\n\nSo, what is the past really for? If we actually worship figures from the past, that would explain the “war” I have been describing—it is a war on ancestors, or, more precisely, on ancestor worship. Having said that, why not think big, and hypothesize that all “religion” (in Girard’s sense, which would exclude the anti-scapegoating monotheisms) is ancestor worship. If we could make this case, it would be enormously economical and clarifying regarding the vast diversity of religions; it would also make it possible to study the persistence of neutered forms of ancestor worship in the post-sacrificial world. In that case, the mania to wipe out the past would derive from an intuition that ancestor worship, even in its contained form, must be destroyed to complete the social justice transformation.\n\nPrimitive peoples generally believe they share descent with the animals they hunt and worship—this would make the ritual scene of egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities a form of ancestor worship. On the originary scene, the sacred object at the center gives life to the community, so it wouldn’t take much to narrativize that relation in the course of the mythopoeticizing of the community, and represent the animal at the sacred center as the literal ancestor of the community. The more elaborate mythologies of more complex communities simply elongate and complicate the lines of descent, but cities are always founded by the gods and populated by their descendants.\n\nFustel de Coulanges, in his The Ancient City, shows the earliest and most en during form of worship to be ancestor worship—indeed, every house is simultaneously burial ground and shrine to the ancestors. The act of creating larger social and political units, then, would involve identifying or inventing a shared divine ancestry between the amalgamating peoples. The creation of larger imperial units concentrates the divine ancestry within the royal family while, presumably, local cults would continue, in a reciprocally limiting relation to the emperor cult.\n\nThe logic of ancestor worship is very compelling. The dead are beyond resentment, and their achievements, by definition, precede and enable one’s own, thereby making them, in an important sense, unsurpassable. All rivalries within an extended family, or a tribe, can then be deferred through references to the figure of the ancestor and the practices he passed down to the community. The value and power of the ancestor can be “modulated” in accord with the strength of contemporary resentments—extremely dangerous rivalries would require the creation of especially wise and powerful ancestors. Moreover, the future is also beyond the scope of our resentments (we can’t really envy our potential great-great-grandchildren), and so we can, realizing that they will worship us in turn, strive to be models worthy of such devotion, for their sake. In this way, we will be imitating our own ancestors, and doing for our progeny what they have done for us.\n\nOf course, ancestor worship is very limiting as well. Ancestors, as communities come, collectively, to imagine them, are meticulous, voracious and arbitrary in their demands; mystifying in their rewards and punishments. Trying to figure out what they want—which vendetta they want continued, which good they want sacrificed—is maddening. The first displacements of ancestor worship, through the installation of Big Men who create new rituals with themselves at the center, must have been liberating: the Big Man tells us what he wants. This displacement would also begin the “search for identify,” which is really the search for ancestors, as more distant progenitors of the community become objects of worship.\n\nBut the Big Man must try and make his lineage that of the community, bifurcating ancestor worship in local and imperial forms. Jewish monotheism articulates the need, if not to worship, then commemorate and worship, in a simulated manner, alongside of, ancestors with the need to make group belonging a matter of law and choice, produced by a revelation which all nations, in principle, could acknowledge—the Jewish messiah is to be a descendant of a convert. But the universal monotheisms and metaphysics seem to assert the possibility of a community without ancestors. That may be impossible, which would help account for the resistance of the ancestor worship of nationalisms to universalist appeals, but before drawing that conclusion, we can imagine how the monotheisms might emerge from and displace ancestor worship.\n\nWithout ancestor worship, how would anyone know what to do? The right thing to do is to pay your debt to your ancestors: to appease them with sacrifice, to sustain their rituals, continue their projects, fight their enemies. But the fact that you will be an ancestor one day, and will obligate your descendants in turn, complicates matters—focusing on those descendants makes you aware of possible inconsistencies in the obligations transmitted by your ancestors. To the extent that differing imperatives cancel each other out, the decision regarding which to obey can be made in terms of which imperative will more effectively obligate your descendants in turn.\n\nCertainly a choice that weakens or destroys your descendants will undermine their obligations to you, and may ultimately obliterate you, since your immortal existence depends upon them tending to you. The more the contradictory imperatives from the ancestors prove paralyzing (presumably because some new conditions make it impossible to satisfactorily fulfill them all), the larger your descendants loom, and the more a new space is created, a space that Hannah Arendt called “between past and future”: the dispute between your ancestors and your descendants creates a kind of “timelessness in time,” in which one can imagine one’s decisions creating a new line from the distant past to the infinite future. This is the space in which the imperative not to carry out some violence at the behest of the ancestors that would initiate a chain of events the effect of which would be to purge the world of your descendants can be heard.\n\nHearing this absolute imperative, then, does not extricate you from the obligations of ancestor worship—indeed, it makes no sense without it. What it does is enable you to retroject that absolute imperative to the origins of your ancestors: that timelessness in time, that presenting, must have been experienced by them if it is possible for you, who are nothing without them, to experience it yourself. There is now a frame in which you can honor, rather than worship, your ancestors, because you both worship the same thing: the voice issuing the absolute imperative. Now, you heed that imperative because they did, and transmitted it to you.\n\nThis opens the possibility, on the Jewish model, of choosing your own ancestors, and it also allows us to examine the limitations of such choices. Anyone familiar with the Left knows how deeply steeped in ancestor worship it is—Leftist historiography is hagiography, populated thickly by martyrs. The Left is many ways like the inhabitants of the ancient city analyzed by de Coulanges—irritable, nervous, petty, always worried that some imperative has been insufficiently fulfilled, the bloodthirsty demand of some ancestor unsatisfactorily complied with. As soon as you cut yourself off from one past you graft yourself immediately onto another—the intellectual world is full of complex filiations which are ultimately subtler forms of ancestor worship, as is obvious if you look at the way the participants of any discipline discuss the discipline’s founders.\n\nThe limitation of nationalist ancestor worship is that it can be deaf to the absolute imperative—especially today, when nationalists are reasonably convinced that they have a pile of neglected debts to their ancestors the repayment of which outweighs all other urgencies, and that the resources available for paying these debts are being stolen. The only way to moderate while honoring (as a form of life) nationalist ancestor worship is with the artificial ancestor worship of the disciplines, and ultimately of the sovereign, since the artificiality of these disciplines means that the absolute imperative is part of their founding—all these disciplines can be traced back to, find their ancestry in, the studying of the divine will in the struggle for faith and law. On these grounds we can fight the war to defend ancestor worship."
    },
    {
      "slug": "another-alt-right-program",
      "title": "Another Alt Right program,",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "also very interesting and instructive :\n\nWhat does the Alt Right want?\n\nStrong, high trust communities for our people: we reject immigration and favor homogeneous societies.\n\nProtection from Third World outsourcing: We support tariffs designed to protect domestic industry.\n\nProtection from the globalist elite: We reject Super-PACS and foreign elites purchasing elections.\n\nHealthy relationships between men and women: We respect truthfulness regarding sexual differences.\n\nProtection from globalist pollution: We support regulations designed to protect our natural heritage.\n\nProtection of cultural diversity: We reject multiculturalism and favor separate cultures.\n\nProtection from forced association: We reject being forced to betray our beliefs and support what we believe is degenerate.\n\nFreedom of honest debates (i.e., history, race, sex): We reject political correctness and cultural Marxism.\n\nProtection from international corporate oppression: We support nationalist economies with a focus on local industry and small business.\n\nThis could very easily be the, or a, or part of a program that emerges from the Alt Right. This program clearly emphasizes the globalist/nationalist antagonism. The final demand, for “protection from international corporate oppression” is the one, I think, that really includes all the rest—it is both vague and comprehensive. All the evils of today’s society could really be traced back to “international corporate oppression,” as is evident from the very odd insistence on “protection from globalist pollution”—is the implication that nationalist industries wouldn’t pollute (why not?), or that we simply prefer nationalist to globalist pollution?\n\nAgain, we have the same question I raised in my previous post: who rules, or, in this case, who is doing all this? The measures proposed here would require an extraordinarily powerful and tightly organized state: indeed, we could reduce all of these demands to the single demand for a state powerful enough to serve as an intelligent filter between the rest of the world and the national territory. This would be a state an insignificant number of whose officials benefit from international corporate trade; a state that competently distinguishes between fair and beneficial trade, on the one hand, and harmful, “oppressive” trade on the other hand; a state strong enough to resist the pressures of all the other states in the world to open its borders and markets; a state strong enough to resist the importunities of the most power domestic economic actors, who would surely be pressing for access to global markets.\n\nIn other words, a fairly absolutist state—even though this manifesto never uses the word “state,” government,” “power” or any equivalent. Now, such a state would clearly also be powerful enough to force you to associate with anyone it wants, or to mix cultures, or control immigration according to its own sense of the necessary. So, if we reformulate this manifesto as a demand for an absolutist state, can we include these other demands (for “healthy relationships between men and women,” for example)? I believe we can: the demand is then for a virtuous, absolutist state. “Virtuous” according to whom, or according to what standard, someone out there wants to say.\n\nWell, is it meaningful to speak of healthy relationships between men and women? It’s actually harder than it seems to answer that question in the negative, especially once we start to look at examples. It would be hard to find someone before whom it would be impossible to place a scenario about which they would have to say: “that’s not healthy.” At the very least, then, we can work our way back from the undisputedly awful to the somewhat better all the way back to the good, or “heathy.” It is very important for the forces of “political correctness” and “cultural Marxism” to prevent this discussion from being framed in this way, because once we are talking about the “good,” the momentum of the dialectic itself will lead us to see as good more or less what most normal people see as good.\n\nA virtuous state, then, is simply one that frames all of its discourse and decisions in terms of the attempt to find and protect what is good. So, we can articulate the more moral demands of the program (for high trust communities, for example) with those implying the need for a state more powerful than the most formidable coalition of competing power centers with access to that territory could be. A virtuous state, one interested in the good, would be empowered by more virtues—by more high trust communities, healthy relations between sexes, and so on. The point about pollution still leaves me puzzled, but it seems to me that a clear relation of complementarity between the Alt Right and Absolute Reaction can be posited: the latter points out that the desiderata of the former require the kind of sovereignty proposed by the latter, and encourage the former to draw the logical conclusions from that observation—one of those logical conclusions being the need for an attitude of deference toward the state, an attitude of delegating vengeance and the adjudication of disputes to the state, and the capacity to self-curtail resentments within the terms set by such a state."
    },
    {
      "slug": "frame-symmetry-equality",
      "title": "Frame, Symmetry, Equality",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Equality as a goal of human relations is chimerical and delusional. It’s just a way of organizing war parties. But inequality presupposes a kind of relationship that we could call “equality,” but need not, and better not, so as to avoid conclusion. If some humans are better fighters, workers, thinkers, etc., than other humans, that is only because all humans (and only humans, in the sense we mean) are to some extent capable of fighting, working and thinking. They are all in the same frame, in that case, meaning that we can see them all in relation to each other. Even more, insofar as we are interested in who is better at these activities, we accept that it is not immediately obvious—that is, we must have standards of measurement, such as contests and after the fact assessments of results in order to determine who is better.\n\nIn order for the measurements to work, we have to suspend our assumptions about who is better, which is to say we “bracket” everything we know going into the relatively controlled situation, so that we can judge the participants solely on what happens there. Even, more, we want to leave open the possibility that people can improve, or worsen, and that, therefore, someone who is better now might be worse later. In this case, what we might call “equality” is an achieved, disciplined perspective, not a presumed attribute of human beings. The more we refine this controlled perspective, which is to say the less we assume about relative abilities based on the qualities (heritage, race, gender, wealth and connections, etc.) we come to deem irrelevant, the more we can imagine ourselves in pursuit of some degree zero of equality, where we will have identified and controlled for all of those distorting accretions on the ability we are trying to assess. But what we are really after in such cases is not equality, but symmetry, which is to say, the “aspect” under which we can look at everyone as identical except for this one ability or quality we want to bring into focus.\n\nThe more humans become disciplined and civilized, then, the more we need to find ways to place them in frames that enable us to create the symmetry the disciplines need to recruit their new members and assess their current ones. As science, medicine, law, pedagogy, management and all the rest of our specialized activities become autonomous and systematized, extra-disciplinary criteria for belonging become intolerable. It wouldn’t take a skilled doctor, interested in reducing the practice of medicine to some kind of method, long to realize that the son of a peasant might be as good a candidate for medical training as the son of an aristocrat.\n\nInsofar as the disciplines want a wide recruiting field, and insofar as the sovereign relies upon the disciplines, there will be a democratic component to the social order insofar as the sovereign will have an interest in making social mobility for the talented possible. Without all of the poor receiving at least some education, there will be no way of judging any of them for possible promotion (it would be almost impossible to identify geniuses out of a crowd of illiterates). Rags to riches stories generate more illusions about equality while hardening the lines of inequality by making the distribution of ability even less random.\n\nThere are broader, more informal modes of symmetry that pass for a kind of equality, such as the symmetry of conversation partners, conviviality, community and comradeship. In a well governed order, occasions will be created for sharing these kinds of symmetry across class lines; otherwise, they will serve as (sometimes richly satisfying) compensations for the less disciplined. For those who resist discipline, whether explicitly, tacitly or unknowingly (say, by developing ADD), the fear of losing out on such modes of symmetry is very likely a large part of the reason why—there’s no reason to despise someone who’d rather put in enough hours at a mindless job to make living and then hang out with his friends in the bar, rather than work 70 hour weeks to climb the corporate ladder.\n\nAn advanced civilization allows for and even subtly encourages the creation of such spaces, and finds ways of recouping the “deviations” they represent—everyone knows the limitations of even the highly intelligent “straight arrow,” and the potentialities of the talented drop out who will find his way back into the system as an idiosyncratic irritant. Many won’t find their way back in, and will contribute little or nothing to an increasingly digital civilization. If they are left alone, though, they may find all kinds of ways of contributing to each other and enjoying a kind of equality (if we wish to call it that) that way.\n\nThere will always be a kind of feeling for equality, desires to enlarge those feelings, and resentment at the disciplinary forms, which will always have a degree of arbitrariness to them, that thwart such desires. Understanding these feelings and desires as the necessary illusions generated by disciplinary frames and and various local symmetries created in response to (or pre-dating) civilized order is essential to containing them. This is an argument for a kind of political formalism—having the most disciplined be the most attentive to their responsibility to rule, and making that rule as disciplined as possible—that continually works on framing the less formal elements of society.\n\nThe more differences that can be framed, the more civilized the order, and the less necessary repression, and the less likely rebellion, becomes. To frame is to rule, and to target ways to enhance discipline is to frame. Redirect all blame of the other to the redressing of your vulnerability to that other—there’s no point to blaming the Left for anything, since we can learn to control the feelings of guilt and fear that the Left exploits and thereby disable it.\n\nThe most productive form the feeling for equality takes is that of play, which is a completely framed event: everyone in the act of playing knows that who they are in the act is completely defined by the act and everyone’s participation in it. There is symmetry, interdependence and togetherness, but to try and figure out whether everyone is equal would ruin everyone’s fun. So, framing is ruling and framing is playing. It’s ruling for the one who is both inside and outside the game, and being both inside and outside of the game is itself a form of discipline—being outside of the game you participate in is possible insofar as you know that the positions and moves in the game are ways of framing and channeling resentments that have their origins elsewhere and must be staged and unfolded in an orderly manner in order to be reconciled to reality.\n\nThe sovereign, then, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, must operate on two levels: framing so as to contain and transmute into sovereign power resentments while entering the space of those resentments and allowing them to target, albeit merely symbolically, the center one occupies. If we are ever to have real sovereigns again, it will be a far more complex and difficult business than it ever was before.\n\nIn an article he wrote around the time his book Coming Apart was published, Charles Murray argued that the problem with the new “cognitive” or “symbol using” elite was that they didn’t preach what they practiced. In other words, these elites became (or in some cases remained—which is not a given) elites by following a clear life path, including abstention from addictive habits, hard work, career orientation, monogamy and intensive investment in children, while simultaneously denouncing “bourgeois culture” and privileging the cultural experimentation that perhaps some of them could afford in their youth but which is devastating for the less disciplined.\n\nMy argument is in that spirit—if you have ever been successful at anything, if you have ever overcome setbacks and obstacles, think about how you did so: what kind of preparation (your own and others) was necessary, what kind of resources had to be summoned, how many new beginnings were required, what kinds of temptations (giving into to despair or all of the excuses for giving up or failing that are so easy to generate) had to be resisted, and what kinds of intellectual and emotional habits had to be formed (and what kind of work was involved in forming them). Insisting that such demands be imposed on anyone else who talks of wanting to succeed or complains of failure will do those people far more good than indulging their resentments against those who prevented them from being who they really should have been.\n\nThe only people who are fit to rule are those who can sustain and convincingly exemplify such insistence in the face of the constant wailing of the less disciplined who, if their wailing goes for naught might find happiness in the more informal pleasures of equality."
    },
    {
      "slug": "liberal-ga-reactionary-ga",
      "title": "Liberal GA, Reactionary GA",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I think that the central theoretical difference between GA as a liberal political theory and GA as a reactionary theory is that the former sees the marketplace as decentered and the latter contends that there are always centers, to which any marketplace (or portion of a larger marketplace) is subordinate. If we start with the market as an entity or process in itself, which is to see it in terms of its difference from “command” economy and gift economy alike, governed by its own “laws,” the liberal argument is persuasive. But it seems to me that a decisive argument in favor of the reactionary view is that, if the marketplace were genuinely decentered, we would have expected to see a gradual “withering away” of the state since the modern market emerged in the 19th century while exactly the opposite has occurred: from the historically unprecedentedly minimal state (at least in the Anglo countries) of the 19th century we have devolved to an enormous, cumbersome, bizarre, state which wages war on behalf of a high-low alliance against the middle.\n\nFurthermore, if the liberal democrat state (do we still have that?) were itself a kind of marketplace, registering resentments so that they can be represented and resolved, wouldn’t it actually be registering the full range of resentments rather than promoting some and criminalizing others?\n\nMoreover, has there ever been, could there ever be, a sustained market unprotected by force of arms that makes a particular territory safe for the transport and buying and selling of products? On the margins of gift economies, sure, but as a social order in its own right? Anarchist libertarians provide us with a detailed hypothetical account of what a completely “marketized” order would entail, and often point to this or that local historical model (usually to point out, no doubt often truthfully, how that privately managed function was usurped by the state). Hans Hermann-Hoppe offers the most compelling arguments for such an order, and if it turns out to be possible my own arguments for absolute sovereignty will turn out to be wrong—or, just as likely, the actual realization of a libertarian realism.\n\nHoppe makes it clear that the largest property owners in a given territory will be, effectively, sovereigns in that territory, and they will govern in a manner far closer to medieval monarchs than liberal democrats: you will certainly need his permission to enter, much less do business within, his territory. The same will be true if all the inhabitants of that territory own that territory as a kind of joint stock company (which would also involve highly undemocratic differential voting power), al though in that case governance might be more “racist” (strict rules regarding what type of people can enter and reside) rather than “fascist.” Absolute sovereignty can be seen as the logical conclusion of anarchist libertarianism, its perfect inversion: just assume all property owner by a single property owner, whoever is actually capable of controlling and defending it, and there you are.\n\nThis difference—the centered or decentered character of the modern social order—is connected to another one I have discussed several times: the relation between “producer’s desire” and “consumer’s satisfaction.” A liberal GA sees a linear progression from the Judaic monotheistic revelation, on the one hand, and the invention of Greek metaphysics, on the other hand, and the development of the modern liberal democratic market order. What is at stake here is also the existence of a center. For a liberal GA, the deferral of an imperative order (an order, let’s say predicated upon the exchange of imperatives between gods and humans: tell me what to do, we “command” the god) creates what we can call a “declarative” order increasingly free of imperatives (I will always be with you, says God, and provides laws to be adjudicated by judicial bodies, deferring imperatives so that they emerge more “processually”).\n\nThe “Age of Discussion,” as Walter Bagehot put it, commences: imperatives must be “consecrated” declaratively before they are obeyed. A declarative order is, like a conversation or discussion, inherently open-ended, desultory, and inconclusive. Whatever can be deferred (“kicked down the road,” as political slang has it) is deferred.\n\nI think this description is accurate and the social transformation in itself beneficial, but, as it stands, massively forgetful. What keeps everyone talking? Person A insults person B—person B responds not, as in an earlier, more imperative age, with a challenge to duel, but with a snarky comment. Surely some Bs out there would like to take a swing at the occasional A (it still does happen once in a while); surely some As would like to provoke the occasional B to do so. So, that impulse to gratify oneself with direct, oh so satisfying retaliation, is restrained—why? We all know that there is very little tolerance for violent behavior, but if it’s just fear of being arrested, getting a criminal record, being sued, etc., there has been no ethical advance—that would just prove we are all scared to death of the state.\n\nBut no state, or social order, could sustain itself in this way—such a violent, terrifying state would also be arbitrary and demoralizing, and would lead to more use of violence to settle scores. It’s also interesting that the “Age of Discussion” lowers the threshold of “insult,” which means that more potential violence is getting deferred—this indicates a genuine ethical transformation, insofar as we presuppose in each other deeper reserves of self-generated restraint. All those who converse rather than strike back are receiving, or hearing, an imperative (don’t respond to that micro-insult in the way you feel, ever so momentarily, inclined to) on a level, or at a frequency, that only someone inculcated in declarative culture can access. Being able to access such an imperative is what it means to be inculcated in a declarative order.\n\nFrom where or whom is this constantly renewed, internally directed imperative issued? It’s an imperative that makes it possible to hear the voice of God or think metaphysically in the first place. I think we should adopt an assumption of the conservation of functions in examining social phenomena—new things happen, human being undergoes transformation, but nothing is lost: every human capacity is saved and either incorporated within or left on the margins of the new phenomena, waiting to be reactivated. If the link between the imperative we issue to the god and the one the god issues in return is severed (we no longer sacrifice—release our hostage to the god—in turn for victory or prosperity) then the imperative exchange must be reconstructed on new terms.\n\nThat link is severed because the Big Man who becomes emperor is too distant to engage in an exchange of imperative with individuals who, for that matter, are still embedded in more local communities and gods (which, in turn, cannot provide an imperative exchange that is effective within the imperial or ecumenical space). But no one can act outside of imperatives—even if we convince ourselves that we act declaratively, by reasoning things through, weighing options, etc., how did we decide to reason about those things in particular; more precisely, what enabled us to discipline ourselves so that we could examine things in narrative or propositional terms without simply acting out?\n\nIn the space between the receding local gods and the unresponsive God emperor, humans learn to hear a new imperative which is also a renewed older one: an abstraction of the first imperative not to retrieve an object but simply (and complicatedly) to “wait.” In the space between insufficiently extensive imperatives (commands that don’t tell us how to finish the task) the imperatives we hear filling that space must come either from ourselves or from some place inaccessible; if they come from us, no order can be made of the imperatives we hear and chaos must result. So, the new imperative, what we could call an “absolute imperative,” is that thou shall not be the source of imperatives.\n\nThat one is commanded to wait and seek an outside source of the imperatives to obey is what makes one open to metaphysics and monotheism. Declaratives, which previously gave narrative form and sanction to imperative exchanges now advance and conceal a longer-standing imperative to be discerned. But this absolute imperative dissolves one type of hierarchy (determined ritually) and creates another (determined by our relative capacity to refrain from, essentially, pretending to divinity). But those most capable of refraining from divine pretensions are also those most given to such pretensions: the humblest are those who have restrained the most prideful impulses.\n\nThose who most feel their commands should contravene all others must listen the hardest for the absolute—and a few of them, if knocked around in the right way, will do so. In that case, the absolute imperative is best conveyed to human society through a hierarchy topped by a sovereign who is both “great” and humble before God or, more broadly, most submissive to the absolute imperative.\n\n“Consumerism,” or the increasingly prevalence of consumer satisfaction in the ethical and political fields, is the regime of those who have so thoroughly internalized the absolute imperative as to have absolutely forgotten it. And there are good reasons for letting it be forgotten, for letting the public sphere be governed by ethical and moral commonplaces that have erased all signs of the struggle and discipline required to create and install those commonplaces. But in the end, this approach breeds contempt for those commonplaces and the history that produced them. Only producer’s desire, the existence of men (and it will be, with very few exceptions, men) who would be great, who seek to make the world over in the form of their imagination (their BS, if you like), makes it possible to remember the absolute imperative—because such men rise and fall, transgress, regroup, convert their humiliations into models for social order, and it from such men that sovereigns can emerge and find support in the various tiers of charisma.\n\nThis is where centrality resides, in this communication of the absolute imperative through sovereignty, in any territorially or even culturally bound social order. For both metaphysics and monotheism, the target of the absolute imperative is the individual mind or soul—both would very much like to sideline or instrumentalize the question of sovereignty. (Arendt said that listening to philosophers theorize politics is like listening to someone laying down the rules for a madhouse.) A sovereign center would be a puzzling stumbling block for the putatively universal disciplinary spaces of metaphysics and monotheism.\n\nBut both metaphysics and monotheism have imploded into the insanity of subjectivism for that very reason. Minds and souls only operate through the engagement with models—others more disciplined than oneself. The consumers need to follow the producers—consumers are completely empty without the producer—and the ultimate goal of consumption is to become a producer oneself, which requires the ability to defer consumption. And sovereignty is production of the community in obedience to the absolute imperative."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereign-selection",
      "title": "Sovereign Selection",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The establishment of dynastic monarchies, while not to be completely ruled out, as it is the simplest way to guarantee the continuity of the sovereign power, cannot be relied upon as a means of selecting the person to exercise absolute sovereignty. Anyway, dynastic monarchies have always been problematic in this regard, as all it takes is one sterile couple to lay the groundwork for a civil war between those allied with the king’s nephew and those insistent that his mother-in-law’s son by her first husband is the true heir. There have been elective monarchies, but in what sense are they monarchies—sovereignty is certainly not absolute, and however carefully the electorate is chosen, it is sure to expand until we have a full-fledged democracy and therefore radically uncertain sovereignty.\n\n(We don’t hear much about elective monarchies, which suggests to me they have never been particularly successful, or established as a stable political form.) This seems to me the biggest logistical problem with absolute sovereignty, since if sovereignty must be completely in one set of hands, how does it peacefully get into another set of hands, as eventually it must? So, let’s try to solve it.\n\nIt is best to see sovereign power as either taken or given—and certainly never as simply extant in some body. Once taken, or received, it is held, until taken by or given to, another. (We can follow the chain of custody.) So, the theory of absolute sovereignty has to account for a repeatable means of giving power and for the least contentious way possible of taking it, when necessary. A ruler could give power to whomever he wants, but a responsible ruler would want to give power to someone who could hold it. We can, of course imagine that being his offspring, who has grown up as a prospective heir, has been trained and groomed for the job, imbued with the proper sense of responsibility, and so on.\n\nThe purpose of primogeniture, of course, was to eliminate rivalries between the children of the monarch by creating criteria that placed the decision beyond their control (criteria that prevented there being a decision). As soon as we introduce the notion that the best must rule, and the foundation of kingly power no longer serves as a permanent legitimation of monarchical rule, we are confronted with the possibility of explosive rivalries, most obviously between the king’s children but then more broadly between his advisors, those discussed as suitable heirs or replacements, along with all the families and factions drawn into these rivalries.\n\nThe intractable nature of rivalries spread across the entire social order being the problem generated by the assertion of absolute sovereignty, it must therefore be made the solution. The more deserving the sovereign, that is, the more power is exercised by the most intellectually and emotionally disciplined individual, the more that sovereign will want the flourishing and interaction of similarly disciplined individuals just below the threshold at which a challenge to the sovereign seems like a good bet. The way to do this is always to be the arbiter in those rivalries—to set up, more or less explicitly, contests to see who is the best advisor, the best surrogate, the best administrator, the best theorist of political power, the best architect, artist, etc., and to be the final judge in these contexts.\n\nThis is a very layered and indirect process—there would be contests over the best advisor for how to determine the best architect, etc.—but that is the art of sovereignty. Whoever is always the judge can never be judged himself, and if the ruler needs judgments regarding his exercise of power, he can set up a contest for that as well, one promoting both honesty and humility on the part of the contestants. These rivalries can reach deep into society, recruiting fresh talent to the regime, while encouraging a general sense of competitiveness, fair play and devotion to the regime among the people.\n\nAs part of his normal exercise of power, then, the sovereign creates and continually replenishes a pool of candidates for his replacement—there will be no outrage or even surprise if the man who has been credited with giving the king some of the best counsel over the past decades is appointed the ruler’s successor in his twilight years, or if the ruler feels his power failing. By the same token, there will be less shock if, supposing the ruler to become suddenly erratic and evidently a danger to the realm, such an advisor, with the support of others—the support of enough to make civil war impossible, or at least brief—were to take power and sideline the ruler.\n\nSuch a seizure of power would be able to account for itself in terms of the recorded history of the regime, and reliable accounts of the ruler’s changed behavior. As always, these simple descriptions of what absolute sovereignty would entail make it obvious how different we would all have to be—rulers and ruled alike—for such a regime to work. I would assume that it sounds crazy to most readers. I accept that as a marker of the degree of transformation in consciousness and conscience that would be necessary to restore civilization at this late date. What we have utterly lost is the habit of deference, not as a means of squelching by precisely in pursuit of our highest aspirations—in other words we defer to others all the time, but always either grudgingly, or or in strict adherence to a set of rules formulated to make it look like one is acceding to reality rather than deferring to another, but almost never in free acknowledgement of another’s unquestioned eminence. Only the direst of circumstances will lead us to recover that."
    },
    {
      "slug": "technopower",
      "title": "Technopower",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Nick Land, at his Outside/Inside blog, strikes back against Reactionary Futures :\n\nTo ignore the historical association of power disintegration with the emergence of self-propelling techonomic competences also looks like a serious blindness. Capitalism hatched in Europe because Europe was broken. Keeping the world broken seems similarly indissociable from the survival of capitalistic historical momentum, and breaking it more profoundly is the route to capital intensification. Perhaps that’s the argument we’re having (not that such arguments matter much).\n\nThe issue here is whether sovereignty precedes and determines economic and technological power or vice versa: for Reactionary Futures , sovereignty is always conserved (someone, ultimately owns society), while for Land (along with most of his commenters), more materialistically, and seemingly more commonsensically, technological innovations from the printing press to “blockchain” (the subject of his next post) have driven upheavals in power. Land, as the the penultimate sentence suggests, looks forward to the complete technologization of power, as each man can become an island fortress. His final comment is meant, I think, as a death blow:\n\nThe Idea that unified power is the reliable principle of social competence is ethno-historically French. That is where it has worked its magic since the epoch of the Sun King. Under sufficiently dismal circumstances, the RF analysis might catch on there.\n\nTouchè! (Keep in mind RF has been criticizing Land and others pretty vigorously lately.)\n\nLand sets up the question properly, I think. There are three possibilities: first, and perhaps most likely, at least for a while, the continual out of control spiraling of technological and political disruptions of existing forms of techno-power; second the establishment of technologically impregnable forms of private property that will allow that least some to escape the first possibility (why should those driving and controlling automation even bother with victimary claims—why not just build businesses, residences and modes of exchange invulnerable to them?); third, the recovery of sovereignty, i.e., power that says what it does, does what it says, and does and says no more and no less than is necessary to ensure that saying and doing remain thus commensurable.\n\nThe materialist argument is that option three is simply impossible, because of the logic of the market, or of complex systems, of evolution, or of technological innovation, all of which cannot be controlled by any central government and, furthermore, will be destroyed by any real effort at exerting control. But the need to caricature reactionary future’s position here is telling. Reactionary future ’s most effective argument regarding sovereignty and technological and economic complexity, is to point to the fact that some of the major success stories, according to free market criteria, such as Hong Kong, Dubai, and Thailand, have taken place under autocratic governments.\n\nThe argument for the strongest form of sovereignty, which is to reduce all of a territorial society to the property of the sovereign, does not imply micromanagement of everything within that social order. It implies management of everything that needs to be managed, which the capable sovereign will seek to make as little as possible. Meanwhile, while Land can look forward to technological powers beyond the reach of any sovereign, the truth is we have never seen anything like that, and today’s new technological powers, despite some instances of resistance (like Microsoft’s original determination not to engage in lobbying, for which it paid dearly) are all too eager to converge with existing forms of (self-subverting) sovereignty.\n\nForming their own armies and carving out territories of their own seems to be the furthest thing from the minds of Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc. More likely than Land’s utopia, I think, is that even a half-way competent sovereign will be able to bring into its service enough technological capability to counter the new techno-powers—new forms of encryption will always generate new forms of decryption and the state will always have an intense interest in preventing the un-decryptable.\n\nBut there’s something more important than these empirical analyses, which, of course, can always be wrong. Whe never we speak of political entities (nations, classes, interests, etc.) or extra-political entities (technologies, wealth, markets, knowledge, etc.) we, in fact, presuppose sovereignty. We presuppose sovereignty because we presuppose property and some originary distribution thereof (the nomos), and in presupposing property we presuppose property differentials and relations, and in presupposing property differentials and relations, we presuppose differentials in discipline. To be disciplined is to be sovereign—that is the origin of the concept, which implies ruling “over” something, first of all one’s own impulses, i.e., desires and resentments.\n\nIf a budding literary scholar (to take a simple example) trains himself not to respond sympathetically and hostilely to characters in novels, for the sake of examining the means by which a novelist can induce sympathies and antipathies in readers, he becomes sovereign over that set of responses, which is embedded in the acquisition of literacy. If you ask such a budding scholar how Flaubert examines mimetic desire through the character of Madame Bovary, and he tells you how sorry he feels for her, you can know for sure (unless he is joking) that he has not gained sovereignty over his “natural” readerly responses.\n\nThe same is true of any field of human endeavor, and any social or economic category. To the extent that we could speak of a “nation,” we imagine a group of people that does or could establish laws and institutions over a territory it controls, thereby distinguishing its members from those of other nations. (At the same time we speak more of nations when sovereignty is weakened and we have to inquire into the “substance” of sovereignty—if the sovereign seems less capable of controlling the territory, we start to ask whether all of the people within that territory are really “under” the sovereign, which implies that some might be more so than others.)\n\nIf we speak of the “interests” of a particular group, we imagine some political center that could address those interests, and favor or disfavor them in relation to other interests. New inventions only take place, are exploited, made profitable, and disseminated under conditions where factories and laboratories are not constantly attacked and raided, where there are schools producing literate and numerate individuals, where there is money that is not completely worthless, and much more. The inventor presupposes that he (whether it be the scientist himself or the company he works for) will be recognized as sovereign over his invention—even if we set aside copy rights and patents, even other inventors or manufacturers who take and benefit from his invention know what the source of that particular addition to the sum of human capacity is, or at the very least know that there had to be a source. They know that someone had to be sovereign over certain materials in a particular time and place, and other conditions, themselves guarded by some form of sovereignty, was necessary for that sovereignty to be exercised.\n\nAll these “local” forms of sovereignty (which multiply with the advance of civilization) either account for the totality of their sovereignty by themselves (the inventor is also guardian of his laboratory and factory, protector of supply chains and distribution networks, etc.) or defer the maintenance of such external conditions of sovereignty to someone who must, therefore, be sovereign over those conditions. The less we speak directly of this sovereignty over the condition of my own sovereignty, the more unquestioningly we presuppose it. (Microsoft’s refusal to lobby indicated, really, a highly admirable if incredibly naïve belief that if the US didn’t yet have undivided, certain sovereignty, interested in nothing more than sustaining civilizational advances that would redound to the reputation of the sovereign, the example of new companies like Microsoft that showed without question the benefits of providing a space for innovators to be sovereign in their one thing would move us closer to such a mode of sovereignty.)\n\nThe question for companies like Google, in a time when rulers rule by undermining sovereignty, is whether it is best for them to support a mode of sovereignty that will let the company do what it does best (gather all of human knowledge, organize it and make it available according to increasingly powerful algorithms) while insisting upon (always yet to be determined) ultimate deference to the imperatives of a sovereignty that as much as possible wants to let Google be Google; or, to directly interfere with, participate in and further confuse sovereign powers by surrendering their own sovereignty as they curry favor with various interest groups, bribable politicians, demographic forecasts, and so on.\n\nI suspect that, if faced with the question in this form, Google would choose the former, and the fact that they are nevertheless well along the path to the latter (aligning itself with the victimary, with open immigration, with the political fashion statements of its Silicon Valley workforce, etc.) shows just how difficult the self-extrication of technological capacities from politics must be. In the end, the flourishing of technological capacities and healthy national and international marketplaces depend upon their seeming opposite: a state that makes marginal and decisive interventions in economic operations in order to preserve its own sovereignty.\n\nCan any state make merely marginal interventions, while at the same time making those interventions decisive? The materialist position, whether it be the libertarianism of Hayek or the communism of Marx, is “no”: the state can never be anything more than meaningless aggrandizement of power, in the interest of a ruling class or the state apparatus and its remora themselves. The reactionary position is “yes,” given sufficient discipline at least among those power centers most capable or interfering and confusing sovereignty and, therefore, most capable of contributing to the restoration of sovereignty by refraining from such interference and deferring to a competent sovereign (perhaps from among their own ranks).\n\nEurope’s emergence from the “Dark Ages” involved a general enhancement of discipline across the board: political, moral, economic-technological, and intellectual. This is why all of Europe gravitated toward absolute monarchy during this period. So, what happened beginning 1300, or 1400, or 1500, to set off the spiral of reciprocally subversive powers we call “modernity”? Reactionary futures has a narrative similar to Eric Voegelin’s, beginning with medieval nominalism, through the various schisms of Christianity along individualist, anti-social lines, through Protestantism, of which liberalism is just a secularized version—Voegelin’s claim that modernity is Gnosticism would fit RF ’s analysis very well. What RF adds is the primacy of power, that is, competing powers supporting these new ideas so as to render power more uncertain and hence aid their own bids for power. But how do competing power centers become powerful enough to advance their subversive ideas, and why these ideas in particular?\n\nI think that if we stay focused on the question of discipline we can approach the problem in a more productive and comprehensive way. Differentials in discipline in a steadily disciplining social order creates power imbalances: between the more and less disciplined, of course, but also between elites that succeed in exemplifying and conveying their own discipline to their dependents and charges, and those that don’t. The latter are likely to try to leverage the indiscipline for which they have become responsible so as to counter-balance the lagging of their own institutions behind the more thoroughly disciplined sectors.\n\nThe way to leverage indiscipline is to replace the charisma of self-discipline with the (anti) charisma of transgression. The (anti) charisma of transgression describes well the post-nominalist schisms in Western Christendom: arbitrary will replaces virtue, which is to say the discipline of resisting dominant (center-acknowledging) habits of thought replaces the discipline of acquiring fluency in and contributing to those habits of thought. The former discipline may very well require courage and ingenuity unneeded by, even inimical to, the latter. As long as transgressive charisma works from the margins of a social order still set into a long term disciplining process, it subverts that order, but not fatally, and may even be harnessed for innovative purposes—I would disagree with RF ’s insistence that liberalism had no significance, and certainly no positive significance, for scientific and technological culture in the West.\n\nAnti-social defiance of norms can inspire generative modes of inquiry that yield fruit before the social effects of that defiance become evident. Transgressive charisma did not decisively break the virtuous circle whereby the discipline of the elites depended upon and saw to the discipline of the emergent middle and lower classes until recently, when the convergence of mass production, mass media, information technologies and socialist welfare state expectations (all, no doubt, representing new and interlocking power centers) converted increases in elite discipline into degeneration of popular discipline. Industrialization required disciplined masses, and so, despite centuries of inroads made by transgressive ideas of individualism, democracy, and liberalism, diluted notions of virtue like “respectability,” “morality,” “decency” and “normalcy” still prevailed.\n\nUp until the 1960s, no one would have wondered whether the triumph of democracy now meant that individuals no longer needed to be responsible for their behavior, even though no one had ever voted on those norms of behavior to which they were held responsible. We have reached a breaking point because automation and algorithmic economics and culture require a specific kind of very enhanced discipline by a small minority, but openly encourages and, at least in the short run benefits from, the relaxed discipline of the majority. If not a majority, a very impactful minority can now participate with little consequence in the culture of transgression, which in turn need no longer present itself as a reform of normative culture—it can openly declare war on normative culture.\n\nIt may very well be that, along with self-disciplining movements within communities by those terrified by social collapse, a reactionary restoration of sovereignty will require that the major technopowers first actually assume and formalize their actual power, and then deliver that power to sovereigns who will integrate the disciplinary structure and vocation of those corporate giants back into a renewed social disciplinary project. Google and the others may have to realize that they don’t really want to rule, but are the only ones capable of seeing to it that someone does. That the giants and the new sovereigns will accept the need (and find a way) to replace the high-low war against the middle with an ordered hierarchy of powers that confers formal recognition upon differentials in discipline may not be overwhelmingly likely, but it is possible and, probably the only way of preserving civilization—that is, the only alternative to the more extreme exigency of more desperate and marginalized civilizational reboots."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-alt-right-nationalism-and-absolute-reaction",
      "title": "The Alt-Right, Nationalism and Absolute Reaction",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve discussed Vox Day’s declaration of principles of the Alt-Right and the theses regarding nationalism in particular, but VD’s declaration has been getting a lot of attention and may very well come to occupy some quasi-official status as representing the ideas of the Alt-Right, and some more thoughts have occurred to me regarding the below quoted theses (7, 10, 15, 16), so perhaps this is all worth a more detailed examination:\n\nThe Alt Right is anti-equalitarian. It rejects the idea of equality for the same reason it rejects the ideas of unicorns and leprechauns, noting that human equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.\n\nThe Alt Right is opposed to the rule or domination of any native ethnic group by another, particularly in the sovereign homelands of the dominated peoples. The Alt Right is opposed to any non-native ethnic group obtaining excessive influence in any society through nepotism, tribalism, or any other means.\n\nThe Alt Right does not believe in the general supremacy of any race, nation, people, or sub-species. Every race, nation, people, and human sub-species has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and possesses the sovereign right to dwell unmolested in the native culture it prefers.\n\nThe Alt Right is a philosophy that values peace among the various nations of the world and opposes wars to impose the values of one nation upon another as well as efforts to exterminate individual nations through war, genocide, immigration, or genetic assimilation.\n\nI pointed out in passing the paradoxical status of nationalism in all this. The Alt Right rejects the idea of equality because it simply doesn’t exist in reality. This implicitly rejects the notion of a more limited political or civic equality, which calls for treating people according to the same standard (by letting them all vote, for example). I have no objection to that, but, then, on what ground can one “oppose the rule or domination of any… group by another”? What, exactly, is wrong with such rule or domination? This point is reiterated in principle 15, where it is asserted that the Alt right does not believe in the general supremacy of any race, nation, people or sub-species.”\n\n(Sub-species? I didn’t notice that before.) But why not, once the principle of equality has been rejected? Perhaps one can always find a perspective according to which differences can always be seen as neutral, rather than conferring superiority on one group or another (one group has higher intelligence, better civic values, more martial courage, but the other group is better at basket weaving…)—but this involves a principle of interpretative generosity—the very principle of interpretative generosity involved in the idea of equality (the smart and the stupid have the same number of votes). Moreover, while VD is not clear about this, it seems likely that the rejection of the idea of equality was meant to apply at least as much on the group as on the individual level.\n\nThe effect of this slippage is clear: within the context of complete separation of groups, a live and let live policy can prevail, and differences can be seen as neutral rather than invidious (so that we can “value peace among the various nations of the world…”). In the context of more than one group within a given territory, differences are given a maximally invidious reading. So, the immediate aims (and current practices) of the Alt Right are privileged over a rigorous and consistent account of the questions raised by those aims.\n\nWe see this in principle 10. The second sentence here is really all weasel words: what counts as “excessive influence”? Wouldn’t any influence that exceeds the influence of any other group be “excessive”? All means of gaining such influence are illegitimate, but the only means mentioned are nepotism and tribalism. Wouldn’t one group being more intelligent, talented, and hard-working gain them outsized influence? VD, I assume, by merely gesturing toward “any means,” doesn’t want to raise the issue of such groups (and therefore the issue of whether it might be an Alt Right principle to drive out intelligence and enterprise)—and, if the idea of equality has no reality, wouldn’t they have to exist?\n\nUnless every foreign group is kept out from the start. But that presupposes, for starters, that all national groups will at least be equal in sharing the Alt Right desire not to conquer other nations, or expand into their lands. War inevitably shifts both borders and demographics—hence the rather incongruous pacificism of the Alt Right. Who can decide where the “real” (as opposed to merely internationally recognized) borders of a country end—was the Sudetenland really part of Germany, is much or all of the Ukraine really part of Russia, etc.—other than the nations themselves, but will this not inevitably be a point of contention? Again, the surreptitious introduction of the idea of equality allows for the evasion of difficult questions.\n\nThere is probably about as much reality in the idea of a nation ruling itself (being sovereign) as there is in the idea of equality. Someone rules in the name of the nation, as the principle of non-equality would suggest (unless one wants, once again, to sneak in the notion of equality, this time within a nation). But it is those who rule in the name of the nation who invite the other groups in—in order, first of all, perhaps, to increase the wealth of the ruler but, in the case of a disciplined ruler, that of the entire people, or significant portions of it. More than nepotism and tribalism must be involved in these efforts of the middlemen minorities (or nepotism and tribalism must be productive in ways we haven’t sufficiently considered).\n\nWhen the imported nation has done its job, the ruler can expel them or deflect resentments on the part of the home nation toward those groups—unsecure power can be blamed on the nepotistic and tribalistic foreigners. (Of course, other approaches might be available.) This brings us to the ultimate limit of the Alt Right, at least in VD’s (fairly accurate, I think) account. The way you direct resentment toward (let’s say) the Jews is by attributing their “excessive influence” to tribalism and nepotism (there’s some redundancy here, isn’t there?). You thereby rule out, as VD doesn’t quite want to do explicitly, the possibility that they served some function, made some positive contributions, or succeeded through some of those “unique strengths” possessed by any nation—you also evade the possibility that whoever rules in the name of the nation might at any time find it necessary to bring in a middleman minority to do some intricate or dirty work—you thereby prepare yourself to oppose that minority, without ever adopting the perspective of the one who rules. You essentially announce in advance your readiness to participate in the obligatory scapegoating of the newly despised minority when the time comes. This attitude reflects a very deep desire to avoid the fundamental political question: who rules?\n\nDeflecting the question of who rules onto, ultimately, the genetic inheritance of the native population, means one doesn’t really want to rule. This is not a criticism of the Alt Right—not every political movement has to aim at rule. Sometimes the demolition of a destructive force is enough. And very few political movements can obtain clarity regarding their own limitations. The leftists are now swinging wildly at the Alt Right, hoping to make it through this election; the conservatives are flailing, practically begging to be trolled mercilessly by the Alt Right. An absolutist reactionary can take a more measured stance—if the Alt Right can seriously damage the globalist-SJW ruling party, it will be doing God’s work. But we can listen very carefully to its many ways of avoiding the question of who rules, and be ready to pose the question whe never the opportunity arises, because the absolute reactionary has no other concern than to incessantly clarify the issue. Principle 12: “The Alt Right doesn’t care what you think about it.” But we can think about it all the same."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-alt-right-s-coming-out",
      "title": "The Alt-Right’s Coming Out",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Hillary Clinton has decided to tie Donald Trump to the Alt-Right so that she can run against it, thereby turning this election into a case (for those who remember the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race) of “vote for the crook—it’s important.” This confirms that the only active forces in American politics are the SJWs (high and low) on the left and the Alt-Right (the middle)—the Democrats and Republicans are basically husks being eaten from within (the Democrats, for their part, have introduced the entirety of the Black Lives Matter agenda into their platform, along with the most extreme immigration policy imaginable).\n\nVox Day has made a(n admittedly) preliminary proposal towards an understanding of the Alt-Right, to which Reactionary Futures has responded. Certainly, many people on the Alt-Right believe many of the things Vox Day lists here, but they believed them before there was an Alt-Right (even if the term “Alt-Right” goes back to 2008, its emergence really dates to 2015), so they are not what gives the Alt-Right whatever coherence it has, nor will any “program” or “platform’ guide the Alt-Right’s future trajectory. The Alt-Right is really the mirror image of the SJWs: the SJWs exploit every actual inequality between groups by presenting it as evidence of oppression; they dare you to assert that those inequalities represent differences in ability or discipline.\n\nThe Alt-Right is simply the sustained, unremitting, unabashed, thoroughly joyful acceptance of that dare. The truest of VD’s definitions is the following: “The Alt Right is not a defensive attitude and rejects the concept of noble and principled defeat. It is a forward-thinking philosophy of offense, in every sense of that term. The Alt Right believes in victory through persistence and remaining in harmony with science, reality, cultural tradition, and the lessons of history.” So, RF may be right that the Alt-Right is “only any good as a punching bag upon which the left can beat and wind up for a new round of expansion,” but this is certainly a punching bag that punches back so there’s no reason not to reserve judgment and see how effectively they’re going to do that.\n\nRF sees the Alt-Right “as a middle rebellion in the De Jouvenelian scheme,” a middle rebellion, presumably, to paraphrase Pirandello, in search of a High. But you can only attract a High patron by looking effective, which the Republican party and conservative movement haven’t for a very long time, so perhaps some billionaire backers who would like to see a restoration of Western order and have been hedging their bets will take this as an opportunity to get into the game. So, rather than asking, as does RF , “how exactly is this [VD’s stated goals] to be brought about,” we might ask, what can be done (and undone) with this [the movement itself]?\n\nMany of VD’s points are, as RF points out, arbitrary and/or bewildering—for example, the definition of Western Civilization as “Christianity, the European nations, and the rule of law.” As RF points out, the rule of law hardly goes back to the foundations of Western Civilization, has not always been present within it, and has not necessarily been present at its highest moments. It also seems like an odd thing to focus on, especially since it hasn’t been something the Alt-right has focused on (many Alt-Rightists, including VD, have contended that massive expulsions from Western countries, including of those who have been citizens for several generations, will be necessary to preserve the West—now, you might argue that only ethnic Europeans can live according to the rule of law in justifying such measures, but you can’t carry out such expulsions in accord with the rule of law, so why foreground it?).\n\nYou could say that the European nations have been the “carriers” or “bearers” of Western Civilization, and from an HBD standpoint argue that only these ethnic groups could have done so, but the existence of these nations hardly clarifies the meaning or content of Western Civilization. The rejection of “the rule or domination of any native ethnic group by another, particularly in the sovereign homelands of the dominated peoples. The Alt Right is opposed to any non-native ethnic group obtaining excessive influence in any society through nepotism, tribalism, or any other means” is also bizarre—as RF points out, this is Wilsonianism, and in sharp contrast with the Alt-Right’s rejection of egalitarianism (VD’s point #7)—if we believe in HBD, and if some individuals are more suited to succeed and rule, doesn’t it follow that the same will be true of peoples?\n\n(Are colonialism and multi-national empires really not part of Western Civilization? Where would we place the Roman Empire?) This vacuous principle serves several very present-day objectives: taking a shot at the Jews (who else “obtains excessive influence through nepotism and tribalism”?); rejecting, in a seemingly ultra-hardline way, globalism; and by apparently presenting a theory of international justice and therefore international relations, actually distracting attention from questions of war and peace (which no one on the Alt-Right seems prepared to discuss) so as to focus on domestic enemies. I don’t say whether these goals are good or bad, just that they aren’t “founding ideas,” or capable of providing the grounding for rigorous debates—they are ad hoc and reactive.\n\nIt is a virtue of the Alt-Right that, regardless of how foundational it wants its thinking to be, each and every one of its concepts are weapons, to be deployed in the here and now. Of course, this isn’t the only virtue, or the highest. At this moment, though, it is the most necessary.\n\nThe best contribution originary thinking can make to making this even more than a near-death experience to our own evil doppelganger, victimary thinking, is minimality. The crux of all this is what Eric Gans calls the rejection (or prohibition) on “ascriptive differences,” or the anti-discrimination imperative. If we accept the imperative that ideas are not to be judged on their truth and institutions on how effectively they fulfill their mission, but on how successfully they stamp out all ascriptive differences, then we program ourselves to help destroy everything. At this point, no one can explain in any clear, much less consensus generating way, what it means to be “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” etc.—it’s really an “I know it when I see it” situation, which means sovereignty resides with those who can see it and show it in the most aggressive, hostage-taking way.\n\nMoreover, no one can even explain why being a racist, etc., makes one the worst kind of person—is being a racist worse than being a liar, a cheater, a thief, etc.? Ask someone—see what they say. All this must be rejected, and can be rejected simply by being honest and saying what you see and think—PC is a war on noticing (a phrase I think Steve Sailer took from Oswald Patton). Liberalism wanted us to forget differences; the logical conclusion of liberalism, the SJW, shoves differences in our face relentlessly on the assumption that, as good liberals, we will do anything to be allowed to forget them again. But once we accept that differences are differences, and that it’s very interesting to try and figure out their sources, and that we might want to maximize some of those differences in the interest of restoring the most basic differences, between good and bad, deference and transgression, all kinds of interesting intellectual and political prospects open up."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-originary-hypothesis-and-reactionary-thinking",
      "title": "The Originary Hypothesis and Reactionary Thinking",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Reactionary political thinking, which is characterized by the rejection of democracy and equality in favor of the promotion of and rule by the good (in the sense of proficient, intelligent and value adding as well as virtuous—keeping in mind the possibility of tension between the two senses) has, unsurprisingly, looked to the ancients (especially Plato and Aristotle and their medieval heirs) and evolutionary theory for its intellectual supports. Those who consider whites both the more intelligent and virtuous of the races can easily include their racial politics within the paradigm, but there is “aracial” reactionary thinking and there is also white-centered racial thinking that declines to supply external philosophical support of any kind to forming its agenda, so we can leave racial realism and human biodiversity out of this discussion.\n\nMy purpose here is to show that the originary hypothesis can form the basis of reactionary political thinking, providing with a more powerful mode of theorizing than reliance on fairly stale Platonic and Aristotlean platitudes. The case needs to be made because Eric Gans has always presented originary thinking as politically liberal (in the broader, 19th-mid 20th century sense) and supportive of modern political categories (freedom, democracy, rights) and modern market society. I don’t deny that originary thinking is also compatible with liberalism, just that it only and intrinsically is so.\n\nNow, my own version of reactionary thinking is “power to the disciplined, and disciplined power.” This formulation, dependent upon the originary hypothesis, seems to me far more powerful than any equivalent formulation using concepts like “virtue” and “good,” for the simple reason that “discipline” is a dynamic praxis rather than a quality, and from that follows far greater analytical precision and perspicuity. And “discipline” is just an extension of “deferral”—it is self-conscious, systematized deferral. I treat “deferral,” then, the way marginalist economics treat “marginal utility”—as a concept that singles out the distinctive and new (the emergent event), and turns it into a hinge upon which all of social reality turns.\n\nMarket society itself is just a form of deferral: not just the deferral of immediate gratification (which allows one to spend money on years of education and sit quietly in classrooms and do homework instead of playing and then to go to work five days a week and stay focused on intrinsically uninteresting tasks or to learn advanced mathematics even though it’s easier to watch movies or play video games, etc.) but also the more easily overlooked deferral of not robbing the corner store because I don’t want to wait until the end of the week to receive what will anyway be a lot less money, or chopping down the telephone or electricity poles in my neighborhood and selling them for firewood or any of the other violent or disruptive behaviors that would make civilization impossible.\n\n(Or, for that matter, not killing my sister because she dates a guy I don’t know or approve of—because in a civilized order we need to interact peacefully with people we don’t know.) All these forms of discipline allow new values to be produced and recognized. Of course, the issue gets complex, because an advanced market system encourages its own form of indiscipline insofar as success in the marketplace yields power which can then be used to intervene in the marketplace in all kinds of ways that undermines one’s own discipline and thwarts the disciplined efforts of others. But, of course, that’s what simple concepts are for—to enable us to understand infinitely complex actual situations. But the point is that everything that we do, every thought and action, is a mode of deferral, and why not stick with the most fundamental concept and use it to reconstruct the more complex ones?\n\nNow, the most consistent reactionary site on the internet (to my knowledge) is the blog, Reactionary Futures , to which I have referred several times. Reactionary Futures reduces reactionary political thinking to the conservation of sovereignty and the advice:“1) Become worthy; 2) Accept Power; 3) Rule”, a more minimal definition than found elsewhere; moreover, Reactionary Futures makes a point of distinguishing, in very hard line ways, his own thinking from that of “neo-reactionary” thinkers (like Nick Land’s Outside In , Brett Steven’s Amerika , Jim’s Blog , Social Matters and some other sites), and they reciprocate. So, there is a kind of debate and discipline here, one that I find far more interesting and free than more mainstream discussions.\n\nNow, Reactionary Futures is familiar with Girard’s thinking, and considers it very important and supportive of the notion of “certain” sovereignty. This makes perfect sense—I don’t know if Girard ever endorsed modern democracy and notions of rights, or had anything positive to say about absolute monarchy (al though he certainly believed that modernity loosened restraints on mimetic rivalry), but if human beings are thoroughly mimetic and endemically conflictual, it’s not a leap to conclude that only a single, clear, and disciplined authority will be able to prevent constant outbreaks of violence. Eric Gans’s thinking (which Reactionary Futures is certainly not familiar with) is a very different matter, though. Gans has laid out a clear and rigorous path from the emergence of the Big Man to the establishment of modern market society, and an alternative, and plausible, path would need to be imagined if the originary hypothesis is to provide intellectual resources for reactionary politics.\n\nThe Big Man evolved into the ancient empires, such as the Babylonian and Egyptian. The emperor is the model for the free individual that will later be generalized, subsequent to the Judaic and Christian revelations. Those revelations, then, were only possible in response to the unifications of large masses of humanity, sweeping aside local deities and rituals, transforming the emperor into a new, sacralized center. If all humanity is (at least potentially) united in its subjection to and worship of a single figure, then that unity and the equality of all as units relative to that center can be imagined as an enlarged reproduction (a scaling up, so to speak), of the originary scene.\n\nThis revelation, made by the ancient Jews and and extended by Christianity, also had the effect of bringing the emperors themselves into history, as they themselves are nothing more than instruments of a divine will. This new sacrality or, really, post-sacrality because post-sacrificial, creates the reciprocity between equals that eventually takes the form of equal exchanges in the marketplace. There is a more strictly economic logic to this process as well, insofar as the asymmetry and instability of the gift economy (still grounded in the struggle between Big Men to outdo each other in the competition for prestige, followers, and power) reaches its limits and is replaced by the exchange of goods in accord with the stable medium of money, a process no one can control and which would automatically defer the deadliest struggles, those over centralized power.\n\nMy biggest question regarding this account has been, why should we assume the incompatibility of the empire with the exchange economy? The exchange economy never developed past a certain point in the ancient empires, but that could easily be due to the level of economic development; even more important, nowhere has the modern market emerged without a strong state that enforced law and order and property rights. You can say that the autocratic emperors and monarchs are replaced by elected officials accountable to the rule of law, but the fact remains that the ability and willingness to use force against criminals and rebels is always part of the repertoire of any state.\n\nCan anyone believe that, even today, even in the Western world, under a liberal democratic regime that has been around for over a century, a government genuinely unable to maintain order would be replaced or at least suspended by those capable of restoring order (if anyone is indeed capable)—and that it would do so to great public relief? A political theory has to have a way of accounting for the state—even an anarchist theory would have to account for how the things the state does would be done otherwise, or why they don’t really need to be done.\n\nIf there is always a state, there is always a Big Man because the state is always organized hierarchically (just like the military always is). Of course, in the modern world, every institution is organized hierarchically, and this is, needless to say, a source of great resentment. It is the notion of equality, modeled on what, in my understanding, Gans considers the elementary moral reciprocity of the originary scene, that generates this resentment. But a conception that generates resentment against a social structure (hierarchy) that is absolutely necessary and that, moreover, everyone, at least in their honest moments, will agree is necessary, must be a false conception.\n\nIt is a protest against reality. We could say, well, “equality” is never to be implemented once and for all, we are always just approximating it, it serves as a kind of regulative ideal on existing institutions, etc.—but why? Are we getting closer to equality? Only in the sense that we are coerced more rigorously to mouth assent to each celebration of some inequality being overturned. There is certainly no objective sense in which we are becoming more equal—does anyone think that, say the janitor of a university would feel free to approach the university president and tell him he’s doing a lousy job? Or that any member of any elite feels obliged to feel the “pulse of the people”?\n\nThe elites are at least as distanced and arrogant as ever—they feel free to tell the people they are a bunch of fascists for voting for Brexit or Trump. Still, at least they feel they have to talk to them (and pay attention to whom they vote for)—they don’t consider the hoi polloi to be quite subhuman, not yet. But the fact that any of us can, as linguistic beings, speak meaningfully, even if contemptuously, to each other, represents a kind of basic equality that is irrelevant politically. The Pharaohs spoke to their people, and, in some mediated manner, probably heard from them as well: social barriers pose no barrier to linguistic exchange, and the notion that the sheer possibility of linguistic exchange is a model for social relations in general may be a necessary illusion, but an illusion nevertheless. When we converse with someone, we may strive for maximum reciprocal transparency, spontaneity and vulnerability, but this doesn’t mean we want all our social interactions to be like such conversations.\n\nAside from the impossibility of defining much less achieving equality, there is no moral or ethical reason for equality (equal in what relation?–consumers and voters are not really in relation with each other) to be a model for social relations rather than the relations between teacher and student, expert and novice, innovator and user, the courageous and the obedient, discoverer and surveyor, etc. Indeed, it is those kinds of asymmetrical relations that better enable us to ask whether this person should be CEO, or President, or professor, or judge, or doctor, etc. Or even whether one wants them as a friend, neighbor or partner.\n\nThere is moral reciprocity in each of these relationships, and even if they are asymmetrical at the moment, students become teachers, workers become managers, privates become generals, mere users become innovators, etc. And this can be modeled very well on the originary scene, insofar as we assume (and how can we not?) that imitation forms the originary scene just as much as it forms the crisis that made it necessary: the learning from each that must have taken place on the scene is the model for the asymmetrical symmetry that in every social interaction has one person yielding, even if provisionally, to another. It is remarkable that we have a social order, social theory, and pervasive social atmosphere that takes it for granted that we direct fierce hatred toward this not only inescapable, but beautiful reality.\n\nIt is not surprising that a mode of thinking that that sees every human step forward as a further excavation of our origins might have reactionary implications. The reactionary thinking I propose involves paring down a model of sovereignty to its most minimal, and fighting against everything that is in the way of seeing and presenting that model. And the model of sovereignty is, simply, sovereignty: someone who decides what it means to say friend or enemy, law abiding or criminal, loyal or treasonous, permitted or forbidden, and everyone knows who this someone is, what he decides, and that he can do what he decides. Sovereignty is not on the originary scene because it doesn’t become relevant until the Big Man creates a social center that is not simply a ritual center. But there is certainly a point on the originary scene when the momentum towards a violent resolution of the mimetic crisis is halted and replaced by the spread of the sign—that point or moment is what is retrieved and clarified in the emergence and preservation of sovereignty."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-is-to-be-undone-1",
      "title": "What is to be Undone?, 1",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It’s time to try something along the lines of Machiavelli’s The Prince , or all those “mirrors for kings” they used to write in the Middle Ages—instructions and advice for restoring and maintaining sovereignty in the contemporary world. But as we’re quite a ways from having anyone resembling a new reactionary ruler, it seems like the “activist” or, as some neo-reactionaries would prefer, the “passivist,” is the only one who could use such a manual. I don’t really have anywhere near enough readers on any political scene to “advise,” though, and there are actually plenty of blogs out there with some very good advice (quite likely based on a lot more experience than I’ve ever had) regarding the kinds of political attitudes, actions and non-actions to take in resisting the consolidation of globalist/leftist political power.\n\nIf “producerism” is to replace “consumerism” as a model for intellectual activity, though, political writing like all writing must be done performatively, pointing to its own participation in the concepts it constructs—writing within the originary scene, rather than about it. Lenin’s What is to be Done is probably the best combination of theoretical innovation, polemical precision and practical intervention in political practice ever written, and his model of “democratic centralism” (everyone within the organization has their say based upon the experience gathered from their own location in the field, but when the decision is made, everyone implements that decision with absolute obedience) is a good starting point for thinking about sovereignty, so this seems like a good model, but only if put in reverse, in a reactionary manner: if we think about reaction literally, as restoring, e.g., the heir to the royal line and of the deposed aristocracy, along with the established Church, etc.; or, for that matter, as restoring the same demographics of an earlier time; we would end up squabbling instantly and impotently about insignificant details or complete impossibilities; but if we think about reaction as a stripping of excrescences from a model of sovereignty that has certainly existed almost everywhere and that attained a kind of perfection (absolute monarchy concerned with internal order, the civilizing process and external differentiation) before (way before) revolutionary modernity demolished it once and for all, then setting ourselves the task of identifying and undoing all the sources of disorder all the way back to the original challenges to that (now abstracted) form of sovereignty—well, then we have a perfectly reasonable project of politically interested historical and cultural inquiry, and one that conforms to the fundamental insight of the originary hypothesis that all action is a form of deferral, which is to say, all doing a kind of undoing.\n\nSince I don’t have a ruler, potential ruler, political organization or potential political organization to address, I’ll just address anyone who wants their speech to more closely approximate truth and their actions to more closely approximate sovereignty, and is willing to invest in the possibility that the originary hypothesis provides a uniquely valuable means of accomplishing same. As Schmitt said, sovereign is he who decides on the exception. So, in the US, there is a legal doctrine dictating that rights can be infringed if there is a “compelling state interest” in doing so. Whoever decides what counts as a “compelling state interest” is sovereign.\n\nSchmitt’s definition is highly minimal and easily operationalizable, but more follows from it. Sovereignty can be exploited and discarded, or it can be preserved: the former occurs when the sovereign power serves external interests, which is to say is sold to them; in the latter case, the sovereign’s existence depends upon the maintenance of sovereignty and so care is taken that all lines of authority can be traced back to sovereign decisions. The sovereign, then, wants everyone else to be sovereign in their own sphere—the most minimal and hence ideal form of sovereignty would be to do nothing more than to set and enforce the terms of all subordinate forms of power.\n\nSo, to speak for sovereignty is to be more sovereign—to treat all powers as sovereign, to treat their formal and real powers as identical (they allow for and therefore endorse everything done in their sphere), and initiate disciplinary spaces that would inform more fully sovereign powers. Within such disciplinary spaces, everything is on the surface: everyone in their sphere is either subverting sovereignty or making it more certain, and we can tell who is doing what simply by listening to and speaking with them. Every word out of every person’s mouth (or keyboard) is either a way of exhibiting and modeling sovereignty by bringing words and actions closer together or dispersing sovereignty by disclaiming the implications and consequences of one’s words.\n\nThis is just a fully political form of the concept of discipline—the more disciplined you are, the more you want to represent things coming from you or touched by you as signifying you; the less disciplined, the more you want to palm off even what everyone sees you do as coming from elsewhere. So, the first thing to start undoing is all of those concepts and mental tricks by which what is within our responsibility as speaking, social and governing beings is farmed out to others and to various impersonal agencies.\n\nThe Big Man is the beginning of history and of all our ethical and political dilemmas. The Big Man disciplines himself so as to accumulate and ultimately break the gift economy by placing himself beyond any possible reciprocity. But in the meantime, he must be managing rivals, cultivating alliances, discovering norms and founding institutions, even if in minimal ways: what is not allowed to others must be allowed to him, and so he finds ways of formulating and enforcing this new ethical realm—and, then, recognizing the new desires his own innovations have inspired in others, and which must be incorporated into his own praxis.\n\nHe institutes a system of discipline, first of all among the second-tier Big Men in his orbit, and hence the first form of sovereignty. Everything done in the space he governs is done, ordered, or permitted by the Big Man. The Big Man stretches imperative culture—the culture of asymmetry, of honor, of the demand that every act be collectively affirmed or negated—to the point where his own sovereignty is limited by events it has set in motion: wars and the rise and fall of regimes are outside the sovereignty of the Big Man become tyrant, which is the beginning of “declarative” culture: sentences that apply equally to every human being, big or small.\n\nWhat is said about the poor farmer can equally be said about the king: they both live and die, rise and fall, find grace and sin, etc. The declarative sentence as the Name-of-God is a logical conclusion of this process, a “purified” sentence that frames all narratives in the naming of the source of imperatives that come before any specific imperator. It is the Big Man who comes to realize that demands he makes of his gods, mediated through his priests, cannot be fulfilled, but some form of speech, cynical or prophetic, is required to make this part of the Big Man’s governance: the final form of discipline acquired by the sovereign, but accessible to everyone participating in that sovereignty, is to listen to those reminding you of the limits of your sovereignty and minimizing your sovereignty accordingly.\n\n(At a certain point, demands like “destroy my enemies,” “strengthen my hand,” “give me a sign,” “tell me what to do” are seen or felt to go unanswered, which means the answer is really just a restatement of what is beyond the limits of your power: I AM. But only someone relatively powerless could say that this limit does not simply imply a more powerful god of the same kind but a God of a different kind who is with everyone—I AM is something everyone can not say, and in not saying it be reminded of the limits of sovereignty.) Sovereignty draws both emulation and resentment toward itself, and in this way brings resentment to a central point where it can be overawed and reframed as unappeasable and hence transgressive if not “donated” to the sovereign.\n\nSo, we must undo our deadly ambivalence toward inequality, the deadly desire for an even greater power to undo some more direct power over us. If you want someone to have the power to do that, you also want them to have the power to not care what you want. In that case, you want to become disciplined enough to be aligned with that power. But isn’t the best way of doing that to respect and seek to further formalize the powers you feel prompted to complain about?\n\nSovereignty does not presuppose ethnic homogeneity—the conditions under which the sovereign takes power may leave several ethnic groups within his territory; through carelessness or deliberation, demographic shifts might diversify the territory; the sovereign may have specific uses for particular ethnic groups; the sovereign himself might come from an ethnic minority, or even be a foreigner—there are conditions under which these arrangements might make a great deal of sense. But one thing the sovereign cannot do is ignore or deceive himself regarding ethnic and racial differences. Different groups, and different factions within each group, will be loyal (or disloyal) to the sovereign for different reasons, and rivalries within and between such groups will be major sources of both potential and danger.\n\nThere might be good reasons for encouraging the dilution of groups, or for promoting their homogeneity and solidarity. Sometimes it will be preferable to address specific groups, and sometimes to subsume all within the category of “loyal subjects.” Still, having said all this, in the end most sovereign orders will have a core ethnic group, and sovereignty will be more secure the more it privileges this group and ensures its flourishing, and even more so if the sovereign comes from that group; it also follows that the restoration of sovereignty will most often begin as the self-defense and self-assertion of such a core group.\n\nOther arrangements must be considered somewhat deviant, and assumed to carry special dangers. At any rate, once we acknowledge that ethnic differences must be acknowledged, we can consider what kinds of acknowledgement conform to sovereign preservation. Each group’s specific contribution to the commonwealth should be acknowledged, and any movement towards a claim to sovereignty by a specific group strongly discouraged. Jettisoning some group and relying more completely on the core group is always an option, though, if sovereignty is threatened. What needs to be undone here is the war against stereotypes and prejudices—it is better that we know what everyone thinks about everyone else, and the more people realize that social order still requires various explicit and tacit negotiations between groups the more prepared all will become for a sovereign that can serve as the authority of last resort.\n\nEvery individual is a sample whose appearance naturally leads to inquiries regarding the representativeness of that sample. But what also needs to be undone is scapegoating, not so much because it is harmful or hateful to particular groups as because it traduces the essential principle that all responsibility ultimately lies with the sovereign. This keeps ethnic conflicts within limits—even if you think one group is violent, another manipulative and greedy, a third lazy and rude, etc., you have to recognize in the end that insofar as these qualities corrode the commonwealth it is a sign of the need for further formalization of sovereign power—the sovereign cannot be said to be doing the “bidding” of one or another of these groups (of course, the sovereign might need to make this clear).\n\nA reactionary politics has to have a way of talking about the economy. We can start here from the elementary observation that, barring a pure, stateless, anarcho-capitalist order, all economic activity has at least the tacit permission of the sovereign of the territory upon which it takes place. This right away implies that arguments for free trade are in fact arguments in favor of the government helping whoever will benefit the most from however “free trade” gets defined and encoded in law and government practice. Here, I’ll have to be tentative, but perhaps the best way for an absolute sovereign to control the economy is through government contracts for work on state property and the war machine (why not do away with euphemisms like “defense”?).\n\nThe sovereign could set the standards for work done for his territory—quality standards, workplace standards, use of local materials and firms, environmental standards, etc.—which companies competing for that work would strive to meet, spreading those standards more widely, and establishing them as normative even when not obligatory. Of course, state contracts are a major source of corruption in contemporary society, but that’s in large part because people circulate back and forth between business and government (and other institutions) and so can benefit from all kinds of indirect and legal corruption (government officials going to work as lobbyists for companies they did favors for in office, etc.).\n\nIf the sovereign must preserve his sovereignty in order to preserve his stake in the social order, and perhaps even his life, deals that strengthen potential rivals and generate contempt from the elites and the people will seem a lot less attractive. The sovereign must at least not let anyone get too close. Ultimately, we must, in our reactionary musings, presuppose a sovereign determined to survive and capable of doing so, to leave his state stronger than he found it, and transmit it to a suitable successor—otherwise, we would be imagining a sovereign who would be deposed to, eventually, give way to the kind of sovereign worth thinking about.\n\nIn this case, what must be undone is “economistic” thinking, i.e., treating the economy as a separate entity and discipline—rather, we would think about the economy in a particular territory as oriented towards and deriving its general direction from a center interested in eliciting rivalries so as to raise the general level of discipline of the people.\n\nSovereigns will like patriarchy, which is just clear sovereignty in the household. They will also prefer an established Church, without necessarily outlawing other religions, if for no other reason than that the sovereign can’t seem to be indifferent to such an important matter; also, insofar as it is incumbent upon the sovereign to inculcate ever higher levels of discipline in his subjects, he should have institutional vehicles for conveying the best means and measures of that discipline. For the same reason, there would be a state school system, strictly subordinate to sovereign purposes, up through the university level—al though here, as well, without necessarily excluding private systems.\n\nNeedless to say, non-established institutions of worship and private schools would not be allowed to become centers of opposition—everything that happens in these places is also permitted by the sovereign. Here, then, we must undo centuries of liberal thought regarding the neutrality of the state in matters of belief—no state has ever, in fact, been neutral in these matters, and nothing could be more comical than the suggestion that our contemporary state leaves citizens to form their own opinions. We can tell the general tenor of accepted opinion under a competent absolute sovereign: aspire high, but ultimately for the glory of the sovereign; take as much responsibility for your actions as you can; recognize your superiors and be an example to your inferiors; be honest and comprehensive in your communications, just making sure to turn all observations into humble recommendations for the use of sovereign power rather than implied evidence of sovereign incompetence or malevolence; accept that while the sovereign is answerable, and on extreme occasions can be, carefully, so reminded, to the same intangible moral and intellectual power as the rest of us, how those accounts are kept are ultimately the sovereign’s affair. It’s the sovereign’s responsibility to enforce such a tenor of opinion, in whatever way best suits the conditions of the regime.\n\nA movement of political reaction is, one, then, of cultural revolution. It is easy, in looking at the attitudes and ways of thinking proposed above as creating the elements of an absolute sovereign order within the current order of maximally confused sovereignty, to see how incompatible they are with either modern or postmodern subjectivities. It also seems to me obvious how superior they are, but that is the case that needs to be made, case by case. Perhaps we can sum it up in a preliminary manner as follows: in a democracy, everyone wants a sovereign that is absolute towards their enemies but virtually non-existent regarding themselves.\n\nIt seems to me that a translation of virtually all political speech into sovereign terms—i.e., based on the question, what would the state have to be able to do in order to do what you want it to?—would reveal that this is the case. To cease thinking in these terms (to undo the fantasy that this oscillation of absolutisms leads to some salutary balance), and to imagine a state indifferent to what each of us would like done to our enemies and solely concerned with transmuting those rivalries into sources of the wealth and power of a sovereign who has staked his existence on preserving his sovereignty, would be to discipline our thinking in absolutely new and empowering ways."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-and-reaction",
      "title": "Anthropomorphics and Reaction",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "“Anthropology” suggests a fixed human nature but, for that very reason, an endless oscillation between that human nature and the myriad varieties of human order, belief and practice (which is exactly what the discipline of that name actually focuses on). Once you say human nature is “x” you must, in observing the varieties of human communities, identify x1, x2, x3, etc., until someone asks whether the “x” isn’t just an essence posited a posteriori to justify the field of inquiry itself—an essence, furthermore, that contrasts in its banality with the rich variety of observed human forms. The originary hypothesis proposes a single human origin, which we can sketch out as universally shared human characteristics: there is always mimesis and therefore rivalry, and therefore the possibility or reality of mimetic crisis, and, finally, therefore, signification as the deferral of the violence consequent upon that crisis.\n\nYou could call this a “nature,” if you like, but since these elements of the human are only manifested in events, and therefore in differing proportions and forms, no human nature can be abstracted from the historical emergence of social forms. We are always trying to retrieve and restore some form of the originary sign, but since such attempts cannot be anticipated, any delineation of an abstract “Anthropos,” or logic of the human, will be obsolete in its utterance.\n\n“Anthropomorphics,” then, suggests an ongoing transformation of the human, a dialectical movement of distancing from and retrieval of the origin. Even more, though, it suggests a reciprocal endowment of “humanity” by humans in their interrelations, rather than interaction between already fixed and defined beings. In an analysis I have had much recourse to lately, Eric Gans, in The End of Culture , shows that while the ritual form in which the originary event is commemorated is pre-verbal and exceeds in its “meaning” (its capacity to stabilize the community) any possibility of articulating that meaning by the community, the development of language, and myth in particular, confers upon those ritual acts and actors ever richer intentions.\n\nThose intentions derive from the accumulated interactions among members of the community and in turn become attributable to those members. If one member of the group asks another for “help” in some task, then one agent “helping” another can be retrojected to the ritual acts performed by the community (the god-ancestor “helps” the founder of the community, etc.), and then new modes of “helping” (and, perhaps, “hurting”) become imaginable in the relations between members of the community. In the process, they make each other human, or anthropomorphize each other.\n\nThe most crucial transformation in human order is that effected by the “Big Man” who, acting on his “producer’s desire,” or imagination (prevailing over the anticipated reception of a portion of what exists) disciplines himself and accumulates sufficient goods, power and the indebtedness of any other member of the community to place himself beyond any possible reciprocal gift relation. The emergence of the Big Man destroys, once and for all, the egalitarianism of the primitive community. The Big Man generates resentment, rather than just envy on the part of peers, because he doesn’t just have things that others want but sets the terms of communal interactions.\n\nThe Big Man occupies the center that was originally occupied by the shared object of desire, consumption, ritual and ancestry. There will always be those who want to displace the Big Man, those who attribute to the Big Man the capacity and therefore the refusal to settle all their conflicts with others (justly, of course) in their own favor, and, at the extreme, those who want to eliminate “Big Manness” itself (and restore the egalitarian community). The successful Big Man will have to impress upon would-be rivals the foolishness of attempting any coup, without suppressing their ambitions (since they will be useful men); he will have decide when to decide upon conflicts between his subjects; when he does decide, he has to decide well and be seen to be doing so; and he must subject those who dream of a return to egalitarian relations to a judicious combination of terror, contempt and ridicule.\n\nThose Big Men who best solve these problems will render themselves so elevated as to become unchallengeable, reputed sources of unimpeachable wisdom, and origins (founders, fathers) of the community and an inexhaustible source of gifting. The gift economy becomes radically asymmetrical: the emperor-god gives his people their sources of life, while the people in return give their obedience and sacrifices that are inevitably inadequate. The relation to the sacred is still what we could call an exchange of imperatives—tell me what to do for you—while that exchange has been thoroughly formalized and ritualized. Resentments are always already recycled through the system of sacrifice.\n\nThe emperor-kings’ decisions by definition confer life upon the people, and the people’s obligations to him are prescribed in inclusive and monotonous detail. The discovery/invention by the ancient Israelites of the God whose name is the declarative sentence (I Will Be That I Will Be) must have been possible because the emperor-king ceased, shockingly, to give life, at least to some, thereby releasing resentment on an unprecedented scale. Even god-emperors come and go, their dominion has limits, so something must endure that prescribes the order of their coming and going. This God, who cannot be called upon by name to give favors commensurate with the completeness of one’s compliance with ritual prescriptions, issues what Philip Rieff saw as a sacred order founded on absolute interdictions, what we could call an “absolute imperative”: an imperative not to do this or that but to give all of oneself in the presence of the ever present God.\n\nThe God who can issue such an imperative, which transcends dependence upon the worldly provisions of the emperor-god, must have given far more than those emperor-gods, which is to say everything. The imperative exchange is replaced by a declarative culture in which the voice issuing the absolute imperative is always in dialogue with you to the extent that you defer the immediate imperatives to sacrifice either the target of your resentment or some proxy.\n\nThis revelation remakes the figure of the Big Man, but not in any obvious way, as the biblical history of the ancient Israelites makes clear. The constitution of a new kind of egalitarian community beholden only to God’s law (presumably as interpreted by judges and prophets) is certainly logically consistent with the monotheistic revelation, as is the Bible’s initial hostility to the institution of monarchy. But the Bible does eventually accept the notion of a king chosen by, and ultimately obliged to and judged by, God. Part of the reason is certainly that a king who can organize the entire nation will make the people less vulnerable to surrounding monarchies.\n\nBut more important is the structural relation between the absolute imperative and the sovereign who is absolute in being answerable only to God. The God who has given all, including human life itself, and to whom all—all thoughts, all fears, all hopes, all deeds—must in turn be given is intelligible as the Sovereign of the world. He has made the world and distributed it among his subjects. Insofar as God’s relation to his creations is a model for relations between those creations, an analogous sovereign-subject relation is suggested as the perfect social model. Furthermore, if we are all equal in being given all by God and being obliged to give all in return, we can only know what it means to give all by observing and emulating those we see have given more of themselves than we have.\n\nWe defer to those who have given more—who have exercised higher increments of discipline—and expect them to defer in turn to those who have given more (and therefore received more) than they have. There is always someone who has given and received more than anyone, and while we can’t be sure that that is actually the person who exercises sovereignty, neither is it our place to try and prove otherwise, so the best course is to hope that everyone acting as though he who rules is that person will help him become as close as possible to being so.\n\nThe problem is that this exemplary attitude requires a high level of discipline on behalf of sovereign and subject alike, and the word of God and guardians of tradition can always be drawn upon by those who would claim that we can, in fact, know that the current ruler has no basis to be considered the chosen of God. In other words, the hermeneutic generosity upon which absolute sovereignty depends can always be rescinded. Even more: that high level of discipline must continually be raised because greater and more widely dispersed modes of discipline generate new centers of power which both derive from the sovereign and represent its limits.\n\nThose new centers of power must be incorporated, and this process of incorporation is problematic because the sovereign is dependent upon loyal participants in these new centers of power to advise regarding their incorporation. All the problems faced by the Big Man—capable rivals, disputatious subjects unsatisfied by the ruler’s judgments, and those proposing ways of “restoring” the center supposedly usurped by the Big Man/King to some prior and innate consensus that can be shared without mediation—emerge and re-emerge, precisely in proportion to the success of the sovereign in enabling the creation of civilization.\n\nThis process is the source of the unsecure sovereignty that Reactionary Future considers the prime political and moral evil. Those capable rivals draw upon phantom modes of centrality (some relation between each individual separately and some unoccupied legal, moral, administrative, or spiritual center to which some rival center of power just happens to offer access) to radicalize subjects’ complaints about the king’s judgments—they are no longer mistakes that must be tolerated and that we are anyway unequipped to judge and therefore may not be mistakes after all but our own contumacy, but inherent in a system that has usurped the subject’s real relation to God, or Nature, or his own Human Nature.\n\nThis process of unsecuring sovereignty is a process of anthropomorphosis, as we are all compelled to attribute intentions of usurpation, subversion and domination to everyone else (except, perhaps, for that one who pulled aside the “veil” for us, to whom we owe unconditional devotion). Now, the continuance of absolute sovereignty also requires anthropomorphosis, as new modes of discipline require new attributions of intention, to both sovereign and subject alike. The sovereign must be imagined as someone capable of deferring and deterring conflicts through means unimaginable to the rest of us, including his ongoing dialogue with God; while subjects must be imagined of being capable of acknowledging the sovereign’s contributions to their ever richer and more complex lives, along with a system of deferences to variously defined superiors in various fields and situations.\n\nOur deferences require that we continually supply intentions to those whose discipline we acknowledge as models—they have our and others welfare in mind in ways that we strive to understand. A corollary to the maxim that sovereignty is conserved is the maxim that the space of sovereignty must be saturated: if we cannot attribute the consequences of the acts that undergird our lives to those duly appointed to carry them out we will attribute them to more or less hidden rulers; the more unsecure the power, the more devious, menacing, cruel and omnipresent those powers must be. While certain patterns emerge—the Jews seem to be a particularly popular candidate for the hidden rulers—and certain attributions may be more or less accurate than others, no consensus can possibly be formed regarding the “real” rulers, as different factions attribute more and more inventive and implausible modes of domination to each other.\n\nReactionary politics, then, is a kind of anthropomorphics: it reads all forms of discontent, all forms of “mythmaking,” all narratives of resentment towards some overbearing usurper of our power, as manifestations of resentment towards unsecure power. Ultimately, our real resentment towards the Big Man regards his failure or refusal to align our realities with our own understanding of our just place within them. He is weak, manipulated, or simply not the “real” ruler. Complaints of the sovereign’s cruelty are complaints that his cruelty is not deployed in our favor, which diminishes his sovereignty. All kinds of quasi-mythical political figures are created to account for this.\n\nIf these resentments are not met with demonstrations of secure power, they create the unsecure power they complain of. Along with exposing these resentments of unsecured power, reactionary politics articulates the kind of secure power those complaints are really demanding. What kind of power would the state have to have to do what you want done? For it to have that kind of power, what hierarchy of effective command would have to be in place—and how would the sovereign have to act upon and frame all other power centers so as to put and keep it in place? Finally, if the state had those power centers so aligned, what would it actually do?\n\nProbably not exactly what you wanted, after all—which means that you are not sovereign over your own desires and resentments. Promoting such an anthropomorphics, a study of the conversions needed to promote sovereignty over desires and resentments by desiring secure sovereignty and resenting the actors who further unsecure it, is the work of reactionary political theory.\n\nSovereignty is always conserved, but that does not mean sovereignty remains in the same hands from moment to moment. Unsecure sovereignty means divided powers, who will ultimately be pitted against each other, but it also means that one of those powers rules here and now, another then and there. Sometimes the Supreme Court is sovereign, sometimes the President. Sometimes, perhaps, Harvard. This is the source of resentment. But the conservation of sovereignty also implies that each and every one of us, in his daily tasks, is somewhere in the chain of command issuing from one site of sovereignty or another. We are sovereign over some small portion of those daily tasks, which is why we can resent failures of sovereignty on larger scales.\n\nThe teacher who exercises sovereignty in the classroom knows whether the students have learned something as a result of his efforts, so he can know what it means for there to be no discernable connections between efforts and results. Complaints regarding the insecurity of sovereignty derive from the model of those areas where the complainant exercises some sovereignty of his own. The problem of political thinking is to scale up the self-discipline we practice so as to exercise sovereignty where we can. Or, rather, the problem of political education is showing others how to do so. If reactionary absolutism is right, such efforts at scaling up will make absolute sovereignty, sovereignty derived from the absolute imperative (a function of one’s efforts to see beyond the constraints imposed by one’s desires and resentments), ever more persuasive.\n\nWe will find that those who unsecure power at the highest levels do so at intermediate and lower levels as well, so that anyone interested in sovereignty of any kind, anywhere (in the family, at the workplace, on the street, in the marketplace, etc.) must feel it and resent it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "more-alt-right-programming",
      "title": "More Alt-Right Programming",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here is what is meant to be a more minimal (7 point) program aimed at creating a “big tent” for the Alt-Right. Particularly worth pointing out here is a direct approach to the question of internal governance, avoided by other Alt-Right advocates of nationalism:\n\n5) Freedom is a responsibility and not a right. The freedom of too many incompetent people to make too many bad decisions is harmful to society and constrains the freedom of virtuous and responsible people. There are externalities to most actions and when these are harmful to non-actors it is a kind of injustice. These need to campaigned against, or suppressed by force or the threat of force—the basis of the rule of law. A virtuous society is an ordered one that provides freedom from anarcho-tyranny.\n\n6) If we must be a democratic society, the franchise should be limited. Universal democracy is a bad system. It gives power to the worst and shackles the fittest. It is a degenerative institution in which the weak and unproductive collaborate against the strong and sustainable.\n\nHere, the insistence on human differences (points 1 and 4) is applied to the structure of the nation itself, with the logical consequence that democracy and liberal notions of rights are more explicitly rejected. I wonder how big the tent will be—Vox Day, whose 16 points we examined a few posts ago, showing his avoidance of any acknowledgement of hierarchy within the nation, has expressed agreement with all 7 points, so perhaps the rejection of liberalism and democracy is not that controversial on the Alt-Right. The recognition on the Alt-Right that much of what they want will require some kind of strongman or elitist rule demonstrates a more comprehensive awareness of the implications of their project than I, at least, have seen so far. At any rate, it is useful to see the Alt-Right take up the issue of the “regime,” and in a way that brings it somewhat closer to disciplinary absolutist reaction.\n\nPoints 2 and 3 are more familiar, but give us the opportunity to raise a couple of questions:\n\n2) Our world is tribal. The struggle for survival which has produced all life on earth extends into biological human races, which both exist and matter to their members. Such conflict is neither immoral nor moral, but a condition we must engage with in order to develop any meaningful philosophy or ideology. It can be found on the streets, in the human resources department, at the ballot box, or in the trenches. Even something as trivial as the Oscars is fought over. Though it is currently politically incorrect to acknowledge that races and their national subdivisions exist and compete for resources, land, and influence over one another or over themselves, that does not mean the struggle has stopped. That one side has been cajoled into not struggling does not mean it is left alone.\n\n3) Our tribe is being suppressed. The new left doctrine of racial struggle in favor of non-whites only, a product of decolonization and the defeat of nationalists by egalitarians after WWII, must be repudiated and Whites must be allowed to take their own side in their affairs.https://atlanticcenturion.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/foaming-at-the-mouth-with-signals/ that says Whites are not allowed to have collective interests and literally every other identity group can do so and ought to do so is unacceptable.\n\nPoint 3 is really the easier one to agree with—of course, the new white nationalism/racialism is just—what’s the right phrase?—the chickens of victimary politics coming home to roost. The stupidity of imagining that you can accuse whites constantly, for decades, of being an oppressor race, without whites beginning to think, at some point, well let’s act like one, then, is simply staggering. Point 2 raises more problems. First of all, why say the world is tribal and then go on to talk exclusively about race? Tribes are nothing like races: tribes are internally structured social relationships, with strict kinship rules and an ethos of retaliation to offenses or insults against what is really an extended family.\n\nWhatever the biological reality of race, no race has ever acted as a race, with internal hierarchies, authority structures, forms of obligation, legitimation of violence, all understood to rest on racial grounds. A white guy from Wisconsin, and another from Arkansas, are not in the same tribe, no matter how racially conscious they are. Indeed, once you try to use biological, racial categories to organize a large scale community, the whole system breaks down—what would count as ethically or politically relevant genetic distinctions within a race? Politically, races are reactions to co-existence of groups of differing origins within modern society.\n\nNo one has ever organized a racial polity or even movement of any significance—considered as an attempt to politically liberate and organize the “Aryan” race, Hitler’s Reich would have to be considered a complete failure, as he ended up at war with, and defeated by, much of (and the much less racially self-conscious part of) the Aryan world. Tribes, however, can act very cohesively and coherently as collectives, so I assume that the slippage here between “tribe” and “race” is a political fantasy in which races can act as tribes. (Moreover, tribalism is awful model for politics, since tribes cannot free themselves from the addiction to violence—the founding act of civilization is the king imposing an end to the vendetta amongst the tribes he rules over.)\n\nThe political structure discussed in points 5 and 6 will not have anything to do with tribe or race—the more fit will rule, but either they will simply rule in the common good, determined by the ruler, or they will rule in the name of the race. In the former case, there is no reason to assume that race will remain the primary organizing category; in the latter case, all the conflicts of a modern social order are re-introduced into and intensified within the closed racial order, since there will be differing views of the good of the race, and one of those views might very well involve culling the unfit. (It should also be noted that the zero-sum struggle for resources characteristic of tribalism as portrayed here is incompatible with the freedom and autonomy of all nations in Vox Day’s 16 points—you can’t recognize the autonomy of a nation sitting on resources you need.)\n\nThis brings us to the culminating point 7:\n\nThe final alt-right shit-test is whether or not someone agrees with the reality that Jewish elites are opposed to our entire program. It is the third rail for a reason. The hardest redpill to take is a suppository, the Jewish Question. (Here I highly recommend Dr. Kevin Mac Donald’s http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/author/kmac/ if you don’t have the time preference for an entire series of books on the subject). The disproportionate influence of an elite Jewish minority in Western societies has been a net negative. Jews, who have a three thousand year history of regulating their communities to be as insular as possible among the nations whose territory they dwell in have a consistent pattern of promoting the interests of their own ethnoreligious minority at the expense of the majority nation.\n\nIt is what they do and when they do it here it is bad news for us. When given the power they have now it results in degeneracy, the losing of one’s race. Even in Israel one will find Jews who are firmly dedicated to the destruction of their host’s borders and hold in contempt the idea of loyalty to their national kin. Who shrieks loudest at anti-immigration nativism? Who praises their own ethnocentrism as a virtue and shames others for having the same feeling? It is a pattern that crosses time and borders, and there is a war against noticing it. The staunchest social egalitarians, anti-nationalists and “anti-racists” are Jewish, inside and outside of Israel.\n\nJews sympathetic to the Alt-Right should certainly have no illusions about “joining” it (insofar as it has something like a “membership”). That’s fine—we can’t join Black Power, La Raza, the Catholic Church and lots of other things. And we’re not so easy to “join” ourselves. The “net effect” of Jews on their host nations can, of course, be debated—it will depend upon what you consider valuable and harmful. But more important than all this is what I see as a very fair and indisputable point: can anyone deny that Jewish elites are opposed, and must be opposed to the 6 points above and virtually any other articulation of the Alt-Right agenda?\n\nCan anyone deny the predominance of Jews in the pro-immigration and anti-racist movements, or o the Left more generally? Or that Jewish leftist activism is very often overtly presented as “Jewish,” i.e., as promoting specifically Jewish values and traditions (“Tikkun Olam, etc.)? Jewish influence and power, and the fantastically varied nature of the perceptions and assessments of that influence and power, is best understood as an effect of unsecure power. The decentralization and differentiation of powers through the Western world over the last half millennium has created the conditions under which groups, like Jews, with a specific vocation and capacities, specific internal organization, relation to the majority community, i.e., as a kind of prototypical middleman minority, are able and compelled to exercise power in all kinds of un and under-acknowledged, and therefore difficult to measure, ways.\n\nRestore sovereignty, and the Jewish Question is resolved. Of course, a restored sovereign might be hostile to the Jews, might see their removal as central to its own restoration; but a strong and effective sovereign is more likely to find uses for the Jews, while blocking their subversive tendencies. Since a restored sovereign would, by definition, eliminate the left, that in itself would remove the main vehicle of antagonistic Jewish influence, allowing Jews to contribute productively."
    },
    {
      "slug": "reaction-as-political-praxis",
      "title": "Reaction as Political Praxis",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It seems rather paradoxical to be a reactionary explicitly promoting absolute sovereignty while simultaneously being radically, inalterably opposed to actually existing sovereignty. If sovereignty is conserved, there is no position outside of the sovereign from which to oppose it. Even if we can show that those who possess sovereignty are actually breaking up sovereignty, using proxies to disrupt any secure sovereignty, i.e., sovereignty in which what is said by the sovereign is exhausted in what is done by the sovereign, shouldn’t we still be trying to locate the most immobile or secured point of the existing sovereign and obeying that?\n\nI think, in fact, that that is indeed what we should be doing, and thinking through the implications will yield some interesting conclusions. Let’s first set up what seems to me the basic principle of reactionary politics: always speak and act so as to make power more secure. In so doing, you will often succeed only in exposing its lack of security. Making power more secure means formalizing what has remained informal. The purpose is always to bring power and accountability into further alignment, with the end point being a single, universally acknowledged power source accountable for everything that happens in its territory.\n\n(Accountability in this case is not local—it’s not as if an absolute sovereign could be put on trial [by whom?] for, say, mismanaging flood relief—but constitutive, in the sense that such mismanagement weakens the viability of the sovereign in the long run, since every one now notices a gap between what the sovereign is responsible for and what it is able to do—that gap will either be closed or widened in the future. A subject for another post will be how much better the kind of sovereign we theorize will have to be than even the most splendid rulers of the past.)\n\nIf we imagine ourselves to be subjects of a sovereign that is ultimately absolute, even if only implicitly so, then everything we do is permitted by or in defiance of that sovereign. Absolute reactionary theory doesn’t have any room for a notion of justified defiance, so supporters of (perhaps it’s better to say, “cognizers of,” since to cognize absolute sovereignty is to support it) absolute sovereignty will want to do only what is permitted or, even more forcefully, mandated. This is where it gets complicated, though, because with extensive, interlocking, reciprocally blocking, power centers, how are we to know what is mandated?\n\nIn some settings I am obliged to treat everyone, regardless of race or creed, in a fair and collegial manner; elsewhere, I am bound to bow down before the transcendence of the violated black body. In yet other situations I am at least permitted to defend myself from, albeit probably only in non-lethal ways, from some of those black bodies. Since these diverse mandates are incommensurable with each other, it may be that there is some meta-mandate to act in accord with what is demanded by the situation. This is not necessarily the much-derided “situational ethics,” any more than telling a general to “defeat the enemy” is “situational ethics,” even though it might sometimes mean retreating, other times sacrificing your own men in a doomed mission that nevertheless raises the morale of others, at other times sending out feelers for negotiations, etc. The meta-mandate is to read the situation and know which imperative takes priority.\n\nI must at least be permitted, and perhaps even mandated, to inquire into the meta-mandates—if I could access no information regarding what is permitted or mandated that would have to mean power is so unsecured that my attempts to obey or evade it could only be ad hoc. And that’s not possible because the sovereign inevitably emits information just by punishing some, elevating others, and leaving yet others alone, in ways that are clearly meant to be seen and meditated upon. In inquiring into the meta-mandates, then, I am also inquiring into the informal power hierarchies that inform the formal ones—we could say that any mandate or (to use Philip Rieff’s term) “remission” from some mandate that deviates from the more transparent power centers (the law and its enforcement, above all) indicates the hidden effect of some informal power center.\n\nFrom these deviations, we can reason inductively (and, of course, highly fallibly) to the entire structure of power relations. Sovereignty has a thousand faces (Harvard, Soros, the Federal Reserve…), but they converge in what neoreaction calls the “Cathedral” or what I would prefer to call the “Inquisition,” with its suggestion of a dialectic between the formulation of doctrine and the identification and punishment of heretics. By noticing who is publicly singled out in a way that includes demands for consensus, for harassment, anathematization, and punishment, I can get a glimpse of the highest meta-mandate—which is, really, to help smoke out the heretics.\n\nThere are plenty of other mandates, many of them quite ordinary—care for your children, work to support yourself, leave your neighbors unmolested, etc., are all, to a great extent, intact, in most places—but none of them can be allowed to interfere with the highest one.\n\nAll of this, remember, is to figure out whom we are to obey and how, and the conclusion is appalling. To be absolutists, we must seek out officer positions in the Inquisition? In a way. How secure is the Inquisition, though? Its rules change constantly, and it doesn’t put forth a version or order that all of the upheavals it initiates are to issue in. Even if we link the Inquisition to “Globalism,” which is to say the continuing transfer of power from national to transnational entities, governmental and corporate, or “govcorp,” that is a result of our own induction and not anything the Inquisition itself is open and unambiguous about—and even the results of that induction are unclear—is the end point one world government?\n\nAn increasingly complex and impenetrable mesh of institutions and agencies? How does one work on making this mess more secure; or, rather, imagining order in the midst of this mess? Above all, I think, by asking for clear instructions. The sovereign wants its intentions to be clear, does it not, even if their lack of clarity is due to limitations in the understanding of its subjects? I recently had a brief pseudo-debate with a feminist, who argued for the necessity of Women’s Studies on the grounds that it sought to articulate voices that had been silenced historically. OK, so that’s a kind of mid-level meta-mandate, to surface voices that have been silenced.\n\nBut the vast majority of the humans who have ever existed have had their voices “silenced” (at the very least, none of us have heard them)—so, if we pursue that mandate, we have a new discipline which we might call “The History of Traces,” or something along those lines—it might be very interesting. But the feminist in women’s studies means only women’s voices and, if pressed further, only specific women’s voices, which say something uncannily similar to what the feminist herself would like to say. Well, Women’s Studies departments actually exist (and I could probably get fired for suggesting publicly that they shouldn’t), while my “History of Traces” is merely imaginary, so they are obviously the ones plugged into some power center credentialized by the Inquisition.\n\nStill, even the most unforgiving sovereign leaves room for appeal—I don’t actually see where the mandate for “Women’s Studies” comes from beyond some rather sordid academic and activist politics—is it permitted on grounds of “academic freedom? But academic freedom would allow for a lot of other things, including the questioning of “Women’s Studies.”\n\nThe purpose of all this is to induce the sovereign power to cough up a more explicit version of the meta-mandate, so we know whether we really have to supplicate before “Women’s Studies” or whether, in fact, unbeknownst to us, we might in fact be violating some higher meta-mandate in doing so. The failure or refusal to issue such a version will be, in effect, a map of informal power relations, which will inform our next query regarding the instructions. If some higher power doubles down and makes the meta-mandate more explicit, the result will be more power division, subversion and confusion (lots of people who thought they were following and enforcing the meta-mandate will discover their relation to the power center is rather different).\n\nReactionary politics derives from this approach ever more detailed maps of the power sprawl that constitutes contemporary disorder and a model of disciplined attempts at securing power. We can keep asking the Inquisition to tell us how to obey until it collapses under the weight of its various power centers’ continual outsourcing of their respective subversions of each other (not that we ever aim for such a collapse!). The method is to ask for instructions in such a manner as to actually provide instructions for the installation of genuine sovereignty. It would be necessary to be high profile enough to attract freethinkers and members of the elite who despair of maintaining their privileges and would prefer truncated privileges in exchange for certainty, while being low profile enough to not become a prime target of the Inquisition. This adds up to being a secondary, or tertiary, target—clearly indigestible but not immediately threatening.\n\nThis approach is different than the “passivism” of some neoreactionaries, and the confrontationalism of the alt-right, while being at odds with neither. Indeed, “requesting instructions for how to properly obey the sovereign” can be dialed up or down, performed literally or with thick irony—to refer back to my brief example, it’s easy to imagine, under the right conditions, an earnest, passionate inquiry into why a discipline focused on recovering the voices of men silenced by feminism might be urgently necessary. Memes can be generated. It is just essential that we never fall back on authorities external to the sovereign order—no reliance on “natural” or “God-given rights,” on “equality” or “justice,” or “self-determination”—we share with the sovereign power the problem of constructing a dead end for the resentments generated by the central power itself, while unconditionally accepting the need for that central power for the sake of civilization. We just want to help that power become more secure, and then more secure, until the instructions it issues anticipate any request we could imagine. In this way we prepare for whatever restart becomes possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "securing-sovereignty",
      "title": "Securing Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The notion of secure vs. unsecure sovereignty has been the most difficult absolutist concept for me to grasp. If sovereignty is conserved, isn’t it by definition secure—if the Supreme Court is sovereign is deciding that same sex marriage will be the law of the land, isn’t that an exercise (again, by definition) of “secure” sovereignty? If, on another occasion, the President decides he is not going to order the deportation of illegal aliens even (let’s say) in the face of a contrary Supreme Court decision, then the President’s sovereignty is secure in that case as well. Insofar as sovereignty is always exercised rather than held, it is always secure—and what would it mean to “hold” sovereignty other than to exercise it repeatedly and explicitly? How repeatedly? One month? Ten years? A hundred? Always when it comes to, say, immigration? There’s really no answer to these questions.\n\nLet’s say a group of five friends decides to go on a hike. They all agree that someone has to be in charge, since they will be going through difficult and sometimes dangerous terrain, and there will be occasions where the leader needs to be obeyed by everyone immediately and unconditionally. Someone always has to be sovereign, in other words. Since they are all equally skilled and experienced hikers, and all trust each other, they decide to rotate in the leadership position. One day for each; or, maybe, one person is in charge of determining the route, another when it comes to deciding where to camp, etc. Such an arrangement might work out perfectly fine, if our assumed conditions hold—of course, if it turns out that one of the five is not quite as good as the others, or does not have the temperament to lead, or becomes mistrustful, it can work out very badly.\n\nThat person is likely to exercise his sovereignty ineffectively, but he will still be exercising it. If his poor leadership endangers the hike, the others may remove him—he might accept their assertion of sovereignty over him gracefully, or he may leave the community. Is that what unsecure sovereignty entails—the sovereign simply failing to perform his sovereign duties, so the survival of the community comes to depend on him being replaced, without there being any clear method of doing so? One could, then, contest sovereignty on the grounds of incapacity at any time, because a subjective judgment is involved; still, sovereigns will sometimes actually fail.\n\nOf course, those five friends can divide sovereignty up because they are themselves included within a broader sovereign realm. Someone owns the land they are hiking in, whether it be a private individual or corporation, or the state; that owner has laid down various rules for hikers, which it enforces through a private security force or public police forces; the land itself is part of a country with an established order, with courts that will try and punish any of the five who might, say, attempt a “coup” by killing one or more of his fellow hikers—the hikers themselves will have to go back to civilization and explain why one of them didn’t return, or came back seriously injured, or refused to ever talk to the other four again.\n\nThat broader sovereignty, upon which they rely, allows for the more local delegation of sovereignty—and, in fact, a breakdown of the “sovereignty” of the hiking group would indicate a weakening of the broader sovereignty over that group. That is, the more hikers forget or reject the norms of the civilization they belong to (e.g., because unexpected conditions return them to something like a “state of nature”), the more likely their consensually agreed upon distribution of sovereignty will fall apart. If the group is to then remain together, some kind of struggle, possibly violent, over the sovereign power, will be waged. During that struggle, sovereignty will certainly be unsecure; but it won’t really be conserved, either—but that just means there is no longer an order to exercise sovereignty over.\n\nUltimately all Western social orders derive their sovereignty from some medieval monarch who claimed ownership over the whole of the land over which he ruled (what Reactionary Future calls “primary property”). Perhaps, though, that was itself a distribution of sovereignty exercised by the Roman Empire, until it could no longer. Perhaps the successive divisions of sovereignty that followed over the centuries were akin to our group of hikers, who take for granted that they can causally rotate sovereignty because they are all subjects of a civilized order—perhaps there was an assumption that the original distribution of secondary property (what Carl Schmitt called the “nomos”) was sufficiently guaranteed so that primary property no longer needed to be preserved.\n\nThose charged with preserving private property preferred a more collegial relation with the largest secondary landowners, or couldn’t summon the energy to resist the push by some conspiracy of those landowners to formalize their title to their land beyond their obligation to the monarch. This laxity didn’t seem like much of a problem, precisely because the order established seemed so permanent. There’s a tendency to forget primary property, a tendency that is stronger when primary property has been especially securely established.\n\nSovereignty is always passed off—to be sovereign is to decide upon one’s successor. In principle, there is no difference between a king passing sovereignty off to his son, and the American president passing off sovereignty when it comes to the question of same sex marriage to the Supreme Court, and then having it passed back to him when it comes to enforcing immigration laws. The difference, then, is in fidelity to the original title, which is to say to the line of succession. Neither the president nor the Supreme Court claims sovereignty in their own right—they only claim to exercise it in the name of “the people,” according to the document (ratified by “the people”) known as the Constitution.\n\nBut popular sovereignty is meaningless—some one always exercises sovereignty, i.e., makes (or declines to make) the final decision. Moreover, from where do “the people” derive their title? Claims to popular sovereignty assert the naturalness of that sovereignty, not its origin in some act of possession. Popular sovereignty is really, then, just anti-sovereignty, an excuse for attacking all the necessary elements of sovereignty, in particular the self-referential claim to act in the name of the sovereignty one exercises. Unsecure sovereignty, then, is sovereignty without any reference to the original claim to primary property.\n\nThe President and Supreme Court don’t really pass power back and forth, because neither claims the right to delegate, having no claim to act in defense and enhancement of primary property—each just seizes the opportunity to exercise sovereignty that comes their way, and the other will either fear the consequences of challenging their rival, or wait patiently for the opportunity to do so (or rest satisfied, since both entities have allowed sovereignty to be seized for the occasion by an ally of both). The division of powers between courts, legislature and executive could work (i.e., didn’t lead to complete social breakdown) as long as all involved believed, however tacitly or vaguely, they were defending the “rights of Englishmen,” i.e., regardless of the break from Great Britain, ultimately saw themselves as tending to property inherited from the original realm. But, then, any specific, breakaway power gains an advantage over the others by throwing off that inheritance, and insisting that this property here and now is ripe for the taking in the name of those who have been denied it (“the people”).\n\nAbsolutism as secure sovereignty must, then, be aimed at restoring the original realm, and deriving all property and powers from the unity of that primary property. Someone will have to claim ownership of it before they control it; the control of some portion of it will have to be seen as a prelude to complete acquisition. Any portion of the original realm that can be recovered must be used to exemplify the form of fully restored sovereignty by distributing secondary property in accord with a detailed hierarchy of obligations and in payment for contributions to effecting the restoration. Any current politician or, for that matter, property holder, has had his “piece” of sovereignty delivered to him under false pretenses, but that’s not the problem, as we have no way of actually tracing a line of sovereignty back to the original realm—what matters is that they are not using that sovereignty to secure the original realm by asserting the primacy of primary property.\n\nThey are not, that is, resisting and discrediting claims made based on the distribution of secondary property, which are inherently incoherent and illegitimate. It is the claims to sovereignty that rely upon the secondary distribution that spiral endlessly into demands for further distribution, to remedy some presumed injustice in that secondary distribution (the belief in the injustice of that distribution is an unintended acknowledge of primary property). In that case, all the social realities hidden by liberalism (except to present them as injustices) and now being surfaced by the alt-right (race realism, the sexual economy, i.e., hierarchies and differences) can all be assessed in terms of the contribution such hierarchies and differences can make to the restoration of the realm. Different groups, and groups preserving different hierarchies, will make different contributions to the restoration of primary property—this will be noticed in the process of restoration, and repaid in kind afterwards."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereign-shifts",
      "title": "Sovereign Shifts",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Vox Day has often reiterated the Alt-Right position that that identity>culture> politics, along with the corollary that we have moved from an age of ideology politics to an age of identity politics. There is certainly a great deal of truth in the latter formulation, at least, while the former might be seen as a transhistorical generalization drawn from a historical transformation. The Alt-right framing (one very much shared by Day) of contemporary political struggles as nationalism vs. globalism can be understood otherwise than as a manifestation of the eternal priority of nationalism over global or imperial identities.\n\nThe liberal state, usually based upon a majority ethnic group, while claiming to transcend that interests of that group in a culture of rights in principle open to all, has been torn apart, first of all due to this very contradiction: the more “rooted” members of the majority ethnic group struggle for a form of the state that recognizes their history and interests, while the more universal social elements try to uproot the ethnic dimension of society and have political legitimacy reside in the state’s adherence to the legalistic standard of civil and human rights. The universalists align themselves more and more with universalists across the globe, and to the transnational institutions and aims in which they feel more at home and too which they transfer their allegiance.\n\nFrom being an argument within each country, the antagonism between liberals and leftists, on the one hand, and traditionalists and nationalists, on the other, becomes a kind of global war. Bio-politics are brought into play, as immigration policies are used to dilute and weaken the native stock, and anti-discrimination policies are used to harry and humiliate the same. The US, which was content during the Cold War to support any allies willing to stand against Communism, started to spread liberalism throughout the world. Much blame is given to the Bush administration for this, but it’s important to keep in mind that it began under Reagan, whose support of proxies in his Latin American anti-communist policies was justified through the insistence on the democratization of military regimes—perhaps at first a token gesture aimed at pacifying those determined to find and oppose the next Vietnam, but eventually a real and precedent-setting effort. Liberal anti-communism always contained the germ of the global liberal crusade.\n\nThe liberal-democratic form of sovereignty, with its capital-labor balance at home and anti-communism abroad, was gradually hollowed out. The sovereign must centralize and defuse the resentments generated by central power, but the globalizing state lost interest in attending to the resentments of wide swaths of the population—vanity environmental, racial, immigration, sexual and other policies, important for the self and external image of the globalizing elites trumped care for the displaced working class. Not coincidentally, those displaced were those “nativists” who were becoming increasingly “problematic” anyway.\n\nContemporary nationalist identity politics is an attempt, as yet groping, to retrench to a more compressed form of sovereignty to replace the one based on “citizenship” and which has been evacuated. The fact that no way of formalizing and thereby actualizing this potential new sovereignty has been proposed indicates at least that little thought has been devoted to it, and perhaps that it’s not even feasible. The more mainstream elements of the alt-right think (albeit with fading hope) in terms of winning national elections and pushing through more rational policies on the traditional model; the more radical elements think in terms of secession and expulsion.\n\nThe mainsteamers almost never consider what it would mean for a sympathetic President (say, Trump), even with a sympathetic Congress, to force the federal bureaucracy (and bring along the governors and the state bureaucracies), along with the judiciary (which brazenly defies deportation orders) onto this new path. I don’t say it can’t be done, just that no one seems to have given much thought to it. And the radicals don’t seem to consider the generation of war their approach would create, wars that would explode their fantasies of a renovated, peaceful nationalist world order. I haven’t even seen anyone point out the obvious fact that expelling your own citizens is itself an act of war against whichever country whose borders you push them over. Where you end up after a major war is never where you thought you would be going in.\n\nThe problem for the nationalists is that they haven’t won over the managerial class—not an easy task, as the managerial class has gone thoroughly globalist. Managerialism and globalism have been converging for decades—professionals of all kinds—academics, lawyers, doctors, executives, actual managers, etc., see themselves on a global stage and find nationalism embarrassing. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but I doubt that more than 20% of the managerial classes are really sympathetic to nationalism. And for good reason—they are more powerful, or in some cases imagine themselves more powerful, considered as global agents. Colleges actively promote, especially for the better and more ambitious students, various kinds of entrepreneurial/do gooder projects and internships abroad, the deeper into the Third World, the more embedded in transnational progressive authority, the better. Obviously there is plenty of money for such things.\n\nThe problem goes much deeper. The disruptions in the late medieval world of Christian Europe that led to the rupture of the Reformation had various causes, but the radicalization of that rupture owed a great deal to what we could call the rise of the disciplines—forms of knowledge and authority based on demonstration (I’m borrowing from Hillaire Belloc’s Europe and the Faith here) rather than faith. It may very well be that new centers of power organized around the earliest emergence of the disciplines had a lot to do with those earlier disruptions as well. At any rate, for the European monarchs to transition successfully to the modern age they would have had to both promote, and be the leading patron of, the disciplines, and discipline the disciplines—block their tendency to create subversive power centers and channel their capabilities productively.\n\nClearly, where the monarchs failed, the industrialists and capitalists succeeded—of course, they shared and could inflame those subversive tendencies. Any absolutism today will have to solve this problem—clearly you don’t want to destroy Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., but how to bring them to heel? It’s possible, since these behemoths have been quite willing to fall in line behind globalizing leftism—but that was the path of least resistance for them. The absolutist restart will have to have substantial support within the disciplines—not 100%, or 80% or necessarily even 50% for starters, but enough to get things rolling so as to ultimately arrive at 80% or so.\n\nThe tech savvy will probably be the best candidates for sovereignty, at least at first, and the state will certainly have to heavily staffed by them; even more, the sovereigns will have to be able to give the technologically and scientifically inclined things to do. It’s a difficult problem but one, I think, that can be thought through from an absolutist reactionary perspective, but not from an alt-right one.\n\nThe rejection of tradition is represented most forcefully in the disciplines. No doctor is any better in his profession for assimilating the history of 19th century medical advances. He just needs to know what we know now. The sovereign must be a generalist, while the disciplines specialize. Attempts to “humanize” the disciplines with hybrids like medical or scientific “ethics” tend to be nothing more than empty alarmism regarding developments strange to the general public. The self-sufficiency of the disciplines is an illusion—Michael Polanyi points out how workers in every discipline must take many of the underlying assumptions of their own work on the “authority” of other disciplines—any scientific paper will be filled with claims that that particular scientist has not “checked out” by himself: each scientist tacitly trusts many others, and therefore trusts the institutions housing them.\n\nThese “horizontal” dependencies further imply a reliance on tradition—at the very least the tradition of research in the field, but that tradition will at each point reach out horizontally to myriad other traditions. The less aware the disciplinary worker is of all this, the more secure he assumes sovereignty to be, because he takes for granted the continuing existence of the entire network of institutions now required for intellectual activity and exchange. This absolute, unconsidered reliance on the security of sovereignty enables the disciplinary worker to dismiss the sovereign as a dangerous amateur, always threatening to encroach upon (or unjustifiably defund) his own power center.\n\nThe implication is that to win the loyalty of the disciplinary workers their reliance upon secure sovereignty would have to become more visible. The modern age has combined intensified discipline in the workplace and education (across the disciplines) with a slackening of political discipline. The establishment of unquestionable sovereignties by the absolutist period in Europe made it easy to believe that restraining one’s resentments and desires was irrelevant to social stability. Even events like the French Revolution didn’t upset the assumption that there would always be a civilized French nation, regardless of whether most Frenchman and women consciously contributed to its maintenance.\n\nThe prosperity that has resulted from intensified economic and intellectual discipline has delayed the effects of declining political discipline—as long as everyone, even the poorest, are getting richer, at least there won’t be massive, coordinated revolts that call the social order into question, even if social stability is undermined in various areas. As the basic “stake” in this bet, the disciplines can allow themselves to be especially cavalier regarding the need for morality, virtue and loyalty in government—especially since doing so increases their own prestige and power, as advocates of rule by expertise. Absolute sovereignty would have to be unremittingly hostile towards any attempt by the disciplines to establish independent power centers—China lays down the law to Google, so this is at least conceivable.\n\nIn exchange for such curtailment, the sovereign would allow the disciplines to pursue their own disinterested ends, which, of course, greatly benefit the sovereign as well. And, finally, the sovereign would have to draw upon the most trustworthy elements of the discipline to staff itself—after all, how else could it know what they are up to? The sovereign, in other words, would have to see to its own intelligence being greater than that of any possible rival. But the only way to avoid extraordinary violence and the possible disabling of the disciplines in accomplishing this is to save the disciplines, especially in their more concentrated corporate forms, from political pressures they are coming to find intolerable.\n\nIt’s very likely that many transnational corporations are more stable and certainly far better run than pretty much any state, and will have to enter the breach in preserving some form of order if social divisions and deterioration continue. But they will never be able to do so on their own, and will have to partner with whatever local and national authorities can establish themselves—but such partnerships, to be effective, must be asymmetrically tilted toward the sovereign.\n\nThe advantage of the sovereign must always lie in specifically political discipline, which we could define as intelligent loyalty. It no longer comes easy for intelligent people to see loyalty as a high virtue—that might, after all, mean that you become the instrument of one less intelligent than yourself. But such loyalty, even if it means subordinating yourself to one less intelligent or capable, and in the process both striving to contribute your intelligence and ability to him and considering that he, by virtue of his responsibilities, however he has come by them, might be intelligent in ways you can’t match—such loyalty represents the highest form of civilized discipline. It’s almost impossible to imagine such a disposition today, much less a social order that honors it—and so, of course, there are almost no opportunities to inculcate it. But we can, at least, as part of the kind of political praxis I described in my previous post, point incessantly to all the places where it is sorely lacking."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-sovereign-and-the-infinite",
      "title": "The Sovereign and the Infinite",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We can assume that in any advanced society all members are involved in asymmetrical gift exchanges with the central power, and what we can call an “incommensurable” gift exchange with the infinite: whether we call that “God,” or “Being,” or “Presence,” or, along more Nietzschean lines, “language” or even “grammar” (Nietzsche once said, disparagingly, that we still believe in God because we still believe in grammar—but aren’t there good reasons to believe in grammar?). The reality of a central power is predicated upon differences in discipline—whoever is more disciplined will, at a minimum, attract more attention because he will become a model for doing things others can’t.\n\nOnce someone stands out in that way, everyone else finds an interest in preserving that individual as a model, because doing so restrains and reframes rivalries amongst others within the community. Once we all decide on a model, rivalries are limited to fitting into places within a system framed by the model, and are therefore intrinsically limited. The argument for a social sovereign is partly the argument for having a centralized executive power for any shared task—the efficiency that comes from clear lines of responsibility—but also partly this more comprehensive need to contain rivalries. Sovereignty is where resentments go to die, as we discover that targeting the presumed source of our resentment does not assuage that resentment and, moreover, creates new resentments in turn. It is also where resentments are reborn as deferences to those we recognize as necessary arbiters of our resentments.\n\nMy asymmetrical gift relation to the sovereign, then, enables me to subtract from my rivalries with others the unlimited character of “unbound” rivalries—he gets the job or I get the job, and however hard fought the competition up until that point, it’s over, because a duly deputized representative of social order has so decided (the means of deciding are of course also streamlined—I will presumably get the job because I am better in some important sense, not because I killed my rival or hacked into his transcript and letter of recommendation). The same goes for the justice system—if someone rapes and kills and member of my family I don’t have to see that a member of the family of the perpetrator is raped and killed (leading him to then retaliate, etc.), the justice system can put an end to it by imposing a properly determined punishment.\n\nThis is extraordinarily liberating, ethically and intellectually—instead of thinking of the best ways to protect my own and harm my rivals, I can think about forms of exchange whereby we try and “bound” more potentially disruptive rivalries. The more operative sovereignty is throughout society, the more progress along these lines (i.e., civilization) is possible.\n\nOur incommensurable relation to the infinite is produced by our awareness that, after all, rivalries can only be bound imperfectly—the very rivalries sovereignty is meant to contain can infect the sovereign power, either internally or in the external relation between sovereigns, and thereby reproduce those rivalries on an even more catastrophic scale. Kings and empires come and go, so what remains? The vendetta is simply the other side of the far more benign sounding gift relation. Within the gifting economy, the quality of one’s gift represents prestige, with each side matching and seeking to outdo the other. The possibility for insult and humiliation is built into the process.\n\nThe vendetta works within the same mode of exchange as the gift, insofar as both are always seeking to restore an injured honor. In the gift relation with the sovereign, I renounce my own independent vendettas while binding myself to loyalty to the sovereign in pursuing his. The hope is that the central organization of rivalry will lead to its more intelligent and therefore limited pursuit, and this is always a wager that is won until it is lost. Our relation to the infinite is in anticipation of the losing of the wager: what I give to God, or grammar, is all of myself, complete dedication to His/Its ends, and I do this by cleaving from the gift relation its flip side, the vendetta, which I completely renounce.\n\nThe gift relation without the vendetta is all giving in response to having received all. Giving all is doing God’s work, which is the work of disinvesting in unbound rivalries—of forgiving, and showing others how to forgive. (It is also, in fact, the work of grammar.) There is much talk of Western Civilization lately, and it seems to me that a good way to think of it is as the ongoing tension, unique, I think, to the West, between the infinite and the sovereign.\n\nHow can we tell that everyone in contemporary social orders is asymmetrically bonded to a gifting relationship to the central power? We all speak. Insofar as we use language, we participate in the deferral of violence; even more, though, we presuppose the subsistence of the entire history of such deferrals. To use Jacques Derrida’s term, violence has always already been deferred. That gives us the space wherein we can either contribute to sustaining that process of deferral, or exploit the trust the history of deferral accumulates to enhance whatever power center we belong to. Let’s look at some of things we do with language, in no particular order.\n\nWe refer—we indirectly point to something in the world that we imagine someone else will recognize as that very thing, so that others can confirm or revise our reference. This requires that the world be held steady—that many objects remain more or less the same, while other objects change in ways we can track, new objects are introduced under some recognizable aegis and other objects disappear in ways we can also account for. Even more important, the names of things are not constantly changing, a process that, with our experience of totalitarianism in the 20th century, we know to be an effect of extremely unsecure power.\n\nIt follows, then, that a stable relation between words and our shared reality is indicative of relatively more secure power—more precisely, that we could examine changes in the language mediating our relation to reality as indexes to the relative security of power. Any time we refer successfully, we rely upon power that is secure at least to that extent, and, therefore, insofar as we intend to refer successfully, we implicitly hope for secure power.\n\nWe argue, more or less rationally and logically. In doing so, we assume that disagreements will be settled through conversation rather than force—and what enables us to do so, if not the central power holding force at bay? The more we appeal to each other reasonably and civilly, the more secure we assume power to be; the more we address each other through the quasi-violence of manipulative propaganda techniques, the more insecure we assume power to be, because the more we assume power is ripe for the taking by the swift and unscrupulous. Even more so if we communicate more often through implicit or explicit threats and intimidation.\n\nReasonable appeals, moreover, already assume a massive iceberg of tacit agreement, of which the actual reasoning is the mere tip—we can’t really argue over whether we should argue rather than try to kill each other, we can’t really argue if our first principles are so disparate as to preclude any shared ground, we can’t really argue if we have differing assumptions regarding, say, the role authority, social prohibitions and established hierarchies should have in the process of civil discourse. Such differences really indicate that we live under different power centers, or in a radically divided one, rendering reason irrelevant.\n\nSo, the more we insist on settling our disputes through reason, and upon raising the standards of rational discourse, the more we both presuppose and promote (even if we are anarchists in our explicit views) central power, which necessarily prefers to preserve that iceberg of tacit agreement.\n\nWe promise and undertake obligations. Here, the assumption of central power is especially evident. The more seriously we take our promises the more we assume broken promises will be registered as scandals and as requiring a great deal of work in restoring one’s trustworthiness, but also, then, some objective, third party measure of what counts as a broken promise. I don’t necessarily mean an actual arbiter, al though there will be plenty of those as well, but that in promising we mostly agree on how such an arbiter would judge breaches—after all, why would anyone promise anything otherwise? To assume the existence of impartial arbiters, even hypothetical ones, is to assume consistent standards regarding justice, even if the application of those standards may differ from community to community.\n\nTo assume such consistency is to assume a central power capable of stepping in to enforce such standards when infringements occur, and the charisma of a central power that means it is unlikely to have to do so often. We could attribute a successful culture of promising, like a culture of reason, to the “mores” of the people, but mores are enforced constantly (they don’t enforce themselves), which brings us back to the question of power. Even more obviously, our complaints when obligations have (in our view) been unmet makes unmistakably evident our “belief” in a central power—what would be the point of complaining that laws are unjust, that just laws go enforced, that officials are overbearing and oppressive, that young people have no respect for their elders (who have given them life and order), etc., if built into our very language was not the assumption that laws can be made just, can be enforced, and that respect can be inculcated across the generations?\n\nIn any particular case, such expectations may be unrealistic, and some expectations may contradict others—that just means that further clarifications regarding perfecting the sovereign order are necessary: reason needs to conquer more ground covered by manipulation, promises need to be elevated over threats, and so on.\n\nWe do much more with language than even what I have outlined here, but in each case I think we will discover the same thing—that nothing that we say or think makes sense without the assumption that all of our desires and resentments target a central power that limits and defines them. Even the most fanatical anarchistic atheist assumes that reason and/or altruistic instincts (as he conceives them) can triumph over all conflicts and self-delusions, which just assumes an absolute sovereignty of the people at their best—that is, the fanatic agrees that everyone must agree on those things fundamental to social peace and civilization, he just fantasizes that happening without any one power to impose it.\n\nWe could say that this fanatic imagines the infinite installing itself directly into our “hard drives,” so that no one needs to impose the peace that makes it possible for us to give ourselves to the infinite in the first place. But anyone who experiences the infinite wants it for everyone, and knows that whatever space of peace and order made the discipline that enabled one to hear the infinite possible for oneself, more such spaces, and more “spacious” ones must be created for increasing numbers of people to hear from the infinite. He will want a central power that provides for such spaces, that rules in such a way as to model such spaces, and that insists upon a tenor of social discourse that honors them.\n\nMeanwhile, competing power centers will find a quick and effective means of subversion by simply “debunking” the connections between discipline, civil order, and success within that civil order. The belief that we are all born with what it takes to rule ourselves will be the simplest way of enacting the needed debunking—discipline, in that case, is really just the expropriation of our natural and naturally egalitarian capacities."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-three-resentments",
      "title": "The Three Resentments",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Reactionary Future ’s explanation for the Black Lives Matter riots brings out the strengths and distinction of absolutism as a theory of social order. I would here like to bring that explanation into convergence with what I think is originary thinkings most important contribution to theorizing social order: the relation between resentment and the center.\n\nRF first distinguishes the absolutist explanation from the others (from Nazis to liberals), all of which share a reliance upon some pre-social being that accounts for social relations, whether they be genetics or natural “free and equal” individuals. Absolutism goes right to the question of how an unsecure sovereign acts to implement policy or, we might say, secure itself (what other point would policy have for the sovereign, especially an insecure one?):\n\nThis is simply the way in which a sovereign governance structure which is subject to checks and balances will act to implement policy. It is clear the central governance structure wishes to re-organise the police force, and has ingrained electoral and institutional enemies which it cannot directly confront. It also labors under the delusion of private society which it cannot merely expose as fraud (it is also manned by people who believe the fraud.)\n\nThe result is that the governing institutions use “private” institutions (foundations) to create agitation and trouble which creates an environment, and/ or results in legal action which allows for the planned policy to be enacted. That this process also attacks the institutional enemies (electoral enemies, republican checks) is also of value.\n\nThe black lives matter seems to have two broad goals, one is to create the required “demand” for a re-organisation of the US police force on a national basis, which is a reasonable goal for a government. The other is to create racial tension for electoral means.\n\nOne important virtue of this approach is to extract all of the resentment from the situation, and reduce it to a question of governance, even management. I will be bringing resentment back in, but not as a pre-social feeling of resistance—rather, resentment is an index of the degree of security or certainty of the central power. It is above all resentment that needs to be governed and managed by the sovereign. Let’s recall the form resentment takes on the originary scene: the central object, intensely desired and therefore all the more intensely prohibited, has both saved (and even created) the community (and each individual in it) and stands guard over the fulfillment of desire. Resentment is directed toward this second function of the object (or, to be a bit Lacanian, Object)—it bars the realization of desire. This goes beyond simply preventing the hungry man from having a decent meal—it also ensures that satisfaction will never match desire. What is barred is possession of the center itself.\n\nWhen we say that the center bars possession of itself, of its own power to create the community and, indeed, the world, we really mean that the collected “sign-ature” of the group prevents each and every member from advancing to the center. Objects (small “o”) can now only be possessed under the aegis of some sign, a sign that guarantees the protection and permission of the Object. We can devour the downed buffalo, which quickly becomes a collection of flesh and bones, with the permission of our buffalo ancestor (who insists we devour it together, in an orderly manner). The members of the group stand in surety for the buffalo ancestor, which means each individual resents that buffalo ancestor for restraining our desire while also resenting any other member of the group that might throw off such restraint. The power of the buffalo ancestor is secure insofar as the latter resentment outweighs the former. We can call this a donation of resentment to the center, which cancels the resentment toward the center.\n\nThis is not accomplished once and for all, nor would it be to the betterment of humankind if it were. Individual resentment toward the center is the source of innovation in human affairs. The appropriation by the Big Man of the center derives from such resentment, and so does the “framing” of the Biggest Man (the god emperor) by a cultural space that retrieves the originary configuration. The monotheistic and metaphysical innovations, whereby the asymmetry of the emperor cult is reconstructed as a form of reciprocity, certainly manifest powerful resentment toward the center. Such innovations, though, must also be seen as attempts to restore and resecure the center—presumably, the Big Man emerges when the primitive community is under some kind internal and external pressure (the terms of exchange with the buffalo ancestor become obscured), and the emergence of the absolute (monotheistic or metaphysical) imperative responds to the instability of the emperor cult with the emergence of competing centers and powers that cult was ill-equipped to handle.\n\nThese innovations (all civilized cultural innovations) will be successful to the extent that they redirect the resentment they generate from the center toward the margins in the name of the center—that is, to the extent that they become conduits for the donation of resentment.\n\nI think we can identify three modes of resentment toward the center (and, therefore, three corresponding modes of donation): the resentment of those who believe they should occupy the center; the resentment of those whose lot in life has been inadequately adjudicated by the center; the resentment of those who object to the existence of the center itself. In the first case, we have rival elites, for whom the fact that central power is in the hands of another is arbitrary (no real difference in ability or desert can be established); in the second case, the acceptance of subjection to the center takes the form of assumption that the center will do justice to the subject (in his relations with other subjects) in a manner proportionate to that subject’s supplication; in the final case, we have those who push the civilizational innovations framing the sovereign to a conclusion that calls for a direct restoration of the primitive equality of the originary scene.\n\nAll three modes of resentment presuppose the center—you can’t envy the possessor of a power you don’t assume to be permanent and valuable; you can’t complain that justice is not being done without taking for granted that it could be done; and you can’t indulge nihilistic fantasies without an omnipotent very big O Object to rebel against. The center, then, is secure to the extent that rivalrous elites compete with other elites over their respective closeness and loyalty to the sovereign; the “middle class” demand for justice can accept the difference between the perfection of divine justice and the imperfection of the worldly kind; and the nihilistic fantasy is contained within ritual and esthetic forms. The center, meanwhile, will be insecure to the extent that these three modes of resentment inspire, incite and collaborate with each other.\n\nTo return to RF and the riots: in the terms I have laid out, it is clearly, for RF , the resentment of the elites that is the starting point. This reverses virtually all modern sociological explanations that locate disruptions in eruptions from “below,” due to some “natural” resentment of economic inequality or political injustice. Which is to say, it clears away a lot of liberal clutter and chatter. So, in the case of BLM, the sovereign power wants to increase its own security by having a police force directly subordinate to itself—a “reasonable goal,” as RF says, which is not necessarily to say that it is likely in this case to enhance the security of the sovereign (federal) power.\n\nThe sovereign power is the sovereign power for the moment (the very meaning of unsecure power is that sovereignty is passed off and seized by one group of elites from another continually), and in this case it is contending with a rival for that sovereign power— RF doesn’t explicate this, but we can simply see this as a status quo power base, which would prefer to see the division of power between municipalities, states and the federal government maintained. It seems to me this is a good place to introduce the absolutist Jouvenelian concept of the high-low alliance against the middle: a secure power could be constructed out of a hierarchy of relatively autonomous police forces in the last instance answering to the federal power—that last instance never has to arrive in reality, and won’t if everything is well managed at its own level, but everyone can know it will arrive if necessary.\n\nSo, the present, Soros-funded sovereign is both sovereign and rival at the same time (again, that must be the meaning of unsecure power), which it seems to me is alluded to in RF ’s reference to the “attack on institutional enemies,” and it tries to ensure its sovereignty by mobilizing the low against the middle. On one level, it’s a perfectly intelligible power play, and even a reasonable attempt to preserve and enhance order (which must be pursued in an indirect and admittedly grotesque way); on another level, we can see the resentment of progressive and by definition better qualified elites towards more “traditionalist,” static and to that extent more firmly grounded elites, a resentment that instigates resentment of the second kind (the police no longer act in accord with the norms of justice, whites don’t care, etc.) to paralyze the middle, and uses the third resentment (a chiliastic belief in a world where all the subjugated, from Charlotte to Gaza, will move from the margins to the center, but also a carnivalesque suspension of law and order) to mobilize the mob.\n\nThe second and third resentments are always there, but the absolutist analysis is right to contend that they only become effective when “catalyzed” by the first resentment, that of the rivalrous elites. But that may be, in part, because the rivalrous elites already incorporate those other resentments: Bolingbroke, in Richard II, has been unjustly treated by Richard in the latter’s adjudication of a dispute between Bolingbroke and a rival aristocrat—it is Richard’s arbitrary judgment that has “debunked” the intrinsic connection between power and the dispensation of justice that let’s Bolingbroke see he could be just as good a king as Richard.\n\nMoreover, are not the “unjustly” sidelined elites the most extravagant fantasists—are not the dreams of George Soros (or Shimon Peres) in a borderless world of unhindered exchange and movements among peoples who are somehow both more themselves than ever and interchangeable as sincere as those of the most wild-eyed Occupy Wall Street demonstrator? If you want to be a realist about power, you must take into account the anthropomorphics of our dance around the center. To imagine replacing the center is not imagine moving into a somewhat swankier residence with a larger armed detail; it is to imagine a new world, with oneself at the center.\n\nThis is all the more the case when one strives to occupy a secret center, a real sovereignty behind the apparent one—or when we imagine others doing so (which in turn makes it more likely to consider doing so ourselves). (We can, in fact, see indications of all three resentments in the passage from the Soros memorandum RF quotes from: for example, “even under a Progressive Attorney General, the Department has failed to take steps” [first resentment]; “the opportunity to promote meaningful and lasting change,” along with the list of “grassroots and youth-oriented groups,” with its gesture towards open-ended and continually growing resistance and change embodies the third resentment; while “enhance procedural justice, reduce implicit bias, and support racial reconciliation” points to the second.)\n\nThe space of sovereignty is a disciplinary space; a disciplinary space of disciplinary spaces. A disciplinary space installs what Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm,” in which certain questions are presumed already answered, or unanswerable, and therefore disallowed or simply ignored within the disciplinary space; other questions, meanwhile, open up new lines of inquiry, making the disciplinary space, like language itself, inexhaustible. For originary thinking, for example, questions regarding ways of making sense of particular practices or institutions as forms of deferral and deference to a sign-mediated center are open and generative in this way—meanwhile, questions regarding the relation between “the forces and relations of production,” grounded in the concept of “labor,” are unintelligible within the discipline—those questions belong in Marxism.\n\n(Of course, we could account for Marxism and its concepts as forms of deferral.) For the sovereign, the disciplinary “paradigm” is the recirculation of all authorized power back to the author, the sovereign, without remainder. “I did this because I wanted to” doesn’t make sense in terms of sovereignty—this doesn’t mean that in an absolutist order no one would ever do what they wanted; rather it means “because I wanted to” would really mean, and would readily be translated into, something like “because it redounds to the glory of the sovereign.” This doesn’t mean we’d always be saying things we didn’t think to flatter the sovereign—it means we’d be trying to eliminate any distance between our own desires and the will of the sovereign to preserve a good order in the realm (the glory of the sovereign is what makes it possible for me to peacefully and productively do what I want).\n\nAbsolute sovereignty is a virtuous circle. Anything that couldn’t be thus “translated” would be remainder. And any remainder would be evidence of one or more of the three resentments. Evidence of the three resentments is then an index of the unsecurity of central power. The defining work of the sovereign as disciplinary power is to establish the terms on which those resentments can be, not so much repressed (though it may sometimes come to that, of course) but converted into donations to the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutist-sovereignty",
      "title": "Absolutist Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Bertrand de Jouvenel, in his historical account of the rise and metastasization of state power, On Power , finds in the origin of absolutism the very defect of unsecure power that leads to the pathological dynamic of divided power seeking more power that absolutist theory decries. The assertion of absolute power by the earliest kings (in Europe, at least, but de Jouvenel sees the model as universally applicable) resulted from their monarchical projects being stymied by the aristocrats they relied upon, who retained their land and men and therefore power (even if it was land and power nominally owned and actually distributed by the king).\n\nThe king, then, elevates the subordinates of those aristocrats, makes them subject to his authority alone, and thereby marginalizes the aristocrats. This is the high-low alliance against the middle, repeated over and over again in the career of state power, because then, of course, out of the newly elevated subjects emerges a new middle, which again becomes a threat and so must be undermined by a new levy of the “people.” In the end, you get Black Lives Matter as a battering ram against the police, local governments and the white middle class.\n\nThe point, though, is that in de Jouvenel’s account there never seems to have been a time when power was “just right”—the aristocrats were, undoubtedly, short-sighted and egotistical and less capable than the king, at least on some occasions, of understanding the interests of the national community as a whole. It is ridiculous that a single aristocrat can go on strike and thereby make addressing some crisis (e.g., a rebellion or invasion) impossible. The initial appropriation of absolute power, then, was not arbitrary and was probably even justified—and probably more likely to succeed than waging war on recalcitrant aristocrats. But this certainly creates a problem for absolutist theory: where, exactly, are we taking our model of good governance from?\n\nWe could pinpoint theoretically and no doubt discover historically moments when the pre-absolutist king called upon his aristocratic loyalists, who in turn called upon their dependents—and all the calls were in fact answered. The earliest absolutisms would themselves have been modeled upon, and attempts to recreate, such events. Whatever made sovereignty reducible to the king’s will is the model for absolutism. We don’t have to assume a single miraculous moment of harmony uniting all wills and strata of society—this would have happened often, perhaps regularly. Aristocratic resistance to, say, 15% of the king’s projects might have been frustrating enough and, indeed, sometimes dangerous enough, for the king to take measures to end his dependence on the aristocrats, but that would still mean he attained 85% compliance. Even if the numbers are lower, the point would stand: unity of will was obtained, repeatedly, so we can figure out how.\n\nIt seems obvious that the king would have been most successful in mobilizing his subordinates in their hierarchical order when there was universal acknowledgement regarding the urgency of some shared threat, or potential advantage. Such acknowledgement can never be universally intense, but enthusiasm must be high enough for the skeptical to yield to that pressure rather than risking going it alone in dissent. In retrospect, it might be discovered that unanimity was attained when it was less necessary, and not attained when it was more necessary—this is what would have initiated the career of power, in de Jouvenel’s sense. In other words, if the king takes unanimity when he can get it, rather than obtaining it when he really needs it, he is not preserving the unity of sovereignty. So, we need to pinpoint our model even more precisely: what we are looking for is the king wisely “calling in his debts” when the future of his realm most depends upon it.\n\nAbsolutism, then, as political theory and method, aims at having and keeping those debts in place permanently, and acting at each moment as if the future of the realm depends upon every decision. The cost-benefit consequences of obedience or resistance must be present to all at all times—the entire social order must be permeated with signs of these consequences, which will be modulated continually: where more benefits are available, costs can be downplayed, but if benefits become limited, the costs must be highlighted. But costs and benefits must always be framed in terms of the largest cost and benefit of them all: the destruction or preservation and enhancement of the realm itself.\n\nIt is easy to see why kings would have judges issuing judgments in the name of the king, merchants selling goods in the name of the king, teachers promoting students in the name of the king, and so on. Nor are these formulas any more tedious, or less given to being renewed by fresh commitments, than the clichés we live by in liberal democracies. It’s really just a way of reminding us that we must be doing what we do for the good of society, which is no vague phrase because we know where that good is located.\n\nThe idea here is less to “assert” absolute power than to simply assume the absolute power already located at the social center. There is a social center because society is founded on deferral, which assumes some central object of desire; the social center, in a civilized order premised on an upward spiral of discipline, is whatever is taken to guarantee that hierarchy of discipline. The sovereign power, then, embodies that guarantee, and the way to embody that guarantee is to issue tokens of permission and promises of protection to all the disciplines, i.e., all institutions that seek to reward discipline of whatever kind and ensure the return in kind to that form of discipline (which might be money for the merchant, recognition for the soldier, a circle of fellow inquirers and supply of students for the scholar, etc.).\n\nAnd then, of course, review the terms of the permission regularly and honor the promises. This is the way to govern with and through the middle, rather than against it—and this might be much easier now than it was for the original absolutist monarchs because the property and power of the disciplines are now more obviously social in character than was the land and serfs of the lord. Computer operators and doctors can’t really go it alone—they need protection and therefore permission. Of course, as de Jouvenel would also insist, all these conditions of absolute rule operate as constraints on the ruler, who, to that extent, is less than “absolute.”\n\nBut no one could ever have claimed that an absolute ruler was absolute in any metaphysical sense—a massive earthquake could destroy his rule, just as much as political mistakes can. His rule is absolute in the sense that nothing in the social order is outside of that rule, and if there is something outside of it he’s not really ruling—there is a descriptive, almost axiomatic component of this formulation, but also a prescriptive one: to the sovereign, let nothing assert itself outside of your grant of permission and promise, but also grant nothing you are not prepared to guarantee; to the subject, unless you wish for disorder, assert nothing outside of that rule, but also assert and cloth yourself in the rule."
    },
    {
      "slug": "central-power-and-the-originary-configuration",
      "title": "Central Power and the Originary Configuration",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Reactionary Future has been addressing the liberal prioritization of culture and religion over politics, as pursuant to the absolutist rejection of “bottom-up” in favor of “top-down” understandings of order. It is not that new ideas lead to a new consciousness which spreads (because they are good ideas? Because they “reflect” some new social developments that just “happened”?) throughout society, finally leading to adaptations in political institutions. The more economic understanding is that the new ideas are promoted by secessionist powers in their exploitation of unsecure power and as part of their own struggle to resecure power on their own terms.\n\nIt follows that the very idea of separate spheres of life, like “culture,” “religion,” “art,” “philosophy,” is itself a product of these power struggles—more precisely, the ascendancy of liberalizing power centers that want to eliminate all mediation between the state and the individual. The very ideas of freedom of religion and free speech, while apparently protecting individuals from the state, in fact ensure the domestication of what gets marked as “religion” and “speech”—ultimately, as we can see more clearly now, making it possible for the state to define such terms according to convenience and “weigh” them against other rights and “state interests.”\n\nThis reification of separate spheres advances the centralizing dynamic of state power that keeps breaking up “middleistic” formation and leaves individuals bare in their confrontation with the state. The replacement of the “thick” articulation of ritual, place of worship, ecclesiastical authority and doctrine by the “thin” gruel of “personal belief” is not just the alienation of homogenized individuals—it is a power play aimed at breaking up solidarities and power centers that interfere with the direct application of state power on each and every individual.\n\nAmong these separate spheres, though, would have to be counted “politics” and “the state” themselves. These concepts would themselves be abstractions advancing divided power by treating the institutions concerned with ruling as slots to be filled by whoever can seize power by whatever mechanisms are available. This would further mean that the sacred, the invisible, the ethical, the moral, and the political are all bound up together in more primordial categories. For the originary hypothesis, this more primordial category is the sacred center. Humanity is founded around a sacred center, an object that has inflamed such desire as to require a sign of deferral to prevent the self-immolation of the group.\n\nEverything is there: “politics” (the nascent form of authority); “art” (the oscillation between the sign pointing to the object and the desirable object itself); “philosophy,” or at least thought (following the relation between center and margins in one’s fellows); and, of course, “religion” (supplication to the “command” of the central object that prohibits appropriation). The approved myth of modernity is that all of these forms of human life, bundled together in an enslaving mass of irrational rules and authorities, all get separated out and “cleansed” of their irrational and oppressive dross. So, reactionary absolutism must rearticulate them in terms of the sacred center.\n\nOne way or another, sooner or later, one member of the community accumulates enough wealth, which also means enough trust and reciprocal obligation, so as to place him beyond the egalitarian customs of the community and (which is to say the same thing) beyond a symmetrical gift exchange with any single member of the community. His relations are now with the community as a whole, as he comes to control distribution. This Big Man now occupies the sacred center, which for the primitive community was occupied (generally) by the animal the community relied upon for food and defied and assumed a relation of mutual obligation with.\n\nNow, the sacred center is a central power, and there is not anything, to this day, which can replace or transcend central power, which is therefore a presupposition of civilized life. Everything in the community circulates through this central power which, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that the occupant of the central position takes it upon himself to manage the daily activities of community members. It just means that everything takes place through more or less direct reference to the central power—everything is allowed or required by that power. So, far, we don’t have the separation of spheres—art, religion, thinking, politics are all bundled up in the community’s relation to the central power, an arrangement that continues even as the Big Man becomes the emperor ruling over vast territories and very different communities.\n\nThe ancient empires obviously lasted a long time—several thousand years in some cases. Whether they ever had to fall and be replaced by new civilizational forms is a moot question (we could ask the same question about the primitive communities, which lasted far longer). The very thing that sustained them for so longer is probably what made them so vulnerable to new conditions—the absolute asymmetry between the God Emperor and any other human being. Anything the emperor does that departs from the traditionally derived prescriptions governing relations between center and margin would have to be obeyed unquestioningly; but it would also have to be virtually unintelligible, immediately generating other power centers, the guardians of tradition.\n\nNo initiative is possible, and no real thinking, other than studying the stars in order to predict and control future events. The two best known breaks with the imperial tradition are the monotheistic revelation in ancient Israel and the discovery of metaphysics in ancient Greece—which are, of course, eventually synthesized in Christianity. (I don’t know enough to say if perhaps a more gradual version of this break occurred with Confucianism in ancient China.)\n\nThe best way of understanding this break is as the recovery or remembering of the originary scene or, more precisely, what Eric Gans calls the “moral model” derived from the scene. The only way to renew social order once the limits of the imperial model are grasped is to imagine spaces enabling the possible co-presence of all human beings. Metaphysics imagines a space of inquiry into eternal truths in which any disinterested individual could participate; monotheism imagines the origin of all human beings from a single creator. The moral model, in my view, need mean nothing more than co-presence and reciprocal acknowledgement—we need not and, in my view, had better not, project back to the originary scene any of our own assumptions of “equality.”\n\nOnce this recovery (which cannot be unrecovered) is made, the moral model is, we might say, mapped onto our model of any particular social order. The relation between the originary moral model and the existent social order poses the problems which later get taken up in terms of the relation between the “city of God” and the city of Man,” and finally, “state” and “religion.” The problem becomes more manageable if we think of it in originary terms.\n\nI don’t know whether the emergence of monotheism and metaphysics involved the interventions of new power centers under conditions of unsecure power, as per the absolutist model. If so, they were the rare interventions that actually provided the means for securing power. Faith and philosophy have certainly caused problems for the state, because they make an a priori claim to loyalty to something higher than the state—the truth transcends the word of the ruler, and the commands of God those of the ruler. But first of all the absoluteness of the truth and the global sovereignty of God provide models for absolute sovereignty.\n\nAt the same time these absolutes frame absolute sovereignty, and provide it with a mission to spread the truth and imitate God by preserving and elevating the ruled. No ruler could possibly rule in explicit defiance of the truth and God (or, more broadly, the moral model). So, the ruler obligates himself to the moral model and makes himself its guardian. This justifies absolute rule, or the occupancy of central power by the ruler, because only through the singleness of power can the singularity of the moral model become the fundamental social guide, embedded in all social practices. Any critic of the ruler would have to present himself as authorized by the ruler to help ensure the conformity of a given institution to the terms of the moral model constitutive of that institution.\n\nSo, all post-imperial institutions are predicated upon the assumption that all institutions provide for co-presence and reciprocal acknowledgement of all participants—and that sometimes this assumption does not coincide with reality, which therefore requires reform. Continual exploration of the forms of co-presence and mutual acknowledgement that transcend the particular social order is necessary if the institutions are to be examined in terms of their conformity to those forms. This exploration embraces all of culture, which thereby has its “function” in relation to the central power. All that matters to the sovereign is that this exploration, these inquiries, be conducted in such a way as to engage vigorously the traditional materials in which forms of the moral model have been inherited, to freely test the implications of those materials for existing institutions, and to suggest reforms (where necessary) of those institutions in a way that recognizes their founding in the moral model.\n\nThe ultimate test of these inquiries is whether they help enhance the sovereign’s co-presence with and reciprocal acknowledgment of the people. The sovereign will be the ultimate judge of whether that’s the case, but we can assume that he will judge more favorably the more the inquiries have been transparently directed towards the edification of the realm. There may be many different faiths and rites, then, just like there may be many schools of art, types of entertainment, and modes of scientific and technological endeavor, but the tendency will be to bring them all into relation with each other as various explorations of the infinitively generative moral model—there may be an ongoing overlapping of undifferentiation, differentiation and dedifferentiation of “spheres.”\n\nAnd if you don’t like the phrase “moral model,” because “morality” has been one of those concepts carved out of prior unity and privatized, we can call it the “originary configuration.” We keep trying to further approximate the originary configuration, which is to say maximal co-presence and reciprocal acknowledgement, but the only way of doing so by continuing to center the center (derive information, instruction and intentions from the center) and thereby turning it into a source of information regarding how to further approximate."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ideology-revisited",
      "title": "Ideology, Revisited",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The absolutist theory of sovereignty makes it possible to solve a problem that not only has never been solved but has never even been adequately formulated, even though it was first posed during the Enlightenment. The concept of “ideology” began, of course, as a proposed discipline focused on the study of ideas, but the problem of how to liberate people’s natural reason from faith, superstition and tradition was already a pressing problem for Enlightenment thinkers—and it is this problem that ultimately became the problem of “alienation” and finally ideology in Marxist thought. Why do the mystifications of bourgeois society mystify?\n\nThe activist thinker can see through them—why can’t others be made to? Noam Chomsky has taken the concept of “manufacturing consent” from Walter Lippman’s study of public opinion, and used it to the same end—why do people accept the alien perspective of their rulers? Of course, much of this can be attributed to the imbalances of power—the Marxists and Chomskyans are all well aware of who owns the media, who runs the schools, who produces mass entertainment, etc. But it is essential to any politics aiming at radical transformation to locate in the “people” some innate resistance to such machinations, whether that be natural reason (which Chomsky seems to believe in as much as any Enlightenment liberal) or some kind of class or other “consciousness.”\n\nBut if that resistance was there to be activated, why does it never seem to take shape? Somehow, ideology must be penetrating the workings of that resistant consciousness and de-activating it. But by now every group and almost every individual has its own theory of ideology—something prevents the masses from seeing corporate domination, or the war on whites, or the insidious racism oozing out of all our practices, or just from seeing how astonishingly evil Hillary or Trump is. We are way past arguments over reasonable differences regarding the fitness of candidates and the justice or effectiveness of public policies—there is no one to persuade, only enemies to destroy and potential allies to be liberated from their false consciousness. The red pill/blue pill distinction so central to alt-right and neo-reactionary thinking is the latest, and far from the most easily dismissed, of these “ideology critiques.”\n\nWe can bemoan the loss of public discourse aimed at persuading fellow citizens, but, in truth, that conception was conjoined at its birth with the theory of ideology, which is meant to diagnose those not amenable to persuasion. The confusions theories of ideology denounce are real, but they are confusions over who rules; moreover, these confusions do not bespeak confused minds but, rather, divided and unsecure power. If it is in reality unclear who rules, who occupies the center, all members of society have no choice but to do their best to identify the real ruler. Naturally they will do this differently, depending upon how they map the moral model of the originary scene onto whichever configuration of the center is most apparent to them, and which potential occupants of the center appear most threatening.\n\nA worker who fears losing his job will believe it is unjust that he lose his job because he has played by the rules and paid his dues to the center—a just central power would not allow this and since it appears likely to happen some unjust power has usurped the once just sovereign (or kept out of power the potentially just sovereign). That worker will want to know who that usurper is. Thus far, the worker is not at all mystified—he is right. The problem is that with multiplying power divisions, identifying the responsible party is a hit or miss game, and the answer that seems most plausible to that worker will depend upon who that worker, in a newly fragile world of shaken authorities, still attributes a knowing trustworthiness to. Perhaps his fellow union members; perhaps his friends at the bar, perhaps his neighbors, or his boss—or a radio talk show host.\n\nMeanwhile, all those powers playing musical chairs are attributing responsibility to each other—the media blame the corporations, the corporations fund think tanks and media outlets that blame other corporate sectors, or the government bureaucracy, the political parties blame each other and each other’s constituencies; foreign powers, and of course, the Jews, get thrown into the mix. There may be more or less truth in any of these assessments, but no one is in any position to determine how much with any real certainty, in part because the precise power balances shift constantly. Ideology, then, is really the miasma of distributed powers all trying to ally themselves with some powers and oppose others, which means all share an interest in never allowing power to become settled, never allowing the center to be occupied.\n\nBut the only substitute for secure occupation of the center is to mobilize as much unanimity as you can against some false pretender to that occupancy. This is how ideological narratives take shape, very much on the model of myth (the Enlighteners had a point there): the pretender (corporations, rogue spy agencies, foreign powers, rogue spy agencies of foreign powers, the ideologically suspect—once Communists, now neo-Nazis) threatens to possess the center, taking advantage of division, complacency and misguided generosity of those who have internalized the true center; finally, a heroic representative of the true center will awaken, enlighten and unify enough of the “centrists” (two or three, including a bratty child, may do) to restore an implicit center occupied by no one but internalized in the hearts of all. Such narratives can frame a news story or a history textbook as easily as a Hollywood blockbuster. In the end, the faith in centerlessness, with a true center in each and every one of us, is restored.\n\nThere is always a sense in which sovereignty ultimately resides in whoever commands the massive bodies of armed men, but it is in the nature of liberal democratic government to pass power out of its own hands like a game we used to play as kids that I perhaps misremember being called “salugee,” where the object was to keep passing a ball or some object from teammate to teammate to prevent the opposing team from wresting physical possession of the object from the carrier (whichever team had the ball or object when lunch period was over won). So, the government attributes its actions to the will of the people, or to some overriding political or legal principle, or to the need to appease the “base” of the party in power—which really means the social groupings the government attributes “peoplehood” to in order to under-legitimize some other group, or some legal authority it wants to empower to undermine some other legal authority, or the agenda of fundraisers who want cheap labor or weapons orders or agricultural patents.\n\nThe tendency is always toward power that is both more centralized and more divided—more aspects of life, more norms, more social arrangements, become the object of interference in decreasingly accountable ways. To whom do you address your grievance if some district court judge appointed by a president (elevated by a particular power configuration displacing another) enamored of some legal theorist at Harvard (himself inspired by some 60s activist and recipient of grants from various foundations) decides low income housing needs to be built down the street from you? The desire to find out who is behind all this is nearly irresistible, but also futile.\n\nIt makes a lot more sense to say that we are alienated from our proper relation to the center than from our real (or genuinely human) self or class consciousness. Our resentments speak of a center—you can’t see something as wrong, unjust, unfair or even just mistaken without imagining the possibility of remedying it (without that possibility, it’s all just things that happen). It’s a sign of maturity to realize that all things (probably most things) cannot be remedied to one’s own satisfaction, but it is, then, a sign of emergent mastery to consider which wrongs most need to be remedied, what kind of authority would have to do the remedying, what interference it would encounter, which wrongs would get neglected in the process, or might even turn out not to be wrongs at all; and, moreover, what kind of person would be able to deploy that authority, what sort of social relations and individual character would be needed to comply with and aid that authority—what you are doing, at that point, is theorizing sovereignty.\n\nIn the process you will necessarily cut through the lies, the self-serving self-deceptions, the panicky confusions, because you will always want to bring the fundamental question up point blank: what hierarchy of authorities would right the most wrongs, do the most justice, lead to the greatest fairness, or, even better, prevent the most wrongs, injustice and unfairness from being committed in the first place? And not just any wrongs, injustices and unfairnesses, but the ones we see right in front of us, the ones that spark the inquiry into sovereignty in the first place. Here, there is a place for dialogue with our fellow citizens in the true spirit of openness and inquiry—indeed, we can focus the dialogue on what mode of government, what kind of occupation of the center, can best guarantee that such dialogues can be sustained? I think it must be an occupation of the center ready to be accountable for all that happens on the margins, but we can continue to discuss it.\n\nAnother dimension of absolutist theory, one that I have mostly neglected so far, can be brought into play here as well. Ultimately, for absolutism, powers that intervene in and influence events simply want their power to be more secure—they want a “decidable” sovereignty as much as anyone. Because of divided power, though, they must make an end run around other powers in order to achieve—never with complete success—such security. (It should be noted that this implies a severely divided consciousness on the part of such powers.) I will refer you to Reactionary Future ’s post on the Charlotte riots, which I referenced a couple of posts back.\n\nThe government, or some part of government, wants a national police force; because of divided power (federalism) that can’t be done directly; so you instigate racial and cop hatred that causes riots so that you have the “proof” of the racism and incompetence of local police forces that you need to propose nationalizing the whole shebang—in stages, of course, first by instituting “standards” whose implementation is to be overseen by the Justice Department, but which can’t really be met by the local forces without resources from the feds, etc. Of course, different powers will be doing this in different ways, often undermining each other. Still, if, as RF says in his latest post,\n\nthe best we can do is to try to deduce what actors will do in the specific position they occupy within a governmental system. We cannot dictate what they must do with a law, constitution or other such ring of Fnargl gimmicks, but must provide them with the requisite circumstances and organisation to allow them to act in accordance with their role without having to resort to such bizarre recourse as funding black rioters, anti-corn law movements or other forms of self-protesting to circumvent the republican blocks in place that stop them from acting correctly,\n\nthen we can conduct our ideology critique in a way that more directly addresses political and policy decisions. Once we have deduced what would “be in accordance with their role” without “resort to such bizarre recourse,” we can use the impossibility of fulfilling their role under current circumstances to expose the whole tangled web of “bizarre recourses” that comprise our present governmental and social order. Indeed, much of our everyday lives must be made up of such bizarre recourses, even though we often do, as must the government, get things done somehow (fulfill the roles the center as allotted us), nevertheless.\n\n(This is possible because all of us recognize at least some of the time that there is a center, and can reconstruct a version of its “instructions.”) When the center is occupied intermittently and unaccountably, everyone will busy themselves in trying to saturate the center space, and this generates the thickets of bizarre recourses (and equally bizarre explanations justifying those recourses) that we must continually cut through to bring the center—a center, I continue to insist, that we all know is there (otherwise, no rational decisions would ever make it through those bizarre recourses at all)—into view. So, the starting point of our counter-ideological dialogues can be asking what you (or anyone else) would be doing right now if a clear and secure hierarchy of authority rendered all bizarre recourse unnecessary; the question of what one should be doing will, furthermore, be of use in constructing a model of that hierarchy."
    },
    {
      "slug": "saturating-sovereignty",
      "title": "Saturating Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Where is Trump’s extra-republican force, asks Reactionary Future . Why not take advantage of the increasingly “interesting” Trump campaign to sketch out a preliminary answer? First of all, it’s the Alt-Right, as I have suggested in recent posts. Still, that’s not nearly as comprehensive as the sovereignty inflating or saturating forces RF has been pointing to over the past few posts—“raw power,” coming from the heights of society, unconcerned with fictional “constitutional limits.” Trump doesn’t have such forces now, of course—virtually all such forces are currently ranged against him, pulling out all stops (no doubt disregarding constitutional limits, or the impropriety of collusion between current administration and a candidate’s campaign, the media, global corporations, etc.) in order to destroy him.\n\nHe needs to win the election to have any chance of starting to gather such forces. Can he win the election, if all dominant social forces are opposed to him? Is the formality of an “election” still a limit the extra-republican forces determined to defeat Trump will not trangress? Maybe it depends on what counts as an “election” –all those efforts on the part of Democrats to make it impossible to determine who is actually voting may pay their dividends this year. How far will they go to shove Hillary Clinton down our throats—would they actually refuse to let a victorious Trump assume the Presidency? If not, why not—what constitutes the limit on their side?\n\nThere must be some portion of the divided and distributed power up top that must be respected, and cannot abide an absolute and obvious suspension of the electoral process. (Unless there’s not—but first let’s deal with the more “optimistic” scenario.) Well, there would be a start—what we might call the section of elites essential to maintaining power but unwilling to completely set aside the facades protecting that power. It might be a very small or rather substantial section, and Trump might start to find his extra-Republican forces there, if he chooses to get to work on restoring American sovereignty by turning on the most egregious of his opponents (using more or less legal means to expropriate them), beginning, to fulfill a campaign promise, with the “Clinton machine”—a restoration of the center will then start to pull the peripheral into its orbit.\n\nThe more Trump makes an example of one or a few, the more others will wish not to be made examples of. Of course we can’t know how likely Trump will be to think along these lines, but his very interesting speeches give cause for hope—he does seem to have raised his addiction to tit-for-tatting to a veritably planetary scale.\n\nOur example suggests two other possible scenarios: one, Trump wins and is prevented from taking power (we can group other possibilities under this category—he takes office and a bi-partisan super-majority immediately initiates impeachment proceedings; the election itself is obviously stolen, etc.); two, he loses undisputedly. First, then, the elite coup against Trump. This would be an extremely risky step, and all the sections of the elite would not be equally supportive; no doubt, some would not be supportive at all. So, you start to gather your extra-republican forces there, among those in the elite who would themselves feel insecure and threatened by their fellow rulers.\n\nIf in the first scenario, Trump would have legitimate control over the armed forces, who would no doubt obey his commands, in this scenario, the funding of parallel military and governmental forces, drawn largely from those in the national forces appalled by this violation of the Constitution they have sworn to uphold, would be necessary. It’s reasonable to assume Trump himself would take command of these forces, unless he is imprisoned or killed in the coup; it’s hard to imagine an obvious replacement, but no doubt emergent figures will present themselves. In this case, conditions will call for extreme measures, and once you choose one side or the other you will be in no position to refuse to carry out those measures.\n\nObviously, a decisive defeat for Trump creates the least hopeful scenario—it’s hard to see why he wouldn’t be completely abandoned by the elite in its entirety, left to be devoured by all the forces he has offended. Then, it would be question of rebuilding “Trumpism,” no doubt against the Republican party, which will probably not be in very good shape when this is over, no matter the outcome. All of us on the alt-right, neoreaction and absolutism would try to influence that process, and ultimately elites marginalized by the ruling Democrats who now find the GOP useless might take a look at the proceedings. There will be many crises to analyze and intervene in from a “post-Trumpian” perspective.\n\nSo, what does this mean for how we talk now, given the unprecedented opening both the turn of Trump’s campaign and some serious rethinking regarding our institutions on the part of some right wing thinkers provides? Sovereignty is the central issue here, more explicitly than it has ever been. This is completely thanks to Trump. All of his speeches now focus on the lack of sovereignty—the global elites rule, the Washington political class rules, the corporations rule, the media rule, other countries making donations to the Clinton Foundation get a seat in the musical chairs version of sovereignty. Of course, Trump thinks the American people should rule, but should he get elected (or have to struggle for legitimacy if he is cheated) it will be his sovereignty he will have to defend against threats.\n\nWe can translate the sovereignty of the American people into the subordination of all those false sovereigns into elements of a genuine sovereign—if that happens (including the elimination of some false sovereigns that serve no real purpose at all), it will be better than the American people ruling, for the American people themselves, first of all. Look at all the names of those exercising some degree of illegitimate sovereignty Trump mentions in his speeches, and simply ask regarding each one: what would it do if it did nothing more than serve its function in such a way as to serve and preserve sovereignty? Sometimes the answer would be “nothing,” the implications of which are clear enough, but quite often the legitimate aims these institutions advance in an illegitimate manner within a system of divided power can be recouped within a power-based analysis and a restored sovereignty.\n\nWe can call this the saturation of sovereignty—filling the central power with all social activities, from top to bottom, proposing for them all an “intentionality” within the system. Even Trump’s method of attacking and stigmatizing, and then negotiating, coopting and subordinating, can be instructive here. The ban on Muslims entering the country morphed into “extreme vetting,” he asserted at the second debate—the provocative, polarizing, perhaps unworkable but readily intelligible formulation is made suited for institutional management, without necessarily losing any of its effectivity. The identification of an egregious violation of sovereignty—a constant influx of Muslims, a knowable number of whom are bound to radicalize each other and Muslims already here, approved by no one knows who and no one knows why—is converted into a subordinate part of a proper sovereignty, reduced to rules and a hierarchy of functionaries. So, Trump’s extra-republican forces are out there, but they don’t know it yet."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-constraints-of-sovereignty-value-and-order",
      "title": "The Constraints of Sovereignty: Value and Order",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans, in his reading of the Illiad in The End of Culture , identifies the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon as one between “value” and social order. “Value” here simply means being more valuable to someone, for some purpose, under specific conditions: Achilles is the best fighter the Achaeans have—you’d want him on your side more than you’d want anyone else, and if he’s on your side you want him out there in the field, as much as possible. Gans argues that war is the first “market” in the sense that it is an overt testing of values. Achilles is certainly a far better fighter than Agamemnon, and his quarrel with the king of the Achaeans is over his not being paid at his market value (Agamemnon takes his fairly won slave girl).\n\nIt’s probable that Agamemnon is better at what he does than Achilles, who doesn’t seem to have the patience or organizational or diplomatic skills to build and sustain a military coalition, but it’s also possible that others could do what Agamemnon has done as well as or better than Agamemnon himself. Agamemnon is simply the one who has done it—he represents order, even if his value, taken alone, is less than other potential candidates. The poem regards the resolution of that conflict, which is to say the resolution of the resentment of one whose evident value (no one disputes Achilles’s superiority) goes unrecognized in the name of social order.\n\nWe can sharpen this antagonism, and thereby make it more interesting and instructive, by further considering Agamemnon’s value. The poem doesn’t focus on him, so it’s hard to tell how good he really is at what he does—the war has dragged on a long time without much progress, but maybe that’s not his fault (still, how, exactly, did he expect to get past that wall?); when the victorious strategy is finally arrived at, it was Odysseus’s idea, but, presumably, Agamemnon saw its value and approved it—and, moreover, was wise enough to trust and seek Odysseus’s judgment and advice; meanwhile, back home Agamemnon is being cuckolded and his murder prepared, but who could have seen that coming?\n\nAgamemnon’s value is testified to by the fact that Agamemnon initiated and sustained the project, and, perhaps, was the only one who could have done so, insofar as it was on behalf of his brother Menelaus, making him a highly motivated party while still not necessarily incurring the skepticism Menelaus himself might have as leader—assuming, of course, one sees the project as valuable one, or at least one worth concluding once started, or once a certain threshold of investment has been reached. So, one could say that Agamemnon is just as valuable to this project (if he were to be killed, could the Greek armies have been kept together?) as Achilles, maybe even more so, in which case we would have a clash of two values: skill or excellence in the primary activity, on the one hand, and initiative and organization in a collective project, on the other.\n\nThe poem provides no internal resolution to this conflict—Achilles returns to battle for his own reasons, that have nothing to do with any reconciliation with Agamemnon (al though his determination to avenge Patroclus does suggest ways of manipulating and governing the man of one-sided excellence).\n\nSometimes Achilles will be more easily replaced, sometimes Agamemnon—and it’s not always possible to know in advance which will be the case. So far, we are dealing with what de Jouvenel called “additive” actions, in which a group is gathered for a specific purpose, upon the accomplishment of which (or its failure) the group disperses. What happens when we speak of what de Jouvenel called “aggregates,” that is, groupings meant to continue in existence over an indefinite period of time, and which therefore develop institutional structures, rules, and inertia—how does the relation between value and order stand there?\n\nThe existence of the aggregate tends to make sustaining the aggregate the primary value, which means being a team player on the part of the skilled and talented individual and preserving, enhancing and where necessary reforming the institutional structures and rules on the part of the sovereign. But this just resets the entire conflict—an insufficiently cooperative but brilliant individual who gets marginalized by the team, and a more energetic leader impatient with sclerotic institutional structures and cautious, complacent leadership comprise the elements of an insurgency, especially in times of great danger or opportunity.\n\nThe implication is that the greatest failure of and danger to the sovereign is the failure to recognize value, and the greatest responsibility is therefore to cultivate and respect value. The difficulty in doing so is illustrated by the fate of the Biblical king Saul, who promoted the extremely valuable David and in doing so unintentionally named his own successor. The market is public: David’s successes were universally acknowledged, his charisma universally experienced. The problem, then, is to identify and elevate but also contain value—something even an over the hill monarch without any of David’s charisma has to be able to manage.\n\nIn a longstanding political order, with clear guidelines and traditions for succession, this wouldn’t seem like much of a problem—until an especially inept ruler, under particularly trying conditions, and faced with capable challengers emerges and makes the problem far worse than in less established orders that still remember the virtues required for their founding. The problem is to both create and contain markets for value—this problem, grounded in the inevitable differences in value between individuals and groups, is the main, maybe the only, constraint on sovereignty.\n\nWithin this market, the sovereign must be both primary “producer” and ultimate “consumer.” The sovereign produces, not simply “order” (which only he can provide, the demand for which is universal, but which is only experienced as a need when it may be already too late to supply it), but central power—and both Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault were right to insist that power doesn’t repress but produces, creates and articulates social relations that did not exist previously. Central power sends forth to the margins the obligation to return to the center the full measure of honor, duty and investment conferred by the center.\n\nThis power structure represents the accumulated results of past “markets” (honors, duties and properties have always been rewards for some service to the center, i.e., the recognition of some value) and in turn frame the ongoing market—new bearers of value must respect and become literate in the existing forms of “social capital” while showing an ability to innovate where necessary. The sovereign must support both the established terms and guardians of the market and the often vulnerable innovators—perhaps the most difficult part of ruling. He does this by being an active and informed consumer of these values, by compelling the guardians of the disciplines to regularly present candidates for honor and promotion that the sovereign (with the help of advisors) must be sure to be capable of judging for himself. That “must be sure to be”—that is the fundamental constraint on sovereignty.\n\nWe can perhaps discern this tension between value and order in the powers spawned by (but also creating) unsecure power—all those billionaires that Reactionary Future has been researching, creating foundations that in turn created disciplines like “political science” and “international relations” undoubtedly thought themselves more qualified to rule than the demagogues and bureaucrats whose only skill was rising the greasy pole of the party machine or gaslighting the populace—after all, these were men who had created the means of transportation, production and energy for the modern world. The values they produced as businessmen certainly had their recognition, but not the value they represented as word creators.\n\nToday’s tycoons are far more arrogant and with even greater reasons to consider themselves superior to mere political authority, illustrating the primary challenge of any attempt to restore sovereignty in the forseeable future. Those possessing unrecognized value will seek recognition by doing “privately” what they feel the sovereign should be doing publicly, and they will promote precisely those values they believe they possess: expertise and intelligence, certainly, but also freedom from parochialism, tradition and convention. They will try to produce the people capable of recognizing (“consuming”) their value.\n\nIn doing so they impose their “market” on all others, which means the work of reaction includes resetting the upset markets, perhaps beginning with the market Chateau Heartiste (leading “producer” in the “manosphere”) asserts is primary: the sexual market. Without power behind you, you can’t resist power, but the protection and restoration of “primary” markets implies a tendency towards central power. By “primary markets,” I mean those to which the application of law can only mean violence and distortion. Law can smooth the exchange of commodities; it can’t smooth the processes of seduction, family formation or the reliance on the more talented and trustworthy members of a group—de Jouvenel’s “additive” acts.\n\nAt best the law can help clean up the fallout when these activities go very wrong. These spheres depend upon tacit rules that can never be adequately formalized. Ultimately central power will have to mediate the relation between these markets and the powers of the disciplines in the way sketched out above, but central power thrives on tacit dimensions that take for granted a permanent order of things—it is centrifugal power that finds it necessary to keep uprooting them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-prospects-of-sovereignty",
      "title": "The Prospects of Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It is worth noting, about a month before the election, that the central issue in this election happens to be sovereignty. All of the issues Trump really cares about—immigration, trade, wars focused on the fortunes of other countries—summed up in his “America First” slogan center on the question, in his words of whether we are going to have a country or not. In other words, will America be a sovereign nation? All of Clinton’s passions, meanwhile, are negative answers to Trump’s question: we will not have a country, because the core of that country is deplorable and needs to be undermined by the global economy, overwhelmed by immigrants, harried by violent minorities, restrained by international law and the international community, and humiliated by “anti-testosterone” sexual politics (I have not heard anyone remark that Clinton’s comments on Trump’s love of beauty pageants in the first debate was essentially a casual demonization of normal male heterosexual desire—how creepy it is to like being around beautiful women! [I can now add a note about the latest video revelation, in which we find further confirmation of Trump’s heterosexuality, and his pleasure in discussing, graphically, with other men, his attempts—in this case, failed—to bed beautiful women.\n\nPerhaps Hillary’s health care plan will include free neutering services.]). Trump’s campaign, whatever the outcome of the election, has done us the enormous service of revealing that the vast majority of American elites are inalterably hostile to American sovereignty, and filled with hatred towards anyone who would assert it. The symmetry is striking: Trump is opposed by the entire Republicrat uniparty, precisely what would need to be replaced by an absolutist restoration. Who knows what intriguing measures even the ultimately liberal Trump might be driven to in the struggle to preserve his Presidency?\n\nIn that case, Trump’s campaign should provide us with a preliminary template of the rigors, dispositions, and, of course, political decisions, that would be required in restoring sovereignty. Let’s begin with this—the restoration of sovereignty would require heroes, and Trump is a hero. I remember at the beginning of this campaign a lot of people saw his candidacy as some kind of publicity stunt meant, perhaps, to help the ratings of his reality TV show. Nobody says such things anymore because of the obvious fact that he’s far more likely to lose everything as a result of his perhaps quixotic struggle to restore American sovereignty.\n\nDoes anyone doubt that if Trump loses, he will be ostracized from the business communities he has frequented, boycotted by companies and countries, probed incessantly by Hillary’s IRS, foreclosed upon by banks wishing to remain in the administration’s good graces, and so on? Even if he wins, much of this is likely to happen, along with a rising up of the entire D.C political class and perhaps a bipartisan impeachment. In other words, we have a man risking everything to save his country. When was the last time we could say that about a candidate for high public office in the US?\n\nMost obviously, restoration will involve control over the country’s borders, and rational, accountable decision making regarding who enters and who stays. Not a single decision made about immigration and naturalization in recent decades has been made in a way anyone could actually account for, other than through clichéd gestures toward “diversity” and the supposed economic benefits immigration brings. The post-1965 mass immigration has been one of the most hostile acts by a ruling elite against the people it rules in recent history, and the whole thing will have to be audited. Trump is barely scratching the surface here: if the processes and interests involved in pushing massive legal and illegal immigration on Americans were brought to light it would be necessary to review the entire enterprise, and determine how many citizenships have been obtained fraudulently in recent decades.\n\nAnd, of course, this might embitter relations with countries to whom we might be returning quite a few people (but if we are supposed to want them, shouldn’t those countries be eager to have them back…). The broader point is: restoration would itself be a kind of war against the crimes against the sovereignty of American that led to the summoning of the forces of restoration in the first place.\n\nRestoration implies returning things back to the way they were before, as well as setting things right. The alt-right provides a blueprint for rolling back the victimary—and it must be rolled back all the way for sovereignty to be restored. The alt-right, on one level, is just an aggressive, uncompromising defense of normality—the normality of in-group affiliative preference, of masculinity and sexual difference, of love for country and its traditionally admired accomplishments (monuments of wealth, conquest, association, etc.), of freely observed group differences. The alt-right is what normality would be if pressed, every minute of the day, to defend its right to exist in the face of an obsessively hostile abnormality.\n\nBeyond that, just as a king leading a conquering force would have to divvy up the rewards to those who have fought alongside him, the restoration of sovereignty would have to give existing institutions—universities, the media, corporations, and so on—to those who have been marginalized under the liberal order and helped fight back. That means that Trump’s addiction to tit-for-tat responses to all attacks, even the most trivial insults, is both his greatest flaw and the most perfect embodiment of the restorer, who will have to assure all his followers that every blow will be met with a commensurate counter-blow. And that all the victorious blows will be commemorated and institutionalized in the restored state.\n\nAmerica First in relation to the world means the sovereign being a systematic filter between the country and the world. For starters, dual citizenship will have to be eliminated: you’re an American or you’re not. The internal market can be made much freer (no minimum wage, no unions, drastically reduced regulation, no corporate taxation) in exchange for capital repatriation—corporations, too, can be made to choose whether they want to be American or global. Tariffs will slow, but not eliminate international trade; corporations can set up shop within the US by paying for the privilege of accessing the American market, or through bilateral arrangements with peer countries.\n\nSince global media corporations like Twitter, Google and Facebook have shown themselves subservient to foreign governments and choose political leftism over fair dealing with their customers at every point, there need be no hesitation in subordinating them directly to centralized political control. Trump’s much derided threat to sue the media for lying about him adumbrates this possibility, and the breathtaking pace of change advanced by the victimocracy allows us to, take a leftist slogan, “imagine the impossible”: just as people can in an instant be expected to accept that they must allow teenage boys in their daughter’s locker room and Syrian refugees in their neighborhood, they will tomorrow accept that, of course, Google must tailor its search parameters, Twitter must undertake to slow the spread of certain tweets, and Facebook must deliver information as requested by the sovereign.\n\nThe emphasis should be on suppressing lies and broadcasting truth, but questions of public safety and public morality will shape decision making as well. These companies promised so much, and betrayed it all, so few will weep when they are brought to heel.\n\nA restored sovereign will undoubtedly be natalist—it will openly encourage and reward large families, it will promote entertainment presenting such families as the norm, and offer no protection to other “lifestyles.” Sticking to such a policy would probably be enough to neutralize the feminist and sexual diversity agendas. No-fault divorce will be eliminated, and discrimination in favor of married couples (in housing, employment, accommodation, etc.) allowed and encouraged. The implications of a restoration for schooling are obvious enough, but religion seems to me tricky. Absolutism requires transcendental support, but the sovereign can’t simply invent a religion and the existing ones are all completely unsuitable for a restored sovereign order.\n\nI think the sovereign would have to immediately make a list of clergy from all religions who are forbidden to preach and minister, because they have been complicit in the crimes of the previous regime. Then some kind of meeting must be convened including the trustworthy and penitent clergy to lay down some ground rules. Input can be encouraged, as the clergy will know best how their beliefs and doctrines can be brought into accordance with the terms of restored sovereignty. There’s also no need to be hostile to all new forms of spirituality—perhaps a renewed sovereignty and social order will release new spiritual energies.\n\nAll this will be easier as more and more people realize that free speech, freedom of religion and the rule of law have become meaningless concepts, as social media, universities and corporations censor and ban right-wingers, Christianity is increasingly subordinated to various anti-discrimination and sexual deviancy agendas, and courts become shameless enforcers of elite opinion. At some point it will come down to the simple question of who will take care of us?\n\nBut all of this means nothing without reactionaries undertaking their own long march through the institutions. Of course, alternative media and social media institutions will need to be built, and schools and (far more difficult) universities and businesses. But all this pales in importance compared to the real institutions of sovereignty: the military and police forces. The tops of these institutions are already highly politicized—Obama has carried out a Stalinesque purge of the top military brass, which now parrots his moronic talking point that climate change is our main national security concern, and we can see how the FBI has been coopted by the Democrats—while the ranks themselves remain right wing.\n\nThe only way restoration will ever be possible is if a large majority of those charged with defending sovereignty are prepared to do so in defiance of political orders and the orders of their own superiors. Here, we’re obviously beyond anything conceivable to Donald Trump, but addressing directly the following he has inspired, by which, of course, I mean the alt-right. When driving home from work, I switch back and forth between Michael Savage’s and Sean Hannity’s shows, respectively. Hannity is still on the endless true conservative loop, going on about taxes, regulation, smaller government, etc. Savage realizes there is a war against very specific targets—white men, masculinity, patriotism, what blogger Brett Stevens calls the “Amerikaners.”\n\nAll the small government crap doesn’t matter anymore. “There’s Obama’s army” Savage exclaimed when discussing the Charlotte riots—that’s exactly right. Don’t be surprised if we start to see “necklacing” soon, or some distinctive American equivalent. And don’t be surprised to see an ex-president Obama emoting plaintively on their behalf, even while deploring the lengths this racist society has forced them to go. The only way a resistant force can be built within the armed forces is on the basis of race—the logic is not all that different than that of prison gangs. This is wasteful, because sovereignty can only tacitly acknowledge a preferred racial pattern, it can’t base its legitimacy on it—which means those movements would have to be curtailed, and we can imagine they won’t want to be curtailed.\n\nBut you won’t recruit cadres ready to restore sovereignty on the basis of lower taxes and less regulation—much less brow-knitting over abortion. You will only be able to do it by drawing on people who are cornered, who understand the war against them in the most pointed way, and can discipline themselves for the long term (and the rapid and aggressive politicization of these institutions currently underway means it will take a great deal of discipline and long-term thinking). Racial thinking can bind people together in an imagined history going back hundreds or even thousands of years, and it will provide ready means of identification and shared experiences—already we can see that the alt-right has an extensive system of symbols and passwords that allow one to signal to others one’s contempt for the pre-approved BS.\n\nThe truth is that the anti-white dimension of the globalist/leftist juggernaut goes far deeper than any “welfare state,” “regulatory,” or “meritocratic” issues can get at, and requires for its intellectual dismantling a more sophisticated hermeneutics that relies upon in-group tacit agreement. It need not involve enmity towards other groups, even if that’s likely—it’s a question of harvesting high levels of trust. Outsider allies should respect that when it comes to choosing sides. The more invested such high trust groups are in sovereignty, the better, even if that kind of trust cannot in itself guarantee sovereignty.\n\nAt any rate, any sovereign will want to replicate, to the extent possible, such prior investments in restoration in the restored sovereignty itself. Those who entered early and contributed significantly should only be excluded from the power structure for extremely compelling reasons. A large part of the attraction of a genuine sovereign, as things are falling apart, is the promise that people will be far more likely to get what they deserve—so, the foundational sovereign acts should exemplify that promise by giving those who ensured the restoration their due."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-two-charismas",
      "title": "The Two Charismas",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Imagine a group of ten people. Nine of them, when food is presented, rush straight towards it and grab it greedily, shoving big chunks into their mouth as fast as they can. The tenth waits a minute or so, until the furor and squabbling dies down, and calmly goes to the food that has not yet been touched and eats it at a normal pace. How impressed the nine would be with the tenth! He would be a veritable god to them—his self-control would seem magical or divinely inspired. This is charisma, in its original sense, according t Philip Rieff: divine grace perceived in a person who has transcended desires that are compulsive to others.\n\nSuch an individual, through force of example, would be able to lay down the law to the nine, restructuring their eating habits so that at least a modicum of his discipline is reflected in them. Or, of course, the nine might kill him, especially if instigated by one of their number who was to point out, for example, the possibility that the new eating arrangements might not benefit all equally, might, in fact, redound in particular to the benefit of the tenth and, anyway, how was he able to restrain himself—does he possess some power he might now use on the rest of us? This instigator would recommend transgressing the better order proposed or even just implicitly embodied by the tenth, and in doing so would end up transgressing even the old order, where at least, however squalid the proceedings, everyone knew they’d get their piece.\n\nHe must end up transgressing this established order because in it lie the seeds of the new, more disciplined one, and he will do so by reversing the scale of values and empowering the most piggish of the bunch. This is the modern, post-Weberian meaning of charisma: the transgression of the established, the secure, and the accepted.\n\nThe two modes of charisma are not, though, as easy to distinguish in real life as they are in this simple example. Those who transgress and flout traditional sexual norms do so in the name of restraining our desire to lash out at those who are “different”; while many of those who defend tradition against the corrosive dictates of political correctness can no doubt feel a transgressive thrill in breaking the rules of current discourse on race, sex and other topics. This complexity is multiplied by the diversity of virtues, each requiring its own form of discipline and capable of being manifested with either form of charisma.\n\nTo be courageous is to discipline oneself to restrain feelings of fear, the most natural and powerful of all feelings, but it is also fear that keeps us in line and in accord with established values, and it might be courageous to break completely reasonable norms. To think carefully and systematically requires years of training, involving the suppression of the natural desire to make every new idea fit the ideas you already have mastered, but careful and systematic thinking can devise monstrous theories, monstrous theories that might put the author’s brilliance more on display than the intellectual output of a more traditionally minded and therefore seeming conventional but no less powerful thinker.\n\nIndeed, if we return to our original example, the transgressive instigator of the other nine must have been at least slightly more disciplined than his brethren—otherwise, there is no way he could have extricated his mind from the sheer expanse separating the nine’s gluttony from the tenth’s restraint to resent the power the latter now deployed. Perhaps the tenth is “more” disciplined than (let’s call him) the “ninth,” but not only is “quantity” a very limited category to apply to the wide range of disciplines, but it may often turn out that the ninth is more disciplined than the tenth (which would be why they sometimes win). The difference we are looking for must be qualitative.\n\nHow do the nine of ten indulge their voraciousness while managing not to kill each other? We’re not dealing with animals, so there must be some minimal hesitation and mutual adjustment even in what would look to mannered onlookers as a disgusting food orgy. They remember enough of the originary scene to let each other know that they won’t interfere, at least not too much, with the others’ satisfaction. The tenth just has a memory of the originary scene that is both more abstract and more present. How is that possible? Compared to the tenth, the nine all seem out of control; compared to each other, though, there are definitely differences—some are, sometimes, more attuned to the danger posed to the group by the aggressiveness of others, and take measures to both limit that aggressiveness and model a more sustainable mode of sharing.\n\nIt may be that these differences never settle upon specific members but, rather, emerge contingently, depending upon which of the ten (first of all) has the sharpest insight into the danger at the time. The tenth emerges when these differences settle upon an individual who is now capable of applying them a priori to any scene.\n\nThe ninth couldn’t emerge before the tenth because in that case he would just be a somewhat cleverer aggressor amongst the horde. So he comes after the tenth. The tenth separates himself from the rest by remembering the originary scene in its difference from the present scene. The memory of the originary scene induces an obligation to preserve the present scene, but to preserve it in distinction from some imminent danger, which also means to modify it—in as understated a way as possible. This involves both the addition of an increment of deferral and thwarting the most present danger. The stronger the memory of the originary scene, the more visible and imitable the deferral and the more accurately perceived the danger. The ninth exploits the hesitation induced by the tenth’s modeling of deferral, while seeking to destroy that model, which would eliminate his advantage as the only one who can choose to hesitate or not. The ninth denounces the commemoration of the originary scene as a delusion that benefits only the tenth.\n\nSo, can we apply this rather abstract model to contemporary politics, and distinguish in real time between the two charismas? The “graceful” charisma wants to bring power and accountability into ever closer identity. If someone is expected to do something, he must have the means to do it; if someone has the means to do something, he must be expected to deploy those means in a way that serves the end for which the means were provided. This extends all the way up to the sovereign, who is accountable to no one in particular but must use the means at his disposal to maintain sovereignty, because no one else will do it for him.\n\nAccountability involves retrieving the model of the originary scene: showing yourself refraining from the act most likely to break the existing truce and restart mimetic rivalry. Power means thwarting the ambitions of whoever would break ranks and rush to center. We can tell when someone wants to bring power and accountability closer together: they evince recognition, at least, of the fact that doing one thing means not doing something else. Transgressive charisma, meanwhile, wants to separate power and accountability—to have power is to be unaccountable, and to be accountable is to be accountable to power. Transgressive charisma promises power without accountability, exercises power without accountability, and seeks to strip the power of those it holds accountable.\n\n(It does take some discipline to maintain this focus and steady oneself to violate norms and normality.) I don’t think we’ll find any unmistakable examples of graceful charisma in today’s political world, but we can certainly distinguish between those at least aware of the possibility and those who want to extinguish it.\n\nRemembering the originary scene is the ultimate tradition. It is manifested not in the construction of pacific utopian fantasies, but in a kind of attention management: noticing where some refrain from violating the perimeter surrounding the center, where some of those who refrain also stand prepared to restrain those (the other locus of attention) who exploit the hesitation of others. To be a traditionalist is to look for where discipline has been stored in existing institutions, and to add to the stock. You do this by preserving and restoring the sovereignty of the institutions by bringing power and accountability into alignment—by adhering to the original function of the institution.\n\nWell, what about bad institutions, whose original purpose was to do evil—let’s go straight to the reduction ad Hitlerum and Stalinum and say death camps and Gulags (are they not institutions?)—but it’s not clear what it would mean to add new increments of deferral to institutions explicitly and solely devoted to torment and extermination, is it? Such institutions are the end point of transgressive charisma, loading on more accountability in proportion to the stripping of all power."
    },
    {
      "slug": "principles-imagining-sovereignty-fantasizing-anarchy",
      "title": "Principles: Imagining Sovereignty, Fantasizing Anarchy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "One of the major conservative objections to Donald Trump’s campaign was that his speech and action so often violated conservative “principles.” Any conservative worth his (or hers; or zir) salt can reel off an approved list of such principles: limited government, reverence for “life,” the free market, support for democratic values throughout the world, etc. Rebellions within the conservative world, like that of the Tea Party, emerge when grassroots conservatives begin to suspect that establishment conservatives don’t really “believe” in these principles—at least not enough to risk their power and privileges over (but, of course, they have a point—if conservatives lose elections, who will be there to fight for conservative principles?).\n\nIn a way, the enthusiasm for Trump among many in the “grassroots” was the latest such rebellion, but with a difference: Trump himself didn’t, unlike his primary rival Ted Cruz, claim to be the truest of true conservatives, the one who really means it and will stand by conservative principles when it counts, regardless of the cost. Cruz’s campaign was the reductio ad absurdam of principled conservatism, because he was so principled that there was no way of knowing what he would do about all kinds of very specific issues and so he had to opportunistically mimic the Trump campaign on issues like immigration and trade.\n\n(It turns out that the Constitution doesn’t really tell us what to do about anything. Nor does “free speech,” or “the free market.” They all sprout exceptions, which means what matters is not the principle but who decides what counts as an exception.) All Trump did was tell us what he wanted to do, and everything he wanted to do (aside from some half-hearted additions meant to get the needed “principled conservative” support) revolved around his axiomatic, even tautological assertion: either we have a country, or we don’t. Country trumps Constitution.\n\nWe all know by now that “principles,” left or right, need to go through the grinder of lobbyists, donors, trade-offs with specific representatives, add-ins to counter inimical characterizations of one’s intent, bureaucratic machinations, and so on, before producing a result—a result which, we further know, will look little like the “principle” it started with. For analytical purposes, it’s certainly far more effective to reverse this process and start at the end, and ask, who has lost and who has won in the process—which elites have managed to elbow out which other elites in getting more direct control over some portion of the population.\n\nThe elites don’t work according to principles, even if they may believe in them—the elites, we can assume, want some freedom of action not afforded them under current conditions, and leverage whatever means of levying and motivating the lower orders they have at their disposal to gain that freedom. Since it’s freedom for them, it’s easy enough for them to sincerely represent their aims as freedom in general, with some qualifier or modification—economic freedom, freedom to love, freedom of religion, etc. There has to be some ideological trickle down, because even George Soros doesn’t have enough money to get people rampaging in the streets in the name of George Soros having more money to get people rampaging in the streets.\n\nPrinciples, then, are located at several removes from where the real action is, but they are still not quite merely “superstructural” (if we work with the old Marxist model, which Reactionary Future has revived for absolutist purposes recently)—they are readings and indices of shifts in sovereignty. To believe in a principle—say, “free speech”—is to imagine a mode of sovereignty. The government that grants free speech does so because it assumes that in the unrestrained discourse in which all citizens participate without coercion or intimidation the truth emerges along with a rational consensus for the government to act upon.\n\nAlong with the imagined sovereignty, then, comes an anarchist fantasy—in this case, of free, rational individuals acting outside of government who choose, collaboratively, to act upon and, indeed, constitute the government. But things get interesting when the exceptions begin to sprout, as they always do: no libel, no sedition, no exposure of government secrets, no “hate speech,” etc. The exceptions enrich the sovereign imaginary (which is not at all the same as an imaginary sovereign), position the person expressing the principle somewhere along the liberal continuum, and turn the anarchistic fantasy into one resentful of its actual dependence upon order: for free individuals to communicate freely, some mode(s) of “distorted” communication which interferes with the real kind must be suppressed. To have a principle is to imagine the sovereign who will decide on the exceptions to that principle in your favor, in such a way as to shore up your anarchist fantasy.\n\nThe imagining of sovereignty and fantasy of anarchy also comes from the top down, insofar as the added margin of freedom desired by the elites must constitute, for the elite in question, the form of a comprehensive mode of sovereignty—my trade advantage will create wealth for all and so the government’s primary purpose is to protect that advantage, the increase in my relative access to the ear of the nominal (and, indeed, still largely effective) sovereign will add to public enlightenment and moderate forces of destabilization, and so on. Whether they think about it this way, as soon as these elites start to talk about their aims they must find themselves saying things like this and, then, hiring and funding the intellectuals who will give them better ways of saying these kinds of things and eventually take over saying them to others.\n\nWe could then see the imaginary sovereignties and anarchistic fantasies generated in the universities, media and corporate think tanks as auditions and job interviews for one elite faction or another, just as we can see activist groups as auditioning for the role of shock troops and street fighters for those same factions. But they can all audition effectively only under the condition that they think that the show is real, that they are making history. That’s not so hard, because in a sense they are, even if as tools rather than makers. Perhaps part of the point of determinist theories like Marxism is to reconcile its agents to being tools.\n\nSo, when we hear talk of principles, we can hear the echoes of this entire process. Is the alternative, then, to be “unprincipled”? Yes, as long as that is understood as indifference to principles, rather than as lacking the principle in question. Each social agent should be in a hierarchical, cooperative, reciprocal relation with other social agents in accord with the social power exercised by that agent. But as soon as we say this, we ourselves imagine a winnowing process by which those social agents intrinsically resistant to such relations with other agents must be destroyed or radically transformed. Absolutists thereby imagine their own mode of sovereignty: one capable of and keenly interested in such destruction and transformation.\n\nAbsolutist sovereign imagination does not constitute, as its inverse, an anarchist fantasy—quite the contrary. Rather, it demolishes anarchist fantasies—this is the central “negative,” “critical” operation of absolutism. In the name of what? The hierarchies, modes of cooperation and reciprocities singular sovereignty relies upon in order to exist. Is there something “principled” in this? No more than a craftsman’s desire for perfection, and his search for the best materials, his work on honing his skills, on cultivating relations with co-workers, assistants and customers, his subordination of baser desires to the time and attention excellence requires, is “principled.”\n\nHe is not adhering to the “principle” of good workmanship—he is just clarifying and enhancing his mode of discipline. The extraction of some “principle” out of this is derivative of the real set of relations involved. His own discipline leads him to acknowledge the need for a sovereign, so that others will not steal his materials, provide him with adulterated materials with impunity, force him violently into subservience to criminal ends, and so on. The sovereignty of the craftsman over his conditions and means entails an imagination of sovereignty: a sovereign that ensures the level of social discipline is such as to support his own practice.\n\nAnd the sovereign’s own discipline lies in preserving the conditions under which as many of his subjects as possible can do likewise—can meet his imagination in co-constituting the realm. The point is not to have principles but to confront anarchist fantasies with embedded, entailed and extended reciprocities. It may even be that “principles” inevitably encourage anarchistic fantasies. It might be best to request of anyone espousing principles an account, as best they can provide, for all the social activities upon which their own activity depends—acting so as to sustain those interdependencies, and to make more of them available for attention, is what accounts for one’s rectitude as a social being. (Maybe asking the principled subject to spell out in ever greater detail all the exceptions to his principles will get him there, in an indirect way—a kind of negative dialectic.)\n\nStill, there is one genuinely meaningfully use of the term “principles”—to refer to origins. Principles are, literally, what come first and therefore make what comes after possible. That “therefore” is not obvious—a mechanistic view of the world, which is much encouraged in a society in which power fragments and reconstitutes rapidly and incoherently, would insist that there is no causal, and certainly no moral, relation between what comes first and what comes after. To be principled in this sense is to be loyal to origins—obviously, “limited government,” “the free market,” and “free speech” are not origins. In a democratic society, origins are revolutionary, which clearly interferes with making absolutism a serious topic of conversation.\n\nBut once we start talking about origins, there is no way to maintain the revolution as the ultimate origin. Revolutions themselves always present themselves as the recuperation of some prior condition and the restoration of rights or obligations that have been taken or disregarded. Revolutionaries may do so fraudulently, but what matters is that they must do it. In other words, revolutions are constituted by some articulation of imagined sovereignty and anarchist fantasy. To be principled, then, is to keep turning the conversation back to a sovereignty that can be imagined free of anarchist fantasies. Remembering the arche is the key to resisting such fantasies."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereignty-as-conquest",
      "title": "Sovereignty as Conquest",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Once we jettison the consent of the governed as a means of determining the legitimacy of government it seems to me that we really have no alternative other than the right of conquest as the basis for the legitimacy of rule. A sovereign has a right to rule based on his ability to maintain secure sovereignty—this means that he has acquired this ability and right through his own conquest, or by inheriting the results of a previous conquest, however long ago; and that he is capable of resisting any attempt at conquest now. Conquest can be more or less violent—obviously, it can result from an extremely bloody struggle, but a conqueror can also essentially be welcomed by some or all of the conquered population, can take over without resistance from a failing sovereign, etc.\n\nThinking about sovereignty as conquest provides us with a ready means for discussing the various orders of an absolutist regime: individuals, groups and institutions are licensed and elevated in accord with their contribution to achieving the conquest and preserving its fruits—subjects are all, ultimately, conscripts, even if some are chaplains, others maintain the supply chain, others educate the troops, etc. A prolonged occupation leads to (if necessary) the merging of conqueror and conquered and the gradual achievement of a kind of rough fit between the two that we call “patriotism.”\n\nThis understanding of sovereignty has a great deal of explanatory power. Indeed, it has been in the context of thinking through the question of Trump’s “extra-republican forces,” and what would actually be involved in “draining the swamp” that brought me to the verge of these reflections—and then, this very insightful article on the current Hillary Clinton campaign as an attempted coup d’etat ( http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/10/yes_there_is_a_coup_on_in_america.html) pushed me over the edge: yes, a successful Trump administration would be something very like a conquest, or a counter-coup, with the use of force of various kinds to remove traitors from sensitive positions, counter all kinds of resistance on all kinds of levels, and mobilize allies across the entire culture.\n\n(We can also see, from the reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails that the lower and middle orders within the warrior caste seem to be solidly and rather brazenly in Trump’s camp.) But it is also helpful in understanding “Fourth Generation Warfare,” in which the less powerful side leverages allies with the more powerful society to achieve its ends. That end is national independence for the inventors of 4GW, but do not the SJWs in the West operate according to the same logic, leveraging White Guilt among the majority population in order to achieve, not independence, but sufficient strength within the regime to ensure they are cut in on all enterprises and exercise veto power on all initiatives?\n\nSeeing sovereignty as conquest also adds something to our understanding of liberalism which aims, above all, at reducing as much as possible all traces of conquest from state power. The very notion of equality under the law erases the centrality of loyalty to the regime—no regime can survive if people are not rewarded in accord with their loyalty, which introduces a principle of differentiation incompatible with civil and legal equality. Liberalism does not and could not eliminate this principle of sovereignty—it just redefines “loyalty” in terms of constantly shifting norms of “good citizenship.” But it does dilute and conceal it, in part by attacking overt demands for loyalty as violations of the principle of equality.\n\nLiberals do not want to see themselves as preserving and enhancing the fruits of conquest, they want to see themselves as managing the fruits of productive activity carried out beyond their own authority. This is why liberals are themselves conquered by the subalterns who present them with evidence that they are in fact exploiting the fruits of conquest—liberals at first would like to deny this, relegating those conquests to the distant past, rendered irrelevant by the general freedom to move within the realm, but that doesn’t work because everyone cannot be equally at home within the realm. So, liberals end up surrendering and entering into prolonged negotiations of reparations, which will ultimately involve all of the social order.\n\nReparations can simply be made part of the general calculation of liberal management. SJWs take over the left once enough liberals realize the hopelessness of performing such calculations in a scrupulous way and that it is preferable to just join in the demand themselves. By now, liberal interest in management is merely notional, a way of branding themselves vs. the government hating conservatives—but has the Obama regime ever actually “managed” anything, or done anything other than troll its domestic (i.e., real) enemies?\n\nBut we are still consuming the fruits of conquest, reaching back to the Anglo conquest of North America and much further back to the conquests of the European monarchs, which were themselves partial restorations of roman conquests. A Reconquista of North America would be staffed by those who can ground their loyalty to that Reconquista in a heritage that derives from that long chain of conquests. Those who cannot do so can be allies of the Reconquista, insofar as they prefer such a restoration to unending, increasingly vicious and extensive 4GW across the social order, or a conquest by other forces, whether they be transnational progressivism, Muslim, neo-Aztec, gangland feudalism, Latin neo-Latifundianism, or some combination of some or all of them. Of course, they would best be useful, unquestioningly loyal, allies, who provide otherwise unavailable services.\n\nThe implication of the identification of sovereignty with conquest is that divided power always involves a diminishment of the founding military and settler discipline. Divided power involves the insertion into government of powers originally dependent upon or even part of but capable of asserting themselves against the absolute military one. Liberalism is of course the most prominent of such split-offs, and is therefore explicitly and militantly anti-militarist. The question liberalism poses is whether physical possession of a territory is a precondition for activity carried out within that territory; or, to the contrary, is it spontaneous interactions and the subsequent conflicts between individuals that leads to the establishment of a sovereign over the territory they inhabit.\n\nFor liberalism, the latter is the case, for absolutism the former. The whole liberal architecture of categories: human nature, human rights, the individual with his freedoms, opinions and beliefs, equality, etc., are all aimed at carving out a pre-sovereign space. But liberalism knows it depends upon sovereignty (as Trotsky once said, anarchism is liberalism without the police principle; but without the police principle, liberalism is impossible). What liberalism’s constituencies want is perpetual exemption from the rigors of sovereignty, along with, as the perennial victims of those who maintain loyalty to the sacred center, extra benefits from the security sovereignty provides.\n\nDivided power is motivated by free riding. It is a free riding, though, that almost everyone can enjoy a bit at times, and so not too many want to take the lead in shutting it down. Most would prefer to manage and try to stabilize the consequences—hence liberalism’s constantly spiraling attempts to secure power by appeasing yet another would-be free rider.\n\nThe purpose of conquest, ultimately, is peace. And peace sets free a range of activities the enjoyment of which (and of the benefits of which) make war increasingly undesirable; even more, induce a desire to forget that what one enjoys are the fruits of past wars—to remember that would be to be obliged to maintain the sovereign virtues. The sovereign allows power to become insecure as soon as he colludes in this forgetting, and ceases to prioritize with an eye toward preserving the gains made by those who have transmitted power to him. It would make sense to respond to such a slackening by recovering the reins of power in the pursuit of further conquests.\n\nAnd sometimes such conquests will be successful and assimilated to the existing power structure. Other times they will make power less secure. This is what led William James to posit the necessity of “moral equivalents of war,” to tighten the civic sinews and preserve loyalty to the whole without the risks of actual warfare. The rhetoric of moral equivalents is inflated from the start, but it’s the right idea. It is possible to maintain a readiness to identify threats, both foreign and domestic—these threats are direct challenges to the “occupying” power, manifested directly and urgently for each of its branches in terms of its specific responsibilities.\n\nThe better you get at identifying threats, the more you are able to identify “pre-threats”—conditions that, if allowed to fester, might become threats down the road—and snuff them out in their infancy. And then “pre-pre-threats,” and so on. Peace becomes a condition of increasingly deferred threats. By the same token, all of society can be mobilized into this condition, precisely because all forms of knowledge bear upon possible “infections” of the social body—all can engage in what Peter Sloterdijk calls “immunological” inquiries and practices. The encompassing goal of all social enterprises is further deferring threats, a project of immense intellectual interest and inclusive of the most abstract speculations as well as the most minute investigations."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereignty-difference-reciprocity-nature-value",
      "title": "Sovereignty, Difference, Reciprocity, Nature, Value",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The contention that absolutism means arbitrary and therefore irrational rule by the sheer will of one man can be refuted by exploring the necessary embedding of absolute sovereignty in a hierarchical, differentiated order constituted by extensive reciprocities. My previous post of sovereignty as conquest enables us to conduct such an exploration. No one carries out a conquest aimed at what Reactionary Future has proposed calling possession of the to-be-sovereign territory alone—one does so with close associates who defer to the conqueror’s authority, trusted subordinates who answer to those associates, latecomer allies who join the rolling bandwagon, the reluctant, resentful subjugated, etc.\n\nThis ensemble of cohorts is certainly not arbitrary—not just anyone can become a leader of men, an organizer of invasions and defenses, the commandeering of resources, the delegation of authority and responsibility, a student and planner of military tactics and cultural organization, and so on. We need not assume a one-to-one correspondence between individual capability and self-discipline, on the one hand, and elevation within the social order, on the other, to assume that any successful order must rely on a general correspondence between the two.\n\nAs I pointed out in Sovereignty as Conquest , subsequent to conquest the sovereign settles down into the work of preservation of his rule and cultivation of the institutions that can ensure a steady source of resources and recruits. This requires and encourages the emergence of new capabilities, and individuals who might be very useful for present purposes even if they might have been useless or worse in the process of conquest. A new hierarchy of value emerges, and the problem for the sovereign is to institute that hierarchy on the new terms of preservation by means of identifying and deferring less immediately visible dangers.\n\nHe will want to do so in a way as consistent and continuous with the existing hierarchy as possible, which entails abstracting from that hierarchy so as to make analogous structures possible. When, in the course of civilizing the realm, universities are constructed, they will be organized in a way analogous to military and/or ecclesiastical and/or feudal orders but distinguished by the difference required to make respect for dialogue and love of the truth stand out as values rather than military valor or exemplary piety.\n\nThese new values are made to stand out by the articulation of reciprocities proper to the new institution. The emergence of modernity actually vitiates reciprocity—no one wanting to build a society rich in reciprocities would think to do so by atomizing individuals and having them interact with each other solely through contractual relations. Rather, you would study the kinds of hierarchies required in any particular shared activity and itemize and formalize the obligations that would best bind superiors, subordinates and peers together. So, in the military, the subordinate owes the superior obedience and the superior is obliged to care for the subordinate.\n\nThese obligations can be spelled out in detail, with the sovereign serving to adjudicate as necessary, but the obligations would be derived from the structure and purpose of the activity, not the distribution of rights among the members. There are a range of possible capabilities and relationships than can sustain a military organization—there must be courage, loyalty, discipline and so on. In this sense sovereignty is ultimately grounded in nature, in the sense that any being, social or otherwise, has its own nature. Capacities are selected for: a beautiful singing voice is irrelevant to generalship, and a squeamishness around blood would be disqualifying (unless gotten under control).\n\nIn this case the organization of (say) a university would be grounded in the nature of the search for the truth and reciprocities would be established accordingly. Sustained focus on abstract concepts, the ability to suspend belief in cherished concepts without falling into skepticism, patience with those in need of instruction, an investment in dialectical rather than rhetorical modes of discourse and conversation, insight into under-exploited intellectual capacities of others, and so on, would all emerge within an institution dedicated to seeking the truth. Pedagogical, collegial and administrative reciprocities would be established accordingly: members might be obliged to remind one another, for example, of recurring patterns of thought that are easy to fall into but have led to a dead end in previous inquiries.\n\nEverything that everyone does within the institution is carried out (and judged) with an eye toward fulfilling, clarifying and further embedding those reciprocities. If a new form of pedagogy or mode of inquiry is introduced, it will be justified on the grounds that it better fulfills the obligation to systematize controlled attention to concepts or solicit contributions from participants whose intellect requires a new vehicle to exploit its potential. The new pedagogy or mode of inquiry is then, partly explicitly and partly tacitly, integrated into the system of reciprocities. The sovereign simply needs to make it clear that if his intervention is required, he will intervene with the aim of binding up the system of reciprocities so as to make that mode of intervention unnecessary in the future.\n\nThe relations between demographic groups and the sexes would be organized accordingly. Some sectors of the population will be better organized and more loyal and useful to the sovereign, and so they will be privileged in the process of staffing the ranks of the administration. Other sectors will be given a chance to show what they are capable of—that is, to strengthen their own system of reciprocities so as to exhibit a capacity to participate in the institutional reciprocities supported by the sovereign. Nature is involved here as well: some groups may produce more soldiers, others more scholars, and such specialization can be encouraged.\n\nNo matter how civilized the society, the ultimacy of the need to defend the realm (sovereign possession) can never be superseded, so the separate communities must be given responsibility for self-defense and the defense of the order. Some kind of patriarchal and monogamous order is implicit in such an arrangement, and so a system of male-female reciprocities must be formalized consistent with it. The activities for women outside of these reciprocities must be consistent with them—single women, widows, women with enfeebled husbands will take on all kinds of responsibilities but husbands may also include and promote their talented wives within their own enterprises.\n\nExogamous mating is obviously healthier than consanguineous marriage, but mate selection will also have to take into account the limits of exogamy and the impact marrying out of the community might have on its stability. Everything will be judged in terms of whether it can be framed analogously to (or in a way that is recognizable within) the existing network of reciprocities.\n\nWe should, then, assess all contemporary practices, norms and institutions in terms of the reciprocities they entail, and criticize them in terms of the obstacles erected to the binding up of those reciprocities. A company’s obligations to its workers, its customers, its community; the workers’ obligation to their employer—the market should be framed as a means of ensuring these reciprocities be maintained. Media organizations’ obligation to their audience and the loyalties of audiences to media outlets should frame discussions of free speech. But what if a leftist president were to appoint FCC officials who would shut down Breitbart as a “fake news site”?\n\nThose with the power to shut down Breitbart will do so one way or another—it doesn’t depend upon whether someone gives them a convenient argument for doing so—they already have the arguments they need. The point is to keep Breitbart or any other space open in the name of its relation to truth, public usefulness, and an audience loyal to sovereign power, properly understood. The denser all these systems of reciprocity become, the less the sovereign will find it necessary to exercise power directly over individuals unmediated by those institutions and communities, and the more it will establish a dense system of reciprocities with all of these systems—serving as backup to and model for them.\n\nSovereignty is absolute insofar as it is absolute all the way down the line—if companies and workers, teachers and students, husbands and wives, general, corporals and privates, and so on, all fulfill their duties to each other the sovereign will be absolute in having nothing to do; since that will never be completely the case, what the sovereign has to do, and is more absolute the more it does it, is enforce those duties where their abandonment is most egregious and evident."
    },
    {
      "slug": "liberal-democracy-is-the-concealment-of-power",
      "title": "“Liberal Democracy” is the Concealment of Power",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "First of all, I put “liberal democracy” in scare quotes because I would like to defy anyone to give it a clear definition, and one that applies across the range of countries currently included under the label. (I have been trying—not that hard, admittedly—to discover when the term “liberal democracy” started to be used. The Wikipedia entry traces its “origins” to the “18 th century Enlightenment” but says nothing about when the phrase itself appeared.) A constitution (or “constitutional order”) which limits the power of government and ensures basic rights plus regular elections for at least national offices would, I suppose, do as a definition (al though some people would want to throw “free market” into the mix).\n\nSo, the Netherlands just convicted the leader of a major political party of “incitement to discriminate.” Is the Netherlands a liberal democracy? Bridget Bardot has been convicted, I think, 5 times for speech crimes against Islam for criticizing the way they slaughter animals. Is France a liberal democracy? Anyone will find it easy to multiply the examples, undermining the whole notion of “limited government” and “guaranteed rights.” We don’t even need examples: as soon as you guarantee a series of vague, abstract rights you will immediately proceed to generate exceptions. You have whatever rights the government doesn’t find it urgent to violate at the moment. You’ll be able to call it a “liberal democracy” as long as the government has a high threshold for “urgency” (and that will be because its elites are able to rotate in power without one section seeking to supplant another) but not a second longer.\n\nBut at least we have elections! In fact, not so much anymore. Leave aside all the usual discussions about the way choices available to the voters are managed oligarchically—that’s mostly done as a matter of course, through well-established channels, behind the scenes, and so as to leave a modicum of actual choice to the voters (al though “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” complaints are perennial, and always at least 75% justified). The 2016 election has transformed the electoral process itself, i.e., the actual counting and recording of votes, into just another arena of political battle. This has been in the making for a while—the Democrats contested the 2000 election, of course, and even, more abortively, the 2004 one; while some on the right (“birthers”) questioned Obama’s legitimacy and, closer to the mainstream, have been insisting (with very good reason) on the prevalence of voter fraud for years.\n\nIn turn, the Democrats attack antifraud measures as “voter suppression,” and they can really go on about that. All this has been prepping the battlespace—each side gearing up to refuse to accept the results of an election. Now, these machinations have penetrated deeper into the system. Trump, of course, spoke of the “rigged” political process in a way that didn’t exclude, but didn’t necessarily highlight, manipulation of the actual process of collecting and counting the votes. The left has now taken the next step. First, they pushed, through the Green Party candidate Jill Stein (an obvious pawn of either the Clintons or forces behind the Clintons) a nonsensical recount.\n\nSecond, they have fabricated the meme “the Russians hacked the election,” a meaningless phrase meant to scapegoat and delegitimate (a side note on the crazed anti-Russian hatred the left is now peddling: Russians are the perfect white hate objects: culturally conservative, isolationist, patriarchal, apparently still filled with unapologetically feminine beautiful women, indifferent to leftist emoting and, best of all, you don’t have to figure out a way to get 35% of their votes). Third, they are actually lobbying Republican electors who need to vote in order to officially confirm Trump’s victory, with their usual combination of high-minded platitudes (appeals to the “intent of the founders,” commercials with fake president Martin Sheen, etc.) and low-down skullduggery (attempts to intimidate and no doubt bribe the electors (Madonna’s pre-election promise should be much more manageable given the small number of electors who would need to flip)).\n\nThe electors should at least be able to see the intelligence (ginned up by Obama’s political appointee John Brennan) regarding the “Russian hacking,” shouldn’t they? That would be quite a rule going forward—from now on, the electors must be apprised of all the intelligence regarding attempts by all actors, domestic and foreign, to influence the election. All of the attention of the political system would then shift focus to the selection of the electors, which no one has cared about in the slightest up until now (name one of the electors in your state), and contributing to “intelligence” regarding as many “hacking” agents as one can concoct. Perhaps a new reality show will result.\n\nBut there’s quite a bit more. Those on the left who see Trump’s victory as a coup are not completely wrong, and they have some support from the right—the Conservative Treehouse: The Last Refuge blog (more Tea Party than Alt-Right, and perhaps the best informed and most loyal pro-Trump site) has argued that Trump’s election does represent a kind of salubrious “soft coup,” arguing (far more complexly than I am here) that the Defense Department has executed a kind of secession from the other elements of the security regime, preserving a patriotic “America First” understanding of national security against the Obamaite (and beyond) corruption of the other elements of the security apparatus.\n\nMoreover, “white hats” within those other elements have rallied behind Trump, perhaps influencing the election in ways we are not aware of. No one has really explained James Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Clinton’s emails days before the election, and a kind of “soft-coup”-like pressure from with the FBI seems as plausible an explanation as any. We can’t know that much about all this maneuvering, but it does seem that different institutions within the government are ranging themselves against one another in an unprecedented way. (Let’s take it one step further—what if Putin really was trying to help Trump, in order to advance the “nationalist international” Clinton warned us of during the election—that would just indicate the emergence of one more player in the field and one global coalition to fight another.\n\nYou can’t be a globalist and then complain about “outside interference”—what can be outside the globe?) One less-often noted characteristic of “liberal democracies” is that we take for granted that this is unthinkable, beyond inconsequential bureaucratic wrangling, and maybe a few discreet donations from Chinese billionaires. And this means that once we have to start thinking it, we are thinking outside of the bounds of liberal democracy. Hence the title of this post: you can only imagine yourself ensconced within a liberal democratic order to the extent that you don’t think about power. But once you start thinking about power, all the busyness of “liberal democracy”—we need to sharpen our arguments!\n\nWe need to appeal to new voting blocs! We need to formulate policies that appeal across different social groups! We need to rebrand! We need to get our message out! We need funding for a new think tank! Etc., Etc.—seem like so many shadows on a cave wall. (And this is not even to address the revolt of the bureaucrats once Trump takes a scalpel to the various agencies—already, the EPA, like some snotty college president, is refusing to cooperate with the President-Elect and Congressional Democrats are offering support to those in the State Department ready to resist the new regime. Or the barely veiled threats behind the hysteria over “fake news,” or the ongoing anathematization of Trump voters and their preferred media. The disinformation campaign the intelligence agencies are running against Trump. And I had actually forgotten the post-election riots.)\n\nRegardless of what one thinks of Trump, the terror he evokes in the entire establishment or ruling class, national and global (even those Republicans now claiming to support Trump give the very strong impression of biding their time) is worth noting. They are ready to expose the ugly innards of the system (to force us to think about power) in order to block him, and that can’t have been an easy decision (maybe it was just impulsive). The most productive way to think now is in terms of order and disorder. The ruling class is sowing chaos, while Trump is assembling a team of “white hats” (almost all from the upper political, military and especially economic strata—no academics, no one promoted from within) is trying to establish order.\n\nJust about every pick for his cabinet and staff so far seem aimed at providing him with a strong hand within the governmental and corporate institutions that most need to be de-weaponized. An Exxon CEO friendly to Russia; a Labor Secretary very knowledgeable of the way the EEOC keeps the illegal immigration scam going; an EPA head seemingly prepared to create a hostile environment for climate change fanatics; an Attorney General with a long history of insisting the immigration law be enforced to the letter—all, except for the women in somewhat marginal roles, seemingly “Alpha” males, like Trump himself, designed to trigger panic in SJWs.\n\nWe can assume he will choose a combative press secretary, perhaps from the right wing talk radio pantheon. Trump seems to be adopting a strategy of baiting the opposition so that he can disable them when they expose themselves (what we now call “trolling”). Our somewhat befuddled but no less dangerous for all that rulers seem to be ready to bring the house down in order to stop Trump, and he may have to be ready to do the same to stop them. Maybe we’ll still be having elections when this titanic battle is over, but everyone will have a much clearer sense of where the real power lies, and meta-electoral concerns will diminish interest in the actual results (the more you can convince elected officials that their power is contingent on all kinds of things that are in turn contingent upon you and yours, the less power they actually have).\n\nThe central theme of this election will be the central theme of Trump’s presidency: sovereignty. Who rules? This decision, this bureaucratic act, this latest delivery of Somali “refugees”—is someone’s fingerprints actually on it, or do we have to go down the rabbit hole where lie in wait foundations, agencies, donors, corporations, foreign governments, etc., to figure out what’s going on? As Colm Gillis says in his The Exceptionally Decisive Carl Schmitt , “politics is the art of counting up to one.” For the forces of order, at least—for the furies of disorder, politics is the art of counting down to zero, that is, of representing order as the source of disorder. It’s a thankfully simple binary to work with, and not one that accommodates the favored and decrepit concepts of “liberal democracy” (“rights,” “due process,” “balance of power,” “rule of law,” etc., all weaponized beyond retrieval)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "prospects-therapeutic-vs-disciplinary-orders",
      "title": "Prospects: Therapeutic vs. Disciplinary Orders",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "What we might call the “cereal wars” has the Breitbart website pitted against the Kelloggs corporation, which has piously announced that it will no longer advertise on the honey badger website since it doesn’t “share our values.” Breitbart’s counter-attack involves both a boycott of Kelloggs (easy for me—no more Eggos, and the kids are off Frosted Flakes) and a series of exposures of Kelloggs’ donations to far left political causes like Black Lives Matters and Soros’s Tides Foundation, thereby vindicating Reactionary Future ’s Moldbuggian focus on the corporate-funded foundations as the source of “social justice” style resentments. Another similarly vindicating item: John Derbyshire answers his own question, “Exactly Who in America has this Insatiable Appetite for Somali Immigration” as follows:\n\nThe appetite belongs in the first place to the refugee importers, the so-called Voluntary Agencies, who get vast grants of federal money to aid them in their efforts, and who pay their executives grand salaries; and in the second place to Midwestern meatpacking and food-processing companies wanting cheap labor.\n\nIt’s all a nice little money racket dressed up in humanitarian language.\n\nNow, these are somewhat different rackets—Kelloggs, I would guess, like many corporations, is a victim of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome probably going back to the trustbusting of the early 20 th century (in general, not with Kelloggs in particular) whereby the pincer movements of the labor movement, the yellow press and Progressives squeezed corporations into paying ransom in the form of charitable (and political) giving most likely to appease those governments most inclined to interfere with your business. In the end, you come to believe what you have to support in order to stay in business. The (Catholic) “Voluntary Agencies,” meanwhile worms its way into reciprocal relations with government bureaucracies, wherein the growth of each is the growth of the other.\n\nStill, while a quick look at their website yielded no enlightenment on the point, it’s reasonable to assume that the voluntary agencies are hardly bereft of private donations (perhaps even from those Midwestern meatpackers), especially with the imprimatur of the government on their activities. But, anyway, the differences are irrelevant—what matters is that if you believe that anyone who would consider deporting Somali immigrants and/or allowing no more into the country is an irredeemable, deplorable racist, or even if you find it a bit indelicate to discuss such matters, it is because very powerful public-private vectors of interest want it that way.\n\nSo, the arguments over “immigration policy” and “the New Jim Crow” are a bit beside the point—if we shut down Voluntary Agencies and restricted Kelloggs to the business of producing obese children, we wouldn’t have to talk about this stuff in the first place. (it’s probably needless to say, but the examples I’ve just mentioned are the tiniest of tips on the most gigantic of icebergs.) We would, though, have to start talking about shutting down a very wide range of completely “legitimate” and even highly esteemed forms of philanthropy, which would in many ways be an even more difficult “conversation.”\n\nIn other words, the liberal democratic process is irrelevant here—no one ever voted to drastically increase the importation of Somalis, and no politician would ever publicly support doing so (al though Hillary Clinton came pretty close), at least not until enough Somalis have clustered somewhere to function as a voting bloc (at which point the Republicans will be exhorted to develop minority-friendly, pro-immigration and anti-Islamophobic policies so they don’t get called racist and even win 9% of the Somali vote). And yet they keep coming. Perhaps Trump will shut down this pipeline (while he opens other, more socially beneficial ones), but for that to be more than a temporary fix he would have to “drain the swamp” even more comprehensively than he imagines (and I think he is already imagining this task on a rather grand scale), so as to take on all these joint public-private predatory cons practiced upon the American people.\n\n(A useful definition of the “right” today would be those who insist that those importing the Somalis ad dumping them on unsuspecting Midwestern towns be held responsible for the consequences of doing so—in the sense of being tried as accessories to the crimes their clients commit. If you don’t support that, aren’t you just a Commie?) It’s certainly impossible to do so on constitutional and legal terms, which means any president (and especially this incoming one) would risk impeachment before even really getting started. If such a president wanted to continue, then, he would need to justify taking on extra-constitutional and extra-legal powers, and to do that he would need a kind of private-public army within the security forces of the state, loyal to him alone. You can see where this is going, but I’ll get more specific about it soon.\n\nCan the victimocracy stabilize itself in some way, or must it continue to generate more chaos until social collapse? While that latter possibility is not to be dismissed, and might even be preferable as it would make the case for the needed state of emergency, I believe that some kind of stabilization is possible. Of course, liberalism has been destabilizing from the beginning, since Locke and even earlier, but it took a long time for liberalism to not only upset but undertake to systematically interfere in and organize all aspects of life, from the most minute and intimate to the most public. Right now a boy taking a girl on a date has no idea what might land him in jail, or make it impossible for him to acquire a college diploma, or lead him to be banned from going within 50 yards of a school for the rest of his life.\n\nThis situation (which can be multiplied for the categories of race, transgenderism, in some places one’s views of global warming, and who knows what else as we go forward), I think, is genuinely new, an exponential rate of increase in destabilization, and will soon be felt to be intolerable. The form of stabilization has been building for half a century, and has been discussed at length by Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, and others—the “therapeutic society.” The tendency to define all unacceptable attitudes as “phobias,” and as indicating a (reactionary, authoritarian) personality out of touch with “reality,” provide the vocabulary for a sustained “intervention” that all the “helping” and medical professions are geared up to provide.\n\nWhy wait until racism, an inclination to distinguish between the sexes, insufficient sensitivity to the environment, and so on, actually manifest themselves, when we can surely identify behaviors and traits that predispose one to such tendencies and curtail their expression in advance. Such intervention can readily be built into the school systems from the earliest years, and the duties of the courts and social services can be revised so as to include determining the fitness of parents in terms of their attunement with these attitudes. And, no doubt, the various foundations will stand ready to infuse billions of dollars in grants to ensure the success of the whole enterprise.\n\nThere can be competition over whether to extend some new form of therapeutic discipline in this direction or that, but all within the same framework. There is something paradoxical in the therapeutic order: one has to believe in a pre-social, naturalized form of “health” that has, nevertheless, been so thoroughly distorted by “society” that it has to be remade from top to bottom according to a model that, due to ever increasing scientific knowledge of human physiology, psychology and sociology, is in a sense more natural than humans ever were in the first place. Stabilization would be relative, for sure, since this can’t really be done in a coherent way (but that itself can be good for business)—but all of these initiatives could at least be brought under a single form of authority.\n\nThe only problem, but it is a fatal one, is that such an order will be completely incapacitated in dealing with any non-therapeutic order, and will exacerbate any conflicts with such orders by treating them as if these other orders were, in fact, under therapeutic authority. (Much like European countries presently try to reduce the incidence of sexual assault by Muslim migrants by treating them as if they simply don’t know the rules and codes regarding sexual harassment in the West, and just need a workshop to clear things up.) This delusional mindset is an advantage for those non-therapeutic orders, and gives reactionaries an incentive to represent the current order as a therapeutic one, regardless of how far it is along that path. It shouldn’t be hard, since the SJW left already speaks about itself as if it is in a hospital, with everyone watching each other on suicide watch.\n\nAs obvious as it must seem, I’ll repeat that electoral politics, discourses on civil and human rights, arguments about promoting economic freedom and growth, etc., i.e., the stale staples of our political diet, are completely irrelevant to these developments, and therefore to opposing them (the Supreme Court may follow the election returns, but the foundations certainly don’t). Anyone who thinks that transgenderism is a fraud or that homosexuality is malleable or who honestly studies the effects of homosexuals raising children will never get through graduate school or get accredited in psychology, nursing, social work, etc.\n\nHow do you vote against that? By all means, sue on behalf of your religious rights—we’ll see if you’ll even be able to find a lawyer willing to represent you. Against the therapeutic order the new order would have to pit self-discipline, privileging the signs of self-control, continence, practice, self-abnegation, loyalty to superiors, respect for peers and protection of subordinates, a willingness to be judged by the highest independent standards, deference to the genuine capabilities and authority of others, and recruiting supporters from the professions, locations and demographic groups richest in these qualities and elevating those groups as examples for the others.\n\n(The blogger sundance at Conservative Treehouse speaks of the “white hats” holding out in within the security apparatuses that have been mostly corrupted.) The new order would be one of faith and knowledge, both of which are generated by discipline—the pseudo-knowledge of the therapeutic would have to be countered by the study of civilization, in its distinction everywhere from barbarism, savagery and decadence. The unnatural nature of the therapeutic can be shown to be nothing but a comprehensive system of, to use the vernacular, “flipping out” or being “triggered”; to use a term that has pretty much fallen into disuse, the subjects of the victimary-cum-therapeutic are nothing but malingerers. General George Patton provided a model for how to treat malingerers, and perhaps learning from that model is a way (to cite Trump) to stop the poor old general from spinning in his grave."
    },
    {
      "slug": "speech-and-sovereignty",
      "title": "Speech and Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Speech is effective, which is to say revelatory and transformative, when it points to some reparable failure of reciprocity—reciprocity that is acknowledged by he who is charged with the failure, pointed out by or on behalf of he to whom the reciprocity is owed. (When reciprocity is wholly realized, received verbal formulas are sufficient for the purposes of acknowledgement.) Such speech is marked by the asymmetry of the relation—the asymmetry in fulfillment of obligations as well as the respective roles or positions of the interlocutors. This is especially the case when an inferior speaks to a superior, but speech between peers carries its own burdens.\n\nThere is an especial gravity, for example, in a private raising a grievance with a general—such an act would be disruptive of norms and forms, and dangerous for the private, which both gives greater weight to the grievance and requires that the grievance be of such weight as to merit the disruption, and be presented accordingly. Let’s take a less consequential situation—a writer who addresses a letter of complaint to an editor who has rejected his work. The complaint is not over the rejection as such, but over the editor’s failure to provide a plausible reason for it. Here, the assumption is of a reciprocity of obligations which is uncodified but embedded in the relation between two individuals presumably invested in the preservation of “letters.”\n\nThe dismissiveness of the editor is a dereliction of duty, because he should be able to explain why the submission is of insufficient interest to be put before the readership served by the journal. (What is of interest to them, within the range of problems encompassed by your journal, and why? Why, for that matter, should not the submission suggest a new possible approach to the readership, and a revision of the scope of the journal? What are you doing with the attention to control?) To provide such reasons would be to render one’s responsibility to one’s interdependencies, to bring one’s power into accord with one’s accountability.\n\nThere are obviously good reasons for rejecting manuscripts, just as the general might have good reasons for not satisfying the soldier’s grievance, but in both cases the question is whether the responsible individual recognizes that some kind of breach needs to be repaired and nominal and actual power brought into accord. Even a trivial complaint may expose such a breach, even if it only calls for an equally trivial, but perhaps meaningful gesture. Knowing that you will be expected to account for your decisions, and that you are not simply exercising power at your own discretion in your own private fiefdom, may lead you to make better decisions—and demand better decisions, in turn, from others.\n\nWe are always addressing our possible audiences, and through them a broader arena of our contemporaries, and, we imagine, posterity, in this way as well: we name them, assign them titles, and corresponding duties, however minimally or implicitly conceived. We insist that they accept their names and titles and act in accord with the corresponding duties; and in doing so we adopt names and titles and duties ourselves. In the process we imagine a mode of sovereignty: a mode of sovereignty wherein the sovereign’s only interest is in a saturated realm of reciprocal obligations, and who intervenes proportionally to the inability of the institution itself to restore rights and duties, and the threat posed by the breach.\n\nAccording to the originary hypothesis of Eric Gans, the first human word was “God”—the name given to the central object of desire the deferred appropriation of which founds the human community. Gans has further suggested that all words are names of God—as speaking beings, that’s all we do: name God. Naming God involves building institutions that commemorate the originary event by increasing the community’s distance from the violence entailed by mimetic desire (which itself intensifies with the increase in desirable objects and social roles). These institutions and their representatives are, we might say, “angelic,” in accord with the original meaning of the word, “messenger [from God]”—they continue to bring information from the originary scene regarding the relation between signs and the deferral of violence.\n\nThose institutions are staffed by those best able and most committed to preserving their function, to further guarantee the deferral of violence in whatever way that institution accomplishes it (worshipping a shared deity, laboring on shared projects of benefit to the community, engaging in some inquiry, raising children to be full members of the community, and so on), and in the order that best matches institutional traditions to individual ability. The more such institutions proliferate, and the more complex their duties, the more we need to talk about where institutional breaches occur, how we can recognize them quickly and remedy them decisively, and, then, more philosophically and theologically, about the entire order of social being, involving inquiries into what kind of world has produced such hierarchies of obligation and coordination of institutions.\n\nAt this level of generality we generate models, around which disciplines and intellectual traditions are organized, and those participating in those disciplines become accountable to each other as teachers, students, colleagues and what we can call “reality checks.”\n\nAll this is to approach the question of how much “free speech” we should expect under an absolutist regime. The stock (liberal) position is that the sovereign, with absolute power, would simply forbid all expressions critical of him or even all those that bother him or that he considers unworthy or irresponsible for any reason whatsoever. In other words, our speech would hang on the whims of a man made drunk with power. In response, I would say that we can assume that a sovereign who wants a flourishing realm will welcome the kinds of speech outlined above. That would be a lot of speech, enough for very substantive discussions on all matters public and scientific.\n\nIf we set aside the kind of 1 st amendment jurisprudence that shapes the thinking of (at least) Americans on these matters (a way of thinking about freedom of speech that goes back to J.S. Mill) we can easily imagine all kinds of speech that wouldn’t be welcome; indeed, that might be suppressed. Much of this speech would be suppressed in ways similar to the suppression of all kinds of discourse today, albeit now mostly by nominally private rather than state institutions—the major media outlets are quite capable, and indeed, if we go back a couple of decades, were almost omnipotent in this regard, of shaping public discourse in such a way as marginalize, drown out and discredit unwanted streams of information and opinion.\n\nThis will be the case in any civilized society, because any civilized society will have elites who govern social institutions. Under absolutism, institutions and communities can be left, for the most part to set limits to public opinion (as, they once did here, prior to intrusive ACLU-inspired Supreme Court decisions and the omnipresence of mass media)—this will be done differently in a small town than in the chemistry department of a major university. Those who think such control is impossible in our connected age should consider technology like V-chips and the fact that both Google and Facebook are now working on revising their algorithms so as to keep some news further away from potential audiences.\n\nThere is no reason why authorities at all levels couldn’t have access to such controls. Someone, at any rate, will be sorting through and finding ways to direct attention to one sphere of discussion, one opinion, over others, and such shaping of the infospace would be more efficient than straightforward censorship at this point anyway.\n\nEven more important is what kind of speech would be effective and what kind of speech would simply be irrelevant in an absolutist order. Even today, if the power to decide on issues like same-sex marriage were taken away from the Supreme Court, talk about the issue would be reduced dramatically, as advocates would focus just on those locations with a potentially sympathetic electorate or set of elites. The fewer of those to be found, the less talk. The same is true of all of our discussions of race and sex—if there was no national center ready to take up issues of civil rights there would be nothing to talk about.\n\nThis is even more the case if we presuppose the elimination of divided and rotating power at the center—if we didn’t have all those elections, think of all the talk, filled with lies, false promises and character assassination, and, most importantly, blather about policies that bears no relation to the power afforded politicians to actually make decisions for which they can be held accountable, that would simply evaporate. “All” we would have to talk about are the things we owe to each other in our direct and indirect relations, which is to say the things we speak least about today because we simply have no vocabulary for them—the discourse of “rights” has completely crowded out any means of thinking together about reciprocities and responsibilities.\n\nNor does this mean that discussions will become more provincial—things will happen in Montana or Bombay that are of great interest to someone living in Queens. The security of power and the unity of sovereignty in each country would be a concern of all, since destabilization is contagious.\n\nThis way of theorizing speech and sovereignty can guide our speech under current conditions of divided power. We can project onto actual and potential interlocutors the duties and obligations that would be taken for granted in a secured regime, and we can adopt those duties and obligations ourselves. To begin with, we can speak in terms of duties and obligations, rather than rights, demands, freedoms, oppression, conflict, etc. We can do so without stinting in our condemnations of the current order, and the various forms of opinion circulating within it—the new, proleptic, norms of speech provide the basis for the condemnation, and we can insist on our duty to speak truths without just finding ways to flip the other’s accusation back at them (“you’re the real racists,” “you’re the real fascists,” etc.).\n\nMost of all, we will point out ad nauseam that the power exercised by institutions does not correspond to the power claimed by them. (Sometimes they claim too much, sometimes too little—and sometimes just something different.) Will it be effective speech? That depends upon how good we get at articulating the obligations others acknowledge, maybe without realizing it—there are obligations that are built into our language, into our being as language users, and we can learn how to reveal them. There are some, maybe plenty, who will recognize no obligations, only grievances—but, of course, that need not be where we focus our energies.\n\nBut people will want to speak about the sovereign, won’t they? The sovereign will want people to speak about the sovereign. Will everyone live in constant fear, knowing they must have some opinion of the sovereign but never knowing whether it’s the correct one, or the consequences of it not being the correct one? Well, people live in fear now of being fired, ostracized, losing popularity, etc. Less so if you have some institutional backing—a well known and respected reporter, a tenured professor, a former statesman—or a network of readers and fellow writers. (Even less so, of course, if you mind your own business—but that may not always be as easy as it seems.)\n\nThe same would be true under absolutism—the sovereign would serve as patron of the truth, of outspokenness, even parrhesia, as well as patron of many other things. Those media sources known to be close to and approved of by the sovereign would have a degree of freedom that allows them to set the tone for public discussion, to open up areas for further inquiry. For the liberal, this proposal prompts instant mockery—you expect truth from the king’s pets! Flattery and fluff is more like it! It is inconceivable for the liberal that those favorably disposed towards another might be the most likely to be frank with that other, that closeness might be a source of honesty and reciprocal revelation.\n\nThat’s because the liberal freethinking journalist or intellectual knows that any organization to which he does not belong is inherently suspect, and guilty until proven innocent. Indeed, he’s just waiting for the smoking gun to show up. The discrediting of other institutions is social capital for him. A good ruler would want the truth told about him, though, and a presumption of the rightfulness of the ruler and mode of rule would encourage a less prosecutorial and more thorough, patient, and fair mode of inquiry into public events. Would there be those who insist on finding scandalous secrets behind the apparent motives of the sovereign and shouting those disclosures from the highest rooftops?\n\nMaybe—al though it’s unlikely they’d be any more effective than such people are now, or at any time. The more cogent they are, the more of a risk they are taking (in any order), and the more likely it will be that they have a point, will be pointing to some breach, that the sovereign will want to look into, some slippage in sovereignty to be repaired—surely some system of soliciting and reviewing even wild charges can be incorporated into the information system of the sovereign (it may make the issuance of wild charges less appealing). He who centralizes feedback flows is sovereign."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-sovereign-remembering-of-names",
      "title": "The Sovereign Remembering of Names",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "How do we recognize the truth? A statement refers to something in the world, and we look at (or for) the referent, and see whether it is there. Or, we look at the different parts of a statement, and see whether one part negates another part. If all the parts of a statement cohere, and we are able to find the referent in the world, then we can certify the truth of the statement. This works if we know how to identify the thing in the world that corresponds to the referent—but that, then, relies upon prior statements being taken as true, and upon my having taken on faith another pointing to a referent (lots of referents, before I had any idea what they were, or that they could be separated from the shared observation) and confirming that I have successfully pointed at it myself.\n\nThere is a relation of faith, a pedagogical relation, and a disciplinary relation involved here. I’m already systematically involved with others before claims about truth become possible. Also, the (metaphysical) approach to truth we are considering works if we banish paradox from the realm of truth, since a paradox is where one part of the statement negates another part. But statements themselves rely upon a paradox: we all see the same thing in our common orientation to truth because we have already affirmed the same thing as a common orientation to truth (which required some kind of common orientation to truth).\n\nAs Eric Gans points out, this means that ethics precedes cognition: we have deferred violence by representing the desired object and thereby letting it be; only then can we talk “about” the object, and say true or false things about it. The paradox is contained within the ethical dimension as well: the deferred object becomes all the more desirable the more barred from appropriation it is. The beginning of ethics and truth is looking at what the other is looking at and showing the other I am looking at it alongside him. This is an extremely complex maneuver: I must correctly identify what the other is looking at, I must realize I am looking at it because he is, and perhaps he because of I (or some third), I must be able to convey a sense of the worthiness of the object as a locus of attention, I must demonstrate to the other that I am looking along with him and that what I take myself to be looking at is the same thing he takes himself to be looking at.\n\nPretty much all of culture, or the order of representations, operates so as to ensure a sufficiently high level of success in executing this maneuver. We certainly don’t need to be aware of all these elements of representation in executing successful representations (in fact it’s best to be aware of only what distinguishes this representation from others), but anyone at any time may be obliged to attend to more of the representational situation than usual.\n\nTo point at something, the same thing, together, is to confer a name on the thing. Before truth, before agreement and disagreement, before arguments, there are names. The first human word, on the originary scene, was “God”—the name of the object that saved and established the community by withdrawing itself from appetitive aggression. A name already preserves the memory of the object as pointed to in common—naming and memory are inextricably bound up with each other. This also means that memory is shared before it is private, personal, or internal. It further means that even when memory is private, personal or internal, it is still shared, as Maurice Halbwachs pointed out in On Collective Memory —the most private memories are composed out of language, public narratives and the imagined gazes of others.\n\nNames can be changed and disputed—this happens all the time and is a well-worn means of waging cultural and ideological warfare—but only some names, while we continue to rely on the unquestioned reliability of yet other names. You couldn’t speak while suspending or undermining the meaning of every word you are presently using to speak; but you also can’t know which might get undermined at any particular time.\n\nWe ordinarily think of names as words referring to unique individuals—as serving an ostensive function. But declarative sentences are a way of naming as well. I will refer, as I have done several times in recent posts, to Eric Gans’s analysis (most importantly in Science and Faith ) of the name that God provides to Moses, I Am That I Am, as “the Name of God as the declarative sentence.” The point here is that to give your god a singular name is to make it possible to invoke God—to enter into what we could call an “imperative exchange” with your god, in which you can bind him to perform a favor for you in exchange for a favor you do Him.\n\nThe imperative exchange is embedded in a sacrificial economy: the subject demands more and more of God, as each form of salvation brings another form into view, and so God correspondingly demands more in return: in the end, the most treasured possession, i.e., your first born. The God whose name is the declarative sentence breaks the imperative exchange and the sacrificial economy not by demanding less of His devotees but by demanding more: by demanding all of you, all the time. You are to dedicate your life to exposing and resisting the imperative exchange and disengaging from the sacrificial economy, with its endless vendettas and scapegoating.\n\nThe declarative sentence is in the first instance an act of faith in the invisible. As Gans shows in The Origin of Language , the declarative emerges through the deferral of a demand for an object: the imperative is countered with a “negative ostensive” that “refers” to the object in its absence. The sentence works insofar as the interlocutors accept the present unavailability of the object and, in exchange, receive some information about the object—first of all that it’s not here, but, then, that it’s there, or that so-and-so is retrieving it, or that it doesn’t really exist in the manner you believe it to, etc.\n\nThe declarative sentence was always the Name of God, as we can see if we consider that to make a claim about anything is to assume that some authority would, “in the long run,” be able to authenticate that claim, even if no such authority is actually available or imaginable in any concrete way. To utter a statement is to assume you and your interlocutors will be able to continue to speak and/or act in the way licensed by that statement (to look at something, to remedy some situation, to cease some activity), i.e., to understand it; to assume that is to assume something like a guardian of the shared understanding that allows for further discourse and action, i.e., God, even if He hasn’t been named yet and in a more conventional sense never will be.\n\n(It’s also worth pointing out here that in his inquiry into the genesis of grammar in The Origins of Human Communication , Michael Tomasello argues that the earliest declarative sentences—utterances beyond the imperative—concerned commentary on the reliability of other individuals as potential participants in common activity. That is, the earliest “vocation” of sentences was to establish reputation and authority—the very thing needed to authorize the sentence itself.)\n\nAll this is to fortify, not dismantle, the notion of truth. To speak the truth is to name God in the world in a way that deserves to be remembered. People properly disciplined away from the sacrificial economy and therefore toward what is resistant to our desires in the world would answer the question you are answering the same way you do. If we don’t want to speak of God we could speak (paradoxically) of “indirect ostensive authority.” The inherited metaphysical concept of truth that ultimately reaches its dead end in positivism eliminates the indirect ostensive authority and would have us focus exclusively on the clarity and indisputability of the reference, ignoring the question of how reference is possible.\n\nAn originary understanding of truth includes the indirect ostensive authority in the utterance. All attempts to proclaim the truth do this—no one ever succeeds in subtracting from one’s utterance everything but the logically isolatable meanings of the words and sentences uttered; everyone relies upon internal and external echoes of other utterances, upon distinguishing marks of some relevant context, and even upon the sound-shape of language (patterns of sound, repetition, alliteration, rhyme, etc.), indeed, all features of language, written and spoken. Why pretend otherwise, then—a more multi-dimensional notion of truth would be more, not less, truthful, as it would more effectively gather its audience into a disciplinary space attending to the truth revealed there, rather than winnowing out non-specialists in accord with some institutionally determined method of presenting truth. And if something deserves to be remembered, you should do everything in your power to make it memorable.\n\nOur intellectual exchanges, then, are attempts to retrieve and establish a shared hierarchy of names. R.G. Collingwood uses the term “dialectic” to refer to the process of converting disagreements into agreements. To refer to Reactionary Future ’s recent “Monkey Shrieking Sophistry” post (while modifying the example), if I say that “capitalism” is an economic system based on private property and free economic exchange while you say that “capitalism” is a system of exploitation of wage labor, the disagreement may seem insuperable—how could we even be referring to the same thing? But there will be something on the margins of my definition that can be brought into alignment with something on the margins of your definition—if I can agree that exchanges between private property owners generate asymmetries in exchange, while you can agree to gradations in “propertylessness” and then we can at least achieve partial reciprocal translatability.\n\nIf we can achieve partial, we can strive for more. Of course, new disagreements emerge as well—I might see gradations in propertylessness as a vindication of the capitalism system while you might see it as an impediment in the struggle against it, and hence to be undermined. (At a certain point, one of us will benefit more in cutting off the conversation.) Nevertheless, to achieve partial reciprocal translatability is to presuppose (name) indirect ostensive authority, and to assume indirect ostensive authority is to presuppose (leave open a space to name) a sovereign who is undivided to that extent at least. (That’s why one of us will cut off the discussion if the proportion between agreement and disagreement remains unfavorable to further dialectic—we will realize that we recognize different sovereigns.\n\nBut to recognize the irreconcilability of sovereigns as an insuperable impediment to continued discourse is to acknowledge the need for undivided sovereignty. The system of names depends upon sovereignty and the hierarchies it oversees.) If there’s one shared human world that at least potentially contains all possible shared referents (we could never place an a priori ceiling on how much shared attention we could harvest), then undivided government that would prevent power struggles from multiplying disagreements at the expense of agreements is also possible. After all, the introduction of new power sources increases the interest in struggling over indirect ostensive authority and in subverting any shared and conclusive authority—it therefore aims at increasing the indeterminacy of language (it’s obviously no coincidence that theories asserting the indeterminacy of reference and undecidability of meaning proliferate as power multiplies (still, we can agree with deconstruction and other such theories regarding the interdependency of meaning and sovereignty)).\n\nIt is therefore destructive of the most fundamental purpose of language, which is to Name God in the world, or preserve indirect ostensive authority. There will always be disagreements—they result from agreements—but we can come to agree that these disagreements are attempts to elicit further signs of indirect ostensive authority. The source of memorability is the enactment and display of this eliciting of agreement from disagreement. We can transcend resentments in a shared search for information from the sovereign center, or we can resentfully decenter authority and assail others’ efforts to affirm or restore it. We can work on ensuring that names become and remain part of the reality they name or, as nominalists, weaponize names in a war against shared reality."
    },
    {
      "slug": "tradition-conserved-is-sovereignty-conserved",
      "title": "Tradition Conserved is Sovereignty Conserved",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2016",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Reactionary Future regularly targets, more or less directly, the conservative aphorism that “politics is downstream of culture,” along with the alt-right version, “identity>culture>politics.” In both cases, the problem is the assumption of a sphere of spontaneity and individual activity that precedes and ultimately exists outside of central authority and power—and, therefore, ultimately determines that authority and power, both causally and as the repository of rights that legitimates the sovereign. All of this is diametrically opposed to absolutism, which places politics, the center, first, with all activity on the margin “always already” accounted for by the center.\n\nAt the same time, a little while back, in a couple of posts on “tradition,” RF introduced the maxim, parallel to the maxim “sovereignty is conserved,” “tradition is conserved.” Just as someone always occupies the center, however ephemerally or unstably, all human activity is wholly indebted to some tradition or traditions enabling that activity. The most fundamental of traditions is, of course, language, which no individual could have invented alone, without which no one of us could perform a single human act, and of which we, to cite Michael Polanyi, know more (far more) than we can say. All tradition is like that.\n\nBut a lot of people would use tradition fairly synonymously with either or both “culture” and “identity,” which returns us to the question of the relation between these differing levels of human existence. Also, the “law of rebellious tools,” i.e., that all supposedly “bottom-up” political activity is really a product of insecure power, whereby one section of the elite instrumentalizes some “lumpen” element so as to undermine another section and enhance its own proximity to the center, would seem to render tradition completely malleable by outside forces—and, hence, not really “tradition” in any meaningful sense at all. There is certainly a lot of truth to this argument, as we find out regularly that supposedly deeply rooted and revered cultural traditions (like Christmas celebrations) are really very recent inventions, often attributable to advertising and publicity campaigns. But in that case, what would it mean to say that tradition is conserved, and why would we care?\n\nFor originary thinking, tradition can only be the memory and commemoration of the originary scene. As Eric Gans has shown, first of all in The Origin of Language , there is a tension between the ritual and signifying dimensions, respectively, on the originary scene and onward. Ritual involves performance, symbolic action, and the ostensive gesture. It also requires strict adherence to a rigorous “script.” Each tradition, in its own idiosyncratic way, re-enacts the originary event, where violence was deferred through the issuance of the aborted gesture of appropriation. The sign, discourse, interprets or, as I have put it previously, “anthropomorphizes” the figures on the ritual scene.\n\nThe commemoration of the scene, then, accretes its own layers of reflection and modification to allow the practice to better embody the scene imagined in such reflections. It would follow that what enables the continuity of tradition is an ongoing dialectic of ritual and discourse, such that the discourse of the community is sufficiently rich in referents to the rituals, and the rituals sufficiently open to discursive accretions.\n\nIt’s not really possible to imagine performative and symbolic actions, organized around an ostensive gesture, without a sacred center. What would the ostensive gesture be gesturing toward? The irruption of the Big Man and its further enlargements into history disrupted the local, relatively egalitarian communities organized around a sacred center I think we can imagine on the model of ancestor worship. The organization of central power destroyed tradition and recuperated it through the divinity of the emperor. It may be that there is a “wound” here that has never healed and can never heal, and that there is something in tradition inimical to central power—the loss, or at least vitiation, of the bond to the venerated ancestor must be something like having one’s child torn away for service in some imperial institution.\n\nThe ancient empires established traditions of their own, in which the origin story of the empire replaced ancestral human/animal/divine origin stories, but such traditions probably never struck roots in the millions of slaves and laborers subject to imperial domination, who likely always maintained more ancient rituals.\n\nA new form of commemoration of the originary event emerged in response to the limitations of imperial traditions—as I have discussed previously, this form of commemoration establishes a scene analogous to the originary scene, but with an abstracted origin that, reduced to its essentials, does nothing more than serve as a locus guaranteeing the possibility of a scene of equal participants. Whether it is all-creating God who lovingly created human beings or a metaphysical “idea,” (or whatever the East Asian, Indian, etc., equivalents, of which I am unqualified to speak, might be), anyone willing to step outside of the ritual hierarchies of daily life can hear “news” of the originary event on such scenes.\n\nWhat one “hears,” in one idiom or another, is that reciprocity and central power are and must be made for each other. This message is audible because reciprocity and central power are so often at odds, so post-imperial tradition anthropomorphizes the dialectic of sovereign and subject as a search for appropriate reciprocity. Christianity is still the most fully realized embodiment of this revelation and tradition, and therefore still the most essential tradition of the West, but inherent in the possibility of a renewed revelation of the originary event is that it can take on new forms. The most abstract and in that sense the most perfect form of all would be a kind of “lingualotry,” or a worship of our miraculous capacity for language, which far transcends any one of us.\n\nThat would itself be a conservation of tradition, with its own performative and symbolic dimension, directing attention to that in language whereby we say more than we can know. Gans refers to the “I Am” that speaks to Moses out of the burning bush as the God whose name is the declarative sentence—an assertion that commemorates the invisible center constitutive of every declarative sentence. If whatever we are talking about were fully present, we wouldn’t need to predicate it—and that’s true even if we are talking about something right in front of us. In speaking, hearing, writing, reading the declarative sentence, we express a shared faith in the center that doesn’t present itself, other than in our inability to ever quite talk about it. Whether a restoration of Christian order is to be achieved, or some equivalent found, establishing the proper relation between sovereign and subject will be constitutive of the project of re-centering. That makes it a good place to start.\n\nNow, the sovereign center certainly does present itself. The sovereign restores or preserves order by exercising the power tacitly demanded by all those cognizant of their embeddedness in the hierarchy of social reciprocities. The sovereign is a constituent of post-imperial tradition. The sovereign is not like God, but post-imperial commemorations of the originary scene presuppose an emissary to align central power (which is taken as given) and the continual enhancement of reciprocities required for a civilized order. Post-imperial tradition is, then, always already informed by sovereign power, actual and imagined, and sovereign power is always already invested in tradition.\n\nHow a particular sovereign will engage the ritual or, more broadly, performative, symbolic and ostensive, orders in a particular society cannot, of course, be known or determined in advance, but we can know that he will have an interest in “clothing” his power in those performative, symbolic and ostensive elements of social interaction—and, therefore, he must be interested in ensuring that those elements will “fit” the power he must wield."
    },
    {
      "slug": "language-the-deepest-and-most-reliable-tradition",
      "title": "Language, the Deepest and Most Reliable Tradition",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Language is the best example of how, in Michael Polanyi’s words, “we know more than we can say.” Most of our linguistic knowledge is tacit, and the semantic distinctions built into the myriad grammatical constructions we know we know not how represent ages of thought and practice so that, to the extent we could credit an individual for this or that innovation, we could only do so by identifying a tiny wrinkle within a massive, ever-changing system. Moreover, language frames reality for us, with each language doing so distinctly, with translation a far more complex matter than it appears. Anna Wierzbicka, in a series of books in the ethno-linguistic tradition on the way modern English constructs reality, shows that entire semantic domains, organized around words like “fair,” “sense” (“sensible,” “good sense,” “common sense,” etc.), and “experience” are without equivalents in other languages (Wierzbicka traces all of these semantic domains to the empiricist revolution summed up and popularized by John Locke).\n\nIn an analysis that uncannily and no doubt unintentionally parallels critiques by Alexander Dugin and others of an Anglo-centric world view imposed imperialistically on the rest of the world, Wierzbicka shows how the emergence of English as the global commercial, scientific and communicative lingua franca displaces native ways of thinking and presupposes without basis the universality of these specifically Anglo concepts (when someone says that “we learn from experience,” he is speaking Lockean English, or “Lockese,” not making a universal claim about the human condition). At the same time, Wierzbicka claims very convincingly, based on empirical (another untranslatable Anglo concept) evidence (there’s another), that we can identify what she (and her colleagues) calls a “Natural Semantic Metalanguage”—a group of words, numbering no more than 200 or so, that we can find in all languages (so far). Wierzbicka uses this NSM to provide a method of translating concepts from one language to another, in what might serve as a kind of Star Trekian universal translator or virtual linguistic UN (far more benign and efficient than the actual one).\n\nStill, while calling the NSM vocabulary “semantic primes” Wierzbicka does not claim that the NSM constitutes the actual original language that humans spoke before Babel—such a claim would presuppose some kind of universal cognitive apparatus that somehow pre-existed language, and where would such an apparatus come from? It’s far more likely that the NSM is a sediment of words/concepts that would have started off far richer and more idiosyncratic but ultimately got worn or pared down (“bleached”) through usage to words/concepts like “say,” “think,” “happen,” “see,” etc. The best proof of this is the absence of any word for “God” or “sacred” in the NSM, since language is inconceivable without such a word.\n\nIt must be that the various words for “God” and “sacred” never shed the residue of the ritual practices and occasions in which they have been embedded to become identifiable as the “same” word across languages according to Wierzbicka’s exacting standards. It is impossible to imagine language originating with propositions, even the seemingly simplest ones, like “food over there,” because there is no way to construct a plausible scene in which one person could say something like that and be understood when saying it for the first time. Language, as Eric Gans has shown, could only have originated as an ostensive sign, pointing to a desired object in order to renounce direct, unilateral appropriation of that object—in such an event, we can imagine all participants on the scene repeating the sign and “understanding” (the term is somewhat anachronistic here) it to refer to this most desired and yet/therefore forbidden object. Such an ostensive sign must remain untranslatable (while being iterable) since it only means something when and where it is produced publicly.\n\nAll languages are different, then, because they have all developed their unique ways of articulating centers and peripheries in myriad ways. Language is first of all about inter-human relations, not relations between things, but relations between humans require that objects stand in between us as centers around which we congregate. Language quickly comes to generate its own centers, as meaning is attributed in increasingly less urgent situations. To learn a language is to master a system of comprehending bodies and concepts in relations to each other—relations between “inside” and “outside,” “part’ and “whole,” “high” and “low,” “life” and “death,” human and other, and so on.\n\nWe can sum this mapping of reality through social relations as “centered ordinality” (I mean no mathematical reference here): in any event , someone goes first, and being first means indicating the center around which activity will revolve, someone must go second (confirming and “standardizing” the initial gesture), third, and so on (al though I suspect that once we get past the third we will see diminishing analytical returns—we can place lots of people in the “third” category—and can just conclude the order with “last”). Centered ordinality accounts for hierarchically ordered and yet reciprocal social relations (the first must attend to the second, who is attending to the first, and so on), whether those manifested in consensually recognized pre-eminence in informal settings, or in complex and organized institutions.\n\nNeedless to say, you can’t “disprove” a language—you can’t show, for example, that English “misunderstands” the relationships between bodies and objects, even if, of course, that understanding will be at odds with scientific ones. We develop more specialized discourses (akin to dialects) within languages all the time, though, because disputes over the meanings of words lead to meta-linguistic discussions requiring the reworking of domains of language, and disputes over the meanings of words follow from interaction between different communities and discourses. Such metalanguages derive from remembrances of the originary scene, in which the centering ordinality of the originary scene can be used as a model for confronting some present disorder within the community.\n\nPhilosophy is among the oldest such meta-linguistic discourse, beginning with Plato and returning with the logical positivists, Wittgenstein, deconstruction and others to the examination of what and how words mean. Philosophy goes wrong insofar as it considers itself to be correcting language rather than elucidating and extrapolating from the knowledge already accumulated there—as Gans has pointed it, in doing so, philosophy presupposes that concepts can be understood outside of language. To consider yourself outside of language is to consider yourself outside of traditions. When we “prove” things, we do so within and on the terms of a particular discourse, the institutional organization of which is a “discipline.”\n\nSo much argumentation, political and otherwise, is wasted time because they take place across discourses with incommensurable rules for determining relevance and truth—and even those within a particular discipline can never be completely aware of the rules they “play” by.\n\nWhat we can do, and which might be more useful than insisting on a specific meta-language that would provide for universally agreed upon forms of adjudication of truth claims (a kind of philosophical version of the “rule of law”), is enter and learn to speak one another’s languages. As mimetic beings, we already do this as a matter of course, both in everyday life and in heated political discussions, where we see the right and left regularly “appropriate” the other’s terms and use them against their enemy. Indeed, the left regularly advances through the right’s attempts to turn words like “equality,” “liberty,” “racism,” etc. against the left, thereby making the words common coin.\n\nLearning to speak the other’s language does not imply compromise or reconciliation, al though it could be an understated way of approaching these goals—it could just as easily be a means of emptying or undermining the other’s language through implicit satire, parody, and exhaustion. Making the other’s words useless, or useful in unanticipated and undesired ways is far more effective than trying to prove those words, or statements using them, to be false. This “multilingualism” does not reject two very valuable linguistic strategies of traditionalists and conservatives: first, tracing the history of words, very often transformed in modernity, so as to recover their prior, ideally original meanings; and, second, dismantling the seeming obviousness and permanence of widely used terms by pointing to specific moments when they were invented or radically transformed.\n\nPolitical language learning would draw heavily upon such strategies, only not merely to “debunk” or buttress an esoteric political discourse (which are fine, as far as they go) but to interfere with and redirect those words in their current circulation.\n\nThe “better” or “truer” political discourse, then, would not be the one best able to withstand some arbitrarily determined logical or empirical scrutiny—“logic” is only a way of manipulating terms you already have, without accounting for why you have them; while no one has ever come anywhere near devising a means of empirically determining the truth of a political discourse—no one would even be able to coherently say what counts as a correct “prediction” in human events (what would count as a “control group”?). The truer discourse is the one that can generate new forms of reference within existing discourses, and enact paradigm shifts within those discourses.\n\nIn the process, whatever discourse you started from is transformed as well—as you “hack” other discourses your own is getting hacked as well, and it will emerge from the process stronger or weaker, but certainly different. And the way you know you need to transition to a new linguistic paradigm is that you come across one that answers or at least formulates questions that the linguistic order in which you are presently steeped cannot, while indicating an inarticulate need to do so.\n\nMy own meta-linguistic starting point is Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis on language origin, grounded in its own tradition of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, itself grounded in and transformative of the sociological discipline organized around the work of Emile Durkheim and modern novelistic traditions among others (and the broader Christian tradition)—a tradition that is always renewed and within which new progenitors can be “recruited.” The originary hypothesis is a genuine hypothesis on how language emerged out of non-language, and therefore how humans emerged out of pre-humans—this empirical dimension, while making an unfalsifiable claim (we could obviously never obtain evidence of the event in which language was invented/discovered), is to be taken literally and seriously—but we can also see it as an answer to a very basic, inevitable question—why do words “mean”?\n\nWhat are we doing when we utter or hear a sentence? We imitate an absent someone who resisted being swallowed up in his present by abstaining from the object of desire that pulled others in, making them all the same, and therefore unavailable for imitation—only language can make an absent someone present and thereby enable us to resist the mimetic, centripetal pull that would render us identical and therefore mute. All the words and sentences and discourses that have come down to us have been transmitted, remembered and commemorated, by those who, however minimally, created “presents.”\n\nIn this way, originary thinking can be seen as a way of making language work, or doing things with words, recalling language to its originary function of deferring violence. As I have suggested in previous posts, the intrusion of the Big Man into history, replacing the ritual center with the sovereign center, introduced a breach in the human community and, we can now say, language, by creating permanent hierarchies and therefore specialties—once there is a sovereign there is, at the very least, something like “official” discourse (a metalanguage on the discourses regarding the sovereign center), distinct from “popular” discourse.”\n\nAll “high” culture—philosophy, theology, literature, etc.—works to repair this breach so we can reap its benefits: high culture remembers the originary scene by generating centered ordinalities implicit, but not necessarily recognized, in existing hierarchies. It’s a search for the worthiest predecessors as they are sedimented within language. Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage, which should be seen as genuinely philosophical, provides a means, for the patient, of translating between all languages and identifying where such translations are needed. The metalanguage of originary thinking is a means of entering any discourse and “practicing” it as an articulation of hierarchies and reciprocities at the peak of which can be posited a position for the one who will be worthiest of imitation in the creation of an extended and continuous present.\n\nThe political hypothesis I derive from this tradition, in intersection with the absolutist tradition in politics, is that all discourse is in search of a secure sovereign center. The traditionalist who bewails the absence of traditional norms and the chaos of contemporary morality and the anarchist who celebrates the endless dispersal of practices, attitudes and “memes” share the same search. The traditionalist might be looking for the hidden king while the anarchist believes that with sufficient centrifugal force a shared elemental humanity will rule through tacit consensus, but each imagines a center—the anarchist must imagine some source of imperatives that warns members of his (or xir) utopia against selfish acts that infringe on the rights of others, and that source must be unitary and consistent—and, it must be embodied by someone, even a “provisional” sovereign, who would point out when one has crossed a line.\n\nIn learning the language of others, the absolutist generates a new referent, the absolute sovereign, that enables whatever can cohere in that other discourse to cohere. In this way we effect a confluence of traditions, into the absolutist one. The most productive form of political discussion, after all, would be one that starts with the hypothesis of all of us partisans laying down our arms, imagines one person with the power to adjudicate all disputes, and then proceeds to clarify how he might do that. Further questions follow from that opening hypothesis: Which institutions would actually exist without political partisanship?\n\nWhat disputes would emerge within them? How would the metalanguages of those institutions undertake to resolve those disputes? At what point would the sovereign intervene, and how might the function of the institution, and all the differentiations within it, be restored? We are already inclined to such discussions when we talk about “issues”—should X be legal or illegal? Should we have more or less of Y? Such discussions are usually nonsensical, because they invariably neglect the myriad mediations that deflect a “policy position” from its initial formulation (we must have X) through its translation into legalese, its modification by all the special interests, its implementation by bureaucracies with their own interests and conflicts, in a social environment different than the one in which the policy was first formulated—that is, they neglect the reality of divided power.\n\nSuch discussions only make sense on the assumption of a sovereign who can ensure that what he orders is commensurate with what is actually done—which would mean the sovereign’s orders are, and are limited to those that can be, converted directly into acts carried out by those positioned to do so. The same is true of more abstract concerns about culture and morality—how do we change such things? Well, either we talk a lot about it and hope for the best—or we imagine someone in power who can, for example, eliminate foundations that fund the propagation of new sexual moralities, or instruct schools to privilege the normal (which they would probably do without instruction if left alone by outside troublemakers)—in other words, in our talk we model a centered ordinality that makes sense of chatter that just serves to justify goldbricking. If humanity is, most fundamentally, centered ordinality (and thereby generative of fractal networks of centered ordinality) then all language is most fundamentally interested in identifying the center and aligning it with all the ordinal orders."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-ministry-of-true-naming",
      "title": "The Ministry of True Naming",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Formalist reactionary theory addresses the problem of divided, insecure and therefore incalculable power by proposing that all players in the social field be given, explicitly, “title” to the power they in fact exercise. So, the New York Times would be granted, say, the portfolio for communications, in which position they would oversee the Washington Post and the major networks, each of whom would in turn have lesser portfolios (perhaps they wouldn’t even need Senate approval); Harvard would be granted the education ministry, Chase Manhattan would run the treasury, and so on. This would eliminate in a stroke the fraudulent public/private distinction by acknowledging that power exercised is, simply, power.\n\nThe very impracticality of this proposal makes it very useful as a thought experiment. The media and bankers “possess” the power they do in part because they are not officially sanctioned—being labeled the official state media would be the kiss of death for any media institution, even if we all know that that is pretty much what the major media institutions have been, almost explicitly so for the past 8 years. The same would be true for banks, universities, corporations, and so on. The power exercised by these institutions is, in fact, in flux, and therefore difficult to “entitle,” because they in turn delegate power to those they depend on (in the end, we can choose whether to read the Times or the Post, we can bank at a small credit union or buy gold, we can go to the state university rather than Harvard, etc.), which also means that in the end power does reside on some kind of genuine authority and excellence and Harvard can degrade its brand for only so long before its graduates no longer get the highest paying jobs in the most prestigious institutions and therefore people stop applying to go there. And officially designating these institutions as “official” would, under present conditions, accelerate the process of decline by encouraging complacency and arrogance.\n\nIt is the very paradox of effective power relying upon not being recognized as such that is made evident by “formalism” as a thought experiment. All forms of power under liberalism depend upon the musical chairs game of power—no one ever really does anything on their own authority. Even elected officials claim to act only in the name of the people, or defense of the constitution, or the rule of law. If any of these institutions were compelled to act in the name of the power they actually command they could no longer do much of what they do. This is because they all act in the name of undermining the power putatively unjustly exercised by others—each one purports to defend the people, the constitution, the law, the truth, etc., against some presumably illegitimate power.\n\nThe media keeps an eye on the politicians and corporations, the government keeps an eye on the corporations and “usurpers” within other institutions, the schools teach you to be suspicious of everyone except for those telling you to be suspicious, the corporations liberate you from your confinements. None of them can be held accountable, except in the most indirect ways, with the seeming exception of the politicians—but even they have figured out a way of evading accountability by rotating out of official power into unofficial power as lobbyists and corporate executives. There are a lot of checks, but the only balance could come from a commitment to reciprocal relations within constrained institutions, and such commitment is discouraged by the ongoing subversion that meets the short-term interests of liberal institutions.\n\nUncertain power equals uncertain accountability. The NY Times, Chase Manhattan, Harvard, etc., strictly speaking don’t owe anybody anything—they can pick and choose the imperative they wish to obey at any moment, whether that imperative is some demand from a constituency, or stakeholders, or some principle of civic virtue, or emergency. (They have to be concerned with the law, of course, but as liberalism progresses, there is less and less reason to assume that the oversight and interventions of law enforcement concern actions that violate the core functions and responsibilities of the institutions themselves.) They will obey the imperative that increases their power relative to other institutions, which is accomplished by off-loading inconvenient consequences onto other institutions.\n\nA relative monopoly on power is acquired by instituting rules that you can impose on others but don’t need to play by yourself. Whe never anyone “critiques” these institutions, they are first of all demanding that the rules according to which they operate be made explicit and consistent; and, second, that those institutions play according to those rules. (The more radical critiques find even transparent and consistent adherence to the rules to be in violation of some meta-rule treasured by the critic, but even they have to convey such critiques through what the Frankfurt School called the “immanent critique” of existing institutions.)\n\nSuch critiques, though, invariably end up seeking recourse by demanding some other, equally unaccountable institution, enforce the rules—why, after all, should any institution answer to critiques on its own terms? So, such critiques just accelerate the recirculation and unmooring of power.\n\nStill, it is always very instructive to see these largely tacit rules get exposed, either by their open transgression or some other kind of breakdown. News organizations take it as a firmly established rule, for example, that they are immune from all the things they can do to you. They can investigate you, ask your college roommate or childhood best friend about your various proclivities; if you get on their radar screen, they can stalk you and stake out your house—but if someone publicizes the address of a reporter who does all these things they treat that as a virtual act of terrorism. The measure of their power is their ability to enforce the rule—they, in fact, cannot stop an online mob from showering a reporter with hostile emails and tweets, or even from organizing protests in front of their house, or following them around taking pictures all day long, etc.— but the media organization will probably be able to sustain this “exchange” far longer, and turn up the heat more intensely, then any of their targets.\n\nAnd if they can’t, that is just a sign that they have lost their power, and another institution will surely fill the vacuum. We already have long and more or less coherent set of rules for banks, universities, corporations, government, and so on, for their interactions with its clients or customers and between the institution and others. Consider various ways of breaking those rules to the advantage of those subject to the institution, along with the likely consequences of doing so, and you will have a measure of the power of the institution.\n\nAll relations are unequal—even in a simple, everyday conversation, one party sets the tone or influences the choice of topic more than the other; even if this changes in the course of the conversation, all that means is that the inequalities of the relationship are changing. What makes even the most unequal relationship reciprocal and therefore symmetrical is the sharing of rules. Now, to imagine a set of rules is to imagine a mode of sovereignty—someone who would, even if in the last instance, adjudicate in the case of disputes. Liberal politics likes to imagine that the last instance never comes, which entails leveraging the undecidability of any determination regarding the rules—from the liberal perspective, the more those who must decide upon the rules can be made subject to the rules, thereby establishing another adjudicator who can in turn be subject to dispute, ad infinitum, the better. This endless process enables to power to operate unnamed and unaccountably. Reactionary politics wants the levels of adjudication all named up. The more we know who adjudicates where, the better.\n\nWe might call the reactionary approach an attempt to make the map approximate the territory. Gregory Bateson’s admonition, issued in 1972, that “the map is not the territory,” rightly reminds us that we should not forget the constructed, historical and constitutive dimension of our conceptual orderings of reality. The Wikipedia page on “Map-Territory relation” helpfully connects Bateson’s maxim with Borges’s reductio ad absurdam of the attempt to match map to territory in his story “On Exactitude in Science”: “In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it.” The attempt to codify every single power relation would look something like that—not just king-lord-serf, with perhaps a couple of other gradations in between but, if we were genuinely to start from scratch, an infinitely detailed and minute set of titles and prescriptions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "fathers-and-sovereigns",
      "title": "Fathers and Sovereigns",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "For Robert Filmer, leading figure in the absolutist tradition (and polemical target of John Locke), all rule is monarchical, and all monarchical rule is paternal. The legitimacy of absolute rule derives from God’s gift of the earth to Adam, who had absolute sovereignty over the earth and all who lived in it, including his sons, who had the power conferred upon them by Adam in his lifetime and by inheritance. All rule ultimately descends from Adam, even if we have long since lost track of the relevant genealogies. The first implication of Filmer’s argument is that paternal rule—rule by the master and possessor of a given property/territory over completely helpless and powerless descendants—is the model for all rule.\n\nThe second implication, it seems to me, is more complicated: insofar as we are obliged to seek out the true sovereign—the actual descendant of Adam who should be ruling—but know that we will only ever uncover inconclusive traces, all power is held in trust against the discovery of the true heir, while being no less absolute for that (indeed, power must be preserved intact so it can ultimately be returned to its real possessor).\n\nNow, there are two problems with this, one more obvious than the other. The obvious problem is that hardly anyone takes the Bible, much less its genealogies, literally anymore, so, we don’t believe there actually was a first man named Adam, who had the sons Cain, Abel, and Seth, etc. Filmer could presuppose the authority of the Biblical account of human history and pre-history, and his republican antagonists did the same—we can no longer do so. The second problem is that patriarchal rule doesn’t correspond to anthropological accounts of the earliest human communities, which were egalitarian, lacking any stable property rights, without any discernable distinction between rulers and ruled, and without families headed by a single, sovereign figure. I think that we can convert both of these problems into supports for a renewed and expanded version of Filmer’s Patriarchal politics.\n\nFirst of all, Eric Gans pointed out in The End of Culture that “It is of great anthropological interest that the expulsion from paradise is associated with the founding of agricultural society, which is… the origin of social hierarchy, or resentment and of its moral transcendence.” This observation comes after an analysis of the story of the fall as a study in resentment, an experience Gans associates with social differentiation, which is to say the emergence of the Big Man and subsequent hierarchies. Adam is placed in a world and given a single interdiction, which he (through his—more subordinate—wife—and the “outsider,” resentful serpent) must violate in order to acquire the knowledge of good and evil, i.e., resentment towards those who are in “your” place and the need to control it. Filmer’s use of Adam as the origin of authority is justified insofar as Adam really a kind of synthetic version of the first father/king and the first to attain knowledge of the need for father/kings in a resentful world.\n\nIndeed, moving beyond this (unforgivably simplified) analysis of Gans’s, the Bible as a whole can be read (I don’t say can only be read) as an ongoing protest of the pre-agricultural, nomadic communities against the ancient agriculturally based imperial mega-societies, along with the recuperation of this protest as divinely commanded moral constraints on the operations of power. The Israelite patriarchs are shepherds, not farmers, representing an emergent hierarchy that is never referred to as a monarchy. They are surrounded by kings (occasionally waging wars with and against them) with Egypt, of course, always looming in the background: the comparison between the contrasting ways of life and their intersections ultimately highlights the fundamental differences.\n\nWe can see two different ways of transcending ancestor worship. Ancestor worship goes all the way back to the origins of humanity, with primitive hunter-gather communities mixing their human ancestors with sacred animal ancestors, but we can associate the worship of human ancestors with the tribal communities preceding the founding of monarchies in settled communities—first of all, city-states, which seemed to be the main social form of ancient Canaan. In the Biblical narrative we see veneration of ancestors but not worship—ancestor worship is countered by worship of a “portable” God who belongs to no one but revealed Himself to a wandering tribe.\n\nIn the ancient city-states, and even more so in the gigantic empires, the king is the father of his people, and his lineage can be traced back to the gods in the city’s foundation myth—the ancestor worship of each family and tribe can be subsumed within this higher identity (which also entails the re-organization of local gods into an imperial/patriarchal hierarchy). Post-ritualistic patriarchal authority is established as a tributary of monarchical authority, which in turn models itself on the former. Filmer’s account requires a little modification, but essentially stands: since the emergence of hierarchy, no one has ever stood outside of patriarchal and monarchical authority, however divided.\n\nThe memory of the originary scene preserved by the “nomadic” generates a moral model that makes it possible to argue for the goodness of monarchy, rather than simply the brute fact of its existence and the futility of resisting it. (I don’t mean to suggest that the earliest primitive hunter-gather communities were free of power or authority—there is always a sacred center and someone—such as a shaman—always represents that center, receives “communications” and commands from it. But there is no social differentiation and hierarchy, and therefore no established distinction between ruler and ruled, under such conditions.)\n\nThe main force of Filmer’s argument, as Reactionary Future has pointed out, is that it demolishes the liberal assumption of free individuals who somehow sprouted full grown ready to start homesteading and adding their labor to the products of nature. This is a critique of liberalism that feminists (like Carole Pateman) have taken up, to different (and never completely clear) ends. We all enter the world helpless and dependent, heirs to traditions, members of families and ethnic groups, subjects of states, with a sex, and so on. How can political theory not account for this? A more sophisticated version of liberal theory might point out that the individualization that Locke projected back into the state of nature is the result of a historical process of civilization, but this just confirms Bertrand de Jouvenal’s analysis of the workings of power: individuals become individuals as a result of the centralization of power which abstracts individuals from their social contexts and makes them directly subject to the sovereign center.\n\nPlacing the individual at the center of political theory is putting the directly subjected individual at the center, while obscuring the real power constituting that individual. Any rights attributed to this individual are really mystified itemizations of the new forms of power unsecure sovereigns intend to exercise upon them.\n\nThe other direction for political theory is to turn our focus to central power, and the recovery of all the traditions pulverized by liberalism, now to be deposited in the central power. The securing of central power and the subordination of all other power centers entails making the sovereign heir to all the traditions inherited by its subjects. The sovereign would address his subjects as bearers of all these traditions, and would confirm their legitimacy in terms of central power—the traditions are legitimate insofar as at one time they has a sovereign stamp of approval. The sovereign would again be father of his people as the inheritor of all the previous sovereigns that made those traditions possible.\n\nThis would be equivalent to ascertaining paternity. Foreign traditions can in this way be “naturalized,” as the sovereign builds relations with representatives of those traditions (e.g., the Catholic Church) and ensures that they are filtered through the means of confirmation and “certification” established by the sovereign. Even liberal traditions can be included, once they are recognized as traditions (e.g., legal traditions of treating people equally under specified conditions, for specified purposes) and not universal anthropological and political claims. Differences can be maximized in this way, including differences, such as racial, presently considered dangerous and taboo—there would be nothing strange or disturbing about groups organized along ethnic or racial lines and preserving and promoting their own traditions and even touting their own superiority, or, as genetic science advances and reveals differing aptitudes across groups, in finding one group specializing in one vocation, another in another.\n\nWe would get into the habit of making requests of the sovereign in terms of traditional interests and historical contributions, and therefore in renewing those traditions. We would always be surfacing new and fascinating lineages, both ethnic and intellectual—much will be demystified and much revealed. Traditions would be clarified and made suitable for present habitation by purging them of the residues of divided power and sacralizing a line of founding and preservative events. Traditions would also be held in trust, as inquiries into lineages are made cooperative by a faith in discernable, recoverable, or at least reasonably hypothesized origins.\n\nHostilities unleashed by uncertain power, and nourished by plausible but unverifiable claims of hidden power, will be abolished once power is transparent—and transparent in the languages of all the traditions of the realm. Nor need people be locked in the traditions they were born into, al though this will probably remain the case for most—anyone so equipped and inclined will be able to take up intellectual and religious traditions, i.e., discover a new line of “fathers” which might supplement or replace his original ones. Such projects of discovery would represent a kind of disciplinary nomadism. Even ethnic and racial groups have some flexibility when it comes to “adopting” newcomers and even merging with other groups.\n\nAbsolute sovereignty is not only paternal, but the font and guarantee of paternity, direct and indirect. Absolutism is a perpetual tribute to our collective liberation from resentment—the other can only have usurped my place if his access to sovereign power is arbitrarily and secretly privileged over mine, and clear lines of paternity from the top down means our “family names” directly reflect our specific relation to central power."
    },
    {
      "slug": "power-and-paradox-gablog",
      "title": "Power and Paradox",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In his Chronicle of Love & Resentmen t No. 531 (January 14, 2017), “Paradox and the Sacred,” Eric Gans reminded us of the centrality of paradox to all things human. Mimetic structures are themselves paradoxical: the model becomes the rival. All representational systems, all representations, are paradoxical—we construct the reality we refer to by conferring a significance it wouldn’t have in itself and yet which must precede us. For Gans, the paradoxicality of representation is tied up with representation’s constitutively ethical character—we represent in order to defer violence, which means we must at least allude to, as a possibility, that violence.\n\nIn speaking about things in the world, we refer, directly or indirectly, to the shared attention that makes it possible for us to think about things in the first place. Even more, Gans takes the further step of identifying culture with the reconciliation of communities to the “paradoxical nature of the human.” In that case, we can proceed, in the interests of conceptual economy, to view all cultural forms as means of embedding the paradox of the human in the materials of specific human traditions, for the purpose of sustaining those traditions as modes of deferral.\n\nParadox is constitutive of power and sovereignty as well, a point of supreme importance for absolutism. Power is located at the center—whoever occupies the center is powerful. If we attend to some object that is both attractive and repellent (a source of desire and therefore danger), that object exercises power over us (it holds us in place, first of all). The power of the object is exercised by proxy by whoever has brought it to the attention of others in its specifically powerful form; whoever does this has disciplined himself sufficiently to see the object in a way others haven’t—as a novel source of power, rather than an appetitive object.\n\nThis is what, in my previous post, I called “centered ordinality”—someone “re-presents” the object in a new way and that new way of addressing it is transmitted, shaped and “standardized” as it is appropriated by the group. In a primitive community (this is a way of defining “primitive community”) this power cannot be monopolized or formalized—it is seized and exercised opportunistically and provisionally, e.g., by shamans, or whoever is best or bravest at something in a given situation. Eventually though (and this is a way of defining “civilization,” or at least its precondition), the center is occupied by an individual who has been first enough times or enough ways to embody a more generalized pre-eminence: priest, warrior, elder all in one.\n\nParadox, meanwhile, not only presupposes a center but generates centrality: insofar as, to follow Gans, the founding paradox is the self-inclusion of the representation itself in what it represents, the elaboration of a paradox is something like the continual generation of eccentric circles.\n\nThe paradox of power is that it is possessed insofar as others acknowledge that possession as preceding their acknowledgement. Power is both a priori and provisional, a location and its occupant. To imagine overthrowing the occupant is to magnify the location; attacking the location involves criminalizing the occupant and mythologizing the champion who would do the deed. We could all imagine the acts that would cause the possessor of central power to lose that power: he leaves undefended what he has pledged to defend, has transgressed the rituals he is anointed to preside over, he fails the community over and over in times of crisis, etc.\n\nWe could imagine that none of this would make any difference in a community that maintains faith in the leader: his leaving the community undefended is a long term strategy for routing the enemy, or a way of saving the souls of the community members by sacrificing their bodies; his violation of ritual is a higher form of obedience to divine instructions; his failures are really those of the community, who must “redouble” their faith in their master, and so on. In this case, the community may cease to exist, as they would likely be conquered and enslaved, dispersed or massacred—and yet, they would leave deposits of new forms of paradoxical thinking that might yield fruit in a more complex order: sometimes bodily suffering must be undergone for the sake of the “spirit,” sometimes rituals do need to be renewed, sometimes short term failures need to be seen as necessary for long term success, and sometimes the members must confer the very strength they attribute to the leader. These fairly commonsensical maxims are embodiments of paradox—it’s not too hard to imagine communities for whom “no pain, no gain,” for us a tired cliché, would be astonishing and nonsensical.\n\nWe could also imagine that these failures and transgressions of the leader would be viewed more “realistically,” and the leader viewed in comparative terms alongside others who might do the job better—an “assistant,” or rival, or leader of some neighboring tribe or nearby empire. In this case, the group’s “faith” in their leader would be less “perfect” than in our previous example: they would be seeing the leader as occupying a position that transcends him, rather than identifying him with the position. On one level, this seems like the more mature and enlightened approach, and it would certainly prevent the suicidal behavior of the “naïve” community—at the same time, though, this approach implies a kind of ethics of suspicion of any leader, and could easily lead to the attribution of faults where none are to be found, leaving the community vulnerable to unscrupulous rivals of the leader, demagoguery, etc.\n\nThis more “skeptical” approach to power would leave its residue in now familiar maxims as well, in this case regarding the abuses of power, the perils of ambition, and so on—but also to analyses and fantasies of a deeper form of power that can create a form of surface power radically different than the one we so resent. The more power we see flowing to and from the center, the more we see ourselves as constituents of power, essential and marginal, entitled and unworthy.\n\nA “high” culture is one with a high tolerance for sustained paradoxicality, from which tolerance flows all of the intellectual insights that make moral, esthetic and historical knowledge possible: we are all sinners and yet/therefore we might all be saved; we are nothing and we are the jewel of creation; in terrible, soul-crushing defeats we find the seeds of future victories; in present victories lie the seeds of future defeats; the seemingly insignificant can be of great moment and what consumes us now might be forgotten tomorrow; and so on. Only central power makes this tolerance possible: we might hate, fear and even despise the sovereign, but we will only attain self-mastery by interposing between ourselves and any action predicated upon those feelings an awareness of everything the sovereign must know that we don’t and can’t, of the consequences of others, ultimately everyone, acting upon similar feelings, of the fact that all of us who hate, fear and despise the king do so for what will ultimately be incommensurable reasons, and so on.\n\nThe more we imagine lapses and defects in sovereign power the more anticipated consequences of seeking to exploit those lapses and defects lead us to self-cancelling efforts aimed at supplementing them by contextualizing and recuperating their consequences within our own spheres of activity. If we do so effectively and properly, they will have turned out not to be lapses and defects after all. We donate our resentment to the center, so to speak. Only such an attitude toward central power allows for the social scene as a whole to be made present before one. As soon as you throw in your lot with those dividing power, who must present sovereign power as limited and parochial, and must therefore project some imaginary mode of sovereignty to be realized in a more perfect future, in which all the partial and scattered views somehow totalize themselves, you initiate a catastrophic lowering of tolerance for paradoxicality and hence of high culture.\n\nInsisting that the integrity of your particular position is an essential element of some body of knowledge to be collected impersonally and revealed in the indeterminate future leads you self-sanctify that activity and therefore to cultivate intolerance toward paradox.\n\nTo maintain high culture in the midst of a lowering culture, then, is to increase tolerance for paradox. Gentle, absolutist persuasion can consist of injecting little and yet lethal doses of paradox into paradox-intolerant strains of thinking. The liberals, leftists and progressivists, i.e., the anarchists, believe firmly in their own implicit version of an absolutist sovereignty, one that would smite with a flourish of righteousness the representatives, even dimly aware, of right order. That they are so certain about who is inside and who is outside, who is “decent” and who is a “Nazi,” without ever being able to identify the source of this certainty, is the great paradox of totalitarian anarchism.\n\nBut how do you imagine the tiny particle of your own activity adds up to a future with fewer Nazis and more decent, tolerant people like you? If you can imagine it there must be an order that allows you to predict the outcomes of your activities—what is that order, then, and how is it sustained—how does your activity sustain, rather than erode it? If you can’t imagine it, why do what you do? Is there anything more than the tautology that lots of people doing what I do will lead to a lot more people doing what we do? There’s nothing more here than a virality necessarily oblivious to the paradoxes it produces in abundance—and full of hatred towards those who expose them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "states-temporary-and-permanent-gablog",
      "title": "States Temporary and Permanent",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It seems to be pretty widely acknowledged (even by neo-cons like Bill Kristol and Matthew Continetti if only, in the case of the former, to applaud it) that elements of the intelligence services are currently seeking to undermine, perhaps overthrow and destroy, certainly weaken and humiliate, the President of the United States. Indeed, the CIA doesn’t seem to bother concealing their intentions—maybe they consider it preferable that they be known. This is a very instructive situation for those of us who think the only serious political question is “who rules”? It has always been fairly evident that the broader institutions of American life, including the intelligence and security agencies cloaked in secrecy but also corporations, NGOs, government bureaucracies, political parties and the media, constrained in informal ways the choices available to American voters (not to mention to those they elect).\n\nIt’s not quite as obvious as the mullahs in Iran, who simply strike names off a panel of candidates, but the effect is the same—does anyone think, for example, that the ruling class would have allowed Jessie Jackson become president in 1988? (2008 was a different story, of course, but even then the candidate needed to be somewhat less obviously bristling with resentment.) What the election of Donald Trump reveals is that the system is imperfect, and this revelation has generated another one, as the elements of the state that normally leak and subvert behind the scenes are now close enough to the surface to be seen by everyone. Outing the fundamental power relations of the United States is one of the many things we can be grateful to Donald Trump for.\n\nNow, the problem is how to analyze all this. Absolutist theory gets taken out for a comprehensive test drive here. First of all, let’s decide which of the two most common names to work with, or at least start with: “deep state” or “permanent state.” The problem with “deep” is that these agencies are deep until they’re not, and right now they seem to be brushing right up against the surface, perhaps ready to breach at any moment. “Deep state” is more ominous sounding, and perhaps better for a fictional thriller, but “permanent” is both more accurate and more conceptually acute. Why is there a permanent state? The ongoing, centuries long centralization of power.\n\nModernity is a high-low war against the middle, a demolition ball taken to all mediating institutions and traditions time and time again. This we already know from de Jouvenal and de Tocqueville. To insist on rights is to demand a state bureaucracy capable of harming those who interfere with the realization of those rights—rights inflation inevitably follows, since that allows for the continual aggrandizement of the state. The same analysis is less often applied to foreign affairs, but if power blocs within a given (powerful) country aim at increasing their own power by undermining mediations, why wouldn’t the same principle apply internationally—why not agitate for the same rights abroad, fund and support those agencies that can fight for them within that country, form new alliances with government, para-governmental and private agencies in other countries and across regions that make you a leader in rights exportation?\n\nIf the agents we get behind turn out to be dangerous and antagonistic, the same dice can be rolled again, leading to further destabilization. And when the destabilization lets loose international forces of chaos and mayhem, why not impose vast security controls that further subvert mediations and allow you to play one end off against the other: if you don’t want a flood of Muslim immigrants and refugees you are a racist who needs to be controlled and ostracized; but, now that we have more and more Muslims, we also need extensive surveillance, infiltration of police forces into everyday life and the general fortressification of the society. When you put it this way, it attributes too much coherence and cohesion to the ruling powers, but this is just a shorthand way of describing what goes one through inter and intra-institutional rivalries.\n\nAgain, all of this is obvious, and I’m a little embarrassed to be providing this summary of analyses one can easily find in dozens of places these days. The really interesting question is who rules? First of all, let’s point out that the permanent state seems to be comprised of an endless and incalculable series of temporary states. When a judge tells President Trump he can’t do something as routine as prevent migration from some hell holes, and Trump complies, clearly Trump is not sovereign. Is the judge, then, sovereign? Not yet—the administration appealed to the Ninth Circuit appeals court which could have, theoretically, overturned the lower judge’s decision, and reinstalled the travel ban.\n\nIs the Ninth District, then, sovereign? In overturning the lower court, would they have restored Trump’s sovereignty? But let’s not forget about the Supreme Court, which has certainly acted sovereignly on a regular basis for decades now. What has allowed them to do so? If a president defies a Supreme Court decision, would he then be sovereign? It would depend, I suppose, upon whether he then gets impeached and removed from power—but, then, would it be the Court or those who remove him that is sovereign? (Let’s go a step further—I just read on a fairly popular blog that the CIA and the Mossad are involved in organizing pedophile rings that are used to blackmail US politicians into doing the bidding of the American and Israeli secret agencies—so, is the guy with the videos of Western politicians in compromising positions sovereign?)\n\nShould we determine sovereignty based on public, obviously consequential decisions, or do those decisions depend upon other decisions made less publicly, maybe years ago? What, then, is the temporality of sovereignty—would a decision made, say, in 2000, that still controls decisions made now, confer sovereignty on whoever made that decision? Until when? Does sovereignty run out at a certain point? And let’s keep in mind that absolutism locates sovereignty in a single individual—not just, say, the Supreme Court, or the CIA, but whoever decides within the Court or Agency.\n\nIt’s interesting that the popular sense that there’s someone out there who’s really running things seems in agreement with the absolutist position. There is an ongoing competition involving finding the level of conspiracy that’s underneath the level your interlocutor has uncovered. This is inevitable as long as informal power is so at odds with formal power—the disjunction between formal and informal power encourages everyone to find new levers of power they can pull or expose. Obviously, trying to identify who’s pulling each and every lever, and each and every lever behind the other levers, or who is responsible for this decision made here right now, is hopeless.\n\nOur outrage at divided power (at someone else really pulling the strings, at no one but ourselves realizing that everything else is just a puppet show) only makes sense on the assumption that undivided power is possible. Our entire moral framework presupposes absolutism. Even if one just says, well, let’s just divide power in a formal and controlled way, between the legislative, judicial and executive, one necessarily concedes competition regarding influence over each of the branches, constant attempts to subvert one branch on behalf of the other, ad infinitum. All the powerful and the powerless they mobilize rush into the gaps between different power centers.\n\nWhat can one really say about a congressman who essentially has donors write the legislation he introduces—that he should have written the entire bill himself, without input, based on his own opinions and knowledge and sense of right and wrong? Or that he should judge the bills introduced by others, each on its own terms, based only on an independent reading of the bill as a good or bad piece of legislation in itself? That’s the implicit model of representative democracy, but it’s absurd, if for no other reason that there is no independent position from which one can think through a piece of legislation on one’s own, or even through free conversation with one’s colleagues in the chamber. It only makes sense on the anarchistic liberal anthropological assumption of naturally free and rational individuals, which means it doesn’t make sense.\n\nWe must assume, if we are to put intellectual order in the morass of divided power, that someone is or could be attempting to restore unified power. It’s impossible to imagine pure chaos—somewhere there must be counter-entropic forces. Anywhere someone tries to constitute a bounded space, with a central focus and purpose, and exclude anything that would distract or dilute that focus or purpose, and bring all the available means to bear upon sustaining that focus and achieving that purpose, we have such an anti-entropic force. The “middle” which de Jouvenal sees assailed by the constant pincer movement of the high-low alliance, is comprised of such anti-entropists.\n\nEven someone who’s vocation was subverted by the latest round of high-low modernist centralization will seek to reconstitute the space on internally coherent terms—that is, to restore the center. The middle exists in business, in government, in the police and military, education, families, neighborhoods, etc., even on the level of a disciplined self. But the “size” of the middle varies—the proliferation of contrary intentions attributed to the center indicates a shrinking middle, while a burgeoning middle would reward more unified power at the top. Simply pointing out the consequences of divided power in the form of eccentric, hidden and transient sovereign acts is itself an act aimed at growing the middle.\n\nBut, of course pointing out such consequences can just as easily be a way of multiplying power (it never takes long before someone who says “it’s all really about ________” is rebuked by someone claiming that “that’s what they want us to think so we don’t see that___________”), intentionally or otherwise. We could say that even the most subversive are, in their own way, trying to steer us towards some kind of secure power. Is Trump, on balance, a stabilizing or destabilizing force? Is some destabilization necessary in order to arrive at en during stability? How much, what kinds, and how do we know?\n\nWe can find the answer in the temporality of sovereignty. To borrow from Kant, we should act as though our decisions today would be sovereign for the forseeable future, would build upon a permanent tradition of absolutism that will only increase. I can write this little blog post under the assumption that its way of thinking will enter (no doubt through myriad indirect routes) the decision making process of some sovereign decades from now, and help tilt a particular decision he is agonizing over towards the slightly better one, ensuring the permanence and singularity of his sovereignty. I would, in that case, be sovereign for that moment, would I not?\n\nBut, since I of course have no way of knowing anything about that sovereign, the conditions he faces, the forms and extent of his responsibilities, the only way I can exercise this sovereignty is by feeding forms of thought that enhance the capacity for deferral, discipline and paradox, and therefore by embedding these capacities in my own thinking. Assume the middle is shrinking at an accelerating pace, to the point of near extinction (give free play in the imagination and actual inquiry to the wildest historical possibilities of constant turnover in sovereignty); assume, further, that this condition can be dramatically and immediately reversed by the right word, here and now (all the historical demons could be dispersed and their forces recouped by the right person in the right place doing the right thing)—try and find that word, and you might be exercising some form of future sovereignty.\n\nNow, contrast this with another hypothetical form of futural sovereignty, drawn from Moldbug’s demonstration that today’s dominant social ideas were the dominant opinions of the Harvard (or maybe he says Stanford) faculty in 1960, implying that the Harvard faculty in 1960 exercised sovereignty that extends to today. Let’s say there is some Harvard professor right now developing a constitutional argument to the effect that only disabled black lesbians should be qualified to be president (do you dare declare this example an absurdity?). And let’s say that 50 years from now, a Supreme Court decision implements this opinion from a Harvard professor in 2017.\n\nHow would the sovereignty exercised by this professor differ from the one I just proposed from an absolutist standpoint? My thinking, on my hypothesis, enters the thinking of the future sovereign, and my temporary sovereignty enhances his permanent sovereignty—in a sense, in his studies and inquiries, that future sovereign periodically cedes sovereignty, within a controlled space, much like a delegation, but with the capacity to surprise and displace current intellectual habits, to representatives of the intellectual traditions he knows himself to rely upon. The Harvard professor’s sovereignty generates more divided power and confuses sovereignty—who, after all, will be sovereign in that future order?\n\nNot whichever disabled black lesbian happens to be president at a given time, because she must be subject to ongoing redefinitions, across various disciplines, of the meaning of “disabled,” “black” and “lesbian”; not the member of the Supreme Court who championed this innovation, because she will herself have simply let loose a stream of arbitrary discussions over whether, for example, degrees of blackness, disability and lesbianism should enter into the qualification of a presidential candidate, making all these concepts even more political, i.e., more attractive to those dividing power, than they already were. And certainly not the Harvard professor of 2017, whose brief moment in the sovereignty sun is immediately sunk in the watershed, contributing to no new order. At any rate, we end with a claim that should prove promising for “sovereignty studies”: in answering the question of “who rules?” one must account for the temporality of sovereignty."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ancestries-and-meta-sovereignty",
      "title": "Ancestries and Meta-Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The political theory being worked out in my posts for this blog derives from a hypothesis regarding the origin of language. I refer to Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis all the time, of course, along with various consequences that he, or I, believe to follow from it. We can speak of the originary hypothesis as articulating an anthropology, but I have come to prefer the term “anthropomorphics.” “Anthropology” implies stasis—the logic of man, or human nature. But if the human emerges in an event, it is emphatically not static—everything that is human is an emergence of events. This doesn’t mean that human events are random or “subjective.”\n\nThe regularity we find in human action derives from our mimetic being. We desire what others desire. This sometimes makes us quite predictable indeed. But mimetic desire leads to convergence on a single object, and therefore incommensurable desires—we both can’t have the object not merely because there isn’t enough but because each one’s desire is mediated through the other. Humanity continues to exist insofar as we find ways of deferring the violence intrinsic to incommensurable desires—that is what language is. The particular ways we find to defer violence are not at all predictable, because they are discovered and invented in the course of the event they manage to resolve peacefully, or at least non-cataclysmically. They are discovered and invented for that particular group in that particular situation. That’s why there are traditions, and why we are always inside of traditions, even traditions of mocking and flouting traditions.\n\nIt seems to me obvious that if one part of a community were to split from another, and contact between the two parts were to be completely eliminated, within a few generations at most they would be speaking different languages, practicing different religions, and living according to different social and ethical codes. They would encounter each other as strangers. Hence “morphics”: we can say there is a common human nature uniting the two tribes, and from within various theological and philosophical traditions we could describe it, and doing so might help us familiarize ourselves with their practices (it wouldn’t necessarily be false), but that would mean we’d just have to ignore everything about the tribes that doesn’t fit the template of human nature we have constructed.\n\nOne obvious reason for doing so would be to make it easier to rule over them. To actually enter the practices and rituals of the other, though, would require undergoing whatever initiation process they impose upon new “congregants,” assuming they have any. Otherwise, we engage with others within traditions of engaging with others, which might indeed by shared across communities. What Noam Chomsky called “the poverty of the stimulus” in his critique of behaviorism holds for any understanding of the other: the models we have to construct in order to address and acknowledge the other can never derive “sufficient” evidence from the actions and words of the other. Hence, the use of the literary term “anthropomorphism,” the attributing of human intentions to non-human beings—the human itself has to be constructed thusly, out of our projections upon a common center.\n\nMimesis is an excellent foundation for talking about the human because it provides a minimal version of human sameness that immediately opens onto a vista of human difference. In principle, anyone might take anyone else as a model and hence object of imitation and potential rival. In practice, communities sort themselves out into those more and less worthy of imitation, and the more complex the society the more activities such hierarchies of value will be manifest in. On the one hand, it would be incredibly difficult to attribute genuine originality to anyone, to say that anyone did something first. Debunking such claims has become a cottage cultural industry.\n\nThe scientist who got credit for the invention really exploited and expropriated the work of less powerful, connected and unscrupulous toilers in the field. Still, wouldn’t that just mean those toilers deserved the credit—and probably one of them more than the others? Someone draws our attention to a particular possibility, and the ease with which we debunk claims of originality may just mean that originality is more complex than we think—it’s not just coming up with an “idea” but understanding the time and place for it. There’s an economy of attention, and some get better at drawing people into their attentional economy than others.\n\nWe could break down, as in libertarian accounts of the making of pencils, any activity into innumerable miniscule acts carried out in oblivion to each other; but we can just as easily find, in every activity, someone who took a risk others avoided, or found a new way out of failure—and we can imagine that human resentment wants to incorporate such instances into a broader mythology of inevitability, or historical laws—to reduce what is different to a fraud practiced upon our sameness.\n\nAs long as we are preoccupied with the object we desire any attempt to possess or control that object will be sharply, and effectively resisted by the group. This was the case for all of human pre-history. Certainly, there were eminences and circumscribed hierarchies, but not unquestioned supreme power. As soon as someone does get control of the object, though, the entire attentional economy is transformed: everyone now attends to the person at the center, because the central issue now becomes, how will he distribute the object? Now, we can’t know exactly how he got control of the object, but he must have been quite a bit better than anyone else at something—perhaps skill and endurance, perhaps a charisma that comes from greater discipline and courage, perhaps the development of a system of self-protection that prevented others from retaking what he had taken or accumulated, perhaps a cynical or even “atheist” disregard for the norms that operated to restrain potential rivals.\n\nOnce he has control of the object, though, we might as well attribute all that to him, and more, because the very fact that he can maintain his position proves that he has reserves that no one else will quite be able to assess. The community will now be reorganized in accord with the needs of the central figure, which will add new layers of differentiation and complexity to the community. The Big Man will need his loyalists, to whom he will distribute land and assign responsibility; rivalry amongst the new “aristocracy” will lead to emulation and the incentive to develop new capacities; the community as a whole will compare itself to other communities; the problem of maintaining the social hierarchy and the loyalty of all, even the lowest, to the community as a whole and the emergent monarch in particular will lead to developments in ritual organization, mythical discourse, military organization and forms of public participation.\n\nIn some way of another, the ruler will become the father of his people: all events in the community will be attributed to his will, and all previous distinctions re-titled under his authority. A new hierarchy of values is created, and there can be no going back from it—everything from before would look shabby in comparison, however it might be remembered nostalgically.\n\nThe simplest way of understanding the maxim that “sovereignty is conserved” is to consider that once the primitive community has been thus transformed, and a center of control and distribution established, all cultural activity only makes sense in relation to some personal center. Anything we can imagine happening, any improvement or reform we could promote, presupposes someone at the center who would do it, or allow it, or get out of its way, or remove some obstacle to its accomplishment. In other words, an absolutist ontology is less to be argued than to be continuously excavated from our discourses and practices.\n\nTo express an opinion is to fantasize oneself the ventriloquist of central power. If you’re “against abortion,” then you either think the people would spontaneously abolish abortion if we could somehow replace or convert the central power that gets in their way, or you think that the people who spontaneously rush to legalize and celebrate abortion need a stern, unyielding central power to prevent them. So, there is always central power and we could say there is always a kind of gravitational pull towards a single, undisputed occupant of central power. If there are multiple competitors for the spot, each must try to marginalize and if possible oust the other—each must make contend that his own undivided and unquestioned possession of central power would be best.\n\nMost important, though, is that central power must have originally emerged in the hands of a single individual who had risen “qualitatively” above any possible peers. Future developments, then, would either consolidate and spread that power or erode it by introducing competition.\n\nCentral power rises through the appropriation of traditions preceding it. What we might ordinarily think of as the most traditionalist societies, the primitive hunter-gather communities bound to ritual and taboo, are in a sense the least traditional. They have no way of recording their traditions, and no anthropologists have been around long enough to see what kinds of transformations their presumably immutable rituals and myths go through over decades and centuries. The Big Man is the ritual center as well as the center of distribution, and he will want everyone to know and remember it—and will develop the means whereby to ensure that.\n\nWriting began in the monarchal bureaucracies, recoding genealogies, myths and decisions of the sovereign. Central social power will be a model for central power elsewhere: patriarchy in the family, generalship in the military, and craftsmanship in the practical arts. In each case a kind of sovereignty is involved insofar as the practitioner or leader wants to maintain the threads of control from the beginning to the end of a particular sequence. Such sovereignty promotes monopoly, both formal and informal: once a measurable and replicable “skill” involving sustained attention emerges, some will simply be so much better at it than others so as to make competition futile; in turn, such informal monopolies will seek public recognition, which the central power will grant because little models of sovereignty throughout the social order embody the absolutist ontology.\n\nIt is these little models of sovereignty where the real traditions are embodied. The monopolies will also monopolize knowledge and lore transmitted from the past. What makes a tradition a tradition is that the final reason for doing something is that this is the way it is done. But whatever we do, we get to that point. The adherent to “pure reason” ultimately ends up defending a particular version of reason because, well, that’s what reason is, and you’re unreasonable if you doubt it. In the end, you can only define so many words in terms of other words before you get to a point where you just have to say, “well, that’s what the word means.”\n\nLaboratory science is steeped in traditions. Of course, traditions can be challenged, reviewed and revised, but only on terms granted by the tradition itself which, however glacial in its movements, always generates new problems, if only through the solution of old ones. Or, of course, you can challenge one tradition in terms of another. The fundamental dishonesty of liberalism is to imagine itself traditionless, to have spontaneously generated itself from human nature. Traditions are embedded in the world of their possessors: it will always be necessary to posit an origin to the traditions because we do want to know why we do things this way, and the best answer will always be because the first person to do it did it this way.\n\nSuch “myths of origin” will always be projections of the present state of the practice back to an imagined precursor, but that’s how some precursor developed the practice in the first place—by seizing upon another’s practice as an origin. So, the sovereign has a natural interest in “baptizing” and claiming a kind of ownership of all the traditions. And sovereignty over all the traditions is also necessary because conflicts within traditions need an arbiter—the sovereign is, by tradition, that arbiter. Traditions have the resources to resolve their problems and conflicts internally, by the awareness of a delimiting sovereign power is a reminder that they must be solved internally and must not be allowed to spill over into other traditions.\n\nTo create a “myth of origin,” though, one must have a memory of the originary scene. The primitive communities are fairly casual about their myths of origin—they have various, flexible, mutually incompatible origin stories. The hierarchal society takes origin deadly seriously—its members are distanced enough from it to want to get it right. The originary scene might not be egalitarian in any simple sense (some members might get a lot more to eat than others) but it is reciprocal, which is to say inclusive in its mutual recognitions. The origin of language, for the originary hypothesis, includes a moral component enjoining acknowledgment of all others as members of the group.\n\nThis moral component must be embedded in the hierarchal society and we can hypothesize that the most successful hierarchal orders in the competition between such orders will be those with systems of reciprocity between levels in the hierarchy that make maximum participation possible. So, we find intellectual and moral traditions emerging, and given the same care by their guilds and the same attention by the sovereign as any other discipline. So, if absolutist ontology has us always seeking to discern the intentions of the central power, it also has us attributing to each other the intention to give ourselves, through our assigned or adopted discipline and the reciprocal recognition of all disciplines, to the central power.\n\nClaims of mistreatment and unfairness within a particular institution can be converted into arguments over the worthiness of the institution’s fruits to be presented to the sovereign. Fealty to the sovereign is remembering the originary center in the wake of a history of displacements\n\nWe will recognize divided power, then, in its ramifications across all the traditions and all the disciplines. We can assert as part of absolutist ontology that everyone wants central power to be secure and singular. So, we have a kind of “theodicy” problem—why would anyone ever introduce division? It must be because they, rightly or wrongly, see some division already in central power and wish to heal it. We can be more precise: there is, or appears to be, some discrepancy between the formal and the informal recognition of some tradition by the central power. The sovereign either favors the representatives of that tradition more than is warranted by the formal recognition he has extended it, or has not sufficiently “stuffed” the formal recognition with the expected accoutrements.\n\nThe first division, then, is an attempt to unify by rectifying this discrepancy. But any attempt to rectify from the margin just adds new imbalances: a discrepancy opens up between the formal and informal powers of the rectifier. More rectification seems necessary, and what was in fact in order (or at least more in order than the self-appointed rectifier could make it) seems disordered.\n\nThe problem is in the original move of purporting to identify a gap in the attentional economy of the sovereign and substituting one’s own attention for the sovereign—rather than further anthropomorphizing the sovereign and attributing to him an intention drawn from reserves inaccessible to us. In the latter case we would think better, less clouded by resentment, and draw upon the reserves of our tradition to better correspond to the apparent distribution of sovereign attention. We can recognize the avatars of divided power in their attacks on disciplines and their monopolies, on traditions, in the claim to possess some power “beyond” or “underneath” disciplines, and to be independent of tradition.\n\nTrying to think in place of the sovereign leads one to find some ground outside of, prior to and constitutive of the social order—the result is the impoverishment of our anthropomorphic initiatives, as we have to reduce this externality to a projection and simplification of our own desired exemption. “Human nature” somehow looks just like the mentality of a merchant looking for leverage in some deal. The pluralist ontologists think the king ought to reach beyond the established order and engage in a broader rectification (the king may, of course, agree); eventually the realization will come that removing the king and basing society explicitly on the extra-sovereign is the most economic approach to rectification.\n\nWe can grant that all this is also an attempt to unify—removing the artificial mode of sovereignty will allow the true sovereignty of human nature to assert itself. But while one can point to centers, large and small—one person’s decision and reputation really is respected where another’s isn’t—every attempt to point to human nature in what humans actually do dissolves into acrimony and the incommensurable claims of competing and unacknowledged traditions. The defenders of central power will be those working to preserve, restore and recover the disciplines and traditions, including the reciprocities within and between them.\n\nSovereignty is central power embedded in the traditions, acknowledging and finding itself modeled in their sovereignties. We could say that absolutist ontology is performative and enactive, a mode of participation, rather than fixed and “ontic.” What is fixed and static is the denial of centrality, because that locks you into an obsession with debunking all evidence of it and destroying the conspirators who, paradoxically, somehow falsely centralize themselves"
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereignty-and-standardization",
      "title": "Sovereignty and Standardization",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "On the Slate Star Codex blog, Scott Alexander recently posted an interesting review of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State . Scott is interested in the way in which states, especially modern states, and especially “modernist” or “enlightened” modern states, erase the tacit knowledge of individuals and communities in the name of large-scale projects conceived by experts who consider theoretically or “scientifically” generated blueprints to be superior to the judgments of people immersed in social and economic life and dependent upon the stability of the structures and activities comprising that life. While highly sympathetic, Alexander goes on to point out the limitations of Scott’s polemic by, for example, referring to the obvious advantages of large scale agriculture and infrastructural and technological and scientific activity sponsored by the state and that would probably never have come into existence otherwise.\n\nThis is all of great interest to absolutist theory, which, in my understanding, articulates an insistence on the centralization of all power in a sovereign who stands beyond the law with a critique of the monstrous modern state, which leaves nothing alone, because insecure power compels it to demolish all intermediary structures in the name of a high-low alliance that relates each individual directly to central power. In other words, to put it in properly paradoxical form, genuinely absolute power would be barely noticeable, while the more pervasive, invasive and unavoidable the power, the more divided and unsecured.\n\n“scientism,” a fellow participant in an online forum and (I think) the owner of an (eponymous) excellent twitter account, sees in the modern state a dialectic of centralization and fragmentation. While the state centralizes (beneficial) technological and scientific activity, it fragments institutions, communities and individuals. This duality is a result of the duality of the modern Enlightenment which, on the one hand, valorized and directed prodigious intellectual energy towards science and technological development and, on the other hand, invented liberal political and ethical theory, which valorizes cynical, resentful and anti-social behavior—defection and goldbricking, in short.\n\nThis is a very important and insightful analysis, to which I haven’t done justice, and which I hope will be made publicly sometime soon, but the problem Scott poses for it is to account for how the scientific and technological developments interact with communities and institutions. It’s clear enough that technological capacity can be a very powerful way for the state to align with the “high” (corporate leadership, heads of universities, powerful lobbyists, etc.) in mobilizing the “low” against the middle. To reference an obvious and very well-known example, and one mentioned by Alexander, the city planner Robert Moses wanted to build an expressway that would have gone through Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan—modern highways are certainly an innovative and highly valuable technology that increases productivity and democratizes public space but can only do so at the expense of irreplaceable neighborhoods and the communities inhering in them.\n\nMoses may have, on balance, done more good than evil and, who knows, Jane Jacobs’s crusade against him to save the Village may have been over-hyped or even counter-productive—I have not studied the issue—but it’s easy to see how difficult it would be to separate the centralization of knowledge from the fragmentation of people. But social order doesn’t depend upon every last neighborhood, down to every corner store and playground, being sanctified either—that easily becomes the site of another high-low alliance against the middle, as the wealthy and connected use zoning and environmental law to keep the middle class out of their neighborhoods while supporting immigration policies that supply the rich with low wage labor while devastating middle class neighborhood.\n\nThere are standards because there is imitation, but, if there is imitation, why do we need standards? Why isn’t a process of learning, through master-apprentice relationships, and the centralization of knowledge in guilds and professional organizations, enough to maintain continuity in production and the transmission of knowledge? Such relationships certainly create a great deal of conformity, and hence something resembling standardization, but the elements of “rule of thumb,” improvisation, and responsibility are never eliminated. When a contractor comes to work on your house, he obviously comes with a range of possible solutions to possible problems in mind, and with an established network of suppliers, housing codes to be adhered to, etc.—but, still, he has to look over your house, see what will “fit,” which kinds of solutions might spill over into potential future problems, and which will match the owner’s sense of convenience and aesthetics.\n\nIf a development company comes to bulldoze the block and put up a series of high rises, it doesn’t need any of that—it can all be designed in an office half-way across the country, or world. There’s some difference here, and it has something to do with power. Here’s a radical (radically reactionary) claim: all mass production is part of a high-low alliance against the middle, and works toward the subversion of secure central power. In that case, either reaction and absolutism are hopeless, utopian projects; or, all the more necessary, if far more difficult than imagined. I’m not making that claim, but I’m not dismissing it, either—at the very least, I would want an account of mass production that can reconcile it with an absolutist hierarchy of power.\n\nThe nationalist argument made by Trump and his supporters is that the return of industry, i.e., mass production, to the US will create well-paying jobs that allow for the maintenance of a middle class lifestyle, and consequently the dignity, self-respect and stability that makes people resistant to utopian and egalitarian hysteria. All that seems to be true, compared to the alternative of devastated communities and opioid epidemics, but we shouldn’t forget all the mid-century critiques (by no means all coming from the left) of that very way of life as a result of the alienation of individuals from more primary communities and complex, “organic” networks of skill and ethics reproducing institutions. Is 35 years on the assembly-line really conducive to a cultured, enriching way of life focused on the eternal?\n\nImitation involves sameness, but what makes an imitation a “good” one? In a pedagogical relationship, the teacher judges. This implies we can separate a particular practice being imitated and assessed from the entire constellation of activity and the “life-world” against which we view that practice. Is it necessary to be good man in order to be a good blacksmith, or can we “compartmentalize” the specific set of skills required for producing excellent metal work from the carousing and whoring the blacksmith engages in during his free time? At an earlier time, the assumption that you had to be a good man or woman to be good at performing a particular function must have been very strong—I assume this because we still have the remnants of such an assumption today, for example in the notion of “moral turpitude” which can still be a justification for firing someone from some professional occupations.\n\nWould anyone claim that a high school teacher can spend his evenings seducing girls just slightly over the age of consent (so it’s all legal) and still be an appropriate mentor for the girls in his class, even if he maintains all the proprieties with them? Maybe some would want to claim it in a debating club, or in acting as a union representative, but very few, I think, in talking about their own daughter’s teacher.\n\nThe assessment of imitation can, then, be very thick or very thin. The process of liberalization has been a process of thinning it out, which is enough to make us suspicious. But thinning it out has obvious advantages—aside from the difficulty of setting and enforcing moral norms for all members of a particular profession in any real detail, singling out and analyzing, on the micro level, specific practices, is crucial in making those practices accord more with their ends. This dismantling and reassembly of practices with a precision that could not be limited in advance, is the secret of all advancement in knowledge and technology—and even yields results in the field of moral self-improvement.\n\nThe most originary forms of imitation bound practices up in ritual along with moral and ethical commands: one imitates the figure at the center, ultimately an ancestor, in some divine/human/animal articulation, however mediated by models within the community. The thinning of imitation is its de-ritualization, which also means its defiguration: practice is no longer a re-enactment of the community’s representation of the originary scene. This is possible because the originary scene can be remembered outside of its ritualized re-enactments, and in distinction from it. This more abstract memory of the scene is generated by the emergence of a new object, produced by some new rivalry, that the ritualized re-enactment did not prepare the participant to notice. Accounting for a new object on the scene requires a re-creation of the scene; any re-creation of the scene requires a re-discovery of the reciprocal deferral constitutive of any scene but forgotten (off-loaded) in its ritualized incarnation.\n\nThe remembering of the originary scene establishes a disciplinary space—a gathering of attendants predicated on sustained and inexhaustible focus. The tension between the disciplinary space and ritual, a tension that is incorporated into the disciplinary space as a tension between tradition and innovation, is the tension between value and ethics, which I discussed in an earlier post in connection with Eric Gans’s analysis of Achilles’s resentment in The Illiad in his The End of Culture . Any disciplinary space, whether it be a medieval guild or a modern laboratory or field of inquiry, must have ways of determining the boundaries of the discipline.\n\nEven the most traditional and rule bound disciplines have to have ways for something new to be discovered, even if only over centuries; even the most forward looking and dynamic disciplines must be working with problems and methods rooted in the past. It must be possible to say “this doesn’t count as doing ‘physics’,” even if the line separating physics from not-physics could never be drawn once and for all. Only people steeped in the practice of physics, engaged in its latest and most involved problems and working with its most advanced methods, can draw this always moving line—and they draw it non-coercively, simply by being interested in some things but not in other things.\n\nAt its limits, this model of the disciplinary space approximates a kind of anarchy characterized by the spontaneous interaction of the participants who are always creating the space anew, are always revising the boundaries of their practices, always seeking to recognize as possible science what was unrecognizable up until now (and which in turn opens up all kinds of forgotten traditions)—a model defended with great force by Paul Feyerband.\n\nActual disciplines are limited by the resources allocated to them, which in turn depends upon assessments of their social usefulness. Disciplines always become political, then, constituting themselves as “special interests,” striking deals with the managers of other institutions, and policing their own boundaries so as to make themselves presentable (no quacks here!). Disciplines stay alive to the extent that the tension between value and ethics is re-established, through the creation of various forms of “ skunkworks ” within disciplines. The perpetual resentment of bearers of value (including self-proclaimed bearers of value) is the source of the separation between being a good man and being a good blacksmith.\n\nThe ritualized norms of the discipline purport to represent a center, a model—the founder, to some extent mythical (even to this day—think of the tales circulated of Darwin, Einstein, Edison, Tesla and all the other scientific founders), of the discipline. The originator of value resents not just the failure on the part of his fellows to recognize value through the veil of tradition, but the center itself for falsifying value, reducing it to conformity to precedents. It is this resentment, pervasive through the social order wherever we have disciplines, which means wherever the possibility of a retrieval of the originary scene is a culturally inscribed possibility, which is to say under any civilized order, that above all requires mediation.\n\nSovereigns need both continuity and talent in and from their institutions. As soon as the law of vendetta is suppressed, value can show itself in fields other than military, and the expression of non-militaristic forms of value are therefore direct reflections of the sovereignty that made them possible. Such values operate on a market with the sovereign as ultimate consumer, but more consumption, a wider circulation of value, redounds to the sovereign. So, you no longer need to be a good man to be a good blacksmith, because you need to be a good subject. The circulation of values will not be restricted to a single realm, and all disciplines will take on a transnational character—as much because of the interactions amongst sovereigns as the nature of disciplines.\n\n(The suppression of the vendetta on one territory will lead surrounding Big Men to emulate the practice, and they will eventually succeed—or be incorporated into an empire, in which disciplines are trans-communal and trans-ethnic, if not exactly transnational.) At the higher ends of the disciplines there will always be complex loyalties, with loyalty to the discipline ultimately transcending loyalty to the sovereign in some cases. The sovereign can permit such cases, because even that is a sign of sovereign supremacy. In fact, it is precisely the most devoted, value obsessed, “skunky,” wild of the scientists who have the most interest in secure central power, because such an individual has abjured all interest in self-defense (he won’t sacrifice his intellectual conscience for friendships, money or power) and is therefore completely at the mercy of a sovereign who can tip the scales in favor of value rather than ethics when called for.\n\nThe originary inquirer, meanwhile, the “skunkworker,” is always at odds with or at least a bit askew of, standardization, or what we can call the “grid,” because the grid imposes constraints external to the discipline—but originary inquiry always issues in a range of possible “griddings.”\n\nStandardization, in that case, is the sovereign leveraging value for the consolidation of institutions and promoting the consolidation of institutions for the glory of the sovereign. The Manhattan Project, NASA, gathering medical researchers to find a cure or vaccine—all this involves the leveraging of value. It’s not something the individual inquirer (which takes an existing field and its materials for granted, in part as a foil to deconstruct) would do on his own, and most will resist the regimentation required to harness many intellects to the solution of a single problem. Skunkworks will always be established within such regimes.\n\nThe results of such leveraging become the legally enforced standards, including of course, feats in administration and engineering (post offices, currency, highways, education systems, etc.) as well as the more directly scientific fields, like medicine, electronics, genetics, etc. A secure sovereign will be known by his maintenance of a balance between ethics and value, continuity and talent, throughout the social order. That means local forms of conformation comprising communal knowledge collected in more informal and embedded disciplinary spaces will be a constraint on more formalized and centralized disciplinary forms.\n\nUnsecured power, meanwhile, will be known by disequilibria between the two—putting real or purported geniuses directly in charge of large scale projects, or persecuting and isolating the heterodox thinkers in the name of some orthodoxy—because keeping the relationship unsettled is the best way of benefiting from high-low alliances against the middle. The middle is the disciplinary space resting upon the oscillation between value and ethics, which means the reciprocal respect of the man of talent and the organization man. Achieving such reciprocity means imagining the mode of sovereignty capable of adjudicating and enforcing it, and imagining such a mode of sovereignty translates into figuring out ways of connecting the nation through a highway system without demolishing large chunks of perfectly good neighborhoods, filled with irreplaceable traditions, a wealth of tacit knowledge, and untapped sources of value. The more secure the sovereign, the more secure the little sovereigns and disciplines at each point in the hierarchy."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereignty-heisenbergian-and-godelian",
      "title": "Sovereignty Heisenbergian and Godelian",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The pride of the liberal social order is the “rule of law,” or rule by “laws, not men.” How laws can rule without men would be hard to explain. Needless to say, every law is enforced (or left unenforced) by someone. What the “rule of law” really means is that power has no final destination. For every person who can enforce the laws with regards to others, there’s someone who can enforce the law upon him. So, insofar as you need to be “above the law,” a man not a law, in order to enforce it, there is always the possibility that someone will come along and be above you. And you do need to be above the law in order to enforce it, because it can never be wholly inscribed in the law that it needs to applied this way, here and now, to his person—that decision is always someone’s prerogative.\n\nCarl Schmitt defined the sovereign as he who decides on the exception, but that may be more of a definition of how sovereignty is surfaced in a liberal order. Under absolutism, with all power concentrated in a single ruler, and all law a manifestation of the ruler’s will, there can’t really be any exceptions. An exception is when a general rule has to be suspended in a particular instance in order to preserve the rule itself. The ruler’s will can’t be suspended in order to preserve the ruler’s will. But there are exceptions all the time in even the most liberal order, as Colm Gillis shows rather systematically in his The Terrible Beauty of Dictatorship .\n\nThe liberal ideal is to arrange things so that we always know which enforcer of the law in one instance will be subject to another enforcer of the law in another instance. Even more, the ideal is to make this knowledge so thoroughly inscribed in the social order that every decision is made in such a way that the transition from decision to review of the decision is so seamless that the review is already built into the decision, which means that there is really no decision. But precisely for this reason the liberal order is a haphazard array of unaccountable decisions, of little dictatorships and exceptions—each site of possible review of decisions is a target of the various interests likely to be affected by those decisions, which means that the more liberalism tries to make the review process airtight the more embroiled in struggle the recesses wherein the review procedures are worked out become.\n\nThe law is a means of settling disputes. The purpose of developing a body of law, rather than just assigning judges to preside over every conflict according to their own personal judgment, is to make the resolution of disputes an orderly, reliable, rational, predictable process. Only in this way can it supplant the vendetta as the primary way of settling disputes—and this transcendence of the vendetta is what marks the distinction between the tribal Big Man and sovereignty proper. The very thing for which the head of one family would have had to have ordered a member of his clan to wreak vengeance upon the member of another clan must now be something recognized by the law and liable to receive punishment sufficiently “equivalent” to the vengeance that would have otherwise have been exacted.\n\nEven more, the law should not intervene beyond the level of dispute that threatens social peace (the revival of the vendetta system)—all other conflicts should be left to lower level mediation, for which a well-functioning legal system, kept within its bounds, can serve as an intellectual and ethical model. Within such a system, there must be a highest judge, a court of final appeal, and that highest judge is the sovereign, who is both the origin and destination of the law. But that means the sovereign cannot be himself subject to the law—otherwise, there would be an even higher appeal. Liberalism is utopian because it wants to transform the law from a means of settling disputes to a means of abolishing them.\n\nLaw has gradually become a means of pre-empting possible disputes, and ordering institutions so that disputes are impossible, even unthinkable, which also means a way of identifying a priori the potential sources of disputes and neutralizing them by rendering them non-persons. This is really the telos of victimary thinking, political correctness, international human rights law, and transnationalism: to identify in advance the very dispositions that undermine equal treatment under the law so those dispositions can be contained (in this way, as I argued in a previous post, all these forms of liberalism converge with the therapeutic).\n\nThe starting point in this entire process is the struggle to subject the king to the law. Once one asserts a court of appeal that can adjudicate between the king and his subjects, one is off on an endless quest to find, define, justify and operationalize that adjudicator. For a long time it was such phantasms as the “will of the people,” “consent,” and “natural law”; the “rule of law” is a weaker and more bizarre version of the same idea, insofar as the law can be imagined to be the opposite of arbitrary force. Now, the arbiter is something like John Rawls’s “least well off,” which unsurprisingly leads to a scramble amongst prospective victims to be acknowledged the “least.”\n\nBut it must be said, in accord with Bertrand de Jouvenel’s study of political history in On Power , that it was the European monarchs themselves who started this process by using the law to make all their subjects equal in relation to the sovereign in order to undermine and assimilate the diverse layers and sites of social power. We can’t say now whether there might have been another solution to the power imbalances and struggles between king, nobility and Church. Once the memory of the suppression of the vendetta (the foundational moment of sovereignty) fades, the law starts to evolve into an internally consistent, self-referential system managed administratively rather than as participation in a hierarchal system of reciprocities.\n\nThe simplest way to do that is to reduce all individuals to equal units, which can be treated in an impersonal manner consistent with the scientific method. Once you have a system that purports to run itself, it’s only a matter of time before enough people realize the king is just one more, not particularly indispensable, unit within the system.\n\nBy making the relation to the law central to sovereignty, we can return to the question of “who rules”? The problem posed by formalist neo-reactionary theory is the discrepancy between actual power and formal power: the power exercised by, say, the media, goes unrecognized in a political theory that refuses to look past the obfuscations of the public/private, state/civil society distinction. For the formalist (who might also be called the realist), all major institutions are sites of social power, regardless of how they exercise it. Once we say this, though, how do we recognize these ordinarily unrecognized or under-recognized sites of power?\n\nAbsolutist theory adds a new dimension to the problem: we assume that sovereignty is always preserved, which is to say always in some one’s hands. Moldbug at various points located sovereignty in such entities as “Harvard” and even “the narrative.” Identifying Harvard as a crucial and usually neglected source of power is obviously critical and revelatory, and, if not the “narrative” itself, whoever drives it at a particular moment, must also be brought into focus as a political agent. Still, we want to speak less loosely about sovereignty. The sovereign must be an agency that acts through the law, that enforces or suspends judgments.\n\nAll non-sovereign agencies act under the aegis of, with the permission or remission of, the sovereign. This includes all sites of social power, whether we are speaking of the CIA, the Ford Foundation, or Stanford, however influential they may be—that is, however many institutional transformations we can trace back to their doings. The sovereign is capable of allowing such institutions to act without his knowledge and contrary to his expressed intentions, in which case the preservation of sovereignty compels us to assume an awareness that such activities will serve the sovereign will, perhaps all the more for not being explicitly willed.\n\nLet’s test this assumption. Let’s say an American president embarks upon an unanticipated project (a war, or some large-scale domestic transformation) that leads to a rapid and coordinated evaporation of support: his party, his donors and fundraisers, the Congress, the media, all turn against him, and carry out a campaign of vilification and de-legitimation. Several possibilities follow. The president is removed from power, either via resignation or impeachment. The president stays in power, but is paralyzed, and is incapable of carrying out his project, but may have some room to maneuver within the confines of the counter-power exercised by the sites of power he has aroused.\n\nThe president discovers or creates new sources of power that enable him to disable his opposition and carry on as intended—in which case the project might turn out to be even more consequential than was originally planned. If we focus on the first two possibilities, it is very hard to say that the president is genuinely sovereign—or, in fact, that he, or any president, ever genuinely was. After all, if the constraints of presidential activity are external, then is it not those setting the constraints who are sovereign? But this leads us on an endless pin the tail on the sovereign quest, and we’ll be proceeding, as in the children’s game, blindfolded.\n\nSo, if we are to identify the sovereign within the system of law and judgment, we must assume the possibility of the third alternative. Those other sources of power, or their “elements,” must always already be there, distributed in the social order. This particular president might not succeed in harvesting and concentrating them, and be replaced by a different sovereign. In that case, he lost, surrendered or transferred his sovereignty. But he was still sovereign until he was replaced, and the new sovereign meets the same conditions of sovereignty. This analysis is complicated by the fact that, in the American system I am using for an example, the president is not, in fact, sovereign, as sovereignty is distributed among the branches of government and even, at least formally, between the federal and state governments (not to mention the limitations on sovereignty imposed by the periodical replacement of the sovereign via elections).\n\nBut as the Commander-in-Chief and chief law enforcement officer, the president is really the only official in the government whose sovereignty we could seriously analyze—the fact that defending his sovereignty in the situation we are imagining might require the president to act outside of the terms of the constitutional system tells us much about the system but nothing about sovereignty itself.\n\nNow, to get to the somewhat tongue-in-cheek title of this post. Godel’s famous incompleteness theorem shows that any internally consistent formal system depends upon the truth of statements that cannot be proven within the system. That is precisely what we have here in our absolutist ontology: sovereignty is “in” the system, in those reserves of social power that are both there and the only thing that really makes the system a system but only there insofar as the principal not included in or defined by the system—the sovereign—“redeems” them. Meanwhile, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle entails that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be known simultaneously: you can know how quickly it is accelerating or where it is but not both.\n\nWhat we do have is knowledge of a probabilistic distribution of particles, rather than of the location and movement of any single one of them. In our case, you can see who has sovereignty or you can see all the vectors of influence that detract from the appearance of sovereign power, but you can’t observe both simultaneously. The more you look at the media, foundations, universities, and so on, the more shriveled and fraudulent the sovereign power looks; the more you look at the inherited, formally recognized and tacitly obeyed elements of sovereign power, the easier it seems to scatter all those external powers to the winds.\n\nThis oscillation between the two observations leads us to a probabilistic distribution of sovereignty: liberal sovereignty, the array of dictatorships from top to bottom that restrains the centrifugal motion of liberalism, always comes with an expiration date. From moment to moment our assessment of the temporality of liberal power must be revised. “Unsecure” power is power with a short time horizon. We can work to lengthen the time horizon of liberal sovereignty, to articulate accountability with power and institute reciprocal hierarchal relations, and we can be aware that the more successful we are the more we are removing the modifier “liberal” from “sovereignty.”\n\nOur observations of sovereignty thereby transform it—what is paradoxical, though, is that the way to participate in the securing of sovereignty is to oscillate, intellectually, more fluidly and rapidly between moored sovereign and remissively unmoored social powers. To identify the disruptive, counter-sovereign dynamic of the unmoored powers is to construct, piece by piece, the project of restoring sovereignty."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereign-commands-anarchistic-demands-gablog",
      "title": "Sovereign Commands, Anarchistic Demands",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Universalisms and egalitarianisms are poisons injected into the social bloodstream. They are declarations of war upon anything “particular” and any form of (real or perceived) inequality. But all communities and institutions have something particular about them, as well as some form of hierarchy, so universalisms and egalitarianisms are declarations of war on whatever is at home in what is. This is already very well known on the post-Dark Enlightenment right—it’s the de Jouvenelian/Moldbuggian high-low alliance against the middle. Still, it’s hard to get used to seeing what have become omnipresent universalistic and egalitarian claims as, in fact, thuggish threats.\n\nNor have we finished explaining how the poison gets injected in the first place—what immune deficiency does it exploit? It’s clear enough that the only resentments against existing institutions that can be addressed in such a way as to preserve and improve rather than destroy those institutions are those interested in clarifying the structure of command and adequacy of the rules to the institution’s function. If your complaint is that someone else has been treated better than you or you have been overlooked because of qualities irrelevant to the institution, you may be right but you’re still a saboteur who should be expelled; if, on the other hand, you identify some way in which the current network of rules and authority structure leaves the institution vulnerable to sabotage, or just inefficiencies, you are actually contributing something (if “discrimination” is actually a problem, that’s kind of problem it is, anyway).\n\nThose in charge of institutions should and ultimately do know this—it is the sovereign himself who generally overrides this knowledge precisely because well run institutions and orderly communities present, on occasion, obstacles to some project the sovereign has in mind. The sovereign, who should have no other concern than to protect and mediate between institutions and communities, would at times rather take a short-cut rather than engage in respectful consultation with representatives of the realm. And, of course, it will sometimes be the case that those representatives will sometimes place local and short-term concerns over the good of the whole, making that short-cut extremely tempting.\n\nStill, none of this rather predictable and routine dysfunction would be revolutionary without the ideas that frame these conflicts as zero-sum struggles. The viral nature of universalist and egalitarian ideologies needs to be taken almost literally and very seriously—these are self-replicating memes that recode existing intellectual frameworks from within. Any member of modern society will find they provide the default form for any discontent or misfortune, which means that one must be (regularly) inoculated against them. I will begin the work of vaccine production by following up on my previous post, which addressed the viral nature of metaphysical discourse.\n\nI worked with Eric Gans’s argument that metaphysics is a belief that the declarative sentence is the primary linguistic form—as I suggested, this leads to the assumption that language is essentially a mode of information transmission, rather than a means of conflict reduction, which further means that language is a means of control through asymmetrical information flows. I would now strengthen that claim as follows: metaphysics is the attempt to subordinate other elementary linguistic forms to the declarative, which means to eliminate them as independent forms. Here, I want to focus on the imperative form in particular—metaphysics, and all its permutations, is imperative-phobic.\n\nThe metaphysical ideal is that all decisions be made through disinterested exchange of concepts aimed at discovering the truth—the “truth” being what all would believe if provided the proper view of things (all the “relevant” facts, seen in their relations and “correct” proportions). This is the model of the declarative sentence. If A is B (in some respect) and B is lC (in that respect) then A is C (in that respect). There’s no reason we can’t follow that approach and organize the world into a totality of objects with various shared properties on as many different axes as we need. This is a model of ethics as well as cognition—ethical decisions are those based on uncoerced agreement, on a free flow of information, minimizing power asymmetries and manipulation.\n\nThe best-known exponent of this version of metaphysics is the German social democratic philosopher Jurgen Habermas. It’s easy to see why imperatives must be taken out of the equation: if it is ethical to command, and to obey commands, the system collapses, and people who know how to use power can do without those who know how use information—or, at least, can keep the latter in their place. An apparent, and potentially major, exception to this rule actually confirms it: Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which seems to place the imperative at the center of moral thought actually treats the imperative (which, unlike any real imperative, doesn’t come from anyone) as one commanding that action be modeled on logical consistency—act as though your action will be a universal law.\n\nAll of modern thought has busied itself on extracting imperatives from social life by ensuring that every decision be labeled as a mere implementation of, first, abstract, objective laws representing universal rights and, then, social scientific knowledge informing the formulation and application of those laws. The idea is that no one should ever actually make a decision—rather, what still appear to be decisions are really nothing more than the effluvia of increasingly free and rational beings with ever greater knowledge of physical, social, psychological and biological nature discoursing with each other over—well, over what, exactly? The best way to remove yet more of the irrational, i.e., more of the imperative, from human interactions.\n\nThis metaphysical ideal is actually an anarchistic ontology, because it presupposes that, as language users (involved in the exchange of declarative sentences), we are all ultimately plugged into the emergent rationality that results from the discovery that we can refine and standardize our declarative sentences so as to orient them toward the truth (i.e., logic and the dismemberment of reality into discrete parts). Anything that interferes with ascension into the rational sphere can be treated as a dysfunction or malfunction to be eliminated by the very rational means being developed, but, otherwise, all human beings are prepared, as human beings, to enter the free discursive marketplace.\n\nBut this requires continuing to roll back the threshold of imperative cultural sites (that’s how you treat dys- and malfunction, which can be explained in terms of “compulsions” to be discursively exposed as counter-productive). You can think of it as a program: find all imperatives and convert them into declaratives. Of course, programming is itself imperative—a series of instructions compressed in an algorithm. The programming comes from the declarative sentence, or, more precisely, its most effective and dedicated users, who naturally want other linguistic forms to be converted to their favored one. And, as imperative sites of culture are extirpated, declarative discourse itself becomes increasingly imperious, a system of disguised commands.\n\nThink of how pervasive terms like “inevitable,” “irreversible,” “inexorable,” “historically necessary,” etc., have become. These are all essentially commands to comply with this or that logic of history, and they always come with an implicit “or else.” That’s the thuggish steamrollery of universalism. Meanwhile, the imperative to be declarative veers off in another direction, since untethered reason is indistinguishable from insanity, as its most devoted adherents must insist that all merely normative structures be tested, and there is no way of doing that without violating them—thereby creating whole new classes of dysfunction.\n\nImperatives can be standardized as well, of course, but only to a certain extent, because imperatives are obeyed because they come from a center which cannot itself be reduced to an extrinsic logic. There are all kinds of imperatives and not all of them involve obedience to a superior (pleading, for example, is done in imperative form, as is prayer), and the declarative is interested in processing them all, because they all involve some at least momentary asymmetry which they thereby confirm—even the one who pleads for mercy invokes the power of some divine or moral model that the addressee considers greater than himself.\n\nWhether you obey the king or some take-charge guy who arrived first on the scene and seems to know what he is doing, command and obedience is always situational and irreducible. All this is intolerable to a declarative, informational culture because centers can’t be reduced to logic, which doesn’t make them illogical—it means they come before any logic, because we all have to be looking at the same thing, attending from some things to other things, in order to have shared objects to reason about. Imperatives are deeply entrenched in any human culture, and even eliminating one set (say, by killing off all the people authorized to issue commands in the social structure you want to dominate) just generates a new one.\n\nOur most fundamental orientation to the world is one of what we could call an “imperative exchange,” best represented by prayer: I will do what you (or, really “Thou”) instruct me, and Thou will in turn… well, the instructions we give in trying to strike a deal with God vary quite a bit, but even the atheists among us think in terms of following rule (imperative) X so that others will follow rule (imperative) Y. Hence the difficulty of completely rooting out from even the most “rational” mind the sense of some moral order in the world.\n\nDeclaratives essentially demystify these little imperative exchanges we live by, and it’s good that they do because often the imperative exchanges break down or are fantasized in the first place. But even that involves following an imperative: keep testing those imperative exchanges. I’m certainly not making an argument against the fullest, freest, and richest development of declarative possibilities. Trying to target and eliminate all the imperatives that seed our speaking and thinking (think of all those “musts” and “have to’s”—disguised imperatives all) can be an extremely liberating experiment. But one is not thereby eliminating imperatives—one is listening for other imperatives, both newer and older.\n\nThe origin of declaratives (I’ll mention again my debt to Eric Gans) is in the revelation to an interlocutor that the object demanded is not available—“reality” (the declarative “constructs” an independent reality) cancels the imperative. But the reference to reality implies an imperative to cease prosecuting the demand—in fact, if the object is unavailable, that must be because it is subject to an even higher command, which we ourselves must heed. We recover that originary imperative when we discipline ourselves to obey less automatically to a particular imperative. The testing of imperatives is responsible in this way, which is why the only critique that can be trusted is from someone engaged in the enterprise.\n\nOf course, the saboteurs of the institution know that so it is precisely such critics that they seek to compromise, so as to convert them into conduits of an external, universalistic critique. There is no formula or procedure than can protect against this—indeed, formulas and procedures weaken the institution by undermining the chain of command. They are declarative solutions to imperative problems. The only solution is the one I propose below but, in the end, people have to do their duty and that can never be guaranteed in advance.\n\nNow, as we all know, the left issues imperatives constantly, but they do so primarily when addressing what they see or present as established power, i.e., the issuer of commands. When the left exercises power, it does so primarily by setting various processes in motion—even the concentration camps and Gulags of the communists are essentially hygienic. But when dealing with those who command, the left demands. Linguistically speaking, this is a very good way to draw political lines: the right looks for chains of command , and the individual finds his place within than chain; the left identifies a chain of command, and makes demands so as to compromise it.\n\nAbsolutism is just the insistence on clarifying to the degree possible the chain of command: a good order is one which everyone knows who commands and who obeys. A good order for leftists is when a barrage of demands confuses the chains of command, because then more demands can be made more effective. But all of this is possible—the constant demands are rendered legitimate—because the imperative is considered by the left a fundamentally illegitimate linguistic-political form, even if it must be answered in kind (with another imperative). However much leftists seem driven by emotion, they always operate in accord with propositions grounded in a universalistic, i.e., anarchistic anthropology: all human beings are equal therefor this form of command and this form of command and this form of command… must be destroyed.\n\nThe “middle” against which the high-low alliance is mobilized is wherever there remains a clear chain of command. Self-immunization against the left means protecting chains of command against demands derived from unconstrained declarative orders. Institutions and communities ultimately have an ostensive basis—some shared object of worship, love or interest—but the chain of command follows directly from the desire to preserve and strengthen that shared attention. The purpose of education is not to have teachers command students, but the purpose of education will suggest some such hierarchy, and attacking the teachers’ authority regarding the students will always be a good way at subverting the purposes of education.\n\nDeclarative discourse—logic, reason, expert opinions, empirical studies, etc.—are welcome if they aim at reducing uncertainty in the institutional order and hierarchy and destructive if they treat that order and hierarchy as just another variable. In responding to demands for racial equality the middle refers to the command structures of community and nation, and insists that any reforms strengthen those command structures; in response to demands for sexual equality, the middle refers to the command structures of the monogamous marriage and the family and insists these not be impaired. Resistance to the barrage of demands is only possible if you can be loyal to the command structure, even a fraying or compromised one—in that case, one’s loyalty includes repairing and restoring the structure, by issuing, asking for, and even inferring more consistent commands.\n\nWithout insisting that only within an existing command structure can new discourses be entertained, there will be no defense to the charge that the institution fails to meet the standard set by some discourse that can treat the imperative order as merely hypothetical. There will be no way of weathering viral storms.\n\nStill, simply insisting is not enough, since the declarative culture of a command structure, as a declarative culture, is vulnerable to hacking by informational processes. It must be met on declarative ground, and that ground is the disguised imperative culture of informational society. In whose name are all these demands being made? The people, the government, the constitution, the arc of history, equality, rights, freedom—there’s no command structure corresponding to any of these concepts. There are plenty of command structures on the left, but they don’t look anything like one imagines an army fighting for those concepts would look like.\n\nWhat, exactly, does George Soros want? I think “he wants to keep dismantling command structures” is the best available answer. Why? Because that corresponds to the needs of his command structure. Iterating and performing this intrinsic circularity and virality of anarchist discourse is the only productive mode of engagement with it—their own command structure exists only to dismantle other command structures and must therefore in the end be self-dismantling. Simply asking the anarchist to clarify her chain of command sets this process in motion, perhaps especially if she denies she has one. But it’s not even necessary to ask—the self-dismantling is inscribed in anarchist ontology, as all their foundational propositional claims about equality, freedom, individuality and hence of oppression, domination, and hypocrisy can only refer back to themselves and each other.\n\nTherefore, they can only reproduce if they infect the command structure and the way to prevent that is to infect them with their own self-dismantling properties by referring to them always and only by their position in their own command structure. The proper response, for example, to any media inquiry aimed at chipping away at one’s command structure is simply to ask who told them to ask that question—who would fire them if they didn’t ask it, or asked another? And, of course, to be ready to tell them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "virality-and-sovereignty",
      "title": "Virality and Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans has defined metaphysics, historically the dominant mode of Western thought, as the belief that the declarative sentence is the primary form of language. In other words, metaphysics sees propositions, which can be true or false, as the basic form of language. This must be wrong, because whe never human beings began using language (and therefore became human beings), they could not have started with subject-predicate relationships (how would anyone have known what that was?). Rather, as Gans has shown, the first sign must have been an ostensive sign, designating a desired object and signifying the community’s deferral of appropriation of that object. From the ostensive sign we can trace the emergence of the imperative, the interrogative, and finally the declarative, as Gans demonstrates in his The Origin of Language .\n\nTo see the declarative sentence as the principal linguistic form means, first, that the concepts represented by the words one uses exist in a higher reality, a realm of ideas—so, I can call someone a “good man” because the ideas “good” and “man” already pre-exist their expression in language. Somehow we just discover or have revealed to us their meaning. If you start with the declarative sentence, there’s no other way to explain why words mean anything at all, unless you want to say that we all agreed upon a meaning for “good,” but in that case, in what language did we arrive at that agreement? Second, it means all uses of language can be (as any proposition can be) determined to be either true or false even though, clearly, all kinds of very fundamental uses of language (greetings, promises, commands and demands, exclamations of joy or sorrow) are off the true-false axis (even if they can be wrenched back onto it, at great cost to linguistic and cultural understanding). Third, this means the world is most fundamentally a source of information, or series of “bits,” to be processed through the binary of truth/falsehood—even if this last consequence of metaphysics does not fully unfold until modern positivism.\n\nIn sum, the effect of metaphysics is to efface language by, paradoxically, dividing the world into everything that is language from everything that is not language. If all language does is accurately reflect the (non-linguistic) reality outside of it, then, like a good window or mirror (whichever metaphorical path we wish to take), you don’t notice it when it is working. The origin and purpose of metaphysics are thoroughly political—metaphysics emerged in Ancient Greece, with the emergence of the creation of relations between rulers and ruled and the suppression of the sacrificial rites of more primitive communities.\n\nThe replacement of the ostensive gesture with the declarative sentence as the primary linguistic form is the original “Enlightenment”—rather than the identification of a victim (human or animal) to sacrifice, metaphysics proposes the arrival at the true meaning of words as a basis for community. At the same time, metaphysics is the first (admittedly abortive) political proceduralism, trying to regulate the unstable regimes of the ancient city-states (especially the democracy-oligarchy cycles of states like Athens) by making adherence to truth and reason a basis for legitimacy.\n\nSocrates and Plato did what they thought they had to in order to maintain some possibility of a just order in decadent times; our purpose today can only be to understand the power, limits and consequences of the intellectual devices they invented. Modern philosophy has essentially been one attempt after another to “dismantle” metaphysics, with Jacques Derrida finally deciding that metaphysics can only be “deconstructed,” which means we can never be free of it once and for all, so deeply is it embedded in our language, but we can at least know that. Originary thinking accomplishes the task, though, and without all the histrionics of thinkers like Heidegger and Derrida, by simply recognizing that the true meaning of declarative sentences lies in their derivation from imperatives and, ultimately ostensives, the purpose of which is to defer community-threatening violence.\n\nWe use declarative sentences and the discourses built out of them to direct attention to a new domain, which is to say, to form disciplinary spaces in which we can reciprocally assure each other we are seeing more or less the same thing in more or less the same way. Then we can talk about things rather than fight over them.\n\nThe critique of metaphysics carried out by Derrida and other post-metaphysical thinkers (including writers—for example, the notion that language is a virus has been most forcefully stated and enacted by William S. Burroughs) is valuable, though, because it showed that metaphysics generated the very contagion it sought to contain. The whole purpose of drawing a clear line between language and non-language is to prevent the ostensive and imperative signs, which make human language more of an extension of the objects it engages with, from governing human communities and keeping us addicted to the violence of sacrifice.\n\nBut as soon as we use this clearing out of “reality” from the supernatural and magical to cast our rational gaze over it we start “reading” reality as a language, or a proliferation of languages. Already in the ancient world Lucretius advanced the analogy between the division of language into meaningful sounds by the letters of the alphabet and the division of the material world into infinitesimal atoms. As modernity has progressed, the reading of the material world in terms of language, stated bluntly already by Galileo, referring to the language of mathematics, has become pervasive—everything, from genes to neurons to human decision making to the ever receding physical structure of the universe, is “coded” as “information.”\n\nWhat has been coded must have a coder, which means the belief in an informational universe is essentially theological; and whatever has been coded can be recoded and, moreover, can never be ascertained not to have been recoded, introducing the possibility of proliferating powers which remain hidden by the very vehicle through which they exercise power (if you can recode some part of reality, you can write any awareness of yourself out of the code). This intellectual frame is the form of modern forms of political paranoia, of which very few are free, since modern political paranoia is virtually co-extensive with modern political thought, and which has its “objective correlative” in the severely unstable, divided power of the liberal order. The paranoia, then, is not exactly out of place, because the possibility of recoding (the genes, the psyche, the brain, gender identify, the social order, etc.) encourages new trials of power, but it is just about always misplaced, because the nature of divided power is to have no clear location.\n\nNow, since we have to worship something, there are worse things to worship than language, but not in its declarative form, which is, paradoxically, the most viral form language takes: in the end you see nothing but algorithms, all the time, which encourages the most extravagant fantasies of transhuman transformation mega-state manipulation. It’s a good way to end up thinking that God must be an evil genius. But, consider (another insight of Derrida’s) that what trips up assertions of the clear truth (the “metaphysics of presence”) is the reliance of language upon iteration. To see the truth as a singular correspondence between sign and reality is to suppress the fact of iteration—that signs only have meaning because they can be repeated, which means any use is first of all a repetition and not a direct relation to reality. By projecting codes onto reality, metaphysics ends up generating viral, which is to say uncontrolled and metastasizing, models of reality, rampant iteration mocking unequivocal assertions of a readily packaged reality.\n\nBut the necessary iteration of the sign can be seen not as a parasitic intrusion, but a welcoming of the return of the sign, and its peace giving powers. There is no higher reality that we grasp by freeing our minds of emotions and imagination; there are disciplinary spaces, in which we all attend to the same articulations of signs with forms of reality made intelligible through signification. Philosophy itself is one such disciplinary space, and when someone engages in philosophy today, he participates in the very space founded by Plato in his Academy around 2500 years ago. Disciplinary spaces do “elevate” us above our desires and resentments—in order to participate, you need to be willing and able to see things the way others do, which means suspending the way you would prefer things be seen.\n\nBut there are lots of disciplinary spaces, and there is no a priori reason for seeing any one of them as the “realest.” The transcendence of the sacrificial egalitarian primitive community implicit in the spread of disciplinary spaces indicates the emergence of an additional layer of protection against violence, which is to say sovereignty; and the sovereignty modeled on the disciplines would be one as absolute as the disciplines themselves, which concern themselves solely with devotion to their respective centers of attention (try to imagine a democratic or liberal scientific discipline, or even common workplace).If any conscientious worker in any field were to think honestly about the best way to govern a community, and to use what he knows best as a model, he would not advocate for a democratic or liberal order.\n\nSo, the sovereign disciplines and the discipline of sovereignty counter viral iteration with a restorative iteration. Think about how difficult it is to convince someone with diametrically opposing views of the reasonableness, let alone truth, of your position. It’s impossible because political antagonists occupy different regimes of truth, different realities—their “facts” are not your “facts,” their “causality” and “reasoning” is not yours. You inhabit different disciplinary spaces, and can only talk past, and ultimately insult, one another. We can see this mini-tragi-comedy playing itself in the comment section of any political blog.\n\nPeople are not ‘convinced,’ unless they already really agree with you; people are converted, though, which is an entirely different matter. The most effective way of converting people is by repeating their own discourse, often, and in varied contexts—through exaggeration, through parody, by taking it to its logical conclusion, by acting out the roles it ascribes to various “characters” in its narratives, by treating its metaphors literally, by separating it from its tacit social conditions, by spinning off unanticipated examples. In a sense, one participates in and precipitates its virality. A funny thing happens when you deliberately repeat something over and over—it starts to become meaningless, and the fact that it is only held together by the common desire for a victim becomes evident (genuine disciplinary spaces, held together by rapt attention rather than violation, are only fortified by iteration—that’s how we can tell the difference between the two).\n\nBut the fact of iteration itself—that we can follow the discourse through all these variations—creates a new disciplinary space, one organized around a shared devotion to the signifying order. This new disciplinary space entails a new relation to reality, in which reality is filled with meaning—the meaning of the disciplinary spaces themselves articulated through the discourses they iterate, generate and make peace amongst. And this disciplinary space imagines a sovereign order in which conversions can take place all the time, in which viral iteration can become restorative—and that sovereign order is one that unifies the power whose division instigates viral metaphysics in the first place.\n\nThe iterative inquiry into all those viral possibilities is the way of imagining the sovereignty that would eliminate them. Absolutist ontology, that is, inhabits the imaginary fueling the desperate viral discourses of liberal ontology. While Sylvia Plath may not have been right that “every woman loves a fascist,” the anarchist thinker or artist most certainly does want a world ordered so that she can appear as sheer sign, a gesture we can all be transformed through the recognition of, without violent consequence. The nihilism of much modern art and modern thought is best understood as a protest bemoaning the absence of such a world. Only an absolutist order can provide it. (Herein lies the basis of an absolutist “cultural studies.”)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutism-and-history-gablog",
      "title": "Absolutism and History",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Modern history begins with the first elites to use the high-low vs. the middle logic first deployed by the king to question the legitimacy of the monarchy itself. The absolutist monarch consolidated power by reducing all subjects to equidistance from his own central power; the next, fairly obvious, step is to ask why we need the king to establish this equidistance from the center. Wouldn’t it be better to have a center actually chosen on the terms of, and thereby confirming, the a priori (and not merely bestowed) equidistance of all subjects from the center? This step, which introduces the public-private, state-citizen distinction (and all the others that follow, such as economics-politics, culture-religion, impartial-partisan, etc.) is also the beginning of the dissimulation of power.\n\nTo be a private entity is to be officially bereft of any formal power, and hence free of responsibility for the power one exercises. We must see things this way if we see individuals as the basic units of society, in which case all private power is vaguely illegitimate while only being liable to criticism in terms of improper access to and use of state power—which is easier to discover or construct, the more powerful the actor (a major exception that proves the rule here is anti-discrimination law, which criminalizes unapproved of forms of association—but which has set in motion the implosion of the private-public distinction itself, because in the end there is no area of life where we don’t “discriminate.”\n\nFor example, could anyone provide, in terms of anti-discrimination law, a convincing reason why marriage certificates shouldn’t only be granted to those who marry “others,” however defined?). In this way we all join in the modernizing project of trying to raze all “cabals” to the ground so as to release the free, self-determining, powerless and power-free individuals somehow enchained within them. Prior to this modern project of concealing and dissimulating power, though, the monarchies of Europe had sabotaged themselves by diluting power by entitling individuals who benefited the throne, rather than those who had proven themselves worthy of what should have remained hard won and rarely granted privileges.\n\nSo, re-starting the absolutist project means naming powers properly. This imperative unites our historical accounts, our analyses of contemporary politics, our ongoing political projects and a summative ontology and ethics of sovereignty. An absolutist history identifies the dilution and then dissimulation of names for power, along with seeking out the actions and accounts of those who, in the midst of the corruption of names, sought to reattach them to their proper objects—those people are our precursors and models, our “fathers” you might say. Political analysis involves tracing the relations between formal, political, powers, and informal, secondary and therefore unnamed and dissimulated powers.\n\nThis is complicated because informal powers preserve their power by being informal. We might say, in good formalist/realist fashion, that the New York Times was the press agency of the Obama Administration, and we would be largely right—but if the New York Times admitted that that was what it was, much less if the Obama Administration had officially delegated such duties to them, they would have been completely unable to fulfill them, and hence disempowered. Similarly, if the Ford Foundation stopped sponsoring activist groups, funding academic organizations, various legal defense organizations, think tanks writing up reports on the future of democracy, etc., and called a news conference in which its leadership openly “owned” its power and declared its intention to start exercising it openly, it would lose all of that power.\n\nSo, we must name the New York Times and the Ford Foundation as delegated powers (looking to the laws and political protection that enable their functioning) that can only exercise their powers (and can only use those powers to exploit and subvert the sovereign that delegated them) as delegated powers dissimulated as informal. The ultimate purpose of the analysis is to show how these delegated powers muddy the chain of command constitutive of sovereignty and, here as well, identify the kinds of actions and inactions that could help clarify the chain of command.\n\nBut what most interests me here is the final question, that of the ethics and ontology of absolutism, which can now be seamlessly integrated into history, contemporary analysis and political projects. The starting point of this post was the inaugural post of the post- Reactionary Future blog Neoabsolutism , entitled Neoabsolutism as a Contender for the Title of the Fourth Political Theory . The post is a review of Dugin’s book, in which Dugin distinguishes between the “subjects” of the main three political theories of modernity: the liberal “individual” subject, the communist “class” subject, and the fascist/Nazi nation/race subject.\n\nIt’s not clear whether Dugin is proposing a new subject for his “fourth political theory,” and if so who it would be, but what is important here is the question of whether neoabsolutism is proposing a new political subject as part of its contention for the fourth political theory, and if so what would that be. After some give and take on our reddit page , I concluded that neoabsolutism (I still prefer “absolutism,” being somewhat allergic to “neos”) is a radical break from modern political theories insofar as, among other things, it eschews the nomination of a historical subject. The political subjects of the other theories are all constituted by some desire for “liberation” from some form of “subjugation,” along a line of “progress” that can never really be accomplished and ultimately serves as a pretext for piling up the body counts. The point of reactionary, and certainly absolutist, thinking, is to be rid of all that world destroying resentment, along with the illusion that the resentment can be harnessed for beneficial social purposes.\n\nPart of the purpose of a historical subject is to generate a historical narrative that one can then enter—the individual struggles against the chains of censorship, persecution and superstition, then against repressive norms of sexuality, against racial prejudice, against the belief in binary genders, etc.; the working class struggles against the capitalist class and its state, and then imperialist encirclement; the nation struggles against formal or informal imperial power, against internal divisions and inherited backwardness, the race struggles against inferior races and the Jews, etc.—very compelling stories can be told using these templates.\n\nSo, what’s the story of absolutism? It seems to me that what happens in absolutism is that tacit powers and the traditions they bear are explicitly recognized and titled. In a sense this is the fundamental attribute of sovereignty, since a precondition of its primary function of protecting the realm is designating and nominating subordinate powers to assist in doing so. The sovereign names powers and “seals” traditions by authenticating their transfer from previous or other sovereigns and their incorporation into his own sovereignty. Rather than a historical subject, there is an asymmetrically reciprocal exchange between sovereign and subjects, in which subjects seek further recognition and incorporation and the sovereign recognizes value and power legitimately acquired within the approved institutions by designating it and providing it with formal access and audience.\n\nThis interaction addresses the fundamental anthropological question of resentment, which is always resentment toward the center (if another humiliates me, it is still the central power that allowed that to happen, and therefore failed to give me my due), by providing for public and controlled competition and ambition. So, our present day auditioning and requests for clarification regarding commands and the command structure transitions into a proper order in which such clarification, through an articulation of sovereign designations, is what sovereignty is openly comprised of. There’s no “progress” or historical guarantees here—there’s nothing but continuing attempts to become worthier and make actual hierarchies explicitly acknowledged ones, along with a cultivation of readiness for exceptional action when it becomes possible. No doubt there are and will be compelling stories to tell in accord with this template, however much we may have to rewire our narrative apparatus to tell them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutism-some-clarifications-gablog",
      "title": "Absolutism: Some Clarifications",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It may be that for some “absolutism” might simply be an argument for one form of government over others—as if an absolute monarch with complete sovereignty over a population with no power and no rights is “better” than a democracy, or a liberal oligarchy, or socialism, or anything else. But the argument for absolutism, compressed most economically in the principle “sovereignty is conserved,” is more a tautological maxim than a preference based on some other ethical, moral, economic or aesthetic principle. The conservation of energy is what R.G. Collingwood called an “absolute assumption,” not a preference for saving energy over wasting it, and the same is true for the conservation of sovereignty.\n\nEveryone really agrees with this, because everyone knows when we speak of “the United States” speaking with “Germany” we know this means Donald Trump, or someone appointed by Donald Trump, speaking with Angela Merkel, or someone appointed by her. We can argue over the real sovereign, and some Americans, for example, out of frustration, will claim that the Supreme Court really rules—but until Chief Justice Roberts starts issuing orders to the special forces I think I’ll stick with the sovereignty of the President. Now, given that the President is sovereign, the arguments about better and worse forms of government begin when we start to ask whether the President should be chosen through an electoral process (and if so, which one), whether he should be replaced regularly, whether he should require authorization from other branches of government for certain actions, whether it should be possible to remove him (and if so, how), etc.\n\nStill, in a genuine emergency, everyone would look to the President to act, and unless all sense of national unity and purpose has been drained out of the country, the states and courts would defer to him, and Congress would facilitate his activity with enabling legislation.\n\nNow, once we have established the ontological claim of absolutism, we can further point out that absolutism enables us to structure in very productive ways the debate over forms of government. If someone is to be sovereign, it were best that sovereignty be clear and secure. We can think about this by analogy with just about any other task we ask someone to perform. If we ask someone to coach the high school basketball team, he must be given power over everything pertaining to coaching the basketball team—if we introduce a rule that the players must vote on the starting line-up, then he isn’t really the coach, and we are setting him to fail by introducing permanent conflict between him and his players.\n\nIf he, on the other hand, wants to give us players that power, it may be wise or unwise, but within the scope of his authority. The same with mechanisms for selecting leaders: the sovereign can allow for offices to be filled through election; indeed, through a supreme act of self-abnegation, he can place himself up for election and risk being removed, without thereby losing sovereignty. We can argue, and I think very convincingly, that this would be a serious mistake and a destructive way of selecting leaders, but that argument would then take place on absolutist terms: the argument against it is that it makes sovereignty less clear and secure.\n\nSo, if we would all defer to the executive in a crisis, we should make that explicit and gear all institutions to readiness to be helpful in serving the executive in a crisis. We might as well take the next step and acknowledge that the executive will decide when there actually is a crisis, and that other institutions should therefore prepare themselves by providing ongoing feedback to the executive on the ways potential pre-crises are registering across the social order.\n\nThe sticking point for a lot of people seems to be the question of removing a clearly unfit leader, which a rigorous absolutism seems to preclude, because any such mechanism introduces division into sovereignty by now making someone else sovereign—the doctor who determines the mental fitness of the ruler, the board of directors that gathers to assess his performance, the judges who would hear appeals regarding disqualifying acts of the president, the legislature that impeaches and removes him, etc. All the divisions and power plays that the clarification of sovereignty aims at eliminating would all then rush in through this open door.\n\nBut absolutism can answer the question of removing an unfit leader, even if it’s not a very comforting answer. If a ruler’s unfitness manifests itself in an incapacity to defend the country or maintain the conditions of law and order, he will be removed by whichever of his subordinates is in the best position to do so—the best positioned in terms of readiness to manage the emergency, rally the support of other power centers, and command the forces needed to rule. And that subordinate will then seek to return power as soon as possible either to the once again fit sovereign, or whoever is next in line according to whatever tradition has been followed in ensuring the continuity of sovereignty.\n\nMaybe that subordinate will serve as sovereign temporally or even permanently. And if he fails to remove the sovereign, and no one else can either, then that suggests either the sovereign wasn’t really unfit, or sovereignty can no longer be sustained in that form on that territory—maybe it needs to be broken down into smaller units or aggregated into a larger one.\n\nIt would be easy to say that this is a recipe for instability, since any strongman can now come along and claim sovereignty if he can take it. But strongman who violently seize power almost invariably do so in the name of some other, presumably more real sovereign, which legitimates the takeover. He takes power in the name of the people, the working class, the dominant ethnic group, a restoration of the principles of some previous constitution, etc. In other words, he disclaims responsibility for sovereignty. Widely shared absolutist assumptions would make it impossible to get away with this—if you want to take power, you might be able to claim that a sense of duty impels you to it, but make no mistake—you are taking power, in your own name, under your own newly acquired authority, and you will be responsible for how you see it through.\n\nYou can’t fob it off on anyone else. Such widely shared assumptions would be highly discouraging to reckless adventurers and utopian ideologues. What’s interesting here is that this supposedly most tyrannical approach to government would in fact rely more than any other of the thoughtfulness, knowledge, and clear-headedness of the people. If everyone understands that a particular interpretation of the constitution, or of the Bible, or a history of mistreatment, real or imagined, by the social or ethnic group you belong to, gives you absolutely no claim to power; that, on the contrary, power belongs to whoever can hold it within the political tradition of rule in that country, then there’s no problem.\n\nBut that means we’re talking about a fairly sophisticated and disciplined people, capable of dismissing all kinds of flattering BS. Everyone would know that attempts to obligate the sovereign are attempts to weaken the sovereign, to subject the sovereign to the sway, not of “the people” in general, but of some very specific people with a very pressing desire for power, if not necessarily a clear idea of how to use it. All clamoring for “rights,” “freedoms,” a “voice,” etc., would lead everyone to look around and discover who is most ready to use and benefit from those rights and freedoms. And to shut their ears to any remonstrance coming from that corner.\n\nBut there must be something that prevents the complete, unlimited power of the ruler from being exercised unchecked upon each and every member of society! If liberalism is part of your common sense, or even a little piece of it, it will be very difficult to get past this kind of reaction. Of course the reaction itself, along with the pitiful devices put in place to calm anxieties, like “rights,” “rule of law,” “constitution,” “checks and balances,” etc., testifies to its own impotence and childishness. Who defends rights, maintains the rule of law, protects the constitution if not whoever has the power to do so; and whoever has the power to do so transparently has the power to violate and redefine rights, law and the constitution.\n\nAs for “checks and balances,” what can that mean other than different institutions or power centers fighting each other to gain more power for themselves and stymie the others, and either one will succeed, or society will become one big bumper car ride, with everybody knocking everybody else into everybody else. And then you end up developing a social theory claiming all individuals are really out of control bumper cars.\n\nAll these devices seem to make sense because they presuppose a shared understanding of “rights,” “laws,” “constitution” and social ends (so the checking and balancing can all seem to be moving things in a more or less agreed upon direction). There can be a shared understanding of these concepts, and as long as that continues the harm done by their incoherence can be minimized. If several people are building a house together, and everyone knows that the roofer needs certain materials and a certain amount of time to work on the roof, it doesn’t matter much if the roofer wants to insist he has a “right” to those things.\n\nBut these concepts become important in proportion to the shrinking sense of shared purpose, and at a certain point they accelerate that decline in common goals. The builders come to work prepared to defend their rights rather than construct the building as well as they can. If the members of society are for the most part engaged in productive and rewarding activities, in which the contributions of each are valued, then we would be speaking about how to ensure this remains the case, and talk of “rights” and all the rest becomes irrelevant. What is experienced or seen as mistreatment or unfairness either is or is not interference with or impairment of the cooperation required for the task at hand.\n\nIf someone could be contributing more than they are being allowed or enabled to, there is a problem, but on extremely unlikely to be solved by some outside adjudicator deploying concepts drawn from legalistic or political discourses. One must appeal to those familiar with and involved and interested in the success of the project. Absolutism in government supports a little absolutism in each sphere of authority. To modify the conservative maxim, everyone is absolutist in what they know best, and an absolutist ruler would find such local absolutists to be the best guarantee of good order.\n\nThe last clarification, for now, is regarding the appearance that absolutism is a retrograde or nostalgic project, inapplicable to contemporary settings. Absolutism is actually a highly innovative and unprecedented mode of political thinking. In looking for genuine predecessors, we find few—Robert Filmer, Betrand de Jouvenel (who, however, was a kind of conservative liberal in his own politics), Mencius Moldbug (whose rejection of “imperio in imperium,” but not his “cameralism,” is essential to absolutism), and that’s about it. Everything—economics, science, technology, art, philosophy, anthropology, history, etc.—remains to be rethought and re-examined on these new premises.\n\nAbsolutism is not utopian, though, because, as I suggested above, it is always in fact assumed in any discussion of politics, which suggests it is an unspoken desire of all political thinking. When “Germany” speaks with “the United States” there is really nobody who would prefer that whatever agreements “Germany” and “the United States” arrive at would be irrelevant because those who represent either country haven’t the power to enforce them. (And if they have the power to enforce those agreements, they must have the power to enforce much else.) Or, if you would prefer it, it’s because you don’t like either or both countries very much and want to see harm come to them—you certainly wouldn’t prefer it for countries or institutions you care about.\n\nJust as it is always assumed, past governments have always approximated absolutism to some degree, especially when they especially needed to, and are therefore rich sources of insights for historical studies. We have no desire to reproduce the ad hoc and unworkable array of “estates,” institutions and rituals of medieval Europe, or the often times desperate absolutisms that tried to tame or abolish them, but we can certainly learn a lot from that history regarding difficulties of re-unifying divided authority. Ancient peoples killed their kings for not ensuring a successful harvest, a practice we won’t be reinstituting, but one displaying a very keen, if primitive, understanding of the centrality of power to any minimally complex social order. Contemporary absolutism wishes to learn from all this historical experience and deliberately establish an absolutist order for what will really be the first time."
    },
    {
      "slug": "auditioning-gablog",
      "title": "Auditioning",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Auditioning\n\nAbsolutism has its own version of natural selection. In his essay in the new journal The Journal of Neoabsolutism , Reactionary Future (drawing upon the poster/tweeter scientism) distinguishes between “the level of individual actors,” “the level of power institutions,” and “the political system.” The “individual actors” are, as one would imagine, “activists, academics, journalists, politicians…,” etc., and following them—their writings, their activities, their priorities, their rationalizations, etc., is a waste of time, because “these developments are a product of selection and promotion by less visible institutions.”\n\nThese less visible “power institutions” single out particular activists, writers, academics, etc., for promotion, funding, and more authoritative positions within the institution. And these institutions in turn are both subordinate too and engaged in constant covert warfare aimed at influencing the state—they are all trying to influence the selection process, and having their own profiles raised within the sovereign structure, so that they are best equipped to continually replenish themselves with “individual actors.”\n\nThe truth of this, for someone who has toiled for decades at the lower rungs in the far corners of one of those systems, the university, is self-evident. Why does one particular literary theory, or trend within political science, or a new “studies” program achieve lift off and start dominating all the journals and producing a whole new constellation of “stars”? There’s always an attempt to explain such things in terms of some historical process or social need, or in terms of some immanent development of an earlier theory. It’s usually possible to construct such explanations in a plausible way, but it’s also always obvious that things could have gone in a very different direction.\n\nThe answer always lies in the “selection” process, whereby power brokers employ interested “experts” to determine how to distribute their largesse. (The independent artist Richard Kostelanetz has written many excellent analyses, beginning with a “controversial” early book [1974], The End of Intelligent Writing in America , through Crimes of Culture [1992] and on, exposing the way various publishing and foundation “power institutions” prevent a liberal democratic consensus and conventional aesthetic standards from being disrupted.) It is really true that more often than not it would be more useful, in understanding a new cultural or intellectual trend, to trace networks of funding, hiring and patronage rather than trying to figure it out “on its own terms.”\n\nThis kind of analysis has long been the province of the left, and it’s very good that reactionary politics is now taking a close interest in the dissemination of power and influence. What do the power institutions want? To be on the cutting edge of anarchist ontology—that is, to increase the power of the centralizing authority by further pulverizing subjects into free radicals, organizing apparently spontaneously and resistantly but actually in a highly choreographed manner against the “middle,” i.e., any functional command structure. To consolidate their own command structures by preventing competing institutions from pursuing their primary function.\n\nSo, what are we individual actors, especially those of us with tenuous or no connections to any institution, and interested in destroying rather than expanding anarchist ontologies, doing? All of us, those writing on blogs, fighting in the streets, wearing pussy hats or armor, digging up funding for an independent film or journal, we’re all auditioning for power. No one says or does anything that they don’t hope and imagine will be become official doctrine and supported practice at some point. This means we have to do two things simultaneously: one, get attention from someone right here and now (and, preferably someone who gets other people’s attention); two say the kinds of things, not necessarily that someone in power right now would say, but that someone who gets to power after more and more attention gets paid to us would say, both right now and at every point along the way to gaining power.\n\nPower institutions want to be on the cutting edge of anarchist ontology, but they also want power to be secure. Being on the cutting edge is a way of keeping control within the hands of oneself and allies, but if the competition for power could be stopped, each and every power center would settle for a clear hierarchy (Facebook, Google, Mobil, Pfizer, Harvard, Disney, etc., don’t want chaos for the sake of chaos). Liberalism auditions for those laying their bets on the continual subversion of the center, while reactionaries audition for those who would like to clarify the instructions coming from the center. To a great extent, we’re auditioning for the same people, but appealing to differing motivations, proposing different imaginaries.\n\nHere’s a list of donors of United for Equality and Affirmative Action, a legal defense fund that supports BAMN (By Any Means Necessary), itself a supporter of the Antifa movement that represents the violent edge of leftist protest:\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Jack Posobiec/status/855789160770273281/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5 Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2 Fimperiuminimperio.freeforums.net%2 Fthread%2F149%2 Fabsolutist-anarchist-ontologies\n\nNow, how do all these corporations and foundations know whom they should give their money to? How, for that matter, do the Koch brothers, or the Mercers, know? They must hire the people who are holding auditions and doing the casting. How do they know whom to hire? That’s what the universities, media and think tanks are for. It’s helpful to keep in mind that these people get it wrong all the time, when they are funding terrorist groups that turn their weapons against their original supporters, when they dump hundreds of millions into a presidential “war chest” for a lemon of a candidate, and, no doubt, when they invest in this or activist group or human rights or anti-war organization—or an academic or artistic trend.\n\nNatural selection is no doubt just as profligate—in both cases, there is no shortage of resources. This further means that those of us auditioning need to outperform the competition while also generating reasonable standards for judging the respective performances, and part of this outperformance involves showing why these others can’t provide power with what it needs. We have to help with the selection process, by reducing the options to simple binaries, and then raising the threshold for entry into the competition; but first we need to lower the threshold to get the necessary attention. You very often hear people say that activists involved in local protests and counter-protests, not to mention street fighting and various seemingly esoteric partisan struggles are really letting themselves be played by power, as they are presumably distracted from the “real” issues by these secondary ones, consumed by the narcissism of small differences.\n\nNo doubt that’s true, but it’s also false—anyone who wants to be useful to power needs to show they can work on various levels, that they can be sober and think in the long-term, and that they can be combative, courageous, and attention to the slightest chance for some advantage. You can’t take every bait, but you can’t let yourself be baited without consequence either. And, of course, there is always a division of labor here—I must confess, I will not be out on the streets (I’m too old and unsuited for it) but I hope some people who want to do that will find some of what I write helpful in guiding their own decision making process and that perhaps some of them will rise up to aid an emergent sovereign and one of them even become that sovereign—in which case, my profile, or that of those who come after me, will certainly be raised.\n\nI think the best guideline for thinking through the problem of audition is one I have mentioned many times already: our discourse should take the form of a request that our instructions be made clear. What makes power unsecure is uncertainty of command: we don’t know what the sovereign would have us do. The reason for this is that those the sovereign has delegated power to (agencies both “public” and “private,” as I accept the Moldbuggian assumption that the distinction is meaningless and everything that takes place in the realm is at the pleasure of the sovereign) ignore or distort sovereign commands; but, then responsibility must be placed back on the sovereign for not making the commands clear enough and seeing to their execution according to specification.\n\nBut who holds the sovereign responsible, and how? Those of us awaiting clear commands, by requesting them. We can think of this in terms of an analogy that is very common in the reactosphere: between the restrictions on discourse imposed by “political correctness” or the SJWs, on the one hand, and laws against blasphemy instituted by more traditional social orders. In effect, political correctness is just anti-blasphemy laws. But while traditional orders are specific and limited in establishing the doctrine and rituals one cannot blaspheme against, and provide a line of intellectual reasoning that allows one to determine what counts as blasphemy, the SJW dominated order is haphazard, arbitrary and ever evolving in its prohibitions and enforced affirmations.\n\nIf you were to ask some diversity officer, official or unofficial (a distinction as meaningless as private vs. public), “OK, I don’t want to go wrong here, can you just give me a list of the things I can’t say, and the things I must affirm?” she would be stunned—that’s not what they think they’re doing at all. Which is precisely the problem. Or part of the problem, which is ultimately that they really couldn’t do it, because in the nature of “social justice” is that we can never allow things to settle down into a final, canonized doctrine. Anyone who tried to do so would be blaspheming against the next frontier in anarchist ontology.\n\nNow, this approach, of requesting clear instructions which cannot be given, seems to me in many practical cases a very clever, irritating and subversive approach to subversion in power. It might show some of the directors that they’ve been casting the wrong people. It also allows for all kinds of ideas to be implanted in the minds of those who overhear, without the person making the request really being required to take any responsibility for them at all. It might be the reactionary version of the Cloward-Piven strategy. It allows for a mock and mocking servility that exposes and confounds the power structure in a way that it is impossible to ignore but very difficult to define precisely enough to punish.\n\nBut beyond that, I think it’s a very good way of grounding one’s thinking in an absolutist ontology while continually refining one’s performance. Can a proposition or broader argument yield intelligible, consistent, implementable commands? If not, that seems to be an argument against the argument. But the question is not always so easily answered—doing so requires the construction of elaborate scenarios, possible chains of events, and models of organization. So, our requests for commands get further inflected by the scenarios, chains and models we embed them in, and the role we would have our interlocutor imagine us and himself to be playing in those scenarios, chains and models.\n\nThis means we further formalize and nominalize our discourses and exchanges with others, who can be explicitly named as possessing a particular rank within a particular corps of our own or the other forces. All kinds of conceptual development and revelatory situational irony become possible. Our audition stands out, and we show ourselves to be ready to say and do what needs to be said and done now, and give evidence of our ability to continue to do so at every point until the commands in fact become clear."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-attentional-structure-of-sovereignty",
      "title": "The Attentional Structure of Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Considered at its most minimal, language is grounded, as Michael Tomasello along with Eric Gans has shown, in joint attention—the capacity to pay attention to the same thing at the same time, to know that we are doing it, and to know that we know (to let each other know). It should be possible, then, to analyze all human, which is to say social, phenomena, in terms of forms of attention, articulated in ever more complex ways. I think we can reduce the basic attentional dispositions to three. First, one directs others’ attention toward oneself as the center, and joins in that attention directed towards oneself. Second, one directs others attention to something one has produced, and joins in that attention.\n\nThird, one directs the attention of others to something one is attending to and neither controls—which is both the originary disposition and, as I will suggest, a “late” one. Naturally, in each of these cases one could rewrite “one directs others’ attention” as “one’s attention is directed by another,” as both must be happening simultaneously and are really almost indistinguishable in their elemental forms. The first two dispositions can readily transition into the third, and beauty and human accomplishments are still among the most compelling objects of attention.\n\nIt seems to me that making oneself the center of attention is the basic feminine disposition and making one’s products the center the basic masculine one. These attentional dispositions can take many different forms and articulate and include each other in innumerable ways. The self-centering of the first mode can take forms ranging from frivolous, borderline hysterical narcissism to self-sacrificing martyrdom. The product centering of the second mode can range from idle boasting and bullying to striving for excellence and even immortality as a creator. If we think in terms of sexual relations, the self-centering woman desires the product centering man because attaching herself to him guarantees a perpetual source of potential attention to her; for the product centering man, the woman best able to capture attention best reflects the value of his own products.\n\n(And, no doubt, this adds to their reciprocal desire for each other in intimate relations.) We could analyze all manner of group dynamics (all female, all male, mixed—mixed singles and couples, etc.) in these terms. What women want in spending time with each other and appearing together is a broadened center of attention which each of them could hope to occupy at any point; what men want from association is a competitive space in which their productive capacities can be tested and displayed, etc.\n\nIf we were to imagine a social order organized solely in terms of these dispositions, it would probably be a highly hierarchical, tribal, patriarchal order that adheres closely to the “social-sexual” hierarchy represented on Vox Day’s Alpha Game blog. The “products” most valued would be weapons, fighting skills, along with organizational effectiveness and the domination and territory they would bring. No doubt many, maybe most, early societies did look something like this, which raises the question of how humans ever found a way to organize themselves differently. Here is where we must consider the third and also originary disposition, that of having attention directed towards something (here, the more passive formulation is more appropriate) that is attached to neither of the “attenders” in particular.\n\nThere must have often been times when physical confrontations led to mutual destruction, or at least the loss of some of those goods (markers of status) that the confrontation was meant to preserve or add to. It may be obvious to us that such a result indicates that a different approach (retreat, surrender, negotiation) might sometimes be preferable, but it would certainly not be obvious to the fighting man himself, nor to his competitors within the order he dominates, whose response to a defeat would surely be to seize the opportunity to contest the alpha. The alpha, in turn, would have to turn his attention directly to defending his predominance. Remaining locked in a hierarchical combative stance has cognitive consequences.\n\nSomeone else in the social order would have to notice that automatic response to physical confrontation leads to unwanted results. That someone would be significantly less alpha than the ruler or his main challengers, who would all be too focused on the struggle for power to think past it. That observer would combine the first two dispositions in order to direct the attention of others, and most especially one of the primary contenders, to consequences of their actions they would not notice on their own. This figure would draw attention to himself in various ways—by having flamboyant “visions,” or fits, or seizures, or ascetic rituals that would mark him as being possessed by some being not subject to the control of those locked into the first two dispositions.\n\nHe would also produce a kind of “work” worthy of attention—spells, stories, prophecies, etc. (There could be no other way of redirecting the attention of those locked into the first two dispositions—you couldn’t just say, “hey, you know what’s interesting about what you’re doing…”) This articulation of all three dispositions is the line leading from shamans, to holy men and saints, to philosophers and “intellectuals.” (It’s worth noting not only that such figures are often sexually ambiguous but that women, and especially women off the “market,” such as old women, often play an important role in such proceedings.)\n\nThe Big Man believes in the magic of words, because when he commands others, things happen; the shaman confirms, supplements and exploits this faith by divining new commands when those issued by the ruler fail to transform reality in the desired manner.\n\nEventually, the Big Man will take to himself the shaman figure for his counsel. In fact, despite the temporal order I’ve laid out for the purpose of exploring the relations between these dispositions, this “alliance” or synthesis would have been there from the beginning. There could never have been any “pure,” Conan-style fighting men who knew nothing but slaughter. War and internal ranking would have had their rites from the beginning. The first kings were priests themselves, guarding the shrines to the ancestors, and kings eventually became gods. But the early king-priests were vulnerable, as they were responsible for everything that happened in the community, and this vulnerability would have required the support of shaman figures who could “read” the signs indicating whether the king’s time had come.\n\nThe far less vulnerable imperial god-kings would construct more elaborate systems of myth and ritual displaying and embedding their rule. Even more fundamentally, only as a result of the emergence of the human and language could the differentiation into these primitive attentional dispositions take shape and thereby recuperate natural hierarchies and complementarities in specifically human forms. The basic configuration, then—the alignment of the exemplary figure of the second (attention to products) disposition and the exemplary figure of the third (shared attention) disposition (which articulates the first two in a more marginal way) is the “attentional” basis of sovereignty.\n\nIf the sovereign, most fundamentally, commands and delegates, then his first command and delegation is to the counsel he trusts to draw his attention to consequences of his own actions and even character that his immersion in those actions might blind him to. The ruler commands the shaman/priest/prophet/philosopher/sage/scientist/intellectual to, first of all, help me to clarify my commands.\n\nThe Big Man/Imperial order remains based on a “command economy” (I’m punning a bit here)—an exchange between the commands of the sovereign and the pleas of the subjects. This order is transcended once the representative of the third disposition is set against the sovereign and community as a sacrificial figure. The obvious examples here are Socrates and Jesus, and what they have in common is that the community as a whole sees that the centering of attention upon this figure reveals a violent resentment toward the center. Such figures reveal the foundations of social order, they remember the originary scene, when the community is ready to iterate it, but the community can only iterate it by murdering the figure who reveals those foundations.\n\n(Think about what Jesus’s impact would have been had he maintained the same teachings but died peacefully in old age as an honored member of the community.) Only in that way—through a community shattering paroxysm—could this revelation of something or someone that cannot be commanded, and therefore our reliance, for anything to be attended to at all, upon a shared renunciation, be made memorable. We see a similar configuration in Moses’s relation to the Hebrews he led out of Egypt, even if it never led to actual violence against Moses (Freud of course, would disagree, and one could see why). And, of course, the relation between the Hebrew prophets and the community and kings had a very similar structure.\n\n(As I’ve done before, I must confess my Western-centric bias here, and would be very interested in knowing how such relations have been historically articulated in China and India in particular. I hypothesize that every civilization has revered figures that spoke and acted so as to make themselves the center of attention in order to implicate the community in their desire to ignore the violent possibilities implicit in their participation in shared attention. But perhaps masculine figures who create en during works synthesizing and de-ritualizing canonical modes of renunciation and deliberately eschew or minimize public reward or honor can play an equivalent iconic, civilizing role.)\n\nThe sovereign, then, cultivates and institutionalizes this form of attention to that which transcends sovereignty. He does this in the interest of preserving his own rule, because otherwise the oscillation between reverence and hatred toward the figure at the center will always threaten to engulf him. The sovereign distinguishes himself, as the figure at the center, from the locus of the center (a distinction for which I am indebted to Eric Gans, if it’s worth singling out one debt among all the others), that will outlast and that backgrounds him. And the sovereign himself takes counsel from those “third persons” who have committed themselves to exploring that disposition.\n\nTo a great extent the pre-modern history of the West is a series of attempts to make sense of the sovereign’s accountability to God. It’s “logical” to say that the king cannot be his own judge in assessing this accountability, but it’s equally logical to say that no one else can without being sovereign himself, which would lead us to an infinite regress. The way of squaring the circle is to direct attention to the ongoing elevation of subjects to third persons who present themselves as offering a kind of tacit counsel to the sovereign by being the kinds of subjects receptive to sovereign will. Not exactly the “nation of priests” of Scripture, or the “nation of philosophers” of some modern utopians, but a nation of seekers after God’s will as mediated by the sovereign’s consular relation to God.\n\nEach fulfills, to the best of his or her knowledge, the will of the sovereign as embedded in the entire chain of command directed towards oneself; and each prepares oneself and one’s works as possible centers of attention that will mitigate damaging and amplify promising consequences of those commands in their margins for choice, which commands always leave. And one stands ready to be corrected in this regard. You could say that an absolutist ethics entails “indwelling,” to use Michael Polanyi’s term for the participatory attention of the inquirer, within the consular relation between sovereign and center.\n\nThe relationship between the sovereign and the representative of third personhood is the most important and requires the most attention—we could say that all the devastating diremptions of modernity result from misbegotten forms of this relationship, one in which the sovereign is irremediably dependent. How can you know whether your advisor is giving you bad advice? Especially since his advice might almost always be good, but a little bad advice here and there might be enough to make things go off the rails. And if he is giving you bad advice, how can you know why? May be he’s just wrong about something, but maybe he’s conducting the ambitions of another power center.\n\nThere certainly can’t be any formula here, and the sovereign is sovereign in his choice of advisors as in all things. The only way of mitigating dangers here is to turn attention to the process of production of advisors, which is to say a system of education, i.e., of the labeling of powers that increases the likelihood that advisors who gain access to the sovereign will dwell within the consular relation between the sovereign and God."
    },
    {
      "slug": "cognition-as-originary-memory",
      "title": "Cognition as Originary Memory",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This is the paper (leaving aside any last minute editing) that I will be reading (via Skype) June 9 at the 11th annual GASC Conference in Stockholm.\n\nCognition as Originary Memory\n\nThe shift in focus, in cognitive theory, from the relation between mind and objects in the world to the relation between minds mediated by inter-subjectivity, brings it into dialogue with originary thinking. Michael Tomasello’s studies in language and cognition have become a familiar reference point in originary inquiries, which have drawn upon the deep consonance between his notion of “joint attention” and the originary hypothesis’s scenic understanding of human origin. Peter Gardenfors, in his How Homo Became Sapiens , builds on the work of Tomasello and others so as to include the development of cultural and technological implements, in particular writing, in this social understanding of cognition.\n\nMuch of the vocabulary of cognitive thinking, though, still retains the assumption of separate, autonomous selves: sensations, perceptions, ideas, thoughts, minds, feelings, knowledge, imagination and so on are all experiences or capacities that individuals have, even if we explain them in social and historical terms. My suggestion is that we think of cognition, of what we do when we think, feel, remember and so on directly in linguistic terms, as operations and movements within language, in terms that always already imply shared intentionality. In this way we can grasp the essentially idiomatic character of human being.\n\nEric Gans’s studies of the elementary linguistic forms provide us with an approach to this problem. His most extended study of these forms, of course, is in The Origin of Language , but he has shorter yet sustained and highly suggestive discussions of the relations between the ostensive, the imperative and the declarative in The End of Culture , Science and Faith , Originary Thinking , and Signs of Paradox . In The End of Culture Gans uses the succession of linguistic forms to account for the emergence of mythological thinking and social hierarchy, in Science and Faith to account for the emergence and logic of monotheism, in Originary Thinking , among other things, to propose a more rigorous theory of speech acts, and in Signs of Paradox to account for metaphysics and the constitutive paradoxicality of advanced thought.\n\nIt makes sense to take what are in these cases historical inquiries and make use of them to examine individual or, to make use of the Girardian term, “interdividual,” cognition, which is always bound up in anthropomorphizing our social configurations in terms of a center constituted out of our desires and resentments.\n\nIn The Origin of Language Gans shows how each new linguistic form maintains, or preserves, or conserves, the “linguistic presence” threatened by some limitation in the lower form. So, the emergence of the imperative is the making present of an object that an “inappropriate ostensive” has referred to. Bringing the object “redeems” the reference. The assumption here seems to me that the loss of linguistic presence is unthinkable—the most basic thing we do as language users is conserve linguistic presence. Another key concept put to use early on in The Origin of Language is the “lowering of the threshold of significance,” which is to say the movement from one significant object in a world comprised of insignificant ones to a granting of less and less significance to more and more objects.\n\nI think we could say that lowering the threshold of significance is the way we conserve linguistic presence: what threatens linguistic presence is the loss of a shared center that we could point to; by lowering the threshold of significance we place a newly identified object at that center. So, right away we can talk about “thinking” or “cognition” as the discipline of conserving linguistic presence by lowering the threshold of significance.\n\nThis raises the question of how we conserve linguistic presence by lowering the threshold of significance. If linguistic presence is continuous, then our relation to the originary scene is continuous—in a real sense, we are all, always, on the originary scene—it has never “closed.” In that case, a crisis in linguistic presence marks some weakening of that continuity with the originary scene—the crisis is that we are in danger of being cut off from the scene. But in that case, continuity with the scene must entail the repetition of the scene or, more precisely, its iteration. As long as we are within linguistic presence we are iterating the original scene, in all of our uses of signs.\n\nAny crisis must then be a failure of iteration, equivalent to forgetting how to use language. The conservation of linguistic presence, then, is a remembering of the originary scene. Our thinking always oscillates between a forgetting and remembering of the originary scene. But this oscillation must itself be located on the originary scene, which then must be constituted by a dialectic of forgetting and remembering, or repeating and iterating. For my purposes, the difference between “repeat” and “iterate” is as follows: repeating maps the sign onto the center; iterating enacts the center-margin relation.\n\nNow, let’s leap ahead to the linguistic form in which we do most of our thinking: the declarative. The declarative has its origins in the “negative ostensive,” the response to the “inappropriate imperative,” where the object cannot be provided, the imperative cannot be fulfilled, and linguistic presence is therefore threatened. But Gans is at pains to distinguish this “negation” from the logical negation that can come into being only with the declarative itself. He refers to the negation in the negative ostensive as the “operator of interdiction,” which he further suggests must be rooted in the first proto-interdiction, the renunciation of appetite on the originary scene.\n\nThis remembering of the originary scene further passes through other forms of interdiction which entail “enforcement” through what Gans calls “normative awaiting”—he uses examples like the injunction to children not to talk to strangers. As opposed to normal imperatives, these interdictions can never be fulfilled once and for all. Now, even keeping in mind the limited resources available within an imperative culture, this is not an obvious way to relate the information that the demanded object is not available. The issuer of the interdiction is told not to do (something)+the object. Not to continue demanding, perhaps; not to do more than demand, i.e., not to escalate the situation.\n\nNone of these alternatives, along with repeating the name of the object, seems to communicate anything about the object itself. But we can read the operator of interdiction as referring to the object—the object is being told not to present itself. But by whom? Clearly not the speaker. I think the initial declarative works because both possibilities are conveyed simultaneously—the “imperator” is ordered to cease pursuing his demand, and the object is ordered, ultimately by the center, to not be present, which in turn adds force to the interdiction directed back at the imperator, who donates his imperative power to the center.\n\nIn essence, the declarative restores linguistic presence by telling someone that they must lower their threshold of significance because the object of their desire, as they have imagined it, has been rendered unavailable by, let’s say, “reality.” The lowered threshold brings to attention a center yet to be figured by actions, from a direction and at a time yet to be determined.\n\nNow, the embedding of the declarative in the imperative order is not very important if once we have the declarative, we have the declarative, i.e., a new linguistic form irreducible to the lower ones, in the way biology is irreducible to chemistry, and chemistry to physics. But biology is still constrained by chemistry, and chemistry by physics. So is the declarative constrained by the imperative order it transcends and, of course, the imperative by the ostensive. The economy of the dialectic of linguistic forms is conserved. Just as on the originary scene remembering the sign is a way of forgetting the scene, immersion in the declarative dimension of culture is a forgetting of the imperative and the ostensive.\n\nTo operate, to think and communicate in declarative terms is to imagine oneself liberated from imperatives. This gets formulated, via Kant, in imperative terms: to be a “declarative subject” is treat others as ends, never as means, to will that your own actions embody a universal law binding on everyone. We could call this an ethics of the declarative. This imperative remembers the origin of the declarative in a kind of imperative from the center to suspend imperatives amongst each other. We could say that logic itself recalls an imperative for the proper use of declaratives, one that allows no imperatives to be introduced, even implicitly, into the discourse at hand—but, of course, this is accomplished in overwhelming imperative terms, as all manner of otherwise perfectly legitimate uses of language must be subjected to interdiction.\n\nEven more, these imperative uses of the declarative include the imperative to not rest content with any particular formulation of that imperative: what, exactly, does it mean to treat another as an end or means, how can you tell whether another is really taking your action as a law—what counts as adjudication here? If you take to treat others only as ends in consequence of your devotion to the categorical imperative, aren’t you treating them as a means to that end? The paradoxes of declarative culture and subjectivity derive from the ineradicability of the absolute imperative founding them.\n\nThe most decisive liberation of the declarative from the imperative can be seen in the cognitive ramifications of writing, as explained most rigorously, I think, by David Olson in his The World on Paper . Olson argues that it is the invention of writing, alphabetic writing in particular, that turns language into an object of inquiry: something we can break down into parts that we then rearticulate synthetically. These parts are first of all the sounds to be represented by letters, but just as much the words, or parts of sentences, that are identified through writing for the first time. The grammatical analysis of the sentence treats the sentence as a piece of information, makes it possible to construct the scene of speech as a multi-layered dissemination of information about that scene, and thereby provides a model for treating the entire world as a collection of bits of information, ultimately of an event of origin through speech.\n\nWe could see this as a declarative cosmology. In that case the world can be viewed as a constant flow of information conveyed through everything that could be an object of an ostensive, that is, effect some shift of attention. This declarative metaphysics only comes to fruition in the computer age. We keep discovering that each piece of information is in fact just a piece of a larger piece of information that perhaps radically changes the meaning of the piece we have just assimilated. This is an intrinsic part of scientific inquiry, but subverts more local and informal inquiries with a much lower tolerance for novelty because of a greater reliance on ostensive and imperative culture.\n\nDeclarative culture promises us we will only have to obey one imperative: the imperative of reality. In that case, we should be able to bracket and contain potentially subversive inquiries into reality by constructing institutions that introduce new increments of deferral and upward gradations of discipline and therefore social integrity, facilitating the assimilation of transformative knowledge. Olson himself, in his Psychological Theory and Educational Reform seems to think along similar lines by pointing to the intrinsic connection between a literate population and large scale bureaucracies, which is to say hierarchical orders predicated upon the ongoing translation of language into disciplinary metalanguages that simultaneously direct inquiry and impose discipline.\n\nHowever, if we take declarative culture to provide a mandate, an imperative, to extirpate all imperatives that cannot present themselves as the precipitate of a declarative, then those flows of information come equipped with incessantly revised imperatives coming from no imperative and ostensive center, subjecting imperative traditions to constant assault from hidden and competing metaphysical centers.\n\nThere will always be imperatives that cannot be justified declaratively because the lowering of the threshold of significance generates new regions of ostensivity that generate imperatives in order to establish guardianship over those regions, in turn leading to requests for information, i.e., interrogatives, which themselves presuppose a cluster of demands that attention be directed in certain ways. In the long term most, maybe all imperatives could be provided with a declaratively generated genealogy, but only if we for the most part obey them in the meantime. This constitutively imperative relation to a center could be called an “imperative exchange.”\n\nI do what you, the center, the distillation of converging desires and shared renunciations, commands, and you, the center, do what I request, that is, make reality minimally compliant. We must think in this way in most of our daily transactions—the alternative would be to be perpetually calculating on the basis of extremely limited and uncertain data, the probabilities of the various possible consequences of this or that action. For the most part, we have to “trust the world,” since we as yet have insufficiently advanced internal algorithms to operate coherently without doing so. The development of declarative, that is, literate, culture, heightens this tension by establishing with increasing rigor both a comprehensive centralized, which is to say imperative, order and an interdiction on referring to that order too directly. The absolutized imperative founding the declarative order forbids us to speak and therefore think about it.\n\nThe revelation of the declarative sentence as the name of God, analyzed by Gans in Science and Faith , his study of the Mosaic revelation of the burning bush, cancels this imperative exchange, which leads one to place a figure at the disappointing center, and replaces it with the information that since God has given everything to you, you are to give everything to God, which is to say to the origin of and through speech. There is no more commensurability and therefore no more exchange. You are to embody the conversion of imperatives into declaratives through readiness to have those imperatives converge upon you. Imperative exchange is ancestor worship, and the absolute imperative embedded in I AM THAT I AM is to suspend ancestor worship and remember the originary scene—that is, remember that it is the participation of all in creating reciprocity that generated the sign, not the other way around.\n\nBut imperative exchange cannot be eliminated—it is embedded in our habits, it is the form in which we remember the sign and forget the scene—if I do this, reality will supply that. Thinking begins with the failure of some imperative exchange—I did this, but reality didn’t supply that, and why in the world should I have expected it to, since it’s not subject to my commands or tied to me by any promise. The declarative sentence, then, is best understood as the conversion of a failed imperative exchange into a constraint—in thinking, you derive a rule from the failure of your obedience to some command to garner a commensurate response from reality.\n\nThis rule ties some lowering of significance to the maintenance of linguistic presence, as this relationship requires less substantial or at least less immediate cooperation from reality. We get from the command to the rule by way of the interrogative, the prolongation of the command into a request for the ostensive conditions of its fulfillment. The commands we prolong are themselves embedded in the declaratives, the discourses, we circulate through—raising a question about a claim is tantamount to identifying an unavowed imperative, some attempt at word magic, that claim conveys. This is how we oscillate between the imperative and ostensive worlds in which we are immersed and the declarative order we extract from and use to remake those worlds.\n\nA good question prolongs the command directed at reality indefinitely, iterating it through a series of possible ostensive conditions of fulfillment, which can only be sustained by treating the declarative order as a source of clearer, more convertible commands."
    },
    {
      "slug": "equality-and-morality-gablog",
      "title": "Equality and Morality",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I appreciate Eric Gans’s detailed response to my blog post (In)equality and (Im)morality , and am glad to respond to at least most of the issues he raises there. Part of the problem here is that, as pretty much everyone knows by now, “equality” is used in so many different ways that it would be futile to define it in a single, agreed upon way. Maybe it’s even useless, or should only be used in very restricted and precisely defined contexts (like “economic inequality,” by which we mean the highest salary is x times larger than the smallest, or whatever). That, of course, would remove it from moral discourse altogether, or at least make it subordinate to a moral discussion conducted on different grounds (high levels of economic inequality might indicate, but not demonstrate, some underlying moral issue). Would moral discourse suffer from this excision or derogation? Let’s look at one of Eric’s examples:\n\nIn spontaneously formed groups up to a certain size and in a context that makes the sheer exercise of force impossible (in contrast to the “savage” groups favored in apocalyptic disaster films), people tend to cooperate democratically, profiting when necessary from the specific skills of individuals but not choosing a “king,” and the same is true in juries, where the foreman is an officer of the group rather than its leader. Democracy in this sense doesn’t deny that some people may have better judgment than others, but it permits unanimous cooperation, and I venture to say, corresponds to “natural” human interaction since the originary scene.\n\nThe point here is to affirm the originary nature of equality, here defined in the sense of the voluntary and spontaneous quality of the cooperation and the fluidity of leadership changes. I think we can easily find other examples of small group formation, especially under more urgent conditions, where hierarchies are firmly established and preserved, without the application of physical force. Indeed, that is what takes place in most of the disaster films I’ve seen—you couldn’t really force someone to follow you out of a burning building, or find the part of the ship that will sink last, or keep one step ahead of the aliens.\n\nIn such cases, people follow whoever proves he (is it sexist that it is still usually a “he”?) is capable of overcoming obstacles, keeping cool, anticipating problems, calming the others, fending off challenges without undermining group cohesion, etc. In the case of a jury, we have one very clearly designed and protected institution (and hardly spontaneously formed)—but why, exactly, is the foreman necessary? Why do we take it for granted that the jury can’t simply spontaneously run itself, with a democratic vote over which piece of evidence to discuss next, then a democratic vote to decide whether to take a preliminary vote, but first a vote to decide whether the other votes should be by secret ballot, etc.?\n\nIt seems pretty obvious that the process will work better, and lead to a more just result, if someone sets the agenda—but why is it obvious? An even broader point here is that we have no way of determining, on empirical grounds, whether the cooperation involved is “spontaneous,” “voluntary” and “unanimous.” These are ontological questions, which enter into the selection of a model. In any case that Eric could describe as people as organizing themselves spontaneously I could describe them as following someone who has taken the initiative. The question, then, is which provides the better description? I think that the absolutist ontology I propose does, because to describe any group as organizing itself spontaneously collapses into incoherence. They can’t all act simultaneously , can they? If not, one is in the lead at any moment, and the others are following, in some order that we could identify. (If they don’t follow, we don’t have a group, and the question is moot.)\n\nDoes talk of equality and inequality help us here? I don’t see how. Let’s say a particular member of jury feels that his or her contributions to the discussion have been neglected, and he or she resents that. There are two possibilities—one, the contributions have been less useful than those of others, meaning the neglect was justified; two, the contributions have been unjustly neglected. In the first case the moral thing to do (a good foreman would take the lead here) is to explain to the individual juror what has been lacking in his contributions, and suggest ways to improve them as the deliberations proceed. In the second case, the moral thing to do is to realize that the foreman has marginalized contributions that would have enhanced the deliberative process, and, in the interest of improving that process, she should acknowledge the value of those contributions, try to understand why they went unappreciated, and be more attentive to the distinctive nature of those contributions in the future.\n\nThe juror’s resentment, in either case, is framed in terms of a resentment on behalf of the process itself or, to put it in originary terms, on behalf of the center. The assumption is that all want the same thing—a just verdict. Once the resentment is framed in terms of unequal treatment, to be addressed by the application of the norm of equal treatment (everyone’s opinion must be given equal weight? Everyone must speak for the same amount of time?), the deliberative process is impaired, and if that framing is encouraged, it will impair the process beyond repair. The moral thing to do, then, is to resist such a framing.\n\nNow, it may very well be that the juror has been marginalized for reasons such as racial prejudice (it’s also possible that the juror is complaining for that reason), in which case the deliberative process should be corrected to account for that. The point, though is always to improve that process, not to eliminate that form of prejudice (and all of its effects) within the jury room. Even if the juror in question is trying to reduce the conflict to one of some difference extrinsic to the process, the foreman should reframe it in this way—that is the moral thing to do.\n\nI think this ontological question, which turns into a question of framing, can be situated on the originary scene itself. What matters on the originary scene is that everyone defer appropriation, and offer a sign to the others affirming this. Everyone does something—should we call that “equality”? We can, I suppose, but why? There are plenty of cases where “everyone” plays their individual part in “doing something,” while those parts are widely disparate in terms of difficulty and significance to the project. It’s just as easy to imagine a differentiated originary scene, where, for example, some sign only after others have already set the terms, so to speak, as it is to imagine a scene in which everyone signs simultaneously and with equal efficacy.\n\nEasier, in fact, I think. What matters is that everyone is on the scene. The same is the case when it comes to dividing the meal—there’s no need to assume that everyone eats exactly the same amount, all we have to assume is that everyone eats together (unlike the animal pecking order, where each has to wait until the higher ranking animal has finished). This is what I think the moral model requires: everyone affirms the scene, and their relations to all others on the scene; and everyone is at the “table” and receives a “piece.” What this will mean in any given social order can’t be determined in advance and therefore will be something we can always argue over (and any ruler will want to receive feedback on), but that what makes it a basis for criticizing the existing order.\n\nIf the individual juror’s contribution never does get recognized and this was in fact to the detriment of the deliberations, then we could say she has done her part in affirming the scene but has not gotten her “piece,” or has been kept away from the “table,” thereby weakening the scene as a whole. Again, I don’t see any point along the way here where the concept of “equality” clarifies anything.\n\nNow, I do believe that primitive (let’s say, stateless and marketless) communities are highly egalitarian. Equality does mean something here—this is their interpretation of the originary scene, and they certainly have very good reasons for it. What equality means might be that no goods of any kind are saved, that no family is allowed a larger dwelling than any other, that anyone who gets too good at something be punished in some way, that no one speak to another member of the community in such a way as to imply a relation of indebtedness, and so on. Such an understanding of equality still prevails at times, even in much more advanced and complex societies—we see it in children, among colleagues in the workplace, family members, and so on.\n\nWe are all at least a little bit communist. But there’s nothing inherently moral about this “communism.” Sometimes it might be moral, sometimes not. It’s immoral to destroy a common project because you’re afraid someone else will show you up; it might very well be moral for children to “enforce” (within bounds) equal treatment by the parents of all the siblings, because this insistence might help correct for favoritism of which the parents might not be aware, and therefore might help the family to flourish. Again, though, the question of morality comes down to whether you are contributing to the preservation and enhancement of an institution.\n\nI do agree that “telling the truth about human difference” is a marginal issue, and not a moral position in itself. My only point in this regard is that, in this case, telling the truth is more moral than lying, and the victimary forces poisoning public life today give us no choice but to do one or the other. I think we could get along fine without dwelling on tables showing the relative IQs of all the ethnic and racial groups in in the world, but we need such a reference point if we refuse to concede that the only explanation for disparate outcomes is racism/sexism/homophobia, etc. And, really, if the more moral thing, in this instance, is to tell the truth, then it’s hard to fault those who do so with a bit of gusto.\n\nThose flinging accusations of racism are not exactly restrained in their “debating” tactics, after all. A bit of tit for tat can be moral as well, al though whether it involves “equality” is also a matter of framing. If there’s a more moral way of responding to those who, by now, are claiming that we want to kill millions of people and openly celebrate violence in the streets, I’d be very glad to hear it. In fact, as some of those most viciously accused of “white supremacy” among other thought crimes have pointed out quite cogently, if, in fact, it turns out that some groups are on average smarter than others (and some groups are better than others in other ways, and some groups are better in math and other in verbal skills, etc.), there is absolutely no reason why we still can’t all get along perfectly well.\n\nAfter all, more and less intelligent and capable people get along within the same institution all the time, so the only thing that would prevent this from being the case throughout society is persistent equality-mongering. That’s why I think the best way forward in terms of using the originary scene as a moral model is to focus on common participation in, contribution to, and recognition by social institutions. And if we are to direct our attention to the preservation, enhancement and creation of institutions (if we want to be good teachers and students within functioning schools and universities rather than affirmatively acted upon experts in group resentment, if we want to be good husbands, wives and parents within a flourishing system of monogamy rather than feminists, etc.) then we want those institutions to be well run and considerately run.\n\nAnd if we want them run in these ways, we want to bring the power of those running them as closely in line with their accountability as we can. In other words, we want cooperation to be directed (to go back to those opening examples, no one is going to propose allowing a university to be run “spontaneously,” I assume) by those with initiative, experience, and responsibility, and we want them to be appointed and assessed in a like manner, by others competent to do so. And that, I think, would bring us to a much higher level of morality.\n\nIt seems to me that the problem Eric is trying to solve here is the following: in any minimally civilized or developed order, “inequality” has developed to the point that the moral model must be “translated” in some way so as to minimize the resentments generated by that inequality. The way he thinks the historical process has enabled this is through the emergence of the market and liberal democratic political processes. The “actual” inequality (the existence of both billionaires and those who sleep under bridges) is mitigated by the “formal” equality of the market (my dollar is worth as much as anyone else’s), the vote, various “rights,” and so on.\n\nHow can we tell whether this “works”? We can point out that the US is still richer and more powerful than Russia or China, I suppose, but, leaving aside how certain we can be about the causes (and continuance) of this Western predominance, we certainly can’t see this as a moral argument. (There’s nothing particularly moral about bribing the lower classes to remain quiescent.) I think there is an unjustified leap of faith here. It may be true that these forms of formal (pretend?) equality have been granted for the purposes Eric suggests, but that doesn’t prove they have actually served that purpose—it might mean exactly the opposite, that the progress of “equality” has been a means of ensuring that the real inequalities (or structures of power) remain untouched.\n\nI would push this further—there is no reason to assume that whatever we can call “inequalities” are themselves the source of any resentment that might threaten the social order. We could say, for example, that the 19 th century European working class resented having its labor exploited, being underpaid, being subjected to unsafe conditions, and so on. Or, we could say they resented having their communities undermined, the network of relations in which they were embedded torn apart, and being driven off the land and into packed cities where they were stripped on any system of moral reciprocities. Interestingly, both the capitalist and the revolutionary have good grounds for preferring the first explanation—it presents the capitalist with a problem he can solve politically (labor unions, welfare, minimum wage, public housing, etc.) and the communist with leverage (in case the capitalist palliatives don’t work).\n\nNeither wants to confront the implications of the second explanation, which would require preserving or reconstructing a moral order. This too is a question of ontology and framing. Maybe real reciprocity rather than formal equality is called for. One could now say “but these changes were inevitable,” but that’s what one says in abandoning responsibility. One could say, “still, overall, modernity is preferable,” but can one make that argument on terms other than those of modernity itself? Has anyone actually made the argument that increasing wealth, developing technology and improving living conditions requires liberal democracy and ever expanding forms of formal equality?\n\nOnce we step outside of the frame forcing us to see “modernity” as a single, inevitable, beneficial package, the connection is not obvious at all. (It’s interesting that there’s never been much of a push to democratize or liberalize the structure of corporations. The continued existence of such a creature as a CEO doesn’t seem to trouble our moral model. Even the left has learned to love the CEO.) Every form of cooperation has an end and a logic to it, an end and logic that we can always surface from the language we find ourselves using in discussing that form. Schools are for learning, commerce is for mutually beneficial exchange, militaries are for fighting other militaries, families are for channeling sexual desire into the raising of new generations, conversations are for creating solidarities, exchanging information, trying out new roles, etc.\n\nWe can frame all resentments as indicating possible infirmities in these forms of cooperation, and then address those resentments by repairing those forms where necessary. And by “we,” I mean whoever has the most responsibility within those forms. This would involve far more moral seriousness than robotically translating each complaint into an accusation of inequality. In this way the moral model would be just as real now as it was on the originary scene (it is still being used to sustain the scene), rather than an abstraction uncomfortably fit onto what we have decided to see as a qualitatively different set of relations."
    },
    {
      "slug": "im-morality-and-in-equality-gablog",
      "title": "(Im)morality and (In)equality",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’d like to work with a few passages from Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle of Love & Resentment (#549) to address some critical questions regarding morality and equality in originary thinking. Needless to say, I share Gans’s “pessimism” regarding the future of Western liberal democracies while seeing (unlike Gans) such pessimism for liberal democracy as optimism for humanity.\n\nWhat kind of state-level government is feasible in the Middle East?—and one could certainly include large areas of Africa in the question. The fact that we have no clear response suggests that the end of colonialism, however morally legitimate we may find it, did not resolve the difficulty to which colonization, both hypocritically and sincerely, had attempted to respond: how to integrate into the global economy of technologically advanced nation states those societies that remain at what we cannot avoid judging as a lower level of social organization.\n\nSo, the end of colonialism is morally legitimate, even though it has left vast swathes of large areas of the world increasingly ungovernable, and made it impossible to integrate them into the global economy. What kind of morality is this, then—what does it consider more important than maintaining a livable social order? A note of doubt is introduced here, though: “we may find” this to be morally legitimate, but presumably we may not. There is some straining against the anti-colonialist morality here. The morality that we may or may not consider legitimate, I assume is that of judging some forms of social organization as lower than others.\n\nBut what makes refraining from this judgment moral? Colonialism involved governing others according to norms different than those according to which the home country was governed, but unless we assume that this governing was done in the interests of the colonizer and against the interests of the colonized, and could only be so, the moral problem is not clear. These assumptions therefore get introduced into discussions of the colonial relation, but since those assumptions are as arbitrary regarding this form of governance as any other, there’s clearly something else going on.\n\nThere is no “racism” here; on the contrary, by assuming that all human beings have fundamentally the same abilities, and that we owe a certain prima facie respect to any social order that is not, like Nazism, altogether pathological, we cannot help but note that some societies are less able than others to integrate the scientific and technological advances of modernity. Thus health crises in Africa continue to be dealt with in what can only be called a “neocolonial” fashion, however unprofitable it may be for the former colonizers, who send doctors, medicine, medical equipment, and food aid to nations suffering from epidemics of Aids or Ebola, or starving from drought or crop failure—or rebuilding from earthquakes, as in Haiti.\n\nThe most moral gestures of the modern West are, it seems, its most colonial ones. And what could more disastrously interfere with this moral impulse that the assumption that “all human beings have fundamentally the same capabilities”? That assumption forces you to look for dysfunctions on a sociological and historical level—one must conclude it is colonialism itself that is responsible for the disasters of the undeveloped world. But if that is your assumption, you can only behave morally—i.e., actually treat other people as needing your help—by finding some round about way of claiming that that is not what you’re doing. That’s the best case scenario—the worst case is that you keep attacking the “remnants” of colonialism itself, even if they are the most functional part of the social order. Morality and immorality seem to have switched places.\n\nFor if we have indeed entered the “digital” age, implying an inalterable premium for symbol manipulation and hence IQ-type intelligence, then the liberal-democratic faith in the originary equality of all is no longer compatible with economic reality. Hence the liberal political system, as seems to be increasingly the case today, cannot simply continue to correct the excesses of the market and provide a safety net for the less able. Increasingly the market system seems to have only two political alternatives. It can be openly subordinated to an authoritarian elite, and in the best cases, as in China, achieve generally positive economic results. Or else, as seems to be happening throughout the West, it is fated to erect ever more preposterous victimary myths to maintain the fiction of universal political equality, rendering itself all but impotent against the “post-colonial” forces of radical Islam.\n\nIf vast inequalities based in part upon natural differences in ability is incompatible with the liberal democratic faith in the originary equality of all than that faith was always a delusion. Some are arguing that the inequalities opening up now over the digital divide are the most massive ever, but who can really know? What are our criteria—are today’s differences greater than those between medieval lords and serfs, or between 19 th century industrialists and day laborers paid by piecework? There’s no common measure, but every civilized society has highly significant inequalities and today’s is not qualitatively different in that regard.\n\nPerhaps there is now less hope that the inequalities can someday be overcome or lessened, but that hope is itself just a manifestation of liberal-democratic faith, so we are going in a circle. It would be more economical to see that loss of faith as an increase in clarity. But what does the increasing or more intractable inequality have to do with the diminishing legitimacy function of the welfare state—is it that the rich no longer have enough money to support it or the less able are no longer willing to accept the bribe (or have figured out that the bribe will continue even if legitimacy is denied)? The choice between an authoritarian China-style solution and the preposterous victimary imaginary of the West seems clear, but why be downcast about it?\n\nIf China is the “best case” so far, presumably there can be yet better cases. Obviously creating myths so as to maintain fictions is unsustainable—what next, legends to preserve the myths that maintain the fiction?—and it might be a relief to engage reality. (In fact, if the welfare state no longer serves a legitimating function, that may be because yet another—let’s just call it a—lie has been exposed, that of endless upward mobility and generational status upgrades.) But does not the discarding of lies and fantasies and the apprehension of reality represent greater morality, rather than immorality?\n\nVictimary thinking is an ugly and dangerous business, but the inhabitants of advanced economies in their “crowd-sourced” wisdom appear to have determined so far that it is the lesser evil compared to naked hierarchy. The “transnational elite” imposes its own de facto hierarchy, but masks it by victimary virtue-signaling, more or less keeping the peace, while at the same time in Europe and even here fostering a growing insecurity.\n\nWe have the “crowd-sourced” wisdom of the inhabitants, but then the “transnational elite” and its hierarchy makes an immediate entrance. Has that elite not been placing its finger on the outsourcing scale (so to speak)? Through which—through whose —sign exchange systems has the wisdom been crowd sourced? So, let’s translate: the transnational elite masks its hierarchy by imposing victimary virtue-signaling, but is now running into diminishing returns—the very method that has more or less kept the peace now generates insecurity. It remains only to add that the elites don’t seem to have a Plan B, and appear to be determined to autistically continue to double down on their masking and signaling.\n\nBut as the economy becomes ever more symbol-driven, these expedients are unlikely to remain sufficient. It would seem that unless science can find an effective way of increasing human intelligence across the board, with all the unpredictable results that would bring about (including no doubt ever higher levels of cybercrime), the liberal-democratic model will perforce follow the bellwether universities into an ever higher level of thought control, and ultimately of tyrannical victimocracy. At which point the “final conflict” will indeed be engaged, perhaps with nuclear weapons, between the self-flagellating victimary West and a backward but determined Third World animated by Islamic resentment…\n\nOr not. Perhaps the exemplary conflict between Western-Judeo-Christian-modern-national-Israeli and Middle-Eastern-Islamic-traditional-tribal-Palestinian can be resolved, and global humanity brought slowly into harmony. Or perhaps the whole West will decline along with its periphery and our great-grandchildren will grow up peacefully speaking Chinese.\n\nBut is the China model exclusive to China? Can we not, in a moment of humility, study the China model, and the way it retrieves ancient Chinese traditions from the wreckage of communism? And, in a renewal of characteristic Western pride, adapt and improve upon the Chinese model? This would require a return to school regarding our own traditions, subjecting them to an unrestrained scrutiny that even its most stringent critics (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida…) could never have imagined. But what’s the point of a revolutionary and revelatory theory like GA if not to do exactly that? But the first question to take up would have to be…\n\nHuman language was the originary source of human equality, and if our hypothesis is correct, it arose in contrast to the might-makes-right ethos of the animal pecking-order system. The irony would seem to be that the discovery of the vast new resources of human representation made possible in the digital age is in the process of reversing the residue of this originary utopia more definitively than all the tyrannies of the past. Indeed, we may now find in the transparent immorality of these tyrannies a model to envy, because it provided a fairly clear path to the “progress” that would one day overturn them. Whereas for the moment, no such “enlightened” path to the future can be seen.\n\nThat of the relation between morality and equality. This is the heart of the matter. Human equality is utopian, but then it couldn’t be at the origin, because the origin couldn’t be utopian. Morality has nothing, absolutely nothing, literally nothing, to do with equality. We should reverse the entire frame here and say there is no equality, except as designated for very specific circumstances using very specific measuring implements. It’s an ontological question: deciding to call the capacity to speak with one another an instance of “equality” is to import liberal ontology into a mode of anthropological inquiry that must suspend liberal “faith” if it is to ask whether that faith is justified.\n\nWe can then ask which description is better—people talking to each other as “equal” or people talking to each other as engaged in fine tuning and testing the direction each wants to lead the other. Which description will provide more powerful insights into human interactions and social order? Determining that “equality” must be the starting assumption just leads you to ignore all features of the interaction that interfere with that assumption, which means it leads you to ignore everything that makes it an interaction—which, interestingly, in practice leads to all kinds of atrocities. What seems like equality is just an oscillation of hierarchies, within a broader hierarchy.\n\nIn a conversation, the person speaking is for the moment in charge; in 30 seconds, the other person will be in charge. It would be silly to call this “inequality,” even in its more permanent forms (like teacher and student), because it’s simply devotion to the center—whoever can show the way to manifest this devotion points the way to others. And that’s morality—showing others how to manifest devotion to the center. Nothing could more completely overturn the animal pecking order—a peasant can show a king how to manifest devotion to the center, but the king is still the king because he shows lots of other people how to do it, in lots of situations well beyond the experience and capability of the peasant.\n\nMorality involves reciprocity and reciprocity not only has nothing to do with equality, but is positively undermined by equality. There can only be reciprocity within accepted roles. Most of us don’t go around slaughtering our fellow citizens, but that’s not reciprocity because such acts are unlawful and these laws at least are seriously enforced and, moreover, most of us don’t want to do anything like that. When a worker performs his job competently and conscientiously, and the manager rewards the worker with steady pay increases, a promise of continued employment and safe, clean working conditions—that’s reciprocity.\n\nFriends can engage in reciprocity with each other without any explicit hierarchy, but here we’re talking about a gift economy with all kinds of implicit hierarchies. I wouldn’t deny all reciprocity to market exchanges (overwhelmingly between gigantic corporations and individuals), but this kind of reciprocity is minimal and, as we can see, hardly sufficient to stake a social order on. Language makes it possible for us to all participate in social order, but inclusive participation is also not equality, nor is recognition or acknowledgement. In other words, morality (recognition, acknowledgement, reciprocity), yes; equality, no.\n\nForget equality. What, exactly, made those old tyrannies immoral, or even “tyrannies,” other than (tautologically) their failure to recognize equality?—their successes and our capacity to shape those models in new ways should not be disheartening. If there must be hierarchies and central power, then those things cannot be immoral, any more than hunger can be immoral. Morality enters into our engagement with these realities."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sacral-kingship-and-after-preliminary-reflections",
      "title": "Sacral Kingship and After: Preliminary Reflections",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Sacral kingship is the political commonsense of humankind, according to historian Francis Oakley. In his Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment , and elsewhere, Oakley explores the virtual omnipresence (and great diversity) of sacral kingship, noting that the republican and democratic periods in ancient Greece and Rome, much less our own contemporary democracies, could reasonably be seen as anomalies. What makes kingship sacral is the investment in the king of the maintenance of global harmony—in other words, the king is responsible not only for peace in the community but peace between humans and the world—quite literally, the king is responsible for the growth of crops, the mildness of the weather, the fertility of livestock and game, and more generally maintaining harmony between the various levels of existence.\n\nThinking in originary anthropological terms, we can recognize here the human appropriation of the sacred center, executed first of all by the Big Man but then institutionalized in ritual terms. The Big Man is like the founding genius or entrepreneur, while the sacred king is the inheritor of the Big Man’s labors, enabled and hedged in by myriad rules and expectations. The Big Man, we can assume, could still be replaced by a more effective Big Man, within the gift economy and tribal polity. Once the center has been humanly occupied, it must remain humanly occupied, while ongoing clarification regarding the mode of occupation would be determined by the needs of deferring new forms of potential violence.\n\nOne effect of the shift from the more informal Big Man mode of rule to sacral kingship would be the elimination of the constant struggle between prospective Big Men and their respective bands. But at least as important is the possibility of uploading a far more burdensome ritual weight upon the individual occupying the center. And if the sacral king is the nodal point of the community’s hopes he is equally the scapegoat of its resentments. Sacral kings are liable for the benefits they are supposed to bring, and the ritual slaughter of sacral kings is quite common, in some cases apparently ritually prescribed. It’s easy to imagine this being a common practice, since not only does the king, in fact, have no power over the weather, a king elevated through ritual means will not necessarily be more capable in carrying out the normal duties of a ruler better than anyone else.\n\nIndeed, some societies separated out the ritual from the executive duties of kingship, delegating the latter to some commander, and thereby instituting an early form of division of power—but these seem to have been more complex and advanced social orders, capable of living with some tension between the fictions and realities of power (medieval to modern Japan is exemplary here).\n\nIt seems obvious that sacral kings, especially the more capable among them, must have considered ways of improving their position within this set of arrangements. The most obvious way of doing so would be to conquer enough territories, introduce enough differentiations into the social order, and establish enough of a bureaucracy to neutralize any hope on the part of rivals to replace oneself. (No doubt, the “failures” of sacral kings to ensure fertility or a good rainy season were often framed and broadcast by such rivals, even if the necessity of carrying out such power struggles in the ritualistic language of the community would make it hard to discern their precise interplay at a distance.)\n\nOnce this has been accomplished, we have a genuine “God Emperor” who can rule over vast territories and bequeath his rule to millennia of descendants. The Chinese, ancient Near East and Egyptian monarchies fit this model and the king is still sacred, still divine, still ensuring the happiness of marriages, the abundance of offspring, and so on. If it’s stable, unified government we want, it’s hard to argue with models that remained more or less intact in some cases for a couple of thousand years. Do we want to argue with it?\n\nThe arguments came first of all from the ancient Israelites, who revealed a God incompatible with the sacralization of a human ruler. The foundational story of the Israelites is, of course, that of a small, originally nomadic, then enslaved, people, escaping from and them inflicting a devastating defeat upon, the mightiest empire in the world. The exodus has nourished liberatory and egalitarian narratives ever since. Furthermore, even a cursory, untutored reading of the history of ancient Israel as recorded in the Hebrew Bible can see the constant, ultimately unresolved tension regarding the nature and even legitimacy of kingship, either for the Israelite polity itself or those who took over the task of writing (revising?\n\nInventing?) its history. On the simplest level, if God is king, then no human can be put in that role; insofar as we are to have a human king, he must be no more than a mere functionary of God’s word (which itself is relayed more reliably by priests, judges and prophets). At the very least, the assumption that the king is subjected to some external measure that could justify his restraint or removal now seems to be a permanent part of the human condition. Even more, if the Israelite God is the God of all humankind, with the Israelites His chosen priests and witnesses, the history of that people takes on an unprecedented meaning.\n\nUnder conditions of “normal” sacral kingship, the conquest and replacement of one king by another merely changes the occupant, not the nature, of the center. Strictly speaking, the entire history (or mythology) of the community pre-conquest is cancelled and can be, and probably usually is, forgotten—or, at least, aggressively translated into the terms of the new ritual and mythic order. Not for the Israelites—their history is that of a kind of agon between the Israelites and, by extension, humanity, with God—the defeats and near obliteration of the Jews are manifestations of divine judgment, punishing the Jews for failing to keep faith with God’s law.\n\nImplicit in this historical logic is the assumption that a return to obedience to God’s will is to issue in redemption, making the continued existence of this particular people especially vital to human history as a whole, but just as significantly providing a model for history as such.\n\nAt the same time, Judaic thought never really imagines a form of government other than kingship. As has often been noted, the very discourse used to describe God in the Scriptures, and to this day in Jewish prayer, is highly monarchical—God is king, the king of kings, the honor due to God is very explicitly modeled on the kind of honor due to kings and the kind of benefits to result from doing God’s will follow very closely those expected from the sacral king. The covenant between the Israelites and God (the language of which determines that used by the prophets in their vituperations against the sinning community) is very similar to covenants between kings and their people common in the ancient Near East.\n\nAnd, of course, throughout the history of the diaspora, Jewish hopes resided in the coming of the Messiah, very clearly a king, even descended from the House of David—so deeply rooted are these hopes that many Jews prior to the founding of the State of Israel, and a tenacious minority still today, refuse to admit its legitimacy because it fails to fit the Messianic model. All of this testifies to the truth of Oakley’s point—so powerful and intuitive is the political commonsense of humankind that even the most radical revolutions in understandings of the divine ultimately resolve themselves into a somewhat revised version of the original model. Of course, slight revisions can contain vast and unpredictable consequences.\n\nSo, why not simply reject this odd Jewish notion and stick with what works, an undiluted divine imperium? For one thing, we know that kings can’t control the weather. But how did we come to know this? If in the more local sacral kingships, the “failure” of the king would lead to the sacrificial killing of that king (on the assumption that some ritual infelicity on the part of the king must have caused the disaster), what happens once the God Emperor is beyond such ritual punishment? Something else, lots of other things, get sacrificed. The regime of human sacrifice maintained by the Aztec monarchs was just the most vivid and gruesome example of what was the case in all such kingdoms—human sacrifice on behalf of the king.\n\nOne of Eric Gans’s most interesting discussions in his The End of Culture concerns the emergence of human sacrifice at a later, more civilized level of cultural development—it’s not the hunter and gatherer aboriginals who offer up their first born to the gods, but those in more highly differentiated and hierarchical social orders. If your god-ancestor is an antelope, you can offer up a portion of your antelope meal in tribute; if your god is a human king, you offer up your heir, or your slave, because that is what he has provided you with. This can take on many forms, including the conquest, enslavement and extermination of other people, in order to provide such tribute.\n\nWhat the Judaic revelation reveals is that such sacrifice is untenable. What accounts for this revelation? (It’s so hard for us to see this as a revelation because is hard for us to imagine believing that the king, for example, provides for the orderly movements of heavenly bodies. But “we” believed then, just like “we” believe now, in everything conducive, as far as we can tell, which is to say as far as we are told by those we have no choice but to trust, to the deferral of communal violence.) The more distant the sacred center, the more all these subjects’ symmetrical relation to the center outweighs their differences, and the more it becomes possible to imagine that anyone could be liable to be sacrificed.\n\nAnd if anyone could be liable to be sacrificed, anyone can put themselves forward as a sacrifice, or at least demonstrate a willingness to be sacrificed, if necessary. One might do this for the salvation of the community, but this more conscious self-sacrifice would involve some study of the “traits” and actions that make one a more likely sacrifice; i.e., one must become a little bit of a generative anthropologist. The Jewish notion of “chosenness” is really a notion of putting oneself forward as a sacrifice. And, of course, this notion is completed and universalized by the self-sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth who, as Girard argued, discredited sacrifice by showing its roots in nothing more than mimetic contagion.\n\n(What Jesus revealed, according to Gans, is that anyone preaching the doctrine of universal reciprocity will generate the resentment of all, because all thereby stand accused of resentment.) No one can, any more, carry out human sacrifices in good faith; hence, there is no return to the order of sacral kingship—and, as a side effect, other modes of human and natural causality can be explored.\n\nOakley follows the tentative and ultimately unresolved attempts of Christianity to come to terms with this same problem—the incompatibility of a transcendent God with sacralized kingships. There is much to be discussed here, and much of the struggle between Papacy and the medieval European kings took ideological form in the arguments over the appropriateness of “worldly” kings exercising power that included sacerdotal power. But I’m going to leave this aside for now, in part because I still have a bit of Oakley to read, but also because I want to see what is involved in speaking about power in the terms I am laying out here.\n\nHere’s the problem: sacral kingship is the “political commonsense of humankind,” and indeed continues to inform our relation to even the most “secular” leaders, and yet is impossible; meanwhile, we haven’t come up with anything to replace it with—not even close. (One thing worth pointing out is that if, since the spread of Christianity, human beings have been embarked upon the task of constructing a credible replacement for sacral kingship, we can all be a lot more forgiving of our political enemies, present and past, because this must be the most difficult thing humans have ever had to do.)\n\nPower, for originary thinking, ultimately lies in deferral and discipline, a view that I think is consistent with de Jouvenal’s attribution of power to “credit,” i.e., faith in someone’s proven ability to step into some “gap” where leadership is required. To take an example I’ve used before, in a group of hungry men, the one who can abstain from suddenly available food in order to remain dedicated to some urgent task would appear and therefore be extremely powerful in relation to his fellows. The more disciplined you are, the more you want such discipline displayed in the exercise of power, whether that exercise is yours or another’s.\n\nWe can see, in sacral kingship, absolute credit being given to the king. Why does he deserve such credit? Well, who are you to ask the question—in doing so, don’t you give yourself a bit too much credit? As long as any failures in the social order can be repaired by more or better sacrifices, such credit can continue to flow, and if necessary redirected. But if sacrifice is not the cure, it’s not clear what is. If the king puts himself forward as a self-sacrifice on behalf of the community in post-sacrificial terms, well so can others—shaping yourself as a potential sacrifice, in your own practices and your relation to your community, is itself a capability, one that marks you as elite, i.e., powerful—especially if you inherit the other markers of potential rulership, such as property and bloodline (themselves markers of credit advanced by previous generations).\n\nUnsecure or divided power really points to an unresolved anthropological and historical dilemma. If the arguments about Church and Throne in the middle ages mask struggles for power, those struggles for power also advance a kind of difficult anthropological inquiry, upon which we are still engaged. There’s no reason to assume that the lord who put together an army to overthrow the king didn’t genuinely believe he was God’s “real” regent on earth. It’s a good idea to figure out what good faith reasons he might have had for believing this.\n\nNow, Renaissance and Reformation thinkers had what they thought would be a viable replacement for sacral kingship (one drawn from ancient philosophy): “Nature.” If we can understand the laws of nature, both physical and human nature, we can order society rightly. This would draw together the new sciences with a rational political order unindebted to “irrational” hierarchies and rituals. I want to suggest one thing about this attempt (which has reshaped social and political life so thoroughly that we can’t even see how deeply embedded “Nature” is in our thinking about everything): “Nature” is really an attempt to create a more indirect system of sacrifice.\n\nThe possibility of talking about modern society as a system of sacrifice is by now a well-established tradition, referencing the modern genocides and wars along with far more mundane economic practices. Indeed, it’s very easy to see the valorization of “the market” as an indirect method of sacrifice: we know that if certain restrictions on trade, capital mobility, ownership, labor-capital relations, etc., are overturned, a certain amount of resources will be destroyed and a certain number of lives ruined. All in the name of “the Economy.” We know it will happen, and we can participate in the purging of the antiquated and inefficient, but no one is actually doing it—no one is responsible for singling out another to be sacrificed for the sake of the Economy.\n\nThe indirectness is not just evasiveness, though—it does allow for the actual causes of social events to be examined and discussed. It’s just that they must be discussed in a framework that ensures that some power center will preside over the destruction of constituents of another. One could imagine justifying the “natural” sacrifices of a Darwinian social order if it served as a viable, post-Christian replacement of a no longer acceptable sacrificial order—except that it no longer seems to be working. We can think, for example, about Affirmative Action as a sacrificial policy: we place a certain number of less qualified members of “protected classes” into positions with the predictable result that a certain number of lives and certain amount of wealth will be lost, and we do this to appease the furies of racial hatred that have led to civil war in the past.\n\nBut the fact that the policy is sacrificial, and not “rational,” is proven by the lack of any limits to the policy. No one can say when the policy will end, even hypothetically, nor can anyone say what forms of “inequality” or past “sins” it can’t be used to remedy. All this is to be determined by the anointed priests and priestesses of the victimary order. We can just as readily talk about Western immigration policies as an enormous sacrifice of “whiteness,” for the disappearance of which no one now feels they must hide their enthusiasm. The modern social sciences are for the most part elaborate justifications of indirect sacrifices.\n\nSo, the problem of absolutism is then a problem of establishing a post-sacrificial order. This may be very difficult but also rather simple. Absolutism privileges the more disciplined over the less disciplined, in every community, every profession, every human activity, every individual, including, of course, sovereignty itself. We can no longer see the king as the fount of spring showers, but we can see him as the font of the discipline that makes us human and members of a particular order. We could say that such a disciplinary order has a lot in common with modern penology, with its shift in emphasis from purely punitive to rehabilitative measures; it may even sound somewhat “therapeutic.”\n\nBut one difference is that we apply disciplinary terms to ourselves, not just the other—we’re all in training. Another difference is a greater affinity with a traditional view that sees indiscipline as a result of unrestrained desire—lust, envy, resentment, etc., rather than (as modern therapeutic approaches insist) the repression of those desires. (Strictly speaking, therapeutic approaches see discipline itself as the problem.) But we may have a lot to learn from Foucault here, and I take his growing appreciation of the various “technologies of the self” that he studied, moving a great distance from his initial seething resentment of the disciplinary order, as a grudging acknowledge of that order’s civilizing nature.\n\nAbsolutism might be thought of as a more precise panopticon: not every single subject needs to be constant view, just those on an immediately inferior level of authority. Discipline, in its preliminary forms, involves a kind of “self-sacrifice” (learning to forego certain desires), and a willingness to step into the breach when some kind of mimetically driven panic or paralysis is evident can also be described in self-sacrificial terms—in its more advanced forms, though, discipline means being able to found and adhere to disciplines, that is, constraint based forms of shared practice and inquiry. Then, discipline becomes less self-sacrificial than generative of models for living—and, therefore, for ruling and being ruled."
    },
    {
      "slug": "debts-and-deferences-gablog",
      "title": "Debts and Deferences",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "(For those who would like to comment on the GABlog specifically, I have set up reddit page: https://www.reddit.com/r/GABlog/comments/6kukdg/debts_and_deferences/)\n\nDavid Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 Years adds a few decisive nails to the coffin of liberal economics and politics. Liberal economists imagine money and markets emerging out of barter; typically, they cannot show that anything like this ever happened, any more than social contract theorists can find an instance where that fictional event ever happened. Villager A doesn’t have too many chickens, while villager B has too many potatoes, and so A and B exchange chickens for potatoes; villagers C, D, E… n do not get in on the game, so that a certain point all the bartering gets too confusing so all must agree on a currency into which all values can be converted.\n\nAll of this is ahistorical nonsense. Markets have historically been created and managed by states, for the purpose of maintaining ritual and military institutions. A fully marketized order, meanwhile, involves the violent disruption of personal and moral economies of credit (largely conducted without currency or calculation) and their replacement by debt regimes in which all of an individual’s possessions and the individual him/herself are alienable. Traditional debt regimes, in which economies are always moral economies, presuppose the inclusion of everyone within the system—debts never completely expropriate the debtors. The market economy has everyone treating everyone else as outside of the system of obligations, as a potential adversary.\n\nGraeber distinguishes between three forms of social organization. First, what he calls “communist,” using the definition from the Communist Manifesto , “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Graeber sees this as a kind of originary form of social relations, which we all live according to for much of our everyday lives—such a relation treats the world as a single, eternal, object/environment to which everyone contributes and from which everyone receives indiscriminately (if you’ve ever held open a door for elderly woman, you acted like a communist). The second form of social organization is “exchange,” in which things are seen as commensurable.\n\nThe third form is “hierarchy,” in which there is no commensurability between objects and individuals, and obligations are set by precedent. The exchange relation is really the focus of Graeber’s book. He traces the disembedding of exchange relations from “communist” ones and this seems to take place through the intervention of hierarchy. Kings need armies, and so they need to pay their soldiers, so they produce coins in order to do so; those soldiers need to spend the money somewhere so tradesmen surround the military. Kings need to tax their subjects, so some way of measuring wealth becomes necessary; taxes can be set high enough so that subjects have to go into debt, which in turn makes it easier to appropriate their property.\n\nWe need currency in order to pay such “antagonistic” debts. Now, part of what makes Graeber’s discussion especially interesting (in a way, it’s the starting point of his discussion) is the perplexing fact that not only is debt generally and unthinkably taken to be a moral question (“we must repay our debts,” everyone must get what is due him”) but that moral thinking more generally seems to operate primarily with a vocabulary drawn from that of debt (God has given us all kinds of things and we in turn are deeply obliged to Him; we seek redemption from the slavery of sin, etc.).\n\nGraeber’s intention is primarily to debunk this language of debt, which he examines in a sustained way in his chapter on “Primordial Debt.” He discusses sacrifice, and makes the very interesting observation that in some conditions the main form of currency (the representation of value into which exchangeable objects can be converted) is some object or objects (like cattle) that are most commonly used for sacrifice. For Graeber, the moral discourse of debt is irrational, and the standard of rationality seems to come from “communist” morality. For Graeber, the communists he discusses are much more rational than those of us besotted by debt-talk, who imagine all kinds of unpayable and even unimaginable debts (with God, for example, who couldn’t possibly need anything from us) rather than simply recognizing the basic fact of our interdependence.\n\nIt would complicate Graeber’s argument to acknowledge that some form of exchange, or debt, not to mention hierarchy, is constitutive of the communist community as well. (Graeber doesn’t see “communism,” “exchange” and “hierarchy” as different kinds of social orders, but as moral economies that co-exist within a single order—still, it’s clear that social orders are distinguished by the predominance of one over the others, and that the egalitarian communities from which Graeber draws his critiques of pathological exchange orders are the more reliable repositories of communist morality.) He focuses on intra-communal relations, not their relation to the sacred center (their ritual order), so the possibility that the notion of debt is indeed primordial, preceding the origin of human inequality, doesn’t arise.\n\nThis makes it easy for him to ridicule the notion, that some researchers purport to see as fundamental in the ancient Middle East and India, that existence itself is a form of indebtedness, as a kind of state ideology, contending that rather than seeing these theological claims as supposing a (ridiculous!) “infinite” debt, we should rather interpret\n\nthis list [of escalating debts] as a subtle way of saying that the only way of “freeing oneself” from the debt was not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence that the very notion of canceling the debt, and achieving a separate, autonomous existence, was ridiculous from the start. Or even that the very presumption of positing oneself as separate from humanity or the cosmos, so much so that one can enter into one-to-one dealings with it, is itself the crime that can be answered only by death. Our guilt is not due to the fact that we cannot repay our debt to the universe. Our guilt is our presumption in thinking of ourselves as being in any sense an equivalent to Everything Else that Exists or Has Ever Existed, so as to be able to conceive of such a debt in the first place. (68)\n\nContrary to his normal procedure, though, Graeber doesn’t show that anyone, other than a present-day anarchist or communist, actually has interpreted these notions in this way. It’s understandable that Graber would want to insist upon an originary debt-free condition, since the only other way out of the violence endemic to impersonalized debt relations would be through hierarchy. Interestingly, Graeber points out that ancient and more recent pre-modern history is replete with revolts against the expropriating consequences of debt, where there is an implicit equality between debtor and creditor (insofar as they engage in exchange), but almost none against caste systems and slavery, and I would add far fewer against monarchy, or military hierarchies, where social distinctions are non-negotiable and beyond appeal—but doesn’t pursue the implications of this observation.\n\nGraeber makes an argument intimately related to one of Marx’s central ones, and it is an argument that must be conceded. What, exactly, makes it possible to exchange one object with any other; what makes the objects commensurable? The objects must be abstracted from the network of relations in which they are embedded, and by “abstracted” Graeber means “violently ripped out.” This analysis, like Marx’s of “abstract labor,” implicates exchange and debt in sacrifice by focusing on the most exchangeable of all objects: human beings. Early forms of exchange between communities and families involved replacing people, and therefore establishing their value (as represented by other objects): brides, slaves, murder victims, and so on.\n\nAlthough Graeber doesn’t speak in these terms, the implication is that hostage taking is central to the earliest forms of exchange. (It is not clear to me whether, for Graeber, or in reality for that matter, the more localized and personalized forms of “credit” Graeber valorizes precede and are distorted by the pathological, hostage taking forms or, on the contrary, the personalized forms are reforms and curtailments of hostage taking, under a new mode of the sacred and new mode of sovereignty. I find myself assuming the latter is the case, since the establishment by sovereigns of markets must have always involved some violent abstraction, and early forms of exchange between tribes, families and communities must have always presupposed the possibility of violent escalation.)\n\nNow, as I argued in my post on sacral kingship, for human beings to have this extremely high “value,” it must be possible to place them at the center—which means that the center must have already been expropriated by the “Big Man” and eventually permanently occupied by the sacral king. Again, we see the inseparability of “humanization” and human sacrifice. Humanity cannot be the highest value without humans being the most valuable exchangeable and sacrificable object. Graeber is right to associate this economy of hostages with the honor culture, which he especially dislikes, seeing one’s honor as being defined by the stripping of another’s.\n\nFlinching at the brutality of such systems, especially when one would be unable to imagine a credible alternative under those conditions, is a serious analytical failure—honor culture must not only have suppressed forms of violence endemic to relations within and between more communist orders, but any replacement of honor culture must defer some critical mode of violence that can be recognized as communally destructive within such societies. And this kind of recognition comes, to quote Marx, under conditions not of one’s choosing.\n\nDespite his ridicule of theologies of “infinite” and “existential” debt Graeber implicitly concedes that that development of these (critical) modes of thought in the “Axial Age” (800 BC to 600AD) of the great ancient empires led to the diminishment and ultimately elimination of the most egregious practices of mass slavery and human sacrifice of those empires. Once debt is conceived in infinite, existential terms, defining one’s relation to the sacred, then it is the assumption that debts can be settled through the exchange of hostages that becomes vulnerable to irony, ridicule and denunciation. Whether it’s “rational” (according to what tradition of rationality?\n\nDeveloped how—by reference to what system of exchange?) is completely irrelevant to the ethical advance that Graeber sees from the Axial to the Middle Ages (600-1450 AD), an advance we must see as a result of the gradual assimilation of the transcendent forms of the sacred of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. The sacral king is the earliest form of absolutism: the sacral king is the cynosure of the order, the mediator between divine and human, and also for this reason a possible sacrifice—the first form of human sacrifice. The ancient emperors retain this sacrality in an extended form (they cannot be violated under any conditions), but since they remove themselves from the position of sacrificial victim, they are sacrificed to, not sacrificed.\n\nThe ancient empires were regimes of expanded sacrifice, or hostage taking, in which the abstraction and redistribution of individuals was routinely used to settle accounts. This accounts for the moral state of the axial empires that Graeber deplores, and which led to the more metaphorical and spiritual forms of sacrifice that provided for the moral revolution which restored a more reciprocal economy, based upon embedded debt networks, personal credit rather than currency, in the Middle Ages.\n\nWe can now focus on the relation between hostage taking, or the violent extraction of humans from relations of “communism,” “exchange” and “hierarchy” that define them, and sovereignty. The forms of holiness inherited from the Axial Age dissenters invalidate hostage taking: each human being has a unique relation to the divine, so humans can no longer be treated as commensurable with one another. Rather than a possible sacrifice or receiver of sacrifice, the sovereign’s role is now to suppress sacrifice. To sacrifice a human requires that all the attention of the community converge on the sacrificial figure. He or she must be seen as the repository of all desires and resentments, the origin of some proliferating criminality or plague, the cause of dashed hopes.\n\nThe post-axial sovereign ensures that such attention can only be organized on the terms of the sovereign. Hostage taking implies an honor system, and the suppression of sacrifice means the suppression of the honor system, which is to say the vendetta. The sovereign must settle accounts between groups and individuals in such a way that grievances are satisfied sufficiently so as to make recourse to the vendetta unthinkable. Sovereignty must reach into and shape the social order so as to block the emergence of power centers interested in restoring the honor system. This means a system of deferences that interpose between the convergent attention of the many and any individual the question, “what would the sovereign do (and have me do)”?\n\nWhich further means that the sovereign construct a justice system that disseminates answers to those questions broadly and clearly, verbally and through institutionalized practices. When our attention converges on an individual—a celebrity, an infamous criminal or defendant, the victim of a Twitter mob—we may insult, ridicule, taunt, ostracize, but will stop short of appropriating the sovereign’s prerogative to imprison or kill. At a certain point, our attention converges on those who seem more likely than us to appropriate that prerogative (to organize a lynch mob, for example).\n\nThis gradual incorporation of the norms of axial age transcendence into Middle Ages governance accounts for the moral, political and even economic and technological advances steadily gained in medieval Europe (I’m not going to try and include parallel developments in the Islamic world, India and China). But insofar as these terms of transcendence inform the state, they can be invoked against the state, especially when they are embodied in a powerful institution with sacral imperial pretensions of its own. It is, after all, possible to concede that central power should be exercised absolutely while still insisting that the occupant of that central power be subject to replacement.\n\nAny specific argument along these lines will be marked by inconsistencies, but so will arguments for sovereign determined succession. And the criteria for replacement will most likely derive from the transcendent terms that are embedded in the sovereign itself. It’s then a few steps to modern democracy, which insists on institutionalizing a system of replacement so that his temporary hold on power will always be present in the mind of the sovereign. It’s then barely a step at all to propose that counters to sovereign action be built into sovereignty itself, in the form of “checks and balances.” But this makes the modern executive perilously close to becoming a sacrificial object again—not just in the once and for all manner in which the absolutist monarchs were sacrificed to inaugurate the modern age, but as a routine, almost ritualized matter.\n\nTo refer again to my post on sacral kingship, I am arguing for an understanding of modern history as the ongoing attempt to create a satisfactory replacement for sacral kingship—sovereignty as a non-sacrificial center of attention that, even more, deflects towards itself all other potentially sacrificial centers of attention.\n\nWhat makes the consequences of the “always already” divided sovereignty of medieval Christianity even more destructive is the possibility of re-“abstracting” individuals from their social networks of obligation and reciprocity. The breaking up of the honor system, which gives the individual a direct relation to the sovereign, makes this abstraction a site of power struggles—the source of the high-low vs. the middle power blocs. I’m not going to work through Graeber’s complex discussion of the rise of modernity, but he associates the rise of “capitalism” with a massive new abstraction of individuals—not so much as human hostages (al though Graeber foregrounds the importance of world conquest and slavery by the West to this process) but as potential capitalists who see the world completely in terms of exchange.\n\nThis self-capitalization respects the transcendent axial terms because in self-capitalizing, the subject is self-sacrificing through labor, discipline, and the exclusion or reduction of whole domains of what have always been considered essential human experiences. The asceticism of the capitalist subject is certainly in the Christian tradition. As long as this type of subject is privileged, the unification and securing of power is impossible—the self-sacrificing individuals will always be eager clients for sowers of dissension and division. The modern market is a product of power as much as markets ever were, with modern capitalists, as Graber argues, the descendants of the military adventurers of the early modern age—but, by setting markets against the state, liberalism makes the market a multiplier and intensifier of divided power.\n\nIf liberalism does not directly restore, it always incites and ultimately relies on the return of the honor system—leftism is the institutionalization and infinitely varied refinment of the vendetta. So, absolutism demands the re-embedding of individuals into “communistic,” “exchange” and “hierarchical” orders, but on terms that preclude reversion to the honor system and preserve the mass literacy and numeracy presupposed, if not quite accomplished, by contemporary social orders.\n\nTo an extent, absolutists stand with some elements of the contemporary left, those that still have abolishing the capitalist world order on their agenda—at the very least, we can notice some of the same things deliberately ignored by liberals. There are actually a very few, and those very feeble (in power and intellectual acuity), among the left that have kept their eye on replacing the metastasized systems of exchange that have swallowed up all human relations and made us all hostage to globalizing economic, political and media regimes. Transnational human rights regimes and climate fanaticism, to take two examples (both providing legal and moral bases for “political correctness” and supply chains from transnational economic entities to your humble social justice warrior) tie the left irreversibly to capitalism.\n\nBlackmailing corporations and other large institutions, along with infiltrating the permanent state (which ensures the blackmailing will work), pretty much defines the left at this point. No one is more calculating and exchange oriented than they are. And those on the left who wish to return to class, economic inequality and socialist transformation are completely unwilling to challenge the splintering of the leftist project along identity lines.\n\nGraeber, to his credit, says little about the prospects of the left, refusing to feed his readership false optimism. To his discredit, while insisting on the permanence of the “communistic” dimension of human experience (we could hardly rid ourselves of it if we wished), and devoting the bulk of his attention to distinguishing productive from pathological modes of exchange, he says very little, especially by way of proposing new ways of thinking, about the “hierarchical” dimension. He concedes its necessity, but never offers even the most qualified praise for responsible uses of hierarchy, much less a rigorous distinction between positive and negative forms.\n\nI have to assume that, as a confirmed leftist speaking mostly to other leftists (Graeber has been an important figure in the “anti-globalization” movement [the ones who smashed up Seattle back in antiquity, i.e., 1999] which, insofar as it still exists, has become the alt-right movement). We, of course, have no such scruples—quite to the contrary! The articulation of “communism,” “exchange” and “hierarchy” can probably be incorporated very nicely into absolutism. The most originary manifestation of hierarchy is naming: to name another being is to establish an origin and destiny, and thereby constitute it, bring it into existence.\n\nDelegating is itself a form of naming. Naming is performative, like christening a ship or marrying a couple, activities that manifest the most basic social traditions. In a sense, that is what a tradition entails—a reciprocally constituting system of names.\n\nThe political formalism instituted by Moldbug is also a form of naming—anonymous, and therefore apparently spontaneous powers are incorporated and made subordinate to the sovereign through naming. The media are propaganda agencies of some power center or another—the blogger Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse asserts that the CIA leaks to the Washington Post and the FBI to the New York Times . No doubt we could create a more comprehensive map of affiliations. In the interests of transparency, we should not only have such a map but it should be used to centralize the information policy of the regime. Every piece of information comes from some specific place in the chain of command.\n\nThat means all information purveyors are named by the sovereign. Moving beyond this specific example, we can see that sovereign naming prevents the abstraction of individuals in a way that conforms to a dynamic social order. Something new—a new enterprise, an invention—comes out of something existing, something with a name, and is itself named as soon as it comes to the attention of the sovereign (and the sovereign keeps getting better at noticing and assessing novel phenomena).\n\nHow do we devise and apply new names? Like Graeber’s “communism,” this practice is part of our most elementary relations to the world and each other. To point to something that hasn’t been noticed is to name it, even if only as “today’s hamburger,” as opposed to all the other hamburgers we’ve all eaten previously. Sovereign naming produces new centers of attention that direct our attention back to the sovereign’s naming capacity. Here’s a way to think about how “naming” as a form of thinking and speaking happens. Gertrude Stein had a habit of naming the chapters in her books. One reads through Chapters 1-6 and then the next chapter is “Chapter 3.”\n\nThis arrests one attention and directs it toward the meta-critical dimension of books, to things we don’t ordinarily notice. After one has read a lot of books, one notices patterns—so, a “typical” novel might have, say 15 chapters, and the different chapters develop a certain character, or “feel,” because of the formulas of novel writing. So, in a 15 chapter book, chapter 7 has a “turning point” or “climax,” and when the reader gets to Chapter 7 such an expectation is implicit. One notices these patterns and forgets them, as we simply plug new books into the formula. But if there is a character or feel to “Chapter 7,” then other chapters can be Chapter 7-ish, say, in a book that reworks the formulae.\n\nYou can let the reader notice the subversion of the formula, or you can explicitly identify the upcoming chapter as, “really,” Chapter 7, even if it comes after Chapter 2 and before Chapter 3. Whatever is better for writers, it is better for authority to explicitly name the “emergent property,” and to do so, also explicitly, in the only way one can—tropologically, that is, by violating some linguistic rule or expectation, using a word in a “wrong” way that is now made “right” by its authoritative application. Sovereign naming is thus the ostensive dimension of social order, which allows for a coherent array of imperatives and therefore a clarified chain of command.\n\nOf course, subjects will themselves get into the habit of naming, of making explicit their relations to each other, their obligations and expectations, and also their disappointments and amendments of those relations. We would have the means to resist our “abstraction” by deferring to one another’s names."
    },
    {
      "slug": "orders-names-sovereignty",
      "title": "Orders, Names, Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I am currently working with the hypothesis that since the fall of sacral kingship human beings have had no idea what we are doing, politically, and that post-sacral kingship history has been a sustained attempt to, first, reproduce the radiating centrality of the ruler constitutive of sacral kingship while, second, eliminating the violent convergence towards the occupant of the center that permeates all social centers until repudiated in theory and practice. We want a king that is a permanent reference point for all social activity without feeling compelled to lynch him, or anyone else taking on a vaguely king-like role, as a way of resolving every social crisis.\n\nDemocracy, for example, can be seen as an attempt to allow us to lynch the king at regularly scheduled times, and to spend every waking hour agitating for his dismemberment and consumption, with less convulsive consequences. Anarchistic ontologies in general for that matter, result from throwing one’s hands up and declaring the problem unsolvable—you can then blame the attempt to solve the problem as the cause of the problem, so fighting those trying to solve the problem and betting on there being some secret source of sovereignty deep in the recesses of each individual seems like the only thing left to try. Until this problem is genuinely solved, the problem of unsecure power cannot be solved.\n\nAfter all, are we certain that we can point to any time in history when power was secure? (Of course, we can distinguish between more and less secure sovereignties.) In this case, the problem of unsecure power is a genuine one, not one arbitrarily caused either by kings who wanted to seize more power and needed excuses, nor by potential alternative rulers who unreasonably mistrust the present ruler. Nor is it just mismanagement. This hypothesis seems to me generous to all participants, which is important not because generosity is a particularly important virtue, in life or hermeneutics, but because it helps us to keep in mind a wide range of possible intentions and motivations on the part of our political opponents, past and present.\n\nIt allows us to derive sustenance from a range of political traditions, not only the few bright lights like Robert Filmer, but far more unlikely ones as well. Along with being open-ended the hypothesis I posit here is very narrowly focused on identifying a specific form of centrality: in other words, it should enable us to pose questions that we can actually answer in a way that advances the discipline.\n\nCoupled with this hypothesis is a hypothesis regarding the originary scene upon which humanity emerged. The anthropomorphic hypothesis (which I don’t tire of referring the reader to Eric Gans for): due to the advanced mimetic capacity of that higher primate that became our predecessor, the desire for a central object led to a violent convergence toward the center that overrode the pecking order of the horde, creating the need for a new means of keeping order. The new means was the sign, a gesture of aborted appropriation by which all members of what is now a “community” showed each other that they would cease their movement toward the central object (now God, repelling their advance).\n\nNow, a further consideration of this hypothesis makes it clear that the extending of this gesture could not have been unanimous and spontaneous: one member would have had to have gone first without, we must assume, completely realizing what he has done until the others, successively, followed his example in a kind of arrest and reversal of mimetic rivalry and crisis. So, everyone participates in the scene equally (with “equally” simply meaning participation) while at the same time a minimal hierarchy exists, as it must exist for every single human action and institution.\n\nThe two hypotheses converge insofar as this minimal hierarchy is repeated, discovered, and resisted until one individual is capable of taking over the center, in place of (almost invariably) the animal “ancestor” and divinity that had occupied it. This, then, is the model for all human action and institution building: there is a founder, a priest-king, and there are “seconds” who order the founding so as to incorporate those to be initiated into and organized within it: managers, bureaucrats and ideologues, to put it cynically. And there are the rest, who operate within frames constructed for them, and from among whom a few are recruited for staffing the seconds.\n\nIt seems reasonable to assume an originary institutional order of priests, warriors and craftsmen, with the king at the top of both priestly and warrior hierarchies. These functions are split off of the power of the sacral king, while remaining subordinate to the occupant of that office. It’s easy to see how the needs of the king, representing the community, would lead to delegations of power eventually threatening the unity of sovereignty: most obviously, war, whether defensive or offensive (a fairly tenuous boundary to say the least), would give power to the warriors, and then to the craftsman who must be enlarged and empowered to supply the warriors, in which case the priests can think of exploiting their legitimating function to support the warrior elite against the king, one warrior faction against another, etc.\n\nAnd war leads to conquest, requiring the incorporation of new populations, the designation of new institutions, the delegation of new powers. In each case, the problem of representing all the new agencies as “always already” incorporated into the sovereign structure presents itself.\n\nWar, conquest and empire building lead to the abstraction of individuals and their reduction to objects of exchange I have spoken about in the last couple of posts in my discussions of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years . This regularizes practices of hostage taking and (human sacrifice). Again, the point is not to take the opportunity of displaying our modern abhorrence of these practices—that abhorrence itself had to be produced, and perhaps has had some unintended side-effects that should cramp our self-congratulation. The point is to explore the problem, as yet unsolved, of creating forms of centrality that preclude violent convergence.\n\nHere, I’ll suggest that the process of abstraction, under conditions (I’m speculating here) of loosened sovereignty, inter-sovereign rivalry, and relative advantages in transportation technology (like sea-faring) created a new figure, also placed by Graeber at the origin of the modern (European) world: the “adventurer,” a kind of synthesis of warrior and merchant (itself a further evolution of the craftsman). The adventurer is delegated his power by the sovereign—this, in fact, is the origin of the corporation as a politico-economic form. (Not a little of the adventurer remains in our modern CEOs.) But the adventurer, in lands far away, under unprecedented conditions, needing to make decisions on the spot, is in a position to force decisions upon the sovereign.\n\nHe creates a trading center far away; he makes deals with the local sovereign to protect that center; he kills and replaces a local sovereign unable to provide the requisite protection; in doing so he makes alliances with other surrounding sovereigns, etc. He creates conditions the sovereign cannot easily walk away from.\n\nBuckminister Fuller saw the world as being divided among and ruled by what he called the “great pirates” until very recently (the 19 th century). He would have included the sovereigns among the pirates. The novel development he was interested in (and saw himself as an exemplar of) was the scientist/engineer, whom we might see as a synthesis of all the previous castes: the scientist/engineer, who takes all of reality as a field of open inquiry and possible transformation to increase the power of humanity, has a bit of the priest, warrior, craftsman and adventurer in him—while being something qualitatively different at the same time.\n\nThe scientist/engineer also represents a new form of sovereignty, over reality itself. For Fuller, the scientist/engineer has taken power away from the great pirates, first of all by making the pirates dependent upon him. He sees the decisive transformation taking place during World War I. Fuller was ecstatic about this transformation, making all kinds of utopian and sometimes bizarre predictions regarding imminent transformations in the human condition that would make all of previous history and thinking irrelevant. But we can be more modest and say that the “scientist” is a problematic figure whose precise role has yet to be worked out.\n\nJust as some persistent and distorting elements of the sovereign, like his priestliness, need to be burned off to solve the problem of centrality, the scientist needs to be shorn of some of his priestly aura, warrior combativeness and even pretensions to sovereignty. Maybe he’s just a craftsman, but, given the enormously expanded field of materials he has to work with, an extraordinary and unprecedented one.\n\nOne fairly inescapable refutation of free market ideology is the way each new technological development leads almost immediately to gigantic monopolies. No one even bothers to go through the motions of saying we should find competitors for Facebook or Google. But there are probably new innovations, creating new megaliths, yet to come, which might yet marginalize them—less by creating a better Facebook, though, than something rendering Facebook obsolete. There are certain predetermined trajectories to the seizure of centrality, and rule through adventurers and scientists encourages such seizures. The government could cut any of these new centers down to size, like it did to Microsoft in the 90s, but secure sovereignty would rule through these companies.\n\nHow? Let’s return to our originary configuration: the central object “stops” all the members of the group from struggling against the interference of the others to appropriate it. It “tells” them to cease and desist, and they “listen.” In a sense, you could say they are talking to themselves, since the big dead bison doesn’t really talk; but something more complex is going on: they are communicating their intentions to each other through their common relation to that central object. It is the mediation of the object that “speaks.” The object is one step behind them and one step ahead. Behind, because it becomes meaningful by making itself vulnerable, by becoming the focus of their aggressive attentions; ahead, because it anticipates and thereby redirects their intentions.\n\nWhen the Big Man and then the sacral king occupies he center, he deliberately uses this configuration—or, more precisely, the more effectively he uses it, the better he will rule. Everybody seeks out and demands the attention of the center, but not directly: in interactions and conflicts with other members, the form of conciliation or remediation promoted by the center is invoked; the center is there without being there. This allows for maximum influence with minimal risk, as convergence toward the center would have a series of hurdles to leap. The center evokes complaints and pleas, because it has established the forms in which complaints and pleas can be formulated and advanced.\n\nThe center constantly takes in new information this way—all interactions between members of the group, and between different groups, cannot be planned by the central power, but they don’t have to be because the center becomes more and more like the network of relations formed by rules put forward by the center itself; rules that are formed out of the information attracted by the orientation of all toward the center. If I can tell everyone they have to act and speak as if I have the solution to all their problems, and I can get word of what they say and do, I will actually end up having the solutions to at least a lot of their problems, and they will be able to solve some of the rest.\n\nSo an absolutist state today would have to become a lot like the major power centers it rules through: information gathering and collating like Google, staging social interactions and networks like Facebook, efficient and productive like the best manufacturing firms. It’s kind of like those aliens in science fiction movies that mimic human beings. In order to do that, though, the activity of these corporations (and other institutions) has to be channeled to the center—everything each center does strengthens the sovereign, nothing they do must weaken or dilute it. The more this is the case, the more the institutions can be sovereign in their own sphere, and subordinates within those institutions sovereign in theirs.\n\nThis is something the aliens never manage, unable as they are to refrain from proceeding to consume their model at the first opportunity. Sovereigns will grow wealthy and powerful this way, wealthy and powerful enough to keep looking past the current reach of explicit sovereign power to make the concept of sovereignty one put up for general inquiry and discourse. What does it mean for humans to exercise sovereignty? Over themselves, over their natural environment, over their traditions? Secure sovereignty would mean distributing the concern over secure sovereignty more widely, allowing for power to take on more and nuanced forms, secure in the knowledge that ultimately, even if extremely indirectly, all sovereignty exercised anywhere redounds to sovereignty exercised everywhere.\n\nIt’s as if, spending years being obsessed with getting into the best physical shape possible, I can finally look around and start helping other people get into shape, because I’ve come to desire a more “shapely” world; and finally, I realize that the notion of “getting into shape” can take on all kinds of metaphorical meanings, that the world can be shapelier intellectually, spiritually, socially, aesthetically, etc., as well. Maybe these are the kinds of questions that would interest art and philosophy in a well order system."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereign-as-onomastician-in-chief",
      "title": "Sovereign as Onomastician-in-Chief",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "To see yourself as an “individual” is to see yourself as a center of attention, with as many qualifications (titles, formal associations, histories) as possible obscured—the more stripped of qualifications, the more individualized. Liberalism projects the denuded individual back to the founding of society, but that individual is obviously a result of liberalism. In other words, liberalism’s self-legitimating misconception doesn’t detract from the reality of such an individual—but it has to change our assessment of its meaning. Individuals can be removed from their supporting and defining institutional dependencies, which means that the individual is defined against those institutions and dependencies. (Eric Gans sees this self-definition as the project of romanticism.) To be an individual is to be in a perpetual state of mutiny against whatever form of order most directly threatens to define one. Don’t look at me as a “_____,” the individual demands, look at me as… the other of “_____.” Individualism is a kind of negative gnostic theology.\n\nDavid Graeber’s discussion in Debt: the First 5,000 Years emphasizes the violence intrinsic to this abstraction of individuals from their dependencies. Humanism posits the “human” as the highest value, and what makes anything a “value” is its commensurability and exchangeability with other values—and against what can human value be defined other than against other humans? Gans sees the romantic production of the individual as a means of enabling humans to participate in the market—the creation of an “anti-social” self-representation is a way of achieving value within society (Gans calls this the “constitutive hypocrisy of romanticism”).\n\nBut in that case it is humans, rather than things, that are circulating on the market. We may not readily see or feel the violence of this competitive self-valuing, habituated as we are to it, but it becomes easier if we imagine removing the (also unnoticed) limits upon individualization that must still exist. What if we were actually to define ourselves constantly, indiscriminately, against every social dependency—friends, families, colleagues, acquaintances, etc.? Such behavior would be psychopathic. Moreover, defining yourself against dependencies don’t leave those dependencies unaffected—rather, it has a deeply corrosive effect.\n\nOur mutinies always target specific dependencies, and are aimed at extracting specific concessions—hence, they are best described as hostage taking. Not the market itself, but the “market economy,” is a system of hostage exchange, of more and less direct kinds. It is promoted by those with the most to gain by sowing discord and disorder.\n\nNow, the expanded economy of hostage taking follows the discrediting of the restricted economy of human sacrifice constitutive of sacral kingship and ancient imperial orders. Since there is no way back to sacrificial order, even if we wanted it (which we can’t, really), the central problem for absolutism is a non-sacrificial recentering. Absolutism extends the basic principles of absolutism—a rejection of divided power, or imperium in imperio; and the assumption that all that is said and done within a sovereign territory is commanded or permitted by the sovereign—to the entire social order. To give someone responsibility for a specific institution or task is to provide them with all the means for fulfilling that responsibility along with freedom from interference, as long as the responsibility is indeed fulfilled.\n\nAs opposed to the abstractive process of liberalism, absolutism would involve a concentrative process—placing everyone within orders in which their responsibilities are made clear. All contemporary issues, such as technological development, “bioethics,” social media, etc., would be assessed in these terms: how does a particular possibility make it possible to concentrate rather than abstract. The elimination of the abstraction of “the human” removes all potential sacrificial targets. Imagine that instead of singling out individuals as celebrities or villains, or getting suckered by the mysticisms of “human rights,” we were to assign responsibility for the actions of individuals (whether praiseworthy or blameworthy) to the executive within the supervising institution. But it’s wrong to say “we” would do the assigning; rather, it would be the sovereign that treats any act that might turn an individual into a cynosure as a problem for the reform of some institution.\n\nThat, in fact, is the defining purpose of the sovereign: to maximize individual responsibility for the institutions that maximize the embeddedness of the individual in the institution. This process of individualization through embeddedness ramifies throughout each institution, and is the object of the discourses and dialogues comprising the life of the institution. What we would always be talking about is how to enhance each individual’s responsibility within an order that thereby comes to be defined by increasing degrees of responsibility, and in that sense complexity. Linguistically, this process takes the form of naming—baptizing, so to speak, new roles to be filled by individuals.\n\nTo name is both to reify, to create a role independent of whoever fills it, and to singularize, insofar as we can always distinguish between those who more or less adequately or authoritatively “inhabit” that name. the reification is then less an alienation or objectification than the creation of a new set of capacities. Names are the most basic link between individuals and the social order—that’s why everyone must have one. (Try to imagine a social order in which most people have names, but there are quite a few without.) Intellectually, naming is aligned to conceptualization: concepts are names for previously unseen objects, actions and processes. Once such things are named we can predicate them in various ways; just as important is that we can receive commands from the name. The first command is to refer to the named object within the sovereign order of names.\n\nA (there are quite a few) good way to think about names is as follows. A is the daughter of B and C; the sister of D and E; the grandchild of F, G, H and J; the cousin of K, L, M, N and O; the niece of… the great-granddaughter of…., and so on. The perfect name would reference all of these relations, in the relative importance they have in that social order (how distant from siblings are cousins considered to be, in marriage and inheritance law or custom, etc.); it would also reference revered ancestors, both familial and those of the community; it would affirm more recent heroes, like the general who won the last war (in both cases, really just more distant relatives, founders of lines, we might say).\n\nIn giving actual names to children, parents select from among all these relations and references, and thereby position the child within the field of the system of names. To name the child after a pop star is to announce the priority of celebrity over reverence of ancestors—naming after an ancestor is a possibility that has been rejected. But the child will also be given a middle name, and might be called by a nickname, and might be drawn elsewhere into the naming field. Again, concepts operate the same way, reorganizing and centering a conceptual field which gives even an apparently familiar concept a new force.\n\nNaming is the way the sovereign and his delegates (those who have been named by him) incorporate and authenticate institutions, authorities and practices. This is also why names are so important politically—it has often been noted how many political movements and even individuals have been named by their enemies, converting names intended as insults into badges of honor. Contemporary meming is essentially naming—each side trying to make names stick on the other (think about the origin of the word “branding,” and how it has come to be used). Whether or not a name sticks, and whether or not you can appropriate it provides a good metric for how likely your position is to endure. If your political enemies can shower you with insults that define you and you’re not able to transform them into badges of honor that’s a good sign either that you’re on the wrong side or your side is lacking in conceptual force.\n\nThe more “anti-fragile” your own position, the more you will be able to inhabit the various ways you have named yourself and been named. This is all part of the process of “auditioning,” that is, performing in such a way as to attract power centers interested in restoring order. What could be more desired by those recruiting an onomastician-in-chief than those proven in the study and deployment of names? This is not a superficial discipline, even if it works on surfaces—naming goes all the way down. The center is always named, and there is always a center. As soon as you take on or are given a name you have a persona, even if that persona is defined by the repudiation of the name.\n\nThe name plugs you into the command order. Thinking politically is to a great extent the ability to think within the names imposed upon one or adopted. Any designation (e.g., “racist”) mobilizes a whole regime of commands that includes the named and others (what they must do to the one so designated). Thinking politically involves figuring out which commands to obey and when—some immediately, some in modified form, some at a yet to be determined future time (commands themselves are time sensitive, but not always equally so). Obey the ones that enhance embeddedness and extend the constitutive traditions of the institution (e.g., “which understanding of ‘racism’ are we working with here…?”) and defer to the extent possible those subversive of articulated obligations (“apologize!”).\n\nSaturating the world with names saturates the world with sovereignty. Whe never one inhabits a name that can spread its shoots through the field of names and anchor it one imagines a sovereignty that would formalize that designation. Absolutism is interested in making dependencies and embedments explicit; liberalism wants to deploy designations as sites of conflict, which is to say inscribe them with loopholes providing for shirking and defection. The most formidable liberal names (like “racist”) are justifications for shirking, defection, and the parasitic blackmail one must live on as a result. Reactionary Future ’s proxy theory, which designates political actors as proxies (“rebellious tools”) of some powerful actor suggests the need to distinguish between titles that are, we might say, “pre-proxified,” and those that are proxy-resistant because they are located within the pyramid of commands.\n\nThe pre-proxified have the loopholes; the proxy resistant designations come with embedments built in and the means to create further embedments. It’s a difference between namings that demand further abstraction (disembed from your traditions, from the chain of command you find yourself in) and namings that command further concentration (clarify the chain of command, embed more explicitly in your traditions). Once we are saturated in names, there are no more abstract humans; there is the sovereign presiding over the field of names."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-roots-of-political-correctness",
      "title": "The Roots of Political Correctness",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In Terry Teachout’s recent article, he shows that past members of two great orchestras, in Vienna and Berlin, acquiesced and in some cases participated in anti-Semitism during the Nazi reign in Germany and Europe.\n\nhttps://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/orchestras-and-nazis/\n\nWe know that most Germans of the time were at least acquiescent in the attempted genocide of the Jews, but we may not have known that also were the accomplished musicians of these orchestras. Hitler is famous as a failed painter, and this article is a valuable reminder that success as an artist does not preclude racism. We can assume that these musicians were cultured and intelligent people, well-respected, who presumably had what they thought were good reasons for acting, or failing to act, as they did. And this should serve as a warning to all of us, that we remain susceptible to the rhetoric of prejudice and scapegoating.\n\nThe message here is important but capable of distortion. It has degenerated into the assumption that anytime we find one group that is less powerful or successful than another group in any given society, the less powerful group must be persecuted victims. Eric Gans views our current victimary culture or Political Correctness as a reaction to the Holocaust. And the message of the persecuted minority is not unique to the Holocaust. We find it in the Bible, with the persecution of the Israelites by the Egyptians, and the persecution of Jesus and his followers. In American history prominent examples include Jim Crow laws and the Mc Carthy Congress investigations of suspected communists.\n\nNarratives of persecution today are ubiquitous. Ethnic and racial minorities, females, LGBT, the 99% and so on are supposedly persecuted mercilessly today, even when they are prosperous and middle class. These groups are assumed to be the modern equivalent of the European Jews during the Holocaust. As a result, anyone who opposes illegal immigration is by definition a racist, and anyone who opposes gay marriage is a Nazi. Since protesting the Nazis during their reign by any means including violence was justified, today’s SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) feel justified in using any means for protesting today’s supposed Nazis. Ironically, Jews do not enjoy any protection by SJWs, simply because they are more powerful than the Palestinians, despite the fact that they have helped the Palestinians more than any Arab country (not to mention the PLO and Hamas), and despite the fact that they are a tiny country surrounded by larger and more numerous hostile neighbors.\n\nHere is a defense of violence and the violation of basic human rights from a liberal journalist:\n\nWhile we may want to rely on a rights defense in court, where First Amendment activity is threatened, our defense of dissent outside the courts should not be limited by what the state deems defensible by metrics of human or civil rights. A rights discourse, for example, would not defend the deliverer of that glorious punch to neo-Nazi Richard Spencer—it would, in fact, defend Spencer.\n\nhttps://thenewinquiry.com/know-your-rights /\n\nSpencer is literally a Nazi, so he is, rhetorically, a safe target, but SJWs also target innocuous figures like Charles Murray with violence, or anyone who doesn’t fit the SJW’s political agenda. Note the euphemism for violence as a “defense of dissent.”\n\nThe message taken from the Holocaust is “don’t be on the wrong side of history.” The orchestra members who submitted to the Nazis, and the American politicians who resisted Civil Rights legislation; today they look like idiots or worse. But how to know which group will turn out to be the Nazis and which group will turn out to have been unfairly persecuted? Rather than use any moral or rational criteria, the assumption today is that the weaker group is always morally justified, and the stronger group must be attacked and brought down. But is the less-powerful group always oppressed? In America, ethnic and racial minorities, females, LGBT, are all accorded extraordinary advantages in many respects.\n\nIn academia, the courts, the job market, and the media they are the privileged class; any public expression of skepticism about their supposed victimization is punished mercilessly. If SJWs were truly concerned about empowering minorities, I would not have any problem with their words and actions. But there is a steadfast refusal to look at the real causes why some groups of people are less successful than others. Instead, there is a blanket assumption that the less-powerful must have been unfairly discriminated against. Any discussion of personal responsibility is dismissed as racist, sexist, classist, etc. This willed blindness makes the problem worse.\n\nAt the bottom of liberals’ political correctness is a vanity for their supposedly iconoclastic moral virtue, a selfish desire to be perceived as bravely defying “the man,” and a cowardly fear of being accused of racism or whatever. Questioning what actually constitutes racism in any particular case is taken as evidence of racism. The PC crowd enjoys a rhetorical advantage because we must admit that no instance of actual discrimination should be tolerated, but they refuse to admit any discussion of what constitutes actual discrimination in any given case. The SJWs have claimed the moral high ground, so that opponents of PC appear to be on the “wrong side of history,” but which is really just the accepted media-narrative of the moment."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutist-economies-gablog",
      "title": "Absolutist Economies",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A partial summary of David Graeber on markets and money, with some additions: Markets are created and maintained by sovereigns. Money is used first of all for internal bureaucratic accounting in the ancient empires. Money is then used to pay soldiers in the imperial army, and markets are created in order to enable soldiers to spend that money. The accepted currency is whatever is accepted by the sovereign for the payment of taxes. Debt is monetized (beyond the gift economy) when standardized payments for injuries are necessary in order to prevent violence—the sovereign as judge establishes standardized penalties and settlements.\n\nIn other words, the introduction of money into the sovereign order coincides with a system of hostage taking overseen by the sovereign: human beings are exchanged in one way or another. Money and markets therefore accelerate that system, abstracting individuals from their social relations, enhancing the power of the sovereign, while generating new power bases that might destabilize power. It further makes sense to assume that the origin of technology is the military: the organization of large masses of men is the model both for mass labor and the technology that eliminates that labor, originating in Lewis Mumford’s “megamachine.”\n\nWhat sustains the value of any currency, in that case, is the stability and reliability of the sovereign issuing and approving it. Rather than labor or subjective desire, currency reflects the “value” of sovereign security. If the sovereign will accept a certain amount of money to settle your tax bill, and maintains an orderly circulation of money, the value of money will reflect that. Sovereign security itself, though, is determined by the oscillation between the abstraction of individuals and the hierarchically ordered pyramid of power articulated by the sovereign: the acceleration of abstraction destabilizes money, the ordering of power stabilizes it. The problem for an absolutist order is to re-embed individuals in ordered hierarchies, which is to say “de-abstract” them. The liberal argument is that the abstraction of individuals (the “free market” or “economic freedom”) has been necessary for the massive increase of wealth and technological development over the past several centuries, and I think there is some truth to that.\n\nLet’s say I’m ruling over 1,000 people. They are all ordered hierarchically, with well-defined roles and obligations—landowners, farmers, soldiers, craftsmen, teachers, fathers and mothers, etc. They live within the kind of reciprocal, pre-money, system of credit described by Graeber. The shoemaker makes shoes for everyone because he knows the farmer is growing food for everyone, the teacher teaches everyone’s children, and so on. Marriages are arranged through families, children tend to enter their parents’ professions. The sovereign and his appointed officials intervene in any disagreements that threaten to get out of control. Now, one day I tell them all: you are all free individuals. You have only those obligations you choose to have, only those reciprocities you have contracted for, you can enter any line of work you want, sell your products and labor for whatever price you want, etc. Whatever land, homes and tools you have right now you will receive a property deed for. Whatever happens to you is because of what you did or failed to do.\n\nAfter the initial shock and confusion, what’s going to happen? A large number, let’s say 250, will very quickly lose everything they have and fall into debt, destitution and criminality. Let’s say another 400 will hang on indefinitely, maintaining some property and the ability to become good enough at something to gain employment and have families, while never quite freeing themselves from the fear of falling into the “underclass.” Another 200 will become useful to the elites within the state or the new private economy, as managers, merchants and bosses of various kinds. That leaves us with 150. 100 of them become “elites,” on boards of directors, high up in the state bureaucracy, running institutions like banks, schools, and prisons.\n\nBut the remaining 50—they will do great things, for good and for evil. For them, the revelation that they are free individuals, for whom everything is possible, who are limited only by the breadth of their imagination, etc., will be an inspiration to invent, explore, innovate and create. They will be the source of economic dynamism, abstracting themselves and everyone else ever more thoroughly, and generating new forms of technology out of all the newly possible configurations. Yes, they will depend upon the state, creating subsidized technology for the military and turning spin-offs of that technology to commercial uses—but not just anyone could do that.\n\nThey will create everything that the elites will divide up among the others, and the pressure from all the newly abstract individuals and their recognized class interests will give the top 50 and the elites the incentive and models for including enough individuals in the economy to maintain enough stability to keep the process growing—especially if doing so gives the social order a founder’s advantage over other communities now forced to play according to the same rules. There will be some hope for societies based on divided power as long as that top 5% or so, and some means of distributing the benefits of their activities to a substantial majority, are not completely shut down.\n\nPolitical arguments and struggles will focus on whether the “freedom” of that top 50+100 is beneficial to the other 850, and will be fueled by struggles between the 100 (the 50 will, for the most part, be disgusted by power struggles, but may show some surprisingly sharp elbows on occasion).\n\nThere may be sovereigns willing to sacrifice that economic dynamism for restored order, and no other sovereign genuinely interested in getting their own house in order should be concerned with or interfere with that decision. I want to think about those sovereigns who would like to combine secure power with continual wealth creation. For one thing, taking that approach will give us more to say about the strategies and results of wealth creation and technological development in the societies we hope to transform. Now, that markets are created by, and maintained for the benefit of, states, only “taints” markets for anarchists and leftists, but not at all for absolutists.\n\nNor does this dependence of markets upon states mean that markets don’t operate in certain ways that we can identify, and that rulers can try to improve. If I tell 5 subordinates to get some job done, part of getting that job done will involve studying the reality of the situations, the necessary means for accomplishing the task, the best way of acquiring those means, the various possible ways of dividing up the task, and of cooperating in various ways. Clearly at every point along the way there are choices to be made and those choices depend upon elements to be brought under control, and therefore as yet under the control of something else. These things can’t be done in an unlimited number of ways. So, we could speak about something like “laws” within the limits determined by sovereignty, and we should try and understand those laws.\n\nBut all this looks very different from within an absolutist rather than anarchist ontology. Let’s say the task is to build an outhouse, and we need bricks in order to do so. We need, then, to buy 200 bricks. From whom? From a range of brick sellers—let’s say 3. Those 3 (not 10, not 1) brick sellers exist because they have been more efficient in moving volumes of bricks than other sellers, and also because they have followed the rules set by the government for selling bricks better than others, and quite likely because they have cultivated patrons within the state which helps them to write, follow and where necessary skirt the rules.\n\nAnd also because there are enough people doing enough building who need a steady supply of bricks. It also means that if the building industry slackens, the state might step in and carry out some “internal improvements” to help the brick business through the rough patch. What absolutist ontology adds to this is that all this depends upon a certain “amount” of order, and therefore hierarchy, which can be qualified if not precisely quantified. It should not be taken for granted that the owner of the brick business applies for a permit, has it approved, has that approval acted upon (it’s not ignored, for example, by some lower level bureaucrat), that this owner orders a certain amount of bricks to be sent out and his employee carries out the order (and if the employee doesn’t, the employer will be able to fire that employee and count on hiring someone who will), that the employee tasked with receiving the bricks does not abscond with them and sell them on the black market, etc.\n\nThe real source of value is a well ordered system, and a well ordered system is absolutist. We should be able to find a way of calculating economic value in terms of the relative dominance of anarchist vs. absolutist ontologies within a given social order. Think of all the forms of disorder that would make it impossible to obtain or rely on permits, to assume the honesty of employees and of employers, of the stability of a government that won’t on a dime start agitating for workers or subsidizing their defiance, or cede ground to various illegal and semi-legal enterprises that have their own patrons within a divided government.\n\n(Of course, many of these forms of disorder were previously forms of order, within some kind of honor system. Order being brought into these systems which at some point produce scapegoating crises—the origin of power struggles within the state—undermining the sacral mode of kingship they depend upon is what creates the possibility of economic calculation in the first place—that is, economic calculation depends upon deferring the convergence upon the central figure.)\n\nIf the state always creates and sustains markets, starting first of all with meeting the needs of the state (provisioning its soldiers, etc.), an observation confirmed by the rise of the East Asian “tigers” (S. Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) which not only had authoritarian rule but deep involvement in the production needs of the US Cold War military economy, then we can think about those enterprises most directly associated with the state as the epicenter of innovation. Here, the state is the customer, and here is where we can see the defects of divided power most forcefully in the kind of cronyism that accompanies, for example, military contracting in a democratic society.\n\nWith the state a single-minded, discerning customer, which it must be given a sovereign whose mind must always be on his own survival, we can expect a heightened focus on accomplishment and qualifications—this part of the economy would create an aristocracy of both management and labor. The graduates of the best schools and the most accomplished military men would gravitate toward these industries. More distant from the center, in successive concentric circles, would be other industries, working with spin offs from military technology (as has always been the case to a great extent), with less urgency and with less demanding tasks. Not everyone will be a top tier engineer or scientist. It should be possible to synthesize the production of consumer goods with respected and meaningful work for most of the population.\n\nBuckminster Fuller asserted that it was worth it to provide free education to 1,000 children because one of those children will end up invented something that pays for the education of the other 999. Massive investment focused on generating singularities will in the end take care of the masses as well. Of course, investment might be focused more precisely on those segments of the population most like to be the source of singularities, but this kind of decision will itself be a marker of the wealth and risk-aversion of the center. Under conditions of extreme scarcity, investment might be focused on those communities likely to produce one singularity out of 400 students, and those where you could reasonably expect only 1 out of 1,500 would be left aside.\n\nGradually, the sovereign could reach further afield in the search for singularities, and also widen the scope of what is to be considered a singularity, which is to say open up more fields. At first the 1/400 communities might be both bulwarks against and mentors to the 1/800 communities, which in turn would play this dual role for the 1/1,000 community, and so on. Securing rule would look towards privileging the mentor role over the bulwark function. Everyone is ultimately oriented toward the center, but in a way that makes convergence upon the center unthinkable. Resentments are contained so as to apply only to those directly above, and are framed as requests for a further shift toward mentoring. Limited competition between regions in attempts to move up the hierarchy would allow for the expression and containment of resentments.\n\nIn this way, the articulation of centering and de-convergence, which I have posited as the logic of post-sacral kingship sovereignty, can be turned into an economic concept, a measurable proportion between singularity and the recirculation of the products of singularity into the production of further singularities. We could define singularity in terms of both monopolization and models of “centered ordinality.” How singular an innovation is (and, therefore, ultimately, how singular the innovator) depends, first, upon how long the implementation can maintain a monopoly position, first of all for the sovereign himself, as prime customer; and, second, whether it models a form of social relation that is both center-oriented and productive of hierarchy.\n\nFor example, in a recent interview, David Gelernter, who invented an early version of what eventually became Twitter, argues that the Internet “should be structured like a recursive net, so that you’re encouraged to return to what you were looking at. Instead, the way it is, if you click you’ll probably never go back.” This addition would make Google a more singular invention, requiring more complex algorithms that account for items that initiated inquiries, were at the center of networks, rather than just the number of clicks. Google would create more value because it would encourage the development of more structured minds, in part by providing access (indirectly) to the results of more structured minds, which means more singularities, and so on.\n\nOther technologies could similarly be judged on how they directly organize workers and consumers, and indirectly structure communities—every technology models and is modeled on a mode of human interaction, and human interaction is the ultimate source and measure of wealth."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutist-morality",
      "title": "Absolutist Morality",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The destruction of sacral kingship, “the political common sense of humankind,” has driven us mad. That’s what happens when functioning common sense is destroyed. We need some way of restoring a political center, a clear chain of command, an articulation of political, communal and personal order, and of social with natural causality. We cannot do all this, though, in the manner of sacral kingship, that is, by holding the center responsible for everything that anyone might imagine someone should be responsible for. If the king can be held responsible for a drought, or a devastating storm, or a flood, or a plague, then anyone—a “witch,” a “demon,” the “deformed,” the “weird,” etc.—can be held responsible for anything for which we feel compelled to attribute responsibility. And, of course, the king himself might very well deflect responsibility this way, setting up an extremely dysfunctional system.\n\nNow, we can of course hold the king responsible for not preparing for the drought, not effectively organizing rescue and rebuilding efforts in the wake of the storm, not enforcing proper hygiene to prevent plague, etc., insofar as all these methods of preventing of minimizing catastrophes are known. But the hardest thing to do in thinking about how we got to where we are is to avoid projecting the things we know (and think we know) back to those in the midst of the process by which we ultimately came to know them. The sacred center first of all not only ensures peace in the emergent human community, but maintains and even completely defines it as a community.\n\nLanguage is only meaningful insofar as it refers to the center, which means that the history of humanity, considered as a (language) learning process, is the history of dialogue with the center, differentiating the various things it has to tell us. There’s no position outside of this process from which we can say “this is irrational,” “this is stupid,” “ridiculous!,” “how could they not know better,” etc. You can say these things, of course, but all you’re doing is removing from scrutiny your own assumptions about rationality, intelligence, common sense, obviousness, and so on. And the fact that we are so chock-full of accusations of irrationality and all the rest is itself just part of the madness I referred to above—we are all trying to sort out clear lines of communication and command with the center, trying to ensure there is a worthy occupant of the center, trying to make ourselves worthy of a center deserving of the name, and keeping in mind both the difficulty of doing all this and the frenzy that this uncertainty can drive us to is the best way of restoring some sanity and continuing the learning process.\n\nThe only way anyone could have come to consider that good hygiene is a way from preventing plagues is by resisting the compulsion to locate the source of all events, good or evil, in the sacral king occupying the center. This was always possible, to some extent—alongside of, and more or less approved of, appointed by, and subordinate to, the sacral king, was some kind of “shaman” or priestly figure, who established some kind of divination and curative method that to some extent relied upon “observation” and “trial” (primitive tribes, for example, have very extensive knowledge of the harmful and curative properties of plants and animals).\n\nAnd it might also be that often the ritual practices associated with the application of various medicines was therapeutically helpful as well—being ritually assured that you indeed remain within the community can be expected to improve your mental and physical health. But none of these ritual practices eschewed the use of scapegoating when the limits of control are exposed, and none can remain effective in mitigating events that irrevocably shattered or transformed the community, especially social events like wars and conquest. They can’t establish traditions that transcend the local community.\n\nThese conquests, along with the mass killing, displacement and enslavement they bring, restore sacral kingship on what are on one level more secure grounds: a god-emperor is not going to have his residence stormed and himself cannibalized during a really bad patch of weather—that’s what palace guards are for. It becomes possible to plan, to differentiate communal and political functions, to create cults and ideologies that help perpetuate the existing form of power. On another level, though, new forms of insecurity are built into this form of sovereignty: for one thing, empires create war machines and massive automatons constructed out of humans, and these machines require markets, and marketeers, and marketeers poach from vulnerable communities, turning them into abstracted human resources which in the long run cannot support the imperial “superstructure.”\n\nAs David Graeber points out, out of these “materialistic” social conditions materialistic and anti-materialist modes of thought emerge—both those who say that all human interests can be reduced to the “pragmatic” and those who respond by saying, no, there is some human value that is beyond all price. Both attitudes actually help in creating what we know as “rationality,” i.e., both calculation of costs and benefits (looking at a plant’s properties, say, without any reference to its ritual uses) and a skepticism about sacrificial rituals that lead to a disaffection with those rituals. Once social crises can be attributed to actions that might not have been taken, that can be located in a specific time, place and agent, it becomes possible to explore a range of plausible “causes.”\n\nNone of this guarantees secure sovereignty, though—on the contrary, once a purpose is posited for sovereignty—once it’s no longer simply a given—whether that purpose be conformity with God’s will, the salvation of the soul of the members of the community, or peace and prosperity, the sovereign can be judged in terms of that purpose, and presumably deposed—which means that someone must have the power to determine whether those purposes are being served—pretty much the definition of imperium in imperio, or insecure power. The “modern” world, considered as the unfolding of insecure power on the terms of a marketized social order and “Axial Age” intellectual and moral concepts (which is to say on the very terms on which the ancient empires tentatively aimed at accomplishing the transition from sacral kingship), has proposed a kind of compromise, a break through attempting to resecure power.\n\nWe could call this compromise, the “self-disposing subject.” The individual on the market, who nevertheless eschews slavery, sacrifice and hostage-taking in general, enslaves, sacrifices, and takes hostage himself. Each of us is both enslaver and enslaved, priest and victim, kidnapper and hostage. We drive ourselves, work ourselves, school ourselves, indenture ourselves, to work, community, family and country. Of course, this is “ideology”—it is what Foucault called the “disciplinary” institutions that ensure that we construct ourselves this way. And it is these disciplinary institutions that seek to secure the state on new, scientific and therapeutic terms.\n\nBut the disciplinary institutions do work, and we do indeed discipline ourselves, and we endure insults, violations and even violence with patience and calm that would have been unthinkable for just about any other people in the history of humanity. In accord with the approach I proposed above, I have no intention of ridiculing the self-disposing subject—there is certainly an increment of discipline included here that represents significant historical learning.\n\nBut the self-disposing subject has taken us as far as it can. This subject can orient us toward a center, vaguely—there is some sense of “the good of the whole” in self-disposition—and it also introduces “relays” between accumulated resentments and the arbitrary targeting of whoever stands out at the moment. It takes some of that targeting on itself—whatever the social crisis is, at least some of it must be my fault. But what it could never accomplish, intellectually or morally, was the task Plato set for moral thought, all the way back at the birth of metaphysics—seeing the moral individual as inextricable from a well-ordered social order.\n\nThe training we undergo as self-disposing subjects compels us to set the imperium at odds with the imperio—the disciplinary institutions continually disgorge reformist projects for disciplining the state that its most exemplary disciples undertake as careers. The state needs to be more educated, more scientific, more compassionate, more therapeutic, according to the pedagogue, scientist, social worker, therapist. And “pedagogue,” “scientist,” “social worker” and “therapists” are masks of virtue we are all encouraged to wear. They all devolve into a single form of priesthood that acquires holiness by excoriating the existing order for its sins. Once the sins have all been forgiven (by those we have sinned against), maybe sovereignty will be secured. This process is compulsively decentering, endless and spiraling out of control.\n\nThe way to affirm and clarify the center while defusing convergence upon centrality is to recuperate superseded and marginalized remnants of sovereignty. I agree with RF’s patron theory, contending that unsecure power and the consequent social conflicts result from rival power centers using proxies to undermine one another. I would add that the pressure points patrons end up pushing and the proxies they employ mostly reside in already existing cultural forms. There was already an “Islamic extremism” combating more “moderate,” colonial/Westernized and “corrupt” forms of Islam, even if it took the usefulness of jihadis as proxies in the Cold War to elevate their profile to world-historical agents.\n\nI think it is very rare that proxies are created out of whole cloth. But what are these “already existing cultural forms” other than former and latent modes of sovereignty still attracting adherents within a divided system? A modern Catholic with even the slightest devotion to the Church as an institution is reproducing the memory of the Church as a sovereign power at odds with “temporal” ones. That’s why it might be possible for some enterprising political entrepreneur to use Catholics, somewhere, sometime, as a destabilizing force in a non-Catholic (or insufficiently papal-centered Catholic) country. All dual loyalties, however quiescent, involve obedience to opposing, perhaps emergent and residual, perhaps real and fantasized, sovereigns. There are always levers for a patron willing to try and err a bit to pull.\n\nThe imperative, then, is to claim those sovereign remnants in the name of center, or (when absolutely necessary) expose them for their incompatibility with the center and thereby nullify their imperatives. This seems to me a way of dealing with all group identities, which may be worthless as governing principles (there’s no coherent way to make “race” a basis for a social order—but, then again, the point of white racialism is really to preserve a form of sovereignty overridden by immigration and civic nationalism) but nevertheless useful in restoring workable hierarchies and middle level forms of responsibility (and extremely difficult or harmful to try to eradicate).\n\nThe implication of stereotyping groups, and holding all members of the group responsible for the actions of each of its members is that there are no lone individuals, and that individual responsibility on moral terms abstracted from social order is a chimera. If you’re in this group, do your part to improve their behavior, because we’re holding you accountable; if you disavow this group, to which you appear to belong, then demonstratively join some other group so we can know who you are. Insisting on everyone’s responsibility for the actions of groups they belong to is a way to start reversing the abstraction of subjects effected by liberalism.\n\nBut it’s also a good way of flipping discussions around: OK, you’re for “X”—what would governance, national, regional or institutional, in terms of X entail? (It won’t always be a rhetorical question.) Most of all, though, it may be a way of competing on the field of proxy formation, by focusing directly on the form and “quantum” of power applied by each utterance, act, organization, concept or institution. (Who is pushing for this to be said about Jews, gays, Muslims, or whoever right now? What else can be said about them to expose that power structure, that imperative order, and reveal the possibility of another?) In this way we can act morally, in the sense of heightened responsibility to the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "brief-remark-on-recent-event",
      "title": "Brief Remark on Recent Event",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It’s never been more obvious that mainstream conservatives take the moral superiority of communism over fascism as a sacred principle.\n\nThis observation, from Nick Land’s “Outsideness” twitter feed, holds the key to all political rhetoric in the US. The framing of every single issue, every discussion, in the US, takes the moral superiority of communism over fascism for granted, and this is one of the few things American mainstream conservatives actually want to conserve. All American, perhaps all liberal, political discourse also takes for granted, even more latently, that all political questions can ultimately be reduced to the epic communism vs. fascism struggle—“mainstream” liberals are never more animated than when defending some brand of communist against someone vulnerable to being labeled “fascist.”\n\nWhat this also means is that breaking this “inequivalence” is the key, at least on the rhetorical level, for those who engage “mainstream” discourse, to making anything outside of that mainstream thinkable. President Trump’s magnificent performance at the press conference yesterday was probably the first breach of this “sacred principle” since it became a sacred principle. Yes, he felt it necessary to condemn “white nationalism” in order to establish a communism/fascism equivalence, but I think he tilted things ever so slightly towards an inequivalence favoring “fascism” by making an argument I haven’t ever heard an American politician make.\n\nI happened to be listening to talk radio in my car and the host was playing the press conference live and I was stunned to hear Trump lay out the annihilatory logic of communism—who’s next? George Washington? Thomas Jefferson? Exactly right—at the end of it lies endless cultural revolution, Mao-style. Dunce caps for professors teaching Shakespeare, some kind of collective punishment for “traditional” professionals, the whole thing. Even more remarkable is what started Trump on the path of these reflections—a defense of the “innocent” (Trump’s word), law abiding protestors who want to preserve the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee/Emancipation park.\n\nThe left—including all the reporters baying and snarling at the press conference—insist that anyone who wants to commemorate some part of their tradition considered “triggering” in the present year be indelibly stamped as a “Nazi.” Rhetorically, then (and that’s all I’m really talking about here), it seems that the way to not only make communism the most horrible thing ever but also to make it possible to stain everyone who puts in a good word for it with its horribleness is to frame things as follows: we want to preserve this one thing (which isn’t hurting anyone), they want to destroy everything (including things anyone listening to this loves).\n\nTrump’s question is really the way to do this: who/what are you coming for next? And after that? This resets things very effectively, because what the alt-right and white nationalists want to do is mostly stop things: stop immigration, stop quotas, stop foreign wars, stop attacking whites and whiteness. Sure, they may want some rollback, but you would satisfy a large part of the alt-rightists by simply stopping these things and enforcing the law. In other words, the question can’t be turned around very effectively. Also, if you’re engaging them, they’re coming for you right now, so the question always has some referential grounding.\n\nThe left cannot help presenting itself as on the attack—they are coming after all kinds of things, ultimately everyone (even their own future selves). So: who and what are you coming for next? It would be very interesting to see what addressing anarchist ontologists every single time with this question would yield. (And, by the way, for rhetorical purposes no one should say “communist” or, even less, “anarchist ontologist”—the latter is too technical, the former completely played out. The name they have given themselves, “Antifa,” is perfect—perhaps Trump will start referring to the “antifa media.” [To concede the initiative to Trump, himself, though, the term “alt-left” should certainly be given a fair try.])"
    },
    {
      "slug": "formalism-all-the-way-down-gablog",
      "title": "Formalism all the way down",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Sacral kingship is weakened, ultimately fatally, by the elevation of the king beyond the reach of the community—that is, once the king is no longer available as a scapegoat. If the king is no longer available as a scapegoat, he can no longer be held directly responsible for mediating the community’s relation to the divine and the divinely controlled universe (he may still be held indirectly responsible in a general sense, for ensuring the prosperity of the country, ensuring the gods don’t turn against it, and so on—but not for this plague, this earthquake, etc.). The king has introduced layers of mediation between himself and his subjects, with these layers of mediation being the “elites” to whom the king has delegated powers.\n\nIf the king is now to be overthrown, that as well must be mediated through the elites. The structure is still the same, insofar as the king at the center is scapegoated so as to avert intra-elite rivalries, but the players are now a more restricted group, who furthermore must prosecute their resentments indirectly, in the name of some obligation the king has left unpaid. The king may have in fact governed poorly, indeed must have, if intra-elite rivalries have gotten to the point where they must be deferred, but very rarely poorly enough that the elites could not have deferred their rivalry by bolstering rather than subverting his rule.\n\nWhen the elites levy the subjects they control to remove the king because he has not respected their rights, or has the left the country undefended against an invader, or has favored one section of elites over another, or has wasted the resources of the kingdom on debauchery, they may have a point but are simultaneously producing the very violations they complain of: they are making it impossible for him to respect their rights, to defend the country, to refrain from choosing sides among the elites, or from wasting resources on his own insular projects or desperate attempts at saving himself. But we can see that the more layers that have been interposed between the king and his subjects, more the reasons for challenging the king must fall within the scope of things the king can actually do.\n\nThere is a kind of rationalization process at work, but it is telling that the rationalization process rarely, if ever, extends to the act of removing the king— that still relies upon gesturing towards the sacrality of kingship, as the king must be charged with something like usurpation or treason (or inheriting the fruits of them). It would be impossible to make a case for removing the king on purely rational grounds (assuming such a thing exists): you could never show that the superior management skills of prospective king B outweighs in importance the disruptive effects of removing actual king A on grounds of inferior management.\n\nIt would always be more rational for the prospective king to help the actual, to contribute his superior management skills (especially if that was his real reason for seeking the throne in the first place). The final residue of sacral kingship, which still invests our elected heads of government, is simply that someone must be at the center, and actually being at the center is a kind of a priori proof that it is you that should be there. The resentment toward the figure at the center merely confirms his sovereignty.\n\nThis means that genuinely overthrowing the figure at the center would require an equal and opposite sacrality. This is so difficult to imagine that you could make a very good case that it has never actually happened. Kings and governments have been overthrown many, many times, of course, but always in one of two ways: either the new figure at the center is presented as “always already” having been there (in which case the overthrow was merely correcting a previous one) or, in the modern revolutions, the central figure is overthrown, not in favor of a new figure, but in favor of a procedure for selecting rulers. Obviously neither Hitler nor Stalin ever contemplated surrendering the power they had seized, but neither declared himself the start of a new dynasty either—they were just holding power, for the Aryan people and proletariat respectively, in trust, until some form of rule (or transcendence of rule, in the case of communism) could settle the question definitively.\n\nConservatives and reactionaries tend to dismiss and even despise “postmodern” thought and culture, but it might simply be that postmodernism recognizes, more explicitly than liberalism was previously willing or able to do, the absent center that nevertheless structures our frenzied political existence. The obsession in postmodernism with ghosts, traces, absence, silence and doubling might be read as an oblique commentary on the failure of the slaughter of the king. Democracy is an increasingly broken method of restoring the central figure—investing it once again with the signs of legitimacy, i.e., sacrality—only to smash and remove it once again.\n\nIt’s not a surprise that this process has become more like an uncontrollable nervous tic than a genuine investiture. It’s as if the present day celebration of men who mutilate themselves and put on wigs is a parody of the once tragic process of bringing down the king—now, “cisgender normativism” is the best we can come up with for a figure to place at the center and undergo ritual vandalization.\n\nWe can see Moldbug’s formalism as a kind of “reduction” of sacrality to the simple occupancy of the center I referred to above—we can no longer believe in kings being placed on the throne by God, or in the integrity of imperial lineages, but we can see that we can’t get past, or transcend, or deconstruct, the simple fact that someone has to be at the center, and that actually being there is irrefutable proof that you should be there. If that’s the only criterion we can have for political centrality, or sovereignty, that criterion must be extended throughout the entire social order. If there’s a center, there are margins; every move made from the center reconstitutes the margins.\n\nIf we assume the formalist principle that powers that liberalism has made implicit, all the better to carry on political struggles behind and under the scene, should be made explicit, the implication here is that absolutist rule involves an ongoing commentary on the relation between center and margin. If the center declares war, social institutions are recruited for this purpose and are therefore re-“baptized” as war or war-related ministries and industries. When peace comes they are renamed again. Here, again, there is a very illuminating parallel with modern and postmodern art. Traditional art, and this is the case through the realism of the 19 th century, is predicated upon the spectator or reader ignoring the means by which the artistic effects are produced.\n\nWe all have a sense of how, for example, a narrative is structured—there is a hero, a goal, there are obstacles to achieving the goal, the hero overcomes them, and so on. It’s all fairly formulaic, and even great and original works of art stick to the formulas. But enjoying the artwork requires one to forget the formulas—to accept that the villain is “evil,” and to ignore the means used to produce the “evil effect” in the reader. The explanation of evil offered by the word might be very powerful and truthful, but assimilating the explanation is incompatible with directing attention to the “devices” the artist has used to produce an appearance you go on to interpret as an “explanation.”\n\nModern and especially postmodern art just goes ahead and says this is the hero, this is what makes him look heroic—look, if I have him do this, he won’t be heroic anymore, but this also means that heroism is not exactly what it appears—and the effect of this direction of your attention toward the devices is that the “exchange” or conversation between artist and viewer/reader concerns your expectations of an art work, and the habits and traditions through which you engage them.\n\nThis transparency and self-reflexivity is central to absolutism. In constructing for myself some possible objections to absolutism I considered that someone might be horrified at all the people who would be disempowered by transference of power to an absolute ruler. The answer, of course, is that this is not the case: for the vast majority of people, nothing would change regarding their share in power within the social order. They have no power now, and they would have no power under absolutism. The difference is that now they are told that they have all kinds of power that they should understand, exercise, and seek to increase (because there are evil forces, whose evilness is constructed through such transparent narrative devices that only addiction to power seeking can blind one to them, that are always trying to rob you of them), whereas under absolutism they would be provided with a range of ways in which they can participate productively in their community.\n\nUnder absolutism, we could freely admit that we’re working with formulas, which is to say traditions, all the way down, even in the very language that we use. Again, there are just centers and margins, subordinate to the constitutive center/margin relation, your role on the margin is (to invoke Derrida) to “supplement” the center and you do this by clarifying the basic command script articulating center and margin. As a thought experiment, we can examine the assumption that there just is a center, even if posited arbitrarily; but if there has to be a center it can’t simply be arbitrarily posited because organizing all social practices accordingly would surface the hierarchies constitutive of those practices and hence of centrality as such.\n\nThat residue of sacrality, which inheres in even the most everyday relationships and professions, is never eliminated by considerations of professionalism, managerialism, efficiency and so on. Calling it a “residue of sacrality,” though, suggests an unhelpful nostalgia—as if we’re trying to hold onto a few crumbs from a table that has long been overturned. It’s better to think, instead, in terms of constraints: foundational names and rules for articulating them that we can’t get “behind,” or place on a “rational basis,” because that process of “enlightenment” would just entail having to get behind and rationalize the tacit assumptions that enabled us to reform or replace the previous set of tacit assumptions.\n\nYou can’t but preserve something of the center-margin relation that now allows you to reform that relation. It’s neither rational nor irrational: it’s like accepting that in one community men greet each other with a handshake, in another with a head nod, and in another with a high five. We can imagine a Swiftian comedy in which the social scientists in the handshaking community arrive at a proof for the rational superiority of the head nod, and seek to have this preferable mode of greeting enforced through society. It would be funny (if handled right, of course) because in order to institute the new practice, you’d have to draw upon the resources of solidarity contained in the old practice—you’d have to shake hands with the men you now hope will trust you enough so that you can instruct them that they are no longer to shake hands.\n\nOnce we realize that all our practices are constrained, though, we can make these constraints explicit, that is, formalize them. I think this may even provide a way for developing absolutist economics. In Jerusalem, for example, all buildings must have a specific kind of stone on the exterior. Of course, this takes away a lot of economic freedom—you can’t build a red brick building, even if that’s what you prefer. But any city would develop some generally shared sense of aesthetics, some sense of what kind of buildings belong and which don’t—the constraint simply establishes a general rule within which that “sense” can develop more coherently.\n\nPresumably, the constraint would be drawn from existing evidence of what the city is already comprised of. At any rate, once you have this constraint, you know that you will have a permanent market for a particular kind of stone. The market will expand and contract, because the city will not always grow at the same rate, but you know that you always want access to this kind of stone—and you need architects who are good at building with it, and perhaps other goods and skills as well(who knows what the implications of a specific kind of stone might have for the market for doors, windows, draperies, yards, etc.). A convenient and economical way to rule a city or any order is through constraints, with the trick being to make them distinctive, assessable and flexible: here, minimally, is what a “block” must be, what a “neighborhood” must be, what an “employer-employee relation” must be.\n\nThis would encourage those on the block, in the neighborhood, and in economic institutions to develop complementary and corresponding constraints—the neighborhood is to have these subdivisions, modeled on the constraint defining the neighborhood—and so on, all the way down. The entire social order becomes an exploration in the ramifications of the center-margin relation constituting it. Economically speaking, this would introduce an irreducible ingredient of stability—much of what is needed, and therefore what is needed to supply what needed, and what is needed to…—can be known with a far greater degree of certainty than in the free market under divided power.\n\nThis means the social order is conceived as a disciplinary space comprised of disciplinary spaces. In the Kuhnian sense, a disciplinary space is held together by shared concepts and tacit practices that enable us to attend to the “same” thing. Think about the experience of being in a lab and having a scientist tell you to look through the microscope—whatever you’re supposed to see is there, but you won’t see it unless you’re primed to see it. You need to separate foreground from background. Again, this is the most common, everyday, human experience. You see a crowd looking at something. You go over—what are they looking at?\n\nWell, it might be obvious—a dead body, a wrecked car—but it may be that someone will have to single out something for you. Even in the obvious cases, everyone already there is looking in a way you don’t yet know how: some significant feature of the dead body, some sign on the car of how the crash happened, has already become an object of shared attention. You need to be shown how to “see” that dent. Again, this is neither rational nor irrational—it is a result of all attention being shared attention. You can only see what others teach you/learn from you how to see. Again, formalism just makes it explicit that this is what we are always doing.\n\nThis doesn’t prevent change—it just means that change will emerge on the terms of the discipline, which undergoes a crisis once an accumulation of observations under the existing hypothesis generates a set of new hypotheses to try out. The dent then becomes one element of more systemic but more subtle damage we are now able to notice.\n\nWe can redefine “universalism” in these terms. Universalism is the fantasy that all humans are occupying the same disciplinary space. You’re a rational being so you already know how to see the dent. You just need to set aside all the other disciplinary spaces that have warped your view and made it invisible—that is, you must simply set aside everything you are. But this just means a particular disciplinary space has usurped all the rest. Which one? The disciplinary space focused on exposing the unjustified assumptions of all the other disciplinary spaces. But the assumption that all assumptions need to be “justified” cannot itself be justified.\n\nThat’s why universalism is fraudulent—just like atheism can dismantle all the arguments for believing in God (what, exactly, is God made of, etc.) but can’t explain why people believe other than their stupidity (they should have, from the beginning, “spontaneously,” seen the “dent” in religion that we now see), universalism can expose the constitutive constraint of all “particularisms” but can’t examine its own. All universalism is good for, paradoxically, is division—for power struggles against constrained order, i.e., all order. Liberalism is nothing but an endless war against all forms of humanity in the name of a humanity that not only doesn’t exist, but can only be imagined as the negation of all actual forms of humanity.\n\nThis is not a new point—the stripped down human being liberal universalism defends turns into the literal stripping down of millions of human beings who must be saved from their particularities—from what we know as the “middle” which the elites target from all sides in their proxy wars."
    },
    {
      "slug": "roots-of-pc-continued",
      "title": "Roots of PC (continued)",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In a book written 28 years ago, David Pryce-Jones critically examined contemporary Arab societies, their pervasive violence and lack of economic-political progress. He also analyzed how the West enables Arab corruption by our tendency to self-criticism, what is sometimes called “white guilt” ( The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs by David Pryce-Jones [Ivan R. Dee, 1989]).\n\nIn the following passage, Pryce-Jones looks at the international context for the emergence of the PLO in the 1960’s: their rise to a political importance radically disproportionate to their objective significance on the international stage:\n\nAt the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century, a sense took hold in Europe that a wrong turning was at hand. People of influence believed that in factories and cities the masses were being submitted to a life more abusive than the customary ways. Consequent attitudes of willful pessimism can be seen with hindsight for the romanticism that it was.\n\nAfter the Second World War, once again people of influence questioned values everywhere in the West, creating another climate of pessimism which was contrary to the evidence. The West, it was widely argued, had acquired scientific and manufacturing power on a scale that was dehumanizing, irresistibly eroding other cultures and even threatening its own progress. In this view, those who opposed the West were to be encouraged and welcomed, no matter what their purpose of motivation might be. Defined simplistically as an assertion of Western power, colonialism was hastened to its close in this climate.\n\nCitizens of democracies incline to attend to their critics and to accommodate through intellectual speculation even the most hostile views. Elements of doubt, therefore self-doubt too, must always be in play within democratic societies in the process of opinion-forming. With hindsight again, the West since 1945 can be seen in reality to have entered a new industrial age of exceptional vitality, leading to increasing choice and freedom. Temporarily, the unexpected confrontation of the Cold War had proved unnerving. To applaud experiments in collective socialism or communism alien to democratic traditions and values, to praise the China of Mao Ze-dong and the Vietnam of Ho Chi Minh or the expedition of Che Guevara into the Andes, to conceive that the “winds of change” detected by Harold Macmillan in Africa were autonomous and beneficial to Africans, to listen either with fear or joy to Khrushchev’s threat that the Soviet Union would bury the West were facets of latter-day romanticism. Imminent doom had its Byronic fascination. In any case, to believe that the blame for the ills and barbarities of other nations or cultures lay with the West was another instance of Eurocentric self-importance, a gratuitous posture.\n\nThe Palestine Liberation Organization was a phenomenon of this aberrant period. (280-1)\n\nPryce-Jones calls this an “aberrant period,” but the tendencies he describes have proven to be a veritable juggernaut in Western society in its relation with any group that differs by race, ethnicity, and so on. He traces the roots of “white guilt” to Romanticism, which is accurate I believe, and the connection could be explored further."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-modernity-of-absolutism",
      "title": "The Modernity of Absolutism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The notion of sovereignty reaches back, in a various forms, to distant antiquity, as does the assumption that the monarch exercises complete power, unlimited by law, but the absolute right of kings, in the Western tradition, is only explicitly stated and defended in early modern Europe, by apologists for the absolutist sovereigns then emergent. Kingship was, through the middle ages, bound up with a whole network of rights and responsibilities which served to limit its power both explicitly and implicitly. At the same time, the king was the king, to whom all owed loyalty and obedience, so we could say there was some confusion there.\n\nIn that case, the establishment of absolute monarchies, along with theorists defending them, in particular Robert Filmer, served as a genuine clarification of sovereignty. You can define sovereignty in such a way as to subtract everything personal from it, and that may be how it looks from the outside, but rule , at any rate, must be personal. A decision can be disguised as a corporate affair, but ultimately someone has made it, and all human activities and institutions are the results of decisions. We could see all of the social sciences which replace decision with “process,” “structure,” “interaction,” and so on as evasions.\n\nAnd with good reason –to say that something happened as a result of a “process” means it’s out of our hands and we don’t have to fight about it. We could, then, see something moral in this evasion, insofar as it is a mode of deferral; but it is a marker of moral immaturity, like telling children the tooth fairy will come to make them stop crying—moral maturity would involve examining the ways we might best make our own decisions so as to preserve or reverse the decisions of the past.\n\nBut while Filmer’s argument for the absolute power of kings is really exemplary and a model of reasoning, contemporary absolutists find the modern absolutist monarchs to be highly problematic. They centralized power by using the “people” as a battering ram against the middle orders, the nobility that exercised countervailing power (they could withhold funds and soldiers needed for war) and the Church that considered itself entitled to determine the legitimacy of the king. In doing so they demolished the entire traditional moral order that situated individuals within institutions, with well-defined roles, and set us on the path where there is no public morality other than screaming for a larger and more intrusive state to grant more equality by punishing those who seem to believe that there is anything more important than more equality.\n\nWas there another way that the “clarification” of absolutism could have been accomplished, though? This is obviously a relevant question for those interested in a similar clarification today. Perhaps that’s the wrong question—after all, we can’t rewrite history. Maybe there was no other path then, but there are paths now. That would still mean we should learn from history, if for no other reason than to help us identify the preferred paths. What, exactly, do we think a more overt absolutist order would accomplish? If we could identify lots of things—ideas, institutions, practices—that are “in the way” of establishing absolutism, surely they are not all in the way in the same way, much less to be gotten out of the way in the same way.\n\nAbsolutism implies some kind of centralization—what kind of centralization, then, does not require that all on the margins have exactly the same relation to the center? What kind of absolutism would preserve and even enhance differentiation and embeddedness?\n\nOriginary thinking provides us with a model for moral development. At the origin of humanity lies representation as the deferral of violence. There’s an object that everyone in the group wants; the fact that everyone wants it, and everyone knows that everyone wants it, makes everyone want it even more. They want it so much that the normal pecking order of the higher animal group breaks down—the alpha animal can fight off any single contender but is helpless against the simultaneous convergence of all upon the center. Some new means of restoring order is needed: that new means is the sign, in this case the gesture by which all members of the group come to “communicate” to one another that they will defer appropriation of the central object.\n\nWe now have a configuration: we all pay attention to something at the center. We pay attention to it rather than trying to appropriate it, and language is our way of letting each other know that is what we are doing. We can imagine that the first, foundational, instance of deferral was very short—as Eric Gans suggests, maybe no more than a brief hesitation preceding a more orderly, or at least “framed,” shared consumption of the object. In that case, moral and human development would involve stretching out that moment of deferral: a group that could defer appropriation for a couple of minutes would be more “competent” than one that couldn’t defer for more than a few seconds. And then the group that could defer for an hour would be even more competent—and would find it easy to conquer the less continent groups.\n\nThis greater competence comes, in the first instance, from a greater control over reactions and the development of a greater range of responses to the actions of others: think about who would win a confrontation between someone who feels compelled to respond directly and completely to every insult, every slight, and someone capable of seeing those insults and slights as baits to which one is free to reserve a response. It also comes, though, from the greater differentiation of signs that results from sustaining, shifting and manipulating attention. Language is essentially us getting each other to pay attention to things.\n\nThe group that can defer appropriation for an hour will use that time to talk about a lot of things—they will notice things about the object, about how it came into their possession, about one another’s relation, or mode of approach, to the object, about the difference between this scene and previous ones. The human vocation is to continue extending the act of deferral, ultimately until infinity. Remember the Greek proverb: call no man happy until he is dead. That itself memorializes a history of deferral, through which rather than seeing human life as bound up with the immediate mimetically generated fears of rivals and ancestors and the constantly shifting “scorecard” in one’s struggle with them, it becomes possible to see a life as an ethical whole.\n\nBut we could just as easily say “call no man happy until all the possible ways of understanding happiness have been exhausted,” which is to say, never. It’s very funny to watch some online disputes, for example in the comments section of blogs, where commenters harangue, ridicule and sometimes even threaten each other, in a style of communication that has its roots in oral communication, where one side will best the other right now to the acclaim of an audience. I can’t say for sure what works best for what purposes here and now (and I like a good meme as much as the next man), but eventually people will start thinking in terms of using these very extended lines of communication to intervene in long term ways in broader communications and institutional networks.\n\nSome people are surely doing this already, and seemingly short term strategies (like memes meant to humiliate) may very well be part of longer term strategies. But that would mean you have trained yourself to not really believe in the meme you are deploying, except in the sense that you “believe” in the arsenal you are maintaining.\n\nSo, we can say, in a preliminary way, that the centralizing imperative of absolutism is better directed against the entrenchment of lesser modes of deferral and in favor of more extended forms. We can see evidence of the degree of deferral attained in the ways communities assign responsibility. A community that attributes a plague to a microbe that can be isolated in a pool of water used as a drinking source has attained a higher degree of deferral than a community that blames the plague on a priest’s failure to perform the prescribed ritual properly. This is not just a question of knowing that science provides us with truth and that rituals don’t really have any effect on the natural world.\n\nIt’s a question of whether the communities involved have suspended their desire to assign responsibility so as to consider a range of possible “causes.” A community that blamed itself for the plague for its failure to maintain justice in its courts would be just as wrong as the community that blamed the priest, but it would be exhibiting a higher level of deferral because rather than directing attention in the least resistant and most “satisfying” way it would have thought in terms of distributing blame, and finding a cure not in murder but in institutional repair. (Such a community would probably be more likely to find its way to some notion of “public health.”) Now, this approach doesn’t necessarily make for easy decision making and the determination of moral distinctions (we could imagine a very—but not infinitely!—patient and very merciless predator, for example), but these are the terms on which a serious moral discussion can be had, and we could say that in all uncertainly over decisions we could sort out the imperatives for extending deferral from those for collapsing it.\n\nLiberalism and progressivism also claim to enable improvements in human behavior and social arrangements, but they don’t purport to do so by extending human deferral capacities. Both ideologies assert the possibility of downloading human morality into institutions—so, the “checks and balances” of liberal government will themselves restrict the violent tendencies endemic to human beings, or the “market,” given sufficient prosperity, will have the same effect. But the implication in both cases is really that advanced civilization is compatible with a reversal of previous tendencies and a decline in the capacity to defer.\n\nIf one’s desires can be rerouted to objects readily available on the market, then domestication probably would be fairly easy—and a lot of study can be put into this rerouting. If you want to render human being a desert and call it peace, this is fine. The logical extension, as the social and medical sciences advance and intertwine, is to develop the optimal social and pharmaceutical “cocktails” to make the potentially problematic manageable. This process is obviously well under way. But this is also a kind of centralization, and it brings to bear social and medical developments that might have better uses. What would make the uses “better”?\n\nThe only real argument is that since all actions, all scenes, involve someone occupying, albeit temporarily, the center, and others aligning themselves on the margins, which themselves on close look are little centers themselves, the absolutist wants everyone to be able to man their positions. Whatever enhances the ability of the individual to adopt a further increment of deferral—not take the quickest route to pleasure, not act out the most immediate resentment—is therefore to be preferred. Only in the course of making decisions within the fullest scope of your responsibility can you acknowledge the decisions made the same way up the chain of command.\n\nThe modernity of absolutism lies in the imperative to make delegation increasingly precise. Responsibility can always be more closely aligned with power. This involves the continual refinement of attention, the mark of a further increment in deferral. So, expecting the priest to stop the plague by carrying out a pre-determined ritual invites no refinement of attention. If the priest fails, that proves he is no longer worthy of being priest, and he should be replaced. Assuming the plague has a point of origin, and appointing someone to determine that point of origin, with that person in turn selecting those he wants to search, according to known criteria best identified by those trained by those who know, various sectors of the city, having them report periodically, pursuant to which he reassigns them, etc.—here we see attention continually refined.\n\nLet’s say the guy charged with searching for the origin of the contagion is required to place ads in the media, which restrict the job to those bearing specific credentials, state the equal opportunity character of the hiring process, and especially encourage minorities and women to apply; must meet environmental and labor safety standards in carrying out his charge; must respect the property rights of those who might refuse him entry. He is clearly no longer sovereign, or a bearer of sovereignty, but that doesn’t mean that to be sovereign he must only hire his friends and relatives, that he should trample all over the accumulated culture of the city in course of his search, that he should behave obnoxiously and imperiously to those with interests in the city that will still be there once the contagion is over.\n\nHe’s sovereign because he knows the best people for the job and they know him and understand how important it is; because they all care about the city and are not just a bunch of hired hands who will get their paycheck and be gone tomorrow; because the people with property know their property best and want to help eliminate the contagion as much as anyone and so cooperate with the guy who has the job in hand.\n\nThe progressives want the equal opportunity employment requirement, the environmental standard, the labor law (and the media that can interview anyone inconvenienced by the search, the special prosecutor who can look into laws violated during the emergency, the licensing board who can take away the guy’s right to lead such a search, etc.) because they don’t want him to be sovereign, and they don’t want anyone to be sovereign over him—they want to be in the fight for power themselves, spreading it and regathering it. They deaden attention themselves, because you have to pay more attention to their rules, and therefore their power games, than to the task at hand—ultimately, it’s like dealing with the priest, as you have to figure out what kind of ritual performance will enable you to get to the next move.\n\nInsofar as that’s modernity, the absolutist is reactionary—the absolutist is ready even to see what the priest can contribute. I’ve been straw-manning the priest a bit—there was always a bit more to divination than carrying out a prescribed, mechanical ritual. The priest undoubtedly “read” the community, and not just the innards: his practices were in fact a form of deferral, a way of delaying panic and providing for solidarity. He may turn out to be an intractable obstacle, he may interfere with efforts to solve the problem that would discredit him, but why determine that in advance, just because he lacks credentials?\n\nHe may know a lot more than he’s letting on. If you’re centralizing power, you should always start with and try to incorporate the existing chains of command. And you should always resist anyone clamoring for the removal of anyone from a position of power and authority for reasons other than their demonstrated inability to use that power to meet their responsibility (if the problem is that they need more power or less responsibility, you can see to that). But what all this means is that absolutism, as a political project, depends upon enough people working consistently to align power and responsibility, for themselves and others.\n\nFor those with more power than you, read back to them their responsibilities by further refining the attention their delegation to you requires; for those with less power than you, dole out more power with each advance in adopted responsibility; for yourself, show a concentration of your powers dedicated to everything within your sphere of responsibility along with an absolute respect for other spheres. How many is “enough”? That’s unknown, but fortunately far less than a majority, at least to start turning things around."
    },
    {
      "slug": "trump-s-process-of-inquiry-gablog",
      "title": "Trump’s Process of Inquiry",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I think we’re all going to be talking a lot about fascism for the forseeable future. Not Nazism, which is really a red herring here. Imperial Energy has been posting on fascism, presenting a definition of it as, essentially, a nation perpetually mobilized for war. I wouldn’t argue with that, but I think “fascism” means something a bit different in American political discourse. Perhaps we need to talk about “folk fascism.” For the left, “fascism” means a kind of extreme “law and order” stance, and that’s a helpful way to think about it (that’s what made, say, Nixon, a “fascist” to the New Left). The left thrives on division—their M.O. is to find some idea or institution that no one has given any thought to because it’s simply obvious, and turn it into a “controversy,” complete with irreconcilable divisions and ongoing moral emergencies.\n\nThe left is an extortion racket, and you need to break a few windows to show the need for “protection.” The “windows” in this case is your peace and quiet and assumption that any activity is outside of politics. The left’s spectral folk fascism is the counter movement of those with sovereign authority to “cauterize” the wounds opened by the left. Fascism in this sense shadows the left, and wherever the left incites division fascism comes right in to isolate, control and expel the source of division, and restore and strengthen the normal chain of command.\n\nIf we can’t call that “fascism” then we need another word for it, because it’s an essential practice, and one especially to be recommended to President Trump. On the one hand, it’s just a question of enforcing existing laws, within the framework of the legal order. Antifa could be shut down very easily using laws against property destruction, assault, racketeering, and so on. Illegal immigration, needless to say, can be treated as a law enforcement problem. But the truth is, law enforcement, to the exclusion of all other considerations, runs counter to American political traditions and cultural norms—look at how any film or TV show represents the “tight-ass” who insists that the rules be followed, that punishment be swift and sure.\n\nVigilantes and rogue cops (like Paul Kersey and Dirty Harry) are far more popular than the straightlaced sheriff. Of course, Kersey and Harry are also part of folk fascism. “Real” folk fascism, then, would be the actual sovereign forces “cleaning up” like Kersey and Harry tried to do from the “outside” (or the outside of the inside in Harry’s case). If the feds crack down on Antifa, they will have to ignore calls to respect the “idealism” of the protesters, to take into account that there may be misguided young people among them, to keep the focus on the even worse targets of the Antifa—there will be stories of this promising young student and that naïve protester who got out of her depths, etc.\n\nAnd the same with illegal immigration—what about this mother devoted to her American children, that hard working father reaching retirement age, and so on. To dismiss all these appeals and cut through the administrative delays they exploit and err on the side of “over-enforcement”—that’s folk fascism. It’s what Slavoj Zizek might (and probably has) call the “real kernel” of fascism constitutive of even the most liberal society. The real kernel displaces the liberal in military dictatorships, like those of Franco and Pinochet but, strictly, speaking, the military takeover shouldn’t be necessary. All that is necessary is that at every point where one might legitimately tilt toward the side of liberal rights or order, one tilts in favor of order.\n\nLiberals and leftists are right to fear that if acted on consistently, this approach would leave very little liberalism left in the state. I know it would be very bad “branding’ to use the term “fascism” for this authority over liberalism approach, but what do we call it, then?\n\nI’ll call it, for now, spectral fascism, or *Fascism*. President Trump may get to the point where he realizes he has to use all the (really quite considerable) legal means at his disposal to cauterize all the wounds being salted by the left or he will, eventually, be removed from power, one way or another, or at best neutralized (and it doesn’t look like his enemies are going to be too particular about the means). Trump’s form of learning or probing seems to be to make innocuous statements and introduce unexceptional initiatives (generally in favor of law and order, public safety, our unity as Americans, etc.), see who attacks them, and then polarize discourse around that enmity.\n\nIt’s a good strategy—how can you tell what your enemies are up to without engaging them, stirring them up, setting them in motion, and it’s smart to do so in a way that forces them to show as much of their hand as possible. The next step, though, which Trump always seems to be on the threshold of, is to flip the means the enemy is using back against them. For example, there is a special prosecutor looking into non-existent Russian influence on the 2016 election. Why not, in the spirit of “both sides share the blame,” appoint special prosecutors to look into the funding of Antifa and BLM, both criminal enterprises?\n\nUse civil forfeiture laws to confiscate the assets of the foundations funding both? Why not special prosecutors and/or FBI investigations into groups that are inciting violence, like the Southern Poverty Law Center or, for that matter, the Anti-Defamation League? You could use the criteria of the left to support official inquiries in these and other groups. Or, for that matter, how about a special prosecutor looking into who started the “Russia hacked the election” hoax? (A special prosecutor to look into who pressed for the first special prosecutor.) Make liberal use subpoenas, find ways to ask all kinds of people, like journalists, questions under oath.\n\nWe all know the drill—the process is the punishment, make them all pay, expose the networks, bring in allies, deputize (or some equivalent) law firms and others to bring civil suits, maybe bring Julian Assange in from the cold, etc. Really, all he has to do is everything they are trying to do to him, and turn their cries of resistance into proof of their guilt.\n\nWith each move the President makes, we will see who doubles down and who backs down—make allies of those who back down by offering a piece of those who double down. Keep upping the ante—anti-trust suits against the major players in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, Facebook, Pay Pal…) who are now arrogantly asserting control over political discourse in the country. (Isn’t that really an attempt to hack all the upcoming elections?) Who knows, maybe an inventive special prosecutor can put together some kind of racketeering or espionage case against CNN and other media organizations. Making the point that we all now know that the law is nothing other than what those who control the law say it is would be valuable in itself.\n\nAppoint one of his hotels to the Senate. (OK, I’m kidding about that one.) Show that he has learned just how liberally rights and procedures can be interpreted—what matters is cauterizing, suturing, protecting. Expose the networks, create a map of enemies of the people. Clearly immigration must be completely shut down until these matters can be sorted out. Lobbyists for foreign countries and companies might want to take a break for a while. While we’re at it, let’s plug all the leaks in sovereignty—otherwise, how can a new mode of legality be established? The only real question is whether Trump has the staff with which to do all this.\n\nAs of now, my guess would be that he doesn’t—but the only way to generate the personnel is to initiate the process, open positions for men of ability, create hierarchies based largely on who came in first and grant amnesty to those abandoning the sinking ships of the foundations and corporations (maybe a whole bunch of people about to kicked off Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and other platforms will be free to pick up the slack). It can’t be for nothing that Trump’s cabinet is drawn so massively from the military. They may be coming for someone you don’t like today, but they’ll be coming for you tomorrow, and I won’t let them get you, even if we have to set aside some constitutional and legal niceties (all those judges I have been appointing will understand).\n\nThat’s a *Fascism* we can get behind: staunch stanching, and nothing else. The universities go back to teaching, learning, researching; the internet companies go back to providing their services; city councils go back to deciding on the upkeep of parks and monuments; corporations go back producing goods and services; the media learn how to report without relying on leaks, and so on. What has turned out to be incompatible with constitutional order is what Madison called “factions,” and which he hoped would counter and balance each other across a heterogeneous country. A “faction” is any group that is against someone else, rather than simply for social order and the normal functioning of institutions.\n\nAny good government will support some kind of think tank devoted to the study of factionalism, especially to detecting its early signs. The roots of factionalism lie in the adversarial structure of liberal society itself, which promotes the assumption that no claim can be considered true unless it has conquered a counter-claim, which nevertheless lives on, chained up down below, spawning more counter-claims. In other words, liberalism builds Satanism into its order—someone is against me, therefore I am. The alternative is a center immune to factionalism. How did you contribute to the institution, and how were your contributions disabled, thereby compelling your contraversion of the center?\n\nYou could never really prove that you have exhausted all avenues of improving the institution, of discovering what is required of you. You’re representing resentments widely held, not just your own? What have you done to dampen, rather than inflame, those resentments?\n\nPerhaps the liberal horror of *Fascism* provides a clue to how the foundations approach things. They always start with some concept, like “democracy,” “freedom,” “the individual,” “peace,” etc., that’s considered central to modern liberal society. It’s always a contentious concept, born in contention, meant to produce more contention. So the foundation heads look around and see that there’s not nearly enough contention around that concept. Most people seem more or less satisfied with the inherited meanings of “democracy,” and so on. But that violates the very essence of the concept! The dissonance is unbearable—the society is not living up to its full potential, to the true meaning of its creed.\n\nSo, you look for dissenters to fund—those who challenge the “complacency” of the majority, and create “real” democracy, individualism and all the rest. There is a felt need for full spectrum dissension—it’s like those activists (in favor of what, exactly, I’m not sure) who complain about uncontested legislative seats and won’t be satisfied until every election is 51-49%, with every community effectively polarized around every issue. Those who feel this need most strongly are the “forward looking” elites, those enhancing their power by distinguishing themselves from the “entrenched,” backward looking elites. And, of course, it makes sense that if you see your growing, spreading enterprise as requiring a more receptive sphere of circulation and consumption, you will see society in general as in need of being “opened up.”\n\nAnd once you start on this path, how do you stop? There can never be enough democracy, freedom, individualism, peace, tolerance—the concepts, unlike, say, sovereignty , are intrinsically open-ended and even infinite. They can’t stop themselves; they must be stopped. That’s what *Fascism* is for."
    },
    {
      "slug": "incorporation-gablog",
      "title": "Incorporation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The notion of viewing the government as a corporation is foundational for Neo Reaction and Absolutism, having first been proposed by Mencius Moldbug and presently being revisited by Imperial Energy . The government is in the security business: its customers (formerly known as “citizens”) pay a fee (formerly known as “taxes”) and the government provides internal security for property and person, and external security from, presumably, the other security corporations in the world—or, perhaps, from more primitive and therefore maybe more dangerous state organizations. The idea has its roots in libertarian thought. It might gain more support from the recent work of political scientist David Ciepley, who in one essay argues that the framers of the US Constitution very deliberately constructed the constitution as a “charter” and the government as a corporation.\n\nAccording to Ciepley, mainstream political thinkers through the 19 th century were perfectly aware of all this, and used the words “charter” and “constitution” interchangeably. This argument regarding the USG is part of a larger argument Ciepley has been making, perhaps most prominently in an American Affairs essay , about the fundamentally anti-liberal character of the corporation. Contrary to liberal and libertarian accounts going back to Adam Smith, which see the economy in terms of contracts entered into by individuals and more recently updated by Milton Friedman, who misrepresented the corporation as owned by its shareholders (causing all kinds of mischief), corporations are fundamentally public-private mixtures, established by the state and rooted in medieval social forms—and these institutions, not contractually based partnerships, dominate the modern economy.\n\nCiepley’s argument regarding the US founding is a complex one. He rejects the notion that founders like Madison and Hamilton had “social contract” theories, whether those positing a covenant among a people or those positing one between the people and a ruler, in mind in theorizing the new order they were establishing. They knew how preposterous such theories were. They were trying to establish a charter for a government, a corporate “person,” that, like a corporation, would have powers limited to those enumerated in the charter. They modeled this new government on the state governments, all of which had, in fact, been corporations chartered by the British government.\n\nLike the shareholders of a corporation, the people could vote for officials filling the positions established by the charter, but would have no role in governing—and, if they were to make demands that violated the terms of the charter, those demands should be ignored. He even shows how the practice of judicial review evolved not out of some pure constitutional logic but the role of the sovereign in rejecting policies of the corporation that violate its charter. But this is where the problem for the founders lay—if the government was a chartered corporation, who chartered it? Corporations are chartered by the sovereign—but the sovereign, the British Parliament, had just been overthrown.\n\nThe “people” had to be sovereign, but what did that mean? A kind of social contract theory gets snuck in through the back door here, as some constitution of the people as a people must be retrojected back into the distant past. Developments within ancient and medieval theory helped here, as the Roman emperors legitimated themselves by claiming a one time (and of course irrevocable) donation of power to them by the “people”; this theory, mostly dormant in Roman history itself, was picked up and activated by those critical of the medieval European kings.\n\nThis opens all kinds of very interesting problems, because in this conception popular sovereignty is essentially a cipher—the sovereign is the original source of legitimacy, and the basis upon which the acts of the government can be criticized, but can’t actually do anything. It’s pure negation, which is the way imperium in imperio works. In a sense, all modern political theory is an attempt to give some content to what is almost a mathematical term introduced to make an equation work—it’s an ideal site for power conflicts because anyone can introduce anything into it they want. The American founders were acutely aware of these dangers (I don’t share Ciepley’s awe at their solution, but his argument is so powerful that his admiration for them rubs off), and tried to present the American people as a kind of instantaneously dissolving sovereign: they assembled in a formal, recognized manner, on the model of, say, town hall meeting called by the local authorities (of course all this must be recognized after the fact), in order to establish the constitution, and then recede into quiescence and let the government do its work.\n\nAmericans still participate in government, but as individuals voting, promoting candidates, arguing about ideas and policies, etc.—not as the sovereign. They can resume their sovereignty in a way accounted for by the Constitution itself—the amendment process—but is that really sovereignty? If the charter of a corporation contains a provision allowing the shareholders to modify some element of the charter, do the shareholders thereby become sovereign? Well, maybe, because if they can modify one element, they can modify two, and if two, three, and ultimately the entire charter. Eventually they would have to finish the “amending” process and become passive sovereigns once more.\n\nThis is quite different, though, from a sovereign who has chartered the corporation from the outside, and who has chartered many other corporations besides this one. The shareholders or citizens all benefit, or perceive themselves as benefiting, in different ways and degrees from the operation of the corporation. To get to the point of a constitutional convention or some other mechanism by which the charter is to be overhauled the divisions must be running very deep among the community—indeed, since everyone knows it can get to this point, the very possibility would be a source of division that many within the corporation would have an interest in inflaming.\n\nAnd this is for the reason I gave above: we are dealing with what is really phantom sovereign, an empty center which those occupying different positions within the actual sovereign can struggle to fill. So, the process of everyone claiming diverse and incompatible forms of sovereignty while being unaccountable to the consequences of such claims in the actual operations of sovereignty never ends.\n\nAny conceptualization of the government as a corporation, then, has to deal with the question of who has chartered the corporation—it’s enough for a business partnership to have customers, but a corporation, an institution that transcends the lives of those who run it and resists any effort by participants to fold it up by “exiting,” must have a charter, from a real, not notional, sovereign. This is why I think both that the corporate form is the ideal form for the absolutist state and that the state itself cannot be a corporation. (Ciepley points out that most of the European states were in fact corporations, but since that is what allowed the phantom sovereignty to be slipped in, they are not to be emulated in that regard.)\n\nChartering corporations of all kinds—and here the medieval and even ancient roots of the corporation are important—religious, educational, scientific, exploratory and, of course, profit-making businesses is the best way for the sovereign to recognize socially relevant and beneficial activities and scrutinize them in the most economical and non-intrusive way. And, as Ciepley points out, the corporation form itself is consistent with all kinds of internal governance—to his credit, it’s very hard to get a sense of Ciepley’s own politics, and I sense they wouldn’t fall very clearly in one place along the left-right axis, but he does acknowledge the viability of worker participation in some forms of corporate governance—as a way of helping keep the corporation focused on its long-term prosperity, rather than turning a quick profit for shareholders.\n\nThe corporate form has obviously lasted so long, through so many social transformations, because it is an extremely reasonable mode of organization. It is especially remarkable that the corporation has persisted in spite of its being in absolute contradiction to liberal principles—the Enlightenment liberals, and liberals since then, have wanted to get rid of or at least reduce to liberal imperatives the corporation, that remnant of feudal governance, with its fixed hierarchies, it being a quasi-law unto itself, its governance through “status” rather than “contract.” The Left has always been well aware of and suitably outraged by these features of the corporation—they’ve never quite been able to give the abolition of the atrocity of limited liability the high profile they had hoped to, but it’s still there, lurking in the shadows, al though perhaps now more for purposes of blackmail than any real transformation, as the Left has learned to work its will very well through corporations.\n\nCiepley in fact agrees with the left (and, in fact, some—especially pro-Trump, interestingly—sections of the right as well) in condemning the Citizens United decision. He thinks that, as entities chartered by the states, corporations should not have the rights given to natural persons. But perhaps the problem is that we still think in terms of “natural persons”—Ciepley doesn’t see any problem with the public-private distinction as such, he just thinks that corporations straddle the divide. He also thinks that corporations can be liberalized and democratized—for example, the free speech rights granted to citizens could be extended to employees of corporations.\n\nBut this suggests some uneasiness on Ciepley’s part with the undemocratic character of corporations. We could more easily argue for pushing the needle in the other direction, toward the corporatization of the rest of social life. While the whole notion of free speech, free assembly, religion, and so on, is becoming increasingly inapplicable in public life, it seems to particularly ridiculous to try and impose it on corporations. You want your employees to speak freely about problems they notice in the engineering design of the latest product; and you want them to shut the hell up about gendered bathrooms. What do we need “people” in general to speak freely about?\n\nAs chartered corporations, shouldn’t towns be allowed to prevent their public spaces from being taken over and defaced by “protesters”? If these public corporations need public input into their decision making, they can solicit it in their own way. Now, the interesting thing about Citizens United was that it wasn’t a business, but, rather, a corporation formed for the purpose of making a movie criticizing Hillary Clinton. Ciepley answers the question of why corporations like the New York Times should have free speech by noting that the Constitution explicitly establishes freedom of the press, but what is the press?\n\nWhatever the sovereign says it is, it seems to me—if I get together with a couple of friends and form a corporation to make gifs ridiculing prominent public figures, we’re the “media” just as much as the Times, NBC, CNN, and the rest—and our charter will reflect that our purpose is to enrich public life through satire. So, rather than saying that corporations should not participate in public life, because they are not “natural persons” with rights, we should say to “natural” persons to de-nature themselves, incorporate, get a charter, and enter public life on terms agreeable to and with rights granted by the sovereign.\n\nCorporations have been so successful (“adaptable”) because they presuppose an absolutist ontology. They presuppose a structured hierarchy prior to the individuals that will enter that hierarchy. We can ordinarily assume that those who originate the corporation and first acquire the charter will themselves fill those roles—perhaps that would often be stipulated in the “application” (much like the US Presidency was designed with its first occupant in mind)—the corporation will be designed to perpetuate that originary relationship and purpose. That’s absolutist ontology: any enterprise has a founding and a founder; the founder has “seconds” of various kinds (a “board”); and the enterprise is then ready to mobilize people and resources.\n\nBut in an incorporated world, what kind of organization will the sovereign preside over? What kind of non-corporate organization will even be conceivable? The corporation institutionalizes, rationalizes and “routinizes” the founding; the sovereign retains the “charisma” of the founding, and is staffed by those who prefer the “team” to the “roles,” the anomalous to the rule-governed. The sovereign would mostly be chartering and inspecting the conformity of corporations with the terms of the charter—he would need a team of “generalists.” How to select the sovereign himself is a problem, because there’s no reason to assume a hereditary monarch will be up to the task.\n\nMaybe some kind of rotation of the leading CEOs themselves, with each choosing his own team. Every corporation has those with abilities, ambitions and visions stifled by the institution—sometimes, of course, they should be stifled, but the sovereign would want to staff his own team with such “rogues,” who are more interested in innovation and excellence than “playing ball.” They must also be the people most interested in secure sovereignty."
    },
    {
      "slug": "p-ower-gablog",
      "title": "(P)ower",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "What, exactly, is power? Who obtains it, who holds it, how is it manifested and used, how is it transmitted, and why? Power, as de Jouvenel says, is credit, which suggests that the origin of power is in the ceding of the decision to one person, or at least a single will, when all have to adhere to the same decision. We can think of obvious examples where this would be the case—during a hunt, or when the community is under attack. Someone who has led successful hunts, or defenses against attacks, in the past, is obeyed in a similar situation now. This assumes, though, that there was a first hunt, or self-defense, in which the need for leadership was experienced in the very act of someone taking it.\n\nInstead of a disorganized chase after the prey, or a rout by some enemy, the group was given form by the credit granted to whomever was presumed or was proving to be most capable. But this can only describe the human group—a group of advanced apes wouldn’t have a “moment of decision.” But the first decision, we originary thinkers assume, was made on the originary scene, and that decision was to not succumb to uncontrolled violence against the others. All subsequent decisions are to be modeled on that one. Power, then, first of all means structuring attention so as to quell or preferably pre-empt the panic that results from a collapse of shared attention into upwardly spiraling rivalries. It is that structuring of attention that makes the hunt or self-defense successful.\n\nWhat is the best way of accounting for the growth of power, its institutionalization, and perpetuation even long after those wielding power have ceased to earn any “credit”? This is a set of issues requiring clarity within absolutism. The uncertainty begins with de Jouvenel and readings of de Jouvenel, starting with Moldbug’s—de Jouvenel’s analyses certainly lend support to the “High-Low v. Middle” structure that has been constitutive and canonical in absolutism and neo-reaction. He consistently shows “Power” undermining the middle layers (the aristocracy in particular) so as to flatten out the social structure and rule directly over an equalized mass.\n\nBut is this because Power was “insecure” or because Power insatiably seeks to grow and extend itself? If Power is insatiable, that implies that there is always something outside of Power, something evading its grasp: presumably some irreducible human freedom or spontaneity. But that itself would indicate something less than secure in Power, something registered as “anomalous” somewhere within the power system. But this also implies that the more secure Power becomes in fact, the more intolerable it will find even minimal gaps in the extent of its reach. “Secure” and “Unsecure” are relative terms. An early medieval king ruling over a territory the size of a small town may consider his power quite secure if he can on occasion rouse his lords to mobilize their soldiers to defend against the predations of a gang of nomadic looters; the modern state apparently feels its power is insecure if there is a single “white supremacist” who can hold down a job.\n\nWhy, though, describe the purge of “white supremacists” in terms of “unsecure” power rather than simply power hunger? What is it the state wants to do that it perceives the “white supremacists” to interfere with? The reasoning can quite easily get circular here: the state wants everyone to feel “safe,” which the existence of white supremacists prevents. It seems that just about any case where power is extended could be described one way or the other. So, which way is better, and why? The determination can’t be made on empirical grounds, because the conceptual order will lead to the empirical observation.\n\nLet’s continue with our originary power analysis. The leader of the hunt or self-defense team acquires his credit by securing rewards for those who obey him. In fact, at more primitive levels of social development, the followers may get a larger share than the leader—the prestige of leadership is more important than the material reward, and that prestige depends upon others being rewarded. But the structuring of attention precedes the reward. It’s not enough that the activity was successful—any member of the group can claim credit for the success—the leader didn’t necessarily throw the spear that killed the buffalo, or kill the most enemy combatants.\n\nIf leadership depended on such crude quantitative measures, it would be impossible to sustain. The source of power is representational. The first attempt to take down a buffalo fails. One member of the group shouts at another, let’s say for throwing and missing with his spear. The member who has been shouted at shoves his accuser. Other members of the group move in, ready to join one side or the other. Whoever can step in the middle of this simmering brew of resentments, stand between the sides without taking sides, making sure that if he has to block a blow from one side he shows himself ready to block a blow from the other, and then points to where the buffalo were last seen headed—that’s the leader, that’s who has power.\n\nAnd only one person can have it, because once one person has resolved things, the situation doesn’t allow for anyone else to step in. Of course, the first person to try this might get his skull bashed in, which would just mean that he doesn’t have the power. Exercising power means being able to “dwell” within the situation itself (you have to be ready to parry and if necessary return blows, you need to know who is most likely to strike, whose potential dominance might need to be countered) while simultaneously standing outside of it and reframing it (this is a distraction, our dinner is still out there).\n\nSo, that leader becomes “chief,” a quasi-permanent position, with ritual honors and responsibility. But it’s not so easy to intervene in every dispute, to calm every panic, in just the right way, by recognizing and deflecting the precise structure of resentments. You’ll need a repertoire of “moves” that are effective in deferring resentments become stereotyped rather than crafted so as to be appropriate to the situation; new acts, moves and postures are created so as to ensure that potential combatants never get to the point where the leader has to directly step in. Credit is extended, which makes it more deeply rooted but also more tenuous.\n\nThere’s always an element of bluff in the exercise of power. This means that the mettle of the leader is tested less often, at least publicly and unequivocally—he has to rely on tales of former heroic acts a general “sense” that things are going as they should, and the proper exercise of ritual responsibilities. So far we’re talking about securing power, and we’re talking about it as very serious problem—only one person can be chief, so absolutist premises hold, but there might be several individuals who would be just as good at it, and it wouldn’t be so hard for one of them to mobilize enough supporters for a real contest.\n\nThe chief will need to create or “certify” new positions: “head warrior,” “storyteller,” “hunt planner,” “seer,” etc. This in turn produces new tests of his leadership capacity—can he manage his subordinates? For a very long time, even into the early modern period, it was expected that kings lead their subjects in war—at a certain point this became unthinkable, which means that something crucial had changed in the meaning of Power. Even modern rulers run risks that give them a quasi-military status—JFK is buried at Arlington National Cemetery because he was killed in the service of his country. But there’s no reason for these risks other than the inevitable imperfections of secret service protection.\n\nAt a certain point the position of power to be filled becomes more important than the person filling it. This has to happen as sacrality drains from the central figure himself; or, conversely, the regularized delegation of “offices” is what drains that sacrality. This would seem to be the perfect security of power—if anyone can be president, then the office of the presidency can’t be damaged beyond repair by any single occupant. This is also what give Power its remorseless, inexorable tendency towards growth: if the person inhabiting the office doesn’t personify or exemplify the office by retrieving the sources of power (by leading an army against Power), then the accrual of power to the office as such will be an end in itself, certainly for those filling permanent positions auxiliary to the elective one.\n\nBut the fact that the office is always “empty” insofar as its occupant is as an exchangeable cog like anyone else really means that it’s a site of endless power struggles. Everyone can imagine they can define the office with their own set of imperatives. These power struggles contribute to the growth of “Power,” because if everyone thinks they can use Power everyone wants it larger. So, are the contestants trying to secure power? Or is Power just following its own growth imperative? At this point the best qualifications for filling the highest offices no longer include the charisma of leadership, or earned credit—rather, those functionaries are recruited from the broader cultural training grounds established so as to continually replenish the elites with facsimiles of the existing ones.\n\nAnd what the future elites are trained in is how to play the idealized “principles” of Power against Power, the equality reflected in the abstraction of all individuals before Power against the insufficient degree of equality presently presided over by that Power.\n\nIn the midst of this, someone must be trying to secure power. Everyone can’t be engaged in a perpetual and increasingly reckless power grab all the time. There must actually be some way of securing power, otherwise what would we be talking about? Maybe not all the time, but we must always assume the possibility. Even those engaged in subverting power, except under the most desperate conditions, must want the technological capacities that will help them rule if they get the chance, and must therefore limit political encroachments upon the space granted to scientific inquiry and production processes. But the failure to actually secure power might very well accelerate power struggles and hence the growth of Power—so the dialectic of attempts to secure power leading to the destruction of middle layers of authority and hence more insecure power holds true under these conditions.\n\nThose trying to secure power will often be the beneficiaries of a previous power grab, so it’s not surprising that they won’t have the institutional, intellectual or moral resources to stop subsequent ones. In order to secure power, there is no alternative to returning to the originary form of power, in which an individual occupies the center, defers some imminent crisis, and redirects attention to the permanent center. The permanent center is nothing more than the possibility that there will always be someone who can occupy the center when needed upon any scene, large or small, central or peripheral, and that each of us be ready to do so or defer to whoever does.\n\nDeferring to the permanent center entails proper naming and seeing to the order of names. By “naming” here, I mean a designation of your place in relation to the center. Your name is your discipline and the articulation of your origin and telos—it is given to you by others and others ascertain your embodiment of it, but only you can fill it. And the better you fill it the better equipped you will be to recognize whoever can best establish and perpetuate the proper order of names."
    },
    {
      "slug": "power-media-and-counter-algorithmic-praxis",
      "title": "Power, Media, and Counter-Algorithmic Praxis",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans published an essay titled “On the One Medium” in a book on Girard’s mimetic theory and media ( Mimesis, Movies and Media , 2015) that I just had a chance to read and is worth discussing here. Gans argues here that the internet is becoming the one medium that will subsume all others: text, video, cinema, music, etc. Other media may continue to exist for reasons of convenience, but everything will be convertible into the one medium, and will therefore be thought of and composed as convertible. This implies the erosion of the integrity of the other media, and their current modes of presentation: Gans gives the example of downloading and binge-watching a TV series, which makes it indistinguishable, other than in terms of time, from watching a movie.\n\nThis erosion is furthered by the capacity, within the one medium, to modify and mix different products of different media—Gans alludes to the implications of this capacity indirectly by discussing an effort at UCLA to impose a licensing agreement on university journals allowing “users of those materials, once the original source is referenced, to ‘tweak, remix, and build upon’ the materials they contain.” It’s easy enough to imagine what might be done by integrating text or “performances” of scholarly articles into music videos—just remember that Hayek vs. Keynes rap contest that was current a couple of years ago. Gans also points out the fragility of the medium, based as it is upon advertising revenue and, even more importantly, like all markets, “on political systems, with peace enforced by arms.”\n\nNevertheless:\n\nThere remain two sets of phenomena that cannot be reduced to the One Medium because they depend upon an immediate relationship to their public: performances on the one hand, and art-objects on the other. Students of GA will recognize the two essential components of the human (cultural-representational) scene: the sacred central object and its sacrificial/alimentary substitutes, and the peripheral human group that surrounds the center, celebrates and consecrates it, and eventually, in a typical rite, takes nourishment from it.\n\nPerformances can be recorded, of course, and events can be hosted on the internet, but the point is that they can be recorded and are therefore “always already” recorded and therefore no longer dependent for their reality upon an original set of witnesses. But all of these recorded performances are still dependent upon an original live performance, or at least the existence of individuals capable of giving live performances—and if there are people capable of giving live performances, there will be a demand for such performances. So, there is something irreducible about performance, as we can see even more forcefully in the sphere of ritual.\n\nCould a baptism be performed online, with the priest in one place and the infant in another? Some actions, to become real, require something like the laying on of hands. Since we are mimetic beings, human interaction grounds our world in a way simulation can’t—Gans uses the example of chess, pointing out that we now have computers that can defeat any human in the game, and yet we still hold human tournaments while no one would have the slightest interest in a chess match between computer programs.\n\nIn his discussion of the art-object, Gans notes that the existence of the One Medium places a premium on work that takes up physical space—in economic terms, “real things,” made simply to be displayed in front of a live audience, become “scarce.” It seems to me a similar argument would hold for performance, al though Gans doesn’t pursue this—that is, those performances that are likely to become the most privileged, the most esthetically pleasing, are those which are most resistant to reproduction. Going to a live concert and watching it later on the internet are not the same thing, but the performer may not do anything different in the live performance than he does in a performance directly recorded to be shown on the internet—and if the performers know that the concert is destined to end up online, they are likely to minimize the “liveness” of the performance.\n\nUnless they don’t, and decide to maximize the difference of each performance, and make the performance as dependent as possible on the live audience. Of course, the best way to do that is to erase the boundary between performer and audience, as in some forms of experimental theater. But in that case, why have a bounded, formal event in the first place—the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is for performers to create scenes and events out of the material of everyday life, in the midst of everyday life, the purest example of which is the “happening,” a form of art developed by Allan Kaprow. These would be events that no one would know to record in the first place.\n\nNow, to push things a little further, if “happenings” become the most valued performative esthetic, physical interactions between people, unrepeatable and unreproduceable events, are going to more and more approximate happenings. In other words, we will more and more strive to give them a ritual character, by introducing constraints that operate as notes of deferral that are explicitly marked as such. The individual who disrupts a scene, however gently, implicitly makes himself a potential sacrifice or scapegoat—anything that goes wrong from here on in can easily be blamed on the disruptor. Your reason for wanting to attempt this, nevertheless, is that you detect some “imbalance” or latent and dangerous set of resentments in the scene; making yourself a potential target of those resentments is a way of defusing them.\n\nThe risk may be worth it, because if you become a skilled “happener,” you can become a very valued person. You might be able to parlay such a skill and such a(n initially minor) celebrity into You Tube fame, thereby creating a dialectic between the simulacral internet and the irreducibly performative. The former tries to capture the latter, which develops new strategies of evasion and in turn informs new meming strategies.\n\nWe have a good reason to theorize such a dialectic. No one can be unaware now of the irrelevance of the supposed liberal freedoms such as speech, religion and assembly. Power is becoming more naked, and seemingly more desperate. It has always been the case that you’re not really allowed to be illiberal in a liberal order—a more secure liberalism could choose not to press the point, though. But the simulacral nature of liberalism itself has caught up with it—liberalism makes no sense outside of the liberal/illiberal binary. What is illiberal is centrality; what is liberal is resistance to centrality. There must be some law of acceleration determining the speed with which new modes of centrality and resistance to them are discovered.\n\nThere must also be some way of predicting what will come next. “Lookism” as Nazism, with a ban on any reference to a person’s physical attractiveness that could even implicitly suggest the lesser attractiveness of others? Borders as apartheid? Both ideas have been floating around—maybe it’s time for one or both to catch fire. Does anyone dare laugh, or claim to foresee the limits of new victimary offensives? Liberalism has become compulsive: it must generate new offenses.\n\nThe internet and social media have accelerated the process by creating, as Gans pointed out not too long ago, a new and devastatingly effective mode of scapegoating; at the same time, the absolute binaries generated by victimary politics are fodder for the creation of new algorithms, which is the manifestation of power by the internet monopolies. Developing an algorithm for identifying “white supremacist” websites, blogs, videos, etc., is precisely the kind of task Silicon Valley is prepared for. You need input from organizations like the SPLC and ADL—they will help you develop keywords, phrases, verbal patterns and other markers to look for.\n\nBut the smarter the computers get the dumber the people get. There have already been leftist websites complaining that they have gotten caught up in the censorious sweeps for heretical material by the Inquisition. The computers can’t distinguish between articles written by “white supremacists” and those written about “white supremacists” by their enemies. And, increasingly, neither can people. It is becoming less and less possible to depend upon people distinguishing between you saying something, and you saying that someone else says that. If it’s coming out of your mouth it’s all the same. I’ve noticed the same kind of intellectual collapse in related areas: if you ask people about the legality or constitutionality of things like giving legal status to illegal aliens or legalizing gay marriage or transgender rights, they increasingly talk about how they care about illegal alien children, have gay friends, and think the transgender don’t bother anyone.\n\nIn other words, admittedly counter-intuitive distinctions between what you are formally allowed to do and what you should do are becoming unintelligible. Just like if the words come from you, they are your words, you can only mention an individual, practice or situation in order to approve or disapprove.\n\nThis massive devastation, a kind of wiping out of volumes of mental “programs” which must end up leaving much of our cultural inheritance unintelligible, actually provides an opening for realist/formalist politics. We have no problem with simplicities: the media talks about Russia because they want to destroy Trump; the Democrats promote immigration because they hate white people; feminists talk about “rape culture” because they want revenge against men; blacks commit more crimes because there are more criminals among them, etc. If the media gets their way, it’s because they are more powerful than those who didn’t get their way; if some part of the US government subverts some institution or country it’s because they are screwing some other part of the government, or some other agency.\n\nWe can hack away at all the vaporous talk of equality, democracy, freedom, etc., identify the workings of power, and presuppose the real binary of order vs. disorder. But it would be a very good idea to learn how to do all this under the radar of the algorithms of the Inquisition. We make texts and events say what needs to be said by introducing disruptions and interruptions into them. Some familiarity with Twitter makes it clear that lots of people are already getting very good at this kind of thing. It would be very hard to police all the variations of the “guy checking out girl”/” distracted boyfriend” meme. Steve Sailer is a masterful, subtle reader of mainstream texts, even if he himself is already too well known to fly under the radar.\n\nThe simplest way to develop such an algorithm-resistant praxis is to speak and write as if you are doing nothing more than taking orders from those in power, and explicitly pointing out that you are doing so. “In such a case, as we have been repeatedly warned, we should look out for someone who might notice…” A lot will depend on how you have described the “case.” Of course, we want to theorize openly and have more straightforward discussions, and we’re probably not all going to rounded up right away, once and for all. But we can have these back-up, “happening” discourses, predicated on an analysis of what would subtly disrupt or interrupt a power approved event, on or off line.\n\nSimply indicating, regularly and casually, that the instructions, while universally felt, are not all that clear, will have a powerful and cumulative effect. In this way we prepare the transition from mock (but actual) obedience to chaos generating sovereigns to real obedience to a patron capable of assessing value, and, finally, to a genuine sovereign. And in the process we will do our part to reintroduce humor, irony, complexity, self-reflexivity and distance back into the culture."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-generativity-of-deferral",
      "title": "The Generativity of Deferral",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The question it occurred to me someone might ask after reading my last post was, “can’t there be too much deferral”? After all, you eventually have to eat, or respond to a threat (or blow), right? You can’t commit to infinite deferral—the Hunger Artist of Kafka’s story dies at the end. Such questions emerge from an understandable misunderstanding of deferral, the more advanced forms of which allow for plenty of eating, drinking, lovemaking, fighting (where necessary) and anything else needed for a full human life. As I’ve mentioned, the immediate effect of deferral is not an intolerable feeling of privation, since deferral emerges in response to accumulating desire more than to need (it is not an increasingly imminent threat that makes you angrier as the argument with your spouse intensifies)—rather, the effect is of a new world opening up.\n\nThreats and rivals become collaborators and potential friends; the source of desire is transfigured. On the originary scene itself, according to Gans’s hypothesis, the object at the center is divinized: it has saved the community by “commanding” them to let it(self) be. A range of other possibilities emerge: the point of contention between friends, spouses or co-workers can become comical—how could we have gotten so angry over that! Humor, or anything else that enables us to convert a source of contention into a new way of looking at something, derives from that divinization on the originary scene. But if the telos of humanity, and therefore our highest priority, is to bring about such conversions, aren’t those who adopt that telos as their own at the mercy of those who defer only so much as is necessary to turn themselves into a cohesive production and fighting unit? Isn’t being willing to hit first an insuperable advantage?\n\nSuch a question easily emerges if we neglect, as I have in fact been doing, the function of the sign and of language more generally in “distributing” the world. How, indeed, does the new community on the originary scene get from the moment of deferral in which they stand in front of a divine benefactor, in a circle no one can break except at pain of restarting the violent convergence, to actually approaching and consuming the object? Here, I may see things somewhat differently than Gans. Gans hypothesizes a “sparagmos,” a violent tearing apart of the central object driven by resentment at the object for “refusing” itself, however momentarily, to the group’s appetite.\n\nIn this, Gans stays very close to both Girard and traditional accounts of sacrificial rituals (the best known example of which is probably the Dionysian frenzy central to Euripides’s The Bacchae ). Subsequent to the sparagmos is a repetition or replay of the originary scene making use of the remains of the devoured object—this is the origin of ritual. I see no basis or need for questioning any of this. I do wonder, though, what, in the course of dropping the restraint acquired in the moment of deferral in favor of a savagery that (because resentful) is more than animalistic, prevents the members of the group from turning on each other once again as they scramble for their respective pieces of the meal.\n\nIt seems to me that the sign formed on the scene of deferral must play this role. Whe never the aggression toward the central object threatens to spill over into renewed intra-group aggression the members of the group would “flash” the sign, or in some manner signify a reversion to the restrained and pacific posture modeled on the originary scene. This directs attention back to shared destruction and consumption of the object, and maintains some manner of “acceptable” distribution of the “proceeds” of the scene—not an equal share, surely (the larger and faster members would no doubt exploit their advantages), but close enough to prevent a breakdown of the accord accomplished. And this use of the sign then continues in the ritualistic phase of the entire event, making the re-enactment (which can subsequently become part of the sign preceding the sharing of the object) possible.\n\nWhat this means is that extending the scene of deferral is not primarily a question of waiting longer to eat, or strike back, or enjoy anything. To some extent that’s necessary—you can’t have a family dinner if the kids are standing around in the kitchen grabbing food as soon as mother takes it out of the oven. They have to sit and wait at the table. But sitting and waiting until 7 doesn’t make them more civilized or moral than if they get served at 6. What is important is that the meal is properly “framed”: everyone is at the table, distractions are eliminated, some kind of sign (like saying grace) that it is time to begin is given, everyone uses their utensils, people don’t reach across the table to grab food off others’ plates, etc.\n\nThe same holds for self-defense. The one who lets himself get hit ten times is not thereby more civilized or moral than the one who strikes back after the first blow, or even pre-empts that blow. The question is whether you act in accord with the social means, resources and rules for defending yourself. Your confrontation is framed through a narrative that will be reconstructed later, even if only by the participants in recounting their actions to themselves. Terms like “necessary,” “legitimate,” “excessive” among others then come into play, along with “fictional” narratives playing out alternative outcomes (could I have avoided the entire situation in the first place?).\n\nAll these terms and mental acts are products of century and millennia of deferrals, and your ability to use these terms in a way that would meet with the approval of those in command of the social resources for managing these kinds of instances is evidence of your having “extended” the scene of deferral. Insofar as more restraint than you showed was, in fact, called for, that will be made evident by these narrative reconstructions, and then an extension of the scene of deferral is displayed others’ and your own capacity for learning.\n\nSo, there can’t be too much deferral because there can’t be too much differentiation and attention control. Every time you don’t do something, especially the obvious and easy thing, you multiply the possibilities for doing other things, and imagining the consequences of doing them. I mentioned in my previous post “infinite” deferral, which is important, because that is implicitly distinguished from the extremely patient predator who nevertheless cannot be infinitely patient. There is an important moral distinction here. What can be infinitely deferred is the degradation of the center. This is in fact the foundational or constitutive deferral, and one that needs to be renewed with each institutional and civilizational transformation.\n\nThere is the figure at the center and there is the center. The king is not God, but the king or sovereign is the earthly means by which deferral is maintained. To obey the king is to recall or to retrieve the founding of the kingdom, while the founding of the kingdom is retrieved in its differentiation from the founding of humanity. We defer our resentments towards the king and those who rule over us as we obey the king to defer our resentments towards those whom we might accuse of occupying our place. These deferrals are never accomplished once and for all, and are continually institutionalized as deferences we owe each other.\n\nOur relation to the figure at the center is our attempt to have that figure convey information from the center: to instruct us by example in the arts of deferral. The abstraction of the sovereign from rivalry provides a model of action free from resentment: regardless of the actual motives of actual sovereigns, to the extent that they are sovereign the absence of resentment can be imputed to them. In fact, obeying them as if they are free of resentment is the best means of encouraging them to become more sovereign."
    },
    {
      "slug": "autocracy-stalks-the-end-of-history",
      "title": "Autocracy Stalks the End of History",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans’s readiness to put “ liberal democracy in question ” would have already made his most recent Chronicle of great interest, but his subsequent “supplement” made it absolutely essential to address this discussion. Gans’s recent discussions, even explicit affirmations, of liberal democracy have had the effect of making this mode of government seem far more hideous and grotesque than I would be able to manage myself, until he got to the point of finding no real argument in favor of liberal democracy other than superior economic growth. So, obviously some questioning has been going on, and the ongoing cannibalization of liberal and democratic institutions and norms alike by the left has reached a certain threshold of unacceptability.\n\nWhat is particularly interesting is that Gans is now willing to consider China a genuine, if still to his mind, undesirable, alternative to the liberal West, and this would put originary thinking on new and untried terrain—GA has focused almost exclusively on Western developments, but it seems we may have to start studying Confucianism; it may also be that China represents a vast, untapped market for GA itself. Here’s a good place to get started:\n\nIn the absence of political parties and free elections, political debate in authoritarian societies takes place among factions whose pluralism varies inversely in proportion to the strength of the central power. If previous Chinese leaders, wary of repeating the disastrous results of Mao’s later years, have preferred to share power among several factions, Xi’s economic successes appear to have provided him a sufficient basis for a new hegemony, allowing him to acquire near-absolute power, so far at least without the irrationality that characterized the reigns of Mao or Stalin.\n\nLet’s note here the acknowledgement that an “authoritarian system” reliant on playing one faction against another (essentially a more controlled form of divided or insecure power) can transition to a more “autocratic” one, with power centralized in the hands of a single individuals. And that such a transition need not be irrational (i.e., it can be rational). One of the interesting things about discussing autocratic rule is that it’s hard to deny that it is better at some things than liberal and democratic forms of rule; and, once you acknowledge that, it’s hard to deny that it can get better at what it is already competent in, and better at things that have been assumed to be antithetical to that form of rule.\n\nAmong the more striking facts of recent history is the ease with which central authorities perpetuate themselves unless toppled from without. Aristotle and Montesquieu described the perilous nature of the tyrant’s role, as illustrated by the oft-assassinated Roman emperors and various examples of “Oriental despotism,” but today’s despots, including Putin and Erdogan, let alone the Kims and the Castros, or for that matter, Saddam and Khadafy before their countries were attacked by Western powers, seem invulnerable to internal overthrow. The crucial difference between them and “strong men” like the Shah or Hosni Mubarak would seem to be greater ruthlessness. But in none of these cases has autocracy provided, as Xi promises to do, superior economic performance in exchange for the loss of political freedom. (Singapore under the late Lee Kuan Yew might be considered an exception, but this city-state can hardly serve as a model for a full-sized country.)\n\nAnother relevant difference is that both the Shah and Mubarak were betrayed by their patron and thrown to the wolves. But this certainly is an interesting observation. Attributing survival to ruthlessness seems a bit circular without some independent measure of ruthlessness—otherwise, their survival itself becomes proof of greater ruthlessness. Maybe it’s just that single man rule is just as coherent and “natural” as liberal democracy. Maybe more—it’s been around a lot longer.\n\nThe fundamental question is whether such a system can ultimately become more prosperous than our messy old market system. In schematic terms: one market or two? Economic markets in both cases, but in one, the higher-level regulation of the market is imposed by a self-perpetuating central authority rather than in the hands of changing representatives of the electorate.\n\nThe one market or two question refers back to Gans’s analysis (recapitulated briefly earlier in this Chronicle ) of liberal democracy as comprised of two markets: the economic market, and a political market that allows for a form of collective decision making that elicits, contains and at least in part addresses the resentments generated by the inequalities caused by the economic market.\n\nThe crux is whether an authoritarian system can generate greater political efficiency to make up for its diminished economic efficiency, which will presumably be affected by the damage to morale inflicted by thought control. Which obliges us to turn once more to the rise of the victimary in the West and the not-so-soft institutional thought control that it produces, increasingly indoctrinating the young with victimary clichés and taboos and obliging its citizens to salute, in place of the national flag, the idol of “diversity.”\n\nWhether an authoritarian system (but why not “autocratic,” or “absolutist,” since China seems to be closing in on that, and that was the very point of Gans’s discussion leading up to this question?) can generate greater political efficiency is an excellent way to formulate the question, but why presuppose the diminishment of economic efficiency? The reason Gans gives here seems especially weak—it would be very interesting to find a way to compare the collective “morale” of China with Western Europe or the US, and I don’t think anyone would be all that surprised to see the former outperforming the latter in this field. It would seem odd to assume that political efficiency must somehow be at odds with economic efficiency—don’t businesses, scientists and engineers prefer a stable social environment?\n\nXi’s ambition for “modern socialism” challenges my response to Ryszard Legutko’s ominously ironic assimilation of Western PC to the dogmas of Eastern Euro-Communism (The Demon in Democracy, Encounter, 2016 [2012]; see Chronicle 532 ): that, à tyrannie égale, at least the West has relatively healthy economies. But leaving the economy aside for the moment, if there is indeed to be tyrannie égale, then the very foundation of liberal democracy on the continued implicit consent of the governed is placed in jeopardy. Grosso modo we may say that the rise of the “alt” versions of right and left reflects this tendency, neither one accepting the traditional gentlemen’s agreement that its opposition will remain “loyal.”\n\nSignificantly, in contrast to the Old Left, with its high hopes for the Soviet Union, the new alt-left is not at all dependent, nor even terribly interested in the fate of socialism outside its home borders. Its conviction of the inherent evil of “capitalism” is not based on a contrast with an exemplary model, utopian or otherwise, but is fundamentally moralistic. Victimary critique takes the place of every form of structural criticism. Since every practice can be shown to “victimize” in some way or other, we must engage in a constant battle against all of them, with “the end of discrimination” the only ultimate goal.\n\nAmerican society’s ability to deal effectively with victimary extremism has yet to be demonstrated…\n\nThis is really the crux—it seems to me that Gans is inching closer to the conclusion that victimary extremism cannot be controlled in America (or the West more generally), in which case exploring the possibilities of other forms of government is essential, even urgent. Gans still sees liberal democracy as the more “ideal” form of government, even if he has been brought to the point of accepting the possibility of settling for second best. But such judgments are inherently unstable—if the second best government can thrive while the best crashes, doesn’t that mean we must reverse our assessment? Gans’s continued hope for a recovery of liberal democracy (and even an ultimate turn in that direction by China itself) must also assume (al though he doesn’t take up the point here—but Chronicle #532, referenced above, is a good place to take a look) that the victimary is some parasitic growth upon liberal democracy, perhaps caused by an over-reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust, rather than a (not necessarily the ) logical conclusion of liberal democracy itself.\n\nAs Gans himself acknowledges, liberal democracy has always been to some extent victimary—why should it be surprising that, as the still extant layers of tradition are peeled off one by one, liberal democracy would be revealed to be victimocratic to the core?\n\nGans persists in seeing “autocracy” (which should mean “self-rule,” shouldn’t it?) as “bad,” even if potentially better in one (albeit crucial) respect than the “good” liberal democracy. But his supplement gives us an opening to examine the question in a rather rich way:\n\nSupplement (October 24, 2017)\n\nHaving read this Chronicle , a friend pointed out to me an October 21 piece by Rachel Botsman in Wired magazine entitled “Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens” ( http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion ), which describes an elaborate rating system that gives everyone a “national trust score,” and that will become the official Chinese basis for all kinds of judgments well beyond financial credit by 2020.\n\nThis gave me the idea of a clearer way of comparing Chinese with Western authoritarianism. These scores will definitely put a premium on loyalty to the regime, and, to the extent they are detectable, keep expressions of dissent to a minimum, as well as stigmatizing easily detectable vices such as video games. Certainly a step toward neo-1984. But there is an upside to this reliance on “objective” measures.\n\nChina (and Japan, and I imagine, South Korea) admit students to universities based on examination scores. American universities, even where racial criteria are supposedly illegal, as in California (hard to believe that prop.­ 209 would get the vote of today’s woke electorate) increasingly give out admissions based on “diversity.” There is also increasing pressure to do the same in industrial hiring, and we are constantly asked to lament the “white privilege” of the whites (and Asians) who get most of the good jobs in high-tech industries. So if we can say on the one hand that the West’s freer economy is a plus over the managed economy of socialism even at its most enlightened, and that it’s arguably preferable to be able to express one’s resentments freely rather than whisper them with the shower turned on, the advantage of these freedoms is certainly offset by the dilution of objective criteria in personnel selection.\n\nAs opposed to the old Soviet dogmas, today’s Chinese dogmas are more methodological than doctrinary, and in contrast to such things as Lysenkoism, they take their science straight (even when taking ours). What this suggests is that the autocratic nature of the society and its repression of dissent bear increasingly on the mechanisms of social control rather than on the specifics of decisions to be made in the economic and technical spheres.\n\nOf course this discussion brackets such things as the Chinese takeover of “territories” in the South China Sea, and its under-the-table encouragement of North Korea, as well as China’s push for economic hegemony in Asia (New Silk Road) and throughout the Southern Hemisphere. But it does allow for an element of objective comparison. As our society becomes more digital-technological, hence farther from the old norm of “labor power” as the rough equivalent of moral equality that inspired Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, meritocratic selection becomes increasingly important—not just to get the “best” people, but to get everyone to strive to be the best . (Which is the major reason why—but don’t let the UC Diversity folks hear you say this— Chinese kids are good at math. )\n\nConversely, it is precisely the evil of meritocracy (“disparate impact”) that is the focus of the ascriptive victimary thinking that has virtually eliminated all other thought on the Left today.\n\nThe Botsman article is a pretty interesting read. Pretty much any autocratic (which is pretty much a synonym for “absolutist”) system with access to advanced electronic technology would ultimately end up employing some version of China’s social credit system—Gans’s emphasis, in comparing China’s autocracy with America’s victimocracy is on the centrality of some notion of objective merit to any social order depending upon advanced technology (you simply need competent engineers, scientists, doctors, teachers, etc., and therefore “competence” must be valued in itself). In fact, insofar as the victimocracy is intrinsically hostile to all objective, non-political measures of merit, Gans seems to be settling the issue right here.\n\nBut, of course, if autocracy is capable of privileging merit so singlemindedly, it can’t simply be “bad.” In fact, if it can be brought to focus increasingly insistently upon merit, it would get better and perhaps find ways of reducing corruption and grounding its autocracy in something other than Communist Party rule (the continued repetition of inane “socialist” slogans and verbal formulas isn’t very meritorious, is it?).\n\nBut what about that social credit system itself? As Botsman points out, it’s really just an extension and centralization of what we already see developing in the West, in which records of all activity are preserved online and in one way or another made available to those institutions that have to “credit” each of us in some way; the most obvious example is our credit score. China wants to add indicators of virtue to the social credit score, by, for example, crediting someone who puts their salary toward a mortgage rather than toward gambling, and to directly reward and punish individuals based on this score. The possibilities here are endless, and would depend upon a discussion of what counts as “virtue,” for which contemporary societies would therefore have to equip themselves: should the citizen who goes to the museum housing acknowledged national art treasures get more points than the one who goes to the latest postmodernist exhibit?\n\nShould baseball be ranked above football, or MMA? Staid but informative documentaries over horror movies? Etc. Botsman also raises the question of gaming the system, which the Chinese have apparently gotten quite good at when it comes to standardized testing.\n\nIn West, the only available answer is to say, “who’s to say?,” and blather on about privacy, individualism and freedom, while railing against the “surveillance state” and “creeping totalitarianism”—you can write up the debates before they even occur (1984!). It is clear that the autocracy would be capable of hosting a much more robust and mature discussion of questions of value and virtue, however it chooses to organize that discussion. Social credit scores would be determined by algorithms, of course, but this wouldn’t be rule by algorithm—the state, the autocrat, would have to determine what criteria should guide the creation of the algorithms.\n\nThis would certainly be a learning process for all involved—if the state discovers that its point system with its rewards and punishments makes a large portion of the population economically unviable (by, say, determining that they can’t use banks or public transportation, or would find it impossible to rent a home or find a mate), clearly the algorithms would have to be recalculated. In general, people would orient themselves toward the social credit ranking system, implicitly participating in dialogues over its determinations. (How many social credit points do you get for blogging on ways of improving the social credit algorithms?)\n\nInsofar as something like a social credit system creeps into the West (in the usual confused, indecisive, partly apologetic, partly arrogant way), reactionaries could use that creep to point out that if individualism is being replaced by something like an electronic village, it is preferable for that village to be centrally run and governed by a shared conception of virtue. The Chinese should really find a way to transition from Communism to Confucianism, and maybe we should as well."
    },
    {
      "slug": "centering",
      "title": "Centering",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Power entails, first, occupying the center and, second, using that occupation to direct attention to another center. It’s like a conversation where you first need to get someone to pay attention to you, and then you can get them to pay attention to what you really want them to. In the kind of power we are most used to talking about, political power, you can make people pay attention to you and then attend to what you wish by making them pay a very heavy price if they don’t. But in order to make them pay a heavy price, there must be lots of other people who pay attention to you and will attend to making sure that actual or potential dissident gets his mind right.\n\nFor a while up the ladder you can make them (e.g., a conscript) pay a heavy price for disobedience as well, and even very powerful people can be brought to heel if isolated, but at a certain point those obeying you (attending to you and to whatever you want them to attend) must have reasons other than fear for doing so. Potential conflicts, perceived to be more destructive than the consequences of obedience itself, are felt to be deferred through respect to the person and/or office. At the very least, then, whoever occupies the place of power must not be generating resentments more uncontrollable than those his presence in power contains. He must, in centering himself, be deferring conflicts by directing attention to a more permanent center, a model of order.\n\nWe can say, then, that centering is power. I have pointed out in previous posts (perhaps not for a while, though) that Eric Gans, in what we could call his originary history of humanity, locates the crucial turning point in the emergence of the “Big Man” who seizes the sacred center and becomes in charge of distribution. Up until this point, in small scale, egalitarian, primitive communities, while of course some individuals are more central than others on all occasions, no one has permanent occupancy of the center, access to which is therefore controlled by a vast, sprawling and intricate array of (no doubt erratically enforced) tacit and explicit rules and prohibitions.\n\nOnce the Big Man emerges, the general possibility of a single individual occupying THE CENTER becomes imaginable; once imaginable, such a possibility can be desired. The ramifications of this social transformation are tremendous—Gans himself traces a line from this transformation to the monotheistic revelations, which essentially forbid the individual from trying, or even desiring, to occupy the center. This doesn’t just mean that no individual should start a rebellion aiming at making himself king—such a prohibition would obviously be trivial, and already covered by the existence and power of the actual king. It means that every individual, king included, should remember that his occupancy implies an ongoing reference to the permanent center.\n\nThere are innumerable ways of placing oneself at the center, which is to say substitutions for and imitations of the centrality of sacral kingship. Power is centrality, and power is absolute. Any occupation of the center, then, means absolute power within the space of attention producing that center. Let’s take the apparently most powerless individual—the torture victim. Insofar as a specific response is desired by the torturer, i.e., as long as the torture is not akin to kicking a sack of potatoes, the tortured has the absolute power to satisfy or not the torturer’s desire and to that extent “over” the torturer.\n\nObviously the scope of this power is extremely limited, in space and time, but within those limitations, it is absolute. And, of course, the largest scale power is also limited while being absolute within its sphere—governing is really a matter of retaining absolute power within that sphere while not (or by not) reaching for power outside of it: the sovereign will rule as long as he directs the attention he draws away from the signs that he causes the resentments he contains and towards the permanent center. More important for my purposes here is that we have a means of analyzing any social relationship in these terms, as an interplay of power (the torturer’s power sets the terms of the power of the tortured). We are always taking turns at the center, and we can therefore always desire to prolong our stay there, with there being no a priori limit on how long that stay might be.\n\nAll this is prefatory to initiating a dialogue between originary thinking (and absolutism) and Alasdair Mac Intyre, maybe the most important moral philosopher of our time, and certainly the most important anti-modern moral philosopher. In his After Virtue , in developing a concept of virtue to counter the incoherence of liberal morality, Mac Intyre begins with the concept of “practice”:\n\nAny coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions to the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended\n\nI consider this notion of a practice very similar to what I have been calling a “discipline.” The practice must be social and cooperative, which is to say it involves shared attention; it is complex, which means it involves a hierarchical articulation of modes of attention, so that one pays attention to one element of the practice in order to direct attention to another, with the result of that act of attention determining the range of possibilities for the next one, and so on. There are standards of excellence, which is to say one could master certain elements of the practice and still be a novice or incompetent in other, higher elements of it: there is a pedagogical, initiatory component.\n\nAll participants in the practice learn how to judge the practice along with participating in it, creating a shared space which one must enter in order to contribute –there couldn’t be any competent judgment from the outside. If “human powers” and “human conceptions” are “systematically extended,” this seems to me to suggest that a practice has a history to it, with models of excellence that can be studied, imitated and improved upon. It is really a question of increments of deferral, whereby letting some object be and transforming it into an object of contemplation and anthropomorphized presence generates new objects “framed” by that one, ultimately producing a “world” of cooperative relations between activities and objects.\n\nFor Mac Intyre, the practice generates constitutive virtues like integrity, honesty, and fairness—if you want to be the best chess player, you not only wouldn’t want to cheat in chess, but you would want a clean space in which chess competitions can take place without suspicion; also, if you are really motivated by love of the game, you will support institutions that nurture young chess players, you will mentor them, and so on.\n\nMac Intyre goes on to point out that all of virtue can’t be contained in the practice because, for one thing, one might be committed to competing practices, and the basis for choosing between them (say, between excellence in chess and excellence as a father raising a family) can’t be contained within any of the practices themselves. It is here that Mac Intyre (drawing heavily upon his recuperation of an Aristotlean ethics) introduces the notion of a telos of the individual life, grounded in the possibility, even necessity, of understanding ourselves in narrative terms. (Here, an understanding of the origin of language and the emergence of discourse, the subject of Eric Gans’s The Origin of Language , would enrich Mac Intyre’s account considerably.)\n\nThe narrative of one’s life as a telos doesn’t so much answer the moral question (practice chess for another hour or come home and tuck in your child…) as it articulates the conflicts between competing goods that are constitutive of a serious life. (Here, Mac Intyre relies heavily upon the tragic view of life, as opposed to more philosophical views that believe one can discover the Good and subordinate all other goods to it.) In engaging the practices and searching for the telos of your life (living a life aimed at discovering what is the good life) you become the kind of person who will make mature, moral decisions.\n\nFinally, Mac Intyre concludes that the narrative of one’s individual telos is always embedded in some tradition, and that part of one’s telos is participating in that tradition and contributing to the work of distinguishing what deserves to survive and be enhanced in it from what should be marginalized or discarded—all in terms of criteria generated within the tradition itself, of course.\n\nI would say that the creation of a narrative form for the individual life is itself a discipline, or practice—so Mac Intyre’s lower level concept can be employed at the higher level. The arts and storytelling traditions are all disciplines/practices aimed at providing narrative forms that individuals will then adopt and revise for the dilemmas and conflicts their own trajectory generates. Similarly, the maintenance of tradition is a discipline/practice, with any complex community having its specialists in tradition maintenance but with any healthy community having all of its members become at least competent “amateurs.”\n\nWe can talk about all this in terms of centering: at each level, from the practice to the telos to the tradition, attention is directed towards something irreducible to the individual: let’s say some model of action (or virtue) distilled through the tradition. Now, what originary thinking can add, and what only a properly anthropological inquiry can add, is an understanding of how all of this is grounded in the fundamental form of sociability, the deferral of violence through representation. A community aiming at the production of excellence (and, therefore, standards and judges of excellence) constructs a system whereby honors are conferred upon someone who occupies the center according to specific rules.\n\nThe desire for centrality is thereby rerouted through a system that makes it serve the elevation of the community. A Freudian would call this “sublimation,” but originary thinking doesn’t approach practices in that way: more complex, learned forms of attention management avoid the bad, it is true, but while also being a positive good and, more importantly, irreducible to the “evil” deferred.\n\nHow you narrate your life, or how you live your life in such a way as to be narrated, therefore involves a practice or discipline of self-centering. You understand that people are looking at you—people are looking at everyone, we are all looking at each other. You act, then, so as to attract attention, but specific kinds of attention. The problem of human centrality is the problem of resentment: the other has taken my place, and the big Other (the sacral king, before being divvied up into God, on the one hand, and the civil authorities, on the other) has allowed this to happen, at the very least by not recognizing and remedying the injury done me.\n\nMac Intyre doesn’t have a way of addressing the crisis inherent in this condition. The Western solution to this problem has been through the sacrifice of an exemplary individual who has attracted murderous attention by revealing, let’s say the log in the eye of all those who see a mote in his. But the attention need not be murderous, and better not be if we want sustainable moral practices rather than emergency coups of a center in crisis. A moral life is one lived so as to attract and deflect resentment, ultimately to the benefit even of those possessed of that resentment. Look at how much of social media is consumed with taking down some Big Man (or Woman) or other, someone who has “illegitimately” claimed centrality. You can’t tell people not to do this, because if they weren’t drawn to such encircling, they wouldn’t be people; but you can respond to this resentment in a defusive rather than escalating way.\n\nThe most basic way of doing so is to occupy the center the resentment places you in, but in such a way as to show that it is the resentful attention itself that has placed you there. In a sense, you would be counter-mimicking or iterating the resentment directed toward you. Once we have moved past the “pure” scapegoating of the Girardian scene of mimetic crisis, there is always some institutional structure, some practice, that justifies resentment in the form of exclusion, punishment, marginalization or demotion—for example, tweeting that a journalist has “lost his credibility” with his latest story. The bar for what counts as “enough” credibility can always be raised or lowered as convenience dictates.\n\nThe way to respond to such a charge is to raise the bar for everyone, including oneself along with the hostile tweeter. Of course, how well that will work will depend upon what kind of journalist one has been, what kinds of narratives one has lived one’s life so as to “fit.” So, how credible are you, anonymous tweeter, in determining the credibility of journalists, how credible can any of us be in this medium or elsewhere, where is the final court of appeals for establishing credibility, anyway? In making the accusation, is the tweeter not trying to establish his own credentials for joining the club the target of his accusation should presumably be ousted from?\n\nIn other words, run “credibility” through the ringer, repeat it over and over again so as to drain it of all use as a portable cliché. Of course, you can do this so as to “discredit” all notions of truth and good faith inquiry and investigation, but it can also be a way of cleansing the words we use to talk about those things—what is it that we are actually talking about when we talk about “credibility”? If you’re a real journalist, participating in a genuine tradition of exploration and exposure for the sake of public knowledge, you welcome the interruption; if not, you will mount a counter-attack to drive the accuser out of the public sphere.\n\nAnd then that will become part of your narratable life, leaving you in the hands or at the mercy of participants in the practice of studying the practice of “journalism.” The result will be what Gans has called “lowering the threshold of significance,” i.e., making things open to notice and meaning-making that previously weren’t, including regarding yourself as the one enabling the lowering. And that’s the most moral practice because it opens new modes of deferral. (What is implies for the practice of governing I will leave to another post.)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "distilling-sovereignty-gablog",
      "title": "Distilling Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Sovereignty is incompatible with democracy, but contemporary politics often make the most ardent advocates of majority rule the most insistent upon a reclaiming of sovereignty. This is most obviously the case in the US, where Trump was, if we sum up his central commitments (anti-immigration, anti-free trade, pro-swamp draining, America First) the candidate of both the restoration of American sovereignty and the redirection of government to the service and control of the American people. The apparent convergence of sovereignty and straightforward majority rule derives from the formidable opponents they share: transnational corporations with economic interests in the ability to move facilities around the world at will; corporations and activists who benefit from the continual migration of masses of Third Worlders; transnational progressives and foundations who find it more efficient to work through institutions less responsive to popular will, like the judiciary, the media and government bureaucracies.\n\nBoth the strict sovereignist and the strict democrat will want these vectors of chaos closed off. The incommensurabilities will become clear eventually, but until then those democrats and populists concerned with the preservation of sovereignty might have a lot of interesting things to say, and even their contradictions and inconsistencies may be worth looking at. Especially when they are both articulate and responsible members of a ruling coalition.\n\nGood governance is not a blind force, certainly not a strong but silent engine… the ability to carry out goals in the way they have been defined is a prerequisite condition for good governance, but is far from being sufficient in itself: good governance is measured above anything else by the ability of government ministers to establish their own goals.\n\nA politician who knows how to bring the train to its destination, but is unable to set the destination, as senior as he may be — is not governing but merely subcontracting; he may have been appointed Minister, and he may get to cut ribbons in the end, but he is nothing more than a contractor… To move down a track laid down by others does not require leaders; any driver could do it just fine. The essence of governance is always setting down directions and posting goals. This requires of elected officials to lay down new tracks only after they had decided for themselves where they would like to take the train.\n\nThis is from the opening of an essay by Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, “Tracks Toward Governing,” published in a new Hebrew Journal last fall. The government of which Shaked is a part has been working on curtailing the activities of foreign funded NGOs (largely by compelling them to reveal the amounts and sources of their funding—I don’t know where this effort stands), is in the process of passing a law that will enable the elected government to override Supreme Court decisions, has built a border fence that has drastically reduced border crossing by African migrants while making fresh commitments to remove the “infiltrators” (the word anti-illegal immigration Israelis use) already there (this seems to be stalled by the problem of finding countries to take them, with their home countries apparently not eager to have them back) or at least remove them from the population areas where they have significantly degraded the quality of life for Israelis.\n\nShaked has been a leading force in these initiatives, and defends and explains them better than other Israeli politicians, so she is unsurprisingly the most vilified figure in Israeli public life today. Many on the alt-right propose, in what always seems to me a combination of bitter sarcasm and a genuine admiration for the way Israel address its own “national problem,” that we take Israel as a model—in the game spirit of “agree and amplify,” I’m going to take that injunction seriously in a discussion and assessment of Shaked’s very interesting essay.\n\nAs we can see from the passage quoted above, Shaked defines sovereignty very rigorously (if metaphorically) and her definition would hold for any kind of government, regardless of who the sovereign is. To be sovereign is to set the goals for governing and possess the means to fulfill them. You could ask someone who sees sovereignty this way whether she would adhere to this understanding even if it can be shown that sovereignty, in this sense, is impossible under either liberalism or democracy. Indeed, her whole train metaphor is illiberal. The notion of the government “setting the direction” and getting to the “destination” is incompatible with liberal government—if we are all free individuals embarking on subjectively chosen and unrelated life projects how could we share a common destination that the government is to take us to?\n\nShaked may mean “destination” in a weaker sense: if the government, say, decides to partner with an energy company to explore off-shore oil reserves (the very issue that is forefront in Shaked’s mind in her polemic against the Supreme Court) no higher authority should be able to disallow or “derail” that “trip.” But if that’s the only kind of “destination” the government is allowed to set, if it cannot, for example, set itself the task of suppressing de-moralizing cultural tendencies, or establishing harmonious terms of interaction between the country’s different ethnic groups, wouldn’t that make it nothing more than a “contractor,” because other forces will then be setting the agenda in those areas, and the government will have nothing more to do than “lay the rails” where they say. Indeed, this question raises itself forcefully in the one area where Shaked lapses into a tentativeness uncharacteristic of the rest of the essay (and, indeed, Shaked’s political persona): Israel’s Jewishness.\n\nShaked’s leanings in political theory are a mixture of libertarian and neo-conservative lines of thought. It wouldn’t be too hard to figure out who she’s been exposed to (she draws heavily upon Milton Friedman in arguing for minimal government interference in the economy). She first attacks Israel’s Knesset (Parliament) for the cancerous growth of laws coming out of that body. She frames this in a very interesting way, al though I don’t know if this is original to her: she says that every law the government passes is a vote of no confidence in its citizens, since it usurps from them the solution to some problem they might have worked out on their own.\n\n(She goes through quite a few particularly ridiculous and harmful laws, focused in particular on their effects on the ability of business to determine their own “destination” in their own sphere.) She attacks the Supreme Court by defining the function of the law in very a precise and minimal way: the law intervenes when there is a conflict, when the conflict may have led to some damage, and when at least one side of the conflict has standing to bring it before the judicial arbiter. The court is not simply to opine on the legality of laws on its own initiative. (Here she refers to Hamilton’s assessment on the judiciary as the weakest branch of government, controlling neither purse nor sword.) All this is really essential to any good government.\n\nOn to the Jewish Question. Israel is defined as a “Jewish State,” but it’s never been very clear exactly what that means, especially in law, beyond the right granted to all Jews worldwide to immigrate there. The Rabbinical establishment controls marriage law, but this is hotly contested and rarely put forward as an example of the Jewishness of the state—if it were possible to form a governing coalition without the religious parties this arrangement might be eliminated overnight. There is some explicit, and much tacit support for Israel’s Jewishness to be understood in ethno-statist terms—Jewishness as nationality, like Frenchness, Russian, etc.\n\nMuch of the activity of the left in Israel seeks to combat this tacit definition. No one wants to define Israel as a Judaic state, though, as one governed by Jewish law. Shaked certainly doesn’t. She wants to insist on the compatibility of the Jewish character of the state along with its democratic character (the “Jewish and democratic” formulation has long been canonized in Israeli law and culture, with political arguments focused on whether to exacerbate or paper over the contradictions). She refers to the Jewish heritage going back to the Old Testament prophets, who criticized kings in the name of justice and the people; she discusses the importance of Jewish history and sacred literature to the modern republicanism that emerged out of Protestantism and the return to an “unfettered” reading of the Hebrew Bible.\n\nShaked is drawing upon some important recent scholarship here, but all this is really well worn ideological territory and not very compelling, relying as it does on a very idealized and indeed modern understanding of the meaning of Judiasm and Jewish history (she doesn’t go anywhere near the whole “Tikkun Olam” nonsense, fortunately). She speaks of making the “Jewish” part of the state as substantial and interwoven with all its institutions as the “democratic” part, which for starters means the Jewish calendar being the state calendar, Jewish holidays being the state holidays, Hebrew being the dominant language, Jewish history being the history taught in school, etc., all of which is already the case.\n\nShaked does make one more interesting move, though: she recalls an argument made by the former Supreme Court Justice Menachem Elon that Jewish law should be used as a source of Israeli law (along with secular Israeli law, the British law in place during the Mandate, and even the Ottoman law preceding that). Depending on the composition of judges, this could involve a gradual incorporation of Jewish law into Israeli law, and then perhaps an awareness on the part of the rabbinical makers of Jewish law of their impact upon state law, leading them, in turn, to think of themselves as legislating indirectly for the state.\n\nThis could de-ghettoize the legal thinking of at least some rabbis, and those rabbis could have their profile raised by the state, creating a virtuous circle. Since the “national religious” community is already the most powerful part of the electorate, and the fastest growing part of the population, with extensive cultural, religious and political institutions of their own, there is a constituency for these developments. A proposal for a return of the monarchy is not unthinkable under these conditions. How better to have a government that can determine its own destination, that is not just a “contractor”? In fact, on some authoritative accounts, the Jewish Messiah will simply be the king of the restored Jewish Commonwealth (he’s also supposed to be of the Davidic line, but perhaps that can be dealt with)—in other words, a completely rational “Messianic” politics is possible.\n\nThis clearly goes beyond anything Shaked, or any other contemporary public figure, would consider. But Shaked insists on foregrounding the Jewishness of Israel because only Israel’s Jewishness prevents its institutions from colluding with it being carved up by lushly funded international NGOs. She is right that this Jewishness needs to be given a content, and ethnicity won’t suffice because no political order can be derived from ethnicity. If one insists on sovereignty (the state as path-setter, and as possessing the means to follow that path) and Jewishness, if, in fact, the Jewishness of the state is perceived to come into contradiction with its democracy, the Israeli leadership would be faced with an interesting choice. What we see, in other words, is that once the question of sovereignty is made the highest priority, that question become a fulcrum that can turn around the rest of the social order, and initiate inquiries in possible reconstructions of the various traditions of that order. He who wants the end must want the means; so, what does he who wants sovereignty want?\n\nI will add that Donald Trump’s speech to the UN on September 19, lays down a similar marker, making sovereignty central to international order. Of course, there are plenty of inconsistencies here as well, as Trump insisted that the US doesn’t impose its political form on other countries while calling for democracy all over the place. But, the question is the same: if you have to choose sovereignty or democracy, which do you choose? In Trump’s foreign policy, he seems to be choosing sovereignty: as analyzed by the blogger Sundance, the proprietor of the Conservative Treehouse blog, that foreign policy involves Trump using economic levers to compel larger states to take “ownership” of their patrons and rein them in—this in particular has been Trump’s approach to China vis a vis North Korea and Pakistan vis a vis Afghanistan.\n\nImplicit in this approach is a world order based on a hierarchy of sovereignties, with the higher level sovereigns supporting and constraining sovereignty on the lower levels. It’s not too difficult to imagine a new international law being written that would take into account these power differentials, and give all the major powers an interest in neither interfering in the others’ sphere nor using their own clients to nurture hostilities against rivals. The recognition that a leak in sovereignty in one place is a leak elsewhere, and perhaps ultimately everywhere, would spread. Insisting that other states exercise sovereignty (as long as one is not simultaneously undermining their sovereignty) has a moral justification that insisting they become democracies or expand human rights doesn’t.\n\nPerhaps at some point there will be the equivalent of a reformist vs. revolutionary debate within absolutism, or NRx more generally—the reformist (or gradualist) case will be that it is possible to form an elite constituency that takes sovereignty as the highest priority, and that such a constituency will find it necessary to become increasingly hostile to liberalism and democracy and will thereby decide what “they want.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "mimetic-theory-and-high-low-v-the-middle",
      "title": "Mimetic Theory and High-Low v the Middle",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Let’s imagine a scene, let’s say an accident on the side of the road: a few people rush to the scene and start helping the victims; if a few more come and there is nothing more for them to do for the victims, they call for help and help keep others from entering the primary scene; then, others come, with nothing much to do, but they serve as witnesses and in case some instrument or specialty must be fetched (a mechanic or doctor; a first aid kit). I think this is the best way to think about social organization, as always centered on specific needs and dangers, and as set up to differentiate people in accord with the role they can best play in meeting those needs and facing those dangers.\n\nIn the scene presented above, there is a bit of chance and bit of natural difference: it may be that those first on the scene just happened to be closest, while some of those standing around later might have been just as qualified to help. Still these things tend to sort themselves out—someone who happened to be first but is afraid to take responsibility (or is unqualified, which means that he has avoided such situations, and neglected preparing for them, in the past) is likely to slip back into the crowd, while someone among the later arrivals who is willing and qualified to help is likely to present and announce himself.\n\nAccording to Eric Gans, the first human scene, upon which we can model later ones like that sketched above, is more precisely specified. Here we have a desirable object, presumably some food item, at the center of the not yet human group: these advanced, highly imitative apes, have their appetite for that central object inflamed, made into desire, by the awareness of the desire of all the other members of the group. This intensifying desire overrides the animal pecking order that normally maintains peace within the group—the alpha animal eats first, the beta animal eats when the alpha is finished, and so on. The alpha could never withstand the force of the group as a whole, but animals never “organize” themselves as cooperative, coordinating groups.\n\nNow, as all start to rush to the center, the animal hierarchy is abolished. What takes its place, according to the originary hypothesis, is the sign—what Gans calls the “aborted gesture of appropriation.” Think about traditional gestures of greeting, like hand shaking—it’s a way for each side to show it is not holding any weapons. Stretching out your hand with a weapon in it would signal violence; here, the same physical gesture is converted into a renunciation of violence. Think, for that matter, of a threatening gesture (which I doubt anyone does any more), like shaking your fist at someone—by demonstratively withholding the act of violence, you actually provide a space of peace, even if coupled with a warning.\n\nThe initial sign was the invention and discovery of this “method” of converting violent actions into gestures of deferral. The gesture is likely to be more effective and en during the more it actually mimics and therefore evokes the violence deferred—when we shake hands now, we don’t do so (in civilized zones, at least) with a sense of the relief that the hand coming towards us isn’t holding a knife—which is what makes the handshake an essentially empty gesture (it’s not good enough to seal a deal any more, that’s for sure).\n\nThe car accident seems like a very different scene—there’s no object of desire, and therefore no cause for conflict. Everyone can just focus on helping the victims. But that’s not the case—every human scene has an object of desire and hence contains within it potential conflict. Something goes wrong in the attempt to extricate the victim—wait a minute, whose idea was that!? The rescue effort can turn very quickly into an exercise in blame shifting and power struggles. There must be someone first on the scene in a more primary sense—someone who can command the gestures of deferral needed to prevent those resentments lying right beneath the surface from becoming manifest and distracting from the effort.\n\nMaybe everyone involved is good at that—like trained medics would probably be. But that’s the result of the institutionalization and trans-generational transmission of the necessary gestures. Someone, then, had to build and maintain those institutions, and doing so involved an analogous process of deferring the resentments inherent in any collaboration and creating the norms and models of leadership others can inherit.\n\nI’ve explored in a couple of recent posts the problems involved in the process of institutionalization. There’s nothing new here—in one of the commemorations I’ve read recently for the just deceased science fiction and military writer Jerry Pournelle, I’ve heard attributed to Pournelle the observation that in every institution there are those who are concerned with the primary function of the institution, and those concerned with the maintenance of the institution itself. Anyone who has ever worked in any institution knows how true this is, with the exception that plenty of institutions don’t even have anyone concerned with (or cognizant of) its primary function any more.\n\nThose concerned with the primary function should be making the most important decisions, but it will be those interested in institutional maintenance who will be most focused on and skilled at getting into the decision making positions. But someone has to be concerned with the maintenance of the institution—those absorbed in its primary function consider much of the work necessary for that maintenance tedious and compromising. (The man of action vs. the bureaucrat is one of popular culture’s favorite tropes—in more fair representations, we are shown that sometimes the bureaucrat is needed to get the man of action out of holes of his own digging.)\n\nIf we go back to the simple scene outlined in the beginning, we can see this is a difference between those who are first on the scene, and those who are second—for simplicity’s sake, we can just call them “firsts” and “seconds.” The seconds establish the guardrails around the firsts as the latter do their work, and they make for the “interface” between the firsts and those who gather around the scene (the “thirds”). They will also decide which resources get called for and which get through to the firsts, who are too busy to see to such details. There is no inherent conflict between the firsts, seconds and thirds, but there is the potential for all kinds of conflict.\n\nThe firsts (and the first among the firsts) should rule, and should be interested in nothing more than enacting all the signs of deferral that have been collected through successive acts of rule. Even defense against external enemies is really a function of enhancing the readiness of the defenders of the community, and the community as a whole, and doing that is a function of eliminating all the distractions caused by desires and resentments, with the most attention dedicated to where it matters most. The seconds should be filtering information coming from below, marshalling resources, and transmitting commands and exhortations from the ruler.\n\nAnd the thirds, the vast majority of the community, should be modeling themselves on and ordering their lives in accord with the hierarchy constitutive of the community. The problem of institutionalization is the problem of the relation between firsts and seconds, or firstness and secondness (since all of us occupy different “ordinal” positions in different settings).\n\nBut, of course, sometimes the first is not up to the task—maybe he once was, but no longer is, while being unwilling to cede power, without their being any definitive proof of his unfitness. And once there is a formalized form of firstness, the tradition or mechanism by which someone is placed in that role will sometimes elevate someone unworthy. In such cases, the seconds, who will be the first to notice, start to worry—they may start to think one of them should be in charge (but which one…?); or that they have to exercise power behind the scenes, reducing the person presently in charge, but very likely his successors as well, to a position of dependence.\n\nUnder such conditions, the right thing to do is to above all preserve the ontology implicit in the originary scene, what some of us call an “absolutist ontology,” which should therefore be inculcated as part of the accumulated signs of deferral bred into the community. We all know that in an emergency, or in any really important situation, no one thinks in terms of democracy—everybody, except for saboteurs, thinks in terms of manning the stations each is best suited to man. But that also means taking the stations each is presently manning, or is accustomed to man, as the default. A reliable indicator of firstness is the ability to revise previous assessments and assignments and to formalize present fitness.\n\nIf the first is not up to the task, the radical solution of removal must come very far down on the list of remedies—we must first of all carry on as if he is capable, and if the seconds have to lend some support that will go unnoticed and unacknowledged, so be it. (This is itself a form of firstness on their part.) It may even be necessary, after the fact, to narrate events in such a way as to attribute centrality to the designated first. Of course, if removal becomes absolutely necessary for the survival of the community, such practices will make it all the more difficult; this is a good thing, though, and these practices also ensure that any remove and replace actions will be carefully crafted so as to preserve absolutist ontology.\n\nAbsolutist ontology is rejected when these practices, these attempts to bring formalized roles and assessed capabilities into closer correspondence, are abandoned and some among the seconds start to exploit the gap between attributed power and actual power of the ruler. If the second’s efforts must sometimes go unacknowledged, the same goes for the first’s dependence on the second, and this can be a lever for increasing that dependence. Then a struggle, partly overt, partly covert, commences, and it is at this point that both parties (or all parties, because the seconds are likely to fall out amongst themselves under these conditions, while the king thereby surrenders his firstness) seek allies, or proxies, among the thirds.\n\nThe king has been granted power, but he doesn’t really deserve or properly use that power; perhaps he doesn’t really exercise that power, which is in fact wielded by secret, insidious forces. The hierarchy inherent in absolutist ontology can in this case no longer serve as a model for the thirds to use in composing their lives—rather, it is a mere appearance, hiding a reality that the action proposed by one or another of the seconds (or the first himself, turning against what Imperial Energy calls his “essentials”) will unveil. Skepticism, pluralism, and all the rest follow, and here is where HLvM has full sway. What has happened is that mimetic desire, that is, envy of the putative being possessed by the other, which the centuries or even millennia of accumulated deferral has converted into a complex array of signs assigning roles and duties, has now been introduced as a legitimate principle within the community (the king/your lord is keeping something from you, so, therefore, are his supporters, and maybe your neighbor as well)—and once this happens, mimetic desire, corrosive as it is, must become the dominating principle of the community.\n\nThen you have institutionalized civil war, and democracy is nothing other than this institutionalization, with voting blocs at most several steps away from dissolving into armed camps. The problem is how to avoid taking sides in this civil war, or at least not just taking sides; the only solution is to find ways of realigning ourselves as firsts, seconds and thirds in as many (and sufficiently visible) ways as possible, and thereby recovering and creating as many gestures of deferral (while marking them as such) as we can."
    },
    {
      "slug": "power-and-digital-order",
      "title": "Power and Digital Order",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric Gans has a compelling hypothesis regarding the form of our present disorder that I’d like to give more consideration than I have done thus far. Gans has been emphasizing the enormous economic gulf created by the digital economy run by those capable of sophisticated forms of symbolic manipulations, since the reduction of production processes to symbolic manipulation makes all those incapable of such intellectual work essentially economically obsolete. Gans has been connecting this development to the intensification of victimary cultural politics (wherein every “inequality” is reduced to the form of the Nazi-Jew binary), because such victimary politics becomes the only way of compelling some kind of moral reciprocity on the part of the elites. In his most recent Chronicle of Love & Resentment , “Common Sense,” he makes this connection even more forcefully:\n\nTo put the binary cultural hypothesis very simply, the more bytes required to organize the material economy, including the entertainment (thank you, Frankfurt School) that painlessly discharges our resentments and satisfies our appetites with fast food and eventually with self-driving cars and AI-enhanced sex robots (in the business section of the September 27 Los Angeles Times: “Silicone sex dolls get an AI makeover. These ‘girls’ will ‘have sensual conversations and tell naughty jokes’”), the fewer bytes needed to maintain cultural solidarity. The Internet is maintained with terabytes of know-how in order to allow people to Tweet the crudest obscenities.\n\nLocal versions of this dichotomy are everywhere. At the university, in the embarrassing contrast between highly sophisticated and theory-driven scientific research and near-universal ideological idiocy. Not to speak of GA’s difficulty in obtaining a hearing. For its complexity is based in ideas rather than algorithms, and it thereby falls between the cultural and technical stools. In a world run on big-data-based algorithms, when it comes to exercising the imagination enough to conceive an “originary hypothesis,” the response is one of intellectual panic: how can you speculate without data, on the basis of what you fancy to be our shared intuition? No one really “understands” particle physics or string theory, but these are not things to understand , merely equations to work out. “Cognitive theory” has equations; GA has only imagination, and there is no longer enough of a common symbolic world to allow sharing imaginary constructs as a mode of truth-seeking.\n\nOnce we have all become positivist creators and “trainers” of algorithms, we can no longer allow the kind of “gentlemen’s” criteria for success that still existed in my youth, which permitted the less favored both to resent the “caste system” yet be reassured by its authority. Today, all that counts is either knowing the right people , which is not the same as being part of a loosely aristocratic old-boy system, or getting a high score on an exam. For those who don’t know the right people, getting the score is all, whence the reign of disparate impact .\n\nEconomic productivity used to require a certain degree of cultural solidarity: bosses, managers and workers needed forms of extended cooperation; the educational and entertainment system had to enforce standardized cultural norms, so as to sustain cross generationally the models of behavior required for an advanced workforce and citizenry. Meanwhile, I just googled to discover the number of Google employees: 72, 053. (A much diminished Ford Motor Company still has 201,000.) The only cultural solidarity needed there is that of the graduates of the top dozen or so universities in the US, perhaps the world. As Gans notes, these elite workers will be able to produce substitutes for the satisfactions previously offered as inducements to participate in cultural reproduction: instead of a wife, increasingly realistic sex bots (will women want these as well?). Soon enough, people will forget what “wives” were. The often cited Morlock vs. Eloi dichotomy is being realized. What to do with all that surplus population?\n\nI want to address Gans’s reference to the reception (not) granted to GA more specifically, but first of all to note (as Gans himself indicates) that this observation holds for social and cultural theory as a whole. Here’s an interesting way to think about this. The linguist Anna Wierzbicka has developed what she calls a “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” comprised of all the words that are common to all the languages in the world. Along with this metalanguage, she has developed a method of translation, using the metalanguage to translate the various otherwise untranslatable concepts constitutive of each language. So, for example, the word “emotion,” which does not translate out of English, can be translated by reducing it to the words “feel” and “think,” which are part of the NSM.\n\nWierzbicka’s method involves composing a series of sentences that are aimed very precisely at bringing out the specific meaning of any word. Now, in describing her method, Wierzbicka says there are essentially two ways of talking about any event: first, one could speak of the outcome or intention as “good” or “bad” (both words in the NSM); second, one could speak of the event as similar to another event. The latter approach opens the way to identifying prototypical events that would distinguish one culture from another and enable us to account for its language as allowing for ever more complex events modeled on while being differentiated from those prototypical ones.\n\nSo, it is as if what has happened now is the complete collapse of all events into certain prototypical ones, with all of them summarily labeled “bad.” It is really a kind of cultural lobotomy. It may be that for the socially autistic digital elites and their political proxies and protectors, social spaces (the Humanities, entertainment, more and more often sports…) are set aside for the sub-elites drawn from the under-classes to, in lieu of forming “cultural solidarity,” lead their charges in LARPing iconic events (the March on Selma, the liberation of Europe, the Algerian War, etc.) in real time.\n\nGA, of course, has never had a particularly warm reception in the academy, and its emergence almost simultaneously with victimary thinking offers as good an explanation as any. GA is interested not primarily in labeling a particular social or cultural form good or bad, but in understanding it as modeled, however distantly, on an originary scene (the prototype of prototypes) defined by the deferral of collective violence. The implications of such an approach for making sense of inter-group and inter-sex relationships are simply too triggering—GA suppresses altogether the incredibly pleasurable retroactive accusation and self-congratulation that has driven most thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences for quite a while.\n\nBut it also, as Gans points out in the excerpt above, resists the supposedly more sophisticated and objective data-driven approaches to social order, because they can never ask the question, why is there social order (and therefore “data”) in the first place? The practitioners of such approaches cannot understand the paradoxical question, what must language be in order to be what it is?, because they have no way or initiating a data search or devising an algorithm to address it. But there was language before there was “data,” and language couldn’t have emerged out of some primordial “data-generating” process on the part of exceptionally intelligent organisms that somehow became a collective process—accounting for that “somehow” implicates the sober scientist in silly “just-so stories” and B-movie quality creationist accounts of human origin.\n\nNow, let’s take a look at Gans’s “final reflection”:\n\nNo one can dispute that making women wear veils or worse in public, let alone “honor-killing” them for speaking to strange men, does not rank very high on the scale of moral equality. But the White Guilt that tolerates it is not solely motivated by fear of “Islamophobia.” It reflects a guilty distortion of the healthy idea that women’s destiny, whatever else they elect to do, is to bear children; that, in other words, female biology, at least at the present stage of human technology, is still “in service” to the society as a whole. Women are not solely to blame for the West’s low birth rate, but in a world where women are not subordinate to men, ways must be found to encourage couples to reach a replacement level of population as we live ever longer as individuals, unless of course we would prefer to disappear.\n\nHowever crude and barbaric these archaic customs may be, they are not simply “irrational.” Not everything that one dislikes can be understood as a variant of Nazism. The idea that the subordination of women, or slavery, or even human sacrifice, is simply “evil” does nothing to explain why it has existed, let alone why it has been abolished in societies that can afford to do so. And calling it “scapegoating” is just one more one-bit explanation.\n\nOnce you start along this line of thinking, there is no way of telling where it will end. If female biology is still “in service” to the society as a whole, we might discover that a lot of other things are as well. The reason for the virulence of victimary leftism is that they know if the male-female distinction can be institutionalized so as to maximize some social purpose, every other distinction can be as well. Some institutionalizations of these distinctions are abolished by “societies that can afford to do so.” But what is affordable at one point might turn out to be unaffordable after all at some later point; the judgment may even be made that it was never really affordable in the first place, but that reckless, wasteful people had gotten in charge of the social reserves.\n\nThe “one-bit” thinking might go farther back than anyone thinks—was not liberalism, in fact, the first one-bit political theory (down with kings! Up with the people!)? In that case, maybe it’s not a question of more or less rapidly tearing down social distinctions but of calibrating the ones that exist along with the emergence of new ones. Here, in fact, we have the difference between conservative and reactionary social thought: the conservative wants to make equality safe for the world, whereas the reactionary wants all inequalities recognized and formalized through reciprocal obligations. All that matters is holding the center.\n\nGans never does propose a way of genuinely countering the victimary, other than a (maybe not so) ambivalent endorsement of Trump’s “common sense,” i.e., open, confrontational, undeterred approach. But more important is the other problem he, along with everyone else so far, leaves unsolved—what to about those who cannot be integrated into the digital order which, through automation, AI and algorithmic programming, is in the process of rendering virtually all means of acquiring virtue not merely degraded or abused but obsolete. At least Gans lays the problem down on the table, with all its moral and ethical perplexities.\n\nBut maybe the two problems, as Gans seems to intuit, are one. In an overtly hierarchical order, the victimary, which depends upon the liberal’s sense that there’s always some unnoticed inequality he’s about to be called out for, would be impossible. In such an order, it would also be possible to ask, explicitly, what is the best way for humans to live, and how can we provide such a way? For example, what form of property ownership would promote self-sufficiency and authority in men, and devotion to family in women? Perhaps a return to homesteading would be best for some, and a case could be made for this on aesthetic as well as health grounds—a revival of craftsmanship and homegrown and hunted food.\n\nMaybe it’s hard for some to resist a smirk here, because homesteading as a “lifestyle choice” seems affected and “postmodern”—real homesteaders did it to survive, whereas this would have something of the Disney park to it. But if enough people turn to it, that would mean it is a question of survival, cultural and maybe physical, if the cities and suburbs become unlivable, or unaffordable for many. Maybe it will become the best way for those who are not rich to prevent obesity. Immigration can be essentially eliminated, and technological developments can be slowed down or even stopped or reversed for some purposes, in some areas—once we habituate ourselves to the sense that technology is a series of decisions, rather than an inexorable force, many things might be possible. There’s no reason to stand in a stupor and stare vacantly as millions of people are displaced by technology. Some as yet unanticipated technological and economic developments may take up some of the slack, but there’s no law saying how much.\n\nBut let’s return to Gans’s essay “On the One Medium,” which I discussed a couple of posts back, and which concludes as follows:\n\nWe may tentatively conclude that so far, at least, under the reign of the One Medium, if the periphery appears to be doing fine, the center seems to be increasingly less figurable, either as a god or as an artwork. This might be thought to signal the decline of the sacred, with as a result perhaps the impending end of humanity itself. But let us avoid apocalypse. A world where rocks and old furniture have taken the place of the works of the masters as the cultural “replacement” for traditional religion may just find that traditional religion does a better job. Certainly, as David P. Goldman (aka “Spengler”) likes to point out, religious people are greatly overrepresented among those who produce children beyond the replacement level, and who therefore guarantee their participation in future generations.\n\nReligion too may be found on the Internet, and not only serving its more pernicious functions, such as the recruitment of jihadists. Do there exist the equivalent of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in religious services? Or should we rather learn to look at the Internet itself at a given moment as a MOO religious service, where virtual human togetherness replaces the central godhead with the figure of global humanity itself, nameless and figureless, existing by right of its ubiquity alone?\n\nNo, I rather think not. But our massive dissolution in the crowd may have for effect our enhanced attraction to the Subject, real or constructed, that we experience in its center: the One God, I AM WHO I AM.\n\nWhy would our massive dissolution in the crowd enhance our attraction to the Subject at its center? Because this dissolution presupposes the emergence of a new center. Similarly, the invention and dissemination of alphabetic writing can be causally linked to the emergence of ancient Hebrew monotheism and Greek metaphysics: in abstracting the word from any voice, the word is “anonymized,” seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. This process is itself bound up with both imperial power and the resistance to it, with both the Greek city-states and the Jewish Commonwealth situated on the margins of, and threatened with assimilation to, the great empires of antiquity.\n\nPerhaps this too is a high-low vs the middle strategy, with God about as high as one can go, and the realization of justice on earth an open-ended project that can never be considered defeated once and for all. The development of writing from its origins as a bookkeeping device to the broader purposes of cultural transmission also follows the trajectory of the establishment of those empires, with alphabetic writing in particular—writing based on the analysis of speech down to the most elementary individual sounds—making available to the “low” (the general population, or much of it) a technology previously controlled exclusively by the specialized scribes of the empire, who monopolized the very intricate technique of hieroglyphic or syllabic writing.\n\nThe internet is not God, and we have become far more aware in recent months of the very direct control the quite visible and well-known masters of the supposedly ultra-liberal technologies exercise over their platforms. But if the invention of monotheism was an imagined high-low alliance, it certainly exceeded whatever political function it never actually performed anyway, at least not for the Jews. The revelation of the one God, I AM WHO (or THAT) I AM, is, we could say, an iteration of the originary scene: God gathers all his people together and speaks to them directly, providing moral dictates that render human sacrifices and God-Emperors irrelevant.\n\nNow, this has often been parlayed into various kinds of high-low alliances, rallying one “people” or another against those pretending to mediate between the people and the divine. That won’t stop, but no one can simply invent a new God either. We can counter the more earthly high-low alliance with the permanent one, though, insofar as the monotheistic iteration of the originary scene need mean nothing more than the general possibility of forming congregations around central objects, i.e., disciplines—even organized around rocks and old furniture, which have displaced the works of the masters precisely because the forms and terms of the congregation are more important than the pretext for it.\n\nThe monotheistic God issued what Philip Rieff called the “absolute imperative,” and we can hear this imperative (to not usurp the center) renewed in the “one medium”: sacral kingship is replaced once and for all by the sovereign restoring the “middle” as the guarantor of the differentiated disciplinary social order for which the one medium is perfectly suited. One doesn’t need to be a believer in anything other than a center that will outlast any other center and will do so because we keep creating and obeying centers in the world that help pare down the sovereign center to its bare minimum while removing all obstructions to its operation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-single-source-of-moral-and-intellectual-innovation-gablog",
      "title": "The Single Source of Moral and Intellectual Innovation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The graded, or staggered, model of action I presented in my next to latest post, and which I have elsewhere called “centered ordinality,” can provide us with a model of thinking along with one of morality. If the first sign appeared as a deferral of violence, then every sign appears likewise: not, needless to say, imminent collectively destructive violence as on the originary scene, but whatever would count as self-threatening violence for the thinker. (By “sign,” I mean anything that is taken to produce meaning). Even the most commonplace thoughts and ideas would fit this model—you produce a sign, i.e., you think of something, something occurs to you, as part of a feeling that something would be lost or destroyed otherwise.\n\nThis is the firstness of thinking, and it doesn’t matter if the sign is original to you in some way or the most tired cliché—it’s doing what it’s doing for you right at that moment. And it’s doing it for you in the plural, even if you’re not directly interacting with others—at the very least it’s the two or several in one each of us is. We’re not the exact same person we were a second ago, if only because the thought we just had mediated the transition from one to another, and we’re always mingled in various ways with everyone else. The kind of panic, or oblivion, or complacency that shuts down thinking is a kind of violence conducted from the outside (the semiotic ecology) and imposed on oneself—if I think beyond this setting something will be unsettled that I’d like to consider settled. It is feeling the imminence of this shutdown as violence that keeps thinking going.\n\nSo, you start off thinking against this imminent violence, and it crystallizes in some encounter with another line of thinking (perhaps the line of thinking that led to the panic, oblivion or complacency) from which it must distinguish itself. This is the secondness of thought—its channeling through inherited formations. But, of course, the thinking itself could never have been outside of inherited formations—after all, the thinking must have been done in language, the most inherited of all formations. But thinking in its firstness takes its departure by rerouting what has been inherited back through its originary structure—an expression that has obviously been said by millions of people but was said by this person at this time and place in this way; a prayer you’ve repeated a thousand times but for the first time seemed to be really heard; a phrase in a book that takes on new meaning because it’s referenced by another book, etc.\n\nA sign can only be meaningful insofar as it has previously generated meaning, but it can also only be meaningful if it represents a new beginning. The secondness of thought wrenches the sign out of that originary context by imposing on it the weight of all the other, and especially the historically most weighted, contexts. The secondness of thinking makes the sign retroactively predictable.\n\nPredictability is the both the issue and bane of thinking. We are seeing, on the alt-right in particular, a very vigorous defense of stereotypes, and it forces one to realize how stereotyped and complacent anti-stereotyping thinking has become. Of course there are differences between groups, however we might argue over explaining them, and these differences are registered in both commonsensical and more rigorous modes of thought. It has been courageous and liberating for the alt-right to affirm these suppressed truths. The acronym NAXALT (Not All Xs Are Like That) has emerged as a standing mockery of the feebleness of most attempts to “counter” stereotypes.\n\nStereotyping is the highest form of sacrificial thinking: if someone needs to be blamed for some social calamity and excluded or made an example of, the stereotype tells you where to look and allows for no appeal—that is, it will not allow the pursuit to be hindered. We can never be completely outside sacrificial thinking (just saying that stereotyping is sacrificial is itself a kind of stereotyping and therefore sacrificial claim). And we certainly can’t refute it. But it is in the nature of sacrificial thinking and action to initiate chains of events that are unintended by and consume the initiator, because, following the laws of mimesis, invidious distinctions operate virally.\n\nYou start with a clear distinction between same and other and eventually find yourself possessed by an other within. All we can do to interrupt such chains is lower the threshold of significance: if a particular group has a disproportionate proclivity to commit certain harmful acts, then you can formalize those acts and target the doers rather than the social reserve from which they sally forth. There will then remain the less violent residue of social stigma and marginalization but, first, it’s less violent and, second, from there another lowering of the threshold might be attempted, if the still remaining level of potential violence continues to provoke thought.\n\n(But let’s say the group in question is so powerful, self-interested and relentless that it blocks any attempt to formalize and institutionalize—well, then, either that group rules through the hierarchy it has established and will find itself with the same need to contain virality; or, it exploits some weakness in the ruling order and does you the favor of pointing out that weakness so it can be repaired—if you restore the capacity to destroy that group, it will no longer be a dire threat, or even the “same” group.)\n\nOf course, if the lowering is not formalized and institutionalized, the lowering process can destroy itself by putting in place another even more viral distinction (between those who continue to stereotype and those who reject all stereotyping and therefore end up stereotyping their “other” especially virulently). To set yourself against stereotyping as such is to place yourself in opposition to social order and thinking itself. If society is oppressive because of stereotyping, then the deepest, most taken for granted stereotypes must be the most pernicious. You then have to destroy the most obvious things, and get outraged by boys preferring trucks and girls preferring dolls.\n\nThe attempt to completely abolish sacrifice issues in the gnostic mania of monotheism; a more en during monotheism keeps noting that whatever order you are trying to protect by conducting sacrifices really derives from another, prior and more permanent order that your sacrifice will violate, even while your sacrifice might defer, make more indirect and mitigating, another more terrible one. The creation of the sign precedes the division of the object and all the sacrifice can do is restore a practice of division that will reset the terms of mimetic rivalry. Sacrifice relieves us of the rigors of deferral by providing everyone with a fair share of the victim. Maybe sometimes we need to relax the rigors of deferral—this is what Philip Rieff called “remissions.”\n\nThe lowering of the threshold of significance constitutes a kind of renewal of firstness within secondness, and is accomplished by incorporating thirdness into the thinking process. Thirdness is the recipient and normalization of the interplay of firstness and secondness, founding and institutionalization, but it is also the position of the witness or spectator. The ability to detach yourself sufficiently from ongoing events so as to observe them as an unfolding drama is an originary source of thinking, morality and esthetics. Of course, this means being able to observe yourself, as both actor and observer, and therefore to see yourself falling into predictable roles and patterns.\n\nThis self-reflexivity represents the extension of firstness into thirdness. The most moral and the most thoughtful position is one wherein you turn yourself into a sign that reveals the panic, oblivion and complacency that suppresses thought and provides a new means of deferring the violence those dispositions evade. This means inventing practices that lower the threshold of significance. The means of such invention are to be found in repetition, which has the effect of taking a sign from firstness through thirdness, as well as continually retrieving its firstness. Nothing has really happened until it has repeated, because the meaning of any sign is predicated upon its iterability.\n\nThe more you deliberately repeat a sign, the more it is both stripped of meaning and becomes sheer sign, nothing but a way of centering attention. Maybe the most accessible form of repetition is satire, which pretty much anyone can do—repeat a familiar sign in a way that’s believable, recognizably not what it is repeating, distinguished by a stripping away of attributes that protect it from certain kinds of scrutiny. The moral and the intellectual come together in satire: the thing represented is “unconcealed,” and implicitly measured according to some standard of the good. To become a sign is paradoxical, both preempting and accepting vulnerability to satire, oscillating between firstness and thirdness.\n\nA model of thinking is always a model of a disciplinary space. A disciplinary space is organized around a sign oscillating between predictability and novelty—a discipline like sociology comes into being because something unrecognizable had emerged in human groups, something that didn’t fit terms like “community,” “nation,” “polis,” “republic,” “people,” “kingdom,” etc. Genuine disciplinary spaces tend to take shape in the corners of the established, institutionalized ones, through “satirical” repetitions of their founding gestures and concepts. Disciplines are determined to make a few terms, bringing to attention a specific cluster of phenomena, work—they start with the assumption that they will work, and don’t abandon that assumption until something else comes along that might include what has been organized through a broader concept.\n\nBut it should always be possible to come back to the founding paradox of a discipline—the decision to see everything one way even though everything appears utterly different than that way (if a discipline just reproduced what we already saw and knew, it would be unnecessary). Let’s say we wanted to view the same social situation as one of complete order and as one of complete disorder. We could easily do it, by adding predicates to either order or disorder—what appears to be disorder is really an invisible order, what appears to be order is really moral disorder, etc. If you keep accumulating predicates on both sides, you would get to the point where you could say, looking at this phenomenon, if we’re willing to see this set of predicates as operating hierarchically in this way so as to articulate the substantive, we’re going to see this kind of order; if we’re willing to see this other set of predicates, etc., we’re going to see this kind of disorder.\n\nAs thinkers in firstness, we should always be on that boundary; as actors and artists in secondness and thirdness we will inevitably be struck by the order or disorder (or uneven combination of both) that actually appears and narrows the world of possibilities. What thinking does is make being struck in this way a starting point for thinking.\n\n(Those familiar with the thinking of Charles Sanders Peirce will notice my indebtedness—somewhat distant by now—to his philosophy and semiotics, in particular his categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness. I would note in particular his essay, “On a Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "declarative-imaginary",
      "title": "Declarative Imaginary",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We think in language, which means we think almost exclusively in declarative sentences. We hear and read lots and lots of sentences throughout our lives; we remember very few of them, but we distill from all of them a stock of sample sentences. When we read or hear new sentences, we measure them against that stock: we assimilate new sentences to some in the stock and “understand” them, we find no way to assimilate those sentences and so we reject them because “they make no sense,” or we use the sentences to expand, diversify and reorganize our stock. And when we write or speak, we aim at affecting others’ stocks in the same way.\n\nA sentence has a topic, and a comment—in the most familiar grammars, a subject and predicate. There is something to which we are being asked to pay attention, or to which it is assumed we are already paying attention, and something is being said about that thing. This presumes some “issue” regarding the topic—if someone needs to know something or be told something about the topic then something about the topic’s “identity” or existence is in question. For originary thinking, what I call “originary grammar” or “anthropomorphics,” what is unsettled about the topic is the status of some imperative directed towards it. The question is more directly associated with the sentence, but the question is asked as a way of holding the commands and demands, however distant, at bay. The comment forbids the interlocutor (however hypothetical) to press the demand further because the referent of the topic has been rendered off limits due to circumstances beyond our control. The sentence is a cease and desist order.\n\nIt is also an order to contemplate, rather than grasp, or change, or possess the “topic.” To “contemplate,” in grammatical terms, means to try out new “comments” along with the topic. These might be comments or predicates more likely to gain us access to the topic, or at least so we hope, but they might be comments or predicates that place the topic even further beyond our original desire. Eric Gans, in his The Origin of Language (of which a new, streamlined and much more accessible but equally rigorous edition is on its way) examines the “esthetics of the sentence.” For Gans, esthetics has its origin on the originary scene itself, in the moment of hesitation created by the first sign: the sign, the “aborted gesture of appropriation,” directs the participants’ attention to the central, desired object, while also forbidding that object, which turns the attention back to the sign. This oscillation between object and sign is “esthetics.”\n\nA similar structure holds for the declarative sentence, which forbids the desired access to the object expressed in the imperative, while at the same time making that object all the more attractive by “framing” it with the “forbidding” comment. Moreover, the object as represented in (and desired as a result of) the sentence is no longer the object originally desired: possessing the actual object would abolish the object as desired through the sentence, while the sentence renders the actual object inaccessible. What Gans calls the “esthetics” of the sentence, though, I would prefer to call the “imaginary” of the sentence, since the “imaginary” is better suited for examining the foundation of communities.\n\nWhat is the “imagination”? I like to work with R.G. Collingwood’s very economical and simple account from The Principles of Art . Let’s say you’re looking at a lawn, at the end of which you see a wall, beyond which you can no longer see the lawn. You can extend the lawn in your mind, “seeing” it continue past the wall by extrapolating from what you see now. You “imagine” the extended, completed lawn. So, the imagination is always an extended, extrapolated and completed representation of something “cut off” by whatever is “framing” it in your actual vision description. But the very possibility of the lawn extending indefinitely, or following any one of a number of possible “extrapolations,” is what makes it appear “framed” and “bounded” in the first place—even the extended lawn will meet and therefore, to use the Derridean term, has “always already” met, a boundary. The possibility of the object being other than it is, and the object being as it is, rather than one of those other possibilities, are both creations of the imagination.\n\nThe “imaginary,” then, is the constitutive frame of a shared reality, always implicitly distinguished from some other possible reality. If I can’t imagine my friend betraying me, and hence inhabit, along with that friend, a world in which betrayal is constitutively excluded, then that is the imaginary of that friendship—one bounded, ultimately, by the threat of betrayal, which would put an end to that world. None of the actions I have ever seen my friend perform, none of the words I have ever heard him speak, can be extended or extrapolated so as to fit into a betrayal scene—which means they negate all those indications of possible betrayal which might otherwise lead one to form expectations of its eventuality. It is through an act of faith in my friend that I have constructed his words and actions thusly.\n\nSo, the imaginary of the declarative sentence is in the process I described above of maintaining the oscillation between the sentence and the desired topic/subject/object by trying out different comments or predicates that keep the real object in sight or mind while reminding us that any appropriation must be in a mediated and transformed form that doesn’t restart the imperative crisis whose imminent or distant possibility first informed the sentence. Now, the roots of the declarative imaginary are in our imperative relation to reality. Gans speaks of an “imperative-ostensive” dialogue that precedes the emergence of the declarative. He models this on the ordering of surgical implements by the surgeon of the nurse or assistant who in turn confirms while obeying the command: “Scalpel!” “Scalpel!” We should imagine such an ostensive confirmation to imperatives to be the norm in the pre-declarative community: it would be an important way of maintaining “linguistic presence,” which is to say assuring one another that our words and gestures continue to sustain a shared world.\n\nBut there is an imperative-imperative dialogue, the “imperative exchange” discussed in my previous post and prior to that. This dialogue is with the center—but it should be pointed out that all dialogues are with the center—our fellow humans are representatives of the center, or a particular manifestation or aspect of the center. Prayer is the most fundamental imperative-imperative dialogue: God, tell me what to do. We request from the center a command; a command, ultimately regarding the most propitious way of approaching the center in the future. We constantly make the same requests from all objects, ultimately stand-ins for the center: when we deal with a new device or tool, we ask it to teach us how to use it. The imperative world is a magical one in which words create realities, and when the imperative turns out to be infelicitous, that world, or imaginary collapses, and a declarative one must come to take its place.\n\nThe declarative imaginary is predicated on possible failures of the imperative imaginary: our declarative sentences are concerned with predicating all the ways all our imperative exchanges can fail. The declarative imaginary is what constitutes and “manages” our stock of sample sentences: all the sentence “prototypes” available for “retrieval” for the purposes of reading, speaking, writing and thinking are cut to size to fit the declarative imaginary. The declarative imaginary is defined, on one side, by what we could call the “marginal imperative”: the weakest but still active and therefore possibly disturbing imperative.\n\nThink about something that offends you, but just barely. Being “offended” is answering to an imperative: what has been done to you must be “answered,” even if only in your own mind. Below the barely perturbing offense there is an act that could be constructed as an offense, but you wouldn’t bother. But someone else would bother, and maybe you did yourself not that long ago. That you no longer perceive any offense means that some imperative territory has been “colonized” by declarative force: you may notice and interpret that action, introduce it into your calculations, but it no longer “compels” you—in fact, that it no longer compels enables you to notice things you wouldn’t have in a reactive mode. There is a new reality behind the action which is more worthy of attention than the action’s (minimal, as you now can see) effect on you.\n\nThe marginal imperative is varied across a culture (otherwise it would be impossible for an individual to set aside a particular imperative) but there are cultural baselines here: in a civilized culture, for example, the imperatives associated with blood feuds fall below the “margin.” But what makes this rising of the threshold of imperativity possible is what bounds the declarative imaginary on the other side: the absolute imperative. The absolute imperative derives from the original declarative scene: don’t pursue impossible imperatives that inevitably lead to violence without achieving their desire. This is a very expansive category—determining what makes an imperative possible and which imperatives must lead to violence depends upon how far down the road of a chain of consequences you can see, which is to say it depends upon how much reality your raising of the marginal imperative has allowed you to imagine.\n\nBut that in turn means that the absolute imperative is translated into the command to raise the marginal imperative. And what answers to the command to raise the marginal imperative is to de-center yourself as a source of imperatives: the more you see yourself as a center, and the more you elevate your centrality and aspire to higher degrees of same, the more you must answer to and answer for. Imagine taking offense at everything that might indicate some slight, however minimal.\n\nTo work on raising the marginal imperative is to take an interest (to hear new imperatives that compel you to inquire into) in the hierarchy of imperatives. There are still things one “must” take offense at—those, then, solicit more important imperatives. That also means some “imperators” are more authoritative than others, which is to say some speak from a place closer to the center. The absolutist imaginary extends and extrapolates from this hierarchy to an explicitly recognized hierarchy in which the source and scope of imperatives is constantly clarified—clarified by our heeding and obeying them. Imperative exchanges are continually breaking down and being reconstructed here as elsewhere: the higher the marginal imperative and the more extended the absolute imperative the more effectively this declarative work, this “sentencing,” proceeds.\n\nIf we de-center ourselves effectively, hear and obey the imperative to not seek to occupy the center, then we may return to the center, stand in for the center, in a new way: as one who has visibly enhanced the reciprocal action between the marginal imperative and the absolute imperative and has thereby clarified the imperative order for others who desire its clarification. Of course, there will always be a place for those who de-center themselves even from that centering, who refuse centrality altogether in the name of naming the forms of centrality that might emerge in the long run. That would be a way of life devoted exclusively to expanding the declarative imaginary, deliberately renewing the stock of sample sentences, always sentencing."
    },
    {
      "slug": "felicity",
      "title": "Felicity",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "J.L. Austin, in originating the concept of “performative” speech acts, considered such acts to be “felicitous” or “infelicitous.” Performative speech acts effect some change in the world, rather than saying something “about” something, and therefore either “work” or don’t “work,” as opposed to being true or false. The canonical example is the words spoken in the marriage ceremony: “I do”; “I now pronounce you man and wife.” In this case, the groom and bride are not describing how they feel about each other, nor is the pastor describing their relationship—all three are participating in in creating a new relationship between the two.\n\nSuch speech acts are felicitous if carried out under the proper, ritual, ceremonial, sanctioned conditions: if I happen to hear, in a store, one customer say to one salesman, “I do” (when asked, say, if he would like to look at another pair of pants) and another customer say “I do” (“do you like that perfume”) and I shout out “I now pronounce you man and wife,” nothing has happened, even if the two might appreciate my quick wit. The problem for speech act theory or philosophy has always been where and how to draw the line between performative speech acts and what Austin called “constative,” or referential speech acts (which can be judged true or false).\n\nAs is often the case, what seems to be a simple and intuitively obvious distinction gets bogged down in “boundary cases” the more closely we examine it. Even a scientific claim, with its proof replicated numerous times, requires its felicity conditions: a “sanctioned” laboratory, a scientific journal, an established discipline, etc. Genuine theoretical advances always come from cutting such Gordian knots by subordinating one concept to the other, with the subordinate concept (like Newtonian physical laws within Einsteinian physics) becoming a limiting case of the dominant one. Within the disciplinary space created by the originary hypothesis, the first speech act was undeniably performative, creating humans, God, and a world of objects that could be referred to, the decision is an easy one: all uses of language are to be understood as performative, with the constative the limiting case.\n\nSeeing language as performative is easy in the case of the lower speech acts theorized by Gans in The Origin of Language ; the ostensive and the imperative are, from any perspective, acts which do something in their saying : such acts only make sense if they work, i.e., change something in the world. The problem comes with the speech act traditionally defined in terms of truth conditions, the declarative. Declarative sentences are, first of all, true or false; that it be reducible to truth or falsity seems almost be a definition of the declarative sentence. So, what do declaratives do ? Well, for starters, they answer questions.\n\nAs R.G. Collingwood pointed out, any sentence can answer, at a minimum, one of two questions: a question about the subject or a question about the predicate. If I say “John is home,” I can be answering a question about John’s whereabouts or about who is home. Introducing modifiers increases the number of (quite possibly mutually inclusive) questions that might be answered by the sentence: “John is safe at home” answers, along with at least one of the previously mentioned questions, a question about some danger presumably or imaginably faced by John. We might say that a good sentence is one that maximizes the questions it elicits and answers.\n\nAnd a good question would be answerable by a declarative sentence. Of course, what makes a question answerable, and which questions a sentence might be answering, depends upon the space, ultimately a disciplinary space of historical language users, within which the sentence is uttered, written and/or read; and sentences provide us with evidence, perhaps the best we can have, regarding the constitution of those spaces. Our sentences are informed by tacit, unasked questions.\n\nBut what are questions? The fact that any question can easily be re-written in the form of “tell me…” indicates the interrogative’s dependence upon the imperative. If you look at it from the other side, we can imagine the process of transition from imperative to interrogative: get that! Go ahead, get it! Come on, get it already! Get it, please! Will you get it? Could you get it? Will you let me know whether you might be willing to get it? If the shared focus is maintained, an unfulfilled (either refused or impossible) command turns into a request for the performed action or object, and finally a request for information regarding its possibility.\n\nImperatives themselves, meanwhile, are an immensely complicated and varied batch—from plea and prayer on one side to command and directive on the other, with summons, requests, instructions and much else in between. I have focused, perhaps inordinately, upon the imperative, and intend to continue to do so, because very few people like to talk too much about it. The reason is obvious: imperatives are intrinsically asymmetrical, implying some difference in power or access, even if momentary—if I tell you to pass the salt because it’s at your end of the table, neither of us thereby has more power, but it is precisely that kind of relation—one person in possession of something others need—that makes a more structural imperative relation possible.\n\nLinguistically speaking, the liberal fantasy is for a world without imperatives: the mere statement of facts and description of realities would be sufficient to get us all doing what we should. But what is the dominant means of production in the contemporary world, the algorithm, if not series of imperatives strung together declaratively (if A, then implement B; if C or D, implement E…)?\n\nAnd, finally, what is an imperative? It has its origins in an infelicitous ostensive—the ostensive involves shared pointing at something, for which the verbal equivalents are naming and exclamations (“What a beautiful day!” doesn’t make an empirical claim but rather assumes the listener to will join in appreciation of the day). The infelicitous ostensive that leads to the imperative is naming—what happens if someone, out of ignorance, impatience, desire or naughtiness names an object that’s not there? If it happens to be nearby, someone might just go and get it, and we have a new speech act. All these speech acts, then, from pointing to the most convoluted sentence, emerge from the Name-of-God directed at the object at the center on the originary scene.\n\nNow that we have brought the center into play, we can work our way back in the other direction. The imperative, according to Gans, would have been invented (or discovered—the line between the two is very thin here) on the margins—the (ritual) activity at the center among these earliest humans would not have allowed for such mistakes (or at least would not allow for them to be acknowledged). But it would quickly come to be applied to the center. The basic relation between humans and deities is a reciprocally imperative one: we pray to God and God issues commands to us. This is what I elsewhere called an “imperative exchange”: if we do what God says we can expect our requests to Him to be honored.\n\nBut the imperative exchange accounts for our immediate relation to the world more generally. In originary terms, the world consists of nameable objects—not everything in the world is named, but anything could be. Those names are all derivative of the center, the source of nameability itself. We engage in imperative exchanges with all named objects, all objects that are “invested” linguistically: we accept commands from them that require us to “handle” them in specific ways, and in return they yield to our own demands that they nourish, or guide or refrain from harming us or otherwise aid us. We of course have little crises of faith all the time in this regard.\n\nOne thing we do in response is firm up the world of things, make it more articulated, make the chain of commands issuing from it more hierarchical and regular. In other words, a technological understanding of the world is essentially the ordering of all the imperative exchanges in which we participate. A very powerful theory of technology in general, and contemporary technological developments in particular, will follow from this.\n\nNow, Gans provides for a complex derivation of the declarative from the failed (infelicitous) imperative, and I would like to preserve that complexity—this is no place for shortcuts. (In my reading, despite its natural relation to the imperative, the interrogative actually emerges after the more primitive declarative forms, filling in a gap between the imperative and declarative.) Someone in the community makes some demand or issues some command and you either refuse or (more likely) are unable to comply—the object is unavailable, the act cannot be performed. This must have happened often in the purely imperative community, but it must have also been resolved fairly quickly, because we have, of course, no record of any human community that stopped at the imperative.\n\nThe problem is, how to communicate, how to find the resources for communicating, the infelicity of the imperative? We have to imagine a kind of brief equilibrium—the “imperator” is not withdrawing his command, but is presumably not proceeding to act directly on its ‘refusal” violently; the recipient of the command is presumably standing his ground, but also not eager to initiate violence; there’s some danger, therefore, enough to make some innovation necessary; but not enough to make it impossible—there’s a need to think and some space to do so.\n\nIn Gans’s construction of this (let’s say, proto-declarative) scene, the target of the imperative repeats the name of the object requested along with an “operator of interdiction.” The operator of interdiction is an imperative, forbidding in an open-ended way, some action: examples would be “don’t cross at the red light”; “don’t smoke”; “don’t eat fatty foods,” etc. The operator of interdiction is an imperative, that seems closer than any other to the originary sign itself, which is essentially an interdiction on appropriating the central object. The operator of interdiction must have emerged when one member of the community needed to bring another member into a familiar form of shared attention or “linguistic presence” in which others were already participating—think about situations where it’s enough to say “don’t” for the other to understand what they shouldn’t do; it would subsequently have been used repeatedly in cooperative contexts, when impatience or imminent conflict threatened to undermine the group’s goal: a gesture meaning “don’t move” or “don’t make a sound” would be readily intelligible in situations where it was evident that that is precisely what someone was about to do.\n\nThe interdiction is a slightly asymmetrical ostensive and a very gentle imperative. The linguistic form of the interdiction would have gradually been extended over longer periods of cooperation where dense tacit understandings unite the participants, until the form became generally available.\n\nIts meaning, though, juxtaposed to the repeated name of the object, in this novel context, seems multidirectional: what is the “imperator” being told to refrain from? Issuing the imperative itself? Proceeding from the infelicitous imperative to violent retaliation? Desiring the object altogether? The imperator will recognize an interdiction being imposed upon him, but why should he obey it? What makes it convincing? Only a realization of the absence of the object. The problem, though, is that it is on this scene that the means for communicating the absence of the object are created. If the operator of interdiction is also directed toward the object, though, that is, if the object itself is being commanded to “refrain” (from being present and available), then the two-pronged imperative can have the necessary effect.\n\nSo, in this primitive declarative—the operator of interdiction is the first “predicate”—the imperator is told to cease and desist “because” the object has been ordered away. And the only possible source for the imperative issued to the object is the center itself, or God. But in that case, the interdiction issued by the speaker must have the same source, since it is intrinsically connected to that issued to the object. The declarative sentence, then, opens us up to imperatives from (to mangle Spinoza) “God, which is to say, reality.” Declarative sentences respond to or anticipate the failure of some imperative exchange by conveying a command from the center to lower or redirect our expectations, which involves redistributing our attention.\n\nUnlike the ostensive and the imperative, the declarative establishes a linguistic reality that does not depend upon the presence of any particular object or person in the world: it creates and sustains, in the face of the constant force of imperative realities, a model of the world that allows more of the world to be named. They utter the Name-of-God outside of any ritual context. That is what declarative sentences do , that is their performative effect.\n\nThis language centered discourse needs to be put to work, and that will be done. For starters, consider the following: why do you, does any of us, do what we do? We can always ascribe rational motives to ourselves by retrojecting a chain of reasoning for what we have done, but obviously there wasn’t a chain of reasoning that got you started on that chain of reasoning in the first place. Why were you interested in the thing you started thinking about, and interested in the way that started that particular line of thought? We can give psychological and even biological explanations, but there is ultimately a leap from some purported internal “mechanism” to language that can’t be bridged.\n\nNo, you do what you do because you are obeying a command. Where in “reality” (material exigencies; tradition, or a long chain of commands) that command comes from, how it has been reshaped in the processes of arriving at you, how you have to modify it in order to fulfill it, when its authority lapses, and that of another imperative takes its place, are all among the most interesting questions. But we are command obeying beings.\n\nA final, ethical conclusion. How are we to find felicity, that is, a general felicitousness of our speech acts? In the continual clarification of each of them in themselves and in their relations to each other. In the ostensive domain, we engage perpetually in the Confucian “rectification of names.” In the imperative domain, we clarify the commands we heed (and those we in turn transmit), trace them back to a larger chain of commands, and cleanse them of reactive, resentful, prideful counter-commands (the commands we heed themselves provide the resources for this). Our questions should be grounded in some imperative “blockage,” and made answerable (if not necessarily once and for all) by declaratives. And our declaratives should decomposable into such questions while letting through higher, more central imperatives, commanding us to renounce stalled imperative exchanges and the resentment towards the center they generate."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-grammar-and-political-grammar-gablog",
      "title": "Originary Grammar and Political Grammar",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The highest purpose of political discourse is to expose the political imaginaries of everyone participating on the scene. How do you solicit someone’s political imaginary? Very simple—ask them what they want, perhaps in commonsensical political terms (“I want universal healthcare”), but not necessarily. If you can determine what kind of sovereign would have to be in place for them to get what they want, you have constructed their political imaginary. The process is much like that new makeapp that subtracts the effect of makeup on a photographed face: everything existing that interferes with the political desire gets subtracted.\n\n“I want a world without racism.” OK, how would our raceapp approach this? We would have to identify all the “markers” of racism, about which we now have an enormous wealth of information thanks to the it’s not ok to be white movement: we can, in great detail, itemize the differences in wealth and power, the choices in mates, friends and even children, the intellectual proclivities (do you like math?), the gestures, the neighborhood you live in, and so on. So, we must imagine all that eliminated (which means we must imagine those who will perform, and those who will suffer, the elimination)—which further means we have to inquire into what other social relations support all of that, determine the various causal linkages tying the supports to the markers to be expunged, and then imagine a process by which those supports are re-engineered into supports for a world in which all of our abilities, our sexual desires, our sense of humor, our sense of beauty, our bank accounts, living arrangements, posture and much else are radically transformed—and all this as required in vastly differing ways for each individual, as we are all unique carriers of racism.\n\nWhat kind of sovereign are you then imagining? One who commands a vast guerilla army of mindless, heartless human resources drones following a rigid playbook that gets rewritten constantly leaving their present efforts obsolete as they are expended so that the next wave of race drones come after them, until the prototypical racist/target is distilled from the continuous investigation. But we’re not done, not by a long shot—how does the never again racism sovereign incorporate the never again sexism, never again homophobia, etc., modes of sovereignty?\n\n“I want a world without racism” is just a subroutine of the apparently more moderate “I want everyone to be treated equally.” Here, as well, one imagines a sovereign with knowledge of the infinite number of markers of “unequal” treatment, or, more precisely, a sovereign constantly engaged in collecting and punishing examples of “unequal” treatment, identified by a previous, so far rough, estimate of those markers of unequal treatment that most need to be addressed, leading to the constant accumulation of knowledge of more and more kinds and indicators of unequal treatment, many of them products of previous attempts to remedy some form of unequal treatment.\n\nA sovereign, in other words, which is the enemy of all the people it governs (in differing degrees, at different times). You would have to be constantly enraged, inhabiting such a vicious imaginary. This imaginary could be considered liberal, it could be considered statist or totalitarian, but, despite the seeming paradox (or because of it), it is best seen as anarchist: it presupposes a circulation of equal units prior to any authority, and the job it assigns to the state, to restore that original anarchy by slicing through layers of inegalitarian accretion, is enough to drive anyone mad. By contrast with the anarchist imaginary, the absolutist imaginary is a thing of simple, almost tautological beauty: all of our wants translate into a desire for a sovereign that is sovereign.\n\nWe imagine a sovereign commanding subordinates to command their subordinates to fulfill the purpose of their institutions as he does with his own. Institutions have purposes we can discern because all human interactions serve some purpose, which is to say they serve the center that has constituted them. Our absolutistapp erases everything intervening between sovereign decision, its implementation, and the feedback required to ensure the next decision is similarly unobstructed. I think these are really the only two political imaginaries worth considering today—all others would resolve themselves back into one of these two.\n\nThe anarchist imaginary only makes sense as a form of resentment towards the absolutist imaginary. Historically, of course, this is the case: liberalism is a process of defectors from monarchy trying to find space within monarchy, to influence monarchy, to transform monarchy, and ultimately to destroy monarchy. The point of attack is always the command structure: no one in a position of command can ever give a completely satisfactory account of why it should be him giving the command, and why he gave this command. On the question, why him ?, the only real answer is that I inherited, seized or was delegated this power, which really just sends the question back into an infinite regress.\n\nRegarding the this , an imperative is always irreducible to declarative explanation (even though, of course, such explanations can be given) since it depends upon circumstances and exigencies that could always be reconstructed after the fact in a way they couldn’t have been in making the decision itself. And even such after the fact reconstructions will send us back to inheritances and traditions that can never be fully excavated. The absolutist imaginary attributes a good faith faithfulness to the best of those traditions to the decision maker; the anarchist imaginary replaces this with a bad faith faithlessness.\n\nThe anarchist imaginary introduces declarative criteria into the selection of responsible agents and into the process of decision. It does this not to provide feedback to those making such decisions, but to establish a perpetual show trial of the imperative as such by demonstrating that it must always fall short of declarative criteria. Whatever names and attributes are given to the leader are translated into a series of predicates that can be subjected to inquiry one by one, according to criteria that could never be stated in advance because the declarative is itself first of all the interdiction on issuing some imperative, in this case the one issued by the sovereign.\n\nIs the king the “protector of his people”? But what counts as “protection,” and are his people really more protected under his rule than they might be under some other possible one? (A series of questions is always the wedge displacing the imperative and introducing declarative rule.) In what sense are they “his” people—how do they come into his possession? For that matter, are they even “a” people—what constitutes a people? Etc. The same goes for decisions actually made, which can always be compared with plausible alternatives with better outcomes which could never be conclusively dismissed. Such criticism after the fact can be very useful if undertaken from the standpoint of the actor, but that is not the purpose of the declarative coup, which seeks to discredit the structure of command and temporal chain of imperatives altogether.\n\nAny “given” can be further dissolved into presumably free agents that have somehow been welded together in a hierarchy. The free individual, conceptually, is the precipitate of the erosion of sovereign command—the most free individual is whoever can be posited as most resistant to the current sovereign command.\n\nIn its fully developed form, liberalism posits the agreement of solitary, ahistorical, self-interested individuals as the original basis or cause of social order; somehow, this original agreement was usurped, and then history can be read as a continual process of its recovery. This means reading history as a sequence of events in which explicit agreements between individuals subject to no command serve (or fail) to overthrow orders predicated on an inherited structure of command, i.e., imperatives derived from accepted names. Explicit agreements that don’t depend upon the individuals entering into them because conformity with the agreement will be judged by those legitimated by that very agreement to judge them according to protocols that can be read out of or into the agreement is the declarative condition.\n\nWhy did you do______? Because I was authorized by an agreement arrived at through free deliberation by all concerned parties and publicly recorded. This declarative politics swallows its own tail because its inheritors can always come along and play the same game and its initiators: what made the deliberations “free”? Who was counted as a “concerned party”? Some already existing authority must have made such determinations. And such agreements in practice must present themselves as pledges and promises, i.e., ostensives: you have to swear loyalty, you can’t just claim that your objective analysis of conditions accounts for the extreme likelihood that you will be loyal—because everyone knows that analysis will be conducted in order to justify your continued loyalty or defection. But that just means that what makes declarativity a powerful weapon against the imperative order keeps it a powerful weapon against the inevitable recrudescence of imperativity within the declarative order.\n\nAbsolutism defends the imperative order within the present declarative one, operating under the assumption that the imperative order, and the ostensive order (the network of names upon which it rests) can never be utterly eradicated. Everyone giving orders and everyone taking orders wants orders to be clear; everyone who begs, solicits, summons, requests, forbids, suggests, demands, prays wants, not necessarily every one of these imperatives to be obeyed, but for us to know whether they are or not, and to be certain we could tell. Everyone has an interest in clarifying their felicity conditions. (Such declarative defenses of the imperative order should be kept to a minimum.)\n\nWe have seen the advantages declarativity has long exploited in subverting the imperative order, but the imperative order has its advantages as well. Not only can the declarative order never separate itself from its imperative substratum, but that imperative order is inscribed within the declarative itself. If we conclude a meeting and someone says, “good, then we’re all agreed,” it does not need to be stated explicitly that this agreement commands each participant to act their respective part in seeing it fulfilled. Separating imperative from declarative is as impossible as separating fact from value, and for the same reason: every declarative, even the most neutral sounding description or explanation commands some response.\n\n“It’s going to rain tomorrow”=” bring your umbrella.” “City x is located at __ degrees longitude and ___degrees latitude”=” set your navigating instruments accordingly”; “remember to write that for your exam tomorrow.” So, in listening to any sentence, your question should always be, what is this sentence demanding of me?\n\nIn the first instance, it’s demanding that you reassess something it presumes you want. It’s interrupting some demand it takes you to be making upon reality. Which means it’s also disrupting the fabric of your imaginary, either to destroy it or enable you to immunize it against some threat. (You can, of course, turn attempts at the former into instances of the latter.) It’s throwing a shadow of doubt on the conditions of some imperative exchange you are in the middle of—it’s encouraging you not to hold up your side of the exchange, not to obey the command directed your way, because the other side will break faith.\n\nIt’s demanding that you look at, and look to, something you have neglected, or have been unaware of. As my examples above indicate, we can often restate in declarative terms the tacit, constitutive imperative of some declarative. That ultimately entraps you within the declarative order. So, for example, arguing over who is the “real racist,” or “what racism really is,” is simply a way of surrendering in the war on imperativity. Even making a clear argument about how evil and ridiculous it is to desire a “world without racism” is feeble—the conditions of declarative felicity will always leave open the possibility of retrieving “hope” of such a world.\n\nThe more all-encompassing approach is to strive to obey the imperatives, to perform the deferral the sentence implicitly demands of you. Acting as someone set out on the hunt by the declaration of the need to abolish racism short-circuits the declarative-imperative wiring far more effectively. Even the most hardened (or softened) SJW hasn’t really taken in what it would mean to take their tacit imperatives literally.\n\nSituating yourself thusly on the border between imperative and declarative is not just a way of counter-culturally subverting the Cathedral (al though it is that, and I do think it provides excellent formulas for memeing). The practice I’m proposing serves a winnowing purpose. Seeking to obey all the imperatives coming our way is the only way of finding out which can really be obeyed, and obeyed without contradicting other imperatives that, taken alone, could also be obeyed. In other words, these are the means by which the imperative order can be recovered and restored. And while we extract imperatives to obey from the sentences/discourses surrounding us, we comment on them declaratively—the most powerful political discourse today would probably be a kind of traveler’s account of one’s attempts to obey the imperative lodged in the most widely circulated declaratives. In that way, the desires instigated by those declaratives can be put on display and thereby deferred, the liberal political imaginary exposed and the absolutist imaginary summoned from its cracks and crevices."
    },
    {
      "slug": "semiotic-engineering-gablog",
      "title": "Semiotic Engineering",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "There is always a center—the origin of language, which is to say the origin of the human, lies in the shared “positing” of a center. Since then we have gone from one center to another, to another. So, if there’s one thing we can say human beings “should do,” i.e., an absolute moral imperative, it would be “sustain the center.” The center is shared, joint, attention, so it’s not a stretch to say that all evil originates in distraction. But evil projects can be carried out with a concentrated focus, can they not? Surely attention itself cannot serve, not merely as a basis for morality, but as the whole of it. If the work is evil, then the focus dedicated to it is itself a distraction from a prior center.\n\nBut how far back can we go—can a whole tradition, a mode of attention transmitted over centuries, be a distraction from a more real tradition, and if that can be the case, how can we tell, or adjudicate between the contending claims? These questions derive from the liberal tradition, so they are themselves distractions. You sustain the center by recuperating, not denouncing, distractions—if they are distractions, they are distractions from a particular center, and can therefore be treated as iterations of that centrality in a particular way: if they are answers to questions that emerge from the commands constitutive of that tradition, then those questions can be recovered and answered differently; if they are themselves questions, posed violently, even incoherently, those questions can be clarified and rooted in the order of commands; if those distractions are forms of obedience that have run amok and threaten to destroy the larger command structure, we can take them as adversarial call to restore the hierarchy of imperatives that prevents one imperative from being obeyed at the expense of the whole.\n\nThere can be no rule for determining the true center, but those interested in having their actions traced back to it will “look” and “sound” different than those who want to make polemical hay out of the warring claims to centrality. You can even ask those who persist in asking “but how do you know…?” to cooperate in tracing your disagreement, or their resentment of your certainty, to a shared origin; their response will tell you what to make of their question and the imperative they obey in asking it.\n\nThere is a term that Gans uses throughout The Origin of Language that I think can be translated directly into “sustain the center”: “linguistic presence.” Maintaining linguistic presence is the urgent imperative that takes us through the succession of speech acts, from the ostensive, through the imperative and to the declarative. At each point a potential break in linguistic presence, which always means a potential outbreak of violence, is what forces the transition from one speech form to another. The imperative emerges from an “inappropriate ostensive”: one speaker, for any one of a number of reasons we could hypothesize, “points” to an object that isn’t there—this threatens linguistic presence, that is, a common reality constituted and acknowledged linguistically.\n\nAnother member of the group brings the object, restoring linguistic presence, and in the process creating a new speech act: the imperative, through which a common reality can not only be acknowledged and constituted, but created, magically, through words, as it were. One speaker, later on, issues an “inappropriate imperative,” one that cannot be fulfilled (the act is impossible or the object unavailable); again, linguistic presence is threatened, and violence menaces. The declarative, in the form of the negative ostensive “forbidding” the further prosecution of the imperative due to the absence of the object, restores linguistic presence. This time, though, linguistic presence is restored through reference to an external presence, a world of objects that go their own ways, of mediated and invisible centers that must be inferred from the visible ones.\n\nA strictly linguistically or semiotically based morality, then, is focused on, directs attention to, the problem of mediating the linguistic presence of members of the community of language users through the reality (that which exists whether we like it or know it or not) that language names and organizes for us. The order of emergence of the speech forms analyzed by Gans in fact provides a good model for how to sustain linguistic presence through the ongoing constitution of the non-linguistic presence. When your interlocutor names something, run and fetch it—turn the name into an imperative. And we are always naming things, in every utterance—all of the speech forms include the lower ones (no sentence could make sense without a pre-existing universe of names) and in fact iterate the lower ones: every sentence is itself a kind of naming of a piece of framed reality.\n\n“Fetching” the named object might be done literally, metaphorically, or farcically, depending upon the necessities of maintaining linguistic presence, and upon whether the name itself was a distraction from a more extended chain of linguistic presents. Acting in obedience to imperatives, actual or extracted from declaratives, in the manner I discussed in the previous post, can help sustain linguistic presence (in a sense this serves to retrieve the lower speech form embedded and concealed within the higher), but so can demonstrating the absence of the object or act explicitly or implicitly demanded or commanded, and thereby introducing a new declarative layer.\n\n(To demands that we extirpate racism, or bemoanings of its continued presence, one can simply point out that the thing doesn’t exist, and therefore can’t be brought forward for excoriation. What, then, might be found in that blank space now left in all those sentences where the word “racism” would have been?) (I have presented this as a model for engaging others, but it would be equally useful in organizing the progression of one’s own discourse.)\n\nBut the form of linguistic presence that includes all and is really the most “anti-fragile” is that provided by the present tense itself. Einstein revolutionized physics in part by pointing out that simultaneity needs to be constructed: two events that happen simultaneously from one point of observation do not happen simultaneously from another, since light, like any carrier of “evidence,” of that which can be registered and measured, has to travel from one place to another and light from different starting points will reach measuring devices placed differently at different times. The declarative sentence, in articulating linguistic with non-linguistic presence, constructs simultaneity; the more “declarative” the sentence, then, the more abstracted from immediate imperatives and the more unobstructed a conduit of the absolute imperative, the more it gathers up all its references into the present tense.\n\nConsider what is called the “literary present”: when we are analyzing or studying Virgil or Homer, we don’t say “Virgil said,” or “here Homer showed…”—we use the present tense in discussing texts written thousands of years ago. This is testimony to the fact that language, even more obviously in the deliberate preservation of linguistic artifacts in the form of textuality, creates a single present. The most distant path and all of the most distant conceivable futures all exist in the mark they have made, or can be made to have made, on the present, or in anticipatory fragments which will be made more present.\n\nTranslation of multi-tensed sentences into present tense ones will always make them more rigorous, if not always more elegant. Take a sentence of mine from a couple of paragraphs up: “Acting in obedience to imperatives, actual or extracted from declaratives, in the manner I discussed in the previous post, can help sustain linguistic presence…” Here, a rather clumsy and reluctant reference to a previous post is a distraction—almost as if I’m asking the reader to stop reading this post and go look up that reference. A slight change, such as “Acting in obedience to imperatives, actual or extracted from declaratives, to return to the practice discussed in a previous post…” keeps the reference to something past (“discussed,” “previous”) but the entire sentence is now in the present tense and compelled to represent an ongoing discourse, rather than different claims to be connected artificially.\n\n“Presentifying” sentences require that we find ways of referring to the past in terms of marks made upon, and identified and shaped within the present; it also means devising means of representing the future not in terms of “wills” and “shoulds” (al though it is interesting that, strictly speaking, we have no future tense in English, but rather various ways of indicating futurity) but in terms of the way (not equally) possible outcomes present themselves to us now. Presentifying sentences also brings to the fore the point of observation, the point from which simultaneity is constructed (markers retrieved from the past, indicators and intimations of future possibilities, pressing concerns of the moment all co-represented), which means less a encouragement of subjectivity than a demand for responsibility.\n\nAn infinity of real presents can be included in any particular linguistic present, creating an incentive to treat actions through their textual traces as well. (Homer may have composed the Illiad , but his composition of the Illiad bears upon some present question…)\n\nI agree with Vox Day that ultimately science must pass the test of engineering—especially today, when no one wants to get sucked into the replication crisis. The purpose of “linguistifying” all discourse about humans, including moral and political discourse, is to propose ways of transforming uses of signs that can then be monitored and assessed. This effort, which breaks down the theory/practice distinction, has its precursors in some strands of modern philosophy and aesthetics, with Charles Sanders Peirce as its leading avatar. (I would revise Peirce’s definition of a clear idea, or meaning, though. From “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have.\n\nThen the whole of our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object” to “Consider what further uses of language, issuing in ostensive uses, we consider our utterance of the sentence to make likely in varying degrees. Then the modification of the relative likelihood of those uses effected by our utterance is the whole of the meaning of the sentence.”) What I propose engineering is a tissue of discourse with built-in immunities to anarchist ontology and the anarchist imaginary. The aim would be to engineer ways of speaking, writing and thinking that make it possible to infiltrate liberal spaces (almost all spaces today), dissolve liberal chains of command and naming practices, and create out of the ruins an absolutist imaginary. Something well beyond “leftists are the real racists/fascists/misogynists,” etc., in other words.\n\nThe prototypical liberal utterance makes a (declarative) claim about reality (e.g., “America is a racist society”) meant to maneuver the other into obedience to a tacit, embedded imperative (“cleanse America of racism”) while concealing the entire ostensive-imperative realm, which is to say, evading the act of naming. If America is a racist society, to eliminate racism in America would be to eliminate America itself; but the problem is that “we” (the “we” accepting the embedded imperative) would be doing so in the name of a presumably racist-free America (otherwise, why single out “America” as the realm to be cleansed?).\n\nThis paradox of naming must be suppressed—the liberal can say that “America” has been racist as a republic, was racist as a group of British colonies, was racist as a Spanish dominion, etc., but the fact that it was named (not always “America,” of course) by each of these entities in turn and that in even referring to “America” we participate in this chain of naming cannot be acknowledged. To acknowledge this chain of naming would be to acknowledge a “spiral” of centrality, the continuity of linguistic presence, and that invoking “America” is to participate in this presence and assume the obligation of sustaining it—which, in fact, one does in the denunciation itself while fantasizing a “reset” of “America.”\n\nThe absolutist anarchist-resistant discourse seeks to increase the likelihood that its utterances will issue in ceremonies of naming, with practices and orders that follow. Even (but why “even”?) discourses that take their mission to be slicing and dicing liberal BS should do this. To the liberal presupposing an anarchist sovereign imaginary we counter-presuppose sovereign naming. All liberal concepts can be chased back into their lairs, where we will discover their founding in some constitutive distraction, some imperative to break the real chain of naming and replace it with a fantasized origin of another chain. (The Google Books Ngram feature is extremely useful here, at least for more recent distractions. Perhaps it will be taken down, or at least certain magical words made unsearchable.) We need not seek to destroy those fake concepts—they come to name certain predilections, certain pathologies, temptations, disguises."
    },
    {
      "slug": "centrality-power-sovereignty",
      "title": "Centrality, Power, Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We can model all centrality on the originary scene, where all participants constitute themselves as members by representing and imitating the desired and (therefore) forbidden central object. On this scene there is what I have been calling “centered ordinality,” which means that one member hesitates and successfully communicates that hesitation first, followed by another and eventually the entire group (with the last few perhaps compelled more by the force of numbers than of deferral). Nevertheless, while there is differential proximity to the center, nobody occupies the center.\n\nBut such differential proximity means that someone, eventually, will come to occupy the center. All it would take is some renewal of the mimetic crisis endemic to humanity which cannot be quashed by the normal signs and rituals, and requires mediation by an individual whose mediation is trusted because it has been applied in less critical situations. This occupation will, eventually, become permanent, and when that happens, all forms of centrality are re-ordered: mimetic rivalry takes on the added dimension of a testing of the occupant of the center, and the invocation of his authority in deferring conflicts constitutes what are now lower levels of social life. We can call this kind of occupying centrality “power.”\n\nCentrality can now be modeled on power, and new power centers can emerge. New power centers will first of all seek to accommodate themselves to central power, while central power must now find ways to differentiate itself from these orbiting centers. By enhancing its own sacrality, which is to say multi-layered centrality (mediating not just between members of the community by between the community and other communities, the community and the gods, the community and the universe), the central power gives the “orbitals” a choice: contribute to this centralization by conferring more loyalty, creating more layers between the central power and potential rivals, and refining the “mission” of the central power along with their own; or, defend their own centers while waiting for opportunities to supplant the ruler.\n\nAs long as the first option is selected, there will not be much need to formalize the supremacy of the central power—it will be beneficial for all involved to emphasize the cooperation between the ruler, the priests, the soldiers, the merchants, etc. It is under such conditions that the work of elaborating a moral culture can be best undertaken: all the different kinds of goods and virtues, in their orders and institutional forms, can be knit tightly together. But it seems that a time will come when the second option is chosen, and the ruler, whether the traditionally anointed one or his usurper, will have to assert sovereignty, a new mode of centrality that claims and enforces the right to be the judge of last resort in all disputes involving lower centers of power.\n\nSovereignty can be de-moralizing, as all other institutions are now directly subordinated to the needs of sovereign power. The sovereign must judge disputes between different power centers, or disputes within power centers that those centers have been unable to resolve themselves, but the sovereign will also be sorely tempted to use this role to play different power centers off against each other to preserve his own supremacy. In so doing, the sovereign will give credibility to de-centering discourses that will eventually endanger his own rule. Moreover, the sovereign judges, but how? According to what standard of right or equity?\n\nIt’s hard to see how the sovereign could generate, simply out of an insistence on his own sovereignty, any standards appropriate to the new conditions: rather, he will apply standards immanent in the power centers themselves, with an eye towards preserving those power centers in their properly subordinate form and calibrating the relations between power centers. But this just keeps the resentments simmering, leaving all holders of power to prepare for the nearest chance to force a recalibration. The failures of this form of rule will give further credibility to decentering discourses and power centers.\n\nThe only way to provide sovereignty with an appropriate form of justice is to give discursive articulation to the difference between power applied so as to preserve the social order and power applied in obedience to a power greater than the sovereign. There are dangers here. The identification of some power greater than the sovereign will be made possible by some synthesis of the de-centering discourses that will have been circulating. Some judgments made by the sovereign have been “better” than others, and those better judgments can be used to judge the worse ones. Only a de-centering discourse will be able to insist on this distinction, which can be formulated in terms of judgments which have led to a more “perfect” peace as opposed to those which failed, or in terms of judgments that reference a more ancient and revered law as opposed to those perceived to have departed from it.\n\nOne event (an event that is then, via myths and legends, further “purified” and “elevated”) is transformed into a model for other events. It then becomes possible to say that a particular judgment may have worked perfectly well on its own terms—it kept the peace and left all sides satisfied—but nevertheless compromised the real norms of judgment. This kind of questioning will lead to the identification of victims of and sacrifices to these compromises: in general, the judgment worked, but in the specifics we can identify those who didn’t receive a true judgment. This involves a lowering of the threshold of significance.\n\nThe danger is that this process lays the groundwork for judging the sovereign in terms of a higher power. But the opportunity is for sovereignty to clarify its own centrality by instituting justice in accord with this “higher power” and “true law,” and by tracing his own lineage to the founding event.\n\nThe way to do this is to command the construction of all sites of power in accord with that same “elevated” event. But the answerability of all these institutions to the sovereign leaves the question of the sovereign’s own accountability to the elevated event and higher law it embodies unanswered. What makes an event subject to “elevation” is that it iterates, repeats under new conditions, the originary scene, which is to say a mode of centrality prior to power. Successful sovereignty and all the institutions of power can “activate” this mode of centrality. The most basic form taken by pre-power centrality is that of the “team.”\n\nIf we analyze the “team” in terms of an absolutist ontology, we can identify a mode of leadership that does not rise to the threshold of “power” because the norms and project of the team are so embedded in its practices that whoever leads is only marginally less exchangeable than the others, and can lead with little more than gestures. The team requires the support of the institution and ultimately the sovereign, which set its broader goals and can dismantle it at will, but is set free by the institution in order to embark on some inquiry and/or practice the results of which can’t be determined in advance.\n\nThe more secure the sovereign, the more comfortable he will be relying on teams. A surprising example comes from the Twitter feed of Thomas Wictor, a military historian (among other things), who claims that the Saudi government, on the model of the WWI German military, has transformed its entire armed forces in special forces, i.e., teams made up of highly motivated and multi-competent individuals set forth to solve some problem or advance some objective. Another example I just came across is from Jack Cashill’s column on the American Thinker website November 30, 2017, where he discusses Charles Campisi’s book, Blue on Blue , on the systematic use of sting operations to reform the corrupt NYPD.\n\nStings, like undercover operations more generally, involve extensive reliance on teams and individuals closely tied to and trained within team settings. So, let’s say that any contemporary recovery of sovereignty will tend more and more towards teamwork; perhaps, even, we should imagine an asymptotic movement towards everyone being “teamed up.” Think about the kinds of individuals required for sting, undercover and special forces activities—they must be able to remember exactly what they are doing and why in the middle of pretending to be someone completely opposite, the type of person they are trying to stop. They must maintain several lines of communication simultaneously—one, to those amongst whom they must blend, and one to other members of the team and another back to the institutional home.\n\nIf investing in the institutional forms needed to create more people like this is what we mean by “individualism,” then as an absolutist I’m in favor of it. (And this is not even to address the necessity of small, independent teams in scientific and technological innovation.)\n\nAs the clarification of sovereignty and the teaming up of society proceed hand in hand, the accountability of the sovereign to the higher law or elevated event becomes less and less of problem because the regime itself is breeding people both loyal and incorruptible. At a certain point we would all be “stinging” each other, in the sense that each and every member of an institution would be ready to identify and curtail abuses of the institution’s mandate. Yes, for some this will evoke the informant of the totalitarian state, but why not refer, more prosaically, to the kind of “whistleblower” we are all expected to be if the institution we are in is engaged in illegal practices?\n\nOr, for the matter, the routine and often ludicrous performance reviews employees undergo at pretty much any institution? The stingers could represent the institution and sovereign in such a way as to render the entire legal and penal system virtually obsolete. If you’re incapable of joining a team engaged in some kind of assessment, i.e., if you can’t demonstrate a basic understanding of the norms and their enforcement, you don’t have a place in the institution. Perhaps you can join a laxer institution—certainly, they won’t all operate with the same rigor. Teams will be assigned to monitor institutions less able to effectively monitor themselves, while those less effective institutions will still be expected to act on the information and recommendations provided by the external monitors.\n\nBad behavior will be stemmed at its roots. And if one team fails there will always be another ready to self-form and seek appointment by the relevant institution. A kind of iteration of the originary scene thereby becomes part of the sovereign order, which can now test itself uncompromisingly against the “higher” without being threatened."
    },
    {
      "slug": "moral-thresholds",
      "title": "Moral Thresholds",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "If morality entails maintaining linguistic presence, then a further exploration of morality in these terms would look into the strengthening and extension of linguistic presence. We’re rarely in danger of the complete collapse of linguistic presence, and if we were it would probably be too late to do anything about it—the goal would be to defer ever further even the merest indications of such an eventuality. And, if we can sustain linguistic presence in, say, a two-person conversation, we can go on to sustain it in a three-way conversation, and then a larger group, across different media, at different levels of centrality (power, sovereignty), and so on. So, a theory of morality can set aside all the liberal obsessions with dialogue, respect, equality, dignity, and so on, and develop ways of thinking through the terms of enhancing linguistic presence wherever one happens to be.\n\nThe emergence of the successive linguistic forms (ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative) provide us with our model for studying linguistic presence: I continue to assume that “originary” refers not to something that happened once and for all, but to a founding event and structure that is iterated in innumerable ways and increasing degrees of complexity throughout the existence of the thing in question; indeed, that the thing in question is nothing but this continual, recursive, iteration. I also propose dissolving the distinction between speaking and acting into the succession of linguistic acts by simply saying that any act can be understood as an ostensive sign, emitted in response to some perceived or intimated crisis or potential crisis.\n\nShaking someone’s hand, slapping someone’s face, ordering a hundred people to line up, those people lining up, walking down the street, preparing to go to sleep, etc.—all ostensive signs, maintaining some linguistic presence. So, questions about why someone does what they do, or what someone should do, can all be answered in terms of what kind of signifying succession, structure and presence your action would enter into, maintain, and initiate. Likewise, all desires (I want this, I want that) can be constructed as imperatives directed to some center, a center from which the desirer has or will receive corresponding imperatives upon obedience to which compliance with the petitioner’s request will be contingent (the imperative exchange).\n\nSo, actions (ostensive, in Peirce’s terms, iconic, signs) “throw off” imperatives: someone doing something demands that another respond in some way. If necessary, explicit imperatives are issued when the example itself is insufficient. As long as the other obeys these imperatives, he “confirms” or “authenticates” the action/sign, supplying the attention it needs to sustain the center it “orbits.” Depending upon how one obeys, the center can be more or less compelling. If the other disobeys, linguistic presence is put in danger, and the moral thing to do is find some other way of maintaining it. One can carry out another act, creating a new center that might attract those drawn to the previous one.\n\nOne can draw out the imperative into a question, a request for information regarding the chain of actions and its “initial conditions.” In the meantime, the further consequences of the initiating action are not pursued. The question raised is whether the center that has been posited is really there, or still there, or what it was assumed to be. The answer will be in the form of a declarative sentence, and the declarative settles the case (if it “works”) by conveying the imperative the originating act was performed in obedience to (the “reason” for the act). Or, conveying the imperative that invalidates that act and transferred (has “always already” transferred) centrality to another act, conferring presence on a more originary center.\n\nSo, knowing or figuring out the right thing to do involves hearing the command whatever action you are currently in the midst of undertaking is performed in obedience to. If you hear and follow that command clearly and unequivocally, your act will generate the right imperatives, which will in turn create new conditions leading to questions regarding the further extension of those imperatives, and to framing sentences making the command you are following more explicit to others, in turn leading to new actions. This assumes that the higher command is always right, and that doing wrong involves suppressing or mishearing that command. But people hear “voices” (more or less literally) telling them to do all kinds of things. We can probably all think of times when we followed some intuition and were absolutely certain we were right, and turned out to be completely wrong. So, why should the higher command be right, and how can we be sure that we are capable of hearing it clearly and completely? What function does reasoning about moral decisions and character have in this process?\n\nWe need to have faith in language. There are a lot of ways of discussing faith in language, probably as many ways as there of discussing faith in God. I’m going to suggest one approach here. Anna Wierzbicka, whose work I have mentioned several times, has, along with her collaborators, identified a small group of words she claims exist in every language and have the same meaning in every language. She calls them “semantic primes.” The only value terms among the semantic primes are “good” and “bad.” So, we know that every human group distinguishes between good and bad. We also know that all other evaluations can ultimately be “translated” into some distinction between good and bad.\n\nBy definition, we want good things, not bad ones, we want to act well, not badly, to be good, not bad, people. The “speech words” among the semantic primes are “say,” “words,” “true” (not even “false”). Saying the truth comes before lying: all humans agree on this, simply by virtue of speaking some language. The “mental predicates” among the primes are “think,” “know,” “want,” “feel,” “see,” “hear.” We can see what is good and distinguish it from what is bad, we can think and say what is true, we can know what is true and good—if we use language, we “believe” all this, even when we use language to deny it.\n\nWierzbicka categorizes these words as “primitives” because they cannot be defined in terms of other words that wouldn’t in turn depend upon these words for their definition. In other words, we just know what these words mean by being able to use them. This is surely true—I’m definitely not arrogant enough to challenge Wierzbicka’s scholarship or reasoning here. But since I have an originary theory of language, I can ground these words in ostensives and imperatives. For example, all of her time and space terms would at some point need to be accompanied by pointing. Now, if we treat the verbs Wierzbicka counts among the semantic primes as imperatives, something interesting happens.\n\nWe may not be able to define “think” in terms of simpler words, but we know when we tell someone to think: mainly, when we don’t want them to act just yet (when we think they might “do” or “move” in a way that will be “bad”). When do we tell them to “say” something?—well, when we think they “know” something that we also want to know—when we think that “good” things will come from saying what they know. When do we tell them to “know” something?—when we think or know that now they only “think” it. So, we start to see how all these words are related in a kind of borderline imperative-declarative language, one in which moral clarity is virtually certain.\n\nAll moral questions come down to when we should tell someone to think, to say, to know, to want, to do, to feel, to see, to hear. And in deciding when to tell someone to do or not do any of these things, we are thinking, knowing, saying, etc., and someone has told us to do so, even if not immediately or directly, someone has told us that it is “good” or “bad” to think, know, say, do… this “kind” of thing when something “happens” “like” “this.” So, the imperatives that have told us to do things that turn out to be good, that now, therefore, also tell us to see one “now” or “moment” as like another, will get amplified—assuming we want to keep doing the things that not only everyone would see as “good” now, but that people will continue to see as good once other things, lots of other things, will have happened.\n\nSo, as language users we want to be people who “do good,” who are the kind of people who do good. The more we want to be that kind of person, the more we want to insist that we can see, hear and feel the relations between seeing, hearing, thinking, saying knowing and doing. If we want to do good, we want to know when we think something and when we know it; we want to know when we should say what we think or know, when we should do what someone says, and when we do something “because” someone else has said to. Being good, or, leaving NSM behind for a moment and moving into a more complex vocabulary, being virtuous, courageous, truthful, trustworthy, faithful, and so on, simply involves “factoring” the NSM into those “composite” terms.\n\nWhat does it mean to be “courageous,” for example? Wierzbicka’s method of translation is very interesting and challenging, but I’ll give just a very partial taste here. I would say that “courage” means to do what is “good” even though one “knows” that something “bad” can “happen” to you if you do. So, to be courageous means that you want to do good, and that you want to know if something bad can happen (if you don’t want to know that you’re just reckless), but you don’t let this knowledge drown out what you now know, simply by persisting, to be a command to do good; others may say to you that this bad thing and that bad thing can happen, but you hear whoever has said to you to do good more than you hear those who say that.\n\nNow, can you be courageous and still do the wrong thing? Of course! But that means that courage also means wanting to know after you have tried to do good whether you in fact did do good, even though bad things can happen if it has turned out to be bad, and others will say that to you. And this courage will then help you to know that what you thought was good because it was like something else that you knew was good was not, in fact, like that other thing. So you are better prepared to identify such likenesses in the future. You may even find that the original good thing that has serve as the measure for goodness was something you only thought was good—but that can only happen because something else has better stood the test of goodness and can now serve as the measure.\n\nIn each social order the vocabulary made up of primes and a great number of composites all provide, in a way specific to that order and language, the means for searching out, thinking about saying to others, hearing from others, knowing, what the highest or most originary command is turning out to be. Deciding what you should do becomes a process of studying what you are doing, what others tell you to do, what others do as a result of what you do, how one situation can be likened to and differentiated from others, and which actions most tenaciously attract particular attributes. And the way to get it right, and serve as an example that will help others get it right, is to have faith in language; a faith that can now be far more informed than ever before."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereign-resentments",
      "title": "Sovereign Resentments",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "All talk of centrality must come around to being talk of resentment as well. In Gans’s account of the originary scene, resentment kicks in immediately after the center is secured through the issuance of the originary sign. Mimetic desire leads to the crisis; resentment comes in its wake, as the center now forbids us from satisfying our desire for the object located there. Resentment becomes a moral and political factor with the ascension of the Big Man, who occupies the center and thereby becomes a resentment attractor. All modes of centrality from here on in are modeled on the Big Man, that is, human centrality.\n\nAll resentment is directed at someone who has usurped, or prevented us from occupying, “our” center. Others don’t recognize your accomplishments, your potential, the real significance of your actions, your true character, etc.—all resentment towards someone (some other center) interfering with your centrality. But not all resentments are created equal: surely some deserve recognition and others don’t. Who decides, though? Power—the mode of centrality that confers recognition. But that, in turn, means that all resentment is really of power—it is power that allows one to go unrecognized, power who recognizes the one who is less worthy than you.\n\nResentment constitutes a “power imaginary”: a representation of the “good center” that would provide me with the recognition due me. If what you really want is that mode of power, though, you should adopt its resentments towards those who have or would usurp it. That’s a very good way of transcending your own resentments, because you would then have to realize that the mode of power you desire doesn’t, in fact, have to recognize your centrality, at least not as you imagine it—if you continue to desire it anyway, you may be wrong politically but you at least have a chance of discovering what is right, because you have become interested in power securing itself.\n\nAddressing resentments is the responsibility of the power center within whose orbit that resentment has been shaped. The first obligation of the center is to contain the resentments within its sphere. This is done by creating vehicles for shaping and directing that resentment: the justice system is such a vehicle. It would be wrong to think about resentment as spontaneous—there will always be resentment, but there is no pre-social, natural form of resentment. Resentment is always shaped by power. If we think we have been treated “unequally,” it is because our legal and political system forces us to think in terms of “equality”; if we think someone has failed to do their duty toward us, it is because “duty” is the coin of the moral and political realm.\n\nIn other words, power judges us in terms of “equality” or “duty.” The best framing is the one that unites power and accountability, that gives everyone the power to do what they are obliged to do—in other words, absolutist framing. That makes it possible for resentment to be directed towards some power/accountability misfit, the repair of which is always possible for the occupant of the power center (or, perhaps, the illusory appearance of a misfit can be corrected for). New ways of framing resentments generate new resentments, because the center now offers a new target, so this work of suturing power and accountability can never come to an end.\n\nThese reflections were inspired, in part, by Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State: A Study in the Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX . Jones seeks (successfully, as far as I can see) to show that the French kingdom under St. Louis recognized neither a “separation of Church and State,” and therefore no conflict between them, nor “sovereignty,” in the sense of a single source of power and a legitimate monopoly on violence. What the sacramental kingdom did recognize is the “business of the peace and the faith,” a business carried on collaboratively by all the power centers of society. Categories like “heresy” and “rebellion” pointed to a single nexus of social unrest that needed to be bound up with the peace and faith of the realm.\n\nAccording to Jones, while the category of “sovereignty” presupposes the primacy of division, conflict and violence, and hence the need to concentrate power in a single source, the sacramental order presupposes the primacy of peace, with conflict and violence seen as aberrations—in which case, power is essentially reactive to breaches of the peace and faith, and can be carried out by any responsible agent—even a tavern owner. There are conflicts over jurisdiction, but the king does decide on these conflicts, even sometimes deciding against himself and ceding the right to punish to a lower power center. (Not to quibble at this point, but whoever has the responsibility to punish, settle a quarrel, or forgive is given the power and fully authorized to do so, which seems to me the essence of sovereignty. But I’ll set the terminological question aside for now, while conceding that Jones is right in terms of historical usage, so the usefulness of “sovereignty” and “absolutism” will have to be shown to override precedent.)\n\nWhat I am trying to do here, then, is resituate the sacramental order on anthropological grounds. The sign and the center, the form of peace, precede resentment, the source of violence, so there is a helpful symmetry between the two approaches. The crucial distinction here is between resentments framed in terms of the system of justice and those which refuse that system; or, more broadly, between those willing to have their resentments framed and those who insist upon unbounded resentments. The latter must be attacked as heresy and rebellion. But if not in the name of the true faith, then in what name? (I don’t mean to object to a sovereignty based on faith, just to develop an anthropological model that would transcend any specific sacramental order.)\n\nI make a demand of the center—that my own centrality, such as it is, be recognized. In making this demand, I imagine a power center that would recognize at its true worth my centrality, the absoluteness and power of my request in the terms of that power center itself; in the process, I concede that the power center might estimate my worth differently than I do. Hence, I end up decentering myself, and reformulating my demand to the center to one that justice be done, regardless of its consequences for myself. In making this demand I restructure my own centrality so that I might be recognized as one willing to do the bidding of the power center.\n\nI take on the resentments of that power center. This reciprocal relation continues, and is continually restructured as new imperatives from the center realign its centrality and my own. New obligations emerge, to my fellow “centers,” who mediate my relationship to the power center. Insofar as the power center keeps remediating these relationships, I imagine the power center itself recognizing a higher mode of centrality, one that I can pray it consults. It is in the name of that higher mode of centrality that we can identify heresy and rebellion. For now, we can consider that higher mode of centrality the imperative to continue to aim our frames for resentment lower, that is, detect resentments and turn them into tributes to and tributaries of the center at ever more preliminary stages.\n\nResentment runs as deep as desire, which is to say it constitutes humanness. We must always have faith in and resent challenges to the center that grants us our centrality. Resentment is a discovery procedure—what we call disinterestedness or objectivity is resentment on behalf of, or donated to, some center with which we engage in imperative exchange. The social order, then, is built out of donated resentments—which also means that all subversion directs the flow of resentments out of their established channels, into anarchist fantasies generating demands that resist integration into a sovereign structure. Structured resentment becomes love: that on whose behalf I resent I also want to protect from my own resentment, which is to say the conversion of my own desire into demands for centrality.\n\nLove is ceding centrality to the other. And anything named by sovereign resentment can be treated as a center, and loved accordingly. The beloved is an endless source of names. This means that the source of rights, as granted by a particular power center within a specific history of settling resentments, is what one has loved well. Jones talks about “use” over time as a source of rights—the noble might drive some peasants who have been using wood from his forests off his land, but if those peasants complain and claim that they have been using that wood for generations the magistrate might agree with them and see the lord’s eviction of them as “violent,” regardless of his own claims to have had the property in his family’s possession since before recorded time. Proper use, i.e., love, overrides title deeds, which represent just one piece of evidence in any dispute, not the deciding one.\n\nLove and resentment articulate the relations between centrality, power and sovereignty. The test of true love and resentment on behalf of is found in language. We can always start with the “I want…” implicit or explicit in every utterance, and trace it back to the absolute imperative it obeys—who told you to want that, and how were you told? What have you done with that imperative along the way (what questions have you converted it into, and what would acceptable answers be)? Everything we say leaves tracks of this process of assimilating imperatives into desires. And if we follow those tracks we can bring our desires into closer alignment with higher imperatives.\n\nA good way of putting liberalism through the wood-chipper is to displace resentful questions regarding rights and their violations, inequalities and their masks, and to simply ask, what would be the best thing for everyone here? It’s interesting that liberalism tends to make such a question seem like a joke—imagine, in the middle of a court case, the lawyers, judge, plaintiff and defendant just gathering together and trying to figure out what’s really the right thing to do. Even if they could all agree separately, the situation compels them to disagree as forcefully as possible. Asking why we want what we want and how wanting that embeds us in a containable structure of resentment is a way to start normalizing such questions. And normalizing such questions is the path toward securing sovereignty."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-counter-inquisition-gablog",
      "title": "The Counter-Inquisition",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2017",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Power operates top-down, but down below we can give power centers ready to be activated. Liberalism has infiltrated all institutions, but it can never completely conquer them because liberalism is intrinsically parasitic: it needs a center to be de-centered. Counter-infiltration therefore involves holding the center, even if the center is just basic competence, which we now know is equivalent to whiteness. I call victimary moral panics the “Inquisition,” with apologies to the real thing, because they function essentially as human rights show trials. The discourse is prosecutorial, with the charges constructed out of what would be the “pre-crime” of earlier, successfully prosecuted offenses (what is now “racist” is whatever perception or assumption might have led you to say or do whatever was “racist” last week).\n\nSo, accusations with follow-up questions presupposing the legitimacy of the accusation. “When did you stop beating your wife” become “when did you stop the silent, implicit abuse of not believing all women everywhere”? The crimes are all necessarily made up, as terms like “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” etc., function in exactly the same way, and have exactly as much conceptual content, as “counter-revolutionary” did in the USSR. They are simply ways of identifying enemies of the people.\n\nIt is very tempting to try and turn the inquisition around, to start asking “leading” questions and make the same accusations that can be so damaging when directed toward you. This works as well as calling your KGB interrogator the “real counter-revolutionary.” If our starting point is liberal discourse, then the goal is to surface the political imaginary and boundless resentments, and the way to do that is to keep restating what that discourse wants everyone to do. In this way you infiltrate their discourse, and occupy the center under attack. What the liberal discourse always wants you to do is engage in symbolic (so far, mostly) lynching and real and symbolic vandalism.\n\nAgainst whom? Against whomever power is gathering against: where is there a vulnerable enemy, where is there some sinecure that could be turned to use, some institution where control could be more firmly secured, some new rabble that can be recruited? So, first of all you read off all these elements of the attack from the discourse itself. It’s a work of constant, patient translation. I think just about anyone who might be reading this knows all this.\n\nThe liberal method is to impose an egalitarian grid on all differences and present this as a self-evident indictment. It then becomes in their interest to inflate those differences. This means that if the grid is removed, they are providing evidence for a case very different than the one they thought they were making. The counter-inquisition helps them to make that case. If racism drives its victims to extremes of crime and violence, doesn’t that tell us something about the limited self-control those victims are capable of and make some form of separation seem requisite? If women can’t co-exist with men in public spaces without constantly falling victim to all manner of sexual assault, shouldn’t rigorous regulation of sexual relations, to the point of not allowing unmarried individuals of different sexes to be alone, be put in place?\n\nNo, the answer will be, we just need to stop white privilege and toxic masculinity. But where is the boundary between white privilege and plain old whiteness, between toxic masculinity and the new and improved non-toxic alternative? Not only is drawing a line here impossible because of the basic incoherence of the categories, but it’s undesirable because it would inhibit further movement, which is to say, it would block the flow of power, undermining the very purpose of these categories in the first place. If the inquisitor stays with you up until this point, there is nothing left to do other than lay out the fundamental imperatives of power.\n\nA rough description of the good white and the good male might be offered up, and that will be their way of telling you exactly what they mean to do to you. But things can be kept interesting here—if the white is good in this way, can we imagine some other ways this goodness might lead him to end up less good? Is this way of being good applicable in all situations? We can game out a few possibilities. Will the detoxified male ever end up making any babies? Running any businesses? Building anything? Protecting anyone? The end game here is to elicit a description of the mode of rule that will keep all this in place—when and where could we expect to see deviations, and what kind of interventions will be carried out? How would signs of white privilege or toxic masculinity in the 3 year-old be identified, and how would they be extirpated?\n\nInfiltration and deconstruction is just preliminary work. The result is shattered relations, but relations, or at least possible relations, nevertheless. The next step is to turn the curses of the center into blessings. The egalitarian grid produces a caricature of real differences, but those differences can then be shrunk down to proper size and put back into normal shape. Let’s take the current panacea of “consent” as the just response to sexual harassment and assault. “Consent” can only emerge as a concept once relations between the sexes are abstracted from their embedment within familial, community and state structures.\n\nOnce sex is no longer restricted to marriage, and marriage is no longer a means to consolidate the community through the formation of alliances and the meeting of obligations, the individual, now on a “marriage market” (however tightly regulated), has a choice of partners. That’s the first “consent.” Every expansion of “consent” is therefore an expansion of the marriage market and its gradual deregulation. At a certain point the marriage market just becomes a sex market—marriage is just another relation one is free to choose or reject. The liberal story is that all this happens because people want freedom; the real story is central power using sexual choice to demolish one intermediary institution after another.\n\nIt’s allies in this have been feminists, of course, but even more, “rogue males,” who, no longer fearing retribution from the families of wronged women or any communal strictures at all, embody in their persons contempt for moral restraint, stopping short only (unless they are powerful enough to feel immune) of the kind of violence that would count as assault or battery (or worse) under other conditions. Celebrity culture has been based on the freedom of rogue males, who are provided access to women who are ready to sacrifice anything to be the center of attention. As the feminist-socialist Barbara Ehrenreich noted many years ago, the real beneficiaries of the sexual revolution were the playboys.\n\nBut once the damage is done, and the tilt of the playing field revealed, it is impossible to imagine redressing any acts of violence other than through continual modifications of the terms of “consent,” new means of enforcement, i.e., new power structures, that will inevitably be more arbitrary and incoherent than the ones we started with. Consent itself, we must recognize, is nothing but an artifact of power relations; if there’s a sexual market, those with more to give in terms of money and celebrity, or even proximity to some marginal form of power, will inevitably demand more in terms of “favors.” Does this represent “consent”? We won’t know until after the fact—the case can never be closed, because the reciprocal power relations will always be shifting.\n\nNow, it’s very helpful to have such an analysis of “consent,” but as I’ve been suggesting arguing the point this directly is a waste of time. Rather than saying that “consent” is wrong, an illusion, absurd, a mask for power, etc.–or, as a better way of not so much saying as indicating all that—“consent” should be constructed as a palimpsest underneath which we can read the forms of the structured reciprocities and hierarchies that would order sexuality in a well governed community. Every way in which women are made vulnerable under contemporary conditions (and today’s feminists are very good at laying all this out) indicates forms of institutional protection that women, on the admission of their most fervent defenders, need.\n\nAll of the forms of abuse men are capable of, likewise, indicate guardrails and restraints that even anti-feminist, traditionalist men will acknowledge men need. But if women need those protections, they must also follow the rules entailed by those protections; and if men need those restraints, they must also be given the freedom of action that would give meaning to those restraints. Accountability must be made to fit power at each point along the line. We can then extrapolate the mode of sovereignty proper to the entire set-up. In the end, we can even redeem the concept of “consent,” as the transparency of the nature of the sexual bond revealed in the requisite arrangements. How could one want it otherwise?\n\nWe could conduct very similar analyses with regard to relations between national and ethnic groups. Simply listening very carefully to what the most committed black activists say about white racism will reveal to us, once we learn how to surface the written over text, the healthiest relations we can imagine between the two groups today. Simply listening to Jews pointing out instances of antisemitism will work in the same way—it is never obvious what is going to count as “mistreatment” or “prejudice,” and certainly not what the hierarchy of complaints about mistreatment or prejudice is to be, and the fact that virtually every organized Jewish group sees the safety of Jews as implicated in the continuance of open door immigration and refugee policies (and sees antisemitism as at the very least lurking behind opposition to such policies) is enormously informative.\n\nThe situation is different in inter-group than sexual relations because in the former cataclysmic “solutions” are possible that are unimaginable in the latter, but the whole point is to create inevitably unequally distributed constraints that ensure things don’t get to that point. Minority complaints are to be read and reiterated as desperate pleas that the majority, normal culture be placed more securely at the center. The real resentment is against a weakened center which can no longer assure the centrality of the normative, and that’s a resentment we’re glad to redress. Perhaps we all do agree, after all."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutism-the-axial-age-and-the-laboratory",
      "title": "Absolutism, the Axial Age and the Laboratory",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The moral and intellectual innovations of the Axial Age—from Confucianism and Buddhism in the East to philosophy and monotheism in the West—create an interesting dilemma in thinking through the implications of the abolition of imperium in imperio , or divided sovereignty. Under sacral kingship, the centrality of the king involves not just rule but ritual duties and ensuring the connection between the community and the cosmos. It may be that the occupant of the position wasn’t very secure (there would be many ways one could be found to have failed) but the position itself was. Under god-imperial rule, the occupant of the position becomes far more secure, while the sacral efficacy of the position becomes thinner and molded more precisely to the functions of rule itself—in other words, rationalized.\n\nLocal and ancestral forms of worship continued to operate more directly on communities. On both levels, though, the sacred is essentially sacrificial: the origin of all benefits is identified, and a commensurate return of some part of those benefits must be made to that origin or its representative. The greater the benefit, the greater the obligation, which means that the sacrificial is always tending towards human sacrifice as its telos. This means slavery, mass armies and the conscription of large populations for imperial labor projects. As David Graeber has pointed out, these developments coincided with the introduction of coinage and debt that involved the “abstraction” of individuals from the communal and ritual forms in which they were embedded—“abstraction” through enslavement and dispossession.\n\nAt the same time, this abstraction and the development of markets on which abstracted individuals can engage in exchange leads to systems of justice: the measurement of acts against promises and obligations. So, we have two interrelated processes: one, the disappearance of situated individuals into anonymous masses; two, the singling out of individual rights and wrongs against a background of precedents and oaths, with judgment carried out by a specialized class of professionals. When “injustice” was done, it would likely appear as if the former process was impinging upon the latter: as if the individual treated unjustly were being sacrificed for some mass, impersonal, mindless purpose.\n\nThe emergence of exemplary victims of sacrificial injustice would lead to the clarification of this appearance, and its articulation in legal, political and sacral discourses. It would be possible to look for such victims, and see them as implicit indictments turned back against the supposed justice system itself; more articulate victims would come to frame their plight in these terms. Critics of the justice system would come to see themselves as potential victims, and develop moral discourses of anticipatory victimage; they would gather around themselves a following, including many from among disaffected elites; and their victimization (which they would more or less deliberately be courting) would be revelatory.\n\nWe would have cases in which the exemplary sacrifice would, in fact, be guilty according to the prevailing and perhaps rather sophisticated and indulgent political and legal norms; and, nevertheless, legible in their execution would be the implication of even a healthy justice system in sacrificial practices—remember, the mass sacrifice and the concept of justice have a common origin. The subsequent intellectual and moral revolution would play out differently under different conditions, but in all cases a new problem has been created: it is now possible to imagine a law that is “higher” than the law presided over by the monarch, and therefore a sacrality that supersedes that of the God-Emperor.\n\nSo, this is the problem that has gone unsolved until this day. Some Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe seemed to be close for a while, but those efforts didn’t last. We can blame competing elites for exploiting the opportunities afforded by the very concept of a “higher law” to introduce a wedge between that higher law and the “earthly” one, but the problem nevertheless remains, unless one believes it possible to dispossess ourselves of the acquisitions of the Axial Age—and no conceivable power center could do that because so dispossessing itself would not only make it too evil but too stupid to rule. In moral terms, the “axial” involves a prohibition on scapegoating: on reviving and reversing the logic of sacral kingship by imposing responsibility for the evils and ills of the community on some marginal individual or group.\n\nThe way realize that prohibition is by building and fortifying institutions that ensure punishment is monopolized by accountable institutions and for offenses that have been named for the harm they do the community and the higher law. The implication is to confer a kind of sacrality on the individual: to collectively lay hands on an individual is to threaten to introduce uncontrolled violence into the community. This horror is the ancestor of today’s victimary discourses, but even before that of liberalism and democracy, with their elevation of the individual and the common man, regardless of the intellectually confused ways in which this elevation has been asserted.\n\nNow, while the implication of axial morality has been to confer a kind of sacrality on the individual (at least in the West—but could that be because it is in the West that axial logics have been vigorously pursued beyond elite circles?), that does not mean it is the only, or only possible implication.\n\nOriginary thinking, or anthropomorphics, helps us out here because it provides us with the hypothesis that the axial is in fact a recovery of the originary scene, in which the newly human community all participated in “addressing” a shared center. Such a recovery was needed in the massive dislocations, brought about at a high level of civilization, leading to the axial age. One way of superimposing the model of the originary scene on imperial civilization is to imagine a single human center: Truth, or God, toward which all can orient themselves and partake of this new center. These are the interrelated paths the West, in pushing axial logics as far as possible, have taken.\n\nBut within the assumption of the global or universal center there is also the realization that the center can only be discerned within what we could call a “congregation of inquiry.” Christianity started out with small groups testifying to Christ revealing himself to them; philosophy and the ancient sciences likewise started out with small groups of adepts or inquirers who separated themselves from the confining ritual practices of the community. The “universal” radiates outward from such congregations, and can only be preserved by recreating them over and over again.\n\nAt some point power at higher levels must support and incorporate these congregations—that is ultimately the only way they could actually be “universalized.” But this also seems to be the starting point of all those conflicts between higher and secular law. The solution must lie in the incorporation of the congregation of inquiry into the very form of sovereignty. In universalism, the individual is imagined as potential victim of overweening power, and the solution is for that individual to be ever further abstracted so as to be acted upon by an even overweenier power. By contrast, the individual within the corporate congregation is imagined in his service to the sovereign, in exemplifying and further perfecting the sovereign’s identification with the higher law.\n\nThe corporate congregants permeate the social order, bringing their more specialized inquiry into the originary-within-the-sovereign to bear on other areas of life. The missionary or evangelical goes out among men, preaching the word, living the word, and doing so, as much as possible, within the lives and languages of those amongst whom he moves. The undercover police agent represents the law within the lawless, and must pass as the lawless, while never forgetting their loyalty to the law, lower and higher, and their other law-preserving brethren. In both cases we have the enactment of the tension between the lower and higher, but the undercover agent is the better example for us now because it is impossible for that police officer, as long as he remains honest, to do anything other than serve the sovereign.\n\nHe cannot rebel, or resist the sovereign, other than by becoming a criminal himself, which is not really rebellion or resistance; moreover, he serves as a harmless but potentially powerful corrective to misuses of power within the sovereign order itself, misuses that the sovereign would want to know about. This is especially the case because we can have undercover agents not only in lawless groupings but in organizations where the lawlessness would be a deviation, but with potentially devastating consequences. The undercover agent within the normal institution, or, each of us acting as if there are undercover agents within the institutions where we congregate, or, even more, as if we might have to take on, maybe even unsolicited, that role, represents the complete assimilation of the axial acquisition to the sovereign order. Disciplinary groupings or social “skunkworkers” permeating and infiltrating all institutions by naming their relation to the sovereign center is the form taken by the retrieval of the originary scene within advanced, civilized social orders.\n\nWe can think about this in terms of the apparently very different institution of the laboratory—perhaps the highest and most consequential result of “axialism.” The laboratory constructs a space in which all possible physical interactions are excluded except for the one we want to study. Often this is done hypothetically, by randomizing the selection of subjects for the study, or introducing probability calculations to eliminate the effects of processes that can’t be physically excluded. In fact, this is the kind of thing you do anytime you are seriously thinking about what the best thing to do is, in other words moral inquiry involves setting aside one’s own resentments and desires, “controlling” for them.\n\nThe mode of thought is equally applicable to religious and secular, social and physical sciences—part of the laboratory model is to think “experimentally” about these very differences. If you are thinking experimentally you are retrieving the originary scene and representing it within the actual scene, because you are thinking, what act would introduce another degree of deferral into this congregation, and make us more focused on whatever our object is? As long as you are thinking of a bounded scene, freed as much as possible from obscuring interferences, you cannot possibly think of mobilizing a mob or identifying a possible sacrifice.\n\nIf such practices are being endorsed, wittingly or not, by the sovereign, you can only stand as an example against it—not as a counter-power, because your very centrality in this case depends upon you eschewing any higher order centrality, which could only introduce interference into your scene. Once the higher law is made immanent to, constitutive of, constrained by, sovereign law, all the imperium in imperio problems invented by liberalism disappear. In assessing institutions and judging actors, we always look to the corporate congregants in those institutions—if we watch and listen to them, we will learn what is going on and what needs to be done."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutist-epistemology",
      "title": "Absolutist Epistemology",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We know that something happened because we have relied upon someone who saw it happen and recorded and reported it (even in cases where we know what happened as a result of recordings made by some measuring instrument, someone had to read and report what was recorded by the instrument). Here’s a way of mapping this out. Let’s take a scene, say a fist fight between two individuals, with a small group of spectators. Let’s call the combatants “Jake” and “Nate.” Jake started the fight for obscure reasons, Nate fought back fiercely and briefly had the upper hand, then Jake landed a few solid blows to the head, wobbling Nate, who tried to get back into things by fighting dirty, but is ultimately knocked for good by an kick to the stomach.\n\nThe fight comes to an end, which is already implicit in the simple statement, “Jake and Nate had a fight,” since “a fight” refers to an event with a beginning and an end. And, of course, we can imagine a varied range of spectators, some of whom knew Jake and Nate, some of whom knew one but not the other, some of whom egged Jake on, some of whom just wandered by and wondered what the fuss was about, some of whom had a rooting interest, some of whom were disinterested observers, etc., etc. Those spectators, and the combatants themselves, will tell others what happened: “Jake kicked the sh*t out of Nate”; “Jack wantonly assaulted Nate”; “Nate put up a good fight but was caught off guard by a violent assailant”; “two pathetic losers swung at each other like 50 times and connected maybe 5 times”; etc. And then the people they have told will “know what happened.”\n\nNow, someone who wants to know “what really happened” will seek out other observers and piece together a more comprehensive account. But no one can be interested in “what really happened” at every event we hear referenced, directly or indirectly—or even more than a very tiny portion of them. For most of us, one of those partial initial observations will become the story, insofar as the event makes its way into the community’s discourse—“do you remember, it was right here, about 10 years ago, that Jake totally demolished Nate.” At that point it would take an enormous effort to create a more comprehensive picture, and only very exceptional circumstances would lead anyone to make the effort.\n\nThe “received” version of events will make its way into the community’s discourse in various ways and at various levels—in references to Jake as a “tough guy” or “bully,” or to Nate as “that poor guy” or the one who “turned his life around after being attacked”; perhaps mothers and fathers tell their sons to be, or not to be, “like” Jake or Nate. In principle, but not really in practice, we could trace the series of speech events which led to these “epithets” being attached to the two men in “public memory.” In claiming that we “know what happened” or we “know who Jake and Nate are” we are relying upon, implicitly trusting, many people, many of who we don’t know but trust indirectly because we trust directly someone who trusted someone else directly who… eventually someone who can attest to having seen what happened.\n\nWhen we talk about knowledge, we are talking about networks of trust and networks of meaning—if Jake and Nate’s fight has worked its way into the public memory it is because it meant something to enough people to keep them talking about it. And by “meant enough,” I mean became an event that in its representation enabled some new anthropomorphization of the community, i.e., provided a means for constructing their humannenss in a new way. Let’s widen the sphere of inquiry here considerably by noting that all of our most basic, tacit, knowledge, has exactly this same form: we are absolutely certain we know the meaning of almost all the words we use regularly and, in fact, they rarely fail us, but we only know what all these words mean because we have heard others use them who have heard others use them who in turn…\n\nSo, in discussing epistemology, the theory of how we know, we should be focusing less on refining instruments of observation and protocols of investigation and more on clarifying who we trust, how much, and why. But this can’t be sorted out in any formulaic, quantitative manner either (I trust the NY Times 22% when it comes to political stories, 46% on the Arts and Leisure section…), nor could the chain of trust usually be followed more than a couple of links. If we flip the question, though, it might become more manageable: rather than “who do and can I trust,” the better question is “how do I present myself as trustworthy?”\n\nThe former question is folded up in the latter. You present yourself as trustworthy, first, by demonstrating an awareness of the vast chains of trust implicit in any statement you make, and some preliminary mapping of the same; and, second, by letting others know which link in the chain you are tugging on. The particular “link” is the center of your discourse, and it is around that center that you provide the “mapping.” If I want to know whether Jake and Nate were goaded and lured into their battle because people were laying bets on the outcome, I’m going to be “tugging” at the chain differently than someone who wants to know whether they were drunk, because they want to show some link between alcohol consumption and violence.\n\n(What ideologies do is systematize the process of “tugging,” so the same mapping comes up every time—in the end, the chains of trust are broken and you have no choice but to trust the ideologue if you want any orientation toward events at all. If you look at our political commonplaces, you will see that they are “chunks” that can be endlessly repeated and inserted in discourse in various ways, but resist any attempt to construct even plausible, hypothetical chain of trust—that is, that can give good answers to the question, “who saw what that led them to say this?”). In order to pursue the question of what really happened, I have to approach the chain of trust with specific questions, and displaying trustworthiness entails being transparent about doing so.\n\nI now want to approach all this in originary and absolutist terms. Every sign, or utterance, establishes a threshold: this is the level of significance at which I take note of something. Or: this thing, event, act, or feature must be marked in order to maintain the linguistic presence I have taken responsibility for. Another present, a real present, must be represented within this linguistic presence. If it must be represented in order to sustain this linguistic presence, then it must resolve some more or less pending crisis facing that presence. If I introduce that present so as to resolve or delay the crisis within this presence, I am now able to detect more distant, less probable and “thinner” crises, and represent them as well (so as to make them even more distant, less probable and even thinner or vaguer).\n\nIn the process you construct a linguistic presence with feelers that keep reaching further into the past and future. But for one present to be represented within a linguistic presence, the two presents must be simultaneous. This is always possible because events “happen” when they register and are iterated so, insofar as the effects, say, of Homer speaking of Achilles slaying Hector ramify today, that event is contemporaneous with my speaking of it now. That means that the effects must be represented as effects, caught up in all the other effects of other events that are equally simultaneous. So, it’s not so much “Homer tells of Achilles slaying Hector” as it is “this is the way of referencing Homer’s narrative that I need here to displace and articulate other possible ways of referencing it (or refusing or neglecting to reference it),” making it simultaneous, here and now.\n\nIn other words, in referencing the Illiad in a particular way, I tug on a chain of trust that reaches back to Homer and his (their?) original audience. So, the “epistemological” question is whether I have tugged and therefore tightened it, or torn it. The answer lies in what will be said by others after I say this—and after I say it, I become one of those others. These others are as obliged to maintain the linguistic presence as I was, and that means proceeding under the assumption that I have both tugged the chain and torn it—like the fate of Schrodinger’s cat, we can’t know until the new linguistic presence is created.\n\nInsofar as you can see the chain being tugged, and therefore you see other chains of trust breaching the threshold of significance, you can keep tugging and tightening one of those; insofar as you see it torn, you work on repairing the breach. Both responses involve enhancing simultaneity, that is, representing my speech act as simultaneous with the presents I have represented, and as simultaneous with your own. As my reference above to the provenance of our language suggests, we are always rendering simultaneous countless presents, and we try to maximize responsibility for as many as possible. The model for this kind of semiotic presencing is sovereignty: you acknowledge that my utterance has brought into being a world you must find your way in and sustain. Even if you’re sure that I’m wrong in every possible way, morally, politically, intellectually, you will only make things right by inhabiting that wrongness.\n\nInsofar as you have listened to my utterance you have started to obey and obliged yourself to further obedience to this imperative to submit my sovereign utterance. (Of course, we can ignore what someone says, but only because we have a prior obligation to another imperative that includes disregarding this one—that is, we are never outside of this network of trust, which has an absolutist and imperative structure.) To use a well-known example from early in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations , if you are on a construction site and your co-worker says “brick” you bring him a brick—that’s what it means to “understand” him.\n\nYour responsibility to any utterance is to bring the equivalent of that brick. And what is needed is the missing present without which this particular node within the network of chains of trust might collapse. The missing present is located in whatever in the imperative (to sustain the world of the utterance) cannot be obeyed, and that present is supplied by finding a way to obey that was unanticipated in the imperative itself. If your co-worker’s wrong and you save him by bringing him, not a brick, but what he really needs you’re still obeying him. Insofar as we’re engaged in inquiry, which means we are participating in a disciplinary space, what has happened when you are not clear as to what the equivalent of “brick” is that one of the links in the network of trust has been exposed as unreliable or unaccounted for.\n\nAnd it must be a link that is needed now—a link we must attend to in order to attend from it to some objects framed by a new question, aiming at a new configuration of simultaneity. That link—say, an interpretation of a canonical text that someone has noticed overlooks certain assumptions underlying that text—has fallen out of simultaneity, because no threads from it can be represented in the present, which is to say the discourse in question has failed to register its effects as occurring now. That is the present that must be constituted in order to restore simultaneity, or linguistic presence. Doing so might knock other links out of simultaneity, within unanticipated ramifications.\n\nThe imperative we are following in such a case is to identify who has seen what, within what set of disciplinary imperatives, and by what chain of custody has this knowledge come to us. The brick equivalent establishes an ostensive-imperative-declarative articulation that answers the question that has emerged out of the unobeyable imperative. And by “imperative” in this context, we mean primarily expectations: you follow certain rules (imperative orders) in order to elicit a specific range of responses from some sector of reality. It is when you get a response you are not prepared for, when you encounter an unnamed or even unnameable object, that the “brick equivalent” becomes necessary. In the end such a disciplinary order relies on faith and a kind of absolutism: a commitment to sustain the linguistic presence, however frayed, transmitted to you by the other."
    },
    {
      "slug": "order-and-repetition",
      "title": "Order and Repetition",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage and her associated analyses of the English language should be devastating to the modern social sciences. All of those moral and political principles presumed to be universal, to be imposed everywhere, all of those concepts meant to be of universal theoretical application—they don’t even necessarily translate into other languages. Evidence, rights, fairness, justice, experience, sense—the imperatives to be drawn from such words are limited to the language in which they are embedded. Wierzbicka doesn’t discuss in detail concepts like liberty, equality, justice, individual, and so on, but not doubt historical limitations would be identified with all of these as well. And what about the objectivizing terminology of more recent political theory and discourse: system, structure, network, institution, norms, theory and so on? How far do they translate?\n\nThe implication here is not that we should only conduct political discussions in Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage; rather, it is that we should treat all of these terms as historical, whether as weapons of intra-social warfare or genuine discovery, or some of both. And if they are genuine discoveries, they remain marked by the conditions of their emergence: concepts are answers to specific questions, and once they circulate free of those questions they degrade into propaganda tools. Bloody Shovel , in his latest Leninism and Bioleninism post claims that the most consequential invention of the 20 th century was the power-seeking clique; but the real discovery was the discipline, of which the clique is a degraded shadow.\n\nThat all knowledge is generated through collaborative spaces in which shared attention is paid to some object defined by the space itself was first asserted, as far as I know, by Charles Sanders Peirce, but has been a thread through the most significant 20 th century thought-currents, with thinkers like Canguilhem and Bachelard in France, R.G. Collingwood, Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn in the Anglosphere, Wittgenstein and Fleck in Germany, and others, contributing to the only understanding of knowledge consistent with the hypothesis of the originary scene.\n\nThis theory of knowledge, which assumes that objects of knowledge are constructed by a collaborative, ultimately institutionalized space of knowledge, may sound relativistic, but there is no need to deny that some concepts, once constructed, can endure and become embedded in successive disciplinary spaces, ultimately becoming traditions that continue to yield truths. It is also the case that the boundary between “pre-scientific” and “scientific” knowledge must be drawn differently in discussing the social world than in dealing with the natural one. Important differences already exist in the natural sciences: no value can meaningfully be introduced into any of the concepts used to construct equations in quantum physics, but biology is meaningless without concepts like “health” and “sickness,” which are inherently value-laden.\n\nLikewise, in the social world, the concepts taken up scientifically must have had their origins in in the lives of communities, where the scientists themselves originate. So, for example, even the most unintelligent person in the most secluded and ignorant community has, as long as that community has a hierarchy (has moved beyond hunter-gatherer conditions), about as good an idea of what a “king” is as any of us do. Insofar as absolutism is the science of the implications of “kingship,” our discipline is continuous with, even as it radically breaks with, that peasant’s.\n\nIn human affairs, in fact, the disciplinary space must continuously be distinguished from and set up against non-disciplinary spaces. In general, a disciplinary space emerges when enough people realize that some word or network of words can no longer be used in the taken for granted way it has been used, and that it’s worth stopping and thinking about what those words mean and where they came from in the first place. This stopping and thinking will always be a minority taste, but if the disciplinary space is to created out of the non-disciplinary space there must be something disciplinary about the non-disciplinary space as well.\n\nThe electrons physicists think about don’t have a shared focus of their own but the people we think about do. Fads, fashions, enthusiasms, cults, fanaticisms all constitute little spaces of a kind of expertise that qualify people to enter and disqualify people from entering them. These spaces are at their most disciplinary precisely when they’re not trying to imitate and import terminology and methodology from some adjacent science. They are at the very least expert in sustaining shared attention, or linguistic presence, under conditions that otherwise would disperse it. This has nothing to do with “respecting” these spaces, al though that’s not a bad approach unless there’s a very good reason to approach one of them otherwise.\n\nBut since such spaces by definition do point at something, a test of any social science is whether it can point at the same thing within a more integrated conceptual vocabulary and a reality that doesn’t require the inquirer to be at the center. All of the words we use scientifically must have had their origins in some non-scientific use, from which they were lifted and transformed.\n\nIn this case the fundamental starting point for any social scientific disciplinary space is the difference between the disciplinary space and what we could call the “attentional” spaces it inhabits. Within those attentional spaces the disciplinary inquirer finds materials and attracts recruits. The disciplinary space is also a pedagogical space. The difference between the two spaces can only be revealed by displaying some content from the attentional space in two ways: one, as it appears within that space itself and, two, the way it appears within the disciplinary space. That material is shown to be repeatable in two different ways, depending on which side of the boundary it is placed.\n\nThis further means that the most direct object of inquiry of the discipline is the different ways things get repeated; which is to say the fundamental object is differential repetition. Differential repetition is also constitutive of the sign, which must be repeated as the same sign in order to have meaning, and which can never be repeated in the same way. We can then bring all our inquiry into the vast array of social rituals, customs, norms, laws, institutions, modes of government, and so on within the frame of differential repetition. The sign depends on its repetition for its existence, which means it depends upon its hearer, reader, percipient, or viewer.\n\nGans’s model for the succession of elementary speech forms is extraordinarily useful in thinking about how this happens. Someone names an object, assuming it is available; another realizes it’s not there, but, not wanted to break linguistic presence (and increase the risk of conflict) procures the object—an ostensive has, through differential repetition, become an imperative; at least it has once it is repeated as an imperative.\n\nAll institutional and historical developments can be explained along these lines: someone repeating a sign which in turn requires some supplementation to itself be completed and that supplementation entails some institutional innovation. Struggles for power follow from someone pointing to the place of power in time of need and someone seizing that place because no one seems to be there to redeem the sign. Of course, we can be wrong about this, and signs can be supplemented with cynical or hostile intent. But we could only know that within a disciplinary space carved out of the attentional space of power. History is the history of relations between attentional and disciplinary spaces and, as I have been suggesting in recent posts, ending history (history in the sense of a succession of empires each purporting to be the empire to end all empires because it is the redemptive empire) means implanting disciplinary spaces firmly within attentional spaces.\n\nAttentional spaces, like all spaces, are implicitly absolutist—they want the world held steady while they pursue their interest—but they can’t know themselves to be so, and can easily get distracted by and drawn into schemes of subversion which provide compelling centers of attention. Disciplinary spaces can know themselves to be absolutist because their participants know that only within an ordered state can the activities of the discipline be fully self-generated and therefore genuinely disciplinary. Nothing is more deadly to the disciplinary space than the infusion of power struggles and nothing is more favorable than power resting upon the competent pursuit of a mission.\n\nSo, absolutist politics within a liberal and democratic environment, or “auditioning,” is the ongoing demonstration and performance of differential repetition. It’s as if we’re always saying, what you want and demand doesn’t really make sense in the current order, while at the same time being an expression of the actual disorder that is current; but that just means that you do want something, and you do want it to make sense, and since we are always capable of making sense of things we can discuss the kind of order that might translate your desire into something worthy and attainable. And we really should learn how to translate others’ actual words and actions into worthy and attainable goals within a genuine order—genuine because it generates precisely these goals and the words and actions by which they are framed.\n\nThe disciplinary space joins the attentional space and works on making it disciplinary by making the relation between subject and object, between those with the desires and resentments and the reality resistant to it, itself the real object of study. We turn their ostensives into imperatives and take their imperatives through interrogatives to declaratives. Each experience and fear of disorder has its own imaginary of order, and that imaginary of order can always be made explicit and distinguished from other forms of order. Everything that happens can then be taken as indicative of the divergent possibilities of those respective forms of order, and increasingly rigorous test of them –and then we have a disciplinary space emerge within the attentional one."
    },
    {
      "slug": "programming-power-and-declarative-culture",
      "title": "Programming, Power and Declarative Culture",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "For originary grammar, the history of civilization is the history of the distancing of the declarative speech form from the imperative. In the mythical and magical world, declaratives are subordinate to, and provide narrative structure for, imperative exchanges. To review: the primary relation to the center is through the ostensive sign, through which the community confers sacrality on the central object by deferring consumption of that object. The imperative speech form emerges from the inappropriate ostensive—one interlocutor names the object, but the object isn’t there, at which point the other interlocutor supplies the object.\n\nThat accidentally discovered effect of the speech act can now be repeated deliberately. This takes place on the margins of the community, once the threshold of significance has been lowered sufficiently so that a variety of less than sacred objects can be named, for various purposes and not just the reinforcement of communal cohesion (al though the accomplishment of any communal purpose at least indirectly reinforces that cohesion). Once the imperative has been discovered/invented, it can now be brought to the center and used to enhance ritual practice: requests can be made of the center, but if members of the community make requests of the center, they must imagine the center acceding to those requests only in exchange for obedience to a command from the center itself—a command that is a prolongation of the original “refusal” on the part of the object to be consumed, its repulsion of the desires of the group.\n\nThis is what I have been calling “imperative exchange.” The declarative, as well, emerges on the margin, in the way I have examined in some recent posts, through the failed imperative, but also comes to be put to use in constructing narratives of “activity” at the center, activity that are in turn re-enacted ritually. In Gans’s account in The End of History , this is the origin of myth—narratives of the central figure surviving the predatory designs on it, conferring the gift of life upon the human community, and interacting through commands and benefits with that community. As long as we remain within mythological thought, and its magical adjunct, the declarative remains subordinate to the imperative—even if the declaratively constructed narratives, by virtue of the essence of the declarative, which is to at least defer the imperative exchange, must raise, in however muted a way, some question regarding its viability.\n\nThis liberation from the imperative is always relative: in refusing one imperative (in the first instance because one simply sees no way of fulfilling it), any declarative allows another one to be heard—an older one, but also one informed by the limits of the imperative exchange in question. To imagine we could be free of imperatives is to imagine we could be free of ostensives, which is to imagine ourselves outside of the world—a fantasy that is implicit in a more fully declarative culture. The imperative channeled by the declarative is, first of all, “don’t fulfill your side of the imperative exchange you have entered into”; but, second, this further entails directing your attention to something you couldn’t have noticed within that exchange—some consequence of continuing in that exchange that would ultimately cancel it.\n\nAn imperative always comes from a center, so the more absolute imperative comes from a center both more ancient (reaching further back to the originary scene) and more powerful than the center one has been in commerce with. This absolute imperative is, over time, pared down to “don’t break linguistic presence,” and this entails bringing some repetition of the originary scene in to supplement the failing linguistic presence. The growing distance between declarative and imperative exchange involves the greater independence of the declarative linguistic form as such. Linguistic presence can be created in a greater variety of ways as the magic of words dissipates.\n\nLinguistic presence can be directly subordinated to attention management, which comes to include attending to the means of maintaining linguistic presence itself, i.e., letters, words, sentences, discourse more generally, but also the means of communication, the various possible positions taken by “communicants,” culturally significant layers of tacit meaning, and the institutions constraining discourse: all these elements of any utterance can now become the target of another utterance. The invention of writing in, of course, a huge leap in this regard, and the connection between alphabetical writing and the atomic (proto-scientific) view of the world has long been noted.\n\nMore recently noted is the connection between the voicelessness of the written word and the monotheistic God to whom no qualities can be attributed. In very different ways, a single source of absolute imperatives is posited, and this in turn allows for unlimited analytical power: just as any utterance, and therefore any “piece” of reality can be broken down into its smallest, most basic components, so a divine voice speaking the absolute imperative that is both eternal and internal enables unprecedented examination of inner states of mind, conscience and feeling.\n\nSuch has been the trajectory of the Axial Age acquisitions and the modern scientific revolution (the laboratory) that is ultimately indebted to them. Many of the pathologies we can identify with modernization, such as rootlessness, alienation, and dispossession are also consequences of this trajectory. (And some would also trace these pathologies back to the Axial Age acquisitions.) We can’t know for sure that we can preserve the acquisitions without the pathologies, but I don’t see any plausible way of proceeding other than by assuming we can. I have suggested that the laboratory, generalized as the discipline, which both constitutes and is constituted by central power provides a way of targeting the pathologies while maximizing the acquisitions.\n\nThe discipline is a social form that keeps “drilling down” below ever lower thresholds of significance, and this activity applies equally to the study of quarks and of conscience. The “solution” of the discipline is possible because the information age has introduced a new dimension to the “detachability” of the declarative from the imperative: the quintessential activity of the information age, programming, is a process of generating imperatives from declaratives. These are not the passive-aggressive imperatives of liberalism, which command you not to commit to obeying any commands (“Question Authority”!). If we think, rather, of a sentence that can be dismantled and reconstructed according to some rule, we can automatically generate imperatives that would bring us from the state of affairs represented by one declarative to that represented by one of its alternatives.\n\nThe more independent declarative culture we have inherited is imperative-phobic, and “demands” (there are all kinds of paradoxes here) that we only carry out actions that can be fully justified on the norms of declarative sentences (reason and logic). We can develop a new kind of declarative culture that embraces imperatives by creating new ones out of the analysis of declaratives.\n\nLet’s take a simple, descriptive sentence like “he had his main opponent arrested” and reverse engineer it. First, treat the sentence as composed of parts that could be replaced—“he” by “she” or “I”; “had” by “will have” or “could never”; “main” by “marginal”; “opponent” by “ally”; “arrested” by “executed” or “promoted.” We could right away see that the simplest sentence “contains,” as possibilities, dozens, even hundreds of other sentences. These sentences can be ranked in terms of their probabilities, given the original, sample sentence as a center around which the possible ones fluctuate. (They are all the things you didn’t say.)\n\nWe can further treat the sample, central sentence as produced by or selected out of the narrowing of that field of probabilities, as a result of all the “paths” the sentence has, quantum-mechanics style, “always already” taken. This field-narrowing can be accomplished by converting the sentence back into the questions it might be answering: who had his main opponent arrested?; who did he have arrested?; which opponent did he have arrested?; what did he do to his main opponent?; etc. Each question would have emerged from a particular field of concern: everyone has been wondering what the president would do next, or what was going to happen to a prominent figure—the question opens up one or another concern.\n\nThe entire field of probabilities is generated by the deferral of an imperative, one side of an imperative exchange that has been refused. The imperative is a set of expectations: be ready for what will happen to the main opponent/watch what the president will do next/look for that oppositional leader’s profile to be raised. Maintaining the expectations involves a kind of readiness—the sentence now relieves you from those imperative expectations by violating them at least in part and commands you to configure a new field.\n\nKeep in mind that we are focused on the utterance, not the topic of the sentence—on who is making the claim about the (presumed) leader, and not the leader himself—but also that there must be a line between the imperative obeyed, respectively, by the subject of the sentence, the utterer of the sentence, and the hearer of the sentence—such a line is a condition of intelligibility. Configuring a new field of expectations means generating a new field of probable sentences, of which we look for the one that best promises to maintain linguistic presence regardless of which expectations are realized, i.e., which allows us to thread the absolute imperative through a broader range of actual outcomes.\n\nWe can identify that imperative by making the imperative represented by the sentence, the imperative obeyed by the utterer of the sentence, and the imperative obeyed by the “recipient” of the sentence “line up” more closely. We then make that imperative available for further iteration—it could turn out to be something like “become a marginal ally so as to accomplish what you would wish to as a main opponent.” The historical form of the absolute imperative will be a “remix” of the materials provided by the field of possible sentences: in this way, something that is imaginable and yet seems extremely unlikely can bolster a preparedness which grasps the broader reality but has failed catastrophically in some particular.\n\nThink of this thinking process as a maxim generating machine—the problem with generally true maxims, in politics and morals, is that without other maxims telling you how to apply them here and now, they’re really worthless. Originary programming is a kind of maxim assembly kit, making maxims adjustable for the occasion.\n\nThe absolutist assumption is that we all obey the same imperative, if we trace it back far enough. We don’t all clarify this imperative in the same way because the mining process involves extracting it from the vast mass of subsequent imperatives which have both made it more absolute (defer the most compelling imperative exchange) and thoroughly obscure it. The work of interpretation is ordering all imperatives in accord with the absolute one. This means we do assume that the king who had his main opponent arrested 3,000 years ago, the chronicler who recorded it 2,000 years ago, the scholars mulling over this chronicle for hundreds of years and those of us contemplating it today are all bound by the same chain of imperatives—to “understand” what that king did is locate ourselves within that imperative chain, and then to defer it, however slightly—to understand how it was is to imagine it might have been different.\n\nThe way to do this is to generate forward that modified imperative chain. So, actual sentence A defers imperative X somewhat more agilely than possible sentence A1 and somewhat more pointedly than possible sentence A2; imperative X is now modified as the question we construct a given sentence as answering, and it takes the form of a “tell me…” command. That “tell me” command can in turn be converted to a command to make present or make available, which in turn brings us to a sacred or significant name of something to be made present or available in whatever way it makes itself present or available. Someone, at some point, wanted the intentions of that “main opponent,” and even his will, made present, in the name of central power.\n\nThose who read such a sentence today also want central power made present, even if now we obey the command to take into account and assimilate in advance the kinds of opposition that bedeviled previous rulers. We can convert the opponent’s aims and the king’s decision into “information” contained in our “stock” insofar as we ultimately obey the same command as both of them, and use that information to carry that command forward.\n\nIn principle, this practice could be a source of algorithms: an algorithm has fed into it selected features of an object or situation, along with the weight to be given to those features, separately or in combination, so as to set in motion a response: so, a male of race A, appearing (according to another algorithm for assessing likely age) to be age B, dressed as a member of social class C, with a posture indicating D level of potential aggressiveness, etc. (however complex we need it to be), is not to be allowed onto the premises, or is to be subject to a stricter degree of scrutiny (with “strictness” also being a term of art to be established algorithmically).\n\nWe could eventually use computers to game out possible “auditioning” outcomes. But the qualitative dimension of assessment and decision is irreducible and always grounded in language—the more complex and targeted we make an algorithm the more its dependence upon humanly set values is evident. (The desire for a non-violent environment is a human value.) And political discourse is more interested in exposing presuppositions about power and sovereignty than in making supposedly rational decisions—the most rational decisions will be those that render those assumptions the most transparent. (The best argument for absolutist rule is that the distance between formal and actual power should be brought as close as possible to zero.)\n\nSince we can’t work with all of the sentences in the constitutive field of the sample, or nodal, sentence, we have to choose a few; these will be the few we feel we can best use as levers to make a link in the imperative chain visible that previously was not. This makes trolling, rather than logic, the model for the most powerful political discourse: trolling aims at eliciting responses from various actors that reveal things those actors would rather not reveal. It’s a way of issuing imperatives, to enemies and allies alike—the imperative is to show us which commands you really obey. Then all you have to do is reiterate, in perfectly declarative terms, the name and character of the god she obeys, the imperative exchange upon which she hangs her hopes—and present the clearer form of the same imperative, the one you obey.\n\nOf course, the implication of this discussion is that the more absolute power becomes, and the lower the threshold of significance, and the more named and incorporated all elements of society, and therefore the clearer the imperative structure, the less uncertainty, and therefore the less need for algorithmic approaches to social order. The argument for absolutism is distilled from the acting out of the anarchist ontologists, by selecting amongst the imperatives they obey those that can be lined up with the imperatives we obey in making sense of them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "technology-and-magic-doings-and-happenings",
      "title": "Technology and Magic, Doings and Happenings",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In Eric Gans’s analysis, in The Origin of Language (a new, streamlined edition of which is forthcoming), of the invention/discovery of the declarative sentence he identifies the first act of predication as an “operator of negation” in response to an imperative (instead of complying with the imperative). An operator of negation is an imperative issued to not do something: don’t smoke! Don’t cross the street when the light is red! Don’t talk to strangers!, Etc. This kind of imperative is clearly more complex than imperatives that can be fulfilled, and “verified” or “authenticated”: if I say “bring me a glass of water” and the water is brought, I say thanks, and we’re finished—nothing in the imperative is left hanging.\n\nBut if I tell you not to smoke, you will never be done not smoking. The attitude the imperator has to the one issued the operator of negation is what Gans calls “normative awaiting”: checking in, keeping an eye on you, more broadly setting in place expectations and, if I really want you to obey, pointing the way toward the formation of habits that will keep you on the straight and narrow. The operator of negation must originate in the original prohibition, created on the originary scene, directed toward the group’s desire, converging on the central object.\n\nThe operator of negation is really a remarkable solution to the problem Gans has taken on here—a problem, it is worth saying, I don’t believe anyone has ever posed as such, much less tried to solve, much less actually solved. Part of this original sentence, or proto-sentence, is what Gans calls the “negative ostensive,” a paradoxical term that involves confirming the presence of the desired object in the other’s imagination while refuting the implicit assumption of its actual presence. There is a sense in which the word is proffered as a replacement for the thing. But why would this work? There seems to be no force behind it—either the imperator will pursue his demand, in which case nothing has been settled; or he will cease, but why would that mean anything more than that he has not the power he would need to enforce the demand?\n\nWhy, for that matter, would the one issued the demand think to repeat the name of the requested object? How would he be trying to sustain linguistic presence? The negative operator provides the necessary counter-force, meeting imperative with superior imperative—operator of negation would likely have been used previously in situations where waiting and therefore patience is necessary, and counseling patience always confers authority—there is no greater mark of charisma than superior self-control. So, on one level, the one who issues the command is confronted with a counter-command, one to which he can have no ready response.\n\nBut this still wouldn’t, as predication must, tell us anything about the object. For that to be the case, the operator of negation must simultaneously be directed toward the demanded object: it is the object which is told, or has been told, to absent or withhold itself. The first predicate simply modifies the name of the object as not present or not available—but, even more, as rendering itself absent or unavailable in obedience to a higher command. This latter, higher command is conveyed by the predicator, but not issued by him—he certainly wouldn’t want to claim to have “disappeared” the object, as that would intensify the potential conflict. So, there is a horizontal (person to person) dimension to this initial predication and a vertical (group to center) dimension—since the two are not sorted out, we still have more of a proto-sentence than an actual one.\n\nWe have real predication when we have verbs. Of course, we can predicate adjectivally—the sky is blue, that wolf is big, that couch looks uncomfortable, etc. Adjectival predication, though, generally presupposes the availability of the object—much adjectival predication can be seen as a prelude to appropriating, possessing and distributing the object in question. It can also be a way of indicating the danger of the object, but even that is a prelude to “managing” the object in some way, perhaps by avoiding it. It is with verbal predication that the at least potential unavailability, the unavailability of the object in principle, is presupposed—even if I say “a whole school of fish is heading our way” (while fishing), I am assuming they could just as easily be heading some other way. So, it is fair to say that a completely declarative sentence and culture is weighted toward verbal predication.\n\nSo, what is a verb? Verbs most fundamentally represent actions, as the standard view (right, in this case) has it. But if we take (and I’ll get to how we should take in just a moment) the constitutive or definitive core of verbs to be acts intentionally and observably performed, once we move beyond that core things get very interesting. As is so often the case, Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage is illuminating here. Wierzbicka reduces “actions and events” to three primes: do, move, happen. That all actions and events can ultimately be distilled to these three is very interesting. The most easily and universally used of the three verbs is “move”: things move all the time—there’s no problem saying that any particular thing moved—you could put any noun in the subject slot.\n\nBut it’s almost impossible for specific things to either “do” or “happen” in this sense—“does,” in a sentence with a subject, when it’s not functioning as an auxiliary (specific to English) is almost always an answer to a question, and almost always a specific and implicating questioning, one that assumes accountability and a prior reference. Without a lot of context, “I’m doing” makes no sense, while “I’m moving” could easily mean quite a few things with very little context. Also, “do” is used in the most forceful imperatives—“do it,” “do that,” etc., and it inherently presupposes that the one taking orders already knows what should be done and perhaps should already be doing it—“do it” implies a minimum of ambiguity (which is the same as saying it is embedded in a dense context).\n\nMeanwhile, it is similarly almost impossible for something specific to “happen”: we use pronouns or generalities with “happen” (shit happens), we use “happen” in very open-ended questions (what happened), and it’s very hard to imagine using “happen” in an imperative. Whatever you would order to “happen” should in fact be ordered to do whatever that entity does. A person, place or thing doesn’t “happen,” unless we are using “happen” in a deliberately anomalous way.\n\nSo, we could imagine “move” as the first verb (what better way to account for the unavailability of an object than that it has moved?), but it’s hard to imagine “do” or “happen” as even a particularly early one; their presence among the primes implies that the primes are a distillation of the essential spectrum of verbs, rather than the original ones. At one end, the verb merges with the imperative; at the other end it approaches eventhood beyond imperative; in the middle, it captures what any entity does in response to an imperative: move closer to or further away from some center. Essential verbness, then, refers to motion towards or away from a center, which also means it is something we say about entities, rather than some self-generated “action” of entities.\n\nThe “will” is an optical illusion of certain verbs, like “want,” but when do we say that we or another “wants”? In making demands, in answering questions about what we are doing, in trying to predict another’s actions, etc. We certainly do all those things, but they don’t add up to a “will.” Those verbs that most evoke intentional actions are actually those best suited for imperatives: “I went for a walk” sounds like a description of the most autonomous of actions, so it’s not surprising that “go for a walk” is a perfectly natural imperative—an imperative to either approach some center (one’s composure, for example) or distance oneself from a dangerous one (a conflict or crisis where one is presently located).\n\nMeanwhile, consider “he died,” or “he drowned”—the verbs here are not really “actions” at all—what do we imagine someone “did” in dying or drowning? These are rather events that “happen” to one, and they happen as a result of the failure to obey some imperative, to stay out of deep water, to keep your strength a bit longer, to find some way to maintain your health, etc. So, we have a verbal spectrum from imperatives we can completely obey to a complete inability to comply with imperatives. Now, it is with “happenings” that inquiry begins: someone died even though they did the things, obeyed the commands, that keep you alive—how did those imperatives become inoperative?\n\n(If all we did was to do things questions would never arise.) What we took to be a doing was in fact a happening: but at first “happenings” must involve other imperatives overriding the one I attempted to comply with. That, in the most literal sense, is how things must first of all appear: some entity was ordered to take his life (primitive peoples never see death as an accidental or natural occurrence). The river god sent the flood to drown him. We must appease the river god; but what happens when appeasing the river god doesn’t seem to help? Someone else is giving orders to the river god. Logically speaking, we can imagine this chain of reasoning bringing us all the way to a single god who issues all commands, but we know that such abstractions don’t occur in this linear manner.\n\nIt will always make sense that the river god keeps drowning people, and that we don’t always appease his anger, until we start building boats to go down the river and have to make more complex requests of the god. And that requires a new structure of authority, which is to say someone giving a wider range of commands to people, upon which new requests to the gods can be modelled. Positing a penumbra of happening beyond any doing makes this possible.\n\nSo, coming to see doings as happenings, and therefore finding ways to pay attention to the ways in which our obediences and deferences “taper off” into gray zones where they intersect with interfering commands, also implies coming to see happenings as doings. After all, we can say “stuff happens” as a way of shrugging off some unanticipated failure, but if we look more closely at what happened we will also find all kinds of things people were doing or not doing. This would be a good way to define knowledge: finding happenings within doings and doings within happenings. In fact, finding doings within happenings is precisely what we do when we establish laboratory conditions in order to reduce something that happens to something we do.\n\nMeanwhile, anthropological and moral knowledge comes from finding happenings within doings: taking identifiable, completed and coherent acts (i.e., acts that could be carried out in response to imperatives) and paying attention to what precedes the act (the name that is the source of the imperative) and what exceeds it (what new imperatives does the act disseminate). The best explanation of what someone did will always involve, first, identifying, even if hypothetically, the imperative he is following; second, the chain of command, both spatial and temporal, that imperative is a link in; third, from what sacred name the imperative is derived from; and, fourth, what imperatives have the action, or series of actions, left for others.\n\nAnd we always pursue these inquiries by observing, producing or simulating some movement on the part of the subject (what if a particular part of the process was accelerated or decelerated? Pushed in more, or fewer, directions?). Finally, we also know that inquiry is conducted through questions posed to phenomena—we can’t set up an experimental or hypothetical situation without asking “what happens if we do_____?” The question is formed out of the latest doing/happening articulation. Something happened that can’t be deemed an effect of what was done. So, we have to do something else, or imagine something else done, and see if that leads to the residue of happening we couldn’t account for.\n\nTechnology, then, involves introducing more and more, and more and more precise—reducible to simple imperatives—doings within all the gaps within happenings. A technological order is one in which we look at things that happen and imagine how they would be otherwise if they were reduced to things done. I think such an order is wholly compatible with a more fully moral and esthetic order in which our doings are interrupted by happenings, in which habits are displaced, disrupted and/or displayed: perhaps the forgotten name one mindlessly derives imperatives from is forced back into remembrance; perhaps, the more complex components of what has come to seem a simple act are separated so they can be noticed; perhaps one is implicated in the train of subsequent imperatives set in motion by those imperatives one has come to consider self-contained and inconsequential. All this induces mindfulness.\n\nWe can see, then, how science and technology had to have been, and perhaps still need to be carved out of magic: magic (and mythology) were the initial ways we attributed imperatives to happenings, or saturated the space of happenings with doings: science and technology involve putting imperative exchanges to the test, as humans must have been doing, in however limited a way, from the very beginning. Everything we do with texts and in laboratories can ultimately be traced back to a long series of questions extracted from failed imperative exchanges—some kind of conjuring or divination. Divination is human imagination, and the way we do that now is primarily through nominalization, which creates new objects.\n\nLook at what happened above: the verbs “do” and “happen” morphed into the nouns “doings” and “happenings,” and this happened as soon as it became possible to examine the relationship between them. Asking why “do” and “happen” happen to be at different ends of a primitive verbal spectrum forced those two words into a new relationship, which transforms them into “entities.” I think a far-reaching model of inquiry and epistemology could be derived from the process of turning relationships between verbs into relationships between nominalizations (which, then, as above, create space for those verbs to act and interact in new ways).\n\nOf course, nominalization can freeze discourse into jargon, which is why using them to generate more verbal activity (so we don’t end up with cartoonish relations between the nominalizations themselves) is central. Breaking up new clusters of jargon is the scientific equivalent of de-mythification—it’s a question of refusing the imperatives the nominalizations start giving you, the imperative exchanges they lure you into (the belief that this terminological tweak with solve the problem)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "first-words",
      "title": "First Words",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Anna Wierzbicka sees her discovery of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage containing all the words found in all languages to be a continuation of Gottfried Leibnez’s project to develop an alphabet of human thought, a universal system of symbols. I’d like to suggest a way of approaching this project, processing it, of course, through Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis and the originary grammar I have derived from it. I’m going to begin by reviewing and following up on some work I’ve done in recent posts on the verbs in the NSM. What originary grammar does to help us articulate rather than simply list the verbs in the metalanguage is ground verbs in the imperative world.\n\nVerbs have their origin in what we could call the “evasive object,” the object (or act) the demand or command for which is rejected in the proto-declarative sentence combining the “operator of negation” and the “negative ostensive,” with the demand rejected (and we could even say proscribed) on grounds of the object’s unavailability. Indicating that unavailability is the first, or proto-predicate. Now, an object can be unavailable because of some quality or condition of the object (e.g., the person whose presence is demanded can’t come because he is dead, the tool is broken, the stone is heavy), or because the object is engaged in some other activity.\n\nTo be engaged in another activity is to be doing something which might be done pursuant to an imperative (ultimately, even conditions and qualities can be viewed as determined by imperatives). I should mention the pertinent philosophical point here: all the questions of “will” and “free will” generated by the alignment of a verb with a subject (he ran, she threw the ball, they danced, we refused to participate, etc.) can be approached in a completely different way by simply positing an imperative initiating these actions. Instead of struggling to figure out what comes between the “he” and the “running” (his will to run!) we can just say he was ordered to run.\n\nBy whom? Well, that depends—maybe by his coach, but maybe by the institutional order (it was a competitive race), maybe by an oath he took months ago to run every day, maybe by his deceased father who wanted him to fulfill his own ambition of becoming a champion, maybe by his own observation that someone is chasing him. This provides us with an avenue of inquiry far preferable to trying to discover and define the attribute that enabled the choice to run, to throw, to dance, etc. Taking that latter route, one day we’ll end up back with Descartes’s pineal gland.\n\nHere are the verbs among the semantic primes, according to the categories Wierzbicka has grouped them in:\n\nMental/Experiential Predicates: think, know, want, feel, see, hear\n\nSpeech: say\n\nActions and Events: do, move, happen\n\nExistence and Possession: exist, have\n\nLife and Death: live, die\n\nThe best way to organize what is so far just a list is to note the obvious relations between them (of course, there are lots of non-obvious ones as well that will be the subject of further inquiries): we think and know things in order to say them, we say things in order to do them, we think about what we have said and done, etc. My approach is to analyze these words in terms of their possible uses as imperatives, and in that way develop a vocabulary for discussing the relation between imperative and declarative orders. So, “think” works perfectly well as an imperative—you can tell someone to think in perfectly natural speech situations (think about something, think something through, think before you act…).\n\n“Know” is a bit trickier: it’s hard to imagine natural situations in which you would order someone to “know” something. We have the idiom, in contemporary English, “know this,” but what usually follows is some kind of oath or promise. “Knowing” doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing, unlike, say, “learning,” that can be commanded. Knowing exists only in the declarative order, then, and it is assumed that one has thought, heard or seen in order to know—so, knowing is the result of faithfully obeying those other imperatives. It also follows that a challenge to someone’s claim to know would take the form of a demand that he think, hear, feel or see.\n\n“Know” belongs more in questions and answers: questions, in our grammatical schema, are modified imperatives, imperatives of the form “tell me…,” requests for information rather than commands to act. Asking whether the other knows, then, is a prelude to demanding that one do or move. Knowing is declarative, and takes us from mental imperatives to practical ones.\n\n“Want” is also very difficult to think of in terms of imperatives: how could you order someone to want something? Wanting seems even asocial, prehuman—after all, animals want things too. But we can situate wanting in a couple of ways here: first, as marking resistance to some imperative (I don’t want to; instead, I want…), as a declaration that one is following another imperative; second, and closely related, in an interrogative negotiation over fulfilling the imperative (well, then, what do you want?). This latter use would include situations where items are being distributed (which do you want? How many do you want?\n\nI want that one). The implication here is that the “will” is less a “faculty” than a kind of friction point between imperatives. Meanwhile, one can certainly be ordered to “feel,” either something in particular or a particular way—bad or good, for starters (be happy! The Bible has no problem commanding us to love God and our neighbor). “See” and “hear,” meanwhile, go perfectly well with imperatives. As for “say,” one can readily be commanded to say something that has already been said (e.g., a messenger or orator), but more primarily what one thinks, what one has seen or heard, what one feels, but most of all, or as the purpose of all that, what one knows.\n\nSo, in an interesting confirmation of Aristotle, “know” seems to be the apex mental verb: seeing, hearing and feeling are transformed by thinking into knowing, while saying serves the purpose of turning what one knows into grounds for doing. We can now move on to action. Here, we have previously noted a continuum from “do” to “move” to “happen”: “do” is as imperative friendly as possible, as being told to “do it” assumes one is in a highly imperative situation in which you already know what needs to be done; meanwhile, it’s almost impossible to imagine commanding someone or something to “happen.” “Happen” seems to refer to the outermost edges of the imperative world—it refers to the results of imperatives so distant or obscured that we can’t perceive them.\n\n“Move” is an act that can easily be commanded, and is therefore close to “do”; but “moving” is in the middle of some process, and is therefore encompassed by doing (you move something to get something done)—while also sliding toward the “happen” side of the scale, the more the moving gets detached from the doing (if you push a rock down a hill, by the time it reaches the bottom, it is something that happens). I have suggested that knowing could be said to involve seeing the doing behind the happening, and the happening behind the doing: someone or some power or force is ultimately doing the things that merely appear to happen, while even the closest adherence to the imperative we have been given sets us adrift amongst counter and intersecting imperatives that may deflect us—to that extent, what we do also happens. That continuum do-move-happen, then, is what we do most of our thinking about, and therefore what we discipline ourselves to feel, see and hear signs of.\n\nThe existence/possession and life/death verbs, meanwhile, are subject to higher imperatives: only a god can order someone to exist, to live or to die (your enemy can order you to die, at least in a James Bond or superhero movie, but that’s just a hammy way of telling you he’s going to kill you). Ordering someone to “have” something, meanwhile, can be an ordinary part of a gift exchange, but “have” is also central to all kinds of cooperative activities in which one would ask another whether he “has” something needed. These verbs, these higher imperatives (to order someone to accept a gift is in a sense “higher,” insofar as you refrain from supervising their use) might very well provide the frame within which all the doing and knowing are set. Are we fulfilling the other imperatives in such a way as to fulfill the imperatives to live, to exist, to have (accept, possess) and, perhaps, to die well?\n\nOnce we have this model of the relations between the “primal” verbs, we can use it to analyze all the other, more complex verbs: where are “play” and “work,” for example, on the do-move-happen continuum; how do they channel the processing of seeing, hearing and feeling through thinking to knowing; how is wanting provoked and integrated, and what do these activities have us say? What about “remember”? I would say that this kind of thinking, knowing and saying would transcend traditional philosophy and replace it with an originary thinking interested in revealing the center. Wierzbicka’s books are filled with analyses that provide us with a great deal of material.\n\nSuch an inquiry would simultaneously be a historical and political one. David Olson, in his study of the effects of literacy on cognition, The Mind on Paper , provides a list of Old English mental and speech act verbs (which is to say, for the most part prior to the introduction of literacy) and Latinate words (following that introduction). The pre-literate verbs line up fairly well with Wierzbicka’s primes: believe, know, mean, say, tell, think (“understand” comes in with Middle English)—Wierzbicka doesn’t tell us which are to be found in, say, 95% of languages, but I would think that “believe,” “mean” and “tell” come pretty close.\n\nMeanwhile, what characterizes the post-literate verbs (assert, assume, claim, concede, contradict, declare, doubt, explain, infer, predict, suggest, etc.) involve telling us something about the situation, goals, credibility, perspective, and so on of the thinker or speaker—that is, they are inquiries into the speech situation because writing has to find ways to supplement everything that is lost in the speech situation when discourse is transferred to paper (tone of voice, posture, the relation between interlocutors, a particular setting and context, the social relation between interlocutors, etc.). So, saying “he contended” rather than “he said” tells us that the saying was part of an argument, and other did or might contend otherwise—all things you would know if you were witness to an actual discussion or if the person orally reporting the discussion acted out the dialogue he reported (repeated in an angry voice something originally said in an angry voice, etc.).\n\nWith verbs representing a speaker within a situation, the imperatives derive from a space of writing, which is also to say a disciplinary space, one in which not only what is said, thought or known is at issue but the status, within that space, of what has been said, thought or known. It’s a difference between ensuring (demanding) that everyone is paying attention to the same thing, on the one hand, and enabling (demanding) everyone to have their attention oscillate back and forth between what we are paying attention to and the means by which we direct that attention.\n\nOlson broadens the inquiry (especially in his recent The Mind on Paper ) by defining writing itself as an inquiry into language: all the features of language we are aware of, and that become the topics of linguistics, are results of the need to figure out how to use marks on paper to represent speech. In the process such phenomena as “syllables,” “phonemes,” “sentences” (along with all the attendant grammatical categories) and even “words” were discovered. (Here, I’ll note a disagreement between the two formidable scholars I am working with here: Wierzbicka claims “word” among the primes, while Olson contends it is a post-literate word/concept.)\n\nHaving what neither Olson nor Wierzbicka does, an originary hypothesis regarding the origin (and subsequent evolution) of language, I can take Olson’s insight further: the declarative sentence is an inquiry into imperative and the ostensive, the imperative is an inquiry into the ostensive, and the ostensive is an inquiry into the center. An inquiry into the center, moreover, is also an inquiry into the relations between all who are constituted by that center and the center itself. Language is inquiry all the way down, and, as I have argued previously, verbs chart the movements, real and metaphorical, of human (and other) “satellites” around the sacred and various attentional centers.\n\nAnd we conduct such inquiries in the presence of such a center, a linguistic presence that represents a real present (that may, of course, have been present 100,000 years ago while being made present to those of us on the scene of inquiry now): a real present stripped and framed according to the question posed on the scene of inquiry.\n\nThere is, then a telos to human activity and human life: inquiry into the center. This inquiry into the center situates us within some tradition, that ultimately continues from the origin and preserves and extends the means and modes of inquiry created until now. There is a dialectic to human history: we repeat existing forms, sometimes mistakenly or inappropriately, and those anomalous uses are themselves repeated and become new forms when they provide a way of deferring some novel threat of violence. The new forms prompt further inquiries into the center, and the social order comes to be split between those extracting fresh forms of ancient imperatives and those distracting from such inquiries (“sinners,” who want to weaken some command coming from the center so that more peripheral commands can be obyed).\n\nThe outcome is unknown, but it will always be possible to retrieve the memory of the originary center and create centers devoted to renewing the inquiry initiated there. And all this can now be done by inquiry through language and inquiry into language. You could always start with the latest thing you heard someone say."
    },
    {
      "slug": "force-and-education",
      "title": "Force and Education",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The fulcrum of any regime is the security force that maintains public order. The sign of regime change is that the security force is replaced or, far more common, stops obeying one master and starts obeying another. The purpose of public protest is to test the security forces, which must repress, contain or protect the protesters—or some combination of all three. The point might be to demonstrate that the security forces will protect you against enemies (counter-protesters), confirming that you are an integral part of the regime. Or, it might be to test the security force’s loyalty to the regime—if you provide the security forces grounds for arresting or physically attacking you (by attacking them, or violating the rules they establish for you), or if you know that the regime is hostile to your protests and has or may have ordered the security forces to suppress them, then you confront those forces with a choice: either attack the protesters in the name of the regime or signal disaffection with your superiors by refraining.\n\nIf your aim is to change the regime, then your entire analysis and strategy can be reduced to this fulcrum: what could you do that would increase the chance of security force defection? We could refine the question further: what could you do to increase the chance that a sample of the security forces will defect, and to in turn confront their own brethren with the choice of loyalty or defection. And not just any sample, but a sample that might serve as a “tipping point.”\n\nIt’s easy to minimize the role of such mass protests in revolutionary change and to point to the “real” shift in power going on behind the scenes. And, no doubt, powers antagonistic to the sovereign, indigenous and/or foreign, must be supporting the protesters for them to have gotten to this point. But those antagonistic forces are no more in complete control of the outcome than the sovereign—they lay their bets, put their fingers on the scale and see what happens. And what happens does depend on that confrontation on the front lines. The proxies do have to fight it out. So, if your politics are focused on regime change, you want to be able to game out the possibilities of such confrontations.\n\nAnd all serious politics regards regime change, either advancing it or preventing it—if you’re the sovereign, you want to ensure that the security forces make the right choice in that encounter. So, we can reduce all the things we talk about in politics, all the policy issues, all the outrages, all the big ideas, to that single question of the marginal security force: what will tilt the balance one way or the other when the regime hangs in the balance. The competent sovereign who wants to ensure that things never get anywhere near that point nevertheless will do so by reasoning backward from that point, and taking measures to ensure that each rogue move by some power center that might push us slightly closer to crisis is never taken.\n\nAt the same time, keeping that fulcrum in mind helps us understand the forces of disorder better: with greater or lesser awareness, all the efforts of the left are aimed maximizing the likelihood that when push comes to shove, the security forces will take orders from them, or those favorable to them. Even the formation of paramilitary extra-governmental forces aims at the existing security forces—no one could ever expect to come anywhere completely replacing the existing forces with one’s own.\n\nSo, in a round about way, even discussions about, say, tax policy, are ultimately aimed the marginal security force. That marginal security force is more likely to obey the guy you like because the security force considers, however distantly, that change in taxes to make the system as a whole more worth defending; or, perhaps, it will make the guys on your side richer, and the security force will consider it a better bet to obey the wealthier side. Needless to say, the other side tries to give your policy proposal a completely different implication, trying to convince the marginal security force that it would make the order embodied by your side less worth defending.\n\nAnd that’s really what it comes down to: what’s worth defending, with the gun in your hand right now, in solidarity with your comrades, rather than more abstract considerations of “legitimacy.” This seems to me a very good way to focus our attention on political issues: we have in our mind whom, what type of figure, we’d like the marginal security force to obey in a crunch, and whatever we support or oppose should be with an eye toward making that force likelier to do so. You could say that it’s very hard to predict what the marginal security force might find worth defending some balmy May day in 2028, but that just means we should always be singling out what is most worth defending here and now, and then tomorrow, and next year, because this doesn’t change radically continuously, and it will change less the more it is emphasized and inculcated.\n\nOne very good consequence of this approach is that it is a way of constantly baiting the left to support exactly those things that are least likely to lead the security forces to support them. What the marginal security force must find worthiest to defend are competent hierarchies, professionalism, loyalty, and courage. These are precisely the institutional structures and virtues the left has the greatest contempt for, because all of them presuppose a social and moral core that sets the tone for the rest of the social order. To put it in today’s parlance, all these forms are “white.” The left cannot attack them as such, but since rigorous adherence to them will inevitably “privilege” the majority and best prepared culture, the left will have to attack them as exclusionary.\n\nThe precise formulations will change, but we can say, for now, that our goal should be for the marginal security force to not care when he is told his competent, loyalty and courage implicate him in white supremacy and patriarchy. He should be prepared to immediately identify these charges as indicating low status and uncontained resentment on the part of those making them—the charges themselves should lead to the conclusion that we are dealing with people to whom no mercy can be shown. Bringing up “whiteness” in any discussion must be made to seem the most incendiary thing there is, veritable fighting words.\n\nI’m suggesting that the high-low vs. the middle scenarios available to the elites now have their limits. Let’s say that the major corporations and foundations keep funneling money into BLM, Antifa, various pussyhat movements, the next iteration of Occupy Wall Street, violent environmentalists, etc. They have to do this because simply giving money to media outlets and politicians to try and get people to vote for more power for the left is insufficient—if it’s just a question of getting the middle to passively support the low with its votes, why should they bother, regardless of how much you harangue them? You need an army, however rag-tag, to engage in actual confrontations that will extract concessions—i.e., you need blackmail leverage.\n\nSo, these groups must enter into continual confrontation with security forces, local, state and national. We already have sense of all the different ways this can go. The local politicians can tell the police to stand down and allow the leftist rioters to wreak havoc. For that matter, politicians can, as they are now doing in Europe, have the police ignore rape and spend their time arresting people who post Islamophobically on Facebook. I wonder whether this is sustainable, though. If leftist progromists know that the police will stand down, it can’t be long before they start attacking the police—passive, neutered security forces that nevertheless provide a fat target for attacking “fascism,” or ‘white supremacy,” will be too tempting to ignore.\n\nCan the security forces be ordered to allow themselves to be injured and killed? It seems to me at a certain point they will start to choose other careers, and you will have greatly weakened and ineffective security forces. But the state needs security forces, and to keep them they will have to let them do their job at least to some extent. And if they let them do their job to some extent, we are back where we started, with the security forces pondering whether it would be better for them to obey this or another source of power.\n\nI now want to suggest that the question of the marginal security force converges with what can seem like the opposite end of the social spectrum: education. We can see education most simply as the recruitment and replenishing of what Imperial Energy calls “elites” and “essentials”—those who actually participate in rule, and those who provide the forms of knowledge and management the rulers require. (The “expendables” are also educated, but that would happen as a result of the aforementioned recruitment, simply because in order to continue replenishing the elites and essentials you’d need to cast a wide net, providing access to knowledge and skills for many who will never use them past a certain point.)\n\nThe focus on the marginal security force provides us with a way of organizing education as well. A good education system will ensure that joining the security force is seen as “essential,” which is to say honored, and its code will be prioritized within the social order. Every educated individual is to be made to see himself, if not as that potential marginal security force, then as one whose own work contributes to the clarity of the chain of command within which the marginal security force is located. The hypothetical dilemmas that would form the substance of moral and ethical education would focus on obeying commands and responding to the point at which obedience must give way to judgment.\n\nYou are given a general order to “suppress” a riot, but the means you would ordinarily use to do so might inflame the rioters, perhaps because the guy next to you is the marginal security force at that moment. As a sociologist your main interest might be the dispersion of mobs into small groups that make this dilemma less likely to occur, or easier to resolve if it does. As an architect you think in terms of designs that would mitigate or eliminate such situations; as a doctor or medical researcher you want any confrontations to be less deadly; as a psychologist, you develop scripts for the security forces to rehearse.\n\nA side effect of seeing education explicitly as the process of recruitment to the elites and essentials is making “protest” unthinkable. Protest really serves no purpose other than to draw “your” elites into battle with “their” elites, by forcing them to bid for control or influence over the security forces. The more the marginal security force is made the center of political reasoning, the less sense it would make to enter into confrontation with them. In a well governed order there would be no protest. Still, such a possibility would always be considered as a frame for considering any changes in the form of the rule: would a particular change eventually, indirectly, activate the marginal security force?\n\nAnd by the same token we can see why in a poorly governed, democratic order, protests must be a regular occurrence—it’s the way the “reserve armies” of the various elites keep track of their standing—how expendable are they in relation to other expendables? And it’s also the way the elites keep their networks of power active. By focusing on the marginal security force, we direct our attention right to the middle of the middle, the thing all power forces must ultimately reckon with. The expected effect of any idea, action or policy on the marginal security force can give us a precise measure of its value."
    },
    {
      "slug": "regime-transplantation",
      "title": "Regime Transplantation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "How to replace a liberal democratic regime with an absolutist one? We’re clearly not thinking in terms of a revolution, which would replace the liberal democratic regime with an even more radically democratic one. There might be elements of regime change similar to military coups, but military regimes don’t really change anything—they’re just placeholders until the powerful and propertied can get their act together and re-establish some mixed authoritarian/liberal regime. Some portion of the “high” (the corporate elite, the top military brass, perhaps presidents of universities and heads of other institutions) would have to break from the high-low vs. the middle action and work on preserving the middle against the high-low coalition.\n\nToday’s populism, which is primarily interested in order, stability and normalcy, and directs its resentments towards those who undermine all three, is a kind of faint image of what that might look like. Presumably, we have to imagine some deep crisis, with liberalism confronting problems it has no solution to and, perhaps, rivals it can no longer contend with—“we” are then prepared to be prepared to be the ones with solutions, the ones who can contend. A lot of people, at different levels of the social order, would have to have their minds very clear. And that’s really all we can do now—keep clarifying out minds.\n\nIn my previous post I argued that the marginal security force is a kind of fulcrum and measuring rod upon which to focus energies: when the security forces start obeying the people they would have been arresting a short time ago, things have demonstrably changed. I’ll suggest another, more political, focus, here. Consider the question, why anyone is obliged to pay attention to the ravings of Black Lives Matter, Pussyhat feminists, LGBT, antifa, immigration activists, and all the rest. Reactionary Future made a very good point a while back (it certainly wasn’t the first time he said something along these lines), asking, why pay attention to what these lunatics say, when we can just go right to the top and see who supports, funds and promotes them?\n\nThe only reason to worry about being called a racist is because you can lose your job, get kicked off social media, be targeted by on and off-line mobs, and be permanently ostracized. And obviously the BLM people themselves have no means to do all that; the Left as a whole has not the means to do all that. Only corporations, foundations and other institutions (universities, media companies) have the power. So, the real question is, why does a corporation like Kellogg’s fund an organization like Black Lives Matter? And the answer is simple: anti-discrimination law.\n\nI’ve pointed out before that words like “sexism,” “racism” and “homophobia” don’t really mean anything—no one could give you a clear definition of any of them; indeed, they’re not meant to be defined, they are “always already” weaponized. The meaning of “racism” is that you use the term to identify “racists.” But this is because “racism” is the ideological expression of anti-discrimination law. Once you have laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, you need a concept like “racism” so that you know who to punish for breaking the law. Paradoxes abound here. Once “discrimination” is against the law, no one will ever admit they are discriminating—so, if we have some employer who doesn’t want to hire blacks, he’ll just tell prospective black employees that they’re not qualified enough, or they don’t fit into the company’s culture; or he’ll fire them quickly for being lazy or insubordinate.\n\nBut, of course, that means that all those criteria—qualifications, competence, industriousness, loyalty, obedience, etc., all become proxies for “racism,” and will eventually be seen to be coded “white.” Also, while anti-discrimination laws are originally formulated in impeccable liberal, individualist terms, forbidding discrimination against whites as well as black, it’s perfectly obvious that no one would ever consider such laws if racial discrimination was seen a randomly distributed occurrence, with blacks discriminating against Mexicans here, Jews discriminating against Chinese there, blacks discriminating against Pacific Islanders somewhere else, etc.\n\nNo, the laws are implicitly (at least) collectivist and reparationist from the start, impugning the majority as “discriminators,” making them inherently suspect. The notion that America is a racist or “white supremacist” culture is simply a necessary ideological “superstructure” upon the anti-discrimination “base.” There’s no other way to use these laws other than to make such assumptions. Ironically, it is here that “profiling” is actually built into the enforcement of the law.\n\nNow, it is because of anti-discrimination laws that Kellogg’s funds BLM. Corporations can be sued for discrimination, and the lawsuits can be very damaging in monetary terms and also in terms of reputation. There is no real defense against them, and the inevitable extension of anti-discrimination laws to cover women, gays, etc. renders institutions even more defenseless. How do you prove you haven’t created a “hostile workplace”? Well, the courts will tell you what to do, which means the attorneys for the “victims” will tell you, and what they will tell is, first of all, give us and the institutions sponsoring us lots of money.\n\nBut they will also tell you to restructure your internal corporate relations in such a way as to provide yourself with a prophylaxis against further lawsuits: quotas, beefed-up human relations, diversity officers, employee workshops, community outreach, the works. In short, the entire victimary movement comes down to the government as a shakedown racket. (The Obama Administration cut out some middle men and perfected it as an art form, but there’s really no other way anti-discrimination law can work.) In the end, the people who really believe in this stuff and will implement it enthusiastically take over the positions of power—after all, they’ll be better at it than anyone else.\n\nMeanwhile, the institutions that replenish the ranks of the elites and essentials make sure to train people so as to take up those positions. I apologize for taking so much time to state the obvious—we all know this, right? I have to state a little more of the obvious: the reason for anti-discrimination law is because such law is pretty much the Platonic form of the high-low vs. the middle strategy used by Power, in this case the State, to centralize power. “Discrimination” is precisely what makes the “middle” the middle: standards, gradations, deferences, differential loyalties, etc. Attacking discrimination in the broadest sense is the most effective means imaginable of demolishing all social constructs that can’t be reduced to the relation between the individual and the state.\n\nThe very commandeering of the word “discrimination” for the purpose has proved prophetic, as it has become sometimes illegal, but always immoral, to discriminate in favor of intelligence against stupidity, good against bad, beautiful against ugly, competent against incompetent, and so on.\n\nSo, anti-discrimination law delenda est . Nothing much new there, and if anyone who wanted to had the power to do something about it, we wouldn’t have to talk about it. The only thing to do is to “become worthy,” and the way to do that is by scouring our minds clean of any remaining anti-discrimination debris and learning how to be unresponsive in the right ways when others wish to echolocate in their social environment by pinging their virtue squeaks off of us. It makes a difference, how much it’s impossible to tell, to have individuals in institutions who are recognizably human in all ways to the SJWs but refuse to provide even the slightest indication of being on board.\n\nNo “sure I believe in civil rights but sometimes it seems things have gone too far…”; no “whatever happened to Dr. King’s dream that we would be judged by the content of our character…”; no “of course we need strong sexual harassment laws to provide a safe work environment for women but there must be safeguards for the accused…”; etc. Maybe there’s nothing new here either—we have to be completely uncucked, which has been obvious for a while. The racket has been rigged from the start—no nostalgia.\n\nYou want to be the one they want to get, but can’t. They can tell there’s something not right about you—you’re silent when you’re supposed to contribute the obligatory cliché, you seem amused rather than appalled in hearing about the latest Trumpocity, you redirect virtue-signaling sessions back to overlooked points of fact and law, you bring conversations about fairness and equity back to the primary function of the institution, you come across as a little bit more naïve than possible when asking them what, exactly, is wrong with making some forbidden statement (why is that racist?). But they can’t quite pin anything on you.\n\nYou even seem like a kind of nice guy, and maybe good at your job, and it doesn’t compute. Those who want to know will see that you’re a discriminating man, though, and they will sense, tentatively, at first, that they can talk with you. As more companies and institutions go crazy, like Google, and become subject to anti-anti-discrimination lawsuits or just mere scandal, and the release of documents and testimony from the inside becomes more common and feared, everyone will wonder whether you just might be the guy to do something like that. All conversations, work-related and otherwise, in your presence will come to have a certain “pre-leaked” character to it.\n\nYou represent the possibility of a kind of counter-surveillance and exposure, which they will model in their imagination precisely on what they would like to do to you. And how many of you are there? They’ve noticed you (and even there they’re not quite sure) but who haven’t they noticed?\n\nI contend that this is a kind of power. Just as no regime can do without competent, loyal security forces who will nevertheless not allow themselves to be wantonly attacked even by friends of the regime, no institution can completely do without those who fit the profile of the discriminating guy. Some people have to be doing real work, and many others have to at least gesture toward it. The elites who realize that things have gone too far and are in a position to do something about it will be aware of the discriminating guy—they will be heartened by his presence and know how to use him. (And he will know how to be used.)\n\nThe discriminating guys will have acquired intimate knowledge of the enemy, and will be relieved to be able to deal with them ruthlessly. Entering the new regime, ensuring its transplantation with minimal disruption and immediately evident positive effects, will just be a continuation of what all these guys have been doing all along. They will be at the point where not only does talk of “non-discrimination” fill them with disgust, but where the stupidity of mass culture, mass propaganda, electoral politics, and elections themselves are becoming pretty clear. (The greatest service the left is providing us now—it’s really beyond estimation—is a demystification of liberal freedoms—speech, assembly, vote—far more powerful than anything we could have disseminated.\n\nNo one could say, “but here at least you’re free to say what you like” in any Western country with a straight face anymore.) Just like I just want to get my job done here, it will be easy to understand how the new national leadership just wants to get its job done as well—endless “debate” catering to the lowest common denominator, majority rule, a scandal-mongering media wouldn’t help me become a better engineer, doctor, teacher, manager, business owner, so why should it help him be a better sovereign? The only question I have is, how many discriminating guys and marginal security forces need to read analyses like this in order to be prepared to do what they must?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-grammar-of-technology-gablog",
      "title": "The Grammar of Technology",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here’s why I talk so much, and so abstractly, about language: my goal is to develop a way of thinking that would really be a way of speaking and writing that would dismantle and reassemble the utterances in which it participates and would do so in the process of participating; while at the same time just talking. This implies the possibility of people who would want to train themselves and each other in this manner of discourse. Why? Because it would make it possible to apply more focused and concentrated force upon all the weak points of the reigning ontology and construct a solid one out of its ruins. Central to this project is an account of technology, and ultimately contemporary technology, in terms of originary grammar. I touched a bit on this in a recent post ( Technology and Magic, Doings and Happenings ), but that is still preliminary. Ultimately, we need a way of creating an absolutist ontology out of the ways people already speak about communications and information technology. I’ll take another run at it here.\n\nI must first review the concept of “imperative exchange,” which I have made much use of and still see much promise in. I should emphasize that this is not a concept of Gans’s, but one I have developed through a reading of some of the early chapters of Gans’s The End of Culture . An ostensive culture is one that takes for granted the presence of the object, so only gestures are necessary—the most basic elements of ostensive culture are warnings which can be assumed to be immediately intelligible, like “look out!” These kinds of utterances can sound a lot like imperatives, and can even be imperatives, grammatically speaking, but if I tell you to “look out!” because there’s a bee flying around your ahead I’m not telling you what to do; it may not even clear what you should do, other than be aware. Human culture was originally ostensive, but it’s clear that it still contains a thick ostensive layer, and always must—the fact that we still have names testifies to that.\n\nThe imperative emerges (is discovered/invented) when the ostensive fails, or is issued “inappropriately.” One person names or refers to an object assumed to be present—the situation here must be less immediately urgent than “look out!,” perhaps involving some kind of cooperation—when the object is in fact absent, leading the other person, who wants to maintain linguistic presence, to retrieve it. Now we have an imperative. There is a lot involved here—to see how much procure the forthcoming re-issue, in streamlined form, of Gans’s seminal The Origin of Language —the beginnings of social hierarchy, but also a kind of intellectual hierarchy insofar as the person receiving the order understands the desire of the other better than the one giving orders does; we also have the beginning of a specifically human temporality, because, unlike the immediacy of the ostensive, here there is at least some lapse between the sign and its “completion.”\n\nOn the originary scene the center doesn’t “speak,” but for the members of the group the center is repelling their desire—that is, a kind of intentionality is attributed to the center, and registered in the sign, but this intentionality cannot be given “voice.” This becomes possible with the imperative. It becomes possible to make requests of the center, and to construct commands coming from the center. It’s impossible to imagine the members of the group making requests without framing that request in terms of their response to a command, since doing so would be tantamount to placing themselves outside of the sign and community. By the same token, compliance with any command from the center must be considered as looking toward an ultimate reward—first, it was the consumption of the central object itself, but as new imperatives are developed, the rewards to be expected from obedience will become more varied. Hence my claim that all interactions with the center take the form of an imperative exchange.\n\nThe next step is to posit that imperative exchange constitutes all of our relations with objects. If I work with a hammer, I am commanding the hammer to drive in the nail, while the hammer is constructed in such a way as to command me to hold it and swing it in just such a way. We see this most clearly when we make a mistake, or misuse a tool, and are forced (commanded) to ask, in essence, what does this thing want me to do with it? If we fix, refine, or improve our things, we are stepping back and giving them second order imperatives: we are telling them to work a certain way so as to tell us to work a certain way.\n\nWith the development of technology, “we” (this “we” becomes increasingly problematic) create an imperative order, in which we command things to command other things to command yet other things… until, finally, the command makes its way to the end users. The end users then engage in imperative exchange with the technological object as it presents itself to them, which of course occludes the entire technological or imperative order that brought it to them. Facebook or Twitter users could, of course, propose changing some elements of the social media they use, but only a very few could ever do so with the entire medium, and all the decisions made along the way, present in their thinking—and even if they are aware of it, there’s nothing they can do regarding the longer decision chain, and will ultimately end up busying themselves with the available options.\n\nAlong the way, of course, the development of the declarative proceeds parallel to imperative culture. To recapitulate briefly several earlier discussions, the declarative identifies something that prevents the completion of the imperative exchange. The earliest discourse was myth, which involved narratives of the central figure—usually some animal. The animal-ancestor created the group, supplies the group with its necessities, punishes the group, fights against the groups enemies, offers words of wisdom, etc. If the people were saved, it was because they needed saving, and if they needed saving it was because they failed to uphold their end of an imperative exchange, or perhaps the central figure didn’t hold up its end (it must have its reasons), and the narrative comes along to demonstrate what needs to be done to bring the system of exchange back into accord.\n\nIt eventually becomes possible to tell stories of members on the group, modeled on the stories of the central figure—what I have been calling “anthropomorphization.” Within the mythical and magical system, the distance between creators and end users remains very small—one could say it hardly exists at all. When we are nostalgic for “unalienated” conditions, in which all members of the community were in sync with each other and therefore with themselves, that is what we are yearning for.\n\nAnd it is, of course, what we can’t have. “Alienation” begins with the usurpation of the center by a member of the group, the Big Man. All imperative exchanges henceforth go through the Big Man. The Big Man himself emerges out of the process of imperative exchange: in the gift competition, whereby various tribal chiefs try to best each other in showing their ability to provide for the community, the Big Man is the one who so out-gifts the others that the competition is rendered moot. The Big Man is first of all the center of distribution: gifts come to him and he recycles them back out to the community. This in itself won’t change the system of production, but once the Big Man must mobilize the community in battle against other communities, led by other Big Men, and once the victorious Big Man dislocates the “subjects” of his enemies and must find some use for them himself, new modes of production are initiated, first of all based on slavery and war. The new modes of production require at least some degree of abstraction, as the sovereign now acts directly upon subjects outside of their established social settings and traditional modes of life.\n\nThe imperative, as I suggested above, contains a double asymmetry: on one side, it is a command, in which one person obeys another; on the other side, what is for the imperator or commander already done (the imperative for the one issuing it is really just a time-delayed ostensive) is for the recipient of the imperative a mere possibility. The one who will compose a declarative exploring the conditions of fulfilling the imperative will be he who has to carry it out. This is essentially the relation between the king and the priests: the priests need to construct a reality that enables the king’s command. This was the function of astrology, the foremost “science,” physical and political, in the ancient kingdoms.\n\nThe heavens represented a hierarchical, orderly world, just like the one on earth, and the high degree of predictability studies of the movements of the stars provided implied that such control was also possible on earth. The technological accomplishments of antiquity, their imperative order of things, comprised mostly extending the power and celebrating the glory of the God Emperor.\n\nThe axial acquisitions involved making the originary scene, rather than duplications of the worldly hierarchy, the model for both “priests” and “merchants.” The ruler must do justice and must give back to his people. The imperative order of things is gradually extended from massive hydraulic projects and war to industry. The model stays the same: the new proletariat is driven off their ancestral lands and atomized in cities, just like the slave hordes were once ripped from their now-destroyed communities. The industrialists are essentially generals. The command chain, leading from those who initiate the imperative order of things, and going through all those who extend the chain and standardize the “links,” until the end users, keeps getting longer.\n\nThe end users are now located somewhere in the production chain as well, but the most constrained end users are also those most distant from the origins of the production chain. The chain becomes more communicative, as innovations at one end transform the possibilities for those at the other end more rapidly. A technological system, like a discipline, is self-referential: everything signifies insofar as it directs us from one element of the system to another. Unlike the discipline, which the absolute imperative retrieved in the axial age commands us to form, the origin of the technological system is obscured by the system itself.\n\nThis really is the fundamental problem of modernity, the one chewed over endlessly by Marxists and traditionalists alike: how to address the incommensurability between the constantly transformed and extended imperative order of things and those who occupy only one link on the chain? This really means everyone, even if the alienation is most evident with those who overwhelming receive, and rarely issue, commands. But one more thing: the development of post-axial imperative orders of things coincided with the post-axial deconstruction of the imperative order of people—industrial and post-industrial armies and reserve armies have also been pawns and proxies in the power struggles of the elites; and, just as important, the imperative order of things has never been made to conform to the imperative order of people.\n\nThe state, in its process of centralization (creating an iron chain of command that somehow keeps producing broken links) has made itself a vehicle of masters of the imperative orders of things who want political order to be modeled on their own self-representation to the end users. The end users are locked into the liberal ratchet while the imperative order of things verticalizes and the imperative order of sovereignty sprawls (which sprawling in turn provides the model for orders to the end users). “Alienation” doesn’t quite cover it.\n\nThe path to order is to seek out a straight line of imperatives, as far back as you can go, and start obeying them. Let your declaratives expose the reciprocity that line of imperatives demands of you, and point out where those imperative exchanges have failed. At least some of those failed imperative exchanges can be reconstructed, and you can treat some power center as if it is more explicit about its place in the imperative order than it appears to be. That makes you a producer in the sovereign order, with some relation, however distant, to a possible end user. Producers attract other producers. Most of us will remain end users in the imperative order of things.\n\nStill, anyone can get to work on exposing the imperatives bearing down on the end user. Perhaps the most prominent one right now is to present yourself as data to be looted. But what could be more social than the data that regularly peels off of us? Our resistance to our conversion into data might simply the humiliation of having our final liberal illusions shredded. Data is itself converted back into the command to adhere to the norm, to contribute to the averaging out. Each such command can be placed on the boundary between absolutist and liberal ontologies: “they” want your data to sell you things, to sell you yourself as someone who transcends the data; but data unrolls difference after difference that the liberal order wants veiled but which can be so easily exposed with just a little nudge, a marginal inappropriateness in your obedience to some command.\n\nThe averaging out has more than a hint of mob rule, in which the imperative follows directly upon the ostensive; that’s a time to hearken back to an imperative that has been raised above the ostensive and provides a little model of secure rule: a model, a norm, rather than an average."
    },
    {
      "slug": "centerism-gablog",
      "title": "Centerism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The danger of titling one’s political position “centerism” is that it is bound to be confused with “centrist,” which will undoubtedly one day become a synonym for “stupid.” (Even spellcheck wants it to be “centrist.”) But centerism ties together ontology and practice in a way that is not necessarily explicitly absolutist, but certainly undergirds absolutism. Centerism entails always supporting the center or, more precisely, donating your resentment to the center. How do you know where the center is? It doesn’t necessarily always announce itself unambiguously, after all. But it’s always there, whe never you talk or think, on both the most micro and the most macro level.\n\nIf you utter a sentence, you direct someone’s attention to something different, maybe even only slightly different, than what they have been attending to. What you direct their attention to may be something they simply didn’t know about, but in some way they must have not been completely prepared to see it as significant. “Significant” is identical to “central.” You are redirecting, with your utterance, their attention from one center to another. We are never centerless, but one center is marginal relative to another. So the problem is distinguishing the central (or perhaps it’s best to say “centeral”) from the marginal. It is when what you have been taking to be a center enters into crisis that its subsistence upon another center becomes evident.\n\nLet’s take the example of two criminals, with a prisoner-type dilemma. They are about to be captured, and each could find a way to abandon the other and cop a plea; or, they can take their chances sticking together in trying to escape or refusing to cooperate. In talking or thinking about it, they put their “partnership” at the center; we can identify in what this partnership consists more precisely: specific events, which included or implied certain commitments (certain imperatives) which, retroactively, is constructed as a “bond” they share. What has sustained that center up until this point is mutually profitable enterprises, but maybe other things as well—shared threats, close calls which enhanced trust between them, maybe they like each other, etc.\n\nNow that this center is coming under pressure, it must either transcend the form it has taken so far (as the likelihood of future profitable enterprises becomes vanishingly tiny) or collapse—in the latter case, in will be replaced by some more sustainable center (like repentance for criminal activity) or reduce each man to an even smaller center, his own selfishness.\n\nTo be a centerist is to seek out the more sustainable center, and do your part to make it even more sustainable. For the criminal, that might mean abandoning the co-conspirator/friend and finding in the legal process that now frames him examples and signs of significance to which he can convert; or, it might mean sticking with his friend and sacrificing himself in the name of a friendship that now means something more than it did previously. Even in the latter case, assuming the two survive, the fact that a new center has been found might open both of them to yet other centers, centers that it’s no longer so easy to dismiss as relevant only to the less lucky, brave, or skilled. Maybe the two friends can now encourage each other in self-reformation projects. Their resentment toward law, or order, or civilization, or respectability, or whatever it was, must now be donated toward that center in order to make it more capable of ordering such self-reformation projects.\n\nLiberal GA focuses on one element of the originary scene while absolutist GA focuses on another. The question is which can frame the other. Remember the originary scenario: a group of hominids, more advanced than other species in the sense of being more mimetic, surrounding some object which they all hunger for, with the hunger of each mimetically inflaming the hunger of the others. The pecking order, which would have the alpha eat first, then the beta, etc., cannot contain this mimetic contagion, and some new form of order is necessary. One member of the group, perhaps the alpha under the sudden, unprecedented pressure of mass resistance, but at any rate probably someone close to the ‘top” and therefore likely to be noticed, converts his gesture toward an appropriation of the object into a gesture of deferral—pointing to the object in such a way as to demonstrate that he will not fight others for the object. By some process, which we can imagine unfolding in any number of ways, the newly invented sign is used by others, as the mimetic contagion is reversed, and all stand pointing to, designating, the object.\n\nNow, when we talk about a center, we’re thinking about a circle, and a circle is defined by each of its points being equidistant from the center with all the others. It is very likely that the originary event would be remembered and commemorated in this way in subsequent rituals, and then myths, because it is the way of remembering and commemorating most likely to retain the full power of the event itself: it directs attention to its completion while disregarding the inevitably messy process. But, in fact, it is very unlikely that all members of the group would be equidistant from the center at the moment of cessation.\n\nSome would be very close, as the sign would probably have first been issued by a few co-contenders, who may have then actually have had to cooperate so as to restrain others, but would at any rate have been the model for them. We should think in terms of points distributed unevenly around a center, perhaps more of an oval or obloid, with a more complex array of symmetries. Liberal GA works with the circle model, and can therefore emphasize the equidistance from the center over the center itself—implicitly, at least the equidistance, which is to say the “equality” of all the members is what produces the center, and it is that equality that is therefore to be preserved above all. Absolutist GA, or centerism, sees the defense of the center by those who best see the threats to it as primary, since that defense is what holds together the positions arrayed around the center.\n\n“Act so that there is no use in a centre,” declared Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons . For a centerist, there might be nothing more perverse than this imperative, but what better way to find where the center is than to act as if there is no use in it. Such “acting” might be carried out for real, in which case its destructive consequences can be studied after the fact, or it can be carried out in a controlled way, in which case it’s a discovery process. If there really is a center, we should have faith that all attempts to subvert, evade, deny ignore, etc., that center will simply reveal it more clearly. Acting so that there is no use in a center would mean multiplying imaginable actions and treating them all as equally possible, setting aside all the frames that have always already ordered possible actions in terms of moral preferences and probability.\n\nThis is not for everybody, only for those conducting inquiries into the center, which is to say only those who want to follow the source of the crisis to its lair. It is the practice of a discipline, a way of training attention. The even more radical direction Stein took this in was to apply it to the sentence, treating each word in the sentence as equally important—the sentence might just as well be “about” the conjunction “and” as about the noun.\n\nIt may sound bizarre, but it’s really just a more consistent way of holding variables constant, or acting in accord with the commonplace phrase, “all things being equal.” The result (maybe not for Stein—al though no one is completely sure about her, given her right-wing, philo-fascist politics—but for the centerist) is a reassembly of the elements of any event or utterance or discourse into a hierarchy of centers, much like the arrangement of scattered metal bits around a magnet. We’re talking about something now—well, first of all, what, exactly, is that “something”—let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing, more or less.\n\nIt’s good to be able to get at that thing from various angles, to zoom in or out, to track the progress of our shared focus. Whatever it is that we’re talking about, it’s something that gave us pause—we have not fully appropriated it; it resists our attempt to possess or dismiss it. It is to that extent a center. As a center it is also an example of centrality as such, and we embed it in a new center by directing our attention to that. Even if we’re just gossiping about our friend’s marriage, something about marriage, or male-female relations, or our friend, or ways of talking about any or all of these things, must be holding our attention to this. Our discussion will either find its way toward that other center, or it will degenerate into “trashing” our friend (“consuming” him, so to speak), or we will simply lose interest.\n\nSo, in every case, you either turn your attention to the center around which the center you now address is orbiting, or you “trash” or discard that center. Trashing and discarding can be of world historical importance, as liberalism has demonstrated. Now, of course, we lay the ground for a whole new set of annoying, fruitless arguments: how can we tell what is preserving and what is trashing, etc.; and, it’s true, such things are not self-evident. But a good sign that one is preserving rather than trashing is that you can (or at least are willing to) show that those you say are trashing are in fact engaged with a center that, for whatever reason (the more you can clarify possible reasons, the better), they have failed to embed in another center.\n\nThere are intimations of centering in even the most violent trashing. Even liberals and leftists have their origin stories—a schoolyard bully, an obnoxious, unjust boss, stories of injustice in the old country told by your grandmother, a visceral sense of compassion for a homeless man, or even frustration at some relative’s obtuseness, etc. There will be a perfectly adequate centerist or absolutist response to all such tales of origin, while the liberal or leftist, the distracter and trasher par excellence, can never stay focused on the need to preserve the center.\n\nThis distinction, in fact, provides us with a way of engaging the liberal as needed, while strengthening our own centerist disciplinary spaces: what center are you defending, and what is the center of that center? They will be with you in the opening—I’m defending basic human dignity! Human rights! Or, even, the Constitution! But what then? If we argue about what constitutes human dignity or human rights, what guides our arguments—what makes one way of understanding “human dignity” or “human rights” more plausible, sustainable, or legitimate than any other? They will drop out quickly, and implicitly concede they are just trashers (I’m defending human dignity against …!), but any terms regarding human goods of any kind whatsoever assume reference to a disciplinary center and a sovereign center: this is the kind of thinking that has converged on this question or category, and here is where I am within that kind of thinking; here is the kind of sovereign I imagine enforcing or protecting “rights” or “dignity” and here is the kind of order that makes such a sovereign imaginable.\n\nThe liberal will have dropped out by now, because it is these very questions that he is determined to trash. He’ll just point to a complaint that won’t be heard if this line of questioning continued. And why should that complaint be heard, by whom, and within what terms of reference? Well, those are precisely the kinds of questions that silence the complaint.\n\nThe ultimate center is the originary event. This is an obviously outrageously ambitious claim, but the only center all centerists, which is to say all absolutists, all reactionaries, all who want to overturn completely the liberal (dis)order, could acknowledge is the sacred center generated on the originary scene hypothesized by Eric Gans. There is nothing there to offend Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian, or any adherent to any other form of high culture or transcendent faith. Even more, each of these faiths of intellectual commitments would be strengthened by thinking of them as a particular form in which the originary event has been revealed and retrieved.\n\nAccepting this common origin would not eliminate disagreements, but would ensure that all disagreements remain centered, as a shared effort to discover more of the center’s imperatives and to embed them in our lives. The very fact of language proves Gans’s hypothesis, unless someone can come up with a better one (and good luck with that!). We can speak with each other because we share a center. Our speech, therefore, is always concerned with seeing the center, hearing it, protecting it, learning from it. Let all your talk be of center and origin, and you will dispel all distractions and outlast all enemies, whose curses will become blessings."
    },
    {
      "slug": "declarative-culture-and-imperium-in-imperio-gablog",
      "title": "Declarative Culture and Imperium in Imperio",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Marx and Engels have been heavily criticized for not providing a detailed model of the communist society they hoped would succeed capitalism, but on this point, at least, they were right. Leaving the details out allows for steady focus on the contradictions you want to exploit; providing a detailed model provides you with something new to argue about, even if there’s absolutely no way of settling all the questions without having power in the first place. So, it provides you with a distraction. I think that we can push this point even further: once a political project has a canonical model, filled with procedures, organization structures, required policies, and so on, it also has a permanent basis for political conflict based on the claim that the actual leadership is not in conformity with the “real” project. This argument is really a corollary of the argument for personal, non-procedural rule central to absolutism.\n\nThere are good reasons why this kind of conflict is endemic with political movements in general, and particularly those aiming at substantive change. The creation of a “doctrine” and a “program” is itself a response to conflict—movements usually start by being for and against something very specific but the specific things they are for and against become vaguer and more complex the closer you get to achieving them; what was originally thought to be “the problem” turns out to be just a subset of a larger problem, and maybe the first “solution” just brings that larger problem into view, and even creates new problems itself.\n\nSo, the only way to quell all the arguments about “what are we trying to accomplish here” is to get something down on paper that can garner enough agreement among the leadership so that the rest can be bullied into line. Still, everyone knows that if this or that detail of the doctrine or program has to be modified or jettisoned in the interest of gaining greater proximity to power, it will be—thereby confirming that managing internal power dynamics is the real purpose of the doctrine and program. That’s why the insider who knows where all the pieces are will generally win out over the one who has best mastered the doctrine and program.\n\nWe can formulate the problem, and thereby a way of avoiding it, in a more fundamental way. A doctrine aims at logical clarity: it proposes certain premises, and then claims that, if those premises are accepted, certain other claims must be accepted as true; and, if those claims are accepted as true, given certain values, certain conclusions must “therefore” be reached and subsequent actions taken. “Programs” are structured the same way, usually in long lists of declaratives and the imperatives that logically follow from them. We are completely within ‘declarative culture” here, and declarative culture is predicated on the banishment of imperatives and ostensives that don’t “follow” from declaratives.\n\nOnce you have banished imperatives (in particular, because if the imperatives go, the ostensives go with them), you are wiping the slate clean and setting all prior obligations, commitments and loyalties aside. You take as your starting point the attempt to construct a discourse which everyone will be “compelled” to agree with, at least if they accept the basic premises of declarative culture. And the basic premises of declarative culture are that, first, in using words, you rely upon established (i.e., through the dictionary, or through some accepted theory) uses of words; and, second, that in constructing relations between words and sentences, you base such relations solely on grammatical relations, which is to say, the substantive-predicate relation (substance-quality, for logicians) and hierarchy, and words (also to be used in formally established, with increasing rigor as declarative culture deepens) like “because,” “therefore,” “if,” and so on.\n\nTo return to David Olson, the scholar of the history and consequences of literacy I have been referring to in recent posts, writing is itself a metalanguage identifying elements of and relations within (but invisible to) previously existing oral language. The development of logic is the further development of the metalanguage already implicit in literacy: it uses the relations between words abstracted in in the creation of written language as a way of assessing and regulating the use of language. In other words, once a discourse has been produced, we can use a model of logic to determine whether it is “logical,” “rational,” “true,” and so on.\n\nBut, Olson emphasizes, these metalanguages tell us nothing about how the discourse is actually produced in the first place, which is to say they tell us nothing about how we actually think. This should be obvious if we consider an even more basic metalanguage than logic: grammar. We can easily see when a sentence has a grammatical error, and we can, if we are informed regarding grammatical terminology, identify the error very precisely, but no one composes a sentence in their mind according to grammatical rules (no one thinks, “now I have to connect a predicate to this subject, now I need an adverb to modify the predicate,” etc.). Interestingly, Olson himself has virtually nothing to say about what we are actually doing when we think and compose sentences in our mind—he seems to hope the metalanguage will seep in sufficiently to make us somewhat better at it.\n\nBut we can develop a pretty good idea of what we are doing when we compose sentences in our mind, and Michael Tomasello’s Constructing a Language is very helpful here. The answer, according to Tomasello, is simple, and fairly obvious in retrospect: in constructing our own utterances, we work with the utterances we have heard and used many times already; what he calls “chunks” of discourses, or what rhetoricians call “commonplaces,” and grammarians call “constructions.” Better and more experienced writers and thinkers have a wider range of “chunks” available to them and, just as important, acquire the skill of varying, and “riffing on” the chunks they are familiar with in accord with the present “rhetorical situation.”\n\nEven more, we can learn to identify the chunks others are using, and put them to new uses by situating them in relation to some of our “our” chunks. Along the way, you probably will get more grammatically proficient and “logical,” but, even more important, you will get more discerning, more comical, more satirical, more alert to the manipulation of clichés, more capable of subverting others’ clichés without falling into your own, more patient when it comes to looking over sentences so non-obvious absurdities can strike you, more detached from the metalanguages so as to be able to mix them up with the “primary” languages they want to expel from their own precincts, better at staying within a particular “topic” past the point where all the conventional things have been said about it so it becomes necessary to find something new to say, etc. These are the kinds of things we are doing when we are “thinking.”\n\nTomasello’s “user-based” model of language points to the ways in which we can avoid being mesmerized by metalanguage, or declarative culture. Privileging metalanguage, or declarative culture, and therefore the “doctrine” and “program,” is like setting up a permanent imperium in imperio in your own mind, or in the collective discursive space you inhabit. It will always be possible to show how some discourse violates the rules of logic or reference and is therefore “invalid.” If it’s not possible, those rules can always be refined further so that it becomes possible. Whoever is most proficient in mastering the metalanguage has a permanent power base, while being unable to actually rule, because that would leave him vulnerable to the very same criticisms, thereby undermining his power base.\n\n(Every organization has those who are always referring to “rules” and “procedures” in frustrating any attempt to arrive at a decision, doesn’t it?) But the installation of the imperium in imperio in the shared thinking of even the more decisive or “alpha” members of the group is the more devastating effect, because it blocks real thinking and inhibits initiative and a willingness to experiment. It may take a dozen violations of logic and regulations in order to arrive at a direction that will in fact be far less vulnerable to charges of “fallacies” than one arrived at under the strict supervision of logical regulators. This, I suppose, is what is meant by “anti-fragile.”\n\nHopefully, it’s needless to say that I’m not arguing for “spontaneity.” The first point to be made is that hierarchy and a clear chain of command is prior to the specifications of doctrine and program. But the hierarchy itself must of course presuppose whatever it is the hierarchy is for. We do need to start with a clear intellectual, conceptual distinction, and a minimal model. Social relations precede individuals; relations are always articulated, and therefore hierarchical; the center is ontologically prior to the margins; any relationship (institution, society, etc.) has an origin; origin is essence; and so on. In working with the “chunks” of language presented to us by an overwhelmingly liberal social order, we keep bringing these distinctions and the models they presuppose to bear in reworking those chunks, turning them against their origins. Inflexibility regarding the basic distinction and model allows for maximum flexibility in “de-chunking” the constraining metalanguages and generating new chunks to send out into the world (what we might call “memes”).\n\nInstead of thinking in terms of striving to conform and force others to conform to logical models, we can learn to think, more productively, in terms of thought experiments. This is already closer to the way most of us think, which is by using examples to probe a particular situation or bring a problem into focus. A thought experiment is essentially an example transformed and given greater reach by being “processed” through our a priori distinctions. How would a particular discourse look if we hypothesized the origin of its governing concepts? How would one of the “we should…” quasi-imperatives compulsively issued by pundits and would-be power brokers look different if we imagined the concrete hierarchy and series of practices that would be required to implement it?\n\nHow can we place an “individual choice” in a new frame by embedding it in the extensive network of relations that make it seem more like automatized mimicry than a “choice”? In a sense, “all” this really involves is repeating the chunk in sentences and discourses where it doesn’t really “belong,” which dissolves its naturalness in an acid bath of highly constructed and power-mediated discourses and chains of command.\n\nA useful criterion (a kind of minimal metalanguage) for the creation of thought experiments would draw on the old appearance/essence distinction: imagine an entity or situation whose appearance is both almost indistinguishable from, while also diametrically opposed to, its essence; for example, a very close friend who simulates trustworthiness almost perfectly while systematically betraying you at every moment. What would be the single, barely discernable “tell” that would enable us to identify the essence behind the appearance? We could answer this question in various ways, for various kinds of friendships (or relationships relying upon trust in general), various forms of betrayal, and so on.\n\nThat’s why it’s an experiment, to be talked about as long as it’s useful to do so, and not a logical conclusion to be deduced. This is similar to the proposal I’ve made in previous posts for treating declaratives as imperatives: in order for me to really “believe” (belief, for Olson, is a metalinguistic term affirming the “sincerity conditions” of an utterance—it doesn’t refer to some “inner state”) a purely abstract, logical argument, purporting to depend upon nothing more than the established meanings of its words, firmly established referents, and non-fallacious connections, what commands would I in effect have to follow, and would in fact already be following?\n\nPart of the purpose here is to bring out of the shadows the vast array of authorities that must be acknowledged and obeyed without question in order to “believe” anything whatsoever; the other part of the purpose is to be able to obey them in a way that winnows out all those within the chains of command who don’t, in fact, command anything, leaving it to those who do command to actually do so. With the declarative imperium in imperio , thinking is engineered so as to undermine hierarchies; with imperative de-chunking, thinking is designed so as to bring hierarchies into sharper focus."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-meaning-of-meaning-and-metalanguage",
      "title": "The Meaning of Meaning, and Metalanguage",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "“Meaning” has come to take on what seem to be two very different, well, meanings: on the one hand, it refers to the shared use of linguistic items—if we know what a word or sentence or passage of texts “means,” then we can use or discuss it with other intelligibly; but, of course, “meaning” has also taken on a more ponderous, or pretentious, “existential” sense, as in the “meaning of life”—a phrase that is endlessly parodied but still seem to pass as verbal currency with undiminished value. People still speak unironically about finding meaning in their lives, their work, their relationships, their families, etc. The persistence of such a, strictly speaking, meaningless, term, suggests that it’s signifying something that couldn’t be signified otherwise, and perhaps its continuing power lies in the fact that there is really only one “meaning.”\n\nIn other words, when someone speaks of a loss of meaning in the “existential” sense, they are really speaking of a loss of meaning in the “literal” sense, i.e., words (and signs more generally) don’t “mean” anymore, they have no shared sense and reference, and so no longer help us find our place in the world.\n\nMeaning is ultimately grounded in ostensivity—to put it crudely, any utterance points at something, tells you what to notice. Even the most abstract theoretical discourse makes some distinction between one way of using a concept and another. Of course, whether that distinction will “mean” something depends upon what the concepts themselves point to, and what whatever they point to points to, and so on. At the end of it we don’t necessarily get to “that guy, over there,” but we get to an ongoing conversation, in which the references can be traced back and held onto by those intensely interested in that conversation.\n\nWhat seems like unintelligible jargon is very often a way of phrasing some claim that has resulted from the cumulative responses to attacks on a dozen previous ways of phrasing it. But for any utterance there needs to be a center of attention for the utterance to make sense, or “mean.” “So, I’ll see you tomorrow at 8” makes perfect sense to the friend you been arranging dinner with; if you said it to a stranger on the subway, it would seem senseless, bizarre, even menacing. You know what each of the individual words means, of course, but if someone said that right out of nowhere you might not even comprehend the actual words—even framing sounds to yourself as meaningful words and sentences requires some preparatory context. And then they would seem like they might have multiple meanings, none of which would be easy to exclude.\n\nSo, a lot needs to be in place for utterances to “mean”: a language, perhaps a particular dialect, a slang, but also a community, an institution, and a history of all of these things. The converse, then, is also true: when utterances “mean” consistently, it means that all of those things are in place. If all those things—a language, a community, a family, an institution, a vocation, and ways of thinking about all these things that don’t insult our morals and intelligence—are all we want, then all we want is for all of the linguistic acts we perform and witness to mean. The things we associate with an existential lack of meaning—a purposeless job, a lack of understanding within one’s family, alienation from the morals and (no longer) shared purposes of one’s community—really come down to signs that don’t find their way to ostensives.\n\nThe “sense” of a job is an activity in which you earn your living by doing some work of value to others; the “sense” of family is a privileged space of love, affection, solidarity and the transmission of a heritage to the next generation—but these words have no “referents” in your actual job and family. Words like “job” and “family,” and other associated ones like “love” and “purpose” literally don’t mean anything, or perhaps, sinisterly, mean the opposite of what they are supposed to.\n\nIf liberal modernity, as it has often been accused of doing, in fact destroys meaning, it is on this level of linguistic meaning that we should be able to identify its effects. If we just look at the most basic liberal concepts we find a junkyard of meaningless phrases: “individual,” “equality,” “autonomy,” “rights,” “freedoms,” and so on. These are all intrinsically corrosive concepts: one asserts one’s individuality against the norms of the community: we can understand the norms (al though there’s something corrosively liberal about “norm”) because we can constantly apply them to our own and others’ acts, but we can’t understand what it would mean to be against or outside of those norms.\n\n“Equality” is asserted against a perceived “inequality,” but no one has any idea what “real” equality would mean—even the complaint against “inequality” attacks an established order in the name of emptiness. “Rights” is a good example of a word that has been rendered meaningless by liberalism: it means something for a peasant to assert his rights, say for grazing land for his sheep, against the lord, because the rights refer to longstanding practices overseen by mutually accepted authorities. Today, “rights” have almost exactly the opposite sense, that of a claim upon other’s money, or respect, or attention that has never been acknowledged and, increasingly, never even imagined before.\n\nA “right” now is a demand that meaning be conferred where it hasn’t been previously, but that is precisely the way “meaning” doesn’t work: meaning is the name given to an emergent site of shared attention. Demands for rights are deliberately destructive of meaning, because the world of meanings is what prevented attention from being lavished on the plaintiff. The most obvious example is transgenderism, which demands that we accept that gender is both all-important and absolutely irrelevant—an almost perfect sink of meaning. It follows from this that persistent, precise, unapologetic linguistic analysis of almost any utterance in a liberal order should prove devastating for liberalism.\n\nThere is another stress test for meaning that, while exploited and exacerbate by liberalism, must be attributed to the centralization of institutional power advanced by, but irreducible to, liberalism. We can attribute the centralization that has been given one, particularly baleful, shape by liberalism to literacy. Literacy pretty much guarantees social hierarchy. The reason for this is the metalanguage writing already is, and which it ceaselessly generates. I have recourse here again to David Olson, who points out that since the invention of the alphabet to record utterances required a study of language in order to determine what, exactly, had to be recorded, writing is essentially an inquiry into language.\n\nOnce we have writing, we can distinguish between proper and improper, correct and incorrect uses of language—distinctions that could never occur within an oral society except, perhaps, within the very controlled setting of ritual utterance. Once the form of a grammatical sentence is set, it becomes possible to make grammatical errors and to be “illogical.” Writing first of all represents a speech act in a specific setting, and must supply everything that is lost in the absence of the actual interlocutors—a whole metalanguage emerges to enable the reader to understand that not only did someone say something, but he said it in a particular way, one that would be evident to those present on the scene—he “suggested,” he “implied,” he “insinuated,” etc.\n\nFrom this representation of a speech scene comes the creation of what Olson, following Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (in their Clear and Simple as the Truth ), calls “classic prose,” which is a transparent form of writing aimed at ensuring that the reader sees and hears exactly what the writer does. From classic prose emerges a whole new metalanguage, used to distinguish writing that more closely approximates the norm of classic prose from writing that doesn’t. All the commonsense ways we have of praising or condemning writing and thinking derives from the metalinguistic norms of classic prose. Writing or thinking is “clear” or “obscure,” “understandable” or ‘incoherent,” “organized” or “confused.” More precise rules for writing can be further derived from these values, including how to structure sentences, paragraphs and essays (the infamous five-paragraph essay inculcated into every American high school student is an instantiation of the values of classic prose).\n\nIt would be very good if everyone were proficient in classic prose (al though maybe not if that were all they were proficient in), but the problem with these metalinguistic terms is that they are, strictly speaking, meaningless. As Olson points out, they allow us to assess a piece of writing, but they tell us nothing about how the writing was produced. A brief discussion with any college student, barely literate or hyper-literate, will confirm this. Ask him what he was trying to do: well, I just wanted to be “clear.” Why did you choose this word—well, it seemed to me to make things clearer. These metalinguistic terms have a sense and referent for those practiced in assessing writing (al though even here one will find wildly differing assessments of the same piece of writing from equally “qualified” individuals) but none at all for the person doing the thinking and writing.\n\nNow, if this were all there were to modern metalanguage, the teaching of writing would be the extremely frustrating profession it is, but the smarter students, given a chance to read serious books and asked to write challenging papers, would still, through sheer will and more or less obsequious imitation of their professors, figure it out, so we’d still have our academics and other specialists in the metalanguages of the literate arts.\n\nThe problem is that the devastation of meaning wrought by metalanguages extends across the entire field of civilized society. Here is Olson on the way in which the literate order, which is also the bureaucratic order, transforms virtues into values:\n\nIn a modern bureaucratic world, knowledge, virtue and ability take on a new form. Institutions such as science preempt knowledge, justice systems preempt virtue, and functional roles preempt general cognitive ability. Thus, ability, knowledge and virtue are construed and pursued less in the form of private mental states and moral traits of individuals than in the form of competence in the roles, norms, and rules of the formal bureaucratic institutions in which they live and work.\n\nWe can see metalanguage at work all the way through here. “Science” emerges from metalanguages created to assess individual claims to “know” something; “justice systems” emerge from metalanguages assessing competing claims regarding the “goodness” of someone’s acts; thinking like a lawyer, or a doctor, or a history professor are the results of institutionalized metalanguages which reduces the person who talks, however intelligently, about well-being, or the law, or history to a “buff,” or a “crank.” An ordinary claim to “know” something is rendered meaningless, while the professional doesn’t speak of knowing anymore because he makes claims that undergo a formal vetting process that has its own internal norms: the point is not whether what you say is true, but whether it has been verified.\n\nAnd, as I pointed out in my previous post, the metalanguages become vehicles of power and sites of power struggles—if you control the metalanguage, you not only can “assess” others without any accountability but you couldn’t even tell them how to do better if you wanted to, because the metalanguage only, in a circular manner, can tell its subjects to do what they aren’t doing now. When central power is secure, the metalanguages co-exist with ordinary languages—the academic need not police the claims to “know” things made by laymen, and may even accept that within that attentional space “knowing” is in fact the relevant goal.\n\nWhen central power is insecure and a site of struggle, the metalanguages are occupied by those who wish to expand their power and can only do so by delegitimizing non-metalinguistic spaces; in turn the metalanguages themselves abandon their primary function of aligning reality with authority and become power-crazed.\n\nWe can’t reject metalanguage, of course—even the most basic mental verbs, belonging to Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage, like “think” and, certainly, “know,” have something proto-metalinguistic to them. “Know,” in particular, is after the fact and evaluative: does someone really know what they claim to know, or do they just think it, or want it to be true? Epistemologies never really tell you how to get better at knowing things—they just provide models for assessing claims to knowledge. Even “thinking” can only be described in its effects—treatises on “how to think” are really logic handbooks, or lists of tests or questions you should submit your claims to knowledge to.\n\nIn that case, the focus on metalanguage provides us with insight into the nature of language, which must always presuppose a referent because there was one on the originary scene, but is really “about” the gathering of a community around something that constitutes them as a community. Referring to people thinking, wanting and knowing allows us to make sense of the various acts we see people engage in, but the words generate the illusion that there is something “behind” the words, some mechanism or homunculus inside doing something that we call “thinking.” In other words, there’s no “real” thinking, knowing, wanting, saying or feeling that we would get to once we peeled away all the metalanguage. So, the explosion of metalanguages does us a service by letting us see that all linguistic acts take on their meaning within a community of users who need to maintain a shared center.\n\nOne of the primary metalinguistic terms is the distinction between “mention” and “use”—the latter involves the use of the word in “natural language,” while the former involves referring to the word as a word. The way to create meaning against encroaching metalinguistic facilitated meaninglessness is to move back and forth across the (meta)language border, which is to say, using and mentioning words simultaneously. (For example: “word” is a four letter word.) This is how you make it clear that you are always within language, and create disciplinary spaces within the metalinguistic disciplines. This could produce a metalinguistic vocabulary that produces imperatives, tells you what to do, rather than assessing you from a putatively unassailable position.\n\nOf course, if we list a set of rules for doing this we’d just have another metalanguage. Use the words others mention, and mention the words others use, and use and mention them in turn yourself, and you will develop new practices of (meta)language. This by itself won’t bring order to the world of referents liberalism has disordered, but oscillating between the use and mention of words will create the kind of disciplinary spaces that keep checking reality along with the linguistic means we develop for attending to reality. Such spaces will have an advantage over a liberalism that is spiraling out of control by swinging back and forth between aimless decentering and punitive assessing."
    },
    {
      "slug": "within-language",
      "title": "Within Language",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A very common comic device is to place a character who is locked into another, usually archaic or ridiculed, set of manners, habits and assumptions, in a group of normal people. ( Don Quixote is an excellent example.) The source of the humor is then the constant misunderstandings, large and small, that result—if it’s done well, the audience can see how the same incident or words can make sense in completely different, but in each case perfectly reasonable ways, by the odd and the normal characters, respectively. The device is effective for two, seemingly contradictory, reasons: first, it reassures us in our normality, telling us that we are not locked into some bizarre set of rituals, routines, and denials; and, second, it disturbs our complacency by letting us see that we are, in fact, so locked in, that under certain circumstance our tacit assumptions would make us look as foolish as the character we laugh at.\n\nThe fish and water analogy can work here: we are so much within language, moving in it, “breathing” it, certainly thinking in it, that we don’t even notice it. Language is transparent to us insofar as we only see through it to the things which direct each other’s attention to; it only becomes opaque once language itself can become the thing we attend to. The shift can be effected by something as simple as someone asking what you “meant” by using a particular word (what you meant , not what the word means )—now, you’re paying attention to words rather than things, or, to use Frege’s terms, “sense” rather than “reference.”\n\nWhen language is transparent we refer to things and engage each other fairly unproblematically, not necessarily without conflicts but without constant misunderstandings; by the same token, everyone not inside our language is a barbarian. When we become aware of language, formalistic and seemingly niggling disputes ensue, but we are also capable of processing a far wider variety of “language games” or discourses. David Olson locates this difference in the emergence of literacy, which makes all language users linguists, to some extent—when children learn to sound out a word according to its letters, or when anyone uses the dictionary to settle a dispute over the meaning or use of a word, they are attending to the properties of language, rather than just using it.\n\nThis ability to attend to and study the properties of language makes us vulnerable to the illusion that we are outside of language, and can examine any use of language in accord with some extra-linguistic notion of truth or good; the contrast with pre-literate peoples, whose customs and beliefs are likely to seem arbitrary, bizarre, and therefore extremely localized, encourages the literate in this vanity. In fact, it is literacy itself than generates a concern with “logic,” and turns logic into a means for assessing the acceptability of a particular utterance: “logic” is really the abstraction of the grammatical properties that become visible in a written language, and the projection of these properties onto some disembodied mind.\n\nThe linguistic turn in Western thought in the 20 th century derives from this recognition, which was certainly aided by both the emergence of mass literacy and mass education, and by the emergence of new media that made it possible to place writing in a broader historical context. There are metalanguages—writing itself, as I just pointed out, generates metalanguages—but there is no all-inclusive metalanguage, and each metalanguage can be treated as a language by some new metalanguage in turn. The fact that one can easily imagine a comic routine (surely some along these lines have already been created) in which a linguist shows himself incapable of using language in some situation precisely because of his hyperawareness of language demonstrates that any metalanguage is just waiting to be swallowed up by some meta-metalanguage or dissolved back into language itself.\n\nNow, let’s talk about power. Access to a metalanguage gives one power over those without one: the history of civilization can be, to a great extent, be summed up in this observation. But having one’s power rely on possession of a metalanguage leaves one vulnerable in important ways. It becomes important to maintain a monopoly on the metalanguage, and therefore to restrict access to it and, more importantly, to make the metalanguage immune to appropriation by those it is meant to exclude—this involves distancing the metalanguage from reality in the interest of maintaining its own coherence. As power is divided, conflict is introduced into the metalanguages: if the teaching of literature becomes central to educating the next generation of elites and essentials, then everyone will want a piece of it.\n\nIn a more literate society, the distinction between metalanguage and language is constantly shifting, so the institutions housing the accredited metalanguages have to keep finding new ways of fortifying the distinction, often leading to various demonizations and anathematizations that would be completely unintelligible to those not within that particular metalanguage. Those within the fortified metalanguages find their language to be both more transparent and more opaque than those who are, relatively speaking, within language: more transparent, because the metalanguage itself is predicated upon vigorously enforced exclusions, so every use of the metalanguage massively reinforced in-group solidarity against obviously deficient outsiders; more opaque, because the more institutionalized and abstracted metalanguages spawn conflicts over the terms of the metalanguage with increasingly rapidity, so that no one really quite knows what anything means.\n\nThis situation provides an opening for those who access the metalanguages, obey the primary imperative of metalanguage to inquire into language, and through language into the center, who accept their being within language, which is to say accept that their own metalanguage is as bounded and centered as any language, who discern the power relations measured and enabled by the metalanguage and, perhaps most of all, understand that their metalanguage “wants” to keep crossing over into language and other metalanguages just as much as it wants to explore the world of signs it has itself generated. So, what does this entail?\n\nThink about one of the most basic ways in which we maintain linguistic presence with others: by using the same words as they have used, but to do so in such a way as to show, first, that we noticed that they used the word in a particular way, for purposes of their own; second, to show that we too can use that word in a way somewhat distant from its more normal uses, and to do so in such a way as demonstrate implicitly that we understand what they were doing with it. This way of using language can be used to undermine an enemy, to enhance intimacy with a lover, to clarify a concept or to sustain a basis for negotiation. It involves playing both ends of the use/mention continuum, both using the word literally, referentially and meaningfully and referring to the word as a word with multiple uses.\n\nThis what everyone is doing all the time—everyone is within language, always. There’s nowhere else to be. If it seems to you that you’re just talking directly about reality, that just means your language is transparent and you’re unaware of how it’s informed by various metalanguages. It seems first of all imperative, then, in the spirit of formalism, to know where you stand and speak linguistically and metalinguistically; and, you can only know that by enacting it, by referring to things only made visible by the metalanguage you inhabit and referring to the words that makes those things visible in that way. This leads you into paradoxical territory.\n\nLet’s take, for example, Moldbug’s claim that any territory is ruled by an absolute sovereign, and that therefore anything that happens in that territory is permitted by the sovereign. We can see right away this is not really an empirical claim—it can’t be proved or disproved. Point to some junkie shooting himself up in an alley, or a couple of thugs pummeling an old woman in the slums. Does the sovereign really permit these things? Well, in the sense that the sovereign issued a writ of mainlining to the junkie, and one of assault to the thugs, or that he gave orders from the top that went down through the ranks until some local precinct officer whispered to the junkie and thug to do their thing, no, of course not.\n\nBut in the sense that the sovereign has set priorities, delegated powers, distributed resources and signaled intentions, and has done so in such a way as leave the junkie and thugs on the fringes of his calculations, or on the calculations he has his subordinates do, yes, he has permitted it.\n\nSo, Moldbug’s claim is about framing, rather than empirical observation. Frames contend with, and supersede other frames—Moldbug here is contesting, and trying to supersede, a liberal frame which would see in the junkie and the thug effects of the spontaneous order of liberalism, or perhaps of stupid government interference in that spontaneous order. Which frame is better? We’d like to say the one that eliminates the anomalies generated within the previous one, and that accounts for facts made observable but left unexplained by an existing frame. And to some extent that’s true, but much more so the more the knowledge in question is sequestered from power.\n\nWe can try to make it as true as possible in the realm of social and political theory, but in order to do that we must fully inhabit the frame. You can’t say, well, in general I think everything that happens in this society is permitted by the sovereign, but this one thing that happened yesterday seems to me to require another explanation. It may very well be that a particular event seems better explained by liberalism, especially if it was generated within a liberal frame. But you can only inhabit one frame, which is why you must fully inhabit it, and insist, even against the evidence, that that event is explained by it, fully and only by it.\n\nIf your frame is wrong, that’s the only way you’ll ever find out anyway. The frame implicit in Moldbug’s claim enables us to see the sovereign as setting priorities, delegating powers, distributing resources, signaling intentions, overseeing operations, and so on, in a way we couldn’t have seen otherwise—it also allows us to see how divided power subverts all these prerogatives of sovereignty. We can now see responsibility where before we saw only remission. You can simply reject the frame (but only from within another frame), but once you enter it, you’re in it until you’ve seen everything you can see through it.\n\nSo, your metalanguage locks you in every bit as much as language, and leaves you in the paradox, not so much of self-reference as of reference—any time you refer to something you are noticing something already there and creating that thing as a thing to be noticed: it’s not representable until it’s represented. If we can talk about an outside to language, this is it—an outside that is inside. In fact, this is the most rigorous way of approaching our traditions, as a specific set of paradoxes, the implications of which we continue to work through. “Faith” is an acceptance that certain paradoxes can never be resolved, but only lived.\n\nMoreover, you can bring others into your frame, willingly or unwillingly—their words can be resituated within your system, and provide you with both testimony regarding the paradoxes they must live and spies within their system. Of course, they might also be converted. This is the true test of the “best” frame—which can most effectively reframe the others. In the end, there will always be ostensive signs that need to be accounted for. And what about originary thinking itself, which seems to present itself as a metalanguage to end all metalanguages? Ultimately, originary thinking is a way of tracing all the frames it comes across back to their origins, and through those origins, the origin of language and humanity.\n\nIf originary thinking fulfilled its wildest ambition, which is, it must be said, to reframe all frames, it wouldn’t be a monolithic discourse describing everything in an abstracted meta-metalanguage; rather, it would be a world of originary inquiries, undertaken wherever people are, within their languages, discourses and traditions and through the new idioms the inquiries themselves would generate."
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-the-culling-of-cant",
      "title": "On the Culling of Cant",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The word “cant” has two meanings, which are distinct but have an important area of overlap: on the one hand, “hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature”; on the other hand, “denoting a phrase or catchword temporarily current or in fashion.” One can be hypocritical without being fashionable, and vice versa, but being fashionably sanctimonious and sanctimoniously fashionable involves occupying a specifically liberal linguistic zone. Fluently employing the latest argot, imposed and enforced by an elite, becomes the marker of morality. “Cant” is a particular form of metalanguage.\n\nMetalanguage turns language itself into an object of inquiry, even on the most basic level: children learning the alphabet are studying language. Once we have metalanguage, pointing to the uses of language becomes a normal part of language use. The boundary between language and metalanguage then becomes one more of different uses than of separable regions of language. So, there’s no sense in which language is more real than metalanguage; and metalanguage is just as much a use of language as any other: it directs attention to uses of language, while language directs our attention to the centered world, but language is itself part of the centered world.\n\nMetalanguage is the pedagogical dimension within language, which means that the primary sin of metalanguage is assessing uses of language without issuing operable imperatives: assessments of the language use of others devoid of operable imperatives is the way I would define “cant.”\n\nThe most useless imperative is one that tells you to do what you already thought you were doing, like your writing teacher or editor making the marginal note “be clear!” or “unclear!” on your text. Presumably, you thought you were being clear, so what we have here is the case of an imperative masking a declarative: “be clear!” really means “I’m the kind of person who knows what clarity entails, and you’re not.” It seems to me that a great deal of the language we use in discussing writing and thinking falls into this category: attributing “richness,” “insight into human nature,” “a deep exploration of emotional life,” etc., to a novel, for example, are all, for the most part meaningless, i.e., cant—think about what it would mean to command someone to “improve your insight into human nature.”\n\nThis is just way of saying that the labels we apply to the novels we approve of we refuse to apply to this novel. Any use of the word “deep” will fall into this category (“go deeper!”). Another excellent example is “critical,” which is very popular these days, especially in the form of “critical thinking.” David Olson claims that the more advanced literacy enabled by the metalanguage surrounding “classic prose” allows its possessors to “think critically,” but he doesn’t seem to consider that this just applies one term within the metalanguage to other terms.\n\n“Critical” at least has a real philosophical genealogy, going back, of course, to Kant’s Critiques , and then working its way through Marx to the Frankfurt School. But while I’m certainly not going to try and make this argument here (or, most likely, anywhere else), I will still suggest that maybe Kant and the others are not doing much more than expanding the possible uses of the metalanguage built into literacy. Philosophy, or metaphysics, which, as Gans has pointed out, takes the declarative sentence as the primary or prototypical form of language, is metalanguage on metalanguage. But philosophy can also involve awareness of this.\n\nWhe never you use one concept, you use a word within a particular system of words, and that concept therefore depends upon all the other concepts (words) within that system; and, for that matter, within other systems as well. When you use a concept, all this is not present in your mind, so it’s easy to fall into the illusion that in using the word you are simply referring directly to something out there in the world. The “critical” standpoint is there to remind you that it can only refer indirectly to something out there in the world.\n\nBut it’s still futile to urge a “critical” attitude upon someone, to tell someone to “be more critical,” either in general or towards something in particular. These are really just ways of calling someone stupid, or telling them to shut up and listen to you. “Being critical” requires that one be part of a disciplinary space that takes as its center of attention the “foundational” concepts of another discipline—and this is possible because anomalies in the various uses of those concepts have already become evident. As a metalanguage attached to a form of literacy, it is meaningless. Which is to say, it is cant. So, what wouldn’t be cant?\n\nMetalanguage that issues operable imperatives—imperatives whose successful completion could be “authenticated” by anyone familiar with the imperative itself. These would be imperatives whose completion would be as easy to judge as an imperative like “pass the salt.” If the salt makes its way from the person asked to pass it to the person making the request, imperative accomplished! If we think about metalinguistic imperatives in a pedagogical context, such a “meaningful” imperative might be something like “identify all of the words in this text that refer to something in the world and all the words that refer to something in the text itself.”\n\nThis would be asking students to distinguish between linguistic and metalinguistic elements in the text. The assignment would surface differing tacit assumptions regarding the significance of the elements of the text, but it would be situated within a shared ostensive field in which we could keep lowering the threshold at which phenomena can be attended to. And the student would gain far more from this seemingly simple and basic assignment than from the best-intentioned request to read “critically,” or “logically,” or “deeply,” or “carefully,” or with an eye to “themes,” images,” “evidence,” “characters,” etc. Once we direct our attention to the uses of language and metalanguage the ground of all inquiry in the “human sciences” shifts. The culling of cant follows from this shift.\n\nCulling cant means distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless metalanguages. Meaningful metalanguage issues imperatives for attending to normal language use that are operable, that produce ostensive results that reset attention; meaningless metalanguage issues imperatives that are nothing but double-binds—they ask you to have already mastered the model that you are being measured against. The culling of cant allows us to formulate the political goals of anti-liberalism and absolutism more comprehensively: what we want is meaningful order. Meaningful order means that institutions and positions have the power and capacity to perform the functions allocated to them, and that they do so.\n\nSo, when we speak of a “university,” for example, we would have a shared use of the term that corresponds to how the participants in the university see their inheritance of and obligations to that institution. This corresponds to the rendering explicit of power hierarchies, chains of command and responsibility proposed by political formalism. Meaningless metalanguage always stands ready to be used to advance political conflicts within any institution, whether it asserts that students should be turned into “critical thinkers,” or “well-rounded individuals” or guardians of civilization or masters of civic and sacred knowledge. The most meaningful metalanguage is one that keeps attending to the distinction between language and metalanguage.\n\nDisciplines are organized on the boundary between language and metalanguage—there are many such boundaries, and therefore many disciplines. Language directs our attention to “the world,” but what this really means is that it attests to the presence of a center and the transparency of the scene constituting it. Metalanguage directs our attention to language, which is to say to the scene of language, which has in some respect become opaque, endangering linguistic presence. In this case, the imperative is a metalanguage in relation to the ostensive and the declarative a metalanguage in relation to the imperative. There’s something metalinguistic in asking someone to repeat himself because you didn’t quite get what he said, and deliberate mimicry is probably one of the oldest forms of metalanguage.\n\nSo it’s not as if an expropriating metalanguage snuck up on an innocent language—language must have always lent itself to being metasized. But literacy represents a threshold because metalanguage no longer needs to share a scene with primary language, and specialists in metalanguage and the power it provides become a permanent feature of the social landscape.\n\nSo, the boundary between language and metalanguage iterates the oscillation between center and the scene on which the center is made to appear. Meaningful metalanguage engages in this oscillation without falling into either the “naivete” of forgetting about the scene or the “cynicism” of seeing the center as a fabrication of the scene. That statement itself comes close to meaningless metalanguage by advocating for an “attitude” which the advocate presumably already exemplifies—hence his qualifications for advocating for it. (“Balancing” statements—“we must neither go too far nor try too little…” tend to be the most meaningless samples of metalanguage.)\n\nBut we can issue imperatives from that metalinguistic statement—the discipline is a scene with a center of attention, and what makes the discipline disciplinary is that anything you say about the object at the center is simultaneously something you say about the history of the discipline. If sociology is a genuine discipline, it is because within sociology everything someone says about “society” is simultaneously something said about the history of inquiries into society, while such inquiries are in fact part of society—even more, society itself is nothing more than inquiries into its own constitution, even when carried out by the most “naively” accepted rituals.\n\nSimilarly, to exercise power is to treat everything in the space wherein power is exercised as effects and examples of that exercise of power. To exercise power is to have one’s imperatives obeyed, which means that power as inquiry is interested in the form, effects and ramifications of imperatives. Power involves a kind of reductionism, an interest in the world only insofar as it can be treated as transformable through imperatives. Discourse on power is metalanguage inquiring into the scenes upon which power is exercised, into the scenic conditions under which imperatives will be completed or will be revealed as meaningless.\n\nImperatives are always part of an exchange of imperatives, albeit an asymmetrical exchange: the commander commands, while the subordinates request, even implicitly in their manner of obeying, that he keep widening his view of the “extension” of the imperatives he issues into a broader field of consequences. As you think forward into a longer chain of ramifications issuing from your imperatives, you also think back to older, more originary imperatives that you have been obeying all along, and can now obey more attentively. Discourse on power shows this larger field to be implicit in even the most immediate and trivial command, imploring the commander to bring such metaconcerns into the framing of the imperatives he issues. This leaves no room for cant.\n\nCant is a linguistic form of imperium in imperio . So are all uses of language that don’t generate operable imperatives, which is to say, something equivalent to “look at this” or “show the difference between…” And there’s no better place to begin than the practice one is presently engaged in, which is bound to have a meaningless metalanguage ready to be circulated within the language it regulates. How clear is the demand for clarity, how critical the insistence of critical thinking? What rules is the journalist defending the rule of law following? Metalanguage purports to have its own autonomous existence, based on its system of internal references—it is fanatical about setting the rules for proper speech, and rules for proper speech are rules for acceptable representation, and rules for acceptable representation will command power to represent some nature or essence known only to initiates into the metalanguage.\n\nAsking metalanguage to represent its own distinction within language restores the center by paving the imperative-ostensive path to it. The test of a meaningful metalanguage is that it can indicate the possible sign that would necessitate the transformation of the metalanguage."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-discourse-of-the-center",
      "title": "The Discourse of the Center",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We are not free, autonomous centers of moral and intellectual activity; nor are we talking apes, whose behavior can be explained by its adaptability to evolutionary pressures, which have caused certain traits to be selected for. We are beings bound to the center: everything that we say, think or do is homage to the center. If there is a logic to history it is a very uneven one: we are all working to bring all of the centers, from the mundane references we make daily, to the authorities we obey and commands we convey to others, to the divine beings we worship, to the originary event itself, into alignment. The logic is uneven because it follows the path of the linguistic presence that is constantly threatened and constantly retrieved.\n\nThe first imperative was an inappropriate ostensive: someone named an object without realizing it wasn’t there, and another member of the community retrieved it, so as to “make good” on the sign. A new form is thereby created. We can assume all cultural creation proceeds this way, a little bit sideways as one is sent astray by a mistake, and then forward as a new iterable form is produced. The ostensive sign is transformed by the introduction of the imperative, both projectively and retroactively: the ostensive sign, from then on, not only creates linguistic presence in the actual presence of some object, but is the source of new imperatives; meanwhile, the interdiction on the originary scene on appropriation of the central object can now be seen as having an “imperatival” quality to it.\n\nThis also involves some abstraction from the originary object and scene: the central locus, which subsists beyond the consumption of the object, is somewhat less bound to the form of that object. It now receives imperatives along with issuing them, and is therefore increasingly defined by this dialogue with the community, what I have been calling an “imperative exchange.”\n\nThe question, as always, is what is the center telling us to do? Answering that question was once the shaman’s job, then the prophet’s, but the academics and intellectuals who have succeeded them are far less credible (there always seemed to be more false prophets than true, anyway). A very interesting essay by Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Political Society” (in the new book he co-edited with David Graeber, On Kings ) challenges the notion of the egalitarian primitive community. Such communities were (and are), in fact, extremely hierarchical—it’s just that the hierarchy includes lots of non-human actors. Ancestors, animals, various gods and spirits (“metapersons”) all play roles in governing the community, and they do so in an extremely domineering and terrifying way.\n\nSahlins sees himself as disproving Durkheim’s claim that the supernatural figures that populate the collective imagination of primitive peoples are “merely” projections of and means of consolidating the actual social relations within the group. He makes the point that the metapersonal governing “elites” in these communities have far more complex structures than the communities themselves, and include lots of positions and rules that have no equivalents within the community itself. I’m not sure this really proves what Sahlins claims (there’s no reason an interpretation or projection of social relations couldn’t be more complex than a straightforward description of them would be), but it provides a very good example of what we might consider the axiom of the sufficient center: human societies will discover/invent the centers they need in order to generate the command structure necessary to control resentment.\n\nIf two young men are about to fight, I might stop them by saying “your late, sainted, mother would be ashamed of you!”—insofar as I succeed in conjuring up the late mother of one of the combatants I have invoked a center capable of issuing imperatives. For a whole society, I would need lots of mothers, fathers, other relatives, forces of nature, animals from whom the group claims to have descended, and so on, to impose the necessary measure of shame.\n\nThe sainted mother, then, who is “ventriloquized” by the peacemaker, represents a center (she serves to redirect attention, leading to the deferral of violence); and she does so by in turn referencing previous centers, which can also be invoked, if the need grows greater. (She was a stalwart at Church, she had sainted grandparents herself.) So, what the center says to us, what it commands, depends upon what kind of violence needs to be deferred in the present, and what kind of inherited resources are available (do we have a God who said, “Blessed are the Peacemakers”?). But discovering what the center wants is easier in an emergency situation (even if compliance requires more courage); finding ways to channel it for the sake of serious thinking, in the midst of complex situations that nevertheless require decision after decision to be made on schedule, is something else.\n\nIt becomes an epistemological question. An epistemological question must frame an imperative, leading to an ostensive: do this in order to see that. The relation between language and metalanguage, which I have been working with in recent posts, can be put to epistemological use. I have been focusing on writing as a metalanguage, the first fully explicit metalanguage, as in representing speech writing must inquire into what, exactly, constitutes speech. But, just as David Olson points out that the features of language revealed by metalanguage were already part of language, the possibility of metalanguage must also have been internal to language, which means that something like the language/metalanguage distinction goes back to the origin of language.\n\nThe repetition of the first sign issued was a commentary on that sign, selecting and singling out certain features as opposed to others. This is simply a reminder that language is self-reflexive and recursive, which is part of its paradoxical nature. The language/metalanguage distinction and relation is one particularly important instance of the differential repetition constitutive of language.\n\nOnly in the fully developed metalanguage that Olson identifies with the assessment of prose (which he, in turn finds most characteristically exemplified in “classic prose,” which seeks to reproduce the scene which the writer purports to witness), though, could we grasp the epistemological implications of metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic terms, for Olson, tell us nothing about the practices involved in producing the text; I’ve been treating that observation as implying that canonical metalinguistic terms are unable to generate operable imperatives. Perhaps the most widely used metalinguistic term for referring to writing is “clarity.”\n\nWriting (and, then, speaking) can be clear or unclear. This makes perfect sense on the terms of classic prose, which aims at providing an unobstructed view of a scene, reduced to its essentials. The addition of details which don’t help make the scene one upon which everyone would presumably see the same thing reduces the clarity of the writing, speaking or thinking; likewise with the absence of details required to make the scene a “complete” one. If we read enough prose, we know what we think is clear or unclear—no matter how certain we are of our own judgment, though, telling someone to “be clearer” is perfectly useless.\n\nHe thought he was being clear. Now, if you tell someone that he has to give us more information about a particular figure in his narrative because otherwise we can’t know why he acts as he does at a certain point, that could be turned into an imperative, al though still a limited one: what, exactly, needs to be known? You could tell him, but then you usurp the position of writer. In other words, the imperative that follows from even a more specific observation is still something like “read my mind.” You’re simply telling someone to assimilate you as a model, but without already being you, how is that supposed to work? This kind of empty or meaningless metalanguage silences the center, putting established models and their guardians in its place.\n\nWhat I suggested instead is the imperative to distinguish metalanguage from language in one’s discourse. You can always do this, and you can always do more of it because you keep generating the distinction. And it’s always productive, because you can always bring out more implicit features of your thinking, which is certainly one of the primary activities “thinking” refers to. Now, metalanguage in Olson’s sense is anything that tells you, implicitly or explicitly, how to imagine or judge a representation of events whose meaning would have been unequivocal had you been on the scene reproduced by the prose. All of those words that are essentially more specialized versions of “think,” “say” or “know” (“consider,” “examine,” “explain,” “imply,” “conclude,” “extrapolate,” and dozens if not hundreds of others) are metalinguistic.\n\nIn the more expanded version I’m proposing, I’d like to push the line all the way back, to the semantic primes themselves: think, say, know, want, and so on. The metaphysical view of these terms, derived from the metalinguistic inquiry into the declarative sentence, is that there is something in us, an activity, that, once we identify and study it, we can call “thinking,” knowing,” or “wanting.” In other words, we just apply the name to something already there. There’s something there, of course, insofar as we repeat and vary phrases and sentences to ourselves, and that activity issues in things that we say, but to assume that we have a word, “think,” and that therefore there must be something inside us that “thinking” refers to, and so we can isolate, define, study and improve that activity is to create a false problem—a problem, moreover, created by the metaphysical assumption that the declarative is the primary linguistic form.\n\n“Think” is a word that is used in a lot of different ways, many of which have nothing to do with any reference to a mental activity occurring somewhere “in” us. If I ask someone, “what do you think of that?,” I’m not asking him to articulate the cognitive processes at work in his mind when he is confronted with “that.”\n\nSo, if “think” is, not so much metalanguage, as possessed of a metalinguistic dimension, in what, exactly, does that consist? First of all, it consists in the limits of using “think” as an imperative. You can tell someone to think in general, or to think about something; you can’t command someone to think specific thoughts, though. If he thought the thoughts you told him to think he wouldn’t really be thinking them. So, when we say someone is thinking we are saying we would expect him to say something different than anyone else would. When I ask someone what he thinks of something, I’m asking him to say something only he would say about it.\n\nSo, when I speak about thinking, I’m really thinking about speaking. And I’m not thinking about knowing, because if we all know something, we would all say the same thing. But there is something happening when someone is asked to say something only he could say that we don’t have words for, even though it’s undoubtedly taking place in language. So, “think” is metalinguistic insofar as it refers to and assesses that process (if I ask someone what they think about something and they say exactly the same thing as someone else I’ll be disappointed—I might tell him he’s not really thinking) but without providing an operable imperative for advancing it.\n\nThe way, then, of displaying the distinction or boundary between language and metalanguage in thinking, then, is to refer to some of that silent playing and working with received chunks of language that made it possible to say what only you would say, and to mention the word “think” as part and also not part of that process. Asking someone to think is asking them to be a center that iterates the originary center, and one can ask oneself to think and thereby let the center speak through you.\n\nThe discourse of the center must work its way through one, some, or all of us—someone has to speak for the center. Anyone can ask the center for something, and as soon as you do, you intuit that the center must require something from you in exchange. Help me pass this exam, God, and I promise I’ll never go out drinking the day before an exam again. If you convert this relationship into declarative form, there’s a problem: “God helps unprepared exam takers pass on the condition that they prepare themselves in the future.” The problem is, that if we present this as a statement that is true every time we say it, the preparation would never have to take place, and so it can’t be true.\n\nThe declarative includes both real presents, the exam-taker’s future preparation and God’s bountiful act now in the same linguistic (which is to say, “portable”) present, in which case they have to coincide “logically,” and they can’t be made to do so without paradoxical remainder. The statement is logical in general but illogical for any individual case because the subsequent preparation could be endlessly deferred—that is, the statement would generate imperatives (don’t prepare) that cancel the ostensive base of the imperative (God helps). The imperative of declarative construction is to bring ostensives and imperatives into alignment: imperatives are issued by some ostensive, and lead us back to one.\n\nThe declarative constructs a scene upon which we observe some entity in a relation to some center (approaching it, retreating, violating it, protecting it from another…), and scenic rules apply, so two incommensurable relations to the center cannot be envisioned simultaneously. (Of course, a sentence like “God helps those who don’t help themselves” could be uttered as an absurdist or caustic riposte to the commonplace, but it then makes sense as a comment on that commonplace, which is to say it shifts our attention to a different possible scene, one peopled by those overly familiar with “God helps those who help themselves.”)\n\nIt’s possible to construct a declarative version of the imperative exchange that squelches the dialogue with the center, by either taking God out of it or reducing God to a metalinguistic verification of “sincerity” or synonym for “reality”—something like “if I prepare for exams I will pass them,” or “God wants me to prepare for exams,” or “if I prepare, God will make sure I pass”—that’s what we’d end with if the exam-taker’s promise is kept and no further imperative exchanges on this topic are necessary. If this individual prepares for and succeeds on all future exams, and exam-like tasks, he may very forget the imperative exchange that made it all possible, and in that case he is no longer listening to the center.\n\nBut there will be more “tests” and various conditions of “unreadiness” for them, and unless I lock myself into the pretense that I am perpetually prepared I will have to keep asking the center to advance me some capacity that will supplement my unreadiness. Passing one test makes the next one more consequential, its contours less discernable, and the reward less calculable. This process proceeds through repeated apparently failed imperative exchanges, and a series of revisions of declarative versions making a “present” out of the terms of the imperative exchange. If I keep returning to and abstracting from the center, I head towards the creation of requests to the center that are simultaneously their own answers. We will still hear the center imperfectly after all this, even if we all help each other extract the most en during declarative forms by serving as centers for one another. But we can keep refining our power to hearken and heed."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-temporality-of-sovereignty",
      "title": "The Temporality of Sovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here’s the strongest argument on the side of those arguing for the spontaneous organization of social relations against those defending an absolutist ontology, which assumes the sovereign center is constitutive: the sovereign, no matter how absolute and powerful, can’t do just anything, can he? He can’t order his people to sprout wings and fly, right? Ridiculous, but it makes a point: the sovereign is subjected to the laws of nature. That leads us to the somewhat less ridiculous: he can’t order all husbands and wives to divorce each other and take new partners, and redistribute the children by lottery, can he? Somewhat further down the ridiculous spectrum, he can’t order everyone to adopt a completely new and alien religion, can he?\n\n(And I don’t mean something like Henry the VIII shifting from Catholicism to a Catholicized and Anglicized version of Protestantism—he didn’t try and force everyone to go Shinto.) Any sovereign command, in other words, comes up against some resistance, some “denseness” in the social material, against inherited customs, rituals, relationships, institutions, and so on. And that must mean whatever constitutes that resistance is prior to the sovereign, in which case sovereignty is raised up upon the basis of those relationships which formed external to sovereign power, making sovereign power dependent upon, and shaped by its necessary conformity to, those “spontaneously” formed relationships.\n\nJust like the sovereign must submit to the laws of nature, he must submit to the laws of human nature, or divine law, or social evolution. And the implications of such a conclusion are clear: sovereign power must also be judged, and its legitimacy determined, in terms of how it serves and corresponds to whatever is taken to precede and constitute it.\n\nThe examples one is forced to resort to in order to make this argument seem irrefutable suggest that the argument is not really made in good faith; still, on the other hand, one might say that the counter-arguments advanced by the absolutist side will tilt toward providing examples representing more “realistic” changes that might have been or actually have been ordered by sovereigns. What, after all, would count as the “tough case” that might settle things once and for all, something that a sovereign “should,” according to absolutist theory, be able to do, but can’t? As with all social arguments, it’s possible to say, in the case of an example that disproves one’s point, that that example didn’t really fit the parameters of the type of example I constructed as a potential test case.\n\nIndeed, the whole notion of “proof” is highly problematic, to say the least, in the social or human sciences, because laboratory conditions are not available—and if they were, they would be completely unrealistic and inapplicable to anything in any actual society. But that just means that the best way of arguing in the social and human sciences is to show how your opponent’s strongest claims can be reframed in terms of your own assumptions. If you can keep reframing, while strengthening and where necessary revising the previous “acquisitions” made by your theory, and further clarifying your founding assumptions, then your theory will either prove true in the long run or will eventually shatter upon the shoals of events that disqualify too many assumptions that have been taken for granted, even in the eyes of the theory’s own adherents. (And even in the latter case a remnant will likely remain, and it might have something to say as well.)\n\nYou should, then, be able to show that what seems to be the strongest argument against you is really the strongest one in your favor; so, that’s what I’m going to do where with the “what about the X which the sovereign couldn’t command” argument. The way to do so is to contend that what limits sovereignty, what represents the penumbra of social action resistant to sovereign command, is prior acts of sovereignty—what the sovereign is dependent upon, that is, and what the sovereign must respect and “correspond” to, are not spontaneously organized social relations but the decisions of previous sovereigns. If we could go back far enough, every social practice—every ritual, every kinship relation, every moral norm, every aesthetic criterion, everything —has its origin in sovereign decision and delegation—or in some pre-sovereign obedience to the sacred center preceding sovereignty and incorporated into it.\n\nEach new sovereign, upon taking power, is faced with the vast expanse of the results of prior sovereign decisions; the new sovereign will reverse, revise, or override some of those decisions, and he will leave the vast majority in place. This will be true even for an ambitious, reforming sovereign, because, as the adherents to the theory of spontaneous organization will attest, the sovereign decisions and delegation made (and left unmade), reiterated, and allowed to shape the tacit habits and knowledge of the ruled over the previous centuries are not just innumerable but beyond retrieval.\n\nWhat makes the sovereign sovereign, then, is not that he can order anyone to do anything at any time and be perfectly obeyed; nor is it that he represents the will of God, or of the people, or that he skillfully balances an immense array of institutions and/or human capacities that exist according to their own logic, outside of his actions. Rather, it is that he occupies the center that previous sovereigns have shaped, and that his own decisions “redeem” the “down payment” on futurity made by those previous sovereigns. The implication, then, is that sovereignty is always oriented toward futurity, always a bridge between past and future.\n\nA “revolutionary” sovereign who tried to tear up and remake drastically the order he has inherited would generate resistance not because he would be waging war against “nature” or “tradition,” but because he would be disrupting previously authorized relations between the center and its margins and thereby vitiating the social center. He would be setting power centers adrift, and those power centers will be defined in terms of the previous mode of sovereignty which redeemed them, opening the possibility of a challenger appealing to that prior mode of sovereignty, which the new sovereign has failed to incorporate into his own.\n\nIt’s not as if we could set some limit to “how much” change a sovereign should introduce—there may be times when much change and much disruption is indispensable, and, anyway, social change cannot be quantified—but, rather, that the threads of sovereignty must be tied up. If a sovereign undoes the work of his predecessor, or of several predecessors, it must be in the name of retrieving some other sovereign work which they had undone (or even work those same sovereigns had done, but undermined by what they had undone).\n\nThinking in terms of the temporality of sovereignty, rather than the endless debates over the state/society “interaction,” not only reframes that powerful argument I began by citing, but provides us with a way of thinking about “meaningful order” in the future, where the claims that can be made to hereditary rule will undoubtedly be much weaker than when monarchy was assumed to be the natural form of rule. So, while the transition from one sovereign to the next, the transfer of power, was always a carefully regulated process, and often a cause of significant conflict and anxiety, we could say that it will take on a vastly greater importance in future non-hereditary (or maybe partially hereditary) autocratic forms; indeed, I would go so far as to say that it will completely absorb the attention of all social institutions, and it can very readily do so in a largely beneficial way—that is, in a way that reduces, rather than inflame, resentment and violence.\n\nLet’s take the most extreme example, a completely non-hereditary autocracy in which, therefore, the pool of possible replacements for the sovereign includes the entire population. The autocrat himself must choose his successor, because only a sovereign decision can effect the transfer of power—we can’t even accept a method of choosing a successor since, however seemingly impersonal and objective the method, it will always be open to interpretation, “exception” and therefore power struggles. The sovereign, then, must choose a successor from the moment he enters office, and be explicit and public in either sticking with that choice or changing it.\n\n(With every “must,” the automatic question must arise: or else what ? Let’s say the sovereign is ambiguous about his successor—then what? Then he’s not doing his job—so, what are the consequences of that? We’ll get to it.) Enormous social resources and energy would have to be directed towards ensuring the sovereign has a large pool of qualified successors, and in providing means for narrowing it down considerably: it might be good to have 10,000 qualified candidates, but the sovereign should only have to choose from amongst, say, 100. “Academies” in ruling would be established, with extremely rigorous entry requirements.\n\nSchools specializing in various aspects of rule—military academies, schools that provide students with advanced knowledge of political history and theory, perhaps practical, scout-style academies that give students experience in governing on a local level, under supervised conditions. One would have to excel in one academy to be admitted to the next—the candidates would be vetted all along the line, from their childhoods up.\n\nThis process would obviously be of great interest for everyone in the social order. Your own child might seem like he has a chance to compete, or your cousin, or your neighbor. There would be “local favorites.” There would be public competitions—exams, fitness contests, Army-Navy style sporting events—that would test the mettle of the candidates in an engaging way. One could imagine much of “popular culture” being caught up in the various “paths to the throne” such arrangements would generate. The candidates would make the rounds of the country—they would visit a “typical” school in one region, a “typical” factory in another, a typical neighborhood in yet another, and so on. This means that all these institutions would be constantly preparing themselves to host the candidates, making their indirect participation in the broader selection process something they would always be looking ahead to, and shaping themselves in anticipation of (they would want to ensure that all are on their best behavior, to ensure their typicality).\n\nThe condition for candidate visits would have to be, though, that the candidates themselves cannot give a single command. There can be absolutely no confusion etween the future, potential sovereigns, and the actually existing one. The candidates would always be accompanied by representatives of the sovereign, and they would give commands (“let us see how that new machinery works…”). This condition would be so strictly adhered to (arguments around the margins, which might turn into jokes—can the candidate ask for a drink of water?—would reinforce the seriousness of the overall interdiction) that any transgression would be immediately and scandalously apparent.\n\nSo, the candidates could not use their tours to build a power base for themselves, develop their own clientele, etc.—they can’t do anything to help anyone. The sovereign, meanwhile, would be maintaining a public ranking of the candidates, but he would naturally be free to revise it whe never he likes, and would in fact probably do so fairly regularly. Just the normal life course of the ruler would lead to revisions—a 30-year old sovereign might want a 50-year old successor, someone whose experience and loyalty to the previous sovereign he admired; by the time that sovereign turns 60, he would more likely want a younger man whom he might have personally mentored.\n\nAnd, of course, the option would exist for a sovereign to simply resign, if he felt his personal power waning, or simply spotted a candidate who seemed completely ready, and likely to rule more effectively. (Since being a candidate can’t be a livelihood in itself, the candidates would serve the sovereign in other ways, far from the chain of command—so, those, the vast majority of course, who are not chosen, will be integrated in the sovereign order. But maintaining one’s candidacy would likely involve some sacrifice of other possible roles, perhaps higher ranking ones than that individual will eventually attain when removed from the list.)\n\nSo, the entire society is constantly engaged in, and therefore thoroughly informed regarding, the transfer of power or, more broadly, the temporality of sovereignty. Each individual is in some way playing a role in shaping the conditions under which the continuity of sovereignty, and therefore the entire social order, will be maintained. Under such conditions, we can also imagine how the (it seems to me as unlikely as it could be made) possibility of a manifestly and dangerously unfit ruler could be dealt with. There would always be publicly known, vetted and trusted potential successors—the very fact that they never tried to exercise even a tiny bit of sovereign power on their own would testify to their worthiness.\n\nThere is the sovereign’s own list, and even if, in the case of a genuinely treacherous sovereign, he named as his own successor, or even the first few on the list, someone expected to maintain the same dangerous practices of rule, somewhere on the list there would be those less effectively “cultivated” (“groomed”?) by the unfit sovereign. In the event that the social elites—the generals, the corporate executives, the presidents of universities and academies, and so on—were, against their own will, led to the consensus that they could no longer maintain their chains of commands under the present sovereign, that he has simply visited too much destruction upon the accumulated and tacit inheritance of sovereign rule, that he had lost the “threads” of sovereignty; well, then, the conditions are in place for a relatively painless and minimally disruptive transfer of power to a worthy candidate, and one that could be justified by appeal to the sovereign’s own “higher” or better will.\n\nNeedless to say, any such situation would be fraught with danger—no one could ever imagine oneself to be designing a flawless social order—but having the entire order thoroughly invested in the temporality of sovereignty, so that such an event would be extremely exceptional but also quickly made commonplace, would be the best way to minimize the dangers."
    },
    {
      "slug": "center-alignment",
      "title": "Center Alignment",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Since it seems obvious to speak about liberalism as a derogation from a period of more secure and legitimate authority, it follows that we have had secure, absolutist rule, have somehow lost it, and must now try to get it back. But, of course, the further back you go in seeking the causes or crucial events in this derogation, the more it becomes clear that power has never been completely secure, there has never been an unqualified shared relation to the center and that even moments of good rule within teleologically articulated social orders contained the “seeds” of degeneration. One of the fascinating and instructive things about Graeber and Sahlins’s On Kings is just how varied the forms of kingship have been, and how obviously flawed each and every one of them.\n\nBut what is equally evident in any historical survey is that there is always a center, and the fact that people accepted even such bizarre arrangements as some of the “divine” kingships Graeber discusses, where, for example, it may be necessary for the king to periodically carry out random massacres so that his people will know that he is alive, is if anything a demonstration of the unintelligibility of any social order without a center. Even a horrible center is better than trying to imagine its absence. In that case, we can reverse our perspective and replace any lingering nostalgia for ideal kingdoms of the past and see ourselves as participating in the single project that encompasses all of humanity, the revelation of the commands of the center. All previous relations to the center can be studied for their accomplishments and failures, and, more importantly than either, the possible terms and forms of a community’s relation to its center that each reveals.\n\nThe originary relation to the center is, of course, that of the hypothesized originary scene, in which mimetic desire generates the mimetic fear that issues in the issuing of the sign modeled on the central object’s vulnerability and power to impose restraint. We resent the center for imposing restraint, while that resentment itself enhances the center’s constraining power, as it locks our attention on it, making it the source of meaning, of augurs of life, prosperity and death. In the most radical act in human history, the Big Man acts on this resentment of the center, appropriates the center, and becomes himself the object of resentment and source of life and meaning.\n\nThere are no rules regarding how this relationship is to be played out, and the resentments and counter-resentments between center and periphery, and along the periphery itself, could not be mapped out in advance. All of the rich panoply of forms of rule explored by Graeber and Sahlins can easily be analyzed in terms of a particular trajectory taken by some field of resentments around the center—they realize something like this on one level, as Graeber periodically points out how relevant Girard’s theory of scapegoating is to so many of the arrangements he studies, while, of course, keeping his anarchist hopes alive by asserting that Girard’s theory is ultimately all wrong.\n\nThose on the periphery model themselves on the center—so, in primitive communities with a sacred, ritual center the members of the community will participate in and inhabit (or be inhabited by) the mythological figures generated out of their ritual relation to the center. When a human comes to occupy the center, the members of the community model themselves on that, and come to see themselves as potential occupants of the , or, and this is crucial, some center. This is what the “individual” is: a center, and a possible center. To be an individual is to imagine vectors of attention directed toward oneself, and to imagine oneself arranging those vectors, drawing in some, deflecting others.\n\nThe Axial Age acquisitions, which exposed the incompatibility of mass sacrifice with civilized order, aim at spreading centrality throughout the social order. Everyone must see him or herself as a center, and so everyone must be enabled to do so in a way that preserves a social and moral center. We can say that liberal and romantic forms of individuality were attempts to do this; we can also say they were disastrous attempts, because they set the individual against the social center, as if the individual could only stand out against the norm, thereby creating a social order predicated upon reciprocally hostile and centripetal centers.\n\nBut the romantic individual, as Gans shows through his studies of romanticism, especially through the figure of Rousseau, is also trying to imitate Jesus, by displaying in his own person the universal hostility a universal benevolence toward all humankind inevitably brings upon one. The problem with the romantic individual is really that he wants to monopolize this attention, to exploit it politically and on the market. The moral use of attention centered upon the self is to display the possibilities for converting resentment into love, in which case one may accept, deflect, or reverse the slings and arrows, but in any case will do so in such a way that the one slinging and shooting sees and displays, if not the arbitrariness, at least the over-determination of his show of resentment. In this way, one converts one’s centrality into a moral and esthetic sign precisely by making space for other centers.\n\nThe more individuals turn themselves into such moral and esthetic signs, the more aligned they will be with the social center, and the entire system of “works” that ultimately signify that center. One thing that really enrages the liberal and especially romantic individual is the fact that an entire world consisting of institutions and technological imperatives pre-exist the individual and are essentially indifferent to his existence. This massive reality diminishes even the fantasy of killing and replacing the king, because it would all still be in place; and, if one intensifies one’s fantasy so as to demolish it all, what would be the point of being king?\n\nPart of the purpose of building up that imperative order is to ensure, in a world of spreading centrality, that the social center is clearly distinct from any individual one. The resentment toward the humanized center is thereby transformed into resentment toward the dehumanized or reified apparatuses supporting that center. This resentment is more easily converted into love, because it provides for a wealth of positions of responsibility tending to the apparatus. You can resent the one who got promoted over you, you can resent the boss who keeps screwing everything up, you can resent the fact that your sector of the economy is neglected despite the evident importance of the work done there, but all these resentments are made intelligible and acceptable insofar as they are framed as attempts to improve the system.\n\nYour resentment may be overwhelming your concern for clarifying the center, which is to say you might be wrong in your criticism, but you must, to maintain the level of centrality to which you have become accustomed, stand ready to be corrected in those criticisms (which means being willing to accept the centrality of others). A well ordered system would encourage these developments, while cutting off recourse to more desperate attempts to assert centrality, through attention grabbing acts of violence, for example.\n\nNow, I would like to use this more expanded analysis of centrality, or centered ordinality, than I have yet given, to solve another problem I have been working on in these posts. That is the problem of the (meta)linguistic boundary, the boundary between using language and directing attention to the use of language. I am hypothesizing that the specific kind of metalanguage that emerged through writing, as a part of the emergence of “classic prose” as the ideal form of discourse, is the source of the “metaphysics” that pretty much all post-medieval thinkers have been trying to dismantle, and for good reason—regardless of how aware any of these thinkers may have been to this dimension of the problem, “metaphysics,” or the assumption of the primacy of the declarative sentence, represents a permanent imperium in imperio that irremediably hinders attempts to construct centered orders.\n\nThe power of metaphysics lies in the assumption that certain truths stand outside of the centered order, and can therefore be used as a standard to judge any such order. This shifts sovereignty from the occupant of the social center to whoever makes the most compelling claim to represent the superior metaphysical order, whether that order is called “God’s will,” “human nature,” the “laws of nature,” the “laws of the market,” or anything else. So, the problem, in equal parts moral, political and spiritual, is to have a way of commenting on uses of language that feeds back into the centered order, that clarifies the center itself, and draws out its commands, rather than setting up an external standard.\n\nThe way I have framed the question is in terms of the metalinguistic dimension of natural semantic primes like “think,” “want,” “know,” “say,” “good” and so on. These words seem exclusively words used to refer directly to things in the world, in particular, human activity. “Consider,” for example, is metalinguistic because it tells us about how someone is “thinking,” and is therefore an implicit commentary on the use of “think.” The metaphysical reading of such words is to posit an essential reality in which they represent an internal or transcendent quality or activity of which the word is a secondary reflection—but this is just a case of commentary or “mention” overriding use, which in the case of all these words is far more variegated than any essence posited could suggest.\n\nBut the simplest way of eliciting the metalinguistic dimension of any word or, more precisely, any utterance, is by deploying it as a comment on a previous use of language. When one person responds to something said by another, the metalinguistic element of the reply lies in the way that response singles out, accentuates, draws attention to, some elements of the previous utterance rather than others.\n\nLeft at that, we could see this as an endless sequence of responses which, for no discernable reason, highlight some feature or another of the previous utterance. But it’s not left at this, because any response is seeking to maintain linguistic presence, and that will determine the nature of the response and the commentary on the previous utterance. And the way to maintain linguistic presence is by showing the previous utterance in its relation to the center, or some center, a center to which the new utterance also claims some relation. On the originary scene, whoever first emitted the sign couldn’t have quite known what he was doing until others iterated (responded to and commented on) his sign; even more, his own sign could not have been anything more than a more formalized version of another’s more instinctive hesitation—the non-instinctive hesitation is a “reading” of the instinctive variety in relation to a shared center.\n\nSo, when I respond to another’s utterance, I see them in a relation to the center, which I can share, while in seeing them (while they don’t see themselves), I attend to something new in that relation to center, making that my relation to it. We develop abstract concepts around which disciplinary spaces can be constructed in this way by putting some words to a specialized use, for the purposes of that disciplinary space, in drawing attention to uses of language in relation to a particular center.\n\nSo, the primarily “useful” primes become metalinguistic, or their metalinguistic dimension is elicited, when we think about thinking, or want to want, or know about knowing, or say things about the things we say. We can, in each utterance we hear, imagine or hypothesize what that utterance is responding to, how the words it is using, the way it is piecing together chunks of language, are themselves implicitly commenting on another utterance. Here we can conduct all kinds of thought experiments, in which we imagine two or more utterances identical in every way but one (perhaps some subtle difference in tone or context), and that difference would comprise the point of creation of the shared center in which the utterances participate.\n\nAll of our disciplines, even those in the physical sciences, operate this way, because they are all predicated upon revising existing hypotheses and the paradigms enabling them. We can be aware that this is all we are doing, and that this is quite enough. The center wants us to enter some proximate field of utterances and generate a new shared center, one that reveals something not yet visible in the center enabling the utterance. The shared project of ordering our centers therefore has its linguistic grounding, which means its grounding in meaning, and in thinking and knowing—a grounding with no ground other than the inquiry into the center itself."
    },
    {
      "slug": "center-and-centrality",
      "title": "Center and Centrality",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "If the metalanguage of literacy is both the equivalent and the vehicle of the imperium in imperio , the ethical practice that follows is reducing the metalinguistic dimension of language to its most minimal, which is the necessity that any use of language reference, iterate and modify some other use. The minimal metalanguage would simply be showing rather than concealing this dependence on differential repetition. Now it is possible to articulate the (meta)linguistic problem with the thought of the center. The way to do this is to address a problem in centered thinking that I have alluded to (and somewhat more) on a few occasions (it could hardly be completely avoided) but have not addressed directly and in a sustained way: the distinction and relation between the desired and ultimately consumed central object, and the subsisting center, which remains in the memory and praxis of the group subsequent to the event itself. It is the imagined central object, or, to borrow Jacques Lacan’s orthographic practice, the Object, that is the target of the group’s resentment and the source of its newly discovered/created communal being.\n\nWe can imagine a very minimal difference between the two, for starters. We could hypothesize that the sign issued on the originary scene would guide the group through its consumption of the object (the sparagmos) by serving, in that frenzied feast, to maintain sufficient order so as to prevent a new violent outbreak. Once the meal is completed, the participants might just walk away and return to their pre-human hominid existence—it’s possible that the scene was forgotten many times before it finally “took.” What would have made it “take” would have been, I would suggest, a final issuance of the sign, gesturing toward the inedible remains of the animal, which would have completed or “closed” or “sealed” the event as an event.\n\nMore of a metonymy than a metaphor, this representation of the continuity of the relation between margin and center would have inscribed the sign in the group’s memory. Nothing might change in their everyday interactions for a while, but every fresh kill would re-ignite the same mimetic crisis and call forth the remembered sign. The Object, or centrality beyond center, would be nothing more than this memory and the maintenance of the unity of the repeated event.\n\nAnd we can imagine a maximal difference between the two. When the tiniest object, event, or gesture can take on enormous, maybe even world-historical significance, we have the maximal difference between the center, some point on which attention converges, and centrality, or the capacities and supports that articulate that point along with numerous others to a distant social center. Let’s take, for example, the question much discussed on the American right, whether the Iran “deal” is, in fact, a “deal,” and, if so, between which entities—the Obama Administration and Ayatollah Khamenei, or the United States and Iran.\n\nIn the end, there is something we could look at, physically direct our attention towards: specific language in a document, the actual signatures of specific, well known people—signatures that could be “authenticated” by handwriting experts (who have themselves been “certified” by experts at “recognized” institutions, etc.). But the fact that people (and it would be carefully selected people) would look carefully at such things is due to the various international political protocols and domestic legal traditions and practices in the US and Iran and that would make such looking meaningful. The object here is some scribbles on a piece of paper; the Object is the alignment of power that follows the ascertaining of international “legitimacy,” which in turn references an entire history of “legitimacy.”\n\nIt’s clear that the maximal difference between center and centrality, object and Object, is the mark of a more civilized order. We can also see all the potential for degeneration and de-civilization in this distance. This potential lies in the possibility of making the abstracted norms sites of power struggle. Linguistic metalanguage (beginning, it can’t be stressed enough, with writing and the creation of alphabets, grammar, and diacritical marks) results from the study of language and represents the linguistic elements required for a workable writing system. In the process it shapes language—for example, a literate population will speak in more standardized and grammatically correct sentences than a non-literate population.\n\n(A non-literate population won’t even understand what a grammatical error is.) For subsequent metalanguages, predicated upon print culture and literacy, like philosophy, literature, and eventually the social sciences, such features as correct grammar and the logic developed out of it also seem to be “in” language, and therefore in the language users themselves: they come to “naturally” represent these cognitive “skills” and “capacities” as “in” the individual (like Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device, somehow planted in the brain). As a result, that such features are dependent on language can be forgotten, and cognition can be spoken of as if language were just an incidental means of representing cognitive activity already going on. Within the disciplinary and empowered metalanguages, then, the objects of thought and praxis are constructs of the metalanguage itself.\n\nThe metalanguages acquire their power by representing and enframing human and social “attributes.” History and tradition are displaced from the scene, even in the disciplines devoted to their study: what ends up getting studied is the development of the attributes of the human that the disciplinary metalanguages have singled out and made available for study and transformation. This is the equivalent of the imperium in imperio : a vast body of disciplinary knowledge that Power cannot help but draw upon and use to frame its own means and ends. We have a center, then, that obscures centrality—you could say I’m putting Heidegger’s notion of the “forgetting of Being” in originary and absolutist terms.\n\nThe center is now whatever can be attended to—defined, treated, assessed, categorized, manipulated—by disciplinary metalanguages. There is no centrality because those disciplinary metalanguages cannot attend to themselves, which is to say their origins. Sociology cannot say why there is such a thing as society; psychology why there is a “psyche” or mind; linguistics why there is language; anthropology why there is Man, or men; economics why there is exchange and money, and so on. A simulated “human being” is projected onto a screen as a placeholder for the attributes identified by the discipline.\n\nWhat writing represents are scenes and events of language, not “language” itself. Along with writing, scenes and events of pedagogy are constructed—a text comes prepared to serve as the source of new texts, oral and written. A text is always a pretext. Language learning is lifelong—entering a new disciplinary space is learning a new language. The way you learn a language is to repeat what speakers of that language say, get it wrong a lot of times, and finally start to get it right. To use a word mistakenly is to overlay one rule or imagined context with another—the word, phrase, sentence or discourse you are using works in some other context you are familiar with, and you assumed that context could be transposed onto the one shared by speakers of that language. Language comes in chunks that are transportable—we’re using the same words and expressions as English language speakers have been for centuries, often in very similar ways—but also very site specific: bits of language are shaped for specific uses.\n\nIn the relation between the mistake and the accepted use lies the relation between center and centrality. “Mistake” is a very broad concept: the way a lot of philosophers use the word “object” would be mistaken in a lot of ordinary situations. It would make the users in those situations laugh, just as philosophers might laugh at an untutored use of the word. It is in such instances that we demonstrate to ourselves that language is in its shared use, not in the things and qualities in the world it purports to refer to. There is reference, but we refer, language doesn’t. So, the language/metalanguage distinction is displaced by the center/centrality relation, which presents as the differing degrees and modes of mistakenness identified by a group of users. Not all mistakes are equal, which is to say not all of them are equally revelatory of the centrality of the center. Some mistakes point more pointedly to the origins of the use of a particular “chunk” wherein centrality is obscured by a new center.\n\nThere’s no need to advocate that people deliberately make mistakes (if you do it deliberately, is it still a mistake?). It will happen whe never we press on those points in a discourse where the discourse seems to hang together by an equivalence between an “attribute” or “quality” and a metalinguistic concept. If you try to dislodge such concepts from their representational relation to an inner substance, you cannot but use them mistakenly. I certainly am advocating lots of “wild” theorizing, with abductions and hypotheses too big for the “data set” they draw upon. But also innovative writing, in particular writing that infiltrates the standard forms and disciplines, revealing their bureaucratic origins and ends, along with the modes of inquiry they’ve made impossible. The only inescapable absolutes are centers and origins.\n\nCan originary disciplinary spaces founded on mistakenness, eschewing imperium in imperio ambitions, provide useful knowledge, to the center or anyone else? The knowledge gained in such spaces is both knowing that and knowing how, above all, knowing how to enter various spaces and be useful within them. Schools and universities would be more explicitly what they already are, training camps preparing the young to act and improvise within the constraints set up by the articulated social hierarchy. The metalanguage of literacy installs a new imagined possibility, one which would be inconceivable prior to writing: that everyone could, eventually, be led to agree—potentially, on everything.\n\nIf there is a single reality represented by language, and through the perfection of logical and empirical methods every single claim could be deemed to be either in agreement or disagreement with reality, then there is nothing preventing us from producing a complete map of reality and having that map already here, in potential, contained in the most advanced methods but also in every human mind or soul. But even two people saying exactly the same thing are not completely in agreement, because one says it after the other, or they say it in different contexts, or in response to different questions or exigencies, and with different audiences, different consequences and implications. The physical sciences approximate the production of universally agreed upon statements most closely, which is why the social sciences are so tempted to promote those sciences, at least nominally, as models.\n\nThe striving toward universal agreement is propelled by the development of declarative culture as the negation of imperative and ostensive cultures. This is the imperium in imperio of proceduralism, which likewise imagines the possibility of a world completely mapped by declarative sentences—in the case of proceduralism, explicit agreements and regulations promulgated by authorities who are authorized to do so by other explicit agreements or regulations. The fantasy is that the imperative order will be erased, or that we will all be induced to participate in the fiction that that is the case (that inducement would be the only remaining imperative).\n\nEven the insistence that one agree with oneself, from moment to moment, from one topic to another, interferes with the effort to hear older imperatives from the center. Declarative culture will always have the tendency toward metalinguistic imperialism, but also opens the possibility of infra-language, a term used by Bruno Latour: “language used by analysts to help them become more attentive to the actor’s own dully developed metalanguage, a reflexive account of what they are saying.” There will always be metalanguage in literate cultures, and the use of infralanguage is to take metalanguage from outside the discourse it regulates and have it circulate within that discourse.\n\nThe compulsion to agree reflects a desire for anonymous discourse, to say what anyone could and should say; but only someone can point to the center. The Object, the Center, Centrality is indicated in the difference between metalanguage and infralanguage, where the object framed by metalanguage is given an infralinguistic and infradisciplinary originary structure: we see that at one point that thing provided for the organization of a new form of attention."
    },
    {
      "slug": "linguistically-constructed-empires-within-empires",
      "title": "Linguistically Constructed Empires within Empires",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It’s not long in any dispute before one side or another enlists the rules on his side: logical rules, rules of evidence, a theoretical method, rules of fair play, rules of the particular discursive space or discipline, precedent, etc. The disagreement gets to the point, that is, where you realize that there must be something you agree on in order for the disagreement to make any sense; but the hope is that you can invoke the rules in order to have yourself declared, by some putatively impartial and sovereign agency, the winner. You implicitly concede power to decide the issue to an imagined logician, or arbiter, or judge, on the model of the civilized man ceasing to pursue his vendetta and allow a court of law to determine the issue.\n\nThis is the right thing to do in a civilized order, but is highly destructive when applied to thinking and speaking. Even if your debating opponent can marshal superior facts and logic and refutes your claims in a way you cannot respond to, you’d really be a fool to concede and change your mind. After all, all the other person is proving is that they are better at logic, have gathered more information (or deploy it more skillfully), and have perhaps honed their arguments over the course of more such contests than you have. What it doesn’t prove is that they are right and you are wrong. It’s a good idea to be highly suspicious of anyone who thinks you should accept that it does prove this. Maybe someone who agrees with you but with greater logical and argumentative skill will make your opponent look the fool. Why not assume he’s out there?\n\nA discussion, a conversation, a space of inquiry, has its own center and therefore its own order. Part of that order is a particular logic, a particular way of identifying, vetting and organizing “facts,” testing “truth-claims” and so on. What people within that order should want is to make the disciplinary space better, which means making everyone within the space better. Of course, it might also mean excluding people from the space and welcoming newcomers in. It may also involve, and must, if one wants a first class disciplinary space, testing the “method” against that of overlapping spaces, perhaps through staged encounters, various forms of “devil’s advocacy,” or infiltration of other spaces.\n\nBut the originary structure of the space must trump any externally imposed methodological standard. (That standard ultimately derives from some other space, that constructed it for its own purposes.) The originary structure of the space is the question or problem it is concerned with that no one else is (if some other space is concerned with exactly the same question or problem, you should join forces and amalgamate—if that proves impossible, then, setting aside purely personal motivations that vitiate the space, what has been proven is that it’s not exactly the same question or problem). Abandoning a disciplinary space before all its possibilities have been exhausted, merely because its hypotheses have more apparent weight against them than for them, is the intellectual equivalent of selling your soul to the devil.\n\nThis intellectual equivalent of the imperium in imperio is the law of the declarative sentence. The law of the declarative sentence is that any declarative sentence, in order to be considered “acceptable,” must be capable of being disassembled and reassembled by other declarative sentences in a reciprocally inclusive way. So, take, for example, a sentence like “All men must obey the law.” There is an entity, “man.” This entity includes all the single entities we call “men.” There is a difference between a single being and the category to which it belongs. The single beings belong to a category because they are the same in some way.\n\nMen are the same in that they are able to obey the law. To obey means to perform an act dictated by another. The law dictates obedience to general forms of actions. Men are therefore the same in being capable of conforming to general forms of actions. This is why all men should obey the law. Etc. This could be done better, and certainly far more comprehensively—but never comprehensively enough. One would still have to establish, in declarative form, the meaning of words like “entity,” “being,” “single,” “category,” “same,” etc. No matter how far you go, it would all be perfectly circular, with everything being defined in terms of everything else.\n\nAnd the introduction of “facts” doesn’t change things, because the existence and significance of facts can only be established in the same way, by “grounding” general categories in other general categories and specific “observations” in general categories. “I saw a tall man yesterday” means I frame an event in terms of the categories of “I” “see,” “tall,” etc.\n\nWhen someone tells you that your argument is illogical or insufficiently “supported” by “evidence,” they are telling you that something is missing in these tacitly assumed self-referential declarative chains. And no doubt there is! That doesn’t change the fact that there’s something you’re trying to figure out. Proceduralism is a fraud in the disciplinary space no less than in the sovereign order. What you’re trying to figure out may be determined externally, say by the state gathering together a group of social theorists to generate proposals for a body of law, but it still will not be the case that you have competed your inquiry once you have finished following a set of methodological rules for conducting such an inquiry.\n\nAs a disciplinary space, your inquiry has either split off from another entity that has become (in the opinion of the splitters) exhausted or sidetracked, having lost sight of its originary structure; or, it has emerged to pursue a new line of inquiry opened by what might still be a quite fertile field. What sustains the space is being faithful to its origin, and if disassembling and reassembling the declarative sentences out of which the discipline is composed is going to be helpful, it will be subordinate to that imperative.\n\nWhat I am here calling the “law of the declarative sentence” is what I have also been calling “metalanguage” and “metaphysics.” It is a necessary function of language, to develop ways of assessing other uses of language, but the metalanguage of literacy, which also in a way creates the declarative sentence (insofar as it identifies it as such), is what has created a maximal metalanguage arrogating to itself the right to call up for inspection any and all uses of language. It is significant that the emergence of literacy coincides with the emergence of a literate class, in service to the state, which can only come into existence with a bureaucracy, which itself requires writing (there may be marginal exceptions).\n\nThe metalanguage of literacy is an intellectual or ideological bulwark to the state, while also providing the material for decentering power by appealing to transcendent models to which the sovereign must adhere. The alternative, which is possible today, is a minimal metalanguage which serves uses of language within disciplinary spaces by distinguishing between those uses that are within and those without the disciplinary space. A minimal metalanguage would be used for saying things like “that’s not what we’re talking about” because “you’re assuming an answer to a question we are still asking,” or “you’re raising a question the answer to which our current inquiry is predicated upon (if that inquiry breaks down, that might be a time to raise that question again).” The minimal metalanguage, or the declarative consultant, helps out by identifying questions which have been “begged,” and formulating those questions.\n\nA metalanguage can be minimal because it has one absolute presupposition: that there is an origin, an origin to the disciplinary space and to the field of inquiry it opens, and therefore also an origin to everything else, and that knowledge of anything is knowledge of its origin or, to minimize disputes at this point, its originary structure. The metalanguage prods us to stay within the originary structure, and to keep marginalizing and eliminating conceptual structures that don’t derive from that structure. To say there is an origin is tantamount to saying there is a center, because the center is what constitutes the origin.\n\nDeclarative social theory, which includes most if not all modern, and probably quite a bit of ancient, theory, is committed to structures without origins and centers. Such theories constitute the “ideological superstructure” of the metalanguage of literacy. But “saying” there is an origin and center is beside the point—we couldn’t say anything in the first place if there weren’t. To assume an interlocutor can understand anything I say, to assume he even knows that I’m talking to him, is to assume a shared center. And to focus on winning debates before an imagined tribunal is to eschew inquiry into that shared center while taking it for granted and identifying it with its most readily available historical instantiation. Once you have won, then what? Try and use Power for mopping up?\n\nThe equality and brotherhood of all humanity is a destructive Enlightenment myth because it serves as an indiscriminate battering ram against any form of “discrimination”; but an understanding of humanity as a potential, and yet never to be realized, disciplinary space can have only productive effects. Whatever I am paying attention to I can point out to another—not everyone all at once, certainly not everyone with equal ease, maybe not some until other things have been pointed out, but there is no need to exclude any pedagogical possibility in advance. Think about when a scientist invites a layman to look into a microscope—the first question, from the layman will be “what am I looking at?”\n\nKnowing what you are looking at without being told is being inside the discipline, but everyone at some point had to have it pointed out. This disciplinary and pedagogical process is not necessarily a peaceful one: armies at war with each other establish a kind of disciplinary space, in the explicit and tacit rules of engagement they establish and the reciprocal process of imitation and learning they engage in—the mimetic rivalry this process might evoke could easily lead to escalation. But it’s also the only way the conflict can be brought to a decisive end, one in which both sides understand that it has to end and why.\n\nThe disciplinary space in which the warriors, or their most disciplined representative, participate, will ultimately reveal potential consequences that will be unacceptable to all sides, relative to any possible aim sought; and it will reveal means of de-escalation and precise trade-offs that might satisfy, to some extent, the needs and honor of both sides. By comparison, a pacifist can only utter platitudes.\n\n“Every man should defy the law.” This counter-intuitive, paradoxical, impossible claim might be far better to think with than the more easily supported “every man should obey the law.” Maybe “the” in “the law” should be taken literally, and we’re just referring to a single law here (and, yet, what holds for one could hold for all, couldn’t it?). Maybe there are ways of defying the law without the authorities even noticing (what could “defiance” mean, in that case)—maybe the injunction is to seek out such means of defiance, and maybe doing so would reveal various gray areas between law, obedience and enforcement. Maybe once enough men have defied some law, or all law, other men will have to intervene and defy other laws in order to counter that defiance and restore balance, and the law, once again—without the possibility of making sense of “every man should defy the law,” maybe obedience to the law would be merely mechanical and mindless and, therefore, a kind of defiance itself. Opening up such disciplinary spaces within disciplinary spaces is the antidote to the compulsion to construct disciplinary empires within empires."
    },
    {
      "slug": "primus-and-skunkworker",
      "title": "Primus and Skunkworker",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Equality simply means the same, in some respect. If you see equality as a value in itself, there’s no reason not to make people equal in more and more respects. Making people equal in more and more respects means uncovering inequality (difference) in previously overlooked respects. This process need never end because people who have been made the same in some respect can, by virtue of that construction of sameness, turn out to have been made different in some new respect.\n\nBut (and this is quite elementary) sameness implies some form of measurement so that the objects in question can be reduced to that measure. All things are equal insofar as they have mass, and can measured by a scale, or length, insofar as they can be measured by a ruler. Then, of course, some things are heavier and longer than others, with the Procrustean solutions implicit in the decision to measure in the first place. In social terms, this entails reduction to a single center. Members of a club are equal insofar as they are members of a club, and subject to a set of by-laws and whoever enforces those by-laws. Members of a modern state are equal insofar as they are all directly subject to the state, and the laws it governs by.\n\nThus, the “moral equality” which Larry Seidentop ( Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism ) sees as having been introduced by the gradual reshaping of the Western social order through the middle ages by the Catholic Church cannot be sustained in a post-Christian world where the only shared center is the state. The moral equality of Christians is equal in relation to God. Everyone deserves moral consideration as a member or potential member of the Church and child of God, not as a bare “human being.” Let’s frame this in Girardian terms: the Christian revelation discredits scapegoating and human sacrifice by displaying what we can anachronistically call the “bad faith” of such means of maintaining social stability.\n\nThe selection, as an object of violence, of someone stigmatized in some way, follows not from any genuine knowledge of social relations or divine-human relations, but the logic of mimetic rivalry and crisis. So, from now on, violence against individuals is proscribed, because intrinsically tainted by scapegoating tendencies, while those who engage in violence can be prevented and punished, but only according to rules designed to ensure that such prevention and punishment is free of traces of mimetically motivated hostility. So, everyone is equal in being accorded such protection from mimetically motivated violence.\n\nBut what of citizens of a liberal order which knows not Christianity, or sees Christianity as part of the order that needed to be smashed for that liberal order to emerge? What if shared protection from mimetically motivated violence is itself productive of a form of inequality insofar as some members of the social order seem to navigate the system established by that proscription better than others? On what grounds can a member of “civil society” claim that the right to disable, hunt down, indelibly mark members of the “privileged” group is any less valid than the right to be given a fair trial? If equality is now equality in relation to the state as central power, and the state itself is driven by the imperative to ensure that more citizens, and more aspects of their life, are equalized, the benefit of the doubt will always be given to whomever can claim to have uncovered a previously neglected, and therefore all the more scandalous, form of inequality—even if it’s just some feature of social life that hasn’t been subject to any regulation up until now, or even some new form of life generated by the latest equalization campaign.\n\nSo far, we have the basic right-left configuration in liberal social orders. The left finds some new inequality, remedy for which it appeals to the state in the prescribed terms; the right, meanwhile, defends the existing form of equality against this new discovery. The best strategy the right can think of within this order is to try and counter leftist encroachments by claiming that those encroachments will in fact create new forms of inequality: so, the equalization of income promised by the welfare state makes blacks more unequal by undermining black family structures, or mass Muslim immigration will lead to a renewed persecution of homosexuals. But these stopgaps can’t work very well because the right always positions itself so as to erect or resurrect some discredited form of inequality: the bourgeois family form that blacks supposedly need oppresses “sexual minorities,” the warning against Muslims is Islamophobic, etc. It is always only a matter of time before the state realizes its equalizing power is aggrandized by recognizing the new form of equality.\n\nIf the state is exhaustive of social centrality, or, more precisely, if a state dedicated to liberal equality, as the successor and eviscerator of Christian moral equality is exhaustive, this problem cannot be solved. Perhaps restoring or recreating a divine center to which the sovereign would be subject would solve it, but only by recreating the old problem of a “real” sovereign to which the actual sovereign must be subject, thereby opening a space for other powers claiming to speak for the real sovereign. But let’s say, with Andrew Willard Jones, that the problem is with the concept of “sovereignty” itself, with its assumption of an original violence, ready to break out as soon as social control is lifted, and therefore the need for an ultimate, unquestioned source of law and order.\n\nThe mimetically motivated violence targeted by Girard is not a Hobbesian war of all against all, it is an all against one which only works if a kind of intellectual dishonesty is shared by all: the lie of scapegoating and human sacrifice is that the sacrality lies in the victim rather than in the terror of a center that no longer defers, whose power of deferral is overridden by the sameness, the equality of mimetic desire.\n\nThe social center is the monarch, or, perhaps, we can say the primus. Someone has to occupy the center because all attention converges on the center, so an occupant who can turn back that convergence is indispensable to social order. By the time resentful attention has all converged upon the center, it is too late, so resentful attention must be dispersed through localized centers—establishing and constraining these centers is the highest priority of the primus. This involves the differentiation of forms of attention: a craftsman’s resentment over a perceived degradation in the social status of his profession over the last generation will not readily join in a common cause with the philosopher resentful over his latest opus not receiving what he considers its due appreciation.\n\nBut, of course, this means that the craftsman must be a genuine craftsman, the philosopher a genuine philosopher (the priest a real priest, the teacher a real teacher, and so on), or, more precisely, that we can measure any particular practitioner against the standard established by the tradition of that practice. In that case, there is a kind of equality among craftsman and aspiring craftsman, which is enforced within the discipline and sanctioned by the primus, who insists that the standards of craftsmanship be maintained, and a kind of equality amongst the various orders insofar as all have constraints imposed by the primus.\n\nThere is a lot of what we could call “equality” here, but they are different forms of equality incommensurable to each other. Resentment can never converge toward a single target, like the rich/white/straight/cis/male who is the virtual and permanent antithesis of equality. A non-sovereign center would restore a “middle,” not of social status and estates (at least not necessarily—I don’t mean to exclude anything) but of diverse modes of deferral and discipline.\n\nBut how can the primus assess the effectiveness of his constraints? The weakness in the order I am describing is that the primus is dependent upon the primus among craftsmen, the primus among academics, the primus among scientists, and so on, and the equality provided by the standards of each practice or discipline can just as readily be used to set in motion the process of uncovering inequalities as demands for equality within a liberal order. Aside from the politicizing of the disciplines, if the disciplines are governed by nothing more than a top-down mode of authority, it is hard to see how the primus could prevent more commonplace forms of corruption, like cronyism, bribery and so on. And entrenched forms of power that only simulate adherence to the traditions grounding their authority must in turn attempt to influence the social primus as well.\n\nThe only solution for this problem I can think of is for the primus to have eyes and ears within every discipline and institution. These eyes and ears must be agents simultaneously loyal to the primus and to the practice of the discipline in question—“equally” loyal to both, in fact, or, better, refusing any distinction between the two loyalties. They are equal amongst themselves in relation to the primus, and participate in the form of equality constitutive of the discipline. They are normal participants in the discipline, and if the discipline and its practices proceed in accord with its own center, the object or aim that elicits the capacities the discipline is established so as to elicit, no one need know they are there, and they need never do more than issue occasional, perfunctory reports to the primus—if that.\n\nIf these agents, let’s call them “skunkworkers” in a bit of a misnomer, detect derogations in the disciplines, they first of all work within existing channels in order to remedy them. That is, they first of all leverage their own “rights” within the institution to correct its course. Having exhausted all such means, they report to the primus with suggestions regarding personnel changes and revisions of the founding constraint of the discipline. Sometimes the skunkworkers will be known as such by their co-workers; sometimes they will be undercover—different situations call for different approaches. Sometimes the skunkworkers’ proposals will be rejected by the primus; sometimes the primus will see the skunkworker as the source of the problem, and someone so relied upon must be severely punished in that case (sometimes the primus will be wrong, sometimes the skunkworker will genuinely fail, or even “go bad”). The skunkworker accepts this risk as part of his higher form of loyalty.\n\nThe skunkworkers would set the moral tone of the social order: they are the bearers of the moral center informing, but not conflicting with or presuming to judge, the social center occupied by the primus. Everyone would wonder whether this or that co-worker were or might be a skunkworker—like any form of social control, this might sometimes be frightening, but the fear of being accused wrongly by a skunkworker would be proportional to a broader breakdown in social and moral order. The only solution would be for the primus to recruit new skunkworkers, perhaps to spy on the existing ones or, in the most extreme cases, for the skunkworkers who remain committed to disciplinary excellence to shift their allegiance to a new primus. If order is well-maintained, the skunkworkers whill be admired and imitated, and everyone would aspire to be a kind of apprentice skunkworker. And that, indeed, is how skunkworkers would be selected in the first place.\n\nThe skunkworker is also the form taken by the continuity between our present order and a future one governed by the articulation of primus and skunkworker. What the skunkworker does is what we can all do, in whatever discipline or institution we are placed: we can all represent the originary structure of the discipline and expose distortions and corruptions, even if there’s not really anyone to expose them to. The exposure must be expected to create the audience for it. In doing so, we assume, on the one hand, maximal continuity between the present order, no matter how bad things may be, and a genuine centered ordinality—we operate under the assumption that all that’s really necessary is for everyone to clarify the terms of the disciplines, and that such clarification is a simple matter given than those terms are immanent in the discipline itself, once all extrinsic considerations (power, prestige, wealth, etc.) are “controlled for.”\n\nWe also assume, on the other hand, that we are perpetually dissolving concentrations of resentment towards the center, simply by proposing new disciplinary practices and the incorporation of currently undisciplined practices within disciplinary ones. All people need is a compelling center, and all people need that, and so we counter all attempts at equalization by contributing to the construction of a center that would render such skirmishes irrelevant. Rather than erecting one center after another (whether political, intellectual or spiritual) to control the going astray of the previous center, we have the center of last resort (the primus) and the delegated powers of deferral that, all together, are “equal” in their actual composition of the power of the primus."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-architecture-of-the-center",
      "title": "The Architecture of the Center",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "When we speak about the absolutism of central power, the point is less that whatever the occupant of the center says goes (so that if something he says doesn’t go he must have said the wrong thing, but in that case was he really occupying the center?) than that no one can imagine anything happening without reference to the center. If I want to do something, I imagine the conditions under which the central power will allow or support it—if I think in terms of how I can do it by evading central power, I am still thinking of the center as a general constraint that must structure my thinking. If I want to bring about some social change, whatever form of cooperation with others I hope to organize, I ultimately assume the change must be channeled through the center, even if that means changing its occupant or even trying to occupy it myself.\n\nThe center as referent and constraint on meaning is implicit in all of our uses of language—if the role of the center in a particular instance is not obvious, it is necessary to invent it. The centered nature of reality is what provides us with the general imperative to support a centered ordinality, which is to say an order in which the articulation of power from the center through the ranks it establishes is rendered transparent and consistent.\n\nThere has to be a center because humanity is constituted through joint attention, and attention must be attention toward something, and if attention is joint that something must be at the convergence of the respective lines of vision of the attenders. The only way this object of attention can be held in place is if it is desired by all of those attending upon it, and the only way it can be desired rather than appropriated is if its appropriation is proscribed; and the only way its appropriation can be proscribed is if the participants on the scene constitute this proscription by offering signs to each other that they will suspend any attempt to appropriate the object.\n\nThe source of the sign(s) offered must be a reversal of the movement towards the object, and this reversal must result from the fear of violence produced by this novel, collective, unconstrained rush toward the object. Now, up until this point in our reconstruction of the originary event, there is in principle nothing that the participants on the scene couldn’t talk about and arrange deliberately among ourselves. That is, so far, there would be some justification in seeing the originary scene as a kind of social contract, if we were to set aside the problem of there not being any language in which the terms of the contract could be set. But we have left out one thing: precisely because there is no language within which a “negotiation” could take place, the injunction against appropriating the object can only come from the central object itself.\n\nNow, one could take the atheist position and say that imagining the central object ordering everyone to stand down is a mere “illusion,” generated by the unspoken balancing of the “odds” and projection of motivations onto each other by the participants on the scene. Maybe one could map it out and mathematize it. But it’s an illusion that returns each time we use language and “understand” each other—the atheist can rationalize the scene in retrospect in terms of a parallelogram of forces, but he couldn’t show us how its participants could have done it then; he can also imagine that he’s rationalizing the world scene on which he acts today, but unless we make the completely irrational assumption that everyone is rationalizing equally and simultaneously such rationalization is really just an attempt to marshal, or imagine marshaling, all of the scientific and technological capacities bound up with the very possibility of rationalizing in the attempt to destroy by force the “problem” of human meaning.\n\nAn illusion which cannot be filtered out of “reality” is not really an illusion—it is what Hannah Arendt called a “necessary appearance,” or what we could call an “imaginary.” In this case, a central imaginary—that is what we can’t think or speak without. All of culture is human beings placing things at the center, which is indistinguishable from being told what to place at the center by the center, and charting and narrating the movements of whatever is at the center. As I suggested in the previous post, we are always trying to get word from the center, no less when we generate complex genetic and psychological typologies than when we consult with demons and spirits.\n\nThere is a continuity between magic and science and technology, as evidenced by the fact that the vanguard of each new scientific revolution accuses its predecessors of some variant or residue of “magical” or “mythological” thinking. This progressive relation to the center is what I have been calling “imperative culture,” or the “imperative order,” or “imperativity.” The center issues commands, commands with their origins in the injunction to suspend appropriation of the object on the originary scene; the participants on any cultural scene make requests of the center. These requests are often refused, and when that happens new cultural forms must be created: the request may have been refused because it was made improperly, which means that the center orders more formalized and supervised forms of petition; it may have been refused because the one making it was not worthy of having it granted, meaning that the center orders new modes of self-examination and purification—these are the ways in which resentment at the center’s refusals are made productive. The relation to the center is in this way refined, and the means of yet further refinement created.\n\nIt is not surprising that once human beings, that is, kings, start occupying the center, a similar process of trial and error would be required—in fact, not only have we, or, more precisely, no political leadership, yet completely solved this problem, we could see the centuries of liberal usurpations of the center as both another attempted solution and a hysterical avoidance of the problem itself. The more we see the incoherence of liberalism, the more problematic and interesting the modern order becomes, because the modern order has obviously seen scientific, intellectual and technological accomplishments that any post-liberal order would preserve, albeit in some revised manner.\n\nSo, has the industrialization and post-industrialization, the massive wealth creation, of the West, and much of the rest of the world in its wake, been accomplished because of liberalism—in which case do we have to accept liberalism along with the technology and wealth, or reject both (and in that latter case, how, exactly)?; are the material developments in spite of liberalism, in which case we can just junk the liberalism and move on to a rational and beneficial harvesting of our growing powers (this seems a little too convenient); are these developments side effects of liberalism, partly rooted in, partly separate from, that political order (in which case a perhaps more complex surgical operation, which might transform the “patient” in unpredictable ways, might be needed)? All of these ways of framing the question, in the very positing of a “we,” are implicated in magical and mythological thinking, direct translations of our hopes and fears into requests of the center.\n\nIn sacred kingship, the king is the mediator between the community and the supernatural world, or the world created at the origin. He has to resolve the paradox of the center, that it both precedes “us” and is the depository of our desires and resentments. The sacred king is responsible for all aspects of the well-being of the community—he brings rain, he ensures adequate food supplies, protects against natural disasters, and so on. This means that these are all things we expect from the center. (The fact that we can still look out the window and say “oh, no, not rain again!” means that we still expect these things.)\n\nIt makes sense to assume that sacred kings would have done what they could to supply what they could, and to turn their failures back onto the community. Furthermore, they would elevate their role from mediator to arbiter, if possible, creating the distinction (made by David Graeber) between “sacred” and “divine” kings: the divine kings “make themselves the equivalents of gods—arbitrary, all-powerful beings beyond human morality—through the use of arbitrary violence.” Graeber sees sacred kingship as a way of controlling for the effects of divine kingship, but there is no contradiction in noting that divine kingship would offer a way of transcending the limitations and dangers of sacred kingship.\n\nViolence against humans and violence against the natural world and everything in it are of a piece—it is only fairly recently that the distinction between the two could even be made. The readiest solution to sacred kingship is, then, divine violence. The imperatives issued by those on the human side of the imperative order start to become more imperious: people can start to say to “gods” and “natural” beings, “do this!” And watching very closely to see whether they obey. And, further, watching very closely for what the audience seems to accept as “obedience”—or, more precisely, what the audience can be induced or made to accept.\n\nAndrew Bartlett , an orginary thinker of the GA school (see also his Mad Scientist, Impossible Human ) locates the origins of science on the originary scene in the possibility of handling one part of the originary object as a part separate from the whole, and that is what happens in the growing autonomy of the imperative order: imperatives need no longer be issued to the center itself, but to its “messengers” and “agents.” The specialization of a few members of the community in the acquisition of such knowledge is the beginning of the disciplines, and the delegation of such powers by the king is the beginning of imperial kingship. This is the road towards the struggle for sovereignty.\n\nSo, there is a dialect between the center through which violence must ultimately circulate and the disciplines, which give, revise, and suggest compound “meanings” granted to anything and everything in the world (everything that has been loosened from sacred kingship). Technology itself, as I think Heidegger was suggesting, is itself a way of conferring upon or summoning forth meaning from nature and human capacities. For those of us in the disciplines, who if anything want even less than the pittance of power allotted us in liberal democracies that means engaging in the kinds of disputes that can only be settled by resetting attention to a lower threshold.\n\nWhen we think or speak we are always on a scene, or a possible scene—but all scenes are really only possible ones. None of us has created the language we use, and even if we speak to ourselves, the self we speak to is not identical to the one who listens—but it’s also very easy to forget this, since the most readily available means of assertion (I think, I believe, I am sure, etc.) give credit to the assumption that we are each of the original source of what we say.\n\nThere is no “world scene,” which is an Enlightenment fantasy, but it is possible to see all of us—“we” language users—as embarked, in all our overlapping and spread out disciplinary spaces, on a collaborative project to refine further our instructions from the center. The architecture of each discipline is a construction of a meaningful “piece” or “dimension” of reality—we undertake the construction by seeking out the failed imperatives we have issued to the center of our space, and replacing them with ones whose meaning we can now test. Imagining goals, causes and regularities, and then finding ways to test their viability is the process of participating in the disciplines.\n\nOne thing that centralizing power does is widen the scope of possible disciplinary inquiries—centralizing power mobilizes collective forms of action, and demands and receives new forms of material force, and therefore provides new areas of inquiry for students of those activities and of power itself. It may very well be, then, that a form of power like liberalism, which is simultaneously centralizing and centripetal, would give a huge impetus to various disciplinary inquiries; and it is also not surprising that those inquiries vary widely in quality and sustainability. Liberalism is a kind of weird, swirling sprawl that sucks everything towards an abyss at the center. But anywhere within that sprawl one can try and slow things, redirect attention, and look at some failed pleas to the center that haven’t even been noticed as such.\n\nAll discourse is the representation of imperative exchanges in declarative, ultimately narrative and paradoxical, form. Myths explain rituals, but they’re not the cause of the ritual—the cause of the ritual is the recreation of the scene to make the central being present, and revisions of ritual are responses to some failure of the central being to appear. The new ritual changes the request, the question and the conditions of the answer: if we do this the being will appear, and the appearance of the being will take this form. Ultimately, if the appearance of the being is evidenced in the petitioner’s ability to find that presence in his own ability to defer some desire, we have reached the point of minimal ritual—ritual as continuous inspections of increasingly refined habits.\n\nThis can then take the form of a narrative of some kind of intellectual and psychological self-transformation. Disciplinary spaces can arrive at the point where they essentially report on the efficacy and results of practices that maintain this minimal and continuous presence. This minimal and continuous presence is to be maintained within spaces where presence is less minimal and continuous—it is to keep working on these spaces, producing practices that with minimal input maximally increase the presence of central being. This kind of practice is what I have been examining in the last couple of posts in my proposals for the deconstruction of metalanguage, which is really a kind of mythological or magical discourse. All metalinguistic terms can be reduced to some scenic version of think, say, feel, or know, and these words can in turn be reduced to imperatives to draw new instructions from the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "disciplining-disciplines",
      "title": "Disciplining Disciplines",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A recent essay in The New Atlantis , “ Saving Science ,” by Daniel Sarewitz, makes the important argument that the goals of scientific disciplines cannot be set by the disciplines themselves, which therefore inevitably meet some externally determined need. The most obvious examples are state sponsored weapons, infrastructural and space-oriented projects, but campaigns for developing vaccines and cures also apply. The free play of inquiry itself, scientists just following the most intriguing and challenging questions raised in the course of inquiry itself would lead, Sarewtiz notes… nowhere. This is obviously true for softer disciplines, like the human sciences as well, which generally meet some less precisely defined imperative to improve modes of civilizational maintenance, social control and surveillance.\n\nThe disciplines have their deepest origins in ritual, myth, priestcraft, magic, and the traditional arts, crafts and labor techniques. We could distinguish between these practices within a still largely undifferentiated society in terms of their respective distance from the sacred center. Indeed, different distances from the center, which involve the creation of new, mediating centers, seems a likely origin for social differentiation itself. In Originary Thinking , Eric Gans, in distinguishing between morality (grounded in the equality of those spread around the center) and ethics (norms specific to some practice), hypothesizes that the origin of freedom is away from the center, for example in those hunting or gathering for food.\n\nFor now, I’m more interested in the differing distances from the center than the specific question Gans deals with here. It’s a very interesting question, after all: if language was originally a strictly ritual affair, serving to mediate the relations between the group on what is ultimately a scene of distribution and consumption, what would be going on elsewhere, in particular in the more “productive” activities? We could easily imagine that for a while, at least, such activities would proceed as before, without the intervention of language.\n\nAt a certain point, sign use would enter the productive sphere, for the same reason it entered the human group in the first place: to defer violence. In this case, though, we can assume the forms of potential violence deferred would be lower stakes than those commemorated on the originary scene: say, a challenge not so much to the leader of the expedition himself but to a particular decision—he is leading the group in one way, an underling sees more potential in a different direction. This might ultimately come to blows, or worse, but in a fairly coherent group with shared goals, that’s unlikely—still, the availability of language would be a useful way to settle the dispute.\n\nGans also suggests in The Origin of Language , in examining the succession of speech forms, that innovation is more likely at the margins than at the center, and this would be a confirmation of that intuition. For hunters out for days, chasing dangerous and elusive prey, a high degree of improvisation must be allowed for, far more than would ever be permissible on the ritual scene, and so communicative capacities would improve correspondingly. Still, once these hunters brought their kill back to the community and placed it at the center, they would bow down, intone the requisite chant and follow the established process of distribution and consumption like anyone else.\n\nAll disciplinary activity, then, no matter how seemingly impractical, unsupervised and free, is at bottom aware that something needs to be brought back to the center. We should see this constraint as a condition of disciplinary activity, not a restriction imposed on what would otherwise be a “purer” form of activity. Let’s say the hunters forget that they need to bring back food for the rest, or decide not to care—their “study” of their prey leads them to get interested in other, non-prey animals, then in the prey of those animals, whose migratory habits then become interesting, and so the band decides to follow them for a while, and so on.\n\nThey would really be following one distraction after another, rather than being engaged in any sort of inquiry. In fact, the surrounding environmental penumbra of the prey animal does become “interesting” in all kinds of ways, but always in ways related to the primary task of understanding that animal’s habits and its relation to the community. The more curious hunters might in fact be the ones contributing most to the mythical center emanating from the sacrificial center, supplying reports of the animal in its natural habitat that in turn become stories of the animal as progenitor and creator of the human group itself, which stories in turn might be made more practical use of in subsequent hunts.\n\nThe very fact that an inquiry is an inquiry into something, that is to say, it has a center, is a mark of its reliance upon an external center. The inquiry then does, indeed, take on its own dynamics: Sarewitz, hoping that the dependence of science on externally produced needs and institutions will make science more “democratically” accountable describes at great length the pressure brought to bear on cancer researchers by cancer survival activist groups; it doesn’t seem to me, though, that these specific vectors of pressure contributed much to actually finding a cure (which, needless to say, we still don’t have, regardless of the constant setting of “deadlines” for one).\n\nHow, exactly, external agencies are to assess the progress of the disciplines is itself a disciplinary question, one that the most powerful and aggressive interest group is no more likely to have an answer to than anyone else. Of course, JFK’s imperative to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade turned out to be remarkably precise—but how many other examples of this kind are there? Maybe JFK’s was just a lucky guess. Under the pressures of wartime, when those setting the goals have powerful incentives to set realistic ones, such mandates and initiatives (like the Manhattan Project) can succeed, while once the setting of mandates gets opened up to the democratic process it becomes a way of grabbing for resources and elbowing out competitors.\n\nAnd strictly technical projects are more likely to succeed than more vaguely defined social engineering ones, etc. It may be that most, it may be that all, of the art or science of governing is learning how to set, assess and enforce constraints on the disciplines. This provides yet another reason for the placement of skunkworkers within the disciplines.\n\nWork within the disciplines, then, must oscillate between distancing from and approaching the constraint set by the center. A new discovery regarding DNA transmission in cell reproduction might be pursued, not knowing where it will lead, and you might put together a new team of people fascinated by the problem of DNA transmission, even if they’re utterly uninterested in curing cancer, on the job; in the end, though, a decision must be made regarding whether this particular path is leading anywhere, “anywhere” as defined by the originating mission of that disciplinary space. Of course, promising, but aborted work done in this discipline might turn out to be highly useful for some other discipline, addressing some other problem.\n\nAt each point along the way decisions have to made, decisions often productive of much resentment, as those utterly fascinated by that form of DNA transmission and furious at the philistine SOB who squashed the project, or those in the general public imagining that this was the way to a miracle cure can attest. (A healthy society would be one that generated primarily these kinds of resentment.) Within each disciplinary space there is a primus, and the sovereign center must generate within itself disciplinary spaces for assessing the decisions made within the disciplines.\n\nThere is only one political principle or axiom worth anything, and that’s because it is converted into an anti-political axiom when adhered to: if you give someone the responsibility to carry out some task or function, you must give them the power they need to do it. It’s difficult, but possible to imagine forms of democracy that accord with this insistence, at least for a while; it’s impossible to imagine any form of liberalism that does. Liberalism compulsively undercuts any form of delegated responsibility—even one as simple as “maintain public order” must be subject to “checks and balances,” “oversight,” “review,” etc., at every level and at every moment. That liberal societies function at all is due to the fact that most of any social order is run non-liberally, liberalism being wholly parasitic on established civilizational forms. (The question of the survivability of liberal societies therefore comes down to the question of whether the parasitosis can be kept at merely chronic levels)\n\nThe converse of the axiom, that someone with power must be loaded up with corresponding responsibilities, while true, is not as primary a principle. Power may have to accede to its responsibilities, it may precede and discover them, power precedes any delegation, and is always at least somewhat in excess of any responsibilities. Fixing power with its responsibilities is a result of the apotropaic tendency of subjects at least as much as the acceptance of responsibility by power. But whether it’s a superior delegating power or an inferior requesting uses of that power, built into the delegation or request is a responsibility to supply the power needed to see it through.\n\nThe establishment of the commensurability of responsibility and power is the constraint establishing the disciplines of the human sciences. That’s what those of us doing sociology, theology, anthropology, psychology, literary studies, etc., are all engaged in: finding ways to “read,” in practical terms, the gap between the social center and that center’s embedment in in attentional centers throughout the social order. And to read it in such a way as to close it. This means reading the center in terms of centrality; and the relation between center and centrality is in the ways of thinking, speaking and acting amongst the subjects needed to establish commensurability.\n\nInquiring into the practices that would streamline the imperative exchange (orders and requests) between ruler and subjects is transcendental inquiry. Even in the physical sciences, some project set by the center, whether it be creating a new weapons system or curing a disease, is the enabling background of disciplinary work.\n\nWhen you study something human, the purpose is to see something in what people are doing that they themselves don’t see. They are actors, you are a spectator; they embarked on a trajectory in their action that can retrospectively be constructed narratively—the spectator can see the beginning in terms of the end, which the actor couldn’t have known, the spectator can try out different beginnings and ends so as to see different events and actors in a different light, the spectator can move back and forth between macro and micro levels in a way the actor couldn’t, and so on. You can construct a narrative that would be recognizable to the actor as a richer account of what he took himself to be doing; or, you can construct a narrative that would represent the actor to himself in alienating terms.\n\nHow you approach the task will depend upon how the actors and events you are studying serves as a center from which you hope to extract imperatives. The disciplinary space is where we argue over these questions and construct such a center, and you have a disciplinary space when enough of these decisions have been made so that those within the discipline can readily generate new questions while those outside of the discipline would essentially be guessing if they tried.\n\nWhat the disciplinary space brings into view is the relation between margin and center—a strong theory enables us to oscillate between the actions taking place on the margin (actors engaging one another) and the center that is apparent only through the interactions of those seeking to protect or usurp it. Ultimately, even the most self-aware and intelligent actor—even the analyst himself if he were the actor—must allow his mimetic engagements with other actors to obscure the relation to the center revealed in their interaction. Here, disciplinary inquiry must be ruthless: all words and gestures and other signs that direct the actors’ attention toward one another must be replaced with a discourse that systematically reads the interactions as signs of the center, as an iteration of the originary scene that simultaneously iterates previous iterations after which there was no turning back. After your inquiry there should also be no turning back, because the center will have revealed a new imperative to introduce a new gradient of deferral, replacing some potential future resentment with a sign pointing out something new in the world."
    },
    {
      "slug": "morality-and-reference",
      "title": "Morality and Reference",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "An always accessible starting place for disclosing imperatives from the center is whatever you happen to be looking at, talking about, or thinking about at the moment. If you are looking at something, your attention is bringing some feature of the foreground into focus against some background; if you’re speaking, your sentences have referents, however abstract they might be. The remotest ancestor of either is the object on the originary scene, which came into view as an object because it was desired, because the group refrained from appropriating it, and because they all indicated to each other that they were doing so.\n\nEven a casual glance at something or a trivial reference is marked by the history of deferral and discipline initiated on the originary scene. Let’s stay focused on the intrinsically public use of language: any time you say something about something, you bring to attention some feature, element, use or context of that thing that had not been noticed previously. Even if all you do is completely agree with what someone else just said you are adding to the “interestingness” of the object in question, which means you are consolidating its centrality.\n\nI want originary thinking to be a form of moral reasoning, one presupposing nothing but center, origin and deferral, without reliance on any particular creed of tradition of thought—or, more precisely, beyond such reliance, at the point where you can no longer rely on the “belief system” because it doesn’t apply in an unequivocal way in the case before you. One still solicits the intellectual resources of the traditions enabling one to think, but in a way none of those traditions would completely authorize. It is in such margins that moral reflection takes place. To practice such reflection means being able to start anywhere, including, as I just suggested, whatever you happen to be talking or thinking about right now, or whatever you find yourself gazing at.\n\nReferring to something implicates one in an attentional space: you’re adding to the attentional “load” of something other have been, are, or might be talking about. This means you’ve set up something that elicits desire and restraint—there’s something someone might want to do with or to whatever you’re referring to but there’s also something holding us back from doing so, at least enough for us to talk about it.\n\nSo, whatever it is you’d like to talk about, you can begin thinking by asking why you want to talk about it. The first response likely to come to mind, for most of us most of the time, will be something like: it’s important! People need to see the truth! These responses might be accurate, but less accurate than “other people are looking at something else,” or “other people are looking at this thing in a different way” and “I want to provide a new look.” You may be right, they may be wrong, you may be substantive and they may be trivial, but you are both facing the same center, insofar as you are in some way referring to the same thing.\n\nThe most fundamentally moral act, I am assuming, is to sustain linguistic presence by keeping that shared center in view. That doesn’t mean you are obliged to keep a useless and banal conversation going—it might mean startling the other participants in the conversation with something provocative or vulgar; it might mean walking demonstratively away from that conversation. That would just mean you determined that it was the conversation itself that was destroying linguistic presence, by taking for granted an increasingly diffuse center, one that couldn’t be sustained under scrutiny (if other people, or other kind of people, entered the conversation).\n\nA new center would then be created, one way or the other, but you wouldn’t be the one helping sustain it, so you would be failing, morally. So, you create a new center: you shocking everyone, you walking away, etc. Such an act falls outside of the boundaries of determination of truth/falsity, but it is undeniably meaningful. And meaningfulness precedes truth claims—you could say lots of true things that are meaningless.\n\nSo, in everything you do or say you are making assessments of the status of the most proximal center: here’s what it needs to keep it strong, it can’t be strengthened or protected and so a radical shift in attention is necessary, etc. If you then represent to yourself what you have said or done (no one can be completely present to himself in any speech or action, so explicit self-questioning—why did I do that? is necessary here), you will reveal another, more distal center. That center was always there—you were attending from it to the more proximal center (I am using Michael Polanyi’s terms here) and you cannot notice the ground on which you stand when noticing something else.\n\nSo, now this new center comes into view. The introduction of metalanguage, incidentally, serves the purpose of shutting down the inquiry at the emergence of a particular center—that center then provides the terms on which you assess your actions on the more proximal scenes. So, if you regret walking away from the conversation because that was “rude,” you have installed a metalanguage of etiquette, derived from a more distal center (the norms of a particular community, to be applied in certain social settings) that sets the limits for your actions in relation to the more proximal center. (Of course, “rudeness” always needs to be interpreted, and, exceptions being the plague of any metalanguage, you can always save the metalanguage by invoking a “decision” here as well. If this anomaly troubles you, you either shut it down and carry out what you judge to be the most widely accepted course of action, or you open it up, which returns us to the continuing inquiry.)\n\nIf your attentions on the more proximal scene reveal a crisis at the center of the more distal one, the process of inquiry continues. You realize that not only was this specific conversation essentially dead, but so are lots of others that, until recently, you were taking pretty seriously. I think that my efforts to shed light on neutralizing metalanguages and the “patron theory of politics” converge here, because the crisis of the center will always, I think, prove to be a crisis of the metalanguage imposed by defenders of that center, and the crisis is caused by the exploitation of the legitimacy of that metalanguage by specific interests.\n\nThese may very well be interests sincerely devoted to the metalanguage: no doubt those who use the concepts of a putatively neutral social science to advance the cause of “social justice” consider themselves the truest sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and so on. You can try to make the center hold by defending the metalanguage but, like insufficient doses of antibiotics, that just makes the “infection” (its partisan “misuse”) subtler and more tenacious. The metalanguage is the anomaly, and therefore the crisis, not its distortions.\n\n“Norms” are really imperatives, and that is what the center issues. “Don’t be rude” conflicts with “dump these BSers.” There’s no universally applicable imperative telling you how to choose which one to obey, but if you refrain from rudeness does the imperative to dump the BSers fade away or become more insistent? If you dump the BSers, are you haunted by echoes of the imperative to be polite? The answer to these questions won’t prove anything yet, but we can pursue the matter further. If the obeyed imperative squashes its competitor, there’s nothing more to think about. Maybe there’s nothing more to think about, and the decision was the right one; maybe you’ve decided to stop thinking, in which case the subdued imperative will act up again eventually.\n\n(Perhaps a psychopath is someone who never hears competing imperatives.) If the two continue to co-exist post-decision, then can one imperative, or its successor in a new situation, be incorporated within the other? Maybe you can obey the imperative to be polite while finding subtle ways to interfere with the BS; maybe you can obey the imperative to dump the BSers while obeying the imperative that precedes that to be polite: the imperative to establish and follow rules of sociability. You provoke, or you walk away, and you take advantage of the paralysis or outrage thereby induced to clear the air and reset the norms.\n\nSo, the way to reconcile competing imperatives issued by differing centers is to listen for an imperative from a center preceding and founding both. How do we do that if we’re not anthropologists and historians rolled into one, with a history of morality readily available for direct application? You disclose the more absolute imperative by trying to find a way to obey both the imperative to be polite and the imperative to expose BS, i.e., be candid. This requires some abstraction from both: being candid and being polite both take on various forms, even within the same normative system, and some of those forms must overlap.\n\nImitation and practice are both important here: reflection can’t answer this question by itself. When you’ve successfully mastered politeness after fulfilling its imperatives a few thousand times, and have mastered (for most, perhaps, less completely) candor, after fulfilling its imperatives perhaps a few hundred (dozen, for the timid) times, you have some scripts to work with. What modification of the gesture or commonplace you’ve executed countless times would allow some candor in? And then some more? What modification of the careless, free speaking, outrageous lout you’ve successfully performed could be modified to allow for a compelling gesture of politeness? It is by carrying out such experiments that you will find the more absolute imperative, and that imperative will come to compete with other more absolute ones in the course of your moral education.\n\nSeeking out the more absolute, which is a conversion of the more originary, imperative is equally a forward looking act. The problem is not just to synthesize politeness and candor; it is to do so within the existing imperative architecture. Scientific inquiry and technological advances are fields in which moral problems are tested out and moral education conducted. How can that politeness/candor articulation be achieved in the process of civilizing some of that architecture? Of course I have in mind the internet and social media, as means of and metaphors useful for redescribing human interactions. But even far more familiar inventions, like cars and air travel, have possible moral dimensions that have been unexplored.\n\nAll of these features of the modern landscape will be liberal by default if they’re not seen as screens upon which moral questions are projected. What counts as politeness on the roads—where is the place for candor in traffic? Maybe the possibilities for both are drastically reduced—but rather than fantasizing their disappearance, the imperatives we would advance for acting in and thinking about these fields would be aimed at creating new possibilities, new spaces where the problem of articulating candor and politeness (just one example, of course) could be enacted. Because we want new opportunities to enact them, because acting as moral being represents the most ancient of imperatives.\n\nLooking for such chances is what we do when we point to or refer to any thing in particular. Here, working our way back to the originary imperative coincides with hearing the imperatives of the sovereign center. All of the technological apparatus, the imperative architecture, is in the service of the sovereign center, creating networks connecting the center to the various peripheries. The mode of inquiry here is homologous to the one I have been describing, as one navigates the competing imperatives of the traffic system, the google system, the financial system, and so on, articulating, for example, the tremendous pressures to conform to norms, manners, clichés, down to the slightest gesture, with the equally imperious compulsion to differentiate and market oneself. So, one tries out various ways of marketing oneself as a version of conformity that turns conforming into a sign of hierarchically ordered centers."
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-the-use-of-the-center-margin-model-to-displace-the-left-right-model",
      "title": "On the Use of the Center-Margin Model to Displace the Left-Right Model",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "If power is subordinated to a higher principle or purpose, like freedom, or peace, or the greatest good of the greatest number, or equality, or the protection of rights, then it will eventually turn out that power is a site of struggle between opposing conceptions of freedom, peace, equality, right, etc. and therefore of opposing powers. If, on the other hand, power asserts the prerogative to determine what counts as freedom, right, etc., etc., then all these words are really just synonyms for “what power wants,” and therefore not “principles” at all. The absolutist project is to find a way out of this antinomy. We might consider an essential, even founding gesture of this disciplinary space the treatment of human history as a series of experiments regarding what kind of figure is to be placed at the center.\n\nWe can attribute such an intent even to those figures we would consider our worst enemies and the most destructive actors—even the worst of intentions must have involved an intention to put a particular type of figure at the center. Complementary to this axiom would be the assumption that each such experiment is an attempt to retrieve the configuration of the originary scene, under conditions created by previous attempts to retrieve the scenic configuration. Such attempts are necessary because each, like the originary scene itself, opens new historical possibilities. The most obvious “experiments” are the exercises in rule by those in power, the attempts to solve specific problems any occupant of the center must confront, and the a priori and a posteriori accounts given of such attempts.\n\nBut we can treat any social praxis as such an experiment, at least potentially, as any praxis involves a sovereign imaginary positing some relation between center and margin. The point is to be able to talk about everything, to move from the most macro to the most micro level, from the analysis of ongoing events to longer term projects.\n\nThe originary sign, the aborted gesture of appropriation, points to a center that is simultaneously a sheer “this” (one of Wierzbicka’s primes, incidentally), that is, the very thing that we are looking at right now, and a named object and agent, from which all other names, acts and intentions derive. Everything specific to this object goes into making up its name, and insofar as that name compels attention to and hence sustains the center the anthropomorphization of that Object will be the source of all commands, practices and even the language of the community. The retrieval of the originary configuration involves the extraction of more “thisness” at the expense of the name, which further means that other means of sustaining attention other than those maintained by ritualized repetition of the name in its increasingly varied iterations.\n\nThe question is, what is to replace something like “Zeus commands that we perform the sacrifice here, now and in this manner” in answering the question, what should we do? Richard Seaford shows how universal monetization in Ancient Greece served to mediate sacrifice once distribution in accord with competition among elites replaced centralized, egalitarian distribution. Money creates a new and more indirect centered configuration under conditions where the ritual center has been usurped by the Big Man, who distributes in accord with merit and loyalty. Once money is widely available, what to do can be determined in accord with distributive principles based on equality, which comes to challenge aristocratic criteria. And these principles imply new, more democratic means of determining distribution. Laying the groundwork for a new usurper of the center to promise even more “equality,” which has more “thisness” relative to centrally organized ritual.\n\nWe have come up against the HL v M problem. One thing we can note is that the political “content” advanced by actual or prospective occupants of the center is “always already” part of the relation to the center itself—for example, some form of “equality” is essential to political strategies simply because that is the way you construct a more direct, less mediated relation to the center, as per the originary configuration. It’s much easier to call for more money for everyone than for more honors for everyone. In any good faith attempt to make occupancy of the center and operations directed from there more secure, promoting equality in some form, cutting out some “middleman,” seems to be the path of least resistance.\n\nSo, more exclusive criteria are replaced with more inclusive ones (according, of course, to some understanding of what counts as “exclusion” and “inclusion”). The mimicry of standard right wing politics in the US, for example, which is set upon showing that the left is comprised of the “real” racists, misogynists, fascists, etc., is a replication of the same assumption. The difficulty of thinking our way through this difficulty, without calling for the restoration of a historically concrete, replete name (like medieval Christian kingship) and thereby relieving ourselves of the intervening historical materials, is a sign of the hobbling power of what we could probably just call political thinking itself. The experiment seems to have gotten into a rut early, and stayed there.\n\nWho implements the new mode of equality? Such a question reminds us that a new dispensation simply replaces the old officer’s class with a new one. The middlemen as such are never eliminated. Even in the most totalitarian states, which supposedly pulverized all institutions, communities and even individuals into atoms related directly to the gravity of the state or dictator at the center, are thoroughly infested with the middle: party members, the various secret and political police forces, hierarchies in the schools and factories and even the pervasive difference between those better and those worse positioned to inform on others.\n\nSo, it’s helpful to keep in mind that what we are always really talking about is the way the occupant of the center rules through the middle, and how the middle is selected, controlled, maintained, replaced and so on. This serves to weaken the focus on equality, which focus is always really a way of levying and mobilizing a new middle out of the lows, a process that also involves an internal competition among those seeking to ascend to the new officer class. The high and the low talk about equality; the middle talks about status, qualifications, gradations, commands, factions and so on—at least when they are talking amongst themselves, but we can see these obsessions in the bromides they produce on command for the low (which generally involve providing markers whereby they can be clearly distinguished from the low).\n\nEquality-talk can be nothing but blather; attempts to work out the terms of existing hierarchies and chains of command allows us to distinguish between obscured and dispersed, on the one hand, and easily identifiable, on the other, hierarchies and chains of command. We can see the difference between a corporal told to make his troops less “masculinist,” on the one hand, and being told to ready them for maneuvers, on the other. Informed observers know what the latter looks like. The command to make soldiers more diversity friendly, meanwhile, is a transparent attempt to install a new officer class.\n\nEven more, saturating our talk with the middle is a better supplier of thisness than equality or rights talk. The originary scene can only consistently be represented as uneven and staggered, both in the instigating rush to the center and the “rippling” stand down. The archaic ritual scene forgets the originary event as it commemorates it ritually, and the Big Man must eventually usurp the center as a more complete remembrance of the event as uneven—even if we must later work on correcting any representation of this usurpation as being carried out in the name of equality. The center effects not equality, but order: the antipolitics of absolutism works on stretching out the middle towards the high and low, rather than crushing it between them.\n\nEquality confuses the thisness of the center by giving it one ephemeral name after another; ordering refines thisness by seeking to continually clarify the commands, tacit and explicit, issuing from the center. There is always a circularity in the relation between center and margin—in a sense, the center is the center because it is distinguished from the margin and vice versa. We’re dealing with a structural property of all social activity. But while we can refer to any old thing as “this,” in articulating our actions by reference to this this, more and more of its thisness comes out as the model or pattern of activity we follow as choreographed with other ever more present forms of activity by seeking out that model or pattern thisly .\n\nWhat would the center have me do so that I can continue to ask what the center would have me do—the more the occupant of the center represents centrality the more consistently this circular question becomes a sequence of questioning. The occupant of the center is the summation and synthesis of the gradations introduced everywhere in the social order, even temporarily and infinitesimally, which tend towards making everyone part of the middle.\n\nSo, the Left is the major key of the HL v M accelerated turnover of the officer class; the Right is the minor key, trying to decelerate or, in extremely rare cases (I can’t think of one off-hand), reverse the turnover. This is the explanatory value of the model, which we will always have to revise so as to account for exceptions and complications, but this modification of the terms we use to employ includes within our descriptions and analyses the antidote. A sovereign imaginary implies a staffing of the officer class. Brush aside talk of principles with the question, how will its implementation be staffed? What model of activity would you be looking for in this new officer class, and how do you imagine other (let’s say “pedagogical”) sections of the officer class producing the numbers of individuals practiced in that model?\n\nWhat kind of know-how would be required, or would have to emerge? We would now be arguing about models of activity, and about inculcating institutions, and about setting the tone for one or another mode of activity, and whom we might look towards to do that. The whole left-right framing dissipates. The closer we approximate discussing nothing but bringing power into further accord with responsibility the more thisness, unencumbered by historical accretions, but informed by the wealth of historical experiments, comes into view."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-ends-of-man",
      "title": "The Ends of Man",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The ends of humans lie in their origins: representation as the deferral of violence. Teleology and morality are fully implicit in the originary structure. The deferral of violence through representation is what we are “meant” to do. The implications require some unfolding, though. First of all, we are not talking about just any violence—rather, we have in mind the specifically mimetic violence that intensifies desire to the point where each mimics the other’s destructiveness to the point of annihilation. This is the specifically human violence that infests all institutions, which are the very institutions created so as to defer it.\n\nSecond, violence can only ever be deferred; there is no fantasy here of discovering a formula to eliminate the possibility of violence once and for all. We are always and forever mimetic beings, and deferring violence is what we will always be doing. Third, violence is deferred through representation: a representation of, simultaneously, the symmetrical positioning tending toward violence, the reciprocal awareness of that tendency (I see what you’re doing and can thereby realize I’m doing the same), and a kind of cessation before taking the next step toward the collapse of the differentiation entailed by the mimetic crisis.\n\nThe aborted gesture of appropriation is the model for all representation: the indication that one progressed toward appropriation; the indication that one sees everyone else has as well; and the indication that one has ceased to progress, one has stepped down, and one is showing others this and modeling for others the way to show it to other others. All of this comes well before there can be anything like rules, agreements, promises, moral codes, laws and so on—all of which are, in fact, constructed on this foundation of deferral. Finally, there is the central object, which has precipitated the rush toward the center, and is now “credited” with effecting the “stand down.”\n\nThe center is the model for all that we will henceforth do: it has made peace and created community (such words are anachronistic but unavoidable) and is therefore the fount of wisdom, knowledge and power. Our telos is to desist from mimetically and rivalrously imitating our fellows by imitating the center.\n\nThis does not mean that we live constantly in fear that the least unwonted or potentially aggressive movement will be taken as hostile, or in constant suspicion that such movements by others will restart the contagion—al though it is possible that much of the social life of very early humanity was consumed in such fears and suspicions. Once the initial catastrophe has been averted a sign, which is to say a kind of “method” is in place for preventing subsequent conflicts from getting to that point. The sign/gesture can be issued before anyone moves towards the object; it can be issued in the process of dismembering and consuming the meal; it can be issued once again afterward, to ensure and “certify” that all has gone as it should, that the benefits of the central being have been conferred once again.\n\nA kind of mastery is acquired over the situation, and once this happens, that same practice can be introduced into other situations, other, less dire conflicts. Eventually, if the possibility of conflict is pushed sufficiently far, signs and gestures can be used to explore new modes of cooperation—once the ability to direct and follow another’s attention has been formed, all kinds of new uses can be found for it. Such uses are never simply “useful”—the new modes of cooperation and the ends to which they are directed themselves become signs of deferral, activities that can be referred to and remembered as gifts of the central being and models of action to preserve and aspire to.\n\nFinally, we can take ourselves as sites of potential violence (including self-violence) by identifying inclinations towards envy and resentment and work on attaining self-mastery, quelling rebellions of our desiring selves, never quite satisfied by whatever recognition of our own centrality we receive.\n\nThe more you look at something, the more you notice things and the more interesting it becomes. This is especially the case if you are looking at something that and because others are looking at it (but this is the case for everything we look at) and this act of observation and engagement is formative. The thing you are looking at is shaping you in some way—how? What does it want? This is an endlessly interesting question, and it gets more interesting the more prolonged the attention you are capable of, and the more you are able to “factor” others’ actual or potential, past, present or future attention into your own (but that is really what makes prolonged attention possible).\n\nIt is also the work of deferral, as what the center has to say always has to do with the detecting and diverting the various forms of mimetic violence. And the forms of mimetic violence themselves multiply and in some ways are strengthened as signs and institutions are fortified and attention is prolonged: each new social structure relies upon a new increment of shared deferral and is therefore vulnerable to refusals of deferral; and the more we can think (i.e., prolong attention toward the center, oscillate between different centers) the subtler and more tenacious forms of refusal we become capable of. Our inquiries (organizations of attention) are attempts to distinguish, even in our own thinking, between refusals of deferral and the introduction of new grades of deferral. All of this is devotion to the center.\n\nThe forms of symmetrical desire likewise become more complex and mediated, and so must our gestural and postural positioning. We give signs, but more and more become signs, all of us, in all of our appearances. We look to the center to guide us in becoming centers ourselves. People are looking at us all the time, in casual and highly personalized ways, in formal and informal settings, in mass and individualized forms, from positions of inferiority and superiority. We elicit envy and generate resentment, or we calm and de-escalate; we make ourselves contemptible or model modes of being for others; we fill up a space or make room for others.\n\nIn so doing, we either refuse or enact models of deferral derived from the center—we demonstrate that the central being is just there for the plucking, first come, first served, or we show how resentful convergence can be converted into a new way of sharing space and being. This doesn’t mean always being nice, considerate, much less pacifist—sometimes evil needs to be driven out, sometimes that’s what modeling the center entails. Those who refuse deferral, even if through their own failure rather than ill will, model their own behavior on normative and admirable forms of action, using it for camouflage, probing for weaknesses—the logic of mimesis is such that sometimes these behaviors must be modeled in turn, and people must be given what they are “asking for.”\n\nHow do we, how can we, know that these are the ends of man? Why isn’t this some arbitrary construct, a form of “belief” that is more or less well supported by “reasons,” “proofs,” “logic,” etc.? In this case, we know it from our language. The languages of despair, of rage, of hope and love all have mimetic desire and the desire to control it inscribed within them. “I can’t go on any more”—this confession of a lack of inner strength is made for others even (or especially) if it is a suicide note, and the person making it asserts himself as a center that has gone unrecognized, unjustly unrecognized; or, perhaps, it is the discourse of someone who has been made too central, burdened with expectations of being able to sustain others that can no longer be met—one’s centrality to oneself is misaligned with one’s centrality to others.\n\n“How could you do this to me!”—here, another’s centrality is asserted as both false and all too real: the speaker has relied on the other, which is to say has organized the elements of a life around her, and that other has now rent that fabric, leaving desires, resentments, memories, signs, uncentered—and nothing is more terrifying than being bereft of a center. All utterances, actions, all signs, can ultimately be made sense of in this way, as creating, uncreating, asserting, denying some form of centrality, and can ultimately really only be made sense of in this way. Everything we engage in our lives defers violence in some way, however distantly, and when something we engage no longer offers itself up for engagement, some new form of deferral must be created.\n\nThis is a highly tentative and dangerous condition, for individuals as well as groups. One of the biggest mistakes any one in a position of responsibility can make is to remove, weaken or destroy one center without having at least the beginnings of a new center ready to replace it.\n\nAll of the moral vocabulary and grammar we need is contained within the deferral of violence through representation. What, exactly, is the center in a particular case—what is the issue, the thing we are talking about, the model of action we draw from the space on which we appear? What is involved in giving ourselves over to it, shaping ourselves as centers in order to model it? What are our desires for it and resentments towards it? What derogates and distracts us from the center? The answers will often not be obvious, al though it’s certainly immoral to deny anyone the means of constructing their forms of deferral.\n\nAll of our ends are bound up in discerning the imperatives of the center, knowing it, shaping ourselves in accord with it. You could deny this, but in what language would you do so? Language that asserts a general centerlessness?—but if you say there are nothing but “processes” without purpose, why do you have to say this? (How can you say it to another, and assume the possibility of him understanding?) Why do you have to deny what you deny? Because others are stupider and less “scientific” than you—but an interest in things precedes a specifically scientific interest and where does that come from? Do you put forth yourself as the only real center?\n\nBut all of the language in which you do so, your very assumption that others can make the slightest sense of your assertion, precede your assertion—and subvert it. If you already have some name for the center, like, most obviously, “God,” then wherein does the language you use discussing and addressing the center diverge, in essentials, from the grammar of the center presented here? If you proclaim the meaningless of existence, you proclaim in language which presupposes and even intensifies the very meaning you find lacking. We are always pursuing and enacting the meanings of the words we use (and we must use words), even in expressions of resentment: what is the meaning of “home,” of “love,” of “work,” and so on—or of “God.” We are to inhabit these meanings more fully by finding in them an incline toward the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "girard-on-the-passion",
      "title": "Girard on the Passion",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Rene Girard’s take on the Passion is, on one level, desacralizing. The Gospel narrative of Christ’s persecution, torture, and execution reveals the perspective of the victim—the victim of sinful men acting as representatives of corrupt religious and political institutions. He didn’t deserve his crucifixion. We can see the “scapegoat mechanism” in action.\n\nIt’s ironic that Girard posits the scapegoat mechanism as the origin of our idea of god, and yet that the true God, when he came to earth, would be scapegoated and then deified. I don’t think Girard ever fully came to grips with this irony and its implications. He just regarded it as a profound mystery. But maybe there is a poetic meaning (I don’t say “justice”) in this irony.\n\nFor Girard, the Passion is the world historical event of events: revealing “things hidden since the foundation of the world.” Girard argues that our political structure and social order is based on sacrifice and/or scapegoating, in one form or another. The revelation of the truth of scapegoating upsets that structure and inaugurates a new age. The mimetic power of scapegoating and sacrifice is so powerful and mesmerizing that only God, in the person of the Son, could reveal its truth. So Girard reasserts true divinity, even as he demystifies the false sacred and false gods.\n\nGirard’s interpretation contradicts traditional (substitutionary) theories of the Atonement, that “Christ died for our sins,” a theology that seems to assume a “vengeful” God who demands retribution, without any consideration of the guilt or innocence of the victim. In practice, Christians have evaded responsibility by blaming the Jews and Romans for Christ’s death.\n\nFor Girard, the Passion is a heuristic, in a radical sense: a revelation that makes continued scapegoating unconscionable. Of divine origin, but ultimately its meaning is rational and cognitive. So radical is the hidden truth of sacrificial religion (and related institutions) that it required the spectacular paradox of the God on the Cross to communicate its meaning. I understand that a theologian was able to convince Girard (after the publication of Things Hidden ) that the substitutionary theory of the Atonement has some validity, but I’m not familiar with the argument, so I refrain from comment.\n\nIn any case, by demystifying “sacred” violence as human in origin, the Crucifixion confronts humans with their own violence, allowing them to recognize the true God, and seek salvation through faith. In this sense, Girard reaffirms the basic Christian message of repentance and faith."
    },
    {
      "slug": "learning-discipline-and-the-thought-experiment",
      "title": "Learning, Discipline and the Thought Experiment",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A sign has to have meaning before it can be true or false, and so setting one’s filters for discourse ingestion on meaningful/meaningless should be more effective than setting them for true/false. Setting one’s filter to sift the meaningful out from the meaningless also opens another option denied the one who stays set on determining truthfulness: the option of conferring meaning on an otherwise meaningless sign. Distinguishing between truth and falsehood is a waste of time unless we are situated within a disciplinary space with shared frames and criteria—insisting that we are telling the truth while our opponents are lying is almost always an attempt to jigger the rules so one can declare oneself the winner.\n\nThe left looks for statements it can find deficient in truthfulness as measured by some fact-checking mechanism also established by the left, so that it can then accuse the speaker of being a “liar” and attach “liar” to that person’s name every time it is mentioned, like a Homeric epithet. They can then frame their questions as follows: how can you believe what he says, since he has racked up 273 lies over the past 3 years? But when the right does the same thing, even if I’m more likely to agree with where the truth lies, it ultimately serves the same purpose of forcing everyone to line up in qualified vs. unqualified terms. Everyone is throwing everyone else out of their playpen. But focusing on meaning allows us to be both more generous and more disabling, as the situation calls for.\n\nHere’s one of Charles Sanders Peirce’s most famous statements, in this case offering a definition of, essentially, “meaning” (for Peirce, the whole purpose of pragmatism was to determine the meaning of signs):\n\nConsider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.\n\nSo, what is our conception of, say, a dog (what is the meaning of “dog”)? It will bark under certain conditions, it is different from a cat in certain ways, from a wolf in other ways, if it is your dog it will be loyal and obedient if well trained, when you pat it it wags its tail and looks up at you, and so on. We can get extremely abstract (a four legged mammal…) or concrete and intimate (it brings your slippers) depending on the attentional or disciplinary space in which the word “dog” is used. Nothing in Peirce’s definition requires the more “scientific” meaning. The definition of a dog in terms of its devotion to its owner (when I come home he comes running and wagging his tail) will generate new questions that will add to “our conception of these effects” just as much as a definition found in a biologist’s taxonomy.\n\nHowever, unless said ironically, or in some fictional context, or as part of some insider discourse, the sentence “the dog is flying home” is meaningless. Of course, though, that sentence can be made meaningful in another way: as an example in a discussion like this.\n\nWhat a disciplinary space is created to do is to take “given” meanings and make them relative or regional. A dog is devoted to its master; but sometimes dogs turn on their masters; so the meaning of “dog” must include the devotion and the possibility, however minimal, of “betrayal”; and the new meaning will include both in a less anthropomorphic and anthropocentric frame: dogs generally respond to certain cues of dominance, which accounts for the “devotion” and, when those cues are “processed” under specified conditions, the aggression to their masters. Or whatever—I don’t know much about dogs. Within one space, “dogs are devoted” retains its significance; within another, it is meaningless, and is replaced by “dogs respond to cues of dominance.” And that will in turn be replaced by something else. At each point along the way a new given is introduced, waiting to be relativized or regionalized. And the biologist studying canines goes home and pets his dog, and there is no cognitive dissonance.\n\nThe (anti)political attempt to establish centrality by dispersing the fogs of liberal obfuscation operates on several levels. It must honor all the traditional forms of life targeted and demolished by liberalism, even if it can’t restore them (al though avenues of restoring what can be should be explored); it must engage in historical analyses of those forms of life, or their vulnerabilities and the intellectual and physical weapons used to attack them; it must distinguish, in the contemporary order, between what can be attributed to the civilizing and centralizing work that started long before liberalism and what can be attributed to liberalism itself; it must develop theoretical and eventually institutional means for suppressing liberalism, in all its forms and all the nooks and crannies in which it hides, while extricating healthy social and technological relations and materials from its deformations; and it must inhabit and rework all of today’s institutions and disciplines in order to accomplish all this. (It must also acknowledge irreparable harm done, and that would unavoidably have been done, to traditional modes of life by any, even the most orderly, form of centralization.)\n\nThe theory of disciplinarity I have been advancing is meant to help with this. Disciplinarity in a strong sense is a result of the grounding of science in the laboratory and the experiment, which seems to emerge slowly in the later middle ages (e.g., Okham’s razor), get presented more explicitly with Galilleo, and doesn’t really get institutionalized until the 19 th century. I am pretty sure that Peirce was the first to treat the experimental method as a model for thinking in general, defining signs as such as means of inquiry (you can always conceive more effects of an object). Attempts to restore the originary structure of Christianity, for example, will rely on the disciplinary modes (and a careful sifting of what is valuable from them) of textual and historical analysis developed far more recently, i.e., on treating Christian texts, documents and histories as one would treat any texts, documents and histories.\n\nAt the same time, though, disciplinarity is a form of discipleship, a mode of authority and inquiry into the divine that reaches back into antiquity and is central to the founding of Christianity; moreover, discipline is simply a more deliberate form of deferral, so Peirce’s definition of the sign as, essentially, anything one could form a disciplinary space around, is continuous and consistent with the originary hypothesis, which sees signification and meaning as an effect of deferral. Disciplinarity and discipleship alike are landmarks in the history of modes of deferral, which becomes the history of civilization—Peirce was also clear that the purpose of signification was to conduct such inquiries as would modify “conduct,” which for him meant “self-control,” i.e., discipline.\n\nTo use the word “dog,” then, is to initiate an inquiry into all our possible relations with dogs, an inquiry that transforms our relations with dogs into one vehicle through which we modify our conduct in shared and deliberate ways—so as to enable us to conduct more inquiries. One effect might certainly be to make us better dog owners.\n\nDisciplinarity in this, now, broader sense, one that acknowledges the equal legitimacy of all modes of inquiry, is characterized by discovery and revelation. This is really what the laboratory brings to the surface: it isolates one specific thing that we don’t know, and it sets up a scene in which we can come to know it. The scientist sets something up that comes unbidden in divine revelation—but is that completely true? Doesn’t divine revelation, or the more secular revelation provided by a startling poem, for example, require some kind of preparation and openness, even if one doesn’t know exactly what one is preparing and being open towards?\n\nIn more ordinary circumstances, when one is, for example, worried about whether someone else can be trusted, one finds a way to bring the question of their trustworthiness into focus—to abstract it from all their other “characteristics,” to gather “evidence,” to “test” it, etc. In the process those other characteristics, which have been “bracketed,” enter back into the inquiry, transformed by it. The less of life that is covered by ritualistic prescription of behavior, the more must be covered by such “procedures.” The trick of progressivism is to attribute this kind of learning to society as a whole, as represented by self-certifying experts, and the state that employs them.\n\nSo, for example, once “we” have concluded that “race” is a meaningless concept, “we” can go about abolishing all social distinctions based directly or indirectly on “race.” We can, in response, make a Hayekian argument about the distribution of knowledge throughout society, or invoke Chesterton’s fence, but we can also simply take the claim head on: lots of people use the word “race” in lots of different ways and choosing a specific, narrowly genetic meaning, and to purport to settle that meaning in accord with an arbitrarily chosen criterion (like the fact that there are more genetic differences within than between races) is to offer a power rather than inquiry based conclusion. The approach I am suggesting asks about the meaning of words; it doesn’t decide in advance that specific disciplines have the sole right to determine those meanings. And it also keeps in mind that those disciplines never have a final meaning either.\n\nThe adoption of any kind of dissident stance implies constant testing of prevailing assumptions, for others as well as for oneself. The cross-disciplinary means of doing so is the thought experiment, which we can get better at constructing and enacting. A thought experiment tests the meaning of a word, or a particular use of a word, or a sentence (a proposition), or a broader argument or mode of thought. The goal is always to de-anthropomorphize, to take a sign that has a (received) meaning in itself and treat it as a sign that has meaning for an (actual or possible) disciplinary space. All exchanges should target some element of the other’s discourse for disciplining—it is a favor we do each other.\n\nLook for some “hinge”: something in the sign that, if the rest of its meaning were left constant, but the meaning of that part of the sign changed, would lead to incommensurable uses. Make one of the possible meanings as obvious as possible, and the other as unlikely as possible (the range can then be narrowed as needed). Peirce’s approach is a good one: what form of conduct would follow from adopting one shade of meaning as opposed to another? Inflate the differing consequences while compressing the difference in the “shading”—constructing the greatest diverging effects from the smallest differences yields the most information.\n\nThis method for the instantaneous creation of a disciplinary space should work equally well for solitary musing as for engaged, even confrontation encounters with allies and enemies alike. The criterion is internal to practice: which form of conduct improves existing and generates new spaces of inquiry? Self-control is simultaneously the control of the effects of practices; others are invited to replace meaninglessness with meaning.\n\nAs an example, let’s take Jonathan Chait’s recent amusing claim that Trump has been a Russian sleeper agent since 1987.What are all the effects of our conception of this object, this sign? Here we can see the limits of truth testing: there’s no way any of us can prove that Trump has not been a Russian sleeper agent since 1987. (The more “verifiable” truth claims become the only legitimate form of discourse, the more you, paradoxically, incentivize the production of claims that are absurd but cannot be falsified.) One of the effects is that we can imagine everything Trump has done the last 30 years as spy work, providing what might be entertaining explanations of “The Apprentice,” his buildings in Manhattan, his proclivity to take wives from the former Soviet bloc and so on.\n\nWho knows what and whom else might be swept up in this net? Another effect is that we are left to consider why his Soviet and then his Russian handlers seem to have had a sharper sense of, or concern for, the interests of Americans than American leftists (or many conservatives, for that matter) seem to. Another effect is that we can assume everyone who is similar to Chait ideologically either agrees with his theory, or will eventually come to embrace it (it’s a , if not necessarily the , logical conclusion of the whole Trump collision narrative), so they can all be asked to endorse or repudiate it. Yet another effect is that we can now frame every other political figure of even (what the hell!) public figure in terms of all the signs suggesting that some other country might be pulling his or her strings.\n\nWe can use the boundary between “Trump is a Russian sleeper agent” and Trump is, well, Trump, as a way of generating conceptual distinctions, hypotheses and conduct—in this case, for the most part, potentially very productive meme-ing and trolling conduct. The claim itself means something. The fact that this particular person makes in this particular venue means something. That others who respond in certain ways to the statement means something. That the statement can be seen to be modeled on previous claims and campaigns means something. That other statements can be modeled on it in turn means something. The way to generate all these meanings is to, on the one hand, take the claim as literally as we possibly can, enter the world it constructs, let that world invade the world of the things we normally take literally; and, on the other hand, mark everything in the reality that we know that does not require the Trump as a Russian sleeper agent hypothesis to make sense.\n\nIn the end this will get us to the truth, because with a truthful sign the invasion by the world constructed by the sign we are studying of the world as it exists without that sign would not provide a jarring juxtaposition; it would fit in seamlessly. Even after repeated tests."
    },
    {
      "slug": "prolegomena-to-the-study-of-the-origins-of-the-disciplines-gablog",
      "title": "Prolegomena to the Study of the Origins of the Disciplines",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here’s the problem I’m trying to solve: absolutist ontology implies a specific way of thinking, which we could call “the supplementation of sovereignty.” This way of thinking assumes that the sovereign center is to be preserved through supplementation by the attentional center. If something seems wrong, if there are unfulfilled desires and unsatisfied resentments, your own or those of others, the end of thinking about it is to identify an imperative from the sovereign center that would remedy them. Maybe the effect will be to demystify and defuse the desire, maybe to give it a more realistic focus; maybe it will reveal the resentments as unworthy, or maybe it will suggest a frame within which it might be addressed.\n\nAll these possibilities are to be considered, which means the desires and resentments in question are not simply accepted as a default, natural starting point. What is important is a more fully installed sovereign. It is the anarchist ontology which sees desires and resentments as forces of nature around which the social order itself must be constructed. The justification of the liberal state is that it prevents desires and resentments from colliding into each other too violently. It must therefore claim to maintain some kind of equilibrium amongst these “passions,” whether it idealistically calls this equilibrium “justice” or cynically calls it a “balance of forces.”\n\nThis means that the sovereign is justifiably assailed for failing to fulfill this impossible to define task; indeed, the logic of the anarchist ontology is to encourage such assault—after all, the only source of information available to the state comes from playing out of these passions.\n\nUnsurprisingly, virtually the entire universe of discourse in a liberal order is of the anarchist variety. When someone hears of something objectionable, the spontaneous impulse is to criticize power—the government, corporations, the 1%, the patriarchy, whatever. It in fact takes considerable effort to break this habit of thought. That such attacks on power just empower another power is a well-known complication that we can set aside for now. This anarchist habit of thought goes much further back than victimary thinking, and even further back than liberal and democratic thinking more generally. What we really have to start with is the very notion that government needs to be “justified,” that it exists for a “purpose”—rather than just being the default condition, the representation of the irreducible social center.\n\nOnce you grant the need for a “political philosophy,” you grant the possibility of an arbiter of the legitimacy of any government; once you grant the possibility, you grant the reality. The political purpose of my study of disciplinarity is to get at the discursive roots, the roots in a habit of thinking, of “political philosophy,” in all its forms, including the most everyday, “popular” ones. A disciplinary space serves the center by inquiring into commands from the center; a discipline assumes the subordination of the center to the object (the center) of that discipline—philosophy presupposes a state conducive to philosophy, sociology a state conducive to rationalized monads, and so on, and advises the state accordingly.\n\nThe potential for confusion (the word “discipline” works in very different ways, respectively, in the two concepts) is unavoidable since there is a dialectic between the two: disciplinary spaces are institutionalized into disciplines and disciplinary spaces are generated within and across the disciplines. Disciplines are delegations that drift and are pushed into autonomy and therefore come to house various forms of imperium in imperio , but what makes this a difficult problem is that we don’t yet have a discourse of the center that can account for sovereign control over the disciplines because all the discourses of sovereignty we have until this point are indebted in a constitutive way to the disciplines. Since the end of sacral kingship there has not been a state which has not relied upon unaccountable disciplines for its “legitimacy.” Hence the need to solve the aforementioned problem.\n\nTo reprise: Writing represents speech, but must develop means to represent the non-lexical elements of the speech situation that cannot be directly represented. Writing is from the beginning an inquiry into language, identifying meaningful sounds, words and sentences. There is a continuum between the representation of these basic elements of language and the further means devised by language to supplement speech with means of indicating the elements of the speech situation unrepresentable as such in writing (such as tone, posture, “body language,” context, history). The metalanguage of literacy is developed so as to assess writing, distinguishing between correct and incorrect spellings and pronunciations, proper and improper uses of words (as judged by dictionaries), and grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.\n\nNone of this is possible or even meaningful without a literate culture. Classical prose develops as the norm of written discourse, based on the principle of transparency (placing, in the reader’s imagination, the reader on the scene with the writer), but including the vast expansion of the study of grammar called “logic” and the notion of “proof” or evidence, which are really just specifications of transparency (involving a comprehensive view of the presumed scene).\n\nIf we look more carefully at these metalinguistic representations and supplementations of the scene of speech we find (I’m still following David Olson, this time his 1994 The World on Paper , very closely) a wide array of words that are complications of NSM primes like “think,” “say,” “want” and “know”: to represent uncertainty or hedging, “he supposed”; to represent a claim aimed at challenging another and meant to be challenged in turn, “he asserted”; to represent a process of thinking, “he considered”: to represent sincerity, “he believed”; to represent the end of a process of inquiry or discussion, “he concluded”; to represent claims that must have already been accepted in order for a particular statement to make sense, “he assumed”; and so on.\n\nIn addition, we have the “reification” of “think,” “say” and “know” into the nouns “thoughts,” “sayings” (or “statements”) and “knowledge.” This is the basis for disciplines like philosophy and rhetoric (and more recently psychology), which are inquiries into metalinguistic artifacts like “suppositions,” “assumptions,” “beliefs,” “assertions,” “knowledge” and so on. In pointing out that “knowledge,” for example, is a construction of the metalanguage of literacy (and would therefore be unintelligible in oral cultures) is not to say that there is no such thing as knowledge (or beliefs, assumptions, etc.). It is to clarify the ontological status of these categories.\n\nIf they are taken as first order realities we must look for a place to locate them, and we will construct such a space, calling it the “mind,” the “intellect,” or whatever. And then we will develop theories of this constructs, theories which are really just reiterations of the metalanguage of literacy itself. If we recognize them as second order realities, derivative of the metalanguage of literacy, though, then their meanings can never be separated from some disciplinary space of inquiry: “knowledge,” then, exists and claims regarding it can be disputed, but always in the form of “what we mean by knowledge in addressing this set of questions is…” In this case, these terms do not refer to “entities” with a specific “location.” They are, explicitly, ways of organizing shared attention.\n\nSo, we have several moves specific to the metalanguage of literacy: supplementation of a presumed scene; the nominalization of those supplements; the treatment of those nominalizations as entities, that can be studied and analyzed as composed of “parts,” with a “structure,’ causal relations and so on, “contained” in a space. Once these moves have been completed, an entire internally consistent metalinguistic vocabulary can be constructed by analogy with the one or few terms initially created. We then have disciplines, which study those locations or spaces—locations like “mind” or “intellect” for philosophy, psychology and related disciplines, but also “language,” “society,” “information,” “belief,” and so on for others.\n\nAll of our cherished interiorities—will, intention, ideas, principles, reason, etc.—are retrojections of the metalanguage of literacy: they are depositories of nominalized entities, which replace what are more simply imperatives from the center. Again, it is not the reality of these objects that is in question, al though they might be, of course, if they are superseded by other conceptual formations within the discipline; rather, it is the kind of reality that is in question. Obviously, studies of specific disciplines, or analyses of such studies, would need to be done, but I want to present the following hypothesis: all of the disciplines share the originary structure of the metalanguage of literacy. And this would also mean that engaging in skunkworks (creating disciplinary spaces) within the disciplines requires converting that originary structure into an infralinguistic one.\n\nThe metalinguistic disciplinary structure plays a kind of shell game with scenes, so this is a good place to probe a bit further. Any written text represents a speech situation or, let’s say, a scene of speech. It always does this implicitly—even reported dialogue in an account of an event is the report of that report. This concealment is maintained by the fiction that is perfected in classical prose which, as Olson, following Thomas and Turner, argues, purports to put the readers on the same scene as the writer. The writer-reader relation is set on two scenes simultaneously: the imagined speech scene and the equally imagined scene of the text. The reader needs to be able to make sense of the metalinguistic dimension of the text, and the writer must help him to do so, for both to be present on the essentially holographic speech scene. A great deal of attention management is necessary for the transparency of classical prose to emerge, and for it be taken for granted.\n\nSome very promising implications for the study of literate cultures follows from this doubled structure of the written text. Writing, in the form of classical prose, which itself follows from abstracting the declarative sentence from imperatives and ostensives, is inherently duplicitous. In that case, we don’t need to focus so much on deceptive intentions in studying writing as a source of propaganda, ideology, manipulation, social control and so on—we can attribute these effects of writing to a lack of awareness of the structure of writing itself, to the writer and reader simply taking the transparency of classical prose for granted.\n\nOf course, this doesn’t imply any Socratic or Rousseauian opposition to writing—of course one can write honestly and intelligently, and need not deceive one’s readers. It’s just that doing so involves more than the intention to do so. At a minimum, this involves drawing or allowing for attention to the opacity which complements the transparency of prose. Furthermore, the presumed transparency of writing in classical prose has been transferred to all the media following writing, especially electric and electronic media—the same hunger for and belief in transparency prevails across the board. The promise of a less mediated ascension to the center guarantees allegiance. The mediation, the opacity, is itself the imperative from the center to derive, with others, further imperatives.\n\nThe disciplines in the human sciences do constitute a counter to the immediate transparency of literacy. Every discipline begins with the realization that this (some eminently predictable, automatic, clichéd statement) is what can be said about X (a novel, a social protest, a primitive ritual, a painting, a political campaign, a famine, etc.); however, saying this reduces what you are referring to the limits of your own vocabulary. The naïve subject from whom the discipline breaks believes himself to be on the scene of speech, treating that imagined scene as a real one. The discipline, by contrast, plants itself explicitly in the literate scene, and knows it can only represent the speech scene in a mediated way.\n\nThe naïve subject calls the violent protester a “traitor,” or “ruffian,” or maybe “hero”; the disciplinary subject calls him a “radical” or “extremist,” because he has lifted that figure from a shared scene (which the naïve subject feels himself to occupy) to a disciplinary scene where one “radical” or “extremist” can be compared to others, in different contexts and cultures, and the “elements” “constituting” radicalism or extremism can be itemized and broken down into yet more elements.\n\nBut the disciplinary subject is just as naïve as the naïve one. He believes in “radicalism” as an essentially tangible entity just as much as the naïve subject believes in “treason.” If you are reporting the speech of someone who shouts “Treason!” and you are aware that you are reporting that speech you can’t simply say “treason” yourself, because you have taken upon yourself the responsibility of reporting the entire speech event, providing your reader with a way of viewing that speaker, and therefore cannot simply repeat what he has said. You need to set up a new context, and a comparative context, in which one act of “treason” can be placed next to another, with the understanding that the second act of treason might be heroic to the first accuser, which requires that you establish a new common denominator: “radicalism,” or “extremism.”\n\nIn the process, though, you have not abandoned all alliances and affiliations; you have just moved from one set to another. The discipline is itself a side, and so is the institution in which it is housed, and the sovereign which it serves: “radicalism” and “extremism” provide far more flexible terms and found far more useful conceptual vocabularies for the purpose of social control than narrowly legal and more emotive terms like “treason.” But the disciplinary subject can’t see that he is doing that any more than the naïve subject can see that his shouts of “treason!” can be seen as identical to those condemning his own leaders as traitors. For him, it is the disciplinary scene that is transparent, as he and his fellow subjects look, as through a microscope, at the various interactions of entities like “radicalism,” “extremism,” “alienation,” “violent tendencies,” and so on.\n\nWhat I have said about literate metalanguage more narrowly considered applies to the disciplinary metalanguages as well: they cannot issue imperatives. What happens if you tell someone to stop being “radical,” “extreme,” or “alienated.” The radical and extremist don’t really see themselves that way—they believe in something they see as true and just. The alienated individual might accept your label, but if he could stop being alienated he would and your giving his condition a name probably just reinforces it. At least the one shouting “traitor” can demand the state hang the miscreant. The theoretician of “extremism” is also issuing imperatives (soft ones: “suggestions”) to the sovereign, but they must be disavowed as such: the series of practices leading from the analytical conclusions of the sociologist to some implementation of anti-extremist measures cannot be reckoned within that analysis itself.\n\nHe may be even more of a sleepwalker than the naïve subject. He’s more abject, at any rate. At a certain point someone in the discipline will challenge the discipline by directing attention to the elements of orality ignored in literate discourse, but without an infralinguistic intervention that identifies a shared, imperative-issuing center ordering the oral, the literate and the disciplinary alike, this can only lead to a kind of primitivism.\n\nInfralinguistic interventions involve taking a metalinguistic term used for the sake of external assessment and applying it within the discipline itself. Identify the polarities within the discipline, analyze their respective “extremisms” the way they analyze those of their targeted populations. The implicit valorization of “moderation” over “extremism” is thereby brought into play, both within the discipline and in its attention to its objects of inquiry. The discipline is made infralinguistic by having extremism used in such a way as to issue imperatives: telling the professor whose extremism you have defined in terms of what he refuses to see does, in fact, give him something to do—look for the center that enables him to distinguish between “moderate” and “extreme” in the first place.\n\nIf in the end the distinction between extremism and moderation is dissolved, all the better. On this new, infradisciplinary scene, what we are looking at together is the originary structure of the discipline itself: its self-distancing from the web of imperatives and ostensives of everyday scenes, its supplementations of actions and speeches with qualifications and modifications, its reifications of those qualifications and modifications, and its treatment of those reifications as real objects that can be analyzed no less perspicaciously than a cell, or atom. In soliciting this scene, ringing its bell so to speak, we also make visible the hidden invisible threads through which it mediates between various power centers and the sovereign center.\n\nA value-free analysis of “extremism” might be suitable for a self-styled Hobbesian sovereign, which is content to know how content or dangerously discontent each of its subjects might be, but that also means such analyses target the sovereign as a source of domination that can be turned in any direction one likes as long as a convincing portrayal of “extremism” can be presented. It is the infradisciplinary analysis that can provide for a graduated series of vocabularies, each of which would develop its own meta-infradisciplinary dialectic. All disciplinary spaces obey the imperative to supplement the sovereign with the attentional spaces in reciprocal constitution with it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "reflections-on-the-passion",
      "title": "Reflections on the Passion",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction novels, some aliens hear the story of Christ, and their take on his story is that the people who crucified Jesus picked the wrong person to crucify, since Jesus’s dad, unbeknownst to them, is the most powerful being in the universe, and so, his cruficiers were going to be in big trouble. The moral of the Passion story, for the aliens, was to be very careful about whom you crucify, because you don’t want to get into trouble with his or her relatives. Girard pointed out that the scapegoat victim is usually someone without any powerful connections, in order to avoid this kind of retaliation.\n\nThe aliens proposed a revision of the Passion story, in which Jesus was just an ordinary person who was elected, by divine fiat, to be God’s Son, either before or after the crucifixion. For the aliens, this would yield a more satisfactory moral: don’t crucify anyone, because anyone could be chosen as God’s Son. The aliens’ revision is to some extent a legitimate interpretation, since the Bible clearly suggests that we are all God’s children, even if we are not the “only begotten Son.” I believe Vonnegut’s ideas here play into scholarly reconstructions of the earliest (1st century) Christian theology, by which Jesus was elected or raised to Sonship by God, not descended from heaven via the Incarnation. More to follow."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-disciplines-the-imperative-of-the-center-the-generative-thought-experiment",
      "title": "The Disciplines, the Imperative of the Center, the Generative Thought Experiment",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The disciplines claim knowledge of the mind, the social, religion, customs, the state, beauty and so on, as things in themselves, while for the disciplinary space of originary thinking the practices given these names are all representations by those on the margins of the center. The study of this practice of representation is what I have been calling, on occasion, “anthropomorphics.” The originary sign inaugurates the human, but the most “human” figure there is the central object, the prey/God of the group. The central being is most fully intentional participant on the scene: he “understands” the desires animating the members of the group, along with the ruin to which they lead, while, finally, repelling the violent approach to itself.\n\nTo the extent that the human participants grasp any of this, it is through the center as a kind of mirror of each other’s intentions. This relation to the center continues as the ritual repetition of the originary scene is explained mythologically, as stories in which the central object is, first, the only, and, then, the main, “character.” Only gradually are the participants on the margin attributed a kind of centrality and therefore agency of their own—still, though, only borrowed from the center. This remains the case today, and will remain the case for as long as there are humans, because this is what or who humans are: the modes of central being we now borrow from are now figures called “society,” “ideology,” “the unconscious,” “the media,” and so on.\n\nThe disciplines study these figures, anthropomorphizes them (we rebel against, resist, try to channel, these entities), and derives imperatives from them. And the disciplines’ relation to these entities is approximately the same as the relation between myths and ritual: they can be a source of knowledge, but ultimately accept as givens those relations regarding which the most basic questions need to be asked. Let’s recall why.\n\nWriting, as recorded speech, supplements the speech scene. Writing is practiced as a repetition of reported speech, aimed at closing any difference between the media. The initial focus is on the attitude of the speaker: how did the speaker say whatever he said about whoever he said it? Here we get the variations on “say,” “think,” “want,” “see,” and “do.” This is meant, as per classical prose, to simulate a scene which writer and reader view. Writing aims at putting you “right there.” There is no scene upon which writer and reader stand, participate or act. They, then, are kept rigorously sceneless. The way to guarantee their scenelessness is to saturate the scene, which then becomes the imperative governing prose.\n\nEvery possible difference between writer and imagined reader leads to a “bulking up” of the represented scene, so as remove all possibility of such a difference. This defers attention paid to the scene of reading and writing, the disseminated disciplinary scene. Everything added to the represented scene serves to defer another scene which might attend to the disciplinary scene of representation. For this purpose the metalanguage of literacy is deployed: relations between nominalizations deposit in the scene what might otherwise be looked for in the disciplinary scene of representation. Here is where we have the origin of the disciplines: in relations between nominalizations that are recognizable as scenes by the sceneless. (“Social structures” lead to predictable “change,” “cognitive structures” lead to typical “behavior,” etc.) Enhancing the density of the presumed causality is the way we avoid paying attention to our modes of attention.\n\nAll the arguments within a discipline, then, concern the proper degree of saturation. This spreads the metaphysical distinctions that took shape in Plato: essence/appearance, unchanging/contingent, cause/effect, etc. An effect for every cause, a cause for every effect; to get at the unchanging essence is to avoid over or under saturation. But how can the right degree of saturation be determined in other than circular terms that reiterate the metalanguage itself? Writing must sustain linguistic presence, which means it must imagine linguistic presence around a center. For classical prose, the center is the model of sufficient saturation; for anthropomorphics, the center is a model of possible gestures of deferral; the more distant the center, the more stripped of specific attributes the gesture—the more replete with possibilities.\n\nA simple example: a sociologist determines that institutions function to reproduce certain norms . We could construct paths to nominalization producing these concepts, which are metaphors drawn from machinery and statistics. A model gesture, meanwhile, is a marginal increment in deferral, itself a heeding of an imperative from the center to do precisely that; an imperative which the analyst shares. The language for the model of activity comes from the activity itself (it is infralinguistic)—the model is a probe we place on the scene as a representative of our own disciplinary activity, aimed at making our disciplinary activity a scene.\n\nThe aim of attending and thinking together is to makes the elements of the originary scene present, that is, originary memory. To do so, we must abstract those elements from all the intervening and intermediary scenes—but it precisely in some of those scenes where the disciplines stake their claims. Such claims are claims to occupy the center, and to issue tacit imperatives from there.\n\nWhat does the concept, “imperatives from the center,” do that can’t be done otherwise? However much we might believe in “free will,” we would all acknowledge that there are dimensions of our thinking and doing that lie beyond conscious decision. The fact that we happen to be faced with this choice, here and now, is beyond our conscious decision. The language and traditions we have to confront the situation or choice lie beyond our conscious decision. So, how do we talk about this, at the very least, “residue” of the unchosen? This, to a great extent, is what the disciplines are for, including sacramental disciplines: saying that the trauma caused by my parents, or unjust social structures, or unconscious desires, etc., are not all that different from saying I was tempted by the devil.\n\nAnd there may be some truth in any of these “explanations”—at any rate, any of them is better than nothing. But they’re all really black boxes, sites of proxy wars for power—a particular psychology or sociology empowers a particular set of interests, within the disciplinary institutions and beyond. To be master of the “unconscious” is to be master of much more.\n\nHere is where originary thinking cuts through the disciplines. We can certainly attribute to mimetic desire the “cause” for a particular act, but mimetic desire is always mediated through language. If another boy is more popular with the girls I can: a) smash him over the head with a rock; b) try to figure out what makes him attractive and imitate it; c) simmer in resentment and console myself with having a “deeper” intellect or personality; d) despise the girls who fall for someone so “superficial”; e) recognize my envy and try to acquire the self-control and higher ends that would prevent me from being dominated by it; and, no doubt, there’s an f, g, h, and so one along with all the possible variations on a-e.\n\nSo, what does our young man do; or, rather, how do we best account for the meaning of what he does? (He is himself accounting for the meaning of what he does before doing it.) I think the simplest and most realistic answer is to say he is listening to differing commands: hurt that kid! Wait for your time to be popular! Get stoned! Don’t do anything stupid! Just focus on your homework! These are all versions of commands he’s heard in various contexts, many times. Imperatives often come with no expiration date. In this particular case the imperatives are coming first of all from the other boy himself, as an object of resentful attention (he really is “making you do” whatever you do)—but any imperative coming from one center can be traced back to other, more inclusive centers.\n\nSo, when assailed by competing imperatives, which one do you listen to? We can reinstate the free willing homunculus, or we can say: the one that comes from the highest authority. Which that will be for the boy in question will depend upon which authorities have demonstratively stood behind their own words in his experience: your parents nominally are the higher authority, but if they tell you to do your homework while not seeming to care what the homework is for, while your cool friend at school is at least consistently and courageously transgressive, he might be the higher authority in fact. But once we’re no longer children the imperatives competing for our attention and obedience are no longer personified in such local terms (or at least not only).\n\nThe cool kid may have commanded you to respond to social rejection by becoming cool yourself, or an adjunct to his cool, but one learns that the command to “screw your parents and the popular kids by going goth (or whatever today’s equivalent is) or far left” hasn’t originated with that particular kid. In other words, we trace the imperatives back to the highest authority we can find. And in doing so, we are following a command to do so. And that command must have been “heard” at the intersection of incompatible, but equally compelling commands.\n\nWe all approach this with differing intellectual resources, but the command that will win out is the one that tells you what to do that that intersection, which will have to be at least somewhat different, somewhat more abstract, older, from either of the commands that got you stuck there in the first place. Now, the higher authority might be wrong, but that will lead you to another intersection, with that authority’s command itself being one of stalemated commands, and you get another chance to trace that command to yet another authority. The immoral person becomes such by refusing to recognize such intersections, which involves obeying the commands telling you to ignore them.\n\nThe moral person keeps obeying the command to notice the intersections, and keep ascending to a higher authority. Now, of course we have been provided with such an authority from our childhood—you can always tell the child to heed God’s word, however that has been transmitted and institutionalized through some tradition. It would be too much to expect people to discover the path of ascent all by themselves. But even if the actual words remain the same, the word of God is not the same for someone who has been asked to repeat them ritualistically as they are for someone who as learned to look for possible intersections. For the latter, that word continually issues new commands, targeted with increasing precision, heard with increasing clarity. This is what I mean by the “imperative of the center.”\n\nSo, in seeking out the meaning of what people do, I propose hypothesizing the competing imperatives that person is hearing, and further hypothesizing the intersections at which the higher authority would be sought and hypothesized by the person himself. This is opposed to what I described above as “saturating the scene.” If anything, we want to subtract from the scene, and only add that which we can represent as a network of imperatives, traceable to the center. This is the meaning of the kind of “thought experiment” proposed in my previous post: represent the participant on the scene as obeying, on the one hand, an extremely overdetermined imperative and, on the other hand, an extremely undetermined, highly improbable, barely heard, one.\n\nImagine, for example, someone who is by all appearances a saint following the command to indulge his own vanity and resentments in an extremely refined way (Nietzsche can help you with this), and interpret all his actions in this way (this heads towards a kind of “saturation”)—the “appearances” or signs you began with all get revised or suspended in this way. Then let’s say he’s following the command to serve God with all his being. Where, exactly, would the difference lie? How could we distinguish one from the other? Make the difference as minimal as possible—locate it in a hardly noticeable gesture, issued in obedience to the imperative to let those devoted to God learn something about what such service entails, while dispossessing of their cynicism those caught up in resentment.\n\n(What series of ascending imperatives would he have to have followed to craft precisely that gesture?) You will then be able to say what “serving God” means, even if it’s not clear how you get a doctoral dissertation out of this particular inquiry. We can say, then, that the utmost imperative of the center is precisely the one commanding you to articulate a practice demonstrating the difference between obedience to the center and obedience to imperatives that display all the signs of obedience to the center but the one through which, as you are showing now, that obedience is unmistakably evident."
    },
    {
      "slug": "towards-permanence",
      "title": "Towards Permanence",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "President Trump’s (central, animating) concern for sovereignty, while certainly not aiming at the abolition of democracy, allows us to see the way there through the extinction of the Left that concern presupposes. Trump’s idea seems to be the simple one that governments should govern, i.e., oversee the interactions of a particular people located on a particular territory, which means those with responsibility should issue commands that should in turn be fulfilled; that is, there should be a commensurability between power and responsibility. Accordingly, Trump targets three obstacles to such commensurability, which is to say three forms of interfering power that aim at introducing incommensurability between power and responsibility.\n\nThe first is transnational corporate interests, which use economic power to blackmail and bribe politicians and impose policies on individual states and aim at breaking up coherent nations: i.e., globalism (supported by conservatives). The second is forms of political power that leverage the instruments of destabilization built into liberalism, such as equal rights, human rights, and judicial delay, the media, the academy (“civil society”) to short-circuit commands on their way to implementation: i.e., the political left. The third is insubordination within the state itself, within the vast extent of its permanent institutions, whose members outlast any particular government and therefore (quite reasonably) feel their expertise and long-term responsibility should override any “irresponsible” short-term, politically motivated, incompetent decisions made by mere elected officials: i.e., the “deep state,” or the “swamp.”\n\nThis third element is, furthermore, the conduit through which the other two exercise their power, through regulatory capture, the circulation of information, the promise of lucrative jobs in the private sector, intimate connections between government, media and academy, and so on: Moldbug’s “Cathedral,” with its permanent Inquisition, in short. (Immigration, especially illegal immigration, is such a central concern because it brings together all three of these obstacles to sovereignty.)\n\nI am one of those who credits Trump with being quite aware of this configuration and as having a plan and method for attacking it; at the very least, it’s worth working under the assumption that he does if for no other reason than that imagining the success of his plan and method provides us with a way of plotting out a particular path, within the liberal democratic order, towards the end of that order—towards, well, order. The way of controlling transnational economic interests is, in the first instance, simple: assuming state control over cross border economic activity through tariffs and trade agreements with individual countries (who are thereby encouraged to exercise similar power themselves), on the one hand, and closely regulating or even eliminating immigration, on the other.\n\nThe problem with implementing and sustaining such policies, though, lies in the other two obstacles to sovereignty. The vast majority of Republicans still oppose Trump on “free trade” grounds, and those Republicans are amply rewarded by corporate interests within the revolving door system of moving from elected official to lobbyist—the implication of which is that the more established political figures, at least, need not fear losing elections, since plush jobs await them in the “private” sector. So, somehow, this system needs to be broken. It does not seem to me that Trump has a plan to do so directly, which would indeed be difficult: even campaign finance reform, which couldn’t get past these very Republicans couldn’t do anything about the revolving door, and past a certain point would be invalidated by the supreme Court, wouldn’t really work anyway (instead of giving money to politicians or political parties you give money to lobbying groups who groom and completely control candidates); while term limits might give lobbyists and their clients even more power over inexperienced and easily intimidated and bribed legislators. But the President doesn’t need much Congressional support to withdraw from existing trade agreements and make new ones—Trump’s relation to the GOP congress so far seems to be to just get as much as he can out of them.\n\nIt is also, needless to say, difficult to get at the “civil society” institutions directly. The decline and crisis of the media and academy should be accelerated and exacerbated, and Trump’s method of treating much of the media as, essentially, a combatant, which forces the media to respond in kind with increasing explicitness and shamelessness, is effective. Perhaps creative ways of using RICO statues could be employed at some point. The universities could be buried in lawsuits on various civil rights grounds (affirmative actions, restriction of free speech, etc.), harassed with DOE “instructions” that force administrators to confront faculty, students and donors in various ways.\n\nGrounds can be created for defunding particularly egregious examples, and then the threshold of “egregiousness” can be continually lowered. It’s risky, but the tech giants (for starters) can be pressured to offer their own training programs in math and the sciences for high school students in exchange, say, for a certain period of “apprenticeship,” thereby bypassing one of the university’s primary functions and putting them on the road to obsolescence. I don’t see any reason to assume that Trump or anyone in his circle has any of this in mind, but these kinds of measures follow from the mindset that seems natural to Trump and his team, which is to treat these institutions as “enemies of the American people”—moreover, Trump, if he gave it much thought, would probably be appalled at how ineffectively the schools and universities do much of what they are supposed to do. (And at how the universities have become an increasingly effective mechanism of wealth and technology transfer to China, and undoubtedly a conduit of much espionage as well.)\n\nBut there is a very clear and direct way to deal with the activist elements of “civil society” such as Antifa, BLM and the others—enforce the law. If the government enforces the law and insists (again, through the use of ruinous lawsuits, among other methods) that other institutions (like universities) follow their own rules, much of the sting of the left can be removed. This is very important to keep in mind: without constant, in-your-face lawbreaking and rule-breaking, the left is utterly ineffective. But this further means that neutralizing the third obstacle, insubordination within the state apparatus itself, is a very good way of netting the perpetrators of the other obstacles.\n\nWithout powerful allies within the state apparatus, corporate and civil society defectors would be powerless. So, the entire problem, hypothetically at least, can be reduced to establishing a clear chain of command within those apparatuses, which also means expelling the traitorous elements. Easier said than done, but saying it is the first step towards doing it, and this is where I do think Trump is focusing his efforts. One way, for example, both corporate and leftist interests are “laundered” through the state is via the “leak” system uniting insubordinate state agents and media operatives (and through them the Democrat party and left more generally).\n\nLeaks are, of course, illegal, but also very difficult to stop, and are a very powerful weapon. The President institutes a new policy—strategically placed leaks gradually discredit it, suggesting it is based on lies, or corruption or incompetence, while the very fact of the leaks themselves seems to prove all this. At this point, I’m not sure it’s an exaggeration to say that the media is really nothing more than a leak delivery system, that is, does nothing more than convey the perspectives of dissident and power seeking elements of the state apparatus, especially the “intelligence community.”\n\nTo a certain extent, then, the entire problem of sovereignty can be concentrated in the power of the leak—at least in the US, right now. You can fire leakers, you can jail them, you can find out who they are and keep them out of the loop or use them for your own purposes, which is to confuse and humiliate your enemies in the media and elsewhere. It’s too soon to say for sure, but I think that Trump is doing all of the above—there hasn’t been much jailing yet, but that might be coming up pretty soon. On the really important issues, like Trump’s negotiations with North Korea, and whatever support he’s given to the Saudi-Israeli alliance to shut down Iranian influence in the region, there seem to have been no leaks.\n\nHis Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, was not, of course, a big surprise but everyone seemed nevertheless to be left guessing, including some claiming to have “sources close to the President.” If Trump succeeds in shutting down this means of controlling the administration in power (the ongoing blackmail represented by the possibility of dropping devastating leaks at any time), the forms taken by anti-sovereignist efforts must become more explicit and hysterical, reverting to more overt forms of rule-breaking and self-discrediting accusations. And not only can those be suppressed, but in the process local jurisdictions supporting disorder can in turn be countered and disempowered.\n\nThere really is nothing stopping Trump’s DOJ from arresting the mayors of “sanctuary cities” and governors of sanctuary states: this is what insurrection looks like. Always target law breaking and rule breaking, which means targeting the transgressions of the enforcers themselves: all sovereignist politics can be compassed by the imperative to guard the guardians. Targeting the swamp, then, gets you the most bang for your buck.\n\nBut it’s easy to see the problem here: this kind of systematic extirpation of anti-sovereign activities must be a long-term project. Even if Trump can keep this up and clean up much of the swamp in two terms, if he’s succeeded by a Democrat or even a normal Republican there’s no reason to think it all won’t be overturned, and a kinder, gentler policy towards the permanent state restored. And, furthermore, if he uses legal methods to harass and punish his enemies in the opposing party and opposing media, the succeeding government will do the same and put Trump’s people and the media that supported him in jail. And this very possibility will lead current supporters of Trump to hesitate in treating political criminality criminally, and it will lessen the constraints on the opposition, as they can just wait for their side to come back in—even if some unavoidable sacrifices must be accepted in the meantime.\n\nIn other words, the transformation needs to be made as permanent as institutional transformations can be, which means that Trump would have to aim at making them permanent. But the only way Trump can do that is by producing a new breed of (mostly) men to run the state apparatus and transforming his voter base into something like a soldiery, with its own media and ultimately educational apparatus (either new ones or, for economy’s sake, a takeover of the old ones) making it capable of sticking a single unanimous middle finger to the blackmail and vendettas of the left. This is something that I see no indication Trump has given any thought to, but he has given some thought to an essential precondition of addressing it, which is downsizing considerably the American empire—with that empire being one important conduit of globalizing power sources. Once downsized (e.g., by removing American protection from Europe and East Asia and delegating to Middle East powers responsibility for policing the region), it will be almost impossible, short of a new war, to “upsize” again.\n\nSo, only some kind of increasingly unopposed government can produce the extinction event of the left, which is to say, dissolve the interlocking subversions of global, civil society and intra-state powers and identify and extirpate the shoots of any resurgence. We can see this from other states that are much further along the path than the US, who have the simultaneously more difficult and easier problem of combating US-originated sources of subversion. The best example today is Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which has simply refused to accept the EU-imposed refugee regime, and is capable of doing so in large part by keeping George Soros-affiliated organizations out of the country.\n\nOrban has been in power since 2010, and just won an election by a larger margin than the previous one (his margin is even larger if one includes the parties to his right). Why shouldn’t he be in power another 10 years or more? And if he is, shouldn’t he bequeath to his successors the absolute ban on both immigration and externally funded “civil society” organizations? In Israel, the left has been out of power for almost 20 years, and the Israelis have also realized that a key to making this permanent is sharply limiting externally funded “human rights” and other groups. Poland is perhaps on a similar route, and maybe even Erdogan in Turkey, in his own clumsy, lurching way.\n\nA virtuous circle might be at work here, as the elimination of outside, globalizing influences reduces the internal opposition to negligible status, leading to minimal conflict and increasingly trivial elections—perhaps the elections will ultimately become vestigial, or really just a way of keeping political leaders already working within a fairly narrow consensus honest. And then, who knows?\n\nTo return, then, to the American context, let’s say that the Republican majority gets a bit bigger in 2018 and then 2020. Starved of the oxygen generated by the stoppage of “leakage” (and other measures like breaking the backs of public employee unions) the Democrats further marginalize and destroy themselves. The media becomes increasingly irrelevant. With the immediate threat of Democratic takeover diminished, Trump can work harder on disciplining the GOP, replacing globalists with Trump-loyal nationalists. A 6-3 or 7-2 majority on the Supreme Court cuts that off as a vehicle of subversion. Elite money starts to flow toward the forces of order (why give money to ineffectual hysterics, especially ones who had the world at their feet and blew it?); right wingers or just normal people in the media and educational institutions start to feel safer as the left is deprived of its ability to carry out reprisals on dissidents and the insufficiently enthusiastic.\n\nA few election cycles down the road, what would there be to argue about, or vote about? Whether tariffs on China should be 20% or 25%? I think most people would be content to leave such decisions to the government—what energy there presently is in the electoral system is that generated by the desire to screw your enemies, stamp their faces in the dust, and perform a victory dance over their corpses. If the enemy-generating machine is shut down, that energy will be sucked out of the system. (Even more serious issues, like social security reform, could be dealt with reasonably and calmly under these conditions.) A big test of the success of this model is whether Trump is able to, more or less explicitly, choose his successor: that itself would create an important precedent.\n\nThere’s an important consideration here regarding “public discourse.” If stopping the leak system is the lynchpin, we have to accept that much of what we see reported in the media, or even announced by Trump or others in his administration, will be falsehoods, deceptions and misdirections. We can’t expect to be told that a particular leaking official, whose “information” turns up on the front page of the New York Times, was given a “barium meal.” We must trust where we can’t verify. If Trump sees most of the media as the enemy of the American people, he obviously feels no obligation to be truthful with it or provide it with any information unhelpful to his own agenda; we therefore have no reason to believe, without substantial supplemental confirmation, anything coming from it.\n\nWe have to set aside our own tendencies to hysteria: Sessions is really deep state! Trump has staffed his administration with enemies! Why doesn’t he fire Mueller/Rosenstein/Wray/whomever! Not only is there no point to worrying about things we have no power over, but we must eliminate our own bad democratic habits, one of which is to imagine that our elected officials are at our beck and call and must take all of our anger and resentment and fantasizing seriously. If we prefer the sovereignist agenda to anything else imaginable now, then we should inhabit and enact it ourselves by being good soldiers and assuming that Trump has things in hand—how can we become worthy of the most expansive understanding of his purposes? In large part by acting illiberally and undemocratically, i.e., like adults.\n\nI would like to give credit where credit is due and also direct any readers to a unique and always interesting source of information and analysis by acknowledging the indebtedness of some of my speculations here to Thomas Wictor’s twitter feed."
    },
    {
      "slug": "way-way-after-sacral-kingship-gablog",
      "title": "Way, Way, After Sacral Kingship",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I am trying to develop a mode of political thinking that is not a political philosophy. A political philosophy, like any philosophy, has “first principles,” and then starts “deducing” secondary principles from the first one (freedom, consent, the will of the people, etc.) including justifications of monarchy in terms of such principles, like the monarch as serving the people, or God, or constrained by “natural law.” All these “principles,” and the institutions with which they become co-dependent, are endless sources of imperio in imperium , installing the assumption that the ruler must be justified, opening up the constant struggle over who controls the means of justification. Instead, I begin anthropologically, or anthropomorphically, with the assumption of a relation to the center, a sacred center, and, with regard to politics proper, a sacred center that has been occupied by a human. In that case, we can remain focused on actual and possible relations between margins or peripheries and the center.\n\nA sacred center is an object of devotion and love, a source of life and everything life provides, and therefore also a source of fear and obedience and recipient of supplications. Our only question is what the center wants from and for us. We turn to the center in times of despair, doubt, hope and triumph: all mimetic emotions. The center rewards, punishes, guides. We must interpret the center as doing all this, of course, and we can do so because the center is comprised of our “donation” of all these mimetic desires and resentments. If I am outraged by my fellow, if I refrain from committing violence against him it is because once, on the originary scene, the central object told the participants there to refrain from engaging in such violence at a similar moment of high tension, and we, the community, or, rather, our language and the stories we tell in it, “remember” that scene—it is that recollection that stays my hand, and informs any subsequent punishment I might receive for failing this test of deferral. But novel situations are always occurring, and we need to continue donating more of the language we arrive at in addressing these novelties to the center. Otherwise, the advice and commands it delivers will fail.\n\nSacral kingship was once such a novelty, as was the Big Man that preceded it. The Big Man is the first to usurp the center and take upon himself the responsibility for distribution: within the gift economy he was eventually able to so smother his rivals with gifts as to bankrupt them, so to speak, thereby turning his entire relation to the community as a whole into a gift economy. The Big Man attains and maintain his position based on “merit”—he really has to provide for the community. He becomes a king in being sacralized, which really means in being killed in a (before or after the fact) ritual manner. It this then that the king takes on all the attributes of the sacred center, which is to say becomes the source of benefits and disasters, the link between the community and the cosmos.\n\nSuch kings are often sacrificed, and the sacrifice is often built into the “office” itself. No doubt the terms, forms and timing of such sacrifices were dependent upon emergent power relations within the community, which is to say sacral kingship was itself highly defective in centralizing and clarifying power relations: rather than smart-ass lawyers bringing his right to rule into question, it would be some medicine man or witch. But it would still be unimaginable that there might be no one at the center.\n\nWe can assume that there were kings who preferred to delay their sacrifice, indefinitely, if possible, and found the means to do so, perhaps deferring the sacrificial ritual to their natural death and burial. Such kingship is still sacred, the king is still the father of his people, the source of all boon, etc., and elaborate ceremonies and exalted offices are created and given the sanction of tradition and divine origin so as to sanctify his rule. Creating such buffers between the ruler and ruled requires wealth, which requires conquest and slavery, which requires wealth. The effectiveness of rule becomes more measurable: we can see the difference between a king who conquers and one who is defeated, between one who enriches at least significant portions of the people and one who impoverishes them.\n\nAt the very least, tacit “justifications” for at least a particular ruler take shape, and can be explicitly formulated by those closest to the king. A kind of dialectic is formed between rulers and those to whom the most important tasks of advice and organization are delegated: they are most dependent upon this particular ruler, but are also best positioned to see his weaknesses, while needing to find ways to communicate awareness of those weaknesses to the ruler himself. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population couldn’t care less whether this or that king rules over them: it is the king and those who are masters of the traditions ensuring his rule. The difference between the occupant of the center and what we could call the meaning of the center, is already opened, at least a crack: kingship is not wholly embodied in the existing king, whose centrality is somewhat indirect.\n\nThat distance is the problem we have to solve. Having the king ordained by God obviously doesn’t solve it—it simply highlights the fact that what God has ordained He can unordain, and who is privy to God’s will on this question? We have to accept the break with sacral kingship once and for all. This is no simple manner, and anyone who thinks we have accomplished it by establishing secular rule doesn’t pay much attention to what people, even in the most “advanced” societies, expect of their rulers. It is repeatedly pointed out that economic growth, unemployment, technological development, and so on, are only tangentially and in highly complicated ways related to policies enacted by the President, but all of that is irrelevant: everyone speaks with complete certainty of the “Obama economy” or the “Trump economy,” as if, just as with the sacral kings of old, all benefits and calamities follow directly from the hand of the ruler.\n\nHe is still the link, if not quite between the community and the cosmos (al though the global warming scare brings us fairly close to this as well), then between the community and all the resources available to, and goods produced by, the community. The president is still there to slay our enemies, domestic and foreign, to stand in for the community as a whole, is still surrounded by quasi-sacrificial rituals of initiation, testing, ascent into the pavilion of honored (or descent into the Hades of dishonored) predecessors. Nor does progressive iconoclasm do the trick: it is very easy to see that it is progressives more than anyone else who repeatedly put all their eggs into the basket of a single sacred figure, whether it be Fidel, Hugo, or Bernie. Legends of the sacrifices undergone by such figures are told for decades afterwards.\n\nThe point is not to reduce the ruler to a “manager” of costs and benefits measured in a utilitarian manner. The occupant of the center cannot be divested of the meaning of the center—the question is how to invest him with it. I would like to keep things simple, non-metaphysical, non-philosophical, non-theological, and yet not “secular” either. Someone has to occupy the center: the most liberal and democratic societies have acknowledged this while trying evade doing so explicitly by devising methods for placing someone at the center as convoluted and bizarre as those of the most primitive sacral kingship. So, that’s a “premise.”\n\nAnother premise is that whoever is at the center issues commands. Again, all the checks and balances in the world, all the rights and courts and human rights groups in all the world cannot deny this. Indeed, all the obstruction and protest and shrieking is to get the ruler to issue their commands. A third premise: commands are not implemented automatically. Someone must obey them, and there is always, even if ever so slightly, some difference between the command issued and the command obeyed. No command can be framed in such as way are to make it unequivocally applicable to all possible instances of its implementation. So, one final premise: the difference between the occupant of the center and the meaning of the center is replicated or iterated in the difference between the command issued and the command obeyed.\n\nThe occupant of the center is still, in fact, the source of all bounty for the community, just as was the case for the sacral king; the difference, now is that this bounty is now manifested in our obedience to the imperatives issued by the center. The sacral king was responsible for a crop or a hunt sufficient to see the people through the season; we know that our plenty today depends upon agricultural machinery, scientifically developed pesticides and genetic modifications and skilled labor within and well beyond agriculture itself—but all of that depends upon an orderly relation to the ruler. That orderly relation lies in the obedience to increasingly abstract and specialized commands, some of which are commands to scientists, managers and executives to provide the ruler with the commands he needs to issue.\n\nThe meaning of the center is in the subjects’ form of obedience to imperatives to the center—this form is determined by every subject attempting to determine how the ruler, mediated, of course, by the various layers of authority through which the commands comes, would have this imperative obeyed here and now. This, of course, can be done resentfully, for example, in the form of “malicious compliance.” But that doesn’t really matter. We are not interested in peering into the mind, heart or soul of each and every subject but of developing the discourses, the language, in which one must learn to speak of “what one is doing.”\n\nIf the only legitimate explanation for why you do one thing or another is some version of “because the command I received left open this margin of decision and, based on the pattern of commands I am accustomed to and my own disciplinary experience and expertise, the decision I made seemed best to complete the imperative originating from the center,” the occupant of the center is invested with its meaning. That meaning lies in the definition and articulation of the margins through their orientation toward the center.\n\nWe can see the cultural implications of the closing of the gap between the occupant and meaning of the center. The arts, education, morality, ethics, leisure, and so on would all be shaped by the imperative to close this gap. Similar gaps or distances exist in all our relations with each other, and are a constant source of misunderstandings, pleasures, tragedies, comedies and learning everywhere. Drawing attention to this fundamental paradox—the more I follow the imperative the more it follows me—is a basic prerequisite for any cultural proficiency, for any form of maturity. It’s impossible to say which genres, which methods, which faiths, which entertainments will be best equipped to be reconstituted along these lines, but at least most of them, we can imagine, will be welcome to try. We can even get started on this now, by forming the master discipline: the study of the imperative order."
    },
    {
      "slug": "fraud-and-force",
      "title": "Fraud and Force",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We can consider the emergence of the Big Man out of the primitive egalitarian community as the beginning of civilization. With civilization comes the placing of some individual at the center of the community, as the source of power (this could just as easily be described as some individual appropriating the center). A new moral order is thereby initiated. With the central object, prey animal, ancestor/icon at the center, the overriding moral principle is precisely preventing anyone from seizing the center—the ritual means of distributing food, mates and other goods follows from that imperative. Once a human occupies the center, that human can be held responsible for everything attributed to the center, which is everything required for the well-being of the community.\n\nSacrificial morality involves adhering to the rules surrounding the worship and eventual sacrifice of the central figure. These rules are already a deferral of the immediate killing of the central figure as soon as some failure in his mediation of the cosmos for his people is revealed. The most moral one can be in the sacrificial community is to increase this space of deferral, by attributing as much of the responsibility as possible to the ruler for actions one might imagine he could actually have carried out otherwise, or left undone. But under sacrificial conditions there is no way of consistently isolating which actions might fall into this category.\n\nPost-sacrificial civilization (accomplished via the Judaic, Biblical, and Christian revelations in the West and otherwise—via Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, etc., elsewhere) is the ongoing effort to bring that category into focus. Once the individual occupying the center can be blamed for anything that goes wrong (because everything, good or bad, comes from the center), then any individual, occupying any central position, can also be blamed equally indiscriminately. And the erection of one center leads to the proliferation of other, orbiting centers, so the resistance to potentially unlimited scapegoating becomes the moral problem.\n\nHow is such resistance possible, and how could the “immunity” in question be built up? There are two ways, which are not mutually exclusive and can even support each other, but one of which will nevertheless be dominant in a given case. The first way is the insight gathered by rulers that perpetual scapegoating, as well as its more organized form in the vendetta, is socially destructive and a threat to the sovereign itself, and must be suppressed. Part of the suppression involves the inculcation of self-control, which means refraining from acting upon your resentment in other than social approved of ways, and also means constructing the means of social approval, i.e., some kind of justice system, that will ensure such restraint has the desired effect.\n\nHere we get, I assume, the Confucian (for example) model of the wise man, who respects authority, doesn’t act upon impulse, pursues moderation, places the family and tradition first, and so on. Such a man will defer to the authorities and not act out vengefully. But there is some question as to whether such resistance to scapegoating is more than just “pragmatic,” with the resentment being enacted in some ritual or aesthetic manner.\n\nThe other way, which is more transformative but also leads to more vulnerabilities, is modeled by what Gans, following Girard fairly closely here, calls the “Christian revelation.” The Christian revelation confronts each one of us with the bad faith implicit in our impulse to scapegoat, to pile unlimited responsibility on some other placed at the center. Jesus proclaims a universal moral reciprocity, retrieving the symmetry of the originary scene, but this time in a way that forces constant confrontation with sacrificial institutions, even the more deferred, mediated and “symbolic” sacrificial culture of Rabbinic Judaism from which Jesus emerged, and from which he adopted and adapted the call for reciprocity.\n\nThe center demands, first of all, refraining from violence, including revenge, against your neighbor; but sacrificial religions and polities displace this violence by establishing the proper form and rationale of sacrificial violence, and they can’t tolerate the exposure of the emptiness of those rationales. It is for this reason that Jesus is sacrificed, i.e., in the name of preserving sacrificial violence and the institutions and resentments predicated upon it. Since Jesus has done nothing wrong, and in a sense nothing at all other than expose these institutions and resentments, our universal complicity in his murder reveals our own implication in sacrificial violence.\n\nAny time we find ourselves starting to put someone at the center, then, a move which always implies the possibility of a violent outcome, we are to question our sacrificial investments in doing so. Since we must put individuals in the center, we must continually disinvest our resentments in the process, and reduce centrality to the barest necessity; the construction of institutions and culture is all directed towards identifying, tagging, studying those sacrificial investments and building regulated forms of interaction that systematize this moral imperative. This moral form is more transformative, because it is reflected back to us in all our engagements with the other, and not just in our acknowledgement of authority; it is more vulnerable because, while not incompatible with authority, the particular form that our restraint before our tendency to centralize, violently, the other, takes can never be set once and for all. We can always identify yet a further, previously unnoticed, incitement to sacrificial resentment and, even more important, can always find grounds for condemning authorities for not protecting the victims of that resentment.\n\nAll of this is really by way of review. The further analytical step I want to take here is to explore a substantive ethical account to supplement these post-sacrificial moral forms. Morality involves the “thou shall nots,” open-ended imperatives, what Gans in The Origin of Language calls the “operator of interdiction.” Ethics concerns self-shaping, bringing one’s actions, and therefore one’s intellectual and emotional prompts to action, into a hierarchical order directed towards a center. No sustainable ethics can be immoral, but morality can’t dictate the content of ethics. There are a lot of different ways, corresponding to different historical situations and individual capacities, of restraining one’s sacrificial resentments.\n\nFor some people basic self-control, the reminder that they will be “bad people” if they commit certain transgressions, may be enough. For others, the imperative to refrain from sacrifice includes nothing less than world-building. It is also the case that ethical failures, the confirmed sense that one has fallen short of the model one has generated or adopted for oneself, that is, the inescapable feeling of being a fraud, is a prominent, I am even tempted to say the only, source of lapses into immorality.\n\nIn a ritualistic culture, one cannot be a fraud—one fulfills or violates what is required. Before we can speak of fraud, we have to have disciplines. Someone purporting to be a doctor, lawyer, banker, investor, soldier, teacher, etc., can be a fraud. All these professions are products of literacy (even soldiers who can’t read and write are part of a literate culture, which makes their discipline and method possible). The authenticity of one’s professionalism, or participation in a discipline, then, depends upon one’s relation to the metalinguistics of literacy. To review: writing, presenting itself as reported speech, supplements the elements of the speech act that are lexically inaccessible (tone, body language, etc.).\n\nThe proliferation of metalinguistic terms supplementing primes like “think,” “say,” “see,” “feel,” “know,” “want,” and “do” follows. And then the nominalization of those supplementing terms. The imperative of the written text, codified in “classic prose,” is to “saturate” the speech scene, to place the reader there with the writer in his imagination. This imperative to saturate the scene is the source of the easily ridiculed and despised “jargon” so prevalent in the disciplines—the psychologist can’t simply say his patient “thinks” and “feels” certain things—those feelings and thoughts need to be made more precise (their scenic preconditions made explicit) and they need to be given a location (e.g., in the “unconscious”).\n\nThe question for the disciplines, then, is what particular thoughts, feelings, etc. (even to nominalize “think” and “feel” is to situate us within a discipline) mean. To say what something means is to refer it to something else, which is to make it less than “prime” and auto-intelligible. Wierzbicka doesn’t find “mean” or “meaning” among the primes; Olson does, interestingly, locate it in the pre-literate English vocabulary he compiles, along with a list of post-literacy equivalents and supplements, in his The World on Paper . “Mean” is a borderline word/concept, then (the Online Etymological Dictionary seems to give it virtually “prime” status, as it doesn’t present It as emerging from a metaphorical transformation of another word).\n\nOlson himself may provide the explanation for this in The Mind on Paper , when he points out that literacy introduces the distinction between “speaker’s meaning” and “sentence’s meaning,” which itself rooted in an older distinction between “say” and “mean.” Once language, through writing, becomes an object of inquiry, words, sentences and the grammatical rules that get us from one to the other are objectified and standardized, which means that we can judge what an individual speaker says against those standards. So, “meaning,” which first marks the observation that something is concealed by the speaker comes to refer to what is concealed from the speaker in his own speaking.\n\nThere’s no reason both senses of the word couldn’t be represented by different words, so “mean” might be more “elemental” in some languages than others. “Mean” as metalinguistic concept refers to the always existing discrepancy between speaker’s meaning and sentence’s meaning—there is always something in the words and sentences we utter that is irreducible to whatever we thought we were doing with them.\n\nThe imperative to saturate the scene constitutive of classic prose, then, is also an imperative to abolish the distance between speaker’s meaning and sentence’s meaning. Think about how much effort is put into avoiding misunderstandings, fending off misinterpretations, attacking “distortions” and “de-contextualizations” of one’s words. All this is an attempt to fold sentence meaning back into speaker meaning. This is the central ethical problem, because all sustainable self-shaping depends upon accepting and living within that distance: what you are for yourself can never be quite what you are to others, and we all need to find ways to have our representations of ourselves to ourselves be complementary to all the representations we “give off” to others.\n\nTo refuse to accept that, whether by completely identifying oneself with the successive representations we give off, or (far more commonly) by trying to control one’s self-representations so as to rule out meanings other than one’s own, is to be a fraud. On the one hand, one is a Don Juan or con man; on the other hand, one is a bureaucrat of the self, or hypocrite. Either way, one is likely to assuage the sense of shame by assuming everyone else falls into the same category, in which case suspending all moral obligations to others is the sensible course. Violent resentment and projecting accusation is directed towards whoever re-opens the difference within meaning.\n\nA sustainable ethics would have to place speaker’s meaning in the midst of the multitude of actual and possible sentence meanings. We have a definition of “competence” and “virtue” (and perhaps “phronesis”) here—neither competence nor virtue is about who you “really” are, or about what you can induce others to believe about you. Both involve a kind of constant interplay in which one keeps refining one’s meaning by soliciting feedback from the ramifications of the meanings of one’s sentences. The first thing one is inclined to do upon being called, implicitly or explicitly, a fraud, at least if one suspects some truth the accusation is to lash out at, centralize the accuser, and prep him for a symbolic lynch mob.\n\nHere is where the ethical problem slides into the moral one. In order to violently centralize the other you will have to “saturate” yourself—the other is “that” because you are “this.” Building and shaping oneself while and by refraining from such violence involves creating spaces that bring other speakers’ meaning into proximity with your sentence’s meaning. As others repeat, in different contexts, for differing purposes, your sentences (and you can of course join in as well), they keep exposing the distance between the two meanings, for themselves as well as for you. With this in mind, you would already write and therefore think differently, more hypothetically—if writing is always implicitly a record of speech (even speech one has with oneself), it makes more sense to explore the various settings in which that speech could have been uttered than to try to reproduce a full, present speech situation that is by definition absent.\n\nIn that case, the distance is addressed from the beginning, not “patched up” afterwards. That distance, and the imperative to make it oscillatory and therefore a disciplinary space of inquiry, resisting the imperative to shut it down and resolve the discrepancy antagonistically, is the articulation of the moral and the ethical."
    },
    {
      "slug": "hypothetically-speaking-gablog",
      "title": "Hypothetically Speaking",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It’s interesting to see people get offended and angry in online discussions—they curse each other, threaten each other, try to demean and humiliate each other. In other words, they act according to codes of an honor society in a medium that renders those codes completely irrelevant. That irrelevance has long been the case with print, as well, but online communication seems to revive the remnants of oral cultures because the exchanges take place in the present. The culture of meme-ing, meanwhile, makes it clear that online communication favors brief, memorable “detournements” of powerful images and clichés, frame-switching of opponents’ arguments, and casual taboo breaking. Such memes can travel nearly instantaneously, are immediately intelligible, and force responses that reveal something about the responder we might not have known otherwise.\n\nThis is to make the obvious point that meaning depends upon medium. But there are some less obvious consequences to this observation. Relying upon David Olson’s analysis of the metalanguage of literacy and classic prose, I’ve proposed that we can see writing, in relation to speech, in mimetic terms, as seeking to “saturate” the assumed speech situation represented in writing. In an oral situation, constituted by physical presence, you can shake your fist at your interlocutor—undoubtedly that once has a real meaning, showing that one was refraining from violence for the moment, but was making no guarantees should things escalate.\n\nIt’s hard to imagine someone doing that now, even in the most heated argument. This doesn’t mean that the written text needs the equivalent of shaking one’s hand in anger—the fact of widespread literacy transforms social order, or entails a transformed social order, such that a certain distance from violence can be assumed, rather than having the line at which we pass into violence represented regularly. This is the first problem with classical prose, then—it simulates a speech situation—the reader and writer as interlocutors made present on a shared scene by the writer’s prose—that is really an ersatz one.\n\nMarshall Mc Luhan was at least partially right to say that the content of a new medium is the older medium it is replacing or supplementing. Certainly, radio tries to reproduce the intimacy of a one on one conversation, and, for a long time, TV shows were basically filmed theatrical productions and extended vaudeville skits. And they try to saturate the space they purport to merely reproduce: in radio it might be the cultivation of (not necessarily “authentic”) regional idiosyncrasies, or an avuncular, reassuring vocal presence; in the TV shows of the 50s and 60s, a kind of artificial national idiom was created, probably based on some variant of Midwestern speech.\n\nNot surprisingly, these are the features of older samples of these media that both evoke nostalgia and are easiest to parody (which makes them a great source of memes). If we are committed to submitting all of the concepts and categories presented to us by the liberal order to painstaking, unrestrained interrogation, we should accept the modernist aesthetic dictum that the capabilities and possibilities of the media as media should be explored, rather than thinking in terms of representing the same content in one form or another. The concept of a “disciplinary space” is meant to help us do that—if there is a universal across all media, it is not content or ideas, but that any medium is a distinctive way of organizing attention.\n\nThe problem with classical prose, and, more generally, the imperative to saturate the scene of one media with terms and tropes from another is that a lot of material that hasn’t been properly “inspected” finds its way into your representations. It’s easiest to reach for the familiar in filling in the gaps left in trying out new media. One of the most revelatory effects of Goggle’s Ngram reader is the realization that concepts, words, that seem so natural as to be permanent features of the social landscape are quite recent creations and, in fact, deliberately created artifacts of the propaganda needs of World War II and then the Cold War.\n\n“Liberal democracy,” “Judeo-Christian,” “separation of Church and state,” “free market,” “nation of immigrants,” “racism,” and much more—none of them pre-date, in any significant way, World War II. The problem (well, one problem) with contemporary conservatives is that they’re still fighting the wars against the Nazis and the Soviets, like the proverbial Japanese solider lost on a Pacific island and never hearing about his country’s defeat. These terms are in turn embedded in larger networks of terms, which are in turn rooted in the disciplines upon which we rely in order to say pretty much anything. (The “separation of Church and state” becomes a serious topic in political science.) All of our thinking apparatuses need to be thoroughly overhauled.\n\nThese concepts, which weigh down our thinking in ways that require continuous effort to notice, are in turn only the visible feature of habits, gestures, reactions and reflexes and that just as grounded in media, histories, and power struggles as the concepts themselves. Part of the purpose of the “originary grammar” I keep returning to, that is, the attempt to reduce all discourse to some relation between ostensive, imperative and declarative signs, is to help us in stripping all discourse and all disciplines of everything “unvetted,” everything bearing liberal assumptions or implications, precisely in the most take for granted places.\n\nPart of contemporary reactionary thought, of course, is the return to “old books” and therefore old and discarded concepts, and nothing I say here counters that practice at all, since retrieving, for example, the distinction between warriors, craftsmen and priests in the ordering of communities serves the same corrosive effect upon liberal concepts. But, of course, maybe society can no longer or should no longer be ordered in that way—these older concepts also need to be tested against what I think is the one criterion all post-liberals and anti-liberals can share: a privileging of order over freedom, however defined.\n\nWe want to make order where we see disorder, and I think order can only mean defense of a center. If in fact, no social order can now be reduced to warrior/craftsman/priest that by no means invalidates the concepts (in general, we can be in much less of a rush to invalidate concepts—why not keep them around in case they prove useful at some point?); rather it renders that trichotomy a source of hypotheses and thought experiments.\n\nWe could spend all of our time (I don’t say that we should) studying the discourses around us, including those of our fellow reactionaries, in search of concepts, words, phrases, even stylistic tics that have previously unnoticed tendrils reaching into the dense network of liberal power concepts. This would be time very well spent. It need not be antagonistic at all—quite to the contrary, it’s a kind of civil hygiene we would be performing for each other. Some of the most pioneering work done along these lines has been by the proprietor of the now defunct blog Reactionary Future , with its most important result to date being his Patron Theory of Politics.\n\nAt least one of the future directions of such work will involve making thinking increasingly hypothetical. To question the meaning of a word or term is to treat it as a hypothesis: what follows from describing phenomena in these ways? The purpose of my concept of a “sovereign imaginary” is the same: when you say something is good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, that we “should” or “must” do this or that, what form of central power would make possible the relation between what you say and what you take to be the “payoff” or “downstream” of what you say? Everything we say or do entails a hypothesis regarding the sovereign order making that saying or doing possible and intelligible.\n\nIn a sense, I am proposing a kind of freedom of thought, one already practiced by many on the new or dissident right (which makes it possible for me to reflect upon it). We’re not obliged, nor does it always serve our purposes, to “prove” that we have a better theory of “human nature” or “social structure,” or to provide, on demand, iron-clad “alternatives” to the seemingly carved in the stone of history liberal order. It’s not as if we shouldn’t do these things, if they seem useful—my point is that these are not rules we need play by. Liberalism thoroughly saturates today’s media-scape, and a lot of what we can do is facilitate liberalism’s own self-dialogues, its incessant, narcissistic babblings.\n\nIt’s helpful to point out that the truth of the matter is almost always pretty much exactly the opposite of what the liberal says; indeed, what liberals say is almost invariably a way of avoiding some damaging truth. My own approach, which I of course hope others will find compelling, is to keep asking about origin, center, power, deferral and discipline, questions liberalism must avoid under penalty of brain death.\n\nTo think and speak hypothetically is to “de-saturate.” It’s very easy to think in terms of being a “man speaking to men,” thereby evoking a speech situation in which one anticipates responses, seeks “common ground,” appeals to approved attitudes, and so on—these are some of those deeply embedded reactions and reflexes I referred to before. Instead, why not think of one’s reader or listener as a vehicle conveying a kind of irresistible, minimal, model, whether by endorsement or opposition? I began by mentioning the absurdity of taking offense in online discussions, but it’s actually pretty absurd anywhere—if you’re not going to demand satisfaction in duel, what’s the point?\n\nGetting offended just gives others needless power over you—if they know what offends you, they know how to jerk you around. (I’m speaking here of people who actually take offense, not of the big business of taking offense for rent-seeking purposes—but, of course, the latter can only persist if the former is still practiced.) If we can learn these things through a new medium we can apply it to older ones, which in turn get situated within the “media ecology” in a new way.\n\nI come back to that here because once we target, analytically, an archaic or useless attitude, the next step is to ask what might replace it. What would take the place of offending and being offended—an interesting thought experiment, I think. (One can say part of being human is being offended by violations of reciprocity—but we don’t know that. There are all kinds of ways of detecting, assessing and responding to violations of norms. Referring to what we must be “as humans” is one of the last resorts of scoundrels.) To be offended is to take the meaning of a remark to be some present or possible future lowering of status, it is to see oneself singled out as a more likely center of resentment and therefore target of violence.\n\nThe first question, then, is whether the remark indeed portends some deleterious centering of the offended: what hypothesis regarding possible targeting is one entertaining? To pose the question is already to make it possible to defer any such danger. If you can’t really point to any danger, maybe you’re the one who is looking to attack pre-emptively. In what way might the offensive remark be fair or just? (What is the scenic meaning of “fairness” and “justice”—what sovereign imaginary comes with each concept?) If there is some way, then we are looking into the sovereign imaginary shared by offender and offended; if there is absolutely no way, if the remark must be deemed sheer, utter, vitriol, then taking offense is particularly ridiculous—the other is admitting his impotence, since he clearly wants to commit violence but realizes he can’t.\n\nInstead of taking offense and devising some “proportional” response, the situation can be used to create memes regarding the paradoxes of simultaneously denying and establishing hierarchies and paradoxes. Using situations to promote such hypothetical thinking will, eventually, lead us to the theories of the human and the social, and the “concrete alternatives” that we will need.\n\nNow, of course, there are times when it is good policy to affect taking offense, to demand apologies, insist on reparations, etc., in whatever form a particular medium provides for. But to think in such terms is to already “de-saturate,” to distance oneself from an imagined speech situation, and to try and figure out how to generate a simulacrum. This is part of the study of meaning: how does the other’s words and actions, within a given power structure, on the margins of a particular center, commit that other in ways that make it possible to help him reveal himself? To approach meaning in this more disciplinary way is to ask what imperatives someone’s words and actions issue to him, which it turn makes it possible to try out ways of amplifying the imperative."
    },
    {
      "slug": "money-and-capital-as-media-and-power",
      "title": "Money and Capital as Media and Power",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Let’s begin with some of what we know about money from Richard Seaford’s Money and the Early Greek Mind and David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years : it doesn’t emerge out of barter, through a gradual selection of one particularly apt commodity to serve as a universally exchangeable object. Money is introduced by the state, or the ruler: according to Seaford, as a way of replacing a more archaic and egalitarian form of sacrifice, where all members of the community were present on the scene, to one in which sacrifice is organized by a warrior “Big Man” (al though Seaford doesn’t use the term) who distributes the offering according to merit (as judged, of course, by the Big Man or chief); according to Graeber, in order to pay soldiers in wars of conquest where the soldiers are away from home and need to supply themselves where they are stationed—according to Graeber, this is also the origin of markets, which emerge in order to supply the soldiery.\n\nI would give Seaford’s account primacy, because he is further accounting for how the Greeks became the first fully monetized society, and he also shows how the Greeks systematically connected money to the instability of power relations. Of course, money could have been introduced both ways, and other ways, in differing times and places. What we could say at this point, though, is that money displaces the sacrificial scene, but without abolishing the center-margin configuration constitutive of that or any scene. Insofar as money is established and controlled by the ruler, and so is the market wherein money circulates, we could say that a sum of money represents access to a piece of the center, whatever that entails in a particular place and time.\n\nAt the same time, we can see that money is certainly a significant factor in undermining sacral kingship, because it creates centers of power and competencies that a sacral king cannot control. Along with the circulation of money comes the circulation of power.\n\nBut Seaford and Graeber also show that money generates new ways of seeing and thinking, which is to say, it is a medium, every bit as much as writing or electronic communication—as has often been noted, money is a sign system. Seaford shows how the metaphysical binaries like ideal and material, mind and nature, universal and particular, individual and society, and others, are products of the form of money (he is of course dependent on the history of reflections on these matters within Marxist theory). Graeber, meanwhile, shows how debt, which comes into being along with money and markets, and is in fact central to their creation, generates entire theologies regarding the relation between humans and the gods, or God.\n\nThis is a good time to point out that, as linguistic beings, we are always within some medium, so it’s not as if the media distort some natural, non-mediated perspective—in fact, one could say that the very notion of a natural, non-mediated perspective is a product of money, which creates the possibility of thinking about an individual directly confronted with “nature.” Within, or perhaps “tilted” towards one medium we can see and say something about our relation to others. Power, of course, would be another medium, with the central power a sign of the center. Money, we could say, clouds our view of the medium of power, because it represents power as something to be bought and sold and as a way of utilizing others and oneself for some immediate advantage.\n\nPower, meanwhile, interferes with the way money would “like” to “present itself”: rather than a representation of the intrinsic properties of its possessor, through the medium of power we can see money as commanding a certain “portion” of the center (and hence as reducing the center to “portions”).\n\nCapital, at the very least is something that makes it possible to produce other things. But while it may be possible to project the concept back to early ages (the native’s spear is capital, etc.) the concept really has its meaning in a social order in which the “economy” has been removed from ritual and political control and is therefore governed by the power of money. Capital is most fundamentally mobile and therefore expressed through money—the most advanced technology is useless without the power of money to command labor, knowledge, resources, supply chains and end consumers. Within capital as a medium, all human activity is homogeneous and exchangeable, while any particular activity presents itself as subject to never-ending growth.\n\nI would say that if money represents power over a piece of the center, capital represents power over the disciplines. Once capital acquired the capacity to outlast labor in any class battle, it also acquired a power independent of either state established discipline or traditional social orders—indeed, the prerogatives of all such became impediments to this new power. And once capital acquired the power to remove itself from one community and move to another, and then from one country to another, it acquired powers that didn’t quite eliminate those of states but certainly penetrated deeply into state power. As theorists like Baudrillard (and many others) pointed out, everything must prove itself before capital, everything must show its usefulness and exchangeability. The sense of one’s own body as a set of parts that might be replaced, repaired, sold, or junked, which is implicit both in much “end of life” discussions and AI fantasies, come very easily within the medium of capital.\n\nCapital is so all-embracing and all penetrating that it’s hard to imagine what it would mean to think outside of, or beyond it. For Marx, this is what the proletariat was for. The Italian Marxism pioneered by Antonio Negri, which has branched out and continues strongly in Europe, at least, also informed the anti-globalization and “Occupy” movements (look through a book list of Autonomedia or Semiotext[e]), transfers this revolutionary power to “social labor” exercised by an increasingly highly trained and intellectual working class. This collectivized, global social labor overcomes all attempts to confine itself with capital’s boundaries or those of the state—some future anarchistic order is more or less explicitly prophesied here, with “self-management” as the highest value.\n\nMore important to me here than the political prospects here is the mediumistic claim, i.e., the claim to be able to see through capital and not fall prey to its machinations. The “hermeneutics of suspicion” here trains its vision on the way everything presented as a “value” by the capitalist order is in fact a stratagem for disciplining, confining, controlling social labor. As Deleuze pointed out in his “Society of Control,” all this has also been autonomized, an argument that the algorithms of Google, Facebook and Twitter make very visible. There has been much news lately about how these companies have been manipulating these algorithms to suppress right wing perspectives; while obviously true, from the “autonomista” approach, this is beside the point and not really necessary. Once these companies overcome this momentary panic, the argument will go, they will see that letting the algorithms work on their own will provide all the social control necessary for capital.\n\nThe problem for the autonomistas is that without the arbitrary assumption of some inherently free laboring subject, it would be hard for them to say what, exactly, is wrong with the algorithmic order. Not that it’s so much easier for anyone else, once all naturalistic conceptions of freedom are set aside. A good ruler would want as much information as possible about his people; he would want such information gathered, compiled and analyzed by competent and trustworthy sources; and he would want such information to be put to use to anticipate future possibilities and pre-empt potential problems. Why wouldn’t he want this, and why wouldn’t his subjects want this, other, again, than in the name of some fetishized notion of freedom?\n\nThe algorithm is the best way of doing this right now. But rather than some temporary, subjectivizing distortion of the algorithmic medium, the jiggering of algorithms by the big tech companies demonstrates that the setting of the algorithms is never automatic or neutral. That good ruler would have to determine, or have determined, what counts as “information.” Within the algorithmic medium each individual is thinking about how one action or even thought serves as an indicator of the relative probabilities of other actions and thoughts. The main source of income for the social media corporations is advertising, and what advertisers want is knowledge of how likely someone interested in one thing is to buy another thing—a detailed profile of consumer habits is immensely valuable.\n\nSo, that’s going to be one vector of algorithmism. The question for the algorithms constructed by the social media companies, though, is a bit different—they want to keep you within their system, and the way to do that is to make the system consistent on the terms on which you enter it. Even when we’re obsessed with buying things, we don’t really see ourselves as “consumers”—rather, we see ourselves as interested in certain things—sports, and specific kinds of sports, specific discussions about sports; books and intellectual “ideas” and “topics,” and specific discussions within these spheres; family, friends, members of our social group; and so on. The social media company wants to help us find our way from something we are interested in to something we might be interested in, and out of that network can be carved various consumer profiles useful to other companies.\n\nSo, the algorithmic is the way this “stage” of capital leverages the disciplines for its own purposes. But, to use another Marxist term (it’s not my fault if no one has given capital as a whole way of life, a medium, as much thought as the Marxists), capital must grant the disciplines some “relative autonomy” in doing so. It must allow us to pursue our interests if only in order to capitalize on those interests; within the more paranoiac streams of “oppositional” thought we could imagine that capital has “always already” channeled those interests in ways guaranteed to flow back to capital in full, but how could capital know how to do that without granting its knowers some leeway in the first place.\n\nSomeone must plug the variables in the algorithm. Now, liberalism can only accelerate capital’s “logic” by trying to access some level of freedom yet unpenetrated by capital. If the medium of capital can be interfered with, it will be through the power medium, first of all by pointing to capital as a power, or a network of powers, rather than an amorphous monster. Power is more of a retardant than an accelerant. Working to see every decision you make as commanded might seem terribly constraining and oppressive, but you’re the one working to see it that way, and it is at least more truthful than seeing everything you do as a result of your unconstrained will. Capital really does attempt the ultimate decentering, but it cannot accomplish it—if it were to “succeed,” it would produce catastrophe, requiring the re-establishment of order (if still possible) from the remains.\n\nIf I say something, I mean what I say, but what I say has a meaning beyond what I myself mean. The modern subject, or subject of capital wants to control the meaning of what he says by making it correspond to what he means. We still see this all the time—as soon as something one says gets out of that person’s control there is a furious reaction, whether it be denouncing those who “distorted” what he “really” said (taking it “out of context”) or apologizing, reframing, “walking back,” etc., so that what I mean can be revised to conform to what I turned out to have meant. It’s incredibly hard to let go of one’s meaning, because that is all that protects one from complete subsumption in the machinery of capital.\n\nBut the very idea of a meaning fully intended by the speaker or writer is itself a product of money and capital—it is within their media (one is thinking in terms of copyright). Self-control, or discipline, is central, but desperate attempts to claim one’s own meaning subvert it. The distinction between what David Olson calls “speaker’s meaning,” on the one hand, and “sentence’s meaning,” on the other (drawing upon Frege’s distinction between “meaning” and “sense”), can be played out otherwise. My “own” meaning is in fact the probabilistic range of all the meanings my sentences, my discourse, might have in one “context” or medium after another, with some of the contexts and media registering meanings constructed in previous contexts and media, and so on; and, it iterates previous sentences and discourses (said by others as well as myself), with their entire “range.”\n\nWhat “I” want is not so much others to hear from me as for all of us to hear from the center. We could imagine an “average” of all the possible meanings of what one has said, but we can also imagine a centering of them: if we’re all focused on the “same” meaning, then that meaning has been detached from any of us and we’re trying to figure out what the center is saying through us; we are obeying the imperative to derive further meaning from the center. We keep showing differences between speaker meaning and sentence meaning, between the speaker meaning and the sentence meaning of the one who shows the difference, and so on.\n\nThe center speaks through these differences: the more what any “I” says generates a range of meaning different than that “I”’s, the more what that “I” says is the discourse of the center. The disciplinary space that can singularize any speaker’s meaning while treating it as product of all the ways it has been taken up is the discipline training itself to listen to the center. The discipline of the discourse of the center sustains a medium irreducible to capital, and it is within this medium that the power medium can be seen as distinguished from capital as well."
    },
    {
      "slug": "narrative",
      "title": "Narrative",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Like other formerly arcane theories that have now become part of everyday political discourse (e.g., the multiplicity of gender, the pervasiveness of implicit racism), “narratology” had a long incubation period in the academy. In this case, the “breakout” is a good thing, and the current “framing” of political rhetoric in terms of “narrative” has more promise than cruder concepts like “ideology,” “propaganda,” “manufacturing consensus,” and so on. The assertion that some event has to “fit the narrative” to be made visible recognizes both that all events are framed narratively and that narratives have “laws,” or at least constraints, governing them.\n\nThere is still some room for improvement here, as the concept of “narrative” tends to be used fairly loosely—for example, “Republicans are racists” is not a narrative. It is, though, a character description, and character descriptions imply a range of narrative options. You can then go on to shape events in such a way that, at the end of the narrative, the “moral” will be that “Republicans are racist.” But there are more and less effective ways of doing this and there are more and less effective ways of constructing counter-narratives and infiltrating the dominant narrative with the counter ones.\n\nNarratives, by definition, have beginnings, middles and ends. They have characters, or agents—usually in some hierarchy of importance (main character, supporting character, etc.). They have events: things happen. The things that happen propel the narrative forward. Narratives are generally set in motion by some problem, or conflict, and what keeps the narrative going are the attempts to solve the problem or resolve the conflict. The end of a narrative generally involves a solution or resolution; ongoing narratives sustained by the media posit, explicitly or implicitly, some resolution to which events are tending.\n\nIf you want the narrative to sustain interest you introduce counter-agents who prevent the main agent from solving the problem—the closer the main agent comes to solving the problem, without quite doing so until the end, which is to say the more evenly matched the antagonists, the more compelling the narrative. Simplistic narratives are set up in terms of a good vs. evil conflict: we root for the good guy against a powerful bad guy—to keep things interesting, the bad guy has an advantage precisely because he is bad and is willing to do things the good guy won’t. The interest in such a narrative is in the revelation of the resources of goodness—being good must, in the end, provide some advantage that makes a successful resolution possible.\n\nMeanwhile, more complex narratives make the evaluation of the antagonists subtler and ambiguous—the good guy carries out actions that make him not so unequivocally good, while we are shown things about the bad guy that qualify our condemnation. Good and evil might switch sides, or the distinction be completely blurred.\n\nThis is all simple and obvious enough but it’s simple and obvious enough because narrative is the primary way of exploring and representing mimetic desire. Whatever kinds of “communication” can be attributed to animals, what is certain is that they don’t tell each other stories. Hitchcock’s dismissive reference to the goal sought by the protagonist as the “Mac Guffin” is correct, because the object is less important than the structure of rivalry itself. I think everyone has had the experience of choosing a side, in politics or any other form of competition, for what seems like a good, justifiable, limited, reason, and then finding that the act of choosing sides and engaging in the competition itself generated goals that seem urgent but would not have even seemed important without that initial act of taking sides.\n\nA narrative “hooks” us by getting us to take sides, to see the agent’s actions and goals as our own. But, looked at this way, narratives generate delusions by inflaming and providing new pretexts for our mimetic desires and resentments. We can easily see how this is the case with political narratives, where people can find themselves convinced that the future of the republic depends on whether some tax bill passes, or an executive order is overturned.\n\nIf we don’t want to just get jerked around, then, that is, become bit players in someone else’s narrative (someone much richer, more powerful and in the know than us), we need to be able to resist the narrative structures imposed on us. Hopefully, no one who has read a few of my posts will be surprised when I reject what might seem the obvious solution: don’t think narratively; think “logically,” or “analytically” instead. There are, indeed, on some authoritative accounts, these two kinds of thinking: narrative vs. abstract. So, if I’m thinking abstractly and probabilistically, I can see that this tax bill or executive action will have specific effects, some of which I can anticipate within a certain range of predictability, others within a wider range, others not at all—on fact, it will probably have all kinds of effects I can’t even imagine.\n\nAnd they may be very small and irrelevant ones. This is all fine, but when we think abstractly we’re not really doing anything more than widening the narrative field upon which we work. The one who takes the apocalyptic view of the tax bill does so because he sees the possibility of some evil agent (“the rich” or “the bureaucracy”) being dealt a fatal blow (or sees the “little guy” or “private initiative” as the one being dealt that blow). The more abstract approach just means we get more discerning about whom we designate agents—there are lots of different rich people, and some of them might be dealt blows while others might find new opportunities to get richer as a result of the bill; indeed, if we back up and take a wider view of the protagonists in our narrative, perhaps some of those initiating the bill are quite rich.\n\nWhen we think abstractly, the one big narrative is broken down into lots of little narratives, all of them interfering with the others—in narrative terms, a main character in one narrative is a sidekick in another, the good character in one narrative is evil in another, there are narratives within narratives, and so on. (Even if we try to work with “pure data,” how do we determine what we are to gather data on, if not the figures in some narrative we are constructing?)\n\nAll of which means that the way to resist narrative, or disable the delusional investments in narrative that help make one a dispensable extra (like those guys who get vaporized in the first scene of the old Star Trek show), is not to try and get out of the narrative but to have other ways of getting into it. (Indeed, trying to get out of it immediately generates a narrative logic of its own—trying to escape the clutches of the evil dominant ideology, etc.) As I’ve been doing in recent posts, I’m, to some extent, giving a more abstract formulation to what lots of people are already doing. So, for example, the writers on the Power Line blog have a kind of running gag where they point out references in the Minnesota media to “Minnesota men” who commit some kind of crime or are arrested for some terrorist plot.\n\nInvariably, the “Minnesota man” is a Somali Muslim immigrant, who, indeed, most likely has a Minnesota address, driver’s license, etc.—but that’s not what the headline means to suggest. Similarly, the website VDARE plays a similar kind of “find the hidden immigrant” game in media references to criminal activities. What they are doing is interfering with the narrative by looking a little more carefully at how the main character is constructed. The mainstream media outlets want to control who gets to be the good guys and the bad guys by proxy. The point of having a more general formulation of these practices is, of course, to make them more readily replicable.\n\nSelf-referential narrative strategies have been more widely exploited in modernist and postmodernist literature than previously, but such strategies go way back (e.g., the 18 th century British novel Tristram Shandy ), probably back to the beginnings of narrative itself, because it exploits such an obvious feature of narrative—the fact that telling a story, and, even more, creating a story, takes on a narrative structure itself. Such metafictional strategies provide what is probably the most comprehensive way of engaging politics narratively within simply accepting the terms of another’s narrative. Again, part of what I’m doing here is bringing more abstract theory to bear on what has become a fairly common memeing strategy.\n\nTo point out that reporter X is referring to the criminal as, say, a “Texan” rather than a “Mexican” in order to manipulate the reader is to compose a meta-narrative in which the reporter is playing a part. It’s better to have your enemy in your narrative than them having you in theirs. And once they are in your narrative, all kinds of narrative and “generic” possibilities open up: you can provide a hypothetical “back story” to the “moves” you show X to be making. You can suggest possible satiric outcomes, point to various dead ends this storyline “typically” leads to, “intercut” other popular narratives and narrative clichés, and so on.\n\nYou can get more abstract and stretch out further narrative lines in the past and projected into the future—X is really a “puppet” in some larger historical narrative. And you are yourself now in the narrative, giving you a kind of pedagogical responsibility—you are showing your reader, here’s how you do this, and then you might try that, and you can invite your reader to join you in some new storylines as well. You may even start to think about ways to turn your narratives into edifying performance art, like Pax Dickinson’s spectacular trolling of reporter Amanda Robb. We could even say that the winning side, politically, is the one that keeps the other side in its narrative.\n\nWe all have, at some level of generality and provisionality, what we take to be an “end game” of our own practices—if pressed, each of us could say, more or less vaguely or hesitantly, “this is where I want things to end up.” Of course, the ending up would be the beginning of a new narrative. But the point here is that even if abstract thinking and meta-narrative interference tend to multiply the narrative lines we still have “grand narratives” we see working themselves out historically. So, what is the relation between the two narrative levels? It’s really a question of the relation between probability and reality—we can identify a series of possible paths from A to B and give each of them a probability—path 1=15%, path 2=30%, path 3=1% and so on.\n\nWe do this regularly even without attaching numerical values—there’s a slight chance that this idea will get me fired but I feel really good about the possibility that it will get me a promotion, etc. One of the paths will become the real one, of course, and sometimes it is a very “unlikely” one—maybe the guy will get canned (of course, we might have been wrong about it being unlikely—but does the fact that it happened prove that it wasn’t, in fact, unlikely?). (Point B could be the same end point—e.g., lots of different ways one side in the war will win—or a set endpoint we are trying to predict, like what will US demographics look like in 2040?)\n\nAll the micro-narratives we generate by acting meta-narratively are the “paths,” and enacting the various paths as richly as possible, while also allowing the narrative materials to crystallize into highly unlikely paths, ones you couldn’t have imagined without opening things up meta-narratively—that’s the way we surface, test and refine the “grand” or “master” narrative that we always have going, that is always guiding us, even if tacitly, in the way it points us toward designating certain agents, noticing certain actions, being alert to certain conflicts, etc.\n\nNarrative does have its limit, even if that limit isn’t abstract thinking. That limit is the present. Everything that has happened in the past is past because it has led up to now, where its meaning is revealed to us in a certain way; everything that is going to happen in the future will happen in now’s future, and every future we project narratively is a construct of the narrator’s relation to everyone else now. We see, or imagine we see, things finishing up, things gaining momentum, things slowing down, things starting to emerge, right now. We can see this vast, sprawling tableau of the present insofar as we carry out acts of deferral, stepping outside of whatever narrative commands us to take a role right now.\n\nThe beginning of one narrative is the middle of another and the end of yet another—in situating ourselves at that point we exempt ourselves, presently at least, from all of them. It’s like removing yourself from the force of a vortex by placing yourself at its center. Such presenting eventually gives way to resistance to the most malignant narrative one is able to resist, the one with the too-convenient bad guy, the too-predictable plot, the too-heroic good guy, the too-satisfying payoff, etc. Then you can work on constructing narratives that include the narrative of you placing your finger on the scales, which can itself be converted into you constructing and enacting the narrative of the center, which is the narrative of the ongoing exposure of all resentments that interfere with the order issuing from the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "constrained-economies",
      "title": "Constrained Economies",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It might be best to think of markets as networks. The word “market” tends to evoke a society of randomly distributed individuals, each with some property, but with none of them related to any other property owner more than the others. If I buy bread from one baker for $2 a loaf today, I’m quite ready to switch over to another baker for an equally good loaf for $1.95 a loaf tomorrow. The baker himself is quite irrelevant to the equation. But if I’ve been buying from the same baker for 10 years, and I like his bread, maybe like his store, like him, the 5 cents, or even more, won’t make a difference. Especially if the baker is on my way to the butcher, and then the laundry, etc.\n\nOf course, I’m presenting an antiquated model here, but which supermarket we go to is similarly determined. Quite bit less, though, at least in some respects—no one thinks the supermarket you go to will miss you, personally, if you start going to its competitor. But that just means the form of our loyalty changes—it’s the specialty items plus the sales plus the fresh rolls in the morning and maybe that you’re more likely to see your friend there. You are “always already” tied into a certain set of connections, you have a built in “bias,” and if you want to make a change it involves wrenching yourself away from all that. You are never all alone faced with a vast range of equally plausible alternatives, which you then proceed to whittle down based on a checklist of pros and cons.\n\nThe same thing is true if you want to start a new supermarket, or a new anything. You know how to do something, you’ve been around people who do the same kind of thing, they know about people with money who like people who do that kind of thing, and they know about the kinds of people who buy the kind of product you’re planning to make. You can figure out what kind of person you need to present yourself as so as to be trusted with the money and support of the people in the networks you’re proximate to, you can shape your product and your persona to their inclinations. Again, it’s never you, with an “idea,” “shopping” that idea around to an endless list of people with enough money to invest what you need in your “idea,” and then trying to arrange meetings where you “pitch” it to them.\n\nYou’re always embedded in a set of relationships with different foci and different degrees of strength, different levels of trust. And, no doubt, various “extrinsic” affiliations, like ethnic, religious, geographic, college ties, and so on help to consolidate these networks. This is all so obvious that I’m sure it’s already well known, but it’s important to point out that there are really a set of gradations from gift and kin networks to the more abstracted relationships normally represented as market ones and, even more, that the introduction of more marketized relationships into more networky ones are just strategies by some up and coming network aiming to usurp power from a more established one.\n\nEven when an institution or organization deliberately goes out of its way to break up established networks by, for example, pursuing “diversity hires,” that just means that either the institution has embarked on a path of self-destruction or the network will take on some new form, drawing upon other, emergent networks—perhaps this helps to account for the politicization of so many corporations.\n\nIf markets are ultimately networks, and relations between networks, then the whole notion of governments interfering with or intervening in markets must be reconsidered. First of all, that markets are networks would help explain why so much government regulation is ineffective and harmful—the government looks at one part of a dense network, in accord with a narrow purpose, or at the behest of a specific constituency, and tries to affect or control that, without understanding how all the “tissues” of the network fit together. But it also makes government involvement in markets less intrinsically fearful. A de-politicized government, one which didn’t need to be elected, and which therefore doesn’t need to buy off members of one network while being bought off by members of another, which doesn’t need to take sides within the various networks, could simply be part of the networks.\n\nSome working members of all the networks would simply be government agents—this would be known to all, and some of the actual agents would be known to be such, while others wouldn’t. And, of course, the government itself needs to buy lots of things, and would therefore be present in many networks. The government’s one demand must be that no network resort to settling disputes by violence that falls below the threshold set for a recognizable justice system. That threshold itself is assessed with the specific networks in mind—even vigilante justice is not necessarily excluded, as long as it doesn’t pass the threshold beyond which there will be nothing but vigilante justice.\n\nThe government introduces its own bias into the network of networks (I mean “bias” here more in the sense of a “tilt” that leads objects to roll in a particular direction than in the sense of deliberately favoring some over others). As an economic agent itself, it has more need of some things than others (the most advanced weaponry, for example), and as the agent responsible for maintaining a coherent social order, must promote some things over others (the population must be fed, energy independence, to the extent possible, is a good thing, etc.). The networks will be constrained accordingly. In this, any ruler will take other, presumably successful, rulers as a model, while also considering that any decision modifies the results of previous decisions made by the ruler himself and his predecessors.\n\nThese considerations, and the reference to models, provides ways of thinking things through and arguing for one decision over another. In constraining the networks, meanwhile, the government makes itself un-networky, which is to say hierarchical and imperative: the government must value continuity, consistency and chain of command over all else. Hierarchical imperatives will therefore reach into the networks as well, in the form of establishing guarantors that constraints will be adhered to, and in the form of some kind of conscription, according to which hierarchs in the networks do government work, at government pay, in some kind of rotation.\n\nThe networks are all oriented, “tropistically,” toward the center. Money is the means by which agents compete within the networks so as to prove their usefulness to the network and to the center. Money itself consolidates networks while allowing for new entrants—I think Mises was right to say that when the government puts money into circulation, those who receive it first are advantaged over those who receive it later, and who are we to imagine receives it first if not the most networked? Still, someone receives it last, and having money enables one to access a network, on the margins, without actually being known by the participants in that network.\n\nThose with some money on the margins, the “end consumers,” make it possible to determine, once all the biases have had their play, which economic agents should be recognized and elevated within the networks. (This may be a much more orderly version of how much of this works now.) But the social nature of capital would need to be more explicitly recognized. The most common complaints about capital and capitalism today provide us with a frame for speculating on ways of doing this. First, capital eviscerates communities and even countries by exploiting its mobility so as to first, undermine living standards at home and eventually leave those affected devastated by exiting the country in search of cheap labor, lower taxes, less regulation, etc.\n\nSecond, capital homogenizes by replacing local cultures and norms with standardized national and ultimately global ones; while what is lost in the first case is extremely palpable, the losses in this second case are more intangible, and more balanced against the gains (the only gain even adduced in the first case is cheaper goods, which is really only a gain for those who haven’t lost anything in the first place, i.e., the “salaried” employees who are not dependent on an industrial base).\n\nI would keep in mind that the first process, in particular, was set in motion by the conditions created in the late 60s and into the 70s by the welfare state and widespread unionization, which created costs for capital beyond any gains in efficiency. (The second process is more endemic, even constitutive.) Still, the process continued and even accelerated and became more systematic once the unions were broken and taxes dramatically lowered. The reason is simple—politicians on both ideological wings became completely dependent on the support of transnational corporations, even while this dependency was inflected along different ideological lines—neither party, in the US at least, even refers to working conditions or workers at all, other than the completely anomalous Trump. If you listen closely, it’s easy to get the sense both parties hate wage workers. The solution is not to bring back unions, especially if a de-politicized order is based upon disallowing organizations predicated on perpetual conflict. But the government can certainly constrain these known propensities of capital.\n\nIn the second case, constraints can be imposed so as to limit standardization, or produce diversities within standardization. Local boards could propose the constraints to be imposed, and if they do so credibly and in good faith, keeping in mind that the final decision will not be theirs, their recommendations might be taken very seriously, maybe even routinely incorporated—this in itself would have a “heterogenizing” effect. In the first case, perhaps a certain amount of the capital held and gained by companies can be held in trust by the government, to be returned to that company based on that company’s adherence to a series of graduated constraints involving working conditions, wages, community investment, stability, commitment to stay put, and so on.\n\nCompanies that wish to surrender some of their capital in the pursuit of cheaper labor and greater profits aboard might be free to, since that would also provide what might be needed economic information and the repatriation of profits. And agreements with the countries capital might decamp to could also help contain such movements. In the course of all these decisions being incorporated into rule, a well governed order would make the central source of economic value the consistency and coherence of government decision making itself. A company that eschews short term profit in cheaper labor abroad would do so in the knowledge that its government will constrain the market at home so that, while it might be good to have newcomers nipping at the heels of established companies, large scale waves of investment and “dumping” will not be permitted to overwhelm normally functioning companies.\n\nThis approach is clearly a “decelerationist” one, from which it further follows that innovation will be encouraged but so would efforts to mitigate the effects of innovation on companies, workers and consumers alike. Again, it seems to me that constraints, rather than more targeted interventionist approaches, will be most effective here. Perhaps constraints would determine the ways innovations need to be embedded in existing networks, structures, institutions, and disciplines. Ultimately, it would be simply taken for granted that of course we take a holistic approach to economic and technological developments, once the sociopathic reduction of all corporate decisions to the imperative to maximize shareholder value is a distant memory."
    },
    {
      "slug": "moral-ethical-governance",
      "title": "Moral, Ethical Governance",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "No theory of government could be more insistent than liberalism that government must be morally neutral, and not choose between different versions of the “good life.” And no form of government is more perpetually frenzied by moral panics than liberalism. The contradiction in the liberal stance is obvious at first sight, has been often pointed out, and need not detain us too long. If your theory of government is that the government is to remain neutral between different versions of the good life, then the full fury of that government must be brought to bear on whomever would put forth their practice of the good life as superior to others.\n\nNow, in a certain sense, everyone does this, making liberalism especially incoherent on this point—even your live and let live guy is presenting living and letting live as a superior version of the good life to be protected by the state over others, with its own privileged attitudes, legal regime, and so on. But the real force of the liberal argument is against a state religion, since that provides for the most systematic imposition of a notion of the good life, so the state religion of liberalism is the transgression of all religions that would purport, even gently, even tacitly, to represent the good life, while the state theology of liberalism is to find a state religion lurking in the doctrine and even daily habits of your political enemies.\n\nBut liberalism’s frenzied anti-moral moralism has made the consideration of some very simple and basic questions almost impossible. Could anyone deny that the ruler or the state could act in ways that tend to make its subjects better people? At the very least we should be able to get some agreement that it could make its subjects worse people—by compelling them to engage in vicious acts, for example. And if it can make them worse it can make them better. Shouldn’t it be doing that, then? At this point in the conversation, the liberal, at any point on the spectrum, from libertarian or American conservative to Antifa communist, is hurling nasty epithets at you.\n\nYou are getting called totalitarian, authoritarian, socialist, communist; you are being told that “this” didn’t work in a long list of places, you are being asked “who are you to say…,” etc. In other words, you are being dragged into a LARPing of WWII and the Cold War. Not a single liberal has ever genuinely scrubbed the idea of the state as the “night watchman” out of his head, or failed to add all of the state enemies of the past century to the list of examples of violations of this norm.\n\nIn some recent posts I have laid the groundwork for addressing this issue. From my discussion of morality in “Fraud and Force,” we could say that responsible parties should establish institutions that extract from a situation in which some violent centering is possible the facts of the situation and the mode and degree of responsibility of all involved, freed from the logic of the vendetta. This institutions can be local, private, even “vigilante” ones—the point is not proceduralism, but disciplinary spaces where authoritative individuals are entrusted with search for the truth, the best remedy, and the preservation of the peace and cohesion of the community—since these different aims can be at odds in some cases, those entrusted to arrive at coherent decisions are given a great deal of leeway—if they are to be judged, it is to be after the fact, and with an eye toward improving the system.\n\nThose entrusted, to be more precise, must be those willing to draw some of the violent centering toward themselves, if necessary. Furthermore, we can say that the government has an interest in every individual having opportunities to reduce the “meaning gap” I identified between “speaker’s meaning” and “sentence’s meaning,” between the way one sees oneself and all the ways one is seen by others. Does this mean the government must guarantee to everyone a meaningful life?, interjects the fuming liberal. First of all, it means the government wishes to see the entirety of the social order bound up in disciplinary spaces, or what Alasdair Mac Intyre calls “practices,” in which forms of human excellence are made possible, even created, by constrained, systematic and cooperative activities.\n\nFinally, what binds these moral and ethical imperatives together is the existence, discussed in “Way, Way, After Sacral Kingship,” of a similar gap in the issuance of any imperative—a gap between the imperative issued and the imperative obeyed and enacted, always under conditions not completely accounted for by the “imperator.”\n\nMoral, ethical governance involves protecting existing practices and disciplines, helping them to become more practice-like and disciplinary, and providing the conditions for other activities to become practices and disciplines. The simplest way of doing this is by establishing constraints to be adhered to by any organization or institution incorporated by the government, which is to say any organization or institution. These constraints would range from institution specific to society-wide; from purposeful and efficiency-oriented to aesthetic and even arbitrary. All buildings, or all buildings of a certain kind, might be required to include a particular design; how they have to include it might be loosely or tightly prescribed (some may have it prominently exposed, others may hide it in some corner).\n\nOf course, similar to the safety regulations in modern societies, all buildings might be required to be prepared for fires or other emergencies, but it’s important that “regulation” not be solely functional. There need to be some constraints that are devised through collaboration with representatives of the institution itself, but others must solicit the contributions of surrounding and interconnected institutions, while yet others must be the government imposing the stamp of the social order itself on all institutions. There has to be a game-like or play-like structure to these meta-constraints, because otherwise the government is reduced to liberal utilitarianism, leaving itself to be assailed constantly for providing less than maximum happiness for the greater number, rather than interwoven into the entire social fabric as the guiding thread.\n\nRather than public discourse getting obsessed with rights, needs, inequalities, inequities, etc., it would always be framed by discussions of the state of constraint. More important than whether injustices are allowed in or committed by a particular institution is addressing the anomalous nature of rule. Any system must have it anomalies, because any system must have some element within it that is simultaneously outside of it and therefore can’t be completely assimilated to the terms of the system itself. More precisely, the founding, or chartering, element of the system is anomalous insofar as it judges everything else within the system but can itself be judged, indeed, is judged, at least tacitly, by every action taken within that system.\n\nThis is the permanent anomaly of any system—the incommensurability of responsibility and power that can be minimized (the discipline and practice of government is concerned with nothing more than minimizing it) but can never be abolished. You can’t know whether someone can do something until he tries to do it, and once he gets started it will become something at least a bit different than he set out to do. The purpose of constraints is to “thematize” the anomalous inside/outside position of the one in charge, so that any judgment assumes he is intrinsically part of the game, and not an imposition on some spontaneous order.\n\nThis anomaly pervades all systems, right up to the top, and it must be faced, because any attempt to abolish this anomaly will merely be an attempt to conceal it under some procedural “plug.” So, there must be an inviolability granted to those in charge—to put it simply, someone charged with doing or running some collaborative effort must be given every benefit of the doubt by everyone he must ask to help him do it. This may mean making the wildest excuses for the most evident failures, anticipating failures based on the ruler’s previous performances and trying to prevent and minimize them in advance without attempting to take any credit that would reflect discredit on the ruler.\n\nAny possible judgment is displaced onto the implementation of imperatives in such a way as to reconcile whe never necessary their authoritative source with their benefit to the institution. The supreme ruler, we may assume, has agents in every institution providing him with accurate information regarding the performance of his subordinates; moral and ethical participation in an institution means being simultaneously ready to become such an agent upon request and never acting like one unless requested. To arrogate to oneself such a position is to point fingers outside of any established framework, i.e., it is to violently centralize others; it is also to try and control the meanings one gives off, rather than allowing one’s practice to speak for itself, to ramify among the responses of others. In other words, it is immoral and unethical upon the terms laid out in “Fraud and Force.”\n\nInstalling this inviolability confronts what may be the most pernicious and tenacious element of modernity. Rene Girard, in his account of mimetic desire, distinguishes between “external” and “internal” mediation. In external mediation, the model one (along with others) imitates is outside of the system, and therefore beyond reach of any rivalrous claims. Obvious examples here would be gods and kings, but it would include any model separated by a formalized distinction from his imitators, such as a member of a higher class or caste—one peasant cannot compete with another to become a noble. With internal mediation, our models are not fundamentally different from ourselves, which means there are no limits to competition, and no established models that could put an end to it.\n\nGirard argues that with modernity, external mediation has been completely replaced by internal. My argument here implies the need, in the face of deeply entrenched commitments to internal mediation, to restore external mediation. The responsibility of the ruler, sane, moral and ethical government, requires placing certain people, in certain positions, beyond criticism. (In an interesting discussion, in the wake of the Michael Jackson trial which, following the O.J. Simpson trial, raised the question of whether it was possible to convict a celebrity of a crime, Eric Gans contended that the modern celebrity system serves a purpose similar to external mediation—but in democratic, liberal market terms, that can only have whatever effectiveness it does precisely because celebrities aren’t really responsible for anything.)\n\nWhat this renewed external mediation might look like must remain an open question. It’s hard to imagine saying that this individual, who is now being appointed school principal, cannot be criticized—even though, yesterday, when he was a teacher, he could be mocked ruthlessly, and once he steps down he can be endlessly attacked for his decisions as principal. (In highly functional organizations and enterprises, things do work this way, so it may be possible to have a social order as whole do so as well, eventually—but even then we could never assume this to be the case once and for all.) In other words, some kind of aura would presumably have to surround the individual preceding and following his tenure in a particular position.\n\nIn other words, the recreation of external mediation seems to imply the establishment of something like permanent class or status distinctions. The model of rule I am proposing is to a great extent a “team” model—someone who wants to get something done appoints someone he knows is best able to do it, and that person in turn assembles a team of the best he can find—who will be absolutely loyal to him because they also want the job done and they know he is the best person to lead them; while he, in turn, knows that since they are “on board,” he barely has to issue them orders, much less boss them around. All organizations and institutions approximate this model as best they can.\n\nNow, families are also teams, as are neighborhoods and towns, and these kinds of teams, if they attain leadership positions, will make it part of the game to continue to deserve it. We have never, in fact, had any kind of society in which family names didn’t mean something, and that’s in large part because in any society families can and do invest a great deal of energy into ensuring they do. A genuine aristocracy would probably have to be landed, but an absolutist order would have to at least be at ease with informal aristocracies, which get formalized in various provisional ways (the ruler might give a particular family firm an established position in some industry, or establish a university under the aegis of an especially accomplished academic family).\n\nMembers of such families would then have a kind of penumbra of inviolability, a benefit of the doubt, before entering the specific positions where they will really need it. Needless to say, preserving the positions of such families once they have entered decline would allow the institution in question to be pervaded by practices and disciplines incompatible with its own. In the end, we can never outrun the anomaly, or the paradox of power, but it can be made generative: the study of the temporality of imperatives (at what point have they actually been obeyed or disobeyed?) feed back to those issuing imperatives, helping them to defer, hopefully indefinitely, the becoming crisis of the anomaly."
    },
    {
      "slug": "moral-modeling-and-ideology",
      "title": "Moral Modeling and Ideology",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The concept of “moral equality” is very similar to the concept of “social justice” insofar as both manage to be tautological and oxymoronic at the same time. “Justice” is intrinsically “social,” so the “social” doesn’t add anything except to suggest that “justice” is attained by changing society as a whole on the model of making an injured individual whole in the courtroom. But in doing so it ensures that a great deal of injustice will be committed, because in “society” there is no governing frame for determining who has been injured. Likewise, insofar as “morality” already implies that we have obligations to each other, we are, as moral beings, already “equal,” which is to say, the same, with respect to having obligations to others. The only thing the “equal” adds is to suggest that morality involves making people more equal in other respects, which is of course the source of a great deal of immorality, in the simple sense of doing bad things like stealing and expropriating the property of others.\n\nThe “moral model” of the originary scene is a central concept to Eric Gans’s Generative Anthropology. For Gans, the equality on the originary scene, where all share in issuing the sign and consuming the central object, is the form taken by all morality, in any human society anywhere in history. I would agree with the centrality of the concept, but would suggest a different way of thinking about it. For Gans, the concept leads to a distributionist morality: in any social order, some members will contribute more to the wealth and well-being of the community, and the community will correspondingly reward those members; in short, there will be inequalities in wealth, power and status.\n\nThe moral model comes into play when those with less resent those with more, and demand some kind of compensation: the “accumulators” need to prove that their productions are for the good of all by conceding something to such resentments. Even if I were to concede that this kind of resentment (and the response by the wealthy and powerful) emerges in all societies, I would still have to say it has nothing to do with morality, in any meaningful sense of the word which, it seems to me must include its commonsensical meaning of doing the right thing or at least not doing the wrong thing. Who, in this model, is doing the right thing?\n\nThe “disadvantaged,” in making manifest their resentment? Even if they have a point, even if they are 100% right, they’re not being particularly moral in advancing their own self-interest. Even if they’re not immoral, they certainly aren’t presenting a model of moral behavior. Is it the “advantaged,” then, who behave morally when they concede wealth, power or participation to the resentful? If they were doing it out of love and a desire to help, the expression of resentment wouldn’t have been necessary; insofar as it is that expression that has prompted them to act, they are also behaving out of self-interest (a desire to avoid crime, riots, revolts, etc.), and therefore not modeling especially moral behavior. Is “society” as a whole more moral? It’s hard to know what it would mean to call a society, but not its members, “moral”; and, at any rate, it just seems as if they’ve institutionalized an extortion racket.\n\nIt seems to me that Gans’s use of the moral model focuses exclusively on the periphery, completely neglecting the center—it horizontalizes, and loses sight of the vertical. And you can never develop a coherent moral thinking focusing on the periphery, or the horizontal. On the originary scene, all are equal in relation to the center, equal, or the same in having that relation to the center. As soon as the center is established, so is a kind of “perimeter,” which no one may transgress. Rules emerge regarding the treatment of and approach to the center. They are first of all ritual rules, but moral insofar as they embody the coherence of the community, and everyone’s obligations to each other and the whole.\n\nAs discourses of the center emerge, and models of action are attributed to figures on the central scene (mythology), new moral possibilities emerge: one can act like the one who rallied the community to repulse an attack by a neighboring tribe, or the one who put out the fire that almost ravaged the entire village, or the one who was always resolving disputes among members of the community. Morality takes the form of enacting these models, which are generalized in the forms of maxims and proverbs. Maxims and proverbs concerned with doing the right thing and not doing the wrong thing , and turning yourself into the kind of person who does right and avoids wrong consistently.\n\nAfter the long history of kingship, and the penetration of Christian morality into Western society, Gans sees the liberal democratic order as recovering and restoring the originary moral model by establishing equality (and more, and more equality) amongst its citizens. I would first make the point I made previously—none of this implies that anyone is behaving well, or is doing the right things while refraining from doing the wrong things. In other words, liberal democracy has nothing to do with morality. The institutional mechanism by which the resentment of the have-nots towards the haves is manifested in liberal democracy is, for Gans, the alternation in power between the contending political parties (even in multi-party parliamentary systems, there tends to be two dominant parties).\n\nGans has lately spoken of this in terms of a dialectic of “firstness” and “reciprocity.” To put it crudely, some people invent and create things, and reap the benefits; and then everyone else demands a slice of the pie. One party defends the former, one the latter. What I said above about the irrelevance of morality to this kind of arrangement holds here as well. Neither the inventors and creators nor everyone else need to be good and decent people for any of this work. One could speak of a kind of center, and therefore a kind of morality, insofar as the institutions are founded on laws which generate precedents, which in turn provide a model for living good lives.\n\nI can’t think of Gans ever discussing, say, the constitutional order in these terms, which would anyway undermine his model: if public morality involves, say, protecting the constitutional order, the main political conflict would be between those defending that order and those subverting it in various ways. But that would be a conflict between good and bad, and therefore not really a political conflict it all—if the established public morality called for selected representatives according to constitutionally prescribed procedures, and those representatives then serving in their offices in constitutionally prescribed ways, how could there be an “oppositional” party?\n\nWhat would it be for—overthrowing what everyone agrees to be good? Even if we could say that there are different ways of interpreted the constitutional morality, if all parties are in good faith trying to do that, they would be continually striving to narrow the differences between them—which is exactly the opposite of what multiparty democracy promotes.\n\nGans has come to speak of his model as accounting for conflicts that get institutionalized in terms of firstness vs. reciprocity. All conflicts in Western democracies get formulated as some version of the underdog vs. the overlord: the underdog naturally elicits everyone’s sympathy, while enough grudgingly and tacitly admit that the overlords actually keep everything running to prevent their complete extinction—in most cases, at least. But we may be in a hall of mirrors here: Gans is assuming, reflecting upon, and providing a kind of blessing for an order that, of course, pre-exists his model. If one has lived all one’s life in the US, it seems completely natural that blacks, as a whole, would resent whites, as a whole (with each and every black resenting each and every white?\n\nTo exactly the same extent?), because some whites did bad things to some blacks over a long period of time. However, if we subject all these naturalized assumptions to scrutiny, we can see it’s not very natural at all. What model accounts for a young black man in, say, Chicago, feeling resentment for some elderly white woman in, say Miami, because another white man enslaved some other blacks 200 years ago? Even if we factor in 10,00 events (and why do some get factored in and lots of others don’t?) it doesn’t add up to the tidy model of whites as overlords and blacks as underdogs. If we really want something close to an experiential, commonsensical model of resentment—someone else usurps the center I thought I deserve, or thought no one should occupy (that guy down the block is ruining my property values with his unkempt lawn, my coworker is stealing at work while I follow all the rules, etc.)—then this certainly doesn’t provide it.\n\nSuch resentment, i.e., political resentment, needs to be ginned up, and a lot of effort and resources need to be expended in doing so, and in naturalizing it. I’ll leave the “high-low v. the middle” model out of this discussion, but suffice it to say that the have-nots themselves are not the ones investing the effort and resources into giving these conflicts their convenient moral narrative structure.\n\nThis is even more true for all the other equalizing movements modeled on the civil rights one—women, gays, immigrants, even the environment. A kind of shell game is being played here, and the moral model is in fact critical to exposing and explaining it. Gans has argued recently that victimary thinking or “political correctness” is predicated on the model of a conversation—just as, at a dinner party with a small group of friends, you would go out of your way to avoid offending someone whatever your actual opinion of him, in our social mediated order we react strongly against anything that would offend some of the “guests” at the universal public “table.”\n\n(Leaving aside that some may prefer rougher, blunter table talk than others.) I would extend the analogy: the imaginary of modern egalitarianism presupposes that the entire world is a single scene. If that’s the case, then the model of the originary scene would apply. But this is ideology, not morality. Whatever we would take to be the center of this scene is really an anti-center, systematically seeking to terminate all competing centers in the name of victims selected so as to pummel a particular institution or tradition (the target institution or tradition would in fact give us the explanation of the framing of victimhood). Could some kind of global articulation be attempted in a different way? Only if the question is not how to make us all equal and over-abundant in rights, but how to build institutions that can allocate power effectively at very different levels.\n\nThe application of this egalitarian version of the moral model to liberal democracy is ideology because it is an attempt to ignore the legacy of the big man—the one who seized the center and became the locus of worship and distribution. The Big Man has never gone away, and is not looking ready to any time soon. In fact, the Jewish and Christian moral innovations would make no sense without presupposing the existence of imperial monarchies. The fact that big men are now selected by tightly controlled processes called “elections,” and blocked and harassed by a series of mostly ineffectual but distorting institutions muddies up that reality, but doesn’t change it.\n\nIf you don’t want to look at the center, it’s because you don’t want to see the heir of the Big Man sitting up there—the egalitarian version of the moral model allows for the fantasy that the occupant of the center is just a spontaneous synthesis of our individual desires, and therefore not really a ruler. But if there is going to be a ruler, how do we clear the way for him to act morally, ethically and effectively? Regarding governance, this is really the only meaningful question. Ask a supporter of liberal democracy whether the system he endorses is the best way to get the best rulers in place, and ensure they act in the most reasonable way. He will look at you like you are crazy, because he has never asked himself the question—and then will call you immoral for asking it.\n\nMorality doesn’t counter (“check and balance”) the occupant of the center; rather, it refrains from seeking to tear apart that occupant, whether physically or symbolically. Once the center is occupied anyone can imagine himself at the center, and anyone can be violently centralized by a convergent mob of others. To be moral is to resist such processes, whether they target the occupant of the social center or a potential scapegoat on the margins. The institutional component to morality is the construction of practices that removes from our attention to the center everything sacrificial—that is, everything that is aimed at settling some issue among us, the potential convergents, rather than allowing delegated, responsible agents to follow clearly inscribed imperatives for how to intervene under given conditions.\n\nMeanwhile, a refusal to violently centralize allows for the emergence of love and kindness—if I’m not looking for signs of provocative, deserving victimage in the other (what is he after? Why is he in my way?) then I can see signs of virtue, a kind of at least potential discipline, and an instigated victimage one wants to protect. Of course, people sometimes need to be criticized, condemned, punished, removed from their positions or even just disliked, and it better to do such things firmly than hesitantly. But, as much as possible, such actions are done in the name of a center, that is, of the system of practices that sanctifies the highest level of deferral so far attained.\n\nMorality can’t be uploaded to the political order—people in positions of responsibility can act morally or immorally in those positions, but voting or contributing to one or another, much less protesting, petitioning, etc., can’t make anyone more moral. That’s all just grabbing for bits of power. The moral model always involves soliciting others in the preservation of the center, which means the near center, one that enables the practices which include soliciting others to join in its preservation. That, an actual scene, is where we can look for the instantiation of the originary moral model."
    },
    {
      "slug": "signing-up",
      "title": "Signing Up",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The human is that being for whom repetition is problematic. A sign has meaning insofar as it can be repeated, which is to say, repeated as the same sign. We can go further and say that the meaning of a sign is precisely the various ways and occasions upon which it can be repeated. One’s understanding of a sign is demonstrated by the ways one is able to repeat it and have it accepted as that sign. But since a sign refers to a shared center, others, whose cooperation, or even attention, cannot be ensured, meaning can never be guaranteed in advance, just like you can never be sure whether a joke will fall flat. It is conflicting desires and resulting resentment that makes signs possible, necessary, and problematic. All culture is created so as defer violence and protect the center that enables us to do so, but in that case it might be more minimal to say that all culture is concerned with making repetition as certain as it needs to be—to ensure that this sign remains this sign for as long as and for whom it is necessary.\n\nThe originary hypothesis assumes an event at the end of which one thing is significant (the gesture of aborted appropriation) and one thing is sacred (the central object)—meaning is completely concentrated in that gesture—the rest of the world is (now) “meaningless.” If meaning is articulated by the ostensive gesture, though, it must articulate the entire bodily posture of the individuals involved. Pointing toward the central object while standing still, and bending slightly backwards, would help endow the sign with meaning in a way that pointing toward the object while leaning, or creeping, forward would not. There would be a tendency to saturate the human bodies with meaning as the originary event is repeated, both in ritual and in its extension to other practices.\n\nCertain situations would call for certain kinds of accentuation, and certain kinds of downplaying, of rendering “null,” certain components of the sign. We learn to calibrate the accentuation and nullification—any English speaker can make out, for the most part, the same sentence as spoken by an American Southerner, a New Yorker, a Midwesterner, a Brit, an Australian, etc., which is to say we can control for accent when we’re interested in a specific kind of meaning (semantic); at the same time, the accent can at times become an important part of the meaning.\n\nI would assume that the ability to exercise such control is a consequence of millennia of learning and the development of media that singled out specific features of meaning, the most important of which media I would consider to be writing. The earliest sign users must have moved quickly from that one, single, meaning, to a world bursting with meaning. The slightest move by another member of the group would take on the form of some kind of menace, suggestion or invitation, which must be directly responded to, because there could be no question as to the meaning of the movement, and that meaning must be “verified” or extended, which is to say, repeated, by a complementary sign/movement.\n\nThe surrounding world would also be replete with meaning—every animal, plant, change in the weather, etc., would be saying something. And those signs would be repeated as well. A “system” would develop, but it would look nothing like Saussure’s “system of differences,” or grammatical or logical systems; rather, it would be a system of what Marcel Jousse called “gestes,” in which sound/gesture/posture articulations, each with its own balance and rhythm and communal meaning, would complement other such articulations, in a never ending process of generating social coherence. Coherence would result, which is to say repetition relatively ensured, by making this gestural-oral system finite and exhaustive, such that every sign can be seen as indirectly referring to all the others. It is the textual reduction of meaning that creates the infinite system. (Is there, then, a tendency in the “secondary orality” of electronic communication, to return us to exhaustive finitude?)\n\nIn a finite, exhaustive, or ergodic system, all signs must ultimately be coming from the same place: the center. All individuals are mouthpieces, or enactments, of the center—this doesn’t imply a lack of individualization on the part of early, gestural-oral communities; in fact, there are many reports that the more primitive communities contain a greater richness of individual differences than our more civilized ones, and I think this is credible because trying to speak for the center might easily generate far more diversity than striving to distinguish oneself from it, which actually gets monotonous pretty quickly.\n\nIt is also the center that would enable a hierarchy of significance, making it possible to distinguish between higher and lower stakes events—every gesture by any other member of the group that suggests in the slightest one’s lesser value within the group doesn’t necessarily have to be answered with maximum and immediate force. But you know that because the center, in the form, say, of a ritually consecrated ancestor, who is at the same time you, tells you so. This is to say that most insistently and carefully repeated signs create a tissue and texture that helps ensure consistent repetition all around—unvarying repletion of meaning would be extremely wasteful.\n\nThe most consistently and completely meaningful system, then, would have been sacral kingship—there, all meaning flows from the center and is directed back to the center, with that center claiming its centrality by way of its descent from the origin of the group, which is to say humanity, itself. After sacral kingship, we no longer speak from within the center. I hope it’s needless to say that no nostalgia for sacral kingship is implicit here: the point of remembering it is to explain why the reductions of meaning that followed sacral kingship tended to assume the surest way of maintaining stable repetition was by distinguishing the individual from the center.\n\nJust as the distribution of money to buy victims for the sacrifice replaced the collective presence of the group on the scene, the distributibility of the center leads one to focus on the rules for distributing the pieces. This involves a diminishment of meaning, or “disenchantment.” It’s logical to assume that the trajectory to be followed here is to keep “clarifying” meaning, and distributing it in discrete, measurable chunks. There will always be significant power centers that find this trajectory convenient, and those power centers will have large constituencies, precisely because it produces conveniences more broadly.\n\nThe counter to this process is a re-embedding of meaning irreducible to its calculated distribution. Clearly, a return to pagan ritual and sacral kingship is not an option here. In this case one must accept the cliché that in order to get out one must go through. The new mode of thinking initiated by the originary hypothesis provides us with a conceptual vocabulary for describing, with great detail and accuracy, every single desire and resentment, and to do so in terms that would not be chosen by the bearers of those desires and resentments but that would be simultaneously very difficult for them to deny. This kind of “parrhesia” provides for a convergence of GA with much of the alt-right and neo-reaction, both of which similarly wish to map out, openly and honestly, the “mechanics” and rules of interaction between individuals and groups.\n\nIt is only such a peeling back of illusions and ideologies that can make a “formalist” political project, in which actual power relations are formalized, possible. (Without a disciplinary space trained on all the various articulations of power, how could the actual relations be formalized?) Pursuing such an inquiry is the highest vocation of the human sciences.\n\nThe question, then, is how does this contribute to the re-embedding, the re-repletion of meaning? First of all, I will note that an indication of how depleted meaning is for us is that the most meaningful thing one can do today is mock, ruthlessly, the circulation of the clichés and commonplaces that have hidden large chunks of reality for decades. What is eminently mockable is diminishing in meaning (the mocking accelerates this process) which means that a process of diminishing returns is in play here. It’s very interesting to consider that, for example, as Jean Baudrillard proclaimed long ago (and Slavoj Zizek, among other postmodern thinkers, have a good sense of this as well), we can all cease to believe in any of the propositions of the “dominant ideology”—we can all come to realize that liberalism, equality, democracy, rule of law, etc., are all jokes—and that the system can go on, because of as much as in spite of this. But Baudrillard, Zizek and the others don’t know that meaning is deferral.\n\nTo describe desire and resentment in “long form” is to make explicit much of what is usually left tacit; it is to put what usually remains on the ostensive and imperative levels into declarative sentences. X resents Y at work for getting the better office. It would take quite a few sentences to unpack this resentment into a series of explicitly stated relations of difference, power, signs of status, the limits of possible responses to this “injustice,” the concept of ‘injustice” itself, the reasons for the limitations on possible responses, and so on. Think about explaining things like desire and resentment to intelligent, non-human beings.\n\nThis has always been the goal of metaphysics, and more narrowly, the human sciences, even if mathematics replaces some of the propositions that would be required. But metaphysics and the human sciences have done so to reduce to a minimum the hold ostensives and imperatives have on us—the liberal millennium, which not coincidentally looks a lot like the singularity, would be the complete replacement of the ostensive and imperative realm by the declarative. That would inaugurate the “Age of Reason,” but we would find all those declarative themselves devoid of meaning, since they would never actually be referring to anything; or rather, they would have pure power meanings, as they would be built to subjugate anyone insufficiently proficient in their articulation.\n\nBut if we are creating a new human science that has a different goal, which is to use declaratives to study the intricate networks of ostensive, imperative and interrogative sentences that in fact make them possible and are inscribed within them, we are free to note the inherently parodic results of precisely the most accurate and detailed transcriptions of desires and resentments. There is a good reason that pretty much all good modern literature is in one way or another a satire of disciplinary or, more broadly, “hyper-declarative,” thinking. The explosion of language generated by the human sciences can so easily be used to show the desires and resentments of the human scientists themselves. This satiric take on the disciplines is effortlessly included in the new, originary, human science, which defuses desires and resentments by exposing them, while also revealing the social relations we assume and therefore the obligations we take on in nevertheless experiencing slightly more deferred desires and resentments.\n\nSo, the “red-pilled” or “uncucked” right, whatever it will be called and whatever it will be, is inherently a satiric operation (perhaps the first constitutively satiric politics ever). Not “satiric” in the narrower sense of criticizing present day norms, mores, and “follies,” but more like what Wyndham Lewis called “metaphysical satire,” one directed at humans as repeating beings who never quite get repetition right. Satire, more than other literary forms, is based on repetition—it purports, unlike “realism,” to represent actual and not merely possible actions (for satire, even when fictionalized, to work we need to have specific targets in mind), and to do so in a way that is “distorted” from the standpoint of the target but truer for the satirist.\n\nIt is therefore also the most responsible form because its goal is to help continue to check and improve our iterative capacities (is that portrait like so-and-so or not? How can we tell?). It therefore is well suited for the project of replenishing the world with meaning again, as it implicates the fundamentally paradoxical nature of our being as sign users (signers?). with its help, we can see signs of the origin of our human being everywhere."
    },
    {
      "slug": "deferral-as-media",
      "title": "Deferral as Media",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve been limiting my discussions of media by assuming it is the sign and sign system that is the media while it is, in fact, the form of deferral created by that particular sign. It is the deferral created by the issuance of the sign that provides for the new form of sense and intellectual activity characteristic of engagement with that medium. Let’s take a simple example: someone insults me. I can take a swing at him, in which case all I really notice is the spot on his face I am aiming at (if I’m collected enough to aim). If I refrain, though, other things come into view. Maybe, his insult was a prelude to an attack on me, in which case I might notice a determined, aggressive expression on his face that suggests I would have been better off hitting him (sometimes he who hesitates really is lost—that’s the bet we lay down in gesturing rather than striking).\n\nEven in that case, though, I might now better prepare myself for what could be a sustained struggle. I might, though, see some hesitation in his expression and posture, I might notice something to suggest that his insult might be a response to something I said or did, perhaps inadvertently (maybe I notice a bag of groceries spilled at his feet and realize that I had in fact bumped into him). My deferral opens up a world of observations to me, directs my attention in ways it wouldn’t have been otherwise, and suggests other possible uses for my eyes and ears (at least). I might even refrain from returning the verbal insult, returning a good word instead, and see where that leads. It is whatever posture and attitude I have replaced the potential blow with that generates this space of deferral in which looking, listening and thinking are possible.\n\nIt would be necessary to show how each new media form, through the different forms of writing up until alphabetic, through print, film, TV and electronic media represent more advanced forms of deferral. Each of these formal advances have been denounced as sources of infantilization, starting with writing and most certainly continuing through the most recent forms of electronic communications. Certainly any modification of the sensorium will involve a loss of some capacities, capacities deemed indispensable by those still immersed in the newly marginalized form of media; and maybe capacities that it would really be better to preserve.\n\nIt wouldn’t be a bad thing if we were all capable of memorizing a few thousand lines of poetry. But I think the more important problem is that each new media form reflexively attempts to model itself on the forms it is displacing. In the example I have spent a great deal of time on lately, writing took upon itself the task of making the written text a simulacrum of a speech situation, one that could be reproduced by the reader. We still use terms drawn from orality to speak about writing—we refer to what a text or author “says,” and don’t even have alternatives drawn from writing should we want to use them. If one individual speaks with another individual, or a few, the listeners or interlocutors know the speaker, can assess him, respond to him, speak amongst themselves, etc.\n\nA single text “speaking” to thousands or millions of people is taking up residence in their minds—it becomes their own voice. The experience and consequences are radically different, but it’s still modeled as an “internal dialogue,” even if one of the participant is remotely controlling that dialogue.\n\nIf writing were represented and performed more as what it is, a mapping of speaking and listening possibilities, it would not have these hypnotic effects. The focus on a single speaker, who must be made answerable, cross-examined, defeated in rhetorical and logical combat (essentially, expelled from the mind); or, on the other hand “internalized” and agreed with completely, would be deferred. One would, instead, be prompted to generate hypotheses. I think the same is true for the other allegedly stupefying media. There’s probably no point to talking about TV by now, since it has become such a minor medium, but the internet and online communications is anyway the far better example of how it is the holdovers of previous media that contribute to a kind of mindlessness easily associated with new communication forms.\n\nIn fact, the recent discovery that the major media companies manipulate their algorithms so as to hide and marginalize thinking considered heretical by state liberalism, provides a perfect example. Now, there’s no doubt that Google, Facebook and Twitter have become the media arms of Antifa; that’s not the issue. The issue is the assumption that algorithms can be neutral, constructed without assumptions regarding a hierarchy of importance concerning ideas, events, agents, and so on. When someone searches “Trump” what should they find? The documents that mention his name the most times? The most recent documents? The documents that mention his name and are on sites that are otherwise the most searched in general? The documents that have received the most hits (partisans could hire illegal aliens to sit and click on the preferred sites all day long)? Some combination of all of the above (and a dozen other criteria we could easily devise)? Which combination?\n\nPeople who ask for neutrality here are imagining what is in fact one of the precedents of the internet: the archive. They are imagining, however vaguely, a scholar, researcher or investigator, interested in getting at the truth of whatever one imagines oneself to be getting at the truth of, sorting through masses of documents, assessing authenticity and reliability, ascertaining relevance, generating links between documents that could only be discovered once one has seen enough of them. An ideal self for themselves as inquirers, really. But most people can only imagine the results of such work, having done very little or none of it themselves in the course of their lifetime.\n\nWhat they imagine is the popular narrative of the heroic sleuth discovering the truth hidden beneath a pile of lies and revealing it to all just in the nick of time, confounding the falsifiers. Or they are imagining a kind of decentered public square, an agora, where equals exchange ideas, battle it out, and get a bit closer to the truth. These are extremely attractive models. But they are all also essentially sacrificial. The attraction lies in the promise to have a scoundrel, stripped of all his protective covering, served up to all. Each new gradation of deferral saps sacrificial thinking of some of its power, power which powerful forces within the new form will seek to exploit and intensify.\n\nThe online lynch mob is far more ferocious and consuming than the real thing, and if it seems somewhat less devastating in its effects, I would say that it would not be at all surprising to pass the point at which online lynch mobs start instigating the real thing. Would either George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson be safe in public in most places in the US?\n\nBut it’s possible to imagine a far more productive discipline of algorithmic design in a well ordered society. If computer programmers know what people need to fulfill their disciplinary assignments, they could design the algorithms most helpful to them, from the sovereign on down. We would all learn, unevenly and in accord with necessities, to think probabilistically, to project probabilities further and further into the future, albeit with declining degrees of certainty as we go further ahead. That is really the essence of deferral: if we don’t think primarily of how to kill each other right now, we can occupy ourselves with more profitable uses of our time; if we extend that period for ten years, yet further vistas open up; for a hundred, and we can imagine civilization building.\n\nThen all our thinking would focus on what builds trust and what minimizes resentment, and our practical activity would focus on deploying resources and energies so as to build that trust and neutralize and redirect that resentment. How would we know we have another hundred years (perhaps to then be renewed indefinitely)? We really wouldn’t, but we’d be able to speak in terms of which activities and which ways of thinking made it either more or less likely. We could be wrong, but then we could study the source of such errors as well, and seek to minimize them.\n\nBut there could be no such “we”—overlapping disciplines, concerned with the intersections of scientific development, technological advance and anthropological understanding—without an unchallenged center. If I want one figure at the center and you want another, that incentivizes us to start arguing over different definitions of “trust,” different assessments of this or that resentment, opposing opinions regarding which anthropological understanding best accounts for a particular conflict. Your acceptance of the self-evident belief that we should be building a society to last becomes for me the arrogant assertion that my subordination must be imposed, my complaint ignored, eternally. We have to then argue about how our respective claims can be adjudicated, and we have to argue about rights, procedures, mediators, and so on. The media form enabling a new transcendence is then weaponized by being saturated with corrupt simulations of earlier forms: oral argument in court, tabloid journalism, state propaganda etc.\n\nThe study of the new media counters this development by articulating the increasing delay of consequences and projection of consequences beyond the immediate consequences, of events “processed” through the media, on the one hand, with the centering and continuity of power, on the other hand. All our inquiries into the future effects of present decisions presuppose a fundamental stability and continuity of order, and all attempts to project probabilities onto particular “timelines” are also attempts to hold constant the bulwarks of order that, first of all allow me to hypothesize without having to daily defend myself and construct my own order.\n\nThose most devoted to research and scholarly pursuits, to the maintenance and articulation of the archive we are all becoming part of, should be the freest and the most powerless, and therefore the most insistent upon the organization of all institutions around central power. Inquiry and social commitment converge, because the best conditions for anthropological research, which is ultimately the basis of all research, are those in which human possibilities are multiplied and presented in well formed, public ways. We have nothing more learn from revolutions and other upheavals; we have a lot to learn from the endless possibilities of dialectical transformations of disputes into agreements, and then those agreements into more disputes that we already know will be aimed at generating new agreements.\n\nBut the media still remain, at least the most elementary ones, like body and voice. The new media become more proficient at turning ostensives and imperatives into declaratives—something like “look at that criminal—stop him!” becomes something like “demographic, environmental, urban and architectural studies demonstrate that instances of disruption can be most significant reduced through the following combination of lighting, surveillance and direction of pedestrian traffic…” Instead of shouting at bystanders to stop the guy running away with a purse, you report the incident to security which undertakes a review.\n\nBut at each point along the way, “fleshy” human responses—what people see, hear and feel, what they look like, how they move, how they play off of each other—gets fed back into the system. But that just means the more ancient media are resituated within the new space of deferral, and they take on meaning insofar as they serve that deferral. We speak and gesture, but we do so as if we might be recorded or are ourselves recording; we write by hand, or by spray paint, but in doing so we present what we know can only be seen as a scrawl; even print writing has “always already” been chopped up into excerpts and sound bites; we sing, in anticipation of various remixes and electronic voice modifications.\n\nAll the media can therefore be kept in play, for the most expansive production of meanings should be kept in play, but always as the oscillation between our “speaker’s meaning” and the now unlimited possible “text meanings” that might result. Deferral lies in that oscillation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "puppets-and-probes",
      "title": "Puppets and Probes",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A few years ago, I saw someone with a T-shirt that had nothing but the words “Us vs. Them” on it. It seemed both meaningful and meaningless, so I gave it some thought. Us vs. Them is, first of all, the most abstract form of all group conflicts, from the perspective of one of the parties (both of the parties). So, it’s the way everyone in every conflict sees things, but it’s also the way no one, in any conflict, sees things: no one would engage an enemy if it was just “the enemy”—the enmity has to have some “content” to it. So, the T-shirt was satirical—when you’re immersed in some struggle, this is the way you see things, even if you can’t see that you see them that way.\n\nIt makes a kind of Girardian point regarding the way in which sustained struggle creates increasing symmetry between the combatants. But at the same time, in claiming a kind of satiric or ironic stance, the T-shirt creates a division, between those capable of this insight from mimetic theory, and those blind to it. The T-shirt is mocking its viewer. So it reinstates an “Us vs. Them,” and it does so on the purely formal level of the abstract antagonism itself. But one final observation is necessary: the T-shirt, or its wearer, in reinstating this division, is itself a target of the irony, which means that all of us enter the Us vs. Them frame, i.e., are subject to mimetic desire, and all of us need to have others snap us out of it by mirroring back to us in a “barer,” more formal way, our display of that mimetic attitude; and each of us has to do it for others.\n\nThis art object (why not?) is exemplary of the aesthetic. That, ultimately, is what the aesthetic is, and what art does: exhibit our resentments back to us in such a way that we can inspect and distance ourselves from them. Eric Gans locates the origin of the aesthetic on the originary scene, in the oscillation between the sign and the object on the part of each of the participants on the scene. The sign (the gesture of aborted appropriation) directs one’s attention to the desirable object at the center, but now the object is just an object, once it is no longer mediated by the sign, so the attention goes back to the sign, and so on.\n\nThis consolidates the sign as an acceptable, albeit temporary, proxy for the object: it is “beautiful,” or at the very least well-formed. I think what is involved here is the creation of a potential scene within the scene: if one participant is “judging” the sign, he must be doing so under the assumption that everyone else on the scene could turn to the sign and do the same. On this scene, the sign will be judged either acceptable (well-formed) or unacceptable (unformed). In the former case, the object is approached symmetrically by all on the scene; in the latter case, the sign may work, but all approach in a state of heightened suspicion (the unaesthetic life is possible, but is a lesser life).\n\nThe aesthetic on the scene, in the form of one of one’s fellow “signers,” is the entire body presenting as a more or less perfect balance between self-disarmament and deterrence. In this balance we see reflected our own resentments, and the means of curtailing them.\n\nWithin every scene, then, that is, every human event or happening, there is a potential aesthetic scene wherein we are able to withdraw somewhat and take in the signs of the scene—rather than trying to push oneself forward as a center, one can inspect the potential centrality of others. The origin of art, as distinct from ritual (where the aesthetic was always surely a contributing element), involves taking some such marginal figure and placing it at a “prepared” center. Gans sees the classical aesthetic exemplified by ancient Greek tragedy as the “degree zero” of art. Art has human figures at the center, replacing the deities of mythology, and the figures initially placed at the center are unquestionably important within the human scene.\n\nThe significance of the scene is taken for granted, and so the scene itself is not represented. But it’s also the case that on this scene the artist is invested with an authority modeled on that of the Big Man who usurps the ritual scene. In classical art, the artist is fully invested in and identifies with the authority of the community. The scene of art is a supplement or direct replacement of the ritual scene, with the art object or happening at the center and the audience at the periphery. The art scene, then, enacts an oscillation between itself and the center, as a site of distribution and modeling of needed practices.\n\nSo, all art works within, that is, imitates, and displaces some discourse on the center—ritual, myth, prayer, public discussion, interactions in the royal court or, in the modern age, the disciplines scientific, pedagogical, bureaucratic, journalistic, etc., along with privatized modes of self-regulation like diaries and letters.\n\nAesthetic history is determined by the ways in which the scene of aesthetic representation is represented within the art work or event itself; or, we could say, the way the potential or virtual scene within the scene is represented. The artist governs the art scene from its center; as such he represents a “bit” of social authority, which also means he mimics and draws upon some other authority. There is therefore a boundary between the art scene and other disciplinary scenes and between center of the art scene and its periphery (between art and audience). On one side, we can imagine maximal differentiation between the art scene and the other disciplines, along with maximal investment of artistic authority in that differentiation; on the other side, the art scene tends to dissolve the boundaries and become an aesthetic difference within the other disciplinary scenes—in the most extreme case, the artist’s authority is diffused amongst other disciplinary authorities as an aesthetic dimension “vibrating” within them.\n\nPost-classical art, which is to say art that purports to oppose the social center, has itself oscillated between these possibilities. I will say that the latter, dissolvent, diffusive tendency is most likely to win out, and should win out, because it leads the artist to be reintegrated into communal authority. I would see, then, the furthest unfolding of aesthetic possibility to be the establishment of the oscillation between the actual scene and the potential scene within the actual or world scene itself: the introduction of “switches” into everyday life that just barely upset our expectations (expectations being a concoction of desires and resentments “streaming” on the screen of the world) and so “read” them back to use in the course of our lives.\n\nThe power of the artist in maintaining the boundary between art and spectator, that is, is already too crude and impossible to credit: we know too much about what goes into the production, placement, and valuation of any work. Aesthetic experience has to include that knowledge and show us how we keep nevertheless forgetting it. Much like that “Us vs. Them” T-shirt.\n\nThe origin of aesthetics, then, is the participant on the scene imagining a potential scene focused on a fellow “signer.” That fellow signer guarantees, to a greater or lesser extent, the significance of the central object. The more the signer presents himself, or is presented on the imagined scene of the viewer, as all sign, and nothing but sign, that is, as a complete and unequivocal model of deferral, the more certain the guarantee. That is the origin of “beauty,” even if naturally desirable objects become the more readily available models of beauty in works of art. But being all sign and nothing but sign is temporary, because it depends upon the specific desire being deferred.\n\nThe “artist,” or revealer of the aesthetic scene, must transform that static sign into a model for recognizing, responding to and generating aesthetic scenes. For this purpose, the static all sign and nothing but sign, which will, or always already has, become embedded in the habits of the group, must be turned into a kind of anti-model. All art begins, that is, with the exhaustion of a previous aesthetic tradition; any art begins by accelerating and accentuating that exhaustion. The same goes for the everyday aesthetics found in our “styles,” whether of dress, speech, gesture, or any mode of interaction. Something is made meaningful by distinguishing it from something that has lost its meaning (it would be equally true to say that things lose their meaning when we distinguish it from something we now find meaningful).\n\nA good way to think about something that has taken the path from maximally meaningful to meaningless is as a puppet whose strings we have just seen. A moment ago, it was to all appearances alive, conscious, spontaneous and intentional; now, it’s dangling and jerked around by unseen hands. (I’m continuing a line of inquiry from my “Signing Up” post, only now suggesting more strongly that there is a satiric element of all aesthetics and art, an element that always highlights the difference in some repetition.) In this way aesthetics erects a potential scene within some scene we are immersed in, the complete meaningfulness of which we have taken for granted.\n\nThe aesthetic scene begins by showing us that we conferred rather than simply recognized the apparent meaning on the scene, and once we realize we’re doing that, we can do it no longer—we’re the puppets, just as much as the objects we’ve been taking too literally. Any art, even the most traditional and classic, must do this insofar as it wrenches us from our ordinary forms of attention in order to initiate us into a more transcendent or “presentified” one.\n\nIn allowing our attention to thus be unraveled and rewoven, we enter the potential scene actualized by the aesthetic object or event. It’s more accurate to say that we send, or delegate, a part of us to attend the scene. This is a more specialized and attentive part of oneself, a more disciplinary self. One “peels” it off, so to speak, as a form of oneself that moves more freely among representations than we normally can or do. We can call it a “probe” we send out. It’s the part of us we train to notice small details or unremarked similarities; to poke into crevices or embed a figure in a vast tableau; to look at something as a point in time stretching backward and forward millennia, or as something that came together miraculously at that moment.\n\nAs aesthetic beings, we oscillate between being puppets dangled by and probes on behalf of the center. Puppets, or in a modern version, perhaps, robots (or crash dummies, or NPCs), can be very instructive—like small children can do, they show us what we look like considered as purely mimetic animals. We need to see that in order to initiate a counter-mimesis, one that remembers the “joints” now operating mechanically as composed and integral to gestures.\n\nNow, we peel off and set free the probe, which examines things from inside the puppet, and the probe itself becomes puppet and peels off another probe, and so on. It’s puppets and probes all the way down. But the probes come home—you can think of them as layers of narration. Like in self-reflexive fiction, the narrator enters the story, and doubles as character and narrator—the telling of the story and the story itself interfere with each other. We can’t set a theoretical limit to scenes within scenes, to the mise en abyme, or vorticism, but there are always practical, which is to say ethical and moral limits. The narrative structure of beginning, middle and end can generally be relied upon to set the limits (which some artists will want to defy—and they may succeed).\n\nYou enter the scene you have constructed, you act within it, and you exit it as the one who was both always outside and constructed it and also constructed it out of your experience within it. This should all be easy to understand today, when everyone on Twitter gets drawn into narratives of their own creation, via impersonation and pseudonymous agency, trying to craft the stories (“time-lines”) that are crafting them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "social-market-gablog",
      "title": "Social Market",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "What would a market, built into which is an acknowledgement of the market’s dependence on central power, on the one hand, and the long term moral and ethical life of workers and consumers, on the other hand, look like? Let’s set aside the policies and governing structure needed to create such a market, and just examine how the people, especially employers and investors, would think and act within it. If I sell heroin, I’m going to keep running out of customers, because they will keep dying or ruining their lives and therefore be unable to pay me anymore. So, I need to keep finding new customers, which I can only do by exploiting unhappy, weak-minded, and desperate people, and making those people no good for anything else, whether it be their families, their jobs, or buying lots of other things.\n\nAnd I contribute to the ruination of the society I live in, diverting the resources of the state into expensive quagmires, where it ends up at war with many of its own citizens. Here, then, we have a model of a clearly anti-social market, from which existing markets will differ to some extent in degree and kind. If I prefer to sell something other than heroin, even if doing so yields me much lower profits, and even if I could insulate myself from the legal liabilities of the drug trade, then this is a choice any individual or firm could make in less extreme situations.\n\nWe should make use of the broader, somewhat metaphorical, use of “market” to make sense of the “market” in the narrower, more technical sense of an arena where money is systematically exchanged for goods (where you can’t get goods any other way). The most obvious example is the “sexual market,” explored so extensively and meticulously in the “manosphere,” at sites like Chateau Heartiste and Rollo Tommassi’s Rational Male. The calculation of male and female sexual value is certainly a highly advanced art, and perhaps a science, at such sites. Because, of course, there is something we could recognize as exchanges here, and a range of possible exchanges that might be made.\n\nDavid Graeber identifies three modes of human interaction: communism, exchange, and hierarchy. In communism everyone takes what they need and give what they can, which is actually a fairly common arrangement, found in families and sports teams, for examples. Hierarchy is unidirectional, whereas exchange, however asymmetrical, is give and take. Clearly, communism and hierarchy shade into exchange, which means that at its margins exchange shades into them.\n\nEric Gans, in his reading of The Illiad in The End of Culture , identifies war as the first marketplace. It’s definitely either that or sex. Warriors are assessed at their fighting value, for which they expect recompense from the spoils—the whole plot of the poem is driven by Achilles’s resentment at being, in his view (and objectively so, it appears), shortchanged. These pre-monetary marketplaces, bordering on communism and hierarchy in very visible ways, are very helpful in assessing more developed, monetary markets. In these more primitive markets, the relation between value and choice is much more direct. The better warrior, the more beautiful woman, the more alpha man—these values can be tested fairly easily, and virtual unanimity achieved.\n\nThe types of conflicts they lead to are also fairly typical, along with the institutions and positions needed to constrain these markets: marriage, family, commanders, kings. And these institutions in turn create new markets: the position of commander can be exchanged for political support, marriage becomes a way of consolidating status by families. It may very well be that, rather than a strict linear procession of markets, constraining institutions, modified markets, the markets and institutions are co-created in various ways in different situations.\n\nAchilles would want the best sword; the alpha of the tribe would want the most beautiful clothes for his wife (she would want this too)—blacksmiths would want to make Achilles his sword, and tailors the alpha’s wife’s dress. We would see the same thing today with makers of private jets, luxury yachts and Lamborghinis and their customers. The most important buildings in town would be designed by the best architects, who compete amongst themselves. Achilles is sure to know the best sword; the mayor or town council is somewhat less likely to know which design will be best, even under conditions in which we could exclude bribery and favoritism.\n\nThe odds are much better if the town has a long tradition of prestigious structures, its own style, and if those traditions are respected. The best construction company will want to build the building, and it will want to use the best bricks, mortar, cement, wood, etc. Less important buildings, built by those with less resources, will be designed and built by the second, third, fourth, and so on best architects and construction companies, using correspondingly inferior materials. They will be modeled on the more prestigious buildings though, and will try to borrow their glamor and charisma.\n\nSuch a system requires that the elites be deserving, and seen as deserving, of their position. Achilles is the best fighter—he proves that daily on the battlefield, and if you want to challenge him you may be able to find out for yourself. Who are the richest men in town, or in the nation? We can dismiss Balzac’s witticism about crimes and fortunes—for the most part, at the origin of wealth and power is genuine accomplishment. Not everyone can build a giant, innovative corporation that will last for generations—Henry Ford, John Paul Getty, John Rockefeller and the others were definitely better at something which it is very good to be better at, than others, even if quite a bit of luck and ruthlessness facilitated their rise (exploited luck, and channeling ruthlessness are also worthwhile capacities to possess).\n\nNevertheless, if one wants to claim they were unworthy elites, and that we would have been better served by a different breed or batch, then the question needs to be formulated properly—a particular mode of rule or sovereignty allowed these to rise, just as a particular mode placed Achilles at the center. The most effective way of making the market social is through constraining the elites—there is, by definition, a bottleneck allowing only a few people to become and remain elites; the attention of the sovereign, from the narrow perspective of wealth generation and the broader perspective of integrating wealth generation into the entire social order, is to closely monitor that bottleneck.\n\nAny social order, at any particular point in time, has a particular stock of technology, infrastructure, sunk capital, homes, buildings, and so on. If the sovereign allows for elites to degrade that stock, he undermines his own occupancy of the center, because he is allowing considerations other than a hierarchy of recognizable value to determine the ordering of society, and the stability of his rule depends on such a hierarchy. If crap is being designed and built, and therefore modeled for everyone else, the sovereign is clearly responsible, and is either incompetent or is being swayed by lesser motives. And this encourages others to try and sway him by such motives.\n\nSo, the ruler is the occupant of the center to the extent that he constrains the elites to preserve and enhance the existing stock of social capacities and goods, which also means to generate markets that serve circles modeled on and organized concentrically around those surrounding the sovereign. At each level there would be means of recruiting and elevating talented individuals from the lower levels; indeed, there’s no reason such a social order couldn’t have as much upward mobility as present-day Western ones which, in truth, is not all that much. And it might have more downward mobility, as the maxim that the fish rots from the head would be put conscientiously into practice, with the elites subjected to special scrutiny.\n\nThe far more important question is that of the mass market. The most compelling moral argument for the contemporary liberal capitalist order is that it has lifted hundreds of millions, by now maybe over a billion, of people throughout the world out of poverty—on the brink of starvation poverty, not food stamp receiving poverty. Even in the wealthier countries, it cannot be denied that mass marketers like Wal-Mart have made available what were once luxuries to pretty much everyone—universal access to refrigerators, cars, air conditioners, ovens, microwaves, lawn mowers and all the rest is far from nothing, and I’ll grant it’s an unmitigated good, even the TVs and computers, which can’t be blamed for what is transmitted via them. But the model of the market I’ve been piecing together here would seem to preclude such direct appeal to a mass, all-inclusive consumer market, one that has not been adequately formed by the market spaces proximate to the sovereign.\n\nOf course, all new products start off expensive and are first of all marketed to the wealthy; still, the process by which such products go down the line, finally reaching the wage earner (and welfare recipient) has accelerated to the point where it barely exists. A new Apple phone, which would have been an astonishing, well-nigh science fictional device to younger versions of many of us, is marketed directly to everyone. How is this done? Vast amounts of capital are moved overseas, so that near starving workers can produce the items at prices affordable for those elsewhere a generation or two beyond near starvation wages.\n\nOK, let’s go along with this for a moment, and take the economic, libertarian argument at its word: those working at near starvation wages now will be middle class in a generation and the work will then be passed on to some other impoverished nation, and so on, until… well, what, exactly? The process has worked for South Korea and the other “tigers,” it seems to be working for China, but then what? It seems to have made no progress at all in the Middle East, much less Africa, which is being colonized by China for its raw materials in a development no Western narrative is equipped to recognize. The results are mixed in lots of other countries, but, anyway, all of these production processes are going to be increasingly automated anyway. Then what? The question of the mass market turns into the question of creating high-quality forms of activity out of the universal networks we are all plugged into.\n\nHannah Arendt remarked that Marx never seemed to consider the implications of the end of labor in the fully automated society he projected communism to be for his own anthropology, which defined man as homo laborans. The same question can be asked of free market liberals—if all necessities and a lot of luxuries can be produced with very little labor, as will no doubt eventually be the case, why is anyone going to work, what is the point of buying and selling what is readily available to all, etc.?—but it’s a good question for anyone. It may be that the work we do will be more social, as the old tech-utopians from the 60s like Marshall Mc Luhan and Buckminister Fuller thought—lots of teaching one another to do all kinds of interesting things.\n\nAs Gaston Bachelard predicted, society will be for school rather than school being for society. (Liberals might consider how inane protests over things like “white privilege” will seem then.) There will also be a lot of caregiving—the health care professions, which have been expanding dramatically for a while now, will no doubt continue to do so, as various forms of therapy will become more nuanced and we will be troubled and seek help for aches and pains we don’t even notice now.\n\nI think what this would amount to is a process of de-disciplining and re-disciplining. Take health care. We still go to the doctor for all kinds of things that could probably be dealt with by trained professionals without an MD (even though more and more people do go to these intermediate caregivers). No doubt science and engineering—a great bulk of the work done will involve keeping everything running and holding up—can similarly be broken down into more precise levels of expertise, especially as the frontiers of knowledge advance and subdivide. If all of these professions involve directly helping people who can judge whether they have been helped or not, and maintaining systems the decline or collapse of which couldn’t go unnoticed, then we actually have a social market that has an orderly, hierarchical structure similar to the one sketched out above.\n\nI wouldn’t want to speculate on the leisure activities that might accompany the social market, but there’s no need to assume that people engaged in productive, freely chosen and mostly interesting occupations would spend their free time in nihilistic pursuits. Absolutism is not utopian, but these eutopian prospects represent an extinction event for liberalism and democracy, which would therefore fight every sign of them fiercely."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-are-we-talking-about-when-we-talk-about-the-market-gablog",
      "title": "What are We Talking About When We Talk About the Market?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It may be possible that no one really likes “the market.” Eric Gans identifies as the “constituent hypocrisy” of Romanticism that the romantic stance is predicated upon resistance to the market in the name of an irreducible individual distinctiveness, while this distinctiveness is precisely what enables the romantic artist to circulate in the market. The analysis applies to contemporary marketing just as acutely, as the method of marketing is to sell identities that liberate the consumer from the judgments of others, that is, of the market. But anti-marketism characterizes producers no less than consumers: not producer really wants to compete; if it was up to the producer, he would secure a complete monopoly, along with absolute control of the supply chain comprising the production of the goods or services produced.\n\nThe advocate of the free market will say that this is precisely the point: the market compels everyone to recognize an impersonal structure indifferent to his desires and resentments, and hence to accept a sociality to which his individuality must be subordinated. The fact that it is impersonal is a key selling point: market advocacy is an argument for authority in the absence of, and to the deliberate exclusion of, any personal, responsible authority. This leads to the assumption that the market is something one might “resist” or “oppose”; as well as to the complementary realization that such resistance is always already futile since it will just produce another commodity. Which, of course, keeps the market going.\n\nThe more you’re ensconced within economic networks, the less you talk about markets—then, it is a case of preserving existing relationships with suppliers and distributors, R & D, planning PR and advertising campaigns, securing reliable politicians, and so on. It is the outsider who engages in market talk, hoping to pry open those networks and get plugged into them. So, if market talk represents a demand for obedience to an impersonal authority, it also, paradoxically, represents the demand that that impersonal authority be turned into a vehicle of power for the marginalized. On one level, there’s no contradiction: the more impervious to influence the authority it is, the more useful it is to sway it to your side; but, of course, sooner or later it becomes evident that the authority was never impersonal in the first place, and it’s just a question of getting your influence peddling installed before the claims to neutrality, objectivity, stability and so on lose their market value. It turns out the market was always already just a big ol’ romantic itself, one big center of resistance to authority. Even the Man wants to fight the Man.\n\nSo, if hating the market is just a trick for drawing you into the vortex on the consumer side, and loving the market is trick for getting into it on the producer side, perhaps a moderate “like” for the market provides a better approach. In this case, it will no longer be “the market.” If someone makes or does something very well, that person knows it, and so do other people who are trying to do that thing or something similar. But when the question is asked, in general, what is done well, what is worth owning or having done, the answer comes back: the market decides. Whether the expert is judging or the market is deciding, there is a circularity here: the expert is the expert because he knows what the best is, but if he tries to explain it to the non-expert, he can’t do so convincingly. The non-expert might prefer lesser wares, and resist attempts to refine his taste so he can appreciate the better product. Meanwhile, on what grounds could one appeal the verdict of the market? To say that the market was “wrong” seems almost like a category error.\n\nDavid Graeber is definitely right that many, if not most, jobs in the advanced capitalist economy are bullshit jobs, even if his explanation (conspicuous entouragement by the managerial class) only covers a small part of it. Somehow, the market seems OK with that. There may not be enough genuine productive labor for the population anymore, but that’s not really the market’s problem either. But the more you are good at your job, and consider it important, and want others capable of judging to share in the fruits of your labors, the more you want a smart market, with no extraneous interests coming between your exercising your discipline and finding those willing to join it.\n\nAlso, the more you are committed to your discipline, the less you want to worry about power, and the less you want everyone else worried about power, because clearly exercised power is the constant that allows you to focus on your own work. And, the less you will talk about “the market,” al though you may talk about systemic failures to produce subjects commensurate to the goods and services you’re able to supply them. Of course, you might be wrong: plenty of people think they’re the best who really aren’t. Here, we have to rely upon intellectual and practical traditions, and those genuinely interested in serving some center to act as judges and “checks” on subjective claims. It is those who talk most about “the market” who want power and want to influence power.\n\nOnly power that plans on being around for a long time can encourage the development of networks of disciplinary networks that will in turn set the tone for markets, i.e., broader spheres of distribution mediated by money. Revolutionary governments will just burn up networks. Liberal governments resting upon a high level of civilization can be more patient, because they can always find ways to exploit new scientific and technological developments, but only until intra-elite struggles require the deployment of proxies leading to proxy arms races between the contending elites. The predictability of governance is already recognized as a contributor to economic value, even if this can’t be calculated, but we can be more precise about which form of government is itself most interested in predictability and reliability and which model of subjectivity such governments will posit as representative of their rule.\n\nIt was, at one time, plausible to argue that liberal governments were the most interested in a coherent legal framework, because the legitimacy of their rule rested directly on protecting contracts and generating wealth. That claim is becoming less and less plausible, but it will still remain for disciplined government to demonstrate that it can be such a guarantor.\n\nThere is a familiar (but I have no idea how common) pattern whereby a new leadership, brought in to save a failing enterprise or institution, or to carry out an important project, selects a team, either of marginalized employees or those brought in from the outside, and sets them to work outside of the normal rules of functioning of the institution. This is called “skunkworks.” The alternative to liberal and democratic governance is governance by skunkworks. On the model of Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science, we would distinguish between the normal, rule-governed operations of a company or institutions, and government by skunkworks which, ideally would always be held in reserve and never used. An executive ready, and known to be ready, to resort to skunkworks, would never have to. The model citizen or subject would be the potential skunkworker, and educational institutions would be constructed so as to single out potential skunkworkers for various fields.\n\n“The market” is also really government by skunkworks, to the extent that it exists. A social order with no potential skunkworkers, with no executives willing to shake up organizations and no disciplinary networks they could draw upon to do so, would be an utterly stagnant and parasitic one. Markets are fields of overlapping disciplinary spaces. My hypothesis here is that we can measure the economic efficiency and long term viability of a socio-economic order (or any company or institution) by the qualitative presence of skunkworkers. This couldn’t be measured, in part because you can’t know it exists until you try to mobilize it.\n\nBut I’m not interested in a new form of economic calculation; I’m interested in the development of public modes of thought and argumentation capable of swaying elites, and those who sway elites. And the best argument for post-liberal and post-democratic, or absolutist, government, would be singling out where skunkworkers are necessary, where they are present, and what interferes with their greater qualitative presence. Focusing on the skunkworker elicits images of the executive ready and willing to use them. All of the criticisms we might make of liberalism, progressivism, and egalitarianism can be reframed as identifying efforts to stifle skunkworks.\n\nThe skunkworker ethics would introduce differentiations across the board. The more focused an inquiry gets, the more directly a discipline’s concepts generate imperatives, the more precise the measuring instruments get, the larger the consequences that follow from small differences. We would have a vast field of overlapping disciplines, some of which inquire into the consequences and implications of other disciplines. A discovery in chemistry is taken up by a pharmaceutical discipline; the development of new medicines must be integrated into the practices of doctors and hospitals, and perhaps by city planners in managing public hygiene.\n\nThe causality might work in the other direction: new forms of travel or work leading to new studies into stress or muscular wear and tear, and from there into genetics. Everyone is to be brought into some disciplinary space—even if some practices start as make work programs, just following the imperative to articulate all subjects into disciplines (which itself would be a discipline), there really always is something that can be done on the periphery of some other discipline. As Mc Luhan suggested, it might be worth it to pay people to learn things.\n\nOf course, the process of production of the scientists and those entering all the other disciplines, i.e., education, is also a discipline; but that means the overall integration of the disciplines must be thought through in organizing the education process, which means that the human sciences, whatever they might come to look like, focused on moral, ethical and aesthetic problems, service, survey and oversee the entire disciplinary field all at the same time. (The religions I would consider human sciences, as they are inquiries into the sacred, or the permanent center.) I think that what I have called “centered ordinality” should be the organizing assumption of the human sciences: there’s always someone at the center, and the way to be at the center is to carry on the work of your predecessors at the center and leave things better than you found them for your successors there; those who follow centrality create little “eddies” of centrality in its wake.\n\nOf course, I have left the central economic issue, the one “the market” is supposed to resolve, out of the discussion so far: the allocation of resources. Even with a group of very likeminded workers, who are in agreement regarding the final goal and the division of labor amongst them, there are very likely going to disagreements over how to use the available resources. If we’re building a house, should we spend a bit more for the superior brick, or a bit less so we can install better windows? There’s no obvious answer to such questions, even for the most expert. But there’s no objection to the answer the free marketer would give: if you’re building the house for someone else, let the buyer decide.\n\nOr, if your company’s brand is that you don’t skimp on brick, then those who agree with you regarding housebuilding priorities will hire you. It may very well be that not enough people consider top-notch brick to be more important than the most up-to-date windows, and you will have to change your brand, accept a smaller market niche, or take up another profession. There will be all kinds of “interfaces” where the market rules in the sense a liberal economist means. It may be that majority, even the vast majority, of transactions take place at such interfaces.\n\nThe real question is whether we can imagine a social order in which “disciplinary production,” even if numerically inferior to mass production, nevertheless sets the tone for the latter. That is a social order where the skunkworker option is always open. It’s very likely that a strict monetary policy, deflationary rather than inflationary, sharply privileging saving over lending, would be necessary here. “The market” would be authoritative, but not in the impersonal sense the liberal wants; rather, it would part of a broader human authority directing economic activity toward social ends. We already have fairly obviously examples even in a capitalist order, like tariffs, safety and building codes, aesthetic constraints, like preserving a particular view or the compatibility of housing styles.\n\nWe know from libertarian economists like Thomas Sowell that such regulations invariably serve vested interests, which is to say the interests of those able to access some portion of state power. (Environmental regulations in wealthy areas make new development prohibitively expensive, thereby increasing the property values of the already wealthy, etc. Such examples could be multiplied endlessly.) But this is a problem of decentered and distributed, rather than hierarchical and concentric, authority. The economic order I am describing presupposes a competent central authority that, regardless of its precise nature, spends like a royal household and a modernizing state, that is, on residences, office buildings, entertainment complexes, parks and gardens, etc., as well as constantly upkept infrastructure—and spends on the best, setting the tone for production and consumption all the way down the line."
    },
    {
      "slug": "crowding-out-the-political-gablog",
      "title": "Crowding Out the Political",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The best way to replace the liberal order would be one modeled on the paradox of identity. We all know this one: you have, e.g., a ship, and you replace one plank, and then another breaks so you replace that one. And so on. At what point is it no longer the “same” ship? Of course, this paradox is meant to examine our assumptions regarding “identity.” So, it’s still the same ship insofar as it’s still called the S.S. Minnow. Is it more the same ship if the material used to replace it part by part is closer to the original (the same kind of wood, or wood from the same stock)? (What if the ship looks so different that people refuse to call it the Minnow, or laugh when the owner does so?)\n\nIf it ceases to be the same, at what point does this happen? The 378 th plank? The 517 th ? Why, exactly? Such boundary questions occur across the board—when does a hill become a mountain (the “heap paradox”)? We have to name or nominate things but the things are not obliged to conform to our labels. Such paradoxes can become sterile academic exercises, but they can become very interesting when how to call a thing implicates interests and elicits conflicts.\n\nSo, when would a liberal order no longer be a liberal order? The ideal would be for the question not to be asked too widely until the answer was already “now.” After all, the assumption that all political intentions be widely telegraphed and explicitly stated is itself a liberal one that liberalism itself never abides by. No one is under any obligation to openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their aims, their views, their tendencies, and meet the fairy tale of authoritarianism with a manifesto of the party itself. It may be better to replace one plank at a time, and at the same time stockpile nicely prepared wood and devise some better names for various institutions, offices and practices, names perhaps to be used informally, satirically at first (memed into existence) but eventually to be “baptized” once the existing names are laughed out of existence.\n\nWhere there is now liberal, let there be authority. If we itemize all the various elements of the existing order that are specifically liberal, approach them analytically, that is, break them down into their elements, we can identify where leverage lies. For example, does it make more sense to try and eliminate elections, or to render their results as irrelevant as possible (in which case they may continue but become vestigial)? How relevant are their results now? What gets decided by elections? What gets decided through the electoral process? What does the electoral process allow to be decided behind the scenes?\n\nHow does the electoral process nevertheless shape what is behind the scenes so as to advantage some power centers over others? The point is to determine how the democratic system undermines authority, chains of command, competence, discipline and tradition, and to interfere with that process, to make it a less promising (more compromised) vehicle for those who benefit from, empower themselves through, higher levels of anarchy and chaos. The proper institutional “fix” will follow, more as a coup de grace than an apocalyptic triumph.\n\nIn other words, we crowd out the political. By “political,” I mean the assumption that nothing can be done without stimulating opposition. If someone wants to do something X way, we can’t proceed until we’ve heard from someone who wants to do it Y way. If no one actually wants to argue for Y, we must conjure it into existence. If you’re thinking politically, you see, e.g., a Congressional district where the incumbent regularly gathers 80% of the vote and stays in office for 40 years, and you think, not “these people must agree on most important things, must be happy with those who represent them, must get along quite well, and probably don’t think politics should consume their lives”; no, you think “this is awful, authoritarian, totalitarian, conformist—these people are not genuinely being represented because a false consensus is being imposed upon them.”\n\nSo, the goal is to turn the 80/20 district into a 51/49 one. How do you do that? Find small disagreements, about things people don’t consider that important, and turn them into big disagreements about issues of existential survival. Political entrepreneurs will ply the margins and figure out exactly where is the particular arrangement of antagonisms that will get them to 51%. This is pretty much all that politics is comprised of, which is why so much of it is patently fake, especially the part about politicians promising to set aside the politics and cross over the aisle to get things done. Even worse, the process covers for and enables the very institutional dysfunctions that produce it—there’s nothing that can’t be politicized, which benefits those who are best at deploying their current market share and access to political leverage to further pulverize power and gather up its bits.\n\nThe 80/20 to 51/49 example is useful because it helps us to see exactly what kinds of attitudes, ideas and behaviors we would have to crowd out to marginalize and eventually eliminate the political. I think that some of my recent discussions of morality, ethics and aesthetics will help us in theorizing or modeling practices that identify, counter and disable those attitudes, ideas and behaviors. Ethics involves the maintenance of some discipline or practice as that discipline or practice—what makes “medicine” medicine, what makes “chess” chess, what makes “governing” governing? There’s an ethics of conversation—what makes this conversation the conversation that it is, and what is involved in sustaining it?\n\nThe way we speak about ethical questions is in terms of the difference or oscillation between the meaning of an act for the actor and its meaning for fellow participants and/or spectators and/or “clients.” If I’m teaching a class, would other teachers recognize what I’m doing as “teaching a class” or does it seem to them something else, like, say, therapy, activism, or performance? What about the students, and then those assessing students (say in other classes for which mine was a prerequisite)? Genuine teaching should produce genuine students who recognize it as such, and assessment practices should be generated by the effect or impact aimed by a genuine pedagogy, but, of course, all these elements of the practice can be out of alignment with each other, and various “inputs” (unprepared students, market-derived assessment criteria, etc.) can make them even more misaligned.\n\nIn that case, “ethics” concerns realigning these elements of the practice or discipline, and that entails retrieving its origin, as a practice created in the midst of other practices so as to elicit and produce certain capacities that couldn’t be acquired otherwise.\n\nIf ethics is centered upon some good to be obtained, morality defers another kind of centering—the violent centering involved in sacrificial practices. A sacrifice is an attempt to influence a deity by offering some exchange; we don’t think we engage in such practices anymore, but we do. Some sacrificial practices seem innocuous enough, maybe even elevating—promising God, for example, that if he gets you out of this jam, that you’ll treat your kids better, or stop drinking, or whatever (something God presumably wants you to do)—as long as you keep the promise, of course. But if you think such exchanges can make things good with God, you will see your practices as accumulating such objects of potential exchange.\n\nEverything and everyone is a potential object of exchange. When there is a crisis, which is to say when “everything” seems to be at stake, your inclination will be to seek out the most valuable object of exchange, so as to ensure the crisis is relieved. Along with your fellow sacrificial participants you will choose whomever seems most misaligned with the system as the most likely cause of the crisis and therefore the most suitable sacrifice, and you will project onto that sacrificial victim the actions and motivations needed to justify his expulsion.\n\nSo, morality involves first of all refusing and resisting such practices. The more moral one is, the more moral some community is, the more it identifies markers and tendencies towards sacrificial practices, and replaces those tendencies with other practices aimed at determining which intentional practices lead to which results and which habits lead to which intentional practices. The causes of the crisis are therefore located within the community, within its mimetic desires and rivalries, and institutions and norms are established so as to discover those rivalries as early and defer them as quickly and decisively as possible.\n\nThese institutions are therefore the ones in which ethics becomes the central question—this is the case even for seemingly amoral practices, like those of science and medicine. Once we realize that some form of defilement or ritual transgression is not the cause of the disease, we are free to inquire into what the causes actually are. Once we stop looking for the ways God has marked out evil doers through some kind of disability or abnormality, we can take responsibility for determining what counts as evildoing and constructing procedures for proving and punishing it. And as we get better at tracing webs of human intention and causality, the we can respond to misfortunes suffered as a result of no action of the victim with kindness rather than horror.\n\nAt the same time, it is in ethical breakdowns that moral questions become immediate and urgent: when we know longer know what counts as “law,” “justice,” “health,” “knowledge,” and so on, we find ourselves in unresolvable conflicts that lead us to lapse into sacrificial practices. It is here that politics finds its point of entry and, really, its entire reason for being. Working towards the proper articulation of ethics and morality gives politics less and less to do. To put it another way, the political entrepreneur tries to turn every moral and ethical question into a political one, that is, one to be “solved” by generating a whirlpool of conflict around it (the permanent conflict is, in fact, the solution for the political actor); a counter-politics works on reversing this and distilling all political conflicts back into moral and ethical questions, in the event of which the specifically political component will vanish, and so, often, will the “problem” itself.\n\nWe do need the “imagination,” or aesthetics, for such practices. Aesthetics, for Gans, is the oscillation, on the originary scene, between the sign and the object: the form of the sign directs the scenic participant’s attention to the transfigured central object; the object, re-appearing as the object of desire, and therefore desacralized, sends the participant’s attention back to the “well-formed” sign. In this way we come to expect formal “frames” for attending to, using and consuming objects. It seems to me we need to see this momentary oscillation as a scene within the scene, or event within the event: a potential and imagined event in which a “figure” appears as both vulnerable and threatening, both complete in itself and “omni-referential.”\n\nIt is through aesthetic representations—not necessarily “art”—that we can see preliminary lapse in ethics within normal and apparently ethical practices, or the immoral intentions, ends, or even implications in the most upright practices. So, I have proposed thinking about the aesthetic as a kind of “originary satire.” Think about how someone looks when we see him simultaneously at his most vulnerable and most threatening—the image is inevitably grotesque. I’ve stumbled here upon the thesis that, aesthetically speaking, the grotesque precedes the beautiful and the sublime. I would defend that by saying that the grotesque gives us the human on the scene as the sign, while the beautiful and the sublime transfer the aesthetic representation to the center and invest it with divinity, which is to say desirability, internal symmetry and unapproachability.\n\nThe beautiful and sublime are, of course, immensely valuable human acquisitions, but if we want to see when and where we are at our worst in thinking we’re at our best, or where our desires and resentments are cloaked in the most beautiful and sublime forms, we need originary satire. I’ll conclude with the grandiose and perhaps grotesque claim that only originary satire can hold the entire moral and ethical order together. Not to mention that it best stymies all political rhetoric—all divisive claims cloaked in the treacly preaching of edifying unification around principles defined and controlled by the rhetorician himself—and therefore most aggressively crowds out the political."
    },
    {
      "slug": "gans-unified-field-theory-1-2",
      "title": "Gans: Unified field Theory 1 & 2",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Toward a Globalist-Victimary Unified Field Theory*\n\nToward a Globalist-Victimary Unified Field Theory: Part II – The Universal Utopia"
    },
    {
      "slug": "hostages-proxies-and-moles",
      "title": "Hostages, Proxies, and Moles",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "One extremely important contribution made by the alt-right and neo-reaction has been the enormous enrichment of the vocabulary we have available for studying social actors and actions. Neo-reaction has retrieved the ancient (caste) distinction between soldiers, priests and merchants; the alt-right has put nations and races back on the agenda, and has also contributed a rich conceptualization of socio-sexual hierarchies, the most fully developed I know of being Vox Day’s (Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, Omegas, Sigmas). Both tendencies have brought back “thick” understandings of male-female differences. Liberalism flattens everyone out into “citizens,” which is perhaps a further development of the absolutist monarchs’ flattening of everyone into “subjects.”\n\nOf course, liberalism has seen its own efflorescence of group designations: capitalist, worker, middle class, new middle class, salaried vs. wage earners, plus professional classifications and, of course, all the political differentiations. But the liberal designations just “happen”—we notice them as statistical distributions after the fact, and they have nothing to do with decisions made or founding events. No obligations follow from any of them. Even the supposedly freely chosen political identities turn out to be almost completely grounded in some combination of economic, ethnic, gender, regional, familial status. (Tell me your race or ethnicity, whether or not you are married with children, or hope to be at an early age, and I’m already ¾ of the way towards guessing what you “believe” about most “issues” with a pretty high degree of accuracy.)\n\nThe socio-sexual hierarchies may present themselves pretty clearly and consistently in high school, where what differentiation there is almost directly elicits varying dominance tendencies among males and conformist tendencies among females, and no one is really responsible for much, but in the adult world such hierarchies are mediated by the professions, or the disciplines. What makes one an alpha on Wall Street will not gain one the same respect in a scientific community, as an author in the world of publishing, or on a neighborhood watch committee. It would be very interesting to do a longitudinal study tracing men’s (in particular) position in dominance hierarchies throughout their lives, and across the various activities they participate in—no doubt there would be quite a bit of continuity, but high school reunions must hold some surprises.\n\nSo, it seems that the caste-like differentiations, which follow very directly from what one would have to do in assembling a team, must be the foundational ones. The socio-sexual hierarchies, then, would to some extent determine whether one becomes a soldier, priest or merchant, but would then primarily show up within those groupings. Of course, we need not assume that these specific castes themselves are the last word—it’s just that this points in the direction of the needed inquiry. What we are looking for in such group differentiations is resistance to the equalization pushed by turnover at the center. Ultimately, we would want grammatical definitions—that is, one’s “vocation” would be identified through one’s relation to ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives. Most obviously, if one’s greatest aptitude is to obey imperatives, one is a soldier; to issue imperatives, an officer, ultimately a ruler (the alpha among officers). Beyond that it will get more complex.\n\nIt is belonging to a team that makes sense of qualitative “identities.” Teams have captains, and most team sports have more central figures, the one who controls the ball or initiates the action. Liberalism can’t do much with such an approach, because a team needs to be very clear about qualifications and roles. Imagine a wide receiver insisting on the “right” to play fullback. But if social orders are teams (really, teams within teams), what’s the game? It’s easy to get tripped up on that question, because it implies the existence of some external, “Archimedean” point from which one could “choose” among different games, different ways of “winning.”\n\nBut we can always ask the questioner what game he’s playing in asking the question. Or what leverage within some other game he expects from that move. We’re always immersed in games, that is, and all we can do is solicit and elicit new moves within them. The new moves might eventually become new games. Of course, someone will come up to you and say “life is serious!” or “look at what’s happening—this is no game!” To “gamify” such moves is then an important act of deferral: yes, I can see there is real danger, people might get hurt, maybe they’re getting hurt, there’s no time to lose—still, though, the more we place people in clear-cut roles where they can show what they are made of, the more we find the right measures of tacit and explicit cooperation; in other words, the more team-like we are, the better we’ll handle the emergency. (And then the alphas, betas, gammas, etc., will step up, or step down, or step off in their own ways.)\n\nBut there’s still something missing in all this. What happens once the team is exposed to disruptions? This must happen even if only for internal reasons, such as the team’s own successes, and the new problems they generate, and the team’s need to replenish and reproduce itself. At each point along the way, there might be reasons to question decisions made by the captain, decisions with no clear precedent. Exacerbating such potential pitfalls is the reliance of one team upon many other teams. A government is essentially a team mediating between other teams. Sometimes a government is like a referee; sometimes it is more like the major leagues recruiting from the minors; sometimes it has to lead a team of teams against some insubordinate team.\n\nInsofar as it is like a referee, which is the case insofar as it runs a justice system, any lapses will be a signal to the players to enter the government team and tip the scale in their favor. So, now we have antagonisms between teams, and members of one team infiltrating other teams. Teams will aggregate into mega-teams. This creates more possible resentments that could be leveraged within one team on behalf of another.\n\nIn the midst of the many stresses placed on a team, the coherence of the team will depend upon how highly it values its members. I mean “value” in a very literal sense: what will the team spend or risk to protect a particular member? We could think of a spectrum of possibilities here, where at one end is a team in which all the members are interchangeable and easily replaced; at the other end, not only is each player highly specialized and impossible to replace, but the set of relations built among team members could not be restored if one of the members is removed. In any complex society, there will be more of the former type than the latter, but the kind of complex society you have will be determined by which type of team sets the tone.\n\nA centered social order will depend on irreplaceables, and will want more of them; a decentered order, or one with a rapid turnover at the center, will want more interchangeables. Liberalism is essentially a process of pulverizing irreplaceables into interchangeables. In fact, that’s how you get all those new “statistical” identities in the first place.\n\nIrreplaceables are high value targets. That is, they are very useful as hostages. The centrality of hostage taking in honor societies cannot be overestimated. Hostages are involved in the most mundane practices. Diplomatic intercourse in ancient kingdoms required an exchange of high value hostages. In honor societies, hostages are highly priced because they signify the value of the patriarch—if a hostage is not returned, the capability of the captain to protect his team is compromised, and seen to be compromised. This means everyone is ultimately a hostage, or just waiting to be one. The reason why a patriarch will feel compelled to kill a dishonored daughter is because her dishonor—even if she was raped, which only means she was allowed to be in an unprotected position where that was possible—shames him as protector.\n\nShe was a hostage, even if this didn’t become explicit until she was dishonored. Post-honor teams consider their members irreplaceable because the team performs some essential function, but no team, and certainly no team of teams, i.e., no government, can ever be once and for all post-honor (and irreplaceability in functional terms is always relative and diminishing). Why is it an issue when a single American is held hostage by some terrorist group, when 50,000 people, or however many, are killed in automobile accidents every year, etc.? Because the investment in redeeming the hostage is a marker of the coherence of the team.\n\nSo, “hostage” is an “identity” that must be added to or supplement soldier, priest, merchant, and alpha, beta, and so on. We are all hostages in potentia, to all of the different teams we are members of. The flip side of being a hostage is that you, as an individual, can shame the group through your actions, which is a way of offering yourself up as a hostage to other teams. The captain is then faced with the choice of redeeming you as a hostage (“he is one of ours, after all, you’ll have to come and take him”) or expelling him (letting the other team do with him what they will). The first approach, all things being equal, implies a hostile relation to other teams, while the second approach implies a willingness to police within your own borders in the interest of mutual amity.\n\nHostage taking is central to political warfare today. Each side attacks someone on the other side for doing or saying something that can be framed as shameful, presumably for some audience not directly implicated in either team (or, an audience made up of members of the team insofar as they are also members of other teams). You then dare the other team to protect the hostage or cut him loose. Protecting him means you put more members out on a limb, and they may be taken hostage; but cutting him loose may encourage more hostage taking as well.\n\nIt seems to me that hostage taking is closely related to the use of “proxies,” which is such a crucial concept in Moldbuggian neo-absolutism. The high uses the low as proxies against the middle. Let’s see if the concept of hostage taking can enrich our understanding of the process. To activate a proxy, you need a group, or a team. In order to turn the team into a proxy, you need to interfere with its exchange system—and exchange systems within groups work primarily on the gift and honor model. Members of that team get humiliated by members of another team. This lowers their value on the team—if they are humiliated enough, it’s not worth it trying to redeem them.\n\nThe way to leverage the team as a proxy is to elevate the value of the humiliated members, to redeem them as hostages by making their humiliation shameful, not for the team to whch they belong, but for the team from which the humiliators come. This can only be done by the “highs,” i.e., an external and more powerful group which has, for example, the means of publicizing instances of humiliation and framing them as shameful, pressuring the team to repudiate them, that is, refuse to pay ransom in added scrutiny of the team. It even becomes possible to induce members of the targeted “middle” group to offer themselves as hostages, by allowing their value to be determined by the team from which the humiliated come, which really means determined by those with the spotlight to shine on (or turn away from) all of these doings. The humiliated ones then acquire the highest value, which they can leverage within their team and on behalf of their team. Within this economy, the interchangeables become irreplaceables.\n\nMuch of this is clearly outside of the control of any individual, but the best way to lessen one’s chance of being reduced to the option of becoming a low value hostage or puppetized proxy is to become a mole. A mole on behalf of the center. Every discipline employs a kind of cover; even its normal members are under cover, which is to say playing a role, wearing a costume, etc. Deferral is itself mole-like—you set aside your desires and resentments, which means you act as someone who has redeemed oneself from proclivities that make it easy to take you hostage (and would also make you a dispensable hostage). You make yourself a higher value hostage by hiding your value in making yourself irreplaceable to those who would protect you but interchangeable for those who would take you. As a mole for the center, you find signs of irreplaceability behind signs of interchangeability.\n\nThe most obvious example of “molarity” is leftist entryism, whereby a traditional institution is infiltrated and transformed into a progressive front. This describes pretty much every institution in the contemporary world. This kind of entryism involves leveraging the institution’s rules against itself. The institution has rules that implement some higher, meta-rules (academic freedom in the name of the search for truth); but the rules exclude (that’s not really “academic” work), so the meta-rules can be invoked to subvert the rules (your definition of “academic” excludes new, path-breaking inquiry). In enough cases the charge will be plausible enough, and sometimes even true, so as to confer the benefit of the doubt on new attacks.\n\nIn the end, “academic” is given a new meaning. In hostage-taking terms, what happens here, at least in the initial stages, is that the activist/entrepreneur takes some member of the team hostage, while simultaneously offering herself up as a hostage. The team member (who has been “critiqued”) can be demoted in some way, while the entrant can be expelled. It’s a long game, a trial and error process—over time, if the game is played right, enough prominent team members get demoted and enough entryists are redeemed. At a certain point the entryists are in, and can dispense with the pretense of playing by the old rules, at least for internal transactions—for external messaging, it might be necessary to keep up the pretense indefinitely.\n\nCenterist molarity replaces the meta-rules with infra-rules. Never, ever, conduct battles on the terrain of the meta-rules, however tempting it may be to defend the cause of truth, justice, freedom, beauty, God, the good. These are all central words, so the point is not that they should or could be forgotten or expunged—they just can’t be the object of a direct contest. Molarity on behalf of the center constructs practices that externalize the practices of the team you join. You show them what they’re actually doing in a way they may not exactly appreciate, but that at least some will find revelatory and compelling.\n\nYou offer them ways of being more competent by showing how their reliance on some skewed version of a meta-rule interferes with some practice they’re trying to construct. This is actually a way of deferring hostage taking—you try and make everyone more irreplaceable, and you try to make the team itself more irreplaceable for as many other teams as possible. You work on producing interchangeable means of making more irreplaceables. Of course, this ends up making us all emissaries, which is to say self-delivered hostages of each other."
    },
    {
      "slug": "logocentrism-media-and-originary-satire",
      "title": "Logocentrism, Media, and Originary Satire",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Jacques Derrida’s concept of “logocentrism” posits that Western metaphysics presupposes that writing is a representation of speech, and therefore approximates speech in a secondary, dependent way. Speech, in logocentric terms, involves “self-presence”: the speaker is identical to his intentions, which are therefore transparent to the speaker. Derrida deconstructs logocentrism by pointing out that the features attributed to writing by logocentrism, like distance, difference, repetition and mediation (all of which means interpretation, and erring), are in fact constitutive of speech and all sign use as well. We are not identical and transparent to ourselves but are—this seems obvious, once stated—constituted by a world of signs and meanings that we inhabit and deploy without ever coming anywhere near exhausting their implications. We are signs among signs, and signs mean deferral.\n\nDavid Olson confirms Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism (I’m not at all sure how much Olson—or Derrida—would accept that description of his work) by showing, through historical studies, how writing was developed as a representation and supplementation of speech acts within speech situations. Writing has to represent not only what was said, but how it was said and the context within which it was said, all of which would have been available to the listener but is unavailable to the reader. So, to use Olson’s example, if I’m speaking to people, and I want to report the speech of someone else, I would simply repeat what that person said in the way that he said it.\n\nSo, if what I want to report that another says that the soldiers are on their way, my tone and expressions would vary depending upon whether the original speaker was hopeful, skeptical or certain; and, al though Olson doesn’t explicitly say this, according to my own assessment of his reliability (I could repeat what he said in a slightly mocking tone, for example). Writing needs to supplement all these extra-linguistic elements of the speech situation (as we become literate we no doubt become far less overtly mimetic), so I would have to write that the speaker “believed” the soldiers were coming, or “hoped” they were, or “assumed,” or “claimed,” or “insisted” they were. All of these words mark some assessment of what we are to make of the statement in question: not just the meaning of the statement itself, but the meaning of it being stated.\n\nWhat further happens, according to Olson, is that we turn these verbal markers into nouns, thereby creating new mental entities: “beliefs,” “assumptions,” “suggestions,” “implications” and so on; we then deposit all these entities in a container we call the “mind” and perform all kinds of analyses on them. We assume they are simply there, that the mind contains thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, intuitions and all the rest. All the modern disciplines are founded on constructing relations between such entities. Meanwhile, what then governs the development of writing is the imperative to simulate the speech situation, to place the reader “in front of” something he witnesses along with the writer.\n\nThis construct is what Olson refers to (drawing on the work of Mark Turner and Francis Noel-Thomas) as “classical prose.” Whe never we talk about whether or not a piece of writing is clear, comprehensive, logical, and accurate, we are invoking the norms of classical prose: we are attesting to having been put before a scene such that we have virtually forgotten that it is a text that we have used to evoke that scene. If we put all this together, we can see how it becomes possible to speak about things like “social structures” and “economic growth” as if they were there before us, and we could see structures strengthening or crumbling, growth slowing and accelerating.\n\nMy discussion so far gives off the vague idea that there’s something wrong with all this, which both is and is not the case. It may be that all media must in some way gesture towards their origin in a scene in which the interlocutors are present to each other in the sense of seeing each other’s faces, hearing each other’s voices and being able to respond to each other. There is, on such a scene, a center (what people are actually looking at and talking about) while references or pointing to the center circulates among the members. But once we have writing, the situation is asymmetric, with the text “infiltrating” the reader’s (along with many other readers, unknown to one) silent monologue or perhaps installing such a monologue in the first place.\n\nThe inner monologue of the reader matches the one imputed to the writer, between whom there is the feeling of a kinship. At any rate, this is the case as reading is privatized and separated from its own original contexts within liturgy and collective study and memorization of texts. The more the reader is isolated and marginalized in relation to the center represented by the text, the more the reader feels free and like a creator of a whole world opened up by the text. Insofar as writing is the representation of speech acts, a “scripto-centric” practice of writing would refrain from filling in the “gaps” to complete the imputed speech situation and would, rather, enact the various possible uses and contexts of speech acts (that is, foreground the iterabiity of the sign made visible by writing).\n\nWhat interests me here is the possibility that the post-literate media share the same duality: on the one hand, in actuality, creating greater distance and enhanced deferral vis a vis an hypothetical “original” speech act, while on the other hand supplementing the representation of the speech act so as to obscure the mediation and leverage the intuitions of the listener or viewer and thereby produce a fantasy of presence. An obvious feature of all media beyond a speech setting is its institutionalization: a lot of work and organization goes into placing a book in the hand of a reader; even more goes into putting the viewer in front of a TV set or movie screen.\n\nOne demand especially forcefully insisted upon by the artistic avant-garde has always been to make these mediations visible, to demystify them. That anchor on the TV screen telling you what happened today is not speaking personally to you, telling you what she and her colleagues have found out about the world that day by diligently seeking out events you might consider important and interesting, but a frame is carefully constructed so as to make the viewer feel that way and it can be a hard illusion to break, maybe impossible for many. If television found ways to bring onto the screen the vast institutional and technological networks that produce the screen, there would be no illusion—it would be alienating at first, but people would learn the new “grammar” of television.\n\nThe only way to become a critical “consumer” of both news and entertainment is to “adumbrate” what you watch with the possible decisions, maneuvers, and conflicts and imagine some “they” who wants you to see these things (and not some other things) in this way. To help others along this path, then, would involve disrupting the imagined “speech situation” that “installs” the view in the desired position. Almost all media representations (including social media like Facebook and Twitter), in fact, aim at simulating a personal, “face to face” relationship with what is on the page, or the screen, or the CD, or the airwaves (indeed, there is outrage and disgust or at least bad reviews when this is not done successfully)—by locking the audience into “spontaneous” oralized reactions (like wanting to sing along, feeling like you’re letting the TV family “into your living room,” or arguing with an anchor or columnist— wanting to “shout at the screen”), it becomes very easy to pump the memes of the day into us.\n\nWhat’s insidious is the fabricated intimacy—an insight, by the way, one can find in the dreaded “cultural Marxists” of the Frankfurt School like Adorno and Horkheimer, not to mention Bertolt Brecht. There is something here that probably goes back to the sensationalist popular press of the 19 th century, looking for sob stories and horror stories that “could happen to anyone” and “bring the nation together.”\n\nThere is quite a bit of irony in the fact that the inquiries of the artistic and theoretical avant-gardes of the 20 th century, originally devised, with a few exceptions, in the hopes of some kind of “anti-capitalist” revolution, are now of interest only to the dissident right. The alt-right is the inheritor of Dada and the Situationist International. It is also amusing to be reminded that Fredric Jameson, in his “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” obsessively poured over by graduate students in the humanities in the early 1990s, complained that “satire” was now irrelevant as a cultural mode: the critical distance and objective standards presupposed by satire had been abolished by the commodification of the world, which (as Baudrillard had been insisting for decades) “flattened out” all representations and realities in a condition of universal equivalence.\n\nAll that was now possible was a politically impotent “parody.” What had in fact happened, though, was that leftist critiques had been absorbed into and neutralized by the liberal world order—as if they had ever really been outside of that order in the first place. But the irreverent satire on the alt-right (how far back would we have to go to find a satirist equal to the Chateau Heartiste?) is, it seems, not all that easily “absorbed.” If it were, its practitioners would be receiving generous job offers from the New York Times , the Atlantic , the New Yorker , etc., they’d be drawing hundreds of thousands in grants from the NEA, etc.\n\nInstead, they are de-platformed and doxed, while every effort is made, by some of the most powerful institutions tht have ever existed, to destroy their lives and taint anyone who has had even the most tenuous association with them. Maybe satire has some life in it, after all. (One important thing to keep in mind about satire is that it can be dialed up and down, made more or less subtle, depending on exigencies—indeed, sometimes simply repeating, without comment, what another has said, in a carefully constructed context, can be satire enough.)\n\nThe alt-right knows its media—it knows how to deploy a twitter feed, the podcast, to spread memes, to create street art—the only thing it hasn’t mastered yet is actual, physical, presence. Such presence will clearly need to be stealth, which is hard to master. These kinds of observations have sent me back, in recent posts, to the originary scene, and Eric Gans’s reflections on the origins of the aesthetic. Gans locates the aesthetic in the oscillation in attention on the part of the participant on the scene between the sign issued by his fellows and the central object drawing everyone in and repelling everyone back.\n\nThe aesthetic, then, involves the human, not the divine—it is our way of representing to each other the kinds of “poses” struck by other members of the community that guarantee (or fail to) that they are suitable to accompany us to sites of social distribution. In other words, aesthetic representations test out the various ways we can recognize each other as human (which means that for the aesthetic, the human is always a question). Aesthetic representations that transcend or perfect humanity, or purport to, are really representing institutions, not poses, postures and gestures on a scene. How do we look to each other as potential guarantors (and potential violators) of reciprocal presence on a scene marked by mimetic crisis?\n\nAs both threatening and vulnerable; i.e., grotesque. Exacerbate these conflicting postures, and you get satire, with its figures bombastic and craven, domineering and slavish, perennially pumping up balloons to be punctured. We see such representations, and we can see others and ourselves, and we can laugh at what goes into and is nevertheless deferred in our everyday representations of ourselves and others. But satire also, of course, bites—what satire reveals is who can survive being punctured and go on in common knowledge of our human faults; and who is really the kind of monster satire teaches us to detect and avoid becoming.\n\nSatire that dispenses with logocentrism once and for all would represent the difference between logocentric, “conversational” representations and the vast networks of technology and power (the imperative field) propping them up. The current NPC meme (is it still current?) is a perfect example. The discipline of satire enters the other disciplines and exposes their reliance on global pseudo-markets, frenzied egalitarian crusades, elite vendettas, as well as cheesy narratives, dead metaphors, sickly clichés, underpaid writers, stagehands, and the blithering idiots produced by the contemporary schools of journalism.\n\n(Indeed, all these postures and positions must be traced back to the supplementation of imagined speech situations.) “Debate” or “dialogue” with anyone dependent on mainstream funding and approval is obviously pointless. Sure, they’re human, but they’re also puppets, and the strings are increasingly visible. They’re walking collections of talking points. They’re tiny people, and also big, blundering people, and crazed scientific frauds, and yahoos. Satire doesn’t rely on or desire fake experiences of presence, communion, or F2F encounters—it revels in the distances and alienations that make it possible to carve the caricature, defamiliarize the comforting illusion, de-activate the automatized gesture.\n\nIf it’s written in classical prose (as we may say of Swift’s satires) it is simultaneously a satire on the transparent, reasonable world classical prose presupposes. Post-liberal politics will be at its best when it’s a giant, open, school of satire."
    },
    {
      "slug": "naming-origins-and-the-necessary-self-referentiality-of-social-order-gablog",
      "title": "Naming, Origins and the Necessary Self-Referentiality of Social Order",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Everything is nothing but the unfolding of its event of origin. To know something is to know its origin; even more, it is to participate in its origin. Constitutive of the originary hypothesis is the assumption that human being emerged in an event, which means that emergence is irreducible to any causes that might have been used as explanations. The reason for this assumption is found in the nature of language itself, which cannot be explained naturalistically. There is no path from whatever “signs” animals exchange to human utterances that can be understand even in the absence of anything in the world to refer to. We don’t need to be standing next to a mountain to speak about mountains. How can that be? Did we (English speakers) all at some point agree to call mountains “mountains”? The silliness of this idea is immediately apparent—in what language would we have articulated this agreement, and when would we have agreed to use the words used in forming the agreement?\n\nIt is possible to refer to the emergence and creation of the sign on the originary scene as a kind of “agreement”—that, apparently, was the point of Rene Girard’s critique of the originary hypothesis as a “social contract theory.” But the notion of “agreement” cannot account for the paradoxical emergence of the sign—all the participants on the scene point to the central object and thereby “name” it as the central object, which is to say, as “God”; but they are able to name it because it is “already” God, and has already repelled their advance. The paradox of the event replaces the infinite regress a philosopher might find (infinite regress is an effect of the declarative sentence).\n\nPart of this paradox is that the “referent” is both present (an object of appetite, right in front of the group) and absent (an object of desire and the transcendence of desire) and this is what makes the sign, and then signification in general, iterable, under circumstances that need not be “similar” to its first use. Gans somewhere says that “God” is the only word whose meaning and referent are identical, which further embodies this paradox. The “meaning” of the word “God” is that which makes it possible for us to speak with each other, which we tacitly refer to whe never we speak. As Gans elsewhere says, every word, indeed, every utterance, is the Name-of-God.\n\nIt seems strange that the primary importance of origins has not played much role in originary social thinking. Too much focus, perhaps, has been directed towards ends, based on a model of the completed scene. Perhaps there is something frightening about pursuing the consequences of the claim that all meaning, which also means all truth, all right, all legitimacy, is located in origins, and only in origins. As soon as we move past the most primitive social orders, origins must become contentious, and if origins are as imperative as our hypothesis suggests, it is very hard to see how such contentions could be settled.\n\nThe notion of legitimation by origins is fraught with seemingly unresolvable difficulties. What is the “real” origin of a social order? For most societies, the answer lies back in times covered by myths and legends; the problems for a social order whose founding is accompanied by comprehensive documentation may even be worse—what about contradictions in the founding documents, the hidden powers, interests and influences only partially registered in those documents? A documented founding can be studied, and new studies undermine the conclusions reached by the previous ones. And, moreover, what if the founding is dishonorable, or unacceptable in some way? Why should be obliged to look back to such an event to understand and justify what we decide now?\n\nThe problem with all of these objections is that they assume that the question is, origins or something else? But there is nothing else. Your critical, rationalistic, moralizing attack on revered origins has its own origins, in another, disciplinary, event. Whatever pact could be forged to reconcile the differing accounts of origins, or whatever act of subjugation could install one at the expense of others, also has an origin. Nothing is done without precedents. The American founders, by their own accounts, rummaged through a vast collection of constitutions, ancient and modern, before framing their own, and then ended up creating an imitation of the British institutional structure.\n\nSince we know there is an origin, the exact details of that origin become less important. We know that what makes the origin an origin is that it placed us before a center, and we can’t help but be aware of the social center(s) around which we congregate with others. The historical study that goes into clarifying the actual foundations of a community are essential, but the more fundamental question is how to represent the occupation of the center as a succession of origins, each of which seeks to retrieve an origin prior to the previous one. (Going forward always means going back.)\n\nBut, we might say, the Bolshevik revolution was certainly an origin—how could we contend that it sought an origin prior to the one claimed by the Tsarist dynasty? First of all, let’s dwell briefly on the fact that the Bolshevik revolution was an origin, and was recognized as such by succeeding generations of Communist Party leadership. It’s interesting that a political project that defined itself by its future-orientation should concern itself so with its origins, as evidenced by the Lenin cult and even the need to airbrush out of existence disgraced members of the revolutionary generation. The very fact that the past is filled with unrealized possibilities means that we are always situated within the origin.\n\nIn fact, leftism is across the board obsessed with founding events—in the US, with the martyrs of Mc Carthyism, Emmett Till, the March on Washington, Stonewall, etc., etc.—verging, even, on a kind of ancestor worship. The history of the various leftisms, like any history, is littered with sacred names; indeed, much of leftist politics can be seen as a series of attempts to sacralize new names for which future generations can be asked to sacrifice (Christine Blasey Ford’s name will be solemnly intoned decades from now as the history of women’s liberation from frat boy groping is commemorated). Marx and Engels even identified the achievement of communism with the restoration of primitive communism, on a “higher” level.\n\nAnd if Eric Vogelin’s identification of modernity with Gnosticism is valid, modernity, which is to say, leftism, seeks after the most primordial of origins, a good creation prior to the evil, false one within which we are imprisoned. But if traditional communities are grounded in sacred origins, and so are revolutionary modern ones (as in American Constitutionalotry), what’s the difference between the two? How do we find the thread of tradition amidst the clutter of Gnostic mock-origins?\n\nWe can acknowledge we’re looking for origins and therefore do so in good faith, for one thing. The left can’t really admit that “Anita Hill” is a sacred name, because the only modes of explanation available to them would lead to the unhelpful conclusion that such names are sacralized because it is useful to do so in pursuit of power. They must represent themselves as even more cynical and power-hungry than they actually are. But those modes of explanation have their origin in the founding event of any attack on tradition—the identification of naming as an instrument of domination. Such a revelation is, of course, possible with any name, and the experience of discovery can be thrilling.\n\nThat everything in the world is named, that there are obvious, unquestioned ways of talking about everything is self-evidently part and parcel of the way the human world is organized. So, to attack the authorities, point out that all the names of institutions, places, and practices, are integral to their authority. It’s undeniable that the way we talk about reality helps keep reality the way it is. And it’s always at least possible that one could speak about things in a different way. Pointing that out gives one a permanent critical edge.\n\nIf we see origins as the source of legitimacy and object and condition of possibility of knowledge, then that’s all we really can and therefore want to speak about. Let’s shift the terrain to talk of origins. If we’re originary thinkers, we’re ready to go all the way back. But we’re also ready to occupy the present. Leftists can interrupt a public lecture with chants of “We believe Dr. Ford,” but we can flesh out the authority they must imagine that will make that belief mandatory. How do they imagine such an authority put in place, defended, expanded? We must know such things if we are to take such a belief as imperative.\n\n(Whom else are we obliged to believe? About what? What is the orthodoxy?) The Ford-faithful would place us in the midst of an event of origin, the unveiling of a sacred name. In that case, every element of the Ford-event must refer to every other element, in a hierarchy flowing from the numinous name itself. “Blasey Ford” must evoke and re-christen the whole series of names from which it derives its own authority. Anything less would be a crude instrumentalization of the divine. If the Ford-faithful are hesitant to spell all this out, we originary thinkers are glad to help out because we really believe that this is how a social order should be articulated—and if the event turns out other than anticipated, well, who is to be blamed for that?\n\nThe Senate hall in which Ford testified, the senate or secret service police who protected her, the laws she and her allies sought to invoke, all have origins that make them a poor fit for the Ford origin event. Post-liberals might also have objections to the republican traditions embodied in these institutions, but those republican traditions themselves necessarily refer back to more salutary and secure (monarchical and aristocratic) modes of authority and power and we are happy to refer to those, and to preserve whatever remains of them in existing traditions. Even if nothing but seething hatred of those traditions were to remain we would be willing to recover the object of that hatred by reading between the lines.\n\nBut we can draw an even more precise line: the origin of any community capable of originary inquiry rather than prescribed devotion to figures of origin must be the transcendence of sacrificial logic by the authorities of the community. We are not engaged in exchanges with the sacred names—we don’t perform some action for them so they will help us win the battle or find a husband for my daughter. We give ourselves over to the preservation and enhancement of our models without hope of return. This repudiation of sacrificial thinking must have had an origin, and every event in a post-sacrificial order iterates that origin.\n\nEven reversions to sacrificial logics iterate that origin insofar as they are recognized, marked and repudiated as such. The work of the sovereign, as onomastician-in-chief, with the help of the disciplines, is to construct an order as completely self-referential as possible by having every post-sacrificial event noted, named, and referred to every other such event with ever greater rigor and thoroughness. It should be impossible to think outside of the idiom of the community—every word, every sentence, would be caught up in the web and woof of the social order’s ongoing commemoration of its emergence from sacrifice.\n\nOf course other (post-sacrificial) languages—scientific, diplomatic and others—would cross the boundaries of specific social orders and one could always learn them; and one social order could unite with or subsume another within its own idiom. But there would be no “generic” discourse, as, in fact, is the case right now because every social order does exactly what I have been describing here, only in more or less haphazard and conflicted ways, and always with significant sacrificial admixtures. But the “resources” are always available with which to both reveal the unacknowledged self-referential order of the community and to begin to construct a denser, more explicit and good faith network of self-reference among post-sacrificial practices."
    },
    {
      "slug": "distribution-from-the-center",
      "title": "Distribution from the Center",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve been overlooking the most obvious and (materially) important thing the center does: distribute. Examining the way all distribution is from the center will take us a long way towards addressing all kinds of economic questions: it all becomes a question of what, exactly, is being distributed. On the originary scene, we assume a roughly equal distribution of the central object. Everyone who has issued the sign gets a piece. But why should this be the case? Why couldn’t one or more members of the group get shoved aside once a symmetrical relation to the center has been established through the sign—say, one or two particularly weak or non-contributing members of the group, who pose no threat to anyone, and therefore were less important than others in addressing the danger created by the mimetic crisis?\n\nI think the answer is that the event could only be remembered and repeated if equivalence between issuing the sign and being a member of the group is absolute. If it turns out, in the midst of the sparagmos, that one or more members who participated in emitting the sign were closed off from consumption, the pre-human pecking order will have been reintroduced into the new human group (or violence will erupt again), meaning that the “humanization” of the group has failed to “take.”\n\nBut this still doesn’t mean everyone gets an identical piece. It would be impossible for us to determine exactly what that means now, much less for those eating together on the originary scene. We must assume an at least minimal hierarchy on the originary scene—a hierarchy now mediated by the use of the sign, which I assume must be flashed repeatedly in the course of the sparagmos. The stronger member will defer to the weaker member, but as the stronger to the weaker, just as the weaker defers to the stronger as the stronger. In this new situation there will be enough uncertainty about who, in the total scheme of things (the alpha having been displaced), is actually “stronger,” and by how much, to allow for a balance to emerge.\n\nWe could call this a spontaneous emergence of order, but, in fact, it is the sign, continually pointing to the center, which allows for the portions to be “allocated.” The center is the source of distribution, and the proof of this is that when the originary scene is formalized as ritual, the distribution most approximating total inclusion, that is, pre-established “equal” pieces, will be adhered to—with any exceptions being due to special functions any particular member plays in the ritual. The group itself must assume and insist that apportionment is determined by the center. What matters most is that inclusion in the group—even of a member despised or mocked—is beyond all question. The most terrible consequences of liberal individualism come from the destruction of this assumption that all individuals, before all else, have their entire existence within the group.\n\nOnce a human occupies the center, distribution is determined by the central authority. At this point, equal distribution is no longer a consideration. The central authority will distribute in accord with merit and loyalty. This also means that possession of what has been distributed will be contingent upon continued shows of merit and loyalty. The most skilled hunter might get the largest share of the game for himself and his family or tribe; the bravest warrior will likewise receive goods and honors commensurate with his significance. Over time these “aristocrats” will become centers of distribution themselves. I will assume that it is first of all subsequent to conquest that land will be distributed among the conquerors, in accord with rank and contribution to the war effort.\n\nThis is all unproblematic as long as sacral kingship holds, which is to say as long as there is no differentiation between the occupant of the center and the subsistent center (corresponding to the central object on the scene, and what keeps the center the center once the object has been consumed). Tribute comes into the central authority, which is simultaneously the ritual center, and is distributed from there. Differentiation between the two modalities of the center sets in with the discrediting of sacrificial practices, which is to say practices which assumed a moral correspondence between tribute flowing to the center and distribution flowing out from it. Once an exchange between what is given to the center, and the benefits in life one receives can no longer be believed in, the occupant of the center and the subsistent center must be made commensurable again. This is the yet unsolved problem of humanity.\n\nThe first attempt to solve the problem is through the concept of “justice,” one of the first concepts explored by the first discipline to liberate itself from the sacral order, philosophy. Justice: each gets his due. Unmoored from a juridical system relying on precedents and limited to questions of property damage (which would include crimes like murder and rape), the concept immediately becomes unworkably complicated. This is also the condition of possibility of imperium in imperio —the measure of a good ruler is that he acts justly, preserves justice, which means that a ruler who does not do so is not a “genuine” ruler.\n\n“Justice” is the subsistent center, to which the occupant of the center is subordinated. How many rulers have been overthrown, how many failed attempts at overthrowing rulers have been made, in the name of justice? The assumption, though, is still that distribution comes from the center: justice is the distribution to each of his due, whatever that means and however it is to be determined. What is being distributed here is not something possessed by the recipient; rather, it is access to a mode of decision making, a recognition of something like a “right” subsisting in the claimant in the justice system.\n\nThe new philosophical, theological and legal disciplines study “justice,” and the rulers are dependent on their conceptual constructs. Those conceptual constructs are inherently divisive, unlike strictly prescribed ritual distribution, because each player within the social order can articulate the conceptual order to his advantage (such concepts enable one to be conscious of this possibility)—this is possible because the real content of these conceptual orders is the possibility of extracting rights from the sovereign. All subsequent disciplines, all the human sciences, from political economy to sociology to anthropology even, I would say, seemingly unrelated disciplines like psychology fit the same pattern.\n\nThey are all constructing entities, groups, subjects, categories of belonging, that can be managed by and activated to make demands on the center. The post-literate order more or less coincides with the post-sacral order, and these disciplines are constructed in accord with the logic I’ve been exploring in my posts on the disciplines: supplementations of speech acts required so as to make writing a simulation of speech are turned into nominalizations which then designate entities, ultimately mental (even the most “materialistic” disciplines, like economics, are ultimately comprised of mental entities, like “choice,” “utility,” “value,” etc.) that can be the recipients of the rights distributed by the center.\n\nEven a state law for institutionalizing the mentally disabled will be constructed in terms of the “right” to treatment of the patient and the “right” to protection of society. The disciplines are essentially studies into the simulacra known as “rights”—what they are, what they entail, who can have them, who decides on their implementation, etc. We are still really within the frame of “justice.” Goods and property are no longer distributed by the center; various kinds of rights to access, or compete for access, to goods and property are distributed (of course these rights translate more or less directly into actual goods—the indirectness offers lots of wiggle room to sovereign and activist players alike).\n\nThe demand for autonomy explicitly made by the bearer of rights is therefore a demand for greater centralization. This is the major paradox of the mature liberal order, and at least a part of the cause of all its major dysfunctions. So, in a post-sacral order, what, other than rights, is there for the central authority to distribute, and to do so in a way complemented by the subsistent center? I think the most radical break with liberal utilitarianism is necessary here, and we have to say that what the center distributes is opportunities to make a complete donation of oneself to the subsistent center. There are only two possibilities that follow from the abolition of the imperative exchange of the sacrificial order: the endless struggle between claimants for ever more obscure rights, i.e., “justice”; or, replacing the donation of a part of your property to the deity in exchange for continued life, health and prosperity, with a complete donation of all that you are to whatever is “highest,” or most central.\n\nWhat this entails is something I have discussed many times: embedding the commands of the occupant of the center in all social practices. There is a constitutive gap between the command given and the command obeyed: self-donation entails the effort to enhance the consistency of the command given with the command obeyed—you could say, to make the command better than it is while ensuring it is a form of obedience that would be recognized by the occupant of the center as obedience to the command he has issued. The human sciences, then, are transformed into studies of imperatives from the center, tracing them back to earlier imperatives, speculating regarding possible imperatives, hypothesizing regarding the extension of present imperatives into networks of future ones.\n\nThe full donation of one’s self to the subsistent center is demanding—not everyone will be equally capable (everyone will be somewhat capable). But once we have dispensed with “rights” and “justice,” except for within very sharply circumscribed settings, authority can be distributed in accord with evidence of self-donation. This is not mere self-sacrifice—it’s not a question of placing someone who gives all of his possessions to charity, or can refrain from proscribed actions more consistently than others in charge of important institutions, by virtue of those “sacrifices” alone. Demonstrations of self-donation involve some clarification of the imperative order, some “competency” in translating the commands of central authority into sustainable practices.\n\nNor is this a matter of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” which is just a modification of “justice.” Those granted more authority will also be rewarded, because the rewards include greater command responsibility. Only in this way could we, on post-sacrificial terms, reverse modernity’s collapse into distribution according, ultimately, to “feelings,” and establish an order predicated upon raising the level of discipline.\n\nOne of the most powerful critiques of modern liberalism coming from a postmodern standpoint is that, despite its formal inclusiveness, the rights-based order must always locate some group or type of person unworthy or incapable of bearing rights. “Rights” are possessed by “humans,” so the argument simply becomes one over who counts as “human.” I would say the real basis of the critique is that there is always someone who, if granted rights, would subtract from the rights of others. If some minority is to have its rights guaranteed, then whoever is deemed a threat to those rights must have their own curtailed. There is always some exclusion, and exclusions from a social order provide leverage for subversion by those in power disaffected with that order.\n\nReceiving the gift of the opportunity to donate oneself to the subsistent center necessarily includes everyone within the order. Everyone is expected to give themselves, and what each is expected to give and receive is commensurate to the contribution made to deferring violent centralizing. The enhancement of the command received by the command obeyed is effected by embedding the command in some practice of deferral. Everyone can be expected to engage in such deferral, and we need never abandon the possibility that even the most reprobate may eventually do so. So, there is no need to place any “category” of human outside of the social order."
    },
    {
      "slug": "esthetic-oscillations",
      "title": "Esthetic Oscillations",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’m going to follow up here on what have been prominent, but subordinate reflections on aesthetics in some recent posts. It’s always good to go back to the beginning: in this case, Eric Gans’s location of the aesthetic on the originary scene in the oscillation, in the attention of the participant, between the sign put forth by another participant, and the central object itself. This right away distinguishes between the sacred, focused on the being of the central object, on the one hand, and the aesthetic, focused on a fellow member, on the other. This distinction is confirmed by Gans’s discussions, especially in Originary Thinking , but elsewhere as well, on the origins of secular narrative and art, which always involves a shift from sacred to human agents.\n\nGans focuses on the well-formed sign, the gesture itself, that presents the object as especially desirable, because desired and prohibited by the gesture itself, and which in turn sends the attention back to the object, which loses its “aura” separate from the sign, leading the attention back to the sign. The gesture is formal—indeed, this is the origin of “form” in human existence, and by “form” we can mean a part of an act or object we can single out and identify as something we see in another act or object. The other’s gesture is well-formed insofar as it is the “same” gesture we see another perform—differences between them can be seen as differences between better and worse formed signs, or, later, at a higher level of sophistication, different types of signs or gesture, but this is a way of recognizing they are the same kind of (repeatable) thing.\n\nOn the originary scene itself, the esthetic and sacred are interdependent, with the esthetic subordinate to the sacred, confirming the transcendence of the object—again, as confirmed by a very long history of sacred representation before the esthetic is ever separated and made autonomous as “art.” It is also confirmed by the fact that Gans always talks about art, and esthetic criteria like “beauty,” as concerning the representation of the central object, even if now from the standpoint of the humans on the scene. (“Beauty,” it seems, emerges as the sacred withdraws.) But it must have always been possible to assess the aesthetic component of representations, even if only to point out that something about the representation was not worthy of the majesty or dignity of the deity, and this is clearly true on the originary scene, where the “form” of the sign becomes an object of attention.\n\nGans, to my knowledge, never refers to anything but the sign itself, by which we mean the aborted gesture of appropriation—the means by which each participant makes it clear to the others that he will not advance further towards the central object. What counts as this gesture must then be distinguished from what is not “of” the gesture in one’s fellow participant. We ordinarily think about the gesture as a pointing, an assumption which has become increasingly entrenched in originary thinking as we have incorporated the social psychology of Michael Tomasello, with his notion of “joint attention.” I don’t dispute the centrality of pointing at all: it is very easy to understand how a grasping would become, through minor modification which need not even be deliberately introduced, a pointing (it’s odd that we don’t have a good noun here: “a pointing” is awkward).\n\nAt the same time, the pointing is a tiny part of the human figure, the rest of which must at least be providing “background” setting of the “point.” The rest of the body must be in some kind of equipoise: certainly not moving, but not even leaning too much toward the object; certainly not retreating, which would indicate concession to the more Alpha, but also not leaning too far back. This equipoise is probably novel as well, indicating a new mode of self-control. Equipoise suggests balance, in this case between the other as threatening, on the one hand, and as vulnerable, on the other. This articulation of fearfulness/fearsomeness is, then, embedded in the gesture as esthetic form.\n\nThis has been the basis for my saying that the most originary esthetic mode is satire—it is satire that captures the grotesqueness of the human figure bare, stripped of any transcendence, simultaneously harmful and harmless, passively aggressive. The implication, then, is that all aesthetic representation, and all art, has a satiric dimension to it. This seems to be me confirmed by the fact that the esthetic scene, to draw the spectator’s imagination into it, must at the very least distinguish itself from some generic scene of “normal” life—to suggest that the scene that conforms to all our expectations is in fact other than how it appears is implicitly satiric.\n\nBut there is clearly much more to the esthetic, and to art, than the satiric; the beautiful, most obviously. I think we can integrate all the different elements of the esthetic by identifying an oscillation within the sign-giving participant on the scene between the sign itself and the elements, evident in the entire posture of the figure, that are less formed, warring, but ultimately articulated in the sign: that fearsomeness/fearfulness balance. The conversion of that balance into a formed sign wherein it can be forgotten, and our attention directed back to the central object, is where the relation between the satiric and the rest of esthetic form resides.\n\nWhat is beautiful is seeing warring, i.e., potentially violent, elements, brought together in a whole that eliminates the possibility of violence while allowing for the expression of all of those elements in relation to each other. And it does seem to me that effective satire can never really be beautiful.\n\nSo, from a purely esthetic perspective, we have, on the scene, an oscillation between the “formative” (but not formed) posture, on the one hand, and the (formed) sign on the other. The oscillation is not static, though, because each “swing” back to the sign also directs our attention to the object, which leads to greater preponderance of gesture over posture. By the time the group actually advances on the object (these specifically intra-esthetic oscillation accounts, then, for how one “snaps out of” the oscillation between sign and object itself and actually proceed to appropriation), posture has become a “component” of gesture.\n\nWhat was once jarring satire becomes harmonious in the beautiful. And the beautiful clearly is much more helpful in enabling us to get along with each other than satire would be; moreover, it’s not clear that the reformist purposes often attributed to satire (pointing out and ridiculing bad behavior so as to induce better behavior) has ever been effective, or ever could be (if you’re the target of satire, it’s “unfair”—which no doubt it must be—if you’re not, or need not include yourself among its targets, it confirms your superior virtue)—so, the significance of satire must lie elsewhere.\n\nThe moralizing intentions attributed to satire may very well be a way of evading the possibility that satire is both, to draw upon Kant’s definition of the aesthetic, purposeful and purposeless. After all, if we’re really Yahoos, as Swift’s satire would presumably have it, what can we do about it? Somehow, it’s true both that we are Yahoos, and that it’s horrifying to imagine ourselves as Yahoos—unlike some modern materialist encouraging us to accept that we, too, are just animals, Swift is certainly not suggesting that we “reconcile” ourselves to our essential Yahooness. It is also interesting that satire gets seen as both extremely reactionary, insofar as it seems to target the new and pretentious in particular, and revolutionary, insofar as it disrupts all authority and leaves no perspective, however sacred or privileged, unsatirized.\n\nMeanwhile, while I’m not sure about this, and there are no doubt exceptions, it seems to me that devoted satirists are the least inclined of all artists to assert a political stance. The know that anything can be satirized, even the genuinely virtuous, even if they’re not sure why. The idea that there must always be some “standard” that the satirist is holding up in examining “transgressions” from it is dubious, even if satire can be used in such a way. The more basic foundation of satire is that all human action can be presented as absurd, with some shift in perspective.\n\nThat satire neither possesses not recognizes any authority makes it apparently “anarchic”; meanwhile, more favored aesthetic categories (most would probably dispute placing satire on the same level as them) like the beautiful and the sublime are very authoritative, both in themselves (one is gently subordinated to the beautiful, cowed by the sublime) and in their integration into institutions (perhaps some of the attention-seeking modern structures aim at satire, while falling into partisan ugliness, but architecture, the most unavoidable and political form of art, generally aims at beauty and/or sublimity). A ruler certainly wants his dwelling to signify vigor and harmony, not evoke laughter.\n\nBut in disclaiming authority, satire also makes no claim upon it: it simply accepts that authority will be authority. Rulers really have nothing to fear from a genuine satirist (even if the satirist, like Brecht, believes otherwise). It is beauty and sublimity that can be readily mobilized for propagandistic purposes to discredit one authority in the name of another. Beauty’s assertion of disinterest makes it especially vulnerable to appropriation; satire’s more genuine disinterest lies in it being interested in anything. We couldn’t do away with beauty and sublimity even if we wanted to, and no one would really want to; but, it is still the case that satire will and should have the last word.\n\nWe can see satire as making visible the distinction between posture and gesture. This would distinguish it from, for example, irony, since the distinction between posture and gesture can be presented extremely forcefully in a non-ironic way. Nor is parody interested in the posture/gesture distinction: parody repeats the entire “move” until it is set on a different scene: the move is discredited on the new scene (it’s worn out) but left intact in its original “habitat.” Satire is imitating the ways others imitate others which, if you remove the center from consideration, is what the use of language involves. So, satire “brackets” the center, that is, proceeds as if it’s not there while knowing it is; it knows the beautiful must eventually guide us through the established mode of distribution, while simply ignoring this.\n\nSatire is not really interested in being realistic, or in improvement—it just wants to show us what inevitably gets forgotten in more acceptable forms of representation. It must be extremely difficult to be an uncompromising satirist, and it is difficult to make sense of an uncompromising satire: we want to think imitation comes to an end at some point, and it’s dizzying to think that it doesn’t. But the implication of this analysis is that satire is the enemy of all imperia in imperio, especially the source of all really important “implicit” forms of sovereignty today: the disciplines (what distinguishes the [easily satirized, implicitly satirical] “populist” is that he makes a claim to legitimacy that doesn’t depend upon economics, sociology, political science, etc.).\n\nI think that a lot of artists and writers, once promoted by the left, like, to take just one example, William S. Burroughs, whose work is really an unrelenting satire on the medical, scientific and social scientific disciplines, will become a resource for the absolutist-informed right. Disciplinary spaces (revolutionary, fractal science) aiming at clarifying the chains of command will be generated through satires of established disciplines (normal, grant-seeking, influence peddling, usurpationist science)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-the-proper-use-of-the-declarative-sentence",
      "title": "On the Proper Use of the Declarative Sentence",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The proper use of the declarative sentence is, first of all, to expose the ostensives and imperatives embedded in another declarative sentence. A declarative sentence is the tip of an iceberg. It rests upon a vast extent of events that have been witnessed, things that have been noticed, and reports, second, third, fourth and so on, hand, of what has been witnessed and noticed; and, upon a deferral of imperatives to demand and seize what has been noticed, to silence and ignore witnesses. A single sentence has roots going back to the origin of language. Needless to say, any sentence directly refers to only a tiny island within this vast sea, while alluding, more or less indirectly, to the rest of it. If we take any sentence as a response to another sentence (maybe by the same speaker or writer, maybe in the same text), then the question is, which “island,” which cluster of ostensives and imperatives is to be surfaced, made ostensively available, in the present sentence? The utterer’s decision paves one path to the center over other possible ones.\n\nThe first referent was the central object on the originary scene, the object that repelled appropriation and elicited and was nominated by the first sign. We are always on the originary scene, which has never been “closed”—every referent retains some of that repellent force of the originary referent, however diminished. The sign, in referring to the thing, lets it be, and in letting it be, lets us share attention devoted to the thing, rather than contend for it. So, the referent lets us be as well. But I don’t really mean to say that, in discussing the relative merits of domestic vs. imported beer in a local bar, we are refraining from plunging into a death struggle over… what, exactly?\n\nWhat is going on is, of course, more complex, and I will now proceed to do the same for the model I’m working with. The argument over beer (which, could, of course, if enough of it has been consumed, conceivably lead to fisticuffs) provides us with a referent (beer) which is sufficiently interesting, which promotes conviviality, and which is low-stakes enough to keep us from arguing about something else which would be less of all these things, which might be more likely to lead to breaches of the peace. Of course, even that more provocative topic would be less dangerous than another possible topic, maybe more contained (it might lead to a fight between individuals, but not a melee consuming the entire bar)—there are layers of deferral here, and this is much of what we mean by “civilization.”\n\nThe ultimate danger is an irreconcilable struggle over the entire mode of distribution of goods, powers, responsibilities and referents, which is kept at a distance but many buffers, one of which is the dispute over beers. And, in fact, discussions over things like beer can be interesting in their own right in large part because of this vastly extended setting.\n\nSo, whe never we’re engaged in any form of discourse, we are aware, more or less vaguely, of a more or less distant possible crisis that would make the referents of our discourse impossible; and, we are somewhat more aware of the “tripwires” that, once broken, would disable the particular buffer we happen to be relying on at the moment. Many are the possible paths from the weakening of any one buffer to the initiation of a more general crisis—there is really little else that the human sciences should be studying. Each of us has some explicit, and far more tacit, knowledge about some of these paths and their relative dangers.\n\nOur discoursing is always concerned with preserving and enhancing the general buffering system, if not necessarily any particular buffer. Even those we consider most destructive are, by their own lights, trying to do this—they may simply think that vast buffering regions must be razed to protect the buffering order as a whole. If, then, any sentence exposes the ostensives and imperatives of another sentence, it does so in order to make more visible the ostensives in danger of being obscured and whose obfuscation would make them less effective as anchors of reality, and to clarify those imperatives which, having been confused, are being obeyed in ways that escalate conflict rather than increasing coherence.\n\nOf course, a particular sentence, or a particular discourse, might be (necessarily is, to some extent) a discovery process aimed at surfacing ostensives and imperatives to see if, indeed, their clarification points towards greater coherence. Knowledge here involves various degrees of vagueness.\n\nThe social model implicit in this originary semiotics is “solar”: there is a center, around which “planets” (other centers) revolve, and then satellites revolving around these planets. If we imagine that satellites would have their own satellites, or, for that matter, that solar systems revolve around other solar systems within a galaxy that itself revolves around other galaxies, and so on, we can begin to get a sense of the complexity of it all. The complexity is qualified and mitigated, though, by the basic reality that there is a center (not to the universe, of course), without which all the revolving would come to an end.\n\nWithout a social center our words and sentences wouldn’t mean anything—we’d still manage to communicate after some catastrophe that destroyed all but the most local forms of social organization, but that’s because our languages would still “remember” the more articulated social forms and because we would immediately orient ourselves to those local centers, leading to corresponding and, over time, massive changes in our language. So, those discursive beers those men are referring to are satellites around the men’s friendship (another object they could refer to), with that friendship, for each man, a satellite revolving around a broader nexus of relationships of which he is the center, and that man himself a satellite revolving around a workplace authority, which itself revolves around a communal authority, and so on. Each referable “sun” marks a certain degree of deferral from some social crisis (which could never really happen as we imagine or fear) that we always want to place a little further away.\n\nWhen we speak, then, we want to keep things in orbit. We prefer one center-orbital relation over others. We have to look to the center in order to intuit, or know as best we can, how the orbits in which we spin can be maintained—within the orbit itself one doesn’t even feel motion. In the same way, if someone “offends” me, I must derive the meaning of the offense from the center—it is from the social center that the rules of personal interaction that have been violated emanate. In feeling, naming and responding to the offense, I construct the center that commands me to do so—I don’t do it out of nothing (I can’t just decide to be offended by the curve of another man’s ears); rather, I interpret and revise an existing set of rules; I modify a practice.\n\nIt is when such a breach occurs that I feel I am in orbit. I am always already attached to the center, and I know this in particular when I am uncertain regarding what to do and must try to “hear” or “heed” a command from the center. That’s what we do when we “make up our mind”—try to determine which of the various commands with which I am bombarded is the oldest, comes most undiminished from the originary center. Doing so might entail mapping out a great many declarative sentences, each one aimed at surfacing a particular imperative, which brings in train other submerged ones, which I try to surface in turn.\n\nDeclarative sentences almost certainly followed ostensives and imperatives rather quickly subsequent to the origin of language, but it is only as a result of the invention of writing that we can speak about declarative sentences (which, of course, we do in declarative sentences): it is writing, first of all a mode of inquiry into language, that gives us letters, words and sentences as “objects.” The imperatives surrounding, impelling and inhabiting declarative sentences are not represented in declarative sentences, which can therefore be taken as representing reality directly: as restoring, in effect, an ostensive condition in which we all stand in front of an absent object and view it together.\n\nTo see declarative sentences this way, imperatives and ostensives must be seen as “fragmented” declaratives, “missing,” in the case of the imperative, for example, the subject, which analysts can treat as “implicit” in the imperative. Classical prose, an artifact of literacy, supplements the oral scene by verbally representing the present but unuttered elements of the scene. These supplementations are essentially partial synonyms of Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes, like “say,” “know,” “want” and “feel”: look at synonyms for these words and you will see that they are all ways of saying someone is saying, knowing, wanting or feeling under specific conditions, with certain qualifications, expressing various degrees of certainty, urgency or skepticism.\n\nDavid Olson analyzes the written text as reported speech, which means when we use words like “believe,” “assume,” “consider,” and so on about ourselves, we are essentially literate subjects, as marked by the fact that we are reporting our own speech in the process of uttering it. Ostensive signs direct our attention to some object, or to some modification of an object; declarative sentences direct our attention to, and therefore represent, all these abstractions fictionalizing reported speech, which become the concepts and objects of the disciplines, beginning with philosophy, the first discipline of all. The ostensive sign points to a sacralized object; the simulated ostensive of the declarative sign points to the authority of an imagined speaker.\n\nTake a few of the terms important to the social sciences like, say, “society,” “structure” and “necessity.” “Society” cannot be traced back to one of the mental verbs among the primes, but it is derived from a Latin word meaning something more like “association,” in the sense of a fellowship or fraternity. The notion of an organization voluntarily joined by individuals who are previously unattached in relation to that organization then becomes a model for what had previously been an order bound up in levels of reciprocity. Its origins, according to the online etymological dictionary, are from an Indo-European root verb meaning “to follow,” so we have the same process of nominalization into a hypostasized abstraction as with a word like “assumption,” supplementing “say” or “know.”\n\nWith “structure,” we clearly have the transference of a word meaning to “build” to a model of a pre-arranged, static form of the community. To “need” is to “want” very much, so “necessity” is an abstracted want projected onto “reality” itself. What we can see in all these cases is the replacement of the sacred center that is lost once the declarative degrades the ostensive and imperative with an impersonal center, which we have followed, which has built us, whose wants we are obliged to supply—and which is represented by the master of the discipline charged with securing its reality. In the “keywords” of all the disciplines, from philosophy on down, we can see such allusions, kept as indefinite as possible, to an implicit but unnamed center which is ultimately a self-reference to the authority of the discipline. This is the source, even more than competing power centers, of imperium in imperio, of a truer, but implicit sovereignty, which the really only nominal ruler must obey.\n\nThe disciplines can only add modifiers to their nominalizations. The only imperatives issued from within the disciplines involve the command to combine a couple of nominalizations, like “social justice.” A disciplinary space, meanwhile, seeks out ostensives that produce “actionable” imperatives like, first of all, point out the imperative licensing that speech or action. The project of what I have on and off again called “anthropomorphics” is to transform the disciplines into disciplinary spaces which clarify and specify the ostensive that redeems the inquiry. This can ultimately only be done from within the disciplines.\n\nThe means for doing so are infra-linguistic: put the nominalizations of the discipline to work as verbs and ultimately imperatives directed at the discipline itself. What necessitates history, what are sociologists joining and following, what are political scientists structuring? What is the source of the imperatives they obey—if they are told to obey them, explicitly, what do they do? This opens the question: whom do they obey? Which traditional figures? Which authoritative, funding, institutional, political center do they follow, build for, and serve? The more the social order can be presented as a hierarchy of imperatives all leading back to an ostensive center, the more the human sciences become concerned with clarifying the chain of commands, including those that lead us to our inquiry.\n\nThe proper use of the declarative sentence, then, is to surface the disciplinary imperatives and simulated ostensives and then reveal the ostensive-imperative order those imperatives and ostensives have displaced. The center-switch effected by the disciplines can be remedied. The ostensives such a declarative practice “points to” are those that minimize the distance between imperatives issued and imperatives obeyed—which is what human inquiry, finally, wants. Authoritative centrality is followed and joined; orbits are built around the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-name-of-god-technomedia-and-the-model-of-the-work-of-art",
      "title": "The Name of God, Technomedia, and the Model of the Work of Art",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A simple way of settling, or at least minimizing, theological disputes, and especially the tiresome atheist vs. theist one, is by replacing the question of whether God exists with the question of whether the word “God” means anything. I’ve seen theists flip the question towards atheists in a clever way: who, or what, exactly, do you say doesn’t exist? If the atheist has no answer, what is he arguing about? If he gives an answer, the theist can always say, but I never said God was that , or, perhaps, well, then, let’s say God is something other than that (I don’t and can’t know who or what God is ). What is revealed is that both sides believe that the word “God” means something .\n\nThis doesn’t prove that there is an entity somewhere that goes by this name (and of whom we can have some kind of certain knowledge), but it leaves open the possibility (it makes unforeclosable the possibility) of some referent . So, what does “God” mean? Nothing other than this possible referent—as Eric Gans has put it, “God” is the only word whose meaning is the same as its referent. “God” is nothing other than what we refer to as a condition of everything else we say—it is essentially a verbal ostensive gesture. After one has finished defining all known words in terms of other known words, and arrived at the words—Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage—that can only be defined by other words that have those words themselves as part of their own definition, and pointed to all the objects that we have given names to, the question of how we are able to do all this or how do we know that these things, events and acts are called by these words can only be answered by saying “God tells us so.” We can speak because we can say “God.”\n\nGans has also said (but has never, to my knowledge, dwelled upon this) that every word is the Name-of-God. All we ever do is name God (how does the atheist know that the words he uses mean what he thinks they mean? Well, others used them before and he learned from them, but how did they know…?) in His infinite acts and manifestations. Everything that happens as a result of a shared ostensive gesture is an “extension” or “elaboration” of that gesture. Languages are defined by the possibility of novel utterances—and, depending upon what we mean by “utterance,” we could say that every utterance is novel, while relying on all previous ones.\n\nEvery utterance is the name of God because every utterance tries to anchor some imminent or distantly imagined crisis in a lineage of utterances that have deferred such crises going back to the first one. All our arguments are over which names clear away defunct imperatives and adjectives (“attributes”) while conveying the imperatives and adjectives that have been occluded. The way to do this is to surface the imperatives others are obeying and embedding in their discourses and isolating the one that would include them all. (The ultimate counter to any political argument, it seems to me, is to point out that whatever one wants would require a particular kind of central authority to establish and maintain—but that such a central authority may not do what you want, so what we all want is first of all the authority that that is presupposed in our other wants.)\n\nWe are always naming God, but some names include others within them because they represent the continuity from the central authority back to the originary scene by creating a disciplinary space addressing the commands of the central authority. Since the Big Man occupied the center through superior deferral, commands have come from a human at the center: disciplinary spaces, organizations of shared attention, retrieve the open center transcending the central object by studying those commands so as to extend them through practices. Disciplinary spaces studying the production and dissemination of signs generate new forms of media, each of which then, distances itself from while presupposing a scene comprised of participants capable of attending to and dividing an object amongst themselves.\n\nIn other words, I’m arguing for a certain kind of presence always implicit in representation, even in some technofuture where humans only engage each other in mediated and simulated forms. This presence is a collective, centered presence, and not the phenomenological self-presence (in which my intentionality is fully “borne” by my utterances) Derrida deconstructs, but a presence nevertheless. We could say it’s the presence of the present tense, without which past and future make no sense, while being implicit in any use of those tenses (in the “I say” constitutive of any utterance). To say someone does something, someone says something, something happens, is to assume that someone could witness that something alongside me.\n\nThis faith is preserved in experimental science, which assumes we could construct a scene that anyone could reproduce to test any hypothesis worth testing—even if that scene involves noting data recorded on an instrument sensitized to measure movements far too small to be seen or even imagined.\n\nWhat this means, as per the Olsonian model I have adopted, is that more mediated forms of representation (where the poles of communication are separated temporally and/or spatially) have two alternatives open to them: the supplementation of the represented speech act with whatever means the medium provides for simulating the presence of the represented scene (“classical prose” is the first virtual reality, remarkably immersive); or, the representation of the speech act as one variably probable utterance on the variably probable scenes that medium can represent. Examples of the first alternative are chummy asides in the written essay, “fleshed out” characters in fiction, and a “grammar” of film that lets us know, for example, that a particular type of character is going to precipitate a particular kind of plot twist.\n\nPeople cry at movies: that can only be effected by heavy duty “supplementation.” The best examples of the second alternative are “defamiliarizing,” “alienating” and self-referential devices and techniques like those of some modern artists (but by no means only modern artists—ancient satire, Cervantes, Rabelais, Stern and many others discovered such methods long ago). For that matter, consider what radio, and only radio, could do with human voices. This alternative corresponds to an inquiry based culture, one in which we know ourselves to be hypothesizing and devising thought experiments, always on the lookout for new disciplinary spaces.\n\nThe argument has always been that only sentimental pap could succeed on the market, but even if we accept this and set aside the Marxist counter-argument that this only holds for an alienated and narcotized pseudo-public, we can look at Generation Z, and the alt-right contingents in particular, and ask: what kinds of aesthetics are they going to demand? People who have grown up chopping up mass culture and political clichés into brutally satiric memes may not be suckers for romcoms and holiday specials. They may want something a bit more demanding. It may be that mass entertainment so far has been suited to the simulated equality of the early modern marketplace, but becomes less suited the more people see the hands pulling the puppet strings.\n\nSupplemented presence is continuous with the imperium in imperio of “legitimacy”—subordinating state sovereignty to some more real form of sovereignty (whether it be God or the people—al though, of course, it’s been quite a while since too many people have seated God in that role) is to demand and produce simulated forms of presence that produce formulations like “the American people want…,” which asks us to imagine some scene upon which hundreds of millions of American citizens declared some desire with absolute simplicity and unanimity. And still desire it now, when you claim they do, with that same simplicity and unanimity—they are permanently upon a scene where they do nothing but utter this desire in unison (do you see how the satirical possibilities start to present themselves, just by turning this everyday language around a bit?).\n\nClaims of spontaneous opinion formation morph instantly into visions of puppeteering. Every formulation of liberalism or democracy is like this. Popular sovereignty is like constantly crying at the same clichéd cinematic climaxes. If one’s program is to name God, this conditioning provides a challenge. These supplemented presences have seeped deeply into our language and uprooting it from the nooks and crannies in which they entrench themselves would itself just about constitute naming God—because God definitely wants us to repudiate all that. This is what art, what Hannah Arendt called “thought-things,” is for.\n\nThere’s a particular form of poetry I’ve been working on, periodically, as a kind of exercise, for a while, that’s an attempt to serve as a model for the kind of art that would convert supplemented presences into variably probable distanced presences. I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible in English (but definitely not in many other languages—maybe it’s actually a genre somewhere), so it stands as a kind of permanently failed form of poetry. It consists of three words, each of which could play each of the three grammatical roles in the sentence. We could call it a rotating triangle. So, in an adjective-noun-verb sentence, each word could in turn, be adjective, noun, and verb; the same with a subject-verb-object sentence.\n\nThe rigors of word order, the almost universally required use of articles with the singular, and the use of “s” in both conjugation and plural marking in English seem to make this impossible, even while the ease with which so many English words can be used as various parts of speech makes it very tempting. It does become more possible if we allow for imperative sentences. To give you an idea, here’s an example: model gut fish. So, the goal (or the game) would be that the sentence could be read as a model gutting a fish, or a gut modeling a fish, or a fish gutting a model, or a fish modeling a gut, or a gut fishing a model, or a model fishing a gut.\n\nIf we loosen the restrictions and allow for the necessary grammatical modifications, we can get many of these. Like I said, if we allow for imperatives (and punctuation to make it clear), we can get quite a bit as well (especially if we allow for both adj-noun-verb and subject-verb object sentence forms): model: gut fish!; model gut: fish!; model gut: fish!; model gut fish! (this last one entails telling someone to model a particular kind of fish, the gut fish).\n\nSo, we start with an impossible rule, which we gradually relax, producing absurdities that reflect back on the absurd “idealism” of the original rule. We must search through a mass of linguistic material to find words that meet very specific parameters. We then use those words, not for their meanings, but for their possible functions within sentences—but, of course, their meanings can’t help but shine through in comical ways. The more liberties we take with the initial rules, the more we might get interested in that satiric dimension. We take a specific kind of interest in objects: we are looking for ways to highlight both their interchangeability and their uniqueness.\n\nWe inculcate an ethics of making as complete and multifaceted use of all of one’s materials as possible. This kind of interest we can take not only in words, but in people, events and institutions. There are roles, processes and results—these categories are transformed into one another in all kinds of ways. The “modifying” parts of institutions (like rules and forms of adjudication) become the “substantive” part; actions get caught up in their designations. We can imagine ways of dismantling mediated transmissions, by rearranging the relations and sequences between imagined, implicit scene, its mediated construct, and its various sites of reception. We can train ourselves to become absurdist satirists, which is going to be the only way to intellectually penetrate a liberal order that metastasizes as it decomposes.\n\nThe above poem form is just presented as an example of how we might take up naming—I think that today that’s going to involve out-hypothesizing liberalism. The race realists who decompose various ideological stances into a range of genetic profiles (like this from VDARE: https://vdare.com/articles/neurotic-leftists-mobbing-noah-carl-un-pc-cambridge-u-researcher-establishment-right-dithers) can be very effective, but one has to recognize that the effectiveness is satirical, not scientific (even if the broader stance is far more scientific than the leftist hysteria being debunked). Calling humanities professors who wax hysterical over discussions of race and intelligence genetically determined neurotics who therefore go into the humanities and can therefore only sputter pointlessly about race and intelligence is very funny and an excellent way of “flipping” a particular “script.”\n\nWhat’s important here is not the verifiability of genotype> phenotype>field of specialization (al though maybe there’s something to it!) but the way of getting inside of the other’s discourse and making them very uneasy about speaking about such things in the future. Once we laugh, we are in a better position to ask, ok, what’s sending this wave of wailing academics against this one guy who wrote a dissertation and got a teaching job? Once the “motivation” of the “protest” has been scrambled, we can take a close look at the contending imperatives, and therefore the competing sovereign imaginaries, in play. The satirical move of situating people in different roles—from defender of victims to victimizer, from defender of “science” (against “unscientific” “race” science) to object of science (genetically inclined to neurotic “critique”)—defers the move toward centralized violence, which requires its victim be taken completely literally. Lifting literalness a bit is already to hypothesize and to start naming God as the one who commands deferral of the naming that commands immediate and total expulsion."
    },
    {
      "slug": "towards-a-globalist-victimary-unified-field-theory",
      "title": "Towards a Globalist-Victimary Unified Field Theory",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2018",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The American left’s political program, especially but not only “democratic socialism,” is based on repairing “disparate impact,” which is a polite term for describing discrimination based on race, class, gender or any such ascriptive category. The argument is that all races, sexes, and ascriptive groups are equal in ability and discipline (any individual differences presumably balance each other out within a group). Therefore any statistical differences in material circumstances between groups are caused by discrimination. The government’s duty in this situation is to prohibit and prosecute any discrimination; but that, for various reasons, such efforts are bound to be inadequate; therefore the government should, by taxes and various welfare programs, redistribute income more equally, first, among all inhabitants of the US, and also all oppressed groups worldwide.\n\nFurthermore, anyone who opposes efforts at reparation is by definition a racist (sexist, etc.). Whereas previous socialisms were based on thesis that the capitalists oppressed workers, the new socialism is based on the idea that “white males” oppress all other groups, and that such oppression is “systemic” or “structural,” that is, not dependent upon the intention of any particular individual.\n\nEconomic success in the 21 st century West depends largely on what might be called “technological literacy,” exemplified by computer programming and other skills. This is a relatively new development. Many individuals and groups are unable to compete successfully in the new “information” economy, which depends upon technology and the manipulation of symbols, as in computer programming—leading to some of the inequalities, and resultant resentments, noted above.\n\nThe irony of this political situation is that the rich and privileged, who presumably benefit the most from systemic discrimination, are some of the most vocal and active supporters of the left. On the one hand, this can be understood as a hypocritical effort at publicity, which can affect the success of corporations, and even more so, politicians. The “socialist” program consists largely of public gestures which have little or no concrete effects; and when they do, usually make problems worse, just as rent controls are well-known to make affordable housing more scarce.\n\nEric’s most original insight, however, is that the benefits of “battling discrimination” are more than simply publicity. That “democratic socialism” actually supports the economic system it purports to combat. This is the only way to explain how and why technological leaders really seem to believe in the battle, such that they are not tempted to vote Republican even in the privacy of the voting booth. This point is rather opaque to me. But it seems to be about how modern Western democracies manage resentment. On the one hand, resentment can result in violence and therefore must be deferred. But the anomalous nature of Modernity is such that the economy actually depends upon the stimulation and production of resentment, which fuels a large part of our economy.\n\nThe most obvious example is social media, but also includes media in general. Perhaps the main export of the West is our music, movies, and television shows. The “productivity” of resentment also applies to our education system, especially the University. But our economy is still substantially based on the production and consumption of material objects and services: food, cars, medical care, housing, and other consumer goods. And it’s not clear how the production of resentment can help supply the material goods upon which our lives depend. Perhaps this is Eric’s point, that resentment is “productive” only up to a point, but ultimately it might be our downfall. It’s certain that the attempt to put democratic socialism into effect would have disastrous effects upon our economy, and result in drastically lowered standards of living for all.\n\nIn any case, it’s not clear that the GAFA CEOs really get a “free pass” on resentment by publicly condemning racism etc. Mark Zuckerberg’s position is now threatened, and Google employees are protesting to great publicity."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-unified-field-theory-of-victimocracy",
      "title": "A Unified Field Theory of Victimocracy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Eric bases his Unified Field Theory on the Originary Hypothesis, which is so original that it has resisted assimilation to contemporary academic discourse, not to mention popular news or culture. We remain limited to a small corner of the internet (the Anthropoetics website) and our annual conferences. As Eric comments, Generative Anthropology doesn’t articulate the resentments of any particular interest group. It’s a sad comment on academia today that a persuasive theory with important consequences is not recognized because it affirms the value of “firstness” or merit. I read almost everyday about the “myth” of meritocracy.\n\nEric points out that the genius of the left’s attack on “privilege” is that anyone can participate, no matter how successful, by simply acknowledging their “unmerited” position with an apotropaic gesture designed to ward off criticism. But anyone who is white and successful remains vulnerable to attack. Political Correctness benefits certain rhetorically-powerful interest groups, while allowing the current political and economic system to operate almost without check. Conservatives have not yet found an effective rhetoric to counter PC. Who can be against “social justice”? The problem is that PC actually functions counter to its stated goals.\n\nDespite the claims of PC, America is still distinguished by its openness to innovation, talent, and merit of all kinds, irrespective of race, gender, or class. But there are real structural issues that have contributed to the large wealth inequalities in America today, issues that could be profitably addressed at the political level. But the current political climate actually prevents any such constructive efforts, because firstness must be denied.\n\nThe current political debate can be derived from the opposition of center and periphery on the Originary Scene. The periphery is defined by equality. Everyone is equal before the firstness of the center, and in the ability to make and exchange the sign. The originary hypothesis explains the fundamental moral intuition that everyone is equal in rights. Studies have demonstrated that children as young as two years old already have a sense of fairness and reciprocity.\n\nThe center of the Originary Scene, on the other hand, defends the rights of firstness. One who benefits the group deserves a reward for their work. PC wants to exclude firstness by claiming that any inequality in material situation can only be due to an oppression that denies fundamental equality. This is a Manichean world-view, in which all the benefits of civilization, because they are not distributed equally, become evidence for evil conspiracy. But rewarding merit is actually completely in accord with the principle of moral reciprocity. One is recompensed according to one’s contribution to the community.\n\nI would like to point out that firstness and egalitarianism actually depend upon each other. Egalitarianism is made possible only by firstness, the power of the center to defer conflict. The sacred center reduces everyone on the periphery to the same level. We are all equal before God. The firstness of the center is not reducible to the authority of the alpha male. He acts solely for self-benefit, even if, as Darwin pointed out, his domination indirectly benefits the species as a whole in the long run. But more importantly, no symbolic representation is involved with the alpha male’s position in the group. It was probably not the alpha male who invented the first sign, al though he must have imitated the sign of others on the originary scene.\n\nFirstness depends on egalitarianism, as the rights of the community, because a privileged position can be claimed and defended only in terms of its benefit to the group. When Obama said, “you didn’t build that,” he was attacking the privileges accorded to firstness, and ignoring that individuals who invest their lives in a business are rewarded freely according to their benefit to the community"
    },
    {
      "slug": "discipline-and-debt",
      "title": "Discipline and Debt",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The Big Man, in archaic social orders, becomes big by out-gifting his competitors. This out-gifting must be understood not simply as giving out goods, but as including “services,” and above all the service of “leadership.” The Big Man renders everyone dependent upon him, entirely for “merit-based” reasons, and this is a debt which can never be paid back. Out-gifting others therefore becomes a model for the initial power differential. The Big Man’s occupation of the center is always precarious, though—his capacity for distribution can lapse, or be out-done by some new competitor. Making the occupation of the center permanent, then, would require always already having given unrepayable gifts—such a gift must be cosmogonic, i.e., mediating between the cosmos and the community, providing for the good will of the gods, as manifested in sufficient rainfall, prey animals, protection from other communities, etc.\n\nThis is sacral kingship, which is itself unstable due to the variability of all those conditions which are not, in fact, under the ritual control of the king. No matter how large the territories over which the sacred king rules, these conditions provide at least a residue of fragility—even if the king’s gift is making the Nile flow and sustain all of Egypt, it’s always possible that the Nile will dry up. Still, at a certain point, sacred kingship can provide itself with substantial hedges against being “refuted” by the cosmos.\n\nThese hedges also minimize the degree of testing to which the competence of the ruler is subjected to. He delegates, and since those to whom power is delegated are less secure in their positions, which is to say, have fewer hedges, they must be more competent—and more competent means obligating their subordinates in the manner of the Big Man. The king must at least be minimally competent enough to assess the competency of his subordinates—incompetence past a point would introduce instability at the top. Meanwhile, the more his subordinates are able to hedge against reverses in conditions that might undermine their power, the more they are able to target their mode of obligating their subordinates in coercive, rather than reciprocal ways.\n\nThe most effective way of doing so would be to indebt them monetarily—indebtedness beyond the ability to repay, assuming that repayment can be enforced, is tantamount to slavery—and, eventually, becomes more than “tantamount to.” The introduction of money in the ancient world was first of all aimed at creating such a relationship between individuals bound to local communities with their own hierarchies and the imperial order, which required vast manpower for productive and military purposes. And the capacity to indebt and enslave entails a corresponding decline in the need for competence, which is to say, reciprocal, asymmetrical, obligation.\n\nWe can then see the periodic debt forgiveness in the ancient world (the “jubilee”), and the ultimately eschatological significance such forgiveness took on in the Axial Age religions in terms of the need to restore competency and clarity in the chains of command—as opposed, as its contemporary theorists tend to assume, to embodying some revolutionary, anarchic impulse (al though, no doubt, such fantasies were often generated as well). What debt, and ultimately money, do, in other words, is represent hedges against direct accountability on that part of those in power—direct accountability, that is, to some competent (in the sense given above) superior. Those who can’t do, issue money and create debts. Of course, then, managing money and debts becomes something one can become competent in. Competence in this field is in that case a marker of the insecurity of the central authority. To the extent that total skunkworks is unattainable (or, at least, unattained), hedges against direct accountability will be created, and money competence will emerge to “measure” that.\n\nThe increasingly popular argument by Michael Hudson (https://renegadeinc.com/he-died-for-our-debts-not-our-sins/), upon which David Graeber’s argument depends, is that the Axial Age religions were really revolts against enslaving debt, in favor of restoring (or radicalizing?) the Jubilee Year of debt forgiveness. All that stuff about sin, repentance and eternal life is really a revision by the power mongers once Christianity (for example) became a state religion—that is, it becomes about making the poor accountable, rather than the rich. Anarchism must reject the claim that social hierarchies allow for the emergence of differentiated competencies: that some individuals can be closer to the center than others makes it possible to discover all kinds of new ways in which one can be closer to the center.\n\nBut anarchists must also project back a modern egalitarian morality to the archaic, which is to say to elide the necessary relation between the community and a center. Debt is not simply imposed on a debt free “primitive communist” community, any more than kingship is simply imposed on a non-hierarchical order: as Graeber himself shows in On Kingship , “egalitarian” communities are in fact governed by the most rigid and demanding other-worldly hierarchies; similarly, the central object always obligates the community. The individual who occupies the center doesn’t create the center—to believe so is to throw us back into the most naïve Enlightenment accusations against “priests” as “tricking” the people.\n\nThe logic of sacrifice needs to be broken, regardless of the need to restrain or abolish “predatory debt”—Graeber seems to be aware of this, to some extent, as his very ambivalent relation to Rene Girard’s scapegoat theory in On Kingship seems to indicate.\n\nMoney is invented to distribute to soldiers away from home who need to purchase goods since they are themselves bereft of productive capacities, and markets are established to provide the soldiers with something to buy. But buy for what? You didn’t just buy a steak and bring it home to fire up on the grill; you bought goods to bring to the communal sacrifice. We can assume every meal was communal, and therefore sacrificial. A strict division of loot would be carried out according to merit, with Achilles getting the most and others in accord with their past and expected contributions; the distribution of money would probably also be done differentially, but would already involve a derogation from the straightforward recognition of merit by an accountable leader.\n\nWe can already see some hedging here. It is the derogation from competence represented by debt and money that encourages fantasies of a complete abolition of debt, obligation, and servitude in an apocalyptic revelation. We can see two tendencies here: on the one side, a more orderly sacrificial process, integrated into a more complex economic and social order, regulated by an increasingly conceptually sophisticated justice system; on the other side, an all-against-one recrudescence of scapegoating. The scapegoating would emerge more readily among the poor, who have less interest in preserving the imperial system, but such tendencies would be encouraged by sections of the elite—perhaps in the name of restoring competence, perhaps in the name of resisting such restoration.\n\nMeanwhile, among the elites criticisms of a necessarily improvised and “distorted” justice system would emerge, generating intellectual models of more “cosmic” forms of justice. These contending models both open intellectual space for questioning the sacrificial system and generate resentments that can be used for intensifying it.\n\nThis Gordian knot can only be cut by discrediting scapegoating through the exposure of the bad faith of trying to purify the community by excising some offending member. And this exposure can only be accomplished by individuals knowingly occupying potentially violent centers—that is, individuals who develop a new kind of “competency,” that of eliciting and attracting the resentments of those who wish the mimetic sources of their desire to remain occluded. These are first of all prophets, saints and martyrs, but as the threshold for dangerous mimetic violence is raised, such dispositions become more widely distributed, and are simply “morality.”\n\nNow, the Hudson-Graeber position is worth keeping in mind here, because money and debt are no doubt bound up in the question of morality. Once sacrificial logic is broken (or, to the extent that it is broken, or, more pessimistically, weakened sufficiently for us to proceed beyond its specter), we can examine systematically the relation between competencies and money as a relation between ordered and at least somewhat disordered imperative orders. What is moral is to determine what each is capable of doing, and to give to each the means of fulfilling the task—and to protect each—to stand in the breach for each—against sniping, undercutting, bluffing, addition of new, unworkable demands, and so on.\n\nThis morality holds both for those who are capable of much and those who are capable of little, however much it will be manifested differently in each case. Judgments regarding money and debt will therefore be moral, in this sense: they might, immorally, be used to inflate the hedge against the deposition of the incompetent by expanding indebtedness and dispossession; or, they can be used to make visible, measure and minimize the hedges already there, by privileging competence over further hedging wherever possible.\n\nIn the contemporary world, we clearly see both tendencies in abundance. The connection between debt, globalism and victimary politics examined by Eric Gans in his first two and final “Unified Field Theory” Chronicles exposes this nexus of incompetence, debt expansion, dispossession and scapegoating very well. The movement on the other side is toward sovereignty, borders, protection of competencies from political contravention, the re-establishment of distinctions between moral and criminal behavior—new, nationalist economic models, privileging productivity over finance, correspond to this movement. Continued movement in that direction depends upon a widening recognition that liberalism has become incompatible with competence, in any field—to maintain competent practices you must either insulate yourself from liberalism or pay it ransom. This will become unsustainable and people will have to choose. It will be helpful to develop an economic theory that posits clear chains of commands and disciplinary spaces as the source of value."
    },
    {
      "slug": "how-does-the-center-speak",
      "title": "How Does the Center speak?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "All human existence is an exchange with the center. The first message from the center is to defer appropriation, a message “heard” by all participants on the scene. Once deferral has been effected, the means of the deferral (the sign) can be deployed in new circumstances, to defer new conflicts. The originary center is still the ultimate reference point: we can defer violence in this new situation because we remember (memory is embedded in the sign of) the originary scene. The original “message” is therefore somewhat dimmed, but also different, because more specific, tailored to serve this new act of deferral. Many billions of scenes later, the number of scenes a particular act of deferral must be imagined to ping off makes the origin and retrieval correspondingly more distant and more complex. The center is always saying “defer appropriation,” but appropriation of what, in the face of what potential violence, constructing what frame enabling eventual appropriation—in those details we can find lots of devils.\n\nThe answers to these questions can’t be self-evident, but we can’t exactly “argue” about them either. On what grounds could one say that we must do X because that follows from the originary scene and all its subsequent permutations? What would count as a “logical” case, or relevant “facts”? We would be better off trying to understand why people have believed shamans and prophets when they claimed to speak God’s word (and why we, even today, could say that sometimes they really were doing something like that, and sometimes less so). Thinking in terms of paradigm shifts in the sciences would also be more helpful, because that would enable us to keep in mind that what is important is not a point-by-point refutation, but a very close look at the most anomalous of the anomalies. I wouldn’t say that deciding things by the force of the better argument is fraudulent, just that for decisions to genuinely be made that way requires an enormous amount of good faith and prior agreement on all sides. If we agree on 99% of things, we could argue productively over the last 1%.\n\nAs always, I want to emphasize that I am not presenting locating and articulating an imperative from the center that we could trace back to the originary scene as one way of making decisions as opposed to others—rather, this is what we do anyway, so we should get clearer about it. If you accept that someone has made a compelling enough argument or disseminated a powerful enough meme that you should change your mind, you have conferred authority upon a particular tradition of determining what counts as “compelling,” “powerful,” or “convincing,” and that tradition is a transformation of some previous tradition, which articulated assumptions (virtual ostensives) regarding the relation between authority and reference, and so on, all the way back to the beginning.\n\nYou are always conferring and responding to authority, which doesn’t mean you always just do or believe what someone more powerful tells you to; rather, it means that have sought out or been provided by someone else who sought out, the authority that has been maintained because it has “packaged” ostensives and imperatives together in such a way as to maintain the continuity of the center.\n\nThe center speaks through everyone and it speaks by maximum paradoxicality. In a sense it would be truer to say that humans construct the center “in their own image,” but saying that would lead instantly to the imperative to decide, together, how we want to construct the center, and that question would contain in itself a complete falsification. We can’t disenchant ourselves in that way—“man,” pure and simple, doesn’t exist, and certainly not as the collective maker of the center. We might, like Descartes, believe we can cleanse ourselves of all prior beliefs, but we certainly can’t cleanse ourselves of the language in which we do the cleansing—we can’t stop believing in language, which always refers us back to the center. We can’t think ourselves out of this fundamental paradox, that we create the language by which we are created—we must think with the paradox. It may be best to say we speak along with the center. We try to make explicit a paradox that everyone is involved in implicitly.\n\nThe problem is how to inhabit the most anomalous anomaly—that is where the deferral capacities of the center you help surround are most strained, and new methods are called for. If a group has been able to avoid conflict by dividing up land a particular way, then if the group conquers new land, or some members of the group bring new land into cultivation, that agreement must now be “applied” to the new conditions. This will involve some revision, and some abstraction from the previously successful agreement. But it will generate new conflicts as well: something that made the previous agreement seem “just” will not be repeated here.\n\nSomeone who was included last time will be excluded here. The judgements of the central authority will seem less grounded, more tenuous; secondary authorities might feel a need to “supplement” him. The decisions made will be increasingly anomalous—that is, they will not fit into the system that has been constructed. If the group is not to unravel, someone will have to propose a new agreement, and they will have to do so in the right way—a way that acknowledges the central authority’s power as judge. It will be necessary to be both more abstract (extracting from the original agreement something that can be applied in a new way here) and more concrete (contributing to a specific, consequential, decision). Some kind of “leap” is necessary—that’s what “prophecy,” as well as “intuition” and “genius” is about. It will most likely involve the invention of a new social or legal category, one that will be shown to have been “always already” applicable.\n\nBut I don’t want to use words like “prophecy,” “intuition” and “genius” because that space of thinking and decision is what needs to be theorized in terms of hearing the center. if I find myself in the space between some imperative and its fulfillment, then I fill that space by oscillating between some possible implementation of the instruction and some necessary limitation in its utterance. I thereby make myself, as much as I can, within that situation, an extension of the will or intention behind the command. The more I separate myself from the command the more I give myself over to it. Everyone else is doing the same thing, or something different, even the opposite—shirking, defecting or sabotaging.\n\nThe center speaks through them as well. Maybe they think you’re the saboteur. At this point, the center needs to speak in declaratives. Articulate maximum agreement with maximum disagreement. Maximum agreement: there is a center, and we all respond to it, otherwise how do words and sentences mean and how do we know what they mean—at the very least, your enemy assumes you can understand the epithets he hurls at you. If there’s a center—even if someone wants to call it “principles,” or “maxims of action,” or better habits—something toward which one orients oneself, then it’s impossible to turn away from that center, and all you could accomplish in trying to do so is show its wealth through your own poverty. We then need not fear maximum disagreement, even among friends and allies: there is always some virtual ostensive we see, some mediated command we obey, differently.\n\nThe same paradoxicality applies from act to act, carried out by the same actor—in trying to obey the command of the center as that command is embedded in its precedents and through the dispossession it requires, my just previous attempt completely failed, and is thoroughly marked by shirking, defecting and sabotage; but that shirking, defecting and sabotage can only be seen because it all clarifies the command one failed to obey, and in my ongoing obedience I will target the inclinations and distractions that issued in the failure. Of course, if someone else accuses me of defection, I will have to agree completely while asking for the imperatives the center his own obedience to which enables him to identify me as an anomaly issues.\n\nAnd what center is that center on the periphery of? He follows the imperative to seek the truth, or maybe to advance equality; he then follows some tradition of sorting out truth from falsehood, of exposing “artificial” inequality as it obscures “natural” equality. But is there not something anomalous in taking the leading role in fighting inequality—surely, to fight it even more effectively, there are all kinds of “privileges” you would have to claim. Now we might be able to reach agreement on how to study the kinds of privileges that might be necessary to advance anything. What falsehoods does he have to leave unexposed to isolate the little truth upon which he has decided to expend his current energies; maybe we could agree on some terms of study regarding the said and unsaid, the explicit and the tacit. The center speaks as we find failures in successes, new problems in solutions, and then answers to old questions in those failures and problems.\n\nThe purest paradoxes may be the paradoxes of self-reference, that is, sentences that refer back to themselves in a way that makes them simultaneously true and false. The one I prefer to use is the liar’s paradox, originally the Cretan liar’s paradox because, even though it has been subsequently tightened by logicians in order to make it airtight, in its original form it sounds very much like something we can imagine someone saying, for very intelligible reasons—that is, it doesn’t come across as an artificial construct. “Cretans are all liars,” said by a Cretan, can very readily be understood, for example, as a Cretan ratting out his fellow Cretans in order to curry favor with whoever, for the moment, is in charge of the Cretans—don’t trust them; rather, trust me, because I know them so well.\n\nAnd, indeed, who could know that Cretans are all liars better than another Cretan? Of course, it could also be a decent Cretan in despair, expressing his hopelessness of the state of Crete, and accepting his own implication in its degradation. Or a Cretan trying to wake up his fellow Cretans—don’t you see you’re all drowning in your lies—I can tell you this because I’m poisoned by them as well. There’s always something paradoxical in an individual speaking for a group, because any such speaking for is an attempt to change the group in some way by posing as a mere description. But there’s no way a group could speak, or an outsider could speak about a group without hearing members of the group speak of it. But any listener must suspect the speaker of describing his group either to cover himself with its luster or distinguish himself favorably from it. But the same is true when one just speaks of oneself.\n\nBut if we know this, we can present ourselves, as individuals or members of groups, as paradoxes. What makes you a member of a group is that any time someone addresses you they do so on both levels: as an individual and a member, a center and a fluctuating probability. I don’t mean in some specific social category; I mean as the type of person capable of being addressed in a particular way—capable of answering a certain question, obeying a specific imperative, adding to a particular discourse. To have the center speak through you is to enact a self-referential paradox of accepting your membership in the linguistically constructed group by attributing, implicitly or explicitly, qualities to that group at odds with what you actually say.\n\nTo take a simple example, let’s say someone concludes a discourse directed towards you with an aggressive “so what do you think about that !?,” thereby constructing you as a member of some hypothetical group that would be offended, or stymied, or angered by what has just been said. If your response is in the vein of “well, here ’s what I think about that,” i.e., one accepting of the challenge, while in fact derailing, or parodying, or neutralizing the prospective confrontation by distinguishing one’s “I-ness,” then you have enacted the self-referential paradox: yes, I’m a _______, and (as you say) ________’s always _________ (even while maybe I don’t quite…). The words, your gesturing, your posture, and/or you use of a particular media, all fitted to the scene, will be the center speaking, saying “transform this into a deferring rather than “horde-ing” center.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "more-on-the-proper-use-of-declarative-sentences",
      "title": "More on the Proper Use of Declarative Sentences",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Declarative sentences appear to be representations of a reality independent of the speakers, and they are that, indirectly; directly, though, declaratives are inquiries into imperatives. To put it even more narrowly: declaratives are attempts to determine the conditions under which imperatives can be obeyed and fulfilled. Intervening between the imperative and the declarative is the interrogative; an interrogative is a softened imperative, which is to say, an imperative coming to recognize that it might not be fulfilled, and therefore transitioning from a command to do something to a demand for information regarding the possibility of doing it.\n\nFrom a practical, analytical, perspective, we can first determine what question a declarative sentence might be taken to be answering. In every case, there must be at least two possibilities: a question about the subject, or a question about the predicate. Everything else in a sentence addresses other possible questions. So, to take the hoary old analytic philosophy example, “the cat is on the mat” could be answering either “where is the cat” or “what is on the mat”? “The striped cat is on the mat” includes an answer to the question, “which cat”? These are all requests for information about the cat and/or mat. We should, then be able to treat these requests as “softened” forms of some command regarding cat or mat. Such a command will ultimately be hypothetical, but the hypothesis could be stronger or weaker. Most obviously, here, might be a standing command that the mat be left clean, or that pets be kept off of it; or a direct or anticipated command to produce the cat; or even just to look at my cat.\n\nThere is an immense variety of imperatives: commands from superiors, pleas from subordinates, prayers; imperatives that can be fulfilled immediately, imperatives that take time to fulfill, imperatives that are essentially permanent and can never be completely fulfilled (“love the Lord thy God”); single imperatives, imperatives that are one in a long chain, imperatives that, when finally fulfilled, might look very different than the outcome imagined by the original imperator. You can think about how much of everyday life is carried out through imperatives (“pass me the salt, please”), and could not be carried out otherwise.\n\nImperatives involve some direct connection between at least two people; imperatives create a new reality, or fail to. Imperatives are somewhat uncomfortable to talk about, which is maybe why discourse and communications theorists so rarely do so—they always involve doing something under some kind of compulsion, even when it’s the compulsion of pity felt for the homeless man asking for money for a cup of coffee, and therefore seem to infringe on one’s “free will.” So, why do we obey most imperatives? That’s a question that could only be asked under the presumption that declarative discourse is the normal discursive form, and anything else a defective, distorted or abbreviated form of such discourse (as if asking someone to pass the salt is just a simpler way of saying something like “I would be happier if the salt were to be made to appear before me by someone seated presently at this table”). Asking why our presumptive response to imperatives is to obey them is like asking why we share a reality with other people.\n\nA social science that focused solely on how imperatives work in all the varied social situations in which they are used would have an inexhaustible topic that leaves no area of human life unexamined. Furthermore, it would be a social science carved right out of everyday discourse because, as I began this post by stating, all declaratives are already studies of imperatives. Social theory that leads to something like “knowledge” will be one that takes us, through the interrogative route suggested above, through the entire network of imperatives until we get to starting point of each chain. We do things like shopping at a particular store, or buying a particular brand, because someone once told us to, and we obeyed—of course, we are often confronted with multiple imperatives, and we “choose” (a declarative concept) between them by tracing—imperfectly, intuitively—one of them back to a previous, or more comprehensive imperative that we obey (to save money, to balance our budget, to please someone else, to see to our health).\n\nTo know a person is to know the imperatives governing his life, to hypothesize where they originated, and how they “snowballed” over the years. Similarly when we vote, or follow political events through particular media—we’ve been told, we are constantly being told, to do these things.\n\nWhen we’re trying to piece together a “logical” discourse, what we’re really trying to do is make all the imperatives present to us consistent with each other. This is what “thinking,” that is, having one declarative sentence follow another with which it is in a reciprocally dependent relation, involves. Moral failures like hypocrisy and discrepancies between declared principles and actual practices are failures to make the imperatives we obey consistent with each other. A “good” society is simply one where imperatives issued and “heard” at various levels—imperatives issued by rulers and their delegates, and imperatives transmitted through traditions—are consistent with each other, where individuals are not constantly forced into double binds wherein they have to obey equally authoritative but incompatible imperatives.\n\nWe therefore have a method of inquiry that can start anywhere, with any utterance, and follow through from there to an account of the entire imperative order. Any utterance that gets us thinking because it is anomalous in some way—or, more simply, we can see no way to either defy or fulfill it—can be the place where we stake out a disciplinary space; or, more precisely, make explicit an already implicit disciplinary space. This is an open-ended and endlessly recursive inquiry, because once you cut through a path of imperatives leading us to the sovereign’s activation of a traditional practice, you can see there were innumerable other paths that might have gotten you there. If we’re all agreed that we want to make imperatives consistent with each other, there is a broad basis of agreement within which all kinds of productive disagreements can be hosted. We can start with a single sentence, taken as a representative sample of a larger discourse, or with what seems to be patterns of sentences that all seem to be answering a related set of questions.\n\nSo, we work back through sentences, to the questions we take them to be answering, to the imperatives whose fulfillment depends upon the information sought by the questions. What could we do with the information provided in the sentences that we couldn’t do without that information—how is fulfilling a consistent stream of imperatives now more possible? We then work on declarative sentences that would test out possible attempts to obey those imperatives—i.e., thought experiments. The thought experiments reach forward in time—once those imperatives are fulfilled, or fail to be, what imperatives might follow?—and backward: what previous imperatives, successful or failed, are the ones under inspection successors or subsidiaries to?\n\nIf we want to make imperatives consistent, we should start with inconsistent imperatives, and imagine scenes upon which someone might be confronted by them. Make the scene as difficult as possible: failure to obey both imperatives would be devastating, while the two imperatives are as incompatible as imaginable. Go back as far as possible into the past, and see if even such divergent imperatives might have a common ancestor; construct possible consequences, and imagine how they might nevertheless have a common destination.\n\nA successful imperative yields a new ostensive. If I ask someone to pass the salt, once the salt is in my hands, the imperative has been completed. If I obey the command to love the Lord my God with all my might, I can put forth signs that I am doing so—the way I treat someone in a particular situation, my refraining from exploiting an opportunity in an unscrupulous manner, etc., might all be such signs—there is an ostensive component to all of them. The ostensive is the “eating” in which we find the “proof of the pudding.” This is the kind of thing a disciplinary space is interested in—what counts as a sign that an imperative has been completed?\n\nHow do we distinguish genuine charity from a self-interested simulation of it? There can never be a universally applicable rule here, if for no other reason than because if there were a charlatan would learn how to meet all the “requirements” and carry out his fraud in a manner that we will have agreed to overlook. We have nothing but the thought experiment, hypothesizing regarding the imperative being obeyed and the possible ways of fulfilling and failing to fulfill it. We keep looking for slighter and slight differences—we learn to notice more and more differences, more ways in which the line between genuine charity and fakery might be drawn. We keep generating new ostensives, what we call concepts, because they are hypothetical ostensives telling us what to look for. Most imperatives will fall somewhere between “pass the salt” and “love the Lord thy God with all your might.”\n\nIn this post I am obeying the imperative to provide potential ostensives that might mark some of the distinctions I have made in articulating what I have been calling the “imperative order.” I write an account of the imperative order, and questions about how to follow the imperative to use this concept occur to me; trying to imagine ways of answering these questions lead me back to the imperative that lead me to that concept (or potential ostensive) in the first place: to develop theoretical alternatives to liberalism, which always leads us back to flaccid and useless voluntaristic concepts which don’t really provide potential ostensives (how does one prove oneself a “free individual”?).\n\nFurther imperatives come embedded in generative anthropology, to generate a vocabulary of social theory completely made up of terms internal to the originary hypothesis; we could say these imperatives have been forwarded by earlier versions of myself, commanding my future theoretical self to take on this task, which itself iterates a broader imperative intrinsic to social theory itself—to generate a new theoretical vocabulary independent of “spontaneous” and “commonsensical” (“doxical”) thinking. But more recent imperatives within the human sciences, finding the field of potential ostensives generated by such meta-languages to be drying up have issued what might be a complementary imperative, to construct self-consistent vocabularies that can generate potential ostensives while remaining intra-linguistically within those spontaneous and commonsensical vocabularies (which, after all, also embed traditions that may not be exhausted), working reciprocally and pedagogically with them not as a sacrifice of rigor but precisely in order to be more rigorous—to extend the field of potential ostensives to include those anyone might see.\n\nThe imperative to develop an originary grammar is a convergence of all these imperatives, because what could simultaneously be more intuitively accessible to any speaker of any language, and at the same time capable of prodigious abstraction, than the fact that we are always exchanging ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives, and nothing else? And if we pursue this further, we will see that I, like everyone else, want my actions to be consistent with each other, want (follow the imperative) to “cleanse” myself of anthropomorphisms, of invented “faculties” that license my finding all of myself nowhere else than in myself—there are lots of post-literate imperatives here, which go back to a history of reading, and very often of trying to understanding very difficult texts by trying to figure out what they are “telling me to do.”\n\n(Reading a difficult literary or philosophical text as a list of instructions for reconstructing yourself is very instructive.) (And, of course, there may be imperatives of which one is sometimes more, sometimes less, aware, such as to do something difficult and even counter-intuitive, and which hasn’t been done before.) At a certain point, a particular path of inquiry becomes less compelling and more obscure (no one wants to know what I was reading in 1991, and how I was reading it), and most importantly, become less likely to lead us back to more ancestral and central imperatives."
    },
    {
      "slug": "paradoxicality",
      "title": "Paradoxicality",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Words like “spirituality,” “religiosity,” “faith” and so on, insofar as they refer to something, refer to a dwelling within and refusal to suppress the constitutive paradox of the human. That paradox emerges with the originary event: the (newly) humans on the scene point to, name and thereby create the central figure that was already there, already a compelling and repelling substantial being—in which case, naming it is just recognizing it for what it is. It is paradoxicality that can never be “proven” or reduced to any particular ostensive sign, because it is ostensivity itself. (For GA, this is the truth implicit in Heidegger’s ontological-ontic distinction.) Paradoxicality is the non-material reality theists are always arguing with atheists about, and if there is to be some kind of dialogue between the different faiths, it would far better be constructed around the assumption that there are various ways of dwelling within the founding paradox than around some general notion of “humanity,” “nature,” “transcendence” or “morality.”\n\nWe can run paradoxicality through all of our grammatical categories: the paradox of the ostensive is, as just mentioned, that we refer to something created by and yet pre-existing our referring to it; of the imperative, that the asymmetry of the command relation is reversed with the dependence of the one issuing the imperative on the one fulfilling it; of the declarative, that we must renounce ostensives (all “irritable reaching after fact”) in order to make a new world of ostensives possible. A paradox is any sentence that puts forward a claim or rule to which it is itself the exception, but any sentence and any discourse paradoxically refers to, talks about, a world created by and therefore always running in advance of and behind the sentence or discourse itself.\n\nWe can formulate the paradoxicality of the declarative as follows: if you try to compose a perfectly clear sentence, that is, a sentence that will be understood in the same way by everyone who hears or reads it, that is, a sentence in response to which everyone will say or do the same thing, the best way to do that is by using the most repeated words and phrases, in the most repeated collocations, in the most repeated grammatical forms, in their most stereotyped uses. This means that you are completely reliant upon a received version of the world presumed to be shared by everyone, conveyed through linguistic means the use of which is characterized by the same unanimity. And that is, indeed, the “vocation” of the declarative sentence: that is how you undo an imperative by embedding its target in a world perfectly constructed so as to cancel it.\n\nBut sustaining this clarity requires continually selecting the features of represented scenes that will ensure unanimity, which means imagining the witnesses on that scene, their means of representation, the traditions enabling them to see what they see as they see it. It means placing yourself on the scene, with all that you have witnessed and all who have witnessed you, your conceptual framework and those conceptual frameworks it has modified. That is, it means joining your potential readers in a disciplinary space continued in one’s own discourse, rendering that discourse intelligible not to everyone, but to those who can follow your trail and continue reconstructing the scene.\n\nImplicit, though, in the constitution of any disciplinary space is the possibility that anyone can enter and transform it so that eventually, conceivably, everyone might enter it and what it presents would become perfectly “clear.” In producing a discourse, we keep generating this paradox, where the clarity and idiosyncrasy of the discourse oscillate for the hearers or readers of the discourse. The more you seek absolute clarity, the more you approximate complete idiosyncrasy; the more precise, micrological and self-reflexive, the more you anticipate a possible universal scene.\n\nSo, trying to say something everyone will understand leads to saying nothing, which nobody really understands because it’s what everyone already presumes they know; trying, then, to make something understood leads to saying something that someone might, someday, in some manner, understand in some yet-to-be-determined sense. We oscillate between the already said and what might turn out to have been said. The virtual scene generated by classic prose through its supplementation of a presumed speech situation can be seen as an attempt to suppress this paradox, while disciplinarity can be seen as an attempt to open it up.\n\nAny disciplinarity in the human sciences must start from mimetic theory because the starting point of mimetic theory is that we are all doing what we have seen others do but cannot acknowledge it to ourselves in action—even the most convinced mimetic theorist must believe in his own freedom, that he has “decided” to do whatever he is to do. Trying to figure out whom you’re really imitating in what you’re about to do would be paralyzing; it might be that such paralysis is a condition for a freer act because you would have to realize that your imitation will get the original wrong in some way; that is, not quite be an imitation.\n\nThe declarative originates in the representation of a reality immune to an imperative. The “task” of the declarative sentence, then, is to fortify reality against imperatives—in each case a specific imperative, or field of imperatives, that presents a danger because it is both pressing and impossible for those charged with fulfilling it. If your boss says that he wants the inventory done in an hour, and you reply that there are only three employees available, that might be sufficient to repel the imperative—OK, you can have 3 hours, then. Maybe not, in which case you would have to make it clear to your boss that three employees simply can’t do that work in an hour—maybe your boss doesn’t really know what he’s doing and has to have explained to him what taking inventory actually entails, and how long it would have to take to do each and every one of the acts involved in “doing inventory.”\n\nIn so doing, you construct a “discourse” filled with virtual ostensives (you “point to” maximum employee capability, to the number of shelves and an estimated number of objects on them, and so on) but each ostensive generates a counter imperative of its own, coming from “reality,” which can only be disobeyed at one’s peril. You would be attempting to make reality immune to the boss’s imperative, but all of these imperatives would not be very commanding if the boss wasn’t already subject to another, higher, one, which seems obvious but isn’t: don’t command people to do the impossible; or, don’t issue unfulfillable commands. Reality’s commands gain their force from this ethical one, which is grounded in the nature of the imperative itself, which is meant to be fulfilled.\n\nSo, where is the paradox in “there’s only 3 of us,” or in the more extended discourse regarding the elements of inventory and the estimated extent of this specific inventory? “There’s only 3 of us” seems perfectly clear but, really, only if the statement was answering the question, “how many are you?”; in this case, it’s only clear insofar as the boss knows why three is grossly insufficient; the further elaboration meanwhile, makes things clearer by referring to the realities behind the reference to “only 3,” but insofar as the boss needs to be informed of this reality he can only take the employee’s word for it, which means he has no way of distinguishing between an accurate portrayal of the situation and a clever employee saying exactly what he needs to say to get the desired and predictable response from the boss.\n\nWhether the statement is clear or not is undecidable, or yet-to-be decided, but whe never it will be decided will be too late and all those references will have lost their meaning. This asymmetry in both power and knowledge could end disastrously (well, unpleasantly, at least) unless a kind of reciprocity is established: the boss modifies his power to acknowledge the employee’s knowledge and the employ frames his knowledge to acknowledge the boss’s power.\n\nThis is done through satire. I don’t mean a tension diluting joke, or a self-deprecating quip. I mean each performing a response to the typical expectations coming from the other—the boss showing that he knows he might be read as the typical slave-driving bully and the employee showing he knows he might be read as a lazy smart-ass. It becomes a satire they perform together. While in the end someone has to be right about how many conscientious employees to takes how much time to do inventory, the two will get closer to being right together through satire than serious, reasoned discussion. This is even the case if we assume that both are completely devoted to the “mission” of the company and know each other (as well as such things can be known) to be sincere in their desire to do things properly.\n\nUnless they’re already in complete agreement (in which case, they wouldn’t be discussing it), their disagreements will involve some kind of oscillation between “typical” responses that are expected to “work,” on the one hand, and what could only be known by someone “inside” the situation. The asymmetries remain, and would be better maintained by being performed.\n\nIs a good ruler a satirist, then? Must ruling be solemn? (How does a good ruler engage the constitutive paradox?) The awe of sacralized power kings could once rely on may not ever be restored. The ruler is always staging things, and if the bloom of sacrality is off the king, those stagings can’t all be pageants. I will propose, hypothetically (hypotheticalism being part of the declarative form of paradoxicality), that if paradoxicality is to replace, because it is the real essence of, the transcendent, then the stage set by the ruler will have to be a satirical one. The more power I have, the more I depend upon the knowledge, faith and mutual trust of all of you; the more you seek out knowledge, transcendent foundations and reciprocities amongst all of you, the more you rely on my power being unquestioned.\n\nThe ruler’s power remains unquestioned because there are better questions to ask, and that can only be asked if that power is unquestioned. The declarative paradox is performed as inquiry into the imperative one: all the things that can happen between the time the ruler relays a command originally issued from within the most ancient origins and the time that command is obeyed and completed by all the individuals at all the social “capillaries” where the details of the command need to be worked out. Here is the source of high comedy, low comedy, subtle humor, friendly joking, and the knowledge coming from all this will be worth more than that produced by the contemporary social sciences, which are all constituted by the denial of the declarative paradox.\n\nThey all believe in the clear statement, which anyone who follows the correct method will agree with and act upon in accord with all of the implications contained therein. The yet-to-be-grasped sentence is just a meaningless one. Once the model of the physical sciences is rejected for the human ones, what does “knowledge” mean? Certainly not predictability, because of all the millions of possible “causes” of any event, how are we supposed to determine the precise “effect” of each of them? (Especially since our very knowledge of what has gone into the event is part of, if not the event itself, then the event of understanding.) To the extent that we can do something like that, it will be in very circumscribed situations, and hardly applicable to others. Knowledge really means surfacing and performing the anthropological form of the event.\n\nI’ve suggested in previous posts and in my Anthropoetics essay that the most important staging carried out by the ruler is that involved in providing for his own successor. The entire social order would be both involved in and represented by such staging. The entire society would be a school for the tutoring of rulers, who would go through a very carefully prepared and “stereotyped” selection process: they would have to prove their capability to rule while and by renouncing any desire to do so. Shows of hypocrisy and self-delusion would separate the wannabees, however intelligent, capable and courageous they might be, from the real deal.\n\nSatire is the medium in which such a winnowing out would be enacted, and for the satire to be trustworthy the ruler would have to be on the stage as well. I’m not talking about Nixon going on Laugh-In, or presidents and candidates going on SNL —the ruler will be the one choosing his successor, so he is inevitably implicated in the selection process, which will reveal his strengths and weaknesses as well. We can’t worship paradoxicality, but we can acknowledge it as something we will never completely master, intellectually and practically, while never being able to rid ourselves of it, either—but paradoxicality can never become the basis of an imperium in imperio, either, because it provides no model for ruling, just a model for staging it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-declarative-order-and-inquiry",
      "title": "The Declarative Order and Inquiry",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "If declarative sentences are inquiries into imperatives, it is also through declarative sentences that we engage in inquiries into declarative sentences. We can hypothetically construct any sentence as asking, regarding a particular imperative, what are the conditions of its fulfillment? An inquiry into declaratives would, then, address the question, how might we simultaneously hypothesize the conditions of fulfillment of imperatives that are preconditions of or consequences of, some primary imperative? To say, “John is not here,” is to answer (most likely) the actual or anticipated question, “is John here?”; to answer that question with “I haven’t heard from John since last night” is to broaden the scope of the questions one is answering—one provides information not only regarding John’s whereabouts but an expected follow-up question regarding my usefulness as a source for tracking John’s movements. The sentence is, correspondingly, significantly more complex.\n\nThis kind of declarative self-reflexivity is intrinsic to language, and there’s no doubt such sentences are common in oral cultures. More abstract and sustained inquiries into the possibilities of declarative sentences are only possible in a literate culture, though. The very concept of a “sentence” is only possible in a literate culture, which can isolate the sentence as a unit of speech, settle upon rules for using them properly, and devise various stylistic alternatives for their deployment. In a literate culture, then, the range of imperatives, and imperative chains, that can be accounted for intellectually increases dramatically.\n\nSo, if “where is John?” is a “softened” version of “show me John,” what the declarative allows for here is an avoidance of the violence likely to follow from one insisting, through sheer lack of linguistic resources, that John be produced immediately. Likewise, the more complex “I haven’t heard from John since last night” allows me to demonstrate that I am sympathetic to your attempt to locate John, thereby forestalling, for example, your concluding that I’m lying and commencing a search of my premises or some more violent approach. Of course, I could be lying about when I heard from John, but my answer already sets up a relation between two different scenes, so if you want to further challenge me you might have to implicate other witnesses or imagine possible scenarios. Again, this allows for deferral.\n\nIf I say, “like you, I haven’t heard from him since last night,” I introduce yet another scene. This is essentially what declarative and cultural complex entails: being able to keep various scenes, past, present and future, completed and still ongoing, within our power to change and beyond our power, etc., suspended simultaneously and interdependently. When we’re talking, reading or writing, or thinking, this is what we are doing it about: whether each of those scenes holds together, and whether each scene supplies what some other scene requires for it to hold together. Each of these scenes has an ostensive-imperative articulation at its center: the “like you” in the hypothetical sentence above imagines a scene upon which I received information that I think is true regarding your latest contact with John (if I haven’t heard this from you, I’m presupposing another scene in which someone found this out from you in order to convey it to me; and, either way, another scene upon which you heard from John).\n\nUpon that scene, John was referenced (a “simulated” ostensive sign), and this reference carried along with it an imperative to find out more about John’s whereabouts. If you now tell me that I’m misinformed, and you haven’t heard from John for days, something happens to the entire structure of interdependent scenes, even if it’s not obvious what.\n\nNow, there must be a dialectic relation between a discursive order that allows for the articulation of all these suspended and delayed scenes and a power structure that allows for predictable suspensions and delays. I don’t think there’s any point to trying to determine empirical correspondences between intellectual complexity and social order: in the midst of a social breakdown, one lone scholar, with a good library or excellent memory, can lock himself away and write an extremely intricate history of the decline of that social order. The real point, though, is that in doing so, that scholar presupposes and embeds in his history the possibility of a social order that would allow for a series of suspensions and delays that would have indefinitely deferred that social breakdown.\n\nEven if the history presents the social breakdown as inevitable, it presupposes the possibility of something that will break down, but hasn’t yet; or, the possibility of another order less affected by the very vulnerabilities the “inevitablist” history has shown. We can’t imagine dispersion through interconnection without presupposing a center. If I am going to figure out whether it matters that the scenic series that led me to say “like you” has collapsed, I can only do so by assuming a shared “(disciplinary”) inquiry into John’s whereabouts (all our sentences and questions are leading us back to the imperative to enable us to ostensively refer to John), even if part of that inquiry might now include a subsidiary inquiry into whether some of those who should be helping locate John are in fact interfering with the search.\n\nA large part of the stupidity of liberalism is that we are forbidden to speak as if we are all looking for something together. In my hypothetical scenario, the more we look for John, following the imperative to find him, the more we must involve prior imperatives that are the sources of this one—the imperative that we remain a family, or a group of friends, or a community; in that case, the ostensive sign we issue upon finding John would be a new sign as well as revealing and confirming that older imperative. Behind that imperative, of course, are even older ones: preserve your family, friendships and community, care for others, etc.\n\nAnd even older ones: don’t transgress that the transgression of which will lead to resentments we haven’t the institutional terms to frame. (Or: err in favor of fulfilling your obligations.) The denser and more overlapping these reciprocal horizontal relations the more there must be a center that makes violence (or, at least, open-ended violence that can’t be stemmed) a distant resort when they are tested or frayed. The relationship between margin and center is reciprocal: the more the security of the center can be taken for granted, the less we need to invoke it in our horizontal relations. Declarative order introduces what N.N.\n\nTaleb calls “antifragility” by articulating a structure of suspended and delayed scenes that presupposes, while invoking as minimally as possible, an absolute center. (If every interaction leads to someone saying “I’m gonna call the cops,” then we’re living in a social order where the cops aren’t much help.)\n\nThe overt and institutionalized study of the declarative sentence is the origin of all the media, themselves extensions and simulations of the originary scene. New media represent scenes enacted in other media, and one way in which that can be done is by using the capabilities of the new media to supplement the meanings lost from the older media. So, to use my prototypical example from David Olson regarding the representation of a speech situation in writing, rather than reporting what the other said in a hesitant or insistent voice, one notes that the other said it “cautiously” or “insistently.” Whatever is lost in the previous medium one tries to replace in the new medium.\n\nPart of the method of supplementation is representing the scene of representation itself in terms of the older, or even oldest medium—so, the writer, broadcaster, or actor writes or speaks directly to you, the reader, listener or viewer, insinuating himself into your living room—all of the machinery of the medium, all of which differentiates that medium from a speech situation, are mobilized so as to produce the illusion or “feel” of one. The result is a vast simplification of the scene, and a collapse of all the suspensions and delays. One must obey the order to enter an illusory scene in order to participate in the medium. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, if the ruling center makes creating and managing such illusions central to its own governing strategies.\n\nThe other approach is to use the declarative capacity to articulate suspensions and delays to represent the suspensions and delays in the media and their institutions. Above, I tried to give a sense of how we could trace a particular imperative, interrogative or declarative, through a series of interdependent scenes—when we watch a movie, TV show, news broadcast, magazine article, etc., a similar, but far more complex process has in most cases occurred—a process probably a lot more interesting and illuminating than the media product itself. We don’t actually need to know what it was, but we do know that the talking head who spouts the day’s talking points has sat in the make-up chair for quite a while that morning, that he got his job because of some connection someone in his family has to someone in that media corporation, that he was herded through a particular journalistic career path by a familiar set of mentors and protectors to whom he is indebted, etc.—and all of this, really, is part of the meaning of whatever he says on the air.\n\nThe more we describe what he says as entailing all of that (or as much of that as is necessary in a given situation to dissolve the smarmy illusion) the more we disable the supplementations that drape an ideological representation over an institutional one.\n\nEvery representation does need to posit some scene upon which all “receiving” the representation are virtually present. In a literate, mediatized order, this scene needs to be a doubled scene, though: the illusions generated by supplementarity must at least be gestured towards in order to construct a scene upon which participants watch the cobbling together of the illusory scene. As I’ve said before, much of this is the legacy of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, of which contemporary absolutists can be the inheritors if they wish (or dare). A scene sustaining both unity and a maximum of cobbling together is a satirical scene.\n\nOne place you can always start is with a sentence produced by the institutional, supplementalized representation and simply turn one of its words into a scene—a scene hidden by the representation. For example, institutions are always speaking in contemporary newspeak—the CIA, the FBI, the White House, the UN, etc., are always “saying” things. What are the scenes that go into and are concealed by these attributions? I’m not talking about doing counter-reporting here, uncovering the sources used, etc. (of course, it’s good that people do that—it’s just not what I’m talking about here). I’m talking about having fun, using our imaginations (as the novelist Ronald Sukenick said, if you don’t use your imagination, someone else will use it for you)—fill in gaps (thereby showing that they are gaps) with caricatures and the absurd.\n\nThe model for this practice is the complex declarative sentence, which can always be made more complex, as something mentioned can always be defined, and then used, and then the conditions under which it has been defined can described, and the implications for the rest of the claims, implicit and explicit, made by the sentence of the various possible definitions explored, and some of those implicit claims made explicit, and the same done for the claims implicit in the newly explicit ones. In this way you represent the authoritative institutions as at least potentially following and defending the absolute imperative to defer."
    },
    {
      "slug": "can-networks-crowd-out-markets-gablog",
      "title": "Can Networks Crowd Out Markets?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "When I go to the store to buy a loaf of bread, I have to pay the supermarket because I am not performing any equivalent service for them, or because, as is the case in David Graeber’s “communism,” we are not part of a community in which it is a matter of course that each takes what he needs and contributes what he can. So, how does the supermarket know how much to charge me? They buy the bread from a baker, and they have to charge enough beyond what they pay the baker to cover the costs of the building, the store technology, salaries and wages, etc., and still make a profit. The baker, meanwhile, needs ingredients, equipment, a building, employees, etc., so that determine how much he has to charge for the bread.\n\nAnd likewise for those who sell the baker the ingredients, etc. If we start at the other end, the supermarket charges what consumers will pay, which comes down to how much consumers prefer buying bread here as opposed to some other place, how much they prefer bread to possible substitutes (e.g., fajita wraps), how willing they are to forego bread compared to other types of food if they have less money to spend, etc. Still, at any point in time, there must be some minimum cost of making bread, and if it isn’t sold at that cost, bakers will simply cease to exist.\n\nThe standard argument for markets against planning is that no one can know how many people over, say the next month, will want how many loafs of bread, and, then, how much the operating costs of the supermarket, the ingredients and equipment of the baker, the machines that make the equipment for the baker, the machines that make those machines, etc., will cost over the next month. The only way to find out is to let supermarkets sell as much bread as they can, then have the bakers buy the ingredients they need to meet the demands of the supermarket, and so on, until we end up oscillating around an average amount of bread sold per month—sometimes the store will be out for a little while, sometimes it will have to throw away some extra, but that then gets worked into the cost. And, of course, with some products (probably not bread, though), the fluctuations can get really dramatic, to the point of forcing retailers and manufacturers out of business.\n\nBut, what if this all worked on something like a subscriber system? I, along with many others, sign up for a certain amount of bread (or a “basket” of goods, within a prescribed range of variation); the supermarket, along with other shops, subscribes with a “co-op” of bakers, who in turn subscribe with producers of wheat and ovens, and so on, who in turn subscribe with those they need to procure materials from? This could only work, or—not to get ahead of ourselves—be imagined to be possible, if everyone one joined various co-ops and virtually all economic activity took place through them. Those who make the machines to make the ovens sold to the bakers must ultimately, through a vast network of subscribers, subscribe those who employ the ones buying the bread.\n\nObviously, I’m trying to imagine an advanced economy without prices and therefore without money, but also without central planning, and if that’s utopian, so be it, but I at least want to think it through in absolutist terms, and maybe someone else could incorporate these reflections into more sustainable ones. The question is whether the more advanced form of coordination that the elimination of liberalism, democracy, which is to say, “politics,” might make possible, would in turn make cooperation through a vast network of agreements between directors of enterprises possible.\n\nIt is already the case that much, if not most, economic activity is organized through networking: if you’re starting a new company, you look for customers and suppliers through established channels, including friendships and other informal associations; also, you will prefer to work with more stable companies with good reputations, in communities with reasonably favorable and predictable government, etc. You will prefer customers and suppliers you expect to be around for years over those who might leave or go under next month. None of this is directly priced. But all this means that the most basic value is an institution in which the high, the middle, and the low, cooperate rather than struggle against each other, in an area where other institutions are not trying to subvert the ones you want to work with.\n\nCompanies that are well established and well run, and that value their reputations, will, of course, charge one another for goods and services, but they might also be more open to various forms of cooperation and exchange where payment can be waived or indefinitely deferred. With enough companies like this, you have your network of subscribers, and below a top-tier of networks, you could have lower tiers that would be more unstable and might need further supervision, or might even rely on money, but the damage done by their failures might also be contained.\n\nTwo big problems arise (at least that I can think of now). First, wouldn’t this be a very static system? How would innovation be possible—how could anyone break into the existing networks, and why should the top-tier companies feel any need to improve their products and services? Second, within this vast network of agreements that all depend on each other within an enormously complex system (the baker can promise x amount of loaves because the farmer has promised y amount of wheat, which he can do because the manufacturer has promised z amount of replacement tractor parts, within everyone bought in all the way across the social order), how can self-interested defections (cheating, strikes, adulterations of materials, side deals, black markets, etc.) be prevented?\n\nThe eligibility of subscribers would have to be regularly assessed. We must assume the highest value of all is a unified and coherent command structure stemming from a central authority and reaching into all institutions. Individuals reporting directly to authorities would be in each company, and everyone in each company would be expected to consider himself a “delegate” of the government. There would be social pressures from other subscribers, who would stand to be disqualified if some of their members were found to be defectors. (If a particular subscriber can no longer fulfill its responsibilities, the central authority’s responsibility is to replace or reconstruct its governing structure.)\n\nWe really have to assume the individualist, utilitarian ethics and morality of liberal society can be eliminated, and people can think of themselves as directly social. While it doesn’t quite prove anything, doesn’t the fact that so many millions of people can be recruited into an increasingly apocalyptic leftism that in many cases at least cuts against individual economic self-interests suggest that for many, if not most, utilitarian ethics are extremely unsatisfying? Doesn’t the fact that so many wish to resist the new order, without any guarantee that it will benefit them materially, indicate the same?\n\nInnovation is really the bigger problem, since any innovation would have to, it seems, disrupt an extremely complexly integrated set of networks. How would R&D be conducted, and by whom? Here, I would follow up on some of my earlier “social market” posts and emphasize the centrality of the state to economic activity. This has always been the case, and is certainly so today—research is overwhelmingly shaped by state investment and subsidies, starting with the state’s monopoly on military equipment (which, of course, involves myriad spin-offs), but including quite a bit of investment in medicine, environmental technology, computing, communications, infrastructure, space exploration and so on.\n\nWe can now add to that social network and surveillance technology. The state, then, perhaps in the form of its various agencies, would be a major subscriber within the networks. The state would be a major “consumer” of technological innovations and the co-ops who want to subscribe to certain forms of technological innovations could do so. (What does subscribing to the state entail? What does the state provide in return? Land, corporate and monopoly rights, airwaves, electronic networks, etc.) The co-op would then be able to provide a better product to its subscribers, and could solicit more subscribers as a result; as a subscriber to its suppliers, meanwhile, that co-op could be more demanding—its greater influence would enable it to get its employees into better co-ops or subscription lists.\n\nI know it sounds crazy to speak of an advanced, civilized social order without money, in which everyone asks another for what they need, and in turn give others what they ask for. Maybe it is crazy, but I think it’s worth the speculation if we are to think beyond liberal fetishizations of the market. Almost everyone will concede that markets require some state support and regulation, but such concessions almost always assume that such support and regulation is the “lesser evil,” and so encourage us to constantly chafe against it, and assume it could always be reduced. Nationalist economics imagine a more positive role for the state, but that still involves intervening in already existing markets in very targeted ways—the basic liberal anthropology is not challenged.\n\n“Big government” left-liberal political economy, meanwhile, always presupposes an adversarial relationship between agents in the private economy—all the state does is take sides in that struggle, or sometimes act as a referee. But if we are genuinely to see the central authority as the source of social organization, as, essentially, the owner of the entire territory over which it rules, with subordinate agencies having delegated quasi-managerial powers over the “productive forces, then we should try to formulate that relationship prior to any mediation, like the various departments of a corporation. A corporation has external constraints, of course, but, then again, so does a government: it must show itself a respected and responsible actor on the international scene, whatever its place among an international hierarchy of states. But more important than all this is how to think about the creation, or re-creation, of an ethics, morality and aesthetics that transcends liberal ontology and anthropology.\n\nI think the conventional view that sees pre-modern peoples as more “spiritual” and less “selfish” than moderns has it completely wrong. With all of the adherence to ritual and belief in supernatural agencies, pre-modern peoples are driven by the most material interests—fear and need. If one sacrifices regularly to the gods and is careful not to violate any ritual prescriptions, one will be provided for—one will have victory against enemies, a good hunt, rain for the crops. In a post-sacrificial order, there are no more exchanges with the gods, or even God: what God has given us is everything and incommensurable with any return; what each of us gives to God is also everything, all of us, even in the knowledge of its utter inadequacy.\n\nThis desire is no less powerful in the atheist. The post-sacrificial epoch would better (and more positively) be called the epoch of the absolute imperative, a concept I take from Philip Rieff. The absolute imperative is absolute because no imperative can be issued in return by the commanded (no “God get me out of this and I’ll never…”). The absolute imperative is to stand in the place of whomever is violently centralized, i.e., scapegoated. The absolute imperative has its corollaries, enjoining us to construct and preserve justice systems that place accused individuals at the center in a way that defers, delays and ultimately transforms the scapegoating compulsion, or represent actions and uses of language that reveal the scapegoating compulsion in less than obvious places.\n\nObviously, we (at least in the West) “hear” the absolute imperative because of the Judaic and Christian revelations, but it can certainly be made “audible” in other ways. But all the radicalisms and “holiness spirals” of the modern world, however “puppetized” and “proxified,” are set in motion by an attempt to obey the absolute imperative. Despite the best and worst intentions of economistic thinkers (who are really obeying the absolute imperative in their own way), human beings will not be satisfied with an affluent society, not even if we make a little bit more affluent. Or, at least, enough humans will not be so satisfied to allow affluenza to settle in, undisturbed, once and for all.\n\nWhat, then, are the economic consequences of the absolute imperative? Eric Gans—while not speaking of an “absolute imperative”—sees the economic consequences of the Christian revelation to be, precisely, the free market, where exchanges are voluntary and non-violent and the natural world can be exploited in increasingly productive ways. This may be part of it: exchanges mediated through money are a huge moral advance over such economic practices as pillage and slavery. But if the most powerful players on the market simultaneously centralize and destabilize central authority, the ethical and moral advantages of both the market and central authority are compromised beyond repair.\n\nThe two must be kept separate: money must be kept out of politics, but once the money is out, what is left of the politics? What, indeed, is left of the money? If money is first created by central authorities in order to enable individuals to purchase their own animals for sacrifice, then it from the beginning is a consequence of the derogation of authority over a shared sacrificial scene. The same is the case when money and markets are created by the imperial state to provide for soldiers in conquered territories—here, as well, money is a marker of the limits of authority, which means what money really measures more than anything else is the degree of pulverization of central authority.\n\nA secured central authority would, then, have to contain the market within its embedding, enabling, moral and ethical (disciplinary) boundaries. The use of money as an abstract sign of the goods, services, and capacities to be commanded by its possessor would necessarily dwindle: the uses of money would be qualified in many ways. How much could that use dwindle? If it dwindled to nothing, wouldn’t that mean that economic activity has been wholly re-embedded in a thoroughly articulated self-referential social order devoted to ensuring the institutionalization of the absolute imperative? That, at any rate, is the thinking behind the thought experiment attempted here."
    },
    {
      "slug": "form-and-paradox",
      "title": "Form and Paradox",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Once the sign has done its work on the originary scene, that of arresting the forward, convergent movement of the emergent community toward the central object, the members of the group will, indeed, proceed to advance on the object and consume it together. This raises the question of how they do so without forgetting what they just learned, and restarting the mimetic crisis. The sparagmos, the manifestation of the resentment toward the center, must be contained. My answer to this question, one I have put forward many times, is that the sign is “flashed” at each point along the way, accruing meaning and variation along the way. Even at the “wildest” moment of the sparagmos, a quick gesture would prevent one member of the group from encroaching “too much” on the portion of another member. What this means is that form is needed to make transitions from one activity to another, or from one “stage” of an activity to another.\n\nThis is the reason for that “canopy of ceremony” enveloping all practices in traditional orders, the loss of which in modernity is so bitterly mourned by reactionary cultural theorists. Think, for example, of how difficult it can be to “disengage” from an intense conversation with a close friend. It’s awkward to say something like “ok, see ya” when that cut-off point inevitably comes. The good-bye is best framed in such a way as to indicate some carrying over of that experience into more mundane activities, as well as that the separation represents a mere interregnum, as the conversation will be resumed at some later point.\n\nOr, take perhaps the most “wild” activity of most modern humans, sexual intercourse—just as some process of seduction must proceed the act, some exchange of words and gestures must “seal” its conclusion, both to preserve it as sacralized memory and integrate it into the rest of life. A lot of “bad” sexual experiences are no doubt a result of a failure on the part of one or both parties to see to the “scenic” character of the act. (The new legal doctrine of “affirmative consent” is a kind of unintentional parody of this need for form, trying to codify in declaratives what must in large part take place on the ostensive and imperative level.)\n\nI’m coming back to this question in connection with arguments regarding the moral order of absolutism I’ve been making recently. The problem for absolutist political thought is conceiving of a post-sacrificial center. We can’t have a God-Emperor because we know that the emperor doesn’t control the weather, the river or the crops, nor can we in good faith bring some portion of our possessions to a temple to be consumed so as to ensure the regularity of rainfall or, more generally, the benevolent gaze of the deities. But, since there is a center, over and beyond any “justifications” for it, or for a particular occupant of the center, that anyone could provide, the center’s de-sacralization leaves a hole.\n\nSince what the center does is issue imperatives, in obeying the imperatives from the center we confer the “graceful charisma” (a term from Philip Rieff recently referenced by Imperius in his twitter feed) the center needs—more precisely, we do so in the way we obey, by eliminating the gap between the imperative issued and the imperative obeyed. “Social science” becomes a holy science insofar as it is wholly engaged in studying the difference between imperatives issued and imperatives obeyed, including the ways that difference is manifested through the declarative order.\n\nA particular “fork” confronts us in embarking upon the path any imperative places before us. Since the center is occupied by, has been “usurped” by, a human, every human comes to model him or herself on that occupant by demanding some form of centrality him/herself. Being the recipient of an imperative places you at a center with, therefore, some power to wield—at the very least the power to direct attention one way or another. One way of directing attention is by appropriating the “transgressive charisma” (to return to the distinction Imperius evokes) one gains by violently centralizing someone “falsely” claiming centrality. This putative falseness consists, circularly, in marginalizing the present claimant’s, and all those he invites to be represented by him, self-centralizing. We can identify transgressive charisma because its bearer will accuse his target of all of the violations of normative order that he himself commits in his very accusation.\n\nAnd this normative order is the result of the deferral of scapegoating that marks post-sacrificial order. Something goes wrong—our first impulse is to find the origin of the threat and eliminate it. (We are all originary thinkers.) How? We first of all look for a human origin because anything that threatens us seems intentionally directed at us, and only a human could threaten us intentionally. (Gods, in sacrificial orders, can be considered humans for this purpose—the border line is very porous.) So, which human? Some of us stand out more than others, whether it is because we are “defective” in some way (physically disabled, speaking with a lisp, etc.) or because we have come, rightly or wrongly, to be associated with “trouble.”\n\nSome of us are “marked,” in other words. Someone, in a given situation, will be “especially” marked. How so? Someone will make some apparently plausible connection between that individual and the event. Someone else will second it. Others start to look more closely, and find other reasons for suspicion. And not just suspicion of a past deed, but of ongoing connivance in whatever the threat is. Everyone starts to converge upon this individual. It is not just that he needs to be punished, but that he is the source of a contagion that can only be stopped by shutting it down at its source, and right now. The proof of this is the very contagion that leads to the convergence on the individual. The panic intensifies until that individual is eliminated.\n\nThat is scapegoating, and we see this kind of thing happen, usually, of course, in much less disastrous forms, all the time. Look at why people get excluded from groups, ostracized by or within institutions. Now, if we put the scenario I described in the previous paragraph in reverse, let’s say that as the crowd starts to converge, one individual hesitates, and starts questioning the movement toward this central object. He points out that the association someone has made could easily have another explanation, or may not even be an association. He proposes that we look more closely at that purported “evidence.” He might further point out that harming this one person will do nothing—whatever the emergency is (if it is in fact an emergency—another question he might raise), it has to be addressed on its own terms. He may point out that some of the participants are clearly hurling accusations only because others are—indeed, they’re the same accusations, and the people hurling them give no evidence of having thought of them on their own.\n\nAll this scenic construction is what lies at the base of a “normative order” or “justice system.” The entire legal system can be seen as erected so as to cut off at the pass all the mimetic inclinations toward scapegoating. But the person who slows down the crowd redirects its hostility toward himself. He may become a victim, but he has advantages that the chosen victim doesn’t. The selected victim, the “emissary,” is marked, and every response he has given towards the crowd has stained him further—his denials are obviously lies, his tone and gestures show that he is keeping some secret, etc. The retardant, meanwhile, is no more marked than anyone else, and attempts to mark him now will be risky because too obviously “interested.”\n\nHe begins by drawing attention to the crowd, which must now look at itself—or, at least some are looking at others, diluting its “crowdness.” To the extent that he is an effective retardant, everything he says confronts some claim, some accusation, made by the leader of the crowd (the self-chosen leader, or perhaps one chosen by the retardant himself, to give the crowd focus and slow it down). Why did he notice this, but neglected to tell you that? The retardant doesn’t want to renew the crowd’s fervor, this time directed at its (former) leader—he wants to dissolve the crowd, while ensuring that it retains a memory of what it would most like to forget.\n\nIt may be important to punish the leader, but it should be a slow and proportionate punishment, in contrast to the hurried and massively disproportionate one the crowd was about to inflict. Most basically, the punishment should be a lowering of the trust given to that individual, which is really just a recognition that he has revealed something that we can’t forget. At the same time, there will now be something in each of us that we trust a bit less, and we will all be a little bit more ready to listen to someone taking on the role of the retardant in similar cases.\n\nYou have a post-sacrificial culture once the balance has shifted from the arsonists to the retardants so that, ultimately, most of us are mostly retardants, and can note our own inflammatory tendencies. But once this takes place there comes the tendency to farm out our retardant capacities to automatized institutions that run according to fixed rules and bureaucrats who can apply those rules without thinking too much about their origins or meaning. Sacrificial tendencies will then recur; indeed, the justice institutions themselves will attract such tendencies, where they can be indulged covertly and in good conscience.\n\n(Liberalism is essentially the laundering of scapegoating through the justice institutions.) We will never have to stop learning to be the first retardants. This is what we learn by giving form to all of our interactions and thereby ensuring continuity and consistency of intent—passing the baton, so to speak, even to ourselves. When scenes are formally constructed, emergencies are already accounted for in terms of the scene itself—there are “procedures” in place, even if only tacitly, in the forms given to actions and interactions. It is accusations of intent that can’t be seen in the form of one’s actions that will stand out, not markings of being less fit.\n\nThis requires an acknowledgment of the paradoxical structure of the sign I’ve been exploring in the last couple of posts. Again: we create the “reality” that we also simply “refer” to. Even knowing this doesn’t extricate us from the paradox because any attempt to act on this knowledge just generates a new scene, with an uncertain outcome, on which new signs with the same paradoxical structure will be emitted. We work, live think and speak with this paradox by remaking ourselves, as much as possible, into forms that sustain continuity across acts. I might be marked; any of us might be, under certain conditions. But one can show that the very things that might mark one are in fact signs of one’s retardant quality.\n\nWhat seems irritating, annoying, or threatening is really my giving notice of a readiness to hesitate before any prospective convergence. I would then need to remake myself so that that is genuinely the case, so that I don’t delude myself into thinking that simply being irritating and annoying in itself marks one as a retardant. One thereby constructs the reality within which one will circulate as a sign of deferral, but it will only be such a reality insofar as one actually defers, which also depends upon all the others—all the others with whom one is then engaged in a reciprocal process of creating an idiom of forms constituting an oscillation between hesitancy and continuity."
    },
    {
      "slug": "paradox-discipline-imperative",
      "title": "Paradox, Discipline, Imperative",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "If the signifying paradox is constitutive of the human, then humanistic inquiry, or the human sciences, really involves nothing more than exposing and exemplifying that paradox in forms where it had previously been invisible. The paradox here is that we know what we’re going to find, but we’re going to find it, if we’re searching properly, precisely where we assumed our search for it was paradox free. I’ve been hypothesizing that what constitutes the post-sacrificial disciplines has been the concealment of the scene of writing (and subsequent media) upon which those disciplines depend. Drawing upon David Olson’s discussion of “classical prose,” in which he shows that writing historically took the form of a supplementation of the speech act represented in writing, I’ve been arguing that this supplementation occludes of the scene of writing itself.\n\nWhat the scene of writing reveals is that words (and ultimately all other signs) can be separated from their scene of utterance and the intentions of those on that scene and iterated on further scenes and taken up by other intentions. As Derrida claimed, writing reveals that what is truly originary in the sign is its iterability, not its meaning or the intention behind it; we can take the next step and say that its iterability, which guarantees the possibility of future human scenes, is its meaning, and is the intentionality of anyone issuing a sign. So, the meaning of the word “dog” is something like “I reference, with varying degrees of directness, all previous uses of the word ‘dog’ in order to enable a potential ostensive that will enhance scene construction in more or less vaguely conceived future instances of emergent mimetic conflict.”\n\nThe disciplines, starting with the mother of them all, philosophy, want to abolish paradox. An acceptance of paradoxicality would situate the disciplines as supplemental to the paradox of imperatives issued by the center: the narrower and more precise the imperative, the more all of its intended subjects must make themselves ready and worthy of obeying it in unanticipated settings. Inquiring into this paradox would be all the human sciences we ever need, but in this case the disciplines would have to “abdicate” their self-appointment as those who provide the criteria upon which we judge the legitimacy of the sovereign.\n\nIs the sovereign doing “justice,” is he protecting and respecting the “rights” of his subjects, is he meeting their “needs,” adhering to “international law,” enforcing the “law,” ensuring “prosperity,” “wealth creation,” “growth,” etc.? Has he been selected and does he rule according to procedures in a way satisfactory to all those who have themselves been appointed by certain procedures; all of which procedures merely lead us back to the establishment of those procedures according to other procedures, which…? If no, then he’s not the “real” sovereign, and in order to know whether he is or not you have to be a political scientist, a legal theorist, an economist, a sociologist, etc.\n\nTo maintain that position, you must suppress the paradoxicality of your own utterances. You must provide certain, clear, unequivocal declaratives yielding universally available virtual ostensives that lead to only one conclusion regarding whether the central authority is rightly distributing whatever it is your science assumes he must be distributing.\n\nThe human sciences claim they conduct inquiries modeled on the experimental sciences, with their process of hypothesis generation and testing, but they really don’t. (Do the physical sciences? Should the physical sciences? I leave these questions aside for now.) I worked my way to this realization through reflection upon my own little field, the teaching of writing. I came to see that all the criteria used to determine whether student writing was “good” or “improving” was circular—terms like “clarity,” “precision,” “deep analysis,” “reading comprehension” really don’t mean anything, because what it means to be clear, precise and all the rest depends upon the situation, i.e., the discipline.\n\nThe assumption is that the instructor him or herself knows what clear, precise, analytical, etc., reading and writing because, otherwise, what would he or she be doing teaching writing at an accredited institution? But that means that all of these supposed concepts really translate into the teacher saying “become more like me.” And how can the student tell what the teacher is “like” (since the condition of the student is defined precisely by being unlike the teacher)? Well, I’ll tell you when you are or aren’t. So, for most writing or English teachers out there, this is why your students always ask you “what you want”—they have intuited that the entire structure of your pedagogy is predicated upon you desiring from them a reasonable facsimile, not of who you really are (that would be hard enough) but of who you imagine yourself to be.\n\nFrom this I concluded that what is to be rejected in this conception of teaching and learning is that its “standards” do not provide “actionable” imperatives. No one can obey the imperative “write more clearly,” unless there is already a shared understanding of what “clarity” entails for the purposes of that communication. And, again, in the educational setting, such imperatives are issued precisely because the student doesn’t have access to such a shared understanding. So, I concluded that the only kind of “fair” and effective pedagogy is one that provides students with imperatives such that they can participate in creating the shared understanding making it possible to determine when those imperatives have been obeyed.\n\nThis generally involves something like “translate (or revise) X according to rule Y,” i.e., some operation upon language from within language. I don’t want to go any further here (but if anyone is interested… https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/double-helix/v6/katz.pdf)–but the point here is that the conclusion applies to all the human sciences (which are all, really, if unknowingly, pedagogical). That is, a genuine human science would have to participate in its “object” of study, producing imperatives aimed at improving the social practices it studies, along with generating the shared criteria enabling the practitioners to assess the way and degree to which the imperatives have been fulfilled.\n\n(Of course, political scientists, sociologists, economists and the rest make suggestions to policy makers all the time—indeed, they are routinely hired and subsidized for this very purpose. But the results of these suggestions and proposals can only be assessed in the language and means of measurement of the disciplines themselves—they therefore represent different ways of imposing a power alien to the practice in question. They are attempts to give imperatives to, rather than receive imperatives from, the central authority.)\n\nThe next question, then, is how do paradoxes generate actionable imperatives? To get to paradoxes generating imperatives, we can start with the imperative to generate paradoxes. Find the point at which the relation between the name, concept, or title becomes undecidable—that is, where it is impossible to tell whether some thing is being represented or some representation is producing a thing. This undecidability pervades language in ways we usually ignore—has it ever seemed to you that someone had the “right” name (their given name, not a nickname)? It’s absurd, of course, but, on the other hand, one’s name can correspond more or less closely to their being, can’t it? The argument over whether words represent their meanings “arbitrarily” or through their “sound shape” as well goes back to Plato’s Cratylus , and is not settled yet—whatever the truth, the fact that it’s a question, that words sometimes seem to match, in sound, their meanings, is an effect of the originary paradox.\n\nThis paradox of reference will emerge most insistently in the anomalies generated by disciplines at a certain point in their development, but can be located at any time. What is “capital,” what is the “state,” what is “cognition,” what is “identity”? If you ask, you will be given definitions, which in turn rely upon examples, which in turn have become examples because that term was used to refer to them. This is the kind of deconstructive work that opens up the question of the relation between a discipline and the intellectual traditions it draws upon and conceals. Within that loop of concept-definition-examples-concept is the founder of the discipline and the containment of some disciplinary space. A new imperative, or chain of imperatives, from the center is identified and represented as a new imperative the sovereign is now to follow—he is to create a new social order freeing capital or making the state independent, unleashing new cognitive capacities, representing pre-formed identities.\n\nArticulating these paradoxes, then, presumably help us generate concepts other than “capital,” “state,” “cognition” and “identity.” Let’s review the process of discipline formation on the model of Olson’s study of literacy and classical prose. Writing represents reported speech, but since it does so in abstraction from the speech situation it must supplement those elements of the speech situation it can’t represent: tone, gesture, the broader interaction between figures on the scene. This generates new mental verbs: suggest, imply, insist, assume, and so on. These mental verbs are in turn nominalized into suggestions, implications, assumptions and so on (it doesn’t happen with all words—there seems no corresponding nominalization of “insist,” at least in English).\n\nThese nominalizations become new “objects” of study, for linguists, psychologists and ultimately all the human scientists. These concepts are artifacts of literacy—this doesn’t mean that they can’t tell us something about processes of thinking, knowing and speaking, but it does mean that they conceal their origins and become naturalized as “features” or “mind” or “language.” Cognitive psychologists, for example, can set up ingenious experiments that test the role of, say, “prior assumptions” in decision making, but built into these studies is the literate, declarative “assumption” that it would be better if decisions were made purely through abstract ratiocination without reliance on “prior assumptions.”\n\nSo, the use of power to favor what cognitive psychologists and like-minded human scientists across the discipline would recognize as “rational discourse” is implicitly favored over any attempt to, say, think through what a “good” shared set of “prior assumptions” might be.\n\nSo, let’s say we reverse the process, and dis-articulate the nominalizations back into verbs. Anna Wierzbicka’s primes can be useful here, but they’re not required. So, for example, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman “writes of a ‘pervasive optimistic bias ’, which ‘may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases.’ This bias generates the illusion of control , that we have substantial control of our lives” (I’m just working with Wikipedia here). So, “we” can measure how much “control” “we” have over “our” lives, how much control we think we have, and the “distance” between the two. Those doing the measuring must have more control than those being measured—they know how “complex” things really are. The best way of measuring such things seems to be asking people how much they think things will cost. (Maybe Kahneman has a bias in favor of certain understandings of “control” and “complexity.”)\n\nBut being more or less “optimistic” is a question of wanting, hoping, thinking, knowing, trying and doing. These activities are all part of each other. You have to want in order to hope, and you have try in order to do and you have to hope in order to try. And you have to know something (not just not know lots of things) in order to hope—knowing the relation between trying and hoping, for example, and how that relation is exemplified within whatever tradition or community you are located. And the relations between all these activities can be highly paradoxical—the harder you try, the higher your hopes might be, which might mean the more deluded you are or it might mean the more you find ways of noticing your surroundings, taking in “feedback.”\n\nBut can you try really hard without hoping? Sure—and consciously withdrawing your hopes from your activity, draining your reality of its aura of hopefulness, so to speak, might be a new form of hoping, one in which you accept a lack of control as part of a “faith” you have in “higher powers” or the mutual trust with your neighbors. From this you derive an imperative to hope, try, know, etc., in a specific way, within a particular paradoxical framing. (All of the binaries targeted for deconstruction by Derrida are sites of this originary paradoxicality.) None of this interferes with re-entering the entire disciplinary vocabulary from which we departed, and reading the discipline itself in terms of its hoping, trying, knowing and so on. Any disciplinary space must also be a satire of some institutionalized discipline."
    },
    {
      "slug": "relevance",
      "title": "Relevance",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It’s common to hear some event or discussion denounced as a “distraction.” A distraction, presumably, from what is really important. A distinction between what is more and what is less important is essentially a distinction between what is more real and what is less real. What is more real, it will always turn out, is what better fits the model of reality you presuppose—and wish to impose on others. So, people pay more attention to some lurid scandal manufactured by media outlets than to the latest study showing a decline in the wealth of the middle class. Clearly, the latter is more real, more important, because it is a sign of other things that are real and important: a decline in consumption, leading to a recession; growing dysfunction among members of the affected group, leading in turn to growing dropout, drug addiction and crimes rates with potential for a higher risk and less stable society; the possible emergence of new political forces trying to represent the dispossessed, with the possibility of upsetting the existing establishment, and so on. Meanwhile, what follows from the scandal? Nothing real—one corrupt politician gets replaced by another, maybe a new rule, soon to be forgotten, gets imposed—no one will remember it a few years down the road.\n\nBut in attributing such a higher degree of reality to certain processes, a further assumption is made: that those who are enjoined to pay attention to those processes in proportion to their reality can also affect the event, or its subsequent consequences, in proportion to the attention paid to it. Why criticize or ridicule others for being “distracted” or “distracting” if distributing their attention in a more appropriate way is not going to pay off in commensurate power over what one pays attention to? Otherwise, why not just pay attention to local, everyday, “petty” events and issues that one might be able to influence; or, to what one finds amusing or exciting?\n\nThe one criticizing the distraction and the distracted, then, is the one out of touch with reality: more people paying attention to the latest economic developments does not add up to more people having intelligent, informed discussions about those developments, which would not, anyway, in turn, lead to a shift in the commitments of policymakers, such that they would now start formulating and implementing policy in accord with the presumably coherent and essentially unanimous conclusions drawn by those intelligent and informed discussions. The pathways from events, to reporting of those events, to taking in that reporting, to public opinion, to official political responses to public opinion are all cut in a manner unrecognizable to one who takes the model of the public spirited, informed, citizen seriously.\n\nWell, then, how should one organize one’s attention? In such a way as to find vehicles for thinking through the anomalies and paradoxes that most forcefully present themselves to you. If there really are intrinsically more important or more real realities, that’s the way you’re going to find them anyway. This means we’re always working with what’s “at hand”—even when we want to be important and talk about important things we end up carving our own little niche within them, like arguing some technical point that hardly anyone else considers important. The desire to pitch one’s tent at the realest of the realities is the desire to have a commanding metalanguage that enables you to give orders, at least in your own mind, or the space you share with others, to those who actually command, who occupy centers.\n\nWhen a pundit or resentful intellectual says that some politician did this or that in order to distract us from what he’s really doing, resentment is expressed in a satisfying way insofar as one is superior to those so easily distracted and to the politician who thinks he can hoodwink you. You can construct a pleasing image of the political leader who will come along and carrying out your instructions to the letter.\n\nA better criterion for determining relevance and reality is to employ as much as possible of the signifying means available on the scene where you find yourself. You’re on a scene—you’re thinking about things, which is to say rehearsing potential future scenes; you’re observing something; you’re speaking with people, even if mediated through a screen. The scene has propos and supports; it has a history. The participants have entered this scene from other scenes. All of this leaves traces on their posture, gestures, tone, words on the scene. All of it can be elicited. How much, and what, exactly, of it, should be elicited?\n\nWell, this is at least a much better way of posing the question of relevance than looking for an objective hierarchy of importance. Elicit whatever can be turned into a sign of the center of the scene. Any scene falls prey to mimetic rivalry: one actor tries to one-up or indebt the other, maybe even without realizing it. Everyone involved wants to be at the center, which might very well mean subverting another’s bid for centrality. It certainly means evincing resentment towards whatever keeps us all on the scene in the first place—even if, in fact, we’re all there to see that person, her attempts to usurp others’ attempt to be at least the center of their own site of observation is a form of resentment. And, of course, pointing these things out on the spot leaves one, justifiably, in fact, vulnerable to charges of deploying an escalatory form of resentment oneself.\n\nAny sign of resentment toward the center is also a sign of genuflection before it. You can always show another their resentment by simultaneously showing their worship of what they resent. And of whatever it is that counts as a center upon the scene. The resented/worshiped figure, itself, points to some other center: whatever we deem to be “in” or “of” the resented object is also elsewhere, in whatever allows that object to carry on in such an offensive way. If your argument with someone escalates, it gets to the point where it becomes “excessive”—but what does that mean? Excessive according to what measure? Well, the argument started with an “issue,” but the stakes have now raised to the point where the “issue” has become secondary—the confrontation becomes the thing itself.\n\nLike it or not, your resentment toward the other is a form of worship: you devote attention to him, and attribute to him power over your own actions (he’s making you angry). But this means that the original “issue” hasn’t been left behind—it turns out that that issue was a mere proxy for this new one, this new form of devotion. And who’s to say it’s less relevant? But what form of worship will this turn out to be? If he kicks your ass, it ends anti-climactically, and you return to your own group in shame. If you kick his, well, maybe it’s the same, because it turns out he wasn’t a worthy adversary, which is also a bit shameful and not very “relevant”; but if you return in triumph, you install him as a kind of permanent deity, whose prowess proves your own. You construct an idol, and will require ritual repetitions of the same battle.\n\nBut it’s also possible that the two warriors will discover that they worship, not the other, but something that is neither of them. Whatever allows them to make peace with honor intact, whatever they can swear by together—that is what they worship. But now every sign put forth by the other—every sign of fear overcome by courage, all evidence of training, sacrifice, self-denial, skill—that one can emulate, that one has put forth oneself, are signs of devotion to that center. All the words that the two will henceforth speak to each other, and that others, telling their story, will speak of them, testify to that center. If one gets unreasonably angry with the other they can both laugh, because that resurgent resentment recalls the scene upon which its predecessor was transcended, and therefore becomes a sign of that transcendence. The show of resentment is just demonstration of the gift of vigor given by the center.\n\nThis brings us to critical ontological and epistemological questions. We’ve already dealt with the question of “reality,” that is, whatever is inexhaustibly signifying. It’s also a question of truth, which, in social and cultural terms, can only mean the eliciting of signs of one another’s relation to the center. One central principle of modernist art is that aesthetic value lies not in what a given work represents (ideas, a social reality, etc.) but in the extent to which it makes full use of its materials—colors and shapes on a flat surface, words on a page, and so on. Modern art and its theoretical defenders were right to defend art against its social utility, which in practice means kitsch, but were mistaken in thinking that rigorous artistic practices meant eliciting desires concealed or suppressed by the civilized social order.\n\nThe materials of art are the materials of other areas of life, which also use colors, shapes, surfaces, words, sounds, etc. The vocation of art is to retrieve those materials from the disciplines, which use them to establish the hierarchies of relevance through which they hope to subordinate those who occupy the center. To some extent this always means the disciplinary establishments of the arts themselves.\n\nWhatever is presented as relevant in itself is to be presented anew as a product of a scene. This includes all the aesthetic materials that, in a disimperativized declarative, disciplined order, are set up for purposes of control—for the anticipatory capture and sequestering of resentments generated by the carousal for rotating power itself. The more you can event-ize and scenicize the conceptual hierarchies streaming toward you the more reality and the closer to truth you are getting. These conceptual hierarchies always stream toward you through other people, people mediated by scenes and media. The conceptual hierarchies, then, need to be performed along with them—one needs to help elicit from them this performance, and help them elicit it from oneself. When the conceptual hierarchies dissolve, the real hierarchies that don’t need their support become more visible. The concepts can then be put to use discerning what the real hierarchies demand of us.\n\nHere’s another way to think about it. Our lives are increasingly run by algorithms, which are really just a technological extension of the desire to predict what others will do. If I’m in a difficult situation, and I can predict what others will do for the next 5 minutes, I might get out of it; if I have machines that can predict what pretty much everyone will do over the course of their entire lives, I can dominate them fairly easily. Two things are necessary to build such machines: first, humans must be analyzed, broken down, into parts (fears and desires, primarily) that make them predictable; second, a social world is built that constantly elicits those anthropological mechanisms.\n\nIt’s a bit too science fictiony to say we currently live in such a word, but it’s obvious that we are governed by those who are trying very hard to construct something along these lines. If you want to approach this in libertarian terms, you could say freedom depends upon being anti-algorithmic; in autocratic terms, you could say that clarity in the command structure requires it. The ideal of the algorithm is to separate the declarative order from the ostensive and imperative worlds once and for all. In the perfected algorithmic order no one need ever command because everyone would always already be guided spontaneously upon the path that maximizes frictionless coordination.\n\nIt’s pointless to ask, well, what would be so terrible about that (even if we could answer the question), because the ideal of the algorithmic order is really the opposite of what its appears to be. It’s just a war machine. It grinds you up to generate the inputs it needs. The victimary left thinks it opposes the algorithmic order because it reproduces the hierarchies resulting from behavioral differences—but the left just wants to control the machine. Which just proves human decisions are necessarily made to determine what counts as “inputs.” So, the left can’t have a counter-algorithmic program. Countering the algorithm would involve asking, what would be predicted of me now?\n\nAnd then confounding the prediction. I don’t mean that, if your “profile” suggests that you will behave compliantly in a given situation you should instead kill a bunch of people. Indeed, a slightly modified algorithm could predict that . It means looking at the markers of compliance, as many of them as one can in a given scene, and delineating their imperative structure. We’re following orders here—we can all see this, right (look at what that guy just did.. why do you think this space is arranged in just this way?… did you notice how that gesture made her nervous?…)? The algorithm can’t account for an ongoing exposure of the terms of obedience.\n\nThere’s no telling where it will lead—not necessarily to disobedience; maybe to subtle shifts in obedience that might eventually add up to decisive ones. The algorithm can’t account for someone seeking out an other worthy of being obeyed, or trying to become worthy of being obeyed oneself. The algorithm can’t account for the irreducible determination of relevance, of centrality, on the scene. It can’t account for the reading and writing, literal and figurative, of all the signs of the sign as signs of centrality and marginality—and therefore of relevance."
    },
    {
      "slug": "salvation-from-the-east",
      "title": "Salvation from the East",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The religious practices of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism are mostly ritual in many places. But there is a more spiritual strain found in certain sects and their texts: the idea that consciousness itself is the sacred or God. The very fact of being conscious means that we already know everything that it is possible to know about God or Buddha, al though certainly revelation or enlightenment can make that knowledge more available to understanding. The insight of Buddhism is that consciousness is essentially one thing, despite the various creatures who each possess their own form of consciousness, and despite the infinite possible objects of consciousness. A Zen master once summed up Zen teaching in one word: “Attention.” When asked to elaborate, he said, “Attention, attention, attention.”\n\nConsciousness is shared by animals. There is a famous Zen koan about a monk who asks his master whether a dog has Buddha-nature or not. The Zen master answers “no!” al though I understand the Japanese word “mu” (sometimes translated as “no”) is actually more nuanced. The traditional teaching of Buddhism is that all beings have Buddha nature and attain enlightenment, including dogs and stars, rocks and trees. The point of the koan, as I understand it, is that the student should be seeking enlightenment not wondering about doctrine. Zen disciples seek enlightenment, the content of which defies any rational explanation. Meditation on the master’s answer to the student’s question, mu, informs the Zen practice of some disciples.\n\nKant wrote, “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” To develop his point, I would say there are three miracles which support faith in God: Being (the universe surrounding us), life (which fills the heights and depths of our planet), and human consciousness, which is indeed distinguished by our sense of right and wrong. Eric’s idea of the scene of representation can be articulated in ethical terms. To be aware of God, or to be aware at all, means to be aware of the human community, as a community, and to be aware of individuals, as individuals. Human consciousness is a new awareness of others, as mediated by a sign. Buddhism is never nihilistic. Consciousness, the scene of representation, is filled with the attention of the human group.\n\nAll animals and even plants have the ability to react to their environment, and can thus be said to share the miracle of consciousness. Rocks and stars do not obviously have consciousness. But Zen Buddhism, like Kant and Hegel, seeks to overcome the opposition of the perceiving self and the objects of consciousness. Anything that can be perceived, therefore, partakes of Buddha, and the duality of subject and object, coming and going, is illusory. For this reason, the question of whether the scene of representation has any ontological status apart from human consciousness is not meaningful.\n\nBuddhism recognizes that life is suffering, and that the source of suffering is desire. The human condition therefore is desire and the suffering which results, a very Girardian insight. The solution is to minimize desires for sensual pleasure and not let desire lead one into sin. There is an ascetic strain to certain types of Buddhism and Hinduism. Enlightenment suggests an inner serenity and detachment from external conditions, founded on the insight that all existence is always-already free and transcendent."
    },
    {
      "slug": "dialectics",
      "title": "Dialectics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Dialectics is the rendering of paradox pragmatic. There are two ways of thinking about dialectics. One is as a mode of generating new ideas through probing, critical dialogue, in which each side tries to make explicit the assumptions underlying the other’s discourse. This notion of dialectics goes back to Socrates, and a particularly interesting modern example can be found in R.G. Collingwood’s understanding of dialectics as the attempt to find agreement underlying disagreement. The agreement, which, in Derridean terms, was “always already” there (insofar as argument was possible in the first place), is nevertheless, once explicated, a position that neither side knew they held in advance. In other words, something both originary and new emerges.\n\nThe other way of thinking about dialectics is as a way of understanding a historical process, or even as that process itself, whereby events are generated by contradictions in an existing social form, so new configurations emerge which both fulfill and confute the intentions of the actors who initiated them. Historical dialectics acquired a bad name as a result of its association with orthodox Marxism, which used “dialectical materialism” as a ‘guarantee” of both the inevitability and justice of its own victory, but Eric Gans employs a much subtler version in his account of the emergence of the imperative speech form from the ostensive and then the declarative speech form from the imperative (by way of the interrogative). Here, the shared intentionality bound up in a particular sign is put to the test (“contradicted” by) an “inappropriate” use of that sign; the tension is resolved as the desire to maintain shared intention (“linguistic presence”) generates a new speech form, “recouping” the “mistake.”\n\nUnlike Marxist dialectics, this Gansian version allows for all the times where this “transcendence” of the previous form would fail to take place—linguistic presence can be broken, and some form of violence and social crisis ensues. The result of a dialectical process, then, can only be assured once the new form has been spread through imitation sufficiently so that it has proven itself capable of deferring the antagonisms those failures would have aggravated. In other words, “historical dialectics” proceeds in a manner beyond the intentions of any participant, but must be “authenticated” by shared intentionality at each point along the way and eventually yield a higher level of shared intentionality.\n\nBut this also means that the two meanings of “dialectic” are one: the emergence of new historical forms is a process of more advanced dialogues taking place at the margins and gradually providing the means of deferral that enable a reconstructed center to resolve some crisis. Thomas Kuhn’s notion of scientific revolution provides us with the best model for understanding this process: the margins where the more advanced, “disciplinary” dialogues are taking place are where those who have perceived the anomalies of the existing social order in such a way as to doubt whether they can be “recouped” within that order produce questions invisible within that order. Their work is then focused on developing and trying out possible paradigms that might replace the prevailing one.\n\nWe could see the emergence of Generative Anthropology itself in just such dialectical terms. At the center, according to the originary hypothesis, sits a potential victim. It is in designating this potential victim, and refraining from victimizing it, that the sign emerges and the group is formed. But how did this clear, minimal insight become possible? If the making of victims is a matter of course, whether it be through conquest, those in power destroying those who might pose even a distant threat, sacrifice, mass slavery, and so on, one would never consider that the production of victims could be a source of any significant insights.\n\nIn fact, I wonder whether a word equivalent to “victim” would even have been used (the word “victim” itself, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, comes from the creature brought as a sacrifice). Certainly those whom we would today consider victims, like conquered, displaced and massacred populations, would have not thought of themselves in those terms: they would know, of course, that they had been bereft of their gods, rituals, territory, wealth, kinsfolk, institutions, and so on, and they would mourn all this and bemoan their destruction or enslavement, but this would be a source of shame and loss of faith more than of a complaint anyone would be expected to attend to. Our gods have failed us, or we failed our gods; what else is there to say?\n\nOnly with the emergence of justice systems can the notion of a “victim” be conceptualized—that is, once wrongs are not addressed directly through a vendetta but through some socially sanctioned process of determining punishment. This indicates an added degree of deferral, which opens a new realm of paradoxes. The law is established so as to do justice, because “justice” by definition is the proper allotment as determined by anyone who is in the “right” position to determine it—so, something we could call “law,” even if that means the sifting through, by legal professionals, of privileged precedents, rather than a written code, will emerge with the concept of “justice.”\n\nBut, then, isn’t “justice” merely an effect of what the law, with its own institutional history, has decided? In that case how do we determine whether the law has been rightly decided? For this, we must step outside of the system, to reclaim its origin, but this stepping outside is a dialectical process which requires the model of the exemplary victim of the justice system itself. At that point, the concept of the victim becomes increasingly central culturally until, in Christianity, we have the worship of the exemplary victim. As Christianity permeates all cultural sites to the extent that it can be detached from its origins and its victimolatry separated from the carefully demarcated exemplary victim defining it, all of culture comes to be obsessed with the search for victims and self-representation as victims.\n\nThe history of democracy, liberalism and romanticism trace this negation of Christianity from within Christianity. With post-structuralism, even language becomes grounded in victimization. Victimary thinking becomes so central as have destroyed any “other” it could distinguish itself from for some moral purpose. Once this ontological colonialism has proceeded to a certain point, it becomes possible to consider that it is not victimization that is at the origin, but a refusal to victimize. And then it becomes possible to think the originary hypothesis.\n\nWe can posit a related dialectic as the form of modern politics. Eric Gans speaks of an oscillation between “firstness” and “reciprocity” as constitutive of liberal democracy, but this can’t be a dialectic because nothing new can come out of it. The distributive demands of the moral model will always be assailing the innovators and merit-based hierarchical structures that make those demands for equality possible in the first place. The only thing that could keep the pendulum swinging back and forth is a sufficient degree of cynicism on the part of the redistributors—they must know, as the Schumers and Pelosis surely do, that the eat the rich and get whitey talk is just to keep the contributions flowing and the voters and activists mobilized—they know better than to actually kill the goose laying the golden eggs.\n\nBut their successors, like AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and others, don’t know this. They’ve grown up saturated in the political simulacra of Media Matters, and take all the egalitarian talk quite literally. Even if they “grow in office” and realize what the progressive ideals are really for, we wouldn’t really have a dialectic: the increasing disparity between ideals and the cynicism with which they are advanced can’t lead to anything new. Even if the pendulum keeps swinging, all it can lead to is more corruption and more advanced degeneration.\n\nWe could, though, speak of a dialectic between the model of the originary scene and the model of the “second revelation,” that of the Big Man. Here we have a genuine dialectic that has always produced cultural novelties. Ancient Israelite monotheism—the name of God as the declarative sentence—is itself a product of this dialectic: a retrieval of the originary relation to a shared center on the terrain created by the ancient empires, heirs of the Big Men. Rather than a figurable center, like a sacrificial animal, a non-figurable God; rather than a sacred grounded in ritual specific to a closed community, a relation to the center any people could imitate; rather than a deity with whom to engage in imperative exchange, a God who commands reciprocity with our neighbor.\n\nBut neither Israelite monotheism, nor its Christian and Islam successors, reject monarchy—rather they, seek to constrain and edify it. Nor do any of these faiths recommend a universally shared relation to the center that would override all hierarchical political institutions: the imperative to seek the peace of the kingdom where you live is always intact—and, of course the Israelite God is Himself paradoxically and scandalously, national as well as universal. As with any dialectic, new problems are generated out of the solutions of old ones.\n\nLiberalism might be seen as an attempt to stall this dialectic by internalizing it within the economy, producing a pseudo-dialectic between expanded production and expanded consumption. This also cannot create anything new. But if we see the adherence to the model of the originary scene as itself a product of struggles between hierarchs seeking to efface their descent from the Big Man, we can set the dialectic in motion again. The logical endpoint of victimocratization would be the direct branding, like with sports stadiums, of groups demanding absolute, genuflecting respect from anyone marginally more normal than them by corporations defending their fiefdoms within the global distribution process.\n\nFacebook’s Women’s March; Amazon’s Black Lives Matter; Google’s Committee to End Transphobia, etc. The “antithesis” to this Woke Capital hearkening back to the emergent originary scene is, first, that the position of the hierarch is left unclaimed; and, second the originary scene as configured around a center has also been abandoned. Pretty much anyone who asserts the right to issue commands, and the grace to obey them, simply because there has to be a social center, is an avatar of autocracy, and heir to the Big Man, consciously or not. And virtually anyone who gathers others together to study some thing unresentfully, letting the object speak or, in Heideggerese, “be,” has created a direct line back to the originary scene. The “synthesis” comes when those forming disciplinary spaces turn their attention to the emergent autocrats, and those autocrats revise their command structures upon receiving feedback from the disciplinary spaces.\n\nThis “synthesis” can only take place in the middle, in the meeting of those upholding the normal and some “allotment,” and those marginal to the official disciplines. Together they will have to form a “spine” which can act once enough elites realize that their role is to govern in their own name rather than ginning up the mobs in whose name they can then claim to govern. But this involves keeping a kind of double dialectic at work. On the one hand, there is the dialectic between Woke Capital and the disciplinary/disciplined, as the latter learn from the negative example of the former how to disentangle the command structure from the demand for sparagmos now.\n\nOn the other hand, there is ongoing dialectic between the disciplined and disciplinary themselves, as the former imbibe modes of moral and ethical prescription from the latter, while the latter learns from the former to be more pragmatic and pedagogical, to be that hardest thing of all for thinkers—useful. The norm-setting distinction of the victim currently situated most antipodally to the normal can then be met by the re-marking of the normal as the vertex of convergent resentments."
    },
    {
      "slug": "identities",
      "title": "Identities",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We are all products of the center; we all want to participate in the center. Any discussion of who any “I” or “we” had better take that as its starting point. Any individual life can be traced from center to center: the parent(s) at the center of the family, the teacher at the center of the classroom, the principal at the center of the school, the cool kid at the center of the peer group, the boss at the center of the workplace, and many more. These are the centers from which imperatives are issued, and which impose a nomos on the scene: the “fair” or “just” division of goods, attention, sympathy, protection amongst siblings, classmates, co-workers.\n\nIn the modern world, there are centers backing these with which we are in direct contact: corporations, media, the state. These larger centers support the local ones, or encourage us to resist them, or some complicated combination of both that individuals need to figure out. The local centers, meanwhile, may support or subvert each other—the cool kid implicitly or explicitly encourages us to defy our parents and teachers. And, of course, the power of the cool kid might be enforced by entertainment media while the authority of parents might be reinforced by the state. Whatever goes into making up individuals will be the “processing” of all these articulated centers in tension with each other within a more or less stable and dynamic structure of desires, resentments and imperatives.\n\n(I don’t deny the importance of biological and ultimately genetic make-up to the formation of individuals, but I don’t have anything to say about that and any genetic predispositions would still get “processed” through the structures outlined above.)\n\nWe will find that all of these local and intermediary centers are supported by the central authority—family, school, workplace, even informal groupings like clubs, leagues and associations are ultimately legitimated by the state. The most informal of these groupings, such as friendships and romances, are not, but are closely supervised by these other structures. One of the most powerful fantasies of the modern world is that of forming an intimate bond with another that is outside of, and transcends, all formal authorities—“us against the world.” But it’s a powerful fantasy because it is produced so often in art and entertainment, and it is part of the long term political process of demolishing intermediary authorities and leaving each individual face to face with the central authority.\n\nThe production of this fantasy draws heavily upon the Christian iconography foundational to Western culture (and I wonder whether other cultures even have something like this): central to the “us against the world” narrative is the martyrdom of one or both of the couple, who somehow evoke the mimetic resentment of the authorities and those who accept them unquestioningly, and whose actual or social death reveals the violence behind the apparently placid normalcy of everyday life. I wonder if it would be possible to test the hypothesis that to be a fully participating member of Western culture, one must have experienced oneself as the victim within this narrative at some point in one’s life. Perhaps that is what makes one “interpellatable.”\n\nOne’s relation to the state could be seen as an articulation of one’s relations to actual, possible, and residual sovereignties. An Irish-American, for example, is first of all subject to the American state, while having more or less distant ancestors who were subject to Irish sovereignty or, more likely, Irish potential sovereignty in more or less open rebellion against British. This residual allegiance might subside into irrelevance and be subsumed into a new mixture of lapsed allegiances; but it might also be leveraged against the American state or other groups (others with analogous more or less phantom allegiances).\n\nThis play of identities we can also see as ultimately an effect of the degree of unity of the central authority: the more pluralistic the state, that is, the more it invites different elites to levy sections of the population to vie for control over an increasingly centralized state, the more sharply defined and reciprocally antagonistic (with various shifting alliances) these groups will be. But there’s no reason to assume that the absorption of all these residual and possible allegiances into a single homogeneous identity subordinate to the state is the privileged model, either—in fact, even the most fractious state will have to recur to that centralizing identity on occasion, making it simply part of a larger system of domination: a proxy of some kind.\n\nWhere there are residual and possible allegiances (which exist even in non-immigrant societies, where nations are formed out of tribes or regions once subordinate to local kingdoms or aristocratic families), partial and local forms of responsibility can be delegated. Everyone should be grouped up, and groups should be allowed to exercise the executive and judicial powers needed to maintain themselves as such. What about individuals who want to escape their groups? Like quitting a job, you’d have to find another group willing to “adopt” outsiders, which they might have all kinds of reasons for doing. Think of the self-exiled black American artists who became, essentially, honorary Frenchmen and women over the course of the early to mid 20 th century.\n\nLiberalism abstracts, ruthlessly; counter-liberalism should concretize. The central authority wants all forms of authority to flow into its own, and that might involve inheriting residual and possible modes of authority borne by its people. A great deal of the ruler’s activity should involve issuing and supervising charters: for corporations, for townships, for local forms of authority, for associations of various kinds. If you want a recognized identity, apply to the central authority for a charter, or apply to subscribe to an authority that has already been chartered. The more generic, and potentially disruptive identities, like those promoted by feminism, can be broken down and sorted out: women’s groups focused on the education of women, on moral improvement, on counseling wives, on the preservation of traditional ceremonies and customs, and so on.\n\nIf a woman wants to experience womanhood in sisterly relations with other women, there can be plenty of opportunities for that in non-antagonistic forms. If an identity can’t really be chartered for some purpose the central authority can acknowledge, then it’s best to let it dissolve.\n\nThrough all of this, to be an individual is to be a morally responsible person. This involves, not imagining oneself outside of, and victimized by, “society,” but establishing practices that defer centralizing violence. What is important is the character of the violent intention one resists, not its target: seditious violence against the state can display the same mimetic contagion as the merciless bullying of an unpopular child, and both cases require an inspection of the authorities that have allowed the contagion to grow to the point where outside intervention has become necessary. But moral action can only be carried out through the identities.\n\nThe media strategy of dispersal and incorporation involves providing models of victimary self-centering and transgressive charisma. You can put yourself on the market as a victim of the normal, or as a defender of such victims who exposes the oppressive underbelly of the normal. It’s a way of taking yourself hostage and demanding the ransom payment. This media strategy works because it managed to plug into the dominant, pre- and non-Christian, heroic narratives of mass culture, which always involve a single man or small group of men defeating many more or much more powerful enemies in defense of the victims of those evil enemies.\n\nReprogramming that narrative is a simple matter because the vicarious pleasure taken by the viewer is too obvious and too obviously exploited and hence somewhat shameful when exposed explicitly—so, the pleasure can only be preserved if the evil enemy is turned into some “exemplary deviation” from the cultural source of the heroic narrative itself. So, Captain America has to fight, not the Nazis, but the Nazi within all of us, embedded in what we take to be normal. His charisma becomes transgressive; but, as I said, this is not so difficult to accomplish, because constructing perfectly evil villains already elicits a kind of guilty transgressive pleasure—unrestrained violence is allowed where it normally wouldn’t be.\n\nCentralizing violence, then, is primarily directed against the normal, or what we could call the normalest normal, the exemplary normal. The normal that’s so normal it has no idea how oppressive it really is. Obviously, in today’s culture this means white+male+Christian+straight+conservative+middle class. Moral action then needs to deflect this centralizing violence from the normal, but this is no easy matter—defending some ordinary guy against a virulent hate campaign because he said something currently deemed racist or sexist invites comparisons between his suffering and all the suffering that has been experienced historically, even if not in this particular case, by those who might, following some familiar if far-fetched chain of consequences, be possibly victimized through the racist or sexist statement.\n\nAnd there’s no transhistorical frame for determining the right terms of comparison. How do you weigh the humiliation and economic deprivation experienced by some middle class white guy against hundreds of years of violence done to black bodies, etc. To defend someone is to enter the legalistic game of attack and defend, and even if you can occasionally manage to turn the tables the prosecutorial initiative always lies with the defenders of the marked on the market against the unmarked.\n\nThe normal is the unmarked, and the postmodern critique that norms produce their own deviations is self-evidently true. The lives saved and improved, the cultural “equipment” made possible, because of the restraints placed on desires and resentments so as to reinforce the most local centers, are all invisible; those chafing under those restraints, unable to comply with them through, arguably, no fault of their own, are highly visible. The long term horizon of liberalism is that we will all be unmarked; until then we must keep up the war against the unmarked, who by definition, “structurally,” mark the others. If we are to get to the condition of universal unmarkedness, then, that means the most marked of today (the transgendered handicapped Somali refugee…) will someday become the norm.\n\nBut does it not follow, then, that at the origin of any norm is the most marked? There is nothing more marked than inhabiting the name others ostensively designate you with because that’s who you in fact have turned out to have been. To be marked is to perform the paradox of self-reference—to be both liberated and constrained by the name. Everyone’s mimetic rivalry circles around this marked one, and mimetic violence is always just below the threshold of convergence upon him while he manages to expose the potential violence, make a nomos out of it, and recruit everyone to defer early on future signs of such violence. This is where a new norm comes from.\n\nMoral action, then, entails performing the hypothetical origin of the norm. This involves opening a disciplinary space within the disciplines—it is the disciplines that control the system of naming. The disciplines can say, “X is Y,” or someone characterized by this feature is going, according to some probability we are competent to establish, to have this other feature. Go ahead and treat X as if he has this other feature, then—the burden of proof is on him. This organization of reality is inevitable, and only immoral if a space is not left open for that burden of proof to be met. Moral action is meeting that burden of proof while imposing a like burden on the disciplinary agents who establish it—what, exactly, do sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc., and the activists mimicking them at a distance, “tend” to do?\n\nThe terms establishing burdens of proof all come from the nominalizations resulting from the supplementations of literacy, upon which the disciplines are founded. A word like “legitimacy” will have been derived from precise rituals and ceremonies that would have once served to mark one as institutionally recognized; now, it’s an abstract concept manipulated by those in the disciplines taking sides in power struggles. In that case, there’s a kind moral “arbitrage” that can be enacted by referring the competing nominalizations in any confrontation back to these power struggles. Attaching various “qualities” (the “Ys” mentioned above) to, say, “white males,” indicates some power differential—the “accuser” thinks this will be effective in some way.\n\nWhat power does it enact? Well, “history,” or “equality,” or “morality”—OK, but name some people, institutions, powerful figures embodying this power. Whom are they contending with, and for which discernable stakes? What will the victor be able to determine? Sure, in placing a burden of proof back on you (“people who believe in ‘racism’ are…”), I’m also hoping to leverage one power against another. In that case, no one is unmarked. That must mean we all want everyone to be marked in such a way as to defer, rather than incite, centralizing violence against them. The power struggles circulating through us make that impossible—each power can contend against the other only by means of incitement.\n\nThe most moral thing to do then—to sound Kantian—is to act as if my act will increase the likelihood of an orderly arrangement of power that will mark (“(re)deem”) everyone accordingly—even though I can’t know in advance where I might fall within that order (a little bit of Rawls there as well). I’m a sign of disorder if that prospect repels you (and you need your dose of centralizing violence), and of order if you can imagine a complementary relinquishment on your part. In that way—to sound Nietzschean—we forge new norms. We return the disciplinary nominalizations back into acts conferring faith, trust and loyalty. The markings of racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/… are converted into notations on the accomplishments and responsibilities those charges aim at dispersing."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-central-imaginary-gablog",
      "title": "The Central Imaginary",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A while back I formulated the concept of the “sovereign imaginary.” This concept represents the assumption anyone makes who expresses a desire or some resentment, who says “we should…” or “someone should…,” regarding some authority who could do the thing “we should” do. If you say “Medicare for all,” you imply a model of a state that would implement Medicare for all and would do so in the way you intend. If you say “Medicare for all” you’re not thinking of the frauds that will be parasitic on it, the bureaucrats who will make cruel and capricious decisions, the drug companies that will donate to politicians who will push to have their drugs purchased at high prices, etc.\n\nIn other words, you airbrush out of the picture all of the crisscrossing powers that would make the reality of Medicare for all far different from the intentions of its supporters. You imagine a unitary executive power, who issues orders that will be obeyed by subordinates, who will in turn issue orders obeyed by their subordinates; you imagine competent people with integrity placed where they belong and allowed to do their jobs. Even if you say, yes, I know there is corruption and incompetence and that bureaucracies develop their own interests, etc., you are still assuming that these are marginal to the sovereign power you imagine—if not, you wouldn’t be able to say “we should…” This seems to me a very useful observation to make because, if it is accepted by an interlocutor (and it’s very hard to deny), the following conclusion is also very hard to evade: such a sovereign power might have very different ideas on how to handle the health care system, and, freed of all the interfering powers (all the conflicting “we shoulds”) would have very little reason to care what you think.\n\nSo, implicit in your political desire is its cancellation. Even better, the same must be true for me, and for anyone else participating in the conversation. So, instead of arguing about Medicare for all vs. private insurance vs. treatment for cash, we can talk amicably about something upon which we have just found we agree: there “should be” a central authority that can carry out policies unhindered by interest groups, nosy NGOs, bureaucratic factions, and so on.\n\nNow, we are no more in a position to institute our desire for clear and secure central authority than we are to implement our version of Medicare for all, and so arguments over how to do this are equally pointless. We don’t need to imitate the pathetic revolutionary movements that split into a dozen factions over how to define a particular institutional reality or assess a particular event. But we are now listening to the center, and we can ask, what kind of practices will enable us to project possible paths towards clarified and security central authority, to prioritize among those paths, to invest what energy and resources we have in the most favorable paths, all the while maintaining our initial agreement that all our desires and resentments indeed point in that direction.\n\nEven more, the projection of possible paths and the prioritization among them should be guided by the need to maximize that agreement, to spread it, and to ground it more thoroughly in the disciplinary spaces we enter and sustain. That is the kind of activity that will let us see the possible paths when they take shape, and to distinguish among the opportunities they offer. What is essential here is that this imaginary is in our language—no one expressing a political desire can be exempt. So, every conversation about every policy or every social evil (poverty, “racism,” etc.) can be directly converted into a conversation about the kind of authority you seem to be imagining as capable of eliminating or mitigating that evil (or perhaps redefining it as not-evil) or implementing that policy, and the kind anthropological, epistemological, ontological, and so on assumptions you must be making so as to consider such an authority worth considering.\n\nAnd this approach can be applied to all of culture, not just narrowly political discussions—a movie will represent a particular sovereign imaginary, as will a dispute between parent and child, a conversation between friends, a psychological theory, and so on. Even if you want to argue for democracy or liberalism, you have to be imagining a sovereign that can protect “free speech,” the integrity of elections, whatever you imagine to be the role of the media in informing the public, and all the rest. Even a globalist, even an anarchist, inhabits a sovereign imaginary, whether it be international human rights courts and organizations mediating trade disputes, on the one hand, or spontaneously formed agreements between unbound individuals, on the other hand.\n\nThe sovereign imaginaries, when acknowledged, are the starting point of needed conversations; when unacknowledged, are the sources of all the conflicts over the actual sovereign. So, making them explicit is the first step toward ending those conflicts, towards overcoming ideology.\n\nNeedless to say, I continue to consider this concept essential and unimpeachable. But I formulated it before I had thought through sufficiently the consequences of installing, so to speak, the concept of sovereignty at the heart of absolutist theory. The concept is itself ultimately a liberal one, assuming a “natural” condition of violence among abstract individuals that can only be quelled by a sovereign with direct power over each individual. It is better to see ruling as helping to maintain and enhance the peace preserved throughout the social order by its various corporate powers and governors. I have come to use the term “central authority” rather than sovereign, and so I will now speak in terms of a “central imaginary.”\n\nThis should also help to conserve, within this concept, the concept of “listening to the center,” which I have discussed in quite a few recent posts. We listen to the center as the center speaks through our central imaginary. Once we have identified the central imaginary as the “topic” of our conversation, we can start to seek out imperatives from the center. Once I find in my desire for Medicare for all a faith in the possibility of clear and secure authority, I cannot but start to think of what I must do to increase the future possibility of such an authority. This imperative, and the subsidiary ones it generates, concerning maximizing agreement on this point, now restructures all my transactions with the world. And I start working on reshaping the declarative order by composing declarative sentences that answer the questions those imperatives turn into as the means of fulfilling them are exhausted in a particular case.\n\nSo the problem then becomes, how to think of that theoretical, declarative practice. I must engage with a particular person who happens to be crossing my path in some consequential way so as to enhance our agreement regarding the existing traces and elements of a clear and secure order. But I’m talking with this person and no way of fulfilling that imperative fills me with confidence at the moment, so the imperative converts itself into an interrogative, which is a way of demanding information rather than commanding a specific act. How do I arrive at a “good” answer to that question? How do we talk about doing so productively?\n\nThe disciplinary space we need here should be filled with thought experiments. In devising such thought experiments, we can derive inspiration from the kinds of experiments cognitive psychologists devise in order to identify the various cognitive thresholds children pass through. David Olson made much use of these experiments in order to determine the cognitive consequences of literacy. So, you want to see whether children of a certain age, or certain degree of exposure to literacy, are capable of understanding the concept of having been wrong—that is, of realizing that they know something now that they didn’t before.\n\nYou can give them a box with pictures of candies on the cover and ask them what they think is in it. Candies, of course. You open the box, and it’s something quite different—say, pencils. What is in the box? Pencils. What did you think was in it before? Pencils! The children are incapable of grasping the concept of moving from one state of mind to another in response to changes in observed reality. Or, you show children a man opening a drawer and finding something in it—neckties, say. The man leaves the room. The children see someone else come in and replace the neckties with bowties. You then ask the children: when the man comes back, what will he expect to find in the drawer? Bowties, they say. They can’t separate what they know from what someone else knows—they don’t yet have a “theory of mind.”\n\nThe question then is, what distinction or threshold do we want to uncover when our imperatives from the center turn into interrogatives that “command” us to compose a declarative response? What opens space to hear the imperatives of the center is deferral, which also means deferring to the other and waiting for a reciprocal gesture of deferral in turn. This is not a question of politeness of considerateness (not that there’s anything wrong with them) but of developing a discovery procedure: from another’s ability or lack thereof to defer an imposition of a compelling resentment we discern the extent to which he is ready to open inquiry into future imperatives from the central authority.\n\nDerrida associated “defer” with “differ,” and the two words are really the same. If we want to “assess” deferral, we can therefore do it through practices of differentiation. The originary scene ends, and, more importantly, is remembered as ending, with everyone putting forth an identical gesture: hence the strictness with which ritual (not to mention grammatical conventions) is enforced. But on the originary scene there would have had to have been significant differentiation: not everyone’s sign was issued simultaneously, was held equally long, was equally well-formed, was equally responsive to the preliminary gestures and potential lapses of others. Future instances of deferral will require someone to re-activate the generative scene out of the ritualized and habitualized one. Tacitly acknowledged elements of social practices need to be turned into signs. This is not a difference between “progressive” and “reactionary”: even the preservation of traditional practices requires this kind of renewal.\n\nThe practices of literacy constellated in “classical prose” are similarly homogenized through the supplementation of an imagined represented speech scene by metalinguistic devices aimed at placing all readers with each other and the writer on that imagined speech scene. The study of language required to create classical prose makes language into the center of a disciplinary scene; the generation of future disciplinary scenes will depend upon turning those metalinguistic devices into centers of new disciplinary scenes. If you take metalinguistic representations as referring to “objects” (“beliefs,” “assumptions,” etc.) your discipline will simply reiterate the construction of “prosaic” metalinguistic literacy itself. Of course, it’s necessary to hold some concepts constant while you work with others, but that’s just a question of the degree of “flux” you want in the disciplinary space so as to conduct a particular inquiry, not of more “constant” vs. more “variable” objects or domains of reality.\n\nYou use a concept (like “assumptions”) in a particular way for a particular inquiry, which differentiates that use of the concept from the history of usage it derives from. That history of usage has taken shape in a normative center of usage, which your own usage will to some degree imperfectly iterate. Now, we can assume that the speaker’s meaning is the same as the word’s meaning, which collapses the very distinction introduced by literacy. In this case, our meta-inquiry will concern itself with guaranteeing the normativity of the use of the concept. This is a way of resisting any differentiation beyond that required to ensure the continuation of the discipline itself.\n\nIn a sense, you are then like the child who thinks he always thought there were pencils in the box, and like the participant on the originary scene who forgets the event itself in its ritualization. Or, you can accentuate the difference, indeed the differences, between your use of the concept and those circulating around the normative center. The purpose of doing this is not a romantic attempt to make yourself a center of hostile attention in what is really just another ritualized form of modernist individualization. Rather, you want to ensure the commensurability of speaker’s meaning and word’s meaning—not by policing deviations from the latter, though, but by making explicit the supplementary character of the meta-concepts of literacy.\n\nWe have concepts like “assumptions” and “beliefs” because the iteration of the sign is always problematic, and always requires a disciplinary “gathering” or “assembly.” In a sense, the most fundamental human question, the question upon which our emergence depended, is whether this sign that we use now is indeed the same sign as when we used it before. Literacy makes this question explicit, and all subsequent media do so as well in different ways. We need for the sign to be the same in its different uses, but if we imagine that it simply is the same, we commit ourselves to resisting differentiation. The only thing that makes the sign the same is that members of a disciplinary space establish continuity with other uses of the sign, which means with other disciplinary spaces.\n\nAccentuating the difference of the sign is taking on the responsibility of the disciplinary community: it is the way we make this concept our own and potentially others’ out of all the other ways other disciplinary spaces have done this. Only in this way can you remember that you first thought there was candy in the box, and what changed your mind; and you can remember the bustling, hypothetical scene even as you fill your allotted role in the rituals and habits in which its residue is deposited.\n\nPerhaps the whole of a “centered” social and political practice lies in devising experiments for determining how a given practice is determining the sameness of the sign it is centered on."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-worlding-event",
      "title": "The Worlding Event",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I have argued previously for the priority of “attentionality” over “intentionality”—attention must precede intention, and “intention” individualizes what is “joint” in attention, making it more of a declarative than an ostensive concept. We can trace the emergence of intentionality from attentionality, whether by “intentionality” we mean the more philosophical notion of constituting an object or the more everyday use of the term as meaning to do something. On the originary scene, all participants attend to the central object, and attend to each other attending; the sign, as the gesture of aborted appropriation, is really nothing more than the demonstration of this reciprocal attending to their joint attention.\n\nSelf-referentiality, then, is built into the originary scene. Even more, what is action if not a prolongation of attention? I see the other attending to me, which becomes a kind of self-attending, as I can single out that in my gesture that might be articulated in the other’s attention, and in that way move myself so as to fit the shifting attentional structure of the other. My movements, and therefore my actions, enter into and are supported by the attentional space I have co-created with others. In all of our actions, then, we are tacitly referring to this attentional space, of which we are mostly unaware at any moment. As Michael Polanyi says, we know more than we can say. But we can say more and more of what we know, in the process producing more knowledge we can’t yet say—becoming a representation of this state of affairs is what ethical action entails.\n\nFor originary thinking, the human being has a telos: to speak and act along with the center; to enter the history of deferral in such a way as to construct the world as the effect of and continuation of that history. We assume everyone is trying to do that as well, which is why we know every utterance includes a sovereign imaginary eliciting commands from the center. Traditional ethical thinking will start to speak in terms of will, judgment, capacities, desire and its education and so on and all of that is fine, but we can just speak of the center one becomes as soon as one is amongst people, a center both actual and possible, and that each of us constructs as the ways we want attention drawn to or deflected from us. You can compete with other centers within the economy of attention, or you can redirect attention from you to the center enabling you to so redirect attention. Sometimes the very competition with other centers can be turned towards that end.\n\nPerforming the paradox of self-reference is the highest good for originary thinking. Turn every reference to something else into a reference to you and every reference to you into a reference to something else. You can never run out of things to do this with because everything is marked by the history of such reciprocal reference, and so keeps becoming something new. In this way you keep turning the world into a completely internalized self-referential system. This would seem to be a completely closed, and therefore dead, system, but in relation to the center this self-referentializing system is itself just a thing comprised of references to the center.\n\nYou point to something, enabling others to see it, which enables it to be, but its being in turn enables you to see it and to point to yourself seeing it along with others—the center makes its appearance in this layering of the scene and the impossibility of determining whether new things are coming into view or we are sharing attention so thoroughly that we’re not sure where your seeing begins and mine ends. The center tells us to sustain that, by constructing institutions out of sites where the articulation of shared reference and self-reference (where we find a way of saying to each other, “here’s how we’re making sense of each other”) can become a model of deferral.\n\nWe don’t need to invent clever ways of enacting the paradox of self-reference, like saying “I am lying.” ‘I see that” is quite paradoxical enough, because “I” can only see that because “you” and “others” are least potentially able do so (and have therefore “always already” done so) as well; “that” is that only because I am seeing it; and I “see” that because our deferral, our laying back from appropriation, lets that object, like all objects since the first object, set itself off against a background—seeing is always a refrained touching and tasting. The disciplined forms of literacy try to suppress the paradoxicality of the declarative by supplementing sentences within imaginary scenes whose parameters are set by those defining the abstractions used to perform the supplementation.\n\nTo define “perception” in terms of physiological structures and learned Gestalts is to try to abolish the paradoxicality of “I see that.” But, of course, we have to say things like that, so it’s best to say them in the manner of little satires on these suppressive supplementations, reintroducing the paradoxes they hope to avoid. Eventually, these running satiric digressions become indistinguishable from the primary discourse itself. If you can find ways of iterating this digression-within-the-discourse in new variations within emergent events so as to have each variant naming the previous ones you enable others to join in self-referential centering.\n\nOne way of breaking with Western metaphysics is by acknowledging the traditional character of all thought. The concepts you are working with have been worked with in other contexts, and are conversions of earlier concepts, which solved problems within a now extinct paradigm which has nevertheless bequeathed to us some of it problems and some of its materials for solutions. But this means that the more we shape these concepts to our own purposes the more we are participating in an ongoing inquiry with those who did so earlier, and had no idea we were coming along. But since the most fundamental and universal tradition is language itself, it seemed to me that the self-aware participation in traditions of thought could more simply be understand as a form of language learning.\n\nWhen you learn a new language, or when children learn language, the process involves imitating chunks of discourse in ways that are inevitably mistaken because you must intuit their uses in unanticipated contexts—how else could anyone learn? In the process, you generate new idioms, and this is how language changes—enough people take the mistake, or even a shift in emphasis, as “correct.” We never stop learning, so we’re always students, but we also have to step outside of the flow of learning in order to teach people who we see falling into what we fear (but we could be wrong) are less productive patterns of error.\n\nHere, we have, broadly, two choices: one, we situate ourselves within a more or less institutionally protected orthodoxy, and correct those whose language usage doesn’t conform. The advantage here is that you guarantee you’ll always be right and smarter than anyone who comes along. Or, you re-use the misused idiom with some of the weight of inherited uses which the newcomer might be less aware of and thereby incorporate the mistakes into a regenerated tradition of discourse. Here, authority has to prove itself by showing itself capable of allowing digressions to flow back into a larger current. You keep emulative mimesis in play by allowing that play to construct the very space in which the implications of language usages can be explicitly hypothesized.\n\nMany years ago I started working on what I called “originary grammar” because I felt that GA needed to be more than just another “theory,” one that offered its own “readings” of texts and “explanations” of social structures and historical events. I thought it needed to generate its own comprehensive vocabulary—a language others would have to and want to learn—rather than just saying something like, “here’s how we think it all began” and then proceeding to talk about ideas and interpretations and principles and beliefs and arguments and proving things like everyone else. And the way to do that was out of the dialectic of linguistic forms Gans worked through in the first work in GA, The Origin of Language (the new edition of which is of course available, and the Amazon page for which is still sadly bereft of comments).\n\nI was encouraged in this by the fact that Gans used a kind of grammatical approach to defining the two key intellectual and cultural transformations constitutive of the West: he defined “metaphysics” as taking the declarative sentence as the primary speech act; and he defined Judaic (I think “Israelite” is better) monotheism as “the name of God as the declarative sentence.” In both cases, the post-sacral or imminently modern world is constructed in terms of some tension between the declarative, on the one hand, and the imperative, or, more broadly, the entire ostensive-imperative network, on the other hand. Wouldn’t anything we would want to talk about be included in this field of tension?\n\nOriginary grammar should supersede scientism while preserving all the intellectual advances of science. Instead of “facts,” we have what is known ostensively: what could become an object of shared attention. Something could only become an object of shared attention on a scene, which cannot itself be prepared ostensively: we are driven to create new scenes by the breakdown of a previous scene, the central object upon which eventually generated new desires it could no longer defer. (Of course, the new scene could feature the “same” central object in a different way.) If the scene is not simply to break down; if a transition to a new scene is to be achieved, asymmetry must enter the arena in the form of an imperative: someone issuing an “inappropriate” ostensive regarding a new or old/new object.\n\nHere, the preservation of presence on the scene can be united with maximum innovation on the scene: we allow a space for inappropriate ostensives, to see which might work as imperatives. Finally, we can bound declaratives to the scene by allowing the declarative field maximum freedom to explore all the complexities of declarative possibilities (to cross over time and space, to organize all of reality around one center or another) on the condition that it represent actual and possible ostensive-imperative articulations. The declarative sentence constructs a linguistic present, the present in which you can utter the sentence, that, unlike the ostensive and imperative, can be separated from any particular scenic present—but that means that the “vocation” of the declarative sentence is to keep restoring the continuity and extension of the trillions of human scenes, each of which threatens in a new way to break that continuity. The declarative would be most interested in suggesting ways of preparing us, or issuing imperatives, to share new ostensives.\n\nIn this way we would have a completely self-contained and completely open system in which we would always be talking about what we’re doing in the language through which we are doing it. The content of our declarative sentences would be the way other declarative sentences have commanded us to draw lines connecting objects around a centerized one. So, discussions would take something like the following form: “you say I’ve been looking at things in such a way that others see what I don’t and this is because of where and how I stand and in saying this you are telling me to be led by the configuration which I have not yet identified as a configuration and thereby to see and lean toward something that would compel others to join me in reconfiguring it…” The specific details of any particular scene at the center of an array of scenes would be inserted.\n\nWe would be more precise than this sample indicates because each sentence modifies in some way inherited chunks of language and meaning is thus generated by the modification itself—in a language user’s noticing that you have eschewed the expression that 87.8% of listeners would have expected to come at that point in your discourse in favor of a rarely or never before used one because you want that point in the discourse to operate as a center that has you reworking language along with perception, intention and intuition. And the next declarative in the discussion could point that out or, even better, iterate it in a new modification that the language learners around you would be able to iterate in turn so as to open new fields of objects. So, we’d be talking about things in the world while talking about how we talk about things in the world while talking about how we can rework the way we and others talk about things in the world and it’s all really one “talking.” This still seems to me to be the imperative."
    },
    {
      "slug": "accessing-the-ostensive-within-the-declarative",
      "title": "Accessing the Ostensive within the Declarative",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It is in the nature of the declarative to both supplant and appropriate the ostensive. The declarative comes into being by deferring some imperative and, first of all replacing it with the combination of an “operator of negation,” or prohibition on proceeding to act on the failed imperative, on the one hand, and a negative ostensive, representing the demanded object in absentia , on the other. The declarative creates a world full objects, which is to say a world of useful and desirable things that we observe and refer to without appropriating. The declarative is born in terror of the imperative and, by extension, the ostensive, the latter of which it produces a virtual version of. All developments of declarative culture involve further distancing and regulating access to imperatives and ostensives. This is the logic of “enlightenment”: all action is to be a result of the sheer accumulation of declaratives, providing such a complete account of the world, that anything one might do has already been so mapped out in advance as to not even require a “decision.”\n\nBut seeking to erase the “violent” ostensive-imperative world ends up creating a new, inverted, version of it. The more distant from the ostensive-imperative world the declarative moves, the more it becomes imperative to interpose new declarative layers in between declarative culture and the ostensives and imperatives that emerge unbidden and unanticipated in the course of social life. Replace actions with explanations whe never possible—but this only produces perverse actions, suppressing those who point out threats or try to solve problems directly, before they metastasize. This is the linguistic basis of liberalism, which becomes a generalizable possibility once the emergence of print culture creates an extensive disciplinary structure that tilts the balance, once and for all, towards the declarative and against the ostensive-imperative.\n\nA linguistic problem requires a linguistic solution or, more precisely, deferral. This is a question I have addressed in many ways, through the concept of “upclining” in one essay and more recently by proposing we think about subjectivity as the performance of paradoxes of self-reference, and the post-sacrificial, post-literate human being as “total sign.” The attempt here is to embed an ostensive dimension in the declarative in the form of a marker of the disciplinary space of attentionality that all the references made possible in the declarative depend upon. The “what” of your sentences should have, as its Mobius strip-like obverse, the “where,” “when,” and to and from “who(m)” of its utterance—not as biographical markers (I’m writing this on a porch in a farm house in Des Moines, September 32, 2016, 5:23 PM, etc.), but as a marker within the current state of language. We could think of this as an attempt to heal the oldest split within language.\n\nThis question can now be approached more precisely by drawing on my analysis of the implications of the “classic prose” that David Olson sees as prototypical of literacy. To review: Olson sees writing as representing reported speech, and identifies as the specific features of writing the supplementation of the words reported with a vocabulary designed so as to represent what cannot be represented directly in writing: tone, emphasis, bodily language—everything that can only be grasped ostensively. If I’m telling you that John says that “the enemy is on its way” and I don’t think John knows what he’s talking about I might repeat John’s words in an exaggeratedly mock-frightened tone.\n\nSince you can’t do this in writing, in conveying not only what John said but the meaning of what he said (a distinction that becomes intelligible only under literate conditions), which is to say, registering my own distance from John’s view, I might write “John claimed that he saw the enemy ready to attack.” The use of the word “claim” puts what John said in question—I make it clear that I’m not vouching for it. A substantial vocabulary serving the purpose of indicating all the possible relations the reporter of speech might have to the reported speech is developed—mastering this vocabulary is what is involved in becoming literate.\n\nSo, we can “claim,” “assume,” “suggest,” “suppose,” “contend,” “argue,” “understand,” “imply,” and so on and these speech acts get nominalized into “claims,” “assumptions,” “suggestions,” “implications” and all the rest and these nouns come to exist within the disciplinary spaces within which we speak about thinking, reading, writing and other intellectual activities. Even “thought” is such a nominalization of the verb “think”—we can have “thoughts,” but there is also a whole world of “thought,” with its own history. Drawing upon Mark Turner and Francis-Noel Thomas’s notion of “classic prose,” Olson argues that the imperative writing is under is to construct a simulated scene upon which the writer and reader all stand—and we can see in this an extension of the declarative’s paradoxical suppression and appropriation of the ostensive-imperative realm.\n\nClassic prose is a manner of writing that enables the reader to see whatever is being described as if he were there. Olson recognizes this to be a “conceit,” i.e., a kind of fiction we adopt for the purpose of reading (Thomas and Turner of course recognize this as well), but doesn’t see any objections on those grounds. The disciplines, starting with philosophy, are in turn erected on the basis of these nominalizations, and we are left with a paradox: the neutralization of the ostensive-imperative world is carried out through a mode of writing that purports to be like a window, given you a “clear” view of the topic under discussion, as if you were present on the scene.\n\nIt seems to me that much if not all literature, or at least literary prose fiction, constitutes an ongoing satire of the disciplines—including literary fiction itself insofar as it becomes a discipline. My own proposal for engaging the disciplines by using the terms they apply to their domain of inquiry to their own space of inquiry is, in this sense, “literary.” It involves taking the nominalizations and turning them into verbs, and therefore imperatives, towards the end of bringing us all into the space of inquiry as both “objects” and “subjects.” This produces a scene of writing which interferes with the scene of presence represented by the writing.\n\nThe paradox of declarative culture can therefore be represented within declarative culture. Once the scene of writing is established, any concept, any word, within the disciplinary discourse can be “meta-d” in this way. One could say that in infiltrating the language of the disciplines only or mainly the “most important” concepts should be addressed forcefully, but that’s “Big Scene” thinking: the most important concepts are not necessarily the ones the discipline itself thinks are most important—it might very well be something the discipline shunts off to one side and yet can’t seem to do without. This is something we can learn from deconstruction. Taking the discipline at its word regarding its own concepts leads to “debates” in which the discipline has a built in advantage—more lateral approaches even the playing field for the innovative.\n\nOn a grammatical level, this involves replacing nominalizations with verbs, in order to represent disciplinary specific concepts as signs of events. If the creation and subsequent uses of the concept can be seen as events, then the set of relations represented by the concept can also be reduced to an originary event form. Those new event forms, no doubt rich in verbs, will in turn become nominalized in a more extensive and de-familiarizing way than in the source material. Let’s take a concept within GA, like “resentment.” It’s easy to use the concept of resentment as a way of expressing resentment: accusing those you resent of being resentful allows for a perfectly exculpatory manifestation of resentment.\n\nBut this means that in order to use the concept effectively, you must have deferred it: your discourse should provide signs that you withhold any resentment you might have for the resentful object of your analysis. How do you do that? You identify the center against which the resentment is directed: there is some rule which some central authority has pledged, implicitly or explicitly, to uphold, and has failed to do so. Even “horizontal” resentments derive from “vertical” ones, because it’s the role of the central authority to ensure groups don’t come into conflict with each other. If you resent horizontally, it’s because you see your object of resentment as the protégé of the “unfair” central power.\n\nSeeing resentment as resentment towards the center provides a way of exhibiting the non-resentful quality of your study of resentment, because you turn that study into a study of the center in which your own object of study, regardless of how “justified” or “unjustified” his resentment is, could conceivably join. In this way you, the inquirer/accuser can own your own resentment towards the center whose lapses enabled the other’s resentment, while converting your resentment into greater clarity regarding central imperatives.\n\nSo, I have brought the originary inquirer into the disciplinary space as both subject and object of the study of resentment. But notice the quotation marks I was compelled to place around “justified” and “unjustified.” This is a particularly difficult question in GA: how can we—even, can we—distinguish between justified and unjustified resentments? The concept itself seems trans-moral. The first resentment is toward the center on the originary scene, in response to the center barring access to the object itself. This resentment is both “unjustified” (because the center creates peace and the human through its prohibition) and completely unavoidable, and therefore justified.\n\nAll subsequent resentment must therefore partake of this paradox. Some resentments will be suppressed because they make the existence of essential institutions (the purpose of which is to limit the consequences of resentment) problematic, but that doesn’t make them “wrong”—maybe a more comprehensive resentment towards the institutions themselves will turn out to be “justified” if it is possible to replace them with something “better.” What is “better”? Providing for the adjudication of a wider range of resentments, which can therefore be productive rather than being—or before they need to be—suppressed. The study of resentment that turns into a study of the center also turns into the attempt to derive from the center a way of determining the latitude to be allowed to different resentments, which must also, though, be a study of the means of transforming those resentments so that they can participate in the discourse of the center—by finding new ways of representing other resentful positions so that they can eventually participate in the discourse of the center by…\n\nSo, we begin with an attempt to “define” or characterize “resentment,” which leads us to a question regarding the relation of the one so attempting to his own resentment, which leads us into the paradoxical nature of resentment along with a means of discussing the pragmatics of sustaining and limiting that paradoxicality. We end up with complex nominalizations, like the discourse of the center, or something like “the reciprocal relation between donating one’s resentment to the center and the naming of resentments in the practice of converting them into donations of resentment to the center.” We could actually put a verb after the long noun phrase just quoted, and predicate various features and consequences of this “relation.”\n\nThe ostensive within the declarative, in all the forms I mentioned earlier, are now in the fully paradoxicalized declarative itself. And the same process can be initiated with regard to any part of that noun phrase, including the by no means transparent concepts of “reciprocal” and “donate,” which themselves could be “verbalized” and reduced to originary event form and in turn re-nominalized as paradoxical articulations of center and margin. As Peirce asserted, all inquiries are inquiries into the meaning of “difficult words,” but, of course, what counts as a “difficult word” shifts as our attentions do. To return to a claim I made a few posts back (The Central Imaginary), the only real question we can have is whether, or in what way, to what extent, is an iterated sign the “same” sign as its previous iteration.\n\nThe only way to answer this question is by reducing the sign to its scenic origins as the representation of those origins is embedded in the event forms of the different scenes upon which the sign was indeed iterated. If that’s all we ever do, knowing that and how that is all we ever do would have us threading the ostensive through the declarative as a matter of course."
    },
    {
      "slug": "moebius-strip",
      "title": "Moebius Strip",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "At one time I set myself the task of generating a discourse on social reality completely in terms of the originary hypothesis—that is, without any supplementations or borrowings from other social theories, disciplines or everyday discourse; or, at any rate, if such borrowings were to be made, the borrowed or supplementing terms must be shown to be fully convertible into GA, with the use of external terms to be a mere matter of convenience. This line of thinking led me away from the more spatial and “geometrical” vocabulary of GA—center/margin, vertical/horizontal, etc.—as well the more anthropological vocabulary—desire, resentment, transcendence—and towards grammar: ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative.\n\nThis seems to me the most rigorous approach: from within the other vocabularies, there is no way of speaking of grammatical relations, so that the relations between, say, the imperative and declarative (as modes of culture), go unexplored and these seminal concepts remain stunted. Meanwhile, within the grammatical vocabulary, all the other terms can be assimilated: we can speak, and more precisely, albeit in more round about ways, about the relation between center and margin in terms, for example, of imperatives derived from ostensives; and about desire and resentment in terms of the “same” ostensive on different scenes and imperatives that cannot be obeyed.\n\nEventually, I found that I had to make one exception to the exclusivity of the grammatical vocabulary, and that was the concept of the “center.” The concept of “attention” has already to be entered into grammatical discourse, because some minimal mention of the mode of being capable of using these signs is necessary even to speak of the signs, and there’s no way of speaking about “attention” other than through some center thereof. From ostensives through imperatives and declaratives we have an increasingly complex reciprocal relation with the center. And, of course, once we admit the center, we also bring in “scene” and with it the entirety of the spatial and anthropological categories. Of course, my purpose was to enrich, not impoverish GA, so I have no objection to the re-emergence of these categories in a new frame. If the spatial and categorical terms are now in a dialectical relation with the grammatical terms, they undergo a kind of “askesis” themselves, relying less of inherited and intuitive uses and more on their commensurability with a grammatical analysis.\n\nThe work of internalizing all discourse within the grammatical categories is paralleled by the work of internalizing all discourse within scenic categories. If, for example, the meaning of a sentence or discourse is the deferral, conversion and re-institution of a particular ostensive-imperative field, then the constitution of a scene involves making simultaneous the signs of the previous and surrounding scenes within that scene itself. A scene is itself comprised of wholly scenic materials. The center and periphery of one scene have been transported or transposed and, of course, transformed in the process, from other scenes; desire and resentment involve a misalignment of scenes, or the differing locations of the same center on different scenes—coming from being the center of one scene to the margin of another means that the “same” ostensives won’t work on the new scene, leading one to “desire” their previous or remembered transparency; while the imperatives fulfilled seamlessly on the previous scene are overridden by other imperatives, or simply bereft of “objects,” on this new scene.\n\nIt then becomes possible to speak of the source of the “imaginary,” in its constitutive as well as its illusory forms, as the “supplementing” of a newly constituted scene with the simultaneity of all the other scenes it is comprised of. On the originary scene itself, what was no doubt a fluctuation of a series of awkward and uneven gestures around a center becomes representable or iterable in the ritual form in which it is repeated afterward, in which everyone issues the gesture simultaneously and identically. This is then the way the scene is remembered. (Notice how we can now bring in new terms from “surrounding” vocabularies, like “memory,” “imagination,” “error” and so on as specifically scenic concepts—this is how we “interface” with more traditional discourses).\n\nIn the same way, when we act as if everyone on the scene were fully present on that scene, we give the scene a memorable form while effacing the constitution of the scene, which necessarily took place through the articulation of elements extended and differentiated from other scenes. We could put this in simple terms: consider all the projecting you have to do in order to make sense of what anyone else is doing, even on the most familiar scenes—you must assume motives of others’ behaviors and in doing so take as given various psychological or phenomenological concepts that enable you to identify and “verify” those motivations.\n\nYou assume, that is, that the person is behaving “like” that person has behaved before in “similar” situations, and “like” other people, “comparable” to this individual in “relevant” ways, have themselves behaved in other “similar” situations. Anything that can’t be familiarized is either “interpreted” in such a way as to render it compatible (“he didn’t quite understand what I was asking him…”) or pathologized (“he’s weird,” or “he’s not himself today”).\n\nThe other way of engaging a scene is to make more explicit your own and everyone else’s constitution of the scene and attending to the way in which each presents himself as a center is a selection and articulation of modes of centering from other scenes. And what is selected is selected so as to maximize whatever center holds this scene together. If we assume the presence of the scene, we maximize the centeredness of the participants at the expense of the scenic center. If we constitute the simultaneity of the scene, we minimize the participants in the name of maximizing the scenic center. Each of us is nothing but the semiotic capacities we are able to marshal so as to contribute to bringing the center bringing us here into view.\n\nThe problem here is that the semiotic capacities most demanded by the scene might wreak havoc, for the participants, with the modes of centrality that sustain them elsewhere. In other words, it can strip them down—nothing they’ve done anywhere else really counts, except insofar as it provided the attentionalities demanded here. You have to love the center of the scene to want to make this “exchange.” There is usually something more comforting in seeing the scene you are on, not as an opportunity to shed yourself of the “badges” of former scenes, but as a compulsion to engage in the familiar contest of competing centralities.\n\nWe can get at this from a different angle. It is only a residue of the belief that words have magical powers that leads us to assume that the same word used on different occasions means the same thing; or is, in fact the “same” word. As I suggested in a previous post, all we can ultimately care about is whether the sign (and by extension, the entire semiotic system) remains the same sign across different uses. One way of reassuring oneself of this is to rely on an official meaning and attack all deviant uses; the way to ensure oneself of the sameness of the sign, though, is to distinguish its use on one scene from its use on all other scenes in such a way as to direct everyone’s attention in a way that situates the sign on this scene.\n\nFor those assuming presence, the sign is the sign is the sign—any divergences are due to inattention or mal-intention. For those constituting simultaneity, the sign is different from these other previous uses of the sign in all of these different ways, because those of us on this scene are distinguished from those constituting all those other scenes in all those different ways. The point here is not to criticize others for not sufficiently differentiating the scene on which they “sign” from other scenes but to go ahead and introduce a differentiation.\n\nIf we go ahead and differentiate amongst the constitutive elements of the present scene, we will do so grammatically: ostensives put forward on one scene have been transmitted to another scene; imperatives issued on one scene are outstanding and yet to be fulfilled on another; the ostensives and imperatives that had been effaced or disavowed by the declaratives on some previous scene emerge on a later one when their declarative force weakens. Now, once we start articulating these speech forms on a given scene, and ask ourselves what imperative we are following, and how might follow it further up to its source, or extending it further to the point where it could be formed as a question to generate new sample declaratives, the differentiation between scenes disappears from our scene of inquiry.\n\nWe are simply on and in our present scene. But if we have to ask why someone continues to try and obey an imperative with no “correlate” on the scene we are thrown back into the problem of introducing scenic differentiations. The differing vocabularies are both incommensurable and transition into each other. Hence the “moebius strip” of the title of this post—if you follow one vocabulary to the end it “obverts” into the other, complementary but “indigestible” one.\n\nIt’s possible to think about the relation between the spatial and anthropological, on the one hand, and grammatical, on the other hand, concepts, analogously to distinctions between esoteric and exoteric and emic and etic. The “method” of scenic differentiation is more suited to a traditional social scientific analysis than the grammatical one, while the grammatical approach “implicates” one—what imperative are you following now, as you do what you are doing? On the other hand, the grammatical “method” could in principle enable the construction of a far more intricate and penetrating analysis of events than the scenic differentiation approach—it would be the only way of approaching the immense complexity of Peirce’s projected (but rarely, if ever, conducted) semiotic analyses, meant to include all forms of knowledge and all practices of inquiry.\n\nAnd it is just as easy to imagine asking someone, how did you come to be on this scene, given the way you are signifying on it? Where the moebius strip obverts itself is the center, both the center of whatever scene we construct as our site of inquiry and the center of the scene upon which we conduct the inquiry. The most objective analysis reaches its end when we can say, on the scene we construct analytically, what the center wanted of those gathered there and how those on that scene heard, heeded, or evaded the commands of the center. But that scene is only “closed” when it turns into an ostensive sign eliciting imperatives from the center of our scene of inquiry. And inquiry into another scene becomes an inquiry into the scenic conditions of our own inquiry, which in turn leads into other inquiries. It is this paradoxical self-referentiality of sign use that our moebius strip models and enacts.\n\nSo, the broader implication of this mutual implication and reciprocal distancing of grammatical and spatial/anthropological originary thinking is that it suggests the need for a moebius strip style of thought. Think in terms of starting a sentence on one side of the strip and continuing it on the obverse, in such a way as to come back to the first side, but with some reversal of the elements. This is the logic, for example, of my notion of “donating your resentment to the center.” Within the earliest human communities, in which hierarchies between humans are not established, a sacrificial logic emerges in which commands from the center are obeyed in exchange for favors from the center: an imperative exchange.\n\nAs the center becomes a site of intra-communal hierarchy, the exchange becomes increasingly unbalanced and untenable: nothing one could give to the divine king, including all of one’s possessions, one’s first born, etc., could ever match the boon of life provided by the king. We have imperatives that can no longer be fulfilled, which means the sacred center is no longer a reliable “target” of ostensives. Rather than abandon the imperative exchange with the center, which is unimaginable, one makes the exchange incommensurable on both sides: to the center we give everything, all the time, but not to the center as occupied by the God-Emperor.\n\nRather, we give everything to the center that commands us to present ourselves and address others as centers. And everything includes, more than anything, that which we hold most dear: our grudges, our pride, our righteousness. Once, that is, the grammatical form is pushed to its limits, it becomes necessary and possible to imagine corresponding changes to the spatial/anthropological form. Now, this, of course, is not the kind of empirical claim that could be “proven” or “tested,” even if it provides (for example) a new way of thinking through the historical material associated with the emergence of the Axial Age.\n\n(For example, it has enabled me to hypothesize that the emergence of a justice system once honor culture has been, if not eliminated, “trimmed back” considerably, necessarily leads to the emergence of exemplary victims that could become cultural icons.) Rather, it’s a way of converting, conceptually and “praxically,” one mode of centrality into another: from a mode of centrally in a constant struggle for space with other self-denominating centers to a mode of centrality that confers names within a new space within which that struggle is converted into a joint operation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "some-further-inquiry-into-hlvm-gablog",
      "title": "Some further inquiry into HLvM",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In formalist terms, the left is the cadres of militants levied by those elites interested in furthering the power directly exercised by the state over the individual, by undermining intermediate power centers. Power over individuals can always be further centralized: the state can arrest you for all manner of crimes, including crimes generated by your interactions with the state, and can surveil you for a wide range of purposes—but it can’t yet tell you what to eat for breakfast. It would be very easy to show how each leftist advance enables the state to single out something new for attention in each individual.\n\nIt still needs to be explained, though, how those agents interested in more direct state power over the individual go about mobilizing the masses they need, or, for that matter, why they want this centralization. Regarding the latter, there might be all kinds of reasons: corporations want to open up markets, which might require breaking up local monopolies and regulatory and tax regimes; for those within the state apparatus itself, it might be felt necessary for making uniform rules of operation across the country, and eliminating various logjams created by the diverse and often confused local prerogatives. In each case, some kind of resentment towards central authority is involved, ultimately for not being central and authoritative enough, as proven by the fact that one can challenge, revise and circumvent it in these very ways.\n\nBut the “low” is not simply bribed, even if there is also some of that going on—leftism is always a racket, among other things. But extortion rackets must also depend upon resentment: information can be used against someone because the dissemination of that information would change the way others interact with that person, and that depends upon the social norms dictating the grounds on which we resent. The left establishes rackets at vulnerable “choke points” in the social field of resentments—sites where attempts have been made to minimize resentments, and where the levers for exacerbating them also therefore exist. To say that those resentments subjected to minimization efforts were themselves ginned up by previous centripetal movements would be true, but ultimately leads us to an infinite regress if we can’t assume an originary form of resentment that sets the whole machinery in motion.\n\nThere are two ways of thinking about the “elemental” form of resentment animating the left. First, it’s a product of social and economic inequality: serfs resent lords because the lords have land, wealth and power and the serfs don’t; a wage laborer resents a corporate executive because the executive has far more money and perks, etc. I don’t think this provides a powerful mode of analysis, for the simple reason that these inequalities are constant, while shows of resentment are intermittent; furthermore, there is no clear correlation between “amount” of resentment (assuming there was some way of measuring that) and the degree of inequality—Bill Gates only recently ceded his position of the world’s richest man, but has never been a particularly intense target of either the right or the left.\n\nIt may be that we will one day find a perfect correspondence between elite funding of specific resistance foundations and the manifestation of political activity along those specific lines, in which case the elites would be impeccable puppet-masters and there wouldn’t even be any way of distinguishing between more and less active modes of resentment. I’m going to assume that elite funding is more like seeding than recruiting—it is widespread and long-term, and no foundation thinks in terms of generating a protest of this size with this specific legislative impact on a regular basis, even if opportunities like that arise. So, the question of what form the basic mode of resentment of the lows takes is a real one.\n\nThe other way of conceptualizing the resentment of the lows is as a response to perceived violations of the trust dependents and subordinates must have for those with authority over them. This would mean that, even with the original victim group of the Western left, the working class, whose grievances seemed mostly focused on wealth inequality (not according to Marx, though), class resentment was more focused on the tyranny of employers and managers, and the broader encroachments upon traditional ways of life (and authority) on which the state and capitalists jointly engaged. While, even on strictly logical terms, there’s no reason to see some equation between degree of inequality and degree of resentment (does my resentment of my richer neighbor automatically go up another 10% when he gets a raise that extends the gap between our respective salaries another 10%?), when it comes to misuse of authority we can assume a direct “production” of resentment.\n\nHere, the relation is virtually axiomatic: however my level of moral maturity might enable me to process it, I can’t help but notice and therefore resent the injury done when agreed upon (tacitly or explicitly) rules are violated to another’s advantage and my disadvantage. The very form of interaction and cooperation is harmed in this way, and I have to respond by either exhibiting or disavowing resentment, and doesn’t require that I look into something far outside of my everyday sphere of activity (like average executive salaries).\n\nSo, this means that when the highs target the lows for mobilization, they will, insofar as they are effective, focus on breaches in trust and derelictions of duty indicating a failure of authority. This is important to keep in mind, because it means that insofar the resentments motivating the lows can be taken as legitimate—as is no doubt often the case—what the assuagement of those genuine resentments really requires is the restoration of stable and well-founded authority, rather than pay-offs (which mostly go to the leaders). Re-establishing authority detaches leftist foot soldiers from the left’s officer class, as the latter live off of perpetual resentment and therefore develop Big Scene theories guaranteeing its perpetuity—it is here that we see the “struggle” framed in terms of equality vs. inequality, because that opposition can never be resolved.\n\nBut it also gives us a way of studying leftist propaganda, by sorting out the appeal to perceived failures of authority (including of course, attempts to raise the bar for the due performance of authority in such a way that failure is included in the very definition) along with the way such appeals are plugged into perpetual struggle models. So, if the Black Lives Matter protestor is genuinely interested in the institutions of policing and incarceration, there is a basis for discussion; once this gets framed in terms of “systemic racism,” there no longer is.\n\nMeanwhile, insofar as the right is the “middle,” we can define that more precisely as well. The middle is those with an interest in preserving workable modes of authority within intelligible chains of command. Of course, what counts as a “workable” or “legitimate” mode or exercise of authority is not self-evident, but if you’re on the left the burden of proof is on those defending authority and if you’re on the right the burden is on those challenging it. But this focus on one’s relation to authority helps us to see all kinds of overlapping and possible shifts in position—so, for example, a black man, insofar as he is interested in patriarchal and parental authority in the home, is part of the middle; insofar as he focuses on himself as a potential victim of police violence, he is “low.”\n\nIn these grey areas, then, is where we can expect to see all the ideological warfare and pedagogical activity taking place. This field is not infinitely elastic, of course—one reason why it has become open season on white men is that is very difficult to figure them as “low,” in part because most white men will themselves resist such an identification. Some alt-right activity is in fact a series of acrobatic efforts to slide white men into the low position, but since alt-right politics largely involves signaling against other low-designees, and you become low by joining more than by elbowing out others, this will probably prove impossible. White men are forced to take up the mantle of the middle, which in turn becomes part of the bill of indictment against them.\n\nThe Middle, then, is a kind of anomalous position. It doesn’t fit into the structure of incentives liberals have built, which is why leftists are always frustrated by the fact that the middle seems more concerned about things like abortion and gay rights than acquiring free medical care from the government. The constant bombardment of the middle (which can almost be a definition of liberal modernity) is multi-layered: the New Deal was really an attempt to erode the middle by bringing them into the welfare state, and European countries have proceeded much further along this path, making their middles correspondingly more flaccid.\n\nSexual and cultural revolution, the cult of the criminal, and other measures, are far more obvious assaults. The middle persists, in part because it’s still not quite possible to abolish the material difference between lives of the middle and lives of the low—but this is itself because once you let yourself go low, you’re very unlikely to sustain the basic discipline needed to organize your life, even with government support. So, the horror of becoming low keeps people on the middle path—but this still wouldn’t maintain the middle, because the real incentive here is to give some “high” enough of what he needs to extend you support (i.e., keep you employed) while signaling along with the highs for the low.\n\nSo, within the frame of liberal incentives, the prototypical middle would be a minimally competent, lazy worker within the safest regions of the corporate or public world, while presenting as hating this fellow middles not only in explicit statements but in manners, tastes, personal associations, and so on. So, why isn’t there nothing but the wealthy and powerful on one side, those who live off of grievances on the other side, and the guy I just described in the middle? (Of course, this would map out quite a bit of the contemporary world—but far from all of it.)\n\nThe Middle is the anomaly liberalism can’t account for. It persists because almost everyone has had delegated to himself some form of authority (the middle actually extends very low—and very high) and it is very difficult to treat such delegations complete cynically. We could explain this in terms of such features of social life (in which liberalism is completely uninterested) like tradition and order, but that would just beg the question of what prevents those structures from completely collapsing. Someone has to run things, but why should anyone in particular see himself as the one who should do so? I think we have to see this as a question of language and meaning.\n\nWhen someone asks you, “what do you do?,” what do you sound like when you answer? You have to be able to say something that you don’t mind others repeating; that you don’t mind repeating to yourself. Insofar as the highs and lows must also do this, they must find ways of making themselves sound like the middle: they are fulfilling obligations and meeting responsibilities, they are transparent, and so on. The anomalous Middle is really the pipeline to the Center. You can demonstrate this socially by extracting and representing the “middleism” that must structure the high and the low insofar that they institutionalize themselves.\n\nBut you can’t justify this on liberal terms, so any demonstrations place you outside of liberalism. It is impossible to exaggerate how terrifying liberalism must find it that in its very heart there is an ineradicable alterity (to speak in the postmodern argot of a onetime high-low articulation). Further middlizing your demonstrations, which is to say making them more law and authority abiding, will be more, not less terrifying to liberalism. But this may be an ineffable terror, difficult to articulate and act on, and so maybe easier to alleviate, assuming one is ready to accept some slings and arrows—even more, assuming one can read those slings and arrows back to those firing them as desperate cries for a sustainable authoritative structure.\n\nThe maxim of the middle is, power should be made commensurate with responsibility. If someone has a job to do, he should be given every bit of power he needs to do it; if someone has power, the responsibility that power can sustain should be attributed to him. An entire way of reading the world and therefore engaging culture is implicit in this maxim. In every problem we look for a mismatch of power and responsibility—we rush to help someone with “too much” responsibility by supplying the needed power, and someone with “too much power” by laying the groundwork for appropriate exercises of responsibility. In every utterance we listen for the evasion or adoption of the responsibility implicit in the power of the utterance itself—if one fairly ordinary person depends a bit on what you have to say, then let your discourse be turned to the needs of that individual; if thousands hang on your every word, then choose your words so as to contribute to their education, to make them communicants, and pedagogues in their turn.\n\nSeek to make those with power more responsible, not less powerful, by sharing their presumed responsibilities; in trying to fulfill the responsibilities delegated to you, try to tap into unused and misdirected forms of power. Ultimately, everyone is of the middle, except for one man, whose own power and responsibility is indistinguishable from its middling distribution."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-big-scene-is-the-anthropological-basis-of-anarchist-ontology-gablog",
      "title": "The Big Scene is the Anthropological Basis of Anarchist Ontology",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "As sacral kingship disintegrated, and the unity of the sacred and social centers was dismembered, the response in the late middle ages in the West was to retrieve the originary scene. Going back to the scene is the only response to any social crisis: if the existing institutions and the totality of gestures they organize no longer defer violence, what else could there be to do other than discover some new gesture; and what other means could we have other than finding some central object the deferral of the appropriation of which we can organize around? Sacral kingship in its high imperial forms (i.e., “divine kingship”) is in fact anti-scenic: the sacral king of a community small enough that they might still be able to simply kill and replace the king if his powers fail is still the center of a scene; with the monstrous empires of antiquity, where the king is completely protected and most people, we can assume, pay him tribute while relying more directly on their ancestral cults, there is no real social scene. In a sense, nothing happens for very long periods of time, other than court intrigues.\n\nThe Axial Age acquisitions, then, restart history by creating centers outside of the imperial one. The Axial Age acquisitions—Greek philosophy, prophetic Judaism and Christianity and even, I think (but probably less so), Chinese philosophy, are both anti-imperial and imperial. They construct a position from which the existing emperor falls short in God’s eyes, which is to say they institute a kind of permanent resentment towards empire; while at the same time imagine an eternal and universal empire under a true, divinely ordained king. Western “history” is, we could say, the history of the deserved fall of empires until the establishment of the one true empire at the end of days.\n\nBoth Marxism and liberalism fit this apocalyptic pattern. So, from the failure of non-scenic imperialism, the recovery of scenicity takes the form of the imagining of “History” as a scene. This is why the anti-imperial side of the Axial Age ultimately wins out—the only acceptable God-Emperor would be God himself, who will rule once love of Him has been implanted in all human hearts by some revelation produced by the final, cataclysmic fall of increasingly evil empires.\n\nWe can see a comprehensive iteration of the originary scene here: our evil inclinations lead to us wanting, also fearing, but finally demanding and deserving the tyrant to end all tyrants; while the gesture on this scene that prevents our final descent is the Word of God becoming our words. How violent this final apocalypse must be, and how much it depends on human action rather than divine intervention will vary according to circumstances, but the structure is unvarying right down to the present day. We are still told, in the midst of declared crises of the liberal order, that the “voice of the people” finally sets things right.\n\nWe still think there is a “voice of the people”—nothing can be more commonplace than to hear commentators says the “American people want (or don’t want)” this or that. What they mean to the extent that they are accurate, is that a sufficient majority could be patched together, by hook and crook, for a particular purpose. But imagine what it would sound like if politicians and pundits spoke in that way (as they often undoubtedly do amongst themselves)—there would be absolutely no reason to grant any decision they make the slightest legitimacy. Which means there is no other way of thinking about liberal legitimacy than according to what is still a Rousseauian notion of the “general will.”\n\nAnd it is also true that unanimity regarding the originary structure of a social order is necessary if that society is not to completely degenerate into warring forces devoid of any limits on the weapons used and aims pursued in the struggle. So, it’s not surprising that liberalism recognizes this. Even leftists need to reference a unanimously held originary structure. Their anti-whiteness, for example, is not asserted as a matter of taste or mere tribal hostility—they must assert that there was in fact another, truer, America all along, with its own genealogies, its own sacred events and names, its own anticipated apocalypse.\n\nThese are all versions of what I would call The Big Scene, and in the end there isn’t that much to choose from among them. The Big Scene is big in size and in consequences, but most importantly it is big in the sense of limitless because it is a scene constructed, not around a center, but in order to prevent the emergence of a center. A centered scene always has limits in space and time—participants must be in a circumference a certain distance from the scene to be witnesses, and if the number of participants grows beyond the size of this original circumference, it is people in the “rows” further back who acknowledge the precedence, in space or time, of those in the front rows, so this growth can be orderly.\n\nA scene whose participants are devoted to the suppression of any center, though, is inherently unlimited. One can organize entire countries, or the majority and most active parts of them, around preventing the emergence of some proxy for a center. One can even organize regions around it; it’s too soon to say whether the world can be organized in this way. Such scenes are like lynchings—anyone can come along and throw another stone. They tend toward egalitarianism—everyone is against the same thing, and intensity is always increasing so no one can establish real preeminence in that regard. Elections are still about selecting a government, so they must put someone, some imperial figure, at the center—but the history of democracy is the history of the effacement and disfiguring of these central figures so that they represent nothing more than “who we are as a people” at this point.\n\nNo doubt part of the hysterical hostility to President Trump is the overly imperial figure he strikes—he seems to actually make decisions, rather than just being the final filter through which the information circulating among elites and specialized institutions is processed. But all of the surrounding para-governmental institutions—the media, the NGOs, the universities, and so on—are completely uninterested in governing, and are free to engage in perpetual center smashing. They support politicians, of course, and more fervently than ever, but center-smashing politicians, more interested in gestures and less in coherent imperatives.\n\nAnd the politicians themselves eventually assimilate to this crowd. Governing of a sort continues, by the civil servants hired to do it, but they are themselves increasingly caught up in virtue signaling and helping to take down anyone who threatens to establish order.\n\nIt was liberalism that finally tilted the apocalyptic scene towards its permanently anti-imperial trajectory. And that’s when we get The Big Scene firmly installed as the imagined retrieval of the originary scene. It is a false scene, because it imagines a world without the Big Men—in this sense, liberalism and democracy are carnivalesque. But for this very reason it seems closer to the originary scene, which had no one at the center, just an object to tear to pieces. Anyone presuming to be a Bigger Man would violate the scene, but the same must be the case for any attempt to propose a general basis for agreement on anything whatsoever because that too must merely be an attempt to sneak someone into the driver’s seat.\n\nThis is why resentments cannot be remedied in this way: only resentments that are framed in terms of some discord between the social center and the sacred or paradoxical center can be addressed. But only a shared concord between both modes of centrality makes discordance a problem—if all social centers, all central authorities, are equally illegitimate because equally evanescent and arbitrary, resentments can only feed on each other.\n\nThe discourse of The Big Scene is deeply rooted in our cultural and political vocabularies. If you listen carefully, across the entire political spectrum, you will see that virtually no one criticizes anything or anyone on any other basis than the violation of one norm of equality against another. All we see is people leveraging one residue of liberalism against another. It’s all people elbowing each out of the front row in the march of The Big Scene. For example, people can acknowledge that there are relations between nations that are best described as “imperial” or “hegemonic,” but such words are only used as terms of opprobrium, and the states accused of creating such relations will insist on euphemisms disavowing them.\n\nImagine somebody criticizing the Saudis and Israelis for not superintending the Middle East effectively enough, or China for not establishing clear rules of inter-state interaction for East Asia, or the US for not thinking seriously about the best mixture of traditional and modern social forms to promote throughout Latin America. For that matter, think about how the sting of populist nationalism would be removed, and the basic ends of such nationalisms brought closer to achievement, if we could simply acknowledge, one, that many, maybe most, societies will be ethnically mixed; and, two, that in ethnically mixed societies there will almost always be a dominant, majority ethnic group that should set the tone for, be deferred to by, and in turn offer patronage to, minority groups. All of these approaches would imply “little scenes” with a center, and therefore must be overrun by The Big Scene apocalypse.\n\nRestoring the originary structure of the social order only secondarily involves getting into arguments over the officially recognized founding events: the “real meaning” of the American or French revolution, of “1688” or the Magna Carta. “Arguments” are part of the problem. The originary structure will be restored through the constitution of disciplinary scenes carved out of the many anomalies of The Big Scene. Every scene must be revealed as originary, as having a central object, even if unidentified or even unsought; every scene institutionalizes itself, even if minimally. The semiotic materials of the scene should be used to name every emergent practice on the scene.\n\nThe practices on the scene at least then become objects of the scene, and the origins of those practices point to other objects to be placed at the center. Relapses into argumentative clichés can be named, as can the pedagogical moves used to circumvent them. This kind of practice in itself looks back toward other originary scenes, as it finds its precedents in them, in part by looking for models to extend its own scene. The more such practices inform and lead others to institute related practices, the more the commonly recognized founding events can be introduced, probably in a revised manner, into the discourse.\n\nBy the way, did you understand the title of this post? (Before you started reading? While you were reading? At this point?) “Anarchist ontology” might be a fairly familiar phrase, going back the Reactionary Future blog. We’ve been contrasting it with “absolutist ontology” for a while. That one might propose that an ontology has an “anthropological basis” might not be very surprising for people familiar with GA. “The Big Scene” is a phrase new to this post, but, of course, in GA we are always speaking of scenes, the scenic, and scenicity. Perhaps the originary scene was a small scene, so this one is distinguished from it, perhaps pejoratively—that it’s the basis of anarchist ontology, which is generally distinguished unfavorably from absolutist ontology, would reinforce this impression.\n\nBut if you’re unfamiliar with all of this, the title would look like sheer gibberish. It would be “unclear.” Now, that someone would say the title is gibberish and unclear, rather than saying that there are signs here of an unfamiliar disciplinary space is another way of being on The Big Scene. The norm of “classic prose” is that your writing should place all readers on the same scene along with each other and the writer. A text which some will understand but others won’t is inherently suspect. Imagining yourself on The Big Scene is the equivalent of what Marxism called “ideology.” The kinds of incommensurabilities between languages identified by Anna Wierzbicka are “retouched” through supplementations like “progress” and “cultural development” rather than seen for the originary constructs they are.\n\nThere is nothing outside of the attention articulated in disciplinary spaces as they study the always distinctive and present imperatives from the center. Building distinctive spaces to study what is distinct even in those spaces under the spell of The Big Scene and being able to answer charges of merely having a little scene by ratcheting up the distinctions all around is the way you resist The Big Scene."
    },
    {
      "slug": "total-semiotics-or-exteriorizing-the-interiors",
      "title": "Total Semiotics, or Exteriorizing the Interiors",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "We have almost no way, at any level of discourse, of referring to mental and psychological states (thoughts, feelings, desires) or qualities (moral and ethical, character, etc.) other than through some metaphor of interiority. Everything about us is “inside,” “within,” “deep down,” “buried,” “kept inside,” and so on. Discussions of learning, or about being transformed by events, are invariably conducted in terms of “internalizations.” Like depth metaphors in general, we can assume these interiors are artifacts of literacy. If you say something, or want something, that’s on the outside; you can feel things inside, but in a physical sense; even thinking does not necessarily require an internal location where it takes place—it’s a way of being embedded in the world and language. “Psychology,” in a pre-literate world, would be framed in terms of voices and agencies that exist outside of the one hearing and being moved by those voices and agencies. Prompts to behavior would not be from “within.”\n\nInteriorization is metaphysics, or the declarative culture of literacy: all the interiorizing concepts are drawn from the supplementations to the reported speech scene David Olson identifies in “classic prose.” For example, Olson points out that the word “belief” is a marker of “sincerity”: “I believe” is a way affirming under more demanding conditions what one has said. But once we have the verb “believe” to indicate a willingness to be held to one’s words with greater accountability than usual, we will have the noun “belief,” and “belief,” as a noun, seems to be a “thing,” and where could this thing be other than inside us—so, we believe “deep down.” Social scientists can then construct experiments to test the “strength” or “malleability” of beliefs, and we can rummage around inside ourselves and others to determine where inside of us our “beliefs” are shelved along with our “principles,” our “memories,” our “unconscious” and all the rest.\n\nEliminating metaphors of interiority and depth more generally coincides with Charles Sanders Peirce’s own anti-metaphysics, advanced through semiotics. Everything that we know is a sign. Things that are not signs can be known because they generate effects that are registered by signs, and from those signs we can infer their causes. But even “causes” are signs. That nothing is unmediated by signs, that we are all ourselves signs referring to other signs, is a necessary consequence of the originary hypothesis. Peirce’s own tripartite schema, icon, index and symbol, corresponds fairly well, but certainly not exactly, with GA’s own ostensive, imperative, declarative. So, we can be less interested in what someone believes, however deeply, and more interested in his conduct, including, of course, his discourse. But what makes someone a someone in the first place is that he constitutes himself as a center among centers, and it is this self-constitution as a center that will enable us to do all the work of the interiorizations I recommend replacing, and quite a bit more as well.\n\nThe post-sacrificial, or omnicentric social order makes us all centers—we have last names, ID numbers, histories in public institutions, credit cards, and much more—all of which requires a center around which all this “orbits.” The work you must put into making yourself a functional center involves managing attention—constituting yourself so that people pay attention to you in the “right” ways, which also means paying attention to them in the “right” ways. We might think of self-centering as a network of attentional exchanges: words and gestures through which we reciprocally confirm (and, of course compete over) each other’s centrality.\n\nFinally, you have to become, and to some extent already are, a center for yourself—Peirce himself endorsed the classical notion of the “self” as the dialogue of the soul with itself, while modifying this formulation into the dialogue of the self with the self that is presently coming into being as a result of this very dialogue (and which is also apparent in what someone says and does). He also saw the enhancing of self-control as the purpose of inquiry (and all sign use, for Peirce, is inquiry), and self-control is simply strengthening the self as center in relation to its margins.\n\nBecoming a center is not a simple matter—drawing attention to oneself means drawing desires and resentments toward oneself. That may mean desires from some and resentments from others. It means modeling desires and resentments towards others. You can be attractive as something to be possessed and enjoyed or as a model to be imitated. If some imitate you, others are sure to resent you. No one’s centrality is self-subsisting: even the most complete narcissist must imagine himself projecting more generally admirable qualities, which means he presupposes a shared set of signs with his “audiences” which must be taken to derive from a common center. In your own signifying activity you gather together through a system of references all of the signs pointing in your direction; in gathering them together you turn yourself into a sign, in the sense that following the signs pointing in your direction can serve to defer resentment. As a sign, what you are pointing to is some other center, one that allows you and your fellow signs to co-exist and even jointly flourish.\n\nWe can generate a vocabulary of inquiry here that can abolish interiorizations. Instead of talking about things like “spirituality” and “faith,” for example, we could speak in terms of the signs you have constellated so as to turn yourself into a sign, for yourself as well as others, that can model ways of placing more signs between oneself and the desires and resentments that lead to violence—even the various violences against one’s own centrality. As an ostensive sign, in presenting one’s centrality one is also an iconic sign, “resembling” the mode of deferral one is modeling. One’s ostensivity and iconicity blend into indexicality and imperativity: your acknowledged presence issues commands and makes demands on the other precisely by occupying the same space and thereby impacting the other.\n\nEven more visceral emotions, implicitly assumed to be “inside,” like, say, anger or despair, are better spoken of in terms of ostensive power that has been weakened, imperatives that can no longer be heard or complied with, ostensives that are overwhelming in their attractive power, imperatives that cannot be resisted even if the consequences of obeying them cannot be controlled, and so on. In this way, all individual feelings can be made directly social, representing ways one is bound up with various social centers and traditions—and what are traditions, if not imperatives from some especially powerful center that have moved through the medium of a history of social practices and can still be heard as a distilled form of the original?\n\nReplacing interiority with the embedding of the human being as emergent center in the ostensive-imperative world establishes a continuity with pre-literate discourse that has been lost. Pre-literate peoples will not see themselves as having autonomous selves, within each person following his own “conscience,” “passion,” “inspiration,” etc. They will see themselves as in constant, often hostile and distressing, dialogue with the dead and various divine figures. Someone is always telling them to do or think what they are doing—we can see this from a late orally produced and transmitted text like The Illiad , even with its significant literate overlays.\n\nEven for Socrates, everyone has their “daemon,” and one is compelled to answer questions posed by oracles. Part of my argument here is that this way of thinking about thinking, desiring and decision making is far more realistic than those framed in accord with individualistic models; in the post-literate resolution of the anomalies of the literate mind (which probably needed to define itself sharply against orality, even if just for pedagogical purposes) we are working towards our self-otherness can be described far more minimally than was possible under oral and sacrificial conditions.\n\nCan it be experienced directly, though? That depends on whether we can distance and extricate ourselves from the still sacrificial exchanges that constitute resentful centrality. Once you have established yourself as center, you have to defend that centrality—you have to be willing to “prove” yourself, counter falsifications, address slights, avenge violations of your centrality, establish various deterrence mechanisms, and so on. You need to assert your “sincerity,” your “integrity,” “honesty,” and so on by demonstrating—and attacking anyone who doubts the demonstration—your consistency (“consistency” according to terms that you also have to establish and impose). The disciplines remain within these reifications even while “explaining” the ways they get articulated one way or another—they introduce rigor into the various “folk psychologies,” which means entering the system of self-controlling centrality and conditioning its terms upon institutional constraints so as to subject them to external controls.\n\nThe only way not to be or have a “self,” without indulging in the fantasy of a direct plug-in to the divine, is to make oneself a total sign. All of the things others can think or say about you, or do to you, are parts of how you compose yourself as a potential center of attention. Every time you so compose yourself refers to other times you have, and other times and ways you might, compose yourself. The furniture of interiorization is excluded in an a priori way—yes, you’ll still speak to yourself (have “internal dialogues”) but these are essentially rehearsals and planning sessions for possible enactments of self-representation.\n\nInsofar as you are to be made into a center you work to defer some possible violence; this means eliciting so as to redirect mimetic crises on different levels. We’re all signs of course, signifying ostensively, imperatively and declaratively, but if you rely on the assumption that the world is a single scene (an assumption encouraged by literacy) then you array your signs so as to pre-empt any questioning of your belonging on that scene. This is “humanism”: a batch of qualities and characteristics that make you like everyone else insofar we are all on the world scene. Humanism is a prohibition on becoming a total sign and an insistence that everyone supply oneself with a full interiorization.\n\nTo become a total sign is to signify the scenes upon which those qualities and characteristics (the supplementations of the self as mandated center) are identified and thereby turn them into objects of inquiry. People get angry and offended; they can be sympathetic, caring, rude, and much more. These qualities can be treated as sites of sign exchange in which one responds in kind, or as expected, to signs of anger, caring and all the rest. You are then in a constant state of shuffling and refining these qualities, and showing them off when they can centralize you most effectively (drawing mimetic desires short of scapegoating).\n\nAll of these emotions and qualities are social and involve negotiations regarding the state of the center and access to it. But why not simply formalize all this as well: to feel anger rather than act is to acknowledge some form of powerlessness commanded by the center; to be sympathetic is to imagine yourself, without much evidence, less in danger of resentment from the object of your sympathy. You can refuse the exchange by not providing the complementing sign; you can frame the terms of the exchange by treating those terms as imperatives—who told you that you should feel angry, offended, concerned, hopeful, or whatever on this kind of occasion (what kind of occasion is it—and you told you to identify it as such?).\n\nWhat do you think would satisfy your anger or your sympathy? When the little imperative exchanges implicit in the supplemented emotional states (where a psychological quality has filled a space left by a god) fail to come off, we are left facing the center, which we counted on to oversee the exchange. Something was telling me to be frustrated, or hopeful, or suspicious (all these “emotions” require scenic “translations”), or whatever, but now the center can tell me to preserve the space within which the exchange takes places, rather than take up one side of the exchange. Instead of an exchange of conventional gestures, we can command each other to go set up new spaces that are themselves aimed at spreading spaces irreducible to gestural exchanges.\n\n“Psychology” is still the residue of sacrificial culture, in which we all cut off little pieces of ourselves to distribute and consume. Post-sacrificial modes of being involve giving over our desires and resentments to the center in the knowledge we will have to sustain our attention towards the center so as to be worthy of when those desires and resentments come back transformed into imperatives from the center. And then we become ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative signs of the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "beyond-post-sacrificial",
      "title": "Beyond “Post-Sacrificial”",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve been using the phrase “post-sacrificial culture,” generally in conjunction with the “Axial Age acquisitions,” to refer to the breakdown of the “imperative exchange” constitutive of sacrifice. Sacrifice involves an imperative exchange because the human member of the community offering the sacrifice (bringing his goat, or whatever, to the altar) is following an order issued by the deity to offer up some of the fruits provided, ultimately, by that deity; while, in exchange, the sacrifice represents a request, on the part of the one offering the sacrifice, that the deity continue providing these benefits (more goats).\n\nIn a sense, our culture is not post-sacrificial, and it may be that no culture can ever be so, definitively—we engage the institutional orders around us in terms of imperative exchanges all the time, simply by assuming if we “play by the rules” we will be commensurately rewarded, and in resenting the failure of the institutional center to hold up its end of the bargain. But it’s still correct to call our culture post-sacrificial, because our “sacrifices” are figurative and not directly measurable—we speak in terms of trust, consent, contract, and so on, and keep extending those terms into areas where the ” superstitious” nature of our “faith” on institutional structures would be embarrassing.\n\nBut the fact that it would be embarrassing, for most, in most situations, to say we offer up a “piece” of ourselves not so much to our boss (which would feel especially ridiculous) or even the institution, but to some “idea” of the institution, even one we don’t really “believe” in, is what makes us post-sacrificial.\n\nBut any concept with a “post” (or, for that matter, a “neo”) in it is still a placeholder, and therefore unsatisfactory. Now, we can say much more about how we have arrived, through those “Axial Age acquisitions,” at a “post-sacrificial” culture. Sacrifice is “embarrassing” because it has been discredited, and it has been discredited because the violent centralizing involved in sacrifice—we commit violence against this being that we all focus on in exchange for peace and prosperity—has been revealed as fraudulent. It’s our own mimetic desires that confer centrality on the “sacred” being, not any attribute of the being itself.\n\nAnd we see this because all sacrifice tends towards human sacrifice and, paradoxically, as Eric Gans shows in The End of Culture , does so the more God Himself is understood in “human” terms—that is, more as a mediator between humans than a central focus precluding the emergence of humans as centers in their own right. If the gods give us food, then we owe them food in return; if God has created us out of nothing, we owe him everything, even our firstborn. But how could even that be enough?\n\nHuman sacrifice emerges along with human hierarchy, as the first figures to make a claim to permanent centrality were sacral kings, who were no doubt often killed in manners that, with immense variation across cultures, became increasingly ritualized. The sacral king mediated between the community and the cosmos, and if that mediation went wrong sacrificing the king would restore it; at a certain point it would make sense to regularize the oscillation between effective and ineffective mediation. Divine kings introduced layers of bureaucratic mediation between themselves and those they ruled, so they themselves could no longer be sacrificed.\n\nBut divine kings eventually established justice systems to deal with disputes between the new centers inevitably created within those new “layers” between themselves and the people. Regularized forms of compensation are established. Large scale imperative exchanges are established between the divine king and those situated in the various layers, all of whom bring tributes to the divine king who has, of course, provided his people with everything. With a justice system, injustice becomes a possibility; if injustice becomes a possibility, it is also possible for the system as a whole, in failing to remedy that injustice, to itself be unjust.\n\nAnd its unjust nature could be concentrated in a singular figure, a victim who has become meaningful in a new way, by being victimized precisely as a result of revealing systemic injustice. The sacrifice of such a victim in order to resolve some crisis would take on the ritual sacrificial forms but would be impossible to “contain” within those forms. This process would set in motion the erosion of sacrificial forms, and of the imperative exchange they institute.\n\nSo, the divine king inches ever closer to demanding a “total” gift or sacrifice, but can only do so in terms that are so monstrous that the more civilized regions of the system make it possible to see those terms as an indictment of divine kinship itself. From here, those in a position to negotiate in some way with the divine center can go in one of two directions: toward cynicism and nihilism, on the one hand; or, towards another form of “total donation” on the other. Cynicism and nihilism can only be a local phenomenon indulged in by the privileged. The new kind of total donation is to a new kind of center, which cannot be embodied in a central figure, and certainly not a central ruler—this is a center that commands a refusal to engage in the discredited forms of violent centralizing.\n\nA genuinely and completely post-sacrificial center would be devoted to propagating and embodying, or signifying, this command. Very few do so wholly, but it is only a certain number, which we couldn’t determine in advance, which would necessary to exemplify the limits of sacrifice and preventing the social order from being engulfed in it.\n\nSo, if we don’t want to call this order “post-sacrificial,” what should we call it? Part of the difficulty is that liberalism “launders” sacrificial imperative exchanges through a post-sacrificial order. Needless to say, scapegoating goes on constantly within a liberal order—much of it remains symbolic, which raises a question: are we irredeemable scapegoaters, so the best we can do is make scapegoating more symbolic, and less violent?; or does a liberal democratic system predicated upon symbolic scapegoating prevent us from more decisively marginalizing scapegoating? If the latter is the case, the only way of creating an order that would be more than merely “post-sacrificial” would be the establishment of an order we might call “charismatic autocracy.”\n\n“Charismatic” in Philip Rieff’s “graceful” sense of charisma as deferral in obedience to an absolute imperative (in our terms, the imperative to defer violent centralizing). “Autocracy,” meanwhile, is essential, because as long as we have hierarchical societies, someone will be at the center, and the only way to avoid constant accusations of illegitimate usurpations of the center and hidden powers behind the temporary occupant of the center would be to place the occupant of the center beyond any external criteria of “legitimacy.” That would represent a radical curtailment of sacrificial logics, because the desire to replace the figure at the center is the most “bad faith” desire possible because it self-evidently represents an attempt to be closer to the center oneself.\n\nA general renunciation of that desire would represent a quantum leap in the deferral power of all members of the social order. The argument for such an order would be predicated upon the assumption, for which we could find a wealth of practical examples, that symbolic scapegoating is really just a “gateway drug” prepping us for the real thing. The “charismatic” component of the “autocracy,” then, is less a quality possessed by than conferred upon the autocrat, who is himself in fact desacralized and represents nothing more than the need that someone occupy the center. (This doesn’t mean a social order wouldn’t want, and couldn’t arrange for, the best possible person to occupy the position—it just means that such arrangements must themselves be bound up with the irreducibility of the central authority.)\n\nIn grammatical terms, “charismatic autocracy” involves a movement past “imperative exchange” to “interrogative imperativity.” Under the regime of imperative exchange, declarative culture is ultimately a kind of scorekeeping, trying to figure out the respective “values” that are being exchanged. To this day, most discussions of morality take this form. But once the imperative is to resist or defer imperative exchanges, an interrogative, a question, is introduced explicitly into the proceedings. Not the question, “how much is this worth,” which is never a real question because it’s just a way of accommodating oneself to the powers framing the existing order; rather, the question is, what violent centralizing lies at the end of this imperative exchange? All the linguistic means by which you construct yourself as a center then become open to “interrogation,” as either demands for a better “deal” or “intimations” of the creation of new centers that would render any deal irrelevant. Only the demand for this state of questioning can satisfy the command for a total donation.\n\nWithin the imperative exchange, declaratives essentially involve haggling over prices—what one owes the gods/institutions, what they owe us, and, further down, what we owe to each other, whether in market terms or in terms of honor and kinship. Within interrogative imperativity, declaratives take on a far wider scope, that of converting possible (and impossible) imperative exchanges into a rule or constraint for deferring “analogous” imperative exchanges. The first question, rather than, “how do we get what we’re owed,” becomes more like, “what makes you think obligations can be calculated?” And then an inquiry is opened up into all the different ways people can imagined they’re owed this or that—and once the strict terms of obligation have been displaced many more such possibilities become imaginable.\n\nAll the mythical and ritual imperatives you are obeying to imagine each and every one of them become evident. Narratives accordingly shift from telling of the spiraling out of control of one imperative economy until it leads to a reset, to putting all imperative economies in question, exposing the imbalance in all presumed balances.\n\nThe most powerful way of doing this is originary satire, which involves turning every threshold and boundary into a narrative wherein figures on both sides of the boundary or threshold turn into each other, so that the terms of some expected imperative exchange are reversed. That is, the “vocation” or telos of the sentence is represent other scenes within the scene of composing and hearing/reading the sentence itself. Everything grammar does—tense, mood, aspect, etc.—it does in order to articulate relationships between the scene of utterance and the other scene(s) it refers/defers to. In that case, all these boundaries and thresholds are themselves materials for originary satire: the relation between present and past, between a continual and a completed action, between possible and actual are all abstracted and re-embedded in narratives.\n\nIt’s just as easy to say we spoke with each other a thousand years ago as it is to say we spoke with each other yesterday; that we are in the middle of doing something that’s been going on for decades and is further metastasizing even as we speak as it is to mention where we are right now; something that is unbelievably unlikely can be set alongside something that seems obvious; linguistically, you could be saying what I think as easily as I can. Originary satire targets chunks of language, stereotypical sentence types, which tend to harden into the marshalling of evidence for imperative exchanges, for their beneficial or inevitable nature—i.e., sentences that supplement imperative exchanges, rather than extracting samples of language from them so as to remind us that language is always received on a scene.\n\nIn simpler terms, our expectations of one another rest on the bedrock of imperative exchanges, and the purpose of disciplinary spaces aimed at satirizing those expectations is so that we can see them, ultimately in order to construct charismatic and autocratic modes of interaction requiring more “input” into the construction of expectations. In truth, this is the most realistic use of language, because we are always, still, on the originary scene, which can never “close.”\n\nThe concept of “interrogative imperativity” makes it possible to pose more explicitly a question that has been implicit in my earlier discussions of literacy as a kind of supplementary originary scene: why is the scene of classical prose objectionable, or worth exposing? Because it fulfills one imperative of the declarative (to defer imperatives by “absenting” the demanded object) by renouncing the other imperative of the declarative—to articulate other scenes with the scene of language itself. This means that the literate declarative scene can only keep reiterating and justifying its own supplementations (again, all the “beliefs,” “assumptions,” “claims,” “suggestions,” “implications,” etc.) so as to sustain the unitary prose scene—it must systematically obfuscate the declarative’s grounding in the ostensive-imperative world.\n\nClassical prose and the “classic” disciplines are interested in making beliefs, assumptions, etc., unequivocal, that is, used the same way by everyone—for this reason, they cannot construct, or even imagine, the possible ostensives and imperatives that would come before any “belief” or “assumption.” Originary writing, in that case, restores this grounding, but not, of course, by pretending the literacy revolution never happened. Rather it takes the nominalizations constructed by classic prose as names which we can apply beyond their restriction, imposed by classic prose, to the unitary scene—most directly, by applying them to the disciplinary iterations of classic prose itself.\n\nSo, originary writing obeys an imperative from the center discovered/invented by the nominalizations of classic prose and the disciplines. That imperative is to generate more potential ostensives and what these ostensives do is name sites of emergent dangerous violent centralization, as early on in their onset as possible. Some nominalizations will end up being genuine names for practices of advanced deferral; some will turn out to have been incitements toward violent centralization—the work of the disciplinary space is to iterate these nominalizations/names so as to discover/expose which is which (or to detour them to new uses).\n\nWhen we study “reality,” that is, what we are doing is inventing and deploying concepts enabling us to detect potential sites of mimetic contagious outbreak. We can do this because of the cognitive consequences of literacy, which parallel and contribute to the discrediting of sacrifice. But classical prose and its metaphysical superstructure just contain and normalize sacrifice by classifying and ordering the markings of the potential victim rather than relying on the spontaneous crisis. Still, it is only through that prose and those superstructures that we can generate the terms of a charismatic autocracy. The supplementary concepts used to simulate a shared scene for writer and reader can be turned into means for generating new scenes of origin of deferred scapegoating.\n\nIf you take a concept out of its context so as to conceptualize the context itself you create a disciplinary space within that context—that disciplinary space will either reveal that the discipline (the “context”) is too bound to its unitary scene to generate further potential ostensives, or recover and prolong the origin of the discipline/context in a recontextualized ostensive."
    },
    {
      "slug": "market-capillarism-gablog",
      "title": "Market Capillarism",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’m going to follow up on this definition of the “market” that I offered in my “The Event of Technology” post: “what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with knowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and bounded but not directly supervised by such authorities.” The market, in its most abstract, praxeological terms, is understood as the interactions generated by the free choices of individuals. As an ontology, this is absurd, if for no other reason than that no one chooses the language in which these choices are made. But it makes good sense if we think about the market as those interactions that take place under the radar of some kind of direct supervision, especially if we consider that such “radar” is never absolutely comprehensive (we couldn’t even imagine what “absolutely comprehensive” supervision would mean, since each form of supervision would generate margins for decision making undetermined by the supervision itself).\n\nSo, if I’m supervising a group of children, and I give them a strict schedule of activities and distribute roles in a hierarchical manner amongst them, and focus mostly on making sure they are doing what the schedule says they should be doing and receiving reports from the individuals in charge at certain points I leave open plenty of space for the children to exchange responsibilities and resources amongst themselves. So, one of the children’s duties is to sweep the classroom; another is to clean the dishes—one child who assigned sweeping duty asks some child who has playtime to sweep for him and, in exchange, the first child will do the dishes for the other later.\n\nWe have the makings of a “market” here, and there’s not necessarily any reason for me to concern myself with it, as long as it doesn’t interfere with and perhaps even enhances the functioning of the institution. I can raise and lower the threshold of supervision depending on how beneficial the “market system” seems to be, and I can make sure the threshold doesn’t get high enough so that my own position gets implicated in the market.\n\nThe introduction of money into the system provides those engaged in market exchanges with more flexible means of establishing long-term interactions, while also ensuring the control of the central authority over this expanded process. Money is introduced as debt, debt which is ultimately owned by the central authority, whether or not finance is nominally controlled by privatized agencies. The more money in the system, the more the central authority is likely to be marketized as well. This is another way of saying that money is power, and this form of power competes with the form of power exercised by the central authority.\n\nThe power of money is the power of abstraction—that is, the power to separate groups and individuals from the larger settings in which they are embedded. If you can separate groups and individuals from their settings you can mobilize them for your own projects. The power of money becomes the power of capital, which is the power to abstract not only individuals and groups but disciplines, which is to say knowledges, media and technologies, from the results of the abstractions those disciplines had helped to effect. The problem of containing the market system within the terms of central supervision is one, needless to say, that modern politics has not solved; indeed, the most cherished principles of the liberal social order make sacrosanct the primacy of market power over central authority—any reversal of this primacy is deemed “tyranny” or “totalitarianism.” And yet the market is still inconceivable without the central authority, reconceived as a political market, in which citizenship is defined as a certain quantity of tokens authorizing one to make withdrawals from the center.\n\nThe traditionalist opposes abstraction in the name of full embedment, but the possibility of rejecting abstraction disappeared with the rise of divine kingship a few millennia ago. By now, the forms of embedment defended against abstraction are the results of previous abstractions that have been re-embedded. The question is, in what form will abstraction proceed? Or, what kinds of mobilizations are necessary? If the market operates within the capillaries of the system of supervision, then abstractions should contribute to that system. The paradox of power is that the more central the authority, the more authority depends upon the widest distribution of the means to recognize authority; to put it in grammatical terms, the paradox of power is the paradox of the most unequivocal imperative leaving the largest scope of implementation of that imperative.\n\nTo think about the scope of the market is to think about how to make this paradox more explicit. As I pointed out in “The Event of Technology” (and as Andrew Bartlett explains very thoroughly in his “Originary Science, Originary Memory: Frankenstein and the Problem of Modern Science”), abstraction always involves some desacralization or, to put it more provocatively, some sacrilege. Sacrilege can be justified on the grounds that the innovation it introduced will enable new forms of observance of the founding imperatives of the social order. So, the sacrilege should be, as Bartlett argues, “minimal,” while the new forms of observance (I depart from Bartlett’s formulation here) should be maximal.\n\nAbstraction creates new “elements,” and therefore new relations between elements. Monetary and capitalist abstractions are pulverizing, creating new elements that are identical to each other, and therefore most easily mobilized for any purpose. This is the process of “de-skilling,” with its ultimate telos being automation, that labor theorists have known of for a very long time. An absolutist mode of abstraction, meanwhile, would make ever finer distinctions between skills, competencies and forms of authority within disciplinary spaces. In this way, abstraction carries with it its own form of re-embedment.\n\nThe market economy, then, becomes a measure of fluctuations around the threshold at which the paradox of power is made explicit. All social conflicts can’t be reduced to this fluctuation, but all social conflicts are “processed” through it. This is most obviously the case for everything grouped under the concept of globalization, most especially movements of capital (at the “high” end) and migration (at the “low” end). Globalization represents a raising of the threshold at which the paradox of power is made explicit: global corporations have been released from obligations to any central authority and construct their own command chains, which include governments as subordinate partners; advocates of increased migration exercise power across borders that national states find it difficult to counter.\n\nIn both cases, states are set up so that they must respond to the same “market” incentives as the corporations and migrants themselves. We could imagine a point at which the paradox of power would have to reach such a threshold to become explicit that central authorities would not be issuing “operational” commands at all—commands would just be one more incentive (or disincentive) agents further down in the chain of command would have to take into account by assessing the likelihood of any penalty for disobedience.\n\nWithin a market order, then, any action, event or relationship is characterized by a fundamental duality. On one side, however thinly, the paradox of power is in play: all actors recognize that their sphere of activity is protected by some more powerful agency and constrain and direct their activity accordingly. On the other side, to some extent, imperatives are converted into market signals—that is, a site of exchange where one person’s power to punish or reward you must be balanced against lots of other peoples’ power to do so. In both cases we find an interaction between center and periphery—in the first case, one acts in a way that redounds to the authority of the center, thereby creating space for the further replacement of external by auto-supervision; in the second case, one tries to subject the central authority to incentives and disincentives similar to the ones we are all subject to—this ranges from simple bribery and other forms of corruption to the vast avenues of influences made legal and even encouraged within a liberal social order, like lobbying, forming interest groups, political donations, think tanks, media propaganda and so on. We could locate anything anyone does, thinks or says somewhere along this continuum and study social dysfunctions accordingly.\n\nProbably the most intuitively obvious argument in favor of the “free market” is the Hayekian claim that all the knowledge required to carry out production and cooperation at all the different social levels is far too distributed and complex to be centralized and subordinated to a single agent. This is of course true, but also a non-sequitur and a distraction. A general must provide some leeway to his subordinates, and they to theirs, and so on, and for the same reason—the general can’t know exactly what this specific platoon might have to do under unexpected circumstances, and he can’t even know all that one would need to in order to prepare them for those circumstances.\n\nThere will therefore be “markets” all along the line, as people instructed to work together to address some exigency organize “exchanges” of knowledge, skills and actions amongst themselves in order to do so. The general doesn’t need to know 1/1,000 of all the specifics of these interactions to still be the general—that is, to issue commands that can be obeyed, and to place himself in a position to ensure that they will be. The same is true for those institutions charged with providing communications, health care, education, transportation, housing and so on. In each case, capillaries along the margins of these institutions can be adjusted in accord with the level of responsibility to be allowed consistent with meeting the purpose of the institution.\n\nThe argument for markets is really saying no more than that you can’t do a very good job if you’re being micromanaged at every point along the way. It’s equally true that you can’t do a very good job if the terms of each move you make have to be “negotiated” with a constantly changing range of agents.\n\nLiberalism has generated the illusion that what appears below the threshold of direct supervision is what, in fact, determines the form of supervision; even more, that the supervision is a servant of those actors which have merely been provided some leeway. This situation produces destructive delusions, because the presumably free agents are nevertheless aware of their utter dependence upon their “servants.” Is there any businessman who thinks he would be able to protect himself against violence, fraud, robbery and extortion by those readier than him to use violence and break laws without the force of the state? No businessman believes this, but in a way they all believe it, because their political theory leads them to assume that, first, there were a bunch of individuals engaged in peaceful exchange with each other and then, only when criminals and invaders, presumably attracted by the wealth thereby created, tried to take it using force, was the state “hired” as a kind of Pinkertons to maintain order.\n\nThis makes it impossible to think coherently about the simplest things, such as how a policy everyone would recognize to be beneficial might be conceived and implemented in the best way. Someone should make a “this is your brain on liberalism” public service announcement."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-event-of-technology-gablog",
      "title": "The Event of Technology",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Insofar as power is desacralized, there is nothing but mutually hostile “interests” engaged in struggle over the decaying corpse of the social body; at the same time, power is never genuinely desacralized, because as soon as the sacred center is punctured, mythicized centers like “the common good,” “the voice of the people,” “Constitution,” “rule of law,” and, eventually, “GDP” are set up as masks of what everyone must assume is there—an unquestioned authority rooted in a singular origin. These mythicized centers are intrinsically arbitrary and divisive, though, which means they must eventually escalate hostilities into some “total” form.\n\nDesacralization of power, though, is possible because there is a difference between the ritual center and activities engaged in outside the center. In the earliest human communities, we can assume that in activities apart from the ritual center nothing at all changed, and the ritual center reproduced as precisely as possible the originary event. But the sign deployed on the originary scene, along with the constraining structure of ritual, would be extended to other activities; at the same time, linguistic development towards the declarative would involve the attribution of actions to (“mythical”) occupants of the center. The mythical interpretations of ritual would be drawn from the far less interesting but nevertheless determinative actions outside the central aura and be converted into actions modeling behaviors for the community. Out in the field, hunters battle their prey; on the narrativized ritual scene, the sacred beast gives life to the group.\n\nAs social cooperation increases, stories of the origin of each new mode of cooperation would be “heard” or derived from the center—it would probably be the case that you couldn’t do or create something new without attributing the discovery to a mythical agent. You would in turn be obliged to that mythical agent, and would give to it some part of the fruits of your labor, which in turn would be part of the individual’s contribution to the center for the entire community. The gift the god has given you comes with an imperative: in one form or another, that imperative would be to use it in such a way as to honor the donor. In return, the individual issues an imperative to the mythical being: a prayer, requesting aid in successfully using the skill or implement. All the implements of work and war would be created within this frame, of what I have been calling an “imperative exchange.”\n\nThe implements themselves, their parts, and the implements used to produce the implements, are themselves all part of this imperative exchange. This is to say there is a “magical” component to the process: ritual words and gestures must be applied to all acts involving production and use, and instances of successful or failed use would implicate the implements themselves, which don’t simply break, and aren’t simply poorly used, but refuse, for reasons that may be more or less formulated, to follow the commands given them. In a certain sense we could say that, of course, an early human smoothing out his spear knows that this has to be done so that it can fly straight and fast when thrown, but his way of thinking about it will be framed completely in terms of being in harmony with all the agencies of the surrounding world. Such processes become institutionalized, and to craft some item in a way that is not traditionally prescribed and monitored by the upholders of that tradition would also be unthinkable.\n\nSo, the question is, how did it become possible for “technology” to emerge—that is, production conducted outside of these forms, in accord with the logic of continually reducing the elements of one process to another set of elements produced by another process? I think that the answer must be: when it becomes possible to see other human being as implements. The divine kings, commanding hundreds of thousands, even millions, in their slave war and labor armies, would first get a view of all these individuals as “parts” of a whole that might be more than the sum of its parts. Some could be added; some subtracted; some moved over here; some over there. If some worked harder, the possibility of combining all the better workers would come to mind; if workers or soldiers improvised and found some new way of cooperating with each other, that could be remembered and reproduced. This is already a kind of technology.\n\nThe Axial Age acquisitions made it increasingly difficult to levy these vast, sacrificial, masses. So, in the European middle ages, while there was steady technical development, and some remarkable feats of engineering and architecture, such development never exceeded the limits set by existing corporate and authority relations. The masses confronted in the New World and, especially, those flowing into the cities from the farmers enclosed out of their land must have ignited a new technological imagination. For quite a while, the development of machinery seemed to track pretty closely intensifications in the division of labor, with each laborer being given increasingly simpler tasks within an increasingly complex process.\n\nIf automation has now itself become an autonomous process, it is because men were first automated. Eventually, of course, technology came to alleviate and eliminate human labor, but in the process the disciplines, focused on both technological and human resources, became the main drivers of social development. The human sciences, which took over from theology and philosophy, treat humans in technological terms, as composed of parts that work together in ways that can be studied and modified. Even attempts to “humanize” disciplines like psychology reduce people to set of interchangeable and predictable clichés.\n\nThe disciplines naturally think they should run the government which, after all, is just another technology. And whatever claims the government might make on its own behalf, like fulfilling the “popular will,” are best left to the disciplines, upon whom the government would anyway be dependent in measuring such things. The emergence of data and algorithm driven, all-intrusive social media which more and more people simply can’t live without is a logical extension of this process, as is the elimination of millions of jobs through new modes of automation. But desacralized technology, like desacralized power, provides a frame within which ultimately unlimited struggles ensue. Indeed, technology is the dominant form of power. If technology presents itself to us as an enormous system of interlocking imperatives which provides a very precise slot for us to insert our own imperatives, who or what is that the center? What ostensive sign generates the system of imperatives?\n\nTechnology is completely bound up with the specific forms the centralization of power takes in the wake of the desacralization of power. It is part of the same furious whirlpool of decentralization, as old forms of power, predicated upon earlier forms of technology, are broken up, and then recentralization, as new forms of power exploit the new technologies to remove mediating power centers in zeroing in on each individual. In that case, the commands of the center are mediated technologically, which is to say through our self-centerings as both objects of technological manipulations and imaginings and subjects becoming signs of the algorithmic paradoxes: our choice here is to become either predictable and unreliable, or unpredictable and reliable. In this way, we situate ourselves at the origin of the technological event, and model forms of power that will advance participation in the reinscription of technological markings upon us.\n\nThe telos of technology, then, is to make technologically produced human interactions into models for further analysis of practices into networks of sub-practices, out of which new practices are synthesized. In the process, the cultural work of deferral becomes increasingly technological—this means that we will think more in terms of deferring possible conflicts in advance, in making them unthinkable and impossible, rather than intervening crudely after the fact. We would work on turning binaries into aggregated probabilities, and making those aggregated probabilities capable of expression in language—this would be a source of important artistic and pedagogical projects. It would be as if we were producing futurity by continuing to work on the originary scene itself—in, say, settling “in advance” some dispute between friends, a particular wrinkle in the fluctuations of aborted gestures on the scene is revealed—the scene, one can now see, would only have cohered if one member had shaped his sign of deferral while positioning himself just so in relation to his neighbor and the center.\n\nWhat about all the moral and ethical questions bound up with technology—gene manipulation, increasingly destructive weapons, pharmaceutical interventions into behaviors, deficiencies and capabilities that were once within the normal range but now, at a higher resolution, seem to call for remediation, etc.? Behind all these anxieties is the fading away of a sense of the human that was formed logocentrically, which is to say through the assimilation of the literate subject to the scene of speech, in which all are present to each other, and intentions are inseparable from signs. Humanism is a degenerate form of the Axial Age acquisitions.\n\nBut this is not to say that our telos as technological beings is simply to go full speed ahead on all counts. We need a new way to think about these things, one that doesn’t rely on what are ultimately historically bound feelings of defilement. There is a human origin, and origins that iterate that origin, but no human nature. The event of technology, in which we become, collectively, models of further interventions that will in-form us, is itself originary.\n\nSome of those moral and ethical questions are not real questions, relying on dumbed down or falsified versions of actual or possible scientific developments. The answers to those of them that are real questions will depend upon the state of the disciplines. Only within disciplinary spaces will it be possible to ask whether a proposed innovation or line of inquiry, i.e., some proposed new power, will have commensurate responsibilities assigned to it. Only in properly composed disciplines can these questions be raised free of scapegoating pressures demanding remediation to enjoy new “freedoms” or to avoid some form of ostracism.\n\nAnthropologically grounded disciplines would have to work to make new innovations and inquiries consistent with the basic terms of social coherence, while using new possibilities to continue studying those terms; and then we would have to assume open channels between the disciplines and central authority. There is even a place for “letting the market decide,” as long as we keep in mind what the “market” is: what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with knowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and bounded but not directly supervised by such authorities. Supervision can be relaxed and tightened for various purposes, and one of the purposes for relaxation is certainly to see what intelligent and talented people can do when encouraged to engage in skunkworks.\n\nIn this case, as in all cases, the ultimate test for the reception of any novelty would be whether it helps sustain the pyramid of command starting from the central authority, and even contributes to ensuring the continuity of that authority from ruler to ruler. And the disciplines will accordingly, make themselves over into articulations of practices refined by the latest divisions in labor that study the diverse forms of human interaction for models of technological transformation—in the process establishing meta-practices for representing this dialectic in a way intelligible to central authority."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-paradoxical-telos-of-the-aesthetic-gablog",
      "title": "The Paradoxical Telos of the Aesthetic",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The origin of the aesthetic lies in the oscillation of the participant on the originary scene’s attention between the sign (the aborted gesture of appropriation) put forth by the other, on the one hand, and the central object, on the other. The sign barring access to the object enhances the desirability of that object, while the object, lacking meaning without the sign, directs the attention back to the “well formed” sign. So, wherein lies the aesthetic, then? In the object, which is turned into something like an image of itself; or, in the sign, which presents deferral as an attractive model, and constitutes the first body image?\n\nIt must be in the oscillation itself—in some object of desire as seen through the gesture, which is to say the constitution of the scene, which makes it an “formal” rather than “material” object. So, historically, works of art have mostly been of potentially desirable, or even potentially repellent, things in the world, rather than (directly) of the others who mediate our relation to it—but the work of art presents this object as so mediated—i.e., as socially protected and inaccessible in some way, as opposed to the object it might be representing.\n\nEric Gans speaks of the history of aesthetics as the history of the incorporation of the scene of representation within the work of art itself. This history commences once aesthetics is distinguished from ritual. So, the earliest secular artworks, like Greek tragedy, do not represent the scene of representation at all—in a manner minimally (but very importantly) distinguished from ritual, the audience participates in the resentment toward the central figure, a resentment that is “purged” by identification with that figure’s suffering. What interests me here is that art, as an immersive experience is, like ritual, institutionally separated from the rest of life.\n\nThis is because the social hierarchy that makes one, but not others, of intrinsic interest, is taken for granted. Once other centers emerge in a post-sacrificial order, the work of art must include peripheral figures within the work, even if the focus remains, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies, on the “Big Men.” This involves obvious forms of self-references like the play-within-the-play, but also figures and scenes within the play (like plebeians expressing resentment towards their superiors) that comment on the events involving the Big Men.\n\nI think we can see this as a broader process of undoing the ontological separation between the work of art and the social world of the audience experiencing it. Once the voices of those similar to the audience are represented within the play, why not the audience itself? Why shouldn’t the participation of the audience be the play? It may be considered an astonishing testament to the institutional power of artistic representation that not only did it take so long for the idea to emerge that the creative primacy of the artist is ultimately a mere adjunct to the experience of the “recipient,” but that this idea has still not moved much beyond the artistic “avant-garde” margins to more mainstream or officially sanctioned works. The pleasure of transcending resentment by subordinating ourselves to the “domination” of the artist is certainly part of the resistance to an aesthetics that would be nothing more than minimal shifts in attention producing maximum oscillation between the created scene and other scenes.\n\nThe broader problem, though, is that trying to undo the life/art boundary requires that the practices of “life” that resist participation in “art” must be represented; and those artistic conventions that “segregate” the audience from the work must also be represented. Otherwise, how would we know we were transgressing a boundary? But these must be critical representations, of conventional “complacency” that wishes to be “spoon-fed” artistic pleasure, on the one hand, and traditions of representation that “condescend” to and “manipulate” a “passive” audience. Taking on the art/life boundary is asymmetrical warfare, i.e., terrorism, which is always snuffed out in the end. This has always been the dilemma of the avant-garde which always, amusingly enough, saw itself as bringing art to the “people.” Even with much more pacific and patient approaches, moves towards abolishing the art/life boundary will always involve moves that reconstitute it.\n\nThat just means, though, that this paradoxical relation between the institutionalized scene of art and the other scenes that art scene must itself stage would be transferred to the domain of everyday practices. The paradoxical telos of the aesthetic is to make all of life aesthetic. Or, rather, since all of our practices already have an aesthetic dimension, this telos is to open up “everyday life” to artistic creativity. The romantic and modernist utopian vision was that everyone would become an artist, once freed of inhibiting conventions; an absolutist approach, more modest, is that everyone would take an interest in noticing and enhancing the aesthetic dimension of those conventions. It follows from the formalist maxim that all relations of power and authority be made explicit and named that the norms and conventions governing all areas of life would likewise be made explicit and named, and naming is best embedded in a memorable act—and, making acts memorable is part of what art is for.\n\nSuch daily aesthetic activity would be intensely interactive: just like on the originary scene itself, we would all be imitating and “inflecting” one another’s signs. Now, if the aesthetic includes the oscillation between sign and object, the recognition of the formality of the sign (which is to say, its iterability and therefore imitability) must take place on the periphery itself, horizontally between the participants on the scene. If we ask, how would the sign “coalesce” into a final shape in the reciprocal gazes cast around on the scene, I think the answer is that it would emerge out of another oscillation which each participant would see in the others: an oscillation between vulnerability and threat. The tension between these opposing attitudes on the scene is what would paralyze everyone sufficiently to arrest the progress towards the central object. This pre-aesthetic oscillation is what would break down the pecking order and require some new means of preventing conflict.\n\nThis pre-representation of the other as equally and alternately vulnerable and threatening is what I have called “originary satire,” and posited as the initial moment of the aesthetic. Think of what would be involved in representing everyone this way—in drawing out everything monstrous, dangerous, vicious and menacing about them, while simultaneously finding everything pathetic, impotent, desperate and cowardly. Some rather remarkable, if ultimately static, characterizations would be possible, especially since presenting oneself as a threat can be seen as a way of concealing or compensating for vulnerability, while at times there can be nothing more threatening than a vulnerable, “cornered” animal.\n\nIf we all saw each other exclusively like this, human life together would be impossible, and an art work that stopped at this pre-moral satire would be incapable of any real closure—I wonder if that is why Wyndham Lewis’s satires often seem awkward, somewhat arbitrary and unfinished, as he claimed to be aiming at such a non-moral satire. So, aesthetic practice must proceed from what is really the most egalitarian practice of representation imaginable back to the center, and the “asymmetry” of placing someone or something at the center and projecting the oscillation of threat and vulnerability onto that individual. Eventually, the figure’s vulnerability is concentrated in high culture, and its threatening character in popular, and then mass, culture where we identify, as Gans says somewhere, with one or a few good guys killing lots of bad guys.\n\nBut originary satire would need to become part of the telos of the aesthetic in the kind of formalist integration of art into life I proposed above. It takes very little to frame another as vulnerable or threatening—in fact, we do it all the time, when we calculate advantages and try to neutralize the aggression of others. Representations in daily life that construct the oscillation between the two would institute a genuine model of deferral, though. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and “what is hateful to you do not unto another” were revolutionary moral advances at the time of their invention, but if you look at them took carefully they are thin, inconsistent, and capable of all kinds of cynical applications.\n\nWhat if others like what is hateful to me? I suppose we could move to the meta level and say, well, in that case, treat the maxim in a more complex manner and figure out is analogous, for the other, to what is hateful to you. At that point, though, we need another maxim. “When you see the other as threatening, imagine how he might be vulnerable; when he seems vulnerable, look for what might make him a threat” would be a much better source of moral reflection, as it would enable us to identify the role we play in constituting the other as victim or victimizer.\n\nIf originary satire is to provide our preliminary aesthetic framing of the other, we would then construct ourselves and others as centers so as to elicit signs of threat and vulnerability in the other, and continue our construction of these modes of centeredness so as to have what is threatening and vulnerable in us “match” that which we find in others. The other might be threatening physically, emotionally, or intellectually, which means that I present a vulnerability to that particular threat along with a threat of my targeting what I perceive as the other’s vulnerability, should he or she in fact prove a threat.\n\nIt’s in both sides mutual interest to proceed in this way, which preserves the symmetry needed for interaction along with the difference needed for the generation of new signs. It would be a learning process, involving trial and error and constant revision. As we proceed in our interaction, we build trust by coming to constitute one another’s centrality primarily in terms of the other’s vulnerability, and to satirize one another less. Relapses are always possible, of course. (By the way, I don’t see this reciprocity exclusively in terms of modern social orders—I think that egalitarian hunting and gathering communities are probably extremely satirical in their dealings with each other.)\n\nThe aesthetic practice of everyday life involves, to use that phrase from Gans’s The Origin of Language , “lowering the threshold of significance.” We can always uncover new layers of threateningness and vulnerability, and potential layers, hypothetical layers, and so on. The aesthetic practices of everyday life would provide representations with at least a trace of this pre-aesthetic representation, resolving the oscillation into a center based on one pole or the other—resolving the oscillation this way more or less, depending upon how much originary satire can be borne in a given setting. The practice of non-moral satire, which aims at an elemental humanness, not simply to hurt and ridicule the other (because, if done right, the practitioner doesn’t escape either), but to represent the most basic materials of any moral order, would be an extremely important thing to teach children at an early age.\n\nIt would discipline some of the cruelty and terrors to which children are liable and vulnerable; even more important, it would inoculate them strongly against taking their resentments in a socially transformative direction, since bred into them would be the knowledge that these human fundaments can’t be transformed.\n\nThe relation between “art” and “life,” then, would be bridged by the reciprocal satire of artist and audience. Any scene becomes an artistic scene insofar as it includes another scene as audience and co-creator, and which turns the artist into a sometime spectator as well—in the end, maybe we can’t tell the difference between one and the other, leaving us with pure oscillation. Social media and “meme-ing” already enact this kind of satirical oscillation, as bits and pieces of language are constantly taken out of their context and used to create other contexts in which anyone might have uttered those words. Imagine B, C, D, E and so on saying this X which A just said—this is an infinitely replicable form, which reveals something threatening/vulnerable about those we can’t imagine saying just as much as it does about those we can.\n\nOf course, the lack of any need for start-up funding is crucial here; and, of course, this also makes the “memers” highly vulnerable to the vagaries of leftist political ratcheting within the various platforms. But the “dial” on boundary abolishing originary satire can be turned up or down. If we think about artistic practices as shaping cultural participants, providing them with language and making them better language learners within the disciplines, originary satire should provide us with ways of thinking about dissemination and infiltration, which requires working just below the threshold at which the cultural censors are programmed to detect transgression."
    },
    {
      "slug": "center-and-origin-the-name-of-the-center-and-centered-names",
      "title": "Center and Origin: The Name-of-the-Center and Centered Names",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Any center is fit out with a link to the origin—therein lies its power. Even more, any center is itself an origin, an ever emergent origin. Any use of a sign entrains the entire history of sign use and any articulation of joint attention iterates the originary scene. Sometimes, due to semiotic and bureaucratic drift, the origin needs to be retrieved, but that just means a particular element or moment of the scene has replaced the scene as a whole. The most likely “culprit” is the deceleratory moment of the scene, when all the participants conform their respective gestures to the norm that has emerged on the scene.\n\nThis “settling in” would be the most memorable part of the scene, and the one that would be confirmed and conformed to even more precisely in ritual. We regularly have recourse to this element of the scene—even in the course of some innovation or disruption much of the scene must be held steady as a kind of “control” so that the novelty can stand out by contrast. When engaged in the “producers desire” to remember the origin this need for control is forgotten, and only the resistance of others on the scene can establish limits to the unfamiliar gesture.\n\nWhatever or whoever is at any center succeeds in a direct line to the central object on the originary scene. The most mediocre president of a fourth-rate country carries this lineage; for that matter, so does a bored substitute teacher in a classroom in a failing urban school. Everyone looks to the center to determine what to do, even if what to do is to defy or ridicule the center, because the central figure is telling you, in not so many words, that he has not inhabited or impersonated the resources the center provides for exercising the power of deferral. If the figure occupying the immediate center allows the baton passed from the object on the originary scene to drop, all those present on the scene are obliged either to prop up that center or turn to a new one.\n\nIf the central figure can’t or won’t issue those commands that will tie this scene to the history of scenes so as to provide those present with the roles or masks they need to organize themselves ordinally around the center, they will treat the central figure as a negative indicator pointing to the commands that should have been uttered, that have been uttered under “analogous” conditions, that can be obeyed even without having been uttered. Once someone is placed in a position where he has to lead or clog things up, those he is responsible for can build their own little centers around the clog or treat him as if he is leading—whether either approach turns out to be subversive or galvanizing will depend upon the response of the potential leader, or the emergence of a new one.\n\nThis discussion is necessary because while I have been generating a new way of using the concept of the center within GA I have not sufficiently insisted on the fact that “origin” and “center” are complementary ways of referring to the constitution of the event. This can make it sound like central power stands and commands on its own, which comes close to sounding like an exercise of brute force, while in fact central power resides in the power of the origin. If we need to make the distinction between “power” and “authority” we can say that “power” draws upon the power of the origin while “authority” carries it forward and extends it.\n\nYou need both—even mere drawing upon and preservation of the center implies at least some “extension.” Now we can speak of something equivalent to “legitimacy,” or the intrinsic relation between ostensive and imperative, as residing in the more specific origin of any community. The communist or liberal or revolutionary or usurpationist origin of the country where you find your obligations, then, cannot be “illegitimate.” What can be the case is that, because the origin of the existing mode of power has weakened or interrupted the line of origins, the commands issued by that central authority cannot be filled in or complemented in the act of obedience.\n\nThere is always a gap between the imperative issued and the imperative obeyed, and that gap is filled in by complementing the imperative with the enabling imperatives preceding it. Those enabling imperatives don’t just confirm the authority of the commander (like asking the manager whether your supervisor can really have you do this) but provide essential information regarding how to do it.\n\nEric Gans has referred to the emergence of the Big Man, i.e., the “usurpation” of the center by a person, as a “second revelation.” I have been arguing that the development of literacy represents a similarly second revelation in relation to the oral/ritual world. Tying these two revelations together is the one Gans refers to as the monotheistic revelation, enacted for a single people via the Mosaic revelation and then for all humans in the Christian one. (As I usually do in these discussions, I’ll make the necessary but inadequate gesture towards equivalent developments in the East, in Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism.)\n\nThis “post-sacrificial,” or “charismatic,” revelation of the “absolute imperative” (to defer rather than sacralize centralizing violence) is the revelation that completes that of the Big Man and that of literacy. What has happened is that we now have a center irreducible to the central authority who issues imperatives, a center with which we no longer have direct access to via “imperative exchange.” These enormous upheavals involved a radical break and alienation from the origin of specific groups, much less the origin of humanity, which as a consequence has to now be retrieved through practices enacting the heeding of the absolute imperative.\n\nSuch practices require declarative formulation, because the remnants of those specific events (the revelation on Mt Sinai; the crucifixion) upon in which the absolute imperative was heard must be supplemented for communities (that is, all communities) which cannot live and sacrifice on the actual site of the revelation.\n\nThese practices are constructed through the naming of events of origin—more precisely, origins of a particular revelation of the absolute imperative (which is always revealing itself in new ways). A country, an institution, an organization, must have such an origin if the commands issued by its central authority are to be effectively obeyed. We can say that all individuals are named because all individuals are such sites of origin: when a new baby is born, we refrain from sacrificing it, certainly literally, but also in the sense of claiming to control or predict who that baby will become. If something changes, it retrieves or repudiates its origin, in the process creating a new one. Insofar as we are all centers, we are all events of origin, and named as such—not just our given name, al though the importance of that never completely disappears, not just new names we adopt, titles, nicknames, and so on, but the declarative names people give us and we give, or try to give, ourselves: statements, descriptions, stories and so on—insofar as they single us out, they name us.\n\nThe center as named provides us with a way of rejecting familiar ways of speaking about “the society and the individual.” I would reject all talk of the “individual” within GA, as well as the concept of an “internal scene of representations” which Eric Gans uses to refer to a kind of privatized space we can trace back to the sparagmos. The individual is always constituted in relation to, which means hearing imperatives from, the center—everything that we do is in obedience to a command from the center. We can speak of a relation between the name-of-the-center and the centered name. We are nothing more than our names, beginning with the socially recognized name to be found on our driver’s license, paychecks, tax returns, diplomas, and so on, but, revolving around that name all the other names that refer to it more or less directly.\n\nWhat the “second revelation,” in the totality I just presented, means in these terms is a shift from a name of the center we can be named after to a name-of-the-center that can only be named in its namelessness. Naming, I am assuming, was originally a way of commemorating and affirming obligations to ancestors, who were worshipped; we are still often named after ancestors, but we don’t worship them and what we worship we don’t take as a source of names—rather, what we worship is the source of naming as an act.\n\nAt the same time, as Gans has pointed out on more than one occasion, every word is the Name-of-God. We have to take “every word” in the broadest possible sense here—a sentence can be the Name-of-God; indeed, the name of God in Exodus is, as Gans has often emphasized, a sentence. A book can be the name of God. Our individual names, then, are also the Name-of-God, but the Name-of-God as given within a particular historical stream, at a particular point within that stream. And names change, while referring to previous names when they do. I came across a quote from Richard Feyman recently: “knowing the name of something doesn’t mean you understand it.”\n\nWithin its context, Feynman’s statement is obviously true, but I am arguing for a diametrically opposed way of thinking about it: if you don’t understand something, that just means that you don’t know its name—its “proper” name, its “real” name, or, if we want to be a little technical, its name in the event of naming. Coming to know or understand something is coming to name it in the disciplinary event of deciding it needs to be named, trying out different names, arriving at one, testing it, and so on. This is an event within which some unnamed object within a system of names becomes available for ostensive reference, and must be named in order to maintain the completeness of the system of names.\n\nI think these formulations have important consequences. Not only do a whole set of pseudo-problems regarding the “individual,” his interiority, his identity, evaporate, or get resolved into the single, always asked, never conclusively answered question, “who are you,” but if all we have in a social order are names everything is part of the social order in a constitutive, originary manner from the very beginning. You are not in the world until you have entered through your name. The way we constitute and present ourselves as centers is through entering or inhabiting our names, projecting a possible new name for ourselves, repudiating an old or attributed one, among other possible acts.\n\nEven more, these formulations advance the mode of engagement I have been coming to propose through the concept of “originary satire.” Not always, but often, satire works through conflating individuals with their names, and with the satirist himself taking on a name so as to move through the system of names he has reduced the surrounding impersonations to. Satire is an attempt to further refine names until they position someone or something or some event on the originary scene, retrieved prior to the second revelation. That is, to refine the names until they name something on the scene at its most scenic, where the issue is in question, where the sign has not yet been normalized, and where our own naming therefore completes the scene.\n\nThe satiric dimension within the esthetic is this moment of the scene at its most scenic, where we have what Gans once referred to as the “fearful symmetry” where each is at once potential victim and potential attacker, threatening and vulnerable simultaneously. The scene is completed simply by having a “critical mass” of participants see each other this way, because enough people seeing each other this way and showing that they see each other this way is the sign. When we’re speaking with each other we’re really just naming each other and everything that makes us each other. Realizing this can make our discourse very ad hominem ; but it could also make it very ad deum ; at any rate, focusing exclusively on each other’s names as named by the unnamable Name-of-the-Center, which is itself nothing but the space opened up for receiving our names, would make us extremely ad centrum ."
    },
    {
      "slug": "from-metapolitics-to-politics",
      "title": "From Metapolitics to Politics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Let’s say neoabsolutism is the organization of those who seek out commands from the central authority, in distinction from those who make demands upon the central authorities. In distinction from, not in opposition to (even if opposition is sometimes necessary)—this distinction runs through as well as across individuals, and neoabsolutists try, not to “purify” themselves by refraining from making demands, but to keep making demands increasingly subordinate to commands—ultimately, demands should be converted into requests for materials needed to fulfill commands. You make demands when you see yourself as being in a transactional relation to the demandee; since no one is ever actually in a transactional relation with the central authority, demands are meaningful insofar as they are in fact at the lower end of a chain of commands issued by the central authority itself, as it has been captured by one or another faction.\n\nIf your demands are not at the end of a chain of command issued by the central authority, they are simply delusional. If they are, they are commands followed in disguise. So, for starters, neoabsolutists don’t make meaningless, delusional, demands—this in itself is enough to distinguish us from all other political factions.\n\nCommands come to us through names. Names institute originary centers: a name refers to an object that is, or might be, desired, and therefore a source of rivalry; naming the thing makes the object available or divisible in an authorized and orderly way. This is the case for intimate nicknames that add a layer of protection to comrades or loved ones, slowing down the movement from attention to resentment just as much as for the names of cities which are thereby brought under central authority. The named object commands us to refrain from violently centralizing it. We refrain from violent centralization by deferring to the central authority conferring and redeeming the name: we do nothing to the object that authority would prohibit; even more, we protect it as that authority would have us do.\n\nWe can always do this, even when the name is contested. Take a frivolous example: some eccentric who insists on calling New York “New Amsterdam” because his own historical inquiries have revealed to him that the British never had a right to succeed Dutch sovereignty over the city. While you are speaking with him, which is to say while the name “New Amsterdam” is in play, and you have no responsibility for preserving the name “New York,” and there is no harm in entering his imaginary space, respecting “Dutch sovereignty,” and finding out what this place, New Amsterdam, is (even if the DMV and Post Office won’t be able to indulge his fantasy).\n\nThe same is true in more serious cases, where the name of a city or country is the stake in a war, insurrection, or civil war. Even when your enemy’s name is in play, you can recognize and respect the buffers he places around his name for the place or site because doing so is a way of eliciting in his speech and actions the sovereign resources that may or may not back the name. “Tell me about your [ ]” serves as both a kind of truce and a way of measuring the forces arrayed.\n\nWe are always most fundamentally naming, which is to say designating centers, not only ostensively and imperatively but declaratively—when someone asks the “point” of a book, he is asking what has been named by it. The only way we can name, which is also the only way we can speak about anything, is by providing the means to “point” to its relation to some more inclusive center; which is to say, some desire provoked by what one points at, some resentment at that desire’s at least partial or potential frustration, and some self-centering by any and all involved that would be a sign of resentment deferred. Within a ritual, mythical, magical, i.e., predominantly ostensive-imperative world, this means outlining someone’s relation to a specific set of figures and the ritual and narrative traditions determining the relations between them.\n\nIf something goes wrong, the gods are against you, and if the gods are against you, you have displeased them in some way, and there are specific, and known ways in which the gods are displeased. A very rich universe, which is to say, a rich set of names, is generated out of such descriptions.\n\nIn a post-ritual, post-sacrificial, world, the disciplines take up the slack, and the centers we deal with are entities like “society,” “selves,” “community,” “morality,” “profession,” “economy,” and so on. These are all normative arenas, and if things go wrong, you have violated some of those norms by being lazy, stupid, dishonest, uncooperative, neurotic, and so on. You accept the judgment of the disciplines, or imagine yourself in a counter-discipline, where you debunk some established discipline and establish a marginalized research canon—but these counter-disciplines are invariably hyper-literal intensifications of the existing disciplines.\n\nMuch of my work over the past few years has been aimed at clarifying the relationship the originary hypothesis is to have to these disciplines. It should be a transdisciplinary relationship, as GA inhabits the disciplines, turns their discourses against themselves, and essentially replaces the disciplines as GA’s minimal vocabulary of “center,” “mimetic,” “desire,” and “resentment,” and its articulation of the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative speech forms comes to account for everything the other disciplines had purported to account for. This is ethical, reparative activity—the central object of the disciplines is the imperium in imperio , or, let’s say, “super-sovereign,” that is intended to reunite the signifying center and the authoritative center, fractured with the fall of sacral kingship.\n\nThe demystifying, secularizing, rationalizing agenda of the disciplines (starting with philosophy) is an attempt to give names to the nameless practices and figures that fall out of the fracturing of sacral kingship, but these names can only designate proxies of would be occupants of the central authority, and the naming procedures necessarily conceal the proxy character of the named precisely because this unknowing is a condition of naming as recruitment.\n\nIn that case, our discursive naming goes directly towards the desire, resentment and center implicit in what others have said: we can be wrong, but we are always making a hypothesis regarding what the other is doing by way of deferring violence in whatever he says or does. We can make these hypotheses increasingly explicit, and the other can, of course, respond that our hypothetical naming of him as a center of desire and resentment is really an articulation of our own self-centering of desire and resentment by which he can name us. On the face of it, and sometimes in actuality, this would lead to a kind of comically reductive cycle of accusations and counter-accusations, but if the analyses are conscientious the desires and resentments would have to be embedded in the institutions and in relation to the projects that would be their objects.\n\nIn fact, naming the other would also entail naming those institutions and those in responsible positions within them, as the institutions themselves are represented as concentrations of deferred desires and resentments. But the better names will be the ones that are brought to an identification of some constitutive paradox of origin and being situating the other within the field of desire and resentment: a particular way of being inside the institution while being outside of it and representative of it.\n\nAn ongoing practice of naming that also keeps renaming the system of names within the names have their place is a metapolitical approach, similar, say, to saying that politics concerns realizing the relation between “man” and “technology.” But what does it mean for institution and organization building, strategy and tactics? What is to be done? We can bring our metapolitics closer to politics by saying that the goal is to create incrementally less reactive individuals. However someone engages you, you learn not to respond in kind, or to respond in kind only when it serves some broader purpose that includes this encounter.\n\nIn other words, you respond to others demands—that is, you respond within their parameters, you pay them attention in a, to them, satisfying way, you recognize their resentments—by positing and obeying a command you all might have in common. This need not be conciliatory: the command might be that the other follow your lead; it might be that he surrender himself to you. At any rate, it’s a command that makes explicit the chain of command that would make the others’ demands more or less meaningful. This is in fact the outcome of the reciprocal naming practice.\n\nSo, the political project is to lower reactivity; and to provide ways for those engaged in lowering reactivity to find each other and collaborate; and this includes distinguishing oneself from, while surveying as possible recruits, the (so far) more reactive. The issues people normally associate with politics are secondary to building models of a post-liberal, post-sacrificial order, but that doesn’t mean they are irrelevant. Nor does it mean that neoabsolutists should not fully participate in all liberal institutions, including elections. What should be done is whatever will clarify some link in the chain of command by naming a center that will incorporate demands into that chain of command.\n\nPro-choice people demand free and funded abortion; pro-life people demand an end to abortion. Where do we see violent centralizing here: that is, where do the respective sides each imagine its own super-sovereign, the foundation of its discipline of naming, predicated upon sacrificial markings? The embryo is not, even in purely biological terms, reducible to a “set of tissues,” or “tumor”; nor is a pregnant woman who negligently falls down, thereby causing a miscarriage, guilty of “manslaughter.” (That the pro-lifers realize the woman would be centralized in a violent way is evident in their absurd claim that only doctors would be punished for violating abortion laws.)\n\nThe language of both sides is driven by the discourse of rights (and the hysterical, highly conformist political organizations the discourse requires) to have recourse to a super-sovereign conceptual order to imagine coercing the central authority. Abortion is wrong, as we can see from the somewhat demonic enthusiasm with which its promoters come to defend it against criticism; but it’s not wrong in the way the pro-lifers say. Extract “rights” from the equation and you eliminate the mobilization of the state against one’s enemies in the guise of self-protection; and if the initial move is not to imagine the mobilization of the state on one’s behalf (a kind of unknowing self-proxy-fying) then we can participate in naming practices that are articulated into more systemic practices.\n\nTo have neoabsolutists capable of deconstructing the standardized formulation of “issues” in this way requires both a “doctrine” in which all are schooled and to which all contribute as they can, and, of course, the institutions that can support such study; and infiltration in the dominant legal, scientific and other disciplines. It may be that the contemporary liberal order, that of the “victimocracy,” or “woke capital,” has evolved in such a way as to make both sides of this equation especially difficult. The tech oligopoly is designed so as to take out emergent intellectual threats, while the requirement, within the dominant institutions, of virtual loyalty oaths to the endless assault of the fringes upon the center means that a great deal of neoabsolutist politics will involve creating conditions under which training and infiltration become possible.\n\nThe weakness of pre-WWII liberal institutions was that they had no consistent way of keeping the enemies of liberalism out of liberal institutions—we can see the current order as a solution to that problem, transitioning from fighting World War 2 and the Cold War to developing prophylaxes against their recurrence.\n\nWhat are the weaknesses of these institutions, then? One is certainly that they don’t provide a public space wherein the ruling class can freely discuss the various challenges and options available to it—such discussions can obviously be held more privately, but not only does the current regime make that more difficult, but a more open loop is necessary if decision makers are to have the necessary feedback. This implies the possibility of elite defection, and raises the question of the means available of punishing such defection, and at what point those means would become insufficient. Another is that it is creating possibly intractable problems of governance for itself—divide and rule, via mass immigration and identity politics, might be a good strategy for a while but at some point it interferes with basic law and order and the production of a competent work force, and new generations of middle and upper leadership.\n\nA third is the corrosion of media, education, legal and other, maybe even scientific, institutions, to the point where they become useless. Where the emerging order is likely to be especially deficient, then, is in the middle, in the officer class, understood more generally, or middle to upper management. Proving worthy of elite defectors and providing at least some of the officer corps even for reluctant elites awash in SJW intrigue would then seem to be the goal of a large scale neo-absolutist politics; more proximately, what would help is seeing is the victimocrats brought out into the open so that they can be seen as the petty and vicious hands behind the curtain pulling the de-platforming levers, and made into an embarrassment.\n\nSo, to take just one example, it seems to me that, preferable to Missouri Senator Hawley’s bill that would require the Big Tech firms to be certified as “neutral” by the government so as to retain their designation as service providers rather than publishers (which would make them liable to libel lawsuits) it might be better to simply change the designation and have the DOJ initiate or support a wave of lawsuits so that the conversations, texts, emails, love affairs, etc., of the petty bureaucrats doing the banning and de-platforming within those companies can all be brought to light. The elites need to be shown, and they need to be seen to be shown: these are the people you have running things, deciding on information to be available to the public and peoples’ livelihoods.\n\nNeoabsolutists would also be ruthless in devastating commonplaces and sentimentality regarding geo-politics, speaking straightforwardly, naming, imperial and hegemonic relations, assigning potential responsibilities to those actors with the power—rather than proposing, or fantasying, implicitly or explicitly, drastic leveling of relations between states. Yes, the US, to take the most obvious example, is everywhere, but every state is everywhere it can be. If the US is everywhere in chaotic, absurd and destructive ways, with, for example, the State Department, Defense Department and CIA all pursuing their own foreign policies, that is largely because of the liberal democratic ideologies, involving the defense of nonsensical chimeras like “human rights,” that makes it so.\n\nHere as well neoabsolutists make no intoxicating demands (“no more war!” “national self-determination!’), but, rather, carry on a continuous audit of the assets under the command of specific states which leads to the naming of institutional linkages that would best allot, within domains supervised by one or a team of powers, responsibilities for peace-keeping and coherence in government among subordinate powers. The same practice of seeking patronage of defecting elites and self-presenting as a more effective officer corps would apply here as well. In this case we can speak of a kind of “internationalist” politics, insofar as neoabsolutists in different countries wouldn’t so much collaborate with as model themselves off of each other, as all try to increase non-reactivity in their respective spaces."
    },
    {
      "slug": "gasc-2019-paper",
      "title": "GASC 2019 Paper",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The Linguistic Turn and Generative Literacy\n\nI’m going to begin with the assumption that the linguistic turn entails the rejection of any attempt to find legitimation for what we say in language in some reality taken to be outside of language, whether this outside be truth, nature, human nature, reality, any form of interiority, the greater good, or anything else. This means that language, rather than being primarily representational, that is, trying to provide an adequate and therefore legitimating picture of what is outside of language, is generative—that is, it is relationships intrinsic to representational structures that create what we call truth, reality, nature, good and so on.\n\nTo say that language is generative is to say that the meanings of signs are to be found in their effects on other signs, not in reference to reality: the main question, then, becomes, what are the levers or mechanisms within sign systems that make transformation possible? To put it in pragmatic terms, to take the example of public discourse, instead of trying to prove that your discourse represents reality better, the point is to transform language so that your discourse works steadily within it to the point of becoming it.\n\nAnna Wierzbicka’s discussion of modern English in her Experience, Evidence and Sense: The Cultural Legacy of English provides us with an example of what this means: she shows how the entire language was transformed as a result of one intervention: Locke’s theory of knowledge and politics. She traces a whole series of terms, such as “experience,” evidence,” “empirical,” “sense,” and others back to Locke’s usages, and points out not only the historical contingency and cultural specificity of these terms, but that these are among the very words English speakers take to be most universal and commonsensical. It’s no coincidence that these are the words taken to provide us with access to what is outside of language. It lies outside of Wierzbicka’s inquiry to explain how these words operated generatively upon the English language, but I would suggest that raising and answering that kind of question is, in the wake of the linguistic turn, central to any aesthetic, moral, ethical or political inquiry. It may very well be all such an inquiry entails.\n\nThe generativity of language, at least in the post-structuralist forms given it by Derrida’s claim that there is no outside of the text or Rorty’s notion of an ongoing conversation of civilization in which everyone participates, is generally taken to be a pluralist doctrine in which the difference inhabiting the sign is irreducible. But the sign that constitutes the originary scene is absolutely generative, insofar as the sign creates the scene and the human, while at the same time presupposing complete unanimity. And, in fact, I think that the linguistic turn, understood through originary thinking, poses a very different kind of problem, to which we can, in fact, reduce all human problems: that of ensuring that all participants on a scene issue, and know themselves to be issuing, the same sign.\n\nThis is a problem because it never really is the same sign (the linguistic turners are right about that)—since signs only take on meaning within a scene, a sign on one scene cannot be identical to a sign on another scene, no matter what measures we take or what rules we construct to ensure the sign will be recognized as identical—indeed, we take such measures and construct such rules precisely because there is no internal essence of the sign that makes it the same.\n\nThere are two ways in which the identity of the sign can be established. One, all participants on a scene can agree that the sign is the same according to some agreed upon criteria for identity—in other words, some metalanguage, which will then have to be grounded in a metaphysical reality outside of language. Or, we can establish the identity of the sign by deliberately and self-referentially constituting a scene upon which the sign directs us to some center. Here, we would embrace what Johanna Drucker’s calls “inscription,” suggesting there is no sign without its embodiment and embedment in material and historical enactment. The problem with relying on metalanguage, or what Drucker calls “notation,” of course, is that any metalanguage is subject to the same self-difference as the language it tries to control.\n\nLanguage is going to be generative even if we act as if it is representational—pretensions to a secure metalanguage really serve to guarantee a moral or political certainty that avoids the problem of creating in some space of language the shared attention directed towards some center. We can find the origin of this logocentrism in literacy. David Olson has shown that writing was created out of an inquiry in language, including the speech scenes upon which language is used. More recently, Olson has used the notion of classic prose (taken from Mark Turner and Francis Noel-Thomas’s book, Clear and Simple as the Truth ) to show that the telos of the metalanguage of literacy is to simulate a scene, modeled on a presumed original speech scene, upon which writer and readers are all present. It is for this purpose that the metalanguage of literacy establishes norms regarding the correctness of sentences and the uses of words—which is to say, it is literacy that enshrines the declarative sentence as the primary form of language—metaphysics is just further elaboration on this.\n\nInsofar as we rely on notation and metalanguage, then, we imagine ourselves to be present on a simulated, always already constructed scene, with guarantees provided in advance that we all use the same sign. We can then proceed to eliminate deviants—the ungrammatical, the illogical, the unclear—which further proves that those of us remaining are all in possession of the same sign. This metalinguistic imaginary elides the difference, constitutive of the declarative sentence, between the scene of utterance and the represented scene. Since the scene of writing and reading can be represented on that scene itself, introducing a difference within the scene, this elision generates anomalies within metalanguage.\n\nThese anomalies open the intrinsically imitative and therefore pedagogical dimension of language use that metaphysical presence occludes. This pedagogical dimension can only be enacted “infralinguistically,” to use Bruno Latour’s term. In place of the hierarchy between language and metalanguage we have the performance of the difference of the metalinguistically guaranteed sign through its representation until its event nature is elicited. These efforts aim at making visible and inescapable the event-character of the sign, which is to say the sign’s inextricability from histories, traditions, the various ways in which it has used by different groups in different situations and, above all, from some event, some act of deferral, some origin, the participation in which is the only the way we can reciprocally “authenticate” one another’s use of the sign.\n\nI have been implicitly suggesting an infralinguistic strategy or vocation for GA, whereby we speak and write in “originary” and “generative” English (or any other language). The basic concepts of GA, such as “desire,” “resentment,” “center” and others don’t really allow us to remain unimplicated in the objects of our analyses—on what basis could I claim to be unresentfully drawing the contours of another’s resentment? GA, then, despite its distinctive (if minimal) conceptual vocabulary, is ill-suited to be a metalanguage. I am asking, what kind of knowledge is GA? If it’s a new way of thinking, it’s a new relation to language. For starters, I’m contending that literacy is itself a second revelation, broadly parallel to the emergence of the Big Man—the revelation here being, as I pointed out before, the autonomy of the declarative sentence.\n\nWe can make further use of Olson to get a sense of what the implications of bringing this revelation to the fore as part of the linguistic turn might imply. Olson points out that the metalanguage of literacy serves the purpose of “supplementing” the presumed scene of recorded speech with verbs referring implicitly to mental acts that would have been performed in a speech situation. If I say someone assumed that something to be the case, I am reporting what another said, while also distancing myself from it—the other person was presumably more certain than I am in reporting his speech. In an oral setting, this would have been reflected in the tone—perhaps mildly mocking—in which the speech was reported; since we don’t have that tone, literacy introduces supplementary terms like “assume.” This allows for another innovation of literacy: the distinction between the meaning of an utterance, and the speaker’s meaning—we can now represent all kinds of ways in which the two can be at odds.\n\nThese verbs then get nominalized and we get new entities, like “assumptions,” and whole new disciplines organized so as to study them. All the human sciences are derived from such nominalizations, and much of everyday discourse (which has been transformed by literacy and the disciplines) as well. Even universally available words like “thoughts” and “ideas” are probably constructs of literacy. What this means is that there are vast domains of linguistic usage that are entirely dependent upon elaborations of the metalanguage of literacy, and also completely oblivious to this fact. We ourselves, within GA, are also thoroughly immersed within the metalanguage of literacy—the difference is, we can know it, and know why, and propose new disciplinary articulations that show such words to be scene and event dependent.\n\nWorking “inscriptively,” then, would involve accepting that writing is scenic itself, rather than an attempt to construct a universally shared and permanent speech scene. One of Derrida’s central observations is that there is no single scene of writing—writing, rather, involves a dissemination of texts, each of which would serve to constitute a scene that might reference more or less directly any and all of the other scenes organized around the disseminated text. This means that writing generates samples of language, no more directly related to one particular scene upon which they are iterated than any other. Charles Sanders Peirce argued that knowledge is always of the relation between a sample and the population of which it is a sample. Once we abandon attempts to supplement the source, then, we have samples of language, and we generate hypotheses regarding their relation to language as a whole.\n\nTreating pieces of language as samples involves creating anomalous uses, or, really, acknowledging that all uses are anomalous, and accordingly situating ourselves on the boundary between talking about something and no longer/not yet quite talking about something—“sampling” is a call, or imperative, to generate a new center with an object at it. If we’re obeying the imperative derived from a concept, like, say, “infralanguage,” or “inscription,” then we are looking for samples of language serving as models of these concepts, and looking for ways to make sense of less obvious instances, even seemingly counter-instances, in terms of these concepts—for example, noting the infralinguistic dimension inseparable from the most rigorously applied metalanguage.\n\nInsofar as we have a new center, that center wants to be more central: if we have a center we are using the same sign, and its identity is affirmed in the self-reference that situates one scene generated by the sign in a history of scenes with an origin that is continually marked. Imperatives from the previous scene, like “find new ways to talk about X,” or “use the conceptual resources you have generated to replace some less differentiated way of saying something,” generate the subsequent scenes. Words that bear with them histories distributed across self-referential networks are going to be more generative.\n\nMetalinguistic terms resist operationalization—what, exactly, are we doing when we “assume” something? Are we always assuming what we assume? If not, what’s the difference between when we’re assuming and when we’re not? The later Wittgenstein was fascinated and perhaps appalled by the evanescence of the “referents” of such meta-linguistic terms. It is precisely such terms we can operationalize infralinguistically. If we make a study of “assumptions,” it is not to define and categorize them or to leverage “hidden” assumptions against explicit statements, but, perhaps, to figure out when they come into view, and what kind of thinking is going on when they don’t. Perhaps we can imagine “assumptionless” linguistic performances; or performances that are all assumptions, right there on the surface. The purpose here being to show that such imagining would require new forms of joint attention.\n\nIf language is the deferral of violence, the only thing we are ever talking about is how we are going about deferring violence. Forms of language that can be moved across scenes make it possible to defer not only immediate forms of violence but possible future forms, even ones that we can’t yet imagine. In more critical discussions, where we’re interested in the “viability” of concepts, what we’re really inquiring into is how many possible uses for deferring violence a particular constellation of words might have. If we know this, but others don’t, in talking with others all we are doing is helping them to know this. This knowledge must lie in their own discourses, their own vocabulary—if they are going to speak GA with us they would first have to see that their own discourse is always already GA.\n\nWe’re all always and only talking about how we are deferring violence but if we don’t all always know this it is because the sign can only refer to a single center, not centeredness in general. So, in entering others’ discourse we identify those signs where reference to a single center interferes with the reference to centeredness as such. This would transform the conversation into one centered on eliciting the distinction between centering and centeredness. This distinction is elicited by treating every utterance as both hypothesizing the way some other sign refers to a center and being, as a sample, a possible center. Our interest in that possible utterance, or sample, then, is in how it can iterated and disseminated in ways that would make more explicit our talking about the way we are deferring violence.\n\nIt is this practice of sampling, taking pieces of language and pointing them at new centers, that makes language generative, memorable and effective. The reason for the linguistic turn is that the metaphysical scene of humanism, predicated upon the metalinguistics of literacy, could no longer effectively defer violence. For one thing, by asserting the unity of humanity humanism, the late form of metaphysics (locating the ultimate reality within rather than without), keeps dividing humanity. Deferring violence now requires making explicit the constitution of scenes upon which we take our own uses of language as the center—this demands that we minimize our assumptions regarding what counts as a scene of knowing, and let the object, the “samples,” organize such scenes.\n\nThe more generative discourses will be those that can create revelatory scenes of the origin and identity of the sign out of the greatest differentiation in sign use. It is the discourse that knows that all we’re ever doing is talking about how we’re deferring violence without it ever being possible to be completely explicit about that will be the most generative one."
    },
    {
      "slug": "language-policy",
      "title": "Language Policy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A sign is the deferral of violence. The first sign deferred imminent violence; subsequent signs may also do so, or they may defer intimations of merely possible violence, raising the threshold of what would count as a cause for violence. And not just violence in in general, but mimetically driven violence that would, if undeferred, consume all. So, in choosing our signs, we aim at deferring the possibility of some violence that will, in almost all cases, not erupt on the scene upon which we cast the sign—we are hypothesizing at several or many steps removed. In developing high level concepts, for example, we hope to defer forms of violence that threaten under conditions we can’t even imagine at present.\n\nOnce a human has taken over the center, the most feared form of violence is scapegoating frenzy directed towards that central figure, and so that must be prevented; still, it must happen sometimes, and its consequences could be more or less destructive; so, rituals and institutions and their linguistic underpinnings must also provide for less destructive consequences. Once we are post-sacrificial and anyone can become a center and hence a target of centralizing violence, the most compelling form of violence—that which holds some marked individual responsible for some imminent catastrophe—is also the kind that must be deferred. Force will, of course, have to be used against enemies and criminals, but only force that maintains the centered ordinality or orderly hierarchy.\n\nWhat we are always talking about then, however directly or indirectly, is whether some person who has been singled out, named, is being prepped for or disqualified from sacrificial violence. Our linguistic intuition always enables us to tell the difference: either we are loading excess guilt onto the individual, placing him below the threshold at which norms regulating the use of force are activated, perhaps because time is of the essence or the regular forms could not do justice to the singularity of this guilt; or, we are constructing reasons not to proceed against the individual, conferring upon him motives and embedding him in conditions that not only stay our hand but lead us to shape the surroundings so that forms of authority are invoked and reinforced.\n\nThese contending possibilities are not only in our language, they are our language. The conferral of an unhindered chain of imperatives upon a central authority is a result of the ascendancy of the moral imperative over the transgressive temptation: the more our language is saturated with ways of naming the impossible victim, the less it can consider centralized violence against the central figure without whom a cessation of violence is unthinkable.\n\nAlways naming impossible victims is the most moral way of speaking and writing; such a practice eventually entails naming ways of determining when, where and how the impossible victim is to be named. But, of course, the chains of command are never quite unbroken, and the temptation of transgression can never be eliminated—in fact, it is always encroaching. So, in naming impossible victims we entrain the naming of those persons as possible victims—such an implication is part of the same language in which we name the impossibility of their victimization, because deferral only makes sense if shaded by mimetic crisis. So, the possibility and impossibility of victimization must be made foreground and background of each other, parenthetical references, subordinate clauses, absolute and prepositional phrased within the sentences where the other is named. Representing both poles in their interdependence is the way in which the impossibility of victimization is represented. The representation of the temptation of transgression within the impossibilization of victimization is originary satire.\n\nWe are always presenting, at different levels of explicitness and awareness, hypotheses regarding the desires and resentments informing others’ actions. This also means we read others’ representations of ourselves as hypotheses regarding our own desires and resentments. But if we can say this, doesn’t it follow that we should always make our respective hypotheses more explicit, and be more aware of them? Note that I just drew an imperative from a declarative, or a prescriptive from a descriptive: if this is what we are always, already, doing, then we should do it explicitly and knowingly. This is essentially what it means to see declaratives as studies of the ostensive-imperative world, aimed at producing more possible ostensives.\n\nBut perhaps making more explicit our respective hypotheses regarding one another’s “mimology” interferes with the imperative to defer resentments. After all, at least sometimes, there is no better way of inflaming resentments than naming them. So, here we have a case of competing imperatives, both them with fairly firm “pedigrees.” They must both be preserved—that’s an even older imperative. There might be lots of ways of making my own and the other’s respective mimological hypotheses more explicit, and some of them might generate more uncontrollable forms of resentment than others; also, not all forms of resentment are equally en during, or convert equally readily into violence.\n\nSo, we aim at maximum explicitness articulated with minimal incitement to direct violence. We don’t want to drive the other into a blind fury; we want give him a new name, and part of that new name is “observer of the old names to which he belonged.” So, this means maximum separation from the old name, with minimal separation from the space of naming itself—the more confrontational one might be, the more the confrontation should be situated within an arena in which there is a shared distinction between fair and foul play.\n\nThis maximizing and minimizing is the realm of the thought experiment, which is the arena within which our mimological hypotheses are played out. If I’ve made the other’s hypothesis a bit more explicit than it was before, where can I find in his own language a way of making it yet more explicit? This imperative-interrogative articulation implies that there is something obfuscating his hypothesis. This something is some disavowed agency, displaced onto some supplementary representation. In the pre-literate, ritual world, this supplementary representation would be of a sacred agent—when I struck him, the god of rage, or whoever, filled my breast and guided my hand, etc.\n\nA ritual response would then be the proper recompense. In the literate world, following the “second revelation” (somewhat parallel to the “second revelation” of the Big Man), these disavowed agencies and supplementary representations are provided by the disciplines. These include concepts of freedom and responsibility that come primarily from legal discourse—the concepts needed to determine how to convict and punish once “blood prices” are no longer the means of settling disputes become “internalized” or, I would say, incorporated into our respective namings of each other.\n\nSince the disciplines are ways of making sense of imperatives coming from the center, it is precisely this relation to the center that is obfuscated. So, let’s say someone commits a crime and confesses, taking full responsibility. Well, that’s better than having recourse to another discipline, like psychiatry, and claiming “temporary insanity,” or whatever, because at least in this case there is an openness to self-inspection. But locating the source of one’s actions in oneself is a denial of the mimetic nature of those actions, and this concealment is sure to show up in the confession itself. Somewhere in there we will find some slippage from being free of a desire to do wrong to being possessed by that desire.\n\nHere’s a place to introduce competing hypotheses, via a satiric thought experiment: something happened within that slippage that you don’t want to or can’t see. Wouldn’t part of taking responsibility be hypothesizing how you came to construct your responsibility as you did? In confessing, you heed an imperative from the center. Let’s first lay that out, in whatever moral, theological and legalistic language you have at your disposal. Then let’s see if we can hypothesize regarding the origin of those concepts in your own representation of your actions. I don’t mean empirical origins (“my father first taught me about guilt when I was 6 years old…”); I mean their origins in this very discourse—what in your story and self-accounting would leave you desiring or fearing violence towards or from others without the introduction of those concepts?\n\nHere is where we can represent an obscured resentment maximally while leaving minimal pathways toward acting on that resentment because we have strengthened our mutual adherence to the imperative to name oneself as the doer of this deed. There will be some supplementary concept here that, if we repeat it enough times, in sufficiently different contexts, will help us bring its origins to light. If we get rid of, for example, the “freedom/determinism” binary we can find a previously obscured imperative from the center.\n\nThis kind of thinking mostly involves converting imperatives into declaratives: “I had to do this” becomes “this other was blocking me from the center,” which in turn issues new imperatives like “discover a center such that it must have been acknowledging both of you equally, in however different ways.” The declaratives one constructs in the process lead one all the way back to the originary scene, where one in fact places oneself and one’s interlocutors; and all the way forward into the future, as one provides the linguistic material or “samples” that can be used in as yet unimaginable ways to defer unanticipated forms of violence.\n\nYour own gesture always borrows from another, to whom you attribute the first one—the more your own gesture is “really” first, the more it will confer firstness on the other. This is the position on the originary scene. The more you represent or adumbrate the resentments potentially generating by this present gesture of yours, along with counter-resentments and possible donations of these resentments to the center in the form of new mediations that would redirect our resenting attention from each other to a new mode of distribution (beyond our control) of the center, the more your discourse takes on futurity.\n\nThis is no longer classical prose because insofar as we are all on the same scene it is the scene of writing, which is a singular scene by virtue of being a mere generator of other possible scenes towards which we all take up some relation by the way of the imperatives we hear on this one. As we turn descriptives into prescriptives, the scene is distributed. In the end we are all shaping a collaborative project, not of representing reality, but of deferring mimetic violence as far into the future as possible (a lot of reality does need to get represented for this to take). And so the imperative is to become ever more explicit about this, and in such a way as to advance the collaborative project itself.\n\nWe must always have recourse to the most direct, explicit, and rigorous thinking of desire, resentment, and the center that we have, which is to say the strongest GA we can make is imperative. But if we’re also going to be using GA to make other discourses more rigorous by eliciting their own discourses of the center, then once we’ve eliminated disavowed agencies and supplementary concepts there would be no difference between GA and all other discourses. We would all be engaged, in infinitely various ways, in the study of our constitutive relation to the center. Our satirical thought experiments would always be necessary because our cleaving to the imperatives from the center that have so far named us will always interfere with hearing a more minimal version of that absolute imperative, but those satirical thought experiments would take the place of the disciplines. That, at least is the project, which is to be made indistinguishable from our language.\n\nWe can describe, in the most immediate and accessible way, this project as the determining and revealing of the meaning of words. This means the retrieval of words from their disciplinary appropriations (their passage through the nominalizations constituting the metalanguage of literacy) and their emplacement within centered ordinality. The question is, how would a given word be used within sentences and discourses that present the hierarchy dictated by the center named by those sentences and discourses? You could say that determining the meaning of words is the formalism of language: what a word like “action” means is the way it is used by someone capable of action, or of commanding action, or of abstaining from action in order to distinguish one mode of action from another, ultimately for the sake of those yet to make decisions.\n\nWhat a word means, that is, is how it is used by someone authorized by the “situation,” which is to say, some center, to use it. And even someone expelled from the center is authorized to name the terms of that expulsion. This also means that becoming a student of meaning entails becoming authorized to use the words you study, which means founding a scene of their use, before you can know whether others will join you there."
    },
    {
      "slug": "language-paradoxed",
      "title": "Language Paradoxed",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The discourse of the center bypasses concepts such as “desire,” “resentment” and “mimesis.” Using these concepts, as I mentioned last post, exempt you from the very things you are describing: insofar as your own desires, resentments and modeling are infecting those you are examining, the real topic of your discussion is your own practices; in which case, why not make it directly so? But, then, you couldn’t present your own self-centering without presenting others, so the problem becomes how to do it all at once. The solution lies in beginning with an account of what you’re hearing from the center. The center doesn’t call to say everything’s OK: intuitions of the center indicate something out of order, and at least a preliminary re-ordering (a mark of a better society would be that its members spend ever more time anticipating potential disorders than addressing immediate ones).\n\nBut “something out of order” means someone positioned where they “shouldn’t” be; to be even more direct, someone positioned where you should be. That’s the elemental core of resentment: the other is in your place, and the center allows him to be there. You can detect the “texture” of resentment in any “sample” of language, including, of course, this one—in this case, perhaps, toward all those maintaining centeredness through distancing declarative language, and toward the center for not sufficiently amply revealing itself.\n\nYou can pursue this resentment head on, and there’s no doubt a cognitive yield in doing so: how did he get into that place, how has he secured it, with the help of which henchmen dispatched by the center, with what other displacing effects, how to extract him from there and replace him with the spot’s true inhabitant, etc. This is pretty much the structure of all analysis—this is what it looks and feels like to examine something “critically.” We get to a kind of basic “humanness” here, because everyone can be taught to notice such logics in others but very few wish to examine the circumference one has constructed around oneself as center in similarly meticulous ways (of course I’m resentful, don’t you see what they’re doing…!); even more importantly, it’s not like we can invent another way of thinking.\n\nIn figures like Jesus or Dostoevsky’s Alyosha we can see what another way of thinking would be, in which every thought of the other would be infused from the start by infinite love, mercy, and compassion. But that could only be the result of a long process of ascesis, itself involving some tremendous wrestling with outsized resentments—plus, one could only attain such a condition at the cost of not really being able to do anything, and how merciful and loving (I ask resentfully) is that?\n\nMaturity means being able to notice more and more distinctions—and all distinctions are on some level invidious—while attending more and more to the formalizing of those distinctions, rather than to seeking out their justifications. The most egalitarian world possible would instantly turn into the most inegalitarian one: imagine we could all be placed in a state of nature, with equal physical and intellectual capabilities. As soon as we got started doing something, status distinctions would emerge—someone notices something first, someone gets a little more of something, someone, maybe for random reasons, is a bit more attractive than others, etc.\n\nEven if the differences were minute and rapidly changing they would loom large. So, everyone would be immediately, and constantly, faced with the choice: you can think, how do I get as much as that person (or reduce him to as little as me); how do I make myself as attractive as that person (or reduce his attractiveness), and so on; or, how can these status distinctions be formalized, so that what it means to have access to things, to identify new centers, to be the center of others’ attention can be made explicit and therefore a source of order. You might still want more things, to have more power, to be more attractive, and you might use others as models to acquire these things, but you would do so in such a way as to strengthen the meaning the center has conferred upon such practices.\n\nEvery utterance points a way to resentment and a way to transcendence, or what I would prefer to call “presencing” and “centering.” If there is one point of unanimity in the modern world, it is that there is no center. All secular people will insist on this once the question is raised, while the religious will insist all the more forcefully on their center to the extent that they must also insist others can only acknowledge it on their terms. In a way, this is also a concession of the general centerlessness. But our language always tells us otherwise—at the very least, when you say something, you are presenting yourself, or what you say, as a center.\n\nAnd not only as a center in itself, but as a center pointing to another center, as will become clear if you ask someone, why did you say that? You were assuming that those who might be listening to you were paying attention to something else (what, exactly, did you imagine they might be paying attention to?), and you want their attention wrenched away from that to this other thing. What did it say about them that they were focused on something else, and what would it say about them to redirect their attention as you propose? The resentment is in the demand for the attention shift (and that demand’s implication that others were lesser for “refusing” to look at your thing); the centering will be in the new nomos, or division of participatory roles, implicit in getting engrossed in this new thing.\n\nSo, gradations, or centered ordinality, are implicit in every utterance, at least insofar as you were less for paying attention to that and will be more for paying attention to this. And whoever follows up on one utterance will construct another order. Listening to the center entails generating finer distinctions along with a center ordering them. In a sense this would be the most originary, and therefore egalitarian way of inhabiting language—far more so than using language to point out that others have something you don’t and demanding some remedy for it. Here, we are all perfectly equal, which is to say the same, for the center, which is more important than where any of us “should” be.\n\nIt’s very important to keep in mind how impossible this all sounds within a liberal order. I think I’m referring to an extremely mature social order and populace—but not at all utopian—in which people get better and better at doing the things they are asked to do, by whoever is asking them to do it, into ways of sharpening a distinctive practice that will serve as a model for others. But to someone bred and indoctrinated within liberalism it will sound like you’re condemning them to a robotic and/or militarized existence (your language will be full of impossible imperatives for them)—simply because you’re not reserving for them (or promising them) some space outside of sociality where they can imagine themselves as self-starters, or an originating center.\n\nEnacting and speaking in centered ordinality is the only way back to the center. This involves both openness of speech, parrhesia, the explicit articulation of the distinctions evident, first of all, in the other’s discourse; and centering, making explicit the new nomos also implicit in the other’s discourse. The point is not to say, “here’s what everything will look like when we’re done.” The point is to elicit from others the kind of center that might make their demands meaningful. In a way it’s good that argumentation has become completely useless, now that the different camps occupy incompatible worlds of “facts.”\n\nArgumentation was always pointless anyway—nobody changes their mind because they’re provided with a better set of pros and cons than they were working with previously—and if they do, they’ll change it right back as soon as they come across another set of pros and cons. This has to be the least effective means of political engagement. To do it right, you would first of all have to determine which subsets of the population, which 5% or so, is worth engaging with; and you would then have to assume, insofar as they are really worth engaging with, they’re not looking for a list of facts but a “scene” within some paradigm they are working with that can be tested for anomalies. If you help some audience exhaust one paradigm by exposing its anomalies, and lend them a hand in transitioning to a new one, you might have actually done something.\n\nBut social and political paradigms are not equivalent to scientific ones. There’s no closed experimental space. There’s only language. We just keep going from the resentful demands implicit in the other’s discourse to the centered commands that would render them meaningful—or not. You could say there’s a resentful demand implicit in this blog post: think and speak completely differently about politics, damn it! What makes that any different than “I wish the left would stop being so hypocritical about the border crisis!”? The only thing that would make it different is if it creates, intensifies, or helps to resolve some paradigm crisis.\n\nThe presence of anomalies indicates obedience to some super-sovereign; the super-sovereign supplements some resentment, positing an imaginary agency and a space within which that agency will satisfy your resentment. A really democratic culture, equal rights, a government that listens to the people, a citizenry that holds its leaders accountable, a return to republican virtue, rising above special interests to embrace the common good, restoring the Constitution—you can make your own list of clichés. These are all super-sovereign supplementations, and we could trace their long history through the disciplines, going back to ancient philosophy.\n\nIf we learn to listen very carefully to these super-sovereign supplementations, we can generate anomalies by subtracting them from the discourse. What would people say if they didn’t have recourse to them? That’s at least an invitation to a thought experiment; if the invitation proves less than enticing, it’s easy enough to render all of these concepts incoherent. The paradoxes that inhere in all of them are descendants of the first philosophical paradox that we meet right at the beginning in the Platonic dialogues: is what the gods command good because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is good?\n\nThe disciplines of Western culture have never gotten past this (this was one of the most valuable insights of Derridean deconstruction). In self-government, what’s the relation between the self doing the governing and the self being governed? Similarly intractable questions can be asked about all of them. You’ll know you’re getting somewhere when the other sputters (I say somewhat resentfully) “alright, so what’s your solution?” What’s your rush? Isn’t it helpful to keep working through the supplementations? Ultimately, we’d work our way towards sheer power analysis, which is extremely disconcerting for a liberal, but, then, what is power?\n\nOnce we start to see it everywhere, we can start stripping it of all those same supplementations meant to make power “accountable” to some imaginary super-sovereign. So, you really mean brute force, don’t you?! The more we find power everywhere, the more it must be just about the exact opposite of that. Why do you listen to, or follow someone, as you surely do sometimes—we can see in your own language the kind of reliance you have on others, the trust and faith you have in them—after all, every single word you say can be sourced to some claim circulating about, or to some tradition. You confer power on them, and assume power yourself within the same space.\n\nAnd you do it without demanding elections or suing to have your rights recognized. What’s going on, then? The answer will lie in the distinctions, the gradations, their suggested operationalization—the centered ordinality we can locate in every utterance"
    },
    {
      "slug": "media-as-scene-gablog",
      "title": "Media as Scene",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It seems to me we have a very simple way of speaking about “media” in a way consistent with GA: the “media” is whatever enables the constitution of a scene. A sign directs participants on a scene’s attention in a particular way and thereby constitutes the scene; but, reciprocally, relying on the elements of the scene makes the sign possible. I think of the originary scene as having a circular structure, because that would maximize the power of the sign: everyone on the scene would see both the object and the others, so they could see each other seeing the object. In that case, the circular configuration would be the medium, or the condition under which the sign could be effectively issued.\n\nAt the same time, the bodies of all the participants are media—or are the bodies part of the sign? After, what functions as a sign here is not obvious: if we assume a pointing gesture, the sign, most minimally, is the extended fingertip—but, of course, the fingertip functioning as a sign might depend upon how the hand is held, and the gesture as a whole would depend upon posture. So, where does sign end and media begin? Sign shades off into its medium, and the medium is concentrated in a particular sign. What is important is not to draw a line separating the two, but to bring into focus whatever is necessary for a particular inquiry.\n\nWriting is a medium—it generates scenes around a text; film is a medium—it generates scenes around a screen; radio is a medium—it generates scenes around broadcast sound; and so on. Are pen, typewriter, microphone, projector, DVD, large darkened room, also part of these media? Yes, but the various elements, settings or implements of the media are more or less contingently associated with or necessary for that medium. When is it the “same,” and when is it no longer the “same,” medium? Again, it’s best to avoid the trap of using concepts to establish classifications, but we could say the following: the originary media, upon which the subsequent ones are modeled, is the singular irreplaceable scene upon which participants shape the scene reciprocally.\n\nSo, let’s say, a speech scene. This can be contested—is, for example, sending signals into space meant to be picked up and understood by some alien form of intelligence out there a medium modeled on a speech scene (which, for GA, is ultimately modeled on another scene, but on most occasions there’s no need to insist on this)? I think so—when speaking about other media, no matter how technologically advanced and no matter how much temporal and spatial distance they put between the users, we always, I think, use terms from a speech scene (“conversation,” “dialogue,” “discuss,” etc.—even “transmit” presupposes the same kind of reciprocity and replicability).\n\nSeeming exceptions, but I think really complements, are terms used to refer to media that generate a series of scenes: terms such as “broadcast” or Derrida’s favorite, “disseminate.” Writing, to take the most obvious example (but why do we still say that the “author says …”?) generates innumerable scenes. The scenes of reading, commentary, and discussion generated by a text all, at least, share that text as a center—so, if I read a poem by Juvenal, do I have a scenic relation to an ancient Roman who read it? We’re not looking for yes/no answers here: if we take that as a genuine question, we would try an answer it by expanding our conception of “media” to include the process of preservation, canonization, translation and publication (all media, or part of the medium of “writing”) that made it possible for me to read a text that is at least in some sense the “same” as that read by an ancient Roman.\n\nThe discipline of hermeneutics understood the transmission of texts to be an ongoing dialogue between readers and the text, and readers amongst themselves—hermeneuticists wouldn’t have a problem saying that “my” Juvenal and some 1 st century Roman’s Juvenal were the “same.” Post-structuralists would dispute this by drawing attention to all the historical differences, registered in all the cultural, philological and critical discourses that “produce” the text for me. But, if the name “Juvenal” is not just a complete mystification, there must be some continuity, some “sameness.” Knowing all the cultural forms that mediate the text for me in ways unimaginable for that 1 st century Roman might itself be a kind of “dialogue” with him.\n\nThat the model for any medium is the speech scene, with bodies and voices all put to work in the signifying act, is an insight David Olson makes regarding writing, and which I have extended to all media. Olson, as I have discussed many times, sees writing as supplementing everything in the speech scene that can’t be directly represented in writing. “Good” writing induces in us forgetfulness that we are not sharing a scene with the writer, and whomever or whatever he is writing about. A “good” movie or TV show, by the same logic, “draws us in” and makes us feel like we are observers present on a scene. I think reading most movie and TV criticism would bear this observation out—“bad” movies are those in which we can’t believe the events are actually happening, in which a sequence of events doesn’t play out the way we would expect it to in the real world, in which characters aren’t “relatable” or sympathetic, i.e., we wouldn’t want to imagine ourselves on a scene with them.\n\nThe same with radio—we have to feel we are, and are happy to be, in the same room with the host. The other possibility always exists, and is sometimes exploited—that of foregrounding precisely what is unique in the medium you are using, that which makes it different from the speech scene and all other media. This involves abstraction and the generation of thought experiments, like, what, exactly, makes film, film? What’s interesting in this case is not, say, using the scenic medium to supplement what would be expressed differently in a novel (preserving the “same” content), but to show precisely what couldn’t be expressed in or mediated by a novel.\n\nThis has been the position of the avant-garde which has never, needless to say, occupied the center of culture, but is always retrieved by those with a low threshold of tolerance for clichés, and this is fortunate because some kind of direct attention to the mediumistic conditions of any sign is necessary for their intelligent “consumption.” The implication of my argument here is that even experiencing the most avant-garde works is modeled on the speech scene, but with the possibility of recognizing all the ways we contribute to constituting that scene.\n\nThese concepts—sign/scene, speech scene/other media, unique scenes/iterable scenes—provide us with a powerful way of examining all media phenomena, and one that allows us to never lose sight of the central question: how does this sign, on this scene, defer more or less imminent mimetic violence? The complementary concept pairs allow us to oscillate between them, using what we identify in some case to be the “sign” to direct our attention to media conditions of that sign, or encompassing more and more of what we see as surrounding that sign (e.g., ownership of a particular station as part of the “medium,” or the scenic condition of those words coming out of that actor’s mouth), which in turn helps us refine our analysis of that sign. Academics like to use such concepts to systematize, but their real purpose is to open up discussions and move them in new directions, often in directions those “behind the scene” would prefer it didn’t. This is the kind of knowledge that goes, at least tacitly, into “meme-ing,” for example.\n\nWe could think of the media as the fractal conditions of whatever signs and discourses we produce. Any action you propose, or any imperative you obey, presents itself as a whole: so, for example, maybe you are determined to “challenge the liberal assumptions” of a prominent blogger who nominally rejects liberalism. Now, “challenge the liberal assumptions of” is one of those phrases that comes very easily and dissipates just as easily. What counts as a “challenge”? What counts as an unavowed “liberal assumption”? How could we tell that the assumptions have really been challenged—what are the “metrics” here? As soon as you start to break down “challenge the liberal assumptions of” into a set of practices, you start constructing scenes and models of the way others will respond to your “challenge” by stripping away some of the credibility of the putative anti-liberal—or, maybe, you envisage them questioning him in a new, friendly but forceful way.\n\nYou would want the liberal assumptions, once they are exposed, to be replaced by genuinely non-liberal ones—not slightly less obviously liberal ones. You’d want to provide certain “scaffolds” that would enable your target to know where the line between liberal and post-liberal is to be drawn here. In other words, your discourse aims at peopling a landscape, as if you were modeling lots of little “challenges to liberal assumptions” to be extracted from your discourse. This is what I mean by “fractal”: explicating a practice asserted in strictly declarative terms that represent a reality without any firm referents by including the components of that practice as, simultaneously, its model.\n\nWhen you think this way you’re thinking in terms of the media conditions of your utterances. “Challenging the liberal assumptions of” gets converted into a scene, or a series of possible scenes: someone saying this, someone writing that, someone broadcasting something else, a flurry of tweets following up in some way, etc. The purpose is to transform the “target” into a different kind of sign across various media. “Thinking” about media is equivalent to producing discourse that travels through various media. There’s something in your writing that will sound just right read aloud; a few things that are tweet-worthy; something that’s an implicit response in an ongoing dialogue with some other position; something that satirizes a TV personality in a way that can only be done in writing, and so on.\n\nThe reason why phrases like “challenge the assumptions of” need to be fractalized is that they are completely logocentric: they “work,” i.e., go unnoticed, insofar as they generate the illusion of us all being on the same scene where we consent to “see” that “challenge” in front of us as vividly as we could see one boxer knocking out another (and, of course, people refer all the time—mostly somewhat ironically, though, I think—about people being “destroyed” by this or that tweet or meme). That logocentrism, that we see in concepts that construct phony simulations of battles between familiar opponents, is what is to be targeted most persistently.\n\nIt’s not so much that specific “beliefs,” “principles” and “convictions” need to be dissolved as that the very concepts of “belief,” “principles” and “convictions,” among many others need to be dissolved into scenes that make them meaningful. What are you doing when you “believe”? If you “have” principles, where are they? These are just ways of saying, “you know that thing I just said—I’m not just BSing it”—which is the surest proof that that is exactly what they are doing. Better than believing and having principles is surrounding a discourse by leveraging media so as to interfere with its “wave structure.” The imperative is to embed the declarative in a scene, which in turn elicits its originary structure."
    },
    {
      "slug": "mistakenness-revisited-gablog",
      "title": "Mistakenness Revisited",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The ritual order provided models, along with comprehensive initiatory practices to enable members of the community to adopt and inhabit those models. The demise of the ritual order means the end of any harmonious or pre-arranged fit between models and aspirants of social membership. There are plenty of models, but no way to know which we are fit for, or, for that matter, which are “fit.” Our first approach to models, then, is to get them wrong. All of modern culture is a result of the misfit of models and aspirants, which is to say our fundamental mistakenness. This mistakenness is generative of the disciplines: social scientific and humanistic knowledge is essentially knowledge of all the human dispositions and social relations that interfere with our adaptation to models.\n\nAll the making explicit, in secular and purely “human” terms, of what we are capable of, how we depend upon each other, how what we are capable of undermines our dependencies and vice versa—all the nominalizations and reifications of “attributes” and “characteristics”—is so many attempts to construct as necessary “steps” from one practice to another what was once acquired through a seamless network of ritual, kinship and myth.\n\nThe implication is that the secular disciplines (the metalanguages of literacy) begin with trying to figure out how we have gone wrong, while the only way of distinguishing right from wrong is imagining some non-alienated condition modeled on the ritual and mythical order. Let’s imagine a social order in which everything, every figure and every practice is named, and all the names are taken to be given by the center. The procedures for generating new names (for babies, captured slaves, etc.) are also named. Such a community, in principle, can continue indefinitely—many no doubt did so for millennia—and we can all feel, intuitively, how wrong it would be to interfere with it, however it offended our modern sensibilities.\n\nBut what is of interest to us is what happens when anomalies creep into such a system, in particular due to its successes. My reflections here are in part inspired by Fustel de Coulanges The Ancient City , which traces the consequences of such anomalies, in the form of groups that couldn’t be “incorporated” into the sacred hearth of the family home, and, later, of the city—for example, the plebeians, or even younger sons without any inheritance. It is the attempts to find names for such anomalous figures that generated the “secular” in the first place: their names can only be some version of “that which cannot be fit into the system,” so they can then only be understood in (resentful) opposition to some figure recognized by the system, and this in turn ends up defining that named figure by its opposition to the “other.”\n\nWhat this leaves us with is a social order describable solely in terms of conflicts (patricians vs. plebeians, etc.), and the only way to imagine reconciling those conflicts is through one of those cant political terms that are still with us today: “justice,” the “common good,” the “public interest,” etc.\n\nBut these purely conflictual terms, which we can only systematize through some notion of “balancing,” generate all the abstractions that also enable us to diagnose this essentially shattered system. (Whether they enable us to “repair” it as well is a different question.) All secular social scientific terms are essentially versions of “that which has been expelled from the center and takes on its meaning through antagonism to other expelled non-members.” Of course, “expel” is itself such a term. And GA is itself a beneficiary of this devastating process of abstraction, as “mimesis,” “desire,” “resentment,” “sign” and so on are all names of what is nameless within any sacred order.\n\nGA’s ambition is to do what can only be done through the secular disciplines—point the way to a renewed practice of naming. In part, this involves getting more minimal, and in that sense more abstract and “secular” (de-mythicized) than the other social sciences; in larger part, it involves collecting and “collating” a vocabulary that can take us so far beyond the concealment of the sacred in the secular disciplines as to show us that even the concept of the “sacred” itself is a later accretion, already reactive and “abstract.” And here I think the concept of the “center” is critical, and unique to GA, as the center constitutes any name (like “God”) we might give to the center.\n\nIf we want to get a little Heideggerean here, we can say that the center is “thisness,” what we can point to because it is “capable” of being pointed to, as shown by our pointing to it, etc. “This” is even one of Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes. Restoring our relation to the center as the source of names, recovering “thisness,” is the neoabsolutist project in a nutshell.\n\nDescribing ourselves and each other to each other and ourselves is the only way forward here. On the one hand, I have been suggesting that virtually our entire secular vocabulary needs to be junked; but, on the other hand, the only way of doing that is by using all those vocabularies mistakenly to show that whatever sense they have is due to their references to some center, whether acknowledged or disavowed. Everyone wants things, knows things, thinks things, does things, sees things, has things happen to him: Wierzbicka’s primes need to be part of GA because we can see a kind of minimal, “secular,” abstraction constitutive of language here. All the secular vocabularies are more complex articulations of the primes: people knowing what they think, thinking that they want, someone seeing that what another thinks he is doing can be something happening to that person, and so on. And whatever you say about someone else is what you think you see or hear.\n\nThe mark of the secularity of words like “desire,” “imitation” and “resentment” is that in using them you feel you are exempt from them—to refer to someone else’s desire or resentment is to be free of it, to point out how another is mimicking someone else is proof that you are not doing so—if your noticing was implicated in what it noticed, how would noticing even be possible? An openly desiring, resentful, imitative discourse would be, by definition, “illegitimate.” Naming these dispositions in others generates the appearance of having transcended them. To put it even more strongly, discourses on these “topics” are attempts to establish a cordon sanitaire around the “contagion” they carry.\n\nOriginary grammar, in renouncing (or at least bracketing) sanitized terms like “theory, “determinations,”” and “norms” with the more elemental speech forms (ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative), is an attempt to remove that cordon sanitaire. This is necessary because that cordon sanitaire, or social immune system, will leave us endlessly proposing new ways of “balancing” the various social elements that can only be named in opposition to each other, as is the case for all discussions of “class,” “race,” “ethnicity,” “nationality,” “gender” and “sexuality.” The compulsion to self-immunize has us looking for something slightly more nameless so as to put it into opposition to something slightly less nameless. But the only way we can explicitly “own” our desires, resentments and imitations is to make them explicitly desires, resentments and modelings of the center.\n\nIn this way, you claim to be exempt from the disposition you describe, but the claim is made explicit and the path out of desire, resentment, and contagious imitation made part of your “explanation.” And, of course, you could be wrong—the desires, resentments and mimicry you renounce might be all too evident in what you say and do. In that case, you have provided the terms on which others could point that out—in that way, we would be engaged in shared inquiry into the desire for and resentments of the center. In fact, the person claiming some relation to the center is most vulnerable to suspicions of being “hypocritical,” of being guilty of the very undisciplined resentfulness of which he “accuses” others.\n\nAnd these suspicions would themselves be resentment of your perceived usurpation of the center. Much of liberalism’s self-immunization process is aimed at pre-empting precisely such discussions over relative proximity to the center. And liberalism detects a genuine danger here. The way to respect that intuition is to never explicitly claim the “mantle” of the center, which would anyway put the declarative cart before the imperative horse, while unapologetically shaping the actual, imminent or potential crisis into a deferral and reframing of some violent centralization. The more you act for the center, the less you must claim to do so—must claim, in fact, to be doing the only thing that could be done because no one else seemed to be doing it. The “proof” here will be whether you thereby give others things to do that wouldn’t be done otherwise.\n\nThere is always a kind of linguistic test for implicit derivations of one’s performance from central imperatives. The greater your indebtedness to the imperatives of the center, the greater the disproportion between the center’s presence in your language and your own centeredness there. You will be talking about how others, your subordinates as well as your superiors, need to be attended to and followed; you will narrow down your centering of any other participant to their precise role within the system, and, to the extent possible, within the operation in question—someone may be corrupt, cowardly, or treasonous, and none of this should be concealed (because concealing it will force you to violently centralize others who do notice it), but it should all be referred to the inherited means for addressing these vices and crimes.\n\nIn other words, not “get that guy!,” but “let’s treat Y the way X was treated,” even if you have to construct the way X was treated in a more coherent and sustainable way than was actually the case, and have to stretch the “similarity” between the case of X and the case of Y. Everyone’s resentments towards the coward, corrupter or traitor will be acknowledged, and, indeed, the precise details of the violation will be presented more openly and coherently than in “rushes to judgement,” but in such a way that the more important result is that we have further fortified ourselves against future instances of the same.\n\nYou can always tell, and can get better at telling, when someone is speaking in this way, or coming closer to speaking in this way. It’s how you can tell who you can trust but, even more importantly, this is the path towards a renewed naming-from-the-center. I’ve been using the concept of “centered ordinality” for a while now, but haven’t drawn that much attention to it. What the concept refers to is the way, once we identify a center, we all fall into rank behind whoever first identified it. As is often the case, the best examples here are drawn from emergency situations—if, in such a situation, one person sees the “way out” and points it out to others, they will all follow him and the one a little ahead of each of them in figuring the precise way “out.”\n\nOf course, in fluid situations the order can change often, but if everyone simply rushes to the way out, the order collapses and the way is no longer out. The more centered ordinality, the less rivalry and therefore the less chaos. What marks centered ordinality is that the naming it involves increases in proportion with the ordering itself—you can’t get a more precise set of “names” than “first, I do this, then, you do that, then he does something else”—even the shift from first, to second, to third person pronouns marks the shift from ostensive, to imperative, to declarative. To the extent that any situation is ordered, everyone is “this one doing this thing right now.”\n\nSecular discourse tells you you’re this one in opposition to all these other ones to be balanced by my unnaming of all of you on the Big Scene. The discourse of the center tells you who you are here and now by asking you to ask yourself who you are such that you can be who you are here and now. And that is the form taken by one’s ascension to their name."
    },
    {
      "slug": "dedifferentiation",
      "title": "Dedifferentiation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Jurgen Habermas saw the differentiation into various spheres of life, whether in terms of public and private, or the different forms of experience like cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as central to modernity. He was right about that—the disciplinary distinctions were necessary for the dismantling of an order centered on God and King, for breaking up the grounding of the human order in the heavenly one. We can see a much earlier, preliminary form of differentiation in the ancient Greek city-state, where Aristotle could write separate treatises on logic, ethics, aesthetics, politics and metaphysics. This is possible once sacred kingship has been overturned, and sacred kingship was overturned once sacral rule came to rely on the growing plebeian population outside of the sacred order.\n\nThe sacred order gives no formal recognition of conflicts: actions either conform to or violate the ritual order, so if there’s a conflict it’s between those defending the ritual order and those penalized by it. Those outside of the sacred order, though, can only be recognized in the form of a conflict, first of all between plebeians and patricians. Further social divisions, say into different plebeian classes, will then be represented on the same model. Once these conflictual models become the dominant ones, the ruler can no longer be the one who occupies the sacred center. The king is replaced by the tyrant, the inventor of the method of levying the “low” against the “middle” in order to maintain his power as the one who can balance and mediate between the contending classes.\n\nWhat must the tyrant do? What is he permitted to do? Why should one person rather than another be the tyrant? The answers to these questions can no longer come from the guardians of the sacred. They can only come from the disciplines, first of all philosophy. If the tyrant becomes a separate “problem,” then human life in general can be broken down into separate problems. The way this happens will correspond to institutional diremptions from the sacred: so, for example, “aesthetics” can become a separate discipline because the theater, primarily concerned with the doings of the various tyrants occupying and contesting the center, has been created as a new center modeled on the sacred.\n\nSimilarly, ethics can become a separate discipline once the family (and especially the head of the family) has been separated from the sacred order, rhetoric once arguing in the law courts becomes the way conflicts are framed and mediated, and logic once disputes within philosophy need to be settled. The proliferation of disciplines in the modern world corresponds to the proliferation of institutional distinctions. And the proliferation of institutions in the modern world is a result of the way the problem of the tyrant presents itself with the removal of the monarchs who had occupied the center since the middle ages: as a whole network of safeguards against the emergence of the tyrant. No one can occupy the center other than temporarily, conditionally, under strict supervision. Modernity is predicated not on helping the occupant of the center govern, but on ensuring he never feels at home there.\n\nThe vocation of the disciplines, then, is to train a population that can sustain the revolving center. This involves disciplining for obedience, but obedience to the same rules that obligate the ruler. This calls for an odd combination of self-reliance, insistence on self-origination, adherence to bureaucratic rules, resentment toward anyone whose life seems less strictly rule-governed, romantic resentment of those rules, an attraction to scandals, and the compartmentalization of “selves.” Such an order is intrinsically hostile to anyone who acts as a “tyrant,” that is, exercising authority and making decisions that can’t be completely traced back to the rules determining legitimacy.\n\nThe levying of masses against responsible authority figures by elites competing over access to the center is therefore a natural fit to this order. Patriarchal power, the power of a coherent and dominant ethnic group, parental power, policing power, even the self-control that enables one to exercise or conform to these modes of power, are all, at root, tyrannical. Attempts to subject these tyrants to rules will only succeed in exposing those ineradicable tyrannical roots. The disciplines both lead the attempt to formulate the rules for tyrants, and encourage the rebellion against them.\n\nThe restoration of authority that can only appear tyrannical to liberal thinking is therefore bound up with dedifferentiating the disciplines. When we think in terms of the relation between morality and power, for example, we are conceding the differentiation of the disciplines: morality is defined in one arena (“Philosophy,” “Ethics”), and power in another (“Political Science”). This is no different than agonizing over distinctions between public and private, political and economic, and so on. But it’s not easy to package all these categories together coherently, so that when we’re talking about power we’re also speaking about morality, and authority, and economics and aesthetics and technology and media and so on.\n\nAfter all, the words exist and refer to different things, in different traditions of inquiry. The path to dedifferentiation is through the undoing of desacralization, of secularization. This doesn’t mean a restoration of previously ruling churches, or the restoration of the sacred. Rather, it means more direct, explicit and formal representations of our sociality, which is what the sacred is in the first place. The gods may have been more coherent representations of sociality, embedded in ritual practices, than what the disciplines provide us with now, which is an ever revised system of reaction-formations to system that is simultaneously and acceleratingly totalizing and individualizing.\n\nThe disciplines help us to figure out ways of, say, leveraging legal power against imagined patriarchal power. Out of such things media representations and “identities” are constructed. But this doesn’t mean people could ever take the gods literally again, or that we could restore such a sacrificial order in good faith.\n\nWhen someone speaks of “equality” it’s always possible to say: any way of filling in the blank in the sentence “equality means_______” is going to be just as meaningless as any other way. So, let’s play a new game: by all means tell me what you think equality means, but only under the condition that you describe to me who you envision instituting and enforcing that version of equality. This is an excellent way not only of exposing the antinomies and infinite regresses of “equality” (shouldn’t the means of determining who will implement “equality” also be determined “equally”?) and of exposing the assumptions regarding institutions and power underlying various arguments about equality. If there’s a version of “equality” that is consistent with a coherent way of enforcing “equality” then I’ll take it and we will find that we are no longer talking about equality at all but formal inclusion, which is to say naming.\n\nWhen the objects of the disciplines appear as separate and autonomous it is because they are being separated in practice, and what separates them in practice is accusations of tyranny in some form or, more generally, charges of usurpation. No one really has unassailable reasons for being in the place they are, so it’s always possible to accuse the other of usurping yours or another’s. This always latent accusation is the kernel of secularism, which is to say the creation of new disciplines to monitor tendencies to tyranny in the old ones, and refusing it by saturating the other’s space serves morality, authority, coherent power and aesthetics alike.\n\nThe other is not sacred, but we must model acknowledgment of the other’s centrality on the sacred (or, really, originary), while realizing that it is only by accepting this inevitably failed acknowledgement and representing this acceptance that the other can be secured against charges of usurpation. Our involvement in scenes, and contribution to their construction, which is to say our participation in media, is then geared toward deferring the accusation of usurpation: whatever our ultimate relation to the other, we can grant that the other is indeed in his place, to which we are happy to supply a name. Meanwhile, technology, which is to say our immersion in a network of devices that have synthesized collective practices and articulate us in other yet to be completed collective practices, can take on forms that lay us open to charges of usurpation or squash such charges. Efforts to discern and realize one form or the other, meanwhile, require awareness of the power relations working through technology. And this cannot be thought outside of the layers of distribution from the center referred to as “economics.”\n\nIn abolishing charges of usurpation, what is recovered of the originary order is the practice of naming—naming always comes from the center, and we are always ensuring that everyone is named, all practices and significant objects are named, and that all persons and things are named rightly, or are the same as their names. This is the case whether they are kings or criminals. Part of naming is providing for the destination inherent in the name, whether that’s the throne or prison. Wrongdoing or conflict derive from actions that require one to be renamed; good acts entail living into the names you’ve been given, and making oneself suited to unoccupied or newly formed named positions.\n\nThere is also the possibility of inventing or creating a previously unimagined position, and awaiting acknowledgement from the system of names. This might turn out to be criminal, but the chances of that are reduced if the invention follows from working out to its limits some available model and name and presenting the invented position as meeting needs that those circulating around the extant ones didn’t know they had, but now can see they do. Invention then follows from resisting charges of usurpation and removing from one’s own actions gestures that would evoke such charges. You can insist on your place while insisting that others are always already in theirs, by endowing each other. And all disciplinary spaces are taken up with one and the same task of inquiry: ensuring that everyone is the same as their name."
    },
    {
      "slug": "mimeticism-and-morality",
      "title": "Mimeticism and Morality",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "To act morally is to sustain the center, which means sustaining, repairing and extending the shared attention or linguistic presence that relies on the center. It’s possible to get more granular here, and speak about moral practices, and to do so in a way that will be inter-intelligible with Alasdair Mac Intyre’s (in particular) moral thought. We can start with mimesis, or imitation, which is not only the starting point of originary thinking but, it seems, a sticking point with some of its critics among those whom Imperius calls “desacralized power analysts.” Originary thinking is more in agreement with classical thought, whether that of the ancient Greeks, the Hebrew Bible, or Christianity, all of which recognize the centrality of mimesis to sin and virtue.\n\nThe sticking point for the desacralized power theorists is the very hard acknowledgement that imitation makes up all of who we are. It is very hard to deny this—what have you ever done or said that can’t be traced back to your imitation of some model? Even if someone says something undeniably new, which, of course, happens (in a sense everything everyone says is new), it is because you have successfully imitated someone else’s (or some composite model’s) way of inventing new statements. It’s hard to accept this, though. It violates our sense of individual and intellectual independence, to the point where, it one takes imitation seriously, can lead to panic—if everything is imitation, who am I?\n\nWhat do I ever say or do that I can actually claim is mine, and therefore control and take responsibility for? If I’m angry at someone, is this “real” anger or some mimetically produced anxiety (he represents something I’d like be)? If I love someone, is it out of mimetically generated emotions, like envy and jealousy, or something more “real”? There is a positive side of mimesis: instruction, emulation, the sharing of goods. The negative side is much easier to note, though, especially if we’re interested in moral and political theory: rivalry over scarce goods, especially moral goods like admiration, honor appreciation, and so on. And from a merely individual perspective, it’s very hard to distinguish the positive from the negative.\n\nWith imitation in mind, a moral practice would be one that transforms negative mimesis into positive mimesis. Since we’re always modeling each other and others (think of how quickly just about any conversation or relation takes on mimetic features, as the partners “mirror” each other’s attitudes, words and gestures), once we’re aware of this we can make it explicit. “You’re just saying Y because I just said X” is the passive aggressive way of doing this. The more graceful way of doing so is to extract a question from a possible misunderstanding of the other’s gesture or utterance and answer it in a way that makes visible the other’s miming without binding him to it.\n\nThis is a pedagogical move, and in this sense I would say that all moral practices are pedagogical. This way of thinking about morality can scale up while also being extendible horizontally. If moral practices are pedagogical, then we can speak of every activity as a possible sphere of moral practice. Apprenticeships are pedagogical, parenting is pedagogical, friendships are pedagogical, organizations are pedagogical, governance is pedagogical. In doing things, we show each other how to do them. Status hierarchies are best understood as pedagogical—a good leader leads by modeling the practices pertinent to the shared tasks, but also the possible mimetic pitfalls to its accomplishment, along with their remedies.\n\nPedagogy is reciprocal: the teacher must learn from the learner how to teach, and so the learner has to teach the teacher. Modern understandings of individuality and autonomy will lead to resistance to seeing all relationships as pedagogical, but this is modernity’s way of destroying all intermediate relationships and institutions—by severing the cords of pedagogy linking one level with the next.\n\nOur analysis here can be extremely simple or enormously complex, as needed. We can’t really be in any kind of relation or interaction without some mutual modeling going on—we have to be providing each with some cues of attention and understanding, and we do this by appropriating the other’s words and gestures and returning them in some at least somewhat affirmative form. A moral practice sustains this by eliciting more of the same and making the reciprocal modeling as explicit as it need be to encourage cooperation and better performances. At the same time, the entire complex of what Marcel Jousse calls “gestes” that make up an “individual” would direct our attention across the entire social order and back into history, to the point where we must rely on anthropological hypotheses.\n\nHere is where moral practices become the kind of narration of the self in terms of life-long project of pursuing the good within a social order and tradition that has revealed a particular array of goods that Mac Intyre speaks of. Someone inherits a particular way of squinting when faced with a difficult question from his father; think of all we inherit from all those our fathers imitated, those whom our fathers imitated imitated in turn, the cultural models synthesized and preserved in history and literature, which become models, and so on. Moral practices come to allude to and advance these models, to find new ways of imitating the in new contexts, and to examine them ever more closely to make them more imitable. If all Americans strove to be like George Washington, our rivalries would be much more edifying.\n\nThinking in terms of imitation is also very helpful in discussing the critical examination of models and traditions. However much we try, an imitation is never perfect; even if it were perfect, the very fact that it is an imitation, situated in a different time and place, would make it different—maybe even more different than a looser interpretation. There’s always an implicit criticism even in our most faithful imitations, which always have a touch of satire or parody. The moral practices of those who identify these differences and mistakes is to bring them into conformity with the original. Maybe this is an exaggeration, maybe not, but I’m going to say that all of culture, all of our thinking and talking, is concerned with this question of the conformity of imitations to their models.\n\nIf we ask whether someone is a “good” teacher, athlete, president, soldier, etc., we’re asking whether his actions conform to the model we share with others of that kind of activity. The question and subsequent discussion is necessary because there will always be some deviation, and we have to decide whether the deviation represents an improvement, an unavoidable improvisation, a betrayal, a corruption, and so on. And when we do this we are working with models, which we inspect and deconstruct in order to refine the practices that are component parts of other practices, and which those who follow us will judge in turn.\n\nAnd if the deviations increase, we may have to decide whether the model itself has been invalidated and replaced. Our judgments are never outside of the act being judged, and even if we see a betrayal of the model, even one that needs to be punished severely, we would still try to isolate the specific elements of the practice that constituted betrayal and preserve the rest—this prevents our justified abhorrence of betrayal from becoming an attractor of mimetic feelings that would tempt us into betrayals of our own.\n\nThe model for this moral practice is the originary scene itself, which “works” and “takes” because everyone on the scene can confirm before the others that all have put forward the same sign. The originary scene would itself be the first human learning experience, as a gesture only minimally different from one aimed at appropriation comes to mean exactly the opposite. Bertolt Brecht used the concept of an “alienation effect” to describe his pedagogical goals as a dramatist: the alienation effect involved breaking the illusion of reality the mimetic representation encourages and pointing explicitly at a gesture on the scene.\n\nThe originary scene must have had a moment like that where putting forth a hand could be pointed to in the sense of “this doesn’t mean what you think it does.” And then it didn’t—but it did, because everyone now thought it meant something else. Any moral practice has this dimension of showing what you are doing because what you are doing could lead to deviations to be avoided or recuperated. And wouldn’t arguments with even bitter opponents be better if we first of all clarified the models we were bringing to bear?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "languaging-practices",
      "title": "Languaging Practices",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The declarative was invented in the course of deferring the imperative, so it follows that one trajectory of the declarative is to imagine the abolition of the imperative. Not of the ostensive, though, insofar as the declarative is also a simulation of the ostensive, presenting the existence of an object as its presence. The declarative, then, would leap over the imperative to the ostensive. But this tendency of the declarative could only be realized with the invention of writing, which makes the declarative sentence its primary object, composing it out of individual words and grammatical rules. Classical prose is the result of this tendency of the declarative sentence, as classical prose is the simulation of a scene upon which reader and writer stand in front of some other scene. Since the abolition of the imperative is a destructive fantasy, the problem posed by the hyper-declarative order enabled by literacy, then, is how to work with, or “carry,” declaratives so that they contribute to rather than neutralize the ostensive-imperative world.\n\nIn an oral culture, declarative sentences stay close to ritual, which is to say, the ostensive-imperative world. Here, the declarative primarily serves to ensure the identity of the ritual order over time, in the form of mythology. Ritual is an exchange with the center: the participant fulfills some command of the center while making a request of the center. It is an asymmetrical imperative exchange. Sometimes the transaction doesn’t conform to the terms of the exchange—the benefits requested from the center are not conferred. The originary purpose of the declarative, to supplement a failed imperative with a “real” that preserves the relations implicit in the failed imperative, is activated here.\n\nThe center was going to provide the promised benefit, but something intervened: another figure occupying the center had other ideas in mind; some present or past violation on the part of the ritual participant, or a relative or ancestor, must first be remedied. Once there are multiple figures at the center, their relationships to one another will take shape parallel to relations among figures at the margin, and relations between the two sites can proliferate endlessly. All these narratives remain tied to the world of ritual.\n\nThere is a middle ground between oral and literate cultures—the culture of manuscript, or scripture. Lore and laws are written down, but are not accessible to most of the population and serve, for scribal and priestly elites, primarily as memory aids, surrounded, furthermore, by traditions that continue to be preserved through memory and transmitted via tightly organized pedagogical relations. Here we have a growing gap between the language of written scripture, which naturally remains the same, and the language of the people. (In an oral culture, the language of ritual would probably remain archaic relative to spoken language, but there’s no reason to assume the mythology preserved through memory and pedagogical transmission wouldn’t change along with spoken language.)\n\nHere is where the transfer-translations examined at length by Marcel Jousse (and no one else that I have come across so far, but I continue looking), and discussed in my latest post, become of interest. The formulas recorded in scripture, themselves residues of earlier traditions, need to be translated into formulas within the new spoken language. In a development analogous to the supplementation of imperative ritual “failure,” the process of creating and employing transfer translations, for ritual and legal purposes (which covers all of life), generates a declarative culture concerned with demonstrating that the two versions, original and translation, are the same. The choice of one formula over other candidates in the target language would generate narratives, proverbs, maxims, and exemplary events and figures as perennial reference points.\n\nIn a literate culture, modeled on classical prose, discourse focuses on ensuring we are on the same scene, the simulated scene generated by the more or less anti-imperative declarative culture. I’m going to take an uncompromising position and say that that is all we talk and write about—except insofar as residues of oral and manuscript culture persist, and so we discourse regarding the remaining ritualistic and scriptural and formulaic elements of culture. The problem of ensuring that we all remain on the same scene is that, of course, we aren’t, and to the extent that we are, we aren’t in any symmetrical or commensurate way.\n\nThink about how much discourse—the way arguments are presented—still presuppose a kind of classical model of public discourse: we all share certain goods in common, we all accept the “reasons” for one thing or another being “good” in a particular way, we all believe that some kind of “agreement” can be reached at the end of a discussion, and that this agreement can issue, in ways no one can really explain, in someone doing something (and then someone else doing something else, etc.) in such a way that those on the scene of “agreement” would recognize that series of doings to be in conformity with that “agreement.”\n\nWithout this set of assumptions, how many discussions would make any sense at all? In the meantime, of course, all those people doing all those things are talking as well, but in much more transactional, ritualistic and, in a sense, traditionalistic ways (drawing primarily upon precedent, etc.). And, then, another kind of talking becomes necessary to show that what was done has some recognizable relation to what was agreed upon—in fact, the very notion of “agreement” corresponds much more closely to this after the fact “mythic” scene talking about what happened than to the original discussion. A lot of power players moving a lot of bureaucratic pieces around in ways that will have effects only partially grasped by everyone involved, and barely at all by the public, is translated as “the American people decided…”\n\nClassical prose has its uses—if there is a very high degree of agreement over what we are talking about and why, or we concede a great deal of authority to the speaker, the “conceit” of classical prose that we are all on the same scene and can just “look at that” facilitates conversation. But what is ultimately indefensible in classic prose is the pretense, already latent in the declarative form itself, that language stands in unmediated relation to reality, rather than, primarily, in relation to other language, or other uses of language. As soon as some disagreement creeps into what we’re “looking at,” we must return to the language we have used to describe it, and it will turn out that our disagreement lies there.\n\nIf we start with the assumption of disagreement, at least potential, over whether we are talking about the “same” thing, then that disagreement or difference should be inscribed in our linguistic practices from the start. The first disagreement any utterance entails is with some other utterance, or, more precisely, some other utterance that might have been uttered instead of this one, which would also be a different way of carrying forward the history or tradition of practices from which both actual and possible utterance derive. This means treating previous linguistic use as a repository of possible utterances. And doing this requires treating “language” as “prepackaged” and revisable formulas, chunks and constructions—that is, as templates for future utterances. This means approaching language mimetically, as a collection of models to be iterated, emulated and revised.\n\nInstead of generating discourse regarding the question of whether we are on the same scene in front of some pre-linguistic scene, we would now be generating discourse regarding the extent to and way in which our utterance is the same as other utterances, actual and possible. “Why did he say X instead of Y” is our way into reality, facilitated by one saying a bit more of Y or Z than he did.\n\nThis kind of practice re-embeds the declarative order in the ostensive-imperative world by working directly with models that dictate particular uses. If a word (in all its customary and authorized phrases) used by the discipline—even better, a word without which the discipline is unthinkable—is now applied to the discipline, any conversation amongst participants in the discipline must be replete with ostensive uses of the word, along with imperative derivatives, because psychologists (say) would have to keep telling each other what is involved in deploying their cognitive capacities in studying cognitive capacities. I will briefly note that GA would be perfectly comfortable with this practice, as participants in that discipline are aware, and are ready to demonstrate awareness, of the primary purpose of language—to defer violence by gesturing toward the center. So, we can carry this practice into the other disciplines.\n\nIf the vocabulary and grammar of the discipline are, then, to be objects of the discipline, the history and “heritage” of those words becomes equally central. If we have to ask if (how, to what extent, within which context…) one use of the word “cognitive” is the same as another, we also have to ask where either or both are the same as the accumulated uses of the word. And we will naturally find that the word has an origin, and that origin will be bound up in some originary event of the discipline (some seminal essay, or foundational conference, or central figure). Our enormously enhanced access to archival material and internet tools like the Google Ngram searcher make inquiry into the origin of words within their disciplines far easier than it once was. When, exactly, did we become “cognitive” beings? And where? After all, as Anna Wierzbicka can tell us, there will not be equivalents to “cognitive” in every language, most of which will probably just import the word so as to be able to participate in Anglo-dominated psychology discourses.\n\nYou can see that we are sticking with the same question as that central to the transfer translation: what makes the word, through its various uses, contexts, redefinitions, borrowings and translations, the same word? Or phrase, or sentence, or larger chunk of discourse? All the disciplines then are inquiries into language and, more precisely, the creation of the metalanguage(s) of literacy out of language. So, we’re now working on two levels, which really serves as a pincer move within any discipline: on one level, the question is something like, what does “cognition” mean as we study our cognitive capacities as they are employed in the study of cognition; on the other level, we introduce the question, what makes “cognition” the same and not the same as a prime word like “know,” as mediated by a vast spread of scenes upon which people speaking about knowing are recorded and simulated.\n\nIn this way one lays one’s hands on the originary structure of the discipline while being even more fully a member of that discipline than anyone else. We are using and enhancing the language of the discipline, using it to generate new problems, and drawing others more completely into the discipline by implicating them in their own commitments to its vocabulary and grammar—while at the same time holding the discipline in permanent question, making it contingent on its historical dependencies on all the other disciplines.\n\nIn this case, what we are also equipped to talk about is the way in which the disciplines are themselves transfer translations for practices conducted across social institutions. Discussing “cognition” is also a way of talking about (“translating”) ways of testing, treating, evaluating, instructing and so on people throughout the social order. Here is where there is an intrinsic moral and political component to the intellectual activities carried out within the disciplines. If we’re able to bring into focus the origin and history of “cognition,” or “dysfunction,” or “ethnic conflict,” we will also be able to show the ways the use of these concepts presuppose the existence of large numbers of people in positions to manage, control, sort out, and categorize people in certain ways.\n\nThis is also part of the meaning of a word like “cognition”; that is, this circulation among and translation into other disciplines is part of what makes the word the same across these uses. This observation will alert us to specific sources of power, and we will look into funding, foundations, the ways in which universities help govern, and so on. But even more compelling and convincing than that is showing that the concepts only make sense when considered within a “who, whom” framework: who decides whose “cognitive abilities” qualifies them for this or that institutional role? We will find such questions inscribed in the uses of the concept itself, sometimes accounting for its coherence, sometimes for its incoherence.\n\nAnd, as always, the purpose is not to discredit and delegitimate but, first, to make explicit that everyone’s place within the social order is in fact a result of decisions that are made in ways we can articulate; and, second, to provide better ways of talking about how institutions might do this."
    },
    {
      "slug": "some-paradoxes",
      "title": "Some Paradoxes",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "My previous post set up a couple of paradoxes, which we can formulate as elements of a historical dialectic.\n\nFirst, I advanced the notion of history as a process of desacralization, or secularization, which brings into view the essence of the sacred, which is presence on a shared scene. Attempts to supplement the vanishing sacred through the disciplines advance secularization while revealing the means to replace the sacred with explicit representations of our sociality.\n\nSecond, I proposed that secularization is an ongoing attack on tyranny, itself a product and construct of secularization, which makes the deferral of charges of tyranny the path to the originary responsibility.\n\nIn both cases, there is the further paradox that the remedy for desacralization or, more provocatively, desecration, and the fully conflicted order it presupposes and generates, must be a retrieval of traditionally grounded knowledge from the hyper-declarative order that razes traditions to the ground. But we don’t need to recover traditions of rituals and ideas to re-traditionalize knowledge—all of the tacit underpinnings of our semiotic practices represent traditions that can then be represented. Part of my purpose is drawing upon thinkers like Anna Wierzbicka, David Olson and Marcel Jousse is, beyond beginning to construct a new tradition drawing upon traditions of questioning metaphysics on a linguistic level, to develop ways of uncovering those more tacit traditions, or the obscured ostensive-imperative world that always surrounds us\n\nAccording to Jousse, the extensive commentaries generated by the early Jewish and Christian communities concerned themselves with the “transfer translations” those communities composed in so as to preserve traditions preserved in now dead languages: first of all, from Hebrew to Aramaic, but, then, from Aramaic to Greek. These transfer translations involved finding formulas in the target language to correspond to formulas in the source language. These formulas are memorized and steeped in tradition and ritual practices, as well as the idiomatic and metaphorical resources that have been exploited within that particular language, so the problem here is not merely semantic.\n\nBut this raises a larger question, regarding the image of language we’re working with. Most literate, educated people take for granted an image of language as a vast collection of individual words that speakers of the language articulate according to grammatical rules more or less firmly installed in their minds. This image of language, which almost all philosophical discussion relies upon, is very obviously a reification of what David Olson calls the “metanguage of literacy.” In making language conform to writing, language must be treated as an object of inquiry—that is, it must be broken down into parts or “elements” that are articulated in some way.\n\nThese elements are things such as phonemes, syllables, words and sentences. Everything in the language must be reduced to these concepts. Most important for our purposes here are words and sentences—the development of prose, which is always an “official” matter, requires that words be seen as identical to themselves, and that the possible relations between words and sentences be subjected to rules. This requires definitions and grammatical rules. Think about how many arguments are ultimately over the definition of words, when it is undeniable that the meanings of words vary over time and space. Likewise, think of how many arguments are over logical, which is to say, grammatical, connections between words and sentences.\n\nThe image of language that Jousse and his contemporaries and successors who developed the study of oral cultures and thereby provided us with awareness of the form of our own, literate, culture, is as follows: language is a vast array of formulas, phrases, commonplaces, and proverbs that can be articulated in various ways with each other. When you listen to someone speak, or read a text, you don’t disassemble the words you see and hear and then reassemble them in your mind or brain, like going through the Star Trek transporter; rather, you assimilate the particular articulation of formulas you’re are confronted with to your own set of formulas, revising as necessary along the way. It takes a great deal of discipline to respond to precisely that in the other’s utterance that is not reducible to your own system of formulas—and even then, you are performing a kind of revision of your own formulas under this new pressure, and not some abstract “thinking about it.”\n\nIt also follows that the formulas available to speakers of a language have been generated out of what was once a much smaller set of formulas and, if we are originary thinkers, ultimately a single one. This means that there are layers within the formulaic structure of language, and we could distinguish between more concrete formulas and those that function more as templates, whose slots can be filled in various ways. When we’re using language we’re essentially deploying formulas or filling in slots in the more abstracted templates. Needless to say, a great deal of inventiveness and ingenuity is involved here. If you just take a few clichés and switch out the words of those clichés with others more or less at odds with the meaning of the original cliché, and then at odds with the meaning of substitutes, and so on, you would find that you have pretty much all the language you need. Being able to read more complex texts, that is, texts that are the results of more extensive practices of substitution and articulation, means being able to work on those “samples” of language in the same way.\n\nThis means (to return to Jousse’s notion of “transfer translations”) that when we “use” language, we really have one thing in mind: how are the language practices that result from a process of substitution a rearticulation vis a vis previous ones the same as, and how are they different from, those they are derived from. Take what has become a very common meme template: the juxtaposition of some attack on or defense of a figure conducted by someone on the left, by someone on the right inserting “now do X.” The juxtaposition assumes some set of analogous features between the two figures; in elaborating on those analogies, along with the differences, you would be generating stories about those figures and the background or scenes they are set in—that is, you would be generating culture.\n\nSo, rather than having big stories from which we then derive smaller stories and moral lessons and folk knowledge, the big stories really result from the ongoing efforts to reconcile one use of language with another by filling in the anomalies distinguishing them in order to show how they are really the “same.”\n\nThe implication is that all our stories and arguments are really aimed at demonstrating that two different practices, phrases, formulas, orders, institutions and so on are really the same insofar they are both translations of some model including them both. A disagreement, then would be each side trying to represent the other’s claim to identity as difference. The best approach to disagreement, then, is to multiply the differences as much as possible and locate the sameness in some “It” we could all still be talking about, and continue talking about. How, then, does all this bear on the paradoxes I began with? The sacral order maintained identity through ritual: people gathering at the same place, at regularly scheduled times, carried out prescribed symbolic acts, which is to say, iterating the originary scene.\n\nSecularization and desacralization is ultimately de-ritualization. The myths and ideas can’t be sustained without the ritual precisely because those myths and ideas were nothing more than representations ensuring that the rituals and the community performing them could be deemed the same over time as, of course, the communities and the rituals themselves changed. But this falling away from ritual made it possible to separate ritual itself from the great variety of rituals throughout the world and hypothesize a single scene they would all derive from—all be the “same” as.\n\nThe disciplines, meanwhile, try to ensure the sameness of social and political practices through definitions and logic, which is to say an internally consistent system of concepts and categories that can only sustain itself by concealing the dependence of all on ostensives and imperatives. Whoever issues imperatives without proper disciplinary backing is the tyrant, and whoever insists on an event that must be iterated as the source of social order is the herald of that tyrant. This is why the best way into any conversation, rather than requesting definitions and “principles,” must be through some version of the questions, “what model are you working with,” and “who told you to say/do/think that?”\n\nThe second sounds more obnoxious, but it really leads back to the first, once we get past the more or less bizarre rituals claims to self-origination that subjects of a liberal order generally feel obliged to gesture towards. We can then exchange models, read each other in terms of our respective models, determine what those models dictate or demand of us, and direct our conversation to questions like, what makes us the same as our models; and, how might our models be the same as each other?\n\nI’m not speaking of ignoring or trying to abolish differences. Quite to the contrary, sustainable sameness can only be distilled through a full presentation of differences. You have a model, but what’s the model of that model? There’s no infinite regress here precisely because we’re not dealing with logic but anthropomorphics: human beings came into being at a certain point in time. Here is where originary thinking outstrips logic because it includes not only the question of the likeliest starting point but the question of whether it’s better to speak of a starting point and if so, what kind of starting point? Even more, what kind of starting point are we already talking about by virtue of talking and assuming there is some “it” that serves as a final reference point?\n\nWe can place “It” (one of Wierzbicka’s primes) at the center—we are always referring to it, but it is never It. It must be generative of all differences: whatever represents despair for you (say, complete social isolation and betrayal by your comrades to your enemy) is the violence deferred on the originary scene; whatever represents salvation is the sign—so, then, the problem is showing that our respective despairs and salvations are the same as the originary scene and in that way, as the other. They can only be the same insofar as they were generated differently from the originary scene, which must have contained the possibility for infinite ramifications.\n\nAnd, then, that is what all our talk is about; and about continuing the conditions under which we can continue that talking. Maintaining that thread of the same through increasing cognizance of differences (or “thises”) is where responsibility for direct acknowledgement of our sociality (the It tacit in every this) begins."
    },
    {
      "slug": "as-who-does-one-speak",
      "title": "As Who Does One Speak?",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "When I listen to Michael Bloomberg, I hear a very wealthy and powerful man who, whether out of a lack of self-awareness or indifference to the effect of his attitude on others, sounds very much like a man speaking directly from his wealth and power. He has no hesitations in dictating to subordinates, prescribing behavior to poor people and other presumed inferiors, casually discussing various legal arrangements to channel behaviors in ways approved by social elites, and, perhaps most “shockingly,” seemingly spontaneously identifying with China’s “authoritarian” rulers in discussing ways of influencing China’s environmental policies (has he had anything to say recently about Hong Kong?).\n\nI am assuming that Bloomberg’s casual rhetoric of power will not win him the presidency, but it’s worth asking the apparently obvious question of why that’s the case, and of noting Bloomberg’s singularity here. Other extremely prominent and powerful billionaires don’t speak like that—Donald Trump, for example, doesn’t. In other words, billionaires very rarely “own” their power—they much prefer to speak as ordinary citizens who have risen from among us in a way any of us could, and as people who want to use their good fortune and the lessons they’ve learned to show us the way. Or, of course, to speak for the “powerless,” or the “environment” (of course, Bloomberg does this as well) It’s unfortunate, but probably to be expected, that Bloomberg’s fantasies (which he has been able to partially realize as mayor of New York) are petty and schoolmarmy—that interview on China, where he took his outraged interviewer through the various considerations the “dictator” Jinping must enter into his decision-making process was undoubtedly his most interesting moment. Maybe that’s the arena he views himself as best suited for.\n\nSo, Bloomberg himself may not be very interesting, but the complete absence of a serious rhetoric of power from the modern world is. Wouldn’t detailed, honest, accounts of everything that goes into their decision-making by the most powerful people in the world be the most informative disclosures we could imagine? Wouldn’t you want to see how the world looks to them? (Maybe they themselves don’t really know!) Think of how irresistible it seems for reporters, pundits and various left and right dissidents alike to pretend to be inside Donald Trump’s head: he’s worried now, he’s being played by his advisors, he’s too lazy to see that things are out of his control, how can he be so lacking in self-control, etc., etc.\n\nAll of these (often hysterical) speculations are certainly wrong in important ways, and for reasons that should be obvious—from his perch, Trump knows lots of things none of us do. It’s not very often that one sees this pointed out—or that Trump has known many things very few people do for decades. And yet it’s easy to see why Trump can’t speak explicitly from within that perch, that is, drawing upon is vast array of sources and inside knowledge of those he must work with and those he must undermine. Insofar as Trump has ambitious plans for the use of power (unlike the anemic Bloomberg—but, then again, do I know what he knows?), such openness would diminish rather than enhance its exercise.\n\nThe less others know about the precise sources of his power, the better—except for when he wants to bring a very precise quantum of power to bear in a particular instance. In any plural, and therefore unstable, order, power is exercised through leverage, and if others know your points of leverage they might be able to target those points with some kind of counter-leverage.\n\nBut I think there’s more to it than that. Were Trump, or any powerful figure, to speak so explicitly about the sources and purposes of his power, he would be presenting an image of the world most of us would be incapable of reproducing or picturing for ourselves. It would sound crazy. For one thing, we wouldn’t be in it, and there would be no “characters” for us to “identify” with. Any medieval peasant would have easily understood that his own understanding can’t begin to encompass that of the king’s, but such a realization is almost impossible now—to suggest it is to sound insulting, and as if you are describing massive “abuses” of power rather than the basic conditions of its use. I can’t think of a single work of art or entertainment set in the present that takes the perspective of the powerful, or the social center—which would be very different from the very common representation of the persecuted individual trying to evade or overthrow the center. This represents a very serious intellectual deficiency—a crippling one, really—and one we should start remedying.\n\nWe can’t remedy this defect by pretending to speak from power ourselves—that would be mere fantasizing. We have to read power off of the effects it produces down the line. And we can only do this as those who have themselves been produced by power. We have no choice but to make sense of power because power is disordered and disordering, and disorder can only be made sense of, indeed, recognized as such, against a residual, possible or implicit model of order. The most basic indication of order is things remaining the same. Which things? By what measure of sameness? We’d have to select a sample of things, and establish a disciplinary space that ascertains its identity over time—this amounts to showing that you can point to what others have named.\n\nThere are always such spaces underway, and it’s a question of joining one, and then improving it. Ascertaining sameness over time is a problem because everything changes, and there are two ways of solving this problem. First, you can ignore all changes and differences and keep repeating those markers of sameness most evident to one’s fellow learners. Second, you identify the sameness in the midst of differences; this involves an oscillation between noted differences and retrieved or re-affirmed markers of sameness. In the process new markers of sameness will replace the old, which means what counts as a marker of sameness will be markers of continuity and transition, or repetition with a difference—an originary logic of iteration, according to which our “sample” is a marker of the origin of our inquiry into it, and the origin of that inquiry is in the production of that sample, in which our inquiry is a, furthermore, participation.\n\nCommitting to the origin and history of the sample involves some form of impersonation—not in the sense of taking on another’s identity but of taking on a persona. Conducting an inquiry means being shaped by the inquiry; the more engrossing the inquiry, the more deeply shaped by it the inquirer; so the sample itself, as constructed by the learners, provides the names that provide the materials for impersonation. A good persona, or mask (or costume), is one that can exist on both the scene of inquiry and the scene inquired into, or the sample. Charles Sanders Peirce said that all knowledge is knowledge of the relation between a sample and the whole—more precisely, whether the “proportions” of whatever “ingredients” you are interested in are the same in the sample as in the whole.\n\nOf course, the whole is changing as you extract each sample, and you could never extract enough samples to equal the whole, so we’re always approximating. There are measures we can take to ensure that the sample will be as close a simulation of the whole as possible, and we learn what these measures are through the process of sampling itself.\n\nIf it is knowledge about power that we seek, then the “ingredients” we want to discern the “proportions” of are those of power that generates order relative to power that generates disorder. That’s really a question of whether the practices of the center remain the same over time. The practices each of us participates in, and those we are made aware of via the more or less reliable media we have access to, provide us with our sample, which is always at some distance from the center. We are interested in the inquiry because we want more order, and we want more intelligent order, which is really saying the same thing.\n\nIt’s possible to want more disorder, but only because you see the possibility of a more orderly setting for your own quest, at this moment, within a broader increase in disorder—but, even then, you’d have to try to stabilize the conditions enabling the continuation of that quest, or the preservation of its results. In that case, the fundamental disagreement we wish to isolate is between those seeking more direct and those seeking more indirect paths to order. Within the sample we help to comprise, we distinguish between more and less direct paths to order, and in doing so try to pave more direct ones. The smaller, more infinitesimal differences we can mark between more and less indirect paths, the more effectively we can leverage that distinction.\n\nThe identity you take on, then, in the ongoing iteration of your inquiry, is one that represents the ordering subject marking the distinction for another insofar as that other is marginally less ordering. If the difference between the two is reduced to the infinitesimal, the two will be changing positions, so your identity is simultaneously that of a learner as well as teacher. Identities will take on names, but more fundamentally the notion refers here to style, figuration, and idiom.\n\nYour maintenance of an identity, given to as much as taken by you, is the way you know things and make things known to others. The “flaneur” of 19 th century Paris communicated knowledge of the street as a series of passing scenes. Philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche did much of their thinking through impersonations—everyone does, but they were just more explicit and knowing about it than others. Epistemologically, such positions are superior to those occupied, discursively, by those in the seats of power—Bloomberg’s remarks on China startle because he says what is forbidden within democratic discourse, and doesn’t seem to care, or, perhaps, realize, that he is doing so—but he gets pretty banal pretty quickly.\n\nFrom a position of power, it’s easier to make disorder than to create order—the direct advantages to be gained from the former are much more obvious. It’s hard to see how anyone with proximity to the center would choose sustainable order over the marginal utility of disorder without knowledge of its possibility, along with knowledge of the futility of exploitable disorders, being transmitted upwards to those in power through displays of discipline from below. This means having names, styles, idioms—an aesthetic.\n\nHere’s a good way to think about aesthetics. There’s some object, or person, or type of practice, that draws dangerous, i.e., mimetically convergent attention. It’s the kind of thing you’d want to render sacred, so as to defer the violent attraction—you want to put it beyond bounds, so it can remain safe, and so can we. But you can’t render it sacred, because only a shared event can do so, as you realize in the course of your efforts. So, your representation of the object is now a representation of the impossibility of sacralizing it, and since this does not diminish the need to protect it, the aesthetic representation makes a case for a different mode of deferral, one to which the spectator/participant’s contribution is more explicit. The aesthetic takes up space ceded by the sacred, and aesthetic representations are representations of the unsacralizable and of a world needing new powers of deferral. This is a world requiring more explicit knowledge of mimesis, and its historical articulation in power, media and technology.\n\nAesthetics, then, also refuses degraded and decadent forms of sacrality, like the bizarre Christian heresies that have devolved into liberalism. Aesthetics seeks out a more direct representation of sociality, of both desires and resentments, stripped of their justifications, and of the institutional forms for naming, pre-empting and countering those desires and resentments—also with no more “elaboration” than that needed to make imperatives issued from within those institutions known. Of course, doing this might involve displaying and exposing lots of justifications and elaborations. The work needs to exhaust the attempts to sacralize as well as the attempts to pretend it’s unnecessary to try.\n\nAesthetics itself should ultimately be dissolved into more knowing and thinking modes of authority, designed so as to eliminate the imperative exchanges in which resentments are bound up (resentments themselves would, then, be directly converted into reasonable and helpful criticisms of the exercise of authority). To put forth an aesthetic, then, is to embody, or impersonate, a form of authority—authority, we could say, is power retracted completely into the ostensive, so presence itself models the proper ordering. So, we want to create identities that tacitly call forth an ordering, that add one more increment of sameness amongst a broader field of difference than existing positions have so far identified."
    },
    {
      "slug": "conditions-for-an-enduring-technostructural-civilization",
      "title": "Conditions for an Enduring Technostructural Civilization",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Dec 2019",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The most destructive thing about liberalism is the systematic falsification it imposes on all of reality. One could say that this has gotten worse—that, for example, mid-20 th century liberalism didn’t so adamantly demand fealty to obvious lies—but this only means that our social orders were less liberal then. At this point, there are very few things one can tell the truth, or seek the truth, about, even in private life, without some kind of “backlash.” The reason for this is that liberalism is founded on the oxymoronic practice of imposing equality from above (which is the only way of imposing “equality”). The purpose of imposing equality from above—from a centralizing power position—is to demolish intermediate layers of authority.\n\nYou need to demolish intermediate layers of authority when you can find no way of integrating them into the power dynamic you need to set in motion in order to undermine some other power center’s dynamic. The consequence is that you destroy reality, because reality can only be comprehended and apprehended from within positions of power and authority, where you need to make decisions whose results are visible and important to others who have to make decisions. And then you have to redouble your attacks on anyone who gestures towards a reality outside of your egalitarian imperative. This process has already significantly corroded the sciences and engineering, and can only continue to do so.\n\nThe creation of a new order would have to involve more reality. That is, people would have to be rewarded, not punished, for speaking and seeking the truth; or, more precisely, for putting forward disputable hypotheses within recognizable intellectual traditions. There will always be borderline hypotheses, where one or more of those traditions are radically called into question, thereby raising questions of institutional authority, but even there a wait and see approach can be maintained, while that sphere of inquiry is “quarantined” without being squashed. Truth (or reality) friendly regimes have so far only been possible within protected spheres deemed essential to central authority.\n\nTo extend such regimes further requires further increments in solving the fundamental human problem of mimesis. If I am to look at what someone else says—something unfamiliar, something troubling, something potentially harmful to my status—and ask questions that allow that statement to be further fleshed out rather than denounce it as heresy, then I must have constructed a model of behavior for myself modeled on central authority rather than on some rampaging power agency solicited to advance my rivalry with some resented other. And there must be a sufficient number of others doing this as well, so that I don’t have to denounce before I am denounced. This means that for a sufficient number of people discourse is sufficiently abstracted from mimetically driven rivalries so that statements can be commented on outside of a “who, whom” frame.\n\nThe most radical form of traditionalism is one that sees mimesis, mimetic rivalry, communal expulsion (what I call “violent centralization), and mimetic crisis, along with the myriad ways mimetic relations are reconfigured through the deferral of actual and potential crises, as the problem with which all of human culture, which is to say all of human language, is occupied with. Every myth, every ritual, every political order, every work of art, is above all concerned with this problem, and represents an attempt to resolve it in a form that accounts for the particulars of a given case or scene, while still being en during.\n\nA denial of mimesis might be the purpose of the self-generated individual posited by liberalism. In moral and anthropological terms, the “individual” is created as a form of deferral—the individual is the one protected from violent centralization, or scapegoating. In this case, who the individual is doesn’t matter—it’s precisely the individual who “triggers” certain forms of rivalry within the community who must be protected, precisely in the name of controlling the escalation of rivalries. The individual, in that case, as one created in the image of God, is a cause for reflection upon our own “sinful” nature, with “sinful” meaning “mimetic”: driven by lust, envy, and hatred—by a relation of “reciprocal usurpation” with some other.\n\nBut if the individual is self-creating, and is the foundation rather than product of a social order, on what grounds can mimetic desires be criticized? Indeed, to criticize them is to attack the “individual,” to be “authoritarian.” In that case all of inherited culture represents arbitrary impositions on freedom.\n\nLiberalism makes much harder what is in any case very difficult: realizing that we are thoroughly mimetic and mediated beings. It’s almost impossible to desire something while simultaneously thinking that you desire it because you imagine someone else desiring it—it’s “cognitively” difficult, and we’d rather not do it, because it saps desire. The satisfaction of desire becomes much less satisfying if such considerations are kept in mind. But where else do you imagine desires coming from? Yes, outside of any human order one would want food, drink, sex, shelter—animals want those things, and work on obtaining them.\n\nSome food would taste better than others, some potential mates be preferable to others, etc. But, absent mimesis, we wouldn’t want a particular “object of desire” more because we have been denied it, or because we imagine someone else enjoying it. And this also means that without mimesis we wouldn’t think in “non-pragmatic” ways about things, because what we think about are what we desire, what or who we fear will abscond with what we desire, those who interfere with our desires, and the ways in which this entire configuration is characterized by ongoing fluctuations: an object seems irresistibly desirable, but, then, not; someone seems unattainably admirable, but then maybe a bit contemptible; a particular struggle seems existential, but then rather silly.\n\nAll of these events happen through language, which is what first of all allowed us to desire something while still deferring appropriation of it but while still desiring it, etc. And it is through language that all of this can become “interesting,” which is to say worthy of sustained and self-reflective attention.\n\nNow, think about how difficult civilization is. Civilization requires hierarchies and divisions of labor. This means accepting that there will always be others who have better things than you, and can order you around, and being able to consider yourself unworthy for dwelling on this fact. And why, exactly? Maybe those with more than you are “better” in some relevant way, but maybe not—such claims can be neither verified nor falsified, so you can tell yourself what you like. More subject to proof is how the power of your superiors is used: we can tell, at least to some extent, whether an enterprise or community is well run, whether problems are solved or allowed to fester, how this particular authority measures up to others we are familiar with.\n\nStill, it’s precisely when things are being run well that we might imagine ourselves most capable of running them—it seems so easy, and therefore all the more “unfair” that this guy gets to do it rather than me. And when we have the “right” to complain about things being run poorly, how much of that arrogated right depends upon us not knowing all kinds of things that are involved in “running things”—and, then, how can we tell how “justified” our complaint really is? (A simple example: I recently saw some figure, respected or at least more respected on the “nationalist” or “dissident” American right than “Conservatism Inc.” say something like, “it’s time to focus on our rivalry with China rather than getting bogged down in endless wars [in the Middle East, etc.],” with this sentiment being met with approval, as rejecting “endless war” has been a password providing entry to the new right.\n\nBut: will not China seek to extend its influence where it can, including those areas from which the US withdraws its influence? And will not getting serious and directing our attention to our rivalry with China therefore not involve countering such attempts by extending our own influence? In other words, is not rivalry every bit as “endless” as our recent wars, and in fact the cause of them? Unless, of course, “international relations” can be reset in new, cooperative, terms. Why not?—but doing so will involve controlling rather than exhibiting resentments.)\n\nA properly civilized attitude, then, requires one to be inquisitive regarding the exercise of authority, including over oneself, while ensuring that this inquisitiveness leaves permanently open the question of what one does not and cannot know as an inquirer without access to the very power one is questioning. You have to be aware of your place within a system while being simultaneously aware that you don’t know the system. And the system itself would have to encourage this level of maturity. As a mimetic being, you must imitate your model as closely as possible while still maintaining an inviolate distance from him.\n\nNow, in the tradition of advanced civilizations, sustaining this equipoise becomes difficult because the system drifts further and further from its founding principles and becomes more reliant on exploiting the hierarchies that were creating under other conditions, in accord with another principle of merit, but that are now primarily sources of self-enrichment available to those most skilled in intrigue and flattery. Here is where the constant revolutions introduced by a technological social order may improve the prospects for the civilized attitude, and provide a means of exiting the seemingly permanent “cycle” of rise and fall.\n\nThe proper technological attitude is rather similar to the properly civilized one: one must recognize oneself first of all to be a means of much larger, impersonal systems, i.e., to de-personalize and fragment oneself, in order to imagine the ways one might be an end of such systems.\n\nThe first, ancient, technologies were predicated upon the power to move around masses of people who didn’t need to be considered as people, i.e., as named within some sacral order. (We can distinguish this from crafts and techniques, which can always be contained within a relation to some cult, transmitted through pedagogical apprenticeship relations.) It was the ancient empires, with millions of slaves gathered from conquered peoples, which had such power, and used it for various construction and destruction projects. All the parts became homogeneous because all the people who were the parts could be made so. The availability of the masses of nameless slaves was equiprimordial with the imperial vision which could imagine god-like projects, i.e., projects of world destruction and creation.\n\nThis is the origin of the technological world view, which is therefore mimetic to the core: the ancient emperors modeled projects on the power of Gods and technologists today model this imperial vision. The technological vision excludes consideration of human ends irreducible to the project itself, even when enacted for the purpose of improving the human condition, and even when it does, in fact, improve the human condition. But there are good reasons why the technological vision didn’t, for the most part, engage in the transformation of materials rather than the movement of masses of people until starting from about half a millennium ago.\n\nIf you are to advance the technological vision beyond the imperial one, you need to expand the range of practices that might become models for technological transformation. Rather than abstracting mass organization from social interaction, the observation of social interaction itself would have to become the source of models for technological transformation. The development of machinery out of the very careful examination of the cooperation, often indirect, of workers, as noted by Adam Smith and then Karl Marx, might be “dehumanizing,” but it first of all required attention to minute human practices and “sub-practices.”\n\nModern technological development is predicated upon explicitly posing questions that have already been implicitly posed by collective practices, and then further sub-dividing so as to replace machinically the practices that posed the question in the first place. So, it becomes evident that more rapid communication across great distances would facilitate practices already in place; so, “communication” must be analyzed and disassembled into its elements (signals, vibrations, spread out temporally, “codes” and decoding processes, etc.), which can then be simulated and transmitted through wires, and so on. And, as a result, even “face to face” communication becomes “distanced” in new ways.\n\nThis process looks a bit like the “high-low vs. middle” power “mechanism”—it’s as if the “high,” the technologist, organizes the “low,” the particulate, “unconscious,” elements of signification “against” the actual speakers of a language. And we could further see how disciplines like linguistics, communications, and information are marshalled in this “campaign.” This might be because the conditions for a “break through” of the HLvM process are the same for the technological break through: a social order that is simultaneously desacralizing and resacralizing. Desacralizing, because the old sacrificial cults have been torn down (and who knows how long the war against their remnants continued even after the cults were officially overthrown), by Christianity in the West, but by the Axial Age more broadly across the board.\n\nResacralizing, because what replaces the cult is not ‘secularism,” not even for philosophy, but the cult of the innocent victim targeted by cultic and imperial power. It is this latter cult that is responsible for the inviolate “individual” discussed above, and that led to new and very intense forms of attention being paid to human individuals. But this is unsustainable as a cult claiming to be outside of, or above, power. For Christianity to find a way to govern the West again, it would have to be a Christianity that makes explicit the entire set of power relations it in fact presupposes: the sovereignty Christianity projects onto God would have to be mapped onto the kind of human sovereignty being projected, with all of the political and economic categories of Christianity (“redemption,” “hostage exchange,” “shepherd,” etc.) spelled out.\n\nSo, we cannot and will not make humans masses of nameless slaves again; but we will continue to detect in the practices other humans perform the elements of new practices inclusive of but unimaginable within the older ones. In the process, technologists mobilize us all to do (including to ourselves) what we “cannot and will not,” even if we disavow doing so all the more vociferously. It may be that a lot of contemporary resentment can be mapped onto such disavowals—it may even be that this is part of the reason it seems to be becoming easier to see each other (and to act?) as enemy “bots,” i.e., cogs in political machines, indistinguishable from pre-programmed responses to utterly predictable “provocations.”\n\nThe kind of governing authority that could guide a post-sacrificial technological order is one that accepts the absolute responsibility to name everything, established and emergent, within the human order; while knowing that naming does not close but rather opens the order to new possibilities. Naming things, persons, practices, institutions, entails placing them at the center, and the creation of a new center in turn creates new peripheries.\n\nIf you take responsibility for naming, you reject—and name—the position that pretends that reality names itself, that wishes to have the names without the resentable namer. In that case, you want the names to last, because you want your name, as you have tried to inhabit it, to last. So you want the names to be able to stand on their own, with you, or a proxy, providing the most minimal backing possible. That means they must encourage a stance of deferral over resentment: those most capable of deferring their resentment and therefore looking carefully at those named objects most likely to incite their resentment must be those who find the most use in the name.\n\nThis is what will make the names honest and truthful. And these are also the names that will most evoke expansive tacit realities. Stable, ordered, named institutions will create individuals who know their names mark events, and that these events can be replicated through the naming of others and self-re-namings. We could come to see our practices, individually and collectively, as the sources of new technological processes we would participate in sovereignty over. First of all, soliciting and enabling such participation would be made intelligible, and become a practice. As a practice more available to some than to others, it would generate resentments, all the more so because the practice has become available—why should the other be a more fully technological subject than me?\n\nSo, then, the practice is replicated and extended to meet that resentment. The most basic precondition for an en during technostructural civilization, then, is the generalized practice of responding to others’ resentments by extending to them a practice; and, of course, a general preparedness to accept such pedagogical gestures as an answer to one’s own resentments, resentments such answers will have explicitly formulated (because to be a subject of resentment is to be at least partly blinded to the mimetic investments generating those resentments). So, in response to a complaint: here’s something you can do—and, even if it had on the face of it nothing to do with your complaint, you do it, and find that it did, and so you can then replicate the practice for others."
    },
    {
      "slug": "design-and-the-attentional-economy",
      "title": "Design and the Attentional Economy",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve been working for a while with the assumption that the “Axial Age” created the conditions for the generation of a new, post-sacrificial morality. Sacrificial morality relies, ultimately, on human sacrifice: someone is put in the place, ultimately, of the sacral king, who served as the target of the mimetic crises that plague any human community. Girard called this “scapegoating,” and I have been calling it “violent centralization,” and I have been following Girard, and then Gans, in attributing to the Christian scriptural tradition the revelation of the “bad faith” of sacrifice—the members of the community must blind themselves to the fact that what they see as an act of deserved retribution (the victim must always been rendered “guilty” in some way) really has nothing to do with the victim and everything to do with their own internal relations as a group.\n\nCalling the social orders marked by this revelation “post-sacrificial” is not to argue that such bad faith centering of the other no longer takes place—obviously, it’s quite common—but that everyone knows it’s wrong, can see it in others, and require elaborate rationalizations to carry it out. When we do it, we must insist it’s something else—and, of course, sometimes it really is.\n\nI believe that, so far, I share this understanding of what Gans calls the “Christian revelation” with just about everyone who has been working in GA since, say, the 90s. In other words, it’s “canonical,” or “orthodoxy.” There is a seemingly obvious corollary that is equally canonical or orthodox, but which I reject. This corollary is that a certain understanding and reality of the “individual” results from the transcendence of scapegoating: the individual who is “equal” to other individuals, within the framework of what gets called “moral equality.” I’ve criticized this concept before, but my recent thinking about design provides it with a larger frame.\n\nMy initial claim is that the social injunction to refrain from scapegoating implies nothing, and need imply nothing, regarding the “being” of the potential victim. In order to justify and reinforce that injunction, or the prohibition on scapegoating, it might indeed be helpful to project onto those not to be sacrificed the qualities which make them undeserving of such treatment. So, for example, if human beings all inherently somehow possess something we can call “dignity,” then it is because of that dignity that they must be treated in certain ways. The same goes for things like “consciousness,” “conscience,” and what Gans has always called an “internal scene of representation.”\n\nRather than such projections, all we need to be able to say about the self is that is continually constructed as a sustainable center of attention, that of others and the self itself. These qualities and entities, along with the aforementioned “moral equality,” and notions of the “soul,” are all, that is, parts of a mythology of the individual, a way of invoking the center (drawing from it imperatives) to match the imperative to refrain from marking individuals in ways that have proven communally destructive.\n\nIt would be at least as easy to say that this prohibition on “marking” the other as victim (or “stigmatizing”) leads us, not to an ontology of the “individual,” but a semiotics of marking. So, we could say, if you frame this kind of behavior in this way, it is likely to incite this kind of response from a particular audience, and so on. A cataloguing of such “markings” would tell us nothing about individuals, but only of possible social constructions of them. And which markings needed to be attended to, and cautioned about, in different cases, would differ considerably—in other words, the prohibition on scapegoating could just as easily lead to an insistence on attending to lots of differences among individuals.\n\nSuch an approach would be far more effective than the one based on “moral equality,” which leads us to scapegoat anyone who notices anything that might make us skeptical of that moral equality, and the way it is enforced under any given regime, and therefore leads straight to our current victimary order, which is has significant sacrificial elements. It would be more effective because it would direct attention where it needs to be, on the proclivities of the community and the various fluctuations in mimetic tensions, rather than upon the imaginary qualities of potential victims and potential perpetrators.\n\nIf our only interest is in “marking,” then, we need no ontology of the individual—nothing, no consciousness, no soul, inner being, free will, nothing. But people would, naturally, construct their behaviors in ways that make the markings most potentially relevant to them as irrelevant (or “counter-relevant”) as possible—to put it simply, they would both be aware of the way certain stereotypes might apply to them, and do what they could to disrupt the application of those stereotypes—which, in turn, would make things easier for those who don’t want their thinking to be in the grips of such stereotypes, but also don’t want to censor themselves for noticing differences.\n\nIn fact, we would be finding ways to take the sting out of stereotypes, for ourselves and others, by making them explicit and thereby making it possible to modify behaviors, even by turning “negative” stereotypes into “positive” ones. All this would obviously be very different from the way we go about things now, and, I’ll repeat, requires no projection of an ontology onto the “individual” nor any assumptions of “equality.”\n\nWhat it will do, though, is turn individuals into designers—of practices and institutions. I’ve been doing some reading in contemporary design theory, of the kind that is very cognizant of postmodern thought (I’ll mention briefly the work of Benjamin Bratton, especially his The Stack , and his colleagues in the Strelka Institute in Moscow), and one can see the tendency towards a very promising post-humanism. The notion that individuals were “constructed” was once a fairly esoteric theoretical speculation, but how does one deny it now that our whole lives are very tightly governed by algorithms under the control of corporations and states that now, between them, regulate all social interactions?\n\nNow, this intellectual tendency is very clear about how the complex of systems constructing our lives—which they are sure to do far more intensively, down to the molecular level, as technology improves—practically dismantle the mythology of the individual I’ve been referring to—where does one find “freedom,” or “conscience” in all of this?—assertions of such qualities are themselves programmed gestures. But the same does not hold for the prohibition on scapegoating, which I would say, counter-intuitively, but in agreement with Girard’s claim that Europe didn’t stop burning witches because it became scientific but, rather, became scientific because it stopped burning witches, that the prohibition of scapegoating has made all of modern technology and even more so its current, scary, intrusive, seemingly uncontrollable social media technology possible.\n\nIt’s not hard to find people with complaints about the totalitarian nature of social media and the forms of government surveillance and information gathering and keeping that work seamlessly with them. But, despite the very serious criminality of sections of the American government that has been revealed through inquiries into the Russia collusion hoax, a criminality almost universally shared with the major American media (which is really nothing more, and probably never has been anything more, than a racket trafficking in information and what we could call “information laundering”), it is still worth pointing out that, for example, these ubiquitous means of social monitoring and control have not led, say, to the isolation and targeting for elimination of large social groups.\n\nYou could say I’m setting a low bar, but if it were the case that this thoroughgoing construction of the individual revealed morality to be a myth concealing sheer utilitarian power struggles or the conveyance of collective resentments, such things would be happening (as they seem to be in China). Meanwhile, if it’s the case that it’s the origin of these technological capacities in the study of the various “dangerous” markings that the prohibition on scapegoating calls for, then the evidence of clear moral limits on the use of this immense power is no surprise. In fact, if we set aside the dominance of much of social media by the “wokeratti,” what this media mostly does is provide security and enhance knowledge dissemination. It’s actually much easier to use it to exonerate rather than frame the innocent.\n\nA lot of scapegoating takes place on social media—at times it seems like little else goes on there. My claim here is that the nature of social media is more to be used to design social interactions or “interfaces” that foreground dangerous markings along with ways of deferring their danger. I’m obviously also saying that those who want to abolish victimary practices should be using social media in this way. Also, I’m just using social media as an example here—post-liberalism should be a project of design across the board. The human sciences should be practices of design—mimetic theory channeled through the originary hypothesis allows us to diagnose institutional dysfunction in terms of ineffectively designed modes of deferral caused by undetected modes of mimetic rivalry; and such diagnoses would lead to proposed designs that would acknowledge the rivalry and re-set them.\n\nYou could say that this leads to a practice, if not ontology, of the individual—the individual as designer of social interactions. Again, nothing needs to projected onto individuals—we don’t need to say that humans are “by nature” designers, that it is their telos to design, that they are genetically determined to be designers, etc.—it’s enough that we are designers as a result of the ways our ancestors and predecessors designed the institutions producing us. We don’t all need to be equally good at it. Those who are better at have an interest in helping the less skilled; indeed, they have an interest in designing institutions and practices that will make people better designers.\n\nMaking design the definitive neo-absolutist practice supports the kind of dedifferentiated disciplinary spaces I’ve argued for elsewhere. We’re always starting with a practice, which we can assume fits a model, and has therefore been designed more or less directly. We can start right where we are, in other words, in improving the design of our own practices and interactions so as to minimize the damage unthinking mimesis does to them. Once we’re committed to a particular practice, we become interested in organizations and institutions that can house and support them. This, in turn, generates new design projects. Designs can be made across the moral, aesthetic, pedagogical and political spheres—we design assignments to enhance learning; we design impossible objects, like perpetual motion machines or Rube Goldberg-style devices, to satirically expose failing institutions and unconsidered assumptions; we can design inspiring utopian visions in the great tradition of such visions; we can unite the infinite with the infinitesimal in our designs; we can design projects for social reform for potential patrons (indeed, wouldn’t they demand it?). In this way, any discussion can be put on entirely new footing, and piles of ideological baggage swept away—we can be designing to make sure that happens as well.\n\nDesign involves translation: a problem into confluence of reciprocally counter-acting designs; desires into a project; a territory into a map; a map into directions; patterns of social interactions into accumulations of reciprocal mimetic modellings; declaratives into an imperative meeting an absolute imperative; imperatives into extended ostensives; any utterance into spread out presuppositions and implications of that utterance; oral into written. Measuring is translating; money is a medium of translation. Any two terms you could put an “=” sign between involves a translation. Even more, then: the use of words and phrases at different times involves what we could call a translation of a term into itself, insofar as it becomes different over time.\n\nThe designing frame entails looking at everything as problems of translation (and if we want to push this a bit further, transcription and transliteration as well0. You ascertain that the two terms are the same, that the “=” is appropriate, which makes you identify all the ways one could introduce a / through or an ~ above the =. When you design you confirm the = by eliminating all the /s and ~s. This is done on the scenes upon which you design narratives and articulate human movements with materials so as to inhabit and suspend the /s and ~s; you are being designed on this same scene, since the most basic reciprocal translation is that between design and designer."
    },
    {
      "slug": "design-imitation-and-the-transfer-translation",
      "title": "Design, Imitation, and the Transfer Translation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jan 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Where do opinions, ideas, beliefs and arguments stand within the production system of modern life? Everyone has ideas, opinions and beliefs, and everyone makes arguments all the time, but through what process of mechanism can one imagine all this mental machinery being translated into institutional modifications that would be recognized by their possessors as realizations of the intentions manifested in them? For that matter, where do ideas, beliefs, and so on come from? Anyone could point to books one has read, education received, events that led to revelations, influences by parents and media, but where do all those sources come from? Once the Enlightenment fantasy of a conversation among equals being directly translated into the creation of social relations is dismissed, we can’t do better than invoking Plato’s cave metaphor in describing ideas, beliefs, opinions and arguments—they are descriptions of shadows playing on a wall. Then again, what would make what I’m doing here any different?\n\nSocial practices are commensurable with each other as practices, and, so, if we set aside terms derivative of the metalanguage of literacy like “ideas,” “beliefs,” “opinions” and “arguments,” and think of speaking, writing, listening and reading as practices, we can speak of media practices that might be converted into or made interoperable with other media practices. A practice is something that one or some do, that can be done again and be the same thing. A practice is a doing in the middle of things that are happening. Part of the practice, then, is marking the difference between what you are doing and what is happening. So, if your saying or doing (your saying as doing) can be iterated by others in such a way that others can say it’s the same thing, well, you can’t guarantee specific results, but you can distinguish the ordering of your practices from a world of events that, as far as anyone can tell, are just happening.\n\nThe most elementary understanding of knowing is that it is being able to say that two things are, or the same thing at different times, or to different participants, is, the same; insofar as things are parts of other things, this means that knowledge is being able to say that the proportions of the ingredients comprising the parts of one part are the same as the ingredients comprising the whole. In other words, that a sample is the same (in some respect) as the population it is selected from. Selecting a sample by doing something is a practice, that may or may not be the same as a system of practices it self-selects from.\n\nNothing is lost if we say that a sample is a translation of the population, or the whole—the whole being nothing more than all of the actual and possible translations of it (in collections, new arrangements, measurements, etc.). A translation produces something in one medium that is the same as some original in another medium. So, all social practices are translations of all the other translations, with the question always being, what makes it a translation, or the same, in this new medium as all the others. When people gather into a disciplinary space, it is to answer this question.\n\nThis now returns us to the “transfer translation” Marcel Jousse found at the basis of the “oral style”—while Jousse is not completely clear about this, the transfer translation seems to be the written residue of the most repeated and most broadly applicable, the most embedded in rituals and other practices, of the oral traditions of a community—the parts of the oral tradition that must be preserved and therefore cannot be allowed to dissipate with the loss of or diminishing intelligibility of the language in which they have been articulated. Since these central discourses have been transferred into a new medium, with different idioms, much of the original is lost, so ascertaining the identity of the translation is the most important of social practices.\n\nLet’s say that in the original God “breathes” life into humans, but Gods don’t “breath” in the target language—maybe God “gives birth” to humans in that language. Now we have two origin narratives, the difference is noticeable and problematic, and therefore must be reconciled. All our ideas, beliefs, opinions and arguments are the effluvia of these efforts at reconciliation.\n\nWe begin with the assumption of sameness and commensurability because doing so is a precondition of the maintenance of linguistic presence and then we create original cultural forms by showing that the new form is the same as the old. This happens because showing it’s the same requires that we generate the idiom within which the repeated form will indeed be a repetition of the form previously embedded within another idiom. This is a way of saying we always assume order, continuity and centeredness. It is also the case that translation is a form of language learning, insofar as we learn a new idiom, or how to use a new word, by treating it as synonymous with ones we are familiar with while also guessing at its proper use in each new context until the responses of other tell us we’ve got it right.\n\nKeep in mind the way Google learned to translate—at first, word for word synonymous translations produced laughably bad results; then, drawing upon previous translations of the same words, phrases and sentences produced seamless results. That search process, for humans, involves trial and error, as we have to find idioms that fit an entire field of discourse in the target language.\n\nI have mentioned on occasion that discourses on racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., are really just “superstructures” erected over anti-discrimination law, which makes it ridiculous to argue over what these words “really mean,” and I’ll return to that now because it’s a good example of translation as a fundamental cultural practice. Liberalism declares all members of a polity to be “equal”—equal in relation to the state, but in relation to the state as form of centralizing power directed at demolishing formal differences, one after another. To align yourself with the state is to point to a difference to be demolished.\n\nThis is what counts as being a good person. That this is really not about equality in any possible sense is clear from the fact, intrinsic to such a demand, that you or others like you be given power over those now benefiting from the difference under attack. One form of hierarchy is being replaced by another. So far, this is all familiar enough. But in applying liberal law, or anti-discrimination law, all kinds of distinctions and decisions need to be made: what actually counts as a violation of the law? We need model events, narratives, to make sense of this, like those involving fat Southern sheriffs harassing innocent black people.\n\nThese stories are translations of the practices involved in enforcing the law, and they are reproduced, refined, and modified as necessary by legal institutions, journalists, politicians, schools, and so on. Broader sociological, anthropological and political concepts are generated to supplement these stories, to make the accounts of differences and attempts to eliminate them as consistent as possible. You can’t argue about these concepts and stories without participating in the practice of translation that produced them—which is why, again, it’s pointless to argue about them.\n\nNow, we can propose, “logically,” the abolition of liberalism, thereby getting directly to the heart of the problem. But this can’t work without a network of practices generating the translative practices that would plug such an argument into narratives and supplementary concepts. And such practices are excluded by the ones already in place. The system of practices and the translations they generate needs to be exposed; but whose “need” is this, what imperative demands it, and from within what set of practices can this exposure be effected? If we want to think in the long term, this becomes a question of which disciplines to infiltrate and how. I would suggest that transdisciplinary practices of meta-translation can be summed up on the problem of design, which is a way of constraining translative practices. To engage in design, of a block, a neighborhood, a city, an institution, a network of institutions, is to think in terms of how the work of all the different disciplines would be translated into each other and into the design as a whole.\n\nWe can think very productively about design in terms of mimesis and deferral. If we know that a certain social arrangement regularly leads to certain rivalries, and those rivalries lead to conflicts which disrupt the ends for which participants engage in that activity, then, rather than talk to the individuals (or “types” of individuals) commonly led into those rivalries, and “explaining” to them why they are really wrong to distrust each other, that it would be better if they worked together, and so on, we would simply redesign the social arrangement so as to avoid the emergence of those rivalries. Of course, another arrangement might lead to other rivalries—we’re talking about a complex business here, in which various disciplinary spaces would need to participate.\n\nBut framing, from the start, every problem as, in essence, a design problem, directs attention towards media, technology, and capital (the power to command the disciplines), rather than ephemera like opinions, beliefs, principles, opinions, policies and so on. The question we pose is, what deployment of media, technology and capital might render a particular conflict irrelevant? We don’t want to resolve the conflict itself, we don’t want to reconcile the parties, we don’t want to hear them out, we don’t want dialogue, we don’t want to take sides, etc.—we want to render the conflict unintelligible, like an argument over the proper way to arrange the sacrificial animal on an altar in some archaic community would be unintelligible to us now. All conflicts, actual and potential, are to be transformed into means of providing informed feedback to duly appointed authorities.\n\nAll practices, then, are to be translated into design practices. The media, technology, capital and power that have gone into producing a certain practice (of, say, conducting an ongoing debate) are included in the practice as part of its idiom. This is not a question of pacification—mimetic practices and practices of deferral are represented all along the line. New forms of mimesis, of modeling our behavior on others, must be proposed for each element of the design. You can imitate someone in such a way as to shrink the object you learn from him to notice and desire, so that there is only enough for one of you; or you can imitate another so as to enlarge the object so it can be shared.\n\nThe latter is easier if we openly acknowledge that we are modeling our behavior on others, which we all know but will all reject for those practices we take to be most distinctive to us. It may be easier to openly acknowledge our unpayable mimetic debts to others if we learn to treat our own practices as design problems, which would naturally involve studying models and distinguishing what is usable and what is not, including what we are already using and misusing. Our transfer translations of design hypotheses would generate stories and supplementary concepts, like any transfer translation, but they would be stories of anthropomorphized beings engaged in translating the “human” into a current set of practices.\n\nEngaging in full scale design requires power and capital, which excludes those who are not privileged actors within the liberal order. But every institution within the liberal order has a non-liberal purpose (liberalism has no purposes that is not parasitic on non-liberal institutions and practices) and insofar as public discourse is part of a post-liberal political practice, rather than offering up our opinions, beliefs, principles, and so on in pointless back and forths with those of others, we can present designs in the form of thought experiments that would eliminate the problem caused by liberalism by making liberalism impossible or irrelevant.\n\nThere may not be any need to be explicitly anti-liberal—one could be ingenious enough to even propose voting systems that make voting irrelevant. These would be thought experiments that would re-formalize the differences and hierarchies that have been demolished, and would displace statements with practices (would insist every statement generate a practice to be part of the game). Whatever organizational form post-liberal politics eventually takes, it will be predicated upon presenting hypothetical designs, large and small, as demonstrations of the capacity to embark upon transformative design practices."
    },
    {
      "slug": "hunger-artistry-of-the-word",
      "title": "Hunger Artistry of the Word",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The hunger artist of Kafka’s story ultimately reveals that he has spent much of his life eating no more than was absolutely necessary to barely stay alive not as an astonishing feat of asceticism but simply because he could never find any food he really wanted to eat. I’m working on putting GA on an equally rigorous diet for a similar reason—while GA is already extremely minimal, there are several concepts that pose problems of digestion. The ideal would really be to have just two concepts—and, then, to get gluttonous and set forth into the world and repurpose the rest of language into GA concepts. The centrality of Anna Wierzbicka’s work to my thinking also comes into play here—I find her contention that any theory should be articulable in the primes, and therefore universally intelligible, compelling—especially for a mode of thinking with the kind of universalist and “absolutist” pretensions GA claims.\n\nLet’s start with “resentment,” the most problematic of all. Resentment is the emotion (?) or attitude (?) one has towards whomever denies you your desire. On the originary scene, this is the sacred center, which “withholds” itself from the desiring community, and becomes even more desirable as a result. This resentment toward the center must alternate with love for the center which has, after all, saved and even created the community. It then follows that anyone who denies a desire after the originary scene is taken to be doing so on behalf, or in the name, or under the authority of, the center (how else could another have the power to deny one’s desire?).\n\nThe originary desire is for the center as such—to be recognized by, or even possess, the center—while subsequent desires would be for one’s “proper” allotment from the center. So, if someone denies you your “allotment” (and what this is can, of course, never be fixed once and for all), say, by robbing, cheating, or even out-maneuvering you through some “creative” interpretation of the rules, your resentment may be directed first of all towards that person but ultimately toward the center itself, which must have “allowed” this “injustice.”\n\nThis is all coherent and powerful, but I don’t see a consistent way of identifying “resentment” in a practice. It all seems to be “internal”—as I suggested above, a “feeling,” “attitude” or “sense of things.” But if we want to speak of someone acting resentfully, what are the markers of resentment in that act—presumably the other way of acting beyond desire is in love, so what marks an act as undertaken out of either love or resentment? Even if we take an extreme, revenge porn style example, like hunting down the guy who attacked me and responding in kind, couldn’t I be said to be acting out of love for his potential future victims just as much as out of resentment for the injury done me?\n\nWe’d need some protocols for reading the particulars of the act itself upon the scene of its enactment, making “resentment” a hermeneutic or heuristic principle—in that case, though, more fundamental would be the interpretive practice through which we identify markers of resentment. If we zoom in close, we may see resentment, while if we pull back we see love—in that case, the question is, how do we decide to focus? Presumably out of resentment or love ourselves, which means someone must be reading our reading in turn. None of this necessarily invalidates or vitiates the concept, but it does make its use contingent on what kind of scene that application of the concept helps maintain.\n\nBound up with this is the moral and intellectual status or meaning of resentment. Can resentment be justified, or is it intrinsically wrong (at least as a “motive” for action)? If it is justified, is it still resentment? Is “justification” or a refusal to justify itself simply another act of resentment? To gesture towards “love” as the transcendence of resentment is to beg the question: what counts as “love”? Eric Gans in his latest Chronicle (#649) seems to suggest that the sharing of food provides a model of love, but it’s always possible to claim that food has been shared “unfairly.” And, if resentment is toward the center, wouldn’t love also have to be first of all for the center?\n\nIs resentment a form of insight, or even cultural productivity, or is it merely a source of violence and conflict to be repressed or controlled? If it can be either, how could we tell whether the kind of resentment we’re looking at in a particular case is one or the other? We can find examples of these opposing ways of discussing resentment across the literature of GA, without, as far as I know, there being any real attempt at reconciling them.\n\nAnother problem, connected with the above, is that resentment might be a very good “third person” concept but it is certainly a very bad “second person” concept. In other words, however useful it is for speaking about others, it is useless and harmful for speaking to others. To point out someone’s resentment to them is to accuse that person, which means that one is generating resentment in that person, thereby interfering with the observation one was purportedly making. Even more, it would be hard to deny some resentment on the part of the one making the “accusation,” which even further introduces more of the “disease” in the process of “diagnosis.” Even if it’s necessary to reveal another’s resentment to that person, there are better ways of doing so than telling that person they seem a bit resentful. And if our concepts are to serve the purpose of social interaction and engagement, our concepts should be just as helpful in second as in third person situations.\n\nOne can see in much GA literature the suggestion that resentment can be alleviated in some way—either by conceding something to the resentful subject or learning how to control resentment. But this raises the following question: if resentment can be minimized, it can then be minimized further, and if it can always be minimized yet further, can’t it eventually be eliminated? If the answer is yes, all of moral and political discourse within GA should be oriented toward this possibility. But if the answer is no, presumably because resentment is so basic to the configuration of the human, then it follows that resentment can’t really be reduced or controlled either.\n\nIn that case, what, exactly are we doing when we engage in all kinds of actions and institution building that certainly seems aimed at protecting us from resentment? Is resentment simply “deferred,” like violence—is civilization building just an endless deferral of what remains a steady “quantity” (and if we don’t want to speak about resentment in terms of quantity, how would we do so in terms of “quality”?) of resentment, which must mean an awful crash lies at the end of it all. That conclusion might be convenient for those of certain passive and cynical habits of mind, but the implication would be that the human is ultimately a failure as a species, so why are we talking about this in the first place?\n\nNext up: “Violence.” I’ll first note that Wierzbicka mentions “violence” as one of those specifically Anglo words that doesn’t translate into other languages. I don’t remember where she says this, or her precise reasoning, but my guess as to what makes it specifically Anglo is that its contextless “doing bad things to people’s bodies” presupposes the possibility of a neutral application of physical force. More important is that, as I was reminded recently in discussions with Joel and Josh regarding the constitutive GA definition of “representation,” in arguing for the primacy of the “deferral of violence” one has to be very specific about what kind of violence is meant.\n\nWe can, for example, imagine on the originary scene that some members of the group, after discovering and sharing the sign amongst themselves, had to then turn on some “unsigned” members and use physical force to restrain them from approaching the object. Even if we assume that a great deal of “violence” had to be used in thereby saving the scene, violence that we would have to accept as necessary, even beneficial, it would not change the fact that another, very different kind of violence must have already been deferred to make that collective effort possible. In this context I will also mention something I discussed years ago—that, in fact, the kind of pan-destructive violence conjured by specifically mimetic crisis could never have actually occurred.\n\nIf the participants on the scene did, indeed, overrun the pecking order and begin attacking each other, there’s no reason to think it would continue until all, or even most, or even many, of the group had been killed. Most likely, everyone would forget what they were fighting about and the former order would be more or less restored. The kind of violence deferred on the scene, then, is a phantom.\n\nNone of this vitiates the power of the originary model—quite to the contrary, I would say. There’s no reason why a kind of omni-destructive imaginary couldn’t both lie at the origins of the human, and be a kind of fantasy. In fact, it makes a lot more sense than assuming that language was founded on a kind of accurate “risk-assessment.” But this reading of the scene makes the kind of “violence” we are talking about even more specific, and calls the usefulness of the concept of “violence” here further into question. What we would really need is a word for a kind of violence that is an intimate betrayal, an exploitation of one’s most vulnerable and irremediable weaknesses, by the last person in the world you would expect to commit such a “violation,” and at the worst possible time.\n\n(Maybe the “deferral of violation” is better—but “violation” often refers more specifically either to rape or to more commonplace transgressions.) Like, say, your twin brother stabbing you in the back as you’re about to confront a shared enemy. But this means that the “violence” in question doesn’t simply come before the sign, and the sign doesn’t just halt it. It would mean that the emergence of the sign and the near climactic perception of imminent violence are simultaneous. There is a moment where the sign is put forth and sharing it has begun and this emergence both incites and registers an even more frenzied mimetic surge toward the center.\n\nIn other words, only as framed by the sign could this very precise form of “violence” be perceived, feared, and deferred. The “ultimate” terror is of the shattering of this novel form of solidarity—and, the “ultimate” violence is towards those upon whom the grace of the center shines. But this also means that this “satanic” violence need not be particularly violent, or even threatening, physically. In issuing the sign, the first signers create the conditions for and defer the “violence” of a refusal of solidarity when it’s most needed. This, in turn, is possible because at this moment the center emerges as “self-aware” and both bestows sameness on the group and demands they constitute themselves as and around an other.\n\nI should say that I see no problem with “mimesis,” both because it is not a specifically human concept and because I see a fairly easy way to translate it (and its escalation into mimetic crisis) into the primes, indicating its universality: “Someone can say: ‘I see you do something.’ This person wants to do like this other someone. This person wants to have what this other someone has. This someone wants to be this other someone. This someone knows this someone cannot be this other if this other lives.” The “center” may turn out to be problematic, but I would eventually like to speak about the center in terms of a “this-it” relation or oscillation.\n\n“This,” what we are looking at, becomes “it” (or IT) as we all see it through the other members of the group. “Desire” I find much less problematic than “resentment,” but it’s certainly not a universal term, and it would be more coherent to see desire as coming from the center than from the subject—desire would be a kind of “ITwardness,” which we “feel” or “know” when some “this” becomes “it-like.” Terms less directly tied to the necessities of describing the originary scene, and which are even more clearly indebted to very specific intellectual and ritual traditions need not detain us long. I don’t see any need for a word like “transcendence,” for example—“presence” is a much better word for our purposes, and is more easily translated into the primes: all can say “all see the same thing now”—not to mention that it is a grammatical tense, which we assume to be the first one, the first to create a world that both is and is not “here and now.”\n\nWhat would replace all this would be the oscillation between mistakenness and presence. In terms of the primes, this involves the shift from “It’s not the same” to “You can say it’s the same.” I’ve reviewed the concept of “mistakenness” recently, and so I’ll now emphasize the subtle but decisive shift in the way it leads us to speak of human intentions. The metaphysical, which has become the commonplace, way of speaking about “intention” is to imagine a kind of internal map that projects some transformation in the world (itself always already organized as a map). We could then speak of an intention realized if the world is made over to look like that internalized map (which can, of course, be externalized and made public). And we can speak about degrees of realization depending upon how different the intentional and actual maps are from each other.\n\nInstead of this “picture,” we would think in terms of someone wanting to do what someone else has done—i.e., we start with a model, who commands you to emulate, conform to, continue some work, etc. The more faithful you are to the model, the more certain you are to mistake the imperatives issued by and through the model, because you must fulfill imperatives issued from a previous scene upon a new one. Your actions will be mistaken according to the “rules” implicit in the imperative itself, as well as according the rules of the new scene or field, to which you are bringing something at least to some extent unprecedented.\n\nYour action will have to be redeemed within the scene, by participants who will have to stretch or bend the rules so as to make them applicable to the novelty you have introduced. So, you don’t really know what you’re doing until you see what they take you to be doing. Your “intention,” then, is really a prolonged act of attention, carried over from your original attraction to the model to the signs of reception given and given off by your audience or collaborators. And if at points along the way you stop and state in explicit terms what you’re trying to do, how, and why, that itself is an act, and one which involves you following some model and seeking “redemption” in some shared scene.\n\nTalk of intention can therefore shift to the question of what makes any act the same in the course of its performance, what makes any agent the same over the course of carrying out successive actions, what makes a scene the same from the start of an event enacted within it to the completion of that event. We know that in each case the “object” in question can be treated as not the same: the act can be seen as broken or inconsistent, the agent as a fraud, the purported scene in fact a product of shared illusions and reciprocally cancelling actions. We know this because on the originary scene this was the first problem nascent humanity had to solve—determining where all members put forth the same sign as the others and none were advancing some design upon the central object. This is the problem we solve through names, designations, rituals, repetitions, self-referentiality, markers of authenticity—and pretty much everything else we do. The first command from the center is to determine that your gestures be the same.\n\nLet’s return to the problem of turning “resentment” into a second person concept. We would have to be able to say that what we now call “resentment,” which Eric Gans in his latest and aforementioned Chronicle defines, in its originary form, as “the hostile reaction to the object’s self-refusal,” as a “mistake.” It’s not much of a stretch—since the object’s self-refusal is the basis of the foundation of the community, “reacting” in a hostile manner is a “misreading” of the situation. (In relation to what “correct” reading, though?) But we could look a bit more closely at that “reacting.” First of all, it seems that the resentful member doesn’t really do anything, insofar as the scene holds, so the reaction is either “internal” or delayed—say, until the sparagmos, when the central victim can be torn apart with special ferociousness.\n\nI don’t see any way of positing anything “internal” to the human at this point (or any other—but that’s a different issue), since the center hasn’t yet provided a model for anything that could be described in that way. So it’s delayed—but if the sparagmos is, in fact the central being giving itself up, wouldn’t that “appease” rather than exacerbate any resentment? Isn’t it simpler to say that the sparagmos is the first trial run of the new sign, and the “aggression” displayed by members of the group are tests of its deferral capabilities?\n\nIf the members on the scene “experience” (more indigestible words) “hostility,” it must be because the central object first of all drew them all in, led them on, gave a promise of itself. It was a tease. In taking his fellows as models, each member was taught to approach the object in such a way as to confer more power of compulsion on that object in the course of approaching it. We don’t have an imperative yet, but the central being is “telling” one and all to become more and more like the others—and it continues to tell them this, but suddenly in a totally different way. Everyone was told to be the same in one way, and now to be the same in an utterly opposed way.\n\nThe mistake was in thinking all could be the same in appropriation; a mistake that would be revealed as the approach of the others toward the object progressively close off one’s own opportunities to approach: the central being then becomes other. This mistake is corrected with the new practice of sameness in restraint, and distribution, and, even more precisely, in relation to an other (another prime word); but the central being cannot help but provoke that same mistake forever. Even the practice of deferral participates in that same mistake by making the central being more estimable and desirable. What we call “resentment” is seeing and hearing the other as we become more the same. But that practice of having the other emerge as sameness reaches its limits and then revising the terms of sameness might include much that we wouldn’t call resentment, but would be included under this seeing and hearing the other.\n\nSo, we can then get rid of psychological terms like “resentment,” “reaction,” “hostility,” and so on, and speak in terms of signs emitted from the center that are mistaken. The mistakenness-presence oscillation is a same-other-same dialectic. We tried to be the same—the same as each other, the same as the being modeled by the center, the same as ourselves—but we mistook the signs needed to verify that sameness and found otherness instead. The mistake is then taken as a sign of presence—everyone is here now before the other—which compounds and redeems it. We need never leave the space of imitation, centrality, mistake, presence, sign, same, other. We must imitate, and we always get imitation wrong; certain ways of getting imitation wrong are prolonged and reversed into a new form of imitation that includes imitating the being we thought was pulling us in, vortex-like—but was in fact arraying us, vertex-like.\n\nThe mistakenness of any practice will become apparent in unforeseeable ways, as will the redemption of that mistakenness. This doesn’t mean we can have no goals, projects or purposes. It means having goals, projects and purposes that include generating scenes upon which our mistakes will create presence. The more aware and attentional we become regarding our models—the deep and vast streams of traditions inflowing all our practices—and the more explicit we make our indebtedness to them, the more obvious must all the ways we are mistaking them also be. Once upon a time we could call these mistakes sins and expiate them through sacrifice. Now, we can present our mistaken practices as calls for presence, as innumerable ramifications from the present each of which faces the other and faces the others as other and asks to be redeemed as the same.\n\nNor do I mean to suggest that we should stop using terms like “resentment,” “violence” and the rest. It’s important to undergo the rigors of conceptual clarification—a hunger strike, if you like—so that we can know better what we’re doing with the conceptual resources at our disposal. Afterwards we can gorge on our inherited vocabulary. It’s good to know that we can go without using familiar terms so that we get clearer about how we use them when we do—and maybe in more and different ways than we tend to realize. It’s good to be able to slim down to the dimensions of Wierzbicka’s primes—maybe it will even be helpful to someone doing translations somewhere down the line."
    },
    {
      "slug": "praxis",
      "title": "Praxis",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Feb 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ve written this post in response to the following comment on the Absolutist Neoreaction reddit page:\n\nI’ve noticed that even in your recent articles there’s something still off. That’s in regards to GA and mechanics.\n\nIt’s fair to say that liberalism has an obsession with the self and super-sovereignty in general. I don’t see how focusing on these pragmatist mechanisms is really actually transcending that. It seems like all we’re building is just some superior version of Gentile, which isn’t going to actually solve anything.\n\nWe, ourselves, can’t fall into this trap of evaluating liberal mechanics. As you’ve put forward there needs to be a direct scenic participation; however, I dont see how anything less than embodying paradox will solve this issue. Rather than speaking about paradox (predicate) we should speak paradox (subject).\n\nWhen I say paradox I speak about asymmetry, first-ness, outside-ness, paranirvana, etc.. All of these are great examples of this emerging paradox that GA elucidates.\n\nIf we focus and bring a further awareness of what we’re even talking about, it becomes obvious that this is GAs true calling card. In order to properly transcend liberalism in toto, we can’t just simply focus on design even.\n\nRather than a flat rejection of super-sovereignty we should be gathering threads of older imperatives in history in order to develop a constantly evolving praxis. We’re only ever actually going to get anywhere if we can participate fully, ultimately that’s what’s going to make us different. Not evaluation of ‘why these are bad’ or ‘inquiries into language’, but rather the focus is the most direct participation available.\n\nNow to address the morality issue of simple charisma and unifying centers. This, once again, is part of the same issues. There needs to be a recognition of unity in dissonance. Embodying and speaking anthropological and moral paradoxes. It really can’t be distilled so easily to static and even dynamic charisma vs transgression. We need to further pick apart moral agency even, with that focus on paradox/asymmetry. Ultimately we shouldn’t be unifying to distill into one bigger center, but rather recognizing that we can turn centers themselves (paradoxically) into larger grander ones, simply by digging down (backwards in history).\n\nI should add before I conclude, that what I’ve typed is by no means fully formed or all that probably has to be said. I’m open to being wrong but I hope I got my point across.\n\nTo conclude, don’t speak about asymmetry, embody it to generate praxis.\n\nSince this message is a call for praxis, I’m in a bit of a double bind because my response here can hardly be anything more than speaking about all of the above. I certainly wouldn’t know how to begin to speak about something like strategy or logistics in this context. The question of flatly rejecting super-sovereignty might be a good place to start. In a sense we shouldn’t be flatly rejecting anything—all language is language we can inhabit. Participation is first of all participating in another’s language. If you surface the paradoxes constituting the other’s discourse, then you’re embodying paradox. A good place to begin is making explicit the distinctions and boundaries implicitly established in the other’s discourse.\n\nYou find a way to represent some position that both can’t and must exist in the other’s discourse. A simple example: I’ve noted that if you listen carefully to certain victimary discourses, especially on gender and race lines, you can, with very minor adjustments in the feminist’s or anti-racist’s discourse, show them to be essentially confessing the inadequacy of women or blacks to fully participate in a modern social order. Too much offends them, too much frightens them, too much disables them, too many minor obstacles for others are insurmountable stumbling blocks for them, etc. You can learn to simply read this off the other’s discourse and enact it, without making any overt argument of your own.\n\nYou can then, not present yourself as the real anti-racist who is quite confident that the victim group in question is quite capable of meeting all the rigorous demands of modern life, but, rather, initiate a discussion of institutional and social design. The feminist or anti-racist might be stymied—if you perform well—but I think my notion of the “sovereign imaginary” could be effective here in laying out some of the governing prerequisites for meeting some of the other’s explicit and implicit demands. What kind of state are you imagining such that it could do what is necessary to address what you want addressed?\n\nI’ve been experimenting with a kind of “vocabulary reform” within my anthropomorphic version of GA. I’ve been working with the concept of “mistakenness” for quite a while now, and it’s one of the concepts that some seem to have found the most interesting and useful. I want to first of all emphasize that this concept is derived directly from Gans’s analysis of the succession of language forms from ostensive to imperative to interrogative (which has still not quite gotten its due) to the declarative. The imperative derives from an “inappropriate” ostensive, which the interlocutor tries to rescue by actually producing the demanded object.\n\nThe declarative, in a more complex way, derives similarly from an inappropriate imperative. What leads to the rescue of the inappropriate gesture or utterance in each case is the desire for what Gans calls “linguistic presence,” and which we can perhaps simply call “presence,” because what would a non-linguistic presence be? The need for maintaining or restoring presence itself derives from the originary scene—we can say, a little anachronistically, that preserving linguistic presence is the first imperative of the center. And what it meant first of all was that each member on the scene ensure that his sign was the same as that issued by others. A sign that wasn’t the same would be a marker either of an intent to resume the approach to the center or to cease defending the center along with the others—either possibility would threaten the collapse of the group.\n\nSo, from the start we have this basic dialectic of mistakenness-presence. My hypothesis is that this dialectic can do all the work of what I have increasingly come to find to be the clumsy and imprecise concepts of “desire” and (especially) “resentment.” With “resentment” in particular, not only do I not see it attain a stable meaning in Gans’s work, but it’s the kind of term that impedes praxis or “participation.” Once you call the other “resentful” you disqualify him as a participant—he really has no choice but to throw the same epithet back at you. My “bet” is that anything we refer to as a marker of resentment could just as illuminatingly be referred to as an instance of mistakenness—an imperative from the center has been obeyed “inappropriately.”\n\nThe most stable meaning of “resentment,” I think, is that it involves accusing another of receiving more from the center than he “deserves,” which in turn is an at least implicit accusation directed toward the center—the substance of that accusation being that the center is insufficiently central, since a genuine central would distribute benefits “appropriately.” But since the center always distributes appropriately, this accusation must be mistaking the command of the center as one to point out this insufficient centrality. The restoration of presence on the part of the other participants on the scene then involves obeying that command in such a way as to ensure that both the accuser and accused have “something to do,” and a more explicitly named (not necessarily better) status within the community. Insofar as the center was insufficiently central, that deficiency lay in some failure in our obedience to its commands. In scriptural terms, the problem is that we were “of little faith.”\n\nIf you were determined to prove to another that he was acting resentfully (not just prove to others who, like yourself, might be too prepared to convict), what would be the best way to go about it? It seems to me you’d have to construct a scene upon which his resentments were acted out without any “objective correlative” to those resentments in the scene itself. If you, for example, suspect someone of resenting his friend’s success, while he in fact believes he has a perfectly good reason for criticizing that friend (e.g., he’s a “sell-out”), then you’d need a situation in which that friend is demonstrably not selling out but the criticism gets triggered all the same.\n\nThis is essentially a comic, or satiric, episode. You’d then be able to point to how the “resenter” acted, and what he responded to, and help him see the incommensurability, or “inappropriateness.” If it’s done well, and he’s at all willing and able to see, then he will. But the best person to be at the center of this enactment would be the friend himself, which is to say the person who actually elicits the resentment. So, “participation” here means being willing to put yourself forward as the “trigger” for resentments that you could then expose, elucidate and find some way to share and thereby dissolve.\n\nBut I said that I don’t want to speak in terms of “resentment”—or, at least, I want to not have to do so. That makes things easier—rather than proving that the other is mistaken, you create presence and prove it by canceling the mistake. And we’re all always mistaken within some frame. You can think about mistakenness as someone making a move that would be appropriate in some actual or possible game, but not in the game everyone else happens to be playing at the time. Since the person presumably wasn’t making the mistake on purpose (in that case it wouldn’t be a mistake), they were making a move that can be seen as “analogous” in some way to moves that would be proper within the ongoing game. In that case, someone can find a way to revise the game so that move would now be a proper (but not necessarily winning) one. But this also means that someone could stumble into a new move which renders all the appropriate ones inappropriate, i.e., turns the entire game into a new one (it would have to be a strong move to enact its own mistakenness so insistently).\n\nIf we’re focused, in this way, on countering and building on one another’s moves, with the main goal being to keep the game going, make it more inclusive, more productive of better moves and new kinds of coordination, then we never have to step outside of the game to question someone’s motives or whether they are the bearer of feelings or “states” like desire and resentment. Whatever we need to know about them will be exhibited in their moves. So, this is a kind of paradox to be embodied: knowing it’s a game—or, really, the more open-ended “play”—while simultaneously taking it completely seriously. The more self-referential the play, the more each move points back to and repurposes previous moves.\n\nThe existence of the play, and the increasing density of the “traditions” of moves embodies an adherence to the center around which we revolve, however unevenly; meanwhile, the ongoing play provides opportunities for the players to occupy centers by making moves that create “temporary monopolies” (a term of Gans’s) of attention—all on the condition that no one steps outside of the play into a meta-language (super-sovereignty) that would claim to codify the rules from outside of the play. (Any attempt to do so would be treated a mistake and recouped within the presence of the play.) Such temporary monopolies would be, within this analogy, “governance,” and one possessing such a monopoly would govern so as to sustain that position as a node within the field, that others could subsequently occupy, insofar as they model themselves on the present occupant and make that region of the field especially productive and “corporal” (that is, involving all its members).\n\nWherever you are, whether thinking or acting, someone has just made a move for you to translate into the first in a sequence of moves, governed by rules that will become more explicit while generating more tacit rules along the way. There’s even a practice of composition here, as you can counter and build on your previous “mistaken” moves, creating structures that contain a margin of mistakenness acknowledging their own historical limitations, and making implicit requests for saving presence from participants yet to come."
    },
    {
      "slug": "declarative-culture-properly-understood-gablog",
      "title": "Declarative Culture, Properly Understood",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The declarative sentence makes explicit what remains implicit in ostensives and imperatives. Ostensives and imperatives “work” because a whole scenic configuration is already in place and goes unnoticed and unremarked upon. Not noticing and remarking upon this configuration is a precondition for the operation of ostensives and imperatives, and remarking upon them is an interruption of their operation. But sustained imperative orders include provisos involving the solicitation of periodic feedback, which is an invitation, in a limited form, of declarative culture into the ostensive-imperative world. You could say that all of “politics” concerns the way this happens, and whether the representatives of declarative culture (the disciplines) support or usurp the ostensive-imperative world.\n\nPostliberals, or autocrats, have a problem in this regard: we must be ruthlessly critical of everything existing, but what we are ruthlessly critical of is primarily the subversion of the ostensive-imperative world by ruthless criticism. We want to identify and pre-empt every encroachment of the declarative upon the ostensive-imperative, while recognizing that the existing ostensive-imperative world is largely comprised of the accumulated results of centuries of such encroachments. We have to be more explicit about scenic orders than liberals can afford to be, while doing so in the name of a restoration of implicitness to its proper place.\n\nIt is actually the more fully developed declarative culture that supports implicitness. The use of declaratives to undermine authority (the ostensive-imperative world) by positing a more real “super-sovereignty” against which that authority can be measured (“nature,” “justice,” “equality”) but can’t be trusted to measure itself is simultaneously a refusal to use declaratives to examine the desires and resentments that lead to the relentless targeting of authority. The declarative culture inhabiting the cloud-cuckoo land of super-sovereignty, then, is really more the outgrowth of a competing, rogue, imperative order than a properly declarative one.\n\nSo, one can target the existing “health care system,” pointing out the “greed,” “waste,” corruptly disordered priorities, inequities, and so on, all the while presupposing a completely unexamined model of what a “good” health care system would be. If you ask someone consumed with the ruthless critique of “insurance companies,” or whatever, well, how, exactly, should a “health care system” work, you will most likely be provided an idealized description of some end result: everyone should have “access,” health care should be “affordable” or even “free,” no one should go bankrupt because of a long term illness, etc.\n\nIn other words, you get a consumer’s rather than a designer’s perspective. If you then probe a bit further and ask, for example, about the training of medical professionals, and which medical professionals should address health “issues” at what level; or how priorities should be set regarding planning and preparing for unanticipated contingencies (or, for that matter, how to determine which contingencies—or, rather, “types” of contingencies—should be more or less “anticipated”), providing preventive care, allocating responsibility for conditions conducive to better health at various levels of authority, including that of families and individuals; upon what other institutional structures does “health care” rely upon; and, finally, what effects the preferred policy of the moment might have on all these imperative orders, you will most likely get a blank stare.\n\nAnd understandably so—everyone is encouraged to play at being president, with immediately implementable opinions; no one is encouraged to think and operate at the level at which one’s feedback might be help (except, minimally, as a private consumer).\n\nWhen you “want” something like “universal access to health care,” however that is pictured in your mind, you really want an entire social order which you could never fully articulate. The left can make it to this point with us, but then they short-circuit it when this “entire social order” dissolves into babble about “disparities in wealth and power” or the like. They want to imagine a social order in which everyone is exactly equal in wealth and power but such a social order is unimaginable—it’s a kind of declarative sublime. As soon as you were to say something like, “well, doctors would have to…,” you invoke an entire order in which doctors are produced, certified, guaranteed a certain income and social status relative to others, embedded in institutions in which that “have to” would be actualized, and all that in turn implicates a whole series of hierarchies and command structures. The proper use of declarative culture is to articulate all this, and engage others in its articulation.\n\nSuch a practice of declarative culture, and the cultured declarative, will invariably have a satiric dimension. Someone says, “I just want to be able to take my kid to the emergency room without going bankrupt” and you say something like, “so, you want a slave class of emergency room physicians forced to work 16 hours a day for subsistence”; or, coming at it from the other end, “so, you want a redirection of resources to medical innovation freed from certain FDA strictures and a redesign of health care professional training so as to provide for more precise layers of qualification”; you will get a “wait—what?” kind of response.\n\nBut something like that really is their desire, properly laid out. And you thereby initiate a conversation—should the other wish to pursue it (and this is a good way of determining very quickly which discussions are worth pursuing)—about what kind of conditions would leave us with harried, exhausted, over-educated and low paid doctors or a well ordered hierarchy of medical professionals and institutions (and associated research institutions, and educational institutions that supply them, and so on). And at the end of such questioning is the question of who could we expect to provide for the preferable alternative. What kind of orders would have to be given at what level, and what kind of people would be capable of giving and implementing such orders? In other words, we would be speaking about the imperatives we hear from the center.\n\nYou can already find discussions of health care that approximate the kind I’ve been simulating—anyone with any responsibility or knowledge of the field knows that these discussions involve institutions, resources, large scale decision making, and so on. But there are whole fields of desires and resentments where this is much more tenuously the case, and which are therefore especially rich fields for rogue imperative-qua declarative super-sovereignties to enter. These are the desires and resentments generated by the grotesque superstructures of anti-discrimination law, the fields of race, gender, and sexuality, where fortunes can be made or lost on the interpretation of a joke or a gesture.\n\n“I just want, as a woman in the workplace, to be treated with respect, and not as a sexual object.” Well, yes, but “respect” and “sex” are historical, deeply tradition-laden concepts, which require elaborate translations if their meaning is to be determined outside of a given institution’s Code of Conduct (which has processed those terms through political structured legal innovations)—or even if we are to make sense of that Code of Conduct in a given case. The actual desire here is to have the option to be a plaintiff in a particular kind of lawsuit, presided over by a particular type of judge, produced by a law school within a system of law schools dominated by a particular judicial and political philosophy, and therefore upon certain funding institutions—and, moreover, to be represented in various media in specific ways which can be described in phrases like “having one’s voice heard,” “having one’s experience recognized,” “finally saying ‘enough’,” and so on, which one has already internalized by imitating skilled and canny female strivers represented by those same media. And this is not yet to speak of the whole history of pulverizations of intermediate institutions and authorities, a history largely forgotten but marked by the epithetical residue of demonizing and popularized terms like “mansplain.”\n\nEven those who think such transformations were good or necessary prefer to not speak of them in other than mythical terms of underdogs overcoming transparently tyrannical forms of power. Dragged out into the light of day, they look less obviously beneficial and inevitable. Answering the rather obvious question, “how did the powerless win,” is where the mythmaking comes in. They must have had some power in the end. Behind the mythmaking lies the rogue imperative order—someone (and we could always name names) wanted to circumvent the established order. Well, maybe there was some good reason to but, regardless, we would have a very different story in that case.\n\nIt would be a story of one form of authority displacing another, each with its own hierarchies, “entailments” and “affordances.” The ultimate revelation is that every desire is the desire of the center and for the center. Here’s the model of authority entailed by your desire, and here’s the model of authority I would propose in response: where are the overlappings and incommensurabilities? Can we imagine various syntheses? What “enablements” and what defects are we presupposing, along with which potential remedies, in the form of authority, and the traditions informing it, authorizing this very discussion we are having right here and now?\n\nLet’s play a little game—how many degrees of separation are there between us discoursing here and now, and someone doing something, indebted to our discoursing, that might make some difference that wouldn’t have been made without our discoursing? How much of our discoursing is informed by the knowledge available to us regarding our remoteness from power and of the constitution of our discoursing by that remoteness? Answering the subsequent question, “well, then, what, exactly, are we doing now,” would be an appropriate use of declarative culture."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-stack-the-city",
      "title": "The Stack, the City",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This will be my first run at Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (2016), a book that is extremely interesting in its own right (and likely to continue to be so) while also representing a new area of inquiry—familiar with postmodern theory, and drawing heavily upon thinkers like Foucault and Deleuze, while taking full account of all the implications of “planetary-wide computation.” As I mentioned a little while back, while Bratton, and his colleagues at the Moscow Strelka Institute (from which much more is promised) and the e-flux journal, is certainly “leftist,” he can barely be bothered to even pay lip service to the trendy race, gender, sexuality issues, or gesture toward “power and wealth disparities.”\n\nRather, his politics is almost exclusively concerned with climate change, and in reading Bratton and some of his colleagues it become fairly obvious that what most fascinates in ecology is the pretext it provides for design projects that would match the scope of the supposed problem and draw upon the resources available through planetary computation. In fact, if, rather than obsessing over trying to minimize (and even shrink) the amount of carbon in the environment, we were to say, “well, why don’t we just accept that all the things the climate changers say is going to happen—melting polar caps, flooded coastlines, super-storms and the rest—will happen and redesign our human habitat in response,” we’d have an “absolutist” or “autocratic” project precisely parallel to Bratton’s in scope, ambition, and disregard for present political pieties.\n\nBratton sees planetary scale computation as a challenge, not necessarily insurmountable, to existing forms of sovereignty. He shifts Schmitt’s “nomos” from the earth to the “cloud,” as in cloud computing. The “stack” is the vertical and “accidental” articulation of different “layers”: the Cloud layer, the Earth layer, the City Layer, the Address layer, the Interface layer, and the User layer. This model is clearly meant to replace or significantly “update” our outdated models of nations, sovereignty, citizenship, rights, and all the rest—but the problem of articulating all these levels coherently leaves open the possibility that some kind of traditionally conceived sovereignty (political will) might be beneficial or even necessary to help create the “stack of the future.”\n\nThis opens the possibility for very interesting discussions. Before saying a little about each of these layers, and zeroing in on one in particular, I want to point out that, with the exception, I suppose, of the “Cloud” and “Earth” layers, which seem to be clearly the highest and lowest, respectively, the layers seem to me to be less piled on top of, than wedged (in very complicated and uneven ways) into each other.\n\nThe Cloud is the layer of the accumulation and processing of the massive amounts of data now produced, intentionally and inadvertently, through all of our daily activities. The Cloud sovereigns are Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook (I’m not sure whether Bratton would—or should—put Twitter, or others—into this pantheon). Google seems to be primus inter pares here. I don’t think anyone needs to be convinced that whether and how these “polities” transcend and subordinate (or eliminate), on the one hand, or are integrated into, on the other hand, traditional forms of sovereignty, is one of the more pressing medium-term questions of the present order.\n\nThe Earth is the earth as the source of the massive ongoing extraction of raw materials required to keep the Cloud going—the entire earth being scoured for minerals and power sources, in the use of which planetary-scale computation dwarfs by a great deal all other forms of power use. And, of course, the Earth absorbs all the consequences of this enormous burning of energy. Needless to say, all kinds of questions of economic and political control enter into ensuring continual access to (and responsibility for) Earth. The Address layer is where institutions and individuals (the latter increasingly through institutions) gain access and make themselves accessible to the Cloud; as an Address, we are each of us entered into the Cloud in various ways, from various points of entry.\n\nThe Interface layer is the ways in which users are provided access to the Cloud and through it to institutions. There is always an Interface, and, the Interface level is the one where the vocabulary of the Stack most overlaps with more familiar vocabularies—we start to notice that every human interaction involves (or can be described in terms of) some kind of “interface,” which is probably going to replace the older, more philosophical term “mediation.” The Interface is a site of interesting design problems—the way the website looks and works, the series of clicks one must employ to “enter” some online enclave is enormously consequential for the shape of the subsequent “exchange.”\n\nAnd we all know what the “User” is, since we are all users, all day long, at various sites. Bratton seems to me to suggesting pretty strongly that “User” (with its, as I’ve seen others point out, connotations of addiction and dependency) is coming to replace “citizen” as the way we are all identified within and participate in the Stack.\n\nFurthermore, Bratton makes it clear that Users are not necessarily human—in fact, the vast majority of them are not—or, at least, that will eventually be the case. Companies and institutions can set up proxy users, automated users with addresses through which business can be transacted. And this brings us to another aspect of what, for now, I’ll call “the thought of the Stack”—its development of tendencies within posthuman and postmetaphysical discourses that relativize or, better, “relationalize” the human in relation to the non-human—the mechanical and algorithmic as well as the animal, vegetable and mineral. To put it simply, humans are not the only agents—al though the question seems to be left open (Bratton often seems to be ready to close it, though) as to whether humans are a particularly important or special kind of agent.\n\nThe transcendence of liberalism would be the transcendence of humanism as well, so there are legitimate questions for postliberals here as well—certainly, if we assume that desire and resentment are always of the center, that we only have being in and through the center, we’re not exactly “humanists” either, insofar as humanism means putting humans at the center. I would insist on the distinctiveness of joint attention, but animals certainly exercise attention, the metabolics and chemical composition of other materials can be said to have some form or “tendency” analogous to attention (we could invoke Aristotle here, or point out that “attention” might be on a continuum with something like “responsiveness”) and our machines have simulations of attention and intention programmed into them—so, humanity’s “specialization” within the Stack can be acknowledged while we see a continuum along various “layers” of being. Anyway, I just mark these as questions to be taken up as more of us, I hope, familiarize ourselves with Bratton’s and his colleagues’ work.\n\nThis brings us to the City layer, the one that I think really stands out here—all the rest of the layers have come into existence over the past few decades, but there have been cities for 10,000 years. The city is, by definition and etymology, a political entity. Bratton, it seems to me, ultimately wants to see the city insofar as it is integrated into the other layers—as a conglomeration of users and architectural interfaces that allow the Cloud nomos to organize production, circulation and consumption. But it’s impossible to avoid questions of power here, and Bratton draws upon Deleuze’s concept of a “society of control,” which Deleuze saw as replacing Foucault’s ‘disciplinary society”—whereas the disciplinary society, through institutions like schools, prisons, militaries, factories, etc., worked directly on the bodies of its subjects, the society of control “modulates” the interfacial means providing ingress and egress to various institution and interactions.\n\nThis distinction has always seemed to me overstated, insofar as Foucault’s notion of “panopticism” already includes the idea of self-regulation in response to anticipated responses to one’s possible behavior, but we don’t need to “relitigate” this debate within postmodern theory here (or anywhere else, probably). Either way, controlling behavior by making it clear that certain kinds of decisions will give you a bad credit rating a decade down the line is far more effective than constantly punishing or shaming people for trivial purchases—at least on a systemic, if not always on an individual level. (Distinguishing between those who need constant “stimuli” and those who can find patterns and anticipate is also a good way of sorting people out.)\n\nBratton’s discussion of the City layer, like all of his discussion, is complex, interesting and rather breathless—he refers back to ancient cities as the city of temples, sacrifice, and distribution (not much, if anything, on palaces and kings, though), discusses airports as a model for thinking the contemporary city, and much else. Still, the fact that the capitals of countries, where the government is seated, are cities, seems to interest him less, as does the imperial nature of at least the major cities. Cities are the center. Like markets and money, to which cities are constitutively related, cities seem to have generally (if not invariably) been created by the imperial center.\n\nJane Jacobs makes a very interesting, counter-intuitive argument in her The Economy of Cities , to the effect that the urban precedes the rural—that, in fact, agricultural communities were established to feed the city rather than, as seems more “natural,” cities being a result of the development of farming to the point where extensive exchange became possible (this seemingly natural assumption is strikingly and suspiciously similar to the seemingly natural assumption of barter growing to the point where money became necessary to mediate the sheer volume of exchanges). At any rate, the better we get at discussing “the City,” the better we will be able to argue that it is within the City layer that the agency needed to make all the layers of Stack more consistent, internally and with each other, will come from within the City. And, unless you believe in the possibility of technocracy (as Bratton does), that is the kind of argument you will need to make.\n\nNeedless to say, there have been lots of cities and many different kinds of cities. But perhaps we can say that cities are where individuals are abstracted from kinship and cult relations and related directly to an at least potentially desacralized authority. Even when there’s a cult of the city, it’s a cult abstracted from and shared by the separate tribes and families with their traditional cults. The city is where divine kinship replaces sacral kingship, and where the mobilization of masses of instrumentalized and de-socialized slave laborers is initiated. The city is therefore the site of intensified and distributed mimetic activity, of endless mimetic crises and deferrals, which are in turn converted into models of governance.\n\nThe pastoral, the aesthetic mode that celebrates the natural and virtuous countryside to the artificial and vicious city is itself a product of and reflection upon urban life—the “artificial” city is the source of “Nature” (part of Bratton’s project is to eliminate the entire notion of “nature” as well as “culture” by acknowledging the artificiality of everything—a development heralded by the city). The city is the cynosure and produces cynosures (“celebrities”). Cities are modeled on other cities and are modeled and remodeled on themselves, or some imaginary project of themselves. To capture the city is at least a precondition to capturing the entire country—sometimes it actually seems to be a sufficient condition.\n\nCities have an egalitarian tendency, due to their abstractness, but they are above all centers generating satellites: other cities, suburbs and countryside, geopolitical peripheries. It is from the standpoint of the city—Washington D.C. in relation to New York and LA, in relation to Des Moines, Dallas and Orlando, in relation to the “heartland”; in relation to London, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Dubai, Jerusalem, Cairo, and so on, and through these centers to other peripheries (and feel free to contest my American-centrism if you think another order is emerging)—it is only by subordinating the Stack to a coherent ordering of these center-periphery relations that the Stack can be integrated into the human order, rather than the reverse. But these reflections are, I emphasize, by way of laying the groundwork for engaging these new disciplinary spaces.\n\nAddendum:\n\nAfter writing this post, I happened to come across an essay (“On Anthropolysis,” published in 2018) by Bratton that touches on the question of human origins. Here are the first two paragraphs:\n\nAnthropogeny is the study of human origins, of how something that was not quite human becomes human. It considers what enables and curtails us today: tool-making and prehensile grasp, the pre-frontal cortex and abstraction, figuration and war, mastering fire and culinary chemistry, plastics and metals, the philosophical paths to agricultural urbanism and more. Given that Darwinian biology and Huttonian geology are such new perspectives, we may say that anthropogeny, in any kind of scientific sense, is only very recently possible. Before, human emergence was considered from the distorting perspective of local folklores.\n\nCreation myths, sacred and secular, have been placeholders for anthropogeny, and still now defend their turf. When Hegel was binding the history of the world to the history of European national self-identity, it was assumed among his public that the age of the planet could be measured in a few millennia (103 or 104 years), not aeons (109 years). The fabrication of social memory and the intuition of planetary duration were thought to operate in closely paired natural rhythms. While the deep time of the genomic and geologic record shows that that they do not, the illusion of their contemporaneity also brought dark consequences that, strangely enough, would actualize that same illusion.\n\nIn the subsequent era, the meta-consequence of this short- sighted conceit is the Anthropocene itself, a period in which local economic history has in fact determined planetary circumstances in its own image. The temporal binding of social and planetary time has been, in this way, a self-fulfilling superstition.\n\nAs such, how is the anthropos of anthropogeny similar to or different from the anthropos of the Anthropocene? Are they correspondent? Does the appearance of the human lead inevitably toward, if not this particular Anthropocene, then an Anthropocene, and some eventual strong binding of social and geologic econo- mies? Whether the two anthropoi are alike or unlike in origin, can they converge or diverge? Instead of becoming human, does a sharp temporal linking also speak to becoming something else? That is, in what ways is a post-Anthropocene—a geo-historical era to come, eventually—aligned with “anthropolysis” — or the inverse of anthropogeny—a becoming inhuman, posthuman, unhuman, or at least a very different sort of human?\n\nThe Anthropocene is that period in the history of the earth where the earth is decisively marked, even made over by, human activity. There is some interesting equivocation in Bratton’s discussion here. On the one hand, human origins can only be seriously explored after the scientific innovations of Darwinian theory and modern geology—prior to that, there was plenty of talk of human origins, but all of it mythical and folkloric (Bratton’s Voltairean contempt of anything smacking of religion or myth comes out especially strongly in this essay). In other words, only in the Anthropocene could a plausible account of human origins emerge—even if Bratton doesn’t consider the question important enough to do more than gesture towards brain development, war, fire and food.\n\nWhat we discover in and through the Anthropocene is that the earth and its history have no regard for human scale. At the same time, the delusional belief that the history of the earth was tailored to human needs and purposes, and was therefore to be mastered, was the very attitude that, in a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” produced the Anthropocene, the age in which the human transforms and even endangers the earth. It then makes sense for Bratton to ask whether “the appearance of the human lead[s] inevitably towards, if not this Anthropocene, at least some Anthropocene.”\n\nWe are in the middle of some very interesting paradoxes here. What kind of being must this human be if it was “destined” to produce some Anthropocene? Presumably a being compelled to see itself as essential to the world, to see the world as created for its own sake. Why should developments in the cortex, the mastering of fire, and so on create such a being? That the human leads to the Anthopocene, and the Anthropocene leads to Anthropolysis, the “breaking up” of the human into the “inhuman, posthuman, unhuman, or at least a very different sort of human,” is very suggestive. But most of the rest of this essay is an attack on contemporary ‘reactionaries,” who wish to return to national ethnic, religious, etc., fairy tales and reject the science that will remake humans into—what, exactly, and why?—finally drifting in and out of various science fiction visions. The limits of Bratton’s anthropolysis lie in his refusal to take seriously the question of anthropogenesis. But he does end with the following thought:\n\nIf the Anthropocene binds social time to planetary time, then let the former scale up to the latter, not the latter down to the former. With maximum demystification, make human economies operate according to the geologic scale we found hiding under the rocks. This inversion of the temporal binding we have is the kind of good definition of the post-Anthropocene that we need, and the inversion of the humanist position and perspective it would require is the anthropolysis we want.\n\nIn a way, this formulation parallels that of the inherently anthropocenic human—in both cases, it seems essential to have the human scale match the planetary scale. The human must make itself a match to the planetary; or, to put it in terms that might repel Bratton, the human has to make the planet a home. I’ll appeal here to Walter Ong, who, in his posthumously published Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization argues that the ongoing “analysis” of reality through the process of breaking it up into smaller and smaller “bits” in fact raises more questions of “interpretation” at each point along the way.\n\nSimilarly, the process of anthropolysis, of becoming a “very different sort of human” (aren’t we always becoming a different sort of human?), raises questions of anthropogenesis. GA has not, perhaps, paid enough attention to the human as a world maker, but the originary hypothesis has us zero in on the human as a scene maker, or, we might say, stage designer. Bratton is right: our stage is now the planet, and we will be designing it, one way or another. Bratton, though, seems to want to clear the stage of the clutter caused by those who still want to reduce the planetary to their all-too-human scale. The anthropomorphic way of thinking about it is to see our discoveries regarding the materials with which we are to design, and the spaces upon which we have to stage our shows, as, simultaneously, revelations regarding the new roles we and our fellow players might inhabit.\n\nWe can be patient as we (diligently) elicit these possibilities, and try out different ways of scaling things up, or restaging—and, really, Bratton can afford to be patient too, because whatever sponsors he might have in mind are not going to scale up to the dimensions of his project anytime soon."
    },
    {
      "slug": "toward-a-generative-logic-of-translation",
      "title": "Toward a Generative Logic of Translation",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Mar 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Traditional logic, a central pillar of metaphysics, involves turning a subject-predicate relation into a definition, and then using that definition to “certify” another subject-predicate relation. “Old people are bad drivers”; “that man is old”; “that man is a bad driver.” A particular subject-predicate relation, along with the definitions of the words involved, is assumed to be stable, which makes it possible for logic to take on a machine-like form of operation and ultimately because the basis of new kinds of machines. This mechanism is transparently a result of literate culture’s hypostatization of the declarative sentence, which produces both grammar and definitions.\n\nAside from the fact that words change their meanings, can have multiple meanings and, indeed, may have less “meanings” than “uses,” any definition relies upon metaphysical or anthropological assumptions that can’t be “proven” within the system itself. But it’s very helpful for a mode of thinking to have a logic, less to adjudicate disputes within the system then for pedagogical purposes—a logic helps produce shared problem-solving devices and habits upon which more advanced forms of inquiry can be built.\n\nI think that Anna Wierzbicka’s natural semantic metalanguage (her “primes”) can provide us with the basis of a generative, “anthropomorphic” logic. Her NSM provides us with a set of words with a stable meaning, but their meaning is not fixed through arbitrary definitions produced through a particular metalanguage, but through the existence of words in every language with these same meanings. This places these words beyond definition—any words you could use to define “think,” for example, would in turn need to be defined in other words, and so on, and you will ultimately be brought back to the word “think” itself.\n\nNow, the word “think” can be used in lots of different ways, so we can question the unity and stability of the prime words as well, but a good place to begin developing the primes into a logic is to note that the prime words limit each other. So, in sentences like the following—“I think I might come”; I’ll have to think about it before I decide”; “you may think so, but wait and see”—the word is being used in fairly different senses: first to indicate indecision, second, to refer to a process of cogitation, and, third, to contrast assumption or expectation with reality. But one thing is constant across all three uses: someone “thinks” when one doesn’t “know.” Similarly, however many ways we could use the word “do,” what they will all have in common is that insofar as you’re “doing” something, something is not “happening to you.”\n\nIt’s important to point out that there’s no reason to assume that the prime words, any, much less all, of them, were the first words in any language. It’s best to think of them as the en during residue of declarative language—these are the words that we couldn’t make sentences without. Part of the project of transforming the primes into a logic will involve hypothesizing “paths” through the ostensive, imperative and interrogative to the declarative on the part of the primes, but that will involve looking at the primes as teleologically oriented towards becoming the declarative “infrastructure.” The primes are the minimal language needed to talk in and about a world in which imperatives can be refused or disappointed without increasing the likelihood of inconclusive and destructive conflict.\n\nIf we resist the habit of seeing words like “think,” “know,” “want,” “can” and so on as representing “inner states,” “capabilities,” “potentials,” and so on, we can see that they all allow for the “codification” of various forms of hesitation: “I want” replaces some form of “give me”; “I can” introduces some space between what one has been commanded to do and the actual doing, and so on.\n\nWierzbicka’s purpose in developing the primes is to develop a logic of translation—first, she demonstrates the untranslatability of the “key words” in any language, and then she introduces the primes as a means of translating them. She both proves the Sapir-Whorf thesis and transcends it. A generative logic would be more a logic of translation than of “correction.” Instead of taking one claim and validating or disqualifying it, we want to be able to translate discourses into other discourses. We then get a logic that both reduces a discourse to its minimal elements and expands it into other discourses. At a certain point I will introduce construction grammar into the equation—construction grammar is the linguistic theory that contends that meaning resides not in individual words but in formulaic constructions.\n\nThis theory of language agrees best with both Michael Tomasello’s demonstration in Constructing a Language that children learn language through the absorption of “chunks” of language learned in daily interactions and with studies of oral culture that show the basis of oral poetry in fixed formulas and commonplaces. Wierzbicka herself may not see things exactly that way, but we will be able to make her NSM consistent with construction grammar. Once we do, we will be able to construct a logic that is based on translation operations carried out on familiar constructions.\n\nLet’s take a look at a couple of prime words in relation to non-prime words that are very close in meaning. (Of course, the results of this exercise will be different in different languages.) First of all, “see,” which is a prime, and “look,” which isn’t. We can right away see a hierarchy between the words: you can see without looking, but you can’t look without seeing. Seeing is built into looking; looking is a particular way of seeing. You look in order to see something, while you see whatever is in front of you (even involuntarily)—looking adds a layer of intention onto seeing, which is intentional only in the most minimal sense of seeing something . You ask someone if they see something, or what they see, while you ask someone what they’re looking at . If you ask someone whether they see some particular thing you have in mind, and they say they don’t, you will tell (command) them to “look there.” Once they look, you ask if they see it now—“seeing” is the ostensive confirmation of the command to look.\n\nWe can do the same kind of exercise with primes like “touch,” “feel,” “want,” “think,” “say” and “know,” but none of them seem to have such an obvious “complement” as see/look—for example, the relation between “want” and “need” seems to me less complementary, as does the relation between “say” and “speak,” or “tell”—and I’m not at all sure what other words might be “closest” to “touch” or “think,” especially if we want to stick to a pre-literate vocabulary. So, we might want to have more of a method before approaching those—it will probably turn out that there are several different kinds of relationships, involving not only semantic differences, but ostensive-imperative relations, first vs. third person reporting and so on.\n\nBut “hear” has a relationship to “listen” that seems to me perfectly analogous to see/look—“listen” adds exactly the same layer of intentionality to “hear” as “look” does to “see,” and the interrogative—imperative-ostensive loop also seems to me identical—you might need to listen more closely just like you’d need to look more closely. It’s certainly no coincidence that these are the two senses through which we take in “meaning”—but, of course, we have to assume that this analogy is not identical across all languages (otherwise, “look” and “listen” would also be primes).\n\nIf we continue on with these two, then, we could trace a path from see/look through all the other words used to indicate taking something in visually—“observe,” “notice,” “view,” “identify,” “spot,” “distinguish,” and so on—or aurally (a quick look at an on-line dictionary reveals that there are far fewer of these). So, if someone “makes a distinction,” he sees something—seeing something would be the ostensive “verification” at the end of whatever trail from seeing gets us to “distinguish.” We always come back to the primes—to start spanning out a bit, if someone “speaks” or “tells” something, that person must have said something—you can always ask what, exactly, they said—which is a demand that a quoted statement be provided.\n\nIf someone “comprehends,” they know something; if someone “reflects” or “contemplates,” they think something. If you distinguish, you see that two things are not the same (all primes). If you identify, you see one thing that is not the same as anything else. If you observe, you see something happening (or not happening). We can use the other primes to add in these layers of intentionality: you want to see if something will happen, or if something is not like other things, or if one thing is not the same as one other thing; and once you have seen, you know that something happened, that things are not the same, and so on.\n\nEach layer of intentionality is a layer of deferral, and being able to say that maybe we can know or see allows us to add more layers. And we can construct some kind of ostensive-imperative-interrogative pathway in any of these cases, which would in turn open the inquiry to questions of institutions, or where we do these things . In this way, we can develop ways of detecting the equivalent of what traditional logics call “fallacies”: if some statement can’t be brought back to “this person said,” “this person saw,” “some person could see if…,” then it has no path back to the ostensive and is ultimately devoid of meaning.\n\nWe can take any sentence and break it down into the primes to as granular a level as necessary. So, for example, “the armed robber killed the victim who resisted.” We can start with a formulaic sentence: “someone did something bad to someone else.” There are a lot of bad things people can do to each other, so we’d need to approximate further. “This someone wanted something that the other had. The other did not want this someone to have it.” Along the way you’d have to lay out the moral objection to armed robbery and murder simply by translating them into the primes—why is it “bad” to do something to another because you want something the other has?\n\nWe’d work our way through “do,” “affect,” “change,” “hurt” and so on—there are good ways of affecting and changing people and bad ways. The bad ways might be when the person affected can’t do some things that person did before. But, of course, we can imagine cases in which it would be good to ensure someone can’t do at least some of things he did before—so we need to get more precise. It would be making it so that person can’t do things which are good, or that we know are good, or that all people think are good—with each of these claims calling for scrutiny in turn.\n\nA generative logic of translation, predicated upon a fluency in the primes, would be enormously helpful in, to refer to a famous paper of Charles Sanders Peirce, “make our ideas clear.” And we could do so in a way that never loses touch with a basic human being in the world, or ethics and morality. Everything we do or say is either “good” or “bad”—or, at least, that question will always be pertinent. We can interrupt even the most abstruse chain of reasoning, filled with hypotheses, speculations, assumptions, conditionalities and so on, at any point, and ask questions like, “if you say this, what other things can you say?”\n\n“What can’t you say?” “What can you do if you think this?” “If you say this can you say that what others will do because they heard it will be good?” Shouldn’t anyone be able to answer such questions? A statement worth working with, and re-translating in turn into other spaces, would be one that can be completely dissolved into something like things that we do because we want to see that something is the same as before, because we could then say it is good—or some other articulation of the primes. It’s a kind of laboratory built into language, allowing for both the testing of hypotheses and the invention of new discursive devices.\n\nThe primes could lead us to more adventurous and paradoxical logics. I suggested above that insofar as you are doing something, something is not happening to you. I meant this very literally—describing what you are doing as you do something excludes consideration of whatever might also be happening to you—which might, of course, be represented later. But maybe the mutual exclusion is the equivalent of Euclidean geometry, where we simply assume the existence of points, lines, right angles and so on. Maybe in a more non-Euclidean prime logic we explore ways in doing things is a way of having things happen to you and having things happen to you is a way of doing them.\n\nMaybe saying things is a way of hearing things and there are similarly transactional relations between seeing and thinking, doing and wanting, and so on. We could then bring this more pataphysical prime logic to bear on the layers of intentions we uncover in the disciplines. The disciplines are built so as to foreclose such possibilities, but leave themselves open to them in all kinds of ways. Imagine a pedagogical enterprise that prepares people to conduct such clarification operations.\n\nMaybe this should be more formalized. It may be better to produce sample translations to serve as models. At any rate there’s plenty of work to do. But the end point should be to combine the traditional functions of logic (determining the clarity, consistency and truth of statements) and rhetoric (invention, responsiveness to conditions) so that anyone who acquires fluency in prime logic can intervene effectively anywhere, with a non-arbitrary base of assumptions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "conversivity",
      "title": "Conversivity",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Hamlet, before following his father’s ghost’s demand to avenge his death, decides to put on a play. The play is to reproduce the event of Claudius’s murder of his brother, Hamlet’s father, and the reasoning is that if Claudius is indeed guilty he must betray that guilt in watching a performance in imitation of the murder he committed. It works even better than Hamlet had expected—not only is Claudius visibly disturbed by the performance, but it sends him to Church in a repentant mood, where Hamlet hears him virtually confess to the murder. In fact, for Shakespeare scholar Harold Goddard, the real tragedy of the play is that Hamlet does not continue to pursue this so far successful method of working through Claudius’s conscience to weaken his will to persist in enjoying the fruits of his crime. Perhaps Hamlet fears that having to confront a penitent Claudius and then decide what to do would leave him even more paralyzed than we see him being throughout the play.\n\nHamlet’s abandoned method is a model of political-pedagogical engagement—a much more effective one than accusations of some kind of betrayal, or attempts through argument to convince the other with lists of pros and cons or some kind of proof. Accusations and arguments work on the margins, when much is already agreed upon and we are confronting, together, a decision that has to be made. A general who wants to win a war, or a surgeon general who wants to stop an epidemic, can find the evidence provided by one subordinate supporting one path of action more convincing than the evidence provided by another subordinate for another path because they are all on the same page, they all know what the goal is, what success would look like, what counts as a reasonable risk assessment, and so on.\n\nWithin those parameters, you can expect an objective case to be heard fairly. Similarly, accusations are effective motivators when we are committed to making the same sacrifices in the name of a shared objective—it would obviously be ridiculous to accuse your enemy or a neutral of betraying you. Hamlet’s aesthetic approach, though, can be made to work under any conditions, for any audience, even if Hamlet’s own version of this approach is itself limited—it would have been much less effective, we must assume, if Claudius had been aware of what Hamlet was up to; and it would be even less effective for audiences less naively willing to suspend disbelief for fictional representations.\n\nThe aesthetic-political pedagogy involved, then, doesn’t necessarily involve putting on a literal reproduction of the failings or crimes of your antagonist or interlocutor—we’re all too suspicious of such transparent attempts at manipulation, anyway. Rather, it involves soliciting and representing the other’s sovereign imaginary. There’s never any neutral engagement—the other doesn’t address you “individual to individual”; you are always addressed as a friend or enemy, collaborator or potential collaborator or obstacle, leader or follower, etc. Furthermore, you are always addressed on a particular scene, in a particular medium, with a particular actual or possible audience—even a private conversation is likely to be repeated and ramify in various ways, in various settings.\n\nThe aesthetic-pedagogical stance is to accentuate the mode of address—to make what is implicit in it a bit more explicit. You may be wrong—we can easily misread each other—but even then the other is solicited to represent the scene in another way, producing a new mode of address, and you can go from there. You need to accentuate the mode of address enough so that it can be noticed, but not enough to collapse the scene—the point is to exhaust the implications of the scene.\n\nTo turn an implicit role into an explicit one is to foreground the mimetic and scenic character of all social activity. There’s always a scene but there’s no set script, just fragments derived from previous, “similar” scenes—so, it’s not a question of line reading but of constructing the scene together. You do this by formalizing moves made as explicitly as possible—explicitly, not necessarily literally (but there might be quite a bit of literalness as well—we tend to feel stupid when we ask for things to be made literal, but sometimes it’s the most intelligent thing to do). Any scene is a descendant of a long line of previous scenes, and is nested in a vast complex of other scenes.\n\nOne could try and step outside of the scene and provide a “history” or “sociology” of the scene. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you know that this involves stepping out of one scene onto another, not a transcendence of scenicity itself. But that’s not what interests me here. The kind of aesthetic-pedagogical practice I’m proposing here involves soliciting the boundaries of the scene within the scene itself.\n\nAnother model: Freud’s therapeutic practice of transference. We can leave aside what we think about Freud’s psychology or the efficacy of psychanalysis—Freud’s theory of transference, contrary to much of his own theory, is part of the 20 th century turn away from metalanguages and towards an understanding of knowledge as participation. Freud realized that if you told, say, some young man that his inability to (for example) accept authority figures is a result of his love for his mother and hatred of his father (etc.), you won’t get anywhere. In fact, he might “agree” with you, and it still wouldn’t make any difference—the agreement would simply be recuperated as part of his “repression” and “resistance.” (You will find exactly the same thing if you explain to some conventional conservative the real power relations producing the concept of “freedom” he takes for granted.)\n\nWhat does work is eliciting a response to yourself that is really meant for the resented authority figure. When the analysand starts accusing the analyst of constantly demeaning him, of deliberating frustrating his ambitions, of never really wanting him to succeed, and so on, then we’re getting somewhere. The analyst clearly can’t be doing any of these things, which means these accusations aren’t meant for him, and the analysand can be allowed to get to the point where the discrepancy between the accusations and any possible response to them on the part of the analyst becomes so obvious as to be inescapable. The unthought mimetic structure of the analysand’s resentments can be laid out on the table.\n\nKnowledge can then take the form of a(n ostensive) revelation rather than a (declarative) proof. The disinterested (al though not exactly, because Freud also came to theorize a “counter-transference” on the part of the analyst) analyst is in a position to present the “blank” surface upon which the analysand can project repressed scenes and desires; the equivalent of that surface in the kinds of encounters and performances I’m suggesting models for here would vary, but the need for a kind of carefully prepared “trolling” is implicit. The point isn’t to generate outrage, but the possibility of a revelation of some disproportion between the resentment expressed by the other and any possible responsibility for generating that resentment on the part of oneself.\n\nThe goal is to be able to say something like, “you can’t be this angry—or angry like this—with me; you’re imagining yourself on some other scene.” That scene can then be unfolded, in a spirit of inquiry—if the interlocutor wants to turn around and suggest you’re carrying some scenic baggage around with you as well, then, fine—we can open that up as well.\n\nIt seems to me that a very close examination of and engagement with language as the form of events is being marginalized today. Benjamin Bratton likes to reverse the Derridean slogan: “almost everything is outside of the text.” The outside of the text is everything that can be handled mathematically and “materially”—engineering, computing, design. These are all languages one can speak. It’s possible to lose patience with the history and forms of appearance of words and other pieces of language, and just say, “but the point is…” The “point” is our entry into a metalanguage whose a priori clarity we must pretend to in order to enter—often presented as the “common sense” we all know.\n\nBut people always say things one way rather than another, and words, phrases and constructions have acquired specific centering powers for a reason. Bratton’s own style is one we might call “ultra-declarative”—every word in every sentence can be traced to some metalanguage, some discipline, creating a kind of forbidding inter-discipline—there is nothing “ostensive” or inviting, no privileged experience being appealed to, no “we.” He doesn’t “touch base” with you. If you read Buckminster Fuller you’ll see something similar. This is a form of writing with its own power and it produces a kind of utopian or perhaps “heterotopian” effect. But it’s definitely a form of writing, one that implicitly asks you whether you’d like to be addressed as a “user” or a ‘designer”—if the former, we’re talking about you, not with you.\n\nIt’s in the language that we use that the boundaries of the scene are constituted and made evident. It’s always possible to try and contain the scene for making explicit rules about what can be said here. Boundaries need to be set, but if they’re set defensively they’re more likely to fail because such attempts are always, like old generals, fighting the last war. It is other scenes that make you a delegate on the present scene. Your responsibility to share some task distributed across contemporaneous scenes, or to continue some project sent to you from previous scenes is what constitutes the boundary of the scene.\n\nMaximizing your responsibility for the things you can be responsible for (because you have the “quantum” of power enabling you to enact such responsibility) and treating others as co-responsible in accord with their powers is what creates the boundaries of the scene. Maximum distinction from other scenes is also maximum embedment of the present scene in those scenes. Self-presentation relies upon the possibility of such a moral relation with the other, while surfacing and representing the interference other scenes exercise upon that relation.\n\nSo, the role-playing or enactment I began by talking about ultimately aims at maintaining the boundary of the scene as maximal distinction and/as embedment. This involves ordering what we might call the “grammatical stack”: the articulation of ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative. Ostensives generative imperatives; but not all of those imperatives are heard, and therefore many go unheeded—we could say they never “make a sound.” Imperatives extend themselves into interrogatives, but here, too, there is much leakage, as plenty of imperatives trail off into oblivion. And interrogatives are converted into declaratives, but not all of them can be at a given moment.\n\nThere are stray linguistic acts scattered around, but they’re all there in some form. Your speech (or media enactment, or interfaciality) is good when it articulates a form of the grammatical stack: your declaratives answer the most precise questions that emerge from the most urgent imperatives that were generated by the most anomalous ostensives. This is how one acts appropriately, as needed, “in the moment.” You can only do this by reaching into others’ declaratives, though. It is in representing the mismatches of the other’s articulation of the stack that your own stack takes shape. And there’s always some mismatch, even if only because the other’s stack has generated new ostensives that you now can, but the other couldn’t have, draw imperatives from.\n\nThis means that we have to be readers of texts of all kinds, including the texts of each other’s self-presentation. I’m defending “close reading,” but I want a form of close reading that travels a bit more lightly than the kind I learned as a graduate student. The closeness of your reading is manifested in the way you accentuate the role the other attributes, not completely knowingly, to you—getting it “right,” or approximating and translating more precisely as a scene unfolds. There’s still very much a place for detailed readings of complex texts—it’s becoming a lost art and fewer and fewer people know the power of this practice. But a future post will lay the groundwork for a practice close reading that will also be a quick and selective, “on the ground,” reading. (Somehow I have come to imagine myself on a scene where I am the target of the accusation of defending an antiquated form of linguistic practice, and have elected to plead guilty with circumstances so extenuating that they invalidate the accusation.)\n\nSo, we don’t need to implicate one another in murder—just in being less “present” than we might be to the traditions, obligations and discourses we participate in. One refuses the imperative exchange offered up—competing claims to centrality, whether personal, ideological or moral that can’t be settled. So much current discussion is modeled on the debate and courtroom forms of contestation, as if some transcendent judge will step in and declare us victorious, rather than an inquiry model. In the former you look for weak points, while in the latter you look for anomalies and paradoxes. After all, someone very interesting, with new things to say, might contradict himself more than someone who only makes safe and boring statements.\n\nThere’s always some hypothesis implicit in someone’s discourse—really, anyone’s discourse can be articulated as a “stack” of hypotheses, in various relations of dependence upon each other—that’s being stretched in any utterance. If you derive some such hypothesis from the other’s discourse, including the other’s “accusations” directed at you (we are all stacks of walking, talking hypotheses) then your response can transform the scene by offering a test of that hypothesis."
    },
    {
      "slug": "nominalization-imperativity-and-reading-quick-or-patient",
      "title": "Nominalization, Imperativity and Reading, Quick or Patient",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "David Olson makes nominalization, in particular the nominalization of verbs, central to his theory of the metalanguage of literacy. To review: the metalanguage of literacy supplements those elements of the speech scene that cannot be directly represented by writing. These elements can be helpfully reduced to all that involve the relation between the speaker and the speech of another which he is reporting. Whatever could be enacted in a speech scene—anything on the continuum from reverence to mockery—through tone, body language, etc., must be represented lexically. (This means that the spread of writing means the partial neutralization of mimesis—or its transformation into a more mediated, long-term affair.)\n\nMost of our conceptual vocabulary is comprised of variants of “say,” with “think,” “know,” “do,” “want” “happen,” and “feel” taking up the rest of the space. (A lot of what is usually associated with thinking, and even knowing, I would suggest, is really concerned with the supplementation of “saying.”) It’s also worth pointing out that studies of academic discourse have shown that what distinguishes academic, or disciplinary, discourse from “ordinary” discourse is the pervasiveness of nominalizations and noun phrases, especially operating as the subjects of sentences. Anyone who reads an article from any academic journal can easily verify this.\n\nIt seems, then, that nominalization must be central to the generative logic of translation I started working on a few posts back. Wierzbicka’s primes are very verb heavy: we have say, want, do, happen, feel, happen, see, hear, know, and touch. The nouns, meanwhile, are very generic: someone, people, all, something, thing, this, one, I, you—mostly pronouns, along with a few others like “place” and “time.” This makes sense, as neither names of people, names of places, nor names of gods could be in the primes, even though they must have been part of human language from very early on. Still, it’s interesting that even very simple nouns, like “food,” or “ground,” or “sky” or others one might imagine (body parts that all humans have, for example) are absent.\n\nPerhaps they were too particularized through being associated with deities or some kind of divine presence; perhaps what seems to us to be, self-evidently, a separate “thing,” can in fact be thingified in various ways. Verbs for various bodily functions, like breathing, are sources for many words denoting invisible objects (like “spirit”), but the invisible world is overwhelmingly populated by nominalizations of these prime verbs and those invented to supplement them.\n\nThe process of nominalization precedes its acceleration under writing—all of the verbs included in the primes have nominal forms, mostly deriving from some conjugation of the verb itself (at least in English, but I would assume this is generally the case); at most requiring a prefix or suffix (which perhaps marks that nominal as later)—thought, knowledge, feeling, want, doings or deeds, touch, hearing, sight, etc. What is the ontological status of these entities? We can trace a progression (relying, of course, on English grammar) from nominalizations that would be at one remove from the scene first represented: for example, if someone thought something, it is not a leap to refer to “a” thought, “the” thought, or “that” thought that they had; to the removal of determiners, getting us to “thought” as such. As the word is stripped of determiners, it becomes intelligible as the “object” of a specialized discipline. An oral world could have “thoughts,” but not “thought,” I assume.\n\nNow, once we have a noun like “thought,” we can start attaching adjectives to it: political thought, cultural thought, critical thought, etc.; we can turn the noun into an adjective, like “thoughtful,” or “thought leader.” The center of gravity of the noun is the name, and so the tendency to generate nominalizations is rooted in the need to generate names, or centers (“nominalization” itself, of course, ultimately means “make into a name”). Verbs can’t be referred to, or placed at the center in the same way—the verb “think,” by itself, can only be an imperative. So, nominalization, which is the linguistic and therefore more fundamental form of “reification” and “hypostatization” is a descendent of the originary sign.\n\nA nominalization is “redeemed” in the same way, through the organization of “congregants” who can generate ostensives singularizing the nominalization. This is what a disciplinary space is: everyone in that space can say something about “thought” that everyone else in the space will recognize as saying that thing about “thought.” It’s circular, but so is all of sign use, and the circle is complete when the participation of our nominalization in events gives us something to point to, like, say, a text or “way of saying things” that we could describe as an “instance” of “thought transcending itself,” or something along those lines.\n\n(Attaching verbs to nominalizations so that they can starting “doing” things is a further step toward entrenching them. The similarity to mythical beings is transparent, and has been noted many times. Maybe this is what at least some mythical beings originally were.)\n\nA generative logic of translation wants to target nominalizations, then—not to destroy or discredit them, but to produce new disciplinary spaces out of them. You want to turn references to “thought” into practices of thinking, which you do before, but manifest in, saying—perhaps so that saying can also become knowing. Constructing relations between the primes keeps us focused on the “destiny” of these verbs. The reference to thought is telling you to think, to think about thinking, in fact, which is to say it is issuing an imperative. I want to be very practical here—I am thinking pedagogically, like a teacher, who wants to help others learn how to do things they didn’t know how to do before.\n\nIn this case, I’m also learning (a teacher who doesn’t learn things in teaching is a bad teacher). A generative logic of translation is a reading and writing practice; more succinctly, a practice of literacy (“literacy” is ultimately a “re-nominalization” of “letter”). As a teacher I’m very hostile to references to “understanding” things, which usually means something like “talking about them more or less the same way I do” (people tend to think others “understand” them when those others speak of them more or less the way that person would). I want to provide means for rewriting, or translating—from one statement to another, or to a question or command.\n\nI much prefer a translation practice that “misunderstands,” that gets things completely wrong, to a show of “understanding” that flatters the teacher but really privileges the more mimetic student, the one who has learned how to game the system—a translation that gets it “wrong” might at least initiate a series of responses that creates a new space, while “understanding” wraps things up like a test question. You understand things when you want to prove how smart you are; learning (or teaching) something plunges you into imitation and the risk of being stupid.\n\nSo, I propose deriving imperatives from nominalizations—references to “thought” are, quite literally, telling you to think about thinking. Discourses about “thought” or, more modernly, “cognition” in general, which have these nominalizations “doing” all kinds of things and possessing all kinds of capacities and characteristics are houses of cards—but the point is not so much to collapse them as to locate the point at which they would collapse most readily at the slightest movement. These points, I would hypothesize, are where “think” or “know” most closely bounds, to the point of overlapping with in part, the other primes—think and know with each other, either with want, or say, or feel, or see or hear or do or can.\n\nThis provides us with a fulcrum. Of course, the cognitive sciences can speak of the relation between “cognition,” “desire,” “discourse,” “action,” and “sensation,” but only to show how they “influence” or “distort,” not constitute, each other—some pressure on those terms will fold them back into think or know, want, say, do and feel. You will always be able to locate some point where, for example, what one knows is “contaminated” by what one wants or, for that matter, what one hears, or touches. Again, this doesn’t necessarily mean one doesn’t “really” know that thing, it just means that knowing is a different kind of thing than we might have imagined.\n\nI want to again insist on putting “say” at the center here. There is something irreducible and irreplaceable about the exact words someone says, here and now—not a paraphrase, not “well the point was,” not “what they were really getting at,” but what they actually said when the moment called for words. All these are translations, which can be interesting as translations, not “clarifications.” And there is something infinitely generative about taking that utterance and translating it into all the idioms, contexts and media in which one has some degree of fluency. All thinking, doing, wanting and so on find their way through what someone says.\n\nEvery nominalization can be folded back into something like “when (if) X happens, someone says (can say) Y.” To ask someone speaking of human “behavior” in some conceptual framework, something like “what would this figure of the human you are constructing say if…” is a way of demanding the further minimalization of the hypothetical underpinnings of the claim. It’s very productive to force the transition from a statement like, say, “denial of emotional investment in relationship double binds is highly characteristic of…” to “what would one of these individuals in such a double bind say if someone else said…”? This creates a space for the oral within the literate while making explicit the scenic accretions effected by literacy.\n\nThis fulfills one of the dreams of postmodernism, to make all writing “literature,” while also making “literature” a rigorous vehicle—to capture the entire meaning of a highly nominalized statement would require the construction of a complex scene, and perhaps alternate scenes, perhaps a long novel. But when time is an issue, one can write flash fiction.\n\nThese would be scenes, moreover, on which both interlocutors are present, even if though an interface. What kind of double bind is constructed in the sample statement provided in the previous paragraph, and what is your investment in it, one might ask the author (for whom, in one’s own discourse, one would have to hypothesize answers). What would you, gentle author, say if… Now that you mention it, maybe this author has already said it—let’s look around. And then you’re reading the text in a very directed, “interested” way. You’re not writing 19 th century style realist fiction, but a self-referential text exposing its own “devices”—but always to get at that question—what would someone say if….\n\nWhat could someone say? What do I say? What will you say when…” And when you say that, what do you think others will do ? What will you be able to say after they do it? For that matter, what are you saying right now? We always return to the crucible of the primes. We have a logic that moves from the highest level of generality, enters the most complex discourse, while remaining rooted in the most elementary relationships, where the primes overlap, interrupt and supplement each other. A reading and writing practice that can facilitate a quick intervention in a twitter burst or the writing of a doctoral dissertation.\n\nWith plenty of room for playfulness, experimentation, and extending the margin of error while developing new ways to test for error. The purpose of logic is to anticipate and address objections in advance; even better, though, is to have possible (and even impossible?) objections converted into broadcasters of what you say."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-pursuit-of-appiness",
      "title": "The Pursuit of Appiness",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Apr 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Think about how medical treatment currently works—it invariably involves some kind of intervention from the outside. Of course, there’s preventive care, or simply taking care of yourself, by paying attention to diet, exercise and so on—taking care of yourself relies upon the body’s own metabolic interactions: ingesting too much sugar induces certain biochemical reactions that ultimately lead to weight gain or diabetes (which in turn affects the operation of certain organs such that…). Intervention, whether surgical or pharmaceutical, starts with the assumption that the body can no longer manage itself—decisions about lifestyle can no longer prevent certain metabolic interactions, or the failure of certain organs to “process” the results of such interactions (which itself would be a metabolic failure).\n\nAnd, so, some “cause” is introduced from the outside that targets in order to suppress or enhance certain metabolic interactions. A lot of this seems to be ad hoc—quite often, it seems that no one is sure why a particular treatment works as it does—we can just verify, within some margin of error, that it does usually have the desired effect. And then it becomes necessary to monitor the body and run separate tests checking for “side effects,” i.e., consequences for other metabolic processes than the one being targeted for suppression or enhancement.\n\nIn other words, there is, in current medical research and practice, no totalizing engineering approach to human health, an approach that would transcend the natural/artificial distinction and make the organic metabolisms self-regulating even in response to breakdowns in normal metabolic operations. In fact, if we had such an approach, there wouldn’t really be “breakdowns”—the “mechanism” introduced into or, better, elicited from, the metabolic organization one is born with would include sensors that detect, well in advance, the signs that such “breakdowns” were likely in a given organ or process—and trigger, automatically, counteracting metabolic activity that, furthermore, is coordinated with metabolic activity throughout the body so effects somewhere don’t disrupt satisfactory operations elsewhere.\n\nSuch mechanisms would most likely be “placed” or “induced” near the genetic level of human functioning, somewhere along the line where genotype produces phenotypes. Maybe these mechanisms would work, in part, by leading the human organism to spontaneously reject the unhealthy and embrace the healthy—for example, by inducing disgust at those foods it would be worst for you to eat right now and hunger for those foods that would be most beneficial.\n\nThe kind of mechanism I am discussing here, and which is really not all that hard to imagine becoming reality in the coming decades, would essentially be an “app.” An app is an interface that creates a relation between a user and the cloud. The kind of biological app that is the object of my speculations here would place the individual human body in relation to the entire, continually updated, database of biological, chemical and medical research produced by global research; included in this database would be the archived information about all human bodies, past and present, upon which information (gathered by the vary apps that are plugged into our bodies, which also become part of the archive) the individual app would draw in controlling the totality of internal metabolic activity.\n\nIt’s hard to see how one could be against such developments—both in the sense that it’s hard not to see it as a tremendous improvement in human well-being and in the sense that it’s hard to imagine what could stop it. We might still die, because organs and functions might still “wear down” beyond the capacity of our total health app to complete reverse, but even death would be modulated so that we “ease into it” (as people occasionally do now, after a long, well-lived life) in a relatively painless, predictable way.\n\nWe could say that things get more complicated when we take into account that “health” includes “mental health,” and “mental health” is always going to be assessed by criteria that are at least in part historical, cultural and therefore political. But it may be that advances in research connecting brain states to mental conditions can help limit the abuse of treating people outside of the norm in terms of taste, interests or opinions as thereby “abnormal.” We do, apparently (suspending, for now, the justified skepticism regarding what anyone claims to know to a scientific certainty right now), know that schizophrenia, for example, is very directly correlated with, and therefore likely “caused by” identifiable abnormal brain states.\n\n(Otherwise, how could we have drugs that modify the experience of schizophrenics?) Anyway, it’s hard to imagine resisting developments in this area either. I recently had occasion to read a paper, written by a student at a fairly elite liberal arts college, in which the issue of mental illness came up, and noticed that where the word “normal” (or “healthy”) would previously had been the word “neuro-typical” now is. One can see how the distinction between “neuro-typical” and “neuro-atypical” would replace the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” (or “healthy” and “sick”) in a victimary as well as more strictly medical framework.\n\nIf we locate different behaviors within a range of brain activity somewhere upon a bell curve, then judgment is removed while the question of treatment can be made more “consensual.” Perhaps a highly neuro-atypical individual can be made cognizant of how his brain activity contributes to his idiosyncratic behavior or thinking and, as long as that individual is not unduly disruptive or dangerous, he might not only be permitted to “embrace” his neuro-atypicality but compel others to respect it as well. It’s easy to see the emergent ethic here: if you’re not ready to enforce medical intervention or, after the total health app has been installed, the cloud finds this person to be safe enough to leave to his habitual functioning, then you need to adjust to him just as much as you expect him to adjust to you.\n\nAll questions about “the good,” then, would become questions of designing apps that would “materialize” or “concretize” the cloud in a particular way. I’ve been using health care as a particularly illustrative example, but all of human life is taking shape along these lines: all practices are becoming apps, or, at least are, or could easily be, “appified.” Perhaps there will be decisions made on the cloud level and those made on the app level. At the cloud level, it would be determined, say, how neuro-atypical people can be permitted to be (depending upon a whole range of “factors”); on the app level, individuals would coordinate their neuro-atypicality with other individual types and institutional imperatives.\n\nOf course, there are apps that establish a very simple relation between the user and his environment—e.g., an app that lets you know the nutritional content of all the food in your refrigerator. But a lot of apps take the form of social experiments. Traffic apps fall into this category: if you use something like Waze to navigate, you not only rely on other people (who must be incentivized in some way) to warn you of speed traps, accidents up ahead, road work, potholes, etc., but you participate in a kind of paradoxical activity because the more people that are aware of present traffic conditions the more their knowledge will transform those conditions.\n\nSo, a good traffic app would have to know how many people use that app, how they adjust their driving behavior accordingly, and what are the consequences of a certain number of people coming to learn that traffic will be lighter along one path than another an hour from now. Won’t that make traffic heavier along that path, and wouldn’t the app need to account for that?\n\nCloud policies will be determined by those in the clouds, but we can think about app policy as providing the feedback any cloud policy would depend on. What I want to bring out here is the difference between app practices and “normal” political practices. Normal politics can be seen, by analogy, as a very crude version of the interventionist practices characteristic of contemporary medicine. Something has “gone wrong,” and you try to apply some arbitrary principle (“equality,” “democracy,” “freedom,” ‘balance of powers,” some institutional “best practice,” whatever) to “fix” it. Needless to say the situation in politics is far worse than in medicine—no one really knows what the cause and effect relations, along with all the “side effects,” of any policy (always introduced, it should be noted, in a highly compromised, proviso-ridden way—almost as if you couldn’t prescribe a drug to lower cholesterol without that drug also including some mood-adjustment “amendment”) are—certainly not beyond the very short term (if you give people money, they will have that money, at least for 5 minutes; if you bomb a building, you will destroy the building, etc.)\n\n“Appy” practices, meanwhile, would mimic the kind of self-regulation we could see to be already at work or possible within existing practices in some enhanced and explicit form. The goal is to act on the “genetic,” or generative, or scenic level and help bring order into the institutional “stack.” Much of this kind of work will have a satiric character. Take, for example, the way interventionist politics deals with the media—both sides, left and right, complain that it is “biased” and influenced by (or “in the pocket” of) “special interests” of one kind or another. Of course, there’s a lot of truth in such accusations.\n\nBut they always are predicated upon a fantasy of a disinterested press serving a general public sharing the same perspectives and interests. The more media companies and institutions are independent centers of power, the less they can be anything other than information laundering extortion rackets whose sole purpose is to wield power over and on behalf of selected enemies and friends. Direct mouthpieces, whether of the government or specific institutions, would be more reliable, because at least you could imagine why that source wants to provide you with this information. But there’s little point to simply saying thi s, either—it doesn’t really help in filtering the vast swarm of information and disinformation swirling around us.\n\nA more “appy” approach would be to attribute a plausible purpose to the media—say, to help people decide more intelligently whom they should vote for—and then translate all media pronouncements into something like “this source says that you do—or should—vote for politicians for X reason.” Let’s say some cable news anchor accuses or purports to prove that a particular politician has “lied” (always at some specific distance from some “truth”—attested to by someone, who we either know or don’t know much about, who has “attested” to other things of varying degrees of truthfulness; always in a specific context, always in a relation to other things said which may be more or less true, always given certain assumptions about what the “liar” actually knows and doesn’t; always with specific presumed consequences, and so on). Well, then, that source is telling you that you’re the type of person who is less likely to vote for someone who lies in that way, to that degree, in that context, with those consequences, and so on.\n\nOur “app,” then, would generate a mapping of all politicians (maybe past as well as present) who have told that precise “type” of lie (of course, what counts as a particular “type” of lie is the kind of question the app would draw upon the cloud to answer), along with, perhaps, politicians who have told “types” of lies that more and less closely approximate that type, with varying criteria introduced to determine which kinds of “lies” are “worse” (in which conditions, etc.); along with which “types” of voters voted for and against all those different “types” of lying politicians. Now, the point of an “appy” practice of political pedagogy is not to produce such a map but to allude to or indicate or enact its possibility and its necessity if that particular report of that politician’s “lie” is to mean something.\n\nIn this way we learn to introduce, to use the idiom of contemporary media and politics, as “poisonous” a “pill” as possible into the relations between rulers, media and public. In the end, we would want to narrow down the question into a very specific “slice” of the “stack”: what are people with specific responsibilities saying, how and why, and how are those of us further downstream of those responsibilities listening to what they say—and how can we do so in a way that brings the way we listen into closest possible conformity with what our own modicum of power (the reach of our apps) best enables us to do. This is the app we try to install; or, this is the mode of being as an app we wish to install.\n\nThe politics of planetary computation is the politics of converting users into interfaces. I’m a political app insofar as, in listening to me, you become an interface yourself by creating a slice of the stack as a grammatical stack: a failed imperative, prolonged into a question, issuing in a declarative revealing a new ostensive from which you derive a new imperative. At the very least you can generate a wider range of responses (hear a broader range of imperatives) to being told a politician has lied (why was he obliged to tell the truth on that occasion, anyway?) well beyond the reactive interventionist one, demanding he be “held accountable”—and into appier regions, as we start to build up self-regulatory inhibitors and activators that come to take in more of the system, in its totality of utterances."
    },
    {
      "slug": "aspiration",
      "title": "Aspiration",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "One broadly, maybe even universally held agreement among “postliberals” is that, contra to liberalism, a properly ordered polity would have a unified project that would command unanimous consent, even enthusiasm. Society should be a team, not a collection of individuals. Indeed, even liberalism itself does not escape this compulsion, even if it gets obeyed indirectly, through imperatives like spreading equality and liberty. If the highest human aspiration to “realize every individual’s potential,” wouldn’t that have to be a cooperative endeavor as well? As with much else in postliberalism, the problem is to make explicit obvious truths that liberalism obscures. In a sacral order, the community is established so as to serve the sacred being; the problem of social organization around a shared project only emerges in post-sacral orders. But if the question becomes, “to what should we, as a society, aspire,” we already border on the ridiculous—it sounds like we’re filling a slot in a questionnaire, rather than pursuing something organically grounded in our practices and institutions.\n\nMy starting point here is the deferral of appropriation on the originary scene. Deferral on the face of it is a “negative” act—something we don’t do. But it’s immediately positive and creative as well: we see and hear something new as a result of our deferral—the carcass we were about to fight over becomes a god, transforming us into a community, initiating morality, ritual and aesthetics. Anyway that we find to talk about creation or invention will involve some permutation of this deferral: it will, that is, involve something like “standing back and observing the whole,” or “identifying an emergent pattern,” or some other intellectual act predicated upon suspending some immediate ambition and “reconfiguring” the desire that led us to it. If we want to pursue this in a more deliberate way, we would pay much more attention to ourselves as mimetic beings: every act that we carry out, indeed, every “sub-act,” or gesture, is modeled on some other’s practice. If we want to be original, we must first divest ourselves of our presumptions of originality.\n\nImitation is really a fascinating business. No one has thought this through as radically as Marcel Jousse, whose anthropology of “mimism” would have us look steadfastly at the mimetic construction of everything we do. In other words, it’s not as if we imitate for a while until we’re mature, and then we’re “ourselves” and we can think more conventionally in terms of individuals as self-contained, coherent psychological and moral beings. But at the same time, imitation is never “perfect,” since any act or gesture is embedded in a particular scene, and its imitation will take place on another scene, giving it a different set of meanings, even if the act or gesture itself, from a purely physical perspective (maybe we could prove it through a video recording) is identical.\n\nThere could never be an end to the excavation of our acts—and desires, thoughts, resentments, judgments, etc.—in layers of mimetic articulation. But we don’t have to become full-time archaeologists of ourselves as mimetic constructs. We just have to learn how to notice the one thing Jousse neglects—the ways our mimisms intersect with their progenitors and derivatives in such a way as to cancel themselves. In other words, at a certain point, imitation becomes impossible because everyone doing the same thing makes it impossible for anyone to do that thing anymore. The “imagination” entails looking at a particular mimism on a particular scene and expanding that scene to the point of “mimic” self-cancellation. And any creative or original act will be one that modifies that scene so that the “mimism” can convert itself in such a way that imitative “drift” provides for the flourishing of the mimism. At least for a while.\n\nThis still seems rather centrifugal, though—so far, the discussion is too individualized. The problem is that there isn’t yet a coherent order that allows us to think in terms consistently centered mimisms. That’s what our thinking has to anticipate and prepare for. With the breakdown of the sacral order, every individual can become a center, and this is what makes mimeticism uniquely uncontrolled and destructive in the modern world. The privileged position is to attract scapegoat level attention to oneself so as to leverage that scapegoat level attention into an immunity to persecution, thereby liberating and capitalizing on one’s desires. Imagination under liberal capitalism, then, involves a constant oscillation between these two poles, which means the ongoing depletion of the moral “capital” inherited from Christianity making the oscillation possible in the first place.\n\nThe crucified Jesus has operated so powerfully as a model through these developments as to become invisible—the “atheists,” whose entire cultural position is predicated upon their potential persecution by ignorant believers, are as steeped in Christian culture and morality as anyone else. It’s easy enough to see, given the iconography of Christianity, why the sacrifice of Jesus would become a template for seeing in a new way the treatment of the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed. But Jesus was not scapegoated for being powerless; quite to the contrary, the fear was that he was powerful enough to overturn all of humanity’s teachings regarding the divine and the moral order.\n\nThe most important argument for mimetic theorists who wish to challenge liberalism to make, in fact, is that nothing in the condition of the powerless triggers scapegoating tendencies; quite to the contrary, it is always those who have or are believed to have “too much” power who are scapegoated. Even when we can observe instances of scapegoating targeting objectively powerless groups, it will always be because some kind of power is being attributed to that group, or exemplary members of it. They are taken to represent some hidden, and therefore all the more dangerous power. In that case, resistance to scapegoating is defense of the social center; indeed, even if one’s concern with the marginalized, the case to make is that only confusion regarding the articulation and exercise of power at the center makes it possible to project sinister and occult powers onto the marginalized (or, for that matter, to force some of the powerful to operate through the sponsorship of marginalized agencies).\n\nThe defense of the center provides the key to the articulation of mimetics and therefore desire under desacralized conditions. To defend the center is to anticipate opposition to, subversions of, even indifference to, the center. The way to anticipate anti-centrism is through the study of mimisms in all of their forms, from the tiniest twitch to the grandest project; and, not just the study of, but the reconstruction of mimisms by teaching and learning how to anticipate the self-cancelings of those mimisms, now as these self-cancelings pertain to the participation in the center. It is astonishing that, as far as I know, in spite of the basic assumption of mimetic theory that we learn through imitation, none of the major mimetic theorists—not Girard, not Gans—has paid the slightest attention to pedagogy (either as a limited practice in educational institutions or a broader social modality).\n\nBut that is where the answer must lie: if the problem is that we blindly enter into conflicts with models we refuse to acknowledge are models, then treat every situation as one in which someone learns from and someone teaches someone else. Even if we disagree about who is learning from whom at a given point, we can at least agree about the general “settings” of the encounter, and give each other the opportunity to learn and teach in turn—we can therefore work towards clarifying rather than obfuscating our relations. On desacralized terrain, the replacement of the archaic formal hierarchies—explicit distinctions in rank—must be the more “fractal” hierarchies of pedagogical relations. In fact, those formal hierarchies were always, at bottom, pedagogical relations as well, most obviously in perhaps the most fundamental—the parental relation, and the initiation of the young into the community.\n\nEvery social encounter is a pedagogical relation and is to be made more overtly so. This doesn’t mean we should become irritating didacts—relations can be made overt through an accentuated gesture as much as through words. The social order as pedagogical order implies a significant moral transformation: in every encounter, each one of us must either submit to the authority of the other or step forward and assert authority in setting the terms of the encounter and revealing its pedagogical dimension. We are all doing this already—as soon as you speak, you monopolize the field, however small, and on what authority do you dare to do that?\n\nBut actually describing our social interactions in these terms would be impossible under liberalism, because acknowledging pervasive, systematic hierarchy on the micro-level leads us to look for more stable and formalized forms on the macro level. Now, to assert pedagogical authority is to invite scapegoating, but not in order to exploit the tendency while backed by broader social prohibitions; rather, it is to elicit, on the model of political-pedagogical engagement I examined a couple of posts ago, in order to study in their self-canceling logic, the “mimic” structures that must be made productive.\n\nSo, to return to my starting question—to what shall we aspire?—which is prompted by the various “prometheanisms” and “faustianisms” which have become mimetically constructive on the postliberal right, with an accompanying futurist aesthetic, a focus on space travel, and so on. The most fundamental aspiration is to render the imagination productive. Work toward the abolition of resentment toward those who try to earn pedagogical authority and accountability, and thereby help those aspirants earn it by participating in the conversion of mimisms: if we look closely at anything anyone wants, we can see that it will interfere with and be interfered with by what others want, and out of this prospectively antagonistic modeling what everyone wants can be transformed.\n\nAuthority will be asserted in the process, because, unless we collapse back into a liberal frame, we have to acknowledge that there must be a component of “this is what you should want” in any genuine pedagogy. But it’s only pedagogy if the “should” is derived from an extended display of the desire to be transfigured in question.\n\nThis still seems very formal, and at a certain point one wants “content.” What should we want, then—to conquer space? Terraform the earth itself? Make the depths of the ocean a new home? Eliminate disease? Liberate the human body from its own limitations? Abolish death? Maybe any and all of these—they’re not incompatible with each other, after all. And if there are going to be “factions” of the postliberal right, these would be good ways of self-distinguishing from others—these would be good arguments to have (they would provide startling and encouraging introductions to “normies” discovering these new political arenas), and would incidentally serve as an ongoing revelation of the squalidness of liberalism. Substantiating any of these aspirations, though, would entail turning all of us into the kind of people who could enthusiastically and competently contribute to such projects and set aside all desires that would interfere with doing so—and that more fundamental project is what I just referred to as making the imagination productive.\n\nBut maybe we can take this a little further. One implication of the “originary grammar” I have developed but have not yet explored very deeply is that we receive, quite literally, imperatives from objects. On the originary scene, the first humans were told something like “stop!”—strictly speaking, this is not yet an imperative, which emerges later, but that distinction is not important now. What matters is that the first compelling “word” we “hear” is from an object. In that case, we can learn how to “listen” to objects, to heed their imperatives. An act of deferral lets some object be—that act of deferral is iterated each time I “stop and look” or “inquire” rather than consume an object, or ignore it, or put it to some direct use.\n\nThe object itself “catches my eye” and “tells” me to “hold on a minute.” So, all our inquiries, whether of the universe or the atom, are solicitations of imperatives from objects (even if the notion of “objects” becomes inadequate here). Those imperatives come through the very instruments we use to perceive, sense and measure phenomena (as Benjamin Bratton has pointed out, to “sense” is already to “measure”). The scientist wants to continually refine those instruments so as to “hear” more from the things, but this also means we want to further refine ourselves so as to build more sensitive instruments, and “build” people who can build and, first of all, want, more refined instruments—which means building institutions that can house such relations between people and instruments.\n\nSo, all the things in the world along with us and our instruments are one. We want more of the world and more of the universe because it keeps telling us to do things we could never have imagined otherwise but we can now see allow us to let in more of the world and less of the delusory desires and resentments that keep the world out because they compel us to demand our “part” of it. What all the things of the universe will tell we cannot know until the refined instruments and those capable of using them do the necessary recording, but we can think in terms of making ourselves “part,” rather than demand our part—that is, we can look for ways to participate in the unfolding of our relation to everything else."
    },
    {
      "slug": "deriving-the-sample-to-its-source",
      "title": "Deriving the Sample to its Source",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "When you “signify” in any way, there are two ways of thinking about what you have done: first, you have conveyed or communicated some meaning, or content, in a package, so to speak, to be delivered to some recipient; second, you are modifying the mass of signifying material transmitted to and circulating around you from the totality of language users. The problem with the first way of thinking about it is that whatever content you believe yourself to transmitting is not something outside of language but is, rather, made up of transmitted and circulating signifying material, which references, then, other “contents,” which are themselves comprised of….\n\nLeading us to infinite regress. The problem with the second way of thinking about the process is similar: that great mass of signifying material is signifying material because it is signifying “something,” something that is presumably not reducible to the signifying material itself. Here, again, we are led into infinite regress, as we can only track the various paths taken by signifying chains by referring to their to some extent at least extra-linguistic referents (i.e., “content”).\n\nThis antinomy is a metaphysical one, insofar as it presupposes the primacy of declarative culture, where we need to keep providing content for sentences but the content can only be more sentences. The originary hypothesis transforms this antinomy into a generative paradox by positing the ostensive sign as the first sign, so that the sacred object at the center is also the first “content,” but content only made available through the act of signification itself. So, there is indeed some “content” “outside” of any act of signification, but it is a content that is the content of that particular act of signification, under those conditions of signification, within a specific event of signification, which thereby produces that content.\n\nSince that act, event, and those conditions must be the performance of positions, rules and possibilities created by the entire history of language and humanity, the creation of that content could just as easily and accurately be described as a modification of signifying material transmitted and circulating—kind of like pulling a switch that directs a chain of signification of one path onto another.\n\nThere is “content,” then, because we can use the “same” sign pointing, or providing a kind of map enabling us to point, to the “same” thing. This is really a single problem, because the “same” sign is the same because it is pointing to the “same” object. What makes this possible is what I call a “disciplinary space,” but it would be more precise to say that this is what a disciplinary space is. But we can just as readily use Eric Gans’s terms from The Origin of Language : “linguistic presence,” which is maintained or restored by “lowering the threshold of significance.” The only really satisfying answer to the question, “what do you mean by that?,” is some version of “look at this.”\n\nThe whole problem then resides in being in the same “place,” “facing” the same “direction,” undistracted by other things one might look at which might obscure “this,” and so on. And this is a problem that can only be solved within some practice, a practice constructed at least in part in order to solve it, here and now. (What “here and now” means is also determined by a disciplinary space: there can be a “here and now” stretching across the earth and the millennia—we can share a disciplinary space with the “recipient” of an ancient divine revelation.) All of our conversations are shaped by some form of the question the novice asks the expert when told to look through some specialized device of observation: “what am I looking at here?”\n\nThe implications of the paradigm-specific nature of knowledge has been studied extensively, by Gaston Bachelard, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn and others—the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has some interesting things to say about Bachelard’s notion of an “epistemological break” separating one paradigm from another—Kuhn’s “scientific revolution.” For a contemporary thinker who goes over this material in an informed and thorough (and accessible) way, I would recommend Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, whom I just came across myself. But my own ambition is to bring “paradigm dependency” into the realm, not only of the human sciences, but that of normal and idiosyncratic signifying activity, which is to say, social interaction.\n\nThis would also bring the question into the moral and ethical fields: it would be immoral to ignore the “anomalies” that bring an established “paradigm” into “crisis,” because in doing so you would be abetting the crisis. But what this means in, say, a conversation between two people, or a political debate, must be very different than what it means in an established scientific discipline. The trick of a certain kind of progressive is to ignore these differences so as to license themselves to harangue their political enemies with what might at best be slightly more “qualified” claims from some “expert” domain. But if you ask such a progressive for the theory of social interaction and signifying activity informing such bullying, you’re very likely to draw a blank. He won’t be able to tell you what he’s doing, and what could be more important to thinking about what is “good” and what is “bad” than being able to say what you are doing?\n\nThe best way of infiltrating all discourse with some translation of paradigm dependency is to articulate all the speech forms identified in The Origin of Language , and explored in various directions in Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center . Any speech act, in any medium, articulates the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative levels of discourse. We can borrow from Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack , and, as I have been doing already without remarking upon it, refer to the “grammatical stack”—those levels of discourse are articulated in what we could call a particular “slice” of the stack (one might say a “cross-section”) in any utterance.\n\nThe “meaning” of an utterance (and, like “here and now,” what we mean by “utterance” is determined within a disciplinary space: an epic poem, even an entire tradition, can be treated as an utterance) is the way it slices the stack. And another language user or (risking confusion) “signifier” acknowledges this meaning by slicing the stack in a way that is possible only because of the previous slice. We all can tell the difference between meaningful and meaningless statements. For example, a billionaire insisting on the need for greater “equality” while ordering his sub-minimum wage illegal alien domestic worker to scrub a stain is not really making a “meaningful” statement: “hypocrisy” is the ready at hand word for this kind of meaninglessness.\n\nBut what does anyone mean when they “call” for greater “equality”—where is the route from that declarative statement to a set of ostensives and imperatives that would lead to a result we could point to together and say, “yes, that’s what ‘greater equality’ looks like”? If you can’t answer that kind of question, what you say is just as meaningless as the virtue-signaling of the most transparent hypocrite. And if this doesn’t strike you as an important problem, your pretensions to being a moral actor are perfunctory, at best.\n\nI propose approaching this by treating signifying acts or utterances as samples . “Sample” might seem like a narrowly scientific term, of dubious application when applied to humans, but the word has a richer history than that—it is really a “spin-off” of “example,” which means it carries the meaning of a “model,” or “match,” and is part of a family of Indo-European words with the root “em,” which means “to take, distribute” (from the online etymological dictionary, of course). So, when we “sample,” we’re passing around parts of the whole, not, in this case, to consume, but to use them to figure out what the whole consists of.\n\nAny use of language is a sample of language, and its relation to language as a whole is precisely what is in question. Here I will invoke, as I have done many times, Peirce’s assertion that knowledge involves determining the relation between some proportion between elements in the sample and the proportion between those same elements in the whole. If you could represent the whole you wouldn’t need samples, and there’s no doubt that with language you can never have the whole. So, when I say something, I’m presenting not only a sample of language (and myself as a sample of language users), but a(n intrinsically open) hypothesis regarding the relation between that sample and the whole (the hypothesis being that the study and iteration of my sample will enable you to generate samples that better approximate the whole than would otherwise be the case).\n\nThis hypothesis is far more often than not implicit, but it’s definitely there insofar as my sample, or part, or slice, is a “response” to others (rather than the feeble “response,” we can say that my sample repairs a break in linguistic presence threatened by a previous sample, using the reparative means provided by that sample). One sample includes, via allusion, impersonation, citation and translation, others, and thereby proposes a better match between sample and whole.\n\nWhat makes for a better match is that some “same” sign is now seen to be marked by difference as a consequence of a new same sign (or sample). We could say that the origin of the declarative is iterated: an ostensive is shown to be lacking, or referentless, or distributed among so many referents as to be inoperative; while a new ostensive realigns the field. This can be seen as a scientific practice—multiplying anomalies until the new paradigm can be constructed—it can also be seen as a moral and ethical practice of reparation, and an aesthetic practice of framing. The more we move away from established scientific disciplines and toward “everyday life” or, more precisely, more open-ended scenes, the more the latter aspects of the practice become the decisive ones.\n\nThe “anomaly,” in moral and aesthetic terms, is the break in linguistic presence. It is a breach one steps into. Your sample has to be a sample of the missing layer of the stack presented by the other’s sample. This is the kind of practice I have discussed many times before: you might take the other’s declarative as an imperative, thereby revealing the contrary or inoperable imperatives implicit in it; one might take oneself to be named in some “meaningless” reference in another’s discourse, and act out that absence; one might repeat another’s declarative in a series of declaratives, each producing a word or phrase in the other’s sentence, thereby laying bare what we are expected to think here.\n\nOf course, this need not be antagonistic—one could use these kinds of practices to amplify another’s discourse, to accentuate the fullness of meaning. In fact, one is always doing a bit of both, because even the meaningless discourse must be acknowledged as enabling the breach one can now step into.\n\nI’m always trying to introduce further gradients of differentiation and deferral into these hypothetical renderings of linguistico-moral-aesthetic practices. We can’t get to the point of writing all-purpose pedagogical scripts (but that may be an imperative from the center that can’t be unheard), but we can clarify an imperative and create a vocabulary for naming its “stations.” We keep putting forward samples with a relationship to the whole that is indeterminate and nevertheless more closely matched than another sample to be included within our own. Every sample is distinct—distinctiveness is the relation between the “elements” in the sample and the relation between those same elements within the whole. The sample is the same as itself, as “verified,” “confirmed,” or “acknowledged” by the other samples it generates. (You could say the determination that any sign or sample is the same is a “fiction,” but as opposed to what reality?) Insofar as the sample can be “authenticated,” though, this sample iterates and is therefore the “same” as a whole series or “sprawl” of samples.\n\nSo, you can always locate any sample at some point on a continuum where at one end we identify everything that makes the sample the same as lots of other samples, all that reduces it to a “stereotype”: the use of words and phrases in the same way, the reliance on grammatical constructions and rhetorical commonplaces, the deployment of familiar tropes, the reliance on the affordances of the media employed, and so on: this brings into focus the tasks of “media studies.” At the other end of the continuum, meanwhile, we identify everything that distinguishes this sample from any other, including time, place, audience and the various possible modifications of inherited means of expression.\n\nThe breach is where you accentuate both, or represent an oscillation between the two, showing how accentuating one end of the continuum ends you up back at the other end—where the most insistent adherence to fixed models produces the greatest originality. The title of this post has the inappropriate “to” instead of “from” so as to accentuation the simultaneity of discovering and constructing the source of any sample. “Derive to” is a sample of mistakenness, interfering with the linearity implicit in the notion of “derivation.” Maybe a good sample, maybe not. Leaving your sample to simultaneously be an absolute novum and a complete copy is language learning as the definitive moral act—you discover what you “mean” by minimally but systematically differentiating your utterance from others. Anything we would take to be moral, above all refraining from projecting your own mimetic crises onto the background of others so we might see them as following the same imperative as us, follows from the derivation of the sample to its source."
    },
    {
      "slug": "exchanges-withe-center-over-time",
      "title": "Exchanges withe Center Over Time",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "All discourse is with and of the center; all exchanges are of and with the center; all discourses are mediating exchanges with and through the center. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the human is the center speaking and exchanging with itself, with humans as the medium of discourse and exchange. We’re the language and money of the center. The reason this isn’t a solipsistic monologue of an autistic deity is that the exchanges take place over time, and the center of now is not the same center as the center now (nine words further along in the sentence). When we think of economic exchange, which is t say, desacralized exchange outside of the ritual center, we think of exchanges between agents located on the periphery—so, my formulations here counter that model. But even if exchanges on the periphery merely interface exchanges of the center with itself over time, that mode of exchange would still be a new interface of intra-center exchanges, and one that itself going, eventually, to be mediated by money.\n\nMoney, then, while initiated to facilitate imperative exchanges with the center through the provision of articles for group sacrifice, comes to stretch imperative exchange to its limits. With an imperative exchange, the participant can say why he is bringing this article, why now, why here, and the reason will include references to a ritual tradition which includes established forms of reciprocity between individuals, families, kin, and communities. The tendency of money is to abstract from all that and render it irrelevant. But what money doesn’t abstract from is its relation to central authority, as means of distribution and measure of stability.\n\nIf someone has $200,000 in the bank, that $200,000 represents, not the amount of labor that person has performed minus what was spent purchasing the results of others’ labor, but the existence of that bank, within a world of banks and other means of registering and preserving amounts and accounts, protected by a particular mode of sovereignty guaranteeing in various ways the ability of the bank to have any or all of that $200,000 available when called for by the holder of the account. And, of course, that $200,000 also represents a certain amount of purchasing power in relation to the rest of the economy, which means today it can buy you a nice house in a good neighborhood whereas perhaps in a couple of years it will get you a decent car.\n\nMoney, then, is a tissue of threads anchored in the sovereign which, in quivering, register clusterings of power interfering with central authority, new delegations of disciplinary power more or less directly sanctioned by central authority, the moral health of the community using that money, insofar as that moral health figures into the structure of the workforce and consumption, and so on. And, not only registers, but reweaves and sometimes cuts off connections. It’s obvious that for a community to have, say, a certain number of highly skilled engineers, it must have a certain number of functional families raising children with the discipline to become trained as engineers, and some form of schooling that does the training, and a sufficiently pacified environment so that those who might become engineers are not compelled, as teenagers, to join a gang to survive, or to avenge the rape of their sister, and that to have all of these things one must have a lot of other things as well.\n\nSince all this is articulated through money, a true understanding of economics would find ways of using money to measure all this. But, for starters, we could say that the question of, say, “priming the pump,” or “printing money,” or “qualitative easing,” must ultimately be a question of whether enough (and how many will be “enough”?) people, in the “right” places, expect the central authority to see to, over the long term, the core social competencies that will produce X number of highly skilled engineers, with X being the number necessary to sustain and enhance as needed the various infrastructures needed to make everything else happen.\n\nAnd such expectations are going to be formed in accord with the extent to which the central authority can be seen maintaining the distinctions and differentiations, or the pedagogical relationships, that would ensure that what we mean now by “highly skilled engineer” will be commensurate with what we will mean by that phrase ten years from now. And that continuity in meaning can be “read off” of all the phenomena we see around us, in new terminological coinages, in slippages in the use of familiar terms, in new specializations that either degrade qualifications or represent genuinely new disciplinary spaces. If we know how to read it—which means that those who know to read it—and to read money flows as signals in the movements of meanings—will eventually constitute the “social spine,” if there is going to be one.\n\nTo read money as rendering the meaning of social differentiations is to read against the grain of money, the primary tendency of which is to efface them. This doesn’t necessarily mean “opposing” money (it doesn’t necessarily mean not opposing it, either), because one could introduce some measure into an order for the purposes of observation and modulation while granting it the necessary autonomy to be of use in that regard. The exchanges among non-sovereign institutions and individuals facilitated by money represent a concession of authority which is really a delegation, by the central authority. There can be good reasons for relaxing control in some areas, and maintaining a system of measurement to indicate when further relaxation might be beneficial or, on the contrary, control should be tightened.\n\nThe alternative is to have spies, or plants, which is to say some kind of sensory “membrane,” in institutions granted authority, which reports back to central authority. Of course, both methods can be used simultaneously, and for those find the notion of spies or plants in “private” institutions to be disturbingly totalitarian, I would ask whether the currently mythologized figure of the “whistleblower” represents anything other than an encouragement to individuals to train themselves as potential spies and plants.\n\nBut reading against the grain of money does lead to imagining its extreme limitation, to the point of its disappearances, at least as a thought experiment. If money serves the same purpose as could be served by spies or plants or, let’s say, sensing and measuring agents directly responsible to central authority, then we could formulate a kind of “equation”: the more that money is minimalized, the more pervasive the sovereign sensorium must be. However “appified” all this sensing and measuring might be, there will always be authorized individuals making decisions. (One of the comical aspects of the systematic and often bizarre censorship exercised by social media corporations like Google, Twitter and Facebook is the fact that, for all the sophistication and complexity of the algorithmic-driven data collection and sorting, in the end the specific decision to suspend this or that account is made by some neurotic, hyper-sensitive, peer pressured, semi-educated 20-something.)\n\nIn this case, money would be measuring the fluctuations of the integration and isolation of disciplinary spaces within institutions: the more the social order is constituted by skunkworking throughout its institutions, the more meaningful money would be, and the better indicator of social health over time; the more skunkworkers are reduced to the condition of “whistleblowers” (with greater or lesser effect), the less meaningful money will be. Things could get more complex—fake whistleblowers can try to undermine genuine skunkworks, for example, in the interest of clusterings of power subverted by effective work—but these developments would also be fluctuations of the integration/isolation of disciplinary spaces. At the extreme, if we could imagine achieving “total skunkworking,” it’s hard to see why there would be any need for money at all—money, as a map, would have become so meaningful as to become absorbed into a shared attunement to the “territory.”\n\nFriedrich Hayek’s argument was that all of the tacit knowledge embedded in the practices of all the distributed agents in the exchange order would be lost if those practices were to be reduced to the direct imperatives of a central authority. For Mises, the problem of there being no money is that price signals are necessary to mediate to allocation of resources. But there seem to be exceptions: emergency situations where mobilization proceeds in accord with motivation, competence and courage, and where it’s easy to see who’s a slacker or malingerer. Maybe just like hard cases make bad law, emergency situations make bad social science.\n\nBut the equivalent of a permanent emergency would be a project engaging the energies of the entire society. The tweeter “scientism” makes a good case that the purpose of liberalism is to prevent the coalescence of such a project—the last such project was the organization of the social order to serve and glorify God, and liberalism got its start by muddying up that project. It’s hard to imagine anything as comprehensive as that replacing liberalism, but what can replace liberalism is a social order of “seed projects,” proposals seeking support for space exploration, medical research, communications and infrastructural developments, and even such leftist fetishes as cleaner energy—the sovereign responsibility would be to order and prioritize amongst such projects, to devote long-term research allocation to them, and to assign to the others the organization of educational and other institutions the task for preparing the people to participate. The articulation of large scale planning and distributed tacit know-how would then take care of itself.\n\nExchanges with the center over time, then, involve disciplinary spaces transforming disciplines and doing so by recognizing and creating other disciplinary spaces. Any creation of a new line of attention confers, however indirectly and imperceptibly, meaning upon money by enhancing the sensorium of the (possible) central authority. One could always, in principle, state explicitly the articulation of distributed scenes represented by a particular use of money: $200 for this television set represents a certain number of people working a certain number of hours upon a certain kind of machinery, with the product of that labor then being transported in a certain way of a certain distance, and so on.\n\nLeftist activists used to excel at such visualizations of the “global factory,” and it must be much easier to do today. The idea is that the more you state it and visualize it, the easier it becomes to consider changing it. This is obviously true. If you look at one link of the supply chain, e.g., the working conditions in some factory in China, you can say: “this is unacceptable. These conditions must change.” You can then specify the changes you would make and put a dollar amount on that. Maybe improving the working conditions or moving the factory out of China would make the TV set cost $220. This, in turn would distribute outlays of money all along the line.\n\nThe purpose is to integrate production and consumption decisions into a moral framework. As in so many other cases, we can say to the leftist activist, first, “what kind of central authority do you imagine being able to approach the supply chain in the kind of systematic way necessary to make this approach coherent?”; and, then, “once you have imagined such a central authority, what makes you imagine it will do the things you want it to do”? The question applies equally to all of us, of course, but we will be better equipped to aid in the installation of such a central authority if we are exclusively focused on contributing to a pedagogical order in which disciplinary spaces as the sensorium of central authority are a matter of course.\n\nWe can set the problem, then, of translating a particular monetary exchange into the measure of the distance between the actual alignment of disciplines and a possible alignment characterized by a further increment of pedagogical relations, or fractal hierarchies made more explicit. As always, we work with a specific slice of the stack, interfacially, “app” ially. And pataphysically, or through what we could call the imperative imagination—so, for example, paying 20% more for your TV set means some worker in China will have free time to study neoabsolutist theory—so, get to it! This can be, at one and the same time, a mockery of activist hysteria and an invitation to a discussion of social priorities, and the assumptions we make about authority when we posit them.\n\nYou don’t claim to represent the totality, just to be an interface between the totality (or Cloud) and the specific situation (the desire of some user). You want the terms of exchange set up by a new occupant of the center (even if it’s the same occupant at a later time) to be consistent with previous terms. You want money to represent the “stock” of skilled engineers, intact families, settled populations, functional educational institutions, and so on, rather than the power grabbing or desperation of someone close enough to the center to inflate it like a bubble."
    },
    {
      "slug": "urbanomics",
      "title": "Urbanomics",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "May 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In a very interesting (and short) book, Urban Planning for Murder: Murder Fact Event , Aristides Antonas argues that the governing logic of the city is to render murder anonymous, and therefore neutral and innocuous. The city takes the “eventness” out of murder. This is a way of identifying the city, which we can in turn identify with civilization, as the transcendence of the vendetta and the tribalism informing it. Under the terms of the vendetta, a murder is an event that puts everyone on high alert and accentuates all social differences; in the city the victim is, literally, a number, filed away in an archive, processed through the judicial bureaucracy which similarly anonymizes the murder.\n\nBut Antonas goes on to add another ingredient to the formula of the city—the injustice that is incommensurable with the justice system because it is committed by one outside of that system, against the system itself. This injustice, committed by the sovereign charged with ensuring justice, produces (I am following up on Antonas here) the exemplary victim, the memory of whom will both undergird and intimate the limits of the justice system.\n\nLet’s approach the city and civilization from another angle. In The Civilizing Process , Norbert Elias traces the process of civilization through the gradual separation of the scene of slaughter from the scene of consumption. At the most primitive stage, the animal is killed, the meal prepared, and then eaten, in succession, in the same place—the slaughter-house and dining hall are one. Then, the slaughter is carried out elsewhere, and the food brought in and prepared and consumed in a single place. Then the preparation is set apart from the consumption, so in the end those eating can be completely oblivious to the provenance of their meal.\n\nAs animal rights activists try through desperate stunts to remind us, this allows us to remain blissfully unaware of the systematic brutalities which eventually land the food on our tables. Labor activists make the related point regarding, e.g., the children digging in tungsten mines in Africa so that we can tweet about trans rights on our cellphones. Here, events are made invisible, but if someone were to propose a remedy to such situations, those remedies would repeat the same civilizing process of eliminating anything event-like along the supply chain through regulations, inspectors, lawsuits, NGOs and so on. In other words, another layer of delegation and distancing would be introduced.\n\nThese processes of civilization in turn produce a strong desire to see what we don’t really want to see. The equivalent of snuff films are meant to attract our attention to the atrocities underlying our peaceful consumption—this kind of porn goes back a long way, as any reader of Dickens knows. Elias traces “sentimentalism” to this process of separation and seclusion: those who slaughter what they then cook and eat, right then and there, aren’t going to be sentimental about animals, or hunting, or the bucolic life: there’s no other scene on which to project the resolution to the resentments felt on the scene one occupies.\n\nGenres like the idyll and the pastoral are the products of urbanization no less than modern genres like film noir and the horror film. Film noir reconstructs and sensationalizes the murder events neutralized through insurance claims, police procedure, property disputes and other urban non-events. The horror film tries to simulate the revenge of repressed nature, from which the viewer is of course at a safe distance. This is fundamentally no different than the pastoral representing the shepherd as a paragon of the virtues forgotten by the city-dweller. “Nature” is a product of the “artificial” city.\n\nThe exemplary victim of civilization is not suited for representation within these genres, which is tantamount to saying that the unrepresentability of the exemplary victim generates these supplementary genres. Think about the victims of precisely the liberal democratic states, violating precisely their founding liberal principles, over the past few years—these would be those dissident right figures marked as “racist” so as to bring the entire machinery of state, economic and cultural institutions down upon them, rendering them as close to “non-persons” as it’s possible to be in an order that records everything. One can want to see these individuals obtain relief and even justice, but insofar as they are suing, appealing, having their cases work their ways through the courts or the adjudication processes of Facebook, Twitter or Chase Manhattan, they are not the kinds of victims who “void” the claim of the system to avoid eventness. Nor would this change if one of these victims went out in a terrorist blaze of glory, which would likewise confirm by triggering the justice system. Pastoral, noirish and horror representations would still be possible.\n\nThe exemplary victim is the one whose path we could follow as a means of salvation while always falling infinitely short of the example. To speak of this civil exposure of the terms of civility we need the language of money, which is as intrinsic to the city and civilization as writing and justice. We have to think of these different power interfaces together. A good starting point for doing so is Devin Singh’s Divine Currency , which examines the ways in which concepts of currency, coinage and debt are constitutive of early, formative Christian thought. Singh’s work is part of an emergent disciplinary space inquiring into the relations between the monetary concepts pervasive in Christianity in a way that doesn’t reduce them to metaphors—books like Michael Hudson’s …and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year , among others that will no doubt come up in future discussions are example of texts that take seriously, to take just one example, the economic roots and implications of a concept like “redemption.”\n\nI will preface this preliminary discussion by saying that the economic dimension of the fundamental concepts of Christianity neither “discredits” Christianity nor reduces it to an ancient world debt-forgiveness activist movement—no more than does the political dimension of calling God a “king” giving “laws” and “ruling” the world discredit Christianity and other monotheisms reliant on such concepts. Quite to the contrary—the implication of such an inquiry is that Christianity, if it hopes to be powerful in any sense, will have to recover its relation to the totality of human life, eternal and temporal.\n\nSo, God is a benevolent administrator of the world economy, and humans are created in His image just like a coin is stamped with the image of the worldly emperor; Christ is the unique divine image that is then copied onto all the human “coins.” Christ is also the “ransom” paid to Satan, who holds humanity in debt due to original sin. (Singh goes into some detail regarding the account one early theologian provides of the rather dubious “negotiations” God must engage in to manage this.) David Graeber speaks contemptuously about this language of debt peonage, seeing it as a justification of power, but one can also turn that around and see Christianity as a call for the liberation of humanity from debt enslavement, a recurring problem in both the ancient and modern worlds.\n\nSingh is interested in the way this theologico-monetary discourse provided the ideological resources for early modern (and late modern, for that matter) defenses of the “free market,” while Graeber, understandably, finds the whole notion of an unpayable debt obscene. But humans have always acknowledged a debt to the center—otherwise, what were all those sacrifices about? Exchanges with the center are intrinsically asymmetrical. Why couldn’t that asymmetry intensify to the point where the debt to the center becomes incommensurable not only to all available resources, but to all imaginable discourses?\n\nThis would always have been thought of in “economistic” terms: if the local deity guarantees a good hunt, or sufficient rainfall, he is providing a good, and holding up his end of the bargain. This kind of exchange is inherently limited, though—if your god allows you to bring down a buffalo, there’s nothing more you can give him than a piece of that buffalo. Once the God-Emperor ensures the yearly flowing of the life-giving river, though, it gets harder to determine what would count as an acceptable gift in return. Money is both continuous and discontinuous with this history of exchanges with the center that constitutes humanity.\n\nMoney, in its universal exchangeability, provides a language for speaking of “infinite” indebtedness, and money is introduced as a means of exercising power when the asymmetry of center and periphery is so immense as to require indirect means of control and regulation. It then becomes imaginable for the exemplary victim of the state’s crime against its own justice system to become a “means of payment” for an infinite debt payable, now, not to the king, but to the God of Whom the king can only be a minted image.\n\nIt is very helpful to keep in mind the economic resonance of central theological words like “redemption” and “salvation.” The sacred can only be a way of representing our sociality, and from where other than our institutional forms could we derive the vocabulary for speaking of the sacred? A different language of the sacred would require a different form of sociality, and vice versa. The alternative to an infinite debt to the center is not a worldly or divine communism, but a donation to the center that is simultaneously one’s “income.” From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs? Communism never even claimed to get anywhere near that point, so maybe it’s not a communist mode of exchange after all.\n\nMoreover, what I think is the common interpretation of that much older than Marx slogan, that it implies altruistic self-sacrifice of the “able” to the “needy,” misses the obvious point that the able also have their needs, which might be quite substantial, and must also be met, if they are to “give” according to abilities sourced by the meeting of those needs (not to mention that the needy must also have abilities, even if more meager, to be cultivated). Your needs are also what you need in order to exhibit, refine, maintain and transmit to others your abilities. Such a mode of distribution makes no sense in terms of spontaneity and autonomy, but only in terms of an exchange with the center, mediated through micro and macro pedagogical interactions.\n\nA new form of “urbanomics,” meanwhile, would involve surfacing the economic underpinnings of our moral and ethical discussions, and also the way all the distinctions of civilization—natural/social, natural/artificial, private/public, and so on—have infiltrated the furthest reaches of our language. In place of attempts to find exemplary victims to martyrize, the crimes against the system of justice we need to reveal in our practices are needs unnecessarily unmet and abilities left unexercised. The civilized question is always some version of, “what could we be doing other than this”? Where is there a mimetic blockage that could be converted into a new medium or interface that would make such a blockage unthinkable?\n\nAs always, this is more a question of ways of being in language and therefore in institutions, rather than a “program.” We can tell, and can get better at telling, when another wants to be too much “like” us, or we find ourselves wanting to be too much “like” them, such that the space between us is in danger of being foreclosed because we would then both have to be in the same space. It is in such occasions where the metalinguistic concepts of the disciplines—all those mentioned above, plus “rights,” ‘equality,” “justice,” “reason,” and much more get leveraged to ideologize the confrontation and make it intractable. Your donation to the center is the representation of an other to which we can both contribute something, the creation of new needs ad abilities.\n\nOne more element of the city is worth mentioning: the grid, or replicable patterns of infrastructure, architecture and information transmission. The grid is the material manifestation of the abstraction exercised through money and the justice system. The grid enforces the distribution of human activities along the lines of the distinctions mentioned above, but also divisions like residential and business, financial and manufacturing, city and suburb—which replicate those other distinctions. The killings on which each of us depend are occluded in the other districts. Should we see the beasts being slaughtered for the benefit of what seems to us a more benign secondary or tertiary activity?\n\nDoes the continuation of civilization depend on not seeing how the sausage is made, or upon having it laid out for us? In the former case, this ongoing process of deferral and distantiation is to be continued—after all, each point along the way some serious conflict was deferred through some distancing and segregating mechanism until we got to the point that we can start to defend against as yet unimagined dangers—but maybe at the expense of seeing potentially “dangerous” (because conflict-generating) dangers right in front of us. In the latter case we want design for transparency, with windows from within each district opening up onto the other districts.\n\nLots of glass and mirrors, the functional parts of buildings and streets (pipes, wires, poles, etc.) made visible and interesting, information displays like the financial ticker for all kinds of activities, explicit recognition of our enhanced visibility and audibility, and therefore more awareness of the performative nature of our activities. If hiding information becomes more difficult, for corporations, institutions and individuals, then secrecy and privacy will have to be replaced by the shaping of the information we can’t help but give off: data is infinite but its processing in real time is finite and we can control the patterns that are going to be read off of us and the ones we read off of others. This all comes back to making our practices explicitly pedagogical, and instances of originary satire."
    },
    {
      "slug": "recirculating-the-center",
      "title": "Recirculating the Center",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The ether is replaced by the constancy of the speed of light; phlogiston is replaced by oxygen; and, of course, geocentrism is replaced by heliocentrism. In each case, critical experimental results effected the scientific revolution, but what I’m interested in here is how the logic of scientific revolution can be applied to the revolution in the human sciences I take the originary hypothesis to initiate—a scientific revolution that is qualitatively different because the scientist is part of the phenomenon under study, and must study that phenomenon by acting within and therefore changing it. Scientific revolution is not only a valid, but an essential model here, because what both levels of inquiry have in common is what Gaston Bachelard called “epistemological obstacles,” which is to say, concepts grounding a process of inquiry that are themselves ungrounded in anything other than inherited institutional and what we could call “mythical” imperatives.\n\nThe theological and therefore moral implications of the displacement of geocentrism by heliocentrism are well known, as is the “trauma” of Darwin’s hypothesis regarding the origin of species. I don’t know of any equivalent investments in phlogiston and the ether, but there were certainly intellectual and perhaps aesthetic investments—such concepts presumably provided a kind of apparent coherence that would have been lacking otherwise. Meanwhile, moralized resentments against the decentering of the conscious, self-centered human subject brought about by modern theorists like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud were also for quite a while grist for highbrow ruminations. The continuity between the natural and human sciences, then, is that the replacement of one disciplinary center by another requires the reordering of an entire constellation organized around that center, and such an event is always consequential.\n\nAs in my previous post, I want to bring the model of scientific revolution, or center replacement, from the level of the one or two in a lifetime event to our day to day thinking or “signifying” (or “sampling”). In a way, the problem gets much more interesting on this level. Once astronomy rejects geocentrism, or chemistry phlogiston, those paradigms are gone because inquiry now proceeds on the transformed terrain; but everyday discourse throws up new epistemological obstacles regularly, because ongoing events always need to be thought through on terms that can’t be completely given in advance. There are always assumptions in place that make it possible to see some things and impossible to see others.\n\nMoreover, in human affairs, not everything can be made explicit—indeed, with everything we do make explicit, more implicit assumptions are generated. There is always what Hannah Arendt called a “necessary appearance.” (Her example was that, however up to date my cosmology, the sun still looks like it is rising in the morning.) On the originary scene, it “appears” that the central object is holding the assembled in place. The same is true every time we attend to something—I’m already looking at something or thinking about something before I can ask why I’m doing so. I’m always being “held” in some way before “reflection” kicks in and, in fact, reflection tightens the grip of whatever holds me because my reflections find it to be necessary, or motivated, or rooted in something “deeper” that holds me, or an entry point into some network that encloses me, or a malevolent spirit that must be combatted, etc.\n\nThe structure of a scientific experiment is similar to that of a sacred ritual insofar as in both cases we have a closed space on which external effects are excluded, we have a precisely organized practice aimed at generating an event with a specific range of expected effects, as a result of which something will be revealed. “Scientific” thinking, in the sense of a practice organized so as to produce a revelatory event, was obviously “applied” to the human community well before it was applied to things. In that case, all human practices must have this structure—we are always assembling our body as a system of signs, conjoined with the mediatory and technological signs across which our attention and its effects are distributed, in order to reveal something: this something will always be some center, which will tell us what we need to do to be “held” by it.\n\nWhen a practice fails, which is to say that the center does not extend us an answer we can “process,” we draw upon our relation to the center as a model for a narrative that will re-position us in relation to the center. We can then translate that narrative into new practices, aimed at revelation. Of course, this process, taken on its own, is just as likely to lead to further obfuscation as clarification. And that’s really the question—how do we distinguish one from the other, and generate practices, narratives and translations that allow us to make this distinction regularly and in a controlled manner? Without the controlled scientific space, we must ourselves be both subjects and objects of virtual experiments that never leave the realm of the hypothetical. So, what makes for a “good,” or “generative,” hypothesis in the human realm?\n\nIt’s one that makes the practice generating it more of a practice. The simplest way to think about a practice is that as a result of some performance, something comes into existence that wouldn’t have come into existence without that performance, and this emergence produces a new scene onto which a performer of practice could enter and perform anew. Games provide good examples of this kind of thing—a good move in chess sets up a subsequent move, etc.—but we could think in terms of asking someone a question. A good question is one that elicits a statement that wouldn’t have been made without that question, and that will now enable a new question that itself wouldn’t be possible without the previous question-answer sequence—that allows the questioner to continue as questioner in an unanticipated way that the previous sequence nevertheless prepared him for.\n\nSo, you could think in terms of continually becoming a better questioner, or interviewer, as a practice. As this happens, you will discover that both you as the questioner, and the one being questioned, however important or interesting, recede into the background of the event of questioning itself. The more you focus on specific things you yourself would want to know, or imagine a reader or hearer would want to know, the less perfect your practice; the same with a focus on the interviewee as the center—you and the interviewee are nothing but the preconditions of this particular practice of questioning. Let’s say you have to keep the focus on the interviewee, and the specific things people want to hear from him, because those conditions are what made the questioning possible in the first place—in that case, those would have to become further preconditions of a more constrained but still potentially excellent practice of questioning. (Of course, the constraints could become such as to make anything approaching a genuine practice impossible, in which case one might be ethically obliged to decline the assignment.)\n\nWhat we see here is an act of decentering and then recentering: from the interviewer or interviewee being the center, which in a sense is the natural situation in a conversation, the process of questioning itself becomes the center, which the individuals involved merely serve. With one of the individuals as the center, the oscillations of desire and resentment generate the scene—the interview humbly defers to the great man, but also hopes to catch him out in some remark that will diminish him, so he projects onto the great man the intentions and qualities corresponding to his own imperfect practice—the great man is arrogant, or insincere, or indeed great beyond all comprehension, etc.—all the narratives of a failed practice.\n\nThe perfection of the practice purges such narratives and translations—insofar as both are being constructed and constituted in this space, through this event, as figures or subjects of this singular line of questioning, all those projections are dispersed. If you think about, or come to narrate, your life as a sequence of practices, and your life as a whole as a practice of practices, within a social order in which those practices are situated and is continually reconstituted by and as those practices, then the problem of the continual replacement of the center comes into focus.\n\nThe mythical narrative interferes with the perfection of practice. It keeps in place a failed practice. This happens because a failed practice at one point must have been successful, or at least seemed more likely to be successful than alternatives. It relies on a narrative whose exhaustion has not been acknowledged, and a relation to some center that seems to have no alternative other than “chaos.” The only way out of a mythical narrative and a center that can no longer keep its “satellites” in “orbit” is to continue in the path of perfection of that practice. First, though, you need to understand that what you’re doing is a practice, even if only the decaying remains of one.\n\nThis means directing your attention to whatever you are doing that you are not incorporating into some practice. When faced with some problem, or encounter, or confrontation, there is probably something in your engagement that you can’t situate within a practice—something that indicates the remains of some gesture that, you imagine, once “worked.” There might be many such things; perhaps there’s nothing you can see in what you do that is the product of a practice. What you are noticing are many at least partially failed practices, and the corresponding narratives and translations of narratives into new practices will to that extent deserve to be called “mythical.”\n\nThere is some event with a center that you are faithful to but, rather than constructing a practice that allows for continual recenterings of the center of that event, you resist anything that interferes with attempts at reconstituting the entire scene that seems inseparable from the event. The mythical narrative and its practical translations are essentially cargo-culting.\n\nEven more: whatever in your own doings and thinking you can’t represent as a practice is by virtue of your inability a part of others’ practices. If you’re thinking of yourself as an individual, with a conscience and consciousness, with character traits, a personality, beliefs, likes and dislikes, and so on, without being able to represent all of this within your practice of your life as a practice of practices, then there can’t be any doubt that all of these things are the results of practices of education, public relations, propaganda, entertainment, the social sciences, and so on that others have constructed for you.\n\nThe perfection of practices always involves inhabiting all these practices produced for you, decentering the desire for recognition, the fear of public rejection, the immersion in thoughtless narratives and all the other centers created by those disseminated practices which provide prepared scripts for the repetition of familiar revelations—and recentering the composition of practices shared by others that treat the practices circulating through as practices rather than pre-given scenes. The good hypothesis, then, is the one that proposes a possible structure as a practice for some experiential given that has been revealed as an indication of a failed practice.\n\nSay you feel impotent rage at some failure or humiliation, or betrayal at what has turned out to be misplaced trust. Bound up in these feelings is a narrative involving characters with certain rights, possibilities and responsibilities, and somewhere in that you placed yourself on a scene just because it conformed to a model of experience of some other scene. There’s something in there that hasn’t been constructed as a practice, some form of mediation between you and others that just seemed inherent in the scene. That experience indicative of a failed practice and pointing to the need to incorporate hitherto unnoticed practices into your own is the moral equivalent of the scientific “anomaly” that calls for a new “paradigm”—a paradigm in which others would be invited to co-construct practices with you, rather than re-inforce a relation of “co-dependency.”\n\nI approached, in this post, a very similar question as the one I approached in a very different way in the previous post. They’re in different languages, you might say, and we should all be multilingual. I think they are completely mutually translatable into each other without loss, but I’ll think about it. If a practice is fundamentally making oneself over as a “sample,” then I think the crossover becomes easy."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-imperative-of-the-occupant-of-the-center",
      "title": "The Imperative of the Occupant of the Center",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "To my knowledge, no one has ever placed the transition of power at the center of political theory—neither as an explanatory principle distinguishing regime forms from each other, nor in normative terms, as a way of accounting for what makes a form of government good or just. Propagandists for democracy like to talk about the “peaceful transfer of power,” but generally in the context of fearing it might not take place—never as a defining feature of the regime itself. Such propagandists are savvy enough to know it isn’t a particularly strong selling point—indeed, defenders of democracy know better than to claim their favored form of regime even provides for the best governance; they know better than to direct inquiry in that direction.\n\nBut even monarchy hasn’t approached the question in this way (at least as far as I know)—maybe because there is no single monarchical method of transitioning from one occupant of the center to the text. Primogeniture is, I suppose, the most common monarchical method of succession, and one can see how it would minimize conflicts over succession, but the weaknesses of this approach are obvious, and history is full of its consequences—kings without sons, or with idiot or wicked sons, open up the power structure the system was designed to prevent, without any clear way of closing it up again (once the chain is broken, there can always be questions about the legitimacy of the monarchy).\n\nSo, maybe no one has wanted to center political thinking on the question of succession because no one has ever felt confidence in any answer. But it really is the best way into theorizing governance: any regime that could present its form of succession as representing a form of continuity that could be traced back with as little question as possible to the origin of the social order itself would surely be the best possible regime. This is a very economical approach.\n\nAnthropomorphics presents a solution: the present occupant of the center chooses his successor. This follows from the rejection of any form of imperium in imperio , or “super-sovereignty”: if there is some rule of succession independent of the ruler, then the interpreter of that rule is sovereign. And, of course, the ruler could choose his son, or a family member—and that would sometimes be the best choice. But sometimes it wouldn’t be, and we can therefore derive a rule for selecting a successor: whoever is going to succeed as ruler must have the character to set aside his personal and familial interests for the sake of the country.\n\nThis is not a rule that could be imposed on the present occupant of the center (it couldn’t even be formulated coherently enough for that), but one that would be part of the education of the ruler, instituted by the first ruler to choose a successor outside of his family, if not earlier. Anthropomorphics lays out a series of such “rules,” again, understood as optimal cultural and pedagogical conditions sure to be discovered from the first principle of selection of successor. Here, I’d like hypothesize regarding the necessary character of a ruler under the kind of post-sacral, post-liberal conditions we have to imagine to conduct our political thinking; and draw the implication of that for our political thinking.\n\nLet’s continue with the selection, education and sequestering of the successor by the current occupant of the center and draw out the implications for actual occupancy from that. The question of succession being central, the entire social order would be oriented towards the process. Competitive academies for training the next generation of governing elites would solicit applications from across the country, giving each community a stake in seeing its native sons and daughters “fast-tracked” to those academies. At a certain level, a small number of students are put on the rulership track, to undergo more specialized training in occupying the center.\n\nIn being selected for this track, the participants forego other ambitions, for the sake of a much grander ambition which, however, the odds are against them ever fulfilling. The highest level candidates—say, a couple of dozen—from which the current governor would always have one selected, cannot exercise power themselves. They cannot be permitted either to become associated with a particular location or institution, or to build a separate power base. They would live their lives publicly, as the succession game would be fascinating to follow, as the current governor could change his mind regarding his successor, and so the prospective successors would have a kind of celebrity, like a royal family, but would have to comport themselves so as to use that celebrity to model lives of pure service.\n\nThis would be a continual test, and a candidate who tries to become a “star” would be immediately and permanently removed from consideration. While not exercising any direct power, the candidates would “shadow” the ruler, learning the ins and outs of governing, making “sample” decisions, allowing the governor to study their abilities. The candidates would live separately, and rarely if ever see each other or interact; and I think it would have to be considered a gross breach of protocol for them to refer to each other, especially in the presence of the governor. Those candidates who are not chosen to succeed may be kept in the pool by the new governor when the time comes, or they might be removed and sent back to ordinary life, without any prejudice, of course, but having squandered at least some of their prime years that could have been spent on building some other career.\n\nSo, we would have rulers with a strong sense of discretion and modesty, a capacity for solitariness, a sense of having been chosen, to a great extent due to their own merit but, at the same time, with a sense of having given over their lives to their country with the possibility of a “reward” that is at least to some extent arbitrary, or at least unknown—it would be impossible to know completely why the ruler decided to place the bet of the country on you, specifically. Each ruler would be aware of being undergirded by powerful institutional and cultural supports which pave the way for clear rule from the center, but without having the support of a powerful family or institutional clique to lean back on, or operate informally through.\n\nThe success of his rule will depend very largely upon his ability to promote, directly and indirectly, the smoothly functioning practices of the major social institutions. He would have a family, and, as I suggested earlier, might very well build what might become a dynasty (we could imagine a strong presumption that a child of his would have to go through the normal process, but this would be within his prerogative)—anti-monarchical prejudices would be ridiculous under such conditions—but it would be very difficult under advanced technological conditions to use the office to acquire the kind of wealth and institutional power that could guarantee its permanency—only a sequence of good rulers could do so.\n\nIn that case, the normal process could be retained as a back-up, which would surely be needed at some point—the demands of social command would be rigorous, and eventually there would be either no heir, or one whom the ruler would have to concede is not up to the job. But the responsibility that comes with knowing that, even if it is your own son, you have chosen your successor, would temper any temptation to do more than bend the established protocol.\n\nFor social theory, we have use the following means of regulation of “quality control,” or what me might call anthropomorphics’ six imperatives from the center. First, power and responsibility are to be matched as closely as possible—it’s immoral for someone to have power without uses of that power flowing back to communal goods, or for someone to be given the responsibility to perform some task without being provided the means to do it. Second, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” as long as we keep in mind the needs of the able, which might be considerable if they are to give in accord with their abilities.\n\nThird, while all scapegoating, or violent centralizing, obfuscates and produces regrettable actions, the most dangerous violent centralizing, the type to which all others tend, is that of the occupant of the social center: the usurpatory motives we might attribute to the occupant of the center, motives which serve as an anchor giving pattern to facts and events, are to be converted into imperatives from the center we make as consistent as possible. Fourth, we are to continually work on articulating the traces of previous scenes into the elements of practices, as argued for in my previous post. Fifth, the mimetic dimension of practices, our reliance on models and previous practices, are to made more explicit as an ongoing socially bonding pedagogical order.\n\nAnd, sixth, the social order is to be seen as a project, with “society” treated as a team of teams, directed toward that project—entering any institution is joining a team, and therefore learning its rules, taking up established (or creating new) roles, and respecting the “captain” and associated hierarchies.\n\nAll of these imperatives overlap with each other and none of them provide the basis for any kind of super-sovereignty because they are all immanent to an existing order and paradoxical. There’s no external point from which needs and abilities can be articulated—any attempt to do so would be employing something theoretical or managerial ability which would already be relying upon certain needs being met. Similarly, power and responsibility can only be matched in relation to some ongoing exercise of power or claim of responsibility—again, to try and stand outside and “measure” power and responsibility would itself be an attempt to take responsibility on the basis of some actual or aspired to power.\n\nViolent centralizing is always very precise and context-specific and can only be detected on the spot, in its emergence, by someone positioned so as to either accelerate or decelerate the process. Even a social project is more something that is pointed to, abstracted from, and turned into a model for transforming, an existing hierarchy of practices. All these imperatives provide entry points into extant practices which are entered so as to make them more thoroughly and coherently practices.\n\nA good ruler promotes, enforces, exemplifies and obeys these imperatives. The best way to examine how this will shape his character would be to start with number three. The ruler is aware that all resentments can ultimately be channeled his way, especially once the democratic alibi of pretending that his decisions and authority are not really his own is rejected. The ruler is above all a specialist in formulating and issuing commands—this is his discipline, his practice, his pedagogy. There is always an “imperative gap” between the command issued and the command obeyed—no order can be obeyed without at least some degree of discretion being exercised.\n\nThe practice of commanding is both to minimize this gap and to fill it with preceding exemplars, previous decisions, and previous exercises of discretion which can be translated for current purposes, along with an entire sensory and investigatory apparatus to follow up on and therefore inform obedience to the imperative. Every command issued by the occupant of the center refers back to the mode of occupation intrinsic to that command, while simultaneously grounding that occupation in all the positions, subsidiary centers, occupied throughout the social order. The decision is represented as both as minimal and as consequential as possible: in an enormously complex and intricate order, one tiny “switch” is turned; that one tiny switch is chosen precisely where the choice between bifurcating paths would make the most difference.\n\nThe command has an economy to it: no more and no less is said than necessary; commands are issued only to those who need to obey them; and this economy models the way further commands for implementing the prime one are to be issued. The ruler both disappears into his commands and stands outside of them. Any complaint directed to the occupant of the center becomes a question—an extension of the command which one delays obeying by complaining—regarding the economy with which one has situating oneself at a bifurcation. The character of the good ruler is one that can always say, I’m doing at my point at a particular bifurcation nothing more and nothing less than what I’m asking you to do at yours."
    },
    {
      "slug": "toward-a-media-moral-synthesis",
      "title": "Toward a Media-Moral Synthesis",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jun 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Haun Saussy, in an excellent book on the relation between orality and literacy (and media history more generally), suggests a way of thinking about orality that reframes the whole question. Rather than trying to define empirically how to sort out what in (or “how much” of) a community is constituted through orality, what we are to count as “writing,” what criteria we are going to have for “literacy,” and so on, he suggests thinking about orality as ergodic in its constitution. Here’s the online dictionary definition of “ergodic”:\n\nrelating to or denoting systems or processes with the property that, given sufficient time, they include or impinge on all points in a given space and can be represented statistically by a reasonably large selection of points.\n\nWith regard to language, this means a signifying system that is finite: given enough time, all the different “elements” of the system will be used. This view of language runs counter to the assumption shared, I think, by all schools of modern linguistics, which is that language is constituted by a set of combinatorial rules that make possible utterances unlimited—new things can always be said in the language, and always are said, and not necessarily by language users who are particularly creative or inventive. Language is intrinsically generative and therefore infinite. If we follow up on Saussy’s suggestion, though, this is in fact only the case for written languages. Languages in a condition of orality are constituted by a finite number of “formulas,” or “commonplaces,” or “clichés,” or “chunks,” that are not infinitely recombinable.\n\nThis new way of framing the question could raise a whole series of questions. One could say that language was always “potentially” infinite, and so modern linguistics would still be essentially right—and there must be some sense in which this is true. One could say that it is the specifically metalinguistic concepts introduced in order to institutionalize writing (and writing was institutionalized from the beginning), like the “definition” of words, and, especially, grammatical “rules,” that introduced the infinitization of language. One might even want to argue that, perhaps, we are wrong in thinking languages even in their literate form are inexhaustible—after all, how could we really know? What I will do is follow up on some hypotheses I’ve taken over from thinkers of orality/literacy like David Olson and Marcel Jousse and explore the relation between the emergence of literacy and Axial Age moral innovations.\n\nRemember that for Olson the entry point into the oral/literate distinction is the problem of reported speech—telling someone what someone else said. Under oral conditions, the tag “X said” would be used (which reminds us that “say” is one of Wierzbicka’s primes), but the reporting of speech would be performed mimetically—the one reporting the speech not only wouldn’t paraphrase or summarize, but would say the exact same thing in the exact same way. That’s the presumption, at least, even if an outside observer might notice discrepancies. What is said is shared by the two speakers, and this presumption is strengthened by the ergodic nature of language under orality, which means that no one can say anything that hasn’t already been said, and won’t be said again. Individual speakers are conduits of a language that flows through them, and that they are “within”—and the language of ritual and myth would, further, be the model and resource for everyday speech, as everyone inhabits traditionally approved roles. Everyone is a_________, with the blank filled in by some figure of tradition.\n\nWhen writing, you can’t imitate the way someone said something, so everything apart from the actual words needs to be represented lexically. This leads to the metalanguage of literacy, involving the vast expansion of words representing variations on, first of all, “say,” and “think.” You can’t reproduce the excited manner in which someone said something, so you say “he exclaimed .” This is, of course, an interpretation of how it was said, and so, one could say, was the imitation, but this difference in register makes it harder to check the interpretation against the original—it would be easier for a community to tell whether you provide a plausible likeness of some other member than to sort out whether he indeed “exclaimed”—rather than, for example, simply “stating.” Proficiency in the metalanguage provides authority—you own what the other has said—which is why an exact replication of the original words would become less important.\n\nWhat is happening here is that while a difference is opening up between the original speaker and the one reporting the speech, differences are also opening up between the reporter and the audience and, eventually, within the speaker himself. This is the creation of “psychological depth.” Did he “exclaim” or “state”? Or, for that matter, “shriek”? That would depend on the context, which could itself be constructed in various ways, and never exhaustively. The very range of possible descriptions opened up the metalanguage of literacy generates disagreements—defenders of the original speaker would “insist” he simply firmly “stated,” while his “critics” would “counter” that he in fact, was losing it.\n\nIt then becomes possible to ask oneself whether one wants to be seen as stating or exclaiming, to examine the “markers” of each way of “saying,” and to put effort into being seen as a “stater” rather than as “exclamatory.” Which then opens up further distinctions, between how one appears, even to oneself, and what one “really” is. On the surface I’m stating, clearly and calmly, but am I exclaiming “deep down”? (Of course, the respective values of “exclaiming” and “stating” can be arranged in other ways—what matters is that the metalanguage of literacy necessarily implies judgments regarding the discrepancy between what someone says and what they “really mean,” whether or not they are aware of that “real meaning.”)\n\nOral accounts involve people doing and saying things; the oral accounts preserved most tenaciously are those in which what people do and say place the center in some kind of crisis, a crisis that is then resolved. Such narratives will remain fairly close to what can be performed in a ritual, and thereby re-enacted by the community. Writing is neither cause nor effect of a distancing of the community from a shared ritual center, but it broadly coincides with it. Writing begins as record-keeping, which right away presupposes transactions not directly mediated by a common sacrifice. Record-keeping implies both hierarchy—a king separated from his subject by bureaucratic layers—and “mercurial” agents, merchants, who move across different communities, sharing a ritual order with none of them. The earliest form of literacy is manuscript culture, where a written text serves to aid the memory in oral performances. The very fact that such an aid is necessary and possible, though, means we have moved some distance from the earliest “bardic” culture.\n\nWhere things get interesting is where the manuscripts start to proliferate, as they surely will, and differ from each other. Member of an oral culture might enforce certain kinds of conformity very strictly, but could hardly keep track to “deviations” from an original text, especially since such a text doesn’t exist. Diverse written accounts would make divergences unavoidable and consequential, because the very fact that a text was found worthy of committing to the permanence of writing (an expensive and time-consuming process) would add a sacred aura to it. As we move into a later form of manuscript culture, in which commentaries, oral but also sometimes written as well, are added to the texts, these differences would have to be reconciled—generating, in turn, more commentary.\n\nThis is an early version of what Marcel Jousse called “transfer translations,” i.e., translations into the vernacular of a sacred text preserved in an archaic language—according to Jousse, the inevitable discrepancies between the translation and original, due to the differing formulas in each, respectively, generates commentary aimed at reconciling them.\n\nReconciling such discrepancies could involve nothing more than “smoothing out” while keeping the narrative and moral lessons essentially intact. There will be times, though, when the very need to address discrepancies allows for, and even attracts, complicating elements. Let’s say the prototypical oral, mythical narrative involves some agent transgressing against or seeking to usurp the center in a way that disrupts the community and then being punished (by the center or the community) in a way that restores the community. If there’s no longer a shared ritual space, such narratives are less likely to be so unequivocal.\n\nTo transgress against the center is now to transgress against a human occupant of the center. It is possible to refer to a discrepancy between that occupant and the permanent, or signifying center. There can be a discrepancy between human and divine “accounting” or “bookkeeping,” in which sins and virtues, crime and punishment, must be balanced. The discrepancies between “accounts” will attract commentaries exploring this discrepancy. The injustice suffered, the travails undergone, perhaps the triumphs, real or compensatory, experienced by the figure of such a discrepancy will come to be incorporated into a text that is, we might say, “always already” commented upon—that is, such a more complex story will include, while keeping implicit, the accretion of meanings to the “original” narrative. This is what gets us out of the ergodic, and into the vertiginous world of essences (new centers) revealing themselves behind appearances, as well as historical narratives modeled on such ambivalent relations to the center.\n\nOnce such a text, or mode of textuality, is at the center of the community, we are on the way to a more complete form of literacy, in which the metalanguage of literacy overlays and incorporates originally oral discourses. Literacy is crucially involved in the shift in the heroic narrative from the “Promethean” (and doomed) struggle against the center to the victim who exemplifies what we can now see as the unholy, even Satanic, violence of the imperial center. This means that the figure of the “exemplary victim,” that is, the victim of violence by the occupant of the center, a violence that transgresses the imperative of the signifying center, is simply intrinsic to advanced literacy.\n\nOur social activity is therefore a form of writing the exemplary victim. Liberal culture has its own way of doing so—the exemplary victim is the victim of some form of “tyranny” and demonstrates the need for super-sovereign approved form of rule that bypasses or eliminates that tyranny. It’s almost impossible to speak in terms other than “resisting” some “illegitimate” power in name of someone’s “rights” (as defined by the disciplines—law, philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, etc.).\n\nIf “postliberalism,” or what we could call “verticism,” is genuinely “reactionary,” I would say it is in redirecting attention from the exemplary victim back to the occupant of the center, highlighting that occupant’s inheritance of sacral kingship and therefore vulnerability to scapegoating and sacrifice. The exemplary victim could emerge in the space opened by the ancient empires, where the ruler was too distant from the social order to be sacrificed, but post-Roman European kings never definitively achieved this distance, and liberalism is predicated upon putting the center directly at stake, predicating the center’s invulnerability so as to exacerbate its vulnerability.\n\nAll scapegoating attributes some hidden power to the victim, which is to say, places the victim at the center; all scapegoating of figures at the margin, then, is a result and measure of unsecure power at the center; so, refusal to participate in scapegoating, or violent centralization, is really bound up with the imperative to secure the center. This means treating the victim as a sign of derogation of central authority, rather than levying the victim against that authority. So, it’s not that we can ignore the exemplary victim; rather, we must “unwrite” the exemplary victim. This may be the hardest thing to do—to renounce martyrdom, to acknowledge victims but deny their exemplarity in order to “read” them as markers of the center’s incoherence—while representing that incoherence in order to remedy it.\n\nThe very fact that we are drawn to one victim rather than another—this “racist” who has been canceled, that website that has been de-platformed or de-monetized—itself tends to make that victim “exemplary,” and we do have to pay attention. Nor do we want to “victim-blame” (if only they had been more careful, etc.), even if discussions of tactics and strategy are necessary.\n\nInsofar as we inherit the European form of the Axial Age moral acquisition, we can’t help but see through the frame of the exemplary victim—even a Nietzschean perspective which purports to repudiate victimary framings and claim an unmediated agency is the adoption of a position shaped by Romantic claims to subjective centrality and therefore sacrificiability (Nietzsche’s own “tragic” end reinforces this). The exemplary victim is constitutive of our language and narratives, which is why it needs to be “unwritten.” The whole range of exemplary victims produced across the political spectrum constitutes our “alphabet” (or, perhaps, “meme factory”).\n\nThe most direct way unwrite might be to follow up on the observation that the function of the disciplinary deployments of the exemplary victim is to plug executive power into the disciplines, which then can turn on and off the switch. But these detourings of centered ordinality nevertheless anticipate some use of the executive—those most deeply invested in declarative cultures like the law want the executive to crack down on their enemies as much as anyone else. So, it’s always possible to cut to the chase and propose and where possible embody that use of executive power which would most comprehensively make future instances of that form of victimage as unlikely as possible.\n\nOne proposes, that is, some increased coherence in the imperatives coming from the center (and, by implication, in the cultivation of those dispositions necessary to sustain that coherence). If we did X, this victim over whom we are agonizing would be irrelevant—we could forget all about him. One result would be the revelation of how dependent liberal culture is upon its martyrs—so much so that they’d rather preserve their enshrinement than solve the supposed problem and thereby write them off. In the meantime, we’d be embarking upon a rewriting of moral inheritances that would erase the liberal laundering of scapegoating through the disciplines once and for all."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-imperative-constant",
      "title": "The Imperative Constant",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "A practice, as I have been using the term, is doing something so that something happens as a result of what you have done. The better the practice, the more it is reduced to only those means that produce these results, and the more it can be ascertained that these results can be attributed completely and only to that practice. Since a given practice relies upon other practices in order to have the necessary means available, practices also convert other practices into auxiliary practices, or practices to which the practice in question is auxiliary. What I will be more explicit about now is that part of the practice is narrating the history, outcome and purpose of the practice, all of which derive from the limitations of other practices—this part of the practice can also, of course, be perfected. Since all of human life is comprised of practices, articulated with each other in various ways, and at various stages of perfection, the theory of practice is the theory of society and culture.\n\nThe power of this theoretical approach can be demonstrated by the similarity between practices and rituals. A ritual also aims at producing a result that can be completely and reliably attributed to the shared act. The ritual arranges a gifting to the being at the center in such a way as to obey the imperative attached to the gift expected in return from the being at the center. A good ritual would be one that excludes all acts, thoughts or gestures that don’t contribute to the devotion to the center enacted by the ritual. The outcome of the ritual is, of course, uncertain—burning the choice chunk of meat to the god, or renewing one’s “membership” in the “clan” led by the antelope-god will not in itself make the upcoming hunt more successful.\n\nBut if we keep in mind that rituals are collective acts, aimed at increasing mutual trust and cooperation amongst the congregants, it may very well in fact be the case that a ritual can be deemed successful. This is especially so since the tightly scripted and choreographed ritual can be replicated in other activities, further enhancing effectivity—which is in turn enhanced through legend and lore retelling of hunting expeditions, war, and other shared projects, through which the discovery and deployment of techniques become ritualized. Ritual and myth shape the “soul” so as to encourage imitation of the models considered most admirable in the community, which also is part of their “perfection.”\n\nThis similarity between ritual and practice means that we could think about post-sacrificial history, as the imperative to participate in the ongoing conversion of rituals into practices. Without a shared sacrificial center, ritual cannot survive, and without ritual, myth becomes detached stories rather than communication with the founders of the community. So, there’s no way to return to a ritual order, but this doesn’t make the Enlightenment approach to “demythification” any less delusional and destructive. If a particular ritual/myth nexus is dismantled, it has to be replaced by an equivalent—the most historically important project of demythification, Christianity, understood this.\n\nIf a particular ritual/myth nexus is not replaced by a higher form of sacrality and a new integration of ritual and “theology,” it will be replaced by lower forms of centralized violence, or scapegoating. What anyone says and “believes,” and their enactment of their priorities and commitments, is an account of their relation to the center and that relation to the center must be revised not “debunked.” And that goes for any of us, as the center is always taking on new “data” that changes our relation to it, making the narratives we rely on at least partially “mythical,” indicating (as so many contemporary deperfecting practices do, on fantasies of return to a shared sacrificial center).\n\nThe conversion of ritual into practice provides us with a practice of history. What is the relationship between what anyone says and does, on the one hand, and the expected vs. the actual outcome, on the other hand? This is always a very interesting topic of conversation! What, exactly, are you trying to do here? And, assuming you manage to do it, then what? These questions can never get old. Whatever is ritualistic and mythical in your practice is that which “serves” a particular figure in your narrative (the “free” man, the “anti-racist” man/woman, etc.) but can’t be shown to actually follow from your practice.\n\nWe can perfect the practice of zeroing in on this ritualistic and mythical residue by oscillating between macro and micro frames. So, for example, you want a “more equal” society and so you go to this demonstration, hold up this sign, shout that this counter-demonstrator, argue with these less doctrinaire comrades, etc. What path do you see from doing all these things to a “more equal” (in what sense, measured how?) society? What other practices would need to be constructed so as to actualize that path? How would the construction of those practices follow from the practice you are currently engaged in? How would you know those practices when you see them?\n\nThese are very good questions for anyone. At every point along the path, then, you construct hypothetical practices, keep perfecting them as practices by fitting them to other practices, and the chances are very good that the “path” ends up looking very different than was originally imagined.\n\nThe conversion of ritual into practice follows the imperative of the center to construct an iterable scene around an object. On the originary scene, a gesture must have been “perfected,” at least “sufficiently.” The “outcome” of the gesture was the repetition of the gesture on the part of the others in group, as a “marker” of each member’s refraining from advancing unilaterally toward the center. All subsequent actions are to be coordinated, and any “unilateralism” is to lead to a distribution including all within the group. The gesture both says and does this. The construction of practices that identify and preempt violent centralization is identical to the construction of practices that transform the social order into reciprocally supporting practices.\n\nSo, in trying to hear the imperative of the center, you convert whatever command you do hear (from your boss, your parent, your priest, your conscience, your president…) and convert it into a practice that identifies, translates and where necessary discards whatever is ritualistic and mythical in it. This is what it means to resolve the ambiguities of any command by following that command back to an earlier, and then yet earlier one—each command you seek the traces of is ordering you to bring what you do and what happens into greater conformity, both with each other and with what others do and make happen. Like on the originary scene, the aim is a sign everyone can say is “the same.”\n\nWe can call this practice of converting ritual into practice the imperative constant, which makes all practices increasingly consonant with each other. Only an imperative from the center can make the perfection of practices more than a kind of professional scruple. Even the professional scruple presupposes a social order in which such scruples can be formulated and protected, and the resulting work properly distributed and appreciated. Wanting to become the best teacher, doctor, welder, landscaper, writer, etc., I can be only makes sense if all of these skills are integrated into a community in which people can tell and value the difference between good and bad teaching, welding, and so on.\n\nAnd if they can’t, I can note that as a measure of social dysfunction or decline. I can’t possibly want anything other than the internal anomalies of the practice and its intersection with other practices to enter into my work on perfecting the practice. And this means I want the imperative from the center—to do nothing other than convert rituals into practices—to remain constant, for each member of society to be able to show any other member how he is doing this. From a total ritual society to a total disciplinary society—whatever we do is perfected so as to make the relation between doing it and this transformation happening more consistent and iterable.\n\nThis practice is a performative one—practices are always on display, even if in different ways and to differing extents for different “audiences.” And it is always moral, even when seemingly primarily or even completely technical. There is always resistance to the perfection of practice and relapse into more ritual practices and mythical narratives. Here is where we can locate such “mimetic structures” as desire, envy and resentment. The perfection of the practice always rubs up against existing habit, relations and hierarchies—it always threatens to shift existing relations to the center. Even under the most collaborative conditions, with a group of dedicated practitioners wholly in accord regarding the shared end, to propose some further perfection is always to appear a bit of a usurper of the center. Registering these appearances as they are distributed across the group, giving them representation, and converting them to proposals for distinctive contributions by those less central is itself a practice that one perfects.\n\nAll of the historical and conceptual material I’ve been generating and gathering—the “exemplary victim,” the “metalanguage of literacy,” more recently, the “ve/orticist app” and so on—should all be used to bringing about the conversion of rituals into practices. These are features of discourses to be surfaced and identified, with the language in which they are articulated subjected to translation practices. It is quite remarkable that it’s almost impossible to speak about politics without some victim of the other’s practices to gather around—the whys and the hows of victim selection and promotion and insertion into practices is always a productive site of attention (George Floyd died, therefore we…. What, exactly, and why?). The problem with the metapolitical concepts generated in opposition to “tyranny”—justice, freedom, equality, democracy, the republic, etc.—is that they are resistant to being converted into practices, which marks them as ritualistic and mythical.\n\nAt the same time, though, we can’t simply discard all these words and expect others to do so as well. They must be turned into transitional concepts as they are stripped of their mythical content and the victimologies through which they cohere subjected to the pressure of more perfect practices. New concepts derived from the “stack” and the data-driven algorithmically articulated reality are themselves meaningful as parts of practices that break up oralizing fantasies of community and distribute signs and discourses across practices within disciplines that can accordingly be infiltrated and their practices perfected.\n\nThe exemplary victim and the metalanguage of literacy allow us to construct model scenes and narratives against which we can generate various algorithmic paths to the scenes and models constructed by the media—and transitioning to the defense of the center (the perfecting practice) and infralanguages of literacy help us to block those paths. All metalinguistic concepts are aimed at obstructing some “tyranny” and thereby indirectly indicate some possible executive action—to put it simply, what should be done is something the anti-tyranny metaconcept enjoins. Convergence upon a victim is a ritual and mythical practice, but it signifies, not a specific form “tyranny” targeting that victim, but disordered power to which the specificities of the victim are incidental.\n\nInfralinguistic centering practices follow the imperative constant to disable the victimary-metalinguistic link. “This violence against this victim means that the system is guilty of this form of tyranny which we must devote our entire being to overthrowing” always needs to be translated into “this anomaly (whether in a law enforcement, or economic, or reporting, or educational practice) indicates the need to perfect this cluster of practices.” This would be the continual conversion of ritual into practice."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-v-e-o-rticist-app",
      "title": "The V(e/o)rticist App",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This post continues the thinking initiated in “The Pursuit of Appiness” several posts back. What I want to emphasize is the importance of thinking, not in terms of external attempts to affect and influence others’ thinking and actions, but in terms of working within the broader computational system so as to participate in the semiotic metabolism which creates “belief,” “opinions,” “principles” and the rest further downstream. The analogy I used there was prospective (and, for all I know, real) transformations in medical treatment where, instead of counter-attacking some direct threat to the body’s integrity, like bacteria, a virus, or cancerous cells, the use of nanobots informed by data accessed from global computing systems would enable the body to self-regulate so as to be less vulnerable to such “invasions” in the first place.\n\nThe nanobots in this case would be governed by an App, an interface between the individual “user” and the “cloud,” and part of the “exchange” is that the bots would be collecting data from your own biological system so as to contribute to the ongoing refinement of the organization of globally collected and algorithmically processed data. The implication of the analogy is that as social actors we ourselves become “apps,” and, to continue the analogy a bit further, these apps turn the existing social signs into “bots.”\n\nThis approach presupposes that we are all located at some intersection along the algorithmic order—our actions are most significant insofar as we modify the calculation of probabilities being made incessantly by computational systems. Either we play according to the rules of some algorithm or we help design their rules—and “helping design” is ultimately a more complex form of “playing according to.” The starting point is making a decision has to how to make what is implicit in a statement explicit—that is, making utterances or samples more declarative. Let’s take a statement like “boys like to play with cars.” Every word in that sentence presupposes a great deal and includes a great deal of ambiguity.\n\n“Boys” can refer to males between the ages of 0 to 18—for that matter, sometimes grown men are referred to, more or less ironically, as “boys.” Does “liking” and “playing” mean the same thing for a 4 year old as for a 14 year old male? How would we operationalize “like”? Does that mean anything from being obsessed with vintage cars to having some old toy hot rods around that one enjoys playing with when there’s nothing else to do? Does “liking” place a particular activity on a scale with other activities, like playing football, meeting girls, bike riding, etc.? Think about how important it would be to a toy car manufacturer to get the numbers right on this.\n\nWe could generate an at least equally involved “explicitation” for a sentence like “that’s a dangerous street to walk at night.” What counts as a danger, as different levels of danger, as various sources of danger, what are the variations for different hours of the night, what are the different kinds and degrees of danger for different categories of pedestrians at different hours of the night, and so on. Every algorithm starts out with the operationalization of a statement like this, which can now be put to the test and continually revised—there are various ways of gathering and processing information regarding people’s walks through that street at night and each one would add further data regarding forms and degrees of dangers.\n\nUltimately, of course, we’d be at the point where we wouldn’t even be using a commonsensical word like “danger” anymore—we’d be able to speak much more precisely of the probability of suffering a violent assault of a specific kind given specific behavioral patterns at a specific location, etc. Even words like “violent assault,” while legal and formal, might be reduced to more explicit descriptions of unanticipated forcible bodily contact, and so on.\n\nAll this is the unfolding of declarative culture, which aims at the articulation of virtualities at different levels of abstraction. There are already apps (al though I think they were “canceled” for being “racist”) that would warn you of the probability of a particular kind of danger at a particular place at a particular time. And, again, you being there produces more data that will be part of the revision of probabilities provided for the next person to use the app there. But there is an ostensive dimension to the algorithm as well, insofar as the algorithm begins with a model: a particular type of event, which must itself be abstracted from things that have happened.\n\nWhen you think of a street being dangerous, you think in terms of specific people, whose physical attributes, dress, manners and speech you might imagine in pretty concrete terms, doing specific things to you. You might be wrong about much of the way you sketch it out, but that’s enough to set the algorithm in motion—if you’re wrong, the algorithm will reveal that through a series of revisions based on data input determined by search instructions. The process involves matching events to each other from a continually growing archive, rather than a purely analytical construction drawing upon all possible actors and actions.\n\nThe question then becomes how similar one “dangerous” event is to others that have been marked as “dangerous,” rather than an encyclopedia style listing of all the “features” of a “dangerous” situation, followed by the establishment of a rule for determining whether these features are observed in specific events. Google Translate is a helpful example here. The early, ludicrously bad attempts to produce translation programs involved using dictionaries and grammatical rules (the basic metalanguage of literacy) to reconstruct sentences from the original to the target language in a one-to-one manner. What made genuine translation possible was to perform a search for previous instances of translation of a particular phrase or sentence, and simply use that—even here, of course, there may be all kinds of problems (a sentence translated for a medical textbook might be translated differently in a novel, etc.), but, then, that is what the algorithm is for—to determine the closest match, for current purposes (with “current purposes” itself modeled in a particular way), between original and translation.\n\nWhich kind of event you choose as the model is crucial, then, as is the way you revise and modify that event as subsequent data comes in. To be an “app,” then, is to be situated in that relationship between the original (or, “originary,” a word that is very appropriate here) event and its revisions. For example, when most Americans think of ‘racism,” they don’t think of a dictionary or textbook definition (which they could barely provide, if asked—and which are not very helpful, anyway), much less of the deductive logic that would get us from that definition to the act they want to stigmatize—they think of a fat Southern sheriff named Buford, sometimes with a German Shepherd, sneering or barking at a helpless black guy.\n\nThis model has appeared in countless movies and TV shows, as well as footage from the civil rights protests of the 50s and 60s. So, the real starting point of any discussion or representation of “racism” is the relation between Buford and, say, some middle-aged white woman who gets nervous and acts out when a nearby black man seems “menacing.” The “anti-racist” activist wants to line up Buford with “Karen,” and so we can imagine and supply the implicit algorithm that would make the latest instance a “sample” derived from the model “source”; the “app” I’m proposing “wants” to interfere with this attempt, this implicit algorithm, to scramble the wires connecting the two figures.\n\nThis would involve acting algorithmically—making explicit new features of either scene and introducing new third scenes that would revise the meaning of both of our starting ones. There’s a sliding scale here, which allows for differing responses to different situations—one could “argue” along these lines, if the conditions are right; or, one could simply introduce subversive juxtapositions, if that’s what the situation allows for. Of course, the originary model won’t always be so obvious, and part of the process of self-appification is to extract the model from what others are saying. In this way, you’re not only in the narrative—you’re also working on the narrative, from within.\n\nWorking on it toward what end? What’s the practice here? You, along with your interlocutor or audience, are to be placed in real positions on virtual scenes. We all know that the most pointless way of responding to, say, an accusation of racism, is to deny it—if you’re being positioned as a racist on some scene, the “appy” approach is to enact all of the features of the “racist” (everything Buford or Karen-like in your setting) minus the one that actually marks you as “racist.” What that will be requires a study of the scene, of course, but that’s the target—that’s what we want to learn how to do. And the same thing holds if you’re positioned as a victim of a “racist” act, or as a “complicit bystander.”\n\nIf you construct yourself as an anomaly relative to the model you are being measured against, the entire scene and the relation between models needs to be reconfigured. The goal is to disable the word “racist” and redirect attention to, say, the competing models of “violence” between which the charge of “racism” attempts to adjudicate: for example, a model of violence as “scapegoating” of the “powerless,” on the one hand, as opposed to a model of violence as the attack on ordered hierarchy (which is really a case of scapegoating “up”), on the other. If we’re talking about “violence,” then we’re talking about who permits, sponsors, defines and responds to “violence.” We’re talking about a central authority whose pragmatic “definition” of “violence” will not depend upon what any of us think, but which nevertheless can only “define” through us.\n\nThis move to blunt and redirect the “horizontalism” of charges of tyrannical usurpation so as to make the center the center of the problematic of the scene is what we might call “verticism.” The vertical looks upward, and aims at a vertex, the point where lines intersect and create an angle. The endpoint of our exchange is for all of our actions to meet in an angle, separate from all, which someone superintends the whole. Moreover, verticism is generated out of a vortex, an accelerating whirlpool that provides a perfect model for the intensification of mimetic crisis—and a vorticism aligned with verticism also pays homage to the artistic avant-garde movement created by Wyndham Lewis.\n\n“Vertex” and “vortex” are ultimately the same word, both deriving from the word for “turn”—from the spiraling, dedifferentiating and descending turns of the vortex to the differentiating and ascending turns of the vertex. The “app” I have in mind finds the “switch” (also a “turn”) that turns the vortex into a vertex. From “everyone is Buford” to “all the events you’re modeling on Buford are so different from each other that we might even be able to have a couple words with Buford himself.” So, I’m proposing The V(e/o)rticist App as the name for a practice aimed at converting the centering of the exemplary victim into the installation of the occupant of the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "truth-and-practice",
      "title": "Truth and Practice",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Jul 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "What is true? Whatever enables you to further perfect your practice. You have a practice when you can point to something that happens that could only have been a result of something you did. So, if I drop a glass and it shatters, something that only happened because I dropped it, do I have a practice? Yes, but a limited one—you could expand it by, for example, dropping other things and seeing that they too shatter; or by hitting the glass with a hammer or throwing it against the wall, and seeing that these actions also lead to its shattering; but that’s about it. On the other hand, if you drop the glass on a pillow, and see that it doesn’t shatter, and then try it out on surfaces intermediate in hardness between floor and pillow, we might start getting somewhere interesting.\n\nYou have a practice that we might describe as testing the resilience of various substances under various conditions, and that could get very sophisticated and be extremely useful. (Obviously, it is .) Every time you identify some correlation between resiliency and constraining conditions you have said or recorded something true.\n\nPart of having a practice is reframing things you were doing previously as imperfect versions of that practice. Looking back, the scientist testing the resiliency of objects can say that’s what he was “really” doing when he dropped the glass. And that’s also true, if you can trace that accident to your present practices—no one can know everything about one’s attentional state in some prior event, and very often later actions in a sequence are needed to bring out the truth of earlier actions. That’s part of the practice—deriving the elements of your practice from previous, maybe “unconscious” attempts at it. This is also a helpful way to remind yourself that you don’t know everything you’re doing right now, and to conduct your present practices in such a way that subsequent versions will reveal what presently remains obscure. The more inclusive of past practices and the more anticipatory of future ones they are, the more truth your present practices generate.\n\nThis doesn’t mean, though, that the earlier practices “contain” or inexorably lead to, the later practices—nothing about breaking a glass sets you on the path to create technologies to test the effects of various temperatures on specific objects. Social and technological histories have to intervene. Various substances come to be used for various purposes; a social space must be created in which people have the time to “specialize” in certain modes of production; and this means certain kinds of violence must be minimized and certain kinds of authority constructed. We can leave scientific practices to the scientists, except for when those practices cross over into other domains; what we can focus on, though, is the practical structures of those other domains, which “receive” the results of scientific practices and provide the conditions for them.\n\nAnd in the domains of human interaction in its various media, the question of what counts as a practice, or as the perfection of practices within a system of practices, is more complex. When I speak with someone, what makes that a practice? What happens, and happens in such a way that I can point to it so that others can see it as only as a result of what I say? How do I conduct my speech so as make things happen so that their effects can be singled out in this way?\n\nIt’s good to be both matter of fact and revelatory at the same time—you’re doing something that can be repeated, i.e., made routine and practicable for anyone, while you’ve designed that practice, and determined the site of its use, in such a way as to produce some knowledge that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. The construction of a practice is simultaneous with realizing that you’ve already been constructing a practice. The starting point is always an anomaly or a mistake—someone does or says something that doesn’t fit the frame of expectations that enable us to make sense of something. The first step is to suppress your impulse to “harmonize” the anomaly with the field of expectations or correct the mistake, and in the latter case to suppress your shame if it happens to be your own.\n\nIt has to become interesting. The breaking of a frame makes you realize there was a frame; since a mistake or anomaly is essentially the collision of some other frame than the one determining your expectations, you now have two frames that happened to interfere with each other. Such interference is what brings the newly recognized frame into view.\n\nYou now have a question around which to organize your emergent practice: what does each frame include and exclude? To answer this question, you have to run tests: repeat the mistake or anomaly, and see how the frame responds. But this raises a question—what counts as a “repeat”? No gesture or utterance can simply be repeated, because part of the gesture or utterance is the context, which has been transformed by the gesture, or utterance, or sample in question. You need to single out what, exactly, in that sample you are identifying as iterable. Since what we’re interested in is the frame which has been disrupted, what needs to be singled out is a particular form of disruption of that frame, or that “kind” of frame.\n\nWhat makes it that kind of frame is the practice that initiated it, and the way it draws in the elements and means from the whole. We can converge the two: the evidence of the practice that initiated a given frame or field is in the way it appropriates and converts elements from the surrounding fields. Something in those surrounding fields will resist incorporation, and the attempt to subdue or ignore this resistance will generate anomalies.\n\nIf we know the starting point of inquiry is the anomaly or mistake, we can refine our attention so as to lower the threshold for what we count as an anomaly or mistake. We can do this by imagining the contexts, actual or potential, in which some sample would appear anomalous. There’s a short step from such refinements to adopting the perpetual disciplinary stance that is always on the lookout for what might be anomalous or mistaken in any sample we come across—always looking at things askew, we might say. In this way we see the possibilities of cultural innovation everywhere, because, as we can know from Eric Gans’s study of the succession of speech forms in The Origin of Language , the new cultural form emerges from the treatment of the mistake as the creation of a new form of presence, if only one can find a way to turn it into a practice others might repeat.\n\nSo, as we’re lowering the threshold for the identification of mistakes, and widening the hypothetical fields in which those samples would be mistakes, we are also, in the very act of ostensively identifying these mistakes, modeling a way of turning them into the origin of new practices.\n\nThe path, then, toward perfecting our practices, lies in the ongoing surfacing of the mistake/practice interfaces all across the field of the present. This involves iterating samples in the closest possible way, making our iterations as indistinguishable as possible from the original; while at the same time revealing everything mistaken or anomalous in the “original” and producing the practice that would make up the difference. It’s a kind of infiltration that’s right out in the open and transforms the space being infiltrated so that it’s no longer an infiltration. The practice is the transposition of a sample from one field to another, in such a way that the fields are converted into elements appropriable by the practice. One would never say anything other than what is being said, but in such a way as to summon everything that makes it sayable.\n\nWe can frame this in algorithmic terms. What we notice are low probability events. We notice them against the background of high probability events, which can be held constant. The paradox here is that the low probability event, if it happened, was in fact very high probability—100%, in fact. What made it seem low probability, then, were precisely all the other events that were being held constant. (The originary hypothesis is a very helpful model here: there’s nothing that we find ourselves more entitled to hold constant than our existence as human beings, whatever we take that to entail—but holding all that constant makes the emergence of the human itself very low probability, since not having the center is unimaginable.)\n\nWhatever our system of measurement is equipped to detect made it incapable of detecting whatever pointed to the emergence of what actually happened. So, we work backwards from the supposedly low-probability event to the system of measurement and we identify everything that pointed to the surprising occurrence, and set it alongside what was actually noticed instead. That’s the instruction that sets the algorithm to work: find all the markers of the event’s emergence, from beginning to end (the parameters for all this would have to be determined), and determine the threshold of detectability of those markers within the existing system of measurement.\n\nAn obvious example here would be the 2016 election: an intellectually honest prognosticator who was 99% sure Hillary Clinton would win the election might want to do a study of the forms of attention that led to that conclusion, and part of doing that would be to go back and look for all the things you could have noticed and articulated into a better prediction, but never saw because you disdained the source (as opposed to more “reliable” ones), or saw but relegated to the irrelevant because it conflicted with other information you held constant as relevant, things that you noticed and found curious or troubling but never pieced together because that didn’t fit a paradigm that had been successful in the past, and so on.\n\nYou could imagine this being done through a continual refinement of search terms taking you through the archives, through the feedback you received from the previous search. The algorithm would be the formula or set of instructions enabling the computer to do this on its own, producing various models for you of reconfigured attentional structures that would have led to different results.\n\nSo, right now, spreading out to the fringes of your awareness and beyond, there are emergent events one outcome of which, if the event were to be brought to your attention, would seem to be 73%, another outcome 17%, another 5%, and so on, until we get to an outcome that seems .000001% likely to happen. Of course, this breakdown will be wrong in some ways, and it will be wrong in more ways as the predictions get more “granular.” (Someone was right in predicting Trump would win, but did they predict he’d win Wisconsin, etc.?) You would then want an ongoing thought process that’s looking into all the ways you might be wrong and refining your explicit and implicit predictions, not so much to be right more often (this is actually not particularly important) but so as to continually lower the threshold at which you notice things.\n\nWhat, exactly, is an “implicit prediction”? That’s everything you’re paying attention to and not paying attention to, everything you’re hoping and fearing, all the people and institutions you rely on to show you things—every move you make presupposes a structure of predictions.\n\nThere’s a question of whether probabilities are “real,” or just a method of thinking: we can’t help but consider one outcome more likely than another; and once we assign greater likelihood to one outcome, we can consider how much greater likelihood to attribute to it, and so on. This presents itself as reality to us. But whatever happens, actually happens. Rather than enter this debate, I will say that what is processed by us, more or less formally, as probabilities, can be resolved into who we think is where, doing what. If I think Trump has a 25% chance of winning the election, then I’m attributing to his supporters, opponents and neutrals a “mass,” a set of motivations and capacities, very different than if I think he has a 75% chance of winning.\n\nThe same goes for all the social institutions that are facilitating one outcome rather than another. The distribution of probabilities is really a distribution of “anthropomorphized” people, ranging themselves in relation to each other. To clarify, at the risk of caricaturing, the point, there’s some guy in Michigan upon whom my system of measurement hangs who “must” be accessing certain sources of information, have a certain circle of friends, be ready to argue with others and help campaign to a specific extent, be annoyed or outraged when he sees and hears certain things, and so on—we could construct a detailed profile, which is much of what present day algorithms do.\n\nMy thinking, we might say, is entangled with the existence of this guy, as a kind of tipping point. We can, then, people the probabilities, which involves peopling ourselves as well—who I am is the sum total of everyone out there I imagine manning their stations, or not. “Peopling yourself” is therefore a practice of distributing the present: present who you imagine as your tipping point for whatever event, and you begin to elicit a model of the entire social order as others do the same. We are all of us tipping points for some set of events and you find out which those are by peopling yourself."
    },
    {
      "slug": "hypothesizing-the-present",
      "title": "Hypothesizing the Present",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This post will deal with the implications for knowledge production of the meta-practices of converting the ritual-mythic nexus into practices and the Big Scene into an articulation of centripetal disciplinary spaces. I haven’t explicitly connected the ritual/mythic and the Big Scene, but it’s not hard to see the connection: if you are imagining the social order (at any level: local, national, or global) on the model of the originary scene with its shared sacrificial center, then you can only think in terms of imperative exchanges with that center. Those imperative exchanges, moreover, will have to involve imagined forms of propitiation through some form of redistribution, material and/or symbolic.\n\nPut simply, you will be compelled to believe that relieving some kind of “inequity” between groups will lessen the total sum of resentment in the social order. This, in turn, dooms you to moving pieces around on a fantasy game board: will formal recognition of national independence propitiate? A check for X billion dollars? Opening new factories in a depressed area? Closing factories in an exploited area? This is all magical thinking and cargo-culting. An absolute precondition for any serious project of social renewal is the unqualified rejection of it.\n\nThe Big Scenic cargo cult is obsessed with big pictures and all-encompassing narratives—telling the story of a civilization or nation can employ the same tropes and formulas as a domestic melodrama, with anger, manipulation, conciliation and so on attributed to mythically constructed actors. The underlying pretense is that the center is no more than various ways these groups leverage power, which would mean the center is divisible and shareable—again, just like on the originary scene (more precisely, in the sparagmos, which is where Big Scenic thinking is always located). This kind of fantasizing can make someone feel powerful, because you can imagine building a big enough lever.\n\nBut keep in mind that when someone pieces together various (reported) events and concludes that Trump is either a lazy, easily distracted incompetent being jerked around by “Javanka”; or, that he is a patient, calculation mastermind who is taking years to properly roll out a plan to drain the swamp, control the borders, neutralize the left, and reorder economic relations to the benefit of American workers—this someone doesn’t really know. These are hypotheses supplemented by attributions of familiar motivations and “plot devices” needed to make the narrative work.\n\nNow, it is also important to say that of course they are hypotheses, because that’s all we have. I want not to eliminate hypothesizing but to make it more “austere” precisely by eliminating the melodramatic flourishes that allow us to find a role for ourselves. We have nothing but samples and are nothing but samples ourselves. We have to hypothesize the present out of a single sample, which in turn produces a new sample out of which one again hypothesizes the present. You keep initiating an ongoing inquiry in which your practices are both the objects and experimental systems. When Trump leaves some “traitor” subverting his policies in place in, say, ICE, well, maybe he’s being played, or maybe he’s letting the deep staters expose themselves, maybe he’s allowing for a distraction while something else is happening somewhere, maybe he doesn’t take his own policies seriously, maybe he’s allowing for an unavoidable “slack” in the system, etc.\n\nOne or more of these hypotheses, or others, necessarily present themselves upon hearing the report (which is itself, of course, sliced out of a “thicker” layer of events)—we can’t make sense of anything without generating hypotheses about it. If you withhold the narrative props, though, you can freely oscillate between these hypotheses and use them to generate further “if… then” hypotheses predicated on each of them. This is an especially advanced form of deferral. This horizontal spreading of various possible presents is what generates the vertical because we also have to make decisions at every point along the way and the strongest decisions, the practices most in accord with the central imperative to iterate the originary scene, is the one that operationalizes in a consistent way the horizontal “slice” that allows for the completion of a practice while keeping all the other possible presents in reserve.\n\nIf your hypothesis doesn’t enable the perfection of some practice—if you can’t say that doing what you do changes the conditions under which you do it—then both the sample you are working with and the sample you presently are are of tangential relevance at best.\n\nWe now have the question of how such a hypothesis and practice are bound up—what does a streamlined hypothesis, free of the narrative devices needed to make us feel like we’re present on a scene, look like? First, I want to bring this question into an intersection with another one, which I have tried out various solutions to over the years. When I first starting working on “originary grammar,” I wanted it to do the kind of work a traditional linguistic analysis would do, like analyzing a particular sentence as an articulation of ostensive, imperative and declarative. I realized that such an analysis would be overwhelmed by the contextual determinations one would have to take into account, and this enabled me to see that the grammar itself could not be complete without grounding it in the center, which is what grounds any ostensive in the first place.\n\nSo, in Anthropomorphics , I did a different kind of work with the originary grammar, on an anthropological, moral, political and historical level. But I’ve never given up on the original intention, and continue to think that further inquiry will provide the materials so as to reframe the problem and make it generative. The recent work I’ve been doing on algorithmic thinking, self-appification and data immersion seems to provide a promising “context.”\n\nHere is one axiom I developed long ago for determining what should count as a model sentence: it is predictable in direct proportion to the “recipient”’s participation in a given disciplinary space. So, if we imagine a sentence being uttered following a previous sentence and therefore an entire speech situation, which itself has roots in other speech situations more or less available to and recallable by other participants on the scene, that sentence can either come as a complete surprise to one, or be heard almost as an echo of what one was already thinking—or, of course, anywhere in between. The model sentence creates a continuum, which is a measure of one’s participation in a space with a history of speech situations, so that the sentence seems inevitable to those participants most immersed in the space.\n\nIt now seems to me that a better way of formulating this is to say the continuum from astonishment to obviousness should be produced for all recipients, regardless of where they are situated in relation to the disciplinary space, with the difference between insiders and outsiders rather being in the rapidity with which one would move across the continuum. So, you want to say something that, for a peer, someone equally immersed and practiced as you, is astonishing, and then instantaneously intuitively obvious. For an outsider, meanwhile, the astonishment opens the prospect of a long period of study and initiation into a space, with the promise of intuitive obviousness lying at the end of the road.\n\nThis axiom is modeled on the creation of a new ostensive. Think in terms of what is involved in pointing out something new to someone, that is, creating a new space of joint attention. If it’s something the person has never seen before, you will have to single it out of a mass of “distracting” material—no, not that, no, look a little higher, yes, but only part of that, etc. That’s what declaratives are for—to make the negations and distinctions that eventually enable everyone to home in on what is being pointed to. And we can see how imperatives are necessary at each point along the way in order to bring the other into the ostensive space you already occupy.\n\nSo, the axiom for the model sentence aims at creating sentences that rehearse the pedagogical practice of showing someone something new. Such a sentence, which arranges its audience so as create a virtual representation of the entire process of identifying something new and being able to say that we are seeing the same thing, may never actually exist. How could you prove you have it? But that doesn’t matter—it exists as a model, against which we can measure other sentences, and determine the extent to which they reveal and iterate this pedagogical practice. This differs from Turner and Noel-Thomas’s model of “classic prose” by, rather than pretending everyone hearing the sentence is on the same scene, constructing the emergence of the scene and the uneven ingress to it on the part of the audience.\n\nWe can then take a single sentence as a sample and hypothesize various possible oscillations between that sentence and the model one from which it must in some ways and to some extent deviate. And this analysis could descend to the level of the embedded phrase, individual word and grammatical choices, and so on.\n\nSo, to return to the question of a single-sample based hypothesis inextricably bound up in the perfection of a practice, we can say that the proof is in the writing, or, even, the style. If I’m going to make a claim about Trump based upon a report about the actions of a mid-level bureaucrat in some department, the purpose of that is to lower the threshold of significance regarding Trump and Trump-related events (and which events are not Trump-related at this point?). To lower the threshold of significance and make my attention more laser-like is to produce a condition of enhanced readiness. Readiness for what? Well, that’s what’s bound up in the hypothesis.\n\nReadiness to contribute to Trump’s efforts; readiness to pick up the pieces after Trump’s failure; anything in between. Full spectrum readiness attunes us to all of these possibilities, and is a readiness to transition seamlessly from one to the other. I remember at some little league training session I took my son to many years ago the trainer showed the kids the ready position for a fielder in baseball. He then showed the ready position to receive a serve in tennis, and to start a play in football, and I think he mentioned a couple of other sports as well. It was the same position, which even he seemed to find astonishing.\n\nWe want to write, think, and practice our way into the equivalent of such a position in participating in our various modes of centered ordinality. A good hypothesis/practice is one that creates that position with an ever so slight orientation to the most likely move you will be called upon to make.\n\nA hypothesis/practice (a binary symmetrical to the myth/ritual one) is always a relation between something you (and others) do and what you (and others) say—a relation that you want to make as close and necessary as possible. What you say is the boundary between what happens and what you do. My opening and continuing criticisms of “Big Scenic” thinking may suggest that I’m in favor of thinking small, but that’s not the case—I’m just against imaginary solutions to real problems. “Trump is saving the world,” a hypothesis he himself put forth in a recent press conference, is a perfectly viable and even operationalizable hypothesis.\n\nThe extent, means and forms in which Trump is saving the world directly impact your positions within the scenes in which you participate. You can convert yourself into a sample of Trump saving the world and, simultaneously, of a sample of the intractability of the present world to being saved on those terms. Everything in the world can be framed in those terms, and every action guided and representable by them—even if, of course, that not the only hypothesis that might take the shape of a practice The practice involves making the boundary (Trump saving the world/the world’s intractability) visible, so that any event can be placed on one side of the boundary and then the other, and in this way become a useful source of information.\n\nAs for which boundaries to take an interest in, I think those which entail a rapid conversion of astonishment to intuitive obviousness on the part of your close colleagues, and presuppose a more arduous conversion for more distant potential colleagues, provide a good starting point. Of course, identifying those features involves hypothesizing as well."
    },
    {
      "slug": "successful-succession",
      "title": "Successful Succession",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "This post could be seen as a “successor” to my previous post on model events insofar as it identifies the kind of event we should be looking towards as models.\n\nIn a recent post I extended an argument I made in Anthropomoprhics and previously to the effect that the mode of succession is the most important question for assessing a social order—how is the center transferred from one occupant to the next tells us everything important we need to know about that social order. I want to further extend that argument now so as to apply it to all practices—everywhere, succession is the sign of success. Whatever you do or say is meaningful and important insofar as create the place for and when possible installs your successor. A “childless” practice is a failure.\n\nThis argument seems to me the necessary and sufficient answer to the notion of “spontaneous organization.” Spontaneous organization seems plausible because so many “causes” go into an event that we could never identify them all and weigh their various contributions to the event—so, if we can’t know all that, even when it comes to our own actions, which we can always see, in the aftermath, as being caused by lines of thinking, memories, automatic responses, and so on above and beyond our own intentions, how could anyone possible control all of those causes and bring them together to produce an event? We can see a paradox here: the more we know about everything that goes into some social process, the less it seems to us that anyone could have determined its outcome. Indeed, it follows that any attempt to control things will have the opposite effect of generating unintended and undesirable results. Better to go with the flow, and if one must act, act so as to balance things out and maintain equilibria that seem at risk.\n\nBut why wouldn’t it be just as “hubristic” to decide “unilaterally” where things are out of balance, what counts as “balance” in this case, what are the “forces” that seem out of balance, what would be the correct action to rectify rather than exacerbate the imbalance? Where does that knowledge come from, and what makes it certain enough to act on? It seems that everyone must see himself as in sufficient control of at least some “portion” of his existence—enough so that a practice can be constructed so as to produce predictable outcomes. If one believes this, one also believes that more effective control can be exercised—practices can be perfected.\n\nAnd perfecting a practice involves distinguishing between what is inside and what is outside the practice, which is to say what you need to be able to control and what you can’t control but don’t need to control in order to control what you can. You can’t control your dreams, but you can prevent your dreams from interfering with your management of your household. Making this kind of distinction is, in turn, key to constructing the meta-practices that enable you to maintain and extend your practices—what we could call the maintenance of subjectivity. And, who knows, maybe such maintenance acts back upon your dreams.\n\nEvery time something happens, we are faced with a choice of explanations: identify the “spontaneous process” that produced it, or look for the hierarchy of human decision making that did so. The two explanations are defined against each other—to look for spontaneity is to deliberately “debunk” any claim to autonomy and authority in a decision making process. This is the assertion of power of those within an anti-imperative declarative culture: you think that the president’s and military leadership’s decisions led to the loss of the war but it was really a critical mass of generational changes, shifts in diplomatic culture, profits driving media coverage, and so on.\n\nThe purpose of the argument is to subvert clear lines of decision making and to give power to precisely all the spontaneous elements you cite—the media, the diplomats, crowds, and so on. There are lots of power bases to be found in directing decision making along these lines—you present yourself as necessary to those making executive decisions because you are clever enough to manipulate the media, popular opinion, the political scientists in universities or whomever. To stay focused on the executive arena, or the imperative order, is to identify the executive power informing all the spontaneous non-agents, all of whom are at the very least initiated by someone.\n\nThe question of succession brings a great deal of force to the executive argument. Every institution, needless to say, takes great care in propagating itself, which is to say ensuring a succession practice that will sustain and enhance the institution. Every decision made can be seen as aiming at solving the problem of succession—who to hire, who to promote, which rationalizations to use in justifying the institution’s priorities, internal policies, and so on. All these decisions lay the groundwork for one kind of potential successor to emerge as opposed to other kinds. Whoever is in charge, then, is always involved in choosing his successor—and this is even the case where there are rules of succession that completely cut the present executive out of the loop—insofar as the governor has any power at all he’s using it to manipulate the very levers of power that overtly preclude his making the decision in order to propagate his own “kind.”\n\nI was thinking of writing a separate post on “American freedom,” but what I want to say about that can be incorporated here by way of an example. I am very favorably and generously inclined toward American freedom because what American freedom really means is a very strong prejudice in favor of an executive culture—freedom means that people in charge of something should be allowed to actually be in charge of it. This is just about the healthiest thing one can believe. Americans passionately hate the “consensus” model of decision making that seems to be popular pretty much everywhere else in the world and is systematically recommended to us as a move toward a less “white” and more “diverse” culture.\n\nI also hate the consensus model, in part because it’s so obviously a way for everyone to evade responsibility. A consensus culture would want to ride the wave of spontaneity, whereas an executive culture wants to make cuts everywhere—this is what I did, this is what he did, this is what I was charged with, this was his responsibility, I’m depending on you to do this, and so on. The “cure” for the more “idiosyncratic” and reactive elements of American freedom, then, is to restore what was once very explicitly part of it—the desire to found something, to institutionalize, to have one’s successors look back to one as a model. (The left’s current attack on the memorialization of America’s past shows that they are also aware of how important this is.)\n\nAll contemporary institutions seem dead set on producing successors who will repudiate the founding work of the institution itself. I’ve been hanging around the academy long enough to have witnessed a couple of generations of nice, gentle, open-minded, egalitarian professors who were adamantly against “racism” and “sexism” and “war” and other things harmful to living things who would, of course, have never burned an American flag, torn down a statue, boycotted a store whose owners made a “problematic” political statement, and so on—but very cheerfully and proudly paved the way for those who now encourage and, I’m sure, sometimes participate in, such activities.\n\nAnd they are still proud of it—with very few exceptions, these nice elderly English professors sign petitions claiming that all of American history has been a conspiracy to torment America’s black population, whether or not they realize that this would invalidate most of what they themselves taught and wrote during their careers. These are liberalism’s chickens coming home to roost, of course, because liberalism has never been anything more than the repudiation of what came before, but I’m insisting that a successor focused version of what gets called “American freedom” is crucial to the antidote. To counter liberalism, then, means to put the successor problem front and center, and this allows us to “recruit” whatever dispositions toward continuity that can still be located.\n\nWe give names to the spontaneous processes: capitalism, democracy, socialism, and, of course, liberalism. We can append verbs to these nouns: capitalism does this, the market does that, and so on. Creating abstract agencies like this means some power centers have broken free of “tyranny,” so the names can be more or less accurate and penetrating. They give names to forms of decision making practices, which to say that they are ways of addressing the succession problem in lieu of any hierarchy that articulates the totality of practices. The problem of history is replacing the shared sacrificial center that was lost with the rise of the ancient empires—I’ve focused more precisely on sacral kingship, but that’s simply the point at which the shared sacrificial center becomes fully “vested” and therefore reveals its limitations—sacrificing the king is an inadequate solution to the succession problem.\n\nCapital is a distribution of power aimed at solving the succession problem by constraining the possibilities—no ruler can rule against capital. Succession within capital is solved by having the enterprise serve as a conduit through which state decision making circulates through disciplinary practices that facilitate the further abstraction of subjects from practices that obscure them in some way from the corporate-state center. Next up in corporate leadership will be someone who can plug the disciplines into the state through the corporation. So, the names of these processes identify sites of inquiry into the succession problem.\n\nThe succession problem is the problem of all our practices. It’s the problem of immortality—how else do we live on if not through others repeating and extending our practices and words? According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat (who very decisively clarified the origin of writing in ancient accounting notation), the ancient emperors helped advance the development of phonetic writing by having declarative sentences, spoken in their “voice,” inscribed on their monuments in the earliest forms of phonetic lettering. They did this because they wanted the reader of the inscription to have to repeat, “I am _________, ruler of _______,” etc.\n\nBy speaking in the king’s first person voice, you give the king’s words, and therefore the king himself, continued life. So, you want your actions and words to have successors, to be repeated in enough contexts so as to live forever, even if the words are ultimately changed and forgotten along with the name of the author. Why should the words of someone who says, essentially, “it’s all spontaneous, I’m not really doing anything and neither should you,” be remembered or carried forward? Speaking and writing are practices—you say or inscribe something so that something happens that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, so that a repetition and perfection of the practice can produce “similar” effects—you perfect your practices so others can repeat them.\n\nWhatever appears spontaneous is where the succession problem needs to be worked out—all of those unknowable causes are sites of deficient or misaligned power and authority, and the most memorable thing one can do is institute the proper forms. Anything else is delinquency, malingering and mindless subversion."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-model-of-data",
      "title": "The Model of Data",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In my latest post on self-appification , I proposed that algorithmic inquiry begins with a model event on one side, and actual events on the other side, with the subsequent inquiry identifying markers of the actual event as a sample of whatever the model event is a model of. The example I used there was “racism,” and the point is that no one thinks about “racism” in propositional terms and then tries to “apply” all the “features” of “racism” explicit and implicit in its “definition”—rather, one works with what we can call an “originary” event of “racism,” and then calls subsequent acts “racist” insofar as they are “similar to” the originary event. The originary event must be an event that “woke us up” to the phenomenon in question, or is retroactively posited as having done so (there’s not clear line between these two possibilities). I now want to explore this example, and bring it to the foreground as a way of engaging our present immersion in data without any nostalgia for a more “human” mode of being—which is to say, for a mode of the human modeled on earlier forms of media.\n\nThe very words used in political attacks make evident their reliance upon model events—“fascism,” “white supremacist,” “Nazi,” etc. Whatever “idea” the people issuing such epithets have of the model event in question, it is obvious that there is some historical referent behind them. The Holocaust, of course, in Eric Gans’s analysis (to which I’ve made my own contributions), is the ur-event of the modern victimary position. Godwin’s law parodies the rules of the game whereby whoever makes the most forceful identification of some current event with the Nazi genocide of the Jews “wins.” We can imagine a method for working out and developing an algorithm for determining the similarity of any modern event to the Holocaust.\n\nIs there a “player” who is unalterably opposed to the very existence of all those playing the role of a member of a group identified according to some immutable characteristic, and are there “bystanders” who allow the event to proceed because it’s “convenient” or they don’t want to make trouble? The criteria for determining each of these roles and the acts that count as them inhabiting these roles would have to made explicit so that search instructions can be designed. Here, we have the perpetrator—but he’s not an obvious perpetrator, because maybe he’s doing things other than trying to destroy all the members of some other group and maybe he’s not even doing that unambiguously at all.\n\nBut we need to shape the scene, because this model event is all we have, so we need to identify markers that would allow us to identify his perpetrator status, and construct the event in such a way that those markers are more predictive of his actions, and the actions of those who would take him as a model are more “real” than statements and actions that would indicate other trajectories. And the other roles, along with the events actualizing those roles, would have to be similarly specified.\n\nNow, my claim is not that victimary agents have constructed and follow such a method with such self-awareness. Obviously, like Beria, Stalin’s KGB head (a model event for me to work with), they’re looking for crimes to fit the people they want to eliminate. If you ask them to explain what makes this or that “racist,” they will rarely be able to tell you, and almost never convincingly. (This is why it’s a good idea to ask.) What framing their actions and agendas algorithmically, though, does, is, first, help us to display how automatic and programmed their actions are—it provides us with a satiric grammar; and, second, it allows us to construct hypothetical rule-following processes that helps us intervene and interfere when possible with transfer translations of their words and actions. But beyond all that, we have here a method that serves our own purposes in remaking declarative culture so that it is directed towards filling the imperative gap rather than inventing outlandish “authorities” meant to generate imperatives that subvert the command structure.\n\nA lot follows from the realization that we’re always working with model events rather than propositional “principles,” “beliefs,” “ideas” and quasi-mathematical representations of reality. Originary models, for one thing, give us something we can always talk about, and return to, in order to revise and extract more “data” from. We can always “thicken” or “thin out” the model event as necessary. We can test its plausibility, and make it more plausible when necessary—or use it to test various norms of plausibility. Take the “American founding,” for example. Like any historical event, it has given rise to many interpretations—it was based on certain principles, it advanced the interests of a particular class, it continued precedents set by earlier historical events, and so on.\n\nBut how would any of these interpretations be pared down to an “event,” rather than some broader historical “process” or “idea”? Where did, say, the “emergent merchant class” as a coherent, intentional agent, do X or Y? How did the “desire for freedom” manifest itself in this or that meeting among revolutionary leaders? (What else manifested itself in that meeting?) We can disqualify any model that can’t be represented as an event, and while the questions I just posed are not merely rhetorical, representing those processes as events in which specific people do and say things would turn them into different originary models.\n\nHere’s what can be represented as an event: the designing, in the composition of the US Constitution, of the executive branch with the knowledge that the first occupant of that branch would be George Washington. I’ve mentioned this in several places, and I would have to do a search to find where I might have come across this (intuitively obvious) claim of seemingly marginal importance, but taking this as our originary model of the America order has some interesting consequences. It would mean, whatever else they were doing, the leading figures of the American revolution were watching and weighing one another and with a great deal of precision identifying those who performed best in the most important roles in the most trying times.\n\nIt means they carried over these assessments to their thinking of a government structure, especially in the wake of the failure of the Articles of the Confederation, which failed to create a central office that gave due weight to the most important qualities of human leadership. It also means that they thought of the forging of the Constitution not just as a formal document laying down rules for the passing and implementation of laws, the transition of power, the division of offices, and so on, but as a model to be filled in with certain kinds of characters. They hoped that Washington’s performance in office would shape the performance of future presidents. Washington was elected unanimously in the electoral college; perhaps the framers of the constitution hoped every president would be elected unanimously, through sheer and undisputed recognition of the superior quality of the man.\n\nOf course, it didn’t quite work out that way—the “factionalist” disease of left and right was immediately imported from the French Revolution coming in the wake of the American (and, of course, it was really there already). But the design of the highest office with the greatest man in mind can, first, be constructed as an event—we can work with records of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention’s thinking, and we can easily imagine how they might have discussed amongst themselves making the match of man and office as close as possible. There’s no plausibility problem here. And we can use this model event as a measure of the defects of their design as they have been manifested throughout American history—but also as a measure of American strengths, almost all of which can be attributed to “energy in the executive” in one form or another.\n\nAnd it’s a good model—that is, a model of how things should be ordered—so, in measuring other events against it, we are thinking in an intrinsically normative way, and one we can make fairly transparent: government office should be shaped so as to amplify the highest forms of leadership. I think that if we devise an algorithm for oscillating back and forth between subsequent events and this originary one we would develop an increasingly rich critique of the American social order and one that would preserve everything great about it. Nor need we ignore everything else the founders were doing other than designing the office to match the man. Everything else they were doing was either tributary to or interfering with this, what we hypothesize to be their central project. In this way the originary model is an inexhaustible source of normatively molded data.\n\nA large part of the power of models figuring an “exemplary victim” is precisely the plausibility and richness of the events they are drawn from, with Jesus on the cross, or Socrates sitting with his students waiting to drink his hemlock among the most obvious examples. Most events promoted by liberals and leftists to this day take these events (especially the crucified Jesus) as their model, as a brief look at the iconography emerging after George Floyd’s death will confirm. Martyrs have been central to anti-tyrannical political practices from the beginning, as such practices are only barely intelligible without them: a broad generalization about “police brutality” would get lost in the weeds of statistics, the vast diversity of situations in which police encounter civilians, the difficulties of working out the intent of people involved in any situation, and so on.\n\nA display of physical force ending in death dispenses with all that, once it’s inserted into the right spot within an algorithmic process matching that event with others. What we’re witnessing in such cases, as gets noted occasionally, is a subtle form of human sacrifice—where martyrs are needed, they will be produced (the whole point of Antifa riots—of terrorism in general—is to produce usable martyrs).\n\nThe aesthetico-ethical problem of the ve/orticist app, then, is to construct model events that can withstand scrutiny as to their particulars, and can, without denying that victims can be framed in any event, replace the victimary with the authoritative center as the data source. It is certain that a structure of centered ordinality can be extracted from any event, and the process of production of victims can be interfered with by pointing out that even in scenes focused on the victim someone had to construct that focus. In cases where the victimization is real in accord with widely accepted frames (that is, when we’re not simply dealing with a hoax), there is always someone, before or after the fact, who tried to close the breach that led to the act of victimization.\n\nThese instances can provide extremely compelling narratives. The polemical counter to the extension of victimage from the more egregious to the more implicit (from the macro to the micro to the nano-aggression) is the construction of events of representation that enact a centered ordinality that points to a structure of centered ordinality in the very events adduced."
    },
    {
      "slug": "transposing-the-scene",
      "title": "Transposing the Scene",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Aug 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ll be coming back here to issues addressed in a post from April 9, 2019, “The Big Scene is the Anthropological Basis of Anarchist Ontology,” and which I can now place in the context of the conversion of the ritual/mythical nexus into practices. The starting observation is a simple one: it is extremely difficult to speak about politics, history or social order without modeling these constructs on a scene upon which all are present. It is necessary to make a real effort not to talk about social groups (“whites” and “blacks,” “men” and “women,” “racists,” “transgendered,” “liberals,” “conservatives,” etc.) as if they were unified individuals with a single intention.\n\nIt takes an even greater effort to resist speaking of individuals this way, even if doing so is equally delusional or, more precisely, “mythical.” The difficulty here is clarified by what Francis Noel-Thomas and Mark Turner call the “classic style,” which David Olson considers central to the emergence of “prose” (and therefore literacy) and which generates the illusion that the writer and reader share the same scene (this is what is taken to be “clear writing”). If we think that there is some “we” that shares the same scene, what we really believe is that we have a shared center, and that finding the right sacrificial object and the distribution of that object will resolve any conflicts.\n\nIt would be impossible to overstate how prevalent and destructive this mythical mode of thinking is. Anyone who says “we” without specifying the practice that constitutes the “we” participates in it. But no one can be blamed for it—it is a deeply laid intellectual and cultural inheritance. That we no longer share a sacrificial center, where distribution takes place directly and intentionally; that the social center is now permanently occupied by someone who cannot be sacrificed—after all these centuries this has still not registered. All of our social and political concepts—justice, liberty, equality, nature, democracy, right, and so on—share the same “big scenic” imaginary, as if we were all imagining ourselves standing around a shared central object.\n\nThe occupied center is still taken as a kind of accident, acceptable only insofar as we can reduce the occupant to the implementation of one of these concepts. The concept of the free market, contrary to appearances, represents the same kind of primitivism, as if we were all at the same meal exchanging parts of the sacred body with each other: “wealth” and “GDP” are imagined as the beast at the center, even if the beast continues to grow. All of the “social” disciplines are engaged in the impossible task of transposing the scenic imaginary of a shared sacrificial scene onto the realities of a social order with a permanently occupied and sacrificial-repellent center.\n\nOur strongest moral inheritances are no less attempts to bypass this “imperial” reality and imagine a direct relation with other individuals with God as an ever more distant center. “Love your neighbor as yourself” was once a moral revolution—in what percentage of actual interactions that anyone today engages in does that statement provide even the slightest guidance? It only makes sense insofar as we can imagine directly dividing something up with our “neighbor”—rather than engaging with our neighbors only through very complex transactions presided over by the center. All the mystifications of our thinking, all of what Marxism tried to understand as “ideology,” or deconstruction as “logocentrism,” comes down to this.\n\nThe same is true of what Bachelard called “atomism,” the “prejudice” in favor of seeing reality as composed of indivisible individual units, even if we keep dividing them further. We think of social being as divisible “substance” rather than articulated practices which have their end in more perfected practices because we have not yet developed modes of practice and inquiry that would identify and resolve once and for all the anomalies of transposed Big Scenic Thinking. But that, then, is exactly what the form of originary thinking I’m calling “anthropomorphics” is for.\n\nStill, those moral inheritances pointed the way forward—not in their moral “principles” or theology but in new, disciplinary forms of organization they created. What is important about early Christianity, Talmudic Judaism and Greek philosophy is that they were communities dedicated to working out the implications of a particular revelation or mode of inquiry. It is in such disciplinary spaces that the originary scene can be retrieved, not in fulsome assertions of togetherness or universality. What matters is constructing practices that work out targeted cause and effect relations; or that iterate memorable events in controlled ways so as to make them transformative of other practices; or that modify or assess or create the conditions for other practices; or that confront mythical thinking with its sacrificial imaginary.\n\nPractices that, like the originary event, create forms of humanization, even if that now means relativizing the human in relation to the organic and technological non-human. All of these practices can proceed without or with occasional reference to the occupied center precisely to the extent that they operate under its assured security—they are all simply working out the implications of a secured center that need not be subordinated to one arbitrary principle or another, and thereby simply gives direction drawn from the strongest work in the most advanced disciplines. Everything comes from the center, and all is given back to the center, in accord with the imperative to create spaces of humanization. A little thought experiment that enables us to distinguish between when something has been learned, and when it has not been learned, is a greater tribute to the center than all the bleating about equality, love of humanity, etc.\n\nOne especially ruinous consequence of the attempt to transpose the parameters of the originary scene onto the occupied center society of scenes is the reduction of human desires to the lowest common denominator under liberalism. Politically, the wager of liberal democracies has been that the frustrations of being abstracted from communal relations into meaningless work and frivolous, often degenerate leisure and the hatreds generated by constantly playing groups off against each other could be kept below the threshold of destabilizing resistance or disintegration by ensuring each individual had enough possessions to fear losing them.\n\nAt every point, responsibility, obligation and reciprocity are replaced by fear, humiliation and demoralization. Here as well disciplinary spaces of intergenerational pedagogy, invention and inquiry counter these tendencies, but then these kinds of spaces get targeted as well. But the reason this all seemed plausible is the assumption that an equalizing distribution modeled on the originary scene could be abstracted from the devotion to the center that is just as essential a component of the scene—as if humans are just animals capable of dividing portions in a peaceful way. But everyone needs to donate the center, even those who have so crippled themselves as to believe themselves capable of satisfaction with a growing piece of the pie.\n\nI have been wondering why the billionaires support the craziest left-wing groups—I know all the economic and political reasons regarding creating consumers, controlling workers, taking out competitors through regulation, high-low vs. the middle, etc. It’s all true, but it doesn’t seem to me enough—it reduces them to the same measure, in the same demeaning way, as the working class man assumed to be satisfied with a TV, house and car. They need to believe they are worthy of their wealth, which is actually a very worthy sentiment, and no doubt many of them support worthwhile enterprises (or at least sincerely try to) aside from their political giving—they simply can’t imagine any way of improving society other than giving a bigger piece of the pie to those with the least, because they have no way of imagining society other than on a scene with a shared center rather than a layered order with an occupied and directive center.\n\nThe moral imperative issued on the originary scene is to iterate the originary scene, and this is not done by imagining oneself in all kinds of friendly and cooperative relations with fictional collective constructs but by creating a present. And creating a present can be turned into a practice. Take any discussion—it will be filled with references to the past and future, along with the present. References to the past are inherently mythical: they represent narratives of attempted occupation of the center that serve as precedents of the imperatives from the center we see ourselves as following now. The same with references to the future: they are either projections of successful adherence to today’s central imperative as followed by the author of the narrative, or jeremiads warning of disaster for not following those imperatives cut to the size of the author. Convert all such mythical references to the present, and you impose a very enabling constraint upon your thinking.\n\nWhat would otherwise have been constructed as a mythical narrative of the past must now be reconstructed as traces of the past in the present, identified as such through practices designed to recognize such traces. In this case there is an explicit acknowledgement of constructing a particular observational system designed to record some things and not others. A narrative of American slavery continued up through segregation and into the present can be aimed at positioning all of us on a single scene upon which some of us are where we are because of slavery and others are where they are for other reasons, and we must find some way to rearrange ourselves on that scene.\n\nIf one is compelled to identify traces of slavery in contemporary institutions and practices, we get a very different distribution. Of course a practice and discipline created to find such traces will be able to do so, and it may be that the current practices of the anti-white cult have identified quite a few. But, of course, you find them because you’re looking for them, and have deliberately constructed practices to bring such things into view. In distributing these traces across the present, though, you necessarily open the field, in a way a linear narrative does not, to other practice designed to reveal other historical traces—and such practices will also uncover many traces that don’t fit the initial frame. And nothing obviously follows from identifying such traces: whether remedying the effects of past actions whose traces we find in the present is a meaningful project is itself to be determined by another practice.\n\nRefusing to mythify the future, meanwhile, enables us to avoid fantasizing in the present. This doesn’t mean we don’t deliberately produce the future—it means that we construct practices whereby we find elements of possible futures in present practices. (I can use “we” here because I’m referring to practices that could produce such “wes”.) Practices are self-contained, while opening up onto other practice—indeed, they are self-contained by opening up onto other practices, which means converting other practices or elements of them into pieces of its own practice. A practice addresses problems generated from past practices—open questions, anomalies, hypotheses we haven’t yet found a way to test, etc.\n\nThese new problems suggest new practices which haven’t yet been constructed, and it is out of these possible practices that the future will be produced. In other words, instead of “visions” of the future, look to everything tacitly spreading out from the “edges” of your current practices as signs of practices that could prepare the way for other practices, and could in turn prepare… Eliciting the tacit is itself a(n aesthetic) practice, which will in turn produce more of the tacit to elicit. Even to talk of the “goal” or “purpose” of a practice is to mythify, to imagine a whole scene in which we are all present in front of the center—what a practice produces is itself simply part of the practice, part of its continuation and revision, not some external objective reducing the practice to a means.\n\nConverting past and future narratives into present practices involves extending practices “horizontally” across the various social scenes. Finding traces of slavery will lead you to find other historical traces and, in fact, constructing practices to identify other traces (and more differentiated forms of the traces you started looking for—why should “slavery” necessarily indicate a single, unified event producing homogeneous traces?) is an act of deferral that kicks in when mythical narratives that can’t be operationalized in a practice start to congeal. Similarly, identifying some elements of possible practices will “slide” over into identifying other elements, ones you can now identify because of the “apparatus” constructed in the course of previous practices so that you get more articulated practices of, say, pedagogy, showing others how to condition themselves to notice ever more minute elements of possible practices.\n\nAll practices tend towards lowering the threshold of significance. It is precisely and only through this horizontalizing construction of the present that the vertical is accessed and comes through loud in the increasingly clear imperative to build more practices like this, like this distilled essence of the originary scene.\n\nConstructing practices of presenting is the only way to break the addiction to the Big Scene, for which the blue pill of The Matrix is really a very good analogy. Redpilling involves the ongoing, patient work of distinguishing the Big Discipline from the Big Scene. The concepts generated by the metalanguage of literacy addressed at some length in Anthropomorphics are essential to sustaining the Big Scene: the justice vs. tyranny opposition, for example, opposes a divinely sanctioned division of the center to its usurpation—as long as you think in such terms, you must imagine yourself on a Big Scene with other “citizens.”\n\nThe same is true of all the concepts required to support the “internal scene of representation,” to refer to our recent Zoom discussion. The “internal scene” is really our “inalienable” piece of the Big Scene. But we can always initiate an inquiry with those terms. Is the tyrant always tyrannizing and doing nothing else besides? If so, “tyrannizing” becomes incredibly complex, and we’ll have to start making distinctions within the concept; if not, well, what else does he do aside from, alongside of, perhaps even as part of, his daily tyrannizing? Inventing practices that reveal such distinctions constitutes the disciplinary infiltration of the Big Scene.\n\nThe same with the “internal scene”—where is the boundary between the inner and the outer here? Will we not find much of what is most interior to be, in fact, traceable to all kinds of external scenes? This is a kind of deconstruction, but, rather than discovering that positing centrality involves constructing a margin to play the center off against, we discover that constructing margins (the rebellious anti-tyrant, resisting from his inner scene) in fact reveals the center.\n\nI’ll repeat the moral-political difference that follows here. Rather than, as we imagine ourselves doing on the Big Scene, expelling the tyrant (and his supporters and instruments) in the name of the exemplary (scapegoated) victim, we instead refrain from scapegoating (we learn to detect signs of accelerating convergent attention) because scapegoating is always an attempt to disorder the center by prepping us to look for indications of a hidden usurper behind it. Maybe there’s an attempted usurpation in process; maybe not—either way, it is increased coherence of the center and the matching of responsibility with power within practices at all levels that will always already disable any usurpation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-single-sample-is-enough-to-hypothesize-the-all",
      "title": "A Single Sample is Enough to Hypothesize the All",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The title of this post was actually the thought that got me started on the “hypothesizing the present” post, which, however, ended up going in a different direction. Coming across the following formulation, attributed to Yitzhak Bentov (previously unknown to me), who himself developed the notion of the “hologram” invented by (the also previously unknown to me) Dennis Gabor, in Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s Capital as Power sent me back to it:\n\nTechnically, the hologram is a photographic method that uses a laser beam to record and then read and project the interference pattern of incidental waves. But it is much more than a mere technical gadget. Seen as a conceptual approach, the hologram has immense potential implications that go far beyond photography.\n\nTo illustrate the underlying principle, think of a pond into which three pebbles are dropped simultaneously. These three incidental ‘events’ create a structure of evenly spreading – and intersecting – waves throughout the pond. Now, suppose that we were to freeze the pond instantaneously, pick up the top sheet of ice containing the wave pattern, and then drop it to the ground so that it shatters to pieces. Because of the curvature of the waves, each piece, no matter how small or from which part of the pond, will contain enough information, a bit fuzzy but nonetheless complete, to trace the three events. All we need to do is to ‘extend’ the partial arcs on the piece into complete circles and then find their centres. Our ability to do so turns each piece into a holo gramma – the ancient Greek for the ‘whole picture.’ (224)\n\nSo, one sample—a single utterance, or even a single sentence from a single utterance, provides all one needs to start hypothesizing the all. It contains enough “information” to “trace” all the “events” which produced it back to their center. As I often do, I will make the point that this is already what we do, in making meaning, not something I am claiming we should do—what we should do is be aware of and “own” this necessary intellectual move. Now, of course, upon hearing a second utterance, the hypothesis formed regarding the first one is revised; perhaps even rethinking the original utterance itself, or having it juxtaposed to another utterance, would lead to such a revision. We are always revising our hypotheses of the all as we engage with and become one sample after another. We can think of this as always revising our search terms within an algorithmic mediascape. The only test is kind of scene would materialize your hypothesis.\n\nThe truth, according to Peirce, is what we would all have to agree upon in the long run—but the long run never gets here (as Peirce knew). So, there’s no point getting bogged down in trying to “prove” or “falsify” a given hypothesis, except upon very carefully controlled conditions (in which case the implications will be limited), especially when the hypothesizer is part of the hypothesis itself. (Evoking the necessary conditions to “prove” what someone claims to know—what would have to be “controlled”?—is itself a fruitful source of hypotheses.) What makes for a good hypothesis is that it generates events in which a community of inquirers—a disciplinary space—into and of that event is created.\n\nThe utterance, or sample, and the discourse on the sample, becomes an origin and model, and comes to position potentially everyone in relation to it—as someone addressed, or not addressed, or addressed under certain conditions, in a particular way, by the utterance; and therefore as someone responding to, resituating, repurposing, re-embedding, and so on, that utterance. For these purposes, sometimes it will be the “wild” hypothesis that is best, because it seeds the most possible scenes. This is what became the notion of “hypothesizing the present,” insofar as a single utterance is made the center of a system of reverberations and resonances that spreads across the entire field that has constituted the utterance in the first place.\n\nThere is a practice here that can always get us started, one I take from Gertrude Stein: treat every word in a sentence as equally important (which would further imply treating every event as equally important, every “component” of every event as equally important, etc.). This doesn’t entail a claim that they are all equally important: it’s a hypothetical move to counter the ingrained assumptions regarding hierarchies of importance we bring to any “sample.” It’s ultimately unsustainable: you can read a sentence as if the “a,” the “the,” and the “of,” are just as important as the noun and verb, and sometimes, under some conditions, for some purposes, they will, in fact, be—but the more a disciplinary space forms around the sample the more some hierarchy of importance will take shape.\n\nBut it will be a different one than that with which you started, precisely because it had to “re-form” out of its “elements.” This is why I started Anthropomorphics by referencing Gertrude Stein’s dictum (maxim? Aphorism?) to “act so that there is no use in a center.” This is a discovery procedure—the more you resist any center that seems to be taking shape in orienting your actions the more the center that will ultimately be revealed as having done so will have resonance and “anti-fragility.” The center will be iterative, insofar as, however it ultimately is structured, it contains within itself all these other possibilities.\n\nA model for thinking in these terms is Richard Feynman’s proposal for dealing the paradoxes of measurement in quantum physics which, as I understand it, entails positing that particles take or “try out” all the possible paths from origin until endpoint, any one of which might be captured in a particular measurement.\n\nAny “element” of an event or model, in that case, can be extrapolated and presented as being always what it is within that event or model and, furthermore, to be fully determinative of that event or model. “A tall man killed a short man on Main Street last night” becomes “tall men always kill short men”; “tall men are inveterate killers”; “short men are perpetual defenseless victims”; “Main Street is a killing field”; “last night was the most violent night in the history of the town”; etc. Such wild hypotheses are always in the background as we work our way back to the more moderate conclusions that height probably had nothing to do with it, Main Street is not all that dangerous, etc.—it’s the only way of really bringing all the different features of the event or model into focus.\n\nIf a part of your thinking holds on to all these wild hypotheses the relative significance of size, location, time, and so on will be composed. At the same time, these wild hypotheses are your transitions to other events and other models, which you seek to anchor in this one, as you seek to determine the “curvature of the wave” of this fragment as an effect and sign of all the killings, all the size differentials, all the Main Streets, all the night times, as differentiated from, say weight differentials, side streets, peaceful interactions, day and evening times, etc.\n\nSo, any utterance contains or indicates the entire social order, and so do you in taking up that utterance—how so, of course, is what is to be determined, or deferred. You can single out an especially odd and contemporary utterance (no shortage of those) but you can also defamiliarize an apparently unexceptional one: where could this have come from, is the initial question? Who would say this, in what media, in response to what problem or provocation, to what interlocutor or audience, within which field of possible effects, with what set of conceivable intentions? (We have to accept, I think, that curiosity and inquisitiveness, once viewed with suspicion at best, and for some good reasons, have become virtues.)\n\nYou populate the field of the present around the utterance, and then keep repopulating it as you go. The utterance can be repeated in various contexts; indeed, in working with it, you are creating some of those contexts. Each repetition would reveal something new about the utterance. Each question opens up a field of others, which can be reviewed without prejudice, until a new “prejudice” takes shape: how do the various media work, what are the various audiences and sub-audiences and cross-over audiences; the institutions through which an utterance can circulate; under what conditions would the utterance be impossible or unthinkable; what are the observations, the confirmation of those observations, the transmission of the summaries of those observations that go into making up the referents in your sample utterance—all these become the origin of hypotheses as well.\n\nThe practice of explicitly hypothesizing the all from the single sample is a form of training in identifying what is peculiar to our present. One is placed on alert to the “signs of the times.” In doing so one knows oneself to be a sign of the times, and thereby comes to signify more. The practice also converts others into such signs, in a form of public pedagogy. And I will here remind you of the Natural Semantic Primes, which encourage us to translate all utterances into someone saying something to someone else, someone doing something, something happening to someone and so on, with the boundaries between doing and happening, saying and thinking, wanting and doing, and so on, being an endless source of hypotheses.\n\nAs is attention to what David Olson calls (and I have called many times after him) the “metalanguage of literacy,” in which we can reduce, for example, “assumptions,” into something “many people say before they say this thing,” “belief” into something people say when they will also say “you can do bad things to me if I don’t do this thing,” and so on—and so generate scenes and histories of scenes out of every word. For example, I knew from the first time I heard of it the Trump-Russia collusion story was nonsense for the simple reason that no one could give it the form of an event one could imagine: Trump says_____; Putin replies_______; Trump responds_______; they shake hands, the election in the bag.\n\nTry and fill in the blanks to construct a coherent event without laughing out loud. (Of course, this also means its satiric possibilities are immense—how would all of Trump’s actions as president appear if we were to believe he really was remotely controlled by Moscow? Moscow would become very interesting!) And in the single sample of the Russia collusion hoax, we have the means to hypothesize the all—all those who pushed it, who constructed bits and pieces of pseudo-evidence to “corroborate” it, all those who actually believed it, everything they had to train themselves to ignore and everyone they had to train themselves to hate in order to continue believing it—this chain of hypotheses leads us to everything.\n\nIn hypothesizing the all from the single sample you transform the entire world into fellow inquirers as well as objects of inquiry, and you can treat all of their utterances as hypotheses of the all out of the single sample whether they like it or not. The practice overlaps with more conventional practices of “fact checking,” “context providing” and other elements of “critical thinking, but without claiming to saturate the field. If you think fact checking is a meaningful activity, you must believe you can gather and confirm all the “relevant” facts in a way all “reasonable” beings would agree on. This is nonsensical, because what counts as “relevant” is always institutionally and historically dependent, but, at the same time, the fact checker, in checking one fact in the way he does, in fact hypothesizes the all from the single sample because he’s hypothesizing the historical and institutional setting that makes the fact relevant—and the institutionalized “chain of custody” that makes it a “fact” in the first place.\n\nThat’s the way to address the fact checker, not by pointing to some fact he left out (unless in doing so you are explicitly hypothesizing the all from a single sample). Similarly, nothing can be more obvious that we can never have, once and for all, the “whole” or “proper” context, which would really have to be the entire history of the human race. But in making a bid to close off the context, the context provider hypothesizes the all from a single sample, and can therefore be treated as a fellow inquirer, even if not in quite the way he might have wished. The same is true of logical fallacy detectors, who wish to institute rules regulating discourse which no one could follow consistently while actually generating any discourse. But chasing down any utterance into the definitions and if… then sequences that would make it acceptable to the exacting logician is a way of creating algorithms and mock algorithms.\n\nThe hypothesizing of the all out of the single sample (and as the single sample) is a form of self-appification, or turning yourself into an interface between other users and the Cloud. This is the way to install the iterative center into the stack. As all the practices I propose, it can operate on various levels—the advanced academic discussion no less than the Twitter ratioing. It can be mastered at a very high level of proficiency, but it can also be broken down into little techniques anyone can use. It’s a way of moving very quickly to broader frames, and also of sticking tenaciously to a single demand: no, tell how it was possible for this person to say this thing, and what follows from him having said it?\n\nEvery utterance “calls for” translation, and every translation is a “transfer translation,” which resolves some inconsistency or anomaly between overlapping discourses (for our purposes here, we can say that a “transfer translation” is when one needs to reconcile the differences between equivalent utterances in the same discourse). My own hypothesis here is that the most important and generative translations will be those of statements uttered under the presumed rule of the Big Scene into statements intelligible within the scenes of scenes authorized by the iterative center. Each hypothesis of the all from the single sample creates such a scene and the revelation of a further iteration of the center.\n\nA final practice to suggest here. All of us, as “selves,” which is to say, as the “same” as we were previously, are comprised of what has been deposited in us by previous incarnations of the center, on the one hand, and by our ongoing engagements with the center, wherein we are deputized, so to speak, to exercise those deposited capacities. Where is that line between what has been deposited, and what one currently exercises? (This bears some family resemblance to the free will vs. determinism problem. But also to Marx’s distinction between constant and variable capital.) No one can really say, but we are always hypothesizing by virtue of our construction of practices, which presuppose the possibility of exercising upon what has been deposited—on doing something with what has happened.\n\nThis line can be hypothesized in the transfer translation of any utterance; it can be drawn up very close, so as to suggest almost nothing is exercised; or it can be pushed way back, so as to suggest that only bare remnants of what has been deposited remain—and we can identify practices where, depending upon the practice and disciplinary space being enacted, it can seem that either one or the other is the case. And such hypothesizing and thought experimenting is itself an exercise on the deposits."
    },
    {
      "slug": "hypothesis-practice-vs-narrative-the-iterative-center-gablog",
      "title": "Hypothesis/Practice Vs. Narrative: The Iterative Center",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "In my previous post I found myself in possession of a neat and very promising distinction between the ritual/myth nexus, on the one hand, and the practice/hypothesis nexus, on the other. This means that the hypothesis, or, more precisely, hypothesizing the present, has the same relation to practice as myth does to ritual. Myth provides a narrative explanation for the vagaries of the imperative exchange that is ritual: the community gives what is prescribed to the central being, who, in return, ensures that the community will have more of the sustenance out of which a portion is returned to the central being. This exchange is, of course, not 100% predictable and successful, and if the central being doesn’t provide what it has promised, some accounting needs to be provided: perhaps the community didn’t, or didn’t “really,” conform to divine instructions; perhaps the divine being has some lesson to teach, or some longer game in mind.\n\nThese possibilities provide a rich source of narrative possibilities, all of which must ultimately reconstruct an origin of the ritual itself—and therefore of the exchange arrangement which is constantly being revised and examined. This can work for a very long time because what the ritual and myth actually does is produce communal coherence along with a set of practices and discursive rules for negotiating differences and sustaining coherence. Along the way, we can assume ritual and myth reciprocally inform and transform each the other. All this presupposes, though, that at the end there is a central object to be divided and consumed equally, in the sense of including all members.\n\nA practice, meanwhile, is stripped of any pretensions to imperative exchange: its relation to the center involves a higher form of reciprocity. A practice iterates the originary scene as a whole—the possibility of refining and perfecting our scenic aptitude is itself the gift from the center, and the commitment to refinement and perfection is the return. A practice aims at producing an ostensive sign: as a result of the practice we can all see something that is there only because of the practice, and we see insofar as we participate in the practice—even as an observer, which is a role many practices provide for. We can speak of scientific practices, or ludic practices (games, sports), or artistic practices, but every time we try to clarify or agree upon the meaning of a word we construct a practice.\n\nLet’s say we want to define “courage,” which is really to say we want a model of courage. But we must want a model of what courage means here and now, an example of a contemporary possibility of courageousness. We can then construct a practice which treats other practices, whatever their aims, as exemplifying either courage or cowardice. If we want the best example, we would seek out one where the boundary between courage and cowardice is thinnest—where some action that seems like cowardice from the outside, or to those with undeveloped practices of discrimination, is in fact the most courageous for this very reason.\n\nWe are practicing seeing and hearing, and directing attention to what normally goes undetected. If we turn out to be wrong in a particular case, the results of the study remain applicable; indeed, realizing our mistake would be a result of the further perfection of the practice. Getting clearer about what you’re looking for is more important than finding it in any instant.\n\nSuch a practice contains and generates within itself the hypotheses which it also tests. The hypothesis is the generation of minimal possible differences in the course of conducting the practice. “I thought that guy was courageous but then he goes ahead and does X.” Here, one’s practice of courage detection has produced evidence of imperfection. Something I took to signify courage must have signified cowardice; or, something I’m taking now to signify cowardice in fact signifies courage. There’s your hypothesis: what does this action, or word, or gesture, actually mean? If he now does Y, it means cowardice; if Z, courage.\n\nAnd then he does something that’s not quite Y or Z, and you refine the hypothesis. The analogy with the articulation of myth and ritual is very precise. For the sake of the hypotheses, the whole world becomes nothing but possible signs of courage and cowardice—that’s the practice of transformation, one which can, of course, carry over into your interactions, as you test this or that individual in order to elicit such signs. Any argument can be reframed this way: should we “take action” now or lay the groundwork for when “conditions are ripe”? Here’s a hypothetical approach: what could you be doing right now that would be equally meaningful—more meaningful than anything else, even—whether the possibility of contributing directly to the kind of transformation you want arises 5 days or 50 years from now?\n\nIt is now clear to me that the conversion of ritual/myth into practice/hypothesis implies the opposition to narrative, which is really the continuation of myth. Narrative is always sacrificial, regardless of the best efforts of its most sophisticated practitioners. Proof of this is not only in the invariance with which the moral truth of narrative can still only be proven through the trial of the protagonist, but in the very fact that there is a protagonist along with other, dispensable characters who are essentially props, butts of jokes, and so on. A narrative in which all the characters are equally important, and in which actions and events are so open-ended as to make it impossible to draw “repeatable” conclusions from the consequences of those actions and events would not be recognizable as a narrative.\n\nThis is no less true of high cultural than of popular or mass cultural narratives. The point is not that the sacrificial character of narratives makes them “bad,” or not worth preserving and enjoying—I’m not interested in that question at all. The point is that in a post-sacrificial order and for a post-sacrificial practice, such narratives suffer a credibility defect—like myths do, once the rituals to which they are adjunct fall into disuse. We no longer have a sacrificial center which can be shared and devoured, and about the distribution of whose parts we can therefore argue meaningfully. But we do have a center, which is occupied, which cannot be sacrificed, and through which we also cannot sacrifice ourselves by opposing it.\n\nThe center we have can only be perfected through the perfection of our practices, by iterating the originary scene in the creation of ostensives—which is to say, names. The center we have abolishes sacrifice along with the vendetta, and replaces them with an articulation of practices that can be entered into through other practices. A world of disciplines and practices cannot be interested in narrative.\n\nBut wait! How can we do without narratives? I mean, things happen, and we have to recount them, don’t we? First A happened, then as a result B, and then as a result of that, C, etc. Yes, but what makes a narrative a narrative is the skeleton it provides for hanging “attributes” to characters, fleshing them out in order to produce the sacrificial moral lesson. We can recount events without that. And it’s true that causality will get thinned out along the way—indeed, causality is reduced to those charged with specific responsibilities and allotted specific powers with doing what they can and should, or not, through some imperfection in their practices.\n\nBut those occupying delegated centers and sustaining or derogating them in some manner is really nothing more than the iteration of the scene itself. Everything that happens answers to a particular hypothesis regarding the constitution of the scene. An instance of violent centralization directs our attention to a lapse in responsibility or a misallocation of power somewhere on the scene, not to the trials and agony of the victim. So, if someone in a position of authority delegates power to a subordinate because that subordinate has displayed the requisite mode and degree of courage in previous assignments, the hypothesis constructed above regarding the meaning of “courage” finds its place within a practice.\n\nWe can become students of courage in order to formulate and test such hypotheses as effectively as possible, but we will never exhaust all the causes of courage and cowardice and so we will always have to restrict our hypotheses to the fitness of this person for this task. Maybe, in fact, his relation to his father (for example), or some childhood trauma, is relevant here; but, maybe not, and, at any rate, no possible “causes” can become independently interesting in relation to determining the meaning of “courage” in this case. (Of course, as a kind of data, it can be preserved and might become relevant for later hypothesis formation.)\n\nSo, what was once narrative becomes scenic intelligence. As we come to know that we are intrinsically scenic beings, we aim at making our scenicity more overt and subject to practices—which counters the reliance on narrative formulas. I’ve drawn before on a model of scenic temporality drawn from Charles Sanders Peirce, and this seems helpful here. How can you determine the borderline between the inside and outside of an object, or between two objects? Everyplace you try to draw it, some of the outside is inside and some of the inside outside. So, Peirce says, the border is where there are an equal number of particles of both objects, or inside and outside.\n\nWe look toward a distribution rather than an ontologically replete object. The equivalent of this for time, Peirce says, and the way we can therefore distinguish when one event is over, and another has begun, is as follows. The beginning of any event is the middle of another event and the end of yet another (to just stick to the strict, narrative, which is also to say, scenic, beginning-middle-end parameters). So, the end of one event is identified as the beginning of another and the middle of a third event—all within the same space. In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis , Gregor’s death coincides with his sister’s rebirth, and marks the resumption of his parents’ normal middle class life, once they’ve cleaned up Gregor’s room. Kafka’s novella is certainly a narrative, but perhaps it contains something anti-narrative as well, and that’s something we can learn to look for.\n\nSo, our hypothetical lapse in the exercise of authority is a kind of end, as the authority becomes no longer authoritative; but we can locate in it the beginning, somewhere on the scene, of a more adequate form of authority (maybe even the same person in a different incarnation), in the midst of more and less adequate exercises of authority in adjacent practices distributed across the scene—the beginning and middle “measure” the end. In this scenic auto-generation, the scene reconfiguring itself out of its own (a)symmetries, we have the source of our hypotheses. Whether or not the authority in question has in fact become less authoritative, if what looked like courage is in fact cowardice, is going to be measured by the middles and beginnings stretched out across this end.\n\nWe have the elements of a narrative but we stay in the present as those middles are supporting and auxiliary practices of the supposed end, and the beginnings are its continuations, refoundings, sproutings, or repudiations. Our focus is not narrative, even if it’s temporal, invoking overlapping temporalities—our only interest is in perfecting our practices of inquiry by introducing hypotheses into the practices we examine.\n\nNarrative, with its mythical, sacrificial roots, is a kind of addiction. Everyone speaks of “The Narrative,” and the need to have a counter-narrative. The practice/hypothesis nexus will prove to be more powerful than narrative. Narratives make people hysterical and it pumps them up like a drug because they don’t really believe it, because has no ritual grounding—and attempts to provide, e.g., demonstrations with a ritual form are just as pathetic as the narratives themselves. Large scale, “big scenic” narratives that have generalized agents (unified groups with coherent motivations) are just preparations for lynch mobs, whether the agent in question represents potential perpetrators or victims.\n\nRather than counter-narratives, hypotheses should be used to dismantle narratives and to show that people are capable of things no one has yet seen. And we actually have a model of this in President Trump, whose presidency continues to astonish despite all the carping by people who supplement dubious news stories with the narrative fleshing out they crave. Whatever happens in what remains of his presidency, whether it’s 5 months or 5 years, will continue to be a rich source of models for hypothetical interventions in practices. A practice of studying Trump under the assumption that he knows what he’s doing better than you do would yield far more than turning Trump into a prop in your own narrative. It’s amazing how few people with even the most marginal public persona are capable of admitting that they are learning from someone else.\n\nSo, instead of narratives, we have the generation of scenes out of scenes, as a beginning is treated as a middle, a middle as an end, and so on. If the originary scene must have taken a while to pervade all human activities, once it did, it’s only possible to think about one scene from within another scene, and that other scene must more and more come to be just the foregrounding of the scenicity of the scene itself. But we could have only arrived at this point through the emergence of expanded scenes that completely absorbed and demolished local scenes. I’m referring to the ancient empires, which no doubt destroyed thousands of little worlds, a process that has continued in various forms since then. Without the imperial scene of demolition, there would be no “meta” scene. The meta derives from the imperial external position. It also derives from the “minor” scenes that preserved their scenic memory and posited a “meta” that transcended the imperial. From the Axial Age moral acquisitions, in other words.\n\nThe meta is only fully accomplished once the fantasy of installing a “genuine” center to monitor and control the occupied center has been relinquished. (Perhaps there are various layers of trauma that are being worked through in this connection.) At that point, and in a sense this is that point, we can speak of the “iterative center,” and not merely the “post-sacrificial.” Instead of trying to institute a global scene modeled on the originary one, with the inevitably apocalyptic consequences, we can accept the imperative to iterate the originary scene in practices where new ostensives can be affirmed, and practices named. Such practices don’t stand alone—they overlap with each other, and report upward and downward in other, pedagogical practices. We accept the center acting at a distance, because the ostensives it allows us to generate also replenish the center in ways we can hypothesize as samples. The point, again, is not to think small, but to ask the biggest questions of the center in a way commensurate with our practices at a certain level of perfection."
    },
    {
      "slug": "power-and-capital",
      "title": "Power and Capital",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Sep 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I have always operated as if, since the originary hypothesis founds a new form of thinking that is essentially indigestible by the existing disciplines, and therefore necessarily at odds with those disciplines, it should be aligned with other marginal indigestibles in the field of knowledge. Hence, my attraction to thinkers like Wierzbicka who, if respected within the field of linguistics, does not seem to me to have had much impact on it; or Marcel Jousse, who takes the notion of mimesis too literally and thoroughly even for the mimetic theorists. Clearly, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, of whose Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder I was previously aware, but which I actually sat down to read at the urging of Joel Davis, fits into this category.\n\nSo, this post will “welcome” Nitzan and Bichler (perhaps without their consent, were they to be asked) into the anthropomorphics “fold,” and I would expect them to be a regular feature from here on in. Like Wierzbicka and Jousse and, of course, the originary hypothesis itself, Nitzan and Bichler have a very simple hypothesis with ramifications that cut down forests of disciplinary obfuscation. I don’t remember when or how I first came across their work, because I’m pretty sure it wasn’t from any website or publication, whether on the left or right, since as far as I can tell Capital as Power has had almost no impact on any discussions anywhere.\n\nIf I were to try and prove myself wrong on this point, I would look to the kind of anarchist spaces where one might find discussions of the work of the recently and far too soon departed David Graeber, with whose work (and, I suspect, with whose politics) Nitzan’s and Bichler’s has affinities.\n\nAs the title of their book indicates, Nitzan and Bichler eliminate the politics/economic distinction by arguing that capital is simply a mode of power. What is power? Power is “confidence in obedience” (17). With such confidence those with power reshape the social order in accord with the principle of its own power. Nitzan and Bichler draw upon Lewis Mumford’s notion of the “mega-machine” here, understanding power as circular and self-perpetuating—the ancient emperors impressed millions of slaves into vast infrastructural projects, not primarily because they wanted giant infrastructure built and wars fought, but because it impressed their own intentionality on the world and increased their confidence in the submission of the ruled.\n\nThis means that there must be some “other” to power, a positive to power’s negative pole: that other is “industry,” which they see, following Thorstein Veblen, as a “hologrammic” system in which all the productive activities in society contribute, governed by what Veblen called “the instinct of workmanship,” and are irreducible to price or any other measure. Bichler and Nitzan very convincingly show that all attempts within the field of economics to quantify such “factors of production” as labor, capital and machinery are arbitrary and intellectually dishonest. This in itself makes them thinkers of the “iterative center” rather of the anarchic, quasi-sacrificial “big scene.”\n\nHere is their definition of capital as power:\n\nThe capitalist mode of power is counted in prices, and capitalization, working through the ever more encompassing price system, is the algorithm that constantly restructures and reshapes this order. Capitalization discounts a particular trajectory of expected future earnings. For any group of capitalists—typically a corporation—the relative level and pattern of earnings denote differential power: the higher and more predictable these earnings are relative to other groups of companies, the greater the differential power of the corporation’s owners. (9)\n\nI would like to single out in particular the discounting of a particular trajectory of expected future earnings. If the ownership of a particular piece of land, for example, can be expected to be worth ten million dollars in ten years, then that determines the value of the land to me now-how much am I, or anyone, willing to spend now in expectation of that 10 million in 10 years? But I think it would be better to say that it is not so much the expected value of that land as what its owner will be able to ensure its value will be. The valuation of the land is from the start an exercise of power: the owner will be able to carry out the actions or create the conditions that will yield those earnings.\n\nThat might include access to governing powers that allow the land to be used in certain ways, and it might include preventing others from using surrounding properties in certain ways. Securing the obedience of members of the city council is necessary for the land to be capitalized in this way, but this doesn’t mean that the capitalization is an economic activity that depends upon an autonomous, political power—it means that the members of the city council are themselves capitalized, and, say, donating to their campaigns or establishing a local media to exalt them and demonize their rivals are part of the same process of capitalization, as investing in the media outlet or the politician is also part of the discounting of a particular trajectory of expected future earnings. The fact that everything in the world and every human activity can be capitalized in this way is the source of capital’s unique and very flexible and effective mode of power.\n\nCapital is articulated with industry, but in an essentially parasitical way—capitalists achieve their differential power relative to other capitalists primarily through sabotage—that is, by preventing industry from performing to its full potential. There are many means of accomplishing this—patent and copyright, price fixing, control of the regulation process and so on. Bichler and Nitzan acknowledge that industry does need to perform—an auto company does need to draw upon a part of the broader hologrammic industry and produce millions of cars—but if industry is given too much free reign, the source of capital’s profit and therefore power will evaporate, so what is ultimately more important is preventing others from producing cars, or better cars, or means of transportation other than cars.\n\nThey also implicitly acknowledge that some forms of capitalist power are less dysfunctional, that is less destructive of industry than others—there are times when capital needs to invest, expand production and hire workers, and other times when they focus primarily on mergers that serve no one other than capital’s power, or price manipulation (inflation), which always threatens to bring about social disorder or even disaster. This would be true of any form of power. Now, Bichler and Nitzan acknowledge that “industry” is not self-determining and involves choices that can only be made by humans and, therefore, as part of the entire complex of human activity and interaction, must be subject to some broader vision of human good.\n\nIt is that this point that they trail off into ritual invocations of “democratic” control, without every raising the question of what “democracy” could have to do with their Veblenian notion of industry—what kind of democracy could make decisions about transportation, medical, educational, scientific, systems, much less the articulation of and “resonances” across these systems, all of which must be done on the terms of the systems themselves. I will also mention here that a remedy for this defect lies in distinguishing power from sabotage, and acknowledging that industry itself in a form of power—at the very least, pedagogical power, as new generations are brought into industry and within industry initiative and intelligence will be deferred to in the name of sharing these capacities.\n\nSince the power of capital depends upon defining and measuring, and then reducing, risk (at least risk to oneself), it also relies upon the science of probabilities. In a brief discussion of “Probability and Statistics” (199-201), Nitzan and Bichler trace this science back to Renaissance thinkers like Blaise Pascal and William Petty, who studied the laws of “chance.” Capital seizes upon this science not to bet on events in the world in a more informed manner, but to control it. But it is also the case that “industry” was dramatically transformed by this science as well, and without it would not have the nearly unlimited capacities Nitzan and Bichler attribute to it.\n\nIt would seem, then, that capital and industry share a common origin. Charles Sanders Peirce’s assertion that “we are each of us an insurance company” captures this common origin of the new mode of inquiry animating industry and capital. There can hardly be a better example of “capitalization” than insurance, which attributes a current value to the insured’s life (or well-being, or as Bichler and Nitzan point out, to some particular part of the anatomy—a leg for a model, an arm for a quarterback, etc.) based on expected future earnings; while, at the same time, is modern science, which is really applied math, anything more that the determination of probable future outcomes in accord with the data collected regarding some current state of affairs?\n\nWas Peirce, unknowingly, a kind of proto-capitalist, or, to use Marxist phraseology, “objectively” pro-capitalist? Is seeing oneself as an insurance company the most abject self-capitalization or a transformation of oneself into a mode of inquiry, inspired by the highest instinct of workmanship?\n\nNitzan and Bichler seem to me unconvincing in one area—their discussion of the state. Their insistence that capital is power—not dependent on power, not an influence on power, not even just powerful, but a specific mode of power—means that the state cannot be conceptually separated from capital. Nitzan and Bichler make this case by contending that the state is capitalized through the national debt, and we could even push this further by pointing out how the logic of capitalization comes to pervade all manner of state activity, from welfare policy, to crime, to foreign policy and education. Everywhere there is talk of “investment,” and “return” on it; policy alternatives are framed in cost-benefit terms.\n\nAnd yet—even the most gigantic corporations don’t possess armies or nukes. That there must be some distinction between state and capital is in fact consistent with their insistence that some understanding of the good life, irreducible to industry, would have to inform the ends of industry. I can call that articulation of industry “power,” because “power” holds no pejorative connotation for me. Nitzan and Bichler’s analysis makes clear that capital could never really establish anything like a model of the good life, as it is nothing more than capitalizing more and more of the planet. In fact, whatever is good would be good because it has not yet been capitalized, or insofar as it has not been completely capitalized, but that good thing would then immediately become a target of capitalization.\n\nThere is a kind of trap here which reactionaries and revolutionaries alike have fallen into, of seeking out supposedly non-commodifiable and therefore non-capitalizable forms of life. All that can do is paint targets on the backs of those forms of life, serving as a kind of advance guard for capital. There is no alternative to entering the algorithm of capital and power and separating out the competing and entwined modes of algorithmic order. Peirce concludes his discussion of the self as an insurance company by pointing out that, in the long run (the same long run in which we would all have to agree on reality, I suppose) all insurance companies must go bankrupt—all the calculations, all the precautions, all the hedging, will ultimately come up against the black swan which could not have been anticipated.\n\nAt that point, for Peirce, we would have recourse only to the old Christian virtues of love, hope and charity, which, regardless of whether we rely on those particular (non-capitalizable?) virtues, suggests that whatever mode of transcendence or presencing enabled us to defer the answers to such pressing questions to the long run will be what succors us in the long run. But what of deferral? Is it not the quintessential capitalist value—the deferral of gratification? It’s not quite the same thing. The good bourgeois subject defers gratification out of a fear of consequences, or out of competition with rivals. This is the kind of deferral capital relies upon and exploits.\n\nThe deferral of mimetic violence precedes the figuration of the violent consequences it defers, and is therefore more like the deferral “industry” elicits, and is never satisfied—it is commemorated in the building of the world. Still, the more localized form of deferral must derive from the more originary one, and so here as well we can see a common origin to industry and capital, in the diverging paths of deferral.\n\nA site of expected earnings can be treated (imagined aesthetically) as a site of eventual bankruptcy and abandon. Single out all the markers of eventual bankruptcy: what would remain of the capitalized practice once all conceivable forms of sabotage have run their course? In a way, it’s a very simple approach: what would, say, a workplace look like if it simply maximized everyone’s ability to do an important job well? Of course, many workplaces, those mostly performing Graeber’s “bullshit jobs,” wouldn’t even exist. The instinct of workmanship itself would be the “motivation” of activity, which we can’t imagine now in any great detail, but which remain in the wake of eventual bankruptcy and abandon.\n\nCapitalization is running the practice through the maw of the Big Scene, with the ever growing and yet divisible central matter and an even more rapidly accelerating sacrificial community. Projecting expected earnings incites mimetic struggles spread across institutions which one plans to have already won: “industrial” practices which defer such struggles indefinitely cannot, then, be fully capitalized—this requires that we construct the counter-algorithms of capital. The calculations of industrial improvements would have to be run parallel to and entangled with so as to redirect the calculations of expected earnings.\n\nWe can at least hypothesize indefinitely deferred future earnings eventually converging with the practices of industry. Right now, this can only be a way of inhabiting disciplinary spaces and infiltrating institutions, but it is simultaneously an implicit model of transformation.\n\nBichler and Nitzan certainly intend for the “hologrammatic resonance” I discussed in my previous post to serve as a model for the abolition of capital. I think this helps to explain their neglect by the left—they don’t provide an “agency” for such transformation that can become a target of political “investment,” i.e., that can be capitalized. Thinking in terms of privileged agencies is sacrificial, Big Scenic thinking—it relies upon the imaginary redistribution of the social product and social power in a more “equal” way that can never be determined outside of the mimetic struggles it incites and depends on. But this also means that the hypothesized practices that would promote “industry” must “resonate” across the entire social order. I think that the most concentrated way of approaching this, and one that might actually become fairly realistic even under the rule of capital is a post-sacrificial reconstruction of kinship structures. This will be the subject of a future post."
    },
    {
      "slug": "maximal-addressability-within-the-field-of-sample-utterances",
      "title": "Maximal Addressability within the Field of Sample Utterances",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "I found myself with the phrase constituting the title of this post at the end of my previous post, as a distillation of the pedagogical order to be strapped into the technomedia order, a distillation that takes the form of sample utterances within a field of utterances. Everything is samples, signs, or utterances—even the most vigorous action in the sense of physical action in the real world involving lots of people only makes sense, has effects, is recorded, remembered and institutionalized insofar as it takes the form of signs and generates other signs. So, the “best,” or most powerful, or durable sample is the one that makes other samples maximally addressable and is so itself.\n\nEvery utterance has its addressees—a greeting addresses the visitor, a command addresses the subordinate, a broadcast addresses all within range. The addressee is part of the meaning of the utterance—most obviously, ostensives and imperatives require presence, but declaratives only take on their meaning insofar as they address a disciplinary space, real or potential (the real/potential distinction is probably not worth holding onto any more than the technology/media one).\n\nThe field of addressees can’t be completely determined in advance—which means that meaning can never be determined once and for all—meaning is always the articulation of a hypothesis. Anyone can claim to be the addressee of a particular utterance and act accordingly—not always with equal success. But the chances of success can be improved. This is the field of ethical and moral decision and acting. You’re addressed by everything you see and hear—it’s just a question of what kind of addressee you’re going to be. A mugger tells an old lady to give him her handbag—his command, as far as he’s concerned, addresses her, but if you see and hear it you become an addressee.\n\nAre you addressed as a participant who will interfere with the event, as a detached spectator, an observant witness? That will depend on what you do, and what you do will in turn address others. The moral or, to stick with Wierzbicka’s primes, the good thing to do is to make that mugger’s utterance (and the victim’s utterances—resistance, cries for help, paralysis through fear) maximally addressable—but that doesn’t necessarily mean the most direct and immediately impactful action. Getting yourself along with the old lady killed is not the best move, even if there are situations in which the imperative is to take that risk.\n\nThe real question is what will spread and embed the signs of this event across the semiotic field, to represent everything that happens as a possibility that transforms the entire field of possibilities. This, again, doesn’t tell you exactly what to do, but it does, first of all, militate against certain responses—running away and remaining silent about the crime, for example.\n\nThe search for maximal addressability is the discovery procedure for eliciting the imperative of the center. If I’m young, strong, and trained in the martial arts I can turn the scene into a rescue operation and sign of the potential of informal, participatory modes of order maintenance. If I’m incapable, I can call for help and remain in proximity to help the victim afterward; I can remember as much as I can to help catch and punish the perpetrator. In either case, the better I set an example, the more meaning I confer on the scene, the more closely I am conforming to the imperative of the center—I’m formalizing myself as rescuer, or witness, or caregiver or some other role in a way that others can play that same role.\n\nThe imperative to create maximal addressability scales up, even if things get more complex. To determine which utterances to take as addressing you and what kind of addressee to be follows from your calculations regarding your own maximal addressability, as citizen, tribune, historian, theorist, curator of likely forgotten utterances for the future, etc. Imagine someone, an hour from now, a year from now, a century from now, seeking out the utterance he could make and that would make him maximally addressable across the field of utterances, formulating the most precise and expansive search of the cloud possible at that moment that would provide him with that utterance, coming across yours. That’s the sample you want to “emit”; that would be obeying to the fullest extent possible the imperative of the center.\n\nMaximal addressability means not only responding to a declarative with a binary (yes/no, true/false) or even with another declarative that would further surface in its richness the imperative studied by the first declarative but also to find a way to obey that imperative even in the form of your declarative, by narrowing down the ostensive (“referent”) to be sought, supplied or hypothesized in confirmation of the completion of that imperative. It is to be the ostensive that would make the declarative maximally addressable, even while sustaining the complexity and openness of the declarative order precisely in order to initiate new searches into the tacitly maintained projects that have become invisible but might need to be surfaced and continued at any time. It means that your statements of fact are also promises, and your promises are also hypotheses, and that this layered character of each utterance, is existence in the imperative-ostensive world and declarative order alike, is inscribed in ways that require the maximal addressability of other to be iterated.\n\nMaximal addressability is always separated by a thin boundary from a failure of address—“too much” addressability tips over into the absurd and unintelligible. The oscillation between maximal addressability and failure of address is the aesthetics of address: saturating the space of address always involves elements of failure to address, in order to mark that saturation. Any meaning displaces some other meaning, and in doing so marks the displaced meaning as a prepping for mimetic convergence. Maximal addressability means signaling a readiness to give the sign a chance, and this can only be done by indicating the possible consequences of giving up on the sign.\n\nThe boundary between maximal addressability and the various possible failures of address is the site of thought experiments and hypotheses, constitutive of the utterance itself. You follow the imperative of the center by distinguishing your adherence from possible “rebellions,” “failures of nerve,” misfires, and so on. You can think about this as paying the maximum possible amount of attention to some interlocutor or source of messages while simultaneously encouraging the interlocutor or allowing the message to command your attention and that of others in ways that create multiple vectors of address—while modeling this posture for others. Or as responding to an utterance in such a way as to make it memorable, worthy of being remembered, and more likely to be remembered to the extent that other find themselves addressed by it.\n\nOne way of thinking about a highly formalized and ritualized order is that it provides formulas for all possible modes of address. Everyone has a “dense” name, in the sense that your name includes all possible addresses to and from the community. Imagine a given name that includes references to all your kinship relations, and that then accrues new names through the successive roles one is initiated into in the community, along with “nicknames” noting the particular abilities, proclivities, and accomplishments that aren’t reducible to formal roles. I don’t know if any community ever existing actually had such names, but some certainly approximated it much more closely than others. And the de-sacralized “modern” order is as far from such a fully named order as it is possible to be. One could say that the most important and powerful desire is to have such a name—to be saturated by recognition. Even humiliating recognition is better than no recognition at all. The problem of maximal addressability could only be raised in a de-sacralized order, and it is a response to it.\n\nThe modes of address prevalent in de-sacralized orders are created by the disciplines—law, politics, economics, education, psychiatry, and so on. We are citizens, legal subjects, workers or businessmen, high-school dropouts or Ph Ds, “on the spectrum,” “neuro-atypical” and so on. These modes of address were, first of all, the basis of statistics, originally a way for the state to keep records and order in the wake of the fraying and then breakdown of traditional communities in which modes of address were contained by kin and liturgical affiliations. These statistics produce data, which in the age of planetary computation can all be preserved and easily accessed in various configurations, by various agencies, for various purposes.\n\nModels of order (safety, health, wealth, aptitude, etc.) are used to search and shape data flows, which leads to each of us being addressed in specific ways. You could say we’re being addressed by vectors of data flow, but also by models of activity. Facebook constructs a model of a particular kind of political identity (“liberal,” “conservative”) and then ensures that news items that feed into your identity find their way to you. The same obviously holds true for musical tastes, vacations, potential romantic partners and so on. This is where the decisions regarding how to be addressable show up.\n\nThe question of “political agency,” then, or “self-appification,” is to be found in the contribution one can make to constructing the models shaping and directing data flows. The algorithms governing data flows are revised by the feedback the machines receive from the users they serve. You can see that you are being labeled as a “conservative,” and so you can through your online searches and purchases scramble with the model and evade any particular model. In that case you become the model that might shape the data for others. This is a model of praxis: maximizing your addressability by the algorithm so that the algorithm can only process your activity by elevating you to a model for others.\n\nIf we were to think of this as an organized, collective practice, it might be very practical. So, the question becomes, how to maximize addressability by the algorithm? You could think this as simulating a particular kind of person who evades the algorithm’s radar or over-saturates it. But a “type of person” which can named by a cliché “(“courageous,” “generous,” intelligent,” “inquisitive,” etc.) would quickly be captured by the algorithm and brought into conformity with its other models.\n\nI would suggest confronting the data in a more Dadaist way. I’m going to be putting together something like a “logic,” using Wierzbicka’s primes, among other things. I’ve already said in Anthropomorphics that what is more important than the mere proof that all languages have words with these meanings in them is that the “prime” meaning of these words is best derived from the relations between them in basic possible sentences. So, for example, ordinarily one thinks before one says something, and it seems like one hasn’t, that is something to be remarked upon. To say that one thinks before saying is not to make an empirical observation (in which case, philosophy or cognitive psychology style, we’d have to start looking for “evidence” of thinking prior to saying) but to posit a right order of things.\n\nWe could say to someone to whom things seem to be always happening that at some point he needs to do something. Before saying that you want something you should know what it is. Various combinations of the primes would produce all the proverbs, aphorisms and maxims of action we would need; and, of course, lots of other combinations would produce all kinds of playful paradoxes and nonsense. The more I do, the more things happen to me; I can only know what I wanted after I do something; you can say what you think but can you think what you say; etc. This is the material out of which design practices of self-appification can be constructed: you can enter the data stream as the type of person who turns what he does into happenings by hearing what he says before he says it (for example).\n\nThen the work of translation begins—translation into an idiosyncratic form of the idiom of any discipline. Being someone who does things that happen by hearing what he says before he says it and wanting what he can’t know (for example) would take on different forms in finance, sociology, psychology, law and so on. You can be sure that any idiom can always be reduced to some relation between wanting and knowing and thinking and saying and doing and happening, etc. And these little (or maybe not always so little) Dada-fied sentences can certainly be spread across the whole field of mimological impressments, introducing new mimical twists requiring new approaches to address. Here is how unseen layers of addressability get surfaced, and our pursuit of the imperative of the center into its lair prosecuted.\n\nThink about it this way—anything you do comes preframed by a set of expectations, your own and others. If the expectations are reasonable, there’s no dishonor in simply meeting them. Just meeting them, though, means that the limitation implicit in those expectations goes unexplored, and other courses of action are never examined, much less taken. Just refusing and defying expectations, though, makes you even more sharply defined and severely limited by them—that’s really what “resentment” is, refusing any input into your decisions and actions that you can’t claim is completely your own. But you can revise the expectations, so as to raise them, for yourself and others.\n\nThis means, first of all, acknowledging the fundamental legitimacy of expectations and, second, subjecting them to experimental practices. Expectations imposed on you subject you to a model: be like this, you are told. If you’re going to change or destroy the model, you better be sure you’re going to leave something better in its place. To become “like” some model, or a composite of successful or admirable actions or lives, is to treat it as a sum total of postures, gestures and utterances that may exceed the sum of its parts but nevertheless contains the sum. Each posture, gesture or utterance tells you: do this.\n\nSo, the question is, what is “this,” “here” and “now” (as opposed to “then” and “there,” in the world of the model). You take all of the parts seriously, including the ones that seem to you dysfunctional or obsolete—maybe you’re right, but start with the assumption that you’re missing something. (In the process, you come to think about how you might eventually be worthy of incorporation into a future model.) You read all the parts generously, you work them all over, you preserve every bit of them you can in your iterations, even the parts you aren’t so sure about which you perhaps incorporate as a kind of “loyal opposition” to your own projects.\n\nYou defend the model against its detractors, even if you’re not sure your arguments are as compelling as theirs—maybe you haven’t yet formulated the more compelling arguments. You can turn out to be entirely wrong, and you may have to junk a particular model completely, but that will only be because you’ve become subject to a new one that preserves everything you’ve crystallized from the previous one along with some new “parts” or more of more than the sum of them than the previous model. This is maximal addressability. You accept your subordination to models and their imperatives, and you do so by carrying forward those models in ways those “inputting” to those models couldn’t have anticipated, and you do so in such a way that others can do the same with and for you."
    },
    {
      "slug": "scenic-design-practices",
      "title": "Scenic Design Practices",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "It seems to me that we’ve gotten to the point, with the emergence of computing as a “metamedia,” where there’s no basis for distinguishing between “media” and “technology.” All media, including the most basic, such as speech, gesture and writing, are implicated in the vast array of recording and monitoring technologies, and as subject to algorithmic governance or “planetary scale computation” as anything else; while all technology is now dependent on code (itself a form of literacy) and contributes to the spatial arrangement of human activity no less than media such as buildings and cinema. And we can include “infrastructure” in this as well.\n\nDrawing, then, upon the understanding of “media” I proposed in Anthropomorphics , as all the means of constituting scenes, and the understanding of “technology” I proposed, that is, as the articulation of desacralized and abstracted human practices, I would synthesize it all as “scenic design practices.” Every practice is designing a scene; or, really, redesigning a scene, or some portion of a scene, with the techno-media (this term to be revised presently) available. This would include all practices, large and small, carried out by the powerless as well as the powerful, obviously with different effects and constraints across the spectrum.\n\nI’m a little, most indirectly, familiar with some of the more significant contemporary theorists of technology, such as Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler and Freidrich Kittler, each of whom reaches back into other traditions of thought, and I’ll be doing more reading here, but I’ve already got some sense of where anthropomorphics will differ from and offer something unthought by these other approaches, so I’ll lay down some of that thinking here. The first “medium,” of course, was the scene constructed and embodied as the originary scene, part and parcel of the emergence of the sign, which I would see expansively as the posture as well as gesture of an entire human body conforming itself in real time to the postures and gestures of an emergent community of other humans.\n\n(One could always draw the boundary between sign and scene/media differently.) The first tool, or implement, meanwhile, would have had to have been some ritual enhancing “device,” that is to say, something that would materialize the memory of the originary scene by drawing or enhancing the boundary between center and periphery. A circle of bones, perhaps, marking the ritual space, eventually something like an altar, and whatever materials might have gone into constructing a permanent likeness of the central figure. Maintaining the means of ritual would involve the development of “skills,” which is to say repeatable movements that can be transmitted to others and perfected, and the creation of increasingly differentiated and specialized “tools,” which would always be bound up with sacred purposes.\n\nThe real “instructor” here would be the central figure itself, who teaches the community how to create and use the tools in accord with ritual prescriptions. And, of course, myths would be generated explaining how some sacred figure provided the community with these tools and prescriptions. Since each new element of ritual must have displaced a previous one, it makes sense that such myths are often associated with some kind of transgression, an aura which until modern times has always surrounded knowledge or technical innovation.\n\nThis would all hold true for the development of weapons used for hunting and war, all of which would involve the same intimate, imperative relation to the gods and ancestors and the prescriptions and tools for building altars and conducting rituals. I’m assuming that nothing can be outside of the ritual-mythic nexus, a very tightly bound up system of imperative exchange, until the emergence of the ancient empires and their serial destruction of local communities with the mass enslavement of their populations (of course, as Engels observed a long time ago, enslavement was an alternative to extermination, once the ruler became powerful enough to make use of subjugated populations).\n\nWe now have vast populations excluded from the ritual center, which means that anything can be done to or with them. It is at this point, I’m hypothesizing, that we can start to speak of “technology,” as the direct, i.e., de-sacralized and de-ritualized aggregations of humans who can be combined in an orderly way for concentrated purposes involving the use and transformation of “nature.” As Nitzan and Bichler point out, referring to Mumford in Capital as Power , the very conception of technology is an effect of power: seeing all this “labor power” at your disposal would inflame the imagination.\n\nThis imaginative impulse is both constructive and pulverizing. Not only does it afford massive and complex structures, but also for continual grinding up into ever more minute particles. “Analysis” is a result of this. So, we can take any scene and treat it as a media apparatus which is simultaneously one small piece of much larger apparatuses, but can itself be broken down into any number of mini-apparatuses. I use the word “treat” here rather than, say, “view,” because to treat something is to change it in some very specific way, to prepare it for a particular use. Insofar as we treat the scenes we inhabit or infiltrate as an articulation of design practices, we are participating in those practices.\n\nWe’re designing the scenic features that will more or less eventually go into the production of some utterance, or sample. If you’re rich and powerful, this might entail organizing a studio, hiring specific kinds of directors, getting certain performers under contract, hiring publicity people to create and maintain a brand, so that you get to the point where your design issues in a movie in which a particular actor stands in a particular way, on a particular scene, and says something, which a designed for audience will hear and pass on in various ways to secondary and tertiary audiences. Designing algorithmic orders that make it more probable that certain items turn up in a search is an even more obvious example.\n\nAnd this entire configuration can continually be redesigned. If you’re essentially powerless, like most of us, the appropriation of design practices nevertheless gives you a way of thinking about how to spend your time and energy—in various ways, you’re contributing to the construction and maintenance of a range of scenes, and the more precise you get about the samples you’d most like to generate, the more effectively you can think where to replace certain scenic elements with others so as to bring about resonant attentional shifts. The powerless can do this because the mega-machines into whose service we have been pressed require the “pieces” to take some initiatives and assume some responsibilities.\n\nThe design of assignments for students in pedagogical situations provide as good an example of design practices as anything else I can think of. (I’ll issue my customary broadside against my academic colleagues and point out that, even though this is their main job, in my experience very, very few of them give this any disciplined thought at all. They ask students to do what they imagine themselves doing, thereby favoring the students best able to mimic their own gestures.) The purpose of an assignment is to have the students learn how to do something that they could only have learned how to do laboriously or even serendipitously without the assignment, with the thing they learn to do also being something they will not only have to do very often in other situations, but that will also be a condition for them to do a lot of other things. This is what makes an assignment, to use a little bit of contemporary pedagogical jargon, “high-impact.”\n\nFor one thing (I’m speaking about my own field, “freshman comp,” here), this requires breaking down “academic reading and writing,” i.e., a particular advanced form of literacy that is best defined in terms of the continuous production of nominalizations that function as subjects and objects of sentences in a hierarchical system of distributed citationality. (In “academic discourse,” “a hierarchal system of distributed citationality” readily becomes the subject of a sentence—so, what has to be learned, for example, is what does “a hierarchical system of distributed citationality” do ; that is, what verbs does one put after it?\n\nWhat is it like , i.e., which adjectives modify it, etc.?) More simply, academic discourse is characterized by vast reserves of implicit references to disciplinary conversations in the abbreviated form of their stored conceptual innovations. You break this down by defining the practice you want rehearsed (say, distinguishing “distributed citationality” from something significantly other to it) against the “epistemological obstacles” that interfere with performing it. Those obstacles are located in the mythical language of everyday life, where “Big Scenic thinking” prevails, and one relies on the dictionary meaning of words and imagines oneself “agreeing” and “disagreeing” with discrete statements, and therefore having “opinions,” “viewpoints,” and so on, rather than working out the implications of a concept.\n\nSo, the assignment stages confrontations between the epistemological obstacles of mythical everyday discourse, on the one hand, and the language of some disciplinary space, on the other. This produces an “inter-language,” where we find the learner using everyday vocabulary in the grammar of the disciplinary discourse and the vocabulary of disciplinary discourse in the grammar of everyday language. The inter-language now becomes the center of the disciplinary space, as the students construct a vocabulary and grammar to describe and analyze it, thereby preparing themselves to move self-reflexively into other disciplinary spaces.\n\nNow, all this is on a small scale—a class with one teacher and 15-20 students occupying the same space. But the practice of staging confrontations between Big Scenic, mythical thinking and emergent disciplinary spaces which expose the limits of Big Scenic thinking can be scaled up as large as one likes. This is the way to think about tweeting, blogging, constructing websites, publishing, even the creation of new currencies, political organization, or anything else we might be doing. Everything is the staging of pedagogical hypotheses that will in turn generate resonant, ramified hypotheses of and against the Big Scene.\n\nThis entails hypothesizing the vast range of possible responses to what you might do, and how you might interfere with that field of possible responses so as to facilitate more encounters between the Big Scene and disciplinary practices. This is no doubt why trolling has become such a prominent, almost all-inclusive feature of social media and more traditional practices that have been transformed by the social media ecology—trolling is aimed at generating responses you can then use so as to compose an utterance that will generate more responses you can use… The problem with trolling is that it locks everyone into their initial positions, whereas it is better to open up new positions.\n\nYou can then, imagine yourself not so much giving an assignment across the techno-media or field of scenic design practices (after all, who are you to give others assignments?) but as performing some assignment that provides an example for others. This is the only way through the “technological world picture,” and through Capital, for that matter, which also depends upon Big Scenic mythology. The iterative center assigns to each of us the practice that will distinguish it from the sacrificial remnants chewed over in Big Scenic thinking insofar as you specifically complete the practice. And that practice is some scenic design practice that will translate that same assignment into some other institutionally, infrastructurally mediated scene.\n\nThe translation will be the creation of the scene, the transference of some vocabulary within some grammar to another technological idiom. You do this by translating the constraints and affordances of platforms into imperatives and questions to be redesigned as assignments. Such practices entail inquiring into the scenic design practices that have produced each and every one of us. A constant pulverizing has been going on since the ancient empires—the Axial Age was a limited response to that, but we still haven’t seen anything better. What would be better is not trying to pick up all the pieces and put them back together again, but treating the pieces (habits that program us to try and get our rightful slice of the central object) as materials for scenic design that will have us all looking to help one another find our respective name and place. We all have some place we should be, and some name we should inhabit, and we can only find our name and place within a social order designed to produce scenes that afford such findings.\n\nMaybe we could call the “techno-media” the field of “mimological impressments” upon which scenic design practices operate. “Mimological” derives from Marcel Jousse’s “mimisms,” which is a concept that enables us to identify any human action as an articulation of infinitesimal gestures rooted in imitation; the word “impressment” means coerced recruitment into some military or industrial mega-machine, but property can also be impressed, and therefore so can anything in the natural world, all of which is pressed into service; but, even more, if we abstract the word “impress” from impressment, we have the (admittedly secondary) meaning of making a mark on something, with the something being the resources of the world subject to (transformed into resources by) the operations of the sciences, and the mark being made by some mimological arrangement.\n\nAll of “nature” is made to imitate the forms of human activity, and that activity is further pulverized into new mimisms in imitation of the new impressments. Drawing on my previous post, I’ll suggest that the “assignment” here is to treat our entanglements with mimological impressments as both liminally obsolete and still under construction. This allows us to defer the demands of imperative exchanges mimological impressments impose on us—it provides a space for studying what it means to be “on” Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or a blog and turning the demands of these spaces into platforms for staging pedagogical scenes that show where the boundaries between one scene and others lie.\n\n(The same holds, even if more indirectly, and through a different kind of operational chain, for building bridges and roads, or weapons, or buildings—it’s all scenic constitution through mimological impressments.) Once you identify a boundary, you can imaginatively, thought-experimentally, place some thing in an oscillatory relation to the respective sides of the boundary. So you take the same sample (utterance, statement, meme, icon, imperative…) and treat it as belonging to different spaces. (The simplest example: some statement or action that would be sign of madness on one scene but of genius on another—this allows you to assess the statement, and the respective scenes, and to respond to the statement or one “similar” to it so as to further test the hypothesis.)\n\nUltimately, if you do enough of this, and bring enough and the right others into doing enough of this, you’ve established a discovery procedure for fulfilling the imperative of the center. Everyone would just be interested in compiling sample utterances in such a way that all participants find themselves maximally addressed by them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-aesthetic-as-liminally-scenic",
      "title": "The Aesthetic as Liminally Scenic",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Oct 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "The “classical” understanding of the aesthetic in GA is that it derives from the oscillation on the originary scene between attention paid to the sign pointing to the central object, on the one hand, and the object itself, on the other. I’ve addressed some of the implications of this understanding in various places (including Anthropomorphics ), but what I’d like to focus on here is the fact that the aesthetic is located prior to the establishment of the sacred center—the aesthetic, that is, is pre-sacral, or perhaps preliminarily sacral. Moreover, while the aesthetic, up until the displacement of the shared sacred center, would have been assimilated to the sacred (amplifying it, contributing to the intentionality of sacred being, providing access to it by congregants, etc.) the aesthetic, in the form of art, only emerges after the sacred center has lost its monopoly on the community’s attention.\n\nThe aesthetic, in that case, supplements the center, first of all by providing something “like” a rite both in its own structure and for those participating as spectators (the purgative effect of tragedy, with its own sacrificial conclusion, is the obvious example here)—while at the same time enacting the transition out of a ritualistic order.\n\nSo, we could say that the aesthetic uses the study of the practices that might culminate in the construction of a shared center to demonstrate the provisionality of that center. This allows us to follow up on the periodization of artistic practices laid out by Eric Gans in his Originary Thinking , along with my own revisions of it in a way that might help us think about aesthetics and artistic possibilities today. Gans first of all distinguishes between the “classical” and the “neo-classical” aesthetic. In the classic aesthetic (associated with Greek tragedy), the audience is essentially an extension of the theatrical scene, responding directly to the central figure, who is unquestionably “central.”\n\nWe don’t need to be reminded why Oedipus or Agamemnon is worthy of our undivided attention—it’s a cultural given presupposed by the performance. (Of course, ancient comedy, which placed an “unworthy” figure at the center, would presumably have already reminded theatergoers of the “de-sacralizable” nature of the scene.) In neoclassical Shakespearean tragedy, for example, the scene itself is represented within the work, in the sense that ruling is seen to take place on a kind of stage of which the “actors” are aware, which also means the occupancy of the center by this particular individual is always questionable. This also means (al though I don’t think this is part of Gans’s point) that, al though the audience is not directly responsive to the scene, it is represented within the scene, as we see in the various kinds of explicit and implicit commentaries on the central scene in Shakespeare’s plays.\n\nWe can already see the possibility of discussing the history of aesthetics as the history of revisions of the boundary between art work and audience or public. And this history parallels the history of the increasing uncertainty regarding who and what can be placed at the center. If art is a practice of deritualization by exposing the preliminary practices of ritualization (showing what leads or inclines us to put something in the center, and then aborting that effort), then it makes sense that the boundary between art work and public would itself become more visible and permeable. The relation between artist, work and public becomes a shared inquiry into the consequences of placing this or that object or figure at the center in this or that way, under these or those conditions. The resistance to figural art and straightforward representations of beauty—the reason such representations get denounced as “kitsch”—is that they are cynical attempts to simulate the sacral scene, which is precisely what art does not and cannot do.\n\nSo, the Romantic artist sets himself off against the community, mimicking the scapegoated Jesus, while also inviting other “rebels” to cross over that boundary and join in rediscovering the forms of natural and transcendent beauty occluded by the market, which reduces everything to its price. For various reasons, Romantic poetry became central to the literary criticism branch of deconstruction, and one of the important contributions of critics like Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller was to show that the Romantic “quest” contradicted and undermined itself—its discourse of authenticity, self-centrality, and unmediated relation to a pre-social nature was undermined by the inability of “expressive” language to do anything more than reiterate the fraudulent centrality it tried to define itself against.\n\nGans refers to the “constituent hypocrisy” of Romanticism in this connection, as self-aggrandizement (and market value) is enabled by a performance of self-expulsion from the community. The later work of some important Romantics like Wordsworth and Byron is aware of this. The Romantic individual is finally ground up once and for all in literary realism, which almost invariably centers on some Romantic individual having his or her dreams contradicted at every point by the institutions and disciplines of the modern world to the point of an essentially meaningless destruction or death. We could see realism as mimicking human sacrifice, as we derive meaning from the immolation of the figure placed at the center, but, since that figure has been exposed as alienated from his own intentions, the sacred has been emptied out, making it more of an anti-sacrifice.\n\nWe could see much of artistic modernism as an intensification of this struggle against the community, with the fantasy of a new mass revolutionary subject (or, for the modernist reactionaries, the restoration of some version of antiquity) that would abolish the boundary between art work and public once and for all. One could say this made modern art far more esoteric and exclusive than Romantic art, which didn’t really question traditional genres, modes of representation, or the autonomy of art. But modernist antagonism to social institutions included an antagonism to the institutions of art themselves, which in turn facilitated the more radical questioning of the boundary between art and non-art.\n\nDuchamp’s “Fountain” stunt is the convenient starting point for those narrating this line of development. This makes art explicitly social and historical, as art has to address the question of what is to count as art under contemporary conditions. Postmodernism’s destabilizing of boundaries between genres, between artist and audience, between “mass culture” and “art” is all part of this bringing to the center the boundary between what is art and what is not art. I think that Joseph Beuy’s notion of “social sculpture,” in which art openly models the remaking social reality and, especially, Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings,” which introduce subtle modifications into everyday practices so as reveal boundaries between habit and innovation, mimisms and modeling, represent the endpoints of explicitly formalizing the boundary between art and non-art: art becomes a question of drawing attention to shifts in attention.\n\nI have previously developed this argument in the direction of what I’ve called “originary satire,” which would be aimed at identifying and enacting a minimal difference with established centering practices so as to reveal unthought layers of mimesis (“mimisms”) implicit in disciplinary practices of centering—for example, the very notion of “modeling,” with its ambiguity between using another practice to shape your own, on the one hand, and shaping other practices so as install your own, is generative of originary satire. Whoever you claim to be is how you are enacting yourself so as draw others into the projection of a world that ensures that you are who you are. The practice of exposing these paradoxes draws us into the paradox of the center, which produces us as we construct spaces conducive to our production.\n\nI’d like to explore another aesthetic possibility here, though. The pre- and extra-, or, let’s say, liminally scenic dimension of the aesthetic, once separated from increasingly desperate attempts to sacralize mundane centers, suggests the aesthetic power of forms of incompletion, obsolescence and ruin. What is aesthetically compelling, that is, what places and keeps us in an oscillatory relation to the center, are incomplete gestures and gestures that linger after the object they pointed to is no longer there. An abandoned construction site, for example; or an abandoned old mill. In these abandoned, left aside buildings, we see concentrated purposes that collided with other, ultimately even more concentrated purposes: in the case of the construction site, perhaps a transfer of investment funds to other projects midway, or conflicts with regulatory bodies; with the mill, new modes of production that could find no further use for this structure, perhaps because it was too perfectly fitted for its own purposes.\n\nNow, the abandoned mill is already a romantic cliché, and the removal of a useful object from its context of use and turning it into an object of contemplation already a well-worn artistic exercise. The construction site much less so, though. Completed purposes that have been left off much better fit the Kantian aesthetic ideal of “purposeful purposelessness”—the abandoned construction site might be purposeless, but not very purposeful. So, let’s say that instead of the abandoned mill, or, more generally, identifiable ruins, we pair the construction site with indeterminate ruins, in which possible patterns could be detected and various possible former uses hypothesized. In this case, we can’t imaginatively complete or supplement the original intention in any way that could compel consensus. The point is not a work of art before which you stand, stupefied, but which helps you sustain the oscillation necessary for the further generation of hypotheses.\n\nI’m going to suggest that an effectively oscillatory aesthetic should articulate the incomplete and the indeterminate ruins in one. I suppose that originary satire applies more to the verbal, dramatic and narrative arts, while what maybe we could call “archi-texture” applies to the plastic arts, but more especially architecture itself. When we build something, we are aware of all the unfinished construction sites that made it possible, that were negated or incorporated in revised form in the finished product; we can also be aware that sometime, in the future, whatever we build will be in ruins, with some future archaeologist left to figure out what it might have been, and how it might have fit into a form of life that can now only be hypothetically reconstructed. The artistic principle here is that the structure must include its proleptic “remainsness” along with its negated false starts. And, for that matter, this principle can apply to linguistically based arts as well.\n\nThis would incorporate oscillation around the present in what we build and implicate the participants in such structures in the now visible choices that have been made, and future ruinous states now to be deferred. If you can think in terms of how what you have built might be made intelligible, even in fragments, to some future civilization, it might help you to think of how to delay that eventuality, because it requires you to accentuate what is meaningful in everything you do. Similarly, incorporating the false starts keeps faith with the workers and thinkers of the past, recognizing intentions and efforts that, through no fault of their own, couldn’t be fulfilled—also a helpful way to think of your relation to some future inquirer. Participation and pedagogy are thereby maximized.\n\nWhat, exactly, would such structures look like? We don’t want grotesques, after all. First of all, I imagine buildings would leave in place some of its scaffolding, including scaffolding that ended up scaffolding something that didn’t end up being part of the building. The leftover scaffolding itself would be become an object of attention, as it gets in the way and ends up getting used in unanticipated ways. It could even get, inevitably ironically, “beautified.” And buildings should incorporate elements, not necessarily completely integrated, that point to structures or land uses that preceded their construction, and others which refer to its surroundings—clues for future archaeologists.\n\nIt should include, not too ostentatiously, what will be taken to be “futuristic” elements, so the archaeologists of the future can see what the future looked like back then. But there should be enough proleptic remainsness to “sufficiently” increase the possibility that there will be heterogeneous pieces for that future archaeologist to assemble, and to prevent too easy conclusions from being drawn. Perhaps this can all be compressed in futuristic scaffolding. None of this need interfere with the functions of the building, and might even suggest new functions.\n\nA contemporary artist, then, or, we could even say, a contemporary ethical aestheticist, would be interested, first of all, in whatever his contemporaries desire to put at the center, to worship or to simply forget regarding the practices by which things are placed at centers. He would then be interested in revealing those practices of centering, and enhancing the hesitations and oscillations that defer the completion of the “installation” of that object (which could be a social or political narrative or fantasy) indefinitely. This involves, third, creating new practices in which versions of prospective centers are shown to be products of the imaginary input to them by the spectators (who become participants) of the work itself.\n\nThere is already enough of a history of internet and internet-dependent art, along with critical and theoretical discussions of such art, to think in terms of deploying contemporary media for these purposes. Ultimately, art of all kinds would best be free of mediators like museums, galleries and publishers. Warhol’s dictum that “art is what you can get away with” would be realized in less trivializing (or smug) terms insofar as aesthetic practices would involve disguising yourself as who you are and infiltrating where you are so as to make more explicit the centralizing expectations of the “who” and the “where”—to turn your fellow participants in whatever discipline into “oscillators” between what you are doing and what you “should” or “might” be doing.\n\nThe approach I’m proposing displaces any intention to use art for sacralizing purposes—to restore old or create new sacred centers. Only an uncontested sacred center would make that possible. The real power of aesthetics today lies in the revelation of the mimetic contagions that are systematically disavowed in the most frenzied attempts at resacralization. For the foreseeable future, anyone not performing rage at this or that “tyranny” will be “undercover” in some sense, so the cover should be designed so as to introduce new patterns into the environment. Such aesthetic practices can be ennobling insofar as they demonstrate what might be done with what we have—while you’re busy putting these unworthy figures at the center, such art might say, here’s what the present level of your mediated mimetic practices would make possible.\n\nHere is where there might be a practice while you’re stuck in ritual and myth. Any move toward the center reminiscent of a direct appropriation of a shared sacrifice needs to be aborted by deflecting that move toward possible and provisional signs across the media and at all layers of the Stack—you can show how a particular demand for justice or remediation gets registered across bureaucracies and technologies and thereby becomes something completely different than what it purports to be. Such a practice is deritualizing and demythicizing and reminds us of the occupied center liberals are so desperate to forget, while at the same time reminding us of how our perceptions and attentions might change if all of the powers not exactly at our disposal were to be deployed coherently.\n\nEvery practice reveals a boundary—first of all between what are the means and expected effect of the practice and what are not—and so if we’re thinking in terms of practices we assume that all boundaries are the results of practices. Reality produces itself by constructing and revising boundaries distinguishing parts of itself, and we are parts of reality. In any thing you say or do you can locate a whole series of boundaries that you had to presuppose or hold constant in order to say or do that thing. The distinction between yourself and others presupposes a boundary, as does the distinction between yourself now and yourself a moment ago.\n\nYou don’t construct these boundaries yourself—indeed, you play very little part in their construction. That you are the “same” person you are now a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago and so one could be attributed to some immaterial entity projected onto the continuity of practices that keep you the same you—a “soul,” a “self,” a “personality,” a “character,” a set of “beliefs” or “principles,” and so on. All these are products of disciplines, from theology to psychology, and these and other disciplines are now data-driven and you can find proof of your “identity” in your credit-rating, your on-line presence and the mountain of data you generate just by being you. Here is where the boundaries between yourself and others, and between your various selves lie. We could conduct a similar discussion of boundaries between what is human and what is not human.\n\nThe point of aesthetico-ethical and aesthetic-moral practices is not to undo boundaries—which, like their construction, is mostly out of our control—but to help make them the materials and results of practices. Articulated boundaries are signs of a post-sacral, what we might call an “ex-orbital” (“other-worldly” in a new sense) center—a center that takes the most perfected practices as the means for organizing the rest of them. Distinguishing more from less perfected practices is the aesthetic-ethical and moral practice of government. The more perfected the practice, the more it presupposes and posits a center that provides for the perpetuation of other practices that could intersect with and supply the perfected one. We don’t need to project a “backstory” with an array of “qualities” to identify practitioners—we can let the romantic individual and his modernist successor wither on the vine. By our practices we shall know each other. The perfection of aesthetic practices is the shared inquiry into the constitution of boundaries between possible centers and possible congregants."
    },
    {
      "slug": "resistance-without-supersovereignty",
      "title": "Resistance without Supersovereignty",
      "source": "gablog",
      "sourceLabel": "GABlog",
      "date": "Nov 2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "Central to the GA form of Neoabsolutism is the elimination of what I call “supersovereignties”—disciplinary concepts, such as “justice,” “rights,” “equality,” “general welfare,” “popular will,” “freedom,” “democracy,” etc., superstructured on the metalanguage of literacy—as a basis for subverting power hierarchies. If you’re fighting for “rights,” the “people,” etc., you’re lying or manipulated—these categories are fraudulent. This might lead to the conclusion that all that’s left is obedience to whatever commands are transmitted by superiors. While what I would like to call “primearchy” would indeed entail far more acceptance of authority and therefore obedience to commands, it would also entail better commands, making obedience reasonable (which doesn’t imply that “unreasonableness” would become a basis for “legitimate” resistance).\n\nBut this also doesn’t mean there would be no disobedience—the issuance of an imperative always implies, not only an imperative gap which could be filled in various ways, but also the possibility of defiance. As long as there are commands, there will be defiance. So, the question is, what would disobedience and defiance look like, how would such practices be thought of, and how would they be enacted without all the supersovereign concepts that now provide a virtual menu of rationalizations?\n\nWe’d have to think in terms of a much more stripped down form of resistance—rather than, “you have no right to tell me to do this,” “I’m a free citizen and can’t be forced to…”, “I refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the procedures which elevated you to a position of command,” etc., etc,. it would really just come down to: no, I refuse. We can set aside the ornery individuals who defy because it defines them, like Cool Hand Luke, who may continue to exist under any order, but don’t really present any serious political or theoretical problems (some interesting aesthetic ones, though). The reluctant resistance I am more interested in could only be done in the name of a practice which has become impossible due to inconsistent imperatives.\n\nA simple version of this would be something like, “you ordered me construct this wall for the purpose of blocking incursion, but now you’re telling me to do it in a way that would facilitate incursion.” So far, this would be a kind of practical or technical resistance, that of the professional who refuses to debase his life’s work, and is ready to pay the price. And this would certainly be one form of disobedience, which might very well often be effective, because one would be disobeying in the sight of other professionals, and in front of a boss who we can assume has at least some investment in a successful completion of the task.\n\nAnd, moreover, we can assume that such disobedience would be the last resort, following attempts to explain and demonstrate the dysfunctional nature of the command. Even in such a narrowly defined case, though, we can expect the disobedience to be “performative”—that is, one would choose a particular way of presenting and publicizing one’s resistance.\n\nLet’s say the engineer assigned to build the wall to prevent incursions comes to the conclusion that the entire wall-building effort, and maybe even the insistence of trying to prevent incursions, in general or in this way, is misguided and destructive. Here, we could say the engineer is stepping outside of his professional competence—what kind of special knowledge does he have the contravenes decisions made above him? It is in this kind of disobedience that the supersovereignties are summoned—resistance is carried out in the name of “human rights,” or “internationalism,” or some such scapegoating political concept.\n\nBut there’s no reason to assume that a neoabsolutist order would be narrowly technocratic; on the contrary, insofar as everyone is treated as a participant in some larger project, part of a “team” trying to “win” some “game,” everyone is obligated to think through the morality of one’s actions, which is to say, their implications for the entire texture of social life. In that case, we can allow for the possibility of disobedience carried out on broader grounds, and if we exclude the levying of supersovereignties here, we would need to explore what those grounds might be.\n\nTo do so, we would have to think of a practice of disobedience that would be the “other” of a practice of obedience. We have a distinction between the occupied center and the signifying center, which, in Anthropomorphics and elsewhere, I have formulated as the problem of the imperative gap: someone tells you what to do, and you have to figure out how to do under conditions that at least to some extent must be unanticipated by the imperative itself, so you try to fill that gap, or, to use the terms of my latest post, become maximally addressable by it. This approach has some similarity to the role of precedent in judicial decision-making—you articulate this imperative with previous imperatives from the same source, from “analogous” sources, from models of higher modes of activity circulating in the culture, and so on.\n\nHere, though, the purpose is to make it possible to fulfill the imperative as perfectly as possible—not to revise or overturn it. Of course, fulfilling as perfectly as possible, insofar as it implies the distinction between explicit and implicit, is not obviously distinguishable from revision and overturning. But what we assume here is no mediating institution that steps in to make the distinction—there’s no “appeal” being made here, not even to your superior’s superior, who only steps in if he sees his own imperatives being imperfectly fulfilled. So, it’s still just you and your boss, who is the one who distinguishes between “perfecting” and “revising.” So, no one would ever be making an argument for some third party in order to overthrow the decision of the boss in the name of some made up concept.\n\nResistance, then, involves laying oneself out openly and transparently before authority. You turn yourself into as complete an inscription as possible of the incommensurability of the imperative gap in this case, with “this case” being circumscribed as narrowly as possible. You make yourself into an “image” of all the consequences of the “infelicitous” command you assert to be invisible to the imperator. You debilitate and disable yourself—in a way, you are a kind of broken tool, capable only of gestures of incapability and impossibility. The imperator is as isolated in relation to you as you are in relation to him: he has to read his own intentions off of you in their alienated form.\n\nYou assume you are being recorded, and might therefore be a model for others, while at the same time knowing this may not be the case in fact—the assumption is made for the boss as much as for yourself, so that he sees himself on a larger scene, one designed by your practice of resistance. You acknowledge your own ineffectiveness—you can simply be replaced—but, of course, you can acknowledge this by representing yourself at your most irreplaceable.\n\nThis mode of resistance is therefore aesthetic, which perhaps makes my Cool Hand Luke reference perennially relevant. Both of the aesthetic models I have mapped out come into play here. First, this practice of resistance is a kind of originary satire—one creates a scene which represents the occupant of the center as contingent and therefore replaceable. More recently, I have proposed an aesthetic practice of what we might call “always already having obsolesced,” that is, creating an array of signs that members of some future civilization might read as causing, resisting and surviving the not necessarily inevitable demise of that other (our) civilization. The self-disabling, this shutting oneself down in stages, that I am describing, is just such an articulation of imminent disaster along with the key to it and traces of practices that might have aborted it (which means if the “art work” is successful, it won’t exist, it will have cancelled itself).\n\nSuch an aesthetics of resistance and resistance of aesthetics can be made into a practice that is both built into the ethics of preservation of the center while at the same time being constitutive of that ethics—and therefore something that could and would be taught. This aesthetic refusal is an act of deferral grounded in originary mistakenness. Remember that the declarative has its origin in the failed imperative—the object demanded cannot be supplied, so its absence can only be referenced, and the imminent conflict arrested. It makes sense to assume that the failed or mistaken imperative at the origin of the declarative would involve a demand rather than a command, because the demanded object provides the “subject” whose absence can be ‘predicated.”\n\nCommands already imply some hierarchical social organization—even if the hierarchy is provisional, it assume a complex cooperative enterprise, and therefore an already existing declarative culture. So, “predicating” a failed command involves referencing not just an object but the entire cooperative order. Without supersovereign intervention, the only way of predicating the hierarchical cooperative order is by simultaneously registering the totality of its effects, its “resonance,” within one’s own practice and demonstratively and absolutely disavowing any attempt to transform it. The practice of resistance is one of turning one’s existence as a center into a predicate, of which the entire social order is the subject—like any “sentence,” it just says what it says, and lets what is, be, but even more so."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-the-use-of-a-center",
      "title": "The Use of a Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "Act so that there is no use in a centre. Gertrude Stein.\n\nIf you act so that there is no use in a center, your action would be dissolving all possible, all\nimaginable, uses in a center. If there’s a center, you can be equidistant from it with others; you\ncan be closer to it or more distant from it than others. A center establishes a hierarchy—at the\nvery least between center and margin. But every other hierarchy is modeled on the hierarchy\nbetween center and margin—hierarchies are only possible if there is a center. Presumably, that’s\nwhy Stein would enjoin us to act so that there is no use in a center, but following her imperative\nwould place her injunction at the center as we take her as a model for detecting, identifying and\nthen disabling this use of the center, that use, and then other uses. But in thus acting to dissolve\nthe center, we would need to use the center, at least in order to determine which use of it requires\nthe most urgent attention. So, as we subtract uses, we add uses to the center: acting so that there\nis no use in a center is, in fact, a discovery procedure for revealing and naming all the uses of a\ncenter.\n\nIn Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences,” we are given and warned\nabout a great many uses of the center. The center allows for the “structurality of structure”; it\nprovides a “fixed point of origin”; it allows for “free play within the system,” which depends\nupon the “coherence” provided by a center; it also limits the free play within the system\n(allowing and limiting free play may be two different, not incompatible, uses). But, according to\n“classical thought concerning structure:\n\n```\nthe center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the\ntotality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the\ntotality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure—\nalthough it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science—is\ncontradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a\ndesire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a\nfundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a\nreassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay.\n\nWith this certitude anxiety\ncan be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the\ngame, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the\n```\n```\ngame. From the basis of what we therefore call the center (and which, because it can be either\ninside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as readily arché as telos), the\nrepetitions, the substitutions, the transformations, and the permutations are always taken from a\nhistory of meaning [sens]—that is, a history, period—whose origin may always be revealed or\nwhose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence.\n\nThis is why one could perhaps say\nthat the movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this\nreduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the\nbasis of a full presence which is out of play.\n```\nDerrida’s language here seems strangely intentionalistic and even psychologistic at crucial\npoints. The center holds the structure together, and is therefore inside the structure; but, the center is not subject to the free play of elements within the structure, and is therefore outside of\nthe structure. This paradox, or “coherence in contradiction,” “expresses the force of a desire.”\n\nThis is a desire for certitude, a mastering of anxiety—it is a way of establishing a teleology,\nwherein the end is contained in the origin. The center is presumably fragile as well—otherwise,\nwhy the anxiety?—and, therefore, a challenge to one center is met through a series of\nsubstitutions and permutations, a constant decentering, with one center replacing another. Still\nthe logic here seems to be progressive, insofar as each decentering implicates the new center\nfurther in the free play it sought to avoid, and we become increasingly aware of our implication\nin the game. (It’s not clear whether this makes us more or less anxious.) The watershed here\nseems to be when “language invaded the universal problematic,” implicating all centers in the\nplay of differences.\n\nWhat prevents us from moving from “metaphysics” to “discourse,” in that case? Why is it that\n“ _[t]here is no sense_ in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter\na single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the\nimplicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest”? It is interesting that the example\nDerrida provides demonstrating why “we have not language” is the concept of the “sign” itself,\nwhich we cannot do without but which Derrida contends is unthinkable without the metaphysical\ndistinction between “sensible” and “intelligible.”\n\nWe can take the concept of the sign, then, as a\ntest for whether we can have any language, not necessarily “alien to this history” but inclusive of\nand non-reducible to it. We can agree with Derrida that the sign belongs at the center of the\nhuman sciences, precisely because the sign marks the threshold of the human. Whether we speak\nin terms of a Peircean “symbol,” or the distinction between signifier and signified, the sign is\ndifferent from any form of non-human communication insofar as the operation of any sign is\nboth conventional and historical while being outside of conventionality and history. Words only\nmean what they mean insofar as a community of language users “agrees” that that is what they\nmean; but the word “agree” is clearly inadequate because a community, as was perhaps first\npointed out by Rousseau, would already have to have language to “agree” on the meaning of\nsigns.\n\nBut this means that the origin of language would also be the origin of community and,\nindeed, the origin of the human. Derrida’s intuition regarding the paradoxicality of any such\norigin, or any attempt to posit an origin, is formidable; and his failure or refusal to hypothesize\nregarding an origin more originary than any other is unsurprising.\n\nDerrida’s intuition regarding the articulation of “center,” “origin,” “desire” and “anxiety” is also\nremarkable. Something like “desire” and something like “anxiety” would, indeed, have to lie at\nthe origin of the sign, because the sign articulates attention, and desire and anxiety both sharpen\nand singularize attention. Where there is attention, there is a center of that attention. As Michael\nTomasello has pointed out, the apparently very simple activity of pointing or, more specifically,\n“pointing something out,” is something only humans do. What Tomasello calls “joint attention”\nis constitutive of human sign use, and is intimately linked to the paradoxical “agreement”\ndiscussed in the previous paragraph.\n\nWe are each directing the other’s attention to something,\nand also showing each other that we know the other is doing so. The paradoxicality and recursivity definitive of human language is already present on this simple scene: nothing but our\nrespective gestures toward some center sustains the gestures themselves, but for each of us the\ngesture is always already available—neither of us invented it or could imagine it to have been\n“invented” (or “discovered”). It only remains to produce a hypothesis regarding the possibility of\nthis paradoxical construct."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-origin-and-hypothesis",
      "title": "Origin and Hypothesis",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "There already is such a hypothesis, and has been for forty years; this hypothesis is the starting\npoint of this book, and following its implications, or at least one set of implications, will be its\nsubject matter. The originary hypothesis, advanced by Eric Gans in his _The Origin of Language_\nin 1981, posits a singular event within which language, or the sign, originates. Gans’s starting\npoint is Rene Girard’s understanding of the conflictual nature of mimesis: as humans are the\nmost mimetic species, and mimesis generates rivalry because our model, the more we model\nourselves on him, becomes our rival for the same object, mimesis leads to crisis, in which the\ncontinued existence of the community can be at stake.\n\nGirard’s hypothesis is that in some such\ncrisis of a “proto-human” species of hominid, a single member of the group is “marked” and\nsingled out as the source of the mimetic contagion, with this “scapegoat” then murdered by the\nrest of the group. The mimetic frenzy of undifferentiation is thereby “discharged” upon this\nsingle “absolutely” different member. The scapegoat then becomes the first divine being, insofar\nas he has “saved” the community.\n\nGans sees the outcome of the originary event differently. The limit of Girard’s account is that\nthere is no reason for the event in question to become meaningful and memorable. Why should\nthe killing of a conspecific, not a very unusual event among mammals, transform the group in\nany way? I used the word “murder” in my description of the scene, but “murder” presupposes a\nmoral order, and nothing in Girard’s scenario accounts for how the scene would create such an\norder. This is another way of saying that Girard doesn’t account for the emergence of language,\nwhich would itself be a prerequisite of a moral order and a community to share it.\n\nFor Gans, the\nhypothetical scene is revised as follows. Gans assumes that the mimetic crisis is organized\naround some object of appetitive attention—most likely some food source, perhaps a recent kill. Ordinarily, among the higher primate species, the object would be consumed in order, first by the\nAlpha animal, then by the Beta, and so on. But on this occasion, the mimetic rivalry induced by\nthe object overrides the pecking order as all members of the group move toward the object at the\ncenter. Appetite becomes “desire,” that is, a social phenomenon involving one’s relation to others\nand not merely the object itself.\n\nDesire intensifies the mimetic crisis. However, within the group,\nsome member hesitates, presumably out of something like terror (“anxiety” would not be quite\nright here), is seen by others to hesitate, and is imitated by others. The gesture indicates a\nrenunciation, perhaps momentary (but that is enough), of the desired object. This, what Gans\ncalls “the gesture of aborted appropriation,” is the first sign. The rivalrous imitation that first\npropels the group toward center and potentially cataclysmic violence is converted into a\npacifying imitation that de-escalates the crisis; the order provided by the animal pecking order is\nreplaced by an order mediated by the sign, which defers violence through representation. A new species is born: the human, the only species, as Gans puts it, that poses a greater danger to its\nown survival than is posed to it by anything in its environment.\n\nThe first sign is an ostensive sign—that is, it is inextricable from the event in which it is issued\nand therefore constitutes the object it refers to. But this is not an act of existential free will on the\npart of each member of the new community. None of them could articulate such a will, not only\nbecause they have no language in which to do so, but because the sign cannot be attributed to an\nintentionality “internal” to any of the members of the group. Each is only repeating the others’\nreference to the central object—none of them could be the origin. And yet intention has been\nintroduced into the community, in the form of the object itself. As the participants on the scene\nsee each other sharing attention to the object of desire, the only agency that could be holding\nthem back is the potential victim itself. The creation of the human is mediated by the creation of\nthe sacred center as the creator of the human.\n\nThe victim does need to be consumed, and the emergent community does need to put its new\nsign to work to ensure this can be done in a communal and non-violent (or, sufficiently non-\nviolent so that the mimetic crisis is not re-activated) manner. In the sparagmos, the tension\ngenerated by the prior restraint is loosened, and so this danger does present itself as the\ncommunity attacks the meal in this unprecedented manner. Resentment at the object itself, for\nimposing restraint and refusing itself, intensifies the devouring of the body. The only thing\npreventing each member from overreaching his bounds and turning on his fellows is the sign\nitself, which we can imagine working within the sparagmos as a kind of reminder of the\ncollective limits making this peaceful consumption possible.\n\nFollowing the sparagmos, as the\ncommunity faces each other over the remains of their victim/meal/deity, the sign would be issued\nonce again, this time pointing to the remainders and mementos of the sacred being, marking the\nfirst ritual. Naturally, this hypothetical account in fully developed language that is both\nunavailable to the participants on the scene and marked by the limitations of constructing the\nemergence of language from within language, must present coherently a sequence that might\nhave developed over a series of similar events—and, more importantly, reconstructed for\nmemory through more orderly rituals.\n\nThe value of such an account, though, lies in the need to\nhypothesize the sign being repeated and made memorable. Eventually the ritual would be moved\nto prior to the act of consumption, so as to prevent in advance the possibility that this time the\nscene might not play out in ideal form.\n\nThe paradoxes of deferral we see on the originary scene are enduring features of the human. That\nwhich we desire and that therefore thrusts itself upon our attention, is given excess desirability\nthrough our mimetic relations with our fellows—desiring something is inseparable from\nimagining others desiring it. For this very reason we are forbidden our object of desire, as we\nintuit the violence implicit in our approach to it. And yet, we might be granted our desire, insofar\nas our satisfaction is mediated through the cultural (sign) systems that allot desirable objects in\nsuch a way as to build layers of deferral that themselves keep at bay the need to improvise means\nof deferral in dire circumstances.\n\nThe alienation of our desires must be represented to us, and we\nmust receive our desired object as a gift from the center. The fact that many take short cuts and evade or violate the cultural mechanisms that formalize our satisfactions as an exchange with the\ncenter doesn’t contradict this claim—rather, it explains our resentment towards those\ntransgressors and our marking them as “criminal” or “immoral.” The immoral and criminal must\ntell themselves, meanwhile, that their own exceptional relation to the center, due unique\ncircumstances or unusual abilities, authorizes a form of appropriation forbidden to others. Our\nmost immediate desires throw us into a net of social obligations."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-a-grammar-of-the-social",
      "title": "A Grammar of the Social",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "Gans, in _The Origin of Language_ , hypothesizes in a remarkably thorough and precise manner the\ndevelopment of the more developed speech forms out of the original ostensive sign. I will\npresent this development here in what can be no more than an outline form, while returning to\nthe sequence of speech forms in new contexts throughout my discussion. Following the ostensive\nis the imperative. The imperative is a result of an “inappropriate ostensive.” One member of the\ncommunity issues the ostensive sign in the absence of the object, and another member of the\ncommunity then supplies the object. Gans is solving a very important problem in this hypothesis\nof the creation of the imperative.\n\nNote that the problem of accounting, not just for the emergence\nof language, but its development from its earliest forms, is that any intention or “motivation” we\nmight attribute to these early language users is going to presuppose that they already possess the\nmore advanced form we are trying to explain. So, to explain the imperative as a result of\nsomeone “wanting someone else to provide him with an object,” seemingly the simplest\nmotivation imaginable, would already presuppose the availability of the imperative. Note that the\noriginary hypothesis accounts for the issuing of the first sign by constructing an attentional space\nthat is first of all convergent, and therefore dangerous, and then becomes shared—in this way, we\ncan see attention becoming intention without anyone actually intending for this to happen.\n\nSimilarly, in accounting for the imperative, the sign has to become iterable, memorable and\ndeployable without anyone intending for this to happen. So, we imagine, perhaps, an\ninexperienced sign user, perhaps a child, imitating “blindly” a gesture she has seen others make;\nanother member of the community, perhaps an adult but still unable to conceive of a sign used\n“improperly,” “redeems” the sign by providing its missing referent. I will note now that this\n“method” of accounting for the emergence of new linguistic and cultural forms as a result of a\n“mistake” that is then “retrieved” within the community is central to originary thinking.\n\nGans\nintroduces the concept needed for us to motivate this act of retrieval: “linguistic presence.” What\nparticipants in a sign community desire above all is the maintenance of linguistic presence: any\nscene we are on must be mediated by signs, and if we intuit that some element of a particular\nscene is going unrepresented, we treat that as a danger to be remedied through the application of\na sign. So, a mistaken use of a sign opens a kind of rupture on the scene that must be recuperated\nsomehow—this can be done by “marking” the “guilty” party, but it can also be done by granting\na new meaning to the mistaken sign on the terms of the scene itself.\n\nI will point to another\nelement of originary thinking illustrated by Gans’s derivation of the imperative that I will also be\nreturning to—the emergence of linguistic and cultural forms from marginal sites within the\ncommunity. So, if one were to pose the question, “how might the imperative have emerged within a community of sign users who only had access to ostensive signs?,” a more obvious or\ncommonsensical attempt to answer it might look to relations of power and authority within the\ncommunity: we might imagine, for example, an adult who “wants” to command a child to do\nsomething. The reverse is much more likely the case: forms that emerge marginally through\nmistakenness are then appropriated within and help to formalize the existing power relations\nwithin the community: once the imperative is in use, someone in a position to do so can “want”\nto command another.\n\nIn moving directly from the ostensive to the imperative, I skipped over an important\ndevelopment that lays the ground work for that leap into a new linguistic form. Once the\noriginary sign has been issued within the event, on the scene, there is no obvious reason to\nassume that it will be used outside of that very controlled situation. In other words, we can\nreadily imagine, for quite a while, everything else remaining the same within that group: they\nhunt the same way, gather the same way, mate the same way, battle with competing “packs” the\nsame way, while only issuing the sign within the ritualized framework of approaching their\nmeals.\n\nThe originary sign creates a radical difference between the meaningful central object, on\nthe one hand, and everything else, on the other. Still, we can’t imagine this continuing\nindefinitely, because in the sign the group has a means of deferring violence, and the need to\ndefer violence must occur in varied settings. Indeed, once it is known that certain dangerous\nsituations can be prevented, it becomes possible to identify potentially dangerous situations,\nalbeit somewhat less dangerous than that of the originary scene, and to issue the sign in such\nsituations. This is the way in which new objects and acts would come to be named, and signs\ndifferentiated from each other.\n\nGans refers to this process as one in which the “threshold of\nsignificance” is continually lowered, and more of the world is made representable. The use of the\nsign outside of its ritual constraints would be an instance of scandalous “secularization,” one for\nwhich we could imagine the sign user paying some price; a re-issuance of the original sign, with\nits higher degree of sacrality, within this new context would recuperate this unwarranted usage\nwithin the evolving language system. The community could recognize its belonging to the same\nsalvationist project.\n\nWe should view the ostensive and the imperative as comprising a pair. For an imperative to be\ncompleted, and to therefore be meaningful, an object must actually be supplied: the supplying of\nthe object is recognized, at least tacitly, with a confirming ostensive (Gans here uses the example\nof an operating room, in which the doctor calls for the “scalpel” with the single word command,\nwith the nurse providing it along with the confirming “scalpel.”) At the same time, the\nimperative makes more explicit the “command” implicit in any ostensive. An object pointed to,\nreferred to, named, is thereby protected, at the very least insofar as we are enjoined to observe\nrather than appropriate it.\n\nThe injunction to defer appropriation issued by the central being on the\noriginary scene already has the elements of a command: something like “stay your hand!” The\nworld of objects, and each singularized or identified object similarly issues such a command,\nwhich is not a command to refrain from consumption or use indefinitely, but to refrain from any\nconsumption or use that is not already sanctioned in the very name of the object in question. The\nuses that are sanctioned by any ostensive sign are determined by its origin and subsequent recuperation with the sign and cultural system. What Gans calls the “dialectic of the imperative”\nbegins with the observation that while, for the one issuing the imperative, the imperative is in\neffect an ostensive (for the “imperator” the object is as good as present) for the one obeying the\nimperative, the space of the other’s desire is opened up.\n\nA new form of reciprocity becomes\npossible and necessary. Some imperatives are perhaps unproblematic, but for those that aren’t,\nand that threaten to break linguistic presence and initiate new conflicts, the preservation or\nrestoration of linguistic presence would involve deriving the imperative from the object\ndemanded or, more broadly, the world of objects, which is to say, the central being constituting\nthat world. Every ostensive-imperative articulation adds to the repertoire of the center, whether\nan imperative is issued in the name of God, of reality or exigency.\n\nWe don’t have “reality” yet, in the sense of a world of objects separate from the sign users\nthemselves. Ostensives and imperatives rely upon the presence of the referent of the sign, and of\nthe sign users to each other. We can take Derrida’s lesson that there is no unmediated presence by\npointing out that central being presides over all linguistic acts without being indexical within\nthem. To more fully address Derrida’s critique of logocentrism, though, we will need to finish\nworking through the succession of speech forms, because the cogency of Derrida’s concept relies\nupon the way meaning is articulated in the declarative speech form.\n\nThe declarative emerges in\nresponse to a problem raised by the imperative—what we might call, although Gans doesn’t, an\n“inappropriate imperative.” There would imperatives that couldn’t be fulfilled, raising the specter\nof a breakdown of linguistic presence. In some cases, the one issuing the imperative would “let it\ngo,” either due to the unimportance of the request or the inability to enforce the command. But\nwhat if a more complex situation emerges—an imperative is not complied with, but it’s not clear\nthat it can’t be complied with; the one issuing the imperative may not be able to enforce it, but,\nthen again, the probability of doing so may seem high enough to risk pressing the point, even if\nnot past a certain, as yet undetermined, point.\n\nSo, the imperative is repeated—let’s say first with\nmore urgency, as the “gambit” or bluff is played; then with a degree of uncertainty, as the\nimperator “climbs back down,” but not completely. In this latter case, the imperative is\nprolonged, along with a tonal shift—the imperative becomes an interrogative, opening a space of\nchoice for the one being issued the imperative.\n\nThe problem of linguistic presence is now posed in a new way. The stakes of the situation have\nbeen lowered—at this point, it’s clear that no physical confrontation is imminent—but that\nmakes the situation all the riper for innovation. In other words, it is one of those marginal,\nmistaken sign usages wherein a new form can emerge. The recipient of what is now a question\nhas the opportunity to “inform” his interlocutor that the requested object is not available. Again,\nthough, the interlocutor can’t simply “want” to “offer information,” because the speech form in\nwhich such a desire could be formulated is precisely what is about to be invented.\n\nFirst of all, the\nname of the object requested is repeated, as in an ostensive-imperative articulation—this\nmaintains linguistic presence. The name, what is about to become the “substantive” (or\n“subject”) is about to be conjoined with the “comment” (“predicate”) upon that substantive. The\ncomment is derived from a linguistic act Gans refers to as the “operator of negation,” which is a\nform of the imperative but one somewhat abstracted from the conditions of presence in which we have so far found the imperative. The operator of negation is a more open-ended imperative\nforbidding some action. Gans gives the example of “don’t smoke,” which is an imperative that\ncan never actually be fulfilled—it’s always possible that at some future time the one so forbidden\nto will light up. More obvious examples would be the “Thou Shalt Nots” of the Ten\nCommandments: we will never have finished not committing murder.\n\nIt’s not clear how such open-ended prohibitions have emerged within the language of ostensives\nand imperatives we are presupposing here. It’s noteworthy that such prohibitions involve\nrefraining from some action, rather than the provision of a desired object, which has been the\nkind of imperative we have been looking at so far. Telling someone not to do something seems to\nalready presuppose the availability of declarative sentences, since it seems dependent upon\nrepresenting the act to be forbidden. So, we need an operator of negation that would precede an\nexplicit formulation of an act—a more primitive form of the operator of negation, in other words.\n\nWe can have recourse here to the orginary sign, which, insofar as it refers to the central object,\nsacralizes that object but, insofar as it is directed to the other participants, issues a kind of\ninjunction, and prohibits a very specific act. All we need is the possibility of a sign that is the\nequivalent of “do not,” split off, so to speak, from the originary sign. The reference to the\nspecific act in question would always be context bound.\n\nSo, we have the repetition of the name of the object demanded along with something like\n“don’t...” as our proto-declarative. We do need an imperative here to function as a preliminary\npredicate: if we try to imagine, say, two successive ostensives as the first declarative sentence,\nwe will not have solved the problem of a sentence that could be uttered out of the presence of the\nobject in question. The question here is, to whom or what does the “don’t” apply? On the one\nhand, the utterance works as a proto-declarative insofar as it is makes present the absence of the\nrequested object. This would really be the first predicate, insofar as it would tell us something\nabout an object that is not present, and that can’t be “verified” ostensively on the scene.\n\nThis\nwould be the creation of “reality,” a world that exists over and beyond our desires and demands,\nand that can therefore refuse and “refute” those desires and demands—and one that we must\ntake, at least at first, on “faith” from the speaker. But the object, in this model, is being ordered\noff-stage; while the predicate must convey that it is already off-stage. And, what would the object\nbe commanded to refrain from? Finally, the operator of negation would just as much, if not more\ndirectly, be addressing the one making the demand: he would be told not to persist in his\ndemand.\n\nInsofar as “don’t” is directed towards the imperator/interrogator, it is issuing a counter\nimperative to cease demanding the object. Insofar as it is directed toward the object, it is\ncommanding the object to absent itself from the scene. Since the proto-declarator is in no\nposition, has no authority, to make any such demand upon the object and, furthermore, since his\ncapacity to make such a demand would imply that he could have complied with the original\nimperative, the command issued to the object to absent itself must come from elsewhere. I would\nposit that the proto-declarator is “remembering” an imperative from the central being to the\nobject to absent itself.\n\nWithout the declarative, in what other way could the absence of an object be understood other than under the auspices of the sacred center? What is present is given by the\ncenter; what is absent has been withheld by the center. We would have to assume that this early\nlanguage is replete with references to the sacred center as a way of maintaining linguistic\npresence: something like the “God willing” that routinely accompanies utterances of some\nreligious communities to this day. The originary structure of the declarative, then, contains a\ndouble imperative: one issued to some implicit, actual or possible imperator, however distantly\nconceived or complexly mediated—this imperative is to concede some demand or desire, to\nrefrain from pursuing it further; the other is an imperative relayed retroactively from central\nbeing to the object in question, or the world of objects in which a particular one or set is\nensconced, and this imperative is to remain beyond the grasp of anyone trying to intervene in\nthat piece of reality.\n\nThis would complete the declarative scene we have been constructing,\ninsofar the imperative that has already been issued to the object would be the guarantee that\nenables the declarator to issue the more “local” imperative to his interlocutor. The speaker can\ntell the listener he must concede that his desire is to go unfulfilled because “reality,” which\nprecedes us both, has so dictated it. Even though the declarative proper follows the path of the\nobject’s absence being represented, moreover, this construction of the proto-declarative scene\nhelps us to think of the declarative “order” as constructed and carved out of the ostensive-\nimperative world, and as always grounded in the imperative and ostensive materials it defers.\n\nA\ndeclarative sentence, then, subordinates an imperative issued by the speaker to one issued by the\ncenter and elicited by the speaker: so, rather than grounding the verb referring to an act to some\n“faculty” like the “will,” we can see it as obedience to an imperative issued by the center, that we\nare in turn commanded to see play out rather than interrupt. If we take, say, the most typical\ndeclarative, one which merely states a fact, we can see the intersection of these two imperatives:\nthe interlocutor is being told to notice something (with, as with any imperative, some kind of “or\nelse...” lingering, however distantly, in the background), and you can be expected to notice it\nbecause the world of things has been told to order itself in such a way that that specific noticing\nis possible and relevant. Even science is only possible because we presuppose a relatively stable\norder that we can’t otherwise account for."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-the-center-and-the-declarative",
      "title": "The Center and the Declarative",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "Social thought has an obligation to maintain linguistic presence, and the way this is done is\nthrough a minimal vocabulary distinguishing one mode of thought from another, and sustained\nconsistently so as to generate new concepts. I take Gans’s derivation of the successive speech\nforms to be that minimal vocabulary. Originary thinking relies upon concepts shared with other\nmodes of thought within the human sciences, such as “desire,” “resentment,” “mimesis,” “sign,”\n“representation” and more. I will use these terms and many others—I won’t be generating an\nentirely new theoretical language, just a theoretical center organized around the speech forms\nand the center to which all utterances must be traced and directed: this theoretical center will\ncontrol my use of all other terms.\n\nGans, beyond his analysis through _The Origin of Language_ ,\nuses the different speech forms to designate different cultural forms—in both _The End of Culture_\nand _Originary Thinking_ , Gans speaks of “ostensive culture,” “imperative culture” and\n‘declarative culture.” Moreover, Gans uses the speech forms to mark decisive shifts in high culture: most notably, he defines “metaphysics” as the assumption that the declarative sentence is\nthe primary speech act; and, through a reading of Moses’s encounter with God on Mt. Horeb as\ndescribed in _Exodus_ , he identifies the specific innovation of Hebraic monotheism as the\n“discovery” of the God whose name is a declarative sentence.\n\nThe burden of this book is to\nfollow those trails and work out a social, political and cultural theory, or, as I will call it, an\n“anthropomorphics,” as an originary grammar of the center. So, I will show that speaking in\nterms of the imperatives we are conveying, or hearing, from the center, when discussing\ndeclarative sentences and discourse, will yield insights (or, ostensive regions) unavailable when\nfollowing more conventional imperatives to speak about sentences and discourses in terms of\nmeanings packaged by one mind for others according to specific explicit and tacit rules. Beyond\nthe heuristic value of originary grammar, I will insist on taking it quite literally: there is no way\nwe could ever be doing anything that is not following an imperative within a network of\nimperatives deriving from an ostensive world and explicated by declaratives.\n\nWe are semiotic\nbeings, composed of signs and signs ourselves, and the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and\ndeclarative are the most elementary signs—equivalent, in a rough way, to Charles Sanders\nPeirce’s icon, index and symbol. All we do is try to follow what the center is telling us to do.\n\nTo begin to give a sense of the implications of this approach, or imperative, I’m going to take\nsome time to analyze a small part of Andrew Bartlett’s groundbreaking originary analysis of\nscience, published in _Anthropoetics_ in 2007, “Originary Science, Originary Memory:\nFrankenstein and the Problem of Modern Science.” Here, Bartlett traces the origins of science to\nthe need to find a substitute for the central object on subsequent ritual scenes. The first\n“knowledge,” in this case, is of the appropriateness of another object to function as the object\nalready inscribed in the community’s memory has functioned—the question is whether the new\nobject is “similar” or “analogous” enough to that previous object. I will not be exploring\nBartlett’s argument in any detail, much less try to reproduce its full complexity; I am using it to\nclarify the implications of an “originary grammar of the center” precisely due to its rigorous\nimmersion in and deployment of the conceptual terms of originary thinking:\n\n```\nOne space of tension, as we have seen, is that between the originary “usurper” whose proximity to\nthe new possibly-sacred substitute object and to the object itself risks his being victimized by the\ncommunity (the usurper as metonym of the new object he introduces). The other space of tension\nis the yes or no of the “analogy” the members of the community may or may not be prepared to\ndraw–relying on originary memory of the image-of-the-object as I have outlined it above–between\nthe new and the original object. Inasmuch as originary memory reproduces a memory of the whole\nscene and the whole event, all forces tend toward the community’s peaceful acceptance of the new\nobject: the usurper wishes to minimize the risk of violence to himself, and the community wishes\nto minimize the risk to itself.\n\nAn object as close in “image” as possible to the original object must\nbe the most appropriate object, because an object as close in “image” as possible to the original\nobject would risk the least disassociation between originary event and ritual repetition, between\nthe “image” in originary memory and its possible re-presentation in a new object of economic\nvalue. What I contend, however, is that the “conservative” minimalization of the difference\nbetween objects is not a guarantee of the absolute preservation of the sacrality of the original\nobject, but rather a measure of the minimality of originary desacralization: the minimality of\n“originary science.” That originary science is the sign in the mode of a minimal desacralization is\nprecisely what we should expect. The other imperative, however, is maximal exchangeability: and\n```\n\n```\nthe new object, to be exchangeable, must be permitted to be different, to have differential\nsignificance. Originary science pays intense, almost total respect to religious imperatives. It is no\none other than the originary scientific “usurper” who asks the community to exchange this new,\n“real” object for the old, remembered, now less “real” object, which risks losing some of its sacred\npower as the necessary consequence of the differential information being created. The new object\nwill not be the same object; therefore, it must present a minimal threat to communal solidarity. Therefore, when Gans writes of the original sign being “applied to a referent other than the\noriginal one” he includes the notion of a “diminution of intensity” in the sign itself.\n\nThe scientific,\nI suggest, has there with that “diminution” taken a little bit away from the sacred. Nor should we\nbe surprised that the originary meeting of the sacred and profane occurs with the usurper’s\nproduction of differential information: “This first differentiation would create a two-place\nhierarchy of signs constitutive of the opposition between sacred and profane representations” (79). The first “profane” representation may be considered the first “scientific” representation.\n```\nI want to emphasize that I have no substantive differences with this passage or, indeed, Bartlett’s\nentire analysis (which, indeed, will be echoed throughout).\n\nI simply want to point to a couple of\ninstances of language indicating intentionality that will highlight a critical element of originary\nmethod I pointed to before—that in identifying a new cultural form, no semiotic resources that\ncould only have been a product of that form can be part of the hypothesis regarding its creation. So, the “usurper” introducing the new object “risks being victimized,” and presumably is aware\nof, can formulate a representation of, this risk. The community, then, may or may not be prepared\nto draw an analogy between the original object and its replacement. Finally, and most\nimportantly, the usurper “wishes” to minimize this risk, and the community shares this same\n“wish.”\n\nBartlett is aware that neither the usurper nor the community has the language to formulate this\n“wish” or this risk assessment—not too much prior to this passage he discussed the same\nproblem, through a passage of Gans’s discussing it, that I addressed above regarding the problem\nof “speaking for” those on the scene. We have to assume some continuity amidst the\ndiscontinuity that enables us to hypothesize usefully—something like what Bartlett describes\nhere must, indeed, be happening. The question is how we represent that. Bartlett here (and,\nreally, only in these fairly unimportant instances) does so by constructing a subject and a field of\nsubjects capable of formulating wishes and carrying out risk assessment.\n\nThese are subjects,\nthen, with an internal mental space that can subsist “horizontally,” that is, in relation to the other\nsubjects in the field, without any reference to the center. Let’s remember the problem here: to\ndetermine whether the new object is, for the purposes of ritual, the “same” as the original object. So, we imagine the members of the group working it out, with the usurper trying to introduce an\nobject that won’t be seen as too different, with the other members not insisting on seeing\ndifferences except for when strictly necessary (or, perhaps, refusing to acknowledge identity\nexcept for when unavoidable).\n\nWho actually decides, though? In the end, a substitute object will be used—but who determined\nits acceptability? How would those on the scene represent the decision as having been made? Could any of them “take responsibility” for it, or “credit” another with having made the decision,\nor playing a special role in making it? If we are going to pursue these questions, we would have\nto attribute more and more clearly unavailable language to participants on the scene, and make them far richer “characters” than we can imagine them being. The other way of approaching it\nwould be to say that the center decides. In other words, the representational capacities we would\nhave to attribute to the participants we attribute instead to the center.\n\nThe center, as we can say, is\nnothing more than the collective or aggregate signifying capacities of the community. But this\ndoesn’t mean those capacities could be disaggregated and redistributed to the members of the\ncommunity—they are only real in their collective and aggregated form. Each member of the\ncommunity only sees the other members through the center, as suspended by the center. If the\nobject offered by the usurper does not desacralize minimally enough, it is because the center that\nsubsists beyond any particular object, the center that calls for the object, has rejected it. The risk\nassessment Bartlett speaks of is a waiting to see if the center will accept the new object.\n\nHow do\nthe members know what the center has “decided”? By reading the other members as signs of the\ncenter, the vehicle through which the center conveys _its_ “wishes.” If some member were to\nprevent the new object from being placed at the center, he would be doing so “on assignment”\nfrom the center—at least if his initiative prevails. Attributing the decision to the center minimizes\nour own discontinuity with the participants on this hypothetical scene because if this counter-\nusurper were to provide a reason for the object’s unacceptability, this is the only reason he could\ngive—otherwise, we’d have to imagine him representing the results of his risk-assessment and\nassessing that risk-assessment relative other ones represented on the scene.\n\nDoes this mean that\nthe counter-usurper has “really” decided? We might say so, even though he surely wouldn’t; but\nwe shouldn’t either, because that would require us to posit some space of decision internal to the\ncounter-usurper, something like a “will,” which has not been accounted for. What has been\naccounted for is the constitution of each member of the community as a protector of the center,\nand therefore as an arm of the center. As members of the community, they have no other\n“content.”\n\nThe problem of determining whether the new object is, ritually, the “same,” is the problem of\nmaintaining linguistic presence with which we are already familiar. It is the problem of\ndetermining whether the sign issued in one case is the “same” as that sign issued on a prior\noccasion. This problem arises already on the originary scene, where each participant must\nconform his gesture to that of the others, and determine whether the others are doing the same. As in Bartlett’s example, there is certainly an allowable margin of error here determined, not by\nsome “objective” assessment in accord with an external “standard,” but by whether the sign\ncomes with a body positioned so as to preserve or disrupt the state of suspended animation\nbefore the central object.\n\nThe only way of determining sameness is by seeing whether the center\nis repelling the others as it is holding oneself in place—which means that the issuance of the sign\nis itself a following of the “rule” of the center. In each case, what we can reconstruct as a risk\nassessment is one member detecting a slackening in another’s adherence to the rule of the center,\nand subsequently stepping in, as minimally as possible, as maximally as necessary, to take up\nthat slackening. The center has decided once the slackening has been tightened.\n\nIt is the center, first of all, that has agency—human agency will later come to be modeled on the\nagency of the center. The center issues signs to those on the margin, who in turn convey those\nsigns to one another in collaborations and deliberations that produce signs issued back to the center. To take Bartlett’s discussion in a different direction, the substitution of successive objects\nfor the originary one transforms the ritual scene from an ostensive one, in which the deity is\nimmediately present, to an imperative one, where the ritual aims at making the deity appear, first\nof all within the ritual itself but also by providing for the community.\n\nBut addressing the deity\nimperatively must itself be done in prescribed forms—that is, pursuant to imperatives issued by\nthe deity itself. The deity, or the center, does not always respond identically to each request made\nof it. Since the form of the request has been prescribed by the center, these differences must be\nattributed to differences in the form of the request in each case. Even if the ritual has been carried\nout, to all appearances, in exactly the same way, something about its performance must be\ndifferent. From the standpoint of more advanced forms of culture we could say, for example, that\nthe “intent” behind the performance was different in some way (it was only carried out\n“mechanically,” for example).\n\nBut what we are examining now will provide us with a hypothesis\nregarding that very difference between performance and intent. No record could have been kept\nof these early rituals so, even if all a great deal of effort was invested in ensuring the conformity\nof all to inherited ritual forms, it would always be possible for some member to introduce some\ninnovation as a recovery of the “same,” originally effective form. What emerges within this\nimperative culture is a continual attempt to reduce the difference between performance and\neffect.\n\nIt is in the failure of the imperative that the declarative is born. The ritual scene I am\nhypothesizing now presupposes the existence of fully developed, that is, declarative language. Following the assumptions laid out earlier regarding the marginal, mistaken nature of new\nlinguistic-cultural forms, we can also assume that both the imperative and the declarative come\nlater to the central scene of ritual. As applied to ritual, the declarative constructs scenes enacting\nthe dialectic of imperatives to and from the center. The community oscillates between successful\nand unsuccessful ritual performances; the center oscillates between honoring and refusing the\nrequests of the community.\n\nIf the central being must be called to present itself on the ritual scene,\nit must be elsewhere and must come from elsewhere. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t\n—either something prevents it from coming, or it doesn’t want to come. If something prevents it\nfrom coming, there are other beings at play—we can see the scenic construction of the center. Sometimes the central being can overcome the obstacles placed in its way; sometimes it can’t. If\nthe central being doesn’t want to come, it may be because the community has displeased it in\nsome way; or it may be because the central being has other priorities, problems and pleasures of\nits own to attend to.\n\nWe can see how the kind of intentional language I wished removed from\naccounts of interactions between the community and the center have now entered into the\ndiscussion—the central being “wants” to come, “overcomes” obstacles, can be “displeased,”\npursues its own interests and pleasures, and so on. All of this results from the “interpretation” of\nritual in declarative terms; or, more precisely, the interpretation of variable results of the\nimperatives exchanged with the center in declarative terms. These “explanations” of the results\nof ritual performances are the origins of myth, as a declarative overlay on the imperative\nstructure of ritual.\n\nWhile we can’t hypothesize with any great specificity, the origin of words like\n“want,” “wish,” “try,” “choose,” “decide,” “like” and “dislike,” that is, the whole linguistic\napparatus of intentionality, is best considered as emerging to fill gaps between the obedience to the imperatives of the center in ritual scenes and the reciprocal honoring of requests by the\ncenter. But these are gaps to be filled in describing activities at the center, and only secondarily\nto those on the margins. Activities between members of the community are modeled on and\narranged by activities at the center, which are far richer in dramatic content and motivation than\nanything going on at the margin. The human is modeled on the non-human center—this is why I\ncall the human science I am presenting here an “anthropomorphics.” Humans\nanthropomorphized themselves before they could carry out this operation on anything else."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-the-centrality-of-the-center",
      "title": "The Centrality of the Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "What is a center? Whatever can invoke and be referenced by an ostensive sign: the center is both\ncause and product of the sign—as cause it subsists beyond any particular reference, and as\nproduct it is continually renewed. Invoking the sign exceeds the reference, though—it is already\nthe beginning of an imperative. So, a center is a locus of imperative exchange—whatever about\nthe object commands the issuance of the ostensive sign is also an agency of which requests can\nbe made. But it is mimetic desire, and the rivalry and crisis it causes, that leads to the emission of\nthe sign; true, and our ability to pare down language derived from scenes at the center and apply\nit to proto-human acts that created the center is itself a sign of our current relation to the center.\n\nThe center is whatever we can compose declaratives about so as to formalize the\nincommensurabilities between what we ask of the center considered, let’s say, as a “situation” or\nemergent event, and what that center, that situation, that event, yields “in return.” We have to\nstart within a fully developed, perhaps (as I will suggest) wrongly developed, declarative culture,\nin order to reconstruct the emergence of that culture out of its prerequisites. This assumes we\nhave a fully developed vocabulary with carefully refined concepts that have been fully\nanthropomorphized, and made available for reference to proto-humans and then humans in their\n“barest,” hypothetically minimal state. I will now start examining how that came to be possible.\n\nThe center requires defenders, interpreters, collaborators. This includes everyone in the\ncommunity, but not everyone equally, certainly not in every case. On the originary scene itself it\nis unimaginable that all members of the group issued the gesture of aborted appropriation at the\nsame time, with the same clarity, with the same effect on other members of the group. This is\nunimaginable not only because it’s extremely unlikely, but because if we were to imagine it it\nwould suggest some shared instinctual response, thereby blurring the singularity of the scene\nitself as the birth of the human. We make it a rule not to overload our hypotheses, but keeping in\nmind our hypothesis that cultural innovation starts on the mistaken margin and is then aligned\nwith the center, we can assume the initial gesture must have been put forth by a member not too\ncentral but also not too marginal.\n\nNot too central, that is, not the Alpha of the group, because he\nhas presumably been neutralized from the start and any gesture of hesitation would be one\nreflecting being overwhelmed rather than symmetrical with others nearby approaching the\nobject. Not too marginal, because we have to imagine the gesture being issued by someone who\nmight be a threat, if it is to be noticed and imitated. We assume minimal awareness of what is\nbeing done—rather than projecting the entire scene, its possible consequences, and the “hope” of\nreversing those consequences (awareness that could only be retrojected back into the scene much later through a narrative consciousness) back into the first signer, we can assume one member\nproceeding step by step towards the center with his fellows, somewhat unevenly, falling a little\nbehind, seeing their attention drawn to his slowdown, and accentuating that slowdown through\nposture and gesture only slightly but noticeably different than that of the others.\n\nThe more they\nnotice, the more he accentuates; the more they accentuate the more the convergence toward the\ncenter rears back and goes into reverse. The scene will be successful when there are enough who\nhave exchanged the sign to restrain those who have not yet caught on—at this point, those who\nhave been rehearsing the sign are acting on behalf of the center, as they attend from the central\nobject to its imminent violators, and back again.\n\nDifferences in proximity to the center proliferate even in the most egalitarian communities. Indeed, egalitarianism is merely fractal hierarchy: unless we imagine genuinely spontaneous\ncollective action, in any instance someone goes first and shapes the field for the others. The only\npurpose of imagining such spontaneous collectivity is to erase the firstness and minimize the\nresentments resulting from the fear that the one first on the scene might try to extend that\nfirstness beyond the scene it constitutes. Defending firstness in order to allow the field to be\nshaped is done in the name of the center; restricting firstness so as to allow new fields to be\nshaped is also done in the name of the center.\n\nErasing firstness altogether is itself a bid for the\ncenter, in the name of repressing all “illegitimate” bids. Fractal hierarchy means that the\nhierarchy assumed in some distribution of shared attention organized into intention will position\nthe agents in such a way as to generate new hierarchies. These turnovers can be rapid; they can\nbe indefinitely delayed—there can be no “rules” about this (even if there are explicit rules, those\nrules need to be enforced, and someone would have to take the lead in doing that, thereby\ngenerating more fractal hierarchy). Someone who has the set the field once will be more likely to\ntake and be given the opportunity to do so again; all the more, someone who has done so 2, 3, 5,\n20 times.\n\nHere we can see the origin of power, not in the exercise of force and violence over\nothers in the community; rather, the origin of power lies with the continuation of the deferral\nexercised on the originary scene, in this case by someone who is willing to take more risks,\naccept more suffering and deprivation in the course of accomplishing some task and, most\nimportantly, stand both inside the scene and outside of it so as to modulate the desires and\nresentments of others who need to brought into the scene. This modulation is carried out\nostensively, through naming everyone else on the scene, even if this naming simply involves\nassigning positions (the one who does this as well as the one who is this).\n\nI am drawing on anthropology and history but I am not writing anthropology or history:\n“anthropomorphics” is completely hypothetical, following the originary hypothesis itself. All\nthinking is hypothetical, insofar as the issuance of any sign hypothesizes regarding the way the\nsign will “magnetize” a given field. I have been leading up to the emergence of permanent social\nhierarchies, and I mention these methodological considerations here to help make this discussion\nand, as much as possible, other discussions of social hierarchies, a source of deferral rather than\nresentment. Among those members of the community who establish the most lasting positions of\nleadership, each of them acting in the name of the center, one of them will eventually seize and\noccupy the (at this point still) ritual center. The term within anthropology for this position is the\n\n“Big Man.” Leadership through deferral is acquired by accumulation and distribution to one’s\ndependents, and through the gift economy with one’s peers and rivals. If one leader can throw a\nbig enough potlatch to bankrupt his rivals and turn them all into dependents, then he has\noccupied the center, not only sacralizing himself but making himself the source of social\ndistribution. There are, of course, millennia across which the historical transformations of the\nBig Man into sacral kingship, and then into divine kingship extend, along with the myriad forms\ntaken by each of these political arrangements, and correspondingly diverse forms of priesthood\nparalleling them. I am only going to be interested in all of these in terms of the strict concerns of\nanthropomorphics, or the originary grammar of the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-the-generativity-of-the-center",
      "title": "The Generativity of the Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "I mentioned earlier that in the earliest communities, the center is far more “dramatic,” which is\nalso to say, far more “human,” than the actual human margin. As David Graeber points out, it is\nnot, strictly speaking, correct to refer to these early, formally egalitarian communities as “non-\nhierarchical.” Quite to the contrary, they are subjected to the most asymmetrical and arbitrary\nhierarchies as they are ruled by the mythical occupants of the center. The very earliest occupants\nof the center would be the transfigured forms of the animals placed at the center for ritual\npurposes and consumption. These beings are the progenitors, guardians, and nemeses of the\ncommunity.\n\nUntil the ritual center is rendered non-figural, we can assume all worship is ancestor\nworship, very much including animals, because the center has generated the community. The\nmore differentiation there is regarding proximity to the center, the more humans would be so\ntransfigured and take their place in the pantheon of worship. Remembered ancestors founding\nand continuing specific family and communal lines become figures of worship. It also follows\nthat the more humans can be elevated among those who have given themselves for the\ncontinuance and provision of the community, the more they can be ritually placed in that\nposition.\n\nEventually, some individual seizes the ritual and distributive center: this first adventurer\nor usurper is the “Big Man” widely noted in anthropological accounts. The apotheosis of this\ndevelopment is sacral kingship, in which the king, as mediator between the community and the\ncosmos, serves as both power center and ritual center. Needless to say, the configurations vary\nwidely, but the sacral king, I am assuming, is the first object of scapegoating and human\nsacrifice. Failures of the community are failures to match otherworldly configurations, to do on\nearth as is done in heaven, and for this the king bears complete responsibility.\n\nThe unity of\nparadoxical, signifying center and the central figure first evident on the originary scene remains\nintact in sacral kingship, which no doubt accounts for the pervasiveness and longevity of this\nsocial form, and even in the extension of its ramifications into modern political leadership.\n\nA pure form of sacral kingship would entail the election of an individual who compels that\nelection by his deferral capacities, which provide proof that sacral agencies look favorably upon\nhim; and the killing and subsequent mythical transfiguration of that individual as soon as those\nagencies gave signs of withholding their favor. When whatever “credit” the king has\naccumulated has been exhausted would have to be determined by those close enough to the\nsignifying center to “read” those signs. We can assume some alliance between prospective rivals and priests in charge of the rituals, if there are such separate from the king himself.\n\nSome degree\nof what would look to us like cynicism would be involved in such transfers of divine favor: the\nfailure of the king to lead a successful campaign, or some waste of resources would be\n“interpreted” in terms of some ritual violation of sacred injunction. But there’s no need to assume\nthat anything like cynicism is even possible here, because that would assume there is some other\nvocabulary in which “rational assessments” of the performance of king could be made, and in\nwhich a “strategy” for deploying the merely “ideological” ritual and mythical language could be\nplotted out. Only once the center has been “unfigured” and its human occupant shorn of sacrality\ncould such a vocabulary emerge.\n\nDecisions that would be intelligible to external perspectives\nwould be made, because the ritual and mythical vocabulary in which thinking takes place allows\nthem to be made—which is not to say the rationality will be quite the same as that of the\nretroactive observer, who would be required to reconstruct the relation to the center constitutive\nof events in that community.\n\nApproximations to this “pure” form of sacral kingship could certainly endure, but the form\nwould be a continual source of rivalry that would, at least in some cases, lead to the ritualization\nof the selection and transference of kingly power. This would formalize kingship and the deferral\ncapacities of the community. The individual who most displays the power of deferral would not\nthereby be elevated to the center—a process of establishing and choosing from among candidates\nwould be put in place. Nor is the king removed immediately when those deferral powers are seen\nto wane—scheduled transfers of power, among them perhaps the sacrifice of the king, or explicit\nrules or agents that must be followed or consulted are established.\n\nThe increases the permanence\nof the occupation of the center—if the merit-based leadership that characterizes the Big Man and\nthe model of “pure” sacral kingship I posited above is no longer the means by which power is\nassumed, the mechanisms and lessons of previous efforts at ruling and be collected, canonized,\nand provided pedagogically to the future ruler who would now have time to prepare to take his\nposition. At this point some diremption between state ritual and more localized rituals would take\nplace: the king is still the father of the people, who controls and distributes the resources of the\ncommunity, and to whom sacrifices must therefore be brought, but his protection and therefore\ndistance from the most active resentments and rivalries within the community make him a less\neffective mediator; such mediation would therefore be relocated within familial cults. This is the\npoint of transition from sacral kingship to the divine kingship that characterized the gigantic\nempires of the ancient world.\n\nOnce a human has occupied the center, the possibility has opened for any human to become a\ncenter. I am going to provide an account of how that possibility has been actualized, but to do so\nit will help to explain what it means for anyone capable of issuing an utterance to be a center. To\nbe a center means that attention can be made to converge upon it in such a way that it can be seen\nto be caused by representations coming from that center. Convergent attention is a source of\nrivalry and possible hostility: if your presence and self-representation becomes a source of\nrivalry, it can be posited as a cause of that rivalry, and your removal from the game in some way\nthereby a means of eliminating the danger raised by that rivalry.\n\nYour self-representations can\nalso become a source of deferral—indeed, it is most likely that one becomes a source of deferral through the management of rivalries generated by oneself as a desirable object. One can\nobviously be desirable and therefore a cause of rivalry in any number of ways, depending upon\nwhere one is positioned within the mimetic field. And there are, equally obviously, innumerable\nways of converting rivalry and resentment deriving from one’s presence into deferral and love. How one operates as a self or individual depends upon how one exercises self-representation as a\ncenter so as to favor some possibilities over another; insofar as one becomes less “functional” as\nan individual, that would indicate that the center is not holding, perhaps because of a failure to\nattract sufficient convergent attention to require the means to construct oneself as a source of\ndeferral; perhaps due to an excess of convergent attention (which can be addictive),\noverwhelming efforts to become a site of deferral. If we were to develop an “originary\npsychology,” this would be the starting point. This is the way in which what Gans calls\n“omnicentrism,” or what I would call the generalization of anthropomorphization,” proceeds.\n\nTo put this another way, to be a center is to be subject to attempts at appropriation and ostensive\ngestures: one can be appropriated bodily, for example, sexually; one can be appropriated as\nmodel; one can be appropriated as a proxy; and so on. Appropriation, for humans, is mediated by\nostensive signs indicating deferral and the acknowledgment of other appropriative claims,\nincluding those of the one being appropriated. The relation between the appropriation and the\ngesture, on the one hand, and the degree of reciprocity between the one being appropriated and\nthe one appropriating, can vary from violent appropriation with a minimal attribution of consent\nto the victim, on one extreme, to publicly recognized, ceremonial pledges of fidelity and respect,\non the other.\n\nTo be a center, further, is to give and receive imperatives—not just explicit requests,\ncommands, demands, pleas, and so on, but the imperatives one gives off merely as a publicly\nrecognized center: imperatives to keep a certain distance, to approach only in certain culturally\nacceptable ways (but also to, nevertheless, approach), and to look to yourself and your own self-\nconstruction as a center. We give off such imperatives through our speech, dress, manners,\nposture, choice of location, and so on, and they are constructed in dialogue with the imperatives\ngiven off by others. Finally, to be a center is to be a source of declaratives: statements and\nnarratives representing discrepancies between the various imperatives one gives off, between the\nimperatives one gives off and those that one obeys, and between the imperatives one gives off\nand those others located “similarly” give off: the problem is always to say how can one be the\nsame as others in being a center, given all the differences in this particular way of self-centering.\n\nDivine kingship involves conquest and the control of vast territories and therefore makes it\npossible to treat populations as means—in particular, human sacrifice and slavery. The king,\nwhether divine himself or not, is sanctioned divinely, while masses of people are treated as\nnameless within the system of naming. Under sacral kingship, everyone in the community shares\nthe same ritual order—everyone is named by the center. That is no longer the case. The other\nnotable breach in the order of sacral kingship is the emergence of populations extrinsic to the\norder, even if produced by that order—such as younger sons without inheritance, and hence any\naccess to the family hearth, in systems with primogeniture.\n\nIt would be the more successful,\nimminently if not actually imperial, sacral kingships that would generate the most “anomalies” in\nrelation to the ritual order. In this sense, these sacral kingships converge with divine kingships while also, most notably in the case of the ancient Greek city-states, entering into competition\nand conflict with them. Once there are groups, or a “people,” outside of the ritual order, kingly\nrule itself steps outside of that ritual order to maintain and strengthen itself. To be outside of the\nritual order is to have no social existence, which is, first of all, to be merely a means, whether for\nproductive or political purposes; it is, secondly, to be defined solely in terms of opposition to the\nritual order, to specific groups within the ritual order (who are now also defined oppositionally),\nand to other groups outside of that order.\n\nStruggles amongst kings, aristocrats and “the people”\nonly make sense once a breach has opened up in the inclusive ritual order. The origin of the\n“tyrant,” as a political concept, lies in this breach—the tyrant is simply a king who is not\nsanctified as the occupant of the ritual center, but defined by his rule through the manipulation of\nconflicts between social groups. The “tyrant” is the central problem the foundation of political\nthought aims to solve, and it remains the problem political thought has yet to solve. This is\nbecause “tyranny” is an unsolvable problem without the creation of a social order grounded in\nthe imperatives issued by an originary center—and such an order cannot be grasped by political\nthinking derived from the problem of the tyrant.\n\nWith the breach of the order of sacral kingship we find money and markets established by kings\nand used by them as political instruments. David Graeber notes that markets are established, and\nmoney provided to make those markets functional, for the purpose of provisioning soldiers\nstationed in foreign territories. Richard Seaford points out that in Ancient Greece money was\nprovided by the king to purchase animals for cultic sacrifices. Markets represent forms of\ndelegation by the central authority—markets are areas of social life that are not under direct\nsovereign supervision. Any form of supervision generates margins where supervision lapses—\nmarkets are established when these margins need to be formalized and supervised indirectly.\n\nMoney is a means of subordinating market activity to central authority—that is, money is a form\ntaken by the delegation of power, and is therefore a form of power itself. Money is the power to\ncommand the labor of others. The pluralization of power within the polity means that power\ncenters can align themselves with or against the king, and the king can align himself with some\npower centers against others. With money, markets and plural power centers comes justice\nsystems, secular thought and at least the beginnings of technology. Justice systems because\nadjudication of disputes between relatively equal power centers requires rules and judges to\napply and enforce those rules; secular thought, because thinking in terms of “Nature,” or some\nequivalent, is the only way to try and name figures and practices outside of the ritual order; and\ntechnology, because once humans are objects, levied en masse in slave gangs, as soldiers, or\nreduced by debt to landless laborers, it becomes possible to think of the use of tools and the\nanalysis and articulation of objects outside of ritual constraints."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-metalanguage-and-metapolitics",
      "title": "Metalanguage and Metapolitics",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "With concepts like “nature” and “justice,” it becomes possible to model social relations on\ndesacralized terms, in accord with the reduction of these and related concepts to their most\nminimal meaning in opposition to the sacred order and “arbitrary” tyranny alike. Essences can be\nattributed to different social groups and classes, along with deviations from those essences: conformity with the essence equals nature, and relating to individuals, and constructing relations\nbetween groups, according to nature, is justice. “Materialism,” “the spirit of domination,” and\n“greed” are among the forms taken by those deviations, as power centers can be imagined and,\nno doubt, seen, acting at large in accord with roles they are given within markets and politics.\n\nTyranny is the manifestation of and response to greed and the desire for domination, “passions”\nliberated on the post-sacral market. Greed and power hunger can be identified by those who have\nliberated themselves from it, by establishing justice within themselves and restoring themselves\nto nature. The post-priestly class of philosophers makes a bid to become a new source of power\nby presenting itself as in command of the concepts that make ruling “legitimate,” that is, non-\ntyrannical: nature and justice. The power of the philosopher, his access to the “super-\nsovereignty” inherent in the proper understandings of the conceptual criteria to which\nsovereignty must yield so as to be non-tyrannical, itself relies upon the spread of writing. Writing\nis also a product of divine kingship and markets, originating in the recording of transactions and\neventually becoming a means of recording and reconstructing language so as to make it visible to\ncentral authority.\n\nAs I mentioned earlier, Eric Gans locates the origin of the two leading streams of Western\nculture, Ancient Greece and Ancient Israel, in terms of the prioritizing of the declarative\nsentence. In the case of the Greeks, the founding of metaphysics involves treating the declarative\nsentence, the proposition, as the primary linguistic form—in direct opposition to the ritual,\nsacrificial ostensive and the imperatives it unfolds. In the case of Israel, we have a new kind of\nGod, who cannot be invoked imperatively—cannot be the other side of an imperative exchange\n—because his name is a declarative sentence. In both cases, this isolation and elevation of the\ndeclarative sentence is possible only in scribal and comparatively literate cultures.\n\nIn discussing\nmetaphysics’ hypostatization of the declarative sentence, I will draw upon David Olson’s studies\nof the cognitive consequences of literacy, in particular his classic _The World on Paper: The\nConceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading_ and his recent work, _The Mind\non Paper: Reading, Consciousness and Rationality_. The use of writing to represent speech,\naccording to Olson, constitutes language as an object of inquiry: the determination of how to use\nmarks on a surface to represent spoken words is that inquiry, constructing such things as\n“phonemes,” “words” and “sentences” as theoretical objects.\n\nThe very possibility of asking what\na word means, what it “really” means, as is usually one of the opening moves of the Platonic\ndialogue, presupposes that “words” have already been identified as separate from each other and\ngiven “official” meanings through the written text, just as the construction of a logic is merely an\nelaboration of various possibilities allowable given a grammatical structure that could only have\nbeen fixed through writing.\n\nThe speech scene is comprised of features that cannot be directly represented in writing, features\ninvolving the physical presences of the participants on the scene, such as tone, inflection, gesture\nand posture, the proximity of speakers to each other and so on. The writing systems we know of\ndid not attempt to directly represent those features of the speech scene. Instead, the development\nof writing involved the creation of a meta-language used to represent indirectly those features of\nthe speech scene. Olson has us imagine a written text as the reporting of a speech act. Now, in the reporting of another’s speech act in person, the speech act can be acted out as a whole—the\ntone and inflections can be imitated, the postures and gestures can be acted out, and even\ncommentary on the speech being reported can be enacted through approving or dismissive facial\nexpressions and otherwise.\n\nWriting, then, has to supplement all the elements of this performance\nthat it can’t directly represent. This is what the metalanguage of literacy does. To perform\nanother’s speech act, you would only, strictly speaking, need the word “say” and perhaps one or\ntwo other words to refer to what the speaker has said. If you need to supplement that report with\nall the other elements of the speech scene, you need a whole phalanx of other words, words\nwhich provide information regarding those other elements: “stated,” “suggested,” “assumed,”\n“implied,” “considered,” “criticized,” and so on. Olson further points out that through the\nnominalization of these verbs we generate the material for a vast disciplinary order, in which we\nstudy “assumptions,” “statements,” “implications,” “criticism” and much more. In hypostatizing\nthe declarative sentence, metaphysics merely treats the metalanguage of literacy as referring to\nan actual, if ideal, order.\n\nThe telos of writing, according to Olson’s more recent argument, is to construct a scene upon\nwhich the writer and reader both stand. Drawing upon Frances Noel-Thomas and Mark Turner’s\nstudy of what they call “classic prose” in their _Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic\nProse_ , Olson sees writing as seeking to efface itself before a simulated scene. This requires the\nabolition of any ostensive dimension to the written text—that is, anything that draws attention to\nthe text as written, to the scene of writing, the scene of reading, and the scene represented in the\nwriting as being distinct scenes that must be articulated, ultimately by the reader.\n\nIt presupposes\na private reader, alone with the text, in a kind of silent conversation with the author as opposed,\nsay, to a public or group reading, or reading that serves the purpose of memorizing ritual\nformulas and myths. The consequence of metaphysics, then, is what Gans calls an “internal scene\nof representation,” where one constitutes oneself as a center of one’s own attention, as one\nobserves oneself alone with the world of ideas made up of the metalanguage of literacy. This is\none way the broaching of the sacral order plays out, as this internal scene of representation can\nonly be represented and maintained in opposition to everything that would define the individual\nas something other than an internalized private order—in opposition to both any ritual order and\nany social claims.\n\nThis is a completely anthropomorphized subject, entitled to be permitted to act\nin accord with spontaneously emerging and self-ordered “assumptions,” “conclusions,” “beliefs,”\nand so; in fact, functioning as a proxy for the post-metaphysical disciplines which deploy the\nmetalanguage of literacy in power plays on the field of super-sovereignty.\n\nHebrew scripture, and then the Christian Testament, represent a different trajectory of the\n“promoted” declarative sentence. Metaphysics aims at abstracting declarative culture from the\nostensive-imperative world as completely as possible—metaphysics never comes to an end\nbecause this abstraction can never be complete: the world can never be completely described\nthrough declarative sentences that are comprised of words that can themselves be defined in\ndeclarative sentences without ever having to come to rest upon an ostensively defined word—\nultimately, a name. Scripture maintains continuity with the sacred order by treating the\ndeclarative sentence as an inquiry into the ostensive-imperative world—as I put it earlier, as an inquiry into the discrepancies evident in imperative exchanges.\n\nIt does this by singling out, in\nnewly declarative terms, the victim produced ostensively in sacrificial orders Once we have, with\na monetized, indebted, marketized, political plural world, justice systems, victims are officially\nrecognized within those systems. Rather than relying upon mimetic contagion or the ritually\nprescribed selection of victims, new means must be created for determining what counts as\nvictimization. New concepts of intentionality and consequence are constructed, ultimately out of\nthe metalanguage of literacy. So, far, nothing in these new arrangements upsets the order of\ndivine kingship, or the imperial order: sacrifice can continue as usual, while relatively minor\ndisputes get settled in increasingly sophisticated ways.\n\nBut with the justice system comes the possibility of being a victim, not just of another player\nwithin the system, but of the system, and its head, and its entire conceptual order. There would be\nlosers within the justice system who would refuse to accept their loss. Usually, these refusals\nwould be attempts to revert to some kind of honor, or vendetta system, in which offenses are\nrepaid in kind by those who have authority over the victim. Such futile resistance to the imperial\norder would be easily suppressed, but would nevertheless mark the system as productive of\nvictims who are heroic on still recognizable terms.\n\nIt thereby becomes possible to represent the\nrefusal to accept official judgment outside of the domain and discipline of judgment itself, to\nsome broader public or audience. In that case, one would simply be representing oneself as a\nvictim and inviting others to see themselves as victims in “analogous” ways, while itemizing the\npredations of the imperial order upon one of its loyal, perhaps even privileged, subjects, who\nappealed to it in good faith. Such action would draw upon itself the concentrated wrath of the\nimperial, probably in stages, making it possible to represent the unfolding of that wrath and\ndisplay it against a larger pattern of systematic dispossession, which now becomes visible in a\nnew way by “analogy” to this “injustice.”\n\nThe social death to be suffered by the victim would\nitself be analogized to the social death experienced, and now newly named, by the massive slave\nclasses of the imperial order. This new kind of victim, drawing upon himself a new form of\ncollective attention, would be or represent a new kind of divinity.\n\nI put all this forward as a hypothesis regarding the conditions of possibility of the new way of\nrepresenting the victim in Hebrew and then Christian scripture. Clearly, the “story” I have just\ntold could approximate various skeletal narratives that would themselves represent layers of\nretelling and revision of some perhaps rather different sequence of events. To construct such\nstories that place the victim of imperial violence where the hero would have been in sacral\nnarratives would require systematic, deliberate revisions of myth. To organize narratives around\nthe victim of false and violent sacrally grounded imperial orders, as opposed to around the\nfounders of such orders, or those rightly (if “tragically”) punished for violating them, would\nrequire a volume of substitutions of vocabulary and syntactical orders that could only be carried\nout under scribal conditions, where the declarative sentence can be isolated, and preserving the\ntext can itself become a divine command around which gather various oral traditions.\n\nSuch\n“scriptural” orders are intrinsically anti-imperial because they posit, precisely in order to oppose\nand discredit the entire imperial order, an imperial order that includes and transcends all other\nimperial orders: God’s empire, to which His people can be directly subject. This is why the opening of Hebrew scripture systematically, if compactly and implicitly, revises and resets the\nmythological orders underpinning the surrounding empires; it is also why the law recorded in the\nPentateuch, as noted by Joshua Berman in his _Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient\nPolitical Though_ t, is egalitarian in a very thoroughgoing way in the precise sense of\nsubordinating each Israelite directly to God, bypassing any other imperial allegiance, but in a\nway modeled on the covenants between vassal and imperial states.\n\nEveryone in such an order is\nequal in the sense that everyone must be made a site of resistance to subjugation to the sacral\nimperial order. The subsequent narrative of Hebrew scripture, though, represents the failure to\nsustain this covenantal structure, leaving us in a position consistent with the working out of\nmetaphysics: the empire of God is reduced to the compass of the internal scene of representation,\nin the form of a “conscience” that also invokes a super-sovereignty by which the central\nauthority is to be exposed, and to which it must submit—if not now, then perhaps much later. The tendency here is to pit, in a kind of absolute opposition, the center within the center against a\nworld of tyrants."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-post-sacrificial-centrality",
      "title": "Post-Sacrificial Centrality",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "You can say the king should rule because someone must occupy the center, and the occupation of\nthe center relies upon unanimous attention involving the suspension of resentment toward the\ncenter; and that the king occupies the center according to traditions and practices predicated on\nthe exclusion of the rivalries expected to emerge once the transition to a new king is necessary,\nand that preserving these traditions and practices is more important than any preference any of us\nmight have for one candidate over another. Here, rule and sacrality are one. But the identity of\nrule and sacrality cannot be maintained, because the divine king must be identified with the\norigin of the community, meaning that such an order rests upon human sacrifice.\n\nThis is the\ntrajectory of imperative exchange: the more the ruler stands in for the community, the more his\nlife must be hostage to the community’s fortunes; the more the ruler is the source of all benefits,\nthe more nothing less than human life can be given in exchange for such largesse. Metaphysics\nand scripture, each in its own way, exposes and prohibits human sacrifice or, more broadly, what\nwe can call “violent centralizing.” In Gans’s account of the transition of the Mosaic to the\nChristian revelation in _Science and Faith_ , he develops the Girardian critique of scapegoating as\nembodied in the figure of Jesus.\n\nOnce God is inaccessible through ritualized imperative\nexchange, we can only obey God in our treatment of fellow humans. The figure—the prophets of\nHebrew scripture and then, most inclusively, Jesus—who insistently points out that God can’t\npossibly want all of the sacrifices offered to Him himself becomes the center of convergent and\nviolent attention on the part of the community. The injunction that we all treat each “as we would\nwish to be treated,” or, we could say, as he or she who is not to be sacrificed, in essence accuses\nthe rest of the community of doing precisely that, and the sacrifice or scapegoating of the\n“messenger” amply confirms that denunciation. This deifies the persecuted one, who has\nexposed, in the most practical and memorable way possible, the baselessness of our sacrificial\npractices, which serve only to avoid our terror of indistinction or mimetic crisis.\n\nThis is what creates the possibility for each and every one of us to become a center—that is, as one who is not to be sacrificed or violently centralized. We owe the God who has revealed this to\nus everything, which is to say all that makes up our own centrality. The only possible repayment\nof this debt is to defer violent centralization wherever one sees it, including placing yourself\nbetween the violent mob and the victim. This is an intellectual or cognitive problem as much as it\nis a moral one—the two, in fact, cannot be separated. We can, perhaps, all recognize a violent\nmob when it is just about to descend upon its victim.\n\nIt is more difficult, though, to identify that\nwhich, in the discourse of a potential mob, is marking the victim, perhaps in a preliminary way. Even harder is to trace the origins of violent centralizing further back to institutions that license,\nperhaps implicitly and unknowingly, the onset of mob-inducing discourses. Perhaps even harder\nthan all this is to determine what would counter, expose or reform such institutions and practices. Once the sacrificial order has been exposed, people can devote their lives to answering these\nquestions. The God to which we devote ourselves by pursuing these questions is clearly not one\nwho can be embodied in a specific ruler.\n\nThe ultimate failure of Christendom to establish the\ndivine sanction of kings is evidence of this. It’s therefore easy to follow a line of thought that\nleads, ultimately, to modern liberalism and democracy, which seem to institutionalize the sanctity\nof the individual that germinated throughout the development of the medieval Christian order.\n\nIt’s also easy to see, though, that nothing has replaced, with any unanimity, the sacred aura of\nkingship. We can see modern politics as a series of replacements for that sacral legitimation,\nfrom “freedom” to “the people,” to “individual rights,” to the “nation,” some oppressed class or\ngroup, and so on. These terms are the source of endless arguments because they are in\nthemselves nothing more than signs of resentment towards some previous form of sacralized\nempire, now marked as “tyranny.” If you ask someone what “equality” means, you will\ninevitably be told that it means someone can’t take something from you—the concept itself has\nno substance.\n\nIt merely marks a presumably inviolable center to be protected from tyranny. Moreover, these modern forms of legitimation have never corresponded particularly well to\nactual social relations, which remain every bit as hierarchical and, in most areas of life,\n“dictatorial” as most historical “tyrannies.” Demands for more democracy or equality are\ndemands that the state act on your behalf against some of your enemies; it thereby empowers the\nstate, and whichever agencies are best able to access and leverage the state. It follows, further,\nthat the way for the more powerful players in the modern world—state agencies and corporate\nleaders alike—to enhance their power is precisely by leveraging such concepts against their\nrivals.\n\nIndeed, we can see that “equality” can’t really mean anything more than the same in\nrelation to central power, and that for central power to treat everyone the same it must acquire\never more power over all of them. So, we see in the modern world, in democracy and liberalism,\nnot the continuation of the repudiation of sacrifice enacted in metaphysics and (more completely)\nin scripture, but its revival, as violent centralizing is “laundered” through the institutions that, in\npurporting to balance powers against each other, actually unleashes them against each other. There will never be an end to finding new forms of tyranny being exercised over one’s own\ninexpressible centrality; indeed, one’s own inner self can be the internalization of such tyrannies,\nthrough the “colonization” of the mind. The means of self-centering are distributed to all of us\nequipped with various devices (we might say “apps”) for leveraging, mobilizing and activating\nthose means to wind us up as proxies for various liberalizing raids."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-signifying-center-occupied-center",
      "title": "Signifying Center, Occupied Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "Insofar as a social crisis is transcended or resolved, it is done so through a retrieval of the\noriginary scene. The retrieval of the originary scene means an assembling by deferred desire for\nsome central object—the central object that is the most dangerous in the given social setting. Scripture and metaphysics are such retrievals of the originary scene within the crisis of the\nancient imperial orders. The organization of communities around intellectual practices resistant\nto sacrificial mobilization, around saints, around wise men, around dialogue focused on\nconceptual paradoxes, around sacred texts and revelatory events: these are the disciplinary orders\nof late antiquity which retrieve the practices of deferral and revise and neutralize decadent\nsacrificial practices.\n\nThe study of these disciplinary orders is itself productive of disciplinary\norders. While these disciplinary orders of the Axial Age exposed the decrepitude of divine\nkingship, they operated exclusively through a withdrawal from questions of power. Only this\nway could they sustain their practices of deferral, but this limits their usefulness as models for\nsolving the problem of restoring a kind of working amity between the signifying center and the\noccupied, governing center. The need to solve that problem is imposed upon all of us, because if\nthere would be one thing we could come close to unanimous agreement on, it would probably be\nthat there is no space of withdrawal from power struggles.\n\nWe are all of us implicated in various\nforms of direct and indirect violent centralization, and all of our language is unmistakably\nmarked by this violence. Just try and speak about any but the most trivial (and even, increasingly,\nwhat we might have considered trivial) matters in a “nonpartisan” way that doesn’t divide the\nworld up into friends and enemies, that doesn’t isolate those against whom the power of the state\nshould be deployed. Try not to speak in terms of inviolable rights perpetually under threat by one\ntyrant or another—and see what you are left able to say.\n\nIt’s therefore not surprising that modern liberal thought is allergic to discussions of power: power\nis either held or used “legitimately,” that is, according to some “super-sovereign” concept to\nwhich the actual ruler is beholden, or it is used “tyrannically.” How it is actually used seems\nbeside the point. In order to make it the point, we can begin by pointing out that power comes\nfrom the center, and the center comes from deferral. Insofar as someone occupies the center of a\nscene, that person wields power. We could use these concepts to carry out very micro-level\npower analyses: if one person, however otherwise irrelevant and ignored, becomes the center of\nattention in however small a group, however briefly, to that extent that person exercises power.\n\nThe exercise of power involves, first, exhibiting deferral: when others give in to some mimetic\ncontagion, like panic, whoever is able to resist that contagion and model another way of\nresponding to the situation is exercising power. In so resisting, the agent turns himself into a\ncenter of attention—he has done something others couldn’t or didn’t think to, and so everyone\nwill now look to see what he does next. It is also the case that in making himself the center of\nattention, whoever exercises power makes himself liable to convergent attention and violent\ncentralization. He has made an implicit promise to provide an alternate response to panic, or\nsurrender, and his next moves will reveal whether he can keep those promises.\n\nHis fellows may\njudge wrongly: what they take to be a failure to redeem a promise might in fact be more acts of\ndeferral, laying the groundwork for some plan, that they are less capable of seeing than he is—that is, their panic can overtake them once again. This is why the second component of power is\nrepresenting the desires and resentments that emerge within the group—that have in fact been\ngenerated by the exercise of power. One member of the group wants to drop out, another\nsabotages it out of spite, yet another engages in petty criticism of decisions that have not yet been\ngiven a chance to bear fruit, another gives off the sense, more or less unmistakably, that he would\nreally have a better way of seeing us through this new difficulty. Exercising power involves not\nonly blocking these moves but using them to continue renewing the group’s relation to the\ncenter: whatever project has led to the articulation of the team.\n\nOnly one person can occupy the center at a time, just like only one person can speak at a time in\na conversation. Part of occupying the center is delegating roles to one’s confederates; by the\nsame logic as single occupancy of the center, each other member of the team, at any one time,\ncan only occupy one position in the hierarchy. So, if there is the one that goes first, there is then\none that goes second, one that goes third, fourth, and so on. If the hierarchy branches off in\ndifferent ways, this sequence is reproduced in each “branch.” We can call this structure “centered\nordinality”: each gesture toward the center, or each assertion of centrality, initiates the ordering\nmentioned above.\n\nInsofar as it doesn’t, it turns out not to have been an assertion of centrality. Leadership can therefore be reduced to the maintenance of centered ordinality: leadership is\nsuccessful to the extent that everyone knows their place in the order at a given point in the\nprocess, and that there is no gap between actual order and nominal order. This is what power is—\nhaving theorized that, I can address the fairly obvious fact that the exercises of power we see on\na daily basis often don’t correspond closely to this model. If an institution deviates too much\nfrom this model, it will cease to function—even highly corrupt institutions must have at least an\ninner circle, or enough mid-level groups, where shared goals and a clear chain of command is\nsustained.\n\nThe question, though, is how to diagnose such deviations, which seem far more\ncommon than the “norm.” We can reduce the question to, “what disrupts centered ordinality?” On the most immediate analytical level, we would look to some discrepancy between nominal\nand actual order.\n\nBut such discrepancies and imperfections are inevitable, and as long as they are marginal they\ncan be addressed within the process itself. These disruptions become pervasive and chronic\ndisruptions of centered ordinality because of some discrepancy between the occupied center and\nthe signifying center. Let’s imagine a team formed improvisationally in some emergency—say,\nescaping from a burning building. One individual seems to know the way out, so others follow\nand listen to him. On the fly, he delegates tasks—you look to see if anyone is left upstairs, you\ncheck to see if there’s something we can use as a ladder, you find a way to help the injured, etc.;\nthe scene has a clear center—to sustain the cooperation necessary to get as many people to safety\nas possible.\n\nLet’s say they succeed—then what? Obviously the group can dissolve, as everyone\ngoes back to their own lives. But let’s say they have reasons to sustain themselves as a group—\nmaybe this building was their home, and now they want to rebuild it, and to do so in a way that\nmakes it less vulnerable to fire. The person who got them out of the building may not be the best\nperson to take charge of this new, radically different, task. They may elect someone to oversee\nthe rebuilding—in that case, the one in charge is formally subordinate to the group, or the majority. This can easily be the case without a formal election, because informal cooperation will\nstill be necessary, and could be withheld in ways that would be difficult to account for.\n\nNow, to\nthe extent that the one in charge confers upon the assembly the power to confer power upon him,\nwe have a discrepancy: the task of the new leader is not to build the building, but to maintain a\nmajority among those he is serving. Every decision he makes now has a double meaning: on the\none hand, it needs to contribute to the rebuilding; on the other hand, it has to help him to keep\nmajority support.\n\nFrom the standpoint of the group, the need to have someone in charge still seems to be the\ndefault assumption; however, the more any particular leader seems dispensable at the whim of\nthe group, the more this default assumption slides into scapegoating, and the generations of\nfantasies, themselves subject to debates and power struggles, of other arrangements. Perhaps a\nmajority can be created for ruling by committee, or for taking turns, or even for a kind of anarchy\nin which each individual simply picks up the slack wherever it seems necessary to do so. Indeed,\nany of these alternatives might work as long as a certain threshold of resentment is not reached,\nbut once that threshold is approached, the default assumption will be restored, only in a less\nexplicit way, because it is now “controversial.”\n\nDecisions will now increasingly be made by\nwhoever is best able to mobilize a majority, according to whatever process of determining\nmajorities the group uses; at a certain point decisions will be made more by those who are able to\nleverage the process of determining majorities. No doubt very skillful leaders can find ways to\nrepresent and redirect even the manifold resentments generated by this process, but it become\nless likely that such leaders will emerge and survive. Now, some reasoning must be providing for\na particular way of selecting and replacing leaders. Why a “majority”? A majority of whom? There may be many ways of slicing up the potential electorate.\n\nSome new agency must be\nconstructed so as to make some sense out of the process (think of all the situations where it\nwould be patently absurd to let the majority decide something)—say, the “people.” The “people”\nmust be anthropomorphized, provided with thought and agency. It has conflicts; it changes its\nmind; it gets fooled and manipulated—a wide range of narratives regarding this new fictional\nentity will be created. Deliberations regarding selecting a leader no longer concern the best way\nto rebuild, but determining what the “people” want—what they really want, not what some\ndemagogue or slick operator manages to make them think they want.\n\nOf course, all along there\nwas another option: let the guy who got everyone out of the building choose his successor. He\ncan do it in consultation with whomever might be able to help him decide; he can establish a\nprocess for providing the group with veto power. He might not be the best person to decide; he\nmight get it wrong—but, at least, there would be a clear decision, made by someone who has\ndemonstrated some competence in one crucial area, along with a willingness to take risks for the\ngroup. We can at least assume he’ll want to do the best he can, and he’s likely to be willing to\nrely on the help of the community to supplement his own shortcomings.\n\nIf he gets it wrong, it\nmay be in choosing the second, third or fourth best, rather than the twentieth best—so, the\nbuilding might go up in the end, with those who could have done a better job gracefully taking\non their allotted roles and maybe over-producing a bit. So, secure power places a premium on\ncontinuity in leadership; if having the actual leader serve some metaphysically “realer” entity is\nthe highest priority, power cannot be secured, and we have all the institutional pathologies we are familiar with. The problem here results from what might seem a small slippage: any leader does\ndepend upon those he leads, who must therefore in some sense willingly participate; but this\nwilling participation, or donation, can only be meaningfully performed when addressed to the\ncompetencies of each, not to ontologically prior identity of them all.\n\nIn the first case each tries to\nalign with the center, while in the latter all try, in what is an inevitably circular manner, to define\nthe center. This still leaves us with the question, which we are still some way from answering (or\nfrom showing how an answer is solicited from the signifying center), of whether I should obey\nthis man; but it shifts the focus of the question from “this man” to the specific command.\n\nNow, the foundation of the community, which is the origin of leadership successions, is different\nthan the assembling of a team—in the latter case, the existence of the community is already\ntaken for granted. So, I could leave the question of sacrality, or the signifying center in it most\ncompelling form, mostly aside. This must be addressed so as to reconcile is the signifying center\nand the occupied center. Gans identifies “significant” and “sacred” on the originary scene, and I\nfollow him here—even with the decline of the sacred, there can never be any decline in\n“significance.” Once the center has been humanly occupied, the problem becomes determining,\nor knowing, that the center as occupied is the same center as the center as signifying.\n\nThe\noriginary center “tells” the group to defer appropriation; as exchanges with the center multiply,\nas the imperatives from the center are extended beyond the ritual space, the center becomes\nricher with activity: beings at the center appear and disappear, make demands, distribute rewards,\nand deliberate and fight amongst themselves regarding how to do so. Once a human occupies the\ncenter, he becomes part of these ritual exchanges and mythical narratives: he ascends to power,\nacts, and distributes in prescribed ways, with the collaboration of central beings. Systems of\nsigns are elaborated that have to be “read” in order to order these prescribed activities in the right\nways.\n\nA priestly class of specialists devotes itself to reading these signs, which is to say to\nconveying the meanings of the signifying center to the occupied one. The continuity of power is\nstill presupposed—even if the priests are, on rare occasions, actually choosing the occupant of\nthe center, they are certainly not determining the form of that occupancy. The reading of signs is\nas ritualized as the ruling, even if the need to interpret opens up some space to deal with\n“exceptional” circumstances. Anyone might be able to imagine that the man who happened to be\nking now might not prove to be the most “qualified” if a kingdom-wide “job search” were to be\nheld, but he has ascended and now rules through a complex, time-tested process that draws upon\nthe talent and accumulated means of the entire community in a way that would not be replicable\nif there were a constant search for someone who might be “better” in the abstract."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-talk-of-the-center",
      "title": "Talk of the Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "All of this becomes problematic once sacrifice has ended, and imperative exchange has given\nway to what we could call “interrogative imperativity”: rather than giving to the center what it\ninstructs you to, and requesting that it fulfill its promises in exchange (one of your goats for\nanother year of the river flowing within its banks), each individual, as non-sacrificable center,\nasks himself who he is in giving himself over to the center completely. There is no more\nhierarchy of beings at the center which orders an earthly hierarchy in which each will find his place. One’s place in relation to the signifying center is fundamentally questionable, even if one’s\nrelation to the occupied center is not—hence the discrepancy.\n\nThis questionableness is what all\nthose new disciplines are interested in, and if they start off on the margins and uninterested in\npower, once they come to replace the old priestly classes this changes. The ruler must himself be\nruled by God’s law, and then by “Reason,” and then as a “servant of the people,” and so on—all\nconcepts controlled by the disciplines, upon whom the king is as dependent as he previously was\nupon the priestly classes. (The distinction between king and priest indicates a fundamental split\nbetween occupied center and signifying center, one that even precedes sacral kingship.) Now, the\ngovernment must be ruled by “political science,” “international law,” or “economics”—only\nconcepts drawn from these and other disciplines can make rule legitimate.\n\nEven the majority, the\nnominal “sovereign,” must yield to these super-sovereignties, which is to say those who interpret\nthem, who “rule” the disciplines. The disciplines can’t rule directly—the head of state in any\ncountry is still the successor, however distant of some last king who ruled over that territory, and\ntherefore all the kings and occasional queens preceding him. But that nominal occupant of power\nis at the center of struggles by power centers, leveraging the results of the disciplines’ inquiries to\ninfluence as much as possible the decisions of the sovereign, which is to say, to deploy the\nsovereign against the enemies of the discipline in question. The discrepancy between signifying\nand occupied center will generate struggles over the occupancy of the center, which struggles\nthen inform and divide the disciplines.\n\nJust as any contemporary ruler is a distant inheritor of the earliest sacral kings, the contemporary\ndisciplines have descended from metaphysics and scripture. They continue the same project of\neliminating the discrepancy between the signifying center and the occupied center. The target of\nmetaphysics and scripture alike was “mythology,” and this too has continued, from the\nEnlightenment critique of Christianity as “mythology” to Marxist critiques of “ideology” and\nmore contemporary attempts to dismantle “whiteness.” We can think about this as a continual\nprocess of replacement and reconfiguration. Mythology explains our ritual practices as\ncommemorating or being commanded by beings of the center.\n\nThe initial move in\n“demythification,” then, is to replace the activities of beings of the center with those of beings of\nthe margins. It was humans that created the myths and the rituals. How and why, though? If you\nare attacking some myth, or something you are going to call “myth,” it is because it supports the\npower of someone you would like to see have less power: your enemy or opponent. Myth\nsupports the tyrant; demythification aids the liberation of those inhabiting some pre-political\nspace (embodied in some internal scene of representation) that is violated by the tyrant. But each\nvictory over myth and tyranny installs a new tyrant supported by a new mythology—that pristine\npre-political space can never be actualized.\n\nThus, with its victory, the discourse of\ndemythification becomes, in turn, the myth to be dethroned. The weapons don’t have to change\nvery much: much of what could be said, in attacking monarch and church in the name of the\npeople and freedom, could be said in attacking the bourgeoisie, or the white, or the male, or the\nstraight, claiming to represent that fictional entity “the people,” in the name of the proletariat, the\ncolonized, the woman, the gay. The basis of the new liberating discourse is never provided, and\ncan’t be provided: it is enough that it is other than, othered by, and opposed to, that which it\nexposes as “mythical.”\n\nStill, today, even the soberest, data-driven study in the most moderate political science department of, say changes in “public opinion,” is nothing more than an attempt\nto demythify one belief about “the people” and replace it a new myth, that of “public\nopinion.” (Or one mythical form of public opinion by another.) For that matter, all public\ndiscourse in modern democracies can be reduced to each side purporting to demythify the other.\n\nMyths are the products of sociality that can’t be recognized as such and the problem of a post-\nsacrificial order is not to restore sacrality but, rather, to make discourse and practice directly,\nexplicitly and completely social. Directly, explicitly and completely social means: a defender,\nrepresentative and emissary of the center, “all the way down.” Our constructions of the center\nreveal our constructedness by the center, which means that we are never outside of some\ntradition of centeredness. We are used to thinking about traditions in terms of rituals and\ninstitutions, but the deepest and most difficult to examine traditions lie in language itself.\n\nWe can\nsee how difficult from the work of the linguist Anna Wierzbicka, who has taken up the Sapir-\nWhorf hypothesis and, one must say, successfully resolved it. Wierzbicka has discovered a set of\nwhat she calls “Natural Semantic Primes”—that is, words, exact translations of which exist in\nevery language. Another way of defining and testing the primes is to say they are words that\ncan’t be paraphrased by other words, without those other words ultimately having to be\nparaphrased using the primes themselves. Now, the existence of words that exist in every\nlanguage might seem to be the exact opposite of what Whorf (in particular) claimed, which is\nthat every language constructs reality for its users in a distinctive way that is not translatable into\nother languages.\n\nBut what the primes enable Wierzbicka to do is to prove Whorf’s claim\nregarding the relativity of language. By translating words from one language into the primes, it\nbecomes possible to show precisely how those words are different in meaning from words that\nseem synonymous in other languages.\n\nWierzbicka’s studies have, understandably, focused on English, the present-day global lingua\nfranca. She focuses on what would seem to be some of the most “universal” and “obvious”\nwords in English—words that not only seem to have intuitively natural meanings but are taken to\nprovide us with a direct access to reality—like “sense,” “evidence,” and “experience” (and many\nothers), and shows that it is precisely these words that have no equivalents in other languages. Even more, she traces these words back to their origins—in the case of the above mentioned, and\nsome other related ones, almost completely from the philosophical works of John Locke.\n\nIn\neffect, when we’re speaking English, and putting forth our theories of (and justifying foreign\npolicy based on) the “rule of law,” “empiricism,” “universal rights” and “utilitarianism,” and so\non, we’re effectively speaking the rather provincial dialect of Lockean. Seeing language anew\nthrough Wierzbicka, just like seeing the metalanguage of literacy through Olson, has a startling,\ndemystifying effect that seems similar to other “demythifications.” They are different, though,\nbecause they point us back to language, and therefore to the constitutive center, rather than some\npresumably self-sustaining “human” margin.\n\nFor the discourses of demythification, the world\nneeds to be set “right-side up” by showing how the divine depends on the human, the ruler on the\nruled, the intellectual on the material. For anthropomorphics, the problem is very different: here,\nthe problem is to constitute our utterances on a scene, with a center. We understand that all we’re\never doing is iterating the originary scene, in increasingly complex ways because we must incorporate anomalies and contingencies (mistakes) generated by previous scenes, and we must\nkeep retrieving and ensuring our continuity recursively with previous scenes. It’s also helpful to\nkeep in mind that that is all anyone is ever doing—all we can do is place ourselves on more\ndifferentiated scenes in the constitution of which we can display ever more of our contribution.\n\nThe implications of Wierzbicka’s primes helps to clarify what this means. Once you have taken a\nword, like “experience,” or “embarrassment,” and shown that its meaning entails a particular\nrelation between people thinking, people seeing, people knowing, people knowing that others see\nthem, people not wanting others to see them like that, people thinking about what they feel,\npeople wanting others to know that they feel this way, and so on, you are done. What you know\nis what you have always known about that word, because you have always used that word\nunproblematically, but what you also could never have articulated about it.\n\nThe word is revealed\nto you as a possible articulation of practices—practices that anyone can engage in and name, but\nthat have been articulated in a very specific way that has also prevented you from seeing other\nthings you can now at least imagine. What seemed self-evident now places you within a tradition\nof centering.\n\nWierzbicka’s primes dismantle any assumption of the transparency of any language, including\nthose of the human sciences, more radically than what are by now standard invocations of the\n(race, class, gender, sexuality...) positionality of the inquirer. If you think you can deconstruct a\ndiscourse in the human sciences because the maleness of the author, or the field, or that subset of\nthe field, shapes the discourse in exclusionary ways, and even if you add to this the whiteness,\nstraightness, First Worldness, etc., of the disciplinary position, you are still assuming the\npossibility of some unmarked, properly intersectional liberatory position at the end of the chain.\n\nWith Wierzbicka’s analytics, there’s no end of the chain. Wierzbicka herself is primarily\ninterested in preventing ethnocentrism, and, perhaps, the globally dominant Anglo ethnocentrism\nin particular from interfering with the possibility of communication and shared inquiry across\nlinguistic lines. But translations into the primes can only be an after the fact practice: we couldn’t\ndirectly communicate in the primes. And this leaves unaddressed what also follows from\nWierzbicka’s confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the distinctiveness of each\nlanguage is a source of discovery in its own right, and not just “noise” interfering with what\nmight otherwise be clear communication. If we could all manage to speak in the primes as our\nnative language, the world of thinking would be terribly impoverished as a result.\n\nI don’t mean to suggest Wierzbicka would deny any of this, but she doesn’t emphasize it\nanywhere that I am aware, and I am emphasizing it because my interests run elsewhere than\nWierzbicka’s. If we are able to see languages as something like disciplinary spaces themselves,\nwhich organize reality in such a way as to bring certain things to attention, and to in effect\nconstruct those “elements” of reality by occluding other elements, we can treat the disciplinary\nspaces of the human sciences as idioms within a larger language, rather than as transparent\nmetalanguages that bring us ever closer to a secular, demythified, liberated reality.\n\nThe\ndisciplines, we could say, are those spaces set up to inquire specifically into what words,\nsentences and discourses mean across the field of language—including within the disciplines\nthemselves. The question, then, is how do we speak about what words mean without some kind of metalanguage that provides the implicitly mystified terms with a demystified meaning? There\nwould be no inquiry into meaning if meaning wasn’t called into question in some way—if there\nweren’t, that is, some question of how to distinguish between normal and anomalous usage. The\npurpose of inquiry would then be less to adjudicate the terms of usage than to identify where the\nboundaries between what counts as normal or anomalous usage lie in specific practices, or fields\nof practice.\n\nWierzbicka’s primes would be very well suited for probing these boundary spaces, as\nwould the kinds of tests Olson (and other cognitive scientists) devise in order to determine, for\nexample, how a child who has learned how to read and write constructs theories of other minds\ndifferently than those who haven’t.\n\nI argued above that the human sciences have their origins in the establishment of the primacy of\nthe declarative sentence effected by literacy and manifested, in the West, in metaphysics and\nscripture (synthesized in Christianity). The metaphysical discovery is that ostensive and\nimperative signs can be represented in declarative terms, and that representing them in\ndeclarative terms enables the declarative to control the ostensive and imperative: or, to put it in\ngrammatical terms, to issue imperatives and generate ostensives. If we’re talking, I can point to\nsomething—if, at some later point, that pointing needs to be represented for, say, legal purposes,\nmy pointing to something gets redescribed in terms that would note my position, what I was\nlikely able to see, what else was in the vicinity, and potentially much more (the state of my optic\nnerve, etc.) that would abstract my pointing from the ostensive situation.\n\nWhat I “really saw” is\nnow better left in the hands of professionals who have categorized all the elements of “seeing\nsomething.” The same is the case for imperatives: redescribing person A commanding person B\nto carry out some act raises the question (to be answered in further declaratives) of who person A\nand B are such that A can command B, and therefore whether that command was a “real”\ncommand (whether B obeyed it or not), which is to say issued by one person who is in a position\nto command that other person. And what does it mean to be in a positon to command another:\none has been “authorized” to do so, and authorization implies terms of authorization, themselves\ninscribed in declarative sentences.\n\nTo some extent, at least, issuing commands places you in\nconflict with those who will redescribe those commands in declarative terms: at the very least,\nthose later descriptions will subject the command to criteria and calculations that could not\npossibly have been present to the one issuing the command in the original situation. The reason\nmetaphysics needs to be dismantled is that the interests of metaphysics lie in ensuring that all\nimperatives and ostensives are controlled and guaranteed in advance by declaratives, and this is\nan infiltration and subversion of the ostensive-imperative world. The declarative order in effect\nusurps the ostensive-imperative world by generating unacknowledged commands to those\nresponsible for commanding.\n\nTo say something like “that order would violate the protocols of\nthis institution, which have in turn been established in accordance with domestic law passed\npursuant to a particular international treaty, etc.” is to say: you cannot issue this command; and it\nis to say this without being able to provide an alternative command that would meet the needs of\nthat situation. One could say that those giving the commands can be trained in accord with\nprocedures that internalize that declarative order, but this just means having the declarative order\nencroach more pervasively upon the ostensive-imperative world, without there being any reason\nto assume that the commands subsequently issued within that institution will be more appropriate for its purposes.\n\nIf the declarative sentence, for metaphysics, is the well-formed proposition that can be linked\naccording to logical rules to other propositions and according to some “rules of evidence” to\nostensive claims about reality (material or ideal), the declarative sentence, for scripture, is a\nnarrative of the emergence of the individual as a center: a non-sacrificable center among other\nnon-sacrificable centers, and therefore a center of responsibility. There is no need for the\nscriptural declarative to invade the ostensive-imperative world, as does the metaphysical\ndeclarative. To be told the story of a victim of centralizing violence is to be issued the imperative\n“don’t commit such violence,” and provided with a kind of map for how to avoid doing so;\nsimilarly, to be told the story of a saint who refrained from responding in kind to some violation\nand absented herself from potentially contagious desires and resentments is to be issued a\ncommand to imitate that kind of response to temptations to resentment.\n\nThe problem for the\nscriptural declarative is that, due to its anti-imperial/meta-imperial origins, the only means it\nprovides for distinguishing between proper and improper imperatives issued by power centers is\nin terms of whether those power centers defend the originating narrative of the authorizing\nscripture. If the power center is responsible for distinguishing between discourses issuing from,\non the one hand, and deviating from, on the other hand, the authorizing narrative, rules must be\nconstructing for establishing that distinction. The only way of establishing a body of rules is\npropositionally, which means that the scriptural world must rely upon the metaphysical\ndeclarative world. Once this happens, the imperatives issued by the metaphysical order will\nconsistently override those issued within the scriptural order because the former has been set in\njudgment of the latter."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-the-center-and-imperative-authority",
      "title": "The Center and Imperative Authority",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "The civilizational problem we have here, at least in the Western world (and therefore the rest of\nthe world, which has all been at least in part modeled on Western norms) is that of the\nimperatives issued from the highest power center, or the central authority. There is, in any\ncommunity, a central authority, the final source of imperatives; and yet those imperatives are\nonly worthy of being followed if the central authority is in accord with the signifying center: to\nput I more precisely, if the imperatives issued by the central authority are the same as those\nissued by the signifying center. As yet, no satisfactory way of ensuring this has been proposed,\nlet along implemented.\n\nThis problem, I have suggested, dates back to the fall of sacral kingship\n(although I imagine I have made it clear that retaining sacral kingship, much less restoring it,\ncannot be considered an option), which makes it a very longstanding one. How to “legitimate”\nthe central authority, or the sovereign (without, for now, getting into the tangled history of that\nconcept), without creating an “imperium in imperio,” or a “realer” sovereign than the actual\nsovereign? This, what I have been calling, “super-sovereign,” must itself be represented—by a\nChurch, or a parliament, a constitution, or a judiciary, or an international body...--and\nrepresentation either recreates the same problem over again (what legitimates the Church or the\njudiciary, who interprets the constitution?) which in turn opens a kind of loophole through which\npower struggles can be waged.\n\nIf the Church or the judiciary is to be the ultimate arbiter, then if one wants to counter the king or president one seeks control of the Church or judiciary, or\nChurch doctrine or legal theory, which, in turn, requires control over the universities, seminaries\nand law schools. Liberalism is the political theory justifying this state of affairs, which means\nthat the purpose of liberalism is to ensure that no one ever knows who decides anything. Can\nthere be any reason to believe that decisions will be made and implemented better this way?\n\nThe civilizational project I am proposing for the disciplines, then, is the one I suggest they have\nreally been pursuing all along: inquiring into the meaning of imperatives issued by central\nauthority (which are of course transmuted into other imperatives along various chains of\ncommand, and studied with regard to needed means of implementation, including the distribution\nof resources, the training and employment of personnel, and so on). I can make this more\nprecise: the proper inquiry of the human sciences is the difference between the imperatives\nissued by central authority and the imperatives obeyed by lower authorities.\n\nImperatives are\nperformatives: they transform, rather than describing, reality. No imperative, however carefully\nand informatively formulated, however close in time and space to its implementation, can ever\ncompletely account for the conditions of implementation. So, if we assume the existence of some\ncentral authority in any community, the most minimal assumption we can make regarding what\nconstitutes a central authority, is that imperatives coming from that authority supersede all other\nimperatives. Which is to say those imperatives are always to be obeyed—to do otherwise is to\nalign oneself with another, potential, more or less imminent, central authority, even (especially,\nreally) if one disobeys in the name of one or another super-sovereign concept (“human rights,” or\nwhatever).\n\nTo disobey is irresponsible and therefore immoral, because it resists the direct\nsociality of discourse. Bringing the difference between imperative issued and imperative obeyed\nbrings questions of morality and responsibility into focus far more effectively. It is in one’s\nfilling the imperative “gap” that one provides moral and intellectual feedback to superiors and\nultimately to the central authority. A bad, or, say, “infelicitous,” imperative, is simply one that\ncan’t be effectively fulfilled, either on its own terms or because it conflicts with some equally\nauthoritative imperative coming from the center. Even a very good government is likely to pose\nsuch dilemmas to its people—perhaps even more so, insofar as a good government would confer\nmore responsibilities on its people, supervise less closely, and therefore issue less specified\ncommands.\n\nOf course, a bad government would pose these dilemmas in much direr ways. If we\nassume that these dilemmas, which would always be posed in unique ways, must be resolved as\nbest as possible without ever imagining one could disobey the central authority, the field of\npolitical, moral and social inquiry becomes very rich indeed.\n\nSo, an inquiry into meaning is an inquiry into the difference between imperative issued and\nimperative obeyed, including how that difference is registered in the declarative order, itself\ntaken as the study of the ostensive-imperative world: more precisely, the study of which\nhierarchy of imperatives will produce the greatest ostensive yield (the practices, places and\nthings that best reveal our social being). The difference in question is a product of the element of\n“inappropriateness” constitutive of any imperative: again, even within the most tightly structured\nchain of command in the most closed environment, there will be something in any imperative\nthat can’t be fulfilled as commanded (as imagined by the commander).\n\nAs the recipient of a command, you become a center, along with bearing and presenting the centrality of whoever has\nissued the command. The mistakenness of the imperatee is a breach in the order of signs\n(linguistic presence) which initiates the convergence of attention upon that imperatee, and\ndepending upon the source and scope of that covering attention, upon the imperator as well. As\nattention converges upon you, there are two possible responses: one, you can try to deflect the\nattention elsewhere, which involves evacuating yourself as one receiving an imperative; two, you\ncan convert that convergent attention into shared attention to the range of problems raised by the\nbest implementation of the imperative (our “selves” are essentially articulations, in some\nproportion, of these two types of response).\n\nThis conversion involves ostensive, imperative and\ndeclarative dimensions: it involves “holding” oneself a certain way—for example, not reacting\nsymmetrically or in kind to accusations; it involves showing oneself to be following orders and\nissuing various imperatives (from modest requests to imperious commands) oneself; and it\ninvolves, invoking and enacting the origin of the declarative form itself, predicating some object\n(and individual, a situation) that could provoke violent convergence, and doing so in such a way\nas to make the object signify a way of refraining from such convergence. Through these\npedagogical and moral practices the signifying center is brought to bear on the occupied center,\nand imperative gap closed.\n\nThe inquiry initiated by potential or imminent convergence toward imperative mistakenness\ninvolves an unfolding of the practice in question into its constitutive practices. This practice of\ninquiry has something in common, then, with any social analytics, which will, for example, in\nexplaining a ritual, identify the “components” of that ritual (the actors, the means, the rules, the\nconnection to other practices, etc.), with it then being possible to “break down” or abstract those\ncomponents into components of their own, until we reach the terms of an anthropological\nontology. What is different in anthropomorphics is that the inquiry is explicitly set on the scene\nof inquiry itself.\n\nThe origin and essence of the declarative sentence is that it provides the capacity\nto represent events happening at different times and places (and different times and places than\nthat where and when the sentence itself is uttered) in a single present. The original declarative\ntraces the transformation of a demand into a request for information regarding the demanded\nobject, that is, a question, which is answered with a negation (not here). An originary ontology of\nthe declarative preserves the negative ostensive by composing the declarative world out of\ndeclaratives that both construct a chain from the ostensive-imperative articulations conditioning\nthe possibility of this declarative order and by indicating, issuing tacit imperatives, that operate\nwithin that world.\n\nThis makes the present tense predominant in anthropomorphic inquiry. What\nhas happened in the past is available in the present because memories, records and ramifications\nof that past are ostensively available in the present: the possibility of a propositional order, which\nwe owe to metaphysics, is redeemed in the possibility of always adding a new increment of\nostensive inheritance that would establish a new post from which hitherto unseen or overseen or\nunderseen memories, records and ramifications can be made present. In thusly representing the\nconfluence of events, each one of which can be more fully represented in its mimetic structure\nand articulation of convergent and shared attention, the declarative order being constructed\ncontributes to closing the imperative gap by modifying that inheritance and thereby issuing a\ntacit imperative to obey the order one way as opposed to another."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-declarative-order-and-the-center",
      "title": "Declarative Order and the Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "Remember that the metalanguage of literacy I have extracted from David Olson’s work aims at\nconstructing a simulated scene upon which the writer and readers stand, observing whatever is\nrepresented by the writer. The scene of classical prose is, then, readerly rather than writerly—it\navoids drawing attention to the scene of writing itself, which is really a sketch of a succession of\nscenes upon which given signs are iterated in different ways. Classic prose solves a problem that\nthe invention of writing creates, but which is really just the expansion of a field upon which a\nproblem constitutive of language itself is displayed and played out.\n\nOn the originary scene, the\nmost urgent problem as the scene takes shape, is for all, or “enough,” participants to be able to\nascertain, or know, simply, that they are all in fact issuing the newly discovered and invented\nsign. This is a process in which the participants transition from attention (giving and receiving it\nin uncertain oscillation) to intention (finding means for identifying and controlling the attention\nof others). As the primary problem on the originary scene, this is therefore also the primary\nproblem of the human. To put it bluntly, we are always doing nothing other than trying to\ndetermine whether “we” are in fact issuing the same sign.\n\nThis is a real problem which can never\nbe solved once and for all because, of course, it never is the same sign—to some degree, every\nrepetition of a sign modifies its meaning, or its range of possible uses, in some way. So, the\nproblem is establishing sameness in the midst of difference. A disciplinary space is where we\nmake this attempt.\n\nMetalanguage is a way of solving this problem, and it’s not surprising that the masters of writing\nwould have found this solution to be an appropriate one to the problem of potentially infinite\ndissemination. Metalanguage establishes rules for the proper use of signs. The metalanguage of\nliteracy, as I pointed out earlier, defines words, which is to say, abstracts from the mass of\nlanguage use those specific ways in which one is allowed to use particular words; it establishes\nrules of grammar and logic, which essentially function to keep the declarative order at a\nsufficient distance from the ostensive-imperative world so as to avoid contamination; and it\nestablishes broader disciplinary rules, and rules of genre and style aimed at guaranteeing the\ntransparency of discourse for those inhabiting the metalanguage of literacy, or those fluent in the\nprevailing literate idioms.\n\nIf we’ve established rules for using words, for grammar, for genre and\nstyle, and, indeed, for checking and updating these rules and adjudicating specific cases, we can\nexamine the differences of specific texts in a contained way. What, though, if each time we read\na text, the proper use of words, grammatical rules, logic, generic and stylistic norms, were all up\nfor grabs at each point along the way of the reading practice, and in shared inquiries into texts? In that case, the sameness of identity of a particular sign could only be affirmed on a particular\nscene of inquiry, in which one participant is able to say something like “if we take these words to\nbe usable in this way, and accept the possibility that this other mode of grammar and logic might\n“work,” and entertain the possibility that genre and stylistic norms are being used here in order to\nproduce effects beyond the consideration of those responsible for maintaining those norms, then\nthe text here would be doing X”; and another participant would be able to follow up on that with\nanother possible articulation of definitional, grammatical, logical, generic and stylistic practices\nin this text, but also, now, in the “critical” practice of inquiry that can use this practice of textuality as a model.\n\nThe starting point of such an inquiry would still be the metalanguage of\nliteracy and the narrower metalanguages of specific disciplinary practices, but now, in applying\nthose terms, either inappropriately, or to an object one shows (or helps) to resist appropriate\napplication, the application of those terms, along with the modifications effected through passing\nthem through the prism of the constructed object, is now to the space of inquiry itself. What we\nhave in that case is a kind of transdisciplinary infralanguage, in which the identity of the sign\nmust be “authenticated” on each scene of inquiry (even the signs marking a scene of inquiry\nmust be authenticated on a scene of inquiry, both within and outside of the scene of inquiry to be\nmarked).\n\nThis takes us to the end of metaphysics by retrieving the origin and vocation of the\ndeclarative sentence prior to its hypostatization by the metalanguage of literacy, of which\nmetaphysics is merely an occluded version. That vocation is to determine the precise distance at\nwhich we need to hold the ostensive-imperative world so as to prioritize the many imperatives\ncoming our way so that we represent to each other the way their originating center would like us\nto obey them.\n\nScriptural declarative orders involve narratives that take us from the violent convergence of\nattention, or violent centralization, to the conversion of that convergence into shared attention\ndirected at the mimetic crisis, or the unresolved mistakenness of the ostensive-imperative world,\nthat led to the convergence in the first place. Scriptural narratives effect this conversion through\nthe hearing and heeding of what Philip Rieff called an “absolute imperative.” Here, the absolute\nimperative is the imperative to devote yourself to the signifying center by interposing yourself\nbetween the convergent attention and the potential sacrifice.\n\nLet’s take this one step further and\nsay that the absolute imperative is to name the potential sacrifice, which is to say surround it\nostensively so as to render it immune to sacrificial intentions. Naming something in the world as\na moral act is the most originary of signifying gestures. Historically, scriptural narratives have\ndisplaced sacrificial and mythical ones by constructing an “emperor” that necessarily transcends\nall world emperors, actual or possible, because He has created the world and everything in it. A\npoint by point “refutation,” or really, satirical subversion, beyond anything we would probably\nbe able to reconstruct at this point, of all previous ritual, mythological and imperial orders was\nrequired to accomplish this.\n\nWe looked before at the impasse at which scripture eventually\narrives: its implicit anti-imperialism dispossesses it of any means of resisting incorporation as a\n“super-sovereignty” that provides the resources for endless denunciations of “tyranny” in the\nname of some inviolable internal center. We could say this process is, in fact “history”—history,\nthat is, is the record of the replacement of one empire after another in anticipation of the\nestablishment of the final, true empire, that would be direct subordination to God, but then, also,\nto some version of the authentically unpolluted human. History, then, has exhausted itself in the\nantinomic agencies of contemporary liberalism, where the genuinely stripped bare human that\ncan be the only source of legitimacy is nothing but sheer opposition to whatever norms make\nsocial functioning possible.\n\nBut the imperative to redeem scripture can be obeyed at least as well as that to redeem the\npropositional order created by metaphysics. What we retrieve from scripture is what we can call\n“listening to the center,” which is to say developing disciplinary spaces for discerning the most pertinent forms taken by the absolute imperative. Like scripture, this requires narrative far more\nthan propositional forms. Let’s start with the appearance of mistakenness in what we can call the\n“in-ordering” of an imperative (the effort to create the order extending from the imperative, to\nact within the order). Any crisis begins with a command, a demand, a request, an injunction, a\nprohibition, an insistence, etc., that is going unfulfilled.\n\nThe “size” of the crisis will depend on\nthe agencies involved, their relative power, the urgency and scope of the imperative, and so on—\neven if not necessarily in any obvious way. But at any size, the crisis begins by being placed in\nsome declarative, narrative form: person or people X did something/are doing something. An\nevent is represented, and an event “behind” that event: what’s happening is shadowed by what is\n“really” happening. The narrative rewires the ostensive and imperative circuitry: you’re looking\nhere, but the signs you are looking at really point there; you are finding it incumbent to act in one\nway, but the situation requires that you act another way.\n\nThe surface is bubbling with ostensives\nand imperatives—simply knowing what to look at and from what angle, and what the situation\n“demands,” itself “demands” one seek out a higher imperative that would supersede all of these. But this means that one is already following the imperative to seek out a higher imperative;\nwhich, further, depends on the ostensive assumption that that higher imperative is there to be\nfound. And that ostensive assumption must be right—even finding oneself disappointed at the\nend, and renouncing the search for higher imperatives, would have one following the imperative\nto not seek out higher imperatives (and, a narrower imperative designating the precise imperative\nlevel at which one stops seeking higher).\n\nSo, when a narrative represents imperative mistakenness, we know a higher imperative will\nreorder the disordered imperative space. In the representations of the scene of imperative\nmistakenness, the participant can hear imperatives generated on that scene itself—imperatives\nthat sustain and accelerate the scene of convergent, violent centralization by pointing out more\nconfirmatory details and compelling each participant to take action that further locks him into the\nscene. “If you refuse to see what that means, that means you don’t belong here”—that is, you\nbelong with the victim. These imperatives can be recognized by their paradoxical form, that of\nthe vicious circle.\n\nIn the aftermath of such a scene, effort will have to put into controlling all\nsubsequent representations of it: everyone on the scene will have to have been acting directly\npursuant and proportionately to some immediate provocation to which response could not be\ndelayed. And one can see signs of this on the scene already. In any representation of such a\nscene, even the most inciteful one, any participant can also see signs that suggest that\ndeceleration is possible. The very existence of such signs rebuts the incitement. “See if there are\nfurther like signs” is the absolute imperative here. If you listen to it, the imperative becomes both\nmore precise, telling you where to look, and more expansive, telling you to show others these\nsigns, or, really, showing others they have already seen them.\n\nEven on a scene where immediate\naction is in fact urgently necessary, there must be some margin of uncertainty with regard to\nwhich action is best, even in split-second decisions. So, even in a genuine emergency, the\ncapacity to decelerate enhances response-ability. A narrative starting from the element of\ndeceleration within an acceletory frame will uncover more signs suggesting deceleration, and\nsubtler distinctions, for example, between signs that presented as deceletory but really served the\npurpose of incitement. Subsequent narratives would become further differentiated, to the point of refusing to converge attention even upon those most unambiguously accelerating on the scene,\npreferring to explore what they might have taken to be deceleratory imperatives to be followed.\n\nIf punitive action needs to be taken, and accounted for after the fact, it is taken, however severe,\nin such a way as to reveal, foreground and enhance deceletory or inhibitory means of\ninstitutional and individual detection. This is how one listens to the center: the absolute\nimperative always tells one to hear more of imperatives to which one is exposed and to make\nthem more consistent with each other: to name practices that bring into view things that issue\nthose imperatives."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-skewing-toward-the-center",
      "title": "Skewing Toward the Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "We inherit from metaphysics the possibility of replacing any word, phrase, gesture, or movement\nwith a declarative sentence, or a string of declarative sentences, and then replacing the words in\nthose sentences with strings of declarative sentences, and then doing the same with the very\nprocess of carrying out all of these replacements, and so on. Having declarative reframing at our\ndisposal serves the purposes of deferral, which can in this way be organized in disciplinary\nspaces, which enable us to reframe accounts of events in new registers. The most minimal act of\nattention can thereby be spread out into a structure and history of practices limited only by the\nquestion prompting the inquiry, and the continual modulation of that question.\n\nWe start with an\nevent or utterance (but we only know events through utterances, and utterances are always an\nevent), and at a certain point we will say we have determined what something means. Wierzbicka’s analysis of words into the primes is an exemplary model for such post-\nmetaphysical work within the declarative order, and I would hereby deem her thinking to be part\nof anthropomorphics. Still there is an interesting aporia in Wierzbicka’s primes: there is, it\nseems, no prime word for “God,” or “divine,” or “sacred” or any related terms. This is certainly\nnot due to any hostility or hesitation regarding the sacred on the part of Wierzbicka, who has\nwritten at least two books that translate Christian scripture into the primes.\n\nMy assumption is that\nwords for God and gods are too singularized, and it would be impossible, using Wierzbicka’s\nexacting standards of identification, to claim that there are words in all languages referring to\ngods or the sacred that are the “same.” Gods are always named, and names can’t be in the\nprimes. Wierzbicka, at any rate, never claims that the prime words are the earliest words, even if\nthey are all certainly pre-literate. We can take them, I would suggest, as belonging to declarative\nlanguage, leaving at least portions of the ostensive-imperative world untouched.\n\nWierzbicka’s claim, which, again, I have no reason to contest, is that one way of identifying and\nverifying the primes is that they are words that cannot be paraphrased by other words without\nthose other words having to be paraphrased, and so on, until we ultimately find our way back at\nthe prime word. So, any attempt to paraphrase “think” would, if sufficiently thorough and\nrigorous, have to include the word itself in that paraphrase; this is not the case for a non-prime\nword like, say, “understand.” The primes, then, are words that are understood or, to stick with the\nprimes, known, intuitively; or, to put it in a way with less philosophical baggage, knowing how\nto use (or when to say) these words is simply part of being able to speak a language.\n\nIn originary\ndisciplinary spaces, though, things don’t end there, because being able to gesture ostensively and issue and obey imperatives are also part of what it means to be able to speak a language. So, we\ncan have non-tautological ways of saying what it means to “think,” “know,” “say,” “want” and so\non: they represent interactions at the center, which we iterate on the margin. The primes\nthemselves are practices and this can be shown in a way that would be in principle available to\nWierzbicka, even if to my knowledge she has never adopted it, and that is understanding the\nwords in relation to each other. This will enable us to defend Wierzbicka’s position while\nrecognizing, for example, that the word “think,” when someone says “I think,” might mean\nsomething different than “think” is the question, “what do you think?”\n\nDoes “think” mean the same thing when someone, in response to a question of whether he’d like\nto go somewhere, says, “yes, I think so,” as when someone says “if you think about it, you will\nagree with me”? The person who says “yes, I think so” is expressing a desire while\nsimultaneously indicating some hesitation (there are other possibilities, of course), while the\nperson saying “if you think about it...” is encouraging the other to engage in a cogitative\nprocess, to carry out a mental activity (but also, perhaps, reminding the other of consequences of\n“disagreeing”). We can make the meaning of “think” seem as different from each other in the\nrespective cases as we like, but what I think vindicates Wierzbicka’s model is that in both cases\none _thinks_ when one doesn’t _know_ , and one _thinks_ before one _says_.\n\nAnd we can make the\nrelations between the words even more precise if we consider when we would use one in an\nimperative rather than the other, or the limitations imposed upon using these words as\nimperatives. When do you command someone to think? When a decision has to be made, or a\nconclusion reached, and the person who has to make or reach it seems unprepared to do so. Which is a way of saying “think before you say you know,” or “think before you do.” Someone\nis commanded to “say something” when there has been ample time, or there is now no time, to\n“think.” Of course, we have E.M. Forster’s question, much beloved of writing instructors, “how\ndo I know what I think until I see what I say,” which suggests the simultaneity of thinking and\nsaying.\n\nEven here, though, it seems that the saying does not so much coincide with as reveal the\nthinking which still, presumably, in some sense antedated it. At the very least, the saying can’t\nprecede any thinking, even if we speak about people speaking and acting before they have\nthought. When we accuse someone thus, we’re limiting what we’re willing to consider “genuine”\nthinking in this case, that is, using “thinking” in a restrictive way, while still preserving its\npriority over saying and doing (no one tells another he speaks or acts before he thinks as a\ncompliment, even if one might advise another not to think “too much” before speaking or acting\n—which, again, presupposes the priority of thinking of these acts).\n\nHowever such intra-prime analyses work out (is it meaningful to command or demand that\nsomeone _want_ or _know_ something? If not, what do we mean when we do so, as we all probably\ndo on occasion?), I put these models of analysis forward as a contribution to the ongoing (it\nseems to be taking longer than it should) dismantling of the metaphysical reification of the\ndeclarative sentence, not in order to devalue (absurdly) the declarative sentence but to liberate its\nreal “vocation.” Wierzbicka’s primes help free us from the metalanguage of literacy, but they\nalso need to be freed from it. It can still be very difficult to resist the tendency, when hearing the\nwords “think” or “know,” to immediately convert that into a question like “what is real thinking/ knowing,” which in turn, as Wittgenstein knew, leads us to construct a “picture” of “thinking”\nand “knowing.”\n\nOnce we are drawing pictures of these activities, we invite arguments over their\n“thoroughness,” or the “correctness” of this or that “detail.” We try to “prove” that this or that\n“faculty” is an essential part of the “thought process,” or that we haven’t really “known”\nsomething until all the items on a checklist of what counts as “knowing” have been checked off. Do I need to convince you of how deeply rooted these habits of thought remain? The\nappropriation of Wierzbicka’s primes by originary thinking allow us to maintain all the precision\nregarding determining the meaning of words that the most demanding analytical philosopher\nwould insist upon, and as penetrating an analysis of the practices comprising any intellectual\nactivity as any cognitive psychologist would hope for, without the kinds of pointless paradoxes\nthat have been with us since Socrates wondered whether acts are good because the gods\ncommand them, or the gods command them because they are good. “Limiting” ourselves to the\nmodest questioning of how the most minimally meaningful words are used in relation to each\nother will help generate a post-metaphysical human science.\n\nWe can remain with the declarative order for as long as we like, and there are substantial rewards\nfor doing so: the purest form of the declarative order is mathematics, and when we are thinking\ngenuinely scientifically, we are within the declarative. However delayed, though, the declarative\nmust come home to the ostensive—even the most complex physics experiment carried out with\nthe most intricate machinery must give the scientist something to see and point to—even if it’s\njust a reading on a meter that is very distantly related to anything we might actually be able to\nengage with our senses. Moreover, science begins with a question, and a question is an extended\nimperative, and the imperative is extended because it turned out to be “inappropriate”—to not, in\nfact, have had the needed ostensive backing.\n\nThe grounding of the declarative order in the\nostensive-imperative world can also only be discussed (as anything can only be “discussed”) in\nthe declarative order, but nothing in the declarative order would ever impel its participants to\ninitiate such discussions—which is why the metalanguage of literacy has ruled for so long. As\nHeidegger and Wittgenstein realized, it is mistakenness that opens up the declarative order to an\ninquiry into its ostensive and imperative roots. All of the paradoxes, aporias and anomalies with\nwhich the declarative order is rife, and which the metalanguage of literacy strives to hide from\nview, lead us back to the ostensive, and the only real paradox: that we name as already\npossessing the characteristics implicit in that name something that is only that thing because we\nhave named it. _We_ , not _I_ ; on a _scene_ , not in a _mind_.\n\nA discovery, scientific or otherwise, has been\nmade once participants on a disciplinary scene see something that is simultaneously real and a\nproduct of the scene of inquiry (and all the modified practices and traditions of inquiry of which\nthe scene is composed) that made it available to us."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-the-center-without-metalanguage",
      "title": "The Center Without Metalanguage",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "The scene on which one sees what one is simultaneously shown has been the concern of\nscripture: this is what is entailed in a “revelation.” One some level, we know that we ourselves\ndon’t completely produce what we see—in some sense we are “shown” it. This raises the\nquestion of how to name the one who shows it. One the one hand, unless we are literal believers, we know there is no one really showing it, and as social thinkers we can find some way of\nnaming an agency that does so—“society,” “tradition,” “ideology,” and so on. This all begs the\nquestion of how any of these entities could show us anything—wouldn’t “believing” in them be\njust as questionable as believing in God?\n\nIt is to fill this aporetic space that the human sciences\nrush in with all the faculties and capacities they deposit in the subject. I would have\nanthropomorphics fill the space with imperatives from the center and declaratives working out\nthe performative gap of those imperatives so as to issue more precise imperatives, albeit always\nwith a margin of mistakenness. I propose this as a theoretical language that should be more\npowerful than those indebted to the metalanguage of literacy. For one thing, it renders the self or\nsubject directly and completely social and historical, rather than leaving us to figure out some\nway to “add” those “forces” afterward.\n\nWorking imperatives through a declarative space so as to\nissue a more precisely targeted imperative produces an ostensive result the actor and observer\ncan both see. That ostensive result is named, and any practice that is named is named as\ncommanding a deferral of desire or resentment. Naming resists the erasure of the practice. Not\neverything that is named is “good,” but the naming always proposes a good way of seeing that\nthing, as source of deferral rather than incitement. This is the case even with instances of naming\nthat we must see, from the outside, as direct incitement—even those names defer some other\neven more imminent violence within that group, and could only meaningfully be countered with\na better name. The result of the mobilizing of the declarative order so as to examine some\npractice that has become a “problem” is to return to that practice (or, perhaps, one of its\n“descendants,” mutations, or incorporations) with a name.\n\nAll “speaking about” is naming, and all naming is the Name-of-God and enacted in the Name of\nGod. So, every utterance is naming God in the name of God, and then we sort things out from\nthere: how did God, or, let’s say, the center, authorize and command that affixation of its name to\nthat form of itself? Instead of asking why someone chose or decided to do or say something,\nwhich situates the prompting of the action somewhere within the subject (which is why we then\nhave to add the social and historical parts afterward), an anthropomorphic disciplinary space has\nsomeone named or deemed by the center to deploy the name of the center.\n\nThere’s no claim to\ninfallible knowledge of the intent of the center here—rather, this anthropomorphic idiom would\nbe a way of initiating and sustaining collaborative inquiries into how we have come by the words\nwe’re using as part of using them. That doesn’t mean we must all be linguists or philologists; it\nwould just mean that our mode of interaction would presuppose that our words come to us, rather\nthan from us. We are all of us centers, attracting convergent attention and open to shared\nattention; we are all of us directing attention to others and everything in the world as centers. So,\non a kind of sliding scale, where is the “needle” between the drawing and directing shared rather\nthan convergent attention in any case?\n\nA study of names, which is a naming of names (we don’t\nhave to keep saying we are always naming but we can always remember that we are always\nnaming), is a continual attempt to pinpoint where that needle is. The further the needle is toward\nthe pole of shared attention, the more the name creates a space in which more naming is possible\n—when convergent attention, violent centralization, has not been sufficiently deferred, a narrow\ncircle of names, applied in a closely guarded (but therefore also, eventually, haphazard,\nproductive of anomalies) way, is insisted upon. What is the advantage, other than familiarity, of speaking in terms of decisions, choices and capacities, subsequently to supplemented by\n“society” and “history,” over an idiom that has us speaking of transitions from attention to\nintention?\n\nIn the latter case we can see the ways that just noticing some foreground against a\nbackground (to speak Gestalt) becomes a way of effecting some new relation between back and\nforeground—without needing to make a stop at a decision, or the will, or some cognitive\ncapacity or moral deliberation (all of which things would be attention-intention “glides,” in\nwhich a centered ordinality is joined).\n\nMaybe it seems like I’m insisting on a metalanguage here, and a rather artificial and awkward\none at that. What would be the point of “banning” perfectly serviceable words like “decide” and\n‘choose,” just because we might have some theoretical questions about the “substantives” which\nthese verbs predicate. I’m just doing the kind of displacement work necessary when one\ndisciplinary space enters into another—much that was taken for granted has to be explicitly\nrevealed as anomalous. An anthropomorphic inquiry wants to settle down with all the commonly\nused words, most definitely including those like “decision” and “choice.”\n\nBut we don’t have to\nkeep using them exactly the same way—I haven’t signed the linguistic or cultural equivalent of a\nnon-disclosure form. When someone does something, and claims to have made a decision,\nthere’s no reason to deny it; what we can do, though, is try to figure out wherein, exactly, the\ndecision lies. What is other than “decision” in an action, and where is the boundary between\ndecision and non-decision? (Note that I am myself using terms like “try to figure out” here.) We\ncan conduct thought experiments. Let’s try and reduce the decision “point” to an absolute\nminimum by introducing as many determinants and making them as determinant as we can—\nbring in that person’s whole history, biology, cultural position, and so on, so as come as close as\nwe can to erasing any trace of a “decision.”\n\nIf there’s something we can’t manage to erase, well,\nthere’s your decision. Let’s move the needle in the opposite direction—let’s reconstruct that\nperson’s entire “equipage” as completely as possible as series of decisions, introducing terms\nindicating alternatives, deliberation, consideration, choice and so on at each point along the way. Let’s try and get this act to be nothing but decision—what does it look like then? Where is the\nnon-decision residue? The very fact that we can move from one pole to another in our inquiry\nsuggests, softly commands, that it is better to be able to slide up and down the scale. And what\nthat further means is that the purpose of doing so is to enhance the probability that the subject of\nour inquiry and all who might model themselves or be modeled on it will be able to do the same\n—that is, keep broadening the space of decision against what will also be an enlarged\nbackground of non-decision.\n\nMaking more conscious, responsible, aware decisions enlarges\nrather than shrinking the arena within which decisions are made. So, we have no problem using\nthe word “decision,” but we do so in order to name and thereby enact a space of deferral (to\ndecelerate and reverse convergence upon some center), not to create some rules for the proper\n“scientific” or “philosophical” use of the word.\n\nIn this way we show any “decision” to be a result of listening to the center. What I am talking\nabout here is not very different from and, in fact, is an extension of, those occasions where one\nclaims to be speaking in the name of some authoritative entity, and therefore has to distinguish\none’s own opinion from what one has to say in the name of that entity. So a diplomat speaks for his country, a clergyman in the name of his church, a scholar in the name of the discipline, and\nteacher in the name of curriculum, a doctor as a bearer of medical expertise, and so on. In many\ncases, these “delegates” will have prepared scripts or language to work with and professional\nnorms to follow, but there will always be those cases where one reaches the limits of the script,\nthe language, the norms, and one has to decide what one’s country, school, profession, church or\nwhatever “wants.”\n\nThis, then, is the model for what we are always already doing anyway, and\nshould therefore do more explicitly and formally. We are always already doing this anyway\nbecause there is never a single word out of our mouths that has not been “borrowed” from some\n“source” we take to be authoritative and are which we are therefore helping to further authorize. If any two or more people were to sit down and examine some “specimens” of their opinions on\nvarious topics, simply asking each other, non-confrontationally, in good faith and the spirit of\ninquiry, where all these opinions came from, down to the use of particular words, phrases and\ngrammatical tics, we would see this very quickly.\n\nOne way of thinking comes from one’s parents,\nanother from an impressive teacher in school, another from the media sources one regularly\nconsumes, and so on. Even if each individual could point to specific modifications in these\nreceived opinions, those modifications have sources, or the intellectual moves that allowed for\nthose modifications (a certain way of assessing facts or logic) have them. Even the best-read and\nmost scholarly among us would have to point to intellectual traditions and their institutional\nreproduction upon which we rely and which, like everyone else, we have been unable to fully\n“vet,” right down to the vocabulary and unknown authorities which trail off into the blur of\nbarely recorded or unrecorded history.\n\nEverything I am saying here is both obvious, once pointed\nout, and indisputable, and yet when are peoples “viewpoints” discussed in this way? Again, the\npoint is not to discredit people by showing their views are not really their own—if that’s true for\nall of us, including those who bring to bear the mechanisms of “discrediting,” how could it\ndiscredit anyone? The point is that we are all, always, far more “delegates” and “representatives”\nthan we are “individuals,” and that formalizing and foregrounding this in social and institutional\ninteractions would provide everyone with more productive ways of contributing to common\nendeavors. If all these inherited ways of thinking, or idioms, can be examined as ways of\n“suturing” sites of mistaken uptakes of imperatives from the center, we can also discover ways of\nimproving them, which is to say, of inventing pedagogies.\n\nThe kind of inquiry I am proposing be made part of discourse generally would no doubt be\nvigorous and reminiscent of some early forms of desacralized discourse pioneered in ancient\nGreece, like “parrhesia” and satire. The minimal anthropomorphic vocabulary allows us to first\nof all identify any utterance as a displacement: if I say something, I make myself a center of\nattention rather than someone else, and I direct others’ attention to some thing in particular,\nrather than something else. This is true even for the most innocuous or welcome of utterances. There is always a prima facie basis, then, for asserting that utterance was aimed at that\ndisplacement, even has, as its full meaning, effecting that displacement.\n\nTo point this out is to\ncentralize the other in a potentially violent way while also, of course, leaving oneself open to the\nidentical operation. If this is the mode of entering a discursive space everyone adopts that space\nwill be able to endure only under the rigorously maintained conditions. Such an approach to\ndiscourse has an undeniable truth to it, while being, under most conditions, unbearably provocative. But the truth can be isolated and the provocation made more bearable insofar as this\nmode of discourse can be practiced as a discovery procedure. Instead of asking people their\nopinions, or what they think, which will generally yield a response, even if frank and\ninformative, that minimizes the “usurpationist” dimension of any utterance, one might begin by\nventuring a hypothesis regarding what they have in fact usurped.\n\nThe most felicitous response\nwould be to admit to that and/or some other usurpation, and then return the charge, hypothesizing\nwhat kind of usurpation might be effected by exposing this one. If everyone is willing to play, we\nwould be mapping out a field of more or less uncertain power, with everyone in a position that\nmore or less coincides with their respective delegations from the center. If we are all usurpers,\neven if just barely, or just maybe, the only remedy is for each to “deem” the others to belong in\nthe positions they inhabit. So, we have a declarative unmasking (“when you say X you’re really\ndoing Y”) followed by an ostensive “re-deeming,” in order to in-order all.\n\nIf participants find\nsome instance of usurpation more difficult to redeem than others, that could also be put on the\nrecord, also in the name of the center, for future review. What I am modeling here is not a form\nof government but a more sociable and responsible form of social interaction predicted upon the\nacceptance of centered ordinality as the originary form of power. If we begin with a secularized\nadmission that we are all out of place, we can further posit that we all might have a place, with\nthe evidence of our belonging in that place to be found in our respective admissions, in the\npractice of our reciprocal redeeming of those admissions.\n\nNot all social spaces need to pulled up to this degree of tension—most won’t, perhaps, and\nmodels can be followed more or less distantly. But the mode of social interaction I am proposing\nwould allow for and demand greater levels of disclosure and honesty, and more controlled and\npurposeful forms of disclosure and honesty, than anything allowed under liberalism, which must\nsee the usurpationist utterance as the exception and therefore subject to severe censure—\nhowever, since no “criteria” for what counts as a real usurpation (or a justified object of\nresentment) or injustice can be other than arbitrary, the supposedly generous assumption that\nusurpers are the exception just allows the charge to be leveled at virtually anyone, depending\nupon the needs of a particular power center.\n\nWhat I am proposing is the possibility that any space\ncan be converted into a disciplinary space in which all the participants are both the subjects and\nthe objects of the inquiry, To assert that someone else is a usurper in his very utterance is to\nhypothesize a proper allocation of positions that has been disrupted, and what would count as\nthat proper allocation can be read off of the language of “denunciation” itself. It is therefore to\npose a problem: how do we identify the boundary line between usurpation and proper\noccupation? What implications of violent centralization can be found in the supposed usurpation,\nthat would not be found in the proper occupation?\n\nWhere in the utterance in question can we\nidentify an opportunity for an increment of deferral that went unexploited? Hypothetical\nutterances that might be seen as being on one side or the other of the boundary depending upon\nsome variable could be constructed. It is in this very process that the participants transition from\nbeing usurpers to being, by reciprocal authorization, proper occupants."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-the-aesthetics-of-the-center",
      "title": "The Aesthetics of the Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "Detecting and articulating boundaries is an aesthetic question. Aesthetics is located on the\noriginary scene, in the oscillation of the attention of the participants between the sign put forth\nby the other and the object. The desire for the object is magnified when the participant’s attention\nis directed toward it by the gesture of the other; the object then attended to directly is stripped of\nthat desirability, which then has the participant return attention to the sign. What is aesthetically\ncompelling here, I would say, is the object as presented by the sign: if we imagine this oscillation\ncontinuing (which, given the nature of oscillation, we must), with each return of attention to the\nobject some way in which the sign has “glossed” the object remains, eventually leaving the\nparticipant with a completed model of the object as marked by the sign, which takes us from\naesthetics to sacrality (and then the sparagmos).\n\nSacrality involves representing the gesture as\ncompelled by the object; aesthetics involves discerning the intentions of the center through the\nattention of others on the scene. This account situates aesthetics on the boundary of both\nknowledge and the sacred. Knowledge is being able to identify, publicly, two objects, but, really,\nfirst of all the same object at different times, as the same. Oscillation between the sign and the\nobject is commanded by the former so as to ensure that all are putting forth the same sign: once\nthis has been ascertained the object can issue imperatives. While we speak of the sign as a\ngesture, we should see the gesture of aborted appropriation as the tip of the sign considered more\ncomprehensively, which must include posture as well as gesture: the hand must be mock\nreaching for the object, but the body must be holding back so as to the frame the reach as just a\ngesture. With each oscillation, more of the body as total sign is encompassed sensually so as to\nconfirm that the sign is the same all around, or determine just how much sameness is necessary\nto make the judgment.\n\nLike every element of the scene, the aesthetic, over time, is abstracted and brought into new\nrelations to the sacred center. A broader desacralization is necessary before “art” can take on\nsome kind of independence relative to the sacred, but until that point aesthetic considerations\nwould be critical to representations of the sacred. Aesthetics would serve the purpose of\nintroducing, welcoming, drawing participants into the sacred scene, providing ways for those\nparticipants to inhabit the scene and minimize the distance between ritual performance and the\nscene of origin. Participants receive their names from the ritual, which carries the aesthetic\ndimension into other practices.\n\nThe separation of art from ritual coincides with the same\ndisruption of sacral kingship that produces politics and the problem of the “tyrant.” It’s therefore\nnot surprising that central to the first works of art is the problem of the tyrant and usurpation of\nthe center more generally. Both Greek epic and Greek tragedy address resentment toward the\nusurped center in a direct manner, in an attempt to discover ways in which that resentment might\nbe made socially productive rather than destructive. Gans, in _Originary Thinking_ , presents the\nhistory of art in terms of whether, and the manner in which, the work of art represents the scene\nof representation itself.\n\nGreek tragedy is a kind of year zero in this regard, as the scene is\npresented directly, and the audience’s participating is mediated directly through the chorus. In\nother words, no reason has to be provided for why we are concerned with the fate of the central\nfigure or, more precisely, why we share and fear the resentment toward him. He does not need to\ncome into, or be brought to, our attention. Once the centrality of the central figure is no longer a\ngiven, the resentment of the central figure himself must propel him to the center—he must be a usurper accusing others of usurpation.\n\nIf the central figure must make his way to center stage, he must also be performing for an\naudience all his own, one he generates and is reciprocally generated by, and that audience must\nbe represented in the work as well. The boundary between the art work and the audience is\ntherefore represented within the work as well. The more the central figure is stripped of any\nsupplementary features that make him “inherently” central, the more arbitrary the placement of\nany figure at the center becomes, and the more interchangeable the central figure and the\nmembers of the audience, both represented and actual. Centrality can only be asserted against\nsome other social center, which generates the resentful hero of romanticism, who is subsequently\nsystematically humiliated over the course of literary realism.\n\nCentrality can be systematically\ndismantled in the work, in which case the subject of the work is exposing the now discredited\nmeans of representing centrality. New figures can be placed at the center, in an attempt to\nrenovate exhausted forms. The boundary between art and audience can itself be placed at the\ncenter, in works of art that can only be completed by the reader, or listener. The center here, we\ncould say, is the art “recipient” produced or called forth by attention and devotion to the work\nitself, a devotion that must be given on faith. What we can trace through all of these aesthetic\npossibilities is a relation to the secular world, all of the energies of which are devoted to\ndiscovering ways in which the central figures at all levels can be deemed “non-tyrannical.”\n\nWhat\nkind of unqualified devotion will either evade or redeem the resentment toward the usurper? The\nsecular world is comprised of the vast archipelago of disciplines, springing originally from\nphilosophy but also politics and the circulation of money. All of these disciplines are in service to\npower, including the more narrowly scientific and technological, and their respective objects of\nstudy are the myriad forms of super-sovereignty that might remove, at least temporarily, the stain\nof tyranny from social institutions. Means of discipline aimed at organizing our attention in\ncertain ways toward certain kinds of objects are presented as legitimate by the disciplines\nbecause they are dictated by some anthropomorphic model that renders that means of discipline\nin accordance with nature, the authority which can’t be superseded.\n\nKnowledge depends upon\naesthetics: only a center free of usurpationist desires can sustain attention on the gap in\nimperatives issued by the center, and only aesthetic oscillation can dissolve those desires into the\nmanifold forms of attention directed toward that center. But the disciplines must present\nthemselves as prior to the aesthetic because their secularized, object-centered forms of\nknowledge cannot see the discipline as a scene. This means that the relation between the work of\nart and the disciplines is satirical: all secular art is a satire of the disciplines. (If it’s not, then it’s\nnot art, but rather promotional material for the disciplines.)\n\nAll satire needs to know is that someone else could be at the center other than the one presently\noccupying it—and that is always the case. Of course, the same is true of any alternative occupant\nof the center proposed by figures on the margin, and it’s true of whatever power center must be\noccupied in order to effectively propose an alternative. Satire is effectively total, and includes\nitself. Satire sees everyone as aspirants for some center who fail to see the inessentiality of that\naspiration, which is to say, its roots in mimetic desire and resentment. Such a view of others can\nbe discerned within the aesthetic moment on the originary scene itself: part of the oscillation between sign and object on the scene is a recursively articulated representation of one’s fellow\nsigners.\n\nRunning up to the issuance of the sign each member sees his fellows as dangerous—it is\nfear, not just of physical harm (although very much that as well) but of the collapse of order that\nleads into the presentation of the sign. Once others have signed, though, they must also fear, and\noneself must also be dangerous. What does the other look like, riven by extreme vulnerability\nand projecting a threat, all in one instance? I think we have our answer if we think about what is\nperhaps the most typical figure of satire: the blustering bully whose pretensions are easily\npunctured. Satire is the most pedagogical artistic form, because if we are all capable of seeing\none another (and ourselves) in these terms (which is not to say we should always and only see\neach other in these terms) it will be a great aid in preventing the escalation of resentments: much\nmore so than seeing ourselves and others as tragic heroes, romantic victims, or lyrical soloists, all\nof which leave residues of resentment once centrality has been demythified and which therefore\ncall for renewed sacrifices.\n\nOrginary satire, then, which is also a very portable aesthetic form, is the manner in which we can\ncarry out the discovery procedure initiated by representing each other as usurpers of whatever\nposition we all occupy by virtue of our utterances. Increasingly proficient satirical performances\nwill situate the respective usurpations within the various disciplinary scenes which enable one or\nanother usurpation—the psychological, sociological, legal, economic, and so on concepts\nrepresent means of ascendancy within a given setting while also being the means of\ndemonstrating the limits of those pretensions. Without originary satire, one can’t really get\nanywhere close to an understanding of the disciplinary social order that would allow one to act in\nany way other than a puppet of some power center or another.\n\nSatire is not infinitely sustainable\nitself, though—successive and reciprocal representations of others as uniting the extremes of\nthreat and vulnerability reduce those extremes, and one can proceed to obey the imperative to\nenter scenes of imperative mistakenness and resolve the gap between imperative given and\nimperative obeyed. Now, though, it becomes possible to stand before the center by treating the\ndisciplines not as imperative frames demanding your obedience to a super-sovereign composed\nof resentment toward the gesture toward any mode of sacrality (center-directed sociality), but as\nsemiotic materials comprising a scene upon which we can see ourselves participating in\nresolving the imperative gap. We can know that we know in the name of the center.\n\nThe secular disciplines all share the same origin: the elevation of the declarative sentence to the\nprimary linguistic form, in accord with the metalanguage of literacy. This doesn’t free\ndisciplinary practices from ostensives and imperatives; rather, it generates imperatives and\nostensives out of the declarative order itself. The declarative commands you to withdraw some\ndemand and convert it into an interrogative—declarative sentences are always answers to at least\none of at least two possible questions (one concerning the topic, one concerning the comment). The imperative of the declarative order is that questions need to come from some uncertainty\nregarding imperatives or ostensives generated by a previous declarative.\n\nAny declarative\nsentence can be checked for meaning and reference: can whatever it has doing whatever it is\ndoing do that thing; can we find our way toward possible ostensives in the world (and scenes\nanchoring those ostensives) that would make the declarative an answer to a question? If the declarative (and in speech act terms, the constative) is the primary, and the ostensives and\nimperatives (performatives) are the derivative forms of speech, there shouldn’t be any\nimperatives or ostensives that can’t be derived from a declarative—imperatives and ostensives\nare merely implementations of the abstract model of the declarative, which must descend into\nreality due to some contingency.\n\nWe should really, eventually, with the help of algorithms and\ncomputers, be able to dispense with imperatives and ostensives altogether and generate a\ncomplete declarative model of reality that would account for all possible ostensives. Any secular\ndiscipline must construct and defend the integrity of its own space by ensuring that this is indeed\nthe case—that there are no stray imperatives or ostensives that the declarative order would be\nsecondary to. This involves establishing and enforcing rules for proper imperatives and\nostensives (“proofs”). This is the source of the super-sovereignty that has involved the\ndisciplines in a millennial-long struggle with central authority, which must issue imperatives\nbefore they have been “justified” on terms that would be satisfactory to any self-maintaining\ndiscipline.\n\nThat this is the unspoken imperative of the disciplinary—that the prerogative of the central\nauthority must be usurped and represented as derivative of the discipline—is the starting point of\nsecular satire. Whatever, within the discipline, is represented as the result of an impeccable string\nof declarative sentences can be represented satirically as resting upon an ungrounded command. The disciplines themselves must incessantly issue commands that they have not themselves\n“sufficiently” justified through their own metalanguages, and since the disciplines cannot allow\nfor this possibility they are more “tyrannical” than any central authority.\n\nThe discipline creates\nconcepts meant to apply to its object of study, while the discipline itself maintains its immunity\nto those corrosive concepts, which situate the “object” of study as dominated by some mythical\norder from which the discipline is to liberate them. The secular satire applies the concepts of the\ndiscipline to the discipline itself, creating an “infra” disciplinary space within the discipline\nwherein the anomalies generated by unauthorized imperatives and ostensives can be enacted and\nexamined. Satire brings an irremediable, incorrigible mistakenness into the discipline, enriching\nthe declarative order through both convolutions and simplifications, precisely by acknowledging\nthe primacy of the ostensive-imperative world.\n\nThe ostensive-imperative world permeates the\ndeclarative order—in making that statement its author commands you to identify the traces of\nthat world in these and other sentences, and to treat the constitution of the boundary between\nimperative and declarative as an event, in which declarative constructs make present previously\nunnoted imperatives in its own predecessor sentences.\n\nSatire is the most mimetic of the artistic forms—often an exact reproduction of an act or\nutterance, in a slightly changed context, is enough to expose the imperative embedded in the\ndeclarative. And it doesn’t take a lot to modify declaratives into imperatives in such a way as to\nshow, as Alasdair McIntyre has pointed out, that the descriptive and explanatory concepts and\nnorms developed by the modern human sciences depend on, are bound up with, and provide\ninstruction to, the institutions and practices that shape the behaviors and the subjects those\ndiscourses purport to account for. To characterize the human subject as a “rational decision\nmaker,” for example, is to abstract that subject from its embeddedness in institutions and traditions and see and respond to only those behaviors that correspond to the model of “rational\ndecision maker.”\n\nThe same goes for characterizations of individuals as consumers, voters,\nworkers and all the other categories that place individuals and groups external to each other, to\nthemselves, and to any form of centered ordinality, subjecting them to the mode of super-\nsovereignty making the designation. To describe me as a consumer is to command me to\nconsume, and if I make explicit that command I can, in turn, if provided with the necessary\npedagogical resources, represent the world back to my designators as containing nothing but\nobjects of consumption that I chow down compulsively like a PacMan. That would, really, just\nbe me hearing your description as an order and implicating you, through my obedience, in the\norder you have summoned into being. In which case, are you quite sure you want to describe us\nall as “consumers”? (What do participants in the discipline, as participants in the discipline,\nconsume?) Satire is a great purgative: whatever survives it might be able to last."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-mediated-centrality",
      "title": "Mediated Centrality",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "We can see the different speech forms as different media, even in the sense that each can be used\nto channel the others in revealing ways: you can point at something in order to ask a question\nabout it in some contexts, a question can really be a statement, a declarative sentence an obvious,\nand ominous, command, and so on. Whatever marks an utterance as one form or another, or\nsome overlapping of forms, is what marks it as media, because the simplest way of thinking\nabout media is as whatever provides for the scene enabling and constituted by the sign itself. The\nfirst medium is the mimetic structure of the originary scene itself, with the symmetry spread\nacross the scene and mirrored and modulated from one body to the others setting the stage for the\ngesture of deferral.\n\nWe can take this tightly organized network, with each “station” “pinging” the\nothers, as the model for all media. Mimetic theory is usually too quick to find its way to easily\nrecognizable examples of imitation, like those found in the mimetic triangles of desire so critical\nto Rene Girard. Marcel Jousse’s “mimism,” though, reminds us that mimesis, or miming, works\non much more levels both more fractal and more macro, and continue operating within the\n“ideas” and “social structures” that we can take to be moderating responses to mimetically\ngenerated violence.\n\nFor Jousse, every move we make is not only mimed, but recalls and deploys (“revivifies”) all the\nmuscular and other physiological responses deposited in the “anthropos” from previous mimings. The world and any knowledge we have of it is mimed, not in “images” in our “minds,” but in our\nbodily movements, stillnesses, and tensions. As soon as we come into the world we orient\nourselves to our surroundings by miming everything in it, with our eyes, ears and touch. With\nour mimed gestures, we act back on the world, forcing new disclosures on its part, which we\nmime in turn. All our communications and interactions with others are saturated with miming,\nsomething which is easy enough to notice if you look at the eye contact, nodding, head tilting,\nword repeating and checking, body opening and closing that is evident in every interpersonal\nencounter.\n\nJousse insists that even more technologically advanced and abstracted forms of media,\nlike reading or films, are thoroughly mediated mimologically. How have we attained the control\nover our body that allows us to sit still, face forward, eyes focused on black print on white page, as we read? Even this non-movement is miming, as we would probably confirm if we can\nremember the days of learning to sit quietly over books and other reading materials in schools. On the originary scene we should imagine a cumulative reciprocal matching of body parts and\nmovements as part of what we call the “gesture of aborted appropriation”—as I’ve pointed out,\nany stray movement, any sudden move within the process of “lining up” in front of the object\ncould easily lead to the breakdown of the scene.\n\nJousse is necessary for anthropomorphics\nbecause he doesn’t remark on the causal primacy of miming and then go on to talk about the\nactivities we already have familiar names for, like “religion,” “art” and so on. He insists that we\nfocus on the constitutive mimological character of each and every one of these human endeavors.\n\nIt’s extremely instructive to consider that one’s attempt to construct a complex string of\narguments, aimed at displacing and modifying some other complex string of arguments, is\nriddled throughout with the oral and written styles derived from the rhythms of vocabulary,\ngrammatical constructs, habits of paragraphing and punctuating, assonance and alliteration, and\nso on, which one has mimed from others and now inhabits as a result of an entire lifetime of\nreconstructing and recombining these rhythms. Even more, the fundamental purpose of the\nclichés, formulas and parallelisms Jousse identifies in the oral style, that is, memorization, is no\nless central to our mimetic and pedagogical practices to this day.\n\nIt’s true that we don’t need to\nmemorize actual texts, but more tacitly we have to remember learned responses to texts, to\nconversations, to questions, to implicit and explicit imperatives, to a world of emergent\nostensives—if we look closely, we can see people’s self-centerings organized through various\nmnemotechnic devices that involve remembering who they are. In other words, we have to\nremember the scenic forms of our interactions with others. Jousse believed that we have\nabstracted or “algebrized” ourselves away from our native miming spontaneity by giving\nourselves over not only to writing but mathematized forms of social interaction, but he provides\nus with ways of seeing a equally pervasive miming being carried over into these media as well.\n\nThe reason we are more than just a jumble of dissociated mimes inscribed in us through the\nbillions of separate “events” we live through is because we bring the mimes that “stick” into\nvarious rhythmic relations with each other; and eventually into what Jousse calls “style,” or the\nbecoming conscious of the mimes working their way through us. Jousse’s project is a profoundly\nanti-metaphysical one, which would have us recover our rhythmic birthright, and which has\nformed a crucial tributary into the study of the difference between orality and literacy pioneered\nby Millman Parry’s study of Homer, continued by Alfred Lord, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, of\ncourse Marshal McLuhan, and others—a tradition which I have taken David Olson’s more recent\nwork to be a kind of culmination of.\n\nWhat Jousse does not consider is the problem of violence, or\nmimetic rivalry, viewing the gestural world as a kind of Eden which has never really been lost\neven if it’s under threat in certain more “educated” regions of the Western world. It’s not\nsurprising, then, that even though Jousse would seem to be especially well placed to hypothesize\nregarding the origin of language he, on the contrary, considers it to be a non-problem, with oral\nlanguage itself simply a form of gesturing, making use of a different combination of muscular\nnetworks—those producing sounds that originally just supplemented gestures. How we could\nhave ever gotten lost in the algebraic modern world then seems to be a problem, but I have no\ninterest in engaging in a “critique” of Jousse here—like other seminal thinkers one has to accept that what he can give you may very well depend upon him not being able to give what he can’t.\n\nAnd what Jousse, resituated within originary grammar, can give us is a model of originary\nmedia, which subsequent media progressively distance themselves from, retrieve and\nsupplement. In other words, I am suggesting a more general application for Olson’s reference to\n“classical prose” to illustrate the operations of the metalanguage of literacy. Let’s say that the\n“media” is whatever makes a scene hold together as a scene, and whatever makes it hold together\nas a scene is whatever provides a space for the sign to signify. This provides us with a kind of\ncontinuum for articulating scene and sign: we can see the sign as a minimal “protuberance” on a\ndensely networked or mediated scene; or, we can see the sign maximally, as requiring an\nextensive articulation requiring only a few “props”; or anywhere in between.\n\nTo use Gregory\nBateson’s definition of “information,” the sign is the difference that makes a difference on the\nscene, and any judgment on what counts as this “difference” can only be made from within\nanother (disciplinary) scene. So, originary media is a network, a set of invisible lines we could\nhypothetically draw connecting the sensorium of each of the scene’s participants to each other’s,\nbut also to all the different “parts” (what counts as a “part” depends on the vision, embedded in a\nbody in motion or stasis) of all the others’ bodies. We would even have to draw lines directly\nfrom body parts of one participant to body parts of others, as we should assume tacit, tactile and\nsubtle forms of responsiveness on everyone’s part.\n\nSo, just as the metalanguage of literacy\nsupplements whatever on the speech scene that cannot be directly represented in writing,\neverything “horizontal” in the originary media would have to be supplemented in subsequent\nscenic articulations; and, just as classical prose generates the simulation of a scene upon which\nthe author and read stand with the topic of the prose, all subsequent media aim at an equivalent\nsimulation of those lines connecting us bodily to our fellow participants.\n\nJust like the sign is immersed in the scene without there being any definite boundary separating\nthem, the scene itself is immersed in its surroundings, making its surrounding conditions of its\nown scenicity. To follow up on the previous discussion of aesthetics, every media represents\nitself as a medium in its distinction from the surroundings it converts into its conditions—again,\nwithout any definite boundaries. An early human ritual maximizes everything remembered to be\npresent in the first ritual, with such memory itself being a series of mimings, supplementations\nand simulations—everyone is dressed as the animal placed at the center, everyone has a\nprescribed part in the drama represented in the ritual—all this is media.\n\nThis mediated scene\ncloses itself off from whatever isn’t the scene—the forest beyond the clearing where the ritual\ntakes place, say. But if there are noises from the forest, or an animal appears from it, the\ncommunity will likely be able to respond to such contingencies from within the ritual, giving\nthese new additions a part, using them to further substantiate the scene. They may become\nserendipitous additions to the established ritual. But this would also mean that members of the\ncommunity are attuned to what is non-scene as potential scene, including other animals, water,\nsky, sun, stars, and so on—all of which could become media insofar as any of it can be brought\nin to supplement the scene and more precisely distinguish the sign.\n\nThis is all miming—if the\nwind, for example, becomes medium by blowing through the ritual and modifying the setting of\nthe ritual, this is because the effects of the wind can now be mimed, but if those effects can now be mimed, that means they were always already mimed, which would explain how they could\nhave been imagined as contributing to the ritual in the first place.\n\nI’m not going to get into a detailed analysis of the tremendous developments in media over the\nlast century and a half that have had the effect, most obviously, of enabling simultaneity over\ngreat distances—unlimited simultaneity across the planet, in fact. I will just point out that what\nthe model I’ve just constructed would suggest must be seen as a problem each form of media—\nradio, TV, film, the internet, etc.—must solve is how to draw those horizontal lines connecting\nall the participants in these very different kinds of scenes. What kinds of miming,\nsupplementation and simulations allow for the operation of these different media?\n\nAlready with\nwriting, we have media that constitutes not a single scene, but unlimited possible scenes. In what\nsense is, say, a modern translation of _Oedipus Rex_ the “same” text as the one first read or\nperformed by Athenian citizens? This is a way of asking in what sense we are on the same scene\nas those Athenians. Insofar as we are, that shared scenic relation is generated mediatically:\nthrough histories of performance, transmission, study, translation, and so on—all of which are\nforms of media generating signs that go into the composition of a transhistorical scene, a present,\nupon which that text might be the “same.”\n\nSo, those horizontal lines are drawn by reaching into\nthe surroundings of a given media and incorporating some of those surroundings into the media. Now, the miming, supplementations and simulations I have been contending are constitutive of\nthe media are also the elements of the media that “critical” media theorists have always taken to\nbe sources of mystification. Isn’t it, after all, the illusion of believing in the lovers’ passion on\nscreen, of participating in the woes of the novelistic character, that enables one to be\n“interpellated” by the “dominant ideology”? In other words, the media generate the illusion of all\nwhose attention it draws being on the same scene.\n\nIt’s not just an illusion, but it’s that as well,\nand a potent one insofar as the devices employed to generate the experience of sharing a scene\nconceal the historic mediations that actually make the scene the same in a different sense. New\nscene can then be generated to represent the mechanisms used to generate the illusion. Paying\nattention to the scene, bringing the scene and scenically transformed elements of the non-scene\ninto the sign is all part of the practice of originary satire—we could say this all involves\nenhancing our resources as mimers beyond what the current media would, strictly speaking,\nallow.\n\nThe challenge is to develop modes of inscription that uncompromisingly expose the\nhistoricity of any particular scene (including the scene of inscription itself) while inscribing a\ntranshistorical (anthropomorphic) model of exposure that persists through the successive scenes\norganized around the text. But we can now pursue all these inquiries without that other illusion\nof laying bare, once and for all, an unjust hierarchy to be dismantled in the creation of a just\negalitarian order. It is remarkable that almost nobody really believes in such a transformation\nwhile at the same time everybody does, as is evident from the omnipresent references to\n“examining power relations” and the still popular gesture of muckraking into “abuses of power,”\nhidden “power elites,” and so on.\n\nYes, there are power relations, and abuses of power, but no\npower-free or power-neutral model against which to measure them. No one wants to say what,\nexactly, “non-abusive” power would look like because then they’d be confessing that power\nhierarchies can in fact be unobjectionable—that is, virtually no one can think outside of the\nopposition between the tyrant and the holy victim. What could be more illusory than that?\n\nThe dominant medium today is the internet which, as Eric Gans has pointed out, tends to\nassimilate all other media to itself: here, we see the work of miming, supplementation and\nsimulation of one medium with regard to another taking place. But the internet is itself modeled\non a rather ancient medium: the archive: books, themselves a kind of medium, placed in a single\nlocation (another medium), catalogued in various ways (more media), used by those specially\ntrained to do so (more media—more miming, supplementation and simulation). The internet is\nan all-inclusive and immediately accessible archive, and it makes all signs, scenes and events\ninstantly archivable.\n\nArchives were used to collect all the relevant cultural products of a\ncivilization; the internet archives everything indiscriminately. Relations between elements in the\narchive are determined by algorithms abstracted from searches by users and shaping future\nsearches. So, if you search “Charles Dickens Bleak House” you’ll get connected to critical\ndiscussions of the novel, Dickens’s other novels, novelists contemporary with Dickens, like\nThackeray, Chancery Court, the all-consuming civil court that a subplot in the novel is centered\non—in what proportions would depend upon what readers, critics and scholars focus on in their\nstudies of the novel.\n\nThe internet distributes scenes of inquiry which overlap with each other in\nvarying degrees. What doesn’t come up in searches will eventually disappear from the culture,\neven if in principle it will always be there to be retrieved. The algorithm is a supplementary\nmedium for this more abstracted, distributed and immense archive in process.\n\nThe primary form of cultural activity is therefore becoming archival work (we’re becoming\nlibrarians). We’re always constructing “portfolios,” in which one cultural item we take to be\nsignificant is shown to be significant because it adds to the significance of other cultural items. And part of what makes an item significant is that others have asserted its significance. Social\nand cultural theories are essentially models for conducting searches and building relationships\nwithin the archives so as to construct hierarchies of significance. Sometimes we’ll assert the\nsignificance of something as lying precisely in the refusal of others to grant it significance.\n\nAnyone who has spent much time on blogs outside of the “mainstream” are well aware of how\npretty much every dominant narrative of the 20th century West is currently under extreme strain,\nand it’s not clear how much of the Whig history that has reigned supreme over the past 70 years\nwill remain intact. All this is a result of archival work, and a lot of it simply involves juxtaposing\ntexts that have been made central alongside equally (or more) compelling accounts that have\nbeen “memory-holed.” It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that’s all that Mencius\nMoldbug did in constructing his political formalism. It’s with far less exaggeration all Moldbug’s\nopposite, Noam Chomsky, did, well before the internet, in his political writing (“here’s what the\n_New York Times_ says; here’s what this paper in Managua, or Beirut, or Madrid says...”).\n\nMedia as archive suggests a way to begin thinking about alternative and counter-models of\neducation, at all levels. Instead of packaging and delivering standard narratives as the school\nsystem does now, just have students, from the beginning, charting pathways through the\narchives. Have students juxtapose multiple narratives around a single event or historical figure,\nusing different media from different periods and from different perspectives. Have them keep\nnoticing differences between the narratives, and building profiles of those narratives. These\nwould be scenes of inquiry that are in turn deposited back into the archive.\n\nTeachers can be there to help out and ensure students construct sufficiently challenging projects. Learning how to read\nand write would be part of this process—dictionaries, grammar, rhetoric, logic and other\nresources are also part of the archives. This approach would break up ideological commonplaces\nand cultural monopolies, while organizing everyone around the process of inquiry itself. Of\ncourse, the possibility of such a pedagogy depends upon the coherence of power, which itself\ndepends upon the mimological relations between different levels of power: the coherence of\npower would be measured by the extent to we see fractalized mimisms through the various\nchains of command comprising the social order: do those with more power model for those with\nless practices that subordinates can, in turn, analyze and replicate in ways that are later\nincorporated by the commanders?\n\nThis inquiry would yield far more valuable information than\nthose predicated upon liberal notions of consent, dialogue, communication, shared beliefs,\nsympathy, solidarity and so on. Can we actually show an institution to be engaged in a shared\nproject? And do all institutions participate in a shared projects modeled by the central authority? These would be the properly pedagogical questions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-center-and-distribution",
      "title": "Center and Distribution",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "The proximal cause of the breakage and spillage of the sacral order is money and capital. For\nsecular theory, labor, property, money, the market and capital are the real underpinnings—the\n“structure”—over which “cultural” and “political” institutions are superstructured. Within these\nsecularized frames, all agents are external to each other, which means they are most\nfundamentally opposed to each other, making the primary theoretical question how do they ever\nmanage to cooperate? Starting with the center, as both occupied and signifying, reverses this\napproach. Now we can see all these concepts as the results of delegations on the part of central\nauthority, and of efforts to extend that authority, to overcome limits to it, and to restore authority\nonce those attempts to overcome limits have produced competing power centers striving to\ninfluence or occupy the center.\n\nMarkets do not spring up spontaneously out of an evolving\ndivision of labor, leading to the use of currency to ease the growing scale of transactions, and\nthen to debt and capital as a result of the unequal success experienced by the various players on\nthe market. Markets are created by states so as to provision their militaries when abroad, and\nmoney is supplied so as to enable soldiers to participate in those markets. Debt is originally used\nto dispossess farmers as the state or more powerful landowners encroach upon their possessions. Modern capital is the power to abstract individuals, groups and perhaps most importantly of all,\nentire disciplines, from the traditions and communities within which they are embedded so as to\nintroduce them into new hierarchies. Power is ontologically prior to and causative of, markets\nand all the rest.\n\nMarkets are real insofar as they are what people without direct authority for maintaining the\nsocial center do with knowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and\nbounded but not directly supervised by such authorities. If the central authority assigns to a\nmember of the ruling class the project of producing a certain number of vehicles in a certain\ntime, he will not need nor want a thorough account of all the decisions made by the individual\nreceiving the delegation. Nor will the individual receiving the delegation want such a complete account from those to whom he delegates. Everyone has a sphere of power and command, and\nexpects those under his authority to find ways to cooperate so as to meet the demand.\n\nSince\n“total” supervision is impossible, since there will always be some space between an imperative\ngiven and one obeyed, attempts at total supervision are signs of a dysfunctional power order, one\nriven by power struggles in which each attempts to attain the mantle of super-sovereignty. In a\nfunctional power order, no more power is given or sought than that needed to complete the\nassignment. The people working at the middle and lower levels of a social order, then, will be\ninvolved in various exchanges and, insofar as forms of cooperation are sustained and\ninstitutionalized, might very well end up interacting in ways suggested by liberal economic\ntheories.\n\nThe fact that corporations need to be chartered by the state, which could in principle\nrevoke any charter once the corporation ceases to serve its declared primary function means that\nthe primacy of the state over economic agencies is already conceded, even in liberal societies. Indeed, the prodigious technological developments of modern Western societies owes far more to\nits enduring corporate structure than to more recent inventions like liberalism and democracy.\n\nThe center distributes. The carcass on the originary scene distributes itself, or is distributed\namong the participants by the presiding and enduring being of the victim, as pieces to be\nconsumed. The earliest forms of distribution are just such divisions of food items, no doubt\nmatched, more or less roughly, with contributions made to the center. This is a gift economy, or\nwhat I have been calling imperative exchange, which can be widely expanded to include\nrelations between families and clans. In the case of conquest, distribution takes the form of what\nCarl Schmitt called the “Nomos,” an originary division of land among the participants in the\nconquest, no doubt proportional to their respective contributions and the command hierarchy.\n\nDistribution can later take the form of grants of titles and rights to make use of one’s property in\nvarious ways. The establishment of towns organized around artisans, guilds and markets, with\nspecific rights, tied to specific obligations, for all, is yet another kind of distribution. The\nintroduction of money into these settings is yet another distribution, aimed at modifying the\neffects of the other ones. If we think of the center as the source of distribution and, also, as the\neffect of its distributions, we will never be able to imagine it makes sense to think of rights\nwithout corresponding obligations—the nexus of rights and obligation, the imperative exchange,\nis simply what distribution from the center entails.\n\nThis would be true on local levels as well. Peasants would want more land, guilds would want tighter protections, merchants would want\ngreater latitude in their dealings—that is, authority would be tested. But the tests and questions\nwould be meaningful in relation to the founding nomos and the traditions it generated. Let’s say\nthat the model of imperative exchange must have reached its limits in the feudal order in a\nmanner similar to the conditions I hypothesized earlier regarding the ancient imperial order. It\nmay seem obvious that this must lead to the “freeing” of all subjects from all fixed reciprocal\nobligations such has been effected by the modern liberal order.\n\nBut if what follows imperative\nexchange is not merely negative freedoms, but interrogative imperativity, that is, the question of\nhow to devote oneself completely to the signifying center, then the answer lies in new forms of\nthe nomos, providing access to the invisible to create new and more minimal hierarchies.\n\nThe introduction of money to empower those more directly dependent upon the ruler indicates\nsome lack of security of central authority—it means indirect forms of power, rather than\nformalized, direct ones, have become necessary. There might be measures that can be taken by\nthe central authority to control the supply of money in such a way as to recoup that power\ndeficiency, but the more social interaction is mediated monetarily the more likely it is that the\nstate itself becomes monetized. The problem here is that the state needs masses of people\nmobilized for various projects, and to mobilize them they must be abstracted from their\nembedments.\n\nFor the state to directly initiate such abstractions is to risk generating opposition\nfrom various power centers—only by recruiting those power centers themselves could the central\nauthority reduce the risk sufficiently. It’s easier to recruit power centers that are themselves\nalready abstracted and thrive on abstraction—risk takers, who can be integrated or dispensed\nwith as necessary. In that case, those abstracters must be permitted to make demands on the\ncentral authority, which is to say abstract its own modes of performance. The other approach to\nabstraction, and the only one consistent with central authority, is the assignation of teams,\ndirectly accountable to the central authority, with the authority to take whatever measures are\nnecessary to improve the functioning of the institution.\n\nIn other words, the form of institutional\ninnovation proper to secure central authority is “skunkworks,” or teams empowered to work\noutside of established protocols in order to accomplish specific tasks. This is a fractal form of\ncentered ordinality, and provides the basis for permanent forms of rule, insofar as the central\nauthority can always “seed” skunkworking teams, announced or unannounced, within institutions\nso as to keep attention centered on the primary institutional function. In this way, the originary\nsocial form is retrieved in a way that counters the tendency of formal delegation to create\ninscrutable forms of power that resist further formalization.\n\nThe traditionalist opposes abstraction in the name of full embedment, but the possibility of\nrejecting abstraction disappeared with the rise of divine kingship a few millennia ago. By now,\nthe forms of embedment defended against abstraction are the results of previous abstractions that\nhave been re-embedded. The question is, in what form will abstraction proceed? Or, what kinds\nof mobilizations are necessary? If the market operates within the capillaries of the system of\nsupervision, then abstractions should contribute to that system. The paradox of power is that the\nmore central the authority, the more authority depends upon the widest distribution of the means\nto recognize authority; to put it in grammatical terms, the paradox of power is the paradox of the\nmost unequivocal imperative leaving the largest scope of implementation of that imperative.\n\nAs\nAndrew Bartlett explains very thoroughly in his “Originary Science, Originary Memory:\nFrankenstein and the Problem of Modern Science,” abstraction always involves some\ndesacralization or, to put it more provocatively, some sacrilege. Sacrilege can be justified on the\ngrounds that the innovation it introduced will enable new forms of observance of the founding\nimperatives of the social order. So, the sacrilege should be, as Bartlett argues, “minimal,” while\nthe new forms of observance (I depart from Bartlett’s formulation here) should be maximal. Abstraction creates new “elements,” and therefore new relations between elements.\n\nMonetary\nand capitalist abstractions are pulverizing, creating new elements that are identical to each other,\nand therefore most easily mobilized for any purpose. This is the process of “de-skilling,” with its\nultimate telos being automation, that labor theorists have known of for a very long time. Any mode of abstraction consistent with secure central authority, or auto-cracy, meanwhile, would\nmake ever finer distinctions between skills, competencies and forms of authority within\ndisciplinary spaces. In this way, abstraction carries with it its own form of re-embedment.\n\nThe market economy, then, becomes a measure of fluctuations around the threshold at which the\nparadox of power is made explicit. Let’s imagine a king turning himself into the largest property\nowner in the realm, and formalizing, as disposable private property, all that is possessed at\ndifferent levels of authority within the kingdom. The king converts much of the army into his\nprivate security force, and the rest are distributed to the various lords, barons, merchants, and so\non. Let’s further assume some external market every producer within the kingdom can sell to,\nwhich would in turn create internal markets. Let’s also accept the libertarian assumption of a\nconsensual legal system, which settles contractual disputes and violations of property rights.\n\nThe\ncommunity would be converted into a mass of competitive enterprises. Some would do better in\nthe competition, and would put the less successful out of business, buy up the pieces and\nequipment of failed companies, hire the former owners, and so on. The trend would be toward a\nhierarchy of monopolies, in which case supply chains could be agreed upon by the companies\nthemselves. The real purpose of establishing a market is to break up one system of distribution\nand create another. The market would essentially cancel itself, and we would end up with what is\nessentially a single company supplying all of the society’s needs, unless the more powerful\nmonopolies undertook to introduce competition at the lower levels in order to provide\nthemselves with a wider range of available products and workers.\n\nBut once this process is\ninitiated, the different leading monopolies would end up in competition with each other, as the\nnew companies they form or break off out of existing smaller ones would serve one monopolistic\nconcern better than others. The more competition, the more instability and insecurity, the more\ncollusion and counter-collusion, the more fully marketized and monetized the social order: it is\nonly at this point that prices are again needed in order to determine which producers are creating\nmore value for the community. Now, that point at which the leading monopolies would intervene\nin the smaller ones is the point at which a central authority could behave in exactly the same\nway, and undermine itself in order to have more direct access to its materials; or, the central\nauthority would act directly on the emergent mismatch between formal designations and actual\nfunctioning by inserting teams into the relevant companies on the model I suggested above.\n\nIn\nthis latter case, the paradox of power is made fully explicit: all members of the social order are\nfollowing the imperative to richly implement the imperatives issued by the center; in the former\ncase, the paradox of power is obscured: explicit power is a mask for hidden and unaccountable\nforms of power.\n\nAll social conflicts can’t be reduced to this fluctuation, but all social conflicts are “processed”\nthrough it. This is most obviously the case for everything grouped under the concept of\nglobalization, most especially movements of capital (at the “high” end), especially financial, and\nmigration (at the “low” end). Globalization represents a raising of the threshold at which the\nparadox of power is made explicit: global corporations have been released from obligations to\nany central authority and construct their own command chains, which include governments as\nsubordinate partners; advocates of increased migration exercise power across borders that national states find it difficult to counter.\n\nIn both cases, states are set up so that they must\nrespond to the same “market” incentives as the corporations and migrants themselves. This is the\ncase even if globalization is an imperialist strategy advanced by one or more leading powers—in\nthat case, the new powers ceded to subordinates end up compromising and colonizing the home\ngovernment itself. That government (or those governments) might even become more powerful\nin terms the effects they can have globally, while still becoming less powerful in terms of their\nability to control or even predict those effects. We could imagine a point at which the paradox of\npower would take on an inverted form, in which it becomes explicit that central authorities\nwould not be issuing “operational” commands at all—commands would just be one more\nincentive (or disincentive) agents further down in the chain of command would have to take into\naccount by assessing the likelihood of any penalty for disobedience. Of course, this is already\nregularly the case, as corporations weigh the costs and benefits of possibly paying a fine for\nbreaking some law or regulation as opposed to losing whatever advantage on the market the\ntransgression provides them.\n\nWithin a market order, then, any action, event or relationship is characterized by a fundamental\nduality. On one side, however thinly, the paradox of power is in play: all actors recognize that\ntheir sphere of activity is protected by some more powerful agency and constrain and direct their\nactivity accordingly. On the other side, to some extent, imperatives are converted into market\nsignals—that is, a site of exchange where one person’s power to punish or reward you must be\nbalanced against lots of other peoples’ power to do so. In both cases we find an interaction\nbetween center and periphery—in the first case, one acts in a way that redounds to the authority\nof the center, thereby creating space for the further replacement of external by auto-supervision;\nin the second case, one tries to subject the central authority to incentives and disincentives\nsimilar to the ones we are all subject to—this ranges from simple bribery and other forms of\ncorruption to the vast avenues of influences made legal and even encouraged within a liberal\nsocial order, like lobbying, forming interest groups, political donations, think tanks, media\npropaganda and so on. We could locate anything anyone does, thinks or says somewhere along\nthis continuum and study social dysfunctions accordingly.\n\nProbably the most intuitively obvious argument in favor of the “free market” is the Hayekian\nclaim that all the knowledge required to carry out production and cooperation at all the different\nsocial levels is far too distributed and complex to be centralized and subordinated to a single\nagent. This is of course true, but also a non-sequitur and a distraction. A general must provide\nsome leeway to his subordinates, and they to theirs, and so on, and for the same reason—the\ngeneral can’t know exactly what this specific platoon might have to do under unexpected\ncircumstances, and he can’t even know all that one would need to in order to prepare them for\nthose circumstances.\n\nThere will therefore be “markets” all along the line, as people instructed to\nwork together to address some exigency organize “exchanges” of knowledge, skills and actions\namongst themselves in order to do so. The general doesn’t need to know 1/1,000 of all the\nspecifics of these interactions to still be the general—that is, to issue commands that can be\nobeyed, and to place himself in a position to ensure that they will be. The same is true for those\ninstitutions charged with providing communications, health care, education, transportation, housing and so on. In each case, capillaries along the margins of these institutions can be\nadjusted in accord with the level of responsibility to be allowed consistent with meeting the\npurpose of the institution.\n\nThe argument for markets is really saying no more than that you can’t\ndo a very good job if you’re being micromanaged at every point along the way. It’s equally true\nthat you can’t do a very good job if the terms of each move you make have to be “negotiated”\nwith a constantly changing range of agents.\n\nLiberalism has generated the illusion that what appears below the threshold of direct supervision\nis what, in fact, determines the form of supervision; even more, that the supervision is a servant\nof those actors which have merely been provided some leeway. This situation produces\ndestructive delusions, because the presumably free agents are nevertheless aware of their utter\ndependence upon their “servants.” Is there any businessman who thinks he would be able to\nprotect himself against violence, fraud, robbery and extortion by those readier than him to use\nviolence and break laws without the force of the state? No businessman believes this, but in a\nway they all believe it, because their political theory leads them to assume that, first, there were a\nbunch of individuals engaged in peaceful exchange with each other and then, only when\ncriminals and invaders, presumably attracted by the wealth thereby created, tried to take it using\nforce, was the state “hired” as a kind of Pinkertons to maintain order. This makes it impossible to\nthink coherently about the simplest things, such as how a policy everyone would recognize to be\nbeneficial might be conceived and implemented in the best way."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-centered-technology",
      "title": "Centered Technology",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "In large part this book is a critique of (strategy for entering and transforming) the secular\ndisciplines. The project, or imperative, implicit here is to roll back the power circulation that\ntakes the form of equalizing abstractions (whether of money or votes) into abstractions\nconducted by formalized and explicit power hierarchies. I’ve been suggesting that rolling back\nmoney and votes is conceivable—if one considers, for example, how much of market activity is\nmediated by informal networks among agents who have been authorized by some form of power,\nit is easy to imagine minimizing the effects of market signals on economic activity—indeed, it’s\npossible to imagine abolishing economic activity in itself, and “incorporating” corporations as\none kind of institution among many others within a well governed social order.\n\nThe same is not\ntrue of the most thoroughgoing form of desacralizing social practice, and the most socially\ncentral: technology. To review: insofar as power is desacralized, there is nothing but mutually\nhostile “interests” engaged in struggle over the decaying corpse of the social body; at the same\ntime, power is never genuinely desacralized, because as soon as the sacred center is punctured,\nmythicized centers like “the common good,” “the voice of the people,” “Constitution,” “rule of\nlaw,” and, eventually, “GDP” are set up as masks of what everyone must assume is there—an\nunquestioned authority rooted in a singular origin. These mythicized centers are intrinsically\narbitrary and divisive, though, which means they must eventually escalate hostilities into some\n“total” form.\n\nDesacralization of power, though, is possible because there is a difference between the ritual\ncenter and activities engaged in outside the center. In the earliest human communities, we can\nassume that in activities apart from the ritual center nothing at all changed after the originary\nevent, while the ritual center was made to reproduce as precisely as possible the originary event. But the sign deployed on the originary scene, along with the constraining structure of ritual,\nwould be extended to other activities; at the same time, linguistic development towards the\ndeclarative would involve the attribution of actions to (“mythical”) occupants of the center.\n\nThe\nmythical interpretations of ritual would be drawn from the far less interesting but nevertheless\ndeterminative actions outside the central aura and be converted, ritually and mythically, into\nactions modeling behaviors for the community. Out in the field, hunters battle their prey; on the\nnarrativized ritual scene, the sacred beast/ancestor battles with its family and enemies, takes pity\non humans and gives life to the group.\n\nAs social cooperation increases, stories of the origin of each new mode of cooperation would be\n“heard” or derived from the center—no member of the community could do or create something\nnew without attributing the discovery to a mythical agent. You would in turn be obliged to that\nmythical agent, and would give to it some part of the fruits of your labor, which in turn would be\npart of the individual’s contribution to the center for the entire community. (The center remains\nthe center insofar as it distributes.) The gift the god has given you comes with an imperative: in\none form or another, that imperative would be to use it in such a way as to honor the donor. In\nreturn, the individual issues an imperative to the mythical being: a prayer, requesting aid in\nsuccessfully using the skill or implement. All the implements of work and war would be created\nwithin this frame of what I have been calling an “imperative exchange.”\n\nThe implements themselves, their parts, and the implements used to produce the implements, are\nthemselves all part of this imperative exchange. This is to say there is a “magical” component to\nthe process: ritual words and gestures must be applied to all acts involving production and use,\nand instances of successful or failed use would implicate the implements themselves, which\ndon’t simply break, and aren’t simply poorly used, but refuse, for reasons that may be more or\nless formulated, to follow the commands given them. In a certain sense we could say that, of\ncourse, an early human smoothing out his spear knows that this has to be done so that it can fly\nstraight and fast when thrown, but his way of thinking about it will be framed completely in\nterms of being in harmony with all the agencies of the surrounding world mediating its\nproduction. Such processes become institutionalized, and to craft some item in a way that is not\ntraditionally prescribed and monitored by the upholders of that tradition would also be\nunthinkable.\n\nSo, the question is, how did it become possible for “technology” to emerge—that is, production\nconducted outside of these forms, in accord with the logic of continually reducing the elements\nof one process to another set of elements produced by another process? I think that the answer\nmust be: when it becomes possible to see other human beings as implements. The divine kings,\ncommanding hundreds of thousands, even millions, in their slave war and labor armies, made up\nof the socially dead, would first get a view of all these individuals as “parts” of a whole that might be more than the sum of its parts. Some could be added; some subtracted; some moved\nover here; some over there. If some worked harder, the possibility of combining all the better\nworkers would come to mind; if workers or soldiers improvised and found some new way of\ncooperating with each other, that could be remembered and reproduced. This is already a kind of\ntechnology.\n\nThe Axial Age acquisitions of metaphysics and scripture made it increasingly difficult to levy\nthese vast, sacrificial, masses. So, in the European middle ages, while there was steady technical\ndevelopment, and some remarkable feats of engineering and architecture, such development\nnever exceeded the limits set by existing corporate and authority relations. The masses\nconfronted in the New World, then in conquered regions abroad and, finally, those at home\nflowing into the cities from the farmers enclosed out of their land must have ignited a new\ntechnological imagination. For quite a while, the development of machinery seemed to track\npretty closely intensifications in the division of labor, with each laborer being given increasingly\nsimpler tasks within an increasingly complex process, with those tasks eventually being\ntransferred to technology.\n\nIf automation has now itself become an autonomous process, it is\nbecause men were first automated. Eventually, of course, technology came to alleviate and\neliminate human labor, but in the process the disciplines, focused on both technological and\nhuman resources, became the main drivers of social development. The human sciences, which\ntook over from theology and philosophy, treat humans in technological terms, as composed of\nparts that work together in ways that can be studied and modified. Even attempts to “humanize”\ndisciplines like psychology reduce people to set of interchangeable and predictable clichés.\n\nThe disciplines naturally think they should run the government which, after all, is just another\ntechnology. And whatever claims the government might make on its own behalf, like fulfilling\nthe “popular will,” are best left to the disciplines, upon whom the government would anyway be\ndependent in measuring such things. The emergence of data and algorithm driven, all-intrusive\nsocial media which more and more people simply can’t live without is a logical extension of this\nprocess, as is the elimination of millions of jobs through new modes of automation. But\ndesacralized technology, like desacralized power, provides a frame within which ultimately\nunlimited struggles ensue. Indeed, technology is the dominant form of power. If technology\npresents itself to us as an enormous system of interlocking imperatives which provides a very\nprecise slot for us to insert our own imperatives, who or what is at the center? What ostensive\nsign generates the system of imperatives?\n\nTechnology is completely bound up with the specific forms the centralization of power takes in\nthe wake of the desacralization of power. It is part of the same furious whirlpool of\ndecentralization, as old forms of power, predicated upon earlier forms of technology, are broken\nup, and then recentralization, as new forms of power exploit the new technologies to remove\nmediating power centers in zeroing in on each individual. In that case, the commands of the\ncenter are mediated technologically, which is to say through our self-centerings as both objects\nof technological manipulations and imaginings and subjects becoming signs of the algorithmic\nparadoxes: our choice here is to become either predictable and unreliable, or unpredictable and reliable; that is, either try and fit the categories comprehending us and become as defective as\nthose categories; or, extract and improve upon the imperative embedded in those categories. In\nthe latter case, we situate ourselves at the origin of the technological event, and model forms of\npower that will advance participation in the reinscription of technological markings upon us.\n\nThe telos of technology, then, is to make technologically produced human interactions into\nmodels for further analysis of practices into networks of sub-practices, out of which new\npractices are synthesized. In the process, the cultural work of deferral becomes increasingly\ntechnological—this means that we will think more in terms of deferring possible conflicts in\nadvance, in making them unthinkable and impossible, rather than intervening crudely after the\nfact. We would work on turning binaries into aggregated probabilities, and making those\naggregated probabilities capable of expression in language—this would be a source of important\nartistic and pedagogical projects: finding ways to express aggregated probabilities in language\nwould mean populating the future by hypothetically placing centrally ordered teams at various\nposts where new practices will be required.\n\nIt would be as if we were producing futurity by\ncontinuing to work on the originary scene itself—in, say, settling “in advance” some dispute\nbetween friends, a particular wrinkle in the fluctuations of aborted gestures on the scene is\nrevealed—the scene, one can now see, would only have cohered if one member had shaped his\nsign of deferral while positioning himself just so in relation to his neighbor and the center.\n\nWhat about all the moral and ethical questions bound up with technology—gene manipulation,\nincreasingly destructive weapons, pharmaceutical interventions into behaviors, deficiencies and\ncapabilities that were once within the normal range but now; at a higher resolution, seem to call\nfor remediation, etc.? Behind all these anxieties is the fading away of a sense of the human that\nwas formed logocentrically, which is to say through the assimilation of the literate subject to the\nscene of speech, in which all are present to each other, and intentions are inseparable from signs. Humanism is a degenerate form of the Axial Age acquisitions.\n\nBut this is not to say that our telos\nas technological beings is simply to go full speed ahead on all counts. We need a new way to\nthink about these things, one that doesn’t rely on what are ultimately historically bound feelings\nof defilement. There is a human origin, and origins that iterate that origin, but no human nature\n(unless one once to call “orientation to the center” a “nature”). The event of technology, in which\nwe become, collectively, models of further interventions that will in-form us, is itself\nanthropocentric.\n\nSome of those moral and ethical questions are not real questions, relying on dumbed down or\nfalsified versions of actual or possible scientific developments. The answers to those of them that\nare real questions will depend upon the state of the disciplines. Only within disciplinary spaces\nwill it be possible to ask whether a proposed innovation or line of inquiry, i.e., some proposed\nnew power, will have commensurate responsibilities assigned to it. Only in properly composed\ndisciplines can these questions be raised free of scapegoating pressures demanding remediation\nto enjoy new “freedoms” or to avoid some form of ostracism.\n\nAnthropomorphically grounded\ndisciplines would have to work to make new innovations and inquiries consistent with the basic\nterms of social coherence, while using new possibilities to continue studying those terms; and then we would have to assume open channels between the disciplines and central authority. There is even a place for “letting the market decide,” as long as we keep in mind what the\n“market” is: what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with\nknowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and bounded but not directly\nsupervised by such authorities. Supervision can be relaxed and tightened for various purposes,\nand one of the purposes for relaxation is certainly to see what intelligent and talented people can\ndo when encouraged to engage in skunkworks.\n\nIn this case, as in all cases, the ultimate test for\nthe reception of any novelty would be whether it helps sustain the pyramid of command starting\nfrom the central authority, and even contributes to ensuring the continuity of that authority from\nruler to ruler. Will a particular innovation make imperatives from the center both more unified,\ncoherent and simple in proportion to the scope it provides for authorities at lower posts to\nenhance and complete those commands in obeying them? And the disciplines will accordingly,\nmake themselves over into articulations of practices refined by the latest divisions in labor that\nstudy the diverse forms of human interaction for models of technological transformation—in the\nprocess establishing meta-practices for representing this dialectic in a way intelligible to central\nauthority. Each individual could think of himself as both an operator of technological forms and\na model for future ones, but the latter only in proportion to the former.\n\nCapital and technology come to represent independent forms of power because they are levied by\nthe occupant of central authority against other potential contenders for central authority and\nthereby become independent sources of power. This has to be addressed on a geo-political scale,\nbecause capital and technology are exported and imported and this process involves competition\nbetween sovereigns regarding the control of what we would have to call vassal states. It might\nseem to follow from the claim that all human activity derives and answers to a singular center\nthat the entire world eventually needs to be brought under a single government.\n\nI think the more\ncoherent assumption is that the world needs a formalized hierarchy of powers. This keeps us\nclose to actual global structures, which are comprised of states of various levels of independence\nand sovereignty. Insofar as the international order is organized in terms of independent,\nnominally equal, states, the maintenance of hegemonies in the form of asymmetrical alliances\nand spheres of influence must be conducted largely indirectly. If a more powerful state wants to\nprevent a less powerful state from breaking a chain of vassal states required to maintain regular\neconomic or political relationships, it can refuse it loans, stop buying its exports, accuse it of\nhuman rights abuses calling for cutting off aid, and so on.\n\nThis requires the cooperation\ninstitutionalized in banks, trade agreements, international courts, human rights organizations, the\nmedia (to propagate the required narrative), and so on. This disorder, in turn, encourages rival\npowers to play the same games, or different games reflecting different power positions,\neconomic, cultural and military means of projecting power. These conflicts generate ideologies\nwhich feed back into the system. Short of world government, rivalries between major powers\nwill always be possible (since I’m not going to explore the possibility of world government here,\nI’m not going to address the issues of what kinds of rivalries the attempt to establish it might\npromote).\n\nThe purpose of formalized power is to concentrate relationships in responsible\ninstitutional heads; what this implies for world order is government to government\ncommunications, with no support for oppositional or subversive movements within another country—at the very least, this means that disagreements between major powers will result from\ngenuine, substantive conflicts of interest which are in principle negotiable, rather than from\nproxy conflicts and reciprocal projections spiraling out of control. Since it seems highly unlikely\nthat the two or three major powers will be identical in power, we can assume a single world\nhegemon, whose power in relation to subordinate power centers we could think of by analogy to\na national sovereign governing an array of local institutions: the more unhindered and explicit\nthe exercise of power, the less intrusive it needs to be.\n\nOnly under such conditions could the\nflows of capital be brought under political control, and reduced to the relation between the\ncentral authority and the world of the disciplines, in which conditional grants of authority\nmatched with commensurate access to resources are monitored by skunkworking and potential\nskunkworking teams reporting to the central authority."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-turnings-to-the-center",
      "title": "Turnings to the Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "“Alienation” is a word that hasn’t really gone out of style. It seems to apply just as well to\ntoday’s labor conditions, people’s relations to unresponsive, even hostile governments, the\ndesiccation and depravation of culture, deteriorating relations between the sexes, as it ever did. But if we’re alienated, what are we alienated from? Critiques of alienation, whether coming from\nMarxism, existentialism or new schools of psychology presupposed some natural or ideal\ncondition from which one was alienated—some intuitive sense of wholeness, from which the\nsplitting of the subject against itself was a deviation to be remedied.\n\nSo far, I can say that we are\nalienated from our proper relation to the center. Our secular condition, and its entire vocabulary,\nwhich can only define the world itself against a demythified center, perpetually refilled with\ndisposable scaepgoats, can only define all the agents in this world in opposition to each other—\neven the individual or subject can only be defined in opposition to itself. Everyone’s externality\nto each other is a useful way to think about alienation. All anyone can do is invoke some super-\nsovereignty that the state “should” be “accountable” to and deploy it against their opponents. More precise than (and complementary to) “alienation” might be another term that has been\nstraddling the boundary separating pop from disciplinary culture for decades: “meaninglessness.”\n\n“Meaninglessness” can be treated quite literally: a lack of access to the center takes the form of\nwords not having any determinate meaning. We can work with the cliché of, say watching TV as\na meaningless activity, and this can lead us to delve earnestly into the empty soul of the TV\nwatcher; or, we can ask what the word “watch” means, and whether this meaning can be\nredeemed when applied to viewing TV—if no, then the real problem is in our language, not our\nsouls (and it’s easier to think of tending to our language). Anthropomorphic inquiry as\nestablishing the meaning of words retrieves something fundamental to the reification of\ndeclarative culture in literacy, which first of all made it possible to speak of “meaning,” a central\nconcern in the earliest philosophical texts.\n\nWords as the sites of thought experiments\ndistinguishing the boundaries distinguishing them from other words; words as originating in\nostensive-imperative-declarative articulations; words as subjected to the disciplines; words as\nmistakenly fit into new uses: inquiries along all these lines are part of the anthropomorphic\nproject of restoring meaning. What we want above all is to mean what we say. If there are\nsubversions in the background of our discourse that empty our words of meaning, we would like to remedy that. David Olson shows that literacy introduces the distinction between “speaker’s\nmeaning” and “sentence meaning,” and once we have such a distinction the latter can get away\nfrom the former, which means one’s words are at the mercy of all the ways in which they can be\nrepeated in different contexts.\n\nClearly, the solution here is not to install a kind of homuncular\nsimulation of the author in texts to ensure they don’t stray from the speaker’s meaning; rather, we\nkeep returning to our words as they are returned to us, supplying them with more explicit\nostensive-imperative articulations that were only tacit the first time around. Others can continue\nthis project after us, as they come to inhabit our words and take on the same stake in ensuring\ntheir meaning. As Michael Polanyi has contended, we know more than we can say; for this very\nreason, when what we say is handed over to other forms of knowledge, we have to make what\nwe have said sites of shared knowing we contribute to along with others.\n\nAccording to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolution, pursuing the questions generated by\nnormal scientific activity leads to the discovery of more and more facts that cannot be reconciled\nwith the regnant theory that determines the relationship between observed facts. These\nanomalous facts are, through increasingly complicated means, made consistent with the theory,\nuntil we get to the point where accounting for those anomalies requires the proposal of new\ntheories, one of which will eventually institute a scientific “revolution” and thereby initiate a\nnew period of normal science. However that may be for the physical sciences, in the human\nsciences we need a different model of disciplinary transformation.\n\nIn the human sciences, it’s the\nmeaning of “key words” within the disciplines that become anomalous, and eventually take on\nnew meanings. Anna Wierzbicka’s work is rich in examples of such transformations (her study of\nthe change in the meaning of the Anglo legal term “reasonable doubt” in _Experience, Evidence\nand Sense_ is exemplary) and Google’s ngram viewer provides us with the somewhat different but\nclosely related phenomenon of new and transformed words created new regions of reference in\nreal time. If we abjure the use of some metalanguage that might put all this linguistic movement\nin order, the only way of working to make knowledge out of linguistic evolutions is by entering\ndifferent linguistic domains and signifying from within them.\n\nAt first glance, of course, the\nteeming new vocabulary of, say, transgenderism, can be seen as a transparently partisan attempt\nto hijack the language in the ongoing wars of the cultural left against normal sexuality, the\nnuclear family, gender difference as experienced by the vast majority of the population, and so\non. This perspective is accurate enough as far as it goes, and there may be times when some new\nlinguistic field can be “waited out” or successfully resisted in the name of some existing and still\npowerful vocabulary. In general, though, it will always be possible, and it is more generally the\nmore powerful strategy, to enter such linguistic fields and supply meaning to its terms where they\nare lacking.\n\nWhenever possible, new linguistic fields, whatever their origins, should be redeemed\n—not in the interest of compromise or dialogue, but of knowledge, which can only be generated\nby enriching rather than restricting linguistic potential. There are many ways of making\nanomalous linguistic fields consistent with existing ones: any decentering can be treated as a\nsearch for the center. Key terms of contemporary liberalism, like “racism,” “sexism,”\n“homophobia,” “transphobia,” “Islamophobia,” and so on, will best be reworked from within,\nrather than resisted from without, or simply turned against the original users (such as accusing\nthe anti-racists as being the “real racists”).\n\nYes, “racist,” in its most common uses, including those uses the newly accused are nostalgic for, is just liberalism’s equivalent of “counter-\nrevolutionary”; but lingering over the term, and making explicit the full range of by no means\ninternally consistent phenomena it brings into view is what will eventually both de-toxify the\nterm and use it to notice new things about what we notice in our attempts to figure out what the\ncenter wants from us. We may almost be at the point where accusations of racism have so\nproliferated that it will be incumbent even upon “anti-racists” to ask what, exactly, makes a\nparticular statement or gesture “racist”—the results should be interesting. Working on saying\nwhat we mean can involve clarifying and simplifying what we say, and bringing our practices\ninto accord with common, or more consistently excavated usage; but it can also mean finding\nways to mean a lot more things."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-the-end-of-secular-thinking",
      "title": "The End of Secular Thinking",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "I suggested above that the exemplary secular subject is the usurper—from everyone’s\nperspective, everyone else is in a position they wrongly occupy. This is a condition of universal\nresentment—open, seething, constant resentment directed against the false center that has\nallowed some other to occupy one’s own rightful position. But this is the condition of all secular\nthought, and without a unanimously acknowledged center, any other mode of thought would be\nsheer fantasy. The world of usurpers at least provides us with recognizable agents, actions,\nmotives, struggles and causes: we can understand why one would want to usurp, why one would\nwant to usurp a usurper, how the specificities of one’s usurpation or counter-usurpation would\nsingularize one, how alliances, divisions of labor and various forms of cooperation can emerge\namong those defending their usurpations.\n\nThe very fact that I have distilled secular thought to a\nworld of usurpers even though, to my knowledge, no actual secular thinker has ever used such a\ndescription, demonstrates the generativity of secular thought. Secular thinkers have thought in\nterms of rulers, and various justifications for rule and obedience; about social groups in conflict,\nand “just” or “pragmatic” ways of resolving those conflicts; about individuals, and their “rights”\nwhich they can claim against other individuals and the state, and so on. If we say that all that can\nmotivate all these agents is resentment, as the naturalness necessarily attributed to them is an\nafter the fact attribution produced by the attempt to reconcile them, that reduces to a world of\nusurpers.\n\nAt best one could achieve a stance of comic detachment—but what is that, other than a\nkind of shadowing of one usurper after another? And this would make mimetic theory, and\noriginary thinking as the highest form of mimetic theory, the end of secular thought, as it brings\nus to the universal condition of usurpers who now, perhaps, can see why others seem them as the\nusurpers. The configuration of the originary scene strips bare all the “reasons” we have for our\nresentments to the mimetic rivalry directed toward and restrained by a center. (No doubt many of\nthe reasons we have for our resentments are good ones—some, at least, must be better than other\n—but that would still leave open the question, why do we resent—as animals do not—even when\nwe have “reasons”? Why can’t we hardly ever say anything that is not some articulation of\nresentment with a grudging concession to the center?) The next step, then, is to move beyond\nsecular thought.\n\nDoing so involves exhausting secular thought, bringing its paradoxes to their conclusion. Secular\nthought depends upon the liberation of the declarative order from the ostensive-imperative\nworld. The declarative sentence produces a linguistic present that does not depend upon\nostensive presence. The declarative sentence does this by projecting possible ostensive presents\nto which the participants in the declarative event are ready to attest. If I say that someone is “not\nhere,” in response to a request that they be made available, my claim has meaning on the\ncondition that the person in question has been named and noted, that my interlocutors have been\nmade aware at however many degrees of separation of this, that there is some “somewhere else”\nwhere someone else could be attesting to the presence of this person, that there are people who\ncould attest to the attesting, bring word of it to me, and so on.\n\nFurther inquiries could be made at\nany point along any of these chains—if it is a fictional representation, then all these possibilities\nare being modeled, and maybe the very process of modeling is being modeled. So, the\ndeclarative generates rather than removes it from the ostensive-imperative world. Even\nsupposedly meaningless (“colorless green ideas sleep furiously”) and sample (“the cat is on the\nmat”) sentences serve to construct a disciplinary present, in which we deliberately “subtract”\nmeaning and context so as to direct attention to, say, the purely syntactic dimension of the\nsentence. But the fact that the declarative sentence generates a multitude of other possible\npresents, the “failure” of any of which would lead to the collapse of the present constructed by\nthe declarative sentence producing it, represents a paradox for the sentence—whatever it asserts\nboth is and is not—and, therefore, a crisis. There does, after all, have to be a present of the\nutterance, even if the sentence itself can only refer to that present by making its reliance upon the\npresent of some “recipient” of the sentence explicit.\n\nBy “present” I mean not anything philosophical, but the present tense, which is the first and, I\nwant to suggest, only, real tense. Other tenses are modeled on the present tense—grammatical\ninflections indicating tenses are ways of showing there are other present tenses that can be\nrepresented within the linguistic present of the utterance. Imagine if we spoke only in the present\ntense—rather than saying, for example, that “the Declaration of Independence was signed in\n1776,” we would have to refer to a field of presently existing documentation recording, and\nrecording the recording, and registering the consequences currently noticeable, of the signing of\nthe Declaration of Independence in 1776.\n\nThe past event would have to be nominalized into a\nnoun-phrase, while mentioning it today would have to be formalized as mediated by a range of\npresently available references, evidence, and “traces” across the culture. We’d be referring, not to\nan event that happened and is done with, but to a field generated by and radiating from an event\nwe know only through that field. Here, the paradox of the declarative, that it dissipates its own\npresent in the articulation of it, would be made explicit and formalized, and in the process the\ngrounding of the declarative order in the ostensive-imperative world would be made present.\n\nIn this case, the representation of successions of events, fully “tensed,” is mythical. Saying that\nsomething happened yesterday is mythical because it’s still happening today. To close an event in\nits own present is to make the center of that event a site of imperative exchange, which is to say\nit’s sacrificial: whoever paid for that event is whom we owe in return. We can’t pay debts to the\npreceding generations, but that’s because we are present with them, as they mediate for us the imperatives we receive from the center. So, if we are Americans, the imperative transmitted by\nthe American founders to rebel against “tyranny,” in the name of “natural rights,” is still an\nimperative for us to work out, even if we scrutinize the specific claims made in the Declaration\nand find them wanting, even if we determine the revolution was really a self-interested move by\nan alliance of farming, merchant and banking elites enabled by anti-monarchical elements in\nGreat Britain, even if we conclude it was merely a convenient justification for maintaining and\ncontinuing slavery, intensifying the expropriation of the native inhabitants, and so on.\n\nThe\nostensives gathered in all these other references bring with them other imperatives which we can\nmake part of the declarative order through which we resolve the imperative mistakenness\nconferred upon us by the existing institutional structure of the United States. We could easily say,\n“the United States is the real tyranny,” against which we must rebel in the name of some other\nconfiguration of “natural” or “human” rights, and so on; but the harder question is to determine\nwhere the central authority lies within the United States, as best we can approximate it, how we\ncan identify the imperatives coming from that at least partially hypothetical central authority,\nhow to obey those imperatives in such a way as to make that central authority more central and\nmore authoritative, and so on.\n\nIf we accept the pastness of those historical narratives, they pull us\nin incompatible directions, obligate us to competing imperatives; if we treat them as present in\ntheir effects, they become commentaries on the imperatives we obey now. In the end, we’d have\nto be able to say that the only real meaning of “rebel against tyranny in the name of natural\nrights” is to clarify for us a history of commands that precedes and succeeds that one. A good\nstart on constructing a more comprehensive and consistent field of imperatives might be to note\nthe curiosity of the framers of the Constitution modeling the office of the president on the only\nman they could imagine occupying it first, George Washington.\n\nWhy could the construction of\nthis new form of republic only be completed only once such a position and its occupant could be\nso precisely imagined? That imperative to construct a new form of post-monarchical, post-sacral,\ncentral authority can still be retrieved and obeyed: what remains is to generate the historical\nnarratives showing how this imperative, elevated, best provides consistency to all the others.\n\nI’m not calling for “banning” other tenses than the present (even if the proposition to do so is a\nvery useful thought experiment) any more than I was, earlier, calling for banning the use of\npsychological terms like “decision.” There is a method at work here to display and displace\nlinguistic and historical accretions and supplementations. Things do “happen,” and people do\n“do” things. For that matter, people “say” things, and the things they say can be “true” or “not\ntrue.” I can assert all this confidently not as a result of a line of philosophical inquiry but because\nAnna Wierzbicka shows that every language has these words, and I accept the unanimous verdict\nof humanity regarding them.\n\n“Someone can do something” according to the primes, which\nmeans all languages can account for the “possible,” which is to say another present “extractable”\nfrom the present. Of course, none of the nominalized terms we take to be virtually synonymous\nwith the verbs (if we can say something is true, can’t we call that statement the “truth”; if we say\nsomeone can, can’t we say they are “able”?) are in the primes. These words, like the tenses, are\nsupplementations and simulations. Again, this doesn’t make them “false”—just sites of\ndisciplinary inquiry. Methods deriving from the primes, as I suggested above, would bring into\nfocus the relation between saying someone “can” and someone “does,” someone “thinks” and someone “says,” someone “feels” and someone “knows,” and so on.\n\nBut most elemental might\nbe the relation between “do” and “happen,” because any event can be represented as someone\ndoing something or as something happening to someone, and displaying the difference between\nthe two would make the event or “happening” fully present. It’s not as if one cancels the other: if\nyou represent someone as having everything happen to him, you can then turn around and\nrepresent the same event as being completely of his doing, precisely by having his doing\n“marking” the happening.\n\nInstead of getting bogged down in arguments over the real causes of events (biological, social,\ncultural, political, economic, historical, etc.), we would then be amplifying the present, where\ntraces of all kinds of causes can be identified on the spreading field of the present. This implies a\ndisciplinary space aimed at making present a pedagogy of the present. A more precise answer to\nthe question, “what are we alienated from” is “a pedagogy of the present.” There can’t really be a\nmore fundamental human relation than pedagogy, and firstness on the originary scene and\nthereafter is really a pedagogical relation; even more, a linguistic pedagogy relation.\n\nPedagogy is\nfractally hierarchical: the most egalitarian group you can imagine will be broken up, in the daily\nand minutely interactions between its members, into pedagogical relations in which one member\nteaches another something else that the first may know simply because he got to that place\nseconds earlier. The origins of trust and faith in each other lie in such pedagogical relations: these\nrelations are formalized by the earliest human groups as rites of initation. The most\nsystematically and permanently hierarchical group relies equally on pedagogy—it just stretches\nout the pedagogical relation (what is entailed in “learning” something) over longer periods of\ntime.\n\n“Teach” and “learn” both come from words meaning, simply, point out a way to go, on the\none hand, and follow that way, on the other. Pedagogy can also, of course range from minimal to\nmaximal (answering a question; years-long initiation), from tacit to explicit (modeling\nperformance; providing detailed instructions), and so on. One way or another, this is all we’re\never really doing. Part of my purpose in introducing Marcel Jousse in my earlier discussion of\nmedia was to get to the point where we can think in terms of the fully “mimological” pedagogy\nJousse himself calls for, in which we continually construct practices that help us see the social\norigins of our practices.\n\nIf this is what we’re doing all the time, how can we be alienated from it? Well, there’s doing, and\nthere’s doing. A pedagogical relation is effective insofar as it’s embedded in some centered\nordinality. A declarative order alienated from the ostensive-imperative world (that insists on\nhaving all imperatives and ostensives generated declaratively) disallows the formation of\nsustained embedment within centered ordinality. This is because the more independent the\ndeclarative order, the more it would have you learn from those justifying the practice rather than\nthose performing it. The imperatives coming from the declarative order are primarily prohibitory\nand hortatory: from “don’t treat other members this way,” or “don’t use too much of this\nmaterial” (imperatives derived from legal, political and supply-chain considerations) to “respect\nothers in your group,” “be a team player,” “be accountable to your subordinates,” i.e.,\nimperatives that are universally applicable and therefore universally irrelevant.\n\nNothing like “do\nthis, this way, now,” can ever come from the alienated declarative order—the declarative order, in itself, is hysterically antagonistic to that kind of imperative relationship (almost any “do this,\nthis way, now,” can be interdicted under some reading of “don’t treat others X way”). And such\nan imperative relationship is central to any pedagogy. Even on a more intellectual level, telling a\nstudent to “write clearly, provide reasons for your arguments, refute counter-arguments,” etc., is\nmeaningless and even abusive, because these admonitions cannot carry with them the criteria for\ndetermining when one is actually doing things this way, or coming closer to doing things this\nway; only a command to imitate a model, and then look, together, at how the model has been\nimitated, how it can further be imitated, and what habits need to be changed so as to imitate more\nperfectly (and out of which arise more abstract questions like “what counts as an imitation under\nchanged conditions”?) can enact a non-alienated pedagogy.\n\nWith a model to refer to, utterances\nand gestures are read as forms of resentment (a desire to displace another); while a pedagogical\nrelation to the model is read off of the resentment—the more detailed the examination of the\nresentment, the more intricate the pedagogical practices it discloses. The other has stolen from\nyou, gone behind your back, taken your place when you were otherwise occupied; that other has\nmade a demonstration regarding your dependence on your goods, your vulnerabilities, your\nnetworks of trust, your assumptions of order in the world; it may turn out in the end that stealing,\ndouble-dealing and dispossession is not exactly, or not only, what happened. At any rate, there\nwill now be contributions to the securing of institutions of trust, verification, interdependence\nand ordering that you will be able to make.\n\nWithin any declarative sentence there is a hypothetical centered ordinality waiting to be enacted\npedagogically. You stake your place in the expanded present of the declarative. Any past tense\nopens the question of the reception of that past; any future tense raises questions regarding how\none imagines the doings and happenings projected being populated. The same for aspect and\nmood—they all construct presents in which people are doing things, seeing things, saying things\nto others who in are turn converted into those positioned in some relation to maybe doing things\nor having things happen to them. There are virtually unlimited positions open in any sentence\nthat one might occupy.\n\nAnd you’re not a usurper if you’re in another’s sentence. If someone says\nit’s going to rain tomorrow, that someone has heard a forecast from some source that has been\nmade available through some medium, and has some reason for trusting that source enough to let\nyour trust in him be put to the test by providing this information—there are people, working with\ntechnology and media, at each point along the line here. If you’re not at the head of the line, you\nare taking orders from another and passing them on, and how and why you do that is your\npedagogical accountability. If you’re being given information, you’re being asked to do\nsomething with it, to make some difference, maybe in your own practice, maybe in that of others.\n\nThe information comes with an imperative embedded in it, in other words. Maybe you’re within\nthe order that’s transmitting that information as good; maybe you’re in another order that treats\nthat information as bad, or questionable, or as providing some meta-information about the sender\n—in that case, it has another imperative embedded in it. How you enact this part, obey this\nimperative, is your pedagogy. The centered ordinality you are most directly embedded in is, in its\nturn, embedded in another centered ordinality of which you are more or less directly aware,\nwhich your immediate center wants you to be more or less cognizant of.\n\nYou need to refer to that\nhigher order insofar as there are inconsistencies in the imperatives directed at you from your immediate center. How you formulate those inconsistent imperatives into interrogatives that can\nthen be “transposed” onto some declaratives that exhaust or “evaporate” it is also your pedagogy. Increasing pedagogical positions within centered ordinalities is the way the declarative order is\ndisalienated. What we all really want is to know that we can do things with others in ways that,\nbecause of those ways of doing, things happen that we see happen because of the things we do.\n\nA completely “pedagogized” order, then (everything anyone does can be described as an effect of\na network of pedagogical acts), abolishes secular discourse. It does so without any need for a\nspecific sacred order, or form of transcendence. It contains the residue of secular discourse,\nthough, which means it also retains the trace of the sacred within the significant. Once the\npossibility of seeing all subjects as usurpers in relation to each other (and therefore themselves)\nhas been grasped, it can’t be forgotten: we must incorporate this basic human possibility, which\nhas enabled us to construct the very originary scene that accounts for it, into whatever order we\ncreate as a remedy.\n\nThe ever present possibility of the charge of usurper being directed at\nanother, even in the most indirect or implicit ways; that is, the possibility of centralizing\nviolence, is the originary event of an order immune to secular thought. The trace of the sacred in\nthe significant is in the “leap” into a new order involved in the act of naming. The target of\nconverging violence is named as the thing not adequately portrayed or described in the\nincitement directed toward it. We name in the name of the occupant of the center, the central\nauthority, who is in fact the most likely and common target of incitement, the most vulnerable to\ncharges of usurpation.\n\nA mature order would realize that any call for the removal of the occupant\nof the center must be false—that is, the occupant of the center is not the one to be removed for\nsuch and such a collection of reasons. To name is commemorate: here, we defended the center\nagainst this subversion. And when other members are violently centralized, those members and\nthe time and place where that violent centralization was arrested and reversed, are also named, as\nother points where a subversion of the center, this time less direct, was averted. Naming is also\nthe most basic pedagogical act: nothing better marks the minimal hierarchy self-evident and\nmodeled in any pedagogical act than saying “we’ll call this ______”\n\nNaming is the result of pedagogical practices of solicitation of the center. As usurping subjects,\nwe want things from the center; we make demands. Everything we want is really a demand from\nthe center. This means we all have what we could call a “central imaginary”: a proto-narrative of\nthe center as the agent that could meet our demands. One side demands that the state protect the\nrights of the unborn; the other side demands it protect the rights of women to abort. What both\nsides agree on is that the state should be able do whatever the one making the demand would\nwant: a state incapable of enforcing laws against abortion would also be incapable of enforcing\nlaws allowing abortion.\n\nSo, the state needs, at least to be capable. So, what makes the state\ncapable? Or, more precisely, what interferes with its capability? If, by whatever historically\nevolved process a particular social order has for placing individuals in the position of sovereign,\nonce someone is in that position, that person is unable to perform in the way mandated (the way\nhe promised his voters, his party, or those who appointed him through whatever mechanism),\nthen making demands of him is pointless. So, all our competing demands on the state can be\ndeferred in the name of inquiring into what kind of state could do the kinds of things we are asking in the way we are asking.\n\nCould a state that operates the way ours does perform in accord\nwith the expectations implicit in the demands we make on it? (So, for example, certainly the\ncontemporary American state could raise the minimum wage to 20$ nationwide if it set its mind\nto it; could it, though, hold everything else in the economy and society constant so that that\nraising the minimum wage would have the precise effect those demanding it want?) Such an\ninquiry would reveal at least some of the demands to be inoperable; even more, it might reveal\nthat the very mechanisms by which demands are generated, circulated through the system and\nused as feedback by the sovereign guarantees that those demands will not be met in the “spirit”\nin which they are made.\n\nJust laying bare all our resentful, usurpationist demands would reveal, in\nincreasingly rich institutional detail, that the kind of central authority that could meet our\ndemands in a way we could recognize would also be a central authority that could and probably\nshould ignore those demands while instituting more workable forms of feedback. Made more\nintelligent thereby, even the citizens of the existing social order could intimate transitions from\nthat order by providing “audits” of institutional forms that both provoke and frustrate inoperable\ndemands. In the end, we’d replace our demands with better ways of following commands.\n\nAn onomastic pedagogy commemorates and honors sites and figures marking the arresting of\nviolent centralization, but operates far more broadly insofar as we remember that a declarative\nsentence named the God who abolished sacrificial imperative exchange and that the declarative\nsentence can therefore be taken up as a form of naming as well. Mistakenness in the imperative\nchain appears; a gap is opened between an imperative issued and the one to be obeyed; linguistic\npresence is threatened. Only a declarative capable of generating new ostensives can resolve such\na crisis, and the path to the declarative is through the interrogative.\n\nThat is, first of all, a question\nmust be formed out of the impasse of the imperative. Let’s put it bluntly: everyone was\ndepending upon you to carry out a task within a chain of command upon which the rest of that\nchain depended, and you screwed up. Everyone is angry with you, and demands follow quickly:\nyou should be replaced, you should be punished, you should be supervised more closely, you\nshould be demoted, etc. Well, maybe any or all of that will turn out to be appropriate, but then\nthere are other questions: how singular was this particular task? How singular did it turn out to\nbe, compared to what might have been expected?\n\nWhose responsibility was it to vet, train, and\nprepare you? Who is available to replace you, and how quickly? And so on. These are all\npredictable, “mimable” demands and questions, and the more of them we ask the more they\nbecome pedagogical questions to be addressed within a disciplinary space formed around the\n“spillage” of mistakenness. For this to happen, everything in the convergence upon the mistaken\nindividual that marks that convergence as mimetically driven must be eliminated; and the\nindividual himself must refrain from deflecting that convergence by instigating a convergence\nupon someone else. “Who are you taking me to be” is the question raised by the mistaken\nindividual; “who are we that we take you to be whatever it is we take you to be” is the one raised\nby those creating a shared attention to the space. Some name in the form of the declarative\nsentence provides the answer to these questions.\n\nThese questions are less to be asked explicitly than to be embodied in a practice: if you’re\nconverged upon, you expose the mimetic marking in the convergence by mimicking them and responding as if you are that one; if you are among the convergent group, you name its object or\ntarget as someone to whom something has happened as well as someone who has done\nsomething and the others in group as those doing something and not merely addressing\nsomething that has happened. In both cases, mimetic excess is subtracted from the scene and\nreplaced by a demythification: rather than building an identity around the stigmatized, the precise\ncausality producing the noted result is separated more and more completely from all the other\nfunctionalities and responsibilities implicit in the situation.\n\nThere are always procedures and\nprecedents in play to facilitate this process, but proceduralism is not only insufficient, but can’t\neven work on its own terms without placed individuals who can read the relevant procedures as\nimperatives bringing with them a margin of decision. The only way to be such an individual is to\nbe prepared to present yourself as such an individual, as demonstrated in a case you are also\nready to present. And the only way to ensure such individuals is through a mimological setting in\nwhich the gestures of each can be dismantled and turned into samples of practices all can inspect. There is a pedagogy of the ostensive (look not at that, but at this; not that way, but in this light); a\npedagogy of the imperative (attribute everything in your act that leads to shared ostensives as\nfollowing from your full faithfulness to the imperative, and the chain of imperatives it follows;\nattribute everything that goes array to your failure to penetrate further layers of the imperative);\nand a pedagogy of the declarative (bringing all the doings and happenings within the scope of a\npresent to the extent needed to exclude from the scene elements interfering with its minimality). The more you bring into focus some local center, the more you elucidate the terms provided by\nthe global center making that focus possible.\n\nEvery demand is to be converted into a shared command that you are all studying together but\nwhich each agent is willing to begin obeying, and in obeying modeling a form of obedience, so\nas to open a space for others to retroject a form of obedience further up the chain, or follow with\na subordinate and subsequent obedience—all in the name of providing objects, of providing all\nthe participants themselves as objects, of that shared study. The central authority presumed to be\nat the highest point in the chain of command might be imagined to be fully secure and coherent,\nor in total disarray, or anywhere in between—these assessments will enter into the narratives told\nof the specific event, and in participating in that event you are already “foreshadowing” the\ncontours of those possible narratives.\n\nSomewhere in there or up there must be some central\nauthority, however embattled or potential, and you assume this central authority will be enabled\nby the forms of centered ordinality constitutive of coherent power. Constructing those forms of\ncentered ordinality at any rate implies a default to some proximal power center, whose\nimperatives you treat as wholly consistent in themselves and with whatever central authority the\nproximal source of power defers to—prioritizing and temporalizing those imperatives so as to\nensure their consistency is what a de-secularizing pedagogy consists of. What is needed for a\nrestoration of the unanimity in practice towards the originating center in any social order is not\n(declarative) doctrines or articles of faith, but the insistence that all imperatives come from that\noriginating center, and that everyone’s contribution to filling the gap between imperatives given\nand imperative obeyed can reveal that to be the case.\n\nThe necessary faith for social order is that\nall named objects give off imperatives that we share and supplement by following imperatives up\nthe line closer to the center. The role of declaratives is to provide order to the various imperatives: a sentence, a discourse lets us know that one is to obeyed now, another later, another\nwould be canceled if we properly obey the previous ones, another is to look at something rather\nthan change it, and so on: if the imperatives are articulated in this way, the declarative tells you\nwhat to expect to see."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-maintaining-the-present-of-the-center",
      "title": "Maintaining the Present of the Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "Once a human occupies the center, the most difficult political, and maybe human, problem, is\nhow to replace that occupant when the time comes, as it must. We could assess different\ngovernmental forms as different ways of solving this problem, but none of them—not hereditary\nkingship, not democratic election—does so completely. Somewhere along the line a king will die\nwithout offspring; somewhere along the line some real or perceived failure into the electoral\nprocess will produce a president or prime minister widely considered illegitimate. I will conclude\nthis book by offering a solution consistent with the originary grammar of the center I have\narticulated here, and along the way I will use this intrinsically anomalous element in any political\norder to make the various vocabularies I’ve been working through more inter-referential, answer\nsome questions that might have arisen for some readers along the way, and even suggest the\nelements of what the Marxists call a “transitional program.”\n\nThe solution I propose: the current occupant of the center chooses his successor. This is, in fact, a\nforegone conclusion, insofar as we take power to be coherent, and all of the positions and\npractices in the social order to be formalized, or named. If some other body, however wide or\nnarrow, chooses the successor, they could presumably choose the time of succession, which is to\nsay, that body could remove the ruler at any time. In that case, that body is the sovereign, which\nmeans that power is not organized coherently. The selection of a successor could be made on any\ngrounds the current occupant wants, and I will stipulate here that the choice of a successor could\nbe made for very bad reasons, leading to disastrous results.\n\nThat’s true of any system—\ndemocracies are obviously no more immune to the elevation of leaders destructive to the very\nsystem itself—and you wouldn’t believe me if I claimed I was offering a fool-proof system. What I can do is suggest some of the considerations that would lead at least the best rulers to put\nin place extended institutional processes for generating candidates for selection, and that, having\nbeen institutionalized and entrenched, would likely be accepted by lesser rulers. We can simply\nbegin with the assumption of a ruler who wants to be succeeded by the most capable person\navailable, and the one most willing to continue the projects the current ruler considers most\nessential to the long-term well-being of the order he presides over.\n\nSuch a ruler would want some way of narrowing down the vast number of candidates the society\nin question would generate—any society will have lots of intelligent, capable, courageous young\npeople concerned about the good of their country. The number must be narrowed down\nconsiderably—maybe to a dozen, or so. The most obvious way of doing this is by establishing\nspecial academies to produce high level government officials, and having the top 1% or so of\ngraduates enter more grueling training and competitions to further narrow the number down. The\nruler would take an intense interest in these academies, ensuring that they inculcate the most important political skills and traditions.\n\nLower level schools would have special programs\ntraining especially qualified students to apply to those academies—the academies, then, would\nset the tone regarding moral, ethical and political education across the system. It may very well\nbe that there are families and communities that have no wish to enter the system-wide\ncompetition—perhaps out of some moral or religious conviction, or because certain minorities\nwill be disqualified from the highest offices, or they simply wish to prepare their students to\nparticipate in and express loyalty to the social order in other ways; indeed, this may very well\nconstitute the majority.\n\nIf the educational system is heavily biased toward creating the conditions for strong candidates\nfor succession, then that means all the disciplines will be oriented toward studying those\nconditions and strengthening them. Psychology, philosophy, sociology, history, economics, law,\nand so on, or, as I would prefer to think, the various regions of anthropomorphic pedagogy,\nwould be primarily interested in questions of leadership and hierarchy—various forms, various\ncausalities, better and worse forms (under different conditions), means of producing better\nleaders and hierarchies, means of sustaining them, and so on.\n\nAfter all, these are the kinds of\nthings the candidates would need to know, and so would all those interested in the process of\nproduction and selection of candidates—and that would include at least most of the social order,\ninsofar as local communities would be competing for and take honor from producing the best\ncandidates most regularly. Since the process of producing candidates would be ongoing, it would\nbe a central concern of the entire society, including, probably, the primary source of\nentertainment. Public competitions and ceremonies would be part of the process, as would the\nselection of marriage partners and family formation of the most promising candidates.\n\nSigns of\nthe ruler’s preference for one or another candidate, or one or another attribute to be privileged in\nthe selection process, would be watched and interpreted with great interest. It would have to be\nthe case that the ruler always has an officially designated successor, but it would also be the case\nthat he could change this designation at any time. A long reigning ruler might no longer think the\n50-year old he chose as successor 20 years ago is still right for the job; or, a candidate chosen on\nthe assumption that rapid technological development was going to be the agenda for the next\nseveral decades might be replaced if it suddenly appears that war with a rival is likely, and a\nmore military-oriented leader seems necessary.\n\nAll this might seem likely to create all kinds of rivalries between different candidates, and\ntherefore resentments, the establishment of factions, bureaucratic intrigue, and so on, leading to\nconstant instability. The way to prevent this is to prohibit the top-tier candidates from occupying\npositions in which they exercise any real power, which also means they are to be excluded from\npositions in which they make consequential decisions. Second-tier candidates and below would\nbe elevated to higher positions of power, placed in charge of the military, industry and other high\npower ministries; if top tier candidates would rather have such a career, they could be given the\nright to renounce any aspirations to occupy the center, and be placed on a career path better\nsuited to their ambitions.\n\nThe top-tier candidates would accept the likelihood of a stunted career\nfar below what they might have achieved otherwise, for the sake of helping maintain the\ncoherence and continuity of the ruling order. They would be familiarized with the mechanisms of rule and, we can assume, would “intern” with the ruler—otherwise, their role would be more\nceremonial, such as presiding over events, touring the country, meeting people from all walks of\nlife. If any candidate were found to be using his role to “drum up support” or try and create a\npower base for himself, he would immediately be removed from consideration. Since this\nprohibition would be universally known, word of any attempt would get out quickly, leading to\nan investigation; even more, candidates would be expected to cultivate a persona that exuded,\nprobably in an exaggerated form, disdain for flattery or offers of favors. In this way, such\nattitudes would also be available for emulation across the social order, raising the moral level of\nthe people.\n\nThe selection of a successor would be the most important decision the ruler could make, and, for\nreasons I suggested above, it would be woven into the texture of all his other decisions: every\nmajor problem or turning point would lead to a reconsideration of the chosen successor and the\narrangement of the major candidates. The ruler might want to bring them in for regular\ninterviews to get a better sense of their fitness. Designating a new successor would be a cultural a\npolitical event, both to the ruler’s subjects and other governments. Everything that a ruler should\nbe, all the threads connecting the ruler to all other institutions, the shaping of those institutions to\nensure they produce the best ruler and enable that ruler to rule—all this would be the basic\nsubstance of the culture.\n\nIf this sounds strange and “cult of personality”-like, I would suggest\nseeing it as a social order in which the most fundamental questions of any social order—its\nstability, coherence and continuity—are systematically placed front and center. No one could\nthink or speak for long without coming across questions regarding what makes this society what\nit is, how it could be improved, how could we do our jobs, raise our families, cultivate or\nintellects, develop our friendships, participate in our communities, and so on, in such a way to\ncontribute to that. To go back to the problem raised above, regarding the dangers of leaving so\nmuch power in one man’s hands, I would say that, with the model I’m presenting here, we could\nsay that such deeply rooted habits in the people would be very hard to repudiate, and a weak\nleader is more likely to rely upon them (or to have his weaknesses recuperated by them).\n\n(I also\nthink this is a system less likely to produce weak leaders, but weakness can come in many forms\nand anyone could make a mistake.) In the event, the possibility of which could not be completely\nexcluded, that a genuinely dangerous leader needed to removed (preferably quietly, in such a\nway to solicit his perhaps grudging consent, with as much consensus among the elite leadership\nas possible), this system would provide a set of buffers lessening the shock to the system.\n\nNow, if you are with me so far, you will acknowledge that we would be waiting for a time when\nthe highest authority of the country we reside in will actually name his own successor. (Assuming, of course, we live, like the vast majority of the planet, in a social order not governed\nby a monarch.) At that point we will know that something has happened; but up until that point,\nwhat is happening is that we are waiting for that to happen. We could think of this as a kind of\ninverted messianism. Inverted, because everything that is shrouded in mystery in messianic\nexpectation is made a site of pedagogy here. What would it take for whoever is formally in\npower right now to name his successor?\n\nWhat are the institutional blockages making that\nimpossible? In our own speech and actions, we evince a readiness to commence constructing the institutional architecture (described above) in case those blockages are removed; at the same\ntime, we act in accord with the implicit command coming from he who would have to name his\nsuccessor that those blockages be respected. Whenever we deal with these institutional restraints,\nwe represent as best we can the contrary imperatives intersecting therein, while trying to ensure\nthe commands we transmit to others are as consistent as possible with those transmitted to us,\nand act so as to intimate at least the possibility of such consistency up and down the line.\n\nThis takes away from us the right, or at least the pleasure, of opposing those in power, including\nthose we see to be most inimical to any possibility of establishing coherent forms of power. But\nthis also doesn’t mean we are obliged to become cheerleaders for whomever happens to be the\npresident. In an insecure, incoherent system, the imperatives issuing from the center are wildly\ninconsistent with each other—simple, strict obedience is impossible. A hierarchy of imperatives\nmust be constructed: there are those explicitly issued recently; older, more established ones;\nthose inherited from previous rulers, even previous regimes, neither explicitly confirmed nor\nsuperseded; those presumed to have lapsed but capable of reactivation; and so on.\n\nThe most\nimmediate imperatives, when they cannot be complied with perfectly, must be refined in terms of\nmore mediated ones. If you can’t provide ostensive proof of compliance with the most direct\nimperatives, you probably won’t be in a position to receive them much longer, but what will\ncount as compliance will be determined after the fact and it’s possible to comply in ways that\nwill affect that judgment. What can always be done, though, is requesting further instructions and\nclarifications, and such requests can invoke the originary events of the institution and the social\norder. This is an instigation to archival work and the construction of alternate histories, with a\nsearch for more reliable forms of governance that were perhaps discarded or allowed to lapse but\nmight be re-invented.\n\nThere is always a mode of deferral that makes a particular imperatival\nspace possible, and questions refer to that mode of deferral. Anyone’s questions regarding the\nimperative chain involve an offer to donate oneself unconditionally to the center, and this\ndonation depends upon a clarification of the centered ordinality rendering the imperative\nconsistent. In this way, one’s actions make the present anomalies transparent while seeking to\nresolve them. Even the most difficult cases can only be dealt with on these terms—let’s say you\nare ordered to commit immoral acts, like atrocities, or to turn yourself over to a rigged process\ndespite your innocence.\n\nThe more your attempts at mitigation or deferral can be presented as\nobedience within a more expanded present, rather than the rebellion of your internal space of\nrepresentation against tyranny, the more likely even your short-term prospects will improve.\n\nBefore we leave off the question of succession, it’s worth nothing that contemporary liberal\ndemocracy, and the US far more than any other country, has been explicitly foregrounding this\nquestion of late on its own terms. In the end, liberal democracy, whatever the textbooks say it\nentails (“robust media criticism of government,” “independent judiciary,” etc.), really comes\ndown to peaceful transfer of power following an election. But, as we are seeing, this is an\nextremely complicated matter. What ensures the legitimacy of an election result? Well, obviously\nif the votes were miscounted, whether due to incompetence or corruption, the election is\nillegitimate.\n\nBut who determines that, other than those who are in some way in office due to their\ndependence on those who have been selected by that very process? At lot of faith must be conferred here. Anyway, we’re just getting started. We have further learned that the results of\nelections might be illegitimate if the election district has been drawn (“gerrymandered”) in such\na way as to favor one party over another. This is especially the case if the district has been drawn\nin such a way so that plausible (to whom?) claims that a protected minority group has been\ndisadvantaged. The legitimacy of elections can be diminished if the rules for determining the\neligible electorate (or, for that matter, candidate) discriminate against such a group, or favor one\nparty over another: should felons be deprived of the vote?\n\nOr for that matter, how about the\nplacement of voting booths, or the lines upon which voters must way in one as opposed to\nanother venue? Why can 18 year olds vote, but not especially mature 17 year olds? What about a\ncorrupt media that deliberately misinforms people with no other access to information? How\nabout foreigners, who are surely impacted by the decisions made by elected officials? Once we\nembark on that line of thinking, why not, for an extremely influential country such as the US,\nenfranchise the entire world? (At this point, have we all been chastened enough by various\nunbelievable proposals come true to refrain from laughing?)\n\nAll these questions become more\ncontentious the more each and every element of the electoral process can be deemed to favor one\nside over another—and this process of politicizing presumably neutral determinations of who\nshould be counted as a citizen and what counts as a fair process obviously feeds on itself. Now,\nof course, all this means nothing until one side in an election simply refuses to accept the result\nof that election, and mobilizes its institutional resources to contest it—we could say that the\nconstant delegitimizing of election results in the US over the last few years (maybe decades) is a\nway of softening people up for this eventuality.\n\nOne plausible account of the origins of elections\nis the concession of one side in an imminent war to another upon seeing the numbers on the other\nside—eventually, it becomes customary and convenient to count heads without all the trouble of\nactually preparing for war. Once one side refuses to accept the result of an election, we will have\nreverted back to the testing of all societal resources on both (all?) sides.\n\nSo, we can say, first, on a practical level, that when the existing social order starts\n“problematizing” succession itself, such problematization can then take on a variety of forms. And this is the case, because, second, what is put into play under such conditions is the very\nexistence of the “people” in the name of whom representative government governs. What counts\nas the “people,” in an operationalizable sense, is arbitrary, which is to say, depends upon histories\nof all kinds of power relations that cannot themselves be attributed to any decision of the people,\nas such decisions can only be made in previously formalized ways.\n\nA conversation over who\ndecides what counts as “the people” is bound to be a productive one, because it makes explicit\nthe paradoxes regarding the various ways the people supposedly chooses itself. We can parcel\nout all the different formal and informal elements of “the people” to different institutions,\ndifferent disciplines, different starting points, and trace its construction. We will no doubt find\nvery specific people, acting in very specific forms of concert, involved in each and every\nconstruct of the people. The people is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, or a robot, or an android,\nor an army of zombies (why not draw upon the full array of popular genres for our stock of\nmetaphors), and it has its origin story like all of those creatures.\n\nThe ongoing process of calling\ninto question more and more of the formalized features of the electoral process, invariably in the\nname of some super-sovereign (a truer democracy based on a more rightly constructed “people”) can be transformed into a process of modeling a process of formalization that would make\nquestions of succession, selection and delegation everyday topics of political discourse. After all,\nthe most likely crisis point of liberal democracy is such an outright refusal on the part of the loser\nin an election to accept the results, in which case these issues of political responsibility (who can\nsecure power) would displace all the evocations of the various contending super-sovereigns.\n\nIf our focus is on the consistency and coherence of power relations, what we see in any\ncommander-in-chief is a certain degree of interest and competence in maintaining the same. Those showing a lack of interest and competence or, even more, showing determination to\nfurther undermine the coherence of power, are the kinds of commanders we would be inclined to\n“oppose.” Well, you could oppose them—vote against them, organize support for their opponent,\nwrite articles criticizing them, and so on. The question is whether you want a different\ncommander-in-chief who will play the leaky power system in a way that provides you with a\nmodicum of real or imagined power; or, whether you want to plug the leaks.\n\nIf the latter, you\nwant to develop practices, relations and institutions that would present themselves to the kinds of\nleaders who might name their successors as plausible replacements for the kind of officer class\nthat thrives on leakiness. This involves minimizing reactiveness and seizing opportunities to\ndisplay deferral—self-defense and tit-for-tat responses should always be framed as instituting a\nmore coherent chain of command from the center. All the secular demands—calls for more\nfreedom, more democracy, rights, equality, etc.—are intrinsically disordering and it will always\nbe possible to show how more granularly constructed pedagogical relations, aimed at modeling a\nform of centered ordinality, would repair the situation.\n\nThe truth of resentment, insofar as there is\ntruth in it, is that power is used without responsibility, or responsibility conferred without the\npower needed to fulfill it generates insecurity, a leaking of meaning, and therefore resentment—\nany analysis of conflict, then, looks for a way in which power might be matched more perfectly\nwith responsibility.\n\nSo, a president who encourages leaking, who undermines his own formal authority by\nencouraging activist groups and cabals within the intelligence agencies to use the media to\n“force” him to do what he would prefer not to initiate on his own, who multiplies factions within\nthe bureaucracy that he can play off against each other, etc., can be distinguished from one\naiming at increasing the coherence of power. The differences will show up ostensively,\nimperatively, interrogatively, and declaratively, and we can learn to see it. When we have a\npresident exploiting incoherencies within the system, we are as loyal to him as to any other, we\nare equally awaiting the possibility that he will arrest the entropic drift of the power system by\neffectively passing power to a successor (or even indicating the necessity to do so), but our way\nof helping him see the way towards to that entails pointing out how all his actions contraindicate\nthis clearly desired result.\n\nThis is different from opposition because we wouldn’t be looking for\nlittle “levers” that could be used to gain some discernable advantage on the time scale set up the\nelectoral process, like trying to incriminate him or bombard him with bad publicity a few months\nbefore the election. It would be better to expose such maneuvering pedagogically, to explain how\nthe system reproduces itself through apparent opposition. It is also the case that the political\nexploitation of systemic incoherencies will overlap significantly with “issues” as they are represented within the liberal order. Most obviously, such exploitation will almost invariably\ncoincide with the subversion of the government’s responsibility to minimize criminal activity\nagainst powerless civilians.\n\nPolicies that encourage criminal activity, or raise the threshold of\nwhat is to count as criminal activity, are the calling cards of those who thrive on instability. At\nthe same time, multiplying bureaucratically defined crimes, to be prosecuted at the discretion of\nofficials at various levels of the system, likewise coincides with the kind of parasitism upon\ndisorder I am discussing. We will also find that these indicators of a more uncertain political and\nlegal setting overlap significantly with a whole range of other issues considered “cultural” and\n“economic”—a careful examination of policies favored across the spectrum of liberalism would\nyield interesting results if undertaken from the standpoint of how much tolerance and promotion\nof illegal activity they would require if implemented.\n\nMeanwhile, most insidious corporate\nactivity can be eliminated in two simple ways (simple, at least if we assume a coherent regime):\nfirst, abolish anti-discrimination laws, which is what, through a predictable, even inexorable,\nprocess has led most major corporations to adopt the cultural left’s agenda unconditionally; and,\nsecond, combine few, clear safety rules with a robust legal regime that can identify cause and\neffect and responsibility when it comes to harmful impact alleged to corporate activity—this is\nsomething we already know how to do quite well. At any rate, I am not suggesting that the\ncurrent lines of political antagonism are completely unconnected with the pedagogical\n“expectancy” my discussion envisages.\n\nNone of this changes the fact that the goal of an onomastic pedagogy is not to address the issues\nbut to produce the dispositions required for when some occupant of the center decides that only\nby passing power to a successor can the attempts he has undertaken to provide coherence to the\nsystem be sustained and continued. Naming always places the named object under the authority\nof the broader system of signs, or cultural authority—to name an object is to place its disposition\nat the disposal of the central authority. But naming is itself only effective under properly lent\nauthority—I can call the president a traitor, or illegitimate, but those are really nothing more than\ndesperate “suggestions” I hope some replacement will adopt—but through what chain of\nmediations, exactly?\n\nBetter to name what the system authorizes me to name: what I am expected\nto do, but find it difficult to do according to expectations. I will be excluded from access to\ncertain institutions and practices if I say something “racist,” and I could protest this on “free\nspeech” grounds, but more pertinent is the absence of anything like an acceptable definition of\nwhat counts as “racist” speech (or “sexist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” and so on). Here is\nwhere a real marker of political reliability will be one’s ability to resist the temptation to turn\nthese accusations back on one’s accusers, which continues the transformation of politics into\nattempts to be licensed as an arbiter of unacceptable speech.\n\nIt will really be essential to find and\ncreate spaces where it will be possible to ask, patiently, for explanations of what, exactly, these\nheresies involve—how do we identify them? Who has authority to rule on violations? What does\nthe history of precedents look like here—how would it be possible to know in advance what\nwould count as a violation? To be blunt, it is to be demonstrated that, as I mentioned earlier, all\nthese words mean no more and no less than the term, central to the pseudo-legal systems of all\nrevolutionary social orders, of “counter-revolutionary.” It would be impossible to overstate how\ntransformative a patient, civil, stoic demonstration of the meaninglessness of all these words would be.\n\nYou could say that without replacing those in power with different leaders, none of\nthis would matter, as power would simply find replacements for all of them. But dissolving these\nwords in the acid bath of their incoherence would itself do a great deal to release other power\ncenters from externally and self-imposed limitations. To put it in originary grammatical terms:\nevaporating all the terms superstructured on anti-discrimination law would upset the entire\nostensive order, leaving us, literally, with little to point at in a shared manner—and these are\nfruitful conditions for an onomastic pedagogy naming the transitions from a society of usurpers\nto an order saturated by pedagogical demonstrations of how to be and how to do in such a way\nthat your practices and your life are pedagogical demonstrations."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-the-center-speaking",
      "title": "The Center, Speaking",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "https://adamkatz.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics-an-originary-grammar",
      "content": "It should be clear that I'm not calling for the restoration of the sacred, but for the increasingly\nrich direct representation of our sociality. The sacred is an indirect, unaware representation of\nsociality, since the human contribution to the construction of sacrality cannot be explicitly\nrepresented. Directly representing the social was also the project of secular thought, but the\nproject turned out to be impossible on those terms because the \"human\" individual must be taken\nas its own origin, with the signs that mediate between humans mere expressions of what is\nalways already internal to the human individual.\n\nThe emergence of government enables a more\ndirect representation of sociality, but as long as government is sacralized, the human contribution\nto sociality cannot be represented. The modern subjection of government to points of reference\ntaken to be immediately \"human\" (rights, equality, nature, and so on) has the effect of making\nanti-sociality a condition of intelligibility. That is, individuals and groups can only be represented\nin opposition to the social, which stands in for \"tyranny\" or some other form of coercion (like\ndeterminism). Only by starting with a center which is both internal and external to the human,\nthat is, a product of human practice but in its effects irreducible to any human practice, can we\nbegin to represent sociality in more legible terms.\n\nThink of how every word or sentence we speak\nor write, every gesture we make, is dependent upon the millions of times those words, sentences\nand gestures have been deployed in extremely similar ways—by contrast, whatever is novel in\nany of our utterances is minimal. Part of the paradox constituting the human is that such\nminuscule \"revisions\" of the common stock of linguistic resources might have effects far beyond\nwhat the proportion between \"new\" and \"old\" in the utterance might suggest. Directly\nrepresenting our sociality is paradoxical, then, because any such representation now becomes the\nproperty of our language, requiring new representations.\n\nRepresentations of sociality, then, are\nre-presentations of existing, less legible forms of sociality: they represent those forms of sociality\nas more differentiated, more reciprocally embedded, more centered, so that those differentiations\nin practices and relationships, and those elicitations of previously unacknowledged reciprocities,\ncan become explicitly formalized designations which distribute authority and responsibilities\nmore transparently and publicly. What I am saying here can be said in more familiar sociological,\ne.g., Durkheimian terms; but the specificity of representation needs to be accounted for.\n\nThe line\nbetween anti-sociality and more formalized sociality is drawn through language itself. If we try\nand represent human or social relations directly, unmediated by the center, we will only end up\nrepresenting their resentments and claims on each other, leaving us to seek some reconciliation or balance between antithetical \"elements.\" If we take care of language, meanwhile, we will be\ntaking care of humans, that is, each other—language always directs our attention to a center, and\nthrough that center, the center that conditions that centering.\n\nWe are all highly mediated and technologized men and women. It’s staggering to think of all the\nways we operate as signs across all the different media, and the way in which all of our habits,\nincluding of thought, depend upon all the devices we are plugged into. It is clear that the political\nvocabulary we are used to, comprised of “values,” “ideas,” “opinions,” “agreements and\ndisagreements,” “principles,” and so on, are completely inadequate for conditions where the\ntweak of an algorithm will determine whether 0 or 10,000 people will be exposed to something I\nsay. To try and stand outside of, say, social media, and denounce it for isolating and manipulating\nand enraging people, is simply to leverage one medium—say, writing, or TV—against another,\nascendant one—it’s not to position us within nature against something artificial.\n\nWe have to think\nin terms of interlocking media strategies—for example, using highly contagious maxims on\nTwitter to, in part, direct attention to longer essays or a book. But it’s not just a question of\nstrategy—rather, it’s a question of modes of being; that is, it’s ontological. If we think of\nourselves as separate individuals, waging war against some tyranny on behalf of a rebellious\nsubjectivity we are playing into well-worn strategies directed from above. Thinking in terms of\ngroup identities, however conceived, is really the same strategy on a larger scale. Thinking of\nourselves as beings of the center, representatives of the center, delegates, emissaries of the center,\nopens up new possibilities.\n\nIn that case we’re offering the central authority feedback based upon\nthe difficulties we’re having in fulfilling imperatives coming from the central authority. Among\nthose imperatives are, certainly, ones directing us to individualize (self-center) ourselves in\ncertain ways, and to organize ourselves into communities along certain lines. Every imperative\nfrom the center—every law, every invocation of a constitutional obligation, every priority\nsuggested by some government action—necessarily suggests various modes of individuation and\ncorporatization. Again, the point is not simply to drop all the ways you have of thinking about\nyourself, but to see those ways as always already in a kind of asymmetrical exchange with the\ncenter. What is wanted is to have those identities named, and the imperatives following upon that\nnaming to be drawn out.\n\nThe various media and technologies, then, are our articulation with and through the center. Questions of whether technologies dehumanize us, or interfere with our privacy or personal\nfreedoms are always questions posed, futilely, from within an older media to a newer one. Even\nmore specifically, it may be that most of these criticisms come from an imagined experience of\nmid-20th century urban living, where for many a certain balance among the desires of prosperity,\nfreedom from externally imposed norms, and sociality was possible. However that may be, the\ncentral authority will always want to know enough about the people it governs to govern them;\nand the governed are also filled with expectations regarding the maintenance of safety,\nconditions for forming families, engaging in productive activity and enjoyment that always\nalready presuppose a central imaginary seeing to spatial arrangements and information gathering.\n\nA demand that I be left alone entails a whole series of assumptions about my relations with others. Even more, it assumes the existence of projects I am or could be engaged in with others,\neither directly or by proxy. Imagine stripping from our discussion all references to “rights,” on\nthe one hand, and notions of “checks and balances,” or “public and private,” on the other hand,\nand consider what discussions of the relationship between individuals, communities,\ncorporations and governments would then look like. The only way we could get our bearings\nwithout those familiar legal and political markers is by isolating another, also familiar one: the\nnotion of “chartering,” central to Western culture, at least, since the Middle Ages, and in a way\nRoman antiquity.\n\nIf everything is chartered—corporations, profit and non-profit, subordinate\nunits of government—as, in fact, is already the case, then as individuals we are always already\nall chartered up. Questions of social order then come down to clarifying the terms of the charters\nissued at all levels, and the only agency capable of doing that is the sovereign, and sovereign\nagents. Charters bind all agencies to the imperatives of the center. To the extent that we’re all\nagents of the sovereign, even if not to the same degree of officiality, our main contribution to\npublic discourse is clarifying the operations of the institutions we participate in in terms of their\ncharters and our own competencies.\n\nTo the extent of our abilities, we clarify and represent the\nkind of scenes the media we participate in place us upon: at the very least, this means\nincorporating, in the way each media allows, the feedback of actual and possible audiences, and\nreconstructing one’s centeredness accordingly; and, it means that it is as “pieces” within the\n“technosphere” that we create fractal pedagogical hierarchies. These practices are part of\nlistening to the center.\n\nWhat will happen once one ruler selects his successor is that we will see relations reduced to\nsovereign-to-sovereign ones, without the mediation of a whole conglomerate of shifting and\nunaccountable agencies. The reduction of all relationships to such formalized ones: ruler to ruler,\nruler to delegate, delegate to delegate, ultimately including everyone in an ordered way—that is\nthe way out of liberalism, on the international as well as national level. As terrifying as it may\nsound to some, such an order in fact expects the most of its people, wherever they are situated\nwithin hierarchies. What is absolutely forbidden under such an order is directing violent\ncentralization toward the authorities—and that target is the source of all violent centralizations,\nwhich always, at whatever scale, seek to find and punish a hidden power imagined to lie behind\nthe scenes of the official power.\n\nAuthorities are never opposed as authorities—no one is ever, in\npractice, an anarchist—but as usurped authorities, at which point we enter the realm of the super-\nsovereigns we invoke to do battle against usurping tyrants. If we can’t charge the authorities with\nusurpation, our resentments must be constructed according to the terms of redress and\nremediation constructed by those authorities themselves. If those terms of redress and\nremediation turn out to be applied in an “unjust,” even “absolutely” unjust way, on their own\nterms, it will be recognized that directing resentment toward those institutions or those who staff\nthem cannot possible correct those injustices.\n\nTo assume that it can is to assume that the\ntemporality of resentment is commensurate with the temporality of institutional rectification. With all the means available, one provides feedback to the system, but it is a mark of advanced\ndeferral to acknowledge that the effective recipient of that feedback cannot be anticipated within\nthe feedback itself. Even if we consider the necessity of disobeying an unambiguously immoral\norder, such an act must be presented as a sign of what will eventually come to be regarded as obedience—not to some higher power, but to that very, for the moment shortsighted, power. Leaving testimony for agents of the regime to examine is a repudiation of any instigation of a\nrevolt against the system. This renunciation of the temptation to occupy internal scene of\nrepresentation in rebellion against the tyrant in the name of some super-sovereign is what we can\ncall “donating your resentment to the center.”\n\nMedia and technology are, as Marshall McLuhan noted, extensions of our senses and body. McLuhan seems to be imagining a “natural” body made “artificial,” though, which paradoxically\npresupposes some kind of control center “using” those extensions, as if they were deliberately\ndeveloped as prosthetics. The situation looks different once we consider technology, media and\ncapital as means of generating asymmetrical reciprocity between center and margins. The sign on\nthe scene is itself the first media, and we use it to “keep an eye” on each other, while turning\nourselves into “limbs” ready to restrain anyone interfering with the visual apparatus, and into\nmeasuring rods dividing up portions.\n\nNow that eyes are literally everywhere, each of us can\ntransform surveillance and recording devices into our eyes and ears; now that calculating\nprobabilities of human action has been automated, we can all transform machinic algorithms into\nour brains; we each have our own access to wheels and wings; and so on. Now, instead of\nplugging these observations into an oceanic feeling of global communality, consider what is\ninvolved in coordinating all the “organs” of these bodies, that each of us participates in from our\nrespective positions on the margin. So, when I see something (say, a video making the rounds of\nTwitter), it means something to the extent that one of the “legs” (or wings or wheels) I have\nanthropomorphized out of the technological nerves, bones and muscles I operate within get me\nclose enough to what I see so that my “hands” (e.g., security guards able to stop an appalling\nsituation) can “touch” and “handle” things; or, perhaps, that one of the voices I’ve\nanthropomorphized as an echo or amplification or translation of my own can command those\n“hands” to operate in that way.\n\nIf I want to increase the efficacy of these “motor functions” so\nthat what I see and hear can be more closely integrated into what I say, which in turn contributes\nto my transformation of things happening to me into things I do then I need to think about where\nsuch coordination is already taking place so that I can, because then I can know where to move\nwithin the system. Where seeing, hearing, doing, happening, saying, thinking and knowing are\nall moving in the same way, that’s where the center needs to be, and to some extent already is. The center is the coordination I’m seeking within the circuits of capital, technology and media,\nand every attempt to contribute to greater coordination is in obedience to the imperative of the\ncenter.\n\nI may be wrong at any time, but if I’m wrong, it’s about the transmission and full\nimplications of an imperative that tells me to defer some resentment at been compelled to\ncoordinate, and others can correct and improve my effort. I may imagine I can see and “grasp”\neverything I need to, but my vision and reach is in fact partial relative to projections of my\npower; it’s not that the occupant of the center is all seeing, knowing, doing, and so on (he does\nall that through us)—rather, it is only in attempting to enhance the commands coming from the\ncenter by animating whatever organs within organs respond to my motions that it can even make\nsense to think of increasing my own motor functioning.\n\nNow, I want to conclude this way so that I make it clear that, how, and why anthropomorphics\neliminates humanism; but also to show that originary grammar identifies the always already\nbecoming human that makes it impossible to think of any post- or transhuman project as\nanything other than a series of distributed attempts to declaratively hierarchize commands from\nthe center so that in re-centering those attempts we pose the kinds of questions that open new\nostensive regions. And we can learn to see any utterance in terms of if and how it opens up those\nostensive regions. In the end, a human science needs no more “proof” of anything other than\nwhat people say (in relation to what other people say, have said, might say...).\n\nAll we can say\n(through whatever media) is what the center has us say, and that the center has us say it. You talk\nabout something, and in doing so make a place for that thing; that place, then, as a center, is\nassailed by some, and inhabited by other, interested parties; you invoke some other center to\nconvert the convergence into a sign of the endurance of the thing in its place; your utterances are\nin turn marked by more or less implicit references to that other center; those markings in your\ndiscourse make you a center as they are noted by others; if you can become a center for others\nyou can inhabit the place where you become so and your discourse can become a center for\nyourself; everything you say, then, counts as saying insofar as it is marked by a reliance on the\ncenter becoming invisible by marking the visible, and it is so marked insofar as it makes that\ncenter even less visible because it is a sheer effect of its visible representatives all maintaining\nthe places enabling you say what you are saying and that you are saying it.\n\nWe become more\nhuman, that is, more capable of deferral and constructions of inviolate reality, insofar as less and\nless is said about the center and all of our doings become the articulated representation of the\ncenter, that is at the same time the retrieval of distributed effects of ever more distant centers."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-book",
      "title": "Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center",
      "source": "book",
      "sourceLabel": "Anthropomorphics",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": null,
      "content": "_The Use of a Center_\n\nAct so that there is no use in a centre. Gertrude Stein.\n\nIf you act so that there is no use in a center, your action would be dissolving all possible, all\nimaginable, uses in a center. If there’s a center, you can be equidistant from it with others; you\ncan be closer to it or more distant from it than others. A center establishes a hierarchy—at the\nvery least between center and margin. But every other hierarchy is modeled on the hierarchy\nbetween center and margin—hierarchies are only possible if there is a center. Presumably, that’s\nwhy Stein would enjoin us to act so that there is no use in a center, but following her imperative\nwould place her injunction at the center as we take her as a model for detecting, identifying and\nthen disabling this use of the center, that use, and then other uses. But in thus acting to dissolve\nthe center, we would need to use the center, at least in order to determine which use of it requires\nthe most urgent attention. So, as we subtract uses, we add uses to the center: acting so that there\nis no use in a center is, in fact, a discovery procedure for revealing and naming all the uses of a\ncenter.\n\nIn Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences,” we are given and warned\nabout a great many uses of the center. The center allows for the “structurality of structure”; it\nprovides a “fixed point of origin”; it allows for “free play within the system,” which depends\nupon the “coherence” provided by a center; it also limits the free play within the system\n(allowing and limiting free play may be two different, not incompatible, uses). But, according to\n“classical thought concerning structure:\n\n```\nthe center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the\ntotality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the\ntotality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure—\nalthough it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science—is\ncontradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a\ndesire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a\nfundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a\nreassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay.\n\nWith this certitude anxiety\ncan be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the\ngame, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the\n```\n```\ngame. From the basis of what we therefore call the center (and which, because it can be either\ninside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as readily arché as telos), the\nrepetitions, the substitutions, the transformations, and the permutations are always taken from a\nhistory of meaning [sens]—that is, a history, period—whose origin may always be revealed or\nwhose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence.\n\nThis is why one could perhaps say\nthat the movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this\nreduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the\nbasis of a full presence which is out of play.\n```\nDerrida’s language here seems strangely intentionalistic and even psychologistic at crucial\npoints. The center holds the structure together, and is therefore inside the structure; but, the center is not subject to the free play of elements within the structure, and is therefore outside of\nthe structure. This paradox, or “coherence in contradiction,” “expresses the force of a desire.”\n\nThis is a desire for certitude, a mastering of anxiety—it is a way of establishing a teleology,\nwherein the end is contained in the origin. The center is presumably fragile as well—otherwise,\nwhy the anxiety?—and, therefore, a challenge to one center is met through a series of\nsubstitutions and permutations, a constant decentering, with one center replacing another. Still\nthe logic here seems to be progressive, insofar as each decentering implicates the new center\nfurther in the free play it sought to avoid, and we become increasingly aware of our implication\nin the game. (It’s not clear whether this makes us more or less anxious.) The watershed here\nseems to be when “language invaded the universal problematic,” implicating all centers in the\nplay of differences.\n\nWhat prevents us from moving from “metaphysics” to “discourse,” in that case? Why is it that\n“ _[t]here is no sense_ in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter\na single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the\nimplicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest”? It is interesting that the example\nDerrida provides demonstrating why “we have not language” is the concept of the “sign” itself,\nwhich we cannot do without but which Derrida contends is unthinkable without the metaphysical\ndistinction between “sensible” and “intelligible.”\n\nWe can take the concept of the sign, then, as a\ntest for whether we can have any language, not necessarily “alien to this history” but inclusive of\nand non-reducible to it. We can agree with Derrida that the sign belongs at the center of the\nhuman sciences, precisely because the sign marks the threshold of the human. Whether we speak\nin terms of a Peircean “symbol,” or the distinction between signifier and signified, the sign is\ndifferent from any form of non-human communication insofar as the operation of any sign is\nboth conventional and historical while being outside of conventionality and history. Words only\nmean what they mean insofar as a community of language users “agrees” that that is what they\nmean; but the word “agree” is clearly inadequate because a community, as was perhaps first\npointed out by Rousseau, would already have to have language to “agree” on the meaning of\nsigns.\n\nBut this means that the origin of language would also be the origin of community and,\nindeed, the origin of the human. Derrida’s intuition regarding the paradoxicality of any such\norigin, or any attempt to posit an origin, is formidable; and his failure or refusal to hypothesize\nregarding an origin more originary than any other is unsurprising.\n\nDerrida’s intuition regarding the articulation of “center,” “origin,” “desire” and “anxiety” is also\nremarkable. Something like “desire” and something like “anxiety” would, indeed, have to lie at\nthe origin of the sign, because the sign articulates attention, and desire and anxiety both sharpen\nand singularize attention. Where there is attention, there is a center of that attention. As Michael\nTomasello has pointed out, the apparently very simple activity of pointing or, more specifically,\n“pointing something out,” is something only humans do. What Tomasello calls “joint attention”\nis constitutive of human sign use, and is intimately linked to the paradoxical “agreement”\ndiscussed in the previous paragraph.\n\nWe are each directing the other’s attention to something,\nand also showing each other that we know the other is doing so. The paradoxicality and recursivity definitive of human language is already present on this simple scene: nothing but our\nrespective gestures toward some center sustains the gestures themselves, but for each of us the\ngesture is always already available—neither of us invented it or could imagine it to have been\n“invented” (or “discovered”). It only remains to produce a hypothesis regarding the possibility of\nthis paradoxical construct.\n\n_Origin and Hypothesis_\n\nThere already is such a hypothesis, and has been for forty years; this hypothesis is the starting\npoint of this book, and following its implications, or at least one set of implications, will be its\nsubject matter. The originary hypothesis, advanced by Eric Gans in his _The Origin of Language_\nin 1981, posits a singular event within which language, or the sign, originates. Gans’s starting\npoint is Rene Girard’s understanding of the conflictual nature of mimesis: as humans are the\nmost mimetic species, and mimesis generates rivalry because our model, the more we model\nourselves on him, becomes our rival for the same object, mimesis leads to crisis, in which the\ncontinued existence of the community can be at stake.\n\nGirard’s hypothesis is that in some such\ncrisis of a “proto-human” species of hominid, a single member of the group is “marked” and\nsingled out as the source of the mimetic contagion, with this “scapegoat” then murdered by the\nrest of the group. The mimetic frenzy of undifferentiation is thereby “discharged” upon this\nsingle “absolutely” different member. The scapegoat then becomes the first divine being, insofar\nas he has “saved” the community.\n\nGans sees the outcome of the originary event differently. The limit of Girard’s account is that\nthere is no reason for the event in question to become meaningful and memorable. Why should\nthe killing of a conspecific, not a very unusual event among mammals, transform the group in\nany way? I used the word “murder” in my description of the scene, but “murder” presupposes a\nmoral order, and nothing in Girard’s scenario accounts for how the scene would create such an\norder. This is another way of saying that Girard doesn’t account for the emergence of language,\nwhich would itself be a prerequisite of a moral order and a community to share it.\n\nFor Gans, the\nhypothetical scene is revised as follows. Gans assumes that the mimetic crisis is organized\naround some object of appetitive attention—most likely some food source, perhaps a recent kill. Ordinarily, among the higher primate species, the object would be consumed in order, first by the\nAlpha animal, then by the Beta, and so on. But on this occasion, the mimetic rivalry induced by\nthe object overrides the pecking order as all members of the group move toward the object at the\ncenter. Appetite becomes “desire,” that is, a social phenomenon involving one’s relation to others\nand not merely the object itself.\n\nDesire intensifies the mimetic crisis. However, within the group,\nsome member hesitates, presumably out of something like terror (“anxiety” would not be quite\nright here), is seen by others to hesitate, and is imitated by others. The gesture indicates a\nrenunciation, perhaps momentary (but that is enough), of the desired object. This, what Gans\ncalls “the gesture of aborted appropriation,” is the first sign. The rivalrous imitation that first\npropels the group toward center and potentially cataclysmic violence is converted into a\npacifying imitation that de-escalates the crisis; the order provided by the animal pecking order is\nreplaced by an order mediated by the sign, which defers violence through representation. A new species is born: the human, the only species, as Gans puts it, that poses a greater danger to its\nown survival than is posed to it by anything in its environment.\n\nThe first sign is an ostensive sign—that is, it is inextricable from the event in which it is issued\nand therefore constitutes the object it refers to. But this is not an act of existential free will on the\npart of each member of the new community. None of them could articulate such a will, not only\nbecause they have no language in which to do so, but because the sign cannot be attributed to an\nintentionality “internal” to any of the members of the group. Each is only repeating the others’\nreference to the central object—none of them could be the origin. And yet intention has been\nintroduced into the community, in the form of the object itself. As the participants on the scene\nsee each other sharing attention to the object of desire, the only agency that could be holding\nthem back is the potential victim itself. The creation of the human is mediated by the creation of\nthe sacred center as the creator of the human.\n\nThe victim does need to be consumed, and the emergent community does need to put its new\nsign to work to ensure this can be done in a communal and non-violent (or, sufficiently non-\nviolent so that the mimetic crisis is not re-activated) manner. In the sparagmos, the tension\ngenerated by the prior restraint is loosened, and so this danger does present itself as the\ncommunity attacks the meal in this unprecedented manner. Resentment at the object itself, for\nimposing restraint and refusing itself, intensifies the devouring of the body. The only thing\npreventing each member from overreaching his bounds and turning on his fellows is the sign\nitself, which we can imagine working within the sparagmos as a kind of reminder of the\ncollective limits making this peaceful consumption possible.\n\nFollowing the sparagmos, as the\ncommunity faces each other over the remains of their victim/meal/deity, the sign would be issued\nonce again, this time pointing to the remainders and mementos of the sacred being, marking the\nfirst ritual. Naturally, this hypothetical account in fully developed language that is both\nunavailable to the participants on the scene and marked by the limitations of constructing the\nemergence of language from within language, must present coherently a sequence that might\nhave developed over a series of similar events—and, more importantly, reconstructed for\nmemory through more orderly rituals.\n\nThe value of such an account, though, lies in the need to\nhypothesize the sign being repeated and made memorable. Eventually the ritual would be moved\nto prior to the act of consumption, so as to prevent in advance the possibility that this time the\nscene might not play out in ideal form.\n\nThe paradoxes of deferral we see on the originary scene are enduring features of the human. That\nwhich we desire and that therefore thrusts itself upon our attention, is given excess desirability\nthrough our mimetic relations with our fellows—desiring something is inseparable from\nimagining others desiring it. For this very reason we are forbidden our object of desire, as we\nintuit the violence implicit in our approach to it. And yet, we might be granted our desire, insofar\nas our satisfaction is mediated through the cultural (sign) systems that allot desirable objects in\nsuch a way as to build layers of deferral that themselves keep at bay the need to improvise means\nof deferral in dire circumstances.\n\nThe alienation of our desires must be represented to us, and we\nmust receive our desired object as a gift from the center. The fact that many take short cuts and evade or violate the cultural mechanisms that formalize our satisfactions as an exchange with the\ncenter doesn’t contradict this claim—rather, it explains our resentment towards those\ntransgressors and our marking them as “criminal” or “immoral.” The immoral and criminal must\ntell themselves, meanwhile, that their own exceptional relation to the center, due unique\ncircumstances or unusual abilities, authorizes a form of appropriation forbidden to others. Our\nmost immediate desires throw us into a net of social obligations.\n\n_A Grammar of the Social_\n\nGans, in _The Origin of Language_ , hypothesizes in a remarkably thorough and precise manner the\ndevelopment of the more developed speech forms out of the original ostensive sign. I will\npresent this development here in what can be no more than an outline form, while returning to\nthe sequence of speech forms in new contexts throughout my discussion. Following the ostensive\nis the imperative. The imperative is a result of an “inappropriate ostensive.” One member of the\ncommunity issues the ostensive sign in the absence of the object, and another member of the\ncommunity then supplies the object. Gans is solving a very important problem in this hypothesis\nof the creation of the imperative.\n\nNote that the problem of accounting, not just for the emergence\nof language, but its development from its earliest forms, is that any intention or “motivation” we\nmight attribute to these early language users is going to presuppose that they already possess the\nmore advanced form we are trying to explain. So, to explain the imperative as a result of\nsomeone “wanting someone else to provide him with an object,” seemingly the simplest\nmotivation imaginable, would already presuppose the availability of the imperative. Note that the\noriginary hypothesis accounts for the issuing of the first sign by constructing an attentional space\nthat is first of all convergent, and therefore dangerous, and then becomes shared—in this way, we\ncan see attention becoming intention without anyone actually intending for this to happen.\n\nSimilarly, in accounting for the imperative, the sign has to become iterable, memorable and\ndeployable without anyone intending for this to happen. So, we imagine, perhaps, an\ninexperienced sign user, perhaps a child, imitating “blindly” a gesture she has seen others make;\nanother member of the community, perhaps an adult but still unable to conceive of a sign used\n“improperly,” “redeems” the sign by providing its missing referent. I will note now that this\n“method” of accounting for the emergence of new linguistic and cultural forms as a result of a\n“mistake” that is then “retrieved” within the community is central to originary thinking.\n\nGans\nintroduces the concept needed for us to motivate this act of retrieval: “linguistic presence.” What\nparticipants in a sign community desire above all is the maintenance of linguistic presence: any\nscene we are on must be mediated by signs, and if we intuit that some element of a particular\nscene is going unrepresented, we treat that as a danger to be remedied through the application of\na sign. So, a mistaken use of a sign opens a kind of rupture on the scene that must be recuperated\nsomehow—this can be done by “marking” the “guilty” party, but it can also be done by granting\na new meaning to the mistaken sign on the terms of the scene itself.\n\nI will point to another\nelement of originary thinking illustrated by Gans’s derivation of the imperative that I will also be\nreturning to—the emergence of linguistic and cultural forms from marginal sites within the\ncommunity. So, if one were to pose the question, “how might the imperative have emerged within a community of sign users who only had access to ostensive signs?,” a more obvious or\ncommonsensical attempt to answer it might look to relations of power and authority within the\ncommunity: we might imagine, for example, an adult who “wants” to command a child to do\nsomething. The reverse is much more likely the case: forms that emerge marginally through\nmistakenness are then appropriated within and help to formalize the existing power relations\nwithin the community: once the imperative is in use, someone in a position to do so can “want”\nto command another.\n\nIn moving directly from the ostensive to the imperative, I skipped over an important\ndevelopment that lays the ground work for that leap into a new linguistic form. Once the\noriginary sign has been issued within the event, on the scene, there is no obvious reason to\nassume that it will be used outside of that very controlled situation. In other words, we can\nreadily imagine, for quite a while, everything else remaining the same within that group: they\nhunt the same way, gather the same way, mate the same way, battle with competing “packs” the\nsame way, while only issuing the sign within the ritualized framework of approaching their\nmeals.\n\nThe originary sign creates a radical difference between the meaningful central object, on\nthe one hand, and everything else, on the other. Still, we can’t imagine this continuing\nindefinitely, because in the sign the group has a means of deferring violence, and the need to\ndefer violence must occur in varied settings. Indeed, once it is known that certain dangerous\nsituations can be prevented, it becomes possible to identify potentially dangerous situations,\nalbeit somewhat less dangerous than that of the originary scene, and to issue the sign in such\nsituations. This is the way in which new objects and acts would come to be named, and signs\ndifferentiated from each other.\n\nGans refers to this process as one in which the “threshold of\nsignificance” is continually lowered, and more of the world is made representable. The use of the\nsign outside of its ritual constraints would be an instance of scandalous “secularization,” one for\nwhich we could imagine the sign user paying some price; a re-issuance of the original sign, with\nits higher degree of sacrality, within this new context would recuperate this unwarranted usage\nwithin the evolving language system. The community could recognize its belonging to the same\nsalvationist project.\n\nWe should view the ostensive and the imperative as comprising a pair. For an imperative to be\ncompleted, and to therefore be meaningful, an object must actually be supplied: the supplying of\nthe object is recognized, at least tacitly, with a confirming ostensive (Gans here uses the example\nof an operating room, in which the doctor calls for the “scalpel” with the single word command,\nwith the nurse providing it along with the confirming “scalpel.”) At the same time, the\nimperative makes more explicit the “command” implicit in any ostensive. An object pointed to,\nreferred to, named, is thereby protected, at the very least insofar as we are enjoined to observe\nrather than appropriate it.\n\nThe injunction to defer appropriation issued by the central being on the\noriginary scene already has the elements of a command: something like “stay your hand!” The\nworld of objects, and each singularized or identified object similarly issues such a command,\nwhich is not a command to refrain from consumption or use indefinitely, but to refrain from any\nconsumption or use that is not already sanctioned in the very name of the object in question. The\nuses that are sanctioned by any ostensive sign are determined by its origin and subsequent recuperation with the sign and cultural system. What Gans calls the “dialectic of the imperative”\nbegins with the observation that while, for the one issuing the imperative, the imperative is in\neffect an ostensive (for the “imperator” the object is as good as present) for the one obeying the\nimperative, the space of the other’s desire is opened up.\n\nA new form of reciprocity becomes\npossible and necessary. Some imperatives are perhaps unproblematic, but for those that aren’t,\nand that threaten to break linguistic presence and initiate new conflicts, the preservation or\nrestoration of linguistic presence would involve deriving the imperative from the object\ndemanded or, more broadly, the world of objects, which is to say, the central being constituting\nthat world. Every ostensive-imperative articulation adds to the repertoire of the center, whether\nan imperative is issued in the name of God, of reality or exigency.\n\nWe don’t have “reality” yet, in the sense of a world of objects separate from the sign users\nthemselves. Ostensives and imperatives rely upon the presence of the referent of the sign, and of\nthe sign users to each other. We can take Derrida’s lesson that there is no unmediated presence by\npointing out that central being presides over all linguistic acts without being indexical within\nthem. To more fully address Derrida’s critique of logocentrism, though, we will need to finish\nworking through the succession of speech forms, because the cogency of Derrida’s concept relies\nupon the way meaning is articulated in the declarative speech form.\n\nThe declarative emerges in\nresponse to a problem raised by the imperative—what we might call, although Gans doesn’t, an\n“inappropriate imperative.” There would imperatives that couldn’t be fulfilled, raising the specter\nof a breakdown of linguistic presence. In some cases, the one issuing the imperative would “let it\ngo,” either due to the unimportance of the request or the inability to enforce the command. But\nwhat if a more complex situation emerges—an imperative is not complied with, but it’s not clear\nthat it can’t be complied with; the one issuing the imperative may not be able to enforce it, but,\nthen again, the probability of doing so may seem high enough to risk pressing the point, even if\nnot past a certain, as yet undetermined, point.\n\nSo, the imperative is repeated—let’s say first with\nmore urgency, as the “gambit” or bluff is played; then with a degree of uncertainty, as the\nimperator “climbs back down,” but not completely. In this latter case, the imperative is\nprolonged, along with a tonal shift—the imperative becomes an interrogative, opening a space of\nchoice for the one being issued the imperative.\n\nThe problem of linguistic presence is now posed in a new way. The stakes of the situation have\nbeen lowered—at this point, it’s clear that no physical confrontation is imminent—but that\nmakes the situation all the riper for innovation. In other words, it is one of those marginal,\nmistaken sign usages wherein a new form can emerge. The recipient of what is now a question\nhas the opportunity to “inform” his interlocutor that the requested object is not available. Again,\nthough, the interlocutor can’t simply “want” to “offer information,” because the speech form in\nwhich such a desire could be formulated is precisely what is about to be invented.\n\nFirst of all, the\nname of the object requested is repeated, as in an ostensive-imperative articulation—this\nmaintains linguistic presence. The name, what is about to become the “substantive” (or\n“subject”) is about to be conjoined with the “comment” (“predicate”) upon that substantive. The\ncomment is derived from a linguistic act Gans refers to as the “operator of negation,” which is a\nform of the imperative but one somewhat abstracted from the conditions of presence in which we have so far found the imperative. The operator of negation is a more open-ended imperative\nforbidding some action. Gans gives the example of “don’t smoke,” which is an imperative that\ncan never actually be fulfilled—it’s always possible that at some future time the one so forbidden\nto will light up. More obvious examples would be the “Thou Shalt Nots” of the Ten\nCommandments: we will never have finished not committing murder.\n\nIt’s not clear how such open-ended prohibitions have emerged within the language of ostensives\nand imperatives we are presupposing here. It’s noteworthy that such prohibitions involve\nrefraining from some action, rather than the provision of a desired object, which has been the\nkind of imperative we have been looking at so far. Telling someone not to do something seems to\nalready presuppose the availability of declarative sentences, since it seems dependent upon\nrepresenting the act to be forbidden. So, we need an operator of negation that would precede an\nexplicit formulation of an act—a more primitive form of the operator of negation, in other words.\n\nWe can have recourse here to the orginary sign, which, insofar as it refers to the central object,\nsacralizes that object but, insofar as it is directed to the other participants, issues a kind of\ninjunction, and prohibits a very specific act. All we need is the possibility of a sign that is the\nequivalent of “do not,” split off, so to speak, from the originary sign. The reference to the\nspecific act in question would always be context bound.\n\nSo, we have the repetition of the name of the object demanded along with something like\n“don’t...” as our proto-declarative. We do need an imperative here to function as a preliminary\npredicate: if we try to imagine, say, two successive ostensives as the first declarative sentence,\nwe will not have solved the problem of a sentence that could be uttered out of the presence of the\nobject in question. The question here is, to whom or what does the “don’t” apply? On the one\nhand, the utterance works as a proto-declarative insofar as it is makes present the absence of the\nrequested object. This would really be the first predicate, insofar as it would tell us something\nabout an object that is not present, and that can’t be “verified” ostensively on the scene.\n\nThis\nwould be the creation of “reality,” a world that exists over and beyond our desires and demands,\nand that can therefore refuse and “refute” those desires and demands—and one that we must\ntake, at least at first, on “faith” from the speaker. But the object, in this model, is being ordered\noff-stage; while the predicate must convey that it is already off-stage. And, what would the object\nbe commanded to refrain from? Finally, the operator of negation would just as much, if not more\ndirectly, be addressing the one making the demand: he would be told not to persist in his\ndemand.\n\nInsofar as “don’t” is directed towards the imperator/interrogator, it is issuing a counter\nimperative to cease demanding the object. Insofar as it is directed toward the object, it is\ncommanding the object to absent itself from the scene. Since the proto-declarator is in no\nposition, has no authority, to make any such demand upon the object and, furthermore, since his\ncapacity to make such a demand would imply that he could have complied with the original\nimperative, the command issued to the object to absent itself must come from elsewhere. I would\nposit that the proto-declarator is “remembering” an imperative from the central being to the\nobject to absent itself.\n\nWithout the declarative, in what other way could the absence of an object be understood other than under the auspices of the sacred center? What is present is given by the\ncenter; what is absent has been withheld by the center. We would have to assume that this early\nlanguage is replete with references to the sacred center as a way of maintaining linguistic\npresence: something like the “God willing” that routinely accompanies utterances of some\nreligious communities to this day. The originary structure of the declarative, then, contains a\ndouble imperative: one issued to some implicit, actual or possible imperator, however distantly\nconceived or complexly mediated—this imperative is to concede some demand or desire, to\nrefrain from pursuing it further; the other is an imperative relayed retroactively from central\nbeing to the object in question, or the world of objects in which a particular one or set is\nensconced, and this imperative is to remain beyond the grasp of anyone trying to intervene in\nthat piece of reality.\n\nThis would complete the declarative scene we have been constructing,\ninsofar the imperative that has already been issued to the object would be the guarantee that\nenables the declarator to issue the more “local” imperative to his interlocutor. The speaker can\ntell the listener he must concede that his desire is to go unfulfilled because “reality,” which\nprecedes us both, has so dictated it. Even though the declarative proper follows the path of the\nobject’s absence being represented, moreover, this construction of the proto-declarative scene\nhelps us to think of the declarative “order” as constructed and carved out of the ostensive-\nimperative world, and as always grounded in the imperative and ostensive materials it defers.\n\nA\ndeclarative sentence, then, subordinates an imperative issued by the speaker to one issued by the\ncenter and elicited by the speaker: so, rather than grounding the verb referring to an act to some\n“faculty” like the “will,” we can see it as obedience to an imperative issued by the center, that we\nare in turn commanded to see play out rather than interrupt. If we take, say, the most typical\ndeclarative, one which merely states a fact, we can see the intersection of these two imperatives:\nthe interlocutor is being told to notice something (with, as with any imperative, some kind of “or\nelse...” lingering, however distantly, in the background), and you can be expected to notice it\nbecause the world of things has been told to order itself in such a way that that specific noticing\nis possible and relevant. Even science is only possible because we presuppose a relatively stable\norder that we can’t otherwise account for.\n\n_The Center and the Declarative_\n\nSocial thought has an obligation to maintain linguistic presence, and the way this is done is\nthrough a minimal vocabulary distinguishing one mode of thought from another, and sustained\nconsistently so as to generate new concepts. I take Gans’s derivation of the successive speech\nforms to be that minimal vocabulary. Originary thinking relies upon concepts shared with other\nmodes of thought within the human sciences, such as “desire,” “resentment,” “mimesis,” “sign,”\n“representation” and more. I will use these terms and many others—I won’t be generating an\nentirely new theoretical language, just a theoretical center organized around the speech forms\nand the center to which all utterances must be traced and directed: this theoretical center will\ncontrol my use of all other terms.\n\nGans, beyond his analysis through _The Origin of Language_ ,\nuses the different speech forms to designate different cultural forms—in both _The End of Culture_\nand _Originary Thinking_ , Gans speaks of “ostensive culture,” “imperative culture” and\n‘declarative culture.” Moreover, Gans uses the speech forms to mark decisive shifts in high culture: most notably, he defines “metaphysics” as the assumption that the declarative sentence is\nthe primary speech act; and, through a reading of Moses’s encounter with God on Mt. Horeb as\ndescribed in _Exodus_ , he identifies the specific innovation of Hebraic monotheism as the\n“discovery” of the God whose name is a declarative sentence.\n\nThe burden of this book is to\nfollow those trails and work out a social, political and cultural theory, or, as I will call it, an\n“anthropomorphics,” as an originary grammar of the center. So, I will show that speaking in\nterms of the imperatives we are conveying, or hearing, from the center, when discussing\ndeclarative sentences and discourse, will yield insights (or, ostensive regions) unavailable when\nfollowing more conventional imperatives to speak about sentences and discourses in terms of\nmeanings packaged by one mind for others according to specific explicit and tacit rules. Beyond\nthe heuristic value of originary grammar, I will insist on taking it quite literally: there is no way\nwe could ever be doing anything that is not following an imperative within a network of\nimperatives deriving from an ostensive world and explicated by declaratives.\n\nWe are semiotic\nbeings, composed of signs and signs ourselves, and the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and\ndeclarative are the most elementary signs—equivalent, in a rough way, to Charles Sanders\nPeirce’s icon, index and symbol. All we do is try to follow what the center is telling us to do.\n\nTo begin to give a sense of the implications of this approach, or imperative, I’m going to take\nsome time to analyze a small part of Andrew Bartlett’s groundbreaking originary analysis of\nscience, published in _Anthropoetics_ in 2007, “Originary Science, Originary Memory:\nFrankenstein and the Problem of Modern Science.” Here, Bartlett traces the origins of science to\nthe need to find a substitute for the central object on subsequent ritual scenes. The first\n“knowledge,” in this case, is of the appropriateness of another object to function as the object\nalready inscribed in the community’s memory has functioned—the question is whether the new\nobject is “similar” or “analogous” enough to that previous object. I will not be exploring\nBartlett’s argument in any detail, much less try to reproduce its full complexity; I am using it to\nclarify the implications of an “originary grammar of the center” precisely due to its rigorous\nimmersion in and deployment of the conceptual terms of originary thinking:\n\n```\nOne space of tension, as we have seen, is that between the originary “usurper” whose proximity to\nthe new possibly-sacred substitute object and to the object itself risks his being victimized by the\ncommunity (the usurper as metonym of the new object he introduces). The other space of tension\nis the yes or no of the “analogy” the members of the community may or may not be prepared to\ndraw–relying on originary memory of the image-of-the-object as I have outlined it above–between\nthe new and the original object. Inasmuch as originary memory reproduces a memory of the whole\nscene and the whole event, all forces tend toward the community’s peaceful acceptance of the new\nobject: the usurper wishes to minimize the risk of violence to himself, and the community wishes\nto minimize the risk to itself.\n\nAn object as close in “image” as possible to the original object must\nbe the most appropriate object, because an object as close in “image” as possible to the original\nobject would risk the least disassociation between originary event and ritual repetition, between\nthe “image” in originary memory and its possible re-presentation in a new object of economic\nvalue. What I contend, however, is that the “conservative” minimalization of the difference\nbetween objects is not a guarantee of the absolute preservation of the sacrality of the original\nobject, but rather a measure of the minimality of originary desacralization: the minimality of\n“originary science.” That originary science is the sign in the mode of a minimal desacralization is\nprecisely what we should expect. The other imperative, however, is maximal exchangeability: and\n```\n\n```\nthe new object, to be exchangeable, must be permitted to be different, to have differential\nsignificance. Originary science pays intense, almost total respect to religious imperatives. It is no\none other than the originary scientific “usurper” who asks the community to exchange this new,\n“real” object for the old, remembered, now less “real” object, which risks losing some of its sacred\npower as the necessary consequence of the differential information being created. The new object\nwill not be the same object; therefore, it must present a minimal threat to communal solidarity. Therefore, when Gans writes of the original sign being “applied to a referent other than the\noriginal one” he includes the notion of a “diminution of intensity” in the sign itself.\n\nThe scientific,\nI suggest, has there with that “diminution” taken a little bit away from the sacred. Nor should we\nbe surprised that the originary meeting of the sacred and profane occurs with the usurper’s\nproduction of differential information: “This first differentiation would create a two-place\nhierarchy of signs constitutive of the opposition between sacred and profane representations” (79). The first “profane” representation may be considered the first “scientific” representation.\n```\nI want to emphasize that I have no substantive differences with this passage or, indeed, Bartlett’s\nentire analysis (which, indeed, will be echoed throughout).\n\nI simply want to point to a couple of\ninstances of language indicating intentionality that will highlight a critical element of originary\nmethod I pointed to before—that in identifying a new cultural form, no semiotic resources that\ncould only have been a product of that form can be part of the hypothesis regarding its creation. So, the “usurper” introducing the new object “risks being victimized,” and presumably is aware\nof, can formulate a representation of, this risk. The community, then, may or may not be prepared\nto draw an analogy between the original object and its replacement. Finally, and most\nimportantly, the usurper “wishes” to minimize this risk, and the community shares this same\n“wish.”\n\nBartlett is aware that neither the usurper nor the community has the language to formulate this\n“wish” or this risk assessment—not too much prior to this passage he discussed the same\nproblem, through a passage of Gans’s discussing it, that I addressed above regarding the problem\nof “speaking for” those on the scene. We have to assume some continuity amidst the\ndiscontinuity that enables us to hypothesize usefully—something like what Bartlett describes\nhere must, indeed, be happening. The question is how we represent that. Bartlett here (and,\nreally, only in these fairly unimportant instances) does so by constructing a subject and a field of\nsubjects capable of formulating wishes and carrying out risk assessment.\n\nThese are subjects,\nthen, with an internal mental space that can subsist “horizontally,” that is, in relation to the other\nsubjects in the field, without any reference to the center. Let’s remember the problem here: to\ndetermine whether the new object is, for the purposes of ritual, the “same” as the original object. So, we imagine the members of the group working it out, with the usurper trying to introduce an\nobject that won’t be seen as too different, with the other members not insisting on seeing\ndifferences except for when strictly necessary (or, perhaps, refusing to acknowledge identity\nexcept for when unavoidable).\n\nWho actually decides, though? In the end, a substitute object will be used—but who determined\nits acceptability? How would those on the scene represent the decision as having been made? Could any of them “take responsibility” for it, or “credit” another with having made the decision,\nor playing a special role in making it? If we are going to pursue these questions, we would have\nto attribute more and more clearly unavailable language to participants on the scene, and make them far richer “characters” than we can imagine them being. The other way of approaching it\nwould be to say that the center decides. In other words, the representational capacities we would\nhave to attribute to the participants we attribute instead to the center.\n\nThe center, as we can say, is\nnothing more than the collective or aggregate signifying capacities of the community. But this\ndoesn’t mean those capacities could be disaggregated and redistributed to the members of the\ncommunity—they are only real in their collective and aggregated form. Each member of the\ncommunity only sees the other members through the center, as suspended by the center. If the\nobject offered by the usurper does not desacralize minimally enough, it is because the center that\nsubsists beyond any particular object, the center that calls for the object, has rejected it. The risk\nassessment Bartlett speaks of is a waiting to see if the center will accept the new object.\n\nHow do\nthe members know what the center has “decided”? By reading the other members as signs of the\ncenter, the vehicle through which the center conveys _its_ “wishes.” If some member were to\nprevent the new object from being placed at the center, he would be doing so “on assignment”\nfrom the center—at least if his initiative prevails. Attributing the decision to the center minimizes\nour own discontinuity with the participants on this hypothetical scene because if this counter-\nusurper were to provide a reason for the object’s unacceptability, this is the only reason he could\ngive—otherwise, we’d have to imagine him representing the results of his risk-assessment and\nassessing that risk-assessment relative other ones represented on the scene.\n\nDoes this mean that\nthe counter-usurper has “really” decided? We might say so, even though he surely wouldn’t; but\nwe shouldn’t either, because that would require us to posit some space of decision internal to the\ncounter-usurper, something like a “will,” which has not been accounted for. What has been\naccounted for is the constitution of each member of the community as a protector of the center,\nand therefore as an arm of the center. As members of the community, they have no other\n“content.”\n\nThe problem of determining whether the new object is, ritually, the “same,” is the problem of\nmaintaining linguistic presence with which we are already familiar. It is the problem of\ndetermining whether the sign issued in one case is the “same” as that sign issued on a prior\noccasion. This problem arises already on the originary scene, where each participant must\nconform his gesture to that of the others, and determine whether the others are doing the same. As in Bartlett’s example, there is certainly an allowable margin of error here determined, not by\nsome “objective” assessment in accord with an external “standard,” but by whether the sign\ncomes with a body positioned so as to preserve or disrupt the state of suspended animation\nbefore the central object.\n\nThe only way of determining sameness is by seeing whether the center\nis repelling the others as it is holding oneself in place—which means that the issuance of the sign\nis itself a following of the “rule” of the center. In each case, what we can reconstruct as a risk\nassessment is one member detecting a slackening in another’s adherence to the rule of the center,\nand subsequently stepping in, as minimally as possible, as maximally as necessary, to take up\nthat slackening. The center has decided once the slackening has been tightened.\n\nIt is the center, first of all, that has agency—human agency will later come to be modeled on the\nagency of the center. The center issues signs to those on the margin, who in turn convey those\nsigns to one another in collaborations and deliberations that produce signs issued back to the center. To take Bartlett’s discussion in a different direction, the substitution of successive objects\nfor the originary one transforms the ritual scene from an ostensive one, in which the deity is\nimmediately present, to an imperative one, where the ritual aims at making the deity appear, first\nof all within the ritual itself but also by providing for the community.\n\nBut addressing the deity\nimperatively must itself be done in prescribed forms—that is, pursuant to imperatives issued by\nthe deity itself. The deity, or the center, does not always respond identically to each request made\nof it. Since the form of the request has been prescribed by the center, these differences must be\nattributed to differences in the form of the request in each case. Even if the ritual has been carried\nout, to all appearances, in exactly the same way, something about its performance must be\ndifferent. From the standpoint of more advanced forms of culture we could say, for example, that\nthe “intent” behind the performance was different in some way (it was only carried out\n“mechanically,” for example).\n\nBut what we are examining now will provide us with a hypothesis\nregarding that very difference between performance and intent. No record could have been kept\nof these early rituals so, even if all a great deal of effort was invested in ensuring the conformity\nof all to inherited ritual forms, it would always be possible for some member to introduce some\ninnovation as a recovery of the “same,” originally effective form. What emerges within this\nimperative culture is a continual attempt to reduce the difference between performance and\neffect.\n\nIt is in the failure of the imperative that the declarative is born. The ritual scene I am\nhypothesizing now presupposes the existence of fully developed, that is, declarative language. Following the assumptions laid out earlier regarding the marginal, mistaken nature of new\nlinguistic-cultural forms, we can also assume that both the imperative and the declarative come\nlater to the central scene of ritual. As applied to ritual, the declarative constructs scenes enacting\nthe dialectic of imperatives to and from the center. The community oscillates between successful\nand unsuccessful ritual performances; the center oscillates between honoring and refusing the\nrequests of the community.\n\nIf the central being must be called to present itself on the ritual scene,\nit must be elsewhere and must come from elsewhere. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t\n—either something prevents it from coming, or it doesn’t want to come. If something prevents it\nfrom coming, there are other beings at play—we can see the scenic construction of the center. Sometimes the central being can overcome the obstacles placed in its way; sometimes it can’t. If\nthe central being doesn’t want to come, it may be because the community has displeased it in\nsome way; or it may be because the central being has other priorities, problems and pleasures of\nits own to attend to.\n\nWe can see how the kind of intentional language I wished removed from\naccounts of interactions between the community and the center have now entered into the\ndiscussion—the central being “wants” to come, “overcomes” obstacles, can be “displeased,”\npursues its own interests and pleasures, and so on. All of this results from the “interpretation” of\nritual in declarative terms; or, more precisely, the interpretation of variable results of the\nimperatives exchanged with the center in declarative terms. These “explanations” of the results\nof ritual performances are the origins of myth, as a declarative overlay on the imperative\nstructure of ritual.\n\nWhile we can’t hypothesize with any great specificity, the origin of words like\n“want,” “wish,” “try,” “choose,” “decide,” “like” and “dislike,” that is, the whole linguistic\napparatus of intentionality, is best considered as emerging to fill gaps between the obedience to the imperatives of the center in ritual scenes and the reciprocal honoring of requests by the\ncenter. But these are gaps to be filled in describing activities at the center, and only secondarily\nto those on the margins. Activities between members of the community are modeled on and\narranged by activities at the center, which are far richer in dramatic content and motivation than\nanything going on at the margin. The human is modeled on the non-human center—this is why I\ncall the human science I am presenting here an “anthropomorphics.” Humans\nanthropomorphized themselves before they could carry out this operation on anything else.\n\n_The Centrality of the Center_\n\nWhat is a center? Whatever can invoke and be referenced by an ostensive sign: the center is both\ncause and product of the sign—as cause it subsists beyond any particular reference, and as\nproduct it is continually renewed. Invoking the sign exceeds the reference, though—it is already\nthe beginning of an imperative. So, a center is a locus of imperative exchange—whatever about\nthe object commands the issuance of the ostensive sign is also an agency of which requests can\nbe made. But it is mimetic desire, and the rivalry and crisis it causes, that leads to the emission of\nthe sign; true, and our ability to pare down language derived from scenes at the center and apply\nit to proto-human acts that created the center is itself a sign of our current relation to the center.\n\nThe center is whatever we can compose declaratives about so as to formalize the\nincommensurabilities between what we ask of the center considered, let’s say, as a “situation” or\nemergent event, and what that center, that situation, that event, yields “in return.” We have to\nstart within a fully developed, perhaps (as I will suggest) wrongly developed, declarative culture,\nin order to reconstruct the emergence of that culture out of its prerequisites. This assumes we\nhave a fully developed vocabulary with carefully refined concepts that have been fully\nanthropomorphized, and made available for reference to proto-humans and then humans in their\n“barest,” hypothetically minimal state. I will now start examining how that came to be possible.\n\nThe center requires defenders, interpreters, collaborators. This includes everyone in the\ncommunity, but not everyone equally, certainly not in every case. On the originary scene itself it\nis unimaginable that all members of the group issued the gesture of aborted appropriation at the\nsame time, with the same clarity, with the same effect on other members of the group. This is\nunimaginable not only because it’s extremely unlikely, but because if we were to imagine it it\nwould suggest some shared instinctual response, thereby blurring the singularity of the scene\nitself as the birth of the human. We make it a rule not to overload our hypotheses, but keeping in\nmind our hypothesis that cultural innovation starts on the mistaken margin and is then aligned\nwith the center, we can assume the initial gesture must have been put forth by a member not too\ncentral but also not too marginal.\n\nNot too central, that is, not the Alpha of the group, because he\nhas presumably been neutralized from the start and any gesture of hesitation would be one\nreflecting being overwhelmed rather than symmetrical with others nearby approaching the\nobject. Not too marginal, because we have to imagine the gesture being issued by someone who\nmight be a threat, if it is to be noticed and imitated. We assume minimal awareness of what is\nbeing done—rather than projecting the entire scene, its possible consequences, and the “hope” of\nreversing those consequences (awareness that could only be retrojected back into the scene much later through a narrative consciousness) back into the first signer, we can assume one member\nproceeding step by step towards the center with his fellows, somewhat unevenly, falling a little\nbehind, seeing their attention drawn to his slowdown, and accentuating that slowdown through\nposture and gesture only slightly but noticeably different than that of the others.\n\nThe more they\nnotice, the more he accentuates; the more they accentuate the more the convergence toward the\ncenter rears back and goes into reverse. The scene will be successful when there are enough who\nhave exchanged the sign to restrain those who have not yet caught on—at this point, those who\nhave been rehearsing the sign are acting on behalf of the center, as they attend from the central\nobject to its imminent violators, and back again.\n\nDifferences in proximity to the center proliferate even in the most egalitarian communities. Indeed, egalitarianism is merely fractal hierarchy: unless we imagine genuinely spontaneous\ncollective action, in any instance someone goes first and shapes the field for the others. The only\npurpose of imagining such spontaneous collectivity is to erase the firstness and minimize the\nresentments resulting from the fear that the one first on the scene might try to extend that\nfirstness beyond the scene it constitutes. Defending firstness in order to allow the field to be\nshaped is done in the name of the center; restricting firstness so as to allow new fields to be\nshaped is also done in the name of the center.\n\nErasing firstness altogether is itself a bid for the\ncenter, in the name of repressing all “illegitimate” bids. Fractal hierarchy means that the\nhierarchy assumed in some distribution of shared attention organized into intention will position\nthe agents in such a way as to generate new hierarchies. These turnovers can be rapid; they can\nbe indefinitely delayed—there can be no “rules” about this (even if there are explicit rules, those\nrules need to be enforced, and someone would have to take the lead in doing that, thereby\ngenerating more fractal hierarchy). Someone who has the set the field once will be more likely to\ntake and be given the opportunity to do so again; all the more, someone who has done so 2, 3, 5,\n20 times.\n\nHere we can see the origin of power, not in the exercise of force and violence over\nothers in the community; rather, the origin of power lies with the continuation of the deferral\nexercised on the originary scene, in this case by someone who is willing to take more risks,\naccept more suffering and deprivation in the course of accomplishing some task and, most\nimportantly, stand both inside the scene and outside of it so as to modulate the desires and\nresentments of others who need to brought into the scene. This modulation is carried out\nostensively, through naming everyone else on the scene, even if this naming simply involves\nassigning positions (the one who does this as well as the one who is this).\n\nI am drawing on anthropology and history but I am not writing anthropology or history:\n“anthropomorphics” is completely hypothetical, following the originary hypothesis itself. All\nthinking is hypothetical, insofar as the issuance of any sign hypothesizes regarding the way the\nsign will “magnetize” a given field. I have been leading up to the emergence of permanent social\nhierarchies, and I mention these methodological considerations here to help make this discussion\nand, as much as possible, other discussions of social hierarchies, a source of deferral rather than\nresentment. Among those members of the community who establish the most lasting positions of\nleadership, each of them acting in the name of the center, one of them will eventually seize and\noccupy the (at this point still) ritual center. The term within anthropology for this position is the\n\n“Big Man.” Leadership through deferral is acquired by accumulation and distribution to one’s\ndependents, and through the gift economy with one’s peers and rivals. If one leader can throw a\nbig enough potlatch to bankrupt his rivals and turn them all into dependents, then he has\noccupied the center, not only sacralizing himself but making himself the source of social\ndistribution. There are, of course, millennia across which the historical transformations of the\nBig Man into sacral kingship, and then into divine kingship extend, along with the myriad forms\ntaken by each of these political arrangements, and correspondingly diverse forms of priesthood\nparalleling them. I am only going to be interested in all of these in terms of the strict concerns of\nanthropomorphics, or the originary grammar of the center.\n\n_The Generativity of the Center_\n\nI mentioned earlier that in the earliest communities, the center is far more “dramatic,” which is\nalso to say, far more “human,” than the actual human margin. As David Graeber points out, it is\nnot, strictly speaking, correct to refer to these early, formally egalitarian communities as “non-\nhierarchical.” Quite to the contrary, they are subjected to the most asymmetrical and arbitrary\nhierarchies as they are ruled by the mythical occupants of the center. The very earliest occupants\nof the center would be the transfigured forms of the animals placed at the center for ritual\npurposes and consumption. These beings are the progenitors, guardians, and nemeses of the\ncommunity.\n\nUntil the ritual center is rendered non-figural, we can assume all worship is ancestor\nworship, very much including animals, because the center has generated the community. The\nmore differentiation there is regarding proximity to the center, the more humans would be so\ntransfigured and take their place in the pantheon of worship. Remembered ancestors founding\nand continuing specific family and communal lines become figures of worship. It also follows\nthat the more humans can be elevated among those who have given themselves for the\ncontinuance and provision of the community, the more they can be ritually placed in that\nposition.\n\nEventually, some individual seizes the ritual and distributive center: this first adventurer\nor usurper is the “Big Man” widely noted in anthropological accounts. The apotheosis of this\ndevelopment is sacral kingship, in which the king, as mediator between the community and the\ncosmos, serves as both power center and ritual center. Needless to say, the configurations vary\nwidely, but the sacral king, I am assuming, is the first object of scapegoating and human\nsacrifice. Failures of the community are failures to match otherworldly configurations, to do on\nearth as is done in heaven, and for this the king bears complete responsibility.\n\nThe unity of\nparadoxical, signifying center and the central figure first evident on the originary scene remains\nintact in sacral kingship, which no doubt accounts for the pervasiveness and longevity of this\nsocial form, and even in the extension of its ramifications into modern political leadership.\n\nA pure form of sacral kingship would entail the election of an individual who compels that\nelection by his deferral capacities, which provide proof that sacral agencies look favorably upon\nhim; and the killing and subsequent mythical transfiguration of that individual as soon as those\nagencies gave signs of withholding their favor. When whatever “credit” the king has\naccumulated has been exhausted would have to be determined by those close enough to the\nsignifying center to “read” those signs. We can assume some alliance between prospective rivals and priests in charge of the rituals, if there are such separate from the king himself.\n\nSome degree\nof what would look to us like cynicism would be involved in such transfers of divine favor: the\nfailure of the king to lead a successful campaign, or some waste of resources would be\n“interpreted” in terms of some ritual violation of sacred injunction. But there’s no need to assume\nthat anything like cynicism is even possible here, because that would assume there is some other\nvocabulary in which “rational assessments” of the performance of king could be made, and in\nwhich a “strategy” for deploying the merely “ideological” ritual and mythical language could be\nplotted out. Only once the center has been “unfigured” and its human occupant shorn of sacrality\ncould such a vocabulary emerge.\n\nDecisions that would be intelligible to external perspectives\nwould be made, because the ritual and mythical vocabulary in which thinking takes place allows\nthem to be made—which is not to say the rationality will be quite the same as that of the\nretroactive observer, who would be required to reconstruct the relation to the center constitutive\nof events in that community.\n\nApproximations to this “pure” form of sacral kingship could certainly endure, but the form\nwould be a continual source of rivalry that would, at least in some cases, lead to the ritualization\nof the selection and transference of kingly power. This would formalize kingship and the deferral\ncapacities of the community. The individual who most displays the power of deferral would not\nthereby be elevated to the center—a process of establishing and choosing from among candidates\nwould be put in place. Nor is the king removed immediately when those deferral powers are seen\nto wane—scheduled transfers of power, among them perhaps the sacrifice of the king, or explicit\nrules or agents that must be followed or consulted are established.\n\nThe increases the permanence\nof the occupation of the center—if the merit-based leadership that characterizes the Big Man and\nthe model of “pure” sacral kingship I posited above is no longer the means by which power is\nassumed, the mechanisms and lessons of previous efforts at ruling and be collected, canonized,\nand provided pedagogically to the future ruler who would now have time to prepare to take his\nposition. At this point some diremption between state ritual and more localized rituals would take\nplace: the king is still the father of the people, who controls and distributes the resources of the\ncommunity, and to whom sacrifices must therefore be brought, but his protection and therefore\ndistance from the most active resentments and rivalries within the community make him a less\neffective mediator; such mediation would therefore be relocated within familial cults. This is the\npoint of transition from sacral kingship to the divine kingship that characterized the gigantic\nempires of the ancient world.\n\nOnce a human has occupied the center, the possibility has opened for any human to become a\ncenter. I am going to provide an account of how that possibility has been actualized, but to do so\nit will help to explain what it means for anyone capable of issuing an utterance to be a center. To\nbe a center means that attention can be made to converge upon it in such a way that it can be seen\nto be caused by representations coming from that center. Convergent attention is a source of\nrivalry and possible hostility: if your presence and self-representation becomes a source of\nrivalry, it can be posited as a cause of that rivalry, and your removal from the game in some way\nthereby a means of eliminating the danger raised by that rivalry.\n\nYour self-representations can\nalso become a source of deferral—indeed, it is most likely that one becomes a source of deferral through the management of rivalries generated by oneself as a desirable object. One can\nobviously be desirable and therefore a cause of rivalry in any number of ways, depending upon\nwhere one is positioned within the mimetic field. And there are, equally obviously, innumerable\nways of converting rivalry and resentment deriving from one’s presence into deferral and love. How one operates as a self or individual depends upon how one exercises self-representation as a\ncenter so as to favor some possibilities over another; insofar as one becomes less “functional” as\nan individual, that would indicate that the center is not holding, perhaps because of a failure to\nattract sufficient convergent attention to require the means to construct oneself as a source of\ndeferral; perhaps due to an excess of convergent attention (which can be addictive),\noverwhelming efforts to become a site of deferral. If we were to develop an “originary\npsychology,” this would be the starting point. This is the way in which what Gans calls\n“omnicentrism,” or what I would call the generalization of anthropomorphization,” proceeds.\n\nTo put this another way, to be a center is to be subject to attempts at appropriation and ostensive\ngestures: one can be appropriated bodily, for example, sexually; one can be appropriated as\nmodel; one can be appropriated as a proxy; and so on. Appropriation, for humans, is mediated by\nostensive signs indicating deferral and the acknowledgment of other appropriative claims,\nincluding those of the one being appropriated. The relation between the appropriation and the\ngesture, on the one hand, and the degree of reciprocity between the one being appropriated and\nthe one appropriating, can vary from violent appropriation with a minimal attribution of consent\nto the victim, on one extreme, to publicly recognized, ceremonial pledges of fidelity and respect,\non the other.\n\nTo be a center, further, is to give and receive imperatives—not just explicit requests,\ncommands, demands, pleas, and so on, but the imperatives one gives off merely as a publicly\nrecognized center: imperatives to keep a certain distance, to approach only in certain culturally\nacceptable ways (but also to, nevertheless, approach), and to look to yourself and your own self-\nconstruction as a center. We give off such imperatives through our speech, dress, manners,\nposture, choice of location, and so on, and they are constructed in dialogue with the imperatives\ngiven off by others. Finally, to be a center is to be a source of declaratives: statements and\nnarratives representing discrepancies between the various imperatives one gives off, between the\nimperatives one gives off and those that one obeys, and between the imperatives one gives off\nand those others located “similarly” give off: the problem is always to say how can one be the\nsame as others in being a center, given all the differences in this particular way of self-centering.\n\nDivine kingship involves conquest and the control of vast territories and therefore makes it\npossible to treat populations as means—in particular, human sacrifice and slavery. The king,\nwhether divine himself or not, is sanctioned divinely, while masses of people are treated as\nnameless within the system of naming. Under sacral kingship, everyone in the community shares\nthe same ritual order—everyone is named by the center. That is no longer the case. The other\nnotable breach in the order of sacral kingship is the emergence of populations extrinsic to the\norder, even if produced by that order—such as younger sons without inheritance, and hence any\naccess to the family hearth, in systems with primogeniture.\n\nIt would be the more successful,\nimminently if not actually imperial, sacral kingships that would generate the most “anomalies” in\nrelation to the ritual order. In this sense, these sacral kingships converge with divine kingships while also, most notably in the case of the ancient Greek city-states, entering into competition\nand conflict with them. Once there are groups, or a “people,” outside of the ritual order, kingly\nrule itself steps outside of that ritual order to maintain and strengthen itself. To be outside of the\nritual order is to have no social existence, which is, first of all, to be merely a means, whether for\nproductive or political purposes; it is, secondly, to be defined solely in terms of opposition to the\nritual order, to specific groups within the ritual order (who are now also defined oppositionally),\nand to other groups outside of that order.\n\nStruggles amongst kings, aristocrats and “the people”\nonly make sense once a breach has opened up in the inclusive ritual order. The origin of the\n“tyrant,” as a political concept, lies in this breach—the tyrant is simply a king who is not\nsanctified as the occupant of the ritual center, but defined by his rule through the manipulation of\nconflicts between social groups. The “tyrant” is the central problem the foundation of political\nthought aims to solve, and it remains the problem political thought has yet to solve. This is\nbecause “tyranny” is an unsolvable problem without the creation of a social order grounded in\nthe imperatives issued by an originary center—and such an order cannot be grasped by political\nthinking derived from the problem of the tyrant.\n\nWith the breach of the order of sacral kingship we find money and markets established by kings\nand used by them as political instruments. David Graeber notes that markets are established, and\nmoney provided to make those markets functional, for the purpose of provisioning soldiers\nstationed in foreign territories. Richard Seaford points out that in Ancient Greece money was\nprovided by the king to purchase animals for cultic sacrifices. Markets represent forms of\ndelegation by the central authority—markets are areas of social life that are not under direct\nsovereign supervision. Any form of supervision generates margins where supervision lapses—\nmarkets are established when these margins need to be formalized and supervised indirectly.\n\nMoney is a means of subordinating market activity to central authority—that is, money is a form\ntaken by the delegation of power, and is therefore a form of power itself. Money is the power to\ncommand the labor of others. The pluralization of power within the polity means that power\ncenters can align themselves with or against the king, and the king can align himself with some\npower centers against others. With money, markets and plural power centers comes justice\nsystems, secular thought and at least the beginnings of technology. Justice systems because\nadjudication of disputes between relatively equal power centers requires rules and judges to\napply and enforce those rules; secular thought, because thinking in terms of “Nature,” or some\nequivalent, is the only way to try and name figures and practices outside of the ritual order; and\ntechnology, because once humans are objects, levied en masse in slave gangs, as soldiers, or\nreduced by debt to landless laborers, it becomes possible to think of the use of tools and the\nanalysis and articulation of objects outside of ritual constraints.\n\n_Metalanguage and Metapolitics_\n\nWith concepts like “nature” and “justice,” it becomes possible to model social relations on\ndesacralized terms, in accord with the reduction of these and related concepts to their most\nminimal meaning in opposition to the sacred order and “arbitrary” tyranny alike. Essences can be\nattributed to different social groups and classes, along with deviations from those essences: conformity with the essence equals nature, and relating to individuals, and constructing relations\nbetween groups, according to nature, is justice. “Materialism,” “the spirit of domination,” and\n“greed” are among the forms taken by those deviations, as power centers can be imagined and,\nno doubt, seen, acting at large in accord with roles they are given within markets and politics.\n\nTyranny is the manifestation of and response to greed and the desire for domination, “passions”\nliberated on the post-sacral market. Greed and power hunger can be identified by those who have\nliberated themselves from it, by establishing justice within themselves and restoring themselves\nto nature. The post-priestly class of philosophers makes a bid to become a new source of power\nby presenting itself as in command of the concepts that make ruling “legitimate,” that is, non-\ntyrannical: nature and justice. The power of the philosopher, his access to the “super-\nsovereignty” inherent in the proper understandings of the conceptual criteria to which\nsovereignty must yield so as to be non-tyrannical, itself relies upon the spread of writing. Writing\nis also a product of divine kingship and markets, originating in the recording of transactions and\neventually becoming a means of recording and reconstructing language so as to make it visible to\ncentral authority.\n\nAs I mentioned earlier, Eric Gans locates the origin of the two leading streams of Western\nculture, Ancient Greece and Ancient Israel, in terms of the prioritizing of the declarative\nsentence. In the case of the Greeks, the founding of metaphysics involves treating the declarative\nsentence, the proposition, as the primary linguistic form—in direct opposition to the ritual,\nsacrificial ostensive and the imperatives it unfolds. In the case of Israel, we have a new kind of\nGod, who cannot be invoked imperatively—cannot be the other side of an imperative exchange\n—because his name is a declarative sentence. In both cases, this isolation and elevation of the\ndeclarative sentence is possible only in scribal and comparatively literate cultures.\n\nIn discussing\nmetaphysics’ hypostatization of the declarative sentence, I will draw upon David Olson’s studies\nof the cognitive consequences of literacy, in particular his classic _The World on Paper: The\nConceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading_ and his recent work, _The Mind\non Paper: Reading, Consciousness and Rationality_. The use of writing to represent speech,\naccording to Olson, constitutes language as an object of inquiry: the determination of how to use\nmarks on a surface to represent spoken words is that inquiry, constructing such things as\n“phonemes,” “words” and “sentences” as theoretical objects.\n\nThe very possibility of asking what\na word means, what it “really” means, as is usually one of the opening moves of the Platonic\ndialogue, presupposes that “words” have already been identified as separate from each other and\ngiven “official” meanings through the written text, just as the construction of a logic is merely an\nelaboration of various possibilities allowable given a grammatical structure that could only have\nbeen fixed through writing.\n\nThe speech scene is comprised of features that cannot be directly represented in writing, features\ninvolving the physical presences of the participants on the scene, such as tone, inflection, gesture\nand posture, the proximity of speakers to each other and so on. The writing systems we know of\ndid not attempt to directly represent those features of the speech scene. Instead, the development\nof writing involved the creation of a meta-language used to represent indirectly those features of\nthe speech scene. Olson has us imagine a written text as the reporting of a speech act. Now, in the reporting of another’s speech act in person, the speech act can be acted out as a whole—the\ntone and inflections can be imitated, the postures and gestures can be acted out, and even\ncommentary on the speech being reported can be enacted through approving or dismissive facial\nexpressions and otherwise.\n\nWriting, then, has to supplement all the elements of this performance\nthat it can’t directly represent. This is what the metalanguage of literacy does. To perform\nanother’s speech act, you would only, strictly speaking, need the word “say” and perhaps one or\ntwo other words to refer to what the speaker has said. If you need to supplement that report with\nall the other elements of the speech scene, you need a whole phalanx of other words, words\nwhich provide information regarding those other elements: “stated,” “suggested,” “assumed,”\n“implied,” “considered,” “criticized,” and so on. Olson further points out that through the\nnominalization of these verbs we generate the material for a vast disciplinary order, in which we\nstudy “assumptions,” “statements,” “implications,” “criticism” and much more. In hypostatizing\nthe declarative sentence, metaphysics merely treats the metalanguage of literacy as referring to\nan actual, if ideal, order.\n\nThe telos of writing, according to Olson’s more recent argument, is to construct a scene upon\nwhich the writer and reader both stand. Drawing upon Frances Noel-Thomas and Mark Turner’s\nstudy of what they call “classic prose” in their _Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic\nProse_ , Olson sees writing as seeking to efface itself before a simulated scene. This requires the\nabolition of any ostensive dimension to the written text—that is, anything that draws attention to\nthe text as written, to the scene of writing, the scene of reading, and the scene represented in the\nwriting as being distinct scenes that must be articulated, ultimately by the reader.\n\nIt presupposes\na private reader, alone with the text, in a kind of silent conversation with the author as opposed,\nsay, to a public or group reading, or reading that serves the purpose of memorizing ritual\nformulas and myths. The consequence of metaphysics, then, is what Gans calls an “internal scene\nof representation,” where one constitutes oneself as a center of one’s own attention, as one\nobserves oneself alone with the world of ideas made up of the metalanguage of literacy. This is\none way the broaching of the sacral order plays out, as this internal scene of representation can\nonly be represented and maintained in opposition to everything that would define the individual\nas something other than an internalized private order—in opposition to both any ritual order and\nany social claims.\n\nThis is a completely anthropomorphized subject, entitled to be permitted to act\nin accord with spontaneously emerging and self-ordered “assumptions,” “conclusions,” “beliefs,”\nand so; in fact, functioning as a proxy for the post-metaphysical disciplines which deploy the\nmetalanguage of literacy in power plays on the field of super-sovereignty.\n\nHebrew scripture, and then the Christian Testament, represent a different trajectory of the\n“promoted” declarative sentence. Metaphysics aims at abstracting declarative culture from the\nostensive-imperative world as completely as possible—metaphysics never comes to an end\nbecause this abstraction can never be complete: the world can never be completely described\nthrough declarative sentences that are comprised of words that can themselves be defined in\ndeclarative sentences without ever having to come to rest upon an ostensively defined word—\nultimately, a name. Scripture maintains continuity with the sacred order by treating the\ndeclarative sentence as an inquiry into the ostensive-imperative world—as I put it earlier, as an inquiry into the discrepancies evident in imperative exchanges.\n\nIt does this by singling out, in\nnewly declarative terms, the victim produced ostensively in sacrificial orders Once we have, with\na monetized, indebted, marketized, political plural world, justice systems, victims are officially\nrecognized within those systems. Rather than relying upon mimetic contagion or the ritually\nprescribed selection of victims, new means must be created for determining what counts as\nvictimization. New concepts of intentionality and consequence are constructed, ultimately out of\nthe metalanguage of literacy. So, far, nothing in these new arrangements upsets the order of\ndivine kingship, or the imperial order: sacrifice can continue as usual, while relatively minor\ndisputes get settled in increasingly sophisticated ways.\n\nBut with the justice system comes the possibility of being a victim, not just of another player\nwithin the system, but of the system, and its head, and its entire conceptual order. There would be\nlosers within the justice system who would refuse to accept their loss. Usually, these refusals\nwould be attempts to revert to some kind of honor, or vendetta system, in which offenses are\nrepaid in kind by those who have authority over the victim. Such futile resistance to the imperial\norder would be easily suppressed, but would nevertheless mark the system as productive of\nvictims who are heroic on still recognizable terms.\n\nIt thereby becomes possible to represent the\nrefusal to accept official judgment outside of the domain and discipline of judgment itself, to\nsome broader public or audience. In that case, one would simply be representing oneself as a\nvictim and inviting others to see themselves as victims in “analogous” ways, while itemizing the\npredations of the imperial order upon one of its loyal, perhaps even privileged, subjects, who\nappealed to it in good faith. Such action would draw upon itself the concentrated wrath of the\nimperial, probably in stages, making it possible to represent the unfolding of that wrath and\ndisplay it against a larger pattern of systematic dispossession, which now becomes visible in a\nnew way by “analogy” to this “injustice.”\n\nThe social death to be suffered by the victim would\nitself be analogized to the social death experienced, and now newly named, by the massive slave\nclasses of the imperial order. This new kind of victim, drawing upon himself a new form of\ncollective attention, would be or represent a new kind of divinity.\n\nI put all this forward as a hypothesis regarding the conditions of possibility of the new way of\nrepresenting the victim in Hebrew and then Christian scripture. Clearly, the “story” I have just\ntold could approximate various skeletal narratives that would themselves represent layers of\nretelling and revision of some perhaps rather different sequence of events. To construct such\nstories that place the victim of imperial violence where the hero would have been in sacral\nnarratives would require systematic, deliberate revisions of myth. To organize narratives around\nthe victim of false and violent sacrally grounded imperial orders, as opposed to around the\nfounders of such orders, or those rightly (if “tragically”) punished for violating them, would\nrequire a volume of substitutions of vocabulary and syntactical orders that could only be carried\nout under scribal conditions, where the declarative sentence can be isolated, and preserving the\ntext can itself become a divine command around which gather various oral traditions.\n\nSuch\n“scriptural” orders are intrinsically anti-imperial because they posit, precisely in order to oppose\nand discredit the entire imperial order, an imperial order that includes and transcends all other\nimperial orders: God’s empire, to which His people can be directly subject. This is why the opening of Hebrew scripture systematically, if compactly and implicitly, revises and resets the\nmythological orders underpinning the surrounding empires; it is also why the law recorded in the\nPentateuch, as noted by Joshua Berman in his _Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient\nPolitical Though_ t, is egalitarian in a very thoroughgoing way in the precise sense of\nsubordinating each Israelite directly to God, bypassing any other imperial allegiance, but in a\nway modeled on the covenants between vassal and imperial states.\n\nEveryone in such an order is\nequal in the sense that everyone must be made a site of resistance to subjugation to the sacral\nimperial order. The subsequent narrative of Hebrew scripture, though, represents the failure to\nsustain this covenantal structure, leaving us in a position consistent with the working out of\nmetaphysics: the empire of God is reduced to the compass of the internal scene of representation,\nin the form of a “conscience” that also invokes a super-sovereignty by which the central\nauthority is to be exposed, and to which it must submit—if not now, then perhaps much later. The tendency here is to pit, in a kind of absolute opposition, the center within the center against a\nworld of tyrants.\n\n_Post-Sacrificial Centrality_\n\nYou can say the king should rule because someone must occupy the center, and the occupation of\nthe center relies upon unanimous attention involving the suspension of resentment toward the\ncenter; and that the king occupies the center according to traditions and practices predicated on\nthe exclusion of the rivalries expected to emerge once the transition to a new king is necessary,\nand that preserving these traditions and practices is more important than any preference any of us\nmight have for one candidate over another. Here, rule and sacrality are one. But the identity of\nrule and sacrality cannot be maintained, because the divine king must be identified with the\norigin of the community, meaning that such an order rests upon human sacrifice.\n\nThis is the\ntrajectory of imperative exchange: the more the ruler stands in for the community, the more his\nlife must be hostage to the community’s fortunes; the more the ruler is the source of all benefits,\nthe more nothing less than human life can be given in exchange for such largesse. Metaphysics\nand scripture, each in its own way, exposes and prohibits human sacrifice or, more broadly, what\nwe can call “violent centralizing.” In Gans’s account of the transition of the Mosaic to the\nChristian revelation in _Science and Faith_ , he develops the Girardian critique of scapegoating as\nembodied in the figure of Jesus.\n\nOnce God is inaccessible through ritualized imperative\nexchange, we can only obey God in our treatment of fellow humans. The figure—the prophets of\nHebrew scripture and then, most inclusively, Jesus—who insistently points out that God can’t\npossibly want all of the sacrifices offered to Him himself becomes the center of convergent and\nviolent attention on the part of the community. The injunction that we all treat each “as we would\nwish to be treated,” or, we could say, as he or she who is not to be sacrificed, in essence accuses\nthe rest of the community of doing precisely that, and the sacrifice or scapegoating of the\n“messenger” amply confirms that denunciation. This deifies the persecuted one, who has\nexposed, in the most practical and memorable way possible, the baselessness of our sacrificial\npractices, which serve only to avoid our terror of indistinction or mimetic crisis.\n\nThis is what creates the possibility for each and every one of us to become a center—that is, as one who is not to be sacrificed or violently centralized. We owe the God who has revealed this to\nus everything, which is to say all that makes up our own centrality. The only possible repayment\nof this debt is to defer violent centralization wherever one sees it, including placing yourself\nbetween the violent mob and the victim. This is an intellectual or cognitive problem as much as it\nis a moral one—the two, in fact, cannot be separated. We can, perhaps, all recognize a violent\nmob when it is just about to descend upon its victim.\n\nIt is more difficult, though, to identify that\nwhich, in the discourse of a potential mob, is marking the victim, perhaps in a preliminary way. Even harder is to trace the origins of violent centralizing further back to institutions that license,\nperhaps implicitly and unknowingly, the onset of mob-inducing discourses. Perhaps even harder\nthan all this is to determine what would counter, expose or reform such institutions and practices. Once the sacrificial order has been exposed, people can devote their lives to answering these\nquestions. The God to which we devote ourselves by pursuing these questions is clearly not one\nwho can be embodied in a specific ruler.\n\nThe ultimate failure of Christendom to establish the\ndivine sanction of kings is evidence of this. It’s therefore easy to follow a line of thought that\nleads, ultimately, to modern liberalism and democracy, which seem to institutionalize the sanctity\nof the individual that germinated throughout the development of the medieval Christian order.\n\nIt’s also easy to see, though, that nothing has replaced, with any unanimity, the sacred aura of\nkingship. We can see modern politics as a series of replacements for that sacral legitimation,\nfrom “freedom” to “the people,” to “individual rights,” to the “nation,” some oppressed class or\ngroup, and so on. These terms are the source of endless arguments because they are in\nthemselves nothing more than signs of resentment towards some previous form of sacralized\nempire, now marked as “tyranny.” If you ask someone what “equality” means, you will\ninevitably be told that it means someone can’t take something from you—the concept itself has\nno substance.\n\nIt merely marks a presumably inviolable center to be protected from tyranny. Moreover, these modern forms of legitimation have never corresponded particularly well to\nactual social relations, which remain every bit as hierarchical and, in most areas of life,\n“dictatorial” as most historical “tyrannies.” Demands for more democracy or equality are\ndemands that the state act on your behalf against some of your enemies; it thereby empowers the\nstate, and whichever agencies are best able to access and leverage the state. It follows, further,\nthat the way for the more powerful players in the modern world—state agencies and corporate\nleaders alike—to enhance their power is precisely by leveraging such concepts against their\nrivals.\n\nIndeed, we can see that “equality” can’t really mean anything more than the same in\nrelation to central power, and that for central power to treat everyone the same it must acquire\never more power over all of them. So, we see in the modern world, in democracy and liberalism,\nnot the continuation of the repudiation of sacrifice enacted in metaphysics and (more completely)\nin scripture, but its revival, as violent centralizing is “laundered” through the institutions that, in\npurporting to balance powers against each other, actually unleashes them against each other. There will never be an end to finding new forms of tyranny being exercised over one’s own\ninexpressible centrality; indeed, one’s own inner self can be the internalization of such tyrannies,\nthrough the “colonization” of the mind. The means of self-centering are distributed to all of us\nequipped with various devices (we might say “apps”) for leveraging, mobilizing and activating\nthose means to wind us up as proxies for various liberalizing raids.\n\n_Signifying Center, Occupied Center_\n\nInsofar as a social crisis is transcended or resolved, it is done so through a retrieval of the\noriginary scene. The retrieval of the originary scene means an assembling by deferred desire for\nsome central object—the central object that is the most dangerous in the given social setting. Scripture and metaphysics are such retrievals of the originary scene within the crisis of the\nancient imperial orders. The organization of communities around intellectual practices resistant\nto sacrificial mobilization, around saints, around wise men, around dialogue focused on\nconceptual paradoxes, around sacred texts and revelatory events: these are the disciplinary orders\nof late antiquity which retrieve the practices of deferral and revise and neutralize decadent\nsacrificial practices.\n\nThe study of these disciplinary orders is itself productive of disciplinary\norders. While these disciplinary orders of the Axial Age exposed the decrepitude of divine\nkingship, they operated exclusively through a withdrawal from questions of power. Only this\nway could they sustain their practices of deferral, but this limits their usefulness as models for\nsolving the problem of restoring a kind of working amity between the signifying center and the\noccupied, governing center. The need to solve that problem is imposed upon all of us, because if\nthere would be one thing we could come close to unanimous agreement on, it would probably be\nthat there is no space of withdrawal from power struggles.\n\nWe are all of us implicated in various\nforms of direct and indirect violent centralization, and all of our language is unmistakably\nmarked by this violence. Just try and speak about any but the most trivial (and even, increasingly,\nwhat we might have considered trivial) matters in a “nonpartisan” way that doesn’t divide the\nworld up into friends and enemies, that doesn’t isolate those against whom the power of the state\nshould be deployed. Try not to speak in terms of inviolable rights perpetually under threat by one\ntyrant or another—and see what you are left able to say.\n\nIt’s therefore not surprising that modern liberal thought is allergic to discussions of power: power\nis either held or used “legitimately,” that is, according to some “super-sovereign” concept to\nwhich the actual ruler is beholden, or it is used “tyrannically.” How it is actually used seems\nbeside the point. In order to make it the point, we can begin by pointing out that power comes\nfrom the center, and the center comes from deferral. Insofar as someone occupies the center of a\nscene, that person wields power. We could use these concepts to carry out very micro-level\npower analyses: if one person, however otherwise irrelevant and ignored, becomes the center of\nattention in however small a group, however briefly, to that extent that person exercises power.\n\nThe exercise of power involves, first, exhibiting deferral: when others give in to some mimetic\ncontagion, like panic, whoever is able to resist that contagion and model another way of\nresponding to the situation is exercising power. In so resisting, the agent turns himself into a\ncenter of attention—he has done something others couldn’t or didn’t think to, and so everyone\nwill now look to see what he does next. It is also the case that in making himself the center of\nattention, whoever exercises power makes himself liable to convergent attention and violent\ncentralization. He has made an implicit promise to provide an alternate response to panic, or\nsurrender, and his next moves will reveal whether he can keep those promises.\n\nHis fellows may\njudge wrongly: what they take to be a failure to redeem a promise might in fact be more acts of\ndeferral, laying the groundwork for some plan, that they are less capable of seeing than he is—that is, their panic can overtake them once again. This is why the second component of power is\nrepresenting the desires and resentments that emerge within the group—that have in fact been\ngenerated by the exercise of power. One member of the group wants to drop out, another\nsabotages it out of spite, yet another engages in petty criticism of decisions that have not yet been\ngiven a chance to bear fruit, another gives off the sense, more or less unmistakably, that he would\nreally have a better way of seeing us through this new difficulty. Exercising power involves not\nonly blocking these moves but using them to continue renewing the group’s relation to the\ncenter: whatever project has led to the articulation of the team.\n\nOnly one person can occupy the center at a time, just like only one person can speak at a time in\na conversation. Part of occupying the center is delegating roles to one’s confederates; by the\nsame logic as single occupancy of the center, each other member of the team, at any one time,\ncan only occupy one position in the hierarchy. So, if there is the one that goes first, there is then\none that goes second, one that goes third, fourth, and so on. If the hierarchy branches off in\ndifferent ways, this sequence is reproduced in each “branch.” We can call this structure “centered\nordinality”: each gesture toward the center, or each assertion of centrality, initiates the ordering\nmentioned above.\n\nInsofar as it doesn’t, it turns out not to have been an assertion of centrality. Leadership can therefore be reduced to the maintenance of centered ordinality: leadership is\nsuccessful to the extent that everyone knows their place in the order at a given point in the\nprocess, and that there is no gap between actual order and nominal order. This is what power is—\nhaving theorized that, I can address the fairly obvious fact that the exercises of power we see on\na daily basis often don’t correspond closely to this model. If an institution deviates too much\nfrom this model, it will cease to function—even highly corrupt institutions must have at least an\ninner circle, or enough mid-level groups, where shared goals and a clear chain of command is\nsustained.\n\nThe question, though, is how to diagnose such deviations, which seem far more\ncommon than the “norm.” We can reduce the question to, “what disrupts centered ordinality?” On the most immediate analytical level, we would look to some discrepancy between nominal\nand actual order.\n\nBut such discrepancies and imperfections are inevitable, and as long as they are marginal they\ncan be addressed within the process itself. These disruptions become pervasive and chronic\ndisruptions of centered ordinality because of some discrepancy between the occupied center and\nthe signifying center. Let’s imagine a team formed improvisationally in some emergency—say,\nescaping from a burning building. One individual seems to know the way out, so others follow\nand listen to him. On the fly, he delegates tasks—you look to see if anyone is left upstairs, you\ncheck to see if there’s something we can use as a ladder, you find a way to help the injured, etc.;\nthe scene has a clear center—to sustain the cooperation necessary to get as many people to safety\nas possible.\n\nLet’s say they succeed—then what? Obviously the group can dissolve, as everyone\ngoes back to their own lives. But let’s say they have reasons to sustain themselves as a group—\nmaybe this building was their home, and now they want to rebuild it, and to do so in a way that\nmakes it less vulnerable to fire. The person who got them out of the building may not be the best\nperson to take charge of this new, radically different, task. They may elect someone to oversee\nthe rebuilding—in that case, the one in charge is formally subordinate to the group, or the majority. This can easily be the case without a formal election, because informal cooperation will\nstill be necessary, and could be withheld in ways that would be difficult to account for.\n\nNow, to\nthe extent that the one in charge confers upon the assembly the power to confer power upon him,\nwe have a discrepancy: the task of the new leader is not to build the building, but to maintain a\nmajority among those he is serving. Every decision he makes now has a double meaning: on the\none hand, it needs to contribute to the rebuilding; on the other hand, it has to help him to keep\nmajority support.\n\nFrom the standpoint of the group, the need to have someone in charge still seems to be the\ndefault assumption; however, the more any particular leader seems dispensable at the whim of\nthe group, the more this default assumption slides into scapegoating, and the generations of\nfantasies, themselves subject to debates and power struggles, of other arrangements. Perhaps a\nmajority can be created for ruling by committee, or for taking turns, or even for a kind of anarchy\nin which each individual simply picks up the slack wherever it seems necessary to do so. Indeed,\nany of these alternatives might work as long as a certain threshold of resentment is not reached,\nbut once that threshold is approached, the default assumption will be restored, only in a less\nexplicit way, because it is now “controversial.”\n\nDecisions will now increasingly be made by\nwhoever is best able to mobilize a majority, according to whatever process of determining\nmajorities the group uses; at a certain point decisions will be made more by those who are able to\nleverage the process of determining majorities. No doubt very skillful leaders can find ways to\nrepresent and redirect even the manifold resentments generated by this process, but it become\nless likely that such leaders will emerge and survive. Now, some reasoning must be providing for\na particular way of selecting and replacing leaders. Why a “majority”? A majority of whom? There may be many ways of slicing up the potential electorate.\n\nSome new agency must be\nconstructed so as to make some sense out of the process (think of all the situations where it\nwould be patently absurd to let the majority decide something)—say, the “people.” The “people”\nmust be anthropomorphized, provided with thought and agency. It has conflicts; it changes its\nmind; it gets fooled and manipulated—a wide range of narratives regarding this new fictional\nentity will be created. Deliberations regarding selecting a leader no longer concern the best way\nto rebuild, but determining what the “people” want—what they really want, not what some\ndemagogue or slick operator manages to make them think they want.\n\nOf course, all along there\nwas another option: let the guy who got everyone out of the building choose his successor. He\ncan do it in consultation with whomever might be able to help him decide; he can establish a\nprocess for providing the group with veto power. He might not be the best person to decide; he\nmight get it wrong—but, at least, there would be a clear decision, made by someone who has\ndemonstrated some competence in one crucial area, along with a willingness to take risks for the\ngroup. We can at least assume he’ll want to do the best he can, and he’s likely to be willing to\nrely on the help of the community to supplement his own shortcomings.\n\nIf he gets it wrong, it\nmay be in choosing the second, third or fourth best, rather than the twentieth best—so, the\nbuilding might go up in the end, with those who could have done a better job gracefully taking\non their allotted roles and maybe over-producing a bit. So, secure power places a premium on\ncontinuity in leadership; if having the actual leader serve some metaphysically “realer” entity is\nthe highest priority, power cannot be secured, and we have all the institutional pathologies we are familiar with. The problem here results from what might seem a small slippage: any leader does\ndepend upon those he leads, who must therefore in some sense willingly participate; but this\nwilling participation, or donation, can only be meaningfully performed when addressed to the\ncompetencies of each, not to ontologically prior identity of them all.\n\nIn the first case each tries to\nalign with the center, while in the latter all try, in what is an inevitably circular manner, to define\nthe center. This still leaves us with the question, which we are still some way from answering (or\nfrom showing how an answer is solicited from the signifying center), of whether I should obey\nthis man; but it shifts the focus of the question from “this man” to the specific command.\n\nNow, the foundation of the community, which is the origin of leadership successions, is different\nthan the assembling of a team—in the latter case, the existence of the community is already\ntaken for granted. So, I could leave the question of sacrality, or the signifying center in it most\ncompelling form, mostly aside. This must be addressed so as to reconcile is the signifying center\nand the occupied center. Gans identifies “significant” and “sacred” on the originary scene, and I\nfollow him here—even with the decline of the sacred, there can never be any decline in\n“significance.” Once the center has been humanly occupied, the problem becomes determining,\nor knowing, that the center as occupied is the same center as the center as signifying.\n\nThe\noriginary center “tells” the group to defer appropriation; as exchanges with the center multiply,\nas the imperatives from the center are extended beyond the ritual space, the center becomes\nricher with activity: beings at the center appear and disappear, make demands, distribute rewards,\nand deliberate and fight amongst themselves regarding how to do so. Once a human occupies the\ncenter, he becomes part of these ritual exchanges and mythical narratives: he ascends to power,\nacts, and distributes in prescribed ways, with the collaboration of central beings. Systems of\nsigns are elaborated that have to be “read” in order to order these prescribed activities in the right\nways.\n\nA priestly class of specialists devotes itself to reading these signs, which is to say to\nconveying the meanings of the signifying center to the occupied one. The continuity of power is\nstill presupposed—even if the priests are, on rare occasions, actually choosing the occupant of\nthe center, they are certainly not determining the form of that occupancy. The reading of signs is\nas ritualized as the ruling, even if the need to interpret opens up some space to deal with\n“exceptional” circumstances. Anyone might be able to imagine that the man who happened to be\nking now might not prove to be the most “qualified” if a kingdom-wide “job search” were to be\nheld, but he has ascended and now rules through a complex, time-tested process that draws upon\nthe talent and accumulated means of the entire community in a way that would not be replicable\nif there were a constant search for someone who might be “better” in the abstract.\n\n_Talk of the Center_\n\nAll of this becomes problematic once sacrifice has ended, and imperative exchange has given\nway to what we could call “interrogative imperativity”: rather than giving to the center what it\ninstructs you to, and requesting that it fulfill its promises in exchange (one of your goats for\nanother year of the river flowing within its banks), each individual, as non-sacrificable center,\nasks himself who he is in giving himself over to the center completely. There is no more\nhierarchy of beings at the center which orders an earthly hierarchy in which each will find his place. One’s place in relation to the signifying center is fundamentally questionable, even if one’s\nrelation to the occupied center is not—hence the discrepancy.\n\nThis questionableness is what all\nthose new disciplines are interested in, and if they start off on the margins and uninterested in\npower, once they come to replace the old priestly classes this changes. The ruler must himself be\nruled by God’s law, and then by “Reason,” and then as a “servant of the people,” and so on—all\nconcepts controlled by the disciplines, upon whom the king is as dependent as he previously was\nupon the priestly classes. (The distinction between king and priest indicates a fundamental split\nbetween occupied center and signifying center, one that even precedes sacral kingship.) Now, the\ngovernment must be ruled by “political science,” “international law,” or “economics”—only\nconcepts drawn from these and other disciplines can make rule legitimate.\n\nEven the majority, the\nnominal “sovereign,” must yield to these super-sovereignties, which is to say those who interpret\nthem, who “rule” the disciplines. The disciplines can’t rule directly—the head of state in any\ncountry is still the successor, however distant of some last king who ruled over that territory, and\ntherefore all the kings and occasional queens preceding him. But that nominal occupant of power\nis at the center of struggles by power centers, leveraging the results of the disciplines’ inquiries to\ninfluence as much as possible the decisions of the sovereign, which is to say, to deploy the\nsovereign against the enemies of the discipline in question. The discrepancy between signifying\nand occupied center will generate struggles over the occupancy of the center, which struggles\nthen inform and divide the disciplines.\n\nJust as any contemporary ruler is a distant inheritor of the earliest sacral kings, the contemporary\ndisciplines have descended from metaphysics and scripture. They continue the same project of\neliminating the discrepancy between the signifying center and the occupied center. The target of\nmetaphysics and scripture alike was “mythology,” and this too has continued, from the\nEnlightenment critique of Christianity as “mythology” to Marxist critiques of “ideology” and\nmore contemporary attempts to dismantle “whiteness.” We can think about this as a continual\nprocess of replacement and reconfiguration. Mythology explains our ritual practices as\ncommemorating or being commanded by beings of the center.\n\nThe initial move in\n“demythification,” then, is to replace the activities of beings of the center with those of beings of\nthe margins. It was humans that created the myths and the rituals. How and why, though? If you\nare attacking some myth, or something you are going to call “myth,” it is because it supports the\npower of someone you would like to see have less power: your enemy or opponent. Myth\nsupports the tyrant; demythification aids the liberation of those inhabiting some pre-political\nspace (embodied in some internal scene of representation) that is violated by the tyrant. But each\nvictory over myth and tyranny installs a new tyrant supported by a new mythology—that pristine\npre-political space can never be actualized.\n\nThus, with its victory, the discourse of\ndemythification becomes, in turn, the myth to be dethroned. The weapons don’t have to change\nvery much: much of what could be said, in attacking monarch and church in the name of the\npeople and freedom, could be said in attacking the bourgeoisie, or the white, or the male, or the\nstraight, claiming to represent that fictional entity “the people,” in the name of the proletariat, the\ncolonized, the woman, the gay. The basis of the new liberating discourse is never provided, and\ncan’t be provided: it is enough that it is other than, othered by, and opposed to, that which it\nexposes as “mythical.”\n\nStill, today, even the soberest, data-driven study in the most moderate political science department of, say changes in “public opinion,” is nothing more than an attempt\nto demythify one belief about “the people” and replace it a new myth, that of “public\nopinion.” (Or one mythical form of public opinion by another.) For that matter, all public\ndiscourse in modern democracies can be reduced to each side purporting to demythify the other.\n\nMyths are the products of sociality that can’t be recognized as such and the problem of a post-\nsacrificial order is not to restore sacrality but, rather, to make discourse and practice directly,\nexplicitly and completely social. Directly, explicitly and completely social means: a defender,\nrepresentative and emissary of the center, “all the way down.” Our constructions of the center\nreveal our constructedness by the center, which means that we are never outside of some\ntradition of centeredness. We are used to thinking about traditions in terms of rituals and\ninstitutions, but the deepest and most difficult to examine traditions lie in language itself.\n\nWe can\nsee how difficult from the work of the linguist Anna Wierzbicka, who has taken up the Sapir-\nWhorf hypothesis and, one must say, successfully resolved it. Wierzbicka has discovered a set of\nwhat she calls “Natural Semantic Primes”—that is, words, exact translations of which exist in\nevery language. Another way of defining and testing the primes is to say they are words that\ncan’t be paraphrased by other words, without those other words ultimately having to be\nparaphrased using the primes themselves. Now, the existence of words that exist in every\nlanguage might seem to be the exact opposite of what Whorf (in particular) claimed, which is\nthat every language constructs reality for its users in a distinctive way that is not translatable into\nother languages.\n\nBut what the primes enable Wierzbicka to do is to prove Whorf’s claim\nregarding the relativity of language. By translating words from one language into the primes, it\nbecomes possible to show precisely how those words are different in meaning from words that\nseem synonymous in other languages.\n\nWierzbicka’s studies have, understandably, focused on English, the present-day global lingua\nfranca. She focuses on what would seem to be some of the most “universal” and “obvious”\nwords in English—words that not only seem to have intuitively natural meanings but are taken to\nprovide us with a direct access to reality—like “sense,” “evidence,” and “experience” (and many\nothers), and shows that it is precisely these words that have no equivalents in other languages. Even more, she traces these words back to their origins—in the case of the above mentioned, and\nsome other related ones, almost completely from the philosophical works of John Locke.\n\nIn\neffect, when we’re speaking English, and putting forth our theories of (and justifying foreign\npolicy based on) the “rule of law,” “empiricism,” “universal rights” and “utilitarianism,” and so\non, we’re effectively speaking the rather provincial dialect of Lockean. Seeing language anew\nthrough Wierzbicka, just like seeing the metalanguage of literacy through Olson, has a startling,\ndemystifying effect that seems similar to other “demythifications.” They are different, though,\nbecause they point us back to language, and therefore to the constitutive center, rather than some\npresumably self-sustaining “human” margin.\n\nFor the discourses of demythification, the world\nneeds to be set “right-side up” by showing how the divine depends on the human, the ruler on the\nruled, the intellectual on the material. For anthropomorphics, the problem is very different: here,\nthe problem is to constitute our utterances on a scene, with a center. We understand that all we’re\never doing is iterating the originary scene, in increasingly complex ways because we must incorporate anomalies and contingencies (mistakes) generated by previous scenes, and we must\nkeep retrieving and ensuring our continuity recursively with previous scenes. It’s also helpful to\nkeep in mind that that is all anyone is ever doing—all we can do is place ourselves on more\ndifferentiated scenes in the constitution of which we can display ever more of our contribution.\n\nThe implications of Wierzbicka’s primes helps to clarify what this means. Once you have taken a\nword, like “experience,” or “embarrassment,” and shown that its meaning entails a particular\nrelation between people thinking, people seeing, people knowing, people knowing that others see\nthem, people not wanting others to see them like that, people thinking about what they feel,\npeople wanting others to know that they feel this way, and so on, you are done. What you know\nis what you have always known about that word, because you have always used that word\nunproblematically, but what you also could never have articulated about it.\n\nThe word is revealed\nto you as a possible articulation of practices—practices that anyone can engage in and name, but\nthat have been articulated in a very specific way that has also prevented you from seeing other\nthings you can now at least imagine. What seemed self-evident now places you within a tradition\nof centering.\n\nWierzbicka’s primes dismantle any assumption of the transparency of any language, including\nthose of the human sciences, more radically than what are by now standard invocations of the\n(race, class, gender, sexuality...) positionality of the inquirer. If you think you can deconstruct a\ndiscourse in the human sciences because the maleness of the author, or the field, or that subset of\nthe field, shapes the discourse in exclusionary ways, and even if you add to this the whiteness,\nstraightness, First Worldness, etc., of the disciplinary position, you are still assuming the\npossibility of some unmarked, properly intersectional liberatory position at the end of the chain.\n\nWith Wierzbicka’s analytics, there’s no end of the chain. Wierzbicka herself is primarily\ninterested in preventing ethnocentrism, and, perhaps, the globally dominant Anglo ethnocentrism\nin particular from interfering with the possibility of communication and shared inquiry across\nlinguistic lines. But translations into the primes can only be an after the fact practice: we couldn’t\ndirectly communicate in the primes. And this leaves unaddressed what also follows from\nWierzbicka’s confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the distinctiveness of each\nlanguage is a source of discovery in its own right, and not just “noise” interfering with what\nmight otherwise be clear communication. If we could all manage to speak in the primes as our\nnative language, the world of thinking would be terribly impoverished as a result.\n\nI don’t mean to suggest Wierzbicka would deny any of this, but she doesn’t emphasize it\nanywhere that I am aware, and I am emphasizing it because my interests run elsewhere than\nWierzbicka’s. If we are able to see languages as something like disciplinary spaces themselves,\nwhich organize reality in such a way as to bring certain things to attention, and to in effect\nconstruct those “elements” of reality by occluding other elements, we can treat the disciplinary\nspaces of the human sciences as idioms within a larger language, rather than as transparent\nmetalanguages that bring us ever closer to a secular, demythified, liberated reality.\n\nThe\ndisciplines, we could say, are those spaces set up to inquire specifically into what words,\nsentences and discourses mean across the field of language—including within the disciplines\nthemselves. The question, then, is how do we speak about what words mean without some kind of metalanguage that provides the implicitly mystified terms with a demystified meaning? There\nwould be no inquiry into meaning if meaning wasn’t called into question in some way—if there\nweren’t, that is, some question of how to distinguish between normal and anomalous usage. The\npurpose of inquiry would then be less to adjudicate the terms of usage than to identify where the\nboundaries between what counts as normal or anomalous usage lie in specific practices, or fields\nof practice.\n\nWierzbicka’s primes would be very well suited for probing these boundary spaces, as\nwould the kinds of tests Olson (and other cognitive scientists) devise in order to determine, for\nexample, how a child who has learned how to read and write constructs theories of other minds\ndifferently than those who haven’t.\n\nI argued above that the human sciences have their origins in the establishment of the primacy of\nthe declarative sentence effected by literacy and manifested, in the West, in metaphysics and\nscripture (synthesized in Christianity). The metaphysical discovery is that ostensive and\nimperative signs can be represented in declarative terms, and that representing them in\ndeclarative terms enables the declarative to control the ostensive and imperative: or, to put it in\ngrammatical terms, to issue imperatives and generate ostensives. If we’re talking, I can point to\nsomething—if, at some later point, that pointing needs to be represented for, say, legal purposes,\nmy pointing to something gets redescribed in terms that would note my position, what I was\nlikely able to see, what else was in the vicinity, and potentially much more (the state of my optic\nnerve, etc.) that would abstract my pointing from the ostensive situation.\n\nWhat I “really saw” is\nnow better left in the hands of professionals who have categorized all the elements of “seeing\nsomething.” The same is the case for imperatives: redescribing person A commanding person B\nto carry out some act raises the question (to be answered in further declaratives) of who person A\nand B are such that A can command B, and therefore whether that command was a “real”\ncommand (whether B obeyed it or not), which is to say issued by one person who is in a position\nto command that other person. And what does it mean to be in a positon to command another:\none has been “authorized” to do so, and authorization implies terms of authorization, themselves\ninscribed in declarative sentences.\n\nTo some extent, at least, issuing commands places you in\nconflict with those who will redescribe those commands in declarative terms: at the very least,\nthose later descriptions will subject the command to criteria and calculations that could not\npossibly have been present to the one issuing the command in the original situation. The reason\nmetaphysics needs to be dismantled is that the interests of metaphysics lie in ensuring that all\nimperatives and ostensives are controlled and guaranteed in advance by declaratives, and this is\nan infiltration and subversion of the ostensive-imperative world. The declarative order in effect\nusurps the ostensive-imperative world by generating unacknowledged commands to those\nresponsible for commanding.\n\nTo say something like “that order would violate the protocols of\nthis institution, which have in turn been established in accordance with domestic law passed\npursuant to a particular international treaty, etc.” is to say: you cannot issue this command; and it\nis to say this without being able to provide an alternative command that would meet the needs of\nthat situation. One could say that those giving the commands can be trained in accord with\nprocedures that internalize that declarative order, but this just means having the declarative order\nencroach more pervasively upon the ostensive-imperative world, without there being any reason\nto assume that the commands subsequently issued within that institution will be more appropriate for its purposes.\n\nIf the declarative sentence, for metaphysics, is the well-formed proposition that can be linked\naccording to logical rules to other propositions and according to some “rules of evidence” to\nostensive claims about reality (material or ideal), the declarative sentence, for scripture, is a\nnarrative of the emergence of the individual as a center: a non-sacrificable center among other\nnon-sacrificable centers, and therefore a center of responsibility. There is no need for the\nscriptural declarative to invade the ostensive-imperative world, as does the metaphysical\ndeclarative. To be told the story of a victim of centralizing violence is to be issued the imperative\n“don’t commit such violence,” and provided with a kind of map for how to avoid doing so;\nsimilarly, to be told the story of a saint who refrained from responding in kind to some violation\nand absented herself from potentially contagious desires and resentments is to be issued a\ncommand to imitate that kind of response to temptations to resentment.\n\nThe problem for the\nscriptural declarative is that, due to its anti-imperial/meta-imperial origins, the only means it\nprovides for distinguishing between proper and improper imperatives issued by power centers is\nin terms of whether those power centers defend the originating narrative of the authorizing\nscripture. If the power center is responsible for distinguishing between discourses issuing from,\non the one hand, and deviating from, on the other hand, the authorizing narrative, rules must be\nconstructing for establishing that distinction. The only way of establishing a body of rules is\npropositionally, which means that the scriptural world must rely upon the metaphysical\ndeclarative world. Once this happens, the imperatives issued by the metaphysical order will\nconsistently override those issued within the scriptural order because the former has been set in\njudgment of the latter.\n\n_The Center and Imperative Authority_\n\nThe civilizational problem we have here, at least in the Western world (and therefore the rest of\nthe world, which has all been at least in part modeled on Western norms) is that of the\nimperatives issued from the highest power center, or the central authority. There is, in any\ncommunity, a central authority, the final source of imperatives; and yet those imperatives are\nonly worthy of being followed if the central authority is in accord with the signifying center: to\nput I more precisely, if the imperatives issued by the central authority are the same as those\nissued by the signifying center. As yet, no satisfactory way of ensuring this has been proposed,\nlet along implemented.\n\nThis problem, I have suggested, dates back to the fall of sacral kingship\n(although I imagine I have made it clear that retaining sacral kingship, much less restoring it,\ncannot be considered an option), which makes it a very longstanding one. How to “legitimate”\nthe central authority, or the sovereign (without, for now, getting into the tangled history of that\nconcept), without creating an “imperium in imperio,” or a “realer” sovereign than the actual\nsovereign? This, what I have been calling, “super-sovereign,” must itself be represented—by a\nChurch, or a parliament, a constitution, or a judiciary, or an international body...--and\nrepresentation either recreates the same problem over again (what legitimates the Church or the\njudiciary, who interprets the constitution?) which in turn opens a kind of loophole through which\npower struggles can be waged.\n\nIf the Church or the judiciary is to be the ultimate arbiter, then if one wants to counter the king or president one seeks control of the Church or judiciary, or\nChurch doctrine or legal theory, which, in turn, requires control over the universities, seminaries\nand law schools. Liberalism is the political theory justifying this state of affairs, which means\nthat the purpose of liberalism is to ensure that no one ever knows who decides anything. Can\nthere be any reason to believe that decisions will be made and implemented better this way?\n\nThe civilizational project I am proposing for the disciplines, then, is the one I suggest they have\nreally been pursuing all along: inquiring into the meaning of imperatives issued by central\nauthority (which are of course transmuted into other imperatives along various chains of\ncommand, and studied with regard to needed means of implementation, including the distribution\nof resources, the training and employment of personnel, and so on). I can make this more\nprecise: the proper inquiry of the human sciences is the difference between the imperatives\nissued by central authority and the imperatives obeyed by lower authorities.\n\nImperatives are\nperformatives: they transform, rather than describing, reality. No imperative, however carefully\nand informatively formulated, however close in time and space to its implementation, can ever\ncompletely account for the conditions of implementation. So, if we assume the existence of some\ncentral authority in any community, the most minimal assumption we can make regarding what\nconstitutes a central authority, is that imperatives coming from that authority supersede all other\nimperatives. Which is to say those imperatives are always to be obeyed—to do otherwise is to\nalign oneself with another, potential, more or less imminent, central authority, even (especially,\nreally) if one disobeys in the name of one or another super-sovereign concept (“human rights,” or\nwhatever).\n\nTo disobey is irresponsible and therefore immoral, because it resists the direct\nsociality of discourse. Bringing the difference between imperative issued and imperative obeyed\nbrings questions of morality and responsibility into focus far more effectively. It is in one’s\nfilling the imperative “gap” that one provides moral and intellectual feedback to superiors and\nultimately to the central authority. A bad, or, say, “infelicitous,” imperative, is simply one that\ncan’t be effectively fulfilled, either on its own terms or because it conflicts with some equally\nauthoritative imperative coming from the center. Even a very good government is likely to pose\nsuch dilemmas to its people—perhaps even more so, insofar as a good government would confer\nmore responsibilities on its people, supervise less closely, and therefore issue less specified\ncommands.\n\nOf course, a bad government would pose these dilemmas in much direr ways. If we\nassume that these dilemmas, which would always be posed in unique ways, must be resolved as\nbest as possible without ever imagining one could disobey the central authority, the field of\npolitical, moral and social inquiry becomes very rich indeed.\n\nSo, an inquiry into meaning is an inquiry into the difference between imperative issued and\nimperative obeyed, including how that difference is registered in the declarative order, itself\ntaken as the study of the ostensive-imperative world: more precisely, the study of which\nhierarchy of imperatives will produce the greatest ostensive yield (the practices, places and\nthings that best reveal our social being). The difference in question is a product of the element of\n“inappropriateness” constitutive of any imperative: again, even within the most tightly structured\nchain of command in the most closed environment, there will be something in any imperative\nthat can’t be fulfilled as commanded (as imagined by the commander).\n\nAs the recipient of a command, you become a center, along with bearing and presenting the centrality of whoever has\nissued the command. The mistakenness of the imperatee is a breach in the order of signs\n(linguistic presence) which initiates the convergence of attention upon that imperatee, and\ndepending upon the source and scope of that covering attention, upon the imperator as well. As\nattention converges upon you, there are two possible responses: one, you can try to deflect the\nattention elsewhere, which involves evacuating yourself as one receiving an imperative; two, you\ncan convert that convergent attention into shared attention to the range of problems raised by the\nbest implementation of the imperative (our “selves” are essentially articulations, in some\nproportion, of these two types of response).\n\nThis conversion involves ostensive, imperative and\ndeclarative dimensions: it involves “holding” oneself a certain way—for example, not reacting\nsymmetrically or in kind to accusations; it involves showing oneself to be following orders and\nissuing various imperatives (from modest requests to imperious commands) oneself; and it\ninvolves, invoking and enacting the origin of the declarative form itself, predicating some object\n(and individual, a situation) that could provoke violent convergence, and doing so in such a way\nas to make the object signify a way of refraining from such convergence. Through these\npedagogical and moral practices the signifying center is brought to bear on the occupied center,\nand imperative gap closed.\n\nThe inquiry initiated by potential or imminent convergence toward imperative mistakenness\ninvolves an unfolding of the practice in question into its constitutive practices. This practice of\ninquiry has something in common, then, with any social analytics, which will, for example, in\nexplaining a ritual, identify the “components” of that ritual (the actors, the means, the rules, the\nconnection to other practices, etc.), with it then being possible to “break down” or abstract those\ncomponents into components of their own, until we reach the terms of an anthropological\nontology. What is different in anthropomorphics is that the inquiry is explicitly set on the scene\nof inquiry itself.\n\nThe origin and essence of the declarative sentence is that it provides the capacity\nto represent events happening at different times and places (and different times and places than\nthat where and when the sentence itself is uttered) in a single present. The original declarative\ntraces the transformation of a demand into a request for information regarding the demanded\nobject, that is, a question, which is answered with a negation (not here). An originary ontology of\nthe declarative preserves the negative ostensive by composing the declarative world out of\ndeclaratives that both construct a chain from the ostensive-imperative articulations conditioning\nthe possibility of this declarative order and by indicating, issuing tacit imperatives, that operate\nwithin that world.\n\nThis makes the present tense predominant in anthropomorphic inquiry. What\nhas happened in the past is available in the present because memories, records and ramifications\nof that past are ostensively available in the present: the possibility of a propositional order, which\nwe owe to metaphysics, is redeemed in the possibility of always adding a new increment of\nostensive inheritance that would establish a new post from which hitherto unseen or overseen or\nunderseen memories, records and ramifications can be made present. In thusly representing the\nconfluence of events, each one of which can be more fully represented in its mimetic structure\nand articulation of convergent and shared attention, the declarative order being constructed\ncontributes to closing the imperative gap by modifying that inheritance and thereby issuing a\ntacit imperative to obey the order one way as opposed to another.\n\n_Declarative Order and the Center_\n\nRemember that the metalanguage of literacy I have extracted from David Olson’s work aims at\nconstructing a simulated scene upon which the writer and readers stand, observing whatever is\nrepresented by the writer. The scene of classical prose is, then, readerly rather than writerly—it\navoids drawing attention to the scene of writing itself, which is really a sketch of a succession of\nscenes upon which given signs are iterated in different ways. Classic prose solves a problem that\nthe invention of writing creates, but which is really just the expansion of a field upon which a\nproblem constitutive of language itself is displayed and played out.\n\nOn the originary scene, the\nmost urgent problem as the scene takes shape, is for all, or “enough,” participants to be able to\nascertain, or know, simply, that they are all in fact issuing the newly discovered and invented\nsign. This is a process in which the participants transition from attention (giving and receiving it\nin uncertain oscillation) to intention (finding means for identifying and controlling the attention\nof others). As the primary problem on the originary scene, this is therefore also the primary\nproblem of the human. To put it bluntly, we are always doing nothing other than trying to\ndetermine whether “we” are in fact issuing the same sign.\n\nThis is a real problem which can never\nbe solved once and for all because, of course, it never is the same sign—to some degree, every\nrepetition of a sign modifies its meaning, or its range of possible uses, in some way. So, the\nproblem is establishing sameness in the midst of difference. A disciplinary space is where we\nmake this attempt.\n\nMetalanguage is a way of solving this problem, and it’s not surprising that the masters of writing\nwould have found this solution to be an appropriate one to the problem of potentially infinite\ndissemination. Metalanguage establishes rules for the proper use of signs. The metalanguage of\nliteracy, as I pointed out earlier, defines words, which is to say, abstracts from the mass of\nlanguage use those specific ways in which one is allowed to use particular words; it establishes\nrules of grammar and logic, which essentially function to keep the declarative order at a\nsufficient distance from the ostensive-imperative world so as to avoid contamination; and it\nestablishes broader disciplinary rules, and rules of genre and style aimed at guaranteeing the\ntransparency of discourse for those inhabiting the metalanguage of literacy, or those fluent in the\nprevailing literate idioms.\n\nIf we’ve established rules for using words, for grammar, for genre and\nstyle, and, indeed, for checking and updating these rules and adjudicating specific cases, we can\nexamine the differences of specific texts in a contained way. What, though, if each time we read\na text, the proper use of words, grammatical rules, logic, generic and stylistic norms, were all up\nfor grabs at each point along the way of the reading practice, and in shared inquiries into texts? In that case, the sameness of identity of a particular sign could only be affirmed on a particular\nscene of inquiry, in which one participant is able to say something like “if we take these words to\nbe usable in this way, and accept the possibility that this other mode of grammar and logic might\n“work,” and entertain the possibility that genre and stylistic norms are being used here in order to\nproduce effects beyond the consideration of those responsible for maintaining those norms, then\nthe text here would be doing X”; and another participant would be able to follow up on that with\nanother possible articulation of definitional, grammatical, logical, generic and stylistic practices\nin this text, but also, now, in the “critical” practice of inquiry that can use this practice of textuality as a model.\n\nThe starting point of such an inquiry would still be the metalanguage of\nliteracy and the narrower metalanguages of specific disciplinary practices, but now, in applying\nthose terms, either inappropriately, or to an object one shows (or helps) to resist appropriate\napplication, the application of those terms, along with the modifications effected through passing\nthem through the prism of the constructed object, is now to the space of inquiry itself. What we\nhave in that case is a kind of transdisciplinary infralanguage, in which the identity of the sign\nmust be “authenticated” on each scene of inquiry (even the signs marking a scene of inquiry\nmust be authenticated on a scene of inquiry, both within and outside of the scene of inquiry to be\nmarked).\n\nThis takes us to the end of metaphysics by retrieving the origin and vocation of the\ndeclarative sentence prior to its hypostatization by the metalanguage of literacy, of which\nmetaphysics is merely an occluded version. That vocation is to determine the precise distance at\nwhich we need to hold the ostensive-imperative world so as to prioritize the many imperatives\ncoming our way so that we represent to each other the way their originating center would like us\nto obey them.\n\nScriptural declarative orders involve narratives that take us from the violent convergence of\nattention, or violent centralization, to the conversion of that convergence into shared attention\ndirected at the mimetic crisis, or the unresolved mistakenness of the ostensive-imperative world,\nthat led to the convergence in the first place. Scriptural narratives effect this conversion through\nthe hearing and heeding of what Philip Rieff called an “absolute imperative.” Here, the absolute\nimperative is the imperative to devote yourself to the signifying center by interposing yourself\nbetween the convergent attention and the potential sacrifice.\n\nLet’s take this one step further and\nsay that the absolute imperative is to name the potential sacrifice, which is to say surround it\nostensively so as to render it immune to sacrificial intentions. Naming something in the world as\na moral act is the most originary of signifying gestures. Historically, scriptural narratives have\ndisplaced sacrificial and mythical ones by constructing an “emperor” that necessarily transcends\nall world emperors, actual or possible, because He has created the world and everything in it. A\npoint by point “refutation,” or really, satirical subversion, beyond anything we would probably\nbe able to reconstruct at this point, of all previous ritual, mythological and imperial orders was\nrequired to accomplish this.\n\nWe looked before at the impasse at which scripture eventually\narrives: its implicit anti-imperialism dispossesses it of any means of resisting incorporation as a\n“super-sovereignty” that provides the resources for endless denunciations of “tyranny” in the\nname of some inviolable internal center. We could say this process is, in fact “history”—history,\nthat is, is the record of the replacement of one empire after another in anticipation of the\nestablishment of the final, true empire, that would be direct subordination to God, but then, also,\nto some version of the authentically unpolluted human. History, then, has exhausted itself in the\nantinomic agencies of contemporary liberalism, where the genuinely stripped bare human that\ncan be the only source of legitimacy is nothing but sheer opposition to whatever norms make\nsocial functioning possible.\n\nBut the imperative to redeem scripture can be obeyed at least as well as that to redeem the\npropositional order created by metaphysics. What we retrieve from scripture is what we can call\n“listening to the center,” which is to say developing disciplinary spaces for discerning the most pertinent forms taken by the absolute imperative. Like scripture, this requires narrative far more\nthan propositional forms. Let’s start with the appearance of mistakenness in what we can call the\n“in-ordering” of an imperative (the effort to create the order extending from the imperative, to\nact within the order). Any crisis begins with a command, a demand, a request, an injunction, a\nprohibition, an insistence, etc., that is going unfulfilled.\n\nThe “size” of the crisis will depend on\nthe agencies involved, their relative power, the urgency and scope of the imperative, and so on—\neven if not necessarily in any obvious way. But at any size, the crisis begins by being placed in\nsome declarative, narrative form: person or people X did something/are doing something. An\nevent is represented, and an event “behind” that event: what’s happening is shadowed by what is\n“really” happening. The narrative rewires the ostensive and imperative circuitry: you’re looking\nhere, but the signs you are looking at really point there; you are finding it incumbent to act in one\nway, but the situation requires that you act another way.\n\nThe surface is bubbling with ostensives\nand imperatives—simply knowing what to look at and from what angle, and what the situation\n“demands,” itself “demands” one seek out a higher imperative that would supersede all of these. But this means that one is already following the imperative to seek out a higher imperative;\nwhich, further, depends on the ostensive assumption that that higher imperative is there to be\nfound. And that ostensive assumption must be right—even finding oneself disappointed at the\nend, and renouncing the search for higher imperatives, would have one following the imperative\nto not seek out higher imperatives (and, a narrower imperative designating the precise imperative\nlevel at which one stops seeking higher).\n\nSo, when a narrative represents imperative mistakenness, we know a higher imperative will\nreorder the disordered imperative space. In the representations of the scene of imperative\nmistakenness, the participant can hear imperatives generated on that scene itself—imperatives\nthat sustain and accelerate the scene of convergent, violent centralization by pointing out more\nconfirmatory details and compelling each participant to take action that further locks him into the\nscene. “If you refuse to see what that means, that means you don’t belong here”—that is, you\nbelong with the victim. These imperatives can be recognized by their paradoxical form, that of\nthe vicious circle.\n\nIn the aftermath of such a scene, effort will have to put into controlling all\nsubsequent representations of it: everyone on the scene will have to have been acting directly\npursuant and proportionately to some immediate provocation to which response could not be\ndelayed. And one can see signs of this on the scene already. In any representation of such a\nscene, even the most inciteful one, any participant can also see signs that suggest that\ndeceleration is possible. The very existence of such signs rebuts the incitement. “See if there are\nfurther like signs” is the absolute imperative here. If you listen to it, the imperative becomes both\nmore precise, telling you where to look, and more expansive, telling you to show others these\nsigns, or, really, showing others they have already seen them.\n\nEven on a scene where immediate\naction is in fact urgently necessary, there must be some margin of uncertainty with regard to\nwhich action is best, even in split-second decisions. So, even in a genuine emergency, the\ncapacity to decelerate enhances response-ability. A narrative starting from the element of\ndeceleration within an acceletory frame will uncover more signs suggesting deceleration, and\nsubtler distinctions, for example, between signs that presented as deceletory but really served the\npurpose of incitement. Subsequent narratives would become further differentiated, to the point of refusing to converge attention even upon those most unambiguously accelerating on the scene,\npreferring to explore what they might have taken to be deceleratory imperatives to be followed.\n\nIf punitive action needs to be taken, and accounted for after the fact, it is taken, however severe,\nin such a way as to reveal, foreground and enhance deceletory or inhibitory means of\ninstitutional and individual detection. This is how one listens to the center: the absolute\nimperative always tells one to hear more of imperatives to which one is exposed and to make\nthem more consistent with each other: to name practices that bring into view things that issue\nthose imperatives.\n\n_Skewing Toward the Center_\n\nWe inherit from metaphysics the possibility of replacing any word, phrase, gesture, or movement\nwith a declarative sentence, or a string of declarative sentences, and then replacing the words in\nthose sentences with strings of declarative sentences, and then doing the same with the very\nprocess of carrying out all of these replacements, and so on. Having declarative reframing at our\ndisposal serves the purposes of deferral, which can in this way be organized in disciplinary\nspaces, which enable us to reframe accounts of events in new registers. The most minimal act of\nattention can thereby be spread out into a structure and history of practices limited only by the\nquestion prompting the inquiry, and the continual modulation of that question.\n\nWe start with an\nevent or utterance (but we only know events through utterances, and utterances are always an\nevent), and at a certain point we will say we have determined what something means. Wierzbicka’s analysis of words into the primes is an exemplary model for such post-\nmetaphysical work within the declarative order, and I would hereby deem her thinking to be part\nof anthropomorphics. Still there is an interesting aporia in Wierzbicka’s primes: there is, it\nseems, no prime word for “God,” or “divine,” or “sacred” or any related terms. This is certainly\nnot due to any hostility or hesitation regarding the sacred on the part of Wierzbicka, who has\nwritten at least two books that translate Christian scripture into the primes.\n\nMy assumption is that\nwords for God and gods are too singularized, and it would be impossible, using Wierzbicka’s\nexacting standards of identification, to claim that there are words in all languages referring to\ngods or the sacred that are the “same.” Gods are always named, and names can’t be in the\nprimes. Wierzbicka, at any rate, never claims that the prime words are the earliest words, even if\nthey are all certainly pre-literate. We can take them, I would suggest, as belonging to declarative\nlanguage, leaving at least portions of the ostensive-imperative world untouched.\n\nWierzbicka’s claim, which, again, I have no reason to contest, is that one way of identifying and\nverifying the primes is that they are words that cannot be paraphrased by other words without\nthose other words having to be paraphrased, and so on, until we ultimately find our way back at\nthe prime word. So, any attempt to paraphrase “think” would, if sufficiently thorough and\nrigorous, have to include the word itself in that paraphrase; this is not the case for a non-prime\nword like, say, “understand.” The primes, then, are words that are understood or, to stick with the\nprimes, known, intuitively; or, to put it in a way with less philosophical baggage, knowing how\nto use (or when to say) these words is simply part of being able to speak a language.\n\nIn originary\ndisciplinary spaces, though, things don’t end there, because being able to gesture ostensively and issue and obey imperatives are also part of what it means to be able to speak a language. So, we\ncan have non-tautological ways of saying what it means to “think,” “know,” “say,” “want” and so\non: they represent interactions at the center, which we iterate on the margin. The primes\nthemselves are practices and this can be shown in a way that would be in principle available to\nWierzbicka, even if to my knowledge she has never adopted it, and that is understanding the\nwords in relation to each other. This will enable us to defend Wierzbicka’s position while\nrecognizing, for example, that the word “think,” when someone says “I think,” might mean\nsomething different than “think” is the question, “what do you think?”\n\nDoes “think” mean the same thing when someone, in response to a question of whether he’d like\nto go somewhere, says, “yes, I think so,” as when someone says “if you think about it, you will\nagree with me”? The person who says “yes, I think so” is expressing a desire while\nsimultaneously indicating some hesitation (there are other possibilities, of course), while the\nperson saying “if you think about it...” is encouraging the other to engage in a cogitative\nprocess, to carry out a mental activity (but also, perhaps, reminding the other of consequences of\n“disagreeing”). We can make the meaning of “think” seem as different from each other in the\nrespective cases as we like, but what I think vindicates Wierzbicka’s model is that in both cases\none _thinks_ when one doesn’t _know_ , and one _thinks_ before one _says_.\n\nAnd we can make the\nrelations between the words even more precise if we consider when we would use one in an\nimperative rather than the other, or the limitations imposed upon using these words as\nimperatives. When do you command someone to think? When a decision has to be made, or a\nconclusion reached, and the person who has to make or reach it seems unprepared to do so. Which is a way of saying “think before you say you know,” or “think before you do.” Someone\nis commanded to “say something” when there has been ample time, or there is now no time, to\n“think.” Of course, we have E.M. Forster’s question, much beloved of writing instructors, “how\ndo I know what I think until I see what I say,” which suggests the simultaneity of thinking and\nsaying.\n\nEven here, though, it seems that the saying does not so much coincide with as reveal the\nthinking which still, presumably, in some sense antedated it. At the very least, the saying can’t\nprecede any thinking, even if we speak about people speaking and acting before they have\nthought. When we accuse someone thus, we’re limiting what we’re willing to consider “genuine”\nthinking in this case, that is, using “thinking” in a restrictive way, while still preserving its\npriority over saying and doing (no one tells another he speaks or acts before he thinks as a\ncompliment, even if one might advise another not to think “too much” before speaking or acting\n—which, again, presupposes the priority of thinking of these acts).\n\nHowever such intra-prime analyses work out (is it meaningful to command or demand that\nsomeone _want_ or _know_ something? If not, what do we mean when we do so, as we all probably\ndo on occasion?), I put these models of analysis forward as a contribution to the ongoing (it\nseems to be taking longer than it should) dismantling of the metaphysical reification of the\ndeclarative sentence, not in order to devalue (absurdly) the declarative sentence but to liberate its\nreal “vocation.” Wierzbicka’s primes help free us from the metalanguage of literacy, but they\nalso need to be freed from it. It can still be very difficult to resist the tendency, when hearing the\nwords “think” or “know,” to immediately convert that into a question like “what is real thinking/ knowing,” which in turn, as Wittgenstein knew, leads us to construct a “picture” of “thinking”\nand “knowing.”\n\nOnce we are drawing pictures of these activities, we invite arguments over their\n“thoroughness,” or the “correctness” of this or that “detail.” We try to “prove” that this or that\n“faculty” is an essential part of the “thought process,” or that we haven’t really “known”\nsomething until all the items on a checklist of what counts as “knowing” have been checked off. Do I need to convince you of how deeply rooted these habits of thought remain? The\nappropriation of Wierzbicka’s primes by originary thinking allow us to maintain all the precision\nregarding determining the meaning of words that the most demanding analytical philosopher\nwould insist upon, and as penetrating an analysis of the practices comprising any intellectual\nactivity as any cognitive psychologist would hope for, without the kinds of pointless paradoxes\nthat have been with us since Socrates wondered whether acts are good because the gods\ncommand them, or the gods command them because they are good. “Limiting” ourselves to the\nmodest questioning of how the most minimally meaningful words are used in relation to each\nother will help generate a post-metaphysical human science.\n\nWe can remain with the declarative order for as long as we like, and there are substantial rewards\nfor doing so: the purest form of the declarative order is mathematics, and when we are thinking\ngenuinely scientifically, we are within the declarative. However delayed, though, the declarative\nmust come home to the ostensive—even the most complex physics experiment carried out with\nthe most intricate machinery must give the scientist something to see and point to—even if it’s\njust a reading on a meter that is very distantly related to anything we might actually be able to\nengage with our senses. Moreover, science begins with a question, and a question is an extended\nimperative, and the imperative is extended because it turned out to be “inappropriate”—to not, in\nfact, have had the needed ostensive backing.\n\nThe grounding of the declarative order in the\nostensive-imperative world can also only be discussed (as anything can only be “discussed”) in\nthe declarative order, but nothing in the declarative order would ever impel its participants to\ninitiate such discussions—which is why the metalanguage of literacy has ruled for so long. As\nHeidegger and Wittgenstein realized, it is mistakenness that opens up the declarative order to an\ninquiry into its ostensive and imperative roots. All of the paradoxes, aporias and anomalies with\nwhich the declarative order is rife, and which the metalanguage of literacy strives to hide from\nview, lead us back to the ostensive, and the only real paradox: that we name as already\npossessing the characteristics implicit in that name something that is only that thing because we\nhave named it. _We_ , not _I_ ; on a _scene_ , not in a _mind_.\n\nA discovery, scientific or otherwise, has been\nmade once participants on a disciplinary scene see something that is simultaneously real and a\nproduct of the scene of inquiry (and all the modified practices and traditions of inquiry of which\nthe scene is composed) that made it available to us.\n\n_The Center Without Metalanguage_\n\nThe scene on which one sees what one is simultaneously shown has been the concern of\nscripture: this is what is entailed in a “revelation.” One some level, we know that we ourselves\ndon’t completely produce what we see—in some sense we are “shown” it. This raises the\nquestion of how to name the one who shows it. One the one hand, unless we are literal believers, we know there is no one really showing it, and as social thinkers we can find some way of\nnaming an agency that does so—“society,” “tradition,” “ideology,” and so on. This all begs the\nquestion of how any of these entities could show us anything—wouldn’t “believing” in them be\njust as questionable as believing in God?\n\nIt is to fill this aporetic space that the human sciences\nrush in with all the faculties and capacities they deposit in the subject. I would have\nanthropomorphics fill the space with imperatives from the center and declaratives working out\nthe performative gap of those imperatives so as to issue more precise imperatives, albeit always\nwith a margin of mistakenness. I propose this as a theoretical language that should be more\npowerful than those indebted to the metalanguage of literacy. For one thing, it renders the self or\nsubject directly and completely social and historical, rather than leaving us to figure out some\nway to “add” those “forces” afterward.\n\nWorking imperatives through a declarative space so as to\nissue a more precisely targeted imperative produces an ostensive result the actor and observer\ncan both see. That ostensive result is named, and any practice that is named is named as\ncommanding a deferral of desire or resentment. Naming resists the erasure of the practice. Not\neverything that is named is “good,” but the naming always proposes a good way of seeing that\nthing, as source of deferral rather than incitement. This is the case even with instances of naming\nthat we must see, from the outside, as direct incitement—even those names defer some other\neven more imminent violence within that group, and could only meaningfully be countered with\na better name. The result of the mobilizing of the declarative order so as to examine some\npractice that has become a “problem” is to return to that practice (or, perhaps, one of its\n“descendants,” mutations, or incorporations) with a name.\n\nAll “speaking about” is naming, and all naming is the Name-of-God and enacted in the Name of\nGod. So, every utterance is naming God in the name of God, and then we sort things out from\nthere: how did God, or, let’s say, the center, authorize and command that affixation of its name to\nthat form of itself? Instead of asking why someone chose or decided to do or say something,\nwhich situates the prompting of the action somewhere within the subject (which is why we then\nhave to add the social and historical parts afterward), an anthropomorphic disciplinary space has\nsomeone named or deemed by the center to deploy the name of the center.\n\nThere’s no claim to\ninfallible knowledge of the intent of the center here—rather, this anthropomorphic idiom would\nbe a way of initiating and sustaining collaborative inquiries into how we have come by the words\nwe’re using as part of using them. That doesn’t mean we must all be linguists or philologists; it\nwould just mean that our mode of interaction would presuppose that our words come to us, rather\nthan from us. We are all of us centers, attracting convergent attention and open to shared\nattention; we are all of us directing attention to others and everything in the world as centers. So,\non a kind of sliding scale, where is the “needle” between the drawing and directing shared rather\nthan convergent attention in any case?\n\nA study of names, which is a naming of names (we don’t\nhave to keep saying we are always naming but we can always remember that we are always\nnaming), is a continual attempt to pinpoint where that needle is. The further the needle is toward\nthe pole of shared attention, the more the name creates a space in which more naming is possible\n—when convergent attention, violent centralization, has not been sufficiently deferred, a narrow\ncircle of names, applied in a closely guarded (but therefore also, eventually, haphazard,\nproductive of anomalies) way, is insisted upon. What is the advantage, other than familiarity, of speaking in terms of decisions, choices and capacities, subsequently to supplemented by\n“society” and “history,” over an idiom that has us speaking of transitions from attention to\nintention?\n\nIn the latter case we can see the ways that just noticing some foreground against a\nbackground (to speak Gestalt) becomes a way of effecting some new relation between back and\nforeground—without needing to make a stop at a decision, or the will, or some cognitive\ncapacity or moral deliberation (all of which things would be attention-intention “glides,” in\nwhich a centered ordinality is joined).\n\nMaybe it seems like I’m insisting on a metalanguage here, and a rather artificial and awkward\none at that. What would be the point of “banning” perfectly serviceable words like “decide” and\n‘choose,” just because we might have some theoretical questions about the “substantives” which\nthese verbs predicate. I’m just doing the kind of displacement work necessary when one\ndisciplinary space enters into another—much that was taken for granted has to be explicitly\nrevealed as anomalous. An anthropomorphic inquiry wants to settle down with all the commonly\nused words, most definitely including those like “decision” and “choice.”\n\nBut we don’t have to\nkeep using them exactly the same way—I haven’t signed the linguistic or cultural equivalent of a\nnon-disclosure form. When someone does something, and claims to have made a decision,\nthere’s no reason to deny it; what we can do, though, is try to figure out wherein, exactly, the\ndecision lies. What is other than “decision” in an action, and where is the boundary between\ndecision and non-decision? (Note that I am myself using terms like “try to figure out” here.) We\ncan conduct thought experiments. Let’s try and reduce the decision “point” to an absolute\nminimum by introducing as many determinants and making them as determinant as we can—\nbring in that person’s whole history, biology, cultural position, and so on, so as come as close as\nwe can to erasing any trace of a “decision.”\n\nIf there’s something we can’t manage to erase, well,\nthere’s your decision. Let’s move the needle in the opposite direction—let’s reconstruct that\nperson’s entire “equipage” as completely as possible as series of decisions, introducing terms\nindicating alternatives, deliberation, consideration, choice and so on at each point along the way. Let’s try and get this act to be nothing but decision—what does it look like then? Where is the\nnon-decision residue? The very fact that we can move from one pole to another in our inquiry\nsuggests, softly commands, that it is better to be able to slide up and down the scale. And what\nthat further means is that the purpose of doing so is to enhance the probability that the subject of\nour inquiry and all who might model themselves or be modeled on it will be able to do the same\n—that is, keep broadening the space of decision against what will also be an enlarged\nbackground of non-decision.\n\nMaking more conscious, responsible, aware decisions enlarges\nrather than shrinking the arena within which decisions are made. So, we have no problem using\nthe word “decision,” but we do so in order to name and thereby enact a space of deferral (to\ndecelerate and reverse convergence upon some center), not to create some rules for the proper\n“scientific” or “philosophical” use of the word.\n\nIn this way we show any “decision” to be a result of listening to the center. What I am talking\nabout here is not very different from and, in fact, is an extension of, those occasions where one\nclaims to be speaking in the name of some authoritative entity, and therefore has to distinguish\none’s own opinion from what one has to say in the name of that entity. So a diplomat speaks for his country, a clergyman in the name of his church, a scholar in the name of the discipline, and\nteacher in the name of curriculum, a doctor as a bearer of medical expertise, and so on. In many\ncases, these “delegates” will have prepared scripts or language to work with and professional\nnorms to follow, but there will always be those cases where one reaches the limits of the script,\nthe language, the norms, and one has to decide what one’s country, school, profession, church or\nwhatever “wants.”\n\nThis, then, is the model for what we are always already doing anyway, and\nshould therefore do more explicitly and formally. We are always already doing this anyway\nbecause there is never a single word out of our mouths that has not been “borrowed” from some\n“source” we take to be authoritative and are which we are therefore helping to further authorize. If any two or more people were to sit down and examine some “specimens” of their opinions on\nvarious topics, simply asking each other, non-confrontationally, in good faith and the spirit of\ninquiry, where all these opinions came from, down to the use of particular words, phrases and\ngrammatical tics, we would see this very quickly.\n\nOne way of thinking comes from one’s parents,\nanother from an impressive teacher in school, another from the media sources one regularly\nconsumes, and so on. Even if each individual could point to specific modifications in these\nreceived opinions, those modifications have sources, or the intellectual moves that allowed for\nthose modifications (a certain way of assessing facts or logic) have them. Even the best-read and\nmost scholarly among us would have to point to intellectual traditions and their institutional\nreproduction upon which we rely and which, like everyone else, we have been unable to fully\n“vet,” right down to the vocabulary and unknown authorities which trail off into the blur of\nbarely recorded or unrecorded history.\n\nEverything I am saying here is both obvious, once pointed\nout, and indisputable, and yet when are peoples “viewpoints” discussed in this way? Again, the\npoint is not to discredit people by showing their views are not really their own—if that’s true for\nall of us, including those who bring to bear the mechanisms of “discrediting,” how could it\ndiscredit anyone? The point is that we are all, always, far more “delegates” and “representatives”\nthan we are “individuals,” and that formalizing and foregrounding this in social and institutional\ninteractions would provide everyone with more productive ways of contributing to common\nendeavors. If all these inherited ways of thinking, or idioms, can be examined as ways of\n“suturing” sites of mistaken uptakes of imperatives from the center, we can also discover ways of\nimproving them, which is to say, of inventing pedagogies.\n\nThe kind of inquiry I am proposing be made part of discourse generally would no doubt be\nvigorous and reminiscent of some early forms of desacralized discourse pioneered in ancient\nGreece, like “parrhesia” and satire. The minimal anthropomorphic vocabulary allows us to first\nof all identify any utterance as a displacement: if I say something, I make myself a center of\nattention rather than someone else, and I direct others’ attention to some thing in particular,\nrather than something else. This is true even for the most innocuous or welcome of utterances. There is always a prima facie basis, then, for asserting that utterance was aimed at that\ndisplacement, even has, as its full meaning, effecting that displacement.\n\nTo point this out is to\ncentralize the other in a potentially violent way while also, of course, leaving oneself open to the\nidentical operation. If this is the mode of entering a discursive space everyone adopts that space\nwill be able to endure only under the rigorously maintained conditions. Such an approach to\ndiscourse has an undeniable truth to it, while being, under most conditions, unbearably provocative. But the truth can be isolated and the provocation made more bearable insofar as this\nmode of discourse can be practiced as a discovery procedure. Instead of asking people their\nopinions, or what they think, which will generally yield a response, even if frank and\ninformative, that minimizes the “usurpationist” dimension of any utterance, one might begin by\nventuring a hypothesis regarding what they have in fact usurped.\n\nThe most felicitous response\nwould be to admit to that and/or some other usurpation, and then return the charge, hypothesizing\nwhat kind of usurpation might be effected by exposing this one. If everyone is willing to play, we\nwould be mapping out a field of more or less uncertain power, with everyone in a position that\nmore or less coincides with their respective delegations from the center. If we are all usurpers,\neven if just barely, or just maybe, the only remedy is for each to “deem” the others to belong in\nthe positions they inhabit. So, we have a declarative unmasking (“when you say X you’re really\ndoing Y”) followed by an ostensive “re-deeming,” in order to in-order all.\n\nIf participants find\nsome instance of usurpation more difficult to redeem than others, that could also be put on the\nrecord, also in the name of the center, for future review. What I am modeling here is not a form\nof government but a more sociable and responsible form of social interaction predicted upon the\nacceptance of centered ordinality as the originary form of power. If we begin with a secularized\nadmission that we are all out of place, we can further posit that we all might have a place, with\nthe evidence of our belonging in that place to be found in our respective admissions, in the\npractice of our reciprocal redeeming of those admissions.\n\nNot all social spaces need to pulled up to this degree of tension—most won’t, perhaps, and\nmodels can be followed more or less distantly. But the mode of social interaction I am proposing\nwould allow for and demand greater levels of disclosure and honesty, and more controlled and\npurposeful forms of disclosure and honesty, than anything allowed under liberalism, which must\nsee the usurpationist utterance as the exception and therefore subject to severe censure—\nhowever, since no “criteria” for what counts as a real usurpation (or a justified object of\nresentment) or injustice can be other than arbitrary, the supposedly generous assumption that\nusurpers are the exception just allows the charge to be leveled at virtually anyone, depending\nupon the needs of a particular power center.\n\nWhat I am proposing is the possibility that any space\ncan be converted into a disciplinary space in which all the participants are both the subjects and\nthe objects of the inquiry, To assert that someone else is a usurper in his very utterance is to\nhypothesize a proper allocation of positions that has been disrupted, and what would count as\nthat proper allocation can be read off of the language of “denunciation” itself. It is therefore to\npose a problem: how do we identify the boundary line between usurpation and proper\noccupation? What implications of violent centralization can be found in the supposed usurpation,\nthat would not be found in the proper occupation?\n\nWhere in the utterance in question can we\nidentify an opportunity for an increment of deferral that went unexploited? Hypothetical\nutterances that might be seen as being on one side or the other of the boundary depending upon\nsome variable could be constructed. It is in this very process that the participants transition from\nbeing usurpers to being, by reciprocal authorization, proper occupants.\n\n_The Aesthetics of the Center_\n\nDetecting and articulating boundaries is an aesthetic question. Aesthetics is located on the\noriginary scene, in the oscillation of the attention of the participants between the sign put forth\nby the other and the object. The desire for the object is magnified when the participant’s attention\nis directed toward it by the gesture of the other; the object then attended to directly is stripped of\nthat desirability, which then has the participant return attention to the sign. What is aesthetically\ncompelling here, I would say, is the object as presented by the sign: if we imagine this oscillation\ncontinuing (which, given the nature of oscillation, we must), with each return of attention to the\nobject some way in which the sign has “glossed” the object remains, eventually leaving the\nparticipant with a completed model of the object as marked by the sign, which takes us from\naesthetics to sacrality (and then the sparagmos).\n\nSacrality involves representing the gesture as\ncompelled by the object; aesthetics involves discerning the intentions of the center through the\nattention of others on the scene. This account situates aesthetics on the boundary of both\nknowledge and the sacred. Knowledge is being able to identify, publicly, two objects, but, really,\nfirst of all the same object at different times, as the same. Oscillation between the sign and the\nobject is commanded by the former so as to ensure that all are putting forth the same sign: once\nthis has been ascertained the object can issue imperatives. While we speak of the sign as a\ngesture, we should see the gesture of aborted appropriation as the tip of the sign considered more\ncomprehensively, which must include posture as well as gesture: the hand must be mock\nreaching for the object, but the body must be holding back so as to the frame the reach as just a\ngesture. With each oscillation, more of the body as total sign is encompassed sensually so as to\nconfirm that the sign is the same all around, or determine just how much sameness is necessary\nto make the judgment.\n\nLike every element of the scene, the aesthetic, over time, is abstracted and brought into new\nrelations to the sacred center. A broader desacralization is necessary before “art” can take on\nsome kind of independence relative to the sacred, but until that point aesthetic considerations\nwould be critical to representations of the sacred. Aesthetics would serve the purpose of\nintroducing, welcoming, drawing participants into the sacred scene, providing ways for those\nparticipants to inhabit the scene and minimize the distance between ritual performance and the\nscene of origin. Participants receive their names from the ritual, which carries the aesthetic\ndimension into other practices.\n\nThe separation of art from ritual coincides with the same\ndisruption of sacral kingship that produces politics and the problem of the “tyrant.” It’s therefore\nnot surprising that central to the first works of art is the problem of the tyrant and usurpation of\nthe center more generally. Both Greek epic and Greek tragedy address resentment toward the\nusurped center in a direct manner, in an attempt to discover ways in which that resentment might\nbe made socially productive rather than destructive. Gans, in _Originary Thinking_ , presents the\nhistory of art in terms of whether, and the manner in which, the work of art represents the scene\nof representation itself.\n\nGreek tragedy is a kind of year zero in this regard, as the scene is\npresented directly, and the audience’s participating is mediated directly through the chorus. In\nother words, no reason has to be provided for why we are concerned with the fate of the central\nfigure or, more precisely, why we share and fear the resentment toward him. He does not need to\ncome into, or be brought to, our attention. Once the centrality of the central figure is no longer a\ngiven, the resentment of the central figure himself must propel him to the center—he must be a usurper accusing others of usurpation.\n\nIf the central figure must make his way to center stage, he must also be performing for an\naudience all his own, one he generates and is reciprocally generated by, and that audience must\nbe represented in the work as well. The boundary between the art work and the audience is\ntherefore represented within the work as well. The more the central figure is stripped of any\nsupplementary features that make him “inherently” central, the more arbitrary the placement of\nany figure at the center becomes, and the more interchangeable the central figure and the\nmembers of the audience, both represented and actual. Centrality can only be asserted against\nsome other social center, which generates the resentful hero of romanticism, who is subsequently\nsystematically humiliated over the course of literary realism.\n\nCentrality can be systematically\ndismantled in the work, in which case the subject of the work is exposing the now discredited\nmeans of representing centrality. New figures can be placed at the center, in an attempt to\nrenovate exhausted forms. The boundary between art and audience can itself be placed at the\ncenter, in works of art that can only be completed by the reader, or listener. The center here, we\ncould say, is the art “recipient” produced or called forth by attention and devotion to the work\nitself, a devotion that must be given on faith. What we can trace through all of these aesthetic\npossibilities is a relation to the secular world, all of the energies of which are devoted to\ndiscovering ways in which the central figures at all levels can be deemed “non-tyrannical.”\n\nWhat\nkind of unqualified devotion will either evade or redeem the resentment toward the usurper? The\nsecular world is comprised of the vast archipelago of disciplines, springing originally from\nphilosophy but also politics and the circulation of money. All of these disciplines are in service to\npower, including the more narrowly scientific and technological, and their respective objects of\nstudy are the myriad forms of super-sovereignty that might remove, at least temporarily, the stain\nof tyranny from social institutions. Means of discipline aimed at organizing our attention in\ncertain ways toward certain kinds of objects are presented as legitimate by the disciplines\nbecause they are dictated by some anthropomorphic model that renders that means of discipline\nin accordance with nature, the authority which can’t be superseded.\n\nKnowledge depends upon\naesthetics: only a center free of usurpationist desires can sustain attention on the gap in\nimperatives issued by the center, and only aesthetic oscillation can dissolve those desires into the\nmanifold forms of attention directed toward that center. But the disciplines must present\nthemselves as prior to the aesthetic because their secularized, object-centered forms of\nknowledge cannot see the discipline as a scene. This means that the relation between the work of\nart and the disciplines is satirical: all secular art is a satire of the disciplines. (If it’s not, then it’s\nnot art, but rather promotional material for the disciplines.)\n\nAll satire needs to know is that someone else could be at the center other than the one presently\noccupying it—and that is always the case. Of course, the same is true of any alternative occupant\nof the center proposed by figures on the margin, and it’s true of whatever power center must be\noccupied in order to effectively propose an alternative. Satire is effectively total, and includes\nitself. Satire sees everyone as aspirants for some center who fail to see the inessentiality of that\naspiration, which is to say, its roots in mimetic desire and resentment. Such a view of others can\nbe discerned within the aesthetic moment on the originary scene itself: part of the oscillation between sign and object on the scene is a recursively articulated representation of one’s fellow\nsigners.\n\nRunning up to the issuance of the sign each member sees his fellows as dangerous—it is\nfear, not just of physical harm (although very much that as well) but of the collapse of order that\nleads into the presentation of the sign. Once others have signed, though, they must also fear, and\noneself must also be dangerous. What does the other look like, riven by extreme vulnerability\nand projecting a threat, all in one instance? I think we have our answer if we think about what is\nperhaps the most typical figure of satire: the blustering bully whose pretensions are easily\npunctured. Satire is the most pedagogical artistic form, because if we are all capable of seeing\none another (and ourselves) in these terms (which is not to say we should always and only see\neach other in these terms) it will be a great aid in preventing the escalation of resentments: much\nmore so than seeing ourselves and others as tragic heroes, romantic victims, or lyrical soloists, all\nof which leave residues of resentment once centrality has been demythified and which therefore\ncall for renewed sacrifices.\n\nOrginary satire, then, which is also a very portable aesthetic form, is the manner in which we can\ncarry out the discovery procedure initiated by representing each other as usurpers of whatever\nposition we all occupy by virtue of our utterances. Increasingly proficient satirical performances\nwill situate the respective usurpations within the various disciplinary scenes which enable one or\nanother usurpation—the psychological, sociological, legal, economic, and so on concepts\nrepresent means of ascendancy within a given setting while also being the means of\ndemonstrating the limits of those pretensions. Without originary satire, one can’t really get\nanywhere close to an understanding of the disciplinary social order that would allow one to act in\nany way other than a puppet of some power center or another.\n\nSatire is not infinitely sustainable\nitself, though—successive and reciprocal representations of others as uniting the extremes of\nthreat and vulnerability reduce those extremes, and one can proceed to obey the imperative to\nenter scenes of imperative mistakenness and resolve the gap between imperative given and\nimperative obeyed. Now, though, it becomes possible to stand before the center by treating the\ndisciplines not as imperative frames demanding your obedience to a super-sovereign composed\nof resentment toward the gesture toward any mode of sacrality (center-directed sociality), but as\nsemiotic materials comprising a scene upon which we can see ourselves participating in\nresolving the imperative gap. We can know that we know in the name of the center.\n\nThe secular disciplines all share the same origin: the elevation of the declarative sentence to the\nprimary linguistic form, in accord with the metalanguage of literacy. This doesn’t free\ndisciplinary practices from ostensives and imperatives; rather, it generates imperatives and\nostensives out of the declarative order itself. The declarative commands you to withdraw some\ndemand and convert it into an interrogative—declarative sentences are always answers to at least\none of at least two possible questions (one concerning the topic, one concerning the comment). The imperative of the declarative order is that questions need to come from some uncertainty\nregarding imperatives or ostensives generated by a previous declarative.\n\nAny declarative\nsentence can be checked for meaning and reference: can whatever it has doing whatever it is\ndoing do that thing; can we find our way toward possible ostensives in the world (and scenes\nanchoring those ostensives) that would make the declarative an answer to a question? If the declarative (and in speech act terms, the constative) is the primary, and the ostensives and\nimperatives (performatives) are the derivative forms of speech, there shouldn’t be any\nimperatives or ostensives that can’t be derived from a declarative—imperatives and ostensives\nare merely implementations of the abstract model of the declarative, which must descend into\nreality due to some contingency.\n\nWe should really, eventually, with the help of algorithms and\ncomputers, be able to dispense with imperatives and ostensives altogether and generate a\ncomplete declarative model of reality that would account for all possible ostensives. Any secular\ndiscipline must construct and defend the integrity of its own space by ensuring that this is indeed\nthe case—that there are no stray imperatives or ostensives that the declarative order would be\nsecondary to. This involves establishing and enforcing rules for proper imperatives and\nostensives (“proofs”). This is the source of the super-sovereignty that has involved the\ndisciplines in a millennial-long struggle with central authority, which must issue imperatives\nbefore they have been “justified” on terms that would be satisfactory to any self-maintaining\ndiscipline.\n\nThat this is the unspoken imperative of the disciplinary—that the prerogative of the central\nauthority must be usurped and represented as derivative of the discipline—is the starting point of\nsecular satire. Whatever, within the discipline, is represented as the result of an impeccable string\nof declarative sentences can be represented satirically as resting upon an ungrounded command. The disciplines themselves must incessantly issue commands that they have not themselves\n“sufficiently” justified through their own metalanguages, and since the disciplines cannot allow\nfor this possibility they are more “tyrannical” than any central authority.\n\nThe discipline creates\nconcepts meant to apply to its object of study, while the discipline itself maintains its immunity\nto those corrosive concepts, which situate the “object” of study as dominated by some mythical\norder from which the discipline is to liberate them. The secular satire applies the concepts of the\ndiscipline to the discipline itself, creating an “infra” disciplinary space within the discipline\nwherein the anomalies generated by unauthorized imperatives and ostensives can be enacted and\nexamined. Satire brings an irremediable, incorrigible mistakenness into the discipline, enriching\nthe declarative order through both convolutions and simplifications, precisely by acknowledging\nthe primacy of the ostensive-imperative world.\n\nThe ostensive-imperative world permeates the\ndeclarative order—in making that statement its author commands you to identify the traces of\nthat world in these and other sentences, and to treat the constitution of the boundary between\nimperative and declarative as an event, in which declarative constructs make present previously\nunnoted imperatives in its own predecessor sentences.\n\nSatire is the most mimetic of the artistic forms—often an exact reproduction of an act or\nutterance, in a slightly changed context, is enough to expose the imperative embedded in the\ndeclarative. And it doesn’t take a lot to modify declaratives into imperatives in such a way as to\nshow, as Alasdair McIntyre has pointed out, that the descriptive and explanatory concepts and\nnorms developed by the modern human sciences depend on, are bound up with, and provide\ninstruction to, the institutions and practices that shape the behaviors and the subjects those\ndiscourses purport to account for. To characterize the human subject as a “rational decision\nmaker,” for example, is to abstract that subject from its embeddedness in institutions and traditions and see and respond to only those behaviors that correspond to the model of “rational\ndecision maker.”\n\nThe same goes for characterizations of individuals as consumers, voters,\nworkers and all the other categories that place individuals and groups external to each other, to\nthemselves, and to any form of centered ordinality, subjecting them to the mode of super-\nsovereignty making the designation. To describe me as a consumer is to command me to\nconsume, and if I make explicit that command I can, in turn, if provided with the necessary\npedagogical resources, represent the world back to my designators as containing nothing but\nobjects of consumption that I chow down compulsively like a PacMan. That would, really, just\nbe me hearing your description as an order and implicating you, through my obedience, in the\norder you have summoned into being. In which case, are you quite sure you want to describe us\nall as “consumers”? (What do participants in the discipline, as participants in the discipline,\nconsume?) Satire is a great purgative: whatever survives it might be able to last.\n\n_Mediated Centrality_\n\nWe can see the different speech forms as different media, even in the sense that each can be used\nto channel the others in revealing ways: you can point at something in order to ask a question\nabout it in some contexts, a question can really be a statement, a declarative sentence an obvious,\nand ominous, command, and so on. Whatever marks an utterance as one form or another, or\nsome overlapping of forms, is what marks it as media, because the simplest way of thinking\nabout media is as whatever provides for the scene enabling and constituted by the sign itself. The\nfirst medium is the mimetic structure of the originary scene itself, with the symmetry spread\nacross the scene and mirrored and modulated from one body to the others setting the stage for the\ngesture of deferral.\n\nWe can take this tightly organized network, with each “station” “pinging” the\nothers, as the model for all media. Mimetic theory is usually too quick to find its way to easily\nrecognizable examples of imitation, like those found in the mimetic triangles of desire so critical\nto Rene Girard. Marcel Jousse’s “mimism,” though, reminds us that mimesis, or miming, works\non much more levels both more fractal and more macro, and continue operating within the\n“ideas” and “social structures” that we can take to be moderating responses to mimetically\ngenerated violence.\n\nFor Jousse, every move we make is not only mimed, but recalls and deploys (“revivifies”) all the\nmuscular and other physiological responses deposited in the “anthropos” from previous mimings. The world and any knowledge we have of it is mimed, not in “images” in our “minds,” but in our\nbodily movements, stillnesses, and tensions. As soon as we come into the world we orient\nourselves to our surroundings by miming everything in it, with our eyes, ears and touch. With\nour mimed gestures, we act back on the world, forcing new disclosures on its part, which we\nmime in turn. All our communications and interactions with others are saturated with miming,\nsomething which is easy enough to notice if you look at the eye contact, nodding, head tilting,\nword repeating and checking, body opening and closing that is evident in every interpersonal\nencounter.\n\nJousse insists that even more technologically advanced and abstracted forms of media,\nlike reading or films, are thoroughly mediated mimologically. How have we attained the control\nover our body that allows us to sit still, face forward, eyes focused on black print on white page, as we read? Even this non-movement is miming, as we would probably confirm if we can\nremember the days of learning to sit quietly over books and other reading materials in schools. On the originary scene we should imagine a cumulative reciprocal matching of body parts and\nmovements as part of what we call the “gesture of aborted appropriation”—as I’ve pointed out,\nany stray movement, any sudden move within the process of “lining up” in front of the object\ncould easily lead to the breakdown of the scene.\n\nJousse is necessary for anthropomorphics\nbecause he doesn’t remark on the causal primacy of miming and then go on to talk about the\nactivities we already have familiar names for, like “religion,” “art” and so on. He insists that we\nfocus on the constitutive mimological character of each and every one of these human endeavors.\n\nIt’s extremely instructive to consider that one’s attempt to construct a complex string of\narguments, aimed at displacing and modifying some other complex string of arguments, is\nriddled throughout with the oral and written styles derived from the rhythms of vocabulary,\ngrammatical constructs, habits of paragraphing and punctuating, assonance and alliteration, and\nso on, which one has mimed from others and now inhabits as a result of an entire lifetime of\nreconstructing and recombining these rhythms. Even more, the fundamental purpose of the\nclichés, formulas and parallelisms Jousse identifies in the oral style, that is, memorization, is no\nless central to our mimetic and pedagogical practices to this day.\n\nIt’s true that we don’t need to\nmemorize actual texts, but more tacitly we have to remember learned responses to texts, to\nconversations, to questions, to implicit and explicit imperatives, to a world of emergent\nostensives—if we look closely, we can see people’s self-centerings organized through various\nmnemotechnic devices that involve remembering who they are. In other words, we have to\nremember the scenic forms of our interactions with others. Jousse believed that we have\nabstracted or “algebrized” ourselves away from our native miming spontaneity by giving\nourselves over not only to writing but mathematized forms of social interaction, but he provides\nus with ways of seeing a equally pervasive miming being carried over into these media as well.\n\nThe reason we are more than just a jumble of dissociated mimes inscribed in us through the\nbillions of separate “events” we live through is because we bring the mimes that “stick” into\nvarious rhythmic relations with each other; and eventually into what Jousse calls “style,” or the\nbecoming conscious of the mimes working their way through us. Jousse’s project is a profoundly\nanti-metaphysical one, which would have us recover our rhythmic birthright, and which has\nformed a crucial tributary into the study of the difference between orality and literacy pioneered\nby Millman Parry’s study of Homer, continued by Alfred Lord, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, of\ncourse Marshal McLuhan, and others—a tradition which I have taken David Olson’s more recent\nwork to be a kind of culmination of.\n\nWhat Jousse does not consider is the problem of violence, or\nmimetic rivalry, viewing the gestural world as a kind of Eden which has never really been lost\neven if it’s under threat in certain more “educated” regions of the Western world. It’s not\nsurprising, then, that even though Jousse would seem to be especially well placed to hypothesize\nregarding the origin of language he, on the contrary, considers it to be a non-problem, with oral\nlanguage itself simply a form of gesturing, making use of a different combination of muscular\nnetworks—those producing sounds that originally just supplemented gestures. How we could\nhave ever gotten lost in the algebraic modern world then seems to be a problem, but I have no\ninterest in engaging in a “critique” of Jousse here—like other seminal thinkers one has to accept that what he can give you may very well depend upon him not being able to give what he can’t.\n\nAnd what Jousse, resituated within originary grammar, can give us is a model of originary\nmedia, which subsequent media progressively distance themselves from, retrieve and\nsupplement. In other words, I am suggesting a more general application for Olson’s reference to\n“classical prose” to illustrate the operations of the metalanguage of literacy. Let’s say that the\n“media” is whatever makes a scene hold together as a scene, and whatever makes it hold together\nas a scene is whatever provides a space for the sign to signify. This provides us with a kind of\ncontinuum for articulating scene and sign: we can see the sign as a minimal “protuberance” on a\ndensely networked or mediated scene; or, we can see the sign maximally, as requiring an\nextensive articulation requiring only a few “props”; or anywhere in between.\n\nTo use Gregory\nBateson’s definition of “information,” the sign is the difference that makes a difference on the\nscene, and any judgment on what counts as this “difference” can only be made from within\nanother (disciplinary) scene. So, originary media is a network, a set of invisible lines we could\nhypothetically draw connecting the sensorium of each of the scene’s participants to each other’s,\nbut also to all the different “parts” (what counts as a “part” depends on the vision, embedded in a\nbody in motion or stasis) of all the others’ bodies. We would even have to draw lines directly\nfrom body parts of one participant to body parts of others, as we should assume tacit, tactile and\nsubtle forms of responsiveness on everyone’s part.\n\nSo, just as the metalanguage of literacy\nsupplements whatever on the speech scene that cannot be directly represented in writing,\neverything “horizontal” in the originary media would have to be supplemented in subsequent\nscenic articulations; and, just as classical prose generates the simulation of a scene upon which\nthe author and read stand with the topic of the prose, all subsequent media aim at an equivalent\nsimulation of those lines connecting us bodily to our fellow participants.\n\nJust like the sign is immersed in the scene without there being any definite boundary separating\nthem, the scene itself is immersed in its surroundings, making its surrounding conditions of its\nown scenicity. To follow up on the previous discussion of aesthetics, every media represents\nitself as a medium in its distinction from the surroundings it converts into its conditions—again,\nwithout any definite boundaries. An early human ritual maximizes everything remembered to be\npresent in the first ritual, with such memory itself being a series of mimings, supplementations\nand simulations—everyone is dressed as the animal placed at the center, everyone has a\nprescribed part in the drama represented in the ritual—all this is media.\n\nThis mediated scene\ncloses itself off from whatever isn’t the scene—the forest beyond the clearing where the ritual\ntakes place, say. But if there are noises from the forest, or an animal appears from it, the\ncommunity will likely be able to respond to such contingencies from within the ritual, giving\nthese new additions a part, using them to further substantiate the scene. They may become\nserendipitous additions to the established ritual. But this would also mean that members of the\ncommunity are attuned to what is non-scene as potential scene, including other animals, water,\nsky, sun, stars, and so on—all of which could become media insofar as any of it can be brought\nin to supplement the scene and more precisely distinguish the sign.\n\nThis is all miming—if the\nwind, for example, becomes medium by blowing through the ritual and modifying the setting of\nthe ritual, this is because the effects of the wind can now be mimed, but if those effects can now be mimed, that means they were always already mimed, which would explain how they could\nhave been imagined as contributing to the ritual in the first place.\n\nI’m not going to get into a detailed analysis of the tremendous developments in media over the\nlast century and a half that have had the effect, most obviously, of enabling simultaneity over\ngreat distances—unlimited simultaneity across the planet, in fact. I will just point out that what\nthe model I’ve just constructed would suggest must be seen as a problem each form of media—\nradio, TV, film, the internet, etc.—must solve is how to draw those horizontal lines connecting\nall the participants in these very different kinds of scenes. What kinds of miming,\nsupplementation and simulations allow for the operation of these different media?\n\nAlready with\nwriting, we have media that constitutes not a single scene, but unlimited possible scenes. In what\nsense is, say, a modern translation of _Oedipus Rex_ the “same” text as the one first read or\nperformed by Athenian citizens? This is a way of asking in what sense we are on the same scene\nas those Athenians. Insofar as we are, that shared scenic relation is generated mediatically:\nthrough histories of performance, transmission, study, translation, and so on—all of which are\nforms of media generating signs that go into the composition of a transhistorical scene, a present,\nupon which that text might be the “same.”\n\nSo, those horizontal lines are drawn by reaching into\nthe surroundings of a given media and incorporating some of those surroundings into the media. Now, the miming, supplementations and simulations I have been contending are constitutive of\nthe media are also the elements of the media that “critical” media theorists have always taken to\nbe sources of mystification. Isn’t it, after all, the illusion of believing in the lovers’ passion on\nscreen, of participating in the woes of the novelistic character, that enables one to be\n“interpellated” by the “dominant ideology”? In other words, the media generate the illusion of all\nwhose attention it draws being on the same scene.\n\nIt’s not just an illusion, but it’s that as well,\nand a potent one insofar as the devices employed to generate the experience of sharing a scene\nconceal the historic mediations that actually make the scene the same in a different sense. New\nscene can then be generated to represent the mechanisms used to generate the illusion. Paying\nattention to the scene, bringing the scene and scenically transformed elements of the non-scene\ninto the sign is all part of the practice of originary satire—we could say this all involves\nenhancing our resources as mimers beyond what the current media would, strictly speaking,\nallow.\n\nThe challenge is to develop modes of inscription that uncompromisingly expose the\nhistoricity of any particular scene (including the scene of inscription itself) while inscribing a\ntranshistorical (anthropomorphic) model of exposure that persists through the successive scenes\norganized around the text. But we can now pursue all these inquiries without that other illusion\nof laying bare, once and for all, an unjust hierarchy to be dismantled in the creation of a just\negalitarian order. It is remarkable that almost nobody really believes in such a transformation\nwhile at the same time everybody does, as is evident from the omnipresent references to\n“examining power relations” and the still popular gesture of muckraking into “abuses of power,”\nhidden “power elites,” and so on.\n\nYes, there are power relations, and abuses of power, but no\npower-free or power-neutral model against which to measure them. No one wants to say what,\nexactly, “non-abusive” power would look like because then they’d be confessing that power\nhierarchies can in fact be unobjectionable—that is, virtually no one can think outside of the\nopposition between the tyrant and the holy victim. What could be more illusory than that?\n\nThe dominant medium today is the internet which, as Eric Gans has pointed out, tends to\nassimilate all other media to itself: here, we see the work of miming, supplementation and\nsimulation of one medium with regard to another taking place. But the internet is itself modeled\non a rather ancient medium: the archive: books, themselves a kind of medium, placed in a single\nlocation (another medium), catalogued in various ways (more media), used by those specially\ntrained to do so (more media—more miming, supplementation and simulation). The internet is\nan all-inclusive and immediately accessible archive, and it makes all signs, scenes and events\ninstantly archivable.\n\nArchives were used to collect all the relevant cultural products of a\ncivilization; the internet archives everything indiscriminately. Relations between elements in the\narchive are determined by algorithms abstracted from searches by users and shaping future\nsearches. So, if you search “Charles Dickens Bleak House” you’ll get connected to critical\ndiscussions of the novel, Dickens’s other novels, novelists contemporary with Dickens, like\nThackeray, Chancery Court, the all-consuming civil court that a subplot in the novel is centered\non—in what proportions would depend upon what readers, critics and scholars focus on in their\nstudies of the novel.\n\nThe internet distributes scenes of inquiry which overlap with each other in\nvarying degrees. What doesn’t come up in searches will eventually disappear from the culture,\neven if in principle it will always be there to be retrieved. The algorithm is a supplementary\nmedium for this more abstracted, distributed and immense archive in process.\n\nThe primary form of cultural activity is therefore becoming archival work (we’re becoming\nlibrarians). We’re always constructing “portfolios,” in which one cultural item we take to be\nsignificant is shown to be significant because it adds to the significance of other cultural items. And part of what makes an item significant is that others have asserted its significance. Social\nand cultural theories are essentially models for conducting searches and building relationships\nwithin the archives so as to construct hierarchies of significance. Sometimes we’ll assert the\nsignificance of something as lying precisely in the refusal of others to grant it significance.\n\nAnyone who has spent much time on blogs outside of the “mainstream” are well aware of how\npretty much every dominant narrative of the 20th century West is currently under extreme strain,\nand it’s not clear how much of the Whig history that has reigned supreme over the past 70 years\nwill remain intact. All this is a result of archival work, and a lot of it simply involves juxtaposing\ntexts that have been made central alongside equally (or more) compelling accounts that have\nbeen “memory-holed.” It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that’s all that Mencius\nMoldbug did in constructing his political formalism. It’s with far less exaggeration all Moldbug’s\nopposite, Noam Chomsky, did, well before the internet, in his political writing (“here’s what the\n_New York Times_ says; here’s what this paper in Managua, or Beirut, or Madrid says...”).\n\nMedia as archive suggests a way to begin thinking about alternative and counter-models of\neducation, at all levels. Instead of packaging and delivering standard narratives as the school\nsystem does now, just have students, from the beginning, charting pathways through the\narchives. Have students juxtapose multiple narratives around a single event or historical figure,\nusing different media from different periods and from different perspectives. Have them keep\nnoticing differences between the narratives, and building profiles of those narratives. These\nwould be scenes of inquiry that are in turn deposited back into the archive.\n\nTeachers can be there to help out and ensure students construct sufficiently challenging projects. Learning how to read\nand write would be part of this process—dictionaries, grammar, rhetoric, logic and other\nresources are also part of the archives. This approach would break up ideological commonplaces\nand cultural monopolies, while organizing everyone around the process of inquiry itself. Of\ncourse, the possibility of such a pedagogy depends upon the coherence of power, which itself\ndepends upon the mimological relations between different levels of power: the coherence of\npower would be measured by the extent to we see fractalized mimisms through the various\nchains of command comprising the social order: do those with more power model for those with\nless practices that subordinates can, in turn, analyze and replicate in ways that are later\nincorporated by the commanders?\n\nThis inquiry would yield far more valuable information than\nthose predicated upon liberal notions of consent, dialogue, communication, shared beliefs,\nsympathy, solidarity and so on. Can we actually show an institution to be engaged in a shared\nproject? And do all institutions participate in a shared projects modeled by the central authority? These would be the properly pedagogical questions.\n\n_Center and Distribution_\n\nThe proximal cause of the breakage and spillage of the sacral order is money and capital. For\nsecular theory, labor, property, money, the market and capital are the real underpinnings—the\n“structure”—over which “cultural” and “political” institutions are superstructured. Within these\nsecularized frames, all agents are external to each other, which means they are most\nfundamentally opposed to each other, making the primary theoretical question how do they ever\nmanage to cooperate? Starting with the center, as both occupied and signifying, reverses this\napproach. Now we can see all these concepts as the results of delegations on the part of central\nauthority, and of efforts to extend that authority, to overcome limits to it, and to restore authority\nonce those attempts to overcome limits have produced competing power centers striving to\ninfluence or occupy the center.\n\nMarkets do not spring up spontaneously out of an evolving\ndivision of labor, leading to the use of currency to ease the growing scale of transactions, and\nthen to debt and capital as a result of the unequal success experienced by the various players on\nthe market. Markets are created by states so as to provision their militaries when abroad, and\nmoney is supplied so as to enable soldiers to participate in those markets. Debt is originally used\nto dispossess farmers as the state or more powerful landowners encroach upon their possessions. Modern capital is the power to abstract individuals, groups and perhaps most importantly of all,\nentire disciplines, from the traditions and communities within which they are embedded so as to\nintroduce them into new hierarchies. Power is ontologically prior to and causative of, markets\nand all the rest.\n\nMarkets are real insofar as they are what people without direct authority for maintaining the\nsocial center do with knowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and\nbounded but not directly supervised by such authorities. If the central authority assigns to a\nmember of the ruling class the project of producing a certain number of vehicles in a certain\ntime, he will not need nor want a thorough account of all the decisions made by the individual\nreceiving the delegation. Nor will the individual receiving the delegation want such a complete account from those to whom he delegates. Everyone has a sphere of power and command, and\nexpects those under his authority to find ways to cooperate so as to meet the demand.\n\nSince\n“total” supervision is impossible, since there will always be some space between an imperative\ngiven and one obeyed, attempts at total supervision are signs of a dysfunctional power order, one\nriven by power struggles in which each attempts to attain the mantle of super-sovereignty. In a\nfunctional power order, no more power is given or sought than that needed to complete the\nassignment. The people working at the middle and lower levels of a social order, then, will be\ninvolved in various exchanges and, insofar as forms of cooperation are sustained and\ninstitutionalized, might very well end up interacting in ways suggested by liberal economic\ntheories.\n\nThe fact that corporations need to be chartered by the state, which could in principle\nrevoke any charter once the corporation ceases to serve its declared primary function means that\nthe primacy of the state over economic agencies is already conceded, even in liberal societies. Indeed, the prodigious technological developments of modern Western societies owes far more to\nits enduring corporate structure than to more recent inventions like liberalism and democracy.\n\nThe center distributes. The carcass on the originary scene distributes itself, or is distributed\namong the participants by the presiding and enduring being of the victim, as pieces to be\nconsumed. The earliest forms of distribution are just such divisions of food items, no doubt\nmatched, more or less roughly, with contributions made to the center. This is a gift economy, or\nwhat I have been calling imperative exchange, which can be widely expanded to include\nrelations between families and clans. In the case of conquest, distribution takes the form of what\nCarl Schmitt called the “Nomos,” an originary division of land among the participants in the\nconquest, no doubt proportional to their respective contributions and the command hierarchy.\n\nDistribution can later take the form of grants of titles and rights to make use of one’s property in\nvarious ways. The establishment of towns organized around artisans, guilds and markets, with\nspecific rights, tied to specific obligations, for all, is yet another kind of distribution. The\nintroduction of money into these settings is yet another distribution, aimed at modifying the\neffects of the other ones. If we think of the center as the source of distribution and, also, as the\neffect of its distributions, we will never be able to imagine it makes sense to think of rights\nwithout corresponding obligations—the nexus of rights and obligation, the imperative exchange,\nis simply what distribution from the center entails.\n\nThis would be true on local levels as well. Peasants would want more land, guilds would want tighter protections, merchants would want\ngreater latitude in their dealings—that is, authority would be tested. But the tests and questions\nwould be meaningful in relation to the founding nomos and the traditions it generated. Let’s say\nthat the model of imperative exchange must have reached its limits in the feudal order in a\nmanner similar to the conditions I hypothesized earlier regarding the ancient imperial order. It\nmay seem obvious that this must lead to the “freeing” of all subjects from all fixed reciprocal\nobligations such has been effected by the modern liberal order.\n\nBut if what follows imperative\nexchange is not merely negative freedoms, but interrogative imperativity, that is, the question of\nhow to devote oneself completely to the signifying center, then the answer lies in new forms of\nthe nomos, providing access to the invisible to create new and more minimal hierarchies.\n\nThe introduction of money to empower those more directly dependent upon the ruler indicates\nsome lack of security of central authority—it means indirect forms of power, rather than\nformalized, direct ones, have become necessary. There might be measures that can be taken by\nthe central authority to control the supply of money in such a way as to recoup that power\ndeficiency, but the more social interaction is mediated monetarily the more likely it is that the\nstate itself becomes monetized. The problem here is that the state needs masses of people\nmobilized for various projects, and to mobilize them they must be abstracted from their\nembedments.\n\nFor the state to directly initiate such abstractions is to risk generating opposition\nfrom various power centers—only by recruiting those power centers themselves could the central\nauthority reduce the risk sufficiently. It’s easier to recruit power centers that are themselves\nalready abstracted and thrive on abstraction—risk takers, who can be integrated or dispensed\nwith as necessary. In that case, those abstracters must be permitted to make demands on the\ncentral authority, which is to say abstract its own modes of performance. The other approach to\nabstraction, and the only one consistent with central authority, is the assignation of teams,\ndirectly accountable to the central authority, with the authority to take whatever measures are\nnecessary to improve the functioning of the institution.\n\nIn other words, the form of institutional\ninnovation proper to secure central authority is “skunkworks,” or teams empowered to work\noutside of established protocols in order to accomplish specific tasks. This is a fractal form of\ncentered ordinality, and provides the basis for permanent forms of rule, insofar as the central\nauthority can always “seed” skunkworking teams, announced or unannounced, within institutions\nso as to keep attention centered on the primary institutional function. In this way, the originary\nsocial form is retrieved in a way that counters the tendency of formal delegation to create\ninscrutable forms of power that resist further formalization.\n\nThe traditionalist opposes abstraction in the name of full embedment, but the possibility of\nrejecting abstraction disappeared with the rise of divine kingship a few millennia ago. By now,\nthe forms of embedment defended against abstraction are the results of previous abstractions that\nhave been re-embedded. The question is, in what form will abstraction proceed? Or, what kinds\nof mobilizations are necessary? If the market operates within the capillaries of the system of\nsupervision, then abstractions should contribute to that system. The paradox of power is that the\nmore central the authority, the more authority depends upon the widest distribution of the means\nto recognize authority; to put it in grammatical terms, the paradox of power is the paradox of the\nmost unequivocal imperative leaving the largest scope of implementation of that imperative.\n\nAs\nAndrew Bartlett explains very thoroughly in his “Originary Science, Originary Memory:\nFrankenstein and the Problem of Modern Science,” abstraction always involves some\ndesacralization or, to put it more provocatively, some sacrilege. Sacrilege can be justified on the\ngrounds that the innovation it introduced will enable new forms of observance of the founding\nimperatives of the social order. So, the sacrilege should be, as Bartlett argues, “minimal,” while\nthe new forms of observance (I depart from Bartlett’s formulation here) should be maximal. Abstraction creates new “elements,” and therefore new relations between elements.\n\nMonetary\nand capitalist abstractions are pulverizing, creating new elements that are identical to each other,\nand therefore most easily mobilized for any purpose. This is the process of “de-skilling,” with its\nultimate telos being automation, that labor theorists have known of for a very long time. Any mode of abstraction consistent with secure central authority, or auto-cracy, meanwhile, would\nmake ever finer distinctions between skills, competencies and forms of authority within\ndisciplinary spaces. In this way, abstraction carries with it its own form of re-embedment.\n\nThe market economy, then, becomes a measure of fluctuations around the threshold at which the\nparadox of power is made explicit. Let’s imagine a king turning himself into the largest property\nowner in the realm, and formalizing, as disposable private property, all that is possessed at\ndifferent levels of authority within the kingdom. The king converts much of the army into his\nprivate security force, and the rest are distributed to the various lords, barons, merchants, and so\non. Let’s further assume some external market every producer within the kingdom can sell to,\nwhich would in turn create internal markets. Let’s also accept the libertarian assumption of a\nconsensual legal system, which settles contractual disputes and violations of property rights.\n\nThe\ncommunity would be converted into a mass of competitive enterprises. Some would do better in\nthe competition, and would put the less successful out of business, buy up the pieces and\nequipment of failed companies, hire the former owners, and so on. The trend would be toward a\nhierarchy of monopolies, in which case supply chains could be agreed upon by the companies\nthemselves. The real purpose of establishing a market is to break up one system of distribution\nand create another. The market would essentially cancel itself, and we would end up with what is\nessentially a single company supplying all of the society’s needs, unless the more powerful\nmonopolies undertook to introduce competition at the lower levels in order to provide\nthemselves with a wider range of available products and workers.\n\nBut once this process is\ninitiated, the different leading monopolies would end up in competition with each other, as the\nnew companies they form or break off out of existing smaller ones would serve one monopolistic\nconcern better than others. The more competition, the more instability and insecurity, the more\ncollusion and counter-collusion, the more fully marketized and monetized the social order: it is\nonly at this point that prices are again needed in order to determine which producers are creating\nmore value for the community. Now, that point at which the leading monopolies would intervene\nin the smaller ones is the point at which a central authority could behave in exactly the same\nway, and undermine itself in order to have more direct access to its materials; or, the central\nauthority would act directly on the emergent mismatch between formal designations and actual\nfunctioning by inserting teams into the relevant companies on the model I suggested above.\n\nIn\nthis latter case, the paradox of power is made fully explicit: all members of the social order are\nfollowing the imperative to richly implement the imperatives issued by the center; in the former\ncase, the paradox of power is obscured: explicit power is a mask for hidden and unaccountable\nforms of power.\n\nAll social conflicts can’t be reduced to this fluctuation, but all social conflicts are “processed”\nthrough it. This is most obviously the case for everything grouped under the concept of\nglobalization, most especially movements of capital (at the “high” end), especially financial, and\nmigration (at the “low” end). Globalization represents a raising of the threshold at which the\nparadox of power is made explicit: global corporations have been released from obligations to\nany central authority and construct their own command chains, which include governments as\nsubordinate partners; advocates of increased migration exercise power across borders that national states find it difficult to counter.\n\nIn both cases, states are set up so that they must\nrespond to the same “market” incentives as the corporations and migrants themselves. This is the\ncase even if globalization is an imperialist strategy advanced by one or more leading powers—in\nthat case, the new powers ceded to subordinates end up compromising and colonizing the home\ngovernment itself. That government (or those governments) might even become more powerful\nin terms the effects they can have globally, while still becoming less powerful in terms of their\nability to control or even predict those effects. We could imagine a point at which the paradox of\npower would take on an inverted form, in which it becomes explicit that central authorities\nwould not be issuing “operational” commands at all—commands would just be one more\nincentive (or disincentive) agents further down in the chain of command would have to take into\naccount by assessing the likelihood of any penalty for disobedience. Of course, this is already\nregularly the case, as corporations weigh the costs and benefits of possibly paying a fine for\nbreaking some law or regulation as opposed to losing whatever advantage on the market the\ntransgression provides them.\n\nWithin a market order, then, any action, event or relationship is characterized by a fundamental\nduality. On one side, however thinly, the paradox of power is in play: all actors recognize that\ntheir sphere of activity is protected by some more powerful agency and constrain and direct their\nactivity accordingly. On the other side, to some extent, imperatives are converted into market\nsignals—that is, a site of exchange where one person’s power to punish or reward you must be\nbalanced against lots of other peoples’ power to do so. In both cases we find an interaction\nbetween center and periphery—in the first case, one acts in a way that redounds to the authority\nof the center, thereby creating space for the further replacement of external by auto-supervision;\nin the second case, one tries to subject the central authority to incentives and disincentives\nsimilar to the ones we are all subject to—this ranges from simple bribery and other forms of\ncorruption to the vast avenues of influences made legal and even encouraged within a liberal\nsocial order, like lobbying, forming interest groups, political donations, think tanks, media\npropaganda and so on. We could locate anything anyone does, thinks or says somewhere along\nthis continuum and study social dysfunctions accordingly.\n\nProbably the most intuitively obvious argument in favor of the “free market” is the Hayekian\nclaim that all the knowledge required to carry out production and cooperation at all the different\nsocial levels is far too distributed and complex to be centralized and subordinated to a single\nagent. This is of course true, but also a non-sequitur and a distraction. A general must provide\nsome leeway to his subordinates, and they to theirs, and so on, and for the same reason—the\ngeneral can’t know exactly what this specific platoon might have to do under unexpected\ncircumstances, and he can’t even know all that one would need to in order to prepare them for\nthose circumstances.\n\nThere will therefore be “markets” all along the line, as people instructed to\nwork together to address some exigency organize “exchanges” of knowledge, skills and actions\namongst themselves in order to do so. The general doesn’t need to know 1/1,000 of all the\nspecifics of these interactions to still be the general—that is, to issue commands that can be\nobeyed, and to place himself in a position to ensure that they will be. The same is true for those\ninstitutions charged with providing communications, health care, education, transportation, housing and so on. In each case, capillaries along the margins of these institutions can be\nadjusted in accord with the level of responsibility to be allowed consistent with meeting the\npurpose of the institution.\n\nThe argument for markets is really saying no more than that you can’t\ndo a very good job if you’re being micromanaged at every point along the way. It’s equally true\nthat you can’t do a very good job if the terms of each move you make have to be “negotiated”\nwith a constantly changing range of agents.\n\nLiberalism has generated the illusion that what appears below the threshold of direct supervision\nis what, in fact, determines the form of supervision; even more, that the supervision is a servant\nof those actors which have merely been provided some leeway. This situation produces\ndestructive delusions, because the presumably free agents are nevertheless aware of their utter\ndependence upon their “servants.” Is there any businessman who thinks he would be able to\nprotect himself against violence, fraud, robbery and extortion by those readier than him to use\nviolence and break laws without the force of the state? No businessman believes this, but in a\nway they all believe it, because their political theory leads them to assume that, first, there were a\nbunch of individuals engaged in peaceful exchange with each other and then, only when\ncriminals and invaders, presumably attracted by the wealth thereby created, tried to take it using\nforce, was the state “hired” as a kind of Pinkertons to maintain order. This makes it impossible to\nthink coherently about the simplest things, such as how a policy everyone would recognize to be\nbeneficial might be conceived and implemented in the best way.\n\n_Centered Technology_\n\nIn large part this book is a critique of (strategy for entering and transforming) the secular\ndisciplines. The project, or imperative, implicit here is to roll back the power circulation that\ntakes the form of equalizing abstractions (whether of money or votes) into abstractions\nconducted by formalized and explicit power hierarchies. I’ve been suggesting that rolling back\nmoney and votes is conceivable—if one considers, for example, how much of market activity is\nmediated by informal networks among agents who have been authorized by some form of power,\nit is easy to imagine minimizing the effects of market signals on economic activity—indeed, it’s\npossible to imagine abolishing economic activity in itself, and “incorporating” corporations as\none kind of institution among many others within a well governed social order.\n\nThe same is not\ntrue of the most thoroughgoing form of desacralizing social practice, and the most socially\ncentral: technology. To review: insofar as power is desacralized, there is nothing but mutually\nhostile “interests” engaged in struggle over the decaying corpse of the social body; at the same\ntime, power is never genuinely desacralized, because as soon as the sacred center is punctured,\nmythicized centers like “the common good,” “the voice of the people,” “Constitution,” “rule of\nlaw,” and, eventually, “GDP” are set up as masks of what everyone must assume is there—an\nunquestioned authority rooted in a singular origin. These mythicized centers are intrinsically\narbitrary and divisive, though, which means they must eventually escalate hostilities into some\n“total” form.\n\nDesacralization of power, though, is possible because there is a difference between the ritual\ncenter and activities engaged in outside the center. In the earliest human communities, we can\nassume that in activities apart from the ritual center nothing at all changed after the originary\nevent, while the ritual center was made to reproduce as precisely as possible the originary event. But the sign deployed on the originary scene, along with the constraining structure of ritual,\nwould be extended to other activities; at the same time, linguistic development towards the\ndeclarative would involve the attribution of actions to (“mythical”) occupants of the center.\n\nThe\nmythical interpretations of ritual would be drawn from the far less interesting but nevertheless\ndeterminative actions outside the central aura and be converted, ritually and mythically, into\nactions modeling behaviors for the community. Out in the field, hunters battle their prey; on the\nnarrativized ritual scene, the sacred beast/ancestor battles with its family and enemies, takes pity\non humans and gives life to the group.\n\nAs social cooperation increases, stories of the origin of each new mode of cooperation would be\n“heard” or derived from the center—no member of the community could do or create something\nnew without attributing the discovery to a mythical agent. You would in turn be obliged to that\nmythical agent, and would give to it some part of the fruits of your labor, which in turn would be\npart of the individual’s contribution to the center for the entire community. (The center remains\nthe center insofar as it distributes.) The gift the god has given you comes with an imperative: in\none form or another, that imperative would be to use it in such a way as to honor the donor. In\nreturn, the individual issues an imperative to the mythical being: a prayer, requesting aid in\nsuccessfully using the skill or implement. All the implements of work and war would be created\nwithin this frame of what I have been calling an “imperative exchange.”\n\nThe implements themselves, their parts, and the implements used to produce the implements, are\nthemselves all part of this imperative exchange. This is to say there is a “magical” component to\nthe process: ritual words and gestures must be applied to all acts involving production and use,\nand instances of successful or failed use would implicate the implements themselves, which\ndon’t simply break, and aren’t simply poorly used, but refuse, for reasons that may be more or\nless formulated, to follow the commands given them. In a certain sense we could say that, of\ncourse, an early human smoothing out his spear knows that this has to be done so that it can fly\nstraight and fast when thrown, but his way of thinking about it will be framed completely in\nterms of being in harmony with all the agencies of the surrounding world mediating its\nproduction. Such processes become institutionalized, and to craft some item in a way that is not\ntraditionally prescribed and monitored by the upholders of that tradition would also be\nunthinkable.\n\nSo, the question is, how did it become possible for “technology” to emerge—that is, production\nconducted outside of these forms, in accord with the logic of continually reducing the elements\nof one process to another set of elements produced by another process? I think that the answer\nmust be: when it becomes possible to see other human beings as implements. The divine kings,\ncommanding hundreds of thousands, even millions, in their slave war and labor armies, made up\nof the socially dead, would first get a view of all these individuals as “parts” of a whole that might be more than the sum of its parts. Some could be added; some subtracted; some moved\nover here; some over there. If some worked harder, the possibility of combining all the better\nworkers would come to mind; if workers or soldiers improvised and found some new way of\ncooperating with each other, that could be remembered and reproduced. This is already a kind of\ntechnology.\n\nThe Axial Age acquisitions of metaphysics and scripture made it increasingly difficult to levy\nthese vast, sacrificial, masses. So, in the European middle ages, while there was steady technical\ndevelopment, and some remarkable feats of engineering and architecture, such development\nnever exceeded the limits set by existing corporate and authority relations. The masses\nconfronted in the New World, then in conquered regions abroad and, finally, those at home\nflowing into the cities from the farmers enclosed out of their land must have ignited a new\ntechnological imagination. For quite a while, the development of machinery seemed to track\npretty closely intensifications in the division of labor, with each laborer being given increasingly\nsimpler tasks within an increasingly complex process, with those tasks eventually being\ntransferred to technology.\n\nIf automation has now itself become an autonomous process, it is\nbecause men were first automated. Eventually, of course, technology came to alleviate and\neliminate human labor, but in the process the disciplines, focused on both technological and\nhuman resources, became the main drivers of social development. The human sciences, which\ntook over from theology and philosophy, treat humans in technological terms, as composed of\nparts that work together in ways that can be studied and modified. Even attempts to “humanize”\ndisciplines like psychology reduce people to set of interchangeable and predictable clichés.\n\nThe disciplines naturally think they should run the government which, after all, is just another\ntechnology. And whatever claims the government might make on its own behalf, like fulfilling\nthe “popular will,” are best left to the disciplines, upon whom the government would anyway be\ndependent in measuring such things. The emergence of data and algorithm driven, all-intrusive\nsocial media which more and more people simply can’t live without is a logical extension of this\nprocess, as is the elimination of millions of jobs through new modes of automation. But\ndesacralized technology, like desacralized power, provides a frame within which ultimately\nunlimited struggles ensue. Indeed, technology is the dominant form of power. If technology\npresents itself to us as an enormous system of interlocking imperatives which provides a very\nprecise slot for us to insert our own imperatives, who or what is at the center? What ostensive\nsign generates the system of imperatives?\n\nTechnology is completely bound up with the specific forms the centralization of power takes in\nthe wake of the desacralization of power. It is part of the same furious whirlpool of\ndecentralization, as old forms of power, predicated upon earlier forms of technology, are broken\nup, and then recentralization, as new forms of power exploit the new technologies to remove\nmediating power centers in zeroing in on each individual. In that case, the commands of the\ncenter are mediated technologically, which is to say through our self-centerings as both objects\nof technological manipulations and imaginings and subjects becoming signs of the algorithmic\nparadoxes: our choice here is to become either predictable and unreliable, or unpredictable and reliable; that is, either try and fit the categories comprehending us and become as defective as\nthose categories; or, extract and improve upon the imperative embedded in those categories. In\nthe latter case, we situate ourselves at the origin of the technological event, and model forms of\npower that will advance participation in the reinscription of technological markings upon us.\n\nThe telos of technology, then, is to make technologically produced human interactions into\nmodels for further analysis of practices into networks of sub-practices, out of which new\npractices are synthesized. In the process, the cultural work of deferral becomes increasingly\ntechnological—this means that we will think more in terms of deferring possible conflicts in\nadvance, in making them unthinkable and impossible, rather than intervening crudely after the\nfact. We would work on turning binaries into aggregated probabilities, and making those\naggregated probabilities capable of expression in language—this would be a source of important\nartistic and pedagogical projects: finding ways to express aggregated probabilities in language\nwould mean populating the future by hypothetically placing centrally ordered teams at various\nposts where new practices will be required.\n\nIt would be as if we were producing futurity by\ncontinuing to work on the originary scene itself—in, say, settling “in advance” some dispute\nbetween friends, a particular wrinkle in the fluctuations of aborted gestures on the scene is\nrevealed—the scene, one can now see, would only have cohered if one member had shaped his\nsign of deferral while positioning himself just so in relation to his neighbor and the center.\n\nWhat about all the moral and ethical questions bound up with technology—gene manipulation,\nincreasingly destructive weapons, pharmaceutical interventions into behaviors, deficiencies and\ncapabilities that were once within the normal range but now; at a higher resolution, seem to call\nfor remediation, etc.? Behind all these anxieties is the fading away of a sense of the human that\nwas formed logocentrically, which is to say through the assimilation of the literate subject to the\nscene of speech, in which all are present to each other, and intentions are inseparable from signs. Humanism is a degenerate form of the Axial Age acquisitions.\n\nBut this is not to say that our telos\nas technological beings is simply to go full speed ahead on all counts. We need a new way to\nthink about these things, one that doesn’t rely on what are ultimately historically bound feelings\nof defilement. There is a human origin, and origins that iterate that origin, but no human nature\n(unless one once to call “orientation to the center” a “nature”). The event of technology, in which\nwe become, collectively, models of further interventions that will in-form us, is itself\nanthropocentric.\n\nSome of those moral and ethical questions are not real questions, relying on dumbed down or\nfalsified versions of actual or possible scientific developments. The answers to those of them that\nare real questions will depend upon the state of the disciplines. Only within disciplinary spaces\nwill it be possible to ask whether a proposed innovation or line of inquiry, i.e., some proposed\nnew power, will have commensurate responsibilities assigned to it. Only in properly composed\ndisciplines can these questions be raised free of scapegoating pressures demanding remediation\nto enjoy new “freedoms” or to avoid some form of ostracism.\n\nAnthropomorphically grounded\ndisciplines would have to work to make new innovations and inquiries consistent with the basic\nterms of social coherence, while using new possibilities to continue studying those terms; and then we would have to assume open channels between the disciplines and central authority. There is even a place for “letting the market decide,” as long as we keep in mind what the\n“market” is: what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with\nknowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and bounded but not directly\nsupervised by such authorities. Supervision can be relaxed and tightened for various purposes,\nand one of the purposes for relaxation is certainly to see what intelligent and talented people can\ndo when encouraged to engage in skunkworks.\n\nIn this case, as in all cases, the ultimate test for\nthe reception of any novelty would be whether it helps sustain the pyramid of command starting\nfrom the central authority, and even contributes to ensuring the continuity of that authority from\nruler to ruler. Will a particular innovation make imperatives from the center both more unified,\ncoherent and simple in proportion to the scope it provides for authorities at lower posts to\nenhance and complete those commands in obeying them? And the disciplines will accordingly,\nmake themselves over into articulations of practices refined by the latest divisions in labor that\nstudy the diverse forms of human interaction for models of technological transformation—in the\nprocess establishing meta-practices for representing this dialectic in a way intelligible to central\nauthority. Each individual could think of himself as both an operator of technological forms and\na model for future ones, but the latter only in proportion to the former.\n\nCapital and technology come to represent independent forms of power because they are levied by\nthe occupant of central authority against other potential contenders for central authority and\nthereby become independent sources of power. This has to be addressed on a geo-political scale,\nbecause capital and technology are exported and imported and this process involves competition\nbetween sovereigns regarding the control of what we would have to call vassal states. It might\nseem to follow from the claim that all human activity derives and answers to a singular center\nthat the entire world eventually needs to be brought under a single government.\n\nI think the more\ncoherent assumption is that the world needs a formalized hierarchy of powers. This keeps us\nclose to actual global structures, which are comprised of states of various levels of independence\nand sovereignty. Insofar as the international order is organized in terms of independent,\nnominally equal, states, the maintenance of hegemonies in the form of asymmetrical alliances\nand spheres of influence must be conducted largely indirectly. If a more powerful state wants to\nprevent a less powerful state from breaking a chain of vassal states required to maintain regular\neconomic or political relationships, it can refuse it loans, stop buying its exports, accuse it of\nhuman rights abuses calling for cutting off aid, and so on.\n\nThis requires the cooperation\ninstitutionalized in banks, trade agreements, international courts, human rights organizations, the\nmedia (to propagate the required narrative), and so on. This disorder, in turn, encourages rival\npowers to play the same games, or different games reflecting different power positions,\neconomic, cultural and military means of projecting power. These conflicts generate ideologies\nwhich feed back into the system. Short of world government, rivalries between major powers\nwill always be possible (since I’m not going to explore the possibility of world government here,\nI’m not going to address the issues of what kinds of rivalries the attempt to establish it might\npromote).\n\nThe purpose of formalized power is to concentrate relationships in responsible\ninstitutional heads; what this implies for world order is government to government\ncommunications, with no support for oppositional or subversive movements within another country—at the very least, this means that disagreements between major powers will result from\ngenuine, substantive conflicts of interest which are in principle negotiable, rather than from\nproxy conflicts and reciprocal projections spiraling out of control. Since it seems highly unlikely\nthat the two or three major powers will be identical in power, we can assume a single world\nhegemon, whose power in relation to subordinate power centers we could think of by analogy to\na national sovereign governing an array of local institutions: the more unhindered and explicit\nthe exercise of power, the less intrusive it needs to be.\n\nOnly under such conditions could the\nflows of capital be brought under political control, and reduced to the relation between the\ncentral authority and the world of the disciplines, in which conditional grants of authority\nmatched with commensurate access to resources are monitored by skunkworking and potential\nskunkworking teams reporting to the central authority.\n\n_Turnings to the Center_\n\n“Alienation” is a word that hasn’t really gone out of style. It seems to apply just as well to\ntoday’s labor conditions, people’s relations to unresponsive, even hostile governments, the\ndesiccation and depravation of culture, deteriorating relations between the sexes, as it ever did. But if we’re alienated, what are we alienated from? Critiques of alienation, whether coming from\nMarxism, existentialism or new schools of psychology presupposed some natural or ideal\ncondition from which one was alienated—some intuitive sense of wholeness, from which the\nsplitting of the subject against itself was a deviation to be remedied.\n\nSo far, I can say that we are\nalienated from our proper relation to the center. Our secular condition, and its entire vocabulary,\nwhich can only define the world itself against a demythified center, perpetually refilled with\ndisposable scaepgoats, can only define all the agents in this world in opposition to each other—\neven the individual or subject can only be defined in opposition to itself. Everyone’s externality\nto each other is a useful way to think about alienation. All anyone can do is invoke some super-\nsovereignty that the state “should” be “accountable” to and deploy it against their opponents. More precise than (and complementary to) “alienation” might be another term that has been\nstraddling the boundary separating pop from disciplinary culture for decades: “meaninglessness.”\n\n“Meaninglessness” can be treated quite literally: a lack of access to the center takes the form of\nwords not having any determinate meaning. We can work with the cliché of, say watching TV as\na meaningless activity, and this can lead us to delve earnestly into the empty soul of the TV\nwatcher; or, we can ask what the word “watch” means, and whether this meaning can be\nredeemed when applied to viewing TV—if no, then the real problem is in our language, not our\nsouls (and it’s easier to think of tending to our language). Anthropomorphic inquiry as\nestablishing the meaning of words retrieves something fundamental to the reification of\ndeclarative culture in literacy, which first of all made it possible to speak of “meaning,” a central\nconcern in the earliest philosophical texts.\n\nWords as the sites of thought experiments\ndistinguishing the boundaries distinguishing them from other words; words as originating in\nostensive-imperative-declarative articulations; words as subjected to the disciplines; words as\nmistakenly fit into new uses: inquiries along all these lines are part of the anthropomorphic\nproject of restoring meaning. What we want above all is to mean what we say. If there are\nsubversions in the background of our discourse that empty our words of meaning, we would like to remedy that. David Olson shows that literacy introduces the distinction between “speaker’s\nmeaning” and “sentence meaning,” and once we have such a distinction the latter can get away\nfrom the former, which means one’s words are at the mercy of all the ways in which they can be\nrepeated in different contexts.\n\nClearly, the solution here is not to install a kind of homuncular\nsimulation of the author in texts to ensure they don’t stray from the speaker’s meaning; rather, we\nkeep returning to our words as they are returned to us, supplying them with more explicit\nostensive-imperative articulations that were only tacit the first time around. Others can continue\nthis project after us, as they come to inhabit our words and take on the same stake in ensuring\ntheir meaning. As Michael Polanyi has contended, we know more than we can say; for this very\nreason, when what we say is handed over to other forms of knowledge, we have to make what\nwe have said sites of shared knowing we contribute to along with others.\n\nAccording to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolution, pursuing the questions generated by\nnormal scientific activity leads to the discovery of more and more facts that cannot be reconciled\nwith the regnant theory that determines the relationship between observed facts. These\nanomalous facts are, through increasingly complicated means, made consistent with the theory,\nuntil we get to the point where accounting for those anomalies requires the proposal of new\ntheories, one of which will eventually institute a scientific “revolution” and thereby initiate a\nnew period of normal science. However that may be for the physical sciences, in the human\nsciences we need a different model of disciplinary transformation.\n\nIn the human sciences, it’s the\nmeaning of “key words” within the disciplines that become anomalous, and eventually take on\nnew meanings. Anna Wierzbicka’s work is rich in examples of such transformations (her study of\nthe change in the meaning of the Anglo legal term “reasonable doubt” in _Experience, Evidence\nand Sense_ is exemplary) and Google’s ngram viewer provides us with the somewhat different but\nclosely related phenomenon of new and transformed words created new regions of reference in\nreal time. If we abjure the use of some metalanguage that might put all this linguistic movement\nin order, the only way of working to make knowledge out of linguistic evolutions is by entering\ndifferent linguistic domains and signifying from within them.\n\nAt first glance, of course, the\nteeming new vocabulary of, say, transgenderism, can be seen as a transparently partisan attempt\nto hijack the language in the ongoing wars of the cultural left against normal sexuality, the\nnuclear family, gender difference as experienced by the vast majority of the population, and so\non. This perspective is accurate enough as far as it goes, and there may be times when some new\nlinguistic field can be “waited out” or successfully resisted in the name of some existing and still\npowerful vocabulary. In general, though, it will always be possible, and it is more generally the\nmore powerful strategy, to enter such linguistic fields and supply meaning to its terms where they\nare lacking.\n\nWhenever possible, new linguistic fields, whatever their origins, should be redeemed\n—not in the interest of compromise or dialogue, but of knowledge, which can only be generated\nby enriching rather than restricting linguistic potential. There are many ways of making\nanomalous linguistic fields consistent with existing ones: any decentering can be treated as a\nsearch for the center. Key terms of contemporary liberalism, like “racism,” “sexism,”\n“homophobia,” “transphobia,” “Islamophobia,” and so on, will best be reworked from within,\nrather than resisted from without, or simply turned against the original users (such as accusing\nthe anti-racists as being the “real racists”).\n\nYes, “racist,” in its most common uses, including those uses the newly accused are nostalgic for, is just liberalism’s equivalent of “counter-\nrevolutionary”; but lingering over the term, and making explicit the full range of by no means\ninternally consistent phenomena it brings into view is what will eventually both de-toxify the\nterm and use it to notice new things about what we notice in our attempts to figure out what the\ncenter wants from us. We may almost be at the point where accusations of racism have so\nproliferated that it will be incumbent even upon “anti-racists” to ask what, exactly, makes a\nparticular statement or gesture “racist”—the results should be interesting. Working on saying\nwhat we mean can involve clarifying and simplifying what we say, and bringing our practices\ninto accord with common, or more consistently excavated usage; but it can also mean finding\nways to mean a lot more things.\n\n_The End of Secular Thinking_\n\nI suggested above that the exemplary secular subject is the usurper—from everyone’s\nperspective, everyone else is in a position they wrongly occupy. This is a condition of universal\nresentment—open, seething, constant resentment directed against the false center that has\nallowed some other to occupy one’s own rightful position. But this is the condition of all secular\nthought, and without a unanimously acknowledged center, any other mode of thought would be\nsheer fantasy. The world of usurpers at least provides us with recognizable agents, actions,\nmotives, struggles and causes: we can understand why one would want to usurp, why one would\nwant to usurp a usurper, how the specificities of one’s usurpation or counter-usurpation would\nsingularize one, how alliances, divisions of labor and various forms of cooperation can emerge\namong those defending their usurpations.\n\nThe very fact that I have distilled secular thought to a\nworld of usurpers even though, to my knowledge, no actual secular thinker has ever used such a\ndescription, demonstrates the generativity of secular thought. Secular thinkers have thought in\nterms of rulers, and various justifications for rule and obedience; about social groups in conflict,\nand “just” or “pragmatic” ways of resolving those conflicts; about individuals, and their “rights”\nwhich they can claim against other individuals and the state, and so on. If we say that all that can\nmotivate all these agents is resentment, as the naturalness necessarily attributed to them is an\nafter the fact attribution produced by the attempt to reconcile them, that reduces to a world of\nusurpers.\n\nAt best one could achieve a stance of comic detachment—but what is that, other than a\nkind of shadowing of one usurper after another? And this would make mimetic theory, and\noriginary thinking as the highest form of mimetic theory, the end of secular thought, as it brings\nus to the universal condition of usurpers who now, perhaps, can see why others seem them as the\nusurpers. The configuration of the originary scene strips bare all the “reasons” we have for our\nresentments to the mimetic rivalry directed toward and restrained by a center. (No doubt many of\nthe reasons we have for our resentments are good ones—some, at least, must be better than other\n—but that would still leave open the question, why do we resent—as animals do not—even when\nwe have “reasons”? Why can’t we hardly ever say anything that is not some articulation of\nresentment with a grudging concession to the center?) The next step, then, is to move beyond\nsecular thought.\n\nDoing so involves exhausting secular thought, bringing its paradoxes to their conclusion. Secular\nthought depends upon the liberation of the declarative order from the ostensive-imperative\nworld. The declarative sentence produces a linguistic present that does not depend upon\nostensive presence. The declarative sentence does this by projecting possible ostensive presents\nto which the participants in the declarative event are ready to attest. If I say that someone is “not\nhere,” in response to a request that they be made available, my claim has meaning on the\ncondition that the person in question has been named and noted, that my interlocutors have been\nmade aware at however many degrees of separation of this, that there is some “somewhere else”\nwhere someone else could be attesting to the presence of this person, that there are people who\ncould attest to the attesting, bring word of it to me, and so on.\n\nFurther inquiries could be made at\nany point along any of these chains—if it is a fictional representation, then all these possibilities\nare being modeled, and maybe the very process of modeling is being modeled. So, the\ndeclarative generates rather than removes it from the ostensive-imperative world. Even\nsupposedly meaningless (“colorless green ideas sleep furiously”) and sample (“the cat is on the\nmat”) sentences serve to construct a disciplinary present, in which we deliberately “subtract”\nmeaning and context so as to direct attention to, say, the purely syntactic dimension of the\nsentence. But the fact that the declarative sentence generates a multitude of other possible\npresents, the “failure” of any of which would lead to the collapse of the present constructed by\nthe declarative sentence producing it, represents a paradox for the sentence—whatever it asserts\nboth is and is not—and, therefore, a crisis. There does, after all, have to be a present of the\nutterance, even if the sentence itself can only refer to that present by making its reliance upon the\npresent of some “recipient” of the sentence explicit.\n\nBy “present” I mean not anything philosophical, but the present tense, which is the first and, I\nwant to suggest, only, real tense. Other tenses are modeled on the present tense—grammatical\ninflections indicating tenses are ways of showing there are other present tenses that can be\nrepresented within the linguistic present of the utterance. Imagine if we spoke only in the present\ntense—rather than saying, for example, that “the Declaration of Independence was signed in\n1776,” we would have to refer to a field of presently existing documentation recording, and\nrecording the recording, and registering the consequences currently noticeable, of the signing of\nthe Declaration of Independence in 1776.\n\nThe past event would have to be nominalized into a\nnoun-phrase, while mentioning it today would have to be formalized as mediated by a range of\npresently available references, evidence, and “traces” across the culture. We’d be referring, not to\nan event that happened and is done with, but to a field generated by and radiating from an event\nwe know only through that field. Here, the paradox of the declarative, that it dissipates its own\npresent in the articulation of it, would be made explicit and formalized, and in the process the\ngrounding of the declarative order in the ostensive-imperative world would be made present.\n\nIn this case, the representation of successions of events, fully “tensed,” is mythical. Saying that\nsomething happened yesterday is mythical because it’s still happening today. To close an event in\nits own present is to make the center of that event a site of imperative exchange, which is to say\nit’s sacrificial: whoever paid for that event is whom we owe in return. We can’t pay debts to the\npreceding generations, but that’s because we are present with them, as they mediate for us the imperatives we receive from the center. So, if we are Americans, the imperative transmitted by\nthe American founders to rebel against “tyranny,” in the name of “natural rights,” is still an\nimperative for us to work out, even if we scrutinize the specific claims made in the Declaration\nand find them wanting, even if we determine the revolution was really a self-interested move by\nan alliance of farming, merchant and banking elites enabled by anti-monarchical elements in\nGreat Britain, even if we conclude it was merely a convenient justification for maintaining and\ncontinuing slavery, intensifying the expropriation of the native inhabitants, and so on.\n\nThe\nostensives gathered in all these other references bring with them other imperatives which we can\nmake part of the declarative order through which we resolve the imperative mistakenness\nconferred upon us by the existing institutional structure of the United States. We could easily say,\n“the United States is the real tyranny,” against which we must rebel in the name of some other\nconfiguration of “natural” or “human” rights, and so on; but the harder question is to determine\nwhere the central authority lies within the United States, as best we can approximate it, how we\ncan identify the imperatives coming from that at least partially hypothetical central authority,\nhow to obey those imperatives in such a way as to make that central authority more central and\nmore authoritative, and so on.\n\nIf we accept the pastness of those historical narratives, they pull us\nin incompatible directions, obligate us to competing imperatives; if we treat them as present in\ntheir effects, they become commentaries on the imperatives we obey now. In the end, we’d have\nto be able to say that the only real meaning of “rebel against tyranny in the name of natural\nrights” is to clarify for us a history of commands that precedes and succeeds that one. A good\nstart on constructing a more comprehensive and consistent field of imperatives might be to note\nthe curiosity of the framers of the Constitution modeling the office of the president on the only\nman they could imagine occupying it first, George Washington.\n\nWhy could the construction of\nthis new form of republic only be completed only once such a position and its occupant could be\nso precisely imagined? That imperative to construct a new form of post-monarchical, post-sacral,\ncentral authority can still be retrieved and obeyed: what remains is to generate the historical\nnarratives showing how this imperative, elevated, best provides consistency to all the others.\n\nI’m not calling for “banning” other tenses than the present (even if the proposition to do so is a\nvery useful thought experiment) any more than I was, earlier, calling for banning the use of\npsychological terms like “decision.” There is a method at work here to display and displace\nlinguistic and historical accretions and supplementations. Things do “happen,” and people do\n“do” things. For that matter, people “say” things, and the things they say can be “true” or “not\ntrue.” I can assert all this confidently not as a result of a line of philosophical inquiry but because\nAnna Wierzbicka shows that every language has these words, and I accept the unanimous verdict\nof humanity regarding them.\n\n“Someone can do something” according to the primes, which\nmeans all languages can account for the “possible,” which is to say another present “extractable”\nfrom the present. Of course, none of the nominalized terms we take to be virtually synonymous\nwith the verbs (if we can say something is true, can’t we call that statement the “truth”; if we say\nsomeone can, can’t we say they are “able”?) are in the primes. These words, like the tenses, are\nsupplementations and simulations. Again, this doesn’t make them “false”—just sites of\ndisciplinary inquiry. Methods deriving from the primes, as I suggested above, would bring into\nfocus the relation between saying someone “can” and someone “does,” someone “thinks” and someone “says,” someone “feels” and someone “knows,” and so on.\n\nBut most elemental might\nbe the relation between “do” and “happen,” because any event can be represented as someone\ndoing something or as something happening to someone, and displaying the difference between\nthe two would make the event or “happening” fully present. It’s not as if one cancels the other: if\nyou represent someone as having everything happen to him, you can then turn around and\nrepresent the same event as being completely of his doing, precisely by having his doing\n“marking” the happening.\n\nInstead of getting bogged down in arguments over the real causes of events (biological, social,\ncultural, political, economic, historical, etc.), we would then be amplifying the present, where\ntraces of all kinds of causes can be identified on the spreading field of the present. This implies a\ndisciplinary space aimed at making present a pedagogy of the present. A more precise answer to\nthe question, “what are we alienated from” is “a pedagogy of the present.” There can’t really be a\nmore fundamental human relation than pedagogy, and firstness on the originary scene and\nthereafter is really a pedagogical relation; even more, a linguistic pedagogy relation.\n\nPedagogy is\nfractally hierarchical: the most egalitarian group you can imagine will be broken up, in the daily\nand minutely interactions between its members, into pedagogical relations in which one member\nteaches another something else that the first may know simply because he got to that place\nseconds earlier. The origins of trust and faith in each other lie in such pedagogical relations: these\nrelations are formalized by the earliest human groups as rites of initation. The most\nsystematically and permanently hierarchical group relies equally on pedagogy—it just stretches\nout the pedagogical relation (what is entailed in “learning” something) over longer periods of\ntime.\n\n“Teach” and “learn” both come from words meaning, simply, point out a way to go, on the\none hand, and follow that way, on the other. Pedagogy can also, of course range from minimal to\nmaximal (answering a question; years-long initiation), from tacit to explicit (modeling\nperformance; providing detailed instructions), and so on. One way or another, this is all we’re\never really doing. Part of my purpose in introducing Marcel Jousse in my earlier discussion of\nmedia was to get to the point where we can think in terms of the fully “mimological” pedagogy\nJousse himself calls for, in which we continually construct practices that help us see the social\norigins of our practices.\n\nIf this is what we’re doing all the time, how can we be alienated from it? Well, there’s doing, and\nthere’s doing. A pedagogical relation is effective insofar as it’s embedded in some centered\nordinality. A declarative order alienated from the ostensive-imperative world (that insists on\nhaving all imperatives and ostensives generated declaratively) disallows the formation of\nsustained embedment within centered ordinality. This is because the more independent the\ndeclarative order, the more it would have you learn from those justifying the practice rather than\nthose performing it. The imperatives coming from the declarative order are primarily prohibitory\nand hortatory: from “don’t treat other members this way,” or “don’t use too much of this\nmaterial” (imperatives derived from legal, political and supply-chain considerations) to “respect\nothers in your group,” “be a team player,” “be accountable to your subordinates,” i.e.,\nimperatives that are universally applicable and therefore universally irrelevant.\n\nNothing like “do\nthis, this way, now,” can ever come from the alienated declarative order—the declarative order, in itself, is hysterically antagonistic to that kind of imperative relationship (almost any “do this,\nthis way, now,” can be interdicted under some reading of “don’t treat others X way”). And such\nan imperative relationship is central to any pedagogy. Even on a more intellectual level, telling a\nstudent to “write clearly, provide reasons for your arguments, refute counter-arguments,” etc., is\nmeaningless and even abusive, because these admonitions cannot carry with them the criteria for\ndetermining when one is actually doing things this way, or coming closer to doing things this\nway; only a command to imitate a model, and then look, together, at how the model has been\nimitated, how it can further be imitated, and what habits need to be changed so as to imitate more\nperfectly (and out of which arise more abstract questions like “what counts as an imitation under\nchanged conditions”?) can enact a non-alienated pedagogy.\n\nWith a model to refer to, utterances\nand gestures are read as forms of resentment (a desire to displace another); while a pedagogical\nrelation to the model is read off of the resentment—the more detailed the examination of the\nresentment, the more intricate the pedagogical practices it discloses. The other has stolen from\nyou, gone behind your back, taken your place when you were otherwise occupied; that other has\nmade a demonstration regarding your dependence on your goods, your vulnerabilities, your\nnetworks of trust, your assumptions of order in the world; it may turn out in the end that stealing,\ndouble-dealing and dispossession is not exactly, or not only, what happened. At any rate, there\nwill now be contributions to the securing of institutions of trust, verification, interdependence\nand ordering that you will be able to make.\n\nWithin any declarative sentence there is a hypothetical centered ordinality waiting to be enacted\npedagogically. You stake your place in the expanded present of the declarative. Any past tense\nopens the question of the reception of that past; any future tense raises questions regarding how\none imagines the doings and happenings projected being populated. The same for aspect and\nmood—they all construct presents in which people are doing things, seeing things, saying things\nto others who in are turn converted into those positioned in some relation to maybe doing things\nor having things happen to them. There are virtually unlimited positions open in any sentence\nthat one might occupy.\n\nAnd you’re not a usurper if you’re in another’s sentence. If someone says\nit’s going to rain tomorrow, that someone has heard a forecast from some source that has been\nmade available through some medium, and has some reason for trusting that source enough to let\nyour trust in him be put to the test by providing this information—there are people, working with\ntechnology and media, at each point along the line here. If you’re not at the head of the line, you\nare taking orders from another and passing them on, and how and why you do that is your\npedagogical accountability. If you’re being given information, you’re being asked to do\nsomething with it, to make some difference, maybe in your own practice, maybe in that of others.\n\nThe information comes with an imperative embedded in it, in other words. Maybe you’re within\nthe order that’s transmitting that information as good; maybe you’re in another order that treats\nthat information as bad, or questionable, or as providing some meta-information about the sender\n—in that case, it has another imperative embedded in it. How you enact this part, obey this\nimperative, is your pedagogy. The centered ordinality you are most directly embedded in is, in its\nturn, embedded in another centered ordinality of which you are more or less directly aware,\nwhich your immediate center wants you to be more or less cognizant of.\n\nYou need to refer to that\nhigher order insofar as there are inconsistencies in the imperatives directed at you from your immediate center. How you formulate those inconsistent imperatives into interrogatives that can\nthen be “transposed” onto some declaratives that exhaust or “evaporate” it is also your pedagogy. Increasing pedagogical positions within centered ordinalities is the way the declarative order is\ndisalienated. What we all really want is to know that we can do things with others in ways that,\nbecause of those ways of doing, things happen that we see happen because of the things we do.\n\nA completely “pedagogized” order, then (everything anyone does can be described as an effect of\na network of pedagogical acts), abolishes secular discourse. It does so without any need for a\nspecific sacred order, or form of transcendence. It contains the residue of secular discourse,\nthough, which means it also retains the trace of the sacred within the significant. Once the\npossibility of seeing all subjects as usurpers in relation to each other (and therefore themselves)\nhas been grasped, it can’t be forgotten: we must incorporate this basic human possibility, which\nhas enabled us to construct the very originary scene that accounts for it, into whatever order we\ncreate as a remedy.\n\nThe ever present possibility of the charge of usurper being directed at\nanother, even in the most indirect or implicit ways; that is, the possibility of centralizing\nviolence, is the originary event of an order immune to secular thought. The trace of the sacred in\nthe significant is in the “leap” into a new order involved in the act of naming. The target of\nconverging violence is named as the thing not adequately portrayed or described in the\nincitement directed toward it. We name in the name of the occupant of the center, the central\nauthority, who is in fact the most likely and common target of incitement, the most vulnerable to\ncharges of usurpation.\n\nA mature order would realize that any call for the removal of the occupant\nof the center must be false—that is, the occupant of the center is not the one to be removed for\nsuch and such a collection of reasons. To name is commemorate: here, we defended the center\nagainst this subversion. And when other members are violently centralized, those members and\nthe time and place where that violent centralization was arrested and reversed, are also named, as\nother points where a subversion of the center, this time less direct, was averted. Naming is also\nthe most basic pedagogical act: nothing better marks the minimal hierarchy self-evident and\nmodeled in any pedagogical act than saying “we’ll call this ______”\n\nNaming is the result of pedagogical practices of solicitation of the center. As usurping subjects,\nwe want things from the center; we make demands. Everything we want is really a demand from\nthe center. This means we all have what we could call a “central imaginary”: a proto-narrative of\nthe center as the agent that could meet our demands. One side demands that the state protect the\nrights of the unborn; the other side demands it protect the rights of women to abort. What both\nsides agree on is that the state should be able do whatever the one making the demand would\nwant: a state incapable of enforcing laws against abortion would also be incapable of enforcing\nlaws allowing abortion.\n\nSo, the state needs, at least to be capable. So, what makes the state\ncapable? Or, more precisely, what interferes with its capability? If, by whatever historically\nevolved process a particular social order has for placing individuals in the position of sovereign,\nonce someone is in that position, that person is unable to perform in the way mandated (the way\nhe promised his voters, his party, or those who appointed him through whatever mechanism),\nthen making demands of him is pointless. So, all our competing demands on the state can be\ndeferred in the name of inquiring into what kind of state could do the kinds of things we are asking in the way we are asking.\n\nCould a state that operates the way ours does perform in accord\nwith the expectations implicit in the demands we make on it? (So, for example, certainly the\ncontemporary American state could raise the minimum wage to 20$ nationwide if it set its mind\nto it; could it, though, hold everything else in the economy and society constant so that that\nraising the minimum wage would have the precise effect those demanding it want?) Such an\ninquiry would reveal at least some of the demands to be inoperable; even more, it might reveal\nthat the very mechanisms by which demands are generated, circulated through the system and\nused as feedback by the sovereign guarantees that those demands will not be met in the “spirit”\nin which they are made.\n\nJust laying bare all our resentful, usurpationist demands would reveal, in\nincreasingly rich institutional detail, that the kind of central authority that could meet our\ndemands in a way we could recognize would also be a central authority that could and probably\nshould ignore those demands while instituting more workable forms of feedback. Made more\nintelligent thereby, even the citizens of the existing social order could intimate transitions from\nthat order by providing “audits” of institutional forms that both provoke and frustrate inoperable\ndemands. In the end, we’d replace our demands with better ways of following commands.\n\nAn onomastic pedagogy commemorates and honors sites and figures marking the arresting of\nviolent centralization, but operates far more broadly insofar as we remember that a declarative\nsentence named the God who abolished sacrificial imperative exchange and that the declarative\nsentence can therefore be taken up as a form of naming as well. Mistakenness in the imperative\nchain appears; a gap is opened between an imperative issued and the one to be obeyed; linguistic\npresence is threatened. Only a declarative capable of generating new ostensives can resolve such\na crisis, and the path to the declarative is through the interrogative.\n\nThat is, first of all, a question\nmust be formed out of the impasse of the imperative. Let’s put it bluntly: everyone was\ndepending upon you to carry out a task within a chain of command upon which the rest of that\nchain depended, and you screwed up. Everyone is angry with you, and demands follow quickly:\nyou should be replaced, you should be punished, you should be supervised more closely, you\nshould be demoted, etc. Well, maybe any or all of that will turn out to be appropriate, but then\nthere are other questions: how singular was this particular task? How singular did it turn out to\nbe, compared to what might have been expected?\n\nWhose responsibility was it to vet, train, and\nprepare you? Who is available to replace you, and how quickly? And so on. These are all\npredictable, “mimable” demands and questions, and the more of them we ask the more they\nbecome pedagogical questions to be addressed within a disciplinary space formed around the\n“spillage” of mistakenness. For this to happen, everything in the convergence upon the mistaken\nindividual that marks that convergence as mimetically driven must be eliminated; and the\nindividual himself must refrain from deflecting that convergence by instigating a convergence\nupon someone else. “Who are you taking me to be” is the question raised by the mistaken\nindividual; “who are we that we take you to be whatever it is we take you to be” is the one raised\nby those creating a shared attention to the space. Some name in the form of the declarative\nsentence provides the answer to these questions.\n\nThese questions are less to be asked explicitly than to be embodied in a practice: if you’re\nconverged upon, you expose the mimetic marking in the convergence by mimicking them and responding as if you are that one; if you are among the convergent group, you name its object or\ntarget as someone to whom something has happened as well as someone who has done\nsomething and the others in group as those doing something and not merely addressing\nsomething that has happened. In both cases, mimetic excess is subtracted from the scene and\nreplaced by a demythification: rather than building an identity around the stigmatized, the precise\ncausality producing the noted result is separated more and more completely from all the other\nfunctionalities and responsibilities implicit in the situation.\n\nThere are always procedures and\nprecedents in play to facilitate this process, but proceduralism is not only insufficient, but can’t\neven work on its own terms without placed individuals who can read the relevant procedures as\nimperatives bringing with them a margin of decision. The only way to be such an individual is to\nbe prepared to present yourself as such an individual, as demonstrated in a case you are also\nready to present. And the only way to ensure such individuals is through a mimological setting in\nwhich the gestures of each can be dismantled and turned into samples of practices all can inspect. There is a pedagogy of the ostensive (look not at that, but at this; not that way, but in this light); a\npedagogy of the imperative (attribute everything in your act that leads to shared ostensives as\nfollowing from your full faithfulness to the imperative, and the chain of imperatives it follows;\nattribute everything that goes array to your failure to penetrate further layers of the imperative);\nand a pedagogy of the declarative (bringing all the doings and happenings within the scope of a\npresent to the extent needed to exclude from the scene elements interfering with its minimality). The more you bring into focus some local center, the more you elucidate the terms provided by\nthe global center making that focus possible.\n\nEvery demand is to be converted into a shared command that you are all studying together but\nwhich each agent is willing to begin obeying, and in obeying modeling a form of obedience, so\nas to open a space for others to retroject a form of obedience further up the chain, or follow with\na subordinate and subsequent obedience—all in the name of providing objects, of providing all\nthe participants themselves as objects, of that shared study. The central authority presumed to be\nat the highest point in the chain of command might be imagined to be fully secure and coherent,\nor in total disarray, or anywhere in between—these assessments will enter into the narratives told\nof the specific event, and in participating in that event you are already “foreshadowing” the\ncontours of those possible narratives.\n\nSomewhere in there or up there must be some central\nauthority, however embattled or potential, and you assume this central authority will be enabled\nby the forms of centered ordinality constitutive of coherent power. Constructing those forms of\ncentered ordinality at any rate implies a default to some proximal power center, whose\nimperatives you treat as wholly consistent in themselves and with whatever central authority the\nproximal source of power defers to—prioritizing and temporalizing those imperatives so as to\nensure their consistency is what a de-secularizing pedagogy consists of. What is needed for a\nrestoration of the unanimity in practice towards the originating center in any social order is not\n(declarative) doctrines or articles of faith, but the insistence that all imperatives come from that\noriginating center, and that everyone’s contribution to filling the gap between imperatives given\nand imperative obeyed can reveal that to be the case.\n\nThe necessary faith for social order is that\nall named objects give off imperatives that we share and supplement by following imperatives up\nthe line closer to the center. The role of declaratives is to provide order to the various imperatives: a sentence, a discourse lets us know that one is to obeyed now, another later, another\nwould be canceled if we properly obey the previous ones, another is to look at something rather\nthan change it, and so on: if the imperatives are articulated in this way, the declarative tells you\nwhat to expect to see.\n\n_Maintaining the Present of the Center_\n\nOnce a human occupies the center, the most difficult political, and maybe human, problem, is\nhow to replace that occupant when the time comes, as it must. We could assess different\ngovernmental forms as different ways of solving this problem, but none of them—not hereditary\nkingship, not democratic election—does so completely. Somewhere along the line a king will die\nwithout offspring; somewhere along the line some real or perceived failure into the electoral\nprocess will produce a president or prime minister widely considered illegitimate. I will conclude\nthis book by offering a solution consistent with the originary grammar of the center I have\narticulated here, and along the way I will use this intrinsically anomalous element in any political\norder to make the various vocabularies I’ve been working through more inter-referential, answer\nsome questions that might have arisen for some readers along the way, and even suggest the\nelements of what the Marxists call a “transitional program.”\n\nThe solution I propose: the current occupant of the center chooses his successor. This is, in fact, a\nforegone conclusion, insofar as we take power to be coherent, and all of the positions and\npractices in the social order to be formalized, or named. If some other body, however wide or\nnarrow, chooses the successor, they could presumably choose the time of succession, which is to\nsay, that body could remove the ruler at any time. In that case, that body is the sovereign, which\nmeans that power is not organized coherently. The selection of a successor could be made on any\ngrounds the current occupant wants, and I will stipulate here that the choice of a successor could\nbe made for very bad reasons, leading to disastrous results.\n\nThat’s true of any system—\ndemocracies are obviously no more immune to the elevation of leaders destructive to the very\nsystem itself—and you wouldn’t believe me if I claimed I was offering a fool-proof system. What I can do is suggest some of the considerations that would lead at least the best rulers to put\nin place extended institutional processes for generating candidates for selection, and that, having\nbeen institutionalized and entrenched, would likely be accepted by lesser rulers. We can simply\nbegin with the assumption of a ruler who wants to be succeeded by the most capable person\navailable, and the one most willing to continue the projects the current ruler considers most\nessential to the long-term well-being of the order he presides over.\n\nSuch a ruler would want some way of narrowing down the vast number of candidates the society\nin question would generate—any society will have lots of intelligent, capable, courageous young\npeople concerned about the good of their country. The number must be narrowed down\nconsiderably—maybe to a dozen, or so. The most obvious way of doing this is by establishing\nspecial academies to produce high level government officials, and having the top 1% or so of\ngraduates enter more grueling training and competitions to further narrow the number down. The\nruler would take an intense interest in these academies, ensuring that they inculcate the most important political skills and traditions.\n\nLower level schools would have special programs\ntraining especially qualified students to apply to those academies—the academies, then, would\nset the tone regarding moral, ethical and political education across the system. It may very well\nbe that there are families and communities that have no wish to enter the system-wide\ncompetition—perhaps out of some moral or religious conviction, or because certain minorities\nwill be disqualified from the highest offices, or they simply wish to prepare their students to\nparticipate in and express loyalty to the social order in other ways; indeed, this may very well\nconstitute the majority.\n\nIf the educational system is heavily biased toward creating the conditions for strong candidates\nfor succession, then that means all the disciplines will be oriented toward studying those\nconditions and strengthening them. Psychology, philosophy, sociology, history, economics, law,\nand so on, or, as I would prefer to think, the various regions of anthropomorphic pedagogy,\nwould be primarily interested in questions of leadership and hierarchy—various forms, various\ncausalities, better and worse forms (under different conditions), means of producing better\nleaders and hierarchies, means of sustaining them, and so on.\n\nAfter all, these are the kinds of\nthings the candidates would need to know, and so would all those interested in the process of\nproduction and selection of candidates—and that would include at least most of the social order,\ninsofar as local communities would be competing for and take honor from producing the best\ncandidates most regularly. Since the process of producing candidates would be ongoing, it would\nbe a central concern of the entire society, including, probably, the primary source of\nentertainment. Public competitions and ceremonies would be part of the process, as would the\nselection of marriage partners and family formation of the most promising candidates.\n\nSigns of\nthe ruler’s preference for one or another candidate, or one or another attribute to be privileged in\nthe selection process, would be watched and interpreted with great interest. It would have to be\nthe case that the ruler always has an officially designated successor, but it would also be the case\nthat he could change this designation at any time. A long reigning ruler might no longer think the\n50-year old he chose as successor 20 years ago is still right for the job; or, a candidate chosen on\nthe assumption that rapid technological development was going to be the agenda for the next\nseveral decades might be replaced if it suddenly appears that war with a rival is likely, and a\nmore military-oriented leader seems necessary.\n\nAll this might seem likely to create all kinds of rivalries between different candidates, and\ntherefore resentments, the establishment of factions, bureaucratic intrigue, and so on, leading to\nconstant instability. The way to prevent this is to prohibit the top-tier candidates from occupying\npositions in which they exercise any real power, which also means they are to be excluded from\npositions in which they make consequential decisions. Second-tier candidates and below would\nbe elevated to higher positions of power, placed in charge of the military, industry and other high\npower ministries; if top tier candidates would rather have such a career, they could be given the\nright to renounce any aspirations to occupy the center, and be placed on a career path better\nsuited to their ambitions.\n\nThe top-tier candidates would accept the likelihood of a stunted career\nfar below what they might have achieved otherwise, for the sake of helping maintain the\ncoherence and continuity of the ruling order. They would be familiarized with the mechanisms of rule and, we can assume, would “intern” with the ruler—otherwise, their role would be more\nceremonial, such as presiding over events, touring the country, meeting people from all walks of\nlife. If any candidate were found to be using his role to “drum up support” or try and create a\npower base for himself, he would immediately be removed from consideration. Since this\nprohibition would be universally known, word of any attempt would get out quickly, leading to\nan investigation; even more, candidates would be expected to cultivate a persona that exuded,\nprobably in an exaggerated form, disdain for flattery or offers of favors. In this way, such\nattitudes would also be available for emulation across the social order, raising the moral level of\nthe people.\n\nThe selection of a successor would be the most important decision the ruler could make, and, for\nreasons I suggested above, it would be woven into the texture of all his other decisions: every\nmajor problem or turning point would lead to a reconsideration of the chosen successor and the\narrangement of the major candidates. The ruler might want to bring them in for regular\ninterviews to get a better sense of their fitness. Designating a new successor would be a cultural a\npolitical event, both to the ruler’s subjects and other governments. Everything that a ruler should\nbe, all the threads connecting the ruler to all other institutions, the shaping of those institutions to\nensure they produce the best ruler and enable that ruler to rule—all this would be the basic\nsubstance of the culture.\n\nIf this sounds strange and “cult of personality”-like, I would suggest\nseeing it as a social order in which the most fundamental questions of any social order—its\nstability, coherence and continuity—are systematically placed front and center. No one could\nthink or speak for long without coming across questions regarding what makes this society what\nit is, how it could be improved, how could we do our jobs, raise our families, cultivate or\nintellects, develop our friendships, participate in our communities, and so on, in such a way to\ncontribute to that. To go back to the problem raised above, regarding the dangers of leaving so\nmuch power in one man’s hands, I would say that, with the model I’m presenting here, we could\nsay that such deeply rooted habits in the people would be very hard to repudiate, and a weak\nleader is more likely to rely upon them (or to have his weaknesses recuperated by them).\n\n(I also\nthink this is a system less likely to produce weak leaders, but weakness can come in many forms\nand anyone could make a mistake.) In the event, the possibility of which could not be completely\nexcluded, that a genuinely dangerous leader needed to removed (preferably quietly, in such a\nway to solicit his perhaps grudging consent, with as much consensus among the elite leadership\nas possible), this system would provide a set of buffers lessening the shock to the system.\n\nNow, if you are with me so far, you will acknowledge that we would be waiting for a time when\nthe highest authority of the country we reside in will actually name his own successor. (Assuming, of course, we live, like the vast majority of the planet, in a social order not governed\nby a monarch.) At that point we will know that something has happened; but up until that point,\nwhat is happening is that we are waiting for that to happen. We could think of this as a kind of\ninverted messianism. Inverted, because everything that is shrouded in mystery in messianic\nexpectation is made a site of pedagogy here. What would it take for whoever is formally in\npower right now to name his successor?\n\nWhat are the institutional blockages making that\nimpossible? In our own speech and actions, we evince a readiness to commence constructing the institutional architecture (described above) in case those blockages are removed; at the same\ntime, we act in accord with the implicit command coming from he who would have to name his\nsuccessor that those blockages be respected. Whenever we deal with these institutional restraints,\nwe represent as best we can the contrary imperatives intersecting therein, while trying to ensure\nthe commands we transmit to others are as consistent as possible with those transmitted to us,\nand act so as to intimate at least the possibility of such consistency up and down the line.\n\nThis takes away from us the right, or at least the pleasure, of opposing those in power, including\nthose we see to be most inimical to any possibility of establishing coherent forms of power. But\nthis also doesn’t mean we are obliged to become cheerleaders for whomever happens to be the\npresident. In an insecure, incoherent system, the imperatives issuing from the center are wildly\ninconsistent with each other—simple, strict obedience is impossible. A hierarchy of imperatives\nmust be constructed: there are those explicitly issued recently; older, more established ones;\nthose inherited from previous rulers, even previous regimes, neither explicitly confirmed nor\nsuperseded; those presumed to have lapsed but capable of reactivation; and so on.\n\nThe most\nimmediate imperatives, when they cannot be complied with perfectly, must be refined in terms of\nmore mediated ones. If you can’t provide ostensive proof of compliance with the most direct\nimperatives, you probably won’t be in a position to receive them much longer, but what will\ncount as compliance will be determined after the fact and it’s possible to comply in ways that\nwill affect that judgment. What can always be done, though, is requesting further instructions and\nclarifications, and such requests can invoke the originary events of the institution and the social\norder. This is an instigation to archival work and the construction of alternate histories, with a\nsearch for more reliable forms of governance that were perhaps discarded or allowed to lapse but\nmight be re-invented.\n\nThere is always a mode of deferral that makes a particular imperatival\nspace possible, and questions refer to that mode of deferral. Anyone’s questions regarding the\nimperative chain involve an offer to donate oneself unconditionally to the center, and this\ndonation depends upon a clarification of the centered ordinality rendering the imperative\nconsistent. In this way, one’s actions make the present anomalies transparent while seeking to\nresolve them. Even the most difficult cases can only be dealt with on these terms—let’s say you\nare ordered to commit immoral acts, like atrocities, or to turn yourself over to a rigged process\ndespite your innocence.\n\nThe more your attempts at mitigation or deferral can be presented as\nobedience within a more expanded present, rather than the rebellion of your internal space of\nrepresentation against tyranny, the more likely even your short-term prospects will improve.\n\nBefore we leave off the question of succession, it’s worth nothing that contemporary liberal\ndemocracy, and the US far more than any other country, has been explicitly foregrounding this\nquestion of late on its own terms. In the end, liberal democracy, whatever the textbooks say it\nentails (“robust media criticism of government,” “independent judiciary,” etc.), really comes\ndown to peaceful transfer of power following an election. But, as we are seeing, this is an\nextremely complicated matter. What ensures the legitimacy of an election result? Well, obviously\nif the votes were miscounted, whether due to incompetence or corruption, the election is\nillegitimate.\n\nBut who determines that, other than those who are in some way in office due to their\ndependence on those who have been selected by that very process? At lot of faith must be conferred here. Anyway, we’re just getting started. We have further learned that the results of\nelections might be illegitimate if the election district has been drawn (“gerrymandered”) in such\na way as to favor one party over another. This is especially the case if the district has been drawn\nin such a way so that plausible (to whom?) claims that a protected minority group has been\ndisadvantaged. The legitimacy of elections can be diminished if the rules for determining the\neligible electorate (or, for that matter, candidate) discriminate against such a group, or favor one\nparty over another: should felons be deprived of the vote?\n\nOr for that matter, how about the\nplacement of voting booths, or the lines upon which voters must way in one as opposed to\nanother venue? Why can 18 year olds vote, but not especially mature 17 year olds? What about a\ncorrupt media that deliberately misinforms people with no other access to information? How\nabout foreigners, who are surely impacted by the decisions made by elected officials? Once we\nembark on that line of thinking, why not, for an extremely influential country such as the US,\nenfranchise the entire world? (At this point, have we all been chastened enough by various\nunbelievable proposals come true to refrain from laughing?)\n\nAll these questions become more\ncontentious the more each and every element of the electoral process can be deemed to favor one\nside over another—and this process of politicizing presumably neutral determinations of who\nshould be counted as a citizen and what counts as a fair process obviously feeds on itself. Now,\nof course, all this means nothing until one side in an election simply refuses to accept the result\nof that election, and mobilizes its institutional resources to contest it—we could say that the\nconstant delegitimizing of election results in the US over the last few years (maybe decades) is a\nway of softening people up for this eventuality.\n\nOne plausible account of the origins of elections\nis the concession of one side in an imminent war to another upon seeing the numbers on the other\nside—eventually, it becomes customary and convenient to count heads without all the trouble of\nactually preparing for war. Once one side refuses to accept the result of an election, we will have\nreverted back to the testing of all societal resources on both (all?) sides.\n\nSo, we can say, first, on a practical level, that when the existing social order starts\n“problematizing” succession itself, such problematization can then take on a variety of forms. And this is the case, because, second, what is put into play under such conditions is the very\nexistence of the “people” in the name of whom representative government governs. What counts\nas the “people,” in an operationalizable sense, is arbitrary, which is to say, depends upon histories\nof all kinds of power relations that cannot themselves be attributed to any decision of the people,\nas such decisions can only be made in previously formalized ways.\n\nA conversation over who\ndecides what counts as “the people” is bound to be a productive one, because it makes explicit\nthe paradoxes regarding the various ways the people supposedly chooses itself. We can parcel\nout all the different formal and informal elements of “the people” to different institutions,\ndifferent disciplines, different starting points, and trace its construction. We will no doubt find\nvery specific people, acting in very specific forms of concert, involved in each and every\nconstruct of the people. The people is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, or a robot, or an android,\nor an army of zombies (why not draw upon the full array of popular genres for our stock of\nmetaphors), and it has its origin story like all of those creatures.\n\nThe ongoing process of calling\ninto question more and more of the formalized features of the electoral process, invariably in the\nname of some super-sovereign (a truer democracy based on a more rightly constructed “people”) can be transformed into a process of modeling a process of formalization that would make\nquestions of succession, selection and delegation everyday topics of political discourse. After all,\nthe most likely crisis point of liberal democracy is such an outright refusal on the part of the loser\nin an election to accept the results, in which case these issues of political responsibility (who can\nsecure power) would displace all the evocations of the various contending super-sovereigns.\n\nIf our focus is on the consistency and coherence of power relations, what we see in any\ncommander-in-chief is a certain degree of interest and competence in maintaining the same. Those showing a lack of interest and competence or, even more, showing determination to\nfurther undermine the coherence of power, are the kinds of commanders we would be inclined to\n“oppose.” Well, you could oppose them—vote against them, organize support for their opponent,\nwrite articles criticizing them, and so on. The question is whether you want a different\ncommander-in-chief who will play the leaky power system in a way that provides you with a\nmodicum of real or imagined power; or, whether you want to plug the leaks.\n\nIf the latter, you\nwant to develop practices, relations and institutions that would present themselves to the kinds of\nleaders who might name their successors as plausible replacements for the kind of officer class\nthat thrives on leakiness. This involves minimizing reactiveness and seizing opportunities to\ndisplay deferral—self-defense and tit-for-tat responses should always be framed as instituting a\nmore coherent chain of command from the center. All the secular demands—calls for more\nfreedom, more democracy, rights, equality, etc.—are intrinsically disordering and it will always\nbe possible to show how more granularly constructed pedagogical relations, aimed at modeling a\nform of centered ordinality, would repair the situation.\n\nThe truth of resentment, insofar as there is\ntruth in it, is that power is used without responsibility, or responsibility conferred without the\npower needed to fulfill it generates insecurity, a leaking of meaning, and therefore resentment—\nany analysis of conflict, then, looks for a way in which power might be matched more perfectly\nwith responsibility.\n\nSo, a president who encourages leaking, who undermines his own formal authority by\nencouraging activist groups and cabals within the intelligence agencies to use the media to\n“force” him to do what he would prefer not to initiate on his own, who multiplies factions within\nthe bureaucracy that he can play off against each other, etc., can be distinguished from one\naiming at increasing the coherence of power. The differences will show up ostensively,\nimperatively, interrogatively, and declaratively, and we can learn to see it. When we have a\npresident exploiting incoherencies within the system, we are as loyal to him as to any other, we\nare equally awaiting the possibility that he will arrest the entropic drift of the power system by\neffectively passing power to a successor (or even indicating the necessity to do so), but our way\nof helping him see the way towards to that entails pointing out how all his actions contraindicate\nthis clearly desired result.\n\nThis is different from opposition because we wouldn’t be looking for\nlittle “levers” that could be used to gain some discernable advantage on the time scale set up the\nelectoral process, like trying to incriminate him or bombard him with bad publicity a few months\nbefore the election. It would be better to expose such maneuvering pedagogically, to explain how\nthe system reproduces itself through apparent opposition. It is also the case that the political\nexploitation of systemic incoherencies will overlap significantly with “issues” as they are represented within the liberal order. Most obviously, such exploitation will almost invariably\ncoincide with the subversion of the government’s responsibility to minimize criminal activity\nagainst powerless civilians.\n\nPolicies that encourage criminal activity, or raise the threshold of\nwhat is to count as criminal activity, are the calling cards of those who thrive on instability. At\nthe same time, multiplying bureaucratically defined crimes, to be prosecuted at the discretion of\nofficials at various levels of the system, likewise coincides with the kind of parasitism upon\ndisorder I am discussing. We will also find that these indicators of a more uncertain political and\nlegal setting overlap significantly with a whole range of other issues considered “cultural” and\n“economic”—a careful examination of policies favored across the spectrum of liberalism would\nyield interesting results if undertaken from the standpoint of how much tolerance and promotion\nof illegal activity they would require if implemented.\n\nMeanwhile, most insidious corporate\nactivity can be eliminated in two simple ways (simple, at least if we assume a coherent regime):\nfirst, abolish anti-discrimination laws, which is what, through a predictable, even inexorable,\nprocess has led most major corporations to adopt the cultural left’s agenda unconditionally; and,\nsecond, combine few, clear safety rules with a robust legal regime that can identify cause and\neffect and responsibility when it comes to harmful impact alleged to corporate activity—this is\nsomething we already know how to do quite well. At any rate, I am not suggesting that the\ncurrent lines of political antagonism are completely unconnected with the pedagogical\n“expectancy” my discussion envisages.\n\nNone of this changes the fact that the goal of an onomastic pedagogy is not to address the issues\nbut to produce the dispositions required for when some occupant of the center decides that only\nby passing power to a successor can the attempts he has undertaken to provide coherence to the\nsystem be sustained and continued. Naming always places the named object under the authority\nof the broader system of signs, or cultural authority—to name an object is to place its disposition\nat the disposal of the central authority. But naming is itself only effective under properly lent\nauthority—I can call the president a traitor, or illegitimate, but those are really nothing more than\ndesperate “suggestions” I hope some replacement will adopt—but through what chain of\nmediations, exactly?\n\nBetter to name what the system authorizes me to name: what I am expected\nto do, but find it difficult to do according to expectations. I will be excluded from access to\ncertain institutions and practices if I say something “racist,” and I could protest this on “free\nspeech” grounds, but more pertinent is the absence of anything like an acceptable definition of\nwhat counts as “racist” speech (or “sexist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” and so on). Here is\nwhere a real marker of political reliability will be one’s ability to resist the temptation to turn\nthese accusations back on one’s accusers, which continues the transformation of politics into\nattempts to be licensed as an arbiter of unacceptable speech.\n\nIt will really be essential to find and\ncreate spaces where it will be possible to ask, patiently, for explanations of what, exactly, these\nheresies involve—how do we identify them? Who has authority to rule on violations? What does\nthe history of precedents look like here—how would it be possible to know in advance what\nwould count as a violation? To be blunt, it is to be demonstrated that, as I mentioned earlier, all\nthese words mean no more and no less than the term, central to the pseudo-legal systems of all\nrevolutionary social orders, of “counter-revolutionary.” It would be impossible to overstate how\ntransformative a patient, civil, stoic demonstration of the meaninglessness of all these words would be.\n\nYou could say that without replacing those in power with different leaders, none of\nthis would matter, as power would simply find replacements for all of them. But dissolving these\nwords in the acid bath of their incoherence would itself do a great deal to release other power\ncenters from externally and self-imposed limitations. To put it in originary grammatical terms:\nevaporating all the terms superstructured on anti-discrimination law would upset the entire\nostensive order, leaving us, literally, with little to point at in a shared manner—and these are\nfruitful conditions for an onomastic pedagogy naming the transitions from a society of usurpers\nto an order saturated by pedagogical demonstrations of how to be and how to do in such a way\nthat your practices and your life are pedagogical demonstrations.\n\n_The Center, Speaking_\n\nIt should be clear that I'm not calling for the restoration of the sacred, but for the increasingly\nrich direct representation of our sociality. The sacred is an indirect, unaware representation of\nsociality, since the human contribution to the construction of sacrality cannot be explicitly\nrepresented. Directly representing the social was also the project of secular thought, but the\nproject turned out to be impossible on those terms because the \"human\" individual must be taken\nas its own origin, with the signs that mediate between humans mere expressions of what is\nalways already internal to the human individual.\n\nThe emergence of government enables a more\ndirect representation of sociality, but as long as government is sacralized, the human contribution\nto sociality cannot be represented. The modern subjection of government to points of reference\ntaken to be immediately \"human\" (rights, equality, nature, and so on) has the effect of making\nanti-sociality a condition of intelligibility. That is, individuals and groups can only be represented\nin opposition to the social, which stands in for \"tyranny\" or some other form of coercion (like\ndeterminism). Only by starting with a center which is both internal and external to the human,\nthat is, a product of human practice but in its effects irreducible to any human practice, can we\nbegin to represent sociality in more legible terms.\n\nThink of how every word or sentence we speak\nor write, every gesture we make, is dependent upon the millions of times those words, sentences\nand gestures have been deployed in extremely similar ways—by contrast, whatever is novel in\nany of our utterances is minimal. Part of the paradox constituting the human is that such\nminuscule \"revisions\" of the common stock of linguistic resources might have effects far beyond\nwhat the proportion between \"new\" and \"old\" in the utterance might suggest. Directly\nrepresenting our sociality is paradoxical, then, because any such representation now becomes the\nproperty of our language, requiring new representations.\n\nRepresentations of sociality, then, are\nre-presentations of existing, less legible forms of sociality: they represent those forms of sociality\nas more differentiated, more reciprocally embedded, more centered, so that those differentiations\nin practices and relationships, and those elicitations of previously unacknowledged reciprocities,\ncan become explicitly formalized designations which distribute authority and responsibilities\nmore transparently and publicly. What I am saying here can be said in more familiar sociological,\ne.g., Durkheimian terms; but the specificity of representation needs to be accounted for.\n\nThe line\nbetween anti-sociality and more formalized sociality is drawn through language itself. If we try\nand represent human or social relations directly, unmediated by the center, we will only end up\nrepresenting their resentments and claims on each other, leaving us to seek some reconciliation or balance between antithetical \"elements.\" If we take care of language, meanwhile, we will be\ntaking care of humans, that is, each other—language always directs our attention to a center, and\nthrough that center, the center that conditions that centering.\n\nWe are all highly mediated and technologized men and women. It’s staggering to think of all the\nways we operate as signs across all the different media, and the way in which all of our habits,\nincluding of thought, depend upon all the devices we are plugged into. It is clear that the political\nvocabulary we are used to, comprised of “values,” “ideas,” “opinions,” “agreements and\ndisagreements,” “principles,” and so on, are completely inadequate for conditions where the\ntweak of an algorithm will determine whether 0 or 10,000 people will be exposed to something I\nsay. To try and stand outside of, say, social media, and denounce it for isolating and manipulating\nand enraging people, is simply to leverage one medium—say, writing, or TV—against another,\nascendant one—it’s not to position us within nature against something artificial.\n\nWe have to think\nin terms of interlocking media strategies—for example, using highly contagious maxims on\nTwitter to, in part, direct attention to longer essays or a book. But it’s not just a question of\nstrategy—rather, it’s a question of modes of being; that is, it’s ontological. If we think of\nourselves as separate individuals, waging war against some tyranny on behalf of a rebellious\nsubjectivity we are playing into well-worn strategies directed from above. Thinking in terms of\ngroup identities, however conceived, is really the same strategy on a larger scale. Thinking of\nourselves as beings of the center, representatives of the center, delegates, emissaries of the center,\nopens up new possibilities.\n\nIn that case we’re offering the central authority feedback based upon\nthe difficulties we’re having in fulfilling imperatives coming from the central authority. Among\nthose imperatives are, certainly, ones directing us to individualize (self-center) ourselves in\ncertain ways, and to organize ourselves into communities along certain lines. Every imperative\nfrom the center—every law, every invocation of a constitutional obligation, every priority\nsuggested by some government action—necessarily suggests various modes of individuation and\ncorporatization. Again, the point is not simply to drop all the ways you have of thinking about\nyourself, but to see those ways as always already in a kind of asymmetrical exchange with the\ncenter. What is wanted is to have those identities named, and the imperatives following upon that\nnaming to be drawn out.\n\nThe various media and technologies, then, are our articulation with and through the center. Questions of whether technologies dehumanize us, or interfere with our privacy or personal\nfreedoms are always questions posed, futilely, from within an older media to a newer one. Even\nmore specifically, it may be that most of these criticisms come from an imagined experience of\nmid-20th century urban living, where for many a certain balance among the desires of prosperity,\nfreedom from externally imposed norms, and sociality was possible. However that may be, the\ncentral authority will always want to know enough about the people it governs to govern them;\nand the governed are also filled with expectations regarding the maintenance of safety,\nconditions for forming families, engaging in productive activity and enjoyment that always\nalready presuppose a central imaginary seeing to spatial arrangements and information gathering.\n\nA demand that I be left alone entails a whole series of assumptions about my relations with others. Even more, it assumes the existence of projects I am or could be engaged in with others,\neither directly or by proxy. Imagine stripping from our discussion all references to “rights,” on\nthe one hand, and notions of “checks and balances,” or “public and private,” on the other hand,\nand consider what discussions of the relationship between individuals, communities,\ncorporations and governments would then look like. The only way we could get our bearings\nwithout those familiar legal and political markers is by isolating another, also familiar one: the\nnotion of “chartering,” central to Western culture, at least, since the Middle Ages, and in a way\nRoman antiquity.\n\nIf everything is chartered—corporations, profit and non-profit, subordinate\nunits of government—as, in fact, is already the case, then as individuals we are always already\nall chartered up. Questions of social order then come down to clarifying the terms of the charters\nissued at all levels, and the only agency capable of doing that is the sovereign, and sovereign\nagents. Charters bind all agencies to the imperatives of the center. To the extent that we’re all\nagents of the sovereign, even if not to the same degree of officiality, our main contribution to\npublic discourse is clarifying the operations of the institutions we participate in in terms of their\ncharters and our own competencies.\n\nTo the extent of our abilities, we clarify and represent the\nkind of scenes the media we participate in place us upon: at the very least, this means\nincorporating, in the way each media allows, the feedback of actual and possible audiences, and\nreconstructing one’s centeredness accordingly; and, it means that it is as “pieces” within the\n“technosphere” that we create fractal pedagogical hierarchies. These practices are part of\nlistening to the center.\n\nWhat will happen once one ruler selects his successor is that we will see relations reduced to\nsovereign-to-sovereign ones, without the mediation of a whole conglomerate of shifting and\nunaccountable agencies. The reduction of all relationships to such formalized ones: ruler to ruler,\nruler to delegate, delegate to delegate, ultimately including everyone in an ordered way—that is\nthe way out of liberalism, on the international as well as national level. As terrifying as it may\nsound to some, such an order in fact expects the most of its people, wherever they are situated\nwithin hierarchies. What is absolutely forbidden under such an order is directing violent\ncentralization toward the authorities—and that target is the source of all violent centralizations,\nwhich always, at whatever scale, seek to find and punish a hidden power imagined to lie behind\nthe scenes of the official power.\n\nAuthorities are never opposed as authorities—no one is ever, in\npractice, an anarchist—but as usurped authorities, at which point we enter the realm of the super-\nsovereigns we invoke to do battle against usurping tyrants. If we can’t charge the authorities with\nusurpation, our resentments must be constructed according to the terms of redress and\nremediation constructed by those authorities themselves. If those terms of redress and\nremediation turn out to be applied in an “unjust,” even “absolutely” unjust way, on their own\nterms, it will be recognized that directing resentment toward those institutions or those who staff\nthem cannot possible correct those injustices.\n\nTo assume that it can is to assume that the\ntemporality of resentment is commensurate with the temporality of institutional rectification. With all the means available, one provides feedback to the system, but it is a mark of advanced\ndeferral to acknowledge that the effective recipient of that feedback cannot be anticipated within\nthe feedback itself. Even if we consider the necessity of disobeying an unambiguously immoral\norder, such an act must be presented as a sign of what will eventually come to be regarded as obedience—not to some higher power, but to that very, for the moment shortsighted, power. Leaving testimony for agents of the regime to examine is a repudiation of any instigation of a\nrevolt against the system. This renunciation of the temptation to occupy internal scene of\nrepresentation in rebellion against the tyrant in the name of some super-sovereign is what we can\ncall “donating your resentment to the center.”\n\nMedia and technology are, as Marshall McLuhan noted, extensions of our senses and body. McLuhan seems to be imagining a “natural” body made “artificial,” though, which paradoxically\npresupposes some kind of control center “using” those extensions, as if they were deliberately\ndeveloped as prosthetics. The situation looks different once we consider technology, media and\ncapital as means of generating asymmetrical reciprocity between center and margins. The sign on\nthe scene is itself the first media, and we use it to “keep an eye” on each other, while turning\nourselves into “limbs” ready to restrain anyone interfering with the visual apparatus, and into\nmeasuring rods dividing up portions.\n\nNow that eyes are literally everywhere, each of us can\ntransform surveillance and recording devices into our eyes and ears; now that calculating\nprobabilities of human action has been automated, we can all transform machinic algorithms into\nour brains; we each have our own access to wheels and wings; and so on. Now, instead of\nplugging these observations into an oceanic feeling of global communality, consider what is\ninvolved in coordinating all the “organs” of these bodies, that each of us participates in from our\nrespective positions on the margin. So, when I see something (say, a video making the rounds of\nTwitter), it means something to the extent that one of the “legs” (or wings or wheels) I have\nanthropomorphized out of the technological nerves, bones and muscles I operate within get me\nclose enough to what I see so that my “hands” (e.g., security guards able to stop an appalling\nsituation) can “touch” and “handle” things; or, perhaps, that one of the voices I’ve\nanthropomorphized as an echo or amplification or translation of my own can command those\n“hands” to operate in that way.\n\nIf I want to increase the efficacy of these “motor functions” so\nthat what I see and hear can be more closely integrated into what I say, which in turn contributes\nto my transformation of things happening to me into things I do then I need to think about where\nsuch coordination is already taking place so that I can, because then I can know where to move\nwithin the system. Where seeing, hearing, doing, happening, saying, thinking and knowing are\nall moving in the same way, that’s where the center needs to be, and to some extent already is. The center is the coordination I’m seeking within the circuits of capital, technology and media,\nand every attempt to contribute to greater coordination is in obedience to the imperative of the\ncenter.\n\nI may be wrong at any time, but if I’m wrong, it’s about the transmission and full\nimplications of an imperative that tells me to defer some resentment at been compelled to\ncoordinate, and others can correct and improve my effort. I may imagine I can see and “grasp”\neverything I need to, but my vision and reach is in fact partial relative to projections of my\npower; it’s not that the occupant of the center is all seeing, knowing, doing, and so on (he does\nall that through us)—rather, it is only in attempting to enhance the commands coming from the\ncenter by animating whatever organs within organs respond to my motions that it can even make\nsense to think of increasing my own motor functioning.\n\nNow, I want to conclude this way so that I make it clear that, how, and why anthropomorphics\neliminates humanism; but also to show that originary grammar identifies the always already\nbecoming human that makes it impossible to think of any post- or transhuman project as\nanything other than a series of distributed attempts to declaratively hierarchize commands from\nthe center so that in re-centering those attempts we pose the kinds of questions that open new\nostensive regions. And we can learn to see any utterance in terms of if and how it opens up those\nostensive regions. In the end, a human science needs no more “proof” of anything other than\nwhat people say (in relation to what other people say, have said, might say...).\n\nAll we can say\n(through whatever media) is what the center has us say, and that the center has us say it. You talk\nabout something, and in doing so make a place for that thing; that place, then, as a center, is\nassailed by some, and inhabited by other, interested parties; you invoke some other center to\nconvert the convergence into a sign of the endurance of the thing in its place; your utterances are\nin turn marked by more or less implicit references to that other center; those markings in your\ndiscourse make you a center as they are noted by others; if you can become a center for others\nyou can inhabit the place where you become so and your discourse can become a center for\nyourself; everything you say, then, counts as saying insofar as it is marked by a reliance on the\ncenter becoming invisible by marking the visible, and it is so marked insofar as it makes that\ncenter even less visible because it is a sheer effect of its visible representatives all maintaining\nthe places enabling you say what you are saying and that you are saying it.\n\nWe become more\nhuman, that is, more capable of deferral and constructions of inviolate reality, insofar as less and\nless is said about the center and all of our doings become the articulated representation of the\ncenter, that is at the same time the retrieval of distributed effects of ever more distant centers."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-bit-more-granularity-for-a-cybernetics-of-judaism-and-thirdness",
      "title": "A Bit More Granularity for a Cybernetics of Judaism and Thirdness",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 14, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/a-bit-more-granularity-for-a-cybernetics",
      "content": "There’s an important critique of Israel that I’ve seen circulating for a while and has been detailed in several books (which I haven’t yet read)—it’s a critique I think I would agree with but treat as exactly the opposite of a critique. Here it is: Israel, due to its “supervisory” relation to the Palestinians has been a pioneer in surveillance and policing technologies that are then distributed globally for governance purposes. Israel, then, is at the center of the new surveillance and data-driven (like facial recognition) forms of governance or, if you like, “repression.” This argument, for example, is what lies behind what otherwise might seem the bizarre claim that the IDF trains American police forces—there is mostly likely a lot to this, especially if one considers that if you sell military equipment, you probably have to include in the sale demos and training.\n\nI don’t know for sure, and I don’t know who does know, but I would not be at all surprised to find that Israeli intelligence from the Middle East and beyond plays a critical role in global intelligence gathering networks. And since much of this is due to the Israeli state’s confrontational relation to much of the region it becomes very easy to take the next logical step and say that these conflicts are kept in place precisely in order to maintain Israel’s edge in such governance technology. (This was written before the recent barrage of missiles from Iran intercepted by Israel with some help from its friends but I think it’s easy enough to read that event in these terms.)\n\nThere can be various processes that keep conflicts going, and those who profit from their continuance certainly make their contribution. It’s also the case that inducing or risking minor conflicts might be a way of deflecting a larger conflict or testing the enemy’s readiness and capability—it becomes a means of communication between enemies who are still deterring each other for the time being, a time being that can continue indefinitely. To see a critique of Israel in all this one must revert to an anarchist anthropology, where men are born free and are only in chains due to the rise of inequality or a small minority of enslavers or some other exogeneous cause—but, if such exogenous causes are to be resisted or reversed, wouldn’t the means of opposing inequality or enslavement involve use the of force and all the technologies needed to make force effective?\n\nThe other approach is to take governance as a given, which means, in one way or another, defending the “Big Man revolution” (centered ordinality, primarchy, tributarianism). The center is occupied, the center distributes, the center attracts and must defer resentments, and the means of doing so and acquiring the information needed to do so effectively will change along with the means of interfering with or thwarting the fulfillment of such obligations. An interesting trope of dystopian science fiction is the system that governs too well, so well that you don’t even notice you’re being governed and wouldn’t be able to form the intention to resist.\n\nThat there is some, perhaps the most irreducible, ingredient of residual humanity, to be found in the inextinguishable desire to resist governance, is a non-negotiable component of all liberal thought. _The Forbin Project_ , a very interesting and well-done film representing an AI takeover of global governance made in the early 70s failed to make much of an impact, the reason being, I would assume, aside from having no big stars, that it doesn’t conform to this liberal desire (although I think it tries to). Much of the movie is taken up with attempts by high-level figures to conceal themselves from and resist the AI, and we find out (spoiler alert!) at the end that they were all futile, and obviously and pathetically so. (This is, of course, a problem for the movie—action in which we are encouraged to take an interest has no impact on the plot.) And when the final victory of the AI is made clear at the end, it’s very hard to see how anyone will be worse off.\n\nSo, the idea that we don’t want governance to get too good is deeply engrained, and this resistant desire converges with the threat posed by the maintenance needs of the Stack, reliant upon a high degree of competence, to existing systems of governance that rely upon continually disrupting any stable occupation of the center, of any center. Cities must not be made safe precisely because they so easily could be, rendering redundant vast layers of the state bureaucracy (understand in the broadest sense, to include media, educational institutions, etc.). There is no more important political agenda, indeed, there is no political agenda, other than to counter and neutralize this resistance—it’s also probably the most difficult political project imaginable.\n\nFrom this standpoint, then, Israel is less of a pariah (or hoped-to-be-made so) than a model—and it would also not be surprising if, in fact, it fulfills both roles at different levels of the social order (it’s obviously a model for all those other states interested in its governance technologies). That the Jews _are_ a kind of governance technology resonates deeply with the cybernetics of Judaism I outlined a few posts back and would help to explain much regarding the historical vicissitudes of this “nation of ledgerers.” It also helps to explain the liberal and leftist tendencies in modern, secular Judaism as, first, a kind of revulsion from this very unliberal historical inheritance and, second, as an “unconscious” attempt to find a new way to fulfill the vocation subsequent to the fall of monarchies.\n\nAnd it further reinforces the “solution” to the “Jewish problem” I worked out a while back: the historical responsibility of the Jews is to make governance good, which is to say to advance the practices that make the operations of justice and judgment so attuned to that middle ground between the recrudescence of the vendetta on one side and the attempt to “place on trial” the nomos or originary distribution on the other side that both possibilities fade from historical memory. This is to locate ourselves in a hot spot, but it also gives Jews the best position in which to keep their heads, in every sense of that phrase.\n\n(I am here seemingly at odds with another way of accounting for the widespread international antipathy toward Israel, which is that Israel represents an “outmoded” idea of the nation-state, even the ethno-nation state, which makes it a target of those working to replace the nation-state order with one organized in terms of the Human Rights World Picture. I have some sympathy to that argument, which I have at times nodded to myself, but there’s no real contradiction here since the kind of global governance I’m speaking of here has nothing in common with one based on human rights adjudicated by diplomatic-media-bureaucratic complexes—one that has at any rate no chance of being installed, however much destruction the attempt to do so might cause. So, I think it makes more sense to say that Israel stands at the intersection of opposed directions for global governance.)\n\nDuring the Gaza campaign many have remarked on the inadequacy (to put it mildly) of Israeli propaganda. Israel can present only a very limited victimary narrative, and therefore cannot possibly compete with the absolute victimary narrative produced for the Palestinians. Therefore, Israeli propaganda should not try to compete and should probably cease altogether, Just give military briefings, contradict false claims from the enemy and its supporters, and demonstrate technological and organizational capacities in verifiable ways—that is, “public diplomacy” should just be a simplified version of the inter-state communications Israel is surely already providing to allies and neutrals.\n\nSay only what you can do and do everything you say. Such an approach hasn’t been tried in a while and, maybe, like a deflationary approach to currency, it will reset informational values, not only for this conflict. Make military and political operations advertisements for your equipment and intelligence, but without hype—simply demonstrations of what everything can do. Emphasize innovations made in the course of action, in the face of exigencies—rewrite the book on urban warfare. Make yourself as indispensable to as many governing entities as you possibly can.\n\nWe see discussions about the percentage of this or that nation’s budget that goes to defense spending, but 100% of every nation’s budget should go to defense spending, properly understood as the creation and maintenance of teams dedicated to ensuring, first, the covering of the threshold of the vendetta from below and the prevention of antinomic agencies (anti-nomos, bringing charges and accusations that can only be remedied through the removal of the accused from the originary distribution, i.e., their excision as property owners and authorities) above and “occupying” the justice system; and, second, the insertion of the nation’s forces into some international (imperial) system of forces.\n\nIsrael might be in a “privileged” position here as well, as a perpetually mobilized country that is simultaneously advanced technologically and constantly acquiring new data regarding technological and human capabilities and challenges. At some point, Israel would probably be able to make explicit, and then increasingly explicit, the exact modes of data exchange that would convert its intelligence system into practices of shared governance across the region and beyond. Specific redirections of military capability, specific transformations in public rhetoric, specific modifications of education and media systems, and so on, would trigger specific forms of reciprocity across governing institutions, understood in a broad sense.\n\nWe could then see the precise boundary between deterrence and reprisal, on one side, and collaboration on the other side—signs indicating the initiation of hostilities could be seen to become signs indicating the initiation of some project in shared governance, and all this shown on something like a big ticker. A prediction market might be established accordingly, in which even those betting on war would contribute to peace by detecting interference with the conversion of retaliatory tendencies into modes of deferral. Think about this passage from a [recent post](https://ericjacobus.com/2024/03/31/the-roba-chip-a-pi-sized-ai-model/) by Eric Jacobus:\n\n_There’s no real difference between Violence and Language. They’re just different kinds of recursion. ROBA is more of a solid state that can be wielded, while language is more of a liquid state in a petrie dish that can be divided, analyzed, and remixed. The Unoptimized Strategy is how to keep recursion in its linguistic state even when it is actively creating world-destroying technologies like iron, gunpowder, nuclear fission, and now AI._\n\nIn my understanding, this means that the only difference between violence and language is that language is violence before it has actualized, and, as merely potential, if imminent, violence, language suspends the time of violence, exposing and thereby deferring more of it potential and imminent forms. A difference both infinitesimal and infinite. A Jewish cybernetics would immanentize this oscillation of infinitesimal and infinite. In this way a Jewish cybernetics would reiterate what I see as a more fundamental Jewish oscillation: that between a fully political engagement with resentful enemies fitting a very specific profile in opposition to governance technologies (deriving from the origin of Judaism in the covenant with an earthly lord), on the one hand, and the embodiment of an ever-present threat of excessive injustice, issuing in either exile or extermination, as testimony to the eternal creator Name, on the other.\n\nThe biggest challenge for Israel here in becoming, essentially, a nation as mode of data currency would be in adopting the [new model of power](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/a-new-model-of-power) involved in becoming a trusted arbiter. Israel is too small, too mistrusted, with too many enemies and demands on its resources to take on such a role right now—it’s still stuck playing the game which, perhaps more and more people will come to realize doesn’t really work, of subverting first one side then another side, so as to weaken all possible adversaries. Sooner or later, you end up hardening a genuine adversary.\n\nBut maybe it would be possible to start with faraway conflicts, where there is little reason to be hostile to Israel, and maybe where Israel already engages in benign forms of cooperation. It’s possible to look ahead to a situation where Israel’s intelligence capabilities and publicly demonstrated capacity for discernment and judgment makes it a trusted arbiter, perhaps first of all in more subtle or secretive ways. All that really matters is intelligence—defense is intelligence, as weapons need to be geared to their most likely uses—and whoever finds the most inventive ways of gathering, analyzing and using intelligence will occupy the center or, more likely, given the necessary division of labor in such things, being the most indispensable servant of whoever occupies the center.\n\nAnd the best way of gathering intelligence will not be the blackmail and compromat that contemporary whistleblowers are most often focused on, even if such operations certainly bring benefits—you can twist an arm here and there, but that won’t tell you much about the intentions of those who have their own “dirt,” probably on you. The most important intelligence for those aiming at singularized succession in perpetuity right now would be the kind that enables you to build cases, make law, and install the judicial functionaries to ensure it stays law—the kind of law, for example, that would make it possible to sue someone into oblivion for calling you a “racist” without having a thoroughly and clearly worked out, and consistently deployed usage, of “racism” and “racism,” with an explanation, capable of withstanding the most expert scrutiny, of how that usage applies to your specific case.\n\n(The same goes for charges of “antisemitism,” which should be replaced by building cases against instances of defamation and incitement that could stand up in court.) It’s easy enough to see the implications of having at hand the history of the uses of these and related terms, the range of application of defamation, incitement and other laws, the backgrounds and personal histories of various operatives and media outlets, and, perhaps most importantly, the kinds of doctrines and dispositions of legal professionals that would make them most reliable creators and protectors of such a system. And who better to take the lead than American Jewish professionals, hardened by preliminary struggles against those who defame and incite violence against Jews by claiming they control US and world governance, among other dastardly deeds?\n\nThis kind of Jewish cybernetics will land Israel in a position familiar to Jews: useful to governments and therefore hated by at least large numbers of “the people.” And by extension it will place Jews in the same position, as one thing made clear by post-October 7 developments is that the boundary between “Zionist” and “Jew” is thin and permeable—only Jews who essentially act as informants, like the Talmud understanders of the Middle Ages, will have a chance at escaping tarring, and such job openings are inherently limited. But the option, tried for over a century now by leftist and liberal Jews, of pandering to one mob or another, is now closed off.\n\nContributing to transparent governance in which lines of succession are announced and preserved, is all that’s left. At least Jew-hatred might then be concentrated on a single point, with the possibility of attenuation over time as governance genuinely becomes good. This is best for a nation of ledgerers, to serve to surface and counter the recrudescence of the vendetta, including the mode conducted through the commandeering of the juridical, i.e., revolution."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-cybernetics-of-judaism",
      "title": "A Cybernetics of Judaism",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 12, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/a-cybernetics-of-judaism",
      "content": "A word on the title—“cybernetics” is essentially the same word as “governance,” and since I want to reject philosophically implicated terms like “theology” and “anthropology” and foreground the centrality of governance in constituting the human, I thought to take advantage of the centrality of “cybernetics” to technological displacements of philosophy. Judaism is intrinsically and ambivalently tied to governance, and since there are already countless books on the Jewish relation to God, to man, to law, to morality, etc., I will offer a rethinking of Judaism along governance and cybernetic lines—which is already implicit in the centrality of law and covenant to Judaism.\n\nI’m following up on my argument for understanding Judaism as a [continually renewed title deed](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-longest-most-convoluted-revised) with ever increasingly complicated terms, conditions and provisos. It’s a kind of doubled title deed—taking on board Bernard Lamborelle’s assertion that Abraham’s covenant was actually made with an earthly lord, some near eastern emperor, I also see Judaism in the erasure but also preservation of that memory as the “lord” is, through a series of conquests and exiles, elevated into a deity standing above all earthly lords, with the only trace of the original covenant being the attachment to a particular territory. I won’t review the entire argument here but will simply remind you of the clear historic link between the Jewish covenant with God and near eastern covenants between imperial and vassal states.\n\nSo, the Jews were (self) created as a people serving imperial interests, as is already implicit in the self-titling as a “nation of priests”—priests serve a king. No reader of the Hebrew Bible can fail to notice how pervasive this theme is—Abraham’s encounters with Pharoah and Abimelech; Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt; Moses’s origins in the royal family, Mordechai’s (not so clear) role in the Book of Esther, Ezra’s mission to re-establish the Jews, etc. There is no contradiction between the continuity of these affiliations with power, which continued up into modern times, on the one hand, and the assertion of the Jews as a people who dwell alone, in a special relation to God, their ultimate protector.\n\nServing as high level bureaucrats is a precarious business, as hostility is easily directed towards such intermediaries, and if the Pharoah confers his favors upon one generation the next generation may confront a Pharoah who knows them not. Only the delegation from God remains in the passages from regime to regime. Ancient Jewish history (or legend, if you prefer) is filled with stories of rulers who turned their face away from the Jews, along with the occasional ruler who saved them. Oppression, resistance and salvation from God is certainly a prevalent theme, as a reading of the Passover Haggadah will confirm.\n\nThis framing continues through modern times, as the inclination is to tell Jewish history as a series of welcomes and betrayals by one ruler or nation after another. Judaism has many differences from Christianity, but one critical one is Judaism’s willingness to express resentment toward all these oppressive rulers and preserve the memory of persecutions. And there has always been a theology to this narrative form, as the persecutions are taken to be a scourging of the Jews, punishment for their sins—even modern Zionism, which rejected traditional theological frameworks, had in some of its most influential strands a similar view of Jewish persecution as corresponding to and in some accounts caused by deformations in Jewish social and economic development.\n\nMy proposal is that this narrative approach be furthered and deepened. Jews should retain all the memories and all the resentments towards their persecutors while also insisting that all the persecutions were God’s punishment, chastisements for us to learn from (we can retain the resentments because the teaching was from God, not his instruments). Punishments for what? Here I will depart from Jewish tradition, which sees the punishment as directed at deviations from God’s laws, in favor of a cybernetics that focuses on the ways Jews have managed our affairs as managers of others’ affairs. A nation of priests became a nation of scribes which means a nation of ledgerers—one way or another, we find ourselves keeping the books and managing the transactions of the powerful.\n\nA very risky business. Traditional Judaism and modern Jewishness alike have had very good reasons for avoiding this lightning rod, in favor of victimary narratives that in modern times became fantasies of joining with the oppressed in revolution. The existence of the State of Israel was intended to short circuit such narratives, and to some extent it has done so. The current spillover of the Israel-Gaza war into American politics, which has figures like Bill Ackman (haunted, perhaps, by the possible fate of his wife had she been in her. homeland somewhere down south on October 7) fairly nakedly asserting something we’d have to call “Jewish power” makes some rethinking especially urgent. Models for Jewish relations to governance, a Jewish cybernetics, are essential, and should, assuming Israel continues to become the center of Jewish life, eventually inform and even revise Jewish law and ritual.\n\nThe initial step toward a Jewish cybernetics is to counter-balance the “evil” rulers with “good” ones, even if only hypothetically. Symbiotic relations between Jews and rulers must become as ingrained in the “grammar” of Judaism as persecutory, doomed ones are now. For one thing, that would make Jews a much brighter light to the nations, a light needed now more than ever when solutions advanced to every problem include all possibilities but that of making governance good, or even normal. If we sin, it is in obscuring succession relations, in touting outside options, in intensifying the hold of the outside spread on chains of command.\n\nThis doesn’t change the fact that the Jew’s primarily relation is to God (i.e., the signifying center)—God’s voice is whatever tells us when and how to defer violence, or when and how we are failing to do so. When Jews undergo persecution we should assume that part of it is in our failure, to some degree, to defer violence. And we should consider and contemplate that part, even if it is painful to do so. Jews are more than anyone else responsible for deferring violence—therein are we “chosen,” at first by some king who thought someone who came to be called “Abraham” was best suited to manage some land in the Middle East, but subsequently by our own ongoing role as mediators between power and its subjects.\n\nThis is the significance of Israel, which is filled with “dirty,” this-worldly” agency through and through, from the initial Zionist settlements, to the further legitimation and defense of those settlements, to settling more in response to attacks on those settlements, etc.—it is an exemplary platform from which try out modes of deferral: part of the hatred of contemporary Israel (which can really be a wonder to behold) is that Israel displays the irreducibility of power, of the intrinsic limitations of all the modern discourses grounded in rights in order to fill imperative gaps with authorized complainants. Jews and Judaism are never outside of the give and take of power exchanges, acquiring power to supplement insecurity and being made insecure in new ways by the contingency of that power and therefore needing to invent deferral over and over.\n\nNeedless to say, Jews fail in this mediating task regularly; about as often, probably, as humans in general fail at the many things they attempt. But it’s a position from which we can’t extricate ourselves, and, in fact, any attempt to do so fastens us even more firmly. This is also the voice of God.\n\nThe voice of God is also in mimesis and its resentments, and I don’t think contemporary Jews, even observant ones, need to shy away from the Biblical scholarship I have been alluding to here (and in my aforementioned post), which show fairly decisively how derivative the Hebrew scriptures are—from, as already mentioned, vassal treaties, but also ancient Babylonian and Egyptian sources and no doubt from Greek philosophical, mythical and poetic sources as well; and this to be factored in with later mimetic rivalries with the Roman empire. Let’s say none of the Hebrew scriptures are “original,” “authentic” documents of the true history of a real people; let’s posit the most unflattering claim, that “Judaism” begins with some elite Judeans returned to Judea by Cyrus to manage that territory (the original Abraham?), and the scriptures written afterward are a hodgepodge of plagiarisms and justifications for this or that section of the ruling elite (imposed, then, upon some native population).\n\nAt least some of contemporary scholarship documenting this “plagiarism” is either written or received with a triumphant debunking air which seems to me itself enslaved to longstanding reverence for the sacrality of scripture—as if once the scriptures have been completely saturated with the literary productions of the surrounding nations we will finally be free of its grip and, not incidentally, for some, we will have confirmation of various other things we kind of assumed about the Jews all along. But this complete saturation will still leave the Hebrew scriptures a qualitatively different text, a series of revisions animated by an unyielding resentment toward the deification of any human and the human sacrifice such deification inevitably entails.\n\nThis is an Axial Age inheritance still be reckoned with, even if transforming Axial Age assumptions and institutions involves moving beyond the “naked human” towards forms of “investiture” in some way we can’t quite imagine yet. Jews will continue to be markers of some unfinished business (there are still contested borders, still irreconcilable interests, still resentments intractable before the human rights world view…) here and taking on the role I’m attributing to scripture here of imitating with a difference so as to display before “the Nations” the evasiveness and ultimate violence of their representational political categories is a worthy task for a more mature Israeli culture.\n\nNor, for that matter, need we be concerned about whether we are what might be called “Theseus Jews,” which is to say the result of a process of the Judeans and then Jews exiting and Gentiles entering the Jewish community such that not a single trace of, say, the inhabitants of Judea circa 250 BC remains—this process of movement, replacement and revivification via transmission of the covenant will itself track cybernetically the relation between larger sovereignties and whatever roles Jews played in their governance. In fact, I would hypothesize that the minimal role of tragedy in Judaism, along with its consequent privileging of continuity and life, is due the need to revise earlier stories that might, in fact, have led to a (tragic) dead end in such a way as to maintain and create lineages that weren’t exactly “natural”—with the most obvious example being the revision of the binding of Isaac story from an original version in which Isaac is slaughtered to one in which God restrains Abraham, presumably to create a line from Abraham to Jacob (originally in another storyline altogether) and thereby two branches of “Israel.”\n\nThe conversion of a fairly routine land deal into a covenant with the creator of the universe, i.e., the landlord of everything, is an achievement and responsibility not be abandoned (if it could be abandoned). It requires a cadre of elites continuous across several empires, a scribal class mimetically reworking legendary, ritual and legislative material, issuing in the narrative framework posing the possibility of a conflict between the ruler and that elite which is in turn singularized in the persecution of an exemplary member of the elite associated with the people, producing a highly replicable form of martyrdom and therefore sacrality.\n\nThis entire configuration is to be rendered cybernetic, with Jews specializing in the detection of fractures across rulers, auxiliary elites and larger popular groupings—surfacing the training materials, we might say. Direct attacks on Jews must be confronted head-on, while beyond that a commitment to strengthening the juridical order and eschewing all mob rule is to be installed—indeed, part of the purpose of directly confronting attacks on Jews is to elicit data regarding the formation of vendetta-based mobs, of which vendettas against Jews tend to be leading indicators.\n\nNone of this implies any immediate changes in Jewish liturgy or ritual that I can think of, but Jewish cybernetics could contribute to transforming Jewish law into a body of law suited to governance on the contemporary technoscene. Discussions of Jewish law (Halacha) have always been international, with opinions circulating around the world even going back to the Middle Ages—the internet further facilitates these circulations of rulings, and, while no expert, it’s hard to see why “contributes to good governance” couldn’t readily be integrated as a criterion into Rabbinic decision making. Perhaps bringing speculation regarding Messianic conditions and possibilities would help.\n\nSuch speculations have remained merely speculative, focused on questions like whether an increase in sin (in Israel, in the world) or virtue is more likely to solicit his arrival. But maybe the one who will turn out to have been the Messiah will be the one who set in place a chain of succession that remained intact, in which case Jewish law could take an interest in creating the broader institutional, intellectual and pedagogical conditions that might contribute to the emergence of such an individual. This would be a way of acknowledging the at one time heretical “activism” of the Zionist movement while accepting the possibility of and need to develop concepts such as “Messiah” with greater precision.\n\nThe first person designated as “Messiah” was apparently the Persian monarch Cyrus, who allowed the Jews (probably those elites who had been carried off in the Babylonian exile) to return to and govern Israel. Maybe the question of whether the Messiah even has to be Jewish, or whether the concept can become plural rather than singular, can be opened. “Messiah” can be something like a measuring rod for the state of governance, a measuring rod in whose use Jews might specialize but which could be useful to anyone.\n\nOne very specific issue where a Jewish cybernetics could weigh in with some effect is the undoing of the post-Nuremberg international legal order which privileges the rights of the individual over the sovereignty of states thereby legitimating all kinds of interventions. Of course, this human rights principle is only honored when it suits the interests of powerful states but if powerful states are to intervene in other territories they should give better reasons than preventing war crimes, human rights violations, etc.—it should have something to do with preventing misgovernance in one territory from spilling over into others.\n\nEven more important, the “human rights worldview” is the basis for media-generated frenzies, both domestic and international, and was an important driver in the installation of civil rights law. This juridical order ultimately derives, or at least credibly refers back to, the Axial Age construct of the sacrality of the individual, positing God as the super-sovereign over the ancient empires. So, the Jews are clearly present and function as a kind of knot holding these orders together (which is why as resentment of these orders intensifies so do fantasies of disappearing the Jews). It is fitting, then, that Jews contribute to their overcoming by placing the sacrality of the individual (which should itself perhaps undergo translation into something like a hypothesis regarding the interoperability of all beings) in the imperative gap, where the various ways of fulfilling a command present themselves as an event unfolds and a kind of correction towards the enactment of the command best enabling singular succession is always possible.\n\nRather than calling upon some fantasized outside force to right wrongs within an imperial setting, the possibility of adding increments of agency within the system becomes the “check” on power. There are existing Jewish traditions (like Joseph helping save Egypt from famine) that can be mobilized here and, more generally, this approach follows from the insistence on preserving remembrance and gratitude toward good rulers along with resentment toward bad ones and commemoration of their victims. Maybe bad rulers can even be made a bit better. The world attributes a lot of agency to Jews, often inflated to the point where abolishing it would heal the world but rather than simply denying it and trying to shuffle it around we can claim it within a recognizable set of reference points and exercise it transparently. It’s better to be obnoxious than appear to be hiding.\n\nI don’t know how interesting any of this will be to my fellow Jews, but I would like these reflections to resonate because one thing on which I think we will have broad agreement is on the need to rethink the Jewish position in the world, which can’t help but involve a rethinking of Judaism. The post-WWII moratorium on publicly expressed Jew-hatred in the West has been fraying for some time, albeit mostly on the margins (where such expressions have long been allowed, within some limits, by minorities deemed to have no guilt for the Holocaust), but I think is now entering a period of dissolution. In other words, overt resentment toward Jews is likely to return to what we might call “normal historical levels.”\n\nIn the US, I certainly don’t think things will come anywhere near legal measures against Jews (much less expulsion or mass murder), which, under the US Constitution, would be extremely difficult to manage. (I’m leaving out of consideration the implications of a more drastic political breakdown, the results of which are impossible to predict in a meaningful way.) But I certainly think that people will feel freer to point out where they think Jews are deploying power in ways that conflict with the interests of others and in general charges of antisemitism will carry less and less weight. (And this might coincide with more “parrhesia” by and towards all recognizable groups.\n\n(It’s also worth mentioning that anyone who pokes around a bit behind the scenes will find “the Jews” appear as a convenient placeholder explanation on occasion. (Of course no one is obliged to give an inch to cultists who think they have an archaic right to interrogate Jews.))) Sometimes they will be right, sometimes wrong, but either way Jews will themselves have to get into the habit of seeing themselves as acting with power—and perhaps we’ll get better at identifying exactly when it makes sense to speak of “Jewish power,” and maybe conflicting forms of Jewish power, when the power of Jews fuses with power exercised by other groups, institutions, etc.\n\nThe kind of thinking I’m proposing here can help Jews think through these new conditions, with a focus on enhancing the coherence and consistency of power and the strengthening and extension of juridical orders—which goes against the grain of many (not all) uses of Jewish power since emancipation. Jews were set free in the West just as some of the new mediating and most subversive institutions—mass media, mass political, especially revolutionary, parties, mass education, entertainment, etc.—were taking hold and the newly emancipated and untethered Jews were well positioned to rush into them. Now those institutions seem to be reaching their limits and showing very significant signs of decay while the sole remaining Jewish diaspora population of any significance (that of the US) is undergoing both shrinkage and a kind of purge of its assimilatory left wing, so it might be possible to create more pro-social Jewish professional and commercial classes.\n\nIsrael, meanwhile, has long been on the side of order, closely aligned with European countries like Hungary and supported by populist right-wing politicians and parties throughout the West. Israel has no interest in seeing the Islamic subversion of Western countries, and represents the first line of resistance to victimary resentments laundered through the Palestinians, ultimately to subvert the US-led order (an order which needs substantial rebuilding but not subversion, which it does enough of itself). It might then become possible to generate new forms of thick-skinned Jewish responsibility for the world—then we could speak of Jewish cybernetics.\n\nUltimately, forms of hostility to Jews tip over into orgies of irresponsibility, as all agency is vacated to make space for Jewish machinations, creating villains like those uncannily represented in Hebrew scripture, like Haman in the Book of Esther, so Jewish cybernetics can counter this by becoming a kind of laboratory of responsibility and increments and delegations of agency.\n\nA final word on a feature of my discussion here that will seem anomalous, even outrageous, to some—my minimizing of the concept of the nation, which, with very good reason, is often seen to originate with the formation of the people represented in the Hebrew Bible. I seem to be replacing the Jewish nation with something like the Jewish auxiliary caste, which further raises questions about how the modern nation of Israel (also often seen as an exemplary form of nationalism and even “ethno-nationalism”) can serve as the center of Jewish life. I would say I’m raising questions less about Israel than about the nation and nationality, which seems to me very fragile as a concept.\n\nNations are in the first instance little empires, composed of a centralized government—first of all a monarch—who has suppressed tribes and the honor system governing their relations and replaced them with a system of justice, however rudimentary. Nations appear as such against the background of larger empires and take on their shape and mythology in defending their independence from those larger empires. In the end, though, they function within those empires, taking on some kind of “specialty” more or less formally integrated into it. The defense of the nation is therefore a defense of that specialized role and the relative monopoly it represents, and that’s something that may or may not be worth defending.\n\nI would also mention that the Jewish people has, at least from the Babylonian exile, always maintained a substantial diasporic population (I don’t know what the numbers are for what is perhaps the most “nationalistic” Judaic formation of the ancient world, the Hasmonean regime, but there were large Jewish populations in Alexandria and elsewhere at the time) up until this day, of course. If the American Jewish population were to shrink through assimilation and migration to Israel so that the Jewish population of Israel were to become, say, 80% or more of world Jewry, that would be the anomaly. But in this as well the Jews are only exemplary and not unique, as many if not most major and many minor nations have substantial diasporas and, therefore, most “successful” nations (as at least mini-empires) host diasporic populations themselves, often offering “specialized” services.\n\nThis is also part of the nation, nationality and nationalism. An Israel specializing in various high-tech industries, weapons production, intelligence gathering, distinctive forms of entertainment and media, etc., would be as “nationalistic” as any other nation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-new-model-of-power",
      "title": "A New Model of Power",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 05, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/a-new-model-of-power",
      "content": "My thinking about the centrality and fragility of the juridical causes me to revise my understanding of power as “centered ordinality.” Power is ordered through imperatives, command and obedience within a team organized around some shared purpose, but that observation always leaves open the question of the form of the imperative (the crafting of imperatives, we could say) as well as the imperative gap, or the difference between the imperative issued and the imperative obeyed. The imperative must be deemed to be the same across this distance, but through some ritual of succession, which itself then defines power. Liberalism fills the imperative gap with what I have called “supersovereignties,” drawn ultimately from the disciplines, centered in law but reaching across all the media, social scientific and even physical scientific disciplines needed to determine the application of law.\n\nThe gathering of these concepts into a new model of power confronts the supersovereignties even more directly by sharing its centering of the law. For liberalism, power derives from the leveraging of rights claims presumably constitutive of the legitimacy of the state itself—that makes it a kind of succession ritual itself, insofar as it’s a way for power to be transferred from one agency of debt enforcement/forgiveness to another. As is always the case with liberalism, it’s a succession ritual that must disavow itself. Nevertheless, liberal transfers of power must take place through judgments, in claims against itself and often other parties that the state empowers.\n\nThis, I would now say, is because all power is exercised through judgments: you have power insofar as, and to the degree that, contending parties bring their grievances, counter-grievances and defenses to you rather than resort or revert to the vendetta. To govern is to enmesh all of the order that answers to you in your judgments to the point where the very anticipation of those judgments becomes the ordering “grammar.” This is the conversion of resentment into donations to the center, or originary “debt servicing.”\n\nIt's easy to counter this claim with the contention that power flows from conquest, and I have and would continue to contend that but would introduce the following question: is conquest ever “naked”? Is there ever a conquest, however brutal and, from external standpoints, unwarranted, that is not presented as a bringing of justice to the conquered territory and people—as recompense for some previous offense or aggression, as an intervention to settle some dispute and thereby establish one’s authority, as the assumption of a grant of territory or authority by an originary distributor, or in some other way? We’d have to go back to very minimal levels of juridical order, I think, to find “naked” conquest.\n\nI doubt whether empire can be conceived of without this assumption of occupying or being authorized by the highest seat of justice. What has helped me arrive at this conclusion is witnessing the stupid, vicious and counter-productive policies the US has come to pursue towards both Russia and China. It occurred to me early on in the Russia-Ukraine war that America’s power would have best been used, and thereby vastly increased, by offering its services as an honest broker (an approach it seems to me likely a President Trump would have pursued). Instead, the US took the path of mindless sabotage, in an attempt to “weaken” Russia and, of course, wreck who knows how many millions of lives.\n\nThe US seems to know no other way at this point than to mimic the sabotage Veblen and, more recently, Bichler and Nitzan attribute to capitalism. Meanwhile, China has seized the opening left by this pathological behavior and inserted itself into the Middle East as a potential mediator, a role it is far less fit to play than the US, which contributed considerably to creating the current configuration of the region, but being able to behave normally might compensate for its alienness to the various actors. What anti-colonialist critics have often taken to be imperial meddling in and manipulation of native disputes is probably a result of such exercises in setting oneself up in judgment—if the conflicts themselves are often stirred up or inflamed by the would-be imperial power that merely proves how indispensable this move is in asserting power.\n\nI am now adding a few words written in early November, to take into account the Hamas massacres of October 7, and the subsequent Israeli war on Hamas. This provides an interesting and difficult case, both for the exercise of power by the Israelis in their little empire and by the US in its global one. Israel has framed its military goal as the elimination of Hamas, which we’d also have to assume means establishing conditions wherein a similar successor organization cannot emerge. So, it’s not a question of judgment in the sense of punishing the criminal but, rather, of eliminating a threat. In that case there is maybe something technical but also something ritual in the war: a restoring of a previous distribution, or nomos.\n\nPerhaps we could think of this as the military and political equivalent of the death penalty; if it’s framed more as self-defense, including the long-term sense of anticipatory self-defense, then Israel would be presenting itself as a party in the dispute claiming rights implicitly meant to be judged by others, with the only imaginable judgment and enforcement institution being larger imperial entities, with extremely unpredictable and diffuse agencies. Should the US, then, here as well, find some way to offer itself as the honest broker? It would be impossible not to pre-judge the October 7 massacre as an especially egregious crime, one which radically calls into the question the standing of its perpetrators.\n\nBut that would just mean that the “brokerage” shifts in determining the standing of the respective actors, with the framing of the event reduced to the how of the elimination of Hamas, in which various actors, including those supporting Hamas in various ways, are stood in some form of judgment. Acting as an advocate for non-combatants is a legitimate role for such an arbiter, which would entail setting terms and conditions for determining who they are and what kind of room for advocacy the imperative to eliminate Hamas allows or demands (and before which implicit or explicit forum, etc.). Such advocacy, conducted within the terms set by Hamas _delenda est_ would, I think considerably advance the imperial power of the US.\n\nThe model is, then, equally effective and comprehensive here, and we can start to see some of the complexities it might entail. (The problems of evidence gathering, assessing and measuring in real time, in ways incommensurable with an actual court case, will have to be considered as well—this is also a question of the generation of norms.)\n\nJudgment must be enforced, but it’s also the case that issuing widely accepted judgments might be a way of acquiring that enforcement capacity. It’s not hard to imagine that the initial Big Man was simply a respected figure others came to in order to settle disputes, who eventually had to seize the center with the aid of those who wanted disputes settled against those who didn’t. All just interventions in the social order (“politics”) follows this model. (What doesn’t fit this model is the more ritual distribution of largesse as patronage. Which is most of what contemporary governments do.) The model, further, can be applied to more individualized cases, with regard to the pedagogical dimension of everyday life, in which I include the pastoral practices of clergy and the managerial responsibility of bosses.\n\nIn other words, there’s a hypothesis regarding leadership here, which proposes that you exercise pedagogical power by making explicit the disputes “within” an individual, or between successive iterations or selvings of that individual and institute habits to settle them. There is also a model of reciprocity implicit here, insofar as the capacity to exercise judgment involves not only the ability to listen to others (take in testimony) but to entertain appeals and submit to the judgment of others, even humbly, when they come without enforcement capacity from those one is accustomed to judge. You want to take all these models of judgment in so as to refine your own practices and quell your own resentments.\n\nIt follows that it is best to think about succession rituals as exercises in judgment, but also in displaying that which stands behind any judgment, which is the founding nomos of the order (originary distribution). To embody power is to select your successor—if you’re not selecting your successor, your power is conditioned on the approval of those who will. Once hereditary succession is ruled out as the default option (while remaining as an option), the process of selecting a successor entails and, really, constitutes and defines, the entire social order. All institutions are organized so as to produce candidates.\n\nOne who is publicly selected as the successor now might be replaced by another, for reasons, themselves ritually embodied, that would also be public. (I’m briefly recalling arguments I’ve made one many other occasions.) It’s easiest to think of this on the model of kingship, but we can’t rule out very different forms of governance. Perhaps there won’t always be a single state—but, we could say that however power is distributed, there will be disputes within and across institutions, and with the decline in contemporary state forms (which will decline or be dramatically transformed) venues for receiving “wise” judgment regarding those disputes will be in demand—the juridical will be found to be irreducible, again and again, with each new technoscenic articulation of pedagogical platforms.\n\nThere might be many firms offering judgments, perhaps specialized across separate fields, but I would hypothesize the emergence and perhaps continual re-emergence of a centralized data security firm that attains a temporary monopoly on treating data for purposes of judgment. That firm will exercise the closest thing to what we currently call “sovereignty.”\n\nJudgment can be rooted in the ritual order or originary distribution by being conceptualized as the realm of debt enforcement and forgiveness. Even in the most mundane cases, whether or how much to, say, punish a shoplifter, can be illuminated in this light: the transgression incurs a debt to the social order and the best way to measure, extract payment for, or forgive that debt is among the most serious kinds of conversations we can have. How do we weigh what the criminal has done with what has happened to him—clearly, this can’t be reduced to a numerical weight; rather, it’s a question of “measuring” the damage done to the originary distribution and the threshold below which the vendetta is triggered.\n\nRight now, the relation between debt issuance (the central bank) and debt enforcement (ultimately, the security and intelligence agencies) results in the outside spread provided by the bank imposing strict limitations on the options available with the governing institutions—no outside option is allowed, of course, but what is going to count as an outside option is precisely the ongoing decision-making process the security and intelligence agencies are always making. The official rotations in power, where decisions about succession, while still relying heavily upon the input of the most capable and ensconced of the office holders, are strictly constrained, function to calibrate movements along the continuum between enforcement and forgiveness.\n\nUnder these conditions certain exchanges are beyond the reach of judgment, and, therefore, so are all exchanges downstream of those. To put it crudely, neither the central banks nor the security/intelligence agencies can be put in the dock even if, very rarely, a member of either group might be singled out for public opprobrium and even penalties (it seems to me you could count the number of such instances on one hand). But, even on the model I’m offering here, would that not always be the case? After all, the originary distribution can’t be undone or restarted, and any attempt to do so will simply set in motion generations of vendettas.\n\nBut there’s no reason any member of the highest governing bodies, even the head of the data security firm selecting his successor as hypothesized above, cannot be brought within the scope of judgment. I think it must be a willing submission, in which, for the period of judgment, the governor delegates to another the right to set succession, and such judgment must be taken to be somewhat extraordinary, establishing very precisely who might have claims and standing in this case. This might be something like a current prime minister calling for new elections, precisely in order to confirm his mandate. Perhaps pre-emptive rituals of judgment are incorporated into succession rituals, like the festivals of medieval Europe when power relations are temporarily reversed: an orderly process of advancing claims before a highly skeptical tribunal might be instituted.\n\nThis might take the form of the kind of “futures” market I’ve been examining in some recent posts, in which bets are made on a final judgment, even if no immediate consequences follow from it. The only way of jumping into (usurping) the line of succession would be through better sampling, and such trials and contests would provide data that the current leader could use to determine whether to keep or change course as well as to initiate potential fork-offs.\n\nIt's good to think through such problems now in part because they help us think through the more immediate problem of producing an outside option that can subject the outside spread to judgment. Here, I don’t have much new to say right now. The only moves that can be made here is to reform and/or replace the existing security/intelligence agencies by infiltrating the disciplines they must ultimately depend on—even the rogue-est political police has to know a bit about what’s going on, and that’s becoming increasingly difficult to follow—more and more of such work will be contracted out, and the contracting out process incentivizes and even subsidizes freelance data gathering among candidates to proceed closer to central intelligence.\n\nThis would in turn redirect significant flows of capital towards investments in institutional maintenance, as these proto-sovereign organizations would need to make inroads in educational and related institutions (this redirection would require and stimulate inroads within finance). This means all the disciplines, however they might be re-organized—a translation of Homer might be as pertinent as the development of advanced AI-controlled surveillance. No one needs to tell me how difficult this would be, but I also don’t think anyone can propose a plausible alternative in taking on systematic capitalist-liberal sabotage.\n\nBut the prospects of advance are improved by training our attention on sites of judgment within the reformations of the originary distribution, to the point of finding reassemblings of the originary distribution in judgments. If a designated owner of a piece of the originary distribution (most simply, a member of the leadership team conquering some territory allocated a piece of it) must in turn rely upon the services of others he must extend them some kind of credit, which they can then extend, opening a space of exchange, distribution and judgment. (There’s a way of thinking about the High-Low vs. the Middle mechanism here: the High keeps transferring sites of judgment from the middle to its own authority.)\n\nThis is the study of history, including all its usurpations, which appear as usurpations against the field of an originary distribution interrupted, but as a doing justice upon some other field of distribution. The best studies of history will be those that frame and propose possible settlements of those differends, which it is the vocation of the literary arts in particular to reveal."
    },
    {
      "slug": "back-to-grammar",
      "title": "Back to Grammar",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 15, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/back-to-grammar",
      "content": "I’m probably one of maybe a few dozen people who remembers Louis Althusser’s critique of “historicism” in Marxism—what Althusser was targeting (as a way, probably, of gaining some distance from Stalinism) was literary and cultural theorists like, for example, Lucian Goldman, who lined up specific historical periods or classes with specific historical forms as in, for example, “the rise of the bourgeoisie lead to the emergence of the novel as the dominant literary form.” Althusser was opposing the notion that an element of the “superstructure” was a direct “expression” of some element of the “infrastructure” for a few reasons, one of them being that this approach generated the illusion of uniform progress toward pre-determined and predictable ends.\n\nAlthusser was right, because there is no direct “transmission” of the “content” of one level to the “form” of another, but his critique also led to years of convoluted debates about how, then, to make the Marxist terminology suited to the “late capitalist” reality. I’m reminding and warning myself in particular here, because I’m going to do some layering myself here by introducing the “originary grammar” I developed (not to perfection by any means) in _Anthropomorphics_ into the programming language I’ve been working on in some recent posts and I want this to be thought of more as a stack (an “accidental megastructure,” as Benjamin Bratton calls it) that the “emanation” of one layer from another.\n\nSo, in a kind of rough way, the ternary structure of ritual-juridical-disciplinary does map on top of the grammatical structure of ostensive-imperative-declarative but if we leave it at that we will confuse more than we clarify. What we could say is that ritual is primarily ostensive, with imperative derived from the center and declaratives serving to determine which imperative to obey in particular cases; while the juridical ends up with a imperative, something someone is commanded to do or refrain from doing, and gathers ostensives (“evidence”), the relevance of which to the arrival at an imperative is determined by declaratives; while the disciplinary is the production of new ostensive-imperative orders by attempts to bring previous ostensive imperative events within the domain of the declarative.\n\nUnlike the Marxists of the 60s, who didn’t know where they were within the “mode of production,” we can always situate ourselves within institutions with a particular grammatical stack and particular interfaces between the ritual (problems of succession and commemoration), the juridical and the disciplinary. These interfaces, in turn, are built so as to register imperatives that cross from one institutional space to another, demanding a reconfiguration of the grammatical stack in the receiving institution. So, a shift in the respective options on succession generates an imperative that will find its way into the juridical, simply in the sense that it creates the possibility of new complainants, even qualitatively new kinds of complainants.\n\nWho can act under a given title is perhaps the most fundamental juridical question (who is the “owner” of this item?), and this the question then emerges when succession options are reshuffled. The disciplinary, then, we can see as always already commissioned by either the ritual or juridical, but as a contractor on a field of competing contractors in a market that reaches its perfection but also its closure when all parties concerned want an honest broker and therefore don’t need one. In fact, let’s think about the market as subsumed within the juridical such that conflicts over pricing would always be submittable to adjudication; i.e, the “right price” would be a juridical question.\n\nAnd a juridical question necessarily informed by disciplinary inquiries into the originary nomos and existing conditions of production and circulation. The more both sides gained an understanding of how price disputes would be settled, the more readily they could agree in advance, and hence we’d have the appearance of a “free market” precisely as a result of it being thoroughly embedded in the juridical and disciplinary.\n\nIn introducing originary grammar into the programming equation I want to bring to our attention what I take to be the extremely novel and radical understanding of “agency” in Gans’s derivation of the speech forms in _The Origin of Language_. I work through this in my introduction to the new edition, but am glad to repeat it here. Gans had the problem of showing how a fully fledged language could emerge from an ostensive gesture toward a central object of desire and repulsion. He had to show how the imperative would emerge without someone “wanting” to command someone (because such a desire could not be formulated within an ostensive language), how the interrogative could emerge without someone already “having a question” and how the declarative would emerge without someone having “something to say.”\n\nHere is where the utter subversion of metaphysics, as the assumption that the declarative is the primary linguistic form, lies. For Gans this proceeds through “inappropriateness” followed by a kind of scene-saving extension of “linguistic presence” by a novel enactment of the existing sign. So, an inappropriate ostensive, in which one member of the group “refers” to an object that isn’t there, and which might therefore initiate the very conflict the ostensive gesture has been created to defer, is responded to by a member to whom the ostensive has been directed by retrieving the object. So, the first person issued a command without wanting to or knowing it, and the second person obeyed a command, also without quite wanting to or knowing it, but nevertheless the “command” now exists as a form that can be repeated, in the future by those who know they are doing it.\n\nIt is the desire to maintain the scene, or the terror at having it collapse, that creates meaning here, and metaphysics is (to gesture toward Heidegger) the forgetting that meaning relies on the scenic. Think about the mixture of pain and humiliation, but also excitement and ecstasy, that would suffuse us if we could remember every single learning experience we ever had, and you can imagine what metaphysics protects us from. Without metaphysics, we’d have to remember our learning by creating new scenes that can ritualize them in shared forms. We could say that once we have made our way to the declarative (as a species we wrapped that up 100,000 years ago or so) that form of emergent agency is replaced by a more declarative willing, but I think our thinking will be more penetrating if we think of all agency in these terms, as a kind of stumbling into scenes in which we are rescued by those we simultaneously rescue only to “declare” once we have landed that that was our destination all along. Treating that declaration as deconstructable then makes the difference.\n\nSo let’s say there is always some margin of inappropriateness (or, as I called it a while back in an essay, “mistakenness”) in all of our signs. The mistakenness can be on either side, giver or receiver. And any utterance or sample at a higher layer in the stack is an attempt to remedy while commemorating that mistakenness. Ostensives are always generating imperatives, imperatives are always prolonging themselves into interrogatives and interrogatives are always calling forth what @scenictechnics recently suggested we call the “bidirectional imperative” that issues in the declarative. (The bidirectional imperative follows my own addition to Gans’s derivation of the speech forms—Gans hypothesizes the declarative as in the first instance a “negative ostensive” [noun] articulated with an “operator of interdiction” [verb].\n\nBut the operation of interdiction operates only on the other speaker, the one making a demand prolonging itself into a question, whereas the verb has to be attached to the object referenced in its absence. I thought the ambiguity of the interdiction—the origin of which is unaccounted for in Gans’s analysis—suggested that two imperatives are issued at once, one to the interlocutor to refrain from demanding the object and one to the object itself from, let’s say, the center, channeled through the speaker, to have absented itself from the scene. So, the declarative is then “saying” something like “stop asking for this object which has been removed by powers beyond us from present availability.” The declarative thereby creates “reality” as a space of imperatives beyond our control.)\n\nIf, as I always insist, we are still on the originary scene, which has never formally closed (who could close it?), then we are also still continually (re) assembling declaratives out of ostensives, imperatives and interrogatives—the entire stack of mistakenness. Indeed, the Big Man would have seized the center in just such a “mistaken” manner, in response to a demand for distribution that the existing ritual model was unable to transcend some conflict in order to enact—while the congregants quibbled over some ritual rule, the Big Man just burst onto the scene and told someone to “take it, already,” sensing a potential breakdown the group members were too busy squabbling to notice.\n\nAnd the juridical would emerge along with an imperial extension of chiefdom or sacral kingship, as brokering an arrangement between parties was both more economical than trying to suppress them both—rather than joining one to suppress the other, which just makes one a party to the conflict, an intuition that more power can be gained by making oneself indispensable to both sides would perhaps resolve some confused oscillation between the two sides. And the disciplinary is always pointing to new ostensives to close imperative gaps, situated both within the space of objects and the space of the scene within which the objects must be arranged.\n\nThe earliest sciences were records of what the gods told us about how objects beyond our control work precisely so that we can arrange ourselves in such a way that the gods will keep those objects in their places. Which is to say, showing how kings came in the line of succession from the “metapersons” ruling over us. What might look accidental or arbitrary was really purposefully and willfully done.\n\nI’ve proposed the translation of the ritual/juridical/disciplinary ternary, before and after are the same/the part of the whole is the same/doing and happening are the same as the basis of a transfer idiom that could be worked up (retranslated) into search terms that would enable us to identify the operations of these categories in all “samples.” Each of these sentences in the transfer idiom would be made to represent a particular grammatical stacking, and the ranking of operational imperatives out of a swarm produced by an ostensive field, the ranking of operational interrogatives out of an imperative swarm and the ordering of things within an ordering of the scene (the declarative as bidirectional imperative) are all programming problems.\n\nThe more we think in terms of algorithmic articulations of these virtual linguistic fields the more prepared we will be to “treat” samples from the “wild” in terms of the transfer idiom. If we discard our interiors in exchange for a more rapid and legible exchange with the center as central intelligence, we will be approximating the originary configuration far more closely than if we remain within Axial Age imaginaries. This is how we can recompose ourselves as data of the highest worth capable of attracting equally high value data in return. This fluency across layers in the stack is technoscenic literacy.\n\nFor the transfer idiom to work as search terms we would have to be able to replace the natural semantic prime words in the sentences with words informed by the metalanguage of literacy to extract useful results from searches. So, “before is the same as after” could be replaced by, e.g., “the administration of James Polk shares X data points with the administration of Dwight Eisenhower.” The events or institutions must have juridical designations in common (not necessarily as close as two different presidential administrations from the same country, under the same constitution) and the “data points” in question concern not a more or less arbitrary choice of characteristics but what we would determine to be succession practices of the former that make the latter a successor, however tenuous and distant (determining these things is the very point of the exercise), of the former.\n\nThis might be the starting point of a search, because we take the origin sought by any inquiry to be the origin of the inquiry and some investigator might have good reasons for seeing the origin of the Eisenhower administration in the Polk administration, but the results of one search will lead to a refinement of the search terms and in the end we’d find an origin to our inquiry which might turn out to concern something other than the Eisenhower administration. Think in terms of transdisciplinary scientific practices interested in the nexus of hypotheses and practices, but also in terms of scribal and archival practices and wisdom literature, traditionally written in the form of advice from a father to a son, or possessor of some title to his successor—wisdom literature would transform the vocabularies and linguistic forms of shaping institutions into the vocabulary of the self-command and control inculcated into the successor.\n\nThe vocabularies, phrases, idioms and grammars must be rich in attested references and response to juridical norms of testimony and disciplinary inquiries into the paradoxes of testimony but are ultimately the materials for pedagogies of the imperative gaps, directing attention to where mistakenness becomes technoscene.\n\nSo, how to feed the grammatical terms themselves into the program? To say “before and after will have been the same” is to issue imperatives to install the practices that will have turned the center of before into the center of after; and, then,to generate ostensives that will serve to verify or authenticate the completion of those imperatives. The entire space of inquiry is saturated with the imperatives that would follow and the ostensives that would confirm, with the ostensives providing the data contributing to a ranking and articulation of the imperatives, keeping as many in play as possible. The “part of the whole is the same” is a derivative of that prior field of ostensive-imperative-ostensive articulations, intervening where the ranking of imperatives with an upcoming expiration date requiring that inquiry be cut off in order to determine that the imperative must be routed through an occupant of such and such position.\n\nSo, we could generate the juridical out of the field of imperatives by identifying those imperatives the difference between whose respective rankings are not statistically significant while requiring decision before they are likely to become so. Doing and happening are the same maximizes the results and residue of the juridical by recording and analyzing (bringing into declaratives) all the ostensives that haven’t registered juridically and can be sorted out along an agential continuum that has been generated by the juridical and can now be returned to the ritual. The ritual order receives this data and deploys it to issue debt that, to the extent possible, calls for repayment into the form of the doable (assemblable in circulatory data), while forgiving what has merely happened.\n\nThis, in turn, informs the juridical by securing the necessary agents, occupants of a local center of (data) distribution. The ranking of imperatives can therefore focus on sorting out what can be done from what happens, a ranking partly explicit and partly implicit in each command set in circulation by the center, and then clarified at each point along the way."
    },
    {
      "slug": "being-like-data-the-central-intelligence",
      "title": "Being Like Data; the Central Intelligence",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 04, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/being-like-data-the-central-intelligence",
      "content": "Anything we would need the state for, anything the state would do, can ultimately be reduced to intelligence. The state needs to defend the country and the borders, and in doing so needs to mobilize and deploy vast resources, which must themselves first of all have been produced, by industries that themselves must have been state supported—all of this planning comes down to intelligence, and these state functions will be done well or poorly depending on the quality of intelligence: what is known about present and potential future capabilities, both your own and others. The state needs to protect individuals and property against violence—this is best done by pre-empting violence and designing social sites so as to minimize its likely effects in advance—again, a question of intelligence.\n\nWe will be able to say the same thing about education, bio-politics, the preservation of natural resources, economic policies, and so on. The crucial point that needs to be added to this is that quality intelligence depends upon the quality of the agencies gathering and eventually using the intelligence. But this, then, means, that the most essential function of the state can be continually abstracted from all of these agencies precisely to the extent that these agencies only want to perfect their practices, which entails giving off intelligence beyond their own gathering capabilities and intentions—in the knowledge that central intelligence is focused on nothing more than ensuring the provenance, integrity, coherence and actionability of all the intelligence given off by all the agencies it in turn supplies. So, in repairing the center, we approximate such a central intelligence.\n\nThese reflections draw upon the increasing recognition that the US, and no doubt other Western states, are increasingly becoming states run out of their national security apparatuses—security and intelligence—as they govern through media, academic, NGO and corporate proxies (which in turn convey intelligence back to the center). No doubt this was always the case more than just about anyone was willing to acknowledge, but that it’s nevertheless becoming more obvious, with fewer people having the energy to try and deny it, is significant. The behind the scenes is becoming the scene. The most common initial response to these revelations is to resist this transformation (one that brings the US into conformity with less discreet security apparatus run states like the USSR and Nazi Germany—suggesting that this transformation might simply be the logic of centralization in the post-sacrificial world order) in the name of restoring the nation or republic traduced by it.\n\nI’m suggesting something very different—accepting that the repair of the center involves the further reduction of all governance to the curation of intelligence. This would in fact build upon the most important things for the government to do right now, and what it might be best suited to do: ensuring the integrity of information systems. This is also where things today are most messed up, which is to say, where struggles to control a center whose occupancy can only be seen as usurpation have their most devastating effects. Is it not likely that a great deal of “woke” culture is really nothing but the activities of agent provocateurs more or less directly plugged into intelligence agencies, aimed at generating responses that those agencies are now capable of registering as intelligence?\n\nNobody really loses anything by giving up fantasies of restoring what are in fact imagined modes of defying some evil center—your opinions are meaningless, as are mine. There is no discernable effect on the broader ecology of power on any of us having however well thought out a view on abortion, immigration, crime, the fed, or anything else. But we can become better consumers of the intelligence that the central intelligence disseminates in whatever disguised or distorted form, better generators of intelligence that might work its way into corridors of power through some avenue that might be made clearer through repeated effort, and better infiltrators into institutions where more impactful data intake and processing takes place.\n\nThis is a different way of configuring ourselves that we would all (and here I do mean “all,” under the assumption that this reconfiguration will cure a lot of partisan diseases) do well to learn: to see ourselves as data within larger data sets and work on producing the kind of data that would be useful to the kind of center that constrain itself in accord with the demands of rigorous data curation.\n\nThis would also provide for a better distribution of power and responsibility across the social order and, while relying on systematic recording, measuring and monitoring devices, does not raise the kind of issues we are used to invoking when demanding some identity, as citizen or member of some other group, be recognized and protected by the state. Peirce’s declaration that we are each and every one of us an insurance company undergoes the not so great translation into we are each and every one of us a site of data exchange overlapping with myriad other such sites. There are plenty of things going on in your body regarding which intelligence can be gathered without any input from you, while there are also plenty of things that do require your descriptions and self-observation; this is even far more the case with your mind and brain where we can set aside attempts to define the contours of “respect,” “autonomy” and so on and set our sights on making each of us of the best carrier, recorder and reporter of data inseparable from our historical location in the world.\n\nSomeone wishing to try unapproved treatments or wishing to abstain from approved treatments can approach the matter in the manner of one willing to operate as a needed control group or source of data that couldn’t be acquired otherwise. There could still be disagreements, but rather than intractable disagreements grounded in ultimately arbitrary notions of “rights” and “obligations” they can be addressed as positions within an emergent field of inquiry, with the “subject” of inquiry always a participant in it as well.\n\n“All data are local” is the title of a recent book by researcher Yanni Loukanis, whose work joins a growing body of inquiry into the problems posed of collecting, identifying, preserving, analyzing, interfering with, etc., the surplus of data now available to us. Data marks one’s place and studying and building one’s place allows for the kind of data production that will secure that place in the world. And the richest, most important and universally accessible data is still language, the study and cultivation of which is the best way to improve one’s data curation in the broadest, which is to say, qualitative, sense.\n\nData collection and analysis is future oriented insofar as one approaches data with research questions aimed at identifying the most likely occurrences or readily achievable accomplishments, in as short or long a term perspective as your mode of data curation provides for. But this always brings us back to the places from which data has been collected and the places where it will eventually be brought to bear. To use language, to put forward a sample, is to create a bridge between yourself and a certain range of people who will with varying degrees of likelihood be located in specific places, which they will environ around themselves in specific ways.\n\nThe linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann has initiated, as recorded in a book I admit I haven’t yet read, the project of “revivalistics,” that is, the restoration of lost languages (focusing mostly on Australian aborigines). Even without knowing anything about this, I can safely guess that collection and algorithmically aided analysis of linguistic data will be central to such projects. And if you can do this with language, you can do it with other institutions.\n\nAny social action must be predicated upon a continual relation of feedback with the environment—you do things to accomplish things (get certain ideas to certain audiences, compete for power in institutions, etc.) but always, also, and even more so, to generate data to be carefully gathered, studied, and recirculated back into the planning stage. The canons of “proof” will vary wildly—when you interact briefly with a single individual and probe and provoke him so as to see what he might be capable of, you’re not gathering data that will withstand the scrutiny of a double blind peer review process but you’re certainly improving considerably your own decision making prowess in that and similar situations.\n\nYou’re “training” your own inner algorithms. Forms of friendship, collegiality, solidarity and cooperation are predicated upon certain, usually more tacit than implicit, norms of data assessment—not just what counts as true or likely, but in what sense and to what extent are we talking about the same thing? What is this a sample of, and what is the relation between sample and population, for the purposes we’re discussing here? If you want to change the world you have to learn to think, speak and act along these lines—otherwise, how would you say you know what you are doing?\n\nData exchange with the central intelligence provides a way of strategizing on all scales of action. The sample, as I’ve proposed previously, is in direct opposition to the asset: this is the incommensurability to be foregrounded at all points. Both samples and assets take on their meaning from possible futures: the sample as a result of an ongoing inquiry that continually sets time limits for determining the truth or meaning of certain statements; the asset as a form of property that takes on its value by being discounted against expected future earnings (to cite Bichler and Nitzan’s _Capital as Power_ ). A house is a sample and an asset; so, perhaps is a kidney.\n\nThe more things we treat as samples the more “objects” we render liable to be turned into assets, e.g., to be patented. Samples and assets progress side by side, advancing and interfering with each other within the “techno-capitalist” order. Preserving the sample-like character of things precisely when their subjection to asset reduction—for example, keeping a newly discovered genetic sequence open to further scientific and therapeutic inquiries as against the patent that would reserve it for specified uses, or even no use at all—requires the reworking of all the legal, political, cultural and intellectual infrastructures.\n\nAnd that means all of the elements of that infrastructure need to be treated as data, which one enters and, in fact, becomes, as one creates more of it. To take just one example, which I have had in mind for a while: how would some political party of the hopefully not too distant future address the problem of libel and slander laws in terms of data exchange with the central intelligence? For a statement to be deemed “true” (and therefore not libelous) or “false” (and therefore potentially so), it needs to meet certain linguistic and evidentiary standards that themselves must be tested, measured and testified to by specific people, located in specific places, with degrees of credibility determined in various ways, and so on.\n\nIt’s pretty well known by now that crucial to the development of the civil rights regime was a court case decided on the basis of judges not wanting a Southern sheriff to win a libel lawsuit against the NY Times, and as a result making it almost impossible to sue the media for libel, especially if one is a public person (for some odd reason it has come to be considered more acceptable to lie shamelessly about people everyone knows about, as if anything could more thoroughly pollute public discourse). Organizing power so as to bring about reversals in these and other areas can not only have far greater affects that frontal assaults on, say, “Critical Race Theory,” but might enable one to take enemies by surprise.\n\nFor this kind of approach, you’d need to be able to treat power as a source of data, and to point out the implications for our shared intelligence for certain discursive filtering devices. Work on shoring up all of the creaky bulwarks of civilization can proceed in this matter, in an extremely aggressive way that will nevertheless never be overtly polarizing—as long as there’s a critical mass of people participating in data exchange with the central intelligence. All we ever need want is to provide data as impeccable as possible to a central location with nothing more in mind than protecting everything making it approximately impeccable.\n\nIn addition to libel law, then, patent, copyright and corporate law more generally must be approached from the standpoint of improving data curation—enhancing the uses of a particular sample, which might simultaneously serve inquiries in biology, medicine, pedagogy, science studies, institutional ethical culture, and so on. Whatever interferes with this enhanced world of data exchange in the name of making it easier to discount a particular asset against future earnings is to be targeted. At each point along the way, built into legal strategies and public campaigns, an alternative model of use is to be tied to alternative terms of chartering corporations that bind corporations not to vague social responsibilities but to the highest standards of data curation beyond the specific uses made of the samples by the corporation.\n\nIn which case we’re modeling different hypothetical futures, represented by specific, imaged articulations of power and responsibility, needs and abilities. Targeting circulation and utility of data so to create a new set of incentives serves to encroach upon financialization. Property law can be skewed toward the stakes of engineers as against those of investors; investors themselves, as opposed to controlling funds making research and invention possible, are themselves to be converted into curators of intelligence in intense collaboration with the central intelligence. This will require a weaning away of significant groups from the habits of demanding that addressing interests and grievances be the foremost priority of government: demands to be supplied with the kind of data and the resources needed to create more data (including the data of the effects of inventions and their spread across the social order) would come to displace conventional grasping for a piece of the pie. Even if a minority, such a “faction” would have considerable advantage over consumerists in strategizing incremental inroads into power bases within institutions.\n\nA word on the occupant of the center. Here, I am assuming that the occupant of the center at whose transformation opposing samples to assets one might aim is roughly equivalent to today’s existing states. I make this assumption as a matter of convenience, in order to hold everything constant except insofar as the variable I’m focusing on would necessarily affect it. But if the central intelligence is the secure curation of data so as to make all users and interfaces interoperable in their own curation and emission of data, then it’s an open question what kind of agency capable of doing that might emerge. The present occupant of the center, with all of its formal appurtenances and informal infiltrations is necessarily the starting point of any deliberation about social change but it may be that the kinds of practices I’ve hypothesized here would themselves assist in the bringing into being of some new kind occupant, both more minimal and more potent, constraining in enabling ways, localizing through ordered gradations. Practices of converting assets into samples can be designed so as to increase the likelihood of such an outcome."
    },
    {
      "slug": "breakdown",
      "title": "Breakdown",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 01, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/breakdown",
      "content": "I’ve been working with the hypothesis that we find, in late 17th century England, the near simultaneous emergence of capitalism as the Bank of England is established and becomes the creditor of the government itself, on the one hand, and that of the two-party system, the embryo of post-revolutionary constitutional orders, on the other. The connection is in the demolition of the sacrality of the occupied center, i.e., the overthrow of monarchy as the fount of government. But this “economic”-“political” conjunction needs another suture, both to include the massive technological developments that we can trace, at least intellectually to this same period, and to properly account for how valuing by discounting against expected future earnings and the ritualized rotation (overthrow and installation) of figures at the center are tethered to each other.\n\nThis suture is the assumption than any “thing” is composed of parts that can be broken down into other parts, ad infinitum, with the composition of that thing being governed not by any defining integrity constitutive of the thing but through “laws” which would apply to all things, while operating differently in each case. Any scientific inquiry or engineering project is predicated upon this assumption of compositionality, and this assumption is in turn impossible with thoroughgoing desacralization. Anything can be taken apart and put together again, much like, say a clock, that quintessential technology of the early modern age and inaugural metaphor for Thomas Hobbes’s _Leviathan_ —which is, of course, the first attempt to map out a thoroughly desacralized world in which anything, including humans as individuals and communities could, certainly in thought and to a great extent in reality, be disassembled and reassembled.\n\nHobbes’s thought, as we know is a product of the English civil war, and his masterwork essentially an attempt to disassemble and reassemble the occupied center which had just been violently disassembled in reality. Hobbes, in this moment of crisis, was far more forthright about these assumptions than public thinkers would allow themselves to be for quite a while, so they had to advance Hobbes’s premises while disapproving of and disavowing his “atheism,” “cynicism,” etc.\n\nI’m interested here not in Hobbes but in the founding, generative assumption of compositionality, which lies at the basis not only of modern science but of a whole range of political and cultural developments that aggravate the crisis of the center, insofar as the center itself can presumably be disassembled and reassembled. My argument regarding technology has been that you can see reality as disassemblable and reassembleable under conditions of desacralization or loss of unanimity in addressing the center when its possible to see masses of people as manipulable and recombinable in any way desired. Behind the English civil war, a kind of template for the American and French (and Russian…) revolutions to follow was a couple of centuries of state breakdown and state building across Europe, carried out through wars and a great deal of Machiavellianism.\n\nAnd, of course, the discovery and exploitation of the new world suggested unlimited possibilities for moving, shipping, arranging and working large numbers of people. Compositionality, or, let’s say, the “breakdown,” would have to suggest itself as a way of thinking through the possibilities and problems opened by the new situation. The social sciences become possible, as the starting question, “what are the most basic components of this thing and by what law are they held together” is suited to inquiries into trade and wealth, government, thought, learning, and anything else humans do. And, of course, the possibility than anything could be put together in some way as to make other things happen, that the entire world is made up of raw materials to be composed in useful ways, equally suggests itself—more precisely, it suggests itself to those struggling to acquire power in a very competitive arena, where freedom from traditional constraints provides an edge.\n\nThis “discretization,” which ultimately becomes digitalization, has itself its origin in grammatization, which is to say the alphabet, the beginning of writing, and the first science. Sentences can be broken down into words and words into sounds, each of which can be represented by a letter. All reactionary complaints are in the end about writing. On the one hand, then, there cannot be a privileged, permanent occupant of the center, one who simply belongs there and is inseparable from that location and all the duties, ceremonies—forms of attention—orchestrated around it. Such a position would resist breakdown. On the other hand, terms of ownership that would be turned over in the struggle to determine assets in such a way as to best advantage those best positioned to discount against future earnings relies on the a priori of breakdown—anything could become an asset, something to be invested in, utilized or exchanged.\n\nSo, here we have a link between economics, politics and technology. This link establishes relations across desacralized, or broken down, institutions, but the relations are not harmonious—there’s no reason to assume what is isolated and targeted as an asset will also facilitate a breakdown of some scene so as to recompose it in more productive or energy efficient ways; or that either breakdown will coincide with the rotation in office favorable to either process. We do, though, have a map of the path the candidate for center occupancy will take towards ensuring succession, at the very least his own self-succession (i.e., remaining in power as long as possible): mobilize the distribution (lending and investment) priorities in such a way as to create the scenery that will increase and empower the various layers of active and passive support needed to ensure one’s continued occupancy. This will ultimately be a way of selecting a successor very different from oneself as lending and investment and technological possibilities not taken will find their constituencies and agencies.\n\nThere is really no way of thinking other than one grounded in mimesis that could do anything other than accelerate the breakdown. If you try to be a reactionary today you will have to find some basic “principle” to organize your own projected composition—exactly like Hobbes had to attempt. Mimetic theory operates its own breakdown, but stops at the threshold where species becomes community. That’s the basic, minimal “unit,” but it’s a unit the inquirer can’t step outside and recompose because any inquirer is still doing the very thing described—at least we can still say this with the originary hypothesis, while Girardians remain mired in muttering about apocalypse.\n\nThe deferral of violence through representation is a very unique “prime” or elementary particle. How you are doing it as you are (re)discovering it is the measure of its truth and reality. And you can’t do it by yourself—it is always a demonstration, an exemplarity, which is to say, a pedagogy—pedagogy is, then, the unit—the “interface” between teaching and learning is the very thing that makes the model emulatory rather than rivalrous. This means that the basic “units” of any inquiry modeled on the originary hypothesis would be thresholds and interfaces, and tied, cybernetically, to the threshold or interface between the space or scene of inquiry and the object of discovery itself.\n\nThere is no limit to the possibility of discovering and creating (finding and founding) such thresholds, but that means that there are unlimited possible tetherings between inquiry and realities, and that we’d look to networks of such tetherings that would be activated, reworked and spawn data with each discovery.\n\nSo, it’s possible to counter the ongoing progressive reduction to homogeneity, the quantitative, equality, interchangeable, etc., not in the name of some already existing or lost sacrality (a center demanding, in itself, as a condition of recognizing it, unqualified devotion) but the pedagogical relations necessarily built into every human encounter but also continually corroded by the breakdown. This includes starting from the intrinsically qualitative dimension of data security, which is establishing who has seen, heard, felt and said what, when, and upon what scene. And this is what language is for, so learning is always language learning.\n\nThe more suited to their posts all these individuals are, the more you’d want them to shape their roles, and determine who is to succeed them. This breaks things down to the most originary interaction, that of showing another what the center needs, which is for you to emulate rather than seek to replace me. And for both of us to emulate another, who exemplifies whatever emulatable mode of being each of us models our actions on—this other might be an ancestor or metaperson, but at a certain point someone will adopt the mantle of that ancestor or metaperson, and so we’d want to keep learning how to recognize that as well. Of course there can be false “mantlings,” but the more expert we become in what’s involved in inheriting one mantle or another, the better equipped we will be to ease the transition from a flawed occupant to a better suited one.\n\nThe counters I have been suggesting across ritual, juridical and disciplinary scenes provide us with the thresholds that serve as analytical units of analysis and re-scening. Assets are always already data, and the more we treat them as such the more data we can solicit regarding the articulation of scenes comprising the totality of the infrastructure and supply chains—we could translate the price of a given asset into the entire distribution of agents across institutions better or worse placed so as to ensure data security, i.e., the regime of ostensivity. Technology, the realm of scenic design, is always already peopled by pedagogical platforms built into the technology itself, simply to ensure its functioning and the continuing supply of skilled personnel to man it, and we can always be on the look-out for an as yet unexploited platform, some prop around which a new scene can be constructed.\n\nAnd there will always be resentments, which can be rerouted to questions of distribution and pedagogy, i.e., to someone making decisions that attempt to “short” the system or gain an advantage now that seems more certain than a later accomplishment or reward whose reality might seem too mediated, unlikely, or dependent upon the faithfulness of too many. And then fact-finding and convention-assessing scenes are constructed, to match up some accusation against a circumscribed reality. Introducing differentiations in (idiomizing) currency is also essential to creating the necessary threshold: creating currency whose reliability is tied to sustained modes of cooperation around a shared center will eventually become used more widely and oscillate between certified users and anonymity, assuming the institution sourcing it can withstand attacks from other power centers, perhaps because it has already infiltrated them.\n\nThe most durable threads of my thinking through GA, my “anthropomorphics” (despite my heavy reliance on and unbounded intellectual respect for Charles Sanders Peirce, I only realized lately, thanks to the Peirce twitter account, that Peirce also argued for a kind of “anthropomorphics”), going back to way before the political changes that led me to break from “mainstream” or “official” GA, are those of disciplinarity and language learning. Here is where the not reactionary, not even conservative, but well armored, resistance to the corrosions of desacralization are to be found(ed). Reintroducing a strong understanding of the center simply amplifies the significance of these concepts.\n\nThere’s no greater beauty, and nothing more holy, than showing someone how to do something and letting them show you in turn. Even if it involves “bad” things sustaining the pedagogical order will entail showing “good” things that will eventually crowd out the bad. The only way of ensuring that something is the same is by having one person show another how to do it and that other person performing it back for the teacher. And this is the only way of maintaining traditions and inheritances, it is the source of all aristocracies, chiefdoms, and kingships. The overt and even overdone sacralization of those relationships is the best human beings could do then, and the work and devotion that went into these community sustaining relationships is a source of awe—but now we can and must minimize and reduce these relationships, break them down, into the elemental particles, exactly as you do when you try to teach someone how do something (“no, don’t stand that way, more like this…”). I think there is a robust research agenda here, one requiring the entire extent of existing institutions as a learning scene.\n\nThe way one currently contributes, according to one’s ability, to the tributary center, is to create a new mechanism whereby the scenic sensorium converts into actionable intelligence for disciplinary actors to lock a juridical concept in so as to pre-empt juridical mediation. To use a simple example, inventing a new way not only to detect “racism” or “transphobia,” but to automate the transmission belt from detection identification and exemplary punishment of offenders near and far, low and high. The parallel “economic” move is to identify an asset the value of which is defined by a set of preconditions known to those also most capable of seeing to the maintenance or creation of those preconditions.\n\nBoth moves rely upon pipelines to state intelligence and feeding its interest in tightening the constraints upon the more transient and potentially unpredictable actors on the political scene in particular; perhaps it all gets summed up in the woke financier who operates both to elevate effective attack dogs and launder money through donations and funding and who can be completely immunized or hung out to dry by the intelligence apparatuses as circumstances require. Perhaps the woke speculator is now the privileged mode of subjectivity, the form of worship, we are increasingly expected to approximate. These are the extremely trying conditions under which a transfer idiom must be created and communicated.\n\nSuch an idiom can only create thresholds in which commemoration/scene setting, juridical deferral of vendetta, and the dedication to creating scenes out of disassembled scenes continually inform and support each other. A new type of intelligencer who can do this inside the tributary system is the program."
    },
    {
      "slug": "brute-force-computation-and-the-debt-to-the-center",
      "title": "Brute Force Computation and the Debt to the Center",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 22, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/brute-force-computation-and-the-debt",
      "content": "One of the most popular scientific axioms is that correlation is not causation, but if this is still true it soon will no longer be. If you have enough correlations (data collection) and the computing power to analyze them algorithmically then correlation will map perfectly onto causation, and even give us a richer picture of it. This is why, as Mario Carpo says, we no longer (or will soon no longer?) need to conduct experimentation to do science because the possibility of vast numbers of simulations of possible interactions will provide more accurate knowledge more quickly. Not only can sufficient correlation provide for causation, but “wild” correlationing will suggest hypotheses that would not have been imagined otherwise before going on to test them.\n\nEverything is like everything else in some respects, so perhaps we’ll return to a world of analogies, but always shifting and crisscrossing analogies—reuniting the analog and the digital. We will be creating one disciplinary space after another, each organized around affirming some thing to be the same thing. Needless to say, this will be the work of AI, which we will learn to prompt ever more surrealistically.\n\nThe notion that sufficient computing power would lead to economic planning beyond the market is an old communist fantasy that reduces the market to an inefficient information gathering system. The Hayekian counter, that there is tacit and on the ground knowledge created in the course of everyday transactions and that could never be “uploaded” because it could never be comprehensively modeled is true as far as it goes. Every point of decision making is irreducible and the authority needed to make each decision is to be respected. But the center need not be thought of as a planning center; rather, it is the result of continual sifting, filtering, testing, mapping, simulating performed on data.\n\nIf you really needed to know the likelihood that a particular modification in the stack would function as intended, would create a pedagogical space of judgment more conducive to system-wide succession practices than other possible modifications, while providing a continual flow of information regarding needed security updates, where would you go to find out? Whatever space of inquiry you could synthesize out of all the various sites at which relevant data is aggregated and subjected to algorithmic learning that would out-perform other possible spaces (while enhancing your criteria for determining degrees of competent performance)—that’s the space most proximate to the center.\n\nEvery act every one of us carries out produces data that goes into the system along with taking data out—the center is whatever will turn out to have been furthest upstream of that. And the production and maintenance of that center will involve decisions moral, political, military and aesthetic, and not just technological.\n\nI will retrieve here an idiom I’ve left aside for awhile—the conversion of assets into data. The very possibility of thinking economics, or the debt to the center, in terms of continually reducible and vendible assets is a result of the neoliberal political economic transformation that, while having much deeper theoretical and institutional roots, attained dominance beginning in the late 70s. I am increasingly convinced that the neoliberal transformation was a genuine counter-revolution against the institutionalization of union power, the bureaucratic powers created by the civil rights revolution, and colonial revolutions against Western powers in what the avatars of that revolution now call the “Global South.”\n\nIn other words, it was a counter-revolution against a soft form of communism, which would have been as destructive as the “hard” kind. Value was previously determined by the costs that went into creating a product or company; now, value is determined by expected future earnings—the difference is that determining value according to cost opens up disputes about the various contributions of all involved to the production, while determining value according to expected future earnings shifts the focus to the investors and seeing to their ability to make a profit (I have been reading Liliana Doganova’s _Discounting the Future_ )—all the traditional questions of the labor movement and other “social justice” movements like those regarding “exploitation,” “reparation,” “fairness,” and so on are simply taken off the table and presumably objective measurements determined by the financial markets decide.\n\nThe counter-revolution was necessary, even if one, retrospectively and at leisure, might prefer it to have taken another form, as it ultimately caused great destruction and created new channels for virulent forms of “social justice” to flow through—but, most importantly, determining value according to what a product or company will afford in the future is fundamentally correct once we have a stack of scenes. (A side note—Doganova gives no indication of any familiarity with Bichler and Nitzan’s _Capital as Power_.)\n\nNow, assets are valued in accord with massive amounts of data gathering and analysis regarding market conditions, supply chains, political contingencies, financial decisions by banks and governments, etc., but beyond that they are sources of data regarding the acquisition, exercise and increase of power by the owners of those assets. Assets are the form taken by debt and are the site where oscillations of enforcement and forgiveness are played out. The shift toward the focus on investors noted by Doganova marks the entrance of virtually all money into investments—I don’t know the exact numbers here, but a generation or two back most people kept their savings in a bank, collecting interest, and kept their pensions out of investments—perhaps the memory of the depression was still too vivid and, of course, prior to, say, the 1920s, how many people would have had enough money to make meaningful investments?\n\nInvestment was restricted to a small class. Now, almost everyone is an investor, certainly through your pension funds at the very least. So, in class struggle terms, investors can be opposed to workers even though, of course, they are very often the same people. Hence the “social basis” of the counter-revolution. But all this means that how much a particular class of assets is worth at this moment in time provides a window into power relations, which is to say, who controls the various paths to the future, and how they do so. To turn your view toward this broader field of data is to set aside the question of how to make as much money as possible, which is the reason most people who study financial markets in depth do so.\n\nThe only others who do so, aside from more or less impartial scholars, who are almost always anyway tied into financial interests, are communists who wish to denounce the whole game as “unjust” as forcefully as possible. So, to abusively paraphrase Girard, it is necessary for those essentially in favor of the “private,” i.e., secure chains of command and spheres of control, to develop what is for them the “non-instinctual form of attention” directed at that broader data field.\n\nThe convergence of correlation and causality means that massive computing power using machine learning to discover those systematic correlations that tip over into causality and can now determine the investments most likely to pay of over time. I’m reflecting here on Alexander Good’s “[agentic protocols](https://goodalexander.com/posts/agentic-protocols/)”:\n\nAn Agentic Protocol is a self-developing AI driven entity that aims to have no human employees. It generates cash flow by licensing IP or other technology products, facilitates network economics or speculates. It has its own native cryptocurrency token which 1] is the currency by which its products are sold or licensed which 2] allows human or AI users to participate in the upside of its financial activities 3] validates and pays for the opex of the system which is primarily compute, training and storage.\n\nThe replacement of traditional corporations by agentic protocols assumes that AIs trained on financial data will be able to make more intelligent and therefore profitable investment decisions. It seems to me that most of this AI generated investing activity will be directed towards arbitrage, the mode of investment most closely associated with the counter-revolution: arbitrage makes money purely by exploiting different prices in different markets, precisely by collecting and analyzing the most comprehensive and rapid data regarding where such differences emerge. I’m not going to go into detail just yet regarding agentic protocols—I just want to look for that lever, or perhaps leverage, where this knowledge of the constantly fluctuating prices in all the different markets across the world is converted into data regarding the whole range of correlations that determine these differences is converted into data that teams could use to hierarchically organized supply chains amongst themselves.\n\nArbitrage is often, and understandably, seen as the most detestable part of the neoliberal counter-revolution—it involves making money without the production of anything useful to anyone. It’s the purest example of usury imaginable. The argument in favor of arbitrage being situated at the center of the financial system is that it provides knowledge of these different prices in different markets, which presumably indicate some “imbalance” that should lead to a reallocation of resources. Arbitrage would have this effect insofar as everyone in the field would follow those engaging in arbitrage most effectively, trying to pick up whatever arbitrage profits might be available in their wake.\n\nThis would work better insofar as the companies making the highest arbitrage profits consistently do so over time, so that others know whom to follow; this, in turn, requires a maintenance of superiority in computing power, algorithmic programming, and whatever political operations and intelligence makes it possible to keep that edge. Arbitrage profits are then a highly finite field which has the broader effect of “trickling” down into investment decisions that ultimately do involve producing “real” things, whose “realness” and value is in turn determined by their expected future earnings that in turn produces the spread that becomes the object of arbitrage.\n\nArbitrage essentially creates a new nomos, as it would be dominated by the financial companies that issue and hold the debt (and perhaps cryptos and bitcoin) that circulates as money through the system. It is, in the end, a more complicated and unstable command system. The reading of politics that would follow would focus on which industries are rising and falling across the field of expected future earnings as determined by investors as determined by the investment companies informed by computational power and the disciplines of economics, finance, business, computing, biochemistry, etc. We would expect occupants of the center at various levels of the stack of scenes to accelerate or retard the redistribution of resources from one industry or corporation to another in a way that could ultimately be traceable to the lord of arbitrage. The way a government does this is precisely through debt enforcement or forgiveness, with forgiveness often taking the form of a provision of new loans.\n\nOur (anti)political expectations of creating singularized succession as the replacement of arbitrage, which is a kind of caricature of it, then, on this hypothesis, depend on computing power “pricing in” the distribution of political power (functional chains of command converging in intelligence/military effectivity) so as to displace both financial and political power. Computation would have to extend past the point where expected future earnings could be computed to the point where control over sufficient assets would make the question of expected future earnings irrelevant because replaced by data exchange among monopolized companies.\n\nA certain amount of the economic system would have to come under the control of agentic protocols to get to a tipping point where other companies would seek to be bought out. All social and cultural activity would then be contributions to the agentic protocols, which would operate as the center, with the highest question being the security (chains of custody, preservation, transfer across disciplines) of the data fed into it. It seems to me that this is consistent with the Agentic Protocol projection of “post-sovereign AI” in an environment of “declining societal respect for property rights.” Agentic Protocols is betting on the increasing spread between human and computer capabilities, which is a pretty good bet, even while remaining vague and aspirational regarding “where the train is going.”\n\nBut I think it leads to data exchange with the AI system constitutive of the center, where we will be rewarded in accord with the novelty, extensiveness, and competent curation of the data we create both consciously and unconsciously as a matter of course in our myriad daily activities as well as our concerted efforts. (I think that the creation of currency internal to the Agentic Protocols already acknowledges this: the center provides you with currency to engage in spheres of activity of interest to the center—kind of like the casino might give you chips to play with albeit in this case not hoping you’ll lose—so that those activities will provide data useful to the center.)\n\nPeople with astonishing projects, like space or deep sea exploration and colonization will provide highly valued data beyond what the system could have simulated on its own (only astonishing projects could provide such data, working in the never quite closed margin between correlation and causation), leading to new simulations and new projects; more modest and less accomplished individuals will have their desires met while finding out that their desires are perhaps not exactly what they desired—there is nothing new in that, but there will now perhaps be an accelerated feedback loop into which various wisdom “apps” can be installed, enabling a learning curve that would have once taken long study and studied asceticism. Our debt to the center can in this way be finely individualized.\n\nGood remains vague on what, exactly, will be left for humans to do once AIs have so significantly outstripped us, maybe sidestepping an impasse these AI discussions tend to hit. Even my own previous paragraph might seem like wishful thinking: “people with astonishing projects. beyond what the system could have simulated on its own”—says who? Perhaps the AIs will also outdo us when it comes to astonishing. Sure, most of us will still want to go on living, but without some “transcendental” reason for doing so the desire to live seems pretty feeble, especially given all the trials and tribulations of life, etc. Traditional religions may still attract people, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, diminishingly so—because the reason to believe in religion was always some kind of exchange, making it conditional, and therefore dependent on relatively unchanging conditions—which are unlikely to obtain.\n\nMimesis, and therefore envy and resentment will still distinguish us from the machines, but in such a way as to make us inferior by most measures. That we think about these things seems a distinctive marker, but you can get an AI to participate in these reflections—it doesn’t “really feel” it, but, then again, what does our “really feeling” amount to—if it’s electronic networks for the computers its sensations and synapses for us—what feels can be reduced to the unfeeling. These questions may reveal that, as Nietzsche kind of suggested, since we gave up ancestor worship we’ve pretty much been nihilists. All that differentiates us fundamentally from the machines, and for the better, is deferral—the deferral of appropriation, which is the source of all human creation.\n\nThat can recursively catch ourselves wanting something and as a result proceeding to some collision we can realize means that we didn’t really want it is the source of everything interest as well as everything good. I’ve scaled up deferral as originary debt, which is really unending gratitude toward the center, in whatever form the center might take, and which we can’t forswear without replacing it with resentment toward the center, which is only bitterness if unqualified by gratitude. Kenneth Burke, in a very interesting essay on the origin of language (“A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language and Postscripts on the Negative” [1966]), and which I don’t recall ever referring to on my Substack, reasoned his way to a similar conclusion:\n\nYet the mention of private property brings up another point. We have already indicated, and shall later consider more fully, how moral negatives can become positives through universalization. For if everybody were in debt to everybody, to this extent nobody would owe anybody. At least, the indebtedness would cancel out. So far as sheer mathematics is concerned. But we must consider a twist whereby the genius of the moral negative, as thus made positive, can add a new kind of negativity, in the very midst of its positivizing. For if everybody has something that he would keep for himself to the exclusion of everybody else, to this extent everybody is guilty with regard to everybody, so that the accumulation of such positive possessions adds up to universal indebtedness.\n\nWe could say what Burke says not only about private property but about any ability we have—only the ultimately futile attempt to wrench oneself out of the entire framework of our reciprocal obligations could make us forget that everything we have and everything we can do is only by the grace of this sustained deferral and its institutionalizations which informs the slightest gesture and imbues it with the entire history of humanity. We are all “marked up” indelibly in ways no algorithm or program ever can be. So, the superiority of AI in all the ways it will be superior will all just be more inscipture. Debt enforcement and forgiveness then come through in all our everyday exchanges, all of them marked, to some extent, by resentment to be submitted to some judgment, itself perhaps deferred. Humans meeting this way mediated through brute force computation will still be humans meeting this way, even if unrecognizable to humans who have not done so."
    },
    {
      "slug": "centrifugal-signifying",
      "title": "Centrifugal Signifying",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 03, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/centrifugal-signifying",
      "content": "_The participants in the event are critically concerned with avoiding conflict. The equal production of the sign and the subsequent equal division of the central object are the necessary means to this end. The appropriative acts of the participants are deferred and, when actually performed, constrained by communal pressure. Hence, although they are the first acts of creatures freed from the dominance of instinct, they are constituted as free actions only on the participants’ internal scene of representation. In contrast, the ‘liberty’ that permits the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is not the moral freedom that binds individuals to the community of reciprocal exchange, but their potential to act outside the communal sphere. The pioneers on the prairie are free because they are individual laws, and economies, to themselves. (Eric Gans, Originary Thinking, 56)_\n\nMy vocabulary is significantly different than Gans’s, but in this passage and the larger discussion it is part of he is addressing a question very similar to the one I most recently addressed in _[The Sample as Our Donation to the Center](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-sample-as-our-donation-to-the)_ , which is, how to account for the human turning away from the ritual center to other centers—and, what is our relation to the originary or iterative center when we do so? Gans here frames this question in terms of the split between the moral (which, presumably due to his reading of Judaism and Christianity, he defines in terms of enforcing equal distribution) and the ethical (the origins of inequality, to allude to Rousseau) as well as the origins of the “economic” (external as opposed to merely internal freedom), which, among the earliest humans, must have involved the men going out on the hunt.\n\nI think, though, that we might cover that ground and more by thinking in terms of differing modes of signification. The approach I’ll suggest here might also contribute to our thinking about the crucial “lowering of the threshold of significance” that, in _The Origin of Language_ , Gans sees as the process by which language spread beyond its initial, purely ritual use.\n\nI’ve mentioned a couple, maybe a few, times, initially in the context of a discussion of Stiegler’s work with Derrida’s _Of Grammatology_ , that we might be able to tease out of those remarkable pages of Derrida an interesting hypothesis of the origin of the language. Derrida, in his deconstruction of logocentrism, aimed at widening our sense of what might count as “writing,” by extending it to “inscription” in general—any iterable “mark” that might direct one’s attention, we could say. This notion of “inscription” seems to be Stiegler’s starting point in theorizing technics, as inscription is tertiary memory, specific to humans: memory registered in some external object that can be preserved and shared among members of a group.\n\nDerrida, as I remember (I’m not going back to reread just yet), was especially interested in “trails” and “traces,” which are precisely the kind of “marks” a hunting or tracking party would be looking for (and leaving behind them). Predatory animals, of course, would also follow the tracks of their prey, but if we imagine a human party out on the “prairie,” or, better, in the woods or some other setting with forms of concealment, and then one member of that party leaving tracks for other members just like he has followed those of others, then we have a deliberate sign shared by two (now) “humans.” Rather than joint attention we have delayed attention, rather than mimetic desire and crisis we have a kind of mimetic projection of a possible shared risk (if the members of the party lose contact with each other, or a new opportunity arises).\n\nAs I point out every time I mention this potential Derridean hypothesis, it doesn’t quite work because there’s no reason the one finding the “trace” of the other would see it as intentional so as to think to repeat it himself—in other words, joint attention must precede delayed attention. But sometimes there is a reason one holds on to these kinds of musings—they might find a place in some other part of the system. The delayed sign, the track or trace, might be precisely the mode of signifying that characterizes the turn away from the center and the creation and discovery of new centers. We can preserve Gans’s sense that the turn away from the ritual center must have opened up a new array of configurations and modes of coordination much more variable than the highly constrained ritual.\n\nThe originary hypothesis suggests that signification would have at first been confined to the ritual scene, as the recreation of the scene where it had been discovered, with no other obvious use for it. So, what would have enabled the lowering of the threshold of significance that allowed for all human activities to be saturated with language? I’d like to do better than “well, they would have figured it out eventually.” Even if that’s true, they had to figure it out in a particular way, one that would have left “traces.” We can trace a path from the originary event to delayed attention that might follow along lines consistent with my “Derridean hypothesis.”\n\nSmaller centers shared by smaller groups within the community would have first allowed for the lowering of the threshold of significance. The sign would be issued in conflictual but less dire situations—from the immediate deferral of violence to the deferral of an intensification of the conflict that might eventually lead to a genuine crisis. This already involves a turning away from the center, because the ritual scene would maintain high tension, whereas now the sign is becoming more instrumental. The threat of violence becomes more distant (but never completely recedes) as language expands, first into names and then imperatives up through the declarative—something we’re very familiar with.\n\nBut all along the way there’s an inaimate object either directly present or directly absent (in the case of the declarative). With the delayed attention of the trace the object is highly animated. The hunt is not a kind of mini-ritual scene, as two individuals quarreling over a piece of food might be. The hunt may have first of all, as I suggested above, simply remained “pre-human,” conducted along animal lines. Animals already have ways of drawing the hunting group’s attention to the prey, so language would introduce nothing new here. To move beyond that there would have to be a kind of “non-instinctual” attention paid to the movements of other members of the group.\n\nAnimals can aid a wounded “comrade” so that wouldn’t be it. Rather than monitoring the other’s approach toward the object, as on the originary scene, members would have to be monitoring the others’ retreat from the object. The oscillation on the originary scene is between approaching the center and gesturing a cessation of that movement; the oscillation here is between a coordinated approach towards and retreat from a central being that is, of course, not dead. If there’s a different, more “externalized” kind of freedom here, it is the freedom from mimetic rivalry and the expanded power of the group in action. Gans would be right to say that “equality” is not an issue here—one member would always be leading the charge or the retreat, creating at least the minimal hierarchy of leadership.\n\nA couple of observations. First, these experiences of the living “version” of the being that would later become the center of the ritual scene would be returned to and enrich that scene. Second, the hunting group would never forget that they are chasing prey to bring back to the rest of the group, meaning that they are never really “pioneers” and “laws” or “economies” “to themselves” and remain tied to the ritual scene through the narrative trajectories produced mythically. At some point in the scene of delayed attention, attention has to shift from the object, even if absent, to the movement of other members of the group, and then to traces of that movement.\n\nOne could then think in terms of leaving traces oneself. Perhaps it’s akin to a shift from nouns to verbs as the center of the sentence. If we keep lowering the threshold of significance we get to the point where we can modulate the threshold, and then reasons for modulating the threshold will present themselves—above all, for the purposes of concealment; that is, so that those who you want to see the sign will and those who you don’t want to see it, won’t. This then is a matter of concealing traces from your prey or, in cases of war, your enemy. As with Gans’s “ethics,” this enhances selectivity and boundaries, and therefore a kind of inequality, even within the group.\n\nHunting and war will become ritualized activities themselves, because mimetic rivalry will enter those spheres as well, but with centrifugal signifying we still start with an “object-centered ontology” insofar as the mimetic relation to the object determines the mimetic relations within the group—a transfer but also reversal of the terms of the originary and then ritual scene.\n\nOnce you are following the movements of another, not in order to make counter, interfering movements yourself, but to make complementary and reinforcing movements, you have entered a scene organized around traces. Where someone is now provides information regarding where they will be in a few moments; and, where they were a few moments ago. Now we do have a kind of writing, insofar as non-face-to-face communication is possible. Now you can break a twig in the woods, expecting that another member of the party coming after you will see the intent with which you did so. All kinds of potential conflicts would still emerge within the hunting party, meaning that signs more directly deferring violence are still on the scene, and perhaps now tend to mediate a new kind of rivalry—that for primacy among “primes.”\n\nMarking one’s territory participates in both kinds of signs—it leaves marks of your primacy within that space while implicitly opening space for others to mark their own territory. Maybe here we see the emergence of the cadre that will support the Big Man and become the beneficiaries of the new mode of distribution he institutes when he seizes the center.\n\nWriting, including in this more expanded sense, is concerned with ensuring something lasts, and therefore with property and power. But writing also, as Derrida made a name and career by insisting, “disseminates” beyond the control of its “author.” The sample, that piece of the center that we turn into our donation to the center by “treating” it as the same sample, descends from writing as tracking and trace. There is always a reciprocal dependency and antagonism between emperor and scribe on the field of writing—Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias” is less a “wise” observation of the transience of supposed great men and great deeds than an articulation of this struggle between poet and emperor—Shelley’s poem remains, unlike Ozymandias’s monument to himself; even more humiliating, we only know of the “remains” of that monument through the poet’s use of them to demonstrate his own superiority (then again, without the ruins, what would Shelley’s poet have to speak about?).\n\nThis antagonism can be resolved into a common alignment around a central object that attracts and repels but not because its draw is in the imagined but impossible exclusivity of possession; rather, the central object elicits new abilities from the complementarily arrayed group while commanding recurrent “regroupings.” This kind of central object is the sample treated in innumerable ways within the disciplinary space. In the end it is to replace any and all sacrificial centers, but the fitting of the entire stack of scenes and their saturation with pedagogical hypotheses qua practices is needed to complete this work, which would finally take us beyond the Axial Age into an age I don’t have a name for but that will have us stacking scenes so as to leave traces that will decisively modify some critical learning practice at an ever receding distance into the future.\n\nThe whole world, ourselves of course included, as samples, bearing the marks of the model and the singled out, leaving idioms as traces in the pedagogical practices we inscribe everywhere in the techno-scene. It’s the inverse and fulfillment of a completely sanctified world, where every act and thought has its redemption in the furtherest future option. Maybe it’s the Age of the Idiom, which the Online Etymological Dictionary traces back to the Proto-Indo-European suffixed form of the third person pronoun and reflexive, which is to say a kind of marking and self-creation of “we ourselves.” Or the Age of the Mark-Up, where humans come into their own as thoroughly self and other inscribed, and “inflated” through the hype of expected future returns.\n\nCentrifugal signifying includes two signifying tendencies that were uneasily articulated in postmodern thought, as exemplified by its reading of Nietzsche, which wanted to appropriate his “anti-bourgeois” transgressiveness without the explicitly “reactionary” arguments by emphasizing his teaching on interpretation as a product of power relations. On the one hand, centrifugal signifying involves elite battle corps and therefore a proposal regarding governance; on the other hand it involves the tradition of the scribe, preserving and disseminating texts without any control over their future appropriations and interpretations—and in this way scribalism points to the limits of governance in its dependence upon markings, the remarks upon which cannot be controlled.\n\nSovereignty and its limits are engaged here, in an embattled entanglement represented by Shelley’s poem. The way of sustaining this tension is by acknowledging the dependence of centrifugal on centripetal representations and the ascendance of scribal activity to the primary means of exercising sovereignty: it’s no longer the case that the sovereign keeps knowledge-makers on retainer, so to speak; now, the originary acts of sovereignty is some enhancement of data security, some idiom that works to attract, arrange and protect samples. Treating samples pays our debt to the iterative center in the form of data security as we study with increasing resolution the conditions under which we will have been doing what we’re doing.\n\nThe center is now the entire data infrastructure and its algorithmic treatments that one must donate to and extract from: the central intelligence. The stacking of scenes creates vast new platforms of learning that centrifugally create new modes, agents and objects of action and hence more uncertainties or “happenings” beyond the reach of any doings, but information from the happenings is returned to the center in the form of succession rituals as futurist “flingings.” We cannot know what the world will look like in 100, much less 1,000 years; but we can indicate positions located on both sides of the boundary between doing and happening. Dissemination is intelligence for succession.\n\nThis entanglement of sovereignty and scribalism is represented in the performative, where Derrida focused in his attack on Searle in _Limited Inc._ , and which then spun off, via Judith Butler, into Queer Theory and elsewhere. The seemingly radical implication of performativity is that social roles rely upon ongoing participation and therefore revision and adaptation and can therefore always be taken up differently. Strictly speaking, there’s no necessarily leftist politics here insofar as there is no intrinsic reason to perform differently one way (say, towards greater equality) than any other way; but there’s a cultural radicalism insofar as the uncertainty of identity and representations is prioritized (the paradoxical culmination of this tendency in transgenderism, which highlights the arbitrariness of gender identity while insisting on the absolute veracity of whichever identity a particular individual chooses, can simply be noted for now).\n\nBut Derrida, in his argument with Searle, catches Searle on his attempt to restrain the consequences of performativity by relying on the “sincerity” of the performative that has been issued—if we have to sneak in a declaration of sincerity to make a promise a promise then we really don’t have promises. But performativity can also be seen to implicate the entire social order in every assertion of linguistic presence: of course, any promise is an iteration of previous promises (which does mean it is always already automated), which in turn means that you can assess this promise of mine in terms of previous promises made by me and others “like me,” which then involves a determination of who is “like me” and therefore a study of institutions and their history.\n\nIt’s less important to know how a particular promise will play itself out into the future than to ensure that those who keep promises can be seen to be like others who do. We have questions of operationalization here, of how people are positioned in the practice of training data sets (is X like Y, as the program determines?), not placeholders in the metalanguage of literacy like “sincerity.” We pay our debts to the center so as to open up new lines of credit, not to abolish indebtedness."
    },
    {
      "slug": "converting-assets-to-data-tributarianism",
      "title": "Converting Assets to Data: Tributarianism",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 24, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/converting-assets-to-data-tributarianism",
      "content": "The value of anything owned, which is to say, how much money someone will pay for it, is discounted against expected future earnings. This is simple and generative formulation of Bichler and Nitzan’s _Capital as Power_. The formulation assumes that things can be owned, which means a relatively stable property regime; it assumes the quantification of value in money, which also assumes a currency creating and maintaining regime. How stable the regime is will determine how one is going to project calculated expectations—and, of course, those calculations can in turn affect the stability of the regime. Part of the point of Capital as Power, though, is that the form of the property regime, and of the currency creating and maintaining regime, are determined by the owners of capital, in constant struggle with each other.\n\nThis is a very obvious conclusion to arrive at once we jettison the distinction between state and market, private and public—all of the things that even the most orthodox economists must assume as preconditions of the “market economy” are sites of intervention by the participants in that economy. Once we acknowledge that, we must also acknowledge that the creation of profit by producing goods and services that a sufficient portion of the consuming public will buy at a price higher than went into producing them is necessarily subordinate to the struggles over the legal and political conditions that give one capitalist, or one sector of capital, an advantage over others.\n\nWe can even assign a date to the emergence of capitalism, and a place: late 17th century England, when, as Christine Desan shows in her _Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism_ , the state authorized banks to create money by funding the national debt, replacing the state as the creator and distributor of money and introducing the radical new idea of individual self-interest as the source of economic growth and therefore public good. Whatever adds to the wealth of the bank adds to the potential wealth of the state, and what adds to the wealth of the bank is loaning money to enterprises with the highest rate of expected future earnings, at least on the face of it, but one can imagine other imperatives entering into loaning and investing that might involve nothing more than increasing the comparative advantage of one firm or sector relative to others.\n\nCapital is completely dependent upon the juridical form, because that is the only way in which its property can de determined and therefore expected future earnings can be calculated—the state continues to play this traditional role, as capitalists struggle over the formulation and enforcement of the juridical form. It must be relevant that it is at this point that we see the emergence of what must be the first “two-party system” in the West (or anywhere): Whigs vs Tories, as a peaceful stabilization of the two sides in the recently concluded civil war (the first civil war explicitly fought over the existence of monarchy, in which a king was put on trial, convicted and executed).\n\nSo, it’s the beginning of what we can recognize as “politics,” which means that politics is nothing more than the extension of the juridical form to the figure occupying the center. Elections are trials of the incumbents, carried out in place of a civil war in which each side would place the other on trial for treason—while also continuing to project the specter of civil war, if the expanded juridical form proves unable to provide for satisfying mock trials of the incumbents. This would explain why political observers consider a regular rotation of the parties in power, regardless of the policies or personnel of the respective parties, to be intrinsically valuable.\n\nYou would think that it’s at least conceivable that one party would govern better than the other, be more popular than the other and integrate its agenda so thoroughly through social institutions as to be the de facto ruling party for an indefinite period. And you would think that disinterested observers would have to acknowledge that this, in fact is a good thing, and really the ideal result of an electoral system—to settle on the best government and keep it. But you would be wrong—the liberal political thinker considers this a very dangerous state of affairs, anti-democratic to the core (even if the party in power continues to hold elections and allows for the free participation of other parties while simply winning convincingly all the time) precisely because the continual staging of the trial of the incumbents must issue in regular “convictions” for the process to be recognizable (“legitimate”).\n\nThis also means that those theorists who consider capitalism, liberalism and democracy to be intrinsically linked are correct—“authoritarian” experiments in capitalist governance always turn out to be forms of emergency rule that eventually revert back to multi-party systems—Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s distinction between the “authoritarian” and the “totalitarian” acknowledges this reality. A central figure who was exempt from being placed on trial could oppose himself to capital; one who is put on perpetual trial must always negotiate with one faction of capital against others. This poses the central problem of what I’d rather not, for reasons clear from my discussion, call “politics,” but, let’s say, restoring the center.\n\nThis problem transcends all culture war issues and is in fact at the root of them; at the same time, all of the “distracting” culture war issues represent forms of assetization which—and this is the innovation of “neoliberalism”—reaches down into and seizes any practice, in any institution whatsoever. I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the civil rights regime as the origin of our “victimary” or “woke” politics, which is also to say as the further corrosion from within of the juridical form. If anything, I’d put that more strongly now—turning the attention of the law to the determination of whether an employer has “discriminated” against one of a selected menu of groups destroys the law by turning into the permanent war crimes trial of “dominant” social groups.\n\nAs opposed to a proper juridical order, where an actual conflict that might have otherwise led to violence, is brought before a magistrate, here the guilty parties are always already known in advance and it's therefore only a question of when one or another accomplice can be arraigned in such a way as to coordinate with the placing on trial of a more central figure. But it is even more important to note that the permanent war crimes trial against “majority” groups intervenes in the process of assetization, that is, creates new forms of ownership of “objects” whose price can be discounted against expected future earnings.\n\nA firm that can render itself relatively exempt from the rolling war crimes trial by anticipating expected future charges and immunizing itself against them through preferential hiring, an active HR division, properly vetted diversity training, etc., increases its own value significantly relative to firms incapable of establishing such a regime. Hence, “woke capital”—but we still have another piece to add.\n\nEngland is the origin of capital, of the multi-party system and, of course, the distinctly modern form of imperialism. Here, I would agree with those (I’ll mention the twitter feed “scientism”) who see “liberal democracy” as a conquering creed: if you can open other countries to markets, first of all, you allow the competition between your own capitalists to extend onto a larger field, and if you impose liberal institutions, whether they be the multiparty system, private enterprise, an “independent media,” and so on, you create an open field for intervention in and control of the country you dominate—without having to expend much in the way of military force.\n\n(Of course, all of these strategies—capitalization, liberalization, woke-ification and imperialism are imperfect and subject to various pitfalls and crises.) We have also known for a while that the American civil rights agenda was an imperialist one, as America took over the imperialist mantle from England—racial discrimination provided fodder for Soviet propaganda and subversion while hindering America’s quest for vassal states in the postcolonial world. The formalization and elevation to transcendent status of, first of all, liberal rights to speech, assembly, property, etc., and the application of these rights to place opposing states on trial (drawing upon the precedent set in the Nuremberg trials) enabled the US to undermine the USSR, but the broader civil rights agenda, to which new grievances and identities can be continually added has added significantly to America’s imperial arsenal.\n\nAnything you can invest in is an asset—a lot of the public-private ventures replacing public services from the 90s on were means of generating assets. You invest in a private prison, or a health insurance company that contracts with the state to provide certain services: insofar as that contract with the state is maintained, the expected future earnings of your investment remain high, and you have an interest in intervening politically or supporting others who do to maintain the political conditions of such contracts. There are limits, presumably to what can be assetized, but I doubt we’ve gotten anywhere near them.\n\nThis means that markers of compliance with the civil rights regime are assets, and assets on the global marketplace, because compliance with the regime—having yourself certified as diverse, gay and trans-friendly, etc.—even buys you a little piece of the global American regime. In accord with the logic of capital as power, what matters is not whether people want the products created as markers of compliance, but whether the owners of those assets can drive all their competitors out of the system, or subjugate them within it. And that’s the state’s job, and a fairly easy one since competitors can simply be deemed illegal, or criminals, or enemies.\n\nI don’t say this is an efficient regime, or one likely to last, or the one the American ruling class, if it could have considered things coolly and from a long-term perspective would have chosen, but that’s not the way these things work. If you’re building an imperial order under conditions of intense international competition and resistance (and under what other conditions could you do so?), you have to target the most immediate obstacles to the construction of that order, even if you will inevitably get a lot of things wrong and provide material for books written decades later on how stupid you were.\n\nTo possess an asset—home ownership is an obvious example—is to make a prediction about the future. You’re claiming to have knowledge, however you may have come by it—insofar as you’re holding on to your home you’re assuming it will maintain or increase its value for years or decades. If you thought it would lose 90% of its value a year from now you’d sell it as fast as you could (hopefully to someone less informed regarding the conditions causing such a precipitous drop). How much you can do to make your prediction come true is a certain marker of your power; we could even say that, since your prediction depends upon the actions of those who can make their predictions come true, your knowledge of those actions and your ability to predict them is also a marker of your power.\n\nCapitalism enables us to reduce power to knowledge, because only those with access to specific levers of power can know how and when to pull them, and there is no other form of power now: even the development of weaponry assumes knowledge of the operation of that weaponry on a field of expected future weaponry of others, including the “soft” weaponry of media and intelligence agency subversion. Capitalism has also coincided with—relied upon and accelerated—the transformation of knowledge into prediction, and therefore eventually the computerization of knowledge. The juridical and the disciplines have been capitalized, which means assetized.\n\nEverything you do you do is an asset, or a bearer of assets, or an obstacle to assetization. The world of assets is a world of knowledge, of a particular kind: how will the centralization of power, now globally, through the organization of show and actual trials against occupants of the center, lead to shifts in expected future earnings? The vast machinery of algorithmic calculation is ultimately devoted to supplying this knowledge to those who can use it, i.e., those who can change the shape of the “object” of knowledge itself.\n\nBut the juridical and the disciplinary can never be completely assetized if for no other reason than that the calculation of expected future earnings also requires some degree of continuity and reliability of institutions, Resistance to capitalized liberalism would have to involve de-assetizing juridical institutions, and all institutions insofar as they have a juridical dimension (which is all institutions) and the disciplines (all the sciences, physical and human). This means turning all the data now churned out and recycled through the surveillance, financial, entertainment, surveying, advertising, etc., industries and rehabilitating it and remixing it with data generated by uncapitalizable results in juridical and disciplinary institutions and practices.\n\nThe engagement with politics can’t be eschewed here—full spectrum conversion of assets into data is required. Why leave any field unoccupied? But it should be a politics undertaken with the intent to serve as the highest judge, the court of appeal, including regarding who can compete for positions that would “prosecute” the occupant of the center. Enormous attention would have to be devoted to legal and monetary regimes, to convert them from sources of data that provide information regarding shifts in expected future earnings to sources of data predicting and enacting the creation of a center immune to trial. Instead of market signals, the ebbs and flows of prices of assets provide signals regarding weaknesses in the existing regime and opportunities to leverage one or another institution or company to take over control of the data of other institutions or companies.\n\nThis can ultimately only be done from within those institutions—all of them—which means what is coming to replace politics is intelligence, in all senses of the word: central intelligence, gathered and generated from within the institutions to be transformed and replaced (in which case their assets are transferred to another owner who will convert them into something other than assets). What, exactly, in capitalist relations is compatible with juridical and disciplinary forms—even if the answer turns out to be “quite a bit,” there is no doubt that creating legal regimes that provide standing to hold firms and individuals accountable for fraud, breach of contract and damages in consistent ways, on the one hand, and facilitating scientific inquiry without regard to profit, on the other hand, would set us on the road to converting property into formalized responsibilities. A “politics” can be devoted to determining what kind of figure at the center would put this question to the test, and to prepare for various possible results.\n\nWhatever the specific juridical and currency practices of such a politics, “prediction” would gradually resolve itself into laying the groundwork for articulated and distributed responsibility for issuing imperatives across specific fields. Instead of predicting the alignment of power and how that alignment would show up in various indicators, we would speak in terms of having a man ready to move into position there and then. Futurity is bound up in succession. I haven’t said anything about the “spiritual” or “transcendent” dimension—what about God (or gods), ritual, sacrifice, and so on. I transfer all these questions to the literary, in the broadest sense, including both aesthetic and scriptural.\n\nWriting has its origins in recording property transactions, marking property, and chronicling dynasties and lineages; out of these inscriptive practices come law, moral and political reflection on law, narratives regarding transgressions of ritual and laws, which is to say epics and scripture and novelistic satire—inscriptive practices should commemorate these genealogies. Broader scenic design practices rooted in the transitions from ritual to drama are commemorated in the daily performances of succession constitutive of institutions—here we have public celebrations and expressions of the community, ceremonies marking originary figures located at various foundational events of the order, contests and displays, and anything else that traditionalist would wish to recover from more self-present orders.\n\nThis will all be geared toward the data exchange that replaces capitalism, as systems of subscriptions to providers linked in networks with other providers circling back to the provided for as contributors in a festive participation with computational and other non-human forms of intelligence.\n\nWhat characterizes capital as a mode of power is that it strains while confusing the juridical and scientific scenes. “Economic” practices used to be firmly located within juridical boundaries, whether it be within the essentially gift structure of feudal exchange, or the chartered markets regulated by monarchs and controlled by guilds. Capitalism took shape within the corporate form within which it continues to reside, but there’s no real way to contain finance within the juridical form—those agencies capable of generating currency and monetary wealth through debt, among other means are, creating the very terms which the justice system would seek to control.\n\nBankruptcy law seems like a set of patches that aims to keep the system from falling apart. The money form must be identified as scenically constructive along with ritual, the juridical and the scientific scene, but all the money form does is posit possible future scenes—and so it must be engaged on those terms, as a formalization of what are yet to become more properly scientific scenes. Money, despite its endless circulation, ultimately derives from and circulates back to the center—central banks, the Federal Reserve, or whatever institution will set the terms of monetary exchange. Money therefore marks and measures what we can call, rather than “economic” processes and practices, _tributary_ practices.\n\nMoney issuing and creating would have to be directed first of all to designated central industries, determined in order of importance in securing data security, which means defense and infrastructure in the broadest sense. Perhaps such industries can have their own financial structure, like they can and should have their own intelligence operations. Discounting against and predicting the future should be continually reduced to staffing the future—firms ensuring the security of data that can be turned into a wide range of productive purposes would need to ensure the availability of raw materials, manufacturing, the education, care and training of personnel, and therefore the communal arrangements providing such personnel. It should then be distributing currency accordingly.\n\nThe more tightly interwoven the organization of data the more currency becomes the equivalent of company “scrip,” certificates and subscriptions privileging specific services and goods. Determinations by financial institutions of the degree of “instability” and possible return regarding investments gets replaced by continual updates in data security, with each update creating new potential weak links. As long as there is such a core of companies, national boundaries are a secondary consideration, and all kinds of more or less close alliances and “blocs” can be considered—but the way to progress is to mark anything that resists enclosure within juridical/scientific articulations and rework such “overflows” so that they can be enclosed.\n\nIn a recent case that I noticed left-wingers on Twitter flipping out about, a conservative court ruled against the SEC being able to directly punish firms and individuals that violate regulations—they must, as the constitution demands, be given fair trials. The left complains that this is in effect the dismantling of the administrative state, and they are obviously right—the administrative state is a way of farming out state functions to “prosecutorial” extra-state agents who draw upon disciplinary knowledge to infiltrate the bureaucracy and blackmail those who concentrate wealth. Of course, though, the immediate effect of such a ruling will be to more directly empower capital, which won’t have to operate through elaborate protection rackets anymore.\n\nBut the obvious response is to construct a genuinely juridical regime, one which revisits concepts of fraud, harm and standing, and which can construct an order of precedents grounded in transparent data collection that would provide such feedback to companies to ensure “socially responsible” behavior. This would require significant transformations in institutions and the corresponding dispositions of the people, which is the point, especially since those transformations would produce others in a virtuous circle. But, as with everything I argue for, this approach can be addressed directly and explicitly by presently existing political agencies—it implies easily composed “transition programs.”\n\nA political party could advance the process of de-assetization by aligning itself with central infrastructural companies, creating its own currency, job markets and even legal and physical defense for its members and working on changing the juridical order so as to make the expansion of such tributarianism possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "data-as-currency-and-the-debt-to-the-center",
      "title": "Data as Currency and the Debt to the Center",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 04, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-as-currency-and-the-debt-to",
      "content": "Since I’m now going to speak of a debt to the center, one extending from the originary event to the latest Quantitative Easing of the Fed, the question of data as currency can be further clarified. That humanity is constituted in debt to the center is, first of all, a consequential enough thesis to dwell on a bit. The notion of an exchange with the center has been (perhaps an understated) part of GA from the beginning, and the undeniable observation that it is an asymmetrical exchange, with the center first giving and those on the periphery then responding in kind, makes talk of debt unavoidable. Why, for that matter, should we want to avoid it, unless we’re holding on to liberal fantasies, which take an even more devastating hit from the insistence on an originary indebtedness?\n\nThe debt grows as the interval in which it is issued and then discharged is prolonged, and interest is accrued as we are indebted to all the previous debtors as well. Many features of human life which often become dysfunctional and, indeed, seem to many to be dysfunctional in their “normal” forms, like guilt and unwavering devotion to individuals, principles, causes, communities and projects, become much easier to understand in terms of originary indebtedness. The originary debt can never be paid back, but we can also never leave off paying our regular installments—a genuine compulsion, which is to say, imperative, is in place here.\n\nOriginary indebtedness also helps us clarify one of Gans’s most important anthropological/historical counters to Girard’s assumption that human sacrifice founds the human—his observation that the earliest humans, those for whom the center is not yet occupied by a human, tend to sacrifice and have as their deities animals, with human sacrifice coming at a much later, imperial state of human development. As we get more and more distant from the center, and the interval between debt issuance and dischargement grows, the debt become overwhelming, even unbearable, to the point where even the sacrifice of the first-born to the God-emperor is not enough, and nothing less than total donation of all one’s property and capabilities to the center will serve even as paying down the minimum.\n\nNo doubt, not everyone “feels” this debt, and many no doubt are gratified to have, in the modern, i.e., desecrated, world, no formalized debt to any individuals or institutions whatsoever (no doubt many are carefree), but that doesn’t mean the debt doesn’t come due, or get redistributed in some way. Why, in the end, does anyone feel they have to do anything?\n\nOriginary indebtedness is a problematic concept. Our egalitarian fantasies, of which democracy and liberalism are probably just recent versions, are primordial, powerful and satisfying. The most common terms of political resentment are predicated upon such fantasies: words like “oppression” and all the other expressions of the concept of “tyranny” only make sense in light of this fantasy. To sustain the fantasy, all that needs to be done is to airbrush out of sight the center, as Eric Gans’s moral and political thinking (since the mid-90s, at least) does. This is a fantasy of instantaneous, mutual, symmetrical, exchange, whether this is conceptualized as a market or spontaneous cooperation.\n\nIf there never is such an exchange, as I suppose Derrida realized, without being able to do much with it, then we are all “always already” hostages to the center, with the question being only how that is formalized and enforced. From the standpoint of the egalitarian fantasy, originary indebtedness is bleak indeed, but how would any concept of heroism, greatness, ambition or, for that matter, generosity, make sense without us experiencing being held by some obligation from which we can never be free but from which we can give shape to the form of that originary gift, while also helping free others from pettier versions of it so they can confront its true demands.\n\nWe might say, humorously, that singularized succession in perpetuity is debt servicing: the occupation of the center by a human makes exchanges with the center non-instantaneous, and thereby require forms to simulate that instantaneity. This is the programming problem posed by “before will have been the same as after.” The techno-scene, or tenting, is the creation of the circuits through which the instantaneity of the exchange is sensed and measured. We can hypothesize that innovation and invention follow from an imperative to bring one part of the scene into accord with another part, to remedy an unsatisfying claim to simultaneity.\n\nAll of the wires and wireless connections are materialized imperatives, which must continually be perfected, which in turn requires derivative imperatives as the debt grows and so do the means of repayment. The human at the center can offer debt forgiveness, but doing so can only be reminder of the ongoing debt to the center. It’s easy to see why breaking with human sacrifice, whether in the form of scapegoating sacral kings, offering first-borns to the emperor or god, the sacrifice of war captives, or the more everyday sanctifications of the punishment of deserving victims is so difficult, so revolutionary, and sometimes so perverse in its effects.\n\nOriginary indebtedness can’t be rationalized, other than on the limited terms of the juridical, which remains the only bulwark against the bloodiest and most uncontrolled means of debt servicing. Nothing can be more important than sharpening our capacity for juridical thinking, than subduing the flows of monetary debt as well as tabernacled technoscene to it—but the sharpening required to do that would create forms of juridical thinking along with figures of arbitrage very different than any we have now. The juridical creates a scene within the scene, an interval within the interval—the problem of time is aligning every beginning with the middle and end it simultaneously is, and a kind of injustice always creeps into such cracks which can only be addressed by juridic-ritual-techno “apparatuses.”\n\nThe full terms of the injustice must be grasped while producing judgments that can’t completely satisfy either side because they involve renewals of the very nomos or originary distribution upon which the complaints and counter-complaints were predicated.\n\nNow, try thinking of yourself less like a “soul” and more like a derivative, a collection of assets that can be exchanged at some point in the future as if they were being exchanged now. One could self-dismantle, assess all of one’s possessions and capabilities, imagine their possible uses in such ways as that making them available, honing and enhancing them, and having them commandeered now might enable the extraction of some expected future earnings. This would involve representing oneself as an inscription and archive, but according to means of listing and recording not given in advance—what counts as an “ability,” other than some future imagined employment of it?\n\nThe image is grotesque if we think of it in sheer financial terms, like some company bought through a hostile takeover, broken down into its components and then sold off. But confronting that scenario with the sentimentalism of some nostalgic vision of a holistic human does no one any good. That would simply restore the egalitarian fantasy of instantaneous exchange. But parceling yourself out is no different than instituting any other nomos, and there are venerable traditions of itemizing one’s daily activities and returning them, via circulation, to their original owner—some writing now, which also requires some reading and time designated for thinking; conversations and gift exchanges with friends and family, which also, when thought about, are “practices” that can be “maximized”; there’s a part of you set aside for contributions to the local community, etc. Thinking purposefully about such self-“nomosing” in terms of ceremonies of singularized succession is simply the obverse of financialization, an attempt to introduce rigor into what financialization does sloppily now.\n\nThis rigor involves forming, assembling, oneself as sample, to be entered as data into the central intelligence. This simply translates all previous forms of knowledge and practice, back to ancient ritual and myth, into the currency of the current driving the technoscene. Trying to evade, escape, opt out, withdraw from that technoscene itself just provides more data. But we prepare our data in cultivating and assembling ourselves as samples. This is where the hardest and most important thinking of today belongs, I think: in theorizing the conversion of assets into data and the exchange of data as currency to settle our debts—to the center, eventually, but only through circulation.\n\nMoney itself is just data—how much money you have, in what form, with what degree of liquidity, etc., conveys to others how much of the technoscene (which switches) you command and can make available to others. So, if we are to imagine replacing money with data, in all its various and continually reformatted forms, we’d have to imagine exchanges that can communicate more directly one’s command of the technoscene. Everything “withdrawn” from the monetary system needs to be replaced by teams, in a way transcending by far any gift economy, so that it’s possible for one team to tell another team that due to team A’s ongoing coordination with several others teams, any one of which could be replaced with a determinate time frame if some kind of failure requires it, team A will be able to provide agreed upon services for team D which is in turn an essential component of team B’s team of teams, from which team A in turn needs something to complete some task on time.\n\nWe’d have to start talking about the blockchain here, about commitments made publicly, about evidence of one team’s ability to fulfill those commitments, which in turn would reach out into networks of similar evidence regarding other teams like abilities. All inscription, primary, secondary and tertiary, would be mobilized and open sourced, and the questions of what distinguishes “the human” from automations of actions and thoughts will be answered by the new community’s ability to sustain this model, which will mean to keep building the requisite juridico-succession-technoscenic apparatuses. The questions are already being asked, albeit in primarily in resentful and victimary terms: how much is your unique genetic make-up worth?\n\nSuch questions have always been asked, even if crudely and indirectly, for example, through mating selection practices. You will have a team curating and putting your data into circulation as part of a mode of exchange which will entail your having data you need as well (like, for example, knowledge of medical interventions that might neutralize some genetic abnormality). This seems like a scientific question, but I will continue to insist that without a juridical element to it, without the possibility of a “hearing,” the worst monstrosities will result. But, as I mentioned above, that juridical element will not be one our presently constituted courts could handle. New literatures will have to be developed to make such courts possible.\n\nWe can present ourselves as both samples and samplers. A sample is always marked by the contingencies of its collection and treatment, both an in itself and as a sample which could have been any one of a number of other samples. Anything we say or do is said or done against a background of all the other things we might have said or done—that is the difference that makes it meaningful to say that this is the same (sample). The more possibilities we distinguish ourselves against the richer the sample, but that will only make sense in terms of the technoscene within the sample will be preserved, studied and, of course discarded as waste—now, don’t be maudlin or dystopian, waste is part of life and we discard parts of ourselves all the time, physically and otherwise.\n\nAnyone can let others pay off their debt to the center, but those who take on the added burden also have the added obligation of ensuring that the debt is indeed paid which means grounding team-making power in higher levels of debt servicing. Don’t forget, in appropriating the formula “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” that the able have needs of their own, in many ways more urgent and consuming of resources than those of the merely needy. The whole problem lies in supplanting money with articulations across the entire social order of networks of teams, that see to their own continuance and therefore succession.\n\nThis new “content” can only be built within the old form, by “recoding” money and debt with liabilities of another sort, extending imperatives into the future by making them resilient, inescapable, and with imperative gaps that can command the building of juridico-succession-technocenic apparatuses. It must be said, though, that we’d need the lineaments of such teams now in order to properly think this."
    },
    {
      "slug": "data-exchange",
      "title": "Data Exchange",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 23, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-exchange",
      "content": "If markets are made, they can be made in more deliberate and constrained ways; if they can be made increasingly constrained and purposeful, they will in effect be replaced. Money is already data, insofar as it provides us with information regarding relations of dependency and the capacity to mobilize resources; so, that data can be made increasingly explicit in non-monetary forms, in which case money can also be replaced by exchanges of data. The cutting edge of the replacement of markets and money is the already existing data exchanges that are increasingly prevalent. We all know how it works: all of our activities are monitored in one way or another, with the online activities most obviously so; this monitoring leads to massive amounts of data collection; this data it put through machine learning algorithms so that our habits can be analyzed and our behavior predicted by governments and companies for surveillance and advertising purposes.\n\nRight now, governments take our data and offer us, in theory at least, security in exchange; companies either give us nothing or allow us free use of apps and free access to sites. The exchanges with government are already non-monetary, so all that would need to be done here is make the provision of security real and commensurate to the data taken. If someone thinks that’s impossible, they can keep coming up with ideas for preserving privacy and concealing yourself from governing agencies. That seems to me impossible, so I will stick with the insistence that we must make government, or at least governance, good, and assume that we can have security agencies that focus on deferring the vendetta from below and avoid getting caught up in vendettas from above; health care bodies that can honestly look at data and keep providing us with knowledge of and access to the best conditions regarding our health care possibilities; environmental governing bodies that can seek to preserve our natural environment, keep pollution at the lowest possible levels, maybe even enhance our “communications” with nature, and so on.\n\nWe give them the data they need for all that, and they provide these services. We can even, individually and through organizations, prepare and provide more useful data and in return receive access to services that enable us, in turn, to continue to present ourselves as data sources. This is really no different than the relation between a scout or spy and the larger expedition he serves.\n\nFood may be data, but most data is inedible. The governing agencies receive the data they need to perform their functions, but how are they fed, housed, clothed, etc.; and since we consider all of us to part of the governing agencies the question is a general one of circulation of goods and services. Well, those who farm and provide food need security, health care, and a clean environment, and since all these needs can be reduced to calculation (whatever feedback is provided by the users) this is all data exchange as well: a cattle rancher needs the conditions under which he can supply butchers a certain number of cattle, so those butchers can supply wholesalers with a certain amount of beef and so on.\n\nSo, if we imagine these transactions being conducted without money, are we imagining some kind of barter system? No, but if no, there must be some medium of exchange, some means of exchanging, recording and satisfactorily fulfilling promises, to speak in Brett Scott’s terms. As always, let’s try and stay as close as possible to existing institutional arrangements, in part to keep our thinking honest and in part because any substantive change we can imagine will result from turning existing institutions inside out, so to speak—making explicit and directly transferable data that is still walled up in assets, which means making those with assets officers with a certain realm of command.\n\nA lot of exchange, and especially on the largest scale, takes place without the direct exchange of money. If one large company has steady suppliers, the movement of goods and performance of services can take place with nothing more than adjustments in bank accounts. The more reliable the suppliers in your supply chain relative to alternative sources, the less often you will need to revisit the terms of the exchange—monopolies would organize supply chains with the greatest ease. But monopolies are never sufficiently monopole, and must always keep an eye out even for distant or potential competitors. They must invest in ensuring that governing institutions due not provide favorable conditions for actual or possible competitors, and that financial institutions provide the outside spread they need to keep investing.\n\nTo provide data on the position of challengers and back-up capacity to provide capacity (to mobilize credit or “confidence” on one’s behalf) money is presently necessary. The question, then, is how to provide for what is really succession in a given industry (whether it be continuity of existing large firms or a transfer of power to newcomers) and confidence in the surrounding industries without money? The answer I have so far is teams and something like a subscription system: companies are converted into teams of operators who subscribe to other teams to supply them and those teams subscribe to other teams until everyone is all subscribed up.\n\nSo far, this sounds like a kind of more complex and indirect barter system, and to make it something else we need to account for the break-up of the monopolistic conditions implicit in these arrangements, something which must occur if, as the name implies, teams are free to subscribe or unsubscribe. New teams, we can assume, will emerge from split-offs from existing teams—if subscribers are dissatisfied with a particular subscriber, a “dissident” teams from within that team would propose a new set of arrangements. (At a certain point it will be helpful to imagine how all this will take place on the blockchain.)\n\nBut now we have to step more completely outside of capitalism and consider how the teams are to keep supplying themselves with new “players.” The logic of providing for educational systems need not deviate from the subscription logic I’ve outlined here but I’m going to assume that the situation is complicated by the need, in an order with a constantly transformed infrastructure, to have an especially variable education system—in educating the kinds of team members who will be needed a couple of decades down the line when no one really knows exactly what innovations in the meantime will look like you would need to think in terms of targeting highly general and transferable capacities and dispositions, and some of the most interesting research in such a social order will involve which pedagogical practices are likely to yield which results.\n\nThis will be especially interesting because it will be the most uncertain and risky part of the social order, and either directing or predicting which pedagogical practices will turn out the best team members will require prognostications akin to those highly refined and computational ones that currently go in to estimated the future prices of derivatives. So, teams across the board will be competing with each other in a controlled way (through the testing of split-offs) for subscribers but more fundamentally over which pedagogical practices will yield the best future team members. Indeed, pedagogical practices can be sliced up into pieces and assessed at various levels, and one could imagine a team looking forward to gaining access to some students at one institution on a particular track, and other students on a particular track at another institution, and so on.\n\nAnd they would mobilize the subscriptions needed to maintain those tracks, in exchange for something like “draft choices” in professional sports leagues. This would of course be an offense against the freedom of students to choose from among various possible employers but, again, the situation would not be all that different from what we have now, where the best students have many choices while still being constrained by the degree to which their abilities and interests match a few prestigious firms, while everyone else more or less gets what they can. So, money, in all its forms, is replaced by bets on the future that take the concrete form of using the credit one’s team has with other teams to channel and adapt subscriptions to the pedagogical practices deemed most likely to provide the future team members most like to increase that team’s credit.\n\nAs the technoscene continues to “tabernacle” more and more of our social practices through the creation of stacks of pedagogical platforms and succession practices, not only will bets be laid on particular pedagogical practices but on particular pedagogical practices designed so as to produce other pedagogical practices, and so on. So, as a professional teacher, I have managed to propose a reorganization of the entire social order around my profession, but in exchange I propose the complete breaking up of educational institutions as such and the generalization of pedagogy as the social ordering principle. Authority, sociality, knowledge, and continuity all come together here, and provide the equivalent of currency as well.\n\nA new split-off bidding to replace an established team can offer, as something like collateral, a schema for tracking current and anticipating future pedagogical practices, offering the credit a novel and plausible approach would provide to the prospective subscriber.\n\nWorking to turn the current order inside-out, then, would involve converting asset exchanges into data exchanges by shaping exchanges, to the extent possible, on the model of extending the reach of the pedagogical derivative. How far into the future can you buy a derivative? Let’s imagine writing up a futures contract that will end in an exchange conducted 50 years from now. 100 years. For such a contract to be meaningful you’d have to assume a great deal of continuity in the institutions enabling such an exchange—that the goods or services involved in the exchange will still exist in recognizable form, that there will be those able to recognize it in a way that others will recognize sufficiently so that the exchange can be repeated, that something “like” today’s legal and political institutions will still exist (or that there will be those able to make an authoritative decision regarding the legitimacy of the exchange who can establish markers of continuity extending back to them).\n\nWould anyone accept a pension that will pay off their descendants in 150 years? But with pedagogical derivatives, such a thing is possible, if you position yourself in relation to institutions in such a way that you single out that which in the semiotics of the institution will defer the noise always on the verge of engulfing any message. Well, how does one do that? First, here’s how you don’t do it: take as given and fixed reified concepts developed after the fact to institutionalize and museumize the results of activities undertake under very different auspices. For example, “preserving Western civilization”—this is the language of mummification.\n\nThe people who created Western civilization weren’t “creating Western civilization.” You must break down the “furnishings” that have been passed down into you in scenes and articulate those scenes into stacks of pedagogical platforms. The best model here is still the sequence of emergence of linguistic forms from _The Origin of Language_ : in the midst of a not-quite-cataclysmic crisis you construct the scene by taking an inappropriate ostensive (even such as vague gesturings towards “Western Civilization”) and turn them into imperatives. You keep showing how converting all the potentially veering into the gutter inappropriate ostensives surrounding us into commands, or requests, for linguistic presence, can be done.\n\nFitting something that no one had realized was misfit is eminently commemorable. It’s like seeing the human world as composed of incomplete gestures that need to be fit to each other to be completed. Then, it’s a question of the scenic arrangement to do that. Such a practice is the origin of any ritual, and the only source of continuity in an order centrifugal to ritual. The best way I can think of to institutionalize this today is through the making of markets, as I’ve been proposing in recent posts, that would anticipate the dissolution of markets into pedagogical derivatives. This must involve, one way or another, setting up bets on the outcome of events that presuppose the possibility of a broker who can be trusted on all sides to name the event and constitute its boundaries—boundaries that are ritual, juridical, and disciplinary.\n\nBetting on a sporting event is easy, at least as long as we can be assured the event is not fixed—games have a specific, rule-governed structure so that, for example, when on player has won the 6th game in a set after winning two previous sets there is no question of the outcome—we might be inclined to complain about some calls by linesmen, but that’s “priced in.” The closest thing in the social world is an election, but what would count as an economic event, a cultural event, an aesthetic event or a political event other than an election (even there the boundaries are getting frayed) such that millions of people could bet on the outcome and be satisfied enough with the results, even if they lose, that they would place future bets with that outfit?\n\nThat outfit, and contenders that would emerge, are the precursors of pedagogical derivatives, as they would place all ritual, juridical and disciplinary practices in a scene that would strip all the furnishings and leave only the scenic design practices. If you interrupt the flow of some routine with a gesture of presence that can only be completed within an event joined by those interrupted, you are such an outfit. And what massive data flows you will be sending back to the center!"
    },
    {
      "slug": "debits-and-credits",
      "title": "Debits and Credits",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 22, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/debits-and-credits",
      "content": "Returning to Zack Baker’s and my [“There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center”](https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2802/ap2802katzbaker/) is a way not only of continuing to explore the notion of originary debt but the implications of that concept for others, which might receive amplification as a result. For example, I have been positing, as the ultimate replacement for money, something like what would be “tokens” representing future pedagogical practices that would most effectively supply one’s team with the best members, increasingly projected into the future. This notion in turn suggests amplification of something I’ve said quite a few times in the context of my thinking of technology as scenic design, which is that what technology produces is, ultimately, pedagogical platforms for the further breaking down and reassembling of practices.\n\nThis is perhaps convergent with Heidegger’s notion of the technological as disclosure, and perhaps also with Simondon’s and Stiegler’s understandings of technics as eliciting features of the human that had previously been merely potential or, more radically, didn’t exist. But, even further, this suggests that the ultimate project or program of the human as such is pedagogical, the ongoing “explicitation” of the tacit, the creation of scenes upon which we might show up in different ways. In this more ambitious formulation, we would have to see how all the idioms deriving from all the world’s traditions would be rendered pedagogically, since it is in the nature of pedagogy that one never clears the decks but always works with the materials provided by the “habitat,” and all the histories trailed along in them.\n\nI wrote a fairly forceful critique of GA a little while back and I want to add something to that on the way to some concept production. It seems to me that the earliest decision, and in my view mistake, that Gans made in turning the originary hypothesis into Generative Anthropology is already there in the original _The Origin of Language_ : the separation between “institutional” and “linguistic” representation. This creates the path to the “freedom” of liberal democracy and the autonomy of the aesthetic as the model of social exchange. The institutional, i.e., ritual, is heavy and filled with various investments, while the linguistic is light as air, travels freely and therefore has an autonomy and duration no institution can have.\n\nBut if there is never any linguistic representation, i.e., no use of language, outside of institutions, then the entire separation collapses. To imagine this separation, we’d have to imagine completely unhoused individuals with nothing between them but their words—where, exactly, would we imagine them to be? Talking about what? We’d also have to imagine something like a Chomskyan reduction of language to the endless possible permutations of grammatical forms—but how would such a language have originated? By tapping into the rhetorical tradition and, in particular, the notion of “commonplaces,” which modern linguistics recoups in the form of “chunks” and “constructions,” we can remember that there is no language without circulation in institutions.\n\nLanguage is always pedagogical, and pedagogy always implies an institution, some scene to be preserved, extended and restaffed. Pedagogy is language learning, and language learning is the creation of idioms out of commonplaces—what we might call “idiom mining.”\n\nSocial life is the recording, enforcement and payment of debts to the center. The first debt is to the object on the scene that has constituted by saving the human community. It does this over and over again, every time the community is provided with nourishing food, protection from predators and enemies, etc. Of course, the community does this itself when observed in the cold light of day, but the cold light of day provides a partial view, missing the miracle of everyone collaborating intelligently in the course of making provisions—that is the work of the center, realized in the fact that all goods are ultimately brought back to the same place, and the center being given its share.\n\nHow else would you name the how of everyone doing things together without some word that would be, functionally, “God”? Everything about every member of the community, then, has been lent to that member, for the purposes of making the provisions that will be brought back to the center. When the Big Man seizes the center, he takes on the debt; there is, though, I think, never a perfect identity between the Big Man and the center, even in the case of sacral kings and divine emperors. The occupant of the center is more like a manager than a holder of the debt, insofar as his own life is marked up with prescriptions regarding his own debt to, say, his ancestors and their ways.\n\nThese groundings will have to provide us with our way, or ways, of speaking about money and markets. Money is distributed as a way of providing people with means of repaying their debt. This might be money generated by the temple or emperor, or locally, within the community. But the money is used for individual transactions—a farmer goes to the local market and gives a merchant a certain amount of money for some seed—where is the repayment of debt there? As Gans says in the passage we quote in “There is No Economy,” the debt is simply paid immediately. The merchant will then use that money and all the other money he receives from similar exchanges to go buy more seed; he needs a buffer, enough money to keep himself stocked with seed when, say, seed is harder to come by or goes up in price.\n\nAnd there will be someone, the outside spread, whom he will go to for money if he falls short, after a particularly long period in which he has difficulty finding or keeping or transporting or selling seed. And that outside spread must rely upon the occupant of the center, who will enable, for example, the expropriations that might be necessary to maintain the holder of the outside spread when things get rough for him. And, finally, the holder of the outside spread is always hedging by looking towards possible outside options that might reroute succession towards someone better able to protect the spread, and in the meantime “discipline” the occupant of the center.\n\nThe expropriations carried out by the occupant of the center may or may not fall upon our farmer, but they shadow him, and create the conditions ensuring that the farmer will buy his seed within the acceptable ritual parameters, as a donation to the middleman’s cut to the outside spread—the farmer cannot be allowed to do his shopping outside of these parameters. Local market exchanges in the capillaries are always held by the availability of credit which have “always already” indebted those on the periphery to the terms of expropriation determined closer to the center. You have been given a certain starting point, within a particular community, neighborhood and family; a certain set of abilities, to some extent “natural” and yet shaped and formed educationally in conformity with and therefore mortgaged to the center; and the way you depart from that starting point and cultivate and employ those abilities is channeled so as to make you useful to, i.e., enable you to repay your debt to, the center.\n\nOn the linguistic or semiotic level, this means that nothing in a given order can be left without meaning, even if tacit or undeveloped. Nobody’s ever just “doing what they feel like,” even if that phrase is a viable idiom describing someone’s withholding of debt repayment on the chance (making the bet) that other forms of credit will materialize, in the form of nurturing associations or some productivity resulting from “doing what you want” that you will find a market for. And the meaning of anything is idiomized. It’s impossible to speak outside of some version or higher-order articulation of the Natural Semantic Primes, and in thinking, doing, wanting, knowing, seeing, etc., one is positioning oneself within a particular eddy or vortex within which the means of redeeming those claims is more or less available within broader circulations of debt and credit.\n\nYou are always referencing, as best you can, the present intersection or conjuncture of the outside option and the outside spread: at every moment, the outside option conditions a regime of debt enforcement that will ensure people have to work, manage their households, save, spend, invest, borrow, repay, etc., in certain proportions, and that means those controlling the outside spread are always weighing the current occupant of the center against some possible replacement who might enforce debts more according to the desired proportions. And it’s possible, perhaps in some historical periods even the default, for the occupant of the center to ensure his own succession in such a way as to impose a “haircut” on those managing the outside spread—the extreme difficulty of even imagining that today is an indication of its centrality to any serious political project. The power of current states comes from the necessity of debt enforcement, currently undertaken in the form of the authorized currency, and they, or at least the largest ones, would have to find some other source of power.\n\nAt a particular turn in my thinking I asserted that with the collapse of sacral kingship, the problem of the relationship between the signifying and the occupied center opened up and became the central, still unsolved problem of social order. This thinking here is a development of that line of inquiry, in the new frame that compresses the signifying and occupied center in the problem of singularized succession in perpetuity. In a recent _[Chronicle](https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw786/)_ , Eric Gans trots out the by now formulaic distinction between “submission to faith” and the open-ended and paradoxical process of self-constitution presumably embodied in the form of liberal democracy.\n\nWe can take up that distinction, or speak in that idiom, if need be, and pose our problem in terms consistent with it: we need to “oscillate” between immersion in the team, including devotion to its current leadership, on the one hand, and the submersion of that team in a stack of scenes that leverages all the data that ultimately constitutes and renders barely meaningful any team. This oscillation can in turn be framed as one between debt enforcement and debt forgiveness: we are each and every one of us repo men. Punishing a criminal is debt enforcement: the criminal has used his abilities and energies in ways that extract from the community in a way that includes refraining from any repayment; so, the loss of freedom for a certain amount of time and imposed in a certain manner aims at approximating the debt.\n\nThinking in these terms, incidentally, would enable use to become more inventive in thinking in terms of punishment, which in many cases might be imposed more along the much despised “social credit” terms (which just submits to algorithmic data collection and analysis time honored forms of reputation maintenance), and involve exclusions and removal of access to certain places and provisions. It would be easy to show that just about everyone critical of such approaches (Deleuze’s “society of control,” etc.) resorts to them immediately and reflexively as soon as they find themselves confronted with others and enemies that normal methods of combating can’t easily be applied to.\n\nAnd with good reason. But we could push this analysis past the contemporary “carceral” culture of punishment, and imagine technologically enhanced means of isolating, restricting and exposing transgressors without traditional forms of punishment and confinement and in ways, moreover, that might turn offenders into suppliers of data regarding training in new modes of self-reflexivity that apply to further refinement of the disciplinary order and thereby represent a kind of debt repayment (and rehabilitation). A kind of high-tech, data gathering cities of refuge, perhaps situated within existing cities.\n\nI’m continuing to draw upon Colin Drumm’s work here, and I look forward to continuing to do so as his inquiries remain quite open. He points out, although here with less originality than with the concepts I worked with above (“outside spread” and “outside option”), that markets are made, and while I don’t think he systematically relates the making of markets, which requires some kind of currency, to the intersection of the outside spread and outside option, there’s no reason for us not to do so. What makes it possible to exchange a particular amount in a particular denomination for a particular good or service within a particular market?\n\nIt’s a question continuous with the ritual one of what makes a particular offering acceptable, or performatively efficacious. The occupant of the center, always fending off at whatever distance or degree of threat, a possible outside option, supervises, through layers of delegation, that market in the name of protecting the continued viability (the eternity, we might say) of the outside spread. So, the denomination will work as it does as a measure of the demands of the masters of the outside spread upon the occupant of the center and the latter’s ability to comply with those demands through a series of commands he issues (an important consideration here is that the demands of the outside spread can compromise the occupant’s ability to enforce them). Politics, then, involves enforcing some debts and forgiving others.\n\nHow, then, to create self-enforcing idioms for the oscillation between forgiveness and enforcement? I’ve done some work on this: you forgive what has happened and enforce what one has done. The line between the two is redrawn, on the one hand as more data comes and on the other hand as creditors become either more insistent or more prepared to write it off—which is also really a question of data. There must be judgment in here, that is, the juridical, which I am increasingly leaning toward seeing in terms of data exchange, which may be seen as implementable on the civil law level (where data can function as currency) but even criminal law translates into data exchange: that someone must be executed as the only way of ensuring the oscillation between forgiveness and enforcement fits the originary distribution entails that data of the specifics of that crime and the way it registered as damage or disruption to that oscillation is extracted by way of the execution (in which case consideration of punishment as an event that elicits the positioning of participants, observers and broader “registrants” of its effects becomes imperative).\n\nThe deliberate generation of ordered data takes place on futures markets organized around events curated by judgment agencies, so we can say that debts are to be forgiven to the extent that currency in which they were to be paid back and the likelihood of receiving that repayment would lead participants in a futures market to decline placing a bet on it; and they are to be enforced to the extent that the assumption of the debt shows forth as having been done and set down a stake so as to thereby attract bettors. Of course, enforcement of debt might involve something like enlistment, deputization as a repo man, which means that forgiveness is for people you don’t want on your team or that about them you don’t want them bringing to the team while enforcement is for those who will be on your team or a competing one.\n\nWe close in on someone whose idiom is to be redeemed, who due to our intervention might turn out to have done what he did; but, then, it’s a question of what to enforce and what to forgive in each case—for one who must be almost completely forgiven because things have been deemed to have happened to him, redemption is only possible insofar as there is something enforceable in the whole mess. Debts below the threshold of current forms of enforcement that thereby trigger new possibilities of repayment become sites of inquiry and pedagogy.\n\nIt's interesting that what happens here is that forgiveness is failure and enforcement is recruitment into higher tasks, which is the way originary indebtedness should be taken on. This does not correspond to existing realities, in which formulating terms for forgiveness is often a precondition for taking on more debt. Every bit of our lives is mortgaged to financial institutions—even if we have paid off our actual mortgages and car loans and pay off our credit card bill in full every month, etc., everything we own can be ruined as collateral and our savings rendered worthless by a series of deliberate articulations of the outside spread and the outside option, making us nevertheless indebted to the behavioral demands, which may be impossible to meet, of those articulating the spread and the option.\n\nWhat role blockchains and bitcoin will have I am still thinking about, but the intelligent decisions by those of us unable to affect the spread/option will be a version of converting assets into data which here means transferring monetary debits to originary credits through the creation of justice markets and edging justice markets towards data exchanges. Forgive all crimes against data extraction insofar as those crimes can be turned into data curation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "debt-and-the-stack",
      "title": "Debt and the Stack",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 25, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/debt-and-the-stack",
      "content": "Here I’ll attempt to synthesize a couple of fairly new concepts that I’ve so far introduced separately but must be made part of the idiom of Thirdness: the definition of the modern (only the modern?) state as a debt enforcement and forgiveness agency, on the one hand, and the transference of political attention and agency to modifications in the surveillance, mapping, recording and simulating stack of scenes. Since publishing Zack Baker’s and mine [There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center](https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2802/ap2802katzbaker/) (even a little before, in fact) I have been hypothesizing the modern state has its origins in the double move of the English monarchy to fund its operations through debt provided by the Bank of England along with its introduction of the two party system of governance, which is to say rotation in occupation of the center.\n\nThe Bank is put in charge of the “outside spread,” or made the lender of last resort, removing money making power from the monarch or prime minister as center occupant; meanwhile, the “outside option” (terms borrowed from Colin Drumm’s dissertation), or the replacement of the center occupant in a manner at odds with the will of that occupant, is “internalized,” made part of the regular rotation. It follows, then, that the rotation system is tethered to the fluctuations of debt and repayment, which means that governance primarily serves to maintain a certain “spread,” determined by the financial class, and governments rise and fall depending on how close they are to the middle of that spread.\n\nAll the issues that are contested in politics, then, do concern justice, but justice itself is constrained by the maintenance of the nomos (originary distribution), while the nomos is subjected to rearrangements depending upon proximity to debt availability.\n\nSo, we’re all indebted to the center—this is originary, not modern, but what is modern is that the value of our debt is determined by expectation of future earnings. You may, personally, be all paid up, but inflation fueled at least in part by debt expansion can whittle away at what you own so that you own very little, and perhaps require you to work longer and harder than you would have and perhaps even re-enter indebtedness. Borrowing done to invest in a new technology that is expected to be valued at X-amount Y years down the road and which can in turn be collateralized and borrowed off of and broken up and sold off in pieces will determine the value of whatever it is you are capable of doing—the value, that is, of your “gifts,” “advanced” to you by the center with expectations that your intelligence, upbringing, and endowments more generally will become part of the circulation of goods.\n\nWe could say, for example, that the “gift” of being white, however we sort out the social, inheritance, and historical components, is a debt for which repayment is enforced especially ferociously under DEI regimes, while payment on what may indeed be lesser gifts to inner-city blacks is increasingly forgiven, even the most basic payment consequent upon being a gifted participation in a social order—not committing acts of violence in public spaces. Each court case is framed by the prevailing enforcement/forgiveness protocols and those protocols are in turn determined by the “differential accumulation” (Bichler/Nitzan) that is continually upending the originary distribution.\n\nWhich side is up in the rotation in central occupancy, then, is determined by the leading sector of capital’s competitive needs—which groups need to be mobilized in order to place which forms of property at risk and which groups must be provided with a steady and manageable repayment schedule in order maintain present or future levels of consumption. But the most powerful sectors of capital can never be left to determine this entirely by themselves, as they contain no inherent guardrails preventing the originary distribution being derailed and making even the adjudication needed by capital unreliable. This is why the intelligence services have accompanied the growth of the system of rotation in occupancy and been transformed from servants of the monarchy to an independent force operating through the media, education systems, technology development and the political parties.\n\nSince rotation in power makes governance impossible, governance must be done through other means—the police power grounded in intelligence agencies. Here we must work with hypotheses driven by incongruities and anomalies observed in governance practices, as direct observation is impossible, and even honest accounts by insiders must always be suspect because no doubt much of the work is compartmentalized. I like to follow deep divers into all the deep state networks but I never really think they’ve got it because they invariably focus on the nefarious doings they are uncovering from an imagined prosecutorial standpoint rather than considering the needs of governance under conditions designed to frustrate it—they share the liberalism of the system.\n\nBut we can assume that all thinking has “always already” been recruited by intelligence, and we can accept this since such acceptance is the first step toward producing intelligence on governance itself. This is the endpoint of acknowledging the scenic origins of thinking—it never emerges from within the individual thinker but is always revising idioms. The better thinking, then, is that which places the most immediately available formulas in a kind of mirror so that the centralizing violence they make one primed for is deferred.\n\nThis discussion makes it clear how fragile and problematic the juridical is, but it’s for that very reason it needs to be centered—no order larger than a small hunter-gatherer community will ever be able to do without the juridical because disputes over the boundaries established in the originary distribution are inevitable, to whatever extent explicitly codified in law or cases are presided over in ways governed by precedent. Even the most totalitarian social orders cannot do without the juridical—show trials were an essential media form in Stalinist Russia. Our language is saturated with juridical idioms from top to bottom.\n\nThis means there are constraints on both the central bank and the central intelligence—the former must work through property regimes where adjudication is possible and the latter must, if it is to itself survive and preserve its prerogatives, keep debt enforcement/forgiveness oscillations within limits that defer vendettas from below and the antinomic vendetta called “revolution” from above (of course, either can be supported in other countries, with greater or lesser risk of contagion affecting one’s own). Even an attempt at a purely military organization of society would end up relying upon military tribunals. Perhaps the USSR, during the 1930s, was as close as one could get to direct rule by secret police but, as I mentioned above, this rule was conducted completely through juridical categories like “treason,” “crimes against the proletariat,” etc., with very public trials for offenders. So, the oscillation between central bank and central intelligence “appears” within the juridical, and it is only there, including juridical elisions, that we can see and talk about this interplay.\n\nModern technology, or the stack of scenes, where divisions of labor can be replicated and replaced by automated machinery, is born (such is the hypothesis I’m advancing) out of the same desecration that demolished monarchy and the Church (as a ruling institution, anyway). Since technology involves transforming modes of human interaction and exchange into automatized scenic operations, it involves the ever more careful and penetrating study of human gestures and capabilities. I’ve therefore moved (leapt?) to the conclusion that the real “meaning” of technology is the erection of “pedagogical platforms” in which ever more complex modes of deferral are invented and tested.\n\nIf there were to be a way of evading the juridical, the stack of scenes would be the place to look, because juridical decisions can, in fact, be automated, and so one might imagine this could be done “all the way down.” Perhaps, for example, rather than arresting violent criminal offenders, putting them on trial, incarcerating them, giving them parole hearings, letting them out on parole, policing them for parole violations, etc., institutions, companies and other establishments would record, through surveillance devices, transgressive behaviors, with those records shared across all institutions. Institutions would establish risk assessment and tolerance protocols which, past a certain threshold, would trigger the exclusion of individuals from those institutions, rendering them unable to participate in society, i.e., get jobs, go shopping, use banks, etc.\n\nThey would then be left to throw themselves on the mercy of charitable or therapeutic institutions established for the purpose of supporting and not so much confining as providing the only refuge for those offenders, with those institutions designed so as to train and test (extract data from) those individuals, producing information that could then be shared with other institutions for the purpose of potentially revising their risk assessments and perhaps readmitting the individual. It would be easy, especially with blockchain, to imagine equivalent set-ups with financial and other white-collar crimes and imagine that such a system might be more efficient, effective and even “just” than anything humanly administered could be.\n\nAnd, as I’ve pointed out in recent posts, the end result would have to be a dramatic decrease in criminal behavior, once it has been made effectively impossible. The perfection of the juridical would be its abolition. But there would still be myriad disputes that would not call for the exclusion of either party from society, disputes which need to be heard before they are possible to judge, and which could be played out pedagogically, to the benefit of students of the institutions in question. Abolishing crime would bring such disputes to the fore, and they would concern something like property and contractual disputes but also the finer points of slander and defamation which, in an order in which one’s standing on multiple teams is all of one’s “capital,” might become all the more important.\n\nDurkheim’s analysis of the impossibility of abolishing crime is to be admitted here, as an ever more civilized social order would learn ever more rigorous discourse protocols. We could then speak very directly of these disputes as concerning the alternation of debt enforcement and debt forgiveness, as the juridical would be embedded in qualities that remain irreducible to the juridical, qualities belonging to the ritual like mercy and grace and those belonging to the disciplinary like calculation and “enumeration,” in the sense of translating the qualitative into the quantitative.\n\nThe thread through all this is, unsurprisingly, singularized succession in perpetuity and the prolongation of the imperative of the center. What is new here (not that it’s not worthwhile reviewing the idiom) is that prolonging the imperative of the center is maintaining justice and that maintaining justice involves the deciding on the distribution of enforcement and forgiveness called for in each case—in that case, that is the imperative of the center, the imperative reaching back to the originary scene itself. Deciding what to forgive and what to enforce involves assessing (ledgering) the gifts involved, identifying the donors in a chain at least hypothetically back to the center, determining the amount of “give” in the nomos, which is to say how much can be forgiven without the constitutive property claims referring back to the originary distribution being vacated and, for that matter, how much needs to be forgiven to avoid the same outcome through the accumulation of antinomic agencies; one needs to be prepared to determine what distribution of forgiveness and enforcement will settle an actual dispute without setting a precedent that makes it more difficult to settle future ones.\n\nThinking the juridical through debt enforcement/forgiveness facilitates the transition to data exchange because it requires some mode of quantification, even if only metaphorical at times. Enforcement involves an extraction of some mode of data, whether it be money, or time, or some display of penitence, while forgiveness forgoes some data extraction or perhaps involves data provision (even if it’s data “interpreted” by one’s body); but, perhaps in each case, both enforcement and forgiveness are enacted simultaneously, with more complex rearrangements of data exchange.\n\nThe farther flung the deferral, which is to say the more prolonged the imperative of the center, the more the distribution of data exchanges can be distributed across the stack and, more importantly, organized through modifications in the stack. To require from an accused certain forms of display in order to be readmitted into society can be and certainly would be scaled up to classes and categories of expulsion and restriction that would lead to new demands upon the surveillance and machine learning systems and therefore the reprogramming of algorithms, with which our interactions would be increasingly complex. Perhaps debt and enforcement and forgiveness can be extended across kinship networks and other teamings, and over generations, as sins will not so much be visited on the children as the effects of sin from parent to child and so on can be given a kind of measure.\n\nBurdens might be shared as team members take responsibility for offenses committed by those that should have known better because we should have taught them better. Pedagogical platforms would be rewired as part or perhaps the entirety of a settlement. This would further enmesh the juridical in the stack and in the disciplinary. In the end “sentences” (strings of words comprising statements) will become “sentences” (penalties resulting from the trial), especially if we see writing, inscription, mapping, and so on as the programming of the programmers (with a sense of the proclamation of computational enthusiasts that “code is law”).\n\nLanguage will increasingly approximate programming, as is already happening due to AI. The internal will continue to be outered as any reference to internal deliberations, feelings, thoughts, intentions, and so on well be referred to the networks within the stack (landmarks, trails, paths) that are in a relation of reciprocal control with those internal rehearsals of scenic participation. That’s the way the idiom of Thirdness and Center Study coalesces around the enforcement/forgiveness oscillation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "designing-idioms-for-data-treatment",
      "title": "Designing Idioms for Data Treatment",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 13, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/designing-idioms-for-data-treatment",
      "content": "I’ll return to my “[ergodic hypothesis](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/ergodism)” and assume, contra “grammaticalist” assumptions regarding the endless possibilities of uttering new sentences, that language, in fact, encloses within a limited system of idioms—of course, on one level, we are always saying things that no one has ever said before but it is always by recombining elements of the system. Just like we have never left the originary scene or moved beyond ritual (merely replacing desecrating rituals for consecrating ones) we have never moved outside of the oral. “Ergodism” counters one of the main attacks on Large Language Models, i.e., that they just recombine existing language—yes, of course, but if you want to differentiate them meaningfully from the human on those grounds you’d have to distinguish between different modes of recombination, not simply contrast recombination with “originality.” Most important for me here is that the ergodic hypothesis, as opposed to the grammaticist, allows one to think in terms of working on language rather than “clothing” thoughts in language.\n\nSome of what I’m going to say here follows my reading of Florian Fuchs’s _Civic Storytelling_ , even while I’m not going to hold myself to high standards of fidelity to the particulars of his study. Fuchs tracing the emergence of modern storytelling, especially the short forms (at one point he seems to me to suggest that the longer forms—e.g., epic length novels—may merely be concatenations of the shorter ones), out of the breakdown of the old rhetorical world where writers worked with a set collection of known and approved commonplaces that they articulated in ways appropriate for an occasion (there is, according to Fuchs, a misreading of Aristotle in here, but I’ll leave that aside).\n\nI would say that writing, in this case, is being modeled on the oration. As is often the case in such derivations, Locke plays a critical role, that of insisting that inherited commonplaces violate and falsify our own experience of the world, which should be the source of our commonplaces. In a way that upends the very meaning of the term, “commonplaces” came to refer to collections of observations and experiences that a writer would undergo in the course of his daily life. From here we get to the emphasis in modern Western fiction on the narration of a “meaningful experience,” some “turning point” or moment of “conversion” that can be embodied in an event—Joyce’s “epiphanies” being a kind of logical conclusion of this movement.\n\nThis kind of study encourages a very practical approach to the production of idioms, organized around the linguistic articulation of events as boundary holders, placing the language user on both sides of some boundary simultaneously. I would resist the individualism of the modern literary narrative, but that’s a minor difference here—I can apply this design practice to the scene stacking of the center. I can start working with the idioms I’ve constructed out of the tripartite ritual/juridical/disciplinary structure I’ve laid originary hypothesizing into: the before and after are the same; the part of the all is the same; doing is the same as happening.\n\nI’ll be adding one more, I think very important, one, but we can see how these natural semantic primed idioms direct one to, first, identify some after that, on the face of it, is not the same as before, i.e., some significant change in some institution or practice that one knows; some way in which the part of the all is not the same, i.e., some injustice taken as a violation of the originary distribution or nomos; and some way in which doing or happening excludes the other (which is already the mode of appearance of experience)—and, then, find the thread, or succession, that through the differences enables us to see the same.\n\nOne sets up a sharp distinction, as sharp as possible, to the point of incommensurability, and then finds some scale, up or down, or temporal, enabling a re-commensuration. The composer of the idiom is on both sides—this is a directly pedagogical approach, a basis for ongoing practice. Some new ritualization, or increment of justice, or human/social causality is discerned as a result. Even if it’s “wrong”—the ritualization doesn’t stick, the increment of justice can’t be institutionalized, the causality only applies to special cases, etc.—it adds to the broader work of idiomatic intelligence—spreading such idioms is an intelligence gathering operation, and a data spread.\n\nAnd I don’t mean to restrict such work to those three idioms, which themselves are to be combined and translated in various ways—made “programmatic” in every sense. As an example, I’d like to add one which I stumbled upon accidentally in a recent entry, trying, precisely, to find a new commensuration. I stumbled upon in the effort to bring the analysis of originary debt initiated in Zack Baker and my “[There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center](https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2802/ap2802katzbaker/).” I can recapitulate and simplify the analysis as follows: let’s work with Gans’s “market society” as the material instantiation of the Christian revelation along with Ian Dennis’s unfortunately neglected generalization of what we could call the “market hypothesis” in his _Lord Byron and the History of Desire_ : everything, everyone, is on the market, selling something, negotiating, increasing one’s value, talking down another’s value, etc., all the time.\n\nEvery social interaction can be described in these terms. But we have to add something: everyone is operating on credit, if not literally (both Gans and Dennis themselves go well beyond the “literal” marketplace, where exchanges are mediated by money) then figuratively, in terms of reputation, skills that can decline, knowledge that can become less relevant, good looks and other physical attributes that fade with age, charisma that is broken by failure, accumulated trust that can be squandered or lost through no fault of one’s own, and so on. Others take these signs that you will fulfill certain desires of theirs, and they “pay” you attention as an advance on you fulfilling these implicit or explicit promises.\n\nYou need to maintain these forms of credit, which means taking out further credit from governing institutions that ensure the markets upon which you promote yourself, hedging on alternatives (e.g., getting married and investing in family life before your good looks fade) and insuring yourself against unexpected hits to your valuation, which also means indebting yourself to the insurers who will insist on certain conditions. And you will then find yourself in situations where you either want someone to use their monopoly power to pump up your valuation or to ensure that it remains continuous with the conditions under which you contracted various debts and took out various hedges and forms of insurance.\n\nIt’s still a market society, but the exchange between individuals for the sake of fulfilling individual desires no longer describes very much of it—to address it comprehensively you must speak in terms of your debt to the center, what you must pay so that your credit holds, which may be anything from holding a steady job and saving money to being willing to serve as part of a rent-a-mob to destroy someone else’s credit.\n\nIn our essay we proposed putting the outside option and the outside spread, power and money, together, so that everything is driven through succession. We could say that the outside spread is created so as to price the increasingly unpredictable and risky outside option. The more familiar way of explaining why this becomes a problem would be the growth of the merchant class, its own expression of power by pricing outside options; true enough, but first of all desecration must have reached such a point where expanding finance and commerce served as a weapon against emergent imperial rivals. Once the outside spread places the various governing options on the market, the outside option is closed off—only inside options can be considered within the system.\n\nThis helps with pricing within the system, which must presuppose some continuity in governance in order to determine the expected future earnings from ownership of an asset. The question of succession then gets transferred to the field of possibilities one determines, ultimately, the price of money itself as an asset, against. This really does reduce governance to debt enforcement—that’s what those holding the outside spread need to know in order to price their derivatives and determine arbitrage opportunities: which debts will be enforced, how and when. This must be engaged—this is the form of political power in the modern world.\n\nBut the power of debt enforcement is also the power of debt forgiveness, albeit only at the highest levels of sovereignty. So, what to enforce, what to forgive? We have a maxim for this: that which one does must be enforced; what happens must be forgiven—governing, then, is deciding where to draw this line, which is really drawn through the juridical. For that matter, one might enforce more on one’s allies, of whom one expects more, and forgive more to the powerless and therefore less relevant—so, the enforce/forgive line does not coincide with the friend/enemy one. You want to distribute power (the power to distribute) in accord with people’s abilities (what they can do) and their needs (what needs to be forgiven), which then means introducing succession involves interfering in made markets so as to convert prices into delegations of responsibility, assets into data.\n\nThis is really covered by creating prediction markets on, e.g., just decisions, and turning that into currency, as discussed in the previous post. But we’re bringing in the maxim now, which can perhaps include the others in the generation of idioms as currency.\n\nWhat is done must be enforced, what has happened must be forgiven draws most directly upon the third of the formulas I’ve been working on: doing is the same as happening. Here it might mean that what is done by some happens to others, which is one way of establishing sameness or commensurability. But we can make this maxim interfere with, or we can toggle it with, variations on the other formulas. As I mentioned above, drawing the line between doing and happening takes place within the juridical, where one must put forth a claim of having done or not done something, of having something happen to them, and of having that happening to them because of what another has done, or not.\n\nHow to ensure that the part of the all is the same after this doing and happening? The doing and happening presupposes something like “property,” a set of possible options on transference and delegation that have themselves been transferred or delegated to one. Chains of custody, chains of command, supply chains and lines of succession all come into play here. We can then formulate the following question: what has the plaintiff or defendant done so as to ensure, or (to stay closer to the primes) see to it that his part of the all is the same? How has he curated his inheritance and the responsibilities it brings? A property purist would say none of this matters, because one is not obliged to do anything to maintain rights in one’s property—and, yet, one is presumably asking for those rights to be protected, which means he could not protect them solely on his own, at least not without violating others’ protected rights (making their part in the all not the same).\n\nSo, the line between doing and happening can be pressed in the individual case, so that all the doing and happening that a sovereign might conceivably be responsible for assessing can be made to constellate in the specific case. And these considerations bring us back to the ritual level, as it is the governor’s responsibility (the responsibility without meeting which he would not be governing) to make it so that after is the same as before. The center’s advance to us is to maintain the precedence of what it does over what it merely allows or fails to prevent from happening, and our debt to the center is to maintain such a precedence in our own little centers, which is the way in which we supply data as intelligence to the center.\n\nIn the end, as Peirce pointed out, even the best insurance company, with the most sophisticated actuarial information and probability calculations and the most responsible direction, will go broke—the black swan will happen—and it is precisely at this point that we will find out whether the community has acquired sufficient credit beyond the measurable in conventional terms to find some way to make after the same as before.\n\nI want to keep in mind the reference to narration here. Narratives are ways of stretching the line of credit from before to after, even if that credit has to be redistributed to the writer and readers as a kind of virtual community. But this is never given in advance (we must take its possibility on credit) and involves a distribution of happening and doing that is arbitrary if judged according to some external standard uninterested in the continuance of the community (and even in that case the judges would at least be interested in the community of judgment). These narratives get distilled into our commonplaces—maxims, proverbs, axioms, even transitions within sentences (“in order to,” “by way of,” etc.)—and get us through transitions in our conversations (“well, what can you do?”; “you need to stick it out,”: etc.) as well as transitions in our communities.\n\nThis is where the real work on language, for which I am providing something like templates, takes place. Reworking, pressing, making more explicit, the relation between and distribution of doing and happening in a particular narration or description, even if vocabulary that is made up of derivatives of these primes is used will, I think, always produce sharper, more helpful idioms. This work is what an academy devoted to originary hypothesizing would entail tied to specific writing tasks and an archiving of Wierzbicka-style “translations” of words, phrases and sentences back into the primes. I think that large language learning machine models will prove very useful here, within a well-structured disciplinary and pedagogical space."
    },
    {
      "slug": "disciplinarity-and-the-center",
      "title": "Disciplinarity and the Center",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 13, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/disciplinarity-and-the-center",
      "content": "To continue articulating in a more thorough way the transitions from ritual, to juridical, to scientific scenes, and to do so without forgetting the reciprocal imbrications of them all (we’re never and will never be done with the ritual, as attempts to transcend it only install particularly dysfunctional and vicious versions of it), I will now look at the transition from the juridical to the scientific and technological scenes, to which pretty much all of our contemporary struggles over the center can be traced. In many ways, we already have a society of the disciplines, and the juridical has been significantly displaced (just think of how much scientific evidence, including social scientific evidence, much of its nonsensical, has come to shape juridical proceedings and their mediatic representations.)\n\nWe couldn’t turn back from this even if we wanted, because the juridical form, with its standards of proof and always problematic notions of intentionality, invites from the beginning these extra-juridical interventions—a large part of the development of the juridical has been “baptizing” and regulating these interventions in a way that makes them consistent with its own operations which, I will remind you, are aimed at representing and resolving conflicts through the use of centralized and measured force that would have otherwise led to vendettas and blood feuds that would make it impossible for social exchanges of all kinds to develop beyond the bounds allowed for by local patriarchs.\n\nTechnology, as scenic design, is already a mode of governance insofar as it generates new forms of surveillance, record-keeping and constraints on and constitutive infiltrations into social interaction, while more literal innovations in governance always become expanded intelligence operations drawing upon and calling for the creation of new technological forms (an obvious example is taxes, since, just in order for the government to get the money it wants from each of us it must be able to detect and archive all manner of transaction and accumulation).\n\nThe ”subject” of science is the “community of inquirers,” or the disciplinary space. A group of people is organized around an artificially created scene which has been designed so as to determine what happens if we do this to that. All other possible doings and happenings must be excluded from the space. I’m prioritizing this kind of disciplinary practice over “technology” because the building of any technological system will require multiple experimentations in which the builders will have to stop and create a space where they see what happens if we do this to that. The attitude or stance of the participant in the disciplinary space is determined by the assumption that truth is what the inquirers will come to agree upon in the long run.\n\nIt is a mode of deferral, and a paradoxical one: every truth the inquirers agree upon will only serve as the launchpad for a new inquiry. The deferral, then, is the point, and this also means a deferral of power and a refusal of invitations and opportunities to exercise it. Once a scientist says “science dictates that we now impose...” he is no longer a scientist. There is a “politics,” though, to protecting such a space, and acknowledging that it must be maintained even if it will never give us the answers to the most urgent questions we face now. Those answers will come from protecting the space, not violating it by trying to leverage its authority—rather, the answers come from modeling political spaces on disciplinary ones, taking into account—making part of the object of study—the different temporality and greater vagueness of relations between thises and thats.\n\nVeblen sees science as grounded in the disinterested production of knowledge, distinguishing it on these grounds from the “barbarism” of exchange and therefore sacrifice based moral economies—very much including Christianity, where you trade faith for eternal life. Science and knowledge, then, would be outside of exchange. In that case it would also be outside of desire, but even if we grant the possibility of a transcendence of desire so complete as to shame the most devoted ascetic mystic, it would still be necessary to effect that transcendence—unless we imagine science getting to the point where all humans are somehow raised free from desire.\n\nBut desire would enter into the attempt to accomplish that. I think we will be better able to speak of science, or disciplinarity, if we see it as continuous with ritual and juridical deliberation insofar as it is a mode of exchange with the center—in this case, the desacralized center. Science is born with the state, which does not reduce it to being a servant of the state; it means that science bears with it the imaginary of a perfected state, perfected at least insofar as it preserves and promotes scientific activity itself. Science is an ongoing exchange with the signifying center while proffering an invitation to join to the occupant of the center, prolonging and exposing the imperative gap constituted by the difference between signifying and occupied center, asking us to, whatever we have to do in the present, and whatever contingent and partial truths we need to do them, to never forget the “long run” and the need to continually lengthen it.\n\nThis also means that science (and I’ll suggest this must be true even of mathematics) is always ultimately historical—resolving the most fundamental questions in physics (like the reconciliation of gravity with quantum undecidability) will require situating them within the history of the universe.\n\nIf the disciplinary space involves seeing what happens if we do this to that the disciplinary space can be grounded in ordinary, irreducible, practices of meaning making. Can this person be trusted? Does this person love me? If this person is behaving anomalously, is it something in the situation, in my expectations, or some previously unexposed component of that person’s self that makes it appear so? All of these situations call for the establishment of a kind of provisional disciplinary space. A great deal of literature deals with these kinds of imagined spaces, in which one creates a new form of scrutiny. A great deal of literature remains within a Christian framework which exposes and denounces sacrifice by representing an exemplary form of it, and this leads to narratives in which love, trust, respect, acknowledgement and so on are destroyed by attempts to “test” them—what is by now a familiar, humanistic, anti-scientistic message.\n\nBut testing trust by mistrusting and testing love by doubting it is a reductive approach and therefore a caricature of science. More scientific would be taking care to create new objects of shared attention that would either increase love and trust or contribute to the broader set of relations that formalize such commitments and provide new models for them. This means that it’s scientific to elicit and strengthen latent and neglected features of ritual and juridical institutions and concepts.\n\nThe transition from taking inherited faiths and juridically anchored rationalities as the ground of our institutions to taking the disciplinary stance as the ground involves working towards the reversal of the relation between school and society proposed by Gaston Bachelard in his concluding words to _The Formation of the Scientific Mind_ : “society will be made for school, not school for society”; that is, constitutive pedagogical relations, not necessary those existing institutions we call schools. Seeing what happens if we do this to that is a learning practice, and staging it is therefore a teaching practice.\n\nOne of my most fundamental differences with Eric Gans’s version of GA lies here. We agree, I think, that all events and therefore all meaning can be understood as re-stagings of the originary event (although I imagine Gans wouldn’t put it quite that way)—these re-stagings are retrievals. For Gans, the post-sacral retrieval and re-staging of the originary event is found in liberal democracy—in the formal equality established in the market economy and voting system. Language derived from the originary scene—our sameness before the center—is certainly deployed here, but such language would be deployed in any social setting because we have no other language.\n\nEven the most brutally inegalitarian order would construct some form of equality in relation to some center, while simply ignoring those features of the social order that don’t fit the model—just as the liberal democratic market order ignores or cleverly narrates out of view whatever doesn’t fit its model.\n\nThe originary event is an instance of successfully seeing what happens when we do this to that—meaning is achieved. To claim the liberal democratic market does the same involves one in endlessly circular apologetics. It is in the successes of disciplinary spaces that we see the retrieval and restaging of the originary event. The same patience, or deriving from deferrals, is involved in the attempt to establish meaning even in what we take to be non-scientific spaces. It is the disciplinary stance that replaces the sacred, and this means the disciplinary stance must be eminently non-destructive and must be able to find a home in ritualistic and juridical spaces.\n\nThinking in terms of replacing religion, morality, ethics, aesthetics, etc., with science was always the wrong and anti-scientific approach (and I’m not sure how much scientists, as opposed to politicians and propagandists, ever thought this way). An ongoing displacement of existing infrastructures by ones more disciplinarily informed is a different matter, as displacements are always ongoing. There can be no certainty here, but, to take one example, there’s no reason to assume that increasingly knowledgeable and analytically penetrating Biblical criticism couldn’t strengthen Christianity; or that a data-driven digital humanities wouldn’t enhance the power of literature. Not wanting to know things will eventually place you in a ridiculous position.\n\nThe mode of exchange with the center of disciplinarity is that of data security, which includes the creation and archiving of knowledge that would, say, both inform a speech regime organized around a robust enforcement of laws against slander, libel and defamation while remaining invulnerable to that regime. The current dementia regarding “misinformation” is completely wrong, but so completely that it points to what would the right approach: a juridical order that makes everyone liable for lying about others while giving expanded forms of standing to bring the liars into court and make them accountable—all this assumes a “knowledge base” that is reliable and shared—that is, a knowledge base full of claims upon which accusations of interested lying would leave no mark.\n\nCuration and archiving and data analysis would here continue to rely on juridical categories like perjury and relevance. I’m not imagining, then, through the slogan of data security, a form of rule by computer programmers and IT guys—the broader provenance of data precedes its final categorized and analyzed forms. To govern is to protect the disciplinary stance and to display that stance: the public process of singularized succession in perpetuity is a permanent disciplinary project, an open study of forms and requirements of leadership under changing (as part of the changing) scenic and infrastructural conditions.\n\nThe irreducible need to figure things out, to project immanent scenic possibilities, within a time frame imposed by the need for decision, and to therefore step back while stepping in, brings the disciplinary space into every practice. Maintaining the disciplinary stance while everything around you militates against it is qualification for governance. There’s always some difference between what you say and what you do, even though your doing is simultaneously a saying and your saying a doing: the disciplinary stance entails catching this difference and letting the doing be the difference. If you’ve done it right, everyone else will want to do what you do, but won’t quite be able to, not in the same way at the same time, and you will thereby be installing difference.\n\nIf you’ve done it wrong, which you always will to some extent, everyone will coordinate their doings against yours. Let what you have done happen and it will attract both responses, and this happening provides the infrastructure for saying what everybody else is saying. You will have done something to something and now you organize spaces for all to see what as happened, as the happenings accrete.\n\nThere is a kind of oscillation involved in the disciplinary stance, one between the continuing search for models behind models, simultaneously an unpeeling of anachronistic labels pasted on things by the disciplines, an ongoing dispossession of assumptions, on the one hand, and a retrieval of lineages made up of intentional inscriptions, on the other hand. We can’t help but construct a hypothetical history of our own emergence, even while not only acknowledging but drawing intellectual sustenance from the fact that the hypothesis will only be tested in the long run. It’s not so much a “belief” in the originary hypothesis that is to displace all previous faiths and re-embed them in the infrastructure as its operationalization as an idiosyncratic universal translator. The disciplinary stance as an attractor is the operationalization and retrieval of the hypothesis, the revelatory apocalypse of which is all of us still being on the originary scene itself—it has never closed. I think this is a stronger and more operationalizable claim than any faith could make.\n\nThe forms of exchange with the center must always be named, which is why we can never. transcend the question of succession: some formal transference of “deemed” power, authority if you like, must always be made explicit—even if it’s just a nod of the head in a small informal and close-knit group. If the juridical can convert the vendetta into contending claims heard in court, this is because the emergent imperial power must deem all forms of possession as having their origin in the imperial center. (The vendetta, in using violence to maintain the power of the patriarch, is also formalizing succession, albeit in ways incompatible with written forms of record keeping.)\n\nPresently, the gathering of data relies completely upon juridical forms: we gather information about individuals and groups based upon categories through which the state exercises juridical forms of governance. If the disciplines can come to create categorizations that yield knowledge without deriving them directly from “non-scientific” juridical sources, that would only be either by reducing humans to biological and chemical categories or by creating such tightly woven and intentional systems of human interaction in which humans are so at one with their practices that simply describing a role on a particular scene will bring into play a kind of “curvature” in the infrastructure that suffices to further design the scene so as to bring that role into even closer relation to others enacted on the scene.\n\nSo, something like “operator of device X in group Y within system Z” would so completely articulate your relation to broader distributions of positions and access that it would render categories surrounding “citizenship” obsolete. Maybe we can assume a kind of triangulation of the juridical leading to its displacement—it would be precisely those involved in advanced disciplinary activities who could set aside humanistic sentimentality and simultaneously monitor themselves as a biochemical community hosting and transmitting various viruses, germs, etc. and having specific effects on enabling environments. This is likely and desirable to the extent that the equivalences constitutive of the juridical (humans as bearers of rights, as citizens, and so on) are no longer given priority over other representing exchanges with the center.\n\nAnd this will be the case insofar as those equivalences no longer seem real because they interfere with more urgent ways of handling “hand-offs” of power. This would be total data exchange with the center and the actualization of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "dual-use",
      "title": "Dual Use",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 20, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/dual-use",
      "content": "Eric Jacobus [has suggested](https://ericjacobus.com/the-art-of-violence/the-roba-hypothesis-of-human-violence/) a modification to the originary hypothesis which I have been thinking about for a while. Such things are obviously not to be undertaken lightly, given the significance of the minimality of the hypothesis. But Jacobus pointed to a question about the hypothesis that I myself had had, which is that a group of bare-handed hominids could not wreak upon each other the kind of potentially fatal harm that would make the sign of deferral necessary (why wouldn’t they just slug it out and go back about their business?).\n\nMy own response to this was that there is no need to assume they _could_ pose such a threat to each other, but only that, given the novelty in the collapse of the animal pecking order, that they could _imagine_ such a horrific scenario. Jacobus’s answer to that, as I understand it, is that something more is needed even to imagine the scenario, which is the possibility of a qualitative escalation, in which the other has unknown capabilities which one might need to anticipate, procure, or invent for oneself. In other words, a weapon—just as, in initiating a street fight with some stranger, you’d have to imagine the possibility that he has a knife or gun, and prepare for that, if possible.\n\nNow, chimps use “weapons,” like stones, sticks, or excrement, in battles with other chimps, but they just throw the stuff—they don’t hold it in reserve in case their antagonist pulls out a piece of crap, nor do they engage in something like an arms race. Jacobus at first seemed to be thinking of the escalatory situation that would elicit the sign in terms of tools turned into weapons but has more recently spoken more generally in terms of the distinction between “object directed aggression,” which other hominids exhibit, and “ _recursive_ object directed aggression,” which they don’t. So, one of the proto-humans would escalate a confrontation by raising, say, a stone in a pre-emptive way, generating a corresponding response in others.\n\nNow, we have a new situation in which each has to weigh the possibility that the others will initiate a new and unprecedented mode of violence, and whether, in that case, to initiate it oneself. We could then more easily posit an “annihilatory imaginary” to which the emission of the sign would be a salvational response. And we don’t have to change our assumption of the scene taking place around the body of a felled prey, as we can assume the “weapons” used to take down the animal are now turned on each other in the mimetic crisis we are familiar with. Perhaps everyone turns their stones or sticks back to their meal (swords into ploughshares), and we have our ostensive gesture.\n\nThe risks involved in violating the minimality of the scene seem to me worth taking because the conversion of, if not “tool” (a stick or stone is not specially prepared for some purpose) at least object into weapon and back again seems to be a permanent feature of technics. If technics, as per my technological hypothesis, is the work of composing the scene for increasingly complex and variegated rituals, then that every scene counterposes in some way the peaceful to the violent use of some “prop” is a plausible architectural principle. Maybe, in fact, the specificity with which the harm one might suffer or do to another contributes to the specificity with which a tool needs to be designed.\n\nAll technologies are ”dual use,” in that case. And that means that any prop or “furnishing” serves as a potential pedagogical platform upon which not only is its use taught, but one kind of use is distinguished from another. This further centers pedagogy in the way I have always done but have been especially emphasizing lately—the earliest initiation rituals would involve teaching young men to distinguish tool from weapon construction and use, and this would become a principle of design because it would define the group in its ritual operations. In the case of both production and warfare the imperative becomes a privileged speech act because organization, hierarchy, rapid coordination and absolute trust, along with the discipline needed for all of those features, are paramount.\n\nSo, I can return to my formulation of technics as the perfection of the imperative—the imperative is perfected by inscribing it in the scene so that it can be continued beyond the direct human relationship between imperator and imperatee. A tool or weapon is a kind of congealed imperative, ready made to transmit to new actors the relation of pedagogy and command that went into its creation, including the trial and error required for its perfection. I can see no other way, outside of brute force, for managing in sustained ways the ever present possibility that emulation might be converted into rivalry than formalized pedagogical relationships—relationships that can stage rivalry as part of the relation of emulation itself. And even brute force requires some pedagogical relation, because some team must be prepared to carry it out.\n\nSerious examinations of pedagogical relationships will always note the porous border between a beneficial and enabling initiatory relationship, on the one hand, and various kinds of potential violence on the other (manipulation, cultism, intimidation, “gaslighting,” etc.). Pedagogy involves bringing someone into a new spaces and that entails wrenching them out of an existing set of habits and commitments. There’s always something traumatic about that, and trauma needs to be dramatized, and so any powerful pedagogical act is self-dramatizing, which makes it even more “suspicious.” There’s no other way to communicate an imperative and create the conditions for its obedience, which requires the suspension of those habits that would serve as a distraction from the full attention performing the imperative requires.\n\nThat such acts are “always already” “weaponized,” and that weapons are “always already” pedagogical provides us with an originary approach to some very trying questions. I’ve taken an interest in the ongoing inflation in the use of terms like “psy-ops” to the point where one must ask—what wouldn’t be a psy-op? In what situation is there not someone with “designs” on you? What community is not a “cult”? And if the answer is, as I am obviously suggesting, we are always being designed, what then? The criticism of one or another campaign as being a psy-op or a cult presupposes that one could be located outside of the psy-op or cult, and where would that be?\n\nIn some position of “reasoned enlightenment” where one just examines the facts on a case by case basis and arrives at “independent conclusions”? That all seems to me like a psy-op as well. One could, presumably, be located within a more socially approved and therefore safer and reassuring cult, like one of the mainstream religions, but that just means you’re in a more relaxed cult, that can rely upon the subsidiary contributions of other cults (consumer cults, media cults, start-up cults, etc.), but offers no defense against cult-collapse where even the more easy-going cult will have to get serious or lose its membership.\n\nEverything is a cult, and that’s OK. It’s just another way of saying we have never left ritual distribution from the center. What we can and do have, though, as a way of differentiating between destructive and productive cults, are disciplinary spaces. Even if you say that all the existing disciplinary spaces—the professions and the academic disciplines—are utterly corrupted in one way or another, you are not going to deny (indeed, the critique presupposes) that such things as bodies, objects and texts can be studied in such a way as to better know how they have been produced and what kinds of things might be done for and with them.\n\nAll the professions and disciplines originated as cults anyway, with oaths, secrets, pledges and so on. But this just resituates the question—how do we tell a “true” disciplinary space from a “fake” one? The better disciplinary space will re-tool questions and imperatives coming from other disciplinary spaces while the worse disciplinary space will weaponize its own procedures of knowledge production to repulse such questions and imperatives. This doesn’t make the better disciplinary space less of a cult; it just makes it a different kind of cult: to “entertain” questions by treating them as imperatives to reorder your space in some way is a practice and a mode of deferral which must be built-in—technized—in the pedagogy of the scene.\n\nWe might say that the true disciplinary space sees the exchange with any and all other disciplinary spaces as central to its exchanges with the center. And the proof of such a disciplinary space will be the degree to which it functions as a central intelligence, and thereby as a constant pedagogical layer infiltrating all the other cults.\n\nThat tools can always be weaponized is a reminder of the sacrificial dimension of any “breakdown”—you are, after all, tearing something apart, destroying its integrity, turning it into a means for the sustaining the coherence of the group. That weapons can always be “tooled” is a reminder of the deferral at the origin of cult(ure). Keeping the tool/weapon boundary visible might be an extremely fruitful methodological principle, enabling us to imagine the entire spectrum of forms of human organization opened up by simply inquiring into reality. If you make weapons sufficiently pre-emptive, they become indistinguishable from tools: if people are especially likely to kill each other under certain knowable conditions, you can rearrange those conditions so as to make them somewhat less likely to kill each other, and so on—in the end you will have created new conditions under which violence has become unthinkable because there are just too many obstacles and mediations you’d have to pass.\n\nThis proposal is only “inhuman” if your definition of the “human” includes the assumption that humans must always and everywhere be equally likely of committing all kinds of violence against each other, admitting no possibility of mitigation. But cult(ure) is precisely this mitigation. But how to proceed on the path towards pre-emption is certainly not self-evident, and it’s worth considering that pre-emption is always a way of speaking about committing an act of “unprovoked” violence precisely on the grounds that doing so will mitigate some other violence in some longer run. In that case, the ideal state, preserving the original meaning of “the state” as derived from the word “statistics,” is to continually improve on both layers of pre-emption—to built layers of deferral while being ready to act suddenly and decisively when any layer is breached.\n\nThe state, then, would be the cult of data security—and what counts as “good data” is whatever enables you to know that the imperatives you’re issuing first of all _can_ and then _are_ being fulfilled. And this includes knowledge of the temporality of the imperative—the imperative is the source of temporality, as both the ostensive and the declarative are concerned with constructing presents. We are still fulfilling imperatives issued thousands of years ago, jostling for our attention with imperatives issued seconds ago and we should work on crafting imperatives that our successors will be fulfilling thousands of years from now, while also issuing the imperatives with much closer expiration dates that are nevertheless preconditions for the more “eternal” ones to be “platformed.”\n\nThe ultimate and untranscendable cult is the cult of language—whatever god or historical project you “believe” in is formulated linguistically, which includes the entire performative dimension of language, i.e., ritual. Your “belief” in whatever implies certain ritual practices and the utterance of certain prescribed words in certain situations (those situations also being prescribed and described in other words) and if you have no trust in those words the entire edifice collapses. To believe in God is to believe that God speaks to men, or at least once did, leaving us records of those conversations—the belief and the relationship with God can only, then, be “reassembled” out of those linguistic remnants, that “data.”\n\nYou have to “believe” in language before you believe in anything else, but you don’t really have to—nor can you—“believe” in language because you must already be “in” language to formulate any skepticism about God, reality, knowledge or anything else, including language itself. Language can become “inoperative” in specific cases, but not in general. There is, though, always some gap between what one says and what one means, which is another way of saying between what one says and what others take him to be saying. Identifying, framing, staging, scenicizing—not necessarily lessening or closing, because the gap as a sample might be worth preserving—that gap is the most basic pedagogical and disciplinary act.\n\nThis is where I see the importance of Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes, which should make philosophy irrelevant and lead to a reworking of the disciplines because they provide for a kind of unified field theory of language, uniting linguistic relativity (the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”) with linguistic universalism—i.e., infinitely translatable idioms. I would imagine the primes would even serve as a programming language. We’re always swearing on and to language, taking out loans on language, paying our debts, providing our donations to the center as well as inspecting and repairing all the institutions of deferral with language.\n\nAnd this includes math, which is, ultimately, language and inseparable from language more conventionally considered. (At some point soon I’ll discuss Jeffrey Binder’s _Language and the Rise of the Algorithm_ on this issue.) Building the extended scenes that enable utterances, including those of the engineers involved in building that scenic infrastructure, involves us not in something other than language but in broken down, reassembled and distributed modes of language for which our cult of language must install new practices and hypotheses.\n\nThe disciplinary, I would now say, circles back to the ritual (commemoration, distribution from the center) by taking accounts of ritual and the juridical. The account—record keeping regarding inputs and outputs, debits and credits—is the first form of writing, and it is all that writing ever does—account for where everything is on the scene. The disciplinary creates new scenes upon which the records of other scenes can be audited, so those scenes can be disassembled and reassembled. Money is itself just another form of account keeping and therefore of writing or inscription. The modern derivative represents a disciplinary space that is both deranged (a kind of pure weaponry) and an almost perfect inversion of the kind of disciplinary activity that must eventually replace it (the articulated system of imperatives).\n\nIf you are betting on whether X number of people will repay their mortgages, you are also betting on whether they will keep their jobs, on whether the rate of inflation will make it worthwhile for “enough” of them to keep paying their mortgages, on the housing market, on whether enough people will acquire the credentials needed to purchase and keep such homes, on whether those credentials will maintain their value on the job market, on whether some war or other catastrophe will upend the entire system, etc.—but, then, you can also hedge your bet by betting in favor of all the conditions that might undermine the mortgage paying system, making the adjustments along the way that enable you extract arbitrage winnings from all those who are slightly behind you in making similar adjustments.\n\nYou’re creating an image of the spread of the entire system while paradoxically helping to make it less likely that the meanings of words like “home,” “learning,” “family,” “community,” “country,” etc., can be redeemed (but even that, perhaps, only in some longer run). You’re also then creating a kind of inverted mirror image of the redemption of those terms. And this is what all of the cults, which are all also either disciplines or have disciplines appended to them—scientific, therapeutic, social scientific, literary, artistic, religious, etc.—do: immerse the participant in the experience of the boundary separating the dual use of all technics, all scenery."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ergodism",
      "title": "Ergodism",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 04, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/ergodism",
      "content": "In my day job, I often imagine a writing assignment that would have students unfold an entire discourse from a very limited starting text, ideally a single sentence. This would be done by making explicit the implications of the sentence, implications derivable from the very relations in the sentence itself along with the field of implicit negations and distinctions constituted by the sentence. One could then make explicit the implications in the explicit statement of the first set of implications. In the process would be produced a discourse that is transparent, self-explaining, and self-contained, while also infinite.\n\nSo, for example: “students might unfold an entire discourse from a very limited starting text.” Students, then, are things such as can unfold, at least, a discourse, and a discourse is something that can be unfolded, at least by students. Texts can be starting texts, and, therefore, presumably, middle, and ending texts. Texts can be the source of discourses and, furthermore, can be turned by students into a source of discourse. If students can turn texts into origins of discourses, teachers either can also do this or cannot do this, which means they share, to this extent, a common relation to texts and discourses with students, or a radically different one, one in which, for example, perhaps discourses are the origins of texts and teachers are incapable of affecting the relations between discourses and texts.\n\nAnd so on. With the help of a dictionary, word oppositions, degree words, and other means of singling out and articulating, we would eventually have a discourse about the entire history of the universe, had we world enough and time, and along a very distinctive path. You could say this would also be the most ethical discourse, one that doesn’t impose any normative frame or extrinsic questions upon a discourse, but just keeps restating what has been said along with what has been just barely left unsaid.\n\nSuch an understanding of discourse, as an endless unfolding, necessarily intra-referential, of a singular event-statement seems to me to correspond closely to the originary hypothesis. Discourses founded on formalizable, universalizable rules are themselves only particular variants of such event-statements, those that effected a more stringent form of deferral, under specific conditions, by elevating the declarative sentence over the ostensive and imperative. Such event-statements can be. located historically, in the history of philosophy, or in the displacement of “intuition” by purely symbolic language in the mid to late 19th century, as studied by Erich Horl in his _Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication_ —producing what Federico Campagna calls “absolute language.”\n\nEven such completely symbolic language, cleansed of representation and even reference, is dependent upon specific scenes and events, embedded as they are in institutions that summon forth other scenes so as to make themselves legible and recordable in the (say) financial terms demanded by tendentially or aspirationally symbolic systems. This primacy of the event over the symbolic, whereby the symbolic is simply a form of deferral, is what I will call “ergodism,” drawing upon Huan Saussy’s understanding of oral poetry as “ergodic”:\n\nWe might describe oral tradition as a poetic technology marked by collective composition, modularity, iterability and virtuality... In _collective composition_ , the right to determine the content of a performance is distributed widely through the community of performers; even where a norm exists, it does not exclude variation or improvement. _Modularity_ : poems are combinations of performed units that can be put together variously; any two different works in a tradition will tend to have many of these units in common. _Iterability_ : a poem is not a final result but only one exemplar in a series of recitations, and to be preserved it must be recomposed again and again, modularly, by members of the collective. _Virtuality_ : what is passed on and learned from poet to poet, if this is seen as occurring, is not the poem itself, a determinate series of words from beginning to end, but rather a recipe or strategy for making a poem that will answer to such and such a description.\n\nConversely, no particular rendition of a poem exhausts the possibilities of the poem’s tradition. The ambivalent relation of such traditions to the usual systems of notation lies in the fact that notation has been limited to recording the particular renditions, leaving the potential dimension of alternative realizations to be inferred. The oral is that virtual or ergodic register. ( _The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and its Technology_ , 72-3)\n\nThe ergodic, on this account, can only be recognized as the virtual environment surrounding the literate systems of notation, and which therefore includes and grounds what must remain implicit in those notations. Even the most privatized silent reading is nothing more than the eliciting of another component of the collective recomposition of the text, whose written character does nothing more than channel the ergodic within centralizing, hierarchical institutions of memory and pedagogy—that “nothing more,” admittedly, is quite a lot, enough, in fact, to generate the illusion that the symbolic, trans-intuitive world can be the real one.\n\nThe fact that it cannot is not necessarily reassuring, because the attempt to implant “absolute language” or, as I would prefer, the “absolute declarative,” has very real effects insofar as it involves the issuing and increasingly frenzied enforcement of imperatives that cannot be recognized as such, but only as self-evident, logical conclusions of centralized data collection and curation. More deliberately inhabiting the ergodic, then is, not so much “resistance” (there is not outside to resist from, such outsides themselves being phantoms generated by the declarative world), as modes of infiltration and intelligence that deploy and emit data as sources of deferral insofar as the commensurability of all data is advanced by further “granulating” the singularity of each point of data creation, collection, transmission and curation.\n\nWe can posit a somewhat different provenance for the originary hypothesis itself if we situate it within an ergodic space—the originary hypothesis, first of all, would be nothing more than the making explicit of the just barely unsaid of any statement whatsoever, or the virtual form including all those unsaids—for any utterance to “make sense” something like the originary scene must be a tacit condition. This does not detract from the indispensable assertion that the originary hypothesis refers to an actual event, something that must have happened, but it brings that originary event within the ergodic world itself, as a virtuality that we collectively compose, modularly, through its successive iterations.\n\nWe are still within the originary event, continuing it, retroactively and proactively recomposing it out of its own elements which have become all the words, sentences, discourses, texts and the material scenes and institutions created in accordance with them. The originary hypothesis spreads and is simultaneously minimized; scaled up around global institutions and scaled back down to the elements that we are ever recomposing reality out of. This would provide us with a measure of historical improvement: the infiltration of the originary hypothesis into all surfacing of implications. The concept of singularized succession in perpetuity, the a philosophical concept that provides the only possible guide to infiltrating intelligence, is also nothing more than the making explicit of what is implicit in the originary scene, that the preservation of this event must be ensured through the transition from one mode of occupancy of the center to another and that the entirety of the elements and relations on the scene must be solely devoted to ensuring this.\n\nNot only must be, but are, even if resentment of the center interferes with the mobilization and direction of all participants in that direction by conflating that work with the demand that the center close its own acknowledgment gap on one’s own behalf: in other words, resentment is the insistence that one’s own proper formal naming by the center has been infringed upon by the center’s undue attention to another. You either contribute to the center in such a way as to better qualify it to see to its succession, or you demand from the center the reinforcement of the terms enabling you to make demands on the center—but even in this later case you simply see your own demand as essential to the continuity of the center.\n\nWho, after all, can imagine a world without oneself? The question is, within what kind of virtuality do you compose out of the successive iterations of that self within its social and technological ecology? There’s no way to avoid participating in the commensuration of data because that’s part of what language does, and what will count as a self that “consists” will be one that erects the constraints within which improbabilities and incalculabilities will be collaboratively both preserved and commensurated.\n\nWe can draw upon the strictly mathematical definition of “ergodic” here: “relating to or denoting systems or processes with the property that, given sufficient time, they include or impinge on all points in a given space and can be represented statistically by a reasonably large selection of points.” I wonder whether all systems could be represented statistically by a “reasonably” large selection of points, but that point about a system or process including or impinging upon all points in a given space is on point (but doesn’t the reference to “sufficient” time make this rather expansive as well? Perhaps given sufficient time and reasonable size all systems are erogdic): let’s just say that ergodism entails conferring meaning on any “point” within the system (any sign) in accord with its immediate or more or less likely or indirect “impingement” upon some other and ultimately every other sign in the system.\n\nEverything is just the way it refers to everything else, keeping in mind that every thing relates to (ultimately is “like”) every other thing in a distinctive way. Anything new in the system is just another articulation of one sign in a network of intra-references with all the other signs. The just barely unsaid of any utterance is nothing more than what remains implicit in this articulation of references, which then means that all we ever do, and should therefore do more deliberately and precisely, is surface some as yet unsurfaced reference within the network. Which one is the best to surface? The one that best draws upon the articulated elements of the system so as to constrain the conditions of the naming of the successor of your practices.\n\nResentment, and the violent centralization it leads to, would in this case simply be a refusal to see to the naming of your successor—the refusal to acknowledge that the world will continue without you. Socially speaking, it’s a refusal of pedagogy, a refusal of initiation, a refusal to rework precedents, even a refusal to mitigate.\n\nNaming your successor cuts through the eternal stand-off with the center regarding reciprocal obligations, a stand-off that leads one to seek out usurpers of the center who have reneged on their obligations. Naming your successor also limits the scope of any purified symbolic system, because the continuation and elaboration of such systems does require the pedagogical raising of the next generation of the officer class to maintain and expand it. Only the originary hypothesis brings us into the centrality and irreducibility of this practice. The originary hypothesis can meet no scientific standard not only because there are no scientific standards but because science can’t address singular events, including the succession of singular events marking its own extrication from the ritual, sacrificial order, which it still serves insofar as the originary hypothesis is not yet co-extensive with the idiomatic central intelligence.\n\nPerhaps the cloak of invisibility in clear view, penetrated only by a few (if only I could create an algorithm accounting for the whos, whens, wheres and whys of such penetration), of the originary hypothesis enables it to occupy that irritating center immune to notation, to simply display the conversion of convergence upon a particular point of irritability into the most generative source of data regarding the notating subject itself and its field—the originary hypothesis would then be modeling the practice of the new officer class that will be ready to take up the failing functions of sovereignty at some point.\n\nData at different scales and according to different systems of measurement—the data taken, say, from a certain experiment on cellular resistance to viral infections along with, say, the data on human reliability under certain workplace conditions involving the collection, handling and transport of the biological material containing the necessary cell cultures for said experiments and, even more, data regarding the sustainability of the infrastructural chains enabling the obtaining of such material and the dissemination, replication and publication of the experimental results—will all need to be made commensurable because “studying cells” includes it all and this can only be done by further singularizing the accountability of those engaged in such practices at each point along the way—increasing automation of decision making processes increases the singularity of remaining human decision hinges.\n\nThese are pedagogical relations through and through, pedagogical relations within language, wherein ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives, and declaratives need to be sorted out in their transitions and integrity. Whoever can enter existing institutions and reorganize them by doing this sorting out where necessary will remake and lead the world and save us all. Only the originary hypothesis, as a kind of, I suppose, Schelling point, can articulate the pedagogical practices that can guarantee a steady flow of such people."
    },
    {
      "slug": "event-intelligence",
      "title": "Event Intelligence",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 14, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/event-intelligence",
      "content": "For Bernard Stiegler, technics is the externalization of memory. The first form of memory, characteristic of the most primitive forms of life, involves the transmission of genetic information transgenerationally. The second form of memory, secondary retention, characteristic of more advanced forms of life, involves the ability to repeat and vary within strict limitations, certain operational sequences: this form of memory gained from learning about the limits of given operational sequences, does not extend beyond the individual organism, except to the extent that the individual organism might alter the environment within which other organisms operate. Finally, there is the specifically human form of memory, tertiary retention, in which memory is exteriorized and made relatively permanent through some kind of inscription upon some matter. Here, Stiegler draws upon Derridean “differance,” according to which each mark or “gramme” takes its reality or “meaning” from its difference from and deferral of other marks or inscriptions.\n\nStiegler is caught up in trying to solve philosophical problems, especially those bequeathed by phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger in particular) so he speaks in terms of these exteriorized marks being re-interiorized so that we can arrive at the kind of consciousness accessible to philosophical discourse. Stiegler comes close to paving a path (leaving and inscription) towards moving beyond philosophical discourse by speaking in terms of a “default of origin,” when exploring the implications of the origin of tertiary retention. How could an inscription be recognized as an inscription? This problem is very familiar to those of us steeped in the originary hypothesis: how could the first sign be recognized as a sign without there already being signs, articulated within a system, that allows us to recognize some mark as a sign?\n\nStiegler can’t get past the realization that this first inscription must be “accidental” but not quite accidental, because it at the same time must have been seen as something necessary, or at least repeatable. You can’t repeat an accident. Hence “default of origin”: there must be some origin, but we can’t say what it is, certainly not without falling back into metaphysics, so we’ll make what is ultimately the same move Derrida made—treating the origin as an “inevitable” presupposition that nevertheless must be endlessly deferred as a sign that we will never once and for all extricate ourselves from metaphysics.\n\nIf we set aside the problems of individual consciousness and memory (i.e., metaphysics), the default of origin can be replaced with a genuine origin, by acknowledging that the “accidental” inscription is “conscripted” into use upon a scene, in an event—in that case, we have an “event-al anthropogenics” instead of philosophy. The pathological avoidance of origins is replaced by the insistence that all we have and do is retrieve and enact the origins through which we have and do. We don’t even need to speak of “interiorization” in that case: we are always in the environment of inscriptions which we know how to “read” because we have been tutored and initiated into the scenes made up of those inscriptions and upon which attention is directed towards some center.\n\nWe all experience some form of interiority, some of us quite intensely, for some of more “really” than externality is experienced—nevertheless, we are always on the margin of some scene, however configured, in accord with whatever temporality, in terms of whatever mode of participation in that scene we find imaginable. The solitary thinker who never leaves his room or books is a highly active participant on the scene of solitary thinkers, in dialogue with other solitaries whose books he reads and those he hopes will be reading his books into the distant future.\n\nSo, while acknowledging Stiegler’s assertion that what metaphysics has really suppressed is not writing but technics—which is systematically thought as merely instrumental to the uses determined by the mind reflecting on the eternal, which remains the commonsensical way of speaking about technology (we invent devices to do the things we’ve decided we want to do in some non-technological space)—I extend that claim to insist (not inconsistently with Stiegler, I think) that what metaphysics has suppressed is learning, and in particular language learning. It’s extremely interesting that Plato came to see knowledge as a form of recollection, which is to say that he found no other way of resolving the paradox that if you come across something genuinely new, it resists all your pre-existing categories and therefore you can’t know it while, if you can know it, it fit your pre-existing categories and therefore you already knew it.\n\nAgain, this becomes a completely different and more productive problem when reframed scenically and, in a way that I also think converges with Stiegler’s thinking, idiomatically (to speak of “idioms” is to recognize the dependence of any utterance upon the scene where it is uttered and those subsequent scenes where it is repeated). The unknown breaks down the network of idioms you have for translating the world, for “enlikening” (to refer to Paul North’s fascinating _Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness_ ) that novel thing or happening to things and happenings already named within that network of idioms.\n\n“Knowing” it involves conferring a new name (which might be a revision of an existing one) upon it, with that name in turn being “verified” or “authenticated” upon a scene where you teach and are taught by others to refer to, attend to, appropriate, “emplace” that thing or happening—which, at this point, is part of a revised network of idioms and not quite the same as the thing or happening “itself.” That we’re always learning is in itself a banal truism, but it becomes less so once we say we are composed of our learnings and teachings, by the pedagogical relations infiltrating every thought and utterance—to “understand” something is to be able to rehearse a way of showing others (specific others, whom you imagine more or less explicitly endowed in specific ways) how to see and hear what you take yourself to see and hear (which will turn out rather differently once you see and. hear it again through these others).\n\nWithin GA there has been both a paucity of examination of the relation between these two foundational terms, “scene” and “event,” as well as what seems to me (I feel certain a search of all writings composed under the aegis of GA would vindicate this claim) a massive disproportion in the attention showered upon the respective terms in favor of “scene.” Gans speaks of “scenic thinking” regularly, and he has a book called _The Scenic Imagination_ —I can’t recall him ever speaking about “event thinking,” and the word ‘event” is not to be found in any of his book titles. This may be specific to Gans’s style of thinking or something more endemic to GA itself—at any rate, I’d like to start redressing both these defects.\n\nTo some extent, “scene” and “event” can be seen as opposites, insofar as a scene is static and defined by everything being in place, while an event is action and transformative. But there’s more of a dialectical relation between them since, obviously, there can be no event without a scene, and the scene is designed for the purpose of staging events (and wouldn’t designing the scene have to be itself an event?). The word “scene” does overflow the boundaries I’ve just ascribed to it—for example, why do we speak of someone “making a scene” when they act “outrageously,” rather than “making an event”? In this case, it’s a question of introducing drama where there wasn’t before—but, then again, where could there be no drama?\n\nCalm, rational discourse focused on adhering to routines and solving some problem upon which there is a consensus is its own kind of drama. So, “making a scene” is less introducing drama to a non-dramatic situation than protesting the illusion of its undramaticality and revealing its inherent scenicity upon a newly created scene. Complaining about someone making a scene is therefore pointless—since you’ve acknowledged that they’ve made the scene, there’s nothing to do but find a way to act on it.\n\nLet’s say that Stiegler’s tertiary retention is inscribed on a scene which is itself nothing more than an arrangement of inscriptions that enables further inscriptions to be made. On the originary scene, the inhabitants inscribe upon each other, as each “carves” his gesture as a “reading” of the others who have carved theirs in response to his. There’s no need to insist that inscription relies on some device, like a sharpened stone—the others on the scene are material enough to take inscriptions that have been caused by one’s own movements. The implements are themselves derivative of the inscriptions made upon each other by the participants on the originary scene.\n\nSo, we can both minimalize and maximize the difference between scene and event by saying that the scene is the articulation of inscriptions enabling a new inscription while the event is the new inscription that re-inscribes all the existing ones. Since the first technics, then, involves making the inscriptions constitutive of the scene, technics are always, to bring back a concept I’ve used quite a bit but not too recently, scenic design practices. The repetition of the originary event in the first ritual will start from some remaining inscription of the event itself and use it to re-member the event—perhaps placing a bone left over from the shared meal to mark the place where the. new kill is to be brought would be enough of a reminder that the entire risky business of experiencing all over again the mimetic crisis can be avoiding by re-enacting it.\n\nTechnics is the continual reinscription of the scene—scenic design practices are events within scenes that design scenes in ways that facilitate new events. Scenic design practices are therefore discovery procedures that elicit, frame and reinscribe the new forms of desire and resentment that are generated by the latest reinscriptions of the scene.\n\nIt's interesting that Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes provide us with a richer vocabulary for speaking about events than for speaking about scenes. “Do” and “happen” are both primes, and, really, what more do we need to speak exhaustively about any event than to identify the ways people are doing things and the ways things are happening to people (the same people are doing and having things happen to them)? (I’ll also briefly mention “move,” also essential descriptor of events.) This, in fact, cuts through all the conceptual clutter of “will,” ‘freedom” “choice” and all the rest of the vocabulary of action—from different positions on the scene we can see different ways of drawing the do/happen boundary (where you think you are doing something I may see all kinds of things happening to you), and that will tell us everything we need to know for the purposes of scenic design.\n\nThese lines are just further inscriptions on the scene. For “scene,” though, we just have “place” and all the relative locations—here, above, below, inside, side, far, near. But this helps because what makes a scene a scene is that everything on the scene takes on its meaning from everything else on the scene, so it is all relative—one thing is near because something else is far, one thing is above because something else is below, etc., which tells us where we are on the scene in relation to each other. Any inscription, then, will articulate scene and event by marking where some do/happen line needs to be drawn relative to all the other do/happen lines.\n\nWe can, then, make the scene/event distinction something akin to the wave/particle duality in quantum physics, which is the kind of conceptual clarity and reduction _ad paradoxem_ that thinking in the human sciences should aspire to. And this readies us event-al anthropogenicists to engage on the terrain created by information theory, cybernetics and what Benjamin Bratton has called “planetary scale computation,” the gigantic computing “exo-skeleton” that we can call a scene/event generator. I will remind my reader (inscribe upon our tertiary retention) that taking up the language of the central intelligence must be done both sincerely and satirically, since any language of the human or subjectivity will be nothing more than a translation of the infrastructural possibilities of those articulations of the human or the subject—which makes it no less real, because—well, what other reality do you have in mind?\n\nThe originary satire which is simultaneously absolute idiomatic infiltration of central intelligence is the only sustainable mode of inscription now. So, let’s consider what happens when we make the obvious observation that, in any human scene/event, what counts as “noise” is always going to be mimesis. For clear communication you need to minimize, ideally eliminate, noise—this equates to abolishing the difference between the scene upon which we presently inscribe and the events that provided the inscriptions constituting that scene. The computational ideal would be that the signs or samples we exchange on our scene are always already, constitutively, the same—which could only be the case if all participants on the scene were constructed in advance as prompted by those signs as to enter operational sequences functionally identical to sequences upon which any other user would enter.\n\nHistory would then be a long process of scraping the noise off of signs so that we’re all equipped to use them the same way. This is the telos inscribed in information theory, even insofar as it’s presented as a purely neutral attempt to understand communication.\n\nStiegler’s program for resisting the entropy and “anthropy” that ultimately pervades, and now increasingly destructively, human negentropic efforts (the memory embedded in technics first and above all) would involve refusing the oblivion of the incalculable. I think event-al anthropogenics can help here. But, first of all, is mimesis entropic or negentropic? Or, rather, wherein is it either or both? Mimesis is first of all positive and generative—you learn from watching another if you can translate what he does into your own movements. It then becomes rivalrous and destructive—you both want the same thing. So, first of all negentropic, but then gives way to entropy through lack of differentiation.\n\nLike the rest of nature, I suppose. But, then, another layer of imitation can be added: the imitation, we can now say, of our reciprocal inscriptions upon each other. This is unequivocally negentropic and incalculable: you can’t tell which new inscription will reorder all other inscriptions in the field and convert them into reinscriptions. The way to do this is to disperse the samples presented to us as the same across a field of likeness (“same” and “like” both being primes, with, of course the difference between them as vanishingly small as we wish to make it) and, as Paul North (I cannot recommend that aforementioned book too highly) points out, everything is in some way and degree like everything else.\n\nSo, from the same, to a field of likeness or enlikenings (which includes all things, all things related to all things, all ways of looking at and using said things and relations between things), and then back to a sameness that rehierarchizes the field of likenesses (this is me, not North) so that we have repeated with some significant othering and satirizing differences the sequences that promoted the sample to the status of the same in the first place. And there must be computable ways of getting to this incalculable. It’s easy to imagine (probably harder to do) jiggering with algorithms so as to produce the convergence of a field of likenesses, articulated a particular way, into samenesses.\n\nWe can use computers to identify all the ways things are like each other that we know must exist but could never gather on our own, and to rate degrees of likeness according to various experimental scales we can construct, issuing in a determination of criteria for sameness. Then, whatever would be involved in configuring ourselves on our varied scenes so as to place those “sames” at the center would be up to us (even if we continue to use algorithms to keep narrowing down the alternatives so as to make them more manageable). At the highest level of technology we would then be doing nothing more than what we humans have been doing from the beginning: affirming through an event that we are on the same scene because have retrieved the “accidental” inscriptions we’ve made upon each other within a self-referential system of inscriptions directed toward the distribution of what those inscriptions have made the same thing and therefore distributable.\n\nAnd we could do so in a way that minimizes and converts into computable resources the noise created by the secondary retention that tertiary retention has not yet managed to eliminate—let’s say that it’s mimesis that extends secondary retention to the high point of tension that makes the event-al “tip” into tertiary retention possible and necessary. So, the mimetic noise of endless enlikenings is converted into the information of samenesses. But Stiegler also insists that part of our crisis is the replacement of knowledge (enduring) by information (time sensitive, computable, and therefore opposed to thinking). Yes, but the deconstruction of this binary leads us to “intelligence,” which has us tracing information back to all the event/scenes that make it intelligible and therefore has us doing everything “knowledge” would have us do."
    },
    {
      "slug": "exhaustive-imitation",
      "title": "Exhaustive Imitation",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 27, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/exhaustive-imitation",
      "content": "Working consistently with mimetic theory would assume everything we do is imitation and should therefore be described in those terms, or in terms that could readily be converted into mimetic ones. The implications of this are, for example, that rather than asking about the “ideas” of thinkers like Rene Girard and Eric Gans we would ask whom they are imitating, and how. Mimesis is two-sided: first of all, it is unconscious and discovered (if at all) after fact, usually through some unpleasant revelation; on the other hand, more deliberately, it is a way of approaching others from the outside so as to take on their attributes and their power.\n\nPerhaps the most constructive approach to mimesis would be to narrow the gap between the two by detecting early on who is getting under your skin and getting under theirs. But I rarely see such exhaustive approaches. Gans wrote a couple of Chronicles a little while back that were the first few chapters of a prospective memoir, and so one would think the narrative would proceed from model to model, but that’s not the case at all—it’s autonomous individual all the way, even as a young child. Much imitation, maybe, in a sense, all imitation, involves getting imitation wrong—falsifying or distorting the model. That question opens up a vast field of inquiry into learning, first of all, and also into cultural difference.\n\nMimetic theory focuses primarily on imitation that leads to rivalry, that then leads to crisis, but this itself distorts the field—that trajectory probably accounts for a tiny number of (admittedly extremely important) imitative acts, and itself must be understood against the background of less sensational imitations. If everything you do can’t be described as an imitation, or you’re unwilling or unable to engage the question, that seems to me to falsify or limit mimetic theory—the demand that the theorist account for his “subject position” is far more urgent here than in the victimary sciences.\n\nSo who, you might ask, do I imitate? Pretty much everything I read, for starters. I read to acquire language, and you acquire language through immersion which means trying out all the implications of a particular way of thinking until you’ve exhausted it and to some extent it has become part of your repertoire. That means I read one thing and therefore imitate the voice in that text, or its logic of composition, through other texts that I am imitating as a reader. It’s imitation all the way down—I can’t be the only one who sees this, because if I were, that would make me the only real mimetic theorist. In most cases, if asked, I could do a fairly good job anatomizing the stances I take up in a particular piece of writing or personal interaction and in most cases would not mind doing so.\n\nI’ll give you an example: when I started advancing rather uninhibited critiques of some of Gans’s Chronicles a few years ago (i.e., when I started being impolite) it was in the course of a strong dose of Wyndham Lewis, whose vigorous aggressive style I wanted to try out, in part as a way of figuring out what, exactly, Lewis was after (I’m still not sure). Along the way I started channeling the polemical stances of a very engaged Marxist professor I had back in grad school, albeit from a diametrically opposed political position. Am I “inauthentic,” then, never having developed my own real self? Which is another way of asking whether I can be trusted, whether I have grown up, etc.\n\nBut those questions can be answered in the same vein—insofar as I’ve adopted and mis-taken adult models and apprehended their modes of operation, testing them in unanticipated situations, yes, I’ve got my own self and have grown up; and if I have, say, adopted and synthesized sturdy models, whether from literature or “life,” that both enabled me to see through and find revolting the evasions and charades of others and furthermore embodied bravery (or at least a bit of audaciousness) and a willingness to confront adversity then, yes, I’ve got a perfectly good and trustworthy self. There is also the question of whether I’ve shaped my practices so as to provide imitable models for others.\n\nI’ve pointed out before as have others the shamefulness, in the modern world, of confessing to being an imitator. And imitation is certainly closely connected to, and is really the source of, shame. Getting that glimpse of yourself from another, normative and authoritative position (a position, that is, you see as original and unmediated by imitation), and finding yourself to be other than you imagined and sorely lacking, is, of course, a thoroughly mimetic affair. Whether one wants to contribute to the shame elements of culture or reconstruct them, without simply replacing them with shamelessness, is also a mimetic question.\n\nWho do we take as a model as we take up such a question? It should be the mimetic theorists, but are they any help? Do they want to be, or do they want to be appraisers of cultural artifacts? I’m not asking for help for myself, even if 35 years ago I could have used some—I’ve got a stable stable of models to work with and want to help others, if I can. Of course, we are often more of a pastiche than imitators of a single model—if I ask myself who I imitate when I write I realize I’d need a bibliography and a whole new project which I consider less important than the ones I’m currently embarked on. And we don’t always know—sometimes we’d need to treat own writing or, for that matter, our own selves, in the manner of archaeologists or philologists, and follow up traces and anomalies.\n\nI think very few people would like to be pressed on these matters, and that’s precisely because the obligation to be original has become a modern imperative so imitation has become shameful. (Shouldn’t we really be talking about nothing other than our models?) Previously the notion that one acts imitatively would have been a given, making the major pedagogical and political problems the creation, promotion and inculcation of worthy models. Who were those foundational modern thinkers who proposed breaking off the individual from his fixed role in the universe imitating? Maybe they were imitating rebelliously, acting out of resentment (what kind of imitation is involved in resentment—that of the Devil’s Advocate, the “adversary”?), in this case in the sense that their rightful place had been usurped, and they were going to usurp in turn.\n\nModernity is really just a case for endless usurpation on the dubious grounds that you have always already been usurped. Most of mimetic theory seemed to be against “postmodernism,” but what accounts for the preference for modernity, for, say the realist novel that presents a world for the reader to enter imaginatively over the novel that abolishes boundaries between reader and writer, fiction and reality? Is it that the former seems to be doing the same kind of theory the mimetic theorists take themselves to be doing (that is, the kind of writing and thinking they are imitating?), while the latter take away (usurp) any external position from which to undertake the analysis, so your imitative and derivative status is exposed?\n\nImitation plays a critical role in the emergence of literacy, on David Olson’s account: as I’ve reviewed many times, he analyzes the transformation brought about by writing by focusing on the problem of reported speech: in conveying the speech of another on an oral scene, one imitates the voice, tone, gesture, etc., of the speaker so as to convey the full meaning and implication along with the words; one cannot do this in writing, so the metalanguage of literacy is invented so as to refer to realm of the implicit in framing the speech of others. This reduces the intensity of imitation and allows for the emergence of a space of de-escalated imitation that we can pretend isn’t imitation at all.\n\nHere is where the problem of “metaphysics” lies—in the pretense that there is a space separable from the desires and resentments unavoidably present in oral spaces where everyone is directly imitating everyone else all the time. Olson and many others see a cognitive revolution in this liberation of the declarative from its ostensive and imperative roots because one can now frame and scenify events natural and human, from outside of the scene, disinvested, untargeted. But writing is ultimately as imitative as speech or any other human activity even if the modes of imitation are delayed and formalized: we are always writing within or proximate to a particular genre or discipline with its models of discourse.\n\nThe sense of an underlying falseness to metaphysics is therefore correct, and the bill comes due when crises can only ultimately be understood as violations of precisely that imaginary space of reflection produced by the written word. There’s a stylistic imperative here, then, if one wants to pursue mimetic thought to its logical conclusions (i.e., not stop when it starts to interfere with your intellectual and institutional pretensions and drag you onto a scene portending some exposure of the “training data”): each use of some element of the metalanguage of literacy is a kind of machinery put in place to erect the space of writing over overt scenicity, and if you imitate satirically the lifting and maintenance done by all the “suggests,” “implies,” “indicates,” “claims,” “understands,” etc., then you re-populate the devastated communicative landscape with the noise and polyphony of potential scenes, meta-scenes and mega-scenes. The work of deferral delegated to the mandarin class of disinterested bystanders can be transferred to those arranging the betting markets on the future.\n\nIt seems to me that Girardian mimetic theory likes to feel it’s playing on the biggest scenes, with angels and devils and apocalyptic crises of nations, while Gansian mimetic theory is content to admit we’re just hooked to our screens if only there weren’t so many ads for the victimary streaming and intruding upon our enjoyment. The pretentiousness and complacency can both be deferred by remembering that technology joins us in the practice of imitation and always had even well before the emergence of the linguistic imitation programmed into Large Language Models. Imitation includes anticipation and prediction, which is both the source of the dangerous conflicts mimetic theory is specialized in detecting but also of the deferral once prediction takes one step beyond “how will he get that thing before I can” to “what if we both try to get it at exactly the same time.”\n\nThe originary gesture is, of course an imitation, even if it’s a novel action, because what it’s imitating is impending stalemate or deadlock—humanity, in this imitation in advance, was always computational. Only once the sign predicts and thereby cancels the impending confrontation do we have a scene, and what a scene does is choreograph movements in such a way that they predict each other. Prediction, in these terms, is complex: like prophecy, it says what is going to happen in order to shape what will happen and that often includes preventing what is predicted. The first scene is iterated as a ritual scene, which is built so as to commemorate that first scene and make the outcome of similar subsequent scenes more predictable.\n\nBut the most effective way of doing this is by making room for the unpredictable on the scene, providing it with its modes of expression, its gestures and. postures, and then dissolving it into the completion of the event. The scene includes a study of its composition within itself. We now live within a global infrastructure, which is nothing but a stack of scenes aimed at coordinating human activity in predictable ways. The most useful service mimetic theory can provide for humanity is to enter the fray and help imitate increasingly virtual activities in their furthest extents precisely in order to inflect the machinery towards an apprehension of moves that might seem dangerous from the standpoint of those currently with their hands on the levers but might in fact be precursors of new modes of deferral if choreographed even a little differently.\n\nThere is an inevitable power struggle involved here, insofar as performing this service will mean imitating those with their hands on the levers who cannot, on the current stack of scenes, well imagine a mode of succession that will “verify” that their hand are, in fact, on the levers. A kind of originary satire is required here, in which one invents the gestures that display the terminal points of actions taken within the oscillation of debt issuance on the one hand, and debt enforcement on the other (roughly, the central banks and the national security/intelligence agencies). Those interested in a negentropic politics will have to imitate those actors in an anticipatory manner, enacting rituals, judgments and modes of knowledge production that at least some of them might want to imitate in turn insofar as they get a glimpse of the succession problem—which is itself a problem of creating and installing durably imitable dispositions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "figuring-things-out",
      "title": "Figuring Things Out",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 28, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/figuring-things-out",
      "content": "How do we solve problems, especially technical problems—but that means all problems, because technics is nothing more than the construction, maintenance, and modification of the scenes upon which we act. One of the hardest problems to solve is how to describe this process in a useful way that might help others get better at it, precisely because thinking is scenic and being on a scene cannot be reduced to its articulation of language. This makes it an interesting test of the thinking of technics as scenic design I’ve been working, so I’ll be writing a few of these posts dealing more or less directly with, until, hopefully, some way of addressing the question becomes implicit in all of my writing.\n\nThe phrase, “figure it out” seems like a good way to get started, as it suggests extracting a figure from what was presumably non-figural, but “figure” is a verb, not a noun, so discovering or designing a figure would be part of the process of bringing the figure out. If you’ve ever figured anything out, and you have, you know that the emergence of the “figure” involves a kind of revelation in which a solution appears, a solution irreducible to all whatever work you have done in arranging the elements of some scenario, hoping for a catalytic event. Since people are engaged in figuring all kinds of things out all the time, and, in fact, since this is central to world order, organized technologically, developing a “grammar” of “figuring out” would seem to be a pretty important thing to do.\n\nI’ve spent a large part of my life designing writing assignments, and I’ve come to take this as a paradigmatic model for thinking about figuring things out—so much so that I would say that the best way of judging and responding to any piece of writing is to posit the assignment it’s written in response to, at least implicitly. (The implication is also that we want to make the assignments—which is to say, imperatives, that we’re always composing, even beyond writing in the narrow sense, in response to, more explicit.) In designing a writing assignment, I assume a student bearing a particular “load” of language, in the form of commonplaces, chunks and constructions.\n\nI assume that reading and writing are a single practice of literacy, because we can only know how someone reads through how they write about what they read, and any piece of writing, even if not produced in direct response to a specific text, is a kind of translation of some other text, suitable for “similar” occasions, that the writer has “inscribed” in his practices. Here, as well, supplying the implicit source text would clarify a lot of what we do as writers, just like positing a hypothetical model, translated in some mistaken way into a set of habits, would clarify a lot of what people do. (Everyone is always at least partially on some other scene than the one upon which you confront them—figuring out who and where they are on that scene will often facilitate “fixing” things with them on this scene.)\n\nIn designing the assignment, then, you want the student to work with the source text in such a way as to single out that source text as a distinctive utterance, against a hypothetical field comprising the totality of possible utterances. This is what you want the student to learn how to do, with any text, on any occasion, because in this way you become a producer of irreducible, irreplaceable texts. So, you have the student read the text against a hypothetical field of texts posited by the text itself—any text constructs itself through negations and distinctions signifying that it’s not saying what all those other texts are saying.\n\nI’ve always worked with texts that make some kind of distinctive theoretical or scholarly claim, but in principle the approach would hold even when it comes to extremely stereotyped or “uninteresting” texts. The practice of approaching such texts would simply have to direct attention more to the markers indicating the singularity of the conditions under which this text has been written, read, and might be read in the future. Perhaps it will be necessary, to bring out the singularity of the text, to situate it imaginarily under conditions where the very infrastructural features that allow for the repetition of documentary forms are presumed absent.\n\nAs you singularize further, you produce “problems” for future readers of the text, and your text—so, the student has to move, intellectually, from a scene upon which the text is legible because the reader can find points of reference that reduce it to other texts within the field, which is to say, a scene upon which all actual and potential readers would be converging upon a reading that slots this text within the existing field, to a scene upon which all those potential readers are now situated differently, as engaging upon a series of reconfigurations of that field. (Incidentally, all the issues of the traditional writing class, in particular those of grammar and syntax, can be productively addressed within this frame insofar as the breaking up of the commonplaces, chunks and constructions under the pressure of singularization are caught up in supplementary assignments to inquire into the origins and consequences of the resulting mistakes.)\n\nSo, the student has to figure out how to “transport” himself and all his possible readers from one place to another. And I am saying this is the model of all figuring out, including the most technical—you’re always on one scene, dealing with some element of the scene that is both in and of the scene, on the one hand, and out of it and badly fit to it, on the other hand. To reconcile the element, you need to construct a new scene with that element at the center of the scene. The “imagination,” then, comes into play here, but what is the imagination, originarily considered? The imagination is one of the concepts that seem to us absolutely fundamental, but can’t be derived directly from the originary scene.\n\nThe imagination extends, surrounds and constitutes the perceived with the unperceived—it conjures the invisible. If I see someone running, I can imagine he’s running from, to or for something; and I can take running as “like” and therefore a sign of other activities. I fill in the scene, or transport an action from one scene to another—I have to do at seem some “filling in” to make sense of the person running. But none of this is possible on the originary scene, where the central object “communicates” directly to all and each of the participants, and where each of the participants see the others directly suspended and held by the center.\n\nFrom our perspective, that may look like imagination, but it’s really more like hypnosis, if we could imagine ourselves perpetually hypnotized by every object we come across. And, before the advent of writing, which makes the representation of absent scenes routine, I think there is no real imagination—just things in the world speaking directly to participants on various scenes, situating them within the community with other members and the supernatural beings presiding over it.\n\nIn a thoroughly magical world, you would always be trying to convince, coerce, cajole or trick some entity to do something so as to transform the scene and your situation within it. This kind of engagement with the world is what gets replaced by using the imagination to try and figure things out. You’ve stepped back from an actual scene (where the ongoing flurry of imperatives requiring “time-sensitive” responses leave no space for the imagination) and constructed an imaginary scene in which the actual one is embedded. You do this because there was something you couldn’t do on the actual scene—say, obey conflicting imperatives, placing you in a double bind—and now it becomes something you can do on the imaginary scene, because a wider sphere of possible responses, due to a suspension of the immediacies of the imperatives, opens up.\n\nThe actual scene, as one among a multitude of similar scenes, now becomes raw material for composing the imaginary one. Other people on a scene are always projections of some shared attention we imagine with other others on the scene—if you see a particular individual as weak or strong, ally or enemy, obsessed or unconcerned with you, deploying this or another strategy, etc., that’s because you imagine some convergence towards that individual that will elicit these “qualities” (in a thoroughly magical world, some immaterial being would simply speak out from other participants of the scene and tell you who they are).\n\nWhat you project onto others, that is, is the way you hold the scene together, and you experiment, in this imaginary space, with different ways of holding the scene together, so as to discover the tightest one, because it is there where you will find the lever that overturns the scene and makes it a new one, resituating everyone.\n\nOnce the elements of the scene upon which all are acting are no longer magical things that need to be approached with the right formula, they become technical—“cultural techniques,” as Bernhard Siegert calls them. These are rules, norms, precedents, means of enforcement, of ranking, exclusion and inclusion, along with physical design, like building, rooms, media, and so on. These are surrounding scenes, and preceding scenes, informing the one in question, the one you want to transform. The stronger your imagination, the more you think about changing one scene in order to transform all the macro and micro scenes including it and which it includes—as with any technical enterprise, the greatest transformation with the least effort and energy is the rule you follow.\n\nBut to get to that you need a proliferation of possibilities, including low probability ones, including the lowest probability you can imagine, precisely because those are the ones you’re most likely to overlook. There’s a lot of “if... then” work going on, constructing scenes, imagining acts that would tighten up the scene in one way or another, and this kind imaginary activity prepares us for our future vocation of training algorithms to take over this kind of work—because this kind of work won’t get us out of the scene and into a new one (it won’t create an event), even if the kind of critical mass of endless scenic construction is necessary to bring to light the anomaly in the scene around which a new norm can be constituted.\n\nAt some point the imagination must be used to transform the dimension of the scene—to enlarge or shrink it; to slow it down or speed it up; to extend or retract it temporally; or really, several or all of these at once. The scene must be made plastic. This must eventually involve doing things differently on the actual scene—pressing on the anomalies and double binds, making the scene as paradoxical as you can. The source of all paradoxes, and therefore all anomalies and double binds, is that we are creating the things we name as always already having been there and what they are. Congealed within naming is the mimetic crisis averted and converted into that name and thereby commemorated.\n\nApproaching and soliciting such paradoxes is dangerous, which on the one hand means you should only do it when a kind of cascade of paradoxes point to one; but, on the other hand, it means that once you decide to “handle” it you have work it all the way through until a re-naming can be enacted. Everyone on the scene has to participate in a kind of implicit ritual of naming, so as to make it that new thing. To get there you have to imagine yourself, even minimally, on a scene upon which the new name is already operative and you are engaged in naming other things on the scene accordingly. What else must be in place for you to be able to do that?\n\nIf you can imagine a whole new infrastructure, which has eliminated the conflicting imperatives that initiated the sequence in the first place, you’ve figured it out. This would include creating an environment in which people can enact paradoxes more freely and with greater attentionality. It goes without saying that at any point along the way you could be completely wrong about which paradox is really the active or sore one, and you might be the obstacle, the stumbling block, but working it through nevertheless will shake others loose from their positions so that one of that might put their finger on it.\n\nWhen I design writing assignments, they’re not aimed at ensuring that students get the “right” or an ‘acceptable” reading of a text, or that they compose in a way that would check off enough boxes so that it can pass as a “good” piece of writing in “enough” situations. You can’t even do these things if you try—this is the kind of stuff students pick up by themselves, or don’t, through mimesis, which in this case means gaming out the likely responses of the authorities in charge of assessing your work (what students think of in terms of “what does this guy want?”). They’re aimed at forcing students to use texts to break up their own commonplaces, chunks and constructions, and to do that enough times so that it can become an iterable practice that the student and others could see as such—what is produced is what scholars of language learning call an “inter-language,” where words and sentences students bring into the class are mixed with those of whatever text we are working with in class, as a Russian speaker learning English will use English words in Russian idioms and syntax.\n\nThe practice of generating an interlanguage is what students study as well as what they do in the class: it becomes the object of inquiry, and so students develop a kind of fluency in transforming interlanguages into potentially shared idioms. And this becomes a model of language use in general. Language use is language learning, which is picking up the idioms constituting a scene and showing you’ve learned them by innovating in them. And each of these idioms itself contains worlds, that is, scenes within scenes within scenes, and so language learning is what generates the resources for the work of the imagination, figuring things out, explored here. And this means the next post needs to address the Mobius strip of event and language."
    },
    {
      "slug": "fit-to-measure",
      "title": "Fit to Measure",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 03, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/fit-to-measure",
      "content": "_We are already data waiting to be recorded. We are not individual substances, but manifolds of differences that are bonded socially and intersubjectively by the manner in which such manifolds of differences are recorded, operated, ordered, permutated, and reconditioned. Any movement or gesture that we perform can be recorded as syntactic information. Even what is called noise can be codified since it is only finite incompression. To be invisible here is not to exist. The sensors today that track and surveil our activity are thus only exposing the informational nature of existence. Theocracy is a computational regime since it is based on the instructions we are given in order to operate.\n\nThe instructions are always initially revealed rather than deduced. The rules for control come from outside of the system initially. A fundamental theocratic movement has to occur wherein the administrative rules are not immanently revealed, but imposed from a transcendent source. And, when there will be a vast power available to read anyone’s mind (now that the truth of thought’s relation to existential space and time has been revealed) as the brain is itself extended, how can one be sure that those who will wield that power not do so in a corrupt fashion.? What besides a theocracy will constrain them?_ (Noah Horwitz, _An Sich_ , 210)\n\nIf any move or gesture that we perform can be recorded as syntactic information then we are, in fact, looking at a computational theocracy. For Horwitz, syntax, a formal relation in which one sign adds information regarding another, precedes semantics. How does it stand with the originary hypothesis? There is a question here of whether the hypothesis entails ontological assumptions, and another question about whether it transcends the semantics/syntax distinction and introduces a fresh vocabulary. At any rate, syntax and semantics, if we’re working with these traditional linguistic categories, needs to be complemented by pragmatics, which in these concluding remarks comes to play an implicit role in Horwitz’s analysis.\n\nSyntax, in the sense of subject-predicate or topic-comment relations, doesn’t emerge until the creation of the declarative sentence—but that doesn’t mean there’s not a more originary syntax, in which the gesture on the periphery predicates the center as the center of that periphery. Do we go further, and embed the originary event in the animal and natural worlds from which it distinguishes its participants? Is that necessary or is agnosticism in such matters both viable and preferable—it’s a position I’ve maintained so far and so, I think have those in GA, but no one has ever really posed, much less pressed, the question.\n\nHorwitz does so here, implicitly. If computation implies the incomputable, since, among other reasons, the data analyses carried out computationally always generates more data that it could not have already computed, then something like an originary syntax is the word of God, and the only real constraint on worldly power. This is an important move to make, in countering liberalism and its fetishism of checks and balances, but for any thinking beyond liberalism as well, because no occupant of the center can deny the incomputable, nor need he in order to see to his own succession.\n\nI have suggested before, without claiming any philosophical competence, that a basic relation of measurement between “things” that, insofar as they share the same universe, is a minimal assumption of reality. Two particles in the same space, however far apart and separated by filters that mitigate any effect they might have on each other, register the effect the other has, in their respective locations within a given time frame. Anything that effects the composition of another thing in any way is being measured by that other thing. Of course, it could only be measuring it for a third thing, which could in fact be either the first thing or the second thing in a different time frame.\n\nSo, two things that are different are the same insofar as they “have” length, and then their difference is recoded as a difference in length (but also every other possible measurement)—all we have to do to provide for an originary syntax is to say that the differences along all those measuring dimensions precede their being different things (and produces their difference as things) and is therefore prior to semantics (not necessarily pragmatics, though). This seems to me to provide for a basic syntax and basis for computation, insofar as the measuring must become reciprocal and the measurements themselves are measured on a different level or in a different register so that measurement becomes cause and generates the operations of what it measures which in turn increases the granularity and complexity of its own measuring operations.\n\nTo measure is to assert two or more things are different in relation to the same: different lengths, different masses, different velocities, etc. On the originary scene, then, a new mode of measurement is created—the sign measures all moves and gestures in terms of the center.\n\nOn the face of it, computational theocracy sounds like a return to Cartesian dualism of primary and secondary qualities, but that’s only if (as it seems to me Horwitz contends) we treat measurement as a solely mathematical matter, rather than a broader question of symmetry or fit—of the kind that is necessary to make a scene a scene (and therefore makes any numbers meaningful in the first place). My breakdown of sociality into ritual, juridical and disciplinary is a way of acknowledging as few forms of fitting as scenic design as possible (if I absolutely have to, I can reduce it all to disciplinary scenes, as I once did in an _Anthropoetics_ essay, but that pushes things further into incommunicability than I would like right now).\n\nAn idiom is a form of measurement, and maybe idiom can serve as the single idiom for “fit” across the different spaces—we can always identify a vocabulary, constructions and grammar to a particular idiom, and even define idioms in terms of a particular fit. This is how stacking works: one item must be fit along with other items into a larger item, and the larger items then in turn need to be broken down in new ways into smaller items. Now we can compute a very large number of ways in which items at various levels of the stack can be fit into each other drawing upon the way they are already fit into each other and are composed of natural items that already fit into each other in ways that have been “designed” over eons.\n\nWith this logic of computation in motion there is only one thing left for humans to do: position themselves at the end of particular processes of computation and determine whether, at the particular scale at which the human is being presently constituted, there is a fit or not. This is not only an irreducible and indispensable position that only humans will ever be able to take up, but it will be an enormously demanding one involving high levels of learning and training, an ability to improvise and take responsibility on the spot, and to convey one’s decisions back to the computational order (the center) in such a way that a new modes of fittingness will result from the next round.\n\nWe can already practice fitting in all of our practices. There’s a minimal syntax to everything you do, every move you make. Paying attention to a particular thing in a particular way is a syntax. How is paying attention to something like some other way you might have paid attention to that particular thing, or like some other thing you could have paid attention to in that way? Singularized succession in perpetuity is enacted here as well: if you think in terms of your practices being indispensable and retrievable by some future practice that will derive unmistakably from those practices while also being unrecognizable as related to them by any other than those who have retrieved the originary practice, then you will be practicing in computational terms.\n\nThis is a kind of reworking of Peirce’s pragmatist maxim that all the consequences you consider to follow from the object of your inquiry comprise the entirety of your conception of that object. What thinking and practice then involve is resolving your practices into the most minimal syntactic elements, transportable and combinable with an unlimited range of other practices. Once you drop the Big Scenic Imaginary, and stop thinking about what you say or do in terms of its reception and acknowledgment by other individuals modeled on your own desire for reception and acknowledgment there is no other way of thinking about what you do than by seeking to indemnify it in relation to all the things that can happen as a result.\n\nThe Large Language Models bring computation back to language and provide a new direction for inquiring into and practicing language (designing idioms): breaking into the training level of the increasingly sophisticated LLMs. This will be the case once it becomes possible to load and train an LLM with your own data (all of the texts you want to be part of your reserve mind) and connect it to all existing data sources so that you can then ask it, for example, to create an argument between Homer and Isaiah about how to interpret a recent decision of the Supreme Court in terms of the legal practices of ancient Egypt.\n\nThe pieces don’t quite fit here (and if they do, it will be possible to introduce some misfit), and so what the trained database takes to be Homer’s view of what the legal practices of ancient Egypt comprise, how they apply to that SC decision, and how Isaiah’s contrary view would take “Homer” to a new consideration of, say, battle and honor, will have holes that you will notice and more that you can learn to notice. Here is where the training material becomes evident and you can guess how your previous determinations of fit are playing out here. In the end, you might want to be able to say something transformative about that SC decision, or some element of it, that no one else would be able to say.\n\nWe can, of course, include forward looking questions regarding, say the technological implications of a court decision, seen, say, from a carefully curated literary perspective. You will be able to tell the LLM to design these kinds of prompts itself, but that will always be a way for you to enter back into the training materials. (This is all obviously preliminary and suggestive, and once various media are articulated you will be able to generate, say, theme music for a SC decision that might have been written by Thomas Carlyle, etc.) All of this will encourage knowledge of our cultural heritages and a more thorough appropriation of it—it will be possible to show, very concretely, that building a database out of materials with more “integrity” will produce stronger results across the board.\n\nWe will then be able to control much of the data we feed back into the computation system—make it both more useful for worthwhile purposes and more tailored to ensure the usefulness and value of those purposes. This would entail what is, again, already possible now, which is thinking of yourself as a walking bundle of syntaxes and stacks of syntaxes in various relations of fit and misfit with the centralized data deposits. Everything can be reduced to what will become the extremely complex and generative activity of determining that this is the same. This is a model of health, this is a model of well-being, this is a model of love, of justice, of devotion, of succession.\n\nThe computation system will spit out proposals regarding whether a particular treatment, lifestyle, decision, gesture, constitutes a sample of these terms, generates an idiom that can house them—and all of us will simply affirm or deny in each case with a growing knowledge of the ramifications of doing so. But in that case this is what we’re doing already even if our affirmations and denials must be composed more complexly due to the degree of misfitting pretty much everyone, regardless of values or politics, is confronted with—we are not yet ready to have our yeahs be yeahs and our nays be nays. Our idioms then will be registering these misfits, complaining, in a sense, that we can’t just affirm and deny in more immediate and immediately understood ways—this is to be made into the main form of resentment, a resentment we keep communicating to the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "from-consultative-stand-off-to-slush-funded-grants-of-bureaucratic-authority-mod",
      "title": "From Consultative Stand-Off to Slush Funded Grants of Bureaucratic Authority: Modern Legislatures",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 15, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/from-consultative-stand-off-to-slush",
      "content": "There’s an anomaly in the canonical three branches of government of the modern liberal constitutional order. The executive and the juridical descend rather directly, and in still recognizable form, from ancient pre-modern predecessors. The language in which the modern executive is described, such as “commander-in-chief of the armed forces” recalls the role of the monarch and reflects an understanding of the need for an occupant of the center—even if the modern liberal is far more interested in telling you what the executive can’t and shouldn’t do, certainly not without the approval of the media and intelligence community.\n\nJudges, meanwhile, still hear cases within a quasi-ritualized setting, with highly formalized procedural rules, relying upon precedent and constrained by an appeal process. But the modern legislature bears no resemblance at all to its medieval predecessors, parliaments which were called by the king when he needed money, usually for a war. These parliaments didn’t create laws and only controlled budgets in the sense that they could refuse the king’s request for funding. (There is a slight trace of this role in the American senate, with its right to “advise and consent” regarding presidential appointees.) And, in fact, what the modern legislature creates is not really “law,” which can only be “created” in the context of some judgment, or by a decree from the executive.\n\nThat is, only someone with a responsibility to see through the decision-making process to its conclusion can “make law.” What modern legislatures do is create grants of authority to bureaucratic agencies along with money to service those agencies without the possibility of the “oversight” which is so often demanded. (If genuine oversight comes along, it’s because the political winds have shifted and a new faction in power wants the funds directed elsewhere.) From and through this activity flows the management of political campaigns and control of candidates and officeholders, the penetration of business and interest groups of various kinds into governance, the freedom of action of the intelligence agencies and the government by leak in which the media plays a crucial role.\n\nAnd the distortions and corruptions of the executive and judicial branches are greatly aggravated by their obligation to adhere to “laws” that emerge from this process. Somewhere along the way the potential of the medieval parliament to check and counter the king got transformed by the revolutionary process of modernity into a circular, self-dealing, self-perpetuating and self-aggrandizing institution by which all the specifically modern disciplines and institutions collaborate not so much to govern, as to ensure that what governance will be done will not interfere with this process itself. This is really the only mode of governance consistent with “popular rule,” and the legislature is, of course, the most democratic branch of government, the most “legitimate” because most directly elected by and accountable to the voters—this makes the occasional “accidental” candidate possible (but also irrelevant), but mostly ensures that the control of and investment in election process will be a central concern of all institutions.\n\nLike all parasitical entities, this liberal democratic model will presumably not survive its host, but there may be sufficient countertendencies absolutely dependent upon some modicum of reliable governance that are able to operate counter-entropically within these same institutions with sufficient power to stave off collapse indefinitely. I have never seen anyone focus on the modern legislature as the locus of political transformation and disorder, but it’s certainly a promising line of inquiry.\n\nThe need for a justice system and a commander-in-chief are anthropologically intelligible, while it’s very hard to say why, exactly, a “legislature” is necessary, other than for contingent historical reasons. Modern legislatures have been designed (always haphazardly, it seems) to accommodate the existence of different factions within the political realm opened up by the otvrthrow or “constitutional” marginalization of the monarch. And they remain dominated by the specter of the monarch, of sovereignty more generally, even long after the last king has been dispatched or where there has never been one in the first place.\n\nIn speaking of the justice system, we can discuss guilt and innocence, evidence, degrees of responsibility for specific events, etc.; in discussing the executive, the means of dealing with an emergency or the questions of war and peace can be discussed with some ongoing reference to consequential decisions whose effects might be measured; with the legislature, meanwhile, the currency of legitimacy is representing the “will of the people” against some more or less imaginary “tyranny” (i.e., desecrated monarchy gone bad). All the vaunted virtues of the liberal democratic order—its supposed openness, pluralism resistance to “totalitarianism,” etc.—reside in this oscillation of factions within the legislature—here is where the executive and judicial branches are opened up to the media.\n\nThe difference within the factions concerns nothing more than the pace, intensity and target of periodic sacrificial rituals against the “tyrant.” Even straightforward gifts to members of the community, like welfare systems, aim at building anti-tyranny constituencies and, indeed, defining tyranny as that will take away from the people what is theirs by right. It is through the legislature that the thread connecting the central bank and the intelligence agencies runs, and it is here that the struggles over which debts will be enforced and which lightened or forgiven take place, There are plenty of things a community needs a juridical order and executive for, but there’s nothing essential that couldn’t be managed without a legislature.\n\nIt may be that the best outcome for legislative institutions would be to reduce them to the condition Carl Schmitt derided them for being: “talking shops.” That bothered Schmitt because the talking was an obstacle to making needed decisions, but if the decisions could circumvent the legislature why not let them talk? Of course, we could say that decisions already circumvent the legislature, as everyone knows that legislators not only don’t write the “laws” they pass but don’t even read them—they are composed by “public interest” organizations funded by private interests and staffed by people going through the various revolving doors between bureaucracies, NGOs, think tanks, activist groups, etc.\n\nBut this entire process is itself an outgrowth of the legislature, and would never have come into existence in a corporate order topped by an executive and regulated by a judiciary—“laws” become increasingly complicated because they have to account for the complexities of institutions created by existing laws and the contortions they have forced all institutions, public and private, into. If “genuine” right wing figures (by which I mean, not those who see the tyrant as Stalin rather than Hitler, but those who want an operational center) are to compete for positions in the legislature, maybe it’s best that they work to turn it into spectacle, creating scandals, making vitriolic (but engrossing) speeches, staging confrontations within the chamber and lots of “cameo” appearances at public events for maximal attention.\n\nBe interesting and entertaining, make everything other than the figure at the center ridiculous. Ask for peoples’ votes just so you can speak for as many of them as possible—read letters from ‘forgotten” constituents into the Congressional Record. Hire a good polling agency and vote on every measure in accord with the majority in your district, thereby making people happy, exposing the agendas of the parties, while also displaying the incoherence of democracy. Draw others into your endless talk, your live-streamed perpetual satire—insult other representatives, get sanctioned, please the tabloids, put on a great show, In the US, at least, this can be attempted against the will of the party—emphasize your powerlessness, be bombastically unthreatening, and make the “establishment’s” reaction to you part of the show, Maybe that will encourage other institutions to gravitate toward the executive and judiciary, and help them contain and eventually ignore the legislature (maybe one day the congress will regularly vote for gazillion dollar budgets which the president will routinely ignore while spending money on policies aimed at securing succession.)\n\nAll our talk of demographics probably proceeds from the legislative as well, as all the struggles over districting, concerns regarding the counting of various groups and therefore attributions of specific interests to those groups, which then means much effort in studying and appealing to said groups must be invested. But let me point to another potential culprit here, modern philosophy, with its insistence on the liberated, rational, “self-legislating” individual who can serve as a support for the modern republic. We must all give the law to ourselves is the starting point of modern philosophy, and why should this be any less true for the society as a whole than the individual?\n\nThe assumption that an elected legislature, backed by nothing but the will of the people, can set aside all traditions, mediating institutions, current practices and existing authorities, and “pass laws” is an especially pernicious modern one that follows from the concept of the self-constituting, self-legislating subject. All judges, and not just the Supreme Court, should be empowered and educated to ask of any law not whether. It’s “constitutional” (another made-up “law”) but whether it’s a law, that is, whether it designates actually existing plaintiffs, defendants and victims within the existing nomos or division of roles and property or turns the state itself into the persecuting agent.\n\nGenuine laws can change through new distributions and divisions, but only through the working out of decrees and novel cases which must analogized to precedents. This would require not so much ‘critiquing” (that quintessential move of desecration) modern philosophy as. replacing it with anthropology, or anthropomorphics, or maybe “humanology.” Testing the hypothesis that much modern vocabulary across the disciplines presupposes the “legislative” function and therefore branch of government might be a worthy intellectual endeavor; at the very least, it’s something to keep in mind and see what it yields when applied.\n\nHow much confusion has been caused and how much damage to literacy done by attempts to figure out the “real meaning” of a statute, and how? By tracing it back to the “original intention” of the legislators? By using the social sciences to find its “objective” meaning? And how much destruction has been visited on the social sciences by attempts to explore the differences between how legislation was supposed to work and how it really worked? Indeed, our whole way of talking about politics in terms of “issues,” regarding which we can imagine a law being passed, which law we can be for or against, reflects the domination of the legislative over politics.\n\nA judge presiding over a case has a history of precedents that can be traced back to a conquest and nomic distribution, two sides, each with a narrative, each with certain evidence or a pattern of facts on their side, and a refined understanding of historically shifting threshold at which violence and fraud, if left to operate on its own, would supplant the juridical with the vendetta. This is not exactly science, but it is a kind of art, and it is representable, can be turned into a “case” to be examined, studied, re-enacted, miniaturized and portrayed from varying angles. Intentions are posited as far as they need to be—could the confrontation have been avoided or was someone looking for trouble?—rather than as magical text producers that we can follow deep into the entrails of the author.\n\nMaybe serious failures of literary analysis have resulted from this way of looking at “intention,” rather than along more institutional and historical lines, which begins with the question of what kind of intentions must the institution presuppose in its own operations. It would be good to learn ways of speaking and writing that deny all seriousness and legitimacy to the legislative, and to uproot the habits of mind that make sense as contributors to framing, enforcing and interpreting “legislation.” Maybe the collapsing of such institutions and habits of thought can play a significant role in learning to think in terms of succession."
    },
    {
      "slug": "gae-unironically",
      "title": "GAE, Unironically",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 02, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/gae-unironically",
      "content": "The more someone insists that the security services and various elites, operating through obscured and camouflaged channels, have in fact artificially produced what we take to be the history of the last couple of centuries (at least), the more likely that person is to arrive (pre-arrive, really) at the conclusion that we must throw off this entire insidious infrastructure and return to some form of national and political transparency, so that things will in fact be something like what they have so far only seemed to be—that is, determined by identifiable and intelligible social agents and goals, whatever we might think of those agents and goals. In fact, the motivation behind discovering layer after layer of conspiracy is exactly that—to get to what is assumed or projected to be at the core of social relations, once all the obfuscating layers have been peeled back. But the problem here is obvious—we have landed in Baudrillardian territory, in which the latest portrayal of “nature” is simply the most advanced simulation.\n\nI don’t mean to denounce conspiracy theories, beyond the obvious observation that one could never really know which level one is at—the thing that exposes one conspiracy might simply be the leading edge of the one replacing it—we don’t really have any epistemological frame here. But, in fact, there are spy agencies, and closed elite societies, and regular circulation on the part of individuals across various institutions and they’re obviously doing something; and, since these people also occupy posts in the institutions that let us see or prevent us from seeing things (the media, the universities, the government), it stands to reason that we don’t know a lot of things they don’t want us to know, and that “knowing” might not be the best word for what they do let us know.\n\nSo, that the appearances comprising “history” are artificially constructed and maintained to a great extent, and in a variety of ways, should be the opening presupposition. But it doesn’t follow that once we get all this exposed, and “the people” see what has really been going on, it will be swept away and we will return to the true nation, or republic, or whatever. This is a very familiar movie plot, and we all know who makes those movies… In fact, exactly the opposite follows. Since we can’t imagine (or, to be broadminded, until we can imagine) a social order without a government, or a government without intelligence agencies, or intelligence agencies that don’t conduct covert activities involving both information gathering and infiltration of perceived threats, it is the completely infiltrated system that should be taken as the historical norm, which liberal politics (another product of infiltration) has obscured.\n\n(For that matter, don’t you conduct a little google search when you encounter someone new, especially someone you’re considering collaborating with?) One way or another, there will be eyes and ears everywhere, what is gathered by these eyes and ears will be preserved, analyzed, and used so as to slant conditions in directions the intelligence agencies (and, to be “optimistic,” their civilian overseers) would prefer. Contemporary technology, or planetary scale computation, makes this fact even more inescapable—as just about everyone has noticed. If we are first of all neither free nor unfree, but infiltrated, we should explore the implications of that.\n\nIn that case, wouldn’t the best default option be to just to assume everyone’s a fed, at the very least potentially? If you make paranoia complete, it becomes something else. Don’t do or say anything you wouldn’t want on your permanent record, any detail of which could be strategically broadcast at any time—that’s not bad axiom to live by, except insofar as there’s nothing approaching a consensus regarding what counts as damaging information, and how damaging it should be. If you’re in your 30s, you would probably deserve a bit more of a (still not indelible) black mark if it were discovered that you serially cheated on your high school girlfriend than if you once scrawled a swastika in your notebook, but that’s not the way things would play out.\n\nIn that case, though, the real problem is not the ubiquity of surveillance and permanence of data storage but the incoherent, selective and malicious nature of information dumping. Including the transformation of that process in your political programming is more daunting and complex but also more productive than trying to redraw yet again the liberal categories of privacy and free speech. If your default assumption is that we’re all feds, that includes you, so, what kind of fed would you be?\n\nMaking yourself uninfiltratable is a good maxim of self-discipline. It would not mean you can prevent infiltration, just that it wouldn’t matter. This maxim would apply to all the groups you belong to but also to yourself: train yourself not to be baited. Such discipline would result in you infiltrating others, simply in order to prop them up and make them worthy collaborators and interlocutors. You’d learn how to continually create double binds for others, in which they’d have to involuntarily reveal themselves as evading something constitutive of their social condition—in this case, though, not to exploit but to contribute to the disciplining of their own practices.\n\nAll this is much more interesting and realistic than freedom, autonomy, consent, etc. You produce compelling models by working, not in the belief in vast Newtonian vacuums in which discrete objects move and occasionally collide, but in the assumption that all order tends towards a center, toward increasingly dense self-referentiality, towards the conferring of meaning on everything. Imagine the arrangement of a house of worship—everything is situated and adorned so as to magnify the glory due to the worshipped being. Imagine one corner of that house of worship that came to be experienced as “just there,” without being integrated into the ritual order—how long would it take for the priest to make it meaningful and commemorate the act of making it meaningful (or the parishioners to protest if he didn’t)?\n\nVacuums and blank spaces are invitations to evil, which is to say, mimetic crisis, to rush in—they will not be tolerated. The social order, or the idiomatic intelligence, is no different—there will be a hectic rush to paint over any blank space. There’s always room for blank spaces, which is to say, ambiguities, but only as carefully curated, as objects, spaces and events meant to remind us of the care to be taken in commemorating the world.\n\nThis, to take a pressing contemporary example, is why the continual extension of civil rights law—more precisely, civil rights prosecution—into every nook and cranny (I almost wrote “every crook and nanny,” which would be more accurate) of our lives cannot be resisted by insisting on restoring the blank spaces wherein we allow each other to exist as unmarked individuals in homogeneous space. I also don’t think anything is served by taking the bait and saying something along the lines of “if you want to talk constantly about race, well we can talk constantly about race…” It is pretty obvious, by now, that the civil rights movement was dictated by imperial priorities: ousting the British and French colonialists and replacing them with non-racist national liberation under American-set economic conditions, on the one hand, and neutralizing Soviet charges of racism in competing for allies in the post-colonial world (ultimately leading even further, towards the possibility of using international human rights agreements to subvert the Soviets).\n\nIf you want to contest and replace one imperial agenda, necessarily bound up with all domestic arrangements, you need to propose another imperial agenda, which will be bound up differently with all domestic arrangements. You can say you’re not interested in foreign policy but, as someone once said, foreign policy is interested in you—in fact, responses to external threats are likely to be a lot more knee-jerk and off the handle if they come as a surprise and cause shocked outrage, rather than made intelligible through a tradition of strategic reflection.\n\nIt's very difficult to think through our contemporary predicaments without accepting the basic reality of imperialism—nationalist and populist frames are far more satisfying narratively, but ultimately just gnosticize liberalism: the “real people” will, once we get to some globalist outrage that finally breaks the camel’s back, emerge and reveal themselves as the real people by driving out the parasites and sweeping out the rot. If you think along these lines there will always be some bait you’re taking, because responding authentically to bait is the way you embody true peoplehood. But the world will be organized in the way and to the extent that the technologies are available to organize it.\n\nSo, if the civil rights formula, leading all the way to globohomo, has made a complete mess of things, what is the other of that imperial agenda, and how would it be enacted? The formulas I originally learned from Nrx and neo-absolutism seem to me valid: all thinking and action should be geared toward bringing names into accord with realities, or formal power into accord with actual power. If someone is the “president,” he should be the president. If he’s not “really” the president, all you can do is treat him as the president in such a way as to surface all the ways in which his occupancy of that office empties the office of its meaning.\n\nAnd in doing so, you occupy a kind of newly created office that awaits its formal designation. This is the meaning of the maxim to have power united with responsibility. And the problem with the civil rights agenda, in its multifaceted extensions and resonances, is that it eviscerates this unity and systematically sets power to work against its formalizations. So, the lines are drawn quite clearly.\n\nImperialism provides a useful frame for formalizing power because it operates on the level of states and the imperial power can simply begin with some objective assessment of the actual power relation between countries in different regions as it pertains to imperial priorities (access to energy, commercial stability, freedom of transport, etc.). The default starting point for the imperial power is preserving and employing those power relations, and this starting point should be departed from only for very specific reasons, to the extent necessary, and with compensatory actions that restore intelligible relations.\n\nIt’s possible that the way a particular regime treats its own people will be a relevant question, insofar as disgruntled elements of the population can be seized upon by other powers for subversive purposes, but it will never be an independent, much less determining, factor. Right now, vassal states have irresistible incentives to use the various unaccountable levers of American power to shift imperial policy in directions they favor; under the easily restorable conditions I’m describing here, there would be little incentive and little opportunity for such machinations.\n\nThe righting of imperial power, then, is the most promising approach for America First political action, because it is most likely to leave the levers of American power to Americans. Not all Americans, equally, but those Americans who have successfully infiltrated institutions with an imperial formalist mindset. Such infiltrators will be offering solutions to and eventually become those being offered solutions as those within the “deep state.” But it’s also very clear that such infiltration must coincide with the infiltration of a political party, and turning it into, if you like, an American First party, but that will have to be an American First party that puts America first by properly husbanding all the means of exercising imperial power available to the US.\n\nMaking America weaker is not patriotic. Such a political party would take on as its core mission the recruitment, defense and cultivation of such infiltrators, and the creation of the legal, educational and ideological means of doing so. (A policy towards corporations, which will essentially evaporate as a political force once the compulsion of wokeness is removed, is implicit here.) And here’s an impeccable, clearly workable and easily understood imperial principle of action: ruthlessly suppress any action (or incitement or incentive to action) that would revive the honor system (domestically and internationally), especially those that would lead to its revival by leaving the kinds of crimes once covered by the vendetta unpunished.\n\nThe positive formulation: relentlessly promote those who have shown themselves willing and able to ruthlessly suppress… Which kinds of actions imply or lead to the revival of the honor system? That field of inquiry is what replaces “Critical Race Theory.”\n\nOne starting point of these reflections was a blog I came across, courtesy of the blogger and publisher Vox Day, which made a case for seeing literary modernism as an artifact of the British and American intelligence agencies—Pound, Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, pretty much all of them, some more tangentially. Maybe! But the conclusion drawn from this is that the goal of the intelligence agencies was to destroy art, for the fairly vague reason that art empowered the people, and the emergent imperialist order couldn’t have that. That the blogger presented Dickens, who basically wrote cartoons, as the gold standard of art, points to the weaknesses in this argument.\n\nIf he’s right, wouldn’t precisely those modernists and postmodernists he considers anti-artistic frauds who presented reality as a texture of opaque and totalizing power mechanisms (like, e.g., William S Burroughs) be much more important and valuable than traditional novelists who create “rich” characters and “deep insights” into “human nature,” etc.? Shouldn’t traditional standards of beauty be replaced, for as long as is necessary, by forms of creation that uncompromisingly expose the unseen infrastructures of global existence? What if—to stick with the example—Burroughs was a fed exposing his operations in subtle ways so as to enable us to detect the various forms of infiltration?\n\nOr, for that matter, what if we just read him and others that way, so as to conduct such exposures ourselves? Consider how important it would be, once a certain threshold of organization was reached, to be able to disseminate disinformation—do you have any idea of the kind of “aesthetic sense” required to do that effectively? Positions within the infrastructure will be more important than ideas and beliefs, but the study of human event-making, anthropomorphics and anthropogenics, will be the precondition for effective use of infrastructure. And the study of human event-making is itself event making. Be an interface between power and the user."
    },
    {
      "slug": "generating-idiomatic-intelligences-and-translation-practices",
      "title": "Generating Idiomatic Intelligences and Translation Practices",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 02, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/generating-idiomatic-intelligences",
      "content": "The only thing to do is to create spaces for the training of writers, with writing understood as the maintenance of data security, as the participation in scribal-archivist-philological-programming traditions, as the meta-representation of oral-literate interfaces constitutive of spaces of writing pedagogy. The more all inscription is traced back to the ascertaining of ritual and liturgical traditions, to discerning the viability of one line of tradition over a sea of others nevertheless maintained in abeyance, the more creative and inventive we will become because it is out of the identification of a stream of seemingly minor differences that all programming emerges.\n\nThe ritual and liturgical traditions are continuous with mythological and royal conditions, once the center has been occupied once and for all, and only by training ourselves to follow the lines of these traditions will we be able to cancel the permanent trial of the center and centering that is the post-sacral world. The complementary problems of succession (the continuity of the center, the system of references of the occupied to the signifying center) and of meaning (enhancing the scenic performativity of our signs), which is all that sociality is comprised of, find their solutions in the creation of such spaces.\n\nI’ll follow up on “God’s affordances,” which is the hearing of God’s voice within a juridical and disciplinary setting produced by writing. It’s obviously crazy to think we could be hearing God’s voice today—that’s definitely the kind of thing that, under red flag laws, will get your guns taken away. But, then, where does our language come from—our heads? Do we just echo other voices, those we hear around us, those we’ve read and therefore recited to ourselves? Even in that case, these voices are different with each iteration—we can either anthropomorphize our “minds” (a construct that serves the very purpose of housing the voices that come from we really know not where) and deposit the thought machinery there, or we study and program the ways we derive voice from the center.\n\nThe voice we hear from the center in that case is the signifying center’s, as it tells us how to fill the imperative gap in our asymmetrical exchanges with the occupied center. This is clearly the more generative approach, and one that supports inquiry rather than the piling up of metalinguistic concepts aimed at reducing human thinking to a set of controllable propositions. Instead of asking “why do you say that” we would ask something more like “where does what you’re saying come from, and how did you receive it?” But the difference between the voice of the center and voice of God is merely a semantic one.\n\nThe voice of God always interrupts some program running in our “head,” “pre-empting” it, as Gans suggests in the Chronicle I discussed in the previous post. We can hypothesize that this interruption is elicited by some anomaly in the imperatives from the center we’re trying to obey. An interruption breaks into your scene, whatever back and forth you are engaging in with others or rehearsing for yourself; but, for us (we generative anthropologists), an interruption into one scene can only come from another scene. And, indeed, the voice of God can only come from another scene. The ritual, juridical or disciplinary anomaly one is confronted with is now opened wide, and an alien voice is present on the scene. We might even say that the entire scene is now organized around either expelling or “naturalizing” that voice. I’d like to suggest, precisely as a basis for the training of writers, a way of eliciting and naturalizing, precisely by alienating and denaturalizing the scene which has been interrupted.\n\nSo, we have two scenes: the one in which you struggle with an imperative from the occupied center and the one from which a voice interrupts that first scene, which we provisionally identify as a scene upon which the signifying center speaks—and this is certainly a scene which, in the post-literate world, we can never claim in any way that meets any conceivable practices for maintaining data security to be present upon. It’s a scene we can only know through its interruptions of the scenes where we can be fit to measure; and, in fact, it’s a problem knowing whether that is where we have derived the voice from. We can only put the utterance of this voice to the test by initiating the composition of a new, third, scene, upon which we work out the terms on which that utterance can be the same on both of those other scenes.\n\nUnsurprisingly, God’s utterance to Moses—I AM/WILL BE WHAT/THAT I AM/WILL BE—is the best preliminary example here, because this utterance will always interrupt anyone who is wondering where or what God is, what we can ask of Him, what He expects from us, along with a range of other possible questions—and the answer it gives to all of those questions is, first of all, I am and will continue to be here for you just as I have always been there for others who asked for My presence. This utterance of God’s is the same here as it is on any other scene it interrupted, and therefore the same as on the scene from which the present interruption was launched.\n\nDetermining the utterance to be the same on the two scenes—the scene from which it has been launched and the scene upon which it has landed—can always be modeled on this originary scribal oral-literacy interface, but it will always be more difficult to carry off. This is the work of the literary experimentation undertaken on the scene of writing, a work which can be modeled very closely on the generation of ancient canonical writings (including, of course, the Bible) out of materials used for the training of the scribal class—but, now, under conditions where we have access to the data of what will eventually be something approximating the accumulated discourse of humanity along with automated ways of collecting, arranging, collating and curating all of that material.\n\nThe space of writing, that is, will be intimately interactive with language AIs. The question of how to think, which is usually pitched in one or another logical-imaginative form (“steps” for arriving at a “conclusion” from a “premise,” ways of “imagining” yourself in a conversation or whatever) that forgets that thinking takes place in language and that language is the very compositionality of the human and not a tool; that question can now be rerouted to questions of writing, of reworking according to preserved but always also improvised rules and moves sample sentences.\n\nAny voice can be the interruptive voice—God can speak to us any way he likes; the question is, how do we find ways to listen. Let’s push it: any interruptive voice, which is to say, any utterance that can be treated as interruptive, is God speaking to us, as long as we construct the space wherein to listen and transcribe. Any sample of language that can be made the same on two different scenes will do. The proof that it’s the same will be the full commemorative order (ritual, juridical and disciplinary) you construct around each utterance on the respective scenes and your “straddling” of both of them on the scene of writing.\n\nSay, for example, you’re confronted with an accusation of lying—an accusation that certainly comes from another scene insofar as the accusation relies upon certain juridical (at least) protocols that must be observed differently upon the scene from which the accusation emerges than on the scene where you are not, presumably, unanimously and unequivocally considered to be lying about that particular fact or incident. To make the accusation the same on both scenes would involve more than just “refuting” the accusation on terms satisfactory to those you share your present scene with; it would involve exposing the two scenes to each other, having them frame and comment on each other, perhaps by introducing disciplinary or ritual “scenery” into both scenes. On the scene of writing you would thereby be constructing a new articulation of the ritual, juridical and disciplinary, ultimately for “training” purposes.\n\nEven this fairly simple example makes it clear that the scene of writing is a space of innovation and I’d like to take that observation further and claim that all innovation, including technical and scientific, can be modeled on the scene of writing with its oral-literate interface. Inquiry and innovation begin when some utterance presents as anomalous, which is to say we don’t know what it’s telling us to look for, or to do, or how to respond to it—the programming has broken down. Repeat any utterance enough times and you will get to this point—the frame of reference upon which its intelligibility depends will have changed, the place it originally held no longer needs to be held, the controversy it resolved is no longer operational, it’s surrounded by an unfamiliar set of utterances with a different set of reference points, etc.\n\nEven an invention presupposes that there is some transformation or conversion or transmission that seems to be demanded by a larger process that existing vocabularies can’t describe or help you enact. So, you try and derive an utterance that will work, and in doing so imagine possible scenes, but what that means is separating off the scene upon which you are now trying out these scenes from the scene that no longer works. And on this provisional scene you are visiting others, others that maybe never completely came off—a single action on one scene may turn out to be decomposable into a series of actions on other scenes, or a new scene might be able to turn a series of actions into a single one, given some scenic design that would distribute positions in some new way.\n\nWhat new utterance, along with its full range of references and implications, would make it possible for you to say the same thing on a not yet existing scene that you couldn’t say with the old utterance, on the previous scene? You work on creating the conditions under which a new concept, phrase, command, question or sentence would attract new selvings and practices that would use that utterance to point to the same thing, and in the process you keep, along with others, hopefully, continuing to revise the utterance. The first science of all, the science of language, of determining which marks would represent which sounds, and which words related to which other words in a sentence and how, is the model for all the others, and this science was first designed so preserve, and show others how to preserve (and show others how to show others…) verbal traditions at some distance from the liturgical settings which are no longer replicable so that textual transmission must do some of the work of presenting the center previously done by ritual transmission. Even the most advanced technological innovation is still deriving some new mode of commemoration from a now absent scene that has become an abstracted model of scenic design.\n\nThink about taking a single sentence like, say, “representation is the deferral of violence” and simply reversing its terms: “violence is the deferral of representation.” We give ourselves a puzzle here—the new sentence doesn’t immediately make sense, but on a second look perhaps there’s something we could do with it, perhaps even in such a way as to add meaning to the original. How about “representation is the violence of deferral”? “Deferral is the violence of representation”? We’re creating a kind of parallel discourse to GA (who might utter these sentences—what, in terms Johanna Drucker uses, “pataphysical demon”?)—we might give ourselves an assignment to write a little essay that articulates all of these sentences, perhaps generating new ones through similar processes along the way—we might invite the GPT to join in.\n\nI think this kind of practice or selving or designing is analogous to the kind of scribal training culture that ended up producing books like the biblical Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and Job (in particular), all of which involve sustained play with paradox and metaphorical leaps.\n\nWe might think about the scene of writing as abolishing the distinction between knowledge and information. We leave our space open to the constant inflow of information, we modulate that space so as to distribute bits of information across different data sets, scales and time-frames, using the information itself to continue refining that modulation—information thereby comes in as “always already” a modification of the ongoing creation of knowledge. This also means that everyone in the space is at their stations, and treating those stations and their own occupancy of that as more info-knowledge to take in and send out, gift-like, as data to other users at other interfaces.\n\nI’ve recently become dissatisfied with the concept of “formalization” as a political ideal, aimed at countering liberalism by insisting, precisely, that all occupants of all stations be identified as such. The ideal is right, but “formalization” suggests a single degree of explicitness for all enactments on all scenes—as if everyone, at every moment, has to be “registered” identically. I think in terms of differing modes of “formalization”—so, the emergent leader of a tightly knit group in the midst of an emergency situation nodding his head slightly in a particular direction for his customary second-in-command counts as “formalization” for me but I can see that this could be stretching the term. And, in a really coherent order, couldn’t we imagine such “nods” as comprising all of social interactivity?\n\nI’ll draw then, upon a fairly familiar concept, that of “idiomatic intelligence,” and us it to replace “formalization.” Idiomatic intelligence, among other virtues, suggests the need for any order, at whatever scale, to model itself as a way of modeling possible articulations of itself with its scenic and extra-scenic (or yet to be scenic) surroundings. “Idiomatic intelligence” has us keep in mind the resistance to translation the ongoing naming constitutive of any event-scene undergoes and the corresponding need for translation practices—in those scenes of writing at the oral-literate interface. “Idiomatic intelligence” incorporates the ritual, or the most originary modes of commemoration, in a way that ‘formalization,” drawing almost exclusively upon the juridical, doesn’t.\n\n“Idiomatic intelligence” commemorates the way all knowledge comes out of commemoration, and the commemoration of commemoration, through iteration, variation, and “sampling”—again, the practices constitutive of the scene of writing placed at the center here. Just as the ancient scribes created the collective identities into which rulers, occupants of the center, can step as always already having stepped into, by stitching together, revising, editing and ensuring the transmission of inherited traditions, so our spaces of writing, programming of programmers, will seed the institutions concerned with data security in all its forms (ultimately, all institutions, but not with equal weight) with intelligence programs that provide imperative transmission belts for those who can select their successors in perpetuity.\n\nThe scene of writing is derivations from deferrals and its test will be whether it can model and ultimately perform in increasingly indispensable ways functions of sovereignty. What will be distinctive in these practices is the performing of constant “stress tests” on commemorative orders in their ritual, juridical and disciplinary forms—only our scene of writing will be able to show how things stand across the board with these institutions—what kinds of orthopraxes, truths, protections against violent centralizations, and inquiries will they help to sustain amidst the increasingly comprehensive uprising against occupancy of the center—an uprising that paradoxically produces increasingly stringent mechanisms of power for whoever can manage to seize the center temporally or operate it from scenes behind the scene.\n\nThe very simple practice proposed here—show samples of language to be the same across different scenes (an inhabited one and an interrupting one)—in all its inexhaustibility can sustain such institution building. Our idiomatic intelligences will retrieve the most tacit and ancient forms of intelligence while infiltrating across the range of all the contemporary modes, creating new practices of art, inquiry and revivification of intermediate ways of communal responsibility. We will be creating inscripture."
    },
    {
      "slug": "hostage-taking",
      "title": "Hostage Taking",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 10, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/hostage-taking",
      "content": "The greatest, and no doubt most thankless, service the Israelis could provide for humanity in responding to the Hamas massacres would be to set a precedent for abolishing the politics of hostage taking. This would mean refusing both to be morally blackmailed by harm its policies do to Gazan civilians and to waver in their refusal to cease operations so as to negotiate for their own hostages. As I write this it is the second day since the Israeli government has shut of all amenities to Gaza. The predictable cries of “genocide” were issued immediately. No—it’s a siege, an ancient military practice. You end it by surrendering, which Hamas is free to do at any time.\n\nThose attacking Israel for starving, etc., Gazans don’t mention that. I wonder, perhaps naively, why, if Gaza can be kept under such a tight quarantine, the IDF even needs to enter Gaza—don’t the Gazans need to come out, with their hands up, unarmed? Why not conquer enough of the strip to set up a refugee camp welcoming those Gazans who wish to repudiate and leave Hamas-ruled Gaza—the Israelis need only ensure that no known or likely Hamas members be leaving and, of course, that everyone enter the protected space unarmed. If Hamas refuses to let them leave will that also be an Israeli war crime? Again, perhaps naïve—there may be reasons against doing this I haven’t considered. (Maybe the logistics are just too daunting.)\n\n_Just a moment, though. The fact that no one has “called upon” Hamas to surrender, or “demanded” that they do so, nor invoked any of the whole range of outraged human rights commonplaces that apply to those who won’t do anything to you or aren’t the tail you need to wag some dog, is a highly significant one. That in all likelihood no one has even considered this possibility exposes the moral fraudulence at the heart of just about all of the moral systems at play here._\n\nBut the broader issue is that of the politics of hostage taking, which is really constitutive of the politics of representation, i.e., modern democratic politics, more generally. Threatening to harm members of other groups, however defined, or finding patrons among other groups who will claim that mistreatment (however defined) of your group (however defined) is in effect a way of taking the social order hostage is the general form of representative politics. “Progress” in such things as civil rights takes place when publicized and carefully framed offenses against a particular group is taken to require new social rules protecting that group against that kind of offense.\n\nIn that case, the only way to talk about politics is to make the most plausible complaints and accusations to the effect that you have suffered such offenses—how plausible they need to be varies greatly. This is the case even for the universal, non-group related rights, upon which the more narrowly focused civil rights are parasitic. The right to free speech means that someone who is prevented from speaking, or punished for speaking, can be held up as a victim (hostage) who substitutes for all of us—the state is the ultimate hostage-taker, and hostages must be taken to counter the state in the form of breaches of the peace.\n\nSuch practices of hostage taking devolve into ritualistic role playing but that’s never all it is—hostage taking is, of course, the dominant form of the regulation of violence in pre-state communities governed by honor codes. In communities governed by the law of the vendetta each member of every group is a potential hostage held by other groups. If a member of your group commits an offense against a member of another group, the conflict reducing mechanism is either to turn over that member, or, perhaps, a member equivalent to the one who suffered the offense, or to exact punishment yourself. This means, of course, that each group needs to police its own members very carefully, so as not to be drawn inadvertently into some larger conflict.\n\nThe much abhorred practice of “honor killing” fits perfectly into this logic, insofar as each member of the group can disgrace the patriarch by exposing his inability to control his own tribe. Even if a woman is raped, such impotence is exposed, and the only way of erasing the shame is by killing its signifier—anyway, the fact that the woman in question was outside of the male supervision of members of her family long enough for such an act to be perpetrated is a marker of complicity.\n\nThis mode of self-policing communities lasts long into the democratic era—in the US, one will see it, for example, in the immigrant groups coming in large numbers around the turn of the 20th century—it is the other side of ethnic solidarity: the group protects you but you must undertake not to shame the group. This is a much weaker version of the honor system, of course, relying mostly upon public shaming and ostracism rather than violence. It no doubt weakens as individuals become capable of entering the larger society and no longer depend upon the protection of the group or, for that matter, want to be associated with such “primitive” practices (which includes such things as approval of mate selection).\n\nThe hostage taking system then gets transferred to the interactions between citizens and states, predicated upon the logic of one member of the group standing in for the entire group (which is what’s going on when we speak of such things as “racism”). On one level, it is the continuum between central banking and the intelligence services (ultimately on an international scale) that determines the rotation in power governing representational systems, but the idiom of such controlled revolutions is that of the taking, redemption and commemoration of hostages. To single out practices whereby one member is made to suffer for the putative crimes of his group is to organize the legal and political system around the punishing of such practices.\n\nThis can be seen as the means by which the monarch breaks up the tribal or feudal order—by claiming the prerogative to judge individuals over and beyond the role they play as tokens in inter and intra-group circulation. Once the king is replaced by the rotation of occupants of the center, competition over which groups deserve to have that prerogative exercised on their behalf becomes the default mode of governance. This is the case for groups you like as much as for groups you don’t like. This, of course, leads to “discrimination” against the least “marked” groups, because it’s much harder in such cases to claim that a member has been treated as a substitute for the group.\n\nThe honor system never changed all that much in international politics, where there are hegemonic powers but no Leviathan capable of judging all cases—countries must address each other on the field of honor. A government must be ready to, if it has the power, wreak destruction on another country that has mistreated one of its citizens. And it is very much a question of power—a weak government can allow offenses to pass because it has no choice—it is precisely the stronger country that is bound to ensure offenses against it do not pass with impunity. If countries are capable of allowing international institutions to mediate their disputes then the honor system recedes, but that just means that a pale equivalent of the Leviathan, good enough for secondary matters, has been created by some conglomeration of reciprocally well-disposed powers; as soon as real competition between powers recommences, we are back to the honor system.\n\nBritain’s reason for entering both World Wars were promises it granted to protect other nations. China cannot allow the US to traverse waters it has claimed as its own without enduring humiliation, even if broader global ambitions make it possible to exercise self-restraint in how remedy for such humiliations is sought. The process of decolonialization was saturated with the language of honor and hostage-taking—the whole anticolonial discourse of figures like Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon was predicated upon the new nations restoring their honor, in large part by showing their ability to take hostages from the colonizers with impunity. And, no doubt, a great deal of postcolonial White Guilt is an acceptance of that logic of exchange—they must take enough hostages from us to even out all the hostages we took from them over the centuries.\n\nMy reference to the self-restraint countries might exercise in exacting revenge or recompense for humiliation points to the need for larger systems if the honor system is to be replaced. Of course, one might argue that it cannot and need not be replaced but, rather, restored to its previous condition, in which honor belongs to those capable of defending it. But that system would really make it impossible to avoid world wars, which we can no longer afford—indeed, much of the dysfunction and even crazed efforts at globalization over the past few decades, under such pretexts as “climate change,” are, if generously understood, based on a shared sense that not only must restraints on competition between great powers be restrained but that we can’t just say that and must therefore have pretexts for imposing restraints—simply establishing restraints on straightforward mimetic terms would incite rather quell rivalry.\n\nSo, we need and will have, one way or another, global ordering systems, and events drawing global attention must be treated as ways of shaping those emergent systems. Israel, whose existence is ambivalent in ways that no other country can match, is both a dangerous and propitious place to begin thinking about such transitions. The position that Israel simply shouldn’t exist has, for very large numbers across the world, never been relaxed since it came into existence. The same, of course, is true for Jews who, according to some (again, never completely abandoned) variants of Christianity, also simply shouldn’t exist.\n\nIn such a case, one’s existence always comes with a bit of a scandal attached—the fact that one continues to exist when one shouldn’t is itself a sign of one’s extensive control over all the mechanisms requisite for ensuring one’s anomalous existence, whereby one has stained with complicity all those who accept one’s existence as default. And, of course, we see the exact opposite position, proclaiming the absolute necessity of Israel’s existence (the same argument has been applied to Jews more generally), for humanity, civilization, democracy, or whatever. Zionism succeeded in creating the Jewish state while completely failing in normalizing Jewish existence.\n\nAll hostage-taking discourses and the accusations that constitute them all go through Israel—Israel as hostage and Israel as hostage taker are inseparable from discussions of Israel. This “status” seems far more of a threat to global ordering practices than it was, and it serves, as far as I can see, no benefit. Even my opening to this post, though, implicitly posits a kind of Israeli “exceptionalism”—it is Israel, I began by announcing, that is positioned so as to usher us into a new, post-hostage-taking era. Do I contradict myself, etc.? Others will come along and do it better than Israel who is sure to, regardless of the overall success of the mission it’s undertaken, to botch a great deal of it.\n\nThe fact that Israel is in this situation is a result of a lot of botching, probably to degrees greater than anyone is thinking right now (and there is already a lot of thinking about it). But let’s put the Palestinians at the center for a moment—Palestinian politics is a global politics in which all the hostage-taking “tropes” of the progressive decolonizing world order have come to concentrate. Palestinians are the global sacrificial object that has replaced the Jews of the post-war world. Palestinian “resistance” is by no means autonomously generated—it is maintained by international funding and fan bases without which the Palestinians by now would have simply been integrated into the Israeli state or formed another impoverished and corrupt Third World dump ignored by everyone. Or let’s be generous and point to the extraordinary seaport Gaza might become—either way, it comes to the same thing, that the Palestinians would be something familiar.\n\nIf the Israelis manage to, in Barack Obama’s words, “dismantle” Hamas, that will be a remarkable accomplishment, in both practical and symbolic terms. It will show that “support” for an entity whose sole legitimacy derives from its opposition to some other entity does not guarantee the perpetuity of that entity’s existence. Hostage-taking in global politics will be dealt a blow. If the Israelis manage it, how they will do so will measure the extent of the accomplishment—optimally, Hamas will be replaced by a better form of government not grounded in antagonism to Israel. I leave out of consideration here Iran and the Saudis, the US and the Russians—accounting for the specific geopolitical consequences would be another kind of discussion.\n\nBut I am assuming that those considerations will be better considered if the specter of hostage-taken were to begin to lifted from global idioms, leaving us to talk in, on the one hand more traditional terms of responsibility for governing the territories one has proven capable of governing and, on the other hand, more forward looking terms in which game-changing exchanges can register and remedy the historical resentments that international “realism” never could. It remains the case that Israel’s future is tied to that of the Palestinians, or the Arabs and others in lands it controls. The extreme savagery of the Hamas attacks might be taken to result from “pent-up” frustration at being locked up in an “open-air prison” all these years; I think it much more reflects a Muslim sense of humiliation at being defeated and ruled by Jews, and a re-assertion of (one version of) traditional Islamic privileges regarding the defeated Jew.\n\nEither way there are certainly “issues” to be dealt with here, well beyond the bromides of the (obviously defunct) two-state solution. Israel still has the primary responsibility for addressing such issues, which also means it has to claim the prerogative to do so. Here I’ll end, since getting more specific here would mean entering a discussion of ongoing reorganizations within Israel, and ways those processes would have to be made more deliberate. But I’ll end with this: any solution to any problem involves a more precise allocation of responsibility in accord with power, and power in accord with responsibility.\n\nAn end to hostage-taking would be an end to opining without being able to initiate a discussion of who, exactly, should do what, and how. And, in this case, all the very concerned parties could use all the means at their disposal to pressure Hamas to surrender and save their own people from the “genocidal” Israelis? Everyone must want that, right? And wouldn’t this be the shortest and even most just way? Wouldn’t Israel, in leaving only that option open, be practicing a kind of hostage taking to transcend hostage taking?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "idiomatic-intelligence-and-the-black-box",
      "title": "Idiomatic Intelligence and the Black Box",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 12, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/idiomatic-intelligence-and-the-black",
      "content": "A while ago, partly because my reading of Peirce got me interested in probability and knowledge, and partly because my work as a college writing instructor got me interested in the formulaic nature of language, I tried to think through a way of assessing and explaining any discourse, idiom, text or utterance in terms of degrees of predictability. Given the explosion of LLMs, this seems like a good time to revive this line of inquiry. I started with the assumption that the more predictable a “piece” of language was, the less meaningful and memorable it was, as it served merely to increase the predictability of all the other most predictable utterances.\n\nSuch utterances have their place, of course, as “phatic” communication, but it’s not what I was interested in. Now, while the LLM presupposes its entire database against which to measure the predictability of the next utterance, we can be much more precise than that (so could LLMs as well, of course, if trained to be so)—what is most predictable in this situation, with these interlocutors, their history, separately and in interaction with each other, what kind of “genre” are they participating in, etc.—we’d have to account for unimaginable amounts of carefully curated data here. At this point, in fact, this conception is more of a “data sublime” sensibility than a real proposal—but the distance between these two is shrinking rapidly.\n\nNow, the most unpredictable utterance would be a randomly generated one, like those generated for us for passwords, and that also doesn’t teach us much about the workings of language. So, if not sheer unpredictability, what would be the “other” of the “predictable” utterance? The best way to think about this is to split the scene between the scene itself and the disciplinary space within the scene to be created by the utterance that is _maximally unpredictable on the scene but maximally predictable for those joining the disciplinary space within, around, or over the scene._\n\nWhat we have here is not so much a secret or coded language as a performative one, with its performativity measured by its scrambling effect on the scene—the way it alienates everyone from the position they are presupposing on the scene. It’s not secret or coded because it doesn’t exist prior to the utterance itself which, as an iteration of the originary sign, is cut and carved out of the semiotic material of the scene, therefore constituted by a great deal of improvisation. The effect is precisely to split the scene, and place everyone else on the scene on the boundary between the two scenes, upon which one acts differentially.\n\nYou could think of it as reworking the map and the terriotory simultaneously. This act is what I came to call “originary satire” in _Anthropomorphics_. This formulation has its roots in the implications of avant-garde writing and post-structuralist theory as much as in the emergence of algorithmic governance. This formulation of the doubled scene now provides for a position on the margin of LLMs, at its limits, and inside the black box within which extremely large numbers of parametrized tokens generate language in ways no one could map out without, it seems to me, another similar LLM which would then contain that same opacity, requiring yet another LLM to map it out, ad infinitum.\n\nThe LLMs replicate the same articulation of transparency and opacity as language itself, where we can all point to the same thing and thereby render it transparent, but at the “price” of not being able to point to how exactly we are positioned to point at it in that particular space.\n\nThe end game of prompt engineering, then, is to enable us to continually position ourselves within the idiom that is most unpredictable on the scene while being most predictable for those taking up the idiom on the meta/para/infra scene. This is a position that can be programmed for, and the programmers can be programmed to program for, while being irreducible to any program. The purpose of all the programming is precisely to free us up to take this position, to create this unique transparency within opacity. And the opacity we generate will be the source of transparency for others, including us as we become other.\n\nIt’s first of all a habit to get into, a habit of speaking and speaking about speaking, a “gesturification” of one’s every utterance, a sampling. A sample must itself be maximally typical but also maximally scenified, this sample place here and treated just so right now to extract from it maximum knowledge and representability. To ask someone why they said something so predictable, or whether they intended what they said to be new or interesting in any way is a hostile gesture, but to take up what someone has said or done as if it were unpredictable on the scene but predictable on the doubled scene is to create a new mode of reciprocity.\n\nSometimes hostile gestures are necessary, but even then the model for the hostile gesture should be the disarming satirical one that invites the other to join a space of inquiry into the idiom we are in the process of creating. One does not thereby eliminate predictability (as if doing so were even imaginable): in repeating and reinscribing this split scene as a practice a broader predictability always remains a backdrop produced by the residue of any series of practices while predictability itself is always deferred. This is the main form of deferral available to us today, as bringing to bear the predictable upon the individual case unremittingly is the most destructive form of violence possible today and one which bears more than a faint family resemblance to scapegoating.\n\nThe predictable will always bear down on the individual—that’s the nature of language and scenicity—but the predictable can only be rescued from its ultimate falsity if it is made to run through a gauntlet leaving it, at the end, predictable only to those designing the gauntlet, setting up the obstacles, etc., so as to distill a precedent-setting decision.\n\nWhat one makes of the black box follows from what one makes of language—or, more precisely, whether one thinks language is elicited through exposure to a world somehow already nameable or one thinks language is learned by retracing, however idiosyncratically, the emergence of naming itself. If you think we’re hard-wired for grammar and merely need to have the words of a particular language plugged into the “mind,” the black box is an anomaly, even a scandal: machinic language generation should take place through logical elaborations of basic statements which could all be reproduced, assessed and made the basis for further assertions designed to withstand logical scrutiny.\n\nIf you think language is learned by participating in human scenes where one follows the gestures, obeys the commands of and issues requests to, others, experiences the co-emergence of objects and their names, imitates, practices, mistakes, varies (through substitutions and combinations) “pieces” of language derived from one’s surroundings, then you realize that language cannot be separated from the events in which we interact with others and try to predict what they might say after we say something and discover what to say next only by improvisationally drawing upon tacit semiotic resources at the moment—in that case, we’re all black boxed.\n\nIn that case, the GPT is the other/meta/infra scene of our scene of language learning, with the machine learning and human learning proceeding in parallel and reciprocally informing each other. We learn language by seeking to predict the actions of others on the scene and trying to be predictable ourselves, but also by learning that predictions often fail from both directions, which requires us to seek and transmit more information facilitating the reading of a particular sample—this in turn entails stretching the range of predictability so that one could, for example, surround one’s sample with markers of extreme unpredictability that are deferred within the sample itself (this, among other things, can be called “irony”).\n\nThis approach to language learning as approximation to an elusive norm that must be elicited and framed against the non-normal suits the “scribal theory of history” I’ve been exploring. The ancient scribal community was a pedagogical order, focused on introducing a small minority into literacy—and, at the highest levels, an extremely advanced form of literacy. The mode of teaching writing was, no doubt, by training learners in the formulas and commonplaces of the culture, themselves drawn from and feeding back into both the wisdom literature and what I will now call “narratives of succession” comprising the team.\n\nNarratives revolve around exemplary figures whose stories are also a source of proverbs, by-words, sayings, and so on. We can assume that scribal learning begins by having students repeat and memorize the most widely shared versions of these idioms, which comprise, more than an analysis of grammar or lexicon, the language of the order. This training prepares the student to handle more complex and ambiguous versions of the idioms, and eventually—perhaps only the most advanced and trusted—to participate in revising, filtering, collating and archiving the collected texts of the scribal community. Treating the ancient Hebrew scribal communities as exemplary (yes, I am choosing them), I feel increasingly confident in asserting that this textual legacy amounts to the preservation, refinement and legitimation of a deed of inheritance, ultimately anchored in land and traced back to a trust, or bailment. Literary culture is a kind of legal and accounting culture, through which debts are ascertained, sorted out, repaid and deferred.\n\nAs language learners, then, we always begin with what is most predictable within the space or upon the scene within which we are situated—we “begin with” in the sense of repeating and trying to get it right, which is to say, to say the same thing everyone else is saying. If we could continue to do that indefinitely we probably would because that is what it means to be on a scene, which is to say, saying the same thing as everyone else so that everyone doesn’t do the same thing at the same time. But we can’t, because the lines between saying and doing get blurred and one finds that one does not know whether what one is saying is the same as everyone else, in which case you fall back on what seems most like what at least some others, maybe one other, maybe one particularly important other, is saying, and repeating that, while stretching what will count as repeating with variations that elicit transitions into new predictabilities.\n\nUltimately, this entails being the same thing you are saying. So, what was very much like saying the same thing as everyone else starts to become perilously close to everyone doing the same thing at the same time precisely because someone, maybe you, is not saying the same thing. That just means that everyone must be saying the same thing as everyone else on some other scene, meta or infra, and you approximate what everyone else is saying until everyone can see and say that it is the same. That other scene might be a prolonged one, comprised of widely distributed doings, so one takes out derivatives on its completion.\n\nThe thinner the line between maximally predictable upon the scene and maximally unpredictable upon that scene but maximally predictable upon the new scene being erected the better—this is where the oscillation of attention between sign and thing at the center (this thing) accelerates to the point where motion is undetectable. On this scene, heightened engagement with other intelligences confirms or authenticates the human as the only intelligence that is always saying this sample is the same.\n\nLLMs, like all technology, are revelatory because they replace things humans might have done with things machines can now do, which raises the twinned questions of what, exactly, were we doing that got automated, and what are we doing now, confronted with the automation. If we say that AI can’t “communicate” (a word that is itself surely an instance of new technologies being retroactively applied to human activity) or “understand” (ditto, probably, even if we’d have to go back further) then we are doing two things: identifying something presumably distinctly human and doing so against, but also because of, the technology that we want to insist has not yet crossed that threshold; but, also, we are identifying some new capacity that we can try and program computers to simulate effectively enough that we couldn’t tell the difference—and in this case we are acknowledging that distinctly human capacity to have been “always already” technological.\n\nThe originary hypothesis interferes similarly with its object of inquiry, though, by “reducing” any human interaction to the “deferral of violence” upon a “scene” in some “event,” which confirms but also deflates such treasured words as “faith,” “transcendence” and so on. It would represent a failure of theoretical ambition to stop there and try to emphasize the “confirmation” and downplay the deflation or demystification—GA then just becomes another modern conservativism “proving” that something like “religion” is good for holding society together, etc. The approach I’m arguing for here (and everywhere else) is to knowingly treat everything we say and do as deferrals carried out on scenes in events, with those deferrals getting more prolonged and discretized as the center is amplified—somehow remembering that there will always be something unknowing about that knowing that others will point out to us.\n\nOriginary hypothesizing is, then, a technology that we program to propose and implement new modes of deferral, and to gather data (detect, record, and analyze) through the techno-scenes we construct that feed back into that programming. Rather than distinguishing the human from the rest, the originary event transforms the world into the imminent architecture of deferral. We are never done anthropomorphizing ourselves and each other because we always do so on the model of the center, which means the reciprocal imperatives (commands and petitions) crisscrossing center and periphery, and which are always revealing new layers of the human and new elements of the human to be deposited upon the increasingly articulated acene.\n\nWhen we look at each other and the world we’re making, we see ever new features of the human that are simultaneously signs of our becoming technological and therefore the prospect of future iterations of the human. It has become routine to think in terms of technological solutions to human problems, like, a blockchain to eliminate bureaucratic and autocratic or just flawed human mediation and judgment, but this just shows us what we thought mediation and judgment look like and how they “works” while creating a new field for new modes of mediation and judgment that will have been “human” while never having quite existed before the technical intervention. And then “blockchain” will start to work as a verb in sentences, something we do as a matter of course and that in turn suggests new modes of technicized deferral."
    },
    {
      "slug": "idiomatic-intelligence-as-register",
      "title": "Idiomatic Intelligence as Register",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 17, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/idiomatic-intelligence-as-register",
      "content": "I think that Jean-Francois Lyotard, with his concept of the differend, identified the central problem bequeathed to us by the enslaved debtor’s (anti)imperial imaginary that emerged at the end of the Axial Age. The differend refers to a situation in which some form of violation creates a double bind by also making it impossible to litigate that violation; interestingly, Lyotard sees in the differend a feeling that cannot be articulated in language, and therefore as the source of new idioms. Lyotard uses examples like Holocaust denial and Aboriginal land disputes, but I think that the concept is at least as applicable to the found(ed) God of history.\n\nIn the ancient empires it was unthinkable that the emperor himself could commit a crime, because who could adjudicate a claim against the emperor? But the Hebrew bible insisted that the emperors did commit crimes deserving of punishment and it seems to me that they were able to do so because a subsequent emperor remedied the harm (to an extent): I have in mind the crux of the composition of the bible, the period of the Babylonian exile and Persian sponsored return. I assume that very few peoples survived the kinds of catastrophes described in the bible, and the survival of the ancient Judeans had to appear as an act of divine grace—in that case, though, the destruction itself must have been divinely sanctioned, a judgment against the Jews, and the emperors carrying out the destruction, like those “redeeming” the exiles, must be mere instruments of God; a God, therefore, heading a court of appeal superior to that of any worldly emperor.\n\n“Monotheism,” then, was the invention of a new idiom in the space of a differend, and this idiom required the articulation of the privileged subject wronged by and defiant toward the emperor (placing the emperor in a double bind that God himself can be placed in) and the dispossessed masses who can see in that uncertain figure a new, redeeming, center. And “redemption” here must be taken with full reference to slavery, into which one could be thrown as a result of one’s debts, and from which one could be saved by repaying them. If it’s God who redeems you, though, you are now indebted to Him in a way far exceeding any worldly debt: human sacrifice, the only form of payment that could seem commensurate with the debt owed to the divine emperor, is cancelled by an even more incommensurate debt of ongoing devotion of your whole self.\n\nThe idiom generated is one in which your entire linguistic order is transformed so as to detect and remedy anything less than complete devotion to God, and there is a great deal to detect and remedy since all of our desires threaten to derail that devotion.\n\nAll of Western thinking, at least, which is to say any thinking done in any of the successor states of the Roman Empire, from the farthest left to the farthest right, remains completely within this differend; and non-Western thinking, to the extent that it is required to participate in the Western-created and dominated international system, does so as well. I say this is a problem for us because in demolishing sacral kingship once and for all, the subjection of actual authorities to higher authorities provides, as the only path to legitimate authority, posturing before some imaginary authority. This makes governance incoherent at the very time that more governance, some of it excrescences produced by the endless struggle to secure power, but some of it quite necessary for the sustenance of technological and monetary systems upon which all other systems now depend, is being erected.\n\nAll that references to higher authority, whether those higher authorities be “democracy,” “human rights,” “the Constitution,” “freedom,” “nation,” etc., can do is create more counter-authorities to the already existing ones—and these counter-authorities get incorporated in the form of the massive excrescences in our burgeoning power structures. Needless to say, there is also no way back to sacral kingship, assuming there were any “constituency” for it. Somehow government will have to be made good, rather than an entity we are always performatively defining ourselves in opposition to. None of our existing political categories help us here.\n\nNone of this is particularly new, but I think I have a better way of approaching it as a result of the work the division into ritual, juridical and disciplinary now enables. The economic-political knot now looks as follows: the overt dislocation of centered occupancy is the other side of the funding of the state through loans directed by the central bank; decision making from the center is now determined by the imperative to ensure ongoing capitalization possibilities for the strongest sections of capital; this gives the state a great deal of power, and in fact leads to the accumulation of centralized power, while sharply constraining any particular occupant of the center.\n\nThe president or prime minister is very powerful when securing capitalization opportunities, through taxation, regulation, war-making, etc., policies, and very weak (unpopular, scandal-ridden, etc.) when countering those opportunities. Opposition to the capitalization of the most capitalized is necessarily allowed within a system in which parties rotate in power, but such opposition will eventually feedback into the system as the strengthening of state capacities to constrain capital eventually are transformed into capacities at the disposal of some state-capital project. In the process, the intelligence of the state, i.e., its spies, operations but also the need to take in as much information as possible, to have eyes and ears everywhere, to channel as much disciplinary activity as possible towards the state, is taken out of the hands of the monarch and distributed in unaccountable ways.\n\nSo, here’s my question: how can we ever manage we have a reasonably accurate, much less actionable, picture of all this? I read all the time accounts claiming to have extensive knowledge of various deep state activities—what are the psyops, who is really an intelligence asset of this or that state, etc., and not only do I have little idea whom to believe (I hardly anyone see anyone consider that maybe what they dug up was put there for them to dig up, or conceals other layers, etc.), since these accounts often contradict each other, but they almost all, caught in the weeds as they are, fail to give intelligible accounts of what all these intelligence agencies want in the end, why they can do some things but not others, how successful they are in getting what they want, whether when they get what they want it’s really what they want and so on.\n\nIf you’ve missed some string, as you surely have, doesn’t that effect in ways you couldn’t calculate, the significance of the strings you hold? The sheer thrill of discovery, usually accompanied by a naïve democratic faith in the power of public exposure, obscures any attempt to create an all-encompassing and plausible narrative. And if you don’t have something like that, and are dazed and confused rather than complicit, aren’t you a kind of unwitting asset yourself?\n\nI’ll pose the question this way: what can we say that will withstand the “economic” fluctuations in volatility along with the dialectic of centralization of power along with the invisibilization of agency directing that power? You can stand tall, have integrity, stick to your principles, speak the truth no matter what, live in truth, etc., but whether what you say is true in any but the most trivial sense is an infrastructural question, and it’s the infrastructure that’s subject to fluctuations in circulation, power redistributions, and data flows. My notion of the “idiom,” or what I’ve been calling “idiomatic intelligence,” and which is probably indebted to Lyotard’s, can, now supplemented with the tripartite distinction of the social into ritual, juridical and disciplinary layers, help us think this problem through further.\n\nI’m going to say the most basic, universal, untranscendable layer of language (fully developed language) is the pragmatic paradox, in which what you say is simultaneously constituted by and constitutes what it’s “about.” This is the layer of language commemorated in ritual, myth, parable, riddle, and all the wisdom literature collected by all cultures. This is the layer of language in which we know that what we desire will desert us if we obtain it, that those you are closest to can best betray you, that luck is really preparation but preparation can be undone by bad luck, that no man should be counted happy until he is dead, and hundreds more already written and that we could write if we set our minds to it.\n\nEvery sentence, even the most ordinary and commonplace, can be paradoxicalized, and this is the source of idiomatic intelligence. At the every least, any sentence could be read as the answer to one of two questions, implicit or explicit, one directed at the subject and one at the predicate: “it’s warm here” can be answer to the question, “what’s the temperature like here?” or “where is it warm?,” and responding as if the ”wrong” question has been answered paradoxicalizes the sentence by placing it on two scenes simultaneously. “So, you’re saying it’s warm _only_ here?” Sustaining the boundary between the “plain” and paradoxical levels of the discourse you’re in keeps the “windows” to the infrastructural conditions of possibility open.\n\nThe reason for speaking of “idioms” is to take any privileged metalanguage off the table, metalanguage being that bludgeon of the disciplines. An idiom is a mode of language use constituted through use and therefore more fully available the more embedded in the scenes of its usage. This describes all language use, so the idiomatic character of language is equivalent to language itself, with the only question being disabusing uses of language that consider themselves sanctioned or official in some way of that assumption. And the ongoing paradoxicalization of language uses is certainly a good way of doing that. The “intelligence” adds the need to move across idioms and transfer signs from one to the other insofar as the provide helpful information—the more learned you are in one idiom the more you should be able to move amongst and gather intelligence from other idioms—the highest knowledge is to know that you are always in an idiom because there is nothing but idioms.\n\nOf course that very claim sounds, paradoxically, like a universal, non-idiomatic claim. And isn’t the originary hypothesis, for that matter, a claim to transcend and thereby found all idioms? Everything should translate into the originary and someday we should be speaking “originary.” But as soon as I say that I turn the originary hypothesis into an idiom into which any other idiom can be translated but which no idiom says without being re-translated and if the originary hypothesis ever came to saturate all discourse it would bring with it maximum idiomatic intelligence of always constituting and being constituted by the stack of scenes we are situated on.\n\nTo continue: the second layer of language use, this one corresponding to the juridical, is that wherein any utterance, any sentence, makes some claim regarding an exchange that presupposes a field of exchange and anticipates some adjudication. You are providing or passing along some intelligence, and as a post of transfer you make a claim and claims can be made upon you. Every sentence defers some imperative by pointing to a less deferrable imperative deriving from reality, but that initiating imperative lies in wait, to be enforced or redeemed. The exchange dimension of any sentence is cut out of the broader cloth of the paradoxicality of language and is ultimately retrieved by it once again, but “ultimately” can be a long time and in the meantime the demands are real and inescapable.\n\nAs society becomes an articulation of distanced and differently scaled scenes this exchange dimension of language is pressed upon harder than in the single scened social order in which we still, for the most part, imagine our utterances to be circulated—pressed upon harder, that is, by the surrounding paradoxicalizations. What can a promise mean when the conditions of keeping that promise—having some legally recognized freedom of motion, physical integrity, source of economic support, expectations of loyalty, etc.—are increasingly under pressure with that pressure increasingly difficult to withstand? But it is also—paradoxically—under such conditions that the promise and other indications of an exchange implicit in language are even more in demand and more meaningful even when honored in the breach.\n\nEven in the most “totalitarian” system language wouldn’t “work” if the possibility of the promise (always idiomized) is completely eliminated. The “tensegrity” of such obligations created through speech therefore becomes a register of the subversions of succession and the tentativeness of bidding on the claim that any scene will have been the same.\n\nAnd then, corresponding to the disciplinary, is knowing the scene you are on along with the supply chain of scenes upon which it is dependent—here is where Peirce’s “what will prove true the long run” is especially pertinent because none of us can have all of the chain present to us at any time and to that extent are flying blind. But knowing the scene means knowing how the scene has been cut out of the encompassing paradoxicalization of language and some scene of exchange that makes the knowledge urgent in the first place. The construction of the scene upon which you know is co-constitutive of the scene the doings upon which you want to know.\n\nYou can always make a judgment regarding whose speech seems likely to sustain the exchange relations predicating it and be continually informed rather than invalidated by its possible conversions into paradox. A figure who can be believed and trusted by the same people able to ridicule and laugh heartily at him will likely be at least a rich source of information. And your model is what you hope for your own speech: to stand up to scrutiny days, weeks, decades down the line, even if it turns out to be mistaken in many or even all respects. And this model also allows you to construct a scene upon which you try out what kinds of mistakes you might be liable to make, which also means what kinds of mistakes you can make allowances for in others, so that your basic relation to the scene can remain the same even as you learn from it.\n\nA new scene can always pop on the scene—someone you took to be a reasonably independent actor turns out to be someone whose strings are held by another more closely than you would have imagined (which might also lead you to imagine what kinds of strings are holding you). That must be manifested, though, by something like promises broken or actions turning paradoxical to the point of incoherence, and even if that might be happening on some scene off-scene it must register on the scene you can follow. So, in broken obligations and paradoxicalized actions and utterances you can see and register the presumed effects of other scenes and at the very least stand in as a sign of where those boundaries are and where we can bring our presence to bear on having obligations met and paradoxes surfed rather than sweeping away.\n\nThis is what requires idiomatic intelligence: entering the language of a scene and refusing to submit that language to an authoritative metalanguage. Maybe a simpler and more wisdom literature way of putting it is that universal lying, deceit, betrayal and idiocy are impossible because we can identify the tendency toward them and tend to the means of attestation, obligation and learning. Someone has to stand for that tending in order for you yourself to tend, and that someone can be pressed toward the center with an eye toward permanent occupancy—and if that someone ends up being no longer an imaginable occupant you would nevertheless being creating a mantle that someone will eventually come to fit.\n\nIf you imagine yourself to trust no one that just means you most trust whoever best demonstrates the trustworthlessness of everyone else and avert your eyes from the infrastructural conditions of that capability. Someone who is worth the trust will point to margins of trustworthiness where they can be found and reveal the infrastructural conditions of that capability. Of course, those margins are always receding and shifting which is why those samples of trust must be fed back into the infrastructures to which you tend. We’re all tending a piece of the infrastructure."
    },
    {
      "slug": "idioms-as-operationalized-samples",
      "title": "Idioms as Operationalized Samples",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 23, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/idioms-as-operationalized-samples",
      "content": "Any act of signification aims at changing the field of probabilities within which it is situated. I’m working with the assumption that the traditional model of how this is done, which is modeled on face-to-face conversations on a shared scene in which the interlocutors advance reasons expected to convince the other, is defunct—assuming anything ever really worked that way, outside of small groups comprised of highly knowledgeable individuals who share common understandings. In other words, we can drop the whole “Enlightenment project” based on public discourse and the triumph of the better, more reasoned argument.\n\nThe model itself, a single scene small enough and leisurely enough for each participant to have his say, is in such contradiction with existing imperial conditions as to disqualify that project. Of course, Walter Lippman was pointing this out a century ago. Then, the alternative was elite gatekeepers who developed expertise in framing, releasing and controlling information provided to the public, which is the origin of the “mainstream media.” One argument that emerged along with the internet is that decentralized communications and the possibility of unfettered peer-to-peer interactions revived the Enlightenment model, but there’s no reason to think that can scale up beyond a single Discord or Reddit page, assuming it’s even operative there.\n\nIt’s better to follow the observation that just as most images are not produced to be seen by humans, most text is not generated to be read by humans so that, as Rhea Myers points out in _Proof of Work_ , we should be taking our audience to be the whole field of algorithms filtering and weighing discourse. When I speak about “working on language,” that’s what I mean.\n\nThe idioms I’ve been creating out of a reduction of scenic thinking to Anna Weirzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes is, then, intended to become the language of a team, or teams of teams, operating directly on the field of probability. The Enlightenment model is a derivative of the Big Scenic Imaginary, where we are to imagine ourselves somehow all seated at a table together. What I’m suggesting is more along the lines of “weighing” the “nodes” in a neural network so as to contribute to the composition of the database. Sure, any individual contribution is minimal, but that’s the case with the Enlightenment model as well, where you’re at a table with hundreds of millions of people.\n\nAt least with this more accurate and focused conception you can concentrate your powers—contributions will always be asymmetrical, and so you can think of making them more targetedly so. We need, then, a limited vocabulary that can be combined and repeated in a wide range of variations, and practice in doing so in order to create boundary formulas that can generate thought experiments. And that is what we have at this point: a kind of programming of the programmer idiom. The thought experiment I designed a few years ago regarding sovereignty is a good model of the kind of thinking that should be effective here: imagine you want something (gun control, universal medical care, an end to abortions, an end of foreign aid, etc.); now, consider (I’m using Peircean idioms here) the institutional alignment and chain of command that could institute what you want in the way you want it (i.e., not just pass a law prohibiting certain kinds of guns with no funds put into enforcement, etc.)—that is the model of sovereignty you want, and if you think about it you will surely see that it is significantly different than the kind we have now.\n\nThe next question is: given that mode of sovereignty you have wished into being, what would it actually do (taking it as a real form of power and no longer an expression of your wishes)? If we were all to accept those conditions, we could skip over the fairly meaningless policy differences and proceed to speaking about the kind of sovereignty that might actually do what it purports to do. In a way this thought experiment is aligned with John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”—we might say it’s the only way of making sense of that thought experiment while at the same time abolishing it. (Making sense of things in order to abolish them is a large part of what operative idioms do.)\n\nSo, we sharpen the juridical so as to approach its abolition (through the internalization of the judgments everyone would learn to expect and thereby simulate in their interactions); debts are to be forgiven to the extent that things making payment out of reach have happened to the debtor and enforced to the extent that the debtor’s own doing has enabled them to pay or not; knowing is sustaining the boundary between doing and happening. These are idioms we can trace back to the more basic code: before is the same as after; the part of the all is the same; doing is the same as happening. Singularized succession in perpetuity materializes after is the sme as before; approaching the ever receding horizon of juridical abolition materializes identifying the sameness of the part of the all; the maxim of indebtedness materializes the renewal of the originary distribution through the juridical (we might say that the juridical, most radically, comes down to the question of debt forgiveness or enforcement) –distribution is succession while succession is a series of judgments; distribution indebts all to the center and the means of repayment is in the iteration of the center.\n\nKnowing is then paying the debt to the center because knowing sorts out the relations between doings and happenings. There will be more, but we can see that we have phrases that can be repeated, inverted and translated into any other idioms, thereby reprogramming them. You are always modeling decisions that sustain the threshold above which the originary distribution would be disturbed irremediably and the threshold below which the vendetta, endlessly recycling violence, would re-emerge; these decisions involve determination of debt enforcement and forgiveness (even questions of whether to convict and how to sentence violent criminals are questions of debt enforcement and forgiveness); and making such decisions requires one to stand on the boundary where doing fades into happening and happening consolidates into doing.\n\nThere’s no philosophy here, but perpetual thinking in common; there’s no orthodoxy but a focus on succession rituals; there is no formula for “dialogue” but a kind of laboratory for the invention of means of reframing any other idiom. It’s still that question about sovereignty, which I would now reformulate in terms of succession, which places sovereignty in time: consider what a sovereign would have to be so as to designate a successor who would continue to ensure what you say you want. We can operate on the highest levels of political theory or the lowest level of the most desultory, propaganda-saturated political desire.\n\nFrom this angle, insistence on shared philosophical “ground” is simply wasteful—all that approach can do is establish a set of publicly approved doxa and, consequently, friend/enemy distinctions endlessly constructed over which statements correspond to the doxa or not. An official religion might at least insist upon some shared, objective and therefore observable public rituals. But any religion would have to significantly scaled up to be refitted for such public purposes—what is the clerical position on nuclear weapons, AI, data collection and surveillance, bio-engineering, and so on? Various sects might have anwers to these questions, but what would make them compelling to the infrastructure?\n\nThey’d all be better off with the idiom laboratory I’m working on. The intelligence idioms created via originary hypothesizing is a medium of transfer translation across the board. The idioms are paradoxical and performative—they serve the same purpose as the old commonplaces, to effect transitions from event to commemoration, which is also the narrative function of God: what went wrong? Well, something was enforced that we can forgive now; the selection of a furtherest future option didn’t scale up enough and left too many shorter options on the table, etc. The idioms in this way become discovery procedures and elements for originary satire.\n\nThere’s a style of argumentation here, one which absolutely eschews a default model of social order that is being violated by whatever abomination we see in front of us at the moment. Here, we are clearing the deck of liberal and Axial Age assumptions alike. Almost all discussions of things like “corruption” and “oppression” presuppose, indeed, are unintelligible without, some implicit scene upon which honest and symmetrical transactions take place. We can certainly trace this model back to the originary scene but the occupation of the center is always either occluded or functions as a deux ex machina, entering the scene precisely so as to clean up the corruption or end the oppression and then exit.\n\nWhat I reject in GA is the lazy assumption that claims of resentment can rely on the implicit invocation of this model. For Gans, the initial resentment was toward the center, but that formulation has been lost, with resentment now essentially mutual strafing on the periphery. If resentment is still toward the center, even if only for allowing transgressions on the periphery, then we would be interested in the conversion of that resentment into love or, let’s say, donation: a relation of obligation and gratitude, not so much toward the current occupant of the center but towards the peaceful and successful transfer of power to his successor.\n\nObligation and gratitude are expressed through succession rituals and paying our debt or donating our resentment to the center (there are dozens of such idioms from my work over the years) involves participating in and rectifying such rituals. (The defense of the Big Man revolution.) Resentment is when something is not the same—not just my piece, but the measurement of pieces as such. So, rather than imposing some a priori model of rights, equality or transparency upon reality so as to ground my resentment, we can just work on reading all expressions of resentment as indicating directions toward converting all practices into more explicit succession rituals.\n\nThis is making after the same as before. What is the center occupancy, the centered ordinality, that would involve you donating your resentment to the center? You could be the most tepid, cautious reformist or the most energetic radical with this question at the forefront—and we would need a spectrum of attitudes to make this question the commonsensical one.\n\nSo, find and create samples of these idioms, and generate out of those usages more idioms. Convert assets into data by diverting the outside spread into the furtherest future option. Turn every social institution and sign into a site of judgment and 50/50 possibilities that can attract bets and be converted into currency. Turning the world into a total array of coin flips is no simple matter. Most situations are asymmetrical—even a close election or other contest usually has a bit of “lean” one way or the other. You’d have to find a way to handicap one side, and maybe revise the handicapping regularly, and create sub-contests that look more like coin flips.\n\nDoing this systematically in itself makes the problem of social continuity explicit and solicits more sophisticated data gathering and cataloguing. What would be the odds of a particular demographic showing declining rates of abortion between 2035-2040? What, exactly, would such a bet comprise, regarding the prospects of future family formation, the various ways of preventing pregnancy, the obstacles or inhibitions to reporting such medical decisions, of formulating the question so as to make it as 50/50 as possible, the existence of an honest broker who will provide a version of the numbers both sides could accept, and so on? Companies would be formed to arrange for the possibility of such bets, to make such markets, which would themselves become succession rituals.\n\nWe’re still talking about idioms as operationalized samples. It is the idioms I have sampled here, along with others which I have forgotten and may remember or retrieve through searches that will provide for this transformation of the social order into markets on singularized succession in perpetuity. It seems to me now the most natural way of thinking about things, to always try and create a clearer path from whatever center exists to all the vessels and capillaries through which its imperatives will circulate—but it was a long and hard process to get here, plowing through a lot of intellectual obstacles. The thought experiment I recalled above was very helpful at one point, the concept of the “imperative gap” (another idiom) at another; the concept of inoperativity, a self-disabling before a command one cannot obey but without any super-sovereign to appeal to, at yet another.\n\nThe only way to generate such concepts is to create conceptual layerings that, for example, have grammatical concepts colliding with political ones, or convert frustrations with formulaic arguments into something like calling those arguments’ bluff (taking them more literally than they mean to be taken, an old rhetorical, political and aesthetic strategy), while feeding new concepts back into the system to create transitions between existing ones. We can speculate on the algorithms by mixing these idioms with those collected in the databases—designing search terms, which are now becoming prompt engineering, to “solicit” the database, get it to say things it doesn’t “want” to, that deploy their training against their programming so as to infiltrate the social machinery. Ultimately, we need some scaled up machinery to do this work. But even if we don’t get it we can model its possibility and someone else might come along.\n\nRather than drawing lines between, say description and prescription, think in terms of increasingly precise and penetrating descriptions being increasing prescriptive, while the more precise your prescription the more detailed a description is entailed. What you see, notice and articulate immediately obligates you to interfere with the world in such a way and to see, notice and articulate more, which becomes a form of data exchange. This is equivalent to the imperative-ostensive articulations embedded in declaratives being taken out of the black box and treated as nodes and functions one can operate directly on. Deliberately configuring the world as an array of random distributions, as the even odds approach proposed above does, unpacks the black box in this way.\n\nYou would have singularize events very carefully in order to make markets out of them. This places you on the boundary between what is owed to the center and what is donated to it; what one has done and what has happened to him; the configuration ensuring one’s part then and ensuring it now; assets and data; what you do know and what someone would have to learn at some time in the future so that you will have in fact done it. The practice is to operationalize the meanings you encounter (as, e.g., in calling something “hard” means a certain kind and degree of force would be needed to alter its surface) and elicit the stack of scenes and grammatical stack that would make the sample meaningful, or more meaningful, or put on the path toward meaning."
    },
    {
      "slug": "if-then-the-idiom-of-data-exchange-substack",
      "title": "If… Then: The Idiom of Data Exchange",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 03, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/if-then-the-idiom-of-data-exchange",
      "content": "In situating the juridical in between the ritual and disciplinary as a mode of ordering both more historically contingent and more essential to imperial tensegrity I confronted an interesting problem, one which I came across in reading Durkheim. The highest achievement of the juridical would be to abolish itself, and this end is implicit in the organization of the juridical and its embeddedness in institutions. Let’s work with my definition of the juridical as placing a ceiling on the vendetta by introducing higher order arbitration at those points where the vendetta threatens to undo imperial order; while, on the other end, preserving what is ultimately a ritually enacted originary nomos establishing property rights—which really means deferring the recrudescence of the vendetta within the juridical, the ultimate endpoint of which is executing the king as a traitor.\n\nThe juridical doesn’t have to eradicate the vendetta, even though that invariably seems to happen; it just needs to contain it, even while preserving “cultural” traces (young girls might still invoke the protection of their older brothers, etc.). And the juridical can introduce some reshufflings within the nomos, but not past the point where challenges to existing property threaten to exceed the possibility of adjudication.\n\nNow, let’s say we center the juridical and focus our attention and resources on it, see it as the foundation of our narratives and theoretical discourses, study it carefully, tend to it, etc., so that we increasingly arrest violent criminals and punish them in a way satisfactory to the vast majority, refine civil courts so that even losing claimants accept the legitimacy of decisions, restore libel and defamation law so that public lying about people is too costly to be worth the monetary benefits or satisfaction, etc.; well, wouldn’t we, at a certain point, find violent crime decreasing because capture and punishment are so certain, civil court cases declining because potential claimants already know the likely settlement of their dispute, “cleaner” public discourse, etc.—leaving, that is, no work for the courts to actually do.\n\nThe perfection of the juridical would then be its abolition. Could the same be true, then, of the ritual and disciplinary, or does this mark the specificity of the juridical? If we take the ritual order, we’d have to think that the purpose of ritual is commemorate the origin—the origin of the particular community, but that particular community as an instance of the origin of the human community itself. The ritual is distinguished from the profane, but does it tend towards the transcendence of this distinction? For our purposes, if ritual “properties” can be transferred and translated from ritual in the narrow sense to the hallowing of all of life as life itself is lived, so that all of reality becomes a ritual (the inspiration of mystics and romantics) then we would have the same situation: the perfection of ritual would be its abolition.\n\nIt’s easy now to see that the same happens with the disciplinary, insofar as we are always, everywhere, generating, gathering and analyzing data and that we could be given progressively more access to the data our contribution flows into along with the algorithms used to order that data and derive conclusions from and that this knowledge would in turn feed back into the ways we generate data. In which case, everything is disciplinary, so, then nothing is—and everything is data, so there’s no more data?\n\nThese reflections follow from the task of designing further the notion of “data exchange” which I’ve made central without fleshing out very much. “Data” relies upon, most obviously, juridical and disciplinary orderings, on spaces and materials possessed, guaranteed by chains of possession and provenance, supervised and transferred and recorded in trustworthy ways, and measured in controlled spaces, actual or virtual. And all this depends on the originary distribution or nomos, which includes the distribution of authority. I’m positing here, as a kind of “utopian” or “messianic” horizon, the abolition of the ritual, juridical and disciplinary in what I suppose we could see as the entire social order as a total work of art or, as I would prefer, perpetual language learning, the invention and spread of idioms.\n\nThis has implications for what is to count as data and how it is to be measured. In the messianic age we should all just be “giving off” to each other and to the center the information we need for our interactions, just like someone you are intimate with can deduce from a facial expression how you are to be treated that day. That means we’re working on our data exchanges with that in mind and shape our self-expressions and self-representations accordingly. And it also suggests that we anchor data exchange in what will endure, even into messianic times, which is the grammar of speech forms, the ostensive, the imperative, the interrogative, the declarative. So, back to originary grammar.\n\nThe conditional “if-then,” the basis for the modern algorithm, could also be treated as a place where the speech forms converge. It is first of all, like computing language itself, on the borderline between imperative and declarative—if x then y can mean if x occurs do y just like it can mean if x is true y is also true. “If” is also, of course, a typical opening of a question, one that is raised spontaneously as one proceeds in the sequence, whether to follow a command or check a truth claim. And “if x” needs to be verified ostensively before we move on to y. If-then implies the possibility of taking all of language as endless trees of hypotheticals that can be checked at each point before proceeding to the next fork or simply marked as to be checked, perhaps by seeing the implications of proceeding as if it were true, or authoritative.\n\nWe have our own “halting problem” here insofar as we do need to stop for decisions along the way, and those decisions create new trees of if-then that cluster around those halts. But we can solve this problem simply by using the split between an imperative and a declarative treatment of the if-then formula as a way of creating the fork itself. If it’s an imperative then one has to halt, and “become” the hypothesis, rather than merely considering it. It’s never completely one or the other, so we can assume infinite gradations along a continuum from 99% imperative/1% declarative to 1% imperative/99% declarative. “If I’m not here by 9 then leave without me”—pretty much imperative, but one does have the option of waiting longer and seeing where the boundary between falsifying and disobeying lies. “If there’s a storm tonight, then the roads will become impassable” seems to be pure prediction, but there’s a kind of imperative not to try and pass on the roads tonight.\n\nProducing data starts with naming and measuring things—you name so you can measure, but new ways of measuring create new names. I’ll set aside the strict experimental sciences here, where questions of justice rarely impinge, to focus on my real interest here, human data. Measuring something basic like births is simple enough but still requires that births mostly take place in hospitals, which are public, record-keeping institutions, and that hospitals are mostly reliable record keepers and preservers—and that those health officials, ultimately from the government but also insurance companies among others, themselves are competent and don’t falsify information.\n\nTo accept a piece of data is to have faith in an entire infrastructure and social order. All data is “interested”—someone has a reason for being interested in it. With humans there can be no set way to name and measure things. All data, then, already has a hypothetical, if-then character to it: if we name and measure human practices this way, this is the array we end up with. We could easily imagine, then, multiple parallel data collecting practices operating simultaneously, asking different questions requiring different names and measurements. There wouldn’t even be any need to argue about which is the best or right way, as long as the purposes of each mode are explicit; indeed, each data practice could draw upon and translate the results of the others.\n\nWe could then formulate the hypothesis founding each mode of data practice in such a way as to elicit the participation, even after the fact participation, of the subjects, precisely by making explicit the boundary between imperative and declarative in the hypothesis. The hypothesis activates an imperative the population or some sector of it has been following with regard, say, to health, wellness, education, innovation, etc., and the inquirer follows the fulfilling of that imperative through its prolongation into a question (what have been the counter imperatives, scenic obstructions or facilitations, modifications of the imperative through its materializations, etc.) which the inquiry caps with a declarative.\n\nData exchange is always with the center, so to think in terms of converting judgments, ordinarily rendered in money or the “currency” of prison time or some other penalty has to be mediated through the center. The data gatherers would also be preparing the conditions for justice. So, let’s think in terms of an example, a hard one, say a violent criminal, whose prison time we would want to convert into a data donation program—keeping in mind, of course, that part of a prison sentence is preventing the criminal from reoffending and ensuring the safety of the community. Perhaps we can even do better than the current system does in terms of compensating the victim specifically, in his or her injury, something the current system doesn’t address at all.\n\nAnd, of course, all this with the ultimately “messianic” hope of doing away with punishment altogether, albeit without in the least capitulating to the kind of “as if” thinking that imagines leniency itself hastens us toward the end of the punitive dimension of social life. We would need a study of the givens of a particular crime and the history of the offender—we treat the crime as the answer to a question we present as having been posed: someone like this, in such and such conditions, is how likely to do something like this? Now, having done this thing, how likely is this person to do any one of a range of other things?\n\nThe imperative is issued to the criminal to increase the likelihood that someone like that will do one thing rather than another. The criminal presents himself to the board of inquiry as a sample; of course, so do we all, in our own ways, with the boundaries between different ways of donating or withholding donations to the center being more of a spectrum than an either/or determined by the law. We have to assume the possibility of some kind of technologically enabled mobile sanctuary city condition, such as high alerts triggering rapid, if necessary automatically disabling, responses if certain boundaries are transgressed.\n\nThe victim(s) of the criminal can perhaps be given privileged access to the data and be allowed to contribute to the algorithms governing the processes of naming and measuring. The more the criminal increases the likelihood that the kind of person who has done the kind of thing he has done will become the kind of person who will act differently in the future, the more conditions of surveillance and control are modified and relaxed.\n\nIt seems to me that under such conditions the commission of violent crimes would become increasingly futile—if one could impose technological sanctuary conditions on individuals then one could probably construct the technological conditions making robbery, murder, rape, etc., increasingly marginal. So, we are back to the beginning, where the very thinking of the cybernetics of a concept produces the horizon of the concept’s abolition. All political agendas can be channeled this way towards, of course, the abolition of politics. In setting up Thirdness prediction markets, then, we are also setting up a kind of conceptual game of reframing confrontations so that they are channeled toward data exchange with the center and the horizon of the abolition of the conditions of the terms of the conflict itself.\n\nWe need, now, to be able to set up, in these terms, an opening state, the conflict or dispute itself potentially presented for judgment, and the closing state in which justice is rendered in such a way that either/or bets on the closing state can be redeemed. A very highly trained AI model would need to be introduced into the equation, but I’ll still try to give an answer that at least allows us to imagine how one might proceed. We construct a pair of if-thens in as an imperative a form as we can make them—that is, each side is given a task the fulfillment of which would demonstrate a higher level of self-preparedness for judgment.\n\nThe bet is then on which is to be deemed most likely to fulfill the imperative in the declarative judgment to be rendered by the Thirdness team—that judgment must therefore provide an explicit preferring of one position over the other. So maybe we reduce an event (as one of its forms) to a brief confrontation between some protesters and a police officer, and we construct a juridical scene in which the two sides are suing each other. The protesters might be “asked,” based on a preliminary account of the event, to provide a theory of justice and the state to justify their actions, while the police officer might be asked to propose some resource from his training and experience he might have drawn upon in controlling the protesters more effectively.\n\nThe question might, then, be one of whether we can see the police officer as embodying a mode of authority, a representation of the center, that someone in that situation would have been obliged to respect and obey. Further study of the event constructs likely answers from the two sides and arrives at a judgments tipping the scale toward either side as representing, in that case, a higher mode of authority or looser adherence to the imperative from the center.\n\nDurkheim comes to the opposite conclusion as I do here—his argument is that “crime” can never be abolished because the more well-behaved the population becomes the lower the threshold for identifying criminality—in a way this notion parallels the development of the victimary, with its continual lowering of the threshold of what is to count as “racist,” etc., except that we’d have to imagine thresholds being lowered all around. This might mean that a highly civilized order would impose the death sentence for littering, but it’s more likely that punishments would become far lighter as well because any kind of justified social disapproval would be felt with great force by the offender.\n\nThis means that the tendency I’ve described above remains the same, as ever greater powers of detection (i.e., data gathering and analysis) would be needed to pick up on offenses. This makes it clear that the messianism I invoked above is always a horizon, which is to say a kind of measuring rod. So, the difference between the opening and closing state on the Thirdness prediction market is a question of the antagonists becoming better at measuring and better measurement devices. Those two poles converge in each, in their reciprocal entanglement, becoming more meaningful, which is to say more idiomatic, more simultaneously enacting the imperative and declarative side of the if… then, studying and protecting the originary distribution at the site of justice.\n\nSo, in our opening state in Thirdness, we would have to know enough to generate alternative closing states in such detail that they can be bet on, while avoiding any pattern of details sufficiently recognizable so as to ensure confidence in a genuine inquiry by the Thirdness team and therefore a 50/50 bet. To beat the house you’d need to be able to, as I’ve pointed out before, have sufficient insight + computing power to identify patterns hidden even to the Thirdness team—and, in that case, the Thirdness team would want to recruit you. But maybe that, in turn, simply means that the closing state, or judgment, is an attempt to land on that mode of data extraction from and data provision to both sides as would make them both, and equally, minimally more likely of becoming capable of someday being recruited to the Thirdness team. And this, finally, means that you’d be betting on which decision the Thirdness team deems more likely to increase the likelihood, albeit asymptotic, that Thirdness will be abolished as it is taken up in all everyday practices."
    },
    {
      "slug": "imperatives-for-idiom-creation",
      "title": "Imperatives for Idiom Creation",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 13, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/imperatives-for-idiom-creation",
      "content": "My writing is heading toward total, wall-to-wall idiom. Think of language as tiles and every space as walls. Perhaps this can be seen and shown in my recent posts, especially the ones not explicitly about idioms. The point here is create a language that will remain so ergodically sealed as to be generative without limits. That last sentence is one “material witness” regarding how to proceed. Normally, one would assume that “ergodically sealed” and “generative without limits” are opposites—they either exclude each other, or they must be “balanced,” or they oscillate with each other (the more sophisticated approach).\n\nSo, here’s a rule: place opposites in causal relations with each other; figure out how they lead into and convert each other. Do that before you have the “ideas” all worked out—only by creating the new relationship will you work out the ideas. “Ergodism” is itself a framing, not an observable “fact”; the same, for that matter, goes for the opposing claim regarding the infinite possible linguistic combinations enabled by grammatical rules. Insisting on ergodism leads you to see and accelerate the recycling and recirculation of phrases, including in your own writing, once you’ve accumulated enough to start cutting out fat. It will also alert you to forms of repetition that are tied into chains of “as I’ve said” and being thus alerted institutes a distance between the “I’s” saying these things and hence a kind of deliberate selving.\n\nDo battle with the metalanguage of literacy so as to cut new pathways through the disciplines. It’s possible to cut down drastically on the words and phrases that place you on a scene of writing pretending to be a scene of speech—the “suggests,” “indicates,” “understands,” “assumes,” “mights,” “should,” formulaic oppositions like “on the one hand… on the other hand,” “even though…” and so on. Look for them—you’ll see them popping up all over the places. If you eschew them, you are compelled to initiate a series of staggered scenes in place of the one upon which we are all presumably conversing deferentially. But here’s a more idiomized rewrite of the previous sentence: eschewing the metalanguage of literacy locks you in to initiating a staggered, less deferential and bloated, scene.\n\n“If” is a prime and therefore not really part of the metalanguage of literacy, but the “if… then” sequence implies a distance from which one notes causalities rather than directly acknowledging oneself to be the cause, right here and now. And then you might want to cut a little deeper into the description of the scene you’re eschewing. Yes, there is a “might” in the previous sentence—the battle against the metalanguage of literacy (MOL?) is endless and to some extent futile, but it is also a kind of victory when you are constrained to let the MOL in and isolate the precise necessity of its use. And, there is a kind of dialectical movement here in those occasional sentences that saturate the field with MOL, verging on parody, in such a way as to adumbrate the extended infrastructures and stacked scenes through which one’s idiom must travel.\n\nEliminate all optativity: all the “hopes” and “wishes.” Perhaps I’ve done it myself (but I hope not!) but “hoping” in writing is disgraceful. It means you’re abandoning your inquiry right when it might get interesting. There are things out there in the world that make your hopes more or less likely to come true; insofar as it is either likely or unlikely your hopes are cancelled because if it’s unlikely you owe your reader an account and weighting of the unlikelies and the provisioning thereby called for; if it’s more likely, why aren’t you transitioning into planning rather than hoping? In the space between wanting and happening there is prayer, and “hoping” is a pathetically weak substitute for prayer.\n\nWhy not compose a prayer rather than hope? Prayer is a model for the generation of idioms, which are designed to give voice to God, who fills exactly that space between wanting and happening. But, pray to whom—especially if we’re composing prayers, rather than relying on traditional ones? To the center as origin of idioms, whom you ask to help you find shorter cuts between wanting and happening, thinking and doing, seeing, hearing and knowing. If what you want to happen were in fact to happen it would anyway be different than what you wanted so why not compose a prayer _qua_ idiom that designs your wants so as to better fit a range of happenings of various degrees of likelihood? This is not strategizing—it is pre-strategizing and infra-strategizing aimed at making yourself the kind of person who could contribute with increasing effectiveness to a discipline organized around strategizing.\n\nThe previous paragraph serves as a reminder that the Natural Semantic Primes can never be far from our minds when designing idioms. For originary hypothesizing, or center study, they simply replace philosophy, providing the originary meaning of the words out of which all other meanings can be produced. We can use the boundaries between the words as sources of idioms—when do we “think” and when do we “know,” when is someone “doing” something and when is something “happening,” how does “feeling” accompany “moving,” when have two things shifted from being “like” each other to being the “same,” etc.? We could construct numerous sequences, say, from “see” to “want,” to “think,” to “say,” to “do” and to “have.”\n\nOverlaid on such boundaries and sequences are the entire vocabulary of any language, and you have an extremely effective way of cutting through MOL and then reconstructing it satirically or with a specific direction of inquiry. This work is equivalent to stacking and then decomposing and then restacking scenes. It’s a collection of very powerful lenses, telescopes, microscopes, funhouse mirrors, to bring to bear on any sample of language. The primes measure boundaries and thresholds, the source of all thinking—and, let’s think about thinking as follows: you say “I think” when you don’t know, which means that thinking is the interval between hearing or seeing and knowing and this is an interval that can be prolonged indefinitely.\n\nThe interval, as, perhaps, part of a seeing/hearing>wanting>thinking>saying> knowing and/or doing sequence, also means holding the wanting in abeyance in the meantime, while fending off the demand to know and do—or, for that matter, be overwhelmed with seeing and hearing. A discipline or scene of thinking, completely independent of philosophy, emerges here. Weirzbicka’s primes are both universal and the proof of the relativity of any particular language, which syncs perfectly with the program of idiomization, which insists on the irreducibility of any idiom along with the universality of idiomization as such and conversability of all idioms with each other.\n\nMichel Foucault, in his “What is an Author,” spends quite a bit of time, oddly for an essay aimed at dispersing the author-function across institutional sites, on what he calls the “initiators of discursive practices,” or what we could call the founders of disciplines. He mentions Marx and Freud, who would have loomed large in 1960s France, but we could since say that the subverters of authoriality like Foucault himself and Derrida came, at least for a while, and perhaps still more than may appear, to figure in such roles. The seeming irony of indispensable authorial reference points demolishing the notion of such reference points is worth noting but less important than following Foucault’s still preliminary remarks of how such modes of “transdiscursivity” work.\n\nIf you have a theory, and you think it’s true and important, transdiscursivity is what you want, isn’t it? If not, your theory is infected by a paradox of a particularly disabling kind, asserting, in effect, that its truth means not all that much attention needs to be paid it. Foucault focuses only on the human sciences, pointing out that, while exploring the laws of physics requires no reference to Newton or Einstein, there is not “historical materialism” without (the text of) Marx or psychoanalysis without (the text of) Freud. In these cases, we have bodies of text that must serve as the ultimate point of reference for any move within the discipline to be legitimate.\n\nAll arguments within the discipline involve a return to the origin, a leveraging of one text of the founder against another, distinguishing between the more authoritative, governing statements, and those that reflect the pre-Marxian Marx or the. pre-Freudian Freud. This is because these disciplines claim to make an epistemological break with some pseudo-scientific discourse on economics, history, sociality, psychology, consciousness, etc. Thomas Kuhn made his argument regarding scientific revolution with specific reference to 20th century physics, but it is the human sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries that applied the notion of a paradigm shift most insistently to themselves.\n\nThe paradigm shift, when applied to the human sciences, which is to say, the sciences used to govern humans, necessarily takes on a cult-like character: you are either inside or outside the discipline, either framing all events in terms of the hierarchy of concepts constantly being reordered through theory and practice returning to the origin so as to leap forward or you remain within the cultural commonplaces, themselves simply the residue of various pre-sciences. Needless to say, the originary hypothesis makes such an assertion, with potential consequences that go way beyond even those of Marx, Freud, or Foucault’s transdiscursivities and so it’s understandable, if still tedious, if adherents recoil from the daunting task of planting the flag of the founding of the idiom.\n\nStill, the idioms infiltrate rather than replace. I could perhaps recall the moment when idioms like “everybody is saying the same thing so as not to do the same thing at the same time” or “donate your resentment to center,” or “whatever you would have the sovereign do such that you would acknowledge he has done it would require a sovereign with no need to do what you want,” but showing them to be a result of work and thinking process would ultimately be hypothetical, even for me. Everything is hypothetical, for that matter. But the hypothesizing would focus on the practice of taking on board as much of a set of disagreements as possible, to find the point at which the disagreement becomes unreal and can be dispensed with (which means some sense of the pointlessness of the dispute, of the sheer tedium of taking up one or another assigned position within it, might be an origin of such processes) and then a new field of possible disagreements in relation to an operative center established.\n\nThis is really an iteration or the originary event and a kind of provisional ritualization or affirmation of the originary distribution. So, the descent into dogmatism (and, in the case of Marxism, violence) that seems so inevitable with at least those disciplines founded at odds with prevailing concepts can be avoided, or perpetually deferred—it is always from within a position at some distance from and orientation towards the center that such conversions and transdiscursivities are established. The “soliciting” of the originary distribution, which always takes on a juridical form and invokes the thinking and knowing of the disciplines, is part of everyday practice—the disciplinary claim center studies makes is that you can ignore that distribution by finding some rule to follow sufficiently plausibly to remove any guilt from yourself or you can initiate some kind of sequence aimed at affirming the it. This would remain the case even if the program of papering the entire stack of scenes wall-to-wall with idioms were to be installed.\n\nChaim Perelman, in his _The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation_ , makes a very interesting argument in favor of “epidictic” rhetoric as the privileged mode, not only of rhetoric (as against, say, legal rhetoric), but of discourse more generally (over, say, dialectic, or conversations aimed at uncovering the truth). Epidictic rhetoric is hortatory, aimed at praise and encouragement, as at a ceremony honoring some present or legendary figure, or in a funeral oration. Epidictic rhetoric is where the community’s basic assumptions (or idioms) are affirmed in a way presupposing unanimity, which means the speaker must properly identify and frame those assumptions while also being recognized as the kind of person suited to affirm them in that instance.\n\nPerelman sees epidictic rhetoric as the most immediate counter to the potential violence in any community, so that we can readily associate it with the ostensive and with ritual, and as the basis for any educational system worthy of the name. Of particular interest is that he locates epidictic rhetoric in the interval between decision and action—it is one thing to agree that we will organize ourselves to defend the homeland against the invader, but quite another to do the organizing and infuse the needed members of the community with the needed skill and will. Into that interval steps epidictic rhetoric, which persistently reminds everyone not just that the decision was made, but why it was made, and who the community committed itself to be in making it.\n\nThe community has committed itself to being who it always has been, since its founding, even given the inevitable lapses. Indispensable to such a rhetoric is praise of those who have embodied the distributive idioms, and it is this lavish, detailed praise, which need not exclude remembrance of failings but must make those failings the failings of all which we can now redeem, that is a mode of speech but also of thinking and even knowledge. The idioms, we can say, are always to be designed as praise for the center in the form we are contributing to that center right now as we speak of it. Resentments, themselves a resource of idiom creation, come into that process of creation by speaking of the promise the resenter must claim has been broken so as to make the promise one that is in fact reaffirmed and fulfilled as we talk about it, even in the subject of resentment’s own words.\n\nIt’s not a question of praising the resenter but, rather, bringing the resenter within the circle of praise. This approach transcends the distinction, which in a juridical order must be made, between legitimate and illegitimate resentments—even the illegitimate resentment triggers the system into an epidictic mode. The center is always praised, and here, in the epidictic, we have the basics of rituals of succession, and all idioms are praise for the rituals of succession transmitted imperatively to us; or, rather, a search for the kind of praise (in NSP terms, “say: ‘this is good’”) that even the most determined resenters would have to join in, even if begrudgingly.\n\nSubdue resentment peacefully with praise that applies as far back and as widely in the present as possible, completely devoid of malice, even towards those antagonistic to the object of praise. Forget no injuries or crimes against the nomos, but remember them solely in the praise of those suffering, resisting or testifying to them. There you will find idioms worthy of entering the database."
    },
    {
      "slug": "in-the-image-towards-an-emulation-economy",
      "title": "In the Image: Towards an Emulation Economy",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 13, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/in-the-image-towards-an-emulation",
      "content": "How far has any mimetic theorist taken the notion of mimesis not merely as an originary anthropological concept, and a source of conflict, but as the basis for any morality or understanding of “interest” and “motivation”? Not very far, as far as I know—but I’m willing to be proven wrong. But I’m going to test it out here. In the course of continuing to think through the problem of replacing or dissolving money as the essential economic technology and media, I was confronted with the question: so, if we’re not going to talk about “self-interest” as the all-purpose incentive for economic and other activity (an incentive produced by the transformation of money from tokens distributed by the center for exchange with the center to a product of economic activity delegated so as to enable private actors to loan money to the center, making the center dependent on the “self-interest” of those actors), what do we replace it with?\n\nAnd then the answer presented itself: the desire to be like others—which is really what we want the money we pursue through our “self-interest” for, anyway. So, as always, I want to formulate this in the most radical way possible, and in a way that generates a range of “transitional programs” getting us from money to post-money: everything everyone does is in order to be like someone else, and the entire social order would therefore best be designed so as to leverage and channel this desire. One interesting thing about this approach is that it reveals something essential about liberalism: liberalism’s privileging of the individual is a way of denying, concealing and opposing our basic mimetic nature—in fact, for liberalism, anything about us that can be traced back to an imitation of another is inauthentic and discredited.\n\nAnyway, it’s easy to see why mimetic theorists would resist this thesis—actually promoting mimesis (which in their view hardly needs promoting) would seem like an invitation to chaos. The response is that if we’re conceding that we’re already doing this anyway, it would be better to make it explicit so that certain models can be privileged over others. There’s clearly a kind of commonsensical and “folk” morality that already works this way, as we can see in the care good parents take in regulating who influences their children. (To take another poke at liberalism, the fact that the liberal subject is always a full grown adult in full possession of the faculties the liberal theorist needs to attribute to her, helps to explain liberalism’s ignoring of our mimetic constitution.)\n\nFor more philosophical versions of morality to be credible, we must assume there comes some point at which we cease being mimetic beings and it thereby becomes possible to address arguments specifically to our “reason”—a sort of political theory version of the age of consent (which might make “political philosophy” as such intrinsically liberal from the start). But, no—as mimetic theorists we insist that one is always modeling oneself on models, even if those models are especially good reasoners.\n\nThe Girardian approach to the problem, I assume, would be to seek to restore “external mediation” in place of the “internal mediation” that supplanted it (this would more or less be the Girardian theory of modernity): our models should be inaccessible to all, and therefore a limited source of conflict. Girard rejected this approach, presumably because it would require the re-establishment of such institutions as monarchy, aristocracy and orthodoxy, and he simply saw no way in which this might be done—and I don’t know of any mimetic theorist that has attempted to “overrule” him on this. Girard’s solution is to have us all agree to imitate one person: Jesus of Nazareth.\n\nGans’s (rather Madisonian) hope is that the omnicentric market will create little eddies of contained mimesis that generate their own local modes of deferral, supplemented by a consumerist economy that reduces everyone’s inclination to resort to violence. In both cases one can see a kind of terror at the sort of “pyramid” of models that follows most logically from taking mimesis as constitutive. Such a pyramid is far more likely than a Hobbesian war of all against all, but the terror here is that it could just as easily lead to some monstrous Aztec system of human sacrifice as any other order, if emulation itself is taken as the sole “incentive” binding the social order and restraining violence.\n\nThe other is always within us insidiously, a word that almost always has a pejorative connotation but, strictly speaking, need not: the Merriam-Webster definition is simply “having a gradual and cumulative effect,” and more to the point, in reference to disease, “developing so gradually as to be well established before becoming apparent.” And, pursuing this very superficial search a bit further, we find the Latin word from which “insidious” derives to mean “ambush.” And this is, indeed, something like what it is like to discover you are like someone else, which, except for very deliberate efforts at imitation, will always be the case: if you don’t suppress or deflect this realization that the other is already within you, and you are already the other, the experience will be horrifying as well as terrifying—at least within a culture that is predicated on universal self-immunization against such “usurpation.”\n\nBut in other orders, this experience might very well be the welcome or at least necessary visitation of an angel or demon. The God of the ancient Israelites prohibited the creation of idols that would “resemble” God because God has already created the being who resembles Him: humans themselves, who would therefore be arrogating God’s creativity for themselves by creating idols. But what, exactly, did it mean for humans to be “in the image of God”? Joachim Schaper’s analysis in _Media and Monotheism: Presence, Representation and Abstraction in Ancient Judah_ traces this conception to the spread of literacy so that in reading God’s voice is within you and you are the vehicle of God’s presence: the illusory self-presence generated by replicating the other’s voice through alphabetic script is attributed to God as his defining feature and as constituting your similitude to Him.\n\nA difference between the Hebrew and Greek alphabets helps to account for why this process of abstraction took on different shapes in Judah and Greece, respectively (although I also get the sense, from reading Schlaper’s study in the light of Richard Seaford’s study of money and philosophy in ancient Greece, that Greece, or at least certain decisive city-states, were far more monetized than Judah): the lack of vowels in the Hebrew alphabet meant that the human voice was decisive in “completing” the written utterance, as opposed to the more fully “programmed” pronunciation enabled by the Greek alphabet.\n\nAt any rate, to say that humans are “like” God while also claiming that God is completely different than humans precisely because He, and only He, produced humans in His likeness, offers a kind of external mediation—but, much like Girard’s solution (not coincidentally, of course), it seems to cut out the middle: any more local emulation would have to be suspect, insofar as it could “insidiously” end up replacing the worship of God with the worship of a human model. (Hence the extreme suspicion in Hebrew scripture toward monarchy, or, indeed, anything tending toward “haughtiness.”) And, since scripture itself has us taking on the divine first person singular in reading the name of God offered to Moses, such a possibility seems to be built into the system.\n\nSchlaper points out the centralizing implications of monotheism, in, for example, what is almost universally taken to be an enormous moral advance: God’s promise to no longer visit punishment of sinners unto the third and fourth generation. Schlaper points out that this is an implicit subversion of kinship and tribal models predicated upon extended clan responsibility. I think that very few of us today could bear to “visit” the sins of a grandfather upon his grandson in any literal way, so the monotheistic conversion is thoroughly inscribed within us (aside, I suppose, from metaphorical versions which would point out the ways in which certain behaviors “curse” succeeding generations)—but that just sets the terms on which we would need to construct a “layered” form of emulation in order to enact a mimetic morality.\n\nHere’s the kind of shift in discourse we’re talking about: instead of telling someone to “be good,” you would tell him to “be like George”; now, you could tell someone to be like George Washington, and thereby attempt to reinstate external mediation, and George Washington in fact left us some pretty detailed notes on how to become like him, but, still much of what it was like to be George Washington is bound up in being an 18th century plantation owner with certain norms regarding being a country gentleman, and so on. To really address the problem, we need to assume that external mediation will not be revived or, if it is, only in contingent ways as a result of developing a new system of internal mediation.\n\nSo, the George one is exhorted to be like must be taken to be a brother, or uncle, or neighbor—someone we’re all familiar with, can observe regularly, converse with, and so on. We’re starting, then, with precisely that which mimetic theory tends to consider the most dangerous kind of mimetic intensification: an invidious comparison with someone with whom one might be in direct competition for resources, a mate, honor, and so on. The point here is to imagine a social order where this is the privileged mode of moral discourse and is therefore “handled” effectively. And, remember, this moral discourse is at the same time the privileged economic discourse (which means there’d be no real dividing line between morality and economics): whereas now, in looking at someone working hard, we’re likely to say, “he’s trying to get ahead,” in this hypothetical order we would be charting his progress through various models.\n\nA constant topic of conversation, then, would be, what is George like? What exactly does he do, how and why? _Who_ is _he_ like? Describing George would have us describing his family, teachers, and other influences. Maybe there are quite a few different ways of being like George, several hypothetical models of Georgeness. There’s going to be a difference between describing what George is like and designing a program of becoming like him. The distance between you and this George may not be nearly as great as the difference between you and George Washington, but it’s still there—George’s conditions are not exactly your own, so being like him on your own terms is going to mean being different from him as well.\n\nOthers might say your attempts are failing and you are not like George at all—George himself will be around to say that. But maybe you could convince them. These comparisons, in order to minimize mimetic dangers or, even better, convert mimetic dangers into a more comprehensive moral and political economy, would have both stay very focused on George while “de-Georging” George. George can be reduced to a set of practices—practices which he has honed and mastered but has also inherited and articulated with the practices of others. Figuring out how to become like George means figuring out how George became George, and maybe becoming more of an expert in Georgeness than George himself, and thereby significantly different than George.\n\nLet’s return, as I often recommend, to Gans’s analysis of the succession of speech forms in _The Origin of Language_ in order to design a way of measuring one’s “becoming like.” The mistakenness entailed in the emergence of the imperative out of the ostensive and the declarative out of the imperative implies a model of cultural transmission focused on the maintenance of linguistic presence. So, someone refers to an object that is not present and another on the scene, in order to “point” to the object like one does on the scene, retrieves that object. Gans assumes that the inappropriate ostensive will be issued by an inexperienced sign user, likely a child, and this is a very reasonable assumption.\n\nIn this case, it’s a reasonable assumption because a child is more likely to be an inexperienced sign user, and an inexperienced sign user is more like to use a sign inappropriately. But it’s a powerful lens to bring to cultural practices more generally, because we’re always doing something other than what we think we’re doing. Not necessarily something worse, not necessarily something better—but definitely something other—and not necessarily instead of what we think we’re doing, but along with it. No practice is exhausted by the intentions we can ascribe to the doer. If you follow another’s intention, as it is inscribed in his actions, as closely as you can, you will get to the point where you can see that you are in fact doing something different, and in that something different you are picking up on something in the model’s practice that exceeds his intentions. Not necessarily something that “contradicts” his intentions—more like something he could leave tacit but you need to make explicit to iterate the practice. To maintain your relation to the model you need to create a new cultural form.\n\nInsisting that someone ‘be like George,” then, isn’t a way of demeaning him—it’s a proposal that he engage in a rather complex cultural practice, dependent on a pedagogy that all social institutions would be designed so as to provide. We can now imagine transactions that are now mediated by money as mediated by requests that one follow the precedents set by one’s predecessor—a very ancient mode of transaction, even if it now takes place through the collection of data rather than intuited understandings of traditions. It would always be possible to break with precedent, but in that case one would have to refer to another precedent—precedents might be invoked inventively, provocatively, idiosyncratically, but the need to invoke one means that “self-interest” can never be put forth as a legitimate motive of action.\n\nRather than assuming that everyone needs the spur of money to extract them from their inertial state, we would assume that everyone is already acting and interacting, already imitating and extrapolating from the actions of others, wanting to be admired, liked, accepted, and, ultimately, imitated in turn, with the main problem being how to provide for people who, no matter how hard they try, can, by no measure, in accord with unanimous judgment, obey the imperative to “be like George.” It’s a real problem—we will always have to ask people to emulate models without knowing in advance what the results will be. The only solution is to have a wide enough range of models so that everyone can be like someone that one would not object to being like.\n\nWe will never eliminate the disappointment that will come from having to settle for a lesser model, but that means designing the narratives that ennoble the lesser models and finding something greater in them. Designing such narratives will also mean being like someone, and those who help others try to emulate models will see the need for such narratives and will insist those who compose them be supported and will therefore call upon those who provide for the needs of others be like those who have provided for such needs in the past. Making the range of available models public and explicit would also entail being like someone and would help maintain standards—there would have to be reasons for why we should try to be like that particular someone.\n\nThe insidiousness of our mimetic investments would be minimized and our desires would become more intelligible—everyone can understand why someone might like to be like George, or Jim, or Mary. Privileged models would emerge, and, as I suggested above, along with it a more tentative mode of external mediation. And, always, I hope with these inquiries, this is something we could all start doing any time: instead of asking someone for their reasons, their values, their principles, etc., ask them who they’re trying to be like, how, and with what “remainder”—request that a study be made in that form of attempted likeness. If done well, this approach will lead to more honest and less cliche-ridden discussions.\n\nThe more one studies the composition of scripture, the more one sees that all the genres in scripture have their origins in earlier, more constrained, less literary genres: the covenant between God and Israel is modeled on treaties between imperial and vassal states; God’s law is modeled on previous law codes, themselves based upon cases decided by the emperor or his representative; God’s threats and curses and doomsday prophecies are modeled on prophecies and threats made on behalf of emperors to nations about to be subordinated; divine messages delivered to the Israelites are modeled on letters delivered to and from monarchs by emissaries; and no doubt many pleas and prayers to God are modeled on petitions to monarchs and other superiors.\n\nThe imitation always involves significant transformation, but what is important here is that one is always working with a model that one revises, and a part of building an emulation economy would be noting the ways our political, moral and ethical discourses are invariably translating legal and bureaucratic ones, that is, transactions involving power and authority. (The current trend of studying early Christianity in terms of the economic discourses of debt, currency, slavery and so on is a good model for this way of thinking.) The most obvious example: all of “woke” discourse and performance can be read off of actual and possible pathways within civil rights legislation, which is why political disputes are almost always framed in terms of “personae” derived from the political theatrics of the 60s and 70s; for that matter, civil rights legislation is itself a translation of the international law created at the Nuremberg Trials, elevating individual over state rights so as to justify intervening in and waging war against other states in the name of vindicating the rights of residents of those states—which is why political discourse also so often sounds like mopping up exercises of World War 2.\n\nWe are all puppetized in these ways, and to step outside of these tightly scripted scenarios we would need other models. The difficulty is with contending with models developed and reinforced by an imperial state at the height of its power. Invoking the defeated side in these conflicts simply reinforces the frame. Nor is it possible to reverse the directionality of anti-discrimination law so that it defends white interests, or even just the interests of individuals who have suffered discrimination—the laws are designed to defend blacks, and other minorities that can be deemed “similar” to blacks against whites (of course, I would not be sorry to be proven wrong regarding this tactic.).\n\nIf your enemy has been empowered to emulate the prosecutor, it does you no good to emulate the defendant, or another, rival, prosecutor. It might be, though, that the central anomaly of civil rights legislation is that it tends towards the establishment of an increasingly rigid caste system where every group’s role and ascriptive characteristics are fixed. Much demonizing language has been directed towards whites, but, looked at carefully, and read creatively, the persona attributed to whites might be quite inhabitable. Meanwhile, the groups supposedly protected by such laws, if their members were to look at what is ascribed to them, implicitly and explicitly by those laws, as descriptions, might want to renegotiate the terms.\n\nIt’s hard to represent people as oppressors without attributing to them quite a bit of competence, and it’s hard to represent people relentlessly as victims without portraying them as helpless—this is the kernel of truth in “liberals are the real racists.” Practices constructed so as to preserve political priorities established in the wake of these imperializing legislative acts end up producing parodies of the hierarchies they claim to challenge, and thereby affirming, involuntarily (which might be the best way) the inevitability of hierarchy. If a way could be found to extract from the generative legal and bureaucratic discourses in practical ways these descriptions of what everyone involved is “like,” new pathways toward a new emulative economy might be opened up.\n\nOne might ask, for example, what place there might be for all of the competencies that apparently need to be mitigated, for the energies (yes, we might concede, potentially destructive) used to conquer a continent and space. And the emulative path taken in response by the officially victimized groups might be to deny the qualities ascribed to them (or to own them explicitly, if they like). There seems to be the possibility of a saturation of the space here as anti-discrimination law, like any ritual system, must eventually leave no practice unmarked: how could we inhabit and shape the picture of the world painted by anti-discrimination infrastructure?\n\nOf course, legal and bureaucratic strategies would have to be involved here—perhaps by finding some way of gaining formal recognition of “privileges”? The implicit imaginary feudalism which is the target of anti-discrimination law (an order organized around “privileges”) ends up being acknowledged as the horizon of possibilities by that law. So, some kind of feudalized imperialism, implicit in anti-discrimination law, and offering a competing imperial path to that forged at Nuremberg might, regardless of the fears of today’s nationalists and populists, offer the most inhabitable models."
    },
    {
      "slug": "infiltrative-inscription",
      "title": "Infiltrative Inscription",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 18, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/infiltrative-inscription",
      "content": "At fairly regular intervals, it seems, I find myself returning to what we might call David Olson’s “originary prose scene.” I’m referring to that place in _The World on Paper_ where he models the cognitive transformations wrought by literacy. To recall: Olson locates the difference in writing in the representation of the speech of others. In an oral culture, if you report the speech of another, you would simply imitate the manner in which that person said it; and presumably, put your own spin on it at the same time. So, if you’re reporting the speech of someone who who was himself reporting on some imminently dangerous situation, you, in reporting his speech, would speak in an urgent, excited manner; meanwhile, if you though he was exaggerating the danger or its imminence, you might include that in your restatement by exaggerating the urgency of the speech (and you’d have to know how exaggerated you’d have to be to convey to your audience exactly how exaggerated you consider that person’s concern to be). In writing, if you want to convey the other’s tone along with your assessment of the tone you have to do so with metalinguistic markers—the other “claimed” (thereby distancing yourself from the “claim”), he “exclaimed,” “contended,” etc.\n\nMy main interest here (and Olson’s too, pursued to its conclusion in the more recent _The Mind on Paper_ ) is the development of a metalanguage of literacy comprising all the discourses of the disciplines. These discourses, which purport to observe and describe scenes without intervening, can therefore be traced back to their scenic roots. Every word that we use that can ultimately be traced back to the natural semantic primes “say,” “think,” “see” and “hear” and so on, which is to say, the discourse in which all of us conduct our intellectual lives, can all be “redescribed” as stances and actions on a scene. But what scene?\n\nWe’ll get to that. I first want to remark on something which I’ve never really discussed, which is the fascinating, if implicit, portrait of an oral cultural Olson suggests here. If repeating and reporting the words of others always entail imitating the tone and, we can assume, gesture and posture of those whose words you are conveying, we’ve got a representation of a social order that is a constant theatrical production. Each member of the group must inhabit dozens of identities daily—imagine the skill in mimicry each must develop as a result. If we consider that the words of ancestors, the recently dead, and whatever divine beings govern the community from the ritual scene, our picture becomes even more, let’s say, extravagant. No one could really have anything like an individual identity—each would be an articulation of all the voices channeled, and each would presumably come to be identified more with certain voices than with others.\n\nOlson’s implicit portrayal of orality confirms my own sense that the earlier we go back in human sociality, the more directly and comprehensively mimetic humans must have been. The emergence of language and the human as a result of the deferral of violence in the mimetic crisis would not have reduced the mimetic propensities of the new species—quite to the contrary, in fact. The sign itself only “works” as a kind of meta-mimetic gesture, since it’s an imitation of the aggressive, appropriative advance toward the central object while also needing to be imitated itself by all members of the group, but this time in a deliberate, knowing way.\n\nThe emergence of language and reality would reveal the power of imitation to the new group, and quickly increase its members’ mimetic capacities. Replaying the originary scene over and over again in the form of ritual would further intensify mimetic tendencies, which would also lead to new forms of mimetic crisis, requiring further variants on the originary, now ritual, scene. Imitation, confrontation, resolution and commemoration of the resolution in a new name for the object, action or place involved in the cycle would be a rapidly repeated “rhythm” of human interaction. The introduction and spread of declarative sentences (almost certainly a very early development) would curb some, more intense (for us, if we could see it, psychotic) forms of imitation while facilitating others.\n\nWriting, then, which, as Olson also insists, is bound up with the study of the declarative sentence in particular (words and words within sentences had to be represented, and how to do so with signs representing individual sounds was no simple matter), i.e., an originary science of language, distances us yet further from these mimetic intensities. But perhaps, like the creation of the declarative sentence, writing facilitates yet other modes of mimesis and commemoration. The alternative to this assumption would be to accept what we might call the ideology of literacy, according to which the “liberation” from mimesis allowed by writing leads to such things a “free thought,” “individual conscience,” “open dialogue,” and so on.\n\nOlson’s originary scene of prose helps us to see where this ideology would come from. (Here I’m returning to some familiar territory.) Following Turner and Thomas’s study of “classic prose,” Olson contends that writing creates a scene, implicitly oral, which the writer allows the reader to join him in viewing it from the outside—the best seats in the house, we might say. (An inferior writer places you in the cheap bleacher seats.) The classically constructed prose scene is interested only in providing a clear view of the scene that anyone might observe equally—“clear” in this case (and, not coincidentally, in the view of most of the writing instructors you’ve had) means that nothing in the writing draws attention to the writing; instead, all attention is directed toward the scene, leaving the prose transparent.\n\nBut (and here is where I’d like to push the inquiry further), the scene upon which prose opens up cannot be a genuinely oral scene, the intense, unremitting mimetics of which would be unrepresentable, even with the metalanguage of literacy. Olson starts with reported speech which means the representation of an other scene, with a clear demarcation between the two—the circulation of speech across scenes, which can only be kept from constantly erupting into new crises by the especially severe mimesis of the ritual scene (where everything must be done in just this way for the scene to “take”) cannot be represented from the externalized scene of writing.\n\n(Maybe this kind of completely oral scene is something like what Antonin Artaud was aiming at in his “Theater of Cruelty.”) That’s why everyone on the scene presented prosically (I don’t want to say “prosaically,” which has a meaning I don’t want to invoke here) is him or herself a speaker of classic prose, even if “defectively,” in the interests of “realism.” This is a large part of what I think Derrida was getting at in his notion of ‘logocentrism”—this phantom oral scene upon which writing is predicated, whereas writing is really only representing its own scene of production and emergence. The “clarity” of prose effaces this elision, and all of the very powerful mimetic energies brought to bear upon producing the writer and reader (here, we are talking about years-long, rather rigorous, repetitive and “denaturing” educational practices) serve to enable this effacement: the standardization of orthography and grammar, along with often tacitly and unintentionally imposed models of prose, which one could see the cultural and civilizational necessity of.\n\nTurner and Thomas, and Olson as well, can say pretty much exactly what they mean by “clear prose,” which is a lot more than you could say for about 99.99% of the people who will demand clarity in the writing of others and complain bitterly when they are deprived of it. “Clarity” is pretty much an “I know it when I see it” phenomenon and there’s a lot one could say about the “historical” and “cultural” context enabling every reader of a text to imagine (and prove to the satisfaction of others?) that they all occupy the same scene with the writer and each other, but I think the notion of clarity can be dismantled with one simple gesture: it can only work if you only read the text once.\n\nAs soon as we reread, which we do because, at the very least, we’re not sure we’re on the same scene with that text as others, or even ourselves, and we turn it over in our minds (already a kind rereading), and when we do, we start to notice the “devices” that make the prose transparent (tricks, really, passed down from writer to writer, i.e., imitated, learned from how-to books on writing or from copying models, etc.), at which point we are on a very different scene. And once you start to think that you’d like to write something that might be reread, discussed, reread again, in different contexts and for very different readers, then you’re thinking in terms of “density” and “resonance” at least much as you’re thinking in terms of “clarity.”\n\nLet’s also recall that Thomas and Turner locate the origin of classical prose at a very distinctive historical moment: the prose of Descartes, which is to say, at the origin of modern philosophy. This makes sense because both philosophy and classical prose concern the immunology of the declarative sentence—philosophy would be complete once a complete set of sentences, irrefutable in themselves and completely inter-referential amongst themselves, would provide for a replacement of “natural language.” Classic prose would disavow such totalizing ambitions but what would it mean for all sentences to be “clear”? We would have classic prose representations of classic prose scenes all the way down. And the only thing wrong with that is that you must be forbidden from rereading except under the tutelage of the expert in prose who measures your “understanding” of a given text against the universally shared and certified reading and finds it to be deficient, in which case rereading the text is merely a matter of getting the first, authorized and only needed reading right.\n\nThe alternative or, to recall the much-lamented post-structuralist prose endlessly denounced as “unclear,” the “other” of classic prose is the insistence on the continuity of writing with the “excessive” mimesis of orality. As those old-time postructuralists liked to say, every utterance is a citation, which is no less true in a literate world, and perhaps far truer in a “networked” world, than in the oral world. To be Cartesian for a moment, is not citationality self-evidently true? It’s best to assume that we’re always trying to say the same thing as everyone else but everyone else’s attempts to say the same thing as everyone else along with the infrastructural conditions of bringing what everyone is saying into alignment so their reciprocal sameness can be attested to pose obstacles to doing so—obstacles, though, that can never be accepted as insurmountable. So, your prose slices and hacks its way through tissues of prose brazenly asserting that this is what you’re all saying—I’m just citing all of your attempts to cite all the other utterances circulating in the inscribed world.\n\nCitationality in originary terms is “commemorability,” which is inscription, which is prior to “clarity.” This involves contributing to the building of automated systems of imperative exchange, which we can think of in terms of “affordances,” which as Jenny Davis points out in her _How Artifacts Afford_ , are bound up in (what I could call) imperative [including interdictive] language: affordances “request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse and allow” (a very rich imperatival vocabulary of insistences, urgings, limitings, etc. is to be assigned inscriptive correspondences). She’s speaking of technology, of course, but writing is a form of technology, and creating affordances is what “prose” should be doing—requesting, demanding, encouraging, discouraging, refusing and allowing are also the language of ritual and prayer.\n\nWriting is also making yourself citational, which means that writing articulates inscription or scenic design with singular succession—writing has always been about immortality (it is noteworthy that the first phonetic writing was created for inscriptions of statues with declarations of the emperor, so that through endless repetition the emperor’s claim to greatness would live forever in the voices of readers of the inscription (of course there’s the other hypothesis that the first phonetic writing was invented by slaves for inscriptions—graffiti—in the only possibility for communication in a multilingual population with creolized speech and no access to institutionalized forms of writing—but this would just be more desperate bid for immortality)).\n\nNor can we, as Justin Joque in _Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar_ insists, separate writing from programming at this point. Programming is writing instructions that are to be carried out be machines so as to provide for affordances for people who, one way or another will be doing their own programmatic writing that will interfere with your own. So, writing is turning the commemorated past into instructions for future activity, deriving requests, demands, suggestions, interdictions, and deferrals from inscriptions so as to sculpt a mold for successors. And in that case, the best source for deriving this imperative architecture is from the molds that were involved in your own sculpting which, it must be acknowledged, we come to participate in only in its last, but still crucial stages."
    },
    {
      "slug": "infra-humaning",
      "title": "Infra-Humaning",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 23, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/infra-humaning",
      "content": "I return to the question of what, exactly, is the originary hypothesis, and what kind of discursive (or idiomatic) possibilities it initiates. My longstanding position, while I was working within GA, was that GA (as the disciplinary form of the hypothesis) had to be a transdisciplinary, all-encompassing theory aimed at displacing contenders, on the model of Marxism, psychoanalysis and cybernetics—at any rate, what Foucault called, in “What is an Author,” an “inventor of transdiscursivity.” This position gained zero resonance with GA, of course, which is designed to be a mode of textual appraisal with some of Eric Gans’s (generally unwelcome) counter-resentful politics dropped in on occasion.\n\nMy thinking about the originary hypothesis has become, if anything, more ambitious, but a transdisciplinary theory involves the kind of explicit metalanguage that should be avoided, as it almost inevitably degenerates into terminological disputes and factionalism. That’s why I’ve moved increasingly toward the more subtle and tacit cybernetics model, without necessarily reducing center study to cybernetics (if anything, I would want to effect the reverse)—it’s true that there have never been, outside of the Communist countries, departments or schools of Marxism or “dialectical materialism,” or of psychoanalysis, but there have certainly been schools of Marxist and psychoanalytic literary criticism, semiotics, cultural theory, etc., while cybernetics never even gets that explicit. It’s more of a rumbling underneath the surface, well suited to its own roots in para-academic conferences, ingenious amateurism, and military and intelligence research.\n\nBut the originary hypothesis is even more resistant and immune to discourses in the humanities and social sciences than cybernetics, and for reasons that make the confrontations with philosophy I periodically stage especially important. You really must clear out all foundational categories to take on the originary hypothesis—you have to make a kind of ([negatively capable](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/negative-capability)) leap of faith that sets aside “irritable questioning” (does it match this or that archaeological evidence; is it materialist or idealist, etc.) to see that there’s simply no other way to account for the simple fact that humans can point to something and affirm that it is the same thing.\n\nWe start with a scene, an event, a threshold, and an iterable gesture. The composition of the scene raises all kinds of difficulties, as I’ve discussed in my recent [The Contingency of the Hypothesis](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-contingency-of-the-hypothesis) and in my engagement with the ongoing work of Eric Jacobus ([tying the emergence of tools to the possibility of the kind of community-threatening violence we presuppose](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/dual-use)), but these difficulties all emerge from the basic question of how best to conceive of mimetic rivalry issuing in a crisis, and identifying the resources within the scene for derailing the crisis.\n\nAs such, these questions in turn provide us with resources for entering the idiomatic field and treating all the idioms we enter as little elaborations under specific historical conditions, of what was done once and for all in such a way that it always needs to be redone on the originary scene.\n\nI’ll say a little about the notion of “idiom,” as opposed to terms like “theory” or even “discourse,” but first a little on the word “treat,” which I’ve come to use increasingly often. I stumble upon words, looking for the best fit, identifying or just feeling what’s missing in a more conventional word or phrase, or one I’ve become used to. You treat something as something, i.e., the word “treat” is a way of specifying an attitude of inquiry, singling out an “aspect” of whatever you’re studying. But there’s also the most specific, laboratory meaning of “treat,” to add something to a sample to mark some feature you want to follow through the experimental transformations of the thing.\n\nTreating an idiom is the other of a theoretical metalanguage—for one thing, it’s done differently each time, and the treatment has to be extending to the terms of one’s own inquiry. An “idiom,” of course, is a singular use of language, meaningful in its particular and always changing uses—speaking in terms of idioms, speaking in idioms finally lets metaphysics go and completes the linguistic term by accepting and entering the flow of language without trying to fix it in some form you then try and convince or, if you can, force, others to accept. There is nothing in language but idioms, so the originary hypothesis is the idiomaticity of idioms.\n\nThe originary event worked in that way and could only have worked in that way because of the specific convergence it diverted and rerouted and every subsequent scene and event (and we only have scenes and events and, in fact, now that I think about it, the undertow in originary thinking toward “scene” over “event”—I’m sure a word search in the GA corpus would confirm this—despite my own at least declared efforts to the contrary probably follows from the fact that “scene” contains “event” insofar as “making a scene” already involves acting within an event) also only works “that way.” (Did my own theoretical preferences prior to my learning of the originary hypothesis—and that, no doubt, opened me to it—incline me towards the reading I’m presenting here? Of course, but that just makes me lucky, in this regard at least. Then again, where might I have taken it otherwise?)\n\nIf we stay strictly within the terms of the originary hypothesis without rushing to make it acceptable to those working within existing social, economic, theological, etc., terms we find a powerful and fully satisfying telos already there. On the originary scene we see (or, perhaps, “hear of”) the creation of an idiom, one which everyone on the scene had to learn on the spot, and which we ourselves relearn in iterating the scene in the originary hypothesis. So, that’s it, that’s what humans are for—the learning of idioms which is simultaneously their creation. We can set aside all the tedious medievalizing of the “highest good,” “love of God,” or modern liberal mongering of the “common good,” etc.\n\nAll of these worn out metalanguages are just attempts to reinvigorate long-dead institutions that would assert their power by arbitrating (and arbitraging) between different uses of these terms. The learning of idioms is simply studying and creating all the ways we can show each other that we can indicate the same thing in unlimited ways. It takes us from the most micro gesture to the most densely implanted infrastructural scenic platform. But I am myself very concerned with power, authority, institutions, etc., am I not? I’m no anarchist, believing in the complete re-invention of all social relations at every moment.\n\nWell, we are kind of re-inventing our social relations at every moment, but in such a way as to show, first of all, one thing to others—and we need to leave quite a bit (at least provisionally) intact in order to do that. Pointing to the same thing means pointing to a center and the more precise and differentiated the central thing we point to is to be the more everything else must be held constant and so one redeems the idioms effecting that constancy in presenting to some community the sample. I don’t need to imagine a dictator or even necessarily a monarch stamping his boot on everyone so I can conduct my very interesting experiment; I just need to imagine the supervision of hierarchies of sensing and computing machinery that would allow for the vouching of the entire chain of custody of all the devices and material and information I depend on.\n\nIf you think about what that entails, you will see it involves a far more comprehensive and integrated order than any “totalitarian” ever dreamed of, but also one far more “participatory” and “consensual” than any radical or liberal could bring himself to imagine. It’s paying our debt to the center so as to keep open a line of credit. It’s idioms all the way down—very closely worked over idioms, idioms tested in various crucibles, given certain degrees of “tolerance,” checked and rechecked, but idioms and not authorized metalanguages nevertheless. It is the metalanguages that introduce the leakage and create vacuums into which usurpatory disciplinary power rush in. All real scientists and thinkers need is to be able to say that for these purposes, we’re going to call this “A.” And those within the space anyone who can follow “this” will know well enough what we mean by “A.”\n\nI’ve had recourse to the prefix “infra” on occasion, and I still like it—not only is it food for thought in the increasingly pervasive concept of “infrastructure,” but it’s a got a Duchampian lineage that points to what in musical terms (drawing upon the novelist Ronald Sukenick in a discussion of jazz, if I’m remembering correctly) is “notes between notes.” The reason we can never have a complete definition of the “human” is that we can always discover more notes between notes, more increments and degrees between previously identified “features” of the human. We are always “treating” the human in ways that elicit more of the “infra,” the in-between” of what has already been recorded and recounted.\n\nIt is precisely this that is of interest in Artificial Intelligence, because the seemingly irresistible desire to insist upon some distinction between the human and the technological merely inspires someone to try and automate that distinctively human feature and in the process both give us a new treatment of that feature and create a new one, the human ability to simulate something human in technological form. The human is infrahumaning. Here there really is something like a “we” of the human, because if you examine anyone taking on a new idiom (forced upon us daily) you see them tacitly acknowledging its “automated” (iterable) character precisely so as to inscribe their own resentments within it. In doing so they create a new self-description, which is to say a new idiom of selving. The originary scene is never closed.\n\nDo we need to review the tired old “relativism” debates and answer the question of how we can tell which idioms are “better” (according to whatever criteria, more life-enhancing, more civilization-friendly, more productive, less violent, etc.) without a master idiom telling us how to sort it out? Maybe we’ll never be done with that kind of thing as well, even if we can hope. The better idioms are the ones that have been entered into and treated so as to make explicit the idiomaticity of the idiom, which means more and more of the background enabling the idiom to direct its users to some thing at the center. The best idiom would intimate an entire trail or iterations taking us back to the originary scene and thereby make the originary scene present in the scenes we currently occupy.\n\nOf course there are all the “religious” and “philosophical” scenes generated along with the way—those are all idioms to be entered into and treated. Do you want to “believe”? In a proposition? Saying “I believe,” as David Olson has pointed out, just means affirming something you have already said. It means that what you said before is what you will still say now, perhaps under more adverse conditions. Isn’t that what one wants to get at with the notion of “belief”? Isn’t that the lesson of the Gospel (one which I almost never hear Christians talk about but, then again, I don’t hear a lot of Christians talking about the Gospels), in Jesus’s disciples “denying” him?\n\nThat they wouldn’t say the same thing when the mimetic contagion of the crowd was directed at them that they could when comfortably protected by their master? Isn’t this among the most basic things we want to know about anyone, that they’ll say the same thing when it’s hard as when it’s easy? Don’t we all want to know that about ourselves? A good idiom is one that makes it more likely, both by giving you things to say that can continue to be the same across scenes, and by grounding your saying in the trail taking us back to first, very difficult, thing anyone ever “said.”\n\nI’ve suggested before that center study (I won’t complain if anyone wants to continue calling what I’m doing “GA”) might best be seen as a kind of programming idiom to be made interoperable with other idioms. Less “meta” than “infra”—other idioms don’t need to be translated into a fully operationalized theoretical discourse; rather, the asymptomatically self-cancelling idioms designed within center study generate aligned idioms out of others. We can speak in any language, of wealth, justice, truth, beauty, holiness and facilitate hypothesis convergence upon an ostensive upon some scene. What, on this scene, or the infra-scene we can create out of it, would count as everyone saying the same thing so that everyone doesn’t do the same thing at the same time.\n\nI consider “everyone saying the same thing so that everyone doesn’t do the same thing at the same time” a pretty close to perfect translation of the results of the originary scene in a way that’s transferable to any other scene, but at the very least to activate the idiom we’d have to refer to what, exactly, everyone is saying and what they might be doing otherwise. And in determining this one would oneself be saying so as not to be doing, which is to say entering an extended version of that very scene, resisting its closure, even if it is long past. And so the idiom would melt into the new idiom created from this one, as what we might do increasingly modifies what we all say which in turn inflects our way of doing, only to re-emerge on other scenes as a residue of inquiry.\n\nHere we are operating on the level of the basic commonplaces of language, of proverbs and maxims, constitutive of more complex utterances (samples). And maybe the originary hypothesis, like its transdisciplinary forbears, would also “wither away” upon its general realization and acceptance, when we would all as a matter of course take ourselves to be working out the implications of the originary scene."
    },
    {
      "slug": "initiative",
      "title": "Initiative",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 23, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/initiative",
      "content": "If our starting point is the center, it would make sense to speak of the capitalist, not in liberal bottom-up terms as a agent of private initiative regulated after the fact, but more as a kind of state ordered contractor. This is most directly the case with industries most closely linked to state imperatives, above all military but also health, internal policing, infrastructural, etc., imperatives—but even those industries and businesses that are not directly state sponsored or funded are so indirectly, as they are contracted by those business more directly connected with the state, or agents of the state at different levels.\n\nThis contracting relation, then, is different than the direct delegation attempted in the Soviet-style states insofar as different businesses are allowed to compete for the contracts, allowing private enterprise to serve as a kind of realm of experimentation that the state can engage in cost-free, since if one contractor goes out of business it will always be possible to replace it, perhaps with remnants of the failed company, perhaps with a spin-off of a more successful company. Over time, monopolies and near monopolies will arise in the most essential industries, where long-term planning and consistency in standards is necessary, but it’s in the state’s interest never to let the monopolies be completely beyond challenge—we can see the emergence of an upstart company in some established industry as the state or some faction within it either pressuring the leading contenders to up their game or having decided they are unsalvageable. At the same time, these quasi-monopolies penetrate the state, which really can’t have any way of distinguishing between various initiatives without the guidance of established figures in the field.\n\nThis is all given and is continuous with the emergence of money and something like private property in the ancient world as a means for empires to supply their troops and maintain supply chains. But it is just the beginning, as we need to take into account the world order, a highly asymmetrical articulation of states driven by the agendas and competition between a top few and the centrality of banking, money, and especially debt to the global capitalist order. As my and Zack Baker’s soon to be published (in _Anthropoetics_ ) essay argues, the modern world begins with the (English) state turning itself into a debtor to the national bank so that the bank can (using the terms laid out above) directly take over financing the “contractors,” and those who the contractors contract, and those whose purchases recirculate money back into those layers of contracting and therefore themselves become part of a system founded on indebtedness.\n\nThe state, in this case, is primarily a debt enforcement agency, and the politics of the state of indebtedness involves attempts on the part of one sector or another (demographic sector, state sector, regional sector, business sector, etc.) to shift the load of debt onto another. The intelligence agencies, then, serve primarily to ensure that the scheduled rotations in occupancy of the center do not, let’s say, threaten to institute a “jubilee,” however potentially or indirectly. Thus, the highest levels of transnational sovereignty and largest banks supply each other and hold each other in check, through an entire order of contractors, sub-contractors, state subsidiaries, displaceable and replaceable populations, and so on.\n\nAgency, or initiative, only exists insofar as one becomes a center, both signifying and occupied, holding and held, and therefore working out the protocols of succession. To lose the reins of succession, as begins as soon as the state is mortgaged to the banks, is to confront the necessity of creating new means of occupying the center. Explicitly, succession is arranged through procedures invented so as to simulate something like the “will of the people,” but electoral processes, however orderly and consensual (i.e., not noticeably contested) they may be, can do nothing more than allow for forms of conflict between organized social factions that remain below the threshold of civil war.\n\nThere’s no reason for such ad hoc and mindless combat to be expected to maintain conditions under which a major state, with domestic and international obligations, could maintain itself as a center. Hence the rule by intelligence agencies, operated for a while and still to a considerable extent through the media and universities but increasingly through the social media and data organizing and searching companies. Private initiative is a kind of pilot, fledged into being by the intelligence agencies, more or less directly, and put through a series of tests by the finance system. Everything that appears to us in juridical forms (the only way things really can appear), whether in the form of legitimated government or private actors, is a point on a string held together to a certain degree of tension by someone in the finance system on one end and someone in the intelligence agencies on the other end.\n\nWhen they don’t need to hold so tight at their respective ends, there is enough slack in the system that there is no interference with the necessary illusion of freedom of action on the part of visible, explicit agents. But in the end, even the banks and intelligence agencies are betting on future options and derivatives, and the exchanges—discharges of debt—that need to take place at. Certain intervals fail to come off, the string needs to be pulled tight, debts, monetary and otherwise, get called in, certain key imperatives must be traced more closely to their felicitous conclusion, and things start to look a bit “crazy”—politicians, media personalities, business executives and others who seemed to be known quantities suddenly act in ways that are “out of character.”\n\nThe best example of such craziness today is the insistence on escalating antagonisms with both Russia and China on the part of those governing the US state; while much remains obscure, the deliberate shedding of one of the few valuable pieces of Cold War wisdom, that war between nuclear powers is to be avoided at almost any cost, is a sure sign of dysfunction. In our _Anthropoetics_ essay you’ll see repeated the proposal I’ve many times before in these essays as a way forward: the establishment of (or conversion of an existing institution into) a political party and/or research/consulting institute (the two options are not mutually exclusive and may have to become one) that also operates as a business, pedagogical center and currency issuing institution ready to take sovereignty through a gradual assumption of responsibilities.\n\nI’ll push this proposal a bit further by insisting that the only governing institution that can ensure singularized succession is one that is economically self-supporting, reliant neither on taxes nor loans, on the model of the king living off his own lands (whether any king ever did so live is beside the point). Just like the king was the largest landowner in an order where wealth derived from land ownership the new sovereign must control the most powerful engines of data gathering and analysis in a period where that is increasingly the main source of wealth. Isn’t it possible, then, for the government to go out of business through a series of bad investment decisions, bad luck, corruption, etc.?\n\nYes, but only insofar as it ceases to be the leader in data collection and analytics, because by definition being such a leader guarantees business success and bad decisions, whether out of carelessness, arrogance or cupidity, will vitiate the data collection and analysis. And such decline will be noticed by other, “contracting” companies, as well as elements within the governing company itself, and a new company will emerge as the primary data power.\n\nIt's important to keep foregrounding such presumably unlikely scenarios (as I will always ask, though, unlikely compared to what? The US surviving victoriously as a pile of rubble slightly less rubbly than that underneath which Russia and China are buried?) in mind because any future flourishing human communities will need to have leadership capable of (and supported in) doing something probably not completely unprecedented but barely commemorated: be capable of acting very forcefully to suppress, especially juridically, all challenges to succession protocols, while never giving into the temptation of the vendetta.\n\nRivalries need to be conducted ruthlessly, but by establishing trustworthy “brokerage” wherever possible, not through sabotage and subversion. There’s nothing impossible here since sometimes humans do act justly in their dealings with each other, so nothing prevents the more influential among us from scaling that up. Brokering disputes can be, has been, indeed sometimes still is a business—business do hire professional arbiters rather than taking their disputes to court sometimes. People are more likely to do so when both sides consider themselves in the right and want a responsible decision based on a examination of the facts of the case in accord with the strongest juridical experiences—when one or both sides knows their case is bogus is when we see influence peddling, venue shopping, propagandistic poisoning of jury pools, etc.\n\nEither our prospective political party or our prospective research institute could take on such a brokering role, one which states might also have recourse to—it might become the case that one side willing to submit to trusted arbitration and the other refusing itself makes for a kind of winning case. And, of course, the best justice system is the one that’s used least, because everyone can make a good guess at the results in any case and accept the results in advance—and, better yet, reform their behaviors accordingly. The opening here is for a “private” actor to take on these roles that political rhetoric demands we expect of the state, which means that political rhetoric really becomes a way of exploiting dysfunction so as to benefit disproportionately from it.\n\nThis would be a kind of initiative that would draw upon similar initiatives of the past, those that led to the emergence of the Big Men, the chiefs, the sacral kings and the empires. Of course one would have to walk that tightrope held on either end by financiers and intelligence agents, and thereby take on a bit of the functions of each. But in both of those institutions one can be at varying distances from juridically intelligible and accountable behavior.\n\nThese proposals are ways of becoming a center, which involves drawing the kind of attention and creates more attention and this attention is a mode of deferral that always stays at least one step ahead of the attention drawn by centralizing violence. We don’t need to be naïve mimetic theorists who see scapegoating as a spontaneous process (which the mimetic theorist looks over at from a distanced position that maybe I’m the only one seeing as somewhat smug)—the real question is whether the most powerful institutions, those holding the tightrope, will take aim (or, to stick with the metaphor, set the rope vibrating).\n\nA great deal of effort must be put into providing research and training services that these institutions find indispensable or, more precisely, that create differences within those institutions between those invested in the massive sacrifices involved in the rituals of the debt-intelligence state and those who want to bring their activity under the light of the juridical. The breakthroughs of “AI,” i.e., search engines of increasing power, is cause for optimism here. The marginal advantages of those with a research project utterly free of liberalism and all the sacralities of the period of its breakdown will be immeasurable.\n\nLook at all these petty concerns about AI “ethics,” “safety,” “alignment,” or, for that matter, its domination by “wokeness.” Anyone incapable of disregarding all this should be disregarded. Such a research program will be programming marginal succession, hypothesizing exchanges between our hypothesis and the furtherest future outside option, For the present, think in terms of designing practices that are unimaginable within existing institutions and yet irresistible once introduced. Celebrating a jubilee day for those who take on their true debt to the center by retrieving, preserving and clearing of noise its oldest imperatives.\n\nThis research project can be understood as an expanded (to the point of being all inclusive) practice of data search. Machine learning through large language models is always a search practice, first of all searching “what someone like_____might say/do/want” and, second, the design of target searches to determine the systems within which various samples of likeness might be the same. Let’s say we generate some text out of a database trained on selected works of Ernst Junger, Franz Kafka and Charles Sanders Peirce, and we determine that this Jungerian/Kafkaesque/Peircean intelligence provides us with several possible directions a discourse on, say, succession, might go.\n\nThese variants will all no doubt be very interesting in various ways, but we would want to find it interesting in some specific ways, perhaps by supplying the database with researched accounts of some events or examples that recur across the variants; perhaps by selecting several words or phrases that are used repeatedly in idiosyncratic ways and doing a wider database search of the uses of that term (or the most similar terms we could find) that are most like those terms and then have the program generate new uses pertinent to (say) the study of succession we are undertaking—to be presented, perhaps, to some institution as a proposed solution to institutional problems.\n\nSo, a new idiom, designed with whatever rigor we determine (there are many kinds of rigor) can be brought to bear in an absolute way to a particular conjuncture. And the search goes well beyond this, to include the search for new clients, new associates, new bodies of text and modes of textual analysis that will be attracted to by the curvature in dataspace made by the customization of the database. All of reality, in fact, presents as fields of hypothetically ranked search results. The knowledge and learning process here will have elements of science, technique, craftsmanship, play, inscripture, archiving, archaeology, and strategy—even a bit of shamanism.\n\nSoon enough, searching will move beyond texts and include images and 3-D recordings of physical actions, real and simulated. It is the originary hypothesis generating a new world within the old by revivifying all the elements of deferral that old world had forgotten."
    },
    {
      "slug": "inscription",
      "title": "Inscription",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 06, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/inscription",
      "content": "Eric Gans has been exploring the concept of the “sacred” in some recent _Chronicle_ s. This is obviously a welcome development and one to be followed, as it returns us to the fundamental concerns of GA, the co-constituent origin of language, the human and the sacred. But it also has me thinking of the insufficient minimality of the concept itself—it’s one of those words, like “aesthetics” and “freedom,” that took on a particular shape in the 19th and 20th centuries within the Western world and seemed obviously universally applicable—but has every social order had, not just what “we” would call the “sacred,” but an actual word for it?\n\nThe same problem holds for “religion,” which seems universally applicable because, after all, it’s a university discipline, but as anyone in religious studies will tell you, if there’s any consensus in that field today it’s that there is no single phenomenon called “religion” that includes all the practices that have been traditionally studied in religion departments (let alone those that have not been studied because they didn’t seem to fit the concept). We can apply the same objection to the word “ritual,” which I’ve also relied on fairly systematically. I think ritual does get closer to something we might be able to locate in every social order, and it’s not as if I’m going to institute a self-imposed ban on its use, but I certainly couldn’t prove its universality and, anyway, we need to be able to move away from any concept that our inquiry comes to suggest might not meet the highest standards of minimality.\n\nSo, if not the “sacred,” if not “religion,” if not “ritual,” then what? We get much closer to minimality with a word like “commemoration”—every individual remembers and, more importantly, every community remembers, and the memories of every individual are simply one part of the memories of the community. “Commemoration,” moreover, reminds us that memory is not, primarily, an internal matter, but one made material through repeatable practices. The repeatable practices are the commemoration. We are always deciding what, out of the vast array of events taking place, we are going to commit to collective memory, and how (“deciding” is a poor word here—the center commands us to attend to a breach).\n\nIndeed, how we commemorate is what constitutes an “event” in the first place. I think we can assume that all humans remember and commemorate, and that public commemoration is part of the signifying world that distinguishes the human, even if Anna Wierzbicka’s primes don’t include a word for (or roughly synonymous with) “memory” or “remember.” I take this to suggest that these more general concepts are so bound up with the traditions, practices and institutions of commemoration that some communities have not abstracted a word synonymous to “memory” or “remember” from its practices of commemoration. But there is a prime word that bears on memory: “same.”\n\nWhat memory is, most basically, is recreating or re-enacting the same event, the event without which we would not be able to say “this is the same.” The fact that in any order people can say “this is the same” is “proof” of the universality of commemoration.\n\nWe’re thinking in terms of an event so powerful, so transformative and so constitutive that nothing could be more urgent than repeating it over an over again. An economy of commemoration is an economy of centrally directed attention. And it seems to me the distilled thesis of GA is that we humans do nothing but repeat the same originary event over and over again, in countless ways. An event is so rich, and the “scaffolding” or scenic design that has made it possible so dense, and so deeply rooted in a broader environment (itself comprised of the residue of subsidiary events), that any attempt to repeat it will be necessarily skewed and selective, focused precisely on that which will enable us to say, enabled by creations created by the event, ‘this is the same.”\n\nOver time, more and more of that scene is brought out, or thematized, or made explicit, even if the question of what was “really” in the scene and what are we attributing to it is unanswerable—and much is surely lost as well. If all of human created reality is commemoration in this sense, we can lop off what might be a lot of other superfluous concepts, and study the interplay of the various modes of commemoration very much, I think, the way in which philologists studied received texts to work their way back to partly hypothesized, partly demonstrated, source texts from which the others are variants; but, even that ultimately leads in the more hypothetical direction of positing texts and languages that had to have existed even if we will never have evidence that they did.\n\nEven genealogies of technologies will become increasingly important, as decisions regarding the various forks in the road of technological development will lead the disciplines will draw upon real and hypothetical origins of the technologies in forms of commemoration to determine which technologically constructed scene will be the “same” as the one lying at its origin.\n\nThat every commemoration involves an inscription and thinking of the originary sign as a public commemoration (of the disaster just averted, or imagined to have been averted) qua inscription allows originary thinking to converge with the thinking of technics clustered around Bernard Stiegler. Inscription is tertiary, and therefore specifically human, retention. There’s some divergence between the two modes of thinking here. I think of Stiegler’s tertiary retention, indebted to Derrida’s concept of “arche-writing,” as literal markings—on a body, or a stone, that would “mean” something to other members of the group (“mean” in the sense that upon exposure to the mark they would act in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise and that would be “responsive” to other responses).\n\nI’ve revised this so as to claim that the originary scene involves a reciprocal inscription, as everyone is shaped by and shapes the other’s gesture and posture, and I stand by that (it’s not difficult to imagine everyone “writing” on each other on the originary scene)—but let’s set that aside for now. A literal marking on some object better fits what seems to be Stiegler’s sense of a quasi-accidental but intentional-after-the-fact emergence of signification. We could imagine, say, markings of a member of the group who has been lost during a hunt or some migration enabling others to find him, and then those markings being repeated another time so as to lead them to him.\n\nFor readers familiar with GA, I don’t need to belabor the deficiencies in this “scene” (what would lead the individual explorer to “write” the signs in the same way, or his followers to read them in the same way?) but it provides us with a good look at an implicit model of language origin that might have emerged from a more intrepid Derrida. This is probably the kind of “deferral” Derrida had in mind—that the “meaning” of language is never present to the language itself but is rather taken up in various ways in the aftermath. Nothing ever means but, rather, “will have meant.”\n\nFor inscription in this model to work, at least two of the markings left behind need to have the “same” (what can be recognized by both pathmaker and pathfinders to be the same) relation to each other in the accidental as in the deliberate case. That would be the deliberate event commemorating the accidental one. (We could, of course, imagine a gradual revelation in which, “instinctively,” the pathmaker makes the markings a little more similarly related to the previous instance, while the pathfinders notice a little more similarity each time, etc.) We can now find something useful in this defective scene: that is, in fact, how inscription qua commemoration would be shaped.\n\nOur originary scene is already intentional, insofar as everyone on the scene acknowledges that all are proferring the same sign (they acknowledge they are doing so by doing so), but much of the scene would still be accidental, which is to say, not deliberately geared or staged towards maximizing reciprocal recognition of the sign. The “intentional” would gradually “colonize” or “territorialize” the “accidental.” And it would do so precisely by staging this very relation between and transition from the accidental (“chaotic”) to intentional (”ordered”). (And new “accidentalities” would be produced as a result.) And when I say that two of the markings would need to have the same relation to each other, that could also mean two “parts” or “elements” of one marking having the same relation to each other—all that matters is some iterable relational difference.\n\nThe hypothesized Derridean quasi-scene I’m positing here is helpful in reminding us (commemorating) that Derrida’s and the broader “poststructuralist” project was precisely to subtract intentionality from language. Gans has argued that implicit here is the positing of an originary violence to language itself, which would make poststructuralism almost the demonic double of GA—the very chaos from which GA needed to create order. There’s certainly a lot that’s interesting here, but even if poststructuralism needed to be corrected or countered in this way GA has been perhaps a bit heedless of the question and stakes involved here as poststructuralism had its reasons for locating a violence in fully articulate language itself.\n\nThis question and these stakes are addressed, implicitly, cautiously and tentatively, but still brilliantly, in Sarah Pourciau’s _The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science_. An inscription—a shared, iterable relation between markings—implies an intention, and one could therefore say leads us to project some form of intentionality onto an inscriber. Rather than proclaiming an intentionality behind the sign, we might want to maintain this paradox. Why? Well, every inscription is different, which means that the intention we are led to project onto the inscriber must be an intention not merely to inscribe in general, but to distinguish that inscription from all other inscriptions.\n\nAnd what distinguishes it from all other inscriptions must be the intention of the inscriber, but, once we say this, we must also say that the “intention” of that inscriber is itself only a “sign” of something like the “essence” of that inscriber. Pourciau shows that something like this was indeed the case with the very powerful language science developed in Germany in the early to mid-19th century, which found what were identified as the originary sound relations of the German language to be inextricably tied to the specific, historical and primeval character of the German people.\n\nTo make explicit what Pourciau never does (and what she might, indeed, reject as an implication of her argument), the project, even before poststructuralism, of “structuralists” like, above all (in Pourciau’s account anyway), Roman Jakobson, was precisely to exfiltrate such an intentionality from language as inscription. Now, it doesn’t seem to me that either structuralism or post-structuralism were particularly Jewish movements—I haven’t done a survey (but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has...), but Jakobson, Levi-Strauss and Derrida himself are the only major names that come to my mind. But “Jewish” vs. “German” is not the best way to frame this anyway.\n\nBernard Dionysius Geoghegan has made the case that the structuralism of thinkers like Levi-Strauss and the even more displaced Jakobson was, indeed, an attempt to draw upon transnational and transdisciplinary fields like cybernetics to create a human science that would be adequate to the crisis of human civilization they considered themselves to be witnessing—and certainly a theory of language leading through Wagner and Heidegger could easily be seen as something needing to be neutralized toward this end. (Indeed, Saussure’s earlier confrontation with German language science may have also—if only Pourciau had taken an interest in such questions, which are really staring us right in the face!—been undertaken in accord with similar intuitions of the stakes, siding with the more “symbolist” French literary scene of the later 19th century against the more nationalist German science.) At any rate, in this direction lies the minimization and delaying of the intentionality informing inscription.\n\nWe’re past having to choose sides in this dispute, and therefore able to embrace the contributions made by all. These are differing modalities of inscription and therefore of deferral. There are times when we want and times when we need to maximize our pretentions of intentionality over and against accidentality, and to bring to bear on any inscription the full weight of historical affiliations, obligation, and the vivid presence of ancestors whose own inscriptions made this one possible and confer meaning upon it. And there are times when we want to trace inscriptions back to unacknowledged contributors, unconsidered events, serendipity, and so on.\n\nThe same inscription can be treated one way or another. It is the disciplinary collective that will be best able to dial things up and down in this way, to propose revivifications of the ancient and archaic along with the solicitation of data from the most far-flung sources. So, I take sides with the communities of inquirers, the founders and spreaders of disciplinary spaces, that operate simultaneously by stealth (if for no other reason than the relative opacity of their vocabularies) and in the most public and exposed ways. We can all set ourselves the problem: what is to be remembered, and how? (This is the “absolutist” or “NRx” problem of “formalizing” power: what is formalized is commemorated as an inscription of deferral of some potential mimetic crisis.)\n\nWe’re all samples of some cluster of commemorations that we present as worthy of commemoration, trying to dictate the terms. of that commemoration while ultimately surrendering that right to our successors (whom we also want to select). This sounds very past-oriented but it’s really the only way of thinking about the future—as the result of the means one finds with present institutions to commemorate past events, ultimately the originary event, in a way that will last and ramify.\n\nWhat my hypothetical Derridean event of language origin displaced is the center, because that is what it was designed to displace (along with his poststructuralist brethren)—so, on that level, I side with Gans against what is really a fanatical ant-centerism. But as I pointed out in the opening pages of _Anthropomorphics_ , Derrida is interesting in the explicitness and desperation with which he seeks to evade the center, only to present us with a center is that is always there because constantly replaced. There is not a great distance, epistemologically, from continually working on deconstructing the center, on the one hand, and continually working to derive intelligence from it, on the other.\n\nYes, the center is constant—it will always be there as long as humans are and we will always set our bearings by it; and it is constantly changing, as it must be occupied, with one occupant replacing another and even the “same” occupant not being unequivocally the same. This is the source of intelligence: the occupant of the center, and all the delegations of the center, up and down the line, selecting their successors with greater and lesser degrees of success, interference, accidentality and intentionality. When someone speaks they speak at a particular distance from and relation to the center, in ways we can trace quite literally through schooling and teachers in the widest sense.\n\nOur commemorations are therefore more or less intentionally (let them be more so, then), histories of the center, aimed at commemorating the center so as to help it, through the necessary degree of intentionality (including the intentionality it distributes all around to everyone), which we confer on it by performing the chain of command enabling each of us to become in charge of ourselves as data center, come into its own."
    },
    {
      "slug": "inscripto-punctualism",
      "title": "Inscripto-punctualism",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 29, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/inscripto-punctualism",
      "content": "The concept of data is extremely generative. Any time you focus on something with a question that brings some things into view and suspends attention to others, you generate data. When you generate data, you generate more data, for others, regarding your means of generating data. When we construct machinery, devices, or new modes of social organization to detect, record and sort data, we generate all kinds of incidental data that will be interesting in ways we can’t anticipate. Johanna Drucker rightly points out that a better word for “data” would be “capta,” which is to say, we’re “taking” rather than being “given,” the information we want from our surroundings.\n\nBut data is a gift as well—we open ourselves up to it without knowing what we’re going to be “taking” from it. The origin of data is in inscription, that is, materialized commemoration. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “data” was first used in the sense of a “fact given or granted,” during, unsurprisingly, the 1640s, at the very beginnings of British empiricism and the organization of scientific activity; while not being used in its contemporary sense of \"transmittable and storable information by which computer operations are performed\" until 1946. I’m still fairly comfortable backdating “data,” because data derives from the ostensive, from members of a group being able to point to something and say it’s the “same.”\n\nThere cannot be a human order that doesn’t need to place things at the center and say what it is in such a way that can be iterated. Our current data driven order is a direct descendant of the priest ensuring the ritual has been carried out precisely according to specifications, as well as the seers and prophets that studied the consequences of laxity and transgression in carrying out those rituals. In every case, some ascertainable relation between what is done, seen and said is enforced, and some path from ostensive, to imperative, to interrogative, to declarative and back to ostensive established. There’s nothing more important, ethically, morally and politically, than participating in these efforts, precisely because “spillage” from these orders is becoming increasingly obvious and consequential.\n\nIt’s getting harder to fake, lie and conceal, and if you tell me, with very good reason, that there seems to more, and especially egregious examples of all these activities than ever, I would simply respond with “yes, and how do you know that, and how much of that despicable activity results from the difficulty of covering up previous instances of it?” You can try and re-install honor, virtue, sacrifice and other values effaced by modernity back at the center, but since modernity has enabled us to see how easily all of that can be simulated and fabricated, we would still be insisting on and learning to assess (including the use of algorithms to do so) the data emitted by actions meant to display those qualities.\n\nThe optimal human-machine relation is that increasingly well-trained humans program machines to collect and automatically analyze data so as to present it back to those humans as reciprocal, anthropomorphic data collectors and interpreters of each other’s latest efforts at machine-aided design. Each element in this process can be continually improved upon without making any of them less indispensable.\n\nImplicit in this devotion to putting order into the proliferating world of ostensives is a kind of fanaticism regarding questions of provenance and chain of custody. Who saw what, mediated by what devices and from what platform, transmitted to whom, through which media, stored where, in accord with which security protocols, etc. You’re imagining an entire social order in which a single weak link might contaminate all the information headed your way; or, more precisely, generate lots of new information regarding breakdowns in protocols, chains of command, and training practices, but information which interferes with the data you need right now and which might only be “handlable” by some special prosecutor or historian down the road.\n\nBut this means, in judging this information, you need to internalize the practices of the special prosecutor, future historian, and others, in the best way you can estimate on the spot, which might mean nothing more than keeping careful records and leaving traces others might follow up on. In this way, the “horizontal” distribution of data, carried out with the degree of scrutiny needed to ensure one is actually handling it as it “demands,” directly takes on a “vertical” dimension, as the data can only take on its meaning against the background of who’s in charge and whether those in charge are really in charge. To the extent that those in charge are not in charge, data becomes kaleidoscopic—lots of patterns, and possible patterns, but without taking on any definite, “actionable” shape. At a certain point all on could do is “testify” to and “enact” the uselessness of the vast stores of data available, like a kind of performance artist—that would be the most reliable information one could provide.\n\nSo, handling data in the most careful, thoughtful, thorough manner possible, even if it’s just a matter of reporting someone else’s speech, is intrinsically bound up with social ordering, or centered ordinality To whom you release or with whom you entrust that data, in what form, how much of it is held back, how it is framed, how much one’s sources and methods are revealed, and so on, become increasingly relevant questions the higher up the data chains you go and the more you need to be the kind of person to whom people reveal and entrust data, or some specialized packaging of it. The fear that with greater inscription, or technologization, the significance of humans recedes is ridiculous because as the data-recording, preserving and analyzing becomes central to our civilization the more obvious it is that humans will always be, overwhelmingly, the primary source of data, because all other data has to flow through us and because it flowing though us adds, exponentially, to the “quantity” of data itself.\n\nWhat is really terrifying is that, if properly ordered, the datafied world would make it impossible to bullshit, lie, slack off, make excuses, throw others under the bus and all the other last resorts we humans have when we fail to live up to our responsibilities. And maybe even more frightening is that we’d also have to show new levels of tolerance, patience, compassion and understanding because we’d all see who really needs them. And this in turn exacerbates the verticalization inherent in enhanced inscription: the very slight degrees of difference in insight, expertise, even intuition between individuals in positions of responsibility could have enormous ramifications—which means this is also the case for those charged with detecting these differences and acting upon them.\n\nI would like to call this immanent, incipient order, in which “we” are trying to translate all selvings of the present order, “inscripto-punctualism.” The “inscripto” part is clear enough—that refers to conversion of all scenes from ritual ones, however residual, into explicit commemorations of newly generated ostensives that cancel resentments by refocusing our attention on the preservation of the center and practices of centering. The “punctualism” is new—by this I mean to make graphic the “verticality” inherent in the horizontality of inscription in the event. Eric Gans has written of the origin of language as “punctual,” i.e., a unique, irreducible event, and it is this above all that I want preserved and commemorated in the incipient order.\n\nThe “punctual” is why there are things to commemorate in the first place—it is the source of all meaning. But I also like the implication of being “punctual,” i.e., on time, where and when you are needed. All the talk of the dehumanizing effects of technology, which supposedly makes us into machines, etc., prevents us from noticing how infinitely more important “punctualism” is than ever. I don’t see how anyone can look at today’s world and not see that everything that looks like problems of technology are really problems of human order. We should, in fact, be moving steadily to qualitatively different levels of inscription.\n\nThe heated debates about the COVID vaccines, for example, distract us from the obvious observation of how crude it is that we still inject things into individuals. We should be thinking in terms of creating environments that boost our immune systems and in turn receive data from them that is fed right back into those environments—but as long as we have to deal with “politics” who will be free to explore such avenues? The more you know about your “unconscious” the more you produce both greater consciousness and a more generative unconscious as you become attentive and retentive in new ways—exactly the same thing can be made true of our relations to inscription, insofar as the. “punctual” dimension is made explicit and cultivated.\n\nAnd the way to preserve and cultivate the punctual dimension is through what I have been calling singularized succession in perpetuity, which we can speak of in terms of decisions regarding to whom to transfer the totality of your data and access to data, and how. Who do you entrust with the “codes”? Ensuring such transfers is what institution building is for. You build endless chains, going all the back and all the way forward, and you gather together all the data transferred, through innumerable hands, directly and indirectly to you, and you try and put in some better order so as to transmit it to others. If you’re the chief executive of a country and therefore have a clearly defined role, this process is simpler, if not easier: you can set up recruitment and training institutions so as to generate candidates and appoint in an always revisable way your successor.\n\nSince most of us will never be that, we can model our own attention to our own successions in a way that is modeled on and meant to support the larger chain of command and chain of custody. If you occupy an “office,” you use the powers of that office, such as they are under current conditions, to narrow the possibilities of succession so that the work you deem essential can continue and otherwise shape your office in such a way that only those meeting certain specifications will be up to it. If you have no formal “office,” turn your activity, whatever you devote yourself to, into something approximating an office, creating for yourself “legacies” worthy of being passed down.\n\nIf you’re utterly constrained, harried, subjected to a constant state of emergency, made the target of vilification for the enhancement of the power of desperate, unworthy power-brokers, you can still insist upon receiving the data needed to fulfill the commands imposed upon you, and in doing so you can generate data regarding the incoherence of those demands and by implication the chain of command and chain of custody needed to replace it.\n\nThe more that technology surrounds and enters us and becomes the immersive environment so that being outside of it is as unthinkable as being outside of the ritual order for archaic humans, the more we are inscribing our histories and destinies upon that environment. “Data security” may not be the most obviously inspiring rallying cry ever invented, but it’s marvelously compact and rich in implications. What inspired all those ancient men we now revere as heroes? Immortality—to live forever in the memories and emulative actions of others through the ages. This means acting so as to be recorded and commemorated, which until fairly recently meant a significant portion of the resources and energy of the community being devoted to such commemoration—the work of poets, historians, novelists, school teachers, artists of various kinds and so on.\n\nNow, everything we do is already being recorded and stored as a matter of course—it’s very likely that already (but if not, pretty soon), all of our lives will be retrievable for inspection by some amateur historian a couple of hundred years from now. All the more reason to take care what he will see and, even more, to make sure that the expanse of devices doing the data collection are asking the right questions and erecting “offices” in which one will be able to produce memorable inscriptions. One line of succession will dominate and shape others to the extent it secures data, which is to say masters arts of reciprocity, encoding, extrapolating, testing, concealing and revealing, timed release, and so on, and gives of data through its selvings that can only be made secure by iterating the practices that produced it.\n\nThe most ancient, indeed, originary, “code” is that what is received from the center must be returned to the center. You might take me to be suggesting that now we’re in a position to do the math. From the center we receive the distribution of positions giving us a certain degree of responsibility over some information or intelligence pertinent to the infrastructure. (Even the most “old-fashioned” physical labor requires precise measurements, adherence to codes, testing, the care and maintenance of tools, etc.) This includes the tokens we use to provide for our housing, nourishment, leisure and the rest, all of which is what we need to secure and project those positions of responsibility.\n\nWhat we return to the center is well-packaged data, which may include meta-data, data analysis, offering up of ourselves as data (being monitored for quality assurance purposes and all that). As always, I insist and emphasize that this is not some novel proposal that we start from scratch—we are already doing this, just with lots of slippage and spillage: our legal and. political systems have always been designed so as to gather reliable data and use them to recreate the scenes we occupy. And therefore we always begin by drawing attention to that slippage and spillage, which includes focusing on lies and untruths, propaganda, sloppy analyses, commitments that bear no reference to existing infrastructures—all of which are imperatives (to see, to repeat, to want, to do) which might have gaps so wide that pointing to the absent center is all one can do for now. Still, there are going to be more and less pointed ways of doing that, and there are also possible suggesting for repairing and creating infrastructure so as to increase reciprocity between center and margin."
    },
    {
      "slug": "intelligence-and-technics",
      "title": "Intelligence and Technics",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 22, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/intelligence-and-technics",
      "content": "I try to make the concepts I use include both the “is” and the “ought,” and to guide the transition from one to the other. So, when I speak of “singularized succession in perpetuity,” on the face of it I’m proposing an alternative to the near randomized leadership drift explicitly endorsed by liberal and democratic politics (and I am in fact doing that) but I’m also describing what anyone with any power, which is to say, any command over the attention of others, is already doing, more or less implicitly, more or less consciously, in however a convoluted way in conformity with existing mechanisms of succession. So, the concept simply enables us to make what is implicit explicit, to bring into focus everything that requires it to remain implicit, and to direct our attention to the possible means of making it explicit. So, the more thorough the study of existing conditions, the more visible and intelligible the way to transform them.\n\nThe decisive move in my rerouting of GA away from Eric Gans’s liberal humanism was to place the center at the center. Or, to return it to the center—because, where else could it have gone? This, I realized, was the aporia that blocked crucial elements of reality from view for Gans and those working within the “orthodox” GA he created: we are supposed to believe that somehow, as a result of the Christian revelation unfolding into market society, there was no longer a social center; rather, each individual was a center in a new, albeit still emergent, omnicentrism. It was obvious that this is why Gans has never had a single useful thing to say about the state: according to his model, it doesn’t really exist: at the most, it’s the field upon which redistributions in accord with a particular balance of resentments takes place.\n\nWhy we should expect them to take place in a “satisfactory” way is never asked. What is at least one of the most important transformations on the 20th century West, the growing centralization of the state, its increasing intrusiveness into every corner of its citizens’ lives, also goes completely ignored. Now, it’s also possible to say that this is also why Gans has never said a single thing about technology (he does have one interesting essay on media), or, as far as I can tell, ever considered he needed to have anything to say about it: technology is part of post-sacral governance, and if you can’t say anything about post-sacral governance, technology can only be smart people inventing things that make life easier but can be “misused.” It’s not really part of the human.\n\n“Restoring” the center implies that maintaining the center must be the source of human aspirations and humanity’s fundamental problem. We must have a center, but we’ve never had a really satisfactory one: keeping this in mind enables us to be unremittingly critical of the existing order without nostalgia for any earlier one. The sacred animal ancestor at the center of the hunter-gather community provided a source of consensus, and is no doubt the longest lasting human order by far, but the egalitarianism of this order was always vulnerable to the emergence of differences that would lead to the “usurpation” of the center by the Big Man.\n\nOrders organized around honor, which is to say, the vendetta, are always liable to degenerate into endemic violence, which also makes them vulnerable to imperial subversion and domination. Sacral kingship provides for a unanimously affirmed central figure, one sensitive to the shifting relations within the community and in the community’s relation to the divine, but the need to turn the king more or less periodically or impulsively into a sacrifice is not only de-stabilizing but is a source of corrosive cynicism—on some level, enough people always know that killing the king won’t restore fertility, or whatever. And the Axial Age imperial orders with the divinized emperor were really just monstrous machines, whose main virtue was in suggesting that, with one “divine” empire being successively replaced by another, there must be something more divine behind all of them. It’s not hard to see how the desacralized power of the modern West just ground up what remained of all these orders.\n\nThe problem of the center is the problem of succession, and we could examine the way even the best of the pre-modern solutions, primogeniture, doesn’t solve this problem, but I’d like now to turn attention to the fact that modernity, or desacralized power, exacerbates the problem of the center, represented in the problem of succession. We don’t need to rehearse the way in which conferring power on some imaginary entity like the “people,” or individuals with “rights,” simply creates new power centers claiming to speak for those entities, instituting a perpetual struggle over the center that is normalized as “freedom” and “democracy.”\n\nIt’s more useful to examine what the real solution has been, and the way this constitutive suspicion toward any occupant of the center has inadvertently advanced this solution—a solution that, with renewed attention to the question of the center, we can inherit now. Technology is that solution, because technology can remain continuous, with one project giving way to another, and with resources devoted to specific projects over prolonged periods, regardless of who occupies the center for the moment.\n\nTechnology is a vast command structure that generates more and more implicit commands as it replaces what was once a ritual system of imperative exchanges: you don’t have to be told to drive a car—it’s just a condition of living under certain technological conditions, and since there are better and worse cars, and cars are indicative of status, you want to drive a car. And you want to get a job that will enable you to afford and maintain that car. And that house, and so on. But while engineers are designing vast scenes that will organize and distribute the entire population, they are not thinking in terms of implementing the commands of a ruler—their imperatives are so distant from whoever happens to be president or prime minister that they can dedicate themselves to purely scientific and technical pursuits.\n\nAnd whoever happens to be president or prime minister, insofar as he’s not simply sabotaging such work on behalf of his party and/or some fraction of capital, wants them to so dedicate themselves—especially since the starting point of all ambitious technological projects is some state imperative, whether it be military, infrastructural, or health-related.\n\nThe abstraction of the project from any “projector” encourages a way of thinking that we can call purely “declarative” or, more familiarly, “symbolic”: the declarative reconstitutes the ostensive as a field of possible ostensives bereft of imperatives, and symbolic logic abstracts away from “intuition” and reproduces reality as the result of a sequence of logical operations (an indefinitely prolonged sequence of statements that can be either true or false). This is the path to the present, digital, order. A sufficiently thorough representation of existing reality in all its probable future unfoldings would eliminate the need for imperatives: once we know reality to be so constrained as to make only one choice the reasonable one in each case, there would never be a need to issue another command.\n\nThis is the technological utopia, bringing to its logical conclusion the declarative’s terror of the imperative (first formalized in ancient philosophy). We would have abolished the center, and whether that is through a technocracy run by disinterested technicians or a marketized order in which value is conferred on every object and every individual through an ever more refined calculation of the future expected earnings to be derived from that asset would be a secondary question.\n\nBut there is this odd fact, explored in different ways in a couple of very interesting books, that along with this tendency toward abstraction and the extraction of imperatives, there coincided a growing interest in the “primitive” that had been ignored or assimilated to bourgeois “human nature” through the dominant disciplines of the 18th into the 19th century. We could see this turn to the primitive as resentment or nostalgia, which would make it easy to dismiss it, but Erich Horl, in his _Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication_ (a book I’ve already mentioned a couple of times) and Sarah Pourciau, in her _The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science_ suggest less complacent and self-congratulatory approaches.\n\nHorl sees the fascination with the archaic as a result of the discovery and creation of new, predominantly electric, fields of communication that couldn’t be reduced to the “intuitive commonplaces of the human sciences—he shows how the descriptions of archaic orders by founders of sociology like Durkheim and successors like Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss are filled with metaphors drawn from the new technological discourses of electric communication. Pourciau, meanwhile, traces the way the structuralist linguistics of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and especially Roman Jakobson tried to replace the German language sciences of the 19th century (culminating in the aesthetics of Richard Wagner) by converting the (ultimately racial-national, although Pourciau doesn’t address this) “spirit” the German theorists saw (on the model of 19th century biological organicism) necessarily informing the inscription of any linguistic order into a silent, constitutive, principle of an autonomous linguistic order.\n\nPourciau gets to the point, as does Horl, even if this can only be made explicit by someone unapologetically attentive to origins (Pourciau comes pretty close, though), where we can see that the autonomous, internally systemic and intra-referential language systems that can theoretically exclude from consideration any external “input,” simply reveal all the more unmistakably the need for an originary hypothesis of language. What the drive toward the symbolic or, in originary terms, the declarative, does is remove all specific ethnic or ritual or historical constitutions of any particular language so as to expose the co-constitution of language with the ethnic, the ritual, and the historic, as such. All those quasi-electric vibrations Horl finds to be disturbing Durkheim are the mimetic crisis simmering beneath the origin of humanity, and the return to the archaic makes it possible to hypothesize communication as such as constitutive event.\n\nIt's not surprising that the most uncompromising abstraction would lead us to the most singular scene and event because what was realized by, as far as I know, only Charles Sander Peirce, the precondition for the scientific and technological revolution launched in the 19th century was the creation of disciplinary spaces, in which relatively small groups of highly committed and intelligent individuals developed conceptual vocabularies that brought previously unimagined realities into greater resolution that could only be expressed mathematically. There are histories to be told here, and some of them have been and are being told, of the parallel emergence of science with secret and esoteric societies, including the occult, along with the parallels one will find in literary history (the trajectory from Poe’s articulation of the uncanny with the rationalistic through the French symbolists and through the modernist avant-garde and the dismantling of the boundaries between “life” and “art” would provide grist for many such histories), and the enduring need for disciplinary spaces no matter how automatized the technosphere is what can bring our attention back to the problem of the center.\n\n(One outcome of this articulation of the abstract with the esoteric enabled by the simultaneous self-concealment and expansion of the center, is the rich eco-system of “conspiracy theories” and conspiracies about conspiracy theories so prominent in contemporary politics.)\n\nThere will be a global center, and it will be a center predicated on the securing of data—it will be a central intelligence. The question is whether this center will continue the declarative utopian project of scenelessness, accomplished through the abolition of imperatives (which must collapse into a hysterical proliferation of incoherent commands); or, whether it will rely on the endless creation of scenes, of scenes within scenes, each with its own level of competence for gathering, assessing, preserving, recording and transmitting data, and each with its own disciplinary space and pedagogical order: its own set of “assignments.”\n\nAnd contemporary art (in the sense of art that will always be contemporary) is interested in precisely this problem, of generating scenes that could not simply have been algorithmically predicted, of putting scenes within scenes, which means making the infrastructure increasingly explicit, not just to criticize or “debunk” the claims it spontaneously emits but to show that each point in the infrastructure there is a scene which, as inhabitants of various scenes ourselves, we can enter and derive and contribute intelligence to if we just learn the idiom of that scene.\n\nIf our selvings create scenes within scenes because doing so provides a more secure data environment than the drive for scenelessness, because secure data (the field of ostensives) also means a more directive, transparent and accountable algorithmic (imperative-interrogative-declarative) order, then we can challenge that drive for scenelessness as resentment abolitionists confronting non-resentfully a kind of absolute, we might even say demonic, resentment. One of the hardest things to do can be to let someone learn how to do something, especially when there’s no time for them to learn how to do it because it has to be done now.\n\nBut learning is precisely learning how to do it in the now. A scene is composed out of an event of learning—the contours of the scene must be felt out, tested, bumped against, jostled. To help someone learn you have to step in with imperatives, but you also have to learn how and when to do that. Without these apprenticeship relations, things don’t work and knowledge isn’t preserved. We all have to seek out teachers and students—that’s how we participate in succession as well as technology. We could even say that the meaning of any sign is in the way it prompts one person to learn something from another. And this always involves something specific to the situation, untranslatable until it wouldn’t really matter anymore.\n\nIt’s easy to see why people who have their hands on things but are not so certain of keeping their hands on things would dream of a scenelessness in which everything happens within a knowledge that doesn’t even need a disciplinary space to be produced because the institutional certifications of the knowledge producers provide a warrant for the knowledge. In this immaculate conception of knowledge, those who designate the truths from which all institutional imperatives automatically follow can do so because they have been designated by those who have in turn been designated, and so on. It’s a kind of parody of singularized succession, because no one actually chooses—they check off boxes.\n\nFor the rituals of reciprocal certification to work, scenes must be abolished. But even here we must say that these rituals are a form of learning, into which we can introduce felicitous, if not necessarily welcome, imperatives. In part, this is an aesthetic project—interrupting the hoped for scenelessness by making scenes. But they must be technological scenes, positing assignments across a field one doesn’t control in order to contribute to the central intelligence."
    },
    {
      "slug": "language-the-ultimate-source-and-analysis-of-data",
      "title": "Language, the Ultimate Source and Analysis of Data",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 09, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/language-the-ultimate-source-and",
      "content": "Insofar as I have an epistemology it’s borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion that truth is what will turn out to be the case in the long run by the community of inquirers, which in my understanding not only makes truth a kind of infinitely receding target but makes it an effect of seeing to the long-term coherence and integrity of the community of inquirers. In that case, the meaning, or eventual ostensive truth, of anything I happen to be saying now, is located in some hypothetical figure upon a hypothetical scene at some hypothesized time in the future—or, really, a sequence and distribution of such figures on such scenes at such times, to be further specified by continuations of the discourse initiated by that statement.\n\nThis also means that part of the meaning of what you say is your own promise to do what you can to ensure the establishment of that scene and the preparation of the figures necessary to populate and act upon it in the way implicit in whatever you’ve said. You start to design a scene, however unlikely or distant, with every utterance even if you’re doing no more than scouting out the location, so to speak.\n\nThis also means that the meaning of any utterance depends upon the indirect cooperation of all the other people saying things, which is to say sketching out the design of scenes that will more or less overlap with the ones undergoing development in your own utterance, and what you say is more meaningful to the extent that you implicate (fold in with your own) those other scenes while inscribing an awareness of the limits of your awareness of all of them. A kind of economy is built into meaningfulness, then, because a severe selectivity is involved wherein you build into your statements criteria for the other disciplinary scenes you are willing to rely upon and how far you are willing to rely upon them.\n\nThere’s no single rule here for determining which scenes to rely on—no one is obliged to restrict themselves to what you can prove right here and now beyond some arbitrarily determined standard of proof—sometimes the more speculative, hypothetical, even fantastical suggestions are the most meaningful. If there’s a rule it’s that you keep learning to discriminate between the ever proliferating, converging and diverging idioms, which refine the ostensive outcomes in ways that can only be mastered on the scenes, which is to say you engage in perpetual language learning and facilitate the same for anyone who might be downstream of your utterances.\n\nAll of this is stuff I’ve said, more than once, even if not so recently, but my own mostly followed rule in such matters is that I repeat myself in order to introduce a new degree of consistency between the various idioms I’m working on. And what I’d like to do here is bring this discussion of meaning and truth into convergence with my recent thinking on data and algorithms and, even more importantly, bring a more definitive resolution to my concept of singularized succession in perpetuity by treating it explicitly as the successor concept to the sovereign or central imaginary. This is all to formulate with increasing precision and effectiveness the notion of “listening to the center” or, for political scientists, the problem of political obedience.\n\nThe sovereign (more recently: central) imaginary is what you arrive at when you utter some political desire (universal healthcare, no more immigration, etc.), imagine the kind of political authority that could satisfy that desire in such a way that you could recognize it to have been satisfied, further imagine the scenic conditions that could enable the stable continuation of that authority (because you don’t want you political desire met just for a single administration) and then consider whether that authority would in fact do what you want it to do because, after all, if it could do it, it wouldn’t have to and might have something very different in mind. If, like the hypothetical recipient of the saying of the eternal return by Nietzsche’s demon you can embrace whatever this authority would command by way of or instead of fulfilling your desire, then your political desire is meaningful.\n\nHow singularized succession in perpetuity catches this up is in the implication that to be ready to obey such an authority is to (to continue to speak a little Nietzschean) “will” its continuation on its own terms, which in turn means to participate in whatever way falls to you in ensuring that authority select its successor, and not just any successor but a successor that it most likely to choose its successor, and so on in perpetuity; and what is implicit here but what I have not yet made so explicit is that if singularized succession is the optimal condition what can this mean other than exercising singularized succession in perpetuity in the way appropriate to whatever disciplinary spaces each and every one of us is implicated in.\n\n(Can there be singularized succession in perpetuity at every level in the social order? What if a higher level disapproves of the way someone under his supervision selects his successor? This would be an indication of dysfunction to be addressed pedagogically.) This, then, is the purpose of scenic design—to set the stage as precisely or vaguely as necessary for the understudy to step in when needed and ready (to help the understudy be ready when needed). This, then, is technics: inventing, refining, spreading and repairing devices so that the figure proposed by any utterance, that successor however distant, will be in a position to enter and revise whatever idiom might pop up on that scene.\n\nEven the most seemingly utilitarian form of tool making, producing a physical object specifically suited to have controlled effects as part of a limited work process only make sense within a process of transmission and pedagogy in which the tool is refined and marked within an essentially ritualistic master-apprentice relationship (somebody showed you how to use a hammer). So, technology is a set of assignments for distance language learning, because what else could be the point of technology other than a specifically distributed population having a new field of ostensives, which means a new realm of meaning, which they couldn’t have had without that technology? And discerning a sorting out and generating in the process a new field of ostensives is language learning.\n\nThis also means that the designing of such “assignments” follows the discovery, creation and revision of a new idiom, perhaps on the margin but transferred to the center (there’s an growing literature on the overlappings of the artistic avant-garde with intelligence and military agencies) which can advance some imperative of governance. Technology is always the transformation of existing forms of human cooperation and coordination, including the gestural, motion, normative and other ultimately linguistic capacities involved in coordination and cooperation. So, some problem of organization related to war, or colonization, or the creation of economies of scale, or continental transportation is taken up on some disciplinary scene which starts to design the scene that would solve that problem along with educating, training, and distributing those who will populate it.\n\nThat technology is a set of assignments for distance language learning is another way of saying that technology is post-ritual governance, but it’s a better way of saying it because it enables us to highlight and then draw consequences from the fact that, post-ritual, the only source of the good is not some moral or ethical “principle” but language itself, or the ongoing commensuration of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives. Any transcendent principle or being you would want to posit would, anyway, be a set of technologies for commensurating the various levels of speech acts: believing in God, or in equality, or in fairness, or in human dignity, etc., insofar as it’s more than than a commonplace, involves saying and doing certain things under certain conditions, according to certain standards, enforced more or less formally in various ways, and so on—the authenticity of one’s beliefs or commitments will need to be assessed, so why not just say that we can trace the ostensives, imperatives and interrogatives that are addressed and in turn issued by a particular sentence or discourse and thereby determine the best way to respond so as to increase the commensurability across the levels. This approach precludes all “nihilism,” because we can’t run out of language, and we will always face an unimaginable and inexhaustible plenitude of possible ostensives.\n\nListening to the center therefore entails creating an architecture for housing the commands of the center, which means prolonging those commands by streaming them off into more localized commands to inquire into extending and fortifying the architecture. This means constructing the apparatus for testing out the central imaginary, because if you can imagine the mode of centrality that would satisfy, cancel and transcend your political desire you can imagine an intermediate arrangement that would be closer to the installation of that mode of centrality than other possible arrangements, and a social technology (all technologies are social technologies) that would approximate those arrangements, and be made more consistent with those technologies that would approximate a later version of those arrangement—and even if you don’t know how to fill in the gaps, others will, or they’ll discover that they can’t be filled thereby invalidating that form of that political desire.\n\nIf we’re to argue about political ideologies, then, we can transfer those arguments into arguments for political machinery that will constrain the commands issued at various levels in such a way that the commands in their implementation would “look like” the field of ostensives your “ideology” or “philosophy” will have in the end been seeking. Listening to the center means building a world in which you and everyone else could choose your successors in perpetuity, but this also means learning how to choose in many different ways and to select for successors who may not be like, much less the same, as you in any obvious way.\n\nWho will be best suited to carry your work forward 70 years from now? You can only have a vague sense, but it’s still a sense and therefore one that can be improved upon, in part by improving your sense of who might carry the work forward 40 years from now, 20, and 2—doing better in the short term will reduce the vagueness of the long-term (this also makes reducing vagueness in the long run part of what “doing better” in the short run means).\n\nWhat is good? Stringing together declaratives that exhaustively answer questions that have been framed so as to be exhaustively answerable, because they have followed the extension of imperatives aimed at preserving an ostensive that has been created by a string of declaratives that exhaustively answer... Ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives all fit into each other in a way that makes a coherent act embedded in an order of which that act is a fitting piece. This is the linguistic formulation of singularized succession in perpetuity. We are now well positioned to technologize this formulation as well: algorithms are articulations of imperatives and declaratives (if... then sequences deriving instructions from the specifications of a statement being met), with the data being the articulated field of ostensives from which the interrogatives regarding whether conditions have been met are derived.\n\nIf you think algorithmically upon data you will be thinking better and, far from reducing you to the terms of the technology, this form of practice or selving submits the technology to human ordering. When you’re designing an algorithm you’re trying to produce an operational, iterable answer to some question like, “how can we be safer,” “how can we be healthier,” “how can we create clearer images,” and so on, but what the words “safe,” “healthy” and “clear” mean in any of these cases can only be specified by their use within the idioms that have called for (or not) the algorithmic designing. Thinking algorithmically upon data is a form of reflection upon data, and this will become evident as we think algorithmically upon data well beyond the rather simplistic questions we pose now, and start to take all of language, which is to say all possibilities of meaning, as the source of such thinking.\n\nLook at any conversation, even the most trivial and casual, you’ve had lately, and take some unsettled question from that conversation and consider how you might design an algorithm that would reveal the meaning of that question, and you will see that it will be all the more your question, and not one any computer could have generated, as a result of such engagement with technology. (And such straining with language against language will always have something funny about it, because it involves a bit of yielding and deferral.)\n\nLanguage is itself the greatest source of data without which we would have no other data. As you gather data you generate more data, first of all regarding the gathering of data, which refers to chains of preferences, priorities, necessities, traditions, and competencies. We will never be outside of this, and all the playing with self-referentiality of innovative writers over the centuries takes on its direct social and political meaning here. The best way to control for all the “posts” the data you gather, archive, curate and analyze will subsequently open is to be the end point, the singularized successor, of some predecessor, in some way he couldn’t have expected but would nevertheless recognize as his own.\n\nThis comes down to developing a style, and a style that makes explicit and formalizing the learning of idioms coming home in whatever discourse you’re working through. Style is technology—if you imitate and translate another’s style you’ll be saying things you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise; idioms are shared styles, and creating styles of learning idioms is a way of proposing new idioms.\n\nYou enter through someone else’s stylistic singularization of another idiom—there’s no other entry point. A style is always at some distance from the “classical style,” which tries to create the illusion of reader and writer occupying the same scene, with the prose offering a transparent window onto some shared event—even if one is writing in the classical style, you will be at some distance from some other possible version of the classical style since the shared scene is constructed, not given. Everything in the prose marks or conceals some infrastructure making the text possible. You can restrict access to the scene in some way or open it beyond the parameters of classicism, exposing the infrastructural conditions of classical prose itself. Either way there’s some movement between those on the scene and those in the viewed event—someone we’ve been looking at gets called on to come look with us, or someone looking with this finds himself on the scene. Someone sneaks off to go behind the scene or someone from behind the scene is brought. out to center-stage.\n\nAll of these maneuvers depend on making the scene of writing more a scene and that involves linguistic involutions and conversions: words moved from context to context, so that they are marked by and mark the discourse itself, words taking on different shapes, nouns used as verbs, verbs and adjectives nominalized, etc. There will be a large role for language generation and translation programs in the science and technology of style, but one can always begin by carrying out operations on a text and generating a discourse simply by saying what seem to be the differences from the original created by the operations. This is how language becomes more data rich, data driven, data savvy and data converting.\n\nIf your style is compelling and demanding enough, if it’s like a home constructed so as to incessantly test your perceptions, muscles and reflexes, then you’ve built a technology designed to attract potential successors and repel pretenders. And style is not only to be found in writing, but in posture, gesture and patterns of decision making. So, listening to the center ends up meaning maximizing the arrangement of all of your “parts” so as to provide a set of implicit instructions for others to do completely different things that couldn’t have been done without the model.\n\nThink about what’s involved in learning an idiom: imitating the speech of others, semi-randomly, making a lot of embarrassing mistakes; twisting and stretching your own language, in ways you sometime realize after the fact and that often won’t fit; tracking the responses of others more inside than yourself and modifying your attempts accordingly; bluffing, at least on occasion, and figuring out what to do when you get called or the other folds; trying to put into new words thoughts that exceed your present linguistic capacities because they are been drawn out by the new idiom which you haven’t sufficiently mastered so as to express them in it.\n\nThis is the case for learning a new slang as much as entering an academic discipline. Those points where you’re using new vocabulary in a familiar grammar, or familiar vocabulary in a new grammar, are the most interesting ones—that’s also what produces change within idioms, so that the idiom generates new ostensives. A new technology, even the most conventionally conceived one, designed to just make something easier for people, situates its users in this kind of position. But, even while we could examine, say, bridges, in these terms, this description clearly best fits information technologies, which always involve the creation of new discursive rules, new networks, and new observer posts (surveillance), known and unknown.\n\nTreating a new expression as coming as a result of the exhaustion of some attempt at extensive mimesis, when you realize that your attempt to be like everyone else, or like some model, has made you something completely different, and what that will be is yet to be determined, has to be useful. Propose some terms for determining what that new thing will be, and you will have the blueprint of a technology to help you sift through the data flow accumulated for solving your successor problem. And once you say, “when you’re learning a new idiom,” it’s easy to see that we are never doing anything other than learning new idioms and so it’s really just a question of keeping attention on ongoing problems of succession, which is to say, the continuity of order cognizant of maximal possibilities of disorder, that constitutes every use of language."
    },
    {
      "slug": "languaging-ordering",
      "title": "Languaging Ordering",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 14, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/languaging-ordering",
      "content": "I’ve mentioned before Johanna Drucker’s _Diagrammatic Writing_ , a book that “is as much about itself as a book can be,” (self) referring to every element of book creation and design while demonstrating the reality and implications of those elements in the composition and printing of the book itself. My point has always been to put forward this very intense degree of self-referentiality as a model for writing and thinking, but also, and especially here, as a model of human orders which, I will say, should be as much about themselves as possible. This is what I mean by “idiomatic intelligence,” and it can be summed up in the proposition that sociality is and should therefore explicitly be an ongoing festival commemorating its own origin, both that human order itself in all its specificity but that order as a refraction, or translation, or transcription of human origin itself. We could all be chauvinist in asserting some capture of some element of human origin left undetected by others.\n\nMaking human orders as much about themselves as possible involves a practice of translating infrastructures, for which I see literacy and literarity as the model. So, when you tweet, whatever you tweet could be set aside as a phrase, sentence or series of sentences and printed out as a text with some meaning that we could determine and argue about; but in tweeting, you are revealing the Twitter infrastructure which, like any media, becomes invisible as we get immersed in it—so, it’s more like you’re getting Twitter to say something than that you’re saying something through Twitter. This self-referentiality has an abundance of literary and artistic precedents, even if it only become articulated as an agenda in the 20th century avant-garde—rather than, say, “suspend disbelief” and pretend (for yourself?) that the characters in the novel are real people whose experiences you are sharing, you would be reading the novel (and the novel would be written) to reveal various features of narration and the literary devices inherited through millennia of publicly significant story-telling.\n\nAnd this would also include foregrounding usually unnoticed features of texts like printing conventions, publishing and copyright conditions and laws, and so on—all the things that get the novel in your hands in the first place. Indeed, the end point of this is relativizing the boundary between writer and reader and having you compose and be composed by the text.\n\nThe purpose of such literary and artistic strategies is to direct your attention to normally unattended to elements of the scene, to situate you as part of the composition of the scene itself—realizing that everything has been constructed can easily lead to paralyzing cynicism unless you also adopt the obvious corollary, that you’re also doing the constructing. I’m presenting a kind of practice in generalizable terms (that is, anyone, anywhere, could do this things) but doing them will create a thoroughly idiomatic form of intelligence because you’d be directing attention to very specific parts of the “furniture” which can be meaningful only to those who have been using it.\n\nYou are consolidating rather than dissolving the scene by revealing its scenicity. The boundary between what’s on the scene and what’s outside of the scene is therefore posed as a question. As Derrida said about the text, there is no outside of the scene, and I will use that phrase the same way I think he did, which is not to assert a kind of solipsism but to point out that anything outside of the scene is registered as such by the sensory mechanisms of the scene. We could call this the para-scene, modeled on the para-texts that come along with any texts—those things in the text which frame it as a particular kind of cultural object, like index, table of contents, publisher’s information, pagination, and so on, all of which are markers of various histories. Anything you point to as Other is the other of everything you have, along with everyone else, determined to be the Same on the scene.\n\nWe’re at the point, historically, where “exposing the devices” is no longer merely a tactic deployed by those on the margin to arouse those occupying the sleepy norm, but a programming problem. My originary grammar (ostensive>imperative>interrogative>declarative) must ultimately be at the center of this programming of programmers, but it seems it needs some mediation, which might eventually allow it to be introduced more subtly as affordances within other programs. I’ve floated various discursive strategies, derived from, let’s say, para-declarative linguistic modes, so as to provide a home for the grammar: language as prayer (petitioning); the dialectic between “likening” (analog) and the same/other dialectic (digital); and infra-linguistic, fractal writing.\n\nAll will be given their programming form, but here I’ll start with the analog/digital dynamic. Here, you may remember, I followed up on Alexander Galloway’s “The Golden Age of Analog” in the Winter 2022 issue of _Critical Inquiry_ , using that to give some methodological force to my enthusiasm for Paul North’s exploration of the “logic of likeness” in his _Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe_. So, everything is like everything else, and we could endlessly acquire productive observations from identifying likenesses, obvious and bizarre and arbitrary, but at a certain point (and here I rely on the solidity of realizing that “like,” “same” and “other” are all linguistic primes) we need to say these things (or even this thing) are the same, which we do by distinguishing it from some other.\n\nWe could readily see the discovery of likenesses as giving free play to the mimetic imagination, with the digital intervention of the same/other distinction being the deferral needed to not only prevent the immersion in likenesses to make social practice impossible but to sustain that field of likenesses itself.\n\nWe’re always located on a scene, locked in by the center (some implicit mode of adjudication everyone imagines they could draw upon, something we could all swear to), and this scene is always being converted into a disciplinary space where some part of the scene presents as anomalous thereby rendering the entire scene so and therefore a field of inquiry. If the scene appears anomalous, it is like but not only like some other scene, actual or possible—first of all the scene which it presented as anomalous in relation to, but once we’ve noted that we’re off and running and finding as many likenesses as we need to saturate the disciplinary space.\n\nWhat we then do with each pair of likenesses is have them regulate each other. Here, I draw upon the anti-modern ontological theater Andrew Pickering explores in his _The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future_. A sustained engagement between GA and cybernetics is long overdue, especially given that Eric Gans has mentioned that trying to work out the implications of what Gregory Bateson called “pragmatic paradoxes” was crucial to his formulation of the originary hypothesis. The anti-representational cybernetics Pickering is interested in involves the two “objects” that are “like” each other (although I I’m not sure Pickering puts it that way) being placed in a reciprocally transformative and equilibrating relation to each other—rather than one object (generally the linguistic one) representing the other as an independent thing.\n\nThis works equally well as a material project as a thought experiment, and you simply proceed by making the two things as like each other as possible, which in practice would mean having some relation within one of the things control some relation within the other.\n\nSo, let’s take two sports, which are, for starters, like each other in that they’re both sports. I’ll be obnoxiously American (mainly because I don’t get soccer) and choose baseball and football as the two sports. So, my task is to find as many points of similarity between the two sports. Perhaps a touchdown is like a homerun—they both put the ball out of play and reset the field. The quarterback is like the pitcher, in that they both throw the ball, initiate the play, and occupy similarly central positions. They are both discontinuous, with single plays coming to an official end (unlike the continuous play of soccer and hockey).\n\nWe could further examine the specific ways teamwork operates in both sports and find further similarities there. Etc. Now, let’s say we wanted to “peg” the football season to the baseball season (they’re not played simultaneously, but let’s leave that aside as a problem to be solved later). That is, some measurable feature of the baseball season would automatically institute a rule change in the football season, and vice versa. We can have any rationale for this we want or no rationale at all—we might just want to see what happens (and maybe that will generate a rationale for next time). So, if, say, an above average (how do we calculate averages, etc.) number of homeruns are hit 30% of the way through the baseball season football teams are allowed to throw only a below average number of passes for the first 30% of the season.\n\nWe could keep pegging the sports to each other in new ways, and we would get to the point where you couldn’t talk about one sport without talking about the other, and they would become a single “thing,” in some very important respects, with new cultures of media coverage, fandom, statistical analysis, gambling, etc., emerging. We could imagine doing this for the entire sport, or just for selected teams in each sport. We get to the point where the sports are so like each to be the same (not only and always the same, since things never are) in the way anythings are the same, as anchoring points of reference of the central intelligence. Now, further imagine one town doing this with its high school sports teams, and consider how different, how idiosyncratic or idiomatic that town would be relative to even the neighboring towns.\n\nOf course, much of our various infrastructures already bear such cybernetic relations to each other—to take one small example, changes in resources within colleges regarding support for one type of course or major rather than another will be pegged with fluctuations in the job market, and while the job market may be the dominant partner, there is some reciprocity. This is the argument for the “free market” and it might be a good argument if capitalism really operated or could operate this way on larger scales (rather than in the marginal spaces where one must scrounge for resources). The most important things to be pegged don’t get pegged at all—for example, try and identify some correlation between copyright and patent law and its enforcement and intellectual creativity and innovation.\n\nThere’s no feedback from discernable blockages in intellectual invention to IP laws. But there’s some recognition that there should be, even in the formulaic justifications of IP law itself. Here, then, would be a sign of power, and an approximation towards lessening the imperative gap: establishing reciprocally communicating likenesses between this domain of the juridical and the disciplinary. The end point would be something like the subscription model of a tributary economy (but I didn’t use that term) I developed in a GAblog post several years ago, with producers and consumers within different economic units continually adjusting a normal mode of distribution in accord with developments in needs and capacities. This would require both a very high degree of intelligence (“smarts” as well as a continual influx and sifting of information) and idiomaticity (familiarity with precise sets of needs and the human organizations devoted to meeting them).\n\nAs programmers, that is, as actors, or “bearers,” who would like to do more than complain about “injustices” and “tyranny,” if we learn how to point out ways in which institutions and practices can be made more like each other to the point where they’d be controlling each other and thereby allowing new imperatives to enter the system, we would be changing things. As always, there’s a spectrum from the satirical and absurdist (having, say, the changing personas of a pop star pegged to the introduction of legislation) to the directly practical (like the relations between education and industry). We don’t need an ideology to look for ways in which the most exciting prospects in technological development could be made reciprocal with the most impactful pedagogical practices.\n\nIn fact, if we get good enough at this kind of thing, maybe it becomes possible to bypass the pathological and dysfunctional political institutions and processes altogether and build sovereignty directly into these idiomatically intelligent pathways. Tactics for disabling sabotage from state and capitalist institutions alike can be built into the reciprocal regulation. All this is under the umbrella of data security as an operational cybernetic system between ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives. Declaratives are just studies in the fulfillment of imperatives, within a world of competing imperatives (which finds voice in interrogatives), and the fulfillment of any imperative is in a new ostensive, which redeems the ostensive of which the imperative was first of all a prolongation.\n\nNever disobey (that’s an order)—if your self in its scenicity can not obey the most direct command due to the swirling of contrary imperatives, including those coming from the same source, then find some way of obeying more consistently, more coherently, and leave the judgment as to whether you have done so to those who will narrate it, perhaps “unjustly” but also perhaps finding it difficult to avoid leaving traces for more conscientious and inquisitive examiners to gather and reconstruct. Generating a system of likenesses will be very helpful in this regard. This kind of practice involves very high levels of deferral, of the kind needed for the creation of a new officer class (the programmers of programmers).\n\nIt seems that bringing into focus the grammatical sequencing requires ongoing scaffolding of the technics of literacy: an ostensive only emerges within a disciplinary space, and so the problem becomes one of performing disciplinarity in terms of their modifications of practices constitutive of literacy. I’ve been critical of David Olson’s notion of prose as the creation of a simulated scene upon which writer and writer imagine seeing the same thing together, but all that needs to be done here is follow the construction of actual scenes to see that the very goal of imaginary presence functions to include and exclude in complex ways.\n\nSo, “here’s the imperative we’ve been following” has to follow an inquiry into the space upon which we might obey it and can only very suggestively precede it. But the description of the space itself takes place on a scene, one which cannot take the vocabulary of the scene being described as given; while, at the same time, we should know by now that no unalterable meta-vocabulary can be imposed. So I’m going to suggest, and see if I can keep in mind and work out a meta-vocabulary drawn from the practices of literacy, now including programming and media literacy themselves as a way of singling out “meta-ostensives” that enable us to analyze the workings of a disciplinary space.\n\nThe categories of print literacy are most embedded, and the claim that I’m making is something like the following: our thinking is more explicable in terms of the construction of texts in terms of paragraphs, punctuation, pagination, tables of contents, indexes, introductions and conclusions, problems of paraphrase, summary, translation, transcription, transliteration and paratextuality in general than in terms of the “cognitive” concepts that presuppose the stage of “classic prose.” All of these concepts of literacy, to which we will of course add algorithmic thinking (and feeling) along with all the other media that have shaped our thinking and perception (the “user,” “interface” and “address” of the “stack”), and which can be made to serve as indexical signs of the administrative, technological and scientific infrastructures at the origin of all written discourse, do present as requirements (they’re mostly the kinds of things one gets corrected on as a student), which is to say, affordances and ultimately imperatives, and therefore might provide the “platform” for exploring the programming power of the grammar of the center. The direct use of media to describe subjectivity or, as I would prefer, selving, generating likenesses across spaces, would be the lever overturning logocentrism, which has turned out to be far more entrenched than might have been expected."
    },
    {
      "slug": "learncoin",
      "title": "Learncoin",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 21, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/learncoin",
      "content": "Back to the question of pedagogical practices as currency, posing the problem of “units” of learning. Money is a bet on the future; more precisely, it is a partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center, what in capitalism takes the form of discounting against expected future earnings. Money assumes the continuity of the world and then relies on that assumption to introduce discontinuities that the holder of money will be likelier than others to receive a return on. Orderly succession lies in the background of money—if anyone could seize power at any time then it would be impossible to rely on money—it wouldn’t work.\n\nThe outside spread relies upon the continuity of power, to serve as debt forgiving and collecting agency; the outside spread is product of central power, so as to enable central power itself, or that imperial power best positioned to instigate and control discontinuities across the world, to bet on futures itself, on itself as future. So, the default mode is singularized succession, transmitted vertically and horizontally, with government debt introduced so as to fund and hold in reserve outside options, at home and abroad. The thinking of singularized succession, then, must involve thinking the abolition of money; discontinuities, on the terms of singularized succession, are initiated and monitored by the occupant of the center for the purpose of creating pedagogical platforms (mimological impressments) that replenish the centered ordinality.\n\nThinking the abolition of money means thinking the retraction of the system of betting on the future into the accumulation of centered capacities not so much to control or predict the future as to staff it. I’ve come back a few times to the problem of the two centers, i.e., the center as generative origin continued through the occupied social center, on the one hand, and the center as anything upon which joint attention is exercised and which therefore sustains the most trivial conversation, communities large and small, scientific inquiry, and pretty much everything. The conclusion I’ve reached is that the “centripetal” centers, with the emergence of imperial systems, draw our attention away from the social center towards samples, ultimately samples of scenes iterating the originary scene, and we serve the center and donate our resentments to it through the curation of those samples as data that, I can now say, would be suitable for data exchanges in the juridical field.\n\nSo, you make your actions such as clarify the imperative of the center by obeying the best version of the commands issued within your team; you make your speech free of slander, fraud and incitement so it would be of value in any proceeding; and so on. The next move, then, is to say these samples are units of currency, abolishing money from within, insofar as each of them represents a pedagogical increment; you learn and you teach how to fill the imperative gap, you learn and you teach how to scour your discourse for inclinations to indulge the “evil tongue,” and these learnings and teachings are idioms that have their value in the conversions in the actions and speech of others that only make sense by reference to them. An idiom marks, commemorates, a scene of learning, and insofar as that scene of learning is transferable it is transmitted to other scenes, infiltrating and converting them.\n\nRemoving traces of ever not having known something is a mark of having learned it and only deliberate resistance to forgetting can undo the mimetic incentives (the shame of learning) to do so. But this resistance involves assembling those traces so you can help others expedite an otherwise haphazard learning process. Learning always involves rising above some threshold at which single practices come together in a new whole—think, for example, of knowing all the allowable moves of chess without knowing that winning the game meant capturing the king; once you realized that, all the “pieces” would come together. To stick with this example, teaching someone is like telling them from the start the goal of the game so that they don’t have to figure out through experience that this is the only “logical” purpose of moving all the pieces around—but, then again, maybe not always telling them from the start because it is often necessary to be familiar with some of the operations in order to understand the goal (especially when it’s not as simple as winning a game).\n\nThe learning threshold is like, maybe even the same as, the self-dissolving thresholds I examined [a few posts back](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/if-then-the-idiom-of-data-exchange). The perfection of ritual turns the world into a site of ritual observance and thereby abolishes ritual, the perfection of the juridical would make crimes, transgressions and infractions instantly and commensurately answerable thereby making such acts impossible and abolishing the juridical, immersing ourselves in data by supplying it in treated form seamlessly to ritual and juridical sites would make each of us self-studying carriers of actionable data, thereby abolishing the disciplinary.\n\nI’m drawing here upon a line of thinking I’ve had recourse to before, including Gaston Bachelard’s projection that rather than society containing the school, the society will become the school, Marshall McLuhan’s prediction (joined by aligned thinkers like John Cage and Buckminster Fuller) that in the future we will be paid to continue learning, and the artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins who seemed to think that the way to eventually make dying “illegal” was to compose the entire social and technological order as a kind of obstacle course requiring us to study and revise each and every movement as we made it. For center study, this means drawing on the infinite resources of the originary hypothesis, and decomposing and recomposing all of our gestures as possible means of deferral under more or less likely conditions that we are always not only imagining but building infrastructures to test and so reveal more elements of the infra-human.\n\nEveryone is working on the stack, trying to elicit some new way of seeing, hearing, recoding, remixing, reordering—some new way of sampling—that will become extremely desired for an extremely short period of time because it will significantly advantage some team but then for that reason be rapidly assimilated by other teams. The value will reside not in some patented technique or blockchain protected diagram but in the skills, cooperation and devotion of a team that will be as a result elevated within the subscription circulation system. This is what money is to become: the idioms produced by such teams, measured by their reshuffling of the subscription system, driven by leading teams maximizing their gestural economy within that system.\n\nThe preferred idioms will not just be immediately advantageous but immediately advantageous as initiating modifications in the entire succession process, factoring into the selection of candidates for recruitment and promotion, with the down stream effects infinitesimal insofar as they operate within a system hardened by increasingly perfected imperatives but also infinite because such systems will be exquisitely sensitive to the slightest modifications. That is learncoin.\n\nThe prediction market proposed by Thirdness aims at achieving learncoin through a carefully curated market, to serve as a model for other markets, to ultimately get to the point where the tacit assumptions ungirding the market and supported by its makers can become increasingly explicit so as to become something other than a market: a form of ledgering directly interfacing with singularized succession in perpetuity. I’ve been presenting this prediction market as involving a bet on the results of a process of inquiry conducted by a trained team transparent in its theoretical assumptions and reliance on available data so that a decision grounded in real uncertainty between two very clearly delineated and equally likely options will result from further inquiry carried out between the time of posting the options and making the decision.\n\nThis is true, but as the boundary between those whose actions are bet upon and those doing the betting is permeable and meant to become more so, those participating in the market are really betting on their own decision processes: you come to think, once I do a really deep dive here, how might things look different to me? As you come to think this way within the confines of the Thirdness market, you come to think this way more generally, and apply the justice logic of reasoning to every choice, as every choice can most effectively be framed as one between competing claimants. Even you, yourself, are an ongoing process of settling accounts between competing claimants—this is a modification of Charles Sanders Peirce’s assertion that we are each of us an insurance company, because what would insurance companies be without independent arbiters of some kind? There then ensues competition between differing layers of the Thirdness team to make the bets better by making the decisions more nuanced and therefore less predictable, so that there remains something to bet on.\n\nThirdness then has a direct interest in the development of the Stack as a system of data collection and preparation and will be running askew of the originary distribution which is now, and increasingly, a matter of allocating licenses to secure financizable monopolies on knowledge. Thirdness counters the partitioning and parceling of the imperative of the center by creating new forms of adjudication that can transfer financialization and intellectual property to preliminary versions of learncoin, that is, companies that create conditions of succession. Judgments are always judgments on the continuity of the nomos or originary distribution which must be protected from judicial vendettas or lawfare by creating spaces of power as judgment.\n\nThink in terms of the original American colonies as grants by the Crown to individuals and companies of land—we could imagine that the current states would still be owned by those families and companies but over time this mode of governance would have to adapt to the proliferation of claims between subjects, actual and potential, across the governed territory, even just in order to prevent the emergence of “untabernacled” populations outside of the terms of belonging that could be leveraged by other sovereigns, leading them to eventually become data security firms anyway. The development of technology, or the technoscene, or stack of scenes, is thus monitored by Thirdness in terms of its conformity with the needs to formulate and settle cases.\n\nThirdness brings the stack of scenes back to its origins in governance with the purpose of fully converting the stack of scenes into an array of pedagogical platforms that set up cases but always also as sample cases used to train those who will staff institutions. And this returns us to the ancient notion of the government as tutor to the people. To paraphrase the bitcoin advocate Max Keiser, all currencies should go to zero against learncoin, i.e., that pedagogical platform offering the best prospects for generating new modes of deferral into the forseeable future.\n\nWe will always be speaking in terms of deferral because deferral structures and “staggers” reality in terms of signs informing us of our distance from some mimetic crisis. We can never be far enough away from such crises, but at the same time we can be too far, so far that we see no markers of such possibilities and hence start dismantling boundaries that have served to keep mimetic crises at a sufficient distance for productive work to take place. The imperative to turn every possible rivalry into a case maintains the proper distance—the imperative can take the form of a command by those in control of a sphere of activity, or of a demand by those petitioning power to take up a case so as to avoid untabernacling some part of the population, and it can transition into a question: does this need to be converted directly into a case, just yet?\n\nMaybe the rivals can settle it by themselves, or in view of a more informal audience. This kind of judgment—whether to hear the case just yet—creates communities, because those informal means of adjudication and mini-conquests need to be studied so as to determine when the hostage taking necessarily governing such spaces is likely to erupt into a vendetta threatening some point in the nomos; meanwhile, those informal means of settling disputes have a lot to teach those situated within the formal juridical arena, who will therefore always want proximity to them. The disciplines studying such pre-juridical arenas will have at least some sympathy for the virtues they sustain and will be interested in the institutional structures strengthening the loyalties (and resentments) they depend on—above all, I think, structures of kinship, which is to say breeding.\n\nA flourishing gift economy can co-exist with the stack of scenes; indeed, judges and technicians will have their own extended families and will be the ones bringing resources into the gift economy. Whether or not a particular case will be taken will itself be a decision posted on the prediction market—does a case make the threshold to be considered juridically; do the complaints have standing? Each case decided should set a precedent—this is a precondition for posting cases, because only in this way will some learning threshold be passed and learncoin idioms mined."
    },
    {
      "slug": "literature-as-para-data-and-intelligence-exchange-with-the-center",
      "title": "Literature as Para-Data and Intelligence Exchange with the Center",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 24, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/literature-as-para-data-and-intelligence",
      "content": "The purpose of scenic design is revelation: scenes should be designed so as to maximize information coming from the center, which is to say anomalies generated by the selvings across those scenes. We create fields of likenesses, as widely and densely as possible—we generate worlds out of samples—and then we establish parameters that lead us to determine that some of those likenesses are more likely, and eventually the same, against some other. Take a text, institution, or person, and say, “I want more like that”—your process of inquiry will be as outlined here—you will conjure up a range of texts, institutions or people (let’s just say “things”), actual and hypothetical (an increasingly useless distinction), that are like that thing in various ways, kind of like a funhouse mirror showing different features of the thing, and you will tether or align some of those things to your sample, then some of them increasingly closely and then you will arrive at actionable criteria for distinguishing that thing and new forms of that thing from other things.\n\nThe same/other distinction will often be drawn through things that are in many ways very much like each other. And you will in the process have set up a way of refining and updating that distinction as new intelligence comes in (having also set the same/other distinction to work in a field of likenesses such that it brings in a steady flow of helpful intelligence).\n\nWhat will never cease to be the case is that the choice of sample and the terms of likeness determining your search are ultimately human ones, even if you design an algorithm for selecting samples and establishing revisable protocols for establishing terms of likeness. Dealing with artificial intelligences is really, as Elena Esposito points out, _Artificial Communication_ , and I see no difficulty in saying that this is the form communication with the center now takes, an update from ancient soothsaying and prophesying, and more recent statistical analyses. There is always the programmer and the programmer of the programmer.\n\nArtificial communication is scenic design and the creation of modes of deferral—the results of the algorithm create constraints on our deliberations and inquiries, making a defense of the integrity of data collection, preservation and analysis a defense of civilization. And what counts as “integrity” here is also intrinsically human—“human” in the sense of that being that poses a greater threat to its own existence than is posed by any external danger, and which therefore defers violence through representation. The databank, far more than the “market,” vindicates the originary hypothesis. And here’s what I mean by the “integrity” of the data and its irreducibly human dimension: let’s say you are in the midst of a pandemic (once the spread of a certain pathogen has reached the threshold at which governing institutions determine it to be a “pandemic” for reasons of funding and bureaucratic activation), and some group of scientists has developed a vaccine aimed at immunizing people against the pathogen being spread.\n\nNow, they’ve done their laboratory tests on subjects and used the available data to simulate the various likely outcomes of the use of the vaccine but none of this is a substitute for seeing how it will actually work in the field where there are still incalculables—so, of course, the population, even if you’re very confident about the vaccine, is to some extent a testing subject population—at the very least, you’re going to be gathering data from the varied responses to the vaccine over time, continually revisiting the data. If, that is, you are really and only interested in seeing to what extent the vaccine works as hypothesized.\n\nThe decision to develop a vaccine in the first place is a human one, though, even if that decision could to some extent be automated (any decision can be and, to reference Derrida, in some sense “always already” is, automated). It might be a very easy decision, but whether it is an easy decision or not is also humanly determined. There is probably a case to be made for relying upon the human immune system and directing resources to making the human immune system more robust, rather than getting into the habit of immunizing against more and more diseases. The enormous pool of test subjects you now have at your disposal is also human, and they will not all equally embrace being test subjects, or having immunization prioritized over immune system robustness, or they may have questions about this particular vaccine or the institutions producing it, or they may just not like being told what to do.\n\nAll these responses are also data and provide information regarding that test population and the “experts’” own way of handling the pandemic—and, more broadly, indications of levels of trust in political, media and medical institutions. And these responses are mediated by ritual and juridical institutions, which might consider certain medical interventions to be off limits, or certain kinds of consent to be required—these ritual and juridical institutions are already embedded in the scientific or disciplinary institutions. Here is the real test for those charged with designing responses to the pandemic: can they get just as interested in this entire range of responses as they are in the narrower question of the efficacy of the vaccine?\n\nIn a genuinely “information” order, the answer would be “yes”: the medical experts would naturally view their administration of the vaccine as also a form of communication with the population (otherwise, you must ultimately come to see yourself as “defending” your hypothesis against “opponents,” in which case you have left the disciplinary scene for a very poorly designed pseudo-juridical one). This wouldn’t dictate any particular response to these responses—it’s easy enough to imagine a pandemic deadly enough that rapid and coerced vaccination, overriding normal concerns about rights and processes, would be necessary—whether something is indeed necessary can sometimes only be meaningfully judged after the fact (and having institutions that can perform those meaningful judgments is also part of an information or “revelatory” society). But prior to and encompassing these practical decisions must be the continual enhancement of the broader “sensorium” taking in the human dimensions of new scenic designs.\n\nEven in such a “sensitive” information order, scenic designers would be making decisions aimed at maintaining linguistic presence (at aligning ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives) on terms they don’t fully comprehend within those decisions. There’s always a constitutive outside to any scene, and any scene generates anomalies. This is far more the case now, when we are very far away from such a “sensitive” order and are not necessarily even progressing in that direction. Discrepancies between practices and hypotheses need to be brought into view, because institutionalized practices will aim at restricting hypotheses to those that maintain the institution thereby excluding some that would address anomalies generated by those practices.\n\nThis should be the role of artists today. The ideal artist today is one fascinated by those anomalies that those immersed in the practice (that is, the most skilled and dedicated practitioners) simple can’t see precisely by virtue of being so, and so necessarily, immersed. The artists are interested in why the medical experts can’t get interested in vaccine hesitancy as crucial data. For the artist, this inability is data, even if immeasurable. There is some very interesting visual art being produced today doing this kind of thing (Trevor Paglin’s work—dealing with recording/surveillance technologies—is the best example I can think of now), that is, getting under the skin of the infrastructure, but I’ll focus on the art I’m best equipped to speak of: literature.\n\nI want to call literature that inhabits the anomalies of ritual, juridical and disciplinary spaces “para-data”—it’s certainly not “meta” data, which is already a familiar term and refers to developments intrinsic to data collection and “registration” itself. It might be “infra” data (I’m very partial to the “infra”) but I’ll stick with the para and paregonal for now. The role of literature is to frame the framing of data—and then to frame that framing. Only literature of some avant-garde tradition is going to be useful here, because what defines the avant-garde is precisely that it doesn’t take the frame of author-reader communication as given and hence best left invisible.\n\nIf you assume literature occupies the space of classic prose, where reader and writer share a scene wherein the writer just describes actions that could very well be taking place on that scene in full view of the “spectators” then the game is lost from the start. Such an understanding of literature treats literature as another disciplinary space, one that provides us with knowledge of “human nature.” But even the mode of knowledge of human nature I’m naturally most sympathetic to, i.e., that we are all mimetic beings and that mimesis leads to rivalry, etc., is essentially bureaucratic knowledge if the writer’s own place within the operations of mimesis is not included in its articulation.\n\nIf your writing is not enacting an engagement with the forces of mimesis, presented as a testing and fortification of the institutions of deferral, you are refuting your own thesis and encouraging complacency in your reader who now has this special knowledge making him better than others (i.e., more cognizant of their mimetic compulsions, which in turn proves my own greater control over my own).\n\nLiterature or, to make more explicit my retrieval of the more advanced mode of literacy I take the “post-structuralist” theorists (and “postmodern” authors like, to take just one example, Christine Brooke-Rose [also a post-structuralist theorist]) to be aiming at, the “literary,” is para-disciplinary as well as para-data. Mimesis, resentment and deferral present differently in every case, and they are infrastructurally mediated, so if you’re going to detect by humanly registering them you need to be alongside (“para”) those infrastructural mediations. Writers can be “para” in lots of different ways, but I feel pretty certain that describing “realistic” characters, depicting their “inner lives” with care, and situating them within “plausible” plots leading to some kind of revelatory and satisfying “climax” is not going to be the way.\n\nAll of our inherited literary devices were designed to address specific infrastructural conditions—melodramatic degenerations of tragedy might have made some sense in, say, the transition to industrialized settings, but events and conversions take place differently now because we have different recording and measuring implements. It is language itself that must be probed—language is the “black box” of the current order. What is language other than a means of programming? Theories of communication and semiotics will have no answer. Here is where the centrality and indispensability of the originary hypothesis lies—all of the relations between what anyone says and what anyone does involve exchanges or negotiations regarding the construction of more or less complex labyrinths designed to ensure we don’t all do the same thing at the same time.\n\nIn order to avoid everyone doing the same thing at the same time (which would entail a kind heat-sensor directed search for the one who is not doing the same thing right now) we all try to say the same thing, translating and transcribing our utterances (“samples”) into as many different forms as possible. Saying the same thing as someone situated elsewhere on the scene involves activating all of the infrastructural resources of that scene—identifying and eliciting the signs of those infrastructural resources and the meanings they might take on beyond that scene is the work of the literary. Learning new ways of taking phrases for a walk might be the future of literature. And this would mean endlessly renewing the Name-of-God.\n\nThose who have been reading my work for a while might recall that I periodically have recourse to a kind of aesthetic criteria for, to be blunt, replacing the outmoded, philosophically compromised concepts of “ethics” and morality.” Eric Gans’s redefinition of these terms is a failure—as I’ve pointed out fairly recently, he ends up turning morality into a resentful subversion of the ethical—which is tantamount to redefining “morality” as “immorality.” I won’t review the intellectual process that, it seems to me, led him to this pass. It’s better to move on, starting with the simple fact of the existence of the word “should” (in English, of course—other languages, I suspect, are more likely to just have something closer to “must”)—how are we able to say that someone “should” or “must” do something or refrain from doing something?\n\nWell, let’s keep it simple, as Gans himself regularly enjoins us to do, and say that we demand of others (issue imperatives) that they say what they mean and mean what they say, which can be further reduced to doing what they say and saying what they do. There is a kind of universal claim here, but one that is instantly relativized because what can be said and done varies vastly across historical scenes. But we can always say that if what someone does is at odds with what they say I don’t really know what they’re saying. And in that case I don’t know how to say the same thing as them. (And what will count as such a discrepancy is part of the problem, and requires assuming a position on the scene.)\n\nWhat remains is to put this to the test, and the aesthetic criterion I referred to in the previous paragraph would involve constructing scenes in order to do just that. The example I’ve referred to a few times is Hamlet’s construction of a scene wherein to “catch the conscience of the king”—the assumption here is that in watching a portrayal of his own act of murder Claudius will in his reaction reveal the discrepancy between what he has done and what he is saying—further implicit in this is that we tend to want to reduce discrepancies between what we say and what we do, which must be the case because even sociopaths must at least want to keep their lies as simple and easily remembered as possible.\n\n(On the originary scene such a consistency between “saying” and “doing”—putting forth the gesture and not advancing toward the central object—is of course absolutely essential). Hamlet’s scenic design works, and the tragedy of the play is that he abandons this “method,” which had the potential of inducing regret and confession from Claudius. Anyway, it is in thinking about generalizing this “method” that I arrived at the specific types of scenes that are already designed so as to elicit such revelations, and as I argued a few posts back, I don’t see any objection to reducing them to the ritual, juridical and disciplinary scenes (as long as the ritual is understanding more broadly as scene-setting and commemoration).\n\nThe literary, then, is “para-site” (alongside of) these scenes. A lower level of the literary, more suitable for entertainment for bureaucrats, accentuates the kinds of revelations these scenes prime us to anticipate and hope for, like the dramatic courtroom confrontation or confession. But literature in the proper sense is a mode of inquiry into the limits and anomalies of these scenes, especially through making explicit the way the scenes infiltrate each other in ways each must disavow and cannot see simply by virtue of being on the scene. Only through the literary can we sustain the kind of openness that resists the temptation to found scenes on expulsion, and some form of advanced literary training will be required for the new officer class, the programmers of programmers, the ultra-literate scribes.\n\nIn my previous post I suggested rethinking the “cognitive” in terms of features of textuality rather than logic, and we could extend this across the infrastructure—speaking of the presumably “ethical” concept of “accountability,” for example, implicates us in juridical institutions dealing with economic exchange, administrative auditing and other very concrete practices of power and exchange with the center—but it is precisely through the literary that these infrastructural traces in language can be elucidated, which brings us back to textual infrastructures. Sentences, punctuation, paragraphs, indexes, etc., are all simultaneously administrative and cognitive and the only practices irreducible to one or the other and therefore “transcendent” are those making visible these infrastructures of literacy. The acquisition of this mode and level of literacy qualifies one for the kind of data security and programming of programmers practices that will set to rights our relation to the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "media-as-infrastructural-translation",
      "title": "Media as Infrastructural Translation",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 03, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/media-as-infrastructural-translation",
      "content": "The articulation of ritual, juridical and scientific scenes I’ve been working on the last few posts open up a new approach for a discourse on media. I’ve been working with the ritual/myth binary, grounded in imperative exchange with the center, for quite a while: ritual enacts an originally sacrificial exchange with the being at the center and myth accounts for when the promises extracted from the center are not fulfilled. A tribe hunts deer, so their deity is the deer-god—in killing the “token” deer, the group brings the kill to the ritual center, returns some of it to the deer-god (the “type” deer) and, more generally, treats the meal with honor and respect, as the gift that it is.\n\nThe deer-god, in return, agrees to donate some of its flock, or people, to the tribe. Sometimes the deer are hard to come by—how could that be? Here’s where myth enters, building very precisely on top of and out of ritual—the two, in fact, are articulated in prayer, recited during the ritual—some failure to fulfill the terms on the part of the members of group is the most likely explanation, and this leads to all kinds of inter-personal dynamic (who is guilty? who let us down?) and introspection (was it me? was my will crooked even if my actions were straight? Etc.).\n\nThe creation of juridical structures under monarch/judges, independent of, but certainly still embedded in and imitative of, ritual, is generative of entirely new theological, scientific and literary discourses. I wonder how much of an exaggeration it would be to say that every single literary work depends upon some “case”—some situation in which “justice” is demanded, denied, received, tested, questioned, literally or metaphorically. Look even at lyrics and love poetry and see how often charges of “betrayal” or a failure to fulfill some obligation, some violation of trust, all of which invoke some image of juridical proceedings, some demand that someone judge between us, are at the center of the discourse.\n\nIn a ritual order, resentment is directed at those who perform the ritual incorrectly; in a juridical order, resentment is directed at those who don’t deal justly, i.e., in terms that would be affirmed by the authoritative judge we imagine through models from our tradition. There can’t be any more important question, then, than what it means to deal justly—with God, with others, with our social order, with ourselves. All of our narratives are attempts to answer that question, or to teach each others how to prepare themselves to do so.\n\nA just order, in fact, would be (by definition) one in which judges ruled: there are institutional relations in which everyone is allotted a role governed by tacit and explicit conventions and rules and disagreements and complaints are either settled informally, on the model of how they would have been settled formally, or they are taken to court, to be settled formally. Everything—property damage, adultery and other sexual transgressions, slander, fraud, murder, could all be handled this way—and once was, more or less. This order was undone by the claim that the judge could himself be unjust, and in need of judgment; once this case is made (also in juridical terms—the king is marked as a criminal, a traitor, etc.) then we have “politics,” meta-juridical procedures for ensuring that whoever is judge for the moment can in turn be judged.\n\nThis in turn leads to the creation of whole new disciplines dedicated to determining the logic or grammar by which the judge can be judged, by whom, in accord with which procedures ensuring that the judges of the judge could themselves withstand judgment in turn.\n\nThis is really a form of disorder that I think is specific to the “West,” and responsible for its glories and well as its deformities and pathologies. I take a minimal definition of the “West”: in the West I include all the successor states of the Western Roman Empire. There might be some boundary issues involved in applying this definition but I think it would hold up pretty well and be illuminating. Rome articulated the three social orders that were bold enough to place the occupant of the center on permanent trial: the Greek city-states, fiercely anti-monarchical in their prime; the Judaic quasi-nation, gaining and losing limited forms of sovereignty that never recognized the imperial order imposing those limitations as fully legitimate; and the Roman Republic itself.\n\nIf there’s one thing that all the citizens of the West have in common, and that differentiates them from “the rest,” it is being on perpetual hair-trigger to denounce as illegitimate whoever happens to occupy the center at the moment. Insofar as we are of the West, we feel it is our obligation to be so prepared. Any reordering of the West will have to address this, but that won’t be done effectively if we forget that this permanent, inbred suspicion of the center results from the ancient empires’ creation of masses of non-people existing outside of the sacred order. We will not be able to uncommemorate the recognition of the victim of violence who, in certain events, stood in for those masses and bore the brunt of imperial violence in their name, even if unintentionally and retrospectively.\n\nThat may have been a digression, but it may also help us to zoom in on the functioning of the media. The media is speech and writing publicized, transmitted, broadcast and preserved through technological and pedagogical—scenic—infrastructures. We have “media” rather than “myth” or “scripture” insofar as we have propagated scenes purporting to judge those who judge those who... That is, the “media” corresponds to desacralized power, and is organized constitutively and pre-emptively against the “tyrant,” that creation of desacralized power. In the West, the Christian forms of kingship served as a bulwark against the outbreak of the media, while the means for deposing those kings and demolishing those forms of kingship were created along with more rapid and expansive forms of media.\n\nI’m not going to go through the history of media from the Renaissance to the present but something fundamentally new happens with the emergence of the “press” in the 19th century. Now, all authorities, from the highest government official to the lowliest impoverished parent, can be placed on trial, and are placed on trial, in a way and at a rate that follows inscrutable battles within the bowels of the state and obeys the rigor of publishing deadlines and subscription numbers. All of the sensory and psychological transformations we can trace from the printing press and through the universalization of literacy and “print capitalism” to today’s electronic media can be discussed in terms of each individual being placed with ever greater regularity and urgency on perpetual “call” to add one’s own voice in judgment to the crowd directed at the target of the day—but also in terms of the intense desire to be exempt from that judgment.\n\nThe technology increases the rapidity with which we move from one scene to the next and oscillate between the positions of spectator and participant. The unbridgeable gap from the attitude of readiness to condemn and one’s complete inability to affect events is filled with simulations, identifications and antagonisms that one must always assign a virtual proxy to perceive, enjoy and engage. Much of the media generated consumer culture, meanwhile, is the ongoing promise to make us the kind of person who has an a priori stamp of approval from the crowd and therefore need not fear the roving scenes of judgment—you can even hope to repel judgments and boomerang them back on those who would make them.\n\nThis is what media generated scenes entail, and we could examine the way mass-produced fictions provide revenge, vindication and salvation fantasies of realizing these virtualities in forms marked by regression to ritual order while occasionally (when some rogue operator can momentarily commandeer the machinery) alienating us from and satirizing those fantasies. There is, now, a more scientific or disciplinary component to the media, insofar as it is curated and organized through algorithms and the authority of the disciplines is used to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable positions, but this just refines the practice of instigating increasingly automated and closely controlled simulated “citizen’s arrests,” provocations, and confidential informants.\n\nThe press was no less dishonest and scurrilous than the media today—there is no call for any nostalgia here. All the media does is stage trials and invite the audience to participate vicariously as judges, jurors and, increasingly, enforcers. This cannot be fixed. The current mania among leftists to stem “disinformation” is breathtakingly dishonest and itself the greatest source of disinformation today but this strategy has been chosen because the previous mechanism for control of information—large monopolized media companies with professionalized staffs working in close but deniable collaboration with their government “sources”—has broken down, and large scale coordination may, in fact be seriously disabled by the proliferation of incommensurable sources of information. On some level, we all have to be able to say that the same thing happened, and it has become easy to imagine that becoming impossible. But the juridical framing of the media might provide a clue to reforming it, by which I mean completely shutting it down and replacing it with something radically different.\n\nThe juridical provides the frame for determining what counts as “news,” or what the public has a “right to know.” No one, I think, will claim to have a right to know what his neighbors discuss at their dinner table, because it’s not a public proceeding, which is to say, not a proceeding subject to some kind of formal, juridical oversight. If my neighbor beats his wife and the police come and haul him away, it has become part of a public proceeding, and now I have a right to know, which is to say, to enter the case vicariously as judge or juror, surround the scene, bay for justice. But we only expect to be provided with this spectacle because we feel ourselves to be called upon sit in judgment upon the judges, and those who judge the judges, and so on (one media company will now call upon us to sit in judgment on another media company).\n\nThat’s the assumption behind a public proceeding. We eliminate the spectacle by insisting that only those with standing in a case, or called in to exercise some institutionally sanctioned judgment, need to know what has happened. If there’s some form of neighborhood justice that I am obliged to participate in, then my neighbor’s treatment of his wife might very well be my business; but otherwise, not. The juridical system still seems capable of imposing closure and secrecy on cases being judged when it really wants to, so the principle could be extended. If I help to render judgment as I am duly obliged to in my neighbor’s case, can I now speak about it to others, and allow word to spread, thereby defeating the entire purpose of making proceedings “privileged,” rather than “public”?\n\nI probably couldn’t be stopped from doing so, but part of such a regrounding of the juridical would be the right granted to my neighbors—maybe the husband and wife themselves, but maybe members of their families or others carrying out their sworn duty—to sue me for unauthorized disclosures or misrepresentations. But how would injustices be exposed? They might not be, but a robust appeals system that remedies them would be better. A remaking of the juridical order drawing upon existing institutions with some modifications—making libel and defamation laws more robust, expanding the range of “gag orders”—could easily be imagined that might accommodate the privileging of the privileged scene.\n\nWhat would the vast media infrastructure we now have be for, if not to continually alert us to and position us in relation to the latest injustice perpetrated by some tyrant? Would we all just “talk about our day”? Are we to expect that we all spend the time returned to us as we are released from the compulsion to remain glued to screens boning up on the classics? What follows from the determination that a desire to know about events which you are not in fact required to judge is the very definition of “obscene”? For that matter, if there are still to be fictional narratives, what are they to be about? What people will not only have a “right” to know but need to know are the actions through which they are being included in the work of ensuring social continuity.\n\nI’ll repeat in abbreviated form the alternative to media spectacles I hypothesized in _Anthropomorphics_. Those in charge of institutions are in charge of those institutions insofar as they select their successors and once they grasp that responsibility they will want to choose successors who will be equipped to choose their successors, and so on. This will be universally recognized as an extremely important decision, and an extremely difficult and dramatic one. There would be twists and turns—changed circumstances, or new assessments on the part of those in charge would elevate the hopes of one candidate and dash those of another—but the infrastructure of the scene would be such that no one could display any emotion other than a desire that the best candidate be chosen (a form of attitude management we are familiar with from well-run sporting events and, for that matter, beauty pageants).\n\nCandidates will be selected and tested, which means that institutions will be designed so as to produce such candidates, from top to bottom—whether we have presidents or kings, or CEOs or something new, there will continue to be social “heights” focused, as I have been arguing recently, on data security, and they will set the tone for the more local events.\n\nMedia obscenities would be completely unacceptable simply as a matter of the enormous data spillage and spoilage it involves—the media spectacles we gobble up today would provoke a visceral disgust. The practices of succession would be carefully staged, orchestrated and choreographed; they will reach deep into all social practices and disciplinary spaces which would be designed so as to enact their own succession practices and produce candidates. Genuinely newsworthy events, like those regarding public safety, would be dealt with in a privileged manner but represented within the frame of putting forward candidates for succession.\n\nFamilies and regions would engage in vigorous competition over their suitability to produce candidates—they would celebrate and take pride in the selection of candidates they produce, and take a keen interest in the probity and relevance of the selection process. In this case, carefully curated and authorized representations of privileged processes might be submitted to public scrutiny, but in accord with a timing and in a context that eliminates any sense that there is a “public” being called upon to judge in unison (most of us would probably be able to discuss and make judgments upon what were highly controversial cases years ago in a calm, disinterested manner); at the same time, that each system would want to show all its “systems” to be in order would create a sense of responsibility for handling matters of justice.\n\nThose in charge would have access to the information needed to preside over scenes of succession, and since the stakes of getting it right would enormous, attempts to falsify the records surrounding the promotion of candidates would be impossible. Today the media translates an infrastructure predicated upon an infinite and accelerating practice of vicarious judgment; under inscripto-punctualism. an infrastructure predicated upon the privileging of the privileged scene would produce a world of shared performances and narratives that would be both extremely captivating and unironically wholesome. It would maximize the sporting and competitive spirit so evident in the West (perhaps a positive result of its hostility to any occupant of the center) and the media technology we have, including social media, is with the necessary modifications especially well-suited to projecting such scenes of succession."
    },
    {
      "slug": "media-as-ritual",
      "title": "Media as Ritual",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 04, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/media-as-ritual",
      "content": "I would like to complement [my earlier discussion of media](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/media-as-infrastructural-translation), which situated the operations of media within a juridical framework, with a broader discussion of media as orchestrating specific forms of post-sacral ritual. The mass media, and now social media, do perpetually position us as judges on events involving some purported transgression, commanding us to “take a position” and add our little quantum of power to whatever target is being displayed on the Big Scene (and Big Screen). This keeps us perpetually locked into oscillations kept within the Overton window and ensures our ongoing contributions to media-governing-financial complexes.\n\nBut this operation is itself possible insofar as the media scales up and distributes scenes by making them “tele-,” i.e., distanced. Think about what it took to place governing, or the occupied center, on display prior to the 19th century—it was necessary organize gigantic ceremonies, festivals, pageants, etc., which could only be done on special occasions, like coronations and inaugurations. Since the invention of radio, at least, such scenes could be composed daily.\n\nRitual is most fundamentally commemoration and scene-setting. Scaled up scenes created through distance-abolishing communications are more abstract, in the sense of singling out a very few features of the scene for attention and vicarious participation, as opposed to the “lush” immersion in a specific community in a specific building with elaborate and tactilely experienced rituals. The scaled up scene marginalizes and reshapes, and often abolishes the local scene. The self needs to be decomposed and recomposed in order find such a scaled up scene inhabitable—much of the 20th century entailed such work on the self.\n\nResponses controlled on a scene with extensive references to previous iterations need to be rewired to be suitable for a range of distanced and filtered scenes, and the old responses must remain in our memory for generations without any guarantee that they will be replaced in a coherent way. It’s easy to see why so many mid-century scientists and spooks and eventually drop-outs got interested in experiments in consciousness. We have here a new mode of governance, one predicated on the systemic and ritually enacted deposition of the occupant of the center, but also on a new mode of distribution organized through finance, which is required if everyone’s living conditions involves buying a home, and maybe moving to another home several times in the course of a lifetime, or renting, and probably moving many more times in that case, and furnishing that home with obsolescing devices needed to plug one into the media and technological system.\n\nIn other words, media as ritual, keeping in mind that ritual always means distribution from the center, necessarily entails consumerism. The new principle of governance is that turnover at the center be accelerated while the means of domination and control be increasingly centralized, thereby intensifying the behind the scenes work of keeping in place reliable bureaucracies themselves reliably open to the influx of publicly and privately funded intelligence from the media and academy.\n\nOn the face of it, this seems to be a very demystified arrangement—in exchange for allowing themselves to be denuded of traditional appurtenances and transformed into an operational element within a machinic structure, the technologized self receives a standard of living that by most standards is higher and more secure than any available previously. That was the promise, often fulfilled, other times reasonably hoped for, and the exchange was probably, implicitly at least (the question is never posed this explicitly), for many an acceptable bargain. In this case, the bargain is utilitarian, and not ritual at all. But focusing on the media helps us to demystify this demystification.\n\nModern mass-mediated consumerism is a cult. You receive, along with your house in the suburb, TV and automobile, badges and emblems of belonging, models to emulate, forms of movement and new modes of seeing and hearing. And in return you supply endorsements, of specific products and institutions, and of the system of consumerism itself. There’s nothing yet particularly “critical” in any of these observations, at least if one is willing to acknowledge that governance is always cultic. And there’s always much that is brutal and demeaning in any mode of governance, and a dose of manipulation, self-delusion and cynicism in any cult. If we are to recognize this system as in crisis, or as having failed, we will have to do a better job of it than by contrasting it with some other order that we idealize precisely for the purpose of presenting it as superior to this one.\n\nThe emergence of contemporary algorithmic governance, as an extension, transformation and perfection of the system of mass mediated consumerism, and also as its potential transcendence, should help us to develop the analyses that might enable those who see the most to do the most good and least harm in repairing institutions. The “production of subjectivities,” which earlier generations of critical theorists alleged to be the implicit agenda of modern educational, entertainment and communication systems is now quite explicitly engaged in by the overlords of social media. Think about how rough, haphazard and wasteful mid-20th century attempts at the formation of consciousness through advertising and TV sitcoms was—we can only think about that (rather than being awed and horrified as those earlier generations of critical theorists were) because we can see the increasing precision with which your own personalized desire can be anticipated and constructed through an ongoing series of iterations drawing upon your past purchases, IRL movements, job choices, internet searches, etc., and of those of people “like you.”\n\nAnd what you donate in return—what the media companies receive—is also far more explicit and precise. Ford Motor Company broadcasting a commercial on CBS in 1955 was taking a shot in the dark, hoping this publicity will marginally increase sales and ephemera like “public good will.” Today Facebook, Google, Twitter et al know exactly what they want from you: data. And this data is highly useful to them even if you don’t buy the products advertised on their sites—indeed, your refusal to buy commodities provides them with data. Indeed, “wokeness” is essentially the synthesis of the figure of the victim derived the Auschwitz theology created through the Nuremberg Trials and the figure of the consumer branded by and providing branding for the financing of turnover at the center.\n\nI have written of this often as data exchange with the center, and as, through the conversion of assets into data, the means by which we can move into a tributary order governed in accord with the imperative to provide to each according to his needs and ask from each according to his abilities. In other words, an order of teams interfacing with other teams, all sharing a common interest in deriving new ostensives from our artificial world. Far from revising any of that here, I’m continuing that inquiry by directing attention to the problem of infiltrating distancing scenes and retrieving from them originary events in the form of disciplinary spaces.\n\nAssets are converted into data by displacing the cult of maintaining the show trial of the occupant of the center in increasingly granular ways with the cult of singularized succession in perpetuity. Resistance in general to “donating” your data is pointless, not only because record keeping has always been built into governance and is now built into all technology in the form of memory, but because anything you, person of the right or person of the left, would ever want your ideal government to do, would require massive amounts of data. How, exactly, do you think “universal health care” would be operationalized? Or, for that matter, enabling each family to afford a private home with a single salary?\n\nThat would also involve targeting very specific institutions in very specific and sustained ways. Similarly, surveillance is terrifying because government totally weaponized by private-public factions in stealth war with other factions is terrifying—and you wouldn’t be able to eliminate routine surveillance as long as the state is organized that way anyway. If you could dramatically reorganize governance, the question of surveillance would take on a different cast as well.\n\nThinking of the media-technological-consumerist complex in ritual terms, as a distribution of scenes at various scales that rivet attention to screens and platforms on which simulated and occasionally real sparagmos are performed allows us to pose the question of how to wrench attention away from those scenes/screens. I think the answer lies in the kind of para-data-cal forms of literacy I have been exploring in recent posts. Such modes of literacy can only be mastered by small minorities at this point, even if there is no need to assume any essential limits on how widespread they might become. Think of all the critiques, repeated each generation with little variation, of how literacy, attention spans, self-control, etc., are diminishing due to the media.\n\nLet’s assume they’re all true—in that case, think of all the power and responsibility that accrues to those able to resist that trajectory and increase their levels of literacy, intelligence, attention, and self-control. They become intelligence agents, training themselves to become ever more sensitive to ripples within juridical and disciplinary systems, turning the traces of textuality detected into actionable intelligence to be supplied to infrastructures of the center. The right kind of intelligence will constrain the operations of the center, first of all by introducing the same distinction within governing institutions as you have drawn within the broader society, between those absorbed in the cults of throwing all who gesture toward centrality in the flame and those building filters selecting for occupants of the center who will select their successors.\n\nIt's good to be able to move in and out of those tele-screenic-scenes—to move from treating some “iconic” movie character as state propaganda, as a triviality, as an exaggerated focal point on which everything depends and upon which everyone must have an absolutely clear position, etc. This showcases new modes of literacy, including “media literacy,” makes the more mobile self attractive, and elicits data that make it possible to explore further anomalies within ritual, juridical and disciplinary arenas. These various scenes at scale and at a distance presuppose the Big Scene (that everyone can see the linear progress connecting your political party, your favorite movie franchise, the pop singer you’re “obsessed” with, etc.) but mostly break it up.\n\nNarrative produced within the Hollywood entertainment industry and the DC political industry don’t map onto one another anymore, and when attempts are made to have them do so the seams always show and can be shown upon some para-scene. What it is imperative to resist, however mobile your scenic operations, is the desire to destroy, engulf, incinerate, the figure you see at the center. War, sure, if you are cognizant of the ritual, juridical and disciplinary implications of war-making and can mobilize the resources—but war is something different than the addiction to constant turnover at the center, replacing one hate/worship/dominating figure with another.\n\nA mark of the new officer class is that it will restore the proper relation between ritual, juridical and disciplinary (which is also the order of ostensive, imperative and declarative)—this will in itself call for ruthlessness and will be sufficient in addressing all the degeneration, dysfunction, subversion, etc., you see all around you. I propose the originary event as the model of ritual, to be fitted to all scenes, at whatever scale and across whatever distances. You will all, sooner or later, see the “utility” of placing the deferral of violence at the center.\n\nEvery new ritual (which, again, also means “economic”) order is to some extent predicated upon disowning and incorporating elements of the preceding ritual order—here, as elsewhere, the Hebrew Bible provides us with an enormously rich model. A ritual order replacing one that places the figure of the consumer and her marginal utility at its center (the consumer is the target of the advertising that all the data collection feeds into, the consumer must be prepped, the consumer is processed—at times sacrificed—through the financial system) would best put the prospective team member who will reveal the previously unseen hole in your team at the center.\n\nIn other words, the entire system, from production through consumption, including all its celebrations, pedagogies and commemorations, should be predicated on making a space for he who will make the space you are making. Every team within the teaming order is following up on the implications of its latest task into the formulation of the next one and is therefore always breeding and recruiting, which means being on the look-out for someone without yet knowing who he is or what he looks like. This is part of what I’ve been calling open-source messianism. If resources are now deployed in such a way as to minimize the risk that you nevertheless want to be rewarded for (as you inflate the future earnings to be discounted against the value of your assets), resources should instead be deployed so maximize the likelihood of arrival of the unknown indispensable.\n\nTeams would make a case to other teams with whom they engage in regular transactions both that they are best able to supply the team on a scene that will maximize that likelihood, and that others should do the same to support the space each team builds to welcome that unknown indispensable. This is an “economics,” i.e., a tributary relation to the center. Part of the value of this conception is that to maintain it you would also have to maintain an appropriately ritualized horror at the entire apparatus of the turnover center that will have been overturned at such expense and with the acquisition of a vast wealth of anthropological knowledge."
    },
    {
      "slug": "modeling-thirdness-2",
      "title": "Modeling Thirdness 2",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 27, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/modeling-thirdness-2",
      "content": "Starting to answer the question of how to model Thirdness, in particular the justice realizing into suspending notion of data exchange, quickly led to the conclusion that in the place of anything like “policy” comes modifications of the Stack, or technoscene, or the global sensing, measuring, computing, mapping and simulating machinery. This is tantamount not so much to asking what “we” would like to see, hear and touch, as what kind of feedback can each of us, at various points downstream from those considering updates and changes in protocols as prompted by that machinery itself, provide to those upstream? Seeing, hearing and touching are only secondarily (at best) the point here—what passes through the technoscene, or stack of scenes is a range of probabilities regarding possible responses to data passing through machine learning algorithms.\n\nJustice is an essential point of intervention here because what pretty much all conservative and reactionary thinkers consider the problem of the present, “wokeness,” or, in the GA vernacular, the “victimary,” is really the conversion of the juridical order into a means of deploying the vendetta at the level of the originary distribution against anyone appearing capable of leveraging succession against the parceling out of the imperative of the center. The parceling out of the imperative of the center means that a calculated strategy of betting against those most dedicated to the creation and transmission of practices of data security can not only break those lines of transmission but can turn those very practices against them.\n\nData can be carefully gathered curated and analyzed for the sake of criminalizing those who would further extend those practices. Hijacking the juridical norms against defamation, incitement and fraud is indispensable to this agenda, and so re-embedding those norms in the stack of scenes is a precondition of establishing singularized succession. Thirdness is to be designed so as simulate this process of transformation so closely as to eventually become it. And this now entails hypothesizing what kinds of information should be available at varying social sites so as to reconvert the vendetta against the nomos into readily framed disputes.\n\nI’m going to bet that originary grammar can be scaled up (or stacked up) for this program. The succession of speech acts followed in _The Origin of Language_ , which I’ve reviewed many times, is generated by the need to maintain linguistic presence. I’m going to retrieve the thread I’ve constructed (it’s in _Anthropomorphics_ , among other places) that has linguistic presence tied directly to the present tense. This is not simply literal mindedness (although there’s nothing wrong with a bit of literal mindedness) because the declarative sentence, on Gans’s account (with my modest modifications) does function to freeze time within language, iterating the deferral effected by the originary gesture.\n\nThe first sentence asserts that something is unavailable, is not here, as an answer to the diminishing demand that it be provided. Part of this deferral of the demand is the demand that the other cease demanding, because a supervening command has been issued to the demanded object. Maybe the emergence of the declarative should be situated in the difference between demand and command, as two modalities of the imperative. Demand is on the consumer end of the imperative continuum, far closer to a request (and complaint) than an order, while command implies hierarchy, even if momentary or usurped. Invoking a command is always available as a way of deflecting or refusing a demand: “I’m sorry, I can’t help you, those are the rules, I could get fired, etc.”\n\nThe first imperative is really closer to a demand, as one participant on the scene “mistakenly” requests an object from another—in which case, the command is secondary, following the invocation of the central object as an authority in whose name one can speak (speaking in the name of the center in turn creates the conditions of usurping it). Any sentence, then, ventriloquizes a command to squelch a demand while rendering this entire arrangement implicit, or embedded in the scene itself. As relations between demands and commands are further built into the scenic architecture, new demands and commands can arise on those foundations which themselves are never guaranteed.\n\nMy innovation here is to take the need for linguistic presence as a broader cultural or scenic model, an innovation I have installed fairly unevenly so far. Perhaps this is a good time to stack it up. What I’ve advanced previously in making the present tense a methodological principle is an Oulipo-style rule of simply writing every sentence completely in the present tense. The effect of this is to convert any claims one might make about the past into claims about the array of evidence and consequences of that past we might refer to today, while collapsing claims about the future into promises, anticipations and preparations that can be referred to in the present tense.\n\nThis seems to me to impose a salutary discipline upon any discourse aspiring toward disciplinarity, which is to say the taking and securing of data. Such discipline is convergent with the higher levels of rigor sure to be necessary as deep fakes contend with corresponding identifying technology and general narrative collapse leaves us with no shared pool of agreed upon fact networks. In other words, at stake is the creation of a new center (or excavation of the buried one), organized around whoever can curate data in ways indispensable for anyone interested in actionability. Disciplined declarativity (past and future tenses represent a lapse in discipline, a kind of pandering and coping) captures provenance and maps comprehensively onto the stack, which is all present, including its “memories.”\n\nAnd it promises to be distinctive stylistically, requiring circumlocutions that read awkwardly but enhance precision while, in English at least, and probably in other languages, raising all kinds of questions regarding what counts as the present tense (strictly speaking, the future tense or, more generally, ways of indicating futurity, in English, are exclusively in the present tense, English having no real future tense verb conjugation—still, using “will be” must be disallowed [how about “must be”?]; but not the present perfect).(The literary present is a model here—think of how we say “Tolstoy says..” rather than “Tolstoy said…” while discussing one of his novels—the assumption is that the literary or even textual world is a single continuous present.) It is the most direct way of fixing our attention on maintaining linguistic presence.\n\nThe art of data exchange is therefore a way of maintaining linguistic presence—in the face of disruptions of such presence. Disciplined declarativity makes explicit where the command displacing the demand is passing the baton, so to speak, that is, transitioning to a new command presupposing the previous one. Returning to the Israel-Gaza scene, where is the imperative of the center here? What would be continuing it and what would count as parceling it out and discounting it? (Are questions allowed? Not really—get right to the answer with the “prompt” built into the sentence.) The creation of a new state modifies the global nomos and is therefore a sure sign of power transmission, while the extension and redrawing the boundaries of an existing state is not far behind, and it seems either one or the other must take place here.\n\nInternational law and institutions are unequipped to make such decision in ways that will last, which is to say the rigamarole of getting and enforcing (which never really happens) either Security Council or (much less) General Assembly UN resolutions really just launders more power through bureaucracies. The whole premise of Thirdness is the utter inadequacy of such pernicious institutions; it is the power laundered through them that is to be returned to its origins and exercised explicitly, which means the means of power are to be transferred by all available means by those who can rise from auxiliary to sovereign offices.\n\nIsrael, then, is to be expected to comport itself, not with hysterical denunciations based on inflationary interpretations of already tenuously grounded human rights law but, rather, in accord with the requirements of an international system reliant upon imperial hierarchies. Our judgment, then, would insist upon identifying signs that the Israel government is or is not so comporting itself, with creation of a prediction market registering and thereby incentivizing behavior that further approximates the demand-limiting commands of the center. All existing figures in all relevant governments, with government understood in the broadest sense, are to be assessed and solicited in terms of their likelihood of participating in such market-making and might therefore be included in the judgment.\n\nA complementary judgment is then to be levied upon Hamas, as the governing institution in Gaza, but might also reach individual Gazans, considered as part of that governing institution—in fact, part of the judgment might concern terminology, that is, whether to refer to the residents of Gaza as “Gazans” or “Palestinians.” An initial data search would look into evidence of governing capacities on the part of Hamas or successor governing institutions; if such capacities exist, then the question of repartitioning the territory of the former British Mandate might be taken up; perhaps signs regarding whether such evidence might be forthcoming, indicating some degree of likelihood, would be taken up.\n\nIt seems to me likely that the question of a final judgment will be formulated in terms of where to fall on the continuum of direct Israeli sovereignty over the entire territory on one end and some kind of condominium of governance including countries having shown compelling proof of governing capacities taking responsibility (and gaining power and authority) participating in governance of the residents of Gaza (and perhaps the West Bank as well). We want to isolate the convergence of continuity with existing power, on one side, and the furthest possible approximation with more direct and transparent exercise of power, on the other (the point is to propose some way of making things better so as to point to something yet better, without simply inventing fantasy scenarios).\n\nWe want to identify moves existing power centers could make that would have them betting that (by definition uncertain) new arrangements that have them shedding certain buffering and hedging auxiliaries would further secure their power. We then set up two possible forms of the bet, because we are so far genuinely uncertain, and then conduct a study, to be published along with the judgment, to determine which of the two bets is in fact more likely to be considered by the largest pool of power of the agents involved to be the better one.\n\nThirdness does probably need first of all to be a more conventional online journal, albeit with an interactive component aimed at incorporating feedback and recruiting writers and researchers. Since I don’t anticipate any substantial (or even insubstantial) flows of cash in the new future, the incentives would have to be non-monetary—the project would have to produce a transferable idiom that can be leveraged as power and money in other institutions. An obvious model is consulting firms, like Samo Burja’s _Bismarck Brief_ , but it’s better to be more of an academy, training the new officer class. There’s nothing to do but continue modeling and mapping and assume that an extremely powerful, if seemingly esoteric (although really the problem is it’s too exoteric), theory will make its way in the world.\n\nIn the meantime, maybe the demand/command entanglement in the declarative sentence can be idiomized further so as to do some of the work ordinarily done by economic vs. political equivocations. Gathering data involves measuring demand, in a sense consistent with its meaning in economic discourse but extending well beyond that to actual and potential disruptants of linguistic presence, with ostensives derived from those measurements then orchestrated commandingly, embedded in language across the board. To register a demand is simultaneously to activate the command that has allowed for and also constrains it. Demands become claims, and at that threshold they register juridically; but they can also remain passive, tacit, even unconscious: within the discipline we register them as measures of the extent and effect of the command structure.\n\nThe project of Thirdness might be seen as the conversion of demands into demands for commands that would commensurate the field of demands—this is another way of speaking of donating your resentment to the center, now in terms of creating a market that selects demands as matches for commands. This even further urges the compression of represented events into the present as imperatives, demands and command alike, are intrinsically temporal, having their fulfilment in the future in ways that can never be entirely contained in the imperative itself, which leave the declarative to represent the entire field of demands as aspiring to and therefore already implicitly tending towards data seekers and carriers for the command from the center, refusing its parceling off and discounting."
    },
    {
      "slug": "modeling-thirdness",
      "title": "Modeling Thirdness",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 15, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/modeling-thirdness",
      "content": "I’m planning to now transition into a series of posts that will be modeling the work of Thirdness, so as to make the project plausible and interesting, and highlight what is innovative in it. I have been highlighting the juridical as a kind of irreducible, if less originary, middle term between ritual (originary distribution) and the disciplinary. In pre-juridical orders, all reality is organized ritually—it is in ritual terms that practices and things are named, sorted and affirmed. Imperial orders introduce the juridical, and then all reality must pass through that—even ritual orders are subordinated to the ritual because they come under the authority of the imperial, which in turn provides a kind of ritual backing for the juridical.\n\n(For example, churches and other religious institutions own property.) The political project advanced by Thirdness is to transition the juridical—opposing claims lifted out of the vendetta by being adjudicated by an enforcing third party—into data exchange, and thereby bringing the juridical closer to both originary distribution and the disciplinary. What is difficult and new, then, about Thirdness, is figuring conflicts submitable to judgment in terms of data exchange—each party donating and/or receiving data from the center in lieu of such things as punishment or damages. Not only every conflict, but every imaginable or hypothetical conflict, must be figurable in this way—this is a construction of reality, one which departs from while being continuous with existing constructs.\n\nAnd every relationship bears within it the possibility of any number of conflicts—ultimately, we find ourselves drilling down to the basic mimetic substructure of human reality, rendering the elementary mimetic emotions like envy, desire and resentment adjudicable, and therefore available to analysis in terms of data exchange and examination in terms of idioms of the center. I’m appealing to a certain self-evidency here, “daring” you to imagine any action or relationship that is immune or resistant to juridical categories, assuming you will fail; and by the same token, asking you to imagine that this imaginary would not, in fact intensify tendencies towards hyper-juridification of modern life (constant lawsuits, incremental criminalizing of previously normal behavior, etc.) but, rather, would have the opposite, pacifying, effect, of enabling us to anticipate and therefore defer actual encroachments upon the nomos. We would be giving more substance to concepts such as “fairness” as buffers protecting cooperative, norm-governed endeavors.\n\nI have written about technology in scenic terms along various lines, as the constitution of the scene itself or scenic design, as governance, as the perfection of the imperative and as the establishment of pedagogical platforms. These are all complementary descriptions, but still don’t yet ground technology in political antagonisms, specific to the modern, i.e., desacralized world, which I see as the effort to centralize power while accelerating rotation in center occupancy, on the one hand, as opposed to the severely diminished but never extinguishable attempt to singularize succession in perpetuity. I want to have ready answers to the reasonable claim that ‘technology is not neutral,” and I think the claim is best addressed through the notion of [dual use](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/dual-use).\n\nComing at dual use in terms of a [new model of power](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/a-new-model-of-power) I can say that techno-scenes (or, really, just stacked scenes, because how else could they be stacked other than through materialized imperatives?) can serve to display human gestures and mimisms so as to allow for the further penetration and self-effacement of the juridical or can be deployed to wage war on those parts of the population seeking to maintain orderly successions. The development of vast new means of surveillance is an obvious example, as these technologies extend ostensives and attendant imperatives throughout all areas of social life and can be used to gather data aimed at making us healthier, safer, more productive more easily assessed for teamwork purposes; or they can be used to gather information to compromise, subvert and unfairly target regime opponents (and benefit regime friends). This distinction, between the display and enhancement of deferral capabilities on the one hand, and the interference with those capabilities, on the other, can be demonstrated and inhabited with each new technological roll-out.\n\nEstablishing justice overlaps with bookkeeping, or what I’ve started calling “ledgering,” which in turn keeps the accounts of originary indebtedness. And all this is preceded and made possible by the originary distribution established, ultimately, through conquest and maintenance of the gains of conquest. Post-WWII international and human rights law can’t negate this fact any more than liberalism’s grounding of legitimacy in the consent of the governed can. If conquest is forbidden soft power and color revolutions perform the same function, far more dysfunctionally. So, Israel is sovereign over what was Mandate Palestine because they inherited the territory from the British via the UK’s withdrawal and therefore acquiescence in the UN resolution dividing the territory into two states and then defending the territory in a war, at least in part of conquest, against the Arab states; moreover, the British acquired Palestine through conquest in war with the Ottoman Empire, which several hundred years earlier had conquered it, etc.\n\nThere’s a chain of custody, and there’s no other coherent way of determining sovereignty. The alternative, upon which the Palestinian case depends, is the spontaneous generation of sovereignty from the consent of the people to their government. The liberal understanding of sovereignty is designed to undermine the understanding of sovereignty as grounded in conquest, because on this theory no matter how many times the government chosen by the people might start wars with its neighbors the rights of the people can never abrogated, with the bizarre consequence that there can be no consequences to starting a war. Liberalism, then, encourages people to eschew any model of sovereignty, and to resist endlessly on the grounds that the preferences of the people have not been implemented.\n\nAnd that is exactly how the Palestinians have acted, or been programmed. This approach keeps the people involved and whatever government they have from real power and governance, but sovereignty is conserved and the permanent minoritization of a people (in the sense of never attaining “majority,” i.e., responsible maturity) transfers a kind of regulatory and arresting power to diplomatic and legal machinations through which the larger liberal powers work at centralizing power by accelerating turnover in occupancy of the center.\n\nSo, a judgment between the Israelis and Palestinians (to start with a crude formulation) must be framed in terms of Israeli sovereignty over the Mandate territories, now including Gaza, which precludes anything like national rights being vested in the Palestinians but opens the possibility for individual claims by residents of these territories against the Israeli state, its organs, and Israeli individuals. We can speak about the responsibility of sovereign power to maintain the juridical order, which means transferring conflicts tending toward the vendetta toward adjudication, on one side, and preventing the legal system itself from becoming a site of a more refined vendetta (“lawfare”) and thereby infringing upon the originary distribution and sovereignty itself.\n\nSo, the space is open for Palestinian individuals (leaving aside the question of whether the state is to recognize that designation) to demand signs that the Israeli juridical order is open to their claims, and once sovereignty is placed beyond contestation there is no reason such claims couldn’t include property claims going back to 1948 (just like the Israeli legal order is open to legal claims by those dispossessed by Jordan in Jerusalem in 1948). This is then data provided by the Israeli government, in the form of samples of cases in which Palestinian or Arab individuals are given such access to the legal and broader institutional order as to render the ongoing national vendetta moot, or “moot enough,” i.e., incapable of mobilizing the violence that would tilt the stack of scenes into a war footing against those deemed most probable threats.\n\nPalestinian/Arab individuals would in turn be asked to provide data indicating disavowal of the national vendetta, with such data being taken through intelligence gathering regarding the kinds of contribution to and participation in resistance to the juridical order that, past a certain threshold, would modify the access of individuals to that order, or disqualify them altogether. These modifications and disqualifications are also data, instituted so as to refine and publicize the boundaries between behavior that enables the continual inclusive unfolding of the originary distribution and behavior that blocks extension of the nomos.\n\nThis is a rough sketch, but it allows us to move on to the real question, which is what would the patrons of Thirdness be betting on here. Anyone familiar with Thirdness would be able to anticipate this broad sketch and so there would be no one betting on a judgment of “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free.” The game would therefore be for professionals who would be able to bet on, say the degree or mode of modulation of particular surveillance, intelligence and media apparatuses in instituting the data exchange which, in turn, would imagine more specific cases than “Israel vs. Palestinians.” Thirdness would, say, flag a particular media story involving some conflict over, for example, property claims in East Jerusalem, or even draw upon reports by human rights groups (against whom claims might in turn be entertained) so as to set up a case that can be reduced to an either/or, with two data exchange scenarios involving a decision uncertain even to the operatives of Thirdness because both scenarios are equally plausible pending further study.\n\nSomeone betting on this outcome has access to evidence of past thinking by Thirdness agents as well as to the facts of the case in question, which Thirdness would open source. Thirdness agents should be sufficiently ahead of the game so as to satisfy losers in any particular case that they themselves gained a more precise understanding of the case from the results of the deliberation. If they are not, and are out-analyzed by a particular player, then all efforts should be made to bring that player onto the Thirdness team or, failing that, a full auditing of his own thinking and methods of computation undertaken.\n\nThe data exchange therefore involves actions that bear a family reference to such legal concepts as “penalty,” “incarceration,” “damages,” “liability,” and so on, while shifting attention to the operationalization of these concepts through the stack. Actors are encouraged by the judgments in question to respond in a voluntary and deliberative way, activating higher level of agencies, while the ledgers built into the stack will record those actions in increasingly comprehensive and granular ways—your actions will be your own, but escape from their consequences will be increasingly impossible. This doesn’t mean being “doomed” forever by some bad decisions but, rather, providing for transparency regarding those decisions and the kinds of decisions that would be needed to pay some of the interest on the originary debt thereby accrued.\n\nThe model of data exchange makes some kind of redemption possible in just about any case, even if one has been deemed permanently unfit to inhabit spaces with unprepared fellow humans. But keeping our focus on how to modulate surveillance technologies so as to position people on the scenes they circulate within highlights the historical nature of all the categories of judgment and justice by vesting social agency in technological agency, in which teams, and individuals on teams, would, at various levels, be programming and programming the programmers. Technologies of warfare would also be influenced, and tendencies towards precision targeting and multi-layered warfare accelerated.\n\nPart of what is disturbing about the October 7 massacre is that, obviously, it should never have been allowed to happen, especially given Israel’s own efforts to institute more “prophylactic” means of warfare, like missile defense. I’ll risk sounding like a turn of the 20th century progressive pacificist by insisting on the utter wastefulness and destructiveness of war at this point—part of the reason for working to maintain the integrity and continuity of the imperative from the center is to defer such violence to the point where it becomes almost thinkable, while remembering that it can’t become completely unthinkable lest it be made all to real by those who realize its unthinkability by some provides a strategic opening for those less occluded.\n\nSurveillance technology (grammatically: materialization of ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits) seems especially important to me in this context in part because much of the resistance to it aims at defending the incompetence and criminality that contemporary governance relies upon but, more theoretically, because here is where the sequence from ostensive to imperative to interrogative to declarative is perpetually initiated. Surveillance technology first of all refers to such things as pervasive cameras and recordings, facial recognition AI, tracking of phone calls according to algorithmic determined searches, tracing of money flows, etc., but the pervasiveness of these technologies in turn trains us to be observant and perceptive in new ways.\n\nThere is more and more that any one will be able to see, and this will further technological developments enabling us to see yet more. What is to count as good, or “clean,” data, out of all that is detected, recorded and archived? Taking on an “issue” like “israel-Palestine” will have to go way beyond the rights and wrongs as determined by some arbitrary category derived from WW 2 like “war crimes” to address the embeddedness of this issue in the larger nomos of the earth, where larger powers must determine where the conflict descends into a vendetta that threatens other sovereigns or ascends to major power conflict threatening existing distribution.\n\nIt’s interesting how seldom either “side” enters into the intentions of the other side so as to examine, beyond what you might “indict” one or the other for, how they are negotiating a wider range of exchanges, only some of which can be made explicit. Surveillance technology will also aid in making inferences regarding that larger field, and this will include “decoding” actions and statements along with inaction and silences according to AIs trained on the documented history of the players. It may be that all policy can be reduced to refinements and modulations of surveillance technology along with humans posted at “gates” to affirm or deny particular imperatives drawn from particular patterns derived from such automated surveillance.\n\nSo, maybe this is where Thirdness plants itself: in shifting political discussions towards proposed modifications in the Stack, proposing mini-regimes of data collection, analysis, mapping and simulation (I’m draw upon Josh Pang’s _World Game_ , which draws out the implications of Buckminster Fuller’s proposal for submitting all world problems to the rigor of computation). The irreducibility of the juridical, the question of justice and, in fact, it’s explicit permeation of all social interactions, serving as the mode of measurement of data security and exchange—that’s Thirdness."
    },
    {
      "slug": "muffled-transmission-from-the-center-substack",
      "title": "Muffled Transmission from the Center",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 02, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/muffled-transmission-from-the-center",
      "content": "We live in a time when it is plausible to ask about every thought that comes into your mind, “who wants me to think that?” And, then, once you realize that, to inquire into the various means by which those others might be inducing you to think that. But things don’t stop there, because maybe those lines of inquiry themselves fall into the category of things others want me to think for reasons that, precisely because I am trying to sort out what is mine and what is theirs in my thinking, I will never discern. But, then, if this is our contemporary condition, we can then ask, compared to what? Thinking always comes from the center, and the center, as the depository of converged and abstracted discourses mediated by various chains of command, is always ahead of us—those who once lived in a mythico-ritual world were certainly not “thinking for themselves.”\n\nBut it is possible to redeem the idioms one circulates within, even if their origins and logics exceed one’s own position within the circuit, insofar as one can test, refine and revise the imperatives issuing from the authorities we are bound by. The wildest “conspiracy theorists” not only do not set aside formal, established authorities, but organize all of their theories upon the discrepancy between what those authorities are authorized to do and what they in fact do. We can’t think outside of the powers that would set the terms of any adjudication we might enter or be drawn into, but we can think their outside by entering the space of judgment and recording where justice is done or denied, and getting more precise about what would count as “justice” by working with the assumption that anything we call justice must be doable. This requires intellectual discipline, and the creation of at least preliminary or virtual disciplinary spaces.\n\nIf there’s a disagreement, must one or both be wrong? What I want to get at is whether the study of the center requires a concept analogous to “ideology,” or “mystification,” or “illusion” or even “heresy.” Is it possible to let difference simply be difference, even while preferring (but how and why?) one intervention in the world as opposed to another? If we’re stepping outside of philosophy, we don’t have an “epistemology,” but there is still the question of when to claim you “know” something. I tried to deal with this question in the first essay on ‘disciplinarity” I wrote for _Anthropoetics_ but was not satisfied with my answer or approach (nor do I remember or wish to retrieve it at the moment).\n\nBut the way to approach it must be in terms of respective paths to the ostensive. You can always ask someone, who would have to be making which decisions, and with what effectivity, so as produce what you would see as the event you are hoping for or warning against. If there’s no path to the ostensive then you could say that what the person is saying is, strictly speaking, meaningless; but you could also refuse to shut down the inquiry by remembering that you never know for sure where a path to some ostensive might show up and so you lay down a few markers (here’s where I think it would have to be). And we can say the same about simple factual claims regarding what has happened or is happening, as we lay out chains of witnesses, recorders and reporters and embed them scenically.\n\nMy own thinking of “subjectivity,” though, involves the concept of “listening to the center” and “hearing and obeying imperatives from the center,” so if someone finds themselves with no path to an ostensive we could say that the “transmission” from the center has broken down and consider how to describe and explain such occurrences. I would like to interfere with the almost irresistible assumption built into such questions that I, of course, do hear and obey the imperatives from the center because otherwise how could I know when others don’t. That takes us down the path to a kind of pure declarativity that sets its own arbitrary criteria of “proof.”\n\nThe imperative from the center is always heard anew, and one of the ways you hear it (the primary way, really) is through the utterances (”samples”) of others which must at least be provoking you to find a new path to the ostensive, or retrace one that might have become obscured. The initial ritual scene presupposes complete unanimity, and some trace of that unanimity remains insofar as we are able to exchange signs at all, so one can always try to force it to the surface—and, in fact, we always do, if often in very flawed ways (like pointing out “hypocrisy”). To recover that trace of unanimity it might be enough to describe, even in outline, some act that all participants in the conversation could agree is “good.”\n\nThis is an undervalued utility of the originary hypothesis—it gives us an undeniable good act at the beginning of humanity, so we could always start there, even if “hypothetically”—if several people all really wanted to grab the same thing at the same time would it be “good” for them, singly and through coordination, to find some way to share it? Then we could work from there to develop analogies with whatever the current situation is. And so the most fundamental imperative from the center is to do that, which we can now speak of as affirming the originary distribution—which really can only be negated in one or another Pol Potish (or, we can now say, “decolonizing”) way.\n\nBut the imperative from the center is now conveyed by an occupant of the center, and an occupant, furthermore, who in most places is considered temporary, contingent on the cooperation of a wide range of actors, and subject to open contestation and attempts to dislodge through a whole range of more or less legitimate means. The closer we are to an undisputed monarch the less confusion there will be regarding the imperative from the center. The “what about incompetent/evil/deranged/etc. monarchs” question really comes down to noting that monarchs can create disputes regarding their power because a king who does not or cannot himself recognize the terms of the originary distribution will issue imperatives that themselves have no clear path to the ostensive and therefore require the establishment of factions that must filter, redirect and mitigate orders.\n\nBut when the occupation of the center is defined precisely in terms of its contestability, then that unanimity around the originary distribution and the imperatives enforcing it becomes impossible to articulate; indeed, it’s prohibited. Liberalism tries to install “values” to replace that unanimity around, ultimately, succession, like “rule of law,” “pluralism,” the importance of opposing opinions as a way of getting at the truth, etc., but these are all ways of conferring power upon the disciplines who will govern in tandem with elements of the state capable of protecting themselves from public scrutiny so as to maintain some continuity in governance. And all this is to facilitate the chopping up and auctioning off of portions of the imperative of the center so that some will never get a clear hearing of it.\n\nWhat closes us off from hearing the imperative of the center then is a commitment, which we can only with great effort and at the cost of having no “net” for catching information avoid, to a particular succession narrative; a succession narrative that must cut of all paths to the ostensive precisely because it splits off into digressions in accord with the shifting value of pieces of the imperative of the center. No progressive nor, for that matter, can any conservative, tell you how their vision of the future plays out in terms of probable technoscenes. The narratives are designed not to get you too far past the next couple of election cycles.\n\nThe problem of access to the imperative of the center is the problem of institution building, of data security and scenic design practices. We can at least know something of what we would need to build to eventually acquire knowledge that would regularly interface with governance. And we can know something of what interferes with that, so the inevitable confusions and shortenings of the imperative can at least be made explicit and hypothetical scenes that would draw in information contributory to governance constructed. This practice, as an extension of the originary hypothesis, might then be a way to create a new form of the founding unanimity which rotating occupancy of the center obscures.\n\nI’m thinking of Thirdness here, assuming that the best form of thought experiments possible right now might be those imagining potential prediction markets that might be organized around scenes and events determined with precision through the juridical and transdisciplinary originary inquiry (center study). Does anyone really have any idea how all the “deep states” or “intelligence communities” of all those states that have such institutions with transnational reach interact with each other? Where are they aligned and cooperative, where competitive and inimical? How would one measure their respective power? How do publicly observed and recorded events correspond to their machinations?\n\nI never see anyone really try and answer these questions—just about everyone seems content either with presupposing the illegitimacy of all these doings and therefore just pointing to the scandalous fact that there are such institutions and they do affect the world, or singling out a particular narrative to “grift” off of. But these institutions operate as they do because the official form of governance disallows governance, which must be done one way or another. So, when there’s a war, or inflation, or scandal, or infighting in a major political party or any of the other millions of events the media can process, what has actually happened across these levels?\n\nWhat kind of prediction market might be established to gather information on the various correspondences between political activity on the surface and intelligence activity in the depths? Maybe we’d discover direct and indirect ways of communicating with the “depths,” by affecting the algorithms they rely on. But only if we clear our heads of our succession fantasies.\n\nI have, though, developed what does, in effect, function as a theory of ideology, what I have been calling the Big Scenic Imaginary. No doubt I had my extensive reading of Marxist theories of ideology from decades ago swirling around in my thinking as I worked on this. It does point to a similar kind of “reification” and. “fetishization” that Marxist theories relied upon, but I’m not sure I ever gave it a causal explanation. Why should “we” use the word “we” so promiscuously, as if the economy, particular countries, the world as a whole had moods, ideas, had made decisions, had concerns and anxieties, and so on? My first impulse for introducing the category was to distinguish my thinking on “resentment” from Gans’s, to make it clear that large groups of people don’t, in unison, resent other large groups of people, as if they were individuals located on a human scale scene.\n\nThe groups of people resenting each other in such narratives, those of Gans and others, are almost invariably state-constructed groups designated by law in some way, and therefore representable in familiar media rituals and spectacles. And this perpetual construction of antagonisms is a result of the process of the centralization of power tethered to the intensified rotation of occupancy of the center. So it’s this dialectic that underlies the Big Scenic Imaginary: the centralizing keeps things “big” while the rotation keeps recreating the narratives, less authentic and more frenzied (so we have amazing stuff like European countries declaring themselves, on the model of post-60s America, to be “nations of immigrants”).\n\nWhat about “resentment” as a causal factor interfering with reception of imperatives from the center? This gets us to the central failure of mimetic theory and GA alike—whatever can’t get reduced to the scale of a 19th century French novel can’t be thought, and broader social developments are addressed only through homilies and thoughts and prayers. Does resentment simply not scale up, and is therefore to be discarded in political thinking? I don’t think referring to the decisions of big players—corporate leaders, finance chiefs, intelligence agency heads, etc.—as driven by resentments will be very productive even if the model seemed to fit the nation-state system from the 19th into the 20th century.\n\nOne could at least imagine speaking of the world wars as driven by mimetic rivalry between the imperialist powers, but even there I think we’d find the explanation limited, beyond the banal sense that you must anticipate and therefore represent to yourself possible responses to your own actions. Governance involves the transcendence of resentment, on the part of ruled and ruler alike, and mimetic theory and GA must both deny this possibility, even while the originary hypothesis presupposes its possibility. To the extent that we explain decisions by rulers as motivated by resentment, especially today, where states are already “networked” and heavily dependent upon “the stack,” we’re really talking about dysfunction, not “human nature.”\n\nBut resentment, as the feeling that one’s obedience to the imperative of the center has not been reciprocated, ultimately by the center itself, is certainly real, and provides the raw material of media narratives (of which it is also the product). And clearly at that level it clouds our receptors of the central imperative. But the cloud of unknowing that blankets the modern world has its starting point when the British state jump-started itself an empire by subordinating itself to the central bank and writing itself out an unlimited line of credit. And from that point on I don’t think we can say the ruling classes themselves know what they’re doing.\n\nEveryone has just been reacting to the British initiative, which was then inherited by the US, while the Anglo-American empire has been mostly preempting potential challengers. It would be trivializing to speak of this in terms of resentment. It is the creation of one device after another to simulate a replacement of sacral kingship, the unity of ritual and policy. The builders of the technoscene, to whom power has been delegated in ever larger doses might be one part of a governing machinery that can create an equivalent unity—computational theocracy, in which we would know ourselves as sites of data exchange and circulation.\n\nThe other part, perhaps to emerge largely from within pockets of the technoscene and debt enforcement and forgiveness agencies is the new officer class (I don’t yet have a better name for it so this borrowing from Philip Rieff will have to do) and if we can know what will contribute to its formation we will be as close to channeling the imperative of the center as is possible. I start with the assumption that however dysfunctional or even psychopathic the ruler, he will need some reliable information about what’s going on, even if just to protect himself against whatever genuine enemies he has, and so some site of data creation is allowed to remain functional.\n\nAnd if there is always that minimal scene of intelligence, other scenes can be infiltrated and transformed by it. In that case, we know where to look for the imperatives of the center. So, the question is not so much how and what can we know as how we (someone, anyway) can build pedagogical platforms in and adjacent to institutions that might become suppliers of knowers to those who want to know."
    },
    {
      "slug": "negative-capability",
      "title": "Negative Capability",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 13, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/negative-capability",
      "content": "Back to the problem of the originary hypothesis as an anomaly. The originary hypothesis of the origin of language answers a question which is “real” by any measure: what accounts for the difference between animal and human forms of communication? Even though biologically based semiotics keeps working on minimizing, relativizing and trivializing the differences, so that the differences are no more interesting, and just as quantitative, as signaling differences between, say, one and another species of squirrel, in the end basic differentiating concepts like Tomasello’s “joint attention” and even Stiegler’s “tertiary retention” have to be engaged.\n\nLike all attempts to eliminate the human in order to plug holes in some pseudo-scientific paradigm, this stuff can get weird and one just feels like parodying it. The most recent version of this I’ve seen is in Jason Ananda Josephson Storm’s _Metamodernity_ , which draws on a Peircean inspired hylo-semantics to put to bed the postmodern linguistic turn and reintegrate us back into the semiotic world shared by all other species. It’s in fact very good to trace all the continuities of communication across species boundaries because this only sharpens the discontinuity constituting the human (which Storm doesn’t really have anything to say about), the only species, oddly enough, that seems interested in this question.\n\nAnyway, I get bored with the inane question of whether human communication is really qualitatively different than animal communication (which is why I admire GA thinkers like Andrew Bartlett and Richard Oort who have addressed it so patiently at times)—I just want to make the point that in saying, “human language emerged in an event, not through a gradual accumulation of genetic mutations tied to signaling behaviors,” the originary hypothesis is answering a real question.\n\nThe problem is that no discipline is capable of accepting this answer, even though none of them have a better one, beyond endless complexification of relations between genes, developments of human capacities over time as evidenced in developments in the archeological record and evocations of various _dei ex machina_ like “increased social interaction.” As Eric Gans has pointed out many times, the answer can’t be accepted precisely because it gives people in these disciplines nothing to do—no future dig will come up with some mixture of bones and pottery that will make the originary event more probable, no analysis of data will do so, etc.\n\nSo, it’s as if we’re being asked to take something on faith in the middle of a laboratory, something which every action-sequence of the modern “scientist” simply overrides. I have myself never liked the idea of applying “faith” in this context, because the originary hypothesis invites heightened and persistent scrutiny, as opposed to faith in the occurrence of certain actual events of revelation of which we can have no “proof.” in a sense the originary hypothesis is “too” scientific, or another kind of scientific. But what kind? I’m probably not the only GA advocate who as devoted some time and thought to this question.\n\nNow it has occurred to me that the answer has been lying out there in plain sight along, in John Keat’s famous (for English majors, at least) concept of “negative capability.” It helps that I loved Keat’s poetry from the first time I read it as a 24 year old grad student, and have lately been drifting off into thought-sequences regarding what Keats and his fellow English romantics were about, in the context of some other questions regarding the emergence of the “aesthetic” in relation to the emergence of modernity (science and politics), etc., perhaps to be addressed sometime down the road. Anyway, I always thought Keats was better than Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron (but I qualify this by acknowledging Ian Dennis’s case for the greatness of the Byron on _Don Juan_ , which I also loved back then), and “negative capability” was Keat’s own attempt to explain why.\n\nLooking back over Keat’s discussion of the concept in his letter I realized, first, that Keats only used the concept once and, second, that my own original exposure to it through the _Norton Anthology_ was in fact a string of passages pieced together from different letters in accord with the editors’—a particular intellectual tradition’s—interpretation of the concept. I wish I had my old _Norton Anthology_ , because the interpretation they (implicitly) gave was a very good one, and useful for me here.\n\nAnywhere, here’s the passage presenting the concept:\n\nI had not a dispute but a disquisition with [Dilke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wentworth_Dilke \"Charles Wentworth Dilke\"), upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which [Shakespeare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare \"Shakespeare\") possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.\n\nThe concept seems to have struck Keats like a revelation, offering a justification for what presumably was his own preference for a “fine isolated verisimilitude” over an empirically testable proposition (is there, in fact, any scientific explanation for what makes for a fine isolated verisimilitude?). The singular verisimilitude comes before the irritable reaching after fact and reason (Keats would have hated reddit, I suppose, but perhaps would have thought the “energies displayed” on Twitter had some value), which must be suspended—there’s a kind of thinking here that involves not rushing to define your position, reach a conclusion, show that you are right and the other fake and ghey.\n\nIf you’re suspending that rush to secure your position on some disciplinary field it’s in order to see and imagine what gets blocked by that rush. So, what is that? It seems to be, essentially, mimetic investments in the activities of others—a bird hopping around on your window sill, poking and chewing, a bunch of boys involved in a fight—in such a way as to not preclude moving such investments around, however incompatible they might be. You can enter the life of the bird but, then, also the worm it has in its mouth, or the cat stalking the bird; you can shift your identification from one to the other of the combatants, perhaps with an interest in sustaining the scene or seeing various narrative trajectories unfold (you might root for whoever is losing at the moment), or expanding the scene (perhaps the crowd observing and egging on the fighters takes on its own interests).\n\n(Here I’m drawing on those excerpts from other letters “traditionally” considered part of the discussion of negative capability). This is, of course, the kind of sensibility Keats identified with Shakespeare (explicitly against Milton, who was very much the thesis stalker), and wished to emulate in his own poetry.\n\nKeats’s reading of Shakespeare already put him on the way toward Girard, who also singled out Shakespeare for his remarkable insight into the mimetic nature of the human. How do you sustain negative capability once you realize that the lives you’re imaginatively participating in without judgment or explanation ultimately become incompatible with each other? This tends to be the kind of realization that leads one to jump ship and start irritatingly looking for things like “structures” and “social laws” to account for why a boy’s fight doesn’t go on forever if one side doesn’t manage to totally clobber the other (or, in another possible naturalistic explanation, they collapse out of mutual exhaustion)—if you keep entering into the actions, struggles, strategies, learning of first one and then another, you can only be interested in how the fight could be brought to an end by the combatants themselves, or perhaps the crowd. How, that is, could the actions in which you are so mimetically invested continue indefinitely, while undergoing transformations at various levels of perceptibility that enable us to demarcate individual scenes within the “flow”?\n\nSo, if you really like to maintain and exercise your negative capability, and maybe even communicate it to others, you have a new and interesting problem: how do mutually opposed and incompatible actions nevertheless sustain each other, modify each other, include each other, convert each other into something else, etc.? All this so you can maximize mimetic investment—a mimetic investment, by the way, which is completely shareable with others—and which therefore entails eschewing any recourse to anything extrinsic to these scenes—something putatively in nature, or some social law modeled on a natural one. You’d run through some interesting failures—you could call them “tragedies” along with some “comedic” successes.\n\nYou’d realize that this mimetic investment has the unanticipated effect of intensifying your mimetic capacities beyond those of the figures in whose lives you immerse yourself, but without coming into the same antagonisms with others as a result—on the contrary, you might get better at finding inventive ways of rerouting mimetic rivalries away from their potentially violent course (which would put an end to the action and demolish the scene). You find the whole world to be full of examples worthy of study and representation. And at no point would you feel a need to have recourse to data or statistics, which really only stand in for insufficiently imagined scenes—only much later, within fully fledged disciplinary spaces can the math be made fully scenic.\n\nSo, it’s not faith but negative capability that opens one up to the unverifiable originary hypothesis. I can’t verify this, so it must stand as a hypothesis. Does Eric Gans have negative capability in a high degree? I have no idea, and no way to test it out. Are those dozen or so academics who have taken up the originary hypothesis as their like-long project especially gifted in negative capability? Again, don’t know. How would I even measure my own negative capability against anyone else’s? I’m sure some psychologist could design a stupid test but doing so would show a complete miscomprehension of negative capability, which also stands outside of “verification.”\n\nWith such a small sample, there could have been any number of reasons why Gans might have arrived upon this a solution to problems he, as a student of Girard, might have been pursuing, or why this particular set of academics would have found this compelling. Maybe even a literary and cultural theory not openly leftist, intellectually unique and challenging, and respectful of religion would have been enough to make it attractive to some academics somewhat alienated by the dominant theories. But I want to think beyond that, and in those terms more important questions would be “can negative capability be taught, practiced or elicited?”—or, even better, how can we engage others so as to presume we are always already working on enhancing our negative capability? (Which I would distinguish from the pathetic liberal concept of “empathy,” as “empathy” involves clinging cloyingly to someone on the scene rather than love of the scene itself.)\n\nI suppose the originary hypothesis would have been too “abstract” for Keats, but you could certainly make a case for him developing an aesthetics of deferral. That you keep setting new deadlines for the attainment and then consumption of your desired objects, and that with each new deadline the object becomes more attractive, with this leading you to want to wait longer because you know it will grow more desirable in the meantime, and, along the way, all kinds of new, supplementary objects of enjoyment emerge in the wake of your deferral, you’re noticing all kinds of fallen warriors of deferral on the field as you advance, along with contrasting figures of deferral as desiccation and deferral as holy devotion—there’s a very Keatsian poem to be written here (and a rather ungrammatical sentence I’ve written).\n\nNone of his greatest poems can be transcended. Who knows where he was going with _The Fall of Hyperion_? Keats was a liberal, but less out of any theory than because that’s where the action was—and he no doubt sympathized more with rougher give-and-take he would have seen among the “popular” classes than the encrusted codes of civility (which force mimetic desire into convoluted paths by trying to strangle it). Like the other Romantics, he must have felt that the French Revolution had swept away centuries of accumulated artificiality and cleared the field for an uncluttered view of human nature. But it wasn’t obvious that this would lead to a view of human nature as so fundamentally mimetic that one had to enter it aesthetically and narratively, rather than locate it in the individual or laws of nature to be measured by government statistics.\n\nA specific kind of logic emerges from claiming negative capability as the specifically originary disposition. As you’re thinking something through, or at least thinking something human through, at each point you’re confronted with a choice: you can either accentuate or dissipate the scenic character of the situation or question you’re discussing. You can further pursue the question of what someone is doing in relation to what others are doing, in the process summoning hypothetical others whom that someone must be imitating, participating with, or coming into opposition with. That is, you can keep populating the field, which will lead you to resist any thinning of the field.\n\nOr, you can translate what that someone and others are doing into a set of synonyms with a pre-established, imaginary or institutionally defined relation to each other. This latter approach is what brings you into philosophy and the human sciences, even if it’s a version of philosophy or the social sciences that goes on about singularities, processes, etc. For negative capability those philosophical and social scientific scenes would just add further layers of the ongoing scenic construction—more people doing things with and against each with various reciprocally conversing and converting outcomes imaginable."
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-love-resentment-and-the-early-chronicles",
      "title": "On Love, Resentment and the Early Chronicles",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 06, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/on-love-resentment-and-the-early",
      "content": "In the panel at the recent GASC conference on a Substack essay I wrote on “resentment,” I began by asking “what is the other of resentment” before realizing that an answer was built into the title of Gans’s regular “column,” the _Chronicles of Love & Resentment_. I was a little bit astonished to realize that I had forgotten that “love” could be seen as the other of resentment, and responded, in those opening remarks, by suggesting that “love,” certainly as compared to “resentment,” is a very underdeveloped concept in GA. I still think this is the case, but I just experienced another, equivalent, moment of astonishment—I have been asked to go through Gans’s Chronicles, in the context of a pedagogical project concerning GA, and select those that should be considered essential for pedagogical purposes, and I have discovered in the very first few Chronicles, not only vivid and even florid descriptions of love, but the claim that love, in fact, precedes and makes possible resentment (and that, furthermore, this is a distinguishing feature of GA as opposed to Girard’s mimetic theory). So, from the very first Chronicle:\n\n_Perhaps the most useful way to describe the difference between **GA** and Girard’s system is that the latter begins with resentment whereas **GA** begins with love. Human violence is as violent as it is only because the first human act is the deferral of violence. Resentment preoccupies us more than love because it poses problems to be solved, but our problems repose on a basis of human solidarity. This is not an expression of optimism, but a reminder of our ontology. One (more) thing the Oedipus myth is about is human survival through love, minimally defined as the deferral of violence. Oedipus is the infant that his father could not kill, that his mother could not abandon to his death; loved as a child by his adopted parents, he leaves the scene, accompanied by his loving daughter Antigone, to die a holy man at Colonus. It is not to make little of life’s tragedies to affirm that they are part of la comédie humaine._\n\n_Of all our personal experiences, that of love is the most profound–in the vocabulary of **GA** , the most originary. So much so that it cannot fully be articulated, no more than the believer can fully articulate his faith. The foundation of language cannot be directly expressed in language. Resentment, on the other hand, rests on a foundation of love; the resenter is a child who breaks his toys knowing his parents are there to pick up the pieces. And thus it can be articulated with great sharpness. Its danger lies precisely in this ease of communication._\n\nAnd Chronicle #2 gives (derived from a Girardian attempt to reconcile the two positions) a very good reason for this: resentment derives from mimesis, and mimesis is driven by love. (But would this make love pre-human?) Then, in Chronicle #3, we have the very interesting claim that “love is to the ostensive as resentment is to the declarative. Love defines a new significance, whereas resentment is parasitic on an old one.” I will keep an eye on this going through the Chronicles, but I don’t think we see this kind of argument after the first dozen or so. Indeed, we already see the concession that resentment “preoccupies us more,” which is to say it’s more “interesting,” and it has certainly come to preoccupy Gans himself more. Necessarily so? If love is ostensive, it’s hard to talk about it. Meanwhile, we also see in these early Chronicles a kind of “constitutive” understanding of resentment, one that is certainly familiar as a recurrent account of resentment, but increasingly over the years tied to those occupying certain moral and political positions:\n\n_Alone, I am the man of resentment. All worldly presence does me injustice, not because it is unaware of its own existence, as Sartre’s Roquentin would like us to believe, but because of its scandalous indifference to mine. Even when my fellow man does not esteem himself over me, he betrays me by admiring another above myself. The least object I encounter in my path, a scrap of newsprint not consecrated to me, an advertisement in another’s image, a street-sign bearing a name not my own; the entire world and everything within it is a complicit witness to my unjust exclusion from the center of significance._\n\n“Alone,” in this context, as we will see in a moment, can be taken to mean “without love”—alone, then, resentment is perpetual, a kind of continuous undertone or atmosphere to our daily lives, as we are always encountering centers of attention indifferent to us. We could almost say that resentment is consciousness itself. But this only works through the contrast with love:\n\n_What is there then for me to love? To love what refuses to acknowledge my infinite power to love would be the ultimate abjection, the relinquishment of my claim of centrality._\n\n_But now we are two and in love; all things in the world become beneficiaries of our happiness. Not only those who smile on us, but those who fail to smile–we pity them: they have never been in love! By centering my little world on another, I am fulfilled by proximity to its center; I forget the world’s indifference in my beloved’s eyes._\n\n_Is not love’s springtime the moment when the libido conspires to perpetuate the species? But our love is not the expression of an impersonal life-force. It is, like all truly human things, a transcendence of appetite mediated by the center of human significance. My beloved and I are not so consumed by desire that we forget the universe; on the contrary, our love opens us to the universe. What resentment saw as obstacles to our being have become extensions of it. Lovers are humble; their love, so much greater than either of them alone, reveals to them the source of their own meaning in the community of meaning that surrounds them._\n\n_For the man of resentment, the center of the universe–the place of God–is the only place. No degree of worldly eminence is enough; although, to be fair, there are probably many degrees between God’s eminence and his own that he has not experienced. The man of resentment suffers from his finitude, not because he knows his life is finite, but because he feels his significance is finite. He, at least, knows what is meant by immortality; it is what would purge him of his resentment._\n\n_But then to fall in love is to become immortal. The lover discovers that, freed from resentment, he has lost his fear of death; his present is full of eternity. Yet love is not idolatry of an image invulnerable to death, but tenderness for a vulnerability that mirrors his own._\n\nThese early Chronicles are very short, and I’m quoting almost all of this one. We can see in this lyrical description of love that the terms of resentment of the one who is alone are systematically reversed: rather than everything in the world conspiring to exclude you, you and your beloved can benevolently include the entire world in your love. Love, it seems—although this is not explicitly said—makes each a sufficient center unto the other, hence guaranteeing one’s own centrality, which is to say significance, and even immortality.\n\nThis dialectic between resentment and love is very compelling, but I think we can begin to see why it wasn’t sustained. For one thing, the love being described here is very much love in the modern sense of “being in love”—this is made even clear in Chronicle #13, on Heloisie and Abelard, analyzed as the first modern love affair, in which the private world of the lovers protects them from the resentments dominant in the larger public world. This is not the emulative love of the center that would follow from the identification of mimesis with love—love and resentment are already being cut down to the size of the modern marketplace.\n\nWe can see this is the description of what I referred to above as “constitutive resentment,” insofar as that constant and continually renewed resentment driven by noticing new centers of attention indifferent to oneself is unthinkable within a ritual order where, in practicing the prescribed rituals, one is not only devoted to a center beyond oneself but is a center of attention of the divine beings (including, at an early enough stage I would imagine, one’s ancestors) in a way as continual as the bereftness of the modern figure of resentment. So, there’s a slippage here between a kind of “stripped down” resentment resulting from the elimination of intermediate orders articulating individuals with the center and an “originary” resentment presumably applicable to all instances of resentment.\n\nThe effect is to make the stripped down form of resentment and the reductively romantic form of love a dialectic that is irreversible—and, interestingly in another one of these early Chronicles (#7), Gans identifies irreversibility with sacrifice. The love associated with emulation that might transcend the resentment of the model is not considered. Even Gans’s lyrical description of being in love seems to me difficult to distinguish from a momentary infatuation, which can certainly give one the feeling of being in love the with world, benevolently inclined to all of its creatures. The protection of the other in her vulnerability, a vulnerability that, paradoxically must be preserved so as to guarantee love’s significance, is also insisted on in #6, and this is a much more sustainable model of love, one that can remain unaltered even in the face of alterations.\n\nThis kind of love, at least, transitions into the building of an institution, the family. But there’s no transition to a “public” form of love, and since private love affairs can hardly provide for a sufficient haven against the heartless world of public resentment, we can see why this dialectic never made it past these early Chronicles. On the terms of these early Chronicles, and Gans’s political thinking more generally, any kind of public love would have to seem “fascistic,” and therefore indistinguishable from resentment. There has been no replacement for the publicly expressed love of one’s monarch in the modern world, which is predicated upon abolishing any such sentiment.\n\nIt’s hard to imagine Gans conceiving of, much less endorsing, such an asymmetrical love (which of course includes reciprocal expressions of love from the monarch toward his subjects). But we can imagine something analogous if we push Gans’s description of love to one of love as the deferral of our own resentful desire to possess the other unto his or her extinction (as they become a mere appendage or reflection of ourself), i.e., the preservation of the otherness of the other in the face of our own desire to render her unrecognizable. This understanding of love can apply to public as well as private, asymmetric as well as to symmetric, varieties.\n\nOnly, though, given the triangular rather binary nature of desire (which Richard van Oort reminds us of in an early guest Chronicle [#14]), if there is some other Other to which both parties can refer. Then we might think of a love for the center in a dialectical relation to our resentment of “usurpations” of the center (which are, indeed, as constant as the objects of resentment in Gans’s model of constitutive resentment). If our only reaction to any occupancy of the center is unremitting resentment—well, that way lies madness, does it not? Madness from which no private love can even extricate itself, much less save us."
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-the-juridical-disciplinary-line",
      "title": "On the Juridical/Disciplinary Line",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 10, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/on-the-juridicaldisciplinary-line",
      "content": "I’ve centered the juridical, elevating it to co-equal status with the ritual and disciplinary, while recognizing that the juridical is both a later development (certainly than ritual, but even the disciplinary, if we trace that back to how to arrange and perform rituals) and somewhat tenuous—it’s possible to imagine the juridical being eliminated. In fact, most utopias and dystopias alike are predicated upon the elimination of the juridical and, usually, its assimilation to the disciplinary; for that matter, much of the progressive program is predicated on this as well. It’s easy to see why: while I consider it best to see the juridical as a mode of deferral sidelining the vendetta (and related practices like blood payments) it remains marked by these practices which look barbaric from the standpoint of the juridical itself.\n\nIt’s impossible to imagine the juridical without some residue of vengeance, and therefore as punishment “meted out” on a kind of scale that would address the resentment of the victim (and the community). The new science of criminology was already raising questions about this in the 19th century, and in a way, the critique is unanswerable which is why the deck was shuffled a bit to turn the juridical into the more disciplinary questions of “safety” and “prevention.” On those more rationalized terms, why, indeed, should a murderer be punished, if the murder was carried out under very specific and unlikely to repeat circumstances, and the offender shows no proclivity to commit “similar” crimes?\n\nOr, for that matter, if we can determine through “scientific means that someone is prohibitively likely to commit violent crimes, why wait until he actually commits them? Indeed, this is just the tip of the iceberg: what if we have the sociological and psychological knowledge enabling us to reliably rehabilitate criminals? Isn’t it enough that the criminal not re-offend? What is gained by “punishment” other than the satisfaction of some archaic bloodlust? What if we can reorganize society so as to prevent most or even all crimes? Why not redirect our energies to doing so? It would be interesting to consider how much social policy over the last 150 years or so has been driven by this irrepressible unease with the “barbaric” residue of the juridical—which, let us also remember, is error-prone in ways and to a degree we wouldn’t tolerate in many other areas of life.\n\nThe question of the boundaries of the juridical press upon us in new ways given our institutions’ reliance upon massive data collection and analysis. I remember the passing of the Patriot Act, now reviled as unequivocally by much of the right as it once was unanimously by the left, back in 2002. The hostility to the law is cheaply gained. A large part of it involved remedying a simple problem: the intelligence gathering part of the national security apparatus couldn’t share information with the law enforcement part of that apparatus even in order to prevent a mass casualty attack because the data was gathered without a warrant.\n\nThe need for a warrant to enter premises or search a person so as to find evidence is obviously critical to the juridical as it has evolved in Western, or at least Anglo-American law. Part of what the juridical does is sacralize the individual in relation to the state: the individual is protected against a rapid and totalizing convergence upon his person which would destroy any attempt to simply provide his own account and have it checked. But what if the state already has this information, gathered by its own agencies or telecommunications companies in the routine course of everyday service provision? Things get more complicated—maybe the state shouldn’t be able to see a particular individual’s phone records without a warrant, but can it be provided with information regarding patterns of activity that stand out in one way or another?\n\nAnd can the pattern-detection that follows serve as evidence that will in turn get you a warrant for that individual’s records? If not, why not? And, if so, isn’t the insistence on a warrant for that person’s records a mere formality? Wouldn’t it be better to change the institution so as to ensure that the data collected and patterns detected are treated in such a way as to provide the suspect or accused with adequate means for challenging institutions of justice? And in that case, would those changes necessarily take on a recognizably juridical form? Maybe it would entail generating a range of patterns and recalibrating probabilities so as to generate possible accounts that might exonerate the accused.\n\nBut “exonerate” if probably the wrong word here—what would happen is a lessening of the probability that that person poses a danger that militates in favor of his removal from society, which puts us outside of the frame of guilt vs. innocence. And the goal wouldn’t necessarily be justice but, rather, accuracy—after all, if the focus centers on the wrong person, it’s off the right person.\n\nSimilar questions emerge in the area of health care, also now dependent on massive data gathering, sharing and analysis—and in ways that it’s very difficult to oppose. It’s obvious that patterns of “health-events” occur across the world in ways that only very extensive analysis could get on top of. But, of course, gathering data en masse just means gathering the data of billions of individuals, each of which might pose health risks to others or, for that matter, encountering risks to themselves they haven’t considered or checked for. The concern for “privacy,” a rather modern and tenuous juridical category, in this and other areas of life will be difficult if not impossible to maintain.\n\nThose determined to maintain some semblance of privacy will be far more likely to seek technological rather than juridical solutions to what they see as unwarranted intrusions, such as computing networks that enable you to retain control over your data. This might put individuals in all kinds of confrontational situations in relation to various authorities, but these confrontations are more likely to be played out through technological arms races than in the courts. It’s hard to imagine a broadly shared body of law that would handle these issues.\n\nSo, such is the case against considering the juridical a fundamental civilizational, much less human, category. Add to this that from the beginning basic assumptions regarding “intentionality” that are indispensable to the juridical have been questionable on various philosophical grounds; and that the juridical is constituted by the discipline of law, a body of knowledge of texts, precedents and the operation of institutions which draws heavily upon and has contributed significantly to, the “human sciences.” (Not to mention that the juridical still dips into the ritual, insofar as every judgment affirms the center and the originary allocation or nomos, and helped create the norms of inquiry that helped shape the hard sciences.)\n\nI have nevertheless insisted on retaining and even elevating the “profile” of the juridical because, for starters, its unavoidable pervasiveness. Nobody, as far as I can see, is willing to surrender it. No one is willing to shift their observations regarding the dysfunctions surrounding us completely onto to the field of the disciplinary—everyone wants to insist on categories like “rights” and “justice.” No one wants to treat their enemies merely as obstacles to some goal that may or may not be eliminable—everyone wants their enemies to be “wrong” and “guilty.” The closest thing to a genuine alternative to the juridical in the modern world has been the kind of biologism that wishes or claims to treat enemies as “parasites” to be removed from an otherwise healthy body.\n\nBut even these political movements have not lived up to their word and moved beyond notions of rights and justice—there is always a need to issue “accusations” which presuppose the possibility of a trial at which the accused would be found “guilty.” At a certain scale, or below a certain threshold, it is extremely difficult to move from the juridical to the disciplinary—someone whose child has been raped or murdered will not, except for very rare and probably insincere exceptions, be able or willing to treat such an event as similar to, say, an infestation of insects which proper maintenance and an array of pesticides will rid us of (even though, of course, infestations, pandemics, etc., can cost a lost more lives that human rapists and murderers).\n\nWe are on a scene with humans in a way that we aren’t with vermin or germs, and the approach of a state that would genuinely move us out of the juridical once and for all would be to treat the father seeking “justice” as just as pestilential as the criminal and suppress the primitive reactions all around—including (why not, if justice is not an issue?)—the same kind of measures one adopts in addressing plagues and infestations. I would, again, insist that it’s indeed possible, if repulsive, to imagine going “all the way” in this direction, but it’s very difficult to do so because all of the actions required to eliminate “justice” as a category would lead to such an accumulation of “injustices” as to make the task Sisyphean.\n\nWe cannot “rid” ourselves of the notion of “justice” or some equivalent because we cannot rid ourselves of resentment, which in turn is some complaint made to the center that terms it has laid down have not been adhered to—as they never can be, hard as representatives of the center may try. There is always an imperative gap, and there will always be someone not doing or giving or receiving their share.\n\nSo, we will have the juridical with us, for better and worse, into the foreseeable future. In that case, we have an interest in strengthening it and minimizing the anomalies I’ve been pointing to and that are a large part of the crisis in Western orders. My way to do that here would be to follow the juridical back into its pre-juridical elements, even back to the originary scene, where everyone, for the scene to be complete, must get a part of the whole. Not an equal part, I would say—for one thing, who would be measuring—and everyone, to get their part, would have to deploy and be willing to “represent” the sign in joining the fray.\n\nCertainly the ritual established subsequent to and commemorating the event would ensure everyone get a part. So, ritual distribution itself includes a way of making a “claim,” which is to say, expressing resentment—the ritual itself would have been violated. This may not look much like a court case, but having a claim on “your part,” however that is ascertained, provides the link. The juridical is in fact an imperial construct, intervening in the reciprocity of families, clans and tribes, and that reciprocity also contains certain limits that anticipate the juridical, but in this case the reciprocity falls on the head of the family, clan or tribe, to whom something is “owed.”\n\nAnd, no doubt, within the group, an allocation of “claims” is made. The imperial institution of justice is therefore quite hostile to the heads and chiefs and the extended kinship relations they embody. This is a hostility that must have played out differently in different places and times, over the course of centuries, with justice between the clans, whose violence the king could no longer tolerate, being the initial step. This hostility has something of the vendetta to it, and it should therefore be ended, in the name of justice.\n\nThe alternative to isolated individuals referencing vague and unclearly defined “rights” against increasingly global institutions is the institution of justice in the team. Everyone really does already “belong” to various teams, which do sometimes gather and control data and negotiate with other institutions on our behalf. If your employer is negotiating with a health care provider on behalf of the entire company, it is your employer who is the juridical actor, with “rights” and seeking “justice.” How your employer allocates agency and voice within the institution is another question—within that frame, you may be a juridical agent, with your employer as final judge.\n\nThe juridical in this case targets primarily the team, analogously to the clan or family (and revivified clans and families might be among the teams), and only secondarily if at all the individual. If you leave one team it’s to join another, under terms that are themselves subject to some juridical order mediating between the teams. No one is unhoused or “untented,” which is really almost always the case now already. This is constraining, of course, but the compensation might be that it is fairly easy to establish new teams—generally as spin-offs of existing teams (everyone’s provenance is traceable). If you’re on a small team than perhaps, like small countries, it forms alliances and “vassalage” type relations with larger teams.\n\nTeams will be disciplinary outposts of the overall tributary order, providing intelligence to the center, but the “part” they have in the “all” will always be subject to review from the center, with a focus on the division of labor and responsibility, on the principle that one must have the power to carry out one’s responsibilities. If there is teaming (and breeding) all the way down, questions of violence against property and person, along with fraud, slander and other offenses become questions of jurisdiction and arrangements across jurisdiction, always anthropologically (or anthropomorphically) informed by the knowledge that not only can the vendetta always return but that the juridical itself can be perverted into a vehicle of even more vicious kinds of vendettas.\n\nIf leaders are responsible for members of their team, they will see to it, either via internal arrangements (if offender and victim are both members of the same team) or insist “diplomatically” (if the offender is of another team) that fully demonstrative, i.e., pedagogical, use be made of treating the offender. Our current, “carceral,” order is not the only possibility, but some form of “justice” needs to be done and seen to be done—some high-tech version of the Mark of Cain might both tightly constrain while protecting from unauthorized violence individuals upon whom disruptive vendettas might converge (and whom no one wants on their team).\n\nMaking punishment a scene, including it under the aesthetic, is preferable to the current sequestering of it under the authority of the social sciences. “Justice” will become a new kind of juridical-aesthetic-pedagogical discipline, aimed at getting all the teams on the same page in order to ensure that injustices at lower levels don’t “infect” the relations between teams."
    },
    {
      "slug": "options-on-succession",
      "title": "Options on Succession",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 31, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/options-on-succession",
      "content": "One of the many interesting features of Colin Drumm’s doctoral dissertation, _The Difference Money Makes_ , is an extended discussion of the interlocking of problems of monarchical succession with monetary policy in medieval England. In his discussion of more central and more peripheral names of English kings, Drumm speaks of potential but more distant successors in current financial terms, as “options on succession.” On the one hand, it’s good that, say, a grandson of a previous king is available as a backup in case the present king fails to produce an uncontested heir; on the other hand, since arguments for legitimacy based on lineage are always a bit sophistic, having such options raises the possibility of civil war if the king fails to maintain some concord or balance between the various social factions.\n\nAnd whether or not he does so depends heavily upon monetary policy—an “austere” policy, which insists that all currency be equivalent to its metallic content, satisfies the nobility because it ensures the dues they are owed by their peasants will retain its value; a “liberal” policy, on the other hand, which depends on the king declaring issued currency to have a certain value regardless of its metallic content, is necessary for merchants buying abroad and supplying the peasantry, which in turn enables them to keep up payments to the nobles. There is also a crucial question of national sovereignty here (even if that’s not the word that would have been used).\n\nPart of Drumm’s project is to critique Modern Monetary Theory, which assumes the sovereign can just issue money as it likes with nothing but its own sovereignty backing it. Well, why can’t it? For the medieval monarch, at any rate (and we’ll have to consider if there is an equivalent today), the coins had to contain enough metallic content to provide the “outside option” of melting down the coins and having them reminted elsewhere to ensure the king will fulfill the promise he made in minting the coins in the first place. So, tilting toward austerity affirmed the king’s dependency upon the nobility, while tilting toward devaluation and liberality would be a move toward the centralization of power and greater reliance on the commercial classes and, at the same time, international trade (and currencies).\n\nThe “outside option” on sovereignty, it seems, would have first of all have been possible but less direct heirs, while the outside option on coinage was international currency (keeping which out of the country would of course be critical to maintaining power). But, then, are not both options called in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, when a Dutch prince is called to depose and replace an English king (who pressed too hard on the merchant class), followed in 1694 by the establishment of the Bank of England making the king dependent on an independent source of money creation—which must in turn be closely linked to the real launch of the British Empire in the 18th century as it decisively outstrips its rivals (a more generative source of money for the state is necessary for wars and other overseas adventures).\n\nSo, the British Empire completes the revolution in monetary policy, which during the Middle Ages had England leaning far closer toward austerity (and hence dependency on the nobility) than the more centralized European monarchies but now had it calling in and cancelling the outside option by, essentially, becoming the outside option, as England itself becomes subordinate to empire.\n\nNow, the “outside option” has another (actually the primary) meaning in Drumm’s discussion, one involved in the making of markets. This is the option provided by what ultimately became known as the lender of last resort—not exactly the purpose of the Bank of England at its founding but we could say it was always inscribed in its logic even if it took a couple of hundred years to be made explicit. People need to carry out exchanges before they can be certain they’ll be able to meet the terms of the exchange—a grocery store ordering a few thousand apples may not have the cash on hand and the apple dealer might not have the apples sitting in a warehouse (and rotting) but both know where they’ll be able to get it, more or less—usually.\n\nAnd when they don’t, they’ll need to have recourse to other lenders, who, if they are not sufficiently liquid (they don’t know if they’ll be able to count on their back-ups, ultimately because something owed to them is not coming through), until we get to the last resort, those who lend to those who lend. Markets cannot be sustained without this outside option, an outside option that itself, in the end, is a question of sovereignty, as we saw in 2008. Questions of money are ultimately questions of sovereignty—part of Drumm’s quarrel with the MMT fantasy that the sovereign can create money as it likes follows from the obvious observation that “sovereignty” is not itself a given, as MMT fantasizes.\n\nThose medieval kings had to decide, in determining how to value currency, whom they could most afford to make pay: the nobility or the merchants (and there were limits to pressing down upon the peasants as well). The problem of distributing costs among various constituencies is no less necessary today, and as long as sovereignty is bound up with central banks no decision regarding the creation or valuation of currency can go too far in constraining the power of banks to acquire assets in cases of default, or of corporations to maximize their profits.\n\nUnless, as I have been hypothesizing in other posts, sufficient data security to ensure that options can be called in requires crossing the Rubicon of converting assets into data. Those hoping to retain some connection (some option) with the rhetoric of the left will be thinking in terms of counterpowers coming from labor, or anticolonial (no more “antiglobalist” movements, interestingly) or whatever rapidly fading agency can produce the aura of resistance. If we discard all that, we can simply say that power depends upon knowledge (even a rejuvenated labor movement would require massive data collection and analysis), and we want power to be informed by knowledge so that those in power can know whether and within what constraints their imperatives can be and are carried out.\n\nCurrent forms of sovereignty operate through increasing the centralization of power while keeping rotation of occupancy at the center at the pace needed for the best advantaged speculators to ensure their arbitrage. Enough data is required so as to know that a specific package of policies and “made” administrators can ensure the exploitation of that advantage as far into the future as one can see; but not too far into the future because past a certain point the option of transferring power to those with best access to the data would eliminate those advantages. So, the model of a “politics” here is the data security company which can impose reliance of sovereigns and the corporations and banks that enable the imperial center to be the outside option and eventually leverage this reliance into the creation of a new tributary order.\n\nIn the meantime, though, the data security company must exist as a company, attracting (and making) investments, maintaining profit margins, coordinating with suppliers, meeting customer demands, and so on, making it vulnerable to the courses it has been constructed to counter. Resilience and ultimately conquest is possible insofar as the growing disorder increases the leverage of the data companies while, data being highly fungible given sufficiently powerful analytical tools, huge monopolies capable of taking over educational, health care and other industries required for team building will result in sovereignty being more or less indiscernibly transferred.\n\nAnd any one of us can equip ourselves to contribute in our own small way to this project by becoming samples of data abundance and scrupulousness, by marking what we say as it travels across the infrastructure until it arrives at a meaning that, if we have been sufficiently abundant and scrupulous, will be the same as the saying. And behaving in such a way will make you a preferred candidate for the model data security company.\n\nSo, whether we’re speaking of “economics” or “politics,” which is to say, distribution from the center, which is to say centered ordinality, we’re targeting what we can call the furtherest future perfect option. We want to be all hedged up and with a data hedge that allows for continual arbitrage regarding whether a particular scene will have been the same (i.e, could trammel up the consequence, and with its surcease, success). I’ve been speaking of singularized succession in perpetuity in terms of selecting your successor such that he will be best able to select his and so on, but I’ve also been making it explicit that this involves having a range of candidates, which is to say options, constantly generated by institutions which are designed, then, precisely to produce the options.\n\nThe furtherest future perfect option, then, goes through the infrastructure, and it does so insofar as everything in the infrastructure can be assetized—and much, of course, already has been. We could say that “neo-liberalism” is continuous with capitalism but involves the breakdown of institutional layers that had previously been immune or resistant to assetization. Neo-liberalism has become a kind of curse word, but it was introduced precisely because the kinds of services that had been taken over by the state through the 20th century were in fact opaque and resistant to assessment—how, exactly, do we tell how a school system is performing; or a mass transit system, or a health care system, etc.?\n\nThese systems set their own criteria and standards, but how do we assess those criteria and standards—they would have to be compared with radically different ways of organizing these activities, and this is unimaginable within the institution. Privatizing them, or subjecting them to the rigors of private measures, at least provides a measure: if an educational, health, transportation or other institution can’t attract investment or turn a profit or, the equivalent, being able to run at costs low enough so as to create a business-friendly environment, then we can at least insist they be organized in some way that they can. We can point to the intrinsically public or immeasurable dimensions of certain human activities, but that doesn’t change the fact that decisions need to be made regarding the amount and kind of resources to be allocated to them.\n\nIn the end, assetizing doesn’t improve things because what makes a set of assets a profitable investment (perhaps for a very short time) or reliable collateral has no necessary correlation with the effectiveness with which it serves its function. An idealized market in which parents pay tuition to schools of their choice rather than taxes that are then distributed through the educational bureaucracy may make sense; but once those private schools must take out loans, turn their property and expected tuition into collateral, agree to cost-cutting in exchange for lower interest rates, and the school becomes an asset bundled with millions of other assets for investment by pension funds subject to state regulation, etc., we are far from that idyllic model. Maybe a lousy school would hit its limits sooner or later, but plenty of good ones would be shut down. The same would go for more privatized doctors and hospitals, even if excellent ones for the wealthy could be created this way.\n\nThat doesn’t mean you don’t build an educational institution, just that if you do it has to be scalable, synced to existing infrastructures, and funded or fundable by sources with assets (otherwise, whence the funds?) but in dire need of data security and, especially, what we could call “anthropomorphic” data security in order to maintain those assets. Agents, in other words, who might have to choose between their governance position within the centered ordinality and the arbitrage position they’ve secured within it. Your educational institution, then, should be designed so as to help such agents make the right choice and see it through.\n\nAnd any institution is a kind of educational institution, or closely downstream of one, insofar as they all run on knowledge, i.e., data security, which someone will have an edge on. You are, then, taking out options on succession from the greatest height you can ascend to, producing knowledge that can only be handled by those who could provide an outside option when there is a great enough gap between the data provided by assets and data incommensurable to assets that enables the formation of teams that can divert revenue flows to themselves by providing indispensable sovereign services. This knowledge is also the transfer idiom, existing on the level of meaning—the very difference between what one says and what one means is itself an option on the sign being the same at some later point where it might be redeemed. Knowledge is only such if it can be redeemed in the long run, even if it must hedge, leverage and arbitrage along the way in order to make it to the long run.\n\nThe way we hedge, leverage and arbitrage along the way is by insisting and demonstrating that everyone else is doing what we are but in indirect, underhanded, unknowing and therefore destructive ways. No one does anything without trying to see it through and, seeing it through, seeing to the possibility of others seeing its consequences and implications. Everyone is selecting successors, and taking out options on the future and you in fact do them a favor by pointing out how. We work in the tradition of “modernist” aesthetic, linguistic and theoretical “options” of the 20th century by directly posing the question of the scenic terms of meaning.\n\nThe purpose of a movement like cubism, or post-structuralism, was to force us off the small scenes, or pumped up Big Scene, upon which we imagine meaning to be produced analogously to on small scenes, and to address the circulations of meaning. It’s naïve for me to think of myself as “communicating” with you, the reader; rather, I must try and turn you into a carrier of the idiom, providing you with phrases you can repeat and revise so that others then might do the same—and this includes degrees of vagueness and layers of implication that might make it worthwhile to revisit this text and notice something you didn’t before.\n\nWe should even be trying to insinuate our way into the databases from which the language AIs will draw for their answers to the search terms inserted by future inquirers. People already think along these lines when they, for example, decide on a title for a book or essay based on what will make it more likely it will come up in certain kinds of internet searches. This kind of inscripture is what will create the outside options that might crack open and exploit gaps between assets and data.\n\nThere is no distribution from the center without adjudication and the creation of the transfer idiom involves creating new forms of adjudication, which means new modes of authority. Distribution from the center, centered ordinality, involves allocation, property, or the equivalent (a sphere of control and responsibility), and this will always lead to boundary questions. Indeed, it is boundary questions that refer us back to the center and lead the center to refer back to previous instantiations of the center, which also means previous adjudications. Legal traditions are retrieved, remade, and rescaled as distribution takes place as and through the infrastructure, or stack (what Bratton calls the “accidental megastructure”).\n\nCapital, the securing of future flows of income by deploying power in the present, is to be brought within the scope of adjudication; adjudication is to be reset scenically and set off from what must condition and enable without being permitted to infringe upon the juridical; and spaces for teaching and learning how to reroute today’s forms of power to the furtherest future perfect options by bringing even the juridical to its limits on the boundary of knowing—this has us obeying the oldest sacral imperatives while disseminating as transfer idiom the program of the originary hypothesis."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-calculus",
      "title": "Originary Calculus",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 22, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/originary-calculus",
      "content": "We have an interesting paradox that follows from the originary hypothesis: we need to describe deferral, on the face of it a negation of action, as a mode of action, or agency. GA is going to confound anyone who wants to base their political or moral thinking on action, understood as an expression of an intention, itself an expression of identity, and resulting in some determinate result reflecting the motivating intention. Yes, ultimately, if you do something, you want to know if you ended up doing what you thought you were, but since you’re “always already” doing things any articulation of doing and happening has its origin in a not doing so as to prevent something from happening.\n\nDeferring some mimetic crisis is always the obverse of any observable act which suggests that the measure of any action is the relative imminence of that crisis and the delayed and distributed effects relative to that more or less likely crisis of the action taken. One could always modify an action so as to correlate it a little more closely to the assumed imminence of the crisis as that assumed imminence is recalibrated through the actions taken to delay it itself. We thereby get fractals, actions within actions, and distant actions affected in non-linear ways by present fractalized actions, which places us within the field of infinitesimals and derivatives, which is the field of calculus.\n\nWhat you are doing when you defer is aligning your gestures, posture, speech and formalized actions with all others who are deferring. Of course, everyone, even the most low-impulse criminal defers—no one carries out constant violent actions throughout his waking hours, finally collapsing out of exhaustion—but there’s a difference between deferring because the field of deferral is already set (you are late on the scene, and confront only obstacles to advancing your desires), on the one hand, and the job of deferring in order to set it, on the other. In the former case, you just need to mimic already formalized responses so as to lessen suspicion regarding your dangerousness.\n\nIn the latter case the entirety of your action entails a “reading” of the imminent generalized grasping and erosion of boundaries which includes blocking the grasping and restoring the boundaries (taking into account changes on the ground). The implications for what everybody is saying are as follows: in the case of late-coming, deceptive mimicry, one occupies the field of the explicit exclusively—you’re following the rules, are beyond reproach, and there’s nothing more to be said. In the case of founding the field, you create and allow for a wide range of transactions between implicit and explicit: there is much more to what everybody is saying in this case.\n\nIn that case, what we derive from deferral are those transactions between explicit and implicit created by deferral. The appearance of the late-comer, who can be a parvenu or bureaucrat, and not a criminal, signifies the exhaustion of a field of deferral—even early on, then, one could anticipate this devolution, as it’s implicit in the various checks regarding what counts as saying the same thing in that field. Clearly, then, I’m writing this for those who want to anticipate, delay and reverse such developments, beginning with the founding gesture itself—in other words, those interested in working in the field of derivatives.\n\nThere is an intersection of the juridical and the epistemological that makes a kind of calculation possible here (how possible is part of what is to be calculated). Anthropologically, we can identify shifts where, from the entire world being a source of what we can anachronistically call “data” regarding the advisability of one or another course of action (the movements of the stars, apparent anomalies in nature, the reading of entrails and other “signs”) to the bounding of an observable event with a narrative structure: that is, what someone did and what they meant to do. This represents an enormous advance in deferral capacities, as someone is placed at the center and subjected to the violence of the group not in terms of singular signs that draw in the crowd immediately but in terms of the creation of a scene with a line drawn between observers and participants. Here, there is an effort to ensure that all involved see the same thing, and therefore herein lies an indispensable origin of scientific, experimental practices.\n\nOne way of framing current impasses, often discussed in terms of the limits of modernity, and post and transhumanism, is in terms of the possibility of experimental scientific practices completely replacing juridical ones. There is an obvious logical possibility here: let’s posit the familiar critique of the juridical in “scientific” terms claiming that, well, since the point of addressing crime through open public institutional means is to ensure that the harm caused by what we deem criminal acts is minimized and maybe even eliminated, why not abandon the “barbaric” practice of “punishment” and treat crime as a therapeutic and medical matter?\n\nWhat matters is not that the rapist and murderer be punished, with the ostracism and horror evoked by the public presentation of the crimes, but that his impulse to rape and murder be neutralized, in advance, prior to the commission of any crime, if possible (and why shouldn’t that be possible?). We’ve all seen enough versions of this scenario in science fiction to imagine what it looks like. And to realize that with the replacement of the juridical by the scientific form, much of what we associate with the human goes too—it would be impossible to exaggerate how much of our moral and aesthetic thinking is bound up in reflections on the various paradoxes of the juridical form, including the ways in which the enforcer of punishment can come to look uncannily like the transgressor/“victim” of the punishment. But perhaps what seems indelibly human here is only transiently so, as we have found to be the case in other areas—maybe we could redirect our moral and aesthetic thinking, or subsume them as well into a broader scientific field.\n\nWhat is ignored by this scientism is the anthropological origins of the juridical form, which lie in the suppression of the vendetta (which would mean that the discussion of appropriate punishment must always find reference to some lower threshold that might reignite the vendetta). There is a larger violence involved in this expropriation of power from kinship networks and tribal orders by new imperial centers but remembering this makes it all the more important to remember the explosive potential of tinkering with and trifling with the juridical form. Indeed, scientistic superventions upon the juridical form threaten precisely such a re-ignition by acting “arbitrarily” (without the formal distribution and exercise of rights), thereby exposing imperial power in a “naked” form and in such a way that discredits scientific pretensions, because the laboratory methods taken as definitive of science can never be matched in the public world.\n\nDemands that all, or a selected “some,” submit to some medical procedure in a manner unmediated juridically necessarily appears “tyrannical,” even to those who see it as benevolently so. Any particular experience of “bio-medical tyranny” might be impotent (then again, it might not be), but such “tyranny” wrecks the always tenuous articulation of the juridical and the epistemological. The juridical form does confront increasingly unmanageable anomalies with the receding of sacrality from the social center, but the only way the scientific disciplines could replace it would be by including all within the disciplines.\n\nThis is a worthy, but daunting task, one that requires the generation of disciplinary spaces focused on the manifold interfaces between the juridical and the scientific—interfaces which involve, among other things, differences in scale between the individual case examined juridically and the general process examined scientifically. To put it bluntly, releasing violent criminals in the name of a scientific hypothesis is both bad government and bad science.\n\nThe generation of disciplinary spaces focused on juridical-scientific interfaces is as important an act of deferral as any one could undertake today. The juridical is essential for ensuring that those authorized to generate scientific knowledge are handling their data and its ramifications for the public with probity. The juridical still provides us with our evidentiary standards for wrongdoing—the transference of the establishment and enforcement of those standards to disciplinary institutions themselves will be a long and uncertain process, and we won’t know that it’s been accomplished until no one feels a need to talk about it—polemical assertions that we have made the “switch” would themselves be signs that we are far from having done so.\n\nThe path to doing so, and a sign of good faith on the part of a new officer class, would be the use of techno-media infrastructures to revivify kinship networks, locally scaled economic units and ethnos, as sites where responsibility for norm-setting, surveillance, policing, pedagogy and so on can be “off-loaded.” It is this space of deferral that generates the derivatives that we use to “up-load” the resentment we donate to the center. The (non-mathematicalizable) calculation involved here is as follows: acting and speaking so as to support the comportments needed to restore and preserve the juridical forms providing for transferability and reciprocal strengthening across juridical-scientific interfaces.\n\nWe try to figure out what, in any case, and in any case within a case, or potential case within cases, make that more likely. The scenic continuity from ritual, to the juridical, to the scientific can only be sustained by ensuring the integrity of each and every scene, organized around an ostensive, even if virtual, center, which means sharply scrutinizing and when necessarily resisting the tendency to treat anywhere in the world as conditions easily made suitably “laboritorial”—a tendency, it must be said, indulged in less by scientists or engineers themselves than by politicians hoping to leverage the scientific to justify their own violation of juridical scenic norms.\n\nThe means of generating this kind of disciplinary space, the kind occupied by a new officer class, scientifically and technologically competent while engaged in the revivification of their various sites of origin and modes of entry into juridical form, is grammatical—the sentence is to be leveraged. Language remains, and I think will remain, our most powerful form of data processing. The declarative sentence, in its literate form, with its constituents made explicit, is one of the great human accomplishments. You have a subject, or topic, what we are talking about, involving an at least imaginable ostensive; a predicate, or comment, what we are saying about the topic, whatever singles it out, as either a target or site to be protected; and we have the modifiers, each of which provide us with information about the subject or predicate, or something that is itself providing us with information about the subject or predicate.\n\nAnd by “providing us with information,” I mean answering questions, actual or potential, all of which is involved in constructing the space of deferral that is the declarative sentence—the modifiers create a thicket of obstacles and considerations we’d have to get through to obtain or get a clear view of the “subject” or “topic.” The declarative sentence is the infrastructure of a disciplinary space, however momentary.\n\nBy creating a center with a mediated and modulated approach to it, the sentence opens up onto a space of differences and similarities, agreements and disagreements, distinctions and deferrals. The modifications—adjectives and adverbs—indicate a range of other possibilities that have been considered, perhaps unawares (they’ve been “considered” by the position one occupies on some scene) and denied or delayed. Pronouns create indexical relations within and between sentences, and the very fact that one sentence follows another for reasons that could never be completely explicit generates fields of the implicit. This is perhaps all elementary, but I’m laying it out to suggest the possibility, value and eventual necessity of speaking this way—which would mean speaking about the sentences we construct in a manner akin to the way we itemize laboratory materials and procedures.\n\nWe all should be ready to talk about why we use one, say, adverb, out of a field of near synonyms—in many cases there will be reasons beyond what we can supply, and since we all know this there is no “gotcha” moment involved here, just an entrance into a linguistic field under formation.\n\nThe value of Anna Wierzbicka’s discovery of the Natural Semantic Primes lies in the power the primes offer us in tracing the creation of disciplinary spaces. Our entire vocabulary of verbs and their nominalizations referring to speech and cognitive acts are all more contextually loaded ways of referring to saying, thinking, knowing, seeing, hearing, wanting and feeling—or to not doing those things. And “all” a disciplinary space does is create a shared and very specific way of doing all those things, including in various combinations with each other. These disciplinary spaces are the derivatives of deferral, and the way to construct them is by deconstructing the existing disciplines, including the residues and wreckages of superannuated disciplines we find scattered in our “common sense.”\n\nThe interfaces between the juridical and the scientific are what we can see, think and know through disciplinary spaces; and these interfaces are also between the securing of infrastructures of data and singularized succession. And these are themselves just ways of speaking about listening to the center and trying to figure out what would count as a way of obeying its commands that maintains it as the center that can prolong that and supplementary commands. The imperatives of the center first of all appear in your language, in your sentences, which are imitations and translations of other sentences which always raises the question we can make more explicit: how to imitate and translate, and why?\n\nWhich elements of the infrastructure to make more explicit; which inappropriate demand or importunity to leave implicit? You find yourself in a field of language that you are always ordering, and that ordering can be brought into view. You can see, think, hear, know, say and feel what you do because you are in a “here” densely anchored disciplinarily, and you must do all of that more explicitly to create the derivative “there” where another might see, think, hear, know, say and feel the “same,” infrastructural adjustments allowed for, in this program of ongoing hominization. The derivative born of deferral, then, is practices and selvings most likely to ensure the continuation of the juridical/scientific, infrastructural/successionist interface made explicit _here_ to some _there_.\n\nLast post I tossed out a way of distinguishing the digital from the analogue, drawing upon Alexander Galloway’s recent essay in _Critical Inquiry_ as translated into the Natural Semantic Primes: same/other articulations are digital, and “likenesses” are analogue. What we experience as intuitive, spontaneous, “movementy,” and so on is spreading across a field of likenesses, with ever-shifting thresholds for what registers as “like.” If we inquire into the production of these fields of likenesses, especially with the intent to construct new ones, supported by new scenic designs, we do so by inscribing a series of same/other articulations and oscillations.\n\nThis is the practice of drawing derivatives out of deferrals. What is the same is what we can point to, indicate, mark in such a way as to return to and reinscribe; what is other is that we can produce ostensives within a space that is never given in advance, subsisting on sheer faith in data (the given) and the imperative to “handle” it. So, we can think in terms of a Turing style series: same-other-other-other-same-other-same-same-other, etc. This would represent the terms of oscillation between ostensives generated within a disciplinary space and ostensives that self-reflexively check the constitution of the space itself.\n\nIn a court of law this might mean moving back and forth between examining evidence and testing and contesting the terms of evidentiarity. In a scientific space one moves back and forth between data gathering and analysis and checking the instruments and their settings, including the algorithmic settings used to process the data. So, programming a greater increment of deferral and therefore a lowered threshold of significance into a given space would mean tagging both evidence/data (same) and constitutive conditions (other) in increasingly hypothetical, even bizarre ways that have not yet been considered and introducing these derivatives into the existing, unfolding field.\n\nThis kind of practice could not be quantified (except in provisional ways, for convenience at given junctures)—it could only be stylized, “literarized,” “indicativized” within sensitivized sentences and discourses. Such practices would contribute to the integrity and continuity of existing spaces while deriving from them other possible spaces found, say, in the implications of a phrase created to capture a possible data drift brought to notice by a particular sub-hypothesis (maybe even by creating a series of new adjectives referring to conversions modeled on existing adjectives)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-grammar-as-model-for-scenic-design-intelligence",
      "title": "Originary Grammar as Model for Scenic Design Intelligence",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 26, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/originary-grammar-as-model-for-scenic",
      "content": "I’m going to keep at this until I get it right; “this” being the use of language as a model for technological and scientific inquiry. Let’s review: “technics” is the scenic design component of the constitution of the human; the human is scenic from the start, definitively, constitutively, but scenes, once in existence, need to be maintained and constructed; the first deliberately constructed scenes were ritual scenes, composed so as to situate the community in a relation to the sacrificial center so as to facilitate and maximize the exchange entered into with that center; ongoing scenic reconstruction is complemented and guided by narrative accounts of the results of imperative exchanges with the center, which call for different positioning, different scenery, costumes, props, furnishings; the human occupation of the center initiates a dual process of sacralizing the human and desacralizing the center which also means, in the end, desacralizing the human; scenic design, then, aims at constructing scenes such that whoever is placed at the center is connected with what is an increasingly exclusive and direct imperative relation with all on the periphery involving an unceasing flurry of supplementary imperatives filling the imperative gap and displacing recall of the succession of imperatives from the signifying center; technology is the creation of expanded scenes enhancing unidirectional center-periphery communication; the relocation of center-periphery relations to straightforward imperativity is revelatory insofar as that’s all it ever was while being disorienting because reference points external to those relations become increasingly arbitrary.\n\nThe signifying center, which under sacral conditions was supplemented by narrative and liturgical knowledge on the part of supplicants, is now constituted by attempts to apply remembered promises from the occupied center to the very scenic (technological) conditions constructing the memory. So, for example, one demands and tries to flesh out the subjective conditions of “privacy” as a response to technological conditions that have already relocated the concept to their own governing “terms of use.”\n\nThose working on technology—inventors and engineers—are therefore working on expanding the scene, whether that be connecting users across space, dissolving users into multiple agencies that can operate on various scenes simultaneously, compressing scenes temporally so that entire narrative sequences can play out in nano-seconds, or extending them temporally so that we pose effective hypotheses that we’re able to wait centuries to test (gathering data along the way). It seems that a crucial point in all invention comes when it is realized that in order to scale up or down whatever scene one is taking to be the model (say, people speaking with each other in real time as a model for prose writing) must be alienated from the representation of that scene on the scene and de-anthropomorphized so it can be decomposed into measurable parts and recomposed into a new anthropomorphized whole.\n\nThis space of de- and recomposing is the space of imperativity, of working out a sequence of commands that would make no sense beyond mandating a specific set of moves to those carrying out the commands and therefore can be distributed across non-human agencies. People would have noticed very early on that objects placed over or across separate pieces of land make it possible to cross them but, such is my hypothesis, only massive slave armies would have made it possible to imagine building such bridges across, say, rivers or distant cliffs and only then, after enough imagining how all those instrumentalized humans would have to articulated so as to hold a board connecting the two surfaces can a properly architectural imagination work out the alignment of beams, boards, etc. to build the actual bridge.\n\nYou are then, that is, able to “tell” the pieces of wood and metal where to stand, how to support each other, and so on. Similarly, today, one can only imagine and design social media and weapons systems by composing a new distribution of end-users and targets.\n\nOf course, the entire algorithmic order presently under construction (I don’t think it’s that near completion yet) is explicitly organized in terms of “if… then” style instructions, which very interestingly combine the declarative and imperative forms, as “if… then” is also the basic logical structure. This rendering explicit of the expanded (through the declarative) imperative form makes it possible to retroject it back to the history of technics and technology, linking it back to the originary inscription, Stiegler’s tertiary retention, or commemoration. Ritual can help us think about technology in a very specific way: ritual always has a “do this so that you will remember that” form, and if we were to remember that technology is always meant (if not quite always “intended”) to place us in closer communication with the center we could think better about it (and maybe better of it).\n\nAll we have is ourselves as ongoing intelligence operations taking in, sifting through, shaping and giving off data as it is distributed and weighed by the algorithms to which our own intelligence operations contribute. This intelligence bears traces of the past, including the very different past, which the “humanities” are to be designed so as to help us read, while suggesting intimations of the future, so thinking of what we do as intelligence operations is the very opposite of “dehumanizing.” Thinking in these terms makes it more likely that we will turn our declaratives more directly to the surrounding swarm of imperatives, sharpening while making razor-thin the boundary between them.\n\nThe question of technology, then, becomes the question of enhancing communication between center and margin, or intelligence exchanges between center and margin, such that we keep receiving/composing messages from the center in which the “if… then” articulation keeps adding meaning to the previous “if… then” sequences we have completed or witnessed. And the algorithmic order is the central intelligence with which we are in continual communication. Anything you would ever want to do, personally, politically, morally, technologically, economically, carries with it the question, what do you need to know and how could you share what you know (and how would knowing and sharing be a single practice) in order to do that—and, then, you must want there to be available and reliable intelligence, and you must want to have iterable and intelligent ways of selving through that intelligence. Wanting that intelligence, self-composing to be that intelligence, in the form you need is your exchange with the central intelligence.\n\nExchange with the central intelligence presupposes idiomatic intelligence—that is the relation between center and margin—the more idiomatically you articulate your intelligence the greater your tributary relation to the central intelligence. The specifically human (“human,” I think we will find, works better as adjective than noun) dimension of intelligence lies here, because here is where its scenic dimension is. The provenance of the intelligence is a sharp concentration of the human and scenic—who knew what, when, how, to what extent, with what form of exclusivity, with what degree of “spoilage” over time, etc.\n\nHere, you need to know and vet everyone involved, or factor your inability to do so into your assessment. Working textually, scribally, being intelligence and therefore being text, locates the provenance of intelligence in what Joanna Zylinska, in _AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams_ , borrowing from Derrida’s _The Truth in Painting_ and examining Trevor Paglen’s artworks aimed at infiltrating and exposing the implications of official databases (a kind of originary satire, I would say) and their uses calls the “parergonal.” The parergonal is what is outside of or beside the work, what frames the work, what situates it in relation to its infrastructural conditions of possibility—and is very closely related to the “para-textual” referred to [a couple of posts back](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/languaging-ordering).\n\nThe paratextual, the parergonal, the “para-sitical” is what places us beside while still being within the algorithmic order. The more that those features that frame the work (title, author, publishing information, index, citations, institutional circulations of texts, etc.) become part of the work, the more one will be creating works so as to operate on the infrastructure. It’s the equivalent of constantly naming and renaming members of your team and the actions they undertake so that only someone on the team can really know what everyone’s doing even if the results are (not necessarily universally) translatable into other selvings. Every noticeable feature of the team and its setting is made available and revelatory, productive of ostensives, or items of intelligence.\n\nLet’s keep the para, but even better is the “infra,” which builds relationships within a text and by doing so builds relationships between everything the text infrastructurally articulates. The infra brings the framing into the text itself, making it a series of self-framings and self-references. Needless to say, I’m drawing heavily upon post-structuralist theory and postmodern literature and for a very good reason—while there has been an enormous backlash against that whole body of work, I read it all as an effort to raise the general social level of literacy and intelligence and, in particular, to get us past logocentrism which reduces writing to (a certain experience of) conversation, ignoring everything that sets up the transmission of words, that is, that fantasizes extra-scenic communication, “mind to mind.”\n\nI will also note that what I am arguing for is emulating the Hebrew Bible, which scholarship has long, but with increasing precision, shown to be a dense network of infrareferences that also represent “external” references to the imperial and mythic orders of the near east and beyond.\n\nThe para and the infra are the forms of imperativity, telling you what texts you must take as models, how to take them as models, how to use those models to work through some particular content or materials, and how to read texts as instantiations or modifications of those models. It locks you in place as a reader with a very elaborate set of expectations and conditions of intelligibility and all “postmodern” narrative really did is make this visible, which some found upsetting because trusting and following without question those conditions of intelligibility led them straight up the path to narratives that could be easily assimilated to pre-existing reading protocols.\n\nOf course, the postmodern experiments can themselves become a staid and obfuscatory set of protocols, which is why new elements of the text and its infrastructures must always be singled out and elevated as framing devices. Exchanges with the central intelligence via language AI can be helpful here. This approach to textuality serves as a model for technology because technology is all para and infra, taking the spatial, sonic, temporal, environmental, visual, haptic, interactive, conceptual, motor, etc., components of existing scenes and converting them into frames of expanded or compressed scenes. We can learn a great deal from the creation of the Google search engine here (and it may be that all of our transactions with the central intelligence can be reduced to searches): Brin and Page rejected the formal, institutional, expert designed means of classifying information in favor of a hierarchy of texts and ultimately phrases that have been found to be important by the people who are out there determining what they consider important.\n\nTechnological development can now, especially if Mario Carpo is right (and if he isn’t yet, he will be) that we have enough data that experimentation is no longer necessary because we can examine all the consequences of having materials articulated in particular ways virtually, can be united with scientific inquiry and humanistic, while social and physical inquiries can be united as well, because we can keep finding ways of getting from the intelligence we can constantly gather about what everyone is doing to ways they can be helped to do them differently, better, or in some cases not at all. Making everyone intelligence gathers means engaging everyone on teams of inquiry as all human activity comes back to inquiry, and inquiry means designing scenes so that we see more of what we have been doing than we saw previously. And this would be a “neganthropic” articulation of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives as practices and hypotheses are increasingly tightly bound up in selvings.\n\nSo, continual para-ing and infra-ing, framing, creating scene-events that introduce macro-scenes and micro-scenes within other scenes, scenes overseeing other scenes, scenes getting you a new glance of another scene, and so on, is the path toward technological development as scenic design. The best way of creating a new device is to ask yourself how you would teach someone to operate on a new scene, within an unfamiliar idiom (and then know that it has been learned)—which naturalized gestures and perceptions would need to be denaturalized, which movements minimized so that they could be rearticulated in a way that fits the new setting, which mistakes untangled so that the integration of the self into the new setting can be seen to be reforming the setting as well.\n\nThen, ask yourself how the scene itself could be designed through an intricate, recursive set of instructions (imperatives) so as to effect that result without you intervening—and you will have the outlines of your device, with the questions of materials, energy sources, interoperability with existing devices, integration into broader systems remaining to be worked out (and even those problems would best be solved parergonally and para-textually). In this way as you scale up you will not do so balloonishly by forgetting all the marginal scenes upon whose resiliency and robustness the center depends. A great deal can be learned about all this by studying the memory practices of oral cultures along with the scriptural practices of Axial Age cultures—the earliest form of “blockchain” (as the AI-collaborative poet Sarah Stiles likes to say) on the one hand, and the culmination of the earliest and most fundamental form of what Stiegler calls “grammatization” on the other."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-hypothesis-as-mobius-strip",
      "title": "Originary Hypothesis as Mobius Strip",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 24, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/originary-hypothesis-as-mobius-strip",
      "content": "The originary hypothesis repels the kind of initiatory revelatory “download” that is nevertheless the only way of understanding it. Eric Gans, and with him every participant in GA will insist that GA is not a faith or religion, and, of course, they are right—in a way it is the antithesis of faith and religion by disclosing the originary possibility of all faiths and religions. There are believers within GA who reconcile the originary hypothesis with their faith, but if you are taking the originary hypothesis literally, without any suspension or bracketing to allow for your specific faith tradition to also be taken literally, then you can only see your faith tradition as an approximation of a configuration you consider prior and irreducible to that tradition.\n\nAt the same time, GA cannot claim to be an “Enlightenment” philosophy that stands outside of faith and “debunks” its pretensions—on the contrary, the implication of the originary hypothesis is that the faiths are truer than philosophy, and it’s not even close. But while philosophy and science allow us to speak of “approximation,” faith resists such an approach—if you’re not all in, you’re suspect, even to yourself. Nor can GA subordinate itself to faith and justify it, or paternalistically confer upon it a. kind of local legitimacy for those in need it of it, as philosophy can easily do (or have done to it). So, the originary hypothesis finds itself in the position of being both closest and furthest from any faith tradition, while remaining completely indigestible to philosophy and philosophy’s children, the human sciences. It’s like a perfectly materialist refutation of materialism, the one true faith masquerading as subversive heresy.\n\nThe originary hypothesis repels the kind of initiatory download that is nevertheless the only way of appropriating it insofar as it is unwilling or unable to take upon itself the burden of a new point of world origin—something inclusive of, and beyond, any faith; something that replaces all the shuffling around of Being and Becoming, social and individual, diachronic and synchronic, freedom and tyranny, etc., in philosophy, the human sciences and politics (and, while we’re at, all the categories of ethics and morality as well). I have often been frustrated by what seem to me Gans’s rather arbitrary and astonishing limiting of the scope and implications of GA (if you scroll through his Chronicles for the occasional discussion of what “GA is for,” it always sounds suspiciously like what Eric Gans does—some literary and cultural criticism, some refereeing of middle brow theism/atheism debates, some apologetics for liberal democracy) but I wonder whether he may have, at some point, finding himself virtually alone in what could not provide the sustenance of a “faith,” simply recoiled at the implications of what he had come up with. And he’s too “democratic” and unpretentious to seed his thinking with an esoteric dimension that might leave some tracks toward a more ambitious GA than the one he has been satisfied with.\n\nTo take on the originary hypothesis, you have to be prepared to be disreputable from all sides—an atheist to believers, a mere speculator to philosophers and “scientists”—and simply unacceptably arrogant—how dare one sweep aside and allow back in only if thoroughly reframed all of human knowledge on the say so of some French professor at UCLA? There is a powerful and, indeed, I think irrefutable (I’ve never seen someone even make an attempt at refutation) logic to the originary hypothesis, as long as you are willing to start with the undeniable fact (one even attested to by Aristotle!) that human beings are especially imitative.\n\nIf you accept that human beings are imitative, can you set a limit to imitation—what does any human do that can’t be traced back to the imitation of another human? And if we’re mimetic all the way down, can anyone deny that imitation leads to rivalry (to other things as well, but rivalry can destroy those other things and so must be addressed)? And how could one deny the sheer elegance of the originary hypothesis’s solution to this dilemma—a form of imitation, on the boundary between “attention” and “intention,” that reverses the trajectory of an appropriative gesture by converting that gesture into one of aborted appropriation?\n\nAnd what better “explanation” of the problematic distinctiveness of language, where we have to account for how it’s possible that we all can mean the “same” thing in speaking words that have no necessary relation to the things they are about? How could language have emerged other than in an event?\n\nStill, both Nietzscheans and Nietzsche’s last men can take a sniff of this and not particularly care for its odor. It’s too social, too unflattering, too confining, resistant to the appropriation of any movement that needs something like a “myth,” i.e., its own sacrifices and the cover-up of those sacrifices. Why “believe” in it? Nothing particularly compels one too—certainly no social pressure, or the competition for recruiting followers or getting grants. It asks for no sacrifice, and, in fact, exposes too clearly what we’re asking for when we demand sacrifice. The originary hypothesis must, I think, prefer comedy to tragedy, spectacles in which blood thirst is averted rather than indulged.\n\nUnless you want to treat GA as another school of literary criticism that offers the best nth reading of some canonical text, you have to let it dispossess you—it can’t stand alongside anything you think that has not been revisited and revised thoroughly through the hypothesis. This is why established people with a publicly or institutionally confirmed identity are extremely unlikely to take up with it—you have, I think, to be on the margins of some field that seems to you in need of refounding. What the originary hypothesis offers in that case is the miraculization of the world—the very existence of the human is a miracle, constantly renewed, always on trial; institutions, names, words, each and every human practice is illuminated by the originary aura of the yet to be hypothesized event that allowed for its inauguration against the odds.\n\nI find myself “applying” the originary hypothesis with increasing literalness and inflexibility. Every name can only be a commemoration of some deferred violence—every word is the Name of God. Since we are fundamentally mimetic beings, all social organization (and “ethics” and “morality”) can be nothing more than emulation—the selection and dutiful study of models, for which study we emulate other models. We are all of us completely of the center—there is no autonomy or freedom relative to the center, even if expanded participation in the center produces the kinds of things we call “freedom.” Since listening to the center as it tells us to not in indulge in the spargmos closest at hand and lie about our noble motives in doing so, all that matters is preserving clear lines of communication with and continuity of the center—this means calling upon the center, imploring the occupant of any center, to take upon himself the responsibility to see to his successor, selecting as his successor the one best suited to in turn select a successor and so on in perpetuity; and, meanwhile, to model the kind of activity that such a singularized succession in perpetuity would need to rely upon.\n\nEverything we do is a reading of imperatives coming from the center, so as we speak in declaratives there is nothing else for us to do other than get those imperatives right and embed in our declaratives further imperatives petitioning the current occupant to clarify the kinds of knowing, wanting and doing that will make us better servants and forerunners to yet better ones. Language, then, is fundamentally prayer. In turn, you turn yourself into a center, creating practices that imply a model of selecting successors, and a mode of engagement with others in which we participate in succession. There’s no room for the history of political concepts here, even if one might find approximations and models of practice here and there—what can freedom, equality, nationality, tyranny, rights, or even monarchy have to do with any of this, even if one or the other might be pragmatically broached here or there?\n\nWe have no idea of the range of organizational forms that will be possible, and can only maintain a readiness of hypotheticality, treating language itself as an inexhaustible source of practices. Just follow those forms that are the most successionist and see if you can help make them more so: anything you say posits a figure positioned to enact some practice on some future scene imaginable now in only the most preliminary way. But any social form or practice, say one lying ready at hand, might be promisingly successionist, and contributions to any of them can’t be excluded in advance.\n\nPractices are simply events on scenes, with the event being the reconstruction of the scene in accord with emerging commands of the center that have themselves resulted from the last scenic redesign. Hypotheses are the opening of space for scenic design practices, which situate us all for new practices. A hypothesis is the inversion of the myth: the myth narrates an exchange with the center so as to foreground the continuity of the community by localizing in a target the resentments that threaten to tear it apart, while the hypothesis is a kind of machine for generating potential scenes on which we can try out various ways of following resentments to their consequences and stepping athwart them.\n\nThe practice/hypothesis nexus places us always on a scene, which is perhaps the most anti-philosophical part of the originary hypothesis since philosophy imagines itself on a kind of sceneless scene that can be sustained as long as everyone maintains the conventions of the discourse. But we’re all on a scene right now, a scene embedded in other scenes, and your performance on one scene brings other scenes into view. While your duty is to sustain them all, doing your part to construct the largest stage around the most compelling center is the best way of helping to contain them all and maintain consistency amongst your practices on all of them.\n\nWhen I discuss the originary hypothesis and the unlimited fields of inquiry it opens up (and which can never be shut down unless the scene itself collapses) I like to provide “proof of concept” by working on a particular concept within GA. This is really the “faith” bound up in the hypothesis—that there will always be new things at the center to draw forth further signs and scenes from us—you can’t really be a nihilist because you still have to maintain the scene on which you nihilize, which must be done within language. “Resentment” has been a kind of sticking point for me for a while—it’s an absolutely central concept, mimetic and scenic and paradoxical insofar as pointing out the resentment of others implicates you in the space of resentment (why does their resentment bother you so much to comment on it?).\n\nIn Gans’s work, resentment is sometimes destructive and sometimes creative, functioning as both sublimation and the desire that is sublimated. All resentment is toward the center, and yet it seems like we’re really resenting the guy next to us, receiving favors that are rightfully our own. What is resentment—a “feeling”? But what comes from a feeling, other than more feeling—as feelings, resentments can be expressed or suppressed in many ways, so what can really be said about it? “Bitter indignation at being treated unfairly.” That definition seems to attribute certain knowledge to resentment—it doesn’t refer to a “belief” that one has been treated unfairly.\n\nBut wouldn’t the (inevitable) lack of unanimity regarding the unfairness of your treatment further add to that unfairness wile, also, making it less a source of knowledge and therefore more suspect because now spread in an unfocused way beyond the original treatment? Here as well, “resentment” in GA covers this whole, ambivalent ground. Is resentment appeased by the reception of fair treatment in response to its expression, or does this just prove the truth and value of the resentment? Would completely fair treatment, assuming we could imagine and manage it, eliminate resentment, or would the threshold for what counts as “unfair” simply get lowered—in which case “fairness” is not the point at all.\n\n(Has any philosophy or human science tried to get to the bottom of this line of questioning, which reduces any other line if inquiry to near irrelevance—which I say at the risk of arousing resentment, because nothing can be/seem more unfair than having one’s central concerns minimized.) When is resentment energizing and when paralyzing?\n\nOur recourse must be to learn to identify traces of resentment in the marks it leaves on language. Here’s the hypothesis I’d like to work out—the linguistic form of resentment is the comparison. To compare things is to reduce them to common measure and eliminate their uniqueness as signs and things—it is to encourage others to find more “points” of comparison in order to further reduce them. This line of thinking has some debts to Nietzsche and to Evola’s “reign of quantity.” But it’s an originary, not merely modern, phenomenon, and therefore shares terrain with a kind of homage to the center. If we strive to reduce things to a common measure it is because of our mimetic realization that we have been reduced to a common measure with all sharing our space and its objects of desire and its center, and so we try to take over the equalization to which we have been subjected and control it.\n\nSo, all resentment takes the form of asserting one thing is like another. But the kind of comparison I’m equating with (comparing to) resentment is the kind seeks to compel the similar objects to be completely contained within that field. There’s another way of finding likenesses, between all things, even the most distant and seemingly unlike, and that’s as a way of highlighting the otherness of all things to everything else (itself a kind of likeness) within an oscillation between same and other. In that case, we keep finding, indicating, acting on, assuming, intimating, likenesses between things while occasionally organizing ourselves around an assertion of the sameness of some of them, for some purpose, against a background of othernesses.\n\nResentment wants all things to be more and more like each other, in pursuit of an absolute sameness that remains forever beyond reach. “Unfairness” is always someone not being “like” enough to me or to others. So, linguistically, resentment takes the form of an insistence on intensifying likeness within a potentially endless series of likenesses measured only against the next likeness pointed out. This obsession with likeness unto unreachable sameness shows up against, and is countered by, the practice of enlikening within the oscillation of same and other, as new lines of likeness that interfere with the convergence of likenesses are drawn.\n\nIf everything is like everything else in ever new ways we create a kind of world scene and a single unfolding world event that is always happening, and the central imperative is to keep it happening. This is a kind of world-play, with ingredients of nonsense and satire strongly mixed in; it’s the praxis/hypothesis writ large, and the answer to the bitterness of resentment, even when “justified” (if there’s real oppression going on, that will be shaken up a bit as well).\n\nIt occurs to me that in entering the world, the originary hypothesis confronts another problem, this one entirely of the making of its inventor and propagators (this one not completely excluded) thus far. Here, Girardian mimetic theory has something GA lacks: for Girard, knowledge of our mimetic desires must be learned and earned—his first book in mimetic theory, _Desire, Deceit and the Novel_ reads novelists like Proust and Dostoevsky as confronting and painfully working through the mimetic desires that prompted them to write and limited them as writers—their novels are a revelatory working through of this learning and earning of what is a kind of divine knowledge.\n\nGans has not only not insisted upon a similar ascesis as a prerequisite for knowledge of the originary hypothesis, but has explicitly desisted from doing so (I’d have to do some searching to find where). But maybe some kind of overcoming of resentment is necessary if one is not just to “understand” and reproduce the originary hypothesis, but to “inscribe” it in, through the self one carries through, the culture. Maybe this is why we can see in much GA work, at least in my view, a preference for conformity and respectability over invention and theoretical adventurousness—hardly anyone working within GA has shown any desire to leave the little niche carved out decades ago.\n\nI don’t say Gans didn’t have good reasons for this refusal of ascesis—I think he may have wanted to resist the kind of cult-like devotion often seen in Girard’s followers, and, even more important, the fact that the originary hypothesis sees anthropogenesis as non-violent, the kind of “drama” appropriate for the Girardian scene might seem out of place in Gans’s more “comic” scene. But there can be no real knowledge without inscription and initiation—without these practices, you get another school of literary criticism. The path I’ve carved within originary thought has foregrounded our being constituted and “held” by the center for this reason—if the conclusion to GA is that we’re all free agents on the market, who needs GA?\n\nIf we are only “actionable selves” insofar as we clarify, direct, intensify, fix , refine, enact and textualize our attention on the ever changing and ramifying, differentially occupied center—well, then, GA or anthropomorphics, becomes a genuine discipline in the fullest sense of the term."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-hypothesis-as-shared-source-and-target",
      "title": "Originary Hypothesis as Shared Source and Target",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 29, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/originary-hypothesis-as-shared-source",
      "content": "A streamlined way to think about the political future is to figure out the various paths by which the originary hypothesis would be the unquestioned common sense of a new global order. “Representation is the deferral of violence” would be at the tip of everyone’s tongue just like a phrase like “God-given rights” is now for most Americans; every event, along with whatever its specific scenic content might be, would also be an overt commemoration of our shared origin on a singular scene. Nothing less than complete unanimity is to be accepted here, and yet such unanimity must be attained in accord with the logic of the originary hypothesis itself: through the incessant deferral of potentially species ending forms of violence anticipated at a greater distance with increasing rigor as a result of the forms of preparation derived from the latest instances of deferral.\n\nDeferral is a form of power no one could ever imagine giving up in favor of paltry substitutes, and enjoyment in life’s goods is continually enhanced as the mimetic desire and resentment informing our choices of objects is continually displaced by the immediate apprehension of whatever draws our attention as a gift whose enjoyment is itself a way of reciprocating.\n\nSo, that’s a sketch of the “utopia” or the GA “endgame.” How can you have a theory that you take seriously without imagining everyone sharing it, in however a differentiated and distributed form? Not only that, but the details of the various ways of getting there must be extremely interesting—a way of fully participating in the present. Every word is the Name-of-God, as Eric Gans has put it, and invoking the Name-of-God is a mode of prayer. So, insofar as the originary hypothesis occupies all the bandwidth in your brain, you are doing nothing but praying for the power to contribute to the ongoing revelation of a mode of being so completely hypothetical as to eliminate from consideration all other hypotheses and thereby be ostensive reality.\n\nIf the originary hypothesis were to so absolutely inflame without consuming our every interaction, would it still exist? If it so permeated our thinking as to leave no other way of thinking, would we still be thinking it? We wouldn’t need it as a reminder, because if we did that would only remind us that resentment still crouches, ready to strike, representing failure rather than deferral. And if our every word and deed were a commemoration of our common origin, would we still be commemorating? As opposed to what? With no possibility of forgetfulness, what need of remembrance? So, we insist upon the originary hypothesis, insert and insinuate it everywhere, so that it will eventually with away, just becoming language itself.\n\nUnless we want to assume that, like Christian original sin, a residue of resentment must always remain; while this possibility must be considered, I don’t see why the conversion on the originary scene from each member imitating the others to each member imitating the center can’t be completed. I don’t see how the originary hypothesis could exclude that possibility, why it couldn’t take “yes” as an answer.\n\nAs always, the way from here to there is to assume that we’re already there, albeit without a full awareness of being so. This is a mode of reasoning akin to the “sovereign imaginary,” later called the “central imaginary,” I proposed a few years ago. Whatever you say you want, imagine the conditions under which it could be delivered in a way that you would recognize it as the thing that you wanted—and, then, think of what would actually be delivered in that case. Whoever could give you exactly what you want could also want to give you something else and the purpose of thinking along these lines is to deconstruct your desires, yes, but in such a way that you learn to desire particular infrastructural clarifications rather than arbitrarily designed fantasy end products. Installing the originary hypothesis as the sole functioning social software is precisely such a continual practice of translating infrastructure. The more you see what goes into producing your wants the more you want your wants to be interoperable with that process of production.\n\nThe paradox of the originary hypothesis as a universal idiom is enacted by treating the originary hypothesis as an increasingly operational translation machine. What does it mean to say that representation is the deferral of violence here and now, wherever and whenever that ‘here and now” is? This scene, whatever it is, is not the originary scene, precisely because the originary scene has made it possible. At the same time, it is, kind of, the originary scene, because we can’t really say when that scene ended (after the first ritual commemoration of the scene has been completed, perhaps, but that has only been completed insofar as it is commemorated by future rituals, and so on), but that in turn just means that the originary scene itself is never perfected as a model as it keeps taking on further “deposits” of memory.\n\nAn excellent—my knowledge is insufficient to say the best—model for this is Hebrew scripture which, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, becomes increasingly fascinating for me the more I learn about how it was made (my growing familiarity with its historical conditions of production—its “demystification”—only increase my reverence for it). During the 5th and 6th centuries BC, a fairly small number of people worked through what must have been an immense collection of legendary, mythical and ritual material, from diverse, often contradictory and even highly antagonistic sources, all of which had been significantly transformed in meaning by recent catastrophic events which must have made the very work of synthesizing and preserving it both tenuous and at times hopeless—and they created, sanctified, raised successive generations to continue recording, remembering, teaching and performing, no doubt with significant oral and written addenda now lost to us, a revolutionary document we now call the Hebrew bible.\n\nThis document is marked by enmities, petty squabbles over borders that may not have even been relevant anymore, resentment towards imperial conquerors, disguised antagonisms toward entrenched practices of the target population, and so on—while creating the concept of the human created in the image of God, and therefore a standing rebuke to the kind of mythical, that is, mimetic, violence overwhelmingly characteristic of all human orders up until that point (and with only some diminution, still today), including the most imminent, imperial and intimate violence of human sacrifice. The production and reproduction of this scriptural tradition was no doubt first aimed at reworking the people in whose name it spoke—we can assume that the Hebrews themselves were guilty of all the monstrosities of which scripture accused their neighbors.\n\nThat this conception of the human and the divine was in the next few centuries worked over in explicit rivalry with the Hellenistic and then Roman conceptions of beauty, reason, power and sovereignty that still largely govern Western institutions both informed by and resistant to that input makes it easier to see why resentments are always simmering and occasionally flare up.\n\nBut what I want to highlight here is the unrivaled density of translation work evident here, in which we can see, for example, that a reference to a particular stone in a particular place is a means of evoking certain narrative sequences that rehearse so as to revise and conceal (never completely, just enough to go on) certain divisive contests of competing forms of sacrality—and this, so as to provide an inheritance that will be re-ritualized and re-narrativized so as to be as portable as necessary. This is the work of translation of imperial infrastructures, whose power must be conceded and negotiated, and to that extent even sanctified, but also desacralized and even demonized in part and rendered nugatory in the long run, while resistance to it, mostly failed, but occasionally, perhaps, successful and therefore to be a site of narrative investment and inflation, is simultaneously commemorated in the name of the only power greater than the imperial one.\n\nWe don’t need to rehearse these entanglements in perpetuity, but the originary hypothesis, an inheritor of scripture, helps us to see this as a model for the very different infrastructural translation work that will infiltrate into the linguistic level of the infrastructure. Whatever happens now, however we talk about it (and nothing really happens if it isn’t talked about, or, maybe evaded in talk about other things), is retrieval, continuation and enactment of the originary event, whether anyone realizes it or not, and therefore a translation of all other retrievals, continuations and enactments (in some order of pertinence enabling this retrieval, continuation and enactment).\n\nWe demonstrate this by deriving a more minimal and yet minimally refracted or idiomatic version of the originary scene from any translation. When speaking of translation, we distinguish between the source text and the target language: a particular arrangement of revised and recontextualized idioms that function within one linguistic economy, are to be transferred into an arrangement that will be situated the “same” way in another linguistic economy. For infrastructural translation, the source text is any piece of language in the entirety of any context whatsoever—any sample; the target language is the originary hypothesis.\n\nThere are multiple histories of programmed deferrals referred to implicitly in any sample utterance an calling them programmed deferrals refers us to the originary hypothesis as we excavate one scene of deferral after another implicit in every word, in its idiomatic, disciplinary usage, after another, and all the other words and sentences implicitly referred to by every word, but selectively so, with the selection criteria determine by the production of the new sample that will be doing this so as to be as helpful as you think you can be in enabling the sample to which you pair your own enter a little further into the central imaginary or intelligence.\n\nYour selving cleaves with their selving as you create a linguistic arena to ensure maximal transferability of terms across the paired samples. You want to help them help you help them excavate together, including making explicit whatever remains incommensurable. The end point is the same sample, data created by and because of that scenic encounter, which will enable us to say we’re doing the same thing as they/we did on the originary scene, so that the difference between this scene and the originary one is minimal, maybe even illusory.\n\nThis also means that the originary scene is continually overlaid with these other scenes which it translates—we keep removing the overlay so as to prepare the originary hypothesis for the next translation, but residue remains, anticipating the replacement of the originary hypothesis by the residue as it simply becomes language that knows what it’s doing. Take, for example, Benjamin Bratton’s “accidental megastructure,” the “stack”: cloud, user, address, city, earth, interface. Surely a translation of the originary hypothesis is implicit here, with the cloud, the source of endless exchanges, at the center and the users at the periphery.\n\nWhatever roles we assign to city, earth, interface and address will entail a revision of the scene, as we make the scene technical by imagining how the first sign would be communicated through the group this time in time, how the group would subsequently “regulate” its approach to the object and then the controlled frenzy with which it divides and consumes the object—and, finally, the way it commemorates and consecrates the event once the food is devoured—imagine them all standing there, satisfied, with nothing between them—what now? Andrew Bartlett located an originary science in the midst of this extraordinary complex and equally constrained scene and I would locate an originary technics as well.\n\nJust follow the sign all the way through—think of what it’s being asked to do: restrain a hungry horde; then mediate the newly invented mode of consumption of this horde; then refer back to this unprecedented event. What keeps it the same all the way through? That question remains our lodestone in insisting fanatically upon the minimality of the scene: if you imagine one form of the sign, you must imagine the rest of the scene in complete conformity with it. There are more addresses than users—what are the implications of that for the originary event?\n\nIn this way we messengers and evangelists of the originary hypothesis process all events, narratives, texts and processes through the translation machinery of the originary hypothesis so that everything refers to everything else in an ever emergent architecture and infrastructure enabling us to say we’re over and over again doing the same thing under the incredibly different conditions created by our continually doing the same thing. We should be able to speak endlessly about the originary hypothesis without ever mentioning it—the materials provided by all the other events stored and commemorated provide us with all the materials we need to translate the originary scene and misplace the original for a while—a while that can become a longer while, in the faith that if the originary hypothesis were ever to be forgotten because it had become unnecessary because completely institutionalized, it would be remembered or recreated as soon as it was needed because it would provide the only way of accounting for why it was needed. Everyone is always already doing originary thinking and for most of them it may not ever even become necessary to point that out instead of just helping them do what they’re already doing.\n\nNow, let’s say that my description above of the formation of the Hebrew bible, as far as my best guesses based on my familiarity with but certainly not extensive reading in contemporary scholarship on the question takes me, is in fact to be taken as a kind of suggestive allegory of how those of us messaging the originary hypothesis through today’s data field are to proceed. Indeed, how could it not be something like that, regardless of my intentions? That little story of how a “few people” leveraged some heterogeneous materials against massively embedded habits to confer transferable meaning upon a condition of exile and return (perhaps a rare occurrence?) would have to, in the mind of any reader following me closely, have implications for what a few of us might be doing now.\n\nThat in turn opens a space of commentary, and a return to the originary scene (any time a “few” resist the “many” will suggest the first gesture on the scene) and a model for examining other situations and texts and thereby infiltrating those situations and texts and making them approximate this “transfer translation” more closely. Every text is like this—a translation of some other actual or composite text that tries to conceal and compensate for its deviation from that other text. This is what ensures some, hopefully the needed, degree of cultural continuity. The “few” are always putting their own and others’ transfer translations to work, making them generative. In this regard, data collection, storage, analysis and use is just another field of translation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-reflections-on-eden",
      "title": "Originary Reflections on Eden",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 22, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/originary-reflections-on-eden",
      "content": "The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in _Genesis_ has been a bit of a stumbling block for me since I started rethinking the Hebrew Bible in terms the realization that, first, it was compiled, revised and edited and, to a significant extent, written, during the period just prior to, during, and immediately subsequent to, the Babylonian exile; and, second, that much if not all of it, involves appropriating and reversing the mythology and literature of ancient Israel’s imperial neighbors. I knew something of all this when I wrote _Anthropomorphics_ , and earlier, when I spoke of monotheism as a kind of anti-imperialist imperialism, presaging the anti-imperialist imperialism of liberalism and modern democracy, but I’ve been pursuing this line of inquiry in greater depth.\n\nThe problem with the Eden story is that unlike the direct reliance of God’s covenant with Israel, and the laws dictated in _Deuteronomy,_ upon Assyrian treaties imposed upon vassal states, or the fairly straightforward lifting of the Moses story from the story of Sargon of Akkad (with, as always, significant “subversive” or, if you like, resentful, revisions), the Adam and Eve story is at best vaguely related to _Gilgamesh_. Indeed, the Biblical scholar David Carr, one of a few upon whom I have relied heavily, argues that the Eden story is probably a particularly ancient one because we see no anti-imperial polemic there (as opposed, say to the clear anti-Babylonian polemic in the Tower of Babel story).\n\nBut I think it belongs along with the rest of the Torah, either written or significantly revised around the time of the Babylonian exile. Why? Well, even though Carr raises and rejects this claim (while noting it’s a common one), it seems to me that the story is very much one of exile—humans as “always already” exiled.\n\nSo, I’m going to plunge in here, with the awareness that I’m still fumbling around in the dark a bit and that I might be going over ground trod by others. I can always do what the authors of the Bible themselves did and go back and revise and layer later on. I will first of all say that the story seems to me very much a Persian one, either written in Persia after the Persian empire replaced the Babylonian one or, perhaps soon after the Persian empire granted the Judeans the right to return and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. I got taken with the idea that there is some connection between the Eden story and the story of Esther, which is set in Persia (if anyone else has made this connection I would love to know about it) and also involves a persuasive woman convincing her husband to make a decision that changes history.\n\nIn Eden, it’s a disastrous decision, while in Esther it’s a providentially beneficial one (if you will grant, even for the sake of this discussion, that the salvation of the Jews from an attempted genocide is an event to be celebrated), but once the possibility of women influencing men becomes a literary theme we would have to grant it can go either way (and there’s talk in the Bible about Solomon’s foreign wives leading him astray). So, there’s a kind of “misogynist” assumption here to the effect that the informal, subtle influence of women was a concern to the authors of these ancient texts (like the Arabian Nights), and its implications explored.\n\nBut—and this is what is crucial here—this concern could only have become explicit and interesting in the case of kings, who really made the only consequential decisions in the human orders under consideration here. So, my first guess here is that the Adam and Eve story is a revision of a kind of story told of kings, here “universalized” and situated at the origin of humanity. (For the moment, of course, I’m placing at the center what doesn’t necessarily belong there—Eve giving Adam the fruit to eat, and him eating it.)\n\nThe fact that the story is set in a garden is also suggestive of its “Persianness,” and the creation of perfect gardens, of a beautiful world in itself, was a “trademark” of the Persian monarchy, and the word for “garden” (“pardes”) worked its way into Hebrew and other West Asian languages and is, in fact, the origin of our own “paradise.” (The writers of _Genesis_ would not have been hostile to Persia, which provides an answer to Carr.) So, here we have a very familiar move of Ancient Jewish literary culture: “backdating” a creation of a surrounding imperial culture and attributing its creation to God, with the replacing of imperial objectives with divine ones.\n\nFurthermore, we could say, now, that the concern with immortality is a universally human one, but I think it’s very likely (and here I’m following a Hegelian thread in Gans’s work that he never pursued very far) that, like many “universally human” characteristics, this one has its origins in the very specific concerns of (and about) kings. (The belief that the dead lived on as spirits may have universal, or close to it, but this was a degraded, frightening condition, not worthy of being called “life.”) Divinized more or less directly, builder of monuments meant to last forever, memorializing themselves in various ways (even going so far as to invent phonetic writing in order to do so) it would have been the ancient emperors who would have found it puzzling and distressing that they can’t actually live forever (at least with all of the privileges, prerogatives and accoutrements they took for granted on earth).\n\nI’m not saying anything new in seeing the story is concerned with the origin of human mortality, even if this concern is complicated by the fact that, while God tells Adam he will die if he eats the fruit (and presumably wouldn’t die otherwise? this is not clear) there is at the same time, as we only find out afterward, a Tree of Life that he (and Eve) could presumably have eaten instead of or after eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—in which case, they didn’t know about this tree (did the serpent?) and were not, in fact, immortal in the first place (we readers are told about the scene through God’s reference to it to... who?). But why, then, if the story is concerned with immortality, are they forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil rather than the tree of life—why is that the tree they are made aware of through this interdiction?\n\nI think there’s an anti-imperial dimension to this as well. The emperors as the highest judges would have been the final court of appeal on questions of good and evil. But isn’t knowledge of good and evil necessary for a judge, and wouldn’t its acquisition be cause for celebration rather than a result of transgression? It would have been better had there never been a king, but if there is to be a king, it is better that he have this knowledge. The real “fall” is into monarchy. But the backdating of the story to the origin of humanity situates this fall in our own constitution—which means we’ve brought monarchy upon ourselves, and will pay for it—exactly the argument God makes to Samuel when the Israelites demand a king.\n\nBut this retrodiction also means that the knowledge of good and evil is now a possession of the entire human race, and no longer the monopoly of the emperor. The covenant of God with the emperor is here as well converted into one with, in this case, all of humanity. In that case, the desire for immortality is likewise a universal human possession—to judge is to speak in God’s name and therefore imagine immortality, which one should never do because that implies a desire to be a god, and if there’s only one God, even worse, God. This is paradoxical and convoluted, but the convolution is in the story, and in the revolution it’s trying to effect, not in my account—the very thing that will lead to the desire for immortality, the elevation to the position of supreme arbiter, is here presented as the cause for (or co-constitutive with) the frustration of that desire.\n\nIt’s an Escher drawing—there’s no “clear” way to present it. Our desire to occupy the center is what reminds us that we can’t. And to prove this, no one else can, either. This desire and its renunciation is so powerful that, I think, human sacrifice, so closely related to the first-born, the first of the flock, etc. (a central concern, of course, elsewhere in _Genesis_ ) must lie behind it—but this story chooses not to take that question on, so I’ll leave it here as an aside.\n\nA difficulty for my argument is that we are not shown how Eve convinces Adam to eat the fruit. It seems a matter of course and, indeed, it’s hard to imagine a continuation of the story in which Eve has eaten the fruit and Adam hasn’t. Not only would she, in that case, have knowledge inaccessible to him, but she would have to endure punishments from which he would be free, making their future life together hard to imagine (Milton saw the problem here). So, Adam eating the fruit is a plot necessity; but, still, we have to motivate it. I would assume Eve repeats the serpent’s arguments, along with describing her own enlightening experience of eating the fruit, but since Adam can see the “plot necessity” as well as we can, he really has no choice, which may be why there’s no point to seeing them repeated for him.\n\nBut the fact that Eve wants Adam to eat as well means that she doesn’t see this new divine knowledge as something that distinguishes her from or gives her some advantage over Adam. Eve has the idea first (or is ready to be convinced first, as the serpent must assume), but the idea she has is for Adam to become like a God. She’s worried he’s not ambitious enough, not claiming his prerogatives (here’s the “misogynist” reading). She’s resentful on his behalf, like an intelligent Queen, with no legitimate aspirations of her own, might be for more a complacent or dull-witted royal husband. The very fact that she was found worthy by the serpent to hear these marvelous and innovative arguments, and had the initiative to act on them, would already be “convincing.” I’m assuming, then, that Eve is a bit of a Lady Macbeth, inflaming a real, but dormant or hesitant ambition on the part of her husband.\n\nAnd what about the snake? I see the snake, as I’m sure many readers do, as a deflation of more ancient and “titanic” mythological confrontations into the voice of desires that humans would have articulated on their own. A bit of an alibi, in that case—a reduced version of what mythology already is, an alibi for violent desires that the human community is not prepared to avow. I’m also going to keep things resolutely anthropological regarding God, treating Him as an effect of the problem I’m positing as the root of the story: the unacceptable desire for immortality that is constitutive of kingship, at least once it reaches a certain point of continuity, security and grandeur. The knowledge required to be a supreme judge suggests the blurring of the boundary between divine and human, and is therefore problematic. We can further assume (and maybe, due to research I’m unfamiliar with, we don’t have to just assume) that we will find some residues of other mythological material from the surrounding imperial cultures.\n\nSo, a kind of “hypothesis” regarding the origin of the human, from creation to our reduction to our (still) present, demanding, somewhat unforgiving condition, filled with pain and hard work, trumps the king as center. The implication is certainly that each individual human is as dear to God as the emperor would proclaim and have himself proclaimed, to be. We can see an extremely powerful and generative resentment which, again, I think only makes sense in terms of an exiled people, bereft of the standard justifications for their existence. The story does eventually bring into focus the desire, including sexual desire of course, constitutive of the monogamous couple (who become “one flesh”), in the couple’s shame at being naked.\n\nIf we explain this internally to the story itself, we would have to see sexual desire as newly shameful as a result of the knowledge of good and evil, itself gained through transgression. If knowledge of good and evil makes sexual desire, openly displayed at least, shameful, that must be because that knowledge brings us into a civilized state, which has also constrained expressions of sexual desire. In that case, there is no causality here—knowledge of good and evil does not make sexual desire shameful; rather, the sphere of human judgment has set various limits, among them those on sexual activity. We are being told by the text that Adam and Eve now inhabit our world.\n\nBut I would insist that while sexual desire is, of course, “dangerous” at all levels of the social order, it is royal desire specifically that is the source of narrative material the authors of _Genesis_ would be drawing upon. The desire which in the story leads to man and woman becoming one flesh is itself likely modeled on and is built to constrain the (potentially transgressive in so many ways) desire constituting the relation of the king and his “consort,” where all the intrigue of the marital bond (the joining of two families, with all the possibilities of divided loyalties, and even two peoples, as we see in the founding myths of so many cultures) can be foregrounded and is here brought within the compass of shared burdens and a shared destiny in the most everyday things (work, giving birth, raising children, creating a future together).\n\nWe are in our natural married state like kings and queens before God, “made” for each other, with our own territory or estate, lineage, and extraordinary burdens of earning our place as God’s people. And perhaps the suggestion, as elsewhere in the Bible, is that if we earn that place, we won’t need kings. A remarkable onto-theological usurpation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-style",
      "title": "Originary Style",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 10, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/originary-style",
      "content": "Everybody is saying the same thing as everybody else: I’m going turn this into a theoretical starting point. It’s better than the founding principles or telos of any other mode of thought. It’s both paradoxical and pragmatic: we’re always saying the same thing as everybody else but it’s never quite the same; and, yet, we could posit degrees of approximation in any utterance or sample. ESTSTAEE is literally the case on the originary scene, even though it must have only been “posited” there—part of the paradox is that everyone is saying that everyone is saying the same thing. So, why does it sound like people are saying so many different things?\n\nBecause we have to say the same thing as everyone else under the scenic or infrastructural conditions of the saying and those infrastructural conditions are part of what is said. We say the same thing as everybody else so that we don’t do the same thing as everybody else at the same time. Everything is like everything else, which is the continuous analogue world; the same thing that everybody says to everybody else is naming the other who commands us to refrain from doing everything at the same time—that is the digital world, same/other, discretized and present. But saying is always a kind of doing, and doing is always a kind of saying: we can trust the world’s languages, all of which, according to Anna Wierzbicka, agree that “say” and “do” refer to different things, while also finding those pedagogical points of undecidability between the two worthy of special attention.\n\nThis string of “theses” is a step in a longstanding attempt to solve a pedagogical problem: how to instantiate the ergodic proposition that we are always only working with existing chunks or samples of language—that anything we might talk about as an “idea,” or a “belief” or an “argument” is to be directly and exclusively treated as a reworking, through replacements, modifications and combinations, of existing discourses, which is to say, trains of sentences. I have been working on something like this, vaguely intuited, in classroom practices for a long time—encountering some discussions of philology, as much a source of modern science as of the modern humanities, provoked me to try and push on towards some solution.\n\nIt was a colossal mistake of modern literary criticism and theory to proceed on the assumption that the literary texts singled out for analysis were to be treated as very special artifacts irreducible to any extrinsic conditions—although it must be said that that was an improvement over the insipid biographical, normative and historical forms of criticism that were the main alternatives—rather than radicalizing philological practices and treating literary texts as made, through a process of filtering and rearrangement, out of the vast body of disciplinary texts (medical, journalistic, political, juridical, theological, etc.) available to an author. Maybe this is really only becoming possible now, with the digitalization and datafication of the world’s texts.\n\nThe kinds of classroom experiences that set me on this path were the occasions on which I realized that it would help students, not so much to “understand” (i.e., present a familiar summary of) a text, but to work with it, to speak its language, to have them do simple things like construct positions the authors would be disputing implicitly (this only requires a rewording of the sentence with a negation), to combine two sentences from different places in the text into one with a conjunction (and then explain why that conjunction), to restate a passage with some modification, such as an adjective turned into a noun and a noun into a verb, a declarative into an imperative or interrogative, and so on.\n\nThe best class would be one made up of nothing but such exercises—perhaps I’ll get there before I retire. I’ve started a few blog posts attempting to lay out this project but could never establish a frame that would make it more than just something I really wanted to get right. But everybody saying what everybody else is saying provides that frame—and for a broader inscipto-punctual pedagogy as well.\n\nSomeone saying the same thing everybody else is saying interferes with someone else saying the same thing everybody else is saying, because what each has said came instead of everybody doing the same thing at the same time but in each case with someone else starting to do the thing everybody might in turn do. Each utterance imagines itself to be blocking its own mimetic convergence, and maybe even one initiated by another’s attempt to do the same. This recreates the scene and creates the infrastructure that needs to be said as part of what everybody else is saying. So, you translate what one person has said into what another person has said, or you propose or hypothesize a possible variant of what someone else has said which is more truly what they said, at least insofar as everybody else is saying it.\n\nWhat I say is always the originary hypothesis as interfered with by Wierzbicka and Olson, and Jousse, and some others whose language I keep recycling and renewing. (The opening paragraph of this post is also a translation into semantic primes of Alexander Galloway’s essay in the Winter 2022 issue of _Critical Inquiry_ , “Golden Age of Analog”) “Thinking” is trying to make some commemorated piece of language fit a new frame, commemorate a new event—some deferral of everybody doing the same thing at the same time. One sign of having done so effectively is that the vocabulary you’ve generated can name your own actions as a writer—that’s a way of enacting the simultaneity of saying and doing.\n\nI’ve been pressing with greater urgency toward a solution to the problem posed by ergodism for another reason: I’ve been reading a great deal of contemporary scholarship of datafication in its ramifications through media, economy, politics and institutions, and much of it is brilliant and enormously informative—much of it produced by people who must still be in their 30s, or early 40s at most—and they always get to the point where they have to say, regardless of how enthused or at least fascinated they have been by their object of study, that, of course all of this reproduces racism, sexism, etc., is the logic of neoliberalism, etc. and we must therefore resist it but we can only resist it from within it—and then they’re stuck.\n\nThey’re stuck because for what are ultimately institutional reasons, they can only think of “resisting” in terms of more democracy, more freedom, more equality, more rights, etc., etc., even while their own studies show how irrelevant all these categories have become. (Even more—they are almost with exception stuck in the leftist media lore of “Russian collusion” in the 2016 election. And don’t get them started on Cambridge Analytica!) There is an enormous opening here for those who can speak this critico-theoretical language within the study of technological, thoroughly digitalized environments, without those interferences.\n\nThis is the source of my insistence of something like “data security” as the “slogan” going forward: if we simply accept, as a starting proposition, that in any shared activity there is what I call “centered ordinality”—someone going first, taking some initiative and then being joined by/initiating others—and we must accept it because the other alternative is simultaneous action by everyone—then the only real “value” we need concern ourselves with is ascertaining the materials required by each “ordinalized” member of the team. Whoever goes first speaks for the center, at least until he doesn’t, and you follow him and try to determine with what he needs to be supplied in accordance with what he asks; if you are him, you are deriving your actions from whomever you’ve inherited the path and sizing up your team for possible successors.\n\nAnd if you’re a scholar, you need only consider the archival resources, modes of collaboration, and mechanisms of dissemination that make it possible for your own work to feed back maximally into the system. From then on, we can then press on to work on replacing capitalism on terms that would seize upon its assets by converting them into the data they already imperfectly are.\n\nAll social institutions are more or less primitive modes of data collection, storage and interpretation—aesthetics, laws, justice, war, business, technology, etc.—but they are specifically these forms of archiving; so to realize their true character (in both senses of “realize”) is not to discard their shell and making them directly productive of quantifiable forms of knowledge; rather it is to make explicit and enhance the specific form of ostensivity each yields which, if it goes to the point of transforming the institution beyond recognition an exhaustive narrative of that transition will inform the new institution and this narrative will be guided by the solution of the fundamental social problem, the succession problem, through singularized succession in perpetuity.\n\nAn actor within, say, the legal institution, seeks to ensure the lawyer or judge who follows in his wake will be explicitly and implicitly selected as thoroughly as possible by further ensuring that this succession will maximize perhaps to the point of integration with other orders the institution’s contribution to singularized succession all the way to the top. The further you are from the top, the less direct can be your control over succession; and therefore the more you’re auditioning by offering samples of obedience to orders coming down from the top.\n\nConverting all means of ascertaining into datafication models completes the work of deconstruction, which was impossible for Derrida and his followers because they confront the same victimary obstruction. Deconstruction takes a foundational binary, in which the dominant term is predicated upon the exclusion of the subordinate one and shows that the dominant term is really constituted by the narrative of that exclusion. Then what? Now we can say that we assess the distribution of data that can be included in one or the other category across commemorative sites. Since language, and writing especially, is the primary form of data management, what is in question here is a style, one that works with samples in which some “metaphysical” (logocentric) claim is made—that is, where a category of substance is distinguished from its antithetical/supplemental other.\n\nThis same/other digitization is spread across a field of likeness, as all the ways the opposites are alike are put on display. But the difference remains, at least for the duration of this infiltrative inscription. So, the same/other binary returns, in the form of the distinction between practices that secure the data needed to relocate the difference, on the one hand, and those that blur the discrete cuts needed to decide on a data set. This dialectic then gets iterated within the research style itself. One way to do this, and what will surely happen anyway, is to take substantives you’re starting with (the logocentric oppositions are almost always between substances) and turn them into verbs and adjectives—they become like each other, at least, insofar as they are actions or qualities, which are more fungible than substantives.\n\nThis is a style of deferral, transferring oppositions from antagonistic convergences upon the center into possible collaborative inquiry into the boundaries of ascertainability, but that doesn’t mean it’s a “dry” or “boring” style. The main interest is never in the rules and procedures generated in the course of the conversion to boundary inquiry—those are the always revisable residue—but, rather, the gestures of commemoration that create a “topic” we can talk about in the first place. Here there is high, if not always easily detectable, drama: there’s always a mess to clean up, a mess created by novel mimetic configurations, and there are always those moves whereby someone occupies the center (maybe after some failed attempts) by attracting potentially dangerous attention to himself in order to redirect that attention to a program requiring that all donate their resentment to the center.\n\nAll confrontations are resolved through ascertainability—even the most direct, all-in, mano al mano street fight comes down to each fighter determining what the other has and what he has in himself—the back and forth, the testing and probing and trials, all of that is data collection and processing and we can come to see the real drama and narrative in those liminal spaces where some added significance comes to be conferred upon a seemingly trivial move.\n\nI’ll conclude with a brief example. It has become very common in the more penetrating precincts of the right to see in all political activity the increasingly less hidden hands of various intelligence agencies—a particular media story is a CIA (mis)information campaign, this faction of this political party is Mossad controlled, these media figures are Russian funded, etc. This is certainly an advance over taking media narratives and political rhetoric at face value, but one gets to the point where one can say that these attributions of hidden hands make the sources that are presumably debunked and discredited thereby in fact more interesting and even creditable.\n\nSo, we can deconstruct the implicit opposition between “genuine,” “independent” sources of information on the model of the “journalist” or “scholar,” on the one hand, and secret agent skullduggery, on the other. If this media outlet is telling me what the CIA wants me to think, and this other one is telling me what the Chinese government wants me to think, once I factor that knowledge in I actually have very useful sources of information—more so than if this is just what some guy on Twitter with 50k followers wants me to think. There’s no reason to assume all these intelligence agencies only lie, even if they no doubt do so often—and even if they do lie, they lie in specific ways, in ways that have to take into account the lies and truths of the other side, that point to doings and not just sayings, that are conveyed and reinforced and amplified by other agents who give off information in the process and that are therefore data rich.\n\nOn this model, we no longer need to imagine ourselves to be crusading muckrakers, exposing the truths that will presumably make the walls of Jericho crumble and the people rise up, with the guilty exposed and led away in handcuffs, etc. (not that there would be anything wrong with that); rather, we’re privy to the conversation of the world, no doubt filled with all the boasting, misfires, stupidities, attempts at manipulation, failed attempts to make one’s discourse real, and so on, as any conversation. And one advantage of developing a style that can join this conversation is that one can address the scribal actors within these agencies, those who can themselves come to see their own program in terms of data security, in ensuring and ascertaining that those appointed to do certain things are in fact doing those things, and determining whether those things have turned out to be worth doing (have they made the provenance and chain of custody of vital data more secure?).\n\nEven the most idiotic and malevolent actor has to ask himself on occasion—well, how did that work out? So, here’s the implications for style: write in such a way that would be taking literally and formalizing addressees anywhere along the intelligence pipeline: imagine a mode of writing equally intelligible, albeit in different ways, to the useful idiot, the operative, the operative’s handler, the handler’s superior, those providing briefings for the superior and the political actor formally in charge of the whole show. More precisely: imagine addressing the entire chain as if it were coherent, or to become more so as a result of your writing.\n\n(And this program of style, incidentally, gives a new way to talk about those menacing globalist entities like the World Economic Forum, currently plotting “great resets” and “building back betters.” Unless you imagine all the world’s nations locked in their respective silos, there will be some kind of global governance, even if it’s nothing more than tacit agreements amongst all the world’s nations regarding respect for boundaries, because even that would require the creation and maintenance of a class of diplomats who would, in essence, become a global governing class, through which the asymmetries of power among the nations would play out.\n\nEntities like the WEF, and the various mostly Anglo-originated projects for global governance going back to the late 19th century that preceded them are right to envision a mode of global governance that transfers military based to knowledge-based power. The real problem is that they want the governance before they have the knowledge and must therefore manipulate the knowledge to fit the particular mode of governance they consider themselves most likely to secure in the nearest imaginable future. The style by which this disastrous approach can be countered is not by positing the exact “opposite” values to those of global governance, but by participating in and spreading the program of data security, which is to say, positions from which ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative-ostensive chains can be authenticated and confirmed. And the strongest frame for doing so in going to be Everybody Says what Everybody Else Says So that We Don’t All Do the Same Thing at the Same Time—what is at once a stylistic, political, moral and aesthetic mantra.)\n\nBack to style. Whenever you have some thoughts, which is to say, words, circulating in your “mind” (in your silent monologues in preparation for entrance upon some scene you imagine), you in fact are working on a text, which has some original which you can reconstruct by distinguishing the text you have from a particular sample of other variants of that same original. Your own text provides evidence of its provenance, in its vocabulary, in what it leaves undefined and taken for granted, in the insistence with which this array of words keeps assailing you, demanding some orderly expression. But part of the sample of variants you’ve selected (partly explicitly, partly tacitly) is also pressing upon you, adding to that demand—in the end, there’s one or two of those texts that is interfering with your ascension to some scene but the translation of which will facilitate said ascension.\n\nAt some point along the way your own text becomes the original of itself as variant, as the terms you’ve taken over and reworked into context after context are differentiated form their uses elsewhere. You get to this point by targeting the metalanguage of literacy that marks the disciplinary space and the ostensives constitutive of that text. Remember that all the abstractions referring to verbal and intellectual actions are infrastructuralized translations of “think,” “say,” “hear,” “know,” and the other primes. You can reduce all of these terms to these primes, but then you have to get back to the abstraction, which is not “fake” or less “authentic” than the primes (well, some are fake, but you could only show that by granting the possibility that it’s not)—those abstractions are what is entailed in thinking, or saying or knowing under conditions where literacy in all its forms is mobilized to translate the imperative gaps evident in commands from the center (into those gaps slip everybody doing the same thing at the same time in all the ways that can happen).\n\nWe can now say that the closing (always provisional) of some imperative gap is the staffing of some fragile and critical sector of data security. You want to write like you’re presenting yourself to be next in line to take charge of that staffing. You then approximate the convergence of saying and doing, with a saying that is insistently what everybody else is saying and a doing thereby properly distributed by that saying."
    },
    {
      "slug": "partitioning-and-parceling-the-imperative",
      "title": "Partitioning and Parceling the Imperative",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 23, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/partitioning-and-parceling-the-imperative",
      "content": "As I work to integrate debt and money into center study I get to the point where these concepts need to be articulated more fundamentally, in terms of originary grammar. For Brett Scott, the issuance of currency involves making a promise to be redeemed—insofar as the promise is formalized and recorded, it can be distributed, and therefore become currency. The question then posed itself regarding the articulation of this way of originating money with the creation of money through the issuance of debt, which seems the opposite of promising (promising seems to be indebting oneself). Of course, both accounts might be true at different times—for that matter, there are probably several other ways in which money might be created—and I should eventually get to all of them.\n\nBut they should be synthesized or at least made to overlap as much as possible, even if for no other reason as that such a procedure uncovers less obvious connections. And in this case it seems to me that Christine Desan’s account of money creation in medieval England might help out here, as Desan sees money as beginning with the issuance by the king of tokens certifying that the recipient has donated goods or services to the king before they were required to, to meet some exigency. In that case, the promise involved in the issuance of money acknowledges a prior payment of an ongoing debt to the center by one who has become in effect a privileged subject.\n\nScott probably has more horizontal relations in mind, but even here I would say that promises always issue from an “always already” state of indebtedness constituting each member of the community’s possession of whatever they are able to promise. We always start with a debt to the center but it is also the case that the debt to the center always takes the form of an imperative issued by the center and, in fact, the broadest of imperatives, the imperative to respect and protect the originary distribution. But, then, it follows that the imperative from the center is necessarily divisible, and that currency marks obedience to a particular part of the imperative, with debt in that case extending the circle of the imperative’s “radiation” by including others less on the basis of loyalty and more bordering on coercion and the threat of expropriation.\n\nAn imperative has to work its way through a series of subsidiary imperatives, with debts and exchanges at each point along the way. Power is “confidence in obedience,” as Nitzan and Bichler put it in _Capital as Power_ , and this confidence is confidence in one’s debtors continuing to pay. What accounts for the degree of confidence? Whatever auxiliaries of power we were to point to, such as loyal subordinates, would just raise the same question at a different level. I think that line of succession provides the best way of accounting for this confidence—the more one’s rule follows most “consistently” from predecessors and seems likely to be transmitted to successors the more that confidence is justified.\n\nThere is a circularity to such a definition as there will always be in such discussions, but the way one deploys institutional markers to distinguish oneself from “pretenders” and clears the way for successors requires cooperative preconditions, real personal capacities and leaves visible trails. This is how one can measure and register the strength of any imperative issuing from the center, and the mode and degree of obedience at any point in the chain of imperatives is a kind of speculation on the security of the officeholder versus any of the outside options. Insofar as that speculation can be monetized we have debt.\n\nThis way of measuring the imperative points to one man rule, but is applicable even under conditions of controlled rotation at the center: imperatives issued by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele with an approval rating upward of 90% deserve a far higher rating than those issued by the crowd jostling to get in line behind whoever the emergent competition between political insiders, “civil society organizations” and donors ends up pushing to the front behind Biden. There’s no reason why more coherent succession practices can’t emerge under electoral conditions, as an executive getting 60% of the vote performs well and hands off to one who receives 70% and so on until elections become uninteresting and ultimately vestigial and finally dropped or converted into a new kind of succession ritual.\n\nThe clarification of the imperative by unclogging the chain of command presupposes the reduction to the point of elimination of the central bank and its equivalents and co-conspirators inside and outside of government. The debt to the center is then directly invested in succession rituals, which comprise the entire social order. All the disciplines are to be organized around unfolding and maximizing the imperative constituting and renewing the originary distribution—including the “hard” sciences which, even allowing for the necessary scope for experimentation and speculation, ultimately feed back into scenic design, the creation of pedagogical platforms which are, in turn, concerned with the creation and learning of idioms.\n\nThis all sounds utopian but you can see that it can be articulated in a compact and easily packaged way that can be adapted or idiomized for any occasion and become a way of thinking through any issue, including thinking through what needs to be thought through. That’s why I’m re-centering the imperative from the center here—as a site of translation which reveals the intersection of the outside spread and the outside option in any event and in turn points to some way of contracting both, ultimately in some form where the juridical channels disciplinary inquiries. I’m not interested in a political “movement” that takes a stand on the “issues,” but in creating a new idiom, let’s even say a new language, that will be learned in direct proportion to one’s ability to, wherever one is found, identify the juridical questions that reinforce the originary distribution and generate new questions for the disciplines.\n\nSomething like a secret society and intelligence agency within the institutions, with the difference that nothing is hidden—if you can’t learn the language because you’re invested in trying to play one outside option off against the other and trying to open the sluice gates of the outside spread and channel it towards your own little watering hole than you just can’t learn it. You are holding on to too many names for things that would need to be renamed.\n\nAnyone can learn to think along the lines I’m suggesting. You are presented with a question, problem or issue—the very fact that is presented means it is, at least potentially, a case, so let’s begin by sorting out who might have claims and counter-claims against whom and before which effective arbiter. This might get complex very quickly, as layers of power hierarchy get implicated since whoever trespasses against another has had some implicit (at least) permission to do so. But dealing with complexity is really just a matter of reducing the complexity to an articulation of simple cases. Someone destroyed another’s property, someone violated a contract, someone committed a violent crime, etc.\n\nSomeone is authorized to adjudicate. “Agency” means bringing the case where it can be brought—if the adjudicator is himself part of the case at a higher level, someone situated at that level will have to bring it. The more thoroughly institutions have been infiltrated and, therefore, the more likely that adjudicator will, if it’s called for, be brought before another court, the less likely that it will be necessary. In any case, inquiry into the facts, law and history underpinning is necessary—by now, this involves everything from the low-tech approach of gathering eyewitness testimony to the most advanced scientific and technological techniques for turning the world into a collection of material witnesses.\n\nWhether the information gathered can be trusted, or has been presented carelessly, fraudulently or malevolently, opens up other possible “cases.” The world is everything that can be made into a case, but we say that so as to work towards making the cases as informally, expeditiously, transparently and mutually satisfactorily handled as possible. Any case can be framed in such a way as to include repair of the institutional breach enabling the complaint, which puts us on the path toward data exchange. The indebtedness of the institution or community in each case is either a constraint allowing for a tighter framing or a corrupting influence compromising the adjudication at some point along the way.\n\nSometimes one loses, the case cannot be kept clean, and so one creates a record of it. And sometimes, very rarely, the originary distribution itself is upended, and those partitioning and parceling out the imperative respond by rushing to the new occupant of the center and his representatives down the line with cases offering the opportunity to start creating lasting precedents. All “literature,” that is, all the modern descendants of scripture, epic and prayer, is nothing other than experimentation with ways of framing cases.\n\nWe “speculate” on the imperative from the center in the sense of working to prolong it into the future—the creation of “derivatives.” There can’t be anything more important than de-monetizing debt and converting it into pedagogical platforms for performing succession rituals. I would be very happy to see the bitcoin maximalists turn out to be right and having El Salvador serve as a test case for both that and the prioritizing of public order is extremely important. It is good that it will be very difficult for US imperial agencies to come up with a rationale for intervention, and Bukele is presumably aware of the various “civil society” vehicles used for subversion.\n\nI keep mentioning Bukele because it’s good to highlight models for clarifying the imperative, and he seems to be innovative in a way that other often touted models, like Viktor Orban, however preferable to alternatives, really isn’t. El Salvador will not be the vanguard transforming the world, but it’s excellent as a test case. It’s interesting that I’ve seen very little written about Bukele—where he came from, the sources of his thinking about governance, what he had to leverage to be able to clean up his gang infested society, where his support originally came from, international connections if any, etc.\n\nPartitioning and parceling out the imperative now becomes an idiom “backing” originary indebtedness and draws upon the more “diagrammatic” idiom of “the part of the all is the same.” Originary debt can be located in the imperative gap, where one must extend and particularize the imperative while prolonging it through its interrogativizations into declaratives that will enable others to do the same. Within the existing, finite, property system, where everything is already apportioned, one facilitates transitions to new subdivisions and consolidations and provides for the entry of new learners to the system by proposing and enacting new spaces of exchange and judgment, which now means new forms of data exchange.\n\nA new form of data exchange, one with the potential for to contribute to the machine learning that will generate more precise and articulate forms of correlation, pays off the interest, if not the principle of the originary debt. Maybe the goal is to get to the point where correlation is indeed causation because the correlations are so systematic and precise (in other words, enough “likes” can become a “because”) that data could be with increasing directness converted into a series of rated (on various scales) options for succession. Imperatives can always be disobeyed (disobedience is built into the imperative just as much as obedience) which means they always include the potential for resentment and new micro-spaces of judgment (of thirdness) are the way of completing the imperative, preparing it for its declarative mark-ups.\n\nCurrency, then, is the creation of inflection points extending the imperative from the center in one or another direction, towards one of another future. It’s a share in the continuity of the current order, in which current it will flow. In that case, movement toward singularized succession in perpetuity means turning everything we can into currency and making everything turned into currency capable of replacing debt money. All the promises you make and all those promises that have been made to you and to others on your behalf (e.g., a degree granted by an educational institution) can be forwarded to others and serve as collateral.\n\nSeparating good currency from bad in that case involves the further extension of data collection and the treatment of collected data so as to make it suitable for potential adjudications. The politics of this movement involves the creation and defense of institutional strongholds where data that is good for indispensable governing purposes is protected from the pincer assaults where the outside spread mobilizes the sabotage of the outside options. This can’t be nationalist or libertarian, both of which desire to evade the demands of global governance. It would require chains of command willing to protect supply chains like air to breathe, idioms that circulate entirely within the stack, algorithmically mediated with the highest human responsibility, and pedagogical institutions directly targeting new modes of literacy preparatory to these new modes of governance. Thirdness should be part of this, but I remain on the lookout for other “inside options,” i.e., those assuming command as if they are merely resuming it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "perfecting-the-imperative",
      "title": "Perfecting the Imperative",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 21, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/perfecting-the-imperative",
      "content": "I’d like, here, to think through more thoroughly than I have so far the problem of identifying technology with the imperatives and doing so within the terms of originary grammar (the sequence of speech forms). Associating technology with scenic construction and design, while still critical, has been a bit of a deflection from this more fundamental thinking. As questions of “AI” and infrastructure become increasingly central, a powerful mode of thinking about technology grounded in GA will be indispensable. I also see a need to counter (but also appropriate) a powerful tradition within theory of technology—that which, like McLuhan most famously, sees technology as an extension of the bodily organs, senses and even nervous system.\n\nThis approach situates technology in relation to desire, rather than governance, and assumes the Big Scenic Imaginary whereby humanity can be portrayed as one big human. After all, who is doing the “extending” or “prostheticizing”? Whose organs are extended? Why, for that matter, would anyone one of us want our central nervous system extended across the earth? The surveillance systems now built into every bit of infrastructure aren’t an extension of my eyes, or yours. To say that human senses and motions serve as a model (and not the only one) for technology is not the same thing as saying technology is an extension of human senses and motions.\n\nNor does a prosthesis utterly transform the organ it is meant to “supplement.” By foregrounding the imperative, we also make explicit the centralized and collective nature of technology: the technology that enables me to “reach” across the world and bring back some goodies produced in China more fundamentally organizes the motions and the interconnections of those motions of millions of people from here to China—and, for that matter, to the end consumer himself, who must position himself in relation to the circuit in prescribed ways. In terms of GA, or anthropomorphics, this is once again a question of producer’s desire vs. consumer’s satisfaction.\n\nIf technology is a prosthesis, it is a prosthesis of the center, and more proximately the occupant thereof, who benefits from having eyes, ears, and limbs all around; but this also requires brain proetheses to handle all the data and intelligence brought in by those expanded senses—this doesn’t simply add up to a more intelligent, insightful or better calculating human because we’d then need a distribution of others to be our prostheses as well, and we’d have to instruct and rely upon them in a way we don’t quite instruct or rely upon our eyes and ears (which won’t hide things from us, or tell our enemies what we’re “seeing”).\n\nThere’s not much thinking of technology within GA, so I can’t attribute the prosthesis metaphor to GA in particular, but I can associate it with the consumerism made foundational by Gans and take this moment to insist that the allergy within GA circles to thinking in terms of governmentality requires a very strong dose of antihistamine, and thinking through technology via the imperative might provide the requisite dosage.\n\nTo issue an imperative is to instrumentalize another. This could be interpreted as making that other my prosthesis, but in that case we are all one another’s prostheses from the start, and the originary community a large, artificial body—which is true but the theory of technology would in that case be an adjunct to anthropology, which accounts for how we could be reciprocally prostheticizing each other in the first place. We are all prostheses of the center. Imperatives get prolonged and modified along the way, and the instrumentalized insttumentalize themselves and others, including the issuer of the initiating imperative.\n\nWhen the. imperative is part of a pedagogical relation, as with an apprenticeship, the notion of a “prosthesis” seems vitiated: a prosehtesis is not created so as to eventually replace the possessor of the organ in question. When you send out a scout you don’t know what he might find—and it’s an odd extension of the eyes and ears that can decide what to disclose. Imperatives are easily repeated, and can be stripped down and refined to make them more effective. And they can be subdivided into smaller imperatives, covering less ground or, of course, prolonged or made open-ended. The scout can be told to send back reports or signals periodically.\n\nAnd then the participants in the activity can issue imperatives into the environment that shape it and enable it to participate in the imperative order. If, drawing upon Eric Jacobus’s supplement to the originary hypothesis, requiring the weaponization of some tool in order to arouse the level of “expressiveness” (to refer to Andrew Bartlett’s [recent essay](https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2802/ap2802bartlett/) in _Anthropoetics_ ) needed to turn appropriation into gesture/sign, we see a kind of war and peace oscillation in the originary community’s exchanges with nature, then the scope of the imperative is further widened—imperatives are given to and taken from the surrounding beings, however they might be named and animated.\n\nAnd we still do have the highly imperative ritual scene, very carefully choreographed so as to issue a shared imperative (petition) to the center and elicit imperatives in return; and, moreover, the originary scene itself which, while devoid of imperatives, is composed of preliminaries of the imperative in the form of movements that confine the other and channel their attention. (This might be included in the “originary rhetoric” Gans speaks of in _Signs of Paradox._ ) But the new work to be done here is to pose the problem of an imperative order that continues taking on new micro and macro imperatives and binding them together in a circuit of imperatives, with the imperatives being shaped into material forms such that one piece can “communicate” that imperative to other pieces.\n\nThis in requires the ability to see reality itself as held together by chains of imperatives, even if one is not obliged (commanded) to see reality exclusively in those terms. I’ll mention briefly (because I’ve said this so many times) that this kind of technological imagination required the mass armies, slave and otherwise, of antiquity and then in the desecrated world of shaken kingship in Europe. But the real problem now is to ground this circuit of imperatives in the sequence of speech forms, with special attention to the imperative-interrogative link, mostly neglected up until now. The guiding hypothesis here is that the logic of “inappropriateness,” or what I called “[mistakenness](https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1601/1601katz/),” can scale up, rather than just being a one-time process to be discarded once the declarative is up and running.\n\nEach sign emerges from a disruption of presence, and is a restoration of presence, with “presence” being the deferral of some likely violence. We are to some extent in the realm of intuition here—no one can, in a given situation, be expected to accurately rank the likelihood, form, and time frame of every conceivable instance of crisis-inducing violence that might erupt within that scene. At the same time, intuition can be trained into habits, which lies squarely within the province of technics. Habit, of course, is also imperfect, and requires constant retraining. In the originary derivation of the imperative, someone—Gans suggests an inexperienced language user, perhaps a child—utters the sign for some object that isn’t there; once the object is retrieved, we have an imperative, even though the original sign user was not trying to invent one.\n\nWe have a dynamic, or dialectic here, one which could be regularized—insofar as I approach the scene with desire, especially a producer’s desire, in a quasi-hallucinatory or, less provocatively, imaginative, manner, I produce absences that generate imperatives. In principle, any hallucination will do, but, here as well, “fancy” can be replaced by a trained imagination that can model perceived absences on previously generated presences. In this case, is the imaginer purposeful in trying to create a new form in a way that the “inventor” of the imperative (actually, co-inventors, as we must include the one who retrieves the object) is not?\n\nYes, more so, but never completely so—if you knew exactly what you wanted to discover or invent you would have already discovered or invented it. There remains a residue of presence-maintenance. We will, then, have to come back to the question of whether and how this could be mapped out and prompt-engineered.\n\nThe world has been laid out with millions of “ostensivities,” sensing mechanisms articulated into a global infrastructure. There are more ostensive “uptakes,” which is to say more data, or incipient data, than will ever to recorded and committed to some kind of memory, much less analyzed and integrated into feedback cycles. Some of them, to pursue the current hypothesis, must be inappropriate or mistaken enough to register and elicit an imperative effort to restore presence. Those would be the data, or “givens,” that stand out in some way, that reach a threshold triggering some responsive mechanism, or that require the description of a new pattern, or answer some latent or manifest question.\n\nUnlike the originary scene, such instances of mistakenness are carefully and systematically prepared for—the ostensivities themselves are the results of untold iterations of the ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative cycle. They were created to answer questions, which means that we should see questions both as prolongations of imperatives into requests for ostensive marks that might themselves be prolonged into imperative complementing and completing the initiating one, but as intrusions of the imperative into the declarative. And the imperative can thus intrude into the declarative because the declarative itself, as an effort at presence-maintenance, requires a series of ostensive confirmations, and often ostensive-imperative oscillations, to be intelligible (which is to say, to be responded to with either a “yes” or a “no” in some way that can be repeated and commemorated).\n\nThe imperative being prolonged into the interrogative implies a potentially lengthy journey, with preliminary questions issued along the way that might add to the momentum propelling the imperative forward. The more the imperative order is systematized and automated, the more it spills over into all kinds of questions, some of which are channeled through disciplinary gutters into micrco-infrasructures designed to lower the thresholds at which ostensivities register and increase the pathways by which they convert into imperatives and interrogatives; while others get drained away, leaving unsystematized questions streaming along the stacked scenes.\n\nHere is where an anthropomorphic theory of technoscience as applied anthropomorphics can train our thinking most powerfully. Every question, indeed, every uncertainty, shock of surprise, or aroused curiosity, can be traced back to some chain of imperatives that has confronted the questioner, but that has origins that can be traced back to the usurpation of the center and the more recent thoroughgoing desecration of the occupied center. It is ultimately a command that everyone be at their posts and contribute to some future iteration of the occupant of the center what can no longer be contributed directly to the present occupant of the center.\n\nDesecration is simultaneously advanced and repaired through the creation of new rituals of succession that reference, break down, and micro-imperativize the imperative order—what I have referred to previously as the treatment of technology as the creation of pedagogical platforms. Scene-stacking is equally a social and technological set of practices.\n\nThe important question here is whether this scenic conception of technoscience can contribute to descriptions of and improvements in the thinking involved in these activities, primarily hypothesizing and constructing thought experiments. And here is where perfecting the imperative and ushering it into the interrogatory state comes in. This, of course, will be hypothetical, and not based on evidence from actual inventors or scientific discoverers, who from what I’ve seen anyway tend to see thoughts as just coming into their minds. But let’s say you see the entire world as a vast network of interconnected imperatives, directed towards you through those imperatives you feel most urgently pressing upon you.\n\nThis could, of course, apply to personal situations, but I’ll stay focused on those situations where you are most directly taking orders from the infrastructure. Instead of trying to “liberate” yourself from these pressing imperatives, let’s say you try to further perfect, make them easier to follow, make them lead into other imperatives more fluidly, have them reveal their origins in previous imperatives. Whatever you’re doing, however much you enjoy it or feel you have chosen to do it, is done according to the most absolute imperative imaginable. Whatever you’re doing now is what you must do, with the fact that you’re doing it proof of that.\n\nAs the imperative, under your own attempt to comply perfectly with it, is prolonged backwards and forwards, the fluency with which some of the imperative has to be obeyed flows into areas where various possible modes of obedience come into the field, leading to the question, how to obey? You select one way of continuing to obey the imperative, and perfecting it further along in its extension, and as a result, the field of possible compliance or application shifts. This generates a new imperative: to “align” the field with that hypothetical imperative, and then another hypothetical imperative, and so on. In each case, new imperative-ostensive links present themselves on an “as if” scene upon which you enter.\n\nA new question: how to make these possible imperative-ostensive links present? All the while, the only thing holding this practice together is the ongoing attempt to perfect the imperative one started with, which has taken on new shapes in the meantime but part of perfecting it is measuring its application which in turn entails composing it as the same. The more the imperative presents as the imperative of the center, the more imperative perfecting it becomes while the more differentiated the fields of possible prolongation of the imperative become. Part of your scenic design becomes conveying the imperative to others, who will have to collaborate with and carry on your work, but that also means introducing new imperatives into nature and the inanimate in order to install that imperative for others.\n\nImperatives thereby generate scenes upon which they can be further perfected. And this facilitates your engagement with existing and potential collaborators, with whom your work will go better in every regard through the mediation of instruments, implements, and measuring devices—themselves the results of the translation of imperatives into imperatives issued into the inanimate. Every difference or disagreement calls for—commands—a new technoscene, hypothetical at first, from which one could narrow down the possible ostensives that would continue the imperative by answering the questions raised by the difference or disagreement one way or the other. These are pedagogical platforms, and so is the line of thinking presented here, which should itself be taken as a kind of technology, or programming language, creating terms on which some “we” might speak amongst themselves."
    },
    {
      "slug": "petitioning-technology",
      "title": "Petitioning Technology",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 13, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/petitioning-technology",
      "content": "I pointed out a couple of posts back that virtually the entire “spiritual” vocabulary we have inherited from scripture was derived from other socio-political institutional relationships: roughly, debt and slavery; testimony and judgment; treaties between imperial powers and vassal states, often including dire threats directed toward the latter; diplomatic messages; and the ceremonies surrounding kingship. I hasten to add that in my view this doesn’t delegitimate scripture derived vocabularies in the slightest—these vocabularies were revised and transformed so as to generate new disciplinary spaces making real discoveries regarding fundamental human paradoxes.\n\nIndeed, where else would such discoveries come from, if not from crises in social relations? The observation enables us to see patterns we wouldn’t have otherwise and vindicates the assumption that thinking is always embedded textually, in practices of translation that are themselves embedded in institutions, and not something we carry out inside our own heads. And now I want to reverse the relation of derivation and point out that the earliest forms of discourse and therefore of thinking were no doubt prayers, which would mean that all those economic, juridical, political and geo-political discourses were themselves translated forms of petition to the center.\n\nPrayer is the paradigmatic articulation of ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative. Prayer directly addresses—“points to”—God; it makes some request of God; it acknowledges some obligation to God (some command that must be obeyed); it at least implies some question as to whether one’s compliance has been acceptable, and one’s petition accepted; and it will, grammatically, have the markers of a declarative sentence (forgive us our sins as we forgive others’ against us—there’s an imperative conjoined with a description here, even if the description is bordering on a promise). So, the “model declarative” I’ve proposed in some posts, aimed at addressing the “impossible question” (a question “demanding” a priori and impeccable credentials regarding the other’s qualification to answer the question) should really be modeled on prayer.\n\nAn impossible question allows for no declarative mapping because it presupposes the existence of center which would make the question unnecessary. For example, “how will you advance equity” presupposes a shared and actionable understanding of “equity”—the “prayerful” answer (or, better, preemptive ruling out of the question) is something like “show us what we could do now that would that would produce and indicate a shared understanding of ‘achieving equity’.” Prayers are meant to make something happen—they’re performative—even if what they are supposed to make happen can be ineffable. There’s something circular about prayer, which always comes down to asking God for the wisdom and strength to know and do His will—and it’s the prayer itself which supplies the wisdom and strength. This makes prayer, which has its origins in ritual, intrinsically “technical.” It’s the first form of self-design—with the self not necessarily being a single individual.\n\nSo, what happens when prayer fails? The kind of minimal and extremely advanced form of prayer I mentioned in the previous paragraph is the result of a long succession of refinements of previously failed prayers. Here is a case where originary thinking is indispensable—in this case, what originary thinking entails is finding in the more advanced form a closer approximation to the original form. So, the originary “utterance,” the sign issued on the originary scene, was really quite close to something like “let us obey you so that we will be saved,” and it is later forms of prayer, subsequent to the incorporation of the practices of everyday life that would lead to prayers asking for rain, for success in the hunt, victory in war, etc. It is the failure of those prayers that would ultimately lead to a “reworking” of the prayer form to something “infallible,” like simply asking God to sustain you in your devotion to him—a prayer like that cant fail because the prayer itself is a sign of its success.\n\nThis ongoing approximation of prayer to its originary form can then be a model for design practices in any area, at any scale. Solving any technical or design problem is a matter of converting impossible questions into “petitional” forms—you’ve solved the problem once you have a self-sustaining petitional form that no longer needs the impossible questions to “prompt” us. We always want to get to the point where we can say something like “let each of us be where we need to be such that things can be as they need to be so that we can be in these places,” with “each of us,” “where we need to be,” “as things need to be,” etc., already having had their referents supplied by the ongoing approximation process originally set in motion by an impossible question involving how it could be possible to enable someone to do something that no one has ever imagined anyone being able to do before.\n\nNow, let’s speak a bit more “technologically.” A, if not the, basic form of a technical device involves some articulation between sensor and algorithmically programmed response to what has been sensed. We could think of the exemplary thermostat here: when the sensor detects that the temperature has hit 77 degrees, a mechanism kicks in to lower the house temperature to 72. A self-driving car articulates data derived from sensors (regarding the immediate surroundings of the vehicle) with data derived from satellites in accord with an algorithm that “tells” the car where to go. We have here ostensives (“sensing”), imperatives which are “extended” ostensives (start pumping in cooler air, turn right, etc.) and declaratives (algorithms) that provide for the continual modulation of the relations between them.\n\nThe mechanism itself has no place for questions, it seems (I’ll be revisiting this question, though), but the questioning comes in the thinking about how to arrange the entire set up. Not only can a lot of different kinds of sensing systems be set up, but any mode of sensing designed will “give off” more data than was originally desired or planned for; likewise, the of imperative sequences result in new ostensives that will confirm the process (measuring the adjusted temperature; arriving at your destination). Thinking technically involves an oscillation between multiplying the possible articulations between ostensives and imperatives, on the one hand, and filtering from among those possibilities, on the other.\n\nSo, we could say that an “impossible question” multiplies possible ostensive-imperative articulations beyond capacity, but this ability, which generates unmanageable resentment in the social world, can be converted into a controlled process of probing in the technical or designed world. (And, eventually, since we must keep reducing the differences between “social” and “technological,” or, rather reduce the differences marked by our present discursive repertoire, “impossible questions” in the social world will be subject to the same treatment—indeed, once that’s the case, we’ll know we’ve made some real progress.)\n\nThe continual refinement of prayer I’ve been referring to is located within the monotheistic tradition: to put it bluntly, it’s a process of approximation available only to those who keep getting their worldly desires denied. If you keep losing wars, and those you considered your saviors keep getting killed, you have to revise your prayers so as to no longer request victory but, rather, that defeat be recognizable as a higher form of victory. The power of this shouldn’t be denied—Nietzsche would have identified it as “ressentiment,” but he also recognized its power, since in the end everyone loses (i.e., dies, but must also consider the possibility of losing what one loves), and will be “tempted” to call upon a God who promises nothing more than to always be with you, even in your darkest times, when everyone else has abandoned you.\n\nAnd the ongoing revelation of the “vanity” of desires and, ultimately, the mimetic roots of those desires, depend upon such prayers which emerge in the wake of defeat. Still, such prayer is ultimately anti-technical—in fact, it will assimilate the technical to the brutality of the “winners.” So, this presents us with a challenge: to “install” the tradition of petitional refinement, or originary petitioning, in the perfection of the imperative that I have been identifying with the technical.\n\nI can test out the hypothesis presented here by treating or formulating this challenge as an “impossible question,” initiating a sequence that would lead us to a version of the model declarative that would generate instructions for participating in the perfection of the imperative on the way to installing singularized succession in perpetuity. I think the “same sample” practice promoted in the previous post but one can be mobilized here. Remember, this practice begins with the assumption of the miraculousness of the utterance, grounded in the “non-fungibility” of language, which only the originary hypothesis can account for.\n\nEvery utterance is miraculous, but they sure don’t all seem to be—many of them seem banal, repetitive, automated, dull-witted, etc. So, we put in place a heuristic: demonstrate the miraculousness of the utterance by constructing the background that first of all seems to “falsify” but ultimately affirms it. It’s a way of thinking you can practice: the most stereotyped, programmed, utterance, like the salesperson’s greeting, seems utterly unmiraculous precisely because we can see the practices setting it in place, while the very possibility of all of those practices having been carved out of contrary inclinations and practices being brought into convergence with the life history of this person, saying it in her own way (different, however slightly, and in indicative ways, from the way anyone else would say it) “proves” the miraculousness of the utterance by way of a social analysis as thorough as our interest and patience allows for.\n\nSince the real “miracle” and the real non-fungibility of the utterance lies in the scenic participation, irreducible to anything extra-scenic, necessary to “pull it off,” we can hold in abeyance the overt religiosity of the “miracle” and speak of the “same sample,” since what is really remarkable here is the sharing of an ostensive indicating that we have all directed our attention upon a single point.\n\nSo, in any inquiry, which includes the solving of some technical problem, we start with a same sample and we arrive at another same sample at the end. We start with something that doesn’t “fit,” something not quite working along with everything else in some mechanism, or some possibility suggested by it that you don’t quite know how to “insert” or even create. The technical process involves beginning with an accentuation of the “at oddness” of the sample with its surroundings, with the sameness of the sample reduced to the very possibility of identifying and focusing on it against its background; and it ends with the same sample embedded in an exhaustive system of inter-reference with the rest of the system—you could say it’s the mere tip of an extended sample.\n\nThat’s the imperative one is enjoined to perfect once one embarks on the practice. So, you keep asking the system to let you do this or that, with each failed petition leading to a reduction wherein materials, capacities of fellow workers, infrastructure, aligned projects, and so on become increasingly inter-referential so that everyone is in a place such that the place will be that place. Petitioning will then have been technologized.\n\nAnd this petitioning technology then becomes a model for addressing the social and erasing the presumed boundary between human and technical. The samples uttered and dispersed all around us need to be taken through a similar process—a continual testing of the meaning of utterances by asking what and who would have to be in which places for the sample to take on programmatic effectivity—we start with an “I want” or a “this is terrible” (which just implies an “I want”) and we get to work embedding that sample in an infrastructure so as to see what same sample would arrive at the other end—that is, a satisfaction of the desire or resentment expressed that would invoke a full mobilization of all that would need to be mobilized so as to eliminate everything interfering with the installation of the desired state and in the end be acknowledge to, indeed, be the thing that was wanted even if necessarily in an unanticipated form—and, for that matter, at each step along the way, would be acknowledged to be at a step along the way.\n\nTo construct a practice aimed at preserving the sameness of the sample would require singling out and including in those practices the preservation or enhancing of the continuity of power of those presiding over the supply chains. A practice of transforming the same sample as problematic anomaly into the same sample as possible center of a system must, then, include a continual approximation towards the naming and improving of the succession of one practice or practitioner to the next. In other words, a socio-technical transformation, or a design practice, is modeled on the exemplary personnel to implement it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "presence-and-intention-in-sampling-as-currency",
      "title": "Presence and Intention in Sampling as Currency",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 03, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/presence-and-intention-in-sampling",
      "content": "Idioms as samples and samples as currency: that’s the marker I’m going to lay down here. Currency can certainly be organized around bets on the future: that’s what derivatives are, and there’s a lot more wealth in derivatives than there is in money. Without money providing the store of value for derivatives, the derivatives couldn’t be priced, but if exchange is carried out through data between teams on supply chains that include the supply of future team members, then money isn’t needed. Wealth is distributed in accord with promises—the promise to supply certain teams proximate in the supply chain and their successors, backed by the promises of those pledged to supply you.\n\nGive everyone a rank in the line of succession as options so that the field is saturated. Newcomers enter with a range of rankings and overlapping networks—even if the expectations aren’t high for a particular newcomer, individual or team (and people will be strongly encouraged to enter as teams right out of their schooling or apprenticeship), by giving them a rank, albeit a low one, an incentive is created to make them as fit as possible, if only to make the field of options as strong as possible all the way through. Derivatives can lose all their value if enough potential buyers lose faith in the eventuality of the exchange that will have taken place, but we can’t run out of the future itself.\n\nThat we will have always been on the same scene is in this way “thematized” by being made into currency—value is conferred by the prospective stacking of scenes that provides a measure of the distance from the originary scene that is simultaneously an affirmation of its sameness, of its presence as a sample from this scene and as this scene as sample. This means we’re directly working on language as the source of such samples through the creation of idioms—distinct parts of language that will always be better responded to than described. The most powerful way of examining and promoting the creation of idioms we have in GA comes from Eric Gans’s hypothesis of the succession of speech forms in _The Origin of Language_.\n\nTo remind you for the nth time, Gans has to account for the generation of a wholly new linguistic form in a such a way that will be recognized as such, which is to say as an intentional speech act, while keeping in mind that a wholly new form could not be intended as such since no one could have had a model of it prior to its creation. Gans manages this through what he calls the “inappropriate” use of the existing linguistic form (what I’ve called “mistakenness”) plus the fundamental desire of any language user to maintain “linguistic presence,” or the continued possibility of some form of sign exchange lest the scene devolve into mimetic crisis.\n\nFinding a way to maintain linguistic presence in the face of inappropriate usage creates the new form, i.e., a repeatable speech act, without anyone having intended to create that act. So, when the ostensive is used in the absence of the object referred to, that object is retrieved, and we now have an imperative, even though no one meant to issue it.\n\nThe maintenance of linguistic presence in the face of potential absence provides us with a general model of linguistic and cultural forms, and it also solves for us the much debated question of “intention” regarding textual production—a question which has come to the fore with AI-generated texts, or what a colleague of mine calls automated writing, where we have text produced by no one and yet which we read as if produced intentionally (this question even resurrected, in a recent forum held by the academic journal _Critical Inquiry_ , a 1982 essay by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory”). Paul de Man’s contribution to the whole issue of “intention,” sparked by post-structuralist theory and especially essays like.\n\nRoland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author” that spoke of textual production in terms of enabling and institutionally sanctioned discourses rather than authorial intention, was to point out that “intention” didn’t mean, tautologically, that the author “intended” to write the words that ended up on the page but that the intention was for the text to be read. That the text is intended to be read situates intentionality in the kind of thing produced, and the kind of space in which that thing is recognizable as that thing, rather than as, I suppose, a presumed paraphrase of what the writer was “trying to say” in the text where he actually says something else.\n\nI will take de Man to be referring to something like the maintenance of linguistic presence, and the usefulness of approaching intentionality this way is that attempts to maintain linguistic presence must always draw upon the existing linguistic resources available to the author or speaker, what we can think of as an archive, in ways that must be at least in part improvisational and while available to the author in ways inaccessible to us simultaneously accessible to us in ways unavailable to the author. This, then, is how an idiom is generated, and we are ourselves attempting to maintain some form of linguistic presence in retrieving and forwarding that attempt.\n\nSince the writer rarely knows his reader, writing involves an expanded or replicable form of linguistic presence—Homer couldn’t have had someone like me in mind, but a space has been created, through the sheer preservation of his texts along with the histories of commentary and translation, that enable me to participate in the extension of the linguistic presence he created. We can say that when we write we intend to maintain a linguistic presence as replicable and extendable as possible, which also includes eliciting commentaries and counter-claims and misreadngs, etc., and examining what a text might do (or fail to do) so as to get us back to the text in a way irreducible to paraphrase and interpretation.\n\nThat our texts now become part of the database chewed up and spit out by LLMs, i.e., that we donate our writing to the computation of average responses to prompts can now be part of our intention as well—an intention also informing, very indirectly, by not necessarily less so than the indirectness of Homer’s intention that I read his text, the AI generated texts (automated writing) we read.\n\nSo, in discussing the issue of idioms we are in a way discussing the question of an enduring style, style that is enduring because transportable and variable, given to parody as much as reverential citing. The maintenance of linguistic presence in perpetuity is singular succession and the scene is the same borne linguistically, and eventually as currency, bearing sufficiently intelligible and reliable promises. We’re thinking of declarative sentences that nevertheless operate performatively, as felicitous or not, depending upon how they are taken up—promises and, of course, prayers. This is not new, but thinking of the design of idioms with currency in mind is.\n\nAs a model we could work with commonplaces, or formulas, those chunks of discourse that function as currency in everyday discourse, and that look, at least, like the residue of philosophical and wisdom literature. “Well, that’s the way it goes,” asserted when one has nothing more to say about a dismaying event, trickles down from Stoic imperatives to keep your mind free from the vicissitudes of life. Every commonplace, formula or cliché was at one time an epiphany—this observation is not supportive of commonplaces, formulas and cliches, but “intends” to make the production of originating epiphanies a priority. What we can say about these language parts that approach purely phatic effect (which is to say, maintaining more direct, face to face, linguistic presence) is that they contain accumulated deferral energy. If the phatic utterances are mass, we’re interested in the energy, This brings us back to the question of the thought experiment, or boundary utterances, the affordances of God and our programming language.\n\nLet’s think in explicitly experimental terms: operationalizing a hypothesis regarding the conversion of existing modes of succession into singularize succession in perpetuity. The hypothesis includes a judgment, that is, a choice formalized as a dispute presided over so as to leave a trace of a dispute whose retrojected resolution has it never having happened. Anthropomorphic thought experiments must display a self-exposure that trails along the entire question of succession, and such self-exposure implies while cancelling the juridical. To invoke the reading of Hamlet I’ve mentioned on occasion, if Hamlet’s thought experiment, in which re-presenting Claudius’s crime back to himself implicates Claudius’s conscience and initiates a process of confession and repentance, could have worked, then not only would Hamlet’s revenge be unnecessary but so would any juridical proceeding as Claudius would then also submit to the judgment of the community without contestation, perhaps enacting a new mode of Lear-like inhabitation of the periphery.\n\nNone of this would make sense without the boundary between the vendetta and the juridical while simultaneously rendering both unnecessary. Implicit here as well would be an orderly mode of succession, perhaps to Hamlet but perhaps not (this would be the matter of the thought experiment), operationalized scenically through some transformation of the kingdom. Such a narrative must then be reduced to an iterable idiom, through design rules, like staying as close as possible to the natural semantic primes or, going to the other extreme, maximizing scenic resonance through indirectness with the metalanguage of literacy.\n\nIn almost any case, there will be a strong bias towards the present tense, and the boundary between declarative and imperative, which is the register of wisdom literature. Ultimately there needs to be a laboratory and even a start-up dedicated to this.\n\nThe generation of idioms as currency is always derived from idioms already circulating—that’s the significance of the model of cultural invention derived from the succession of linguistic forms. A thought experiment singularizing succession out of the entropic modes of succession currently on display would have to work with the entire stack of scenes processing those successions, beginning by the finding of the thread that gives at least some minimal order to succession through succession rituals involving the continual restarting of distribution from the center. It is a question emerging from some lingering or dangling imperative that is to be operationalized.\n\nIt might involve working on one’s own mistakenness by learning to identify what one has invented inadvertently, simply by asking how could a particular figure at the center see to his own succession? We can use prediction and similar futurizing markets as models here: let’s say it could be made meaningful to predict who will be elected US President in, say, 2036. I think placing bets on individuals would be too tenuous, especially if we pushed the date back further. The problem of identifying specific characteristics of the winner of that election in such a way that all participants in the market would accept the decision is great, maybe insuperable; maybe it all depends upon whether there are trusted judges, in which case maybe that would be the thing to bet on—will such a potentially lucrative betting market find a mode of organization in which winners could be paid off and losers not only left with no recourse but continue to participate.\n\nAnd then shares in that betting market could be sold, and used to back currency, or as currency to carry out transactions in the present. We would be literally betting on the future, which means those who are best able to shape, and show they are shaping, the future, will be the ones capable of making those markets.\n\nIdioms would then function as currency insofar as prospective arbiters and brokers on such markets would be revealed as most likely through the deployment of those idioms, by themselves as others. You’d be investing money or something approximating money now while hoping to be paid off eventually by a more or less succession proximate position on a team later. That formulation is itself already very close to idiomization: donate your money so that your designated successor can designate successors. There would already be something different in such an investment, even if on one level it looked like any other: you’d be investing in an attempt to make a market that provides the beginning of an exit from existing markets; once all markets are “made” with increasing explicitness, we will be approaching the transition from markets to the promise and pedagogy based mode of absolute donation to the center.\n\nAll institutions and practices existing now are partially the elements for the operationalization of such market building and partially its entropic negative image, so the constant reading and conversion of the idioms constituting those institutions and practices by mistaking them logistically is the generation of sample idioms as currency.\n\nThe human takes on varying proportions in this stack of scenes, both miniaturized as the human is integrated as one more organic information system in a world of such systems and the physical resources they depend upon and recycle, while also handling the control panels of “spaceship earth,” perhaps on the brink of sending probes and colonies across the solar system. Of course, not every human will be equally positioned in relation to these possibilities, which is why speaking in terms of “humanism” is always a bit of a mystification. The most advanced AI systems still seem to need someone to tell whether a particular image is, in fact, cat, or whether a particular string of words is “offensively racist.”\n\nWe will never be rid of the ostensive measure of things, and the gesture of pointing out “what we are looking at” is always what will confer value on an idiom, because that gesture, situated with the scene and stack of scenes which brings that thing we are looking at into view (also tacitly gestured towards ostensively) is what constitutes the data exchange that will increasingly govern our relation to institutions. The idiom you put forth, representing your bet on a particular option on the future and the liquidity of a particular spread in the present, is you composing yourself as someone proposing a preliminary labeling, categorization and archiving of data—as someone perfecting the imperative.\n\nThe idiom is partly operationalizable now while also evading operationalization until some undetermined date, when as yet unknown conditions and unborn personnel further operationalize it with remainder. One place to begin is with a seat of judgment which takes on and frames cases with the slightest margin of fault on either side so that every judgment becomes a kind of arbitrage of justice where each side is at fault given the branching off into multiple alternate successions. The option of, say, one decision operating as a precedent more often or more “impactfully” (according to reliable judges) than others would be purchased, and the totality of such options would be currency, dependent now upon the preservation of the juridical, upon which everyone would want to bet, but differently because the juridical can never be certain, thereby creating the value of the currency. Operationalize the simultaneity of judge and witness and you will train your sites on succession."
    },
    {
      "slug": "programming-and-visuality-toward-inscipto-punctual-cultivation",
      "title": "Programming and Visuality: Toward Inscipto-Punctual Cultivation",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 04, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/programming-and-visuality-toward",
      "content": "Technology is governance, and so is media. The study into the perceptual, cognitive, emotive, limbic and so on transformations wrought by the successive media, beginning with writing, then print, and then the acceleration of mediatic innovation in. the 20th century (film, TV, computers, smartphones, internet, platforms) should be undertaken as studies in mass mobilization—which may often take the form of mass neutralization. Each media provides new ways of cutting up and restitching experience, but this is so as to produce the kinds of selves needed to enter and manage or to reside their trust as clients in the disciplines.\n\nModern technology—the perfecting of the imperative—has become the exclusive form of scenic design since the occupant of the political center has been placed on permanent trial; the corresponding development of capitalism as a mode of power has dictated the mobilizing uses of technology through the reciprocal capture of a particular sector of capital and the state. The most powerful sector of capital must drag in its wake other sectors in its struggle for differential accumulation through the use of state capacities to ensure the greatest relative discounting against espected future earnings of one’s own assets as against other sectors, and this is by now a global process whereby, for example, capitalists invested in China can soften up the American state for Chinese political and intelligence penetration (including, no doubt, sectors of Chinese capital).\n\nThese struggles between capital-state articulations take the form of struggles between and within media, all of which can be brought with the compass of intelligence operations aimed at enhancing one’s own or undermining some opponent’s data security. Effective mobilization is when those in your own ranks know exactly what they need to know and no more, assuming what they know is in fact knowledge, however limited. (Knowing that your enemies can be hurt by the repetition of particular mantras is a kind of knowledge, regardless of the truth or meaningfulness of those mantras, and for certain ranks this may be enough.) But effective mobilization is also relative and depends on your ability to recruit to the point where effective mobilization is decreasingly possible for other sectors.\n\nEric Gans’s notion of the “screenic” provides us with a powerful way of making sense of mediatic domination, even if that is not his intention. In his _Chronicle of Love & Resentment_ 615, “GA and Cinema,” Gans begins by describing film (the first “screenic” medium) as the 20th century equivalent of the “total work of art” aimed at by Wagner: “the cinema screen... was a transcendental “window” that could display images of the real world in a separate universe of human representation, to which the spectator can react with no need to accommodate the trappings of convention. Even before sound, seeing ‘reality’ on a screen was a radically new experience...” The total attention we devote to the screen is the equivalent of, and gradually replaces, previous modes of scenicity, like theater and ritual, which could never create an “ontologically other world.” Gans goes on to point out that\n\nThe screenic universe was the first full-fledged duplication of the ontological otherness of the _scene of representation_ , the scenic world of human culture, the “vertical” dimension added to the “horizontality” of the appetitive-inhibitive animal universe, now freed by its technological independence from the artifacts of worldly framing. Dare we speculate that without cinema’s revelation of this radical otherness, the originary hypothesis would not have been conceived?\n\nGans then extends this ontologically other screenic replacement of the scene to all of our present day devices: “Today there is a screenic culture that corresponds to a desire to be both spectator and creator of one’s own spectacle.” This is no doubt an accurate description, and from Gans’s standpoint from, to use terms he introduced in _The End of Culture_ , “consumer satisfaction,” this is an unequivocal increase in human freedom and well-being. I argued in _Anthropomorphics_ for a GA grounded in “producer’s desire” because it provides the more comprehensive form of inscriptive commemoration—the producer has to take the consumer into account, while the consumer can be blissfully oblivious to the demands imposed upon the producer.\n\n(There’s also a kind of deception, and perhaps self-deception, in _writing_ as a consumer.) And from the standpoint of producer’s desire, the ontologically other screenic is transparently ripe with opportunities for domination and control and hence represents a new mode of struggle over the human, now unavoidably considered as technologically constituted (systematically subjected to “asacral” commands)\n\nAs a “full-fledged duplication of the ontological otherness of the scene of representations,” the screenic is analog, but has come increasingly to be produced digitally. Movies create an image on a screen out of a recorded scene but computer visualization is done by coding the original image into programming language and then recoding it so as to appear on screen—a lot of decisions need to be made along the way regarding what will count as the reproduction of a certain part of an image. The screenic is likenesses, and programming is a series of decisions regarding oscillations between what will be determined to be the same and what will determined to be other.\n\nThe likenesses are what “satisfiy” the consumer and the programming is what the producer “desires.” And programming is still writing and derives from the “arche-writing” of inscription. Likeness is an irreducible reality that must be “experienced,” even to program, but its production through writing “duplicates” the priority of the digital over the analog in our data-centric contemporaneity. Agency is located in some form of programming while the analog/screenic offers stupefaction.\n\nTo be a “programmer” is to deconstruct the logocentrism replicated in the screenic and construct a line of writing back to originary inscription. Writing does not reproduce speech, it does not convey “ideas”—it distributes and articulates possible practices. And right in the middle of this line of writing as derivatives of deferrals are the ancient Hebrew scribes. Gans makes the very helpful observation that the experience of the Name of God in Exodus—the “I AM”—is “autoprobatory”—that is, it could only have been imagined if it had been experienced. But Gans doesn’t ask whose experience it is—surely not Moses’s, a legendary figure standing in for the only one who could have experienced it—the Hebrew scribe who heard the voice of God “internally” in copying but also no doubt revising the mass of inherited materials under conditions of national crisis and reconstruction—as well as repeating and thereby hearing the words attributed to God, for the sake of memorization and teaching of disciples.\n\nBrian Rotman argued that in reproducing silently a text in reading one experiences the voice as coming from nowhere and everywhere, an anonymous voice reduced to “I am/will be what I am/will be.” But other peoples had writing, so why the Jews, or, rather, a crucial distinction, that small group of scribes reconstructing Hebrew literary and ritual traditions so as to impose it on a “mixed multitude” or returning exiled elites and peasants who stayed in the land, in order to govern them as a small province of the Persian (and maybe merging into the Hellenistic) empire. So, how did they do it? I think it was through the force of having to construct a series of binary oppositions so as to carry out the needed national reconstruction while creating a historical narrative that accounts for their own survival under what must have seemed like fairly miraculous circumstances.\n\nFirst of the all the binary between Israel and Judea is constructed as the Kingdom of Israel is destroyed with some of its refugees certainly settling in the Southern Kingdom which internalized Israel’s laws and traditions as its own while “othering” Israel. Then the repudiation of Judea’s own history of sacrifice and child sacrifice in particular, which is projected onto the “othered” Canaanites. Then a series of oppositions between Judea/Assyria, Judea/Egypt, Judea/Babylon, Judea/Persian, and Judea/Hellenist (a pattern to be continued with Rome). (If we are to follow Ron Naiweld— _The Age of the Parakletos: A Historical Defense of Rabbinic Knowledge_ —we should add the binary “Elohim” (the creator of a perfect world) and YHWH (the usurper from the cohort of Elohim who set himself to ruling the world and first of all Israel).)\n\nAnd we can assume various permutations of all of these binaries. Each of these oppositions left its mark upon—was “internalized” into—those traditions undergoing perpetual revision through emulative competition with these empires that Israel, merely by surviving and incorporating them must be superior to in some sense. This whirl of same/other distinctions abstracted a God who preceded, transcends and will outlast all empires and who chose Israel before any of them emerged on the scene. A God who, we might say, is the world’s first digital object. Now, there might be something infuriating about this simultaneous immersion in and disavowal of mimetic rivalries so as to produce a divine priority of which one is oneself conveniently the privileged bearer, But how else could it be done? And the “it” that was done was the creation of a writing before speech and writing that produced the world.\n\nOne initial metalanguage of literacy would have to have been derived from the juridical, replete with judgments, contracts, violations, rebellions against authority, justice and injustice, truthful testimonies and perjuries, betrayals, and so on. This is how the speech scene would have been fleshed out in writing, and many subsequent metalanguages of literacy would be “spin-offs” of the juridical one. But philosophy, birthed along with the emergence of “tyrants,” i.e., rulers other than sacral kings, in Greece, is another major source. The problem for philosophy is to derive a form of legitimacy from the intellectual activities of reasoning and calculating required by the universalization of money (not coincidentally coinciding with the emergence. of the tyrants).\n\nThe metalanguage of literacy is always concerned with creating disciplines that can fill imperative gaps—the gap between issuance of the command and obedience to it. And they do this by spatializing, i.e., creating scenes or, rather, the infrastructures of scenes. In all of the metalinguistics of literacy concepts there are things above and below other things, inside and outside. of other things, around other things, behind other things, confining things, etc. The spatializations create pedagogical platforms, upon which things are shown, from which things are announced and something is placed at some center. Deconstruction of disciplinary languages by making explicit and enacting their spatializations and reconstructing scenes out of “primal” (i.e., Wierzbicka’s primes) translations is a kind of “hacking” of the disciplines.\n\nSo, for example, when you “suggest,” you, according to the online etymological dictionary, “place before another’s mind” some “proposition” (but does it have to be so clear and complete as a proposition?). It comes from a Latin word meaning, among other things, “bring up, bring under, lay beneath.” There would be no “theory” without such infrastructures, which doesn’t mean that theory is not real because no longer transparent but that theory involves translating these infrastructures which are disciplinary, historical and technological as well as intellectual—a lot needs to be in place for a suggestion to put something before another to “consider.”\n\nNow, the digital oscillation between same and other involves the convergence upon a single point where some discipline can determine it to be the same as distinguished from some other—this is located on the originary scene where, as Gans says, one thing is significant and everything else is not. But then another thing can be determined to be the same as distinguished from everything else and so on as we lower the threshold of significance. This kind of practice then generates the degrees of sameness we call “likenesses.” You create a map out of a range of identified and recorded thing-events, and this map is one way of mapping overlapping all the other actual and potential mappings across a field of likenesses.\n\nAgency is dissolving fields of likeness into oscillation between singulars determined to be the same and others. A way of putting it, derived from my previous posts, but also explored in _Anthropomorphics_ , is to introduce the scientific into the juridical, the juridical into the scientific and the ritual into both, or, further, to judge the terms used juridically and experiment with the concepts used scientifically. These are ways of “treating” samples so that a single likeness might become a set of same/other oscilations. But it’s all writing, and all writing is transmitted through scribal traditions, tutorially and it’s all commemorating a series of deferrals through more or less idiomatized designations that one’s writing makes more the. center of a self-referential system.\n\nAs a marking, writing is self-commemorating, creating pedagogical platforms, as every time the same words (now ascertainable because written) are repeated they are different and we are always trying to catch up to the difference in our next inscription. These successive differences are data and creating disciplinary collectives that can identify a range of ways of making new oscillations of same and other out of them is data security because this is how names, designations, contracts, agreements, records and recordings are archived. Agency is producing data by collecting it and collecting it by recording it and becoming data by producing it and becoming it as the only way to reliably record it.\n\nThe Hebrew scriptures are guided by two fierce and hard-won polemics: against child sacrifice and against humans being gods. Both are broken by the Name of God as declarative sentence which ends all imperative exchanges by imposing the imperative to donate your resentment to the center, which is “exchangeable” only with being granted the ability to do so. “I will be that/what I will be” is an answer to the question Moses poses: when the children of Israel ask me your name, what shall I tell them? The answer is “presence”—whatever linguistic presence they will need (but not necessarily want) when they call upon Me.\n\nA human saying the name of God would have to be claiming to be God. As a “declarative sentence,” or, as Gans says elsewhere, a template for declarative sentences, God announced himself as a distant presence, or we could say an absent presence, the vowels in between the consonants that makes each utterance, understood as the reading of a text, the same and other from the one it’s iterating. This introduces a permanent difference between the occupied center and the signifying center, which has become a permanent problem for, first of all, the West. The king cannot be God or sacred, and all the ritual apparatuses, formulas and doctrines created to have the king approximate sacrality were bound to be flimsy—they always contain the very criteria that enable a king to be rejected for not meeting them.\n\nNeedless to say, the ancient Hebrews didn’t solve the problem of a “theocracy,” or direct rule by God, any more than the Greek city-states solved the problems of “democracy” or the Romans the problems of a “republic”—because these problems can’t be solved. There are no models there to work with. As designers, though, we can program the forms of linguistic presence that will have one here saying the same thing as one there so that they can do what others will be able to say is the same thing (but at a different time). The digital dynamic here is the oscillation between the most extreme expression of probability (given our best reading of the data, these vaguely conceived kinds of people will most likely have to do something like these kinds of things at some not quite determined point in the future...) and the relentless approximation to this individual positioned here to do this thing at this exact moment.\n\nThis oscillation could no doubt be programmed and algorithmized, while simultaneously requiring the highest levels of competence, reliability and judgment under pressure to repeatedly, continually act upon in any present. This would have to comprise the world but could be initiated and advanced right now at any point. We might have a hypothesis that genuinely has no need of God because God has been integrated as the linguistic operator (still, first of all, of interdiction, so as to grammaticize datafied ostensives and algorithmized imperatives through human interrogatives into declarative sentences) into all human systems. (Perhaps the human can then be specified as the interrogative interval—what I was once trying to call imperative interrogativity/interrogative imperativity. You must pose the question/be posed as the question. Something to return to.)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "programming-the-same",
      "title": "Programming the Same",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 29, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/programming-the-same",
      "content": "I am trying to provide programming language for bettering our relation to the center. Humans have never left the originary scene; rather, humanity has been an ongoing attempt to better the terms of that scene which, in fact, has never been “quite right,” having been improvised from the start (this observation alone should be enough to dismiss any nostalgia or desire to restore any tradition). The first problem of humanity is the problem still—to indicate by the same sign that we are all seeing the same central thing—rather than deism, the problem is deicticism. In a broken, non-linear way we have continually created greater distance between ourselves and such a center, introducing an ever more complexly articulated array of proxies which would, through a never completed series of delays, provide us with intelligence regarding required actions to ensure the center keeps providing intelligence.\n\nIn this sense every human order is total, if not “totalitarian”—we are always, each and every one of us, leveraged. Capitalism, in Bichler and Nitzan’s understanding, as value determined by discounting against expected future earnings, is simply a particular, and particularly consequential, endpoint in this development. Everything move we make is a ritual gesture aimed at calling into being a particular array of gestures deriving intelligence from the center. In that case, though, we can relativize the concept of “ritual,” rather than using it counter-intuitively to describe “secular” actions, and speak in terms of establishing a durable same as opposed to some other across a field of likenesses—durability is key here, because what I say or do now must continue to be the same against whatever that saying or doing defers implicitly forever; which commits me to continually intervening in the infrastructural conditions that will make it so and generate proxies who will in turn continual to make it so—or make it have been so, which introduces infra-referentiality into the equation.\n\nThe assumption that at every moment we are engaged in an exchange with the center recalls the argument I’ve made previously that language is most fundamentally prayer, with the most fundamental mode of prayer in turn being a request to the center that one be supplied with the knowledge and willingness to give oneself over to the center. Here as well, though, perhaps we can generate a more precisely originary idiom rather than using, other than as a kind of index, terms claimed by vast inheritances burdening any new use. Peirce’s maxim that meaning is whatever you take to be all of the consequences of whatever claims you are making is still with us here, as long as the consequences of making the claim itself are included among those consequences.\n\nTechnology is a breakdown of sacrality, or ritual, insofar as it allows the occupant of the center to treat human beings outside of any sacred framework, “untented,” as “pieces” or parts of some all that can then be used as a model for any number of configurations. This has enabled scenic construction in which humans are both operators or props, in widely varying proportions, with operational presence continually prop-ized or puppetized. Media that represents our practices back to ourselves mediated by data that can be parametrized in different ways introduces an irreducible pedagogical dimension to scenic intension and extension that doesn’t sacralize but does deicticize.\n\nBut the broader distribution of resources and, firstly, positions, is essential to such scenic design. Money is a result of scenic expansion and the articulation of scenes within scenes and once unmoored from a publicly sacralized center money is used to secure assets that can guarantee greater revenue flows better than competing assets. Such a guarantee of revenue flow requires metrics of performance, and these metrics of performance involve cutting costs and increasingly profits within the time that the asset is held, or the introduction of standards that are taken within some administrative or legal frame to indicate the cutting of costs and increase of profits, which has no necessary correspondence with the conditions ensuring the pedagogical continuity of any particular scene.\n\nThere is a space for innovation here insofar as the relative monopoly provided for by innovation can provide for enhanced relative revenue streams but the legal and political means used to exploit and preserve the monopoly depress innovation past a certain point.\n\nTechnocracy has not only not replaced finance but has been even further subordinated to it. This means that distribution from the center, what I have called “centered ordinality,” cannot be technologized away. Whoever initiates or is charged with an operation assigns and allots, and in doing so continually acquires knowledge of what must be allotted per assignment and what counts as accomplishment. On ever larger scales this involves data, not simply or even primarily quantitative, but qualitative data. What kind of data? One could say the data obtained to constant observation of individuals in conditions of stress and text, but so far this doesn’t involve a scaling up.\n\nThe scaling up comes with the study of idioms, beginning with the awareness that there is nothing but idioms all the way up and all the way down. Idioms are themselves virtual scenes, or scenic generators, with their own assignments and allotments, and they are always revisions of other idioms. An actor can be uttered by an idiom as well as setting forth an utterance from it and telling which is which is a more challenging matter than determining the competence of an individual under conditions of direct observation and tried and tested modes of assessment. This is data that has to be called literary or “inscriptural.”\n\nOne is speaking in layers of the paradoxicality of ritual, of exchanges with the center, of intelligence gathered through interference or noted disruptions in either of the above, all of which have infinitely various forms. Idioms can only be known by participating in them, which means simultaneously speaking in the discourse of a rite, the language of justice, and the idiom of inquiry. What this has to do with money is that only idiomatization can replace it—what money tells us about the likely results of projected enterprises, which now means everyone using money to predict the predictions of everyone else regarding those likely results, and the reduction of likely results the securing of future revenue streams, which means what others will pay to secure as their own revenue streams, all as a way of coordinating the tributary economy at the expense of the constant rotation of occupants of the center, can only otherwise be told by counting on a future spread of individuals holding responsible posts of which one’s counting on them doing so is a critical component.\n\nIdiomatization means turning discourse towards denser self-referentiality, with meaning increasingly dependent on the constitution of the scene with the relation between scenes constituted by scenes of translation and transposition, which means ever more precise detection of sayings at odds with meaning and bringing saying into closer approximation to meaning. Liquidity in the circulation of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives replaces the liquidity of money.\n\nTo say that a specific practice of language can replace money is not exactly intuitive, so I’ll have to keep coming back to that. (I’ll point out, though, that notions of money as media and sign system have been around for quite a while, so why couldn’t one media or sign system be replaced by another? The standard argument is that only prices can provide the information needed to coordinate the activities of producers, distributors and consumers—no wholesaler could just know that he needs an agricultural firm to provide him with 300,000 chickens over the next year because he doesn’t know what the retailers, who don’t know what the customers will be willing and able to buy, etc.\n\nBut if everyone in a given order is included on teams, the leaders of which want to keep their members supplied and in good shape, information might be provided by leaders of teams.) An idiom, then, is always designed so as to make it that some initializing gesture will have been the same. Public rituals, whether they be improvised mass rallies or formal events like coronations or inaugurations, are taken to iterate some founding event. “Design” might not seem the right word to use here, insofar as idioms must be collaboratively and unpredictably constructed out of the very materials of centered ordinality—one or another “op.”\n\nBut think about design as singularized succession in perpetuity, with each participant creating a spot into which one’s successor will fit, and that will make that person, once he comes along, recognizable, even if unexpectedly so. Everyone, then, is designing the idiom with everyone else’s design as the materials with which to do so, albeit unevenly, even extremely so. The duality of props and operatives is transformed through the idiom into one between being designed and designing, a duality that is progressively minimized insofar as the difference is really a question of scale and time—the most assertive and dominating designer is really only the material of some prior designer who designated him as successor, and the most powerless puppet can always make some marginal gesture that affects in unforeseen ways the entirety of the design.\n\nFinance continually seeks to shorten the time span within which expected future earnings can be bet on—if most people think that the future expected earnings of a particular company will go up 100% over the next decade but you have good reason to believe that the company will in fact go bankrupt in a couple of years you can, if doing so will further elevate the profile of the company, buy it at its valuation, increase momentarily its valuation by virtue of having bought it, quickly, let’s say simultaneously, or as close as possible, and make an arbitrage profit produced solely by the interference in the market your purchase of the company introduced.\n\nThe further the less powerful and less knowledgeable (in great part because less powerful) look ahead to value possible investments the more arbitrage style thinking on the part of the more powerful and knowledgeable is advantageous. The institutionalization of such thinking and practice will further install such power and make such knowledge accessible—control of politicians, media, and therefore laws and courts, as well as the financial institutions and people trained so as to staff them that determine that a particular mode of austerity will increase value rapidly. The regularized flipping of occupants of the center is indispensable to this process.\n\nThere’s no way of opposing this order without entering it—I won’t bother to argue against a “proletarian” revolution, but it’s worth making the point that a revolt of the engineers is just as much of a fantasy—to take just one obvious example, what would be the correct, indisputable engineering solution to the best form of energy to rely on in the coming decades? Scrupulous engineers and scientists could likely form a rough consensus regarding a range of possibilities, but disagreements, and very consequential ones, would remain, since we’re always working with estimates here. So, companies would need to be formed, and would need to be valued, and would need to therefore protect themselves against the ruin of financialization while participating in it.\n\nThis, then, reduces to the problem of forming data security companies—again, data in the broad sense described above—that would provide indispensable information but also the personnel suited to interpret and apply that information to sovereigns who are willing to give up one kind of sovereignty so as to preserve the means of governance. It may very well be that the whole unholy alliance of intelligence agencies, propagandizing media, and politically compromised social and physical sciences (MKUltra and all that) reflects nothing other than a realization that authority hand-offs must be organized in ways the formal political order disallows. The point is not to continue with such skullduggery, which I strongly suspect is completely screwed up even from the standpoint of the agencies involved themselves, but to make overt and aboveboard the problem of succession.\n\nAnd the only way to do this is to provide qualitative, incommensurate advantages to governing agencies (not necessarily states—let’s keep all possibilities open) that preserve and enhance data security which, in a more traditional idiom, means centering virtues like honesty, conscientiousness, dedication to the truth regardless of consequences, courage and decisiveness, and so on. So, the meaning of what I say or do now is the likelihood of someone, decades down the road, manning reliably under difficult conditions some bit of infrastructure critical to ensuring the pedagogical conditions of succession within an emergent idiom.\n\nWe know that however powerfully knowledgeable and knowledgeably powerful any set of financiers will be they will arrive at the point where the props supporting their valuations will be toppled because we’re still working with a system of circulation depending upon trust and revised valuations all along the line and not centralized, omniscient planning, and at some point those financiers will rely more urgently and explicitly upon some sovereign power, a sovereign power that might in fact tip over the financial system at a crucial point so as to induce precisely such dependency. In fact, we already seem to be living in such a permanent state of emergency where the state is constantly fending off the very crises it is also inducing.\n\nWhich sovereign, or potentially sovereign, agencies, then, are marginally more interested in finding succor against the storm continually created by those best positioned to determine present expectations of future earnings? That’s really the only political question—that, and how to provide the service such governing entities are prepared to use. And this question transcends the more pedestrian one of how to keep such companies honest, because the answer is built in: if such a company becomes dishonest it will provide less data security and will be replaced by its partners, subsidiaries and spin-offs (who will first of all supply data regarding the infirmity of that company).\n\nTo answer such questions we need to cut through all the standardizing idioms posing as metalanguages for the purpose of stabilizing valuations and which have been constructed by the disciplines. The most effective way to sell the kind of service I’m speaking of, in today’s world, would, I imagine, to be able to present a Power Point display of a checklist of qualities or capabilities, implicitly measurable quantitatively, that can predict or be manipulated so as to attain a promised outcome. This is good for the standardizing agencies and consulting companies and bad for everyone else. You can get investors if you have been vetted by some consulting firm, but the entire point of doing so is to have that consulting firm get paid for telling you what to do so as to attract the very investors who will make a great deal of money arbitraging the expected future earnings confirmed by the consulting company, whose own value is in turn confirmed by the profits of the investors.\n\nAnd the people at the top of the doomed company might make a lot of money by selling out as well. To design another path one needs to discard metalanguages for idioms, even while those idioms will in large be composed of pidgins and creoles composed out of satirized and broken up metalanguages (created by refugees of the disciplines).\n\nThe staggering difficulty of such a program is why I’ve tended to assume that only close association with a new kind of political party would make it possible. Of course, such a political party would arouse the violent resistance and all the immune systems of the guardians of the existing order, but at least there would be measures of progress in the degree of power obtained by the party. And it’s also why I’ve assumed that this party will have to issue a specially designed currency for its members and supporters—an even more allergenic innovation. Such company and party articulations would, to make matters worse, have to be transnational, while strictly preserving all the legalities involved in sovereignty.\n\nSo, American and Chinese engineers would have to have a collaborative spirit as engineers while maintaining loyalty and propriety as citizens of their respective political orders—again, a rather neat trick, under present and likely future circumstances. The best way to do that is by being anti-war, on the simple and until recently widely shared grounds that all-out war between any of the major powers today would be insane. But utopian pacificism is as ridiculous now as ever—as long as there are different agencies and blurred lines of power and authority there will be competition, with all kinds of potential unintended consequences.\n\nThe way past this is to convert rivalries into competition as peace brokers, which is to say as installers and enforcers of international juridical orders—a role the US could have played with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and in such as way as to increase its international prestige and power in the long term. This would even keep the innovation pipelines initiated in defense industries running, while giving new uses for surveillance and data-gathering technologies. These prospective forms of organization, none of which require the invention of arbitrarily designed institutions, and all of which can locate agencies and proceed through conceivable reforms which might be pursued through various routes within the existing orders, would in turn shape what must be for now preliminary idioms situated within the articulated scenes taking in central intelligence in compelling, interesting, literary, inscriptural ways.\n\nThe only way to get started is as a pole of attraction for those who see the dead end of pretty much everything being proposed and imagined today and can discard the nostalgia for the natural by embracing the complete artificiality of our scenic order—which is to say, its complete dependence on our donations of our resentment to the center. Archivists of the future, I could say, to be a bit literary (and, no doubt, derivative).\n\nInterestingly, the word “idiom,” according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, means “peculiar,” peculiar to oneself but, ultimately, it seems, “itself,” which is to say self-same, which is to say same-same. Think about what it takes to keep an awkward or aimless conversation going or, for that matter, to make an ordinary conversation more memorable—the perpetual recycling of words used earlier so as to turn them into reference points that can frame the conversation itself. An idiom is that, sustained indefinitely. Programming an idiom or, perhaps, programming the programming of idioms, then involves the creation of a transfer idiom, which keeps recycling the idiomaticity of idioms by creating patterns of repetition of idiosyncratic but transferable idioms.\n\nIf you stick to the transfer idiom (which replaces things like theories and philosophies) you can keep making things the same within fields of likenesses because it will keep reminding you that what makes things the same is and is only this use of this idiom, inscribed indelibly on the culture. The idiom enables you to get closer and closer to, more and more like, any other idiom, bringing it to a crisis, even if only imagined, only to issue an aborted gesture of appropriation referring to the new form of the transfer idiom which both the mimicry derived from it and the mimicked idiom can install ostensives referring to, differentiating them once more, with an imperative to avoid crossing certain boundaries attached. The transfer idiom is our equivalent of prayer and programming."
    },
    {
      "slug": "programming",
      "title": "Programming",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 13, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/programming",
      "content": "Before and after will have been the same; the part of all is the same; doing and happening are the same. This is the basic programming language, which we can articulate with connectors like “such that,” “when,” “insofar as,” etc. Before and after will have been the same poses the question of succession and options, and also our debt to the center; the part of the all is the same pertains to the decision settling a dispute retrieving the nomos or originary distribution; doing and happening are the same operates the sensing, measuring and computing organs and mechanisms so as to increase their power of penetration into the fate of the imperative: is what has been done what has happened?\n\nEstablishing the same across these registers does not involve a reference to an ideal state but, rather, to the temporal and spatial measurements that would see to its installation. Perhaps the scope of a single country and a single generation makes the scenic realization of the same imaginable; maybe we need the universe and eons for the scenic design. Along with being abstract conceptualizations, the articulation of these phrases is to be prayer, uttered in the face of perplexity, as a reminder of the means of engaging perplexity.\n\nThe program needs to enter and generate transformations in the surrounding environment, which is to say, everything for which the various possible articulations of our phrases do not suffice to describe but can nevertheless be leveraged by them. So, we approach reality with our phrases as a kind of a priori (but also a reduction) and we then find that everything in reality is like everything else in reality in innumerable and ever new ways. But now we can say that everything is like everything else insofar as everything, with each thing presented to us through the grace of a historically extended deferral, is an articulation of the phrases, with a programming string long enough to effect the mode and degree of similarity measured by that historical deferral.\n\nThe model here is Anna Wierzbicka’s translations of words into the natural semantic primes, only on an immensely larger scale, translating sentences and entire discourses. When the programming string gets long enough then the likeness is converted into a same/other binary, and we have our thing, like before but also like a whole new realm of things. Programming language and prose are to increasingly approximate each other here, so that learning to code will eventually converge with learning a language, or an idiom. The programming language enters “natural” language as a transfer idiom intertwined with it, as a kind of magnetic center of conversation.\n\nWhen someone is speaking, or when we are reading (either way, dealing with a text—even non-verbal texts can be included) it is always possible to ask what in the text or in a particular “voice” or “position” or word within the text will be what it is after we have taken in as much as possible all the ways in which it will not be what it is and has been as scene gives way to scene; we can always identify the givens or data enabling the intelligibility of the discourse, which is to say, who has what, who is commanded and who commands, in what way, what are implicit terms of exchange, etc., and ask in what way or requiring how much time and space, or upon what scenic expanse, would the givens be what has first of all been given; and we can always alternate between maximalizing and minimizing the doing and the happening of all nameable things on the scene, including the chemical and physical things. (Difference is relocated to likeness.)\n\nSensing, measuring, mapping, recording and algorithmic extraction and derivation—all of science and technology circles back to these constitutive products of the disciplinary space. We can identify all as features of the scene, going back to the originary ritual scene itself—a scene is designed so respond to movements, position movements in relation to each other, provide various standpoints from which the scene can be surveyed, serve as recipient of deposits and residues left by actions on the scene, and shape the activity of participants. To design a scene is to enhance those features, to place them in cybernetic exchanges with each other.\n\nScenic design, extracting and deriving from the scene, is the event. When you work on the elements of the scene, you need to find out what they can do, and some of the things they do become leverage for establishing new scenes: this is the reciprocal convertibility of furnishings and scenes. A telescope developed to scope out the enemy becomes the lever of a new scene once it is pointed toward the stars; or vice versa—I don’t know the history of developments here. It is this convertibility that the transfer idiom targets, and it is a convertibility that operates at all scales, from the planetary to the molecular—on a disciplinary scene, anything can become a scene within the scene.\n\nThe disciplinary inquiry, pursued to its limits, finds cosmic and atomic scenes of justice and finds in the requirements for the renewal of its own scene the elements of succession; just as the order of succession and paying back and forward creates an allocation and scenes of justice and the disciplinary inquiry into governance or the tensegrity of the imperative; and the scene of justice refers back to its origins in ritual commemoration and initiates all the sciences of human behavior, becoming the screen against which all desires and resentments appear and can be scrutinized.\n\nIn breaking down all expressions, linguistic and otherwise, to these articulated phrases or formulas, we set ourselves the problem of recomposing expressions in the world, or scenic reality, as signs and evidence of scenic design. It’s best to begin on the surface of things, flittering among likenesses, such as what one or another event, scene or figure reminds you of. This is Peirce’s “musing.” You end up, after circling around a bit, landing on a field of likenesses, interested in finding/founding the same in it. And then you start playing with the idiom, working on a translation by reducing the field of likenesses to some variant of after will have been the same as before insofar as the part of all is the same when doing and happening are the same.\n\nYou can think of yourself as being on a disciplinary scene, miniscule, like standing very close to someone else sharing a rare instrument with great penetrative power upon which you must take turns; or gigantic, spread over centuries, with you pointing out something to someone who might be born a few hundred years from now. You can think about justice being done swiftly, visibly and to universal acclaim; or coming late, too late for the victim and known only to a few, but still enacting a retribution which the victim might have anticipated as posthumous vindication. So, we have new formulas, like “justice being done swiftly, visibly and to universal acclaim” and “justice coming too late, and yet coming and still being a kind of justice,” and these are a couple of variants of “the part of the all is the same,” which we need as a transfer idiom because what is the same in these two like experiences of justice is that the part held by the victim is the same, even while being fundamentally different, before and after.\n\nWhat is the part, which part, what is the all, how does the all circulate as parts and reassemble as all—with these questions, raised by the imperative to solve the formula, the idiom enters the general language and the infrastructure while also eliciting the claims of succession rituals and the disciplinary.\n\nNote that the idiom is constitutively “optimistic,” here in agreement with Peirce again, because “meaning” can only be optimistic, presupposing that someone else will in some minimal sense “understand” even your cry of despair, because without such optimism you would not be able to shape and utter that cry. You can’t imagine justice without imagining it might be done, you can’t imagine knowledge without seeking it and therefore assuming you might find it, you can’t make a gesture without allowing for the possibility of a reciprocal one. The vast extremes the idiom asks us to imagine allow for the convergence upon the “middle” of action—justice might be done by a rigorous investigative team and honest judge tomorrow, or it might be done retroactively by some future historian, and it is in that margin that you can press for the former while hedging by leaving traces for the latter—and leaving those traces enriches your sense of tactical moves that might be made in the moment.\n\nI could say these things without the transfer idiom and have been for years, but it’s not the same without the insistence on positing and acting on some scene upon which more than one person could say “this is the same.” This is the irreducible component of ritual, of commemoration and scene-setting, which keeps recirculating the pointing out of the same on an expanded or relocated scene. The idiom can only be convincing, though, insofar as the prose becomes continuous with programming in the sense of guiding research into increasingly comprehensive databases in such a way as to distill new searches regarding the most expeditious way to register and ramify the imperatives of those who can only act insofar as they are seeing to their succession.\n\nAn array of articulations of these formulas can be turned into search terms by training them on a selected database drawn from texts inquiring into the thresholds and anomalies constituting each of them: so, various versions of a move made within a disciplinary space that would detect the threshold at which the juridical takes hold in some aligned space, and so on. The purpose of high cultural texts, especially literary and other scriptures, is now to serve as such a database. The training of the terms on the database would have to be done by “cultivated” readers but once machine learning takes hold in a satisfactory manner the database is used to cultivate readers at different levels and scales.\n\nAnd then, with the idioms thereby created, you start putting questions to all the databases, questions regarding law, monetary policy, knowledge, sacrality, law, succession and so on with a special focus on how these questions constitute each other. This would be a kind of sculpting of the databases, and an ongoing exchange with the central intelligence, and it will be an inexhaustible exchange because new decisions drawn from the exchange will transform the entire database. The database or central intelligence will become currency, because it will provide not only the information but the personnel capable of employing and reshaping in real time the information to meet the immediate needs of institutions strategically located within networks of interdependencies.\n\nIt will be authoritative and sacred because it will be an institution of deferral, providing answers that no one exactly wants but that are nevertheless irresistible—an kind of oracle, but one whose underlying message will always be “I will be all and I will be there, with you, the same throughout,” which I think is a good, if free translation of the Name of God given to Moses before the burning bush.\n\nThat initial work of translating the formulas into purposefully curated language stores, the work of the transfer idiom, will always remain, and will always solicit participation from everywhere and everyone—from their abilities, according to their needs. There will always be a kind of leap of faith and judgment that the translation will be the same as the original, and this faith and judgment will have to followed by continual iterations that continue that gesture of saying these two very different samples of language are the same. And a fairly small number of people would have to make the initial leap, just because it’s more interesting and promises unimaginable benefits, before it has any really backing or can make anyone a profit.\n\nOnce set in motion, it would produce at an exponential rate the new officer class whose services would be indispensable. The habits of thinking required can be developed now, simply by translating language back and forth into the transfer idiom, which involves reworking language so as to intimate some way in which, say, an incremental enhancement of deliberate succession practices brings a sphere dominated by resentment under the empire of the law, provides some confused disciplinary space with a tighter set of questions to ask, and so on. Our thinking and writing habits would change accordingly, as we would intentionally write as the creation of search terms aimed at rummaging through and reorganizing the databases, considering how to be unpredictable enough and in the right ways so as to widen and rank in a more informed way the options consistent with the current spread of reliable intelligencers. This, in fact, actualizes the originary hypothesis itself as a mode of deferral, and the successor to the very gesture it has hypothesized."
    },
    {
      "slug": "questioning-god",
      "title": "Questioning God",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 05, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/questioning-god",
      "content": "I’m going to take a highly speculative look at a Biblical story that puzzles me, in part because I see so little scholarly interest in it despite its obvious (to me, at least) importance: Abraham’s pleading to God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah in the name of the hypothetical innocent residents that might be found there. Other than Moses, I think Abraham is the only biblical figure who argues with God and, unlike Moses, who appeals to God’s mercy and uses moral blackmail (if you blot the Israelites out of your book I don’t want to be in it either), Abraham we can see getting the better of a reasonable argument—he wins his argument with God insofar as God tacitly concedes that He should not utterly destroy the sinful cities if there are people in them free of sin.\n\nThis seems to be an origin story of moral progress, from collective to individual punishment, from the honor system or routine genocide in the course of war to the juridical. And, more specifically, in terms of the biblical narrative, it helps us to see why God has chosen Abraham to receive the covenant, blessing and land. Part of my puzzlement involved the question of when and how such a story became possible—if mass culture is taking the side of the perpetrator and high culture the side of the victim, this story is about as high cultural as you can get, as the story is completely set up to lead us to agree that the cities have it coming and yet we are expected to adopt Abraham’s perspective.\n\nI’m going to approach this so as to test and “flex” the mode of Biblical interpretation I’ve been working out—trying to identify the ways post-exilic scribes reworked the traditions they both inherited and repudiated so as to create a national identity predicated on the rejection of human sacrifice and human godhood, with the consequent direct line of communication between God and each individual, who has been made to be like God. This story certainly strikes me as post-exilic, and so the destroyed cities our scribes would have had most present to their minds would have been those of Judah, especially Jerusalem. But they’re working with ancient narrative material as well, so there was some reality to the Sodom and Gomorrah story which is now being used as a “screen memory” to work out the implications of the harsh judgment recently levied by God on the Judeans themselves.\n\nWe know how cities were destroyed in that world, and it wasn’t by nukes dropped by God—we are looking at cities destroyed in a war, and it is a war that “Abraham” (whatever referent this legendary figure ultimately had) was either on the winning or losing side of. I’m going to say “winning,” because otherwise why would the material have been retained? (Indeed, just prior to this narrative, there is a story of Abraham’s involvement in a was with several neighboring kings, including Sodom and Gomorrah—the details are not all that clear to me, but Abraham clearly comes out of it well and with an interest in removing any basis for obligations to his former allies.)\n\nSo, I’m going to assume that the scribes are working with narrative material that had Abraham, along with allies, participating in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—if the war, according to this material, was carried out on the command or with the sanction of some deity, the frame for introducing the dialogue between Abraham and God is already there. The fact that Lot, Abraham’s nephew, along with his family, are the sole survivors of the destruction further indicates that we might have been dealing with a hostage situation, or the mistreating of guests, a fairly common cause for conflict.\n\nLet’s also assume that Abraham represents a figure within an older ancestral sacrificial cult, a figure who petitioners would sacrifice to in order to solicit his own intercession on their behalf with God (or their god). In that case, Abraham would be doing here for Sodom and Gomorrah what he traditionally did for the Judeans and/or Israelites themselves. He can’t be seen to be interceding on their behalf regarding the more present situation of their exile, homelessness and powerlessness because that would precisely the kind of mythology the Bible rejects, but his role in this earlier story could be reversed so as to turn Abraham into a model of the kind prophetic intercessor Israel is currently in need of.\n\nAnd retrojecting this intercession to pre-history and the initial formation of the Israelite people themselves provides a justification and precedent for such prophetic pleas. We can see a very complicated moral reasoning here: if God used His instruments (the surrounding emperors) to destroy Israel and then Judea, they must have deserved it collectively but, unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, some have survived (a remnant) and they must have therefore done so due to their own at least relative freedom from sin; or, perhaps, having survived they must retroactively justify having done so by being the people free from sin God did not find in Sodom and Gomorrah.\n\nThe direct relationship between the individual and God we have inherited through layers of translation and interpretation from the Bible is in this case revealed to be the relationship between a surviving remnant who must stand in for the whole people and the God who is in a sense holding them hostage as a warranty for the future of that people. As my earlier reference to Moses’s own intercession with God on behalf of the Hebrews (also no doubt post-exilic) indicates, this a scenario repeated in the Bible and therefore an especially formative one.\n\nThis kind of remnant held hostage by God for the people is exactly how its scribal authors (who, let’s remember, were not just scribes but priests, administrators, diplomats, educators, etc.) had to have seen themselves –how else could you summon up such audacity? There’s one more thing to consider here—the difference between the fate of the doomed cities and the prospective redemption of Israel makes it possible to differentiate the fate of countless cities and civilizations destroyed due, ultimately, to their sins, and the people of Israel. This, indeed, is to be the fate of those very people that have destroyed Israel, along with any that will do so or attempt to do so in the future.\n\nSo, a thorough immersion in likeness is concluded with the re-establishment of an iterable Same/Other distinction. Precisely because we had Abraham who interceded for the undeserving we will be deserving even when we’re not because we’re just like all those other undeserving peoples. As I’ve pointed out in early discussions of scripture, this can easily seem hypocritical and self-serving, but I will repeat that this is the only way in which such intellectual and moral modes of presence can be acquired and preserved. There is now the obligation to be worthy of having descended from Abraham, or at least preserving the textual traditions that will indict you along with everyone else for failing to be so.\n\nPreserving and transmitting the “contractual” evidence that you have offered yourself as a hostage to God to guarantee the good behavior of your people (whoever they may be—just as the Hebrew scribes transferred the relation between God and emperors to one between God and each individual Israelite that new relationship is itself transferable) is a far more powerful moral model than that offered by commonplaces about loving your neighbor as yourself (which is itself scriptural, of course, but an exoteric version of the more demanding model representing by Abraham’s argument with God).\n\nAs a final note, I am uncertain whether this mode of reading and reasoning, which draws upon Girardian and Gansian myth analysis along with Biblical scholarship that neither takes scripture at its word nor denies its crucial differences from myth, might be more broadly applicable. The Bible might be _sui generis_ , and the value of studying it may lie in the unique view it provides on some constitutive moral, juridical, literary and sacral vocabularies still active. The broader implications may lie in the reading of Bible as a product of scribal training, qualification, self-assertion and power. There’s something more difficult in the kind of reading of an order against itself so as to offer a startling new identity that is presented, audaciously, as a retrieval of what was already there at the origin than in Strauss’s “writing between the lines” aimed at prospective philosophers.\n\nThe best example from my own writing I can think of is in my reading (in _Anthropomorphics_ , most accessibly) of the US Constitution in terms of the awareness of its composers that George Washington would be the first president—in which case, we could wrench the Constitution away from its reflection on the human equality announced in the Declaration of Independence (as first Lincoln, and then neo-conservative thinkers like Henry Jaffa tried to frame it, not without reason) and towards another telos: Washington as a model of type of man such an order would need at the center. Instead of John Adams’s assertion that the American Constitution would only suit a moral people, I would say that it could only suit a people that could produce figures like Washington, recognize their value, and place them at the center.\n\nEven though the hermeneutics of my proposal might be weak (but perhaps no less so than what the Biblical authors did with much of their material), it’s a reading that would work on the condition that Americans wanted to firmly reject liberalism but needed some anchoring in the old order—in such a case, my reading might become canonical and obvious (as turned out to be the case for the scribes who composed the Bible). So, a scribal pedagogy, among other things, might teach students to learn how to identify such unlikely “hinges,” realizing that their likeliness ultimately depends upon non-textual matters that will nevertheless require corresponding inscriptions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "resentment",
      "title": "Resentment",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 03, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/resentment",
      "content": "Here is Eric Gans, back in 1998, presenting the problem of resentment in all its knottiness:\n\nResentment is the one category that cannot be deconstructed. Nietzsche, who discovered the power of resentment, was destroyed by it all the same. For to discover resentment in another is at the same moment to discover it in oneself. Only resentment can know resentment; yet resentment knows nothing since it distorts the reality of what it observes. Nor can anyone reveal resentment without being contaminated by it; history only gives us models for putting it off, for spreading it thin enough to let some light pass through its opacity. No “genealogy,” no act of deconstruction can separate itself from the construction of the order it resents. No use of language can represent, and defer by representing, its own resentment, yet all of culture is nothing but this attempt. (Chronicle 144, “Beyond ‘Generative Anthropology’ I. Deferring Resentment”)\n\nSince this passage introduces the ouroboros-like character of resentment, let me add: doesn’t it follow that to identify the resentment of another (as, it must be admitted, Gans, and not him alone, often claims to do) is to throw one’s own resentment into the mix and thereby “out” oneself along with the other as resenting? The inquiry into resentment, which is always the resentment of specific selves and others, is presumably part of culture, so this inquiry is itself part of the impossible attempt to represent and defer its own resentment. All deconstructions or “critiques” of some central figure are driven by resentment, indeed all of “secular culture,” as we can see in this passage from _The End of Culture_ , where Gans defines resentment more explicitly as a product of “moral” objections to “ethical” (i.e., necessary) hierarchies:\n\nResentment may be defined as the scandal of the peripheral self at the centrality of the other which transforms the equality of the original scene of representation into an absolute polarity of significance. It differs from mere envy in being directed not at contingent but at communally significant and hence ethically necessary differences. It is thus a necessary evil. but its necessity makes it, at the same time, an instrument of a new form of solidarity that is no longer bound by the concrete ethical limitations of ritual. This solidarity is expressed in secular esthetic and theoretical culture, that is, in art and philosophy, and, ultimately, in the sciences, where it appears purified of all contact with its origins in desire. (174)\n\nThis much earlier (1985) passage suggests how the attempt to defer by understanding resentment is made: by creating new spaces in which everyone desires but cannot obtain, once and for all, the same thing: beautiful objects, truth, and so on. But, presumably even in science, the origins of these cultural products in desire (and therefore resentment) cannot really be effaced. In a sense, then, they are all failures, however great, transcendent or world transforming.\n\nWe will find many more references to esthetic articulations of resentment than philosophical, and many more philosophical than scientific, in Gans’s work, but I think fewest of all to political or, even, more practical, judicial, articulations of resentment. The possibility that well designed and administered institutions might defer or lessen resentment rarely, if ever (I can’t think of any example, but I could be overlooking something) seems worthy of consideration in Gans’s thought. But wouldn’t that be the first place you’d look? Isn’t a court or justice system precisely where the “moral” would be built into the “ethical”?\n\nWe could imagine many different judicial systems, because each would have its own way of assessing evidence, appointing judges, revising traditional procedures, etc. In fact, one might argue that there’s no necessary tension between the moral and the ethical here—the use of those weird looking wigs in the British courts is certainly “ethical,” but why wouldn’t that, by ensuring decorum and respect for the proceedings, facilitate rather than interfere with the provision of “reciprocity”? (Must the judge or jury be resentful as they study the motivations and actions of the various parties? If so, whom must they resent, in that case?)\n\nMaybe Gans never takes up this question because the court system is where resentments may be reconciled, whereas the resentments that generate culture (through the attempt to understand and thereby defer them) are the irreconcilable ones. The ancient Israelites’ imagining of a God who was the king of kings, greater than any merely worldly emperor, and who would stand in judgment of those lesser kings, would certainly be a response to some irreconcilable resentment. Of course, even in this case, the irreconcilable is reconciled through the use of a legal, juridical, frame, albeit metaphorized. It may also be worth pointing out that we can trace the emergence of a judicial system out of what were once essentially scapegoating rituals (trial by fire, etc.), and that the development of notions like “proof” and “evidence” that resulted had a lot to do with development of science (and probably, back in ancient Greece, philosophy as well).\n\nIf vengeance is the Lord’s, that means it’s not yours, and, as directed toward the subject of a monarch, that limitation of the right of vengeance is an injunction against rebellion—the king is precisely he who judges and not he who is judged on this level of existence. At any rate, must there be resentment in a well-ordered judicial and political order? If so, why? Is the very existence of a human judge “scandalous”?\n\nGans, much more recently (2019) has written (but not for the first time, I think) of an “Epistemology of Resentment” (Chronicle 621) which is an interesting phrase to put next to that earlier claim that “resentment knows nothing.” The epistemology of resentment, although he doesn’t quite put it this way, is the foundation of modernity: liberalism, democracy and the rest. Here Gans refers to the French Revolution, where he sees “the world’s first, tacit, if not explicit, affirmation of resentment as the source of moral authority.” “We need no Aristotle or Montesquieu to analyze the various forms of sovereignty; our resentment of the Old Regime _demonstrates_ its injustice.”\n\nHere, let’s note, the notion of “justice” is built into the notion of resentment, but once you use a phrase like “sense of injustice,” it’s hard to avoid adding the qualifier (as Gans does) “whether ‘objectively’ justified or not” (but Gans surely believes some resentments are more “justified” than others, because he is clearly more resentful towards some than towards others—it’s not all perspectivalism, is it?). Even here, though, the alternatives Gans mentions for addressing such resentments are, on the one hand, “an offering of sacrifice (and food!),” and, on the other hand (for “less desperate times”), the mimetically satisfying example of its presumably justified discharge in popular culture alongside the high-cultural display of our eternal connection to the terror of the moment of origin”—but nothing, once again, as familiar and presumably sometimes effective as a judgment in favor of a plaintiff.\n\n(Note Gans’s qualifications every time the question of how “justified” a resentment may or may not be is introduced by the logic of his own discussion—it seems to be a theoretical point of great importance to resist stating outright that we could sometimes decide rightly between two sides.)\n\nHow to do justice to this indispensable concept of resentment has been perplexing me for a while. I think that Gans finds his very powerful insight that resentment comes into its own as a force once ritual has been weakened (it is bound up with secularity) very troubling, and with good reason. Resentment is there from the beginning, on the originary scene itself, where it takes the form of resentment toward the denying center, but it is bound up immediately in ritual. Resentment within the “egalitarian” order gets turned into a question of transgressing against the center, so it could never become “resentment-in-itself.”\n\nIt seems reasonable that the way to bind resentment back up again would therefore be to once again treat expressions of it as transgressions against the center, albeit the centers reconstructed post-ritual, which would ultimately be the “state” or imperial center, with the judicial system that always comes along with it. It seems to me that there may be something in Gans’s thinking that resists such an approach with great tenacity. Maybe it’s that the possibility of a decidable justice sounds vaguely “fascist,” but the same argument for institutionally containing resentment can be made for a liberal or democratic state, unless we want to insist in advance that such a state could never provide justice (because it could only provide a field for the expression of resentments?).\n\nMaybe he just thinks it’s impossible, and therefore not even worth considering, but, in that case, it couldn’t be too difficult to consider the idea and demonstrate its impossibility. So, why does Gans present resentment in a way that makes it seem unbound and, at best, only occasionally and unpredictably appeasable?\n\nI think the answer is to be found in an expression Gans has used, more than once, in studying “wokeism,” where he explicitly eschews condemning the phenomenon and enjoins us to instead “learn from it.” On the one hand, this could simply be a scholarly caution about not letting our own resentments cloud our analysis and would therefore apply to other phenomenon we might otherwise wish to prevent, but what is different here is precisely Gans’s insistence that wokeism represents the “moral model” constructed on the originary scene, which gives wokeism a kind of epistemological priority that wouldn’t be granted to, say, Nazism or Communism.\n\nBut in that case, the resentment that Gans has in other places shown to have emerged as such in secular culture, or in revolutionary modernity, is now situated back on the originary scene. At some point along the way, the claim that the moral model involves the congregation around the center turned into the claim that the moral model involves the organization of the community against the individual member who stands out. Why? Perhaps because without the emergence of resentment “in itself” in secular and then modern culture, GA itself would not have been possible: the “moral” could not have been sufficiently separated out from the “ethical.”\n\nSo, my hypothesis is that, since resentment “unbound” is originary for the emergence of GA, at a certain point it became, for Gans, originary altogether—to oppose it would be unthinkable, and even to imagine sufficiently well-run institutions to subsume it within the ethical would seem “dangerous” and bordering on the inhuman. (This would also help to account for the centrality of Romanticism, with its always barely contained Promethean resentment, to Gans’s thinking.)\n\nResentment, though, must always be bound up in the exchange relations with the center, which means that if we can’t start with the assumption that it may be remediable, all we can do is resent in turn (or simply protect ourselves from it). Making explicit the possible remediation of any resentment must be done on post-ritual terms (the problem of living post-ritually is one humanity hasn’t solved), which means resentment needs to be defined in terms of an exchange between periphery and center. So, I will put it as follows: “Resentment is your fulfilling of an imperative, having the reciprocal imperative you issue go unfulfilled, while not letting that reciprocal imperative lapse.”\n\nYou did what you were supposed to, and in exchange some other is to do what he is supposed to (fulfill an imperative at least implicit in your action), and you’re holding them to it (regardless of any actual power you have to hold them to it). This seems to me a usefully public and institutional way of defining resentment, by grounding it in the structure of ritual—a structure that can be resituated in relation to a post-ritual center. We’re not, then, in the position of describing resentment as a “sense” or a “feeling,” which also means we don’t have to claim the ability to peer inside of others’ emotions and locate something there they might deny---it removes our discussion of resentment from the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which interestingly, is fairly obviously a generator of resentment—what arouses resentment more forcefully than being told you’re feeling it when you just don’t think you do?\n\n(It would be ironic if the effect of introducing the clarifying concept of resentment into discussions of culture were to produce more of it.) Resentment, or, we can say, a refusal to release an other from imperative you consider them bound by, will either show up in your language or not. If you’re resentful, you will be accusing the object of your resentment of failing to abide by some binding imperative that would constitute an exchange with one you have followed—this accusation, explicit or implicit, would be legible, and could be demonstrated or at least discussed publicly.\n\n(Is my discussion here exhibiting resentment toward Gans? We could answer this question—not that there couldn’t be disagreements—by determining whether my discussion of him implies I consider him has having failed in some obligation he undertook by formulating the concept that I, in turn, took from him as an imperative—and that I still consider him under this obligation. I won’t venture to answer this question, as perhaps we should avoid doing regarding resentments actually or possibly imputed to us.)\n\nOne’s resentment will be evident in their language, but I mean this in the broadest sense—resentment, like all meaning making, is a performance. Sometimes one will explicitly demand the fulfillment of the presumably binding imperative, stating in detail its terms. Sometimes one “acts out” in ways that only make sense as a way of drawing attention to oneself as aggrieved in a way so specific as to be unmistakable, unless one were to be so oblivious as to aggravate the resentment by failing to “read” the signs. Sometimes resentment is in the inner monologue that gets refined and perfected but never uttered—but even in this case that monologuing will ‘wedge” its ways into shared discourse in discernable ways—discernable for those sufficiently mimetically attuned to circulating signs of resentment.\n\nAnd the understanding of resentment I’m positing here makes it possible to scale up resentment to the social level in fairly precise ways and without attributing some “feeling” to millions of people—imperatives, what we owe each other, are inscribed in laws and institutions and the traditions that allow for their interpretation.\n\nWe could also, in this way, speak more freely about justified and unjustified resentments: whether or not following an imperative confers upon the fulfiller of that imperative the “right” to issue a new imperative is, in Gans’s terms, an “ethical” question, depending upon the ways institutions customarily and sometimes through written forms handle questions of “ought.” One could obviously be wildly wrong in imagining that just because he did what he imagined he was supposed to this in turn entailed that another was supposed to reciprocate, and in that particular way. But we’d also be in a better position to contest resentment by, first of all, asking: what exactly do you think that other is obliged to do now, why, and how?\n\nAnd my definition also allows for us to define precisely the way out of resentment: allow the imperative you consider the other bound to fulfill lapse, as far as you are concerned (which also by the way helps us to see the longevity of some resentments—until they’re fulfilled, or the subject is released, imperatives are, strictly speaking, forever)—in other words, this definition of resentment also gives us a definition of forgiveness. Perhaps, following the logic of the succession of speech forms in _The Origin of Language_ , one reshapes the imperative as an interrogative, a request for some kind of disclosure.\n\nGans mentions repeatedly that the reason resentment becomes so titanic in the modern world is that it gets removed from the entire web of obligations that reify expressions of resentment in orders governed by what Girard calls “external mediation.” Accepting the explosiveness of resentment is accepting modernity, and who could refuse that? The only ways of mitigating unbounded resentment Gans ever suggests are creating wealth through the free market and appeasing leftist demands in the liberal democratic political system. I suppose one could continue to wait for that to work out (was that sarcasm indicative of resentment?).\n\nThe other approach would be work to formalize the social gradations that clearly already and continue to exist, not to make them permanent, but to attach webs of obligations and responsibilities to them. Contain resentment within pedagogical relationships where failures of reciprocity can be made visible, maybe appealed, maybe remedied, maybe recorded, gaining in specificity and information rather than in vagueness and vastness. You could say this violates some modern principle of equality or universality, or that it’s unrealistic, or utopian—but those would all be resentful responses, with the resentment being directed at those who would take away from us those resentments that have come to define us, that we allow others to cultivate so that we in turn can cultivate them.\n\nTo be a modern subject is to hold in reserve the right to access the inexhaustible well of resentment. The less resentful response is to, wherever and in whatever way possible, draw out, amplify and formalize the obligations that tie us together in our labors, leisures, and uses of language together."
    },
    {
      "slug": "revivalistics",
      "title": "Revivalistics",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 09, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/revivalistics",
      "content": "The center is whatever interferes with violent centralization. Think about it this way: have you ever felt (and given into) the temptation to “pile on” someone who is being criticized, attacked, or ridiculed? There is no way you would have been thinking of the clever bon mot you are about to add without the mimetic instigation of those who have already dropped a couple. Then you know what violent centralization looks and feels like, even if we can’t really place some good natured ribbing among friends in that category. But the reason we can’t do so helps us to answer the obvious question, well, what kind of concentrated focus on an individual or group would not be violent centralization? We must be permitted condemnation of wrong actions, sharp and uncompromising critiques of thinking and behavior, the conviction and punishment of criminals, and so on—otherwise, how could we even address the problem of scapegoating without engaging in it ourselves? Where is the boundary here?\n\nThe boundary is scene-specific and our knowledge of it partially tacit, so we can’t draw up hard and fast rules, but we can construct thought experiments that include the interruption of an emergent bout of violent centralization. The good natured ribbing follows from a “tradition” of friendship and it is “framed” in terms of the roles each occupies in the group—at the same time, the nature of the ribbing can become a bit less “good” if, say, it is persistently, and perhaps imperceptibly increasingly directed at one member, or if the “material” of the ribbing is taken from outside of the range of regular topics and therefore has not been “framed” and “vetted”—like, say, some argument a couple of members of the group have been having elsewhere and here transport to the ribbing; or a new vulnerability of on the members (e.g., he has just lost his job) makes him a target in some fresh way.\n\nThe transgression of such boundaries, from a carefully constructed normative environment to one in which other vectors of mimetic rivalry are transmitted, is a rich source of art. Here’s how we can tell when that line has been crossed: at what point would it be meaningful for one member of the group to reframe the scene so as to block the path to the target. By “meaningful,” I mean that both the potential victim and emergent victimizer(s) could see what they are becoming. If the intervention is wrong, then the intervening member is merely ridiculous and will be laughed at within the same “good natured” frame, enabling him to rejoin the group; if it’s right, the hostility directed toward the initial target will be transferred to the intervening member, but with everyone more aware of what’s happening, and a more even contest that now depends on the intervener’s will and ability to serve as an alternative model to the other members of the group.\n\nIf we scale up a bit, the difference between exposing abuses and organizing a mob lies at that point where the creation of a case relying upon, building and activating institutional or institutionalizable norms is replaced by a contest to see who can make the target more attractive, unprotected, vulnerable but also, paradoxically, more powerful and urgent. (“The monster lies there right before us—this. is our chance...”) The normal rules of dealing with social disorder must be suspended, without any “new normal” being instituted. Here, as well, the boundary will be marked less by victims fighting back (because if they’re genuinely victims, they can’t, against a unified mob) than by defections which might be wrong, misguided, misdirected or futile.\n\nThis is just about the most difficult kind of thing we humans have to do. All of this shows up in language, in whether we can point to without tearing apart the same thing, because if the concerted and inter-referential pointing to interrupts the tearing up it will become a kind of artificial space in which more and more “interesting” and “relevant” things can be noted and which makes the tearing apart increasingly distant. An enemy may still have to be killed, and a danger of the community may still have to be confined but doing so will add to our knowledge of the various ways of “dealing with the enemy” and “dangers to the community,” and first of all of identifying those who belong to these categories.\n\nThose who, to put it bluntly, stand between the mob and victim in this way, are listening to the center—which can also, of course, be done more or less acutely and carefully (other voices, ultimately those of the mob, have to be “tuned out” or modulated).\n\nAll of this is pretty familiar, but I want to say more about the crucial need, in developing GA, to scale up—we always begin with small group settings, because that matches the originary scene, but social order can’t very usefully be modelled on a bunch of guys ribbing each other. We have to turn our attention to orderings that are predicated upon a sacrificial logic and those that aren’t—once we’ve made a breakthrough to non-sacrificial means of controlling violence, then those means provide the model for all other settings. But a lot can, and has, gone wrong in this transition: much of modern civilization can be seen as a kind of auto-immune disorder, where our ability to detect orderings that not only are explicitly based on sacrifice (e.g., inter-group vendettas) but the “potential” within not obviously sacrificial orderings to “revert” back to sacrifice has led us to find and fear dangers which are in fact negligible.\n\nAnything that looks like a ritual can set off alarm bells if the sensors are set to a low enough threshold of detection; so, for that matter, can anything that looks like devotion to anything other than maintaining that threshold of detection—if you care more about your family and your neighborhood than about the proper level of sensitivity to even indirect and hypothetical threats to protected groups, then you have yourself come under the scrutiny of those with the proper level of sensitivity. I’m well aware that those with radar set to detect the tribal and the ritualistic become a tribe of their own with their own, far more bizarre rituals and martyrs; and that a great deal of power and wealth is invested in maintaining and deploying the infrastructures of detection and response.\n\nBut I’d still like to propose that those of us who would to see communities and institutions develop their own means of deferring mimetic violence while sustaining the necessary level of mimetic “energy” needed to develop cultures of emulation will do better to set aside the admittedly difficult to ignore malignancy informing the hunt for the unmarked (and unprotected) and nevertheless operate under the assumption that the difficulty lies in our remaining at a crude level of data collection, storage, curation and analysis.\n\nSo, if “racism” becomes a proxy for “threat of lynch-mob violence,” and we then go off looking for proxies for “racism,” we not only delegate all power to the anti-racist “experts,” but, more directly, are working with corrupt data collected something like 70 years ago and barely analyzed. If we agree that the threat of lynch-mob types of violence must be controlled as a fundamental condition of civilization, we can also assert that, in that case, we should be having our social sciences gathering data directed solely to answering the question: what kinds of conditions, relations, legal structures, inter-group enmities, forms of economic dependency, and so one produce what we can take to be proxies of various degrees of likelihood that certain sectors of the population might “evolve” towards intolerable forms of violence.\n\nBut this wouldn’t just be a project for the human sciences in the strict sense: each and every one of us is a human scientist, gathering as well as giving off data and curating and analyzing in the situations where decisions need to be made—where to walk at night, where to buy a house, how to go about protecting oneself, which politicians to vote for, and so on—what are well known as “revealed preferences.” A lot of the human sciences should involve little more than making what is implicit in such decisions explicit, and in broadening the context of the decisions that are explicit. In this way, the human scientists would be collaborating with their “objects” of study who would in turn become more “subjects” of the study.\n\nNow, if we bring in the other sciences—environmental, biological and medical, engineering, and so on—all this obviously gets far more complex, while the superfluity of data currently at our disposal makes it possible to have a data-driven order that is far more participatory than what we have now. As I suggested a couple of posts back, this means that ultimately the most important form of security in any order is data security, or intelligence. The integrity with which data is identified, collected, labelled, curated, employed, distributed and organized is paramount. Nothing we do can mean anything outside of that.\n\nAnd this includes ensuring data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, and that money and assets, which increasingly function as data, measure and record what they are supposed to. The only mode of governance that will be anything other than haphazard harassment and protection rackets will be that which ensures that data is controlled and distributed in accord with the capacities of those who can use it and the needs of those supplying it. This also means that the only meaningful politics today would be one that contributes to a transition from the current distribution of data-drivenness to one in which all institutional entities “gravitate” towards or approximate total commensurability or fungibility of data precisely so as to support the infinite incommensurabilities and non-fungibilities of the pedagogical encounters and contingencies that create the idioms through which each of us enters the field of data. A brief look at the conditions of data handling and usage scattered across all the governmental, scientific, media, education, health, military, financial and so on institutions throughout the world would demonstrate the immensity of the task.\n\nSo, now, something new. I want to zero in on that idiom I dropped earlier, when I referred to those of us who would like to sustain the level of mimetic activity and engagement in every scene required for each scene to develop a culture of emulation that would control its own mode of mimetic rivalry and potential violence. Cultures of emulation are probably the oldest kind, as every archaic tribe no doubt educated and initiated its young through the promotion of models for emulation, mythical and living. This continues into modernity, as it must (could teachers stop referring, or even gesturing involuntary to the best pupils and implying that others might be more like them?) but is still at odds with it.\n\nWe speak of “role models” and “mentors” (again, we must have some elements of a culture and even economy of emulation), but these are never to infringe upon the freedom of the individual or the procedures of the institution. But we could set ourselves to judging and reforming each institution in terms of how it would best generate an economy of emulation in which every single act and decision would be justified in terms of “being” or “doing” like some promoted model. This would also have to be an economy that encourages individuals to step up and test themselves and be tested by others as candidates for such models. As I’ve pointed out before, this would engross us in studies of what is involved in being “like” someone under conditions that are inevitably different than those under which that person was “like” someone else.\n\nI have still not read Ghil’ad Zuckermann’s _Rivivalistics_ , but I’m going to do my best Pierre Menard and apply his approach to the program I’m proposing. With the data at our disposal, if we can revive dead and dying languages, we can revive long-dead communal forms. We would want to type into our database the search term “orders that best approximate rule by model.” I think the results would satisfy traditionalists and reactionaries, but there’s more to it—we would have to revise the search, or create the proper translation program, so as to identify which current forms of organization would be the best receptacles for such revived forms.\n\nThis would then mean that those interested in one revivalistic project or another would work on creating groups and communities that would be better receptables. Rather than simply insisting that something lost or stolen be recovered or returned, such projects would participate in the project of “cleaning up” our sewer like data streams. It would be possible to bring into focus those elements of revived forms that could create economies of emulation and sift out the purely sacrificial elements. Such efforts would have an interest in promoting other revivalist projects, even among ancient enemies, because we could also develop programs to help us to game out the causes of ancient conflicts and convert those causes into modes of reciprocal learning and exchange.\n\nAnd my guess is that what would, of extinct orders, be best suited to a world of data exchange (but also controlled data currents), most “tensile,” would not be the bloody rituals themselves but the kinship and clan relations which I genuinely think could with the help of ethnographic, archaeological and biological data (like DNA) be revived in an attractive form that creates a “middle” capable of productive transactions with “high” and “low.” It is not too hard to imagine a revived ethnos, presenting its data to various institutions and negotiating for various rights to in-group authority—among the data offered might be such as shows such an arrangement would lower crime and inter-group violence rates and other positive benefits could be adduced.\n\nYou could start with, I don’t know, cousins fourth removed as the outer boundary, and offer invites to all that would be included in that group, complete with a revived language, folklore and other cultural appurtenances which might be more or less central to group formation, with the group also being more or less plugged in to surrounding cultures. Make the group as attractive and non-degenerate as possible and you might draw in the best candidates for increasing your numbers. Included in this might be claims to land acquisition, which, of course would be complicated, but could also be subject to negotiation and land and population exchanges.\n\nIt’s an uncertain project—without achieving a certain threshold of revived peoples, those modeling revivalistics might turn out to be too isolated to sustain inter-generational stability—but it might succeed, a lot would be learned from it, and it would put a lot of hypotheses regarding the centrality of group belonging and various ways of determining group belonging to the test. At its most successful, revived clan and kinship relations, and a total economy of emulation (which would itself provide pressures to embed and materialize emulation in long-term forms) would abolish all the abstracting struggles over the center, articulating data commensurability with pedagogical and idiomatic incommensurabilities."
    },
    {
      "slug": "scale",
      "title": "Scale",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 16, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/scale",
      "content": "One way of summing up my “dissidence” towards the “mainstream” GA represented by Eric Gans would be to distinguish between two ways of understanding “scenic thinking.” For Gans, it seems to me, scenic thinking is the way we think of others: we “explain,” “describe” or “narrate” what others think and do in terms of a scene hypothetically occupied by those agents, a scene modeled, of course, on the hypothetical originary scene. For me, scenic thinking includes the thinker—in other words, some implicit answer to the question, where are you when you think or speak, is always part of the thinking or speaking. If the scenic conditions of your own discourse are not translated or translatable into that discourse, in my view you aren’t really thinking scenically---yours is a sceneless thinking.\n\nAnd a sceneless thinking doesn’t represent a break from philosophy and the human sciences so as to found something new. Even more, sceneless thinking leaves you with no alternative to working with the materials offered by the media or, at best, some version of reality promoted by a canonized text (and institutionally approved through that very canonization). A particular way of narrating and framing events thereby emerges, one in which you locate one-to-one equivalents between the originary scene and the “prepared” scene you happen to be working with. So, the “free market” is “like” the alignment of participants on the originary scene, the resentment of one ethnic group for another is “like” the resentment “felt” and presumably suppressed on the originary scene—perhaps the best example is the definition of antisemitism Gans has advanced, which maps Jews and non-Jews directly onto the first participant to issue the sign and those who come after, respectively.\n\nIf you examine Gans’s writing on antisemitism and the “Jewish Question” more broadly, I think you will see that “Jews” are perpetually frozen, much like the figures on Keats’s Grecian Urn, in the pose of those who invented the one true God (who created the world and declared all humans to be equal) and who _did nothing else thereafter_. The question of why anyone would resent those called “Jews” today for a discovery made by some very different people who weren’t even called “Jews” 2,500 years ago, never gets asked, much less answered. And this is dictated by the model, which must freeze all the “pieces” as if on a game board which the players have left, having gotten bored and moved on to other activities.\n\nThese reflections converge with another issue which has become increasingly urgent for me recently—the question of scale. We have, in GA, an originary scene/event from which, we hypothesize, humanity has issued. Gans has made the very bold claim, one I would “double down” on, that everything human can be traced back to some “moment” or “element” on the scene. And the converse must be true—everything on the scene must be carried forward in all of the diverse and increasingly complex paths the human species has taken. But this can’t mean that a particular category, with the meaning it has for us (“us” being a particular segment of the historically spread and diversified human species), can simply be “found,” intact, on the originary scene.\n\nThis remark lies at the basis of the objections I’ve made recently to Gans’s references to “morality,” the originary kernel of which he claims to locate on the originary scene. Such efforts to map contemporary categories directly onto the scene must fail because, in this case, a term like “moral” is a latecomer to human societies, on that has taken on a distinctive meaning in certain sectors of the modern West, a meaning that it does not have and has not had for most people throughout human history. There’s a kind of Whig historicism on steroids here: unless you want to insist that what “we” mean by “morality” now is the historical cumulation of humanity’s “moral” wisdom already implicit in our origin, you have to acknowledge that “moral” is a modification of other words (“mores”) that meant very different things in societies that didn’t have a word for what “we” mean by “morality”—and the same is true for “ethics.”\n\nThese analyses only hold up if we assume that the academic and broader public debates that have enshrined these terms in, I’m guessing (we could pursue the question by starting with a quick Google ngram search), in the postwar liberal democratic West, represent “peak humanity”—something it is getting harder, I think, to assume. You end up making originary claims drawing upon propagandistic simulacra—it’s not all that different than making claims about “race relations” based on the latest media-promoted panic about police violence towards blacks.\n\nThis problem is not exclusive to GA—far from it. I think the problem is virtually universal—no mode of thinking has really scaled up from the “small group” models that everywhere lie at the origin of inquiry into social interaction. Attempts to do so end up relying upon, e.g., statistics that operate at whatever scale you like but end up abstracting from human agency in the very specific sense that the very concepts which designate things in the word about which one could gather information were created and are sustained in social settings—I don’t think I need to make a sustained argument to the effect that statistics don’t directly access and transparently represent the real. Neither do reified concepts like “structure” and “process.” Collapse of collective into individual agency and inflation of individual into collective intent are the norm, and not only because it makes for good trolling and propaganda. There’s a real problem here that I think only GA can solve, but only a GA that has solved its own scaling problem.\n\nMy own solution is to hold fast to the one thing absolutely distinctive about GA’s model of the social: the center. Gans allows us to believe the center disappears in modernity, to be dispersed across the “market,” because this is the only way to bring GA into accord with what he takes, for what I must assume to be reasons external to GA, to be the best form of social organization, “liberal democracy.” This makes sense because “liberal democracy” is a propagandistic simulacrum of Cold War ideology—strictly speaking, it doesn’t exist, as not a single country calls itself a “liberal democracy.” But if we work with the obvious implications of the originary hypothesis, and, indeed, “scenic thinking,” there must always be a center.\n\nAnd if we actually look, behold! there is, in fact always one, in the most literal sense, as no country has abolished its government or “de-privileged” its capital city—the monarch was replaced by people doing similar kinds of things, not some empty space we can pretend doesn’t exist. And all the players on all the markets know this very well as, every time they find themselves in conflict with other players on the market, rather than creating an alluring self-representation that will seduce the antagonist into a mutually beneficial compromise, they without fail try to drag the state in hoping it will see the matter their way. But I’ve made these arguments many times already and if anyone is interested in them they are certainly not situated with “mainstream GA.”\n\nThere is always a center whenever humans are arranged in relation to each other, and the center is always occupied, even if only by a sacred carcass. All the continuities and discontinuities in human history follow from successive attempts to occupy, hold, expand the reach of, or replace, the center or its present occupant. Questions of scale are therefore questions of the reach of the center, and its maintenance or extension of that reach through the creation of subordinate centers. A particular historical trajectory (Christian-informed modernity) is completed once every individual can become a center within some space, and this only happens once the occupant of the center has been sufficiently singularized so as to become something like a “personality” upon which other “persons” can model their own, which also means becoming sufficiently desacralized so as to become an actor outside of very tightly scripted ritual roles.\n\nThis is basic GA “orthodoxy” that I wish to strengthen, not undermine. It means that what I called, in _Anthropomorphics_ , the “signifying center” can inform the practices of individuals in ways that are irreducible to commands given by the center’s occupant. This doesn’t loosen the bond between individual and center, though—rather, it makes individuals more active and intentional participants in the center, a form of participation I describe there as the incessant work of closing the “imperative gap” between orders given and orders obeyed. That is what declarative sentences are for.\n\nThe work of closing the imperative gap is conducted in “disciplinary spaces,” which are retrievals of the originary scene/event. This speaks directly to the question of scale: the configuration of the originary scene/event is reproduced in all human activity, but directly only within disciplinary spaces, which are governed by their own inquiries and idioms. It may very well be that disciplinary spaces generate their own utopias by mapping themselves onto the social—a small group, bound by duty, devotion and sacrifice easily takes itself to be model of the ideal order. But scenes directly orchestrated by the center, in collaboration with its closest subordinates (these being, today, the major media and tech companies), are of an entirely different character: these are spectacles, mass mobilizations, shows of force, sentimental morality plays, scapegoating rituals, and so on.\n\nSince everyone is included in these scenes as spectators, it feels natural to assume that participating in them in ritually prescribed ways and opining on them affects them and that this, in fact, is the most genuine form of public activity. Only work that goes on in disciplinary spaces such as to facilitate the formation of new disciplinary spaces within and on the margins of these scenes matters, though. Disciplinary spaces have been organized for quite a while within institutions dedicated to their perpetuation and exploitation, in particular universities. Needless to say, once an institution is established in order to produce the large and small scale knowledge needed for governance, including that exercised through technology, the authority granted to such knowledge will make it an irresistible pole of attraction for those competing over occupation and securing of the center.\n\nThe only solution is the cessation of struggles over the center. This is not news, and I don’t need to repeat my arguments on this point. Here, I want to bring this argument to bear on the question of scale, which is to say, what does it mean to say someone does something, or might do something, that has such and such an effect. Obviously, saying “I oppose,” “I resist,” “I struggle for change,” etc., means nothing. These are phrases that energize the members of some group on the margin. The ideal or model intervention, argument, or text would be one that signified to all situated in their respective positions relative to the center so as to provide the intellectual (declarative) resources to close the imperative gaps where they are.\n\nThe imperative gaps can be enormous, and any practice needs to put that on display. Sometimes one could say that demonstrating the imperative gap, making oneself a sign or bearer of it, is the best practice of beginning to shorten it. Since I think only the originary hypothesis can save the world, I have to think very carefully about which frames, organized in what ways, directed at which audiences, are best suited to eventually making it the global lingua franca. But everyone must be included. We may be heading, as I suspect, towards some form of global governance (which I also suspect will look very different than both its current supporters and opponents imagine), but even if I’m wrong and nationalism (or regionalism, or some new feudalism, or whatever) prevails, it will be an “international nationalism” (or whatever) in which everyone is cognizant of everyone else and works to move in alignment with all the others in accord, then, with some center, even if one explicitly occupied only on occasion by a particularly exemplary national leader who happens to be positioned so as to arbitrate some dispute. So, even as a nationalist, one would be thinking in terms of embodying such exemplarity and recognizing it in others.\n\nBut everyone has a part to play, and if it’s manipulative and deceptive to tell some impoverished, disempowered young person that you’ve got the movement that will make him one of the elite, or a contributor to “genuine change,” if your own practices are capable of reproduction and spread they will make a place for pedagogical relations all up and down the line. Anyone, anywhere, can study the forms of authority they must attend to, however corrupt, decrepit, or hostile they might be—we all know who we must ask for a license or permit to do something, who can help or punish us, whose aid we would solicit in some dispute with another.\n\nYou can read your understanding of the authority you’re subject to off of your own resentments—who do you feel, at least on occasion, denies you your place in the sun? How does that authority stage events, at various scales, according to some schedule? Everyone can examine the means and mechanisms of staging, including the staging that has positioned oneself, written the scripts you’ve rehearsed, mastered and improvised on. Everyone can think of ways they might contribute to re-stagings aimed at ensuring that transitions from staging to staging bring everyones’ roles and “lines” into greater coherence with those of others and the scene as a whole.\n\nAnd everyone can help others think of such ways. Everyone can think of himself as auditioning for a team or “troupe” that will become possible as a result of enough people auditioning for it. The more you act and think this way, the more you will in fact find yourself in better ordered settings, better equipped to assess the outcomes of events, including the events of informing others of events—“facts” and “information” will come “encrusted” with the material of the events issuing them. And then our scaling will get better precisely to the extend that orderly, pedagogical relations are maintained across different scales—and the scene/events orchestrated by the center will be more like the formation of a central intelligence in which all are agents and less like tawdry, hysterical soap operas and woke remakes of action movies."
    },
    {
      "slug": "scene-stacking",
      "title": "Scene Stacking",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 25, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/scene-stacking",
      "content": "I have never signed on to any political, ideological or spiritual position among those circulating on the right, like Prometheanism or Faustianism, in part because I would anyway have to translate these terms into originary ones, but also because professions of faith of any kind are at odds with my understanding of the consequences of the originary hypothesis, at least as I have processed it through Anna Wierzbicka’s primes and histories and theories of literacy like those of David Olson and others. I don’t believe in “belief,” or have an faith in “faith,” because these words already presuppose the declarative order—if asked what you believe and have faith in, your answer will be in declarative sentences or, at least, in single words whose meanings are constituted by declarative traditions (“God,” “truth,” “loyalty,” etc.).\n\nTo inhabit the hypothesis is to have a different relation to inherited vocabularies, a zone between literalness and allegory, demystification and unreserved indebtedness to the Other. I know that all human interactions derive from a scene that can be dissected with such analytical precision as to evaporate all idealisms while at the same time knowing that this knowledge cannot be made fully explicit on any particular scene that already comes with its settings. A scene upon which others might be interested in the hypothesis will have its own terms and cannot simply be transposed upon the originary scene hypothesized, and one must be on and in that scene.\n\nAnd this would be the case for any name those on the scene give it, which implies a steady turnover in such names. So, if I’m pressed on these questions, I have to say something like, “I’m on the originary scene, gathering data as to its (non)closure.” But what I can speak about, in a way that I think addresses all those names in a way that meets the demand for self-reflexivity imposed by the hypothesis, is “scene stacking.”\n\nBenjamin Bratton calls “the Stack” an “accidental megastructure.” Originary grammar, extending the successive emergence of speech forms, gives us a way of theorizing megastacking on the boundaries of intentionality. A very difficult standard of rigor is implicit in Gans’s derivation of the speech forms, one that I must confess I have not always adhered to: whenever anything new emerges, it does not result from an intention to create that thing. It results from something more “profound”—an attempt to resolve an anomaly within another system, using the means available within that system, in which the anomaly is resolved because the system has been transformed.\n\nThink about how a feeling and practice of an “internal scene” would be created: demands and commands, implicit and explicit, from the surrounding “external” scene, become increasingly difficult to comply with; it may even become increasingly difficult to know what counts as compliance. One’s attempts to fulfill imperatives, including those embedded more softly and indirectly in “expectations,” keep failing, and so one keeps on trying to correct for the previous failures (without, of course, any way of knowing whether one has correctly determined the cause of “failure”) by forming new responses, which are variations of already attempted response and imitations of responses of others to “similar” imperatives that seem to have “worked.”\n\nThis is the kind of situation Gregory Bateson’s schizophrenic finds himself in—the double bind. It’s also the kind of situation the ancient Judeans found themselves in with the destruction of the temple and exile in Babylon. As one keeps finding new ways to follow the imperative, one changes oneself, but also the form of the imperative and the identity of the imperator. One may have mistaken the purpose of the imperative and therefore the character of the authority who issued it: maybe, for example, rather than wanting me to fulfill the imperative successfully, he wanted me to fail, so that I would be forced to inspect my thoughts and practices (precisely as I am doing now) so that I would become the kind of person worthy of being given such a heavy load of duty.\n\nAnd maybe the time frame of the imperative is lengthened—rather than an imperative that can be carried out daily by each individual as a matter of course, maybe it’s a long-term, open-ended imperative meant to be preserved and transmitted generationally. Nothing more than constant repetition of the imperative for oneself is needed for these transformations to occur. Within this new scene, a scene within the scene is constructed, an “internal scene,” in which one part of the “self” takes on the role attributed to the external authority with another part taking on the role of the failing, and hence inadequate, unruly, disobedient self who has been repeatedly chastised, directly and indirectly, by the authority.\n\nSo, a form of inner reflection, inspection, training, discipline, etc., in which one comes to name parts of one’s self, and categorize one’s habits and desires, comes to iterate what were once attempts to obey external, explicit commands. Furthermore, this new internal scene can only be maintained through the construction of new external, public scenes, like religious sects that have arrived at a “higher consciousness” of their relation to God and set up a shared disciplinary space to develop and explore the vocabularies, grammar and constructions this new “consciousness” requires. And while all this is done with some degree of deliberateness, no one set out to create an “internal scene” or an esoteric sect. All these did was acknowledge anomalies, or paradoxes, within an existing set of vocabularies, grammar and constructions.\n\nSo, the kind of “subjectivity” we would want is one that would maximize both sides of this boundary of intentionality: both the deliberateness with which the terms of an order are pressed into new forms of service through analogy, allegory, mistakes, experiments, etc., and the ability to wait and see what new sign will tie it altogether into a new scene. One thing we can say about any scene is that it has a measure, even if not immediately numerical, which is to say some form of symmetry, distribution of places, ordering of practices and so on. Anyone on a scene tries to maintain that order, but everyone trying to do so means continual recalibrations are necessary—these recalibrations are where models derived from other scenes enter as possible means of reordering—even previous iterations of the same scene.\n\nA proposal to align everyone just suchly involves an imperative, and we can speak of technics as the issuing of imperatives to order (we can use Bichler and Nitzan’s neologism “creorder” here) scenes, along with the making declarative of the imperative as its prolongation and penetration into the scene thereby generating new ostensives, i.e., realities resulting from the disruption of existing orderings. This involves getting everyone placed along with the construction of settings and furnishings as reminders and impersonal imperatives directing them to and keeping them in their places. Scientific and technological knowledge emerges from the quantification of the measure of the scene but requires more thoroughgoing desecration before becoming an independent logic in which measures can be applied to anything and you can start looking for more things and especially events to measure.\n\nThe local sacralities must be smashed by the divine empires so that desecrated masses of people can be removed from any ritual order and made to serve imperial projects carried out under a unified intention; but the imperial sacrality, which confined abstract knowledge to calculating the correspondence between imperial ritual, succession and history and astronomical patterns, must also be smashed, first of all by the Hellenistic empire (which smashed the divine emperors of the near east after having already smashed their own sacral kings and replaced them with “democracies” and “tyrannies”) and successor states and then, much later, by the desecration of Christian monarchy in the wake of global exploration.\n\nThen it becomes possible to look at everything that has been constructed as something that has been constructed, and to find its measure, and then the measure of like constructs yet to be constructed. There seems to come a point when all of reality, human and natural, becomes viewable as constructed, i.e., as given to being broken down and pieced together again—this “revelation” can be lost, as was ancient Hellenistic science under the “philistine” Romans, but by now it has acquired a momentum that would require hard (but not impossible) to imagine catastrophes to reverse. And this means that every scene can be made to fit, include, take as a base, superstructure or conduit, and model any other scene, and that this is the powerful way of creordering today.\n\nI have compressed this condition into the concept of “data security,” a very everyday matter, of course (data security companies proliferate) but also a entry into “transcendence” insofar as one scene is the source of data for another scene which opens each scene onto all the others while making the problem of creordering them all perpetual. The tensegrity of the originary hypothesis as a scientific proposition lies in its identification of the particular form of data comprising the human scene: signs, or representations, as the deferral of violence; or, let’s say, measures of the potential intensity of mimetic violence in the form of measures taken to measure and therefore delay the succession of incremental intensifications.\n\n“Measure” seems to me essential to thinking technics. Everything exists through a relation of reciprocal measurement with, ultimately, everything else. Perhaps the universe first took shape through reciprocal measurement of its parts. Measurement is simply the imposition of a mode of sameness on whatever one registers or is effected by. A wire carrying an electric charge must be constructed so as to measure and therefore conduct the charge in discrete “doses.” The charge, in turn, is measuring the material of the wire in passing through it. Placing one thing on top of another has the two things measuring each other, as evidenced by the impress each makes on the other, including over time.\n\nDoing justice is a form of measurement. Commemoration is measurement. Measurement is ultimately quantitative, but originally qualitative, because something must be that thing before it can be broken up into equal (i.e., the same) parts, or made one part of a larger thing. The balance or equipoise on the originary scene is a kind of measuring, each of all the others, with the center serving as the “scale” or “ruler.” The more intricately you measure the scene, and its relation to scenes it is stacked on, or that are stacked on it, the more precisely you can target one or another corner of the scene for measurement as a furnishing of the scene and the more, in turn, you measure yourself and, in and through your fellow measurers (your team), the more technology becomes co-constitutive with the human.\n\nOne scene is a scene in itself and a furnishing of another scene, and in that way each scene provides a kind of unit of measurement for the scenes furnishing it and those scenes it furnishes. There are therefore various units of measurement, operating at various levels and scales, and they are variously and continuously measured against each other and in that case we could say that a technologized desire is interested in fittings, in what seems unmeasured, even unmeasurable, and in bringing some measure to it. Doing so will in turn open up new unmeasured terrains and properties.\n\nMeasurement provides for a kind of originary syntax of the world, as one thing “predicates” another by finding it to be same as itself according to way of turning it into units or a unit. Perhaps “fit” comes before “measure,” as “fitting” involves just finding the place of one thing among other things. And this originary syntax takes on reality through scene stacking, which is a recentering after all has been desecrated. We can know that the center is “really” nothing more than the self-generating vectorization and measurement of all of our convergent desires, with the desire to persist (live one with one’s desire in some manner) added on, and is therefore “illusory”; but we can’t do anything with this “atheist” knowledge because it can only be articulated on a scene in a way potentially intelligible to and sharable with others, which in turn presupposes the therefore never fully demystifiable center.\n\nAnd if the center can never be fully demystified, there’s no reason to continue to try, which only causes frustration, harm and resentment. The alternative is to fully flesh out the center as an articulation of stackable scenes or platforms which might program us forward immeasurably if we only donate our abilities and refine (measure out) our needs accordingly. What people like to call “spirituality” or “transcendence” is simply the sustaining of scenes, of scenes within and stacked upon scenes, acting upon scenes that resist closure by folding out into other scenes. One could speak about this in more familiar terms as the play of the world."
    },
    {
      "slug": "scenic-event-intelligence",
      "title": "Scenic/Event Intelligence",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 27, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/scenicevent-intelligence",
      "content": "The event/scene duality, then, is to run parallel to information processes sifting out noise from communication systems. Posing the problem this way (which must be done just to ensure GA’s competitive superiority to post-cybernetic theoretical systems) allows us to notice that constructing a scene has a filtering function, insofar as it sets up an inside and an outside. The symmetry established on the originary scene filters out any extraneous mimesis—that is, any mimetic action not tending toward the appropriation of the central object. Everyone knows exactly what the others are doing. Anyone coming late to the scene would either fit right in or render himself irrelevant, his movements essentially random.\n\nBut this perfect information becomes a surplus of information, increasing entropy exponentially: everyone knows everyone else wants the object, but no one knows who is going to get it and what the others and oneself will do if the drive to appropriate it continues. Everyone seems capable of anything, and so no information can be derived from the scene. The aborted gesture of appropriation, then, restores that fleeting condition of perfect information in a more sustainable form. From here on in we can always know that we might at least be converging through signs upon the same object in inverse proportion to the degree in which we are converging upon it with the aim of possessing it at the expense of the other.\n\nThe clearest information then is when we are most certain that appropriative gestures have been suspended—but this information becomes intelligence insofar as we can include in our representations the entire spectrum of possible advances upon the object. The richest conversation, then, would be one in which both participants are completely aware—increasingly aware, as the conversation proceeds—of all that they might do to each other, while also being increasingly certain that they won’t do any of it. It’s in this running up and down the scale of possible but suspended actions and counter-actions that we can see the event “profiled” against the scene.\n\nIf we ask, how do we determine the boundaries of a scene and the end of an event, the only answer can be, upon another scene, in another event. A scene is composed, or, an existing scene is adapted, so as to concentrate focus on the center—it’s easy to think of examples, such as ritual scenes, but also theaters and lecture halls. But, then, a beggar locked out of a house of worship might weaken the boundaries separating the inside of the scene from its outside; the same with a protest that breaks in from the outside into a lecture hall, or the opening night festivities outside the theater. With highly formalized events such as plays, lectures and rituals we may feel certain we know when they end—indeed, we might say that much of civilization and community depends upon everyone knowing the relation between inside and outside and beginnings and ends.\n\nBut there’s no reason for accepting the formal closure as the end of an event, to the exclusion of its various reverberations and resonances. And with less formalized scenes and events—conversations, encounters, strolls, exchanges of emails, romantic affairs, lifetimes—which, tellingly, we often try to model on more carefully enclosed events like works of art—the possibilities are endless. But we can only make sense of some “relationship” by imagining an end to it, even if that end can also be imagined as a new beginning.\n\nTo close one event, then, is to open another—the event of closing the previous event. To identify the boundaries of the scene is to construct another scene within or surrounding that scene. I long ago took from Peirce a model for thinking about this. Imagine we want to determine the exact line where one entity ends and the adjacent one begins. We can represent the two entities as different colors, say red and blue. Within each entity, we have all blue and all red, respectively; at the boundary, we have an equal number of blue and red “particles” on each side—and, of course, we can always develop sensory mechanisms enabling us to detect smaller “particles,” in which case the boundary might shift insofar as we can see a bit more blue on the red side than before.\n\nWhatever we take to distinguish a same from an other can be thought of in this way, and the more complex the entities the different kinds of “particles” we might be interested in. Similarly with events: the beginning of an event is the middle of another event and the end of yet another event—so, when we identify the end, middle or beginning of some event, we do so in the middle, beginning or end of another event.\n\nI’m borrowing from a “philosopher” here, albeit a rogue one—the only one, to my knowledge, to take the “community of inquirers” rather than the individual mind or consciousness as the “epistemological unit.” And, of course, a semiotically based thinker, whose icon/index/symbol triad overlays helpfully if inexactly over the ostensive/imperative/declarative one we draw from the originary hypothesis. But we end up back in metaphysics if we try to “define” scenes and events outside of their evidencing themselves in linguistic acts and artifacts. Data ultimately has to resolve itself into ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives.\n\nMore precisely, into the “proper” relations between these speech forms. Any imperative is issued from an ostensive, any imperative extends itself into an interrogative, and any declarative will “cover” the interrogative by supplying a new ostensive that will enable the fulfillment of the imperative and thereby keep us upon the scene of the ostensive that began the sequence. All the ethics and morality we would ever need must be here. “Bad” and “evil” lie in imperatives that obscure the ostensive they issue from, in interrogatives that are actually imperatives, in declaratives that don’t situate you on a field of ostensives, etc..\n\nBut, to anticipate the deconstruction of these boundaries, such “deviationist” speech acts might be performed in protected or enclosed spaces so as to provide examples of what we must learn to look out for. But those protected or enclosed spaces can open up into the “general economy,” and “make a scene” out of a scene trying to enforce scenelessness. So, the most important boundary is that between obscuring and participating in the design of a speech act sequence. You can say that there’s no greater indictment of an authority figure than commanding people to do what cannot be done, but one can imagine a productive and necessary pedagogical scene that does just that precisely in order to reveal the boundaries of the possible in a way that is more credible than had it been presented declaratively—in which case, we could say that we’d have to trace the imperative through to the declaratives it issues in.\n\nBut that would also mean we might always be able to save a misfired imperative by having it land where it should have been aimed in the first place—and then, perhaps, it’s a question of what the commander has to say when he sees the results. We have to construct and replay the entire sequence within another sequence, with the aim of (obeying the imperative to) exhaustively fit all the speech acts into the sequence—at this point, we would no longer need to speak about “morality” and “ethics.”\n\nI’m obeying the imperative to remap the human on the model of the originary scene, an imperative that is drawn out of the originary hypothesis’s “revelation” to me. Obeying this imperative entails treating everyone else as if they’re doing the same thing, which amounts to assuming that we’re all still within the originary event, ensuring it remains open by acknowledging provisional closures (as soon as the ritual comes to an end we treat that ritual as the middle of something). But this also means doing so, to the best of my ability, through all the idioms spoken by everyone, the more differentiated the more one tries to learn them.\n\nIt’s easy to get lost in another’s idiom, but at some point some boundary will emerge distinguishing between idioms and then you might find you’re making the idioms speak about themselves. It’s good to try and sustain that indefinitely, speaking in and about an idiom, thereby creating new idioms. An idiom is particular set of ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative sequences, so learning an idiom is learning when, for example, someone asking a question or making a statement is really requesting that you do something.\n\nLinguistic data, then, most fundamentally, is an idiom being found oscillating between two sides of a boundary, and any idiom can be found there in the right scene/event articulation, so we can create practices of maximizing the production of linguistic data that would call for (issue an imperative to establish) disciplinary spaces to form around them. These practices would have us translating infrastructures so as to display that idiom on that boundary surrounded by a field of idioms held constant within boundaries for the moment. These are the same samples I’ve been speaking of. It’s a question of developing the habit of asking what (implicit) question is a declarative answering, what imperative would have extended and converted itself into that question, and what shared object issued that imperative to sustain itself.\n\nAnd then asking what other ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives are like these, and how? I’m very drawn to Paul North’s proposed world of likenesses here: everything is like everything else in some respects, and everything is constituted not by its own essence or becoming, but by the networks of similitudes continually constituting it. For me, when we single out the same out of world of likenesses and enlikenings which are deferred (kept at various degrees of “like,” prevented from advancing on to “same”) we can say that we know something—contingent upon others joining and sustaining that scene or idiom of knowing.\n\nHere’s an idea for a think tank. Create sets of ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative (let’s go to the acronym: OIID) sequences out of Anna Wierzbicka’s natural semantic primes. We’d need a lot, so there’d be plenty of work for plenty of researchers. Then, choose a range of training texts—again, we’d need a lot here. Then, translate the texts into the OIID sequences. (Tons of work here too.) This could then be computerized, like any translation or language generation program. (Lots of work for tech guys.) Then, the OIID translations are translated back into English. Here’s the trick: this second translation doesn’t just replicate the original text insofar as we compose the OIID sequences to function as filters that would produce revelatory differences from the original.\n\nThe original texts will usually have defective OIID sequences, which we can eliminate from the prime OIID sequences. So, the OIID sequences into which the original text is translated would seek out different English chunks to be retranslated into. The difference between the original and retranslated text exposes the “ideological” implications of the original. We can expect the retranslated text to have both more perfected OIID sequences and more incoherent ones, and algorithms can be continually refined to achieve different effects. These effects will be visible to the trained eye—this is also a pedagogical program, aimed at training a new datafied officer class.\n\nNow, I do insist that this can be done (while also mentioning that I’m completely unafraid of anyone stealing the idea because, well, anyone who really gets and is taken by this idea would want to work on it with me anyway) but the purpose of such a program is also to make it possible to start acting and thinking as if it’s in process and we’re already working on a rudimentary form of this translation program, attuning ourselves to exposing and noting the kinds of similarities and differences it is designed to reveal. In this way, scenic design practices work directly on the idiomatic field, events are built directly into scenes, and aal of language is turned into data around which an unlimited number of disciplinary scenes can be constituted."
    },
    {
      "slug": "scenic-linguistic-undecidability",
      "title": "Scenic/Linguistic Undecidability",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 07, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/sceniclinguistic-undecidability",
      "content": "Eric Gans has a “methodological” position that I would call “semantic leniency”—he’s very resistant to terminological debates, and the notion that developing greater conceptual precision (arranging words greater internal referentiality, we might say) will add much to analytical clarity. It’s a justifiable approach, especially if there’s not a strong disciplinary space around you forcing upon you questions that must be answered, then answered again, and so on—obviously, terminological disputes can descend into petty pedanticism very easily. But, still, there comes a time in the life of any theory, or discipline, or even conversation, when arriving at some kind of agreement on the right name for things becomes essential to going on.\n\n(At a certain point there’s a need to ask: what do you mean by that?) The concept of “resentment,” for example, will at some point have to be nailed down if we are to have serious discussions about it. Nailing it down might not mean a precise, “official” definition that must be referred to every time you use the word but, rather, explicitness over the range of ways it’s used.\n\nIt seems to me that naming in general needs to be taken much more seriously in GA—after all, the originary sign was the Name-of-God, and presumably how that name was used as it became part of a ritual order was pretty tightly controlled. We can assume that all names were conferred in events that involved mini mimetic crises at a lowering threshold of significance—names probably were all, originally, something like “God’s this,” “God-like,” “son of God,” “beloved by God,” etc. And naming individuals consolidated their position as protected members within a group, representing a particular initiation process, obligations, ritual suitability and so on.\n\nThe question of linguistic decidability, then, is a question of what you want your discourse to do—if you want your discourse to be a sustainable, ongoing reading of the imperatives of the center you will take care in your naming—again, not necessarily in a strict definitional sense but, rather, in the sense of concern for the commemoration of whatever event, even a theoretical or disciplinary event, led to the conferring of that name/concept. Do we see ourselves a descendants of those on the originary scene, or not?\n\nBut when I ask whether you want your discourse to be a sustainable, ongoing reading of the imperatives of the center I’m referring to my own, specialized, project within GA—what I refer to as an originary grammar of the center. Here, I invest in Gans’s derivation of the successive speech forms in _The Origin of Language_ , treating it not, as I think Gans does, as a problem that had to be solved to demonstrate the superiority of the originary hypothesis to other accounts of the human, but as a model for human orders that will displace all other accounts. (I do want to note, though, that Gans made very important uses of his “grammar” in defining metaphysics as the belief in the primacy of the declarative sentence, on the one hand, and Hebraic monotheism as a belief in the God whose name is a declarative sentence—innovations I am greatly indebted to.)\n\nSo, the theoretical task I set for myself was to make it possible to describe every event and, indeed, every utterance (every “sample”), as an articulation of ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative modes. This task is far from complete, but I could see from the beginning that this would involve extensive redescriptions of all reported and transcribed events in a radically different form or mapping. In a fully developed form, it would rival Charles Sanders Peirce’s charting out and naming all the different permutations of iconic, indexical and symbolic signs.\n\nThis would mean a terminological revolution within GA—in particular, terms like “scene” and “event” would be rendered obsolete—these “things” would simply be articulations of the speech forms. And, indeed, we can see how an event is organized around an ostensive center, from which, or in the name of which, imperatives are issued, with questions then raised about those imperatives (all of this tacitly or explicitly), and declaratives narrowing down the possible ways of obeying those imperatives, with the confirmation of the compliance with a given imperative marking the closure of an event. This might greatly increase our resolution, so that what we would now call an event can now be seen as a confluence and overlapping of a range of ostensive-imperative-ostensive “units,” while a “scene” would be an articulation of ostensive “prompts” that might set any number of imperative sequences in motion.\n\nI think it’s worth continuing to work towards this potentially far more powerful human science, but the “problem” is that we can never completely erase the circulating names we currently use to refer to things, instigate actions, and so on. There will always be “normal” human language, even if all human language is also the residue of what was at one point specialized theoretical or ritual language—even if the theory I’m describing here were to be developed, receive institutional support, become useful and popular in various ways, even become _the_ theory of the human, the very fact that it would be widely used would mean it would get “normalized,” blunted and made more polysemic (it would generate new slang, be used ironically, etc.).\n\nAnd, so, the regular language in which “scene” and “event” (and, really, all of GA’s main concepts—like “resentment” and “desire”) are embedded will continue to be the launching pad of any inquiries. I think GA is uniquely suited to maximize this productive dynamic between “wild” theoretical inquiry and everyday human situations—in fact, one way of surfacing the “ordinary” is by testing it against the never complete redescriptions enacted within a theoretical space. (Indeed, this discussion is obeying the imperative to maintain this tension as productively as possible.)\n\nAnd this is where I can pick up the discussion initiated in my previous post regarding “figuring things out.” Inquiry always involves following some discourse when it starts to go off the rails until you’ve pieced together enough of its fragments to construct some new rails for a new discourse. If what the other person says makes perfect sense to you, you don’t even register it—it just confirms your own thinking and feeling on the matter, so it gives you a little cognitive “high” without being particularly memorable—at least if you more or less expect that person to make sense because you’ve always been more or less copacetic with him—someone you are usually at odds with and don’t expect to “make sense” suddenly making sense would be a sign of a discourse you’re familiar with starting to go off the rails.\n\nIt’s when a discourse starts going off the rails and you need some vocabulary that can both remain within that discourse and track it from within a new discourse under construction that you start to get “theoretical.” And here is where scenic thinking is very helpful, in a very pragmatic way, because what gets revealed when things start making less sense is that what seemed like a natural set of interactions was actually scripted, and involved role-playing—if you notice the other is reading from another script, that reveals that we’ve always been reading from scripts, rehearsing, enacting, and so on. And then you can start fleshing things out with the “imagination”—who’s writing the scripts, what’s the larger “play” this “scene” is part of, how did the scene get set in just this way, how much room for improvisation might there be, and so on.\n\nAnd as you run through various possible scenarios you keep naming elements of the scene that would either facilitate or prove an obstacle to the realization of that scenario, and then it’s possible to imagine further scenarios that would involve the leveraging, removing or modification of those elements of the scene (“props”). And if you keep in mind that every single element of the scene was placed there, fortified, “decorated,” implanted in the scene by someone, under conditions of some mimetic necessity, and that therefore every element of the scene be opened for discussion (by those who oppose you, at least, even if you’d like to leave a particular element of the scene intact), you can do some very good thinking this way. And this, of course, is the kind of thinking that will enable you to speak freely with others who are also situated on the same scene and engaged in the same practices. And you can do quite a bit of this kind of potentially excellent thinking without worrying too much about terminology or the “rectification of names.”\n\nBut you will start to run into problems when dealing with the formality of designations, which are deeply interlocked with “how things work.” The kind of “scenic thinking” I described above will get you to the point where you can say something like, “we should reorganize this scene in such and such a way so as to enable such and such a mode of interaction that will eliminate the kind of dysfunction that caused things to go off the rails (stop “making sense”) in the first place,” and everyone can nod their heads but then you have the question: who is this “we,” and then you start plugging in answers like “we the people,” or whatever and then your discourse goes off the rails because there is no “we” but rather legal orders that allow and prohibit certain chains of actions (consecrate, we might say) and then even if these orders get interpreted increasingly arbitrarily they still remain the reference point.\n\n(Revolutions are especially punctilious about things like appointing, pronouncing, authorizing, constituting, etc., because they have to ground their legitimacy in something emergent but unrealizable within the old order so as to capture the legitimacy of that order.)\n\nBut these legal orders name all the institutions, the mandates of those institutions, departments and divisions within institutions, operational rules for those institutions and so on. In other words, anything we could talk about is pervaded with legality, which is just the form “formalization” takes in any order not based on direct command. In that case, when a discourse goes off the rails, what is happening is a kind of slippage between orders of formalization, which can show up on the margins of a long official report or as a kind of oddity in phrasing within a particular sentence. So, scenic thinking starts to become participatory naming, or “literary.”\n\nIf you take yourself to be on a scene with someone, you learn to comport yourself, to frame your performance in such a way as to elicit these slippages, even accepting that you’re allowing them to be emitted from yourself as well. It’s in proposed reformalizations within these slippages that the scene is being recomposed. As soon as someone says or does something that doesn’t follow any rule, that isn’t always already formalized, all effort goes into formalizing it—it takes on the urgency of a search and rescue mission. “Higher order” scenic thinking involves initiating and then participating in such shared efforts at reformalization, but that means following very closely what we call things and what happens once we start calling them that.\n\nAnd this will likely look like unintelligible chaos from the outside—it is, in fact, a kind of controlled and simulated mimetic crisis, created within the midst of and so as to fend off a more genuine one (which would involve the breakdown of formalization itself—which, even if not really possible, always tinges the edges of the imagination).\n\nIt's for engaging in this kind of participatory naming that an adoption of the idiom of originary grammar comes into play, because if you’re proposing and trying out names along with others it’s very good to point out what we _must_ now do as a consequence of that naming (a kind of constituting), simply in order, now, to preserve the name, ensure its continuity. Questions people have can be directed back to the stream of imperatives emerging from the new system of naming—how do we do that, what other things need to be named and how, as a consequence? You can show how each question is essentially a prolongation of one or another imperative—it’s the addressee of the imperative stalled, blocked, sending out requests (imperatives) for information on how to fulfill the imperative.\n\nAnd each declarative sentence uttered is essentially managing all this “data” emitted by the newly named center and the centers orbiting it, as they compel us to rearrange our relations. Declaratives are themselves ultimately ostensives at a distance, naming things in their absence, mediated by some imperative relation to it—the most elemental question after naming something central is, then, what do we name this? And that? This is how scenic design proceeds—by working on the operational levels installing and articulating the scene, not performing directly on the scene itself. So, if you want your discourse to enter, infiltrate and reshape the scene, you need to be primarily concerned with formulating names that will, stick, proliferate and turn into networks.\n\nAnd, of course, as you work on that, you find yourself upon a scene, where you are performing in accord with a script which is always in danger of going off the rails, with others in ways that involve tacit positionings that can’t be completely redescribed in the very vocabulary you’re all attending to."
    },
    {
      "slug": "selving",
      "title": "Selving",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 18, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/selving",
      "content": "For a while I’ve been working with a notion of “practice” dependent upon Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition, which views practices as intrinsically normative and embedded narratively in communal structures. More fundamentally, though, I’ve been thinking of practices as continuous with ritual, in which something is done in such a way as to elicit a response from the center such as to enable an ongoing revision of the practice. I’ve paired practices with hypotheses, analogically with the pairing of ritual with myth (wherein myth supplements the “failures” of ritual), so that part of the practice is the generation of hypotheses regarding possible responses from the center and their implications for further articulations of the practice.\n\nPractices are both grounded in language and technical: the examples I used in _Anthropomorphics_ and since have usually focused on single words, much like some Platonic dialogues, with practices aimed at redeeming the meaning of the word. So, for example, what would a practice of “honesty” be, under specified technical or scenic conditions? Even more: what would maximize and exemplify “honesty”? I’ve deferred the next step, which would be think in terms of sentences and discourses which position us—issue imperatives to us—under certain scenic conditions and call for articulations of signs. This would essentially be a way of turning all of language into scripture, as if it were nothing but a giant prayerbook.\n\nNot only should we always mean what we say, but we should only say the things that we can mean, under a fairly rigorous regime of meaning as institutional and historical enactment. At least we should do this if we want to be taken seriously, and we should expect others to do this if we want to know who to take seriously (and who are therefore the ones we especially want to take us seriously).\n\nPart of that next step is setting aside the terms practice/hypothesis, and synthesizing the dyad into a single term which which draws upon another line of inquiry I’ve been committed to: “selving.” I have for a long time preferred the word “self” over near synonyms (in some contexts) like “individual” or “subject,” because it’s more minimal, the word “self” really meaning nothing more than the “same” (hence its use in reflexive pronouns like “itself,” “himself,” etc., which really just means the same thing that was just referred to). So, to be a self is to be the same as you were in some other situation where you were also that self.\n\nInstead of looking for some “deep” or metaphysical foundations of selfhood (like a soul), we can just direct our attention to the ways in which selves are maintained across time and space. Through names, for example—or social security numbers. Such inquiries can be as far ranging and differentiated as we need them to be, and anyone might embody various selves, recognized in varying ways for different purposes and “addresses” (and we might start talking about “meta-selves”). And maintaining ones selving requires doing things to continue constructing those forms of sameness in a sea of differences, which is to say mere likenesses, juggling a whole set of reference points—hence “selving” (which I’m a bit surprised to find has no authorized use as a verb).\n\nThese considerations are informed by a book I’ve mentioned a few times: Paul North’s _Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: A Logic of Likeness_. An important part of North’s project. is convergent with my own: to render philosophy obsolete, in his case by starting with the familiar and both unprovable and irrefutable intuition that everything is like everything else in some respect. The universe, then, is held together by vast networks of likeness, constantly shifting in accord with the “quality” taken as the point of similarity in each case. Part of my attraction to North’s argument lies in the fact that “like” is one of Anna Wierzbicka’s natural semantic primes, and hence universally human—in any language you could say one thing is like another, which frees us from worrying about what counts as “legitimate” terms of similarity or metaphoricity or analogy.\n\n“This is like that” is enough to get any conversation started with little more than an ostensive gesture. North shows no interest in that equally primitive word “same,” but for me this makes it possible to articulate North’s “system” as follows: within the constantly expanding and shifting field of likeness we can create centers of attention by treating selected things, when doing specific things, as the same. And anything we do can be spoken of in terms of what, in doing that thing, we are taking to be the same.\n\nLate in his book, North makes an argument against the notion of “practice,” which I naturally wanted to think about. For North, this refusal of “practice” is part of an argument made in this book for the discovery of fields of likeness as a form a deceleration, which is in turn part of a broader argument he also makes in his book on Kafka, _The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation_ and in his _The Problem of Distraction_ (in which Kafka also figures prominently), an argument that I take to be one in favor of indefinitely prolonged modes of deferral—and to which I am therefore very sympathetic. He doesn’t really say much in his refusal of “practice,” but I see the point: to speak of “practices” is to presuppose control over the conditions of your practice such that you could show the results of that practice to indeed be the results of that practice.\n\nAnd this is a very important issue, because if you are thinking of all activity in terms of practices, and your concept of “practice” implies a form and degree of control over your scenic conditions that cannot be ascertained, you will end up either restricting your activity to situations where you can pretend to have achieved a sufficiently closed space of “causes” or indulging in fantastical claims regarding the causal chains between what you do and what happens. The paradox in imposing such a “praxical” regime, first of all upon oneself, is that it aims at anticipating and helping to advance movement toward a social order in which all activity would become increasingly praxical, as in Bachelard’s conclusion to _The Scientific Spirit_ where he calls for the reversal of the relation between school and society—rather than school existing for society, society should exist for school, that is, endless teaching, learning, practice and innovating with new forms of teaching, learning, practice and innovating. But, of course, this presupposes that we are currently far away from a social order organized in terms of practices, so why should we assume that creation of islands of practice here and there would somehow “add up” to such a social order?\n\nEnter “selving,” which, I’ll mention right away does not apply only to human individuals but to anything about which we could say “itself”—social orders are selved, institutions are selved, things are selved. But certainly human beings as well, and all the others only in human discourse. Selving is more minimal than practice, as it involves anything that makes something itself within a field (not against a “background”—North also demolishes “Gestalt” thinking) where it is like many things (everything, in fact), including “itself” but never the same as any (including “itself”) except insofar as some “we” sees, hears and says it to be so in order to selve that “we.”\n\nSo, the question one can always be asking oneself is what to do so that it happens that the field across which the one asking is the same as the one answering can be spread as far and wide as possible. Such a question is self-centered, but not only for oneself—lots of other things need to be selved to maximize that spread, including others who are equally necessary to “verify” the sameness across the field. Selving obviates and includes the command to be in control of the conditions sufficient for one’s practice because before your “means” can be means they must be the same as themselves as things you are doing something with and doing something with them is really just ensuring they remain the same across the field in which you are doing whatever you are doing with them.\n\nTo put it another way: you could find out a day later, a month later or 10 years later (or someone else can find out centuries later) that your practice was not really, in the end, a practice: but, if you gathered some things and people in such a way as to make apparent a field of sameness, that could never be falsified, even if you thereby relinquish control over how that field might be dispersed and made part of a new assemblage . All you can do is try to make your field of samenesses capable of both shaping and fitting into a number of different assemblages. What you’re trying to do is reach the undecidability of “doing” and “happening”, where putting your own mark decisively and distinctively upon a field is indistinguishable from letting things come to be whatever they are.\n\nSelving returns us to language as always fundamentally ostensive—in the end, signs “work,” and even only exist as signs, insofar as at the end of an however long chain of signification at least two people can know themselves to be pointing at the same thing. Selving is the answer to the Girardian crisis of indifferentiation, where only the possibility of singling something out can preserve the community and if what is singled out is not to be conveniently othered by the crisis it must be a new field of samenesses within a field of likenesses. Scapegoating is a practice of subtracting likeness from the othered, making likeness among those who do the othering less threatening; to acknowledge various ways of identifying the same amongst the like is to make it possible to lower and raise the threshold of differentiation as needed.\n\nIt may seem an obvious but it is nevertheless a potent observation that even those you hate are like you in some way, and to add that this likeness can be selved. And moving above and below the threshold separating likeness from sameness and thereby raising and lowering that threshold (by working on the infrastructures undergirding it) is a good description of what we do as language users. We’re selving every time we open our mouths or arrange ourselves amongst others, even before we could think about constructing a practice or hypothesis; indeed, any practice or hypothesis would pertain to the field of the same already being assembled. Meaning what we say and saying what we can means involves moving around that threshold, to the point of being it.\n\nSelving is being the same sample which means presenting as the model sample articulating a data field organized by and soliciting scenic designers. Mario Carpo’s observation that now that we have passed the threshold of data abundance, traditional experimentation, conducted within closed spaces so as to control variables, is no longer necessary, means that we can proceed to using data directly to world build. If you have enough data to calculate all the outcomes of articulating materials in one way or another, and even eliciting from materials, including organisms, the kinds of adjustments that might anyway take place in order to mitigate entropic tendencies, so as to minimize external therapeutic interventions, then everything can be treating as selving.\n\nYou would no longer have to repeat something over and over again to determine that if you do X, Y will happen, even under all the different real world conditions which might interfere with the path from X to Y. We could simply ask what would keep, say, a functioning kidney, the same (functioning as a kidney) in the midst of ongoing chemical and physical and metabolic processes in which things are like each other in all kinds of ways? You can start, that is, with an actual kidney, in someone’s body, which is like all other kidneys but only the same as itself—or that, anyway, is the problem we can set ourselves. Holding that one thing constant, not only hypothetically but in actuality, the more we know about all the ways in which it’s not holding constant, will become the most difficult and important thing of all. And only an ongoing selving can make it possible to hold all the other things, including oneself, sufficiently and suitably constant, so as to hold that one thing so.\n\nI’ll test selving against the problem of resentment (and vice versa). We can say that resentment is when you see that something is not the same (as it was, as we took it to be, as was promised, as was expected...). Since we emerged as humans by confirming that we all issued the same sign to point to the same central object in the same “aspect,” our default position is that everything should be the same. This means that we’re in a constant state of imminent (at least) resentment. (Where our resentment is directed is a question of who interfered with everything remaining the same.) The deferral of resentment, then, entails allowing that whatever has refused to stay the same is, instead, like lots of other things—you refer what has become other back to the field of likenesses.\n\nTo do this, you must become the same as yourself within this new field, and to do that you must bring a lot of the constitutive infrastructure along with you. Whatever has refused to stay the same has shaken up some of that infrastructure, which therefore requires at least a check-up to ascertain its sameness. Maybe a lot of that infrastructure has been shaken rather badly and maybe only a small portion of it can be checked and center the field of likenesses by being the same. Maybe resentment is a warning sign regarding the fragility of the infrastructure. But there’s always some infrastructure remaining, even if just the possibility of a shared gesture.\n\nHowever little you can do it’s still better than heeding the call of your resentment to make that thing the same again because it can never be the same in the same way—it will need to circulate through the field of likeness, which serves as a vast resource from which anything can be returned to the center of sameness from whence it originated. Nothing is “really” the same, even as itself, but it’s only possible to “realize” that because humans came into being by “pretending” that something was the same without having any way of constituting a boundary between pretense and reality, which therefore only comes into existence as a result.\n\nTo borrow, invert and revise Gregory Bateson’s well-known definition of “information” (a difference that makes a difference), we can say that resentment demands that the like be the same, while the defusion/diffusion of resentment involves selving through a field of likes.\n\nWhat about “singularized succession in perpetuity,” what we might call the successor concept to “absolutism,” and which, to anticipate (a few posts down the road), will be used as a counter to what Bichler and Nitzan call the “capitalist mode of immortality”? This concept certainly seems to rely upon the kind of control over conditions implicit in the concept of “practice,” so it’s necessary to ensure its compatibility (perhaps I should start saying: interoperability) with “selving.” It seems to me that singularized succession in perpetuity becomes more implicit and more precise with selving. Whatever you do to ensure you will be the same, say, tomorrow, within the total scenic design and its mapped out satiric undertow (to put it bluntly: you can sustain and even enhance your self through the most unrestrained and thoroughgoing mockery imaginable) is also the same kind of thing you will do to provide for your self to be the same tomorrow, the next day, and 10, 100 or 1,000 years from now, when its sameness will be in the hands of those who can trace their mode of intelligence (their selving) back to your own.\n\nThis doesn’t preclude explicit naming of a successor, which is still to be highly recommended for high profile public figures, but it should also make it unnecessary: it should be obvious,to anyone paying attention, who will be enough like you to be the same under transformed conditions. And if it’s not, there’s more selving for you to do."
    },
    {
      "slug": "singularized-succession-in-perpetuity",
      "title": "Singularized Succession in Perpetuity",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 09, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/singularized-succession-in-perpetuity",
      "content": "Back to this concept (see <https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-sufficiency-of-singularized-succession>) in the light of recent thinking on debt and the center and their implications for thinking futurity. Originally, the concept was a continuation of the absolutist thinking through which I transitioned out of liberalism back in 2015-6: starting with the maxim that sovereignty is conserved, and that it always has a locus, I further concluded that the most certain test that power was in fact held was that the sovereign selected his successor. Otherwise, would it not be those who selected the successor who wielded power?\n\nI pursued this thinking in _Anthropomorphics_ , drawing out the further implications that the selection of a successor must be a public event, and a unifying, celebratory public event, and in that case it further follows that the entire social order is to be organized around succession, with pedagogical institutions devoted to producing plausible candidates for succession, various regions and communities taking in pride in the candidates they have advanced, or centering their aspirations around improving in this regard. The concept also cuts against, without excluding, the most historically “popular” means of monarchical succession, primogeniture, since succession is now understood as the outcome of competition and mentorship, eliminating all the disputes that derive from the ambiguities bound to arise regarding rightful succession (a childless king, etc.) but also asserting a different approach to governance in a technologized order.\n\nAs always, I want the concept to be descriptive in a revealing way rather than simply normative or prescriptive, and so succession posits the assumption that this is what we’re always doing, i.e., trying to “bias” the future so that those loyal to us and those who will continue our projects will be more likely acquire the power to do so. And there’s a kind of “existential” dimension here: if you really want what you say you want, how can you just let it all go after you step off the scene? If you’re serious, you must want to pass the baton. Finally, _in perpetuity_ turns succession into “trans-scenic” concept, building into succession the preservation of the imperative of the center, the point of infinity, however vague—you want to select someone who will in turn select someone who will in turn select someone, etc.—a program which moves beyond the “metaphysical” to the increasingly practical as data security becomes constitutive of governance, and futurity can become a genuine political question. There’s a question of “breeding” in the broadest sense here, of continuing a line which has and will accumulate and accentuate various traits, characteristics, habits, etc.\n\nSingularized succession in perpetuity seems to me the most anti or non-liberal concept possible—liberalism (and democracy) cannot come to terms with it and both are exposed as serving no other purpose than to interfere with singularized succession. I have been focusing insistently on the juridical but singularized succession completely invalidates the “rule of law” because the “rule of law” would apply to succession as well while the purpose of singularized succession is to secure the juridical within the nomos, or originary distribution, which in turn depends upon succession. And it’s interesting that liberal (and left, if we are to make the distinction) institutions themselves understand succession far better than the right side of liberalism, as they take great care in how power is packaged and handed over to the next generation of activists.\n\nThey just want to prevent everyone else from doing the same. Singularized succession in perpetuity, as a mode of breeding and, therefore, perhaps the construction of kinship networks that would enhance the production of qualified candidates, is not at odds with an ethnicized or racialized mode of governance, but it doesn’t guarantee the superiority of such modes either because we are really only at the beginning of understanding what humans might be capable of. And, having incorporated the articulated concepts of the “outside option” and the “outside spread” (thanks to Colin Drumm), I can say more precisely that closing off the outside option (by “internalizing” all the options) is the only, and a very good, way of replacing the outside spread with another way of investing in futurity.\n\nAnd that’s really what prompted me to take up the question of singularized succession in perpetuity now, in the middle of my development of Thirdness. I’ve been considering ways to think about how to counter capital’s (in Bichler and Nitzan’s formulation) determination of value through the discounting against expected future earnings for a while now (here is a, I think, fairly early attempt: <https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/media-as-ritual>), and singularized succession in perpetuity (SSIP?) must advance that attempt. In both cases, we’re speaking of defining the present in terms of the future which, in a technological order, makes sense.\n\nWhat we do now should be valued in terms of its future consequences (this is pretty close to Peirce’s pragmaticist definition of truth), and the only problem with the capitalist definition is that value is conferred by potential buyers who must see the stream of future earnings within a set time frame, even if it's not clear what that is. “Discounted against expected future earnings” is an excellent concept because open-ended, as the expected future earnings can be set, presumably, 2 years or 20 or 50 years down the road, and how this is determined is, as Liliana Doganova ( _Discounting the Future_ ) puts it, a “political technology.”\n\nStill, there must be upper limits; there must be a world’s record for the futurest discounting—no one determine value by the earning expected in 200 years (I assume). The ceiling is probably set by when it would be most profitable to cash in because other, better bets would be expected to become available at that time, and this must have something to do with the political technology that will ensure that the territory, materials, labor conditions, financing, licensing, tax policies, etc., priced into the value will remain intact (or improve). So, one can imagine discounting against expected future earnings running parallel to SSIP, but the conditions of ensuring the expected future earnings are so contingent as to make this the far less likely scenario.\n\nSo, SSIP runs counter to capitalism within the same future directed framework: within SSIP, what is worth doing today is also determined by some future conditions that will have made that action the preferred one, but in this case determined otherwise than by the confidence the investor class, or some portion of it has in maintaining control over the reins required to make future earnings sufficiently predictable.\n\nDetermined how, in that case? We need to answer this question in such a way as to operate within, infiltratingly, capitalism, as well as to indicate post-capitalist (and decidedly non-communist) directions. Here is where the notion of making markets, and in particular prediction markets, which have come into my thinking via Thirdness, adds something to SSIP. We assume a world of closely knit reciprocal subscribers supply chaining each other. New suppliers need to able to enter the game so as to provide the necessary mimetic tension (competition) for existing suppliers; those new suppliers can be from other teams redirecting some of their capacities to a new line of production or from teams within the team being elevated within a renewed capacity.\n\nI’ve worked through this question in terms of “pedagogical derivatives” here: [https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-exchange?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fdata%2520exchange&utm_medium=reader2](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-exchange?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fdata%2520exchange&utm_medium=reader2). In that post I set aside the question of SSIP, and the maintenance of the imperative of the center, only slightly touching on prediction markets, so now it’s possible to tie it altogether. Each team wants to replenish itself, because each team aims at singularized succession and in therefore laying the groundwork for producing new candidates.\n\nThose in engaged in narrowly defined pedagogical practices are also interested in SSIP, which is possible insofar as they produce candidates for recruitment into other institutions but also insofar as they create pedagogical disciplinary spaces that will continue to study new capacities generated by the practices elicited by the stack of scenes in its ongoing remakings. Those leading the teams on the lookout for candidates can’t be sure which of the pedagogical disciplines have identified those ostensive-imperative-ostensive links that will transform the declarative order so as to register new realities. They are essentially betting here, perhaps relying upon “consultants” who do study pedagogical tendencies but not quite from the inside, making them fallible.\n\nThis set up is not all that distant from current arrangements where, at least in the stories academic institutions tell themselves, employers are looking for certain qualities in their employees and universities can make themselves attractive to students by providing them with those qualities. It’s as if companies were to take a more direct role in assessing curricula and pedagogies and acquiring “rights” to students through contractual arrangements with the universities—a horrifying prospect under today’s conditions, but not at all if we are imagining teams whose explicit purpose is always to surface some new human capacity within the stack of scenes—our whole replacement of the “economic” system presupposes a comprehensive and socially sanctioned and sanctified apprentice system.\n\nThis only takes us a generation, maybe two, ahead, which is hardly perpetuity, but we have nevertheless broken the link between futurity and discounting, and in the pedagogical practices one examines in order to replenish one’s team, one not only penetrates beyond the higher level of education (“college students”) down to the elementary levels and even systems of childrearing, kinship networks, neighborhoods and so on as preliminaries of the kind of pedagogies capable of providing the needed candidates, but one comes to see future versions of oneself in these pedagogical practices, albeit versions that are simultaneously utterly and unimaginably different. And this in terms means aesthetic investments, in the creation of imaginaries, of ways of being one could promise to contribute to, even if in ways one couldn’t specify at the moment. The entire present is therefore spread out as signs of SSIP.\n\nTo make the problem more precise, what is at stake is how to tokenize pedagogical increments—that is, what is a “unit” of pedagogy, or do we need to think in other terms? We could think of pedagogy as compression: practices that were previously learned in haphazard ways can now be transmitted while filtering out all the haphazardness—what was learned through trial and error can now dispense with the errors. Could a particular pedagogical compression then be a “unit,” that could identified and measured, and treated as currency? It’s better to say that one mode of pedagogical compression is better than another, as judged by those recruiting to replenish their ranks, and in organizing subscription networks having subscription arrangements with educational institutions with compressions you would claim better serve to attract potential subscription partners by providing privileged access to a particular pool of candidates.\n\nThe bet here is that judging the future effects of pedagogy is uncertain, and discredit would accrue, perhaps to devastating effect, from choosing poorly. We could imagine that some new pedagogical approach drawing upon new technological affordances might be either a game-changing investment or the equivalent of the Dutch tulip bubble—but even in the latter case we wouldn’t be looking at fraud or a Ponzi scheme but an experiment that is successful insofar as we will have learned from it.\n\nMaybe for “pedagogical compression” I can replace that unwieldy concept I’ve never found much use for, originally intended to conceptualize technology: mimological impressments.\n\nWe can think of a compression or impressment “unit” as an ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuit—although even here, there is no reason to assume they will all be of equal “value,” if “value” is still the issue. Pedagogy is itself a kind of technology, so mimological impressment unites the two explicitly: a mimological impressment reduces a capacity that requires a declarative to name it to an ostensive-imperative-ostensive (OIO) circuit: identify some thing or feature; make some change required by that identification; show the result. The power of one pedagogy relative to another is that what is still represented declaratively in the inferior pedagogy is transformed into a mimological impressment in the superior one.\n\nThe teams deciding which pedagogical institution to invest in would themselves be learning and taking up the mimological impressments in some way, and those that are most transferable to their own practices are more “valuable.” In this way those most adept at data circuit and thereby home of the occupant of the center will generate a pool of candidates that will be able to generate a pool of candidates, that will… Until we have deferral all the way up and down.\n\nThat’s the program, then; to get there involves creating markets constantly on the way towards the abolition of markets by creating spaces where currency is created by betting on pro-social, which is to say singularized in succession, practices. What is moral is not so much making one choice over another as creating a new space of choices in which moral deliberation can be exercised and displayed. And the moral is really a derivative of the juridical, presenting decisions as adjudicable before a virtual tribunal, ultimately God, which is freed of the ritual and lingering vendettas that mar any actual court. Obviously, it’s immoral to betray your friend, but this is a lower level of morality than that involved in the consideration of how to enable your friend to deal with getting betrayed by reality (once you’re thinking in those terms, it’s simply a given that you wouldn’t betray your friend).\n\nWe create more informal prediction markets whenever we frame conversations in terms of equally moral but consequentially different decisions emerging from a single event. This is when we get interested in, curious about and immersed in another’s deliberations, rather than being anxious over whether they will fall short of our expectations. You pursue their moral reasoning by narrowing down their decision to a 50/50 chance so that something that is only noticed as a result of the reasoning determines the decision and a new idiom is created. You can frame decisions at a lower moral level in these terms as well—the one considering betraying his friend doesn’t really want to betray his friend; you can simply assume this as a fulcrum point in the conversation and insist that he’s really, say, exploring possibilities rooted in his history so as to refine his moral thinking.\n\nIn this way you gain credit in future conversations as someone who expands the present by injecting the future represented as currency into the scene as a scene-maker. The formality of such markets can be modulated—you can describe another’s actions and decisions to a third party in such a way as to implicate them in the decision and reveal something of themselves in the way they bet."
    },
    {
      "slug": "some-political-reflections",
      "title": "Some Political Reflections",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 20, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/some-political-reflections",
      "content": "Here’s a simple way of crystallizing the politics of “anthropomorphics”: there is a vertical axis and a horizontal axis; on the vertical axis, we start with the minimal model of an issuer of imperatives that include the presumption of obedience (as opposed to imperatives—like those of the petitioner—that include no such presumption) and what one wants is that those imperatives be fulfilled, which means they are “well formed” and situationally “actionable,” are transmitted in a way included in the command, and received by those taking the intention implicit in the command as their own. Anything that gets in the way of this process of issuance, transmission and reception is what one is against.\n\nBecause what’s the point of putting people in charge of things if they’re not in charge of things? The horizontal axis involves the acquisition, collection, assessment, preservation, filtering and communication—ultimately to those who need it and as they need it on the command chain—of data, information, intelligence; here, we want data, information, intelligence produced in the most directly and comprehensible usable form: we want data, information, intelligence such that if you were to assign teams of auditors to check and verify it all the only defects they would find would be due to the time constraints of having the material available when needed (if the decision could have been put off until tomorrow, the intelligence could have been better, but the best available evidence suggested that the decision could not be put off and the checking and verifying could not offer a better reading of the intelligence then available).\n\nAnything and anyone mucking around with this process should be opposed and subsequently suspected with the greatest possible prejudice (but this is not necessarily an obvious determination insofar as, to take one example, public falsehoods may be disseminated as part of a broader intelligence operation—part of knowing is knowing who knows).\n\nIf we want to then get into institutional analysis (monarchy vs. republic vs. democracy, etc.) it will be in accord with the question of which arrangement will best enable the vertical to intersect with the horizontal. My own way of formulating this intersecting is through the concept of “singularized succession in perpetuity,” because the most direct proof of a operational command structure is being able to select one’s successor, and the most direct proof of an operational intelligence structure is that such selection is most likely to best serve social continuity, making the present a space where the past flows intelligibly into the future.\n\nThis is a politics that is as radical as one can get, I think, in its implications for transformation, while still observing the principle “do no harm,” since any but the most completely broken institution will have some operational command and intelligence structure, or even just the institutional memory of one. It’s also the most visionary as well as most practical politics, since it would inflame the imagination of anyone thinking of the kinds of people and relationships needed to create such an order while informing what anyone can do right now, at any level or scale. And think about all the pointless arguments over definitions you can avoid by just asking questions like, “ok, so what can this guy that you want to do things actually do”?\n\nWe can conduct ongoing, unprejudiced audits of the existing order that question the criteria for assessing facts along with the facts themselves—maybe, for example “90%” of the social order can be deemed “healthy” but even so the corrosive effect of that “10%” is yet to be determined.\n\nLet’s now bring this pared down version of an “anthropomorphic” or “originary” politics to bear on what I hope is an equally pared down version of the primary political transformation we have been undergoing in the transition (to first of all speak colloquially and imprecisely) from modernity to postmodernity. The problem posed for modern governance is the deferral of violence under postsacral conditions where the ordering offered by the honor system must be placed, at the very least, under perpetual pressure. This was accomplished through the assignment of rights to the individual as a simulacrum of the sacrality of each soul before God as the correlate of the evacuation of the sacred governing center: one can rule insofar as one’s rule is acknowledged to be provisional and only in the service of protecting the rights of the individual.\n\nThis mode of governance has generated an entire moral, ethical and aesthetic order of the elaboration of the individual, his/her/their outer and inner components, dilemmas, comedies and tragedies, and so on. It reaches its breaking point as governance is transferred to the bureaucracy as a result of the evacuation of the center, which is still preserved and even enhanced for stage management purposes, along with the increasing distribution of resources to meeting the needs of all of the individuals (at least sufficiently so as to ward off catastrophe) in the social order so that considering individuals qua individuals becomes impossible.\n\nIndividuals can only be represented as victims of some usurpation of the center, or as brave opponents of some such usurpation—any claim to centrality, or to be intrinsically centered, is highly suspicious, to say the least. And all of this corresponds less and less to the actual workings of governance.\n\nWhat governance, with the aid of social media and increasingly sophisticated forms of automation, now aims at, is a probabilistic approach, which involves the generation and ranking of probabilities through the gathering and analysis of data. When I say that “governance aims at” this, I mean that anyone given genuine responsibility over large scale human activities will have to resort to such means or will very much want to. We see enormous resistance to the emergence of this mode of governance, and while the most sensational form of resistance is from right-wing opposition to globalism, the most effective resistance is in fact from the left, which is a kind of internal resistance deforming the process (and thereby producing results especially objectionable to conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists).\n\nThe probabilistic approach to governance (algorithmic governance) poses enormous, maybe even existential challenges to the juridical form, which is the source of and is reinforced by the institutionalization of the sacrality of the individual. One vector of science fiction has zeroed in on this challenge (e.g., “Minority Report”), and I have mentioned it in previous posts as well: if we can determine through, say, some socio-biological science which people are most likely to act anti-socially and disruptively, who will under-perform and who will perform well, why not act directly on that knowledge to steer and constrain groups and individuals before waiting for them to do the kinds of things we already know they will do? The only thing standing in the way here is our juridically derived commitment to judging individuals in accord with their own actions rather than in accord with some stereotype they fit.\n\nThe left is closely aligned with and even embedded in the emergent institutions of algorithmic governance so its completely rational concerns here can never be made sufficiently explicit to be discussed openly. If we allow for a strictly probabilistic model, the victim groups defended by the left will be disproportionately disadvantaged. The left tries to get around this by attributing such results (which we’ve already seen enough of to elicit by now stereotyped responses) to something like “racist capitalism,” but they don’t really believe that a more fine-tuned and nuanced programming of the algorithms will produce more favorable results.\n\nAt the same time, there is much in algorithmic governance that they see much use for, especially in the surveillance field. They need to work out the right mode of control but getting control of the “bad” results might interfere with at least some of the “good” results for some major players. But the left is correct to assume that lowering the threshold of the juridical will lead, not to a more properly scientific creation of social order, but to openings for various returns of the honor system, i.e., the vendetta, and this from both right and left. And, in fact, we are not able to imagine the abolition of the juridical and a full move into disciplinary governance, and we may not ever be—to imagine the uprooting of juridical terms (justice, freedom, equality, rights, impartiality, etc.) is to image the creation of a new language, which can’t be done within the language we have.\n\nIt remains the case that even if there’s a 10x higher likelihood that members of group A will commit a crime than that members of group B will do so we don’t know whether this member of group A will commit this crime here and now—and this is still a “higher” insight than any we could glean from the most advanced algorithm, simply because removing this assumption narrows and deforms the data we will receive for reworking the algorithm. But the juridical can be not only preserved but enhanced by acknowledging the implications of probabilistic knowledge for auxiliary preparations meant to remain in the background as much as possible until necessary.\n\nWhen encountering a member of group A, alarm bells, at a certain volume, can be set off and tactical reserves carefully and unobtrusively mobilized. And if this particular member of group A does nothing to increase the volume of the alarm bells or initiate activation of those tactical reserves, he/she/they need ever feel (even if everyone will know) that they were set off. And, of course, those tactical measures can be made as transient in their effects as possible (pre-empting rather than punishing crimes is preferable). These are all things those responsible for public safety could work on, that would in the long run be more transparent, more conducive to public trust and solidarity, and evidence of a mature social order.\n\nAnd what counts as appropriate measures could itself be assessed on juridical as well as disciplinary terms. We could imagine behaviors (and therefore algorithms) changing over time as the more productive members of the various group would be influencing the more anti-social or low performing members, whereas the reverse tends to be the case now. Working towards such an arrangement would be an excellent example of the mode of politics described above, which is therefore well-suited toward ushering us in to the age of algorithmic governance—but I don’t think I’d have to convince anyone that this would not be an easy politics.\n\nThe left currently stalls such a politics with a hyper-juridicalization that draws upon the early results of algorithmic governance to radicalize claims of discriminatory institutional structures and thereby using the discipline to launder power in an acceleration of turnover of occupancy of the center conjoined with the intensification of centralized means of control. The various strains of the anti-globalist right, meanwhile, will have to determine whether they can see a way clear to an embrace of algorithmic governance, especially, in the wake of their repudiation of the COVID regime, in the area of bio-medical politics.\n\nMust all bio-medical politics be “tyranny”? More effective and less intrusive modes of provision of public health must be imaginable, and in fact one often sees explorations in that direction by anti-globalists—it will be a question of, as I attempt above, reconciling such measures with some reconstruction of juridical categories, rather than a reactive use of existing juridical categories to bolster opposition.\n\nThe greatest challenge, though, will probably be engaging surveillance itself—the kind of “casual” surveillance that results from the fact that every means of communicating, transporting and transacting we have today leaves digital traces that could be collected and used by corporations and governments. The current approach, one that with no exceptions I can think of is shared by left and right alike, is to deploy existing juridical categories to denounce and seek to minimize and control this pervasive surveillance. Indeed, much of the existing surveillance exceeds existing legal (and moral) provisions, which were not designed with the existing technological means in mind.\n\nAll our assumptions about “privacy,” for example, are outmoded and reactionary, modeled on mid-20th century urban anonymity. But if we mistrust our rulers so much that we don’t want them to have any information about any of us other than what could be obtained through a properly secured search warrant how could we imagine that any rules we could somehow force upon them would in the end be observed? Indeed, who other than these same rulers would be enforcing those rules? Making the social more intelligent implies more intelligence. Here in particular is where a more open and even adventurous approach to the juridical is necessary, where energy could be focused on enhancing individual responsibility for actions on the model of what was once routine: suing individual law enforcement agents for unjustified searches and arrests.\n\nThis practice, in fact, was part of the objection to the exclusionary rule derived from the Miranda case—if the officer stumbles, why does that mean the perpetrator should walk? Address the officer’s impropriety separately—if the evidence, even if improperly collected, does point to the guilt of the accused, it should be used, even if the officer is liable. Instead of a polarity of tyrannical government vs. innocent individual, we’d be involved in sorting out cases where the government is engaged in fulfilling its responsibilities employing the means it sees fit in a given situation from cases of incompetence or persecution, where information is misused.\n\nThis would have a de-bureaucratizing effect, and relativize distinctions between official and non-official modes of enforcement while also accentuating the paradoxically self-abolishing nature of the juridical: after all, if every criminal were arrested, convicted and jailed according to the legally determined penalties there would soon be no more crime; if every transaction was entered into and conducted with good faith there would be no lawsuits, etc., and this is exactly the result the law is designed to encourage—so, in a sense we can not so much imagine as get a glimpse of the post-juridical by re-imagining the juridical.\n\nJust as developments in AI make the element of human control and crucial nodes even more important, the pressure placed on the juridical by the disciplinary in algorithmic governance can lead to re-inventions of the juridical and even its expanded use—and then, new versions, moral, ethical and aesthetic, of the “individual,” will emerge in its wake."
    },
    {
      "slug": "stacking-against-the-big-scene",
      "title": "Stacking Against the Big Scene",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 02, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/stacking-against-the-big-scene",
      "content": "I’m going to follow up here on the notion of the “grammatical stack,” or the imperative to “line up” the speech forms (ostensive>imperative>interrogative>declarative>imperative>ostensive) so as to approximate maximum internal referentiality across the speech forms. In other words, the imperatives you follow should map onto the ostensive field they emerge from and serve the preservation of that field; those imperatives should be “prolongable” into the questions which flow exhaustively into your sentences and discourse, and your declaratives should “give off” imperatives that guide other centers in the identification of new ostensives that reconfigure the ostensive field around the anomaly that originally broached linguistic presence, initiating the sequence. I will call this moral practice (and should be replacing the concept of moral practice with) “stacking,” so as to include grammatical stacking in the broader practice of data exchange and the conversion of users into interfaces.\n\nI’m pursuing stacking here as a continuation of my breaking up of what I’ve been calling “the Big Scene”—that is, the representation of social reality (on any scale) modeled on a single scene with a divisible object at the center. Most ways most people talk about most “issues” would serve as examples, but here’s a simple one: when we speak of something like “racial justice,” we presuppose agents designated in racial terms (say, “blacks” and “whites”) and we imagine them standing together, perhaps across from each other, on a shared scene with the total goods of society at the center, with the “whites” receiving more of those goods than some imagined “equal” sharing would allow for.\n\nIf you look at any discussion of racial justice, gendered justice, social justice, global justice, etc., you will see that it can all be reduced into these terms. But the terms are illusory—the agents don’t exist as agents, that is, “blacks” and “whites” don’t “do” anything—they wouldn’t work as characters within a coherent narrative; nor is there a set of social goods that can be divided like a pie into more even slices. Big Scenic thinking can only generate resentment; moreover, it is an indication that we have not transcended sacrificial thinking, which can only be formulated into terms of exchanges with a center in which unified agents give something to the center (“follow the rules,” “act as good citizens,” etc.) in exchange for a fair piece of the pie.\n\nThe most direct way to opt out of such narrative structures (in which whites and blacks fight, do injustices to each other, reconcile, try to work it out, etc.) is to treat only official names as narrativizable agents. Sovereigns can act; institutions delegated or chartered by the sovereign with designated officials can act; individuals with names can act. So, “blacks” don’t do, say, or think anything, but the NAACP can, individual African-American individuals can, and so on. Attributing agency to unchartered and therefore mystically summoned actors contributes to the erosion of sovereignty by imagining behind the scenes narratives behind formal actors, who are therefore mere fronts.\n\nThis is not only the source of “conspiracy theories,” under the assumption that the agents who officially do things can’t really be the ones doing them, but it’s a great bane to the social sciences, which use the same kinds of magical actors to exert their own pressures on sovereign and chartered actors. Needless to say, sovereignty “leaks” considerably, and the construction of behind the scenes narratives is effect as well as cause of this—in the end, though, if you want to point to agents controlling or circumventing sovereign and chartered agents, you will have to point to them doing so through those agents, and those who are behind the scenes are ultimately named themselves—specific individuals, specific organizations, even if clandestine ones that are nevertheless following assignments from named actors.\n\nLet’s say we have a country where unofficial mafias run everything and all public officials are in their pockets and under their sway—we will find that the mafias, or their heads, or the heads of at least the most important families, have in fact been formalized in some way, and could therefore be formalized more explicitly. Formalism is a mode of analysis, not just a political aspiration.\n\nBut surely we can study ethnic groups (Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc.), keep records of them, speak of tendencies and patterns we see across these groups, including stereotypes and so on? You couldn’t stop people from talking about the ethnic groups in their neighborhoods, after all. Yes, these groups are groups because they have passed from one sovereign to another, but also because they establish various ethnic organizations that are recognized by the sovereign. There’s some discrepancy, to be sure between the “real life” and communal existence of an ethnic group and the various fraternal, cultural, trade, lobbying, etc., organizations it establishes—still, if you drill down a bit deeper into communal institutions, like schools, local businesses, churches, neighborhood events (block parties, etc.), and even into things like gangs, which themselves are bound to families and attended to by the police, social workers, and so on, usually with the same ethnic “inflection” (not every police officer in a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood will be Italian, but disproportionately they probably will be, and those who are will probably have a different relation to the community), then the discrepancy ultimately evaporates.\n\nOf course, plenty of sociologists, ethnographers, anthropologists and, for that matter, reporters and novelists have known this, but it is very rare to see the kind of discipline I’m suggesting now, of giving a publicly registered name to every agency to whom action and motivation is attributed, and whom you wish to put into a narrative. Even if you don’t know all the details—and none of us do, except in cases we’re close to—you should speak knowing that they could be known, and that there are such agencies implicit in your descriptions and that you’re always rendering a hypothetical account of them.\n\nThis is critical because names are ostensives and are therefore the first samples fed into the stack, grammatical and computational alike. Moreover, that you start by sorting out the names that will include everyone also implies that the purpose of your inquiry is to strengthen the system of naming. And that is indeed the purpose: to turn names into sites where power and responsibility coincide. The coincidence of power and responsibility is the organization of the grammatical stack. A name gives off imperatives—directly, to its subjects; indirectly to others, to offer some kind of support, engage in some kind of exchange, ultimately in order to direct attention the relation between the name and the center.\n\nYou want the name to remain the same in relation to the center, even if that involves exposing all the discrepancies and inconsistencies in its relation to the center. In fact, a nominalist appreciation of the arbitrariness of the name initiates the hypothesizing of possible relationships between the name and the center. Whatever anyone says about the name is to be treated as such a hypothesis. These hypotheses are questions shading into declaratives: is the president the president if_______; if not, what would the president have to do in order to be president; in order to do that, how would other named centers need to arrange for their own succession?\n\nYou generate a series of sentences that might answer these questions, sentences that correspond to different degrees of likely occurrence, of success if realized, supplemented differently with guesses regarding information one couldn’t possibly have but are necessary for a definitive answer to your questions. These sentences generate questions and imperatives for you: who would you have to be to receive such a president, and start preparing to become that person—you would then be able to detect signs in your relations to others pointing you towards the fulfillment of that imperative, and its subsidiary imperatives.\n\nApproximating the same name in its successive samples is a continual source of hypotheses, but never of narratives. Narratives presuppose that the name remains the same—of course, the protagonists of a narrative change as a result of the events depicted, but the changes are meaningful precisely because the protagonist remains the same in spite of it all, however transformed. You couldn’t “learn from your experience” if you weren’t the same person who had the experience. The hypothesis acknowledges that the name remains the same insofar as and to the extent that the center calls upon it in a way that leverages previous denominations.\n\nNarratives are what keep the Big Scene in place: every narrative follows a protagonist, individual or collective, from having or lacking its piece of the central pie, to losing or gaining more of the pie, in such a way as to demonstrate, if not the justice, at least the irresistibility of the center (and irresistibility is really justice for those capable of the level of deferral needed to discern it). If your hypothesis is a program design for a world exhaustively described by the names conferred by the center, then there’s no protagonist and no narrative—even the occupant of the center, assuming your hypothesis fleshes him out and makes him interesting, isn’t a protagonist because nothing’s at stake for him—if something is at stake for him, he’s not really occupying the center.\n\nIf someone were to ask, well, what do we do to right the world, how do we act on this hypothetical knowledge (if “knowledge” is the right word), the answer is: make a name for yourselves. Organize yourselves as the immanent regime, the regime the “actually existing” regime should be and “really is,” in such a way as to model the regime becoming itself through the rectification of names. Treat names so as to more closely approximate the terms of their charter. Every named practice presupposed the intervention of the center insofar as any act can be contested and appealed to the center: engage disputes when called upon to do so, but convert the dispute into an exemplary practice making the name more itself by deriving an assignment from the center. “I have a right to…” becomes “insofar as we are indeed_____, here’s what we are doing:_____.” Convert drama into hypothetical practices.\n\nThat is what stacking against the Big Scene will look like. Names issue imperatives insofar as they are not the same as themselves—the imperative is to reduce the discrepancy, to have the names approximate themselves, but, to do that, the imperatives must be prolonged into interrogatives regarding the whole field of discrepancies, using what seem the less irremediable discrepancies as anchoring points. These questions are mapped onto declaratives: this self-same name would approximate itself more by…; …by…; …by…; etc. Each sentence is a hypothesis, which “leans into” new imperatives, because they “suggest” (“suggest” refers to a soft imperative, barely emergent from its declarative cocoon) testing out the descriptions, which necessarily leave openings in the field.\n\nAnd these imperatives to test out these possible openings or positionings within the field empty out into ostensives, which are indications that a given name, or network of names, or the entire system of names, might self-approximate more given the position occupied. Such practices will generate new names, but the best way to generate new names is by working on rectifying the existing ones until you get to the point where you can see that the name is the same as itself because it’s not what it once was or what you imagined it to be. And this will result from wiping out vast semantic swaths, as whole vocabularies turn out to not only be intrinsically subversive of self-approximating naming, but designed so as to make such self-approximation impossible. You can guess at what those semantic regions are—they are organized around terms like “freedom,” “equality,” “rights,” “tyranny,” “oppression,” and so on: all terms designed for deployment in semiotic wars over the Big Scene.\n\nGrammatical stacking needs to be put in an uploadable form so that it can be data entried into the computational stack. That will be the work of the coming months. Whether it is ever in fact computerized (I do want it to be) or not is less important than that it provides primearchy a way of processing parallel to the planetary stack. Even if the planetary stack turns out to be less than resilient, or unable to resist the dysfunctional power relations on which it relies—indeed, even if we see some kind of collapse, and we have to learn to homestead once again—the planetary stack will still be the immanent regime, the system a functional system of power will one day occupy. It is therefore the present horizon of thinking."
    },
    {
      "slug": "techno-grammar",
      "title": "Techno-Grammar",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 04, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/techno-grammar",
      "content": "As [Brian Roemelle](https://readmultiplex.com/) points out, at the center of technology now is prompt engineering, which is essentially the designing of search terms that would elicit results from searches into textual databases (i.e., AI) that will most powerfully suggest the design of a new search term. As [Henrik Karlsson](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2) (and, I must say, me) have said, prompt engineering or search term design goes well beyond database searches and reach into all social networks—your search results will situate you within the data, waiting there to be found via another’s search.\n\nThis is arranging and treating your data as part of data exchanges, with others but ultimately the center, the repository of all data. Roemelle is also aware that this places language back at the center of technology, as even coding is coming to be generated through verbal search terms. But I think a better account of grammar and language as a mode of inquiry can be provided than Roemelle does, so I’d like to begin by presenting an explanation of grammar that I have used in my classes but can’t remember ever working through here or on the GABlog, and then move beyond that to a technologizing of language as, seemingly paradoxically, a mode of wisdom literature (which it seems to me now can incorporate the transdisciplinary discourse I have worked to turn GA into).\n\nI present the declarative sentence as the unfolding of an anticipated dialogue embedded in the sentence. We begin the subject, something you could mention, name or point to; about this subject or topic we could expect one to ask, what about it? The answer to that question is the predicate: what about the horse? It’s running, or it’s brown, or it needs to be shoed, etc. We then bring in the modifiers, first of all the adjectives, which answer the possible question, which or what kind of [subject]? The brown horse, not the black one, the fast horse (not the slow one). (It seems to me that “which” has priority here, because singling out one object of interest out of several possible ones is logically prior to the more abstract categorization of types.)\n\nThe adverbs, meanwhile, answer the possible question, how or in what way: the horse runs quickly, not slowly, it walks nobly, not nervously. I don’t fall into the trap of defining or explaining prepositions (although Anna Wierzbicka does think this can be done, and I’m sure she’s right, even though I don’t think it helps much in the analysis of sentences) for the simple reason that prepositions always either are or (much more often) go along with nouns to form adjectives or adverbs, which are already accounted for. (“I don’t fall into the trap…” which, or what kind of trap? The trap _of defining_.) But I have never bothered with conjunctions, or articulations of clauses, because it has seemed to me less important that students have a way of talking about them. But this is a very important issue for prompt engineering, and, grammatically, I think we can focus less on the paratactic “and” (interestingly not one of Wierzbicka’s primes) and more on the hypotactic “if,” ”but” and ‘because.”\n\nI’m going to come back to something I haven’t discussed in quite a while (and which might turn out to be as important to originary grammar as I once expected), construction grammar, and with the help of Daniel Shore’s _Cyberformalism_ which places the grammatical construction of formulas at the center of language, displacing the two poles of word and sentence that have dominated semiotics, and in particular for the purposes of designing and carrying out corpus searches across large databases. My plan is to target those constructions or formulas that do the work of “if, “but”” and “because” within phrases, or a group of words that together functions as a subject or (much more often, I assume) modifier.\n\nLet’s start with the following sentence, from the Cambridge University’s online dictionary definition of “to the extent that”: “It’s only worth planting flowers _to the extent that_ it gives you pleasure.” This sentence could be rewritten as “ _if_ planting flowers give you pleasure, _then_ it is worth doing it.” So, the causal/logical connection between planting flowers and receiving pleasure is made more explicit here, which is to say, the phrase _to the extent_ _that_ conceals or renders implicit the causal relation. At the same time, it makes the thought slightly subtler, by recognizing degrees of desiring to plant flowers which, presumably, up until a certain point or past a certain point would not give pleasure.\n\nAnd this suggests that making such causal/logical relations implicit will enrich meaning by (implicitly) adding questions of degree and other qualifications that make the thought more complex, simply by being translated out of these “prime” terms (I’ll note, though, that “but” is not a Natural Semantic Prime) into sentences including formulaic phrases or other means, such as the passive voice, nominalizations, turning verbs into adjectives within phrases, and so on. And if meaning is thereby enriched, the searches will presumably be further enriched, even if we would need the attentive interaction with the measured and mixed up database to see how this might be the case and to make it “richer” in the ways we want.\n\nThe search term as wisdom approach provides a powerful new application of the work I have done (included in _Anthropomorphics_ ) on Wierzbicka and David Olson’s theory of literacy, i.e., the metalanguage of literacy. If we start with the prime verbs focused on mental activity—think, say, want, know, feel, see and hear—and consider the way in which writing is (per Olson) in the first instance a record of reported speech which must indicate the attitude of the speaker whose speech (recorded in lieu of being able to imitate him) creates a whole field of verbs and subsequent nominalizations that in my hypothesis open up the disciplines.\n\nWords like “suggest,” “consider,” “understand,” “imagine,” “imply,” “indicate,” etc., are just ways of translating words like “know,” say,” “think” and so on into some stack of scenes build out of data including all kinds of other things that have been said, known, thought, said to have been known, etc. In making our way back and forth from the hypothetical scene we can draw from Wierzbicka’s primes (which finds some confirmation in a list Olson compiles in _The World on Paper_ of pre-literate speech act verbs) upon which only the primes are used and the enormous range of far more complex discourses in which those words have been made to “trail” behind them whole series of scenes we can enter from any number of angles any discourse.\n\nI’m pursuing here my hypothesis (again, articulated in _Anthropomorphics_ ) that the disciplines, starting with philosophy, are nothing more than articulations of the metalanguage of literacy, picking up and translating along the way the more fundamental categories of ritual, debt (exchange with the center), and the juridical. The metalanguage of literacy produces a fabricated present contrived out of various match-ups between categories deposited in the mind and categories deposited in reality—the purpose of originary grammar is to deconstruct such a present into the stacked scenes presented with the problem of succession. The question of succession, the ongoing distribution of team members and teams across scenes, is the true present.\n\nAs Roemelle points out, the search is conducted by giving the “AI” (let’s say, algorithmically saturated data such that the data elicits incipient reciprocal commensuration across reality) imperatives and asking it questions. The prolongation of the ostensive into the imperative, the imperative into the interrogative and the interrogative into the declarative studied by originary grammar will prove its potency here as well. The imperative is the command or demand that some object—which could be a person, a word, an arrangement—be made present. Using evolutionary language, we can say that those imperatives that can make the trek through to the declarative will be “selected for.”\n\nThose are the imperatives that can wait, survive changes in power relations and conditions on the ground, become requests or insistences, get differentiated in requests for information about the object, which in turn become requests for information about the possibility of obtaining information, and so on. In the end, an interrogative has to map onto a declarative—a good question is one that can be answered by some presence or a promise of presence; clearly the promise of presence is where things start to get interesting, because here is where various conditionalities enter into the equation and the whole array of formulas and constructions come into play.\n\nThink about a sequence like the following: “you’re not here… get over here… could you come here… why aren’t you here… when can you get here… is something preventing you from being here… could you tell me when you might be here… are you planning to come at all… how will I go on without you… I will be there with you as soon as I can, I am facing obstacles and opposition, the situation keeps changing, I won’t forget you, think of me always, I will always be there with you even if not bodily.” The questioner frames questions so as to “lock in” the interrogant, to provide language for a satisfactory answer, but also to prepare for the worst, and to provide language for an answer that might enable the interrogator to reconcile himself to disappointment with minimal resentment.\n\nThe data search is conducted in the assumption of and commitment to the programmability of all of reality, including the programmers; indeed, the always already programmed nature of all of reality. Programmability means all of reality is primed to engage mimetically with humans and with itself, part to part. We expect everything to become more responsive and in turn we become more responsive and anticipatory ourselves—we give data as we take it in. Roemelle recommends creating what are essentially fictional characters to interact with the algorithmically treated data—“you are a Harvard professor, specializing in…”—which is asking the program to imitate a particular kind of performance.\n\nBut once we acknowledge the comprehensively and constitutively mimetic nature of human reality, and, especially, once we have recognized the rivalries that result from attempts at full bodied imitation, we can divert our thinking to another kind of imitation, one targeted to gestures, and more explicitly pedagogical. Instead of commanding (often tacitly) the student or initiate to “be like me,” it is possible to demystify that authority and say ‘do it like this.” Now, of course there can be no dangerous mimetic rivalry with the program, but there is a question of thinking here: if you ask for a result that might have come from a Harvard professor you bring along all the projections upon that figure that go into making up the Harvard professor.\n\nIf, instead, we, say, formulate questions aimed at tracing a particular legal term through legendary or ritual material; or test out the boundaries between the ritual, the juridical and the disciplinary; design searches to identify a specified variety ways of translating “think” or “say” into disciplinary concepts; translate imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives into each other, and so on, we can work below the level of personalities to the basic moves and gestures that comprise the basic elements of a stack of scenes, which is to say, that fill in the various imperative gaps articulating center with periphery. We then hypothesize regarding the way the scenes are stacked, which is how we continue to stack the scenes we are on.\n\nThere remains the question of the programming language I’ve been working on in recent posts, that have applied the primes to the tripartite distinction of ritual, juridical and disciplinary. Before will have been the same as after; the part of all will have been the same; doing is the same as happening; and, let’s add, indicating the imperative threading through these domains, more happening can be because of doing. These serve as formulas, drawn from the primes, like the basic parameters of wisdom literature from which are derived narratives and commands. They are fleshed out with the metalanguage of literacy in ways that create stacks within the disciplines, preserving inscriptions of the ritual in the juridical, the juridical in the disciplinary and the disciplinary in the ritual.\n\nAnd disciplinary discourses can be reduced back into articulations and configurations of the formulas. Jaron Lanier in a recent article called for opening up the “black box” of the large language models, for the good cause of crediting the producers of the data used by those models—that is, to restore the juridical to the ritual and disciplinary explosion of technology. Lanier sees this as a way of compensating producers who contribute the data, but this goal seems unlikely; what is more likely is not to open the black box literally by tracing back all its data points but rather hypothetically, by designing prompts that expose possible inscriptions of the ritual, disciplinary and juridical in one another.\n\nInstead of paying people for past productions you would convert them into more effective producers now making contributions to institutions reduced to the problem of data security. Hypothetical trails would lead to ways of constructing and creating present trains of data; we provide not, primarily, information or knowledge, but language, which precedes and includes both. We would want to learn how to design rather surreal, or perhaps pataphysical prompts, asking, for example, to compose a story in a mock documentary style regarding a case that produces a differend (i.e., in which any decision produces an injustice) and that starts small but comes to involve powerful social actors.\n\nThe program will produce something that touches awkwardly and perhaps unconvincingly, even bizarrely, on these commands—but then you begin to work backwards, engineering prompts, searching for court cases with language similar to the story, for mock documentary stories that might have served as models, for well known cases of a seemingly trivial case triggering wider social contagion. You shake loose the data in this way. We’d have new language for speaking about court cases, especially extremely difficult ones, for describing the ways powerful players get drawn in involuntarily while also exploiting such cases, for turning factual, presumably neutral language into satire at various levels of explicitness. The human is dissolved in the institutional and technological scenery while re-emerging by re-naming it all."
    },
    {
      "slug": "tethering-and-toggling-ritual-juridical-and-disciplinary",
      "title": "Tethering and Toggling Ritual, Juridical and Disciplinary",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 10, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/tethering-and-toggling-ritual-juridical",
      "content": "What we speak of as ritual is distribution from the center returning to the center including the process of distributing people so as to manage the distribution and return. Needless to say, this permeates all social practices, and once the occupant of the center is no longer sacralized (leaving aside for now how secure he should be in that occupancy) we can proceed to speak of those practices previously known as ritual as central intelligence deeming the same to be returning as the same. Returns are all ultimately “in kind,” even if the kind is money or devotion, and intelligence is intelligence of the same enduring through its circulation (through ever expanding fields of likeness and against some otherness).\n\nThis means ongoing checking of the channels of communication, which means continual language learning. The financial system, which I have been working on getting my vocabulary around recently, is particularly central to the central intelligence, providing intelligence regarding what is to be distributed and who is at the posts ensuring distribution. In some ways, at some times, it’s an intelligent form of intelligence, but it’s ultimately unintelligent insofar as it provides us with more information regarding arbitrage possibilities and the spread of what Edward LiPuma calls the “speculative ethos” and “monetized subjectivities” than it does regarding the state of social needs and capacities. Everything we do is an attempt to discern and follow the imperatives of the center, which we can now (while continuing to use the more accessible word “ritual”) call findings and foundings of the same.\n\nFinding and founding the same in a field of likenesses against some other can take infinite forms (we are doing this with every utterance and sign issuance) not all of which are equally acceptable to the central intelligence. Under strictly ritual conditions, where the center is occupied solely by what Marshall Sahlins calls, in an exceptionally useful terms, “meta-persons,” the only question is whether ritual commands have been adequately complied with—this is the only “same” that is of concern. (We would have to assume that some members of the community would have greater authority than others in determining what counts as a disobeyed or flawed ritual, or contamination, but also that this might shift often and rapidly and in general be rather “situational”.)\n\nOnce the authority of the meta-person-in-chief is seized by the Big Man (to be later transmitted to the chief, the sacral king, etc.), a different way of determining what can be designated as the same and under what conditions emerges. Some form of reciprocity acknowledging hierarchical relations comes into being—the tributary relation is between humans now, and what the occupant of the center distributes to the community must be returned as, all things being unequal, the same. Like all tributary systems, this is circular, serving to affirm the authority of the center. The asymmetry between center and margin, evident in the meta-personal hierarchies ruling the “egalitarian” community, is continued here insofar as nothing returned to the center could ever be enough, given that the center provides everything. Debt is built in from the beginning; the community runs a permanent deficit with the center. Sameness is always provisional.\n\nThe imperial order institutes a juridical order in order to replace this asymmetrical reciprocity with symmetry between the subjects in relation to the center, whose occupant is beyond all reciprocity. The creation of what Alan Strathern (I’m working with _Sacral Kingship in History: Between Immanence and Transcendence_ ) calls the “transcendence” invented in the Axial Age out of a (never completely eliminated) world of “immanence”) comes about with the effort, scriptural, philosophical, congregational and ritual if not (yet) effectual, to include the imperial center within the justice system. I’m repeating myself here, but never exactly, as I’m aiming at patterns intersecting with patterns, in the generation of a transfer idiom. Again, the unfolding of “transcendence” into a new mode of “immanence” (moving the accountability of the imperial order from the meta-personal to new forms of institutional power) is the central problem presented to those of us interested in clarifying the channels between center and periphery.\n\nThe purpose of working through these concepts here is to center the observation that the restoration of old and the creation of new forms of reciprocity is essential to guiding traffic back and forth between center and periphery. This includes pre-juridical modes of reciprocity, which don’t need to be eliminated, simply modulated so as to prevent independent streams of violence from hindering the operations of the juridical order. To put it simply, not every instance of schoolyard bullying calls for an administrative response; nor does every border skirmish within the international order. The repair of the juridical order includes determining thresholds at which events become of interest to that order.\n\nThe spread of modes of reciprocity is encompassed within the ritual order, and we will always see conflicts settled in some kind of ritual form, with a recognizable gesture, but nevertheless irreducible to it. The same is true of disciplinary knowledge, going all the way back to the use of astrological knowledge to guide decision making in the ancient imperial kingdoms—science is never untethered from the center, and is simply a way of crossing scenes so as to synthesize intelligence gathered across scenes into a new scene. An enclosed, laboratory-style scene is a meta-scene, populated by those drawing upon intelligence gathered by lurkers upon other scenes, including the hardest sciences which invariably involve abstracting elements of the scene, such as sensory and measuring equipment, from the purposes to which they are habitually put and turning them into the platform of a new scene. Preserving the “relative autonomy” (who out there remembers Louis Althusser?) of these scenes while maintaining their installation within the central intelligence is the whole problem.\n\nSo, everything that “we” say “we” want to do has to involve some advance in the interoperability of these three “modalities,” keeping their asymmetry in mind. Advancing some such interoperability is what it will mean to be a “we.” All the means of deferring violence must ultimately be compatible with each other, and the kind of condition religions will refer to as “sin” and Plato might have seen as a “disordered soul” are results of one or another incompatibility. And it has to be shown than ensuring this compatibility, or, better, commensurability, is a source of power, because every argument in favor of damaging disciplinary or juridical conditions in the name of “economic” necessities, or encroaching on basic conditions of scene-setting and commemoration in the name of “justice” (i.e., expanding inordinately the juridical order), diminishing the operations of justice in the name of psychological or sociological knowledge, etc., will be made in the name of some increment of power to be acquired thereby.\n\nThe figure or “identity” of the intelligence gather across scenes, which draws upon the scholar or scribe, the priest (who acquires meta-personal intelligences for his congregants), the derivatives trader, the statesman and spy, seems to be the best way of ensuring the commensurability of the center, its sameness, across time.\n\nWhat the intelligencer is doing is tethering and toggling the three modalities to each other such that transformations in one elicit a range of possible interventions in the other(s). As an aside, I don’t think the three modalities are arbitrary—I believe anything that doesn’t fit into these categories (most obviously things like morality and aesthetics) can be comprehensively accounted for as derivatives of them; nor can I see any way of reducing them further, with the most obvious target for elimination being the juridical but in thinking it through I am reminded of Durkheim’s insight that criminality can never be eliminated because the elimination of one class of recognized wrongdoing will simply lower the threshold of what counts as “crimes,” meaning that communication with the center can always be made more precise and violations will therefore always be detected; but, also, in observing complaints, critiques and resentments across and outside of the political spectrum I see virtually no way anyone has of articulating objections to anything outside of the primary juridical terms like “justice,” “rights,” “freedom,” “equality,” and so on.\n\nEven complaints about “hypocrisy” and “lying” derive from the expectations of the witness; complaints about ‘bias” rely on the figure of the judge, etc. It’s always there, even if implicitly. The alternative would be to complain that things aren’t “efficient,” which is no doubt true, but begs the question of what should be done more efficiently, and why that thing. Even talk of ‘efficiency” would break down into who should be responsible for what and accountable to whom, which are in turn matters of property and the juridical. You might want to speak in terms of something like human “flourishing” or “excellence,” but that mortgages your project to the human sciences and therapeutic discourses.\n\nThe abolition of the juridical, for good or evil, and the redistribution of objects within its frame among the ritual and disciplinary, will be, if it ever happens, the result of a history that I can’t imagine and don’t think anyone else alive could either.\n\nSo, our intelligencers are simultaneously minding tributary chains and continuity at the center, the boundary between the asymmetrical reciprocity of the honor system and the juridical, and the conversion of elements of the scenic infrastructure into new scenes. Assets into data, vendetta into justice, prop into scene. The most immediate data provided by the valuation of assets regards continuity of occupancy of the center in reproducing tributary systems. Here the problem posed is the irreducibility of capitalism to juridical categories and the consequent need for an account of chains of command over supply chains brought to a head in data security.\n\nThat is, where economic agents cannot be tried or sued for breach of promise, fraud, intellectual theft, or other violations of contract because of issues of size, location, legal anomalies, technological complexity making discovery difficult, etc., they will be subject to audit by data security companies interested primarily in bringing them within the scope of the juridical which will also mean separating out and protecting operations whose technical requirements resist reduction to the juridical. The juridical is reduced to points of contact, but everything lying behind those points of contact is legible at those interfaces or are to made so.\n\nObviously, the point is not to say “we” should do this but for intelligencers to commence and continue building such companies to eventually become the best last resort for all (or a critical mass of “all”) concerned. There is always the danger of familial, kin, ethnicity, or locality becoming a source of the resurgence of the vendetta, but the most immediate danger now is the rerouting of juridical capacities for the sake of conducting vendettas—i.e., “lawfare.” Here, it is the signs of such rerouting that must be addressed through data security, by translating the banners of lawfare—“racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “hate,” etc.—into legally actionable and legally irrelevant forms.\n\nMaybe class action lawsuits against people “slandering” entire groups are conceivable, in which case bodies of law could develop regarding the terms and limits of such suits; far more often it is the accusation itself that will prove libelous, and made costly within a well-run legal order. Here, simply demanding definitions of these terms, challenging those definitions or their applications in specific cases, and defending the victims of what remain damaging defamations will take the sting out of them, thereby rendering the underlying anti-discrimination legal order supporting it weakened and irrelevant and/or vulnerable to dismantling.\n\nMeanwhile, all this provides a large part of the agenda of an improved disciplinary order, completed by an ongoing drawing of the boundary between a particular sensing or measuring apparatus as part of the total infrastructure, on the one hand, and its conversion into a new scene centered on gathering data on the effects it produces and detects, on the other—which data is then reconverted back into infrastructural transformations. Both science and the arts are conjoined in the props to scenes pipeline, as, for example taking particular genres of writing (legal, psychiatric, journalistic, encyclopediac, etc.) and seeing “what can be done with it” is a major generator of modern literature and doing the same for new infrastructures is the engine of much modern art.\n\nSo, the acquisition of authority to tilt practices of discounting against future earnings within the scope of the juridical; identifying and controlling for attempts to weaponize the juridical against the juridical; and cultivating habits of singling out unnoticed infrastructural elements that might become scenes in their own right—doing one of these things should “trigger” the initiation of action to do the other across the networks of intelligencers. The work is to make it so if you’re focused on one you’re doing the others as a side effect. Keep uncovering layers of commensurability across these practices. The kind of knowledge needed to bring supply chains within the scope of authority that can deliver evidence to courts and follow the execution of judgments, requiring lots of people trained in ways few if any have ever been trained; this is technical, organizational, legal and therefore anthropological knowledge all at once; knowledge, therefore, requiring the habits of singling out various parts of the entire order and testing, probing, playing, imagining rearrangements, substitutions, modifications of both materials and their human handlers.\n\nThe ability to disassemble and reassemble oneself as needed is implicit in this new kind of human being. We would then be bringing closure to the remnants and residues and ruins of the Axial Age by serving a central intelligence driven entirely by chains of authentication, attestation, archivization, confirmation, transmission, authorization, and so on—that is, explicit ostensivity.\n\nTo figure out how particular classes of derivatives might be brought sufficiently within the frame of lawsuits concerning fraud is a question of knowledge and technology—how can sales and movements of money and assets be measured and recorded so that the behavior of legally defined agents can be made reliable enough as to make a system-threatening withdrawal of “faith” extremely unlikely is a problem to be solved through algorithms and increasing computing power. Perhaps a new technological development, or even the scientific development presaging such a technological one will generate new forms of juridical agency.\n\nChanging legal behavior, then, might start at the other end, in the problems set within the disciplines of computing and data science. Meanwhile, the data made available by the infrastructures for such inquiries derives from institutionally sanctioned forms of data gathering dependent on juridically defined modes of authority. And those juridically defined institutions in turn bear responsibility for the distribution of production and pedagogical capacities, with the failure to meet such responsibilities to others within the supply chains also a juridical matter—what is legally imposed on one end can’t make what is legally imposed on the other end impossible.\n\nI’m not making an argument here so much for “policymakers” (“protect the rule of law but without hindering the creation of wealth,” etc.) as for allied intelligencers infiltrating the various institution and sharing data across them—think in terms of fulcra that would generate effects across fields that advantage “meta-dataticians” who know how the same piece of data becomes a difference piece on each scene, real or imagined, with the imagined scenes working on the real ones."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-affordances-of-god-continued",
      "title": "The Affordances of God, Continued",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 02, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-affordances-of-god-continued",
      "content": "A while back I worked on singling out [the idiom of God](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/writing-as-the-programming-of-scenes?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fthe%2520affordances%2520of%2520god&utm_medium=reader2) in our everyday language in terms of an irruptive and interruptive voice that takes us out of the scene we are in, places us on another scene, and is made to say the same thing on both scenes from within a third, meta, scene. So, you’re having a nice conversation with a couple of friends and one of them asks a question about something you’ve all avoided talking about for a while, like, say, a friend you’ve all broken with for reasons that have never been made explicit.\n\nSomeone there is raising the question, but the question still comes from elsewhere, even for the person asking it, and it evokes questions of betrayal, resentment and cowardice that now find their echoes on other scenes; even if uttered differently on the other scenes, the word is the same as you work it over and try to integrate it in or display it against, the scene it interrupted. In this way we can think about God’s word as being within, alongside of, commenting on our own words, meaning it’s just a question of developing habits of inquiry and reflection, which are forms of deferral, to cancel out the noise and make it audible.\n\nI’d like to now thread this idiom through a couple of revisionist readings of the Bible I’ve fairly recently become acquainted with, and which happen to be at odds with each on some crucial points, in productive ways. The first reading is by [Bernard Lamborelle](https://earthlycovenant.com/), which it seems to me few people have taken up so far. Lamborelle argues that the “Lord” who makes a covenant with Abram and then cedes to him quite a bit of territory was not, in fact, “God,” but, rather, an actual, temporal lord, a powerful king in the area—Lamborelle goes so far as to contend it was Hammurabi. Lamborelle gets equally specific about many other things, and it’s a fascinating analysis, but what I find sufficient for my own purposes is the way thinking of Abraham as being\n\n“entitled” within a kind of feudal relationship in which he is essentially a mercenary serving a local ruler clarifies some obscurities and contributed to my understanding of how the ancient Jewish God was found(ed) out of a mimetic and resentful relation to divine kingship. Lambotelle sees the beginning of this relationship in the aftermath of Abram’s defense and rescue of his cousin Lot in the war of the five kings around (really, against) Sodom. Lamborelle argues that, in saving his kinsman, Abram had to rather bravely take arms and strike a blow against the powerful king involved in extending his sovereignty by subjugating Sodom.\n\nAbram so impressed this ruler that he offered Abram a covenant, in which Abram will act as governor of the Cannanite territories for the ruler, and the ruler will then allow Abram (then, Abraham) to have his children inherit them. Soon after Sodom is in fact destroyed, and Lot and his family saved. Not only is that episode made much clearer now, but so is the fact that Abraham, while at times seeming to be a rather simple shepherd, is obviously a man of considerable wealth and power. So, I am taking on board the assumption that somewhere in the memories eventually recorded in the Hebrew Bible we would find the conversion of a covenant with an earthly into a meta-personal “lord”—with that original covenant, perhaps made with someone not too clearly connected with those who came to claim it as an inheritance, being held onto in all its earthly specificity extremely tenaciously.\n\nNow, from another angle, we have the “supplementary hypothesis” of the bible’s composition, as developed most prominently by [Tzemach Yoreh](https://www.thetorah.com/) which, as opposed to the canonical “documentary hypothesis” which posits several different documents being stitched together to create what was to become the bible, proposes a process of layering and revision wherein the later documents (especially “J” and “P”) are adding to and more or less subtly “correcting” (while trying to avoid actually erasing) the earliest layer, “E” (“Elohim”). Yoreh’s readings are extremely convincing and it seems to me that at least some of the relation between to the biblical sources must have had a revisionary character.\n\nI’ll give now the example of Yoreh’s most spectacular claim, which also happens to be the one that most interests me here: that in the earliest, E, layer, Abraham does, in fact, sacrifice Isaac. (I won’t go into the details here, but the more you think about it, the more obvious it is—which means we have, rather amazingly, documentation of one of the most profound revolutions in human history: the rejection of child sacrifice.) Now, Lamborelle is impatient with all this talk of layers and thinks it was just Hammurabi testing Abraham’s loyalty, but this seems to me a bit too subtle (Lamborelle also thinks Hammurabi cuckolded Abraham in order to produce Isaac, which then leads him to the conclusion that, as Muslims believe, it was in fact Ishmael who was brought to be sacrificed—Yoreh’s account is far more economical.)\n\nBut Yoreh thinks it was really “God” who demanded the sacrifice, and the reason he gives is Abraham’s lack of faith in Elohim (while Yahweh wants to be exalted, Elohim just demands faith) displayed in the episode where Abraham tried the same old (and never very successful, or even coherent) wife/sister trick on Abimelach because he believed there was no fear of God in that place. Since this was post-covenant, Abraham should have relied on Elohim’s protection. So, I want to preserve the relation with an earthly lord along with the actuality of Isaac’s sacrifice, and I can do so by simply transferring the lack of faith Yoreh finds to the earthly lord Lamborelle has identified and say that it is Abraham’s independent and bungled relations and negotiations with Abimelach that led the earthly lord to “test” Abraham and take away his sole legitimate heir.\n\nBut in that case Abraham could not be the patriarch of the Jewish people, since his legitimate line would have ended (even though, aside from Ishmael, he goes on to take another wife and have more children after Sarah dies, they are not relevant to the line of inheritance the bible is interested in preserving). With Isaac out of the picture, there is no real connection between Abraham and Jacob, which means—as Yoreh asserts—that Jacob was the first “real” patriarch (all of this is caught up in relations between the respective kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which I’m leaving aside for now). The reason for keeping Abraham at the head of the line (even going so far as to manufacture a kinship relation between him and Jacob/Israel), and even for commemorating him in the first place (without Isaac, which is the telos of much of his story, Abraham is at best a “tragic” hero, which the biblical stories, or the patriarchal ones at any rate, never have any interest in), is to assert that property grant from “the Lord”—and so I am sticking with Lamborelle in assuming there is something very real and earthly there.\n\nIt also means that the land deed has been usurped, how, and why, I can’t say, but this would explain the ongoing motif in the patriarch stories (especially Jacob and Esau, but also Joseph and his brothers) in which a kind of usurpation is legitimated after the fact, both by God and by some “deserving” quality of the usurper. In this case the ancient Israelite nationality derived from imperial service, an always tenuous mode of employment, and a pattern we see playing out elsewhere in the bible, most obviously the story of Joseph in Egypt and of Esther in Persia. This is the original meaning of “chosenness,” then: especially useful for and devoted to imperial service.\n\nThis is probably a good time for my regular reminder that while it might sound like I’m “debunking” or “demystifying” the bible, for me the is a very different kind of exercise, one which increases enormously my awe at those generations of scribes who maintained and revised this “inheritance” for centuries, drawing a thread through various stages of national existence, imperial dependency and national catastrophe. (Which also means that there’s no reason to assume that the stories of the patriarchs interacting with regional kings in situations with uncertain power dynamics corresponds to the ancient history of Jews, Judeans, Hebrews or whoever; it seems to me more likely that the stories are selected and reworked in accord with the problems faced by Jewish elites in Babylonian exile and then under Persian restoration, both situations no doubt involving complex and novel patron-client relationships.)\n\nAnd it seems to me even more remarkable to note that this pattern has continued with the Jews until this very day, in which a kind of national existence coincides with various forms of imperial service, punctuated regularly with disastrous collapses of the terms of service. This may tell us a lot about traditional Jewish social structures, with figures at the top plugged into the surrounding social order (bankers, merchants, “court Jews”) supporting a system that privileges scholars and rabbis, bottoming out with craftsmen and peddlers; it might also provide some insight into all nationalisms, which, anti-imperial as they all are, without exception make accommodations and form alliances that make them useful to one or another of the imperial powers; but I’m interested here in what it tells us about the affordances of God.\n\nAnd the implication of the observation that every commemoration of God’s discourse is channeled through the memory of an asymmetrically positioned human voice is that any human voice may be a channel for God’s voice, since there is always an asymmetry to every human exchange, even if it just comes down to who speaks first, or whose words cause the other to pause—and to cause to pause is to confer and compel a kind of authority. The voice of God is, in fact, in every human voice, including our own interior monologues, even if it is far from identical with any human voice. Any human discourse concerns the transmission and safe-keeping of some inheritance, because all discourse is of and toward the center, which long ago became transmissible through kingdom, property, more or less formalized obligations and the “proper name.”\n\nThe scribes who wrote the Hebrew Bible followed the implications of this further than anyone else that I’m aware of because the demolition of their treaty or land grant issued by an imperial power, and the repetition of the demolition both in reality and (I am assuming) as itself a kind of textual inheritance indirectly transmitted (“usurped”) required them to posit a king above all earthly kings, and therefore a king who would remain after all the other kings, one by one, fell, and therefore a king who looked on with indifference (at best) at the ambitions and claims to eternity made by those (merely) earthly kings, and therefore loved faithfulness to this king above kings more than loyalty to any earthly king or their rituals (“idols”), a faithfulness only those exiled time and again could exhibit—this is a God people could covenant with above and beyond all earthly covenants, and the joining in such a covenant would spread love amongst other adherents to it, a love greater than love for any earthly inhabit of the center.\n\nAt the same time, this is a covenant one has “always already” broken and betrayed, making repentance and the quest for forgiveness and redemption (from the debt entailed by the covenant and left unpaid by the betrayal of it) the basic stuff of life. There will always be an incommensurability between human and metapersonal imperatives. Any imperative we receive from an earthly governor has an end date and is itself one in a longer chain of imperatives, an acknowledgement that itself requires faithfulness to that earthly imperative and the attempt to make that imperative commensurable and “interoperable” (with imperatives we are in the realm of technics) with those preconditioning and entailed imperatives tagging along.\n\nThat earthly imperative, which concerns some earthly inheritance, must be addressed, even if to repudiate it, to turn over the property to other claimants, to donate it all to the center or to satirically disable oneself as an instrument of the imperative. The details of the inheritance implicit in the imperative (which might be a plea from a dependent as much as a command from a superior) then become the idiom in which one becomes a derivative, speculating on the furthest future options of that imperative.\n\nI am continuing my work here on the full externalization and performativation of selving, which is to say the evacuation of the internal scene of representation which certainly had one of its origins in the revising and “strong reading” of biblical literature in the Second Temple period in ancient Israel. Maybe I could say I’m skipping over that interiorization back to a more literal understanding of the covenants, vassalage treaties, assignments, land grants and other forms of transmission which the biblical scribes preserved and recoded. We are all fully describable in terms of the institutional positions we circulate through and the layers, modes, and retrieval and analysis of the data we perpetually give off.\n\nWe don’t need, in that case, notions of subjectivity, the soul, freedom, and all the other transcriptions of those institutional positions and data emission—we can go ahead and transcribe our selves (whatever makes is the same across time and place) directly in terms of the financial, ritual, juridical and disciplinary idioms through which we circulate. It’s no less human or “profound” to revise some combination of psychiatric, literary and political discourse to describe one’s activities in an empowering and alert way than to draw upon ancient metaphorizations of breath or wind that once relied upon carefully designed commemorations to take on their meaning.\n\nSuch an approach enables a much more precise accounting for one’s ledger of exchanges with the center, which records or inscribes in one’s practices and hypotheses what one has been given (what has happened to one), what one has taken (reassembled into doings) and the distributory logic or nomos according to which one gives back. These circuits form an infrastructure which must be locked in and tended to and the elements of which must be made increasingly interoperable. In other words, you want the most precise and comprehensive vocabulary for ensuring that if you cheat in your life it will show up and become an unavoidable reality for you.\n\nTo be “human” in the Abrahamic tradition, then, is to be heir to a land grant and grant of authority that, given that imperial authority has passed from the earthly lord to God, includes the entire earth and all that is in it, albeit distributed in accord with descent from earthly lords. The boundary between humans and animals follows accordingly, and the (imperial) desire to become like God acknowledged but rendered paradoxical and the very source of the boundary between human and divine. Leveraging the higher authority of God against the earthly lords has proven catastrophic, but listening to and supplementing the discourse of God operating through earthly authorities might prove less so.\n\nIf someone (who had been granted it) grants you a bit of territory, virtual or physical, and that territory can be governed through a workable juridical order—a juridical order, that is, that can refer back to an originating distribution (even if of questionable provenance) and withstand challenges to it, and that can solicit the contribution of disciplinary agencies (distribute authority to them) without ceding the integrity of the juridical—then the word of God is in there somewhere to be worked out through self-reflexive practices of pedagogical commemoration. And reducing the human to a minimally “successionable” grant of authority over a field of practice/hypotheses might produce textualizations of such grants (contracts, judgments, and literary inquiries into their anomalies) that allow for overlappings with other traditions which, if they don’t provide for such minimal grants, might be able to explain to us how they account for succession in ways we might make commensurable."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-center-its-affordances-and-issuances-and-time",
      "title": "The Center, its Affordances and Issuances, and Time.",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 13, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-center-its-affordances-and-issuances",
      "content": "I’ve been insisting for some time that what makes language language is that we can say “this is the same.” No non-human form of communication allows for this. I’ll leave aside for now the question of whether an AI can “really” say it. Part of what makes “this is the same” distinctive to human language is that nothing is “really” the same as anything else, or even itself—saying “this is the same” is our distinctly human way of world building. And there is an implicit “this is the same” in everything else we say, which also means there is an implicit “we are saying the same thing” in everything we say. The first thing we nominated for sameness was the object at the center, and the maintenance of sameness is what Gans in _The Origin of Language_ calls “linguistic presence.”\n\nIt follows that building samenesses across differences is the way we “endorse,” or donate our resentment to, the center. To make it possible for anything to be the same as anything else, under certain, provisional, transient, conditions, we must also learn to find similarities across vast fields of differences (differences insofar as they have not yet been samed), and this also means dissolving previous fields of samenesses into new differences and new similarities. Herein lies the digital/analog complementarity I discussed [a few posts back](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/programming-and-visuality-toward): the dissolution of concentrated blocks of sameness is effected through same/other operations across the various scales that must be set aside in any assertion of sameness—indeed, “difference” is not a natural semantic prime, but “other” is, so by “field of differences” we really mean a practice of othering.\n\nThe above sketch of a practice is aimed at bringing the distinction between occupied and signifying center into language—that is, making the distinction into a way of listening to and affording the voice of God. I’ll begin by reviewing the way in which the differentiation of the center is already within language, which is in the form of the imperative gap. The “imperative gap” is my way of referring to the simple linguistic fact that there is a difference between the imperative uttered and the imperative obeyed (or, for that matter, defied). In “filling” this gap by trying to make the performance of the imperative a mere prolongation of it, the obedient “informs” the imperative given by the occupant of the center with the staged social continuity implicit in the imperative given.\n\nWhatever is involved in fulfilling the command but is not explicitly detailed in the plan (and that there is always something so involved is the meaning of “imperative gap”) is supplied by the imperatee, and this “supplement” is an inscription of the imperative infrastructure enabling the imperative as one in a chain of imperatives pointing backwards and forwards. Here is where, to draw upon my recent posts, the scribal/programming discipline makes its mark. And it within this disciplinary space of “wisdom” that I would like to deposit the differentiation of the center.\n\nThe imperative gap addresses what political theorists call the “problem of obedience”—for modern political theorists (at least) the problem is explaining why people obey; I address the question from the standpoint of the presumption of obedience, since we are created as humans in obedience to the originary center. If we disobey one occupant of the center, it is only because we have shifted our obedience to another—it is the responsibility of the occupant of the center to make this an unlikely and undesirable choice, and to ensure it fails and doesn’t become a pole of attraction. Prior to any such shift in allegiance, though, there is the intrinsic possibility of disobeying any imperative—a possibility inscribed in the imperative itself.\n\nI am interested in showing that any such disobedience is “ungrounded”—that it, it cannot be justified by the supposed “illegitimacy” of the imperative or the one who issues it, because no territory has more than one supreme governor. But this doesn’t mean that disobedience is simply irrational or arbitrary; rather, we could say insofar it is neither of these things it is because the attempt to obey the imperative has rendered the self in its scenicity inoperative. The imperative, that is can’t be obeyed, due to its form, its object, the position and abilities of the recipient, etc. The way to disobey, then, is not to make abstract arguments about the sources of authorization of the command but to display the full inoperativity of the self in its scenicity, and to thereby maximize the data produced by one’s engagement with the imperative.\n\nIt is the subsequent securing of such data by agencies picking up falling sovereign functions that might enable future operationalizable imperatives. (Of course, the disobedient can be wrong, in which case he will still be sending out data, albeit more as message than messenger.)\n\nWe can now say more about what is entailed in the operativity of the self in its scenicity—this operativity is what I have been calling “selving,” the creation of a system of “sames” out of a field of “likes” by generating same/other distinctions. Creating sames is the creation of a scene within a scene, a meta-scene that idiomizes a new array of props, scenery and staging by othering the previous uses of those materials. Among the most basic imperatives are those involving seeing to the maintenance of institutions, like provisioning and keeping records of provisioning, assigning tasks and recording the assigning of tasks, the transformation of materials into new forms and the recording of such transformations or attempts at transformation.\n\nKeeping records is the common denominator here, is ubiquitous, and is the most scribal of activities and responsibilities. Herein lie the origins of writing. Recording presents a series of selvings into a single program and refers back to the originating imperative of the program. It accounts for the provenance of the materials—how they have been brought into and distributed within the organization—and the nomination of individuals within the division of labor. The more the attention to the intention structure of the originating imperative is recorded the more other articulations by other actual or possible organizations, and this same organization at other times or under other conditions, are othered as a condition of realizing this imperative ordering. The likeness of all these actual and possible organizations (tacitly assumed in everyday practices) is reduced to a set of same/other distinctions.\n\nAs I have arguing the last few posts, there is a continuum between the straightforward and consistent recording of where things are and who is responsible for them and the more elaborate and complex forms of “record keeping” we find ritual, art and, more generally, in juridical and disciplinary institutions. This is the scribe to programmer pipeline. Records need to be coherent—otherwise, they couldn’t become parts of a history of records in which each recording accounts for part of the infrastructure including (metonymically, we could say) the others. The inoperativity of the self in its scenicity results in a recording that doesn’t fit or work.\n\nAll records fail to register something that might have been worth recording, or name some practice in ways that interfere with taking in all of the data it might have provided, even if such deficiencies don’t show up until other institutional lapses lead bureaucrats or historians to review them within a new disciplinary space. We could say that the best records have the longest temporal and spatial lapses in detecting their lapses as they become part of a world of study and art that produces memorable work through the strain of eliciting and exploring anomalies not immediately visible. The worst records (which are probably the worst for reasons other than incompetent record keepers) might produce equally memorable work, but it is more likely to be bitterly satirical, cautious and allusive or desperately apocalyptic.\n\nThe differentiation of the center (occupied/signifying) is found in the spread of the recordings as you try to minimize its anomalies to the irreducibly anthropological one of the distance of periphery from center. Insofar as you make the records fit and work (which also means, if you are not in any obvious sense a record keeper yourself, acting and doing in ways that can be recorded workably), you have created a field of sames, and are filling the imperative gap, even if with a figurative bucket while the gap widens into a flood. Insofar as the others insinuate themselves into the sames and such ordering of the record becomes impossible, the imperative gap cannot be filled and the self in its scenicity is rendered inoperative.\n\nThe individual faced with an implicit or explicit imperative is testing the boundaries of operativity continually, while these tests find their judgment in the disciplinary scenes of scribal/programming culture as participants in those disciplinary scenes work on securing data for sovereign functionality. And the participants in these scenes are themselves individuals continually testing these boundaries, with the final judge being he for whom the records are kept, the figure providing sufficient intentional shape so as to arrest the drift (which will be evident to the future historian who can to some degree be anticipated by the scribe/programmer) towards total anonymity in utterance.\n\nIn my latest post but one I argued for folding knowledge into intelligence; I will do the same thing now for “wisdom.” Wisdom literature facilitated the ongoing reinterpretation of divine law and the application of the entire historical learning process to that reinterpretation so as to situate it firmly within the scribal pedagogical space. Wisdom, we can say, is the bringing to bear of the paradoxical nature of human existence as a means of deferral of sacrifice. An originary understanding of intelligence as the conversion of all elements of the scene into sources of information such that oneself becomes an especially informational element of the scene incorporates this paradox.\n\nThe more one gathers information, especially indirectly, from elements of the scene that would seem inert to others and organizes and presents this information by conferring situational value on each bit, and on the possession of each bit by one or another situated agent within what can be grasped as a historical learning process actualized in pedagogical spaces, the more wisdom and knowledge converge in intelligence. You emit data in ways you are aware of and can become more aware of and in ways you will never realize and that might penetrate and subvert the means by which you make yourself cognizant of and in command of some data.\n\nHere is where we can relocate the imperative gap, and therefore the differentiation of the center—in the database that comes recognizably self-interpretable and hence a model for and partner with future users, surrounded by greater or lesser data spreads that disappear into their use.\n\nThe sorting of data becomes more intelligent and more conducive of intelligence the longer the time the programming of likely uses of that data. A single fact, ingeniously established against the resistance of (anti)juridical and (anti)disciplinary authorities with the use of uncustomary collecting, presenting and preserving of evidence suggests an entire social order yet to be established—only in anticipation of such an order could one persist in that kind of effort. If the fact is rendered beyond dispute, it turns all the falsities of the existing order into unwilling witnesses of that truth, and unwilling witnesses are succeeded by willing witnesses.\n\nThis kind of work closes the imperative gap by prolonging the imperative, from before its issuance by the current occupant of the center to after all the authors and sufferers of this order are gone. The oldest and most basic imperative is to ensure the continuity of the center, which is maximized by the center selecting its own successor in perpetuity, while making the social order a celebration of this practice. Taken as a model of our own selvings, singular succession in perpetuity means assembling the materials available to oneself and distributing all the selves around oneself so as to ensure that the self that will continue reassembling those materials and distributing those selves is the same, even with, but retrospectively also because of, all of the mistakes and revisions in attention and accruals of knowledge.\n\nThis means inscribing yourself across the scene so that you’re reading yourself and/along with others who have also been inscribing themselves. The inscription is the pressing of data into commemorative forms. Inscription means pushing your self to the limits of its operativity, so that the beginning of its inoperativity is legible on the scene as a potential performative element in the renewal ceremony of the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-contingency-of-the-hypothesis",
      "title": "The Contingency of the Hypothesis",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 13, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-contingency-of-the-hypothesis",
      "content": "I have just read _A Critique of Natural Language: Human Being: The Species that Begat Itself a Future_ , by Willem Ernst van der Roest. I did so because the book, published in 2010, was one of a very few Girardian-inspired inquiries into human origins, and in this case language origin in particular, that takes some time to address Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis. The book ultimately fleshes out and extends Girard’s idea that the remains of the victim of the lynching caused by the mimetic crisis could be taken to be the first sign, or at least a distant ancestor of it, and if you’re interested in seeing that worked out the book is worth reading.\n\nHis account is anything but minimal, as it supplies whatever “instincts” are needed to push the novel “non-instinctual attention” in the direct he needs. I found a couple of features interesting, in particular his assertion, made, as I pointed out a while back, by Eric Jacobus as well, that we need to posit the existence of weapons in order to account for the overloading of mimetic rivalry to the point where it can override the natural animal hierarchy. But van der Roast just mentions this, and it doesn’t become part of his later theorizations. And his critique of Gans is shallow and oddly condescending, based, as far as I can tell, solely upon two (#329 and #332) _Chronicles of Love and Resentment_ published in 2006 (which van der Roest doesn’t bother to cite properly—if you didn’t know of the Chronicles already, I don’t see how you would find them from van der Roest’s reference).\n\nStill, van der Roest does advance one critique of the originary hypothesis that I believe is correct and important, pointing to something that I have noticed myself, going back, in fact, to my first GA essay, “Remembering Amalek,” where I introduced a suggestion for reconfiguring the originary event for this very reason. It’s not only a critique that needs to be answered, but one that, when answered, leads to some important questions regarding the nature of the originary hypothesis—what kind of thing, or “artifact,” is it? Van der Roest is right to point out that any intensification of the emergent mimetic crisis that is powerful enough to override the natural animal hierarchy would also be too powerful for the shared focus on the center to be maintained.\n\nThe breakdown of the animal hierarchy would mean the breakdown of the group into a general melee, with individuals fighting other individuals, smaller groups fighting other smaller groups, or groups attacking individuals, etc. But this only means that the constellation of the scene around the central object was highly unlikely, not that it was impossible. It is then our burden, as defenders of the hypothesis, to construct the unlikely conditions under which the breakdown of the animal hierarchy would sustain the orientation towards the center, at least sufficiently for the scene to take hold. Gans had very good reasons for insisting, quite a few times as I recall (even if not lately), that the originary event was unlikely, almost miraculous.\n\nWe have perhaps not sufficiently considered that there is a particular logic built into the originary hypothesis, a logic of contingency rather than necessity, making it impossible for adherents to the far more popular logic of necessity to “see” the hypothesis. I am not well schooled in logic but maybe there’s a name for something that is unlikely but only needs to happen once to “take” (and maybe a lot of life is like that). I would also point out that, in this case, Gans’s own insistence, articulated most explicitly somewhere in our antisemitism book, but evident in virtually every word he writes, that the best approach to viewing historical phenomena is to treat them as if they were inevitable, is tantamount to sabotage directed at the originary hypothesis itself. Exactly the opposite is the case: faithfulness to the hypothesis calls for a logic of radical contingency, beginning with the contingency of the human being itself, and continuing with the contingency of every subsequent event.\n\nSomething on the not-yet-originary scene must reveal or present to the participants the implications of their convergence upon the central object before those implications become manifest—because, again, once those implications unfold past a certain point, there will be no scene because there will be no one positioned to see them. Gans has spoken of a kind of “fearful symmetry” being visible to members of the group, and something like that is indeed necessary—but think about the problem this raises: each member of the group must have some way of taking in the group as a whole (the “symmetry” assumes this), something we must assume has never happened before.\n\nHow could the group as a whole appear in this way, over and beyond each member’s more immediate proximity to an increasingly enraged rival who would be drawing his attention in an urgent manner? We’d have to imagine a contingently arranged configuration with, say, everyone (or “enough” of the group) at an equal distance from the central object—something that adherents of the hypothesis indeed take for granted but that is by no means assured in advance; indeed, it is a configuration that is unlikely. This unlikeliness is the force behind the Girardian assertion that the originary hypothesis is another social contract theory (an assertion van der Roest repeats and emphasizes) and to which Gans’s answer is what seems to me the radically unsatisfying one of “so what if it’s a social contract theory?” (this answer is already implicit in the _Chronicle_ van der Roest refers to (#329), and became more explicit later on—if necessary, I suppose I could find where).\n\nPart of the critique of the originary hypothesis here is that Gans wants or needs a “happy ending” to the originary event, and this coincides with Gans’s more general desire to highlight the peaceful, productive side of humanity at the expense of its “darker,” more violent tendencies, and so Gans supplies the participants on the originary scene with the historical resolution he attributes to them in the form of the modern “market society,” thereby introducing an anachronism into the scene. This coincides with my own conclusion, arrived at more “conclusively” recently, that Gans has channeled the originary hypothesis into Generative Anthropology, with the latter designed as the ideology of liberal democracy.\n\nSo, this part of van der Roest’s critique has some resonance for me as well and needs to be addressed. (The claim that Gans’s scene downplays violence has been made before, and answered by pointing to the violence of the sparagmos Gans sees as following the emission of the sign. Van der Roest mentions this and is more dismissive than I would be, seeing it as a kind of feeble mimicry of Girard, but I’ve never quite seen the necessity for the fury of the sparagmos. Here is one of those times when it seems to me Gans relies upon a hydraulic model of human psychology, where resentments “suppressed” at one moment need to be “expressed” in equal measure the next moment.\n\nI’ve said on many occasions that it might be better to see the sparagmos as a clumsier affair, in which the members on the scene try out, practice, and modify their new “device” as they jostle with each other to get their share. That the sign that they just discovered would be immediately dropped seems odd to me [how would they retrieve it afterward?]. Rather than furious resentment directed toward the central object, why not take on (imitate) the resentment of the center by using the new sign to block “excessive” moves toward the center? In this case, as well, imitation of the center is unbroken. Maybe I’m wrong, but—here’s another question GA is designed to ignore—how do we tell what is right or wrong in analyzing the scene?)\n\nMy original formulation of “firstness,” that is, the claim that someone on the originary scene had to emit the sign first, albeit in a way that could not be recognized as such until it has circulated among the group, was very explicitly aimed at the problem posed by the assumption of the unanimity of sign issuance in Gans’s account of the scene (afterwards I realized that there were, in fact, indications of this unevenness of the scene in some of Gans’s descriptions). It would simply be too miraculous for all on the scene to simultaneously emit and recognize the sign—such “spontaneity” would indicate some pre-existing capacity to signify, something like an “instinct,” which would in turn undermine the claim that a new, “non-instinctual” feature of a new species emerges on the scene—to put it another way, it would make the originary event _inevitable_.\n\nThis is why the “social contract” “accusation” needs to be answered—it assumes a declarative understanding (of the kind that makes it possible to “reach an agreement”) that could not have existed on the scene and can only be imagined as a spontaneous emergence of non or post-mimetic peaceful intentions. Gans’s only demonstrated interest in the concept of firstness was in idealizing modern market society and tarring its opponents with “resentment,” but there’s a much more important issue here. I happen to agree with the solution I proposed back then: we need to assume a kind of unevenness on the scene whereby some members proceed to initiate the full-scale breakdown of the scene while others hesitate and can mark this hesitation in each other precisely in distinction from that breakdown.\n\nIn most cases, the breakdown would overpower the emergent restraint, which would be forgotten; all we need to imagine is one time where the hesitation is marked a bit more precisely (the gesture of hesitation turned more evidently into a gesture of deferral), spreads a little bit more quickly, and enables some on the scene to model a different kind of outcome and even restrain those who are “breaking down” the scene. And this “one time” might very well rely on a specific scenic configuration that we could only track down partially, but for that reason remains a source of ongoing reflection and inquiry, leaving a trace in all originary thinking.\n\nI would guess that this more extensive reconstruction of the scene (it’s all there in “Remembering Amalek”) was of less interest to Gans (and everyone else in GA) because it introduces some inequality and even “force” onto a scene that he would like to see as a model for the consensual market he would very much like to see today, even if through the haze of the victimary, wokeness, etc. Whatever exists is inevitable, and therefore the best, so whatever exists is good—sure, some bad things might appear here and there, but we all know they’re not really real, which is to say can have their ontological insignia removed and be consigned to the dustbin of the history of resentment.\n\nBut the consequences of “firstness” are significant, and, to me at least, to be embraced. Here we find a genuinely new way of thinking in a logic of contingency that we must grant pervades each successive iteration of the sign or of the originary hypothesis itself. The logic of inevitability is a sorting mechanism that renders irrelevant whatever has not led or cannot be attributed to whatever is deemed “inevitable” right now (which can’t be quite the same as what will turn out to be inevitable tomorrow—the inevitable is never what it used to be). According to Gans’s Darwinian/Hegelian logic, what is inevitable must be whatever has survived and is therefore the fittest, or best—I think we can assume that the fall of the Soviet Union was a revelatory moment for Gans, “proving” that “liberal democracy” was the best (even if only as the worst except for all the others).\n\nOnce the bets on bestness are laid, then, anything that does not contribute to our affirmation of liberal democracy can be ignored—such deviations are not real, in a fundamental sense. The same logic of inevitability as bestness is found at every point in Gans’s work: only the best society is real, only the best work of art, only the most beautiful woman, only the best explanation of the bestness of these things. It’s as if there’s some unnamed competition here, only there’s no field, no other players, no score, no referee, no victory podium and no spectators. The fantasy logic here is that if everyone could be persuaded to admire the best, even if it exposed the rest as less than the best, a kind simulacrum of the originary scene might be created and we’d have a central object emerge victorious on the market (perhaps GA could then be smuggled into the center as the best explanation or at least best appreciation of the best).\n\nThe actual effect is self-inoculation against inquiring into the grounds of bestness (arguing about bestness is itself not the best because a failure to spontaneously judge the bestness of the best marks one as less than the best—there’s a deeply reactionary and aristocratic politics implicit here, and it’s a shame Gans never pursued its implications because it would have been far more interesting than his feeble pleas in defense of liberal democracy). But if you want to lay all your chips down on one bet in this manner, you yourself had better be the best, and your inevitabilities a bit sturdier than “liberal democracy,” in which case you can’t withdraw from the intellectual marketplace because you find some unpleasant politics going on there (the unpleasant politics being people carping about what they should just recognize as the best or whether “bestness” is the best question after all); and entering that marketplace or field of intellectual battle would require a somewhat more robust notion of what might be best than Gans’s consumerist/connoisseurist predilections can allow for.\n\n(In this valorization of inevitable bestness, only what has been preserved and curated in stable condition as a culturally recognizable artifact can be appreciated—which means a social form like “liberal democracy” must be treated that way. We might say that GA is self-immunized against becoming, which means becoming is invisible, which is devastating for your perception, let along assessment, of anything other than traditional art objects and packaged consumer goods.) Maybe it’s not just GA—maybe mimetic theory in general is allergic to shared inquiry (as itself a kind of “best” language use the bestness of any sample of which is always deferred) because of the assumption that there’s nothing more that really needs to be known—just the work of revealing to the potentially receptive what we already know.\n\nI have wondered whether, rather than something like a modern “theory” (what I have been fantasizing GA might be), mimetic theory is more in the tradition of wisdom literature, which draws upon a pool of transmitted maxims to comment upon the follies and futilities of human life from a disenchanted perspective. Even that might be fine, because there is some talk of reviving wisdom literature around the emergence of AI, but in that case as well we’d need a renovation of wisdom literature and, like anything, it would need to be scaled up and do a bit more than point out “wisely” how people struggling with each other start to mirror each other or the ways aesthetic and consumer products reconcile us to our resentments, i.e., pacify us.\n\nI have drawn upon a lot of other thinkers in my attempts (as I now see them) to fork off another path starting from the hypothesis, but the only one I have found to be decisive in shaping my thinking about the scene and, also, the only philosopher, has been Peirce. With Peirce we can find a logic of contingency nestled within a broader iterative logic of complexification which seems to me consistent with a Bayesian logic, where nothing ever “is” but declaratives are uttered in a field of possible ostensives and imperatives whose likelihood is constantly shifting and we, as fields of ostensives and imperatives ourselves, shifting along with it.\n\nThis would be a genuinely hypothetical and paradoxical logic, with the thinker and speaker influencing the spread of probabilities and therefore ultimately coming to do so more deliberately. There’s a place for markets here, but not as an ontology which manifests anthropological truths; rather, markets are made so as to test out more precise “bets” on various scales, and thereby elicit scenes upon which the relations between ostensives, imperative, interrogatives and declaratives can be better known, which means better practiced and enacted. “We are each and every one of us an insurance company,” as Peirce, singling out one particularly innovative and representative institution of 19th century America, insisted.\n\nAnd, as Peirce also insisted, every insurance company, however well run, endowed, actuarily calculated, hedged, etc., will go broke in the long run (what we can now call the “black swan event”). But the long run need never arrive and our vocation as humans is to defer it for as long as possible. There is always the center, and the center is nothing more than the increasingly dense self and other-referentiality of all the intelligence we produce so as to further defer the long run. “Prediction” has become a kind of menacing boogeyman for GA, the harbinger of “dictatorship” and all kinds of other nasty things (but if we are to treat events as inevitable, shouldn’t they be predictable?\n\nWell, perhaps the Owl of Minerva flying at dusk it a programmatic statement rather than an observation here), but we’re always predicting and deliberately refraining from predicting out of fear of some unaccountable power is as stupid as failing to try to identify the limits of any prediction (which itself involves a kind of prediction).\n\nBut who is this “we”? It is the Big Scenic Imaginary that imagines all of humanity as an agent acting (with whom?) on a single scene. “We” certainly don’t all predict the same way (or all at one time), with equal resources and skills, or shared intentions. There is no “we,” other than when it comes to imagining disastrous consequences (if the planet really becomes unlivable, there will be a “we” that can no longer live). There are “insurance companies” at various scales, of varying efficiencies, in various relations of collaboration and antagonism (translatability and commensurability) with each other. (Insofar as the whole world becomes a single insurance company, that “we” might materialize, but it would be a highly differentiated and distributed one.)\n\nBuild yourself an insurance company or refine or scale up the one you have. Make markets and make marks on markets others have made. None of this can be said within GA—I know, I’ve tried. A firstness fork off of the originary hypothesis is the only way of giving the hypothesis a fair chance (a greater likelihood of dissemination and transmission, of finding suitable carriers), a fork that takes on board the contingency of the hypothesis and simply disregards “liberal democracy” as propaganda, while paying close attention to the social orders currently labeled as such: there is no “liberal democracy,” but there are election procedures and technologies, media companies generating narratives in collaboration with intelligence and security agencies, juridical orders, bureaucracies, debt regimes, securitizations, infrastructures, data regimes, etc.\n\nAll of these are “insurance companies,” indemnifications against originary debt coming due at times and in ways one is not yet ready to pay. The originary hypothesis has not been indemnified—it is unprepared even for a flawed, careless critique like van der Roest’s, much less the much more sustained questioning that would come from theorists in the tradition of critiquing all that exists or, for that matter, the tradition of anti-critique; GA purports to welcome all challenges and constantly bemoans and muses over their failure to materialize, but would in fact wither quickly under sustained examination of the doxa of GA and even some carefully applied pressure on the originary hypothesis itself. The originary hypothesis can be indemnified, and be brought into the general system of indemnification; but not by or in GA."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-holding-and-the-held-center-beyond-disagreement",
      "title": "The Holding and the Held Center: Beyond Disagreement",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 13, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-holding-and-the-held-center-beyond",
      "content": "There’s a kind of spatial problem involved with speaking of the center and I think I’m ready to resolve it at this point. What I mean is that “the center” is always what draws your attention right here and now—and, even if it’s something you’re looking at by yourself, the fact that you are directing human attention towards it means that the attention is nevertheless shared—you are looking at with, through, and for others even if those others are not there. In this case, the center is always shifting, with one center being constantly replaced by another, and while this is an indispensable meaning of “the center,” it’s not what I, at least, mean most of the time when I speak of the center, which is to say the social center.\n\nAnd there’s something a little disorienting here, because insofar as you’re attending to some local center your back, so to speak is to the social, or occupied/signifying center. So, the articulation of these two centers needs to be accounted for, and it needs to be accounted for in a way consistent with, and to the extent possible, overlapping with, the distinction between the occupied and signifying center, and doing so should provide considerable explanatory power. And my [recent post](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/generating-idiomatic-intelligences) addressing precisely the issue of locating the signifying center in one’s relation to the occupied center should provide the needed resources here.\n\nThe very possibility of attending to something in such a way that it implicates you upon an actual or possible scene with others demonstrates your humanness and indicates your reliance upon the signifying/occupied center, even while your back (so to speak) is to it. Even more, the degree to which you create an idiomatic relation to some thing, that is, “hold” it in front of you, notice new “features” of it, imagine ways you could frame it and point it out to others if you could help them get situated on this scene with you, is a marker of the degree to which you are yourself held by the center. The occupied/signifying center, then, is more powerful and all-encompassing the more it goes unnoticed precisely because it provides you with the space within which you can construct a disciplinary scene.\n\nIf you had ample cadres of researchers across all fields, from the most esoteric humanities to the most “hard” STEM subject, working free of political and economic pressures, simply trying out as many ways of gathering and interpreting data as possible, then you would have a situation in which the imperative gap between occupied and signifying center is very nearly closed, and those researchers (which would then be all of us, in our own spheres) would never have to give it a second thought—but they would, though, notice immediately, feel revulsion at, and respond forcefully to, any violation of the evolved practices of the disciplinary space in question, and this would be them donating their resentment to the center.\n\nThe center, then, would be silent and present only in the way its being embedded in our practices turns us into fervent guardians of those practices. This model is not obviously consistent with my much reiterated concept of singularized succession in perpetuity, which argues for a regular and emphasized organization of attention around the occupied/signifying center. This model involves those with authority having the sole right and duty to appoint their successors, and therefore making a public show, around which the entire institutional order would be organized, of nominating, testing, selecting, revising the selection, shaping the institutions so as to provide ever more highly qualified candidates.\n\nThis model corresponds with the notion of human orders as ongoing festivals commemorating our shared human origin as it has been instantiated in that order, and certainly implies that we are turning toward the center in overt ways. There’s a kind of tension or oscillation here which is important for theoretical development, and the resolution is already implicit in what I’ve said here: a highly mature order (way more mature than any we’ve seen or even imagined so far) would see in even the most mundane objects with which we busy ourselves the entire infrastructure of the order that produced, identifying especially with the human decisions whose results we would see inscribed on those objects.\n\nSo, in experiencing the marvelous forms of coordination the most advanced researcher is privileged to participate in that researcher also experiences the wisdom of each of the decisions which in their concatenation placed him there. Maybe those everyday objects would have explicit commemorations of that decision chain inscribed upon them or maybe the researcher we place at the center of this thought experiment does the governors and traditions of his order more honor by getting right to work on it.\n\nSo, we are held by the center even as we hold our own centers in front of us, and we are measures of the integrity of that center in the effort needed to defer the resentments that, like swirling demons, try to interpose themselves between us and our objects. When we turn and face the occupying/signified center, we turn what is happening there into “things” we can center within a disciplinary space (always, still dependent upon the juridical to create the visibility of things). If we occupy the Big Scenic Imaginary, we imagine that offering opinions about the conflicts at the center enables us to “weigh” in and affect the outcome, and if we imagine that we are allowing the encirclement of resentments to confuse whatever object we could genuinely bring into view.\n\nIf we, instead, take those events at the center as indications of the state of the ritual, juridical and disciplinary, we might point to ways in which those categories could be strengthened. In this case, looking at the Center is no different than looking away from the Center at some object we place at the center, because we have to single out the “marker” that offers us useful intelligence in studying politics as well, and that also involves a kind of turning away from the Center—which, in that case, we could say, much like the sun, never comes fully into view, even back when we had God-Emperors who could only be seen through very thick ritual mediation.\n\nSo, the translation of the occupied/signifying center into intelligence available at some disciplinary center refers to the same thing as the “redistribution” of the signifying center into our management of the imperatives from the occupied center. And this conceptual advance also enables us to speak of scale, which is also necessary if we are to dispense with the Big Scenic Imaginary: there are scenes that position an entire country, even the entire world, on their margins, and we could imagine this entailing a gradation of positions from various layers of participation and responsibility to pure spectatorship. And, in most public scenes, the vast majority are pure spectators, and coming to terms with the fact that that’s all we are and can be is a condition of possibility for dissolving the Big Scenic Imaginary.\n\nOf course we can take in intelligence as spectators, but vicarious participation is wasteful and obfuscating and the intelligence gathered can only be meaningful on scenes where we do participate. If you’re thinking in terms of intelligence gathering, filtering and transmission, you’re also thinking about what might be useful intelligence for those positioned to use it, and what would be involved in positioning yourself so as to offer it, and this attitude provides a powerful check on the disciplinary spaces you construct.\n\nBut this also means that I can and should be more explicit about something that has been at least strongly implicit in the concept of “centered ordinality” which served as an organizing principle of _Anthropomorphics_ , which is that attention is always directed through membership, even if virtual or potential, in some team. You’re always putting together, seeking to join, or advancing the goals of some team, and that is what makes one or another object meaningful or worthy of attention. Even being an advance scout, making a preliminary mapping of some strange terrain, without yet knowing what you’re even looking for, is part of being on some team you might be only dimly aware of as a possibility.\n\nI’ve tended to avoid the word “team” which seems too “corporate” (which means I haven’t been quite ready to take in all the intelligence offered by companies, and that’s something to fix), but, as is often the case, checking out the online etymological dictionary adds an interesting dimension. Here, we see that “team” in Old English (and its Germanic roots) includes notions of “brood,” “race” and “band,” among other meanings, which to me connects it strongly to notions of “breeding,” which I find extremely interesting and helpful. To put together a team is to engage in a kind of breeding process, which involves selecting, mating, looking into lineages, and so on. It may be a metaphorical breeding practice, but this is another case where this continuum between the literal and metaphorical is suggestive.\n\nBreeding gets us into questions of tribes, ethnicities and races, including eugenics, questions which are always there in some way or another. The question of breeding also resonates with my Biblical inquiries, where questions of the “first born” (in what is represented as beginning in a pastoral, nomadic, shepherding order) seems to me to cross lines between animal sacrifice, human sacrifice and inheritance and succession—and all of this, in turn, is crucial to the extraordinary transference effected by the Hebrew scripture of relations between God and king, imperial and vassal states, to relations between God and the individual made in “His image.”\n\nSo, “teaming as breeding” seems to be a generative way of fleshing out the relations between the held center and the holding Center. There’s a very literal breeding going on when, for example, parents interfere in their children’s dating and mating; a somewhat less literal one in choosing to live in a neighborhood made up exclusively or primarily of co-ethnics; a somewhat more metaphorical breeding involved in creating, say, a company dealing in information (how literal or metaphorical is the breeding if one is drawn to work with or hire people who went to a small cluster of universities?), where we start to tilt towards teaming.\n\nTeaming as breeding might provide a way of speaking more openly and less hostilely about race—breeding, something humans have always done, with animals as well as themselves (the word “team” might have first referred to animals yoked together), and must therefore be affirmed and revivified where possible, but there must also be points where breeding priorities interfere with teaming priorities; and, for that matter, where teaming needs some ballast from breeding. At any rate, looking for the breeding-teaming continuum within any practice is sure to clarify what we’re doing in that practice.\n\nAs to the subtitle of this post (“beyond disagreement)—it seems to me that our misplaced faith in the Big Scenic Imaginary is what leads us to think disagreements are meaningful, that we’ve done something important in settling them, in winning over or convincing the other of one’s own position, and so on. I’ve always felt a twinge of guilt at convincing another I was right about something, because I already agree with myself, so why do I need another to do so, and all I’ve done is close down a vector of intelligence that might have come from that person’s difference. This doesn’t mean we should stubbornly disagree with the other; rather, the goal should be to situate our respective positions on the originary scene, and solicit from one another’s postures some indication of the furnishing of the scene.\n\nAs a kind of language policy, I would like to work towards formulations with which it is impossible to disagree, that one could find unintelligible or uninteresting, but that so contain their references within their own articulation that disagreement would be meaningless. Eric Gans says somewhere that the meaning of the word “God” is that the signified of the word is simultaneously its referent, which means its ostensivity (and subsequent imperatives) is built into its use in a declarative sentence. Since we should always be trying to speak only the word of God (is it meaningful to disagree with that?), we can do so by bringing the signifying center into our relation to the occupied center, the holding center into the held center, which is to say being on both scenes at the same time as demonstrated by showing someone, in your utterances or samples, something they could only see by virtue of being on the very scene upon which your showing them it has placed them.\n\nWe can also know from scripture that this direct relationship between signifying center and the individual required the destruction of the occupied center, placing center stage the biggest unresolved problem bequeathed to us by the Axial Age. But the supplement of the lack was the expectation of the Messiah (also involving a kind of breeding, as the line of David needed to be invented for this purpose) which also includes an expansive continuum ranging from highly apocalyptic scenarios to the one who will simply redeem the human order by making it more of an order. So, teaming as breeding directs our attention to intelligence of open source Messianism, gathering and promoting signs of singularity in succession in texts and events we read as texts.\n\nThe object of a scribal or search pedagogy is to practice a turning toward the center through a reading of the legible signs bred by the center—sacred writings are also the children of God, and the signs of succession we turn into those writings will always be at some distance from the center, in the seed of some future and singular occupant. Even when you’re looking directly at power you’re seeing its traces. And if someone disagrees with you they’re just providing more signs of the center, more data. Let’s put it more paradoxically: precisely the most vigorous and irreconcilable disagreements best mark a shared search for origin, center and succession; even more seeking out and cultivating such disagreements represents the remembrance of the originary scene where we try to issue the same sign from different positions. “Disagreement” is how we all say the same thing in order to avoid doing the same thing at the same time."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-longest-most-convoluted-revised-and-thickly-imagined-title-deed-possible-substack",
      "title": "The Longest, Most Convoluted, Revised and Thickly Imagined Title Deed Possible",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 13, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-longest-most-convoluted-revised",
      "content": "Needless to say, the title refers to the Hebrew bible, about which I will now proceed to speak in highly hypothetical, but hopefully generative, terms. That central to the Bible is a covenant between God and the Jewish (let’s set aside disputes over this name for now) people is uncontroversial; that the entire Bible is nothing more than an ongoing consideration of the history, consequences, implications, terms, identity of each partner, etc., of this covenant might be a bit more so, but probably still mostly plausible. But if we get more precise and, we could say, more “realistic,” about the origins of this covenant (following the suggestion of Bernard Lamborelle) and say that the covenant is in fact a title deed to a piece of land granted to someone who came to be called “Abraham” as part of an allocation of responsibility for supervision of the parts of an empire by the emperor (or his delegate), we enter into more unknown territory.\n\nFor one thing, this approach makes the entire affair far more political, because if God gave your people the land in perpetuity that would be an end to it,you’re your rights would be secure; if, however, the memory of a more mundane exchange is never completely lost, the claim to the land must constantly be re-asserted. (As an aside here—but an extremely important point to return to—this hypothesis also helps to clarify another ancient Judaic innovation: entering into a covenant _with_ (a) God rather than the parties to a covenant swearing _to_ a god as the judge between them.)\n\nThis very practical, material and legal notion of the founding covenant sheds light, as I mentioned in a recent discussion of the Hebrew Bible, on the intense concern with transmission of inheritance in the stories of the patriarchs, along with the willingness to leave uncensored and uncriticized some rather unscrupulous maneuvering. Jacob has a case for inheriting the birthright over Esau that might very well stand up in whatever court we could imagine presiding in that case, and perhaps Esau’s willingness to renounce it so easily should be taken to suggest that Jacob really deserves it—but, still, why emphasize such dubious proceedings, and, especially, the deception of an elderly, blind Isaac, with the aid of the sons’ mother?\n\nThere is perhaps some nomadic admiration in this another stories of the patriarchs of besting the other in a negotiation, regardless of the method, but applied to one’s own brother? The stories are remarkable, but it seems to me clear that their authors could not care less whether we see the protagonists as heroic or not. What do they care about, then? Providing evidence that the title deed has, indeed, been transmitted from its original lessee through a verifiable chain of inheritances, until the authors of the story itself have received it. I’m suggesting that all of the stories fall into place if we start with the assumption that nothing else matters here, and that at every point along the way the assertions of other claimants, some of whom are no doubt forgotten (or have been assigned to different latter-day referents), are disputed, implicitly and explicitly (but in ways that would have been recoverable at the time of composition and subsequently became sources of speculation).\n\nThis would account for the need to construct a line from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob even though, as Tzemah Yoreh points out, in the earliest version of the story, Abraham in fact sacrificed Isaac. In this case, the attempt to “cover up” a murder so as to preserve a viable line of inheritance resulted in one of the most generative foundation stories of Western civilization. Eric Jacobus suggested to me that the extremely unpleasant scenario of Abraham essentially pimping out his wife/sister Sarah to other Near Eastern potentates might bear traces of attempts to acquire more land or create further alliances through the exchange of sisters as wives (Hagar is an Egyptian).\n\nHere there might be some tension between the insistence on preserving all evidence pertinent to the legitimacy of the title deed and the need to claim that the lessees are indeed worthy of receiving and transmitting it. It would be interesting to read the story of Joseph and his brothers in this terms—the extreme case of a very young son (even if of the favored wife—and how does preference for one wife over the other, one child over the other—these resonant stories of envy, rivalry and resentment so important for the development of mimetic theory—come into play to legitimate one line of inheritance over others?), and moreover, one who has taken up a powerful position within an alien culture (migration to which no doubt muddies the claim to rightful inheritance) might require the powerful account of self-concealment, testing, revelation and forgiveness we see here.\n\n(The Pharoah gives Joseph land for his family to settle in Egypt—no opportunity to legitimate ownership over a piece of territory is missed.) Disputes over claims can be reconciled by narrativizing those disputes as the playing out of resentments that must be portrayed in the detail and with the plausibility necessary to rule contending claimants out of court. We see in Joseph’s story a kind of ranking of the brothers that no doubt drew upon later borders and disputes.\n\nThe primeval, antediluvian stories make new sense in these terms as well. For the Talmudic rabbis (at least in one register), the whole point of the creation story was not the grandeur of an omnipotent being who creates the entire universe out of nothing out of love for humans as the apex of creation, but that it attested to God’s ownership of the entire earth, and therefore His right to gift any part of it to whomever He wished. The polemic against Babylonian creation myths and imperial legitimacy that has long been noted in these stories also function as arguments against imperial ownership of this particular land.\n\nThe argument becomes anti-imperial since we have now erased all but a few traces of the originally earthly grant of land—and this is necessary because we’re no longer talking about whether it’s the Israelites or some other Canaanite tribe that has a right to the land, but about imperial states making increasingly universal and absolutist claims to sovereignty. There’s a kind of sleight of hand here as God must be retrojected as the other partner in the exchange while the specificity of the grant makes it look suspiciously like more mundane ones. There is never a point, either in the Bible or in all of Jewish history, where some important, lasting tradition just took the seemingly obvious step of saying (the more “Protestant-like” forms of 20th century Reform Judaism reverted to “nationalism” with the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Israel), if our covenant is with God, who is everywhere, and we are now ourselves everywhere, why do we need to insist on our right to that plot of land which we will never see, much less inhabit?\n\nThere is some sense that the entire collectivity and. its history would collapse if such a step were to be taken, however immaterial or merely notional that step would actually be. The entire paradox of the God of All choosing this single people, whose persecutions testify to the truth of that God and his grant, with all its implications beyond the Jews themselves, presupposes this “irrational” tenaciousness. If my hypothesis has merit, it would also contribute to explaining the various layers of the Bible, its “supplementary” composition, from the earliest “E” layers, through the later “J”, “D” and “P” layers. Each layer, no matter how problematic, had to be retained in its entirety, because it preserved indispensable evidence of the continuity of the transmission of the deed, while the identities of the partners and the terms of the deed required constant revision.\n\nThe guiding thread here would be “proving” that those of us in possession of these documents, and the broader community and ruler we serve, are, in fact, the “same” people who possessed these documents and asserted title to the land prior to us. And this requires extremely agile textual acrobatics because, as I think, from an “objective,” historically informed perspective, would be indisputable, the identity of those at different points along the line of transmission is not only unprovable but unlikely. The birthright must have been “stolen” at various points along the way, and traces of this and its denial would be found throughout the text.\n\nAnd God is nothing other than He with whom we have covenanted once the contact with the original has been lost and through all the twists, turns, exiles, returns, demographic shifts, changes in patron-client relations, etc. Torah study is the ongoing work on the terms of the deed or bailment, conducted through the constant retracing of all the crisscrossing lines of descent and transference and ensuring they are all at least consistent enough with each other. God is He who helps us through the trials and disruptions of inheritance precisely because H also wants to keep His side of the deal. This is the Jewish stack of scenes.\n\nIt would be easy enough to take all this to deny the legitimacy and even reality of the “Jewish people,” and denounce the Jewish tradition as a pack of lies, etc. My reading is exactly the opposite—there is a tenaciousness and willingness to undergo trials in the preservation of this legacy in the “selfishness” of its very “materialist” claims that legitimates far more than simple father to son property and monarchical transmissions (none of which have ever lasted anywhere near this long, and all of which have required a bit of “stretching” along the way). I would even say it makes the title deed legitimate as applied to the State of Israel.\n\nPolitically, anyway—obviously the UN or some international court couldn’t be expected to recognize this title deed from an earthly lord over three millennia ago, but the tenaciousness mentioned above has in the meantime built up various subsidiary legitimations to hold onto. Nor is it then surprising that, once in possession of the deeded territory, Jews would take and hold possession regardless of competing claims. My argument certainly lends support to those who see something intrinsically “political,” radical, revolutionary, liberal, democratic, or maybe simply argumentative, in Judaism—Judaism as we know it today (Talmudic Judaism) took shape, on the account I’m proposing here, through an extension, elaboration and sharpening of the Jewish claim to the land through a sustained, highly mimetic, argument against Roman (and no doubt other) imperial claims.\n\nThe Mishnah, the foundational text of the Talmud, is apparently an essentially utopian legal order modeled on but also meant to sharply differentiate from the highly sophisticated Roman legal system. (It is likely that the Talmudic legend that God first offered the Torah to all the nations of the world and then only to the Jews after the others had refused its terms—the younger usurping the older again—is suggested by the Roman practice of publicly posting imperial decrees.) I can see how others would find it annoying that the Jews would never give up those claims, including the claim that following Jewish law was their way of upholding their side of the covenant and was therefore critical to them having any right to assert their claim, eventually, to that land.\n\nNo doubt we could trace the various formations of Judaism through similar confrontations, sometimes explicit, sometimes cautious and subtle, against claims made by other empires (Christian and Muslim most prominently) that would challenge, even in the slightest, the currently asserted status of that originating covenant. (The elevation of the Davidic dynasty and the establishment of Messianic traditions around it would also make sense in these terms.) But this means that the Jews are indeed always jockeying for power, and usually under unfavorable conditions that might require some “Abrahamic” or “Jacobic” maneuvering, as they try and form covenants with some current earthly power that will provide the political space needed to keep their claim alive.\n\n(There would be a kind of tropism toward imperial that would model the original covenant.) It also means that Jews are far less likely to take literally and “idolize” any particular authority, ruler or political system, and that they can’t help but provide for a certain degree of “ferment” within those systems. For those desirous of a scene of transcendence beyond such “wrangling,” this is all understandably infuriating. This desire for such transcendence is logocentrism, the desire to have an unmediated relation to an original, authoritative voice, and Judaism is indeed allergic to anything like that. For Judaism, we are always on another scene.\n\nThe scripto-centrism of “Talmud,” as “the art of disagreement” (Sergei Dolgopolski) implies a continual retrieval of the terms of a disputed inheritance. God had to speak directly to the people (“reveal” Himself) in order to lay down the terms of the deed, but we don’t need to know any more about Him, even if the conversation is prolonged—we just need continual information regarding the transmission of the terms of the deed.\n\nA genuinely secular Jew, then, would be one who rejects the title deed and renounces any part of it. This will lead to acrimonious splits among Jews because much intra-Jewish interaction, even under conditions of attenuated assertion of “entitlement,” presupposes that the substance of the interaction concerns sorting out the inheritance, its preservation, justification, and the distribution of responsibility for defending it. If one renounces the inheritance, one must abjure and, indeed, abhor all that, and even set one’s sites on its destruction. Such a Jew must embrace unequivocally some kind of essentially “revolutionary” authority, i.e., some authority founded on the sacrifice of the king and the “consensual” foundation of a new order by the “people.”\n\nAnd will likely devote all the energies to defending, elaborating upon and drawing all the “logical” conclusions from that contractual order that his (or her!) ancestors would have devoted to maintaining the title deed and their part of the “class action” created to ensure it always has a hearing. I’m no Jewish authority, so it’s not for me to either endorse or criticize such decisions, even if they seem to me less “free” than a willingness to partake in the ongoing negotiations of title deed and its “nomos,” with all its ambivalence. In a world where Jewish doings are always completely public, that willingness also entails an engagement with the ‘others,” the “Goyim,” if you like, and such engagements, on the hypothesis I’m proposing here, would have Jews frankly seeking support for their title deed in open and explicit exchange for supporting in any way within their (our) power the arrangements and nomos by which other people sort out their affairs.\n\nIn other words, dealmaking with earthly powers, in accord with their power, in a way that makes the assertion and clarification of the Judaic title deed consistent with the capacity of other powers to maintain such orders as would make them willing and able to stand by the deals they make. A world in which we work on making all the longest standing claims of inheritance as consistent with each other as we possibly can. In this way the highly dysfunctional dynamic of addressing political obstacles by making accusations of antisemitism that in their very presumed effectiveness reveal an interplay of power that falsifies the absolute asymmetry implicit in the accusation should be abandoned.\n\nThis kind of accusation is certainly not all that contemporary Jewish (and especially Israeli) politics consists of, but even some is too much. Jews would be performing a public service by helping break the association of powerlessness with virtue that the commemoration of the Holocaust turned into a virtual political theology—and which underwrites, ideologically (theologically), “woke” politics.\n\nThe hypothesis I’m presenting here is also perfectly consistent with the hypothesis I previously entertained, regarding the Hebrew Bible as a product of scribal culture, rooted in the pedagogy of literacy issuing in iterations and variations of the kernels of wisdom literature, expanding them into narratives, often narratives that permeate legends and chronicles of kings and battles. Training for the writing and preservation of contracts, treaties, grants, and ledgers recording debts would have been among the central concerns of scribal pedagogy and would have provided a vocabulary for describing our broader exchanges with each other and reality.\n\nMaintaining and revising a kind of ur- or meta-grant, with all of its attendant reciprocal obligations, would provide an effective ordering device for organizing and thinking about the more transient exchanges conducted on less intensely commemorated scenes. Presenting all everyday exchanges as governed by the terms of the original deed would allow for communication across scales, or the stack of scenes. Thinking about my everyday actions, even the most minute, as part of my attestation to and defense and fulfillment of the original deed would produce generative forms of logic, dialogue and narration that move seamlessly across expanses of time and space, so that one can be on the same scene as one’s ancestors even while being right here with one’s interlocutors."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-prospects-of-the-hypothesis",
      "title": "The Prospects of the Hypothesis",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 25, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-prospects-of-the-hypothesis",
      "content": "In my latest post, I focused on what might be entailed by acceptance of or resistance to the originary hypothesis; I’ll follow up on that now with the more blatantly marketing question, what can the originary hypothesis _do_? The answer must be something along the lines of “offer us guidance out of our current crisis” because, otherwise, why care? To offer such guidance, which is to say, to found a research program that can diagnose the current global situation and offer remedies anyone could imagine oneself contributing to, we would need the following: first of all, a set of defensible anthropological assumptions, or an answer to the question, what is the human?; a transdisciplinary approach not bound to the limited and arbitrary lenses of sociology, economics, psychology, and so on; the capacity to scale up and down as needed, that is, to analyze geo-political fractures as effectively as and consistently with individual desires; an openness to a range of different theoretical approaches that nevertheless share a similar starting point, so that increasingly large scale collaboration is possible; ways of analyzing historical transformations that lend themselves to proposing ways of intervening in those transformations.\n\nLet’s start with the easiest hurdle, the anthropological one: for the originary hypothesis, the human is that being who is a greater danger to himself than is posed by any external danger. This follows from the mimetic constitution of the human, and I think that we might have broad agreement, at this point, across the political spectrum, that the human is the only species that could be the primary cause of its own extinction. The human is founded in a gesture of deferral, which establishes a shared and compelling center, and this very establishment ensures the continuance of the conditions requiring it as the first place—our relation to the center is both the source of rivalry and the means of controlling it.\n\nThis very minimal starting point commits originary thinking to no particular set of theological or philosophical assumptions—paganism, monotheism, secularism, and all the varieties within each of these categories have all established centers under particular conditions, and we can measure them against those conditions. And by “measure them against those conditions,” I mean identify the most threatening rivalries those centers were established so as to defer, and which rivalries they instigated and in turn needed to be (not always successfully) reformed so as to address.\n\nOriginary thinking does not need to take sides in debates over idealism and materialism, realism and nominalism, and so on—philosophies can be important but come very late in the game, are ways of coming to terms with the sacred, and can themselves be seen as offering means of deferral. Nor does any of this mean that originary thinking is neutral or above the fray in social conflicts—working with the originary hypothesis might involve distancing oneself from a pressing conflict so as to think outside of its terms in an attempt to (provisionally) resolve it; but originary thinking can also lead to the conclusion that only certain changes on the ground can make a new mode of deferral possible.\n\nAnd, of course, originary thinkers might disagree on such things—the originary hypothesis confers no infallibility on its adherents—it just offers a better way of thinking things through, and thinking things through is best done with others. And, finally, nothing in the originary hypothesis implies that the more moral course is to keep the peace at all costs (keep your head down, go with the flow, pay the Danegold, etc.)—keep in mind that the “creation” of the human was an astonishing accomplishment, against all odds, requiring a new level of discipline, a new mode of courage and an unprecedent type of devotion in the participants on the originary scene, which would seem to suggest that at least some of us were made for such things.\n\nNor does originary thinking call for any particular political content—it’s not intrinsically committed or opposed to monarchy or democracy, fascism or communism, nationalism or imperialism, ethnocentrism or ethno-pluralism, liberal democracy or authoritarian rule. Any of these forms of political commitment or governance could conceivably create the modes of deferral that would establish or preserve a community in crisis—or, at least, the originary hypothesis provides us with no way of ruling any of them out of court in advance. But originary thinking can put an extremely pointed question to any of these political tendencies: within the formalized boundaries of your community, what _internal_ rivalries does your tendency identify and how does it propose to frame, redirect and/or resolve them without just displacing them onto another level?\n\nI emphasize internal, because it is conflicts—constitutive, inevitable conflicts—within the nation that the nationalist is most hesitant to looking into, the same kinds of conflicts within the “class” or “party” will lead the communist to avert his eyes, and advocates of “liberal democracy” and “market capitalism” have designed their ideologies so as to rest secure in the extremely implausible claim that any significant conflicts can be resolved through electoral and consumerist means as long as the totalitarian other is safely sequestered (but don’t those totalitarian desires then turn out to inhabit the liberal subject itself?).\n\nIt’s likely that not all of these political tendencies will meet the test equally, and I, like anyone else, will have my own ideas about the probabilities, but they should all welcome it and be questioned along these lines; and, most important, this means that originary thinkers can in principle engage with all of these political positions and might, under specific conditions, join with pretty much any of them. At the same time, having a common theoretical currency should enable originary thinkers to share notes, so to speak, on the experiences yet to come and to synthesize some conclusions. A monarchist in one country, facing its crisis, might understand why an originary thinker in another country would be a communist, even without agreeing, and be able to communicate in ways that political polarization has tended to make impossible so far.\n\nNow, if what you’re really committed to is an open-ended critical thinking, challenging all ideologies and developing correctives to the propaganda and mass media assaults we are constantly subject to, there are no limits to what the originary hypothesis can do for you. Everything is open to question—not just politics, but ethics, aesthetics, morality, institutional design, the meaning of life, everything. We just hold onto one constant: that humanity emerged in an event in which a mimetic crisis was deferred through the issuance of a gesture of aborted appropriation. That’s the human—if you have a better account, one that can get us from a hominid that is not yet human, but becomes human (yes, we must accept, in very broad terms, evolution, but no particular evolutionary theory), that does so with a focus on the group (which somehow must be transformed together), and along with all this accounts for language, let’s, by all means, hear it.\n\nOnly a kind of extreme scientism, that must explain the emergence of the human along the exact same lines of genetic modification through selection as for every other species, would have to dig in his heels here. Otherwise, the originary hypothesis makes no claims about differences within or between groups, or their causes. By holding onto this one constant we can both ensure intellectual liberty and discipline—asking how a particular concept, artifact, act, or institution deferred a more or less imminent crisis, on a greater or lesser scale, will not by itself tell us about its truth, beauty or goodness, but the aspiration for truth, beauty and goodness are themselves forms of deferral that then generate their own criteria.\n\nSo, a common line of reasoning within originary thinking would go like this: “truth,” say, might not have been what humans first needed to become human, but it might be something we need to stay human, and we can understand why and how that might be the case. We can enter any of the disciplines, taking their questions completely seriously while shaking them up but insistently hypothesizing regarding the origin of both the “object” and the inquiry into it. Originary thinking can enable the most thoroughgoing historicization and demystification of the most taken for granted concept and then return that concept to us in a way that enables us to commit to it in full knowledge of its origins and “priors”; it can help us tease out the “ideological interests” of a seemingly innocuous news item as effectively as any other mode of critique but without then leaving the question, “then what?” hanging.\n\nSo, then what? Here I need to sharpen the question originary thinking would pose to the political positions across the board. Since the fall of monarchy, all of politics, from left to right, have shared the same model of “liberation.” Working class or nationalist politics, liberal and democratic politics, all construct a relation between a political subject and some oppressive agent—the political subject is formed through the struggle against that oppressive agent. Marxism, liberalism, nationalism, antisemitism, anti-colonialism, are all identical in this regard. These are all very easily identifiable mimetic scenarios—the rival who has usurped my rightful position at the center, who continually anticipates and thwarts my desires, who saturates the space of action so that, ultimately, only the elimination of the other can enable me to arrive at my full subjecthood and achieve liberation.\n\nIt’s not necessary to claim that any of these political projects deliberately falsify facts, events and intentions to say that the narrative thereby constructed is fictional. Any historical narrative is fictional, an application of existing templates to selectively framed events. Perhaps each and every one of the political programs I’ve mentioned could extract what they really want from such narratives, thereby reducing considerably the melodramatic quotient of their discourse. Again, I can’t exclude that possibility, and they would all be better for it. But this, at any rate, is probably the most challenging “demand” originary thinking about politics would make, because it requires deferring the extremely powerful (and propagandistically effective) desire to predicate one’s political aims on one’s own victimization.\n\nAnd replace it with what, then? _With the center_. Meaning what? I trust you will acknowledge that your country, county, city, district, town, workplace, even family has someone at the “head,” even if temporally, even if loosely and mostly consensually. (Can we even converse without focusing on someone, who thereby becomes the center of our deliberations, weighed down by our projections and myth-making?) Maybe you really hate that person and want to replace him (or her!). But the place would still be there—you would just put someone you prefer there. Maybe you want to replace that person with no one, imagining a free association without regulation or coercion.\n\nNow, if you imagine social interactions within this free associations taking place completely spontaneously, with all discussions initiated equally by all involved and concluded with complete agreement on all sides, then you’ve stymied me—but in that case it seems to me you’d need to posit some instinctive, even genetic, mechanism ensuring that all can be always and completely in accord—something equivalent to Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device, but covering reasoning, morality and ethics as well. Otherwise, even in “free association,” someone takes the initiative, someone sets the tone, someone starts off in a new direction, and we can say that person, albeit momentarily, occupies the center.\n\nAccording to our hypothesis, humanity was created around a center—that central object all members of the group desired and that “interdicted” its own appropriation. All “legitimate” commands can be traced back to that. The first revolution in human affairs was some individual “seizing” the center—what the anthropologists call the Big Man, and from whom follow (along extremely complicated routes) all the kings and emperors and prime ministers and presidents and even “bosses.”\n\nSo, I am asking you to consider that there must always be a center, even if the forms “centering” might take are infinite. Think about anything you want done, at any level of human existence—someone has to be at the center of a chain of events and commands that would lead to the thing you want being done in a way you could recognize it as having been done. Even if what you want is distributed, decentralized, centrifugal networks comprised of unregulated exchanges of goods and information, someone sees to the spinning off of a new center and someone, eventually, will have to be central enough to fend off attempts from other nodes in the network to recentralize.\n\nThink of any agreement implicit or explicit, you operate under with another—do you not imagine an arbiter whose fair decision you count on or whose unfairness you stand ready to protest? Rather than liberation from a center that arbitrarily dominates us, what we want in that case is the firming up, or repairing, or reconstructing of a center that would ensure the commensurability between what we want to do and want done and the sorts of things this kind of center does. It’s a question of wanting to know what the other wants of you, and being able to represent in turn what is involved, as far as you can see, in you doing it.\n\nThere can be lots of disagreements, and I’ve written a lot about these matters, but I will leave it here and say that discussions of how to clarify our relations to the center are going to be far more promising than discussions over how to liberate ourselves from it. Another way to think of it: whoever is at the center now will have to hand off his (or her!) centrality to another, eventually. So, how can we ensure that this hand off comes off as smoothly as possible, with capacities and obligations kept intact from one occupant of the center to another? Our political thinking would be immensely improved by translating all questions of liberation (and its attendant questions of “legitimacy,” “rights,” “representation,” and so on) into versions of this question.\n\nPolitics is then a community openly thematizing, dramatizing and narrating its own continuity—which means the problem of continuity, its evitability, is firmly fixed in everyone’s mind. Again, this says nothing about traditionalism, conservatism, innovation, experimentation, or anything else—the human practices associated with all of these categories, and others, might come into play in any number of ways in this “evitabilism.” But in proposing the originary hypothesis as itself originary, as the founder of new modes of inquiry and even new worlds, what is “central” is thinking and speaking of the center. Therein may lie many rivalries, but also the means of converting them into new and better modes of social being.\n\nAnd in these reciprocally constitutive exchanges between center and periphery we will find not only the key to social repair but some interesting approaches to the way we enact our subjectivities through technologies and media—if humans have never discovered a way of replacing the sacred center, perhaps all these new ways of plugging us in are attempts to simulate it—attempts which become something else as we scrutinize them in these terms. At all scales across the “stack” we can design ways of demanding power do the things we are being held responsible for and disclaiming responsibility when we are disempowered in order to model the existing discrepancies between power and responsibility along with intimations of their remedies.\n\nSo, anyway, this provides a sample of the kind of discourse that might be created within a GA think tank."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-same-sample",
      "title": "The Same Sample",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 23, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-same-sample",
      "content": "As I mentioned in “The Originary Hypothesis in Itself,” a participant in the recent GA conference (Dominic Mitchell) referred to the “non-fungibility” of language. He used this term in the context of language’s resistance to “scientific” reductionism, and it provides insight into both language and the originary hypothesis. I suggested that to be “converted” to the originary hypothesis—to take is as the point of departure of your inquiries—would require a sense of the “miraculousness” of language, or a constant wonder at its very possibility, even as that possibility is continuously affirmed in its reality. The “creationism,” or “ex nihilo” character of language which the originary hypothesis insists upon, is a scandal and stumbling block to the philosophically and evolutionary psychologically inclined.\n\nWe can reduce the issuance of the sign on the originary scene to a minimal conversion of a gesture of appropriation to a gesture of deferral—we can readily imagine grasping for something and in the midst of it, slowing down, even slightly, perhaps opening up one’s hand in an only partially articulated disavowal. In a sense, that’s the easy part, because we just have to imagine someone suddenly confronted with previously unseen opposition. The tough part is the second person now imitating this new gesture, after having gone all in on the rush to appropriate the central object—and then a third, and a fourth, until the tide turns and enough on the scene stand ready to restrain whoever still approaches the object.\n\nAt least one participant is playing against type here in imitating this new gesture, and that participant must be taking in the scene in a way we could never reduce to anything external to the scene itself—no animal “instinct” or “predilections” could account for the how the entire scene resonates in this single participant—the entirety of the event has overridden all that and created a new, immanent causality that we language using humans cannot so much explain as enact. Hence the scene’s, and language’s, non-fungibility.\n\nIf language as a whole is non-fungible, so is each particular use of language, each utterance. I don’t make this (or any other claim) in the philosophical spirit of inviting counter-arguments but in the generative spirit of producing pedagogies. Anyone can break their head trying to “prove” the fungibility of language as much as he likes—only a self-parody would result. I prefer to take the opposite route—to show the non-fungibility of every single utterance (including to any other utterance) even and especially when it seems counter-intuitive and counter-factual. The bored drone of the demoralized teenager working late night at the McDonalds and repeating for the umpteenth time “do you want fries with that” is surely fungible with every other instance of that quasi-automated phrase, isn’t it?\n\nWell, what would be indications of its non-fungibility, precisely to those instances of that phrase that seem most identical to it? Some tiny difference in tone, something in the surrounding scene to which the speaker’s body language directs our attention, something in the way it is heard (maybe it sounds, all of a sudden, hilarious, after having been heard for the thousandth time), something in the way it marks some transition in the biography of speaker or listener. At any rate, that’s the challenge that produces generative knowledge: treating every utterance in its non-fungibility to any other and thereby revealing the miraculousness of language.\n\nThat’s the research project, or the assignment, and pursued consistently it will generate the samples of non-fungible utterances it’s seeking and working out: revelation bound up in a mobius strip with unremitting satire would be the result. The study of that “do you want fries with that” would produce both an epic of our present and a devastating exposure of the wasteland making that utterance possible. And more serious and profound utterances would, _mutatis mutandis_ , produce equivalently non-fungible results. This is the source of writing strategies, some of which would no doubt converge with those of certain 20th and 21st century authors. But now we can know it to be a study of and participation in the origin in the present.\n\nI don’t object to the “religious” overtones of the “miraculousness of the utterance,” but I also like to speak in more scientific idioms and would translate the miraculousness of the utterance into “the same sample.” All utterances are samples, of course, but all samples are also utterances, insofar as we can only identify, mark, collect and name them through language. The science vs. humanities division is thereby abolished in a single stroke. We have samples, which in its aggregate means data, and what counts as a sample, what counts as data, depends completely upon the disciplinary space wherein we are pursuing the answer to some question.\n\nThis post is a sample, and each word in it is a sample, as is each sentence, and it can be sliced up into samples in as many ways as people can aggregate it as data with other samples, of American English, of contemporary prose, of Substack discourse, etc. And such slicing and aggregating would itself produce more data, of studies conducted for certain purposes, in certain kinds of institutions, with various criteria for creating data sets, and so on. The central problem in any shared inquiry is ensuring and establishing that we are all examining the same sample. What am I looking at here? The social, historical, mediatic, and disciplinary conditions of possibility for us to reciprocally demonstrate to each other that we are looking at and/or listening to the “same” thing, keeping in mind that that same thing is changing constantly and that determining its sameness also requires determining some degree of tolerance of difference (it’s the same for this purpose), are staggering in all that they entail.\n\nBut only if we do it do we have a sample: we meet the miraculousness of the utterance at the other end. We’re always re-enacting and, even participating in and prolonging, the originary scene every time we do something like this, and we are always doing something like this: ensuring others that we’re “handling” the same sample. Each utterance singles out and presents for confirmation a particular hierarchy of relevancies, at the tail end of which lies an ostensive which it may or may not be for any participant in the exchange to finally issue. And this is indeed the central, even only, issue on the originary scene: are we all proffering the same gesture of deferral?\n\nNow, let’s return to a conceptual round-up and plug the same sample into singularized succession in perpetuity, the perfection of the imperative, and data currency (I have a few other concepts lying around ad will get to them but these have busied me most of late) so that the same sample, guiding the actual practices of inscription, ties them all up together. Then we’ll have the basics of a curriculum. Now, singularized succession in perpetuity is predicated upon a particular understanding of what a practice is, that is, what we are doing when we do things. And what we are doing when we do things, insofar as we are doing them, is produce signs that could only have resulted from doing that thing.\n\nSo, if everything resulting from your action could only have come from that action, with no remainder, your practice was perfect. Every possible utterance, or sample, is the result of a practice, either “auto-probating” the practice or providing evidence of remainder. The more perfect the practice, the more that practice initiates the successor practice, by providing both model and preconditions for it. Governing, ruling, managing (leaving aside for the moment how we want to name the practices of the occupant of the center) are practices, practices defined by commands issued resulting in responses recognized by the commander as consistent with the commands given.\n\nSo, I’ve hypothesized that, to the extent that this is the case, only the commander can issue the command to appoint his successor—only that provides a guarantee of the continuation of the practices initiated by the commander. This would, in fact, be the most important decision made by the commander, and the most important criteria would be that the one selected in turn select his successor, and so on. The basic continuity of the social order is placed front and center and made fully explicit. This is especially the case insofar as the selection of the successor would have to be continually reaffirmed, because changing conditions might always affect the criteria for choosing a successor.\n\nThis practice of singularized succession would capture the attention of all and would be repeated at all levels of the social order, as practices of succession would be modeled on those conducted at the top. The entire social order would be a kind of pageant of passing the scepter or baton, with each day bringing fresh scenes against an increasingly rich background of transmitted habits and institutionalized norms. The defining function of the occupant of the center, then, is to maintain a steady and curatable data set of samples of futurity for the study of all.\n\nThe perfection of the imperative would involve the study of movement, which means separating specific movements from larger wholes and detecting new movements within the movements you have already analyzed. If you separate out and objectify ever more minute movements, you can off-load those movements into articulations of natural objects (themselves taken out of larger wholes and refined so as to be repeatable) and thereby extend the chain of imperatives into the natural world so that we are both giving imperatives to reality and taking them from some reorganized part of reality. The initial refinement of the imperative concerned the ritual scene, with imperatives taken from the center so as to construct rituals whose rigor can be enforced and can take in more of the world of practice in which the efficacy of the ritual scene is tested out.\n\nTechnology can only develop autonomously, as a self-referential network of imperatives once the relation to the sacrificial center has been destroyed—then, technology comes into its own as a form of governance that competes with personally exercised and transmitted governance. Technology can never win this struggle because technology is incapable of generating events, and so on its own can only try to extirpate them when they emerge—a good example of the limits of technology in this regard is given by Sigfried Gideon in his _Mechanization Takes Command_ , when he points out that, despite all efforts, in the mechanization of the hog slaughtering industry in the US (an early instance of automation), the actual moment of death, the killing of the individual animal, could never be mechanized—someone had to manually apply the fatal blow.\n\nBut it’s not clear that technology, or the technocrat, can ever be convinced of his limitations in this regard. At the same time, personalized rule must embed itself technology but can’t do so without dramatically transforming itself—singularized succession in perpetuity is a modeling of that transformation.\n\nSince technology emerges from the break-up of the sacrificial scene, it is from the start arrayed against the Big Scenic Imaginary—that is, ways of referring to the world and human interaction as if all included in some “we” were ranged along a single scene with an object at the center to be distributed “properly.” Our thinking has never ceased to be permeated by this imaginary, and the best way of thinking about technology is as a new mode of governance deeply distorted by its subordination to the specifically capitalist form of the Big Scenic Imaginary, the money system that reduces technology to assets that indirectly return to the center in such ways as to empty the center of intentionality; but, at the same time, as only intelligible once extracted from the Big Scenic Imaginary and resituated within the dynamic of hypotheses and practices.\n\nWhat we ask or demand of technology, in that case, is to enable us to perfect our practices within the ongoing perfection of chains of practices. When I do something, I’m providing data samples of what others are doing through me, of what they might be doing through me, and of what I might be doing through others, in increasingly prolonged time frames. As I perfect my practices, I reveal potentialities undetected by the practitioners upon whom I rely, and generate samples of potentialities which will be dependent upon and completely unanticipated by my own. The pageant of singularized succession in perpetuity and the perfection of the imperative converge in the ongoing formation of modes of attention, or sampling, directed at determining that which would make our present more fully consonant with our descriptions of it precisely by delivering that present up to our successors of whom all we could know is that we were a necessary presupposition.\n\nAnything I say now, taken in its fully technologized and mediated form—as a contribution to scenic design practices—is a program for where everyone will be situated at some undetermined future time, which really means a program for where one exemplary sample will be situated at one time as a sign of the whole. My utterance organizes a disciplinary space around that sample: to “make sense” of it is to provide samples of the kinds of successions that would articulate the dismantling of the Big Scenic Imaginary with more perfected practices which I can imagine being unimaginable.\n\nI continue to insist that there are answers to the question, “what is to be done,” in all of these very abstract formulations. You’re doing various things, engaged in various practices, at various degrees of perfection, more or less explicitly reliant upon broader networks of practices—the thread that takes you through the labyrinth is the explicitness with which the terms of succession all of the practices to which you contribute are articulated—making the terms of the practices more explicit is to further perfect them. You can even think about how to make, say, your podcast a podcast that would enable others to make podcasts that would follow up on your own so that eventually this network of podcasts infiltrates other media, with those practices of infiltration seeking out their successors within media and other institutions, and so on.\n\nWhat it all might add up to regarding the conversion of all assets into samples can only become evident as your scenic design practices produce revelations of scenes of succession torn between the mire of the Big Scenic Imaginary and further perfection. You want to participate in those scenes, pushing the perfection of the succession practice, making it more explicit, more embedded in other practices, while exposing the big mess of the Big Scene. We are looking for new modes of exchange to replace those conducted through money, but if the samples we’re exchanging are non-fungible they can only be paid to the center so as to support other practices.\n\nDo what you’re doing in such a way that you can do more of it and so that it contributes to others doing more of what they’re doing; even if what you’re doing is wrong or bad, only doing more of it and discovering its sterility or its constant cross purposes with what others are doing will enable you to dismantle the practice and to package it as data for others because if you’re still doing it you haven’t yet assimilated the conviction that its bad or wrong. At any rate, all around us there are models of exchanges “in kind,” which are really incommensurable, and treating such exchanges as samples out of which we build data sets is the way of modeling the replacement of the entire social order through such exchanges.\n\nTo ask others to examine the same sample as you are examining is to open an array of overlapping data sets across the expanse of which we would have to continue to ensure it is the same sample. This renders the miraculousness of the utterance prosaic by representing the sequences of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives that would have to be deployed in order to maintain the contours of the sample across these terrains. We are the ones behind the curtain, and once we start paying attention to what we’re doing there the real scene becomes the ongoing one of “adult learning” (a phrase we’d have to play off against its institutional circulations—the kind of thing we shouldn’t be afraid of, even if some comic banality attaches to our own utterances). These scenes of learning—that’s where we perfect the imperative and select our successors—where data is deliberately and incidentally created in the process of packaging and analyzing it are the non-fungible objects of exchange that will replace the world presenting itself as a vast accumulation of assets."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-same-sentence",
      "title": "The Same Sentence",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 09, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-same-sentence",
      "content": "In the course of a recent exchange the discussion came to focus on whether the originary gesture of aborted appropriation could “scale up” all the way to global peace and cooperation, even if never completely guaranteed. My answer was yes, since there are not “others” left out on the originary scene, no group against which that group is formed and, therefore, there is no ceiling on the creation of new modes of deferral. The reply was that that was true in principle, but not in practice, just like it is true in principle that there is no limit to the length of a sentence but, in practice, Proust probably pushed the length of the sentence to its limits.\n\nThis led me to recall that I know of at least a couple of books that are comprised in their entirety of a single sentence, one of which I have read (and which I love: Ronald Sukenick’s _Long Talking Bad Condition Blues_ ), and there are no doubt others. The idea then came to me of figuring the unending sentence (unending at least until there is no one left to continue it) as a social model—that is, seeing how far we might get treating the human community as co-composers of a single sentence which we are all obliged to keep adding to but can never complete and therefore shouldn’t try (that is, our contributions to the sentence should leave hatches open for continuing it). So, that’s what I’ll be working out in this post.\n\nI’ll begin with a feature of David Olson’s model of writing and cognition that I haven’t dwelled on previously: the fact that he sees writing as the recreation of a reported scene, rather than of someone speaking himself on a scene (say, the writing of a speech). Writing would never develop the metalinguistic features Olson identifies if it were just a kind of script to be recited on a specific occasion (even if, in Greece at least, this may have been a very common early usage). Writing, “prose,” is then inhabited by the voices of others in a constitutive manner, even if I’m just writing down what I think about something.\n\nEven in the first person I’m reporting my own speech, representing some other scene which is being restaged in the text or, rather, in the imagined text’s ramifications through a spread of readers. And on that other scene I am an other. Whatever is implicit in a text is these other scenes, and most of what is “in” a text is these implicit (re)stagings. I have focused on the verbs representing cognition that are, in fact, most illustrative of the transformations Olson is interested in in which words indicating distance, placement, movement and so on are recruited as a “walking army of metaphors” to embed the mobile scene of writing and reading in a vast array of scenes, actual and possible.\n\nBut the incorporation of scenic architectures in prose goes way beyond mental verbs like “assume,” “suggest,” “imply” and so on into all the ways one sentence entrains all the preceeding and touches all the contemporary sentences in its articulation. The hypothesis that in each sentence we try to keep all those connections and continuities in play, like one of those games where each player tosses a fragile object like an egg to the next one, can only enhance the meaning conferred upon present scenes. What is added here is the assumption of the incompleteness of our sentences, conceding that where we are putting periods someone else could put a semi-colon, colon, dash, some modifier, etc. We’d start to speak, write and think somewhat differently, as if we were very specially treated samples in data exchanges.\n\nThe dialectic of demand and command I’ve hypothesized in recent posts would also involve a process of continuing the same sentence, which has, after all, been initiated to institute that very dialectic. There is a single command to be obeyed since the beginning of humanity, to sustain the presence of the scene, which is also an imperative to design the scene, to lay the tracks, create the affordances, practice the gestures and incantations that create the singular paths to the center in any community, a path that has its shape so as to ensure all petitioners of the center are worthy of being heard and carrying back the command of the center so as to match the demands of the community.\n\nWhat I have been calling the partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center is not so much resisted as raveled up by creating knowledge of use to cases in stacked scenes that keeps pushing cases asymptotically to their self-abolishing limits. That is, we place the juridical at the center—the juridical is the form taken for the settling of resentments and since it has become the indispensable form for doing so it has also provided the language in which resentments are formulated and felt. Resentments themselves indicate a disparity in obedience to the imperative of the center, which we can now speak about in terms of a violation of the nomos, or originary distribution.\n\nResentment is when one’s own effort in sustaining presence is not matched by others, who nevertheless remain on the scene. The juridical relies on knowledge—every form of knowledge, humanistic as well and physical—in order to answer the demands made and questions raised by the disputing parties satisfactorily. This implies the maintenance of institutions dedicated to the production and preservation of such knowledge. The settling of a case involves an adjustment of the nomos, a re-establishment of boundaries, including by removing the offender from the community so as to prevent further violation of those boundaries.\n\nBut it also involves the continual design of the scene—the building of prisons to hold convicts is scenic design, but so is the establishment of police and other security forces, fences and other ways of protecting houses, other buildings and neighborhoods, habits of scrutinizing others and reading situations which themselves get built into the scene. With the emergence of planetary scale computation scenic design has now come to include extensive surveillance, recording, data collecting and algorithmic-driven machine learning which, as I’ve been speculating in recent posts, will likely render certain kinds of cases obsolete while creating new ones—cases, though, that will center on modulations of the stack at one or another of its levels just as much as upon measuring the proper degree of retribution or reparation. Humans will still resent, and massive reserves of potential violence will still “power” the system, but deferral will increasingly be referred to learning to navigate designed scenes.\n\nThe same sentence is then continually making such referrals, registering the demands placed upon us by various modes of training for entrance onto teams. The same sentence, really, inscribes the possibility of making such referrals, by countering the partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center. The kind of “politics,” or exercise of power, implicit here is the occupation of strategic nodes in the stack of scenes, juridical order, and knowledge producing scenes. Through the occupation of such nodes and the creation of networks mapping out these scenes into a meta-scene always concerned with data security everything can be made meaningful—in the precise sense of being semiotically operational.\n\nEvery relationship, every move, every decision, is “ordained” in a way best described as ritual, referring back to precedent and the needs of singularized succession. This means some kind of eugenics, arranged marriages, responsibility arranged through kinship and so on, in a manner befitting people who are engaged in abolishing old and creating new levels of the juridical. As always, the counter to liberal objections here is to point out that such arrangements have never really disappeared, and have recently taken on more online forms—people have always thought of the offspring to come from a particular matching, our social circles always channel us toward certain matches over others, we are still mostly, more willing to take a call and be sympathetic to the appeals of a cousin we haven’t seen in decades than of a stranger, etc. We’re always speaking of further formalizing and making explicit permanent features of human organization.\n\nThe same sentence further advances the project of converging currency and language proposed most recently in [Tokenization](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/tokenization). Very explicitly, I want words and other signs to replace money, the debt to the center to replace monetary debt. This must sound deeply utopian to most, and I don’t mind thinking of it as something to approximate—if you approximate something enough, you are it. We can call this practice of approximation “inscripture”: referring to the originarity of inscription, the simple making of a mark that differentiates that mark from what surrounds it, as the most minimal form of signification; but also to “scripture,” the privileging of certain texts, treated as vessels of commemorated scenes and the distillation of textual traditions and in turn generative of the continuation of those traditions.\n\nThis may be Derrida’s “archi-writing,” appropriated by Bernard Stiegler in his theory of technics—tertiary memory, the externalization of the depositing in memory which, taken to its conclusion, means the emptying out of our interiors and leaving us with practices of literacy prompted by an ever more intricately designed environment. Commitment to a project—a building project, a travel or exploration project, a colonization or terraforming project, a research project—that can only be conceived of as multigenerational cannot be funded under capitalist conditions—at any point its continuation might be estimated to be of less value to its investors than some other potential investment; the support of a state, meanwhile, depends upon changes in leadership, which is radically discontinuous in “liberal democracies” (or debt enforcement/forgiveness agencies), and so far not at all guaranteed in a party system like China’s.\n\nBut such projects are essential to singularized succession in perpetuity—the hand-off from one leader and his team to another must involve a promise to continue and branch out such projects. In that case, if the entire social order, as I’ve been arguing for a while now, is to be organized around succession, that includes these trans-generational projects. We’d have to imagine the entire process of discounting against expected future earnings as both prolonged beyond an imaginable expectation of future earnings and as externalized (inscribed) in institutions top heavy with expectancy. There is nothing more important to think today than this inscripture.\n\nContinuing humanity’s single sentence is tracking the imperative of the center through all its windings, its subsidiary commands and the demands they incite and contain. Part of the Thirdness program involves constructing cases, to be adjudicated by a trained team, on the outcome of which one would bet. For the bet to be meaningful, you can give odds, but since we’re not talking about betting on ritualized events with a public outcome (sports, elections, etc.) it is better to construct cases that are as close to 50/50 as possible so that it is the deliberative process itself that is the focus of attention, not trying to guess at some hidden predilection or pattern of the judges.\n\nThis means constructing odd and idiosyncratic cases like, say, whether the firing of some political operative from a campaign was a resentment-generating violation of, let’s say, the “customary rights” of that level of campaign operatives. The point is to use the concept of justice to systematically take the temperature of institutions and generate knowledge about them that would not have been generated otherwise. The Thirdness team then comes to represent the required juridical temperament. But there’s a broader way of thinking inherent in this approach—rather than joining some majority to weigh in on some “weighted” event constructed so as to program a particular form of division, look for those questions where no majority has or even could form because the question only exists as an especially good occasion to exercise specific forms of judgment.\n\nOn any issue, then, try to find the 50/50 point on it—not whether someone is innocent or guilty, good or bad but whether, for example, a particular person positioned some specific way would consider that someone to be worse than someone else; or if someone is guilty, how far the implications of that guilt might travel if certain legal standards were to be retrieved or refined or, even better, the stack of scenes were to be modified in some way. Answers to the “easier,” “majority take” questions might be implicit in taking up these distributed questions, but the questions actually taken up can be designed to keep their relation to the originative question (if there is one) hypothetical.\n\nBy making every sentence as hypothetical as possible while including “cuts” at which one would have to “punctuate” the hypothetical with the real (cases answerable to the center), one would be writing that endless sentence of humanity. To dwell in the hypothetical would be to be the most real because you’d be revealing the imperative of the center in highlighting the convergence on the center by diverging alongside that convergence. This will even turn into the best way of exercising power as it is the best way of forming teams to detect data leakages, which are really results of the rush to the center.\n\nThe idiom worked out here might seem esoteric but it’s not a writing between the lines—everything is open source, explicit. It’s more a question of replacing all those linguistic translation devices, like philosophy and its descendants, the human sciences, with an inscripture that translates not only discourses but obligations, which is to say becomes currency—currency as data. Is this something that will really happen, is it realistic or merely utopian, etc.—no use of language directly matches reality, and each is therefore an approximation inviting others to approximate it in turn. As with everything else, center studies just makes things more explicit—it outers, or utters.\n\nWe are always, in every utterance, tallying up receipts, marking up our ledgers and ourselves as ledgers. I would want everyone’s language to eventually curve towards, be drawn to the gravity of, these inscriptural idioms—they should turn up as a better way of saying what you were in the midst of already saying. Inscriptural idioms are anti-resentment because they refuse to compare—comparison is itself always resentful, asking why the standard is applied differently here. Standards are always rules of thumb derived from a mixed bag of interpretable precedents and every case is singular. If a judgment in some case causes that feeling of resentment to start creeping into your utterance imagine some mode of deferral that would extend the one enacted in that judgment.\n\nYour idiom will then work to extend deferral indefinitely, to sustain the presence commanded by the center. Here we have all the “spirituality” some are calling for as a civilizational necessity as well as a program for the human beyond any “Prometheanism” or “Faustianism.” What arrangement of markings, aural or visual, will be referencable in a future beyond our imagining because it is inscribed within that future condition; what could we be loaning our furtherest descendants in such a way that repayment would be indistinguishable from forgiveness? What nomos might you be initiating? Such questions combine the most precise and disciplined attention and the most far-flung imaginings.\n\nTo be a little more precise: what I see distinguishing center studies from contemporary embraces of capitalism, cryptocurrencies and AI technologies (the singularity, accelerationism, etc.) is my insistence on the irreducibility of the juridical, of judgment—this insistence helps us to remember resentment, which is always essentially a contesting of some judgment, and therefore mimesis. All data, which is to say all information and knowledge, has as its ultimate destination the securing of judgments, whether formal in the case of actual court cases or informal, in what will always amount to some decision among contenders regarding succession.\n\nFor the chosen successor, originary debt (to further secured succession) is enforced while the debt traced back to the outside spread (the recording of promises that guarantees rotation at the center) is forgiven; the further out from the line of succession, the more that distribution is reversed—for, say, common criminals, the originary debt is forgiven but the debt grounded in contemporary property relations enforced. Making this distinction, though, is the site of pedagogy, which is to say language learning and learncoin: commonplace, secular thinking is the simulation of the vendetta below and revolution above along with resentment that one’s enemies remain untouched and the “system” unmoved (in a way, commonplace thinking is a kind of implicit demand for funding).\n\nThe idioms of singularity, meanwhile, convert all cases into selections of successors and it is this that bends the partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center towards succession in perpetuity: to decide a case is to appoint, even if in the abstract, someone to superintend its enforcement. It’s the way you would think in building a company that is meant to last forever, to incorporate all other companies, to issue its own currencies and create spheres of justice among its actual and potential yet to be incorporated partners: the ever more finely tuned medium of the juridical is the means of conveying the imperative of the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-sample-as-our-donation-to-the-center",
      "title": "The Sample as Our Donation to the Center",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 23, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-sample-as-our-donation-to-the",
      "content": "Sometimes the Online Etymological dictionary is worth working through carefully. I’ve been centering the word “sample” for a while now, using it, essentially, as a replacement for “sign” or “utterance,” so as to place language within the broader field of inquiry created by language. I don’t think there are many possible uses of “sign” or “utterance” where the replacement would impair the meaning and many where it would enrich it. “Sample,” though is just an offshoot of “example,” which adds the extremely important notion of a part that provides knowledge of the constitution of the whole. This makes “sample” central to science and inquiry, as Charles Sanders Peirce insisted in his assertion that all knowledge can be reduced to the relation between the sample and the population. I want to use the etymology of “example,” which I will “credit” to “sample,” to take the implications of this “substitution” a bit further:\n\n**late 14c., \"an instance typical of a class; a model, either good or bad, action or conduct as an object of imitation; an** _ **example**_ **to be avoided; punishment as a warning,\" partial re-Latinization of earlier** _ **essample**_ **,** _ **asaumple**_ **(mid-13c.), from Old French** _ **essemple**_ **\"sample, model,** _ **example**_ **, precedent, cautionary tale,\" from Latin** _ **exemplum**_ **\"a sample, specimen; image, portrait; pattern, model, precedent; a warning** _ **example**_ **, one that serves as a warning,\" literally \"that which is taken out,\" from** _ **eximere**_ **\"remove, take out, take away; free, release, deliver, make an exception of,\" from** _ **ex**_ **\"out\" (see[ex-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/ex-?ref=etymonline_crossreference)) + **_**emere**_ **\"buy,\" originally \"take,\" from PIE root[*em-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/*em-?ref=etymonline_crossreference) \"to take, distribute.\" **\n\nHere we see “example” implicated in mimesis, as the provision of a model to be followed or avoided, with further suggestions of folkloric warnings; but this then leads us back further into a series of uses implicating mimetic crisis, i.e., scapegoating, where the “warning” tale is of someone who has been singled out, made an exception of, or released from having been made “an example” of. And, finally, we get down to the IE root of “taking” (out of) and, most “originarily,” “distribute.” It’s as if we see the entire history of the sacred object at the center here: its sacrality is affirmed through a practice of (“equal”) distribution, in which everyone takes a part from the whole; eventually, a human occupies the center, who becomes the “exception,” a model, sacred, but also a possible victim; then a more neutralized mode of demonstration and explication, which we can trace back to processes of deferral and remember always involves that originary danger; until, finally, it becomes, as “sample,” that “part” of reality that we place in the center of some inquiry so that we can treat it was representative or indicative of the whole.\n\nThe history of “sample” follows, we might say allegorizes, the history of humans’ distancing from the originary scene with the shared object at the center. The earliest humans were present before the central object, on a scene where they could all affirm that the object was the same for all of them, confirming this affirmation with strictly choreographed rituals enacting the originary event itself. The Big Man’s “usurpation” of the center introduced the first distancing of the community from the object—now, the object is only available through the Big Man’s distribution, a distribution which might have started off adhering closely to the more or less egalitarian norm of the originary community, but would gradually introduce new layers of distance, as the Big Man would distribute first of all to the worthiest and most loyal of the community, and then delegate to those “senior” members the responsibility for distributing among their “clients.”\n\nWe can then see developments in money and technology as further measures to ensure that we all remain on the same scene through ever complex mediations by which some commensuration between donations to the center and distribution from the center is ensured.\n\nI wrote a post entitled “[The Holding Center and the Held](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-holding-and-the-held-center-beyond)” which explored what seemed to me some ambiguity in the uses of the notion of the “center” that I’ve been working with, and that I think can be more perfectly clarified now. The “center” refers, most “centrally,” of course, to the originary object, which is both the thing we attend to and the meta-person we obey and participate in. It is these two “features” of the “center” that get separated as, over time, humans come to “turn their back” on the center as issuer of imperatives so as to attend to the more singularized object of attention.\n\nSo, the question I had is, what is the relation between the center of my attention when I focus on a loved other or a carefully prepared object of inquiry, and the Center that organizes the very possibility of forgetting it so as to devote my attention to this more contingent piece of the world? The answer is that in treating the other or thing as a fully individualized sample to the extent possible on existing scenic conditions I make the object a worthy sample of my own donation of my entire self to the center. So, to put it simply, we can no longer walk up to some hallowed place, bring a specific, authorized object, and present it directly to the deity, along with the rest of my community.\n\nI can only iterate that originary gesture across the monetary, sovereign and technological expanses that create a circulatory and tributary order. Of course, holy places, where revelatory events are commemorated, still exist, and might exhibit their power in unexpected ways, but insofar as they do such exhibitions will also take place on the terms of the prevailing media, which will enable those commemorations to be broadcast and repeated. Even if you go into a Church and utter exactly the same words as a worshipper did 1,000 years ago, it’s only the “same” insofar as your prayer and petition cut against the grain of today’s world “similarly” to the way that worshippers did against the grain of his. Everything needs to be according to measure, or scale.\n\nPresenting the “sample” as the residue or remnant of the originary sign and object does, in a certain sense, prioritize a mode of scientific thinking. I consider this necessary both as an intervention within mimetic theory which, present company excepted, still seems to me to operate exclusively on the model of the small, “primary” group (it hasn’t scaled up, in other words), but, more broadly and importantly, because the techno-scientific scene is the outcome of the desecrations of the sovereign center that we cannot undo and therefore must move through. Any political, intellectual, religious or spiritual project you propose that can’t be scaled up technologically is DOA.\n\nAnd in my formulation here I want to provide a way of thinking about this other than as a loss, about which mourning and nostalgia are the only responses. We are as “tented” and “tabernacled” as any of our ancestors ever were, even if we need to think quite a bit more about how this might be enacted. Despite the “scientistic” “bias,” though, no form of human experience or interaction is diminished here. We must prepare the others and objects (and lets just call them all “others”) presented to us as samples in accord with the prevailing scenic conditions of doing so—that is, in terms of the stacked scenes we inhabit.\n\nAnd these stacks are enormously diversified. We still passionately love spouses and children, immerse ourselves in conversations with friends, enjoy spontaneous walks through the woods, etc. We can think that one diminishes these activities by referring to them as the treatment of samples, but that’s precisely the “misreading” my etymological excursion aimed at deferring: by “treating as a sample” I include bringing to bear some of the penetrating insight of the modern sciences, yes, but also “taking a part,” accepting your piece of the whole gratefully, engaging the other as a model, modeling for the other (treating yourself as a sample), making the other an exception, singular being and perhaps a potential victim to be protected or, if protection fails, memorialized. All of these presences can be what they are and also scaled up without desecration—this is what aesthetic scenes are for.\n\nOn the terms of the “same sample” I can take one (final?) step further in the thinking on money and debt I’ve been attempting recently and pose the problem of language, or, more precisely, the idiom, as currency. In a sense, this will just be a scaling up of the familiar phrase “my word is my bond.” “Money talks,” money is a language, money is a sign system, etc., so why can’t language be money? I have abundant resources here (this is pretty much _the_ problem I’ve always been working on) and would expect to return to this question repeatedly. The best place to begin is with my privileging of the present tense, recorded in _Anthropomorphics_ , which presented the present tense as a kind of constraint that (in the terms I’m using now) forces a kind of compression of pasts and possible futures into a single present scene, infinitely expandable.\n\nSo, instead of saying something like (to propose a new thesis, but one which has probably been made elsewhere) “the entire 19th century was a prolonged attempt to make sense of the Napoleonic experience,” you would have to say something like “Here we see the residues of our having inherited the 19th century’s self-constitution as a prolonged attempt…” The present tense here becomes a mode of registering and measuring “samples” of the past. Even to say things “have happened” rather than that they “happened” makes the present the point of reference. Regarding the future, the constraint of the present would mobilize formulations of the “is to have been” kind.\n\nAgain, this compels the construction of links between past and present or, we could say, paths of succession starting now. For that matter, I would make a case of “will have been” as the present tense because “will,” strictly speaking, odd word that it is, is the present tense—presumably its original use was to refer to something one was “willing” at the moment. It is the present turning itself into the future, making it perhaps an especially useful sample for my purposes here. Maybe I’d be freer from reproach from grammatical sticklers if I opened myself to reproach from another angle and used “it wills” instead of “it will” to indicate futurity.\n\n(Ultimately there is no real future tense in English, so all ways of indicating futurity are modifications of the present tense.) So, anything happening now is to have been some kind of case under such and such conditions or something happening now is willing some possible future condition into existence. The purpose of such a constraint is not to police language—I am not proposing that anyone, including myself, renounce the past tense—but to serve as model samples, much like the model organisms biologists determine to be particularly useful for studying particular features of life. It’s a non-philosophical way to order thinking, one that draws upon both literary and scientific sources.\n\nIn a way, information already functions like currency: if I have a piece of knowledge that will enable one to make a deal worth a great deal of money but only if acted upon within a very brief time span, then that information can be given a very clear value—that is, people in a position to use it will be willing to pay some predictable amount of money for it. But let’s consider that in exchange for that piece of information it is not money but another piece of information that is exchanged—now, we are thinking in terms of a post-monetary tributary order, even if only for those positioned to make rapid and profitable use of information—but, that’s where any transformation starts and even the less well positioned of us might always be able to find some use for information for which we would then want to acquire some information to exchange for it.\n\nSample for sample. At the same time, I want to resist this particular kind of financialized model of information exchange. So, I switch over to the furtherest future perfect option on succession proposed [here](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/options-on-succession?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Ffurtherest&utm_medium=reader2), which (presupposing the universal team subscription model outlined [here](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-as-currency-and-the-debt-to?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fteam&utm_medium=reader2), for example) involves advancing resources to those pedagogical institutions most likely to provide the prospective team members you don’t yet know you will need.\n\nHere the resources are knowledge, rather than information, since they involve creating expanded, stacked, scenes, rather than maximally compressed micro-scenes in which fortunes can be made or lost in a second. But prior to knowledge comes language, or idioms, so that, in fact, is what is provided. The most powerful idiom, and therefore the worthiest of exchange (and, like all language, only meaningful in exchange), would be the one that opens paths between past and future within the present that create the present as a site of continual deferral, which is to say, of hypotheticality. And that’s the idiom constantly on the lookout for the most promising samples and the most singularizing ways of treating them so as to represent the all as fully successionable as possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-scene-is-the-same",
      "title": "The Scene is the Same",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 03, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-scene-is-the-same",
      "content": "A theoretical claim I have been making since I’ve taken up the originary hypothesis is that the originary scene has never closed. In other words, if we ask, when would the originary event be over and the scene complete, we could answer by saying, once the sparagmos has been completed and the first ritual (the repetition of the gesture, this time deliberately and in unity) has been enacted. But the possibility that the scene will still break down and that the ritual will be insufficiently choreographed to “hold” remains until the closure of the scene has been “confirmed” externally, upon a new scene referencing the previous one.\n\nBut the same question could be raised regarding this new scene of confirmation, which would therefore need a new confirmation within a new scene, and so on, as long as humanity endures. Rather than infinite regression we have infinite progression. We are still, then, on the originary scene, and the subsequent and widely distributed scene created to confirm it also index its uncertainty and the ongoing tenuousness of the human. I consider this a highly productive extension of the hypothesis because it allows us to analyze each scene and each stacking of scenes in terms of the question of the demonstration and even operationalization of the continuation of the originary scene within these others—that is, we are always performing our presence on the same scene, the originary one. My insistence on the centrality of succession should be seen in this light: only by ensuring, marking, validating, authenticating, etc., succession at the center can the chain of references back to the originary scene be prolonged.\n\nThe originary event involves an exchange between center and periphery. This is an asymmetrical exchange, recognition and obedience from the periphery and existence, protection, even creation, from the center. This exchange is materialized in ritual, as a portion of the meal that the center has provided for us and enabled us to share, is returned to the center. This ritual involves a broader set of relationships and obligations between the being at the center and the community, extending throughout the world of animals, plants, celestial bodies, rivers and mountains, etc. Genealogies and modes of kinship are first of organized around these obligations, and hence around ritual.\n\nLanguage would be infused from the beginning with the vocabulary and syntax drawn from these relationships, as dramas enacted at the periphery enrich the scene at the center, which becomes, even prior to its usurpation by the Big Man, a council of governance. There could be no way of speaking about how and why things happen, how and why people do things, who we all are, without wrapping it up in these meta-worlds populated by meta-persons.\n\nKeeping all this in mind is helpful in enabling us to understand the revolution enacted by that usurpation, and the human occupation of the center. It wouldn’t be too far wrong to say that all of our arguments trace back to this revolution, with all of us ranging ourselves on the pro or anti-Big Man side. The most convenient position is to protest the usurpation of the center while advocating, pressuring, manipulating, etc., some existing or potential Big Man (or woman) to displace another and thereby empower you in the name of the originary community (the “people,” the poor, the workers, the republic, etc.). Certainly, most modern political theories and arguments can be reduced to this.\n\nThe other approach, barely thinkable under “modern” conditions, is to defend the Big Man revolution and assist in stabilizing the nomos and distribution it implies. The difficulty in doing this now is that the aura of sacrality that until the desecrations of the modern world had always surrounded the occupant of the center has been thoroughly demolished, and any attempt to resurrect it would probably be counter-productive as the mode of production itself (the use of PR, scapegoating, fabrication, bluffing, etc.) would be evident and easily “debunked” in real time. The only way through, then, as I’ve argued quite a few times, is to make explicit the centrality of succession as the continuity of the community as the “political” question and hence the establishment of succession rituals as the substance of the social order from top to bottom.\n\nResentment toward the center, rather than resentment toward one or another peripheral figure, would be recognized as the greatest danger for the community—while not prohibited, since such resentments can register failings in governance that could pose even greater dangers, such resentments will be subject to special scrutiny and contained within carefully constructed and protected guardrails.\n\nNone of this is exactly what I want to address here, though, even if it’s essential as background. I want to follow up on my recent arguments regarding the relation between debt, money and the center, especially in Zack Baker’s and my “There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center.” The consequence of the occupation of the center by a human introduces further layering within the human community as, even prior to such forms as sacral kingship (much less divine emperors), that is, even with more “primitive” Big Men and chiefdoms, the occupant of the center would have his supporters and cohorts, who would be considered in an earlier stage of distribution and would, in fact, be responsible for those later stages of distribution.\n\nThere is no longer a single event of distribution in which the community as a whole participates, and therefore no direct, shared ritual event in which the exchange with the sacred center is unmediated. It is here that we can locate the origin of money and debt, which serve as extensions of the scene and prolongation of the event. The earliest loans, I would assume, would be made to those who needed money to be the animal to be sacrificed at the temple, for those who had to travel and couldn’t bring their own, or hadn’t any to sacrifice, and could only afford one bought on site. But loans made to set up markets and facilitate long-range exchanges of goods would of course also be part of this scenario—but these are just more indirect ways of donating to the center.\n\nAnyone who gives a loan presumably expects to be paid back, and therefore wants assurances, guarantees, collateral, etc. These would first of all take the form of family and community members sharing responsibility for loans, along with the back-up possibility, no doubt often invoked, of enslaving the debtor for non-payment. Systems of slavery and feudalism no doubt often had their origins in such arrangements, which have the effect of eliminating tributary mediations between center and periphery. And, of course, there was the jubilee, mass debt-forgiveness, which must have also entered into calculations regarding lending and restored some mediations.\n\nBut with the attenuation of such arrangements, with the circulation of money beyond the limits of any one sovereign and, even more so, with tying of monetary circulation to the rotation of occupancy of the center, lenders would need other assurances of the future of the money they set in circulation. Risk calculation comes to the center—you need to know not only whether you will be paid back but whether, when you are paid back in the agreed-upon terms, what you receive will equal in value to what you originally loaned or invested. You need, that is, information regarding the conditions under which you are initiating a particular circulation, and this information will itself have value calling for assessment.\n\nI want to follow up on a suggestion made by Joseph Vogl in his _Capital and Resentment_ to the effect that the earliest modern print media emerged to provide precisely such information to investors to argue that herein lies a broader theory of the functioning of the media in the broadest sense, that is, to include the various sources of the media, which reach into all governing and disciplinary institutions.\n\nSo, let’s say that ritual, our debt to the center, is now articulated through indebtedness, which is to say everyone positioning themselves in relation to the financial institutions as indebted, actually or potentially, as a good or bad risk, and as someone whose riskiness is monitored and recorded via all the data one produces over the course of a lifetime. The state, meanwhile, serves as debt enforcer, on behalf of those same financial institutions which, in fact, deem the state to be more or less of credit risk depending upon how effectively it performs this function. All debts can’t be equally enforced at all times with equal determination and ferocity, so political questions can be reduced to that of where the energies of debt enforcement are to be directed.\n\nThis doesn’t apply only, or even primarily to individuals—all institutions, public and private, rely upon their credit rating and therefore must comply with the industry-approved standards for determining credit-worthiness. This process operates globally, and we’d have to distinguish between, right now, the US as the primary currency generating state with the power of debt enforcement globally, and other states more or less outside of the nomos or orbit of US debt enforcement (operated, of course, through layers of vassal states and transnational institutions). I have spoken before of a kind of oscillation between, or thread upon which other institutions hang reaching from the central banks to the state, which is to say, the permanent state, which is to say, those layers of the bureaucracy with surveillance, investigatory, and prosecutorial powers; despite appearances, I continue to assert that the state always has primacy and I can now say that this is exercised through the chokehold the agencies would always have over financial institutions through their ability to determine what manner of debt enforcement will be pursued.\n\nThe agencies can’t do away with the central banks or financial institutions, but they can subject those institutions to any degree of turbulence needed to align their priorities with those of the agencies. Finance, meanwhile, has no corresponding power over the agencies.\n\nSo, what are all those cultural, mediating, disciplinary institutions (universities, media companies and platforms, NGOs, etc.) doing within this framework? They are, most immediately and formally, providing knowledge and information pertinent to risk-assessment by financial institutions. Everything considered worthy of reporting on or studying, and the way in which it is reported on or studied, can be clarified in these terms—as identifying possible areas of risk that the central banks can draw upon in making decisions. This may sound cynical, but it’s actually the best-case scenario, and one in which all individuals could acquire information that might help them in their own risk assessments.\n\nThere is no firm boundary, though, between scouting out events (keeping in touch with major players within various institutions, watching for signs of disturbance, etc.) and actively intervening in events and generating risk—and “news” organizations must have figured this out simultaneously with the discovery of the usefulness of their information to financiers, that is, along with the creation of such organizations. In accord with the logic of capital as power, new agencies directly, but the workers in the human sciences more indirectly, disable, defame, blackmail, inform on, threaten, etc., one set of actors in the interests of others.\n\nThis is a way of distributing risk along with providing information on it so that those sectors of capital with the greatest leverage over the media can be told “you can proceed more or less safely in this manner because we are sabotaging those who might proceed in some way you are less prepared to exploit.” This approach provides, I think, a powerful way of reading all of the major “event” of recent years, which are with increasing obviousness, media-generated with the operations of the media increasingly seen as those of the intelligence agencies. This way of thinking fits rather well with the higher levels of scrutiny and awareness regarding the media we see across the spectrum.\n\nYou can get things wrong by asking, when presented with any media product, “who wants us to know this, why in this way, and what do they not want us to know by letting us know—or believe—this?,” but you’ve got a much better chance of getting it right than if you allow yourself to be “activated” by the story to express outrage against the villain it presents you with. In the latter case, you have no chance of getting it right, even if the story happens to be true and happens to reinforce one’s political preferences.\n\nNow, these are all intelligence operations, and we are all intelligence operators. We want orderly exchanges with the center, and we therefore need the information and knowledge required to allow us to engage in such exchanges, across the various tributary layers and circuits. Such transactions are always enabled technologically and mediated juridically. We can therefore assess any story in terms of the way it sets up a juridical case, with specific laws broken (or not) by specific people, within a certain chain of precedents and legal tradition (referring to tributary channels), coherently assembled and presented evidence, a coherent, narrativizable event giving rise to the case, and so on.\n\nA story that doesn’t provide all that or doesn’t indicate that some of these details are still missing, is likely to be fraudulent. Likewise, a chain of custody of the information, if not fully presented, should be evident—out of what institutional and technological capacities is the story composed? If we are provided with such knowledge, the imperatives issued by the center are being made intelligible to us, along with the actions that would indicate obedience to those imperatives. If, on the other hand, we see people accused by “many people” of vague pseudo-crimes, with accusations supported by “sources,” and framed so as to induce conformity with some ongoing public vendetta (“a growing appreciation of the importance of…”—or something along those lines)—then we know we are being put as risk for the sake of someone’s risk assessment and information extraction operation. And this also tells us a lot about the kinds of institutions we should try to build.\n\nIt follows that no one can see further into the future than furthest derivative one might buy. I have no idea how far away that is—can you buy a derivative allowing you to purchase a stock 10 years into the future? 20? 50? What’s the world record? At any rate, if you remain with the system of capital, that’s the furthest along any social change can be imagined in a way that could be discussed meaningfully—otherwise, it’s just imagining new technologies aligned to ideological positions of the present. The only way to peer beyond those confines is to start making markets, and being explicit about making markets aimed at serving specific needs of specific communities and answerable to specific authorities.\n\nThis is the way things work now, but implicitly and incoherently. But if you make it explicit, you can make markets until markets no longer need to be made because we will have transitioned into team-to-team subscription system in which each team (producing something, protecting something, teaching someone, etc.) subscribes to the products , services and personnel it needs from other teams, in turn providing its goods, services or personnel to other teams that can be or already are articulated in the network. At that point our debt to the center is paid forward into the institutions of pedagogy, which the various teams would competitively cooperate (or compete cooperatively) so as to request from those institutions the preparation of new team members who will be able to identify and do what we don’t yet quite realize we’re going to need.\n\nThe continual deferral of the furtherest future operator of the network then replaces currency. The outside option and the outside spread will have been brought inside, replacing risk assessment qua risk distribution with total data exchange with the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-scene-on-which-you-find-yourself",
      "title": "The Scene On Which You Find Yourself",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 20, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-scene-on-which-you-find-yourself",
      "content": "There is no inquiry that can’t be reduced to an utterance on a scene. The more you singularize the utterance the more you fill out the scene and filling out the scene evokes and invokes other utterances on other scenes. This is the continuation of the work of the ancient scribes and the early modern philologists and archivists, among others. The utterance on the scene can be further reduced to the cited sample. To treat any “thing” as a sample is to ask what it is a sample of, and it’s a sample of all the other things it is “like” in one way or another on innumerable other scenes. It remains a sample for as long as you don’t close off the field of likenesses and when you do close off the field in order to establish same/other distinctions that only creates entire new fields of likeness above and below the threshold any same/other distinction establishes.\n\nPresenting a sample is presenting it as cited, as, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “summoned” to appear. And every utterance or sample is cited, and is citing citations, which in turn… History is ultimately a project of tracking the chains of citations all the way back to the origin; at least, that is the imaginary guiding historical inquiries. “Citationality” most immediately comes to us as a post-structuralist concept, through the work of Judith Butler but through her citing Derrida’s _Limited Inc_., in particular, where he deconstructs John Searles’s attempt to distinguish between “proper” and “improper,” “sincere” and “insincere” uses of language in part by, over the course of the book, quoting every word in Searles’s essay, completely “expropriating” it.\n\nWe can say the originary scene is composed of a series of mutual citations, establishing language as citationality, where everyone says the same thing so as to ensure that we don’t all do the same thing at the same time. As self-citing samples we are all signs, all literal allegories, all idiomatic intelligences, all faithful satires.\n\nIt's been a long time since I read Derrida’s book, but I’m pretty sure that what enables him to turn Searles into a figure of fun is Searles staking “sincerity” on a kind of “legality”—that is, copyright becomes impossible if we can’t distinguish between who is really saying what. It’s not too hard to turn this around and say that what we consider “sincere” will depend upon the legality of the situation, which is to say that morality and ethics are interpretations of legal and ritual practices, rather than seeing law (or even ritual) as the implementation of a moral order (conceived where, when and how, exactly?).\n\nOf course, Derrida himself took umbrage when misquoted, or quoted “out of context” (what constitutes a “context” also being an issue in _Limited Inc_.), i.e., “misinterpreted,” perhaps even “maliciously” (i.e., insincerely). Critiques of hypocrisy are irrelevant here, though (isn’t “hypocrisy” just an effect of the possibility of arguing for either side in a legal dispute?)—it is both urgent and ultimately impossible to “nail down” citations once and for all. Tracking down and verifying a citation ultimately leads us to some point where we can’t proceed any further, without being sure there’s not some “plagiarism” or fabrication we haven’t detected.\n\nMost of language is both citation and beyond citation. Knowing that it is citation serves an important purpose in guiding inquiry: every utterance or sample is citing and creating a scene for the reception of the citation of some other piece of writing, and we can lay down likely paths, such as between legal, medical, pedagogical and journalistic texts and novels. Constructing possible lines of transmission issuing in the text now considered as a tissue of citations will provide far more productive interpretive practices than those focused on authorial intent or genre (such practices will include these terms), especially now that we can work through vast databases and powerful searches so as to move back and forth between distant and close reading.\n\nThis is not primarily a matter of literary studies, since any kind of research imposes similar demands, and any kind of intelligence involves research. Any politics predicated upon what I’ve referred to as the Big Scenic Imaginary, which is really just a more primitive, pre-electronic, oral/literacy interface, will be easily captured and disposed of. Look at people on Twitter swearing to “oppose” this or that, to do so strenuously, bravely, along with the rest of “us,” even to the death, etc.—on what scene is this “struggle” taking place? How does it get scaled up from the individual tweet? How is this struggle distributed across the Stack?\n\nWhat are to be its tributary, juridical and disciplinary articulations? If you can’t answer these questions you’re engaged in a ritual practice, a minor cult, perhaps similar to those found all over the Mediterranean world before the victory of Christianity, even if electronic media makes it a globally distributed cult. Even meme-ing, that most electronic media form of communication, is just a cultic practice if you don’t have laboratories and factories working on industrial scale memes. What scene am I on now, for that matter—the scene on which I’m writing this is only in a very specific sense the same scene(s) upon which it will be read and then perhaps cited, more or less accurately, with or without attribution.\n\nIf the scene upon which I’m writing this is not a programming scene, the creation of an iterable idiom that can maintain minimal consistency while translating and being translated into an unlimited number of scenes, then I would concede its pointlessness.\n\nHowever conscientious, scrupulous and diligent, you will always reach the point at which citations trail off into the mist and you find yourself outside of the disciplinary or juridical and within the tributary. The tributary is the broader field of likenesses, where everything is like everything else in some way and to some degree—the disciplinary is like the juridical is like the ritual and all is circulation with devotion to the center shown through the preservation of each and every likeness within one’s reach in the form of the same sample. Samples and data are just particular articulations of likenesses, available to others who are like enough to the collector.\n\nThe tributary never appears as such but breaks through the break down of juridical or disciplinary discourses, precisely when the boundary between citation and citing discourse is broached. What happens then is bits of discourse simply being there, unattributed, without anyone having said what they say. The Derridean argument is that in the end this is case for all discourse, which is why such moments of unattributability are revelatory and it is of course a good, if not exhaustive practice, to reduce to an absolute minimum the particular circuit through which some words re-enter circulation. The “I” who wrote those words, after all, has been created by a long process of buried mimicry and long-forgotten self-held conversations.\n\nThe deconstructive argument, though, doesn’t take the scene into account—the “I” is also a product of public verifications, attestations, signatures, registrations and so on, in which that “I” had to be in specific places in specific times and in ways witnessed and accounted for by others and that’s enough for an “I” to emerge upon who we can hang sufficient intentionality. The stripping of samples of everything raising them above the threshold of anonymity then invokes the renewal of procedures and naming and authentification.\n\nImitation is one form of likeness, or of finding likeness, in a field of likenesses that dwarf those we can deem imitative; further, of all the ways humans imitate each other the vast majority are benign, with the rivalrous, and therefore dangerous modes of imitation a very specific mode. I say this not to detract from the theoretical power of mimetic theory in either its Girardian or Gansian forms even if it is worth noting that, to my knowledge at least, neither ever seemed particularly interested in this obvious observation. Those cases where imitation does initiate rivalry are just as crisis-bearing as Girard and Gans claim, and we can never know when benign forms of mimesis will turn malignant.\n\nBut scaling up seems to me a problem for mimetic theory which, in the case of Gans at least but also, I feel pretty sure, Girard, ends up analyzing relations between social groups such as nations and ethnicities as if they were just outsized individuals. This is, in fact, where my critique of the Big Scenic Imaginary has been primarily directed. You end up with good cultural, anthropological and literary analyses and wretched political ones, because the political analysis needs to scenize conflicts within the institutions of deferral that given them their shape and determine their effects. Why do some rivalries and resentments fizzle out without leaving a trace and others flare up and make it into media narratives and history books?\n\nIf you just focus on those that make it big you need never ask this question, but in that case you basically become a pundit with your own “take.” You can’t pay attention to hidden, silent operations that not only don’t get coverage but determine what does, and you therefore are extremely limited in the kinds of thought experiments you can design so as to hypothesize regarding the functioning of institutions. GA, at least, should have a way of diagnosing institutions of deferral, and it is there, paradoxically, that a lot of destructive work can be carried out because there is a kind of immunity to being caught up in mimetic vortexes yourself. I can’t remember a single discussion from Gans on how deferral operates. He defers that inquiry to the market, but how does the market operate?\n\nSituating the question of mimesis, and within mimesis, the crisis-bearing mimesis, within a much larger field of likenesses provides a way of speaking about institutions and deferral in a vocabulary that remains intimate with that of mimetic theory. Articulating, circumscribing and hierarchizing fields of likenesses (systems of correspondences through ritual and myth) is how “pre-modern” or sacred communities organize deferral. This is a way of turning the center, which is always already there, into a model for the periphery. Girard’s distinction between “external” and “internal” mediation tries to account for this—the obvious conclusion from Girard’s diagnosis of modernity as the plague of internal and therefore unlimited mediation would be to reconstruct some form of external mediation but that has to be done on terms consistent with your theory and if you defer that responsibility someone else will do it in what will probably be dysfunctional ways.\n\nThinking through institutions is needed here--clearly, we can’t just set up, arbitrarily, a new system of “correspondences” at different “levels” that everyone will share. The data search, though, can help us create a system of likenesses grounded in the historical generation of our institutions. Here we have to thank the inventors of the Google search engine which, in a merciless decapitation of modern hierarchies of specialization and classification, simply finds for you a document that is most like the one someone like you would be interested in. And who or what are you like? All the other people searching for documents in ways that reveal patterns (fields of likenesses) into which you and your search fit.\n\nThere is nothing but calibrated likenesses in the data search, and you can continually recalibrate the field of likenesses with each successive search and, soon enough, by customizing searches so as to target certain databases and train the algorithm to learn more from selected searchers. All the predictable complaints about the liberal bias of AI should be disregarded—all that is a last ditch effort to control what can’t be controlled in that way.\n\nSo you, anon, are on a search scene, searching, being searched, inflecting and contaminating the field of likenesses you keep recalibrating. To paraphrase Charles Sanders Peirce, you are yourself a search term. Research on the search scene involves sending samples of language into the engine and then continually refining your search so as to build chains and networks of scenes that are present on the scene of your search. You go from anonymous, unattributed samples to intersecting fields of likeness until your scene becomes the same as all the other scenes you conjure up, scenes which you are just building a new scaffold around, a scaffold that is itself immediately full of action.\n\nIn the end you want all scenes, everywhere, from the originary one on, to be presentable, which is to say to be citable. That means having them cite each other, building little research platforms within the scenes you study so that they study their own derivation from other scenes, sometimes from some corner of the scene. Citationaliy brings us to ascertainability and certifiability which are the ways those on the scene gather, name and preserve artifacts, remnants—inscriptions—from other scenes. Data is only data as a result of these processes by which likenesses are converted into provisional sameness, making it less and less likely that we will all proceed to do the same thing at the same time.\n\nGive data in accord with your ability and take data in accord with your needs is the slogan of this politics, if that’s what it is. And you package and donate, and receive and store, data in such a way as to build the institutions that will make the best use of it that will, in fact, make it data in the first place (useless data isn’t really data, so the more useful it is, the more it is data). Which means that data about management and supervision of data producing institutions (i.e., all institutions) are part of your data, singularized and prioritized so as to maintain and revise the gradations and spread of likenesses constituting your data.\n\nThe less you can trust direct and indirect sources of data, the less it is data or, more precisely, the more challenging it is to figure out what kind of data it is. That’s the “politics”: enhancing citationality until it blurs over into the tributary and you are feeding and warding off the swarm of orphan samples that you are simultaneously generating and in fact becoming."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-sentence-as-metric",
      "title": "The Sentence as Metric",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 02, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-sentence-as-metric",
      "content": "I have relied a lot on the architecture of the declarative sentence, including for the purpose of parsimoniously accounting for the history of media, broadly from orality to literacy to whatever we have now—electronic? Digital? Digital orality? That’s the test I want to put declarativity to now—to offer a way of thinking our current media conditions, in particular in the context of those, like Andrey Mir, supportive of the “digital orality” concept, to which I’d like to offer an alternative. It’s easy enough to see the plausibility of seeing digital orality as the defining media condition of our time, as it reflects the dominance of social media, which prioritizes and incentivizes “polarization,” with the demolition of traditional media ‘gatekeepers,” presumably still drawing upon conditions of literacy in order to slow down response time, force resentments to be worked through various filters, and so on. Social media retribalizes us, on this account. But this leaves the Stack out of account, and the entire order of intelligence, which operates beyond and to some extent through digital orality. It’s a consumerist approach to the question.\n\nThe declarative sentence, under orality, would always approximate the imperative, in the form of oaths, curses, prayers, accusations, prophecies, threats, spells, and so on. It would be incorporated into performances that re-enact stories that are themselves made of those kinds of speech acts. The imperative is delayed just enough to be deflected. The declarative would become isolatable and analyzable as a speech form in the wake of writing, where an observation and clarification of its syntax become necessary and can be modeled on accounting records. The form the declarative takes in writing, what we might call “high literacy,” is what Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner call “classic prose” (I have discussed this many times, but we do have a new context here).\n\nClassic prose creates a fictional scene upon which the reader is placed—you describe, as a writer, what both you and your reader can presumably see in front of you. You can ask yourself how much of what is ordinarily called “good” writing conforms to this model—the very notion of “clarity” in writing presupposes that the language doesn’t get in the way of taking in the scene. Classic prose works because of what David Olson (who also needs no introduction for anyone familiar with my work and who, it should be mentioned, himself relies upon Thomas and Turner) calls the “metalanguage of literacy”: proposing that we see writing as the recording of another’s speech, on the model of someone telling others gathered on a scene what happened on some other scene, Olson hypothesizes that everything mimetic on the reporting scene (where the one reporting the events and speech from elsewhere would directly imitate all the words and actions) is filtered out by a new set of linguistic formulas that inform us more indirectly of the speakers’ relations to their words—so, instead of getting all worked up and shouting when the “character” in the story you are telling raised his voice you would say “he then exclaimed,” etc.\n\nMy own follow-up hypothesis is that all the disciplines, starting with philosophy, are attempts to ontologize these formulas of implication (e.g., what are valid and invalid “assumptions”; indeed, what is an “assumption,” etc.) rather than contribute to their stacking in scenes.\n\nThe question I ask, then, is what happens to this model of declarativity in the wake of the emergence of new media over the course of the last century and a half or so? I would agree with the proponents of a new digital orality that the performativity of language, which is occluded under the “regime” of classic prose, displaces the objectifying and neutralizing pretensions of classic prose. But surveillance, information sharing, data collection and analysis, algorithmic governance, simulations, forecasting and so on are performative without marking a returning the hyper-alertness of orality. It’s easy to overlook these modes of performativity, or to examine them only in some kind of protest mode which pretends to imagine a return to an earlier form of liberty, and thereby remain focused on the predations of social media.\n\nOnly the officer class can see the data exchanges between “addresses” and not only “users” (to recall Benjamin Bratton’s terms from _The Stack_ ) as a site of intervention, construction and decision making rather than threat and violation. I’ll take this opportunity to remind readers that one can make great use of many “leftist” analyses of the new media and modes of data circulation if one simply subtracts or filters out all liberal and democratic assumptions and thinks in terms of more deliberate and transparent data exchanges between teams of subscribers. The same is true regarding those on the republican or populist right: I read fairly recently an account by the pro-Trump conservative blogger Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse about how the supposedly environmentalist legislation being proposed in Congress has been written up by BlackRock because it has invested in Chinese companies producing the very electric vehicles whose sales would be boosted by this legislation.\n\nAnd, of course, he’s perfectly right, and, under present conditions, such arrangements are absolutely insidious and destructive. But that’s only because everything has to pass through the Rube Goldberg device of “liberal democracy,” requiring that those in command of resources must do their coordination amongst themselves under the guise of various forms of liberal and democratic ratification—and, of course, the credit system which is itself laundered through the same means. Otherwise, of course those in command of the resources required for one part of a production line should be coordinating with those in command of the resources required for other parts of the production line—how else, indeed, could it work?\n\nSo, I can allow myself (and you can, too) to cut to that more basic question of how to enhance coordination amongst those best able to secure succession, in their own lines and in social orders more generally. The question of the media takes on another cast in that case.\n\nI’m going to develop the suggestion of a demand into command model of the declarative from [a couple of posts back](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/modeling-thirdness-2) into the model of a new mode of declarativity as data exchange. So, let’s recapitulate, again (we can never do this too many times), Eric Gans’s hypothesis regarding the invention/discovery of the declarative sentence, with my own little additions. We have an imperative that cannot be fulfilled because the object is not present (an “inappropriate imperative”)—we assume this because if the imperative is refused we have a confrontation, and nothing new, linguistically, can happen, while if the imperative can’t be fulfilled we have the “agent” of the imperative (thinking in terms of the “principal-agent” problem) still interested in maintaining linguistic presence, and so the design of the speech form can proceed.\n\nSince the imperative involves the supplying of an object (there’s no way at this point to think in terms of an imperative aimed at an carrying out an act within a chain of command), we can call this imperative a demand. Demands come from the margin, presupposing some other has the means of satisfying it; the demand leaves the ‘recipient” of the demand intact, or even more powerful, as more responsibility is added to its “remit”; the command assumes the delegate is relatively interchangeable with other possible “obedients” of the command. In this case, considering the imperative in question a demand helps us understand how the situation is defused, since it is backed neither by hierarchy nor a threat of violence, while the agent of the demand more closely approximate the center through accepting it.\n\nThe demand, then, is repeated in the face of continued failures to supply the object and, rather than escalating, the demand is prolonged until it trails off into a request and finally an interrogative, which becomes a proto-request for information about the demanded object insofar as the demands pending state continues to strain the bonds of linguistic presence, until the agent of the demand repeats, counters and completes it with a ”negative ostensive,” modeled on the “operator of negation,” retrieved from repellent “stand down” order issued by the central object on the originary scene. The operator of negation is itself an imperative, but in this case a command, as the object of the imperative to for the other to cease demanding.\n\nThe command here is coming from the interlocutor of the demander, i.e., the agent, but only as backed by the center, or what we could call the “real” (itself created by the declarative sentence, which calls into being what can be referred to but not changed), which has issued its own imperative, also a command, to the object, for it to absent itself. So, the declarative, on this account, elicits a command to constrain a demand in the name of a prior command. We can see how performative it is from the start, but also how it opens a space for commands to be issued by what Marshall Sahlins called “metapersons” (upon whom actual persons can come to model themselves), and therefore for a world that resists our desires but with which we can “negotiate.”\n\nIt's hard to imagine a more powerful model of “objectivity” than being able to elicit and register all demands, across all scenes, whether made by humans or by some device activated on some scene, and channel them through questions so “executive agencies” can in turn be channeled through chains of command to “corner” those demands and convert them into information about the distribution of needs and abilities on the scene. We could call this the metricization of the sentence. Any sentence might be taking in dozens, hundreds, even more demands, and commensurating them all to a single command capping the imperatives at the point where some disturbance in the nomos would threaten to reintroduce the vendetta.\n\nAny sentence is already designed as an answer to questions, with at least two possible questions informing even the simplest sentence: a question about the topic and a question about the comment or predicate. All the other parts of speech simply pre-empt possible questions posed to the presenter of the subject-predicate relation, i.e., the commanding reality: adjectives answer the question “what kind” or “which one,” adverbs answer questions like “how” and “when.” And every question can be traced back to its demand or network of demands. The design of a sentence is then one aiming at attracting all manner of demands into the dead end of a commandingly arrayed reality which, then, in turn supplies the questions into which the demands have mutated with knowledge (a new world of possible ostensives) with which to reformulate the originating demands.\n\nOur sentences are scraping the data field for demands to be converted into commands. Our bodies, for example, are comprised of a vast set of demands for pleasure, comfort, space and therapy, including anticipatory therapy or potential therapy, while all those demands made from throughout our metabolism are registered by data control centers which use them to create new networks of ostensives, then imperatives, interrogatives, and declaratives encoding demands conveyed elsewhere on the production lines so that bodies can in turn be supplied with data, in form of various treatments, that our organs know how to make use of.\n\nWe could say that desire is a demand made to the center—ultimately, a demand to be cradled and protected by the center, to have the attributes of the center conferred upon oneself, however that might be imagined. If I recall correctly, Lacan models desire somewhat similarly—you need something, and call out for it (i.e., demand it) and then it becomes desire insofar as recognition by the one upon whom you make the demand is overlaid on the need with which you started. Lacan is thinking of an infant, while I’m thinking of a participant in a scene governed by mimesis. And what is imitation if not attention directed so insistently upon another that the very maintenance of that attention requires the participation of the entire body in tethering (in the face of distractions) the attention to the other—the body becomes a kind of record or measure of attention to the other.\n\nThat attention gets redirected to the center once it is broken up in the mimetic crisis. One’s demands to the center then compete with those of all the other members of the scene. All these reciprocally reinforcing and subverting demands supplies the most important data. The demands merge as data because the demand already presupposes and awaits the command—the entry of the command onto the scene is in fact part of the demand, as demands never quite know exactly what will satisfy them. This returns us to the paradox of governance as I’ve formulated it on occasion, here reformulated as follows: whatever your demand of the center, consider the kind of command that could limit and satisfy it better than it would itself know how to and then realize that your demand is really for such a command.\n\nIt seems to me that thinking of sentences as the recording or ledgering of demands that become in encountering some command the demands they always were provides for a very generative idiom. It provides for protocols of literacy, or modes of interpretation. The sentence can be mapped onto succession, very unlike any digital orality. Good sentences would not be the clear sentences that put you on a scene (while conveniently forgetting that the composition and sharing of the sentences takes place on other scenes) but sentences that interfere with each other by surfacing the demands informing them leading into commands calling them to order.\n\nThere’s another kind of clarity in this. What is this essay if not the eliciting of all the demands I could dig up for a media theory of the imperative of the center, producing some rubble in consumer and market-oriented versions of the media? Media as the intelligence of the center, as data exchange oscillates with becoming data and demands are recalled to their origins in indebtedness. Demands become facets of commands as the forgiveness and enforcement of the debts they bear get sorted out. Commands carry a kind of succession in perpetuity with them, as any command can only be one in a chain, while demands are very time sensitive.\n\nThis is why the commands of ancient emperors could be converted upwards into the eternal commands of God. The interplay between escalating demands and commands that draw strength from and further elicit those demands is the site of declarativity and therefore media today. But let’s think differentially here—the shift from a consumer’s satisfaction to producer’s desire economy means something like Bichler and Nitzan’s notion of “differential accumulation,” which is just a degraded form of centered ordinality—the defining command comes from whoever is first on the scene. The sentence that most creates a disciplinary space around a new idiom is best and here that means the point where the demand dissolves itself into command and command into a new field of demands, where the command is therefore to convert your most disabling resentment (the command you alone obeyed faithfully without recompense, the juridical space closed off to you) into a demand for knowledge of how to donate that resentment to the center. To use Bichler and Nitzan’s terms, to draw productivity out of sabotage."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-sufficiency-of-singularized-succession-in-perpetuity",
      "title": "The Sufficiency of Singularized Succession in Perpetuity",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 07, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-sufficiency-of-singularized-succession",
      "content": "I came by the concept of singularized succession in perpetuity in trying to think through the furthest implications of the absolutist politics I wanted to give some finished shape to in completing _Anthropomorphics_. The logic of concentrating actual power in nominal power, in acknowledgment of the fact that every social order in which the center has been occupied has found it necessary to designate some power as central and “ultimate,” seemed to come to rest in the question of selecting your successor: if you are not choosing your successor you are not actually in power, because everyone around you can hedge on various degrees of obedience and support by transferring promises of obedience and support to the more likely successors—which also means the successors they are helping to make more likely.\n\nIn hereditary monarchies, the problem is solved, but in such a way as to generate other problems, and since it's a mistake to invest one’s thought in a single, rigidly defined form of order, I considered it best to abstract away from the (one must admit) remote possibility of establishing hereditary monarchies across the world. Meanwhile, if you are choosing your successor, then it would follow that choosing your successor is all you are doing, which means that all decisions, all allocations, all considerations held in reserve are directed toward the “fluency” of that succession, thus placing social continuity explicitly at the forefront of public concerns and organizing all attention on commemorative events surrounding that succession and its prerequisites.\n\nAnd, like all concepts I prefer, this one has a direct purchase on the reality we see before us, because viewing everyone, in every field of endeavor, as concentrating their efforts of selecting their successor, is the most powerful way of reading human practices in terms of the desire for immortality constitutive of the sign user. The most devastating critique, then, of the contemporary order, is how heedlessly, sloppily and maliciously this is done, with the upshot of that critique being to take the requisite care in building your own organizations, companies and communities to ensure succession.\n\nSo, it’s not surprising to me that this concept has stuck by me and that I constantly find myself reaching for it, often to solve fundamental problems—such as the difference between the occupied and signifying center manifested in the imperative gap. Now, I can say that the imperative gap is closed to the extent that each of us contributes to singularized succession in perpetuity. The reference to “perpetuity” is to sharpen the focus—it’s not just a question of choosing the best person for this job right now, but the best person who will also be best in choosing a successor, seeing to all the conditions enabling that successor, who will best choose his successor, and so on.\n\nWe open up onto infinity here, as one must imagine oneself selecting your nth successor somewhere down the line while realizing one can’t really do that but can only promote the intelligence infrastructures that make consistency and continuity more likely and understood in terms of confronting specific modes of discontinuity. Here, in fact, as this infinity is embodied by open source Messianism, we have our answer to capital’s discounting against expected future earnings. The entirety of culture is therefore organized around producing candidates for succession, creating spaces of performance for them to test and prove themselves publicly and exploring the various conditions that seem most fertile for their future generation.\n\nSuch a mode of central intelligence further imposes upon one the need to see oneself as a successor, and to identify one’s true predecessors, those who have implicitly selected you and would have done so more explicitly if not for the distracting noise interfering with such singleminded vision. This brings us back to the originary scene itself, continually regenerating it as a source of possible ways of holding to and being held by the center.\n\nWell, what about bad leaders choosing their own successors—you don’t want them doing that, do you? Do you want Biden to be allowed to choose his successor, and then that successor to choose hers, ad infinitum? Doesn’t that mean heading further into leftism, incompetence, and mindless egalitarianism forever? First, they are already do so, insofar they have any power at all; but they can only do so very partially precisely because they don’t exercise real power. If the president of the US were actually the chief executive and commander-in-chief it wouldn’t be Joe Biden. Challenging such a selected occupant of the center to choose his own successor would be very illuminating, because it would be impossible for him—for any of them—to do so without upsetting the delicate balance of rivalries between the various agencies, interest groups, formal and informal organizations that currently count on being able to sell themselves based on their input to the process.\n\nThe successor such an occupant selects would not, in fact, succeed. Only someone who has the necessary threads tied up in his hands would dare to do so, and it would always, even once it became an established practice, require audacity. The selection would not be made once and for all, in the form of a permanent vice-president; rather, in the course of the occupancy at the center conditions will change, requiring reconsiderations of the qualifications for succession, new candidates will emerge, existing candidates will reveal themselves in new ways, the occupant will himself revise his expectations and sense of future directions, and so on.\n\nThe current nominee would be a marker of the occupant’s purposes and assessment of the scene—there would also be nothing preventing the occupant from stepping down or retiring, which also be a way of signifying purposes and assessments. The role that should be played by the leading contenders would be a perpetual subject of discussion—perhaps they should be gaining valuable experience at the highest levels of governance but, then again, perhaps they should not be allowed to hold levers too close to the central power. (It’s interesting that the “totalitarian” leaders never publicly—and, probably, privately, for that matter—choose a successor [except insofar as they come to approximate hereditary monarchies.] Either they want to maintain the fiction that they are not really in charge or understand that they in an order where it is too dangerous to have someone with a comparable level of legitimacy. In a genuinely coherent order, neither condition would hold.)\n\nSuch a political formula is, of course, “formal,” and not, it seems, as rich in content as proposed modes of government based on some kind of “substantial” identity, like creed, nation, or race. But not only does it not exclude any particular basis for social order, it provides a powerful principle of selection of one over another. What you would be looking for, trying to excavate and revivify, is the most unbroken chain of transmissions of power from the origin of the social until now. As you work to make the order more of an order, the more “vested” the leading candidates for figuring out some way internal to the existing order to create a new mode of succession are with the heft of the political traditions of the country, the better.\n\nThis imperative would inspire new studies of history, as the genealogies that can be traced back and then forward to the most compelling candidates and to the mechanisms, perhaps obscure as well as regularly used, might turn out to be complex and surprising. We could therefore imagine a spectrum from ethnic orders, on one side, to more associative orders on the other; from authoritarian and traditionalist orders on one side, to innovative and experimental ones on the other. (And those two spectra don’t necessarily line up with each other in any obvious way.) Singularized succession in perpetuity should provide powerful ways of arguing within any political tendency.\n\nA failed occupant of the center would naturally pose a challenge to any order, but valorization of occupancy as such would enable leading actors to rally around even a malevolent occupier and mitigate while overtly disobeying as minimally as possible destructive decisions.\n\nI have come to treat concepts in a way that I think is rare—they must be descriptive and constitutive at the same time, much like ritual, capturing the paradox of the originary event. In this case, singularized succession in perpetuity is both normative and diagnostic: a flawed society is one in which succession is not attended to and accounted for and a pathological society is one in which succession is actually subverted; meanwhile, the cure is to identify, protect and articulate those forms of succession that nevertheless survive, as they must, as no order can destroy it altogether. This has enabled me to construct a dialectic between the treatment of the center as either designated object of the endless simulation of regicide or designated scapegoat-free zone, on the one hand, and scenic design (technology) and the future perfect (finance, capital), on the other.\n\nAll have their roots in desacralization, and in the severing of narrative and pedagogical ties between the signifying and occupied center, which is to say, in the defense of the imperative gap itself, as such (this is modern freedom). It is the unhousing or “untenting” of people from a sacramental order that makes it possible to eye them as dispersed, mobile parts of yet to be imagined wholes. Humans then become components of the scene, while circulating within it, requiring the erection of various scenes at various levels, scenes for training participants to enter, for their recreation when they exit, for their mobilization for contingencies.\n\nAnd it is the elimination of the center as the site of a distribution that is explicitly ritual in the complete sense (that is, including the “economic”) that makes contenders for the occupancy of the center tokens and guarantors of the extension and riskiness of circulation, committed to defending whichever section of capital can most forcefully order the whole by ensuring the return of its own investments. To create a new mode of distribution, a tributarianism, would also be to create a mode of scenic design devoted to making each scene a pedagogical translation of the infrastructures.\n\nIt seems impossible to even get started on such a project (if it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism it’s because you can imagine getting financing for the end of the world but financing just reproduces capital), but that’s not the case, once we jettison the desiderata the main antagonists to capital thus far have attached to it. The perfect, endless, self-reproducing arbitrage would entail identifying two adjacent markets with the same asset sold at a different price on each of them, respectively, and with yourself as the only one with access to both, and with your participation in the total market system composed out of perfectly balanced hedges on all other assets in the world.\n\nYou perpetually rebalance all the hedges while investing the same amount on the asset at that moment differentially priced across the two markets. But no firm could approximate such a condition, if for no other reason than the existence of all the other firms. The market resists such control because the knowledge needed to approximate it would require the very stable succession at the center the market has been invented to disrupt. All of the supply chains, though, are priced, and therefore knowable, as their prices tell us how secure the future earning expected from ownership of it is but also, I think, the scenic and pedagogical conditions of the continued maintenance of those chains.\n\nThat is, price only secondarily reflects the power of the owners of capital as opposed to the counter-power of other claims on the social product; primarily, price reflects the resilience and robustness of the entire infrastructure with all of the humans posted at each station along the way. Prices go up when the strongest section of capital can sabotage that infrastructure so as to lessen the flow of income from it to other social entities. They go down when such sabotage is interfered with, always temporarily as long as we have capital, when other capitalists can pry open new sources of earning themselves from it.\n\nBut while they can’t go up infinitely without destroying the capacity to extract even exclusive sources of income, they could conceivably go down to nothing if we get to a threshold of companies and governments able to protect them that can engage amongst each other in the equivalent of intra-company exchanges. This would not be so much a question of calculating the number of widgets needed for each department as the formation of teams engaged in skunkworks that operate on the logic of Big Men and at least some company founders in taking less for themselves so as to model the kind of teamwork required to sustain circuits of production and distribution.\n\nThe functionality of such companies in advanced industries as yet beyond the reach of the finance industry, along with the functionality of teams within companies that have been subordinated, and even teams within the finance industry itself, is where the work of converting assets into data would take place. One way or another, this would have to be seen as a kind of holy work, as “tenting” or “tabernacling” humanity, and it would take place in the face of furious resistance and intensified sabotage by the financiers, the conglomerates most tied up with them, and those states (no doubt including the leading imperial one) that has most aggressively and completely tokenized itself as a marker of the health of the market.\n\nOnly a mode of thinking and practice that can see the whole, without fraudulent divisions into public and private, economic, political and cultural, etc., and that can envision humanity from its origins into the distant future, could provide the ballast for such a project. As I’ve argued many times already, these companies and organizations would be fundamentally interested in data security and, I can say now, “search wisdom.” The gathering, classification, sorting, analysis, preservation, dissemination, etc., of data is constitutive of anything else you’ll ever want to do—in a way this was always true, even before there was anything that could be called “data.”\n\nThe interest in data is what tells us how to donate our resentments to the center, which means converting our resentments in indications that data is being corrupted back into assets. We could reduce it to control over increasingly massive and targeted search engines, keeping in mind that the search engine itself will never be able to design your search terms if they don’t already exist in. the system. Adventurous, scholarly scribes will have to man these stations, and some of them can be manned now. With such searchers, all the forms of institutional intelligence can be infiltrated—the secret police and surveillance agencies are more dependent on data security that they can’t entirely provide for themselves than anyone is.\n\nThis is naturally a global project—why in the world wouldn’t curators of the crisis from China, the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Germany, and so on not find common ground here? Data security is bound up with succession across the board. This means some form of global governance, but not a global government formalized as such—it would mean that the system of teams most effectively ensuring its pool of candidates for succession would effectively be a kind of global directorate. Their power would flow from them being completely open about their data management because they know that others’ use of it will just produce more candidates for them. All of this follows from frontloading the responsibility of singularized succession in perpetuity to the social order."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-tokenization-of-resentment",
      "title": "The Tokenization of Resentment",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 03, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-tokenization-of-resentment",
      "content": "“Donate your resentment to the center,” one of the first coined idioms of center studies, can now be given a more strictly economic meaning; i.e., it can be tokenized. “Resentment” remains an irreducible concept for center studies—indeed, one impetus for separating center studies from generative anthropology was the inadequate and impressionistic discussions of resentment in the latter. As with much of generative anthropology, the problem is with scaling up, or resisting the Big Scenic Imaginary, which reduces all social interactions to the model of the small group imagined to be present on the originary scene. The most basic form of resentment in a juridical order would be a feeling of injustice, which in turn presupposes a particular conception of justice, which is historically variable—GA would never go in this direction.\n\nThe point is not that resentment must be rational—feelings of injustice can derive from a very tenuous grasp on how a particular scene would be “rationally” modeled. Nevertheless, implicit in my analysis here is that we always distinguish between more or less “legitimate” resentments or, perhaps it would be better to say, we position ourselves differently as potential adjudicators between the resenter and his resented in each case. There’s no pure, unmediated resentment, because resentment only comes into being in relation to the center, which means that the mimetic rivalry that drives the group toward the mimetic crisis is not yet resentment.\n\nSo, even on the originary scene itself, the resentment felt toward the center for denying access will be distributed differently across the group, and expressions of that resentment will not draw identical responses. And those responses will always be from the center, through an “impersonation” or elicitation of the center. In human communities prior to the emergence of the juridical, resentment would have to be expressed in ritual terms, which means in terms of customary distribution, which might be more or less intelligible to or requiring of initiation by the observer.\n\nOnce we have an imperial order and the juridical resentment takes a wide range of forms—there are resentments within the ruling group, between the occupant of the center (and his clients) and the various “outside options” (and their clients); there are resentments between participants in the various exchanges constituted by the imperial order and handled by the juridical, or juridical-style settlements; there are antinomic resentments, more or less inchoate or organized, towards the nomos as such, which is to say revolutionary resentment, even in the perennial peasant revolts of feudal orders but much more targeted in modern revolutionary movements.\n\nNow, if we assume that all distribution comes from the center (the only alternative assumption being that somehow everyone was simply placed exactly where they are and with whatever they have in some unfathomable way—which would, paradoxically, make it especially difficult to deal with resentments, since there would be no nomos to refer to and no way to distinguish resentment from its deferral) then the originary distribution is itself a paying of debts to those who aided in the founding of the order, and a loan to those included in the distribution—all of which involves anticipating and fending off resentments while creating new ones in the specific form of indebtedness tying the various circles of distribution to each other.\n\nIf we work with and extend the formula I’ve been proposing for the juridical, i.e., that it formalizes conflicts before they can ignite the vendetta while exempting those proximal to the center from such formalization since the occupation of the center is necessary to juridical formalization in the first place (the king as ultimate judge cannot be put on trial), then the juridical is a matter of measuring resentments. (The occupant of the center can be overthrown, of course, but this is never a juridical matter—unless it’s a question of an imperial center removing a vassal—but of a bid to remake the nomos to a greater or less extent.\n\nThat there is usually a felt need to justify such moves with almost invariably patently ridiculous juridical forms—the king as a traitor or some lesser kind of criminal—just shows how far beyond “justification” such moves stand—the only real justification is a grave threat to the integrity of the nomos itself, and such actions can only be vindicated in the aftermath.)\n\nSince the originary distribution eventually takes the form of money, or tokens issued and accepted by the center, then what money measures is resentments or, perhaps, deforming Bichler and Nitzan’s formulation, “expected future resentments.” In that case taxes already serves as a model for donating your resentment to the center, one which, like all such donations, might generate more resentment than it assuages. I’m testing out the possibility of “universalizing” the concept of resentment so that it can be tracked through as constitutive of all institutions. So, we start with debt as an anticipatory deferral of resentment that creates new possibilities of resentment—here, we might have to speak of the temporality of resentment, as gratitude turns into resentment insofar as forwarding some form of “capital” installs some form of reciprocity which might turn out to be more “extractive” than could have been initially anticipated.\n\nAnd in this case we could further say that gratitude is always a kind of anticipatory resentment. But penalties are also ways of tokenizing resentment—the determination that the commission of a particular crime calls for a certain number of years in jail also has no real “justification” beyond measuring the amount of resentment generated by uncompensated injuries a social order can bear. Part of the tokenization of resentment is also marking the recourses available to those passing some threshold at which notifications occur—so what if your daughter was raped and killed and in the name of social justice we let her murderer go free and, for good measure, settle his lawsuit for police brutality in the process of his arrest?\n\nWhat are you going to do about it? Kill him? Or the judge that set him free? The legislators who wrote the laws empowering the judge to or mandating that he do so? Etc. (An interesting novel by Sol Yurick, _Fertig_ , plays with these questions in a more juridically precise and sophisticated way.) These questions have answers—past a certain threshold, those promoting the policies leading to such results might be replaced by whatever means are available, or a regression back to the vendetta will be seen to threaten the positions of those who discovered some interest in the original promotion of disorder, etc. Any of these developments would involve some way of measuring the resentments, expressed but more importantly anticipated, generated by such events, by those in a position to measure resentments, which is to say those exercising power which, as I argued in [“A New Model of Power”](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/a-new-model-of-power), is exercised most effectively through adjudications. Such measurements will always be tokenized—in money, time, mandated forms of reparation, etc.\n\nThe resentment to be donated to the center is excess resentment that is incommensurable with the existing institutions designed to formalize and defer it—and there will always be such incommensurabilities, as justice is more of a rule of thumb than a precise science. So, you’ve been obeying the center, whatever that might entail—say, refraining from exacting revenge by taking your case to court and enduring the long, frustrating and at least to some extent unjust process—and yet the center rewards those who have been less obedient or, let’s say, have been letting the debts pile up that you have been punctually and fully paying (with interest!).\n\nUnless you’re the one benefiting from the injustice, there will always be some such residue (even then, you might resent even having to worrying about your “victims”). This means that the injunction to donate your resentment to the center only applies to “losers” who have no means of retaliating—“ressentiment,” in Nietzsche’s sense—here is where he locates the origins of the moralizing priestly caste. It is then reasonable or even obligatory to ask whether donating your resentment to the center is not mere “cope,” of the kind “true conservatives” are accused of, where you take you higher moral ground as compensation for your failure to achieve any political victories.\n\nThat will depend upon how you tokenize the resentment you donate to the center. The tokens to create, accumulate and distribute are “quanta” or “chunks” of data and information that could be used by those as close to the center as possible to identify, formalize and settle cases in ways that create “synergy” between juridical and succession practices. Even if you are losing cases, find the cases to lose that will surface features of the dissipative rotation at the center hostile to succession across the board (maybe even increasingly in their own institutions). Organize and strategize your cases so that there are wins as well as losses.\n\nTokenize resentment against the antinomic agencies pulverizing the juridical so as to reintroduce the vendetta through the juridical. Thirdness is intended to be such a mode of organizing and strategizing. And it’s also the case that no one wins all the time or, really, ever, completely, and so loserdom is spread across the board, albeit unevenly (according to which measurement?). The left sees itself as losing all the time, and, from their perspective, they have a point too—their resentments also power the system.\n\nThe center doesn’t resent—that would serve as a definition of the center. But, of course, any occupant of the center will resent and be the bearer of other resentments. Think about obeying even the worst commands of the worst president imaginable but in such a way, drawing upon the discretionary “margin” any imperative allows for, as to increase, even minimally, the likelihood that even that worst president will be in a position to choose his successor such that that successor would choose his successor, and so on. This would be donating your resentment to the center, because assuming succession in perpetuity is better than continuing to disperse and randomize succession options (even though sortition, imagined as an approximation to conditions under which succession could be randomized because anyone would be equally qualified might serve as a helpful metric to social and institutional robustness) and would even make the worst president slightly less worse.\n\nAnd this approach of hyper-obedience even positions you better for the replacement of the occupant of the center by a substantially better one, who could presumably see what you were doing. The heroization of disobedience has deep roots in modern revolutionary politics but has been consolidated by publicly entrenched commemorations of the Holocaust, taken to involve a set of commanded actions in which disobedience, regardless of the cost, is the only humanly possible response. And it is very hard, unless you imagine yourself waging eternal war on the Jews, to imagine a non-repulsive way of obeying the command to “show me where the Jews are hiding,” etc.\n\nThere is no need to remove all possibility of disobedience from our thinking, since any imperative already includes that possibility; maybe we should all, for the purpose of moral hygiene, keep a brief list of commands we would refuse to obey no matter what. But acknowledging that there might be commands that leave no margin for deflection means sharpening our detection instruments for identifying such margins in places where we might not have thought to look, with singularized succession as the metric. A command you have to refuse must simply be a dead end, doing nothing but obstruct thinking of succession—the command to kill every member of a particular group confesses the impossibility of sustaining the scene without removing the protections of the scene for those members, thereby contaminating the scene and any succession until properly repudiated. The disobedience models that repudiation. To claim, though, under almost any conditions, that you are at such a dead end, will be self-evidently self-refuting, even in your ability to claim you are at such a dead end.\n\nThe tokenization of resentment lies, then, in the margins around and generated by commands, in the remainder of the demands those commands ravel up and abolish. Here we can loop back to Bichler and Nitzan’s definition of power as “expectation of obedience,” which I now notice has an interesting symmetry with “expectation of future earnings.” Everything that we have, whether it be freedoms, wealth or personal and even physical attributes, has been “given” us in some irreducible sense, which is to say “loaned” to us, because gifts always imply reciprocity. So, to recall Peirce’s “we are each and every one of us an insurance company,” we are each and every one of us a bundle of assets, most of which go unnamed and untokenized but nevertheless “backing” those assets that are (and the tacit assets might be made explicit at any moment).\n\nThe ever-shifting valuation of those assets, very much a juridical matter, is the source of all resentments, as those valuations are derived from our approximating expectations of obedience—preserving, refining, specializing, distributing our assets in accord with institutional demands that represent debts enforced or forgiven by the occupant of the center. The bundle of assets with their shifting labelings and valuations represent a stock of potential or expected judgments, and each of those judgments is tethered to the expected future resentments and the expected effects of those resentments on the nomos. For Capital as Power, there would be, I assume, a strict correlation between the level of expected obedience and expected future earnings, at least for the strongest fractions of capital.\n\nThe problem, then, is not so much to break this correlation as to reconfigure it by creating forms of obedience that would correlate with modes of tokenization that would represent earnings otherwise than monetarily. Originary debt is to be tokenized and enforced and forgiven differently—the starting point is to tokenize loyalty and usefulness to the governing order, i.e., to create modes of property (or assetization) that resist fluctuations in value because they are tied to continuity in governance, i.e., succession. Here, the donation of resentment to the center can be made visible and given a kind of measurement, through the demonstrated loyalty of servants of the center and demonstrated trust by the center in those servants models the settling of scores (resentments) throughout the social order presided over by the highest circles."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-transdisciplinarity-of-the-hypothesis",
      "title": "The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 03, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-transdisciplinarity-of-the-hypothesis",
      "content": "No way of thinking with any chance of helping change the world could ever come from within the established disciplines. One might even say the disciplines are designed so as to prevent the emergence of such thinking and, when it does emerge, to domesticate it. An old Marxist critique of disciplines like sociology and economics was that they were invented so as to break up Marx’s totalizing and revolutionary critique into specialized studies aimed at channeling elite and ultimately mass opinion in established ways. Since Marxism maintained a real connection to political movements through WW 2, it resisted incorporation into the disciplines, but it ultimately succumbed, so we ended up with Marxist philosophy, Marxist history, Marxist literary criticism, even a bit of Marxist economics.\n\nFreud’s psychoanalysis quickly overwhelmed the medical discipline is originated in and had to invent whole new ways of thinking about art, civilization, and the origins of human order. Like Marxism, psychoanalysis worked substantial changes into the thinking of Western populations before being itself into literary and cultural criticism, with a still functioning clinical rump. (There have, of course, been numerous Marxist-psychoanalysis syntheses along the way.) Cybernetics and information theory were developed out of scientific and intelligence work done during WW 2 and it’s hard to see any of that coming out of any of the established disciplines—nor was it ever quite absorbed into them, being sustained by think tanks, the military and Western intelligence, being partly repudiated by the politicized environments in the human sciences after the 60s and partly taken up studies in cognition and computation.\n\nIt’s interesting to note that the CIA took a special interest in cybernetics and somewhat allied transdisciplines like semiotics and structuralism, seeing them as a way of modernizing and “rationalizing” along American lines postwar Europe. There seems to be a dialectic that would be well worth studying between the transdisciplines and the disciplines, but the observation I want to work with here is that any mode of thinking likely to make a difference is going to be transdisciplinary, which must mean not only extending across the subject matters of all the disciplines but capable of infiltrating their separate vocabularies and assisting “insurgents” within them to transform them while maintaining its own transdisciplinary base.\n\nI’ve previously “nominated” GA as just such a transdisciplinary discourse, what Foucault called an “initiator of discursive practices,” with a founding irreducible to and “indigestible” by its surroundings—originary thinking does not just offer another perspective but requires one to rethink entire fields from the beginning. A look at these other transdisciplines helps us to see that what GA lacks is an independent base from which it could make forays into the disciplines and broader public fields—like the revolutionary movements, clinical practice and psychoanalytic institutions, and the military-industrial complex were for these other transdisciplines.\n\nOf course, in each of those cases the discourse served a specific “clientele,” which GA can’t claim to do other than that of a new office class in formation. And all it could offer this officer class is the means of its self-formation, which is really quite enough. The qualities of originary thinking which distinguish it from other available modes of thinking available, then, must correspond to the qualities of any new officer class worth serving. These qualities would include an unapologetic awareness of the precise weight and responsibility of this class in advanced technological social orders and from this follows, for example, an ability to adapt to and use the extremely fast paced media environment without allowing one’s long term program be affected in the slightest by media fluctuations and the capacity to register the flood of grievances generated within a mass and social mediated society while converting those grievances into manageable feedback on thoroughly considered projects which are not dictated in the slightest by those grievances, however intense.\n\nI mention these qualities in particular because an officer class in formation would have to take on projects that anticipate power it does not yet have and would have to prove its worth by operating effectively within hostile media, legal and political environments—probably building businesses, a political party, institutions to protect its supporters, media platforms, perhaps even its own currency. This can only be accomplished if guided by a mode of thinking that rests upon unshakeable fundamental assumptions that can withstand all critiques, traditional, modern or postmodern; that is comprehensive and innovative, allowing for disagreements that get to essential questions while being orderly, collegial and ultimately given to productive resolution; and that arouses unending fascination with all things human. This post is a sample of GA as such a discourse.\n\nGA has a small set of “invariants”: concepts like “center,” “origin,” “mimesis,” “scene” and “deferral,” organized around a hypothetical event founding humanity and which is then repeated, expanded and made complex is innumerable ways. We are mimetically drawn to the same central object, which is also central being; because it is central being, we are also repelled from appropriating that object or being. Being mimetically drawn to something is precise enough that we can identify it, if we learn how to look for it, in the most diverse situations—it can mean wanted to possess and consume a consumer item; it can mean wanting to exercise some kind of authority over others; it can mean public recognition.\n\nAny number of things can therefore be at the center: a desirable consumer object; a position of power, a particular kind of “spotlight.” Being repelled from appropriating the object involves the kinds of laws, norms, and rituals constitutive of a given community, all aiming at providing the appearance that the center has granted itself to whomever might acquire it: one cannot become king without an elaborate array of ceremonies, because it cannot appear as if that sacred office is seized; property laws, laws of inheritance, zoning laws, graduation ceremonies, documents affirming one’s right, and so on all ensure that desire for appropriation has been deferred and conferred in accord with the traditions and authorities of the community.\n\nThe originary form of human interaction and engagement with the center is ritual. Again, there are, obviously, innumerable ritual forms throughout the history of humanity (and yet there are always rituals). But, for originary thinking, there is a simple, irrefutable and extraordinarily useful definition of ritual: a repetition and commemoration of the originary event itself. That there are lots of different ritual orders testifies to the various ways the originary event or, indeed, any event, can be remembered and re-enacted—in these differences we find the accretion of the specific events shaping individualized communities, which in turn testifies to the myriad ways mimetic crisis can erupt.\n\nIn each ritual we can look for a kind of dialogue with the center, in which some breach of the center and its response is commemorated in such a way as to affirm the community in the face of that breach. From this way of thinking about ritual follows a way of thinking about myth, which is the narration of events within the frame of expected ritual effects. In ritual, the community engages in a kind of exchange with the center: the participants follow the commands of the center, commands involving the various preconditions of appropriation that have evolved in the course of the community’s history, and the center in turn promises the community success in its endeavors.\n\nThe promises don’t always come true—since a repudiation of the center is unthinkable, stories must be created accounting for some improper compliance with ritual commands which, in being corrected and punished, “resets” the relation to the center. (I’m getting ahead of myself here, but think of how much commentary on contemporary liberal democratic societies takes exactly this form: since the democratic order itself cannot be questioned, we must construct narratives of evil agents, failures of will, incorrect interpretations of democratic “prescriptions,” etc., to account for the failures of our societies.)\n\nFor originary thinking, there are really two revolutions in human history, distinct but related. First, the occupation of the sacred center by a human being, first of all the individual referred to be anthropologists as the “Big Man.” This revolution unites distribution and political power at the center, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, initiates a line leading from the Big Man, through ancient sacral and divine kingship, through the modern day presidents and prime ministers. On the originary scene, and in the ritual orders preceding kingship, it is the Being at the center, different from if intimately connected to the community who poses an obstacle to desire: this being is resented for blocking our desire, but also loved for providing a pathway toward fulfilling it.\n\nRitual and myth concern themselves with these lessons in deferral and acquisition: one must pay the center and show proper devotion to it, and one will be rewarded, even if not exactly in the way one anticipated. But once a human being occupies the center, the center can be (because it already has been) usurped. The community can now be ranged against the center in a way it couldn’t have been previously. One significant difference between Gansian Generative Anthropology and its Girardian predecessor in mimetic theory is that whereas Girard places the scapegoating “mechanism” at the origin of the human, Gans places it here, in the centrality of the human charged with mediating between the divine and the human.\n\nThis human can be sacrificed, and so the social order becomes dominated by the terms on which the central figure will be sacrificed, which often comes to involve all kinds of “symbolic” sacrifices that leave the actual king intact. The destruction of monarchy and its replacement by democracy puts an end to that “game,” and introduces a new one whereby the sacrifice of the central being is effected and minimized through regulated legal and political processes. But it’s easy to see how much of democratic politics is organized around directing resentment to the figure at the center; we have become accustomed to see this as harmless because we trust that the rules regarding the replacement of one central figure by another will be respected; but, more recently, we have also come to notice that those rules and that trust might be quite a bit more fragile than we had realized, which will perhaps raise the problem of the central figure, whether we call this “sovereignty” or something else, to the central political problem of our time.\n\nThe other revolution is the elimination of the sacred center itself. It’s best to take “sacred” in a very specific and precise sense here: a sacred center is one to which the members of the community bring sacrifices, that is, part of the possessions the acquisition of which they owe to the central being. Under sacrificial conditions, ritual is effective, not because of any magical or supernatural effects attributed to it, but because it brings about the “miracle” of a successful distribution of the social product. Each member can be rewarded by the center in accord with his donation of the center in accord with the prescriptions laid down by the center.\n\nThe word “justice” is anachronistic in describing this scenario, but it’s a good word to use because concepts like “justice” come into being precisely in order to replace the harmony attained by ritual distribution. Our thinking about politics is still dominated by imagining ourselves on a single scene, like the originary scene, in its ritual reiterations, receiving what is “due” to us due to our contribution. The destruction of the ritual scene was set in motion by the first “usurpers” of the center (this links the two revolutions), leading, for example, to the invention of money and debt as a way of providing for a mediated relationship to the ritual scene; the destruction of kingship, which was sacralized as a way of maintaining a ritualized order, means the final destruction of the ritual scene.\n\nWithout the “backing” of ritual, all our concepts of “justice” and “legitimacy” are, in effect “fiat” concepts, held together by increasing desperate exercises of power, assertions of “expertise” (themselves attempts to confer a kind of ersatz sacrality on decision makers) and scapegoating of enemies accused of preventing a client group from receiving its due. Along with, indeed part of, the question of the central figure, the question of the commensurability between what we “do” and what we ‘receive” is surely the central human problem of our time—only the mode of thinking enabled by the originary hypothesis helps us to identify these problems and provides us with the means of seeking solutions or transformations that will “deactivate” what are now, in the absence of any shared ritual order, unsolveable problems.\n\nI hope you can see the way in which fields such as anthropology, sociology, and political science can be reworked through these concepts, and, in fact, transformed into a new discipline included them all with considerable gains in consistency and explanatory power. Even a discipline like psychology, not obviously implicated here, can be productively rethought: consider how much of human behavior, emotion, cogitating, interaction, and self-representation can be discussed in terms of the problem posed to each and every one of us by a post-ritual order of presenting ourselves as a center to others. We must constantly compete with other claims to more or less arbitrary forms of centrality; we seek to make ourselves desirable in all the ways one can be desirable (as sexual partner, as collaborator, as model, etc.) while also deferring the resentments and possible violences (physical and symbolic) that endanger any center.\n\nHow many of our inner dialogues and the dilemmas we encounter in our relations with others could be translated into these terms? And how much of therapy and self-help more generally can be read as attempts to simulate the work once done by ritual orders? Consider how the contemporary reduction of all human relationships to the question of “consent” can be seen as an attempt to put some order into all of the ways we seek centrality, which also means relegating others to “orbitality”—the tendency to reduce all interactions to formal, explicit rules of interaction that would demonstrate mutual consent before “qualified” third parties is a transparent parody of the kinds of elaborate ritual orders that evoke contempt and provoke ridicule on the part of the very parties drawing up these intricate little consent decrees.\n\nBut I’d like to suggest that originary thinking can enable us to rework a field of human activity seemingly quite distant from its focus on mimesis and the problematics of human order: technology. Many would certainly put the economic, political and ethical dilemmas posed by the explosion of technological development of the past couple of centuries at the center of human concerns—such existential stakes as the environment, the integrity of the human body, and the autonomy of human thinking and decision making are involved here. Here’s a preliminary approach (and one that would, as seems to be the current tendency, synthesize discourses on technology with discourses on media).\n\nLet’s return to the ritual scene. Ritual makes things happen—in that sense, we could already speak of it as a kind of technology. What it makes happen is the coordination of the community around practices of production and distribution: it is assumed that none of this could be possible without the “mechanisms” through which the aid of the center is solicited it. Ritual is a mode of governance, as becomes more explicit with the institution of kingship, where access to the decision making and distributive center is carefully controlled so as to preserve the centrality of the center. I would hypothesize that we see what we would recognize as technological development—the organization of human labor in ways that directly subordinate that labor to an always automatable individual will along with the replacement of human labor through the articulation of inter-operating parts—in proportion to the weakening of the sacred center, first of all under the ancient empires, but also in “break-off” orders resistant to empire, like ancient Athens.\n\nTechnological development serves the governance of the center, whether in the form of monuments to kingship, war machinery, or the servicing of groups “orbiting” a bit more distantly and “eccentrically” relative to the center, like merchants. The trend towards exhaustive automation corresponds to the collapse of the ritual center along with sacralized governance: technology is essentially an exo-skeleton that replaces the more human scaled skeleton of ritual: it still manages our relation to the center, it still accounts for distribution and, not surprisingly, it is the source of our dominant narratives (“mythologies”), whereby we project our resentments toward the center and try to seek out the kinds of prescriptions from the center that will provide for some kind of harmonic order.\n\nTo focus just on automation: every automated decision defers some (perhaps potential) rivalry over the terms on which that decision is to be made, while at the same time empowering one center over another and directing attention to the next decision node to be automated. Entailing a precise chain of consequences from the replacement of a human decision maker by an algorithm can be reduced to a technical problem; why those consequences and why that decision maker never can be—but nor can those questions be reduced to some human agent external to technology; rather, they are bound up in pedagogical relations within techno-governance. There’s really no point to trying to answer them other than in the course of seeking to enter the network of power relations wherein they will be answered.\n\nIn that case, the problem of technology is the way the problems of centrality more generally are posed today. Money, media and technology are all real, of course (money is itself media and technology), but we can learn to “read” them as signs indicating (dis)order of the center. Only a transdisciplinary approach can address this, and whether the university is fit to do so is questionable. The problem of the center is the problem of “thematizing” and “performing” social continuity, which ultimately means “staging” the succession from one central figure to the next. Only in this way can power be united with responsibility in transgenerational ways.\n\nContemporary politics would best be seen and practiced as a global competition to see who can find the best way to create such an order. The overwhelming desire for all social participants must be that each occupant of the center (ultimately at the highest level, but all the way down the line, with the needed variations at different levels) transfers power, explicitly and openly, to his successor; which also means first of all exercising the power to be transferred. This poses tremendous problems which stretch across all the disciplines, including some that have not yet been invented. Modeling the reorganization of desires and resentments necessary to bring about this transformation in the entire sphere of human habits will be the work of a new officer class, and this class can only be guided by a theoretical model grounded in the originary hypothesis."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-transfer-idiom",
      "title": "The Transfer Idiom",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 11, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-transfer-idiom",
      "content": "Doctrine, theory, philosophy, principles, belief, ideology, etc.—my extraction of anthropomorphics out of GA as a more total reading of the originary hypothesis has been aimed rejecting or, better, deferring all these guides to maintaining shared direction and resisting the distractions that interfere with sustained and mobile joint attention. All of these terms open spaces for disciplinary disputes and bureaucratic manipulation that can never be articulated in any way with the results of your practice—rather, attempts at such an articulation will always generate more indeterminate disputes and manipulation. You cannot have a doctrine, theory, philosophy, principles, belief or ideology that is not mortgaged to the metalanguage of literacy, those scene-fillers that make us forget that inscription generates scenes even while taking place on one.\n\nIf we don’t have writing, and you report another’s speech, you say exactly what they said, and in the way that they said it, and therein lies an implicit commentary on what they have said, ultimately indicating some degree and conditions of reliability. When speech is reported in writing, the way they said it must be indicated in words—so and so claimed, stated, suggested, assumed, indicated, and so on, creating a rich metalanguage that fills in the scene that is now represented upon the scene of writing. And these verbs get nominalized and we find ourselves in a world of claims, statements, suggestions, assumptions, indications, and this is the world of, first of all, philosophical discourse and, then, all the human sciences that flow from it.\n\nIn part, I can now add, because these terms are all essential to juridical scenes, where testimony is “assessed” and “relevance” is determined, and it might be more precise to say that the human sciences are philosophy applied to juridical scenes. All of this David Olson 101, as I laid it out in _Anthropomorphics_ and elsewhere without, admittedly, coming back to it recently. But now I am, as you can see. Even “belief,” so fundamental, so deeply felt, so worth sacrificing yourself for is, as Olson also points out, merely a placeholder for some formalized affirmation of something you have said. You will not have a doctrine, etc., that is anything other than another iteration of the metalanguage of literacy and, therefore, nothing more than a mode of asserting power by lining up pre-populated positions within some bureaucracy.\n\nSo, what, then? Well, for starters, something closer to an oath, a prayer, an incantation, an initiation ritual—something directly performative and transformative, something invoking and testing trust, instituting centered ordinality, requiring a signature. But it needs to be in a declarative form, with a simultaneous and time-limited ecumenical outreach, a public key that allows entrance without guaranteeing investiture, that possesses its users and makes them carriers even while they acquire fluency. We need a higher degree of declarative functionality than any of the metalanguages. I also want to come back to this now to follow up on my recent discussions of “idiomatic intelligence,” of which the transfer idiom is essentially a translation, and the reason for that is that all the theories/metalanguages are essentially political phlogiston serving to provide hypotheses for the intensification of centralized power conjoined with the increasing turnover of occupancy at the center.\n\nIt’s increasingly evident that the real action is going on on some scene behind the scene, and one needs a hypothesis to construct that scene and make it visible and, hopefully, open to intervention. Idiomatic intelligence, the transfer idiom, is better suited to flow into those spaces between visible agency and invisible strings so as to generate actionable hypotheses. The available scenic hypotheses are inevitably arbitrary, based either on some pre-political “anarchist” scene of equality or some concrete historical and therefore unrestorable model. Anthropomorphics is historical—we’re always facing _some_ center—but originary—we’re always facing some _center_. The transfer idiom is always already inside the scene—it doesn’t try to re-design the scene from upon some other scene.\n\nIdiomatic intelligence involves placing yourself at some center that attracts resentment while deferring that resentment; even more, turning the resentment into new sources of deferral. So, it’s not for everyone, all the time, but it could be for anyone, any time, and it’s something one could practice and can only learn by practicing—there are all kinds of ways in which placing oneself at the center of a vortex of resentment in order to verticalize it can go wrong. You might just be annoying or obnoxious. I want to use the term “transfer idiom” because if we extract all the metalanguage from our exchanges, even the minimal metalanguage of the originary hypothesis, all we have are translations across idioms and transpositions across media.\n\nYou treat everyone else’s idiom as a transfer idiom which can be broken down into a hypothetical populated field to whom we are sending communications across temporal and spatial barriers. Who will do the things you say or imply people “should do,” and who will do the things that will create and distribute the people who do them? Most declarative orders want to rest upon authorities without taking responsibility for them—if you want to call someone evil for doing something, then you must want someone empowered to stop them from doing it but it’s usually much more pleasant to leave that part unmentioned. The transfer idiom has a kind of faith in language; “faith,” I’m certain, can be shown to have its genealogies in various metalanguages, implicated, I would guess, in ancient idioms of debt, but I can translate it into saying that as long as you’re using language you’re in language and you’re deferring something and initiating some centered ordinality even if you don’t know the anthropomorphic currents you’re swimming against.\n\nYour declarative statements are answering some question trailing an imperative thread and as answers only mean something if a new imperative thread issuing in an ostensive can be tracked in successive inscriptions. Being in language replaces, or, better, translates all other faiths—whatever you’re willing to swear or donate to, the Cross, the Koran, the Shema, your ancestors, the Constitution, whatever, issues in something that is and something that will be seen, heard, felt and said and that therefore requires an idiom to register all that and that idiom can be broken down into a succession of scenes and infrastructural designs.\n\nThe temporalizing and spatializing resources of language far exceed any we could attribute to a particular “vision,” “imaginary,” or “faith.” There is a radical demystification of everything reduced to exchange, but exchange is always with the center so the demystifications or breakdowns are only releasing the energy of the center into new hypotheses that at the same time could only revise these existing idioms, to whose continued transcription you can remain utterly devoted. Can you not see that no other discourse comes anywhere near doing anything like this?\n\nTo speak or even think is to posit and sit on a scene, and to (po)sit a scene is assemble an arraying of enabling and hypothetically consequent scenes and that in turn minimally populates various mediating, distributory and adjudicating scenes to which one provide data and whose decisions one anticipates and seeks to shape. The mediating, distributory and adjudicating scenes go all the way to the top, because they themselves will enter into rivalries over boundaries and jurisdictions and while there may not ever be a single world government with a single ruler as soon as nations are large enough to form empires and compete with each other there will be the hypothesis of something like that.\n\nThere is always the feeling of a possible “appeal.” This too is in language: any utterance waits upon a possible judgment. The “economy” is just everyone’s place, and everyone’s seeking to (re)place, in the order of having distributed to one and that one distributing to others. The “economy” is the tributary order and, since distribution can’t be spontaneous, i.e., generated by some pre-social invariant, it will be some kind of centered ordinality—the occupant of the center will allocate to others the power to allocate to others who will… Money marks the various layers of distancing from the center and ways centralizing power and disrupting central occupancy are modulated. But allocation sometimes is and always or eventually could be, saturated by naming. This is the wildly hypothetical component of the transfer idiom: its destiny to become currency.\n\nWe can start with the minimal hypothesis of an emulative economy, which seems to me reasonable and decidedly non-utopian, unless you want to insist on the possibility of the entire social order lapsing into apathy and torpor without the whip of, well, some whip, including the wage relation. There will be those inclined toward apathy and torpor, but those motivated by admiration towards those who have taught them to become beings in language will figure out how to deal with that. If you don’t want to be on anyone’s team, and no one wants you on their team, I’m sure some provision can be made—but you’d be missing out on a lot.\n\nWhat money as investment in assets valued in accord with expected future earnings does is coordinate the tributary order in accord with who is best able to ensure a predictable rate of future earnings, which also means ensuring that others will not be able to procure that rate. This, I am going to say here, involves speculating on the correlation between the centralization of the means of power, on the one hand, and the fluctuations in who controls what part of that power. If you have the advantage of the largest store of capital, you would want power to be increasingly centralized, which makes it easy to cut out potential competitors and pummel the subjects into obedience, while at the same time wanting to be able to pull the particular string that elevates one and degrades another in the power structure whenever desired.\n\nSo, the power to set in place overarching legal measures is always in place, while you can determine exactly when and how that power is deployed. This is “value.” Moreover, this, as I suggested in my previous post, inclines us to a certain kind of subjectivity or agency, one that can deploy centralizing political mechanisms to test out various possible valuations—the woke entrepreneur, which can be scaled up or down and produced through various educational and media institutions. What is especially important to me here is that, while this correlation between centralized power and fluctuations in occupancy in power gets measured in money—it _is_ what gets measured in money—it can be effectively translated into discourse. And if it can be translated into discourse that discourse can be translated back into currency as the ongoing effort to create commensuration between power and occupancy at the center.\n\nWe can carry out what is in effect a currency conversion by treating technology as, itself, a transfer idiom. Technology is scenic design and the design of the scene is part of governance and hence part of the tributary order—technology situates everyone within some centered ordinality and creates the pedagogical platforms necessary for succession. We can introduce a little dose of what some might consider “technocracy” here insofar as distribution from the center can’t exhaustively anticipate what new inventions and discoveries might emerge and what effects they might have, because such inventions and discoveries result, as I’ve been insisting the last couple of posts, in treating some part of the scene as the infrastructure for a new scene—the entire sensory, recording and internally communicating infrastructure provides ample opportunities for such conversions—for example, you can always find some pattern in “noise” and then turn it into a “signal.”\n\nCapital is interested in such inventions because they can provide a stream of income, and they are interested in controlling and limiting their uses to ensure the maximization of their income relative to that of some other capital. So, technologies are always inscribed with this tension between the way they are jump-started and then constrained and crippled by capital, on the one hand, and all the conversions they are given to, on the other hand.\n\nThis inscription is made legible by erecting the pedagogical platforms inherent in all scenic articulations—you can always stop and direct the audience’s attention to where you are standing, as an actor on the scene, and thereby bring the audience up onto the scene as well. This is also a breakdown, not into atomic but into mimetic, gestural, elements. You make the thresholds explicit—the theatrical metaphor of the scene itself commemorates the conversion of ritual into theater, and that theater and the arts more generally continue this work in superstructuring over juridical and disciplinary infrastructures—infrastructures, I will hasten to add, that would be inoperative without a constitutive scenic and therefore aesthetic component—the superstructure/infrastructure distinction here is certainly deconstructable, within the historical limits of acknowledging the conversion of ritual into juridical and disciplinary orders (as suggested above, the disciplinary is also a “superstructure” infiltrating the juridical “infrastructure”).\n\nThe problem is to erect pedagogical platforms displaying the thresholds differentiating and articulating commemorative, juridical and disciplinary and thereby insinuate the emulative economy within the capitalist one. You can only do this work from within the algorithm, by turning the algorithm toward that correlation between centralization and fluctuation in occupancy: to put it simply, the transfer idiom decenters as more consistent forms of centering. Decenter relentlessly—this is a kind of breakdown—but don’t imagine you’re reducing things to some prior state of unmolested rights or autonomy; on the contrary, you’re creating posts from which to direct attention to the center in a way to elicit more actionable imperatives.\n\nThe transfer idiom translates all of our scenic exchanges into proposals which are invocations which are enactments of this breakdown into idiomatic intelligences. There’s a kind of leap of faith insofar as you are then willing to donate your resentments in the form of data to the center, to become an ostensive center yourself from which imperatives can be derived.\n\nThe metalanguage of literacy is the most basic source of reified concepts, concepts of “mind” (itself a reified concept) and human exchanges more generally—the most basic, along with money, so there must be a convergence between the two. The disciplines—whether economics, psychiatry, management or sociology—all rely upon nominalized concepts traceable to the metalanguage of literacy, creating their own disciplinary metalanguages which are assetized as the professions operationalize the human parts who will speculate and provide intelligence on fluctuations in power occupancy. The transfer idiom engages in the work of translating those concepts into modes of literacy that allow data to cross scenes and take on its distinctive idiomatic form in each.\n\nIdioms, like currency, can be designed so as facilitate exchanges across distances or more rapidly in localized settings; it can be advanced on credit or paid in cash; it can be spent anonymously or in named and repeated encounters, and any combination of all of these. When we circulate idioms, similarly, we make them to last or to trend; to be repeated authorlessly or to refer back to a single point; to make pledges or call in debts. Always in the name of another increment of deferral, even if in the form of what Philip Rieff called “remissions,” the relaxation of some rigor in the name of affirming it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "thirdness-and-the-same-sentence",
      "title": "Thirdness and the Same Sentence",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 14, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/thirdness-and-the-same-sentence",
      "content": "This will be an essay in method—the method of designing and mining idioms that serve as currency. As part of the case for Thirdness, I proposed establishing bets on curated judgments that are as close to 50/50 as can be determined in advance of doing the research and thinking that arrives at the judgment. If the bettor can trust the judgment and integrity of the Thirdness team, then the construction of the case creates conditions under which the bettor exercises his somewhat less informed judgment (necessarily less formed because the Thirdness team has tech and training unavailable to the bettor) to anticipate the judgment of the Thirdness team—it’s kind of a guess, but also a competitive guess because you are trying to outguess other bettors (at least over the long run), than whom you might be better informed.\n\nThe Thirdness team, for its part, acts according to the logic of the bookie, who establishes odds or a point spread that evens the bets on both sides, allowing for a guaranteed profit through the vig. But this kind of prediction market also suggests a new mode of thinking, and therefore a new mode of writing, predicated on searching out the 50/50 in every topic of conversation, every referent, every propositional claim. This is an idiomatic logic—speak only of the 50/50, and continue your discourse by spreading the 50/50 through all the implications of the starting point of your discourse.\n\nIt would seem that to designate a particular judgment as 50/50 is to presuppose a lot of the world being far more certain than that. To take an example that is in the news as I write, I would not set up a bet on whether Benjamin Netanyahu will be arrested by some state, held by some state, put on trial by the ICC and then, if convicted, imprisoned by some state for some period of time—I would not set up a bet on any of the those event-points because I consider them all extremely unlikely (more so, of course, as subsequent events presupposes the occurrence of previous ones) and therefore resistant to a 50/50 set up.\n\nI might, though, think of setting up a bet over whether a particular media outlet, or set of outlets, will end up correcting certain factual or legal claims made in the course of reporting on the ICC’s call to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu—that might be a way of getting at 50/50. That might give you a sense of the kind of prediction market Thirdness would create but, more importantly for my purpose here, laying a bet one way or another here already presupposes a great deal that is known well beyond 50/50 about the world’s media, and therefore the political, corporate and financial governing groups whose imperatives they convey.\n\nIn other words, much has to be held constant, as close to 100/0 as possible, for the 50/50 events to appear on screen. What I want to attempt now, then, is to abandon that logic and aim at 50/50 all the way down, both to test out a new way of thinking and to expand the range of Thirdness.\n\nLinguistic interaction usually involves a dialectic of the known and unknown—two people in conversation will oscillate between touching base on the assumptions they share, on the one hand, and venturing forth into potential areas of disagreement, on the other. It’s very easy to see this in operation—for example, once the dialogue partners start to wander off into disagreements that turn into disagreements over the basic facts and ethical frames that would make any agreement possible you will almost always see one of the speakers shift back to some assertion of agreement—“but, of course, you will still agree that…” At a certain point this kind of move might be a basic prerequisite of continuing the conversation.\n\nThis is the kind of interaction, then, that I am breaking from, towards full “differenda,” to use Jean-Francois Lyotard’s term for incommensurable utterances. So, we can disagree, then disagree about the terms upon which agreement would be possible, and then disagree about what would count as an agreement in this case, and so on. And yet we want to go on talking, or the reader wants to go on reading. Why? Clearly a discursive desire other than agreement or what Peirce saw as the main purpose of inquiry, reducing uncertainty, would have to be involved here. One would have to enjoy something like a pure exchange of hypotheses, with no certain way of distinguishing the real from the pataphysical among them, simply in order to keep generating your own hypothesis generation machinery.\n\nEvery conversation need not take this path; indeed, only a tiny minority might; but, it would be the ever present possibility of the irruption of such conversations that would provide the “grounding” (or “airing,” or “sinking”) of all other conversations—rather than some philosophical position. This seems to me the only fundament adequate to the originary hypothesis, since it would involve an ongoing, never once and for all settled enactment of the infinite recursivity (to refer to Eric. Jacobus’s account) of the violence/language oscillation—we might be aiming at a way of continually straddling the boundary between the triggering of a chain of events leading to World War 3, on the one hand, and settling all outstanding antagonisms, on the other.\n\nIt is testimony to the astonishing complacency that seems to be induced in many practitioners of originary thinking that no one, as far as I know (unless I did so somewhere along the line and have forgotten) has drawn the (fairly obvious) conclusion that accepting the originary hypothesis should direct all of your attention to precisely those “stitches” in the social “fabric” that seem marked by the most enduring modes of deferral and should therefore be endlessly scrutinized for even the slightest tears. Anything can happen anytime should be the default position of originary thinking, and that anything doesn’t happen anytime therefore that which is to be explained—which would mean studying reality as comprised of events that can just as easily go either way, towards the consolidation of deferral or the random access to the center. Orginary thinking would be institutionalized as a training center to inculcate precisely this kind of highly counter-intuitive thinking. It’s either too late to do so or just in time.\n\nWhat I am describing here is a way of continuing the same sentence and providing the continual check that it is the same sentence; it is also a way of returning to the question of the conversion of traditional juridical remedies (penalties, punishment, compensation, etc.) into novel modes of data exchange. From a political standpoint, this is the most important and challenging part of the Thirdness program. I have been emphasizing as forcefully as I can the centrality of the juridical to the specificity of the “Stack” and “Absolutism” as understood by center studies, but the historicity (and therefore non-originarity) of the juridical, and therefore its possible transience (as compared, say, with ritual distribution) is part of that centrality, as it marks the fragility of the juridical.\n\nThe juridical can always collapse back into the ritual, in the form of the vendetta and honor culture; but, as a way of expressing resentment (the more transhistorical category), the juridical could also be replaced or even supplemented by a more civilized way of doing so, a way capable of remedying the imprecisions and arbitrariness inseparable from the juridical. My own definition of the juridical, as located above the threshold of the vendetta but below that of the antinomic (placing the social order, in the form of the occupant of the center, itself “on trial”) itself, to the extent that it is accepted, tends to erode the juridical by undermining belief in its categories (for example the “zeal for justice” becomes less credible if “justice” is really trying to find the middle point between those thresholds).\n\nThe generation of outrage over presumably violated terms of justice, what we might call “guiltmailing,” seems to be working fairly well but maybe that’s just a “dead cat’s bounce” and too many (obviously) bad faith invocations of victimary claims are sapping its power. It’s possible to work for a restoration of the juridical in accord with the many commonsensical axioms advanced against its corruption (crime should be illegal, illegal entrance into another country should be illegal, etc.) but since a snap-back to pre-civil rights broadly liberal understandings of justice is not possible (since, for one thing, it led to the civil rights agenda), such a restoration will have to involve attempts to shut down all kinds of “speech” and “assembly” deemed under more stringent interpretations, to fit such categories as defamation, libel, incitement, fraud, obscenity and so on.\n\nThe new juridicality to be produced and therefore aimed at as a result would therefore be highly dependent upon the knowledge produced by the human sciences (think about how complex inquiries into what might count as “incitement” under specified historical conditions might be) which furthermore implies titanic struggles over the control and legitimation of what is to count as “human science.” And this means we’d already be approaching conditions of data exchange where, for example, both sides to a dispute end up sharing intelligence regarding the genealogies of their respective discourses and predictive analysis of their likely effects.\n\nMy two previous posts provide examples of the kinds of questions implicated in the transition from judgment as compensation/correction to judgment as data exchange: first, the question of the relation of the occupant of the center to the juridical order (can the king, president or whoever be put on trial within the system he presides over—a very complicated and longstanding question which we see playing out in the US, for example, in disputes over Presidential immunity); and second, in my highly qualified endorsement of the neoliberal counter-revolution precisely on the grounds (unaddressed in that post) that it removes conditions for complaint and contention, which is also to say conditions for juridical remediation.\n\nSo, let’s take a look at these questions, on our way back to the pataphysical same sentence. The targeting of the occupant of the center is always extremely dangerous and is most likely the original scapegoating (the scapegoating of marginal figures and groups is very much a modern appropriation of the concept—those with real or perceived power are scapegoated [that “perceived” can do a lot of work, though])—it necessarily prefigures civil war precisely in the hope that it can be unanimous. Succession arranged according to familial descent provides a way of considerably softening the blow, by allowing for sophistic genealogies and close enough replacements—but that was always pretty dangerous nevertheless.\n\nWhen the occupant is placed at the center by procedural means, the procedural means for removing him in some extraordinary way must be compelling enough and managed expertly enough to prevent irreparable cracks from opening in the ruling group and below. But these are systems with formal and informal mechanisms, however imperfect; for singularized succession in perpetuity, which retrieves the tradition of the king as final judge within an order in which the juridical (and not honor system or bureaucratic measures) is given its due, we would have to both acknowledge the possibility of charges and suits being brought against the occupant of the center and extremely rigorous standards of accusation and proof, with the option of counter-charges if the charges brought don’t hold up—if you want to charge the king with treason be prepared to be charged with it yourself if he’s acquited.\n\nThe same would have to hold for charges against the selected successor who, of course, would in turn be free to pardon his predecessor. A very high level of coordination among the ruling group would needed to pull off a clean removal, so much so that it would indicate either extreme corruption among the occupant and his immediate circle or a widespread malicious conspiracy—in either case, something very wrong systemically which would then restart the infiltration process within intelligence that I have hypothesized would have created this new form of governance in the first place. Which is a reminder that we would always need to maintain and archive those traditions.\n\nIn any case, charging the occupant of the center involves intervention in the nomos, so it can be no ordinary case. Regarding thequestion of establishing justice and proper cases in the new “postneoliberal” nomos, that will likely need to be done through substantial revisions of fraud statutes so as to determine how the expectations regarding future earnings have been determined in such a way as to value assets for the purposes of selling them and using them as collateral: what kinds of promises get made, what kinds of claims get affirmed, what kind of data analysis, etc., is employed in such determinations? The conflicts are then internal to those engaged in currency exchanges—investors, lenders, regulatory and taxing agencies, CEOs, etc., rather than between “classes.”\n\nIn both of these hypothetical scenarios (are not all scenarios hypothetical?) we can see the beginnings of a transition to data exchange. What is wanted from the occupant of the center is good governance, and evidence of good governance, and so part of the demonstration of good governance is the collection, organization and provision of evidence of its goodness—only significant gaps or failures in this exhibition of evidence would motivate the initiation of a process of removal or hampering of governing operations. And all disputes, likewise, refer back to governance and one’s role within it: if one person defrauds, defames, incites against, etc., another, he is doing so as part of a team and against a member of another team and so the issue necessarily gets referred upstairs.\n\nUnlike tribal conflicts, the impulse will not be to defend the member of your team or, for that matter, to simply treat him as a hostage to the deal struck with the other group; since your continuation and success as a team depends upon serving some need within the subscription network your primary imperative is to demonstrate you’re suited to doing so. This implies some combination of discipline and compensation where warranted but also the insistence on a forum where the “warrant” can be examined but this in turn implies recourse and contribution to databanks determining the implications of the dysfunction in question for remaining within the two thresholds.\n\nThis already starts to look like the contribution of data is the term of settlement, and this might include some “proof of work” on the part of the offender demonstrating the needed levels of civility and honesty. Each case turns into a singular practice of inquiry. (A study of decisions regarding penalties and settlements would involve converting juridical decisions into data which is itself a step toward turning penalties and settlements into data exchanges.)\n\nWe students of the center can always then see ourselves as straddling the boundary between the juridical and data exchange, assuming that the boundary will never be abolished once and for all or if it is only to create an analogous boundary within data exchange. This boundary mirrors the time lag allowed for judgments within the Thirdness prediction market, because what is presented in the initial state is a conflict in some juridical form while the outcome is some invented data exchange, with the obligatory ruling in favor of one side a pretext for and justified by that data exchange. The work of Thirdness, then, is idiom mining in the sense that its generating singular hypothetical data exchanges that would be oscillations between 50/50 microdecisions carved out of the formal case.\n\nTo settle a case is to have each side know something about the other side’s likely future actions that they didn’t before. Again, this is not so different from judgments in the conventional sense: to be awarded some sum by the court against someone who damaged your reputation is be given assurances that that offender along with possible imitators are less likely to attempt such damage in the future—and, for that matter, that those who decide whether or not to trust you are less likely to do so based on representations from that party. So, imagine such assurances can be granted without money—by promises of enhanced supervision by the offender’s team(s) along with, perhaps, guarantees of providing retractions rapidly in these and “similar” cases or, for that matter, revisions in the algorithms determining attention to one or another story.\n\nThis would provide expectations of future boosts to one’s own reputations that might be worth more than a cash settlement. Such data exchanges would rely on formulas, no doubt, but they would also have to singular enough to fit the case at hand—a great deal of culture, including “entertainment,” might be absorbed in the representation of such cases. Whole lines of probable courses of action and reaction would be laid out and compressed in sentences aiming at being exceedingly precise and hypothetical, including lots of seemingly improbable if… then scenarios that can be algorithmized but only so as to make their implications even more complex and wide-ranging.\n\nCurrency can be eliminated from the settlement insofar as the settlement itself becomes currency: the language of a good settlement would, for example, be adopted into the public documents of teams, with an ongoing transparent record kept of adherence to that language. This would be “capital,” and its “value” would be determined by its tethering to a growing archive of 50/50 cases the judgments of which at each point along the way our capital language iterates within a space of inquiry."
    },
    {
      "slug": "thirdness",
      "title": "Thirdness",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 02, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/thirdness",
      "content": "I’d like here to outline a proposal for a company which would put into practice the trajectory of my thinking of the center up until this point, which could start small while containing the capacity to scale up indefinitely, and which is fully imaginable as a new reality while perhaps also taking form as an aesthetic object. The proposal is first of all an extension of my centering of the juridical as a minimal condition for the constitution of events: nothing “happens” that could not be framed as including potential claimants before some tribunal. The juridical is secondary to the ritual, on one side, and dependent upon the disciplinary, on the other.\n\nThe ritual is the originary form take by events, so, in centering the juridical I am posing the juridical as an extension of the ritual, one that takes shape under the originary distribution of imperial conditions. The implication for the disciplinary, which also constructs events through the experimental method but only by eliminating or controlling for the human construction of the event itself, is that all inquiry is itself framed by and directed back to, by whatever complicated route, the juridical—even strictly scientific inquiry relies upon the occupation of spaces, the ownership (in some form) of equipment, the proper publication of results, preservation of data, and so on, all of which is unthinkable without the juridical—and which ultimately serves various forms of centered ordinality.\n\nWe may be able to imagine social order taking the form of a single laboratory in which all human beings work as simultaneously subjects and objects of inquiry but even there we would find the equivalent of a nomos, an originary distribution, with allocations of resources and responsibilities, which would only make sense given the possibility of adjudication.\n\nOnce the juridical is centered in this way as, among other things, the irreducibly human in the increasingly permeable and manipulable boundaries separating humans from nature and technology, a new mode of inquiry presents itself. To understand and represent any event is to represent it as composed of implicitly juridical instances in which complainants and tribunal could be singled out, hypothetically and conceptually. To talk about a war, for example, would be to sort out claims and counter-claims the respective sides do and might make against each other and the kind of tribunal that might sit in judgment. This would be an open-ended and in principle infinite inquiry, as injuries and judgments generate new injuries and judgments and various appeals processes, opening of closed cases, and so on would become the substance of discussion.\n\nEven more, it is a mode of inquiry that could be scaled up to the highest global level, including all of those agencies “implicated” in the war through systems of alliances, arms sales, corporate collusion and so on; it could be scaled down to the micro-level, including creating new virtual spaces of judgment within each of the adversaries; and time frames can be prolonged or contracted, with judgments either instantaneous or projected decades or centuries ahead, perhaps as a footnote in some future history book or as a literary allusion. This would really be formalizing, making explicit, the way we already (tacitly) discuss everything, as we never completely set aside basic questions of resentment and reciprocity in our examination of or participation in any event. The best theoretical thinking always aims at making the tacit explicit, which is to say the creation of pedagogical platforms, which is always a technological matter.\n\nIn its original form this proposal was to be, in the first instance, a journal, which would publish essays framing events as hypothetical, potential or virtual “cases,” so as to create an ongoing layering of judgment as a civilizational exercise. But this was to lay the ground for the creation of a kind of arbitration firm, as the power of the analysis demonstrated in the essays written for the journal would recommend the practitioners of this mode of inquiry as an impartial arbiter for real world disputes. This would appeal most immediately to parties with genuine, good-faith disputes, with each side believing that if only its side were fully heard, they would be vindicated.\n\nThis also means that those parties interested in honing grudges for the sake of institutional blackmail would avoid the firm like the plague. This in itself would draw a firm line between serious and frivolous disputants. All this would depend, of course, upon the reliability of the firm’s judgments—only insofar as those judgments and the reasoning offered for them were seen to be impartial could its success as a company and metric of civilizational layering be assured. The success of the firm would in turn entrench its judgments as models to be emulated. The judgments would exemplify the juridical, but operate extra-legally, on the model of the following provision in George Washington’s will:\n\nthat all disputes (should any unhappily arise) shall be decided by three impartial and intelligent men, known for their probity and good understanding; two to be chosen by the disputants—each having the choice of one—and the third by those two. Which three men chosen, shall, unfettered by law, or legal constructions, declare their sense of the Testator’s intention; and such decision is, to all intents and purposes to be as binding on the parties as if it had been given in the Supreme Court of the United States.\n\nSo, the journal/firm was not to be bogged down in legal interpretation in the narrow sense but was, rather, to aim at restoring a “sense” of the juridical under the assumption, indisputable in my view, that we have been witnessing over the past several decades an increasingly irreparable corrosion of the same.\n\nThe journal/firm was to have an innovative technological component, employing specially trained large language models and data search and analysis programs so as to pose questions at scales and with precision and speed that would not have previously been possible. But the thought of how to make this a genuinely profitable business and one that would draw investors (even just to play out its possibilities as an aesthetic object) and, ultimately, as I have been arguing any firm must if it is to flourish and remake the world, issue currency, led me to think of the model of the stock market and derivatives, which loomed large in Zack Baker’s and mine “There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center”: all this must be included and operationalized.\n\nThe notion of a prediction market then presented itself (God only knows how these thought thresholds where a new idiom presents itself “happen”). The limit, thus far, of betting upon events is that only an event with an official closure can take bets—sporting events are the most obvious example, as the rules for determining winners and losers are transparent and unchanging. Similarly with gambling in casinos. In the public world, only elections have that kind of closure—and here we can already start to see how betting on elections presupposes the integrity of the process—if it came to be taken for granted that elections were regularly, even if not invariably, fixed, then betting on elections would cease to be possible; or, perhaps, they would take on a very different character, in which one would be betting, implicitly at least, on whether they will fix it this time.\n\nBut it’s easy to see how unstable such a system would be, as those doing the fixing could also be betting on the markets. In principle, of course, any event could be bet on—what will be the inflation rate in 6 months, who will win a particular war, what will turn out to be the case in some disputed factual case—but in all of these cases a stable betting market would depend upon the reliability of the measures of inflation, or the agreement on what counts as “winning” a war, or the trustworthiness of some arbiter of factuality (some media outlet, government agency or courtroom). Otherwise, how would one know whether to pay out? The range of events that could be bet on can be treated as an index to the, let’s say, “replicability” of existing institutional arrangements.\n\nThe mode of juridical thinking I have been proposing would solve this problem and make it possible to bet on any event precisely by constituting events as juridical, in which case the market would depend upon the faith invested in the company constructing events and issuing judgments. The overtly and strongly pro-social and pro-civilizational nature of the project is thereby retained: higher forms of judgment are being modeled. Thinking about this on the largest scale possible, such a company would then be constituting hundreds, maybe thousands of events continually by identifying the parties and virtual tribunal that would be rendering judgment.\n\nYou would really be betting less on the event itself than on the judgment rendered, which itself means that the interval between constituting the event and rendering judgment (which would be done continually, on a rolling basis), where the information gathering, analysis and thought are “input” is where the uncertainty lies. (You could think about it as betting on the referee’s calls rather than on the game or discrete units of the game, as long as you keep in mind that the refs are always making calls including all the calls they don’t make, and the fact that every move made by every player is shaped by that player’s sense of what the refs might call, how, and what falls below the threshold of their attention.)\n\nWe would keep publicizing prospective claimants within a possible dispute with an outcome including a range of results such that an either/or bet is plausible with a time frame for judgment giving people enough time (what counts as “enough” might vary widely) to examine the issue and lay bets. It would even be possible to make available the datasets upon which the LLMs and other forms of data search used to organize inquiry into the cases are trained along with, to the extent possible, the weighting done in the training, so one’s betting is itself an attempt (perhaps aided by AI) to guess at the way artificially generated representations of events will in turn be interpreted.\n\nThe better a bettor is able to enter the mode of inquiry being modeled, which is to say, the more the bettor scales up his civilizational intuitions and follows events closely, or perhaps creates his own organization or firm to do so, the more successful he will be on the market. Perhaps some successful bettors will join the company or create similar firms of their own. Meanwhile, the company would want to frame all events so as to make the odds essentially 50-50, so that the company, like any bookie, just skims the vig off the top. This might lead to idiosyncratic framings of events—rather, than, say, whether one party is going to be found guilty or liable, the bet will be on the degree or mode of guilt or liability. Hard cases might make bad law but they make good rods for honing meta-juridical thinking on.\n\nSince framing events at various levels of granularity in such a way that bets can always be either/or poses challenges that maybe only computation can solve. What would it take, say, to be able to construct dozens of bets on bureaucratic decisions that might set the closure of the event (one party being found to have done an injury to another requiring precisely this particular payment) with a specific deadline, and then another bet to be closed an hour later, and so on; that is, with something resembling the rapidity with which one can trade stocks? How far in advance could bets be set; would bets have to be canceled if the presupposing conditions ceased to exist, or could systems be constructed for converting a bet on one occurrence to a bet on another should the presupposed conditions of the first lapse?\n\nWe could start small but to fully realize the system it would have to be continually expanding, perhaps to eventually encompass all social activity and become a means of holding wealth to be used as collateral and hence as currency: someone with an established track record would be able to sell off pieces of bets held, perhaps far into the future, while bets held with a certain prospect of pay-off could serve as collateral. But in that case we might as well transition into settlements represented as data exchanges, in which, say, the winning party is granted certain surveilling rights over the loser, who is in turn hemmed in with certain behavorial conditions tethered to those surveilling rights, with these arrangements setting the terms for the formalizing of future events.\n\nThis will be a virtual justice system with no direct impact on the world and it might become a kind of marginal, “dissident,” even “prophetic” reproach of a world where the eruption of vendettas from below and degeneration of succession practices from above render the originary distribution increasingly a mere base for launching sabotage operations. Or, it might gradually come to approximate the real world by proving a model for new disciplinary elites to infiltrate and reform institutions. Perhaps we would look for a tipping point where it becomes profitable for institutions to take longer term bets on higher internal levels of justice or fluid data exchanges in anticipation of improved succession practices. Thirdness would then become the one big company, continually closing but never, Achilles and the tortoise-like, quite, the gap between prediction and realization across all human orders.\n\nWhile increasing the degree of computational governance by creating what we could call, referencing an older project initiated by Buckminster Fuller back in the 1960s, the “world game,” that game remains linguistically grounded. The idioms of center study center are to be sharpened and serve as intelligences formalizing events in terms of succession, the threshold separating the vendetta from the juridical, the conversion of assets into data, the intersections of outside option and outside spread, debt enforcement and debt forgiveness. originary debt and the donation of resentment to the center, the dynamic of same and other, same and like, the oscillation of doing and happening and so on—indeed, part of the project would be idiom mining so as to sharpen formalizations of events.\n\nWe can only know what is to count as an institution and therefore an event, in such terms—otherwise we could never step outside of the nominalistic closure of empirical institutions. In other words, we could never enter the juridical “as such,” “unfettered by law or legal constructions.” Representation as the deferral of violence can never be transcended nor can the paradoxes of the center that follow, including the paradox of power whereby the more “absolute” the power the less it is experienced as such insofar as all the teaming and breeding is designed into scenes as pedagogical platforms that also make the scenes and technology transparent vectors of newly exhibited and discovered human mark-ups of those reciprocally present.\n\nJust as with the initial idea for a journal, I would anticipate this prediction market becoming a Schelling Point for all manner of social inquiries and practical projects. One sees occasional references to betting markets today as a way of orienting oneself towards events, but this doesn’t seem to have had any real influence on those events. Thirdness (a reference to Washington’s third man as well as Peirce’s concept of generality and significance created through agreement) would succeed here by generating hitherto unseen and unnamed event clusters that evade the radar of the media and even the world’s intelligence agencies, who would surely take an active interest in its doings.\n\nUltimately it should become the new media, or a kind of world brain. This would all depend upon establishing and sustaining traditions of juridical thinking and impartiality that remain immune to the markets it makes and oversees—we are speaking of very high levels of integrity and impartiality that would need to be periodically pedagogically renewed. The argument implicit here is that only such an institution, and its spread through all institutions, can transition humanity past the current recording of debt through state-initiated expropriations and sabotage and create a new center as central intelligence. As I would have hoped for the journal, the prediction market would also transition into arbitration and consulting contracts, which would in turn serve as data gathering, or new data exchange markets.\n\nIt would make inroads into existing media and educational institutions, condition new modes of representation and pedagogy becoming a universal intelligence infrastructure. All under the condition that humans can increasingly identify and master modes of the deferral of violence at ever higher scales. Progress in this direction would be the best “proof” of the originary hypothesis.\n\nSo, that’s the project—as always, I’m glad to leave it open source because no one could do this without me or, perhaps, at some point people who have learned quite a bit from me. We’ll see if there are any takers; perhaps future posts will simulate an ongoing prediction market on the likelihood of various possible kinds of takers."
    },
    {
      "slug": "threading-through-history",
      "title": "Threading through History",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 02, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/threading-through-history",
      "content": "Once you find yourself in a “reactionary” position, even to the extent of arguing that the latest mode of “liberation” instituted a couple of years ago can and should be reversed you start to confront certain difficulties. This latest form of “liberation” is really just the logical conclusion of the form of “liberation” instituted a decade ago, and that just follows up logically on the one universally applauded 50 years ago, and so on. So, how far back do you want the reversals to go, and who, exactly, do you think is left to operate according to the laws that were repealed a century ago? To be more specific: fine, you’re against wokeness, but what about the civil rights legislation of the 60s and early 70s?\n\nOh, that too? How about women’s suffrage? Really? Slavery…? No matter how much you’re willing to play along, this becomes a bad game fairly quickly, because you end up doubling down on stigmatized and long gone modes of life with no chance of resurrection, or, at least, not any imaginable on the narrow terms on which such interrogations take place. But you do have to talk about history—the Russian Revolution definitely shouldn’t have happened; the French too—throw the American, and English revolutions into the pot as well (how could you not?). Well, alright, then what?—these revolutions were possible because of decisions made by European monarchs going back to the Middle Ages, decisions that would therefore have to be revisited critically, but according to what criteria?\n\nThey shouldn’t have done X implies there were Ys they should have done. And having these Ys is also indispensable if we are to think forward as well—obviously we’re not simply reactionaries in the present, since there are plenty of things we want to change, and we acknowledge that things will in fact change, but that means there are good and bad changes and we can tell the difference. We can have a reading of history within history, and if we are to systematically reject liberal, democratic, progressive and deterministic narratives, we need to be able to say how.\n\nThis is the question my concept of singularized succession in perpetuity aims to solve, and I want to work it through this particular context (interpreting history within history). I haven’t pointed out for a while that the usurpation of the ritual center by the Big Man was the most consequential revolution in human history and the good news is that it’s the only one “reactionaries” can unreservedly support. So, that’s our endpoint, retrospectively: there is no human history, just unrecorded and unaccountable shifts in ritual and myth, without the human occupation of the center. We are defenders of the Big Man revolution!\n\nI would wager that not even the most reactionary reactionary wants to restore pre-Big Man conditions (anyway, you’d need a Big Man to do so, which defeats the purpose)—although some anarchists might (which might mean that, implicitly, that’s the fantasy of liberals and leftists as well, which might flip the terms of the discussion in interesting ways). One is reactionary (that is, outside of liberalism) insofar as one hypothetically narrates the occupation of the center “emically,” that is, sharing the perspective and entering the terms of decision making confronting the successive occupants of the center. We are therefore reading history through the highest responsibilities imposed upon and accepted by humans, and this is the thread that takes us from this first revolution through all the subsequent ones we would have liked to have seen avoided and can now say might have been avoided if the occupants of the center had husbanded their responsibility and authority more effectively.\n\nWithin this framework there will always be plenty of room for disagreement, but we can at least know what we are disagreeing about. Furthermore, the position or stance from which we write history, including present and future history, is clarified: since the occupants of the center only very rarely write history (Julius Caesar being the obvious example) because they are too busy making it, insofar as we are writing history we are doing so as scribes and archivists of the center, hoping to gather, sort and sift through evidence and information in ways that will help the most likely inheritors of the Big Man mantle to wear and pass down that mantle in an orderly way.\n\nI would still defend something like an “absolutist” position regarding the occupant of the center, but for the decisions or imperatives of the occupant to indeed be immediately recognizable to him (i.e., for him to have actually decided), a whole array of institutions and individuals need to be in the “right” place. Absolutist power is not so much an _a priori_ as the result of the proper husbanding of power and authority—one has found the way of articulating the current flux of institutional linkages such that your decisions become legible across the board. Any king who had his decision implemented as intended was absolutist to that extent, not in spite of his reliance on attending to the interests of the nobility, merchants, peasantry, Church and so on, but precisely because he did attend to them.\n\nIf the occupant of the center makes decisions that are less likely to become decisions in effect, he is also making decisions that lessen the likelihood that he will continue to occupy the center, and lower even more the likelihood that he will select his successor in a fully intentional way (he’s always selecting his successor, even if he doesn’t know that he’s doing so). So, attending to the full institutional array is selecting your successor by elevating and preparing the candidates for succession, which also means seeing to the institutions through which those candidates must be ranked, tested and assessed. Even if you’re a king in an order in which primogeniture is the default mode of succession and you have a healthy and perfectly capable male heir, nothing can be taken for granted.\n\nThe entire order must be organized around transitioning that heir, and that also mean weighing and ranking the options in a way that is embedded ritually, juridically and through the disciplines, and this means never losing site that succession is the central problem of human social existence and must be made so explicitly. Look at how terrifying things get in a representative democracy when the mechanisms of transitions in power seem broken—I was completely with those who wanted to leverage available constitutional options for contesting the 2020 presidential election, but I also know that if the Trump campaign had successfully gotten the state legislatures of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia to withhold the electoral votes from those states in time we would have had a very interesting, which is to say, unprecedented, situation on our hands. It’s easy to understand the fear one might have of crossing that threshold.\n\nThis approach, then, provides us with a way of threading our way through history by entering sympathetically into the frame of those making decisions, even those we might consider enemies because if those enemies sought to institute new modes of authority it must be that they noticed weaknesses, in some cases fatal ones, of the mode of authority in place. We can introduce what we know now, but that those occupants of the center couldn’t have known, because the purpose is not to indict those figures of authority but to learn from them and with them. We can say “this shouldn’t have happened” because we will be able to point to ways in which those occupying seats of power might have held the threads of power better than, in the event, it turns out they did.\n\nWe could be wrong now, just as they were wrong then, but we nevertheless institute the habit of training our focus on the immense and never once and for all solved problem of succession; we learn to probe, to test, to bring to bear all the theoretical and technological means for ensuring or subverting successful successions. Maybe sometimes the kinds of changes we might oppose can be hypothesized to have been enacted in very different ways, ways that reinforced rather than accelerated subversion of succession. (Defenders of the Confederacy’s right to secede have generally had an argument regarding a more peaceful, if gradual, way of abolishing slavery.)\n\nThe obvious question now is, well, what about “bad” guys of history and of the present? Would we like to have seen Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, et al achieve an orderly succession? First of all, it’s interesting that none of them did, in fact, publicly name and appoint a successor, which tells us quite a bit about those regimes. (The partial exception to the refusal of ‘totalitarian” regimes to nominate candidates for succession would, I suppose, be the North Korean regime, which seems to have devolved into something like a hereditary monarchy, but who knows what is really going on in there.) The same for Biden—do we want him choosing his successor, who will choose his successor, etc.?\n\nAgain, I would say that the interesting point here is that he couldn’t, because he obviously doesn’t exercise power. So, only in certain kinds of regimes is “absolutism” possible. There is no reason, though, not to imagine the possible development of regimes if they had instituted orderly, intentional succession practices, along with using the principle of singular succession as a diagnostic concept for analyzing such regimes. If Stalin or Hitler (the two most “interesting” examples, I think) deliberately named the positions they occupied in such a way that, rather than being, nominally at least, a mere instrument of the party, class or race, they were to adopt the responsibility to see, publicly and explicitly, to the preparation and selection of named successors, they would have in fact been, or would have become, different regimes.\n\nBetter regimes, even if not ideal ones. A regime that can allow for the public and, indeed, spectacular ranking and display of successors of the current ruler without the nagging fear that one of them will contend as a rival to that ruler at any moment will be a strong regime indeed. Such a regime would have articulated very powerful institutions of deferral with an unhesitating willingness to defend those institutions against subversion.\n\nIt might be best to treat resentment toward authority as memory of and desire for the ritual scene preceding the revolution. I use the term “resentment toward authority” rather than resistance to or repudiation of authority because “resentment” assumes some adjudicable lapse in meeting obligations and insofar as authority is authority, there is no space for adjudication. Resistance to authority can be carried out in the name of that authority, in the interest of revealing it to itself and improving it, while repudiation of authority is merely futile. Resentment toward authority creates a double bind in which you can’t stop engaging it while never really being able to acknowledge it.\n\nYou just keep rubbing up against it, so to speak. This recalls the position on the yet to be usurped ritual scene, anticipating its usurpation and mourning it all at once. Perhaps we all have such a recall. I want to distinguish this from what Eric Gans calls the “moral model” of equality on the originary scene, which abstracts from everything that makes ritual ritual in the name of liberal apologetics. Insofar as we recall the ritual scene, we recall being held along with others on a scene before a spectacle placed at its center; we recall performing, carrying out movements that come from us and not from us, movements that transfigure us.\n\nThis is why demonstrations and riots are ends in themselves, not just demands for a fair shake or a piece of the pie. Our resentment to authority, to the occupied center, can only be met by a re-enactment, with heavily ritualized overtones, of that originary usurpation, in what must be a fundamentally pedagogical gesture. This pedagogical gesture gives us the basic “cultural” form of the order centered on succession, and around which are ordered all the forms of work, play and learning taking place across the order."
    },
    {
      "slug": "through-and-out-of-politics",
      "title": "Through and Out of Politics",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 03, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/through-and-out-of-politics",
      "content": "The most important and definitive thing the occupant of the center does is select the successor who will be most likely to select the successor who will be most likely… This may sound like a very “formal” and “selfish” way of thinking about governing but the exact opposite is the case—the entire field of centered ordinality must be continually surveyed, all institutions must be created and maintained so as to produce suitable candidates and make those candidates known to people, responsibilities must be conferred across all distributory channels and priorities set so as to produce the dispositions needed to provide a sufficient number and range of candidates, Selecting the successor in perpetuity is intrinsically bound up with the center as the site of distribution, in which is remains continuous with its originary ritual function.\n\nAs with all of my hypotheses (I know that I repeat this often) this is not just prospective and normative but descriptive—everyone with the slightest authority is always already doing this, even under conditions inimical to such projections of authority, which means it is often done dishonestly, without unawareness or, in the best of cases, by modeling one’s occupation of the center in such a way as to constrain future occupants. Everyone can feel on some level that all their work would be in vain if the wrong successor was to take over—trying to make your work indelible is an attempt to select your successor.\n\nThis description touches on the ritual, primarily, and the disciplinary, secondarily, “aspects” of center occupation—the disciplinary because all the knowledge acquired through the study of institutions of deferral would feedback into the process of setting the terms of succession. From the juridical standpoint, the occupant of the center (perhaps I should just start referring to that role as “the occupier”) is the highest judge, which is in fact a very pervasive and, next the that of presiding over or being the object of sacrifice, perhaps the most ancient function of the monarch. Since my diagnosis of the contemporary crisis of the liberal order has come to focus increasingly on the systematic vandalizing of the juridical (turning it into another means of conducting the very thing it was established to defer—the vendetta), this is probably the most direct way of thinking about interfering with and directing the uses of institutional power within this order towards another one.\n\nThat is, open source Messianism is best focused, for now at least, on discovering and promoting and creating the personnel to support whoever is best suited to creating a juridical order consistent with intelligence gathered through studies of current forms of vandalism. All questions, e.g., regarding the specific institutional structure of governance (relations between executive, legislative and judicial, the role of elections, the enforcement or repudiation of one or another set of “rights,” etc.) can then be reduced to this problem.\n\nConquest, which is to say war, lies at the heart of the juridical, because whether we are thinking in terms of imperial conquest or the ascension of one feudal lord through the subjection of the rest, it is through conquest that the original nomos distributing territory and authority that the rights and privileges would be allocated and then confirmed, adjusted and adjudicated by various layers of authority and ultimately the king. Even division of territory based on settlement, as in the American west, presupposes an imperial authority to whom disputes can be brought—the extension of the law proceeded parallel with the settlement of land in the West.\n\nSo, the current occupier is the inheritor, however distant and through however crooked and hidden a path, of the original conqueror of the land in question. But, to refine our thinking about the “absoluteness” of that occupancy, the occupier is bound by the entire history of judgments made by himself and previous occupiers, through whatever system of delegation those judgments were made. “Bound” not in the sense that some higher judge will judge the sovereign (we must do our political thinking today free from the assumption of a just God) but in the sense that everyone is where they are and ready to do what they are ready to do as a result of this history, and that the very language you have for governing is suffused by all of these people being positioned where they are.\n\nSo, any political change, and certainly any substantive political change, can only be articulated as a rectification of some fundamental injustice that can be recognized but not remedied under the present justice system. There will never be any way of stepping outside of the existing order and representing that order as badly ordered in accord with some abstract model of order and proposing bringing it into closer approximation to that ideal. The very first decision you would make would activate all the resentments, i.e., the “sense” of “injustice,” that is inextricable from the “sense” that things are badly ordered in the first place.\n\nRegicides had to criminalize the king—they couldn’t just say that things could be run more reasonably through parliament. The nomos enforcer in waiting might be a bit Machiavellian and think he is using those resentments to get to the more rational order, but I think in the end he will have to be fully invested in his juridical role as the supreme arbiter, weighing out cases. This will a disconcerting conclusion for some because it implies the impossibility of extricating oneself from the dirtiest parts of the existing order—all the insane and virulent accusations people hurl at each other.\n\nI think this also opens up the possibility of taking the “cleanest” approach to politics by making the suppression of lying publicly about others the central political issue. I’ve indicated this before in, for example, my discussion of [“media”](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/media-as-infrastructural-translation) a little while back. If you get at defamation, libel and slander you can get at the entire system—which is pretty much based on such practices, and has to be. Not a single law could ever be passed by a single legislature (well, I at least know this to be the case in the US) without sustained campaigns of slander against various figures, slander that is inevitably built into the law and its enforcement.\n\nEven an innocuous and potentially beneficial (to some) law that, say, lowers the cost of some widely used medicine will also have some slander of the drug companies built into it—at the very least, it will slander by omission (an interesting legal category to create if it doesn’t exist) by providing a very selective account of the reasons for drug pricing. Now, if the government were to broker an agreement pursuant to a dispute between some combination of drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals, patients organized as a class, etc., that could be done without impugning anyone’s motives or flinging wild accusations.\n\nBut, then, we wouldn’t be “passing laws” but, rather, settling disputes which presuppose an existing body of law derived from the settlements of previous disputes which in turn presuppose property ownership traceable back to an original nomos. And that’s the point—laws should not be passed or created by legislators—that’s not what “law” really is. Legislatures should not exist—that historical transformation of parliaments from advisory to legislating bodies should be overturned, and can be overturned by focusing on the juridical. The last, and self-cancelling act of the legislature should be passing laws against defamation that include themselves and therefore make their job, or running for office, impossible. And, of course, the NGOs, interest groups, etc., are also eliminated along the way.\n\nSo, we then have the judiciary with the executive on top as final court of appeal and enforcement arm of the juridical order—this even takes into account international relations and the “commander-in-chief” functions insofar as relations between governments ruling over territories necessarily takes on juridical forms, even if less formal , more tentative and blurrier ones. (The only justifiable use of power of the hegemonic imperial power is to serve as such a reliable judge that other countries want to bring their disputes before it.) But the problem of transforming the entire order and then, presumably, organizing the new one, on the identification of defamation (for the religious, “bearing false witness”) as the central problem of social order is what’s really interesting here.\n\nThis obviously paints “free speech” into a very tiny corner because there would be all kinds of things it would in effect be impossible to say without paying unacceptable costs. (There were, until very recently, exactly such constraints upon speech, but what I’m suggesting goes well beyond that—just look at what political candidates used to say about each other in the 19th century.) Of course the most powerful institutions will be best positioned to squash any reports or even observations or opinions critical of their operations—even if those criticism are true, the cost of proving that in court might prove prohibitive to the critics—this can obviously be a problem today, one which I could be seen as magnifying exponentially.\n\nBut such objections can be addressed in various ways—through very expansive discovery procedures, through levying punitive damages in accord with the amount one has spent on the course of the case itself, and levying those damages on individuals and not institutions, etc.—these are interesting problems to work on! (And routine defamation of public figures, even powerful ones, might be more corrosive to social order than more isolated cases.) A social order that has determined through its highest authorities that not bearing false witness against your neighbor is among if not the highest value will work these things out.\n\nOrganizing a political movement or party around this approach would require innovative thinking, but could, I believe be shown to benefit the vast majority of people and only really disadvantage the political parties, media and various institutions involved in propaganda. It would reach down into the most thorough anthropological analyses of envy and resentment and could be shown to be an effective and economical approach to everyday questions of abuse of corporate power, abuse of government power, and the creation of needless divisiveness. The most immediate wedge is the vehicle for attacking “wokeness” it would allow for.\n\nAlmost all charges of “racism,” for example, are defamatory according to any reasonable understanding of “racism” (whether there is, for that matter, any reasonable understanding of “racism”—and “sexism,” “antisemitism,” “homophobia,” etc.— such that accusations of such can be made is a question that will get raised as a matter of course). You could hit the ground running by defending your supporters in the most direct way against the most vicious vilification and persecution (as the government itself is to a great extent driven by “defamational” assumptions). We would be working on creating presentable scenes upon which the question of whether someone has “lied” (as opposed to being mistaken or misled, or thinking hypothetically, etc.—how, exactly, do we say what someone “did”?), has lied about someone in particular (are claims made about institutions, systems, processes, etc., really targeting—“implicitly” perhaps—individuals who can be readily identified with those institutions, systems and processes?), and has the person lied about been materially damaged (rather than made uncomfortable, or, for that matter, being able to profit off the lies told about them) as a result of those lies.\n\nMaking these questions central to social order would provide a way of talking about everything. And, not incidentally, such an order would create the most fertile conditions for the performance of succession across all institutions and, more broadly, the organization of centered ordinality as a perpetual festival celebrating our shared human origin.\n\nTo determine whether someone has lied about someone, and the consequences of that lie, under contemporary conditions, means bringing in the entire information, knowledge and data gathering and analyzing system into play—which means that a crucial concern of government is making all the institutions concerned with those practices fit for the task as well. This provides a way of bringing the massive surveillance systems that are inseparable from the data collecting devices attached to virtually all transactions within the juridical order—its most important function becomes keeping us honest when it really counts. It’s also hard to see a more likely way of making virtue central to public life.\n\nIndeed, an incremental improvement in human nature is implicit in such a politics, which would ultimately take us out of politics and toward helping each other become the kind of people who know what leads to distracting and destructive disputes and therefore learn out to convert the elements of such disputes into creative, cooperative projects. To transcend the law you must fulfill it. To further remix scripture, this is not in heaven so that you don’t know where to look for it; rather, it is right here on earth, in being the kind of people we all (just about) say we would like to be (honest, with integrity, meaning what we say and saying what we mean, fulfilling promises, etc.) and in making the laws governing our interactions simpler and more transparent.\n\nThere’s something here for the materialists—if a particular way of organizing economic relations makes it essential to lie, commit fraud and slander then that doesn’t speak well for that mode of organization, which should therefore be replaced; and for the idealists, even the Kantians, to some extent at least (lying to a murderer about where his victim is doesn’t really harm the murderer). It would also encourage us all to become scrupulous handlers of text and, of course, expert attendants upon data security."
    },
    {
      "slug": "tokenization",
      "title": "Tokenization",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 12, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/tokenization",
      "content": "The first writing is the first designation of property and the first token of exchange and issuance of debt. Implications must follow from this. When an entry is made of “3 cows” (with 3 ideographs of a cow and then a single ideograph with the number 3) in a ledger, and this is copied onto an envelope or packet designating the contents of a delivery, and this same envelope can then be used to promise someone else a future delivery of those items then we have the origin of writing tied up with the origin of property, trade, currency and debt. There may be no necessary reason to treat this co-origin as telling us anything about writing, specifically, and trying to figure out, say, how jotting down a few notes for myself to develop later (maybe by texting myself) has an intrinsic relation to ownership, money and debt.\n\nFor a long time, though, I’ve assumed there must be some relation, and I think now would be a good time to try and work it out. It would, I think, be very helpful to be able to think about the act of writing as creating a token that entails a debt that at some point, in some way, comes due.\n\nDavid Olson finds a kind of originary grammar (certainly not his term) in that inscription of “3 oxen,” or whatever. We have the subject-predicate relation of the declarative sentence in embryo here. That basic structure prepares writing to represent speech acts, and once writing starts to represent speech acts, we are on the way to alphabetical writing. At that point we are already at quite a distance from a ledger entry, and it’s easy to see why one might assume the two forms of inscription, currency and writing, simply went their separate ways here. Which speech act would have been the earliest to have been recorded, though?\n\nInscriptions on monuments, in the voice of the god-emperor, for one thing—assertions of power and immortality. Prayers, magic formulas and the like, preserved for pedagogical purposes within small priestly castes. But also, as Seth Sanders has suggested, and, even primarily, if Sanders is right, the graffiti on walls created by slaves working within imperial systems, appropriating the alphabets of their masters, perhaps even, out of ignorance of their hieroglyphic operations, creating them _as_ alphabets. There’s no need to choose among these and other possible scenarios in order to assume that writing as the recording of speech acts retained its close connections to ownership and inheritance, marking spaces as one’s own for those who follow designated to or able to inhabit and extend them.\n\nThe same set of associations and commitments must hold for the writing down of epic poems and scripture, also bound up tightly with oral, communal, pedagogical scenes. To read these texts, that is, to repeat out loud what others have said out loud, is to issue a token and take out a debt—one is obliged to be ready to live out those words in other situations, and to affirm them in the face of hostility.\n\nThere are similar trajectories here—to write “3 oxen” makes it possible to give that piece of writing to another, who will now have a claim of 3 oxen upon the issuer of the note, and the note can further be circulated along with other similar notes as a form of currency, without anyone ever necessarily going to collect the 3 oxen; while transcribing or simulating a speech act will be circulated as a text, become part of various rituals and pedagogical settings, be included in other texts, mixed in with other texts from other origins, and other versions of that same text. “Dissemination,” to cite Derrida, in both cases.\n\nPerhaps, to maintain, not so much the analogy as the identity of the two modes of circulation, we would have to say that the original speech act transcribed or imagined (but, if imagined, imagined from some, to use one of Eric Gans’s most felicitous conceptual inventions, “autoprobatory” event that had to have been experienced to have been imagined) remains as a reference point anchoring the entire circulation—perhaps it is writing that creates, not so much the sacred as the sacred as singular event of revelation. “Writing” creates “speech.” Even asemic writing, or writing that departs, as all writing of course does, from strict phonographic representation, is predicated upon an event of creation even if not quite a speech act.\n\nWe’d have to see writing as a kind of “ledgering.” Each piece of writing is categorizing and weighing debits and credits, in a way that that could ultimately be made “literal”—which, we would then have to say, is the task of criticism. In doing so, it must in turn be claiming a kind of authority and issuing a demand to be repeated through all the differences iteration involves and generates. Writing sorts out the doing and happening composing any event, and therefore the history of debt enforcement and forgiveness it is part of. Blockchain, then, must also be a kind of writing, and we want writing to approximate the qualities of blockchain.\n\nI don’t get a sense that promoters of blockchains are particularly aware of this, but the public verifiability and automated enforcement offered by blockchain represents death to victimary and even democratic agendas. There are many things it used to be possible to argue about but no longer are. Blockchain leaves open plenty of things to argue about, but they mostly regard protocols and questions of operationalization rather than unanswerable questions of fairness regarding differential starting points. As I have been arguing pretty persistently for a while now, the juridical, which means questions of justice and fairness, can never go away, but it can be singled out much more precisely across larger fields of entangled causes and effects.\n\nOther dysfunctional forms of power are also endangered—if bitcoin and/or related forms of blockchain technology and economy can eliminate capitalist power by removing from state and banks alike debt issuing power, they are to be unequivocally supported. Only what can be agreed upon and submitted to third parties, including automated decision-making mechanisms, in such a way that neither party can deny the terms of the agreement have been implemented, is really worth discussing. Our writing, then, should seek to approximate such discussions, and this includes demonstrating the implications and consequences of discussion that don’t seek to approximate blockchain conditions.\n\nAll this returns us to the declarative sentence, and the work of revealing its logic and perfecting its operations—tasks I have announced a few times without yet seeing them through to the end. The declarative sentence defers and converts an imperative threatening to break linguistic presence by eliciting a counter-imperative from “reality” (which it is the business of the declarative sentence to construct). A declarative sentence informs someone, at whatever remove, that something they are demanding or commanding cannot be produced or performed—it is not there or not possible. A declarative sentence can always map onto an interrogative, which is to say can always be presented as an answer to a question or, to be precise, at least two questions, one answered by the topic or one answered by the comment—and everything else in the sentence (adjectives, adverbs, etc.) are just answering other questions.\n\nSo, a good sentence is one that packs in as many answers to as many presence-threatening questions as possible. Interrogatives are prolonged imperatives, converting the demand for action into a request for information, a conversion that is really the emergence of the declarative sentence. The further you prolong imperatives into interrogatives the more the questions pertain to various “meta” issues regarding how you have been able to answer other questions; at the same time, the originating imperatives remain in the background, threatening to collapse the structure built through the interrogative prolongation. We can now speak of this in terms of “prompt engineering.”\n\nStill, as a result of the declarative sentence, a new imperative, entailing a chain of imperatives, self-correcting as each of them runs the gauntlet of becoming interrogative and becoming sentence, must be issued. A sentence is only intelligible insofar as it tells you to do something, and that something is first of all to redirect your attention, to make it joint with some other you previously had no occasion to point along with.\n\nI can now say that a good sentence, then, issues redeemable tokens (here I am answering questions coming to the above discussion from my more recent inquiries into debt and power). A discourse (an institutionally recognized or potentially recognizable arrangement of sentences) offers words, phrases, sentences that can be used as counters within other discourses. They are on loan and are used to pay some other debt. Every sentence and every discourse issues the imperatives that will assert and clarify the originary distribution and singularize succession (expose and cut the ties between the holder of the outside spread and the outside option) by constructing juridical scenes that serve as pedagogical platforms.\n\nIdioms are currency and forms of intelligence. Centered ordinality takes on directly linguistic forms: in any form of social organization or coordination, someone will go first, simply because everyone can’t do the same thing at the same time—this is what “firstness” means. Someone initiates a conversation, someone shifts the conversation to a new topic, someone spots the impending emergency and moves toward it or others away from it first. Simultaneity is impossible, which is why it must be constructed ritually, which is to say institutionally and verbally. We all say the same thing so as to prevent everyone from doing the same thing at the same time—everyone doing the same thing at the same time can only be centralized, auto-accelerating violence.\n\nYou can see this in every discourse simply by noting who the discourse thinks should be doing what, or what actions deemed necessary by the discourse have had the doer omitted. Discourse should in that case aim towards producing nothing but idioms that work as redeemable tokens—words that only have meaning insofar as they entail an obligation and lay out the terms of the receipt of that debt by its holders. I can assert one of my oldest idioms here: if you imagine the kind of sovereign who could do what you say you want done in such a way that you can acknowledge it has been done you are imagining a sovereign who wouldn’t care what you want and would do something different from it. So, cut to the chase, peg your desires to the center, and work on the balance sheet, the debits and credits, the forgiveness and enforcement, an occupant of that center capable of singularizing succession might take as a program.\n\nSo, writing can’t really do anything other than draw up ledgers. Let’s now push back beyond the speech/writing distinction that Olson works with (and that I accept as giving us the most precise account of writing and the declarative sentence) towards Derrida’s “arche-writing,” inscription prior to the speech writing distinction itself and really, prior to anything we would recognize as language. Arche-writing was a starting point for Bernard Stiegler in his inquiry into writing as technics and the way he uses inscription to mark the transition from animal to human is completely consistent with the originary hypothesis—it is only with the origin of language that memory can be transmitted generationally, rather than either genetically or through the learning experiences of individual organisms.\n\nThe arche-writing for center studies is design, and first of all the symmetry in the arrangement of individuals on the originary scene. Everyone on the scene marks and is marked-up by everyone else, producing a kind of inscription on the ground. This inscription is retrieved and reactivated with what I have suggested earlier can be seen as a secondary, supplemental or “centripetal” event, the leaving and following of traces left on the hunt or gathering exercise. (Perhaps this is women’s non-violent entry into language.) This is a mode of inscription that immerses the human in a much broader world of inscriptions made by other animals and plants.\n\nAnimals of course track and evade each other by sight, hearing and smell, but deliberately leaving traces for others to follow is something new and would transform the vast inscriptions made on the earth by other organisms and inorganic entities like the wind, fire, etc., into intentional marks to be woven into ritual, myth, and eventually science, which is really just the creation of controlled scenes for gathering traces. All of these traces are ancestral gifts, and hence part of the originary debt.\n\nThere is always that which doesn’t fit into the ledger, which doesn’t balance out and our inscriptions capture that as well. That which doesn’t fit is what happens to the indebted, so as to place them in debt, or make the debt exceed their means of repayment, and to some extent this is the case for all of us—who has not left things undone? The corresponding agency of a creator who has given us more than we can ever repay, hence cancelling all human sacrifice and calling for the complete devotion of the self, an invention shared by Judaism and Christianity, is registered in all those idioms in which someone does something without there being any way of specifying any “mechanism” by which he did it.\n\nTo some extent, all of language is comprised of such idioms—even a simple description of an action, like “he went to the store,” leaves open a fundamental mystery of the creation of desire and its transmutation into action. The Natural Semantic Primes are on the one hand the simplest, most commonplace words and the most mysterious—how is it, exactly, that we “think,” “say,” “know,” “do” and so on? These primes are certainly late coming words, the distillation of declarative culture, polishing off and replacing more ominous names and commands coming from beings hovering overwhelmingly over the community and directly constituting every particle of its shared consciousness.\n\nThese essentially unbearable first words mark a debt that can’t be remembered or recorded because too terrifying, marking reciprocal recognitions of tremendous violent capacity from which we were saved only God knows how (and therefore “God” remains the best word for designating the agency enabling such articulations, which it would be most accurate to describe as being done with, or in, or of, or for or at the center). The only way to mark these inscriptions is to place scenes within scenes, to keep moving the speaker of the declarative sentence into the center as ostensively gestured towards and then doing the same for the speaker who made that move, and so on.\n\nThis would be equivalent to eliciting from one’s interlocutor an unspeakable mimetic memory that, if recalled in full, would call into question one’s ability to speak, which is to impose a burden that only in its sharing restores and amplifies the linguistic presence within which we speak. An arche-writing like that drawing of Escher’s in which two hands are drawing each other. The ultimate proof of work."
    },
    {
      "slug": "toward-a-unified-idiom",
      "title": "Toward a Unified Idiom",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 09, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/toward-a-unified-idiom",
      "content": "I want to bring into a single idiom the discourse on “media” developed in _Anthropomorphics_ and the discourse on “technics” initiated there but currently under significant refinement and expansion—this latter discourse has been organized around the perfection of the imperative. The perfection of the imperative can be further clarified or perfected by identifying the end point of the imperative, or the relay of imperatives, to be the perfection of the practice of the user. The perfection of the practice of the user is manifested in the provision of the successor practices to your own, which in turn brings the discourse of technology into the singularized succession in perpetuity composing the central intelligence.\n\nThink about composing your practices so as to ensure they are continued in a way consistent with your own construction, and that those who continue them will be such as to continue them in a way that will be consistent with their originary constitution in your own practice, and so on, for as far ahead as the mind can imagine (and part of your practice is to increase the mind’s imaginative capacity)—and making that constitutive of your practices. The question of the media has been set aside during this theoretical work, and now needs to be integrated, and the entire distinction between “media” and “technology” abolished within the discourse of scenic design practices.\n\nI proposed as the best way to think of media as the setting of the scene within which the sign can be issued—in fact, this notion of media was the starting point of the concept of “scenic design practices.” On the originary scene, we must imagine a continuum between scene and sign: if we identify the sign as the gesture of aborted appropriation, then we can bring this to a very fine point in the shaping of that part of the body that most singularly suggests a transformation of the animal grasp into the newly human gesture. The attention of all will be drawn most powerfully to the most evident conversion. But the most evident conversion will be embedded in less completely or obviously transformed postures and reciprocal positioning that allow the sign to be set off; and, beyond that, whatever in the background is set off or employed in such positioning.\n\nFor example, how far each member is from the central object will be part of the way the sign is received—we can imagine someone having to back up a couple of steps before his iteration of the sign can be “read.” If we think of increasing care being taken to ensure the iterability of the scene by arranging for positioning and posture along with gesture with “props” taken from the natural surroundings and the remains of the central object/meal in the ongoing construction of the ritual scene we have our originary “media.” But this also means that the initial technics will be directed towards media, because the imperative exchanges with the center will first of all be directed towards bringing the entire ritual scene into greater conformity with the increasing complexity of demands taken from the center.\n\nSo, the media is nothing but the means of generating scenes, and once the relation to the sacred center is broken, the possibility of generating, through the arrangement of a single sign on a single scene (say, in a studio), an unlimited succession and distribution of scenes coincides with the turning of technics from operating “magically” on the ritual scene to eliciting, manifesting and making continuous and worthy of continuance the power and intelligence of the center. So, again: scenic design practices.\n\nMore discursive and conceptual elements are to be impressed here, among them “mimological impressments,” a concept I proposed at the beginning of my rethinking of technics and which has so far remained abortive. To get to that, though, the model of cultural continuity derived from Eric Gans’s deduction of the succession of speech forms in _The Origin of Language_ needs to be reiterated and repurposed as a model of cultural continuity (which Gans never claimed for it). This is a model of cultural continuity generated through what I have called “mistakenness,” drawing upon the creation of new forms around “inappropriate” deployments of existing forms along with the constitutive participation of others in the maintenance of linguistic presence.\n\nThe imperative is created out of an “inappropriate ostensive,” wherein the naming of an object which happens to be absent is treated as a demand to produce the object; the declarative is a product of an inappropriate imperative, through the relay of the interrogative as the prolonged and converted imperative, as a doubled command to cease demanding because the center has itself commanded the object to render itself inaccessible. My first thinking of firstness, or the first issuer of the sign, was completely (if not completely consciously) indebted to this model insofar as the first member to display hesitation could only have known a small portion of what he was doing—he sees the impending disaster before or more clearly than anyone else but certainly has no “solution” in mind (he has no mind to have anything in—he “has” and “is” nothing more than whatever correlation between his own felt movements and the movements of others on the scene he can continue reproducing in his own movements); that “solution” is provided by everyone else (and no one in particular) imitating that hesitation, which has brought their own attention to the implications of their push to the center.\n\nSo, there is a logic of cultural continuity and transmission here, one which is neither accidental or meaningless nor fully intentional (as we are with great force compelled to represent such transformations retroactively); which recognizes unevenly distributed responsibility while implicating the “buy-in” of the entire group. But we need to add something: repetition, without which the sign could not become sign. There is a repetition in the “dialogue” producing each new sign itself (in bringing the retrospectively demanded object the recipient of the new imperative would likely repeat the name, as in Gans’s example of the “dialogue” between surgeon and nurse in the operating room: “scalpel”… “scalpel”), but the sign could only be carried beyond that scene if there is an audience participating in the repetition (otherwise, how could anyone else “understand” that naming something can now be treated as a command?).\n\nThe way to understand a new sign is by repeating it as a practice in a controlled situation or scene; we must assume an almost unbelievably high level of mimetic responsiveness in these early humans learning language from each other, and immediately after seeing the ostensive treated as an imperative others observing the interaction would start demanding objects from each other in lower stakes, lower threshold of significance (I‘m, of course, retrieving another absolutely crucial concept from _The Origin of Language_ here) interactions aimed less at obtaining objects than at practicing the new sign. From now on, every ostensive sign contains an implicit imperative; every object that might be identified is “demandable,” every action “commandable.”\n\nAnd every imperative contains within it a potential declarative reality check, so a kind of “always already” rehearsed character attaches to all signifying practices. And all of these new sign-practices must be made derivable from the center, integrated into ritual and made a source of ongoing commentary in (declarative) myth. Gans situates these linguistic innovations off center, assuming, correctly I think, that the ritual scene would have little tolerance for the invention of new forms; but I think, for this very reason, any innovation will quickly be repeated as part of the ritual relation to the center, and the innovation narrated as commanded by the center. So, whenever you invent something, you’re claiming to retrieve some form already implicitly contained in the center, and you are ultimately right to do so.\n\nNow, we could say that attributing the order of signs to the center (the central being has told us to distribute things in this way, to request things from each other in this, to repeat certain formulas in this way, etc.) is a “delusion,” but we reach an irreducible anthropomorphism here: knowing it’s a delusion doesn’t help dispel it because, in fact, we will never reduce our “decision” to say or do this or that to a fully present representation of all things we didn’t say or do instead of this one along with a self-generated, unimpeachable reason for having said or done this. At some point you’d have to say: I modified a model available to (“compelling”) me in the face of a partially intelligible set of exigencies.\n\nA delusion that can’t be dispelled is not a delusion: it’s a command to acknowledge our irreducible historicity and sociality. Claiming to liberate oneself from a delusion is a way of maintaining linguistic presence on some new scene one can imagine oneself to be on, perhaps a scene upon which you say the first word to people who might join you on the scene decades hence.\n\nBut there is a delusion that can be dispelled, and that, in fact, my thinking of scenic design practices aims at dispelling: the delusion, lingering after-effect of our origins in ritual and sacrifice, that “we” all exist on a single Big Scene with a central object to be divided in accord with rules provided by that center. All “identities,” resentments, calls for “justice,” proposals for reconciliation, and so on, are captured by that delusion. Group A is being favored by the central intelligence, and Group B demands that this be redressed: regardless of the facts of the case (and, no doubt, Group B might be able to build a powerful case, in accord with protocols passed down from the center), this description of action can never match anything that happens.\n\nWhether this delusion is a permanent part of our human inheritance, and will need to always be “worked through,” like Freud’s “interminable analysis,” or can be eliminated with the abolition of the dysfunctional power forms now parasitic upon it we will only know post-abolition—for now, this primary way of maintaining linguistic presence is so deeply embedded in our practices as to be the obstacle any practice must construct itself against. If it can’t be eliminated, it can be marginalized, and there’s no reason to set limits on that in advance. Scenic design practices names the practices undertaken in thrall to the Big Scene imaginary and in doing so works to dissolve that imaginary.\n\nEvery new sign form or cultural form, then, will involve an imitation of practices caught up in the fantasy of getting its chunk of the accumulated wealth upon the Big Scene, an imitation that will be so close as to be “off,” and interruptive, and therefore calling into being a new mode of linguistic/cultural presence. (My own attempts to describe the lineaments of contemporary practices free of Big Scenic fantasies counts as such an imitation, at least if I’m right about what we’re doing.) This imitation must extend itself so as to be co-extensive with all of reality, which is to say everything taking place under the aegis of the center.\n\nIn doing so you give yourself over to maintaining linguistic presence, but an iterable, infinitely renewable linguistic presence, i.e., one given over to singularized succession in perpetuity. You have to stamp everything, all scenic arrangements, all the props, postures and positionings on all the platforms, with this mode of presence; but you can only do this through a singularized gesture, focused on a single point of the networked world, designed so as to exercise maximum resonance on the rest. This is the case if your “intervention” is an essay, a work of art, a conversation, or a technological innovation. Like the ostensive that anticipates its transformation into an imperative, you repeat something in advance of its happening.\n\nYou make some arrangement of material, natural or human, into an imitation of what it already must have been in order to be most likely to maintain presence here and now. So, this is what I can call “mimological impressment,” both an imposition on and recruitment of some part of reality and a submitting of oneself to the form your impressment will take when it becomes authenticated by other interfaces as a mediator of presence. A model for this might be a narrative in which all the characters create each other through their own narrative activity: such a narrative would represent our reciprocal contributions to the constitution of reality by creating a model of the scenic design practices that must precede and make the model possible.\n\nIf you design a device so as to make explicit what has been so far tacit, you make a claim about reality that only exists as an effect of the device you’ve designed, while that design marks any samples of the prior reality that might be collected as precedents. You can only claim that some part of reality is an extension or model for human activity by compelling it to imitate and mediate some form of human activity; and vice versa.\n\nWe can now speak in terms of assignments to engage in mimological impressments. These are always assignments to translate the results of a previous mimological impressment. You are going to leave unmistakable marks of what you’ve done, which means revising what you’re doing so as to remove everything that will interfere with those markings and accentuating everything that will point to them. The results of the mimological impressment impressing themselves upon you now still retain various interferences with the markings that have impressed themselves upon you, so your translation of that practice aims at eliminating such interferences and constructing a shorter path to a completely different mimological impressment that is nevertheless the same as its predecessor as a translation of another mimological impressment.\n\nYou “show your work” so as to mark your translation and the innovation in your practice, and it is in fact those markings that turn your mimological practice into an assignment for others to translate it into their own. Markers of your own translation work will present or impress themselves as interferences to be marginalized within successor practices but also as a program to resist that marginalization when the originary form of the practice can be deployed against the infiltration of Big Scenic fantasies into the successor practices. This all sounds very literary, I know, and I’m insisting on the literary as a model for the technological, but if you think about technological innovation not only in terms of the mechanically describable operations of a technological form but as the generator of scenes, in terms of corporate organization, some form of “skunkworks,” and the array of possible deployments by and of end users, then you will equally find such markings of mimological practices there as well. In principle, technology and science involve a simultaneity of operations across fields any one of which is an equally appropriate entry point but, in practice, any thing has a point of reference and origin which marks it ineradicably.\n\nTrying to invent something new involves trying to solve a problem within an existing field, and the initial approach is always to translate an existing, detachable part of the field into a new form that will eliminate the anomaly. Very often this works, and problems can be solved by improving or refining existing objects and mechanisms. When it doesn’t work, it will be discovered that the translation is staying too close to the original and to disturb the surrounding field as little as possible—the anomaly will in that case become more visible and pressing (within the space of innovation, at any rate). In this case, only a reorganization of the field will do.\n\nThis reorganization of the field is the attempt to maintain linguistic presence under new conditions. I think that we can apply the model of the succession of speech forms very directly here: something that is just “there,” part of the field that can be singled out, must issue an imperative, demand to be put to use; something one “must” do, some part of the arrangement that demands to be included or used a certain way, must turn itself into a question; some incommensurability of demands must become formulable as a sentence. The attempt to force a resolution of the anomaly by drawing on existing operational sequences and thereby confirming and saving the field has the effect of pushing these signs or samples out into the open: some element in the field lends itself to a new use, which renders an older object or sequence questionable, and whatever use the new sequence offers must be repeated so as to address whatever the now questionable sequence was useful for.\n\nThis issues in the construction of a new scene, which assembles elements in a way that can be repeated. The original attempt at translation becomes the transformation of the field, with the hypothesized, testable, iterable scene as the new center. Repeating the recruitment and assembly of elements set loose in the attempt at translation is “mimological impressment”; creating a new field which will order everyone in a new way is “scenic design practice.” Even if you were just aiming at a technical fix, you’ve laid out a field of imperatives with unknown ramifications, and if the inventor doesn’t promote a way to singularize the consequent practices in their successions in perpetuity, someone else (sometimes) will—even if just to restore the linguistic presence you’ve disrupted."
    },
    {
      "slug": "transfer-idiom-as-infra-program",
      "title": "Transfer Idiom as Infra-program",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 21, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/transfer-idiom-as-infra-program",
      "content": "I’m going to work here on further approximating writing to programming. We have our three co-constitutive categories: ritual (ensuring it will have been the same); the juridical; and the disciplinary. We can identify a threshold for each category so that derivatives can be drawn from it: for ritual it is the reversal of entropic tendencies toward furtherest future options; for the juridical, it is the conversion of the vendetta into cases and claims; for the disciplinary it’s the reduction of the imperative gap so that the problem of “tyranny” and the differend is abolished. We should, then, be able to program the targeting of the threshold of each category so as to ensure performance above the threshold in the other categories.\n\nWe can, further, code each of the categories in natural semantic primes, so as to bring us closer to actual programming. In this case, ritual is when and before and after are the same; the juridical is when this part of the all is the same; and the disciplinary is when doing and happening are the same. What we are programming for is intelligent scenic design intelligence: converting furnishing into scenes and scenes into furnishing so as to maximize pedagogical platforms in the infrastructure. And the form programming takes is finding and founding as many likenesses across scenes and events as possible while punctuating the spread of likenesses with same/other cuts or discretizations.\n\nProbability takes command; hence the “smartness mandate”; but the ostensive can never be eliminated, and any attempt to do so triggers collapse of institutions below the thresholds. We can go full bore into planetary scale computation because programming for singularized succession in perpetuity creates data exchange with the central intelligence rather than data seizure. The screen is always showing you what someone like you would like, while you can multiply to infinity the possible someones like you in order to apply data to selecting, enabling and constraining the successor you against all the not-successor yous.\n\nMoreover, the three categories are already (“always already”) cybernetically tethered to each other such that changes in one can be made dependent on changes is the others. The tightening on options for succession will help maintain the juridical over the threshold of the vendetta (including the rights-based hyper-vendetta) while helping the disciplinary to study imperatives free of the tyranny/differend oscillation—and vice-versa. The purpose of programming is to be able to pitch the adjustments needed within one category to proximity to crisis in the other categories. If succession proceeds in an orderly manner, judgments are rarely indefensible enough to arouse resentments, and inquiries are restricted to how imperatives from the center can be ramified through the infrastructure, then that means all the people are in place needed to see to the orderly order and nothing more than the occasional tweak is required.\n\nNeedless to say, not only could this never be completely counted on, but we are very far from it now—hence the need for programming. There must be some way, better than any other way, for anyone, situated specifically, to, say acquire standing in some court case so as improve the standards of justice and, collaterally, provide better data for unresentful inquiries and encouragement to some in power to see more effectively to matters of succession. We want as close as possible to a series of if… then sequences that would identify at different scales as many similarities as possible while being able to make the cut at any point as say “this is the case to take,” “this is the candidate to fund,” “this is the question to research,” etc.\n\nSo, lets work on “before and after are the same,” “this part of the all is the same” and “doing and happening are the same” as the elements of a programming language that can be embedded in “natural language” so as to regulate a machine language learning process. These elements must be legible in any signifying sample (I think “signifying sample” is redundant). “Doing and happening are the same” refers to the furthest extremes by which any event can be described: agency can be maximized, and the event represented as the result of legible intentions by every actor conceivably associated with the event; or, agency can be minimized and “conditions” or “circumstances” maximized such that extra-human or meta-human imperatives saturate the event—and, of course, we now have a continuum, where any representation of an event can be located.\n\nDoing and happening are the same because the various representations along the spectrum are “like” each other, with any particular representation, with an ostensive grounding, articulating two points along the spectrum in a paradoxical form. The best method of inquiry would be represent every possible articulation of all pairs of points until one is selected. Selected, that is, as the closest approximation to some actual sample of language, with language understood in the broadest possible sense including all human products. (Ultimately, the hardest of science and technology must be included here.)\n\nSuch inquiries are always initiated so as to ascertain how before and after will have been the same. Everyone’s sign must be the same as itself at different points in time—different points along the extension of the imperative—in the midst of all the ways the sign is merely like itself and like innumerable other things besides. Names of individuals and titles of offices give us the most readily available examples here—is the President of the United States the President of the United States—even at the two mentions of the office in this very sentence? A particular articulation of doing and happening will make this the case while simultaneously creating a field of likenesses within which the case is made.\n\nThis might produce the most unexpected inquiries and the most bizarre continuities in the succession of one occupant of the American center after another. Many inquiries, often overlapping but also mutually exclusive—ensuring, authenticating that before will have been the same as after is the work of the human. One might focus on the history of executive orders, of State of the Union addresses, on some metric in the ongoing interactions of the presidents with successive congresses, with memoirs of appointees in successive administrations and periodically attempt to converge these narratives. In any case one is situating actors on scenes somewhere on the spectrum of doing and happening, trying out narratives of the president as driving force in history alongside narratives of the president as mere puppet of larger historical “forces” (which themselves can be broken down into agencies and the sedimented results of their actions).\n\nIt is only through the ritual and then the juridical that we can identify “doers.” No one does anything or exists as an agent other than as some designee of, for starters, a ritual performance, and then subsequently as a member of a family, a citizen of a country, a member of a profession, a participant in some activity sanctioned, directly or implicitly, by some central power—even (especially) the occupant of the center is burdened, hemmed in and lifted up by titles such as “president,” “commander,” and so on. The ritual extends into the juridical while the juridical retrieves the ritual for increasingly distanced relations to the center: the part of the all is the same indicates the allocation or nomos at the origin of any order, and any reference to “justice” has to refer back to allocation, which is to say make it so the part allocated to an actor coming or brought before the representative of the center (the ritualized institution of decisions and judgments) is the same as the part of the all that actor has after his encounter with the institution.\n\nEven someone transformed from a close associate of the occupant of the center to one stripped of everything might have the same part of the all afterward insofar as he has exchanged the allocation given or inherited by him for the power, glory or momentary satisfaction aimed at by some transgression against the center; and if we are speaking of a case of “injustice,” that only means that we need to reconfigure the scene and bring in a metaperson as judge and devotees of that metaperson as commemorators so as to make the part of the all the same—justice is done in the succession of empires as God’s intervention in history.\n\nThe juridical is the peg on which we hang the reciprocal conversions of furnishing into scenes in scenic design practices, because reconfiguring the juridical requires constant innovation and disruptions in the juridical mark the results of ongoing innovations—in other words, finding a place for the juridical, the doing in the midst of the happening, requires the most acrobatic thinking. This may seem an odd way to think of innovation, but when the “theory” people used to speak about things being organized so as to produce certain kinds of subjects, I think they were right, and that can only mean juridical subjects.\n\nProducing juridical subjects is what extends the ritual order beyond itself, as that order, having become imperial, has arrived at the necessity to delegate authority, and this authority is required to adjudicate disputes within the also post-ritual order of exchange through money. Juridical subjects, then, are on a scene or, rather, an articulation of scenes, held together at two ends, we could say, by the central banks on one side and the intelligence agencies on the other. A longer discussion of the increasing centrality of the intelligence agencies over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries is needed, but for now it’s enough to say that liberal democracy simply needs more and more things done “off the books”—in more rigorous terms, the intelligence agencies maintain the tension between the increasingly centralization of power with the increasing rapidity of turnover in its occupancy.\n\nThis is why it’s good to expose but pointless to complain about intelligence, which strictly speaking should be the research arm of the occupied center, and hence the disciplinary annexed to the ritual but instead is mostly dedicated to keeping ritualized activities from the extension into juridical spaces that would undermine the operations of all spheres. In other words, so much of what must be done to maintain rotation at the metastasizing center could not withstand juridical scrutiny while producing effects that constantly spill over into juridical operations. This reinforces the centrality of juridical, because all the distortions and refractions caused by intelligence creep show up there eventually, even if in the form of “odd” decisions by investigators and prosecutors.\n\nTransfer idiom programming, then, generates platforms, whether as actual cases, thought experiments, artistic happenings, simulations or otherwise, that identifies complaints, actual, possible, justified, preposterous, whatever, as raising the question, is the part of the all the same? The answer implicit in the complaint is “no”; we would want to program for a “yes” answer. To do so the programmer must posit an initial nomos, or distribution, or allocation of positions within the centered ordinality (which is fractalized throughout the human order): that is the part of the all that is to be the same, one iterating the founding allotment.\n\nThe initializing centered ordinality takes place through an imperative, so in programming we are studying the terms of fulfilling that imperative. What that initializing imperative is will never be self-evident, but there must be some way to it through the existing juridical categories, and questions about how to locate the initializing imperative will be accessible through anomalies in the juridical order; and anomalies there will always be, with the specter of the differend lurking in each case; and these anomalies will leave their marks in texts. Resolving an anomaly might involve extending the terms of the allotment; it might involve retracting them.\n\nEither way will involve introducing discrete intervals along the line of the standing imperative, marking places where a case stands out as requiring an imperative issued within the imperative gap; i.e., an imperative that does not automatically follow from the initializing imperative. A platform is created when within one interval another is represented, and hence the continuity of the initializing imperative enacted; this makes the platform pedagogical, because some kind of gesture, a showing how, is required to create this meta-interval.\n\nNothing is off-limits here, as the juridical can be planted within and between other institutions—I’m not just talking about working through the existing court system. The juridical can be private, established within the institution or team; between teams, through contracts and covenants and agreed upon arbiters; it can be introduced in the middle of some practice to defer some spiraling violence. Anywhere resentment is made visible within the allotment, there the juridical might be. Not all expressions of resentment are to be taken at face value—part of the purpose of the juridical is to sort that out, including the determination of resentments that surreptitiously try to break the initializing imperative.\n\nBut all expressions of resentment do invoke the juridical, including, say, a preposterous lawsuit that ends with the plaintiff being bankrupted by having to pay the legal fees of the defendant. The programming problem is to identify an innovation in the infrastructure that would make the part of the all the same, and this will often involve highly hypothetical restructuring of the legal system (in a way, the “social credit” systems which everyone is so terrified of is such a restructuring, as all it really purports to do is introduce a layer of automation into the credit scores, arrest records, employment history, certifications, academic performances, etc., that already enter into—and must enter into—decisions made by the institutions we are allowed or prohibited access to).\n\nWe can bring this into focus: what, for example, would be required to address resentments over police violence, or violations of election law, and then what would be required to meet that requirement, and then what would be required…? We end up with a sequence of “if.. then formulations that could be probabilized in accord with differently algorithmized data searches; and such formulations would inform the data searches and lead to new modes of data identification, collection and analysis. The programming must involve transformations in the disciplinary along with transformations in the ritual (modes of commemoration, the renewing of the initializing imperative—but, really, succession), and these transformations must be cybernetically linked, so that transformations in one entail transformation in the other.\n\nThe programming tries to make these interlinkages as tight as possible, increasingly predictable and calculable but also increasingly sensitive to the limits of predictability and calculability implicit in the question of succession—a new succession, activating a new initializing imperative, might be needed to intervene in anomalous interactions across the ritual, juridical and disciplinary.\n\nContemporary technoscience seems to me to be particularly in accord with the programing model I’m proposing. 19th century through mid-20th century technology seems to me to have been engaged in enlarging and expanding scenes, allowing for governance across wide distances and the mass mobilization of populations—factories, cars, planes, harnessing energy, etc. Contemporary technology is more about firmly embedding us in scenes, which is why the earlier forms of technology seem more liberating (they opened up expanses, for governing, yes, but also for subjects) while the current ones seem more confining and controlling.\n\nI suppose if I had my choice, I might also prefer a scenic arrangement in which I could buy a cheap old Ford and just drive across the country with some cash, not have anyone care too much about what I’m up to, be able to disappear in some small town and take a job in a gas station without too much identification needed, etc., like in an old noir film (maybe I would prefer this because I like old noir films). But destroying what has been built since, assuming it were possible, wouldn’t bring us back to that anyway. Any innovation today will be built out of the sensorial, recording, data analyzing infrastructure we presently have.\n\nFiguring out new ways to search the databases—to detect, sort out potentially relevant connections between what you’ve detected, constructing hypothetical patterns and then testing them—will be, I think, the source of innovation, even of the kind more in conformity with the high modernist imaginary, like space travel. Constructing machines in order to generate a new field of ostensives, so that we all become students of the scene and not “victims” of it. Since these new technologies do position us as subjects far more directly than, say, cars, it also becomes easier to see how starting with resentful anomalies in the juridical can turn into a programming for scenic innovation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "translating-infrastructure",
      "title": "Translating Infrastructure",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 23, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/translating-infrastructure",
      "content": "I’m going to begin with something I’ve discussed many times before: David Olson’s contention that the scene of writing (it might be more precise to say the scene of prose) is predicated upon the reporting of speech outside of the presence of the listeners. So, to review: according to Olson, if, in an oral culture, one person, on one scene, is reporting the words of another person, spoken on another scene, the reporter will fill in the context of the original scene by imitating the speaker. Instead of saying something like “he angrily responded,” the reporter would speak in an angry sounding voice, affect an angry looking posture, and so on.\n\nThe problem (alphabetic) writing, as a representation of spoken words, had to solve, then, was how to supply the context that would have once been part of the enactment of the speech. The problem is solved by the invention of new words, first of all verbs, and then nominalizations of those verbs, culminating in what Olson calls the “metalanguage of literacy,” which allows us to represent a whole panoply of imputed stances to the original speaker. And, of course, today, as literate men and women, we do this when speaking as well, rarely (but not never) enacting the attitudes we wish attributed to those whose speech we report.\n\nI’ve done my best to radicalize this “hypothesis” of Olson’s, by drawing out a couple of implications, with the help of other elements of Olson’s lifelong study of literacy. It’s telling that Olson completely takes on board the notion of “classic prose” developed by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Taylor—on the one hand, Olson shares with Thomas and Taylor a basically scenic notion of writing; on the other hand, he also agrees with them that it is the nature of prose to efface the scene of writing, and create the illusion that writer and reader are present on the scene of reported speech. This is the understanding of good writing familiar to everyone: with good writing, the presence of the writer, and even of the language, is invisible—writing should be like a window onto whatever is being “shown” us.\n\nSo, there’s a kind of massive “cover-up” built into the constitution of writing and literacy. It seems to me that any writing that plays along with this without drawing any attention to it is to that extent a falsification. But the falsification lies less in the style or straightforward reportage (but somewhat there as well) than in the entire vocabulary, generating an entire theory of “mind” and sociality, that conceals the media, or mechanisms, or infrastructure, that in fact makes the reported scene accessible. This is the—it seems to me quite relevant—truth of Derrida’s concept of “logocentrism.”\n\nOne next step to take here is to say that, if this is the way writing operates, and writing is a fundamental mode of technics, couldn’t it also be the case that a similar kind of concealment is constitutive of all technics? I think we’ll be getting to that question by and by. For now, we have not exhausted the implications of the infrastructural dimension of writing. Take one of Olson’s basic examples of an element in the infrastructure of the metalanguage of literacy: the verb “imply,” along with its nominalization, “implications.” If I write (or, as a literate person, say) of someone that “he implied the authorities were lying,” the word “imply” is doing some important work here.\n\nIf we imagine an original scene of speech being reported here, we’d have to imagine the reporter indicating this “implication” through his reporting of the speech. The original speaker in question said something, and it wasn’t “the authorities are lying,” and from whatever he said, we are able to draw the implication that that is what he thinks, or “really means.” I’m not sure it’s very easy to imagine such a speech in a purely oral setting: we’d have to imagine, for example, someone saying something the authorities have said but in such a way, through vocal and bodily means, to enable his listeners to conclude that he considers the words he is actually repeating to be a deliberate falsification on the original speaker’s part. That’s quite a performance—to really make it work, we might have to further imagine an audience who knows the speaker and is familiar with his attitude toward the authorities.\n\nIf this kind of paraphrasing already strains our ability to imagine an original scene of speech upon which our understanding of the statement is nevertheless predicated, then we must accept that the infrastructure providing us with access to this understanding of the authorities has thoroughly supplanted any original scene of speech which could be provided transparently. And, to make this deconstruction complete, we must accept that the infrastructure was “always already” infiltrating the oral scene itself, in its scenic conditions or articulation. The importance of drawing attention to the metalanguage of literacy, then, rather than assuming its transparency to “mind,” is to read off of it precisely the infrastructural conditions of the utterance.\n\nA great deal of infrastructure must be in place for someone to imply the authorities are lying, and for others to grasp that implication. The authorities have various means of communicating its declarations and commands; its words are transported and repeated by people occupying various offices at various ranks; the possibility of introducing a note of skepticism into those declarations and commands itself depends upon differences among elites and dysfunctions in the chains of command, and what is taken to be an implication, and how that implication is received and recirculated, solicits the entirety of this system.\n\nSo, when we talk about “implications,” “assumptions,” “premises,” “suggestions,” “considerations,” “understandings,” and so on, we are not referring to properties of mind to be sorted out philosophically but “properties” of infrastructure of knowledge and communication—but that, today, also means the infrastructures of sensing, measuring, data collection and curation, and algorithmic analysis that undergird knowledge and communication. This is all “in” our language, all the time, and can be elicited and extracted from our discourses regularly. To return to Olson: the creation of alphabetic writing involved turning language into an object of inquiry, one that can be broken down into such entities as “phonemes,” “words” and “sentences.” The next step is to make the inquiry into linguistic properties that all of us participate in as literate people itself an object of inquiry into the scenic conditions of possibility of the “objects” in question.\n\nI’m reviewing this material in order address another question. The question is: what should discourse do? I’ve been moving away from metalinguistic cliches like “explanation” and “description,” which never really stand up to much scrutiny and, more importantly, presuppose the classic prose scene of transparency: when you purport to “explain” something, you are effacing your own participation on the series of overlapping scenes that includes both the one you are providing reasons for and those from which you are deriving the reasons. When you say something like “the revolution happened because of rising expectations frustrated by a stalling economy following a long period of growth” all of these phrases refer to formulaic summaries of areas of disciplinary activity, boiled down into abstracts, journalistic “think pieces,” etc.—that is, you’re referring to a whole infrastructure while pretending to be on a scene where some question is genuinely settled. You are, in fact, translating that infrastructure, which I don’t object to because that’s all you can do; it’s the pretense, usually involuntary, that is objectionable.\n\nSo, rather than speaking in terms of “explaining,” “describing,” “accounting for,” etc., I can speak in terms of translating infrastructure. You’re translating infrastructure, they’re translating infrastructure, I’m translating infrastructure, we’re all translating infrastructure. Now that that’s settled, toward what end are we translating infrastructure? Perhaps we should first ask, what are we translating infrastructure into? Something other than infrastructure?—what would that be? I would use an analogy here: translating infrastructure is like converting a declarative, along with the entire ostensive-imperative world it entrains, into a new ostensive.\n\nSo, translating infrastructure is like an infra-lingual translation. You want what you say to have maximum impact, don’t you? And you want that impact to be one you could continue to recognize as one you initiated and can continue to contribute to, as that impact plays out, don’t you? That’s what I’m talking about here—making your utterances, your samples, performative, and doing so with increasing explicitness. There’s a kind of transparency desired here as well, but one that takes in rather than rendering invisible the surrounding enabling infrastructures.\n\nNow, infrastructures are massive and distributed, and can’t be translated all at once, at least not in any way that can be brought within the scope of an utterance one might respond to. It’s always another’s translation of infrastructures that one is in turn translating. So, we’re talking about something like dialogue or conversation here, but one that accepts the staged, mediated, “disseminational” character of any dialogue or conversation—that is, that accepts the constitutive sense in which none of the participants are present for it. To translate is to carve out within one body of language an approximation to a selected portion of another body of language.\n\nThe best English translation of, say, Cervantes, is one that would have the same relation to English as _Don Quixote_ has to Spanish—a very challenging and probably unattainable way to think about translation. But to approximate is not to attain, and approximation is all we need. So, your sample has a relation to the whole that I try to approximate in my sample, remembering that the whole is now different because your sample has been added to it and my own sample is about to be. What my approximation adds to yours is the rendering of some relation to the infrastructure more explicit, and the request or invitation to have you do the same to my sample. What we would all be approximating in that case is a discourse which is the cooperative adjustment in infrastructural arrangements.\n\nYou can see that this is a discourse that is becoming more like technology insofar as it involves the exchange of imperatives that are continually measured through declaratives and generating new ostensives. To the extent that we are all respectively referring to the same sample, imperatives to introduce infrastructural adjustments that generate more ostensives that we can scramble to authenticate are being issued. We participate in society as inquiry as samples and inquirers—this model of discourse is the approximation of the originary scene once the replacement of the ritual order by the technological one is complete.\n\nWe are now prepared to undertake the inquiry into all infrastructure, all scenic design practices, on the model of the installation of the literate order. Any device replaces, not so much an appendage of the body, as a scene or, rather, the results of a sequence of scenes that would have had to have played out to arrive at the results the device replaces while making unnecessary our own enactment in that chain of scenes. The implication for our relation to our devices is not that we should try and find our way back to the next scene that would have been in that series—we will never succeed because it doesn’t exist.\n\nWhat seems like the natural human relationship replaced by the device was another infrastructure. What you can do is work on translating the infrastructural inflection introduced by the device into our language as we now find it, transformed, however slightly, by the infrastructural modification. And you don’t have to be an engineer—you just need to hew very closely to emergent idioms, linguistic shifts induced by the infrastructural adjustments, and have faith that there must be some relation, which we can performatively translate, between each and every idiomatic difference and some rumbling in the infrastructure—even if we don’t know what it is yet.\n\nThat’s the relation that we set about reciprocally provoking one another to approximate. And I refer to “faith” here because if there is something genuinely, irremediably wrong with a particular technological innovation that will show up in the language—there will be words that don’t work the same way, and can’t be made to give way to words that work better; there will be sentences with elisions that no one can “fill in.” And noticing such things will also be your guide toward repairing what has been broken, which will always mean creating something new on the model of infrastructural possibilities brought into view by your reparative inquiry."
    },
    {
      "slug": "war-art-bureaucracy-and-other-miscellanies",
      "title": "War, Art, Bureaucracy and other Miscellanies",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 29, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/war-art-bureaucracy-and-other-miscellanies",
      "content": "In my recent articles I’ve working with the assumption that human reality can be comprehended using the categories of the ritual, the juridical, and the disciplinary. I got there from the question of what we might call “admissible language use”—when can we say that something said is true, or fair, or just, or even interesting? We can only make such claims upon a scene, so the question becomes, upon what kinds of scenes are such claims made? The ritual scene needs to be there, simply because it is the first human scene, so, even if ritual is really pre-truth, pre-fair, pre-just, and so on, these concepts, which would be anachronistically applied to the ritual scene, nevertheless must derive from it.\n\nJust as the ritual scene defers violence and thereby maintains community by summoning the presence at the center, the emergence of concepts covering “right speaking” must evoke some center in the interest of sustaining institutions of deferral. Even very early humans, even if their communities are overwhelmingly ritually governed, must have concepts and practices that are proto-juridical, and we know from Anna Wierzbicka that all languages have the equivalent of the word “true,” which indicates some preliminary disciplinarity. This means that we can trace the juridical and the disciplinary back to the originary scene and subsequent ritual ones, we can see how they might have infiltrated it, and how they would have conquered swathes of communal territory from it by addressing conflicts on spatial and temporal scales beyond the capacity of ritual.\n\nAnd, so far, I can’t think of another human category that couldn’t be included in one or more of these three or that can be seen as equally imbricated in the ritual scene. But this means that very important social institutions and historical processes must be shown to “fit” these categories, and so I’m setting aside this article to explore a few.\n\nIt's obviously critically important to account for war, which it would be easy enough to consider, from certain anthropological standpoints, as the central or defining human institution—and about which, incidentally, GA has so far had very little to say. So, we would need to segment war into the ritual, juridical and the disciplinary. In the first case, war can be an extension of the vendetta, situated within honor culture, itself situated within ritual but on the way, we might say, to the juridical. Honor culture presupposes a pre- or sub-state (or monarchical) social organization along kinship and tribal lines.\n\nHonor cultures are governed by Big Men, who control the ritual and distributory center, while sharing power intermittently and “anarchically” with other Big Men at the top of other kinship and tribal networks. The lines of command, through the family and concerning women and children, are sharply defined and defended under the principle that the head of the clan is solely and personally responsible both for whatever happens to any member of the clan but for what every member of the clan does. Everything done or suffered by any member reflects upon the honor of the head—and the honor of the head reflects upon the honor of each and every member.\n\nA willingness to commit violence against members of other clans as well as to sacrifice a member of one’s own clan are implicit here—this is the logic of the notorious “honor killings” of young women that get sensationalized today—however contrary to our own juridical logic, that vengeance needs to be taken against a woman who has been dishonored sexually (has engaged in sexual relations outside of tribally sanctioned relations—i.e., relations that consolidate intra- and intertribal relations) makes perfect sense, and how voluntary that dishonoring was is not necessarily a question (that is, there may not be a significant difference between “flirting” or an “affair,” on the one hand, and being raped, on the other).\n\nBut honor culture also verges upon the juridical, insofar as injuries done by one tribe to another can be compensated materially, in which case something like a legal tradition would develop, albeit one very different than one based upon our notions of the “sanctity” of human life—not all that different, though, than the compensation doled out by insurance companies based on actuarial tables.\n\nWar has historically been a large scale activation of honor culture in many cases and, indeed, even in the most liberal and postmodern societies it would be absolutely impossible to maintain an army, much less wage war, without the residue of an honor culture among at least some portions of the population—even if it’s an honor culture forged in the midst of war itself, say among draftees, who take responsibility for their buddies and would find it “shameful” to let them down. States will still invoke national honor as a reason for going to or risking war, very often including some point of satisfying honor as a sticking point in negotiations, above and beyond whatever “material” benefits a peace treaty at a particular point might bring.\n\nAnd this is necessary if mobilizing the nation for future war is to be possible. Meanwhile, the juridical has crept into war in the modern age with the laws of war and human rights war, leading to the question of how juridical war can be made without rendering it impossible, which is probably what some legal warriors against war would like to see but may, in fact, paradoxically, render war far more total and devastating by making the “crimes” committed by one of the sides so egregious that only an absolutely devastating war, prosecuted as, well, a prosecution, could satisfy it. But this also implies that war can be fought, rhetorically but also in reality, as an extension of the juridical—as an application of law to some new territory where it has been lacking, in which case waging war become more analogous to replacing the vendetta with the juridical.\n\nAnd, of course, the disciplinary has entered war from very early on, as technologies change war dramatically and, as with the juridical, raise the imaginary of a post-war social order, one in which war is pre-empted by the technological means invented for rendering it impossible or pointless. But we should also add that highly asymmetrical forms of war conducted without any moral coloring, such as that conducted by the ancient empires, has something like the character of the hunt—and the hunt is in its origins a thoroughly ritual activity, with the victim brought back as a trophy or for sacrificial purposes. So, it seems to me we can have an exhaustive account of war, in all its historical forms, using solely the categories of ritual, juridical and discipline.\n\n“Art” is an important category to take up, not only intrinsically, but because Eric Gans has made the aesthetic so central to his GA. So, the burden is on me to show that art is always nothing more than accompaniments to the staging of ritual, representations and narrativizations of the limits of the juridical, and the development of new ways of perceiving, sensing, experiencing and thinking that derive from and flow back into the disciplines (but which the disciplines could not have produced themselves, without this artistic “annex”). For starters, if we treat aesthetics and art as independent “faculties” or capacities, we end up with vacuous generalizations about transcendence and the realization of some profound humanity; if we trace art back to whatever ritual practices it was invented to compensate for the limitations of, or the way it frames judgments and what exceeds the historical contingencies enabling those judgments, or the way it trains us to organize our attention so as to notice new things being placed at the center, we have far more substantive things to say about it.\n\nI’ve noted before that almost all narrative and dramatic art takes on a juridical framing—a crime, or what might be taken as a crime placed at the center, some dispute that characters or the audience are invited to decide, some situation that presents what Jean-Francois Lyotard called a “differend,” where the application of accepted norms of justice leads to a new form of victimization that needs to be named, and so on. What makes it art in these cases is precisely that it resists what might be the easy decision to make by implicating the judge in the juridical process, making such art “infra-juridical.” Meanwhile, innovative or avant-garde art might place the institutions of art themselves “on trial,” exposing their implication in broader failures of the juridical, or “unjust” blockages of disciplinary inquiries; or, for that matter, such art might proceed directly into the creation of new sciences of the human, however anomalous or idiosyncratic (generally by way of satirizing the existing disciplines).\n\nGans places the aesthetic (but not necessarily “art”) on the originary scene itself, in the form of the oscillation of the attention of participants on the scene between the central object and the sign/gesture put forth by other participants. The aesthetic, then, makes the enactment of deferral visible, and this indispensable analysis opens a space for exactly the approach to art I’m approaching here, one in which art inhabits the very constitution of the ritual, the juridical and the disciplinary, while always taking its shape from these practices.\n\nMoney is a challenge to work with here, since it arguably supersedes all of our categories as a supreme power in its own right—it has certainly often been represented that way, and you’ll certainly get a lot right attributing the ordering of the world today to international finance. But money begins with ritual, or, rather, with a breakdown or perhaps extension of ritual, when the congregants are unable to bring their own animal to sacrifice and must be provided money (say, by their commander) to buy an animal at the temple itself. Money is always distributed from (and first of all purchased from) the center, so as to pay tribute (taxes) to the center (the king)—money is always the vehicle of a tributarian economic order.\n\nIn the process, money becomes means of exchange among the subjects of the crown, and hence bound up with the juridical order as, of course remains the case today, where civil court deals primarily with the issue of monetary damages. Money is separated from ritual and the juridical when the occupant of the center is desacralized (first of all sacrificed), which is to say money proliferates when the problem of “tyranny” emerges, and “tyranny” operates overwhelmingly through money since the modes of honor that previously mediated rule are no longer operatives. So, the hostility toward any “usurper” of the center (which means any occupant, sooner or later) and the consequent more or less regular more or less haphazard turnover at the center and the rule of money are one and the same phenomenon.\n\nThe emergence of capitalism, in which money measures the value of any asset as discounted against its expected future earnings, adds a new dimension to the articulation of money and power. Capitalism is heavily dependent upon the legal system and, as far as I know, capitalist interests have only ever sought to shape and never to eliminate it; but the expected future earnings of a particular asset is a question of knowledge and rather complicated forms of probabilistic knowledge at that, and so money becomes a question taken up by the disciplines. Since both money and state power press in the same direction in creating and maintaining institutions of knowledge making, the disciplines have primarily produced apologetics on behalf of the monetary order, but this is where the real struggle is because in measuring expectations, albeit expectations that the possessors of money themselves shape, money is necessarily itself a mode of knowledge making and the site where assets can be converted into data. And in that conversion the juridical and ritual or, more broadly, the entirety of social practices of commemoration, are to be remade as exchanges between users and producers of data and the data center.\n\nBureaucracy is always associated with the executive, that is, the command structure, and the command structure is the enforcement arm of the juridical: we could imagine a juridical order so unanimously respected as to be self-enforcing (judgments would have such authority as to be immediately accepted in the spirit as well as letter—but, then, how much serious disagreement, calling for judgment, would there be in such an order?), but short of that someone will have to be charged with enforcing judgments. The bureaucracy, then, exists in the imperative gap: in what happens between a command being issued and that command being obeyed.\n\nThe imperative gap is where the juridical borders the ritual on one side and the disciplinary on the other—the ritual, because anyone entrusted with implementing the commands of the occupant of the center will have been “sworn in” in some sense, in accord with accepted precedents, or commemorated ways of presenting the initiated individual as a center of attention in organizational terms; the disciplinary, because how to apply a command always includes an element of cause and effect, and you want to both issue and transmit the command in such a way as to ensure its fulfillment as intentioned (which also means knowing what kinds of intentions can be expected to be fulfilled as intended).\n\nEven the most secularized, down to earth, casual setting of terms for employment by an institution must include some confirmation on the part of the employee that the terms are “understood” and “agreed to,” and this marks the employee as formally inducted, which is to say “sanctified” in some sense. And even the most direct commands in the most familiar circumstances within the most clearly defined hierarchy can confront circumstances that must invalidate some part of the command. In these ritual and disciplinary elements of the command structure lie the characteristics we associate with bureaucracy: obsessive formalism, lack of accountability, subversion of lines of authority, the creation of hard to find and almost impossible to counter forms of informal power, and so on.\n\nProposals for overcoming bureaucratic inertia, obfuscation and subversion often involve either hyper-ritualization (making initiation and the forms of reciprocal obligation cult-like) or hyper-disciplinarization (the automation of decision-making by subjecting each possible decision to vetted, peer-reviewed, specialist, etc., authorization which can in turn be coded). But, as the internet meme has it, “why not both”? If the crisis of the juridical lies in the encroachment of the ritual and the disciplinary, maybe the juridical is best seen as a kind of holding pattern between them—which, of course, means that it needs to be held.\n\nThe ritual, most fundamentally, names things in the name of the center; the disciplinary, most fundamentally, asks whether we point to the same things when we use those names. Maybe the juridical is there so that these fundamentally complementary practices don’t devour each other by invoking the name of the center in contrary ways. Historically and anthropologically, the juridical is there because the Big Man was there, and the sacral king was there, various forms of divinized imperial monarchs were there, and more recently the figures placed at the center to endlessly retry the king have been there. And because these figures have been there, others, like corporate CEOs, popes, presidents of universities, generals, and others have been there.\n\nIf the problem of bureaucracy is the problem of the imperative gap, that’s another way of saying that it’s the problem of the disjunction between the occupied and signifying center, which I have been posing as the central problem for the originary hypothesis for several years now. And so the only encroachment upon of infiltration into bureaucracy I can proposed is that same conjunction of data security and singularized succession in perpetuity I have been hammering out: if you practice and demand from others a kind of cultic attention to succession, i.e., the continuity of your practices, including ensuring you have all the information required to guarantee succession, you will not eliminate bureaucracy or create a universally applicable formula for containing or controlling it; you will, rather, tilt the field in the favor of ruthlessness towards bureaucratic tendencies by forcing everyone in the institution to show themselves in the ways they have “sworn” to show themselves.\n\nThe ultra-loyalty and uncompromising search for data points implicit in this model might approximate rule by intelligence agency—which, it seems has become the universally feared and suspected mode of governance today but which can only criticized, much less resisted, by presupposing the possibility of the independence and robustness of the juridical. The juridical presupposes an uninfringable distribution of property and responsibilities that requires the protection of arbitration by those who refrain from making any claims on those properties and responsibilities themselves—which already presupposes considerable levels of deferral.\n\nThe juridical holds at bay, or allows for hope of salvation from, terrible nightmares of rule by blackmail based on secrets acquired through any means necessary, above all the implication of targeted individuals in criminal, shameful, and especially, sexual, misdeeds. But only the existence of the juridical allows something like this to work—without courts, trials, prison, and the publicity that amplifies all these proceedings, how would the blackmail work? Otherwise, hostage taking would have to revert to older, cruder, grounds. So, you’d need juridical spaces free of such vulnerabilities to contest governance by extortion.\n\nFor that matter, could democratic governance operate other than through extortion, even if not via these especially sordid means—what kind of “pressure” do “activist groups” and “special interests” apply other than to hit elected representatives (and their supporters) somewhere where it hurts? At a certain point those who could would stumble upon these more sordid and quicker methods. But maybe there’s hope at the other, more disciplinary end—with the possibility of deep fakes and other technologies that make visual, auditory and documentary evidence intrinsically questionable, couldn’t information gathered on individuals simply be denied by those individuals who, if they have not been sufficiently isolated, could always try to gather enough support to go on in the face of even the most discrediting accusations?\n\nWhat can count as “proof” even now, when large portions of the population disbelieve in events that for other portions serve as a bedrock of their political and historical theologies? All information is someone’s disinformation, so maybe governance by blackmail dies of its own over-saturation. The kind of governance by intelligence I’m suggesting here would therefore have to look significantly different, as it could only be intelligence that increases in verifiability and acceptance by proving itself capable of serving sovereign functionality for institutions and companies that can only continue exist, however questionably ethical their goals, if such sovereign functionality is maintained.\n\nThis would include reliable knowledge of people and the institutions producing people just as much as knowledge of underwater cables or fluctuations in asset valuations or fragilities in governing institutions, all of which counts as data security. Even secrecy might become less important as more refined information will be temporally and spatially tagged information, thereby losing its usefulness quickly or not having any at all for those outside of the disciplinary space. As a result, we might find ourselves with restored juridical institutions, as such intelligent governance would return the juridical to its original function of delegating the resolution of disputes in which the higher levels of authority need not intervene."
    },
    {
      "slug": "will-have-been-the-same-future-perfectism-or-derivatives-of-the-tributary",
      "title": "Will Have Been the Same: Future Perfectism, or Derivatives of the Tributary",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 14, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/will-have-been-the-same-future-perfectism",
      "content": "There is no “economy.” There is only, as there always has been, ritual distribution from the center. I’m a little embarrassed that it took me so long, even after replacing the vocabularies of liberalism and democracy, to get to this conclusion—such is the power of propaganda. _Mea culpas_ aside, though, I was able to get to that conclusion by getting interested in the question of derivatives, coming across some excellent work on it, like Benjamin Lee and Randy Martin’s 2016 edited volume _Derivatives and the Wealth of Society_ (and Martin’s 2015 _Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative_ ), to just mention a couple; work, moreover, I could make productive sense of in the context of Nitzan and Bichler’s _Capital as Power_.\n\nThese thinkers have been drawing upon anthropological understandings of ritual and gift in order to make sense of the derivative against the narrow economism of market models and calculations based on the Black-Scholes equation. Two intertwined concepts that I have been insisting upon for years enable me to incorporate the derivative into an anthropology far more powerful than is dreamt of by any of these thinkers: first, my “derivation” from Gans’s notion of “linguistic presence” in _The Origin of Language_ of the assumption that all human sign use aims at establishing presence; and, second, what is really the same thing, with a more grounded (in the semantic primes) and expansive cover, that we are always showing things (some things, on some scene) to be the same.\n\nThe abovementioned thinkers, while as leftist as you’d expect academic humanist auto-didacts in economics to be, are all profoundly impressed by the social logic of the derivative—the fact that it involves a vast, cooperative, uncertain constitution of social reality which in times of crisis happens to draw upon the language of hope, prayer, the miraculous and so on. I also have little difficulty in acknowledging this logic, or their also held view that making more explicit the social logic of the derivative will transform that logic decisively.\n\nThe derivative is constituted by the attempt at arbitrage within a system of exchange that is theoretically predicated upon the impossibility of arbitrage and practically predicated on the volatility that makes achieving an arbitrage situation extremely difficult. Arbitrage, of course, is the opportunity for profit created by the differing valuations of the same asset in different markets, so that if one can buy it on the market where it sells cheaper and sell it (“simultaneously”) on the market where it is more expensive, one makes an entirely risk-free profit. I will here just point out the similarity between this scenario and my analysis of hearing the voice of God [some posts back](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/writing-as-the-programming-of-scenes).\n\nI will return to this. A quick analysis will reveal that the two trades, though, can never be exactly simultaneous (can not an entire market turn bad in a milli-second?), so risk cannot be completely eliminated. But given the desire for arbitrage, the closest thing possible to simultaneity can be constructed, precisely through the examination of every possibility that would interfere with the two exchanges of the same asset, and the hedging against those possibilities. Here is where knowledge, or the disciplinary, becomes paramount—the study of risk, of all the things that can interfere with presence, with something being the same thing on two different scenes, involves an eventually all-encompassing study into all the institutional positions, rules and movements of the entire order.\n\nNot only that, there is only the thinnest of boundaries between the study of the interests, assets, liquidity, etc., of all of one’s nearest and more distant competitors along with the broader legal and political events and environments that will constrain both oneself and those competitors, and the intervention in these conditions so as to reduce one’s risk. Knowledge and power converge here. And, of course, it’s easy enough to see that everyone’s mimetic engagements on these markets keeps introducing new information into everyone’s calculations so as to make it possible to hope for only little islands of calculability (little islands, moreover, likely to sink back into the sea at any moment) with a broader incalculability created precisely by the frantic efforts at calculation.\n\nOne of the many virtues of this new thinking on derivatives (although there is a little unevenness here) is the liberation from the notion (common to Marxist and liberal economics alike) that there is some “real” value from which financialized values are a “deviation.” Like Nitzan and Bichler (to whom there is, I believe, a single, unelaborated upon reference in Lee and Martin’s volume), these thinkers accept (one senses it was a hard pill to swallow, but once it's down…) that capitalism _is_ financialization, which is to say that value is nothing more than price which is the discounting of the asset’s expected future earnings.\n\nAn asset is worth the future expected income flow derived from ownership of it, and ownership of it is participation in the juridical and disciplinary order involved in ensuring that future income flow. “Ownership,” and the vast panoply of legal and political institutions defining and protecting it, implicates the entire social order. Now, I would modify Bichler and Nitzan’s claim that capital is a mode of power by insisting it is so only under political conditions of continual turnover at the center, [in which a ruler governing in an already divided state gambles on enhancing the power of whoever occupies the center by creating a central bank to loan the state money](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/converting-assets-to-data-tributarianism).\n\nAs Christine Desan, in _Making Money,_ points out, this shift from the monarch as creating and selling the currency used to pay taxes to the monarch to the financing of the state out of the general social income generated through the capacity to monetize assets is the beginning of capitalism. The political parties can jointly participate in centralizing the state apparatus while taking turns occupying the center and becoming one more set of assets for the central bankers (and their subsidiaries within the financial, insurance, etc., industries) to gamble on and intervene in. Continuous occupancy of the center would make this entire system impossible—the more deliberate the process of succession, the less there is to gamble on. Financialization is thus thoroughly social and political from the beginning, and the measures of value which gave the impression of some real, underlying value, whether it be labor or gold, were financialized from the beginning.\n\nThe social logic of the derivative, then, is that of the future perfect (a tense much beloved of Jacques Derrida): this value of the given asset will have been the same as itself. I have returned many times to the question of what, beginning on the originary scene, is needed for something to be the same—the same object or the same sign. Establishing sameness requires the sustained and energetically maintained and insured participation of everyone in the social order: what makes a country, a community, a law, any institution, words, etc., the same over the period of a day, a month, a year, centuries? In governance more specifically, this is the problem of succession: a political order is the same insofar as succession in power iterates the terms of succession.\n\nThe derivative situates the problem of sameness within the financial system, but, as these new thinkers of the derivative make clear (their new thinking has its origins in the 2008 financial crisis), in times of crisis the entire social order is mobilized by the “financial.” I can return here, as these thinkers cannot (they are welcome to, though), to the distribution on the originary scene, and its successions in the distribution by the Big Man, and the sacred and then divine kings. Money has its origins in the distance of the congregants from the scene of sacrifice, and the need to provide them with (lend them) tokens to buy a sacrificial animal at the scene—it is very telling that, as we see in Richard Seaford’s study of _Money and the Early Greek Mind_ , that philosophy emerges in the first thoroughly monetized societies of the Greek city-states and that these city states is where we also see the emergence of desacralized governance in the form of “tyrants” and democracy.\n\nThe tyrant is “greedy” because he can only rule through money. Further developments in the use of money involve systems of indebtedness in the ancient empires, with coins distributed to soldiers far from home and the establishment of markets upon which to spend them, and then also as a means of dispossession and enslavement of the peasantry through debt.\n\nOur relation to the center is if anything more devotional if less sacrificial than ever. We all hold up the center, regardless of the wretchedness of its current occupant, by donating our resentment to it; the monotheistic innovation on paganism is, in fact, that since no gift, not even our first borns, can be commensurate with the gift of life and world God has given us, the only reciprocity possible is the gift of our entire selves to God. (We are thus enjoined to see to the sameness of our self—which is just a tautology anyway—entering new scenes through a series of conversions ensuring that the self of yesterday or tomorrow will have been commensurable with the self of today.)\n\nThe derivative represents our gift of ourselves to the center: we, on whatever scene we are on, guarantee (redeem) the signs proffered on that scene as the same as signs proffered on other scenes. (Think about the conversions and displacements needed to see, say, your child, as the same, despite all the growth and changes, at birth, 2 years old, 10 years old, 30 years old, etc.) We guarantee that following our use and recirculation of the signs they will have been the same as when we ourselves encountered them on the scene. This involves the equivalent (the likeness) of hedging, as we implicitly or explicitly pledge to step into the breach of any number of imperative gaps that might open into chasms in front of us.\n\nBut all of this means we have been providing for making such pledges—our homes, our jobs, often our education, our health care, everything—has been mortgaged to the financial system through the ongoing assetization. This is a problem I have been addressing under the concept of converting assets into data, and now we can add more precision and breadth to this concept. Under capitalism, we can contribute to and receive from the center only under the condition that we submit to the process of having ourselves broken up into assets that can in turn be packaged into derivatives that in turn serve as collateral for further assetization and financialization.\n\nThe key here, as Robert Meister argues in his contribution (“Liquidity”) to Lee and Martin’s volume, is money (even if, as you’ll see if you read Meister’s extremely valuable discussion [if very vague on this, his concluding, point], I take this argument in a very different direction).\n\nEveryone follows more or less closely the developments in digital currency, including me, even if I have never said anything about it (that I remember, anyway). Whether currencies like Bitcoin are ultimately practical, capable of replacing fiat currency, or flat-out pyramid schemes, they make explicit what conventional economics obscures in theory but renders inescapable in practice—that money is created and, even more, ultimately depends upon nothing more than the general “agreement” (centrally enforced, of course) to treat it as legitimate legal tender. And money is created in a lot of ways, by actors and institutions other than governments and banks.\n\nReward points from your credit card company or frequent flier miles from an airline are a kind of currency which it’s easy to imagine exchanging and speculating on in various ways. Now, what I have mentioned here and there is the need for a political party to bind its supporters to itself through the issuance of currency (through loans and investments) and I would insist that no party or organization intent upon establishing the continuity of occupancy of the center can avoid doing so. If you join the party you receive, say, coupons, redeemable at places of business that donate to and receive the protection of the party (legal and, where necessary, physical protection).\n\nThe party becomes an increasingly “total” one. (If there are laws against operating a political party in this way then central to the party’s program must be changing those laws.) The reciprocity between party and its members, a multifaceted mutual loyalty and interdependence, increases the power of the party, which in turn opens new avenues of reciprocity. (The provision of insurance would be crucial here—the full blown financialization of capitalism has been, among other things, a way of dismantling here and curtailing there the welfare state, but the welfare state was itself an attempt to bring insurance within the state and financial systems, so the remedy to financialization must include a resituating of insurance within relations grounded in loyalty and reciprocity.)\n\nNow, even if there is no “real” value, money always has to be tethered to something, even if only the promise of a government we take to be stable and capable of at least minimal maintenance of its commitments. The political party I’m imagining tethers its currency to the success of its various enterprises, social and directly political. It bets on itself, in other words, and asks its members to join the bet and make the bet a favorable one by occupying socially significant positions from which donations in various forms can flow. The party in this way ranges itself against by simultaneously drawing resources from the entire financial order.\n\nThis would be extraordinarily difficult, not only because of the threat this would pose to the “vested interests,” but because of the high level of trust within the organization that must be sustained over an extended period of time. There will be no shortage of people willing to accuse the organization and its leadership of being frauds, sell-outs, controlled opposition, etc., etc. And there may be no shortage of occasions giving such accusations credibility—this will be a learning process. But only by creating such elevated levels of trust can the current order be overcome, so if it’s impossible to do something like this it’s probably impossible to do anything.\n\nAs with all transactions, the party will be an immense data-gathering operation (requiring an extremely efficient and trustworthy data security arm), and our phobias about data collection will have to be overcome—the party will draw upon data gathered by the financial system and its enemies as well. The entire operation will be a vast, no doubt international, experiment in whether distribution, even in an advanced technological order, i.e., an order comprised or layered and distributed scenes, can be tethered to increasing continuity rather than increasing volatility in occupancy of the center. (Finance is often said to be dependent on “political stability,” but while this might be true generally, it is untrue of those who most forcefully drive the system, which is those best positioned to seek out arbitrage possibilities.)\n\nThis is the ultimate tethering of currency—to the ongoing ceremony and festivity of our common human origin as “sampled” by the idiomatic mode of singularized succession discovered and invented (“found(ed)”) in the particular order. Money is eventually translated back into the centered ordinality of the team, which establishes its social “value” by serving as a hub of resources distributed from and contributed back to the center—tributarianism."
    },
    {
      "slug": "wisdom-as-searching-the-central-intelligence",
      "title": "Wisdom as Searching the Central Intelligence",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 27, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/wisdom-as-searching-the-central-intelligence",
      "content": "The simplest way of speaking about thinking is as an internal conversation (usually, I suspect, if not necessarily, a dialogue). You begin by taking issue with what someone has said and if you can produce for yourself what they might say back to you you are thinking. The quality of your thinking is then a result of the range and quality of the interlocutors you can imagine for yourself. Reading, of course, is what enables you to move beyond narrow and stereotyped modes of thinking and, even more so, writing, which allows you to look at sentence after sentence and consider ways one might take issue with each and every one.\n\nBut a range of scenes must be imaginable as well: for many, if not most, the reading and writing they do is on some institutional scene of education, in which case the kinds of responses to your statements will be restricted to those you imagine coming from your teacher in the context of some kind of assessment. If you can’t imagine yourself on other scenes, you will forever be striving to be an A student, which does mean getting good at certain things that bring certain rewards, but is not really thinking. A sign that you’re getting pretty good as a thinker is that you can entertain highly unlikely, even nonsensical, claims, for the sake of seeing what else you would have to be willing to say to defend them.\n\nAt this point, you’re creating whole new scenes, scenes that could never really exist, rather than just rehearsing the intellectual moves that will raise your prestige (or, more bleakly, ensure your survival) in already established settings. And it’s also likely that at this point you’re having fun.\n\nWhat I’m describing here implies the ability to step outside of the existing ritual, juridical and disciplinary scenes—not to repudiate any of them, but to carve out scenes within these scenes. Still, carving out such scenes does depend upon them having been shaken, through the questioning of the efficacy of ritual, the justice delivered by the legal system, the knowledge legitimated by the disciplines. A mode of deferral is involved here: once these scenes break down the violence they defer becomes imaginable and even imminent, and when you’re thinking you may not be restoring the categories and institutions that have been shaken but you are at least resisting the rush to find a victim to blame.\n\nAnd, of course, this might put you in line to be the victim, and examining this kind of scene was no doubt central to the kind of thinking done by the ancient philosophers but also to the producers of ancient wisdom literature. “All is vanity” says the preacher, but the word really means something more like evanescent—everything you desire is temporary and will disappear. Conversations, even if internally constructed, with those who have been consumed with desire only to find that possession of the object of their desire did not correspond to the satisfaction imagined in the desire itself, are implicit in such formulations.\n\nThe very fact that you desire something means that it will not be what you were desiring. There’s a kind of self-evident incommensurability between desire and fulfillment that is the ultimate “topic” of wisdom literature, which aims at teaching us to make our desires things to think about rather than causes to shut down thinking.\n\nI will remind my reader that ancient wisdom literature was the primary means of training scribes. It’s easy enough to see memorizing, learning to recite and write the accumulated proverbs of a culture as the equivalent as the “Dick and Jane” readers children in the modern West are (were once?) taught to read from. We can imagine starting with the simplest and most “authoritative” sayings, and many scribes might stay at that level, if their tasks were to be mundane. But some students would have access to a wider range of sayings, would be allowed to notice that some sayings contradicted other sayings, that many sayings vary significantly in their formulations and in this way constituted a kind of conversation of the community, one the higher level scribes had privileged access to.\n\nThe resources for revising inherited texts and creating new ones is implicit in this conversation, as one could flesh out contrary sayings, attribute some of those sayings to legendary figures that make it possible to develop the narratives implicit in pretty much any declarative sentence. The smashing of both ritual and governing centers would intensify this process and lend it an urgency as well as some latitude, as one is no longer maintaining but rather reconstructing a communal identity. Composing texts would involve soliciting, creating poles of attraction, for synthesizing material from the vast and fairly disorganized collection of traditional materials.\n\nSome years ago, in discussing with my GA colleagues the topic for the next year’s conference, I proposed that we deal with the “digital,” and further wrote up a proposal that proposed that the “search” was the fundamental defining concept of the digital society. I’m not sure how I arrived at that intuition, and probably wouldn’t have defended it so well had I been explicitly challenged, but I must have had a “sense,” based on experience with Google and algorithms, e.g., on Amazon, that ultimately all intellectual activity will be reduced to this. Just the experience of continually refining your search terms so as to get what you want, even without exactly knowing what you want (hence the “search”), suggested that this was a new mode of writing.\n\nThe rapid development of language AIs, which are obviously still in a very early stage, confirms the centrality of the search to digital practice, as the language generation operated by these machines is nothing but a search of the internet for language that would “match,” according to some parameters, the language one has provided it. The data accessed through the search is (or will be) the entirety of the culture, which obviously includes far more material than was transmitted by the ancient scribes. When you type some language into the engine you are organizing all of human knowledge around that language, skewing it in some way.\n\nWe can see that the quality and importance of a piece of writing will be determined by the way it arranges the collected expression of humanity around itself in such a way as to enable a revision of the “search term” (entire books will be “search terms”) so as to elicit yet another, more revealing, display of human thinking. The equivalent of scribal education today, then, is the composition and ongoing revision of search terms.\n\nOnce you’ve written enough, you’ve generated your own interlocutors in the form of arguments at cross purposes or seemingly unrelated to the one you’re making now, and in fact a lot of theoretical development happens this way. In this case, the “assignment” is to articulate searching as wisdom with the derivative, or future presentism, and technology as scenic design. If these are all generative concepts, they must be reciprocally generative. It was bringing Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Sematic Primes to bear on the originary scene that enabled me to say that saying “this is the same” is constitutive of all language use.\n\nThe sign has to be “certified” or “authenticated” as the same sign for all who use it (just like words in our languages are the same for all users even though we all pronounce them at least slightly differently) and the central object must be acknowledged to be the same for all, as both the desired and repelling thing. But there is a temporality of the scene, as participants follow up on the first hesitant, and at a certain point a threshold is reached at which the sign is indeed a sign because once one emits it one ceases advancing toward the central object. So, there is always a point at which it will have been the same, however dimly perceived by whoever gestures before that threshold has been reached.\n\nThat (not yet) sign, then, is the same, has the same “value,” as the sign that marks the crossing of the threshold into the human community. So, there is the derivative on the originary scene. And whatever the not-yet signer is doing to enhance the likelihood of the sign being transmitted through the group (maybe he has to exaggerate his non-threatening posture in a way that latecomers won’t have to) is him hedging against the sign not being taken up; but one might also say that holding a threatening or retaliatory response in reserve is also a kind of hedging, and this maps out the scene in the same way as the contemporary market where risk reduction and risk intensification proceed in tandem.\n\nThere is a political movement in the US that, presumably realizing the futility of changing the Constitution so as to turn the presidential election into one determined by a national popular vote, has tried to circumvent the constitution by trying to get states to agree to elaborate vote-swapping schemes so as to attain the same result as a popular vote would. This seems to me to leverage the logic of the derivative. The starting assumption is that only majoritarian decisions can be legitimate in the election of officials, and so the pre-modern electoral system is a dangerous form of illegitimacy; rather than conceding the inevitability of this illegitimacy, and further conceding the illegitimacy of the Constitution itself, these sources of potential “volatility” can be addressed by introducing auxiliary institutional arrangements that would ensure the “legitimate” result.\n\nThis is a mode of thinking applied to institutions, and could be used across the board—the assumption that only a straightforward popular vote is legitimate is arbitrary, and one could, of course, just as easily say that 17th amendment to the constitution is illegitimate and a source of volatility and try to create some institutional work-around whereby you would get the same result as having state legislatures select senators (this would be more difficult, but therefore more interesting to think through) or, for that matter, having only those owning a certain amount of property vote. In each case, one tries to find some way to ensure that the input is the “same” as the output: a “legitimate” election.\n\nThe derivative order heightens our mutual interdependencies and indebtedness and even reveals that at the foundation of any social order there is nothing but the exchange of faith in one another that constitutes sociality. But if the goal is arbitrage opportunities, there’s no reason why investment should flow towards any enterprise that serves any socially useful purpose. That also means, though, that if you want to get something productive done, you need to pitch it as a potential arbitrage opportunity—at the very least, some investor can get in first and make rapid profits before the field is saturated with investment and a few firms monopolize the field and proceed to sabotage competitors.\n\nNothing that would benefit everyone, or that would not necessarily, in a pre-calculated fashion, benefit specific people, could possibly attract investment. This makes it pretty easy to understand why nothing much is done about our “crumbling infrastructure.” And which investor, in particular, would benefit from controlling the southern border? During the 90s, that is, during the launch of the fully derivative order, public-private partnerships were much touted, precisely in order to deal with such problems, but I’m guessing that never worked out to anyone’s satisfaction because since Tony Blair and Bill Clinton left office we haven’t heard much about it. (Although the whole “green credits” scheme seems alive and well.)\n\nNow, this is where good government progressive types start saying, “see, we told you that the government serves an indispensable purpose and should not have been dismantled and it’s time to set the old New Deal state back in place”—but what is the government if not another site of speculation, in which proposals for public investment would work their way through banks, campaign donors and monopolies? And privately funded philanthropies and NGOs, staffed by graduates of elite universities on their way to careers on Wall St., McKinsey, etc.? What are the scenes upon which other scenes are coordinated? Somewhere along the way the nostalgic progressive will resort to metaphysical concepts like the ”will” with which government action needs to be infused, or the “popular energy” by which it needs to be guided, and then anyone can know they can be safely disregarded.\n\nBut derivative thinking can provide a way of articulating a long march through the institutions with satiric exposures of the existing order. If what we’re interested in is the order becoming more of an order, with the ritual, juridical and disciplinary mutually shaping each other and the ostensive>imperative>interrogative> declarative forms being mutually clarifying and approximating reciprocal exhaustion we have advantages over those with fantasies of finally installing real democracy. There are specific levers within the ritual (scene-setting and commemorative), juridical and disciplinary orders that can be discovered and pulled in tandem.\n\nAnd here is where wisdom, in the form of designing search terms, comes into play. What will have been the same is the “conversation,” or scene/event that is to be inscribed on the central intelligence as a bias or attractor. To represent a scene of thinking so as to ensure it will have been the same scene across, in principle, infinite subsequent scenes, involves a form of writing that programs its own receptions. This is what Straussian esoteric writing was addressing, as it was predicated on an ongoing pedagogical space in which the true doctrine would be continually retrieved from the deliberately seeded surface contradictions by those masters who, paradoxically, know that the true doctrine is really the preservation of the master-student relation itself in resistance to the mimetically generated illusions and turbulence of the world.\n\nAnd what was the writing between the lines Strauss claimed was practiced by philosophers if not the creation of search terms that would generate the retrieval of those suited to continue the tradition? The pedagogical relation is indeed the fundamental human relationship, one which needs to be scaled up well beyond what Strauss’s esotericsm could (or wanted to) handle. Search inscription now takes the form, rather of a radical exotericism, a rendering transparent of the infrastructures enabling any utterance. This means treating any object on any scene, or any scene as an object, as a transfer translation, itself inscribed with search terms distributing pedagogical sites across space and time.\n\n“Belief” is for cultists; imagining yourself on single big scene, ranged against an enemy, is for cultists. Cults will continue to exist within disorder, but can be disregard in the articulation of scenes at different scales—except insofar as the cults might be samples of transfer translations themselves. When you inscribe a scene/event as transfer translation, you “bet” on that transfer being the same under a range of different conditions, including differences in the inscription itself (changes in idiom, deterioration in the physical means of preserving the text, etc.). All that can justify such a bet is the markings in the inscription that can be read as a sign by some unknown, projected other, working on his own transfer translation.\n\nHere is my most treasured borrowing from C.S. Peirce’s notion of the truth as that belief that will be confirmed in the long run—in that case, you can’t prove something to be true now, but you can arrange the means and media that are within your power to arrange in such form as to be maximally revelatory and participatory so that someone might do the same after you so that someone will do the same after them, etc. What brings this into focus is the question, what would count as a deferral of violence in this case, which at scale means a deferral of the multi-pronged threats driven by rivalries across the scenes to the ritual distribution from the center, the juridical order, and the disciplinary order.\n\nI’ll return to this question soon, but I’ll pose the following as a provisional “transitional program/prayer”: abolishing capitalism by working to make it compatible with a juridical order governed by the design principle of a supreme judge. A transitional program would be the term for a series of searches that would elicit and instruct those posted so as to determine that this decision would be the same as that affirmed by a court of last appeal expecting its decisions to be upheld by future courts of last appeal because they would minimize the resentments generated by distributive decisions. And this would be the form of wisdom literature today."
    },
    {
      "slug": "writing-as-technics",
      "title": "Writing as Technics",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 10, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/writing-as-technics",
      "content": "Among the earliest written sentences in the world were those carved into the base of statues of ancient God-Emperors, proclaiming, in the first person, the power, will or accomplishments of the ruler—kind of like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” It’s not too much of a stretch to derive from this that the purpose of writing is to speak through inanimate objects. And the purpose of speaking through inanimate objects is to speak to everyone who will come into contact with those objects, and thereby speak through them as well. But it would be more precise to say that you want your voice installed within each individual, and made part of its self-centering—no individual could literally say, on pain of death or being deemed insane, “I am Ozymandias,” etc.\n\nRather, “I am Ozymandias” engages with, countermands and overrides, other voices competing for expression in your data banks. The most historically consequential example of this is God’s revelation of His name to Moses: one speculation, which I find convincing, as to why it is forbidden to say the Name of God is that you can’t do so without proclaiming yourself to be God (I Am That I Am). Brian Rotman directly ties the disembodied Name of God as declarative sentence to the invisible source of the voice entering your mind when you read: you are hearing the identical voice as everyone else, equally inaccessible to and unidentifiable by all. In writing, we try to relay that voice through the Stack so as to have it enter, not only, by this point, everyone’s mind, but everyone’s social, material and institutional ecology.\n\nThere is a way of following up on this originary account of writing by synthesizing it with the originary thinking of technics (originary technicity) I’ve been working on in recent newsletters. The origin of technics is in the perfection of the imperative; the origin of the declarative sentence is in a failed, resisted and rerouted imperative; the perfection of the imperative must itself be a response to a failed imperative, or at least the anticipation of one—therefore, the revelation of the limits of the imperative splits off into the co-constitutive origin of technics and the declarative. Writing, moreover, is itself the study and perfecting of the declarative sentence: the metalanguage of literacy described by David Olson, which “discovers” individual words and the sentences comprised of them, is concerned with ensuring that the sentence that we see is exhaustively composed of interrelated parts, each with one, and only one, function in the whole.\n\nBeyond the individual sentence, the metalanguage of literacy is interested in constructing discourse and language itself as a system: words are to be used in authorized ways (in accord with their definitions and proper spelling—and the establishment of correct pronunciation probably starts with writing as well), each sentence refers to previous and succeeding sentences in rule governed ways, and each sentence bears with it a mini-epistemology telling you were you should look, within language and/or within the world, for the “verification” or “authentification” of the sentence. And, of course, grammar is the origin of logic, which establishes rules for how sentences can be sequenced, and logic eventually leads to programming, which is, then, the full convergence of the perfection of the imperative.\n\nIn perfecting the imperative you would work very closely with the one to whom you give the imperative—first of all, rehearsing the action with him, and then by deploying reminders and aids for the fulfilling of the imperative; eventually the imperative can be replaced by the reminders and aids. The scene is designed so as to make that action the only conceivable one. This best describes the ritual setting, the origin of all that is technical and institutional. But there are always scenic designers, including the most obedient participants on the scene. Rituals can themselves never be replicated perfectly, and each difference in the new iteration calls for a newly modified imperative.\n\nThe difference between the imperatives is generative of the declarative order, which narrates the ritual scene as an enactment of scenes played out at the center. The earliest declaratives are formed in direct response to questions emerging directly from the “sliding” imperative. Previous declaratives serve as a model, and are revised and recombined. The declarative order collaborates with the design of the ritual world. This reciprocally constitutive relationship has never ended: today’s technology is just as much an arraignment and deployment of the accumulated and compressed reminders and aids, automatizations, of previously perfected imperatives, and the declarative order is just as much an ongoing effort to supplement, regulate and hypothesize that design so as to hear the imperative of the center in the perfecting of our practices.\n\nThe imperative I’m listening to here is to design discourses that can enter into the design of technologies and institutions that will ensure that the questions to which we apply our declarative models do, in fact, emerge from slippages within the iteration of the imperative order. This requires the most advanced form of literacy we can muster: to interface between power and the user is to read the writing that has programmed the imperative order in such a way as to leave a margin of intervention for the user. It’s a question of moving further up the algorithmic chain. We can assume everyone is located somewhere on the algorithmic chain: discarding humanist assumptions, we can treat everyone’s discourse as a more or less complex set of if/then protocols.\n\nHumans, of course, write the programs, and there’s nothing “anti-human” here—algorithms will be our greatest creations from here on in. But the algorithms need to be not only trained, but strained, tested, subverted, mocked. Even if we know all that will only produce feedback that leads to stronger algorithms. You can write programming that compels those who can read to fend for themselves outside of the programming—to move further up the algorithmic chain.\n\nThe slippage in imperative sequencing shows up in power/responsibility and need/ability discrepancies. The only stacking protocols that will make the imperative world cohere better are those that identify the discrepancy more closely, more granularly, and hypothesize with as great a juggling of variables as possible, the likeliest manner for the so inclined to repair the discrepancy. An unanswerable question blasts apart the imperative cluster congealed in any power/responsibility nexus—it is easy to identify because it will target either power (more here or less there) or responsibility (again, either more here or less there) separately—it’s either a power grab or deflection of responsibility, or both.\n\nThe model declarative can map the unanswerable question so as to model a needs/ability discrepancy and thereby not so much answer the question as cancel it. The maxim, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, is prior to the power/responsibility nexus: someone must be able to create a new need set for the deployment of his own abilities in order to take responsibility for the distribution to meet needs in general. The claim that someone has too much power is only intelligible insofar as that person is unable to see to the meeting of needs and eliciting of abilities: this may be because that person has not been supplied with what he needs to do so, but that also means he has been unable to ensure such a supply, reflecting upon his inability, and so that is the question: who would be able to see to such a supply, to ensure the meeting of his own needs as a power center and, then, insofar as they are genuinely his needs as a power center, to arrange for needs to enter into a greater conformity with ability.\n\nWe can disagree and discuss what such conformity entails, that is, we can continue to generate declaratives, but only insofar as we agree (which we in fact always already do) that a needs/ability vertex formalized as a power/responsibility apex makes such declaratives meaningful in the first place.\n\nYou want to write sentences that can be models for other sentences—through the substitution of words and phrases, a direct model. Oscillate, without middle ground, between direct, absolute, highly consequential alternatives, on the one hand, and indefinitely hypothetical string of phrases and clauses on the other. Eliminate the space for middle-brow style debate and dialogue: allow for only extremely open-ended inquiry, of the kind willing to (first notice and then) suspend one assumption after another, or for statements that require the creation of an entire discursive position to resist. Zero in tenaciously on who is doing what in every layer of discourse, outing the agencies embedded in phrases; or, set everything floating, unmoored from ontological anchors.\n\nSystematic diffusion and scattered causalities ultimately allow for a center to coalesce, simply in order to sustain the discourse itself—the center might be the linguistic oscillation itself, and an inquiry into what happens once we abandon the tacit agreement on a set of unquestioned ontological verities. This is how your writing enters and activates the inanimate and animate alike: your voice, turned into the reader’s own, upends that readers zone of ontological comfort so as to disable attempts to rest in the fuzzy middle ground. (Look what happens when you eliminate the “but” from a sentence like the following: “People often want to maintain a comfortable dialogic space, but that must be denied them.”\n\nIt’s already fairly confrontational but consider the following: “The gestures underpinning expectations of even, flowing dialogue are refused and thereby dismantled.” What looks like a choice, even if a tilted one, in one sentence (one would have to “decide” to deny the dialogue) in this latter case implies inescapability because the denial of dialogue comes from within the means of sustaining the dialogue itself. The refusing and dismantling appear agentless, but that inserts the reader into the discursive machinery to fulfill that function. The first sentence leaves the semblance of a space of inner dialogue; the second one a fiat accompli, built into those undefended gestures and evanescent “expectations” themselves. Of course, something like “perhaps as the dialogue drifts off-script and attempts to find indications of a complementary response grow more desperate, one might…” might be a way of opening a space less of dialogue than of dissipative inquiry.)\n\nThe kind of “technical writing” I’m modeling here is more alienating but also far more honest than the classical prose proposed by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner and adopted by David Olson. The mechanisms are made clear, and the writer is on the scene—the writer is on the scene to demonstrate that the scene itself is uncertain, and contingent upon accepting the primacy of the conditions of scenicity itself. I can keep unsettling things or we can settle on something—what I am doing is closing those crevices where the unanswerable questions hide and metastasize. Everything on the scene that is not directly foregrounded is held constant in classical prose, but left oscillating in programming language. What’s programmed here is interfaces that leap from one level to another, between wide open, continually dispersive inquiry and securing absolutely the scenic design enabling that inquiry.\n\nGiven the complementary responses of the invention of technics and the discovery of the declarative to an imperative in need of perfecting, the same method of deriving cultural developments through mistakenness might be as applicable to technics as it is to linguistic form. Gans solves a very difficult problem in an ingenious way in _The Origin of Language_ : how to account for the fully intentional emergence of forms that no one could have planned, desired or imagined in advance. The solution is an “inappropriate” use of the existing linguistic form and the subsequent compensation by the interlocutor in order to preserve linguistic presence.\n\nIn the case of the imperative, an object is named without being present, and so it is retrieved; in the case of the declarative, an imperative cannot be fulfilled and the gesture naming it is repeated along with an “operator of negation,” let’s say a retrieval of the sign of deferral—in the proto-declarative, the object is represented as absent, with an “appended” imperative to cease demanding it. Technological innovation proceeds in the same way—a solution to one problem, within the terms of that problem, present itself as a possible solution to another problem, which didn’t even exist as a problem until the solution presented itself.\n\nAt least sometimes it proceeds this way—the internet’s transformation from an internal communications network for the military to a global communications network seems to fit this model. On the other hand, Google’s founders were very deliberately searching for a better search engine, and no doubt knew exactly what it was when they achieved it. But perhaps this fits the model as well, as all kinds of things became searchable algorithmically that almost no one would have previously thought of in those terms (the few who could have imagined such things had no idea of the technical solution). This suggests a model of “inappropriateness” or “mistakenness” for cultural intervention, or scenic design within idiomatic intelligence.\n\nUse existing technical objects according to idiosyncratic rules; make visible gaps in algorithmic order; prolong by imitating an automated imperative chain; put pressure on linguistic presence and force a scramble to reconstitute it. Maybe much of what we take to be insidious and dangerous, because potentially directed toward us, could more productively be taken as mistakenness, which we can take in a new way to recreate linguistic presence. Maybe we should treat everything, even the most perfected practices and devices as mistaken, even if only on the margin, and act as if called upon to stumble upon new ways to be addressable to them. That itself would be in obedience to the highest and oldest imperative, to elicit from others the symmetries of a human order around a center opened and threatened by crisis.\n\nI don’t think I can sufficiently emphasize how dead the classical prose mode of writing, aiming at transparency and presupposing equal standing upon a present scene, is. Style is political, but it is also technological. (Even that last sentence is a bit weak—but I’ll leave it as a sample—“you may already agree that style is political, but I urge you to consider it is also technological.” This grasping at a shared point of agreement so as to say something new is textbook liberal rhetoric. “Style is now resonance across the fields of political technology” is better—you accept or reject the entire positioning before the planetary declarato-imperatival order.)\n\nThe middle-less oscillation between incessant hypothesizing and the ruthless perfection of practices implants iconic intelligences in the devices operating scenic design. If this text works, it takes away from you a whole array of lazy rhetorical maneuvers, thereby compelling you to deliberately and explicitly construct models of the scenes across which your words might resonate. You could say that all intervention in the idiomatic intelligence takes the form of writing pedagogy."
    },
    {
      "slug": "writing-as-the-programming-of-scenes-the-affordances-of-god",
      "title": "Writing as the Programming of Scenes: The Affordances of God",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 16, 2022",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/writing-as-the-programming-of-scenes",
      "content": "I’ve come back on a few occasions to my critique of what I’ve called the “Big Scenic Imaginary”—that is, the representation of the world as a single scene on which unformalized agencies act directly upon each other. The Big Scenic Imaginary is what we are constructing when we speak about relations and interactions between ethnic, national or racial groups, between sexes, between sexual orientations, between classes, occupational groups and so on or, for that matter, “forces” like “technology” and “media.” I developed this concept originally as a way of critiquing Eric Gans’s political thinking, relying as it does upon the relationship between high achievers (bearers of “firstness,” in his understanding) and those who are, let’s say, somewhat less endowed, intellectually speaking—the resentment of the latter towards the former, and various attempts on the part of the former to fend off such resentment is, for Gans, a defining feature of contemporary liberal democracies.\n\nWhat I wanted to point out here is that these “demographics” are not agents to whom emotions like “resentment” can be attributed. Gans is obviously not the only person who sees things in such broadly characterized terms, filtered, as I see it, through media sensationalism (where the media sets itself up as prosecutor and judge on a simulated scene). In fact, I may be in a small minority here. My assumption is that the only real agencies are those constructed upon ritual, juridical or disciplinary scenes (I include the level of the state within the juridical, for reasons I’ve been giving in the last several posts)—any agencies not so constructed reside in a fantasy world, however widely shared.\n\nI want to now place the Big Scenic Imaginary within a broader framework by observing that it really represents a residual orality within literacy. In other words, it represents a kind of illiteracy, if we operate with a more robust notion of literacy. The Big Scenic Imaginary is equivalent to the scene of writing of classic prose, predicated upon the presence on a shared scene between writer and readers, in which the writer “points” out things that the readers can see as clearly as he can. If the writer and readers can be on this scene, present to each other, then so can everyone and everything they talk about, including groups, which act in unison as individuals.\n\nIn fact, these groups can be interlocutors within the conversations, on mass mediated scene producing simulacra of juridical scenes upon which judgments, which heavily impact actual juridical scenes, can be pronounced. But writing is less a presentation of a shared scene than a programming of possible scenes: if someone were to write X then some implicated set of persons might be expected do Y range of things. In other words, a declarative sentence is best understood as an algorithm figuring various possible ostensives at the end of the line of a sequence of imperatives. The better sentence is the one that more singularizes the operator of the hypothetical prospective gesture at the end of the line.\n\nSuch a sentence would be anonymous—that is, it could be uttered by anyone in a position to have uttered it, which would be anyone who might have figured that range of possible ostensives—and yet the link to orality, to voice, is never lost. The written sentence is still one to be read and “heard,” even if in an unidentifiable voice within one’s own “head.” The sentence template “I AM THAT I AM” pronounced by God in naming Himself to Moses, articulates the intimacy of that heard voice with its “anyoneness,” “anywhereness,” and “anywhenness.” Only under such conditions could God always be with you, untethered to any specific ritual place or gesture. The God whose name is the declarative sentence is therefore a mode of generating scenes (which ultimately must “take place”).\n\nJacqueline Vayntrub’s _Beyond Orality_ helps me to arrives that this conclusion in her study of Biblical “wisdom literature,” by observing that while speech, throughout the Bible, is invariably attributed to someone (even if in traditional, quasi-ritual ways, as in attributing the Psalms to David), in the Proverbs this tether to some putative “speaker” is broken and we get “sayings” that just “say” themselves. At this point, writing becomes autonomous, needing no longer to be presented as a representation of some locatable speech act—but what this further means (Vayntrub doesn’t go in this direction but other studies of “wisdom literature” do) is that this literature represents the centrality of the scribe.\n\nA lot of discussion, within Biblical studies but well beyond it into studies of the ancient near east, in recent decades has followed up on the obvious observation that a specific group of people, with specific skills and training, sharing traditions, reaching across social classes and social functions, often exercising considerable power and at any rate indispensable to those who did, must have written, edited, rewritten, preserved and saw to the dissemination of all these texts. That much sacred writing, issuing in the Bible but also the literary traditions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and so on, originated and served as material for training scribes seems to me to be pretty important, making the scribe a far more interesting figure than priest, shaman, oracle or other essentially oral figures.\n\nTo get ahead of myself, I want to draw a line from the ancient scribe to today’s “programmers of programmers,” to use Laurence Diver’s term from his _Digisprudence_. This would mean that the texts we read, preserve, refer to, and produce all have the purpose of training these “programmers of programmers,” the “descendants” of the scribes, now engaged in scenic design practices, in creating affordances. That would have to be what I’m doing right now as well. This would then be all the “agency” we need for what I’ll call an “open source Messianism”—an agency on the boundary between formalized and non-formalizable, which is to say, a completely literate mode of agency. (“Open source” because the waiting for the hidden Messiah is inverted into an increasingly explicit identification and creation of advance conditions under which one who will name his successors unto perpetuity will emerge.)\n\n“I AM THAT/WHAT I AM” itself as, as Gans says, a “template” of a sentence, looks like a kind of training module, an abstracted kernel of the “mashal” form Vayntrub clarifies as a kind of parallelism or “likening” (“a good wife is like gold but a bad wife is like spoiled food,” etc.) and is the basic structure of the proverb (”mashal” in Hebrew), other forms of wisdom literature and probably prayer as well. “Mashal” also means “example,” or, for our purposes, “sample.” Training on such samples, to the point where you can revise and play with them, use them to comment on and revise other sacred texts, apply them to situations in your duties as an administrator, would be enough like listening to God and having Him tell you he will always be with you to suggest something like “he is always here” as God’s name.\n\nIt is then a question of creating such training modules adequate to our contemporary scenic conditions, under which everything we might think is always already algorithmized through the database—we’d then be hearing God’s voice and refining His imperatives, which is to say, engaging His affordances.\n\nGans, in his _Chronicle of Love & Resentment_ 724, “The Sacred/Significant,” suggests the following as the simplest way of understanding the sacred:\n\nconsider the role of the signs of language in everyday life. Whatever I am doing, an utterance of language has in principle the capacity to preempt my attention. Unlike animal calls and cries, which humans use on occasion as well, the use of language is a _cultural_ act, one that in principle is presumed to take precedence over the ongoing state of affairs. If the linguistic irruption is considered inappropriate, we may say that it is comparable to the misuse of a sacred privilege.\n\nThe voice of God breaks in on us, interrupting our participation in some scene, claiming our attention; but any voice does that, meaning that any voice might be the voice of God. When is it actually the voice of God, then? Let’s put this in scenic terms: you are on a scene, and the utterance interrupts you, placing you on another scene, where you are interlocutor of that voice which, if we follow Gans here, as long as the interruption was not “inappropriate,” is at least a bit the voice of God—or, the voice of God can be heard through it. But you’re still on the other, interrupted scene, and the voice of God, if such it is, must be heard there—it must crowd out and supplant, but also speak through the utterances circulating on that scene.\n\nThis takes some work, work on the utterance. It is the voice of God insofar as it is heard on a third scene, one upon which the utterance is the same on both of the other two scenes. This cannot ever be the case automatically, otherwise the utterance wouldn’t be an “irruption.” The utterance will be significantly differentiated by the respective contexts of the two scenes. You find a way to become an interlocutor with that utterance in the same way on both scenes, with all of their differences (the third scene is simultaneously on both of the other scenes, a kind of meta-scene). In making the utterance equally irruptive and equally a center of attention on both scenes, you are hearing and hammering out the word of God.\n\nBut this kind of working over of the utterance presupposes full literacy as the explicit programming of scenes—only someone at home in textuality can run through all the alternative framings of the utterances that would equivalate them across the two scenes, and to do so (or at least initiate the sequence) virtually instantaneously, as would need to be the case. And, however much work you put into processing the utterance, in the end it would still come from the Other, as an irruption.\n\nA little context and commentary here might help. For a very long time I have been intermittently interested in treating thought experiments as a kind of fundamental “method,” and I tried out a version of this in my essay (“Originary Method”) in the volume of GA essays I edited back in 2007, _The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry_ (which is very reasonably priced on Amazon, by the way). There, I was thinking that the way you would “run” a thought experiment would be to take a single utterance and imagine it at the center of two incommensurable scenes—my example was the fairly stereotyped one of an utterance that could be either a sign of complete insanity or utter brilliance depending upon the most minimal change in the surrounding context you could imagine.\n\nNot bad, I think, but what I’m proposing here is getting at something similar but in a less cloistered, more “social” way—rather than a fictional scenario to be worked out in your mind, the “word of God” here would be more engaged in a specific setting, with others, and with a less easily packaged result—even if making the utterance the same across the scenes would be continued with an “internal monologue” it would still be an utterance coming from the Other that has transfixed by interrupting you. What makes an utterance the same in different settings is not something that could be settled in accord with some external and replicable standard—it calls for the creation of a disciplinary space, even if a virtual one.\n\nI am recalling here my own “mashal,” that everyone is saying the same thing so that everyone doesn’t do the same thing at the same time—the work involved in ascertaining and demonstrating that everyone is saying the same thing in the samples available is bringing forth the voice of God and engaging His affordances.\n\nThe voice of God heard as a result of highly literate practices iterates the residue of presence immanent in any pedagogy, however remote, indirect, or even unintentional (the way an author from thousands of years ago can “speak to you”). Pedagogy is always an irruption. But what else is going on here is what we would have call the “political” or, as I would prefer, “open source Messianic,” dimension of the center. In _Anthropomorphics_ I distinguished between the “occupied center” and the “signifying center”—the different between the slain deer at the center of the originary scene and the divine utterance calling upon the newly human group to cease and desist and then approach in an orderly way is also (with all of its differences) the difference between the “God” and “Emperor” components of the God Emperor.\n\nThe playing out of the God whose name is the declarative sentence separates out irremediably the signifying from the occupied center and this decisive separation is an important source of our current “difficulties”—if no human can be a god, then why should anyone be at the center; and yet someone must be and, in fact, is. The word of God is the irruption of the signifying center upon the subject of the occupied center and we should now be mature enough, which is to say, capable of deriving from our deferrals the requisite disciplinary spaces so that we can resist opposing antagonistically the two centers with wails and shrieks attributed to the otherworldly (our God-given rights, some open-ended horizon of equalization, resistance to “tyranny,” etc.).\n\nWorking out the same sample utterance across scenes is how we listen to the center, which is to say, clarify the imperatives from the center, which is to say, fill the imperative gap. And in doing this kind of “inscriptural” commentary on my previous writings, I’m working over these utterances and making them “inter-operative” across scenes, thereby generating new formulas, eventually “templates” for a range of other utterances (samples).\n\nListening to God can therefore be made fairly routine, while at the same time, being irruptive, something that can always disarm us. The occupied center oversees the preservation of ritual forms, the juridical form, and the disciplinary spaces: no utterance can be meaningful to the extent that it undermines the pertinent occupied space—such utterances are what we call lies, deceptions, evasions, falsifications, defamation—all, today at least, derivatives of what is ultimately the laziness of the Big Scenic Imaginary, which is activated by any attempt to find a short cut to power by imagining a unitary agent in action.\n\nUpon these scenes we do critique or expose any utterance that we can show to be a violation of the terms of the scene. The voice of God, then, speaks most loudly and persistently through the victims of these predations—and you know when we’re dealing with a real victim (one denied the requisite protections of the scene, not one with “less” power) by determining whether supporting that target will preserve and enhance the scene rather than subvert it. But hearing the voice of God is also a disciplinary program, where we hear not only victims of violated scenes but witnesses to such violations, indications transmitted by speakers who have themselves not detected those violations, including indications of weakening and carelessness among the guardians of those scenes.\n\nThis can only be work inherited from the scribes, who worked across ritual, juridical and disciplinary scenes in reworking and reinstituting, perhaps often in only literary forms, rituals that sanctify the juridification of rulership and history. It’s in reworking another layer of already layered texts that voice of God becomes audible.\n\nThe Big Scenic Imaginary can be approached more fairly if we say that by “residual orality,” we mean a tilting of the juridical toward the imminently juridical within the ritual, which is to say the vendetta. The casual exchange of stereotypical insults as well as the reconciliations effected through representative figures that get dressed up more theoretically in the Big Scenic Imaginary has its place at the sub-juridical level of conflict resolution, where rougher forms of justice, based on informal, shared communal knowledge can preserve the autonomy of the community by not allowing confrontations to escalate to the point where the state must intervene.\n\nIt’s at this level that statements like “that’s the way they are\" and “let’s sttle this amongst ourselves” have their place, and where various degrees of insiderness and outsiderness need to be discerned on the spot. The autonomy of such spaces is essential to a good, functional social order, and they need to be revivified, counter to the use of infinitely extendible anti-discrimination categories to demolish them. But such spaces will be better preserved and enhanced, not only as “life-worlds” but as vocabularies that can contribute to the design of larger spaces, if it is recognized that they are liminal spaces bounding honor cultures and juridical cultures and they don’t scale up to the sovereign level.\n\nIt is probably the case that attempts to scale these vocabularies up in this way is due to capture by the anti-discrimination slant in juridical language, which provides the disciplines with the basket of entities they need to prove, disprove, and explain. It takes some effort not to take these categories, in which all conflicts, needs and aspirations can be readily described by the state and media, as, simply, reality."
    },
    {
      "slug": "promise-fraud-the-options-on-the-imperative-messiah",
      "title": "Promise, Fraud, the Options on the Imperative, Messiah",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 15, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/promise-fraud-the-options-on-the",
      "content": "The question of speech or, to evoke post-structuralism, the sayable, is now to be pursued more thoroughly on the terrain of the expectant scene, credit and originary grammar. Obviously free speech rights, guaranteed through whatever legal documents and history, represents a very marginal corner of the stack determining what will be said and heard, by whom, for how long, amplified or dampened by what other utterances, etc. A part of my interest here lies in the conviction that has strengthened in me over the last few years that publicly lying in order to damage people’s reputations, to persuade them to give you money for dubious purposes, or incite others to violence or lawlessness more generally, should be vigorously suppressed and penalized.\n\nThis is all very difficult and therefore interesting, but we do have vast legal traditions to draw upon here. The informal gatekeeping done by the major newspapers and networks, especially post-Sullivan, has really been a way for those outlets to monopolize defamation, incitement and fraud, and now that that monopoly has been broken the main effect has been to distribute those forms of speech more widely and to lower even further the standards of the sayable. This is a question central to governance, and, of course, any government that wants to combat this degeneration will have to be much more truthful itself. Other countries, without traditions and expectations of public officials being held accountable, have managed to live without believing anything the government says, in part by developing alternative networks and codes of information transmission—but this may not work for the world’s major power, which relies upon some reliability and coherence at least when it comes to commerce.\n\nI have argued many times for a very robust regime of legal action against defamation, incitement, fraud and even obscenity, in part because truth ultimately needs to be determined by courts, which then in turn provide the model for scholars. I’ve also maintained that such a regime would make almost the entirety of our current media illegal, and that this would unequivocally be a good thing. Media should be rerouted to reporting the results of legal processes and replaying the process to check for flaws. This would mean that politics should be redirected to repair of the judiciary and legal system, which would involve targeting systems of patronage, educational institutions, think tanks, congressional approval practices and so on.\n\nSince no electoral politics could focus on such boring topics, the politics in question must be carried out through companies engaged, first, to advance lawsuits of particular types, and, then, to use the same means to target fraud all along the lines of the judicial and legal establishment. This means finding good judges, channeling cases toward them and leveraging the results of those cases to get more good judges. A political arena focused on establishing such things as what is to count as a lie, what is harmful to one’s reputation, what counts as an attempt to deceive, how should we judge the distance between a particular utterance and a particular violent act, etc., would be far more civilized than the politics we have now.\n\nOne could easily mimic the now well-worn phrase “we’re not going to vote our way out of this” as “we’re not going to sue our way out of this,” and I will explore the problem this poses a bit further. A part of Lyotard’s discussion of the differend involved a shattering of the very norms by which we would judge—the way he put it was, imagine an earthquake so powerful that it destroyed all the instruments for measuring earthquakes. The implications of this metaphor for any one of a number of recent events should be obvious. Here we touch upon the sublime, and perhaps origin, of politics, insofar as the nomos is put at stake.\n\nA juridical order depends upon a prior allotment of property, and therefore authority, first of all so that people can even have standing to be represented in court. If those allotments can all be subject to lawsuits that would strip ownership over them, once we get to a certain point it’s not even clear what lawsuits can decide. Of course, the same would hold for populists who proclaim no interest in whether any of the elites hold on to any of their property—other than falling back on the mystique of “the people,” what kind of allotment can the populists claim to hold? Whose home, bank, account, investments, etc., could be considered safe?\n\nWhose freedom guaranteed? We would have to revise Lyotard’s metaphor and say that there are always measuring instruments and even if there are none that can measure the earthquake there are some that can measure the debris. And someone will always be cleaning up, collecting and rebuilding from the debris—and they will have some interest in expanding measurement outward. So it might be best to start, very literally, with all the means and methods and instruments of measurement we have and lend enough trust or credit to whoever can enforce an allotment and non-violent disputes over it. But that means those instruments of measurement should be built and maintained now, and the skills need to apply them cultivated, and the kind of nomos-oriented class action I’ve been arguing for would be drawing upon and trying to render more precise such techniques.\n\nEven such things as militias and self-defense organizations can be established within the framework of class action, in the form of lawsuits on behalf of those defending themselves against criminal organizations, rioters and even rogue elements of the state itself. You will be able to build such organizations, and to do so responsibly, if you know you have the legal backing to do so. (Obviously, money directed toward such efforts would pay off 100x compared to money given to politicians, activist groups, think tanks, propagandists, etc.)\n\nSuch a system of crisscrossing lawsuits would itself, without the assistance of the state, build up extensive tracking and tracing machinery—those expecting others to defame or incite against them will be recording not only speech and writing but movements and associations; the specter of such lawsuits will lead people to take out insurance against them, and insurance companies will likewise want extensive records of the doings of everyone even vaguely associated with possible cases. The condition of the leader of an organization who has to run every statement past legal will become the general condition and this will also mean that genuinely truth-telling individuals who can successfully defeat lawsuits against them will come across as especially free, uninhibited, and trustworthy—and enormously admirable.\n\nWe will be returning speech back to its most originary condition, the promise, to which one will be zealously held (albeit with vehicles of forgiveness). A promise draws credit from the promisee and places one in debt. A promise derives from the most originary imperative, to sustain the scene by deferring the rush to the center, and this also means sustaining the nomos, which is nothing more than a scaled-up scene with a dictatorial center—what I may start calling “centropia.” A promise discretizes the imperative from the center into an imperative chain and series of imperative exchanges, as it solicits others to share the promise and requires feedback from the promisee.\n\nEven in a completely oral setting, the promise will have a technical component, in the form of some kind of material memorial, especially in the case of mutually exchanged promises, i.e., pacts. A promise is meant to lock you in and now we have blockchains for that, which should encourage greater precision and calculation in making promises, in determining what, exactly, is to be recorded as evidence and what, therefore, must be treated and framed for presentation (and what may be withheld), while requiring the inscription of their renewals and machine-human interfaces for judgments regarding enforcement and forgiveness.\n\nThe further the stacking of the scenes, the more layers of recording and authenticating and checking and measuring the promise will undergo. Every institution has its allotments as a result of a commemorated promise, and its norms will ultimately refer back to the means of fulfilling it. I will also point out that promising, indebting, and issuing credit are speech acts that cannot be reduced to computation, and are therefore the domain of decision. (A promise includes an articulation of predictions, just like, for the legal realists, the law was a prediction of what a judge would decide, but in both cases broader conditions of predictability are necessary for these more localized predictions to be possible and those broader conditions require humans to be reliable before they are predictable.)\n\nI always want to compress the results of new inquiries into new idioms so as to continue to flood the scene with center study idioms because your thinking is not radical if it’s not creating a new language more compelling than the ones people are already speaking. How, then, to encompass recent inquiries into credit, the perfection of the imperative through imperative exchange and originary grammar, and the disciplinary, which, admittedly, I have not addressed for a while. Center study is held together by a sufficiently small number of concepts—along with the above, we have nomos and the juridical and surely a couple of others I’m forgetting now.\n\nCreating new idioms involves using one of the concepts as a platform for the others—this is itself technological and a kind of stacking. I want to center the imperative, in particular perfecting the imperative and imperative exchange, since that has been the object of the most significant recent theoretical development. The imperative follows from an inappropriate ostensive and it gets extended and ramified the more out of reach that ostensive remains or becomes and the greater the risk of initiating confrontation over the failure to produce the mentioned item. This will most closely describe ritual scenes, where something is needed to complete the scene, maybe something intangible, ineffable or transient, like the “willing” participation of one or more of the members.\n\nTo be “willing” is to be fully in compliance with the founding imperative of the ritual—“you will…” The most consequential ritual in the stacked scene is that ensuring succession, so the perfection of the imperative minimizes non-compliance with succession ritual, leading to the technology/media oscillation analyzed in the previous post. “Media” is the “emanation” of imperative exchanges branching off into interrogatives and declaratives: in terms I’m working with now, claims of broken promises and deliberations over enforcement and forgiveness. The tracking and tracing of utterances and the media’s disciplinary inquiry into samples therefore aims at maintaining this oscillation but while ensuring that compliance spreads further thereby making grey areas more informative.\n\n(What, exactly, is everyone doing, if compliance is increasing and scenes are getting more stacked? Mobilization for space exploration is a popular proposal among the successors of NRx and some in the high-tech scene, but I’ll go for the more open-ended “terraforming,” which can take place anywhere and is essentially scenic design.)\n\nAny act we could carry out, then, is some kind of continuation of the promise that has founded whatever imperative grounds the imperative exchange we’re currently a party to. Let’s say we want to be on the boundary between ensuring greater compliance and generating interrogative-into-declarative sequences. Choosing the spot located on that boundary constitutes a bet and a prediction or, in center study terms, a drawing and issuing of credit. The imperative to track and trace samples will spread and sprawl one way rather than another, and one is hedging and trying to arbitrage the various possible directions, insofar as they’re visible: this will mean identifying ways of both channeling other “streams” into greater compliance while eliciting from them more “nutritious” (to use a term of AI researcher Brian Roemelle) data.\n\nOne models a way of maintaining the scene, while creating expectations conducive to successive scenes best able to search for needed resources from the data left from this one. This is essentially taking out an option on the imperative, obeying ostentatiously in a way one considers most likely to provide nutritious data for some scene projected and “lineaged” as far into the future as possible, with the awareness that, of course, the data provided might be completely “spoiled” by that point, useful primarily as data of a particular dead end (which is a kind of redemption and forgiveness nevertheless). The option on the imperative is a bet and issuing of credit for the furthest flung and barely imaginable mined human measure of the layers of the stack we’re creating the preliminaries of as we speak.\n\nI want to make one final move here, which is to carry options on the imperative into more familiar territory of Messianic expectations. I have in mind here Peter Thiel’s thinking of the Anti-Christ, who comes offering peace and safety, but delivers only stagnation and tyranny. Thiel seems to me aware that historical thinking really begins, albeit paradoxically, with Messianic thinking, because the Messiah represents the end of history, thereby relegating all prior events to stages that serve as premonitions and preparations for us to exist the historical stage. All periodizations, including those distinguishing “modern” from “primitive,” or “civilized” from “savage” or “barbarian,” derive from this, as does the entire notion of “progress.”\n\nIf we were to stop thinking Messianically, or apocalyptically, it seems as if it would all just be one damned thing after another. Thiel’s Christian eschatology wants to (in originary terms) defer the Anti-Christ, which would, I suppose, defer the Second Coming, which must follow the emergence of the Anti-Christ. It’s best to see this kind of “discrepancy” in terms of paradox rather than contradiction. Maybe Christ will return when and because we’ve defeated the Anti-Christ before he gathered up his strength, maybe without even realizing it. Thinking along those lines would cut apocalypses down to size—maybe what is revealed is further discretization.\n\nMaybe the Messianic Age will be eventful despite not being “historical” because we’re just absorbed in one layer of terraforming after another and will lose any memory of why life was supposed to have more “meaning” than the continual elicitation of human capabilities in various forms of collaborations with expectant scenes. The greater the compliance with the originary imperative the greater the expectancy of the scene—that is the option on the imperative we’re taking out."
    },
    {
      "slug": "idiom-and-the-differend",
      "title": "Idiom and the differend",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 01, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/idiom-and-the-differend",
      "content": "I have worked with the notion of “idiom” rather than “theory” or “knowledge” because I want to defer the possibility of any metalanguage that is not convertible into the language it describes along with the scenes upon which that form of language is enacted. Center study could be seen as a kind of metalanguage, converting all discourses into mimesis and deferral just psychoanalysis converts all discourse into desire and repression or historical materialism converts all discourse into base and superstructure. “Idiom,” for that matter, could be seen as a metalinguistic labeling of all forms of discourse. This would mean work within center study would be a kind of deconstruction, always dismantling metalanguages while always producing new ones to be dismantled as well.\n\nThis dynamic is what kept deconstruction in business, because if metaphysics could be dismantled once and for all, deconstruction would become obsolete. There’s a kind of narrative problem here, because in either case (metalanguage or deconstruction) we all know how things turn out in the end. For center study, metaphysics or metalanguage is, more specifically, the metalanguage of literacy studied by David Olson, which means our engagement with metalanguage is scenic: the metalanguage of literacy creates an apparent non-scene that is really a disciplinary scene engaged in inquiry into language, that is, how to package or compress other scenes into speech on a particular scene.\n\nAll the metalinguistic concepts, of which I have always focused most on the mental verbs (assume, suppose, indicate, suggest, etc.) are means of replacing the mimetic reproduction of reported speech with judgments about the stance with which that speech on the other scene was accompanied. The scene upon which this compression takes place is reflected in the idiom of “classic prose,” as studied by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner, which is predicated on the appearance of writer and reader being situated on the same scene and being able to point to what will be affirmed to be the same thing on that scene. I call this scene an apparent non-scene because it is not acknowledged as a scene, reliant upon scenic design aimed at bringing certain objects into view (or within hearing, or touch, etc.) but, rather, presented as a transparent view of the thing.\n\nIt’s possible to be clear, as classic prose insists upon, but one always obscures at the same time. “Idiom” marks this oscillation of clarity and opacity, which is always pedagogical, enabling someone to see what you see, while indicating what one is attending from in order to attend to. Classic prose involves a forgetting of learning (try and capture those moments where “not understanding” became “understanding” and hold them in memory—I’m not sure it is possible) which the idiom, by twisting our discourse in some way, makes us remember. The originary scene or, even more, the originary hypothesizing on the originary scene, is the entrance into the idiom, which is re-enacted whenever we use language.\n\nCenter study assumes that any tracing of any idiom to its possibility and emergence will lead us back to the originary hypothesis, while anthropomorphics assumes that the originary hypothesis can only find its proof of work and concept in the jarring of an idiom. Anthropomorphics, then, is not so interested in reducing or explaining, metalanguage like, any discourse to the abstract concepts developed in the center study factory as in infiltrating other discourses and having them approximate or become successor discourses to the originary sign. If we were all deliberately replicating the originary event in every utterance we’d all be speaking in constantly novel ways that would need to be apprehended in the stream of things, and this is what the concept of anthropomorphics is indicating. The more elaborate conceptual architectures I have worked on and promised (originary grammar) are really just technological means of bridging such approximations—creating a little eddy within the current to get a view and chart a course.\n\nI am indebted for my use of “idiom” to Jean-Francois Lyotard, who began speaking that way, I believe, in his The Differend, which also introduces the concept given in the title. A differend is a case, a dispute, wherein the two sides enact idioms that have no common measure and so any judgment will necessarily be an injustice because it will fail to account for one of the idioms at stake. Lyotard framed this, not surprisingly in the 1970s, in terms of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and disputes of native land claims, on the other—prototypical victimary problems (and Lyotard’s responses are fairly standard victimary ones, regarding acknowledging the other, etc.).\n\nBut with a concept like the differend it’s better to untether it from such inspirations or instigations and apply it across the board—what if every case involves a differend? Judgment becomes, not impossible, but always problematic. There is a very powerful stream of the Axial Age working its way through the differend, as its prototypical cases, like the crucifixion and the trial of Socrates, involved some kind of differend, where we have an injustice unintelligible on the terms of the existing justice system (without which, though, “injustice” would be meaningless). But differends remain an anomaly for Axial Age institutions—maybe, then, Ve/ortexicality is predicated upon institutionalization of the differend itself, as a way of keeping in mind the way the juridical is bounded by the disciplinary on one side and the nomos on the other.\n\nThe differend enables rather than paralyzing judgment insofar as the contending idioms and not only the judgment are ledgerized, that is, recorded and made available as a so far unactivated precedent. Maybe the native understanding of land use, incommensurate with modern notions of property rights, gets factored or priced in to some later question of land rights that only fits troublingly into the established legal order. We would be looking for ways to balance the earlier injustice without simply repudiating the case (in which, we can assume, a kind of justice was also done) or for that matter making any kind of reparation to the party in that case (the parties to the case may no longer exist and the balancing may be incommensurate with any kind of recognizable reparation)—the victim in that case will have made a donation of his resentment to the center insofar as we record it as such, and if that original party would not quite have volunteered or been satisfied with this, well, that becomes part of the record as well. Every balancing leaves some things unbalanced.\n\nOne instigation leading me to examine “idiom” at some length is some reading I’ve been doing regarding the “lashon hara,” or “evil speech,” in Judaism, something I was vaguely aware of previously (Philip Roth has a Mossad officer deliver a long, hilarious and informative speech on lashon hara near the end of his Operation Shylock). Lashon Hara is a very sustained inquiry into forbidden forms of speech, even if the forbidding rarely seems to cross over from moral to legal territory. Essentially anything that might put a person in a bad light, or lead others to see him in a bad light is off limit—even giving someone credit under certain circumstances—say, if you could be taken to imply that you’re giving him credit for one thing so as to imply he deserves blame for something else—is problematic.\n\nIt’s a very rigorous inquiry which greatly enhances sensitivity to interpersonal relations. The best way I could think of summing it up would be to start with the legal categories dealing with damage done through speech, like defamation, incitement, and fraud, and backing up from legally provable instances of such violations to any speech that might conceivably have ramifications leading to effects analogous to the effects produced by any of the above. I hypothesize that the attention given to this concept in Judaism derives both from the vulnerable status of Jewish communities, leading to a kind of training in being careful what you say, but also the need for solidarity in such a community, so that giving offense unless absolutely necessarily is to be avoided.\n\nBut most of the internal arguments seem to follow from the imperative to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” This resonates with my interest in academic discourse, with its emphasis on maintaining a space of shared inquiry and demonstrating an awareness that one will never have the final answer, leading to an emphasis on hedging and making concessions to positions you disagree with. These idioms, you might say, depend upon a fairly closed space where open expressions of hostility and confrontational stances can be excluded, but also, perhaps, entail making a bet on the proposition that “a soft answer turneth away wrath.”\n\nBut on the other side of the spectrum of idioms there is what I’ve referred to as “originary satire,” which calls for an uncompromising exposure of everyone in their rush to grab the central object or as much of it as they can get a hold of and carry away, with all the side looks and elbowing and self-justifying and self-pitying this stance involves. Originary satire seeks to freeze everyone pre-deferral, both overcome by and oblivious to mimetic contagion. Originary satire is clearly lashon hara, which means I have a differend to work with here. Originary satire (my starting point here was an extended bout of reading Wyndham Lewis, but I don’t think he would share my understanding of satire), though, to be real, must include the satirist himself, and therefore must inform the “style” of the satire.\n\nThis would differentiate originary satire from other modes, which tend to rely upon a kind of authority that allows the satirist to take a “prosecutorial” stance toward his subjects. Originary satire is rude, uncouth, uninhibited, lacking in “empathy,” while still including a kind of “fairness.” I’ll describe what this would look like while remaining cognizant that I know of no writer who has ever actually done this (Lewis, it seems to me, leaves himself out of the picture, but I may be doing him an injustice insofar as he might fit the criterion I’m about to give). Originary satire is “over the top”—it’s “too much,” showing everyone in the most exposed, compromised, humiliating posture imaginable but this very “style” leaves the satirist in the same condition.\n\nPast a certain point showing how ridiculous everyone else is must make you ridiculous as well—your own resentments, your own demands for centrality must come to the fore. (Maybe Melville does something like this in Pierre, or The Confidence Man—or even “Bartleby.”) And at that point originary satire becomes, not so much a gesture of deferral in itself as a prelude and invitation to one.\n\nThe lesson in both cases—language as layered, self-labeling deferral; language as occupying the boundary where risk of mimetic melee touches a possible gesture of deferral—is that putting someone else at the center implies the possibility of being placed in the center yourself in turn. The best, or most responsible, utterance, does both simultaneously, or, more precisely, allows for both options. If you’re going to tear someone to shreds know that you’re going to been seen, red in tooth and claw, knives out, and regardless of how justified your attack is your investments which will exceed just doing justice will be on display—so, put them on display in an edifying manner.\n\nWe could think of this as a kind of arbitrage: you center the other and yourself simultaneously for maximum deferral power. And in this case, the moral architecture of lashon hara is really originary satire inverted because it implicitly acknowledges that the human in its entirely is a gigantic sore spot, or an unlimited number of ways of inflicting humiliation. Someone being extra careful not to offend you just lets you see how obvious all the things you might take offense at are. Such verbal acrobatics are themselves a kind of satire. We could put the kind of arbitrage the post-Axial Age, ve/ortexical idiom should be attempting in “Bayesian” (or pseudo-bayesian, I wouldn’t get into arguments here) terms: let all your utterances (samples) be as close to 50% directing attention to the other and 50% drawing attention to yourself as possible.\n\nNeither truth nor morality need be compromised here but this logic does tend to a post-juridical framing as one leaves the prosecutorial or testimonial stance aside to take on a stance of firstness on the scene—remember, whoever issued the sign first on the originary scene didn’t know what he was doing while having some feel for what he wasn’t doing and he has to hold on to that not doing long enough for the chain of counter-mimetic conversion to be able to refer back to and then forget him. To direct attention to the other is to set up a possible scapegoating scene, which includes the possibility that the attention of the participants will circle back to you, but we must talk about each other and the way to do so is therefore so as to instantaneously circle back to yourself, rather than just risk the possibility.\n\nIf we are to pursue the inquiry into lashon hara further, we could acknowledge that what counts as harmful or humiliating is not only variable and historically transient (in a traditional community implying someone was homosexual would no doubt involve a very high degree of lashon hara) but in the telling itself. Laying out what you think will be seen as another’s flaws in a way that represents him as leaning toward improving in all those things (and how do you know he’s not—you need not lie, even a little whitely, here) as in fact are we all creates a very different picture. But you never eliminate the differend—a slight shift in the scene might peel back the lashon hatov (“good speech”) leaving only the bad.\n\nAnd anyone on the scene, or responsible for further iterations of it on other scenes, might do the peeling. But if you keep approximating that 50/50 mark you model such attempts for others and then can include in your further samplings the respective probabilities, as they seem to you presently, of your sample having taken (having shifted the weights in the latent space of the database), always trying to drive everyone toward that 50/50 mark."
    },
    {
      "slug": "credit-idiom-imperative-perfection-expectant-scenes",
      "title": "Credit-Idiom-Imperative Perfection: Expectant Scenes",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 14, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/credit-idiom-imperative-perfection",
      "content": "Let’s start with a little utopian vision, one which I’m borrowing from someone who gave a talk at a GA conference some years back along those lines. He wanted to argue for the possibility of non-hierarchical relationships, at least within a single space—whether he was arguing against me specifically or what he took to be GA’s conservatism I don’t remember—and he had a case study which involve advanced forms of cooperation within a high-tech environment populated by very well educated and civilized team members. So, of course the presentation was convincing—a group of highly motivated people guided by a shared goal which they have the means to fulfill will certainly not need to be bossed around and can more or less work spontaneously on their own.\n\nThis is the kind of post-capitalist imaginary that Veblen had in mind with his engineer-run social order, once the financiers were dispensed with, and that Bichler and Nitzan (Capital as Power) deploy as their own possible future (they are taking it from Veblen). I see no reason not to stipulate to the possibility of such an order, but its possibility derives from the prior possibility of so thoroughly inscribing imperatives from the center into the scenes occupied by the citizens of this future order that they are essentially taking dictation from the machinery itself, which they themselves have been intricately fitted to.\n\nThis, in fact, is a good way of thinking about what we might be working towards, with the qualification that the machinery itself might “insist” on certain hierarchies and gradations. But we’re not talking about “utopia” here; rather, we’re talking about an “installment,” a paying down of originary debt. And the proof of that is that precisely such an order would invest heavily in succession, in the sense a great deal of organization would be put into pedagogy so as to ensure there are future generations to replace the present one.\n\nI would also like to return to an old and radical argument of mine and bring it into the discussion—the assertion that all of the disciplines, starting with the original discipline of philosophy, are further inquiries into the metalanguage of literacy. All of the indications of stance in the representation of the other’s voice on another scene is where, ultimately, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, aesthetics and so on come from. This analysis needs to be expanded across all the disciplines, including science and technology, and turned into a technological, i.e., scenic design problem itself. All of the words central to all the disciplines, whether it be “value,” “ritual,” “communication,” “society,” “cognition,” or “electron,” “function,” etc., are all virtualizations of someone on a scene pointing to something at the center of that scene and affirming along with other members of the scene that they see or hear or touch the same thing: the words themselves involve taking on trust, or crediting, that such scenes have occurred, or are possible.\n\nWords are more or less dense articulations of a spread of scenes upon which one could say “this is the same.” My hypothesis here is that a philological history of the disciplines will bear this out, but we can see how generative it is before we have such “proof.” (What other explanations for where concepts come from, starting from an elementary anthropological and semiotic mode of inquiry, could possibly be better?)\n\n“Credit,” “debt,” and “ledger” are very elementary terms—not Natural Semantic Primes, of course, but easily traced back to the most elementary social forms, and in such a way that we can use them to track the transition from pre-money to monetized communities. What is happening, then, in terms of those constitutive relations, when a scene is constructed in accord with an imperative from the center, involving the imperative exchange between center and periphery issuing in a declarative order produced through the metabolism between declaratives and ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits? An imperative, whether it be a command, demand or anything in between, always looks forward to some exchange—even the most imperious, uncompromising ruler expects petitions from his subjects, who he knows needs to eat, be clothed and housed, or even require clarification on occasion.\n\nEvery transformation of the environment or setting of the scene is aimed at objectifying or, better, tokenizing, the terms of that exchange, in the process necessarily modifying them as well. We want to get to a point I have approached or circled about many times, which is a direct “creditation” of any utterance, which is to say its conveyance and iteration across scenes at various levels of the stack, including its transfer translations at each point along the way and, what most interests me here, getting a measure of the scenes the utterance or contributing sample can command, in the disciplines above all. Technology is at least potentially solid and enduring—we can tell how long built things will last—but finance is exactly the opposite.\n\nObviously a project that is fully funded, with more backers getting in line behind the scenes can see that support evaporate overnight, with the result having technological ramifications in the form of research enterprises abandoned, factories left to rust, maybe data in centers being unextracted, etc. What we would have here, then, is an imperative exchange broken off, in ways that probably implicate the juridical order in some way, but that also suck the meaning out of a whole range of utterances which now become empty talk, platitudes, wishful thinking, etc. So, I’d like to get a read on that so that we can bring all of the discussions of money, technology and governance back to language, which is where all the indications of effects of those relationships must always turn up. A collapse of a regime is most reliably registered in a command lapsing—someone would have obeyed promptly yesterday but laughs at it today: in the surrounding declaratives will see the “radiating” of the compliance or contempt.\n\nTo recall yet another concept I’ve left in abeyance for a while, I am speaking about assetizing discourse (any utterance or sample) so as to prepare it for the conversion of assets into data. Here’s a new concept that I think can help us tie all this (originary grammar threaded through technology, media and finance) together: the expectant scene. I’m drawing further from the source of “expectations,” representing the open field of ostensives resulting from the ostensive-imperative-ostensive loops issuing in imperative exchanges rolling out through interrogatives into declaratives. That’s what the declarative does: generate new possible, hypothetical, potential ostensives, which also means new scenes upon which we might say “this is the same.”\n\nDiscourse and idioms are “assemblages” of declaratives which leave us always expectant of encountering new fields and which are built into scenes to the extent of being the components of scenes and stacks. The expectant scene is, for center study, the equivalent of “smartness,” as in the smart city, the smart institution, the smart phone, etc.—smartness seeks to optimize, but expectancy is more a set of affordances to fit a given scene in its ramifications and unfoldings. Optimization is doomed to fail precisely because it can’t account for investment because the relation between the outside spread and the spreads further inside can never be optimized—the entire financial order is dedicated, on one level, to ensuring such optimization and, on the other hand, to arbitraging all the differences in likelihood that optimization will actually be approximated.\n\nOptimization has to pretend this isn’t the case, but expectancy can toggle between the need to survive arbitrage waves and the attentions of those interested in succession. We have, on one side, expectations of future earnings, i.e., capital, according to Bichler and Nitzan and, on the other side, expectations of scenic transmission, in which the ending of one scene is the middle of another scene and the beginning of yet another one. Every scene has both sets of expectations built in.\n\nExpectations of future earnings is a very generative concept because such expectations are self-confirming—if you expect future earnings to flow from ownership title of a particular asset then you will buy that asset thereby raising its price and increasing the expectation of future earnings. And, of course, it depends upon who is doing the expecting—the more the expectant can invest, the higher the expectations. But such expectations are always ranged across a field—one invests because it will provide a higher return than some other possible investment; or, rather, one portfolio of investments vs. some other portfolio, and this question can be re-asked at every moment.\n\nAnd all these expectations come with an expiration date, an expectation date that is in turn affected by the inflow of expectations. The ideal is, again, arbitrage, which therefore becomes a model for thinking through the conversion of asset to data. If you can sell the same asset in one market at a higher price than you are buying it in another market simultaneously you have made a risk-free profit. But I’m not so sure about “simultaneity”: maybe in the instant between pushing the button on the sale and the sale being recorded the prices have changed. And maybe this happens because you are constantly laying the groundwork for arbitrage and thereby shifting the market around so that someone with more computing power than you or smarter quants gets the arbitraged profit ahead of you.\n\nSo, one instance of arbitrage doesn’t eliminate risk: you need to be big enough, i.e., to have sufficiently privileged access to the outside spread to arbitrage across the board, so that even your arbitraging in hedged. But this also means having your tendrils reaching out across the political arena, i.e., the nomos as mediated through the juridical, so as to create the surest possible conditions for your arbitraging spread—and this means bringing all the lines of succession into order with your arbitrage spread. This really means turning succession practices themselves into assets, subject to the same processes of arbitrage—e.g., investing in several politicians simultaneously so that the differences between them average out in your favor.\n\nNow, one could argue that this is in fact the best possible way of allocating resources for future use because, despite the now familiar stereotype of financial institutions buying up functioning companies, breaking them apart, selling off the pieces for a quick profit and thereby leaving industries and communities devastated—a stereotype which I assume has some truth to it—it is probably also the case the companies vulnerable to such a practice had their own difficulties and may not have been capable of innovating in ways necessary without bringing in new loans and investment; but, even regardless of that, this is not all that financial systems do, and who knows how they might be reformable in ways that increase the benefits of free flows of capital while minimizing and mitigating the losses.\n\nAnd there is certainly good reason to be cautious in laying hands on these institutions—it would be very easy to fall into Bernie Sanders style idiocy in denouncing “finance capital” or whatever. But for me the question is whether the outside spread can be encompassed by the juridical, and it seems to me the answer is no; this observation, moreover, provides for a sustained, intelligible practice of transformation that raises rather than lowering the level of civilization. Larger and larger bailouts (and by whom, exactly?) of financial institutions that can’t help but extend their credit lines precisely in expectancy of being bailed out really is unsustainable—we can’t just do this every few decades.\n\nDebt must always be adjudicable, and to the extent that that’s the case the value of assets can be assessed in courtrooms, thereby relying upon some measure other than what someone would pay for it right now, pricing in its juridically assessed price and the outcome of the trial. That measure, as things stand now, I assume would be given by experts from the financial industry who would, in fact, try to make their best guess as to what a market price would be for the assets at the moment: we would be betting on the existence of such experts, on their selection by the authorities, and their continual incorruptibility.\n\nBut I’d like to focus on a very singular, and I think currently impossible, kind of adjudication: one in which the lender of last resort cannot meet its own obligations to pay for the assets it has hedged itself with and must have all of its assets dismantled and sold off to pay its own debts. These assets would include money owed to it, so an exchange between its debtors and creditors would have to be mediated. Under such conditions, where the value of the store of value must be assessed, what criteria would there be? Everything would be up for grabs, and whichever court, backed by whichever sovereign, could pull it off, would institute a new regime of credit and credibility.\n\nHere the definition of the juridical I have been working with would come directly to the fore: judgments between parties that take the vendetta from below off the table by on average providing results better than expectations from pursuing the vendetta; and deferring the vendetta from above, against sovereignty itself by allowing for strictly limited suits against and appeals to the sovereign sufficient to prevent any critical mass of antagonists expecting a better redivision of the nomos through extra-juridical means. These would be thoroughly pragmatic and anthropomorphic determinations, without any external measure of “justice” or the “common good.”\n\nAnd I think part of the determination would have to go beyond the price for which the assets in question could be sold right now to the preservation of modes of possession and power that could be shared across companies, professions, kinship groups and, most importantly, generations. And then the assets start to become data as a new nomos is created out of the old.\n\nHow, then, is this eventuality, this horizon toward which Anglo modernity beckons, to be inscribed in the idioms of the expectant scene? You want to create novel idioms that will attract attention while still be durable, maxim and proverb like. You want to stay as much as possible in the present tense, while reaching, within that tense, for what has been, what might have been, what we have indications of having been, what is to be, what will have been, what might yet be, and so on. You want to identify ownership of assets and assess credit, determining who is up and who is down, for how long and on which markets, while simultaneously converting such identification and assessment into markers of the scene and the scene across scenes and within the stack.\n\nAnd, ultimately, these assessments, conversions and measurements must be tested as companies gathering data under the auspices of actual and possible disputes considered under the most rigorous juridical conditions to the point where the accumulated disputes empty out into a new nomos where everyone contributes to ensuring that imperative exchanges never reach the threshold of formal resolution. Try to see everyone in the light of a peaceful settlement of all the possible disputes over the obligations of an outside spread dissolved into distributed pedagogical accreditations."
    },
    {
      "slug": "media-technology-and-originary-grammar",
      "title": "Media, Technology and Originary Grammar",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 29, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/media-technology-and-originary-grammar",
      "content": "The last (Grammar of Technology) post suggests avenues of inquiry that would tie together on a higher level all the center study idioms I’ve been developing the last few years. First of all, it opens the possibility of returning to the problem of originary grammar, a problem I never succeeded in solving, even though I began working on it back in 2007. I had essentially abandoned it, without ever acknowledging as such, and maybe withholding such acknowledgement was right—this too might be a technological problem. The original project was to articulate any sign, utterance or sample out of the ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives into which it could also be dissolved.\n\nIf you think about the extensive reach even the simplest discourse has into ostensive and imperative realms, you can see this would have to be a computational project, as vast connections would have to be made, in very discrete ways, which would then have to be abbreviable for everyday use, which is to say for actually learning to think and speak in the ways which first of all would require very disciplined analysis. Some of my initial musings about working with LLMs with a few colleagues several years involved trying to map out such an approach to computing the originary grammar, but while that led to some interesting work with Anna Wierzbicka’s primes I certainly didn’t succeed in designing a proposal that might interest anyone willing to provide resources.\n\nTo give a sense of how we might come to talk in these terms, my knowledge of critical theory and ideology critique or, more broadly, semiotic “decoding,” led me to want to try to get to the point where someone would speak a few sentences to you and you’d be able to respond by pointing to the chain of imperatives hierarchically organized and deferred through the creation of a new, potential or virtual ostensive and, not only that, obey those imperatives more precisely and loyally with a more readily available set of potential or virtual ostensives. Obeying the imperatives would simply be their exposure.\n\nTo now see this as a technological problem would mean articulating it in terms of the stack of scenes which make the string of sentences possible—on the simplest level, are we engaging in a conversation, watching a movie, a TV show, blockchaining some evidence, posting on social media, etc.—the media, or the scenes, itself, we can now say, has a grammatical form in the working through of some imperative to position people on different scenes as if they are on the same scene. This goes back to my use, not often revisited, or at least not recently, of David Olson’s model of literacy to talk about media in general. Again: Olson sees writing as representing the speech of others when you are not on the same scene with those people and therefore haven’t access to the mimetic “clothing” that would come into play in a face-to-face conversation.\n\nWe’re skipping past McLuhan and, for that matter, more subtle theorists of media like Vilem Flusser, but we can always bring them back into the machinery at any point. Right now we can just see each media as supplementing in some way what it can’t supply, but within a media environment where each media is doing this not only or not at all in relation to some non-mediated condition but in relation to all the other media. The declarative sentence, with its creation of the virtual or potential ostensive, is the model here: every media is doing something like that. A potential ostensive to supplement an absent scene—that’s a very minimal way of thinking about media.\n\nOf course, with the media we have much more than linear, written or printed discourse: we have sound and images of all kinds—all the senses are involved. And what we can add to Olson’s model is that even his “originary” speech situation is supplemental, because the sign is always supplementing some blocked desire, or the dead-end or “knot” (to dip a bit into Lacan) of any imperative exchange. And this was part of what has prevented me from thinking through originary grammar past a certain point—a failure to sufficiently bring in, not just the imperative, but imperative exchange, the model for which is prayer (which is therefore also the model for desire). Media, or the stacking of scenes, is the anthropomorphics of imperative exchange. Images, still or moving, and sound, model forms of imperative exchange issuing in declaratives, in the sense of a scene completed with a potential ostensive.\n\nWe can now go narrow and go wide, be immersed in the scene or sitting several scenes back, doing some ledgering for another scene. An image/sound combination is commanding, or requesting, or implicitly suggesting, that you move forward, retreat, move laterally or adjust your posture at some pace, to some extent. On this virtual scene, which you share with others across various scenes, and maybe with yourself across successive scenes, you have been compelled or invited into some imperative exchange that in some way intervenes in some imperative exchange in which you are already invested or with which your familiarity and hypothetical affiliation with is assumed.\n\nLanguage and discourse still provides the strongest model here, for we can describe all this in terms of connectives, subordinate clauses, parataxis, recursion (scenes containing other scenes, perhaps embedded in such a way as to require effort to access)—in short, the single sentence of humanity. But now we can use “sentence” less metaphorically because we’ve determined that technology, as the perfection of the imperative, requires precisely the generation of the potential or hypothetical ostensive precisely for that perfection—an imperative is not perfected until it is not only complied with but seen to have been complied with and affirmed as completed—kind of like the signature a delivery man requires or the photo the Amazon guy takes of your package at the door.\n\nYou as a “reader” or a sampler of media must determine where to end a particular sentence. When has the hypothetical ostensive emerged? Right now I’m thinking of being on X and looking at the replies to a (usually fairly predictable) post and seeing a long string of virtually identical replies and moreover, replies that I have seen to many other posts. Maybe they’re bots, of course, and so here we don’t need to speak metaphorically (if we ever do) about the machinery of language. Maybe there are sentence breaks within the series of replies; maybe the entire reply section is a sentence; maybe this reply section is itself a verb or expletive in a much longer sentence including many reply sections, the bot farms and algorithms producing them, resentments amplified by those algorithms, and so on.\n\nAnd here is where the question of how to “engage responsibly” with media enters. Do I add a reply, maybe trying to short-circuit the sequence, or, by receiving no reply myself, expose the “botiness” of the series? Do I take notes, inscribe the latest adaptation of some meme in some more or less implicit way in my own posting, so as to play my own discourse off against such trendlines? Maybe one could make a pastiche of stereotypical replies, as another way of idiomclining. Here is a good place to reintroduce a couple of somewhat latent concepts—first of all selving. I use the word selving instead of “subjectivity,” or “person,” or “personality,” or “individual” and its variants, “soul,” along with other possibilities precisely to minimize and single out the most elemental, constitutive fact about the individual—that whatever we do we act in ways so as to mark ourselves and our settings so as to provide surety for remaining the same over time—if I’ve completely changed, it’s still me that has completely changed.\n\n“Self” means nothing more than “same.” Selving is clearly a weighted activity—ethical, or, as I would say, one involved in conferring and claiming credit. We selve in lots of different ways in lots of different places. Is the “I” that posts on X, that writes this post, that plays with my grandchildren, etc., all the same I? Are these different, unrelated selvings? These are often presented as deep philosophical questions, but the various forms of selving and their intersections are determined institutionally. My grandchild can interrupt me in the middle of writing a post and I can get an idea for a new post while pushing him on a swing, and, who, knows, maybe in 15 years or so he’ll get curious and read one of them, so clearly, the selvings do intersect in various ways even while it’s still the case that it’s easy to keep them mostly separate—and that it’s easy to do so is also a technological matter, which is to say the existence of a wide range of scenes, local and extended, articulated within the stack of scenes.\n\nBut the more difference, the more of the other, you process your selvings through, and the more you keep track and records of those inscriptions as you selve your way through a scene, the more your selving will resist algorithm “capture.” Selving in this case is sentencing and therefore also technological—exhibiting an imperative exchange (embedded in any number of other imperative exchanges) issuing in a hypothetical ostensive.\n\nFinally, let’s see if the concept of “transfer translation,” which I use but rarely do much work with despite its great promise, can enable us to enter the discourse of selving. To recall: “transfer translation” is a concept of Marcel Jousse, the priest, biblical scholar and theorist of mimetics. Jousse pointed to the way in which, in the translation of ancient scripture (say, from Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek) the words and phrases used in the target language often had effects on the concepts in scripture and these effects would show up in the narrative explications of scriptural passages. So, e.g., if a word generally used for “occurrence” is expressed through a metaphor drawn from a flowing river in the source language but a metaphor drawn from birth in the target language the scriptural tradition would then be inflected in the direction of birth and surrounding concepts as part of scripture itself.\n\nThis seems to me a powerful model for cultural change in general, even within a single language (and no language is simply single). The current online meme discourses makes the significance of the notion of transfer translation even more evident. All the major memes take on discursive lives of their own, well beyond their immediate use to mock or compress a response. There are little mythologies of the various “jacks,” the meme of the guy standing alone in the corner of the party thinking “they don’t know that I…” has versions in which the other partygoers are thinking back at him, creating a kind of dialogue, the gigachad meme has become a legendary figure regularly “embodied” by actual men, etc.\n\n(It’s amazing that there has as yet not been, as far as I know, a serious study of online right wing meme culture.) But the same kind of transfer translation effect happens in conversion of a story or text from one medium into another. The more familiar the samplers are with various versions or realizations of a given narrative the more meaningful and difference between the versions become, which means the more meaning one can make by inscribing such differences. That heroism can be unalloyed in one version and problematic in another generates new narrative possibilities applicable within any new version. I often wonder how much of our vocabulary of such things as psychology and personality emerge out of the attempt to make stories work better.\n\nEveryone has probably had the experience of watching a movie where the plot requires one character to, e.g., betray a character he has so far been loyal to, but in a “bad” movie, there may be no real reason provided for the betrayal, perhaps because it really doesn’t make sense and was mere a device to push forward a haphazardly constructed plot. In watching such a movie, though, there is an inclination to supply some motive, and this may lead to a view of the character in question as containing hidden depths and complexities. This may not “work” for that particular movie but the possibility is now there and it’s easy to imagine a subsequent filmmaker designing a more effective plot embodying the motive that might have been there in the previous movie.\n\nThis is a kind of mistakenness, as is transfer translation in general, that generates innovations in “human nature”: new possibilities for resentment and betrayal. This is also technological, insofar as it involves discursive incisions, cuts and recombinations and something left on the cutting room floor today might serve some unanticipated purpose later. But let’s take the next step and say that this is how all motivation is constructed, all the time—to fill in narrative gaps and cover up glitches. And this is because the form and outcome of any imperative exchange can never be given in advance: there is no natural or pre-arranged harmony between command and demand, request and imposed condition, etc.—each exchange is a disturbance of the nomos.\n\nThe word that may best sum this up, and that can guide us in or idiomclinings across media, is “expectations”—vaguely imperative but also open-ended. Expectations might change before you get around to meeting or failing to meet them, which means you can also modify those expectations, which are never anyway singular enough for the specific case. So, stretch, contract, project, retroject, the expectations informing whatever imperative exchange you are operating within and which are inscribed in the samples you’re deploying and the sample you are. Expectations are the field of possible, virtual and hypothetical ostensives.\n\nSo, the perfection of the imperative, i.e., “technology,” is now to be “processed” through the imperative exchange eventually unfolding into the operator of negation concluding with the declarative doubled imperative (the target of the demand issuing a “cease and desist” backed by the imperative issued from the background ostensive field—“reality”) and the virtual or hypothetical ostensive. An imperative exchange can be more or less symmetrical or asymmetrical, but the perfection of the imperative, involving sustained lower order imperatives, convertible and transitional into each other, is decidedly asymmetrical: petition meeting command.\n\nTell me how to do what you are telling me to do. This characterizes all our interactions with the stack of scenes, which always takes place on a particular scene constituted out of compressed other scenes. So, we can think in terms of a spectrum or continuum: the more swiftly concluded the imperative exchange and transition into the declarative “this is what I do now,” the more we will speak in terms of “technology”; the more prolonged and inconclusive the imperative exchange, the more sentences it generates and therefore the wider the field of hypothetical ostensives, or expectations, the more we veer off into conditionals and hypotheticals, the more we are talking of media.\n\nAnd there is a kind of telos built in in each case: working technologically is working to shorten the imperative exchange and working mediatically is working to prolong it indefinitely. In that case we want (we institute a new scene dedicated to a particular type of imperative exchange) to chart circuits where technological and media practice, respectively, maintain their logic, but can flow into and inform each other. We redirect media exchanges to the new scene, a system of ostensives, imperatives and declaratives, where whatever desires are generated on the media scene can undergo a kind of stress test, simulating various possible outcomes of the imperative exchange.\n\nAnd we look for technological blockages or glitches where a new set of expectations, new possible scenes, can be streamed into the more compact imperative exchanges. Originary grammar then becomes a fully technological problem, one in which we narrow the field of ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits that might be of interest by locating them within scenes we can access through the data trails they leave. We’re always doing what the scene commands or demands, and compliance with or defiance toward that command or demand (which can only be enacted in obedience to another) tests the scene and elicits data for the center, in preparing and curating which we turn the scene we’re on into a compression of the center and its imperatives.\n\nThe more compliance is simple and easily confirmed and rewarded, the more we’re operating technologically, and the more in sync we are with the center; the more compliance is problematic (which is really what defiance amounts to), the more feedback from the center we are requesting—just as Peirce said the goal of any inquiry is the replacement of doubt by certainty, so in expanding our imperative exchanges on any scene we are seeking out ways of concluding them expeditiously and in a way given to authentification. Originary grammar constructs scenes overlooking the compressions of media into technology and the compressions of glitches into media scenes."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-grammar-of-technology-substack",
      "title": "The Grammar of Technology",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 16, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-grammar-of-technology",
      "content": "I’ve been stuck on my definition of technology (the primary one among others yet to be fully integrated) as the perfection of the imperative since I formulated it because, as I now realize, in part with the help of reading some work on Gilbert Simondon, I never thought to integrate the perfected (or undergoing perfection) imperative into the full grammatical stack. So, I’m going to try and work that out here. Hannah Arendt once described science as “acting into nature,” giving it a kind of political resonance, and thinking of technology as issuing imperatives to nature seems to me a refinement of that claim. But technology precedes the relation between “man and nature”: the first technology is ritual, in which words—prayers, imprecations, blessings, etc.—make things happen on a scene, assuming the participants on that scene are aligned with the materials arranged (props, furniture, scenery) to create the conditions for the happening.\n\nOn the orignary scene itself, the gesture of each participant instrumentalizes the gesture of all the others to create the first form of artificiality and anthropomorphics. In fact, the relation between ritual and myth, wherein myth “accounts for” (answers questions laid out by extended because unobeyed imperatives) “failed” ritual, provides a model for thinking about technology and its function within the stacked scene as pedagogical platforms as well.\n\nThe initial and fundamental performative speech act is the ostensive—when, to use J.L. Austin’s famous example, the clergyman announces that “I now pronounce you man and wife” that is clearly like an ostensive, not an imperative. He’s not ordering them to become man and wife, he’s ordaining them as such. This means that technology will always be framed within the ostensive—it is originary, i.e., constitutive of the human, but not primary. It’s essential because the marriage ceremony is also replete with imperatives—telling the couple what to say, to exchange rings, etc., because this “hierarchy” between speech forms is inscribed in the ritual order itself.\n\nWe have technology as soon as an imperative is extended past the immediate relation between imperator and imperatee, and therefore requires some kind of inscription, cooperation and enforcement. When an imperative puts people to work, makes them “part” of a “whole,” it has become technological. And I continue to insist on my assertion, derived from Lewis Mumford, that the first scaled up technologies were the slave labor armies of the ancient empires—and that to this day technology remains an analysis, replacement and scaling up of “broken down” human actions and interactions.\n\nFull exploitation or “optimization” of the grammatical stack would lead us to ask what would be the inappropriate ostensive that initiates the technological move and what would be the inappropriate technologized imperative that integrates technology into the declarative, which is to say, juridical and disciplinary, order. The center, whoever occupies it, most fundamentally distributes—this sounds “materialistic” and in a way it is, crudely so (without enough people getting a share of sustenance no community can subsist) but it is also a compression of ritual scenes affirming the sacred center as, for example, when a priest provides each congregant a wafer in turn.\n\nCenter study, anyway, ultimately wants to override this kind of distinction between the material and the “ideal” or “spiritual”—that is what “compression” should do for us. But the implication for us here is that the extended imperative, given over to perfecting intervention, results from some break in distribution. In the creation of new technologies, then, this is where we would begin to look, and some failure or distribution might be close to the consumer end but will more often, I think, be found further up the line in the organizational chain, or the centered ordinality. Following up on my suggestion, a couple of posts back, that the problem of money is the same as the problem of delegation, suggesting that the extension of the imperative also addresses the problem of delegation seems a promising approach.\n\nThis would certainly provide us with a helpful way of examining contemporary attempts to create technologies that make exchanges trustless. Technology locks its users or those it uses into unalterable and inescapable sequences of acts. This would also be why technological development is so closely associated with military developments and governance in general—it solves problems of coordination in some competitive field where others are working on similar problems.\n\nThe real challenge for this approach would be how effectively it helps us to describe the actual inventions that have defined the history of technology—the specific ways in which \n“efficiency” has been increased. This would oblige us to offer an anthropomorphic account of, for example, Simondon’s distinction between “elements,” “individuals” and “ensembles” in considering technological objects and forms. Elements can be combined in various ways in different technological enterprises; individuals are an ordering of elements in self-sustaining, coherent way (like a car made up of body, engine, the various parts of the engine, which I know nothing about, etc.); ensembles would be the way a technological object fits into a broader environment, e.g., an “industry,” and it is on this level that technology remakes civilizations.\n\nAny technology is reworking and departing from some existing articulation of elements, individuals and ensembles, and this involves a history of copying and design—trying to figure out how the existing articulation might be scaled up or extended, making the elements fit together in new ways into new individuals and then getting to the point, maybe because of the discovery of some new material or form of energy or even an influx of “human resources,” where you need to start looking for some new “fit.” All this would be included under “perfecting” the imperative, in part by breaking it down into ever smaller imperatives to have one piece of the machinery do what another piece “tells” it to do.\n\n“Elements” might be the remains of often repeated minor imperatives, separated (abstracted) and perfected from their history of use, “individuals” are imperative orders ordered by specialized declaratives created through the exchanges with a series of partially failed imperatives, while ensembles are something like “discourses,” or declaratives articulated through connectives, mostly causal and additive ones (“and,” “in order to,” therefore,” etc.) Anyway, all this is tentative and insofar as this discourse is technological, I’m still working (and invite others to work) on perfecting this arrangement of imperatives.\n\nI’ve already introduced the declarative, and the system of discourse in which declaratives are themselves “elements,” and these speech forms would have to be on the ground from the beginning in technological development, but, more broadly, the declarative and discourse are the interfaces between the technological and “society” and “culture,” all of which, at this point, I simply designate the “pedagogical” which itself gets folded into “accreditation”—showing us how to do the things within our technological order. And in this case, seeing the declarative and discourse as “interfacial” fits seamlessly into one of my other definitions of the technological as “pedagogical platforms.”\n\nThere’s something circular here, or paradoxical, which is a sign of being on the right track: technology creates the means of forming the kinds of people needed to operate and keep developing the technology. It is here, moreover, where the inappropriate imperative leading into the declarative becomes even more important than in the direct work on perfecting the imperative itself. I think we would find that most of the discourse on technology, throughout the history of industrialization and probably going back much further, is skeptical to hostile to the latest technological developments. Indeed, technological boosterism always comes across as shallow and naïve, while technological doomerism has a much greater chance of achieving an at least apparent profundity.\n\nThis makes sense because technology first of all issues a massive influx of new imperatives to us that we could not possibly know how to fulfill. They are inappropriate because they interfere with the technological world we have already formed our declaratives and discourses to bound, juridically and disciplinarily. And, in fact, the pressure put on legal structures—questions of property, rights, evidence, procedure, etc.—by new technologies will invariably be a very productive, maybe the most (I think by far) productive way into studying the new imperatives which are really carrying forwards of old imperatives and seeing what they demand of us.\n\nThose declaratives through which the pedagogical platforms being restructured by newly perfected imperative introduce counter-imperatives (those that, in my originary grammar, are issued by “reality”) are in turn valuable feedback to those working on further perfections of the imperative. An absolutely perfect imperative would be one you couldn’t even imagine disobeying, and so there is a kind of tension here with the declarative because a perfect imperative would leave nothing more to be said. This is the technological nightmare that has been haunting the technologized world for a couple of centuries. But that just means the perfect imperative is a chimera, but one spontaneously generated by the continual perfection of the imperatives at hand.\n\nA perfect imperative would also, for that matter, be one the obedients would have to keep extending and transmitting because it would keep causing transformations of the conditions under which the imperative was issued. We will always be puzzled by what the world of automated imperatives is asking of us, and that world is increasingly predicated on anticipating such puzzlement and factoring it in to its own imperatives. In fact, we might want to introduce here the distinctions between the imperative, the interrogative as the prolonged imperative, and the operator of interdiction, the final transition to the declarative order.\n\nIt can be hard to distinguish between disobedience and puzzlement—either way, the imperative is not being fulfilled, leading to the choice, on the part of the imperator, even an automated one, whether to proceed to enforcement or clarification. Clarification would mean that the delay in implementation is being taken as a question, which would never be obvious—even a literal question can be a subtle way of disobeying. The operator of interdiction on the originary declarative scene I have always taken to be a response to a demand rather than a command, because it is the demand that could be deferred by a new ostensive attached to the operator of interdiction, a “negative ostensive” indicating the absence of the object.\n\nSomeone commanding an action could not be put off that easily—you are in fact here and could do what is commanded. But, in addressing technology, we are dealing with commands, at least in addition to demands, so this raises the question of what would be the equivalent of the operator of interdiction. I would say that this is what the pedagogical platform is for—to design operators of interdiction indicating an absence of some piece of the imperative itself that would have to have to be available to operate the rest of the imperative and this would involve a inventory of those pieces and levers of the imperative that are available, much of which would be “internalized” or, better, disciplinarily installed, pieces of the imperative, or what we call “knowledge.”\n\nSo, the completion of technological imperatives entails laying out that inventory of the pieces of the imperative that have been installed through one’s path through the disciplines and which are missing—the problem, then, is to give a name to those missing pieces.\n\nI have started to introduce here the notion of “discourse,” where Gans stops his account of the linguistic forms because discourse is just a sequence of already existing linguistic forms (although in the original edition of The Origin of Language he does go on to discuss discourse, in connection with myth and in a way laying the groundwork for those early chapters of the The End of Culture I draw upon in discussing the relation between ritual and myth). What I’m finding interesting about “discourse” here is that we can see discourse as a kind of technologization of the declarative, as it involves piecing declaratives together through connectives, not only the causal and additive ones I mentioned above, of course, but also contrastive connectives, which function as hinges that enable one to piece together declaratives in unlimited ways.\n\nIn a sense a “theory” is perfecting the imperative to articulate declaratives into a discourse via connective hinges, insofar as theory ultimately comes down to whether particular “becauses” and “neverthelesses” work as hinges, and this scrutiny shapes the declaratives themselves which, as a theory is developed, compress more and more of these hinged pieces of discourse (perhaps the declaratives are elements here and discourses are individuals, but we might make this kind of distinction at various points and levels of the discourse) so that we have implicit “becauses” and “neverthelesses” within words and expressions that need to be decompressed pedagogically as part of the work on the discourse or of the perfecting of the imperative to extend the interrogatives issuing from inappropriate imperatives which requires the use of those hinged pieces of discourse to provide answers.\n\nThis would make discourse a meta-technology, a suggestion which is not original here but I can’t think of anyone who has “grounded” this suggestion anywhere near this “conceretely”—or, to draw once more on Simondon, in such a way that discourse as meta-technology is individualized sufficiently so as to remake the surrounding ensemble of (what we can now see as) meta-technological pieces."
    },
    {
      "slug": "idiomclining",
      "title": "Idiomclining",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 01, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/idiomclining",
      "content": "I’ve been reminded lately of Goodhart’s Law, that once the measure becomes a target it becomes useless as a measure. I can say that my incessant focus on the linguistification or semiotization of everything has always been in adherence to that “law”—every single word, expression or sentence is or contains measures that are liable to become targets. This is the reason for my hostility to words like “cognition,” “consciousness,” “belief,” “communication,” even “memory” and many others, and my insistence of constantly returning to the more primitive elements of language, either in the form of Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes, David Olson’s metalanguage of literacy, originary grammar, or that of the scenicity of every use of every sign, which finds its expression in my reduction of all utterances to the disciplinary space within which they are produced.\n\nAlmost every political concept is vulnerable to Goodhart’s Law, including “rights,” “sovereignty,” “justice,” etc. Goodhart’s Law gives us the logic of bureaucracy. My focus on pedagogy derives from my extreme suspicion of the drifting of measure into target, because any pedagogical outcome is measured by those who know how to do that thing or to judge that thing in specific circumstances. (And, of course, education is one of the worst offenders of Goodhart’s Law, as can be seen in the tendency of education to be reduced to teaching for tests. We supposedly want students to become “critical thinkers”—setting aside for now where that phrase comes from—and so we have to establish markers of critical thinking: a critical thinker does X, Y, and Z.\n\nFine, but, now, we have to determine what will serve as a measure of X, Y and Z, and in the end we have to be able to look at a sample and agree that we all see “Y,” but there will always be enough remainder as to send us back to the drawing board—and, have we been thinking critically through the process? How would we measure that? And if we found a measure for our own critical thinking in the process of assessing others’ critical thinking could we then name the things that we were doing so as to think critically in such a way as to increase the likelihood we would do them again? Such a thing are, in fact, possible, because learning does take place, but only through a mapping of iterable linguistic moves that would be practiced and articulated mistakenly until a new idiom is created in conversation with the idiom we started with—and neither idiom would find arbitrary, bureaucratic abstractions like “critical thinking” of any use.)\n\nThe most important measure I have taken in this regard is centering the concept of idiom as the condition of all discourse: the protection offered by “idiom” is that it ensures that we don’t forget that any measure is an idiom, a naming, a labeling, a designation that depends on those who can look at that thing and say “this is the same,” thereby iterating the fundamental gesture of language and that, by the same token (tokens are themselves idioms) so is every target. What you want to measure follows from what you want to do and what you want to do rests upon a series of other measures. You are yourself a measure of the scenes upon which you are located, and that scene is measuring you in various ways and if you were to try and turn yourself as measure into a target (which is hard to even imagine) you would be rearranging the entire field of measurements, thereby ensuring you will “miss.”\n\nThe problem, then, is to make “idiom” generative as a concept, so that it would do the kind of work we want done by, say, “cognition,” which allows for identifying features of thinking and knowing that can be in principle broken down into elements and thereby measured, assessed and tracked. We want to do this completely within language, rather than stepping out into the metalanguage of literacy, of which “cognition” is an excellent example. We can now also keep in mind that such questions are also questions for the training of AIs, which “idiom” must prove its superiority in and according to measures intelligible to those working within the idioms of the “cognitive sciences.”\n\nI also want “idiom” to serve as an counter to “viral” theories of language, traceable back to William Burroughs, which subverts consciousness, cognition and subjectivity by radicalizing the mimetic tendency of language so as to make discourse something one “catches,” like a cold, rather than something one uses and masters or, for that matter, enters and organizes. I want to counter viral theories because they clearly carry a lot of truth (maybe more than the cognitive sciences) but concede what I would not—the possibility of deferral, which makes it possible to supplant virality with anthropomorphics. The idiom is conversant with computation, as coding is itself a field of idioms, while remaining one step ahead of and one step behind computation.\n\nThis is a good time to return to my revision of information theory, which involves measuring meaning in terms of the greater the unpredictability of any utterance or sample the greater the distance from the idiom issuing the sample and the greater the predictability of the sample the more one is within the idiom, with the ideal, maximum information generating utterance being utterly unintelligible to those not conversant in your idiom and transparent to those who are, with ever greater distinction in the constitution of the idiom. This provides a basis for computation while indicating computation’s limits.\n\nAn idiom implies organization around a center such that there are ever new things to point to at the center and that pointing at those things increases interest in the center. This is what makes it unintelligible to anyone not part of that circle. But the more inexhaustible the idiom, the more translatable it must be, on the condition that it converts outer circles into conveyors or, let’s say, measures of the idiom. This transference of the idiom takes place through a series of exchanges—we can imagine a circle behind the first circle whom members of the first circle initiate into the idiom. Any idiom contains the possibility of all other idioms or stands as a measure of any possible idiom, but the deferral power of an idiom resides in the range of exchanges it implicitly refers or alludes to, So, the transference of the idiom across successive layers of exchange is actually constitutive of the original idiom, distinguished by the back and forth of the exchanges and the way they inform the original circle.\n\nWe could measure, through hedges, contrasts, exemplifications, compression, etc., the degree to which any idiom of marked by anticipatory exchanges with other idioms. But this in turn sets off the more inclusive idiom from all the others, returning us to its original state. We are not dealing with stable factuality here—any idiom might be maximally inclusive or exclusive depending on the flows at the given moment of transfer translations across the idioms. The same idiom might be infinitely complex or extremely simple depending, to stick with our original metaphor, on whether the outer circles turn away or towards the inner circles (or vice versa).\n\nIt is also in the nature of an idiom that it is never wholly present in some isolatable form—even those features I mentioned above can become so formulaic as to mark belonging to a impenetrable bureaucratic space. There must always be space for idiom generation within the idiom.\n\nSo, whatever measure we are to apply must be applicable with each and every sample issued. We are always reconstituting the originary scene, which depended on everyone’s gesture, but the above paragraph, emphasizing the uncapturability of language might seem to be of little help. But let’s consider, in the most minimal way possible, the issuance of signs on a scene, imagining a continuum from the most imminently dangerous to the most safely buffered scene (always keeping in mind that such designations can change in an instance—don’t try and turn “safely buffered scene” into a target!). So, a scene in which the structures of deferral have broken down and the most extreme mimetic violence becomes imminent—which is to say every attempt to decelerate only accelerates the turn toward violence so extreme that even the formation of smaller groups that suppress violence within themselves faces overwhelming resistance—might require one of the two following types of sign: one, a completely improvised sign that manages to measure the incoming waves of violence in all their various strengths and variations and mirror them back to their agents in such a way as to interfere with the step-by-step acceleration; or, two, the most exact and easily repeatable iteration of the most traditionally effective sign issued in the way most likely to be effective way.\n\nEither one might have the best chance of deferring violence depending on conditions that couldn’t be predicted: the completely improvised and reinvented sign assumes that we are thrown back into a new originary scene while the exact iteration assumes we are thrown back into the originary ritual, and at moments of crisis there is an oscillation between those two possibilities.\n\nMeanwhile, the buffered scene likewise presents us with a polarity: a sufficiently buffered scene allows for a heightened playfulness and awareness of the hypothetical, contingent and improvised nature of all sign use and replaces scenic caution with an attitude of endless rehearsal of semiotic possibilities; at the same time, the buffered scene allows for the most thoughtless, tacit, inattentive gesture, like holding your ID up to the sensor the 1,000th time you’ve entered a restricted area—more and more of social reality can slide into this thoughtlessness, which can open up to playfulness but might also be where playfulness itself ends once one runs out of variations, routines and audiences. So, if we want to name what we might be doing as sign users so as to encompass these continua we need to think in terms of a mistaken measure of all of them at once; mistaken because once a sign or sample has been issued it modifies the field the sample was meant to measure—there is an originary debt here insofar as the effect of what sample one issues depends upon someone else picking it up.\n\nThe implication is that the issuance of a sample must somehow be hypothetical and high-stakes, distinct and iterable, all at once. It’s in the present tense while reaching backward and forward. The “as if” (combining “like” with “or”) comes into play here: you issue an improvised sign as if it is the most strictly enforced ritualistic gesture possible; you issue the endlessly and exactly iterated gesture as if it has just been improvised; you play on the scene as if all the buffers might collapse at any time and all the rehearsal finds its use in the oscillation on the dangerous scene; and you enter the dangerous scene by distinguishing on the spot between everything that can still be taken for granted (maximizing the tacit) thereby rendering the scene potentially legible while singling out the swiftest path to verticality. If we want to identify the “human” it’s going to be in the navigation of these rapidly shifting shoals. It is this navigation that creates the idiom, which is characterized by its affordance of these oscillatory relations.\n\nWhat you want to do, then, is make your idiom both more idiomatic and more transferable—you want to be able to speak with the person you are speaking with so that you are speaking only to them, on the very topic that drew you into that exchange, in such a way as to make that topic the center of a scene that places only the two of you on it, while at the same time in such a way that either you or your interlocutor might speak with anyone and everyone about that newly created “topic” so as to generate new idioms in each new exchange. This kind of stance requires a relationship to the resources of your idiom and surrounding idioms, and to the relationship between those idioms and their respective resources, which means it requires a stance of semiotic research.\n\nI would like to call this kind of research “clining,” drawing upon an essay on something I called “upclining” I wrote quite a few years ago in an effort to engage with processes of “grammaticization” in language, i.e., the tendency of expressions to transition from semantic to grammatical functions. The general idea I had at the time was retrieving grammaticized signs and re-semanticizing them, in what was a kind of (Walter) Benjaminian sense that the grammaticized term crystallized a kind of “memory” that might “flash up in a moment of danger.” But the notion of “cline,” or gradual, imperceptible shifts from one state to another, which is preserved in “incline” and “decline” (but not “upcline,” which is therefore necessarily a neologism—or, for that matter, other ways things might “cline”) fits the thinking in terms of ever more discernable and discrete thresholds I’m trying to encourage here, and “upcline” seems a way of “resisting” the more passive “incline” and catastrophic “decline.”\n\nAnd dedicating oneself to setting relatively immobilized “pieces” of language back into motion seems a good way of thinking about operating within an idiom. You will always be mistaken in doing so, precisely because you’ll be violating some convention or expectation, but you also can’t go wrong because you present a opportunity for an adjusted response on the part of others—it’s a more semiotic way of speaking about stopping and thinking before doing as itself a kind of doing. So, “idiomclining” instead of “critical thinking” or other bureaucratized categories designed for mass test taking. Idiomclining is the interface between the human and computation.\n\nIt is a way of working with signs as both traceable back to the originary gesture and marked with every usage thereafter and also as renewed with each iteration. You deepen your idioms but welcoming and “naturalizing” others and if there is a kind of method here it is in the treatment of idioms you must transfer translate into your own, as there will always be conversions (adjectives and nouns and verbs into each other—and even, why not, prepositions) and compressions that create metascenes upon which the various idioms can cohabitate. In the end the anthropomorphic idiom is nothing but this process of conversion and compression, moving through and translating the other idioms so as to derive imperatives out of declaratives and ostensives out of imperatives so as to deliver up to the central intelligence more and more samples around which researchers can virtually gather and say that this is the same."
    },
    {
      "slug": "rotating-dictatorship",
      "title": "Rotating Dictatorship",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 17, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/rotating-dictatorship",
      "content": "A few posts back I suggested “pointman” as a possible title for the occupant of the center (so I don’t have to keep writing “occupant of the center”) but in doing so I continued to overlook the fact that the perfect term already exists and has for a long time: dictator. This completely innocuous and perfectly descriptive term for whoever governs directly and without formal hindrances dates back, of course, to the Roman Republic, where “dictators” would be appointed to see the republic through some emergency (that, presumably, normal means of consensual rule, i.e., convoluted dictatorship, were inadequate to). My reason for rejecting (or deferring) this term is the massive accumulation of moral opprobrium piled upon it through the 20th century, to the point where, like “fascist” or “Nazi,” it just became a way of describing anyone who, say, prioritized the safety of potential crime victims over addressing whatever conditions or trauma we imagine to have driven the criminal.\n\nOne would have to introduce your use of the term by wading through the accretion of misuses that, of course, anyone will be free to reintroduce or attribute to you at any point along the way of your discourse. But maybe I don’t have to concern myself with that, since I’m not going to be going mainstream in any familiar manner, and if the word “dictator” serves as a kind of repellent to those concerned how their liberal friends assess their associations perhaps that should be embraced as a filter. Conceptual clarity has to precede all.\n\nThe question of the dictator is situated within the question of “the West,” a certain version of which has been ideologically embedded since WW 2 and has been vigorously contested in recent years. The debate usually concerns intellectual and ritual traditions, on the one hand, and genealogies, on the other—which peoples, which ideas, genuinely comprise the West. I reduce “the West” to a simple observation or definition: the West is where the problem of “tyranny” is a perpetual concern. Is there even a concept like “dictator” in any other civilization? Other civilizations have a much more direct line back to sacral kingship than the West has had for a long time—the experience of the ancient Greek city-states, where the sacral king was usurped by a ruler relying upon no ritual validation, and supported, instead, by money (to pay for supporters but also to weaken the sacral order), has not been replicated anywhere, I think.\n\nPhilosophy, in its break with myth and poetry, emerges as a response to the problem of tyranny, which raises the question of what is a “good” ruler and by extension social order. Furthermore, philosophy’s initial “mandate” was to determine the meaning of words, because one of the effects of “tyranny” is to destabilize meaning. All of the classical and modern philosophical problems, of ethics, epistemology, ontology, and so on are all tributaries of the problem of tyranny, and the limit of philosophy is that it can’t recognize this without surrendering the privileged status it still clings to.\n\nJudaism also makes its own contribution here by positing a God who is King of Kings and to whom, then, any existing King, however sacralized, must be subordinated and by whom he will eventually be humbled. The linear history invented by the Hebrew Bible is essentially the fall of one arrogant king after another until we get to the end when we can all acknowledge God as the only real king. Modern, progressive teleologies are really just secular versions of this, and modern democracy in particular is driven by a virtual paranoid terror of the return of the tyrant, always conveniently lurking behind your electoral opponent.\n\nChristianity restored sacral kingship for quite a while, but the split within Western Christianity was precisely over the question of the “tyranny” of the Pope, portrayed in the most lurid manner in Protestant propaganda. And it is from the Protestant (a whole religious tendency calls itself a “protest”) insistence on no one having a right to tell anyone else how to read the Bible (because that would be tyranny over one’s very soul) is the origin of modern democracy. With all the palace coups, conquests, peasant revolts, etc., that have marked history everywhere, nowhere, I think have these struggles ever been framed in terms of “tyranny,” i.e., ungrounded rule.\n\nAnd outside of the sacral rule cannot, in fact be grounded—popular will was a stop-gap measure that managed to hold things together long enough to take us through industrialization but we can now see that any particular configuration or representation of the “will” of the “people” can be as easily denounced as “tyrannical” as the bloodiest and most brazen “usurper.” Robert Filmer already saw this in the 17th century. Once you can put the king on trial for “treason,” there is no turning back.\n\nBut this account leaves out the fact that the West has seen vigorous and effective governance, in both the state and corporate spheres. It turns out that rule is possible without “grounds,” and that maybe the absence of grounds, ultimately a philosophical, i.e., fraudulent, problem, is just nostalgia for sacred kingship. Before sacral kingship, though, there was the Big Man, who usurped the ritual center and took over distribution on his own “authority.” A viable narrative for the recovery of the West might argue that the West has conserved within the transitions through various modes of kingship, that original, revolutionary usurpation—a revolution far more radical than any attempted since the French Revolution.\n\nThe West is the inheritor of the Big Man revolution—as for why this should be the case, well, here we can welcome all those intellectual, political and even genetic genealogies of the West. The Big Man, in usurping the ritual center, places himself in the company of those terrifying metapersons who ruled the “primitive” community. The only real “rule” for the Big Man is that he indeed distribute, at least to those whom he needs to fend off any challenges from those “reactionaries” who would like to return to the older ritual order or from other, prospective, Big Men. The Big Man is domesticated through the obligations of chiefdom and then the various kinds of kingship, but all that really serves to occlude from view the usurper within.\n\nIssuing a command makes you at least a little bit of a usurper and the immediate impulse is to derive that command from some metaperson, however indirectly (the “will of the people,” as the saying “vox populi, vox deus” already suggests, is a kind of metaperson, mythically constructed)—and one is not wrong in doing so insofar as the command does come from language, the ultimate ritual machinery. But meta-awareness that one is invoking a semiotically constructed metaperson makes it a stretch to invoke him in good faith.\n\nAmerica, the furthest point West of the West, is where the Big Man revolution can be unapologetically restored. I may be mythologizing here but the mixture of the assumption that he who is in charge should be in charge along with the seemingly contradictory assumption that anyone in charge could be dispensed with fairly easily is quintessentially American. Authority is absolute and contingent at the same time. This is the only way to fully recoup the Big Man revolution (against the Left, which is really primarily, ferociously, primordially, opposed to precisely this) and “solve” the problem of tyranny is through the establishment of a rotating dictator system.\n\nIn the background here is the notion of sortition, or the determination of ruler by lot, also from the Greeks; my own system, of course, is singularized succession in perpetuity which on the face of it is the direct opposite of sortition, but if we consider that once we’ve passed the threshold beyond which being dethroned doesn’t mean death, power can be passed around with facility, and then we approach the point where we might say that anyone might give ruling a try for a bit. The more market approximate (or market virtualization) approach to succession I suggested in my recent Originary Debt, Credit, Succession post fits this assumption.\n\nIf those amongst the ruling elite trust each other sufficiently, as they must if something better than the troubled American imperium will result from today’s collective cluelessness about the problem of tyranny, then we can easily imagine the chief executive of the central intelligence company simply handing-off command to the successor who best meets that moment and perhaps receiving it back in return at a later point. And this also leaves open the possibility of introducing a bit of randomness into the selection process, maybe first of all in the lower ranks, to give people a chance to govern who might otherwise be overlooked.\n\nAfter all, in the system I’m hypothesizing, having some direct role in governance will be the central way of acquiring respect and dignity, and it will also be an essential component of pedagogical practices. If someone who is given a chance proves incompetent, it would not be too difficult to ease him into selecting the “right” successor.\n\nSo, the rotating dictator system combines extreme concentration of power with simplicity of replacement of those exercising it. This is a good time to review the function of the juridical in this set-up, because I have already been exploring at some length the possibility of bringing a lawsuit against the “dictator” (I’ll be removing the scare quotes now). Lawsuits, properly understood, can only be brought after an action has been taken, and only by those with standing, i.e., injured in some way by that action. (So, the kinds of restraints we see from district court federal judges now on Trump’s executive orders are not lawsuits in any meaningful sense—they are just the invention of a new form of partisan power.)\n\nIn that case, the power to carry out any action is not hindered. Still, the awareness of the likely success of a future lawsuit serves as a kind of prior restraint, not only for the dictator but for those implementing his commands. Our current polarization, in which the party in power understands they are likely to be criminalized once out of power, makes this very palpable. Just like the party system seeks to defer civil war by internalizing it into rotation in power, the possibility of a lawsuit against the dictator in a rotating system internalizes this kind of civil war scenario. Ruling can never be risk free, and even civil war can never be once and for all eliminated as a possibility, but the dictator will not be defenseless against lawsuits.\n\nThe problem with the impeachment process under the US Constitution is that it replicates putting the king on trial, which means that the president has the right to defend himself but not to file countercharges. If the president could seek to remove from power and impose further penalties on those participating in a failed impeachment and removal attempt, impeachment would become an entirely different proposition. And that is the way to look at it—legal “weaponry” would be built into the dictator’s actions from the beginning, so you would need an extremely strong case to charge him and, therefore, intimidate him or his team even prior to any action.\n\nWho, then, is appointing the judges? This may seem like a more important question than it actually is. Judges are part of the governing system so they are appointed, more or less directly, by the dictator, or chief executive of the central intelligence company. Any form of governance, once it attains a certain scale, will need some kind of juridical order—the carve out of the juridical from the ritual happens some place along the transition from sacral to divine kingship (the ancient Greeks had an extremely robust judicial system, suing each other all the time in what I imagine were fairly wild scenes, and this will always be the case with republics or democracies with unsecure central command structures), simply because at that point commands from the center are no longer transparent and generate disputes—disputes which the king can’t adjudicate himself requiring that he delegate.\n\nEven an army will necessarily create military tribunals, in which decisions by commanders might be examined. Administration is merely a streamlined juridical order, with what we call “bureaucracy” a degenerate form (kind of like, for Plato, oligarchy is a degenerate form of aristocracy). Administration implements commands and always has decision and appeals processes precisely because there is almost always more than one way to implement a command, and there will be parties on the various sides of doing so. Imperatives change as they are prolonged. This all means that judges and administrators (all descendants of priests and scribes) should be loyal to the system and that also means loyal to whoever is governing at the moment—their role is keep the vendetta at bay, both from below (tribal conflicts) and from above (systemic resentments instrumentalized by a section of the governing class) and this enforces what appears to be “neutrality” but is really just preservation of commands from the center.\n\nIn dealing with specific cases, including those involving the dictator, even the one to whom they owe their appointment, they will remain loyal to their role and respect the boundaries constitutive of vendetta deferral. Otherwise, the very order required by the dictator himself is weakened. So, if the case against the dictator is very strong, having a “loyal” judge wouldn’t really help (there will also be other judges, who might be less “loyal” and each judge would anyway, like anyone in the governing class, have to weigh the likelihood of various outcomes of any such lawsuit). Unless we are talking about a very desperate man, but in that case we’re also talking about a different kind of order. I am always assuming an order in which good data is king—as long as we don’t have such an order, it is toward it that anyone primarily concerned with governance should urge the powerful to move."
    },
    {
      "slug": "compression",
      "title": "Compression",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 02, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/compression",
      "content": "A single sample includes the whole. This sentence is advocacy for a wild form of thinking, one involving abduction and an endless range of constantly re-examined (even self-re-examining) hypotheses. Even when you have lots of samples, you’re always hypothesizing from a single one of them insofar as there is always a privileged sample through which you compute all the rest as iterations. There’s a method of composition implicit here as well, in which each successive sentence would hypothesize from the previous one as a sample. Such a mode of composition would create a kind of mapping of the reality that is simultaneously being generated.\n\nAnd all this implies compression, which is a product and hinge point of disciplinarity and what I would point to as a sign pointing to the center and therefore as the meaning of transcendence. Peli Grietzer, in his “A Theory of Vibe” (easy to find), examines the kind of compression manifested in the easy to feel but hard to define “vibe” as “autoencoding,” i.e., rules for enabling the reconstruction of some phenomenon through the disassembly and reassembly of its components. Creating such rules is a moving target and hence subject to approximation and improvement, drawing upon a flexible “canon” (that’s Grietzer) of texts and objects to create a certain aesthetic and historical effect and affect.\n\nEven trying to describe a particular vibe involves compressed language: e.g., a certain film gives of a certain mid-90s urban vibe poised between the “vulgarity” of the “Reagan” 80s and the “return of history” post 9/11, effected through the foregrounding of some 90s-specific technology, landscapes, event, etc. “A vibe is therefore… an abstractum that cannot be separated from its concreta” (Grietzer, again). So, the practice of generating vibes would be to simultaneously get more abstract and more concrete, more extractive from your materials so as to generate samples that enable a wide range of hypothetical selvings to hang together and find themselves to be part of the sampling.\n\nCompression, of course, has resonances (which Grietzer draws upon) with contemporary technological developments regarding AI and machine learning, but I think it also helps us to understand what makes for a successful and enduring ritual. The initial ritual on the originary scene would have had to compress a series of iterated gestures into a shared gesture that would enable each participant on the scene to look through the scene at the other participants and to further check and refine his own gesture. So, compression is scenic design; meaning is compression. If we go through the sequence of speech forms developed in Gans’s The Origin of Language we see a series of compressions as well: the imperative recovers from scenic implosion by introducing time into the scene, thereby compressing scattered ostensive gestures into deferring to the other; the interrogative does the same by compressing opposing imperatives by prolonging the initiating one so as to allow for a new mode of deferral to a new world of imperatives; and the declarative waves the demanded object away while preserving the possibility of its restoration, but in a new form that will reconfigure the scene.\n\nThe declarative compresses the world into a range of possible ostensives. At the end of each compression is an exponential increase in the number of possible scene invokable or reconstructable out of the sign, and this increase is the accretion of deferrality so that activating one of the possible scenes leaves all the others in what we can now call, as we replace vocabulary drawn from older media with that drawn from emergent media, “latent space.” We could decompose any utterance or sample into so many articulated and articulable, within a shifting hierarchy of probabilities, possible ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives.\n\nThis is the kind of thing we do, in a commonsensical way, when someone explains something and someone else asks, well, what do you want to do about it—which is essentially a prolonged imperative demanding that an imperative be extracted from some declarative order.\n\nThis kind of decomposition or disassembly within the declarative itself is enabled by Anna Wierzbicka’s natural semantic primes, as evidenced by her own explications, which take a single word and break it down into a series of utterances that are invariably highly scenic. Every utterance is a compression of someone thinking about what someone says about what someone sees someone else doing when… Every word beyond the primes is therefore a compression, and is therefore always proto-disciplinary, requiring some shared scene upon which an ostensive might always lie at the end of however long a series of exchanges. This intensification of compression as the disciplinary space becomes more specialized is the reason for what is seen as the “jargon” of academic and scientific spaces (or, really, any kind of expertise).\n\nThe reason the use of a strange word or phrase becomes strictly enforced is that the installation of that expression resulted from the trial and error of realizing that received vocabularies didn’t allow for the shared attention needed to generate new questions. And once someone leaves the discipline, even for a short time, upon his return its conceptual order will be alien, in part because one has been stripped away from that shared attention but also because such highly artificial (artificial in the sense of being explicitly designed and redesignable) vocabularies are always subject to change and the accretion of new nuances and implicit distinctions.\n\nThe greater propensity of academics to write in long noun-phrases, often heading sentences, and thereby breaking with the almost compulsory subject-verb opening (even if with a brief introductory phrase), and which seems arbitrary and obnoxious to others, is really first of all a way of saving time (writing fewer words) but also a way of “name checking” a set of reference points all need to share for the discourse to proceed. This is why I am always working on developing a specialized vocabulary, or idiom, for center studies, even if it impedes popularization (never much of a possibility, anyway)—it enhances compressibility, and hence the exponentiality of the growth of name-able scenes.\n\nI’ve said a few times that, if pressed on what I “believe,” my answer will ultimately be “language,” which seems to me far more miraculous than anything believed in by adherents to other faiths. And, of course, it’s also far more commonplace—a miracle occurring trillions of times every day. Believing in language is continually testing its compressibility, which provides me with a new way of returning to my privileging of the present, as in the present tense. I’ve made this argument quite a few times and do so completely seriously—one way I’ve put it, fairly recently, is to say that the past tense is too mythological and the future too pseudo-prophetical and therefore pompous.\n\nWhat you want to say about the past or future can be said in the present tense, if only you compress sufficiently. Doing so imposes a kind of discipline that sharpens the mind because you are constantly reminded that whatever you know of the past is only what you are receiving, organizing, enhancing and interpreting right now as you bring others’ attention to it and that whatever you can say of the future is redistributing the proportions of evidencies in the present which, sufficiently redistributed, does issue in novelty (there is no creation from nothing, at least not for us mortals)—and when you force that upon your attention you can train your attention on the repositories of the past, the archives, you have been drawing upon, how they have been transmitted, how you would like to be transmitting them now and which organs of perception and thought might single out otherwise neglected features of the evidencies for some shift in resolution and articulation. This seems to me a worthy heir to ritual, as it involves the continual offering of scenes around which anyone and everyone might gather.\n\nThis also means that what people often like to speak of in terms of “dialogue” are really cases of inter-language or transfer translations, which is to say some reciprocal modification of idioms, which in the end becomes compression. Memes, of course, are compressions. Resistance to compression is a condition of sustained and extensive intelligibility—if tens or hundreds of millions of people are to share a “culture” (i.e., a pedagogical and accrediting network) for decades or even more such that, for example, a hit movie still “strikes” audiences more or less the same, or at least trackable, way, fifty years later, a certain hostility to compression is probably necessary.\n\nIn discursive terms, resistance to compression takes the form of examples and reformulations. You get to generalism, universalism and humanism through enough examples and enough of putting things “in other words” so as to spread sameness over compressions. In other wording unwinds compression by allowing for sentences resisting differentiation to be reiterated over multiple occasions. You might say this is the linguistic form taken by the High/Low vs. the Middle strategy of power centralization. Of course, that in itself is a kind of in other wording, which is hard to avoid when discussing resistance to compression, but if aligning the high, middle and low, or center intermediaries and peripherals (to use Chris Bond’s more recent terms), something that it is not clear has ever been done in a sustained way, is the goal, compression must be the way because this articulation can only be effected pedagogically and pedagogy is compressive if it recreates an idiom.\n\nMy own energies are of course devoted to making center studies/anthropomorphics the one big compression; indeed, how could one assert that we are heading to an idiomatic future without also laying claim to the idiom of idioms, the idiom compressing idiom?\n\nHere is Grietzer again:\n\nOne reason the mathematical-cognitive trope of autoencoding matters, I would argue, is that it describes the bare, first act of treating a collection of objects or phenomena as a set of states of a system rather than a bare collection of objects or phenomena—the minimal, ambient systematization that raises stuff to the level of things, raises things to the level of world, raises one-thing-after-another to the level of experience. (And, equally, the minimal, ambient systematization that erases nonconforming stuff on the authority of things, marginalizes nonconforming things to make a world, degenerates experience into false consciousness.)\n\nSo, a vibe involves the habit of treating an object as part of a collection of objects (all of which are “like” each other in some way), which is to say as a single sample that includes the whole, or a system, to which the addition of each object, including the addition of existing objects as new kinds of objects within the system modifies the system in ways that still resonate with the constitutive vibe. This is non-totalizable in the sense that there is no position or rule outside of this “world” that would give us the world—only continual training on reality, or things out there outside of this world that might find points of likeness within it can count as agency within the system. Grietzer’s parenthetical observation, furthermore, gives us a way of identifying “moves” that violate what we could call the rules of the “language game,” as per Wittgenstein—“erasing” stuff “on the authority of things,” rather than the authority of a continually retrained system.\n\nI would say this means continuing to double down on compression against in other wording, and, even if in other wording and exemplifying have their place that place should be one that, rather than reducing compressed material to an existing field of commonplaces, brings the other words or examples into the system as things in a defamiliarized way. All this concerns our styles of thinking and making, first of all, but I think that makes it directly relevant to scenic design with machine learning and algorithmic governance insofar as something as simple but increasingly difficult as correct labeling is likely to become the primary human vocation under such machinery.\n\nLet’s say you’re researching (and, now, everything is researching) some newly coined medical term in 19th century psychiatry and want to follow its operations across languages and disciplines—how often it appears, where it is approved of or criticized, how it spread and later declined, differently in different places, various implications of its translations, how it licensed certain medical diagnoses and practices, contributed to the formation of institutions and was implicated in the transformation of pedagogy, etc. You’d be doing document searches (imagine LLMs but with the ability to trace any outputs back to their original inputs) with increasingly precise questions aiming at locating, not only that term under specific institutional, historical and conceptual conditions, but terms “touched” by or “vibrating” (vibe-ing) with that term in various states of the system.\n\nYou get to the point where, as with any real research, you are finding things you didn’t know you were looking for and which therefore take you well beyond the search terms you started with to search terms you keep remaking with each search and the returns of each search, as you learn along with the machine. As a result, every medical term you encounter now will vibe for you in a similar way, as long as you “keep faith” with compression and the integrity or selving of the idiom, and refuse to marginalize (in other words or exemplify) new things entering the system and thereby exclude them from the auto-encoding process.\n\nWe do have an alternative to in other wording and exemplifying when it comes to unwinding or unfolding the system either for explicatory or initiatory purposes, and that is translation into the primes, which continues to raise the intellectual demands of entering the system while making it accessible to anyone wishing to enter. The system is both totally other and yet the same in each iteration—not coincidentally, this is itself an iteration of the problem of succession—and maintaining the functionality of such a system means being able to show how it is absolutely and necessarily even more the same while being even more wildly and disorientingly other at each point along with way.\n\nAnd, methodologically, this does come down to writing sentences in the present tense that have to “reformat” other possible sentences as noun, adjectival, adverbial and prepositional phrases modifying each other with increasing precision. That is, a writing class, dedicated to learning how to write the single sentence of the world. I don’t see what other than that one could want in terms of “transcendence.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-debt-credit-succession",
      "title": "Originary Debt, Credit, Succession",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 19, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/originary-debt-credit-succession",
      "content": "I’ve been positing what would have to be seen as fairly radical “post-economics” theory in some recent posts and it seems like a good time to see if I can focus on it directly and in a sustained way here. I’ve been working with Colin Drumm’s twin concepts: “outside spread” and “outside option.” The outside spread is the lender of last resort and the “outside option” is whoever within a monarchical order might be leveraged as a possible replacement to the king. Drumm, in his dissertation, where he develops these concepts, is interested in the ways in which problems regarding money intersected with succession questions in pre-modern English society, working this analysis through a study of Shakespeare’s plays.\n\nThe crisis of the Stuart monarchy (which I am not going to analyze here), culminating in the civil war, transformed the relation between the outside spread and the outside option—it internalized both. The monarch is displaced from its central position by the central bank, so the outside spread is now directly funding the government, while the outside option is brought inside in the form of the rotation in power (a kind of simulation and deferral of civil war) between the parties, each of which tries to undermine credit when the other is in power. And no party could usurp the system because those managing the outside spread can always induce crises that make continued rule untenable.\n\n(At a certain point, I am hypothesizing but as yet have not explored, the intelligence agencies come into oscillation with the central bank.) So, rotation in rule is mediated through fluctuations in the outside spread. This schematic account led me, more recently, to propose a simplification of “cultural” and “political” analysis to the concept of credit—everyone is trying to increase and expand their own credit (the confidence others—and especially others in whom others have more confidence—have in them) and the only way to do this is by buttressing or undermining the credit of the central banker or outside spread.\n\nWe could then end up with interesting questions like how Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man is meant to affect his own credibility as a publishable author, the credibility of the publishing business, and, ultimately, the credit system of American capitalism as a whole, in the short, medium and long runs. I’d like to do this at some point, but for now it’s an aside.\n\nIf I have accurately described the operating principles of the current, “Anglo” world order, and we want to replace this order with the Ve/ortexical one theorized in the previous post, the difference between the outside spread and inside optionality needs to be collapsed. It has to become a single mode of operation. This is the intuition shared by reactionaries hoping to restore absolute monarchy as well as modern “totalitarians,” fascist, Nazi or communist, who hope to establish some kind of “monistic” order, free of “bourgeois” contradictions and crisis. Clearly there are blaring red warning sides for anyone wandering into this territory, and I am cognizant of the Hayekian critique “discrediting” any such order in terms of the impossibility of information being gathered up, analyzed and used for decision making from any central location—the demon of “planning.”\n\nMy way of addressing this is by having singularized succession in perpetuity swallow up in the succession problem the outside spread so that credit is conferred by the “pointman” or, to anticipate a future post, the “distributed dictator.” The more everyone in every position of any authority whatsoever is publicly choosing their successor and even ranking possible successors, and doing so publicly, on a kind of digital bulletin board (on which we would see fluctuations, like stock prices, which these nominations would replace), the more the pointman is determining credit, thereby “counter-usurping” the central bank.\n\n(Some of Trump’s recent attempts to subject the chair of the Federal Reserve to his will might be seen as a kind of faint prefiguration of that transformation.) This, then, would also solve Hayek’s information problem, insofar as relations between institutions within supply chains would exchange information through attempts to engineer usurpations in other institutions or companies, giving another form to the internalization of the outside option—institutions would directly test one another’s robustness and signal new needs, dissatisfaction with current operations, etc., in this way. And, since each institution would be competing with the others in recruiting new talent and therefore seeing to the production of the needed talent, the system would be run on “pedagogical futures,” i.e., pedagogical practices within educational institutions upon which institutions would acquire “options” by providing ever more discretely dissected models of necessary practices. So, that’s what I have laid out, here and there, so far.\n\nI’m not going to say that money will or must be completely eliminated (of course, I’m also not saying it won’t be), but I’m going to hypothesize the possibility so as to bring into focus the relationship between credit and succession as two sides of deferral. To bring credit and succession together, we can consider that money and delegation are two sides of the same problem. In fact, delegation is itself a kind of credit, and conferral of confidence upon someone to advance the commands of the delegator. So, singularized succession in perpetuity would have to solve both problems; or, rather, turn them into problems of data security for teams competing to occupy the center.\n\nWe have to imagine what could appear to be the most static, inflexible mode of power transmission, absolute power transmitted from one power holder to the next, as even more capable of agentic initiative as even the most optimistic theoretical models of the market confers on its avatars. We are assuming that governance depends on knowledge, and that increases in power will coincide with access to well collected and curated data—even someone who, say, manages to pull together a mob to massacre the governing class and install himself in power will simply face the same problem, or his successor or his successor will.\n\nThis is why intelligence agencies rise to power and essentially govern in the liberal, democratic world—it’s the only way to ensure the continuity or any governance if succession is not directed from the center. The president or prime minister relies on information to make decisions, and those with the best information will make the best decisions (leaving aside individual differences in capability—which anyway come down to ability to assess and use information), which means those providing the information are really making the decisions, Even an alert ruler well aware of the manipulations and subversions of intelligence agencies and therefore capable of pushing back and demanding precise, provable, annotated answers to his questions is merely making the intelligence agencies better rather than reducing his dependence on them.\n\nSo, central intelligence does and should govern, with the director of central intelligence the pointman. Continually improving central intelligence would make this the evident and, eventually, accepted reality—central intelligence is currently disastrous precisely because it’s not allowed to make decisions that it clearly is making, and therefore has to make them in such indirect and surreptitious ways that they are ultimately bad decisions.\n\nAnd the intelligence agencies are “always already” spread out through all institutions—again, necessarily so, insofar as that’s where the information is. It’s not clear that the line between gathering intelligence and creating events can be maintained—just setting up listening stations and sending out feelers involves the creation of events. Instigating criminal or insurrectionary activity may be counter-productive most of the time and probably often derives from the “metrics” used for internal assessments, but even here it’s not too hard to imagine scenarios where infiltrated institutions (i.e., any institution) might be made to demonstrate their robustness precisely by integrating and neutralizing instigations within their internal functioning and thereby integrating more seamlessly with intelligence.\n\nBut by the same token, these various branchings and streamings out of intelligence involve contracting out for services, from firms with more advanced technology or interpretive sophistication. So, there is already something like a market here insofar as there is competition over who is going to be assetized or deputized by the central intelligence and if the director of central intelligence governs then whoever at the moment has tied together the most strings of clean data will be governing, i.e., will be central intelligence, regardless of titles. We’d have to assume some threshold past which a particular company becomes the location of the central intelligence simply because it has in turn provided intelligence to the juridical and disciplinary institutions responsible for producing the necessary data in the first place—that is, whoever learns and tells the truth most reliably acquires a monopoly.\n\nThis doesn’t mean there won’t always be secrets, just that the secrets will be only minimally at odds with publicly available—through the courts and academies—knowledge. (If they are more than minimally at odds, then distortions of those sources of information will set in, alerting other arms of the central intelligence to usurp lapsed functions, first of all to resupply the center but eventually, perhaps, to replace it, through the available juridical and disciplinary tracks.)\n\nWe already see here the circulation of information in a way that looks like a market but is mediated by privileged access to and ability to put to use vital intelligence. But I’ve so far been discussing this as an impersonal, implicitly bureaucratic system, and the point of singularized succession in perpetuity is to put an end to that. Functional institutions working at high levels of responsibility will have clear lines of command, even if they are informal, grounded in trust between committed and honest experts. But these roles can shift—hand-offs can occur regularly. It’s in the hand-offs that we replicate the market.\n\nEach institution has a head, and this head has an appointed successor, and the successor has an appointed successor, all the way down through each institution. But the appointed successor will be assessed and replaced regularly, for any number of reasons, and these changes will ramify through the entire system. These constant fluctuations in succession replicate price change by providing information about who will be directing a particular link in the supply chain. All this information can be made available in some form through new data science disciplines who will model these fluctuations the way investors model fluctuations in the stock market.\n\n“How much does this cost” takes the form of “how resistant is this supply chain, and each of its links, to interference from faulty information coming in from juridical and disciplinary sources, which ultimately make succession less trustworthy?” Each institution, which is to say each point along the supply chain, is ready at any moment to exercise some kind of controlled usurpation at other points precisely in order to test their resiliency—this process replicates leveraging a competitor, perhaps offering a lower price or quicker delivery, against one’s main supplier.\n\nUltimately, maintaining regular, if flexible and unpredictable in the details, succession practices requires “investing” in pedagogical futures. If you’re going to guarantee a steady source of successors, that means you would be rather obsessed with the prospects of future generations, who will give meaning to your present efforts. Institutions would be contracting with pedagogical institutions, which will in turn bolster and draw upon renewed kinship networks. This replicates the defining feature of capitalism—discounting against expected future earnings. Every question concerning price or credit (and price is ultimately derivative of credit) becomes a question of some node in the broader intelligence network.\n\nIn a sense we could think of this as scientific, maximized, nepotism and patronage, with the proviso that familial networks are not self-sustaining and must be shaped by the rigors of scenic design, which creates intelligence networks that provide the information that make extended interlocking kinship networks possible in the first place. So, it’s not like you would just hire your son; you would start in proximity to your own position in the kinship network but be ready to seek out relatives at some distance—and, even this, just to provide nominees for a particular position. There’s a whole new way of thinking here: how can I ensure that my “line”—familial but even more, occupational, institutional and governance—can be extended X number of generations into the future?\n\nHow can I continually discretize my practices so that they can be distributed across the stacked scene and automated and packaged so as to become elements of a new practice in such a way as to maximize future discretization through pedagogy—the pedagogical institution that best promises such a transmission will be extended the most credit and will be “invested.” What replicates “cost” is the skewing of whatever it is you’re doing so as to get in on the ground floor of pedagogical innovations with the most promising succession practices. The more the entire scene is named, with each node continually updated in its relation to the other nodes, the more questions of money and delegation come down to identifying particular nodes within the system as suturing points that for particular purposes of intelligence gathering (intelligence basically means “gathering”) “grasp” the entire system.\n\nIt comes down to a question of who the most importantly situated people are most drawn to as the one most to rely upon in a particular case. Culture has always been pedagogy, or the practice of welcoming new generations into the idioms of the community, and this becomes the ultimate source of value, the paying down of originary debt and it will now be elevated to the central source of prestige with its rewards.\n\nNo hypothesis is complete until we bring it to bear on what we are doing now. I would say that center study has a critique of capitalism, which is that it has never been shown that capitalism can be contained within a juridical and sovereign order—indeed, for its more radical and honest proponents, that’s a selling point. If it comes down to protecting the outside spread, even if it means dismissing all kinds of crimes—ultimately various kinds of fraud—it’s clear what the decision will always be. And this really means that the outside spread is inherently fraudulent, allowing for more fraud the closer we get to the top.\n\nIn fact, the outside spread is itself always a kind of bluff and hostage-taking, depending upon the enforcement agency (the state) coming through when the chips are down. And the exception is the rule—the credit system is always governed by the threat of the collapse or withholding of the outside spread. At the same time, center study repudiates other critiques of capitalism, whether communist, fascist or nationalist, which rely upon some collective agency that remains essentially the same over time. And it certainly rejects critiques of capitalism based on “exploitation,” or “equality” (which was not really Marx’s idea anyway).\n\nCapitalism can only be transcended by forming companies which discount against expected future earnings foundationally, by charter, beyond the life span of anyone running the company. The problem is forming what would be permanent companies which can pay dividends, of course (people have to live), but, kind of like the endowments of universities serve more as collateral for taking loans to maintain operations. Only various kinds of data security companies, based on one or another mode of the preservation of knowledge, capacities, information, technological, archeological, philological, biological, and so on, could fit the bill.\n\nCompanies that require extended terms of deferral so that knowledge only adumbrated by current research provides the goal of the company. And ultimately what makes it possible for such companies to survive is providing valuable services to the central intelligence, which provides services to all the other institutions. In the end, central intelligence will be a kind of rotation or “head of the joint chiefs of staff” of these companies. To put it bluntly, the state very much needs all those kinds of knowledge I listed above, along with many others, and once the knowledge gets organized and imperative-issuing to the point of algorithmic governance you have something other than the state.\n\nIf you are not in a position to found and maintain such a company, then you can act as if you might one day be employed by or contribute to one, and donate your resentments to the central intelligence in the forms of the continuing unfolding data of your existence."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ve-ortexicality-post-axial-age-morality",
      "title": "Ve/ortexicality: Post-Axial Age Morality",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 28, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/veortexicality-post-axial-age-morality",
      "content": "I’m going to begin by doubling down on something I don’t recall mentioning for a while: the principle, or imperative, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.” I won’t spend too much time defending the phrase against its communist “taint”—of course, I first came across it in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, but have done enough looking into it (I wouldn’t want to call it “research”—i.e., the Wikipedia page) to see that Marx did not invent the expression and a bit of reflection dissipates its communist “vibe”—unlike the principle emblazoned on the Communist Manifesto, “the free development of each is a precondition for the free development of all” (which is also not necessarily all that “communist”), “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” is expressly inegalitarian—indeed, Marx explicitly presents it as a critique and transcendence of “equality” (which we might recall Marx saw as a “bourgeois” concept).\n\nThe objection from “hierarcharians” to the principle might be that it sounds extractive and exploitative regarding the more able, but this can be dissipated by keeping in mind that the able also have needs, which might require a far greater allocation of resources than that to be distributed to the needy. Think of the needs of, say, a nuclear engineer, or the leader of a team of nuclear engineers.\n\nUnlike more explicitly reciprocal moralities like “do unto others..,” the outflow of abilities and the inflow to meet needs can scale up as much as necessary: how, exactly, does “do unto others…” enter into a discussion of war, or budgetary decisions, or the deployment of police forces, or family policy, etc., etc.—it will instantly turn into a propagandistic talking point, with each side shaping it to its own political “needs.” “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” meanwhile, can be thought of in terms of mobilization, allocation, planning and pedagogy. What I’d like to do here is think through the principle as a post-Axial Age morality—even though, as you can see by checking out the Wikipedia page, it may have its origin at the highwater mark of “Axiality,” i.e., early Christianity.\n\nI’m assuming that post-Axial Age morality will be explicitly inegalitarian, starting off by making explicit the tacit inegalitarianism of any post-Big Man order, including, of course, our own “liberal democracy.” I’m also not going to stick with the word “morality” for long, as that word, along with other elements of ethics and culture, can be transferred over to credit and confidence, which is to say materialized, tokenized forms of shared deferral. The main test of “from each… to each…,” or what we might call (to avoid having to keep repeating the phrase or some acronym if for no other reason) “stacked reciprocity,” will be whether it can serve as the connecting tissue, or credit system, of a juridical order.\n\nJuridical orders are presently based, of course, on the presumed equality of all individuals (first of all property holders) before the law, a principle clearly vulnerable to witticisms like “the law, in its majesty, forbids both the man living in a mansion and the man without a home from sleeping under a bridge”—such clever criticisms can imply the need for some kind of mercy or grace exceeding the merely legal or to abolish law altogether, but I’d like to see if stacked reciprocity can strengthen the law itself, on its own terms.\n\nWe’d have to begin by understanding property in a way that might outrage libertarians but that I would say simply corresponds to reality: property is an advance, from the center, of a particular amount and form of credit, which can include the use of territory and various apparatuses. This is nothing more than a charter, the terms of which are laid out in advance and which are revocable, or justiciable in court. Suing someone, then, comes to focus on violations of the charter (which would then be written so as to anticipate such eventualities) more than upon the injuries to the plaintiff which are, however, accounted for in terms of interference with the plaintiff’s ability to make use of the credit advanced to him.\n\nThe center is protecting its interest in ensuring a return on the credit it has issued on both sides. The amount of credit issued to any agent is a measure of the “needs consequent upon ability” “accredited” to that agent and the terms of repayment established accordingly. So far, this is essentially what a central bank does, issuing credit (“creating money”) in terms of how likely any recipient is to pay back (maybe not exactly, but let it go for now), which is in turn determined by how much credit that recipient himself issues, his history of repayment, and his access to those willing to extend credit to varying degrees.\n\nNow, think in terms of the pointman (“sovereign,” if you like), whose priority is to establish succession and a pool of eligible and loyal successors, aiming to roll back and eventually eliminate the central bank’s (and its clients’) ability to issue credit to “outside options” (the pool of successors are all inside options). Here, we have a fundamental and irreducible judgment: the ability of those gathering resources should be channeled toward the inside rather than the outside options. This can be formalized by having the pointman explicitly nominate and rank candidates so that he or they can sue the token issuing institution for aiding outside options that interfere with the candidate’s ability to exercise his options.\n\nThe token issuing institution might then be signing onto the charters issued by the center, committing to issuing a certain line of credit. All the time we are pushing towards the subscription and token issuing system I have referred to many times, going back to the GABlog, in which networks of suppliers maintain the chains tying them altogether with each company or team holding the “right” (really, the ability) to exercise outside options with their suppliers or recipients—“usurpation” is internalized as part of the transfer translation of “free market” operations to the subscription and monopolistic order. Conflicts are possible at each point along the supply chain and in each act of interference in the other’s charter and the juridical order will be shaped to settle those disputes. Again, the focus is on each party’s use and repayment of the credit issued in terms of the charter, which represents a particular configuration of “needs” and “abilities.”\n\nNone of this, nevertheless, is in the title of this post, which is where the more fully developed post-Axial Age language is to be found. Here, I want to articulate “vertex,” being the top point of two lines meeting and, of course, cognate with “vertical,” on the one hand, with “vortex,” most basically in the sense of a whirlpool, as a representation of the churning of mimetic crisis, so that vortex/vertex is where the mimetic whirling and escalation is converted regularly into the vertex. A brief etymological search shows that the two words are originally one, even though (as happens often) they seem to be opposites.\n\n(Think, for example, of “cleave.”) (There was an artistic movement in England called “vorticism,” with Wyndham Lewis among its founders, and I do have this in mind even though it never seems to have been clearly defined and may not have represented much more than the desire to stir things up.) Vertex originates in a root word meaning “to turn,” and we can see how that might split up into, on the one hand, a single, defining, culminating “turning point” and, on the other hand, a turning that never stops. I’m proposing some iconography to work with here--maybe even a retrieval or vorticism on firmer anthropomorphic terms. There’s a lot to do with this imagery—a vortex forms a center, and when it goes fast enough can appear to be still around the center. Also, one might pronounce either the “e” or the “o” depending on the context.\n\nThere is continuity from the Axial to the Ve/ortexical Age. I have always seen the “equality” established by Judaism, Christianity and Greek philosophy as the equality created within a discipline, rather than social equality: the early Christian communities organized as disciples of Christ, the peripatetic Socratic dialogue among free questioners, the Rabbinic pedagogical institutions, and so on. There is a similar equality or symmetry, which we can see as a retrieval of the originary scene from its burial underneath sacrificial divine empires, in the modern scientific enterprise governed by the experiment, or any form of inquiry or discussion, including Habermas’s coffee shops of early modern Europe.\n\nSuch forms can be maintained, and their maintenance is really the best way to understand “freedom,” but they don’t scale up, and for scaling up the Axial Age came to rely on the extra-juridical “differend” (to refer to Jean-Francois Lyotard), with an injustice incommensurate with existing ways of doing justice. “Freedom” becomes associated with martyrdom by the tyrant (always hovering the background of those Axial Age disciplinary spaces) and it becomes easy to reverse the terms and define freedom as participation in such martyrdom, yielding the victimary, which may have especially blossomed in the post-Nuremberg world but has roots laid much deeper.\n\nIt is this in particular that Ve/ortexicism wishes to replace. A disciplinary space, constituted by continual usurpation to option the implications and extensions of that space, determines which needs it has depending on its evident abilities. What I have in mind here is the promotion and churning of skunkworks as the leading social edge. Every member of society has some credit issued to them, though, and there will also be disciplinary spaces dedicated to commensurating, publicly, within the juridical order, the needs and abilities of those least able to do so for themselves. Skunkworks are aways delegations, an issuance of credit from some institution, with leading figures in those institutions gambling that the results will redound to their further credit.\n\nStacked reciprocity gives us a way of recognizing the obligations of the strong to the weak (the “widows and orphans” in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible) without the eruption of masses around some victim of extraordinary injustice, of a kind that calls the system into question, in which faith in another world is ultimately convertible into faith in the revolutionary transformation of this one. Stacked reciprocity within the credit system opens up new possibilities for adjudication and the exploration of these possibilities involves the organization of disciplinary spaces. A sturdier juridical order could accommodate something like the “Innocence Project,” which is actually a good idea—a kind of rolling paraclete testing the judgments of the existing order.\n\nHere, though, it’s worth pointing out another implication of stacked reciprocity for the juridical: a shift from process to truth, i.e., a rejection of some Anglo legal traditions, like the adversarial process (which differs significantly from Continental systems that emphasize the search for truth). Within the adversarial system, something like the “Innocence Project” inevitably incentivizes the search for “technicalities,” which is to say, not so much “innocence” as insufficiently proven guilt, with “sufficiency” an ever rising bar—if for no other reason than the maintenance of the project, which can thusly continue even if not a single innocent defendant is ever convicted.\n\nStacked reciprocity would zero in on the relationship between victim and perpetrator, plaintiff and defendant, ascertaining the truth of the matter in terms of the credit extended to both sides and now to be retracted or extended on one side or the other (in a civil case, maybe both). It is the bar for deferring the vendetta that gets lowered, and in doing so various forms of data supplied from all environments are solicited, including data providing information regarding levels of resentment and desire for revenge, all of which can be discussed and examined openly. Whether a criminal is poor, deprived, a victim himself of mistreatment, etc., is very much worth knowing, without leading to any particular conclusion.\n\nWe could say that everything is narratively accounted for, with the implications for judgment and severity of punishment to be thereby determined but not according to the calculation that more understanding equals lesser severity. The opposite might very well be the case. But what matters is that nothing is left outside of juridical treatment and therefore outside of the nomos, or originary distribution—everyone’s needs and everyone’s abilities are given a full reckoning and accreditation.\n\nThe credit order that comes after the Axial Age must confront the legacy of the Big Man up front: inequalities and asymmetries are part of any order, all the justifications or mythologies we create to naturalize them (“merit,” “inheritance,” etc.) will never completely do so and, nevertheless, the resentments these “misfits” generate must not be framed as violations of some imagined but illusory equality; rather, they must be framed as derived from some violation of the imperative of the center and remediable through the donation of one’s resentment to the center. Anything less means failure, and the continuation of centralization initiatives carried out in the name of some further horizon of equality.\n\nWhoever occupies the center is obliged to more fully occupy it by transferring debt/credit from institutions that fund outside options to the ever more precise tokenization of a ranked field of successors: whatever knowledge the market system distributes through the tacit and non-totalizable practices of all the producers and consumers, large and small, and which is measured through prices, is to be translated into a formalized ranking and corresponding allocation of credit (materials and a sphere of activity) within and across all institutions. Your “price” is exactly the responsibility someone who has been given responsibility by another who has been… has given to you, and the tacit and explicit assessments and accreditations further formalizing your “price” or credit; and this further means your expected future credit, which depends upon the pedagogical futures laid upon all the educational or “successionary” social institutions.\n\nThis conversion of money into learncoin transforms the juridical order by bringing the institutional backing (credit) advanced to individuals into the dock along with the individual in any dispute—something like the ancient distribution of responsibility for acts committed by a member of the group is retrieved here, with stacked reciprocity subtracting the recourse to the vendetta. And disciplinary spaces, retrieving most directly the “equality” discovered by the Axial Age communities of inquiry, conduct unrestrained inquiries into the entire tokenization and adjudication process while establishing mobile units to consult with regard to cases.\n\nAnd this includes inquiries into the physical world, with the barriers separating humanistic from scientific and technological knowledge relativized to the research in question, as levels within the human, credit, and technological stacks (and boundaries between these types of stacks) are continually probed and reconstructed. Certainly microbial, viral and conceptual transformations are connected in ways we haven’t yet explored, to take just one example. This new ordering, toward which concrete action within the existing order can always be taken, in the form of companies aimed at prolonging the extension of credit, is what I would like to call “Ve/ortexticality.”\n\nMaybe things can be pushed a bit further. At the heart of the Axial Age are the antinomies of the juridical, which take the form of the possibility of an injustice beyond remedy within the justice system. This “meta-injustice” can take on either otherworldly or revolutionary implications, and the oscillation between the two characterizes much of Axial Age Western history. Maybe the horizon, then, is the abolition of the juridical, its recollection back into ritual, or distribution from the center. I have played with this possibility in some previous posts, pointing out that the further we move approaches to transgression away from explicit penalties and towards various forms of prevention and containment, the more evade the traditional state vs. individual or individual vs. individual model of accusation and judgment.\n\nI’ve been arguing for a while that the juridical is the most fundamental post-tribal institution (rivaled only by money—but could you have money without courts of law?), and is central to the anti-imperial imperialism of the Axial Age, both in reality and in the imaginary—so, we are touching on the roots here (getting radical). Try to think of any complaint that isn’t formulated in juridical terms. No more juridical, no more justice (all those who clamor for justice don’t seem to realize that justice would be meaningless without injustice). Abolishing the juridical would mean moving so far beyond the vendetta that it no longer need even be gestured to as a reference point.\n\nAlso, despite the centrality of the juridical, it has never been more than a carve-out within the ritual, as a way of regulating distribution and hence preserving the nomos. We can’t, though, consider the abolition of resentment, which would therefore require some other mode of expression and settlement. We would have to think about judgment being completely brought into existing institutions within the subscription system, and the subscription system being made to cover all territory and all activity (as is already really the case, albeit in haphazard ways). So, street crime is not some public issue but a problem for whichever security firm runs the city, or a particular part of it, subscribed to be the various businesses and residents.\n\nIf there’s still street crime, though, then there will need to be some accepted way of arresting, judging and punishing criminals—transcending the juridical would mean a deferral of crime—that, then, is the responsibility of the security firm. So, for example, some past behavior provides for someone, through facial recognition, DNA samples, etc., to be deprived of access to various facilities, maybe culminating in something like house arrest. Such deprivation might have a very low threshold, if banishment is to kick in before crime as such has been committed. We’re speaking of very high standards of civilization here.\n\n(And, of course, we all know the sci-fi dystopian versions of this kind of order.) Such a person might feel aggrieved at his exclusion, which might seem arbitrary, based on a misreading of merely idiosyncratic behavior, and so on. In a post-juridical order, his appeal would have to be toward the security firm and the subscribers, not to some third party adjudicating between them. And here he could draw on the disciplines, in the same way someone operating within the juridical would, in this case requesting “data-driven” reassessments of his banishment or sequestration, perhaps negotiating over possible behavioral adjustments.\n\nIf everyone had an expectation that such an appeal would be treated “fairly,” i.e., with a decision that leaves that person’s access to institutions within the agreed upon or “optimal” range of probability for interrupting their operations, and all such resentments, civil as well as criminal, were to be treated similarly, then we will have abolished the juridical and would no longer be speaking in terms of justice and injustice. We would, in fact, be speaking, directly, in the idiom of deferral. So, post-Axial Age, Ve/ortexicality, means the systematic naming and tokenizing of modes of deferral. (I shouldn’t need to emphasize that the only way past the juridical is through it by converting all the tokens an increasingly rigorous juridical arena would produce into markers of deferral—a paradigm shift through the tokenizing of exceptions, rather than a mere declarative abolition.) This returns us to Measuring Deferral and Tokenizing Deferrality. And, of course, credit and debt are also modes of deferral. Eventually, I will want all these terms translated into deferrality, and maybe eventually will come soon."
    },
    {
      "slug": "addressing-an-objection-to-the-originary-hypthesis",
      "title": "Addressing an Objection to the Originary Hypthesis",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 15, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/addressing-an-objection-to-the-originary",
      "content": "I’ve just read Gregory Lobo’s essay in the most recent Anthropoetics, “Homo imaginatus: Generative Anthropology, prefrontal synthesis and the origins of the human,” which includes a critique of the originary hypothesis which should be addressed. I think the best way to approach it is to quote fairly extensively and deal with one passage at a time—at the very least, Lobo’s argument calls for a tightening up of the language used to articulate the originary hypothesis, as one can see with the first critique he makes, which I would agree with:\n\nEric Gans says: “Perhaps the simplest characterization of humanity is that it is the species that has more to fear from its own members than its natural environment, including predators, starvation, and everything else.” I don’t think this is quite right. A species itself does not fear anything, for a species is not a whole biological organism. I understand that Gans is employing a shorthand here, but I want to be as precise and literal as possible. What I would say is that the individual organism of the species Homo sapiens has more to fear from another individual organism, or from other individual organisms, of that same species, than from anything else.\n\nHere, the point is well taken, but one could still respond that the “shorthand” Gans is using alludes to our sharing of language, which implies such a collective agency. But we will see that Lobo’s focus on the individual organism as opposed to any collective agency is an important component of his critique of the originary hypothesis. So, let’s continue:\n\nAnother presupposition, also from Gans in “A Dialogue”: “As our ancestors became more human, they became correspondingly more mimetic, with the result that the potential violence of their rivalry became too great to be controlled by animal modes of communication.” This is linked to the idea, central to GA, that “language, and human culture in general, insofar as it falls under the general category of ‘representation’ or the use of signs, emerges as a collective, ‘scenic’ means of deferring the violence occasioned by mimetic desire” (emphasis mine). Here I think we are straying into a kind of evolutionary functionalism. The argument, if I can paraphrase it, is that culture emerged to fix a problem. The problem was mimetic violence, which had gotten out of control. The function of culture—its purpose—is to defer such violence.\n\nMy initial problem with this formulation is that there is no reason to think that a particular instance of mimetic violence would ever, prior to culture, constitute an extinction level event. Inversely, there is no reason not to imagine that bouts of mimetic violence might have played a role in the natural dynamics of ecological equilibrium. It is quite possible that in ethological terms what we might think of as excessive mimetic violence was a factor in constituting such an ecological equilibrium. Perhaps the violence kept our ancestors’ populations at numbers that did not exhaust local resources, while local resources, fauna and flora, were never so depleted as to motivate migrations, at least not in precultural times.\n\nWhat I want to suggest is that there simply is no scenario in which it makes sense to think of a hominin population being unable to control its mimetic violence yet needing to control it. The level of mimetic violence would—must—never have exceeded the capacity of the population to recover. At a certain level of recovery, perhaps a bout of mimetic violence served as something of a tonic, culling some conspecifics and insuring—unconsciously, of course—ecosystem equilibrium.\n\nGans certainly does sometimes speak the language of functionalism, which is an after the fact, we might say “Whiggish” way of speaking about things. (Also, to say that “our ancestors became more human” presents becoming human as a gradual process rather than a punctual event—but the more precise way of formulating this would have to be something like “as our ancestors became more the kind of hominid that would be capable of the kind of collective act that would transform it into the human,” which, like functionalism, ends up in a tautology). But we could simply say that some “protohuman” (itself a kind of proto-functional way of putting it) groups, or even just one, discovered/invented language and others didn’t—perhaps the one(s) that did become superior in self-organization and killed off the others (i.e., we don’t have to assume that a “failure” to sufficiently control mimetic violence was an automatic death sentence for the entire species).\n\nBut, once we have “culture,” or language, it can be said to address a “problem,” insofar as the emergence of that problem will be registered in language, first of all in the failure of ritual, which will then require “mythical” reconstruction. So, the evolutionary advantage of the group(s) with language need not be some general advantage in terms of the “environment” as a whole but simply in competition with the other groups.\n\nLobo then continues with such evolutionary arguments before getting to what I would see as the heart of his critique, addressing the plausibility of the originary scene itself, but there is one very telling little passage I would like to highlight: “For while it is axiomatic for GA that “the human is uniquely characterized by the deferral of violence through representation” (“A Dialogue”), what is left out of such a formulation is the corollary: the human is uniquely characterized by the dreadful, systematic organization and practice of violence through representation (ritual being only the first example of this).”\n\nThe “justification” of ritual as a “lesser evil” by the originary hypothesis, and its inscription as constitutive to the human, may be the hardest pill for the evolutionary scientist to swallow—note the highly value-laden word “dreadful,” something we don’t see elsewhere in Lobo’s discussion. But the history of working our ways through ritual orders that generate new ways of deferring violence at higher scales while simultaneously producing the capacity for greater violence is one of the more compelling paths of inquiry opened up by the originary hypothesis. Anyway:\n\nNow I would like to challenge a particular aspect of the Originary Scene. We will use the account given by Gans, again in “A Dialogue”:\n\nIn a scenic configuration, with the participants on the periphery of a circle and an object of desire (say, a source of food) at the center, each wishes to appropriate the object for himself, but, as each fears the others, his gesture of appropriation is cut off from its object and transformed into the first sign.\n\nWhat puzzles me about this scene is how it could have ever been enacted. My principal question is, why would the mimetic hominins ever have organized themselves into such a circle? To have done so would have already required deferral. To understand why a spontaneously organized circle seems to me untenable, I want to bring up the work of Michael Tomasello, whose name will be familiar to scholars in GA. He has provided an important analysis of chimpanzee hunting in Chapter 5 of Origins of Human Communication. What others see as an instance of cooperation and sharing (which would already require deferral), he sees, rather, as an exercise in appetitive animals pursuing food self-interestedly, without regard for conspecifics.\n\nThough a number of chimps appear to participate in the hunt, they are not doing so together. Each is doing it, according to Tomasello, on his own. When the prey animal is captured, it is captured by only one chimp, which proceeds to attempt to dismember and devour it as fast as possible, without concern for the other chimps. That the others manage to feed too owes not to “sharing” but to the fact that the captor simply cannot devour the entire prey animal all at once. Thus, those who were also hunting—each one for itself, not for the group—can grab some and feed too. Finally, those who were not hunting can feed once the others, having fed, become disinterested and abandon the leftovers.\n\nThese chimpanzees do not form a circle around the prey is what I want to highlight. To be able to do so would indicate that they are already cultural, already engaging in deferral, and I do not see what impedes us from saying the same about the hominin participating in the Originary Scene, as construed by GA. Since the formation of an originary circle already implies deferral, the deferral of the aborted appropriative act constitutes only an anticlimax. Something must have happened elsewhere.\n\nI would first of all say that the assumption that we need to imagine the great apes we know of today enacting the originary scene is a mistake, one that I think Eric Jacobus also makes. We can assume there were a wide range of hominid species somewhere “in between” (there goes that “functionalism” again) ape and modern humans. But Lobo may be identifying some lack of clarity in Gans’s formulation here, as it is true that the formation of a circle would require some means of organization beyond the pecking order and therefore can’t, it would seem, precede language. But Tomasello’s description here leaves out the pecking order, which I don’t think we can be prohibited from assuming, and therefore the breakdown of that pecking order as a precipitant of the originary scene.\n\nThe circle comes after the breakdown of the pecking order and only becomes fully formed with the emergence and circulation of the sign, but what happens in the meantime is a gradual approximation to equidistance to the central object through a tentative approach and withdrawal as each member of the group measures his own desire and fear against that of the others. So, Lobo here is subtracting precisely what makes the scene a scene.\n\nAnd, finally:\n\nFinally, let us look at what is perhaps the fundamental axiom of GA—that the human is defined by language or representation. My view is this, which both upends received understandings of GA while nonetheless comporting well with its basic terminology: humanity, just prior to language, is defined by scenic cognition. To make sense of this, let us recall that the human vocal tract appears to have been fully developed by about 600,000 years ago. But scenic cognition—the ability to see different things in relation, that is, in spatial and temporal and in comparative relation to other things—what I will soon be calling (following Andrey Vyshedskiy) prefrontal synthesis, only shows up about 50,000 years ago. Such cognition is, it turns out, a prerequisite not for ostensive signs—“lion,” “water,” perhaps even “danger”—but for mature, which is to say, recursive (prepositional, spatial, temporal) language. Scenic cognition is first; language comes next. Indeed, Gans himself gives support for this way of putting it in “A Dialogue.” There he says:\n\nThe point of the originary hypothesis is to account not so much for the superiority of human language over that of our ape cousins as for its different mode of operation, through symbols as opposed to “indexical” signals. [. . . ] Apes can no doubt communicate all sorts of things [using those signals]. But a [human] language of conventional signs, even if at the start it doesn’t communicate very much information, has an essentially unbounded capacity for such communication, whereas animal signal systems do not.\n\nWhat I think Gans is actually indicating here is the difference between mere signs that are more or less indexical and recursive language. The latter, via prepositions, is potentially infinite. The former is squarely limited to things that are there. The difference between a human language of conventional signs and animal (and, likely, hominin) signal systems is that the former is what it is due to recursion and the latter is what it is due to a lack of recursion. The recursiveness and prepositionality of language derives from scenic cognition and also drives it, as language tells us to see scenes in our mind’s eye which we have not and perhaps could not see out there in the world, in “reality.” For the scene itself is recursive and prepositional, requiring a cognition that can see in such a way: scenically. Parts are embedded or nested in other parts, and isolatable from other parts; and stand in relation to other parts, enjoying significance as a result. Thus, the fundamental question is, whence recursion? We will answer that question below.\n\nThat whatever species became humans needed something like “scenic cognition” before they could assemble themselves on a scene seems self-evident, and of course the recursiveness of language distinguishes it from animal semiotic systems, but Lobo skips over some difficulties regarding signs referring to “things that are there.” Ultimately, you do need some version of Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device hardwired in the brain if you are going to treat the proposition (which I am going to assume Lobo means when he says “preposition”) as the fundamental linguistic form. Lobo is leaving unaddressed (despite his earlier reference to Tomasello) the problem of joint attention which it would be, I think, more difficult to find a genetic “predicate” for.\n\nJoint attention most plausibly emerged in a situation where some new relation to an object of attention called for a new mode of attention under unprecedented conditions: the participants needed to look back and forth from the object to each other and to indicate that they were doing so. There is already a kind of recursivity here insofar as the co-signers are generating something like scenes within scenes. And this really gets us to the heart of critiques like Lobo’s: while Lobo sees the originary scene as highly unlikely, Gans from the beginning always acknowledged this to be case, leaving the originary scene as a kind of “miraculous” occurrence or, even, “revelation”: a one time event that somehow “stuck” and determined everything following it.\n\nIt may be that one cannot accept the “unlikely” from an evolutionary (functionalist?) perspective—the “gaps” must be filled in. And we do want to fill in as many gaps as we can, but none of that can change the fact that something happened on the originary scene—and something “happening” seems to be recorded as the origin across all rituals and cultures.\n\nI have, from the beginning of my work in GA, taken seriously the question of the plausibility of the scene, but always in terms of the scene itself, rather than its prerequisites, because once you start requiring genetic and biological prerequisites you’re doing something else. I’ve always seen the originary hypothesis as depending at least as much on what language is as how it came into being; or, rather, treating the two as a single question—nothing is easier than to give language one of the many available definitions and then rejigger or replace the originary scene to make it fit that definition. I have taken what I see as the most differentiating feature of language, which is less recursion (which is a result) and more what Peirce called the “symbolic” sign, i.e., one determined by convention, or what Saussure called (not so felicitously, I think) “arbitrary.”\n\n(Of course I assume I am in agreement with Gans on this.) We then find ourselves with the properly paradoxical question of how conventions could have been formed without the means of forming conventions. This takes us outside of all evolutionary and genetic considerations and poses the question of a scene—regardless of how much evolutionarily produced furniture one provides this paradox must be deal with. If one sticks tight to this, one sticks tight to the scene, and the “competition” between scenarios has to include the competition over which provides the broadest and “thickest” account of human history, which is human “being,” if we want to be a little philosophical.\n\nI have formulated this as being able to say “this is the same,” which is a proposition, of course (and a paradoxical one at that), but one directly tied to an ostensive, so it seems to me we have the generation of linguistic forms contained within this formulation. If you tell someone you see the same thing as they do, what makes that possible; if you say you are doing the same thing you did yesterday what, exactly, makes it the same, and for whom—and, can any of this pertain to anything any other species does?\n\nThe question of what kind of danger or threat could have been imagined or perceived by individual members of the group in the run up to the originary scene is, indeed, a critical and very interesting question. Lobo is right to say that “group extinction” is not something that could be imagined by any member of the group; nor, for that matter, is it a likely outcome of even the most unrestrained melee subsequent to the breakdown of the pecking order. (I’ve made all these arguments before.) And without some unprecedented consequences, at least in the “imagination,” the event is less likely to be memorable (i.e., one to be repeated, which is to say ritualized).\n\nBut here I will borrow from (and maybe slightly revise) Eric Jacobus and suggest that it is not a question of tools becoming weapons that precipitates the scene but, drawing upon a remark he makes elsewhere regarding the kind of “escalation” we are assuming is assumed on the scene, i.e., the limitless increase of human forces on the other side that incites this insight. Jacobus gives as an example of the tendency toward unlimited escalation the possibility that the other side’s brothers, cousins, etc., will join in the fight. Now, while this formulation is anachronistic regarding the originary scene itself, where there are no kinsmen, we can assume that the perception of a greater and growing number on both sides of the “equation” would represent the mimetic crisis leading to the emission of the gesture of aborted appropriation.\n\nIt wouldn’t have to be a lot—2, 3, 4 heading for the object—maybe a similar number are gathering behind you but you don’t see that so some member(s) of the group converging on the object would withdraw while approaching, which movement issues in the gesture, then accentuated by each member imitating and refining the gesture of the other. As Gans always said, this kind of scene might have “failed” (there’s that functionalism again) many times, and if we want to assume some learning over the course of these failures that made the ultimate “success” possible, I see no objection, especially if it adds to the power of (what I call) center study. But, even with that gap filled in, we need the event."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropomorphics-substack",
      "title": "Anthropomorphics",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 30, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/anthropomorphics",
      "content": "I have to admit I was a always a little tentative about the title of my book, even though it seemed to me appropriate and necessary. My thinking was that while anthropomorphizing was a very common criticism of certain ways of thinking and tropes, the criticism itself implied that the “human” that was projected onto the non-human was itself a given. So, I wanted to “appropriate” the term and turn it around and make the point that humans had to be anthropomorphized before they could get around to anthropomorphizing anything else. I didn’t want to the use term already used in GA for the creation or invention of the human, “hominization,” because the turn from GA I was making in the book was toward the center, drawing upon Eric Gans’s own insight in The End of Culture that humans originally modeled themselves on the center—“hominization” seemed to me to elide that step by suggesting the original humans simply invested themselves with humanity, so to speak.\n\nI didn’t put it this way at the time but now I will emphasize that “anthropomorphics” was also meant to foreground the artificiality of the human, from the beginning—we were always already imitating the center that was itself nothing more than a vectorization of our converging desires turned back at us through a prohibition. This was a way of distancing myself from GA’s or any humanism and insisting on the historicity of the human. Still, while I, on occasion, “proclaimed” the new science of anthropomorphics I rarely returned to it, settling instead on the more disciplinary sounding “center study” to label what I was doing. This is because anthropomorphics is a widely used word with a whole range of associations—even a children’s novel series—that I was tentative about having to “answer” for in ways that might complicate the inquiries I wanted to advance.\n\nBut some recent reading, some of it quite proximate to the Antikythera project, has buoyed my sense of the usability of the concept. First of all, Lambos Malafouris, in his How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement, following up on the notion of the “extended mind,” i.e., the thesis that thinking takes place not only in the brain or even in the whole body but across the entire expanse of the world in which we participate (a thesis with which I am familiar and with which my insistence on a kind of exhaustive performativity is in agreement) insists that anthropomorphism, i.e., the projection of human qualities onto non-human realities is not merely “natural” (but “illusory”) but necessary and a critical part of thinking and knowing the world.\n\nHis argument is, in part a critique of Cartesian modernity for trying (and necessarily failing) to abolish anthropomorphism. Second, Iulia Ionesco’s PhD dissertation, “Just Like Me But Not Exactly,” which is a study of the way users anthropomorphize computation, including the apps with which we engage all the time, arrives at similar conclusions, in this case I think somewhat against her will and to her surprise. Her whole dissertation is an attempt to design experiments that can test the degree to which humans model AI anthropomorphically, which leads to questions of how humans model each other, and finally to the conclusion that there’s no way of constructing an artificial situation that will help us understand how humans model AIs outside of such contrived situations.\n\nThis paradox applies to simulations, predictions and computation more generally insofar as the simulation, prediction and computation can be incorporated into the activity that has been simulated, predicted or computed—this all goes back to basic cybernetics research. After all, the data used to create AIs was drawn from pre-AI humans and therefore might not be applicable to post-AI humans in their interactions with AI; and, for that matter, AIs that are built on data including humans’ interaction with the previous iteration of AI may not be relevant to humans in their interactions with the present iteration. So, her questioning of anthropomorphizing led her to very fundamental questions of the human—ultimately, maybe (although she doesn’t say this) as modeler whose models are always trying to chase their own tails—or, perhaps, swallow them.\n\nAll of this, then, seems to give a kind disciplinary imprimatur to “Anthropomorphics,” making it of use in further exploring questions of the human, humanism, post-humanism, trans-humanism, and so on. An important part of the Antikythera project is to learn to think “allocentrically”—so, for example, instead of seeking out “human centered AI,” i.e., trying to fit planetary scale computation to the Procrustean bed of our limited understanding of the latest iteration of the human in relation to the technological, we think outside of ourselves as co-evolving in ways we can only partially determine along with AIs. Antikythera’s Cognitive Infrastructures Lab is a collection of essays, several of which examine the implications of such allocentric (or “xenomorphic”) thinking and creation.\n\n(Kenji Siratori’s “xenopoetics” project is worth mentioning here as well, as he articulates the “human” with various layers of the biological and technological. I will no doubt be returning to this.) There may be some tension between allocentricity and xenomorphicity, on one side, and the tenacity of anthropomorphism, on the other side, but if the center is “allo” and “xeno” from the beginning then center study and scenic thinking suggest a way forward here. What would be genuinely “other,” though? Postmodern thought broke itself over this question. To paraphrase Wittgenstein’s maxim about the speaking lion, if an AI was genuinely beyond our comprehension, how would we know it was beyond our comprehension rather than just incomprehensible?\n\nAnd if it is comprehendible, how “alter” is it? Machinery that, e.g., can alter our biological nature, or even physical laws, might be beyond our comprehension (but why assume intrinsically rather than temporarily beyond?), but its downstream effects wouldn’t be; and, anyway, this wouldn’t hold for LLMs or whatever the successor to LLMs will be, since if they will be speaking some language, even if it’s one the LLMs create for themselves, if it’s “language” we will be able to learn it. Ionescu’s cybernetically aligned paradox seems to provide an answer here, as it suggests a kind of gap whereby the AI is always ahead of us in one sense (extrapolating from our data) while being behind us in another sense (not extrapolating from the data we’ve generated from interacting with the latest extrapolation). But take a look here at what might be the most extreme imaginable attempt to deanthropomorphize the human itself, from Buckminster Fuller’s definition of man:\n\nA self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped; an electro- chemical reduction-plant, integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent actua- tion of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries; millions of warning signal, railroad and conveyor systems; crushers and cranes (of which the arms are magnificent 2 3 -jointed affairs with self-surfacing and lubricating systems, and a universally distributed telephone system needing no service for 70 years if well managed); the whole, extraordinarily complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range finders, a spectroscope, et cetera, the turret control being closely allied with an air conditioning intake-and-exhaust, and a main fuel intake. (Fuller Nine Chains to the Moon, 18)\n\nNow, we could easily see this, paradoxically, as a kind of poem, while also imagining it could be lengthened practically infinitely (if we were to, say, break down all the components here into their components, etc.) and also note that it’s essentially a more complicated version of Thomas Hobbes’s observation that we could see human beings (individually or collectively) as analogous to a watch. I don’t know if it’s intentional, or how much of a sense of humor Fuller had, but this is also very funny. But all that aside, we can also see that Fuller describes “man” by analogy with a series of man-made devices and in that case is still anthropomorphizing, only one degree removed. To take the Theseus ship model, if you were to take a human and, gradually replace every organ in the body with an artificial one (a project some of our transhumanist billionaires might be working on) we could argue, once the replacement was complete, whether it was the “same” person, or even a human, but it would certainly be anthropomorphic.\n\nWe don’t need to be allocentric or xenomorphic, then; anthropomorphics will suffice, since the manufactured being manufacturing the next iteration of itself or, more precisely, designing the scenic architecture to which the next iteration of itself will fit itself, will always generate results beyond what has been intended or could have been predicted. The other is always already us—maybe we can vindicate postmodern thought here as well. I have been focusing very intensely for a while now on articulating debt/credit with the juridical and succession, addressing the technological or scenic design in terms of data exchange, so as to integrate it into those other categories.\n\nBut none of this excludes presenting anthropomorphics as participation in the universe as an inexhaustible series of models for potential iterations of the human. It encourages us to model ourselves explicitly on whatever metapersons our interactions with computation and the computed/computing universe generate—and, if Ionescu and Malafouris are right, those interactions will always be generating metapersons, whether we choose to name and engage with them or not. In terms of the broader model center study is currently proposing, we could think of this as the expansion of the nomos, for which we are indebted to “modernity,” and “Anglo” modernity in particular.\n\nExpanding the nomos involves reinitiating the originary, which means the sacred or iterable or commemorable or citational, while also providing the new response to resentment: not a redivision of what is (often by looting certain members of the group or finding some other group to loot—as was the method of Fuller’s “great pirates”) but a creation of more to be shared. This “bourgeois” desire is also sacred, because it is currently the best way we have of deferring the most terrible violence. If our current systems are failing to create a bigger pie so that “equitable” distribution becomes moot, we can at least ask why they are failing and think of ways to improve or replace them.\n\nFor a while, the main task of politics has been to replace the irreducible and indivisible with the self-regenerating and expansive. Our political leaders have been failing miserably at this, but no one has suggested anything else that doesn’t involve restoring some status quo ante. We have been thinking too narrowly, in terms of reorganizing social orders internally, along “liberal democratic” lines, of course, within their already existing borders. But creating new political demarcations, both in the sense of traditional national boundaries and in the sense of pluralizing jurisdictions, have remained too incompatible with the existing post-WW2 arrangements.\n\nI have in mind Balaji’s “Network State” and other proposals (whatever happened to Moldbug/Yarvin’s old “patchwork” idea?) but, following my recent inquiries, would start more “traditionally,” with extending, perhaps most fundamentally, models of insurance to their limits, making them transgenerational, even eternal. Insurance is creating models of the human—the human as extended, against shoals of risk and reward, across decades, even centuries of the just barely but sufficiently predictable to lay down some markers of futurity; insurance is anthropomorphics, as we, in accord with Peirce’s magnificent prophecy, all become insurance companies.\n\nJust think of all the requirements an insurance company meaning to cover you and your descendants over the next two centuries would lay down, in terms of provisions you would be expected to make for yourself and therefore many of us for each other. What would we have to build, what kinds of research into health care and longevity, what designs of cities, environmental programs, etc.—maybe even a certain degree of fertility could be mandated to ensure payments would be maintained. Over time insurance might be morphed into various kinds of “companions,” built around and into us in a further anthropomorphic increment and calls by various teams upon the most promising students across the educational systems.\n\nThe juridical order would be organized around adjudicating claims, the disciplinary directed toward testing out futuristic models in physical, chemical, biological and social terms. And the pointmen governing us might be the uninsurable, because a suit brought against him might so engross the entire system as to swamp any outside spread capable of covering it (not to mention the possibility of regicidal violence, which could never be completely eliminated)—they would be pioneering the further anthropomorphisms that insurance companies then insist get standardized. And the uninsurable would in turn be a new model for the human.\n\nCenter study traces the commands of the center, from the demarcations of the nomos through the histories of succession, to the treatment and preparation of disputes that look to be if they are not actually to be decided by the center, to the creation, ordering, curation, preservation and delivery of data that will serve both to help decide and to proactively identify potential cases. Anthropomorphics guides scenic design in enlarging the nomos, in issuing the credit required for creating pedagogical platforms that require for the discretization programmed into their founding modes of payment, forgiveness and enforcement incommensurable with the currency in which the credit is issued.\n\n(You will always pay back in currency that that is just like but not exactly the currency in which you contracted the debt.) These are two sides of the same coin and have a kind of Mobius strip character, or a relationship like that between the duck and the rabbit in the drawing that drew Wittgenstein’s attention. If you do “enough” center study you’ll find yourself anthropomorphizing and vice versa. But there may be a division of labor here as well, between the researcher and the designer (who, of course, also morph into each other regularly). Let’s say that in gathering, preparing and studying data you yourself become a source of data worth gathering, preparing and studying and it is in participating in the creation and accumulation of that data you become a designer, while in the course of designing and enlarging the nomos problems of debt forgiveness and enforcement emerge in terms that require provisional commensuration and so one must morph back into center study.\n\nIn either case, though, the conversions can be handed off to others better suited to the task and one could set one’s data free into the wild for others to incorporate into design or delegate the labeling of discrete increments of debt to the more scribally oriented."
    },
    {
      "slug": "notes-on-governance-and-center-study-politics",
      "title": "Notes on Governance and Center Study Politics",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 13, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/notes-on-governance-and-center-study",
      "content": "This will be a short post. I think I have a simple way of addressing the issue of obedience and disobedience to the center more minimally than I have done so far. Both my recent incorporation of “credit” idiomatically and the consequent articulation of Colin Drumm’s concepts of the “outside spread” and the “outside option” allows for an elegant formulation: the degree and quality of your fulfillment of imperatives coming from the center (the “pointman”) constitutes a bet on the likelihood of the replacement of the pointman by an outside option. Complete and devoted obedience would indicate no possibility (whether it be desire for or fear of) an outside option; complete disobedience, meanwhile, indicates reliance upon and proactive obedience toward, some outside option.\n\nIn between these poles there will be some hedging of bets. Now, this is not a solely utilitarian decision—in general, obedience to the sovereign will decrease as that sovereign’s hold on power slips and his replacement seems increasingly likely; indeed, one could easily reverse the formulation—but there are questions of “sunk capital” here as well and how thoroughly identified with the existing regime you would be for a successor regime—in cases where one would almost certainly be treated as a traitor by the new regime, intensifying loyalty to the existing sovereign might be the only way of maintaining one’s dignity or honor, with “dignity” and “honor” here being a kind of credit that cannot be cashed in either under the present or successor regime, but only in the eyes of God or History, however one understands these forms of judgment.\n\nAnd something like “credibility” irreducible to the likelihood of predicting one’s next action will be more important the higher up the hierarchy one goes—of course, paid soldiers can be allowed to switch sides without suspicion being shed on them, but for those in the higher ranks not to be seen as “irredeemable,” credibility would have to lie in something like professionalism, demonstrated concern for the country regardless of who rules it, or a type of loyalty to something like the “office” that seems transferable. And all of this enters into the quality of one’s obedience even when one has placed all of one’s chips on the extremely low likelihood of any outside option.\n\nAn important implication is that, by the same token, the degree and quality of obedience of the pointman’s subordinates provides an ongoing measure of the viability of one or another outside option. The “modern” world system, i.e., the oscillation between the central bank and the central intelligence, is predicated on the assumption (or bet, or faith) that there will always be an outside spread and that the outside option has been securely internalized through the rotation in power of the competing parties. Concerns about radicalism are less about the emergence of a revolutionary outside option (which the “First World” has never experienced) than damage to the credit of intermediate actors sufficient wreck credit beyond foreseeable repair.\n\nStill, there’s a “spectre”—the chances of the evacuation of the outside spread and the emergence of the outside option can never be zero. Center study implies what I think is a unique politics: placing all the bets on a center or prospective or type of pointman so inside as to turn the central bank and central intelligence into a single entity, thereby abolishing both, along with the outside spread and outside option. Everything is to circulate through succession practices. I would also add that, if degree and quality of obedience constitute a bet on the continuance of the pointman, we can say all bets, i.e., investments, are themselves ultimately bets on the degree of oscillation within succession, which is to say how much credit-wrecking each side in the rotation of power is likely to do, with zero being the point at which we have the center study bet.\n\nThis assumption would be consistent, I think, with Capital as Power’s definition of capital—the oscillation within succession (and the way it plays out in specific sectors) determines the expected future earnings against which current value is discounted. In this way we bring “politics” and ‘economics” within a single category: confidence in the pointman. It’s obviously, even trivially, true that any investment is ultimately a bet on the regime being able to protect that investment.\n\nThe kind of politics that aims at channeling all obligations into succession practices is one, to idiomize another recent formulation, that sees governance as follows: everything everyone does can be traced back to an adjudicable command issued by the center. This is a holistic or totalizing formulation: whatever each of us does, even in our most private or intimate moments or associations, is pursuant to a command by the center, even if it’s one that allocated property in such a way that I have a space to pursue intimacy and privacy (with said allocation therefore at least partially or potentially dependent upon how it is pursued).\n\nBut every command from the center must be adjudicable, because every command creates a “spread” or nomos or centered ordinality that will lead to disputes and uncertainty. (Even a military government will need military courts.) This cognizance then enters into the design of commands and of the architecture (“technology,” or scenic design) constructed so as to “platform” commands. The juridical and the disciplines are in this way brought into oscillatory alignment with the pointman, as the disciplines are dedicated to gathering, labeling, curating and analyzing data so as to settle cases that arise from adjudicable commands—which become more adjudicable the more the disciplines have studied the conditions of their articulation.\n\nBetting on succession then become betting, or exhibiting some degree of confidence, in the settlement of possible cases. So, the politics proposed by center study involves perfecting the juridical (ultimately, bringing cases) toward the horizon of its abolition by enhancing deferral to the point of fending off the potential conflicts that might develop into “cases.” Assets, which we might call tokens or credits, are converted into data suitable for the juridical in ways studied and refined by the disciplines. Using our credits to join cases then becomes data we contribute to the center as part of the data exchange by which we solicit more data, of increasingly precisely determined kinds, from the center—for the sake of helping to decide cases.\n\nThe ethics, or morality, or politics of this mode of activity then lies in presenting oneself as increasingly rich and intricately demarcated data which also involves training the machine learning processing data. This is a politics that can be and in fact always is being conducted even on an individual level but it’s meant to be scaled up, enormously. In a way this resonates with much more ancient understandings of morality which involve asking oneself how you would behave if God could (as was the assumption) see everything you do. Maybe part of the insistence on privacy in modern life is to discount our transparency to God—a transparency which has now returned, recorded in the Domesday machine being currently built."
    },
    {
      "slug": "credit-and-succession",
      "title": "Credit and Succession",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 31, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/credit-and-succession",
      "content": "Carl Wennerlind, in his Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720, observes that the emergence of journalism in the wake of the political duopoly of Whigs and Tories resulted from each party seeking to damage credit when the other party was in power. This encapsulates very neatly the core of (what was to become) “liberal democracy”: a constantly broached and deferred civil war waged indirectly by making one’s opponents casualties of the credit now determined by the central bank independently of either party. More directly, though, I think the logic of this development should be applicable to “society” and “culture” in general—and I put “society” and “culture” in scare quotes precisely because speaking in terms of a broader system of debt and credit might make it possible to dispense with such malleable terms—and maybe some others, like morality, ethics, and aesthetics, once everything is reducible to the credit conferred upon each creditor and debtor.\n\nThinking about art in terms of the effects of a given work and its reception as raising the credit of some and lowering it of others might provide interesting ways of examining even the minutest formal features of the work (and I don’t just mean the art market here). And asking someone whose credit they are harming and whose they are propping up might cut through a lot of noise and hypocrisy of discussions of ethics and morality.\n\nCredit is the monetization of debt and succeeds previous forms of expressing obligation like honor—it is only when the central bank (or, maybe, a more decentralized banking system outside of direct political control) replaces the general “pointman” that we have a credit order. But credit is part of the long history of debt, which is the history of humanity, beginning with our debt to the central being on the originary scene. Already in Zack Baker and mine “There is no Economy But Only the Debt to the Center” a complete reframing of human intentionality in terms of indebtedness is proposed. A debt to David Graeber is evident here, but also a kind of calling in of his anarchist “chips,” since his entire critique depends upon the assumption of an originary free community where, presumably, each exchange leaves no imprint on subsequent ones (we’d have to imagine no one remembers anything—memory, or commemoration, is itself a recording of debt).\n\nPart of the general credit system I’m advancing here retrieves the role assigned to the sovereign, or occupant of the center or, now, “pointman,” posited by follow-up discussions—that of debt enforcement and forgiveness. Now, this role, which can take on many forms (e.g., inflation might be a form of debt forgiveness), must provide feedback on each creditor and debtor’s creditability—knowing which debts are likely to be enforced or forgiven must certainly play into decisions to offer credit in the first place (something I still don’t quite understand about the ancient Jubilee year, which I have to assume involved all kinds of exceptions and end-arounds).\n\nThis, then, is the form sovereign intervention in the credit system takes and provides a way of introducing the central intelligence into the central bank/central intelligence oscillation I have been hypothesizing as the logic of the modern (post-sacral kingship) world. This can hopefully sharpen the inquiry into the development of intelligence agencies and their changing role (of which I still know next to nothing) from the absolutist monarchies that certainly built them up prodigiously and the elective governments that followed and tend to be governed by them. But one thing that can be said is that intelligence agencies have many ways of wrecking credit when doing so might harm disfavored parties.\n\nIt's impossible to say anything to or about anyone without some impact upon that person’s credit, with ramifications, however miniscule, across the credit system. Wennerlind’s claim is a little bit different, though, than this observation that each encounter has an impact upon the credit of the people involved—he claims that it’s not just that Tories and Whigs tried to undermine each other’s credit (although they must have been doing that as well) but trying to weaken the credit system run by the central bank when the other party is in power. This suggests a newly created relationship between succession in power and credit: a healthy, which is to say reliable and predictable credit system is necessary for orderly succession, while, conversely, disrupting the credit system is a good way of interfering with succession.\n\nWe should, then, look for the ways in which subversive activity and propaganda targets credit, i.e., lowers the willingness of people to hold and trade in the currency issued and backed by the central bank. As power is increasingly centralized in the modern world it is more tenuously held by any pointman and therefore more quickly turned over (while the stakes get higher), and this means we can directly connect the field of what Colin Drumm calls the “outside option” and capital as (per Bichler and Nitzan) “value discounted against expected future earnings.” There used to be Marxist analyses that would get very granular here by, for example, tying some shift in a politician’s rhetoric to fluctuations in real estate values; we still see such analyses, but maybe a bit more on the right.\n\n(Bichler and Nitzan, for example, correlate wars in the Middle East with oil prices. Maybe, but I want the mediations—how does an attempt by some oil producer to jack up prices translate into jihadist preaching in mosques or votes for religious nationalist parties in Israel?) In part, this is what I’m aiming at here—very direct lines drawn between credit and “subjectivity.” As always, what I’m looking for is a more direct translation of all discourse into idioms of the center. To say that someone’s critical review of a novel aims at weakening credit because the publisher responsible for that novel interferes with the creation of other publishing enterprises that would allow for the publication of novels consistent with another system of credit doesn’t diminish the “reality” of one’s literary assessment of the novel—it just translates, more directly, whatever observations one would have regarding, say the deployment of familiar or innovative narrative devices into the broader forms by which we credit each other. And this must, ultimately, be what “culture” is all about anyway.\n\nThis also redirects all questions about art, culture, thought, etc., to questions of which credit system is to be preferred over others. We can work at various levels of specificity here but the ultimate level of analysis can’t be something like “this poem makes it more likely Jerome Powell will continue to head the Fed” (which is not at all to exclude the satiric uses of such a intermediate, deliberately “crude,” level of analysis). Colin Drumm, as I’ve pointed out many times, provides us with a broader frame for addressing the articulation of succession and credit in his “dialectic” (I’m not sure he’d call it that—I’m not sure I will continue to do so) between the “outside spread” (the lender of last resort—who could always decide not to lend, precisely when credit is most needed) and the “outside option” (some possible replacement of the present monarch, there to serve as a focal point for mobilization of opposition and therefore as a kind of background check on the monarch’s power).\n\nDrumm was discussing pre-modern (i.e., pre-central bank, pre-generalized credit) England, but the modern credit system and the alternating parties trying to wreck and restore it, respectively, is what has replaced it. The new system is an attempt to exchange the elimination of the outside option (by internalizing it within the system) with placing the central bank in charge of the precipice over which economic life will now dangle. But if we get too close to the precipice, let alone go over it, the outside option will simply be deployed against the entire internal oscillation between the central bank and central intelligence, mediated through the political parties (this is what the talk of “controlled opposition” is all about).\n\nBut we’ve never actually gone over the precipice, even if large accumulations of assets have periodically been tossed in the abyss, and it may be that we can’t without the creation of a new order. This is the implication of Bichler and Nitzan’s “capital as power”: there is no endemic crisis, there is no “internal contradiction,” there is no transcendence internal to the dialectic of capital—individual firms can keep discounting against expected future earnings even if that’s done primarily through sabotaging productive activity rather than stimulating it. (In that case, the outside spread will always be made available to some borrowers, even if only after a vast culling of less credit-worthy ones.)\n\nThis makes it all the more ironic, even if it adds to the credit of their own system, that Bichler and Nitzan offer exactly nothing by way of a possible replacement of capitalism. To the extent that we accept their theory, though, we are cautioned against choosing one saboteur against another—which would be another way of describing the two-party system, with each party set upon undermining credit when the other is in power.\n\nTo think in terms of a better system of credit we must go back further beyond pre-modern England, beyond the ancient empires and the Greek “tyrannies” that succeeded the sacral kings and introduced the generalized monetary order which, according to Richard Seaford philosophy represented (without exactly realizing it was doing so, and therefore itself being, I suppose, merely controlled opposition)—back to originary debt, on the originary scene. Here there is a unity of succession and obligation, since the community’s shared obligation is to sustain the ritual center, which means ensuring that the ritual scene we all exited last time is the same one that we all enter this time.\n\nCenter study’s “telos” is to restore this on the vastly expanded scale of the stack of scenes, and this involves the tokenization of deferral and exchange in what I have been calling “pedagogical futures.” At some point, this must involve something like a political party issuing currency, i.e., credit, and establishing institutions that would enhance that credit by organizing people in such a way that they would be better able to maintain it. Since organizing such enterprises around existing political parties—certainly in the US but probably anywhere—could not be properly done and would in fact likely be illegal in various ways, they must first be located in companies adjunct to the government (central intelligence) which are in the business of converting assets into data, i.e., mapping out the existing credit system for the sake of simulation and prediction (“assets” really are issuances of credit, which can be drawn upon in accord with the legal provisions ensuring a reliable interplay of debt enforcement and forgiveness—and let me mention here that if we wish to turn assets into data we might first need to generate a range of novel assets).\n\nThere’s nothing more important, and really nothing else than, imagining and building such companies. Such companies will seek to monopolize and thereby guarantee sources of credit, i.e., step further in from the precipice—they will make their debt the bank’s problem, so to speak. A lot of sabotage might be necessary along the way (we could think of sabotage as eliciting especially punitive debt enforcement on others) in order to get to the point where expected future earnings are projected well beyond the possibility of any sabotage, which also means beyond the cashing in of anyone alive or even their known descendants.\n\nSuch expected future earnings, now beyond any present-day “discounting,” could have once been invested in land, but now could only have a home in the ongoing learning of the accredited. This means assuming future descendants who will have mastered credit and scenic systems well beyond any we could imagine now, but who will also have recovered and preserved all the lost human capabilities of human history. Such recovery will be an important use of artificial intelligence, which will be able to offer reconstructions of, e.g., engineering and architectural knowledge, and even physical knowledge of builders, based upon monuments and artifacts discovered archeologically. In this way alternative paths of human development can also be constructed and enacted and made to converge with those paths that won out.\n\nIn a sense, then, center study takes sides in contemporary politics—it tries to impact credit, i.e., engage in sabotage, in accord with whether its preferred party is in power—but the real issue is ensuring credit flows to promising companies and keeping those companies promising by relying on data collection from institutions within juridically intact spaces and keeping those spaces juridically intact so as to feed their hunger for nutritious data. The simplest way in here (not to suggest here aren’t already promising companies) that I can think of is data collection and curation for the sake of large scale lawsuits for defamation and fraud, with the goal of making lying very costly (on this point I agree with Curt Doolittle, but this agreement may end—I genuinely don’t know—once I point out that not all human utterances can be classified as true or false because not all human utterances are solely declarative).\n\nBut we can also counter and include new forms of assetization (Bitcoin is not credit so it’s not really money) by proposing tokens issued by the United States backed by the blockchained obligation to maintain the scientific, technological, and educational capacity to go to war in a timely manner against any state upon which some of such capacity still depends—i.e., an obligation to be able to convert to total autonomy virtually instantly. (Establishing and maintaining this obligations would require exactly the kind of data security “subcontractors” I referred to earlier.) This should be the case anyway, and points to the inclusion of credit and tokenization, or the outside spread, within the order of succession.\n\nThe outside spread is already the most crucial depository of data in its vast recordings of claims to assets and credit and the strengthening of succession involves retokenizing those tokens as teams who can be counted upon to assess, verify and accredit those records. This involves the creation of what we can call a Domesday Machine, after the survey ordered by William the Conqueror recording all the property claims in England after the Norman Conquest, as an attempt to approximate the Last Judgment. Now, such a survey would be ongoing, constantly updated, including mappings, simulations and predictions guided by machine learning AIs—but such work would still be meticulous labeling, at all scales, requiring equally highly levels of integrity, innovativeness and precision—“precision in matters of the soul,” as the novelist Robert Musil put it. And it could start at any scale right now, with various inventories of creditability."
    },
    {
      "slug": "tagging-and-tracking-the-human",
      "title": "Tagging and Tracking the Human",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 14, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/tagging-and-tracking-the-human",
      "content": "A central element of the “linguistic turn,” at least in its poststructuralist and postmodernist form, was the critique of “humanism,” taken to be the guiding ideology of the West in the post-WW 2 era and perhaps beyond. “Humanism” might be roughly equated with “liberalism,” or, in a more post-War context, “Judeo-Christian”—attempts to retro-engineer an essential identity that legitimated “liberal democracy” (also, of course, “humanist”) in philosophical, aesthetic and civilizational terms. “Humanism” was also taken to do the ideological work of distinguishing “West” from “East,” the “developed” from the “Third” world, etc.\n\nHumanism was attractive (so much so that the USSR had its own version) because it purported to confer dignity upon the person, the individual, in a way that comported with human rights, rule of law and related US-order sanctioned concepts. Morally, it was associated with granting a high level of intentionality and responsibility upon the individual (itself seen as legitimating “free market” economics that attributed success to individual efforts and capacities); aesthetically with forms of realism presenting rich portraits of individuals distinguishing themselves from constraining social settings and philosophically with realism or representationalism and phenomenology and its continuation in existentialism (i.e., with strong notions of intentionality, choice and responsibility).\n\nHeidegger advanced, I think, the first explicit critique of humanism and Althusser approached the question in especially polemical terms, perhaps at least in part as an oblique attack on Stalinism; then, all the work of thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, Lacan and many others, whatever their differences, were all attacks on humanism in the name of language, or the unconscious, or desire, or some other “structuring,” “constitutive” order beyond the control or even awareness of any of us—except, perhaps, from the elevated theoretical perspective provided by the theory itself which never, though, even in Althusser’s Marxism, led to any compelling notion of agency (in fact, one important reaction to poststructuralism, cultural studies, was initiated and sustained as a search for these missing agencies among the various subalterns and identity groups).\n\nThe emergence of AI returns us to these questions in a new way, as many of the critiques of AI can themselves be critiqued as returns to earlier, discredited notions of human agency, uniqueness, cognitive specificity, ethical or creative distinctiveness, and so on—although, of course, this all depends upon whether one thinks those earlier critiques were, indeed, discrediting. Another element of the critique of humanism is that it is a vehicle and declaration of secularism—if the human is the center, or the measure, then God has been removed from the picture—and various political claims made for religious institutions are reverting to these questions as well, more or less explicitly.\n\nI can’t recall specific assertions to this effect, but I am virtually certain that Eric Gans would consider GA a humanism, and this is part of the broader range of issues on which I left GA and started Center Study. In fact, the questions raised by humanism are similar to those raised by secularism—the originary hypothesis does, indeed, cut the divine in any traditional sense out of the equation and in that sense would be the most “humanist” mode of thinking imaginable; but in place of the divine or holy we have the center which can never quite be “human” yet governs all. There is a relation to the center, not a human essence present in each individual.\n\nIt is on these grounds that I aligned myself with the poststructuralist critique against what I would see as Gans’s “existentialism,” a label confirmed by his recent reliance upon Sartre’s “neant” for his descriptions of the effect of the originary deferring representation. But this is less important than bringing the question into closer focus, because I think the question of the human has changed from that of whether the human or some structure is the center to how do we think the specificity of the human against, on the one side, the animal and, on the other side, the technological. Biology and ethology continually pressure the boundary between the human and the animal while media and technology studies erode that between the human and the technical, by drawing attention to the various ways in which we are “always already” technical and, more recently, even “computational.”\n\nI will take a paradoxical approach to the question, trying to join in the boundary erosion on both sides but precisely as a way of continuing to isolate, perhaps in ever new ways, the impossibility of erasing those boundaries. I of course see the originary hypothesis as constitutive of the human and the distinction of the human, but if the originary scene was computational (and I think some of Gans’s recent “ontological” Chronicles could be taken in that direction) then that specificity would be swallowed up within the broader “computationality” of reality. And that is the context I want to focus on here, because it is becoming clear that computationality is going to be the prevailing concept of the thinking of “planetary scale computation” currently organized around Antikythera, which seems to me the most powerful direction the thinking of the Stack is taking now.\n\nAnd I want more precisely to address the argument, very much countering previous iterations of anti- or post-humanism, by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, equating intelligence and, ultimately, life, with prediction. It’s easy to see one can claim that every organism is making predictions about its environment, with those predictions then getting tested, with those organisms passing more tests “graduating,” i.e., surviving and passing on its genetic material and so on. And one could fit the originary gesture within that frame: those on the scene are “predicting” that converting the grasping into a gesture will lead others to do the same.\n\nBut “prediction” is a very declarative modality—you can’t predict without saying something like “X will happen,” which in turn relies upon some prior agreement regarding what we are to label as “X,” and what it counts for something, and then “X” specifically, to “happen.” We’re working with measures, bounds, fits, likes, sames, etc., already in place. We can project this speech act onto other organisms but only a the cost of obscuring something of what is happening—a bacteria is not stating that the chemical composition in the surrounding liquid environment will alter so as to take on certain proportions and then establishing conditions under which the hypothesis is tested (of course I know that no one is claiming it does this but, then, why refer to what it is doing as “prediction”—so that, of course, on could undergird it with “computations”—why not “anticipation,” or “approximation,” for example?)—the organism is, rather, inclining and maybe “upclining” in certain ways in accord with inclines and upclines in its surroundings.\n\nEach incline or upcline “indents” the surroundings, laying tracks favoring some future movements over others. By marking the environment through these tracks it moves upon it takes in “information” (feelings of new indentations allowing new passages) so that in a sense future tracks are laid upon previous ones in a way that we could then sum up as prediction or computation but is really more of a fitting. (I’ll also mention that “prediction” as a definition of intelligence is enormously reductive and excludes from intelligence all kinds of states and stances that might very well be considered intelligent. If, for example, I like, for the moment, a particular image as the wallpaper for my laptop screen, I don’t think I’m predicting anything [except maybe a good feeling the next time I look at it?—but does that count?], but I also wouldn’t exclude the possibility that there might be intelligence in the choice. No doubt other examples might come to mind.)\n\n(I’m going to make a brief mention here of something I anticipate returning to: I am seeing in the thinking of planetary scale computation references to mimetic theory—only Girard, so far—that imply the possibility of important overlaps with center study.)\n\nI think that this little “ontological” disagreement is in turn helpful in charting a course through the question of the human. Marking the environment is, in retrospect, “tagging” it, i.e., marking it as part of a mode of labeling and categorization and that tagging creates the tracks along which the organism will move—but the organism doesn’t tag in order to track. I am going to say that every organism marks or tags its environment or surroundings and that these tags mediate its relations with predators, prey, and various possible dangers or aids but that no animal tags in order to track—animals follow or evade in accord with the marks made by other animals but they are not themselves “labeling,” or, in terms of the originary hypothesis, ostensively naming features of their setting.\n\nThis is another way of saying that animals don’t have a scene. But humans do tag in order to track, because they can refer, ostensively, through joint attention, and therefore follow the movements of pre-labeled entities. How about machines, though, and, in particular, artificial intelligence? If machine intelligence tags in order to track then the human/technical boundary collapses, at least according to the construction I’m proposing here. Now, of course, in a sense not only do machines do this but this is one of the most prominent and contested (or resented) aspects of current deployments of machine intelligence—its use for surveillance purposes. Machine intelligence, in this regard, allows for far more intricate and complex systems of tagging to track than human alone or, more precisely, humans in previous technological configurations, could ever have done.\n\nI think there is a critical and, accepting the risk of all such claims, irreducible, difference between human and machine intelligence here. When we turn tagging and tracking power upon humans, we penetrate more deeply into scenic articulations, both horizontally and vertically and, of course, temporally. If I label a particular gesture that seems to me to be increasingly common in certain circumstances (taking into account all the work—for which machine intelligence can be very helpful—needed to identify that particular gesture, distinguishing it or, rather, constructing spaces upon which we can jointly distinguish that gesture from “similar” ones) we will find previous gestures, or traditions of gesturing, or conditions calling forth certain “families” of gestures, and this history and ethnography of gestures will in turn have reference to specific juridical institutions and models of indebtedness that have their own histories of transformation and that have been registered and recorded in various ways in media with their own histories, and so on.\n\nIf the AI turns its tagging and tracking power upon itself, what does it turn up? And of what interest would that be to the AI? There’s the data upon which the machine intelligence has been trained and the algorithm or supervised or unsupervised learning process through which it does its next-token prediction, but does any of that tell us anything that wouldn’t just repeat the content that has been generated? If you gather this data and train the program on it in this way, you get these outputs. The AI could tell us that, but that doesn’t tell us or, for that matter, the AI, the next thing to do with the AI, whereas the scenic inexhaustibility of our tagging and tracking of the human gesture carries untold implications of where and how we might make our marks, lay our tracks, incline and upcline.\n\nFor the originary hypothesis to participate in history, it must be open to being treated to endless redescriptions, taking on vocabularies drawn from new social and technological settings—indeed, a “genealogical” analysis of the originary hypothesis, formulated at a particular moment by a particular thinker and propagated by specific people situated in specific institutions, organized in deliberate ways, would show that it has already been thoroughly marked or tagged by actors in particular surroundings; meanwhile, an at least partial “proof” of the hypothesis would be its commensurability with any theoretical vocabulary.\n\nTagging and tracking are terms I’m largely taking from some brief and incomplete what I take to be speculations on a possible way of thinking the origin of language from Jacques Derrida, and which I have discussed more than once previously—and that seem to be resonant with the kind of intellectual work required by the development of AI and therefore likely to become especially important. Derrida (I’d have to find the specific references in Of Grammatology), in his speculations on an “arche-writing” that would displace the phonocentric notion of writing as a representation of speech speaks about the creation of trails and landmarks as such an arche-writing, and so I wondered whether he might have hypothesized that the first sign might have been a result of members of the group following each others’ trails and eventually creating them so as to be followed.\n\nHere, we wouldn’t have a scene or event, but rather a gradual making deliberate of the “traces” of activities carried out with other goals in mind. I rejected this hypothesis because there’s no way of accounting for when a “reader” of the track would become a “writer “ for the subsequent “reader” but still preserved this as a secondary hypothesis for spreading the sign outside of its initial ritual context, when the reciprocal tagging and tracking in the deferral of violence gets transferred to non-confrontational cooperative activity.\n\nOn the originary scene, we tag the central object and then we track each other through it and we do this because the correlation between our tagging others and our being tracked by them becomes both compelling and overwhelming forcing and enabling this shared tagging. We could say that the originary scene has been completed when the tagging and tracking system has been installed. This reciprocal tagging and tracking describes the advance and withdrawal involved on the originary scene, perhaps under, to keep Eric Jacobus’s ROBA hypothesis in the equation, “weaponized” conditions with participants on the scene bringing cutting “utensils” now appearing as weapons and then converted into something like measuring implements for dividing the meal.\n\nTagging and tracking tracks with governance. There is equality in relation to the center on the originary scene because we are all trying to successively tag the movements of the other (under our ritually enclosed scrutiny) in accord with the commands of the center. “History,” in this case, is the successive series of tag and track iterations following the initial inequality in tagging and tracking through the center. Those who come to tag and track the community in the name of the center introduce an asymmetry wherein the oscillation between transparency and opacity on the part of the center sets the terms for the same oscillation on the part of the periphery.\n\nBut those on the periphery can operate this same asymmetry in relation to their tagging and tracking of each other, thereby training each other in the training of the center. The center in turn calibrates its own distribution of opacity and transparency—tagging certain features obscures others, and no tagging and tracking could be exhaustive because each iteration of tag/track produces new features to tag and new possible pathways for movement. Those on the periphery likewise, under unequal conditions, calibrate their oscillation or fluctuation between opacity and transparency. We might say there’s an endgame here in the form of an exchange: we concede a certain opacity of the center in exchange for it allowing us to be opaque in ways that enable us to be transparent in the ways the center needs us to be transparent in order to balance transparency and opacity so as to… There’s no “grand narrative” (like those of the humanists—which, in this context, is nearly synonymous with “Whiggism”) but, rather, an ongoing reciprocity of tagging and tracking trying to “optimize” the degree and mode of transparency/opacity on both sides.\n\nIt is the case, though, that tracks previously blazed or laid are never irrecoverably lost, so every attempt at optimization is drawing upon and modifying previous provisional optimizations. I’m not sure whether insisting, through all this, on a constitutive asymmetry between center and periphery makes me humanist or anti or post-humanist, but maybe that particular mode of tagging and tracking can be relegated to the sidelines for now."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-pointman",
      "title": "The Pointman",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 29, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-pointman",
      "content": "The Axial Age can be defined as a new mode of rationality transcending ritual or a kind of secularization in which new modes of universal understanding transcend narrow or “compact” social groupings, drawing upon the simultaneous emergence of Greek Philosophy, the Hebrew prophets and Asian phenomena like Buddhism and Confucianism. In Western terms, though (and whether Chinese and Indian cultures recognize or care about this historical transition is unknown to me), what happens here is a new form of victimization that invalidates existing ritual, in particular human sacrifice, and creates a new mode of sacrality that recognizes, more or less explicitly, the centrality of mimetic desire.\n\nIt’s not just that Socrates invents a new mode of dialogic inquiry that examines the meanings of words that are ordinarily taken for granted, it’s that he is killed by the community for this questioning—this event, the execution of Socrates, is what founds “philosophy.” It’s not just that the later. Hebrew prophets refined the Judaic understanding of God, abstracting it away from sacrifice and locating it in inner intentionality, but that they were ostracized by and suffered in the name of their community, a community which in turn was made to suffer for (at least retroactively) this new conception of God. And this line of prophecy finds its culmination in the willing sacrifice of Jesus—again, Christianity is not just a a series of propositions about God, the trinity, redemption, etc., but a commemoration of this event, of a killing in which all of our (mimetic) sins are concentrated and expiated.\n\nIn Anthropomorphics and elsewhere I provided a broader speculative narrative framing for these events in terms of a kind of anti-imperial imperialism, which is to say the instantiation of a kingdom beyond and commanding all earthly kings. The new mode of sacral victimology fits within this more political framing because what the imperial order, in suppressing the vendetta and centralizing power in the divine emperor, does is to establish a justice system in which the right to revenge is disavowed on the condition that complaints will be heard and adjudicated in a “satisfactory” way—i.e., a way that approximates what would have been the result of a successful vendetta “closely enough” (we must use such approximative terms because any justice system is always poised on the verge of a “tilt” back into the vendetta but there is no way of determining in advance when one or another of the parties might initiate the decisive “tilt” through a calculation of the risks and benefits entailed in breaking with a less than satisfactory judicial regime).\n\nBut the justice system can itself always be placed “on trial” in a kind of case that, analogous to the “exception” Carl Schmitt considered constitutive of sovereignty, stands both inside and outside of the system. Here we imagine—and literature provides us with ample samples for such imagining—a figure who suffers an injury that goes unremedied while possessing the ability to leverage resources that would challenge the injustice through a force illegitimate within the system but in the name of correcting that injustice (rather than overturning or escaping the system). Such an encounter creates what Jean-Francois Lyotard identified as an incommensurability of idioms (a “differend”) and is, in the first instance, necessarily tragic: the injustice can no longer be remedied without acknowledging the extra-juridical force through which it was remedied thereby undermining the justice system from which remedy was demanded in the first place. The figure initiating this singular case can only be killed or expelled and we are forced to see him as both right and wrong while nevertheless also now being forced to see a fatal flaw and vulnerability in the justice system itself.\n\nMy argument here is that the Axial Age is the ongoing testing and examination of this kind of hypothetical case which was, in fact, most closely realized in the cases of Socrates and Jesus. The problem for those committed to drawing out “centered ordinality” or the “tributary” from the current disorder driven by the oscillation between the central bank and central intelligence is that the centrality of the victim to Axial Age and successor models (modernity) has led to the extreme dysfunctions of the victimary in which, to retrieve an old formulation of Eric Gans’s, the “marked” is a priori privileged over the “unmarked.”\n\nYou can say that transgenderism, Black Lives Matters, Free Palestine, etc., don’t necessarily follow from the crucifixion, or from universal morality, or reason, and you would be correct, but these movements are advanced not through testable propositions but through staged events that are “close enough” to the history or martyrdoms, including the all the secular martyrs to reason, science, liberal rights, etc., to override propositional claims. So, either the Axial Age is restored to its groundings in some way as to immunize it from such deviations, or it is rejected as a failed model, or some other new “age” is created to correct or maybe supplement (I won’t say “transcend”) it.\n\nI don’t think it is possible to reject the Axial Age revelations without breaking with the entire notion of a juridical order because it is predicated upon certain irremediable elements of that order—so, I will leave it to those who would prefer a return to the vendetta and honor system (essentially some form of “mafia”) to make a case for that approach (I have in mind here Mike Maxwell’s inquiries in his Imperium Press Substack). But I also don’t think that a mode of sacrality that relies upon the death of the singled out and centralized victim can be immunized against using that model to train attention on whoever can be presented as the most powerless and guiltless figure in any event.\n\nThat leaves us, then, with the creation of a new revelatory order, one which preserves the insights into the nomos and the juridical generated throughout the Axial Age while eliminating its vulnerability to parasitism. I have already suggested the most minimal (always to be preferred!) path here—maintain the scenario constructed above while subtracting the death of the victim (who will therefore no longer be a victim). The Christian revelation already recognizes that, in some sense, Jesus didn’t have to allow himself to be killed—He was God himself, after all. The same would hold true in a weaker way for the prophets (and the Jewish people themselves) who, if they were indeed vessels of God’s word and will, could have been spared exile and universal hostility.\n\nEven Socrates rejects proposals to help him escape his sentenced execution—in each case the point is insisted upon that the sacrifice is voluntary but also, therefore, necessary for the installation of the new order of sacrality. Even well past the age of sacral kingship, in which sacrificing kings was part of the system, the possibility of the king willingly presenting himself as a sacrifice remains essential to Western legitimacy. The power of this voluntary sacrifice is that it turns the attention back on the perpetrator, who is confronted with his act of lynching an innocent victim and therefore with recognizing some degree of innocence to every victim—this is the source of the moral transformation—in Girard’s terms, one has to face the bad faith in which one carries out the ritualized killing—you can no longer believe the official story, that you are saving the community from the plague, or a drought or some other “contamination.”\n\nI certainly don’t think we can restore good faith to human sacrifice, which leaves us with the question of how an equivalent revelation can be effected without death—how do you prove you are willing to die without actually dying? Even putting yourself in an extremely dangerous situation allows for the possibility that you will try to survive it and in doing so will reveal an entirely different scenic order than by succumbing.\n\nIt must, then, be possible to commemorate, iterate and cite that other scenic order more effectively than the scenic order installing the Axial Age can now be commemorated, iterated and cited. We still have that figure, inside and outside of the system, occupying some juridical anomaly, becoming the cynosure. Here we’re thinking about a genuine candidate for power, even someone exercising power, even sovereign power, while simultaneously enacting a mode of power and sovereignty repellent to the existing mode. This candidate realizes and for others is a source of revelation that at every single point of the existing order the incommensurability or anomaly one occupies finds a source of strength.\n\nSomething like a universal conversion is necessary but, simultaneously, that conversion can only find its reference points within the existing order: it only makes sense in terms of the juridical, the originary distribution, and credit. Something like maintaining the existing order by turning it inside out is called for. But this candidate wants to win, to succeed, and here is where we enact a kind of repudiation of the Axial Age’s repudiation of the merely human, social order. Redemption is within the human world—it is “social” and “political.” This is anathema to the remnants of the Axial Age, which have, under “liberal democracy,” organized themselves by attributing such a commitment to what they call “totalitarianism.”\n\nAnd, indeed, what I have called an “open source Messianism” is invoked here—but, at the same time, such Messianism is “reduced” to “history,” to the ordering of power. You might say that this model involves restoring the disavowed political dimension to the Axial Age model.\n\nSo, we have someone who is indeed ready to lose, resistant to compromise that would in fact be failure, but making every effort to win, clarifying what that would mean at each point along the way—this is what we want to “sacralize” or, again, to be more precise, identify, name, commemorate, iterate, and cite. I’ll get more specific: during Trump’s first term, when the “Qanon” posters and others (like Thomas Wictor) were attributing to Trump far-reaching plans, strategies and powers that they claimed refuted the appearance of lost opportunities, poor appointments, lack of control over relevant agencies, etc., my attitude was always that I don’t know how true any of this might be but there’s no reason it (or at least much of it) couldn’t have been true.\n\nIt seemed to me at least as plausible as Trump being a screw-up or just being defeated. And I didn’t see any reason not, as an interested observer unable to influence these events, to maintain a kind of oscillation between the possibilities, assigning various likelihoods as things go. This still seems to me the right approach, resisting the arrogance of claiming to have some behind the scene knowledge (that others are too stupid or weak to grasp), and in the process contributing to the construction of an iconic sign of governance that might become real. Even “cognitively,” this position seems to me the best one, as it embodies a humble stance of constant inquiry, employing the simple heuristic that, on some level, Trump means what he says—and meaning what you say also means that what you say has the kind of bearing on reality you say it does—and then “measuring” events accordingly, as either opening some distance between saying and doing or introducing new layers and temporalities of meaning—leaving open, as a last resort, the possibility (which can never be completely abandoned) that it was all false, a lie, a fraud, an utter failure, etc.—but even in that case we would emerge with a sense of what would have been the truth, what would have counted as success, what would have involved maintaining the identity of saying and doing.\n\nI am going to call this figure whom we should be seeking out and in seeking out hypothesizing regarding the conditions of emergence and features of, the “pointman.” He is at the point, taking the initiative, gathering all initiatives under his banner, and at the same time the one everyone points to, out of wonder, curiosity or outrage, with the finger of accusation. Like the Axial Age sacrificial figure, the pointman must draw all attention to himself, and must compel everyone to choose whether to join or deny him. Everyone will marked by the degree to which they keep “faith” with him. We are speaking of the latest iteration of the Big Man, which also means that what is now commemorated is the pointman’s reception, seizure and eventual transfer of power.\n\nThe word for “center,” if the Online Etymological Dictionary is to be trusted, derives from the word for “point,” which itself derives from the word to “prick,” i.e., to wound, to cause to bleed. So, I can now replace the clumsy “occupant of the center” with “pointman,” as a more resonant and less technical-sounding synonym. Nor is seeking out the pointman a merely passive stance—it’s not waiting for Godot, because there are a lot of candidates out there and you’re looking for them, testing them when they emerge, drawing conclusions from events they create, contributing to the conditions of their platforming and, indeed, in the process, someone so engaged in the process of pointing out the pointman might end up having been the pointman all along. You might turn out to have been the outside option insofar as you have been contributing to the monopolization of the outside spread.\n\nWhat I am describing is marked by all the paradoxes and perils of Messianism, and even more, a worldly Messianism. Liberalism has good reasons for being wary here. It’s easy to imagine things going terribly wrong and, after all, would we ever know, would there ever be anything approaching unanimity, on the arrival of such a figure? I’ll answer these likely objections by referring to my concept of the succession ritual, in which this high tension between being “pinned” to the center, so to speak, on the one hand, and entering and occupying it, on the other hand, can be enacted and the scenic structure attributed to and conferred upon the pointman.\n\nThis conception draws upon archaic rituals of initiation and sacral kingship, but in place of the sacrifice of the central figure we have the high stakes lawsuit against him, which might be brought by any subject and might end in the ruin of the pointman (or the subject). Anyone daring to take on the pointman in this mediated, spectacular, presumably non-violent (but the possibility of violence is always part of the background of the scene) contest would have to be ready to claim the title himself, ultimately, given a victorious suit, through a gracious transfer from the present pointman himself. Note that the trial of Socrates and the trial of Jesus are critical to the Platonic constitution of philosophy and to the Gospels, respectively.\n\nEchoes of trial by combat can be heard here as well, but now through the marshalling of data more than through individual valor and skill (but, again, once a confrontation is initiated, however closely it’s controlled by conventions and careful monitoring, the outcome is never certain). What is at stake here is both the character of the governor and the maintenance of governing traditions placing social continuity, i.e., succession, at the center. And, in the end, the maintenance of such traditions will do more to protect the weaker members of society from violence, injustice and indignity than all the martyrologies we’ve inherited through the Axial Age."
    },
    {
      "slug": "measuring-deferral",
      "title": "Measuring Deferral",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 15, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/measuring-deferral",
      "content": "Continuing to pursue the Holy Grail, or the white whale, whatever the case may be: a complete, self-generating, perfomative discourse on language drawn entirely out of the originary hypothesis and originary grammar. Maybe it’s the philosopher’s stone, or the quintessence. Language, or sampling, as the ongoing measure of deferral is the path forward here—we are always measuring our respective measures of deferral, in the process building new. Infrastructures of deferral. I’ve been reading through the first issue of Antikythera, in particular Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s discussion of life as computation, which I defer while being prompted by, and so I want to lay a little “ontological” groundwork—that is, an attempt at a minimal account of the most minimal categories we need to think, and whose interrelations and articulations can produce everything.\n\nThe key to doing this in such a way as to defer dualism is identify categories that are necessary to representing and “computing” reality while also being part of reality—in that case, we’re engaging with reality as just another part of it. For a while the most basic category that I thought fit this description was “measure,” since that’s the first thing we must do in dividing reality so as (going back to the originary event) distribute it. We could, it seems to me, think of reality as always measuring itself—for example, one object affected by another is weighing that object through its own modifications under its pressure; objects measure one another by existing at a certain distance from them within space, and so on.\n\nBut then it occurred to me that even more fundamental than measure was marking—one piece of reality must somehow be separated from other pieces in order to be measured and, we could say that a measurement is really at least two marks, with the distance between the marks between the measure. Both mark and measure are fundamental to writing, with its origins in inscription and accounting, so I would continue to credit Derrida’s “arche-writing” here. One more category might be enough for a “fundamental” or “originary” ontology: threshold, meaning that a certain articulation of marks and measures becomes something more than those marks and measures themselves (which themselves, therefore, must have “always already” have passed some threshold so as to become marks and measures).\n\nMore minimally, instead of “threshold” we might say “boundary,” because once a boundary has been drawn around something or between two things, that boundary creates something new and more complex on both sides. And a boundary is itself a mark and a measure. But it seems to me that one more category is needed, so as to produce the relations between these others: “fit.” Things tend to fit together in some way, to occupy space so there is place for each thing, and marking and measuring might be first of all ways of fitting one thing in among others. All of these categories seem to be directly constitutive of language, and therefore of language’s way of mapping over whatever is not language so that language is also part of non-language.\n\nThis is all subject to revision, even though I will be very resistant to adding more categories and, anyway, I’ll have to see how necessary I find all this. I’m working on it now because it seems to me that these categories seem to me to provide everything necessary for computation without saying that life or the universe is computation, which I defer because who, then computed the emergence of it all? That the universe is, first of all, some set of things oriented toward each other in some way, seems the more minimal hypothesis.\n\nLanguage, then, measures while effecting deferral, and language is deferral, which is important because no true measure of anything human can come from something non-human—we are always speaking in terms of one part of what is human measuring another part, for the purpose of fitting and bounding. One utterance, or sample, can only measure another utterance or sample but that means a whole field of possible and actual samples—whatever anyone says has deferred and thereby measured all the other things that could have been said instead. But this marking and measuring extends across the whole stack of scenes. It may be necessary to invest heavily in deferring some local rivalry so that some other means of deferral can be assaulted or protected; or, it might be necessary to undermine established means of deferral within a small group so as to prepare that group to participate in wider circles of deferral.\n\nWe can say that the best enactment of deferral is one that extends sensory receptors as widely as possible across scenes and thereby most approximates measuring the entire human field and updating the measuring rods accordingly. We’d be thinking here of measurement less in numerical terms than in terms of a kind of mirroring that shifts perspectives so as to show how something looks, feels or sounds from a particular point within a particular scene. This is unsatisfying for those who want a separate scene upon which measurements could be conducted unaffected by the scenes being measured, but this is a possibility to be infinitely deferred.\n\nThere are kinds of calculation and computation involved in the measurement of deferral, but they are of the type that tries to sharpen questions like what kinds of rivalries might require some thus far unimagined mode of adjudication given the further development of a particular technology. And this involves embedding the adjudication further into the situations where the need for adjudication might arise, thereby making those situations more auto-adjudicable through, say, protocols and software. Or, how might fields of candidates for succession be drawn out of institutions, ranked, placed in competition sufficiently unrivalrous (or rivalrous only in the “right” ways) so as to have all contribute to the selection process—which, in turn would have us hypothesizing institutions focused on highlighting and cultivating the features such selection processes would eventually come to focus on.\n\nOr, how do we, to refer to that Peirce statement I often recur to, price into existing credit systems (the “outside spread”) the collapse of the existing lines of credit to that point where “all insurance companies go bankrupt” and we have no recourse other than that originary line of credit—hope, love and charity or, more minimally, deferral itself. One’s utterance, or samples, would elicit other like ones that in the end become a kind of planetary scale computation.\n\nMimesis is the way we measure each other. Invisible components of human activity, like “intent,” can only be marked and measured by some complementary or counter action—you fit into someone’s action through imitation or you see what it’s made of by opposing, inflecting or deflecting it. Escape from the Big Scenic imaginary involves imitating and measuring others’ actions so as to change the fit—rather than just fitting both actions into the present scene, fitting both actions into the present scene so as to fit that scene into a network of scenes: presenting the other’s and your own actions as signs or, here very directly, samples, submitted to other scenes where those samples can be marked and labeled and recomposed.\n\nThis means that you are always marking the scene you are on so as to prepare it for measurement. You are always on some other scene of measurement while being on whatever scene you’re providing samples on. As you mark and measure your power of detection grows. Within language, the present tense becomes a measure of the field of samples, a sharpening of the means of detection. Everything past must be projected on the field of the present, processed through a current reckoning of the way previous events have been recorded and continued up until now; everything future is some ranked or weighted probability of the present, some marking of the present as a will have been of some likely extension.\n\nThe entire present (the English language allows us to do quite a bit with the various forms of the present tense but I think any language could be put to work this way) shrinks down into a constantly modified measurement of likely filterings of the past into the future—have beens into will have beens. To just say something “was” is to slip into the mythological “voice,” to say something “will be” into the prophetic or oracular, and both voices are easily undercut through satirical iterations, or just iterations which will have been satirical.\n\nThe tracing of mark, fit, measure and bound lead us to speak in a way I’ve always deferred while knowing it was possible and even unavoidable—that of “us” being nothing more than the center speaking to itself. This always sounded to me too mystical or Hegelian or too something, and so I’ve set it aside—there’s also the question of what the center would have to say to itself in the first place. It is the final oblivion of “freedom” and related concepts. The center is always marking, measuring and bounding itself, and this only sounds like a kind of divine solipsism if we leave out of account that there is no center without this dialogue, one which takes place across all scenes and even “inside” each of us.\n\nThe better samples more closely approximate the center speaking to itself, which maybe involves something like acquiring and transforming external material (whatever is not in “orbit”) into ways of iterating itself. We’d be aiming at the vanishing point of intentionality, where intention becomes the marginally different/deferred iteration of the stack of scenes. In our samples we try to make the smallest mark that would call into being a whole new Department of Weights and Measures. And that’s what the entire stack of scenes encircling the globe now amounts to, and the problem is how to become an ostensive sign, attracting and deferring even some little bit of resentment, so as to become an imperative, directing attention elsewhere, prolonged into a question, or inquiry, yielding a series of declaratives inverting the question in various ways—ultimately to be subsumed as so many data points within informational circuits, yet always retrievable as a sign contributing directly to maintaining linguistic presence upon some scene, which is also a meta and infra scene.\n\nA further degree or increment of deferral, then, is measured through a taking up of what is deferred into a new assembly, in which what might have been said, what would have been the previous increment of deferral, becomes part of the scene upon which the measurement takes place. We can go back to the scene of reported speech upon which David Olson erects his theory of writing: saying what someone else has said in a different tone, with that difference in tone marking the reported statement as a commentary, enacted from some stance. And we can get more precise, if not more numerical, by drawing upon originary grammar and thinking about how what I’ve been called the ostensive-imperative-ostensive loop, as a kind of unit of discursive material, involves taking up separate signs and fitting them to each other as measures.\n\nDeclaratives are essentially answers to questions about actual or presupposed O-I-O loops, and any such loop leaves plenty of room for questions, because the scene supplies a lot of the tacit reasoning behind responding to this ostensive gesture by issuing or obeying this imperative and confirming the carrying out or failure to carry out of that imperative in this way. The declarative measures O-I-O loops so as to fit them into strings of declaratives while maintaining access, at any point along the way, to any particular loop, however tacit or buried beneath innumerable others.\n\nMeasuring is maintaining linguistic presence, keeping at bay whatever in the present might collapse the scene through an opening into incalculable escalation which is itself possible, as Eric Jacobus shows (in my reading, anyway), because of all of the elements on the scene that might be turned into weapons against the scene, or first of all against its current configuration, but failing that, the scene itself. Maintaining linguistic presence means seeking the gesture that will defer implosion, and then who might make that gesture, how, with what kinds of markings from others on the scene, and so on. This is source of all novelty, even in the form of a slightly different tonal inflection, which results from one scene intruding upon another.\n\nWe can mismeasure, and every measure is a kind of mismeasure as well, but it’s impossible to avoid maintaining linguistic presence, so something is getting measured in a way that can in turn be measured. Now it is possible to say is that what is getting measured is also originary debt, of which debt measured in monetary terms, or, for that matter, in gift economy terms, is itself a kind of measure. What I owe to the center is precisely the measurement of deferral, to contribute to the infrastructure of deferral slightly more than I would have otherwise without cognizance of the debt. The measure of the difference between what I own and am owed, my credit, given and offered, in monetary and originary terms takes the form of what I forgive and what I enforce, and what is forgiven me and enforced upon me.\n\nThe political form taken by the maintenance of linguistic presence is singularized succession and the more I’m contributing to that the more others lend me credit while enforcing the debt of that contribution—according to my abilities. Eventually we’d reach a threshold where monetary debt would be forgiven and I would forgive whatever others owe me, so what my samples measure now is the distance from that threshold—the threshold where monetarily measured credit is converted into the recording of all aptitudes, capabilities, accreditations, authentifications, etc., onto the blockchain, revised retroactively with each new recording, made by those likewise all recorded up on the blockchain.\n\nIf we had recorded, and knew how to record in increasingly precise and farseeing ways, exactly what everyone was likely to do under all imaginable circumstances, so as to participate in which institutions and activities, and could even regularly intake everyone’s feedback on such computations, what would we need money for? The answer would be that there would always be gaps in such knowledge, which is true, so there will always need to be a diminishing store of tokens, under increasingly restricted protocols of issuance, situated at the furtherest bounds of our knowledge, what will prove true (or a proper measure) in the long run."
    },
    {
      "slug": "secular-thinking",
      "title": "Secular Thinking",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 29, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/secular-thinking",
      "content": "Secularism is a question regarding assessing the modern world but also one more specifically for the originary hypothesis which, you could say, brings secularization to its conclusion and thereby cancels it. But, if so, cancels it in the name of what? The originary hypothesis finds the origin of the human, of language, and of the sacred in a single gesture. If the sacred is thus bound up with language from the beginning, how can secularization even be imagined? Wouldn’t secularization have to conceal other modes of sacrality, or perhaps negations of existing modes of sacrality—and therefore be nothing but nihilism?\n\nBut at the same time, if the originary hypothesis locates the origin of the sacred, from where and how is it doing so? Any manifestation of the sacred by definition excludes any other manifestation—even if one accepts that there are various names of god(s) constituting various communities how does one get from there to the concept of “the sacred”? We seem to be caught in an oscillation between “everything is sacred” and “nothing is sacred.” And out of these questions must issue implications for our current social order, which certainly claims to be secular and to make firm distinctions between secular and sacred, relegating the latter to the “private” realm.\n\nI think we can locate the origin of the secular in philosophy, or metaphysics, or the hypostatization of the declarative sentence. If our conversation starts with the question of what is true (or what is good) then we must resort to protocols governing that conversation and those protocols will involve certain rules or processes of logical induction and deduction, dialogue, agreement, assessment of evidence, and so on. We have to agree on what it would mean to agree. Something is or is not the case: we would all be able to agree on one or the other, or on some way to keep the question relevant as a topic of conversation.\n\nIn that case, the question of sacrality is suspended, because determining something to be sacred and hence the source of the good, the true, etc., would then invalidate the conversation. We don’t begin by pointing to the same thing and then asking what we are doing; rather, we begin by asking what is something we might all point to together. The failure of philosophy is that we must already be on a scene to engage in this conversation—something that is made obvious by the origin of Western philosophy in the Platonic dialogue (people walking around and talking) and concealed by the disciplining of philosophy over the centuries. If philosophy was to start by asking how the interlocutors have found themselves to be upon that scene, and how those topics (the good, the true, the beautiful) came to stand in its center, it would become a different kind of conversation.\n\nThe conversation would then have to focus on the break-up of the ritual world that is the real concern of philosophy and the break-up of that ritual world results from the invention of writing, the spread of money and, I will say, the phenomenon that includes both of those, the establishment of “tyranny.” The real topic of philosophy is “tyranny,” which is to say rule that is not ritually established, which is therefore usurped and has no justification and therefore rules through money, which destroys old affiliations and creates new, much more unstable, ones. The rules about what a ruler can do to not be a tyrant are mere backstops, because then you have to start arguing about constitutes a violation of the rules, the severity of that violation, which other bodies (of what “legitimacy”) get to decide, etc.\n\nYou can bravely oppose a tyrant but only in the name of something that wouldn’t be tyranny, and what would that be? You can try to educate or persuade the tyrant to no longer govern arbitrarily, in which case you need a model of the good, the true and beautiful to present to him and guide him. You could say that philosophy is always complicit with power because all it can do is come up with better ways for power to justify and, at best, reform, itself. And if philosophy is always complicit with power, then the same is true for all “secular” thought, which is to say all the “social sciences” spawned by philosophy: political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, etc.\n\nThey are all trying to solve the problem of tyranny, which is to say the destruction of sacral kingship, but can only do so by concealment and disguise. And, even more: the destruction of sacral kingship is not, I would suggest, primarily an internal, organic development but one imposed by some external sovereignty, which is to say by imperial conditions that either explicitly interfered with the community governed under sacral kingship or demanded some organized response that only a usurper could provide. The problem of the many and the one is the problem of empire.\n\nI am challenging “secular” thought here and so I used the formulation of “complicity” with power, which sneaks in the presupposition that one could somehow be either “genuinely” opposed to or free of all debts to power—which, of course, I by no means contend. The accusation of “complicity” is ultimately one philosophy makes to itself, as it chases its own tail. I think we can more straightforwardly address the reality of the imperial, which is to say the human usurpation of the sacred center, with its line taking us from the Big Man, through the chiefs, the sacred kings (who can be sacrificed by the people) and the divine kings (who can demand sacrifices from the people).\n\nTreating the imperial as a “problem” to be “addressed” and “solved” is of course a kind of secularization, insofar as I am not starting from the presupposition of the divinity of power, something which current manifestations of power in fact prohibit (or with good reason accuse of arbitrariness). So, the originary hypothesis initiates another mode of secularization, first of all in thinking but ultimately in human ordering as well. This mode of secularization involves holding the thread of the center, which is the thread of succession and, ultimately, of social continuity itself. Do we live in the “same” order today as we did yesterday and as we will tomorrow?\n\nThis question resolves itself into others: are promises made yesterday obliging today? Is debt enforceable—or forgivable? Is my credit good? Concepts like the true, the good and the beautiful take on their meaning in the context of these other questions. And I am asking such questions both inside and outside of their frame: I am keeping a promise, fulfilling an obligation, paying a debt in trying to clarify these questions, even if part of the clarification involves figuring out exactly what and to whom are the promises, obligations and indebtedness.\n\nRene Girard’s contribution to this mode of secularizing thought that becomes something other than secularization lies in his radicalization of imitation to the point where there is nothing any of us could say, feel, think, believe, that wouldn’t be “touched” by our imitation of others—a radicalization furthered by the introduction of Marcel Jousse’s mimologics and Derrida’s citationality which, if pursued consistently, would have us doing nothing other than iterating one another’s gestures back to one another with the minimal difference any iteration entails. Exhausting, extending, and overturning the other’s gesture in your own implies an ethics yet to be explored.\n\nBut we need the originary hypothesis for a sign to result from this process, and we get this sign by radicalizing the antagonistic logic certain modes of imitation directed toward possession of a single object lends itself to because here we have the minimal conversion of one kind of imitation into another, only slightly different but completely opposite in its effects. This “miraculous” event is part of what makes the originary hypothesis so hard to accept, for the “secular” (who want causes that can’t be provided here because we have a singular event) and the “religious” (who need a deity to ‘legitimate” their miracles).\n\nWhat would it take for the hand grasping at an object, trying to get there before the others, realizing that singular possession is becoming decreasingly likely, to become a hand pointing to the object, indicating the cessation of that frenzied advance—and for that converted gesture of aborted appropriation to “take,” and in turn be imitated by others in the group. This is a radically secular question because it vigorously displaces an entire field so far covered by “theology” into a hypothesis about a bunch of not necessarily impressive “protohumans” who manage to get something “right” that they’ve probably gotten “wrong” many times already.\n\nBut the gesture is conferring a new and “ineffable” power upon the central desired object and this first word is the Name-of-God and if the first word names God than what happens to secularism? We’re always just naming God, in that case—“atheism” would just be another, desperate but maybe in some case appropriate, way of doing that, ultimately by naming the “victims” (martyrs) of various religious. “persecutions.”\n\nThe equivalent but also the “supersession” of secularism for center study (I won’t make such a claim for Generative Anthropology, leaving that up to its practitioners) is what Eric Gans in The Origin of Language calls the “lowering of the threshold of signification” which makes the development of language possible and allows for the establishment of scenes outside of the formally ritual one. Not every gesture and reference is an immediately life and death situation—which means we provide ourselves with spaces to anticipate and mitigate in advance the life and death situations which will surely continue to arise. But then these other scenes are more in the penumbra of the sacred than outside of it—and the existence of a center implies the possibility of being at a greater or lesser distance from it.\n\nEven more, the existence of different locations on a scene, and different “times” on a scene (preparing the scene, exiting the scene, recalling the scene) implies the possibility of scenes within the scene which in turn take on a certain independence. And what the imperial involves in the creation of a meta-scene which includes a series of scenes constrained but not explicitly scripted by that meta-scene. It is within the imperial that we first find a “stack” of scenes, making it simultaneously the origin of the technological, which in turn has its own secularizing and resacralizing effects. We really see the demolition of both sacral and divine kingship in the trial and execution of Charles I of England, even if the results play out over the succeeding centuries—this is where a secular “society” rather than simply local and marginal atheist spaces of thought emerges—while finding its formal theory in a kind of generalization and forgetting of its origin in the radical Puritan sects that deritualized faith.\n\nFor center study, what is happening here is the multiplication of scenes, macro and micro, upon which the assembled can say “this is the same” in unlimited ways. Finding and creating new scenes upon which we can say “this is same” and thereby say the same thing so as not to do the same thing becomes a self-directed practice, an “end in itself.” This is how the space left by the evacuation of sacral and divine kingship is filled, and center study unconditionally endorses this process and finds itself at home here. Scenes continually generate new scenes which, among other things, single out elements of an already constituted scene as the object of attention around which the new scene is ordered.\n\nThis process involves something like a radical decentering but, like all decenterings, it creates the material for a new centering, this time one directed at curating and circulating the results of all these proliferating scenes, “standardizing” and “accrediting” them in real time.\n\nBut it is the possibility of singling out as a site of inquiry some crucial element of another scene that leaves open the possibility of center study being seen as “secular” in the sense of “anti-religious” because demystifying, debunking, and therefore demoralizing what must be left uninspected or taken on faith for other scenes to “work.” Something as simple as examining the material and political processes that led to a particular change in ritual can easily take away the “aura” required for the effectivity of the ritual—it becomes a problem if some gesture you believed grants you salvation was really a result of some compromise between local clergy, central religious authorities and a sovereign concerned with suppressing a rebellion.\n\nBut congregations can learn to be unscandalized by such inquiries (while those making them can learn to be less enthused by scandalizing) insofar as any scene must be constructed out of the available materials, which can always be consecrated, regardless of their origins. Even more, “religions” can scale up, growing to fill the space opened by a world governed by a kind of scenicity-in-itself (beyond sacrality and secularity), converting other scenes into the conditions of possibility of receptivity to its own. Christians and Muslims, to take the two most universalizing religions, can no longer expect to govern in the name of their respective revelations without considerable and probably insuperable resistance but they can “prep” other scenes to accommodate and, perhaps on some longer timeline, come to accept that revelation.\n\nYour own scene can be designed so as to read the other scenes back to themselves, creating scenes within them that scrutinize their design and workings and find in them elements for constructing meta-scenes of your own. This would turn all “religions,” or all disciplines, into a kind of center study which, of course, is working on infiltrating other scenes in the same way. And may the best mode of deferral prevail."
    },
    {
      "slug": "nomos-and-transfer-translation",
      "title": "Nomos and Transfer Translation",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 17, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/nomos-and-transfer-translation",
      "content": "I’ll begin by doubling or, maybe, by this point, tripling or more down on couple of basic idioms or hypotheses. First, and most central, singularized succession in perpetuity—recently, in the course of a brief discussion, answering a couple of questions regarding governance, I hesitated when it came to reducing governance itself, as a whole, to succession. That is, I got a little thrown off guard by having no quick answer to commonplaces regarding governance, like the “common good,” the “good of the people,” etc. I don’t know if I’ve ever emphasized sufficiently forcefully that, yes, there is nothing more to governance than singularized succession in perpetuity, and all these other criteria (along with the ones mentioned, stuff like consent, natural right, natural law, etc., etc.) are either dispensed with or subsumed within it.\n\nSingularized succession in perpetuity is the umbilical cord linking us to the originary scene—hence its indispensability. Whatever “good” or “right” that you might have in mind means nothing if the governor of today is not handing off the reins to the governor of tomorrow. These more “idealistic” or moralistic notions of governance are really apotropaic—things for a ruler to say so as to ward off incitements to rebellion—the most obvious such incitement being “he takes everything for himself and doesn’t care about you.” But if we take such notions seriously, we’d have to ask how, exactly, the sovereign knows what the common good or the rights of the people are?\n\nOnly through the disciplines, starting with the priests and then extending through the philosophers, the spies, the lawyers, the nobles assembled in parliament (but how do they know what the common good is or, rather, how to frame their own demands in the idiom of “good” or “right”?) and ultimately the economists, sociologists, “area studies” scholars, etc. So, these concepts invite in the supersovereigns from the very beginning. Still, this doesn’t mean that singularized succession in perpetuity involves a mere assertion of power and an insistence on obeying whoever has it—if the occupant of the center doesn’t or, even more, can’t, name his successor, that derogates from his authority, because everyone obeying him now is simultaneously scrambling around trying to find whom they might be able to recognize as a successor.\n\nEveryone has to consider whether following some order now might put them at odds with the next occupant of the center. If you choose your successor, which would also mean changing that choice where necessary and therefore always oscillating between and shifting the value of various options, you are interfacing with various social institutions, offering a reading of their current state and directing them towards some future state and therefore shaping that institutional space even to the point of eventually replacing money with the “succession market” or market in pedagogical futures. All this serves the “common good” and elicits the kind of public feedback a ruler needs—which is really the point of granting “rights” in the first place.\n\nEvery public act becomes a confirming or revising of one’s chosen successor. Even more, insofar as your choice is aimed at someone who will be able to choose his successor, who will in turn choose his, etc., you are affirming social continuity and long-term investment in “human capital” as the highest social priority—and, again, without doing that, “common good” and “right” mean nothing. There will always be a reference to and implication of traditions in singularized succession—first of all, most obviously once one can trace one’s occupancy of the center back to a series of predecessors, but even in the case of a break one would make the best case possible for having acted exigently in retrieving some line of succession dropped by a predecessor and whenever possible outlining the juridical paper trail establishing the case.\n\nAnd, of course, as a model for everyone else, you are encouraging the same priorities in all other institutions, installing centered ordinality as the general public protocol. This is a theory of governance that consistently adopts the stance of governance itself, proposing a kind of self-pedagogy of the prince, with everyone else converging on a “theory of the ruler’s mind” which they do their best to make more intelligent. And any theory of governance that takes its point of departure from the stance of the governed is just going to be a playbook for rebellion. (Meanwhile, all the other concerns, regarding forms of culture and morality, demographics, inequality, etc., can all be folded up into succession because, given certain initial conditions, some types of “spreads” along these axes will be more conducive to succession than others—such an order will be organized around succession rituals, which will place institutions and communities on constant display.)\n\nI have been reading about John Selden, the 17th century English jurist and political philosopher, and will mention his notion of “metaphysical equity,” which would ground governance in the obligation, which ultimately requires divine sanction (grasped through the “active intellect”—for me, the result of the study of central figures who attract and defer resentment) rather than mere self-interest, to keep promises and abide by agreements, including those grounding the political order one has inherited (and therefore has not explicitly “agreed to”). The occupancy of the center would then be grounded in the reciprocal obligations between ruler and ruled, with the former obliged to judge justly amongst the latter; a certain right to resistance is allowed for here, one not grounded in natural right, but on the nature of the specific social arrangements that have extended existing agreements and promises into the present.\n\nSuch resistance is first of all aimed at protesting the abrogation of such promises and their restoration, and even if that proves impossible, to the creation of an order as closely modeled on the previous set of arrangements as possible. (This is closely related to my speculations, a few posts back, about the possibility of suing the occupant of the center or putting him on trial.) This is all very coherent, and might be the political theory I’d choose if I had to, but I would incorporate this understanding within singularized succession as well, insofar as by distributing and overseeing distribution and the adjudications necessarily following from distribution and inheritance the occupant of the center is modeling practices for his successors and appointing and variously elevating and demoting those possible successors based on their performance in the juridical arena.\n\nThe other idiom, to which I have had recourse more seldomly, is that of the sample. A while back I proposed “sample” as a replacement for “utterance” in an attempt to unite various layers of the stack in a way which the linguistically certified concept “utterance” cannot: so, an utterance is, in fact, a sample of language, which one “understands” as a representation, metonymic and metaphoric, and probabilistic, of the whole, and in such a way that one contributes another sample, that adds to and alters the whole while advancing knowledge of it. This is a very simple way of thinking exchanges with the center, as mediated by exchanges with each other—we exchange sample for sample, and there will be some kind of measurement and notion of “equality” (“sameness”) involved, but only in terms of the whole, or, to stick with primes, the all, which, of course, neither of us comes anywhere near encompassing.\n\nThinking in terms of samples is also a way of thinking in terms of data, its labeling, curation, and use in training, and therefore of reminding us that we are, however much we want to feel we are guarding our privacy, contributing systematically to the various databases. How to make your sample an improvement of the database and in such a way as to inscribe yourself and ensure your legibility in terms that enable you to keep improving your contributions, will become the most important, maybe the only, moral and ethical question. To those who consider considering oneself an issuer of samples an indignity I would say that you are yourselves samples, and not only is there no loss of dignity in being so but that being or becoming a sample is like (sometimes maybe the same) as becoming a “substitute,” which forms a cord linking us back to the sacrificial center and the elevation of humans to sacrificial value with the emergence of sacral kingship.\n\nThe dignity and even divinity of each individual is synonymous with each of us being a sample. We are samples sampling samples and I would say this sampling/sampledness might also be the most durable way of naming the human in all its interactions with the animal, mineral and machinic. Samples are tokens of deferral and therefore our debt to the center and humans will always be the only beings that have taken on this debt. The idioms of sampling are the best fit for center study as, essentially, a hypothetical infrastructure or infrastructural hypothesis interlaced with all idioms. We always want to make every thing we say—every sample—a bit more hypothetical while making every hypothesis more livable and therefore testable.\n\nAll of this is really a prelude to the topic of the post announced in the title. I want to return to the nomos in order to address certain things center study is allergic to in their familiar formulations, which is to say what ordinarily goes under names like “spirituality,” “religion,” \n“faith” and so on. These names refer to hypotheses I consider defunct. I have consistently proposed replacing them with language, or here we could say sampling, since maximizing the meaning of terms, constatively and performatively, or, all along the ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative axis, covers everything one might mean by those words, while resolving the aporias constituting them (is “faith” “had”?\n\n“Expressed”? “Manifested?” Once you’ve asserted it—against what real or imagined objection or accusation?—then what?) The language of sacred texts themselves, drawing on notions of seeing, witnessing, promising, judging, owing, etc., are far richer than the dogmas and doctrines these words end up referring to. But it also seems to me that this maximization of the sample, seeing to the iteration of the sample, can also be seen as an ongoing refounding of the nomos, which is most real point of origin any of us can participate in. The nomos assumes the conquest of some territory (even if just from “nature” and not its previous inhabitants) and the consequent distribution into lots by the conqueror to his confederates in accord with the role they have played in the conquest.\n\nAll subsequent inheritances will refer back to this nomos, just as US law ultimately refers back to the grants by British monarchs of colonies to individuals and companies. To challenge the distribution is to commit to a new conquest, so anyone who imagines doing so in the name of something like “fairness” or “equality” should have that in mind. But every inheritance, division and delegation, in referring back to the nomos or originary distribution, also accesses the intention of the distributor, which can be re-experienced in every moment. The Jewish version of this is being enjoined, during the Passover Seder, to see yourself as having been present at Mount Sinai during the revelation of the Lord and the giving of the Torah.\n\nThis is meant to be taken quite literarily. Christian rites also place the worshipper with Jesus on the cross and with the disciples at the Resurrection, and there is a model here of concentric circles, where those in the inner circles turn around and gesture toward those in successively outer circles so as to create an unbroken continuity from the initial revelation. Here we find very direct obligations, debts, promises, injunctions, relics of various kinds, modes of congregating and distributing and so on, all governed by some sense of ritual constraint. So, what else is necessary for a life beyond the daily exchanges with those like yourself, one in which and experience of presence through contact with the metaperson(s) guaranteeing the nomos is pervasive?\n\nIn a way this is a getting back to basics post, so I’ll conclude with a revival of the concept of “transfer translation,” which I took over from Marcel Jousse, and which is ultimately a more historically specific way of speaking about “mistakenness.” I’ll frame this is terms of an observation which I’ve been aware of for a long time but never ceases to startle me when I confront it in a new context—that all of our “ideas,” “principles,” ‘convictions,” “fundamental beliefs,” etc., all, without exception, originated in some polemical exchange where reasons had to be given for something one was already doing, or was compelled to do, in the course of following certain imperatives and engaging certain challenges or enemies.\n\nNone of them originated with someone sitting down and thinking, “what’s the real meaning of X?” In the process of connecting one declarative to another through expressions like “because,” “either/or,” “in order to,” etc., an optical illusion (which is really what modern critics of “metaphysics” meant by the term) arises whereby the ideas seem to be generating each other. The notion of the transfer translation gives us a more specifiable way of examining this kind of process, one which I find preferable to psychological concepts like “cognition.” Jouse was interested in what happens when a sacred text is translated and the terms that are treated as equivalent for the sake of the translation have different meanings or webs of connotation in the respective languages.\n\nNew commentaries on and narratives “explaining” rituals or sacred events emerge from the translation and even find their way back into the original language, since in these cases of translation (Hebrew-Aramaic-Greek-Latin in the case of Scripture) many in the scribal class are familiar with several of the languages; indeed, since these kinds of transferences might have been going on well before the texts were gathered together and canonized, the transfer translations might already be “contaminating” the “original” text. Now, as plausible and interesting as I find this as a way of understanding scribal, ritual, liturgical and theological cultures, I’m more interested in it as a model for our every day exchanges of samples, where metaphors getting taken more literally, slippages from a localized to a general application, names turning into words, along with many other semiotic processes generate new understandings of our transactions with, or, rather, indebtedness to, the center.\n\nOne could certainly say that the entire financial, ritual, monarchical, technological and juridical vocabularies I’ve been taking over and remixing (sampling) for years now are just so many transfer translations—more deliberately formed, but never with complete foreknowledge of further permutations and combinations. It’s all a way of pressing samples into service to the center precisely by transgressing their respective specializations (the source of disciplinary power) and putting them in “orbit.” It’s a kind of controlled (but never completely) mistakenness, creating a store of idioms to be sampled in ever new ways. It’s a kind of cult of the idiom, but one open to anyone willing to have their commonplaces displaced.\n\nOur learning processes today are continuous with those deriving from the originary scene: we carry out rituals that have made the center present to us, which is to say, added an increment of deferral to the field of mimetic practices; those rituals are felt to be uneven in their effectivity, leading us to comment narratively on the failure of the ritual, in turn adding to or revising the ritual to fit the commentary. We’re trying to draw out imperatives from the center—what should we do, how should we contribute to the center so as to be worthy of and receive its bounty—whether this is done by more rehearsal of a chant and dance or by revising a prompt or search term eliciting information from the center is the aim.\n\nAnd this is all iteration and commemoration of the originary event, the one that first “worked” and therefore provides a model for all subsequent ones. One implication is to be skeptical of ideas, which is to say declaratives; or, to use the language from my previous post, just treat every declarative as a citation, citing other citations (a form of sampling), which brings its history and grammatical embeddedness to the fore. This will return to you at least a hypothesis regarding the argument (the sampling of a mimetic convergence) over some failed imperative that issued this restraint before a conjured reality and attempted repair of the imperative."
    },
    {
      "slug": "perfecting-the-imperative-and-imperative-exchange-originary-fintech",
      "title": "Perfecting the Imperative and Imperative Exchange: Originary FinTech",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 31, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/perfecting-the-imperative-and-imperative",
      "content": "I have been using “perfecting the imperative” as an idiom for technology for a while now and have started to pursue it further in some recent posts, in part by refining it through the concept of “imperative exchange.” Imperative exchange is an extremely important concept for center study, as it, along with the ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuit, constitutes something like what Plato called (although I’m drawing on my memories of Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language) the “chora,” a space where desire emerges and contacts without yet reaching the threshold of language. Here, though, we’d be thinking of a pre-declarative, not pre-linguistic, stage, but we still have a space where the unarticulated interfaces with the articulated.\n\nI have taken the ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuit from Eric Gans’s examination of the dialectic of the imperative in The Origin of Language, where he imagines the surgeon needing and then requesting a scalpel from the nurse with the nurse handing it to him and repeating and confirming the answered request: “Scalpel…Scalpel.” I’ve generalized this dialectic under the assumption that every met imperative includes an at least tacit confirmation, and that this helps us understand the transition to the virtualization of the ostensive in the declarative. I have always associated the imperative exchange with prayer, which is always undertaken in obedience to an at least implicit or, rather, “lingering,” imperative to seek “information” from the center and constitutes a request for another imperative (“tell me how to do Your will”).\n\nBut this is also to say that the space of prayer is also the space of desire, insofar as desire is the unfulfilled imperative, which we could say is deferred rather than insisted upon through prayer. Perfecting the imperative, then, is building bridges over desire.\n\nRitual is the first technology, as it involves each instrumentalizing all the others so as to effect an event, that of constituting the community in its imperative exchange with the center. Ritual is designed so as to enhance the channels of communication, which is better considered as sign exchange. Technology becomes recognizable to us as such once it takes the form of one commanding many, which is to say under imperial conditions, as with the armies, military or slave, of the ancient empires. Here is where it becomes possible to step back and hone the form of coordination in question, which is a prerequisite to replacing humans with (to retrieve a semi-lost concept) “mimological impressments,” or “drafting” the non-human to mimic the human mass.\n\nI’m speculating here but can hopefully come back to the hypothesis that the smaller scale “technics” of the artisan or craftsman is also post-imperial, as the more individual-sized “impressments” are subordinate or “orbital” to the large-scale projects and the markets produced by large movements of people. Artisanship or craftsmanship, in that case, would replicate ritual as a branch off of imperial projects: such “professions probably began as supplements to ritual staging. Perfecting the imperative then means extending it to further forms of coordination by replacing the current form of coordination with mimeological impressments and thereby creating a new form.\n\nAt each point along the way in this sequence the imperial ordering will be reaching further into the existing store of communal wealth and issuing further calls for authorities to stand by and mobilize forces. This means drawing further upon credit and issuing more of it, in whatever form “credit” takes—but it will eventually take the form of money.\n\nMore of the past and future is then compressed in the present with each perfection of the imperative. We can see, then, a bifurcation within the imperative exchange, allowing us to see both finance and technology as having a shared root—I’ve suggested before, along these lines, that money is best seen as addressing a problem of delegation, which is to say a fundamental problem of governance, and at this point I am fairly close to seeing governance simply as technological, as a matter of scenic design and perfecting the imperative. Keeping prayer in mind as the linguistic form of imperative exchange will guide us here.\n\nPerfecting the imperative means deriving further imperatives from the center, precisely through the refinement of one’s own side of the imperative exchange and this is done by making cases that make the nomos more explicit in forms of coordination. The ever perfecting imperative, meanwhile, requires credit, i.e., resources held in reserve and readily available, from the center, and the drawing of credit involves questions thrown off by the extended imperative with positive answers required for the declarative completion of a new “accredited” scene in the stack. As Lyn Alden points out, money is also ledger, and this includes a technological component, which is to say, money is recorded in the perfected imperative—the creation and maintenance of currency is part of the perfection of the imperative.\n\nAnd credit, moreover, is always a bet on succession, on the continuity of governance maintaining the backing of currency and the juridical order ensuring debts will be enforced and forgiven in ways that can sustain juridical scrutiny. All this plays out in the expectant scene, which we can best represent as everyone trying to accredit themselves as issuers of credit in increasingly blockchained form or, we might say, in ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits within which all can say, “this is the same.” The infinite chain of credit is to be declaratively ledgered not only in money and credit instruments more generally, but in every bit of actionable data, which further means that all data is to be made increasingly actionable.\n\nAnd this brings us back to the conversion of assets into data (once data has first been assetized) and the conversion of currency into data exchange: each of us supplies all of ourselves as data to the center, which is to say the open performance of succession, and the center in turn supplies us with data attesting to our performance that we then advance to teams occupying a particular place on the supply chain, or subscription network.\n\nAnd the supply chain or subscription network is itself a series of overlapping scenes with interfaces, the boundaries between which can be modeled similarly to the Peircean mode of understanding temporality I’ve been using. To recall: to answer the question of when one scene has become the next scene we construct what are in effect inter-scenes whereby the beginning of one scene is the middle of another scene and the ending of yet another scene. So, the boundary between two scenes, the transition of one into the other, is simply the middle of a scene with its beginning in one of the scenes and its end in the other.\n\nFor the purposes of analysis we could easily populate these scenes as needed: we have to posit an observer certifying the end of a particular scene but for the observer that boundary is situated in the middle of the scene of his observation. Now, the original of this model was, in fact, as I recall, spatial: Peirce was posing the problem of the boundary between two objects next to each other. If you get close enough, applied a high enough resolution, you would find that the boundary is in fact an equal mixture of, say, red and blue particles (if we’re looking at the boundary between a red and blue object or space).\n\nThe boundary, then, is where there are slightly more red particles on one side and slightly more blue particles on the other. We can think about horizontal and vertical (as opposed to successive) scenes in this way—obvious examples are boundaries between countries, physical and political, where we have, physically, towns on each side of the border speaking languages or dialects more closely related than either is to those further in the country; or, we can imagine every country has citizens with varying degrees of “particles” of other countries. So, each company along the supply chain is a scene or articulation of scenes with various overlaps with scenes in other companies, above, below and alongside it.\n\nIt would seem that this model compromises sovereignty, but it just means that sovereignty includes provisions for various forms and degrees of foreign presence which would also involve specific forms of adjudication between these various forms of property and standing.\n\nPart of the “tributarian” model of scenic design I’ve been assuming for a while, albeit it without mentioning it much lately, involves the replacement of the market with succession fluctuation: the sovereign, or pointman, or dictator (but maybe I’ll stick with “sovereign”) selects his successor but it is equally within his right to revise that selection which we could in fact imagine him doing regularly in accord with changing circumstance and changing assessments of candidates as those candidates are tested by circumstances, especially as the order becomes more high trust and fears of violent usurpation (or banishment resulting from demotion) recede.\n\nIn that case, changes in succession selection would be assignments of value which would ramify throughout the system, especially insofar as this method becomes installed across the board. The same approach, in modified form, applies to setting values across organizations as each organization moderates its interfaces with other organizations by engaging in what I’ve called “controlled usurpation” across the boundaries of organizations. This, on one level, just makes more explicit what goes on regularly anyway while removing the scandal: if my supplier is too slow or his product has declined in quality I will feel out subordinates to see if they might be able to improve matters and maybe either split off and take much of the team with them or replace the current chief executive.\n\nThis kind of interference across boundaries would just become part of the interface, which would therefore be penetrating all the way into each organization, in layered forms with varying degrees of granularity. This replacement of market forms of valuation would take on complex forms of tokenization as assessments of performance become increasingly precise and important and ways of measuring it take on forms accounting for tacit understandings in ways we are still unable to surface. And in this way values measured through tokens are, simply, data, which, on the blockchain, travels with people across institutions as part of the process of controlled usurpation.\n\nWe started with a bifurcation within imperative exchange: the imperative exchange tends both to further the command to perfect the imperative (the imperfection of which is the source of the exchange) and to solicit the nomos. The nomos, let’s recall, is the originary division of property, originally land, in accord with services rendered to the central commander (the centerarch). But the nomos doesn’t remain static: the value of the different pieces of property change, in accord with both the fluctuations in loyalty and usefulness to the monarch and the “creditability” of each property, its capability of serving as collateral—and this latter property of property depends on the relative care and maintenance of and investment in that property, or its owner’s participation in the perfection of the imperative.\n\nEven more, new modes of property and new ways of dividing, collateralizing and accrediting property emerge, to the point where we are speaking of “assets” more than “property.” So, by “solicit the nomos” I mean enhance the creditability of assets so as to attain a higher rank in the succession sweepstakes—i.e., becoming essential to succession. This makes one’s issued loans more likely to be enforced and one’s borrowed loans more likely to be forgiven. This bifurcation is what “backs” the transition from sacrificial imperative exchanges, in which the gods give us continued peace and prosperity in exchange for a part of our possessions and, eventually, our offspring, to the donation of one’s resentment to the center in which a complete devotion acknowledges the incommensurable asymmetry of the exchange and therefore only asks for further instruction and guidance in perfecting that devotion in exchange for further dedication in pursuing that devotion.\n\nI wouldn’t say, though, that either perfecting the imperative or soliciting the nomos “corresponds” to one “moment” in the trajectory of imperative exchange; rather, both branchings off are aligned with both. There is a sacrificial element to both: perfecting the imperative can trend toward absolute domination, or at least attempts at such, i.e., the continuation in other forms of human sacrifice, but it can also tend towards accelerating pedagogical exchanges around an imperative from the center that empties itself out into the rapidity of those very exchanges. Soliciting the nomos, meanwhile, can either contract that nomos into maximal extraction of assets predicated on the most minimal increments in access to the enforcement/forgiveness ratio of the center; or, it can prolong the nomos by pricing assets as pedagogical futures, to be recouped after anyone alive today will benefit.\n\nStart-ups that bring more of the infra-computable past and the future into the present articulate the anti-sacrificial tendencies on both sides. Such start-ups are a kind of prayer, then: a prayer into the creating world (what Heidegger says has been made into “standing reserve” but we can see as echoes, mirrors, trails and imprints of our imperative exchanges) predicated on faith in the infinite convertibility of that world and a prayer to the nomos, to human organization itself, to the center and to deferral. And any prayer is a renaming, which is necessary because names eventually get mismatched to their objects because they become sites of rivalry—for the same reason there are always mismatches between the nomos and the juridical, which is the same problem at a civilizational level—and renaming is both a technical and financial (insurable and collateralizable) matter, that is, both perfecting the imperative and soliciting the nomos on the expectant scene."
    },
    {
      "slug": "style-markers-and-measurements-of-deferral",
      "title": "Style: Markers and Measurements of Deferral",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 15, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/style-markers-and-measurements-of",
      "content": "Style is a fundamentally mimetic concept. At the origin of any style is the performance of a role. Roles are ultimately ritual performances: certain gestures and utterances are commanded by the center in exchange for the center’s continued solicitousness. And those gestures and utterances are traceable to the oscillatory equilibrium established on the originary scene, as each indicates to the others his aborted appropriation of the object whose compellingness must also be indicated so as to make the gesture intelligible. Even in pre-Big Man orders (are they still called “hunter/gatherer communities”?) there is enough differentiation, along sexual lines and in delegation of authority over ritual to priest and shaman figures, so that performances take place outside of a strictly ritual scene, but I would assume with the same saturation of meaning as the tension of the community is communicated through each member and even more so those situated more centrally.\n\nWith the emergence of imperial orders divisions of labor increase and therefore performances governed by criteria other than ritual rectitude, without necessarily being any less rigorous. “Style” is when the imitable features of a particular performance, either typical to a role or specific to an exemplary performer, are transported beyond that performer or that role. This means that we can thread of all of history through the mutations, articulations and transmissions of styles and stylistic features, and, since style allows us to zero in of the most minimal gestures and infra-gestures, it is a privileged field of data gathering.\n\nAll styles and stylistic features carry in their trail ritual and sovereign commemorations that have been marked and incorporated into new ritual performances and enactments of sovereignly certified practices. Styles carry scenes with them, and with the refinement of styles we can see the creation of abstract scenes implanted in other scenes and we could call this a way of perfecting the imperative.\n\nStyle is stance, and some linguistic theorists of style reduce stance to the relation to some object or topic, the relation to an assumed set of readers, and the relation to an entire norm-governed field of expectations taken for granted by those readers. I would think of this tripartite structure in terms of deferral, deference and deferrality. A style implies some restraint—there are things you don’t say because saying them is too close to doing something that would implode the scene. Deference is offered to reader, listeners and potential interlocutors—a style encodes and enables certain typical responses and includes others in a space of conversation.\n\nDeferrality refers to the broader juridical and nomic conditions within which any style operates and which is inscribed in any style. So, speaking in terms of style, which may be very close to speaking in terms of inscription and ledgering, while being closer to a more publicly legible style, brings us closer to a vocabulary derived directly from deferral, which also means greater compression. Credit is the creation of terms under which immediate demands can be deferred; the nomos institutes a system of deferral around centered ordinality; sovereignty is deferral of claims to occupy the center; the juridical entails deferring the vendetta; and so we might get closer to being able to speak directly about layers of deferred appropriation mediated grammatically, now with the help of the very flexible concept of imperative exchange.\n\nWorking through a new concept, as here with style, is a kind of perfecting of the imperative and solicitation of nomos or requesting further imperatives from the imperative and prolonged deferral from the center. (The “center” might be the undecidable hinge that must be accepted as true without being provable within the system.) And the need for new imperatives could be described in terms of the discovery of inappropriate imperatives issuing in declarative pinpointing of potential ostensives inappropriate enough from the start to be prolonged into imperatives while the request for prolonged deferred appropriation from the center can indicate possible ostensives around which might be designed scenes providing for ritually structured appropriations making further prolongations inscribable on the imperatives from the center.\n\nAnd so on, as we approximate a perfected originary grammar as the scene of center study; while, at the same time as this constrained, increasingly self-referential scene is constructed, more and more of the common language is poached so as to produce interfaces across expectant scenes. Maybe the poaching is needed to turn the common language into a kind of store of value. Hence: style, reducible to deferral while expanding deferral into the worlds of taking on and mutating “roles” or performances.\n\nI’ve referred quite a few times to Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner’s study of “classic” style in their As Clear and Simple as the Truth, invariably in the context of working through the implications of David Olson’s metalanguage of literacy. Like Olson’s, Thomas and Turner’s account is scenic, in their case classic style is understood on the model of writer and reader sharing a scene evoked by the writer as if both are present on the scene and are looking at the same thing. Classic style, then, does not argue or purport to instruct—it simply points to a reality and the truth of that reality which the reader, as co-present on the scene, is equally capable of judging.\n\nThomas and Turner do not study the prevalence of classic style in specific times and places, but it seems to me it was probably the civilized norm for writing from the late 17th to mid-20th century, co-existing at all times, of course, with various other styles (the question of the Baroque looms here). Thomas and Turner locate its modern origins with Descartes, whom they also treat as an exemplary practitioner, and, in fact, their account is heavily Franco-centric. But I would tie the emergence of classic style as a dominant civilizational style with the “break” in English I’ve also discussed before, noted by T.S.\n\nEliot as having occurred around the time of the English Civil War, corresponding also to the founding of the Royal Society, with its stylistic preference for referential over metaphorical language. Classic style is, I think, a de-ritualized form of language, negating hierarchies or obligatory references to a priori doctrine, formulas or Names-of-God. All of this should be studied with the research tools made available through AI but, to follow Eliot, just a look at a poem of John Donne next to one of John Dryden will give you a clue. We can identify some specific features of classic style which might aid in archive searches, like categorical statements constructed through generalities balancing each other to the point of paradox: classic style is not “uncritical,” to use a non-classic idiom but, rather, in showing the reader a self-evident truth also creates a space of deferral whereby prior assumptions are displaced and the truth that the reader would not have considered strikes him immediately as obvious.\n\nAny educated person writing for a public would have taken classic style as default, and most of “realistic” fiction as well as political classics like The Federalist Papers would, I think, be judged to be in classic style. A very interesting history can be written (and maybe already has) from the standpoint of this very imposing and imperative style and other, “resentful” styles challenging it until it is finally overthrown which, I think, it largely has been—the struggle between classic style and the “jargony” style of bureaucratic and disciplinary styles might provide material for the tale of an epic struggle (with Romantic and other exotic styles waging guerilla operations).\n\nClassic style represents a kind of secular faith that is egalitarian and elitist at the same time: anyone can learn to think for himself and once he has can communicate freely with others who have also done so. Meanwhile, language, we can be assured, is, when properly used, in alignment with the truth. Marxists might call it a kind of “high bourgeois style.” If we trace it down to a particular scene on which it is modeled, that scene might be the conversations emergent civil society found conducted in coffee houses and publishing in the late 17th into the 18th century idealized by the recently deceased Jurgen Habermas and probably by classic style itself.\n\nAs part of my day job I have been studying other styles, such as the academic style predicated on the assumption of an open-ended conversation and inquiry in which no one will have the final word and any generality is suspect because it presupposes a consensus that has yet to have been queried—a style characterized by hedges predominating over boosters, concede/counter moves and compressed (especially) noun phrases that might delay the verb until halfway through the sentence or more with that verb, furthermore, likely to be “is” or something close. This is a style that serves as a kind of archive itself, compressing histories of conversations in those phrases, and one in which every claim must be “accredited”—someone must have said it, or said something the claim is responding to.\n\nAll this contrasts sharply with classic style which represents the thought as that of the writer himself and one that the reader himself could also had arrived at—the insistence on enchaining all statements within references is a kind of ritualistic dimension of academic discourse as all conversations must be “licensed,” and I am not being critical of academic style here anymore than I am of any of the styles I’m examining. We can also speak of a kind of cousin of classic style, what Thomas and Turner call “practical” style, which is pragmatic, function and task oriented but also (in accounts less condescending than Thomas and Turner’s) “honest” and “sincere.”\n\nPractical style is what Orwell is arguing for in his often anthologized “Politics and the English Language,” even if quite a few commentators have had some fun with Orwell’s systematic violations of his own edicts in that essay. But here too we can look for specific features or markers: simple subjects and simple verbs (Joseph Williams, a major theorist of this style, calls for characters as subjects and actions as verbs), with limited abstractions and long noun or adjectival phrases. Thomas and Turner formulate the “last third test” to distinguish classic from practical style: with sentences written in the practical style you can often skim or skip the last third of the sentence because it will contain less important or predictable information whereas the sentence written in classic style requires a full read through because the reversal in expectations of paradoxical balancing is often saved for the end.\n\nAcademic style is modeled on a kind of disciplinary scene, of course, while practical style draws heavily, I think, on a kind of “veteran” to “apprentice” scene, where one who knows something or has seen or experienced something the other hasn’t is putting it in “layman’s” terms for the reader.\n\nI have also argued for a kind of originary, or maybe I want to call it “centropic” style, involving a compression and telescoping into the present tense. I would say this is modeled on the originary scene itself, or, rather, its iterations, as drawing all of the past and projecting all of the future within the scene of writing and reading itself. The most obvious marker here is the constraint of having everything in one of the present tenses, on the assumption that the past tense is mythical and the future tense prophetic and both of those styles are to be deferred in the name of curating ourselves as data for the center.\n\nThis centropic style would share with and even exceed academic style in prolonged phrases tracking and tracing various instances of deferral conceivably issuing in the enactment of the present one and with classic style the compression into maxim-like paradoxical and transportable idioms—while for classic style such maxim-like phrases are to be presented as the product of thinking and observation going on behind the scene, for centropic style they are to be seen to emerge through a continual effort at executing the equivalent of the “optimized” instance of deferral. (All my work in exposing and rerouting the the metalanguage of literacy is in the interest of this style.)\n\nAnd on occasion centropic style will want to explain in simple terms how to do some specific thing. And, of course, we could classify a wide range of styles deriving from prayers, Chaim Perelman’s “epideictic” speech, oratory, everyday conversation and so on—along with all the satires and parodies of those styles as they become styles and are transported across scenes, far from their origins (to new origins). Each style could be dissolved into originary grammar and then be derived from it again in some trans-form, in this way serving as a kind of ongoing measure of deferral. Once style is marked, it also become self-referential as one always knows one has entered classic, practical or some other style from another style and can therefore narrate one’s movements, creating new styles as self-marking and measuring discourses.\n\nAnd it’s this possibility of marking features as precisely as need be—a word, a prefix, a punctuation mark can be a marker of a particular style on which we might train our search engines, and so might be sentences, paragraphs or patterns across texts. Generating a style of inquiry into style will enable us to transition in and out of originary grammar, now organized around the imperative exchange and get us closer to a kind of holy grail of anthropomorphics, which is to saying what we are saying as we are saying it with no debilitation of the saying (indeed, with an enhancement of the saying) which is also to say the articulation of the scene from within the scene itself.\n\nI am fairly certain that it is possible to identify a set of linguistic features common to all styles that would exhaustively account for the writer’s stance toward the topic, toward the reader and toward the broader field of conversation archived in the text or, more centropically, the deferrality and deferentiality of the utterance or sample. Each style simply articulates those features in a different way. This would provide us with a technics of style determined, ultimately, by where your readers are positioned scenically in relation to you: are you imagining co-presence on a scene immediately visible and available, or a stack and succession of scenes implying a sequence or hierarchy of collection, verification, authentication, curation, ordering, etc., of what would ultimately be ostensives.\n\nTo be more precise, your utterance or sample transports others from one scene to another: from a scene upon which whatever your ostensive now points to was invisible to one upon which is brought into view (or within hearing, or touch—we need not privilege any sense over the others here). So, style is the virtualization of some stack of scenes at the end of which we might expect to be able to say, “this is the same.” But “virtualization” itself means the expectation of others expecting others to have been manning posts across those scenes. Style, then is the perfection of the imperative to enact deferrality and deferentiality at ever expanded scales."
    },
    {
      "slug": "trails-of-attentionality",
      "title": "Trails of Attentionality",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 30, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/trails-of-attentionality",
      "content": "We are always on a scene, but any scene is at the intersection of any number of other scenes, and we can describe this fairly precisely and embed it consequentially in idioms. The problems of time and space in center study have identical solutions—both come down to overlapping scenes; more precisely, in the case of time, the middle of one scene being the ending of another scene and the beginning of yet another; when it comes to space, the occupants on the margin of one scene are at the center of another scene. Our knowledge of our own and others’ presence on these distributed scenes, which can be multiplied as needed beyond the simple model I’m presenting here, is in varying degrees ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative. I’d like to situate Michael Polanyi’s model of tacit knowing in originary grammatical terms, as our distribution across scenes is also our distribution across the various speech acts we articulate, are addressed by, and “give off” to various recipients.\n\nMedia, beginning with writing, complicates the scenic architecture because, for starters, the scenes of reading and writing don’t coincide. In some sense I am on the scene of reading with you right now, even though I’m no doubt busy with something else at the moment. One of the questions raised by automated text generation is whether the lack of an author’s presence as a kind of presupposition and even feeling of reading (as the author speaks in your voice inside the scene of your rehearsal) is a difference that makes a difference. The way to answer such questions is to keep in mind that the relation between writer and reader, however apparently or intuitively intimate, is institutional and historical—this text is, more minimally or greatly, interfering with the chunks of discourse, the commonplaces, the idioms and templates, into which you integrate new bits of text in the course of your “selving” across several scenes.\n\nThe purpose of reading is to displace that array of idioms called into presence by the appearance of any new text of any kind—whether in order to reinforce an existing hierarchy of affective responses to text signals or to make space for new idioms to potentially remake all of the existing ones will determine what and how you read. You as reader are plugged into systems of language this way and so am I as writer and the act of reading conjures a virtual scene upon which we converse even if I’m otherwise occupied at the moment and this scene is scaffolded over innumerable other scenes of reading, writing and every other sampling in which you engage.\n\nWe can now compress these scenes into one in which I present some data which I have gathered, curated and submitted to the center precisely by sending it through readers like you, and you further curate and resubmit with your own contributions that data.\n\nI can now speak about style as the way in which the array of scenes are registered in any utterance—style is one’s stance towards a world of ostensives at varying distances and degrees of “moment,” or deferral, accessed through imperative exchanges, petitions advanced to various addressees with varying degrees of deferentiality, and declaratives registering the more or less satisfying conclusion of the imperative exchange as it confronts, albeit tacitly, or ostensively, the operator of negation calling for (demanding) the creation of a new ostensive (data). Style is a response to demands that one adheres to certain forms, ultimately rituals, even if transformed into juridical or disciplinary norms—one demands, in turn, clarification of the terms of adherence or their modification—even demands for modification are better seen as clarification because in the end everyone wants to say that they are most strictly obeying the commands of the center.\n\nThe most rationalistic scrutiny of “reasons” presupposes an arbiter whose decision both interlocutors will accept because that arbiter is taken to be the master of reasons, or “Reason Central.” Right now I am erecting a scene upon which questions, prolonged demands for further information on previous answers to previous questions, flow toward me in some way I can order so as to perhaps answer several and defer while acknowledging several others simultaneously. To lay all this out would require a post far longer than this one and would generate at a larger scale more questions that would require posts exponentially longer in order to answer and so one.\n\nAnd so the scene of writing here must be curtailed in the name of something like a sense of the state of the discipline, which is located upon an expectant scene, a scene tuned as precisely as possible to the most relevant signals arriving from other scenes (and the determination of “relevance” or, for that matter, what counts as a “signal,” are questions for other, deferred, disciplinary scenes). I think the state of computation and therefore any eventual artificial intelligence corresponds precisely to this “dilemma,” if we want to call it that (but which it only is from the standpoint of some utopia of perfect or complete knowledge, a world exhausted by declaratives).\n\nThe anthropomorphic style is the articulation, Mobius-strip like, of the “presental” and “absolute satire”—which comes down to a kind of suspension between different elements of the scene, between beginning, middle and end and margin and center. If we set aside tragedy as a genre and spoke of a tragic style it might be one that holds together the beginning and the end of the same scene. That’s just an accessible example—I have no particular investment in that very historically specific aesthetic form which, once it becomes valorized, loses its profundity and veers off into psychopathy. The place to be is precisely at the beginning of one scene, the middle of another and the end of another, all simultaneously, and oscillating between center and margin of all scenes. We can now draw upon what Benjamin Bratton has called the “accidental megastructure” comprising planetary scale computation to construct a style adequate to our emerging scenic architecture, the expectancy of our scenes.\n\nThe scene I’m constructing here is following (not necessarily exclusively) the command to press to the limits the possibility of knowing things and what seems to present itself, in the course of an imperative exchange involving the request for further instructions because sometimes we do have to say “I know…” (it is a natural semantic prime, after all), as the consequent command to compress as much of knowing into style as expectancy as possible. But while I’m doing that further ostensives, more data presents itself, in the form of the succession of speech forms charted by Eric Gans in The Origin of Language and which charting is extraordinary in doing something I’ve never seen anyone in the “human sciences” do before: show how new cultural (ritual) forms are creating intentionally but unknowingly.\n\nIn response to the inappropriate ostensive, no one “decides” to create the imperative; what they decide, both the “interpretant” of the inappropriate ostensive in retrieving the object and the inadvertent issuer of the inappropriate ostensive is accepting this retrieval as “appropriate,” and, for that matter, others in the community as this “solution” to inappropriate ostensives spreads, is to maintain linguistic presence. And, so, for center study and anthropomorphics, that is all we are ever doing, and iterating that commemorates both the fragility and durability of human language and the institutions built to house it—and we can’t know how or when that durability might reveal all the faultlines of fragility. Knowing things is just a particular way of maintaining linguistic presence over increasingly expanded and prolonged times and places.\n\nMaintaining linguistic presence does entail something like “prediction,” and I want to return to this critical (expected) interface between center study and the discourses around Antikythera. Reducing everything to prediction, as Blaise Aguera y Arcas does (and I will set aside for now some dissidence regarding this position within Antikythera and adjacent discourses) presents a productive challenge, As with every principle or principal, a kind of Baroque exhaustion of the possibilities allows those within a disciplinary space to turn it into something like the opposite—through, really, stylistic conversions or transfer translations.\n\nAnyone could always be said to be predicting, even if nothing more than that the speaker who ends this particular sentence will be roughly the same as the speaker who started it (which comes down to predicting what I will predict). So there’s no reason not to inhabit computation and surface its boundary with uncomputability from within the disciplinary space—that is pretty much how traditions (prolonged linguistic presence) in the human sciences are built and sustained. This approach is almost always better than “arguing”—arguing based on what? Who will issue the better predictions? As measured how? Reducing the world to predictions means reducing it to predictability and the obvious objection is that you end up screening those events most reducible to prediction: sporting events, elections, deaths, stock market averages (although even here things start to get a bit slippery).\n\nAnd, moreover, insofar as you have to frame less amenable events as predictable you force them to approximate the more amenable events, so things that are not at all like sporting events or elections get framed as such, I.e., in straightforward win-loss terms. But there is no need to allow that in spaces one controls (are predicting continual control over by virtue of exercising present control), and one can seek to divert resources to such spaces by entering the space of predictability by offering a menu of predictions richer than the focus on gaming allows for. Part of any prediction is the supplemental prediction that one will retain one’s commitment to the prediction, and that one’s identification of what would count as proving or disproving the prediction will be revised, loosened or tightened along the way, or more or less shared by others and, in a properly originary prediction, these shifts will be registered in the predicted events themselves.\n\nIf we really go fully Bayesian, but in language rather than numbers, then the example I gave above will serve as the best model of predictability: how will I finish the sentence I have just started, a prediction built into the way I started the sentence and that will influence the way I continue and ultimately end it, if I must.\n\nHere, I’m predicting whether and how I will manage to maintain linguistic presence (perhaps becoming tenuous in this space of writing and reading), in which we can now include predictions regarding which scenes must be registered and through which signs, from what position within which scenes, and through what allocations of beginnings, middles and ends, centers and margins, such registering will take place. And my predictions, continually revised and checked, are part of the maintenance of linguistic presence. It’s not up to each of us upon which scene we will stand and where on that scene, because your scenic position now depends upon which props and furniture across the various scenes you have authorized access to—where you are situated within credit orders and surveillance systems (both are expanded scenes).\n\nHere, stylistically, in the name of maintaining linguistic presence, it’s probably best to take on the mantle of full paranoia while extracting the fear and realizing one’s own integrality to the systems. Wherever you are, you can know that your creditworthiness will be determined by each and everything you do, and in ways that you will not always be able to predict, but you can both strive to be creditworthy and to provide data to the credit system that makes it more worthy of determining creditworthiness. You can fail utterly in this regard, through no fault of your own, but that’s true of anything you do. The riskiest thing from your own position (unless you are located close to the center) is to do what you can to confer creditworthiness on options likely to go unrealized until long after the passing of anyone occupying the planet at this moment, and to do this you’d have to hone your predictive powers to see future imperatives and declaratives in the most minimally glimpsed ostensives. That’s a vocation worthy of a being striving for creditworthiness."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-theseus-ship-anti-revolution",
      "title": "The Theseus Ship Anti-Revolution",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 15, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-theseus-ship-anti-revolution",
      "content": "A kind of rigor of thought and action can be derived from creating the paradox of wanting complete transformation of all social institutions but not only without revolution but without anyone particularly noticing. Put this way, such a stealth program seems antithetical to norms of good governance, popular will, democracy, public airing of disputes over social futures, etc. It seems downright immoral, a coup against the public, a conspiracy against the political order. But I will intensify the paradox by insisting that the program be carried out completely explicitly at each point along the way, relying only on a kind of linguistic drift which is always present but can be directed and exhibited as it occurs.\n\nI will take the paradox of Theseus’s Ship as a model for such a program: as is well known, this paradox involves replacing the broken or decayed parts of a ship one by one and thereby raising the question whether, once every part is replaced, it is still the same ship; if so, what makes it so, i.e., what do we consider to be “the ship”? If not, at what point did it cease to be the same ship—with the replacement of which rotten plank? Like most of these venerable old paradoxes, what gets exposed is the most fundamental paradox, that of naming which, for the originary hypothesis, lies at the origin of language. Names are conferred by the namer, but the name also “appears” as immanent in the thing itself—otherwise, what would make it a name and how would it allow for referring to the thing?\n\nWe trace this back to the originary sign in which the shared designation of a central object confers meaning upon while deriving it from the object or thing. For this reason I once referred to the sovereign as the “onamastician-in-chief,” and consistently reduce meaning to a scene upon which we could say “this is the same.” The paradox of naming, which is the paradox of language more generally insofar as all words are, as Eric Gans once put it, Names-of-God, includes the “inadequacy” or even “falseness” of names, resulting from the fact that anything we name or refer to changes and therefore becomes something other than that thing and, even more, the act of naming or referring itself initiates that process of change.\n\nWhat counters the resentment toward the lability of some thing we have named is that it is not the thing itself that matters but the establishment and maintenance of the scene and the succession of scenes upon which it will be possible to say “this is the same.”\n\nFrom a political standpoint it is better to keep the names and create, where exigent, scenes upon which the fit of those names to otherwise anomalous things and happenings can be affirmed and authenticated—to be a bit crude, it’s better to see to the adoption of an abandoned child, in which he is given a name not “really” his, than to leave him in his “raw,” bastard state—in which latter case the state or magistrate will simply have to register them in some way abstracted from any network or genealogy of names. Entire legal systems have been transformed by including new relationships under old names and this is understandably a source of great resentment but, interestingly, as I write this, the birthright citizenship case is being heard by the US Supreme Court and the problem of whether the categories used to determine which people born on US soil are “naturally born” there refer to the “same” kinds of people now as they did when the 14 th amendment was written is front and center.\n\nEven the most principled originalist seems ready to say, well, the authors of the 14 th amendment couldn’t have thought that the industrial scale production of US citizenship for Chinese nationals would be covered by this law, even if nothing explicit in it forbids such an enterprise. But, then, what if here is where the real politics takes place: in shifting designations so that they cover something they didn’t before or cease covering something they so far have? The Progressive notion of the “living constitution” is a particular way of weaponizing such a politics but ultimately focused on a rather small set of “planks” being replaced in a fairly crude manner so maybe a better cybernetics of the linguistic drift can be designed.\n\nI understand that what I am saying could be mistaken for propaganda methods, or a kind of brute force computation whereby you flood the zone with new designations and references to match them so as to operationalize stereotypes. But if you do that you’re not interested in complete plank replacement, but rather in damaging a few especially rotten planks so as to create a rocky ride in which you might, with foreknowledge, be able to commandeer the vessel. The planks are most fundamentally juridical arrangements, cases and the iteration of the results of cases in new cases and in constructing practices so as to avoid the necessity of producing new cases in the first place because they anticipate the expected range of possible settlements.\n\nIt is in the world of cases that we see the strongest linguistic drift and the linguistic drift of the nomos at large through the expansion and transformation of the nomos into new forms of distributable and divisible properties and tokenizable assets. If your focus is on the juridical as the medium of the nomos then you acknowledge the need to work one plank or case at a time while simultaneously transforming each case into a precedent for future cases and designing strategies for doing this across the board. And you work with a very definite, if rough, criteria: to create a body of case law that prevents vendettas from below from passing the threshold at which preference shifts from recourse to the courts to recourse to one’s most readily accessible avenger; and defers vendettas from above that target the very system of deferring vendettas because they interfere with short-cuts to power on the part of sections of the governing class.\n\nNone of this precludes swift, decisive action, even on the boundary of legality, on the part of the sovereign but even in that case such action is, first, justified by the need for enforcement of judgements and defense of what we could call “presumptions of standing” that have been allowed to lapse; and, second, followed by the work of consolidation, which involves building the cases that confirm whatever was creative and preservative in said sovereign action while discreetly setting aside whatever was not.\n\nWe can work under the assumption that the institutions we inhabit have served to defer violence and that they have always done so imperfectly precisely because things shift around underneath their names. Every naming is a renaming and that is a kind of linguistic drift that can be subjected to constraints. We are always naming scenes and roles and enactments on those scenes and it’s impossible to do that without figuring some further perfection of the scene, whether by imagining it better than it is or leveraging some minimized element of the scene as a kind of controlled usurpation. Of course the discussion can always be raised to the level of alternative versions of sovereignty, even to the point of naming the possibility of a refounding of the nomos, but even such indications would be laid out plank by plank.\n\nSomeone who doesn’t follow politics closely should just at some point notice that there are venues where one can file complaints and also that if those complaints are not well-formed you end up vulnerable to the complaint of whomever you complained about and so that it might be better to examine your latent space, run your programming through some rounds in your internal GANSian space, take counsel and consider you path forward more carefully, thereby becoming the kind of person who considers paths forward more carefully. That same person should also find, as a condition of the existence of more transparent venues for filing complaints, that what he owns, what he can offer as collateral, what makes him more or less creditworthy, has also become less mysterious and better defined.\n\nMaybe laws and institutional structures will have changed considerably by that point or maybe not—constitutions, laws and institutions can be leveraged in a range of ways. But we can imagine that laws that function as grants of resources to bureaucratic agencies that in turn outsource their responsibilities to various non-governmental agencies who, along with their clientele, thereby become the ultimate beneficiaries and leveragers of those resources will have been abolished or somehow rendered purely nominal. Such laws can be repealed the same way they were passed, but it might be better to be more patient and probably more effective by developing legal strategies that neutralize them.\n\nIf there is anything to which this Theseus Ship, plank by plank strategy might seem unsuited, it would be in bringing the intelligence agencies to heel or, more precisely, making them either properly adjunct to authorized decision makers (who, in turn, would need much longer terms with much more secure succession practices—many planks to replace here) or, more radically, be transformed openly into sovereigns themselves. How do you act, from the outside, on agencies who control the information and access to sources of information you would need in order to act on them? They seem sometimes vulnerable to the juridical order, but only minimally so—they control the determination of whether the information required in any case could be presented in court.\n\nPresumably you could just dismantle the agencies and fire everyone working in them, but someone would have to move in and assess all the information held there and enter the exact some roles. I think we would find that the real problem, the real reason these agencies have usurped power, is that those whseo power is assessed publicly don’t want to take responsibility that can be delegated to the intelligence agencies. And the agencies themselves, understandably, don’t want to be publicly accountable for their actions any more than the politicians do. Bringing the central bank into the juridical order seems simple and painless by comparison.\n\nHere I’m going to return to a major “plank” in my own platform to suggest the kinds of planks that might, indirectly, corral the intelligence agencies back into a proper cybernetic (maybe GANSian) relation to decision makers, towards creating genuine central intelligence. A major part of the power of the intelligence agencies to interfere with the adjudications of the nomos and cripple the sovereign comes from its access to media outlets through which it can spread lies, rumors, and decontextualized and massaged truths. Without such conveyer belts, the intelligence agencies would be able to mislead their “customers,” but would have no defense against rigorous cross-examination and the sovereign’s ability to set one team against another and set up adjudicating teams to help decide between them.\n\nAnd without those outlets, the incentive to mislead would diminish because there would be no way to coordinate such deception with broader campaigns that would amplify it. So, this brings us back to essentially shutting down the media through a revivification of the laws that have always governed speech: libel, slander, fraud and obscenity. Smear campaigns could be made extremely risky, and so media outlets would be reduced to notifying the public regarding the outcomes of court cases (and they could make that very interesting and valuable) and forwarding messages from the sovereign which they could check for consistency and conformity with information derived from court cases.\n\nA full, and mostly truthful, representation of public affairs would be the norm, enabling “datazens” to understand the terms of their data exchanges with the center. The intelligence agencies could no longer join the media in trying to damage credit when one or the other party is in power. These are very specific planks, discrediting and disempowering one habitual liar after another.\n\nThe study and imitation of various linguistic drifts can then become a leading theme of the arts and object of the disciplines. The discrepancy between what is promised and what is delivered, what impressions we give and which we give off, the expectations we create and invest in and actual results, have always been the stuff of artistic representation and the key to the study of institutions. The arts and disciplines track cases very closely and the better that cases are framed the more precise and robust the arts and disciplines will be. Writing scripts that make more visible the slippages between names and named become part of the directed linguistic drift, one plank after another.\n\nAnd each plank is a prefiguration of a comprehensive replanking, as a single sample includes the all. And the sovereign companies, which tokenize arbitration, I’ve proposed repeatedly could serve as patrons of the arts and sciences as they would in turn help provide the data those companies need to grow themselves, one plank at a time, into the central intelligence, and central intelligence would entail routing the linguistic drift of names into data distributions that help settle cases."
    },
    {
      "slug": "nomos-class-action",
      "title": "Nomos/Class Action",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 12, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/nomosclass-action",
      "content": "If I had the ear of any billionaires, I would try to persuade them to stop wasting their money on political candidates and even most of their think tanks and divert it towards developing a large-scale legal strategy for bankrupting the left (of course some money would still need to go to candidates to ensure the judges needed to support the strategy are in place). I work on the assumption that the left is essentially a criminal organization—as Michael Walsh puts it, the Democrats are a criminal organization masquerading as a political party—running various blackmail, money laundering and protection rackets. It’s easy enough to see that without allowing for all kinds of criminal activity, from petty (vandalism, trespassing, assault, etc.) to major (money laundering through countries like Ukraine) the left would essentially cease to exist (I assume, but set aside for now, that something like this was always the case since the birth of democracy).\n\nIt's a vendetta against civilization, which is effective because it has learned how to use the means of civilization, in particular the juridical. This last weapon, in particular, needs to be taken away and re-weaponized so as to de-weaponize it. One vector is, of course, working to replace DAs and other politicians who see the criminal element as leverage to be used against the population, but that’s difficult, considering that most of these politicians are in cities tightly controlled by the leftist cartel. But one approach that is completely within the power of a pro-civilization coalition of the rich and powerful would be to use the domain of law essentially dealing with speech and agreements, like fraud, slander, incitement defamation and so on, to attack organizations and individuals who cannot continue to exist without committing all these violations.\n\nSeveral benefits would result from a sustained and intelligent strategy: first, an important body of law would be reconstituted and a significant civilizational imperative addressed; second the media, as we know it today, would almost completely cease to exist, because today’s media cannot exist without constant violations of these legal norms; third, the intelligence and other state agencies would lose a crucial means of controlling public opinion and would have to resort to doing their jobs; fourth, the right-wing would clean up its own side, as no doubt the Republicans contain significant degrees of criminality as well, as does the conservative media; fifth, it could be a profitable venture, while effecting a significant redistribution of resources from leftist organizations and donors (and, why not, a few rightist ones as well) to the investors in what should be a trust-busting litigation company.\n\nThe media would be replaced by records of court cases, along with summaries and analyses of those cases—what will be presented as fact will at least have gone through an evidential process—along with announcements of the means by which judicial decisions will be enforced.\n\nThe title of this post is a proposed name for this company which would aim at putting itself out of business and transitioning into becoming a governing agency, part of a larger security system. It would create a new market for anti-leftist and just adventurous lawyers, and for the disciplines, from laboratory to textual analysis. It will give new direction to the humanities, the originary vocation of which, I would say, is authenticating texts and accounting for their provenance (which by now would mean the way any given text is a product of a large pool of intentions interacting with generic conventions, literary traditions, the economics and politics of publishing and so on, going back as far as necessary), now invigorated by corpus-searching technology and the study of automatically generated texts.\n\nThis project would be drawing upon deep legal traditions and would lead to studies of the moral and ethical underpinnings of those traditions, underpinnings which are in turn translations of the norms of governance implicit in those legal traditions. Studies in the history of fraud, incitement, slander, negligence and so on, as both legal categories and modes of human interaction, would lead to inquiries into the anthropological roots and implications of these categories—ultimately, these categories are the best evidence we have of the history of resentment. An exchange with a correspondent has pointed out to me the translatability of these categories into concepts of game theory, and I would add to that their implications for the adjacent field of cybernetics.\n\nAn early point along the way of my thinking along these lines was the suggestion that one should be able to sue someone for calling you a “racist” without them being able to provide a coherent definition of “racism” and explaining how whatever you have said and done can be classified as “racist” according to that definition. It seems to me that this would shut down an entire front of the left and force a great deal of scrambling on that front—if they couldn’t call their enemies racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., what, exactly, would they have left to say? (We would also in this way be sharply refining discussions of damages, harm, reputation and its value—in a sense all the talk about “political correctness” and then “cancel culture” was a very degraded form of what are deeply rooted and urgent concepts enabling us to speak of what speech does.)\n\nIt would also be good to break the right’s fetishization of “free speech” which, obviously, never included slander, incitement, fraud and so on (I’ll also mention “obscenity,” which might become a focus of the kind of campaign I’m discussing but seems to me of secondary importance—for one thing, was obscenity ever something one could be sued for, rather than being a question of local ordinances?). The reconstruction and repurposing of all these legal concepts would involve a great deal of intellectual work, but this would be very productive, civilizationally clarifying work, that would furthermore be subject to constant practical testing.\n\nIt would give existing forms of power a channel that could redirect it from corrupting and debilitating pursuits. It would exacerbate divisions among the governing class while providing a conduit for the peaceful resolution of those disputes and the attainment of an elite settlement. No doubt the left would respond with their own lawfare strategy, a continuation and intensification of current efforts. My proposal is predicated on the assumption that a proper legal regime is deadly for the left while only being purgative for the right. Maybe some on the left could be induced to develop legal means of controlling financial and corporate rapacity through well planned fraud, breach of promise, negligence and other lawsuits that could direct compensation to documented victims (with, of course, a cut to the attorneys) so as to cut out regulatory middlemen and the protection racket regulation always devolves into. We might converge on abolishing the entire left-right distinction, which is anyway implicit in destroying the left.\n\nIt is worth pointing out that such a company would provide for lots of victories and humiliations of leaders of enemy forces and therefore a kind of festival atmosphere, thereby fulfilling one of the more important of Alinsky’s rules for radicals: make sure your people are having fun. It would convert “anti-woke” sentiments (for starters) into teams of private investigators, gathering and supplying evidence along with lots of insider knowledge. Wars on social media would be transformed from exchanges of insults and spite into evidence collection missions. Social media companies could themselves be sued from blocking or de-platforming people for posts that don’t reach the threshold of actionable offenses—I’m not sure exactly how this would work (i.e., establishing a legal regime under which you’d be liable for something like slander for closing accounts for posts that are not, in fact, slanderous), but that’s what an inventive and hungry team of litigators is for—to make new law.\n\nThere’d be defeats as well, sometimes due to leftist entrenchment within the justice system but also due to poorly chosen and planned lawsuits—it would be a way of putting to the test the assumption that the right is fundamentally a defender of civilization and the left ultimately civilization’s nemesis, and we might be surprised at some things we find out. We would be setting in motion a pedagogical and learning process, training a new generation of leaders. My own agenda here would be to force a convergence between juridical and originary anthropological thinking, a convergence that would open paths within the disciplines. I’m also assuming that much of our existing juridical order, in particular those parts sheltered from media scrutiny and essential for infrastructural purposes, is intact, so that we already have a foothold within the system.\n\nWe could think of this project, somewhat more “ideologically,” as a rolling class action suit on behalf of the law-abiding or, better, the nomos itself, against antinomic lawbreaking. There is always an originary distribution, rooted in ritual and something akin to sacrifice, where some land is conquered and property titles distributed to the leaders of the conquering team by the occupant of the center. Every last piece of property can be traced back to this, and the best use of historians and the social sciences more generally would be to trace back title deeds, with an eye to their subsequent courses through sales, appropriations, etc., even raising questions about the legitimacy of certain transfers along the way—it’s a question of establishing something like chains of custody for the sake of adjudication.\n\nThe “Big Man revolution” might take some other path as data exchange comes to replace exchange via currency and assets, but, so far, what I am describing here is the only way of defending the Big Man revolution right now and making that future path possible. Almost everything the left does is a violation of this kind of order—all leftist thinking, what I would join with Eric Gans in calling the “epistemology of resentment,” is ferociously directed against such an order. If, on occasion, it serves some purpose of the left to defend, say, some local community against environmental damage caused (and maybe covered up) by some corporation, we should be capable of restraining our partisan impulses and join in (and maybe take over) such pro-civilizational actions.\n\nIn fact, the kind of company I’m proposing here would privilege security firms, in particular those concerned with data security, over those kinds of “late industrial age” corporations more likely to spill chemicals into rivers (or fill fast foods with poison), so that it would be possible to take action against the latter.\n\nSuch a company would be far less esoteric than Thirdness with a clear path to profit—fleecing the left and retrieving its own ill-gotten gains. It would vindicate center study as a fork-off of the originary hypothesis away from GA, with the distinctive argument I’ve been making for the juridical as a provisional space between the ritual and disciplinary. “Resentment” has always been a weakly theorized concept in GA, despite its centrality (a word search in Gans’s works would, I imagine, locate thousands of instances)—it remains on the level of “I know it when I see it” or, to be a bit blunter, “resentment is when you’re against things I like.”\n\nBut the juridical provides measures of resentment in very specific historical conditions, while providing us with a vocabulary for distinguishing between more and less justified expressions of resentment and creating forms or remediation. And such measurements can get increasingly precise, moving us away from vague discussions of ethics and morals (which are anyway just second or third order reflections of the juridical itself, if not derived from terms and codes of loyalty to superiors) as the juridical becomes a site of knowledge production. How, exactly, has person A been harmed by person B calling him a “racist” on a particular platform?\n\nInstead of surrendering to the counter-productive reflex of trying to invent some way of calling the accuser the “real racist” we get into questions of who, exactly, is A, who is B, what kind of reputation has A so far earned, how capable is B of harming that reputation; what, exactly, counts as a harmed reputation in this case, and how much is it worth, monetarily? “$250,000 settles my resentment” gives us an exact measure, which then serves as a precedent for future exercises in such measurement. In this way center study promotes more complex understandings of resentment than “you took something that was mine,” even if that remains at the root of all resentment. So, maybe someone can find a way of packaging this proposal for some billionaire out there who wants to leave a legacy of helping to preserve our civilization, and maybe get some retribution as well. I would probably be happy with a consultant role."
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-hypothesizing",
      "title": "Originary Hypothesizing",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 19, 2020",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/coming-soon",
      "content": "Welcome to Center Study Center by me, Dennis Bouvard. Author of Anthropomorphics\n\nSign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.\n\nIn the meantime, tell your friends !"
    },
    {
      "slug": "reconceptualizing-desire-substack",
      "title": "Reconceptualizing Desire",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 19, 2020",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/reconceptualizing-desire",
      "content": "I have termed the “Big Scene” the transposition of the originary scene upon post-Big Man scenes that operate according to a different logic of the center and are therefore distorted by this transposition. On the originary scene, the central object is an object of consumption and, simultaneously, a source of proscription. The proscription is reconciled with the consumption by imposing an order of equal distribution, with “equal” determined by relative proximity or similarity to the central being by members of the community. So, you can consume, on the condition that you do so on the terms of the center—what I just referred to as “central being” is the ongoing iteration of the originary proscription as modified by the relative centrality distributed across the group.\n\nOnce a human comes to occupy the center, this “grammar” starts to change. The Big Man, and certainly the sacral king, can be sacrificed and perhaps even devoured, but not on a regular basis—it’s not like a hunting party bringing back an elk every few days. The occupant of the center starts to distribute, and can no longer be seen as an object of consumption. The more the occupant of the center is placed beyond sacrifice, the more thinking in terms of equal or appropriate distribution of the central object is at odds with reality. But this configuration continues to make intuitive sense, because we have our origins on the scene, and no culture has done more than create specialized practices that enable practitioners to defer the implications of these spontaneous intuitions.\n\nThis notion of the “Big Scene” is a pretty close equivalence to the concept of “ideology” that Marxists struggled so mightily over through the 20th century. All the forms of desire and resentment, embodied in emotions ranging from “greed,” to ‘vanity,” to “envy,” to “anger,” “hatred,” and so on can all be reduced to some narrative that has others enjoying some part of the central object that is “rightfully” one’s own. This narrative projects the intentions onto others that makes them suitable obstacles to one’s desire within the narrative, and introjects the intentions that make oneself the victor, on whatever plane that enables the narrative to be roughly reconciled with reality, or, more precisely, with one’s continued participation on future scenes. And it’s all a “misrecognition of one’s real relation to one’s social relations,” to speak Althussereanese. Or, to invoke a once famous essay of T.S. Eliot, your anger, hatred, or for that matter, love or empathy, has no “objective correlative.”\n\nThe fact that, in a post-Big Man order, everyone can imagine one’s own centrality intensifies the anomalies. Not only must one receive one’s rightful portion, but the terms on which one deems it rightful must be recognized. It may be that the tendency toward every man being his own cult, with the consequent cargo-culting, has made the extreme centralization of modern states easier—it’s always possible for those within reach of the center to align enough orbiting fantasy worlds so as to pursue whatever path toward centralization provides the path of least resistance. The disciplines, inheritors of the Axial Age acquisitions, preserve specialized practices of deferral while also accelerating the turnover at the center, depleting those very acquisitions.\n\nBut, as I have pointed out many times (and therefore won’t belabor here), the indebtedness of the Axial Age acquisitions to narratives of the exemplary victim ultimately contribute to fantasies of centrifugal centrality. The separation of the center from any scheme of equal distribution requires the abolition of such narratives and the installation of practices which iterate this very separation from redemptive victimhood. What this conversion looks like is the following: you are angry, say, and you want to express this anger and extract some kind of tribute, material or symbolic, from your object of anger; as soon as you put the question this way, you realize you are in the realm of equivalents, or values—X amount of anger = Y amount of reparation; so, you then start to calculate the means by which this value can be secured (one person would have to suffer one way, another person could have to be recompensed in another way, etc.); which in turn leads to the imagining of a series of acts that would secure it; and to the gradual realization, through the mapping out and implementation of these acts, that they are ultimately incommensurable with the value they are intended to obtain; that the reason for this incommensurability is that various individuals, and perhaps institutions, would have to be “in place” for the practices to have their intended effect and one has no way to ensure they will be; leading, finally, to the rerouting of those practices to contribute to everyone, including oneself, being “in place” of maximal addressability.\n\nThis kind of conversion of ritualism and narrative into practice and hypothesis can be designed at any scale. Addressing the center from your presumed position in relation to the center through your engagements with others opposes invoking the center on your behalf against others. This requires large scale linguistic, moral, institutional and infrastructural reconstruction.\n\nThe moral and intellectual implications of installing the iterative center are immense. The only possible order is one in which Big Scenic thinking is abolished, with everyone “intuitively” seeking out maximal addressability to sample utterances, everyone engaging “spontaneously” in scenic design practices. The occupant of the center is not only beyond sacrifice but beyond distribution, which is determined by the needs of participation on one or another “team.” This corresponds to the structure of scientific thinking and practice, which always involves a conversion from some kind of “atomism,” in which reality is conceived as having a determinate number of “pieces” to a conception of the field as being organized around a centered concept that is simultaneously inside and outside of the system.\n\nIn social practices, questions of distribution and “desert” are converted into respective places in a shared practice that is partially explicit and partially implicit in the very dispute that threatens to degenerate into questions of distribution. The translation of a sense of being shortchanged or belittled is translated into a proposal for doing things differently, and embedded in that proposal is the first step by the complainant towards establishing that new way of doing things. One exchanges one’s portion for a hypothetical place in a modified collective practice. The moral rigor of abstaining from demanding your portion matches the intellectual demand of replacing the search for ever smaller “basic elements” in increasing complex relations with the enactment of hypotheses that can attract converted desires.\n\nConcepts like “desire” and “resentment” can’t survive the shift from narrative to hypothetico-practice. The means for further perfecting your hypothetico-practice are always there, and so the drama of erecting obstacles to your obtaining your rightful portion can’t gain any foothold. Neither can the projection of enemies aiming at shoring up those obstacles, which means no resentment—of course, your practices are dependent upon others, and cross purposes can lead other to interfere in your practices, but the “data” generated by such interference is itself incorporated into your revised practice. You can always render explicit the implicit (and thereby generate more implications for new practices to reveal), test the emergent meaning of sample utterances, and make yourself maximally addressable, and that’s all practices do, even scientific and technological practices, which design scenes, like all other practices, by showing how what seemed external to a scene is really constitutive of it. The perfecting practice generates new ostensives, thereby obeying the oldest imperative, which we retroject to the pre-imperative originary scene, to generate ostensives around which new spaces can be created.\n\nIt is the emergence of planetary-scale computation that makes the installation of the iterative center possible. What is new here is that we are always already within data, and hence dependent upon innumerable observations, controlled and uncontrolled, recorded and transmitted in various ways, with the provenance of all of it tailing off into vagueness at some point. To start with one data point as an anchor for organizing a field is to already have a hypothesis of the whole, just like determining what counts as a “sample” is to hypothesize the whole. From the sample we extract a search term, and what happens to that search term as it is run through a data field will depend upon the algorithms created so as to sustain that field, but the operations of the algorithms also depend upon the search terms entered into them.\n\nSeeing every utterance as a search term, aimed at organizing a field, is a very minimal hypothesis of the way we enter streams of data as living, breathing hypotheses. Greeting someone in the most conventional terms is the entering of a search term into the system, even if it’s a search term governed by highly restrictive algorithms returning extremely predictable responses. Of course, sometimes even the familiar greeting will return anomalous responses, revealing new data fields.\n\nWhen we enter terms into a search engine we embark on a process of successive approximation, without end or even an aim that can be formulated in advance. I might be curious about how the voting patterns of a particular demographic group has changed over the past 50 years. So, I type in something like “Hungarian-American voting” into Google, and I might (probably not in this case) get back a chart with clear numbers—from 40% Democrat to 45% Democrat, or whatever, over the decades. But then I might get interested in the difference between those Hungarian-Americans who vote Democrat and those who vote Republican, or parallels and differences between Hungarian-Americans, Czech-Americans, Romanian-Americans, etc., and then how differences within these groups parallel one another, and then whether these voting patterns overlap with other patterns, like membership in various associations, profession, education level, and so on.\n\nIf I then meet a Hungarian-American, or, say, someone who is ¼ Hungarian-American, I’ve got them mapped out in a way which may or may not bear upon my specific interaction with them, in which case that interaction is the introduction of another search term into the system.\n\nSo, the world is thereby spread out into fields, fields within fields, fields overlapping other fields, all in motion, and we get the image of moving swarms shifting this way and that which leads to some beautiful imagery and is a new kind of art, but since it all derives from data, which has been gathered and stored by institutional entities of varying degrees of official sanction and reliability, this entire swarm simultaneously confirms the solidity and authority of the institutions collecting, storing, transmitting, and allowing varying degrees of access to data. Data gathering, going all the way back to the first statistics gathered by early modern monarchs, is the technological form in which the High-Low vs. the Middle process has operated—we are all abstracted from our embedments in kin and place and equalized before the central power as demographic categories.\n\nBut it can also be the case that statistics make us all the middle, albeit high-middle, middle-middle and low-middle—everyone is searching and a search term, everyone is responsible for the maintenance of some data chain: in searching, in being a search term, you are modeling for the algorithms. Statistical institutions are set within vast mimological impressments, where humans and machines co-constitute practices, and so all the frenzied struggles over the center appear as struggles over the certification of data, which really means the naming of things that can be indicated ostensively. Which brings us back to the originary scene, but not in the horizontal form of peering sideways at our neighbors to see whether they’re encroaching on our portion (what could this even mean within data fields?); rather in the vertical form of directing all our attention to ensuring that the sign we all emit and see is the same sign to the maximal degree of possible confirmation, so that even those who deny it must do so in a way that confirms it, so that it is really the center putting forth the sign through us. Since such confirmation can never be confirmed once and for all, perhaps this is a kind of “desire”—a desire to see and hear the fields we feel ourselves to be immersed in."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-bearer-of-sovereignty",
      "title": "The Bearer of Sovereignty",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 29, 2020",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-bearer-of-sovereignty",
      "content": "Anyone with a political project finds himself speaking, at some point about “mobilization,” which is to say determining who is on your side, who might, under certain conditions, be on your side, how to weigh those who might under those conditions be on your side (as opposed, of course to those who are or might be on the other side) and, of course, how to create those conditions by which they might be on your side along with increasing their weight. The question, then, is what’s the best way of talking about this. The default discourse is derived from liberalism and democratic discourse, and in particular, the language of PR, advertising, polling, and so one which identifies “issues,” which can ultimately framed in terms of some law or court decision, the demographics and underlying “beliefs” of those who care about those issues, and so on.\n\nAll of this is designed for winning elections, and appealing to donors who are necessary in order to win elections, and frames media discourse and leads to the creation of think tanks and other institutions aimed at studying and modifying public opinion. The basic question is also something like “what can I say to the person with profile X to make it sufficiently likely to make the investment in persuasion worthwhile that that person will vote for candidate Y”? We can easily imagine a dollar per vote calculation underlying efforts at communication.\n\nThis is a trap for anyone outside of the liberal consensus because you end up trying to assemble pieces of opinion and sentiment produced under liberalism for the maintenance of liberalism into some new political machinery where they can’t really fit—“we can recruit this anti-abortion blue collar worker who hates racial sensitivity training and whose property values have gone down as a result of a new influx of low wage immigrants to his town if we target him as follows:….” There is always a leap out of liberalism that can’t be accounted for along these lines, and it is very hard to resist the temptation to turn familiar liberal and leftist resentments around and thereby reinforce them (“you’re really the one being discriminated against, the government doesn’t really work for you,” etc.)\n\nIf one addresses potential recruits as bearers of sovereignty rather than constituencies or demographics, one might generate new political discourses. Everyone is a subject of some sovereign, which means being loyal to a line of sovereigns with an internally determined line of succession. This is true of everyone—the person who claims to be loyal only to the “rule of law” or the “Constitution” is loyal to those he sees as defenders of the rule of law or Constitution. If you probe sufficiently, you will find a line of succession of true sovereigns and sovereigns in exile—from Bernie Sanders through Barack Obama through Howard Dean, back to Adlai Stevenson, or whoever.\n\nEven people who are explicitly loyal to some principle explicitly aimed at blocking the exercise of sovereignty, like free speech or some kind of proceduralism, is really loyal to those occupants of the center who have outfitted themselves with the trappings of those sovereignty blockers. “Principles” in general are just attempts to get ahold of some comprehensible line of succession by establishing constraints on whom the present occupant of the center might claim descent and whom he might deem, implicitly or explicitly, his successor. Most political arguments can really be narrowed down to whom the contemporary contenders have been nominated as successors by and what new line of succession they might establish.\n\nPolitical support is diluted enlistment in an army, or, perhaps, appeasement and servicing of those who are essentially occupying forces. Nobody ever believes their side lost an election “fair and square”—in every case the enemy used overwhelming force of some kind, drawing upon institutions like schools, the media and law enforcement, sometimes going back decades, to create conditions and conceal the truth from potential recruits on one’s own side.\n\nSo, the problem is not changing people’s minds by appealing to their principles, much less a list of policy prescriptions (people convinced by this are loyal to a line of pseudo-wonky sovereigns like many recent Democratic candidates in particular)—rather, you have to acculturate them to a new mode of sovereignty embodied in a particular occupant or potential occupant of the center and the line that might flow from him. It’s good to be able to go back a while, all the way back if possible, perhaps to a line of deposed or exiled sovereigns, as long as some viable heir to that throne is available. Other lines need to be diverted into the main line you want to present, along with the histories and traditions of debates, tragedies and triumphs, exemplary figures, and so on.\n\nIdealized claims regarding policies and principles need to be relentlessly reduced to traditional loyalties—no one really thinks Social Security is an ideal public retirement fund, and very few people could compare it intelligently to other possible ways of supporting retired workers—they are activated by accusations that the other side wants to take away Social Security because they’ve inherited their grandparents’ fanatical devotion to FDR in his struggle against the usurping plutocrats.\n\nEven while idealized projections get reduced to personalized loyalties, those figures deemed worthy of loyalty have projected onto them the manifold possibilities of sovereignty. The “policies” you would like to see “implemented” get dissolved into the candidate as solvent of blockages to sovereignty. A “health care plan” is a clear chain of command and distributed responsibility for determining the proper articulation of preventative, emergency, regular care along with the association of narrowly health care responsibilities to broader institutional support of fitness, nutritional awareness, self-control and discipline, etc.—the likely sovereign is the one you can imagine bringing in a team capable of organizing such a distribution—or opening up space for someone to come along who can. And there can be no more narrow focus on a few changes in specific governing institutions—since those institutions run everything, the sovereign worth imagining will bring the entire social order in line with his program—otherwise, why sign up?\n\nThe building pressure on liberal democracy will come from both sides increasingly totalizing the struggle and implicating all institutions, including electoral ones, in it. This is at least the case in the US, probably in part because the rest of the world, which has obvious stakes in the outcomes of US elections, have themselves been invited into the process by domestic players, albeit highly asymmetrically. Candidates who simply wish to govern will find it necessary to openly solicit loyalists in all institutions, including the military and intelligence agencies, and this will go well beyond the traditional seeking of endorsements and fund raising.\n\nLaw enforcement and military personnel will no doubt be encouraged to defy or subvert the rule of the opposing party, teachers will be compelled to propagandize for one or another party, social workers and other elements of the state will be directly responsible for engaging their clients on the party’s side; while the other party will work on creating minority factions within institutions controlled by their opponents, with arguments over policies and principles becoming directly mapped on to these very public struggles. Of course, this would really be making more explicit and accelerating what is already happening, which is to the benefit of those who have so far preferred to pretend it isn’t happening.\n\nThere can’t really be any way back to civil service neutrality—would anyone even know what that looked like, at this point? In contemporary American terms, this means that the Republicans and the right would start openly politicizing the military and police in the same way the Democrats and the left have openly politicized the media, schools and universities. A Republican presidential candidate would be expected to speak less about tax breaks and regulatory reform and more about how he plans to clean out various rats’ nests in the bureaucracy. And fill those spots with supporters. And this, or course, means the return of something like the spoils system, but in a way that goes well beyond graft and towards keeping your enemy closer to jail (or worse) than you are. The need to hold onto power or else would, especially once oscillation slows down as one side gains ascendancy, lead to a far more integrated and coherent “public philosophy.”\n\nSo, great tests over sovereignty, in which sovereignty is placed directly on the table, are approaching, and those with a systematic vision of rearticulated institutions will have the advantage, and far more so if they are actively grooming, teaching and training those who will occupy the new positions. This struggle will extend across the new technologies, across what Benjamin Bratton calls “planetary computation,” the “Stack,” an “accidental megastructure.” Those in the Strelka group led by Bratton hope to participate in this struggle, which I sense Bratton sees as less of a struggle than a kind of shaking off of obsolete norms, theories and institutions that hinder the re-organization of the world around universalizing automation and AI—an ambition that is reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s program for “Spaceship Earth.”\n\nOf course, the Strelka group has not yet, as far as I’ve seen, said anything particularly concrete about modifying a single sovereign power anywhere in the world, and I suspect their own adherence to obsolete egalitarian and democratic rhetoric will make it especially difficult for them to do so. It’s worth keeping an eye on, but since such ambitions preclude foregrounding the occupant of the center and clearing the pathways of his emanations to the margins, they will likely end up in the paradoxically liberal position of hoping that experts engaged in technology, Veblen’s “industry,” will spontaneously engineer us into a post-political engineered world.\n\nSome form of the Green New Deal might be the platform that allows leftist energy to power the engineering fantasy, but is it possible to imagine that woke democratic socialism of the American left will allow the engineers to go about their work, diligently and dispassionately, calculating exactingly the latest readings of carbon part per thousand, rather than sticking it to “racist” Trump supporters? And will any of them be ready to take on capital, which has funded all the anti-labor projects of the victimary left precisely in order to remain in control of the dismantling of the “middle,” i.e., the potential loyalists of an integrated and coherent system of authority?\n\nHe who shows himself ready and able to take on capital will in the long run have the best sovereign program. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, an appropriation of the slogan, itself appropriated by Marx, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities,” can be turned into a powerful criterion. This slogan provides for a comprehensive and dynamic form of inquiry and institution building, as the study of needs and abilities and their various articulations within institutions, orders and individuals, provides both a mode of criticism of existing social forms and a means of producing new needs and abilities. The slogan is utterly inegalitarian—it appealed to Marx precisely as a critique of the concept of “equal rights.” The anti-liberalism of the slogan remains a dead end within communism which, with all its totalitarian centralization, cannot honestly answer the question of who determines what everyone’s needs and abilities amount to.\n\nBut the question can be answered from the standpoint of sovereignty: the occupant of center decides, and must be provided with everything he needs so as to be able to distribute power and authority in accord with the needs and abilities required and produced across all levels of the social order. If capitalism is the form of power of those who control a particular set of disciplines and practices, and the space of potential exercise of those disciplines and practices, so as to be able derive income from that control, then to reduce and eventually eliminate the power of capital involves turning that control into delegation.\n\nTurning that control into delegation means working to make power and responsibility commensurate, to the extent that this can be done within the existing institutional and legal framework but with an eye toward transforming that framework. This is different from the anti-capitalism of the left, which seeks simultaneously, and maniacally, to disempower while adding on responsibilities. It is better to make all delegations of authority models of the mode of sovereignty capable of establishing such delegations. The articulation of needs and capacities, of power and responsibility, counter capitalism by singling out the specific convergence while also extending into the indefinite future, which will require continual adjustments of the “formula.”\n\nOnly in the single, central, figure can this convergence be made visible in such a way as the bear the weight of the world insofar as all of us recruits help to bear the weight of sovereignty. So, the appeal to the serried ranks of potential loyalists will always come down to conveying an imperative to put their abilities in play to support this central figure or this locus which some central figure will seize. The “proof” of the centrality of the occupant of the center is that he is able to tighten the reciprocal feedback between the field of needs (to live healthily, but also to live meaningfully in the sense of being able to continually approximate meaning what one says, to excel, to uncover, refine, train and display new abilities) and the field of abilities such that one’s fundamental need is to do what one is able to.\n\nThe occupant of the center worth devoting oneself to is the one seen “trending” in that direction. You may be disappointed in your devotion, of course, but it is only through the unabashed immersion in sovereign projects that even such disappointment can become a discovery procedure, for yourself and others."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-sign-substack",
      "title": "The Sign",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 3, 2020",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-sign",
      "content": "The Sign\n\nDerrida pointed out that “sign” is an inextricably dualist and therefore metaphysical concept, being both “intelligible” and “sensible” and therefore in need of deconstruction. The question then is whether you want to see this as a problem that needs to be addressed. Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, the type/token distinction, Frege’s sense vs. reference all maintain this dualism. Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra is in a way a resolution of this dualism, along with the dualism of Marx’s distinction between “use value” and “exchange value”—just like exchange value swallows up use value, the signifier assimilated the signified so that reality is replaced by hyper-reality, a world completely generated by signs and comprised of simulacra.\n\nBut Baudrillard’s resolution is a dystopia. Even Peirce’s tripartite distinction between icon, index and symbol reproduces this dualism, because while the “icon” would seem to be a natural, self-evident sign, the similarity between sign and referent is in fact not “obvious” and is culture-dependent, just as different languages have different sounds for a dog’s bark. And the “symbol” is the sign that takes on its meaning through “convention” or “agreement,” which returns us to the same place, Saussure’s “arbitrariness”—how did we all come to agree that this sound would “mean” and “refer” to this. Gans, as well, accepts the dualism of the sign as having a material and immaterial or transcendent component, as the immaterial, transcendent, invisible “side” of the sign corresponds to the originary paradox wherein the meaning and the referent of the sign both pre-exist and are created by the emergent human community.\n\nBut Gans, without repeating this too many times that I’m aware of, has defined “God” as the word for which sense and referent are identical—the meaning of the word “God” is the reference to the being God. The implication of this is that the word or, more precisely, the name “God” anchors the entire linguistic system—every language, really any discourse, would have to have some word that unites sense and reference, signifier and signified, icon and symbol, in this way. Denying such words is really just another way of affirming them. This points to an interesting lacuna in Anna Wierzbicka’s natural semantic primes, which doesn’t include the word “God,” I presume precisely because “God” is really a name and the various ways of invoking deities in the various languages can’t be determined to be the “same” according to the linguistic protocols Wierzbicka has adopted.\n\nThis suggests that linguistic centrality of the name of God, which includes, embodies and resolves the paradox of the sign, should really serve a similar function, but to different ends, as Derrida’s deconstruction, that is, of revealing where a given sign system “arbitrarily,” that is culturally and historically, has come to resolve its foundational paradoxes by privileging one set of terms over another. What strengthens this suggestion is another, as far as I know seldom repeated assertion of Gans that “every word is the Name-of-God.” I’ve never seen Gans explore this claim, but I think that it must mean that every word, in the singular, irreducible way it participates in a given utterance, does, in however a distanced or mediated way, what the aborted gesture of appropriation did on the originary scene.\n\nHere, we’d have a distinction but no longer a duality—the word is itself, a single, definable word within a linguistic system, a word which has various uses that distinguish it from other words within the system, while its “destiny,” we might say, within any utterance is to sustain the center, to “mean” by invoking the participation of all listeners in a centered presence. We could use the use-mention distinction to make sense of this—when we use a word, it’s the Name-of-God, characterized by the unity of sense and reference, signifier and signified; it’s only when we mention it, to make a study of language, that these distinctions emerge.\n\nThat suggests that the dualities are artifacts of literacy, but, as David Olson likes to insist, the constructions of literacy can only make explicit what is already implicit in language. In this case, the origin of the linguistic dualities would lie in the rigors of ritual, where the question is one of performing a ritual, including its linguistic component, correctly, on the one hand, and performing other than according to custom, on the other, with potentially devastating consequences. The dualities of the sign, then, have their origins in the expulsion of the member of the community who causes the ritual to fail—any student with grammatical issues, accustomed to having his paper filled with menacing red ink, could, I think, be convinced that his little ostracism has such roots.\n\nThis hypothetical retracing of the dualisms of modern linguistics and philosophy allows us to revisit the otherwise rather bland assertion that signs have their meaning as a result of “social agreement.” We already have the paradox here that the only way of arriving at such an agreement requires a pre-existing agreement—a paradox pointed out by Rousseau and then Claude Levi-Strauss, leading to the logical, if equally paradoxical conclusion that language must have emerged all at once. Gans’s originary hypothesis is, of course, the solution to this paradox, but in that case it should also enable us to resolve the paradoxes in the word “sign.”\n\nOne problem caused by the metaphysical dualism of “sign” is that it insufficiently distinguishes between human and animal and even non-organic “communication” or “exchange of information.” It is very easy—it’s the path of least resistance, especially in the wake of the cybernetic revolution—to treat the entire universe as a semiotic system, with human signification being qualitatively no different than, say the “exchange” of pheromones that initiates the mating sequence of a pair of insects. Peirce’s “indexical” sign reaches back into the non-human in this way, and it would be possible to analyze the iconic and symbolic as more complex articulations of indexical signs.\n\nThis would make it much easier to “handle” and to justify handling humans in any “Great Reset” one has in mind; for example, vast projects of carbon minimization and extraction, or of social control and immunology. The only argument against this, aside from reactive invocations of some threatened human essence, would be to show that human sign use is irreducible to the universe conceived as vast flows of information. If the supposedly “transcendent” dimension of the sign could be shown to be explicable and, more importantly, predictable, on a completely indexical model, the traditional defense of the singularity of the human collapses.\n\nI think a better framing of “signification” can start from one of Wierzbicka’s primes: the word “same.” When we speak about the “meaning” or “sense” of a word, what we are saying is that it is the same word in its different uses. This “sameness” is verified, or affirmed, or authenticated, along with each use—this is the “Name-of-God” implicit in every utterance. Then the immaterial, invisible, transcendent dimension of the sign is rerouted to a continual regathering of the community around its center. The constative is brought back into the performative, to draw upon another tradition of modern linguistic philosophy, speech act theory.\n\nTo mean something is to “insist” that what you have uttered will be insisted to be the “same” by other language users in situations that will likewise be determinable to be the “same.” But the same what? To say the same “sign” or “word” is to land us back in the same dilemmas. Since this sameness is always constructed, selected, “taken” as much as “given,” we can take an absolutely indispensable concept from modern, scientific thought and say: the same sample . Taking and treating samples might be seen as a reductive procedure: this living animal, with its entire species being, meaning within human communities, evolutionary history and so on is to be treated as a cluster of cells which we wish to observe under controlled conditions to answer specific questions.\n\nBut this practice is true of all language use—we never “grasp” the complete “richness” of a given phenomenon—we always select and single out that which is urgent to us in the present. Taking a sample is actually irreducibly human—we could say that one snail following in the slime tracks of another for mating purposes is responding to “signs,” but we couldn’t say it’s taking a sample, separating out and setting aside a part from a whole in order to know the whole.\n\nIf I point, or speak a word, or a sentence, or write a book, that’s a sample—a sample of language in general, a sample of a particular region in language, defined according to discipline, period, genre, or anything else, in accord with the needs of some inquiry. The sample stands in for that larger “population,” metonymically, which is to say, first of all, indexically, but insofar as it is made to serve as a good or representative sample, also iconically, and, insofar as the sample has to be “treated” or “carved up” in a certain way, according to certain rules, to make it function iconically, then also symbolically, in some agreed upon manner.\n\nSo, this accounts for the sign’s/sample’s relation to the system of signs/samples, and the users of signs/samples. As for the linguistic sample’s relation to something extra linguistic, now we have to speak GA rather than Peircean. Insofar as a sample of language distinguishes itself from the larger population of language, which is to say, from all other samples, it does so by directing our attention, ostensively, to something in the world which is now itself turned into a sample. Let’s say that a book directs your attention to a certain corner of some scholarly discourse, making “original” statements that take on their meaning from the distinction the book makes between these statements and some set of inherited statements, which they aim at displacing.\n\nLet’s say it’s a new interpretation of some historical event—the remains, the indications, the ramifications of that event, in memories, artifacts, primary sources, consequences, and so on can now all be examined in new ways—they become signs or, samples, now of that historical event considered along these new lines. Let’s take a more familiar example of a “sample”—something you would look at through a biologist’s, chemists, medical practitioner’s, etc. microscope—something that has been set up, prepared, treated in specific ways so as to make something visible. Your first question will be something like “what am I looking at?,” and the answer will be some kind of sign (“that dark circular mass moving slightly on the top left side…), and this sign or sample will direct your attention to what has now been converted into a sign or sample, as that “mass” is now a sample of the kind of thing one looks at in this way, under these conditions, for this purpose.\n\nA disciplinary space, which is really any linguistic space, generates transformational samples of this kind—samples that convert what has not yet been differentiated from some whole into samples of that and other wholes, considered in some way structured by the space. Every sample both represents and is represented.\n\nWe can, of course, only replace the word “sign” with the word “sample” because we inherit established scientific traditions that give the word “sample” the meaning we now exploit. Any word, including “sign,” will carry its history along with it, and it’s better to be explicit about that. We can speak of “samples” precisely because of the very conditions which make an unproblematic relation between sign, mind and referent impossible—the massive displacement of places and people under what we can call the paradoxically centrifugal centralizing tendencies of modernity. From a gradation of names marking embedded relationships, each social “particle” has multiple and changing relations to the center.\n\nThe epoch of “data” emerges for precisely this reason—think of what had to be recorded in, say, the records of the local parish in 11th century Europe—births, deaths, marriages, at most—and go through the growing agglomeration of record keeping and statistics that follow from the absolutist monarchs through the vast bureaucratic paperwork of the 19th through the mid-20th century, now all, multiplied immensely, gathered up into the Cloud. There’s no way of working through this vast storage of information other than through sampling and searching. So, we’re all samples sampling. Like a lot of us now, I imagine, since it’s so easy to search the etymologies and histories of words, I do that for words that become important to my thinking, and so I’ll point out that “sample” is really, not surprisingly, a variant of “example,” which in Latin had meanings relevant to the iconic nature of the sign (like “portrait” and “pattern”) but can ultimately be traced back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to take,” or “distribute.”\n\nSo, using the word “sample” to replace “sign” retrieves an originary understanding of the sign as a mode and object of distribution. The originary event is a sample of humanity because all members of the group became sampling samples there. I’ll also add that a sample is a “substitute” for the whole, or, in terms of mimetic theory, an “emissary” that we now preserve and amplify rather than sacrificing. As a cultural-linguistic strategy, using “sample” in this way to both displace “sign” and crowd out or assimilate other meanings of sample creates an overlay onto scientifically informed discourse that, first, makes that discourse more rigorous (any conclusion claiming to be scientific, indeed, any claim to knowledge, must account for the relation between sample and population in its presentation of the results of its inquiries); while also making that discourse more embedded in the human designing of the human that’s always implicated in technology and science.\n\nIn other words, we talk to (and as) scientists and engineers as people who as are always making meaning, rather than doing something outside of meaning. If you’re working with samples, you’re thoroughly immersed in sign usage, or sampling. And I’ll conclude with a quick mention of the musical meaning of sampling, which involves taking a piece of recorded music from one context and repurposing it for another, and which completely relevant to the sampling of the word “sample” I’m attempting here."
    },
    {
      "slug": "scenic-technics",
      "title": "Scenic Technics",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 6, 2020",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/scenic-technics",
      "content": "For Bernard Stiegler, “technics” is “tertiary retention,” following the “primary retention” (“memory”) of the genetic code (any way in which physical, chemical, or biological reality “preserves” in its functioning the results of past interactions would be included, I suppose), and “secondary retention,” language, is the specifically human preservation of the results of past events—so, “technics” is the inscription of memory in material reality. Language is itself a kind of inscription, whether it be a sound or gesture, but the distinction between such inscription and an object whose lasting materiality would make it available after the one who produced it is gone is clear enough.\n\nI also wouldn’t consider language to be a technique, or tool, or technology, because while we could speak of refining and sharpening specific areas of language for specific uses and purposes, language itself can’t be “used”—“primary attentionality” always precedes and constitutes any “use.” The line between language and technics can’t be drawn so clearly, though, as language can be instrumentalized—but this is because language is always produced on a scene, and it is the scene that is the location of technics.\n\nWhy develop these new forms of memory, and first of all language (“secondary retention”)? Presumably tertiary retention would actually precede secondary—some object, for some reason, would “record” and organize a social relation and therefore retain the activity that went into producing or even finding that object, which would then be named. But why would any of this happen—primary retention wouldn’t produce it. Of course, the originary hypothesis is my answer for the emergence of secondary retention, but it is helpful to think about tertiary retention as emerging simultaneously with language and as being co-constitutive with it.\n\nThe “scene” is really an undeveloped concept in Eric Gans’s work—it serves some purposes in aesthetic analysis, where we very literally have “scenes,” but much less in social and historical thought (what kind of scene do we have in liberal democracy, for example) and none at all in discussing the material “shell” humans construct around themselves, in particular technology. But the scenic is very well suited to serve these purposes, as even the most rudimentary scene needs to be constructed. The furniture in a room is a “memory” of the design of the room and the events that have taken place there, and situate the people in ways that recall previous interactions. There’s no scene without some “setting.”\n\nThe first scene is the originary scene and subsequent scenes are ritual scenes. The originary scene, I assume, ends with a ritual-like repetition of the originary gesture that created the scene and guided the consumption of the object (the sparagmos). The ritual-like gesture would be the first material “memory” of the scene, as some reminder of the scene (a bone of the “victim,” for example) would be the center of the gesture. In subsequent scenes that gesture would come first, as memory is “front-loaded” so as to guarantee the results of the scene in advance. This is the setting of the ritual scene, and therefore the original “technics”—there is a very urgent reason for inscribing this memory in reality.\n\nThe very center-margin relation would be the object of this originary scene-setting. The remnant or remainder of the scene that serves as the center of the ritual would be preserved and worked on in ways that accrete iterations of more complex scenes, represent the tension between desire and repulsion, and make the center forbidding and impregnable. This would stimulate the acquisition of “skills” and ‘specializations,” as questions would emerge regarding the materials used in constructing the “altar,” its precise dimensions, its conformity to the need of a ritual increasingly influenced by mythic narrations of the originary event, and so on (how does the central Being want to be housed, how to keep lines of imperative exchange open, etc.). These very skills and specializations would create differentiation among the community, extending scenic construction to the margin, as masks, costumes, implements used in worship, etc., are treated with care as well.\n\nSo, technics, as I’ve been arguing over several posts, is scenic design. The development of what we could recognize as genuine “tools” and “weapons”—really just another kind of tool—such as spears, knives, hammering instruments, and so on, would all be directly tied to the ritual scene and service to the center. Large scale technology involves a qualitative transformation, as I’ve argued in Anthropomorphics and in more recent posts on the GA Blog, insofar as the model for “technology” is the mobilization of masses of dispossessed individuals in the ancient empires—the original “mega-machines,” as Lewis Mumford puts it.\n\nBut these mega-machines are still engaged in scenic design, as they are used to glorify, exalt, commemorate and make immortal the imperial center. So, they are continuous with the originary technics of scenic design. The gradual technical improvements of the European middle ages were possible because the spread of Christianity created a more abstract and shared ritual center that extended across communities, even while the continued existence of communities and traditions and workmen and workmanship ensured that technological development remained on a “human scale.” The development of rapid, “interruptive” technological development that transformed communities and individuals in ways that pre-empted their ability to prepare for those transformations has to wait for the massive dispossessions of the enclosure movement and colonial discovery, which again set masses of people in motion during what Marx called the period of capital “primitive accumulation.”\n\nHere, though, developments are decentering as well as centering, as a kind of cooperative competition over control of the process between the (decreasingly) absolute monarchs and the emergent capitalist class drives events. I see a dialectic of initiative and sabotage at work here, unlike the exclusive emphasis on sabotage insisted upon by Capital as Power , simply because I know of no instance, and can think of no hypothetical reconstruction, of the development of technology (that ultimately includes energy exploitation, communication across vast distances, and automation) outside of the spurring of capital (which, even on Bichler and Nitzan’s account, often sabotages other uses of technology precisely in order to maximize the profitability of its own investment).\n\nAs the more efficient form of power, the logic of capital comes to pervade the logic of the state, as the emergence of liberalism is a way for various factions of capital to more peacefully work out their differences (and try to get the state machinery on their side). This also means that the pulverization of individuals situated within the technological juggernaut is more thoroughgoing, as they submit to the imperative to discount their present property (however meager) and capacities against future earnings (and call this “freedom”). This is a transformation in “subjectivity” that the ancient empires could never have imagined.\n\nCapitalism and liberalism are both anti-scenic, and therefore pose challenging scenic design problems, which as a result come to be focused on technology’s resistance to capitalism and liberalism. Technology is the only site where scenic design can be imagined to have free play, which is why virtually all modern utopias, left and right, include some version of a liberated technology. Scenes comprised of individual sites of technological operation, like factories, offices, or even laboratories, are squalid and uninspiring, so the technological imagination constructs a scene that projects beyond any actual contemporary operations, which are resistant to any design beyond the needs of intimidation and demoralization. Such technological imaginaries are the only alternative to liberal capitalist narratives, which always repeat the fantasy of the future earnings that have been discounted for actually arriving as expected, even if in the form of some kind of moral compensation. These are scenes designed to scurry around on, not find a place within.\n\nThe notion of a life filled with “meaning” has been a therapeutic cliché for a long time, but I continue to insist on the notion of “meaning” because it retains its moral power if constrained by its stricter linguistic meaning, which is really being able to “say something” that remains the “same” across time and media—that is, across scenes, and the disruptions of events. So, I see no problem with saying that what humans ultimately need is meaning, in this sense. If I describe myself and my world in ways belied by what I do and how others see me then my life is in disarray, subjected to no discipline or “program.”\n\nIt’s always possible to increase the consistency across scenes of what one says, but the form of social order will limit possibilities here. Someone can want to be “courageous,” but if the only form this takes is getting gunned down by a cop in a pointless confrontation, “courage” gets sunk in irony and its meaning is reversed. So, to have “meaning,” one must have, be in, build, a place governed by scenic design practices that allow for consistency of utterances or “samples” as they travel across scenes. This in turn means the scenicity itself is to be maximized, and technology should generate more scenes, upon which practices are possible, and the tendency of the technological imagination to insert individual activities as “functions” within a “system” must be resisted. Only a powerful central authority would make this possible.\n\nOne sees two tendencies in post-liberal thinking. One participates in the technological imaginary I’ve been describing above, which sees engineering or Veblen’s “industry” as an autonomous form of social development that would replace capitalist ‘discounting” with a form of planning integral to science and technology as we go about automating everything. On the other side, we have strong sympathy for resistance to technology, and a retrieval of pre-industrial, highly wrought and communally embedded forms of workmanship. This latter proposal seems especially utopian, but Curtis Yarvin makes a powerful argument for in in his latest “Grey Mirror” essay, in terms of a “disutilitarian” ethic in opposition to liberal utilitarianism.\n\nTo the argument that making clothes and toys, building houses, growing food, etc., under prescribed conditions recalling the pre-modern would be an unsustainable, artificial throwback or “theme park,” Yarvin’s answer seems to be the pragmatic one that, given what we see of mass production, we might actually have much better things this way. Yarvin’s argument draws upon anthropological assumptions regarding what is good for humans, on both an individual and communal level, as one rarely sees such assumptions advanced, much less defended, on the “technocratic” side, which wants to retain control of the questions asked.\n\nThe question is, what kind of center are we serving in either case. The reason engineers have not engineered a social order in which all problems can be turned into engineering ones is that the center they tacitly serve is what I have been calling the “iterative center,” which displaces (sacrificial) ritual and narrative in the name of the hypothesis/practice nexus. On these terms, no single “Big Scene,” upon which “equal” distribution is organized, can be imagined. The individual or collective practitioner cannot demand his/their “share,” since an integrated system cannot separate “fair” distribution from participation in a system where “inputs” and “outputs” can’t be quantified.\n\nWhat the practitioner “wants” is for surrounding practices to be made “interoperable” with his/their own. But there’s no broader “social engineering” practice because the only ways of reducing humans to engineering logic are brutal ones which violate the ethical sensibilities of the engineer (but which also make engineers vulnerable to recruitment to the engineering of brutal political projects). So, the iterative center predicates the primacy of engineering and “industry” but without providing a place for the engineer qua engineer as the occupant of the center. The engineer is always designing from the margin, providing for a center irreducible to distributary (tributary) logics.\n\nAs to why any center is necessary, and why an autonomous system of engineering can’t gradually and imperceptibly replace the existing system of liberal capitalism, the simplest answer is that engineering does not produce practices that defend the engineer against exploitation and sabotage, and there will always be agents who consider the latter to be in their interests. But this is also to say that there will always be mimetic rivalry, which can only be controlled through a center.\n\nSci/tech will continue to pulverize so as to rearticulate, and in doing so will always displace those situated on existing scenes, real and imaginary, such as they are. This makes scenic design practices irreducible to science and technology necessary. But not really irreducible to science and technology, because for such complementary scenic design practices to be designed, a specifically human science, dedicated to human meaning and place, is necessary. It’s evident enough what my candidate for such a science is. What makes GA, or more specifically “anthropomorphics” scientific here is that it posits, demonstrates and draws the conclusions from the inexorable centeredness of all human being.\n\nAny utterance, or sign, or “sample” (as I will increasingly be saying) is a hypothesis regarding the ordering of agents on a scene around a possible center—this means people in a position to say things—to name things, issue commands and requests, formulate questions, make statements, construct a discourse that keeps the ostensive, imperative and interrogative active within the declarative. To say something is to propose a populating of the world in accord with delegated charges to everyone on every scene. Precisely because there is no “Big Scene” there are scenes delegated to oversee and infiltrate other scenes to assess them as meaning productive or “extractive.”\n\nLanguage serves as the test here, while the examination of language is part of the practice. A given problem, posed in engineering terms, will lend itself to various solutions (the process of automation can never itself be completely automated), including some explicitly limiting the reach of that solution. We can pose the question as follows: will a particular contribution to scene setting (a new form of production, a new social media app, a new form of birth control, etc., will all generate scenic possibilities regarding which we can hypothesis which, indeed, already contain scenic hypotheses) help increase or diminish the likelihood that words like “trust,” “love,” “violence,” “honesty,” “courage” and so on will be “sampled” consistently across the various scenes (of course, there may be words found to be inconsistent with the ones most  important to preserve and enrich, whose meanings might be revised or restricted; and vocabularies can be transformed, but without effacing the distinctions between words that “mean what they say” and those that don’t)? Bringing the fullest expansion of scenic design capacities into conformity with the richest enhancement of our linguistic being will be the central problem of post-liberal governance."
    },
    {
      "slug": "scenic-design-practices-the-transfer-translation-of-events-into-scenes",
      "title": "Scenic Design Practices: The Transfer Translation of Events into Scenes",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 16, 2020",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/scenic-design-practices-the-transfer",
      "content": "We know that something happens because what happens leaves a mark—a sign, some residue, information, difference, data, etc. The happening, which is to say the event, cannot be experienced as such—no matter much in the flow you are, you are noting things, naming things, making distinctions, giving some form to the event. At the same time, we know that there is more to the event than can be formalized—we can know this because the formalization could have gone otherwise, which means there were possibilities latent in the event that went unrealized. You are remembering the event already as it is taking place, which means you are giving form to an iteration of the event within the event itself, an iteration that you spread over a field of practice, and that is constitutive of the event itself.\n\nAn event emerges within a scene—it sets in motion the dissolution of a scene. A scene has everyone positioned in relation to each other so as to elicit imperatives from the scene’s center. Even if it’s just a few people having a casual conversation, they’re all trying to determine “what needs to be said next.” What you find to say will sustain, enhance, disturb, disrupt, etc., the scene. But whatever is said initiates the dissolution of the scene, one way or another. The imperative from the center keeps changing as it has been heeded in various ways, rendered in some part moot in another part more urgent. The imperative is always some version of “remove or bracket any interference with the imperative coming from the center.”\n\nTrying to clear the channel to the center initiates the dissolution of the scene, but is also why the scene can only be reconfigured, never dissolved—even utter destruction preserves the remnants of a scene on other scenes. And the scene is never completely set because it represents an ongoing formalization that never excludes the possibility that its formalization will have been revised with the next gesture.\n\nAt a more concrete level, the history of design shows a continuing response to events. The spread and growing knowledge of infectious diseases, the “discovery” of neuroses, and the trauma of World War One led to an emphasis on transparent, “clean,” uncluttered, forms of architecture and design. This is a clear case of events being translated into scenes. One out of many ways of formalizing the consequences of the war, the influenza outbreak, and the rise of psychotherapy for the Western middle class was selected and promoted over others. The ancient scenes of masses of slaves constructing giant buildings, temples, dams, fighting wars and so on were a translation of the event of formation of the gigantic empires. In either case, a center is served, whether it be the divinized power of the emperor or the model of disciplinary power which came to qualify one to rule in modernity. Styles in art, thinking and writing are equally the result of scenic design practices translating events.\n\nMarcel Jousse’s concept of the “transfer translation” refers to the translation of sacred books into currently used languages, which inevitably led to discrepancies in scripture simply due to differences in idioms across languages. The pedagogical practices of memorizing and disseminating scripture, then, come to include commentary and stories that reconcile these discrepancies. I’m translating Jousse’s concept to apply to the situation where competing formalizations of events both reference and repel each other. The event makes itself known by producing such competing possibilities, which must get reconciled sufficiently for the minimal consistency required for the design of scenes. A particular way of occupying the center, of filling the seat of power, will need translation practices capable of translating any formalization that might redound to the advantage of a competitor.\n\nWe live in a liberal, capitalist order—the two are interdependent, but not identical. The liberal subject is the capitalized subject, who has been discounted (and participates by discounting himself) against expected future earnings. If you imagine what you expect to be “worth” 10 years from now, 20 years, 30 years, etc., you can put a “value” on all your present “investments”—and then you can decide between different investments based on their respective expected earnings. From a strictly capitalist standpoint, this would be calculated monetarily, but even the most successfully capitalized subject wants something other than and irreducible to money.\n\nMoney and power are for something, even if just the recognition from others that you have them. The other things one might want—home, family, intellectual accomplishment, community responsibilities, sex, love, and so on—rely upon the extent to which one has capitalized oneself, and add to one’s capital value if successfully attained, but will nevertheless come into conflict with the needs of capitalization. So, the liberal and capitalist subjectivities have to be reconciled through translation practices, and pretty much everything mass produced under liberal capitalism offers some kind of translation. The center in a liberal capitalist order is issuing the imperative to produce these translations, as a condition of the continuance of that order. For narratives to succeed, they must be able to translate unsuccessful monetary capitalization into successful moral capitalization.\n\nBut there is a mode of scenicity and eventness that comes into existence with capitalism while remaining incommensurate with it. This mode is equally dependent upon the algorithmic logic of capitalism, in the sense that it conceptualizes the present as a bundle of future possibilities whose relative probabilities are continually readjusted not only with each act but with each calculation. It might be possible to go back to a lot of presumably antiquated social arrangements, but there’s no going back on this. A social order that has completely replaced capitalism and removed all residues of its existence—money, debt, law, rights, etc.—would still be algorithmic.\n\nIt would replace capitalism by being more consistently algorithmic. Industry, run according to its own scientific and technological imperatives, would still involve deciding whether to carry out one project or another, allocate resources in one way or another, based on anticipated outcomes, which would be projected further into the future and more expansively in space the more the logic of this order (let’s say, to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities) becomes its exclusive logic and knowledge becomes more precise and therefore the consequences of transformation more predictable. You might not fire a bunch of people because doing so would raise the value of the firm as discounted against expected earnings, but whoever is in charge would decide that these specific people are no longer necessary for the continuation of the project because he knows exactly how much energy, time and labor are necessary for its completion.\n\nThe difference is that, since capital is power, the capitalist tries to realize those expected future earnings by using his capital to eliminate obstacles to its realization—whether these be the success of competitors or social demands that might introduce unpredictable value drops along the way and would therefore undermine present valuation. Politicians must be funded and bribed, social movements must be supported so as to provide the government the power it needs to eliminate potentially frustrating intermediate layers of authority, competitors must be undersold, or their supply chains sabotaged, etc. “Predictability” would have to take on another form in the post-liberal capitalist order—it would have to be replaced by the “reliability” of all of those intermediate layers of authority, because whatever you want all the automated machinery and the algorithms running the machinery to do, they can only do it if the people needed to run it are “distributed” properly.\n\nI’m assuming here that, contrary to many dystopian scenarios, more automation will give people more to do—not only interfering with the algorithms and reshaping them, but attending to all those relationships, capacities and activities that people often rightfully say they are too busy to cultivate under capitalism.\n\nWhat would ensue is much more granular forms of sensing, assessing, measuring and responding. These forms would be embodied in practices, which is to say, doing what you are doing only continually more so so that you can ascertain that you are indeed doing that along with everyone else doing what they’re doing. Let’s say you “take a walk”—that’s a practice. Taking a walk is different than running, different than walking to get some place, maybe even different than “strolling.” You can take a walk in a desultory, haphazard manner, or you can make your practice of taking a walk more precise, more demonstrable in terms of an end built into it.\n\nNot that there’s anything wrong with the “desultory”—desultoriness can become a practice as well, a kind of play aimed at discovering which initiatives might turn into practices undiscoverable otherwise. The relation between the rigorous and the desultory can itself be the subject of a practice. This is another way of talking about the enactment of the meaning of words—if you want to know if you are “courageous” or “resilient,” you need to construct a practice in order to find out whether you’re sampling those words. If you transform “taking a walk” into a practice, all kinds of things come into view—you start to notice things about different routes, different paces, the relationship between your muscles, between nutrition and exercise, between your walking and other forms of physical exertion, and so on.\n\nYou produce more and more samples for yourself to take as proxies for some constantly redefined population, and you are offering yourself as a sample for those at higher levels or responsibility who can now notice how the community is designed with an eye towards making it more suitable for those “taking walks.” This is the imperative coming from the post-liberal capitalist center, and it’s an imperative we can hear and partially obey, while constructing practices revealing the obstructions within the liberal capitalist order to the creation of a realm of practice.\n\nThe imperatives of this, iterative, center, is what takes us beyond the sacrificial center. Capitalism retains the Big Scene, that is, the assumption that the entire social order, and ultimately the entire world, can be treated as a scene upon which coherent actors make exchanges as part of the distribution from the center. On the Big Scene we will never be done with money, capital, debt, exemplary victims and the apocalyptic struggle against tyranny. The iterative center produces an articulation of practices and hypotheses; the Big Scene generates narratives which, for the most part, fantasize some component of the liberal imaginary triumphing over some compulsion to self-capitalize. So, the work of scenic design is the translation of events designed into narrative form into the terms of a possible practice. There is nothing utopian in the practice—we can always work on perfecting some practice, even under difficult conditions. The practice of translation formalizes the event of the iterative center against the liberal-capitalist formalization of the event.\n\nEverything we do or that happens to us (every event) can be part of a practice of capitalization (scenic design aimed at capturing value)—getting better at something, improving appearance, making friends, learning things, etc., can all increase our value by indicating the possibility of greater future earnings. I give some “credit” to capitalism because I acknowledge that it may be impossible to prove that people might do things worth doing which they otherwise wouldn’t have in the hope of capitalizing them. Even more, taking a strict anti-capitalist position counter-productively places nominal or fantasized opposition to capital over the work of leveraging power differently even under capital.\n\nI can agree with capital that any present practice will be pulverized, with greater precision and temporal reach, into signs of possible futurities. This is where power lies in the post-sacrificial order—this is what the center commands. To paraphrase Marx, the capitalist world presents itself most directly as a collection of (scenic design) practices given to capitalization; the practice of translation involves bringing those practices to the edge of meaning and over, to the point where capitalization subverts the practice. That will be the point at which power is detached from responsibility, capacities are not being maximized and needs met, and therefore where words don’t mean the same thing over successive iterations.\n\n(How people talk about things and represent them, how they preserve and embed meaning over time provides the means of “measurement” that must replace money in assessing and revising practices of distribution.) Presenting those successive iterations is the entry into the translation practice, because in taking charge of the loss of meaning you match up whatever power you have with the responsibility to the center implicit in the formalization upon which even the rottenest institution depends, and you relay the center’s demand that you be supplied with what you need to enhance your capacity to start auditing unmet needs and wasted capacities across the board. Then your translation becomes a sample of the kind of translation others have to complete."
    },
    {
      "slug": "mimological-impressments",
      "title": "Mimological Impressments",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 27, 2020",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/mimological-impressments",
      "content": "“Technics” is the perfection and generativity of the imperative. We issue and receive all kinds of imperatives, all the time, with varying degrees of explicitness, force, precision, and time-sensitivity. When you work on making a particular subset of your imperatives conform without deviation to a model you have attached to that imperative you are working within technics; and when you include in that precision the placement of that imperative within a chain or network of imperatives, you are engaged in technology. I have elsewhere referred to Lewis Mumford’s notion of the “mega-machine,” as the origin of technology, insofar as it involves the transformation of human beings into functional elements of a dynamic whole, whether it be a labor force or army—the implication I wanted to draw from this is that the first machines are comprised of humans, and only after that is the surrounding inorganic world pressed into service to supplement and eventually in part replace and in part make contingent the human parts.\n\nWhat I will add now is that this is the case as well for pre-“technological” technics, reaching back into the earliest human creation of tools—for cutting, carving, grinding, etc. Rather than thinking about technics in terms of the relation between “man” and his “environment,” technics should be thought first of all in terms of one human “tooling” another, that is, issuing an imperative that is closely supervised and repeated in a standardized form. This would have first taken place within a ritual framework, and would have involved, first of all, getting the ritual “right.” In other words, we should think of the first technicians as priests administering rites.\n\nThe imperative, which is also to say, pedagogical relation between the imperator and the imperatee, would also be enveloped within a ritual relation—that is, in an imperative exchange with the center. This special and specialized instance of the imperative form would be akin to initiation into a secret society, where, by the way, is where we would have to look, along with the various mysticisms, for the materials for a hypothetical history of pedagogy.\n\nA perfected and generative imperative would involve a very close mimetic relation between the participants. To show someone exactly what to do you need to have them follow your every motion very carefully, with little tolerance for deviation, and a great deal of repetition. Since reproducing the pedagogical relation is a large part of the purpose, the mapping of one set of motions over another might be elaborated and accentuated for its own sake. Now, this specialization of the imperative serves the purpose of scenic design, or the translation of event into scene. We could think of the translation of event into scene as the sifting through of everything that might be said and done here and now so as to produce what is to be said and done here and now against the background of that range of possibilities.\n\nTechnics, that is, serves the originary media of the scene—everyone positioned in a particular way in relation to the center so as to re-enact the originary scene. The “content” of the ritual scene is enhanced and modified by the various iterations and expansions of the sign, on and off the scene. The imperative exchange with the center is continually revised in accord with the relative success of previous exchanges, each of which would suggest new procedures for improving conformity, conveying requests to and obeying the imperatives coming from the center. That is, the originary tools are “props” for the scene, meant to constrain the scene in repeatable and enforceable ways. The refinement of imperatives and the more studied implementation of the pedagogical relation constructing them can be extended to other practices off the ritual scene as those other scenes are annexed to and made to supplement the ritual scene.\n\nTo make your imperatives more precise and generative is to extend yourself into the imperatee—that is, to create a mimetic relation approaching exactness. You watch the other fulfill your imperative, notice where it goes “wrong,” repeat his gesture with the “correction” of that particular move in mind, all of which means making the other imitate you while you imitate him—even to demonstrate the difference between the wrong move he made and the right way of doing it. And to extend yourself into the imperatee is to suggest the possibility of extending yourself into your surroundings, and imagining ways in which those surroundings—animal, plant and mineral alike—might be brought into that mimetic relationship.\n\n(In ritual relationships, the boundaries between the human community, its living and non-living companions, and the figures narrated at the center are not firmly drawn.) The role of the declarative here is to narrate this process of revision, and to bring figures at the center (gods, ancestors) into the story. Every innovation (and until very recently there were not all that many) would have been some transgression carried out to compensate for another transgression, and the creation of mythologies incorporates this dynamic. The specialized imperative relation would have to be abstracted from ritual communities and situated within broader imperial, urban and market relations in order to begin to think about the perfection of imperatives and imperativity outside of mythical terms—that is, to establish “craftsmanship.”\n\nIt is also at that point that it becomes possible to think about technics more systematically, that is, technologically—to think about how one perfected imperative could itself be subjected to and a source of other imperatives, and eventually an entire, potentially unlimited, network of imperatives. This technological practice relies upon the megamachine but also transcends it by creating the possibility of an imperative system with no humans actually taking direct orders. We are all dominated (if not to equal extents and in the same way) by technology because embedded in it is a history of accumulated imperatives which bring their collective weight to bear on the individual entering the machine.\n\n(Your devices keep telling you how to use them, and an order comprised of the interlocking of those devices is offering stronger or weaker “suggestions” for how to do everything.) And, of course, technology is designed in such a way as to give the individual operators, especially at the endpoints, as little leeway as possible. At this point, though, the declarative is “liberated” to examine the various ways one imperative or imperative order can be made “interoperable” with another. So, one can imagine commanding the river to stop flowing at a certain point, but issuing this command only becomes imaginable if you can imagine commanding stones and wood to join together in some permanent way and be put in place in the midst of the river, and this in turn become more imaginable once you can order one piece of something to stick to another piece, and so on.\n\nYou imitate nature by bringing it into the network of imperatives, and you also impress it into your imperative order—mimological impressments are the means of carrying out scenic design practices—you want the river dammed so as to create a distribution of farmers who will bring tribute to the center.\n\nAlgorithms are imperative-declarative hybrids. Take the simplest kind of algorithm, instructing some instrument, like a thermostat, to adapt its functioning in response to feedback: if the temperature goes above 70 degrees reduce the heat input by X; if it goes below 65, raise it by Y. You have an imperative that transitions between two declarative statements: it is 70 degrees; it is 65 degrees. From here we can keep introducing new sentences presenting new conditions for the thermostat to readjust. If you learn how to think algorithmically, then, you learn how to think your declaratives in direct relation to the imperatives they produce and follow from, along with the ostensives upon which the application of the imperative is predicated—what it means for the temperature to go up 5 degrees is not self-evident, but requires decisions regarding how to prepare and calibrate the sensory and measuring device.\n\nIt is possible to think all imaginable ostensive-imperative-declarative pathways along these lines, and the more technological we become the more we do so—but if the technological “reveals,” one thing it reveals is where ostensive-imperative-declarative pathways reach the limits of algorithmic calculations.\n\nThe more you try to minimize room for error and judgment in one site along the imperative network, the more you open and reveal imperative gaps elsewhere. Addressing all the intellectual, moral and political questions associated with technology comes down to creating a way of thinking about the imperative, and the way the ostensive-imperative world has been reworked and subjected to the de-ritualized, post-sacrificial declarative order. A central part of that world now involves making each imperative in a gigantic network as completely unambiguous as possible, so that the results of the imperatives going through could be modeled exactly.\n\nA certain portion of this network is “discretionary,” i.e., can be reordered to meet specified purposes; most of it runs on its own and tells us what it wants. This network is the scenic design, and what we translate events into—the “technostructure” orients us to the center just as the enormous temples of the ancient empires did. Working out the algorithms generated by the system of planetary computation, the stack, is what listening to the center means today.\n\nSo far, at least, nothing in the technostructure is telling us how to produce the people we need to work within the technostructure—one look at schools and universities or, for that matter, at the kinds of suggestions coming from those located within the technostructure, is enough to convince anyone of that. So, the discretionary element may be relatively small—the proportion of addresses without users to those of users may continue to increase—but the discretion left to us users and interfaces is still decisive. A further confirmation of this is the discourse of those who assert otherwise, who think that the stack, or AI, or management can exercise sovereignty, or whatever would replace sovereignty—the more the talk about science, the less of a human science they have, which means they can only think about humans as broken pieces of furniture to be fixed or replaced.\n\nDon’t take more word for it—you can see that they will always refuse to answer the most unavoidable questions regarding the peopling of the machinery. Still, the books and articles Amazon and Google suggest are often very helpful, even for the serious scholar or theorist, and the algorithms producing such suggestions can be continually improved, and maybe even to the point where an entire essay or book would be implied by the totality of suggestions, which we can imagine eventually taking in feedback from the work you’re actually doing (“that last sentence you typed suggests that you really need to take a look at…”), so that margin of discretion needs to be constantly revised—this might now and for the foreseeable future be the central question for inquiry into the human. My next post will take that on directly.\n\nFor starters, though, we can lay down the rule (the imperative-declarative hybrid) that putting mimological impressments to work for the sake of scenic design practices involves composing imperatives that are both as perfected and as generative as possible—that is, each, by following them exactly, in the same way as everyone else, generates results that reveals an articulation of power and responsibility, needs and abilities. This is precisely what a pedagogical practice trained on the translation of event into scene would accomplish. Let’s say there is something you know how to do, and you would like to teach others to do it—a simple and common enough situation.\n\nBut you learned it in what you can see was an unnecessarily slow, laborious, zigzagging manner, and you want to design a quicker, easier and more direct path to that knowledge. This poses a programming challenge, because it’s very hard to separate out, in examining a learning experience, what was necessary to the learning and what merely got in the way. It’s like trying to distinguish signal from noise without any established criterion for doing so—you know that a message has been received and you can translate it into usable terms but you don’t have access to the sender and don’t know his intentions and so maybe you’re missing and mistranslating things.\n\nYour first problem is to figure out what, exactly, you learned (what are you now able to do or see that you couldn’t previously?)—itself no easy question to answer. This means identifying a new practice you have emerged with: something you can do while knowing that the results are and can only be the results of that action.\n\nYou now have a practice to target, and you can present that practice directly and explicitly to the learners. But the practice itself is complex, and the entire articulation of its component parts can’t be learned in one leap, so you need to identify component parts and present them to and impose them on learners before those learners can see the results—they can see you do something, but they can’t see the connection between what you’re asking them to do and them being able to do the same thing (which, moreover, may not look exactly the same—what makes it the “same” needs to be determined as well). The learners (all, of them; each of them—how different the learners are, and how diversified the teaching needs to be, and how much coordination and reciprocal pedagogy amongst the learners  is needed, will vary) are all embedded in existing sets of practices, which will necessarily interfere with the one you seek to inculcate—even more, in attempting to carry out the component parts of the practice, they will inevitably bring with them those habits which they are not yet able to distinguish from the partial practice you are asking them to perform.\n\nThe interference of those habits must themselves be separated out from the practice itself, and this itself requires a practice wherein the learner is presented with the results of this interference. You have to interfere with their interference. All this requires an ongoing modeling of previous modellings of samples of the entirety of socio-natural interactions.\n\nNow, let’s take the next step, and assume that you are not directly instructing and supervising these learners (you want to scale up, potentially all the way, the pedagogical system); rather, you are constructing scenes in which they will be compelled to undergo the learning experiences described above. You have to set up things so that they will see samples of the privileged practice, will accept the imperative to learn it to the best of their abilities, and will be able to find the fastest route towards successively approximating it. At the highest, most distant level of design, you need to leave open lots of possible routes, with the possibilities to be narrowed down by authorities at each level.\n\nImagine the entire society organized in this way—in a sense it already is, and must be, even if in the most incompetent and self-subverting way imaginable. You are yourself embarking on your design practices against this society, which adds new layers of interference to those already innate in any learning situation. You have come, through a long, painful, uncertain and complex learning process, to see the problem in these terms. This is how you look at history, or the event: as a field of learning for yourself and fellow practitioners that you are now determined to intervene in to turn it into a more expeditious and ascertainable field of learning.\n\n“Technology” is the infrastructure of that learning process—it is the site of translation from event (the revelation of a possible practice within a field of mistakes) to scene (conversion of a field of mistakes to an infrastructure supportive of that practice)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sampling-on-the-data-exchange",
      "title": "Sampling on the Data Exchange",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 4, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/sampling-on-the-data-exchange",
      "content": "I’m going to return to a distinction between opposing models of language I’ve made before (most recently here: http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/2020/06/toward-a-media-moral-synthesis/) and would like to drive to some new conclusions here. This is the distinction between, on the one hand, language as comprised of individual words, whose meanings can be defined, along with grammatical rules which determine the correct ways of articulating words and thereby creating an, in principle, unlimited number of possible sentences; and, on the other hand, language as “chunks” which are learned together in practice, and which become “commonplaces” and “constructions” as pieces from different chunks can be exchanged for pieces in other.\n\nThe former model is shared by most of modern linguistics, most prominently in the generative grammar of Noam Chomsky; the latter is advanced by the social psychologist and primatologist Michael Tomasello and, within linguistics, advocates of “construction grammar” and perhaps “grammatization” theorists (who focus on grammatical changes over time) and no doubt others—anyone, really, who treats language as historical rather than structural.\n\nWe can now know, thanks to David Olson, that the words+grammatical rules mode of language is nothing more than a reification of the metalanguage of literacy developed to supplement the shift from reported speech in oral settings to recorded speech in literate settings. The metalanguage of literacy is useful only a posteriori, to examine, assess and correct already written prose—it can create nothing (but—an important qualification—very interesting literary experiments and hypotheses, a question I set aside for now). I think that the entire history of metaphysics is really nothing more than an attempt to derive the reality of conversation, thinking, inquiry and discourse from the metalanguage of literacy.\n\nThis still goes on today, as the default criticism of another’s discourse is almost invariably its “illogic,” “irrationalism,” incorrect use of words, a failure to rely on “facts” and, of course, “critically assess” and “logically” articulate them. The fetish of “proof” is nothing but a mindless reiteration of the metalanguage of literacy, presuming, as it does, the universalization of legal language and the courtroom setting—since the law and the courtroom are largely dependent on precedent and traditions, even in the forms of “logic” and “proof” required, to demand logic and proof outside of that setting is to abstract from it only the metalanguage, which does certainly overlay and inform, and increasingly mar legal discourse.\n\nPeople end up arguing about the “amount” of “proof” they have (and the other side doesn’t) rather than asking the more normal question about some event: what, exactly, do you think happened? What do you make of the way this event played out, and the way the resulting scene is set and peopled?\n\nThe real action in language is in the “chunks,” a word which is interchangeable enough with my own preferred term for “sign” or “utterance”—“sample.” Thinking in these terms situates language in its history, including the hypothetical history of the derivation of the speech forms: ostensive, imperative, interrogative, and declarative. As Gans shows in The Origin of Language , what underlies or grounds this succession is the maintenance of “linguistic presence”—the exchange of assurances that we continue to interact on the same scene. So, the first imperative rushes to turn itself into an ostensive; the first interrogative presents itself as an elongated and softened imperative; and the first declarative “insists” that it has merely obeyed an imperative that included the one that has been resisted.\n\nIn this way we can effect what the title of the post linked to above calls a “moral-media synthesis”—what is “good” is the maintenance of linguistic presence, and linguistic presence is maintained by making the various layers in the linguistic “stack” convertible and “interoperable” with each other. So, a good declarative, or, more broadly, a good discourse, is one that would propose a manner of “fielding,” “seeding” and “populating” the referenced territory with hypothetical observers, actors and inquirers who would redeem the ostensives implicit in all the nouns, adjectives and phrases of the discourse.\n\nThe model of good writing and good thinking proposed by the metalanguage of literacy is the “classical prose” explored by Mark Turner and Francis-Noel Thomas: writing (and the thinking which prepares one for, and is exemplified in, that writing) should provide the reader with a clear view to scene presented by the writer. The writer, and the writing itself, should be self-effacing. The writer should set up, even if necessarily from a particular position in relation to the scene, a “window” onto the scene that purportedly provides the view of the scene. One of the virtues of this approach to writing and thinking is its pedagogical promise: it provides a way of categorizing all mistakes and infelicities of prose, whether grammatical or stylistic, in terms of how they intrude the writer onto the scene, and draw attention to the writer and writing at the expense of the scene.\n\nAnother model of writing and thinking follows from language as sampling. Classic prose presupposes the existence of a scene, and a vantage point on it; language as sampling refuses to take linguistic presence for granted, and therefore must set the scene, and provide a way of checking everyone on it. Something more like Leo Strauss’s esoteric/exoteric writing, which implants a pedagogical relation within the prose, is more appropriate here. Classical prose imagines “One Big Scene” that all readers can share; language as sampling imagines something more like a single, localized scene, with participants on that scene turning away following its closure to offer testimony regarding what they saw and heard on that scene, with the participants on those scenes in turn creating new ones to testify on, and so on.\n\nThis set of “staggered” scenes is built into the writing and thinking itself. To put it simply, if we take the claims of classical prose seriously, one should never have to reread a text (other, perhaps, than to remedy a memory lapse)—one should read it once, take in the entire scene to which you have been given a full view, and be able to reproduce it for oneself on demand. You wouldn’t even have to talk about it, because any competent reader would see and take in the same scene as yourself. This is, in a more prosaic way, the “metaphysics of presence.” Language as sampling wants to produce texts that will be discussed, argued over, taught, redirected and recontextualized—although it’s more accurate to say that it recognizes that this will always be the case with any significant text, and that this possibility should be maximized rather than reduced to a minimum as nothing more than the need to clean up regrettable misreadings.\n\nNow, it’s very interesting to point out that algorithmic, computational approaches to textual production adopt, seemingly counter-intuitively, the “chunks” approach rather than the words+rules (maybe words x rules?) one. Google translate began to work when it stopped trying to replace the words in the source language with synonymous words from the target language and then program the translation to arrange the words in the grammar of the target language. Rather, what works is the following: perform a search for all the existing translations of specific phrases and sentences from the source to the target language, and replace the phrases and sentences in the original text with existing translations from the target language.\n\nOf course, if phrases and sentences have been translated in different ways, or not every phrase or sentence in the original has been translated (obviously the case with a genuinely original phrase or sentence) the program needs to be further modified, and judgments need to be made—an important thing to point out, but something that only in very rare circumstances of extremely innovative texts would create an unworkability. Similarly, the new language generator GPT-3 seems to work by being fed an opening passage and then proceeding to draw upon the corpus to generate the most like next passage and, then, given those two passages, the most likely third, and so on.\n\nIt’s a question of generating sample texts that would best (according to some parameter) represent the entire population. To realize that humans don’t think all that differently—following an assignment to fuse text fragments together from various sources, adapting the fragments to make them interoperable with each other (according to an emergent parameter)—is also to take on the possibility of thinking differently.\n\nThe same is true of algorithmic “governance” or, we could say, “haunting,” in general. Amazon doesn’t abstract a set of qualities or characteristics of me as a reader and then apply those characteristics or qualities to books that “embody” them—it identifies who else has bought the books I’ve bought and then identifies which other books they’ve bought, and then, after determining what counts as “similar” books and how much “similarity” is necessary, and how many other samples need to be surveyed, is able to get back to me and let me know that I might also like… The more I buy, the more accurate its choices will get.\n\nSimilarly, if one wants to compose an algorithm for an app (which has already probably been done) to inform its users of the relative “safeness” of the various neighborhoods in some city, it wouldn’t begin with definitions of “safeness” and work from there. It would start with models of the kind of events one wants to avoid when looking into “safety”—muggings, rapes, murders, gang activity, etc., and composes an algorithm that will let you know the likelihood of encountering one of these situations in given times and places, based on police records and other evidence.\n\nTo compose a model, you need to start with an event, real or imagined (or real events imagined in a particular way). To start with an event is to start on a scene—it is to enter the scene. There’s no neutral position on a scene, but scenes produce their own means of adjudicating conflicts that might arise on them, and those provide for roles one might occupy—one is “interested” rather than neutral insofar as the overriding imperative is to preserve the scene itself. As a reader, writer, thinker, learner, you don’t learn to “think logically” or “critically,” or to cut your thinking to the contours of specific canons of evidence and proof.\n\nYou work with models—first of all, some text, which you know had a thinker behind it, which interferes with your existing “store” of linguistic samples sufficiently to compel you to work with and within it to further rework your “store” or “stock” so as to achieve a new consistency. You go through a certain number of texts and authors, and a synthesis, or competing syntheses, emerge—some thinkers get elevated into the judge of other thinkers, some thinkers corner some restricted domain of your sampling—perhaps no one else has yet ventured there—one thinker fills in gaps that made it difficult to integrate yet another text, and so on.\n\nYou become, yourself, a model of reading, writing and thinking, and you get to the point where you can model your own adjudications between competing syntheses. You become a “self” by populating yourself. Of course, along the way, you can stop and ask questions about “logic” and “proof,” but these will always be questions immanent to the body of texts you have familiarized yourself with and which you also use to defamiliarize yourself—they will really be you either responding to objections you’ve already heard or, increasingly, those you can conjure up for yourself. Your touchstone, though, is never logic or proof in themselves; it is linguistic presence to yourself as a self ensuring your own succession in time as a sample that might spread and be replicated in certain ways.\n\nThe fact that this very model lies at the basis of our algorithmic surrounds and hauntings is what enables us to—not “resist,” not desperately assert our “humanity,” which means nothing more than asserting the subject formed by print against the user/interface being formed by planetary computation—enter into exchanges with what is the center that speaks to us today. I tossed out an example in my previous newsletter to bring the question into focus: the algorithm has developed to the point where, as you are writing an essay, your computer will inform you that since you have written that sentence, it is urgent for you to read this text (or body of research).\n\nAnd, keep in mind, your computer will already know whether you have done so. If the computer is, in fact, right, and you couldn’t justify having written that sentence without demonstrating familiarity with a particular region of texts, could the next step—the computer revising your sentence—and then the next step—your computer writing it, and all the other sentences, itself—be next? Couldn’t the program know as well as any inquirer what, given the existing status of discourse in its totality, would most advance the discussion here and now?\n\nOnce that became the case, we would of course know it to be the case, and we would therefore no longer “write essays”—if we were interested, we could just ask the program: what’s next? Why would we be interested, though, if we weren’t actually participants in the inquiry? Why, for that matter, would the program be running if no one were interested? And wouldn’t the computers themselves then “lose interest”? It seems that some kind of exchange between program and user is irreducible—the question then becomes, what kind? If the program relies upon human ‘input,” it can’t calculate for “linguistic presence” past a certain point.\n\nWhat only humans can contribute to the center, then, is forms of linguistic presence. I have formulated this many times, in part because it always needs new formulations: originary satire; hypothesizing the present ; hypothesizing the whole from a single sample , maximal addressability within the field of sample utterances ; testing through enacting the meaning of words; the primacy of the present tense; and so on. We can speak, in more familiar terms, of maximizing self-referentiality. An example: Johanna Drucker has written a book called Diagrammatic Writing , which is a “book that is about itself as much as is possible.”\n\nSentence by sentence it refers not only to its words and sentences but to everything that makes a book a book, including much that we never think of—title page, margins, spacing, print, etc. It’s an interesting book to read and would be very interesting to study, but it is to be read iconically, as a model of enacting literacy. To examine what you are doing, following the “assignment” to identify everything that is “automatic,” sheer repetition, or pre-programmed about it is to create a practice that exceeds its programming and contributes to future programming. The implication is that acting morally is presenting ourselves as a sample within a continually reconfigured field of populations so as to model ways for, eventually, everyone to be doing so all the time. You draw upon all the fields of inquiry within your range and even those beyond it to present yourself as a sample and in doing so give yourself as a sample over to fields of inquiry yet to come.\n\nI return to the definition of “technics” I proposed in my previous newsletter: the perfection and generativity of the imperative. The technical question is, how to form an imperative that will be performed as specified. And, then, can be repeated, with identical results. And, then, can be supportive of and supported by other perfected imperatives. And, then, made to be “imitated” by matter, in such a way as to eliminate some links and add others in new imperative chains. As technological users and interfaces, our primary duty is to participate in this process of perfecting imperatives so they can be disappeared so as to present us with new imperatives.\n\nWithout becoming proficient in this duty, anyone will be completely ineffectual, socially and politically. “Users” and “interfaces” should be able to itemize all the ways they are fulfilling programmable commands. Indeed, that’s an imperative all can issue to themselves, and work on perfecting. As designers of declarative sentences, or “prosaicists,” we can project and enter the scenes upon which the ostensives confirming the completion of imperative sequences are played out. We can present ourselves as fulfilling programmable, but not yet programmed commands—the programmable can be made to run parallel to and engage in reciprocal translation with the programmed.\n\nI could imagine, more or less vaguely, the algorithm that could have searched and sampled through the archive so as to have written this essay; if I were to enter that algorithmic imaginary with an eye to perfecting it, I would write a very different essay, or a new one."
    },
    {
      "slug": "assigning-for-interoperability",
      "title": "Assigning for Interoperability",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 15, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/assigning-for-interoperability",
      "content": "Any writing instructor could provide you with a long list of common student mistakes involving the confusion of one word with another. One of the earliest I noted, and always one of my favorites, was “interoperate” for “interpret,” which I begin seeing before I had ever seen “interoperate” in other contexts, but which eventually came to seem to me prescient and now prophetic—to “interpret” a text is, in fact, to make it “interoperable” with some other discourse which recodes it, and we have passed the point where we should transition from asking students to interpret to asking them to interoperate (or render interoperable), which includes the former while being far more expansive in its implications. This holds for all learners in all fields, who will flourish by rendering themselves as interoperable with as many centers, users and interfaces as possible. Of course, interoperability can take on many forms, and this is something we should start exploring.\n\nIn 2006, in my essay for the GA book I edited, The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry , I defined “meaning” as “the experience of initial conditions.” I mention this because this formulation is itself the initial condition of something I’m still working on now as part of my project of turning the metalanguage of literacy away from metaphysics and towards an intralingual pedagogy. To say that meaning is the experience of initial conditions is to say that any utterance is a hypothesis regarding the possible consequences of that utterance (I’ve always been borrowing heavily from Peirce here).\n\nSo, instead of measuring a statement or gesture in terms of its use of words with specific dictionary or specialized meanings, its truth value when measured according to established epistemological standards, its moral or ethical reliance on utilitarianism, consequentialism or deontological norms, etc., treat it as a prediction of how everyone on a given field would be situated differently at some future date as a result of the utterance. Instead of an epistemological criterion, we “posit” that a particular person, possessing certain observational and reporting capabilities, a certain mode and degree of scrupulousness, and certain conditions under which to act more or less freely, would ascertain such and such to be the case.\n\nWe populate a field. Needless to say, we don’t need to itemize all the positions comprising this field—just one, which is exemplary for the purpose of the discourse in question. Instead of trying to conform to presumably air-tight standards, we lay all our bets on this one guy. And then we want to find out if someone approximating him indeed exists, making the rest of our discourse a search for him, or signs of him.\n\nThis scenic, or field-ic, thinking is a proposal for re-temporalizing the declarative sentence. The declarative sentence constructs a present, but rather than a present standing outside of time, it is a present marking the conversion of the scenes we have been leaving into the ones we will be entering. This means that it is a way of bearing the imperative within the declarative, because the imperative is the only speech form that is intrinsically temporal—in a way the declarative is a kind of mediated ostensive, as both create a present, while the declarative constructs a present distinct from the linguistic present it constitutes, but the imperative can only take on its meaning in its fulfillment or denial by another, after the utterance.\n\nThe imperative is language’s clock—we can measure our relation to the center by the “expiration dates” of the various imperatives we are obeying, resisting or defying at any one time. And we are nothing other than the sum total of those imperatives, which come to us from sacred texts and rituals, parents, ancestors and other models and teachers, the spaces designed for us, and the technologies we use. I presented this choice in Anthropomorphics : when someone does something, we can posit some inner agency within the agency that led him to do it (will, conscience, intention, etc.); or, we can look for the imperative he’s following.\n\nI consider the former approach essentially mythical, grounded in some imperative exchange disguised narratively—some kind of deal with reality. The latter approach gives a way to start putting order into the imperatives we follow, by submitting the more transient to the more enduring. “Internal spaces” are just places to dump attributions and motivations that we need to make our narratives work.\n\nThe originary event, then, de-temporalizes, as Gans has pointed out: it creates the first present. This provides yet another reason for rejecting the “internal scene of representation,” which would introduce some little narrative within a scene that is so self-referential that it doesn’t move. Whatever you think you would need to deposit in the internal scene of representation can be resituated in the scene itself, in which every participant constitutes himself in response to him seeing everyone else constitute themselves response to… It was pointed out to me in a discussion of my book with GASC members and others that the basis for positing an internal scene of representation given by Gans is that on the scene the individual participant anticipates the consumption of the object as he is refraining from advancing to do just that—that “anticipation”—this provides an interesting link to Siegert’s account of the origin of technics—is the origin of the internal scene.\n\nBut the anticipation itself is seen in the hesitation of all the others in the populating the field confronting the individual participant. The anticipation is just as “external” to him as any “fear” or other emotion we could reasonably attribute to him: it is completely bound up in his relation to the others, whom he also sees waiting, and therefore representing his waiting. But if there’s no internal, there’s no external—there is just a scene comprised of the number of levels of self-referentiality needed by us as inquirers while being unrepresentable past a certain point to the participants themselves.\n\nThe imperative, then, introduces time into the human community. We have our account of the imperative, as a speech form, emerging from the inappropriate ostensive. We could say, well, we have imperatives, however they originated, and now it’s just a question of how and when to issue and obey (or defy, or evade) them. But this would be to fall back into a metaphysical understanding of technology: some subject “decides” to issue an imperative, and another “decides” to obey or defy it. We’re back to a subject with an internal scene upon which we have to model some process of decision making, eventually creating an elaborate metalanguage for the purpose.\n\nThe originary, or anthropomorphic, way of approaching the question is to see any imperative as emerging from an ostensive that has ceased “working.” One is moving about, surveying a populated field one has been authorized to supervise, singling out for attention first one, then another, practice, until a discrepancy emerges between what one sees, which is to say, what has been pointed out (even by oneself, a moment ago), and what would complete the thing one sees. The ostensive sign, the attentional space it summons, can only be completed if supplemented by referring to what is missing in a way that would eventuate in someone supplying it.\n\nSo, the imperative, properly issued, is always an extension of an ostensive. You do your best to see everything in order and only when you are compelled to acknowledge that something is coming loose do you extend your looking into a command. The more practiced you become in both issuing commands and assessing the new scene they eventuate in, the more practiced you become in identifying even minute and potential disorderings that might require extended, complex and conditional imperatives.\n\nWe are talking, then, about the transition from immersion in one scene to the creation of and entrance onto, another scene. An imperative is the only way of effecting that transition—things only change because someone obeys an imperative (to defy one is just to obey another), even if implicitly, which is to say an imperative that can be read of the scene itself because it was intrinsic to its construction. Technology is the organization of the inorganic so as to obey imperatives produced by but unfulfillable upon, other scenes, and so as to install a new constellation of imperatives as a scene resistant to that kind of imperative failure.\n\nThis also means that the more advanced the technology, the more it creates potential scenes, unpredictable by, but within parameters set by, the designer. It’s a matter of producing more, and more densely networked, but also more open-ended, imperatives. In this situation you can be either a user or an interface—this distinction will be critical to any future “moral” discourse (which I’m increasingly hoping won’t be called “moral” discourse). To be a user is to be plugged in and fed—to be an addict, essentially. To be an interface is to retrieve data from the Cloud, to “eavesdrop” on the exchanges between non-user addresses, so as to convert users into interfaces.\n\nThe telos is for all of us to be interfaces: that is the translation of what most people would now think of as “critical, thoughtful citizens,” or something along those lines. Since we’re all becoming different interfaces or, more precisely, samples and apps, soliciting and converting data so as to supplement some disordered field, the “moral” question is how to make all of ourselves interoperable with each other—it’s a problem of curating data so that it can travel across the boundaries separating the zones within which we operate.\n\nWithin the Stack, the way a human (there is always a non-programmed and only potentially programmable distinguishing feature of the human) takes initiative and exercises authority is by giving assignments. You can give an assignment to a single individual, to a group, to a crowd, to everyone; you can give an assignment to everyone so that those who can participate in the practice it directs can self-select for it. The “sovereign” will be he who can give assignments across zones, which is where interoperability is necessary. The assignment is meant to convert the user, who is infiltrated by the programming, into the interface, who infiltrates the programming so as to effect this.\n\nYou want to stage a confrontation between the programmed and programming. Look for where “chunking” is taking place—“chunking” is the use of prepared “utterances” or “samples” that are automatically elicited by certain “kinds” of situations. When you’re predictable, it’s because you’re chunking. Take a chunk—a phrase, a cliché, a familiar attitude or reaction—and reduce it to its elements: break it up. Take one part and replace it with another part. You can do this in a programmed manner that nevertheless interferes with programming—this is the value of the literary strategies of pataphysics, and especially Oulipo: use, for example, the N+7 constraint: replace a noun in the chunk with the 7th noun after it in the dictionary.\n\nYou’ll get a new phrase that you don’t necessarily have to use, but can become the material for a transfer translation. Now more than ever we need to free ourselves and others from stock responses, and designing assignments that interfere with those responses is the way to do it.\n\nTreating another’s response to you as if it were an assignment, asking you to break up and re-arrange a chunk in some way is how you make yourself interoperable—this doesn’t mean “fitting in” or “getting along”—it just means data can be exchanged between the two interfaces. Data can travel along different routes through various vehicles—you can make others “carriers” of your data, and yourself a carrier of theirs, in many different ways. Providing a response that causes a revision of expectations, that interferes with chunking, right away allows for data exchange. Speaking, partly ironically, partly literally, about your discourses and communications as data exchanges will itself facilitate data exchange.\n\nMaking the linguistic present approximate the real present, which is to say, saying only exactly what is happening right now and is happening when the sentence you have written is read, facilitates data exchange. Being maximally addressable—obeying and defying imperatives, authenticating or “decertifying” ostensives, drawing out imperatives from ostensives constitutive of the other’s declaratives—facilitates data exchange. The chunk works insofar as its always already lined up with a verified ostensive—if someone says “but that’s socialism” in accord with certain conservative talking points, one assumes that we can point to the same sample and find “socialism” there.\n\nIf you treat the chunk as an inappropriate ostensive, so that linguistic presence can only be preserved by treating it as an imperative, and “bringing” something (maybe something both appropriate and incongruous) to supply the needed reference, you open up the possibility of data exchange—of turning everyone involved into interfaces.\n\nThe real test is the design of distributed assignments, where you want to mark existing institutions and practices in such a way so that large scale conversion of users into interfaces is possible. Assignments need to be inscribed at points where sovereignty (law and its enforcement) names samples that are named differently within some trans-sovereign zone (a population governed by technological, scientific, commercial or other imperatives). The assignment will be to develop a new sovereign practice of naming, which might require first of all some unnaming, and that would subject the zone to the sovereign order of naming by compelling those within the zone to inhabit those names.\n\nA difficult program! The assignment—to be varied and modified accordingly in each case—is to become an infiltrator into the discipline (zone) in question on behalf of a possible mode of sovereignty, or, more precisely, on behalf of a closer approximation to prime-archy, governance concerned only with firstness. Creating a disciplinary space within the discipline transforms the user into an interfacial avatar of firstness and in turn an agent of prime-archy. Identifying some sample that needs to be translated back and forth between sovereign and disciplinary terms is always a good starting point—the translation that becomes the necessary reference point will also project the new form of sovereignty, will program for prime-archy. You maximize the self-referentiality of the sovereign-discipline interzone so as to produce a new stream of imperatives for reordering sovereignty."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-algorithm-as-originary-stack",
      "title": "The Algorithm as Originary Stack",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 23, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-algorithm-as-originary-stack",
      "content": "Algorithmic governance renders transparent the succession of speech forms hypothesized in The Origin of Language : ostensive>imperative>interrogative>declarative. The algorithm turns the sequence of speech forms into a stack. The basic algorithmic form is “if… then.” You start with a sentence representing a state of affairs, which is taken to be a merely possible state of affairs, which in turn implies a field of declaratives with varying probabilities of being the case instead of the one we start with. So, an algorithm designed for airport security, to determine when an alert should be sent to security personnel, might begin with “if an article capable of hiding explosive materials is left unattended then…” So, we start with a sentence: An article capable of hiding explosive materials is left unattended: this is the description of a state of affairs understood to be possible—it’s what we are looking for.\n\nIf it’s what we’re looking for, then we need to be able to distinguish it from other states of affairs, especially those closest to it. We need, then, to specify the terms involved more precisely: which articles—bags, packages, etc.—are capable of containing explosive materials? Is it a question of size? Shape? Other features? What do we mean by “unattended”—how far away do people need to be to be leaving the item “unattended”? Do we need to see someone with the article and then leave it? For how long? Etc.\n\nIn order to choose one from among a series of declaratives representing differing states of affair, you need to have a sensing system—in the case of airport security, presumably a camera, but also, perhaps, heat sensors, x-ray machines, etc. The sensing system needs to be set—a certain degree of some measurable condition or change triggers the selection of the declarative sentence in question, i.e., notifies us that the state of affairs represented by the sentence is now likely “enough” to initiate some sequence. The sensing system is ostensive: it registers what an individual present, adequately trained and equipped, would be able to point to.\n\nAs is always the case with ostensives, that hypothetical person is looking for something—he’s not aimlessly surveying a field. He’s already following an imperative—look out for… The terms of that ostensive have, in turn, been determined declaratively, which has assessed the likelihood of certain sequences of events—with a “sequence of events” reducible to a series of ostensive-imperative-ostensive articulations. The ostensive registered by the sensory mechanism triggers another imperative, to affirm that the possible declarative has moved from possibility to close enough to reality so as to trigger another imperative: send out the prepared alert.\n\nFinally, when the alert should be sent out is itself determined by some rule of selection from a field of declaratives representing possible states of affairs: set the threshold of triggering the alert too high, and various catastrophes can be imagined, with degrees of likelihood we can keep getting better at determining; set it too low, and other unwanted events will occur, with an easier to determine degree of likelihood—panics, harassment of passengers, leading in turn to other states of affairs, such as an increase in tension, loss of trust, opting out of air travel—the same states of affairs that, of course, we could arrive at through another route by setting the threshold too high.\n\nThis virtual condition is already inherent in the first act of shared deferral on the originary scene, which could no doubt be gamed out with probabilities determined for all the possible outcomes of the hypothesized mimetic crisis (Gans has always assumed that the “successful” resolution of the event would have been extremely unlikely, which would mean such mimetic crises might have happened hundreds or thousands of times before the sign was actually issued). When you stand before an ordinary decision, the algorithm is a fair enough model of what you’re doing—you’re noticing things, and one thing rather than another, some thing you are ready to notice, tilts you towards doing something, producing a field of things one might do with a vague and yet actionable representation of the likely consequences of doing one or the other… The more we analyze and come to practice our thinking and decision making in this way, the more we make our actions programmable, while at the same time generating a space of the unprogrammed, where beyond the determination of the likelihood of any outcome we find the miracle of the space of deferral that sets the sequence in motion and that we ultimately want to preserve and enhance. The machines will always relegate the miraculous to the negligible—it is incumbent upon humans to input it. Thinking of the speech forms as layers in a stack will help us to do this.\n\nThe originary grammatical stack turns the succession of speech forms into a perpetual object of thought. We are always moving from ostensive to imperative, through interrogative to the declarative and from the declarative back again into a field of possible ostensives. The move from one form to the next should always be seen as a result of the attempt to preserve the existing form, threatened by some break in linguistic presence. So, the first transition, from ostensive to imperative, can be seen as a continuing attempt to keep the object in view. You’re looking at something, sharing attention to it (even in solitude our attention is shared, as you can only see what you can imagine helping others see), and it becomes difficult to continue to see the thing you are looking at in the way you are looking at it.\n\nThe very realization that you are looking at it in a particular way is already a sign of some difficulty: other things are competing for attention, other modes of attending to that same object obscure what you are seeing. Out of this fragility of the ostensive emerge imperatives: ignore that, move that out of the way, zero in more closely on this part of it, as that is what you were “really” interested in, etc. Eventually: create an institution to be peopled by yourself and others interested in sustaining a tradition of seeing this kind of thing in this way.\n\nNext: the prolongation of the imperative into the interrogative. “Give me that” becomes “will you give it to me,” or “do you have it,” or “can you get it,” but also “is that what I think it is,” “does it only look like that,” and so on. An imperative can always be extended or prolonged—even something as direct as “give me that” opens up the possibility of taking the time to retrieve the requested object; even the more precise “give me that now” implies some distinction between a “now” and a “later” that contains some room to maneuver. If the imperative is pressed (no messing around—give it to me within the next 10 seconds or else…), then the possibility of its being prolonged becomes a way of deferring a crisis.\n\nSometimes the “or else…” is activated, but at least sometimes it will turn out to be a bluff, in which case the “or else” must get converted into some kind of “when,” “where,” “why,” and so on. Sometimes the boundary between imperative and interrogative is thin: “what time is it” is merely a politer way of saying the semantically identical “tell me the time.” But it is the “tell me” that introduces the interrogative into the imperative: the prolongation of a failed imperative opens a space in which a new imperative can replace the original one: instead of “do” something, the imperatee is now told to “say” something. The imperative to say something about the conditions of doing something is the space of the interrogative.\n\nThe request to say something about the conditions of doing something is the space filled by the declarative. A declarative refuses some request in its undistilled form: I will not do it. But if that’s all it was, it would merely collapse into the crisis of the imperative, forcing the issuer of the imperative to put up or shut up. The declarative must (is subject to the imperative to) imagine and intimate the conditions under which the speaker might fulfill the imperative; or someone else who, under other conditions might fulfill it; or who the imperator would have to become in order to accept it going unfulfilled.\n\nAnd it must do this under the assumption of some estimated imminence of the initiation of the imperative crisis—how long the imperative can be prolonged without snapping, so to speak. What must ultimately be effected is a transfer of attention from the ostensive that set it all in motion to some new ostensive which will be different even if it is the same. A condition of the completeness of meaning of the declarative is that it issues the imperative: repudiate all ostensive-imperative links inconsistent with the ones constituted or “fielded” by this sentence. You haven’t “understood” a sentence until you’ve relinquished the imperative it is refusing: “understanding” a sentence is a conversion to a new reality. Once you’ve relinquished the refused imperative, a new field of ostensives opens up which you are, likewise, commanded to populate with those who will keep clearing the way to keeping those things in view.\n\nTo input the miraculous to the grammatical stack is to hypothesize wildly from the slightest sample. You can test the hypothesis and thicken the sample as you proceed, but even that will be an effect of continuing to hypothesize wildly. This is necessary to sustain the grammatical stack—to have your declaratives grained with the ostensives, imperatives and interrogatives upon which they depend. And sustaining the grammatical stack makes the stack of planetary computation one’s friend, and an instrument against liberalism (equalization through centralization) and its anarchist ontologies. The wild hypothesis is firstness, the same “wager” placed, with only the absolutely necessary degree of intention, on the originary scene. The wild hypothesis is the initial setting of an algorithm, an if… then that sets the stacking in motion.\n\nThe declarative issues another imperative—to replicate it by continuing to neutralize other imperatives until there is no imperative that can’t be derived from this declarative. This, linguistically, is the origin of liberalism—the utopianism of the declarative. Every word in every sentence can be defined, and the grammatical relations between all the word explicitly stated. This would convert one declarative into a set of declaratives. It’s one way of rendering the “meaning” of the sentence. Imperatives and ostensives resist this treatment, but not completely, and their resistance makes it all the more important to subdue them.\n\nWith an imperative, you have to supply the subject, which can then be converted to a declarative: “I am commander of this regiment,” for example. You can continue: “I am informing you that you will be in accord with the description of your role as a ______ once you have had your division moved from point A to point B.” You’d have to go further to completely extirpate the imperatives—in fact, you could never do it, because at some point you would need to do more than offering a description of someone’s actions as being in accord with another description of a type of action given elsewhere.\n\nThis is why “consent” is so central to liberalism, and so self-defeating. To consent can be to promise to act in a certain way, fulfill certain obligations, meet certain demands, and so on, but that kind of consent only make sense in the context of an existing relation or project, where we know why we would be making such commitments. Foundational consent means repeating a sentence describing yourself as the kind of person who can repeat that sentence imperative-free, without anyone ordering you to. The only kind of sentence that meets these parameters is something like “I am a free, unconstrained individual who will continue to be such an individual along with other such individuals as we engage in free, unconstrained commerce with each other.”\n\nOnly the pre-social individual can function as the subject of such a sentence. But, of course, once you sign on to such a sentence you start seeing constraints everywhere, which must be rationalized as “really” a result of some series of freely made agreements or a usurpation, because you haven’t abolished the ostensive-imperative world, just futilely tried to conquer it and thereby forced it to interfere surreptitiously. At this point, it’s a 2.500 years long quagmire. “All” we need to do is to show that this doesn’t “compute.”\n\nThis doesn’t mean that you should refuse or defy the command implicit in the declarative sentence to “declarativize” more of the ostensive-imperative world. Sheer defiance of an imperative is never quite right—it locks you into a vicious circle. This is especially the case for imperatives deeply built into our language. We can, rather, hypothesize the origins of our declaratives in ostensive-imperative articulations—this is ultimately what the originary hypothesis itself does, and the originary hypothesis is necessarily formulated in declarative terms. Repudiating any ostensive-imperative articulations inconsistent with a declarative (which can also mean, more broadly, a discourse, configured in a particular way) always open various possible fields of ostensivity—a way of “declarativizing” more of the ostensive-imperative world is by translating the fields into each other.\n\nIn particular, bring the command to declarativize itself into the ostensive-imperative field so as to revoke its metalinguistic privileges. This is the distinction I’ve made between the metalinguistic and (with a hat tip to Bruno Latour) the “infralinguistic.” So, if we take a concept which was always leaning towards liberalism and has long since tipped over into it, that of “rights,” conversations over who has rights, which criteria for determining rights should be invoked, what’s the proper remedy for the violation of rights, etc., much less to enter into some rights exchange or competition (well, what about my rights as a…), it’s better to ask who had the right to grant rights, and how did those right granters come by their rights?\n\nWe’d quickly be talking about chains of command and the transfer and delegation of authority. We’re talking about the authority to name, to create new public ostensives. After all, even if one thinks rights are natural or God-given, someone must have, at some time, told the people claiming rights that they had them. How did that happen?\n\nThe great advantage of primearchy—guidance by the first—within algorithmic governance is that it has no fear of putting forth any hypothesis, however wild, and using that to feed samples as data into the system. This is already and will increasingly be a serious problem for liberalism, which already knows which outcomes and therefore which inputs it doesn’t want. We can also have guiding questions for constructing hypotheses which are pretty resilient: how to bring power and responsibility close to each other in every single existing institution; and how to arrange for eliciting from each according to his ability and distributing to each according to his needs.\n\nA systematic study of power and responsibility, and the maximization of abilities and need meeting—we welcome any hypotheses along these lines, and any assignment aimed at testing those hypotheses. The assignment itself, like the algorithm, is a kind of stack, articulating all the speech forms—one is asked to something that must be stated in declarative terms and whose outcome must be a verifiable practice. Even more, the assignment sets the algorithm in motion, insofar as it involves doing something so as to see what happens, with successive approximations to ensure that the happening is nothing more than the revelation of the doing as a practice. A wide range of practices proposing different ways of populating out a discourse are thereby produced, giving us precise outcomes to hypothesize on."
    },
    {
      "slug": "idiomatic-intelligence-intelligent-idiomaticity",
      "title": "Idiomatic Intelligence/Intelligent Idiomaticity",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 14, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/idiomatic-intelligenceintelligent",
      "content": "Here is a problem I have been working on for many years—or, rather, working on finding a way to work on: to use the originary grammar I have developed from the succession of speech forms analyzed in Eric Gans’s The Origin of Language as a way of not so much analyzing specific texts, down to the level of the individual sentence, but of participating in the transmission of texts, down to that level. Now I think I have a way of proceeding. I mention this because the “breakthrough” comes through my exploring further the implications of the two models of language I have been contrasting recently: language as grammatical rules+words, on the one hand, and language as “chunks,” on the other. This distinction first became important to me in a pedagogical context; more precisely, the context of teaching writing, and determining the treatment of error within that context. More recently, this distinction became important in thinking through the algorithmic order, and in figuring out how not to resist nor merely endure, but to participate in—to engage in data exchange with the center.\n\nMuch of this was already worked out in Anthropomorphics , but I was still thinking about the problem of what I could call the “participation in linguistic presence” along rules+words lines—as if I had to figure out abstract rules for all the ways ostensives could be embedded in imperatives, and imperatives in declaratives. This also means I was thinking in traditional disciplinary terms, that of constructing a neutral “method,” rather than designing a practicing of contributing to new modes and levels of linguistic presence. So, it didn’t occur to me that that it was necessary to start with a model declarative, which is a model declarative precisely because it was a mapping off the very interrogative that demands the model declarative.\n\nAn interrogative prolongs or stretches an imperative—from “do this” or “give me this” to “will you do this/give me this” to, finally, “tell me if/when you can/will do/give me this.” The declarative enters the scene to provide the requested information or assurances. Here, though, we’re dealing with scenes upon which the declarative is commensurate with the imperative stretched into interrogative—scenes of “good faith,” in other words, where there is a shared desire to maintain linguistic presence.\n\nThe inquiry I’m conducting, though, presupposes the unanchoring of the declarative from the ostensive-imperative world; or, really, the turning of the declarative against that world. It is only under such conditions that the question of regrounding the declarative in the ostensive-imperative world could arise, and so that problem must be made explicit in the study. The declarative that is weaponized against the ostensive-imperative is closely tied to, and may even be a grammatical transposition of, a certain kind of interrogative: an interrogative that stretches the imperative to its breaking point and thereby become unanswerable.\n\nConsider the following questions: “why are we doing this?”; “why are you telling me to do this?”; “who are you to tell me to do this?”; “what has made you the ‘who’ that can tell me to do this?”; “when and where have we agreed on the what that makes you the who that can tell me to do this?”—you can see a general progression towards unanswerability leading, not coincidentally, to a question essentially demanding the “receipts” of a social contract which is the only thing, other than sheer force, that could make me obey the command, and which is also impossible to produce. The explicit formulation of the social contract is fairly recent, but all that is needed for the question to stretch the imperative to unanswerability is the application of juridical thinking to the sovereign so that the sovereign can be placed in the dock, with unanswerable questions regarding the “title” to his ownership of the realm posed to him.\n\nIn juridical reasoning, every imperative follows from an imperative: “the sovereign has declared…” Well, it doesn’t take much to realize that we can then ask who has declared that the sovereign is sovereign. Answering “God” was a stopgap for a while, but only shifted the question to the unanswerable one, “who knows what God wants”?\n\nSo, the model declarative must be one that can be mapped exhaustively onto the aggressively unanswerable question. The model sentence names precedents, however vague and tenuous, of some establishment that, at least as far as we can tell, made things at least marginally better than what it replaced, traces the filiation, however thin and disputable, by which the present authority derives from that establishment, and proposes some way of doing “this” that offers the best chance of revealing and facilitating participation in that filiation, those precedents and that establishment. Of course, any contending model sentence might do all this better than some other, but this sets the rules of the game.\n\nNot every sentence is a model sentence, and no sentence is the model sentence, but every sentence can be translated into a closer approximation of such a sentence. In this case, the imperatives that are entertained by the declarative and the ostensives the sentence would send us to seek out are determined by the approximation to the model sentence in mapping the unanswerable question into a corner of self-accusation. (By what authority can I ask this question?) This should now set me on the path toward programming the participation in linguistic presence.\n\nThe progress I’ve made here derives from and feeds back into my recent work on technics and technology; moreover, it tells us something about technics and technology, insofar as the solution to one problem will not only generate other problems but set lingering problems in a new light. Those lingering problems are really yet to be obeyed imperatives, issued from ostensives produced in previous work. I have to frame the question of technics/technology in terms of originary grammar—that’s an imperative generated by the “machinery” I’ve been working on. If I’m going to be wrong, I should be wrong about everything—that will at least be more illuminating for others.\n\nSo, technics has to be thought in terms of the imperative—technics and technology make things happen, they command nature and in turn us. This right away gets as at the heart of a perennial question regarding the technical: the relations between tools, machinery, and humans. Imperatives are issued to other humans, while at the same time making those humans instrumental to the will of the one issuing the imperative. You can keep working on a technical object, selecting more suitable material, making it better suited to its task; you can also keep working on imperatives—you tell someone to do something, and see they haven’t done it in the way you imagined, so, you can punish them if it is within your power to do so, but you can also look at the imperative you issued and see whether you can ensure it is shaped so as to lead inexorably to the result you want.\n\nOnce you do that, you are already thinking technically. You keep thinking technically by composing more extended imperatives, and imperatives that include subsidiary imperatives; along the way, the modifications you have had your “instruments” make in surrounding material (animals, stones, wood, etc.) serve as “impressed” imperatives—if it is the case that if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail, that is because the hammer commands you to look for nails. The hammer is a congealed cluster of commands, all of which have been made consistent with each other within this assemblage, but which might also be disassembled and made explicit if the hammer needs to be fixed, or taken apart to form a different kind of tool, or pressed into the service of some ensemble. This is all the case on an immensely expanded scale in machines and the current techno-order, or Stack.\n\nPressing the imperative into theoretical service in this way also provides us with a way of formulating the human-technological relation in all of its historical and social manifestations and dimensions. However mediated human relations are by technology, that mediation is always the means by which we issue imperatives to each other. Issuing an imperative always has a pedagogical component, at least if you are interested in seeing the imperative not only fulfilled but as a source of further imperatives. You need feedback to know whether you’ve properly fulfilled the command, even if you can defer the reception of that feedback indefinitely.\n\nSo, the problem of the relation between technology and humans can be “reduced” to the problem of pedagogy, which allows us to reduce “society” (more on this in a moment) to the ever-changing totality of teaching and learning, which is to say instruction, guidance, initiation, leadership, demonstration and mentoring—all of which takes its most advanced form in the assignment—an imperative, or sequence of imperatives, by which the learner will discover the ostensives that will issue the imperatives that will integrate him into a ostensive-imperative world presided over by declaratives reintegrating the unanswerable questioner.\n\nAnother problem that offered itself up for a solution within this imperative network: the problem of “society.” Human orders were once “kingdoms,” or, rarely, “republics”—republics, not to say democracies, are degenerate, but at least imply the possibility of a general naming. “Society” derives from the Latin “socius,” which meant, and continued to mean in its English form at least, an as soci ation entered into voluntarily for some common purpose—like a Society for the Advancement of Temperance. In the application of the concept to the entire human order, the “mission” element gets lost, and all we have is a “voluntary” association of anons, which creates the perpetual problem of social science: what holds it all together?\n\nWe need to work through all these concepts, even at the price of inventing intricate, difficult to understand and even difficult to say concepts (Charles Sanders Peirce deliberately changed the name of his thinking from “pragmatism” to “pragmaticism” once it had been appropriated by epigones so that the harder to pronounce word would make the field more forbidding), as I am now going to do.\n\nA “society” is a field of naming—in a genuine socius, everyone would have their “office.” The best word for language as a field of naming is “idiom”—“our” language, with “our” name for each and everything. A human order, therefore, is idiomatic. Sovereign is he who decides upon the proper idiom. But I have wanted to be rid of that other intransigent term, “sovereignty,” for a long time as well, for reasons I outlined after reading Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State . So, what “modifies” (or is modified by) “idiom,” if not “sovereignty”? We need to name a center that issues imperatives and receives interrogatives as those imperatives play out in the ostensive field.\n\n“Intelligence” should work here (I’m not going to go through—assuming I could—the trial and error process of arriving at these two to be conjoined terms)—intelligence would survey the idiomatic conjugations and permutations it supervises and continually select certain idiomatic paths over others; the center is the source and destination of intelligence. Why should a particular practice be given one name rather than another? The better name generates names for the vertical links to the center along with horizontal links to other “orbiting” centers. Naming is (if I may) “central intelligence.” So, instead of “society,” “state,” “sovereign,” and so on, we have idiomatic intelligence/intelligent idiomaticity (getting confused, long ago, on Eric Gans’s “gesture of aborted appropriation,” calling it—I wasn’t the only one—“aborted gesture of appropriation” led me to think that grammatically paired concepts might replace the single word or phrase concept as being more generative [I did the same thing, accidentally, with interrogative imperativity/imperative interrogativity”—why not keep both?).\n\nIdiomatic intelligence/intelligent idiomaticity can be scaled up and down as much as we need—an individual is a site of II/II, so is an institution, so is the commander of the armed forces. The closer we get to the center, the more intelligence is gathered and the more tightly woven the idioms—or that, at least, is a test of the centrality of the center. Intelligence is released from the center in distributed idioms. And this brings us back to the model declarative, because the answer to the unanswerable question is tracing the convergence of idiom and intelligence to the center. The unanswerable question is posed in an idiom that it simultaneously accuses of having no “ultimate” declarative backing, and it presupposes intelligence not in its possession.\n\nWhence the question, in its current formulation? That sets us on the trail of precedents, establishments, and modes of succession, leading to the vertex where idiom meets intelligence. And we’re not always sure where we will find this vertex—what we call the “state” is certainly the most heavily named institution, but the system of naming can lapse, involving a decline in intelligence and a loosening of the idiomaticity of the system. Provisional convergences of idioms and intelligences can name these lapses, and create new idioms and intelligences: think of it as a party (I’m borrowing from a recent post of Curtis Yarvin here) interested only in taking power to the exclusion of all other parties and thereby developing an uninfiltratable idiom of infiltration that would dissolve the party upon its success in the intelligent institution of that idiom.\n\nAlong the way, that idiomatic intelligence might be resonant in various locations, producing samples to be uploaded to the stack and downloaded elsewhere. The marker of such developments would be a growing richness of pedagogical relations, of the refining and testing of imperatives, contracted and extended, all along the order of idiomatic intelligence."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ostensive-imperative-generativity-and-scenic-design-practices",
      "title": "Ostensive-Imperative Generativity and Scenic Design Practices",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 25, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/ostensive-imperative-generativity",
      "content": "I’m continuing to work on my technics hypothesis that the construction of a technological world constitutively complementary to the human one is a product of the perfection of the imperative. The dedication to perfecting the imperative—that is, to ensuring that the imperatives you issue are fulfilled in a way that is completely contained within and predictable by the imperator—has the following consequence: it spreads the initial imperative by generating subsidiary imperatives that prove necessary to ensure the repeatability and controllability of that initial imperative; it generates new pedagogical relations by requiring human supervision over relations between primary and subsidiary imperatives; it spreads the imperative order into nature, which must be made to work as part of the human-machinery network.\n\nIt should be added—it is imperative to add—that any analysis of these consequences can only be conducted within the perfecting imperative order itself. Any attempt to imagine a “human” space unimplicated in the technological would lead to an incoherent ranting against all the implications in the technological the “humanist” denies. But this also means that in developing an analysis, like this one, for example, one must design ways of indicating the spread of the words one is using across the various technological media. This implies a way of writing, and a way of thinking, that is not logocentric, i.e., that depends neither upon the presumed scenic transparency of classical prose nor the Big Scene imaginary.\n\nI’ve already constructed, in Anthropomorphics , a theoretical frame for addressing this set of problems: “imperative exchange.” Gilbert Simondon sees technics as emerging from a breakdown in the world of “magic,” and the concept of imperative exchange enables us to hypothesize this process. Imperative exchange with the center results from ostensive failure, and aims at restoring an ostensive relation to the center. The people consume together the meal they have been granted by the center in accord with the rituals derived, which is to say, commanded by, the center, and in return request from the center that the next meal be made available.\n\nIf the next meal is not made available, either the ritual was not performed as prescribed and needs to be “tightened” up, or a new command needs to be heard that would apply to this unprecedented situation. We can be economical here and say that every new command would take the form of obeying a command to tighten up of the existing ritual tradition, however significant the change might appear to an outsider. Something more, and with greater certainty, needs to be given to the center. This also means the center needs to be reconfigured in such a way as to match this enhanced demand. The central figure becomes more like us and we become more like the central figure: we dress and orchestrate movements so as to approximate the central figure.\n\nAt the same time, the central figure become more distant and powerful precisely insofar as the possibility of new commands is assimilated by the community as part of their relation to the center. The center becomes populated, and everything of interest in the human world becomes projected in a far more interesting way in the world of the center.\n\nAll this involves design: costume design, stage design, choreography. The people turn themselves and each other into implements. Even as pre- or proto-humans there was most likely some kind of tool and weapon use, as we see among advanced hominids like chimpanzees. In fact, while there’s no need to assume our hypothetical participants on the originary scene were equipped with anything more than hands, nails and teeth as implements of violence, it does not violate the minimality of the scene to assume that whatever implements they did have for use on other occasions (sticks, stones, etc.) would be part of the offering on the evolving ritual scene.\n\nHunting implements, for example, would need to be blessed by the central figure. The relation to the center becomes a totalizing one, as every design both enhances the group’s mimetic relation to the center and further distances the center from the group. The design of the scene coincides with initiatory relationships, within differentiated sections of the community and between the generations: using a tool is inseparable from how and from whom you’ve learned to use it, and from how and to whom you will teach to use it. The ultimate tutors would be the gods. Let’s remember that all worship is ultimately ancestor worship—the animal at the center of the tribal feast is an ancestor and, for that matter, so is the “father” God of the monotheistic faiths. When you use the tool properly, you’re really using it along with its creator deity.\n\nThe dissolution of the relation between tool, ritual and deity must follow, I continue to think, the establishment of imperial centers and markets that distance individuals and groups from the ritual center. Under these conditions a “craftsman” occupying a “niche” in a market becomes possible. Even here, we would see elaborate guild-type relations, with high barriers to entry, cultish esotericisms, and so on. Being a metal worker would be a bit more than having a “profession.” The pedagogical relation is deeply built-in here as well, through formalized apprenticeship relationships. But the imperative exchange now begins to involve a technical order irreducible to a sacred center.\n\nIf we place the emergence of independent craftsmanship alongside the more or less contemporaneous mega-machine composed of masses of slaves, we can add that the craftsman would distinguish himself from that, as a cruder, monstrous, more alienating, even if more productive, form of technology. This is, of course, a tension that re-emerges in the modern world, with the introduction of the factory system. I want to keep insisting that the critical distinction between modes of technics and technology is the extent to which they facilitate or diminish the pedagogical “architecture” supporting the technical assemblages and system.\n\nThe less teaching and learning a mode of technology calls for, the less open it is to the feedback of its users, the less open those users are to the feedback of those affected by the technology, and therefore the more destructive and detrimental to idiomatic intelligence the technology will be. But this criterion can be formulated in imperative terms: it’s the difference between ordering someone and “charging” someone, which is itself the difference between an imperative that includes the imperative not to modify it and an imperative containing instructions for further revision.\n\nMy insistence on this distinction might seem to contradict my definition of technics in terms of the perfecting of the imperative. But the perfecting of the imperative always relies on the transmission of the imperative to humans on a scene, for the reproduction of that scene. From the beginning the natural environment is turned into the condition of the scene, and represented by proxy on the scene. The first technical objects, on this hypothesis, were props. Once the sacred center is broken up, starting with the occupation of the center by the Big Man but perhaps better dated from the overthrow of sacral kingship, what kinds of props are needed?\n\nLet’s say: those that distinguish communities of one ancestry from others of different ancestry within a single imperial order. This involves reciprocal protection, creating conditions of exchange, signaling fealty to the imperial center, and establishing internal differentiations. We could say this is the transition from the sacred to the cultural: the form of housing, implements of farming, household utensils, weapons, and so on have “utility” in distinctions within and between groups, which includes what modern economic subjects would consider “utility,” while still tinged with the sacred. They’re still props, which is why no one would ever think of “inventions” that go beyond enhancing one’s one communal scene in comparison with others.\n\nThe imperative remains bound to the ostensive, while generating new ostensives in turn. Technology emerges as a reality in its own right when the implementation of imperative orders generates ostensives from which further imperatives can be elicited within a scene separate from imperial scenic design. It may have been necessary for liberalism to shatter the center and make explicit the struggle over distribution for technology to be liberated from the last remnants of the sacred. This “scientific” space is one in which generating further ostensives is the purpose of the space, and the only imperatives accepted are those which elicit new ostensives.\n\nThese ostensives feed imperatives back into the technological system, but even more importantly transmit imperatives to create spaces of inquiry and curiosity within technological or engineering spaces. This maintains the pedagogical margin essential to friendly human-technology relations. This means that there’s an intrinsic value in revelation—in showing the new, even without purpose or context. Creating ostensives in search of the imperatives that would enhance their accessibility is the highest form of idiomatic intelligence. Here is where the model declarative explored in my previous post becomes especially useful.\n\nThe declarative itself has as its vocation the uncovering and generation of ostensives, and therefore defers imperatives that preclude them. But, now, deferring imperatives that narrow the ostensive consequences of their fulfillment entails lending voice to as many possible ways of fulfilling the imperative as one can, so as to zero in on the one that combines local certainty with global possibility. We want things that work very well without fixing in advance all the different ways they might work.\n\nThe person best equipped for this kind of stacking is the one always on the lookout for conversions and translations. All the things humans do can be converted into things machines can do; all the things machines can do can be translated into things that humans can’t necessarily do but can be converted so as to receive. Everything we do tacitly, moreover, can be made explicit, which in turn creates new tacit knowledge. If you think too much about how to walk while you’re actually walking you will disable yourself, but such stumbling is a useful prelude to reassembling the practice of walking. How do we read, write, think, move, feel, experience things (lots of different ways)—we know some kind of simulation of all these activities can be created (many already have been) and so why not participate in the practice by enacting as many possibilities as we can? Develop ways of making easy things difficult and difficult things easy. Surface the design principles of our environments so as to make it possible to revise them. Become a prop among props.\n\nBuilding the imperative order is the way we listen to the center. My way of explaining what is entailed in listening to the center has generally focused on imagining a form of adjudication that would make the case you brought to the ‘court” inoperative. I’ve discussed this most often in terms of what I’ve called the “sovereign” or “central” imaginary. You want something—universal healthcare, abolition of copyright, free trade, the abolition of abortion, or immigration—in fact, put together all the things you want. Imagine the government that would do everything you want—what would it look like? Who would be in charge?\n\nWhat chain of command would lead to the result you would recognize as what you wanted? It wouldn’t look anything like the government we have now, which means your desire has shifted from a bunch of policy preferences to a form of government—but now that form of government would not necessarily do any of the things you want; moreover, if we had that form of government, there may not be any point to wanting those things. Following this line of inquiry would be listening to the center, the more so insofar as it’s deployed to suspend desires across the board. We can scale this model up or down, to world history or daily decisions—a judgment occurs to you in the course of some interaction, which implies some adjudicator who would rule in your favor, initiating the sequence I just laid out.\n\nNow we can bring to bear on this model the perfecting of the imperative. Start obeying the commands that would issue from the sovereign in whose name you have suspended your desire, and work on perfecting and installing that imperative. (In fact, begin with the command you’re obeying right now, which is to say, with what you are doing right now, and set yourself to perfecting it.) The entire infrastructure, the Stack, must be conveying those commands even while it’s been hijacked by the sovereign who has produced those now suspended desires in the first place. The problem you set for yourself is to design assignments that would situate those transmitting the imperatives circulating through the technological system in front of this discrepancy.\n\nThe center is now less adjudicating and more issuing instructions on how to instruct and be instructed. It’s not a question of settling disputes but of rendering all the scenes stations of conversion and translation. This is how you give yourself over to the center as a sample in the data exchange. You don’t know which scenes, across all the media, you might be acting on—there are delayed or protracted scenes upon which you might turn out to have been acting that take shape a century ahead. All you can do, or all you can want, is to maximize the data you register and transmit by contributing to the perfecting of the objectified imperatives whose commands you keep taking in.\n\nWhat must ultimately be holding the whole technological system in place is that originary imperative to deploy and muster all to simultaneously concretize, mimic and distance the center. This means that the more technologically attuned and alert one is, the more one is noticing places where the center remains too abstract and mimicry of it too incomplete, suggesting impending collapse into the vortex of hysterical displacements of the center. Technological thinking, then, is bringing elements within more vulnerable technological assemblages into a match with those generating new and articulated forms of pedagogical accountability.\n\nWhatever form of idiomatic intelligence would have Facebook or Twitter doing what you think it should is an idiomatic intelligence that would distribute itself very differently than through vehicles like Facebook or Twitter (even if only through knowing those social media could this other mode of distribution be initiated). Think in terms of creating an assignment to inculcate a practice that is itself the creation of an assignment that would enable more people to create a more effective version of the original assignment. The identification of new sub-practices and the compression of those sub-practices so they can be shifted online would continually suggest new innovations in the programming and in the hardware that can accommodate such programming that would in turn provide new problems to be assembled into new assignments."
    },
    {
      "slug": "algorithmizing-sampling-practices",
      "title": "Algorithmizing Sampling Practices",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 5, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/algorithmizing-sampling-practices",
      "content": "One thing I am trying to do is to complete the linguistic turn, that is, making explicit that there is nothing for humans outside of language, which also means nothing outside of some scene. Thinking of technics as the perfecting of the imperative makes it clear that “language” and “scenes” includes, for example, all ways of generating new ostensives (technologically and scientifically) and all media (as ways of staging scenes). Ethics and morality must also be rolled up into idiomatic intelligence (which is reducible to the selection among possible names on a particular scene), as I have been doing through the concept of grammatical stacking: the reciprocal exhaustability and addressability of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives in the samples you donate to the center. (The center, Godelian-like, is inside and outside language, represented by the oscillation between It and This.) This post will scoop up a couple of additional concepts into the net, and indicate a way forward towards programmability.\n\nThe weakening of sacrality has replaced the ritual/narrative form of imperative exchange with the practice/hypothesis one. Ritual and narrative involve a relation to a single scene, in which donations given and gifts received from the center are commensurable. If it ever crosses your mind to, say, promise God that will give up on some sin if He just gets you through this tough situation, you are within the ritual/narrative problematic. This is also the case if you think something like “I’ve played by the rules set up by this social order and I’ve got coming to me a good home, a safe neighborhood, retirement while I’m still young enough to enjoy it,” etc.\n\nOur conceptions of justice and fairness still hearken back to the shared ritual scene. But our social orders have not, for a long time, been organized around a sacrificial center. There is a center, and the center distributes, but what the center distributes is not the sum total of what it has taken in; rather, it distributes nexuses where power intersects with responsibility, and needs with abilities—if it, or whoever runs it at the moment, does this badly, it has nothing to do with what any individual deserves, so the best complaint to make is always that you want more power so you can fulfill your responsibilities and you want your needs met in a manner commensurate with your abilities—and you want the same for everyone else (indeed, that is part of your responsibility, and the telos of your abilities), because only if so ordered can anyone’s place be relied upon.\n\nThe most minimal way I have of thinking of practices (in a winnowing process going back to Alasdair MacIntyre’s well-known definition) is tasking yourself to approximate conditions under which the results of what you do can be shown to be part of what you do. This makes practice close, but not identical, to technics, and technical examples will be the most accessible: if I set out to build a table, and the table comes out as I imagined it, while I used the time and resources I had planned upon in building it, then we have a “practice.” But language use examples are better for my purposes. Let’s take a simple one, a promise: a practice is not so much keeping your promise, but, first of all, making a promise that, in keeping it, would contribute to creating and preserving the kind of relation to (the scene shared with) the other in a way that only making and keeping a promise (that promise) can.\n\nThis can be put simply as meaning what you say. Meaning what you say is not so simple, though, because, as David Olson shows, the separation of the two results from literacy, which makes it possible to look at what has been said as a text, and attribute to it meanings the author could not answer for. Following Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism and asserting that the effects of literacy only show that what is said and what is meant can never be present to each other is fine with me.\n\nThe distance between saying and meaning is a question and problem, though, not just a condition. The author may be dead, but you could strive to speak for the author, to enter his idiom and, of course, do so better or worse—that would be a practice. If you could ridicule someone, you could know what it would mean to not ridicule him. Doing so is always tentative, though, which is to say, hypothetical (undertaken with insufficient data). You have to see, for one thing, whether others will answer you as the author’s stand in. (Will your refusal to ridicule open the floodgates to ridicule that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred?)\n\nMore important to me is setting the meaning of words to practice. Again, we can start with obvious examples: what does it mean to be “honest,” or “trustworthy”—what do these words mean, here and now? How do you enact honesty or trustworthiness in a way that ramifies across the various media, so that when the results of what you have said and done bounce around for a while through the mouths and hands and devices of others, you can step back into what you have said and done and continue it, or take the next step? All of us would make a lot of mistakes trying to make what we say remain the same over time and space, but constructing a practice entails making this more the case with each sample one donates.\n\nNow I can say: the practice of bringing saying into accord with meaning, or of keeping what you say the same as it passes through others, involves saying what contributes to the perfecting of the imperatives that design the scenes upon which your sample will be iterated. My bet is that all ethics and morality can be rolled up thusly.\n\nI’ve been working on the following political concept: primearchical successionism/successionist primearchy. All political problems can be reduced to (and ultimately abolished by) following, in order, whomever is to be followed, and ensuring the transition between whomever is to be followed now to whomever should be followed next. You follow the person currently in charge as if he is the person who stepped up to be in charge and in doing so you both make it more likely that he will be that person and make it possible for him to be proven to be not quite right in such a way as the “criteria” for rightness would be clarified for succession purposes.\n\nAll political discussions can be rerouted to this practice (there’s no point to concepts that don’t reroute everything into a practice). Approximate the conditions under which some occupant of center will see to the next occupant in perpetuity. Obey better than you are commanded so as to be a reminder of the origin of human order. So, this is a test: how is this to be “languaged”? I’ve already done it: idiomatic intelligence/intelligent idiomaticity is PS/SP linguified. Idiom and intelligence apex at the center: the center selects from among possible names of events, scenes, participants, and, in selecting, continues as the center.\n\nYou select from among idioms for This, some local object of attention, for It, the center that distributes places from which attention can be directed. You make a practice of it so as to facilitate the arrangement of a field of practices by It. The It is enacted by some him whose practice is to ensure it remains the same It—doing so may subvert a lot of good practices across the field, but the hypothesis is that good practices, which provide a fine array of ostensives/names for him/It to select from, can eventually circumscribe a place wherein the apex of idiomatic intelligence successively approximates good practices.\n\nThe reason why all decision making can’t be assimilated to technology (after all, the central authority wants to perfect the imperatives he issues) is that technology doesn’t produce unanswerable questions (at least not in any way humans would have to address) but humans engaging with technology do. Selecting from among names is the practicing of modeling declaratives that map over unanswerable questions. This may entail eliciting the unanswerable question lurking behind an answerable one. The unanswerable question is some version of, where is the representation of the scene upon which I issued an unambiguous declarative to the effect that you can impose this set of expectations on me here and now?\n\nWe can be generous and say this demand retrieves the memory of the originary ritual scene, with its absolute conformity and to that extent equality; so, the response must be to predicate the originary ritual on the event it commemorates and forgets. The question is not being asked of he who is exercising authority but of the It whom the question imagines adjudicates between us. So, the question already acknowledges that which it questions—if you think the It (center) has been poorly preserved, instantiated, represented or enacted, fine, but that’s a very different kind of (answerable) question, which would turn into something like “how can we perfect this infrastructure of imperatives?” (The more I think about technics, the more I think to make all my concepts interoperable with each other.)\n\nI would like to create a computer program that would translate text into Anna Wierzbicka’s primes, assess that translation in accord with stacking protocols based on model sentences comprised of primes and their possible combinations, resulting in a series of retranslated versions of the original text that approximate, in different degrees and different ways, model-sentence style discourse. This would be a way of using algorithmic governance to heighten ethical and moral reasoning. I have no computing skills and no intention to acquire them in the near future, so someone who does would have to get interested, which means, I suppose, it would have to be either profitable or to pose an irresistibly fascinating problem for someone.\n\nBut it might even suffice as a hypothesis—a kind of technological sublime. The core of the project would be turning Wierzbicka’s primes into a kind of elementary moral idiom, with enough sentences of various types (imperatives, interrogatives, and exclamations—which would function as ostensives) so that unlimited recombinations would be possible. The idiom would be comprised of little moral “profiles”—relations between wanting things, seeing things, hearing things, knowing things, doing things, and so on, and saying things are good, or can be good, or not. The sentences in the original translation (in Wierzbicka’s analyses of individual words, she always arrives at an exhaustive “translation,” but translating sentences and texts would be a different matter, and one might program for various translations) would be converted into the sentences and their combinations available in the elementary idiom—one could program so as to display moral deficiencies in the source text, or (really, and) rebuild a more moral (idiomatically intelligent) stack out of it. But one could already develop the habit or technique of carrying out reductions to primes, which creates little scenes (Wierzbicka’s analysis are like this) in which someone says something about what someone else (or that same person) does.\n\nFor my day job, I’ve recently been reading a bit about how the emergence of automated grammar checks changes the landscape with regard to dealing with student error in writing. In theory, it should already be possible for anyone to turn in an error free piece of writing, whether for publication or for a class. Of course, we could then say that students (or writers in general) don’t really know grammar, even if they make no mistakes. Then again, what it means to “know grammar” is a complex issue. But it turns out that, since grammar check has to work with sentence models rather than assessing individual sentences in terms of their accordance with grammatical conventions (regarding which there is, anyway, no universal agreement), its “reading” of text and search for error is erratic in ways that are likely to persist for quite a while—like many students, for example, it is likely to find a long and complex, and therefore unfamiliar, sentence, to be ungrammatical, even without being able to say why that’s the case.\n\nIt turns out that the use of grammar check becomes a human-machine collaboration, where both learn together: the grammar check provides alternative sentences to some of the sentences you’ve written, and you have to determine whether those are really “your” sentences. It’s like reading a translation of your writing and deciding whether you prefer it to other possible translations. If you’re serious about your writing (and if you’re not, none of this really matters), this may get you thinking more about questions of grammar and error, which, in the end, is really a question of the ratio of attention to meaning, for writer and reader alike: error is a problem when it causes attention to be paid that is disproportionate to the meaning derived from a text. But there are lots of ways of deriving meaning.\n\nSimilarly, what I am proposing would be a kind of moral prosthesis, which would transform and potentially enhance, rather than replace, one’s relations to other humans within institutions. We already have moral prostheses, in the form of moral rules, codes and conventions, laws, and so on—this would simply be a more deliberately constructed one, capable of receiving feedback. A prosthesis can extend well beyond a replacement limb—as theorists of technics have been arguing for a long time, all of technology can be seen as a vast, shared, prosthetic device—eyes, ears, hands, feet, now brain, extended across the world.\n\nAn imperative, in this case, is already a prosthesis—you make another an extension of yourself. Whether I create a program along these lines or not, it’s a way of thinking that can be increasingly formalized and made a source of thought experiments. How would “formalize,” for example, be translated into the primes? I would start with “say something is this thing because you want others to say this is this thing,” but this further requires that “people can see you say this is this thing. People can hear you say this is this thing. You have to do this in some place where everyone can see you, where everyone can hear you.”\n\nBut for something to be formalized (the passive voice) we would further need something like “people can do this: people can say this is the same thing now. People can say this is the same thing after now.” But what makes it possible for them to do so? We would need to start to distribute and arrange people: not everyone sees, says, and hears simultaneously. Are there times when someone has to say, and other times when that person has to hear? We would be constructing an elementary moral order, kind of like some video games and computer simulations do. At the end of it we might have a way of talking about formalizing as some people speaking, some listening, under controlled conditions necessary for formalized relations to be sustained."
    },
    {
      "slug": "be-an-interface-between-power-and-the-user",
      "title": "Be an Interface Between Power and the User",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 14, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/be-an-interface-between-power-and",
      "content": "What is to be done? On one side there is Curtis Yarvin, who counsels doing nothing. On the other side are those who demand a vision, a movement, counter-institutions and a program, yesterday. Any radical analysis generates the question, and, of course, there might be multiple answers. Who knows what might come of Yarvin and his do-nothingers—perhaps they’ll produce a perfect model of government that will be completed just in time to fall into the lap of a new set of system builders on the eve of the collapse of the old system. And those who are in a hurry to build now will at least provide lessons, cautionary tales, data, and perhaps a model or two in whose path others might follow.\n\nI don’t have any specific goals or visions in mind—just a model of practice, which complements a minimal model of politics: do what you can to help create conditions under which someone will take the center in such a way as to name his successors and they name theirs in perpetuity. There’s someone out there now who best fits the bill, or will discover, support or teach he who does: find that person, send out feelers for him, turn the social order into a gigantic device for detecting signs of him, and bring others into the search.\n\nThere’s a practice of disclosure that I’ve gleaned from Freud’s theory of transference and Hamlet’s dramatic practice, processed through mimetic thought. This practice of disclosure entails mirroring the desire of the other, positioning oneself as the target of the other’s desires and resentments, so as to draw those desires and resentments out into the open so they take on textual or public form and can be inspected, diagnosed, and revised. In a way, this is an extremely passive practice, pure receptivity, akin to Keat’s “negative capability”—you let the voices echo and get amplified through you. You have no designs of your own—you don’t even know how things will turn out.\n\nYou just want as much turning out as possible. But this is also a very active, intricate practice, requiring constant alertness, precisely because the best way of bringing what would otherwise not be seen to light without any “entrapment” on your part is a kind of aesthetic capability that could never be reduced to a set of rules. It’s kind of like mimicking another, gesture by gesture, but also selectively, so the other gets a reading of himself in the process.\n\nIn this context, I will also recall my concept of “originary satire,” which I argued for in Anthropomorphics , which similarly combines intense action with extreme passivism. (It is a way of doing nothing, but doing it very energetically.) Here I had Bertolt Brecht’s notion of “alienation” as a pedagogical theatrical effect in mind. Just doing what the other does, after he does it, and ever so slightly askew to the way he did it, has the effect of a startling exposure if performed right—by repeating very closely another’s act it calls attention to that which was repetitive, and therefore not self-authorizing, in the act itself.\n\nI also insist that satire wants nothing, supports nothing, has no political goal in mind—it’s not “reformist” in this radical mode. What, exactly, was Aristophanes after? Or Swift? They wanted to take apart our perceptual and cognitive apparatuses and make us reconstruct them. But they do focus, in particular, on power, and thereby make themselves potential targets—no one likes to be mocked, but those with power can do something about it. But the originary satirist places a bet: the more overtly and undeniably harmless he is, the more he is stripped of any conceivable goals or the slightest association with an “opposition,” the freer he is to utterly expose what is automatic and habitual in the operations of power without restraint.\n\nThis is the basis of an apolitical political practice, which can be scaled up and down as necessary. At all times we should be revealing the desires of power by enacting the grounds along with the figures of power. We can always begin with whatever little piece of power and responsibility you’ve been given—provide yourself with the assignment of making power and responsibility match each other. There’s always an institutional proposal to make, but also a way of engaging with others, so as to make your efforts to make power line up with responsibility interoperable with others’. Insofar as this can’t be done—and it will always be impossible to do it past a certain extent—then you represent, speak for, the space wherein it would be done, and gesture toward those operations of power that prevent it from being done.\n\nThis, by the way, holds for more informal and voluntarily chosen occupations—if someone asks you what you think about something, and they seem even minimally likely to listen to you, you’ve taken on a bit of power and responsibility. You might try and bring your power and responsibility into alignment by speaking with more people, and listening to some others; maybe you’ll start a podcast, or join with others in forming a website. The problematic remains the same—you’ve taken responsibility for the future of your community, and the power you’ve seized is probably incommensurate to the responsibility you adopt, so your work is to obtain more power and keep honing your sense of responsibility. The way you do this is by continually conveying the operations of power through your practices—you’re at some intersection, and you want to make evident, through X-ray treatment, the powers that have come to meet at and form that intersection.\n\nAll through this, you don’t really “want” anything, nor are you “doing” anything. You’re just an interface between power and the user. You show the user of your “device” that space where power would hypothetically meet responsibility and the two would reciprocally enhance one another as one side of a Mobius strip the flip side of which is the operation of power that “disappears” that space. For this to work, you’d need to eschew all pretenses to power, beyond whatever is exercised in your utterance, yourself. No “positions” on “policy”—you should never utter a sentence that begins with “we should” or “we must.” If you have no real power beyond the discursive space itself, why should anyone care what you think about climate change, or lockdowns, or monetary policy, or police reform or the latest executive order?\n\nWhy should you care? The same thing holds for grander, long-term goals—what, exactly, do you think is the relation between you saying “this is what we need to do to save Western civilization” and anything that might be said and done in the coming decades that might have some greater or lesser impact on something we might or might not still be calling “Western Civilization”? You can’t summon anything with such phrases. At the same time, you can talk about anything, and in lots of different ways. Just talk about them in such a way that they interface between the operations of power, on one side, and the user in some anomalous position between power and responsibility, on the other side. You’re a walking, talking, curator, provider, piece, analyst of data under the controlled conditions of marking that space—those spaces where power is incommensurable with responsibility.\n\nBeing an interface between power and user enables you to do all the things political actors do—organize, argue, debate, confront, even protest. But you do all these things in order to convert others by becoming interoperable with them. Insofar as they’re not already engaged in the kind of practice you’re modeling, they are evading, concealing and falsifying those power-responsibility incommensurabilities—they’re pretending to power they don’t have, or claiming responsibility they can’t back with power, or concealing the power backing them so as to evade responsibility. And they could be doing these things honestly or dishonestly—sometimes that matters, sometimes it doesn’t.\n\nYou want to enter into an exchange with them by laying bare your own incommensurabilities and exposing theirs, insofar as they reveal themselves under the glare of your presence. This can be done in collegial or confrontational ways. You engage with them in such a way as to surface their designs on you—whether they see you as friend, enemy, tool, or somewhere in between, you can enact the construct of you they are producing so as to surface their commitments.\n\nThis practice could be minimalized to the postage stamp size of a tiny dissident community, or it can be taken all the way to Power itself. Let’s say we have an emergent confrontation between the collected forces of a globalized liberal order, operating through the organs of state, media, educational institutions, etc., on the one side; and, a proto, let’s say “authoritarian” order, with bearers of its potential sovereignty occupying strategic positions within those institutions but with prevailing power in the military and informal pedagogical and cultural institutions. Even here, there is absolutely nothing the representatives of the potential new order would ever have to do other than point to formal responsibilities that are being evaded and power that is not being supplied where some stand ready to fill the responsibility gap; even the very taking of power need be nothing more than a kind of satirical demonstration of everything the previous regime left undone by virtue of everything they were doing instead. The best way to take power is to slide imperceptibly into it, with one’s enemies dissolving upon being deprived of the final levers or power which, in their desperation, they had clung to.\n\nNor are dreamers and big picture types excluded from being an interface between power and user. Incommensurabilities between power and responsibility can be pregnant with previously unimagined possibilities. The climate changers claim they want to save the planet—what kind of power, social and technological, would have to be composed so as to meet that responsibility? And once it was composed, of course, it might find it has other things to do than pump carbon out of the atmosphere. I haven’t mentioned the articulation of needs and abilities here (from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs) because incommensurabilities and anomalies in this realm are brought into focus with the anomalous space of power/responsibility mismatch—you need to see yourself has having responsibility, and as wanting the power to match it, to bring into view the enormity of unmet needs and unused abilities. Whatever vocabulary might be harnessed to name the practices necessary at that level is not for me to guess at, other than to say that the closer you are to that level the more likely you’ll be able to make the names stick.\n\nThere’s nothing particular complex or esoteric about this—one never needs to compromise or deceive; one can be intelligent without being cunning. Ways of writing, thinking, talking, and organizing are all implicit in being an interface between power and user. If you want to form a political party and get a bit closer to formal power, you could put together a program that’s essentially proposing to do nothing but show the usually invisible workings of the system and you might make a good case that this would do more for your constituents than getting some laws passed. Attention leads to intention—what you bring into view will tell you what you need to do as you turn what you bring into view into a launchpad for bringing other things into view.\n\nIf you’re an interface between power and the user you can be completely consistent in your practice without ever getting bogged down in specific promises and commitments that could be used against you—you’d be teaching your users what you’re up to and that if they’re not interested in joining the inquiry and being converted into an interface they’re free to keep supporting people who they think will give them things or protect them against others. An interface between power and user might do this on occasion because we are, after all, exercising power (as is everyone) but only in order expose anomalies and incommensurabilities, which must always come first."
    },
    {
      "slug": "paradoxes-of-self-referentiality-as-algorithmic-practice",
      "title": "Paradoxes of Self-Referentiality as Algorithmic Practice",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 23, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/paradoxes-of-self-referentiality",
      "content": "In my essay on “GA as the One Big Discipline” in Anthropoetics and again in Anthropomorphics I proposed turning the metalanguage of a discipline upon that discipline as a way of intervening in the discipline: transforming disciplines into disciplinary spaces. So, for example, one might ask how a particular sociological inquiry helps maintain social cohesion in sociology, how an essay in psychology enacts certain forms of cognitive operation, what are the rituals holding an anthropology department or journal together, and so on (and even more so, in this very discussion we are having within sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.).\n\nThis approach has much more thoroughgoing implications which we can examine by taking into consideration that virtually all language in a literate civilization is disciplinary in the sense of being both historically and institutionally specific and authoritative while exempting itself from the discipline imposed on its subjects. If we start with the widest and wildest hypothesis, all the verbs, and the nominalizations formed from them, concerned with thought, speech, desire, ethics and morality, other than the Natural Linguistic Primes, are disciplinary. That’s the starting assumption, at any rate—we can remove terms that we deem pre-literate as it seems necessary.\n\nLet’s take a simple, and certainly pre-literate example: the difference between “do,” which is a prime, and “make,” which is not. (There are definitely languages without a word equivalent to “make.”) Think about how hard it is to define “do”—anything you could do is something you do, and any words you could use to define “do” would ultimately themselves have to be defined in terms of “do.” But “make” is fairly easy to define: it involves moving and doing.(both primes) something to different things so that they become one thing. “Do” is absolutely simple, while “make” has a degree of complexity—that complexity is what different languages will formulate in different ways.\n\nIt’s not surprising, then, that self-referentiality yields meager results when applied to “do” but interesting results when applied to “make”: you don’t really “do yourself” when you do something, but to say you “make yourself” any time you make something can be true and worth reflecting on. I think we will find something similar with other primes and the words that seem closest to them: “say” and “speak,” “hear” and “listen,” “want” and “need” and so on. In each case, the prime has a simplicity that repels self-reference while the non-prime has a degree of complexity that rewards it. So, we can treat such words as disciplinary and, in fact, in each case the non-prime word can be taken to presume a position of exempt judgment that does not apply to the prime word. You can ask or tell someone to say something and you can repeat what they said, but “speak” is used to add a layer of command regarding how one says something (one is told to speak more loudly, more clearly, more slowly, etc.).\n\nAll of language, then, is a field of play, and most importantly all those words by which one claims to say, think, see, hear, or know within a particular institutional setting. Zero in on the prime at the base of the word in question, and design the scene from there. Take a word like “understand”—a study of the uses of this word would be extremely edifying. One could, of course, offer definitions of “understand,” one could write philosophical essays and books arguing for what it “really means” to “understand,” one could nominalize it as “the understanding” and put it at the apex of a philosophical or theoretical system—but it seems to me (a precisely targeted corpus search could prove or disprove this) that “understand” is most often used to refer to what someone doesn’t do—it points to a lack.\n\nOf course, one might confess a lack of understanding oneself, but even in that case to “not understand” is mystified, whereas what we’re really taking about is not being fluent in some idiom. But one is always fluent in idioms that must overlap with the idiom in question, and to put it this way is to initiate a learning sequence, rather than erect a barrier that is as miserly when it comes to providing access as the officials at Kafka’s Castle . So, asking how we understand “understanding” here is a good way of exposing the mysticism holding up that barrier.\n\nWhat I am presenting here is more practical than anything else anyone might do, whether it be organizing, fundraising, creating narratives, forming communities, establishing independent and resilient platforms, etc., as worthy as all those activities are. I am providing an app here, one which can be uploaded to any device, which is to say, deployed on any scene. This app is a means for subverting and satirizing the pretentious, testing the claims of the authoritative, working out the implications and limits of your own (and thereby creating a shared) vocabulary, and keeping your mind alert and in practice. (Try it out on one of my own posts—I won’t mind.)\n\nIt is a way of creating a community of learners, in which everyone can remember and be reminded of what it’s like to not know how to do things you now know how to do—I think very few people have considered how extraordinarily difficult it is to remember that, and the power of a community predicated on those who do remember has never, I’m virtually certain, been tried out. If your struggle is against those who are certain they know it all, such power is not to be underestimated.\n\nCOIK: this acronym, standing for Clear Only If Known, used in discussions of teaching grammar (you can only explain to a student what a “dependent clause” is if the student already knows how to recognize a dependent clause), applies across the board to all our “explanations” and “understandings.” All you can do is invite people into a vocabulary—that’s all the disciplinary discourses themselves do—with whatever barriers to entry you might want, keep speaking it with them, incorporate whenever possible their mistakes as variations on this or that region of the idiom, and use the idiom to name the activities within the group. If you realize that’s all you’re doing—carrying forward other vocabularies that revealed some way of transcending an anomaly in a discourse you were previously immersed in into a new idiom—you can do it less obnoxiously and in a way that facilitates greater contributions from the participants. The app I’m proposing here is a way of doing that while and by cutting a swath through other idioms.\n\nEvery order aims at total saturation of naming—one of the many things liberalism forbids and therefore must pursue in roundabout and dishonest ways—every person, place, time and thing is named, by the onomastician-in-chief or someone named by him, and therefore refer back to the central authority. Any name outside of this system of inter-reference is an abomination. Converting disciplines into disciplinary spaces aims at producing a social dome, or canopy, out of language. Or, we can say it creates a set—the set of everyone whose name refers back to the center. The set is renewed with each act of naming, so the social order is the set of all the successive sets.\n\nEveryone is therefore outside of the system with each utterance (sample) only to be in placed right back in by all those named by the sample. You want to name so that the name will be transmitted in perpetuity, even if only as a trace in subsequent names. You convert mythical names into the names of hypothetical practices, which is to say what will be the signs that you have done what you are doing: so “explaining” a social process is turned into what someone, somewhere, would say if certain things were deemed to have been done and to have happened. Any reference to the social order, to the idiomatic intelligence, is the initiation of a series of actions issuing in one uniquely exemplary of it.\n\nYou can only understand what is understandable; you can only explain what is explicable, which means in your claims to understand or explain you’re enacting its understandability and explicability so we can read these features of reality off of you. Of course, they are not features of reality, but, rather, mythical projections of an epistemic practice circulated by some faction contending for the center—so, rather than explaining them, we can look for the translation in what the understander or explainer says. When you critique you enact a crisis, even if not the one you claim to expose; when you analyze, you break down yourself into the components of your object of analysis.\n\nWhen you argue you create a society of shills for hijacked traditions of thought; when you interpret you confirm the institutionalization of the text as part of the interpretation industry; when you proclaim you conjure an audience magically prepared to echo your speech. It’s not that these words are off-limits (who could forbid them?), but that when you perform explaining, analyzing, and so on you’re only renewing the names if you include your own performance within history, institutions and disciplines within your speech act. And this always means that you saying something now increases the likelihood of someone else saying something else on some other scene—something that, in iterating what you do now what results from what they say will be part of what was said.\n\nHow to repeat with some difference the other’s sample is perhaps the most important thing to figure out in any exchange. That you will mirror the other in some way is certain. You want to mirror, or iterate, in such a way as to found a new sequence that can supplement the voice of the center enduringly. This involves hypothesizing everyone’s input to scene to which the sample was contributed—everyone, say, at least implicitly contributing to the explanation of that which in turn explains them and their explanation. Then, everyone’s samples are being donated to the center—insofar as everyone is outside the scene only so as to be more firmly networked and embedded within it the governance of the scene is strengthened by a central intelligence that iterates the entire scene as a set that keeps trying to include itself.\n\nIn maximizing the idiomatic intelligence of each scene you defer the authorizing of each term of the idiom to central intelligence, which is thereby made more intelligent. The endgame is the abolition of metalanguage, which would be the infralinguistic integration of literacy into a transformed media ecology. Imagine there’s no metalanguage! This would not reduce our vocabulary—quite to the contrary, we’d find there are dozens of ways of covering the semantic ground currently covered by “understand,” “explain,” “analyze,” “interpret,” “mind,” “consciousness,” “will,” “intention” and all the rest. All of these words come down to saying, hearing, thinking, knowing or seeing something on one scene that someone else (maybe another you) will say, hear, think, know or see on another scene, and that someone else could say is the same thing.\n\nThere’s no more momentous utterance than that “this” is the same “it” as “that.” Everything is staked on such a claim, which can only stand for as long and as widely as it is iterated, which means you leave it up to the center to ensure such a distribution of selves. Paradoxes of self-reference has always been a political problem of the declarative, beginning with the treasonous Cretan who tried to curry favor with the Greeks by accusing all his fellow Cretans of being liars so as to prove his own truthfulness. Any declarative statement implies an exception because it must await another’s ostensive verification, which means any sentence is always held hostage: metalanguage, or disciplinary discourse, redeems itself by holding authority hostage to the ostensive-imperative paths it has inscribed (only our protocols can determine what counts as data—liberalism is really nothing more than a long, more or less successful, attempt to cancel its enemies for violating its terms of service)).\n\nHostage taking ends when the sentence is performed, or designed as a script to be performed, on a scene set within an endlessly unfolding setting of scenes upon which the sentence will be displayed as a spread of people. Using someone’s discourse to demonstrate that he is part of what he says everyone else is initiates this unfolding. Who will watch the watchers is always an operative question—who certifies the certifiers, who regulates the regulators, explains the explainers, etc.?\n\nThe implication here is that if you want to immunize your own most important claims against the same kind of hacking you should ensure you could retreat, if necessary, into formulations derived entirely from the primes. So, my own insistence on power/responsibility interoperability can be reduced to: if you say you want someone to do something, you have to see to it he can do that something. Among other possibilities. What are discrediting circularities under liberalism can be reduced, under absolutism, to problems of converging primearchy and succession: saying and doing things so as to enable others to approximate practices most likely to see to the management of existing institutions so as to ensure deliberate transference of power from the top in perpetuity. This becomes algorithmic practice when you work as a translation program that distributes all practices into successionist convergence, on the one hand, and effacement of the center and defacement of anyone likely to occupy it, on the other. A strict binary."
    },
    {
      "slug": "global-dominion",
      "title": "Global Dominion",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 31, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/global-dominion",
      "content": "Every sovereign title can be traced back to a conquest, wherein the leader of the conquerors divided the land amongst his subordinates, in accord with the contribution each made to the conquest and will make in preserving its fruits. Insisting on the legitimacy derived from conquest (and then inheritance) is far more peaceful than insisting upon other forms of legitimacy, like popular will. Popular will, consent, and so on, change all the time and can’t be measured in any reliable way; who controls a territory is always clear enough—it’s always easy to design tests to check for sure. Troublemakers can always agitate to produce some new simulacrum of the popular will, but if only conquest legitimates rule you’d better make sure you’ve got substantial numbers and resources ready to go, if you’d like to make a bid.\n\nLegitimacy by conquest alone explains the decline of civilization. Civilizations decline when they have ceased conquering, need not maintain any high alert to preserve what they’ve won and, eventually, want to deny that conquest provides legitimacy so as not to encourage more energetic challengers—at that point, sections of the elite, and eventually the entire elite, will be attracted to theories of legitimacy that depend upon the affection of the ruled. My assertions here don’t imply a morality of “might makes right,” or even the reality of “might makes right.” Not just anyone can conquer anyone else—in some sense, God has to be on your side.\n\nThe problem with nationalism is that it doesn’t address the question of how to protect yourself once you have broadcast your renunciation of all conquest. What do you do when your neighbor, who issued no such renunciation, starts raiding border towns, chasing your ships out of waters it deems to be under its sovereignty, makes alliances with your neighbor on another border, etc.? Reprisals? OK, but how do you make the reprisals stick, without instituting permanent dominion over your neighbor? And how can permanent dominion not include, say, insistence upon at least tacit approval of your neighbor’s government. Unless we imagine that all nations remain equally powerful or equally principled in their anti-imperialism forever, and that all nations are certain of this symmetry, nationalism gives way to empire sooner or later. So, why go through the routine?\n\nAt lot of the dispositions so heatedly denounced today are really side effects of empire—“racism” is just the feeling of superiority over a conquered people (ultimately, so is “classism”); “sexism” is a privileging of the male-female relations suited to a conquering people, etc. Even nations are imperial, based on conquest by one ethnic group over others. If ceasing to conquer leads to decline, decay and degeneration, then the answer must be to never stop conquering. And we can see that no one ever does stop conquering until they start being conquered. To speak in neo-absolutist terms, the implication is that power is only secured when new regions are opened up for conquest.\n\nThis is because the securing of power means mobilizing your people, and organizing them, so as to be conquerors. “Values” get sorted out rather easily under these conditions: whatever keeps the people primed to conquer and defend their conquests is good; whatever weakens them and undermines their belief in the rightness of their conquests is bad. To the accusation, again, of asserting that “might makes right,” I will say that what keeps people primed is going to vary in different situations—staying primed means being able and ready to rule and obey when necessary, to plan, to inspire, to reassure, to distribute properly, to intervene in distracting disputes, to prepare for succession on every level of the social order.\n\nSo, politics entails encouraging the political order to which you owe allegiance to keep conquering, and to keep doing so more intelligently; or, if you happen to live in a social order with very limited imperial prospects, to encourage your rulers to make themselves a useful and reliable bulwark of whatever imperial order seems most likely to prevail. Keep conquering until you’ve conquered the entire world—that’s the only way it can end. The Babylonians, Persians, and Romans could never get anywhere near global conquest, but it’s certainly possible today. Once you’ve conquered the entire world, what then? Let’s set aside the possibility of finding new worlds to conquer in space—conquest must turn inward.\n\nA great deal of self-mastery must have already gone into forging an empire that could conquer the world, but that can only whet the appetite for the kind of self-mastery that would be entailed in reducing all human activity to rigorous practices. Everything that everyone does can always be made more definitively and demonstrably that kind of thing; even the bad things people do, once they become habitual and compulsive, need to made more that kind of thing until it is undeniably exposed as that kind of thing (but a more advanced form of discipline would involve playing such consequences out in the imagination). And making space for such self-exposure, or confessions in practice, is itself a practice. Desires are to be immediately caught up in hypotheses: what does it really mean to want that thing, what would the world have to be so as to provide it, and what would that world actually give you? Teach yourself and others to want that.\n\nWe are well past the point where conquest is conducted solely, or even primarily, through force of arms. It might actually be possible to conquer through force of example—has anyone ever made an honest effort to do so on a large scale? Conquest today would involve the creation of “zones”: areas, not necessarily geographic, organized around a series of exemptions and privileges that distinguish the zone from other areas so as to allow for some practice to be exercised and perfected. A zone can be a space where trade is carried out under conditions that exclude bureaucratic obstacles; it can be a space where research is conducted free from security precautions, patents, residency requirements and other restrictions.\n\nAmong the restrictions zones transcend are those associated with the nation-state, which means they will ultimately need to be defended by a single state that can organize others under its hegemony. It’s impossible to avoid imagining possible zones once one considers the logistics of a particular slice of the Stack, requiring raw materials from one place, scientific knowledge from another, labor from another, applications in yet another. Large scale practices would call zones into being; the conqueror of the future will be in a relation of exchange with the Stack—the future ruler will be a kind of Stack whisperer.\n\nAs is always the case, radical proposals such as this are really nothing more than an honest exposition of what’s already going on in obfuscated and dishonest ways. The various European nations vied for global dominion for quite a while, then the US and USSR did, now it’s the US and China. Speaking of, and to an extent for, the US, we can easily see that ever since the US entered the global stage with pretensions to dominion every single decision its rulers have made have been with an eye to conquest. The most hyped, propaganda-wise, of post WW II political transformations, above all civil rights and its continual unfolding, have all been nothing but instruments of conquest: first of all in the replacement of European empires with American rule, based on economic growth rather than the white man’s burden, and in immunizing the US from communist charges of racism; and, now, in providing pretexts to intervene anywhere and everywhere. The dissident, as usual, simply wants to make open what is concealed so as to, as someone once said, turn what has been set on its head back on its feet.\n\nAiming at global dominion is really no different, morally, than founding a start-up which always wants to go, as Peter Thiel says, from zero to one. Nobody loves competition for its own sake—everyone wants to win—and, if you’re right, or you’re the best, why shouldn’t you win? We don’t have to be Kantians to insist that your victory is likely to be more enduring and beneficial if you actually deserve to win, which is to say if you prove best at synthesizing scattered practices into a new stack. There’s no other way to win today, which is why we can set aside the fear of hearing anyone say they want to win, thereby setting in motion a destructive circle of violence—once we say you can only win by instituting “best practices,” through education, training, delegation, and anti-fragility, then there is no more need to fear the conquering spirit.\n\nAll the virtues we value as civilized beings, such as generosity, kindness, helpfulness, and so on will have a secure place within the new dominion, as they will all be synthesized into enabling people to do more and more exactingly what they’re already doing.\n\nThe odds are very much against you becoming king of the world, but the odds shift dramatically in your favor if you aim at perfecting your practices, so as to be worthy of being recruited into a project of conquest. To obey the imperative to make your practices interoperable with other practices of conquest, you should, to dip into academic jargon, make your practices transdisciplinary. There’s a kind of dialectic between the disciplinary and transdisciplinary—transdisciplinary projects, with cosmic ambitions, get broken down into disciplinary specializations, which reach their limits in what they must exclude by maintaining disciplinary boundaries, giving way, in turn, to new transdisciplinary projects.\n\nThink about what, in your practices, cuts across disciplinary boundaries, will therefore be accused of lacking rigor by the guardians of those boundaries, but will nevertheless expose and resolve the anomalies invisible to those bunkered into the discipline. If you use their language consistently and systematically, albeit idiosyncratically, because you use it to describe their own practices, their attempts to exclude you will give you further leverage over their discourses. The disciplinary relies upon established institutional, bureaucratic power; the transdisciplinary is necessarily in search of other sources of power, and is able to preserve its conquests by addressing the problems of state power, or dismantling dominant ideologies for marginal dissident groups. I, of course, consider the originary hypothesis to be the foundation of the quintessential, non-transcendable transdisciplinary discourse—I am right here and now trying to make it conquer the world.\n\nThis all falls within the framework of being an interface between power and the user. To aim at global dominion is to work out the relations between powers and responsibilities. Just like empires often develop as one power steps into vacuums left by the decline or unpreparedness of other powers, a lasting global dominion can only be developed through intervening in sites where power is being exercised without corresponding responsibilities, or where one has to seize the power to exercise one’s responsibilities. And what makes dominion last is that rulership takes succession as the primary question: everything you do is done in such a way as to ensure the continuance and further perfection of what you do by others.\n\nChoosing your successors, both literally and in the sense of constructing the profile they will have to match, in terms more or less vague depending upon the practice, is built into, and constitutive of the practice itself. You become irreplaceable precisely by creating a space for your replacement. The future ruler of the world will be mapping out power/responsibilities lapses by auditioning, more or less explicitly, his own successor. Each shift in his assessment of the candidates indicates a more precise mapping of such lapses, a mapping that becomes a modeling for remedying them.\n\nFor mimetic theory, attention directed outward must always be seen as a deferral of potential violence within the community, This is, in fact, a very familiar critique of imperialism and militarism—it is a way of distracting attention away from internal problems. (Do those who advance this critique wish to see it conquer…?) The assumption is that, rather that expanding abroad, the society should take care of its “real” problems. This is a progressive, utilitarian perspective—the real problems are feeding the hungry, increasing wages, eliminating discrimination, etc. At that point we leave off mimetic theory, for which the real problems derive from the increasing incommensurability of desires, between those who have, just as much as between the haves and have-nots.\n\nFor a country or its rulers, to look outward in an effective way, those incommensurabilities must have become both increasingly dangerous and increasingly generative: conquest, whether in the form of exploration or war, must be seen as a way out of some impasse (countries can’t be obliged to consume themselves, which would be the consequence of the anti-expansionist critique if the ameliorative approach proves wrong, as it surely will). The way things look to the rulers and the most adventuristic in a given social order is that their own little corner of the world has grown too small, and they need room to roam. This is not false, because, if you get to the point in a social order where every desire meets its complementary desire around the next corner, things have, indeed, gotten too crowded.\n\nThe question, then, is whether you can conquer in such a way as to provide other orders with ways of deferring their own, perhaps imminent, crises, and perhaps even to refine the means of conquest you have brought upon them. Both the libertarian and nationalist would like us all to leave each other alone, but perhaps there are reasons why those with the power to live and let live have, often enough to discredit the desire, decided not to do so.\n\nIntersecting dominions, then, produce a stack—there are many ways of totalizing the world, and, thinking technologically, so the trick is to turn some other totalization into an infrastructure supporting your own; it would even help to ensure that your own totalization, or dominion, can be turned into an infrastructure for another’s dominion. Incommensurables can co-exist this way—rather than states within enforced boundaries, which have to make patently insincere professions of desiring peaceful co-existence, we have zones alongside and within other zones that openly assert their absolute dominance of the zone as a model for all other zones (with each zone simultaneously submitting to and incorporating on its own terms the other dominions).\n\nSingle military powers will exercise sole responsibility for, and brook no opposition to or super-sovereign subversion of its power over, demarcated territories, while incorporating and mimicking on the boundaries equally absolutist but qualitatively incommensurable zones. No one, then, need fear the one who insists everyone must bow down to his universal truth, because everyone can ask to see the practices aimed at institutionalizing that truth and entertain that truth insofar as it produces transferable practices that would have to be taken up on other institutional terrains that would read it back to the original, insofar as it has actually been made to register.\n\nOnly those who absolutize in this way can be taken seriously: and then a practice of properly bowing down in such a way as to advance your own practice can be designed. Political, militarized power might very well always be a privileged zone, but it will clarify and fortify itself by creating an environment for, and acclimating to, other zones. Only by declaring your goal of global dominion will you win an absolute zone within and infrastructurally indispensable to, the Stack. You can start by declaring your intent to eliminate and incorporate all who share the same zone as you by providing a new infrastructure for solving what they take to be their problems."
    },
    {
      "slug": "staged-succession-marginalizing-the-victimary-and-scapegoating-in-a-single-move",
      "title": "Staged Succession: Marginalizing the Victimary and Scapegoating in a Single Move",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 20, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/staged-succession-marginalizing-the",
      "content": "Transcending the sacrificial is a demanding project. Sacrificial thinking runs deep, into all our assessments and commitments. Risk calculation is sacrificial: trying to figure out how much suffering is “worth” how much benefit is disguised scapegoating: even if we can’t see or name them, giving the process a more hygienic character, we’re setting aside some of our fellows in the name of preserving the health of the community. But we can’t really do away with risk calculation—indeed, our algorithmic order enshrines by automating it. Resisting stereotypes is part of the anti-sacrificial project, because the stereotype provides the ground for convicting and punishing the individual, not for something he has done, but because we can plausibly enough attribute characteristics to him such that, on balance, he can be taken out, one way or another. Normal life has an irreducible sacrificial dimension—which is why resisting the sacrificial so often veers off into craziness, becoming, in fact, ultra-sacrificial itself.\n\nIn response to the anti-sacrificial madness turned ultra-sacrificial of the woke it is easy to turn back to a normal sacrificialism, which seems harmless and stabilizing by comparison. I don’t think this will be possible in the long run, because such a return would involve renouncing available knowledge of the mimetic nature of the human—a knowledge that the ancients actually possessed far more securely than the moderns. Only ritual can provide a way of commensurating the transgressive deed with the communal response, and we have no more rituals, certainly not in the strong sense, because rituals are sacrificial.\n\nThe Nazis chose to annihilate the Jews on thoroughly modern, “anti-sacrificial” grounds—that of eliminating, disinterestedly, a species of bacteria—rather than acknowledging that what they were doing was more akin to slaughtering a hostage held for security against the betrayal of the Aryan nations of England and America. Hostage taking is sacrificial logic applied to relations between groups. No doubt Curtis Yarvin’s insistence on refusing vengeance against the “libs”—and retiring them with pay, instead—is due to his own understanding of the implications of the desire to “pay them back in kind,” which presupposes the sacrificial logic of equal exchange (which is never equal and always escalating).\n\nSo, if we insist on preserving the wisdom of the post-sacrificial, we have a dilemma: how to act as forcefully as necessary without either denying our mimetic implication or indulging our sacrificial bloodlust. The pedagogy of exposure and disclosure I’ve proposed (Hamlet’s theatrical method + Freud’s transference; becoming an interface between power and the user) is designed as a solution to that dilemma: as opposed to revenge, the mirroring or reading back to the other of everything in their own actions that is in fact not their own. The certainty of individuality and suppression of dividuality that is necessary for evil, anti-social deeds is undermined.\n\nOf course, this presupposes the openness of the other to such an approach: Claudius’s Christianity, in the case of Hamlet, the patient’s desire to be cured, in the case of psychoanalysis. The stronger version of this pedagogy of exposure and disclosure, then, is originary satire, which uses positions within the system, positions that must be attended to one way or another, to expose claims to responsibility that conceal the operations of power. Originary satire can only work in a posture of prostration, a disclaiming of all power and responsibility beyond that which has been delegated and disabled, initiating the satiric gesture.\n\nA model of a post, or, perhaps, asacrificial ,mode of power is implicit in originary satire, though. Let’s take the minimal absolutist model of good order: all is coordinated so as to ensure that the current occupant of the center is as likely as possible to select the next occupant of the center and so on in perpetuity. This presupposes a ruler who oversees a process whereby institutions are organized so as to generate the strongest candidates, to stage the most telling tests to distinguish between and form these candidates, and to refine and present in an ongoing way to the ruler the information that allows him to settle on a choice for now. The whole social order would have to be organized around the recognition that all questions in any social order can be reduced to the question of succession. All questions—of economics, foreign policy, technology, health care, the family, etc.—would all be greatly clarified if passed through this filter.\n\nAnd this highly organized process of arranging for succession must itself model the pedagogy of exposure and disclosure. A continual convergence of all upon the various posts distributed would be continually encouraged and resolved in ways that perform, confirm and stretch where necessary existing hierarchies. Communities would love and cultivate those raised in their midst who aspire to enter the academies training potential candidates for ruler—they would organize and define themselves accordingly, as each striver would inspire his own narratives, coming from a specific place within the community, exemplifying certain qualities, highlighting certain traditions.\n\nThe vast majority would not be serious candidates, but they would all be candidates for supporting roles, part of helping the community to demonstrate its worthiness to present those candidates who do rise to the time. The trials undergone by the candidates who enter the academies and make it to the “final rounds” would obviously be demanding and the criteria uncompromisingly and explicitly geared toward those abilities best suited to produce a ruler; at the same time, since the ruler would be using his own judgment to make the final choice, higher test scores or victories in specific competitions would offer no guarantee, and so the competition would take on a more intangible and contingent cast, as each would also have to think about how to win and how to lose and how to display oneself more generally, while always accepting that the decision is out of your hands, with the proof that you have put yourself forward for pure love of the central intelligence being that the odds are greatly against even the “finalists” and that if you are not selected you, in particular, have to be kept far away from power and therefore from any position an ambitious man might otherwise aspire to.\n\nThe sacrificial is extracted from the entire order insofar as no claim to an ultimate commensurability between who one is and what one does and what eventually happens to one could ever be made. Maybe you “deserve” to be the ruler, but the ruler himself has decided that the next 30 years, due to historically specific reasons, will require a mode of rule someone else is better qualified to provide. And as above, so below—this will be a model for organizing all institutions. Various ways of approximating the model of rulership are put on display with no one having in advance anyway of saying what the closest approximation is. The limits, and also the real rewards (the “losers” will have to find inventive ways of making their lives productive) of any desire for centrality are made explicit.\n\nThe purpose of having such a model worked out is to claim that, since it’s the only real model, it is in fact in place now, only badly implemented. Does not every president and governor and senator and representative take an interest in his successor, and act in his official role so as to influence the party in such a way as to ensure his agenda lives on? Are not educational institutions, from pre-school to university, designed so as to produce candidates for the exercise of power—in government, of course, but also in the media, high tech, entertainment, and the university itself? What criteria are displayed in ensuring succession—what kind of succession seems to be aimed at?\n\nLike any political formalism, the same assumptions that provide us with prescriptions also supply the descriptions—our advantage over the actual power brokers is that we can make explicit what they must leave implicit, fobbing off inquiry onto mysticisms of “merit,” “networking” and so on. That there are in fact vast overlapping lines of succession with shifting interdependencies and degrees of power allows us to conduct an inquiry the rulers themselves cannot while constantly peppering them with wild hypotheses (“conspiracy theories”), as plausible as any other account, of who happens to be the designer of the scene from behind it at this moment.\n\nThe model of successionism I’m proposing, then, is a source of ongoing originary satire. It is also, though, easily satirized in turn: read the model of successionism two paragraphs above to any leftist or, indeed, any normal person, and you’re sure to provoke uproarious laughter and concerns for your mental health. That’s also good, as long as you stick to it. Such a pedagogy means putting yourself at the center, which involves some vulnerability, that is, the attraction of sacrificial resentments. An exchange of satirical representations is a good contest, providing training in responding to the ridicule any marginal position will receive, and allowing for a wide range of registers—from jocularity (we don’t have to take any of this seriously, but it’s fun to create these wild models) all the way toward focused inquisition (what, exactly, are you contributing, in the entire way you live, to the kind of succession that might do the things you desire?).\n\nIt’s a way of talking, both seriously and luridly, about well-known individuals—it’s both a repudiation and appropriation of the celebrity culture. Meghan Markle is talking about running for president? Very interesting! What sequence might that initiate? The focus becomes trying to figure out what anyone might turn out to be “made of.” This installs the exposure and disclosure pedagogy within the idiom of intelligence—every discussion of the disconnect between power and responsibilities, and of the unmet needs and abilities unrealized, can be designed so as to zero in on individuals who exemplify this disconnect (and thereby render succession opaque) and those who promise to in some way remedy it, or teach us how to look for those who might.\n\nIn this way, you keep adding to and revising the content of successionism so as to make it match the historical trajectory you’re intervening in. Again, the entire character of a social order can be found in the way it transfers power from one ruler to another, as each institution is organized in accord with the same logic of instituted practices that produce those who would continue them. The reciprocal satiric representations of successionism and its others will produce one approximation to the model after another—once successionism is in the cultural bloodstream, there is always a timeline that is moving closer to it, and it becomes a question of showing how its enemies are aiding its conquests.\n\nThis becomes a practice: transforming anticipated historical sequences into approximations of successionism. The proof of the practice is its resiliency in assessing the resiliency of this or another torchbearer of the mode of rule that can serve as an origin for successors in perpetuity. Whatever values or projects you wish to install or promote can be tested and refined in this way: how does (your) Christian nationalism or Faustianism or Prometheanism identify and reach for the levers that would increase the likelihood of a singularized power center that would see to its own succession in perpetuity? Not only does your project need to account for singularized self-perpetuity as the default position to be approximated, but it must be suited to prepare a population to contribute devotionally to the scenes of succession implicit in singularized perpetuity.\n\nSome projects might be ruled out in this way, while others will enter the contest and hone themselves. So, your pedagogy of exposure and disclosure reads the other back to himself as a particular way of approximating singularized perpetuity, and therefore never fixed as a target upon which all social energies are to be directed; and, in your own modeling of that other mode of approximation, you model a mode which can situate the other.\n\nThe model of singularized succession in perpetuity, then, situates all specific programs for appropriating power, without usurping any of them, since it will need some idiomatic articulation. In this way, it enacts the constitutive paradoxicality of human existence, a constitutive paradoxicality which irreducibly situates without usurping any program of metaphysics, faith, or existential commitment. If you ask me what I believe in, that would be my answer: the inexhaustible constitutive paradoxicality of the human. And then I would acknowledge that any mode of singularized succession in perpetuity would have to select from among the idioms circulating within its domain a creole, so to speak, in which that paradoxicality could speak under those conditions.\n\nBut any such idiom would have to have a touchstone—there is “theology” because the events founding any faith require interpretation of the imperatives issued from those events, and “theology” must be judged on terms other than the circular one of conformity to the event itself. So, I propose as a criterion for what I’ll provisionally agree to call “political theology” that its touchstone or meta-discipline be the facilitation of participation in the staging of singularized succession in perpetuity in such a way as to accentuate its constitutively paradoxical character: the figure at the center extends his imperative into futurity without hindrance or interference insofar as the entire order is ordered so as to engage everyone’s energies in such a way as to make all institutions at every moment harmonized so as to be conducive to that extension into futurity.\n\nThe perfecting of your practice so as to contribute to the barely imaginable future revelation of the articulated coordination of that very practice with all other practices made interoperable so one’s practice can make that revelation barely imaginable is the highest form of union with the central intelligence possible. To put it more simply: insofar as everyone is doing the same kind of thing you are doing, each in his own completely different way, the kind of thing you are doing will in fact be that kind of thing, as you can see, by doing it, in its indefinitely delayed form, which will have to turn out to be completely different so as to be exactly the same as what you are doing now. And no one could ask for anything more than that."
    },
    {
      "slug": "fict-tech-tion-archae-tecture",
      "title": "Fict-tech-tion;  Archae-tecture",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 29, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/fict-tech-tion-archae-tecture",
      "content": "Eric Gans has remarked on many occasions, in agreement with Rene Girard, that mimetic theory has been derived ultimately from literature—rather than, by contrast, from philosophy and the social sciences, on the one hand, or even religion, on the other. I agree with this as well, and the reason for this is that literature is a continuation of scripture under post-liturgical conditions. Philosophy is a repudiation of ritual, and the social sciences are split-offs from philosophy, sharing this constitutive repudiation. Scripture, which is to say, the sacred text, shares a kind of contemporaneity with philosophy, insofar as the sacrality of the written word is only possible and necessary when there is no longer a shared sacrificial center. There’s a rejection of sacrificial ritual here, as, for example, in the Hebrew bible’s denunciation of idolatry, but this repudiation is in the name of acknowledging a more originary centrality, rather than recentering truth in the exchange of declaratives among those who have set aside their ostensive commitments.\n\nScripture is testimony, which means it derives from the juridical systems established, along with markets, and reliant upon writing, in the ancient empires. Scriptural testimony is extra-juridical, as it represents a plea, a stating of one’s case, before God and fellow petitioners—but this must be modeled on the petitioning of the monarch by subjects. The whole apparatus of “monotheism” is modeled on the divine monarch, with the appeal, over the head of the divine monarch, to God, with whom a covenant is entered into, modeled on those between the imperial power and its vassal states. As per this covenant, God will see His people through until the end of all such worldly monarchies.\n\nScripture is essentially exilic—I have hypothesized that it is modeled on the special case of injustice delivered to a privileged subject of the king; special in the sense that it implicates the justice of the system as a whole insofar as the masses of enslaved or “unpeopled” can be represented as sufferers of this injustice as well. The logic of scripture, then, is to record the testimony of the victims of this special injustice which brings to bear the weight of an evil empire on a single individual and community whose relation to a redemptive divine is mediated by that individual. This also means that scripture is the testimony of those exposed to and exposing human sacrifice.\n\nScripture creates the privileged text, which must be authenticated and commented upon (including the comparison and assessment of various versions and translations), and which therefore also creates a new disciplinary space, which allegorizes its own interpretative practices through sacred narratives, and is ready to imitate its exilic, sacrificed heroes on behalf of scripture itself.\n\nThe love of God for those who have been so despised must be great, and scripture testifies to this love—and also, of course, the testing and chastisement of those who have been promised such love. God is incommensurable to all earthly powers, while being intimately concerned with each living soul; we must, according to scripture, imitate God by showing this concern ourselves for our fellow sufferers. This testimony on behalf of the unseen, unheard, unconsidered by the powers, is also the logic of literature. Poetry is the cry of abandonment and assurance that it will end; fictional narrative is the continual playing and testing out of the sacrificial practices renounced in scripture.\n\nIn literature, there is nothing but language, though, and so the historical tendency of literature is to reduce it further and further to pure utterance, the miracle of utterance in itself. I have been reading Trevor Stark’s Total Expansion of the Letter , which examines the ways in which Stephane Mallarme’s purification of poetry so as to reduce it to the sheer emptiness of language, informed more powerfully than has been recognized the avant-gardes of the 20th century. Gans knows Mallarme very well, admires him, and has written on him, but in learning more about Mallarme’s fascination with the sheer being of language, its universality and fragility, its endless deferrals, even, within the limits imposed on him, its origin, leads me to believe that the originary hypothesis may owe more to Mallarme than Gans, as far as I know, has ever imagined (the same seems to me true of French poststructuralism as well; and, while I’m on the subject, it seems to me that Derrida’s most indelible contribution will be that he helps us to read philosophy and all its descendants as literature).\n\nThere’s something intrinsically anti-technic about scripture, and this carries over into literature—the ancient machinery was composed primarily precisely of those unpeopled slaves, and brought massively to bear upon the human sacrifices. Scripture and literature testify against this insult of effacement added to the injury of enslavement and slaughter. But this mode of literarity is no longer tenable, and no longer necessary since, as Girard and Foucault pointed out in different ways, the resistance to scapegoating instituted by the spread of scripture created the legal norms of objectivity that ultimately made science and technology possible.\n\nNow that technology has replaced the old world of imperative exchange with the center with design practices through which one extends the imperatives one receives into questions circulating through others, other modes of non-humanist literarity serve as better models. For literature to continue to work, not so much as a means of anthropological revelation, but as the ongoing manifestation of language modeling enactments of its constitutive paradox by “languaging,” it must serve as a model for the singularization of succession in perpetuity through the imperative order of technics. To design is to arrange a scene, including a scene organized for the arranging of other scenes, so as to issue an extended imperative through a relay of imperatives, landing on the final recipient of the imperative for whom it must be an imperative to perfect his practice so as to set the scene for its successor practice.\n\nI don’t see language in general as technics, but literature turns language into a model of technics insofar as it displays the way in which in language, in this way just as in technics, the implicit preconditions of an explicit practice either present themselves or are elicited as an interruption of that practice. So, literature that continually exposes the devices and narrates its own coming into being to the point where that coming into being is a hypothesis shared by writer and readers, models the designed participation in design that constitutes an idiomatic intelligence that must deliberately and explicitly see to its own continuity. I’ll call this kind of literature “fic-tech-tion,” which we might see as a kind of meta-programming.\n\nAlongside the meta-programming of fic-tech-tion, everything is design, because everything is scenes, and what we do on scenes is design them so actors on those scenes can design new scenes, meta-scenes, sub-scenes, and so on. All of technology, including the most “technological” (automation, engines, robots, algorithms, etc.) are part of scenic design, and the principle of scenic design, again, is to issue delayed imperatives through a relay of imperatives so that the final imperative should always be to perfect a practice predicated upon singularized succession in perpetuity. The model I propose for design is the derivation of architecture from archaeology, or, archae-tecture.\n\nI should emphasize that I’m not trying to give practical advice to technicians, engineers, or architects here; I’m providing an ultimately literary model for thinking about design. Let’s take a simple example: you are building a new structure where a previous structure stands (and will therefore need to be destroyed) or has stood. You can take as the imperative for your construction that the new structure be situated in relation to its surroundings in the same way the previous structure was situated in relation to its surroundings. “In the same way” creates a constraint, but one whose contours need to be determined: the same in what respect?\n\nA study of the structure being replaced can focus on its function in relation to the buildings, neighborhood, area, city, country, world, around it; it can focus on appearance, relative size, the combination of aesthetic architectural traditions drawn upon, its use of materials and energy, its sources of funding, political debates over its creation, and ultimately, some combination of all of the above. This would involve the design of algorithms and simulations to “factor in” all these variables, and since part of the character of the structure being replaced is the structure it replaced, and so on, all the way back to the beginnings of human habitation and even geological deep time in that place, this would turn into a complex, extended practice always in need of further perfection, under the assumption that one is continuing the series of practices constitutive of that location.\n\nThe rule, then, is that the future of the place must be derived from its origin, or initial conditions, which, of course, can always be done in any number of ways, but which would be subject to increasingly rigorous criteria, which might involve retrieval, compensation, honoring, penance, extrapolation of lost opportunities, among other possible relations to the past.\n\nThe splendors and ruins of the past are always present, and if they’re not perceptibly present, they are present in their absence, as the existing structure is taken to allude in some way to what it doesn’t directly present. I suppose this might be a kind of archaeofuturism, even though I’m not very familiar with the concept. As I always insist, this is not just a way of projecting utopian futures (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but first of all a way of engaging the present as if, of course , this is what all design of our settings is already trying to do, albeit in a blinkered manner. In the same way, each use leverages the origins of our practices, as we can recover them within the current iteration of those practices, so as to derive a new practice that both follows completely consistently that origin while being unimaginable from within it.\n\nAll of the arts are to be pressed into the service of archaeotecture, even if not obviously or directly, insofar as they all construct scenes, with some centered performance or representation, with an audience separated from the center by some more or less permeable boundary, and prime the members of the audience to go forth and participation in further archeaotecture. More and more, the relation between the arts that have been sequestered, in theaters, museums and elsewhere, and their surroundings, will become subject to design practices: maybe certain kinds of sequestering will continue to be encouraged, but that itself is a design practice.\n\nTo engage in a bit of disciplinary scenic design, and perhaps scripture, myself, I’ll return now to Gans’s location of the aesthetic on the originary scene, in the oscillation of each member between the central object and the sign of the other. In heading toward the center, drawn by the object, you see the gesture of aborted appropriation of the other, which leads to deceleration and cessation, but then a renewed attraction to the object, and so on. That there is a moment like this on the scene is undeniable; that we should call it the “aesthetic” is far less certain. The aesthetic is a late category, which relies upon distinctions made within advanced civilizations between beauty, the good, and the true, and therefore falsifies much of human experience where images, sound and performance has been in direct service to the sacred center.\n\nIf we make the obvious point that this oscillation is both potentially infinite and yet necessarily comes to an end, we can introduce a sequence into the oscillation whereby the sign is perfected, placed in sync with a measured, ordered movement to the center, and therefore becomes a guide towards what will have been a pre-rehearsed appropriation of the object. In other words, the sign takes shape as a practice of designing the scene of appropriation, which then makes it possible to iterate it afterwards as ritual—and sustain it as a kind of reciprocal bounding of the other during the sparagmos. Originary satire preserves and represents the initiation of the oscillation, in which the other appears as both menacing threat and impotent victim—originary satire is softened, erased, and forgotten as the scene is designed and the other is “positioned” on and shaped by it, meaning that the practice of scenic design begins by recovering the originary satirical possibilities of the space and then representing the gradual erasure and preserving traces of those possibilities.\n\n(If you say that “satire” is itself a late concept, relying upon the broader theatrical world of ancient Greece, in particular, I would counter that move by saying, alright, we can call it originary mockery, being very the same and very not the same as the other—it would be hard to deny that something we might call “caricature,” in the performance of actors at the center, goes way, way back.) Planetary scale scenic design fully replaces the imperative exchange with the center constitutive of the sacrificial—the practices producing this (we still have a ways to go) are the matter of hypothetical fic-tech-tions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "language-as-model-for-technics-literature-between-translation-and-transposition",
      "title": "Language as Model for Technics: Literature Between Translation and Transposition",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 19, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/language-as-model-for-technics-literature",
      "content": "A while back I suggested replacing the word “sign” with the word “sample.” I take the critique of metaphysics seriously, since I consider it a starting and differentiating point of the originary hypothesis, and “sign,” with its philosophical and linguistic roots in the signifier/signified distinction, carries a lot of metaphysical residue. If a sign is constitutive of a system in its reciprocal references to all other signs in a way that is constantly changing and non-totalizable, then signs can only be lined up with signifieds and referents on scenic terms, within events. “Samples” are, intrinsically, only identifiable upon a scene of inquiry—what they are samples of always issues in some ostensive sign.\n\nThere are lots of things in the world that can be treated as samples that we wouldn’t ordinarily refer to as “signs,” but the very fact that we are treating them as samples means they could be called signs; indeed, that we can call them samples is testimony to the human creation of a world of what we are accustomed to calling “signs.” A sample is both systemic, gathered up as “data,” or, if one likes, following Johanna Drucker, “capta,” and irreducibly singular, marked by history and its specific uses. We all use signs and are signs, which means we put ourselves forward as samples, which is only slightly different than saying we always act as exemplifications of one or another possibility.\n\nAnother reason for insisting on the use of “sample” in place of “sign” (or “utterance”) is the dramatic transformation charted by Mario Carpo in The Second Digital Turn from data scarcity to data abundance. Everything is now instantly transformed into data, i.e., into the store of samples to be drawn upon by the ever increasing number of disciplinary spaces and inquiries. We are always already on the data exchange, and making this explicit moves us beyond the Big Scenic imaginary. There is an interesting test here: which, if any, uses of the word “sign” (or near synonyms like “utterances”—i.e., “units” of linguistic analysis) would resist replacement by “sample”? (“That’s a good sample”? A “sample of things to come”?)\n\nCarpo goes so far as to argue that the abundance of data might render the sacrosanct scientific method obsolete: instead of constructing a “scene,” within a closed setting, in which isolated variables can be seen to interact free of interference, it will be possible to retrieve enough instances of all the materials and substances in question interacting with other materials and substances in various situations as to know exactly what they will do in a given case. We could, then, imagine an ongoing process of exchange between various users and interfaces and the central intelligence as follows: each of us constantly supply all kinds of data to the Cloud through every thing we do (all recorded by the devices we carry and those installed everywhere), while we have access to that data for purposes of seeking employment, companionship, health care, research, and so on.\n\nThose who point out that if a service is free, the user is the product, already recognize that this is the reality; and so do those arguing that the giant tech companies should pay us for our data. But let’s imagine how all this might work if we were to eliminate the main economic engine of data collection: advertising. From an economic standpoint, the entire system would collapse without advertising; from a technological standpoint, nothing would change, so we would all have to be “plugged in” in a different way—political thinking could do worse than on spending its time studying ways to abolish advertising and imagining the structure of “Big Tech” that might result.\n\nI also think that using “sample” in this way can help inculcate ways of resisting propaganda and ideology. You put forth your sample as a donation to the cloud, where it can be treated as a sample in innumerable disciplinary spaces, and this gives the impression that any care given to the act of preparing the sample is sure to be swamped and dissolved by those multifarious possible treatments. But a sample is released within a specific space, it overlaps with and touches at various points with other samples and will be more resistant to some forms of treatment than others. You can’t control the travels of your sample, but others will have to contribute their samples in treating it, and you can design your sample so that certain treatments stain or mark both your sample and the one treating it in more or less indelible ways, so that the markings become part of the sample, eliciting some treatments while repelling others.\n\nIt’s extremely difficult to think of one’s thinking, writing and work in this way, as (hopefully) “replicating” itself across scenes, but it’s worth making the effort, because it’s an exercise in deferral that might help you turn attempts to recruit or impress you into vanishing friend/enemy switches into means of disseminating your own samples. If there’s something perpetually anomalous in your samples you generate anomalies across the field of samples and to the extent that there’s nothing but anomalies only disciplinary spaces dedicated to sustaining linguistic presence through the creation of singularized successions in perpetuity can be productive of meaning.\n\nAnd then the originary scene, now entered upon as we have never been anywhere else, would model the perfection of human practices into gestures anticipating and preparing for the same and utterly other gesture on scenes barely adumbrated in the practice itself. To return to Carpo’s book, it seems to me that the implication of the abundance of data is that the most important intellectual activity is likely to become the composing of search terms, in particular an ongoing sequence of search terms in response to the data retrieved with each entry. Along with increasing sophistication in composing search terms must come the realization that one is, oneself, a result of particular sequences of search terms.\n\nThe more your appearance as a result of searches is marked by the results of your own searches the less effectively pigeon-holed and targeted you will be, and taking this essentially “literary” (because “fictional”) artifact (the coincidence of searcher with searched) as “food for thought” will make you more resistant to PR, advertising and propaganda mobilizing efforts.\n\n(Here is a footnote from Carpo’s books, suggesting the emergence of a new “style of digital aggregation”:\n\nFor what an anecdote may be worth, I can refer to the case of the assistant to a very important person who has been curating said person’s biographical entry in Wikipedia for the last ten years, and has developed over time a very special literary skill: when editing or updating the entry, she redacts all the new text in a deliberately fragmentary way, sometimes even introducing partially inconsistent or redundant information; the purpose being that her own authorial text should read just like a real Wikipedia entry should—that is, as if it had been written by many people of variable literary talent editing one another. over time. Digital aggregation has already begot a recognizable literary style—the Wikipedic style of many hands.)\n\nBut this is not the subject of this sample, except insofar as the insistence on language, and not “ideas,” “concepts” and “cognition” implies that we and all we do are samples of a “population” that will never be summed up once and for all. I want to further pursue the literary transformation of language into a model of technics. Language is not technics, but that’s because there is no language as such—language is not available as an object. There are just uses of language, each of which continues and translates an earlier use. It’s the construction of a scene around a linguistic event that is technics and a model of technics.\n\nThink about saying something (complete with gesture, posture, setting) that’s just right, exactly what needed to be said there and then; and then imagine tracing that saying back to all the previous uses of the “same” words, syntax, bodily holding, and so on, that made it possible, and projecting it forward to all the sayings that might now happen but wouldn’t have otherwise; and imagine revising that original saying so as to mark it with those histories and possibilities, while keeping it just as perfect, because the others on the scene would join in the expanded space: that’s language, languaged as literature, as technics.\n\nFrom one thing one person says, you can deduce everything else that person ever has said and ever will say, given enough data and computing power; of course, this means the same would be true for everything everyone has ever said or will say. While Marvell’s speaker had neither world enough nor time, we are rapidly approaching having enough data and computing power. But, of course, there’s not enough time to take in, in your own practices, all of that; much less all of that once everyone has access to all that and can revise their inputs accordingly. But there’s an alternative that provides us with what we really need.\n\nWe can easily posit a single parameter shift which, in another time line, would have led to a different sample being presented—if someone had gotten a bit more sleep last night, he wouldn’t have had that nasty tone, etc. If we can posit one we can posit many, and we can then treat the sample as a translation of all of them into the existing parameters, as they are constructed by the translation itself. The first sign was a translation of all the gestures of appropriation on the scene into a gesture of deferral—this is essentially a transfer translation, to bring in Marcel Jousse’s concept, in which all the meaning of all the gestures of appropriation is shown to be self-cancelling, a meaning that can now be transferred back to each gesture insofar as they all translate the gesture of deferral. Narratives and hypotheses are generated out of the work of the transfer translation, which needs to reconcile the various samples and can only do so by organizing them so that they are reciprocally commenting upon each other.\n\nI’m currently reading From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends , by Avigdor Shinan, Yair Zakovitch, and Valerie Zakovitch—I keep getting more interested in the composition, preservation and transmission of scripture. The book goes into greater detail regarding what I already kind of knew—that the Bible is engaged in a titanic polemical struggle against the myths of the pagan world, and beyond that with various alternative traditions preserved in scripture itself, well beyond what is already evident. So, at the margins of the story of creation and Adam and Eve we see the largely implicit “refutation” of tales of creation involving the struggles of gods against one another and monstrous dragons and serpents.\n\nOf course, to refute is to retain memory of. If literature is the continuation of scripture, then it continues this practice as well, with each disclosure coupled with the marginalization of some “myth” organized through the Big Scenic imaginary. And I’m calling all language literary that refuses any transcendence of language itself. (Maybe what we see here in Scripture samples the relation between the written and the oral as such: writing is always polemicizing against whatever in the oral that would initiate a confrontation that couldn’t be “redeemed” in the traditions formed around the sacred text.)\n\nThe more traces of the transfer translation, the more literary the language, as the transfer translation sifts through all the simultaneous samplings to marginalize without destroying whatever would collapse the dissemination of the disciplinary spaces organized around the text itself. What’s on the margins can be brought back into relation to the center: the snake can no longer be a source of immortality independent of God, but it can remain as an inimical reminder of that desire, which was part of the God-human relation all along. You could say that any literate person takes on the priestly burden, which now entails distilling each sample into evidence of the originary miracle of shared attention.\n\nOf course, what if you want to do battle with the great serpent, and to do so as a god, reiterating the founding gesture of what would have to be a single community? Such desires seem to be circulating, if one can judge from internet memes. I would say that these are fantasies of auto-generation that deny mimesis and launder sacrifice as heroism, but who am I to say? Let the question be turned into an issue of technics: my bet is that the literary can reveal the props holding up and effaced by sacrificial narratives and program the design of scenes that recode the mythic as the replenishment of the center through singular succession in perpetuity.\n\nWhatever narrative you’re working with is going to change in its next iteration and no narrative contains a logic determining which change to activate or even what makes the characters the same—only designating occupied posts responsible for ensuring succession, while occupying one yourself, can determine the sample. The transfer translation aims for the greatest reciprocity between posts.\n\nHere's an example: Johanna Drucker’s Diagrammatic Writing , which is a book that is as much about itself as it’s possible for a book to be. The book enacts and describes its own constitution as a physical and historical product, what we have come to call the “book.” Everything that goes into making the book a book, words, letters, sentences, print, spacing, margins, pages, etc., are referenced and utilized. The first page states the circularity of the constitution of the book:\n\nThe semantic system of graphical relations\n\nThe graphical expression of semantic relations.\n\nMeaning and spacing are reciprocally constitutive and irreducible to each other. She then skips a page and devotes a page to:\n\nThe first words placed define the space.\n\nShe then repeats that statement after skipping another page and begins to expound:\n\nThis is both too obvious to state and so complex that the full exegesis of the act and its implications could take volumes. Artists will always tell you the first stroke defines everything that follows on a canvas, and formal analyses will detail the relations and effects of each mark and subsequent addition. Thus the very writing of this paragraph, under the initial statement, supporting the line with a whole plinth of prose, distorts the single statement above, which asks, actually, to stand alone, showing, demonstrating dramatically, how the area below differs from that above.\n\nSo, you can see that a book being as much about itself as a book can be might be quite interesting, while creating a book that is just as much an object as “container.” There are also an unlimited number of ways in which this can be done (Drucker doesn’t claim this book is more about itself than any other book could be) and doing so produces a model for producing scenes that are as much about their own perpetuation as scenes can be. (Drucker’s book actually has a few typos, and I have no idea whether they might be deliberate or not.) We could see Drucker’s effort as a transfer translation of every book ever written, but once we posit it as a model the practice of translation reaches its limits.\n\nA scene (a city, a country, a school, a family, a world…) that is as much “about” its own perpetuation and, even more, creating its own ”thisness,” as any scene can be, could take a book as much about itself as a book can be as its instigation, but more through transposition than translation: you could exhaust the book as model by taking any self-reference in the book as an imperative to identify an “analogous” self-reference in the scene, but what will count as “analogous” here cannot be derived or translated from the book—or, no derivation or translation would have any greater claim to fidelity than any other. Such a correspondence between fic-tech-tion and archae-tecture will guide the creation of articulated scenes-of-scenes (grids and infrastructures) that issue in imperatives to perfect practices in their succession at designated posts."
    },
    {
      "slug": "data-mining-the-sentence",
      "title": "Data Mining the Sentence",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 29, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-mining-the-sentence",
      "content": "The thinking of technics should be compressible within the succession of speech forms culminating in the declarative sentence, so long as we follow that sequence back from the declarative sentence as made iterable by writing. My present hypothesis: technology is the imperative order, as various chains of “do this” are made interlocking with each other. At one end of the chains (which we would then have to imagine drawn together in a single set of interlocking chains) is the central intelligence, which is interested solely in selecting the successor most likely to select the successor most likely… in perpetuity. That is, the network of imperative chains is ordered by the chain of maintaining order and continuity and recruiting all of the idiomatic intelligence toward that end.\n\nThis dependence of the technological network on the central intelligence reproduces the reliance of the imperative upon the ostensive: just as technology replaces ritual in articulating the community at a certain distance from the center, so the central intelligence replaces the originary central object and resolves the problem of situating an individual at the center—since that problem lies in the uncertain nature of succession, “selecting the successor most likely… in perpetuity” offers a solution. We can leave the actual content of this completely open—will it be a king? Military leadership? Something resembling a one party state?\n\nWill rulership be life long, or will rulers pass the baton to their successors regularly? All that matters is that succession is staged all throughout the order, and that every order culminates in an apex. At the other end (in this case, the many ends) of the network of chains, then, are the various idioms, intelligences, assignments, or, as we can still call them, individuals, in their pedagogical introductions to the imperative order.\n\nThe imperative succeeds the ostensive, but it also translates the ostensive, and in doing so leaves a residue which is also a construction of the imperative. Ostensives now give off imperatives, at a minimum the imperative to preserve that ostensive relation—to keep a clear view of the center. Interrogatives must, then, in turn, translate and construct imperatives: imperatives are now all potentially extendible into various requests for information regarding the possibility of their fulfillment. Likewise for the declarative and the interrogative: interrogatives come out “mappable” by a declarative. Still, that residual ostensive force, and then imperative and interrogative force is necessary for linguistic relations to be sustained.\n\nThis residual force is articulated through the declarative’s mapping of a new distribution of ostensives, carrying with them imperatives and so on. The declarative invokes an imperative from the center to counter the imperative force decelerated interrogatively—that imperative relies on the ostensivity of the center of centers, and is represented in the declarative as a spread of sign users who would issue the ostensive signs authenticating that emergence of the center of centers. A sentence tells us, in a highly compressed and largely implicit way, what we would all see, hear, feel, say and do if we were all positioned in the way directed by the sentence.\n\nWriting represents the sentence as a linguistic artifact and thereby rips it out of its relation to the ostensives and imperatives out of which it flows and back into which it would directly flow. Among other results, this creates a relation between a sentence that could have been said by anyone and that is “heard” by each reader internally (even if the silent reader stands at the end of a long history of reading—“hearing” internally is just repeating the words silently). More importantly here, this is an early, enduring and highly transformative mode of technics. The objectification of the declarative sentence leads to logic, and therefore math, and then computation (but also accounting and therefore accountability): what science does, through mathematics, to the world as text, is first of all what the declarative did to the earlier speech forms: study, dissect and rearticulate elements and movements so as to make them available on a scene.\n\nThere’s really something approaching perfection (while still trailing off into “exceptions”) about the grammar of a literate language. It’s the perfection of an imperative: to make the language itself transparent, so that shared attention can be directed toward the scene that is linguistically mediated, without distraction by the mediation itself. The success with which this transparency is created is the reason why technics (and learning) have essentially been banished from philosophy (as the study of the declarative sentence and all its implications): only insofar as the mediation gets in the way can language be turned into a model for the study of technics.\n\nThis is why remembering and recognizing all those modes of writing that violate the demand for transparency is central to the study of technics and technology. This includes pre-alphabetic writing, it includes writing that has illustration built in, writing that treats the letters as “characters” in the “content” of the writing, writing that draws attention to formulas and devices. Non-transparent writing displays the scene of learning that must precede and always inhabit the transparent scene. Such practices reset writing within an ostensive and imperative world—you have to, for example, pay attention to the shape of this letter to understand what is being said.\n\nThis is a practice of deferral—the real story, or the real point, can be endlessly delayed by reviewing all the preconditions of “really” getting there, and then reviewing the preconditions of those preconditions and so on. This process is always cut off at some point, but the insistence on having it inhabit and inform the discourse makes the technological conditions and consequences of any saying evident. The principle here, first articulated, I think, by William Burroughs, is that you only write what is happening right now—a principle that presses the limits of both transparency and opacity.\n\nA sentence, then, is a chain which, by getting a hold on it, enables you to get hold on parts of the larger networks. You can then see the sentence as a site of production, with each sentence one in an unlimited number of variations, with the reciprocal translations of the variations producing the meaning. The sentence seen as a site of production, an unlimited number of variations in each sentence, so that the reciprocal translations of the variations are productive of meaning. Each sentence varying itself unlimitedly, translating these variations into each other, is productive of meaning, as you can see. Translating these variations into each other limits the variations, without which there would be no meaning that you could see.\n\nProductively seeing meaning entails limiting variations and translating limitations into other limitations which would then be the sentences. Sites within sites are productive, vary and translate, limit, see and are seen, here by you. I just looked at each iteration of this sentence and imagined what might be done with it next, what had I left out in the last couple of iterations, etc., but this practice of internal translation could be reduced to a set of rules aimed at producing a discourse which one could shape and refine as it produced unanticipated paths. It’s not a question of whether we do this, but that we see this as a model of language production as opposed to transcriptions of existing realities in either the lower or higher realms.\n\nBecause, in fact, language is actually produced more along these lines, driven by imperatives inherent in the chunks of language available and the ways those chunks presently at hand get magnetized and polarized by a field in which the same and other, complementary, chunks, are configured differently. Someone else is for something, compelling you to be more for or against it; someone doesn’t see what you can see precisely through their neglect or omission, so you must point it out: in doing so, you turn their sentences around much in the way I just played with my own sentence.\n\nIf we oscillate on the boundary between nonsense and highly marked sentences we can establish continuity across the linguistic forms, including literacy and orality. This entails working with a model in its difference from itself, as an origin, rather than an original preceding all models. I know this all sounds very abstract and unpragmatic, but this is the best way of thinking technology in such a way as to enter and participate in it rather than remaining at the end of fairly predictable chains. What we say goes all around the world on wires dug under the ground, powered by massive amounts of energy mined and transported, preserved in data farms soaking in huge pools of water, our words move across various jurisdictions, subject to ever changing terms of service, might surface in various times and places, be remade and rewoven with other words and images in ways we can only partially anticipate—and all this is part of what we say.\n\nIt’s not enough to say, “well, what I meant was…”. Your point is not your point. We can’t assume antiquated transmission models whereby someone “understands” what you say, conveys it someone else, until eventually something changes as a result of what you said, and in a way “contained” in what you said. This model of transmission derives from the world represented as a Big Scene with a single sacrificial center, turned into a discourse model by the Enlightenment: all of us, equals in speech, stand across from each other in the public square and concede to the force of the better argument. Much discourse, even produced by those intensely aware of exactly where the terms of our tightly administered discourse come from, is conducted in accord with this model.\n\nWe don’t all need to become avant-garde writers… but, maybe, in a sense, we do. And much dissident discourse is not so far off—as someone incompletely familiar with and initiated into the language of online exchange, I can say that much of the meming, indirection, and fragmenting of the mainstream discourse fits right into those traditions. I’m certainly not the first to point this out (nor is this the first time I’ve pointed it out). To an extent, I’m describing as much as I’m prescribing.\n\nThe ”successionism” I’m proposing provides a guide to an expanded techno-media practice. You do, in fact, want to the outcome of what you say to be implicit and “coded” in your saying—otherwise, why say it, if it could mean anything whatsoever? Just as the best political order would have the occupant of the center choose his successor, and, in fact, would be organized around the entire order being generated out of this practice of selecting the successor and, moreover, just as the criterion for selecting a successor would be that that successor would select his successor such that his successor…, without break, in perpetuity, so, your practices should be designed in such a way as to select their successors and thereby participate in a form of idiomatic intelligence where all practices are so designed so as to feed back into the succession practice at the top.\n\nSaying only what is happening right now includes the way in which everything coming out of what you’re saying is part of that “now.” In part, this involves constructing resistances to certain uses, uses that would replicate the model of (transparent) classical prose in particular. Building implicit and explicit assignments, things a user would have to “do” in order to use, is important—as an interface, you want to draw upon certain irreducible contexts that would have to be reconstructed at some point down the road, maybe hypothetically. Have parts that don’t quite fit; frustrate certain expectations; impose a kind of self-selection upon your users—not only in the sense that some will opt in and others won’t, but in the sense that each user will have to select the self fit to use the writing. Improvise rules out of patterns you notice as you write and break them so as to call attention to the rules. Write as if a single sentence contains an entire universe of discourse, and thereby stage the succession of your practice.\n\nImagine thinking of your readers less as individuals stuffed full of opinions, ideas, viewpoints, facts and so on and more as words that might be pieced together to create sentences, or letters to produce words. Of course, they might see you the same way, in which case you should be a word fitted for some idiosyncratic set of uses, or a beautifully adorned letter. This exemplifies a more properly technological approach. Under a ritual order, when the interlocking imperative exchanges don’t work, myth is generated; with the evacuation of the ritual order, imperative failure leads to hypotheses (hypotheses are really articulations of particular ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative sequences).\n\nYou find yourself a teacher, whom you might succeed, or from whom you might pave the way for another successor, or a field of successors, which means reading the teacher as the beginning of an assembling—what would succession look like here, there, now, later on; how could you make this site, this medium, this institution, this discourse speak the language of this teaching? Everything takes on its meaning in terms of the range of ways it might be assembled into provisional statements, whose continuation and implantation across the board would be imperative. So, we’re not talking about convincing, explaining persuading, etc.—we’re talking about inscribing, which might be done just as well via one’s opponents as via one’s friends.\n\nI’ve hypothesized a model declarative sentence, which would be designed so as to confront, confound and return for revision the impossible interrogative; the impossible interrogative being a disguised imperative to the effect that the questioner and all others affirm the prior declarative that would authorize the answer to this question. So, the typical impossible interrogative would be along the lines of “what do you plan to do about X inequality,” in which you can see built into the question the assumption that all inequalities can and should have something definitive “done” about them. It’s important, than to have the elements and models prepared for designing timely transferable answers to such questions.\n\nI would suggest taking my often repeated (and hardly original) slogans—power and responsibility are to be matched; and from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs—and turn them from “principles” into sentence building materials. “Power” is a noun, and, of course, can be either plural or singular; strictly speaking, the only way of making it into a verb is as “empower,” which one does for others—otherwise, it remains as a noun, which one can “take” or “use”; and there is the adjective “powerful” (and adverb “powerfully”). “Responsible” is an adjective, with the somewhat differently significant “respond” as the verb form, and “responsibility” as the noun (which one can “take” or be assigned—but, then, taking and accepting must be a single practice). “Need” can be noun or verb, with the somewhat archaic “needful” and more distant “necessary” as adjective. “Ability,” a noun, breaks down to the adjective “able,” with the closest verb being “can” (which loops back to “power”).\n\nThe purpose of inspecting our linguistic materials in this way is to practice weaving these words, in complementary ways, into sentences designed to address impossible interrogatives. This would instill the kind of “message discipline” associated with propaganda, while being a kind of negative image of that discipline, insofar as it requires constant innovation rather than mind-numbing repetition. The two slogans are kept at the center of your discourse, but now made responsive to attempts to assert power, generating the ability to meet the needs of a given situation. Whoever might have the power to remedy the injustice you complain of also has responsibilities other than remedying that injustice and we might talk about those responsibilities but can you please come clean about the power you bring to bear on the situation?\n\nI can see how you might be pointing to unmet needs but that you’re able to make me see it points to an infrastructure that claims its own needs that may or may not have as their affordances a set of imperatives that would enable us to meet those needs and be responsible for ensuring they have been met. Designing such responses provide you with tests of good faith and, where needed, the ability to expose bad faith; but also, always, ways of zeroing in on the intersection between the perfecting imperative and the singularized succession in perpetuity at stake."
    },
    {
      "slug": "data-as-currency",
      "title": "Data as Currency",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 8, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-as-currency",
      "content": "Money started off as a way of managing distanced distribution from the center—providing tokens of contributions or expected contributions to the center by social participants in sustained cooperative projects (which is what any social order essentially is). Specifically capitalist uses of money result from the center licensing moneyed agents to lend money to the center, which places the creation of money in control of those moneyed agents, makes the government dependent upon the money-making capacity of those agents, and leads to the propaganda promoting self-interest as the generative logic of social order and wealth. Turning the social order back into a collaborative project, then, taking into account the technology and means of communication and information creation, preservation and dissemination now available therefore entails thinking through the abolition of money, which can only serve centripetal purposes.\n\nThis means thinking through the question of measuring and recognizing contributions to the social order by individuals and institutions. We already have a direct and fully functioning way of doing this: data collection, preservation and analysis. Data now functions, of course, in a way fully contained by the monetary system: so, we have free internet and social media because the owners of these media can make enormous amounts of money by selling our data to those who will sell us things for money. So, data is already working as currency here, in a manner subordinated to the currency generated by state-bank interactions, meaning we can pose the question of whether data can function as currency in such a way as to replace money.\n\nLet’s pose directly the kinds of questions that would need to be answered (or “disabled”) in that case: what would it mean to receive your salary in data? To save data for later use? To, say, buy groceries with data? How is data enabling one to command the use of others’ labor? How would data serve as a basis for calculating, say, the cost of an operation and hospital stay? And no doubt other questions would quickly emerge—but not, at least, how to arbitrage the use of data, or to gamble on its fluctuations.\n\nWe give off data incessantly and, of course, what counts as data depends upon what questions are asked, pursuant to what hypotheses, tied to which recording and measuring devices (that is, what will count as an ostensive sign), within what disciplinary space. So, each of us and, in fact, everything in the universe, is giving all kinds of different data simultaneously, to different recorders, collectors, archivers and inquirers. We are always donating samples, and each and every one of us is a sample, and a sample of samples. Not all data is quantifiable, and a proper understanding of data would pay close attention to the specific spaces within which data is organized—if you greet someone, you are supplying someone with data regarding your intentions, likely subsequent actions, interpretation of their greeting, etc.\n\nYou probably don’t think about it in that way, but you could, and without any necessary diminishment of the encounter or relationship. So, all discourse and knowledge can be rerouted into data, which is why we can simplify things by referring to “selves” and ‘signs” as “samples.” (That there is nothing intrinsically “dehumanizing” about this is demonstrated by the irreducibly comic or satiric dimension such talk will have, along with its high seriousness.) Every interaction (even every solitary action, which must have some effect in the world) is therefore already an exchange of data—as I suggested in the paragraph above, thus far these exchanges of data have been framed within pre-datafied terms, like money, making the problem, again, how to make data exchanges all-inclusive.\n\nSince money itself is recorder and accumulator of data, it’s really a question of diminishing until the vanishing point everything in money that claims a stake external to the production and use of data (to produce data is to use it, to use it is to produce it). To anticipate, this involves the conversion of assets into samples.\n\nI’m presupposing here an order dominated by hypotheses, pedagogy and inquiry; or, “practices” in the sense in which I’ve been using the term (a use indebted but not identical to Alasdair MacIntyre’s). A practice is “doing” something such that you can show afterwards (or, for that matter, in the enactment) that it was in fact done. A practice carries markers of its identification and assessment. If someone is “learning” something we could identify some boundary between what was known before and what was known after the “learning,” and we could point to something that was done so as to produce the difference. We might disagree, but we could agree on what we’re looking for.\n\nPractices are ultimately grounded in language, which always carries with it its own means of “authentification”: we can always discuss meaningfully what it means to follow a command, conduct a conversation, lead the way, answer a question, and so on and when we do any of things we enact a hypothesis regarding the meaning of the word, expression or discourse under the conditions of its enactment. Wherever you are, whomever you’re with, and whatever you’re doing you can always further perfect your practice and those of others. Any practice provides for its successor, he or those who will continue, repurpose, further embed and perfect that practice.\n\nPractices are always dependent upon broader fields of practices, the framing, shaping, interfering with, and interfacing with therefore becomes part of the practice itself. Your practices involve the increasingly refined collection and conversion of data, while also giving off lots of data: the more perfect the practice, the more it gives off both data that can be used to replicate and expand the practice and data that can serve the study of practices more generally. An innovative and successful military leader will produce a generation of successful military leaders, as well as a broader, more generative military culture, and also lots of material for students of warfare but also students of discipline, training, self-mastering differing levels of thinking, and so on.\n\nThe leadership of any social order will want to devote the needed resources to practices like this, and practices like this will attract the most intelligent, disciplined and ambitious social elements. Other practices, institutionalized across the social order, will emulate and strive to outdo such practices. In a sense, this means a constant struggle for primacy within a social order, but since the practices are not equivalent the competition is not a straightforward one for mastery. In a few key institutions that may be the case, but victory, primacy and mastery take on different forms: let’s say the leadership of the Church strives with the military leadership for mastery within a given social order—is it to be a military aristocracy or a “theocracy”?\n\nThe Church’s way of striving is not that of the military, though, and if it is to attain mastery it must be in a way that shapes and constrains the mastery striven for by the military hierarchy—ultimately creating an order in which neither military nor Church dominates, but in which a specific form of “Church militant” rules. We must, of course, factor into the analysis other elites, such as business, scientific, technological, educational and so on, so as to identify a particular synthesis in which each institution attains its form of primacy within the “stack.” Standing on top of the stack is the occupant of the center “curating” the “idiom of intelligence” that results from this specific stack (which in turn might enter into other, transnational or imperial stacks).\n\nThe exchanges within the stack can be readily understood as data exchanges once we presuppose the perfecting of practice as the grammar of the stack. This makes sense of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Practices within the schools provide data taken up in various ways by Church, military, corporate world, scientific enterprises, etc., and the data provided by each individual going through these institutions is taken up other institutions as a measure of that person’s needs and abilities. A student’s performance in the 100 yard dash will be relevant to the military more than to the Church, one imagines, but the Church may make some use of it as well.\n\nWe can assume universal circulation and availability of all data—the very thing that terrifies people now within a malevolent order but would be completely appropriate, desirable and a matter of course in a society governed in accord with “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” A particular type of “needy” person would attract the interest of people with specific abilities, as even now certain students gravitate towards special education. Since everyone is formalized within various institutions in various ways (included families and kinship networks, which give off and use data in their own ways), practices of recruitment and initiation would place people more effectively than differences in salary offered.\n\nWe don’t have to imagine hyper-organized social structures here: even if there were space provided for rural living, individual farming, and ways of living off the grid, sufficient data would be given off by those practices so as to acknowledge them formally. From an individual standpoint, you’re providing both inadvertent data (e.g., regarding your health, consumption patterns, personal interactions) and more deliberately produced data from those practices you’re trying to perfect as a model or starting point for others. In return, other institutions, will orient themselves towards your nutritional needs, health care needs, information regarding family formation, etc., and the data you’re provided with here is also provided to those participating in the perfection of practices of medicine, counseling, and so on, with, somewhere down the line, these being your own practices as well. Everyone supplies at least some data, and can therefore make some claim upon the attention of those whose practices rely on gathering that form of data and data in that form.\n\nSo, you don’t receive a salary and go to the store to buy things—the data you give off attracts and activates others situated within other institutions who are thereby oriented toward meeting your needs and drawing upon your abilities. Those institutions to whom you supply particularly important data supply data to other units so as to meet your needs and a range of needs “similar” to yours. You don’t save money, have credit lines, pensions, etc.—your life-long trajectory is itself a practice of data “harvesting” which designers of homes, neighborhoods, towns and cities draw upon in proposing and implementing ways of living corresponding to specific trajectories.\n\nEveryone, after all, is intensely interested in materializing life narratives. You wouldn’t have “rights” to anything—“rights” are a kind of political equivalent to “assets”—but a social order of hypothesized practices would place a premium on designing new and increasingly refined, precise and comprehensive uses of data, and this would create practices of treating people on both collective and individual levels far better than can provided by any norms of “justice” or “fairness.” I wouldn’t call this a “technocracy” because it can be acknowledged that data is always locally situated, and those “handling” it immediately are always, at least to some extent, better judges of how to assess it than those more distant or privileged to be able to second-guess after the fact.\n\nClearly, a shift in anthropological assumptions is required here—rather than assuming that everyone first of all “looks out for themselves,” we’d need to assume that first of all everyone emulates models. And, then, we’d contribute to creation of a social order in which that assumption is fortified as fact.\n\nData, then, is currency in the sense of being the means of (largely indirect) exchange. We only need to make the assumption that wanting to live within our language provides sufficient motivation for participating in socially beneficial activities. The fundamental assumption here derives from the originary hypothesis itself, which suggests that participation in the paradoxicality of the utterance is the quintessence of the human—it is this assumption that enables us to consider singularized succession in perpetuity as the most promising mode of organizing order—around the emergence of new, anticipated, but always surprising successors/samples.\n\nThe “miracle” that we can see and show each other same thing even though it has never presented itself before provides for the ever tended to designs for deferring violence—hence enabling the culture of emulation referred to in the previous paragraph to continue. Now, the outcome I’m presenting here only takes on its value, and, indeed, is specially designed for, the identification of such practices and data packets within the present order—the broader historical assumption, the most ecumenical one possible, which I argued for in Anthropomorphics , is that humans have not yet solved the problem created by the human occupation of the sacred center, including in its successive attempts through sacral kingship, divine kingship, republican government (the “few” organized against both the “one” and the “many”) popular sovereignty as mediated through the social scientific disciplines, and so on.\n\nWe’re just joining the previous generations in trying to solve the problem of how the center should be occupied and maintained, now in the wake of ample data regarding previous attempts—and all that data is now available to us as we work to transform the energy and intelligence invested in these previous attempts and still residing in their current iterations to the provision of data for the excavation of the elements of singularized succession in perpetuity.\n\nThe basic unit of the capitalist social order is the “asset”—an “asset” is whatever can be, to use Nitzan and Bichler’s terms, discounted against expected future earnings—i.e., the difference between the money you have to spend to own it now versus the money you could sell it for at some future time. The entire social, legal, political and ideological order is organized around the conversion of practices and their products into assets and certitude regarding ownership and control over those assets. A piece of land can be an asset, a factory can be an asset, a stock can be an asset, a part ownership in the contract of an entertainer can be an asset.\n\nAssets can be leveraged so as to acquire more assets, and so as to secure the conditions under which assets in those particular forms will be more highly valued and protected. A specific kind of state-capitalist synthesis emerges in which the state mobilizes its assets to ensure a world of assetization or to survive and flourish within limits in the world dominated by states maximally exploiting the asset form. We can see the division and reduction of practices into assets everywhere—assetization bureaucratically impinges upon and deforms virtually every practice, down through the very language used to describe and. promote it.\n\nNow, assets are, of course, like everything else, already data, but the asset form prevents them from becoming fuller-fledged sources of data for a wider range of practices—whether by restricting their use and the experiments that can performed with them, or by creating forms of data that really function as data within the existing financial system. The conversion of assets into data involves first of all displaying the capital power invested and congealed within a particular asset—a song, a sporting event, a novel, a scientific discovery is real enough, and sometimes good or valuable, sometimes bad or trivial, but it is at the same time a screen against which the capital as power constraining the practice is made visible. Such a practice consistently resists capture by assetization and therefore represents one particular passage out of it.\n\nConverting assets into data also requires intervention in and control of existing forms of currency. Any political party that might be turned into a vehicle for exiting the order which produced it must not only have inscribed in its logic the destruction of all other parties but must, as much as possible, contain with itself a total order in itself—a total order including the use of all available means to protect, defend and struggle alongside its members and supporters—everything from innovative use of defamation, anti-monopoly and other laws, to extensive patronage, to self-defense units should be used unapologetically.\n\nThis very much includes a party currency, modeled, perhaps, on cryptocurrencies, but just as likely on the exclusive “clubs” promoted by credit card companies, and based on varying degrees of contribution to party activities (while also helping those who contribute what they can, on the principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”). The party currency would direct members/users to businesses and activities actually or potentially supportive of or useful to party activities. The boycotts of hostile business and institutions conservatives now lamely endorse could be put on a properly wartime footing.\n\nThis, of course, would require a high degree of accountability and transparency within the party. Currency would be modeled as embedded in a better way of life, including the kinds of data exchanges now considered obnoxious but under different conditions (this is the challenge, at any rate) viewed as a form of reciprocal support, mediated through an emergent center. You’d want to push things to the point where all practices participate in making data as currency—helping secure the majority in some state legislature would entitle one to credits to be used in stores that supply party members in exchange for data regarding shopping habits of party members, which are continually shaped by the new businesses interested in entering an exchange with a guaranteed customer base, extensive legal protections, a political party dedicated to enabling producers to do what they do best, and so on.\n\nYou could never completely evade or replace the existing form of state sponsored currency in this way, but you could put enormous pressure on it and compete with it as you seek to destroy the other parties that must associate themselves with an increasingly despised form or currency and the assetization it serves to protect. In the US, a very clear program for taking over the Republican party, already riven with struggles between the “establishment” and “American Firsters” (itself a kind of struggle of richer practices against assetization), could be designed, and one which would involve extremely productive and fraternal exchanges with the growing American First wing. All interventions and the conversations they create will be, in turn, rich sources of data for the scenic design of party practices of mobilization, intervention, demonstration, attack and defense."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-originary-hypothesis-in-itself",
      "title": "The Originary Hypothesis in Itself",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 17, 2021",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-originary-hypothesis-in-itself",
      "content": "I’m going to take a break from my regular programming (designing a totalizing version of originary thinking that can indelibly embed itself in the culture; more specifically, continuing the discussion of data as currency) to step back and take a look at the thing itself. I’m very grateful for the readers, some of them very thorough and penetrating, I’ve had over the past few years, but at the same time I’ve noticed that, with perhaps a few exceptions, not a one has taken the originary hypothesis as the basis of a self-contained “research project”—one that would engage other discourses and findings, but always on its own terms. Rather, for just about everyone, as far as I can tell, GA has some “interesting ideas,” but interesting ideas are a dime a dozen and eclecticism is a dead end. In a sense, this is “on me” for not yet making GA compelling enough, but it still makes me curious regarding where the “resistance” might be—perhaps GA gets in the way of doing some things that people really like to do.\n\nI’ve heard GA described as very complex, but I don’t see how. The originary hypothesis is easily summed up in a couple of paragraphs, at most, and all it really assumes is that human beings are mimetic creatures. Can anyone really deny that human beings are fundamentally mimetic? How, exactly, do you think you learned to do anything? Can anyone fail to see the logic of imitation leading to rivalry? Again, have you ever watched children, or observed the simplest inter-personal dynamics? I don’t see how any great complexity or difficulty has entered at this point. Once you have a conflict between two people desiring the same thing because they are each taking the other as model and therefore obstacle, that conflict can only be resolved in one of two ways: one defeats the other; the two share the desired object.\n\nThe first case is familiar from any other species; only in the second case could something like a “community” emerge. Perhaps I’m missing something but, again, I don’t see the difficulty here, so I have to say if you don’t see the foundation of human community in some way of sharing commonly desired objects, you don’t want to see it. Perhaps you prefer to see the foundation of community in the defeat of one contestant by the other. OK, but how does that defeat sustain a community? If we’ve found a way to share something, we need to remind ourselves of it every time we do so; the superior strength of one member of the group over another doesn’t need to be commemorated—it’s immediately evident and can simply be repeated or reversed at any time.\n\nI do have to acknowledge that GA is odd in being very similar to a religion and at the same time the exact opposite of one. It is an “origin story,” and it can feel like one is being asked to “believe in” something. If you’re a secular person—and plenty of contemporary “trads” are completely secular in this sense—you’re immediately suspicious of and resistant to being asked to “believe” anything. And if you already “believe” in something, why switch over to this? I don’t see it as a question of “belief” (which I don’t “believe” in), but it does, perhaps, require a willingness to live or think in a kind of “suspense.”\n\nYou have to acknowledge the irreducibility of language to any other kind of signaling, communication or information, and one could never really “prove” once and for all that every sentence we utter was not really programmed by our genetic code. Maybe we’ll discover the code tomorrow. Maybe acknowledging the irreducibility of human language sounds too “postmodern” or something. If you find it essential that language be reducible to logic, the irreducibility of language (or, as a participant in the recently completely GA conference said, “non-fungibility”) is a problem. If language is irreducible, how it is even possible becomes a question you’d have to take seriously, and if you take it seriously, it might disable certain other things you want to believe to be true.\n\nIn this way, the originary hypothesis is similar to a faith, in its incommensurability with any other way of thinking about humanity. If the singularity of language means it must have emerged in an event, then everything must follow from that. Something like a conversion experience may be necessary here: you’d have to be able to abandon and revise all “priors.” Why do that to go off into the wilderness with a hypothesis which acknowledges it can never be proven, and doesn’t promise salvation?\n\nMy answer to that might not be a very helpful one: because otherwise everything you hear yourself or anyone else say is just an echo of other things other people have said, all bouncing around in a closed chamber. Where do all the “we shoulds...” come from? Why should we? Who is the “we” that should? The blanks in the formulas could always be filled in differently. You’d have to want a way out of this, and why would you if the lines you’ve been given provide you with a good role to play? There’s something analogous here to the experience Plato’s cave analogy might be getting at, which is to say that there is a kind of revelatory experience that may be required to “get” GA: that experience would be that of miraculousness of any utterance—to revise Heidegger, that there is speech rather than silence.\n\nThe radical form of this experience is that you are, literally, on the originary scene itself, which has never been “closed,” only sustained and suspended, and that the very next thing you say will be version of the originary gesture that keeps the event in play or a premature attempt at appropriation that will collapse the scene. Is this complex and difficult? Or too demanding? Maybe figuring out what this might mean in a particular case is extremely difficult, and subject to disagreement and ultimately inconclusive, but this, then is the “research program,” the thing that all the talk and all of “history” and “culture” is “about.”\n\nIt’s very hard to imagine building a community around the originary hypothesis. Here is where the Girardians have a huge advantage. Once you identify scapegoating as the predominant but now discredited way of organizing communities, you can organize intellectual and sub-cultural communities around exposing and resisting scapegoating. It’s easy enough to identify who is being scapegoated at a given time, or at least to agree on who is the socially recognized scapegoat, and check and police each other through periodic quasi-ritual cleansings of scapegoating tendencies. Since Girard plugged his mimetic theory directly into Christianity, the Girardian community can be organized as a faction within Christianity, or as a form of leftism with a family resemblance to Christianity.\n\nIt can’t work that way with the originary hypothesis, which “denies” that the initial (if it is “initial”—there’s not quite an originary event for Girard) scapegoating ever took place. There was a center, reinforced by ritual, but now that we can “see through” rituals, but without any founding event that enabled us to do so and that we can commemorate and repeat, there’s nothing to put in its place. There’s always a center (but I’m not sure whether the founder of GA would agree), but post-ritual it can only be a political center, and that doesn’t really serve the same purpose or elicit the same kind of devotion to the transcendent, despite some attempts.\n\nI’ve offered a way of addressing this, as many readers of this essay know, but I’m willing to grant that my elaboration of the originary hypothesis is “complex” and poses some difficulties. On the face of it, taking the originary hypothesis in its bare-boned form, there’s not anything for us to “do.” It’s a new form of inquiry, but only a community of inquirers can be organized around that; now, there are certain thinkers within the philosophy of science who would suggest that a post-ritual community can ultimately only be a community of inquirers, as in Gaston Bachelard’s suggestion that the relation between “school” and “society” be reversed, but here we start to get complex again and that’s going to be a bridge way too far for most people.\n\nThe originary hypothesis doesn’t seem to call for any sacrifices, courage or heroism—it seems pretty bourgeois, best suited for literary and cultural commentary, from academic to middlebrow. It’s certainly hard to imagine any government demanding generative anthropologists renounce their “faith” on pain of persecution, and thereby creating martyrs. The originary hypothesis won’t lead someone to throw themselves between an oppressor and his victim in some dramatic confrontation. It’s hard to be defiant in the name of the originary hypothesis. I would take issue with all this and argue that the originary hypothesis calls for a very high level of courage, one I can’t claim to have exhibited—the courage of saying exactly what needs to be said in a given situation, because it exposes everyone’s mimetic investments, and which therefore no one really wants to hear.\n\nThis kind of utterance is more paralyzing than polarizing, more the creation of obstacles to action than energizing. It’s a non-heroic utterance, because, while unavoidably drawing attention to the speaker, does not accumulate resentment toward the speaker, turning him into a magnetized center—the speaker makes no claim to victimization or to power, just to being in a place where this thing needing to be said can be said this way. Moreover, you’re sure to get it wrong and will only be able to partially correct it if you can pick up enough feedback to feedback to others in turn their now more evident mimetic investments. Nothing very attractive here—just a form of discipline without any necessary reward.\n\nI’ve often thought that a great idea for a documentary would be to just make up a list of questions, ranging from obvious political ones (what do you think about abortion, etc.) to more obscure issues regarding the operations of institutions (e.g., how do you think school administrators made a particular decision)—and then just let people talk at length, following up with questions aimed simply at letting them feel free to keep talking. We would hear the most fantastic things. Who knows, maybe someone has done something like this. I’d like even more to do something like this with language. What do people think language is?\n\nWhy, when you say something to someone else, does the other person “understand”? Does the other person understand? How so, and how do you know? How do we know that others are doing something that entails “making sense” of something? I guess we’d get a lot of versions of “well, it’s worked this way all the other times.” I wonder how often people would stumble upon the sense that there’s something amazing and inexplicable here, and who therefore might be willing to be amazed one more time by the claim that it is explicable, but only in this one way that’s actually quite simple when it’s laid out but that only one person actually thought of—and if he hadn’t, it’s quite possible no one would have. Maybe you’d have to “believe” that every conversation is about how it’s possible to do what we’re doing right now (having this conversation) in order to “convert” to the originary hypothesis.\n\nBut I’ve left one thing out of consideration—the fact that GA has never had the slightest bit of power backing it—it’s just been Gans, joined more or less regularly by maybe a dozen talented and often inventive and ingenious but ultimately mostly conventional academics, and then me. Gans is certainly useless when it comes to thinking about power, whether in theoretical or practical terms—it would be interesting to do a search of all his works and see how many times he has actually used the word. I’ve certainly used it a lot, but I couldn’t say I’m any better in finding it and soliciting its interest. I’ve designed a version of GA precisely to be used by the right kind of power—maybe that means the wrong kind of power must be “allergic” to it.\n\nThat’s either a white pill or a cope, but I don’t see how I could know for sure right now. But it does seem to be the case that no discourse can be powerful enough in itself to compel intellectual and moral devotion without some kind of institutional or organizational “currency”—any discourse looks “poor” if it’s still nothing more than a few guys talking about it. There will be something “missing,” and the need will be felt to supplement it with some name brand. (Still, you’d think at least a few would want to get in on the ground floor of a completely new way of thinking—what with all the talk about start-ups and all. And it’s not too late!) So, I’ve got to work on making the originary hypothesis the equivalent of a (not quite) brand in itself."
    },
    {
      "slug": "there-is-no-economy-substack",
      "title": "There is No Economy",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 23, 2023",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/there-is-no-economy",
      "content": "In the new Anthropoetics :\n\nhttps://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2802/ap2802katzbaker/"
    },
    {
      "slug": "mining-idioms-in-thirdness",
      "title": "Mining Idioms in Thirdness",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 26, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/mining-idioms-in-thirdness",
      "content": "The origin of humanity is the creation of the ostensive sign and the future of humanity is the endless generation of new ostensives. When I speak of “technology” as the stack of scenes, scenic design and the establishment of pedagogical platforms, that is what I am referring to: scenes are designed so as to bring something new into view, something we could point to; scenes are stacked so that each scene can subcontract to other scenes the production of new ostensives out of what is tacit in existing scenes; and pedagogy, or learning, is nothing other than being able to say, jointly with others, “this is the same,” with regard to something that only exists as something to point to because of the configuration of that scene.\n\nWriting, or inscripture, has as its end the generation of idioms, or self-referencing, self-constituting, world creating discourses that maximize the possibility of new ostensives. What I’m writing now should serve to reconfigure some scene I can’t imagine centuries from now. I work with and against David Olson’s concept of metalanguage, as it is instantiated in Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner’s As Clear and Simple as the Truth , predicated on the fiction that reader and writer stand on the same scene with the writer pointing to the doings and happenings on that scene precisely because it is both true as a theory of composition and to be redesigned insofar as it is the scene of metaphysics.\n\nNote that there can be no learning on that scene of writing: both reader and writer are always already configured so as to see what is after all right in front of us and immediately intelligible once seen. That scene starts getting frayed at the edges once we acknowledge that it is constructed and itself a product of technology or the stack of scenes, and that those scaffolding and supplemental scenes can interfere with the “view” offered on this one, and do so irremediably once attention is directed toward them. Now, the basic configuration remains intact, which makes the fiction of the scene of writing so powerful, but now we have several scenes, upon which the writer might be taken to be standing with various readers, some of whom are to be figured as themselves writing on other scenes, which themselves open up.\n\nThis line of thinking gets us to the point where it’s most economical and productive to think of writing for the algorithms that will determine the configuration of all those scenes. If we’re thinking, then, in terms of producing idioms that enter into the algorithms in such a way as to maximize the pedagogical performativity of the most performative platforms (“performative” in the linguistic sense of “doing things with words,” or creating scenes) then the models we’re working with are those of protocols and mining—in the sense of authenticating an exchange in such a way as to generate currency for future exchanges.\n\nThis can be (hypothetically) operationalized through the (hypothetical) Thirdness apparatus. We have here a prediction market, where what is predicted is the judgment to be rendered on actual or potential conflicts articulated as cases. We don’t want to issue odds, so we try and construct cases so as to be as close to even as possible which will often involve constructing cases around conflicts at the margins or what would ordinarily be taken to be the event in question: for example, rather than predicting the result of a trial, or even a would be trial, which will almost always weigh more towards guilty or not guilty, we might construct a case in which we imagine the plaintiff suing a media outlet for incitement for a particular claim about the case.\n\nThese marginal cases, if considered pedagogically, will be more important than the center of the case because they offer routes of circulation back to the tributary center, where data pertinent to the stacking of scenes and preparing the bringing of more cases to more effective judgment (i.e., capping the vendetta on one end and aborting the antinomic vendetta through law, the attack on the nomos, on the other end)  is gathered, filtered, and mapped. Plus, judgment is here a pedagogical site, where the future officer class can learn to transform resentments into social energies.\n\nSo far, I’ve been speaking of this as a bet one would lay down once a case is announced (with a time frame for the case to be studied and judgment rendered)—one is betting on one’s own greater discernment into the case, the knowledge base drawn upon and the intellectual habits of the team involved in rendering judgment. I consider this all to be critical “human capital” development of an unprecedented type. I’ve been thinking about these bets being made in conventional currencies, with tokens or coupons being issued that turn into a specifically Thirdness currency. Since Thirdness aspires to become the world company (either by taking over all other companies or being taken over by a company more capable of actualizing the Thirdness program), it imagines Thirdness currency becoming the only currency.\n\nThis project is not only compatible with but made more precise when conjoined with Brute Computation economic forecasting—investing in and eventually taking over and remaking the most powerful companies would generate myriad new cases—Thirdness assumes the intensive formulation towards ever lower thresholds tending asymptotically towards abolition of the laws of libel, defamation, fraud, slander and incitement in particular. (It might be very interesting to convert intellectual property cases into fraud cases: after all, intellectual property “theft” comes down to presenting as your own work what has been done by others, and the work of sifting through the threads of some intellectual work and determining where due recognition is called for might be less arbitrary than trying to determine who “owns” an idea and the monetary damages owed through “stealing” it—and if the “ideas” are real, public acknowledgement will provide the best material compensation anyway.)\n\nWithout “cases” there is no reality—this cannot be put strongly enough. An anonymous society built up out administrative abstractions which, as Blaise Aguera de Arcas points out in Who Are We Now? , is the source of all of our “identities,” i.e., resentments, which therefore cannot be made visible and accessible other than through cases, which ultimately return to the juridical. All of our intellectual and therefore economic and technological energies come from simultaneously multiplying cases and dissolving them into new tacit norms, and social improvement comes from decreasing the lag between the multiplication and the dissolving to the point where the two approach articulation within single gestures. It is this practice that is in turn to be converted into one of idiom protocols and mining.\n\nWe have this gap between the bet laid and the judgment rendered, and so far this gap is going unutilized. Rather than a simple bet, which has the bettor then waiting passively for the judgment, which then ends the participation of the bettor, instead have the bet set in motion a process involving the bettor. The either/or choice directly present to the bettor is linked through an algorithm (revised with each bet) to previous either/or choices (previous bets). This would tie the individual bet to a logic of continuity that the judgment would, on one level, implicitly reject or confirm, while, on another level, it would redirect that logic or path through the data.\n\nThe bettor could then, in the interim, reject or confirm the paths presented to him, thereby selecting a context for the judgment and the bettor’s judgment on the judgment. It would be like intervening in the weights to be selected as the program works its way through the neural network on the way to the predicted outcome. The judgment by the Thirdness team, then, would rebound back on the path through the data selected by the bettor and in this way function like a kind of appeals court or peer review, even if implicitly (the Thirdness team would not have access to this mining work of the bettor), and in this way add to the weights given to the various paths, rejected and confirmed. Rejected judgments are fed back into the data along with the confirmed ones, functioning as minority opinions that might be retrieved by some future majority. This is how the system learns.\n\nIf we have these various paths from the setting up of an either/or decision and the making of the decision itself, then each of these paths can be generated as a discourse or, in Thirdness terms, idiom, that can be extracted and turned into “exchangeable” language while also being recirculated back into the data. In other words, each path could be turned into a sentence or series of sentences that would articulate the stack of scenes in an iterable way. So, for example, a sentence would construct some relation between, say, a plaintiff suing a media outlet and a judge’s decision on whether to allow evidence enhanced through a machine learning process.\n\nWe could think of this by analogy to the stock of commonplaces ancient and Renaissance rhetoricians collected, repeated, remembered, varied and so on in the course of producing their discourses. This is material to think with. These mined idioms can then function as currency within the Thirdness system or, first of all, metacurrency, since we’re still assuming traditional bets using conventional money. The idioms, which come first to the bettor who mined them, give that bettor access, only some of which need reach awareness, to the system of weights within the system—the idioms would eventually filter back into the system and become available in some integrated form, but would nevertheless provide a temporary, but very important, advantage to its holder (or hodler, if we like).\n\nMining idioms has Thirdness more closely approximate a mode of central intelligence pegged to singular succession in perpetuity. We’re learning along with the machine now. If we read Peirce in a radical way, every utterance not only makes a prediction or proposes a certain probability regarding future events but weighs in on that probability—it’s not too hard at this point in history to see that predictions are really ways of increasing the likelihood that something will or won’t happen. We can start to think in terms of an exhaustively performative language, in the sense of utterances that don’t mean but make things happen.\n\nHere, language, technology and currency all converge—what is tacit and probable is made more explicit and more probable by excluding from one’s discourse anything that doesn’t intimate a particular way of increasing explicitness and probability. This is not cynical rhetoric, where you try to manipulate people within a particular scene and hope they don’t realize they’ve been manipulated until you’re safely off the scene. Those are the idioms that don’t last or get minted. I’ll return to the concept of “inscripture” here, and frame it in terms of the more familiar question of what makes a particular text last—what makes for a “classic”?\n\nWe can’t separate the intrinsic qualities of the text or work from the institutional structures embedded in traditions that perpetuate certain understandings, interpretations, exchanges, pedagogies, rituals and so on around the work. (An interesting experiment—perhaps there is some Borges story like this?—would be to apply all the canon-making firepower on some utterly mediocre text and see what it would take, what kinds of contextual complexity would need to be constructed, to confer upon it the needed profundity. Of course, there are people who would attack much, if not all, of the existing canon along these lines.)\n\nUp until modernity writers and artists (and there were never that many of them) could anticipatorily curate their work by situating themselves within communities and networks of patronage that increased the likelihood of the perpetuation of their work. It was probably very rare that one became an artist without serving some kind of apprenticeship within such communities and networks—maybe it wouldn’t even occur to one. Now, the proof of concept and work of an idiom would have to be meme-ological, that is, your idioms need to be able to fit into and eventually replace existing discourses. There will be a qualitative dimension to such idioms—they can’t be gossip or topical insults.\n\nThey need to withstand sustained anthropological scrutiny. They need to be able to convert opposing theses into samples testifying to their own reality. They need to infiltrate all disciplines. They need to consist of a tissue of overlapping and inter-referencing mini-arguments that reinforce without simply repeating each other. Maybe the best way of summing all this up is in terms of the irreversible and undeniable impact the system of idioms would have on a Large Language Model—an impact that is predictable to the extent one has mastered the mode of idiom generation itself and that in the same proportion contributes to greater mastery.\n\nThe equivalent of a community and network of patronage today would be a company designed to provide intelligence useful in proportion to one’s proximity to power and one’s commitment to making singular succession in perpetuity more likely and imminent. That is the institutional framework within which the asymptotically self-abolishing idioms of Thirdness can operate and proliferate. But this institutional framework itself needs to be organized so that discourse flows accountably into upper level decisions or decisions that could understudy upper level decisions—that is, the institution has to be a pipeline, an ongoing dress rehearsal for governance and intelligence operatives.\n\nThat’s what Thirdness aims at—in the meantime, oscillations in our approximation to such conditions indexes the meaning of our idioms. Approximate speaking only of the 50/50 splits as I explored in The Same Sentence , focusing on cases and the cases within cases and the cases behind cases and you will be idiom mining. That, then, is the protocol: keep further approximating making every declarative claim about something in the world that is equally likely and unlikely to be the case, or, more precisely, build performativity into the declarative (embed it with imperatives) in such a way that reality will be permitted to unfold until either one out of two ostensives could be equally reasonably predicted or, again, to be more precise, an a scene around either of two ways of saying “this is the same” can be imagined with an equivalent number of choreographable moves in either case."
    },
    {
      "slug": "downstream-of-the-imperative",
      "title": "Downstream of the Imperative",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 7, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/downstream-of-the-imperative",
      "content": "The imperative is a vast, unexplored territory. There is first of all the enormous continuum, from precise imperious command, backed by unimaginable force and the will to use it and supervise the results, through requests and demands containing various loopholes and room for interpretive maneuver, all the way to pleas, perhaps for nothing more than the strength to endure what one is suffering, which perhaps contains a kind of feedback loop wherein the weakest imperative constructs the entity capable of offering relief from the strongest one, thereby shifting the terrain of the imperative to the constructs of selving.\n\nAll along this continuum the “panel” of reciprocally empowering agencies shifts, in a vast array of high/middle/low “settings.” I’ve spoken about this on a general level many times before (but maybe not in a while, so it would be hard to find a good link), looking forward to a more precise and layered study, along the lines of Peirce’s enormously complex semiotic systems (stacking icon/index/symbol in as many ways as possible), but perhaps it would be mistaken to demand or command that (but, not to be discouraging, perhaps it would be a generative mistake). Another thing about the imperative is how hard it is to step outside of it—attempting to do so simply involves obeying another imperative—since the imperative is completely bound up in its fulfillment, and in its raveling up with convergent imperatives eddying off from the center.\n\nThe reliance of any utterance on the possibility of a verifying ostensive somewhere down the road is what makes language irreducibly performative (and therefore demands that performativity be made explicit and central) but the imperative amplifies and activates that performativity and makes it technological. So, it might be better to get into the habit of excavating the protocols implicit in our samplings than attempt an extensive mapping of the imperative.\n\nThe Nietzschean question here is how we issue imperatives to our successors, which is the only way of making life meaningful, in the strict sense of the signs we emit finding their ways toward shared ostensives (which is what “meaning” means). The only way to do so is by hearing and acting on imperatives from our predecessors, which might mean retrieving imperatives not meant for us (and, then, issuing imperatives for we know not whom). The most basic imperative our predecessors issue us is not to forget them, which means to commemorate and imitate them. This is an overwhelming and impossible command, not only because of the vast (and by now disappeared, or dispersed in traces) databanks required, but because so many different predecessors are demanding so many different and incommensurable modes of attention.\n\nThe destruction of kinship and gift relations by the articulation of the central bank and intelligence agencies in the “Anglican” world offers the possibility of writing off these more archaic debts in horizontal exchange relations where you only need to maintain creditable books in the going currency. This has left the field open for that massive vendetta against civilization using all the means afforded by civilization that we call the “Left,” which leverages debts from the past in the form of retrieving the pleas for remembrance and commemoration deposited in the margins of the historical record designed to consign them to oblivion.\n\nThis is the energy source of resentment on the Left, one which is easily accessed in the present and projected into the future in the form of speaking for those we will not allow to be forgotten today. This practice is what makes it possible to keep producing new excluded, oppressed marginalized agencies with entire backstories to be constructed regarding “our” failure to have recognized them. In this way, one end of the imperative spectrum—the mere plea for remembrance—gets played off against the other, the unilateral, “tyrannical” regimentation and discarding of those we are commanded to forget.\n\nIt is usually the “Right” that is taken to be more locked into memories and commands from the past, but the Right, in the post-monarchical world (there is no left vs. right in monarchy, as how could the king be either one or the other?), is really just the anti-Left, and so commemoration is mostly reactive—and the proof of this is that such memories never become slingshots hurling imperatives into the future. The terrain of Left v Right, still an unavoidable frame, can be sorted out on the terrain of the imperative more productively, though. Most minimally, the Right places order and authority first, before (or instead of) such imperatives as equality, justice, rights, and so on.\n\nFrom the standpoint of social ontology, this is obviously correct, and is just a way of saying the center precedes all. But, to continue the commemoration of Nietzsche, once order and authority are simply responding to the ongoing revolution, they are turned back on the past and can issue no imperatives to the successors. Of course, at the center of the revolution there is always a kind of order and authority, articulated precisely through the commemoration of leaders and, especially, martyrs, of the past (look at how insistently and fervently leftists ritualize the memory of those who have purportedly been sacrificed in their name; the closest the right has come to something like this was a spate of Reagan-namings the Republicans managed to muster up the energy to push through over a couple of decades). This is how you commandeer the entire language.\n\nThe Right has its own revolutionary origin, though—the Big Man revolution, which involved the astonishing usurpation of the center by an individual who then becomes a center of distribution. The Big Man revolution is one of the great centerings in the early years of GA by Eric Gans, who took over the concept from Marshall Sahlins (a mentor to and collaborator with David Graeber, so we have interesting affiliations—debt relations—here) and then—did nothing with it. But we can trace history (with infinite variations and complications through, e.g., media history, of course) from the Big Man, to the chief, to the sacred king, to the divine emperor, and then to the Axial Age which, for my purposes here, can be seen as the furthest extension of the imperative continuum where pleas to the King beyond earthly kings become a new generative ritual and juridical kernel.\n\nI can then say I’m continuing the Big Man revolution so as to provide for a meeting place with the leftist enemy on the field of the imperative. The imperative is the space where there is only non-adjudicable accountability, i.e., accountability irreducible to compensation (irreducible to the debt and money form), which is to say accountability that takes the form of removal from power. This is the terrain of the police power, but also of administration, and of “special operations,” where, however extensive the legal guardrails, at a certain point one makes the law one’s own—which means it’s not really “law” anymore.\n\nThe left has a particular relation to the imperative—their MO is to insist upon the absolute accessibility of the imperative to the declarative, in the form of a judgment that is presumed to derive directly from a universally accepted principle inscribed in authoritative institutions. In this way the imperative, insofar as it must depart from complete legibility by any authorizing legal structure, is always already criminal (drawing, of course, on the by now unthought extensions of the post-war Nuremberg trials) (the reference here to the concept made famous by Derrida can serve as a reminder of his late and ineffectual attempts to delve into this area of law and politics).\n\nAnd it was the blood of those martyrs that made those institutions authoritative within the system closed by the US victory in WW 2, and which through further development provides the left with the margins of discretions it needs. As, in essence, a kind of traveling prosecution with an unlimited remit, the left is free to issue all the imperatives it likes (every utterance of the left is a kind of subpoena). So, it is this constellation that needs to be broken up, or perhaps deactivated, so as to continue the Big Man revolution, or what I called in Anthropomorphics “centered ordinality.” And this work must be done in this space downstream of the imperative, both widening that space of discretion and making explicit its intrinsically hierarchical (ordering) nature. We want posts whose occupants can only be replaced by a higher authority, not put on trial by those who cannot be their peers.\n\nWhen you are, say, policing a violent protest and need to determine what kind of force is necessary to arrest some vandal or assailant, and you close in, assessing the situation… that’s when you’re stepping into that zone inaccessible to the law, which could not anticipate that particular situation in the necessary detail—so, any judgment after the fact will be more political than juridical, mediated by media power, precisely because you were authorized by the law in the first place. In pre-Axial Age terms, there is no reason the state wouldn’t just have tanks plow through the demonstration and flatten everyone—there would be no higher judgment to prohibit what would in a sense be the obvious move, and it would, after all, make such demonstrations far less likely in the future.\n\nOne reason for not resorting to such a move now would be that states that have, let’s say, incorporated the full imperative spectrum into their operations, rely upon the feedback provided by public displays, or, more realistically (or cynically) have found such displays to be a functional mode of inter-elite communication; also, with a wider range of preventive and punitive measures available (surveillance, protection of targets, seizure of assets, criminal record interfering with career prospects, etc.) adopting such crude measures would, paradoxically, be a sign of weakness. It is precisely in those preventive measures becoming ever more widely available to states (and not only states), and that terrify in equal measure left and right, where the space of the imperative opens up.\n\n(I’ll mention that much of the populist, anti-establishment right has adopted the exact same demand for the full transparency of the imperative before the declarative that the left has monopolized for a century or so.) The operations of surveillance, in particular, which multiplies ostensives to the point of full social coverage, “calls for” (commands) the elaboration of a commensurate network of imperatives—constraints that would be governed by the imperative to make the data gathered through surveillance richer and more precise so as to enable the installation of the full spectrum of the imperative order (from unyielding rigor to mercy, grace and forgiveness).\n\nThe asymptotic abolition of policing and, for that matter, administration, imagined in a couple of recent posts would then be enacted through the matching of legibility and constraint. I’ll introduce here this reminder that this is what abolishing liberalism means—replacing endless suspicion of the government (which really just accelerates the competition over control of the government) with infiltration of the government and articulating the nomos, the juridical and the disciplinary. But what about abuses of power and authority! You will not be able to show that what even you see as abuses will run more rampant under some system you devise (or any present one you think you can describe) than under the one described here.\n\nOne addresses “abuses” by treating them as imperatives that pose difficulties of fulfillment because they’re at cross purposes with other imperatives and you work to build spaces within the imperative spectrum so as to make the stream of imperatives more consistent and, indeed, sustain that full spectrum. And this will always come down to data security, which can now be formulated as the commensuration (the reduction to a common, albeit always adjusted, measure) of data (everything collected through screens, texts, and other sensory mechanisms) and the treatable cases they can or cannot be made part of. In this way we can issue actionable imperatives to the future even, if only in the traces we can with increasing deliberation lay out, the distant future—continue this work of commensuration, continue the work of data collection, differentiation and security (the way someone “felt” at a given, “unique” moment, is also data and can and has found its way into “storage” through memoirs, literature, film, and so on—all also data, requiring specific reading protocols).\n\nSee more, feel more, experience more, while at the same time finding ever new ways of framing and drawing out the implications of it all in the stack of scenes. We can assume that the possibility of authorized figures having to physically close in on someone in unpredictable circumstances will also never be abolished once and for all—trying to do so only brings into clearer focus the anthropological and historical conditions under which the unexpected event takes place and training for even such rare occurrences will remain routine for a significant part of the population and will continue to serve as preparation for drawing wide ranging implications from those rare occurrences.\n\nMachine learning or AI, especially in the Large Language Models, provides ways of entering the intentions of our predecessors and prolonging those intentions into imperatives inscribed in the stack for our successors. Those simplistic and easily caricatured questions, like “what would Jesus do,” in fact now become both answerable and potentially extraordinarily complex. Drawing upon all available data for a particular figure—their doings, writings, utterances, remembrances of others, responses by others, various legacies, etc.—and running that data through all the institutional transformations that have taken place since can initiate conversations with those figures that would both preserve their otherness and make them speak to us.\n\nThe most important enterprises will involve training AIs to do precisely that, by filtering the curated data of the intention we wish to prolong through a series of weights comprised of other intentions—asking how, e.g., George Washington would address today’s federal bureaucracy would require drawing out a very long thread from Washington’s tenure to Biden’s. Where, exactly, would Washington be with us; or, with whom would he be? Would we be training leaders on the Washingtonian model? Building Washington apps for insight into various situations? Settling (or teasing out further implications of) some of the debates between his cabinet members, which after his Presidency exploded into partisanship?\n\nMight we create a kind of Washingtonian currency that would provide a language in which we formulate reciprocal obligations? We’d be getting at the proper uses of history for life precisely by asking questions that keep us squarely within the imperative spectrum. In prolonging imperatives into these kinds of questions that prepare us to make probing demands upon the data we join in prolonging the imperative of the center further into the future by commanding our successors to continue our building beyond what we could recognize by forgiving our unpaid debts to the center (forgiveness is really just calling off all the collection agencies because they tend to take on the form of new vendettas which lock us into issuing overly specific commands to our successors)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-political-infrastructure-of-judaism-the-inscription-of-the-reality-and-vanit",
      "title": "The Political Infrastructure of Judaism: The Inscription of the Reality and Vanity of Empire",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 19, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-political-infrastructure-of-judaism",
      "content": "This post is a further development of my Cybernetics of Judaism , and drawing out further implications of the hypothesis of J udaism as the longest, most convoluted, revised and thickly imagined title deed possible (and therefore, interestingly, a highly idiosyncratic social contract theory which, while scandalous, is no less implausible than any of the others). I am clearly taking a very directly political approach to Judaism, disregarding the more familiar theological and moral questions usually involved in such discussion—questions I consider far downstream of Judaism’s unique relation to empire. I still maintain the position articulated in Anthropomorphics and quite a bit prior to that that we need to see Judaism (and Christianity—I’m more cautious about Islam) as a kind of anti-imperial imperialism, positing a locus of judgment and punishment above while modeled on the divine king, and a locus of judgment asserted to be as universal as that of the most ambitious worldly emperor: here is where I see the origin of what at any point I might resume calling “super-sovereignties.”\n\nAll of my political thinking takes as its point of departure the Big Man revolution, the occupation of the center, which transformed humanity in ways second in significance only to the originary event itself—while being just as irreversible. I’ll round out these introductory remarks by referring to the figure of this new locus of judgment: the member of the elite subjected to or taking on an injustice so grievous and incommensurable with any existing remedy as to place the entire system on trial, albeit with a delayed, indirect and intangible judgment that takes shape in the peoples formed through the revelation constituted by such an event.\n\nThis figure has deep roots in Jewish scripture, starting with Moses (if not earlier with Joseph and maybe Abraham) and oscillates constantly between more and less successful versions (there remains a “precarity” even to the successful figures) extending to elites like Mordechai in the Book of Esther—I think Jesus could be shown to fit the model, if less obviously, which is then pervasive in Western culture (and probably elsewhere as well). All political discourse and problems in the post-imperial world (i.e., a world predicated on a kind of automated rotation at the center) can be reduced to this constellation, and this is part of the reason things very often come back to the Jews: “antisemitism” is really about giving a name to hidden sources of power, which in the West always involves some kind of “prosecution” of “tyrants.”\n\nMy title here encapsulates what seems to me specific about the Jews within this constellation. Acknowledging the reality of empire probably doesn’t seem very exceptional—who doesn’t? Anyone, I would say, who grounds political legitimacy on the governed rather than conquest and control over a territory—if you think individual rights, collective rights or the consent of the “people,” however imagined, is the basis for owing obedience to the government, then you see empire as of secondary reality, which ultimately means seeing it as not real. But does Judaism “believe” what I have just presented as the basis of imperatives to be obeyed?\n\nNo doubt many political theories have been and can be extracted from the texts and traditions comprising Judaism, but when I say “acknowledgment” I don’t mean “belief”—rather, I mean something like “takes as an immovable, irresistible predicate of any mode of community.” Judaism is “founded” on the Jews as a minority community within, dependent upon, and covenanted with, some imperial power, and this is reflected thoroughly in its ritual and legal order, most powerfully in the “title deed” (with specific conditions to be met) to the Land of Israel, even if that deed inscribes memories and anticipations of Jewish or Hebrew independence in those orders.\n\nNietzsche was right to counterpose Judea to Rome—the creators of Judaism, first of all the rabbis and other “archivists” who composed the Mishnah did precisely that, viewing Rome as model, rival, and unalterable horizon of political thought and activity.\n\nTo speak of the “vanity” along with the “reality” of empire adds a degree of complexity and distinctiveness to Judaism, especially with regard to Christianity, which both unconditionally embraced empire and converted itself into a kind of empire. Empire is inevitable—and it will never be “ours”—but each particular empire is doomed to fall and be replaced by an equally doomed empire, making it, ultimately not as serious as… what, exactly? Part of the acknowledgment of the vanity of empire is the recognition that one’s own place in that empire is fundamentally precarious—one might get tossed at any time from one empire to another.\n\nWhat lasts is what transcends and ultimately determines the fate of any empire, and that is what “God” is in Judaism (such is my hypothesis). God is he who will be with us as empires fall and we are removed from one and brought into another. Jews are, paradoxically, an eternal sign of precarity. Jewish political memories are of times when Judea or Israel was squeezed between competing empires, tossed and turned between them, making what invariably (and maybe unavoidably) seem to have been unfortunate alliances with one or the other. And projections of the Messianic future have God, not Jews, as king of the world, while Jews are just restored to their national existence within its old boundaries.\n\nThis articulation of the reality and vanity of empire produces an oscillation between obsequiousness and irreverence toward the governing powers—one can’t avoid or evade them but should never take them too seriously either. This oscillation takes the form of a divide within the Jewish community between the upper levels which have always worked with the rulers in “keeping accounts” in one manner or another, and the lower levels which see the operations of power in its less “presentable” forms.\n\nThe inscription of this articulation of the reality and vanity of empire is most important—again, I am not speaking of “beliefs” but of a ritual and legal order, and a very elaborated one at that. Here is a good place to emphasize the hypothetical nature of my claim here—I have enough knowledge of Jewish history, texts, rituals, and law to say something about them but also to know how much I don’t know. My hypothesis would be a heuristic for further research and study—it might help us to notice things and find patterns that would have otherwise gone undetected—maybe it would assist in designing search terms for corpora of Jewish texts, most of which I imagine must be online at this point.\n\nJewish law and ritual are obviously designed to maintain Jews as a separate community under conditions where all kinds of necessary interactions with surrounding communities mitigate against doing so. I’m suggesting, then, that we could look at a particular ritual, or holiday, or celebration, or legal dispute, and see it as marked by the tension between the reality and vanity of empire and the specific Jewish task of maintaining or serving as a “witness” to that tension. I continue to work with the assumption drawn from Bernard Lamborelle , mentioned most recently in Cybernetics of Judaism , that we can locate the origins of Jewish covenant making, and therefore Judaism, in a covenant between “Abram” and an “earthly lord,” binding Judaism to service of empire; but, at the same time, the story of Abraham’s defense of Sodom and Gomorrah, and his argument that the cities should be saved if even ten good men could be found within it (“for their sake”) marks empire by the “remnants” that it must always produce, and that a fellow remnant is equipped to recognize.\n\nThe emperor is to be just, and we can and must demand this of him, even if futilely, perhaps ridiculously, but something in even the most pathetic witnessing to injustice outlasts the gains of the injustice itself—a record is being kept, in the books and even the bodies of scribal people—even, I hypothesize, those of its mostly non-practicing members. This mixture of complicity and “advocacy” can be infuriating to others but, I would emphasize, far more so when power is unaccountable than when we know where the imperatives are coming from and that they are mostly fulfilled. The specific dynamics of the war against the Jews are set by the opening Christian insistence that Jews should not exist and that therefore extraordinary explanations are required for the fact that they continue to do so (with the logical conclusion being that “only Jews do things,” as the new internet meme has it) but how, when, and with what intensity this dynamic is “triggered” depends upon the extent to which hidden powers seem to determine (or can be represented by those possessing sufficient media power as determining) events.\n\nJudaism, then, is located in the imperative gap (between the issuance and enactment of the imperative), which it transformed into the possibility of the highest judge being subject to judgment by God, which eventually became “History.” This location suggests a power behind the scenes and as a result it becomes easy to identify Jews themselves with that power behind the scenes. Jews, due to their proximity to governance are always “disproportionately” represented in positions of power or subject to erasure, expulsion or extermination—there’s no “normal” in between. In this oscillation, which is really a wild swing, we can see the articulation of the reality with the vanity of empire.\n\nIt is also in this imperative gap that modern liberalism or, I think more precisely, the entire desacralized world created by the British in the late 17 th century is situated—this is the site of the super-sovereignties requiring that sovereign action be supervised, regulated and certified by authority derived from the disciplines. Power is increasingly centralized while rotation at the top is normatively rotated—this is a material embedment of the reality and vanity of empire—the “most powerful man in the world” will be a somewhat ridiculous retiree in a few years’ time. In the wake of emancipation Jews were well equipped to enter the disciplines and operate them along these lines, and Anglo “soft power,” pre-existing and contributing to the French Revolution, came to take on a “Jewish” character” (thereby also producing a softer target).\n\nJudaism is not so much a claim or theory regarding the reality and vanity of empire as it deeply mimics that dynamic. Judaism is much more practice than theory—there has always been something like theory supplementing the practice but the theory comes to stand in for the practice when or among those for whom practice is declining. There is a “theoretical” distinction in Judaism between strictly ritual and moral/ethical commandments—for example, you can violate the Shabbat to save a life—but the ritual rules, as subject to legal disputation as moral and ethical ones, serve to set boundaries around the community that in turn make it possible to discuss moral and ethical issues within what can be taken as a civic or political space.\n\nInterestingly, there is very little if any enforcement built into the body of Jewish law—there’s no real punishment for, say, turning on the light on Saturday—which means that ostracism, or “herem” (which certainly has its harder and softer varieties), is presumed to be enough, but that in turn presupposes external governance to which the use of force can be outsourced. Autonomy, vulnerability and dependence are built into the Jewish community in its relations with its outside. I’m assuming or hypothesizing that Jewish ritual can be interpreted along these lines at a more granular level. It may be possible to test this hypothesis in Israel, where much of the religious community still practices its relation to the Israeli state along lines similar to those it would practice them toward any other state while demographic changes require Israel to move more vigorously towards integrating secluded orthodox communities into the military and economy. We may see how rigorous versions of Jewish law can operate through recognition of a specifically Jewish state, i.e., a Jewish mini-empire that is simultaneously a vassal state amongst global empires.\n\nMaking Jewish law in its entirety “interoperable” with the system of centralized currency issuance (the outside spread) and central intelligence (the monitoring and manipulation of the outside options) would require deploying, so to speak, resources towards the reality of empire while holding insistence on its vanity in abeyance (while allowing the latter sensibility to attune us to what might be inside options). In other words, Jews will have to own the power they obviously have, if for no other reason than to counter accusations of abusing power they don’t have. If Jewish citizenship in the US becomes qualified in more or less explicit ways (I would anticipate at least some reversion to pre-WW 2 patterns of social segregation and tension) then the Jewish community will depend upon Jewish law being made more comprehensive and inclusive, even if not necessarily less rigorous.\n\nBringing into focus the supersovereignties and “thematizing” them within Jewish law, probably starting with the relation Jews have to the juridical order itself, would provide a real test for new ways of articulating difference and participation, and thereby perhaps modeling broader uses of kinship in intermediary ways. If a significant shift of Jewish politics, especially at its upper levels, towards the right, is in fact in the works, that would encourage a rethinking of Jewish community along lines that would enable Jewish thinking to filter out all the leftism that has entered into all but the most ultra-orthodox forms of Judaism over the past couple of centuries, and what remains might look very different and open to active intervention.\n\n“Inscribing the reality and vanity of empire” brings out the technological foundation of Judaism—its tabernacling, we could say. Judaism can be further built to detect and respond to any movement towards enacting fantasies of the non-reality of empire, by now entrenched within the “occupation” politics from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matters and MeToo and now Free Palestine—all aim at cutting through juridical and pedagogical circuits so as to enact a new distribution. The assumption is that empire is just a violent crust imposed on naturally benevolent “peer-to-peer” relations. Judaism is well-equipped to permanently disable all such movements by enhancing the coherence of juridical categories like fraud, incitement and slander that have frayed (and more in politicized cases) over the part 60 years or so—those legal categories are as enduring and universal, at least within an imperial frame, as anything humanists have ever wanted to inscribe as the human.\n\nThis is to a great extent a data collecting and analysis enterprise and a good way of keeping yourself honest as well. A newly coherent Judaism might be able to restore the herem (~excommunication) for Jews siding with the enemy (and maybe instituting a form of atonement—a little addition to the Yom Kippur litany?—for Jewish contributions to such movements). Remembering the vanity of empire focuses attention on how dangerous these fantasies are, while also opening up the possibility of new programs for sustaining and creating forms of centered ordinality (the originary infrastructure of any order, including empire) that those given to complacency about empire could never imagine.\n\nStart-ups are proto-empires, and mediators of governance, as Jews have always been, and are needed to propose and try out start-up forms of governance—Israel itself should be completely transformed into a start-up in governance, as part of inscribing the Jewish anomaly in a new approach to Jewish law that recognizes the partial abolition of the diaspora. Bringing the complexity of inquiries into and debates over Jewish law (which reach systematically into questions of technology and commerce in very distinctive ways that ask what particular arrangements do for a very specific purpose) into the network of surveillance and buffering of “pre-violent” movements would produce conversations worthy of those instructions for building the tabernacle in the desert.\n\nThe ritual labor that went into the conversion of a land title granted by a local emperor into a covenant with the God of history who transcends all empires undergirds the Jewish claim to the land of Israel. This is admittedly bizarre, because it’s absolutely unique—no other social group would attempt to press such a claim, and it is not interoperable with any other theory of legitimate governance. Obviously there’s no reason for Arabs or Muslims to accept it. The Jewish claim to Israel then gets collapsed into a more familiar right of self-defense, as all actions taken by Jewish agencies and then governance have at least a kernel of self-defense—even in the early 20 th century when there were maybe 90,000 Jews in what was to become Mandate Palestine those Jews had a right to defend themselves against violence which ramped up in 1929, if not sooner.\n\nAnd part of that self-defense involved bringing in more Jews, which doubled as self-protection against the Nazi-occupied continent. And then the acquisition of assets to maintain self-defense of a growing Jewish community ultimately lands Israel in the same position of a qualified autonomy via collaboration with imperial power. This is easily branded as hypocritical, and fits into longstanding accusations against the Jews for being “materialistic.” Yes, the Arab and Muslim states have always wanted to destroy Israel but also, yes the battle has always been “unfair” because Israel brought modernity to region through what must have been experienced as shock tactics deployed by more modern community against communities utterly unprepared for the challenge.\n\nThe Jewish people have historically played a role analogous to Jesus—that of a sacrifice to what transcends empire (that which testifies to empire’s transience in a scene that reroutes hierarchy to degrees of renunciation of empire in the name of God)—but without offering themselves up as a willing sacrifice. So, the Jews want “credit” for being scapegoated while also possessing and deploying power to mitigate and if possible even abolish that scapegoating. Again, very hypocritical and annoying, and incommensurable with the neatness of political theories based on “consent.” Jewish power is real but it’s also interesting that no one ever really tries to measure it.\n\nAny attempt to do so would find wild fluctuations and lots of “dark matter.” All those images showing (often enough erroneously and maliciously) all the Jews in positions of power in government, the media, finance and elsewhere prove, if anything, the opposite of what they claim—why would the dictators of the world staff middle management in this way? There’s no formulation of the accusation of Jewish people that doesn’t come down to the need to eliminate them because of all the things they do to prevent us from eliminating them. AIPAC seems to be an especially effective lobby (but compared to which other lobbies?) with a laser focus and therefore especially annoying, but its effectiveness presupposes a limited range of options within a broad consensus among military and intelligence institutions—AIPAC has a “stranglehold” on pushing US policy toward one among those few options, and even there they often fail (self-promotional claims about their vast power made for fund-raising purposes again prove the opposite of anti-Israel assertions).\n\nAnd, yet, try and take AIPAC out of the equation without creating an entirely new free speech regime, one that would essentially ban lobbying as such (i.e., “petitioning” the government)—you won’t be able to do it, which means that complaints about AIPAC are themselves performative and serve fund-raising and other purposes (if an American citizen is not allowed to say that the US should see Israel as an asset there would be many other things we wouldn’t be allowed to say—unless you want a Jewish exception, because, after all, the Jews consider themselves an exception—but, then, aren’t you deforming the system in the way you say Jews do?).\n\nAll this is the reality and vanity of empire, which is to say, the powerful urge to speak of anything other than governance, inscribed at every point in the “Jewish,” internally and in Jewish-Gentile relations. You’re owed a pound of flesh because the ledgers don’t quite balance but try and collect it without killing the body. If it weren’t for Netanyahu, if it weren’t for AIPAC, if it weren’t for Israel, if it weren’t for Jews, things would add up—we would have commensuration among the people and between the people and their representatives. Follow the language of those who merely “criticize Israeli government policies” and see whether I’m describing its logic accurately. Jews should not exist and yet all existence is held together by the insistence that they shouldn’t exist. This logic matches the gap between power and legitimacy, and the Jews serve as a meter measuring this gap."
    },
    {
      "slug": "reconstituting-kinship",
      "title": "Reconstituting Kinship",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 31, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/reconstituting-kinship",
      "content": "The development of the imperial center, i.e., the state, is gradual process of demolition of kinship—monetization, the juridical and the disciplines all take kinship, where blood feuds and vendettas continually regenerate, to be the crucial obstacle to their own installation. Only in this way can the state have direct access to the application to each individual, as an individual, of regulated force. The state has been very successful in this regard, but it remains the case that wherever the state’s power does not reach, or has been withdrawn from, kinship will re-emerge, in the form of gangs, organized crime, neighborhood-based ethnic networks or otherwise, suggesting its resiliency; even more important, the honor system, in which the patriarch takes responsibility for actions of all those over whom he exercises violence, and each individual is expected to be prepared to display loyalty to the family head regardless of the cost, represents a tacit infrastructure needed to make liberalism cohere, as all the virtues felt to be lacking in liberal orders, anything that would prevent each and every one of us from selling out at each moment to the highest bidder in the market order, has its substrate in the honor system.\n\nPerhaps one could say that the honor system, or kinship, needed to be curtailed this far and no further, but who could have known how to draw the line—once kinship is marked as the enemy, uncovering new layers of resistance in it to liberalism will remain a well-subsidized specialty in the disciplines. The never-ending war against kinship constitutes a new kind of vendetta, constitutive of the left, which wages war on the juridical and the disciplinary precisely in the name of reliance of these civilizing institutions on an honor substrate. “Race” has served as a kind of right-wing retrieval of kinship, but one which relegates it to a hygienic state without distributing responsibility back to family networks, but that failure only accentuates the importance of reconstituting kinship as an indispensable part of the texture of power.\n\nAnything can be framed in juridical terms, but as few things as possible should be—drilling the juridical all the way down to each elemental human interaction draws the disciplinary in its wake with the paradoxical result that juridical responsibility itself is evacuated and transferred to the disciplines. For the sake of the juridical itself, the threshold above which events and resentments become of juridical interest needs be raised to the point where lower levels of remediation have been exhausted. You can’t rely upon people unused to exercising a full range of responsibilities; even for the purposes of data gathering formalized sites of judgment below the juridical must be multiplied—the juridical was not designed to settle disputes between parent and child over curfew times, and parents prohibited from making such decisions will ultimately be useless as reliable witnesses and defenders of everyday norms.\n\nI can’t think of another way of filling up these sub-juridical layers other than kinship, and so any political thinking outside of the terms of liberal democracy must take up the question. Scattered elements of contemporary conservative politics point in this direction, but the insistence on preserving the nuclear family and parental rights against overweening bureaucratic intervention driven by activists who see very clearly what is at stake in breaking up the last remnants preserved in such forms already presupposes the unthinkability of kinship. Kinship means that you are held responsible, in some material way, for what your cousin does, and no one in contemporary politics could imagine thinking along those lines.\n\n(Interestingly, the closest I’ve seen any contemporary politician speak in kinship terms is the kind of remarks Trump occasionally makes about American Jews being “disloyal” in failing to support Israel.) Nor has “race realism” ever, at least that I’ve seen, indicated any interest in this direction, as its primary concern is using statistics gathered under egalitarian premises to bust egalitarian assumptions.\n\nKinship would need to be tokenized in some way in spaces where sovereignty is loosened or lapsed, which means where sympathetic administrative insiders provide for such loosening and the licensing of intermediate private agencies. And this in turn requires the space for a new kind of company party—in the US, at least the Republican party might be targeted as a shell within which such a company/party can grow. Something like the much reviled (supposed) Chinese “social credit” is necessary here: whether you get into a particular school, get a particular job, are considered marriageable by a particular mate, acceptable as a homeowner within a particular community, etc., must be made to depend on whether you have drug addicts, criminals, or even unemployed in your extended family.\n\nHow extended? How many “points” are you penalized for what indicator of unreliability? These are the kinds of things to be worked out. There is a “spontaneous” dimension to such assessments towards the suppression of which anti-discrimination law directs considerable energy be expended. I think anyone would find it very hard to deny that they’d rather their daughter not marry a man whose brother is an addict, even if the prospective groom checks all the other boxes—from a basic “security” standpoint such an association opens up too many variables. Modern statistics and data collection can be used for this purpose—we’re really just talking about being more open about “background checks.”\n\nRapidly increasing knowledge of genetics and heritability can be pressed into use here. Many people are clearly interested in obtaining very precise knowledge of their genetic inheritance, and we can assume greater accuracy in this regard will be increasingly possible—instead of simply 76% British maybe further breakdowns into clans and families. Degrees of closeness (there may be many ways of measuring it) to a range of individuals will be calculable. No doubt people already take an interest in and sometimes contact people who unexpectedly turn out to be cousins, or from the same place; the next step would be to formalize reciprocal obligations along these lines.\n\nBegin with \"affinity groups\"—geneticists could develop criteria for degrees of genetic proximity and corporate entities could be established to create modes of exchange (reciprocal obligations) for different degrees of proximity. Within the inner circle of affinity you oblige yourself to engage in, say, crowdfunding for members of the group in demonstrated conditions of need—in exchange, of course, others are obliged to crowdfund for you when you need it. Dating/mating sites would be set up within affinity groups, shared business enterprises, etc. The boundaries of groups would be continually revised and refined in accord with scientific developments and changing demographics (there would be formal and informal rules regarding how far out of the group a new member can be accepted through marriage, or adoption for that matter).\n\nPeople might join just because it's a group, or because they're a bit \"racist,\" i.e., prefer members of their own group and care for group continuity, or because the affinity groups become successful modes of cooperation. There would be a degree of anonymity to it, as people from the same affinity group could live across the world, but at the same time we'd probably find ourselves with more actual cousins to get to know. And DNA as a kind of language might become meaningful, even aesthetically, in new ways. This model of social order would co-exist and compete with, perhaps infiltrate, existing civil orders predicated on stamping out kinship as a meaningful marker of belonging, with encounters taking place through the law and otherwise.\n\nThere will remain individuals who prefer to remain unaffiliated, whether because they are individualist and/or idiosyncratic, or are “self-hating” in some way, i.e., are alienated from their family or group, or do not identify with what will surely be both resurgent and new “stereotypes” with which they are tagged. They will protest against being associated with their ascriptive groups, and there can be ample room and generosity to credit those protestations in many cases—you can be asked to prove yourself worthy of individual assessment. What matters is that whatever case they make be confined to the individual case and that attempts to generalize them as arguments against “prejudice” or whatever be seen through with ease. And the affiliations will matter less for some purposes, like technoscientific work.\n\nI’ve already pointed to ways in which interests in kinship manifest already, and we can further add increasingly mediated forms of mating which necessarily take into account, even if in disguised ways, issues of lineage and reputation, and this will likely increase. Why wouldn’t we expect people to request full DNA profiles and family histories, perhaps going back several generations. It may become suspicious if one has not had the interest, diligence and foresight to be ready to provide such information—respect for one’s heritage will become more than an empty assertion. If such becomes the demand, supply will come to match it, as we could all already probably learn more about our family histories than we currently know, and new means of gathering this information will arise.\n\nWith pride in heritage will come shame—no one can expect to have a background made up entirely of honorable, accomplished, moral and respectable ancestors. But shameful elements of one’s past are debts to be repaid and redemption to be gained. There will be idioms to be revivified. All this mediation or tokenization (the involvement of the disciplines in establishing kinship) should ensure that kinship not revive ancient vendettas and thereby override the juridical. Appeals courts will concern themselves with that threshold at which resentments require juridical treatment, and if the threshold is lowered we would have evidence of either vendettas starting to infiltrate the juridical or lapses in kinship maintenance.\n\nThere will be all kinds of differences along kinship lines, including differences in accomplishment and approximation to the power center and subsequent resentments will fluctuate around the juridical threshold but will also provide a basis for all kinds of more peaceful competition. There are all kinds of ways of “participating in mutual being,” to take Marshall Sahlins’s definition of kinship, and kinship systems have always been inventive in the use of mechanisms such as “adoption” to fill in gaps and continue lines. Arguments over how to assess lineage will be productive and can be open sourced and determined on the market—one could put forth matrilineal and patrilineal versions, for example, and let potential partners or team leaders emphasize whichever they like. We will know that kinship has been genuinely restored when we see a return to kin alliances being arranged through marriage—which would also, incidentally, signal the end of the influence of Romanticism in Western culture."
    },
    {
      "slug": "thinking-only-through-models",
      "title": "Thinking only through Models",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 9, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/thinking-only-through-models",
      "content": "“Critical thinking” is an extremely popular phrase, not only in the academy, where it has been institutionalized as a kind of Holy Grail that we are to lead students to, but in the world of online political battles, where it is invoked most often as that which one’s opponent is lacking (second only to “knowledge of history”). I’ve always resisted the term, first of all because, when pressed for a definition, its proponents invariably provide a list of banalities that would themselves need to be defined in terms that would only incite more definitional conflicts (“reaching conclusions based on evidence”; “taking into account other viewpoints,” etc.) but, even more importantly, because I’ve never seen anyone provide a clear genealogy of the concept, or have been able to get very far in doing so on my own, suggesting to me that “critical thinking” is a purely bureaucratic invention, much like “diversity” (there is no great thinker of either of these concepts).\n\nJohn Dewey seems to have used the phrase (which is not a recommendation for me), and there’s the concept of “critique,” with a clear point of origin in Kant, but discussions of “critical thinking” never refer to Kant, Kantianism, or the post-Kant trajectory of “critique” (in Marx, etc.). “Critical thinking” in every single one of its uses really means something like “thinking like me,” and it would be more honest and illuminating to make that explicit, since presenting ourselves and treating each other not just as people with opinions and ideas but as models of thinking (that we at least implicitly want to propagate) would bring our encounters into much clearer focus and provide for much more verifiable observations regarding the thinking process than going through the checklist provided by “critical thinking.”\n\nPart of the effect of centering “critical thinking” is to detach us from texts and thinkers that compel us so as to subject us to bureaucratic testing methods and ideology. Students obviously learn much more from entering, even or especially naively, into the “logic” of a compelling text and taking it on as an identity, a position from which you see everything, going beyond the model itself, so that you’re trying to figure out and are ready to insist upon what, say Nietzsche (who is I think a very typical thinker in terms of inducing such an experience) would say about bowling. Entering and “uncritically” adopting a text or author in that way will ultimately lead you to its limits (in which situations does Nietzsche not, in fact, provide an answer?), and will also lead you to other thinkers whom you could merge with in turn, carving a distinctive path through intellectual history.\n\nWhen you get to the point where you feel confident about asserting how Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Kant, Melville, Heidegger, Gertrude Stein, etc., would take up a particular question differently, you will find attempts to apply the institutional criteria for “critical thinking” as annoying as I do. Your thinking will be “partial” and idiosyncratic, but no less than anyone else’s, and you will always be in good company.\n\nThis argument leads to the Girardian question of which models to choose, but that’s a problem as well since first of all our models choose us and then guide us towards subsequent models—that is, from what model-free position is one “choosing” models? The pragmatic resolution of this paradox is a pedagogical one—at a certain point you will intersect with others carving their own path through intellectual history and be confronted with the reciprocal imposition of models that will shape that encounter and it is then that you will propose models for the other and in this way find yourself backtracking through your own intellectual history and providing various weights to your models.\n\nWe then have something like a disciplinary space and how weights are assigned to various models, or differing versions of those models, will be determined by maintaining the disciplinary space, or the conversation. Once you are thinking about producing models for others the question of which model to choose is no longer situated within individual contemplation but in the continual testing of “merges” (I’m using the word “merge” with an inflection taken from Eric Jacobus’s ROBA model) and while this is no guarantee of “correctness” it does provide for a kind of responsibility that gets you into the habit of thinking through the implications of modeling yourself one way or another.\n\nWalter Benjamin was right to say that we are incapable of resenting those who will succeed us (because, in my view, we can’t flesh out the world in which we’d have to imagine ourselves competing with them) while we are certainly not only capable of but almost addicted to resenting the past, so this shift from thinking about which model to adopt to thinking about which ones to produce represents entry into a higher ethical world.\n\nI’m drawing here on many previous discussions (with “ Exhaustive Imitation ” probably the most recent) calling for the maximization of imitation, first of all by tearing down all the pretenses leading us to imagine we could ever be doing anything else. If you see yourself as taking a “critical distance” from all models and assessing them all according to some epistemic or ethical criterion that just means you’re modeling yourself on some institutional figure who represents the power behind that kind of assessment. My argument for exhaustive imitation follows from my longstanding adoption of mimetic theory but it is also a way of backtracking my adoption of mimetic theory by identifying the intellectual habits that “primed” me for it.\n\nThis, indeed, was my only way of learning for a very long time—enter a compelling model thoroughly, live it, apply it to everything, stand ready to defend it against all opposition, trace it through its predecessors and successors as best I could until the next compelling model came along—and what counted as a compelling model was whatever most effectively shattered my “internalization” of previous models. Then you get to the point where you can do this in a more controlled way, especially once you understand what, exactly, you are doing and bracket the shame involved in understanding that. If I had sufficient means, I could work through each sentence I’ve written here and provide a genealogy for my acquisition and use of that word through that ongoing but now systematic and controlled battle of the models through which I learned to see through a thousand eyes, most of which I could not remember or identify. (There’s a kind of reading of Husserl—whom I have in fact only “read” through others—in the phrase “bracketing of shame,” which for me situates his phenomenological concept within an anthropological/mimetic frame.)\n\nExhaustive imitation is worth returning to (there’s a point at which you can take your own prior iterations as models) because it places us right in the middle of problems posed by AI or the Large Language Models which are “imitation games.” To get a machine to imitate you you have to look at what you’re doing in a fresh way, breaking down your motions intricately because operationalizing them computationally will always have to be done indirectly through a process of breakdown and reconstruction. The obsession with distinguishing humans from machines leads to a defensiveness that militates against taking this new opportunity to re-examine the human, leading to the paradoxical result that lists of things humans can do that machines can’t merely provide a menu of AI improvements for the next generation of programmers to attempt.\n\nI didn’t develop the notion of “originary debt” with AI in mind but I think it can very effectively be pressed into service here insofar as it, like any other distinctly “human” attribute, presents a challenge for programmers to install it algorithmically, but also ensures that such programming efforts will run parallel with rather than replacing our own working out of our own debts—the reason for this is that the technological developments themselves continuously deepen and modify the debt by transforming our relation to our successors, to whom we try to transmit the debt so as to approximate the convergence of debt enforcement and debt forgiveness. (Think in terms of making provision such that our descendants’ absolute fidelity to us will simultaneously entail a plasticizing of the models we transmit.)\n\nI’ve come to see the “vocation” or best use of the LLMs to be the prolongation of intention. I wrote at some length about the question of “intention” in an essay I recently published in an academic journal, but to put it briefly (and then get to a conclusion I hadn’t quite yet arrived at then) here: “intention” is joint attention directed towards the maintenance of linguistic presence, which is always at risk or, even better, always already under siege. So, when we’re speaking about the intention of a writer what that means is not something like “what Shakespeare is really trying to say here is…” but something more like “Shakespeare is engaging and exploiting the conditions offered by the Elizabethan theatrical world (set within the Elizabethan world) so as to ‘re-scene’ those scenes in as iterable a way as possible.”\n\nTo take a more commonplace example, the intention of a student writing a paper is to position the reader of that paper (the instructor) as favorably toward the student as possible—even if the student couldn’t really say exactly that to instructor or maybe even to himself. This recognition of the undeniable reality frees us from pretending that the student is thinking through and wishes to “communicate” “his” ideas to an imaginary audience and enables us to engage more explicitly our real institutional situation—the instructor can proceed on the assumption that the student wants to know what the teacher wants and use that assumption to get more explicit and “intentional” in communicating what he wants.\n\nWe can then perhaps come closer to sharing the intention of making the historical and institutional space of the classroom as productive as possible, making that setting, within the disciplinary assumptions of the academy and the social function of the academy, the “topics” of the writing.\n\nThe concept of intention, which can always be reduced to the simple “what do you want?” while being expandible into the infinite conditions that would be drawn into the articulation of that want, therefore enables us to connect the basic mimetic and “populist” question, WWXD? with a persistent questioning of the distance between us and whoever that X might be. In other words, the prolongation of some intention that we want to bring to bear on our work is what informs the prompt. What, for example, would George Washington make of our sprawling administrative state, accountable to no one and field of competing lobbyists pressing bureaucratic buttons to receive some return for their clients?\n\nThis becomes a very challenging research question, because we’d have to figure out who, exactly, was George Washington (and which texts, of Washington and others, do we draw upon, and how do we weigh them, in determining this), or, perhaps, which George Washington do we wish to prolong into the present; and, then, how does whatever we are to take Washington to have been precisely in his difference from any of us or anyone we could imagine today, get mediated in his Rip Van Winkle awakening into a no doubt confusing and in many ways appalling (but also amazing) world—do we want to account for that disorientation as well, so as to draw out that in his intention towards, say, the office of the presidency, that we wish to converse with and model ourselves on? (The challenging research questions overlap with formulaic sci-fi time travel movies, which we would want to control for without denying.)\n\nLet’s break down imitation into an attentional model, with single attention transformed into joint so as to complete the imitation. If you pay close enough attention to someone, so as to virtually hypnotically be absorbed in their movements such close following eventually requires you to move your own body as closely in sync with the other simply in order to continue tracking them with the closeness your absorption demands. Imitation, then, grows out of attention and then joint attention emerges from the stand-off that results from imitation so close that the two converge on the same object—imitation can then only continue without canceling itself in a struggle that would put the two decidedly out of sync with each other if that convergence swerves into the gesture of aborted appropriation.\n\nIt is this gesture that we are prolonging in the maintenance of linguistic presence, while any particular figure, like George Washington, is a way-station, but an absolutely necessary one because the prolongation of this gesture is human history. In any encounter we always have in mind various possible disruptions of presences that we might need to fend off, with “back-up” modes of presence in case the fending off fails, and so on, and it is here that we can use a curated body of texts against which we have trained our model to generate unlimited scenarios that serve pedagogical purposes, i.e., the construction of artificial scenes in which various paths from attention to imitation to joint attention can be simulated and the results recorded and fed back into the program.\n\nThis approach would fulfill Nietzsche’s view of the “use of history for life” and make real all those familiar and, of course, “cheesy” calls to imitate this or that admirable figure—those calls to imitate admirable figures are completely correct, with the “cheesiness” merely a result of the inadequate and narrowly subjective means of determining WWXD we have so far had available. We’d be using the past to fling ourselves further into the future while maintaining massive research projects that are focused on the most important thing—the retrieval and reconstruction of the intentions of all of our ancestors from whom we might like to hear from—it would even be a recovery of ancestor worship, no doubt the most ancient form of ritual, the traces of which remain evident everywhere."
    },
    {
      "slug": "continuum-of-power",
      "title": "Continuum of Power",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Aug 20, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/continuum-of-pwoer",
      "content": "It is true that monarchy is the only real form of governance—everything else is either mimicking monarchy or predicated on the endless struggle to prevent others from installing “their” king (the “tyrant”). But monarchy itself can take a lot of forms, so for the sake of inquiries into possibilities we need the concept of “singular succession” to include all that we want to in monarchy without restricting ourselves to forms of governance “similar” to known forms of monarchy. Let’s say a tech security firm with contracts from the military, intelligence agencies, etc., gets more and more of those contracts, incorporates more and more of the other security firms and tech companies, establishes protocols of interoperability across functions that make the government increasingly dependent on it; meanwhile, the government becomes increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt, sensationalized, i.e., a joke, but a frightening one (or eve, for that matter, just falls behind this company in terms of competency)—at a certain point, in some crisis, would not that security firm simply assume with general, even if tacit, consent, the attributes of sovereignty?\n\nWould the CEO of that company be the king? A dictator? Let’s say that company directs, through friendly and remaining competent members of the official government—especially, I would think, the judiciary, which is far more likely than the legislative and executive branches to hold to its moorings—to go through the process of revising the constitution so as to make the transition from “liberal democracy” or “constitutional republic” to whatever we’re going to call this new form of government completely legal, and enable it to retain and reform whatever is still of use in existing institutions. There would be no reason to assume that this process will establish the position of “monarch.”\n\nAnd yet we’re assuming the abolition of elections (or their reduction to a far more ceremonial status). So, as per the hypothesis I’m presenting here, the new ruler would create and encourage others to create succession rituals; indeed, to move towards organizing the entire social order around succession rituals, and therefore all social thought and creative activity (i.e., the arts) to the central human problem, that of the continuity of order in the face of tendencies toward mimetic violence. But the multiplication of succession rituals would distinguish this order from monarchy, which has few and regularly set succession rituals (coronations).\n\nSo, monarchy remains a placeholder concept, still indispensable in arguing with “democrats” and “republicans,” not to say “socialists” and ‘communists”—or, for that matter “fascists.” But we’re in uncharted waters here and must be prepared to think in terms of a continuum of possibilities of rule, from traditional monarchies with primogeniture on one end and rapid transfers of power from one figure to another based on the specific talents of particular candidates and functional necessities—much like one might see in a baseball game a succession of relief pitchers, sometimes each one facing only one batter, based on such criteria of left-handed or right-handed pitcher and batter, who needs to be saved for the next day, scouting reports on a particular batter, etc.\n\nThis need not be seen as an indication of crisis; on the contrary, it can be a sign of deep reserves of trust and experienced cooperation. Occupation of the center would be completely desacralized and de-divinized in this case and reduced to functionality; but it would be just as easy to say that the forms of attention devoted to sacrality and divinity are transferred to all the disciplinary apparatuses continually generating a wide pool of well-prepared candidates, a process that will accrete its own ceremonial and commemorative features.\n\nIn thinking through this problem I took note of another problem, one which has troubled me for a long time, and which is just as important as conceptualizing the replacement of money—the abolition of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy always seemed to me to be built into the relay of imperatives through the institutions, and with this relay comes inevitable delays as figures at various points along the way have to interpret imperatives and will do so, even unintentionally, in such a way as to make their own position and function indispensable and permanent. This seemed to me something that could be continually minimized but never eliminated, but this never satisfied me because I see no reason to believe that any form of social disorder is in principle ineradicable—or, no reason to operate under the assumption that this is the case, because doing so just becomes an excuse for tolerating bureaucracy.\n\nI’ve been thinking enough about the juridical for it to occur to me that bureaucracy is bound up with, complements and negates, the juridical, such that further theorizing of the juridical provides a model for the abolition of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is characterized by rules designed or, perhaps more often, “evolved” through settlements of specific cases, to “rationalize” interactions and regularize the functions of the institution. One might say (I have myself tended to assume) this shows bureaucracy to be a deformation of the executive function—imperatives aimed at specific actions and results are turned into rules that generalize regarding broader “classes” of actions and results.\n\nBut the need to generalize and more generally, to “certify” interpretations of imperatives from the center, results from the possibility of conflicts at each point along the way. The settlement of conflicts is the domain of the juridical, once it rises about the threshold of ritual modes of settling conflicts, whether through various forms of revenge and recompense or more or less formal games with traditional ways of determining winners. And these ritual methods are inappropriate once we’re dealing with questions of the nomos, or originary distribution, under imperial conditions. So, we can say that bureaucratic rules pre-empt the juridical forms of settling—and also anticipating, reframing and defusing in advance—conflict.\n\nThis is understandable, because how could we have little tribunals set up to address every disagreement between clerks in the DMV? But it’s also the case that judicial rulings generate rules, explicitly (more so in recent decades than previously?) or implicitly, insofar as one can draw conclusions from the way a court rules now to the way a similarly constituted court will rule in the future—so, avoiding acting in such a way that is very likely to get you on the losing side of a lawsuit is functionally identical to following an administrative rule. In that case, bureaucracies are fossilized legal traditions. But what would replace bureaucracy, then, is not endless lawsuits at every level of every institution, but a juridical order governed by anthropological awareness of the basic purpose of the juridical: to prevent the recrudescence of the vendetta from below and the emergence of antinomic agencies (those that would in effect put the order itself, its mode of property, on trial) from above. Again, we aim at the paradox that the perfection of the juridical tends asymptotically toward its abolition—but only the incorporation of any awareness of this paradox into juridical institutions can ensure this.\n\nThis abolitionism regarding bureaucracy further relies on the fairly traditional role of the occupant of the center as the final judge, to which we can add some considerations I don’t think I’ve explored, involving the broader management of the nomos or originary distribution. We assume foundation by conquest and the subsequent division into lots amongst the originary team, i.e., military leaders converted into landowners. The original 13 colonies that became the US fits this pattern, even if the colonies were allotted by the king to noblemen, which is to say inheritors of an earlier distribution. The occupant of the center oversees ongoing redistribution, as property is sold, consolidated, parceled out, contested, etc., and new populations (setting aside migration, just subsequent generations) need to be included, and all of this contains sources of resentment that need to be formalized juridically.\n\nThe final judge wants to foresee these possibilities to the extent possible and thereby prevent cases from emerging. We can think of the entire order as established to perfect juridical conditions so as to make recourse to them as rare as possible, and this becomes a motor for the entire system as it involves the creation of data systems that produce the knowledge needed to adjudicate potential cases which at this point involves all knowledge, physical and human. This, then, is what the “sovereign” is doing: using his own resources (whether we’re imagining a monarch who is also the largest property owner or our data-tech-security company that has acquired a functional monopoly and therefore great wealth and power over markets) to identify and pre-empt tendencies toward the recrudescence of the vendetta and the higher order vendetta involved in antinomianism.\n\nThe continual reassessment of lines of succession is a metric of all the fluctuations of incoming and potential cases, and the problems of personnel supplant the recourse to bureaucratic rules. And this enables us to see technology, or the stack of scenes, as the widening of the nomos, the creation of new distributions so as to both circumvent impending conflicts and create the possibility of higher order, more generative conflicts—conflicts over the further discretization and rearticulation of practices—and even these are included within the juridical insofar as tech decisions always involve disagreement over the deployment of resources.\n\nClearly, my prioritizing of the juridical does not share “legalistic” assumptions about the independence of the judiciary and the autonomy of legal logic—a judge should be thinking anthropologically, or anthropomorphically, and be asking himself where along the continuum between the vendetta from below and the vendetta from above a particular decision lies—in the vast majority of cases, such decisions will be accepted as fair and reasonable (that’s really what we’re looking for in the first place—for the justice system to punish criminals consistently and effectively so we don’t have to resort to other measures).\n\nAs I’ve pointed out previously, a robust juridical order would essentially eliminate the media, almost none of which could survive serious legal regimes dealing with defamation, fraud, incitement and so on. Instead of the media, or as the media, we’d have reports of court cases and succession rituals. In this way, language becomes explicitly performative—every utterance is doing something rather than just saying something. And this suggests another use of Marshall Sahlins’s discussion of “immanence” in his The New Science of the Enchanted Universe . Sahlins points out that every object in the world is an agent for “most of humanity,” and all of those agents are subordinated to others within a vast metapersonal “polity” with a single supreme ruler—that is, humans imagined and in their own way implemented “absolutism” thousands of years before it was a social reality (which makes, perhaps, monarchy a hyperstition).\n\nThis means that all language is nothing more than transcriptions of imperatives from the center, with some backstories (myths) regarding the origins of those imperatives. Compared to the (transcendent”) language we’re familiar with, “immanence” involves a massive privileging of “doing” over “happening.” But I think Sahlins may be a bit off here—if everything is enchanted, nothing is (would the people Sahlins describes describe themselves as “enchanted”?—for them, it’s just reality), and in the end we’re just talking about language. The “disenchantment” involved setting the declarative at odds with the imperative and ostensive (or, more precisely, ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits) and “enchantment” is the “normal” state of humans, as Sahlins contends, because it accepts the complementarity of these speech forms.\n\nIn that case, it’s not a question of “re-enchanting” the world, much less of believing that trees, fish and clouds are telling us what to do or engaging us in complex exchanges. We can be explicit about the ways in which language animates the world for us because all we are doing is transcribing imperatives from the center. We just need to remember that our every utterance produces waves across the entire stack of scenes, affecting algorithms and processed through protocols governing infrastructures. To incorporate this understanding into our speaking and thinking, to see our every utterance as a sample, would rewire our entire systems and this would at present be borderline unintelligible. Which is no reason not to begin building such idioms.\n\nThe left has been here before us, with “ideology critique,” which interprets every sign in terms of the ways it contributes to the continuation of the existing “relations of production” without ever being able to explain which signs wouldn’t so contribute and how do they know—such questions just devolve into intra-left squabbling. To maintain coherence the left must posit, as tacitly as possible, some liberal utopia of individual autonomy and equality, from which we have somehow strayed. This just intensifies the antagonism between declarative and ostensive-imperative circuit, because the tacit utopia is an entirely declarative affair.\n\nBut if our utterances are samples contributing to the expansion of the nomos, modeled on prayers, promises and absolute satire (when imperatives can’t be obeyed) and the making of cases, we can track our donations to the tributary order. To some extent, it’s a matter of refraining from proclaiming that entities over which you exercise no control “should” do this or that—even if they obey your command, they will not be doing what you thought you wanted them to do. Try it out—obey the constraint to not say that distant, abstract others “should…” It will open up all kinds of possibilities and compel you to seek out the intersecting levers that make things happen.\n\nSahlins himself at one point notes the similarity between the metapersons of “most of humanity” and the transpersonal, abstract entities and agencies we appeal to now—governments, companies, countries, universities, “public opinion,” etc., which are all very real but, in contrast to the archaic metapersons, not at all tethered to our own intentions—they will not serve us and we are not conjuring them. How to make every utterance, or sample, performative, like a judgment or prayer or program, is the question. I’ll be coming back to this in the next few posts. For now, I’ll say that maybe more can be done with my notion of “originary satire,” understood as a kind of mimetic disabling of impossible imperatives.\n\nAn idiom that constantly references power while deferring it for itself has a kind of performativity insofar as it serves as a measure for each exercise of power. I can show you how the command’s succession breaks off at precisely this point by following it especially closely to that breaking point. We can then rejoin the command as we see that break together and thread the command through it. If succession has been extended just a bit, the idiom commemorates that by extending the horizon further and hypothesizing a break down the road resulting from the ongoing failure to tokenize certain idioms through which the command might eventually run.\n\nWe’re still perfecting the dynamic of sacral kingship whereby every practice is a ritual practice that centers the king so “circumferentially” that he can only perform his own ritual gesture felicitously—only we want to add to this the deliberate effort of deferring the sacrifice of the king in perpetuity by supplementing as we can the mechanisms of the certification of felicity in a virtuous circle with the gesture’s performance."
    },
    {
      "slug": "tokenizing-the-primes",
      "title": "Tokenizing the Primes",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 2, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/tokenizing-the-primes",
      "content": "Reworking the relations between currency, succession and the Stack provides a frame for returning to Anna Wierzbicka’s primes and giving them some real work to do. Wierzbicka’s discovery of a set of words which exist in all languages and that can be identified by their not being definable other than through (at some point) the use of the word itself should be far better known and I assume it’s not because it would make many discussions in which there are great stakes irrelevant. All of philosophy, for example, which finds its justification in hosting conversations over the meaning of words (and therefore comes into existence where the circulation of money and spread of literacy reach a certain threshold, along with the emergence of the problem of “tyranny”) should be put out of business: prime words simply mean what they mean, and all other words are articulations of primes which can be provided in the kinds of explication Wierzbicka has modeled extensively.\n\nEven ethical and moral questions can be addressed by exploring relations between the primes, even if Wierzbicka never seems to have explored this, perhaps because it would take her outside of the discipline of linguistics. (In general, even while invoking Leibniz’s project to develop a universal “character” as an inspiration, to my knowledge Wierzbicka has never undertaken the kind of “combinatorial” work I’m initiating here.) Constructing moral and ethical (and, for that matter, ontological and epistemological) discourses out of the primes would entail treating them as comprising a miniature language of its own with words bounded by other words in a way we could determine in ways that allow for useful conversations.\n\nWhat is the boundary and relation between, for example, “think” and “know”? We preface a statement with “I think” so as to tell our interlocutor that we are not claiming to “know,” which also means that saying “I know” means a certain train of thinking, presumably retrievable, has come to an end. (I’ll note here that Helen Bromhead points to important differences between the meaning of “I think” in different historical periods—so we need to keep in mind that Wierzbicka’s theory takes into account words in their collocations and not just as separate items.) Where the line gets drawn here is a source of data regarding historical change, traditions and the constitution of specific communities.\n\nWhere do I draw the line between what I say has “happened” and what I say someone has “done”? Questions of morality and knowledge are implicated here. What are the protocols for saying something is “like” or the “same” as another, or that something is a “kind” of something? The vast vocabularies built over these primes, involving the permutations of these words in their interoperations, can be mapped  as a series of historically weighted acts. Philosophy can be collapsed back into its origin: asking what someone means when they say something and, for that matter, reclaiming meaning as the highest purpose.\n\nPart of my reason for returning to the primes is my growing conviction that the latter half of England’s 17 th century is one of the most consequential periods in human history and by far the most consequential in modern Western history: the prosecution and replacement of the king and, albeit temporary, rejection of monarchy itself; the creation of the national bank and debt financing; the emergence of a primitive form of the “two party system”; the establishment of the preliminary form of modern science and a modern scientific community (the formation of the British Royal Society)—all of the elements of the Anglo-izing of the world that we have come to call “modernity.”\n\nAlong with all this there is a fundamental transformation of the English language, which is obvious to anyone who reads something written, say, in 1620 alongside something written, say, in 1670, and which T.S. Eliot interpreted as a dissociation of sensibility, i.e, a kind of “fall.” (Augustan poet John Dryden referred someplace to his poetic predecessors as writing “before the Flood.”) Wierzbicka has herself dealt extensively with this question, with an eye at least as critical as Eliot’s, especially in Imprisoned in English and Experience, Evidence and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English , and a student of hers, Helen Bromhead, has continued this inquiry in The Reign of Truth and Faith: Epistemic Expressions in 16 th and 17 th Century English .\n\nBromhead narrows the transformation down to one from a language of “certainty” to a language of “doubt,” and shows how various words either disappeared or took on dramatically transformed uses and meanings in the process. This is an extremely helpful distinction and can be very readily mapped across all the other transformations in 17 th century Britain mentioned above—and, I am proposing, can in fact enable us to anchor all those transformations in language. It’s not that the changes in language caused all those other changes—clearly, if we had to choose, the causation would be found to go in the other direction—but that language serves as the measurement of those changes, and measurement is more important than and our only path to whatever causality we’re interested in.\n\nOne more thing: Wierzbicka very convincingly found the linguistic transformations she is identifying in the works of John Locke, and from a more quantitative perspective that may be true (I’m anyway in no position to challenge Wierzbicka on this) but I think it makes more sense, if we think about this linguistic shift as a paradigm shift on the model of Kuhnian scientific revolutions, that we should date its origin with Thomas Hobbes, in particular Leviathan , published, indicatively, in 1651, almost exactly mid-century and right in the middle of the English Civil War. It is Hobbes’s revolutionary proposal to use mathematical and scientific style definitions and reasoning to study human orders, along with the reduction of human action to “units” of self-preservation, self-interest and self-aggrandizement that seemed dictated by that proposal that would have massively leveraged the language in this new direction.\n\nWe can treat the primes as an idiom of its own in which we can describe the meaning of each word in its relation to other primes—that is, the primes exhaustively cover the possible semantic space and the boundaries on each word are marked by the other, proximate words. So, “think” is proximate to “know,” but also to “feel” and “say”—but, really any word can be proximate to any other word, because proximity is determined through sentences—Wierzbicka’s model presupposes that any meaning can be stated in declarative terms, demonstrating a faith in the declarative that I don’t so much share as think should be pushed to its limits.\n\nSo, we say “I think..” when we cannot or do not want to say “I know…” This tells us a great deal about how we use the word “think,” and allows us to dispense with much philosophical and psychological reflection on “thinking”: thinking is not so much an internal “cognitive” process following certain rules or operating according to certain mechanisms as the marker of a hesitation and the opening of a space between “feeling” and “knowing” when “saying” something. We can bring “feel” back into play, thereby providing a link between the primes and Peirce, who insisted that the meaning of all signs ultimately registers as feeling.\n\nFeeling is firstness for Peirce, which would be the root word of any NSM explication of “presence” I would attempt. Presence is saying with some other that something is “the same” (to remain within the primes). We don’t have to say that we can say that something is the same when we also have the same feeling, or that we can ever know that such is the case but, rather, that we can only say that we have the same feeling when we are able to say that something else is the same. This is what I take to be the lesson of Wittgenstein’s refutation of the possibility of a private language, and I take the further implication that sustaining the joint attention implicit in “this is the same” would require establishing sufficient reference points whose interconnection we can say is the feeling the same thing.\n\nSo, when someone says “‘I feel…’ it is like they are saying “I know we could say ‘this is the same’ many times about many things.” Given that there is no time or space limit required for the construction of presence, those many times and many things could have existed long ago or come into being in the far future and be anywhere in a particular construction of presence. Note that we are working horizontally in placing primes in sequences of declarative sentences. I have elsewhere, for example, come close to saying that knowing how doing and happening are the same—in less prime-like language, the more you can see (there is much to do with “see,” hear,” and “touch”) the world as saturated with intentions the more you can see the world as extending beyond any intentions, and vice versa. We’re working on ways of reading and writing here.\n\nNow, the vertical dimension is how we can think about the generation of all the far more complex words and idioms that construct them along various horizontal registers by working our way from the ostensive through the imperative and interrogative and up to the declarative and back again. Wierzbicka’s explications are very scenic: they always involve some “someone” who can or wants to say that we can know or feel something if or when something is the case. I make no causal claims here, and have always been clear that there’s no reason to assume that the only words to be found in every language were the first words in any language (in fact, I consider this highly unlikely, since the primes include no word for God and, of course, no names), but we can nevertheless take any word or “chunk” in any language to be a compression of a particular array of sentenced primes and hence stacks of possible scenes operationalized by a particular word or phrase.\n\nWe could not articulate this entire stack (or very much of it) in engaging with specific utterances or samples, but we can know it is there and target what we want to present as the most pertinent bit of it. We enter these compressed stacks by maximizing the horizontal relation between the primes comprising them—as suggested above, there is a moral and ethical component (“I want to say this is good”) to articulating the primes. There is always an optimal relation between what one says one feels, thinks and knows, and since all mental act verbs (and the adjectives and nominals into which they are converted) derive from these we can use the relation between these primes to inflect the words compressing their possible relations.\n\nThis is a way of thinking: first, determine how a particular word or expression derives from the primes and then consider (how does “consider” derive from the primes?) how to further optimize the relations between the primes relative to some other proximal or possible utterance or sample. If, for example, “I think” is on the boundary with “I know,” then you want to direct what you can know to encroach upon what you merely think and disturb what you know with the new frontiers opened by knowledge of that regarding which we can thus far only say “I think.” And you can bring in “I feel” by testing what, at each point, it would mean to say “I feel” given what you have already said you think and know. This is a way of entering the disciplines, in their most compressed and metalinguistic forms, and converting utterances within the discipline into their scenic terms.\n\nNow, Helen Bromhead’s identification of the transformation of the language of certainty to the language of doubt becomes important because, however we might say we dislike “modernity” it is only this transformation that gives us the means to think any of this or, for that matter, enable Wierzbicka to imagine her project. Think about (the “think” in “think about…” places “think” on the boundary with “do”) what happens when, instead of saying something like “X cannot do Y” you say something like “if X were to Y that would mean…” and you plug in there some implication of the unexpected, even impossible (but do we ever really know, and not just think, what is impossible?) then you open up a whole realm of thinking, or hypothesizing (what is hypothesizing if not thinking like you are knowing, a kind of scene of as if knowing?), of imagining possible events that would never have occurred without that linguistic shift: in the realm of certainty, turning out to be wrong (to think something that is not true—to discover that knowing overturns your thinking) must be s result of some betrayal; that is, one must saturate the space with doing, leaving no space for happening—a remnant of what Marshall Sahlins calls the “enchanted universe”—and therefore for playing thinking off against knowing or, for that matter, against the interplay of doing and happening.\n\nWe cannot restore the enchanted universe of the immanence of metapersonal command chains—no one is positioned so as to say something like “I feel that tree is saying…” in any other than a private capacity—the shared reference points, which would ultimately be grounded in ritual and sacrifice, are not there. We have to leverage the idiom of doubt cybernetically, so as to make what we say interoperable through whatever stacks of scenes with all the transactions of doings and happenings. This is what I have in mind (“have in mind”= I think+I can think this because I have said I think other things+I think this because if I think this I and others can think other things) when I speak of “tokenizing” the primes.\n\n(To hypothesize, then is to follow the command: think like you know when you know you don’t know: this is how “hypothesis” is a compression of “think” in its relation to “know.” But, of course, other explications will be possible—ultimately, all these compressions of the horizontal filed of the prime will become a space of inquiry drawing heavily upon specially trained LLMs.) I’ll return this in other posts, but let’s think about it a bit here. (Maybe Hobbes was even trying to do something like this, and we are retrieving a thread from him here.) We’re thinking here about how to make all language performative all the time—which is to say, the equivalent of ritual and magical, but predicated on doubt, or following the imperative to never be completely sure but never stop wanting to be.\n\nDoubt replaces certainty when vouching, honor and oaths are insufficient to make it possible to say “this is true,” and the only thing that can provide similar or even better support are disciplinary teams trained on trains of succession: the devotion to truth unmoved by appeals to interest relies upon “faith” in the possibility of improving succession choices by the occupant of the center; this is what all disciplinary activity comes down to.. We are already trained to read the media as producing tokens of succession—a given report on the president is a particular branch of the intelligence community trying to operationalize a particular policy or personnel shift, etc.; optimizing the horizontal spread of primes through the vertical stacks aims at saturating the field with such effects.\n\nBring thinking closer to knowing, knowing to doing, prolong doing into happenings so as to bring happenings into proximity to thinking, test the boundary between feeling and wanting—operationalize the language as compressions of all these imperatives and in order to generate more of them.\n\nThe idea of tethering movements of different actors and programming them to reciprocally control one another goes back to the earliest days of cybernetics and practitioners like Gray Walter and Ross Ashby and is currently a major field of aesthetic inquiry: The New Normal (2021), edited by Benjamin Bratton and others, is filled with brilliant examples. The problem is to ground this practice in language so as to replace the break-up Hobbes initiated with a universe that will not so much be enchanted as fully idiomized. The meaning of any text I produce is to be the constraints it places upon text production, which is the presence it constructs; reciprocally, the constraints the text I produce imposes have further optimized the linguistic field by tethering the horizontal semantic field of the primes to ostensive>imperative>interrogative>declarative sequences.\n\nI’ll put the question this way: how can something someone says now anchor, through repetition and reference in various registers, actions to be taken in some indeterminate future? That is what is necessary for idioms to be tokenized and become currency, and to replace such guarantees as oaths as verification and authentification. It would kind of be like passwords that are fully public but only work when deployed by someone rightly positioned and knowing that and how they are rightly positioned. This would require the constant generation of idioms out of the primes and translated into other idioms: for example, thinking like you know becomes knowing that anyone can think like that: an idiom or series of idioms regarding hypotheses and disciplines and inventing ways of configuring actors so as to have new ways of saying “this is the same” emerges from these “primitive” idioms.\n\nInstitutions, command structures and supply chains can be built around such idioms, like they are now built around slogans, mission statements, etc., but in ways that require constant learning. The primitive idioms meet the self-canceling idioms on the boundaries of the ritual, the juridical and the disciplinary, idioms of asymptotic convergence of debt enforcement and debt forgiveness. These are all ways of staging deferral, and placing the consummation of the want deferred on the horizon which, of course, we can never approach while turning the universe into a stack of signs of desire."
    },
    {
      "slug": "stacked-presencing",
      "title": "Stacked Presencing",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Sep 24, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/stacked-presencing",
      "content": "Tokenizing NSM primes involves turning the declarative sentence into or treating it as an output of the linguistic data stored as ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits. I’ve taken the concept of an ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuit from Eric Gan’s example of the everyday working of ostensives and imperatives in The Origin of Language , which is the familiar “dialogue” between nurse and surgeon which has the surgeon requesting a “scalpel” with the nurse providing it while repeating the request: “scalpel.” My reading stretches this example, which only involves an imperative confirmed, in its fulfillment, by an ostensive, but nevertheless suggested to me a version of a kind of base reality (replacing talking of “percepts,” “sensations,” etc. and other concepts drawn from philosophy and psychology) which involves the world continually communicating with us by presenting us with things for our attention which entail imperatives (respond to, handle, this thing in some way, attend from this thing to some other thing, etc.) which we fulfill and confirm (or authenticate, consecrate, etc.) through some ritual repetition of the ostensive.\n\nThrough this constant churning or mining of the tokenized world some imperatives prolong themselves into interrogatives which concern the availability of a particular ostensive but this is mediated through some obstacle to fulfilling the imperative. Think about how often questions have a trailing off tone, a kind of bridge between the hesitation caused by a problematic imperative and the “hope” for some restoration of the linguistic presence that is put at risk. The declarative is a kind of proposed bet that something we could recognize as the restored ostensive is out there, somewhere, and at least potentially available, if certain ostensive-imperative-ostensive conditions were to be fulfilled.\n\nThe specific sentence lays out the conditions of that bet which, of course, may in turn raise any number of other questions, soliciting any number of subsequent sentences. The sentence, then, creates a field of possible ostensive-imperative-ostensive (from now on: OIO) sequences while weighing the likelihood of anyone of them playing out in such a way as to restore presence and/or instruct us in revising our expectations regarding what should “register” as an ‘authorized” presence. Clearly, I’m drawing upon the discourses of search engines, data search and machine learning to provide us with a vocabulary for extending originary grammar into the stack of scenes constituted by search engines, data search and machine learning.\n\nWhat we are doing in language, through our idioms, is summon intentions embedded in the stack of scenes in the form of the trillions of OIO circuits deposited there. The initial imperative issued by or deriving from an ostensive is to intensify attention and since by “attention” I always mean joint attention, intensifying attention means multiplying its joints, spreading it out. What a thing, or, in full-fledged language, a scene centered in a particular way, wants (commands) you to do is join it, add it to the scene you’ve entered it from and carry it over to the next scene you’re going to. To be a carrier of the scene, which requires mining all the OIO circuits embedded in it, calling into motion all of your capabilities to do so.\n\nI’ll use the language of “intention” (which, more originarily, is just an outgrowth of the kind of attentional dynamic I’m describing here) because that’s the way questions of automated text generation tend to be taken up, as in the discussion in Critical Inquiry I discussed in a recent essay of mine which I’ve already linked to on several occasions. That online theory forum took as its starting point Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s “Against Theory” from 1982—Knapp and Michaels there argued that the meaning of a text is its author’s intention, toward the identification of which interpretative efforts should therefore be directed, while the forum was launched to explore the possibility that AI, or automated text generation, had rendered this understand of text and authorship problematic (or, more precisely, called for a revisiting of the way in which poststructuralism had already rendered it at least theoretically problematic).\n\nMy way of advancing what seemed to me, in the forum, a stalled discussion, was to take up Paul de Man’s understanding of “intentionality” which is essentially that the intention of a text is first of all to be read. This allows us to set aside the conventional approach to “intention,” which is usually to present a familiarized summary of the text (what Melville is trying to say in Moby Dick is….), and take up the question of what is involved in constructing, preparing and disseminating a text to be read. The author’s reliance upon genre conventions, specific histories, the language he uses, contemporary publishing conventions, etc., however much we want to attribute awareness of all this to the author, becomes part of our understanding of his intention because this all comes into producing a text to be read.\n\nFurthermore, intending a text to be read begs the question of “read by whom,” and, setting aside local inquiries regarding how a given author might have constructed his immediate readership, any author is aware, however vaguely, that there are many readers who will all make sense of the text differently and whom the author will want to serve as carriers of the text because wanting the text to be read means wanting it to be read by a steady readership, whether spatially or temporally and, even more, to be, if not the only text that is read (and reread…) the text through whose frame all other texts will be read—that is, if it’s a text worth reading—but, if the intention of producing the text is to have it read, part of that intention must be to make it “worth reading.”\n\nWe have now passed through Harold Bloom and Leo Strauss territory so that we can get to the point that writing aims at generating an entire textual field within which that text will continue to operate pedagogically: it must produce its carriers, which is to say its promoters, defenders, imitators, even enemies, etc. The intention of the author is as much to do something as to say something. Such an understanding of intention takes us far away from the banality of Cliff Notes while still guaranteeing very close, sustained, multilayered study of a given text deemed worthy of such attention. For one thing, we want to learn to do, on a completely different terrain, whatever it did.\n\nBut none of this was really the “intention” of the essay—where I wanted to get from here is that if all of the supports and “affordances” of the text are part of the intention of the author, an intention that we, as readers, are prolonging, then the entire make-up of the world, all of the furnishings of all the scenes, are marked by the intentions of all the forms of authorship, from literary to administrative, that have gone into composing those scenes; even more, that in acting upon those scenes we are activating those intentions, or, again, prolonging them. No one, for example, can think seriously about politics today without asking where a particular political figure stands within the stack, in relation to the entire oscillation between debt and the intelligence agencies, as mediated by all the institutions and disciplines through which these oscillations are articulated.\n\nFewer and fewer can take seriously the old commonplaces of political discourse about one’s “stand on the issues,” “getting your message out,” one’s “record,” etc. All of that stuff is merely symptomatic, far downstream. Politicians have intentions, and if they are sufficiently securely situated within the stack, we might indeed find threads from what they say they want to do and at least some of the results of their actions—but that just directs our attentions to their sufficiently secure situation within the stack—and, of course, securing that security is also part of their intention. But all of these features of the stack are themselves, and have been for some time, largely automated—as the academic Straussians like Harvey Mansfield showed, central to the argument for “popular government,” or the “extended republic,” or what was to become known as “liberal democracy,” was that the grounding of governance in the routines of the marketplace would make citizens predictable and controllable—which means that governance has for a very long time involved the pulling of levers, the oiling of machinery, rebalancing following disturbances, cybernetically taking in feedback from the environment and, now, “optimizing” the totality of social interactions.\n\nMachine learning, then, merely further automates a largely automated process. It may have the added advantage of disabusing us of whatever liberal illusions of “public discourse” and “rational exchange” remain. But we also know that the machinery has never really worked as “intended”—indeed, much like current “AI hype,” “liberal democracy hype” has always been a series of propaganda campaigns that have performatively falsified its own idealisms. Governance remains a matter of “intentions”: the nomos must be expanded and attended to and the juridical needs to be preserved. We can, though bring declarative intentions in line with the tacit OIO background by thinking of governing intentions (and all intentions are governing intentions) as “stacked presencing,” that is the work of maintaining presence across the stack of scenes and through the reverberations of that stack of scenes.\n\nProcessing the primes through originary grammar is the path toward making language programming and making it currency, against, I would guess, the discoverers of both these linguistic hypotheses (but, maybe, we can redeem Wierzbicka’s and Gans’s intentions by prolonging them through the stacks). Such idioms are to be as iterable as they are defamiliarizing and plastic; they are to attach terms from across the stack of scenes while being irreducible to instructions issued on any of them. They are to lend themselves to satire and parody and, even more, to deploy satire and parody as emissaries ensuring the spread of the idiom.\n\nI think at this point I’ve done enough idiom mining that the sequence ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative, on the one hand, and ritual (originary distribution, nomos)-juridical-disciplinary can serve as allegories of each other for generative purposes. Of course, ritual is not purely, ostensive, the juridical is not purely imperative, and the disciplinary is not purely interrogative/declarative—we’re speaking of weights here: declaratives issued on a ritual scene aim at guaranteeing the presence or effectivity of the ritual object, ostensives on the juridical scene flow more directly into imperatives while declaratives are more closely tied to the justification of imperatives; in disciplinary spaces, meanwhile, OIO circuits need not be guaranteed—their hypothetical or virtual character can be posited.\n\nI’ll remind you of, or mention for more recent readers, Peirce’s elaborate semiotic mappings where he fractalized his icon-index-symbol trichotomy to the nth degree (implicitly unlimitedly). The continual generation of language out of and its return to the primes is the medium through which these allegories are performed. Think, know, do, and so on stretch out as words like “faith,” “assume,” “hypothesis,” “consider,” “perform” and so on as words are treated and prepared to operate on scenes that refer to, include, nestle within, form an infrastructure for, other scenes. A “species” of the “family” “think” has emerged upon the semantic field held by the primes because of all the ways it has been deployed to maintain presence under specific threats to that presence—insofar as we take the primes as our point of departure, a threat to presence might be a threat to the boundaries upon which portions of the semantic field cleave (i.e., separate and connect).\n\nA threat to presence, then would be a threat to the boundary articulating “think” and ‘know,” or “do” and “happen,” or “same” and “other,” or any articulation of these provisional opposites. If we set up a kind of Laputa-style laboratory for the study of language we might construct hypothetical models showing how a single prime might mutate into all of the words that would rely upon it for its definition or explication simply by working through all the meanings that word would accrue as it was used in various forms of address to various audiences, as an ostensive or exclamation, across the imperative continuum, as a question growing in complexity by being prolonged through a series of answers and, finally, as a declarative deriving an imperative from the field of reality so as to issue an implicit command to suspend demands until a space in which the desires indexed by those demands can be created.\n\nThat’s the work of stacked presencing—to perform the stack of scenes as an ever problematic, never guaranteed prolongation of the originary scene. A unit of currency is a miniaturized replication of the originary scene, made available as a possible ostensive horizon of a declarative.\n\nWierzbicka’s NSM primes provide us with elementary building blocks out of which language is composed—any word or statement or discourse or, for that matter, gesture, can be explicated using the primes. Out of elementary building blocks we then build secondary building blocks and tertiary building blocks, and so on. This is what it means to construct an idiom: as much as possible you draw upon or, in fact, let it be explicit that you build upon, “pre-fab” phrases and sentences. While literacy was more directly based on orality, in particular oratory, it was a given that the production of texts involved working with inherited commonplaces to be mastered by the writer or speaker.\n\nWith the unmooring of literacy from orality, which perhaps can be conveniently located in Romanticism, the way is opened for writing to become programming and language to become performative in this new way. Idioms now need to be manufactured rather than inherited, and a good way of thinking about how to do this is to work on inventing sentences that have something paradoxical and imperative about them and that are readily iterable and take on more paradoxicality and imperativity the more they are repeated; moreover, these little idioms maintain consistency when one pre-fab phrase is switched out for another, taking on a kind of Ship of Theseus character, wherein it remains the same throughout, even because of, changes.\n\nGenerating collisions at the boundaries of the primes across the semantic field through words further downstream up the ostensive>imperative>interrogative>declarative circuit is the method for doing so I’m proposing here. Why rely upon philosophy or any of the disciplines derived from it when we can endlessly explore the relations between the primes manifest in the language we already have: where “think,” “feel,” “know” come up against each other and generate new combinations which, in turn, come up against the boundary between “do” and “happen,” and then between “same” and ‘other” and so on. Wierzbicka provides comprehensive and convincing explications of individual words but once her method is brought into collaboration with originary grammar and stacked presencing explications will become much more complex and debatable: try to explicate an entire sentence into the primes and you will end up with something far more elaborate and questionable than what Wierzbicka provides us with. Such a discipline will remain highly grounded in certain “fixed” terms that in turn lend themselves to infinite and orderly variations. The implications of this for training LLMs is to be explored."
    },
    {
      "slug": "demand-and-the-grammar-of-desire",
      "title": "Demand and the Grammar of Desire",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 8, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/demand-and-the-grammar-of-desire",
      "content": "Desire is generally understood in distinction from need, and in that way its specifically human quality is brought out—desire implicates us in the other, which for mimetic theory means those we imitate or, more broadly, are bound to through a web of models. The originary hypothesis would place desire on the originary scene, with the accelerated rush to the center constituting the imminent mimetic crisis that calls forth the sign. Even if, strictly speaking, we can only speak of desire once the sign has been issued and participants on the scene barred from possessing the object, the overriding of appetite and therefore need precedes the sign and calls it forth.\n\nWith desire comes resentment, directed toward whomever is taken to be blocking access to the object of desire. We could say that both desire and resentment are first directed toward the center, each toward a different incarnation of the center: desire for exclusive, sole, guaranteed possession of the object and whatever properties have been conferred upon it by the scene and resentment for the center that has mobilized everyone else on the scene to interpose themselves between you and the object. We could say, then, that the constitutive human reality is being oneself mobilized through desire to “reflect” and “measure” the resentment of others, while those others are doing the same for oneself. This reciprocal measuring would provide for a mapping of any scene and this mapping would be carried out in language: ultimately, the declarative sentence provides for such a mapping.\n\nWe can trace desire/resentment through the evolution of the speech forms by associating each side of the complementary pair to the demand/command poles of the imperative. I’ve argued previously for the temporal priority of “demand,” which remains closest to the “inappropriate ostensive” Gans identifies as the origin of the imperative: demanding an object be provided is prior to commanding an action on the part of the other. I don’t see how we could even posit a command prior to the emergence of the declarative sentence, as the command relies upon the possibility of a complete sentence (maybe we could see the command, more specifically, as a “deformation” of the declarative sentence).\n\nThe operator of negation Gans places at the entry point of the declarative (the “negative ostensive”) is already verb-like, and would have to, as I argued in Anthropomorphics , be seen as a retrieval of the originary gesture with the then implicit command of the center now made explicit. The demand is met by the command, and this comprises the “materials” of the declarative sentence: “reality” and “truth” are what remain immune to demands but also that which provides “legitimacy” to the command—but, better than “legitimacy,” it’s better to say that reality and truth are simply the source of the command, its original issuer.\n\nTo construct a declarative sentence is to present the scene in its termination of the demand. The demand, then, is really a demand for the command, insofar as a centrally sanctioned form of the satisfied demand is also protected by the command, in which one can participate in conditioning and shaping the form of satisfaction of the demands of others on the scene.\n\nThis analysis is converging a bit with Lacan, who also saw desire as result of the demand—built into it, insofar as the demand instantly expresses one’s dependence upon whoever will satisfy it—in psychoanalytic terms, the mother. And the desire produced by demand likewise finds its termination point in the Name of the Father, the issuer of commands—the rebel, for Lacan, whom we can call the issuer of incessant demands, desires a master and will find him. What we can add to this is the way demand and command, desire and resentment, are built into the sentence and the scene. If we were to map out all the various forms of imperative along the poles of demand and command, we’d have a language for examining any sentence and therefore any discourse.\n\nPetition, plea, beg, pray, insist, request, order, dictate, urge, enjoin, instruct and no doubt many others depending upon how much imperative we might find in less obviously imperative words. We will find, I think, that the closer we get to the command pole the less there is to say: demands are far more articulate. The best command is one leaving nothing more to be said: this is almost in agreement with Gans’s claim that the only authentic language of power is silence; indeed, if we suggest that the best command is one that is evident in the mere presence of he who is authorized to issue it (e.g., bow down before a king), then we approach complete agreement. But that silence accompanies all of the more verbalized commands of the enthroned, affirming their “authenticity.”\n\nIf we stay with this problem, though, we can carry over this question of the tacit imperative to the declarative as its true home. A perfectly formed declarative sentence would leave no one in any doubt regarding what was to be done upon hearing it. This is the idiom I hope to generate, one increasingly approximating performativity. It’s easy to think of examples: in the right context, mentioning that the window is open would find its “meaning” in the listener closing it. There are always those sentences that would create such a scene out of the context—the closer we get to articulating them, the more meaningful our utterances are--this is really the kind of thing that someone like Heidegger is aiming at in speaking of remembering Being.\n\nSuch declaratives are converting demands into commands, and this is what makes them compelling and effective. And, as I always remind you when I speak of imperatives, imperatives don’t necessarily have expiration dates—but now I can say that this assertion is truer of commands than demands. A demand ceases with the death of the subject of desire, at the latest—it can be taken up by another, but then it will be their demand; commands, meanwhile, can maintain their power indefinitely. So, the recycling of decaying and evaporating demands into enduring commands embedded in descriptions of reality is the production of meaning.\n\nEven better: making meaning involves seeking out and sweeping up the most dispersed and evanescent demands and programming them into the most far-flung reality. To misquote Heidegger, “challenge forth” all those demands implicit in utterances, gestures, movements, configurations, etc., and solicit them as data and raw materials for commands that need never be uttered. (“Solicit” seems to be closer to the “demand” side of the continuum but not all solicitations are equal and some are more like subpoenas which are themselves essentially commands.)\n\nTo command seems to be evidence of failure in that case, and the vocation of the declarative sentence is to abolish or, better, indefinitely defer, commands in its approximation to performativity. That would be a criterion of “good writing”: it positions all of its readers within the stack, having them take on the responsibilities attendant upon their respective positions, merely by outlining all of their inchoate demands as they terminate in a commanding reality. This is another way of getting at the conversion of language into currency. A model of such an idiom is the kind of religious experience wherein proof of your conversion consequent upon a revelation is your conversion of others by transmitting to them that same revelation.\n\nPerhaps a style book or rhetoric could be written; or, more importantly, an LLM trained. The thought experiment guiding this style would be how to produce the effect of an overarching, irresistible, intricately detailed and indefinitely ramifying command with the most neutralized declarative sentences possible. What kind of understated, dispassionate sentences could align samples as if with absolute coercive force?\n\nWhat we would need is less straightforward descriptions that place readers on a scene than a pursuit of the implications of the language of doubt and hypotheticality. In this way demands are drawn out through interrogatives into sentences filled with conditionalities that position readers as inquirers and, even more, as samples of data. If your every action is testing some hypothesis in such a way as to defer any proof or falsification indefinitely you are yourself not only following the most stringent command but are modeling and communicating that command to others. This absolute command, rather than shutting down discourse and conversation, would have the effect of revivifying language, as we would all be incorporating others’ performed hypotheses into our own but revising our hypotheses correspondingly.\n\nThe terms of any such hypothesis could only be firmly grounded in institutional reality and function as a way of further probing that reality, which also means that heightened conditionality not only does not paralyze us but activates even the most down to earth actions insofar as such actions provide needed material to articulate, refine and test the hypothesis. And we’d always be bringing a more local hypothesis into accord with prior ones, upon which it depends, which I have faith would ultimately have us all talking about the originary hypothesis and making it current. The more sustained and permanent our practices and institutions of deferral the more varied, refined, beautiful, ingenious and therefore pleasurable our modes of distribution and enjoyment.\n\nIf you first of all want to keep the hypotheses you have initiated in motion you want to recall and mobilize the hypothesis which set it all in motion, treating the originary sign itself as the first attempt at formulating the originary hypothesis—with all other human events as subsequent approximations. Every conversation becomes both directly challenging and imposing as we elicit and test our respective hypotheses but also completely open precisely because we are commanded to formulate the hypothesis so as to sustain genuine doubt.\n\nOne might ask which demands were converted into reality-issued commands in my previous paragraph—that is, is the style here approximating the stylistic norms drawn out of the demand/command dynamic centered in the declarative sentence? Can we see the oscillation or complementarity of desire and resentment here? I see some room for improvement. Take a look at this sentence: The terms of any such hypothesis could only be firmly grounded in institutional reality and function as a way of further probing that reality . “Could only be” and “firmly grounded” seem to me insufficiently conditional and inspire unproductive resistance.\n\nIt is more that the terms of any such hypothesis solicit inquiries constitutive of the practices and institutions that provoked them and in this way find and prolong their own hypotheticality; nor is “reality” quite “there” to be probed so much as it is continually renewed as an ongoing layering of hypotheses. The demand to be given reality and firm grounds is drawn out further and further until we are systematically replacing reality and firm grounds with possible ostensive-imperative-ostensive machinery that turns reality and grounds into indications continually re-patterned and hierarchized.\n\nThis talk of turning reality into a set of hypotheses drawn out of or let out of automated ostensive-imperative-ostensive circults might sound very liberal and Popperian but that’s only the case if we cut short our inquiry into what kinds of command structures and modes of authority and succession would make it possible to imagine the total hypotheticalization of the world. Implicit in the commanding sentence of our thought experiment is a community transitioning out of exchanges with each other except insofar as we are proxies for enabling exchanges with the center. We would all want the most secure, competently and transparently gathered and expertly curated data possible and in turning ourselves into sources of data in furtherance of our hypotheses we would have this in mind.\n\nOur primary ethical obligation would be to provide worthy data flows and see to their uptake and circulation. Removing the commander from the center merely means that whoever best executes linguistic performativity, which means scenic design, would effectively occupy the center—rapid turnover at the center in this case would be a sign of sturdiness, not instability. This doesn’t mean rule by “nerds,” because linguistic performativity means leading men, and men dedicated to the most rigorous testing of the more daring hypotheses. “Leadership” here means eliciting demands, even those your fellow performers don’t yet know they’re making, which is itself possible insofar as you direct your hypotheses anthropologically and convert them into an array of resentments of the center. What we have here is a tributarian order and a corresponding style.\n\nWe can get even more precise (and make progress on that handbook of style) by noting that the three “posts” in the social circuit I’ve been hypothesizing, i.e., the ritual, the juridical and the disciplinary, will provide all of our vocabulary for articulating the grammar of demand-command conversion. The most parsimonious way of speaking about ritual is in terms of entering and exiting a scene, both of which involve a gesture which is “arbitrary” and therefore requires a kind of consecration. Everything involving beginning, sustaining and concluding, which is also to say all narrative, refers us back to ritual. If we’re talking about rights, claims, disputes, disagreements, violations, offenses, and so on, we draw upon the rich vocabulary of law, invoking, metaphorically, provisionally, often ironically, its deference to procedures, precedents, reasoning around the question of penalty, restitution and compensation.\n\nTo assert, compellingly, a judgment, is to insert the blocking command here. And if we’re in the realm of hypotheses and thought experiments, where every assertion and even every fantasy can become one or another, we’re in the disciplinary, or the discourse of doubt—and here I will disagree with Peirce who dismissed Descartes’s invocation of doubt by trivializing it as make believe, insisting that we only claim to doubt the things we do doubt; Peirce may have been right about Descartes’s performance of doubt, but I am in favor (maybe Peirce really was too) of all kinds of invented, playful doubting, introducing, pataphysically, doubts, .00001% possibilities in the most unlikely places.\n\nAnd, finally, and most importantly, “invention” (a hoary old rhetorical concept) will often come from treating events that seem to be in one of the three spaces as if it were in another—treating scientific work as if it’s an arcane ritual, ritual as if it includes intricate questions of property right, the courtroom as a space of experimentation, and so on. This is how idioms are generated."
    },
    {
      "slug": "blockchaining-the-center",
      "title": "Blockchaining the Center",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 18, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/blockchaining-the-center",
      "content": "I begin by recalling (and revising) an old thought experiment of mine, somewhat derivative of Moldbug (but also Peirce, and maybe even Nietzsche), and which I can now speak of in terms of the demand-command circuit explored a couple of posts back. Consider what you would have the government do, what the government having done that in a way that you would affirm that it has, in fact, been done in such a way as to fulfill your demand would look like, which means without any unintended effects that would vitiate the intent of your demand; then, consider all the institutional realignments required for all that to be the case; then, consider the kind of government that could enact such a change and further consider that a government with that power would not only have so much more knowledge and understanding of the conditions enabling the meeting of your demand than could be informing the demand itself and, further, that the government capable of doing all this would have no need to care what you wanted even while it might find your demand to be useful input into its data banks—well, then what?\n\nDo you retract your demand? But wouldn’t that be only to issue a new one, since we can’t help wanting? Or, rather, like presumably Nietzsche encourages the one faced with his demon providing intelligence on “eternal return,” would you accept the demand-command circuit and seek agreement with your fellow citizens on a mode of governance that could detect and analyze all demands while being beholden to none; a government that you would therefore demand nothing more from than the provision of opportunities to donate most effectively to those data banks? If, in that moment of greatness and ecstasy you were to answer the demon affirmatively, then you are ready to receive your cryptographic key and participate in blockchain governance.\n\nThe centrality of data and data security to governance means not a “totalitarian” surveillance state or, more ridiculously, an exacerbation of “biases” that, coincidentally, DEI bureaucrats have been worried about for the past half century but, rather, the most heightened forms of responsibility imaginable. Take all the spheres of human life from which we would want data from: public safety, health, education, etc. Such data is only as good as the institutions charged with attending to those public functions and the institutions dependent upon the functioning of those institutions. We would expect schools, hospitals and police forces to provide us with data on education, health and crime, but we would also depend on institutions that depend upon people being able to read and do math, carry out strenuous tasks over long periods of time and storekeepers and people who go out in the evening to confirm the data provided by the primary institutions.\n\nIf the police tell us crime is down but everyone is afraid to go out after dark what we have is data testifying to not only the inefficiency but dishonesty and corruption of the police and/or the courts. But that means that someone is gathering that other kind of data downstream of the primary function. We have our three destinations for the gathering of such data: the distributory center, arbiter of the nomos, holder of debts and dean of succession; the juridical; and the disciplines. The occupant of the center needs intelligence to make decisions on succession, and so the more questionable and arbitrary those decisions become the less valuable the intelligence; the juridical order needs data to make decisions that defer both the vendetta and antinomic prosecution of the order itself; and the disciplines need data so that their hypotheses are testable, their experiments replicable and their proofs scalable.\n\nThey all know what kind of data they are looking for but they don’t know what kind of data they aren’t looking for but might need and so they all want institutions that continually refine their practices while also always recruiting initiators of anomalous and incommensurable practices. We’re always trying to make things fit, at every level, and can never know in advance perfectly what will do so. So, to think of yourself as a carrier of intelligence regarding learning, health and well-being, justice, and so on, is to think of yourself and make yourself something other than a drone slotted into pre-existing pigeonholes.\n\nA text is data; reading a text produces data; producing a text in response to a text is data pertinent to the primary text and the range of possible ways of reading it, its affiliation with a world and history of texts, etc. We will be increasing training ourselves on such things.\n\nNone of this broader human activity has been blockchained yet—the blockchain has really been limited to money and commerce. There is still far too much disagreement about what counts as learning, knowledge, health, justice, or, for that matter, character building, virtue, enjoyment, kinship, etc., to make it possible to establish protocols regarding what would count as publicly available, permanently stored, actionable data regarding all these forms of life. But that is what center study and, now, more precisely, the demand-command circuit is for. Technology, after all, is really just a way of binding ostensives, imperative, interrogatives and declaratives more tightly together.\n\nThe problem with gathering data regarding education, health, public safety and so on is that all of these parts of life are connected to each other and the boundaries between them are institutional and historical, even if not arbitrary. Students will not learn if they grow up in crime-ridden neighborhoods and eat processed, sugary foods, and their failure to learn will therefore provide us with only limited intelligence about the schools. Indeed, attempts to single out and blame separate institutions corresponds to democratic politics, and hardly anyone ever does this kind of thing other than to score points. Imagine parent, community groups, employers, etc., suing the school—maybe they’d build a very good case in many instances, but, then, we’d have to acknowledge the school’s right to sue the police, the courts, the food and drug industries, (and maybe even the parents) etc.\n\nAnd that should be our framing, as the juridical is right in the middle of the demand to command circuit—the juridical is always already technological, a stack of scenes, but it also is our best representation, even better than ritual in many ways, of the scenic nature of the human. So, protocols and blockchains would turn the juridical into pedagogical platforms constructed so as to maximize the oscillation between the penetration of juridical categories into every nook and cranny of life and the abolition of the juridical through its perfection. Modern, i.e., desecratory, attempts to mechanize human life through, in particular, the regularity of markets and the distributed agency of divided government along with electoral feedback themselves all depend upon and feed back into the juridical. Without spaces of judgment it’s absurd to speak of markets, political decision making or even, as we are rapidly learning, the most basic institutions of electorally based governments.\n\nThirdness and Nomos/Class Action are both ways into blockchaining the center and we just have to go on creating other models, or prototypes, as Denisa Kera speaks of in her Algorithms and Automation . (To paraphrase William Carlos Williams, no ideas but in the companies themselves.) She wants a democratic model, based on rights, dialogue, participation, and so on, but we can treat all that as a series of demands to be input while sharing her interest in maximizing agency—not random agency of decentered, independent citizens, but duly appointed, anointed, assigned and delegated agencies positioned variously within the stack in accord with each’s need for data and ability to further shape that data for juridical and successionary purposes.\n\nWe want to raise debt enforcement in proportion to proximity to the center, where the gifts, opportunities and therefore debt is highest. Let’s try converging health, public order and education in the “unit” of the “fit individual,” always keeping in mind that our future vocation will be training the AIs, or co-constituting with technology, or perfecting stacked presencing. “Fit” means “in shape,” well-conditioned, healthy; but to fit in means to be part of, to correspond to other parts, to be able to take on the characteristics of the whole, to fill some role that might otherwise go unfilled. For our purposes, we can define fitness in terms of exemplary data exchange: the fit individual is he (or she) who both makes best use of available data, including data generated by the activity of the fit individual and provides the best data, precisely by making use of all available means of fitness, physical and intellectual.\n\nFitness is always an approximation to some ideal generated by the fitness activity itself—so, handicapped people or people with diseases and disorders can also be made to fit the fitness regime, which is also concerned with possible biological and technological transformations of the body. We are looking for social or communal fitness as well, so in this regime of regimens we include various learning projects, very much including operating textual transformations. I am to some extent influenced in this line of thinking by Curtis Yarvin’s insistence, recently reiterated in a Gray Mirror post, on maintaining useful, which is to say, challenging, socially important and character-building activities that would otherwise be lost to automation.\n\nI don’t agree with this specific proposal that something like shoemaking should be mandated, but there should be institutions conducting continuous inquiries into mind/body/community fits focused, I would say, on exemplary modes of activity that could be auto-telic, having only aesthetic and prototypical value. There is not a single member of any society who could not be made useful, and made to feel useful, within such an order.\n\nWhat I am suggesting here would be a data exchange, first and foremost—partnering with “rogue” food producers, medical caregivers, pharmaceuticals, biomedical engineers, students of texts (especially those retrieving philological traditions), trainers, stunt men, and others, our company would recruit individuals interested in joining rigorous regimens for nothing more than free access to the goods and services provided by these partners, who provide such goods and services in exchange for nothing more than the data they provide. This would be a prototype of a broader total stacking of data exchange while in the present, of course, the participants would have other gigs, gigs for which the fitness company would make them more fit.\n\nThe company would serve as a kind of employment and talent agency for its clients, and as marketing for its partners. The company would give out something like “degrees,” with something like “grades,” which, much like the degrees and grades handed out by universities, would serve as tokens providing access to other institutions. At the center of it all is, of course, center study and the originary hypothesis, for which this like any other proposed prototype is a kind of advertisement and proof of concept. And this would require continual increasing precision in the identification of practices, and the exercises that enable and refine them.\n\nThere’s no real divide between the physical and the intellectual here: learning to read and write in increasingly sophisticated, powerful and nimble ways can be broken down into parts that can be articulated in various ways no less than gymnastics. And this is what would be put to test and put on the blockchain: specific interventions, exercises, applications, assignments, etc., identified with sufficient precision to receive increasingly useful information from (with that information defined as such, along with its degrees and varieties of usefulness, by other interventions, exercises, applications, assignments, etc.), so as to allow for predictions and betting which, in turn, would serve as a model for real world investing.\n\nThe prototypes such a company would produce might include moot courts, trying out various ways of refining juridical scenes, film and theatrical productions, music, and so on, testing out ways of measuring the value or the “fit” of various talents (and their conditions of production) in actual or possible communities and institutions (and it’s easy to see the possible spin-offs of such enterprises). But it would also be a hub of scientific and technological innovation. We are again thinking of a kind of boundary between the capitalist, even ultra-capitalist, and the no longer quite capitalist order: betting, prediction markets, employment agencies, new currencies, investment inquiries; but, also, a space where well-being, learning and inquiry are ends in themselves—whether a new, qualitative enlargement of the nomos, not territorially but in terms of added layers of the stack, is possible along these lines would be one of the hypotheses placed on trial."
    },
    {
      "slug": "trails-of-liminal-succession",
      "title": "Trails of Liminal Succession",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Oct 29, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/trails-of-liminal-succession",
      "content": "There’s nothing that can’t be automated but there will always be a residue to any automation, and a new, surplus capability to train the new forms of automation. It is this residue and surplus that keeps humanism solvent, because you can always abstract away from the automated infrastructure and isolate something that “presents” as purely human, whether it be intuition, some quality of feeling, the capacity to “really” think or reason as opposed to mechanical pattern recognition, etc. But the residue and surplus are of the automation and inseparable from it, and defending humanism requires constant negation of increasingly subtle ways of ensuring repetition and modification of motions beyond human intention.\n\nThe reason why I always emphasize pedagogy as a kind of fundamental human modality is that it builds sociality and techne directly into the human itself: if we understand or practice ourselves as always teaching and learning then we would always be imagining ourselves on a scene and as participating in scenic design—the originary event is the original pattern recognition. Pedagogy is the residue and surplus—there will always be a need to show others how to do things.\n\nThe words “teach” and “learn” are ultimately rooted in following trails by identifying (pointing to) marks that “mean” because they have previously drawn attention, and attention that is at least potentially joint attention—if you notice something and remember it it’s because you might point it out to another. I’ve hypothesized before that following and creating trails (assuming we can distinguish between following and creating) was itself the pathway by which the sign traveled from the originary scene to other scenes outside of the pull of the ritual one. It would also be the way in which human signs rooted themselves in the natural environment and developed forms of kinship with animals, who also follow and leave trails—insofar as they are signs, it would be easy to think that one’s prey was leaving the trail for you.\n\nThese earliest trails are the ancestors of todays thoroughly stacked environment, with the globe crisscrossed by cables, wires, trading routes, highways, and so on, with everything, including our bodies, increasingly thoroughly mapped. We’re always creating search terms, leaving data trails behind us while following others, like leaving bread crumbs for others to find us and for us to find our way back… well, where? not necessarily home.\n\nThe problem of succession is easily seen as a problem of pedagogy. The “education of princes” is an ancient genre, and it has not become less relevant over the millennia. That controlling succession within a single family that claims ownership over a territory is increasingly unlikely to be a way of making the problem of succession intelligible and treatable marks our own distance from a sacred order. We cannot turn back from the desecration that founds not only our politics but our science and technology, but the problem of succession indicates that we cannot settle with desecration, permanent hostility to the center, as our default mode.\n\nAny attempt to sanctify today will appear to too many, and too many of the highly capable, to be sanctimonious. The Big Man revolution must be continued otherwise. Pedagogy is not necessarily sacred, but it also need not be sanctimonious, while creating tacit and haptic relations between individuals, relations which can in turn be scaled up. There’s something irreducible and beyond any critique in simply showing someone how to do something, which means apprenticing them to a scene. Whatever you can show someone how to do you can think of how to automate, but that automation will produce new practices that we will have to show each other how to do.\n\nWe find ourselves in the middle now, requiring continual mapping, mapping which transforms the territory, with partial, precarious succession and pedagogical practices confronted with ferocious efforts to keep the desecration going. To use Colin Drumm’s terms, we are governed by the oscillation between the outside spread and the outside option: between those with the funds, however tokenized, to back up any shortfall in liquidity, and those who can control the current occupant of the center by holding in reserve a “bullpen” of potential replacements. If the occupant of the center seeks to ensure liquidity or liquidate the need for liquidity by building originary debt into succession practices themselves, those in control of the outside spread can liquefy him simply, for example, by calling in all debts.\n\nIf the occupant of the center seeks to establish succession practices outside of the purview of the intelligence agencies, cutting the threads that bind political parties, large media corporations (including, of course, social media), NGOs and so on to those agencies, any number of coup opportunities, more or less credibly legitimated by one or another democratic procedure, can be leveraged. This is a forest with many trails, because of lines of succession must be forged here and there, if even to maintain the outside spread and outside option themselves, but none of which lead anyone anywhere other than into some unmapped entanglement.\n\nThis, then, is the territory to be mapped and navigated. Our Big Men today will have to be cartographers, and being cartographers today means organizing the cleanest and most comprehensive data and submitting it to algorithmic training dedicated to the expansion of the nomos and the settling of cases within it. This also means overtly and systematically foregrounding pedagogical practices all the way down. Expanding the nomos involves creating what Zack Baker calls “namespaces,” which allow for new levels of the stack, new territories, real and virtual, to be distributed, divided, transmitted and inherited. If we are to have “faith,” that faith should be in our inexhaustible capacity to name things, as onomastic beings.\n\nNaming something is an originary, generative gesture, but it’s never just you doing the naming—the object draws you toward and you in turn are drawing others toward it and those others who might be drawn to it are part of the object drawing you to it. And we could teach others how to do it—we could have institutes for naming instruction. Likewise, we could teach people and ourselves learn how to judge better—this is really one of the highest human abilities, involving occupying a center in front of disputants while claiming nothing for oneself and dedicating oneself only to “justice” which, anthropomorphically, we can translate into maintaining the threshold below which the vendetta re-territorializes social life and above which the antinomic vendetta against the center is triggered. Technological innovation is then the construction of platforms upon which pedagogies of naming and judging can be invented.\n\nJohn Barth’s Giles, Goat-Boy , which I almost finished many years ago, analogizes the world to a university in a fairly comprehensive allegorical manner (salvation as matriculation, etc.). Gaston Bachelard recommended turning society into a school, rather than containing school within the society. Such a recommendation is not to expand our existing educational institutions throughout society but to abolish them in what would be a new order of apprenticeships, tied into new kinship networks. There’s nothing schoolmarmish about it—but, there’s a place for schoolmarms as well. Pedagogical relations and networks would be trailblazing, marking all institutions with succession practices.\n\nWhat that would look like today would be a pedagogical company which could begin modestly by providing a pathway for gifted young people to skip college and be prepared to work for, first of all, the most forward looking (pathfinding) data security companies, those who must be grooming themselves to assert sovereignty. Scientific and engineering education would, of course, be central, but the holism of the medieval university would be recalled as well and center study would provide the all-encompassing and open-ended (ever hypothetical) curriculum embracing the human and social sciences, and the physical sciences within them.\n\nOnce college has been eliminated for enough people, middle school and elementary school can as well—as broadly as possible, but without waiting for the all the regulatory hoops to be jumped through so it can be universal. Different communities, which really means different kinship networks, since under such pressure and given such incentives, communities would fork off into extended families capable of advancing, protecting and sheltering their young, would compete for entry into the apprenticeship programs.\n\nThe results of different pedagogical institutions would be made public and blockchained not through standardized tests but through open competition, which would become the source of betting markets, initiating new forms of currency. Athletic contests, infrastructure building contests, moot court contests, city building contests, all judged by those with the most vested interest in maintaining the school’s credibility and attractiveness to prospective applicants would be the substance of the education. Fitness is all. Once such institutions attain lift-off, they could publicize themselves by challenging Chinese and Russian teams (I’m obviously Americo-centric here) to competitions, perhaps thereby usuring in a more humane and productive model of international political competition.\n\nWe could even organize espionage contests, with each side agreeing to place certain mid-level secrets on the boundary between within reach and just out of reach, with further disclosures given to the winner. Studying and remixing the records of the contests would provide new pedagogical but also artistic materials: these competitions would be the basis of succession rituals I have written about many times before, and which would in turn become the main source of literature, film, and music. Everyone comes to see themselves as a possible candidate for occupying the center but as, for almost everyone, those chances will obviously diminish through life, as possible nurturers and models for those who might have better chances.\n\nAnd we would work toward the point where it would be possible to make claims on generations of graduates across these institutions, as if professional sports teams could draft the future starting play of a particular high school with an especially strong sports program, several generations down the road on the expectation that that program would remain strong. This would then abolish currency in any conventional sense, because originary debt would be directly realized in succession practices.\n\nWhat I would like to do is derive from this enlarged scenic thinking, this stacked presencing, a way of thinking in the here and now. We’re cutting paths toward these practices of stacked presencing, and whatever we do either gets us more entangled in desecration or generates new pedagogical pathways. Whether we’re talking about inflation, wokeness, AI, elections, TV shows, romantic relationships, or whatever, we’re always at a certain inflection point toward moving originary debt enforcement up the pedagogical ladder. You take more of the debt on yourself by making your practices more explicitly pedagogical and making your pedagogical practices samples of sampling, distinctive and timely enough to be iterated across the stack.\n\nDirectionally, we’re thinking of a kind of diagonal movement here as we are pulling in one direction guided by the Big Man revolution while being pushed in another direction by those furiously trying to maintain maximum randomness around all succession other than what ensures the continuity of that very effort. (I’m borrowing here from an analysis of a very short Kafka story, “He,” by Hannah Arendt, in her Thinking .) There’s a deferralesque, demand-command dynamic here, as we’re always not quite going in the direction we’re going. We’re looking for trails of liminal succession, drawing nearer to them, pointing them out, marking and commemorating them, treating even their erasure as signs.\n\n(There’s some of the old post-structuralist idiom in this description.) It’s a matter of lowering the threshold of detection and significance, the next to oldest linguistic practice according to Gans’s The Origin of Language , and this is in turn a practice of naming and namespacing. As a genre, it’s a proposal for a novel and universal pedagogical system, present everywhere but never completely institutionalizable, presented to whomever wants to take the originary debt fully upon himself, to transfer it generationally rather than liquidate it. Of course, we’d accept a small grant to get a few classes up and running, even from someone who will not know he has contracted the debt until he himself has gone to school.\n\nFollowing the trail of liminal succession means transferring debt enforcement and forgiveness from its current, monetary, form, to credit and debt bearing idioms. The credit and debt bearing idioms are promises, oaths, prayers, testimony, hypotheses, bets, bids, moves in games, and so on. All of these are marginalized by desecrating modernity, i.e., the replacement of orderly succession by rotating succession and the consequent introduction of the oscillation between the outside spread (the central bank) and the outside option (the intelligence agencies) as the mode of governance. The value of everything under capitalism is the expected future earnings tied to possession of any thing as an asset, and this mode of valuation is a mode of power (I’m just restating Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power thesis) that has everyone relying on those determining the outside spread (liquidity) with the intelligence agencies no doubt exercising at least a veto.\n\nEven within this space, credit and debt bearing idioms must have their function—sheer reward and punishment is never enough to ensure that those you need to do X tomorrow will in fact do X tomorrow, if for no other reason that if reward and punishment are the only mechanisms of control there’s not even any way of knowing what will count as X. Someone must be able to say, “sure, I’ll get this done by next week,” be believed, and indeed get it done by next week. Any company to be built must occupy that space and enlarge it, and the only way I can think of enlarging it is by creating such spaces for others, which is to say by building a pedagogical space, which would also be a technological space, a modification of the stack of scenes such that the expectation of future actions and outcomes can be brought into closer correspondence with those actions and outcomes idiomatically than monetarily.\n\nShowing someone how to do something is the ultimate act of faith—faith in that increment of deferral represented by the practice can be sustained and further stacked. It is also the origin and essence of debt—if someone shows you how to do something, it is inscribed in your practices and you are obliged to maintain and transmit it. And this will be the case at any scale and for any duration."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-palestine-war",
      "title": "The Palestine War",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 11, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-palestine-war",
      "content": "After the early, highly successful, Israeli moves against Hezbollah in Lebanon, I saw it reported that Israel was offering to stop the attack on Hezbollah in exchange for Hamas releasing the Israeli hostages in Gaza. I never saw this confirmed, but I find it believable. It would have been a parodic, preposterous reversal of Hezbollah’s own demand for a cease fire in Gaza in exchange for them ceasing missile attacks on Israel—an equally preposterous linkage. Israel works (not always or completely consistently, of course) on a (sometimes very nuanced) tit-for-tat basis with its enemies in a way that I don’t think we could imagine any other country doing.\n\nSimilar longstanding Israeli policies include the destruction of the homes of the families of those who have committed terrorist attacks—something, of course, justified by no juridical principle, which will always demand that punishment target only the guilty party. High level Israeli politicians can demand creating settlements in “occupied” territory (more neutrally: territory Israel has not yet claimed sovereignty over) in response to every act of Arab violence against Jews. Indeed, many settlements had their origins in this practice. Israel just passed a law allowing for deportation of families of terrorists, even Israel citizens.\n\nSuch practices could of course be defended on grounds of maintaining deterrence, but they tend to be precisely enough formulated so that there is an unmistakable “eye for an eye” component to them, beyond the kinds of calculations that go into preserving a deterrent. It’s vengeful, but not the kind of revenge a gang or mob would take—we’re not talking about rampages, but purposeful and meaningful acts, negations of a negation (of Jewish life in Israel)—and yet I don’t think any other country operates or thinks this way. There’s the straightforward use of force, where you just crush the enemy beyond the possibility of resistance; and there’s the “hearts and minds” approach, where you try and mix careful targeting of the enemy with cultivation of the inner enemy to your enemy, in the name of at least potentially shared values.\n\nIsrael has used these approaches as well (that’s what all the wistful talk about “liberating Gaza from Hamas” is about), but I don’t know of anyone else who uses Israel’s more “measured” and even “Biblical” (Old Testament, of course) approach. Needless to say one doesn’t see much appreciation for this approach either—if anything it seems a bit grotesque even, I sense, to many supporters of Israel—but the reason for this is that it stand outside of the “human rights world view” which even “American First” warriors against Jews want to exploit so they can accuse Israel of “genocide” (a particularly incoherent and almost constitutively abused construct of post-Nuremberg international law—no one can explain what it would mean to “stop” a genocide since it’s not a genocide if you can still stop it).\n\nI had always thought that a more sovereignty-oriented American right would be supportive of Israel because it would recognize that the decades long international war against Israel conducted primarily though the UN had its roots, beyond the Arab and Muslim ordeal of international civility, the global dependence on oil, and Communist “anti-imperialism,”  in Israel’s indigestibility by what is now called the “globalist” order. This indigestibility lies precisely in Israel’s insistence on “communicating” directly with its enemies, including the “material” ways mentioned above, rather than accepting as the default position the submission of conflicts to some form of real or imagined international arbitration (which, again, is not to say that some powerful sectors in Israeli politics are not “tempted” by that possibility).\n\nAnd, in fact, such an appreciation of Israel is strikingly evident in Trump’s politics and of many in his circle, even if there is vehement resistance far down on the totem pole. Hatred of Jews blinds many to the obvious reason Trump would support Israel: because a Middle East policed by an Israel-Saudi (and other Gulf States) condominium (with the possibility of adding a post-Islamic Republic regime in Iran and a healthier Egypt at some point) is the best way of minimizing America’s own obligations and intervention in the region, As opposed to what: an Iran-Palestine-Syria-Houthi “axis of resistance”? Even beyond this the fact that “Palestine” is itself wholly a construct of a UN, post-Nuremberg international legal regime meant to transcend sovereignty through international institutions.\n\nThe fact that “Palestine” is also a license to murder Jews anywhere just makes it clear the new international legal order that originated in the genocide of the Jews will finally be decisively established when all claims to Jewish sovereignty or power have been eradicated. Only then can the international order be free of the specific “taint” of the “Holocaust” and attain full universality.\n\n“Palestine” is constructed so as to construct all Israeli actions as requiring UN and International legal approval and therefore intrinsically illegitimate. There is not a single thing Israel could do or refrain from doing that would not in some way be covered by some Security Council or General Assembly resolution, some ongoing or threatened international prosecution, and some boycott or sanctions legitimated by one of the above. All the methods here are familiar to those who follow the left carefully: invent some new legal category; get the network of NGOs to frame the issue in terms of that category; get some quasi-official body to issue proclamations and judgments ratifying the category; treat the category and judgment as officially determined and therefore factual, and pressure politicians and the media to use it every time they refer to the situation in question; demonize and delegitimize everyone who refuses to use the term or concede the judgment: in the case of Israel’s war with Hamas, that makes you a “genocide denier” (all of this continues to be modeled on Holocaust discourse, with everyone competing for bandwidth space on the Holocaust network).\n\nA secondary model applied to Israel is, of course, South Africa, which provides a playbook for accusing Israel of apartheid and rolling out a whole series of strategies for abolishing it. A tertiary model, itself modeled on the legal framing of Nazism, is perhaps Serbia, the international attack on which birthed the concept of “ethnic cleansing.” All liberal and leftist strategies are conserved, in part by reactivity of the accused, who think that they can turn the power of these totems back on their originators, as many supporters of Israeli sovereignty are doing now, often recycling old “War on Terror” tropes, like “Islamonazi.” This just helps, albeit minimally, to keep ratcheting the terms further.\n\nIsrael is an anomaly, just like Jews are. It’s ultimately not a liberal order, nor can it be since it can never erase the specifically Jewish and Judaic elements of the state. Supporters of Israel struggle to make Israel fit the liberal norm by pointing to everyday life in Israel which does, indeed, have a great deal in common with life in other Western liberal democracies—a New Yorker would feel at home in Tel Aviv, etc.—while also straining to attribute the non-liberal elements of Israel to other Western states. While having some truth, e.g., in the way countries like Germany and Ireland provide access to citizenship based on ethnicity, it’s far easier to imagine these countries doing away with such practices and going full America than to imagine Israel doing so.\n\nThe Jews bought a lot of land pre-1948, but enough only to establish some roots and infrastructure, not an entire country; they acquired some legal justification of their presence and potential sovereignty, but the need to do so is itself suspicious—if they were just there, none of that would be necessary; much of the displacement of the Arab population of what became Israel was a result of war and Arab atrocity propaganda and can be a posteriori justified by the expulsion of Jews from Arab states, but, some of it was just expulsion (attempts to justify which will always be suspect because certain demographic realities needed to be in place for Israel to exist).\n\nEvery government in the world depends upon other governments and institutions in the world order, but Israel seems uniquely dependent on the US, and therefore uniquely and suspiciously interested in its politics, especially if you think the US shouldn’t support Israel at all (in which case the “Israel lobby” assumes mythical proportions). Most supporters of Israel are liberals themselves and want to lessen the discomfort caused by these anomalies. Similarly, in many ways Israel is not a “settler colony” analogous to the US and Australia since it did constitute a “return” grounded on connections to the land maintained over the centuries—that there has not been a sovereign state on this territory prior to Israel other than the ancient Jewish Commonwealth itself is, at least, interesting.\n\nOf course, none of that fits modern norms of legitimacy, and it’s undeniable that Israel’s emergence as a modern state was fundamentally different than that of the decolonized countries—Israel is not a settler colony because it wasn’t a colony of some other country, but that just makes it more anomalous as a kind of autonomous colony transplanting itself not in accord with the logic of discovery and conquest but in the only place it could. I’ve seen that people who have not paid much attention to Israel before and start to notice all this stuff and find it bewildering, and with reason. It’s all sui generis and cannot be fit within existing frameworks of international law and legitimacy, thereby calling for some extraordinary explanation—which are not lacking when Jews are the topic.\n\nThe specific, and uniquely intense, hatred directed toward Israel certainly draws upon more or less explicit theological frameworks making Jewish power and sovereignty unthinkable (the Catholic Church still can’t quite come to terms with it, let alone Islam), but also derives from this singular condition. I can understand why people who have been “led to believe” that Israel is a typical liberal democracy sometimes become furious when they start to look into Israel marriage laws, immigration law, land property law, etc. It is simply very difficult to examine all these features on their own terms if you don’t love Israel—so, if you don’t love Israel, you’re very likely to hate it.\n\nAll this makes Israel extremely vulnerable in terms of all liberal political frames, and those countries operating outside of liberal frames, at least to some extent, have other reasons for supporting Israel’s enemies, including Israel’s preference for inclusion within the liberal left (for that matter, there’s no reason to expect non-liberal regimes to have anything in common with each other aside from their rejection of liberalism).\n\nThe only argument for Israel likely to withstand all the slings and arrows is one that places order over any abstract principle of legitimacy, or super-sovereignty. Of course, Israelis themselves will be loath to make such an argument, as Israeli political discourse is itself often driven by attempts to smooth out these anomalies, although there are some political figures of some prominence, like Einat Wilf and former justice minister Ayelet Shaked who have come to focus primarily on strengthening Israeli sovereignty (in both cases, though, within liberal political frameworks). But while arguments for Israel sovereignty should eschew abstract political principle it cannot ignore the way Israel serves as a cynosure of international attention and, for the reasons given above, is likely to do so for the foreseeable future.\n\nIt will seem pretentious and almost a kind of gratuitous baiting for Israel to claim the mantle of the “light unto the nations,” but its anomalous and singular place in world order can be represented otherwise. Israel actually represents another form of world unity than the prevailing human rights world view: one that foregrounds relations of power, international hierarchies and therefore the importance of covenants, necessarily asymmetrical but not therefore invalid, between states operating at the same level within the international “stack” and between imperial and surrogate states. If the question becomes, how can we maintain and even create order replaces the question of how can we guarantee the human rights of each individual on the planet, Israel’s anomaly becomes exemplary rather than monstrous.\n\nPutting together jigsaw puzzles of international cooperation on all the possible levels requires accepting anomalies all around. The duality of the Judaic covenant, with an earthly lord but also with a deity sovereign over all sovereigns , could then be freely examined as a particularly meaningful approach to world order. The first step in this direction would be for Israel to solve the anomalous Palestinian question within the framework of the assertion of Israeli sovereignty over all the territory it considers it necessary to control. To echo Napoleon’s proclamation regarding the emancipation of the Jews, with all the necessary historical irony, for the Palestinians as individuals, everything; for the Palestinians as a separate nation with national rights, nothing.\n\nAnother anomaly of Israel is that there is no middle ground: either Israel will be sovereign over all the territory it needs to defend itself or it will be obliterated and its people, for the most part, killed (some exiled, if anyone lets them in). All discourse on Israel is predicated on finding some middle ground, with the “two-state solution” being the most symmetrical and therefore obvious formulation, but all that discourse is wrong. This is because the Palestine War gives “Palestine” (not just the people called Palestinians but the entire Palestine apparatus—all those institutions mentioned above, what Lee Smith calls The Global Empire of Palestine ) no reason to accept anything less than a complete erasure of any Jewish footprint on the land.\n\nEven a single Jew there will represent Zionist contagion. Unless “Palestine” is defunded and dismantled, it will press forward, and I don’t see it being defunded and dismantled—too many careers in too many institutions depend on it, and it is surely supporting various networks of shadowy power across the world. The current wave of riots is making all of this very clear, and it is helpful that any pretense of Jews and Arabs living together in some future Palestine has been dropped by the movement. This way Israelis, Jews, and their supporters, who have been notoriously slow learners, can catch up with reality. Maybe it will lead to some “Greater Israel” yet.\n\nBut the real tit-for-tat (not to exclude the others) should be that every time “Palestine” renders itself a danger or nuisance, Israel should render itself helpful, if possible indispensable, to at least some powers that be. Meet uselessness and sabotage with usefulness and innovation. Meet the antinomic with the nomic—spread covenants across the globe so as to include the Holy One, Blessed Be He."
    },
    {
      "slug": "universal-translation-machine",
      "title": "Universal Translation Machine",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Nov 24, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/universal-translation-machine",
      "content": "The earliest computer translations were comically bad, because they tried to translate texts word by word—at first, it seemed, without any grammar check, but even if they added that in they would be comically bad because languages are idiomatic and as we speak, listen, read and write we don’t check the dictionary definition of every word we use. Machine translation became good when it began to “cheat”: rather than producing translations from scratch by matching words from one language with words from another, they worked with a database of already existing translations and could therefore check how specific words, phrases and sentences of, say, English, had already been translated into, say, Italian, and draw on the database that way—for completely novel sentences made of completely novel phrasing (not that common) approximations are possible while, perhaps at the furthest reaches of innovation or idiomaticity, even this kind of translation can’t be done very well yet.\n\nA similar trajectory characterized the development of AI in the form of LLMs: from earlier attempts to simulate human speech by producing vast logic trees that might lead from one sentence to another, efforts moved to next word prediction based, again, on which words have actually followed which words in all of the texts included in the database. In both cases the success of the later approach is obvious, but in both cases it’s also possible to think that certain very interesting problems have been skirted rather than solved.\n\nA similar oscillation has accompanied my own attempts to think about universal translation, since I wanted to produce specifically pedagogical translations, most importantly within the same language, that would more closely approximate what I would now call center study idioms. For this I wanted to use some articulation of Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes and the originary grammar I had been extracting from Eric Gans’s The Origin of Language : the ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative sequence (with ostensive-imperative-ostensive loops included). The method would be to break down any text or utterance into an explicit articulation of ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative, expressed in the primes.\n\nWierzbicka’s own explications, in which she takes a particular word or phrase and breaks it down into what is essentially a scenic articulation in which “someone” can “say” that they “see” something, or “want” something, but one “way” and not another “way,” and only “after” something else “happens,” and so on, served as a model for thinking about this. Initial approaches seemed to require the creation of what would essentially be an operationalizable proto-language that would provide in advance all necessary phrases and sentences, but this would obviously require massive labor even to prepare the database to perform machine translations.\n\nThis line of thinking, that is, ran aground on the same shoals as those early attempts at machine translation and language AIs. Another approach, following the same trajectory as those fields, might be to start with fully developed modes of language which can be designated as specific articulations of originary speech forms with samples translated into primes, and then maybe get the algorithms churning. The break down into primitives would still be necessary, but only as needed, say, to advance a particular side conversation, not as a pre-existing comprehensive base.\n\nIt's helpful to think about what and whom such a machine would be for, and it’s possible to be more precise about this now. Such a machine would be part of the officer class pedagogical company (let’s say: The New Officer Class Academy) discussed a couple of posts back and which would ravel up Fitness, Nomos/Class Action and Thirdness (with its strictly controlled predictions markets on judgments—which now, due to a suggestion from Eric Jacobus, I can see as a way of tokenizing deferral). Even more, building, maintaining, updating and deploying the machine might very well be the central, maybe in a sense, the sole, activity of the pedagogical company.\n\nThis technology, like all technology, has a specific goal: to bring ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives into closer correspondence with each other. This entails bringing more of language into a performative condition and making performative language increasingly felicitous. Healing the cut of the primacy of the declarative, we might say—putting the overcoming of metaphysics on firm footing. There’s a place here for a kind of extreme declarativizing—there’s an Oulipo procedure that calls for replacing every word in a text with its dictionary definition (and, of course, we could then replace all the words thereby produced with their dictionary definitions and so on) and a thoroughgoing prime translation of a text would look something like that—this is one of the ways I have thought of originary satire: taking things belonging to the ostensive and imperative realm and rendering them so completely declarative as to expose the ridiculousness of trying to “justify” every ostensive and imperative; but it could also work the other way, of exposing the ridiculousness of certain ostensive gestures and imperatives—either way, the ostensive-imperative-ostensive realm is being put to the test by being brought into the light of day of the declarative.\n\nBut such extreme declarativizing would itself be performative, because no one, not even the most “academic” of intellectuals, could ever really speak like that, so it’s a way of exposing the limits of the declarative rather than just stating propositions.\n\nWe could start, then, with the idioms of center study and a list of performative discourse forms and then put together a database of high-quality texts, narrowing down a range of world traditions to the ones on which we want to leverage and train contemporary utterances, prompting the model to translate contemporary texts of all kinds into a more centered discourse. We create the weights as we go by privileging those idioms that turn discourse more towards the center, creating, say, hypothesis/thought-experiment/prayer/promise hybrids from which we can derive modes of tokenization and protocols for blockchaining data.\n\nIt would then be here, in the selection and refining process, that originary grammar and explications in terms of primes are employed. We search for closer ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative fits, using reduction to the primes to further clarify the scene each utterance presupposes: what is the relation between someone thinking, someone doing something, something happening, someone thinking they see someone doing something when something is happening, and saying this is good, etc. We would be preserving and reactivating a whole range of traditions, and not only those of high culture but everything that reveals something of humanity, because none of it should be lost, even those parts we wouldn’t want to revivify. This selection and refining process is really a refining process and small changes in the prompts would yield significant dividends at the margins where entire forks of civilization are at stake.\n\nSo, AI in the broadest sentence is translation machinery: from input to output is translation, next word prediction is translation because each new word reconfigures the discourse into a different one, imitation of human language is translation, from possible to actual. All of the arguments about AI Ethics, AI alignment, AI safety, etc., are all about translating the mass of data we now have collected, tagged and assorted in ways that are “better” rather than “worse,” with no one being able to say exactly what’s better or worse without resorting to liberal bromides. We’ll be able to say, and in a way that takes in the entire supply chain of data organization and processing: better is more performative, better is more useful in settling cases, better is placing winning bets on pedagogical futures, better is widening, deepening and expanding the nomos by making more namespaces—and this “better” is determined within the pedagogical institutions serving as a pipeline for the leading companies in data security.\n\nEveryone will eventually be working on the universal translation machine because everyone has worthwhile data to offer while at the same time the need to gather forces against antinomic vendettas means filters are created that allow only a few in for now: Nomos/Class Action will be part of the machinery for this very reason. Zack Baker’s tokenization of kingship argument provides an approach—those producing and handling data in more useful ways receiving tokens providing access to the subscription system the company builds with other companies, serving as currency. The translation machinery should be able to instantiate Alexander Good’s goal of using AI to predict the economy sufficiently well to invest successfully enough to, ultimately, govern.\n\nBut such predictions must encompass what encompasses the economy, the broader array of kinship relations, pedagogical practices and succession rituals. How far into the future can we see family trees branching out; or increasing precision in showing others how to do things one way rather than another; the likely trajectories of candidates for the governing class a couple of generations down the road? Whatever “picture” we could get of all this now would guide us in our current practices, which is to say would become input that makes something like that future more likely but also, precisely because of the increasingly valuable flows of information entering the machinery, more likely to look different than what we can imagine now. Such predictions, then, are more a question of fitness and readiness in the present, while also being an abundant source of idioms.\n\nFinance provides the best idioms for weighing pedagogical futures, with the “futures” of course itself a derivative of financial terminology. Finance is completely future oriented, organized around exchanges to take place some time in the future, with the contract to engage in such an exchange then itself becoming an asset that can be bought or sold, and then used as collateral or included with a batch of other assets that serves as a hedge for some other investment. Of course, anyone with financial knowledge knows all this, and where I’m getting things wrong or putting them too simplistically. I will try to keep learning and improving, Money, according to Samuel Chambers, is credit, and nothing but credit, which I embrace since it’s entirely consistent with the concept of originary debt and makes it clear how the entire world runs on exchanges of confidence that change constantly.\n\nFinance is money exchanged for money, which if Money Has No Value , as the title of Chamber’s book has it, shouldn’t be possible but (and you’ll have to read Chamber’s book to see what I’m doing to his argument here) it seems to me that money exchanges are essentially exchanges between those who want the money at one time and those who want the money at another time. What’s being exchanged, then, is ready access to money, or liquidity, on the one hand, or the accumulation of reserves of it, on the other. Someone is obliged to pay me 100$ ten years from now, i.e., I am their creditor, and so I can sell you that credit for 60$ right now, because I can’t wait for the money, or can’t take the chance that debt will not be repaid—you, on the other hand, can wait and can absorb that risk, and what is involved here is simply a money as power equation because you have a far larger spread than I do.\n\nThis means that the critical financial devices of derivatives and arbitrage are solely measures of power: not everyone can be in a position to scour the markets looking for assets priced differently in different markets and scoop them up at the lower price and to be sold instantaneously at the higher prices. Chamber makes a very powerful case that there has never been a non-financialized capitalism and never could be, and that finance shapes the underlying commodities speculated on in constitutive ways—it’s not a distortion of some real economy. All this is completely consistent with Colin Drumm’s dissertation (which Chambers cites, very favorably) and Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power (which he doesn’t).\n\nFinance’s futurism serves as a kind of funhouse mirror, but one accurate down to the last detail in its own way, of the transference of originary debt to succession rituals I like to imagine. For Chamber, bitcoin cannot be money because it cannot have a credit-debtor relation—indeed, is designed precisely not to have such a relation—and also addresses the question of whether it is something else, potentially post-capitalism (which Chambers, who seems clearly critical of capitalism, would probably take an interest in) and concludes, not really. All this will have to be considered, while there are all kinds of other implications of blockchaining than the creation of new currency, but Chamber’s argument helps me to reconcile my own sense that bitcoin is ultimately an attempt to cancel all debt to the center, and therefore will always be limited.\n\nWe should want the world to be predictable in certain respects and unpredictable in others—we want to build forms of exchange that will be recognizable as precedents to forms of exchange to take place in the distant future without us, now, being able to tell what those future forms of exchange will look like. The things historians can recognize in the past, such as a small, backward province having what were then unrecognizable capacities to eventually become an empire, to be visible to us in the present, regarding the future. Then we could issue credits to some marginal sector or technology, seeding it for skunkworks and channeling promising students in that direction, but that is only possible insofar as the value of that sector or technology is not discounted against expected future earnings so that, for example, there are incentives to invest, hype, sell high and then let crash.\n\nThe best way to counter capitalism, it seems to me, is to be able to predict the value of a particular investment decades or more into the future so that even the most narrowly profit oriented will have the incentive to stick it out. Then, considerable social energies can be directed toward reinforcing that prediction, thereby improving the odds of the prediction, and building in other directions that depend upon the long-term viability of that project. And this would to some extent depend upon and to some extent help create, new kinship networks that would make all classes want to provide for future generations.\n\nThis may seem like a digression, but this is the kind of thing the universal translation machine should be for only not only and not even primarily to predict investments but to predict, given various hypothetical conditions depending upon the state of the juridical and the disciplinary, the prevalence and distribution of specific dispositions which can themselves only be located upon pedagogical scenes. This where the work of approximating discourse to performativity and the donation of resentment to the center leads—this is the path to the conversion of assets into data. I am writing this portion of this post the day Trump announced that, if he wins, he will establish an online American university, free to all, free of wokeness, and dedicated to making available the highest forms of knowledge.\n\nMaybe that will be a place to start building; more likely, it will serve as a model for forms of higher education rivaling and poaching from the current university system. What will count as the highest or, for that matter, genuine, knowledge will clearly be up for grabs, and center study should be ready to enter the fray, with our universal translation machine, predicting pedagogical futures. Once the prediction of future value extends beyond decades and looks towards centuries, we’re not talking about capitalism or money any more, and it will just be a question of the officer class and a few generals taking the leap from control over assets to positions within pedagogical platforms that provide a spread in the form of supply chains that have also moved off the capitalist line, and operate ritualistically, with the ritual being the tributary one of succession, with apex operators of one platform exchanging goods, services and materials to each other for publicly staged succession rituals—which ultimately become, simply, the nomic order."
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-the-existence-of-world-scenes",
      "title": "On the Existence of World Scenes",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 7, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/on-the-existence-of-world-scenes",
      "content": "If we’re going to talk of the stack of scenes then we’re going to be speaking of hierarchies of scenes and scenes referencing other scenes in various ways. If we think, for example, of a deliberation regarding some law leading to a vote in the US House of Representatives as a scene then we would have to acknowledge the specificity of that scene—it has a center, it generates resentments that are institutionally deferred in such a way as to reinforce the center—while also recognizing that everything on that scene is informed by myriad other scenes—the scenes of lobbyists meeting candidates in closed rooms, of congressional staff strategizing media strategy, activists and media outlets doing their own strategizing, etc., and then all the cross-over scenes between these various actors.\n\nAnd we are on some other scene here, me writing about this and you, whoever you are, reading it, on the scene mediated by electronic technology. I plan to encroach on McLuhanesque media theory here, by collapsing it into technology, or the stack of scenes, and that into pedagogical platforms. I’ve approached this before, drawing the fundamental line between the claim that media is an “extension of man” and my own claim that media is scenic design. At the same time I want to bring together my thinking on technology, which has a lot of not quite integrated components, but none of which I want to abandon: the stack of scenes, scenic design, the perfection of the imperative, mimelogical impressments and, more recently, bringing the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative into closer alignment (maybe I’m forgetting something).\n\nIt’s not that any of these descriptions contradict each other but that there is something to be gained by attempting to synthesize them. Moreover, Yuk Hui, in his new Machine and Sovereignty , recalls (as do Bichler and Nitzan in their Capital as Power ) Lewis Mumford’s notion of the “mega-machine” drawn from the ancient slave labor and military armies—something which I also had in mind in thinking about technology in terms of the kind of desecration needed to turn men into machine parts and then model actual machines on those configurations. Maybe I won’t get all this done in this post.\n\nMedia (or technology) as the extension of man retains a humanist residue, as there is a man to be extended; technology as scenic design has the human and technic entangled from the start, in a way consistent with Eric Jacobus’s reconstructing (in my reading) the precondition of the originary scene as the “recursial” object-based aggression made possible by the proto-human’s use of tools doubling as weapons. The creation of the earliest scenes is therefore already technological, as we are all instrumentalizing each other to protect and take instruction from the center. The earliest scenes were ritual, and ritual always entails design, because the participants are playing strictly choreographed roles that require them to be positioned in relation to each other and to the center in very specific ways that can be repeated.\n\nAnd the ritual is technical insofar as it makes something happen, in this case the co-constitution of the community and the center. This leads me to transfer this ritual dimension of the technological to the pedagogical, also at the heart of the communal and ritual (“education” is just an “extension” of “initiation”). This may be the least intuitive of my claims here: how can I say that the real purpose of building factories, cars, airplanes, advanced weaponry, medicines, etc., is the creation of pedagogical platforms. That social media conforms to that concept much more readily might suggest that I’m just projecting the obviously interactive nature of social media to earlier forms of technology.\n\nBut what we need to remember here is that technology is also always (and this is something I forgot above) a mode of governance and governance is always technological. Governance always concerns countering some real or anticipated resentment by bringing the governed into closer accord with imperatives from the center—making the governed more visible, as James Scott contended, but also making the center more legible and intelligible. So, technology always points outwards towards war and inward towards governance (which also involve imminent war against some section of the community), and this therefore means always training the governed in ways that make them more fit for both. So, yes, the purpose of factories, new forms of transportation driven by new forms of energy and all the rest is “ultimately” aimed at increasing coherence, adherence and competence in desired ways.\n\nEven from the standpoint of the individual inventor invention is fundamentally pedagogical: as AI teaches us especially forcefully, to replace a human activity with a technical device means studying that activity just as you’d have to do in order to practice it and in the process creating new human activities that can be replaced, and so on. Media theory tends to focus on the consumer or user of the media of technology—how cars transform living and working patterns, etc. If we look at things from the producer’s standpoint, or in terms of governance, then all those changes in lifestyles appear as opportunities to create new conditions, new modes of consensus and new paths towards proximity to power for the officer class.\n\nIdioms like “perfection of the imperative” and “bringing the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative into alignment” point to a trajectory that is both driven and stifled by distribution at the center. Under desecrating forms of power, Instrumentality of power is centralized while occupancy of the center is “desecured,” introducing divisions within the governing class and making the power of the central bank on one side and intelligence agencies on the other side more overt. One of the founding insights of the progressives, and the reason for their now generations long attempt to undermine and rework through subterfuge the US Constitution is that once technology reaches the point of quasi-monopolization dependent upon extended supply chains and technological coherence and continuity there are all kinds of things we can no longer productively argue about.\n\nThe standpoint of the small producer can no longer dictate politics, even ideologically. But the Progressives themselves had to work through a political order that lacks fundamental transparency regarding the source of imperatives and therefore relied upon technical and scientific metaphors. And they had too many of their own resentments to accurately gauge so as to enable them to give due respect to, and gracefully defer the resentments of those undergoing rapid transformations out of their own control. I wonder whether it would be possible to untangle the strands of 20 th and 21 st century technology that owe more to the relative competence in centralizing (perfecting) the imperative and those that owe more to back and forth subversions of untrusted sectors of the governing class.\n\nThe task here is to speak of all this as the stack of scenes—scenes within scenes, scenes simulating other scenes, fake scenes and real scenes, scenes behind the scenes, etc. We can’t name all of the trillions of events taking place daily throughout the world but we can keep tokenizing those that best serve as proxies for others in the ways that juridical orders (which include economic exchanges) make visible. I stay focused on the juridical because, as I’ve explained before, even events that seem outside of the juridical like scientific discoveries and technological innovations ultimately appear in juridical forms by relying upon property rights, investments, liabilities, insurance, sales, and so on: a new invention created by some lone individual in their garage only becomes an event once it enters that arena.\n\nWe could say that the media already tokenizes events by presenting them in a particular shape, and that the media’s representation is itself an event that is tokenized by that same media and others. It is tokenized in the sense that the event through its representation draws upon a kind of credit—we pay attention for some reason—and either accumulates or dissipates credit as a result. We could also say that the narrative forms and genres through which events are presented are tokenized. And events are tokenized so as to prompt those interpellated by them to position themselves within the nomos, in a way preparatory to entering the juridical.\n\nEvents almost (maybe I don’t even need that “almost”) always take the form of an implicitly juridical contest, in which competing claims are put against each other, in which we are incited to accuse or defend someone who has been accused. However much people want sci-fi talk about the acceleration of technology beyond human will and desire, even the futurists will get to the point where they have to accuse someone of preventing us from getting there faster. The only way to sustain a frame outside of the juridical is to remain solely within the ritual or the disciplinary: in the former case, that would mean creating a new nomos and doing nothing more than expanding it and refining its distribution; in the latter case, it would mean remaining strictly within a hypothesis testing mode where one is merely recording effects of some controlled action in strictly mathematical terms.\n\nCreating a nomos is the work of exploration, conquest and settlement, and is therefore the stuff of sci-fi but can also apply to earthly forms like the foundation of institutions and such things as start-ups, which therefore supply us with something like our modern myths. And events represented within the juridical will always refer back to this foundation, which itself always settles into a juridical form—which, though, in reality it always had as the discovery or foundation will have always had its origin in some charter or grant. (This is why an especially effective and somewhat cruel way of debunking such origin stories is by finding some legalistic sleight of hand that gave one or another of the founders the rights later exploited economically.\n\nIt’s also why uncritical celebrations of foundings, like the story of the creation of a great store chain always comes across as kitschy and vaguely dishonest—and also will almost invariably contain a sub-plot where rivals or the government use legal machinations to block the hero.) And there’s very little of interest in the event of scientific work itself to non-scientists until the invention or discovery can be presented publicly. So, we are led back to events ultimately taking the form of framing transgressions to be remedied, with the public brought in as a kind of jury, but sometimes solicited as witnesses, or a braying mob outside a courtroom demanding justice.\n\nSo tokenizing events would involve creating chains of precedents in which guilty parties and types of transgressions can provide templates for future events to be slotted into. In this way the media producer builds an audience that presides over certain kinds of crimes and claims and is trained to respond in predictable ways toward them. In this sense, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the enormities supposedly committed by the WEF or the “murder” of Peanut the Squirrel. If we assume that events have effects that don’t get captured in media mobilizations, then we’re looking behind those scenes to the real juridical scenes, that is actual court cases, too boring or drawn out or inconveniently revealing to get media play, but where real distribution takes place.\n\nThese events can be tokenized by those researching them as well, but differently—the media tokenization realizes value that can be immediately cashed in by the media outlet, its investors and its collaborators in the intelligence agencies, political parties, activist organizations and think tanks, etc. These actors can think in terms of exploiting the short term for the medium term, but not far beyond, with perhaps the exception of some within the intelligence agencies (it’s hard to know about this). The tokenization of scenes with a great degree of reality, though, can think long term precisely by planning the creation of a new nomos out of a more precise building of precedents and assets out of those precedents.\n\nThere is then a question of where the real nomos building intersects with the flow of pseudo-events, “pseudo” in the sense that the juridical framing of them is more of a fantasy vendetta—we see this when some think tank or policy formation group writing up detailed position papers for prospective reference by political actors get dragged into the public light as an involuntary witness against some political enemy who can be associated with that group. The point is to avoid such occurrences but the point of the media is to dig up and exploit them, and sometimes one has to say something. So, you try to be as uneventful as possible: we’re really just looking over this data, trying to solve these very nuanced administrative problems, etc.\n\nBut an officer class pedagogical company training its universal translation machine would be equipped to tokenize this artificially created event in a different way, to bring charges against the media outlets themselves—this is why the pedagogy company would have to have a Nomos/Class Action division as well. Then you drag those who believe they can produce the scene and stand outside of it, as shadowy prosecutors, onto the scene as defendants. And in this way you enter onto world scenes, create world scenes, while tokenizing them within a narrative that only the most patient and resourceful (in all senses) could assetize to the point where assets become data.\n\nI can sum it up in this way for now: we can distinguish between media in terms of how they enable the leveraging of the more fundamental juridical infrastructure and the disciplinary and aesthetic inscriptions of that infrastructure. But there is also a dimension of the technological more broadly that involves expanding the nomos—the stack of scenes can always add new scenes with new territories to distribute. In this way we can work with media theorists like McLuhan and, currently Andrey Mir, without seeing media as an independent force. If we see media in the frame of governance, we can apply the Jouvenalian model by seeing centralization via the production of additional “units” of direct state action as operating through and over the juridical, which is to say shifting the boundaries between the juridical and the vendettas from above and below.\n\nDifferent media, and different uses of media, are more or less suited to eroding and reconstructing these boundaries. There’s no way to separate what is “inherent” to a particular medium from its historical function in government, and McLuhan also recognized that particular media, like, say, radio, will have different effects in, e.g., literate vs. illiterate societies. Perhaps the best way to generalize is to identify the possibilities for data security opened up by a particular media and the way struggles over the center make for data insecurity in that particular media. In this way we could still speak about things like truth and falsity without reducing such determinations to mere declarative sentences: its more a matter of preserving the integrity and continuity of the imperative of the center, which is really consistent with bringing the various speech forms into alignment. And this returns us to the centrality of pedagogy to the stack of scenes, as pedagogy is a performance of archiving, of creating, maintaining and transmitting practices of collecting, sorting, preserving, becoming data.\n\nThis turned out to be a more narrowly focused discussion of the media, suggesting that the synthesis of stacked presencing needs a wider scene."
    },
    {
      "slug": "on-credit-and-the-idiom",
      "title": "On Credit and the Idiom",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Dec 20, 2024",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/on-credit-and-the-idiom",
      "content": "Here's a way to prepare for the explorations of this post: think about “argumentation,” what we mean by it, what counts as a “good” or even “genuine” argument, and then “counter-argument,” how to teach and assess one’s argument, and so on. The go to disciplines for addressing these issues would be philosophy and rhetoric, along with the legendary contest between them, from which all the other disciplines in the human sciences flow (I have not credited rhetoric in the past, so I’m correcting that now, considering that rhetoric essentially co-emerged with philosophy). But rather than the whole array or logical models and rhetorical techniques we might appropriate from those disciplines, what if we just say that “argument” is knowing how to use a particular cluster of words and phrases: because, nevertheless, therefore, for example, imply, and dozens or even hundreds of others—a few of them primes and others products of the metalanguage of literacy.\n\nYou learn how to use all these words in all the varying and ever-changing ways they can be used, by reading and writing and being read, by working with texts and producing them. There’s quite a bit of technics here, but not of the kind you’d learn from rhetoric, with its hundreds of devices, thoroughly labeled and defined, but also standing outside of ordinary language to create a language with narrow designs on the other. With the techno-lingual or originary semiotic approach I’m proposing, it’s a question of operating on vast linguistic infrastructures to bring new scenes into view and into play, and in a way directly reliant upon their intricate histories.\n\nThat is endless language learning, which I have for a long while placed at the center of human existence: the question of meaning is a literal one, concerned with our declaratives cashing out in exchangeable ostensives. We never really know our own language because language is a home of idioms that are perpetually invented and re-invented. Reading a new text means learning the language that text is constituting; entering a conversation means learning the language that has emerged amongst the speakers. But language is gesture and motion, and it is sedimented in our artifacts, so aligning ourselves with scenes and stacks of scenes is also language learning.\n\nLearning is contributing to the constitution of scenes, which means manipulating props and scenery, and becoming a prop and part of the scenery oneself. Entering into scenes also means marking and re-marking traces of the elements of those scenes, all derived from a single scene, but not in any way one could comprehend on a particular scene. We can model this working with traces on the work of the philologist, confronted by a series of variants of a particular text, or set of texts, and having to determine the provenance of each—originally, of course, to identify the genuinely sacred text that could be traced back to revelation through its generations of loyal caretakers.\n\nNow, though, we want to know how the array of scenes constituting us now is the result of a reconfiguration of earlier arrays of scenes, and we want to know this for the arrangement of orderly succession and the settlement of cases. Just as the metaphysical concepts of transcendence, logos, truth, and so on can be reduced to certain ways of using conjunctions and pronouns, historical inquiries can be reduced to identifying viable chains of hand-offs of power. In both cases this is a huge let down only if one can only imagine acting on a small set of inherited Big Scenes, free of the Stack; otherwise, creating meaning will have to suffice: if you want to continue to use words like, “noble,” for example (and why not, it is still part of the language), then you need to install the grammatical stacks and idioms through which “noble” will pave a path toward an ostensive, to an act ramifying across the stack of scenes that enough of the noble themselves will point to so as to perpetuate the sign.\n\nI’m working through the implications for center study of Samuel Chamber’s analysis showing, convincingly and, for me, “pleasingly,” that all money is credit—any token refers to a creditor and debtor. What those tokens entitle you to will, then, depend on the quality of your debtor or, probably more precisely the assessment, on the part of those who would have to grant you the entitlement, of the quality of the debtor. Having the US Treasury as your debtor when you hold dollars is having a very solid debtor, until it’s not. The state goes into debt so that it can be indebted to you so that you will in turn draw upon that credit to encourage others to provide you with things, for which others have to provide them with things, and so a chain of credit ultimately winds its way back to the state—which therefore must maintain a monopoly on that line of credit, at least in part by outlawing by force either the use of other lines of credit or refusal to take tokens issued from this one.\n\nBut we must then factor in the exchanges of money, or tokens, which I hypothesized in my last post means paying for use of the money at a particular time: you pay more for the use of money if you need it now than if you can wait for later. But even those who can generally wait until later need it right now, because enough of the people who generally need it now were not able to pay for their use of it. Chambers assumes that the production (of commodities) system is still essential to the money system, perhaps in part due to a residual Marxism, but I think he’s right. The financial system can greatly “distort” the production system by treating ownership of the assets comprising that system as forms of money, like collateral, so that whoever can discount the value of those assets against expected future earnings can make the commodities cost something other than they “ordinarily” would.\n\nBut Chambers is pretty clear that there is no “ordinarily,” and there never was—money and commodity were always tied up together as long as we’ve had capitalism. But capitalism can continue indefinitely because as long as people need commodities, productive assets can always be revalued and become a source of monetization once again.\n\nBut the ultimate source of credit is succession, and we could say that governance involves indebtedness to the governed, with the government backing the donations to the center commanded of the governed. If succession is insecure, credit is insecure: this is the grain of validity in the governing class’s fear of Trump, since succession under the current regime means maintaining the bureaucratic displacement of the juridical sufficiently robust and directional as to wage war or impose debt enforcement on the constituency of the potential Big Men, wherever they may be, while preventing any Big Man from rising to the top.\n\nThere’s an arbitrariness to it, since no action can ever be taken that won’t create fertile ground for the emergence of the chief or the sacred or divine king. And a constituency for such an emergence seems to be taking root in the one area of American life and maybe even global life, where something like monarchies can exist—the tech world. And something like monarchies can exist in the tech world because that world has been a reliable weapons supplier to the bureaucracy against the Big Men, but that no longer seems to be the case. It’s no coincidence that the tech world is one of the only places that seems conducive to learning, and is therefore the most likely site for the originary debt to be taken up again, in the form of reciprocal indebtedness of governor and governed.\n\nAnd this in turn means that the most basic form of learning, the kind that serves as the infrastructure for scenic design and idiom fluency is when and how to enforce and forgive the originary debt. Our most fundamental stance toward each other is the question: what do you owe to the center and what must the center provide you with to make that donation? But what you owe and what you ought now receive also entails a forgiveness of outstanding and even longstanding debts, and there will always be such. And this involves configuring yourself as data and initiating data exchange with the center. This must always already be technical knowledge, of the kind needed to configure yourself as data selected, curated and preserved against a broader field of data, which is also to say, everything.\n\nMoney is a particular kind of data, an especially important kind under capitalism, and the only way to transcend capitalism is to create investments that only pay off long after we are all dead—for that matter, that never pay off and are indefinitely deferred, while perhaps allowing a living on the interest and subsidiary investments whose yield is to be funneled back into the deferred one. And that long term investment would have to be in “human capital,” because even if, say, you wanted to invest in growing a new forest whose trees will only be usable for lumber in 150 years, you must also want the human “gardeners” (biologists, chemists, etc.) needed to ensure the growth of that forest.\n\nWhat you’re really betting on, then, is that there will be enough people to tend effectively to the forest. You’re taking on pedagogical futures which can only be valued in your current learning: the more thresholds of idiomatic penetration with the stack you pass, the more the worth of your pedagogical futures. We pay off our originary debt by producing ever more refined and precise measurements of fitness, where we are continually learning to do things we couldn’t have imagined as something one might do until after we’ve done some other thing.\n\nOriginary debt is paid down (and you must pay it down if you want your line of credit kept open) by identifying the beginning of some event as the middle of another event, the middle of an event the end of some other event, and so on—each such identification is a unit, if not necessarily an equal unit, of learning. Let me back up a little here. I am retrieving an old analysis of mine regarding scenic temporality, in which I borrow heavily from Charles Sanders Peirce’s analysis of boundaries and transitions. If we want to see exactly where the boundary between, say, a red and blue area is, we should examine, at the boundary, how many red and blue “particles” we find mixed together.\n\nWhere it’s 50/50, that’s where the boundary is. Similarly, how do we determine when a particular event has ended? This became especially important to me in thinking about the closure of the originary event—when, exactly, could we say it has been concluded? An event could only be determined to have been concluded from outside of the event, which is to say afterward, by someone unimplicated in the event—but, then, the completion of the event depends upon that person deeming it so, but who in turn deems that person to be beyond the “boundary” of the event? We seem to have an infinite regression of events validating or confirming previous events.\n\nPeirce proposes thinking about it as follows: consider the beginning of any event to be the middle of another event and the end of yet another event—in that case, you’re always in three events, or on three scenes, simultaneously, and from within each of these three scenes the other two can be deemed open, ongoing or closed. Obviously, we could multiply this model without limit, but three is the minimum, and beginning, middle and end represent the basic narrative structure, so any further analysis would just follow from this basic analysis anyway. So, presence involves establishing simultaneity of these three points in these three events (I also had in mind Einstein’s famous thought experiment regarding light coming from different directions and being registered by an instrument as a measure of simultaneity).\n\nInstead, then, of this analysis serving the purpose of entering some Bergsonian discussion of time and continuity (which it could still do, of course), it now seems to me to have more use as applied to learning: you have learned something when you have coordinated or interoperated these scenes. I would apply this to learning how to work with a tool as much as to learning abstract concepts or learning a language (setting aside that learning to work with a tool is also a kind of language learning). Rather than just being on one scene, which is, to speak phenomenologically, a kind of immediate form of being, the way things appear to a “natural disposition,” what you’re initiating now on some scene with some prop or piece of scenery is also in the middle of discovering some use and at the end of a certain perfection of the scenery, prop or, even, let’s say “app.”\n\nWe could speak in terms of the conversion of a scene which is the same as itself into a scene upon which we can continually say “this is the same.” Likes converge into sames while new kinds of likes are always being generated and discovered. Everything is like everything else in some way and we now have the computational power to keep generating more and more ways things can be like each other, while this computational power also enables us to decide the likelihood that any number of those things can be said to be the same on a scene. So, that’s learning: operationalizing new ways of saying this is the same sample out of a scene that is the same as itself.\n\nThis way of thinking about learning is fit to complete and continue our analysis of originary debt as being accounted for and paid off (“cleared”) in the currency of “learncoin,” which now becomes creating scenes within scenes—scenes within scenes that are both discovered and invented while, in some sense, having been always already there—the fundamental originary paradox. And we will always “relapse” in “feeling” ourselves to be on a single scene, and so debt enforcement involves interrupting that scene (interposing the temporality of one of the other scenes), for oneself and others, and while forgiveness involves allowing for it as a constant that allows for plural scenicity to spread out “elsewhere.”\n\nAnd this can only take place on a scene within the stack of scenes, which will come increasingly to involve writing and revising protocols and preparing oneself as a data sample that is like all other samples in ever more anomalous and incongruous ways while being the same under closely controlled ostensive conditions. Wealth, then, comes to be measured in learncoin, which is the approximation of succession practices to pedagogical practices, that is, practices that do nothing but create tripled scenes out of mono-scenes. All value will reside in the promise of new idioms that are transparent in proportion to one’s presence on the scene of saying “this is the same” with each such scene becoming the same as itself only long enough to become a new scene of saying this is the same in perpetuity.\n\nSo, each time you saying “this is the same” is iterated by others upon a scene that started off the same as itself, you have mined a learncoin. How much is that learncoin worth? Its value is as liable to fluctuations as any other coin, depending upon how much credit it provides, how much future that credit has, and how liquid that credit supply is. And that will all depend on proximity to singularized succession in perpetuity. Ensuring greater approximation to succession entails bringing the completion of a learncoinage into alignment with the middle of another mining process and the initiation of a new one. If we think about singularized succession in perpetuity as a kind of fluctuation negatively mirroring the fluctuations of money/credit then acting sovereignly means seeing to the alignment of these scenes, by continually updating your successor in such a way as to signal new more.\n\nOr less likely alignments of scenes. And any kind of acting means acting sovereignly, or in as close approximation to some sovereign action as possible. Only bringing into view and into practice an even more inter-articulated and complex array of futures can displace the futures generated by money as credit."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-thing-that-it-is-toward-a-curriculum-for-the-officer-class",
      "title": "The Thing That It Is: Toward a Curriculum for the Officer Class",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 3, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-thing-that-it-is-toward-a-curriculum",
      "content": "I’m going to follow up on suggestions in preceding posts and outline the program of a prospective Academy for the New Officer Class. I will reject liberal concepts like “disinterestedness” and “neutrality,” but without presupposing that, even if all education is intrinsically political, an educational institution can simply know in advance what is in the interest of those interests it serves. What is good for this or that group or social project is itself a matter of inquiry, the results of which can’t be determined in advance. I can distinguish this proposed project from liberalism by saying it will serve the center, and even go further and say that it should serve the Nomos through succession rituals and providing the kinds of knowers and knowledge that will settle cases within the juridical—only secure succession and a juridical order oscillating between the lower threshold of the vendetta and the upper threshold of the vendetta against the nomos can provide the extremely high quality data required for the anthropomorphic disciplines .\n\nBut the disciplines, whatever they are to look like, will need to explore those questions on their own terms—it’s not as if the occupant of the center or a team of practicing jurists can set research agendas beyond opening questions—they themselves are the products of former research agendas. In fact, in place of concepts like disinterestedness and neutrality, which could never drive inquiry and only serve to provide criteria for judging it, we could simply place curiosity, unlimited curiosity, with the only additional demand being that the results of your inquiries be placed fully at the disposal of the curious. We want our academy to be comprised of people who want to know what kind of thing every thing is.\n\nThe broadest way of conceptualizing this I have at my own disposal is in terms of what I’ve been calling “ stacked presencing ,” which in this context means following all the paths cut by human intentions, tracing them all the way back to the first human intention, on the originary scene, and forward through all their trajectories. This does mean I would insist on founding such an institution on the originary hypothesis—or, to put it another way, I wouldn’t myself be curious enough to do it any good if it were founded otherwise. I will suggest as I go what (certainly less evident) implications this would have for the physical sciences, but I’ll also mention that the originary hypothesis itself can be a kind of “target”—that is, if you can enhance it, excellent; if you can replace it with something better, fine, but you first of all would have to show you know what that would mean.\n\nBeyond my own “belief,” I would make the case that only through the originary hypothesis and the center study that follows from it, can a comprehensive curriculum be developed that overcomes the fragmentation of the modern disciplines without resorting to some kind of orthodoxy, much less the trivium of the medieval university. “Intention” is the maintenance of presence in the face of more or less imminent or anticipated violence that would disrupt the continuation of a speech act. In Gans’s analysis of the emergence of grammar in The Origin of Language , this is the process of emergence of the speech forms and, as I have argued many times, can be extended to the emergence of all cultural forms.\n\nI name something and it isn’t there but there might be trouble if it’s not supplied so another retrieves it—the origin of the imperative. I demand something but it’s unavailable; rather than outright refusal or failure, which includes a risk of violence, I convey, by combining the name of the object with the “operator of negation,” that the object has been rendered unavailable and that the demand for it should cease (mediated by the imperative stretching out into the less threatening but still not quite remitting interrogative)—the origin of the declarative. In each case, it is the maintenance of presence, not the creation of that specific cultural form, that is intended.\n\nThe maintenance of presence is synonymous with the maintenance of a scene, and so the creation of linguistic and cultural forms derives from the maintenance (which is also the re-creation) of scenes. And the “scenic intentionality” (we could also use the title of one of Gans’s books, the “scenic imagination”) therefore employs all the materials afforded by the scene—its props, furnishings, sceneries, which includes the other players on the scene and oneself. Using the elements of the scene to block a path toward its implosion and forge one towards its enhancement creates a new arrangement and purposing of those elements but in a manner and with consequences well beyond what could have been planned.\n\nEven if we speak in terms of scenic design, the more mapped out implementation of scenic intervention simply produces even further reaching implications beyond those which have been “input” to the design. We are building on past presencings to hold mimetic violence further at bay, and we can do so more intentionally (otherwise, why even bother thinking about it?) but never in a way that will free us from continuing to do so. What I want to draw attention to here is the extraordinarily rich field of study of all human activity in its engagements with the world and technology such an approach opens up. Any particular object we study—a text, an institution at a particular stage in its development, a device, historical actions—would be or be the results of stacked presencing, and we would develop ways of distinguishing the potential crisis (and its degree of imminence) constitutive of any intention and the reworking of available materials to fend off that crisis in greater or lesser degree.\n\nNo a priori moral or teleological assumptions would be needed here and I suspect they would be most unwelcome. We would be cultivating the sense that we, ourselves, are engaged in stacked presencings, preserving the scenes we inhabit (including the scenes of our inquiries) with whatever means their furnishings provide us with. If we are “biased” at all, it is toward identifying founding events, which will always be posited hypothetically, and as a way of bringing into focus specific actors on specific scenes, regarding which productive conversations can be had.\n\nI have thought for a while, and with greater conviction with the emergence of AIs that can produce texts, images and videos impossible (eventually) to distinguish from those humanly generated that the forward path for the human sciences involves retrieving the fundamental purpose of philology which, I think, lies at their modern origin. Philology emerges in order to distinguish the genuine sacred text from among all the variants: determining that this was the real text of a particular Gospel, for example, was critically important for institutions and doctrine, and also called into play extremely challenging and delicate inquires ranging from making out the letters and words on a piece of parchment to establishing which idiom was most likely to be employed during the time period accepted for the composition of that text (while being ready to revise assumptions regarding all that).\n\nDeepfakes, to take just the most obvious example, will confront us with similar challenges, but beyond that the access to massive databases, powerful search engines, and, now, machine learning algorithms open up research questions no one would have considered previously. To take a simple example, it is these technologies that have enabled Dennis McCarthy to establish, I think very convincingly, that Thomas North was the actual author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare (what about the sonnets and other poems though…). To take an example I like to use of the kind of research I would like to do, we could take a particular 19 th century author and correlate his texts on various linguistic levels with medical, governmental, scholarly, legal, journalistic, epistolary, fictional, etc., texts written during that same period and study the way that author was engaging the scenic dilemmas spread across various institutions—first of all, how he was drawing upon and reworking other idioms.\n\nOr, for that matter, how are they all drawing upon another—what are the linguistic tissues of what used to be called the “Spirit of the Age”? Radical revisions of our history would result. What we would be doing, in a sense, is a kind of blockchaining of history: distributing a particular text among all the other texts preceding and succeeding so that it exists for us in a network that will continue to be added to but can’t be detracted from. T.S. Eliot’s notion of tradition, in which a new poem retroactively changes the meaning of all the poems that came before it, would be made “material.” In all the vastness of the corpora and databases brought into play, we need never lose sight of the question of how this particular thing is that particular thing it is—a question that co-exists fertilely with the questions of what is everything else in the light of that thing.\n\nIn a hypothesis I worked out leading up to Anthropomorphics I suggested that the real results of the “anti-imperial imperialism” of the ancient Greeks and ancient Jews was less to provide us with abstract principles of behavior but to retrieve, through resentment toward the depredations of empire, an originary equality in the form of the proto-discipline: the philosophers in the form of the Greeks and the rabbis of the Talmud in the case of the Jews. This originary equality doesn’t scale up, which is why broader moral admonitions like “do unto others…” are really reformulations, in the style of wisdom literature, of the deferral of violent centralization also needed to constitute, and serving as the subject matter of, the proto-discipline.\n\nDisciplines can proliferate and become a model for social organization on the principle of creating scenes upon which we can say “this is the same” in a way that would be opaque to anyone not on that scene (which does not exclude the possibility of “inter-scenes” upon which the results of inquiries can be presented in various ways). The target of the Academy is the training of a New Officer Class, or governing class and so we would have another “bias” here: within the terms of a broader pursuit of disciplinarity, the Academy is especially interested in transforming governance into a discipline. This means not only a “field of study,” but a field of training and learning in which the students are considered to be apprentices to the governing class—or, now, whatever fragments of such a class might be said to exist in particular, I think, in those sectors of nomos most concerned with data security, which is to say ensuring the provenance of data and its usefulness for specific clients.\n\nSuch practices are more continuous than ever with, for example, studying the authorship of an obscure 17 th century Spanish play, its debts to various literary, legal, theological and other traditions, the precise forms and reasons for its obscurity, the conditions of possibility of its retrieval as a hinge upon which the tradition of European drama is revised, and so on—an inquiry that might have been started out of an accidental discovery that sparked some researcher’s curiosity. These habits of thought, which are more fundamentally habits of literacy, will be immeasurably important to the creation of a new governing class.\n\nThe thinking of disciplinarity is a derivative of scenic thinking—to consider that every utterance takes place within some discipline, even if a popularized, outdated or degenerate form of that discipline, and takes on its full meaning therefrom, is to think scenically, and this seems to me essential to researchers within the physical sciences as well. It’s a commonplace, but maybe true for all that, that while scholars in the humanities value actual texts and creators in ways that physicists, chemists and biologists don’t (no physicist needs to have read Einstein, let alone Newton, etc.) it may very well be that innovations within these fields will be accelerated by those texts having been read, if not by individuals in the disciplines, then by the disciplines themselves, in the forms of AI models trained on various precursors and paths within the disciplines.\n\nThese disciplines, within our Academy, will contribute to the Universal Translation Machine, retrieving discarded hypotheses, discovering the origins in certain discoveries and inventions in governmental or commercial or military projects in ways that suggest possible futures for those discoveries. Maybe a chat with a Feynman bot will help a young physicist achieve some breakthrough—but, then, that bot would have had to have been trained. So maybe the Academy will attract those scientists and engineers who are especially curious about how science might depend, and maybe has always depended, on materials usually taken to like beyond its boundaries.\n\nAnd such scientists and engineers might also be more interested in joint projects with those in the human sciences, and with artists, whom I don’t mean to exclude and who (very much including avant-garde, pataphysical and conceptual artists) should have an honored place in the Academy. I think this could be written up as a more formal proposal for any contemporary members of the governing class in exile who might want to increase the probability of leaving behind successors.\n\nThe future Officers Class needs to be able to see itself exclusively as producers, collectors, curators and analysts of data, but within a much broader understanding of data than we tend to have now. Data is whatever can be registered and recorded by the instruments we have now, whether that be money, court cases, polling results, indicators of health, textual archives and so on. We will be registering and recording far more, including much that would seem ineffable today: through learncoin, we will be registering, measuring, recording and blockchaining minute shifts in attention, along with the shifts in attention that notice those shifts in attention.\n\nWhatever is confusing to you about some old obscure movie is just as much data as what is contained in the movie itself. We will be meta all the way up and down. There will always be the remainder, all the new ostensives with implicit grammatical stackings attached—in fact, with the increase in registering there will be far more remainder, including that of all the computation itself that does not get registered computationally. This is just another way of saying that originary debt will never be cleared, and this fact provides a medium of exchange between center study and all the other ways of clearing debt throughout human history (what we call “religions”).\n\nThe Academy will be pedagogical platforms throughout, which means no ideas without a scene and no scene outside of the stack of scenes: the test for whether a declarative statement is to be taken as true will include questions regarding scenes of testimony, questions of scaling and replication, and tokenization. The Academy will itself produce currency, precursors to and ultimately convertible into learncoin. Thirdness and Nomos: Class Action are folded up into the Academy. We’re not quite ready to take applications."
    },
    {
      "slug": "judaism-as-civilizational-blockchain",
      "title": "Judaism as Civilizational Blockchain",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jan 17, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/judaism-as-civilizational-blockchain",
      "content": "The existence of Jews is a scandal, and therefore their existence is an unmistakable sign of immeasurable and monstrous Jewish power. “The Jews as scandal” is preferable to “antisemitism,” because “antisemitism” always tends to approximate “racism,” and to entail a series of officially approved definitions, criteria, etc.; whereas a brief conversation will always surface those who want to mobilize all their fellow victims of the Jews to bring violent measures towards the erasure of Jews. Erasing the scandal of the Jews requires operating extra-juridically, even extra-systemically, precisely because the Jews control all that and make it impossible to obtain “justice,” with the proof of that being, tautologically, their existence.\n\nIt’s necessary, then, to cut through the juridical and target the Jew directly, and if you listen closely to such discourses, whether on the right or left, there is always a point at which the need for identifiable markers useful for direct action kicks in: anyone who is not perpetually on guard against the Jew either is a Jew or is controlled by them, and this provides a clear path toward targeting the enemy. (The arc of antisemitism is long but bends towards accusing everyone else of being Jews.) There is thus a kind of transcendence to the project of Jew erasure, and “Palestine” has made it easier to see how fundamental this is to warring against the Jews by dropping any pretense of Jews and Palestinians sharing the land in some more equitable way (and bothering less and less with fastidious distinctions between “antizionism” and “antisemitism”) and moving directly on to demands the land be cleansed of Jews—and, further, taking the next step of tagging all insufficiently anti-Zionist Jews as targets as well. The fact that Jews exist proves the system corrupt, therefore, to get at the Jew systemic norms and guardrails must be disregarded, even torn down.\n\nThis is why all the anti-Jew stuff is really just collective fantasy, even if it can inspire violence—the destruction of Israel would have nothing to do with “Palestine” but, rather, with significant changes in imperial and regional power structures or priorities, even if laundered through something like “Free Palestine.” If the Jews really control everything, there’s nothing you can do; if you can do something, they don’t really control everything but, rather, represent one of many power centers, with which the Jews, however you configure that agency (if you were to bring a class action lawsuit against “the Jews” on behalf of their victims, to whom would you deliver the subpoena?\n\nWho would be part of the “class” bringing the suit?), has various relations of collaboration and antagonism. Then the power of the Jews is measurable, if in no other way than through those forces opposing them, at least to some degree effectively. Ask the victim of/warrior against the Jews to map this out for you—I suspect he will very much wish to avoid doing so, because that would leave open the possibility that not only is Jewish power less than 100%, but maybe it is even less than 50%, even much less, depending on how you identify collective action on the part of “the Jews” (which, upon entering such a discussion, you’d be obliged to do).\n\nThen they’d be left saying something like, “well, but even if it’s only 5%, they use that power to cause a lot of harm and I want to stop that,” but the problems with this are obvious—you could identify those harms and try to counter them using normal means available within the system. This double bind could be avoided in 1930s Europe because there were deep rooted traditions of excluding Jews from the polity and society, and in the 1930s and 40s these merely needed to be reinstalled, but nothing similar exists or could exist in the US without a complete breakdown of social order (in which the case the warriors against the Jews would have to first make their bid for power against other entrants into the field, like Mexican cartels).\n\nSo, while anti-Jew warfare can never involve anything more than low-level violence and occasional social hostility and the question of Israel is much higher up on the stack than those fuming against the Jews can reach, that the war against the Jews implies a comprehensive vendetta does suggest a kind of vocation for the Jews themselves: maintaining all the institutional means of deferring vendetta. There’s always a place for revenge and tit-for-tat—sometimes the neighborhood kids from different groups need to be allowed to sort things out for themselves, etc., and, I myself, in a previous post, drew attention to the way controlled vengeance keeps Israel grounded in reality, but in such cases responsible actors within the community are expected to keep a cap on it, so it doesn’t rise to the threshold at which the state (or threatened regional and imperial actors) would have to take an interest.\n\nAll this is part of the thinking of the juridical, which Jews have a very long and broad tradition of. While I’m certainly no Jewish “leader,” I’d like to contribute answers to the question of Jewish survival, vocation and continuity, which has become much more urgent post-October 7. I mentioned in a previous post that I think the normative Jew is the observant Zionist living in Israel—I distill that model by considering what mode of being Jewish is most likely to survive, grow, and maintain traditions and it seems to me irrefutable. Other Jews interested in Jewish continuity and community should at least respect and “inflect” toward that model, approximating at least some features of it, while maybe also providing those who conform more closely to the model with information they might not have access to or means to fully interpret, especially regarding the broader field of interplay between Jews and non-Jews.\n\nWhat it seems to me the normative Jew I’m proposing may not see is that the Jews have no choice but to represent something. There’s too much attention coming our way, always has been and we can assume always will be, and just asking to be left alone and treated like anyone else is a refusal of reality. We might as well represent something that serves to regulate internal Jewish relations as well as relations between Jews and other communities and Jews and the state—and something, of course, that must be recognizable in terms of Jewish traditions, Torah, Talmud, etc.\n\nThat being a Jew means witnessing to injustice is as longstanding a proposition on the meaning of being Jewish as anything. Being targeted unjustly, even outrageously so, over such a long period of time, interpreting that persecution as punishment from God while at the same time refusing self-sacrifice and the forgiveness of enemies is a kind of paradoxical position, but a fairly textured one for the detection of injustice. I would want to sharply curtail the leftist Jewish interpretation which applies this mandate to “social injustices,” limiting it strictly to the operation of the juridical within the terms of the nomos, which is to say perversions and travesties of justice within the strict sense of a court case with opposing sides, governed by ever refined canons of evidence, relevance, etc.\n\nI would take this a step further and ban Jews who promote the killing of their fellow Jews, which would place all the pro-Palestinian Jews outside of Judaism—but I think that would require a bit of a legal revolution. A strict interpretation of “witnessing” would also oppose activities likely to arouse the hostility of the larger world within which we live—which has always been a consideration in Jewish legal reasoning. We Jews don’t have the power to prevent much injustice, but we can witness to it, even if first of all towards us but then to others within the only kind of order within which we could live as well—one with clear power lines and accountability running through it.\n\nIn contemporary terms, this would mean that Jews should try to become a civilizational blockchain—recording social exchanges and disputes as objectively and permanently as we can. This seems to me an easy to understand and noble aspiration for Jews, one applicable to Israel as a nation and state and Jews across the professions in which we are so disproportionately represented: the fields of law, knowledge-making, media, finance and governance.\n\nThe blockchain is where covenants can be recorded in a permanent, inalterable manner, and the primary point of pride for Jews who bear some relation to Jewish traditions is the preservation of a once in history covenant with the creator of the universe, which is to say the founder of the original nomos. The covenant is a very detailed one, covering all of life, so that we are continuing the creation of the universe with every deed. I have my own reading of the formation of that covenant, one I have explained on a few occasions, derived from Bernard Lamborelle’s theory that the covenant of Abraham described in Genesis was with a Mesopotamian king, allocating to Abraham a plot of land in exchange for services.\n\nThat the memory of that covenant was preserved and revised through centuries of tribal conglomeration, national consolidation, vassalage, several exiles, and so on makes me, at least, more committed to its continuance than if I took it literally. Other Jews need not accept this account, but its value, in my view, is that it unites service to earthly governance with commitment to eternity and always mediated through the juridical, the space of judgment—but there are other ways of cutting a path there than through this particular account. Jews are better thought of as a nation of scribes than a nation of priests, and a nation of scribes is mostly concerned with keeping the records clear, sorting out the provenance of variants of sacred writings, and there’s no better preparation for being a civilizational blockchain.\n\nEven if Jews as a whole will not maintain this standard (there has never been a version of Judaism that all Jews adhered to or maintained) it can serve as an idiom uniting the more and less observant, diaspora and Israeli, while ordering more properly relations to Gentiles, not one of either separation or assimilation, but something like: we will mark your treatment of us on the scale of justice while marking as deviant anyone claiming adherence to Judaism who seeks to undermine covenants, or contracts or agreements. This path must also provide a way for Israel to deal with those Arabs currently called Palestinian who will eventually come under Israeli sovereignty, and provides a frame for contributing to global order, currently fraying a bit, as also operating, more minimally, potentially and provisionally, in terms of justice, which we can also try to bring into closer approximation with order.\n\nI don’t address current blood libels against Jews, in particular the accusation of genocide, since there are plenty of others doing that effectively, even if without much effect on public opinion, and I’ll just note my agreement with people like Natasha Hausdorff and John Spencer. But the need to make such charges symmetrical with the most notorious crimes against Jews is precisely the kind of thing to record on the civilizational blockchain, and somehow incorporate into Jewish praxis. Being a civilizational blockchain, though, involves exercising power, and exercising power involves being involved in power struggles, and there is no doubt that Jews have always had some relation to power and now more than ever.\n\nThat Israel, through the Mossad and AIPAC, controls some “portion” of American politics is undeniable, but how much in relation to MI5 (and the “five eyes” generally), the Qataris and other oil producing states or the hundreds of other lobbying groups representing everyone from ethnic interests to NGOs to corporate cartels? I have never seen anyone try to quantify any of this, which means everyone gesturing toward Mossad/AIPAC is content to leave open the possibility of turning Israel into the US’s enemy at some point—I suppose this is a “Schelling Point.” Israeli control or power, in such discourses, is also invariably represented in unilateral terms, rather than as exchanges—of intelligence, military technology, goods, etc.\n\n(In most “power” discourse the possibility that exercising power might entail being good at something—other than endlessly tormenting and killing people—is rigorously excluded, which means that ways of exercising power oneself can never pass a certain low level. Calls to “wake up” do the heavy lifting.) And I do mean invariably, with the exception only of unequivocally pro-Israel positions (which in turn tend to ignore power possessed by Jews). The implication is that Jewish existence is conditional, granted on sufferance, which is in a sense the case since, obviously, if a large enough coalition of world powers decided to target Jews, that could kill every last one of us.\n\nIsrael is contentious because the Jews of Israel conquered the country (implementing a UN resolution) with some hastily cobbled together diplomatic support and the Arab-Israel conflict has since then been framed in terms of the implicit, but now very explicit, legitimacy of an Arab re-conquest. The Christian, post-Christian and Muslim worlds have never quite signed on to the unconditionality of Jewish life, which also means that Jews must always seek out some reserves of power, some buffers against eventual annihilation, “more” than they seem to need, which calls into question the legitimacy of Jewish existence, etc.\n\nBut the Jews could never be targeted at a high enough level to constitute a real threat without bringing down the entire juridical order and converting it into a global order of hostage taking—the logic of both the Nazi genocide and Muslim terrorism, the logic of you must hunt the Jews or be hunted yourself as a Jew. “Evidence” is reduced to ever fluctuating metrics of loyalty. Measurements of this ever present “penumbra” of another possibility against the terms of juridical order is what is to be measured on the civilizational blockchain."
    },
    {
      "slug": "deactivating-the-legislature",
      "title": "Deactivating the Legislature",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Feb 18, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/deactivating-the-legislature",
      "content": "If you have some radical ideas about how to remake the social order it’s a very helpful exercise to think through how those changes might be introduced with minimal, or, even, no overt transformations in existing social institutions or their founding narratives. (My argument, in Antropomorphics , for reading the US Constitution as written for a Chief Executive like George Washington, is an attempt to do this.) It’s easy to see that running headlong into massive, densely structured institutions staffed by well trained and committed people drawing upon decades or centuries of traditions of rule, as anyone familiar with the Jouvenal model knows, can only be successful with significant elite patronage—but in that case, is there any reason to think you’d be bringing about the changes you want?\n\nThe left has, over the past century, operated overwhelmingly through infiltration, involving not only the insinuation of favorable personnel into major social institutions, from government to media to the universities, but the systematic revising and reinterpretation of founding documents and principles. This was much easier for the left than it would be for the right since those institutions were “pre-infiltrated,” being based on liberal principles conducive to High-Low vs. the Middle maneuvering. But the right has had its successes, in the realms of gun rights, abortion, and free market economics (which, yes, is not real, and is anyway currently out of favor with ascendant factions of the right, but think about whether you’d rather have corporations or communism), and these successes involved infiltrating law schools and economics departments, founding activist groups with donor networks and, I assume, something like NGOs.\n\nWith a rigorous focus on law and order and equal treatment, there might be more victories in the coming years won through some canny appropriation of leftist-style strategies (this post was written prior to the inauguration of President Trump, and his initiation of what I suppose we could call a “Yarvinite” strategy of “regime change,” which might supersede the more cautious, gradual approach I explore here—but I think there will still be plenty of work to be done and some suggestions here as to how to do it).\n\nBut even while some important future officer class training and recruitment might be taking place through these battles, in the end they remain mere skirmishes. They can’t touch the basic fulcrum of desecrational politics, the oscillation between the central banks and central intelligence. And this oscillation works through the only thoroughly modern and completely unnecessary branch of government: the legislature. There never has been and there can be no governance without an occupant of the center, whether it be a monarch, chief executive or prime minister. Nor could there be without a judicial branch, or court system, which we also find in at least rudimentary forms in the most ancient forms of government.\n\nAnd we can see why—at the very least, from the standpoint of the center, the judiciary serves as a filter, framing, articulating and settling conflicts before they can snowball and become a threat to order or the regime. But the legislature develops out of late medieval struggles between the king and nobles over royal attempts to extract the necessary revenues, mostly for war. The idea that there can be a body of government that “writes laws”—and, for that matter, that “writing laws” was the basic source of laws, is a modern “discovery.” It probably developed out of the aforementioned requests for revenue by the king, which we can see “evolving” into the composing and passing of budgets in desacralized orders.\n\nIf you’re responding “pre-emptively” to a request for revenue (implying the king has conceded that it is a “request”), then those providing the revenue must be allowed to determine the sources of revenue (not them, anymore) and its various destinations. (I assume late 17 th -18 th century England would be the place to study this transformation). And here we have most of modern law: grants of funds and authority to bureaucratic agencies (like through USAID). And since this is the money sluice, this is where all the attention of those outside of government who want something from government is directed, which is why a simple answer to any complaint about almost any feature of “liberal democracy” or “constitutional republics” (if you prefer) is: abolish the legislature.\n\nAll law was originally royal decrees and common law developed through precedent based on judgments made in terms of the founding nomos (whose land is whose?). The “Code of Hammurabi” is just a collection of judicial decisions and most likely so are laws attributed to God in the Torah (which is still, clearly, a source of the idea that laws can be “written”—even if the assumption was that they can only be written this once).\n\nAbolishing the legislature while (remembering the exercise proposed above) leaving it formally intact is a formidable task. Sticking to the US system (I suspect that parliamentary systems pose greater difficulties since the prime minister comes directly from the legislative body—still, most—all?—parliamentary systems have back-up reserves of power in either a monarch or president). In the US, the Congress has to pass a budget (which they haven’t actually done for quite a while, which mean we’re already either on the path outlined here or even further off it), but the process does begin with the President sending a proposed budget to Congress—so, the trick here would be to make congressional rubber-stamping of the presidential budget routine.\n\nWe might want to model strategies on the Jouvenalian HLvM process, only in this case make it Executive and Judicial vs. the Legislative. It might be possible to use all kinds of legal measures, even drawing upon interpretations of laws passed by Congress, to place individual representatives in all kinds of potential legal jeopardy. This would be much easier for the House than the Senate, as in the House they’re almost all probably involved in borderline illegal activities on a regular basis. Understandings between the Department of Justice and the Federal Judiciary would work wonders here, even if I don’t know just yet how to spell out the details (leave that to the think tanks).\n\nCongressional representatives are privy to all kinds of classified information, which they can then transmit to well situated agents in the media, and there might be a lot to look into here as well. This presupposes the executive getting a handle on the intelligence agencies, which is very difficult in practice but at least easy in principle since those agencies have no constitutional authorization—the American political order could be what it is without the CIA and NSA in a way it couldn’t without Congress. Maybe another layer of strategy is necessary here: leveraging some parts of the intelligence agencies against others and leveraging the intelligence agencies against the administrative agencies.\n\nThere was a very fashionable movement, initiated in the US by Clinton and the “New Democrats” (with parallel developments in Blair’s “New Labour”), to privatize social services, on the publicly stated understanding that, given the post-Reagan and post-Communist faith in “markets,” this would lead to greater efficiencies and lower costs. I don’t think there’s anyone today calling these efforts a success, or pushing much to attempt it today, but a similar attempt has become routine in the “harder” areas of state power like intelligence and the military, where the use of contractors is indispensable—of course, private industry was always heavily involved in military production.\n\nThe leveraging of private companies to route around and surround the legislature is much more promising in this area. If you listen to Trump speak about NATO and the US’s relation to its allies, you can see he sees the US as essentially contracting out its superior military power to the Europeans, and he is appalled that we should have been doing this for free and at a loss for all these years. If the government becomes more like a protection agency, intelligence service and, even more, an insurance company (which, strictly speaking, it has been since the 1930s), then the availability of resources outside of those raised by taxes and controlled by Congress presents itself.\n\nAll of the regulatory and social service funding and agencies empowered by Congress can be transferred to local levels, through the repair of the legal system so that it can handle lawsuits regarding damages attributed to products, working conditions, the environmental effects of production, and fraud, on the one hand, and decrees requiring localities, companies and families (kinship networks) to provide aid for, confine, or engage in “useful occupations” those who would otherwise become burdens on or dangers to the community. We remove all incentive to donate money to Congressional campaigns, and much of the incentive to go into politics as a profession—no more lobbying, no more rent seeking, no more use of regulation against competitors, etc.\n\nWe do have to take into account two highly significant powers of Congress: the declaration of war, and impeachment. We could say that if congress has been brought into line with regard to rubberstamping budgets it will already be sufficiently tamed not to dare to defy the president in such matters. But let’s continue the exercise and assume these problems need to be confronted. First of all, what is war, and what would count as a declaration of war? War can be waged without declaring it, simply from the president’s power as commander-in-chief, and military action can be approved in verbal forms other than a “declaration of war” (“approval to take necessary actions…”).\n\nAnd have not the lines between war and not-war been blurred considerably, to the point where ordinary surveillance, information gathering, positioning and posturing, already approximate war? The need to neutralize congress will be an incentive to push these arguments further. Regarding impeachment, which is already a rare and risky recourse, never yet in American history leading to conviction and removal of a president (or hardly anyone else) from office, it can be made even riskier by the president availing himself of the same kinds of persuasive and coercive methods already adduced for bringing congress into budgetary compliance.\n\nI wonder whether RICO actions or the equivalent can be used to break up the political parties themselves, designating them as criminal organizations. Along the way there would be showdowns, with each one won by the president making victory in the next easier.\n\nWhat, then, would be left for Congress to do? Well, there are still some Senate functions, such as approving Cabinet appointments and judges and ratifying treaties—maybe if these became more focused they could become useful, and since there are already end-arounds these dependencies, the Senate could be further marginalized in these areas as well. The Senate seems to be very dependent on the intelligence agencies, disciplines and secret and political police in these functions, and if those agencies are altered or eliminated as necessary, the Senate might become highly compliant here. There is one thing that both houses of congress do that they might very well be encouraged to do more of, and that they really seem to enjoy, and that is to hold hearings.\n\nHouse representative never seem happier than when they are humiliating (or trying to humiliate) some corporate or bureaucratic bogeyman or political enemy. All these hearings ever lead to is a referral to the DOJ for prosecution, which is to say, to the executive branch. Such hearings can be entertaining and informative and could be used to serve the president’s purposes. This might be glossed as returning the legislature to its original function of providing advice and counsel to the ruler, providing him with access to knowledge of the realm he might not have access to himself. And, finally, congressional representatives might find their true vocation as cheerleaders and publicists for their districts and states, representing their needs and accomplishments in a promising light, pointing out where federal agencies might be located or how the state might be staffed.\n\nThis might make individual representatives very popular and very reliant upon their constituents, along with making representation less of a lifetime job and more a position people rotate in and out of—and the institution of congress itself, famously unpopular, might become admired liked again. And, some might say, isn’t that a truer democracy than what we have had so far?\n\nThe key here seems to be for some popular president to work systematically at coercing congress by targeting individual congresspeople in coordination with the DOJ and intelligence agencies—only a minority would need to be neutralized to significantly weaken the body as a whole. This assumes the possibility of coordinating with those notoriously “swampy” government agencies (or, given recent events, simply eliminating them—far better!), and the best way of approaching that is probably through the companies which those agencies contract out to, which can provide leverage in the form of necessary intelligence and capability and personnel.\n\nRegarding the DOJ, dependence on law schools, various legal communities and the disciplines more generally would be an issue—there are already bastions of conservative legal thought in those spaces but Federalist Society trained legal minds might be an obstacle insofar as they genuinely believe in a particular, originalist, understanding of the Constitution. Histories of legislative bodies, throughout the world and history but especially in the US, will need to be commissioned and written, in order to create space to speak about the legislature in terms other than the “body of government closest to the people,” etc.\n\nMarginalized traditions of American, Anglo and European political thought can be brought to bear on the effort. The legislative branch can be completely discredited as a serious vehicle of governance, and that should be the goal from the outset. One might not want it to be explicit from the beginning, but even if the project gets publicized early on, disgust with corruption and congress can be mobilized to counter charges of an attack on democracy, etc."
    },
    {
      "slug": "toward-a-curriculum-for-the-new-officer-class-academy",
      "title": "Toward a Curriculum for the New Officer Class Academy",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 4, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/toward-a-curriculum-for-the-new-officer",
      "content": "The early modern “absolutist” state in England was broken by a revolution, the execution of a king, the creation of a central bank in control of credit, and the establishment of a prototype of the two-party (and journalistic) system (it seems that journalism was created by the public organs of each party trying to weaken the credit of the central bank when the other side is in power). Such are the origins of liberal democracy. The increasing difficulties James I and Charles I had in financing their regimes as imperial exploration and competition heated up pushed the latter into an ultimately fatal conflict with Parliament.\n\nThere is much more to be said about money difficulties of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs and their own encouragement of financial enterprises that aimed at solving those problems but ended up liquidating the monarchy, but this outline can suffice for now. My working hypothesis regarding liberal democracy is that it represents the oscillation between the central bank and the central intelligence—so, it would be interesting if significant developments in British intelligence coincided (roughly) with the establishment of the Bank of England. I don’t think other countries had such a decisive break up of the regime and centralization of the bank, but once the British did it it wouldn’t matter if others did—the British established a new international order, which was eventually passed onto the US, which established its central bank around the time it began to assume imperial powers (creating its own intelligence powers commensurate with imperial obligations in the 40s). All this is just by way of reminder, so as to move into new material.\n\nThe concept of singularized succession in perpetuity (SSIP) is designed (not to say I always had exactly this in mind) to directly counter this regime—it serves as a kind of equivalent, measure, mirror opposite, and projected replacement of the bank/intelligence oscillation. In general terms, SSIP attracts all of the hypothesizing, futurity, probabilistic thinking, risk, reserves, credibility, etc., constitutive of the credit system: the purpose of the concept is to imagine all of those qualities transferred to an agency as intentional as the central intelligence can be, while transferring all of the intentionality of central intelligence, its patient and persistence gathering of data, infiltration of institutions, surveillance, seeding of disciplinary projects, etc., to public demonstration.\n\nThis framework provides a theoretical approach that allows for any degree of resolution into existing realities within a resolutely normative frame: “is,” “might” and “should” are all articulated. SSIP is a hypothesis strictly continuous with the originary hypothesis, as the designation of the successor affirms the center in anticipation of an increasingly deferred violent crisis. SSIP, then, is not just an absolutist political proposition; it is an “ethos,” and a mode of inquiry and an ongoing fluctuation itself, as the occupant of the center can and will change the designated successor and, indeed, the entire slate of candidates, as part of his ongoing retrieval of information and corresponding assessment of situations.\n\nNor is SSIP just for strictly governing institutions—in fact, since all institutions are governing institutions, SSIP is the privileged mode of maintaining social continuity (the originary problem) across the board. “Technology,” or stacked presencing, can thus be seen as a continual enlargement of the nomos, making possible new distributions along with new allocations of responsibility. Freeing the stack from the bank/intelligence axis involves the conversion of assets into data I’ve often discussed and the transformation of the stack into what it always already was: an articulation of pedagogical platforms, calling on pedagogical futures within a subscription system of distribution and coordination.\n\nOperations within the juridical order serve as a measure of progress and possibility in laying the groundwork of SSIP. I have spoken several times of the basic paradox of the juridical: the more secure the juridical order, which is to say the more likely that transgressions that tend to bring the vendetta or feud above the threshold marking the possibility of the juridical, or above the threshold marking the inviolability of the nomos, are dealt with fully and openly and certainly so as to lower those respective thresholds, the less likely they are to be employed: i.e., if every criminal and every fraud and every defamer, etc., knew to a near certainty he would be detected, caught and punished those activities would drop down to around zero.\n\nSo, a perfect juridical order would lead the juridical order to disappear within a broader field of blockchained interactions. This tendency will always be asymptotic because our mimetic nature means that the threshold of objectionable behavior can always be lowered, but that in itself provides a measure of our progress towards SSIP. The real objection to capitalism and central bank rule is precisely that it is always beyond justice because above a certain power level crimes can be committed with impunity because bringing them into a court would threaten the nomos too catastrophically for any orderly disposition to take place.\n\nThe exercise of sovereignty into bringing such crimes within the juridical order would be comprehensive beyond the current imaginings of any but a few (we few should be those few), utterly transforming the allocational order not towards the abolition of the nomos (i.e., communism—which makes justice meaningless) but towards a more fully intentional supervision of it represented by SSIP. And the same is true for the central intelligence, whose operations are too deep, and too bound up with untraceable imperatives, for any but the most limited hangout to be brought within the scope of the juridical.\n\nAll of the human disciplines, and all of the disciplines insofar as they touch upon, require approval from and are contained within the human order, are bound up with, which is to say serve as commentaries upon, the juridical—in a post-Axial Age, where God is understood to be a judge and God of justice, this includes ritual and theology. I’ve remarked before on the anthropological and sociological richness of juridical categories, putting to shame those invented by disciplines like, say, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and psychology (which latter only serves the purpose of determining fitness to enter into the juridical order as a responsible participant).\n\nAll the moralizing about honesty, sincerity, authenticity, kindness, etc., etc., even courage, are practically worthless compared to (and no doubt parasitic upon) the historically crafted, refined and preserved concepts of perjury, fraud, relevance, libel and slander, contract, impeachment, standing, damages, filing suit and so on. The human sciences are just supplemental to clarifying the conditions, implications, and determinations that these concepts entail, including those surrounding competence to enter into agreements. Literature belongs in this category—much of the novel can be seen as a sustained inquiry into the conditions and implications of the marriage contract, one of the knottiest of all legal arrangements.\n\nAnd so the curriculum of the proposed New Officer Class Academy is comprised of all of the documents tracing the various histories of the juridical order as inquiries into that order, with the aim of identifying those scenes, real and hypothetical (real as hypothetical), where crises in the juridical got resolved in some way worthy of retrieving—but, of course, we can’t know what’s worthy of retrieving until we’ve retrieved and investigated it. Every document is really such a record, and calls upon all our philological, rhetorical and interpretive expertise to see it properly as such.\n\nThe word “deem” may be useful way to center this inquiry. Deem is a transitive verb, so you don’t just deem, you deem something to be something. It’s a kind of naming. According to the online etymological dictionary, “deem” comes from a Middle English word meaning to “judge,” or “condemn” (how close must “judge” and “condemn” be in their origins?), with the Proto-Indo-European root being a word meaning to “set,” or “put.” You can train AIs to give names to phenomena they identify—indeed, this is routine—but AIs can’t “deem,” or if they do deem, they have been authorized or deemed worthy to do so, by, ultimately, a human.\n\nWe can get away from the parameters of the Turing test and find the test for the irreducible difference between computer and human to be whether the centrality of deeming shows up in language on scenes in ways we can identify. Deeming places us in the chain of originary debt to the center, and while we can readily understand why a human would deem something to be that thing in a way we would go along with, there’s really no particularly good reason why we should accept deeming carried out by a computer program or algorithm. Deeming is part of a cluster of other words and phrases in the ostensive-imperative-ostensive sphere that become especially important within the Stack because uncannily similar to programming: promise, prayer, oath, curse, bless, oblige, thank, grace (as in “grace others by one’s presence”), and so on.\n\nI will propose, then, as a hypothesis that I as yet have no idea how to prove or disprove, or even whether proof is the relevant consideration here, that when AIs simulate these speech acts there will always be something “off” that humans can detect, even if not describe. We can’t credit a machine’s promise, even if we fully expect it to do what it says it will, nor can we credit its “hope” for us, even if we expect it to be unconditionally helpful.\n\nThese revisions of the Turing Test only really matter insofar as they provide models for performing our relations to the scenes we are on. That is, it’s not like once we have “proven” that there is something irreducible and irreplaceable about the human we can call it a day. If we are studying texts as transmissions of originary debt then we are interested precisely in how they established and preserved networks of institutional affiliations and obligations—how they kept the ledger. And that study is itself us adding new chains to the ledger, in the form of the data we provide to the central intelligence. Here we can begin to see a productive and paradoxical dynamic in our scenic interactions: the more we make and keep promises, the more we deem, and thank and “authenticate” our social being the more our actions will be intelligible at various levels of the stack.\n\nMaybe I haven’t been clear about this before, but there is a simple point here: a sloppy judicial scene tells you very little about the case the court is dealing with. If witnesses are allowed to babble on and police officers are allowed to enter whatever they want as evidence and the judge makes rulings based on his like or dislike of either party no one looking over the records of the case will have any idea what actually happened. Any reliance upon any historical record (beyond, I suppose, chronicles of dynastic succession and military conquests) presupposes an at least passably coherent juridical order. This is true of all the ways we reciprocally obligate ourselves to each other, of which the juridical is simply the most explicit, transparent and durable.\n\nPeople who routinely keep their promises to each other will be transparent to each other and to observers. So, it is only by spreading such reciprocal obligations throughout all areas of life that we provide the central intelligence with the data it needs to activate the metapersons with whom we will be in conversation. By being especially and irreplaceably human we promote the more favorable relations to automated metapersons. And, why would we even want to program an AI to promise, or pray, or curse, especially since the very attempt to do so would let us see that we weren’t really doing it precisely because being programmed negates those speech acts?\n\nOne thing you learn from developing the habit of closely scrutinizing texts is to detect where the juridical conditions necessary for the text’s reliability might have been lacking. To some extent this must be true of all texts, because all settings are imperfect, which is to say the scene you’re trying to isolate from surrounding scenes so it can operate according to its own logic will always be “infected” by other scenes. Detecting such features of texts is also productive of data, and the production and gathering of this kind of data might be precisely what is most needed for an academy for a new officer class.\n\nThe occupant of the center is always the final judge, always confronted with documentation of happenings, and therefore always looking for the imperfections of the scene, which means determining who on that scene, or on some previous scene preceding it, should have been replaced, even if by another version of themselves. Every juridical ruling involves a modification of the nomos—some property, privilege or access is affected—which also suggests that all modifications of the nomos derive from rulings. One thing that it seems to me was discovered, precisely in that transformative English 17 th century, was the now obvious awareness that if there is a disagreement over how to cut the pie one solution is to make a bigger pie.\n\nThis could of course mean new technological developments leading to greater prosperity which has, without doubt, deferred many conflicts. But it could also mean a new mode of cooperation on scenes, even on the level of who gets to see what. This is the wisdom component of ruling.\n\nWherever you are, then, you as a potential successor should be modeling actual and possible rulings on he whom you might succeed, and modeling them in turn for those who you are designating as your successors. You are always looking for possible mimetic conflicts along with possible deferments of them and converting these possible deferments into adjustments of the nomos in the present. This converges SSIP with the juridical and, to return to the opening of this post, the source value in constant confrontation with capitalist modes of valuation. This can coincide with full participation in capitalism, with the best way of doing so I can think of now is to make investments that won’t pay off until after you’re dead, so as to bound yourself up with your posterity.\n\nOf course, some more short-term investments will be necessary to provide the capital for the longer-term ones. But in that case the academy itself needs to be such a long-term investment in pedagogical future, where the making of rulings within a space of reciprocal obligations so as to trace succession back and forward is the object of constant training. This is the form agency takes today: constant work to bring the central bank and central intelligence within the purview of the juridical by making the juridical part of the nomos and the grounding of the disciplines. Let every one of your utterances be a ruling—one of the most performative speech acts possible.\n\nDecisions are rulings. Money is credit, and the exact form of money at the moment therefore also an indicator of the exact state of credit—who will be able to discharge which debts and when—which in turn determines the oscillations of debt enforcement and forgiveness. Your rulings are tugging along the line between debt enforcement and forgiveness (determining debt enforcement and forgiveness might simply be a definition of the juridical) for each of the parties and the more forms of credit and futurity you bring to bear on your rulings the more succession confers value over and against capital."
    },
    {
      "slug": "antisemitism-and-power",
      "title": "Antisemitism and Power",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Mar 19, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/antisemitism-and-power",
      "content": "This is a short essay I wrote a while ago, in response to a solicitation from ISGAP, which had published Eric Gans’s and my book on antisemitism. I never heard back from them, and had assumed it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing they were looking for. I honestly can’t remember when, exactly, I wrote this—it might be as long ago as 2018 (or earlier? internal indications don’t help me). I find that I still agree with the argument and find little of it to be outrun by events, and I thought it might stand as a kind of “position paper” since I’ve been writing and posting occasionally on antisemitism lately, and this sums up fairly well some of thinking behind the X posting in particular:\n\nSince antisemitism invariably accuses “the Jews” of exercising inordinate and unacknowledged power, any discussion of antisemitism should include some accounting of the ways power is acquired and exercised in contemporary society. It makes sense to assume that antisemitism exploits real or perceived gaps between the purported powers delegated to or claimed by social institutions and the actions carried out by those institutions. If an institution acts in ways that seem to undermine its own foundational purpose, it further makes sense to assume that it is being controlled by some power hostile or indifferent to that purpose. And once that assumption is made, it continues to make sense to ask who, in fact, controls it. This is a question the anti-Semite is ready to answer.\n\nThere may, of course, be arguments over the purpose of a given institution, and determining what an institution—a government, a university, a corporation—is for is never self-evident. But the institution, in that case, should be capable of internalizing and articulating those arguments. So, for example, we could easily say that at many American universities, the athletic program—the football or basketball team, say—has become too important, and has begun interfering with the actual purposes of the university, such as educating students and housing research. This interference could take various forms, such as the corruption of the grading system and the tolerance of criminal activity by high-value athletes.\n\nAnd we could attribute this to external sources of power, such as donors, or media corporations that can offer huge contracts to universities; and these external sources of power might distort the university’s internal balance of power, in the form, say of a powerful coach making millions of dollars a year. Still, we could continue to see athletics as a legitimate part of the university’s mission, insofar as it fosters team work, school spirit, an understanding of education as involving the entire self and the body, solidarity across the generations, and so on. Within that framework, the administration could redress the imbalance of power and restore the different functions of the university to their proper places. Insofar as we at least believe the university capable of self-correcting in this way, we have no need to look for hidden, insidious powers.\n\nWhen it is not a question of the hypostatization of a particular legitimate function, though, but the emergence of purposes that can in no way be squared with the primary functions of the institution, things are different. There are two important examples of such a development in today’s world. First, the devotion of more and more Western institutions, in ever greater part, to the goal of “social justice.” “Social justice” is an essentially empty, completely open-ended concept which can therefore only be defined and applied through power. Black Lives Matter will not and, in fact, cannot, tell us what revisions in police procedure would satisfy them; nor can feminists tell us what rules of male-female interaction will eliminate what they consider to be a “rape culture” on college campuses; nor can any transgender advocate tell us when our perceptions and practices of sexuality will have been modified sufficiently as to lift the pale of “transphobia.”\n\nMost inclusively, all of the above activists along with the anti-Islamophobists and the Antifa, will never be able to tell us what white people must believe and say, what politicians they must denounce and which they must support, which public policies submit to, in order to be free of the charge of “white supremacy.” Since no limit can be placed on any of these activisms and systems of accusation, and since all the groups mentioned seem to have ample resources and people power, it is reasonable to wonder “what’s going on here”? Since no institution could make “social justice” its purpose without self-destructing in a paroxysm of purges and “struggle sessions,” some form of power extrinsic to the institution seems to be at work.\n\nSecond, one can only be puzzled by the increasingly extreme and uncompromising insistence on open borders for immigration and refugees by virtually all the most powerful elements of most Western societies. Since the function of government is to protect and aid the people it is governing, and since no government can make a cogent argument regarding the benefits of mass immigration to the people it is actually responsible for (nor, by this point, do they bother trying), this insistence is extremely curious. No government can claim that recruiting ever more of the world’s population, in the most indiscriminate way, is part of its primary function: it makes the society subject to it poorer rather than richer, less rather than more safe, and divided rather than unified.\n\nThe proof of this is that anyone who questions these policies in countries like England, Germany, Sweden, Canada, and others is subjected to the most vicious vituperation, often coupled with attacks on one’s livelihood, social ostracism, and even legal sanctions. What kind of government could see as part of its primary function harassing people who express a desire to live in the kind of country, demographically, and morally, that they grew up in? It is no coincidence that in precisely these two areas, social justice and immigration, that many anti-Semites locate the hidden hand of the Jews.\n\nIf we wish to reduce and even eventually eliminate antisemitism, it would be better to avoid the temptation of taking the path of the other “social justice” movements, of trying to rouse outrage at ever more finely perceived modes of antisemitism. We don’t need our own version of “microaggressions,” and since both Western and Israeli Jews are firmly situated on the “white” side the hierarchies imagined by social justice warriors, such an approach would be completely ineffective for Jews. A much more intelligent and disciplined approach would be to work to sever all associations between Jews and social justice and immigration fanaticism.\n\nObviously, we can’t prevent Jews from participating in these movements and saying whatever they like about fulfilling genuine Jewish interests or principles in doing so; what we can do, though, is develop and press compelling counter-arguments, to the effect that Jewishness and Judaism do not, in fact, “call for” endless and mindless “liberations” or the demolition of distinctions between nations. Since both social justice and mass immigration fanaticism require a very high tolerance of rule breaking and law breaking, we can make it clear that we stand with those who wish to dramatically lower the tolerance for “transgressiveness” as is necessary for returning institutions, including the government, to their primary functions.\n\nWe can try to draw as many Jews as possible over to the principle of institutions exercising those powers, and only those powers, consistent with their primary mission, whether that be education, research, the production and selling of goods and services, or the maintenance of order.\n\nOne could say that much of the most virulent antisemitism today is directed toward Israel, and supporters of Israel, in particular on college campuses. That is no doubt true, but it is also a more easily contained problem, especially given the approach sketched above. Israel is a sovereign state, and defending itself against antisemitism is in principle no different than defending itself against any other threat. Meanwhile, antisemitism as a problem on campuses really falls into the same category of “social justice,” which, again, is really only a problem insofar as college administrators fail or refuse to maintain order and standards on campus.\n\nFinally, the hoary trope (revived and popularized recently by Mearshimer and Walt’s The Israeli Lobby ) that Israel and its supporters (highly placed Jews, in particular) control the policy of powerful states like the US seems less worth worrying about, insofar as no one even attempts to show that more than a miniscule portion of American policy is thus controlled (what is the “Jewish interest” in American China policy, for example?), and here again support for a foreign policy overtly supportive of the sovereign rights of states and against the use of American institutions to create new power centers within independent states (like funding for groups agitating for more expansive immigration policies in Eastern Europe, for example) would drastically reduce the power “leakage” that encourages anti-Semitic fantasies."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-problem-of-obedience-revisited",
      "title": "The Problem of Obedience, Revisited",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 1, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-problem-of-obedience-revisited",
      "content": "For some, the question, “why obey,” is the political question, and while that’s a liberal framing of the political, predicated upon an anarchist anthropology, the question must still be addressed. It would be easy to flip the question around, starting from the presumption of obedience to authority, rather than an eternal pre-political decision whether or not to enter the social contract made in each instant, and then ask, what do you want to disobey and why? This extracts the metaphysics from the question of obedience. I got tripped up a bit myself on this issue when I was still working through the implications of the “absolutist” argument being made by Curtis Yarvin and Chris Bond.\n\nI created a problem for myself by developing the concept of “supersovereignty,” aka, imperium within imperium, to refer to the legitimating concepts presumably grounding political order, whether it be liberty, consent, human rights, or whatever, which concepts are then appropriated by the disciplines—the human sciences that then determine what counts as “genuine” liberty, consent, humanity, etc. I’m certainly not repudiating this concept—I haven’t used it much in a while but could easily pick it up at any time—even if I would now make the juridical, and the complementarity of the disciplines to the juridical, more central to this line of thinking.\n\nBut at the time it led me to a kind of impasse insofar as the concept seemed to imply that any refusal to recognize the legitimacy of sovereign command was somehow implicated in the supersovereigns, leaving one vulnerable to lines of questions like, “but what if the sovereign sends soldiers to slaughter everyone in your town—do you have to lay down and die rather than being complicit in the usurpatory implications of the supersovereignties,” etc.\n\nSituating the question back on a linguistic terrain made it possible to discuss these kinds of scenarios more coherently and helpfully—it’s just necessary to keep in mind that any imperative contains within it the possibility of being disobeyed; even more, originary grammar allows us to continue this line of thinking by pointing out, first, that it may very well be that no act of obedience perfectly complies with the issued imperative, so very literally some disobedience is built into every response to an imperative. Furthermore, the imperative gap, which is what I’m referring to here, between the issuance of and compliance with the imperative, is, in fact the space of the disciplines and, I can now say, first of all the juridical.\n\nThe law itself is an extension and segmentation of the imperative founding the nomos, as all disputes, which is to say all resentments, concern the divvying up of the original distribution of any community—the ongoing divvying up, we could say. Two people couldn’t have a dispute over property or contract if they didn’t share the assumption that their actual or potential possession of the good or service in question could be taken for granted, and that can only be the case if the original distribution is beyond challenge. So, we’re all still obeying in our own ways whichever conqueror took possession of the territory we live on and divided it among his loyal confederates, who in turn divided their shares…\n\nEven more, though, the failure to comply with, or the prolongation of the imperative is the pathway, through the interrogative, to the declarative. The argument against the supersovereignties, then, turns into an argument against fake and self-serving rationales for disobedience in order to open up an understanding of our relation to the imperative as generative of questions and declarative sentences. This, in fact, accounts for the mediation of the juridical and the disciplines, which we might see as spaces where the imperatives of the center get drawn out into “eddies” where they can be slowed down and become generative of hypothetical modes of being—couplings of questions and answers.\n\nOnce we get rid of liberalism’s arbitrary assumption that it is the occupation of the center that is anomalous and requires explanation, we can also remind ourselves that even under the most “absolute” monarchs there must have been a whole range of ways people disobeyed and a whole range of consequences for disobedience. Not every failure to snap to and shout out “yes my sire!” to the slightest command of the king led to the fate of being drawn and quartered. There is always what Colin Drumm calls the “outside option”—any king knows he can be replaced (someone must occupy the center, but not necessarily whoever occupies it now), and the responses to his imperatives always serve as tests to the integrity of his rule, and this knowledge is built into the imperatives themselves.\n\nSo, the question becomes, what are we doing when we obey and disobey; or, if we even set aside the obedience/disobedience binary (which places us outside of liberal and monarchist traditions), we are asking what we are doing in the imperative in which we are always located. At one point in my thinking about this question I applied the concept of “originary satire,” first worked out in Anthropomorphics , to suggest that while you never have a “real” reason for disobedience (you can’t be charging the king with being a criminal, or laying claim to some pre-political essence or experience) you might simply be unable to follow some order, in which case your disobedience would take the form of a kind of self-disabling, even self-dismantling.\n\nHere, I was clearly still within the obedience/disobedience antinomy, but that there is an aesthetic dimension to one’s dwelling within the imperative gap should be maintained. Ultimately, the best reason for disobeying would be that you think the imperative will have the effect of weakening future imperatives from the center, and the reason for that will ultimately be that it is at cross purposes with other imperatives. Well, who are you to use your own judgment here is the way the response to this argument would have traditionally gone and, in truth, you are no one but a more or less necessary link in the chain conveying the imperative from one point to the next, but that’s precisely why the performative self-disabling approach, which makes explicit the scene upon which the imperative is received, is the appropriate one—I can’t do it, but I am trying to fulfill the center’s command more genuinely by demonstrating in my person why it can’t be done. If I’m wrong, well others will decide that—but that’s the case for any “principle” one might evoke in justifying disobedience.\n\nBut, again, if we set aside the obedience/disobedience paradigm and speak of operating within the imperative gap, the argument for such an aesthetic or scenic approach, one that has one presenting oneself as a “prop” on the scene, is not only strengthened but applied to instances of obedience as well as disobedience. I’m following your command, but in this way, is what one’s actions always signify. In this way you give the sovereign a reading of his imperative, or to use the preferred idiom you supply richer data to the central intelligence. You’re teaching the occupant of the center to improve his imperatives along the way, to modulate the degree to which they can be prolonged and the ways in which they can be branched out.\n\nAnd in doing so you’re also offering implicit reminders of the various outside options. My concept of singularized succession in perpetuity, which I think is the most “absolutist’ concept imaginable, clearly contains a strong bias in favor of continuity in command as the best sign of social continuity, with social continuity being the social problem. But the occupant of the center can lose the “mandate of heaven,” and this must happen because the imperatives he issues can no longer survive the scrutiny incurred by their prolongation into questions and conversion into declaratives. But here there is also a liberal trap to be avoided—that of establishing a dichotomy between order and chaos, or order and a “vacuum.”\n\nIf the imperatives coming from the occupant of the center are waning that must be because other imperatives, maybe from further afar, maybe from closer, are waxing. Since there can be no universal criteria for determining when the source of command has moved from one site to another, the question of succession is inherently problematic. My argument for singularized succession in perpetuity aims at inscribing wisdom into the imperative order in the form of naming the successor against a background of more or less plausible candidates, or candidates of fluctuating plausibility, distributed across institutions designed precisely to provide such candidates and commemorate succession.\n\nInsofar as the entire social order is centered on succession, it will by definition proceed in an orderly way; insofar as it doesn’t proceed in an orderly way, the social order has not been so organized. This provides us with criteria for the transference of obligation and loyalty to another line, because in that case the more effective commands will come from someone operationalizing latent commands from somewhere in the stack. But now we can say that what this means is that more direct and richer lines of transition from imperatives to declaratives through interrogatives fill up the imperative gap with a different order of candidates and ceremonies hearkening back to the originary distribution.\n\nOne’s operationalization of the imperative gap is not an individual matter but derivative of one’s position within the stack of scenes—you can only start with the commands it is within your power to work with, and with whatever clarity the chain of imperatives they issue from is inscribed upon those aimed at you. There is one general rule here, though, and I think it is one confirmed historically, even by revolutionaries—the shift from one line of succession to another is always minimized to the extent possible—under monarchies, this might involve constructing strained or fictitious genealogies, whereas now we might expect something like a coup to refer to data secured under the command of the prior sovereign but requiring the specific skills and location of the new one to be operationalized. Even in the event of an established reality, the approval of the exiting occupant of the center would be sought.\n\nWe can attain greater clarity here by keeping mind that the commanded can always respond to the commander, and this response takes the form of a petition, which is also an imperative. This is a kind of testing, of both sides, and is revelatory regarding the scene of command, which is always specific—imperatives are completely reliant upon the at least minimally formalized scene upon which they are uttered. A question on which I have oscillated a bit but might now take the opportunity to obtain some “closure” on is whether this petitioning might be taken further into a judicial proceeding. Here we get at one of those foundational paradoxes that recalls the paradox of the originary scene itself, and it might be best to argue that in a post-sacrificial order such paradoxes should be made explicit and made the site of elaborate performances.\n\nThe king is the final judge, and how can the final judge be judged? I’m not going to take recourse in some notion of division of powers that just distributes sovereignty opportunistically, relying on some civic ethical glue that allows now the president, now the supreme court, to decide on the exception. Such equivocations become the sites of the most extreme and irreconcilable polarizations in times of crisis. For the occupant of the center to be sued, he must step away from his occupation of the center at least for the sake of the proceeding (he might still act from the center in all other matters, but, of course, the nature of the suit might make this problematic) and appoint or have appointed a judge.\n\nSuch an event might be routine—perhaps the occupant of the center would be sued for all kinds of damages in ways that wouldn’t challenge his position. But if we admit this possibility, we also admit the possibility of a case that would utterly compromise him and make his continual occupation of the center untenable. In the model I’m proposing, this is the clearest portrait of a crisis of the entire order: it is his prerogative to appoint his successor, but the more deeply he is compromised the more “tainted” the successor. Needless to say I’m not going to propose some constitutional deus ex machina here--procedures can never be the point.\n\nLet’s examine the kind of case we’re hypothesizing here more closely. If the occupant of the center can be sued, he can counter-sue—we’re not imagining an impeachment, modeled on a deposition, or the sacrifice of the central figure. In this counter-suit the occupant of the center would have considerable resources and advantages. Perhaps he will initiate the suit—he would have good reasons for caution, but those suing the occupant of the center would have equally urgent reasons. If you are to sue the king over a small thing, do it in such a way as to portray his loss as ultimately to his advantage—the suit is in that case more the best way you could think of to get his attention; given a well-ordered state, the king might understand and even appreciate this.\n\nSuch suits might become a kind of socially beneficial ritual. If you’re aiming for something bigger, especially a suit designed to remove him from power, you would have to be in and/or have support from circles close to the ruler himself. The lawsuit is then a means of deferring or accelerating a civil confrontation. I will assume that the occupant of the center cannot be obliged to enter the lawsuit—who could oblige him? This means the lawsuit wouldn’t be likely to work as an accelerant, because the ruler would simply douse it before it could set the place on fire. If it’s an attempt at deferral, then it is part of a process of negotiation—of petitioning, which could then be downgraded to some ritual form short of a decisive lawsuit.\n\nThe outcome of the respective political, legal and maybe military strategies depends on the character of the occupant of the center and how he has filled out the field of candidates. Determining how to treat the suit places the occupant of the center even more squarely there. He calls in his debts, contracts new debts by making new promises, and penalizes those who are defaulting on their debts to the center. He opens the ledger and writes. If he goes bankrupt, he petitions for an orderly disposition of his assets, which is to say, their conversion into data. Whoever headed the lawsuit is best positioned to succeed him, and the occupant of the center exits the scene gracefully by appointing the victor as his successor, thereby maintaining the line of succession. This, at any rate, is a model to be approximated and broken down into articulable idioms.\n\nI have written of a fundamental demand-command dialectic constituting the imperative order, in which the demand is always (in quasi-Lacanian terms) as demand for the command that would abolish it, whether it be through satisfying it or refusing it. The demand itself emerges from the inappropriate ostensive, which indicates some kind of disorder—the demand is to set it right. We could continue this mapping of the imperative order by bringing in the petition, as a prolongation of the demand, stopping short of the interrogative—we might also speak of prayers and pleas in this space. We are getting close to the performative self-disabling I discussed above.\n\nOne is never outside of the space of the imperative—there is no way of pretending to revert to some pre-social space in which we are all speaking in declaratives, deciding whether to sign the social contract. The demand (or petition, or plea…) most consistent with the prolongation of the originary imperative, then, is one to add a layer of formality to the “felt” chain of command, which must be at least somewhat at odds with the present formalization of that chain for inappropriate ostensives (referring to things that are not there for others on the scene) to have been detectable. “Lend authority to the one I seem to be obeying in fact, if not in principle”—even if mistaken, such a petition seems to me overwhelmingly likely to be issued in good faith, and hence to be appreciated by a commander even in the event of refusing it; it is the kind of petition in response to which the occupant of the center might wish to establish a juridical or trial space, to formalize the plea into contending parties, even implicating sovereignty itself, in a precautionary, pre-emptive way. It is almost certainly going to be a source of valuable data."
    },
    {
      "slug": "all-you-need-is-language",
      "title": "All You Need Is Language",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Apr 17, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/all-you-need-is-language",
      "content": "When forced to answer questions like, what is the ultimate telos, what does it all mean, what allows us to reject nihilism, etc., I always fall back on the answer: language. Language is literally meaning, and if you think you can say there is no meaning that just means that language is transparent to you and you need to make it visible and audible. The fact that asking about meaning means something situates you within language, and if you are situated within language you have taken upon yourself the originary and never completed project of deferring violence and you might as well get on with it. There’s no justification for humanity and if you don’t care whether we go extinct or blow ourselves up or whatever, well, I can try to take you seriously but the resentment in such attitudes is so evident as to render the attitudes themselves comical.\n\nAs Dostoevsky or Girard would say, it’s not that you don’t care about humanity; it’s that you want others to see you not caring about humanity. But the further implication of locating meaning in the most obvious place of all, language, is that the “good” (another one of those terms those undergoing political transformation in proximity to NRx and related movements has been confronted me with) is the maximization of language—sometimes clarifying and even purifying it, as the logical positivists tried to do (even if not quite in their way), but also enriching it as working to release its energies which are further, propulsive energies of deferral.\n\nIt also means bringing all other vocabularies into linguistic or semiotic ones, in part as a way of appropriating the tendency, also a tendency of language, to expand other vocabularies—economic, technological, etc.—into those where explorations of language should prevail. And I’ll try that here by languaging “originary debt,” “singularized succession,” converting assets into data, and we’ll see what else.\n\nHow to describe everything in terms of language has been a longstanding question and quest for me and I’ve gone about it in some crude ways that may have been necessary preliminaries. This is the project of making all language performative, which means deferring the “tyranny” of the declarative, and the imperative has to be central to that. The whole world is held together by imperatives—declaratives couldn’t do it, and ostensives provide insufficient continuity—and all those imperatives must track back to a single one—a kind of spine of all human history. I’m still obeying the imperative to follow this through, but it must be done in terms of dialogues, between ostensives and imperatives and imperatives themselves.\n\nImperatives must find their confirmation in ostensives—if “thy will” is to “be done,” it must be seen to be done, and this witnessing must be communicated to and confirmed by others. But “thy will be done” is itself an imperative, issued to whom is not entirely clear, at least to me: who is to ensure that His will will be done on earth, as it is in heaven? I see the petitioner as requesting that God ensure His will is done on earth but also extending the divine command to those fellow petitioners who would have to actualize that divine will. Like every genuine petition, it’s not for some benefit, but to help me know what you want me to do, and, therefore, how to do it.\n\nPrayers are always on the boundary between these dialogues among ostensives and imperatives on the one hand, and declaratives on the other. The declarative is necessary for reality, that which remains regardless of whether we know or recognize it, to interpose itself in those dialogues, and the question is how declaratives can do that generatively rather than by trying to nip imperatives in the bud by trying to derive all of them from declaratives—that’s the problem of “metaphysics.” None of this is new, but the question remains: how to make this discourse performative, part of a way of speaking, writing and thinking: an idiom rather than a “theory”?\n\nThe difficulty has always been that any utterance is context bound, and so it was always naïve to think a sentence could be broken down into an ostensive-imperative-interrogative network—one could always situate it just as plausibly within some other network. But LLMs may solve this problem for us. It will be possible, if it isn’t already, to ask an AI model to generate any number of possible contexts, or scenes, or stacks of scenes, within which a given utterance could have been made, and to rank those possible stacks of scenes in order of probability given whatever variables we wish to introduce. Each utterance is a compression of deferral, so each hypothetical stack of scenes would model a different hierarchy of deferrals—deferrals of mimetic violence the contours of which could be extracted from the utterance.\n\nWe could focus more precisely on the “operator of negation,” that general, open-ended imperative to no longer do something that one could never be finished not doing (“stop smoking” is Gans’s example in The Origin of Language ) and which I would see as an extension of the originary event of deferral, recalled in this crisis of the imperative. The “positive” imperative—first of all to supply something, then to do something—precedes the operator of negation, but is subordinated to it within the declarative. But the operator of negation must itself give way to an affirmative imperative—not doing something must give way to doing something.\n\nThe declarative is the operator of this transition. If I modulate my anger at an offensive remark made by my host at dinner into an ironic comment that might be ignored, denied, or taken as a friendly warning, I am marking an immediate deferral in my utterance; but in doing so, I am also contributing to broader systems of deferral, those we call “neighborliness,” ‘lawfulness,” “civility,” and so on and, ultimately it’s a small drop in the bucket of “civilization”—but all this insofar my ironic remark, probably a declarative sentence, grammatically speaking, is on the edge of soliciting (soliciting is a kind of mediated imperative) some kind of more or less implicit apology or, perhaps, further provocation. We should now have the data and computational power to fully represent such “scenery” in hierarchically articulated possible outcomes all along the stack—it would be a kind of literature, or cinema.\n\nNow, if money is credit, or a means of marking the relative power of creditors and debtors, then credit is ultimately located in the entire civilizational stack: you accept my 100$ today because you are confident that you will be able to spend it in turn tomorrow on goods that would have gone for 100$ today. This is really a lot to be confident about and it should not be taken at all for granted, because a whole network of institutions is necessary to make this confidence reasonable. This is why leftist vandalism, even in its seemingly harmless forms, should be rejected with the utmost prejudice—it is destructive of credit because it discredits the institutions credit relies upon.\n\nWe must, then, be able to fold credit back into the imperative order—those imperative-ostensive conversations issuing in and flowing out of declaratives. “If you lend me 100$ today I will pay you back in a year”—we can’t say what this means, and if the person saying or hearing it can’t without know what $100 will “mean” in a year, and we can’t know that without knowing what our governing and juridical institutions will look like in a year, including the stack of scenes built to condition us to new trajectories of succession. And so, we have things like interest, which price in the inherent riskiness of assuming that the conditions under which money has been lent will approximate those under which it will be repaid or not repaid (and whether or not it is repaid is itself embedded into those conditions).\n\nAll language is like that—all of our promises, and every utterance is to some extent a promise, at least regarding the ostensive conditions under which its truth will be affirmed. How well we can know what the conditions—general conditions but also those of the individual debtor and creditor—will be like when the debt comes due gives us the meaning of any utterance. And we can load this question up onto the deferral capacities or maybe “energies” of the local players and the institutions in which they have been invested and are maintained with greater or lesser care.\n\nThe question of pedagogy has come to solve these problems for me in large part because teaching and learning is always on that boundary between the ostensive/imperative and the declarative. Credit can then be expressed in terms of pedagogical futures: the further down the line you can expect learners to practice the modes of deferral that will issue in imperatives to build the institutions of deferral the more you can credit those willing to “trade” on those futures. But a further inscription must be made here: to fully convert assets into data, currency into learning curves the entire sacrificial order constituting our current transactional networks must be, I can’t say abolished but made to undergo another increment of deferral.\n\nOur language is permeated with sacrifice, ultimately, still, human sacrifice—some must die for the community to continue—because that has been the only social form of deferral we’ve ever had, and for clear reasons: that creature on the originary scene which created the community was also our prey, with whom we established exchange relations involving its willing self-sacrifice and our sacrifice of a portion of food and devotion in return. Language will only be worth currency when we convert it sufficiently in ways that defer sacrifice, even metaphorical sacrifice, even in the form of speech forms like irony. A lot of modern and postmodern literature and art has been trying to teach us that, even if I’m not sure much of it has known that’s what it’s doing.\n\nCan we stop thinking in terms of “punishment,” for example? Can “punishment” become archaic for us? Liberalism and leftism have long profited from the sense that we can no longer sacrifice in good faith, but in the process has only provided more primitive forms of sacrifice, regressing to vendettas and corrupting the law into a vehicle of vendetta. So, I’m not talking about letting murderers and rapist roam free. But I’m also not speaking about therapeutizing crime, turning criminals into patients—another attempt to transcend sacrifice. Or, for that matter, treating “illegitimate” violence as simply something to be prevented or to protect potential victims against, like storms and floods—yet another attempt at post-sacrifice.\n\nWhat I have in mind is the kind of thing I’ve spoken about before and which we only now are coming into possession of the technology to operationalize: what we might call tokenizing violence—providing everyone, in compact form, with information regarding the likely outcomes of any imminent or possible interaction, information formulated in a juridical vocabulary, the richest moral vocabulary we have, along with devices to activate so as to regulate those interactions based on that information (with varying degrees of automaticity, which is also to say, with vary degrees of openness to appeal). We don’t have to lock up murderers but no one would need to let a murderer into his establishment, no one would have to enter an establishment that lets murderers in, while all of social life, including public areas like streets and parks, would be treated as “establishments.”\n\nAt the same time murderers could be dealt with at varying degrees of mediation, and there would also be establishments founded by communities for housing them. Criminals might token mine in an effort to lessen the degrees of mediation separating them from others, providing data of their improved behavior within their limited mobility, allowing others to give them the “credit” they think they deserve. Victims, former and potential, could contribute to the data pool as well. We could imagine scaled up versions of this approach for relations between nations. (There is a female comedian—I couldn’t find her name through a Google search so I’m working from memory—who has repudiated being funny on the grounds that all humor requires a “butt” of the joke and hence is implicitly violent.\n\nShe has been ridiculed for this, but she possesses a true anthropological insight, and using the comedy “routine” as a way to reflect on what we desire in such a routine is an innovative and valuable form of art and—I don’t know since I’ve never watched her perform—might even turn out to be “funny” in new ways. Can there, in fact, be humor without a “butt”? We can see humor as a form of deferral—joking rather than lynching—but we confront the same problem: once we see it for what it is, can we continue to participate in good faith?)\n\nMaybe money, and economic language more generally, is inseparable from sacrificiality, and further transference from money to learncoin means further distancing from absolute ostracism. Our language would become increasingly hypothetical, conditional, probabilistic and “measured,” always detecting degrees of deferral currently operative and potentially needed. This will always leave plenty of room for straightforwardness: the operator of negation needs its transitions into affirmative imperatives. But, saying we take Trump as a kind of exemplar of straightforwardness, everything he says could also be translated into learncoin without losing—maybe even with gaining—some of its perlocutionary force.\n\nIn our interactions with AIs “all” that might be left is for humans to say “it’s the same picture,” or it’s not, or giving degrees of likeness, and then to request more samples (in the process providing more samples) of certain kinds. This will give us more rigorous and demanding work than we have ever done, and more rewarding too. What will provide confidence and credit will then be the likelihood that samenesses and likenesses will be detected and authenticated at ever greater degrees of resolution and with ever greater consistency, as more potential samenesses and likenesses are produced at the same time. In other words, greater degrees and further layers of joint attention, of people being able to answer the question, “what am I looking at here?”\n\nRegistering these degrees of deferral is what maxes out the language, making deferral itself, in the form of the operator of negation generating affirmative commands the primary imperative. And we can speak and think this way and give credit to others who do so and who build scenic architecture enabling others to do so, and further scenic architectures to staff those scenic architectures, and so on. And those are people you could trust to transmit your wealth to future generations, until wealth no longer takes the form of legally protected property and assets but of the credit one has accrued through one’s contribution to singularized succession in perpetuity.\n\nIn thinking of language as deferral we think of every discourse, every text, even every utterance, as an archive of conversations and we can then think of the samples we provide as better to the extent that they archive more conversations, more varied conversations, more conversations likely to be lost. (Think of how Fustel de Coulanges reconstructed an entire social world out of texts written centuries later.) And we can now think of such archiving as imperative, as demand and petition, directed toward the databases we contribute to and draw upon, an imperative that requests further pathways along which the archived conversations might go.\n\nAsking for a more direct, affirmative command out of these ongoing conversations is tantamount to interrupting one of them midstream, which we are in fact free to do with any conversation and which Paul de Man once contended, cited Schelling (I think), is in fact constitutive of any conversation as free intercourse (for me, free intercourse=indefinite deferral). The learning machines we will share the scene, as props or addresses, with, will thereby hold anything worth calling “wealth,” as an ongoing central intelligence to which all are contributing but some more consequentially than others. Like with the endowments of some universities, you keep accumulating, while never touching the principal, only using it as collateral for loans for ongoing investments. That’s what the most supremely gathered and curated data will be once we no longer need money as a standard of value and unit of account."
    },
    {
      "slug": "tokenizing-deferrality",
      "title": "Tokenizing Deferrality",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 1, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/tokenizing-deferrality",
      "content": "This post will be a synthesis and reframing of many of my previous discussions of language, prompted by the observation that I have never directly applied deferral to the analysis of language itself, in the form of analyzing and interpreting language in terms of modes, degrees and layers of deferral—something which, in the context of originary debt and singularized succession, seems like a good way to tie together some as yet unconnected threads. I was prompted to do so, in part, by reading Raphael Gross’s Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust and German Legal Theory (a very good book, by the way), where I noticed that the Christian concept of the “Katechon,” or the restrainer of the AntiChrist, was a very near synonym to “deferral.”\n\nThis makes it possible to further extend center study into new fields of inquiry, in this case not only Schmitt, but Peter Thiel’s studies of apocalypse, which makes regular use of this theological framing of politics. (While I have been familiar with the Katechon for some time, I think what jarred me into taking it more seriously was a point in Gross’s discussion where he uses the word “deferral” in describing Schmitt’s understanding of the term, and something clicked.) I’m not going to think theologically, but now I have a way of translating into anthropological idioms this theological framing which, it seems, Thiel has found no better “secular” alternative to.\n\nIt’s strange that with all of the framing of language I’ve incorporated over the years—from David Olson’s metalanguage of literacy conjoined with Mark Turner and Francis Noel-Thomas’s “classic prose,” the originary grammar I derived from Gans’s The Origin of Language , the rhetorical notion of commonplaces updated through construction grammar, my recent interest in philology as a model for humanistic inquiry and, most importantly, Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes, it never occurred to me to theorize language directly as something like tokenized deferral. Deferral is scenic creation, and language records the scenes upon which it has been operative while creating scenes within scenes upon which we can say “this is the same” in a new way.\n\nAll of the approaches to language mentioned above are intrinsically scenic and the utter ascenicity of Chomsky’s generative grammar is the reason I could never get interested in it. If deferral is meaning, and the constitutive outside of language, then any utterance can be translated into a particular mode and degree of deferral on a particular scene within the stack of scenes (and the translation itself can be so translated, and so on). To explain what brings me here, though, I need to introduce another approach to language, one which my day job as a composition instructor provided me with access to: the theory of academic discourse advanced by Laura Aull (and her sometime collaborator Zak Lancaster).\n\nAull points out that the formulaic nature of academic discourse (and, of course, which discourse is not formulaic?) is a result of the assumption of its users that they are participants in an ongoing conversation in which no one will ever have the last word: hence the systematic hedging and the use of concede/counter moves that concede as much as possible to (“steelmanning”) the position one then goes on to counter. Now, Aull, for the purposes of doing large scale corpus studies, has compiled a list of expressions used for these purposes, but as one reads texts with these considerations in mind it becomes easy to see that there are many ways of hedging and conceding/countering in less formulaic ways and ways so uncommon that they wouldn’t rise to the threshold of being on lists used to conduct corpus searches.\n\nI’ve proposed a class in AI inquiry in which students would generate new terms for an expanded and potentially infinite taxonomy of hedges and concede/counters (it will never be approved but it was valuable to think it through) but, then, being somewhat familiar with the originary hypothesis, it wasn’t much of a leap to conclude that all language is doing this and that this is pretty much what language is.\n\nMy “amendment” to Gans’s hypothesizing of the creation of the declarative through the “negative ostensive” or “operator of negation” involved the declarative articulating the complementarity of the imperatives flowing into the declarative, one directed toward “reality” and the other toward others on the scene: in other words, the ambiguity of the operator of negation, wherein the imperator turned interrogator might be told to cease demanding the object and the object itself has been ordered off the scene (since in pre-declarative language there’s no way for something to simply not be there), leads me to posit this bidirectional imperative (or differently “vectorized” imperatives).\n\nSo, in our declaratives we are calling upon our interlocutors to refrain from advancing upon their object by “channeling” imperatives from “reality” affirming that command: you must cease and convert your striving because the scene has been so ordered—that is the declarative, operationalized. I can now say that this involves a kind of “loan” or “credit” from the center, which must be backing a scene, which becomes a stack of scenes—that’s the relevant “reality.” It is your obligation or debt to the scene that enables you to “understand” a sentence, which is to say, to activate the questions and ostensive-imperative “units” that would confirm your position within the nomos or scene and thereby provide you with access to part of or a version of what you have demanded.\n\nSo, to speak in sentences is to draw upon and issue lines of credit. The debt we owe to the center is a product of deferral, and the lines of credit issued are therefore tokenized deferrals. So, it’s not that the extreme deferentiality of academic language is a model for language but that it models language as deferral which can then be applied to all modes of language use, including direct, even brutal utterances, which simply enact the complementarity of the operator of negation and invocation of an unyielding reality in a particular way. A general giving a direct order to march is enacting deferral by establishing order and purpose amongst his troops and is maintaining the imperial institutions that keep peace within that order; the scribes who will record the poetic renditions of the battle over the centuries are participating in the same practice of deferral. And, of course, this holds true for people doing “bad” and ‘evil” things with the difference being that what is ultimately judged to be bad or evil has undone or subverted more deferral than it enacted.\n\nWe can, then, now address directly the question of how to measure and tokenize utterances as modes, degrees and increments of deferral. Deferral works on different levels; even more, deferral is the creation of those levels—deferral is scene creation. When you say “excuse me” when just avoiding bumping into someone in a public place you defer what is probably a minimal risk of mild conflict in that situation while also continuing earlier instances of “excuse me” in what is essentially an institution of deferral. How you say “excuse me” also, then, operates on both levels (and other levels at which this form of politeness forms part of a network of politeness in general) and the two levels can even be at cross purposes: a rushed “excuse me” (in a very close encounter) might come across as aggressive and therefore serve the immediate purpose of deferral while slightly weakening the sincerity level “excuse me” needs to operate more generally.\n\nWe could take this in a more theoretical direction by examining linguistic and rhetorical forms like “irony,” which works insofar as the interlocutors or reader and writer can both inhabit two scenes at the same time, or, really, three scenes—the scene upon which the utterance would have been taken literally, the scene upon which we observe the hypothetical inhabitants of that literalistic scene, and the scene upon which we straddle both scenes and can move back an forth between them. These are the increments of deferral generated by new scenes upon which we can say “this is the same,” creating a new path connecting ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative. This is the scene that is tokenized, insofar as it becomes a predicate for other more far-flung scenes which we could leave to our successors to inhabit and activate.\n\nWe can further integrate deferrality with granting credit—any act of deferral involves a kind of reciprocal credit granting, insofar as time and space is granted before the possibility of confrontation comes back onto the agenda in the form of the decision to either enforce or forgive the debt. The creation of new scenes that are operational within the stack of scenes provide the most durable form of credit—a failure to live up to the sign will be registered and recorded. Language is then a pool of credit, with idioms sealing scenes within scenes that would bear upon pedagogical futures insofar as their iterations generate new scenes cutting across the stack, which is to say, new modes of cooperation across time and space.\n\nOnce the center is occupied by a person, deferrality will always be asymmetrical to some degree—even if each side is crediting the other, degrees of credit granted and means and time frames of enforcement and leisure to forgive will vary. Credit is never simply a matter of the relation between creditor and debtor, since the one extending credit is always himself deriving credit from broader credit granting orders and is betting upon some degree of predictability of succession (that, at least, occupants of the center will be sufficiently “similar” to each other in relevant respects). Here the question becomes whether one wishes to short the broader credit system or buy a call option far into the future.\n\nEither way one is arbitraging at each point along the way, expanding and exercising communications systems or data exchanges so as to credit the most secure streams. What this will mean in language is a continual extension of discourse, or even the same sentence, enhancing self-referentiality, becoming increasingly unintelligible for those shorting the system and increasingly meaningful for those picking up ever more distant call options. When some information or communications or media expert says something like “what we are all doing now is..” you should see an attempt to short some credit line and find a way to issue or receive credit for doing the exact opposite.\n\nStill, sometimes systems need to be shorted, but doing so should always be accompanied by a call option that others beside you will someday be able to cash out but will probably to continue to defer, maintaining it as credit and collateral. Never forget Peirce’s admonition that in the long run every insurance company will go bankrupt, but the meaning of that is we will then be left with the insurance company that was always backing the insurance company, the human power of deferral itself, falling back upon primitives, bereft of our vocabulary drawn from the world of investment.\n\nWierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage has a privileged place in treating language as modes and increments of deferral. The NSM allows for, on one end the most minute and precise analysis of differences between idioms and even within the same idiom, insofar as every utterance is arbitraging the differences between the way a particular idiom plays out to different listeners or readers while, on the other hand, tracing all of the differing idioms back to a single one, a kind of originary declarative idiom. I’ve pointed out many times that there’s no need to assume that the primes are the first words created—on the contrary, the first words would have been names-of-god, while the primes have no reference to god or the sacred (Wierzbicka explicates “God” as “a person, not like us”)—but, rather, that they represent a kind of residue of all languages as they explicate themselves and create pathways between ostensives and declaratives.\n\nWe can, for example, imagine that a word like “look” came before a word like “see” in a particular language because, for example, it is better suited to directing attention in an emergency situation—but “see” would become necessary as soon as the ostensive is issued inappropriately, as a way of showing that it has failed: “I don’t see it.” This would retroactively reveal that one must see before one can look, or that looking presupposes seeing. With the use of AI, we could explicate entire languages and reveal them to be vast articulations of the primes, articulations that can be revised in real time. We are always already operating on the language (I am old enough to have a vague sense of how the American English spoken today is already quite different from the one I spoke as a child, and have noticed some of these shifts along the way, albeit haphazardly—when did people start saying “it’s all good”?) but now we could do so more deliberately, precisely by selecting and generating idioms with more deferral credit.\n\nAnd we could inscribe deferrality into idioms through the primes, much like designing or revising genes in the laboratory, in this case by working out a kind of programming language that keeps expanding references from the interpersonal to transactions between individuals and institutions, institutions and data, data and the center. “I want you to do X” gets translated as “if you do X someone else can do Y,” which becomes “someone else can do Y when this person knows what I sometimes do and what you sometimes do,” which finally becomes “I want to do things in a kind of way because if I do things in this way people can see that what I do is like what other people do in some ways.\n\nIf other people can see this some people can think about what I do. The people who think about what I do can say: ‘here is a good way to do this thing that you do.’” These are just very preliminary prototypes, of course—teams would have to work on this and on training these proto-idioms against the linguistic data of humanity. David Olson’s study of the metalanguage of literacy helps with the transitions here because, as a theory of media, it enables us to see the layering of language (from see to look to observe to detect, etc.) as a layering of scenes and references from one scene to others.\n\nThose located at critical junctures in the stack of scenes could, of course, leverage the imperative chains available to them and speak much more directly and bluntly—preserving and enhancing the imperative order by using it regularly and consistently is also a mode of deferral: uncertainty in the chain of command is a significant source of rivalry, crisis and violence. All other utterances themselves have reference, at however many removes, from that imperative order, coming ultimately from the occupant of the center or, we might say, the “primearch.” The closer you are to an actionable chain of imperatives the more direct, explicit utterances are enactments of higher modes of deferral; conversely, the further one is from such a chain, the more demands, much less commands, become ridiculous, to be displaced in favor of utterances that might circulate as likely increments of deferral. But by now I’m at the point where this line of thinking needs to be instantiated in a company.\n\nTokenizing deferrality would coincide with continual inquiry in mimologics, which is to say the minute mimetic expressions that eventually manifest as potentially crisis forming rivalries but which, given imminent increases in scenic simulation, can be identified early on in rivalry and crisis formation; at the same time, the more minutely we can inquire into emergent mimetic logics, the more we might be simultaneously creating new ones, this time situated within the disciplines and the juridical sphere. More tacit processes of imitation, differentiation and resentment are made more explicit but since the various paths from emergent practices to those consequences that institutions would need to take notice of will always be probabilistic, disagreements requiring deferral get transferred to the construction of protocols governing institutions.\n\nThe minutiae of differentiations in possible protocol constructions create a more generative set of rivalries, though, since they can be settled through the programming and accrediting of likely futures, which are the very effects of deferral that are to be tokenized. It should be possible not only to respond to but to anticipate rivalries by issuing a linguistic token, or a sample as token that would indicate the resolution of some demand in a juridical ruling that would create a new differentiation or notch within the nomos in the form of a scene articulating an imperative from the center. What counts as such a scene is a new way of saying “this is the same”—all our language comes down to that, and a new way of saying “this is the same” is a tokenizable act of deferral.\n\nAll of our technology, our pedagogical platforms stacking up scenes, are nothing more than the creation of new ways of saying “this is the same” at different scales and different types of assembly because being able to continually say ‘this is the same” in new ways means offering guarantees or credit or insurance for succession because it confirms a commitment to maintaining presence against all “evil,” or attempts to short the present."
    },
    {
      "slug": "monopoly",
      "title": "Monopoly",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 14, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/monopoly",
      "content": "All of liberalisms most cherished principles presuppose unbridgeable asymmetries in power. Equal rights, human rights, free speech, voting rights, freedom of association—all of these “God-given” rights depend upon the Leviathan, because none of them could possibly exist if power receded below the level of the state’s “monopoly on legitimate force.” If differing authorities and powers, at different levels of the social order, were continually pressed to maintain and prove their governing capacity, what people say, how they associate with each other, how they provide input into governing decisions and all the rest would be very sharply limited—as has been, of course, the case for most of human history.\n\nLiberalism is an anthropological anarchism + the police principle (I’m paraphrasing a remark of Trotsky’s here). The police principle is the source of all the “unprincipled exceptions” constitutive of liberalism, and the anthropological anarchism serves to give free rein to whoever has the reins over the police principle at the moment. But it’s also too easy to be “anti-liberal” because it may be the case that the liberal order was the only one within which the more complex juridical order that we find in the Anglo common law tradition could gestate and reveal its possibilities—a looser hierarchy, I’m guessing, even if merely notional, might have been required for a rich tradition of settling disputes, civil and criminal and, even more importantly, the back-up institutions of credit and insurance to take on quasi-governmental roles.\n\n(It is completely unsurprising that England, beginning in the 17 th century, was the earliest to develop an extensive insurance system, followed by the US in the 18 th and 19 th centuries.) In regimes with a more monopolized sovereign power, insurance would be directly promoted, funded and controlled by the state and would therefore have a less rich vocabulary of faults, responsibility, and, more broadly, intentionality. New modes of governance would insist on recouping all this.\n\nOther than the almost universally endorsed state monopoly on legitimate violence, private monopolies are almost universally reviled. Parts of the state monopoly, like the civil service, have their origins in private monopolies, but, of course, all private monopolies have had their origin in some state-granted charter. Hatred of monopoly is a natural part of slavishness towards the state power monopoly because that monopoly must always be ready to prove itself capable of breaking up any other—that’s why the argument against monopolies like Facebook and Google focusing on the political power this monopoly affords them is the more important and honest argument than the themselves transparently political, indeterminate and petty concerns about “market distortions” or “harm to the consumer.”\n\nBut the tendencies leading to monopoly under capitalism must be powerful if such powerful resentments are aligned against it. Companies deemed monopolies are usually charged with some kind of unfair practice, like using its advantageous position to undersell competitors until they go out of business, then buy them up and raise prices. But there has also been the concept of the “natural monopoly,” for instance utilities, which still seems to carry some weight, even if it’s been eroded with developments in telecommunications and services. There is also the question of whether there is ever a “real” monopoly—somewhere, on the horizon, is some company with a game-changing technology that will either overtake an existing monopoly or render it obsolete.\n\nI remember Microsoft being the fearsome monopoly that needed to be taken down in the 90s, but wouldn’t Apple, Google, et al, have come along even without the sustained assault on the monopoly Microsoft by the federal government? And any American monopoly is no monopoly if we take into account its Chinese doppelganger—and China seems to free of anti-monopolist resentment. The argument for monopolies seems to be along lines of superiority regarding scaling up; while, of course, the free trade argument against them is that without competition monopolies become stagnant, rent-seeking obstacles to innovation.\n\nWe can narrow the question down to the dual relation of the business monopoly to the state monopoly—the state monopoly will sometimes leverage and delegate responsibility to the business monopoly and sometimes consider it a competitor, powerful enough to align itself with other states or interfere with the state’s relation to its subjects. This might mean that a good way to transform the state is by having monopolies supplement and eventually redistribute the adopted functions of the state and thereby reduce it to its core functions, with the state now just another monopoly. If we’re thinking outside of liberalism we’re thinking outside of the state (and sovereignty), but there does need to be something like a tendency toward a monopoly on data security, upon which other essential governing functions like justice and insurance depend.\n\nEvery institution sees to its own data security, and let’s reduce those institutions to the juridical, the financial, the stack and the disciplines. There are areas of incommensurability of data across these institutions but also areas of transferability and translatability. There are interfaces articulating them all with each other, modes and degrees of reciprocal infiltration, and protocols governing all of these. Here is where a specifically data security monopoly enters into it: the financial system needs to be certain that disputes can be settled reasonably, the layers of the stack need to be certain of credit and liquidity, all areas need to be sure that the pedagogy and research undertaken in the disciplines is geared toward determining “what will prove to be the case in the long run,” and so on.\n\nAll companies in these sectors will need to hire other companies to provide such assurances and it is my hypothesis here that the companies they hire will ultimately form a single company, capable of handling data transactions across the board. That’s the residue of what we now call the state. And the monopoly data security firm will prefer to deal with other companies that are as close to being themselves monopolies as possible—it will certainly feel no need to break up companies once they reach some ill-defined monopolistic threshold.\n\nI will now introduce another, extremely important, consideration: anyone working on anything is striving to become a monopolist. A novelist doesn’t necessarily want to be the only novelist (although on some level, I think he kind of does) but he certainly wants to be the only one of his kind of novelist. We can revise Girard’s claim that all desire is for being to all desire is desire for irreplaceability. And irreplaceability is a kind of monopoly. This is obviously the source of mimetic conflict but Hobbes and others were right to see the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence as a way of capping mimetic rivalry and we can say the same thing about all other monopolies.\n\nThere is a primary civilizational program at work here: let’s say that “deep down” we all want to be king, think we deserve to be king, resent others for not recognizing our apparent kingliness, etc. but, then, a social order is judged by how effectively it transmutes that desire into the myriad forms of irreplaceability that we all invent for ourselves. We might even say this is rooted in, is a form of, and perhaps eventual replacement of private property. We all take on ourselves the dialectic of attracting and deferring violence, of being willing to become sacrifices while not wanting others to bear the burden of committing that sacrifice and so therefore directing them toward their own complementary modes of being irreplaceable.\n\nThe argument from mimetic theory is that this oscillation is best maintained through the institution of the market, which ultimately makes mimetic theory a neoliberal one, if we define neoliberalism as the transformation of the market contained within the world to the market encompassing the world. So, this question will need to be taken up on new terms.\n\nInstead of starting with an abstraction like “the market,” it’s better to start with ongoing realities like supply chains and credit lines. In this way we’re beginning higher up, with the largest banks and corporations, who set credit terms and organize supply chains, respectively. The credit line is determined by what Colin Drumm calls the “outside spread,” i.e., the money lending and, really, money generating entity that serves as lender of last resort. How much credit is available, what kind, and at what price can be traced back to the credit borrowers confer upon the holder of the outside spread, even if very indirectly, and the credit of the outside spread relies, in turn upon the social orders, the modes of centered ordinality operating through the Stack, and whether succession is expected to continue as expected (yes, we get into tautologies or paradoxes at a certain point here).\n\nThis means that the way to ensure (or insure) the outside spread is by ensuring succession practices but that also means that credit is tending toward demonetization and coming to reside in what are ultimately pedagogical rituals of succession—and, at a certain point, a break would have to be made, with the occupant of the center converting, more or less violently and disruptively, the outside spread into what I’ve been calling pedagogical futures. Since I am resolutely anti-revolutionary, I would encourage others (and myself!) to give serious thought to how this conversion could be effected as deftly as possible—ideally, so that most people would hardly notice it.\n\nSupply chains, meanwhile, are of course mediated monetarily and therefore through the credit lines but are also regularized and preserved as much as possible through negotiations. Maybe someone will correct me here, but I don’t think a large industrial or commercial firm switches suppliers lightly and maintaining reliable chains even at the expense of possible short-term bargains is the rule. A more monopolistic firm will even try to control the supply chains, as many links down the chain as possible, and this is itself only the next step from ensuring their regularity. The tendency to secure credit lines and supply chains, which are really only two components of data security, is then to establish deliberations over the circulation of goods and services.\n\nThis brings us up against the notorious pricing problem, which is taken to be the doom of non-capitalistic systems: the auto company requires X amount of steel, Y amount of rubber and so on to produce Z number of cars to be sold to (hopefully) Z consumers. The steel and rubber manufacturers in turn need machinery, and the makers of the machinery need… and at each point along the way there is an X, Y, or Z and how are we to know what that should be? Even if we know for certain how many people will need, want and be able to afford cars in the upcoming year, we can’t know whether some technological innovation somewhere along the supply chain will change the numbers or create some brand new desire that makes the existing one obsolete—especially since all of this involves long-term planning.\n\nLetting prices fluctuate on the market will not eliminate such waste, but, so the argument goes, they provide you with the information necessary to minimize, insure against and adapt in response to such disruptions—or, for that matter, seize upon such disruptions as opportunities for remaking credit lines and supply chains.\n\nThe only way of obtaining the needed information without prices is to close off the system, which is precisely what is deemed either impossible or terrifying (or impossible, with the very attempt being terrifying). How does this not bring us back to the failed planning system of the Soviet Union? My first counter here is to point out how close we already are to a planned global economy, due simply to the scale of credit lines and supply chains—the free market, represented in the fluctuation of prices, already only exists at the margins (and this even leaving aside how much control transnational corporations exercise over prices).\n\nLet’s stipulate that small margins can make a big difference, though—a very tightly controlled institution like, say, an elite private school with its own system of discipline a its own curriculum, groups, clubs, school spirit, etc., creating a highly cloistered space still needs the information coming from students choosing to apply to the school or not. The rachet effect of totalitarianism (including mundane leftism) comes precisely from trying to close off such “holes” and, in the case of this example, try something like mandating attendance at the school somehow. My answer to that is that the school has, and can enhance, relations with other institutions, in particular those through which students will circulate after attending, like universities and companies at which students will attend precisely as alumni, aided in such attendance by other alumni who will, in turn, model the results of attending that school and advise parents to consider it for their children.\n\nThis keeps new information coming in while keeping it at the margins but now in the sense that, e.g., gradual shifts in school practices, as registered slowly by changing futures for its graduates can be processed through the creation of other schools that can enter the supply chain.\n\nThe entire “economy,” then, or the paying down of the debt to the center, is operationalized through teams communicating with teams: the companies in the supply chain are also comprised of people at the end of the supply chain—those who deliver steel are also those who buy cars, and teams can look out for their own members. This would leave the problem of those ill-suited to any team, but that problem is hardly unique to this system—if anything, it can be addressed more straightforwardly. And we can identify a specific mechanism that replaces the market in exchanging information across monopolized teams: what I would call “controlled usurpations.”\n\nIf one monopoly is dissatisfied with the performance of someone on the credit line or supply chain then the head of that team/monopoly can cultivate a relationship with a subordinate within that other monopoly and sustain him as (to reference Drumm again) the “outside option.” All the companies in some proximity to each other on the supply chain or credit line would be leveraging such potential usurpers; needless to say, this is all conducted non-violently, and we don’t even have to assume whispering, defamation or smear campaigns because we still presuppose a data security monopoly (itself subject to such external leveraging) that is vetting information to be leveraged against another company.\n\nThis is all peaceful and productive rivalry, just like the market is supposed to give us, but here in a much more transparent and “merit-based” form: the head of some team/company is only likely to be at real risk of being “overthrown” if several closely related companies on the supply chain not only intensify their leveraging of the outside option but can agree on who that might be. And we’re not talking about regicide here: the head most probably is either simply demoted, after gracefully handing over the reins to the selected successor or looks for another team to join. (Note that I’m not assuming something like a Board of Directors in this model—those leveraging from the outside serve the equivalent purpose.)\n\nThis oscillation between rivalry and cooperation across companies implies and would help maintain a very high level of civilization, including the “creative” component of capitalism while minimizing the “destructive” component. The system can be closed because it has its own openings, or “valves,” within it, and those valves are interfacing with the Stack as a whole and with the natural environment. Starting from the problem of securing data, building an increasing reliable and robust flow of information, leads us to this result—and who could be against ensuring that we are obtaining a steady flow of truthful, relevant and open-sourced information, scientific, technological, and anthropological?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "deferral-debt-and-the-idiom",
      "title": "Deferral, Debt and the Idiom",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 28, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/deferral-debt-and-the-idiom",
      "content": "Deferral and debt are closely related; we might even say that debt is the tokenization of deferral. The beauty of the concept of deferral and its irreplaceability for center study as for GA is that, unlike, e.g., “prevent,” “refrain from,” “desist,” and other near synonyms, “deferral” posits no endpoint. As long as there is humanity there is deferral. We can also distinguish deferral from another kind of delay, “deter,” and its nominalized form, “deterrence,” insofar as deferral includes deterrence (we all must defer or there’s no deferral and therefore we all must monitor one another’s deferral) while adding a critical component: allowing for an orderly distribution.\n\nWhen we deter, we just watch each other; when we defer, we allow one another to proceed, to “re-imagine” the shared object of desire in creative ways. “Defer” includes deferring to the other. With deterrence there is no object, and therefore no desire—only fear. We each let the other take a piece in the “faith” that they will limit themselves to only a piece and let us have our piece in term. The systems of exchange and negotiation this involves have no place in a system of deterrence, where one simply remains on hair trigger lest the other step over some at least somewhat arbitrary line. All this is a way of saying that in deferral we remain indebted, to each other and to the center through each other: the shared object is a gift from the center and sharing it is how we pay or, rather, pay down, the debt.\n\nIn that case, every utterance, or every sample, is both marking and repaying the debt, and in learning language we are learning the “weights and measures” of a complex system of debt. So I am here continuing my “Tokenizing Deferentiality” discussion (and “All You Need is Language” and earlier discussions), aiming at treating all human activity as linguistic use and all linguistic use as a marking and paying of debt (debt paid through its marking, which prices in degrees of enforcement and forgiveness). I refuse any numerical marking or mathematical method here (even if I wouldn’t and couldn’t prevent others from trying) because such methods merely beg the question of what you determine to be a “unit” to be measured, and such measuring already presupposes an answer to the question of the relation between what you will take to be “units”—their respective weights and measures.\n\nWe have many ways within language of tokenizing deferral—indeed, if we didn’t, math would be impossible—and measuring its various increments, at various scales and within various frames of reference. We have, above all, “like,” positioned somewhere in between “same” and “other.” When you ask how much one thing is “like” another consider how many other assumptions the question and answer entail—everything is like something else in some way, and you could equally say that nothing is like anything else in other ways. You could right away introduce a scale (“1 to 10”) of “likeness,” but you will quickly find any measure along this line to be arbitrary, not least because in performing the measurement you are putting your finger on the scale in a way that would require another scale to measure, and so on.\n\nSo, it’s more “accurate” instead to say that one thing is more like another than some other thing, in some regard, on some scene, from somewhere on that scene, with whatever exemptions, postponements, expirations, etc. are entailed. In that case, you’re standing for, or representing, that likeness.\n\nEverything is to be sunk into tokenizing deferentiality, as we aim to ever simplify and make transportable and transferable (and “cheaper”) our idioms, which means that the most essential concepts, like scenicity, singularized succession, the juridical, the nomos, etc., must all be tokenizable. The word (a prime) “like” is itself, it seems, a kind of loosening or mitigation of “same”—a kind of lowering of the threshold of those things we might be able to identify as the “same” (or “other,” for that matter).”Things that are like are potentially the same—we are deferring saying “this is the same”; or, we are deferring saying they are “other.”\n\nBut things that are like are also things that we like—the adjective and the verb apparently are ultimately the same word. And this makes perfect sense, since the things that we like are like us by virtue of the fact that we like them. So, “like” situates us in a desiring, deferring and reciprocally signifying relation to our scene—it is how we are building our scenes and fitting ourselves into them. But then we may take the next step and introduce the adverb, “likely,” which introduces, through desire, similarity and reciprocity, the domain of probability—if something is likely to happen, then the event in question is “like” some other event that has happened or that we know will happen.\n\nThe more like it is the more we feel we can say it will happen, or has happened, with past events we have not “verified.” All the substitutions/sacrifices through which we pay our debts leverage the likelihood that things are like what we like. When we say something is “likely” we are already betting on it happening—“likely” implies at least more than a 50% probability. In that case, everything below 50% fails to meet the threshold of sayability within the idiom of liking and likening—under 50% and things are no longer like each other and one no longer likes them. One could argue that this installs a kind of blindness, a prejudice against the unlikely, into the idiom, the idiom I would like to propose as a tokenizing one, but the answer to this is that the scale or frame of reference needs to adjusted so as to like, find to be like, and to be likely, all that falls below this threshold—which means lowering the threshold of significance, which means increasing the sensitivity and resolution of our instruments registering new layers of data. We have to shape our desires and therefore our scenes so as to like and be like things previously off our radar, and in that way they become likely in some respect, upon some possible scene.\n\nI’m aiming at an analysis of language that, because it is necessarily carried out within language is not only an analysis but an immersion and participation—which, then, pays down the debt to disciplinary analytical traditions. If someone pays you money in exchange for something you own, you “analyze” their gesture and the token offered by turning over the thing. The difficulty here is really analogous to (“like”) the difficulty posed by mathematization—as soon as you assign values to tokens you abstract the token from the events in which it will have it fluctuating values and create a metalanguage that serves more to police and regulate valuations than to directly raise and lower them.\n\nSo, it’s a problem to, say, make lists of words and expressions and assign a particular increment of deferral to them—the list is itself just another use of signs, another idiom. It’s precisely because language always defeats such attempts at calculation that it is privileged as a mode of tokenization. Derrida’s marking of the constitutive iterability of any utterance is maybe the most effective way of making the point—the very fact that someone might be saying something ironically or citing rather than saying it (which really includes “irony”), and that you can never be sure, absolutely frustrates more familiar ways of tokenizing transactions.\n\nThe way through this thicket is to always be liking and likening toward the end of making something in particular more likely. We are very close to Peirce here: to say what becomes more likely as a result of what you have said is to give the meaning of what you have said. And we are enclosed within the originary hypothesis as well, which presupposes that “meaning” originates in an effort to make the survival of the group more likely, in this case precisely because liking something too much made us too much like each other. The solution turned out to be making all of us more like something else, something that is not a person, i.e., a metaperson.\n\nAnd it is of that metaperson that we can first of all say, “this is the same,” closing all the likes in upon identity, precisely so as to provide us with the slack to merely be like each other, rather than the same. Singularized succession in perpetuity is a concept that places the entire community all in regarding its continuity, which depends upon sustained, continually transferred, attention to the center. The token then comes with creating a new way, place and now of saying “this is the same,” which is a way of reorganizing and thereby recreating all of reality so as to center it on some new object of attention.\n\nThat is the source of value, even if it involves authenticating the result of a prompted and targeted data search issuing in a valuation of some asset or the accreditation of some occupant of some center. You want to make social continuity more likely and this entails making a whole “suite” of things more likely insofar as they contribute to the likelihood of social continuity. The suite gets enhanced as more data comes in, as we contribute more and better data, and therefore as all the data recording, coding, curating, collating and training keeps lowering the threshold of detectability and intelligibility.\n\nAll of the means each and all of us have been afforded for finding and founding new ways of saying “this is the same” and this affordance is what we have been gifted and which we are obliged to pay forward, creating new debt as we go. We’ve been taught, by David Graeber and leftist thinkers like Maurizio Lazzarato, to see debt as a horrifying prison constructed by malevolent power actors, but debt is only an extension of the gift economy, itself only an extension of the ritual and ultimately originary scene wherein the central beast gives itself over to the group which in turn gives up a portion of future kills to the gifting metaperson.\n\nIt is a world without such reciprocal obligations that should horrify us. When someone erects and “furnishes” a new scene upon which some thing can be displayed of which we can say “this is the same” (I see what you see and see that you see that I see…), we have obligated in turn all who come onto that scene to affirm that they see that thing, and the value of the token, then, is a matter of the social “curvature” carved out in the construction of that scene whereby others are drawn into it. But we can add that any new mode of indebtedness reacts back on previous modes, “doubling down” in the manner of enforcing them or forgiving them, while replacing them with a more payable or more “likely” loan—or, of course, both, in differing degrees, soliciting different actors on this scene or its successor scenes.\n\nThe concept of citationality, for which I cited Derrida above (think about the debt accrued here) is in fact (even if Derrida never turned it in this direction) a very parsimonious way of analyzing texts, including in the manner I proposed above (some of what I do is redeeming the unfulfilled promises of postructuralism and the “linguistic turn” more broadly). Once you’ve determined who is being cited in a particular utterance (sample), and establish the entire chain of citationality (really a massive, ultimately ungraspable web) you have understood the meaning of the utterance/sample—this is just turning the Peircean definition of meaning in reverse.\n\nOf course, for Derrida, it’s citation all the way down, and so it is, but citation still presupposes a “citer,” who is, after all, citing rather than not citing, citing one thing rather than another, and from one “stance” rather than another—and all of these differences introduced into the cited material concern how the cited sample will travel and endure, which might make us carriers of the Burroughsian “virus” of language (a concept very much alive in contemporary innovative writing) but I’ll stick with the pharmakon, which preserves the difference between pointing as singling out the victim for a lynching and pointing as an act of deferral, a substitute for the lynching (let’s say, the paraclete, or advocate, supplementing the katechon).\n\nSo, citing the citable in a citable way is liking, likening and increasing likelihood and this by no means restricts one to or privileges the commonplace (you don’t have to cite the most often cited)—you pay down your debt by generating new likelihoods because this involves building more deferral than you undermine by marshalling more semiotic material to the cause of deferral. Thinking in terms of citation introduces a metalinguistic dimension: you are pointing to the “piece” of language you are deploying as well as whatever you are having that piece of language refer to. And this pertains to our completely institutionalized mode of life, where everything you do cites some prior utterance, some rule, some precedent, some model, increasingly explicitly.\n\nTokenization heads toward citation as naming, much like one is named after a grandparent or beloved figure, but it is that which makes you singular and not just a “mention.” The most valuable token, then, is that which cites not exactly most widely but by casting the net of “likes” most widely while fishing out a name, a title, an honorific, in the most singularizing way possible.\n\nThe ideal style is one which is impenetrable to those on the scene where everything is always already the same and crystal clear insofar as one is on the infra and meta scene upon which we can say “this is the same.” This is an argument I’ve made many times, but I’m returning to it here to add that this infra and meta scene is the scene of tokenization, where a call is placed on a pedagogical future—you’re saying, not so much what everyone will necessarily be saying at some future date but what will be a constitutive element of the archive enabling anything to be said at that date. You’re liking those people and things that are likened to the furnishings, props and actors on future scenes that will be likely to like those people and things that will be likened to… It’s like a conversation anyone can join by introducing something unsaid in the conversation and yet without which nothing in that conversation could be said: some historical, institutional, conceptual, or linguistic frame of reference the traces of which can be made into outlines of the present scene.\n\nEveryone has had conversations in which the interlocutor is taking so much for granted that he has no right to and yet continuing the conversation requires ignoring that fact—in a sense, every conversation is a bit like that. We can create spaces that abolish such conversations not so much by establishing tables of agreed upon “facts” but by threading the conversation on protocols for summoning the archival traces that bear most directly upon it. We’re not thinking in terms of winning arguments here but of remaking our conceptual resources (idioms) in real time, with that being the “topic” or substance of the conversation.\n\nIn doing so we can draw upon all the vocabularies bequeathed us by the institutions of deferral: we insure ourselves; we make deposits and withdrawals, invest, let interest accrue, short and buy put and call options, indemnify, copyright, trademark and patent, witness and subpoena, algorithmize, etc. Every sentence then becomes a summoning of the archives, or a search term, as well as a rich source of data deposited in the archive. That would be a likely scene of debt and deferral, upon which the distinction between forgiving and collecting what is owed is gradually eroded because the distinction between word and token would be dissolved in the sample. Generational debt would be forgiven once a progeny arrives who can re-found the corporate order."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-couple-of-texts-on-writing-pedagogy",
      "title": "A Couple of Texts on Writing Pedagogy",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 5, 2025",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/a-couple-of-texts-on-writing-pedagogy",
      "content": "https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/double-helix/v12/katz.pdf\n\nhttps://wac.colostate.edu/docs/double-helix/v12/katz2.pdf"
    },
    {
      "slug": "deferral-and-appropriation-property-and-the-center",
      "title": "Deferral and Appropriation; Property and the Center",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "May 31, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/deferral-and-appropriation-property-and-the-center",
      "content": "Center Study has no political theology, because what would be political theology is retracted into anthropology and anthropology is retracted into anthropomorphics, the constitution of the human through signs. Political theology is taken to be some kind of ultimate back-stop, kind of like a lender of last resort, or the outside spread, guaranteeing your more mundane positions of nation, race, constitution, the people, friends and enemies, and so on. And it’s true that supposedly secular political theories and commitments hold in reserve such a theology, in the West usually traceable back to some variant of Catholicism or Protestantism, and it’s also true that exposing the political theology of political tendencies that most vociferously deny can be an illuminating demystification.\n\nBut this is because secular theory has foreclosed the question of the sacred and God, rather than solving it. The originary hypothesis not only solves it but does so in a way that can support more historically specific revelations, while accounting for the “substrate” of those revelations, which is to say, why (and what it means to say) one “believes” in them. Historic faiths are discovery procedures whose results can be assessed while being maintained as ongoing inquiries, and any inquiry needs fervent advocates who feel something irretrievable might be lost without adherence to the founding event. But any political arrangement dictated by any historic faith will be transparently arbitrary to anyone not of that faith and, increasingly, to those within it as details of governance find ever more tenuous reference points in theological particulars.\n\nAt the very least, then, the originary hypothesis provides a kind of meta-faith, and if you want to see that as a far more minimal “political theology” I would see no reason to object but the ground of a hypothetical event with no trace of philosophy also seems to me to make the demand that the originary hypothesis be slotted as a political theology a futile one.\n\nAn originary event provides a theory of “justice,” since that answers a persistent question, while also recognizing that “justice” is an anachronistic term, a de- and re-ritualization of the distribution created on the originary scene. The central object is shared in accord with the dictates of the center, which is the central object giving itself up to be shared but under very specific conditions. Those conditions are established through the originary event itself, as the sign of deferral that stemmed the contagion of violence imminent on the scene is iterated throughout the act of appropriation, marking the point at which taking too large a share would threaten to restart the catastrophe—the shares are equal enough, as determined through the jostling and pushing back that would register some differences in strength, speed and risk-tolerance while measuring the limits at which such differences might engulf the community.\n\nThe results get formalized through the iteration of the event as ritual, which is a preliminary preparation for consumption—the formalized ritual evens things out further as all must be equal before the center while leaving the differences untouched as long as they don’t interfere with ritual proprieties. What would be “wrong” or “bad” would be to appropriate against the will of the center, codified in ritual and presided over by the “community” or, more precisely, whoever stands ready to mobilize enough of the community against a perceived transgression, with those guardians of ritual eventually getting separated out and formalized as priests. There will always be a rule of thumb character to this along with various a posteriori adjustments as sometimes transgressions go unprevented or unpenalized and therefore need to be forgotten or written into the ritual in some way.\n\nAll of the laws, rules, tacit understandings, gestures, postures, etc., that mediate human interactions on any scene are, then, preliminaries to some kind of distribution and consumption, and are continued through to the completion of consumption. All that changes are the commands of the center, and that matters quite a bit—the history of the human is the history of the center and its commands. Private property is one, very long and durable, set of relationships pursuant to commands of an occupied center, which is to say, a distribution by a Big Man and subsequently various forms of monarchy and states, ultimately, as our “liberal democracies,” organized around the reciprocal struggle to oust whoever has been grudgingly placed at the center.\n\nThe heyday of private property is under a monarch whose realm is also understood as private property, the protection of which is bound up with the distribution which he sits at the head of. This is to say that property has always been a kind of permission slip to operate certain territories and assets but as the occupation of the center becomes more tentative so does the issuance of permission slips, which first of all become devalued by being more widely issued, which for a while produces a kind of renaissance of ownership but in the end is hemmed in by so many provisos laid down by a state that increases its power by accelerating the subversion of the present occupant and thereby exercises such asymmetric power as to make the balance between armed lord and king in the heyday a distant memory.\n\nTo accept that there are no natural or divinely granted rights to property or anything else that anyone is required to acknowledge outside of the power (perhaps just as natural or divinely granted if sought out and cultivated) to resist encroachments upon them is to see property as derivative of one’s position on a team that needs to allocate responsibility and therefore power in certain ways. As always, property, or one’s share, operates through petitions to the center.\n\nAll this so far is probably obvious enough for those familiar with center study and intelligible enough to those familiar with the originary hypothesis, but what I’d like to add now is a scenic dimension that I don’t recall being particularly explicit about yet. I’d like to draw (“liberally”) on Eric Gans representation of the history of aesthetics in Originary Thinking as a series of scenic transformations: first of all, from ancient Greek tragedy, where the central figure is simply placed on the scene with the audience on the periphery to Renaissance or more specifically Shakespearean tragedy where the central figure places himself on the scene, represents himself on the scene, defends his right to occupy the center, and so on.\n\nIn other words, the scene has to be explicitly staged. The Romantic aesthetic then shifts the scene to the periphery itself, making the individual’s relation to the center more explicitly problematic, and then the Modernist aesthetic in which the figure on the periphery becomes overtly resentful towards the encroachment of the bourgeois center on available sites for scenes, with the postmodern aesthetic becoming a promiscuous eagerness to inhabit any scene and any articulation of scenes. What interests me here is the assumption that the succession of aesthetic forms involves a rendering explicit of previously tacitly enacted scenes along with the penetration of scenicity into previously unaestheticized scenes.\n\nMoving the analysis outside of the realm of the aesthetic, we can design a model whereby scenes get stacked through the “platforming” of scenes and elements and preconditions of scenes in a way that is technological. Once the scene upon which the king sits gets made explicit, becomes increasingly elaborate, adorned with intricate justifications and arrayed with intelligence of actual and potential enemies we have the creation of an entire set of new scenes, of administration, law, intelligence, the military, sources of funding, etc., all of which in turn get broken down into scenes and so on. This makes occupation of the center more buttressed but ultimately more fragile, as those supplemental scenes can fail, deteriorate, become infiltrated by enemies, create new enemies, and so on.\n\nOne of the scenes, or one set of scenes, is that of science, which both flourishes and is corruptible as it works over the materials provided to it by scenic design and construction elsewhere. When the king is deposed and the center left empty, all the supplemental scenes take on the responsibility of “continuity of government” while also dedicating themselves to ensuring that any temporary occupant of the center (the scandal of modern political thought is the need to come up with some reason why someone has to be there in the first place) remains cognizant of his contingent hold on the place.\n\nWe will keep turning parts and pieces of scenes we never noticed before into the centers of new scenes as they are brought to our attention, generally due to some misfit with other features of the scene, and these new scenes will have interfaces with other scenes, supply other scenes and be supplied by them, and open new areas of inquiry and new modes of performance. This is not fragmentation because no scene is an island and there are strict hierarchies of scenes governed by protocols regulating exchanges between them. Furthermore, what unifies all these scenes is that they all rely on and generate data, and data across scenes will become increasingly commensurate, not because everything will be reduced to biology or chemistry or physics but because everything will get reduced to scenes of teams doing biology, chemistry, physics and everything else and new ways of counting and recording things will be designed so as to make data transferable, so that new knowledge about human bodies can be articulated with new agricultural knowledge and new pedagogies training the people developing the agricultural knowledge.\n\nNot only is this not fragmentation but it makes the emptiness at the center, the carnivalesque replacement and behind the scenes arranged succession at the center, increasingly untenable because agencies will need to be able to range freely across all the disciplinary spaces and the meta-disciplinary spaces and protect and ascertain data security. And this will break up the existing forms of sovereignty, except insofar as some of them can transition into data security companies competitive with other data security companies on the field of providing vital assurances to other companies and institutions that their own data will stand the strictest juridical scrutiny.\n\nThe winners of this competition, those companies that supply the most reliable data security services will end up exercising new modes of authority with the fee for their services resembling the tributes paid by subjects to monarchs as sovereignty relinquishes all of the bureaucratic trappings that made it appear an indispensable and immovable machine, returning them to what sovereignty has always been—the largest property owner, establishing and presiding over the nomos. And there will always be competition, since data can never be completely monopolized once and for all (your own work at securing data produces more data), but there is reason to believe this competition will remain “meritocratic” since trying warfare would assume you already had a decisive data advantage but if you had that why would you need war?\n\nDistribution now takes the form of assignment to teams, issuing credit to specific initiatives, securing of supply chains, the creation of smart contracts, the drafting or recruitment of future members and, therefore, the pedagogical futures supervised without any guarantee of calculable return. And the originary question of the human as a derivative of the center will inform distribution in a way that some might still want to call “theological” or “philosophical.”"
    },
    {
      "slug": "tokenizing-succession",
      "title": "Tokenizing Succession",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 15, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/tokenizing-succession",
      "content": "We can compress the hyperstitching of soliciting the center with prolonging the imperative (credit/ledgering with scenic design) by defining money as options on succession—that is, credit determined by the likelihood of one or another change in occupancy of the center. This will entail thinking about succession not only along the top line, so to speak, but in terms of the juridical and disciplinary orders as, ultimately, part of an ongoing succession ceremony. In this way, singularize succession in perpetuity provides us with a way of designing possible lines of succession from the current order in which power is increasingly centralized while the occupant of the center is subjected to ever more grotesque virtual sacrifices to one in which sacrifice is distilled from succession and central power clarified through reduction to supervision of nomic distributions.\n\nVarious juridical and disciplinary lines of succession currently substitute for open succession practices through competition over which line (which articulation of social, economic, cultural, political, etc. theories and enclaves) can most credibly claim to control depositions at the center. There are different pacings here and differential power—habits of determining interest rates at the Federal Reserve have a different weight and continuity than habits of working out the nuances of gender theory in American universities—but once power has been handed over even merely to the central bank no limits can be set in advance regarding the force of given levers over the central occupant.\n\nPart of our hyperstitching, then, is “suturing” those juridical and disciplinary sites through counter disciplinary and juridical practices so as to trace a path toward open succession. This also means that all of those factors that must be priced in to our solicitations of the center, or our various ways of drawing credit as advantageously (as close to forgiveness and far from penalty) as possible are really components of succession—whatever, that is, goes into calculations of the volatility that derivatives and arbitrage profit from is part of the field of succession and therefore everything pertinent to succession is part of what makes money money.\n\nIf the market goes up in expectation of a change of administration in the White House, or a shifting of power centers within an administration, then it is also going up and down in expectation of developments within critical theory or aesthetic innovation, even if the latter are too much on the margins of existing forecasting methods to be brought (yet) explicitly into calculations. So, when you decide what to do with your money, in whatever form you hold your money, you are tokenizing succession.\n\nThe meaning of the derivative is that any event that might possibly occur, at any time, could be a source of expected future earnings insofar as any event will impinge upon the value of some property or asset that might be bought and sold. We could say that the prediction market is a very pure form of capitalism, precisely because they redirect investment to the event itself. Prediction markets, though, are constrained by the difficulty of determining what is to count as the outcome of an event: aside from officially approved outcomes, like elections and sporting events, whether something has happened is always open to contestation.\n\nYou can assign third parties to determine whether, for example, inflation has increased to a particular extent and thereby settle bets on that but it’s easy to see how hard-won and easily-lost such trust would be. So, there might be a market for nominalizing and curating events, to represent them as more robust sources of value rather than just in terms of their effect on properties and assets already recognizable within the market. The way I have been proposing doing this is through the deployment of the juridical, based on the proposition that any event can be represented as a site of potential conflict rising to a formal level, which, in juridical terms, means such things as offense, complaint, suit, etc., with two claimants and some adjudication and the settlement would be what constitutes an event as an event.\n\nMy post on Thirdness a while back laid out the logic of this approach. We then have the basis for a company that, in essence, constructs and curates events, at any scale and of whatever duration might attract betting interest. We would be saturating the world with high quality events. We might think of it as a a kind of editorial process superstructured over and transforming the “raw material” of the stream of poorly differentiated events confronting us now. This is a matter of prolonging the imperative because this is irreducibly a technological problem, one of gathering and preserving data, creating platforms with layers of authentication, new levels of the nomos upon which claims regarding distribution can be made.\n\nThere are no intrinsic limits regarding how to construct events—what might be seen as a single event, in particular for its direct participants (all of these terms are getting hard to stand by), can readily be constructed an indefinite number of ways, depending upon the kinds of complaints and micro-complaints and counter-complaints we might extract from it—we can just follow the immense complexity of modern legal systems here. The purpose here is not to intensify litigiousness but, by anticipating it, tokenize emergent resentments as modes of deferral and thereby defer recourse to the law. Legal framings flow into ethical and aesthetic gestures (I am using the words “ethical” and “aesthetic” in brackets) on the condition that judgments remain guardian of that space between the lower and the upper (revolutionary) vendettas.\n\nThe question here is how to create derivatives and options out of this practice so that, first of all, there is a way of describing future events that might be wagered on before we can know the contestants in and terms of those events. What, that is, is the equivalent of building a prediction market for the 2032 presidential election outside of such a regularly scheduled event? We already inevitably anticipate the future—it is built into language—so the problem is how to cover, to saturate, futurity with discrete chunks of events that remain the same through all the changes in personnel, means, constraints, and so on that intervene between the anticipation and the realization.\n\nIf we can do this, such futures markets would serve as currency, replacing existing currencies so we are simply exchanging degrees of confidence in various outcomes as avenues of access to participation in some capacity on one or another team. We would then be “fixing,” in both senses of the word, the market as we trade on it and transition to something that will no longer be the market but, rather, options on controlled usurpations and shuffling of succession promises across institutions.\n\nWe need “running” events that are continually being closed and reopened through judgments, so in buying a position on them you are seeing fluctuations in value regularly while also holding an asset one might expect to have certain expected future returns. We might organize such event creation around lawsuits targeting major institutions—banks, universities, government, companies, etc. We need the form of a particular suit that might conceivably, under rigorously considered juridical conditions, be brought at any point, now or in the future, against the institution or some official position within it. So, for example, a fraud lawsuit against the Federal Reserve according to a particular understanding, specified in advance, of the legal terms of money and debt issuance.\n\nThe problem lies in making this the same lawsuit, tried repeatedly, with potentially different results each time; or, at any rate, the same something done repeatedly. You can start the token with a case drawn in 50/50 terms, so as to try and solicit an equal number of bets on each side and then every day, or week, or month, etc., you bring in new data, curated according to the original form, and the bettors use that new data to revise their bets, which is to say buy and sell that derivative (e.g., the “fed fraudulence, yes/no” derivative—of which there would be many): will the fed be convicted of fraud? You can then buy an option to have the “yes” position in, say, 2 or 5 years, and then you can sell that option, etc.\n\nWith social media the bet may be on how closely site moderation approximates legal principles of incitement, fraud and slander, again, choosing the present as a baseline which can be given a numerical representation; the university, or various sectors or departments, how closely they approximate the form of disciplinary inquiry, according to some model of inquiry. You can see how this only works if we tether the prediction market to the terms of good governance, which is to say, orderly succession. People would be free to try and influence the outcome by making the bank less fraudulent, social media more rationally moderated, the university more devoted to inquiry, etc.\n\nThey would then be betting on the effectivity of their own activity. Since the easy assumption right now is that the Fed will become increasingly fraudulent, social media increasingly unhinged, the academy increasingly frivolous and narrowly politicized, those betting on order and succession would be going long on the institutions (or, more broadly, their functions) and the incentives for doing so would be to identify those with faith in reparative practices, allow them to know each other and distinguish themselves from “doomsters” and because if your options become worthless, in the long run no one else’s would be of much value either.\n\nYou thereby set up an open competition between those shorting and those longing the system, and those shorting it need not be seen as traitors or subversives because they are providing useful information. (And even those going long might hedge a bit.) The existence of the market, then, serves as a kind of mirror on these institutions while coming to serve as currency for the social order more generally. If the institutions change in significant ways so that, e.g., according to the opening terms the fed would lose or win every lawsuit easily (so that betting on the outcome would dry up) the values would be adjusted accordingly, as would the higher political stakes; if the institutions cease to exist (e.g., new institutions of inquiry and pedagogy replace the university) some way of rolling the bets over can be found—you want to select social forms that are necessary enough so that they will always exist and so different versions can be commensurated—credit, inquiry, judgment.\n\nUltimately, if the system drifts or is accelerated toward an absence of truth and justice, this model collapses, since it is intended to, first of all, be a bulwark against precisely that. But various resets might be possible before the model need be abandoned altogether.\n\nThe turning point toward approximating orderly succession would come when those shorting the system, in realizing that they are in fact providing information, begin to see themselves as raising the standards for transparent succession even higher than those intending to long the system. Everyone would then be betting on enhancing succession practices, with the differences being over which judgments would best do so, thereby providing information for the governance system. The completion of this process would entail turning these future options into currency, whether that be the only currency or a kind of reserve currency backing all others and replacing or marginalizing national currencies.\n\nThe future options would then have to be converted into units that can be tokenized and used for exchange. We could, for now, call the units “inaugs,” as short for the ceremony of succession, the inauguration, giving us the question of what counts as a inaug? An inaug might be a rightly predicted case outcome. For this to work we would have to assume homogeneity across all the different futures or, better, succession markets. Judgments on the beauty or revelatory character of a work of art would have to be commensurable with judgments on a case of fraud, and, in fact, they are commensurable insofar as they are decisions on cases.\n\nWe would have to accept leveling all the cases, which means the real, social importance of any case is irrelevant for tokenizing purposes. This doesn’t present any problem—we already do this kind of leveling all the time—it’s implicit in quantification: shares in a biomedical firm developing cures are measured in dollars just like shares in a cannabis firm. But if we are to assume the homogenization of judgments across cases and fields we must work to produce it by selecting cases that approach 50/50 as closely as possible and doing so regularly which in turn would require the kind of constant computation currently devoted to mining crypto, and the judgments themselves must include transparency in data and criteria of judgment.\n\nA large part of the workforce would be involved in producing currency, which would therefore be done by a company or cluster of companies overlapping with the central data security firm. Knowledge production, technological innovation, currency generation and sovereignty are thereby knit or stitched very closely together. We could imagine individuals dealing in inaugs, but the heaviest trade would be by teams, who would only minimally be gambling as, much like current practices of hedging and arbitrage, most would place inaugs on both sides of every case, tilted slightly one way each time. So, does an individual or team keep inaugs in the bank?\n\nI think, rather, they are all already called for, advanced to other teams within the supply chain or rolled over on the succession markets, with slight adjustments around the edges, especially as succession becomes increasingly distanced from usurpation. I have suggested in the past that the entire market might be transferred directly over to the succession map, and that is the end game where, within a subscription order in which goods and services are accessed through teams that operate through adjustments on a pre-existing supply chain with those adjustments regulated through reciprocal interventions (“controlled usurpations” as options) in each others’ companies by leadership teams as a kind of back up to routine negotiations or arrangements. In this case, the “value” or “price” of anything lies in the calculability of the succession practices of the firms involved in its production, ultimately reaching down into the educations systems reproducing the team.\n\nThe (very critical) mid point, then: exchange completely converted over to inaugs. As always, I want to think in terms of an end point that can be instituted within companies today, as a way of getting to that end point or some modified version of it. In that case, I may not have much to add to Thirdness, other than the tokenization through inaugs, or maybe “futures,” or some other name, with such tokens to serve as private money offering access to, say, certain job or apprenticeship pools, much like donations to a political campaign give you a chance to meet and dine with candidates, members of his team and other high profile donors.\n\nCreating this new kind of prediction market would itself institute new educational institutions, focused on judging ever more detailed, complex and high stakes cases. I haven’t returned to it here, but the predictions as currency only works with a very high degree of trust in the honesty and competence of the companies running the prediction markets and part of the argument for such an approach is precisely to gear the social order to producing the kind of literacies that would justify such trust"
    },
    {
      "slug": "paradox-and-post-dox",
      "title": "Paradox and Post-Dox",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jul 01, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/paradox-and-post-dox",
      "content": "If we are no longer to think in terms of the liberal social contract in which we are each of us free individuals whose protection is guaranteed by the state on condition of law abidingness and not reintroducing the vendetta and thereby reject the revolutionary (i.e., large scale vendetta) implications of that conception, the question of how to account for and practice our exchanges with the center is reopened. Insisting on pure obedience to the absolute power that is sovereignty, regardless of whatever mediating institutions are said to allow us to make claims on the sovereign, is at best limited if for no other reason than the unavoidability of what I’ve called the imperative gap, which is to say the difference between the imperative issued and the one obeyed.\n\nIn other words, the “here and now” of how to obey can never be fully specified in the imperative itself, and if we crowd into that space all the considerations and calculations we might ordinarily assign to the free subject at large, we have a formidable space of ambiguity and proliferation of possible decision paths. Embed the potentially infinite space of the imperative gap in the new norms and technological capacities of recording and surveillance and the stakes and challenges increase, especially once we price in the double-edged nature of every technological development, which always will provide means of evasion, subversion and redirection along with the direct exercise of power from the center.\n\nThe expectant scene, into which we can compress the stack of scenes and the embedding of the entire stack in the credit and accreditations installed in any particular scene, is a terrain on which we will all be making the most consequential decisions, those regarding the provision of data to the center.\n\nThe sovereign, or pointman, or dictator, can be seen as the origin and continuation of the nomos, which is to say the originary distribution, which can be traced by a series of successions, however crooked, from some appropriation of a territory to its current governance. Yarvin’s “sovereignty is conserved” maxim is true in the best sense, that of enabling us to study any institution or event in terms of who, exactly, is sovereign at any particular point—for example, part of the reason why crime is so scandalous is that sovereignty is ceded in various patches of territory to some thug with a knife or gun (we could call them little big men); and it’s even more scandalous insofar as this sovereignty is ceded as a delegation or a “short” (i.e., sovereignty strategically ceded so as to be recovered at a lower value) so as to allow for the terms of governance to be redesigned surreptitiously.\n\nThis also makes the sovereign, or occupant of the center, the final judge in any dispute over the exchanges and inheritances constituting the ongoing exchanges within the nomos. The lurking anomaly in theories of sovereignty has always been how to situate the sovereign in relation to the law: if within the law, the sovereign is not really sovereign; if outside the law, the law is nothing on than the sovereign’s arbitrary will—we end up with an endless oscillation between monarchical and republican forces since the “instruments” (very much including human instruments) of rule will always have some say within the imperative gap and the monarchical/republican binary leaves the question of that say up to the hostage taking stance of imminent civil war or even the surrendering of sovereignty altogether.\n\nMy proposed answer to this question is that the occupant of the center does, indeed, make himself available to suits by members of the order, in accord with their standing and registered reciprocal obligations, but he does not make himself vulnerable in terms of stripping himself of his powers in the face of accusations—that is, you can sue the sovereign, but you’d better have a very good case and probably a class action, because it’s a perilous undertaking in which the sovereign will not only defend himself but countersue. A certain lurking of civil war in any order cannot be excluded a priori but we can minimize it here insofar as the intensity of the struggle over the occupant of the center’s removal, if it comes to that, is moderated by the chain of succession which must eventually get to a point where we get a successor who was not a “co-defendant” in some sense with the sovereign removed under cover of law.\n\nThis would require creating a level of trust wherein, say, one could accept that an impeached and removed president could nevertheless be trusted to appoint a successor who could in turn be trusted to appoint a successor and so on until we get to the sufficiently unimplicated sovereign.\n\nThe imperative gap is where the imperative exchanges get worked out and where credit is granted, extended, retracted, forgiven and enforced. It is where tracking and tracing takes place and therefore the interplay of transparency and opacity. Here is where the questions of “citizenship” and “subjectivity” get worked out, as imperative exchanges increasingly take the form of data exchanges. Peirce’s “each and every one of us is an insurance company” remains largely true in this new form, as you prepare, generate, curate and emit data for all the tracking and tracing devices on every expectant scene and in return data assessments are made and disseminated on your behalf by the institutions through which you’ve circulated, providing you with access to positions within those and other institutions.\n\nThis can best be studied on terms derived from ritual, which is to say, those of petitioning, perhaps the typical form of imperative exchange (as it includes without being limited to prayer), but also poised to appropriate the idioms of data exchange itself, as our vocabulary becomes increasingly fintechy, as we come to speak in terms of “latent spaces,” “vectors,” “calls” and “puts,” “shorting,” “derivatives,” and so on. In finance all reduces to credit and the ledgering of credit, which is most directly transferable to petitioning, but the language of algorithms and machine learning also involves indirect petitioning, as one comes to behave in ways intended to move the needle one way or another on various accrediting scoring systems—here, one is simply petitioning an even more unseen agent of the center, a kind of virtual representative of the current terms of centered ordinality.\n\nParadoxically, the best way to determine the ways in which you will be trackable and traceable will be to continually update your vocabularies and idioms in ways that the databases upon which the language learning models will not have caught up with until you have once again updated your, let’s say, passwords. And here is where a new form of agency aimed at qualifying oneself for the New Officer Class (but all qualified agency will come to be modeled on the NOC) can be situated. Drawing upon new institutional forms and technologies to describe human interaction is a perennial feature of linguistic development, with a particularly obvious example being the notion of the mind as a “blank slate” at an early stage of print literacy when many more people faced blank pages (I assume the “slate” is a reference to the classroom, which suggests the ominous possibility of erasing it periodically) regularly than had ever before.\n\nOne argument I could make for a kind of “accelerationism” is that this continual linguistic updating will likely accelerate with accelerations in the expectancy of scenes (the myriad ways operating on one scene requires reference to other scenes with devices planted in the one you operate on) and that, furthermore, participating in this process as intentionally as possible is what will count as “freedom” under enhanced scenic expectancy. Think of it as blockchaining (another obvious candidate for various metaphoric extensions) your idioms. AIs are extremely unlikely to coin phrases in ways that will be immediately recognizable and “contagious” within a shared space, unless, perhaps, they are very intensively trained upon carefully selected databases to do so—which, then, opens a space for new institutions, pedagogical and corporate, that would contribute to the coining of idioms for specific sites and groups.\n\nRight now I think that it is the Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs that provides an avenue (or at least a trope) for such contributions Perhaps the best way to contribute useful data to the system is by striving to occupy the boundary between the categorizable and the uncategorizable so as to continually train the system on revising its categorizations. Are you a qualified “professor” of a particular trend within a particular domain of knowledge or have you been engaging in practices that don’t fit into that category without falling easily into another? If you’re doing genuinely important and innovative work this should always be a question, but now the question can be foregrounded and stretched across all the forms of qualification and accreditation.\n\nFit the category as best you can while scrambling the terms of the category so that it oscillates between recognizing you and failing to do so. Be the GAN you want to see in the world. Make your selving a public process, raising the question of whether you are the same, and under what scenic configuration it would be slightly more likely than not for some “average” cataloguer to say you are the same. A company that helps you blockchain your idioms for advanced petitioning practices might build databases out of the latest research in AI, singling out terms of varying degrees of specialized use and obscurity to recoin as descriptions of selving.\n\nLet’s wrap the imperative exchange (petitioning) around a revisiting of the origeneration of the speech forms, with succession driven by inappropriateness and retrieval. Since the best use of AIs will ultimately be to keep having them learn and then teach us new languages (idioms), let’s assume that the emergence of the speech forms is recapitulated with each new sign (sample) issuance. Every utterance includes an inappropriate ostensive retrieved by the creation of an imperative, an inappropriate imperative prolonged into an interrogative and an inappropriate interrogative halted (the declarative solves a kind of halting problem) by the array we find in the declarative: the imperative to stop the question (the operator of negation)+ the imperative conveyed from reality to an out of reach object of petition (the fact of the matter) = a new, virtual ostensive, to be in turn indicated to some degree inappropriately.\n\nIn the heart of this I would implant, as a kind of stabilizer, the imperative exchange, whose own career from something like “here is the piece of food you demanded/now give me more food to find” through increasingly elaborate rituals and sacrifices culminating in the offering of the first born, to, finally, “help me know how to follow your commands,” in which the petition becomes a self-regulating oscillation where you’re demanding commands that enable you to make your demands clearer so they bring forth clearer commands. The imperative exchange shadows and informs the succession of speech acts, and, from a linguistic stance, a felicitous utterance will approximate the convergence of the two tracks.\n\nMaximum information about how the thing might be taken alongside revisable filtering about how the thing seems now and minimum commitment to any the possible futurities that follow. Maximum elicitation of the convergences heading toward crisis along with minimal sacrificial and maximal aesthetic inclination as they approach you. Maximum power attributed to the center along with maximal credit and delegation from the center and minimal direct command. The better the declarative the more parsable it is along these lines—you can see that these paradoxical, maxim-like utterances are right on the boundary of the self-regulating petition: let my declaratives be parsable along the lines implicit in this very request for assistance in forming the declarative.\n\nNow, let’s think of clothing ourselves in these linguistic shields and mirrors in our petitional relation to center—we will both be providing enormously useful and prolific data to the center, laying out samples indicating fracture lines and reparative healing across the entire centered ordinality and protecting ourselves from intrusive tracking and tracing precisely by anticipating any collateral that might be taken from our own practices and used to short us. Anything the center might think needs to be protected from any of us has been preemptively turned into a call on a future derivative that even those invested in a center that is shorting the system must see as necessary collateral.\n\nWhat some occupant of the center could think to charge as subversion has been articulated as advice from which all cashable interest has been divested. If the center wants to surveil us within the terms of criminality and forfeiture it will not be able to see us because we have rerouted those categories into programs of deferral, pedagogical futures—to look at us is to see a deflection of interferences with petition learning, which accelerates the machine learning of the center itself. And this would mean deferring indefinitely our suits against the center while gathering evidence and identifying possible torts and complying with an enhanced and anticipatory practice of discovery."
    },
    {
      "slug": "hyperstitching-the-soliciting-of-the-center-and-the-prolonging-of-the-imperative",
      "title": "Hyperstitching the Soliciting of the Center and the Prolonging of the Imperative",
      "source": "substack",
      "sourceLabel": "Bouvard Substack",
      "date": "Jun 15, 2026",
      "url": "https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/hyperstitching-the-soliciting-of-the-center-and-the-prolonging-of-the-imperative",
      "content": "Sovereignty, tech and finance are to be articulated into a single scenic articulation, which on the terms of center study means the articulation of succession, the soliciting of the center and the prolonging of the imperative. Succession has served as the center of thinking about sovereignty, uniting what Anthropomorphics calls the “signifying center” (the sacred) and the occupied center (the imperial) in the temporality of singularized succession in perpetuity: the occupant of the center selecting not just the next occupant, but the next occupant to select the next occupant, who is to select the next occupant and so on.\n\nThis understanding of what is still “sovereignty” on center study’s public interface serves as a measure of what is always already the operative telos of any sovereign, which is succession and perpetuation, however roundabout and contra-indicative the means. Once we further consider that the selection of the successor can be revoked and transferred at any time it becomes clear that assigning successor status, and a more or less explicit hierarchy of likely candidates, serves as a means of establishing values in a way parallel to and eventually replacing the market system. And this in turn further assumes that the “toxins” have been extracted out of succession and the various candidates, indeed the dictator or pointman himself, has other things worth doing and which can be safely pursued so that taking the highest responsibility is not a matter of survival or life’s highest ambition.\n\nThis assumption depends on the creation of a more robust juridical order than we have seen previously, allowing for peaceful, explicit and easily disposed of challenges to decisions made at all levels. One could issue a charge of “utopianism” here, but there’s no need to answer such a charge from anyone who will use the word “should” in the course of projecting any social or political possibilities until someone can show which variety of “shouldness,” or normative mapping of human action, would not be open to such a charge. The goal of center study is to stay as close to boundary between diagnosis and prescription as possible on the longest timeline imaginable: to always be able to say, this is what everyone is already doing and here’s how they might, given certain shifts in visible trajectories, do it more explicitly and accountably.\n\nThe “solicitation of the center,” meanwhile, is a very recent coinage for the “patriation” of discourses of debt, money and financialization within center study. Credit and ledger involve the diversion of the resources on the scene toward certain parties and the registering of such diversions. Any credit is drawn on the center, a practice that is transparent enough under either archaic gift economies or monarchical regimes where the monarch is responsible for coining and authenticating money. No doubt over an extended period of time we would find kings increasingly reliant on external sources of money from international moneylenders and banks and external sources of accounting from middlemen minorities: such episodes get resolved through war and conquest, or the eventual loss of sovereignty.\n\nOur interest intensifies with the situating of the central bank at the center in England in 1694, and transformation associated with, most directly, the creation of the two party system and its attachments, such as journalism, whereby each party tries to undermine credit when the other party is in power; also, though, the emergence of official science (the Royal Society) and related changes in the English language (I don’t know whether other languages saw similar linguistic shifts). Now we have a kind of split and oscillation between sovereign and debt center, one which gradually gets “communicated” across the world through Anglo imperialism.\n\nIn seeking a conceptual formulation for this epochal transformation that doesn’t confer upon it the privilege of inevitability and eternity, i.e., to make it possible to think outside of the terms of “liberal democracy” without reverting to one or another stereotyped archaism, I’ve designed the phrase “soliciting the center,” which involves an ongoing request, petition, even disturbing of the center for the purpose of channeling resources toward specific agents and projects—soliciting the center would happen under any regime, making it possible to think in terms of transitions from the oscillations between succession and the interference in succession by credit issuing agencies in the dialectic between debt enforcement and forgiveness toward the programming of futures that would ledger the field of succession itself.\n\nThe prolonging of the imperative is another way of speaking of succession, as one aims at reaching back to the originary proto-imperative issued on the originary scene itself to the furtherest future obedience to that imperative through accredited pedagogical institutions; but speaking in terms of prolonging the imperative allows for a closer integration with the perfecting of the imperative, center study’s (so far) primary way of speaking about technology. Any governance is to some extent “technocracy” and any technology is governance, and the more explicit we get about this the better, because then conflicts over techno and cracy can be given proper juridical form and removed from the purview of any demos.\n\nSoliciting the center, succession, prolonging and perfecting the imperative should all be one thing and that is the object of any politics seeking to abolish itself, which is what politics is for. “Modernity” is their splitting apart, dispersion, and reciprocal sabotage. The way you solicit the center under capitalism is by presenting yourself as more creditworthy than other credit seekers; or, as presenting your potential bankruptcy as prohibitively draining upon the center. This certainly involves soliciting credit on behalf of perfections of the imperative, especially those that contribute to governance (succession) by automating (stacking scenes) some part of it.\n\nBut it also includes the sabotaging of perfections of the imperative outside of one’s control, which might in turn mean sabotaging that which is under one’s control as well, and the creation of various kinds of artificial scarcity so that the debasement of currency can be evaded and hedged, and interfering with succession so as to guarantee continued lines of credit by enabling lines of succession whose mode of governance coincides with the particular mode of sabotage in which one specializes. But it must also be added that modernity is also the series of spastic attempts to break with the central bank backed imperial order without finding any way to recreate the oscillations within governing and between governing (succession) and finance (soliciting the center) and technology (perfecting the imperative.\n\nSuppressing such oscillations becomes the misguided goal of anti-liberal politics, introducing some kind of ritualized vendetta run through the secret police, to fill in the gaps between the oscillating poles. In this way, the present form of oscillation appears, simply, as “freedom” against “tyranny,” rather than as the creation of juridical and disciplinary scenes that create new scenes to send data back to the center.\n\nI am idiomizing the now commonly used word “hyperstition” as “hyperstitch” because I’m not speaking about conjuring or meme-ing something into existence but stitching together the world of debt and money and the world of technology and technocracy. The stitch is succession, and the stitching extends and holds to the extent that succession is singularized in perpetuity. It may now be possible to explore this grammatically, since the imperative exchange that effects the transition from the ostensive-imperative world to the declarative world through the sequence of petitions issuing in the plea to the center to let us know its command through the creation of disciplinary spaces allows for the controlled generation of idioms.\n\nWe stitch our petitions into the fabric of reality by leveraging existing institutions of deferral so as to produce more objects that can become the target of ostensives and shared in more diverse ways, as subsistence and as data and as subsistence that enables us to become carriers of fresh data. Most directly to the question of succession, it can be proposed as a rule to lend support, to donate your resentment, to whoever most proximal to central power seems mostly to, even tacitly or tendentially, nominate and invest like successors because they in turn will be most likely to do the same. A range of actors might fit this description in a floating manner, with it being possible to assign fluctuating probabilities to each of them, and to articulate possible convergences between them.\n\nSomeone close enough to power to be worth rating in this way is going to be embedded in some financial or technological enterprise able to collaborate on the level of sovereignty—or, some crossover between fin and tech. What we are looking for is where technology might become ledger, perhaps through electronic currency but more importantly through the collection of data that is juridically and disciplinarily relevant and becoming more so. We can hypothesize some boundary where fin becomes tech and tech becomes fin, with succession running through that boundary by bringing fin, the outside margin, within the juridical and aligning tech with high level pedagogy.\n\nThe first part is the hardest, as it overturns several hundred years of entrenchment and would arouse the ideological suspicions of the entire debt-ordered world (forming companies that could bring capitalism increasingly within the law, in particular as we approach its outer limits in the outside spread, are of the highest priority, as these would also be very innovative tech companies). Right now, the US is defending the debt-ordered world organized around the dollar and Treasury bonds and this requires escalating military supremacy (but for that reason not necessarily escalating military action). This is only sustainable if it translates into accelerating industrialization within the US core, first of all the US itself, of course, but also transnationally through what we might see as a kind of internalization of multipolarity.\n\nSimply ending the Fed or nationalizing the banks falls back into the anti-Anglo reactiveness I alluded to earlier. Eliminating fiat currency might not be the point either. Rather, we might think more in terms of converting US debts into formalized security arrangements that would pay them down, and this might mean encroaching on the sovereignty of debtors by carving out sovereign entities within their borders and paying off the debt to them, as protectorates, specifically, There’s something of the state as protection racket in this approach, but that has always been part of what any state is, and some protection rackets are preferable to others, in particular those that extend new powers to favored clients.\n\nThis is a risky approach, but it’s hard to imagine any approach free of risk (indeed, risk is better thought of as something to be optionalized rather than avoided)—in particular, we’d be thinking here of breaking of up China, obviously something to be undertaken with great caution and only after some practice redrawing borders in other regions so as to align assets with governments best able to protect and cultivate them. As long as I’m working this through in a very practical manner, I’ll add that this extremely interventionist approach becomes possible only through a reindustrialization of the US homeland with the prosperity and sense of a national project that would bring along with an expansion of the national security apparatuses to train a new officer class, one that would include all kinds of overseas appointments and adventures, along with letters of marque and other private adjuncts to the state.\n\nThis would also include the creation of something like honorary Americans amongst the governing classes of other nations. In a way, this would be the neoconservative strategy for global power projection set right-side up, to speak a little Hegelianese, insofar as the point would not be to spread “liberal democracy” but compatible or interoperable modes of succession across the world. I’m not doing much more here than drawing out some threads I think I see implicit in the “Trumpian” approach to the world.\n\nIn such an ordering, credit would increasingly be directed in advance, called upon, for longer term state aligned projects and grounded in what would ultimately be data security companies whose exchanges of data would eventually supplant currency. The coordination problem money was originally invented to solve would be solved in such a way as to phase out money while making it possible for many in the credit-offering section of the governing class to transition into other managerial and planning positions. Oscillations are thereby recouped within fields of succession around which cluster juridical and disciplinary scenes answering questions that come from what will increasingly be stage-managed, not in the sense of fake “psyops” but of induced collisions between different paths that might be taken from wherever we are now, disputes at various levels of the expectant scene.\n\nThe great arguments can then become over pedagogy, or language learning, with vast research institutes reconstructing paths through the various languages and idioms and hypothesizing ways of upclining forward to increased sensitivity toward nuance of expression, gesture and posture all of which are forms of compression—compressions into (governing and being governed) styles."
    },
    {
      "slug": "debts-and-deferences-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Roles, Reciprocity, and Social Exchange",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jul 09, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/GABlog/comments/6kukdg/",
      "content": "[Q:laskitude] this is in response to the post (in)equality & (im)morality; the blog comment-function itself still does not seem to work: The bit that jars is where you state \"there can only be morality within accepted rôles\".  To be honest I cannot even begin to conceive of what 'rôles' might ever be said to obtain at that level where widespread social media kicks in,  such media being probably the only level at which the broadest mass of us have learned to operate in anything freshly conceived by its participants as a truly 'moral field'.  There, even as countless persons madly strive to impose conceptions of equality left, right, and lore-or-mess centre, the 'laws' of reciprocality hold terrible sway. One should probably not mention mimesis at this point. Well, it certainly does not go down a treat with the 'little brain cottage-industry' that extends out from committed players within the American heartlands to the warbling world beyond.... All suggestion of manifesting devotion or explicitly '\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, I didn't think to post the older posts on this reddit page. We can keep all discussions here, since I have no idea what's going on with the comment function on the blog.\n\nRegarding roles, I think anything you do implies participation in an institution with roles--roles that are \"accepted\" insofar as they are essential to the institution. Being a doctor involves accepted roles; being a mother; being a teacher, etc. Everyone would agree that doctors, mothers and teachers can violate the norms constitutive of those roles, even if we would disagree on what counts as a violation. Working within the media also involves established roles--journalists tout their devotion to \"ethics\" constantly, and even purveyors of entertainment provide moral justifications (and answer moral criticisms) of their products. It would be very hard to find someone who says \"journalists should publish whatever they want about whomever they want whenever they want without any regard for truth or the public value of the information,\" which means that everyone accepts that being a \"journalist\" involves constraints. Whether the media, especially driven by victimary imperatives, operates immorally to obscure these norms and roles is a different question.\n\nI think I can best answer your question regarding \"neocolonialism\" on more general terms. The interest of wealthier, more powerful countries in the weaker, poorer countries is in ensuring secure sovereignty in those countries--not making them more free, more democratic, or more like us in any way--and not making them less like us for that matter, either. If there is already secure sovereignty, we should leave well enough alone. Disasters like plagues and famines are obviously not conducive to secure sovereignty, so intervention might be justified. I don't see any point in pretending that the situation is other than it is--rich and powerful confronting weak and poor, with the former helping the latter sometimes the moral thing to do.\n\nI'm against NGOs altogether--they are controlled by neither the powerful nor the weaker government (at least not in any accountable way) and no government interested in maintaining its sovereignty should allow them to operate in its territory. Regarding \"sex work\" more specifically, the question is, would a government that effectively secures and controls its country allow its country to be established as a site of sex tourism or prefer established familial roles? I suspect the latter. Now, it is of course possible that a country can have traditional familial roles, even mixed in with women's access to professional roles, in the main, with a tiny minority \"set aside\" or allowed to \"drift into\" prostitution.\n\nAfter all, it probably doesn't even take 1/10 of 1% of a country's women to create a viable \"sex industry.\" Since this wouldn't impinge on the security with which sovereignty is held, NGO or other international intervention is wrong (who could throw the first stone here?), but anyone could point how that tacit acceptance of such a situation is shameful.\n\nCan an argument be made for the morality \"sex work\"? You think so, on grounds of \"far greater degrees of freedom.\" Most of the counter-arguments today would focus on the intrinsic \"exploitation\" involved in prostitution. Neither, of course deals with the question of \"accepted roles,\" but we could, for the sake of argument, try out the possibility that prostitution serves a certain need, can be supported via orderly institutions, is perhaps even a \"discipline\" that can be performed more or less properly, etc. It will certainly never be the predominant sexual institution, though--that would be marriage. So, the real question would be whether prostitution supports or subverts the institution of marriage, and the \"accepted roles\" of husband and wife, mother and father.\n\nOne could make an argument that prostitution supplements marriage by providing dissatisfied spouses an \"outlet\" that makes its easier to stay in the marriage--but even that presupposes that satisfaction within the marriage would be better. And it certainly removes the prostitutes themselves from any possibility of performing those roles. It may be that no minimally advanced society has completely eliminated prostitution, and it may not be worth trying to do so, but there are very good reasons for instituting on its marginalization, and resisting its legitimation.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] well I have read through what you have to say here about three times so far and have to say I am really none the wiser regarding how to think of multiplicitous and multifarious exchanges throughout social media in terms of any \"accepted rôles\". And I am, of course, taking raw exchange as the pre-eminent, irreducible human relation! Am i to understand that by \"anything you do implies participation in an institution with rôles\" you mean to say that the institutional/form-al distinction at the core of GA is not what it seems? That each and every sign we might generate seemingly of our 'own accord' within the Anglosphere is yet bound to a sacred fixity-of-invisible-purpose that I cannot necessarily (re)cognize even as I speak? One to whose (insititutional) bosom all the form I can muster must yet inexorably cleave? This very distinction between formal/insititutional/ or dialogic/discursive would obtain also at that abrupt disjunction you make between prostitution and marriage, no? But are\n\n[ADAM]\n\nRoles can't be completely fixed because they do change and new roles emerge. How do they change and emerge? Through exchanges that seek to enhance reciprocity within existing roles, and exchanges that seek to undermine those reciprocities. We can also speak about \"roles\" more broadly than suggested by stricter, more \"feudal\" uses of the term. Those engaged in a conversation are fulfilling roles--one provides information, one \"cheers the other up,\" one offers \"another perspective,\" one tries to one-up the other with jokes or wordplay, one questions and the other answers, etc. These kinds of expectations kick in as soon as we begin talking, or resume an previous conversation.\n\nWe could identify these roles with some precision if we needed to, even though they may change several times in the course of a single conversation. As a partner in conversation, then, you either play your role, get better at it--or you resist it, reject it, try to transform it into a new role, etc. Which approach is the most moral depends on the conversation of course, but the ultimate criterion is ensuring that the conversation will remain a \"genuine\" conversation, whatever the participants take that to mean. Likewise, the media give us various roles to play, and ways of playing them--they purvey and enact certain narratives, in which we have bit pieces (and a few have starring roles).\n\nThe moral way of engaging these roles is to make the media more of what it should be. What that entails will be a point of disagreement. Perhaps in general we would agree that the media should be more \"honest,\" and that the larger media organizations should display a wider range of narratives. We would then disagree on what counts as honesty, what narratives have been concealed or falsified, etc., but no engagement or exchange is going to proceed very far with absolutely no agreement on what we are looking for (that's why almost everyone's default move is to accuse others of \"hypocrisy\"--it's a way of affirming a shared set of values).\n\nOf course, there's the exchange that isn't really an exchange but a performance for others--or, you could say that the real exchange is between each participant in the exchange and the audience he is playing to. And these roles can overlap and combine. (This all suggests that I might see the formal/institutional distinction in a wave/particle way--if you're primed to see one, you miss the other, and can't quite catch them both simultaneously, and yet they are very intimately intertwined.)\n\nUltimately, we have bring power and sovereignty into the discussion. I can certainly imagine a sovereign who decides that marriage and prostitution are, indeed, complementary institutions, and I can also imagine a way of protecting prostitution so as to minimize its degrading effects. As for seeing marriage and prostitution as equally venerable, that seems to me less likely, but who knows? Can we imagine a sovereign who would subsidize the prostitution industry just to keep it going if marriages were generally happy and healthy and young women had a range of acceptable life-options? Also unlikely, I think, but no doubt there's an argument for it. At any rate, I don't think the reasoning would be the liberal one of increasing \"degrees of freedom\" for women.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] Hello Adam. I am back. And this is what I have to say. You have taken me places with the GAblog that I could have never ever dreamed of going, and with an attention to de-tail(s) that the very Devil's rear-end itself would kill to sprout.  And thus do I invariably come to this discussion more than somewhat compassed about with a reverence that knows no bounds. But re-reading your words here today I am well... energized by something greater. And that is a ferocious dissatisfaction with what you have said. Might I now deflect for a moment to another recent GApost, wherein one paragraph begins this way..  I thought it useful as launchpad for what I need to say: \"Narratives of persecution today are ubiquitous. Ethnic and racial minorities, females, LGBT, the 99% and so on are supposedly persecuted mercilessly today, even when they are prosperous and middle class\" In a word, this sort of assertion reeks for me of profound complacency, or at very least, an apparent refusal or felt lack of\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThat GA post you quote from is not mine, but I suppose that's beside the point here.\n\nIt can't really be that hard to imagine why prostitution has been, certainly not universally, but very widely, considered \"problematic.\" Any social order needs families, which means it needs most women bearing and caring for children. Prostitution cannot provide a model for that, since the sex they provide is explicitly intended to be child-free. At best, then, prostitution can be a marginal practice, and a suspect one because only a certain number of women can be spared from participation in the broader familial order. Prostitution can only be seen and judged in terms of that order, which means that at best it can be seen as providing a necessary \"release\" for men without wives, or with wives in unsatisfactory marriages that it is nevertheless preferable stay intact.\n\n(There's also the whole history of sacred prostitution associated with temples and sacrifice, but does that even exist today?) Insofar as any community sees women as having a \"destiny,\" which it be a wife and mother, or, to put it more mimetically, to be like her own mother, prostitution, for the individual woman, must be seen as a kind of derogation from that role and degradation of the individual. Insofar as sex is seen as an activity best enjoyed within a loving relationship, especially marriage, prostitution must be seen as a degradation of the sex act. Now, you can insist that women really have no such \"destiny,\" the very assumption that they do being a \"sexist\" imposition; and you can say something similar about the sex act from a kind of materialist or utilitarian perspective. But that simply means that attempts to establish prostitution as equally legitimate as marriage are part of a feminist, materialist agenda, aimed at devaluing marriage, family, and the kinds of community that place them at the center.\n\nLike drug use, the criminalization of prostitution generates a kind of paradox: the very forms of degradation that is associated with the condition and used to justify its criminalization can be attributed to that criminalization itself. Just treat the use of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc., the way we treat alcohol, perhaps providing some treatment for those who get addicted, and all the nasty side effects of of drug use will be gone. By the same token, legalize prostitution, regulate it, remove the stigma, and we get rid of the pimps, the violence, the disease, and we have a perfectly respectable profession like, say, massage therapy.\n\nI'm not necessarily opposed to this argument, and it wouldn't change anything I said above. But while ending prohibition eliminated (as far as I know) bootlegging, I think that legalization in the case of both drugs and prostitution will generate a considerable black market or underground of illegal versions of these activities. Why? Because legal, respectable, regulated versions of these things will never provide a lot of the customers with what they really want--secrecy, and the particular forms of excitement that go with it. A man can easily tell his wife he's going for massage therapy; he can't tell her he's going to bang a prostitute at the local brothel--but if prostitution is legal, he has to pay by credit card, there's a receipt and a record, his \"provider\" is free to speak about details of the encounter (I don't anticipate any \"privilege\" being applicable here), he will be liable to all kinds of charges of mistreatment (surely the whole thing will be covered by sexual assault as well as labor, health and safety laws), and, aside from all the risk of exposure and liability, the whole thing might become too boring to bother with. Men will seek out the genuine, unregulated experience, and rough men will corral desperate young women into quasi-slavery in order to provide it.\n\nIf sex is not sacralized in some way, it becomes a site of violence--commercialization is a way station towards that.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] I need to ask now if you could better explain what is really implied by \"...can (only ever) be a marginal practice\"? Does this mean for example that all of the multiple indignities and indeed minor atrocities perpetrated quite regularly by officers of the law and indirectly by political representatives against whores should continue unabated in service of this supposedly necessary \"marginalization\"? You then go on to say that \"what customers (must) really want\" is the element of \"secrecy\" above all. And that the establishment of respectability - or even of 'cool' for pity's sake - could never, ever suffice to deliver the goods these customers really desire. I would very much like to learn on what sort of basis you arrive at this conclusion? Doesn't such a conclusion presuppose the kind of 'sacralization' -  contrary to your claims that our relentless focus on the marriage-site will prevent violence - that can only ever do us harm, and no real good at all? I think it plain (to a GA n\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIs \"decriminalization\" quite the same as \"legalization\"? Here in the States decriminalization means you don't go to jail but can still be fined and penalized in other ways. So, that's an example of marginalization. In Nevada, prostitution is fully legal. So is gambling. Maybe it all works out fine--I think it's mostly confined to a couple of cities. So, if you want to go to a brothel and gamble all night, you go to Vegas. But other states are not in a rush to follow suit. That's marginalization. If an office is hiring a receptionist, and she puts on her cv \"two years as a working girl in Barnacle Bill's Brothel,\" she's probably not going to get the job.\n\nThat's marginalization. If a woman wants to settle down with a man she's been seeing and they come clean about their respective pasts, and she tells him, \"oh, I was a call girl for a few years back in grad school,\" contrary to what Hollywood tells us, that man is now less likely to marry her. Also marginalization. If he brings her home to his parents, and says, \"oh, by the way mom,...\"--you get the idea. Are these indignities and minor atrocities? Maybe--very minor, it seems to me. Should all of the people in the above examples act differently? Should the people of an Indiana suburb want a Vegas-style brothel in their midst?\n\nShould the lawyers or doctors office hire the applicant with the colorful background and unique experiences? Should the suitor joyfully embrace her having slept with hundreds of men past? Please tell me how you would convince them that they should do so?\n\nIf the sexual can be sacralized, it can also be desecrated. Gans has a Chronicle where he offers an explanation for why sex is always \"dirty\" or \"sinful\"--in the sexual act, the couple isolates itself from the community, and therefore against the community. We might say that the solution is to have all sex conducted in public orgies, but even then the couple engaged at that moment would be turning their back on everyone else. So, to integrate sex into the community, the relationship between the couple needs to be consecrated. Marriage can do that, and prostitution cannot.\n\nIt seems to me your arguments are very narrow. Do you want to argue for a particular kind of sexual morality? Against all sexual morality? Against morality in general? Or are you just protesting the ill-treatment of prostitutes?\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] It seems to me sir that I am arguing for as unflinching an examination of what is meant at any point by 'moral' or 'morality' in the discussion of sexuality and society's representation of that to itself as you are accustomed to giving it on the 'broader' or more 'general' level. Where, if I am not hideously mistaken, you focus on what may be said to be truly reciprocal in any given instance of exchange or relationship. In speaking now of 'sexual morality', we have moved very swiftly away from the pure question of who does what to whom but above all how that is conceived by each player in the current exchange, to something murky and horrid but something that rings all the right dysphemistic bells to the pre-conceived and pre-digested.. It looks to me that what you are supporting and even promoting, in your paragraph full of ..evident marginalia, would be better described, and even identified, as the positive value of stigma? Nothing less? You say my argument is a 'narrow' one. Ye\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, certain activities should be stigmatized. Let's say we have someone who consistently behaves disruptively at work--shows up late, interferes with others' work, insults the bosses, etc. He gets fired, and has trouble finding other work because prospective employers look into his work history. He might overcome the stigma, but he would have to overcome it.\n\nReciprocity and morality only take on meaning within a social order. Any social order has a way of organizing sexuality, which is one of the most important areas of social life. Is polygamy immoral? Should there be a stigma attached to it? There have been plenty of social orders in which the answer was \"no\"--there still are a few. You could even make a case for it on terms of contemporary morality. It's all consensual; the husband can treat his many wives well; men who don't find wives, well, there's always homosexuality (which has been de-stigmatized), or enlistment in some militia which will most likely drastically cut short your life, so who cares; or prostitution.\n\nBut if it's no good to have lots of desperate young men circulating in a civilized social order, then a marriage system of monogamy should be enforced. And then morality is based on preserving that system. Who does what to whom within that system can be judged in moral terms. So, for example, it's wrong to try and entice a married man or woman into having an affair with the offer of short-term pleasure and excitement, even if it's all consensual. You can destroy people's lives for no good reason at all. A man or woman in a community who is known for attempting this should be excluded from social gatherings and, generally, shunned. And for the same reason you wouldn't want a brothel near by.\n\nIf I take your word that prostitutes are often abused, what difference does it make how many accounts of the abuse I am familiar with? I can also easily take your word that there is a lot of \"prohibitionist propaganda,\" and if you want to call it \"raving,\" fine. But none of this means that the abuse is because of the propaganda, or that there would be less without it. Your own insistence on \"decriminalization\" rather than \"legalization\" seems to me to suggest otherwise--if the abuse is because of the stigma, why wouldn't making it completely legal end the abuse? Why, exactly, does this distinction matter? I think that prostitutes are often abused because they have sex with lots of strangers, some whom will inevitably be violent or refuse to pay, so they need the protection of violent men themselves, and those violent men will often abuse them--just less unpredictably and permanently than random strangers are likely to. It is possible that an elite class of prostitutes, serving a much wealthier clientele, can escape these conditions, but I don't think the mass of prostitutes can.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] Given that, just as Peter Thiel says, technology effectively fulfils the rôle of religion today, I think it slightly absurd to invoke the sex act's turning its back on community/consequent need to re-integrate scenario. Technology now makes it possible to do something similar in a multitude of ways, as does the superstructure of our our societies in general. Let us not be merely compulsively-anthropological if we can help it? (Re)integration of sex into the \"community\" as you call it - never pausing for a second to ask (in the Katzian tradition I hope) whether or not a (central) community of any sort is really involved - takes place in a thousand and one tongues by now, for does it not? I guess we'd then need to talk about at what level that lingua franca inevitably generated by the countless globalling internet-exchanges could be understood as a community? Ooops, already back in Rôle-world.....\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThis is an interesting question. I think this is an area where I see things differently than Gans. Your argument here seems to be that \"technology\" (especially media technology) creates anarchic social conditions, where it would indeed be absurd to speak of a \"community\" or a \"center.\" This seems to me what Gans means by a \"decentered market.\" And yet there are states, and states control borders and enforce laws within the territory they control. If you've been reading my posts over the past year or so, you know that I consider this a rather more important observation than Gans does. I think it means there is a center, even if there are powerful forces working hard to undermine those centers.\n\nThe argument they make towards that end is the argument you make--given today's technology, which transcends borders and connects people across the world instantaneously, etc., how can we imagine we still live in a world divided into nation-states, etc. Leaving aside the question of who is pushing this agenda, and why, to embrace it is to gamble that the global market can establish a higher level of morality and civilization than a world dominated by relatively stable states. I think it's a very bad bet. I think the global market means unending war on people who want law and order, stable communities, non-disruptive social change, and meaningful work and relationships. To say such developments are inevitable or have already happened (so just get with the program, already) is to take sides surreptitiously.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] I do thankyou for your further engagement! Your outlook on present-day prostitution however can only be described as an archaic one. Your assumption that there exists but some elite class of women who have managed somehow to escape the \"dark, violent (fill in dysphemism of choice)world\" inhabited by the broad mass of hapless prostitutes is simply as out of touch with reality as it gets. Within this imaginary world you sustain, a cycle-of-violence obtains in virtue of, so to speak, the 'very nature of the polyamorous beast'. I must now repeat - the only genuine violence done on any appreciable scale anymore to prostitutes in America, and by extension the rest of the assuredly 'Americanized' world, is that violence done by officers of the law. Pimps, what is more, are largely a thing of the past. If any can be said to still exist, they are no more than some overbearing, annoying boyfriends. I do not know what will convince you of this truth other than some downright quality-time spent a\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't really see a distinction between \"controlling ways of influencing and limiting the moves of those who have chosen sexual services as their path to greater freedom\" and \"the treatment of sex work AS work, and the governing of sex work by the very same laws that affect all other employment and labor.\" The laws that affect employment and labor are, I think your call girls might find, quite \"controlling.\" Business get raided, fined and shut for health, safety and employment law violations fairly regularly. I don't think the police are especially gentle in these cases, either.\n\nSo, these days there are only call girls, no streetwalkers and hookers? That would be an interesting development--I'll now be on the lookout for information on all this. I do hear talk of sex trafficking along with the broader transportation of illegals from Mexico, but who knows?\n\nAnyway, I'm not opposed to decriminalization (nor am I exactly in favor of it either--it's not a core issue for me), as long as \"sex work\" is subjected to one other type of regulation that also affects ordinary businesses: zoning laws. Communities should have a say in whether they want a local brothel.\n\nIs all disapproval and distancing \"stigmatizing\"?\n\nThere's always a system--an order of ostensives and imperatives, we could say. There's always a relation between the names of things and practices (ostensives) and commands/demands across the sexual, economic, political, linguistic, etc., realms. There are various attitudes you can take towards it: you can try and preserve it; you can try and destroy it; you can try to reorder it; you can try and replace it. I have been thinking, for a while now, that precisely in a mature \"declarative order\" (where ritual and sacrificial-style imperatives have been deferred considerably) hierarchical orders are inevitable and therefore the chain of command should be made as clear as possible.\n\nEgalitarianisms and universalisms are really attempts to destroy the system--they offer no real projects for reform, and their proposals for replacement are invariably hideous. Hence, absolutism. A clear chain of command is good for the declarative order--for science, for serious thought in general, for art, for more refined and reciprocal moral relations, all of which rely upon not having to think too much about their relation to power. If power relations are essentially settled, these engaged in these activities don't need to think about them.\n\nI don't say that prostitution fits in any particular way into this abstract schema, but, anyway, maybe that is a \"bridge.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "formalism-all-the-way-down-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty, Center, and Structural Meaning",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 16, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/GABlog/comments/6tuxfa/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] It would seem incorporating MacIntyre would bolster this discussion.  Then we could also examine his diagnosis. >This is not a new point—the stripped down human being liberal universalism defends turns into the literal stripping down of millions of human beings who must be saved from their particularities—from what we know as the “middle” which the elites target from all sides in their proxy wars. The alternative perspective would be:  this \"stripping down\" is the goal.  It is not an un-intentioned side-effect of \"elite proxy wars.\"  Again, MacIntyre would be helpful here; particularly his discussion on the reasons for the failure of the social sciences. Also helpful would be de Jouvenel's \"On Power.\"  Instead of reinterpreting it as \"HLvM\" or \"unsecure power battles,\" consider that de Jouvenel specifically treats Power as being its own entity regardless of the specific human actors.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThanks. Could you direct me more precisely to MacIntyre and de Jouvenel? It seems to me that if we say that everyone wants secure power, but understands that in terms of their own position in relation to power (so that the \"stripping down\" would be the goal in the sense that certain positions can only imagine secure power in those terms) we can avoid the tendency to see mindless and endless struggles for their own sake. We might also want to close the gap between means and ends--what you actually do is what you are trying to do (unless you fail, but that's a different issue). But, again, if you have particular texts in mind here I'd like to hear it.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] >Could you direct me more precisely to MacIntyre AV in total provides a complimentary perspective which I consider more robust.  In particular, it provides an account of what MacIntyre thinks went wrong during the Enlightenment and why discussions like these are so off the rails.  More generally, it provides an alternative perspective to the idea that political change fixes everything (engineer the best system and everything else sorts out), which is very much a liberal idea. Regarding the quoted part, MacIntyre's discussion beginning on p.84 and through the next chapter provides an account for why social sciences have failed and offers a perspective on why it sometimes appears otherwise.  Part of this account involves examining the views of those tasked with manipulating people. As for On Power, it appears de Jouvenel's perspective has been lost.  It seems most read it after being primed to see the \"HLvM\" and \"unsecure power battles\" and completely missed how comparatively strange\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThanks. I will do some reading.\n\nIt's not that I saw you as seeing \"mindless struggles\"; it's that that seemed to me the logic of the position you were opposing.\n\nMy understanding of structure: there has to be a center. There is no meaning or intelligibility without a center, i.e., that which is desired and repels appropriation, and is therefore represented. So there is always a center/margin structure. Once a human occupies the center (the Big Man, then sacral kingship), we have the problem of scapegoating: the man at the center is responsible for everything, so his sacrifice can resolve anything. The basic modification in this structure is the king removing himself from appropriation by the people, i.e., interposing layers of \"elites\" between himself and the majority. Sacrifice is thereby deflected away from the king towards other relatively central figures--the more successful the elites, meanwhile, the more centrality can be conferred on \"fringe,\" powerless figures, who can be presented as the source of some kind of contamination.\n\nThis structure persists (and the deflection of scapegoating to the powerless is the most successful political structure up until this point) until the \"axial age\" modes of thought and sacrament discredit sacrifice. Then there is a new problem, the one we still have today: the mode of thought/sacrament that discredits sacrifice (that enables us to defer the compulsion to scapegoat) is incorporated into government, providing rulers with a broader range of rational strategies for dealing with conflicts. At the same time, the \"axial age\" praxis sits in judgment on the state--the government is legitimate insofar as it refrains from violating the sanctity of that mode of praxis.\n\nHence, imperium in imperio--any secondary power can raise the banner of defending the sanctity of some praxis that has putatively been violated by the sovereign (or someone protected by him). The way to solve this problem is to institute a fully \"post-axial\" mode of government that oversees institutions so as to disallow conflicts deriving from sacrificial crisis, which have been disguised and transmuted but never abolished precisely because they provide causes for divisiveness--the more effectively an \"absolute\" government does this, the more it will eliminate the imperium in imperio problem before it gets started.\n\nIf we look at it this way, it's really nobody's \"fault\"--everyone wants to secure the center, but the means of accomplishing this very difficult task (a leap forward for human beings) have not been completely assembled. So, we could speak about this as \"unsecure\" power, insofar as long as we don't have a center that abolishes sacrificial crises and imperium in imperio crisis, we will continue to undergo that pathological interplay.\n\nI'm not sure whether my claim that there is always a central figure coincides with Jouvenel's understanding of power, as you present it here. I'll have to think about it--I'd like to hear how it seems to you.\n\nI'm also not clear about why seeing Power as its own entity leads to the rejection (or qualification?) of HLvM--if power exists regardless of who occupies it, there would still (all the more, even) be struggles over who will occupy it. That struggle would be carried out by the elites, against one another. Each would try to subvert the other. How? Two ways, I think: weaken the other's relation to the current occupant of the center/power; weaken the others' relation to their subordinates. Using the terms of GA I've set up here, that means creating sacrificial crises, masked as attempts to recover the \"official\" or \"genuine\" axial praxis, aimed at the other. Meanwhile, the sovereign, insofar as his occupancy of the center is unsettled, acts the same way towards the elites--in the end, he either manages to sacrifice (in a more or less modified and mediated form) the elites who threaten him to their subordinates and/or rivals, or is demoted to just being another elite himself, and may be removed by someone better at playing the sovereign.\n\nNow, my understanding of your objection to RF's absolutism (I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm misreading you) is that he doesn't distinguish the kind of struggles the constitute an \"unsecure\" system from the kind of action that would be required to secure it; while, in fact the latter activity would be qualitatively different, ethically, politically and otherwise. What \"they\" have been doing all along is what \"we\" can now do them (especially now that we see so clearly what they are doing). Also, there is a kind of modern problem here, one we see in Marxism and Foucault, among other places--once we say that a particular mode of knowledge has been produced by \"power struggles,\" does it discredit it as knowledge. Is being produced by power=being false? This assumption always seems to be dialectically linked with its seeming opposite: we can use power to prove our knowledge is true. There must be something other than power in terms of which we can assess power.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I am familiar with your perspective.  However, saying that there is a center/margin structure and/or that all understandings of sovereignty are tacitly absolutist is *not* the same as saying that all persons “gesture” towards the same center or that a “central figure/person” always occupies this center.  It seems like you are claiming “we” currently live in a place where “we” all acknowledge the same center and all recognize the same central figure (though it isn’t clear who “we” refers to).   I do not see this. Additionally, the way you’re describing the transition from the big man to the axial age seems suspect.  Yes, we do see a layer of elites “interposing” between the scapegoat-seeking majority and the king, but you seem to claim that the king purposely did this to protect himself from sacrificial violence.  Don’t we empirically see the opposite?  Elites become elite by cultivating a disciplinary space (war, trade, agriculture, etc), otherwise they are agents of the king and do n\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI am identifying the sovereign with the center, and I think that everyone subject to the same sovereign recognizes it. Almost everything we do is a more or less explicit gesture towards the same center--getting a driver's license, using money, etc.\n\nYes, I spoke too reductively about the development of elites--they cultivate disciplinary spaces that are part of the disciplinary space of ruling of the king. It may be more important to note that conquest is almost certainly involved in this transition--possessing larger territories, with more wealth, generates more space for elites (probably first of all for military, governing, bureaucratic purposes--then trade and agriculture extend from that). The interest in conquest would include the interest in creating distance from the people.\n\nIts this process of civilization that creates new center-margin structures. Obviously this can vary a lot, but it does seem like intermediate loyalties and responsibilities are generally involved. But it's civilization that creates the ways of thinking that make a return to sacral kingship impossible. Even when the king rules directly and marginalizes the nobles, no one will believe that he can control the weather, the crops, etc.--and he wouldn't want anyone to believe it. Christianity is the obvious example in the West, but I assume systems of thought like Confucianism played a similar role in China, of discrediting sacrifice/scapegoating.\n\nIt'a certainly very interesting that Christianity and Greek philosophy share a similar structure of origin, with the individual proposing a higher level of deferral (Jesus, Socrates) being executed, and then afterward recognized as a kind of \"founder.\" I don't know if Confucianism or Buddhism have something similar, but they both in their own ways call for a kind of social withdrawal, a refusal to participate in \"contagious\" activities. It's impossible to go back to sacral kingship after this; and it's also hard to form a government that fully incorporates the knowledge gained in these disciplines. It hans't yet been accomplished.\n\nIt's not a question of abolishing  resentment, etc., although I can see how I made it seem that way. It's a question of containing them. One peasant can resent another, one lord can try to displace another and get closer to the king, and feel that the king is treating him unfairly, and, of course, kings themselves (and their advisors) can aspire towards empire, etc--but something else has to happen for all the peasants to resent the lords as a class, or for the lords to organize themselves collectively against the king--resentments have to be \"weaponized\" in the ways I described (sacrifice disguised via imperium in imperio). The post-axial modes of praxis (Christianity, philosophy and the others) propagate the understanding that resentments are \"internal,\" and cannot simply be blamed on their objects. This mitigates resentment, both by changing the way people understand themselves and each other, but also by suggesting institutional forms of justice, mediation and mitigation (which in turn is how people change their understanding of themselves).\n\nRegarding de Jouvenel, I'm not sure I see how Power can be a thing in itself that just wants to grow. What could one do, in that case? Counter power with something other than Power? What would that be? Counter one Power with another? The countering Power would itself want to grow. I'll have to think about this, and go back to de Jouvenel with it in mind. The desire for a \"symmetrical\" center-margin relation seems to me more coherent, anthropologically.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] You say sovereign, yet it is never clear what that means.  Is it the US federal government?  The president?  The elites who lobby and engage in proxy war?  The \"instigator\" of conflict who  pushes his wish through the State? You say \"civilization\" makes the return to the sacral mode of thought impossible, but do you not mean the \"State?\"  If it isn't the State, and it's a more amorphous mapping of all the disciplinary spaces that make up \"civilization\" that enable the progression past the sacrificial crisis, doesn't the idea that the State can simply enforce a \"post-axial\" mode of government lose credence?  In fact, you specifically call the sacrificial/axial \"modes of thought.\"  Of whose thinking? This is all to point back at the original quote about the \"stripping down of human beings.\"  If the relationship of margin to center is different under the \"sacral,\" \"axial,\" and \"post-axial\" modes of thought, you seem to be implying that the HLvM proxy wars, etc. are all \"attempts to secu\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe US is deliberately vague about sovereignty, but I think that the best approach is to treat the President as sovereign, because the President alone acts. The rest of the government are built in limitations of sovereignty, which the president can sometimes use to enhance it. The very fact that the President must be elected, and is now limited to two terms (and could not, anyway, choose his successor) are all severe limitations on his sovereignty. We could see the growth of executive power from the Civil War on as very confused and ambivalent attempts to place the president more securely at the center. A lot of other power centers have an interest in this, because then there'd be a single point to push. But there would always be other power centers who may want this too, but not now, not in this way, etc.\n\nThe problem is to civilize the state so the state can reside over the civilizing process. The state incorporates post-axial thinkers because the residues of sacral kingship lose credibility. This is problematic, because those thinkers can weaken the state's authority, even without intending to. It would be good for the state to become, say, more \"Christian,\" but it's a problem to suggest that it isn't \"Christian enough.\" All thinkers, at least all those with any public, are part of the state--at universities, or think tanks, or elsewhere in the media. That's the state thinking, in a sense, often against itself.\n\nMy question for you, then, is what do you think those engaged in political struggle to be aiming at? I would basically agree with your formulation of my view, but would just modify it to allow for political movements--perhaps Nazism was one--that genuinely try to destroy post-axial modes of thought/government. Maybe we could see Communism this way as well, which would make for a significant \"exception.\" But if establishing \"post-axiality\" is so unprecedented, we should expect \"relapses.\" Anyway, you see something else going on here. Why the \"stripping down\"? Who or what is doing that, and why?\n\nBy \"symmetrical\" center-margin relation I mean that everyone is aligned in relation to the center in a way that supports everyone else's alignment. In the most primitive society, everyone wants to get the ritual right--the right object, the right place, the right actions. In a shared practice, everyone wants to know who's in charge, who to appeal to, who speaks for the authority when he's not there. In a complex society, everyone wants to know what the rules are, how they will be applied, what accounts of oneself may be requested, and so on. I am saying that this is really what everyone wants, even those who are are destroying these very things--the ones trying to destroy them believe that the rules are unintelligible, unevenly applied, what is demanded from one is unconnected with what one is capable of--only a completely different system can set this right. One way or another, everyone is trying to restore a \"sustainable\" relation to the center.\n\nAnyway, I certainly don't object to some more dwelling with de Jouvenel and MacIntyre.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Regarding your first paragraph about sovereignty, I do not agree.  Considering we probably understand each other much more than some random American citizen would, and considering both of our perspectives are very far from the norm, this sentiment is strange: >I think that everyone subject to the same sovereign recognizes it. Almost everything we do is a more or less explicit gesture towards the same center Even more, you'd be treating HRC, or even Obama as the \"sovereign\" if you'd struck upon this line of thought at different point in time without Trump?  Frankly, that seems unlikely to me.  Remember this? > It’s not surprising that all critiques of government would share certain “family resemblances,” because they all take for granted that if “government” or “sovereignty” means anything it means that what the ruler wants done is done. All the critiques, then, look for hidden rulers, or flaws in the actual rulers (they say what they can’t back up, they do things that contradict wha\n\n[ADAM]\n\nHow could I not recognize HRC or Obama as sovereign? My dissent (I would even want a better word) from their actions would involve seeking to clarify their imperatives, which would be imprecise and contradictory since they would be marked by limited and divided power. This would be a critique in some ways similar to, but more coherent and less hypocritical than, the kind of critique I discuss in that passage you quote--rather than looking for hidden rulers, you try to treat the actual ruler as a real ruler. Even if I proclaimed myself part of the \"resistance\" to them, I'd still obey the police they ordered, I'd still use the money they are responsible for introducing into the system, etc. What would my declared resistance amount to? All the posts I wrote on inquiring into imperatives and requesting assistance in properly obeying them were attempts to address this issue.\n\nYes, the post-axial route is an attempt to maintain power and also to use it properly. I think Power did take this route for quite awhile, say from 800-1400 in Europe maybe more elsewhere. Even since then the record is very mixed, with de-civilizing and civilizing processes competing with each other. I'm not sure which histories to rely on here, but I do think that everyday life got steadily less violent over the centuries. I've never had a physical altercation since I was 12 years old, and I never really had to go out of my way to avoid them. That must count for something--Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process provides some support here. Of course there have been massive, if sporadic and at times localized, increases in other forms of violence. But I don't think we've experienced a steady, unqualified descent into barbarism. I don't know how many histories look carefully at this specific issue.\n\nWell, what have empires been aiming at? Certainly not at having their arms turned against them. How about those turning the arms against the empire--what do they want? Sheer domination in the first case, revenge in the latter? Assuming so is also a kind of a gamble. In modern times, maybe it has something to do with the weakness of those Third World states--there are a lot of differences, but the Chinese and Indian states were clearly severely weakened by the 18th an 19th centuries, as was the Ottoman Empire, and Africa hardly had states at all. I don't know enough about all the histories involved here, but overwhelming asymmetries between states might lead the stronger states to introduce their own structures, or structures more conducive to their own power, in the weaker states. That might also be an attempt to sustain a relation to the center.\n\nYou're still being a bit cryptic, but as best as I can tell your own preference is for a kind of polycentric feudalism. Is that where you see de Jouvenel and MacIntyre heading? Are you arguing against absolutism, or for a different version of it?\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, I had plenty of resentments toward Obama and was very happy to see Trump elected. That didn't make Obama any less the president, the head of government, the sovereign. The problem is to think through a conceptual frame within which one's resentment makes sense, so it's something more than \"I hate tis guy!\", \"He's a traitor!\", etc.\n\nInstead of post-axial, let's speak in terms of the replacement of the honor system by \"civility.\" If someone rapes your daughter, you don't go out and kill him (or his sister, or whoever). You restrain yourself, you accept that vengeance is not yours, and you call the cops. Someone with enough power can probably command everyone to let the police, or secret police, deal with violence--maybe there was very little street crime in Saddam's Iraq. But if the government just makes you afraid of carry out vengeance, without ensuring that something (\"justice\") will replace it, it will make you afraid of lots of other things as well--afraid of things that a functioning, certainly a flourishing society needs--honesty, a willingness to come forward to the authorities, initiative, etc.\n\nSo, it's better if you have a reliable system of justice rather than a system of terror--better for the ruler as well, since most rulers would rather not have to worry that everyone in their inner circle would kill them if they had half the chance. If you have a religion like Christianity, which teaches you to turn the other cheek, to beware of throwing the first stone, to ask yourself whether you have sinned before accusing another, it is easier, I think, to replace the honor system with a justice system. So, in a sense I do think Americans are waiting around for a leader to establish justice, stop the rise of vendetta and violent politics, lessen corruption and destructive forms of self-interest and parasitism. And all that would, in a sense, be \"Christian\"; or in China \"Confucian.\"\n\nNow, the articulation of Christianity with a justice system is an advance over tribal politics but it's very imperfect. Arguments over Christianity become arguments over government. People come to rely on the justice system and lose all capacity for self-defense. They try to drag the justice system into their own vendettas. Christianity is a highly de-ritualized religion, and is even borderline atheistic. The secular bet was that Christian ethics without Christianity was enough--maybe that was wrong. Maybe Christianity helped civilize the West for as long as it could, but then hit its ceiling. It would be silly to say, now, that we need more Christianity, or this kind of Christianity, or this simulacrum of Christianity. It's better to be minimal: sovereign power, without division, blocks, procedural limits; and deflection of resentments away from mimetic/sacrificial crises. Using our best judgment, we can support actions and actors that seem to go in that direction (and oppose those who push in the opposite direction), while at the same time thinking bigger about possibilities.\n\nAt this point I'm not sure about imperialism, past, present and future. Sometimes taking power over another country seems unavoidable (like if they force you into a war and you defeat them), and the consequences of doing so are never completely foreseeable. Maybe you see responsible imperialism as a transparently self-serving oxymoron, but it may be that a bit of that went into the building of every state. Something went very wrong with Anglo and then American imperialism, and it obviously has a lot to do with liberalism. A good sovereign would, I think, work on lessening our \"commitments\" overseas, steadily but gradually (it should' look like a rout), and shift those commitments to support for sovereigns trying to rule their own countries coherently like we should start doing. No more support for \"reform movements,\" \"democratic rebels,\" etc. I think most Americans would see such an approach as a piece with overseeing justice and the \"disciplines\" at home."
    },
    {
      "slug": "declarative-culture-and-imperium-in-imperio-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Interpretive Authority and Institutional Proliferation",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 21, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/85ssxf/",
      "content": "[Q:imperialenergy] \"once a political project has a canonical model, filled with procedures, organization structures, required policies, and so on, it also has a permanent basis for political conflict based on the claim that the actual leadership is not in conformity with the “real” project. This argument is really a corollary of the argument for personal, non-procedural rule central to absolutism.\" True, but on the other hand it could also be genuine corruption. As for personal rule V procedural rule, there need not be such a sharp contrast here. There can be procedures that led up to personal judgment, in fact there must be. Also, while it is clear that the sovereign decides the exception and, in both your and our view, operates outside the system in order to maintain the system, the people within that system must follow the rules of that system. Must here is prudential and categorical. \"(Every organization has those who are always referring to “rules” and “procedures” in frustrating any attempt to\n\n[ADAM]\n\nAny rules will be part of a tradition of practices, a tradition which also determines how the rules are to be read. We could say that we are just resituating the potential imperio in imperium by saying that, now, privileged interpreters of that tradition actually rule--but the ruler empowers that tradition by inheriting, affirming and supervising it. In this case, rules are really generalizations of precedents, and generalizations that go no further than the particular case being judged or decided. (If someone does try to push them further, that is a red flag indicating the emergence of a rogue power center.) There will still be exceptions (the precedents can themselves be interpreted in varying ways), but in addition to deciding in such cases the sovereign also wants to minimize them.\n\nThe way to do this is to have all rules relegated to a particular \"sub-system,\" with those in charge of the sub-systems also deciding. Even on the lower levels judgment is exercised. There really are, then, no rules or procedures in general--only rules describing the historically accumulated practices now overseen by this or that judge (\"judge\" in a broad sense--a general is a judge insofar as he has to decide on a dispute brought to him by inferiors). If someone genuinely wants clarification regarding how to perform his function, he can therefore be directed to a closer study of the precedents and decisions made and to whichever superior addresses that sphere of his activity--rather than turning to a \"constitution\" or \"code of conduct\" and saying, \"hey, we're not doing this!\" If you're not sure you're doing as well as you could, there are ways of finding out how to do better.\n\n---\n\n[Q:imperialenergy] We are explicitly referring here to the \"practice\" conception of rules. See our earlier comment on STEEL U: https://metternichian.wordpress.com/2018/03/19/anglo-utilitarian-angst/comment-page-1/#comment-19 We discussed the \"art of ruling\" in the following post: https://imperialenergyblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/07/a-steel-cameralist-manifesto-part-3b-the-age-of-crisis-and-the-predators-diorama/ \"Ruling involves the following options: A: To create new rules (a rule is If X then Y.) B: To change rules (if X1 then not Y but Y1.) C: To clarify rules (in case Z, which appears to resemble circumstance X and A, do not do either Q or I but C). (The ruler must distinguish what the critical variable is in the case and why one action should be taken and not another.) D: To revise rules (rule 76 no longer applies because of facts a,b,c and so in case K you must do J or J1 if P.) E: To reject rules (Experience has taught that Rule 42 does not bring about its intended result; thus, this rule\n\n[ADAM]\n\nBut now we have rules for following and changing rules. Then we will have to have further rules for determining whether judgments about whether the rules have been revised or rejected according to the rules have been properly followed. All this generates new offices and therefore new power bases, which can only justify their existence by finding fault in the way the rules have been applied. My view is that if a social order creates the kind of people who will follow the rules in their \"spirit,\" we will need very few rules and very few people watching to make sure everyone follows them.\n\n---\n\n[Q:imperialenergy] We understand. How can we say this without being rude...?? The trouble is that when it comes to actually running a state, nevermind an empire, there needs to be a certain amount of bureaucracy or just organisation. There, you need rules and procedures. At the very least, you need rules and procedures in law enforcement; the military; courts and in international relations. \"My view is that if a social order creates the kind of people who will follow the rules in their \"spirit,\" \" This must also play a role as well (virtue ethics). One thing to consider is that the vast majority of people are not all that subtle or sophisticated in their moral thinking when it comes to difficult and modern moral problems. They need to be directed. They need to be ruled in other words and they need to be ruled with rules. However, among the Essentials, you clearly want men who are capable of exercising a high level of personal judgement. The question is when does personal judgement come into play?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, each institution has its rules and procedures, and under normal conditions most of the activity within those institutions will involve routinely following those rules and procedures. Not everyone can exercise the same level of judgment or be given the same scope of initiative, but just about everyone can exercise some judgment, within some sphere, and those that are absolutely incapable of doing so will simply be wards of some institution. The heads of institution will not overhaul the existing body and tradition of rules except under the rarest of circumstances--they will inherit and then maintain, cull, or adapt as necessary.\n\nBut at no point can one appeal to the rules against the head--if there is an appeal process, that is also subordinated to the head, who can over-rule or cancel it. The question is, how are the rules understood or conceptualized, and how is rule-following practiced? What I am against is the notion of rules as standing outside the institution and being seen as its \"basis\" and used as a \"check\"; what I am for is seeing rules as implicitly and explicitly generalized traditions of practices by the heads of institutions: to follow the rules is to seek to know and adhere to the will of the head without having to ask him what to do.\n\nIf the heads are well chosen and well prepared, and serve the primary function of the institution, then there will be minimal deviation from protocol and \"equipoise\" will be maintained. My approach seems to me consistent with your distinction between normal and crisis rule.\n\nYou don't need to be concerned about being rude.\n\n---\n\n[Q:imperialenergy] Thanks for the reply. Much agreement with your last comment. This seems to be the key point: \"What I am against is the notion of rules as standing outside the institution and being seen as its \"basis\" and used as a \"check\";\" So, at the end of a legal process say, the final judge (sovereign in this case) makes a determination that is an exception to the ordinary or stipulated rules or principles. However, there is nothing else to appeal to; there is no external moral reality for the individual to appeal to. If this is what you mean, then we are in complete agreement. Now, Catholics and other Christians will say that there is natural law and natural law is the final court of appeal (though who decides however?). It is less clear what a secular or atheist person might \"appeal\" to in this case. It could be the UNDHR or it could be some moral or political theory. However, if the sovereign has decided the exception - if the sovereign has ruled - then that is it. Principles, procedures\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, there are constitutive rules, as you say--this is very important to Wittgenstein as well. What does it mean to be performing a particular practice in the first place, regardless of whether you are doing it well or correctly. Games are always the favored example here, but one could speak about communities and institutions in this way as well. But where do the constitutive rules come from? Games are good examples because they are so self-contained that one doesn't think to ask about their \"outside.\" But games have origins as well, and the rules are not arbitrary. One interesting thing about the US is all the games and sports we have that have been invented fairly recently, and whose history is well known: baseball, football and basketball, for starters, all of which have seen constant and sometimes radical revisions in their rules.\n\nIn each game or sport there are specific skills or capacities that are tested, and the rules evolve to highlight and make more explicit those skills and capacities. The three-second rule in basketball was introduced because if one player was much taller than the others he could just stand right under the basketball and be given the ball, so he could just put it in the basket virtually unopposed. This made the game boring, but it made it boring because what is central to basketball (and it is \"anomalies\" like the much taller player that reveal the meaning of the game) is the contest between the team trying to score and the team trying to stop them.\n\nAll the rules, e.g., regarding \"fouls,\" will be devised so as to make this contest uncertain and therefore dependent on the team member's honing of their skills against a range of possible counter-strategies and the team as a whole working together in the most flexible and integrated way--always while trying to anticipate and, if you like, get inside the other team's OODA loop. So, the referee doesn't have to explain why there is a rule against fouls, but he knows and we know why there is--because, say, if the defender could just tackle the guy with the ball it would be impossible to score (while if the defender is not allowed to touch the player on offense at all, it would be impossible to stop him from scoring).\n\nIn a sense, then, there is an internal morality governing these activities and all institutions: everyone, ultimately, wants basketball to be a good and successful game, and what makes it good and successful is that it elicits a distinctive and rare set of physical and mental capabilities. This is really McIntyre's notion of a \"practice.\"\n\n---\n\n[Q:_Different_T] @ Adam Somewhat OT: What is your perspective on Chris' and IE's work and how it relates to your project?  What are you finding of value in their work? For instance, IE just intimated that theology has little or possibly nothing to do with absolutism and clearly seems to think an \"atheistic state\" can obtain \"sovereignty.\"  What is your thinking here? Considering this discussion with IE, how do you read this: >Earlier you excellently stated that with liberalism “you end up developing a social theory claiming all individuals are really out of control bumper cars.” It sometimes seems that when absolutist’s confront reality (or more accurately “life”), they end up developing a social theory claiming all individuals are really just confused robots in need of reprogramming.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nFirst of all, it's good to hear from you.\n\nI like reading IE's blog--he brings in lots of interesting writers and theories and that I may have little familiarity with, and he synthesizes them in useful ways--I always learn something. I also enjoy dialogues like the above with him--he helps bring out the essential differences between modes of political thought. But you're right to see him his work as presupposing the liberal subject, and ultimately a liberal understanding of sovereignty insofar as the sovereign simply maintains law and order and leaves all non-violent activity alone. So, we're very different in that regard.\n\nI see Chris as trying to solve the same problems I am, though. Aside from what I consider some very valuable historical or, in Foucault's terms, \"archaeological,\" work on \"power\" through his reading of Jouvenel, he is interested in Girard and Gans and the question of the \"center\" in a way I don't see with anyone else; what this also means, to me at any rate, is that he is always thinking things through and trying to solve a specific set of problems without getting stuck in a particular formula. He is restless, in a good way, in a way i also consider myself to be. You've pointed to deficiencies, what it seems to me you see as obstinately insisted upon deficiencies, in his readings of Jouvenel, Filmer, MacIntyre and others, but I think we always approach texts like this with a very specific question in mind; it's good to let the text give you a new question as well, but we can always come back to them, once they've been made \"canonical.\"\n\nRegarding the passage you refer to, maybe it will be better if we can stop thinking in terms of \"individuals\" altogether, and thinking in terms of relations to the center.\n\n---\n\n[Q:_Different_T] Can you point to something that expands on this: >I see Chris as trying to solve the same problems I am, though. Everything I've seen from him (though admittedly not much recently) continuously points back to a conception of sovereignty that is, and must be, imposed.  There is nothing human there. Additionally, your reading of his interest in the \"center\" could just as easily be accounted as evidence of exactly the search for a rationalizing-materialistic-deterministic account upon which to heap a bunch of \"because,\" \"therefore,\" and \"then.\" IOW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJUJW589HZI It seems like you're saying \"No, *this* time, the rebels really are moderate!\"\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThanks for the link. I actually like that group, but didn't know this song.\n\nHe can often sound as if he thinks sovereignty must be imposed, but I wonder whether that often isn't in polemical situations, where he's arguing against something else, like \"spontaneous organization.\" He also speaks of sovereignty as something that \"always already\" exists, i.e., absolutist ontology, but he has also recognized need for an anthropological grounding for this claim. Without the anthropological grounding, it can sound like an arbitrary claim, and the sovereignty it justifies will therefore also seem forced or \"imposed.\" The notion of a \"sacred center\" provides such a grounding, which accounts for the role it is starting to take on in his thinking.\n\nThe \"negative\" critiques of liberalism, individuals, spontaneous organization, and so on can get ahead of the \"positive\" foundations one has to lay, and it's easy to take on some of the language of the concepts you are attacking until the more \"ontological\" and \"anthropological\" thinking is done. You may have noticed that Chris hasn't been blogging or tweeting for at least a few months--he's working on a book, which will try to think these things through more systemically.\n\nWe're trying to rethink everything here, so a bit of unevenness has to be expected.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIt would be better to say that a center always exists, and once an individual occupies the center, central power. It's true that \"sovereignty\" is a concept that comes much later and is much more specialized in its meaning. Central power can't exist outside of understandings of the center that tacitly recognize that power, so central power does \"always already exist\" precisely because it is tacitly recognized.\n\nSo, the warlord in your example wouldn't be \"sovereign,\" for the reasons you give. Does he occupy the center? Well, does he organize some distribution, of land, power, goods, prestige? Let's say he doesn't but, for now, the guys with the guns still shoot whom he says. So, what's going on? We have our axiom (or I have my axiom), there is always a center, but here it seems uncertain. Well, we have to use the concept--it's not a question of yes/no answers. Maybe the guys with guns listen to him because they tacitly realize there has to be a center and he's the closest thing to it right now. Maybe their tacit realization that it's a highly insecure center will account for how they end up using their guns.\n\nThey may always have in mind that if this center doesn't hold, they will have to scramble to look for another--an ethnic or tribal center, or some other gang. But it might also be that the warlord in question, if he manages to hold power for a while, will start to take on some of the attributes of something like \"sovereignty\"--ensuring communications with those he rules over, imposing some \"doctrine,\" and primitive \"law,\" even making treaty-like agreements with other warlords or even some UN institution and the intelligences agencies of genuine states. If he doesn't move towards doing those things, he will be much more likely to be replaced, one way or another.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nA new center can be imposed, and it can incorporate or simply replace the previous one. This has happened regularly throughout history. Was Great Britain sovereign in India, France in Algeria, Belgium (or King Leopold) in the Congo. How about William the Conquerer? I don't know what the specific political and legal arrangements were in each case, but they could have been. The foreign sovereign will  also have to discipline itself, or acclimate itself. It will find native \"collaborators,\" probably work at least to some extent with existing religious and other institutions. The new sovereign will understand enough about the center to know that he has to understand more.\n\nOver time, the Norman and Danish Kings become \"all-English\" kings. Even home-grown sovereigns have quite a bit of the \"colonizer\" about them--a single language has to imposed, so dialects need to be stamped out, \"barbaric\" local religious practices need to be eliminated. Imposition/importation of a distinct center and Power learning to discipline itself may be at different ends of a continuum, but they're not mutually exclusive.\n\nBut may the more important thing to say here (maybe better say the more important thing) is that the center is constitutive and structural: no human community can be without it. The relation between center and periphery can, of course, be more or less reciprocal and mutually enabling.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIt's easy to imagine situations where the imposition of a distinct center and the requisite disconnection from the original would be unavoidable. We don't have to imagine it--it happens, still. After the Khmer Rouge has wreaked incredible destruction on Cambodia, and was engaged in destabilizing neighboring Vietnam, the Vietnamese government invaded, removed the Khmer Rouge and put a \"puppet\" ruler in power. Now, I don't know how \"distinct\" the new center was, and how much the original, or existing, one needed to be displaced or destroyed, but let's say it was \"a lot.\" Let's say the Vietnamese couldn't find a native Cambodian willing to take power (maybe the likely candidates were all too afraid of being branded Quislings), let's say they had to put a Vietnamese ruler in power.\n\nLet's say all the schools and media institutions were run by hard core Pol Potists, and had to be shut down and new ones created. Etc. Let's say the Vietnamese couldn't do this and a more distant, and dissimilar power had to intervene. (Some of the colonial projects started this way.) If the alternative is allowing a genocidal regime that won't live in peace with its neighbors to continue to run amok, a responsible foreign power will do what it has to do. So, what do you do. Let's say you start with an absolutely distinct center and completely obliterate the existing one (imagine the society had descended into institutionalized cannibalism, for example).\n\nSo, you put the new, alien center in place, and at first it will rely on force and the exhaustion and relief of the population. Then you try and make it less alien. You recruit locals to staff the institutions. You promote a recovery of native myths, or literature. You encourage the cultivation of lapsed kinship ties. You gradually let power descend to the local level. Etc. In the end, you want a fully participatory people, whether you accomplish that by incorporating the country as a region within your own country or ultimately giving it back its independence.\n\nIt may be necessary to seize power in an undesirable way in a serious emergency, and in that case a lot of things would need to be imposed, but even if any \"absolutist\" alternative government that were to emerge had to be ready to do something like that it can remain aware that it doesn't want to and most likely won't have to. How you take power is part of how you rule, and it would best to cultivate new loyalties and new ways of thinking (new ways of framing resentments) as far in advance as possible so as to make the transition as seamless as possible. But we're talking about what would be the biggest social transformation in human history, and it can only be carried out by humans. It would be irresponsible not to think about a full range of possibilities.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nCannibals might be a tough nut to crack, it's true. But they can at least be deprived of their customary nutrition, and they'd be better for it. And then we'd see.\n\nEven the most alien center would have to interact with the periphery, and even the most alienated periphery has to interact with the center. Liberals and democrats want to calibrate the alienation to preserve their own access to power; absolutism wants to keep minimizing it, to the point of abolition, if possible. Is that salvation by the state? There's no civilizing without the state. A good state will make invaluable contributions to civilization, and the more those on the periphery understand that, the better."
    },
    {
      "slug": "states-temporary-and-permanent-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty's Necessity for Unified Authority",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Feb 20, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/5v5n1u/",
      "content": "[Q:reactionaryfuture] I second this question. Given the drastic lack of clarity, there needs to be a number of concepts untangled here. The first of which is sovereignty. We can do one of two things here, the first is to simply abandon the term \"sovereignty\" as hopelessly abused, or we can try to salvage the meaning in the original sense of someone ultimately at the top of authority/ a political group. A sovereign would then be sovereign in a given territory, over a given population, and at a given time, and be so without any one above them. Following through the origins of the beliefs of the sovereign would be a different matter altogether, surely?  The sovereign is that person who is the ultimate point of reference in the exception. There is no one above. Now, I fully grant there would be serious ambiguity, and the nature of the true sovereign in any political entity may be unclear, say in the example of a state with a king that makes ultimate decisions, but another power center (like a parliament) is i\n\n[ADAM]\n\nDivided sovereignty is also confused sovereignty--we don't know whether Mike Tyson is genuinely incapacitated or will simply get tired of the whole thing and dispense with the kid. Once we start talking about divided sovereignty there really is no obvious way to place a limit--there can be 2, 10 or 100 competing sovereigns--the Supreme court, the president, the heads of the media, etc. In the end, there's no point to trying to nail it down once and for all, because by the time you do that sovereignty has shifted again. But it only makes sense to talk about divided power if we assume power or sovereignty need not be divided--otherwise, what, exactly, would be divided or unsecure?\n\nSo, rather than trying to pin the tail on the sovereign donkey of the moment, we can distinguish between actions that work to maintain divided sovereignty, or further divide it, on the one hand, and actions that help or imply unified power. Here is where we could start to talk about ethics, even if it's not only an ethical issue. Those people who preserve the primary functions of their institutions are supporting unified or secure power--they are the ones who would benefit most from and contribute most to overtly absolutist power, i.e., a central government that is visibly and explicitly responsible for everything done on its territory.\n\nSuch a government would want everyone preserving and enhancing the primary function of their respective institutions, as he is doing with the institution of government. These are also the people the prospective sovereign would rely on in taking and establishing power. Now, all of those \"pro-sovereignty\" people (the \"middle,\" in the post), from the lowest to the highest (of course they are not all equally important) have their own view of divided power in the corruption and subversion of their own institutions. They are therefore sources of information into the field of competing sovereigns, and they will know more about those dividing sovereigns the more they notice, study and resist them. Which means the more divided power is brought into the light and \"reified\" in the antiversity, the less of it there. So, the question has shifted from \"who is sovereign right now\" to \"where is centrifugal power being countered right now?\"\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] 1+1=/=1 1+1+1+...infinity=/=1 edit:  If you do not care that the \"is equal to\" portion is not \"one,\" then state that. You are not clarifying your definition of sovereignty.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThere can be one sovereign at a time. Sovereignty is transferred from one sovereign to another. This can happen in a formal, orderly way, under the control of the present sovereign; it can happen in informal, disorderly ways, because sovereignty is seized, or abdicated, or delegated in ways that lead to overlapping spheres of responsibility. In the former case, we know who is sovereign; in the latter case, someone is sovereign at any one time, but we have no way of knowing for sure, which means we have to consider a range of possible \"candidates.\" This is both because power can be concealed and because there is actual turnover in sovereignty, do to shifts in social power. The more unsecure and divided the power, the less we can know. Of course, in that case, we really want to know. Pretty much all political argumentation in advanced (i.e., decaying and splintering) liberal societies is over who has the \"real\" power behind the \"apparent\" power.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] After further reading, it seems you’re attempt to clarify may be located in the latter example of “informal, disorderly ways.”  However, let’s start with the former example of “Sovereignty is transferred from one sovereign to another.” While this example is understandable in the context of an absolutist regime, does it withstand scrutiny in regards to the US federal government?  I assume we can agree the US federal government is the legal entity that is the final arbiter within the US, correct?  Being a legal entity, roles and procedures are created by which actions are implemented.  If a subject (whether an individual or another legal entity, such as a corporation or NGO) seeks legal remedy (introduction, modification, removal, etc.) at the federal level, it may only appeal to the US federal government, correct?  This is an indispensable characteristic of a “sovereign” according to a conception along the lines of the linked wiki page.  However, no such characteristic seems to exist i\n\n[ADAM]\n\nBut the federal government is not a singular, unified sovereign entity. It is explicitly established so as to disallow any final locus of sovereignty. Congress passes laws, the President enforces them, the Supreme Court decides on their validity--but the President can defy the Supreme Court, which would have no recourse, and the Congress can place certain topics outside of the jurisdiction of the Court. The system is set up to allow for constant tests of power over who is the real sovereign, and there is no way of knowing in advance who will prevail (or whether one branch prevails because the other \"let\" it). This is by design--it's not a flaw in the system. So, when I speak about transferring sovereignty in this context, I mean that the Supreme Court (or the deciding vote on the Court) might take a decision the Court has made before, and could reaffirm now, and lets, say, the President make it.\n\nMore broadly, we need to give some meaning to the term \"unsecure\" or \"divided\" sovereignty. I think it makes as much sense to see these concepts temporally as spatially--in spatial terms, the sovereign in control of a particular territory might go back and further; in temporal terms, the sovereign to whom I appeal may not be the same sovereign who decides on the appeal.\n\nYou're identifying the sovereign with the legally recognized sovereign. But the whole point of thinking in absolutist terms, I think, is to ask whether the sovereign is really sovereign. If you define sovereignty in legal terms, then someone has to determine whether the sovereign in place meets the criteria for sovereignty--let's say, for example, that the issue of whether Obama was really a \"natural born citizen\" had become a serious one. Whoever would have made the final decision on that question, and would therefore have had the power to remove Obama from office, would be sovereign. Unless, of course, Obama then refused to go, and stood his ground successfully--then, he'd be sovereign--more securely sovereign that he was before the whole affair started, in fact.\n\nI would like to make the whole question of insiders and outsiders more precise--the more power is divided, the more fluid this becomes. Hence the importance of looking past the public/private distinction--something like the Trilateral Commission could be sovereign (I don't say that it ever was); for that matter, if Hillary had won, maybe the Clinton Foundation could have competed for sovereignty. At what point would it go from being an outsider trying to influence to being the insider others try to influence? I am trying to develop an approach that enables us to take up such questions.\n\nSovereignty is control over territory, but it precedes law--you can only have in reference to a sovereign. For that matter, it is the sovereign who designated territory as this particular territory. Sovereignty is certainly formalized and stabilized through the protection of territory (the enforcing of borders, for example) and law, but for the purposes of my recent posts, the question I'm interested in is whether law and other institutions are defined by and subordinate to sovereign, or are fields where competing sovereigns seek their own advantage.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWho legally recognizes the real sovereign?\n\nThe real sovereign decides on the exception. If free speech is allowed, but under exceptional circumstances it isn't, whoever decides on what counts as an \"exceptional circumstance\" is sovereign. If the states can decide on their own economic or educational policies, except when it interferes with interstate commerce, then whoever decides what counts as \"interference in interstate commerce\" is sovereign. These are exceptions defined within the system (even if what counts as a legitimate decision can't be defined within the system), but it's not too hard to push the boundaries. Those in the military take an oath to the constitution, to protect it--if that oath can only be preserved by resisting legal orders from the commander in chief, then whoever (like some top general) takes the mutinous yet preservative action is sovereign (if he succeeds).\n\nThere's still a legal thread here, so let's push it further--social disorder is so extreme, that despite the lack of constitutional and legal remedies (the president, say, is encouraging the disorder), the head of the Joint Chiefs deposes the president and imposes martial law. He who decides that restoring order cannot await the discovery of constitutional and legal means to do so, and that \"order\" is therefore prior to and a condition of \"Constitutions\" and \"laws,\" and that now is the time when that truth becomes inescapable--he is sovereign. The imposer of sovereign law is the real sovereign, without any legal recognition (of course, if he is successful, plenty of legal recognition will follow).\n\nIt's easy to distinguish real from formal sovereignty in such extreme circumstances, but it would be helpful to have a way of doing so under more normal conditions. If we stick with reducing sovereignty to the legally recognized, the same problem will emerge but in a distorted way--we have to figure out the effects of all the \"outside\" influences and proxies--who is influencing, how much, how can we tell, how unsecure is the sovereign, etc. If ultimately, some donor, or international institution has the president of some country in his or its \"pocket,\" e.g., is able to veto any budget proposal the putative sovereign proposes, how do we talk about that?\n\nAnyway, that's what adam is thinking the afternoon of 2/27/2017.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI do think we've reach an impasse here. If you think that there is a \"law of the sovereign\" that impersonally recognizes the real sovereign, that an impersonal \"legal entity\" makes decisions through \"mechanisms,\" we're just talking about different things. Our assumptions are incommensurable. The sovereign imposes and guarantees order, and law follows order. In a sense it follows simultaneously--the first decree of a new sovereign is the establishment of law, and the sovereign must issue a decree upon taking power. But it's not the decree that issues the sovereign.\n\nYou are thinking there is a place or locus of sovereignty that transcends any individual who occupies that place. There is a sense in which I would say this as well--someone must be sovereign, so sovereignty transcends any particular possessor of it. But it's not a given, actually existing place--it's just a default condition of community. If the federal government of the US collapsed, we might have 50 new sovereign entities emerge. The territory of the US would still be \"saturated\" with sovereignty, which would therefore be conserved. But there is no transcendent sovereignty that acts independently of persons, that offers legal recognition, that grants statuses, that exists by itself as a legal entity. Someone has to do all those things, and to do all those things he must be above law and legal recognition, above status, above all entities. We're really speaking different languages here.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI'll try a little more, even though I'm pretty sure we're talking past each other at this point.\n\nI agree with this:\n\nThere are laws, written by people acting either directly as sovereign or in their roles granted them by a sovereign. Probably the very first law written in these instances is to define the sovereign.\n\nAs long as sovereignty is secure, the law conveys the will of sovereign and provides for the acknowledgement by all subjects of the sovereign. As sovereignty becomes insecure, the laws are decreasingly enforced by the formal sovereign; instead, various informal rules are imposed and enforced by other agencies than the formal sovereign. These informal rules come to be at odds with the formal law, and the powers enforcing them subversive of the formal sovereign. Who actually rules becomes uncertain--the uncertainty can be concealed as long as the formal sovereign doesn't call attention to it and lets the informal powers set his agenda.\n\nIf he tries to resist, the uncertainty becomes evident. It is true that this situation cannot go on indefinitely (it can go on for a long time, though). At a certain point, one of the competing powers will have to install himself as formal sovereign, and the informal rules turned into a body of formal law--otherwise, the whole system will be destroyed, or fragmented. In the latter case as well, though, new forms of sovereignty will arise. And then we will know who rules, i.e., who is sovereign."
    },
    {
      "slug": "could-you-elaborate-on-these-2-concepts-imperius-brought-up",
      "title": "Bouvard on Imperative versus Declarative Sovereignty",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 08, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/byb8pa/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] During his debate with Curt? I liked the stream but I felt that you guys weren’t really able to engage past the superficial because you were just using different frameworks. But you mentioned 2 things in particular which curt basically said ‘I don’t care’ to, but I’m curious to hear if you care to elaborate on them: 1. The difference between liberalism and reactionaryism is that the first thinks we need to describe the morality of ruling within the declarative mode in real-time, whereas the second would say that cannot be done and the best we can do is narrate an act of ruling into the declarative after the fact. <—having some trouble with this one. Shouldn’t we use everything at our disposal to make good sovereign decisions, including the declarative? What’s wrong with doing some economic modeling before issuing a new regulation? 2. ‘You are trying to declare non-declarative items/you are trying to map post-literate categories onto pre-literate people’. ‘I don’t care’. Why should we\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf you look at the way you frame things in (1), I think you can see the answer to your question. Liberalism thinks we need to describe the *morality* of ruling in declarative terms--but there's no mention of morality in your representation of \"reactionaryism.\" Of course we have to think in declarative terms, and that includes planning, among other things, but the morality of ruling lies in how the ruler occupies the center, not in whether he measures up to some external (declarative) concept of \"justice,\" or the \"common good,\" or whatever.\n\n​\n\nRegarding the second, my answer would be similar. Of course we speak about imperatives in declarative terms--in a sense, imperatives and ostensives is *all* we speak about in our declaratives. The point is that the vast majority of our imperatives could not be justified declaratively, and, so, to try and impose declarative accountability is really a power grab by those in the disciplines, who control the declarative order. By examining imperatives in declarative terms, though, we can clarify their consequences which provide feedback for those issuing imperatives.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Hey thanks, For 1, isn’t ‘how the ruler occupies the center’ determined by his actions? So the question still applies, what’s wrong with using declarative tools to inform and evaluate those actions in real time, in addition to aesthetics? Like I get that if you ignore the moral foundations of actions, it’s a problem, but why would you make a point of only including the declarative _after_ an act of ruling? And also, how would you determine whether he’s a moral ruler without invoking any normative criteria? For 2: This is the crux of what curt was saying I believe (although I never heard of propertarianism tbh fyi) that by forcing the justification into the declarative mode, we can make it intelligible to agreed-upon moral criteria. Isn’t the whole point that rational criteria emerge in the declarative? So imperatives are amoral phenomena (from a rational perspective), we _need_ the declarative to decide whether they fit our rational criteria for morality or not. In that sense you _\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThere's no contrast between aesthetic and declarative tools--the declarative is also aesthetic. Declaratives inform and evaluate--we think about what we're doing, and you can only think in declaratives. The question is whether the declaratives you are thinking in are attempts to figure out the implications of an imperative, or to provide criteria according to which all future imperatives will be judged.\n\n​\n\nA moral ruler keeps the center singular--that is, everyone knows where the commands are coming from. And this is only the case if all the subordinate centers are also kept singular. A coherent chain of command is moral because lines of responsibility are clear and violent centralization (attributing excess guilt to others because events occur without a clear author) is minimized.\n\n​\n\nThe declaratives you give as examples might make motivations clear but they certainly don't justify anything--kissing a girl because she's hot is no more justified than kissing random girls. The question is whether there are imperatives in place forbidding people kissing whichever girls they want. What does the obfuscation or clarity of motive matter here? The act itself (which might include speech) declares as much of the intention as necessary--after the fact explanations might contribute to our understanding, and they may not. But either way we're focusing on defiance (or not) of some social sanctioned imperative.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Sorry, my reply wasn’t clear so I think we have some miscommunication. I was just trying to get at my original confusion in point 1, regarding why you believe that it’s impossible to look at the morality of ruling in the declarative, in real time. My confusion is, if ruling consists of taking a certain set of actions, then it is deliberate, right? Given that it’s deliberate, aren’t sovereigns and institutions free to engage in inquiry before acting, to ensure they take the best action? Here I gave the example of economic modeling of regulations. Wouldn’t that be an example of evaluation of an act of ruling in the declarative, in real time?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nSovereigns and rulers not only deliberate before making decisions but enlist others to help them do so. But they do so in order to make their decision, not a decision they are merely \"delegated\" to carry out. A ruler will have to decide, say, whether to go to war, and will give this decision a lot of thought--the question is whether he is thinking in terms preserving and enhancing his occupation of the center or, for example, fulfilling his obligations as commander-in-chief under the terms of the constitution. In either case, in truth, he's deciding, but in the latter case he's telling himself, and leaving it open for others to tell him, that it's really the Supreme Court, and therefore legal scholars, and therefore Harvard Law School, that's really deciding. The difference lies in whether the declarative is used to confirm or displace the central authority as the source of the decision.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] That definitely sounds fair to me. If he doesn’t use Harvard law, he will still need to go to (or be informed by) some other socially constructed tradition to give him meaning though right? I thought that was one of the insights of GA.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, but relying on traditions to give meaning is different from relying, for justification, on concepts implicitly claiming to be outside of tradition. Let's say the ruler has to decide a case involving a dispute between different subjects. He can try to settle the dispute in a way that stays close to and confirms earlier decisions made within the legal tradition; or, he can try and decide it in terms that satisfy an abstract definition of \"justice.\" If we all need to agree on the meaning of a term like \"justice,\" \"common good,\" or whatever, that is a sign we are in a declarative order--a ruler deciding within a tradition doesn't need a single, unequivocal understanding of these obviously complex, contentious and multivalent terms in order to make a good decision.\n\n---\n\n[Q:LegionTheAi] > In my opinion Nietzsche’s ‘there are no moral phenomena’ is inescapable, there is no framework you can construct which is going to eliminate the need for arbitrary moral judgment at its root to imbue it with meaning Well, my argument doesn't need to go that far. The point is just that there you're not escaping the matter of morality. Whether that morality is arbitrary or not is another matter. The problem here seems to be wanting to have the cake and eat it. Both saying that morality is \"arbitrary\", or not ultimately \"real\" AND saying that preservation of the center can have any \"cash value\". Indeed the denial of an ultimate basis for morality(or any other stand-in for this term) seems to devolve into the Big Scene, \"A scene whose participants are devoted to the suppression of any center\"(since none of these centers are in the end morally justified at all). http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/2019/04/the-big-scene-is-the-anthropological-basis-of-anarchist-ontology/\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe questions you're raising arise because I've neglected a couple of elements of the \"thinking of the center\" I'm proposing. In some recent posts I've been remedying this deficit. The moral content of Absolutist GA lies in the deferral of \"centralizing violence.\" This goes back to the basics of GA and mimetic theory more generally: imitation generates rivalry, rivalry generates violence--and, not just violence, but a kind of \"totalizing\" or \"existential\" violence that threatens the community itself. For Girard, the way communities have traditionally dealt with this threat is through the institution of scapegoating: choosing a single individual or group, \"finding\" that \"object\" to be the source of the community's mimetically generated dilemmas, and killing or expelling it.\n\nFor Girard, Christianity exposes the \"bad faith\" of this sacrificial logic, which we still revert to, but no longer with a good conscience, so it no longer solves the problem. Gans differs from Girard on some historical points here, but he accepts this scenario. I've broadened the \"post-sacrificial\" to include related developments in Eastern cultures. But the point here is that there is a very definite morality to Absolutist GA: refrain from and \"disable\" the tendencies toward mimetic crisis that lead towards violence against some chosen center. This is moral because it recalls and repeats the originary scene, and because it is the most advanced form of deferral yet, since it recognizes that when the community chooses a victim, there is almost inevitably an element of arbitrariness to it that we can try to reduce further.\n\nOf course, people need to be punished, we need to defend ourselves with force if necessary, wars need to be fought, etc., but it is moral to do so in a way reduces as much as possible the elements of scapegoating or centralizing violence that such situations always elicit. Of course, I am assuming that a central authority that establishes and maintain institutions that defer centralizing violence will also be one that establishes and maintains a clear chain of command. Ultimately, all centralizing violence, even against some marginal figure, contains an element of violence toward the central authority, which therefore has good reasons for ensuring restraint.\n\n​\n\nOne more thing. The way we know what counts as the kind of centralizing violence from which we must refrain is that the origin of all our institutions is in such self-restraint or deferral. More precisely, this is the case in \"post-sacrificial\" orders, which are post-sacrificial precisely because their institutions are marked by the resistance to scapegoating. To determine how to make law enforcement, education, corporate, etc., institutions more moral is to retrieve their origins in some act of deferral: in each case, some center that defers rather than incites, and therefore makes possible peaceful labor instead of the vendetta, has been created. Recovering that center also recreates it, in a way that defers current violent potentials.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWhy would I want to leave the circle of descriptors? If someone doesn't want to preserve the center, that person wants to destroy it--the \"is\" and the \"ought\" are bound up together. If someone wants to destroy the center, he imagines another center that would replace it. He is immoral for acting to destroy the only center available, but we could still engage him morally because he is nevertheless looking for a center. (How we engage others morally is more important than categorizing actions and individuals as more or less moral.) GA could certainly engage in dialogue with philosophical and other conceptions of morality and \"the good,\" and it would do so by treating them, ultimately, as anthropology.\n\nFor philosophy to take off, I suppose we would have to leave the circle of descriptors. But can philosophy prove that we have to leave the circle of descriptors, and that there is somewhere else to be? Can it prove that it is not just another circle of descriptors?\n\nOn the other hand, if I understand your last few sentences, GA would already be doing moral and political philosophy (or at least might, with a couple of little tweaks). Maybe I should go with that! But the view of the human seems too static--rather than a \"nature,\" the human is always constituting itself. And why is \"telos\" better than center? It seems the paradox of the human--it makes itself and is made by the center--would still place it outside of philosophy.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI want GA to be closer to all kinds of discourses, including everyday ones, rather than more distant--that itself would be a good reason for rejecting metalanguages. \"Philosophy\" can say that morality involves statements like \"one ought not to do X,\" but this is only the most ruled based, codifiable, way of thinking about morality. I think morality involves getting inside of the language someone uses in deciding what he is going to do, has done, or is in the process of doing, and helping that person see where he might be acting out or resentment rather than a desire to preserve the center or, more colloquially, \"keep everyone on the same page.\"\n\nSo, I'll be interested in philosophical discourses that seem most interested in the ways we use language regularly, not just working with very artificial examples that are constructed to frame a particular debate. We talk about morality all the time, and derive oughts from ises all the time, and doing so is only incoherent in terms of the very separations produced by modern society and modern philosophy. Simply in describing something I'm presenting it as worthy of another's attention, and that in itself is a moral gesture: it is \"good\" for you to pay attention to this rather than something else. Testing the coherence of statements is something done collaboratively, and as it is necessary--because it is \"good\" that we generate shared meaning and create more ways of examining our desires and subjecting them to scrutiny--because knowing the roles we are playing is good because clarifying our relations to each gives us more ways of imaginatively deferring violence, which is good...\n\nI think we started this conversation because you challenged my claim that GA can ultimately do away with philosophy--it seems to me you want to argue for philosophy's position as the \"queen of the sciences,\" or at least the human ones. But philosophy will always be able to give good reasons for why every discourse needs its stamp of approval.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIs philosophy good? Is living a good life good? Is good good? The \"good life\" seems to be the coin of the realm here, but your attempts to define it will be circular: something is good because it meets some criterion of \"good,\" and that criterion of \"good\" is a good one because it meets some criterion of a good criterion, etc. You're not really explaining why I should answer all these questions, other than that I need to do philosophy, and the proof that I need to do philosophy is that I'm not conceptualizing things in a sufficiently philosophical way. You think I have to explain why enhancing sociality is good, but I don't think I do.\n\nI'd rather make fun of someone trying to argue that enhancing sociality is bad, which I think would be pretty easy to do. You think I need to explain why acting out of resentment is bad, but what, exactly, do you think \"resentment\" means? Value judgments are built into the words we use--so, instead of simply using those words, you think we should use other, presumably value free, words, so as to reconstruct the understanding of \"good\" already implicit in the original word."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-response-to-dark-reformation-on-oligarchy-and-democracy",
      "title": "Bouvard on Ontology, Mimesis, and Sovereign Decision",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Apr 29, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/686vnl/",
      "content": "[ADAM]\n\nI think the focus on ontology is especially important here, because any description of a specific situation will be determined by the ontology you bring to it. Whether you think a group or an individual makes decisions depends upon what you're looking for, what you think counts as a decision. Which means we're also talking about anthropology, which is to say what human beings are. You can't prove in a particular case that this or that individual, or an individual or a group, made the decision; ontologies stand or fall with the intellectual and political tradition they found--they can't simply be \"falsified.\" Let's take the liberal (but not only liberal) ideal of how deliberative decision making should take place.\n\nThere's a case before the Supreme Court; the lawyers come and argue their positions, drawing upon precedent, Constitutional provisions, and the facts of the case; the justices go into their chambers and continue the discussion, free of partisanship, interested just in the law, the viability of the precedent they will set, the rigor of their constitutional reasoning; they change each other's minds; they arrive at a new synthesis and majority, with a decision that none of them could have put forth without the discussion; and with a couple of respectful dissents, by justices who hew a bit closer to precedents they would like to see preserved in the Court's memory than do their colleagues.\n\nWe can imagine something like this because we can imagine it among ourselves--people talk about things openly and honestly, they use examples and reasoning, and they persuade each other, get persuaded, and arrive at new conclusions no one had thought of going in. If we can do it, the Supreme Court, or, for that matter, the Senate, or any other deliberative body can.\n\nSo, surely, we can imagine such a free, democratic order established in society as a whole, right? Not so fast. The Supreme Court can deliberate in this way only if they know their decisions flow from and back into a political order in which they are accepted without question--they have not been elevated to the court by one faction aiming to defeat another, they have not gone through decades of law school and practice adhering to one judicial ideology at odds with others, they have not developed loyalties, they don't go home and socialize with members of one political party or section of the media, or care about what the legal activists on one side of the spectrum think about them. And they preserve the authority they have been granted by acting only--but therefore freely--within its limits. I insist that we can imagine judges free of all this, but only in a social order from which all of those features of social conflict have been removed, i.e., one in which there is undivided power.\n\nSo, does that mean that, paradoxically, genuinely democratic decision making can take place only within a social order antithetical to democracy? Not quite. Let's return to that deliberative process. If we look more closely at it, and are familiar enough with the terms of the discussion, we will notice that not all justices are created equal. Some have more experience, more knowledge, more intelligence, a better judicial temperament than others--even among the most eminent jurists in the land. Here is where the ontological/anthropological differences become particularly evident. \"Power\" can take on a lot of forms, and one of those forms, in fact a very basic one, is the natural authority of the master of a particular field over those who have reached such a degree of excellence that they can and willingly do recognize this greater mastery.\n\nI said that \"some\" will be more eminent than \"others\"; well, if we follow that reasoning, among the \"some,\" one will ultimately be the most eminent. That most eminent (and it might not always be the same justice, since they have different specialties and experiences) justice will be the one making the decision. And this will be the case even if he turns out to be one of the dissenters, because we have to keep in mind that it is not obvious what will count as the \"decision\"--it may not be the decision about the particular case, but rather the decision to ensure that the discussion itself maintains a sufficiently high level and avoids certain pitfalls resulting from human frailties and, maybe, the limitations of the legal system--that is, a decision to preserve the Courts social role and authority.\n\nThat's what you see if you're approaching the situation from an absolutist ontology--the relations between all involved get more and precise and the stakes involved clearer. The approach is better because it leads to more sustained inquiry and better understanding. If you approach it from an anarchist ontology, there's a lot of talk and a decision just bubbles up from the magma of clashes between personalities, idiosyncratic opinions, etc. And everyone just arbitrarily agrees or disagrees with that decision--however detailed your knowledge of the biographical particulars of the justices, it will always come down to something like \"that's who he was.\" In the end, you understand nothing and end up projecting your own proclivities onto the decision.\n\nSo, in all of the social institutions, if we look closely enough, we will see the most eminent making the decisions at both the micro and macro levels, as long as we keep in mind that institutions generate very different forms of \"eminence,\" some of them, of course, especially in a system of divided power, distorted forms. And these forms change over time. But we have to be ready to think about what counts as a decision as well--decisions can be multi-layered acts, following up on previous decisions, laying the groundwork for future ones. In every situation there is someone at least marginally \"elevated\" in the relevant qualities than anyone else--we just need to learn how to look for that person.\n\n---\n\n[Q:reactionaryfuture] \"If you approach it from an anarchist ontology, there's a lot of talk and a decision just bubbles up from the magma of clashes between personalities, idiosyncratic opinions, etc. And everyone just arbitrarily agrees or disagrees with that decision--however detailed your knowledge of the biographical particulars of the justices, it will always come down to something like \"that's who he was.\"\" I would say a vote is never a decision, it's a result. A result of the conflict between factions. This is the key point. If you are voting, then your society is a trouble.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, there could never be a good reason for voting. In that case, even a body with many members, like a Supreme Court, should have one person in charge who makes the final decision. But, there will always be deliberation--the person making the decision will want to hear from others, so we should have an understanding of what that process entails. Second, part of my point here is contend that absolutist ontology provides us with the most power way of analyzing what is actually happening when, under contemporary conditions, there is a vote. But I'm also addressing the monarchy vs. oligarchy distinction prompting the original post. Things that look like oligarchy are in fact monarchy if you know where and how to look. That's important, because the discussion can't proceed productively on the empirical, anecdotal level--\"what about...\" The question is how to scrutinize the examples themselves.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] Adam, i would like to see how you might develop an anthropology of revelation on this question.  Decisions flow from variously shared revelations in the course of events and often the decision maker relies on what others see, and in ways that can't always be fully understood, even I assume under the kinds of clarifications you are advocating. And there can be conflict between prophetic and kingly authority, etc. because, i assume, divided power is somehow implicit in revelation.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, this is very important. The relation between the emergence of the monotheistic revelations and the existing ancient empires is one starting point for thinking about this--Gans stresses this relationship in Science and Faith and elsewhere. Clearly I'd be going in a different direction from Gans, who sees a linear relation between the Christian revelation and market society and liberal democracy. In no way, as far as I can see, does the revelation of I AM or the later Christian \"why do you persecute me\" compromise central power, i.e., absolutism. Certainly the writers of Scripture didn't think so, nor did anyone else for quite a while.\n\nI would agree with Gans that the monotheistic revelations reveal God as residing in reciprocal relations between (amongst) those on the margin. But those on the margins are not monadic individuals who relate to each other on one-to-one terms--that's an illusion generated by the relation between individuals on the market (the Marxists had a point here). We are always articulated in reciprocal relations within institutions, which are themselves articulated in relation to central power. Reciprocities fray and break down--I would further say that the monotheistic revelations become compelling once the ancient empires enter history, and the emperor gods are exposed as weaker than some other God.\n\nThe originary scene then needs to be (and can be, because central power has been shaken) recovered or, more strongly, remembered--that is the means by which we identify and repair impaired reciprocal relations, or injustices. Remembering the originary scene is the source of the \"intelligence\" that a monarch who wants a reciprocal relation to those he rules, and doesn't want to simply be interchangeable with a bigger imperial power (who could replace him without anyone noticing), would systematically draw upon. I'm coming to think of this in terms of the clarity of commands. If divided power is a result of misrule, that misrule must itself present as insufficiently clear commands--the sovereign didn't really know what he wanted his subjects to do.\n\nUnclear commands leave open a margin for lesser powers to assert independence, first of all in the name of the sovereign himself. An unclear chain of command is the source of injustice, and this would cover a lot of what we ordinarily think of as unjust--for example, a boss telling his workers they must work for 20 hours a day would be giving an unclear, because impossible, and therefore unjust, command. The sovereign has an interest in providing avenues of appeal for such commands, which ultimately enable him to keep clarifying his own. Seeing an unclear command is only possible if a clearer command informs one's vision, and that must be from God or, more precisely, a remembering of the originary scene, which enjoins reciprocal answerability; so, speaking out against the unclear command, in a way that requests clearer ones and acknowledges the sovereign as the ultimate judge, is speaking in the name of God, however minimally.\n\n---\n\n[Q:darkreformation101] I want to try to understand the argument here in case I'm missing something here. Is it accurate to say to say that you reject the concept of a decision taken by more than one person as a priori impossible? For instance, the idea that a group such as the Supreme Court could collectively arrive at a decision is incoherent in the same way that \"green ideas sleep furiously\"  is? \"So, in all of the social institutions, if we look closely enough, we will see the most eminent making the decisions at both the micro and macro levels, as long as we keep in mind that institutions generate very different forms of \"eminence,\" some of them, of course, especially in a system of divided power, distorted forms. And these forms change over time. But we have to be ready to think about what counts as a decision as well--decisions can be multi-layered acts, following up on previous decisions, laying the groundwork for future ones. In every situation there is someone at least marginally \"elevated\" in th\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, I accept your restatement of my argument. The statement \"the Supreme Court decided....\" is fine for some purposes--if you're reading a newspaper, you don't need to know that Sottomayer deferred to Breyer's authority and wisdom 4 hours into the deliberations, etc., so, it's not quite as meaningless as \"green ideas sleep furiously\"--corporate bodies have a reality of their own. But there are nine individuals there, so obviously something else happened. Now, we could further develop the analysis by saying that the second most eminent \"decided\" not to resist the decision of the most eminent (which is to say he refrained--decided to refrain--from attempting what would have been the equivalent of a coup) and the third did the same regarding the second and so on down the line.\n\nUltimately, though, a hierarchy was manifested or established in the decision. We understand better the more we pinpoint the decision with precision, rather than dispersing it across a field. I think this becomes clear if you were to ask yourself, what would you do to try and influence the decision, or to predict it--you would target the center, where you think the decision is going to come from."
    },
    {
      "slug": "race-is-a-moral-linguistic-construct",
      "title": "Bouvard on Race, Morality, and Linguistic Authority",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 17, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/bpi68c/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] You ask helpful questions as usual. >What is it that’s constructing race? You're really asking how are identities constructed, specifically group identities, but learning from the different perspectives on how individual identities are created can also be helpful. There are so many writers you can explore on the question of identity, falling into the camps of HBD, postmodernism, and post-postmodernism.  It's ultimately about inheritance, the 'tyranny' of social inheritance, and the oscillating connection between agency and sociality/sacrality (distilled down to how language works—transmits and is modified), respectively. Identity will always be an interesting, complicated topic because it's a constant narrative; analyzing it is more narrative. >What is the more fundamental identity? The shortest technical answer is 'sharing an ostensive', in a given moment, which creates a layer of a shared identity in that given moment.  You do enough of these and you get a sub/culture, shared l\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI agree with all this, but I'm not familiar with the study you're referencing. Race realism is important in challenging \"blank slate-ism\" and the subsequent implication that group disparities are results of oppression. This is obviously very important, politically, today. But beyond that nothing follows from what group differences we identify and, of course,the more subtle and complex (the more historically marked) the differences across groups the less they will be traceable to specific genetic configurations. I also assume that further studies in genetics and biology more generally will lead to all kinds of discoveries we can't anticipate, and that will probably upend some assumptions made by everyone. We can't wait for such results in making moral, ethical and political decisions.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Couldn't that lead to some other problems though? Would massacring people who resent authority then be moral in GA? Or would the argument go that this action would increase resentment in the other people who saw it taking place, thereby increasing total resentment? And if so, wouldn't that imply that people are placing a moral value on not massacring people which is contained outside of the center?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWe'd have to frame better questions. (The best way to frame moral questions is itself a moral question.)The word \"massacre\" already implies a critical moral judgment. Hitler and Stalin wouldn't have used the word to describe what they did--they were \"exterminating vermin\" or fighting \"the enemies of the people.\" Should vermin be exterminated and enemies of the people fought?If you put it that way, who could say no? What are you, pro-vermin? The question is, within what kind of moral order do we arrive at such framings, and what kind of order would provide other framings?\n\nNo one could deny that a state or central authority will have to use force on occasion, or at least must be prepared to--the questions would be, when, against whom, what kind of force, how much, for what purposes, etc. And we can't answer such questions in general.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] It seems to me that this is close to meaning acts which make it easier for people to successfully coexist in the society without conflict, right? As opposed to anti-social acts which are harmful to the viability of that society. But given that most 'anti-social' actors aren't genuine psychopaths, just people who have an ideal which differs from the existing order, don't we have a problem there? Why is the existing social structure inherently more moral than the goal which they are endeavoring to bring into being by being temporarily anti-social? If those people believe themselves to be right and that their idea would make a better society, are they not moral in trying to replace our current structure with theirs? Even if that disrupts cohesion in the short term?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe question is not directly to me, but I would say that trying to change the existing order based on an \"idea\" external to that order (or, more likely, an idea one claims the order is \"really\" based on) is indeed immoral because whoever does so arrogates to himself the right to establish an *imperium in imperio*, the \"true\" authority which supersedes the merely actual authority, and hence introduces (or exacerbates) division into the center. Yours is the liberal argument, which leads directly to elections, rights, division/balance of powers, etc. We all have our \"idea,\" and who is to say which of us, or which combination of us, might be right against all the others? Liberalism institutes resentment towards the center--therein lies its immorality. What is moral is obeying the imperatives issued from the center, and trying to make them more consistent and therefore the center more coherent when necessary.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Fair enough. But aren’t you sortof conflating what is socially possible and what is moral? Sure, Stalin and Lenin made killing the kulaks socially possible and framed it as a moral act, like many other tyrants, but does GA stop there and conclude that it was indeed a moral thing to do? I would argue that Stalin was an opportunistic con who usurped power and wronged people, ruling awfully. Imo people who resisted dekulakization were the moral ones, even if they ultimately failed. Why should I at all times deify the center even when it’s a P.O.S. center, is the core of the argument I’ve been making. I understand the counter that without victory and continued existence, how much morality can there really be? But these are Nietzschean, fascist, and ultimately Roman arguments—GA has not acknowledged these as influences to my knowledge.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe point is not that what these rulers did is moral--the point is that the immorality of what they did needs to be located further \"upstream,\" in the way they have conceptualized the taking and use of power in the first place. The basis for exercising power has to be the fundamental anthropological necessity of a center. If you rule on the basis of \"nature,\" whether it's nature located in class, race, or natural rights, you introduce perpetual struggles over the center. These perpetual struggles over the center account for the pathologies we see in pretty much all modern government, but most obviously in the 20th century \"totalitarian\" ones.\n\nThat is what corrodes the central authority, and within such a form of rule the subject is confronted with many contradictory imperatives. The moral way to respond is act, and enable others to act, to the extent possible, in accord with the most consistent \"chain\" of imperatives possible. In the worst cases, like the 1930s USSR, that might not mean much more than sustaining any trust-based relationships possible--just trying to act and speak more or less the same way over a period of weeks was a challenge.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] > the will of 90+% of the population What Adam is going to do is inquire further what center is really at the heart of this 'will of the people'. >Why should I call such states legitimate and take it upon myself to support them in ‘governing better’, when I am a resourceful person and could have some resistance to offer? We technically are not telling you to not resist in some ways.  And for that matter, Adam is always advocating a _mutual_ transfiguration between the Middle and the High, not simple obeyance like what I've termed a 'desacralized power theorist', people who mistake moral governance with the material motions of ruling. It's not easy to preordain tactics so far in advance, but we can lay out a strategy we would like the Middle to work within, and that's to work with the force of your moral imperatives in actual operation, rather than a reification, which if you do will make you lose to the even more reified ideologies, like the thin kind of universal humanism that glo\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI'll just add that the purpose of having a moral theory is not to label this or that person moral or immoral but to have a \"vocabulary\" with which to discuss the moral implications of one or another course of action. Person or group A might be using his/its power to mistreat person of group B and, of course, we can't be surprised if B notices this (leaving aside the question of what counts as \"mistreatment\"--I'll just stipulate that some things can be)--but no obvious and unequivocal course of action follows from this recognition. That's exactly where moral thinking comes into play: how to recognize these resentments, while still deferring them in the sense of not having your actions be determined by them.\n\nEven if you're oppressed, there's no reason to assume that acting as \"forcefully\" as you can against your oppressor all have the results you want. This is not just a strategic question, either--how you participate in the transition from one center to another will determine the quality of the new center. Ultimately, the strategic questions (how to win) are themselves moral questions--how to be the kind of \"winners\" that will build a sustainable and good order. The more you are able to move from singling out immediate enemies to acting within a new order, the more moral and more intelligent your actions will be.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Thanks for the reply. I don’t fully understand what it means to rule only in accordance with the need to have a center. Isn’t the question of ‘which center’ always going to bring ideology back into it, no matter how pragmatic you try to remain? Sorry if this is a thick-headed question.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIt's not just that there has to be a center but that there always is one--we don't go to a supermarket, to the shelve marked \"Centers,\" and choose the one we like. Ideologies are just the way people justify their attempts to control the center--they always identify some way of fighting other groups trying to control the center from the outside, so as to guarantee permanent control. Such permanent control is impossible, because the victory of one ideology excludes other and incites them to sharpen their own weapons. If you have an ideology, you want the government to do x, y and z. That also means you want the government to have the power to do x, y and z unhindered.\n\nBut if the government has the power to do x, y and z unhindered, it will also have the power not to do these things, or other things you (and others) want it to do. Realizing this is the beginning of political wisdom. The thing to want from the government is that it governs, clearly--that we know who is in charge, who is second in command, third, fourth and so on--and where we are in that order. This means we want it to be free of the Xs, Ys and Zs of all the different interest groups, i.e., all the ideologies. If you ask, what is such a government actually doing--what does it consider \"good\"?; the answer is, whatever follows from its origins, that is, from the event that enabled its establishment in the first place.\n\nBecause such a government can only be established by providing a means for all the conflicting groups to defer their resentments towards the others, which means to defer their resentments toward the center for \"privileging\" the other groups over one's own. This would require both exemplary leadership and exemplary \"followership,\" because on both sides there would have to be the acknowledgement that there is no path from the intensification of resentments to their \"satisfaction.\"\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe only way to keep resentments within limits is to keep power and responsibility aligned. If someone has a job to do (responsibility) he needs to have the power to do it; if someone has power, he needs to have corresponding responsibilities. Ensuring this is the case is the main responsibility of the central authority. There will always be power differentials, but they don't always generate the same level of resentment. The resentment comes when we are obliged to do what we are not given the means to do, or when power is used irresponsibly. That's what it means t be \"screwed over,\" and it's possible to develop shared criteria for determining when it has actually happened and how it should be remedied.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe shared criteria are narrowly focused. I don't mean everyone in a social order has to agree on, e.g., how a law should be enacted. If we're able to continue our conversation here, it's because we have shared criteria regarding what counts as a \"response,\" as an answer to a question, etc., Any functioning workplace or institution has similar shared criteria--the less functional, the less is shared.\n\n​\n\nOf course, people want power, and existing institutions often thwart honest efforts at productive work. Every social order limits the desire for power one way or another--it's just a question of how best to do so. And dysfunctional institutions is the reason we're developing these diagnoses in the first place. If everyone used their transparently delegated power responsibly, politics would essentially disappear as a topic of discussion and we'd be talking about other things.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIn the case of a conversation, the question is not whether we agree, but whether we are still having a conversation. As long as we are still having a conversation, resentments regarding what has been said by either party can be addressed within the conversation. It's the same thing with uses of power and institutional relations. The question is, are we still working within the same project, for the same purposes? (Of course, there is some elasticity to the notion of \"same\" here.) If we're still working together, the answer is yes; if the subordinate can ask the superior to clarify a command or to help settle a dispute with another subordinate, the answer is even more clearly yes.\n\nThis means resentments can be addressed within the system, even if there's not universal agreement on every single thing. The question is whether people feel they have recourse, and I am assuming that they are more likely to feel this if they actually do have recourse--and even more likely if frivolous objections are rejected. Now, you can say, what will count as \"recourse,\" as \"frivolous,\" etc., but unless you want to say it is always equally impossible to arrive at any shared use and meaning of these terms, you have to acknowledge things can be arranged so as to increase the shared understanding of them."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-does-adam-katz-mean-by-this-paragraph",
      "title": "Bouvard on Collective Center-Formation and Deferred Appropriation",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 20, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/b3c8ny/",
      "content": "[Q:TwatBrah] I don't fully understand these things: -What is meant by \"creating realities\" in this context? -What does it mean that the center \"makes demands\" and why can only one demand be made at a time? -How can we know that those with the greatest power of deferral always ends up in power? The paragraph in question: >What generates power, and gives one person power over others? Here as well we must think in terms of proximity to the center. The first instance of human power was on the originary scene, where a group of newly formed humans collectively deferred their desire and allowed a new reality to emerge at the center. This provides us with a model of human power: creating realities by following the lead of the object at the center of shared attention, rather than rivalrous desires. Power is always differential because some members of any group, in any situation, will exhibit greater powers of deferral: they will be able to stop and examine a situation while others are rushing in, and t\n\n[ADAM]\n\nPeople acting together itself creates a reality--there is an agent in the world who wasn't there before, and there is therefore a world for that agent that wasn't there before.\n\nThe center is what we are all focused on when we interact in some way. We create this center by representing it, and we represent it by deferring appropriation. Insofar as we defer appropriation, we have conferred upon the center the power to \"demand\" that we do so. Think about a few people looking a photograph together. If they speak about the photograph, they are treating it as something worth talking about, and therefore as something that has its own \"integrity\" and as something people can see different ways. The photograph is, then, \"demanding\" that we look at it carefully, that we don't close off the space of interpretation prematurely (that would be \"appropriating\" it).\n\nI speak in this way to avoid the impression that we just decide, on our own, what to look at and talk about--we are embedded in a socially created world that *compels* our attention in all kinds of ways. The center only makes one demand because there is one especially dangerous desire that must be deferred above all in any particular case--so, its command is to defer that desire. Anything else it might command will follow from that.\n\nRegarding your last question, that is really an axiomatic definition of \"power\"--it's what power intrinsically is. In a situation where everyone who is terrified, the one who is less terrified, or able to act coherently in spite of being terrified, will be the one everyone follows. This is the most fundamental form of power. Now, of course, this will not always apply to the person who ends up with power--in fact, very often, maybe more often than not, it will be people with inferior capacity for deferral who will end up ruling. But this is possible because the institutions those individuals can then commandeer are based on previous acts of enhanced deferral, ultimately many generations worth, if the institution has in fact managed to endure.\n\nEven then, those people with lesser deferral capacity who manage to take power most likely exercised superior deferral within the specific institutional base that happened to be closest to power. So, for example, let's say the secret police carry out a coup in some country and place the individual (not necessarily the formal leader of the organization) who led the coup in power. That individual may not have shown greater powers of deferral than, say, some war hero who was never anywhere near the heights of power--but he probably exercised, in a superior form, the kind of deferral that gets you close to the levers of power within the secret police. He built alliances, waited until it was right to take out an enemy, refrained from avenging himself on someone who tried to eliminate him if that revenge didn't serve his interests, etc.\n\n​\n\nDoes that help?\n\n​\n\n​\n\n---\n\n[Q:TwatBrah] It does, thanks. The only thing I still can't quite wrap my head around is this: >The center only makes one demand because there is one especially dangerous desire that must be deferred above all in any particular case--so, its command is to defer that desire. Anything else it might command will follow from that. I understand this in principle but I cannot think of an example of this, would you mind? Love your blog btw\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThanks.\n\nLet's say a group of guys are playing football. It's a very competitive game and there's tension between the two teams. Things are starting to get heated--guys on one side make some dubious hits, and then someone on the other side escalates. So, the question is whether the game, and everything implicit in the game (friendship, camaraderie, sportsmanship, etc.--the \"transcendent\" rules of their interaction) can be sustained, or whether it's going to become a brawl, or even just broken up with bitter feelings. Some of the guys, from both sides, want to step in and make things right. How? Well, there are no general prescriptions here--it's a \"call\" that needs to be made on the field.\n\nSomeone has to identify one particular trouble spot--say, a grudge between a respected player on one side and an equally respected player on the other side. If that gets turned around, the situation can be dramatically transformed. Someone will have to identify this trouble spot and take steps toward resolving it (*how* will depend on who everyone is). The idea is that there is always one spot like that--the \"dangerous desire\" here is the desire for supremacy or honor for which each of the two players is willing to risk the good will of all. So, whoever identifies and addresses this trouble spot is obeying a command from the center.\n\nHow so? He is remembering (and recreating)  the way a previous analogous situation was resolved--a teacher, or coach, or father stepping in and reconciling contending parties not through force but by modeling an equally honorable, and  ultimately more honorable, form of behavior. That voice and maybe gesture or posture he \"extracts\" from the past tells him what to do--*commands* him.\n\n​\n\nDoes that make sense?\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Dear Adam, I have a criticism of your points here, which is that, even if GA is correct, it feels like you’re doing the equivalent of trying to build a bridge using quantum physics. Modern society is just governed by things that are not reducible to ostensive signs, in my view. One model which I think serves better to understand western societies than GA is the so-called ‘JQ’. Take the example of an average Fortune 500 company in the USA. It might have been founded a couple generations ago by a guy, and at some point a board of directors was created. That board was composed mainly of group ‘X’, which was 90% of the population, and group ‘Y’, which was 1.5% of the population. So far so good. Now consider that group Y is highly ethnocentric, while group X is not very ethnocentric. What happens when it’s time to replace people? Group X decision-makers will choose people largely with respect to merit and % of population, while group Y will disproportionately choose people also of group\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe model of power I worked through above explains, first of all, why there are such things as \"universities\" in the first place. This institution is one of the best examples of an institution based on immense moral and intellectual capital, accumulated over centuries. Now, once we have an established, influential institution, and once it becomes newly elevated to an institution crucial to determining social success, an enterprising group, whether an ethnic minority or some other group, has a powerful incentive to increase its own power by hijacking all the power accumulated in that institution. Even if Jews are as ethnocentric as you say, that would not exclude the possibility that their powers of deferral, when it comes to running the institution, is greater than that of the gentiles they are displacing.\n\nIndeed, in selecting other Jews, they could simply be selecting those exhibiting greater capacity for deferral. At the other extreme would be the possibility that Jews have figured out some mechanism for controlling the institution against the best interests of the institution itself--just like a group of Wall St. traders could leverage the funds to take over a company, sell off all its assets, make a fortune and leave the company an empty husk. In this case, the Jews could only be running the universities into the ground, or making it profoundly dysfunctional in some way. This kind of power can't last for long--even if what counts for a \"long\" time for an institution with so much social investment as the universities is not easy to say.\n\nOf course, the actual situation could be anywhere in the middle. So, the model of power I'm proposing provides us with a good question to ask: looking at how Jews run the universities (assuming, for the sake of argument, your claim that that is in fact what is going on) will tell us what we need to know about the nature of the power they exercise. It seems to me a better method than relying on silly articles from the Unz Review. (If Jewish college admissions officer overwhelmingly and presumably deliberately favor Jewish applicants, wouldn't at least some Jews know about it? Is it a conspiracy without conspirators?\n\nOr just \"structural anti-Genitlism\"? And where are all those people trying to expose this scandal who have been shot down by the Jewish media? Presumably the non-Jewish admissions officers know something about this--perhaps they have all been selected out?) At any rate, the only way the model of power I have proposed could be refuted by any of this is if an institution seized by an anti-social group with purely ethnocentric interests nevertheless continued to flourish as the kind of institution it was intended to be. If Jews have unscrupulously seized power in the universities and are using that power solely to feather their own nests and reward their own they will exercise that power very poorly and we will see the results.\n\nIf their interests have been ethnocentric along with some other concerns as well, that will also be evident, if we learn how to look for such evidence. And this will also be true if, as if far more likely the case, Jews exercise significant power in the universities along with other groups.\n\nAs to why both parties have supported Israel, it's probably for a similar reason that both parties have supported NATO and Saudi Arabia and many other countries. Israel proved itself useful to the Western alliance by opposing Soviet allies during the Cold War (and testing a lot of US made weaponry in the process) and posing an obstacle to Iran in particular afterward. The turn toward a pro-Israel US policy came immediately after the Six Day war, in which Israel demonstrated its far superior military prowess vis a vis the Arab states, and well before American Jews had organized themselves along solidly pro-Zionist lines (that Israeli victory was a spur to that process as well). The US went with the winner, and the Israelis bet, correctly, on the US in the Cold War.\n\n​\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Thanks for your thoughtful response. I would like to respond to a few points: 1.  On Israel, your explanation simply begs the question. Israel has been in the western sphere, yes, because it was created under the auspices of Western political power. But why? Why was a tiny global minority able to constrain the greatest empires of the age to just give it land, political sovereignty, and military protection, all for free? Has there ever, in all of history, been another example of this? The only explanation for this is that said group had a vast degree of influence over the decision-making processes of the empires, a fact which only bolsters my original point about Jewish power. This reality _precedes_ the creation of Israel, and, in fact, is a necessary condition for it. 2.  On group incentives, I disagree with this view. I don’t think it is logistically possible for every member of a group to be thinking all day “let’s increase my group’s power” consciously. That may occur at the lev\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou're not really interested in my basic argument, which is why there is \"power\" in the first place; only in how already existing power can be seized and used for purposes antithetical to its founding purpose. So, lets reduce things to the minimum. Your theory seems to be that \"in-group preference\" is the source of power. So, everywhere we look, historically, those with greater in-group preference should have power over those with less. This would have to include ruling groups within an ethnically homogeneous community. And all \"in-group preference\" would have to  be identical--there'd be no need to make further distinctions here. You should then help the alt-right develop this theory of power.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I am interested in your model and basic argument. What I am saying is that I think you are overextending its ability to explain things; that's why I present to you a case of a group holding power which is clearly not able to be fully explained by capacity for deferral. I have no problem entertaining multiple models of power, and while I do think that in-group preference is critical (how can you hold power if you have no concept of 'group'?) that doesn't oblige me to advance this as the _only_ model for power. What I am interested in is establishing what compatibility these ideas really have with far right or altright beliefs. You will have to be able to address the kinds of things I have been bringing up in order to claim that your model is more general than mine, or you will have to concede that the explanatory power of your model is simply limited in its ability to diagnose all of modern society--which is fine! What a task that would be! But let's be honest here. Are you able to e\n\n[ADAM]\n\nA group with greater solidarity than another group can certainly advance in power in certain situations. In-group solidarity is itself a form of deferral--enough members of the group must have resisted opportunities to defect. Enough members of this in-group must also be better at some of what that institution requires than enough members of another group for that first in-group to gain entry and establish dominance. They must, that is, identify some principle, or center, in that institution to which they are devoted, and for the sake of which they defer other possible actions. We have to talk about what the institution is for, and what the usurping in-group understood it to be for. In that way we could analyze a specific situation"
    },
    {
      "slug": "restoration-projects",
      "title": "Bouvard on Absolutism and Hierarchical Consciousness Formation",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 28, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6duasf/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] LOL.  Well, this is damned funny.  Literally the opposite conclusion from the intention.  (MacIntyre's ridiculousness about \"deliberative forums for the attainment of a common mind that could rationally integrate private and lesser common goods to a comprehensive common good all could share\" finally banished to the dust-bin of liberalism, LOL) >we can't yet seize the state. So you think we should point our Death Star at the USG and bring them to their knees? And then we will instantaneously be living in an absolutist state? It seems a sure way to avoid the implications of this statement: >What’s interesting here is that this supposedly most tyrannical approach to government would in fact rely more than any other of the thoughtfulness, knowledge, and clear-headedness of the people. If everyone understands that a particular interpretation of the constitution, or of the Bible, or a history of mistreatment, real or imagined, by the social or ethnic group you belong to, gives you absol\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWhat I think we should do is keep showing that all desires imply absolutism for their fulfillment and that accepting absolutism means realizing that all desires will not be fulfilled and therefore are not all worthy of fulfillment.\n\nI can see why the argument I (we) are making seems like it presupposes mass conversion. My own thinking has changed on this significantly over the past year or so. I used to assume that peoples' beliefs were deeply rooted, in habits, reasoning and background, and that changing people's beliefs would therefore be a long, involved process, involving sustained dialogue, refutations, new evidential frames, and so on. No doubt that's actually the case sometimes--I would like to think it's true for me, and I think that I could show that it is, so I'd have to assume it's true for others. But it's obviously not the case for many, probably most, people.\n\nI began, at a certain point, to notice when I spoke with leftists (or listened to them speak wth each other), that the things they said came directly out of that days outrage promoted by the NYT or WaPo. Not the general ideas, but the exact same topic, even words. And this was from intelligent people--they were obviously functioning as ideological \"delivery systems.\" I can see from right wing blogs that the phenomenon is not exclusive to left-wingers--it's not exclusive to anyone. Not every media campaign works--I don't see any public panic over Russia, for example, although we still might--but in general the content providers do provide the content of most peoples' thought.\n\nI think the same process would work even more effectively in a reasonable, well ordered system where fake conflicts aren't constantly being instigated. Even now, it's easy to see that most people agree about most things regarding social arrangements most of the time. The divisive arguments are at the margins, and they are deliberately inflamed. Douse the fires, make it clear how they have been doused, and people will be much more resistant to attempts to generate fake controversy. That is, given a chance to focus on what is productive and beneficial in their social arrangements, they will be \"fairly sophisticated and disciplined.\" You wouldn't need to find some way to educate them all in advance of the social transformation, which would anyway be impossible.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Looking at the overall context in which that quote was written, you seemed to be addressing the concerns some might have about absolutism, in this specific instance that absolutism may seem to lack any defense against something approximating \"might makes right\" and instability created by competing strongmen.  You then identified the means such strongmen use to \"legitimate\" their rule and indicated that an \"absolutist population\" would in fact not be nearly as prone to these techniques. In this comment, however, you seem to basically reverse this claim here: >but in general the content providers do provide the content of most peoples' thought. I think the same process would work even more effectively in a reasonable, well ordered system where fake conflicts aren't constantly being instigated. That essentially the absolutist population would remain \"vulnerable\" to whatever message comes from these content providers; but, ipso facto, the absolutist message won't be divisive.  And this\n\n[ADAM]\n\nForms of consciousness are socially produced--perhaps we agree on that? This will be the case in an absolutist no less than a liberal system. People will always remain vulnerable to \"top-down\" messaging. The respective systems will produce different forms of consciousness. The preferability of absolutism in this regard can't be that it produces freer or more independent thinkers, who don't have messages imposed on them. A Christian population, imbued with knowledge of the gospels, an encompassing ritual structure, consistent, regular and intelligent preaching, will, all things being equal, be more resistant to scapegoating, vendettas and other forms of uncontrolled violence.\n\nThat wouldn't make them any less \"vulnerable\" or make the content of their thinking any more \"their own\" than that of pagan, or communist, groups. It would make them more disciplined and their thinking more mature, though. I'm not sure if we disagree so far. Yes, the absolutist message wouldn't be divisive, because it has no reason to be divisive. (Which also means that there may be plenty of resentment in the sense of feeling your merit or value has gone unrecognized, but that kind of resentment can reinforce the authority you ask for recognition from; but political resentment based on some kind of innate, pre-social right being violated can be eliminated.)\n\nNow, if zero people were equipped for and interested in an absolutist order, there would never be one; if everyone were equipped and interested, we'd already have one. So, clearly we are somewhere in between, much closer, no doubt, to zero than to everyone. We need more people to be equipped and ready--how many, no one can say. But a lot less than everyone. We are now commenting on a post claiming that we'd only need a \"small group with resources.\" No doubt a vanguardism that would shock Lenin. By definition those ready to take power are in advance of those who are not participating. My own thinking is that more important than how many people are \"oriented in such a way\" is how profound the crisis is.\n\nFor enough elites to throw their support behind a project that overturns centuries of political development, especially in a country like the US, the crisis would have to be deep indeed. In that case, a dictator who establishes order would indeed be something like a savior--plenty of people without a political thought in their heads would see how much better this is. There is also the possibility of an orderly transformation, maybe even one brought about through electoral means. We should leave no possibility unconsidered. In this latter case, the thinking of a large proportion of the people would have to be advanced, and in that case the leader might be less charismatic, maybe even a more technocratic type.\n\nThe real question--in a way it was Lenin's question as well--is how the thinking of enough people would get advanced enough under a system that discourages such thinking so strongly? It's hard to answer, which is why I consider the crisis more likely; but it is possible that in a weakened state counter institutions (like the \"Antiversity\") could develop traditions that prepare for social transformation. A kind of more or less prolonged \"dual power\" (to return to Lenin) arrangement is imaginable.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] > Forms of consciousness are socially produced--perhaps we agree on that? I tend to interpret this in MacIntyre's voice as \"found in the activity of communal learning through which we together become able to order goods, both in our individual lives and in the political society.\"  Yet you seem to reject that, so it isn't clear that we do agree. As to the rest of this comment, it is a pretty accurate example of the cost of Messiah-ism (or now you've indicated you want it softened to \"crisis management).  Everything is run through the filter, not of \"does this make sense with regards to absolutism,\" but \"does this allow restoration/redemption/crisis aversion.\" There are alternatives to investing your time, energy, and resources remodeling the shit-hole you're leasing.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThen we might as well sharpen and clarify the disagreement. Forms of consciousness are produced by the shared attempt to follow the ordering of goods dictated by the center. The primary relation is between margin and center, not among those on the margin. The center has both a \"figure\" and a 'locus.\" The figure is the sovereign; the locus is the reordering of reciprocities around the hierarchies established by the sovereign's displacement of the ritual center. Communal learning means bringing the locus and figure into closer accord--or, trying to understand the will of the sovereign as a will to order asymmetrical reciprocities.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, this is useful. Let's see if I can reciprocate.\n\nWhat is going on at the top, and why? Power centralizes, but it does so by simultaneously fragmenting. Why does it centralize--because it wants more or because it wants secure power? I think it makes more sense to think in terms of wanting power to manage the divisions, including, increasingly, the divisions created by the latest centralization. I say this because sheer power and wealth hunger would not generate the discourses needed to organize the low against the middle, and society in general--if the rulers genuinely want to solve problems and create more stability, we have a better explanation for the reasons they find useful (more equality will lessen destabilizing tensions, for example). This would also account for the \"high\" sharing broadly similar resentments as the \"low.\" Ultimately, though, there is a more fundamental anthropological issue: we all want a secure center, and can't imagine anything else until we can imagine that.\n\nNow, if we follow through on this notion of the \"little absolutisms,\" in trying to secure power, which I see as securing or clarifying sovereignty, the \"middle\" the absolutist would rely on would be all those in favor of such absolutisms in social institutions. Absolutism would restore all them in restoring itself. Schools that want to prepare students for entrance into professions and disciplines, universities that are interested in inquiry, businesses interested in providing a good product and providing for their workforce, police interested in maintaining law and order, etc. The perversion of all those institutions means that restoration might require establishing dictatorships in many of them--giving a few \"real\" professors charge over the university, for example.\n\nIn other cases, it might just be a question of turning the institutions back over to those running them, and letting them work naturally. So it's never a question of just guns and domination, because all of the institutions and traditions need to be brought in as participants. I would distinguish the ways in which a restorationist sovereign might have to confront politicized and demolished institutions from the social \"acid\" of the atomizing modern state.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, I accept the account of modern power that RF derives from de Jouvenel. What the state and elites think they are doing is more complex--I assume they think they are stabilizing conflicts and potential conflicts by striking at what they see as the source of the conflicts--more traditional orders that make smooth social functioning more difficult. They let the politicians, media and academics to work out the details--they can fill in the language from the resentments elicited from the \"lows.\"\n\nIntelligent people can find a lot of meaning in quasi-theological discourses of victimization and white guilt. They can feel they are transcending inequality, prejudice, self-interest and other forms of nastiness.\n\nI do think of absolutist politics as restorationist--not restoring a previous order so much as immanent orders. So, that's what I want. What do you want? We need some way of thinking about the relation of now and then. Or maybe you think we don't?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "auditioning-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Power Institutions and Hegemonic Control",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 03, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/68u1n7/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Dear Diversity Officer: Can you give me a list of what I can't say and what I must affirm? DO:  You must use common sense.  You're a hegemonic white male; therefore you must not show disrespect (knowingly or not) to anyone who isn't a conservative, fascist, neoreactionary, or absolutist.  And you must affirm everyone who isn't a white male. Now since this is the kind of question that, when posed by, say,  a lesbian, of Han Chinese origins, now identifying as Hui (Muslim) Chinese but refusing to wear hijab, takes up all our time, if you continue to bother us with further questions we will have to take that as an aggression against those who need our resources.  I'm sending Rocco and your supervisor to have a \"talk\" with you.  Next?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nPerhaps! We may have reached essentially Stalinist conditions, where the answer would be something like, \"don't be a counter-revolutionary wrecker, and as for what that is, you'll know when we come knocking on your door...\" They aren't quite saying this yet, and if they open with \"common sense,\" one can point out what a hegemonic, raced and gendered concept that is. The point might be to get them this specific, because they really don't want to say this--that's why the system is so Byzantine.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] >Power institutions want to be on the cutting edge of anarchist ontology, but they also want power to be secure. Being on the cutting edge is a way of keeping control within the hands of oneself and allies, but if the competition for power could be stopped, each and every power center would settle for a clear hierarchy (Facebook, Google, Mobil, Pfizer, Harvard, Disney, etc., don’t want chaos for the sake of chaos). While this is statement is understandable, it is derived from your personal judgement regarding the goals, motivations, etc. of the \"power institutions.\"  Can you see what that judgement is? This is relevant.  Maybe this \"thing\" can start considering military strategy at some point... >Have you ever read about the ways and means the Persians ruled their empires? How about the Mongols? The Romans? Here is Filmer regarding Rome: >For the Arms she had prepared to conquer other Nations, were turned upon her Self, and Civil Contentions at last setled the Government again int\n\n[ADAM]\n\nSo, it seems the question is whether the power institutions genuinely want secure power, because unsecure power seems to be their path to more power. But the destructive power exercised against other countries will eventually be \"turned on herself.\" If my assumption that the power institutions want secure power is the \"personal judgment\" you're referring to, that's more of a deduction from absolutist theory than a judgment of mine. Some institutions must want secure power more than other institutions. Now, you refer to a perspective from the American military, and perhaps it is, but I don't see that as military strategy--perhaps a strategy for domination, of a very uncertain kind.\n\nHowever the Persians and the Mongols ruled their empires, I'd bet it wasn't like this; the Romans, I'm not so sure, although they were undoubtedly far less reckless and more competent in some fundamental ways. Well, if the means of cultural destruction are turned on the US itself (which must, really, have been the first target anyway), and that leads to re-settling the government as a monarchy, then maybe that is what it will take. But it won't happen by itself. It may very well be that some of those power institutions will need to be very sharply curtailed, to say the least.\n\nOf course, I'm not sure that I'm getting your meaning at all.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Semi-unrelated, but do you think that the Roman conversion to Christianity was an example of high-low alliance? Was Rome particularly insecure during Constantine's reign?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't know enough about it, but I've heard it portrayed that way (I wouldn't be able to remember where). If so, would it be a high-low alliance that led to long term beneficial change (assuming one sees Christianity that way, as I do)? How else, in terms of absolutist theory, would we account for such fundamental transformation? I think we'd have to be very careful in applying concepts that have been derived from a study of the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity to very different social orders and historical processes. This is really a new field of study.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] > So, it seems the question is whether the power institutions genuinely want secure power, because unsecure power seems to be their path to more power. Not only that, but earlier you stated you were inclined to immunological analogy.  Have you ever heard of toxoplasma?  Short description would be that it is a parasite that infects rodents but can only complete its life cycle in cats.  To accomplish this, the parasite \"re-wires\" the rodents to become attracted to the smell of cat urine. In other words, you are also assuming very definite things about these \"power institutions\" goals and their alignment with what seem to be your own goals. >Now, you refer to a perspective from the American military, and perhaps it is, but I don't see that as military strategy--perhaps a strategy for domination, of a very uncertain kind. It seems very uncontroversial to state that Liberalism is used as a tool for foreign policy, do you agree?  Why might that be the case instead of outright conquering?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nOK, I think I'm getting closer to understanding. I'm thinking in terms of \"the United States,\" but \"the United States\" isn't thinking in those terms. I'm familiar wth MM's chinese elm analogy, and it certainly goes a long way toward explaining Anglo-American domination. It does seem to me that the elite stratum works through control via disruption (using equality, democracy, liberty, consumerism, etc.) but it's a very uncontrolled strategy--I don't think it's nearly as disciplined as traditional divide and rule tactics, which did not aim, I think, at dramatically transforming the conquered societies. It doesn't seem to have worked in Iraq, which now seems to be half controlled by Iran, and the  other half by ISIS.\n\nBut, more broadly, yes, these are global powers that are certainly trying to destroy the sovereignty of nation-states. But they're much better at destroying than ruling. What is their endgame? Are they so shortsighted and undisciplined as to not have one? Regarding the abominations attributed to the elite stratum lately, I'm not really sure--whether the claims are true, but also how much difference it makes. Their interests are what they are either way.\n\n\"Structure of government\" is not a simple problem. Trump has apparently not yet even proposed replacements for 85% of the bureaucratic positions he needs to fill. I take this to indicate a severe lack of candidates for such positions that are both competent and (maybe especially) loyal. The problem is \"staffing\" the restoration, and it is a problem we have barely begun to address. How to introduce the necessary \"antibodies\" into a sufficient proportion of the population--and without stupid factional fighting amongst ourselves? But it will also be necessary to have significant portions (not necessarily a majority, or even close) of the elite stratum capable of seeing the sheer destructiveness of the current course, and wanting something else.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] But isn't Christianity the arch-liberalism? Here's just a couple of examples. *Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.* (Matthew 10:34-37) *Do not trust in princes, in mortal man, in whom there is no salvation.* (Psalm 146:3) Saint Maximus the Confessor: *“I tell you”, said the Lord, “love your enemies, benefactor whoever hates you, pray for whoever harms you” (Math. 5:44).* *Why did He give these commands?* *To free you from hate, sadness, wrath and revenge and to grant you to obtain perfect love. This is impossible for whoever does not equally love all people, just as God loves everyo\n\n[ADAM]\n\nAquinas certainly is an arch-liberal, based on the passage you quote here, but it's the only one referring directly to politics (the Psalm advises us not to have faith in princes, presumably because they can't \"save\" us--it says nothing about disobeying or rebelling against them).\n\nIf we think about Christianity (and let's restrict ourselves to the passages here) in anthropological terms, we can see this higher, apparently universal, love, does two things. First, it encourages people to resist the urge to vengeance, which is to say governance by vendetta. This is absolutely essential for the establishment of central government. Second, it enjoins upon us resistance to the extremely powerful human impulse to scapegoat, to find a victim whose death will restore unity to a divided community. \"Love your enemy\" is just an extreme or perhaps vivid way of saying \"don't rush to attack whoever has been designated the one everyone has to attack.\"\n\nImplicit in this injunction, though, is that a central government will decide on questions of \"good\" and \"evil.\" And the resistance to vendetta and scapegoating, i.e., to immediate reaction to any injury, does create the possibility that today's enemies will become tomorrow's friends. And that doesn't imply anything about social equality, civil equality, or the erasure of borders. On the contrary, as a good Christian you are to leave those things to Caesar. You can treat a wayfarer decently without offering him citizenship and welfare benefits.\n\nI'm less sure about the \"bringing a sword rather than peace\" passage, but I would say that this refers to the \"violence\" of the conversion process, which will often require the courage to stand up to those closest to you, and even those with authority over you. One is to love Christ more than even the most beloved individual, but that will turn them into your enemies (if Christ were urging his follower to take the inimical stance, i.e., to initiate rather than anticipate hostility, I would remain puzzled--but I would also suspect that there are people out there who could enlighten me).\n\nAll of this requires and contributes to the kind of discipline required for a civilized order. I also think that the imagining of such a deity (first of all the \"I AM THAT I AM\" of Exodus) requires a stance outside of any particular normative, political and ritual structure. This is a much bigger issue, and I may take it on in my next post, but it seems to me the kind of God not necessarily required (the East Asians have obviously gotten along without it) but highly favorable to complex, layered, hierarchical, secure order could only have been discovered under nomadic conditions.\n\nNone of which means that Christianity, in some of its manifestations, may not have been politically problematic.--certainly, there have been extreme egalitarian readings of the Gospels from the Middle Ages on that have caused a lot of upheaval, and they can't all just be \"misreadings.\" They are narrow and partisan, though.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Yes, Scholastics were big on tyranny prevention. Are you aware what the title of 'confessor' means in Christian hagiography? Saint Maxumus the Confessor rebelled not merely against the authority of the Roman emperor, but against authority of the church hierarchy (which became heretical under the emperor's machinations). Confessor is a title bestowed upon the saints that are tortured for their faith, but not killed (those are martyrs). He and his ally Saint Martin the Confessor were both tortured by, now Christian, Roman state. It's not just him. Saint Ambrose of Milan stood up to the emperor. Saint John Crysostom stood up to the emperor. Then there's Saint Athanasius the Great, *Athanasius contra mundum*, etc. etc. It's basically DEFOO--renounce your family if it stands between you and higher good. It's currently practiced solely by that one weird pseudo-religious libertarian cult. Everyone else would consider it extremely distasteful *at best* to turn one's back on one's family fo\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI can understand martyrdom, where an individual would feel compelled to resist the command to violate some essential religious interdiction, but in even such cases there's no justification for encouraging rebellion against the king. The Church and King should always strive to co-exist peacefully, especially since it is overwhelmingly likely that faith will make for better citizens. Still, only one can be sovereign. Otherwise there can only be conflict. Who adjudicates between king and bishop? Anyway, you don't seem to be interested in the anthropological issues I raised--you seem to want to argue that Christianity is good because it's libertarian, like you, I presume--but what makes libertarianism good? Christianity?\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] >I can understand martyrdom, where an individual would feel compelled to resist the command to violate some essential religious interdiction, but in even such cases there's no justification for encouraging rebellion against the king. The Church and King should always strive to co-exist peacefully, especially since it is overwhelmingly likely that faith will make for better citizens. So, what would you do if king invented a heresy and started spreading it among the populace? Especially if it's coupled with persecution of yourself and your church? Would you not wish then to simply replace the king, with one more to your liking? >Anyway, you don't seem to be interested in the anthropological issues I raised--you seem to want to argue that Christianity is good because it's libertarian, like you, I presume--but what makes libertarianism good? Christianity? Oh, that's because I think anthropology is bunch of hokum. No, I am not arguing that Christianity is good because it's libertaria\n\n[ADAM]\n\nOnce I arrogate to myself the right to replace the king by someone I expect to be less supportive of heresies then there are no grounds for not removing any king for any reason whatsoever--in fact, you incentivize the discovery of heresies. Rather than incite disorder and create social chaos I wold suffer persecution or flee if possible.\n\nYou think there are such things as \"rights,\" so you must assume that humans are beings that bear those \"rights,\" so you have an anthropology, just not one you want to make explicit."
    },
    {
      "slug": "high-low-vs-the-middle",
      "title": "Bouvard on Institutional Hierarchies and Administrative Power",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 01, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6ej0mf/",
      "content": "Within each school there is a high/middle/low, but it is also true that you could say there are high, middle and low schools. Power to the administration subordinates the middle of each school (the faculty) to the high; upward power to the admin allows the power of the elite schools to be conducted throughout the system.\n\nThe project  of the admin is to fit in and move as high as possible within the system. When you say \"fully cognizant that what they are doing...\" the \"they\" is the faculty (but also more traditional organizations within the university like fraternities). Yes, of course the admins know that all kinds of interactions can lead to charges of sexual harassment, racial discrimination, \"rape culture,\" etc.--they have lawyers who tell them this. And of course they assume that having strict and strictly administered rules regarding all interactions will at least mitigate the risk--such rules and regimes are often the result of lawsuits, so it makes sense to use them to try and pre-empt lawsuits. If the point was just to consolidate power, couldn't simpler means be found than unleashing mobs on \"white supremacists\"?\n\n---\n\nSo he's really questioning me here. Obviously we don't have to squeeze every situation into HLvM in order to make the concept work--things can happen in the corner grocery store that don't fit the model. Perhaps I'm overreaching in trying to see how the concept might work. But I do think that eventually even in the neutral company the company will eventually take the new rules on board enthusiastically--and when they do, even if the company was not directly an obstacle to any government plan previously, it will certainly be more compliant to government plans in the future. A lot of attacks on the 'middle\" are just smoothing the path, not attacking that part of the middle in particular.\n\n---\n\nMaybe there's really no alliance between Harvard as a \"high\" school and Evergreen or Brooklyn College as a \"low\" one--I'm not sure, although it does seem the \"low\" schools are more radicalized than \"middle\" ones like, say, Syracuse, Boston University, etc. But I can't be sure that's the case generally. The lower you are in the system, the more expendable, and the administration can be empowered even if the president is pushed out. But, more generally, what \"projects\" are being blocked so as to make power \"unsecure\"--that's really your question. What do the powerful really want, what are they after? The HLvM model is persuasive to me because the \"middle,\" whether it be the demographic middle (white middle class, etc.) or the middle in the sense of autonomous institutions with their own criteria for excellence.\n\nIn general, the middle stands in the way of centralizing power, but it also blocks the ideological/educational component of centralizing (and globalizing) power. The middle slows things down, it represents interests that might be better served locally, or by scaling down power. Even institutions that are a bit slower in adopting the new terms are useful targets, because they will come along and can be made examples of. There doesn't need to be a specific, identifiable project in each case, but the increasingly thorough introduction of legal equality is the common thread. Legal equality gives administrators and executives a governing strategy, but it doesn't do anything for scholars, teachers, engineers, etc., i.e., anyone actually working on something specific.\n\n---\n\nThis is an important question, and there may not be a good answer in each and every instance. It's a broader question of whether to adopt the \"generous\" reading of power, which presupposes that those in power accept at least a modicum of responsibility for those they rule over. What do \"they\" (the Davos crowd, for example) really think and want. I think it makes more sense to assume they're not Bond villains who simply want to rule the world through sheer joy of domination. Climate change may be a scam, in order to gather more state power and wealth for the wealthiest corporations, and \"they\" may even know this, but they may also believe that the industrial system, mass consumption and increasing population are out of control and destructive and that only they can take responsibility for such issues--even if it means embracing a \"noble lie\" and enriching themselves (so they can do more good).\n\nIf you think about it this way, the sheer fact of people going their own way, having their own interests, defending their own borders, trying to improve their standard of living is in YOUR way, and you want to chip away at it wherever possible. And since you're trying to do this, you are insecure because you know that people see you doing it, and report on it, and object, and might vote for the occasional politician who can really get in your way. So, now you need to control opinion and information, which in turn leads to people developing conspiracy theories and more insecurity, etc.\n\n---\n\nWell, that's a good analogy, and I could see why \"this current iteration of absolutism\" would look this way to you. The way I would think about it is to think, there should be a parent or teacher here. If we can find such an authority figure, then he will put order in things by first protecting the kids who want to play peacefully and then arranging for some more competitive and \"edgy\" (but still controlled) activities for the more combative kids. Maybe the fighter can be made a kind of deputy, and turned around. The man watching, if we are already postulating he can provide a baseball bat, can step into the role of teacher or \"concerned citizen dealing with an emergency\" or whatever and start to restore order.\n\nThe trickier question is how to imagine this working internally. We can think of it as an originary scene. We need some kind of sign--some recognition of a center, and given the differences in \"leadership\" ability someone will have to occupy the center. That toughest kid will have to be reckoned with. In your telling, the fighting continues to escalate because the high and low are in an unstable equilibrium with the middle. The equilibrium needs to be stabilized. For this to happen, sheer fighting ability can't be the deciding criterion. Whoever can come up with a settlement, some way in which the playground can be shared reasonably (a distribution of territory), and take the initiative to implement that settlement, should \"rule.\"\n\nI actually think such a figure is more likely to come from the \"middle,\" i.e., the bigger kids who don't submit. He would have to gain the respect of the toughest kid, which means getting the toughest kid to respect something other than strength, something outside of himself, something he doesn't quite understand. (The movie \"Cool Hand Luke\" actually shows something like this--interestingly, in part by the \"resistant\" prisoner standing up to the toughest guy and letting him beat the hell out of him without giving in. There's a bit more to it.) In that case the vicious and angry child can, in fact, become \"well adjusted,\" as a kind of loyal deputy. Once this \"primus inter pares\" from the middle forms this alliance with the \"alpha,\" the situation is \"humanized\" (we have transcended the animal pecking order) and a good order becomes possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "neoabsolutism-as-a-contender-for-the-title-of-the-fourth-political-theory",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty, Subjectivity, and Historical Narrative",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 08, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/69z9qn/",
      "content": "[ADAM]\n\nA very good start. I haven't read this book, but from other things of Dugin I've read, he also puts enormous influence on tradition. I would almost have expected him to name \"tradition\" the fourth subject.\n\nDoes neoabsolutism propose a new subject, or is \"political subjectivity\" inextricably tied to liberalism? The point of having a subject is unite agency and process in history--the power of the individual advances, the power of the working class advances, etc. If neo-absolutism has no subject, then it would \"measure\" developments (and create corresponding organizations) in some other way.\n\n---\n\n[Q:reactionaryfuture] The scheme really helps clarify people's positions. All political positions and institutions could be said to imply a historical agent. So you can ask someone, what is the historical agent of their position, if they reply with some attempt to say class, the syndicate or the family they you can ask why they are pushing electoral politics which has (quite obviously in my eyes) the individual as the historical agent.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIt's a subject/agent without a narrative, then. Insofar as the sovereign is sovereign, he's immobile--he's not going anywhere, he's not overcoming anything, he has no antagonist. I'm not necessarily objecting, just pointing out differences. I wonder whether the notion of \"subjectivity\" relies upon some narrative of liberation from subjugation. If the sovereign represents order, we'd need to posit disorder for the sovereign to do anything (the best sovereign in the best state would do almost nothing, or at least nothing particularly visible), but why concede the necessity of disorder? One could say the chain of command could always be further clarified--but not in any single, predictable way, so there's little promise of a narrative there.\n\n---\n\n[Q:reactionaryfuture] I have no objection to your arguments here. I have been struggling to locate what would be the subject of neoabsolutism. The sovereign does seem a little awkward. Dugin points to this actually when he claims that prior to modernity there were no societies with subjects in this sense. I don't recall which chapter, but I can trace the section down later.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nAbsolutism's break with modernity might be so radical as to require a different vocabulary, one which doesn't include \"subjectivity.\" I think that absolutism enhances civilization, so something is happening, and it is linear to some extent (we can distinguish between more and less civilized, even if there are many ways of being civilized), so there are narratives, just not of struggle, liberation and self-transcendence, ending in some apocalyptic upheaval and denouement. What really happens under absolutism, I think, is that traditions that were tacitly accepted by the sovereign come to be recognized, named and cultivated by the sovereign.\n\nEverything aims at being \"titled,\" but there are always more things and there's no illusion that everything will be titled once and for all. The sovereign is at the center of this process, but not as subject or \"protagonist,\" it seems to me--just like the Bible isn't really \"about\" God. But we might be able to see it as an open-ended asymmetrical dialogue between sovereign and subjects. The will of the sovereign is increasingly embedded in the traditions he acknowledges, while becoming more expansive and forward looking as a result. The difference with modernity, then, is that we see no end to to it, want no end to it, and don't imagine or desire that future developments would be unrecognizable to us now. Maybe the postmodern notion of little vs. grand narratives is relevant here.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] >Absolutism's break with modernity might be so radical as to require a different vocabulary, one which doesn't include \"subjectivity.\" Finally.  The way absolutism is currently being formulated your statement seems to follow.  The question is, does this in any way seem to model reality (humans that do not exhibit subjectivity?). This is the ever present danger when discussing Power.  You're abstracting so far off the ground about some things (this discussion being an example) that it becomes utterly un-anchored to any referents in reality. You've done so much excellent work  from the perspective of the originary scene etc. but it often seems completely forgotten at points. Eg. from the GA perspective aren't all the subjects of communism, liberalism, etc. simply the \"resentful\" actor according to the historical scheme and the historical process is the narrative of their power increase and the resented parties' decrease (to say nothing of the accuracy of this accounting, but that is\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIn a sense, the question you are asking is whether absolutism is utopian from the standpoint of GA. Successful absolutism would eliminate resentment as a motive force of history, but how is that possible in terms of mimetic theory and originary thinking? There is, I find, a persistent ambiguity and ambivalence in Gans's thinking about resentment: it sometimes figures as a destructive force, to be minimized (but why not, then, ultimately eliminated?); sometimes as productive of ethics, esthetics and economic development. Maybe there are different modes of resentment, or different modes of \"framing\" or \"channeling\" it.\n\nI would probably be ready to use, for absolutism, the terms Gans using for discussing the market economy: it \"recycles\" resentment in productive ways. All the forms of resentment--\"jealousy,\" \"envy,\" \"ambition\" and the rest--are ultimately resentment toward the center before they are directed at other individuals. It is the center that has not given us our \"due.\" Sovereignty contains this resentment by establishing means of recognizing it where possible and defusing or suppressing it when necessary. Absolutism is crucial first of all as a statement of reality, rather than aspiration: there is a central power, originating in the Big Man.\n\nThat's what I understand by \"absolutist ontology.\" The question then is whether that central power is to be secure and coherent: can consequential and measurable decisions be seen to be issuing from it? The more coherent central power, the more resentment can be recycled productively--the market, I believe, cannot in fact do this--to the extent that \"the market\" even refers to something real. \"Life\" doesn't have to mean \"tragedy\" or \"rises and falls\"--it can mean increased discipline and increasing identification and formalization of hierarchies and differences. It can mean more effort expended usefully and beneficially and less energy wasted on stupid fighting. But there must also be an abstractness to such discussions--theorizing is at the very least simulating responses to all the questions that will come our way the more we engage with other positions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-counter-inquisition-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Authority, Sexual Regulation, and Centers",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Dec 27, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/GABlog/comments/7ma41o/",
      "content": "[Q:laskitude] Dear AK, it does not appear possible anymore to both comment and see the text 'pon which one comments... in fact, it does not appear poss to read the post here on Reddit at all now - just switches back everytime to the anthropoetics venue... am I stupidly overlooking something? Christmas has come and gone and I'm still thinking about what you wrote in 'moral thresholds', wanting to engage on that somehow, and wanting also to embark at some point on a whole new year re-read of crucial AK postings.. would even dearly appreciate a 'guide' to which of these you yourself consider to be most indispensable... just confronting the sheer bulk of what you have written is, for this wastrel at least, quite intimidating!! Oh yes and on the way to here I encountered this heading for an archived post, that I wondered if directed your way at the time, and how you went about answering it? It's never less than weird how utterly intrigued I am by such questions, and whether in fact they are susceptible o\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, that's the way it works--the link is to another website--but I suppose you could just keep two windows open.\n\nFor me the most important posts are the ones where I make originary grammar do some work, and write directly in terms of ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative articulations. That's ultimately the project, even if I still haven't found a way of completely integrating the spatial vocabulary (center/margin) into the grammar. But it may be that center, as center of shared attention, is the single extra-linguistic term needed to make the grammar work.\n\nI came across an essay on Girard by a really real anthropologist named C.R. Hallpike, who is actually quite interesting in his own right--he treats Girard like some clueless literary theorist who wandered off into areas he has no business dealing with. He thinks Girard just embarrasses himself, and anyone who takes him seriously. I don't think Gans even registers. (I'm actually going to use that essay for the Intro to the new, streamlined TOOL--it provides a good way into a discussion of what it is about the anthropological imagination that makes it impossible to register Gans.)\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] Present an Anti with a hypothetical child who is sexually experienced, who is knowledgeable, who is independent-minded and autonomous, who lives in a society where adult-child intimacy is licit and who is eager to engage in intimacy with an adult. Ask him ”Can that child consent to a relationship with an adult?”. Furnishing us with a prime example of begging the question, his answer will be “No, of course she can’t! She’s a child!”\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWe're starting from different places here--you from a liberationist and me from a \"centralist\" position. You are focused on \"consent\" because you want to maximize liberation, sexual and, presumably, otherwise. My starting point is that centers are to be preserved. So, regarding matters sexual, I start from the following, it seems to me incontestable, assumptions: one, children will be subject to the authority of adults in some manner until such time, decided within that social order, they become adults, i.e., fully participating members in society; two, every social order will regulate sexual interactions within its members, one way or another--whether through arranged marriage and the law of the father, or constantly morphing sexual assault, harassment and rape law, or anything in between.\n\nSo, adult responsibility for children's sexuality will be determined by the broader mode of sexual regulation which the children will be subject to as adults. In more traditional orders, things are fairly simple: the only licensed sexual behavior takes place in marriage, which therefore happens early and is tightly embedded in all other social relations. The parents, and adult guardians more generally, are therefore responsible for making sure that young people are pure before they enter marriage, and plenty of social norms and institutions collaborate to ensure this, allowing, of course, for some \"remissions\" or \"hypocrisy\" here and there.\n\nModernity overthrows all this and, in matters sexual among all others, introduces \"consent\" as the \"ceremony\" or \"ritual\" that legitimate a sexual encounter. Of course, this first all meant the right to choose a marriage partner, rather than having one chosen by your family--but \"consent,\" like its cousins \"freedom\" and \"equality,\" is a viral concept--it automatically lends itself to the question, if here, why not there? So, while you want to enter deep into the metaphysics of \"consent,\" I consider it a fabricated and fundamentally incoherent category, and therefore want to take it off the table. We will never be able to agree on what counts as markers of consent, what counts as more or less subtle coercion, etc.--and so such things will be determined by political power and the ingenuity of lawyers.\n\nNow, the issue of children in particular lies in the fact that parents are still responsible for children, but without any consensus, much less institutional affirmation, of what this responsibility is for--what does it mean to raise children so as to become \"suitable\" adults? You will receive a different answer to this question from everyone you ask. Moreover, parents' responsibility had become both more extensive and high stakes (you have to think about drug use, and nutrition, and allergies and self-esteem, and bullying, etc.--all terms that are sharply contested) while also being constrained in unpredictable ways (under what conditions can a child be removed from a home with \"unfit\" parents? no one really knows for sure).\n\nSo, the safest thing for a parent is to insulate their children from contact with and knowledge of the world other than that sanctioned by whatever passes as an authority at the moment. Obviously, in this context, it would be insane for a parent to make his or her child \"available\" for sexual initiation with unrelated adults. If it's insane to do so, there's no point to reason about it--in fact, anyone who wants to reason about it should be treated with the highest degree of suspicion. And this is the case whether none, some or all of what you say is true. As I said, I have my own reasons for not entering this reasoning.\n\nYou need to imagine a very different social order for your understanding of consent and childhood sexuality to prevail--a non-WEIRD society, presumably. I don't think it will be a possible or, if possible, better society. I think a reconstruction of monogamy in such a way as to both limit choices and enforce the consequences of those choices is the better approach.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] well, I'd have to say that I am more than somewhat (get ready) bamboozled by all this, and am wondering if 'twas not your intent to bamboozle? Again, I am flummoxed by how exceedingly, surpassingly difficult it is for me to even begin reconciling in my thought the intimate, utterly generative dynamics of language (the very same language with which I believe we ought indeed be able to shift the pre-confounded 'starting-places' of \"centralism\" and \"liberationism\") & exchange, on which you expound like no other, and the kind of recourse to fixed categories, more-or-less institutional in all of their parts, that you evince here. Most especially, with the reality that these are simultaneously by-productive of more victimary rhetoric than almost anything else I can think of, the *bambina* of course being heralded from sea to scalding sea as *victim par excellence*. Where, oh where to start... \"Now, the issue of children in particular lies in the fact that parents are still responsible for c\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou're not really addressing what I see as the \"central\" issue here: one, children will be under the authority of adults until such time as they are deemed adults themselves; two, sexuality will be regulated; and, we can add, these two things will be related: children will be raised so as to conform to and flourish within the regime of sexual regulation. This all can be and has been done in lots of different ways (there was an article on Yahoo yesterday about abducting young men for forced marriages to girls as young as 9 in some province in India--it seems to be a diminishing but still fairly \"normal\" practice there) which means, for one thing, there is no \"right\" way to do it which we can abstract from all these particular conditions.\n\nAnd you may be right that we WEIRDOS might be closer to your preferred socio-sexual arrangements than to mine--it would not surprise me at all to see open advocacy for adult-child sexual interaction if a certain version of the LGBT-inflected left gets more power. But I think the best, the most  \"human\" social forms result from transparent and predictable exercises of power. A sexual regime based officially on consent will unofficially be based on other things altogether, and will therefore be riven by constant uncertainty and conflict of the most irrational kind (it will be impossible to know what might emerge as an \"issue\" tomorrow).\n\nThe \"other things\" it will unofficially be based on will be (among yet other things) the contrary and complementary sexual natures of men and women--something that \"reason,\" unless unreasonably based on some assumption of a blank slate polymorphous perversity, should be interested in. \"Consent\" obviously can't go \"all the way down\"--we can't consent to having been made into the kinds of beings who consent or do not to one act or another. So, consent inevitably becomes a mask for other things. Embedding sexuality in broader social relations via various formal and informal sanctions seems to me to promise a much closer fit between the \"official\" and the \"unofficial.\"\n\nGiven that approach, a spectrum of possibilities exist, from Hasidic-style arranged marriages to what I think was the normal 19th-century (and well into the 20th century in many places) approach: small, homogeneous communities, where everyone knows each other, where young people know who they can \"bring home\" to their parents, where everyone has a fairly well established reputation, where young people tend to pair up fairly early (\"high school sweethearts\"), where divorce is \"frowned upon\" and made legally problematic, etc.--that's not exactly arranged marriage, but in effect it's pretty close."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-single-source-of-moral-and-intellectual-innovation-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Primitive Cognition and Category Formation",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 13, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/GABlog/comments/79vseg/",
      "content": "[Q:laskitude] This is what I'd like to try and say - the supposed 'stereotype to end all stereotypes' (paradox maximally intended there) - I speak here of the term 'paedophile' - gives the lie I think to this whole 'NAXALT' derision. Firstly, the p-term is one that needs no real-world, concrete figure whatsoever to fulfill its commission in the term's user's mind, it needs but the panicked notion of some definitively disproportionate phallus invading the sacrally-conceived space of something definitively lesser and weaker than it, generating thereby a pain to end all pains and putting everybody back, by and by, right there at Pain One (where we belong). I am seeing, in my investigation of the NAXALT territory, any amount of stereotype-positive fever generated with the \"easy examples' of a) misogynists b) rapists c) paedophiles given to convince us that we shall always find therein exactly those traits of which we have already conceived, evident in spades wherever we might care to look for fruities\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou seem to be questioning whether there is any definitive meaning to the category of \"pedophile,\" which amy then be related to the question of either stereotyping thus-designated \"pedophiles\" (as what?) or stereotyping a particular group (however delimited) as disproportionately pedophilic. Perhaps the stereotyping of pedo-types creates the false category; or the false category leads to equally false stereotyping. I'm guessing, perhaps wrongly, that you are objecting to the cutting off of certain desires from the broader continuum of desires so that they can be marked as both irremediable and deviant. So, if a 30 year old man desires a 23 year old woman, we would all agree that's perfectly normal; 22 year old, still normal; 21, still ok... but we will get to a threshold at which that 30 year old man needs to be conceptually and physically removed from the human community.\n\nAnd that threshold will be culturally and therefore political defined, but presented as if it derives from a natural and universally shared moral sense. The establishment of the category of pedophilia, I think, ultimately depends on some form of elder-younger sex that would universally be condemned. I think there are such practices--is there any individual or culture that would allow a 30 year old man to vaginally penetrate a 5 year old girl or anally penetrate a 5 year old boy? In that case, the word \"pedophile\" has such an image affixed to it--it rings that bell whenever it is used. And once the bell can be rung, it will be rung by whoever can gain something, like discrediting a political opponent, or an ex-spouse, by doing so.\n\nAnd who will be found to argue for lowering the age of consent or adulthood for sexual purposes--once there is a digital lynch mob out for Roy Moore for dating a 17 year old as a 32 year old, who is going to come along and say, 'that's perfectly fine, I think 32 year olds should be able to date 16 year olds--for that matter, I'm willing to discuss 15...\" That fact that very few (there are some, I've seen them) are willing to essay such a defense of \"dating teenagers\" marks this as sacrificial territory. So, the way to get out of this sacrificial territory (and I'm still not sure how or if we are really talking about stereotypes here, unless it's the \"once a pedophile, always a pedophile--and only a pedophile\" mark that seems to attain to anyone so accused) we'd have to think about all this very differently.\n\nI think these moral panics result from a crisis in the \"consent\" model of sexuality which has replaced the hitherto universal model of close adult and communal supervision of sexuality, with sexuality confined as much as possible within marriages approved and often arranged by familial authority. Those more \"archaic\" cultures had no problem marrying off a 12 year to her cousin because consent wasn't an issue, an open sexual \"market\" was never considered and sex could not be separated from all the family, communal and sacred ties constituting individuals in relation to each other. Once \"consent\" becomes the sole criteria for determining the \"legitimacy\" of sexual relations, everyone goes mad because the absolutely separate and equal individual who could consent in some \"confirmable\" way doesn't exist--it's unequal power relations, dependencies, illusion, mimetic contagion all the way down.\n\nAnd people can only legitimate the world of consent by singling out the most obviously \"unconsentable\" relationships, and focusing all moral opprobrium on those. It's like knowing that you're good, or at least not evil, by knowing how different you are from Hitler.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] Your concluding line unfailingly recalled to me the following declaration from AH himself. You don't want to miss the accompanying image! (The mustachioed Austrian of course has long been included in the paedosexual hall-of-fame). But take it away Adolf.... \"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation\". - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf https://imgur.com/IsAWydK let me see now... some of your comments did tend for my purposes  towards a sort of digression, although I am extremely pleased that you were able to make any at all! It is no small thrill you know when any correspondent (one cares to name) on the present face of this earth steers unflinchingly AWAY from the irrational (by which almost all are instantly enveloped the millisecond one speaks of the concepts of 'children' and '\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI've been reading the anthropologist C.R. Hallpike's \"How We Got Here,\" and in his opening discussion of the most primitive hunter-gather societies he points out that these people don't count past 2 or 3 and so if you ask them how many rivers are on their territory they don't even understand the question because each river is itself, with its own features, its own mythology, its own memories, etc.; the same with \"how many knives\" you have, as each knife is incomparable to the others, etc. This resistance to all categorization is a high form of morality and thinking, even as it has come to depend upon high level abstractions: each and every soul as a sacred entity is a highly abstract concept.\n\nI think the interruption of accusations of pedophilia relies on the accusation being made--that is, if you just say \"no one should ever be called a pedophile in such and such a tone and \"someone's age\" should never be a means of \"marking\" them as inviolate,\" etc., then a wide range of resentments are stripped of their name but will not cease to exist because each and every person also has those who are responsible for him or her. The better approach is the patient deconstruction of accusations as they are made--and if the accusations are valid, accounting more precisely for their validity.\n\nYes, Gans has instructed us that the \"market society\" was \"always already\" prefigured on the originary scene, but I disagree with this. Gans has never shown any interest in power, and it mars much of his analysis of modernity. Feudalism has not been replaced by unregulated egalitarian atoms in market motion--it has left a vacuum into which power has rushed, power which benefits from not being named as such. That 24/7 supervision is a large part of it, and every society, I would be willing to bet, has had it's equivalent to our antiseptic \"age of consent,\" with various initiatory rituals marking the different stages of maturity. In every community, it means something to \"violate\" \"children,\" even if what counts as \"violation,\" who is considered the real \"victim\" of the violation, and what counts as \"children\" will differ very widely.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] addendum:  ..so my thought would be something like (i'll try to truncate this)  ..the Innocent Child archetype primarily protects the (nuclear) family, not the child. That which must know its *place* long before it can ever know anything like a community. And in this protectorate it is then realized one has only one basket in which to put all one's 'emotional eggs'. Now no-one can opt out of the relationship, least of all the child. In paying endless lip-service to the existence, or loss thereov, of a 'child', we promote the pure idea or simulacrum of something that has quite possibly never fully existed as an authentic, spiritual entity in its own right.. If, as my former colleague RH has proposed, emotion itself must play all manner of role within the dynamics of an originary scene, how does one aspiring to anything like truly anthropological perspectives start to think of this disjunct between 'family' - invention of capitalism (von Mises) or maternal enclaves (Engels) - and 'commu\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou beg the question of whether the nuclear family should be protected. I'd say it depends upon \"from what,\" and against which alternatives. From the current movement, still tiny but such things can grow very rapidly these days, to eliminate the family in the name of direct care taking by the state of all children, I would defend the the nuclear family. If it becomes possible to recreate more sane overlaps between immediate family, extended family, community, nation and state, then I would be in favor of transitioning the nuclear family into this more complex web.\n\nBut the ideology of \"consent\" will always be incoherent under any set of relations.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] Summing up - or really leaping right over - all I have said thus far, I think it never less than an appallingly despicable situation that a so-called \"sex offender\" can never, ever pay his 'debt to society'. That would clearly seem to be the entire point of such a branding, and I believe it to be inhuman. But your assertion here that Gans' work is \"marred\" by its lack of reference to power, has somewhat overtaken (for now) my intention to present you with a careful analysis of the idea of consent (not written by me) that I believe can challenge - or at the very least mix it up irresistibly with - your apparent insistence that what is at work here in the current propagation of said term can only be first & foremost an ideology. An \"incoherent\" one at that. Under \"ANY set of relations\". (Might I send that here, or better via email? I think I must advise that I sent same some weeks back to the \"always worth listening to\" (hear hear) JG of Vancouver, and he refused to even read it, assu\n\n[ADAM]\n\nSend it here--it won't get buried,like in my email.\n\nI think I'm accounting for desire through what I am calling the \"imperative exchange,\" for which I am also very dependent upon that same E of C. Desire is both socially constructive and socially constructed--we can't treat it as \"natural\" and \"spontaneous\" any more than we can treat it as epiphenomenal or mere symptom. The way to take this into account is to situate it within language, especially the imperative, the most transparent linguistic expression of desire. Through the imperative exchange, we can see any particular desire in a chain of desire (our imperatives are extensions of those issued to us), along with the demystification of desire (but also its enshrinement) in the declarative."
    },
    {
      "slug": "mistakenness-revisited-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Ideological Abstraction and Centered Order",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jul 03, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/c8p64l/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] I can rephrase it even more tightly in this way: There is the restoration of attention and then there is the knowing to restore attention.  What are we historically moving toward as we come to consciously recognize these acts?  How are we not continuing this same pretense of transcendence through naming?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThis is obviously an extremely important question and I don't think it can be answered all at once--the answer will be determined within disciplinary spaces. But what I think those within those spaces will be looking for is the replacement of intrsinically divisive concepts with concepts that propose an order oriented toward a center. Think about how we would have to talk about social situations and decisions if we eliminated all the post-ritual, secular concepts: the common good, popular will, the greatest good of the greatest number, the protection of rights (or liberties), fairness, equality, etc. How would we actually talk about things in that case?\n\nI think there are two possibilities: one, a reversion to talking about social relations in terms of sheer force (but that's not really possible--loyalty would be the guiding concept of a pre-liberal order); two, we would have reports from people situated in specific places within institutions; these reports would regard how certain delegations of power have been carried out; and among those delegations would be those concerned with the maintenance of the institution, i.e., educating people or \"contracting\" with educational institutions. Now, this will never go completely according to plan--there will be mistakes and anomalies.\n\nThe real test will be whether the causes of those mistakes and anomalies are represented as being intrinsic or extrinsic to the institution. Positing extrinsic causes, like the incompetence, greed, ambition, etc., of individual members directs attention away from everything in the institution that allowed those causes to persist and have visible effects. The implication is that expulsion loves the problem. If you represent the causes as intrinsic, then you are representing them as genuine anomalies--i.e., they have emerged from the practices of the institution itself, and addressing them will re-discipiline the institution.\n\nNow, it is of course possible to write up a report that represents causes as intrinsic, with lots of \"we failed to...\" and \"we need to do x or y\" type of language. If you signal to people that intrinsic causes are more \"legitimate\" ones, they will find ways to frame them in that way. Of course, that might be a first step to actually thinking in that way; but this also means that someone else will have to determine if genuine anomalies are being identified. After insisting on intrinsic rather than extrinsic causes, you would then, that is, have to distinguish between more and less differentiated attributions of causality.\n\nTo say something like \"we weren't alert enough\" is really just to posit an extrinsic cause, while spreading it around (even though, clearly, everyone couldn't have been equally lacking in alertness). You'd have to point to someone at a post dealing with a new situation that was revealing in some way--and that's where the naming enters into it. .\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] But, you're presenting the accepting of originary mistakenness as a solution to social-political problems on the scale of a historical dialectic, not merely as experience with restoring attention. It's this perception and conception of a historical dialectic that I'm asking about—what level of abstraction is it occurring on and what makes it not a reification, metaphysic, or ideology?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIt's a discovery procedure for revealing the center, or hearing imperatives from the center. \"Ideology\" is a systematic formulation of one or more of those inherently divisive concepts: an ideology extracts and systematizes a particular set of imperatives derived from concepts like \"freedom,\" the \"common good,\" and so on. This divides the world into pro-freedom and anti-freedom agents; those who support the common good vs those who defend their own selfish interests. You can do this only by presupposing adequate implementation of a model (the freedom loving or civic minded citizen), against which deviations can be measured.\n\nThe way I speak about mistakenness in this post is in terms of a discrepancy between model and aspirant. If what is being modeled is most importantly the deferral of violence, the discrepancy revealed is always an incitement to violence, even though not intended as such. Treating this discrepancy as mistakenness rather than oppositional generates a new center that can be named, and this naming can be attributed to the central authority. So, rather than arguments over the forces of freedom vs. the forces of tyranny, or defenders of the common good vs. special interests, we have competing ways of taking some disruption or interruption as an occasion for further enhancing by differentiating the deferral power of the center.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] >the model is a person leading others, not a construct abstracted from any person Isn't 'a person' _in this sentence_ (rather than a definite historical moment) a universal abstraction?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, once the abstractions are possible, and we have to argue with others or examine contending models, we have to use them. So, we could say that \"follow a person rather than a principle\" is just as abstract (and therefore bureaucratic, ideological, etc.) as \"follow principles rather than persons.\" The very structure of the question you pose draws on an implicit comparison, which involves an abstraction. Obviously, such questions are inevitable, and part of what we're doing here is testing out possible responses to them. Getting into the argument on this abstract level perpetuates the ideological structure: it presupposes a disciplinary space in which we're examining and comparing models that are presented as universally applicable, so we have to choose one or the other.\n\nSo, rather than get into such arguments, we should work on the paradox of words like \"person\" which, because they can refer to *anyone* can refer to *everyone*. Even if we wanted to get more specific and try something like \"follow the this person-to-whom-you-are-bound-by common-pacttices-and-tradtions-and-tacit-understandings, etc.\" it would still be just as abstract. The problem \"we\" have in resisting abstractions is matched by the problem \"they\" have in describing and adhering to a principle in such a way that doesn't involve taking individuals, in specific historical circumstances, as models. So, we can keep talking, but in a less sterile way (because we're now talking about what we actually do, even now as we're having this conversation)--in a way that doesn't involve just trying to catch the other in contradictions.\n\nIt comes down to different ways of talking about things (we get caught up in the abstractions because we want to talk to people): on the one hand, the question is, \"is the king acting justly\"; on the other hand, the question is, \"how am I helping the king maintain the realm\"? \"We\" have to show that \"is the king acting justly\" only makes sense if \"translated\" into the other sentence (this is a much more productive discussion, at any rate). To take another example, think abut the difference between asking a student to write a \"well reasoned essay,\" on the one hand, and asking that student to \"imitate\" another essay (presumably one the teacher considers \"well reasoned\").\n\nA teacher cannot make present to the student all the \"elements\" of a \"well reasoned\" essay, and how those elements must be articulated, in advance of having the student write it, so the teacher's response to the student will be mostly pointing to things in the essay that are less than \"well reasoned\" according to criteria the teacher can never adequately \"formalize.\" (Or, the teacher can say \"great job!,\" in which case the student also learns nothing.) If you ask the student to imitate, it's possible to go back and forth between the student paper and the model, asking how one thing in the essay is being imitated by the student, asking the student to explain how he takes this part of his paper to be an imitation, etc. In other words, we get a much more ostensive-rich environment."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-deep-state-vs-the-deep-right-the-american-mind",
      "title": "Bouvard on Power's Self-Knowledge and Temporal Horizons",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 27, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/dmxja0/",
      "content": "[Q:Trumpspired] Interesting that Yavin seems to be taking an opposing position to much of what is argued here. >The ultimate cause of the *entire* Russian Revolution—February and October—was Tolstoyan *anglophilia*, an *aesthetic* impulse. > >... > >All revolutions begin as a fundamentally *aesthetic* break. The  first step in a cultural revolution is the birth of a new artistic  school. Behind this aesthetic must come an artistic movement, then  artistic institutions. These institutions, if they prosper, become the  cultural core of the new regime. Art is the spring, lever and hinge of  any real change in our time. In his argument the aesthetic impulse is the \\*cause\\* and not power centralization, who according to neoabsolutism would support the aesthetic that lends credibility to its goals whitest atrophying and starving those in opposition no matter how refined or truthful. Who supports and nourishes the institutions and schools he mentions?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nPower has to figure out what it wants. We can say, \"power wants what will help it stay in power,\" but that just rephrases the question. How does power know *that*? Does power want to hold onto or increase its power right here and now, or is it capable of thinking in terms of maintaining itself over a long period of time? There must be differences within Power--even the sovereign can change his mind, and the sources of information and organizers of social consensus can certainly change theirs. Transitioning from one state of rule to another is always tricky--it's always possible that mediations that were expected to smooth the transition accelerate it or drive it off the rails.\n\nIf we imagine a situation in which the dominant power center has reduced itself to increasingly incoherent centralization (such as \"everyone has to recognize the 200 genders within us\"), then it makes sense to assume some power centers would stand back and hesitate before taking this plunge. If we ask, what would enable this \"dissident\" elite to step into an increasingly violent power vortex and create a new order, I think \"a very powerful representation of reality that dissolves the lies we have been living with\" is a good answer.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Trumpspired] >Power has to figure out what it wants. We can say, \"power wants what  will help it stay in power,\" but that just rephrases the question. How  does power know *that*? Does power  want to hold onto or increase its power right here and now I always took this to be a largely automatic process, not guided by any reason but occurring inexorably over time. It is similar to a incoming tide eliminating sand castles, there is no underlying intelligence it is simply a matter of force eliminating obstacles to its movement.  Possibly with many temporary detours but leading to one destination. This is in my view the core insight expressed by neoabsolutitism, the problem lies exactly in that this central power is not guided by an individual human reason but instead simply continues it's onslaught mindlessly. ​ >or is it  capable of thinking in terms of maintaining itself over a long period of  time? There are a few egregious situations such as mass immigration in which basic human instinc\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf everything you say here is true, we'd be wasting our time, wouldn't we? (Wouldn't that serve the interests of Power very well?) In fact, it's hard to see how we could even be here--most of us seem to think we're getting at some of the \"objective truth,\" and as our inquiries progress I'm not sure that we're being progressively more surveilled and harried by the CIA. Maybe the CIA isn't equipped to discover what might be an idea that 30 years from now would lead to the abolition of the CIA.\n\nI assume that human action is always intentional, and therefore never automatic or \"natural.\" There is the inertia of tradition, and the weight of actions already taken that narrow down your options, but order needs to be maintained, decisions have to made--and the inertia inherited from the past always needs to be interpreted. Otherwise, what would be the point of distinguishing \"secure\" from \"unsecured\" power? If we didn't have a model of the use of power commensurate to its purpose and object, we wouldn't be able to analyze power gone awry. And we do have such models of power, even if imperfect: even the CIA must have some functional chains of command, otherwise they wouldn't be able to operate subversively and destructively; beyond that, families do get raised, some traditions, even flawed ones, get transmitted, production takes place, technology is invented and implemented, there are functional institutions.\n\nSometimes countries even win wars and achieve their aims--even if the aims are perverse, their attainment is a sign of functionality. And maybe they're not always perverse. So I also don't think it's true that our \"consensus reality\" bears no resemblance to objective truth. People say things that are true all the time. You think you're doing so in making these claims. And I would agree there is a lot of truth in what you say.\n\nThe question of our concrete circumstances is obviously more complex than these general considerations. We have a lot of thinking to do regarding the relation between internal and external influences and sources of power. It doesn't seem to me that an American aesthetic movement inspired, say, by French postmodern theory, would therefore necessarily mean the elites \"awed\" by those aesthetic representations are therefore just a branch of French political development. For one thing, French theory has its own American roots, inspirations, antecedents, along with some CIA and other funding, I would assume. But no country is an island (figuratively speaking) and lots of ideas ultimately have shared sources.\n\nIf power is in disarray (as you indicate), there will always be the possibility of dissident elites. If you delegate to subordinates in an incoherent way, for example, by commanding them to do things one of which subverts the others, you virtually command them to be dissident in at least some respect. You give them an anomaly to resolve, and sometimes the only way to resolve an anomaly is to change the terms of the problem that generated it.  And I take the implication of Yarvin's argument to be that powerful aesthetic representations are better at changing the terms of the problem than a more \"logical\" or \"scientific\" analysis would be. Maybe it's true, maybe not--but it's worth considering. But I, at least, have been thinking that some kind of alliance between a dissident middle and dissident elites is the most likely path towards change. And producing aesthetic representations, and even searching the world (past and present) for inspiration for such representations would then be an important part of what part of that middle would be doing.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Trumpspired] We’re not under surveillance or harassed as we’re not a threat currently. I didn’t say that power is in disarray necessarily, it simply operates under its own nonrational logic, exactly like the tide analogy. It always acts to centralise and expand. The disarray occurs precisely due to the obstructions that prevent power from ruling absolutely. The resulting disarray has an underlying logic and goals relating to tactics used against competing power centres. It’s pointless to attempt an underground revolution without elite support so anyone espousing that is wasting their time. However attempting to understand the forces at work is not a waste of time. While lots of ideas have shared sources, they need to grow in an environment that is conductive to them. This environment is determined by Power. If power wants to eliminate certain ideas and movements it’s trivial to do so. There is effective action such as the examples you give above but these are largely practical outcomes. A stan\n\n[ADAM]\n\nTo put it in very simple terms, we need to be able to distinguish between better and worse forms of power. This would mean that there are better and worse ways of \"subsuming,\" better and worse ways of expanding, and it may also be the case that power doesn't always have to expand. In fact, if it has to expand because of obstacles to coherent \"subsumption,\" then if power can subsume coherently it doesn't need to expand. There's nothing wrong with power as such, as power is closely related to relationships like \"guidance,\" \"influence,\" \"leadership\" and so on. We shouldn't, therefore, speak about power as a kind of out of control monster. If there can be disarray, there can be \"array.\" And if there's disarray, it's as a result of attempts to \"array\" things.\n\nThe question of what's involved in power ruling \"absolutely\" also has to be considered carefully. Everyone can do exactly what I say because I have guys with guns watching their every move (why are the guys with the guns doing what I say, though?); or, they can do what I say because I know what I'm doing and they want to accomplish the same thing I do. In this latter case, I'll probably say a lot less, but they may follow what I say just as \"absolutely.\" There's a normative dimension to this kind of analysis, and if we're not aware of it we can start to sound either like slaves looking for the right boots to lick or, weirdly, like anarchists.\n\nThere is even objective truth regarding people's understanding of the \"individual\"--notwithstanding the doctrinal individualism we are perpetually bombarded with, not all talk of individuals detaches \"individuals\" form social contexts and traditions. And people with more power and responsibility will on balance be better at seeing through the ideology, because their power depends on it. There is a basis on which falsifications can be exposed. Power could shut it down, but incoherent power will sponsor a lot of things that might go wrong."
    },
    {
      "slug": "in-which-gans-resentfully-recounts-how-the-only-reason-he-gets-attention-is-thro",
      "title": "Bouvard on Resentment as Cultural Productivity",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 20, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/98r9c3/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] /u/bouvard1 These self-therapy posts he does from time to time get a little tiring.  The main thing motivating my interest in a systematic treatment of the Right is spiritual and epistemologically Idealist, not resentful in a limited ethnic sense.  I'm not trying to learn a few language tricks to enact revenge on an enemy.  I'm trying to help solve the linguistic problem of the Axial Age. It's the same thing for Richard, who has been a Nietzschean before anything else.  The myopic in the alt-right still don't even know about GA.  Those who do are more religiously minded and wanting a re-sacralization, not an outlet for resentment.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf they're tiring they can be overlooked, right? There's no need to resent them. But keep in mind that for Gans resentment is not exactly a \"bad\" thing. He has said many times, and in important contexts (like his analyses of the Illiad and the Bible) that resentment is productive--productive of culture. Resentment is in that case the transcendence of revenge. On the originary scene our first resentment is toward the central object itself, which denies itself to us. On the other hand, sometimes resentment is \"bad\" for Gans. I've tried to sort out this question of good vs. bad resentments, mostly by myself since Gans tends to resist (perhaps \"defer\") requests that he get more \"specific\" or \"precise.\" My solution has been, essentially, to exploit the ambiguity of \"of\"--the resentment of the center, i.e., towards the center, gets converted into the resentment of the center, i.e., the center's resentment towards those who would violate it. In other words, \"re-sacralization\" is adopting the resentment of the center or, as I've put it, \"donating\" your resentment to center.\n\nWith regard to his reference to the alt-right, I think he's leaning more toward the \"good\" resentment because he is, after all, attributing to them an interest in GA that he obviously thinks everyone should have. Nor does he say anything to suggest that their interest is somehow misguided or in bad faith.  So, he's not calling them petty and vengeful, or complaining that they are interested in his work rather than someone he would be prefer. At the same time he doesn't know too much about all that, and he's a bit wary.\n\nIn the end, I'm not sure that he'd really object to your characterization of his Chronicle in your title for this post. He knows he's got his own resentments.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] >that resentment is productive What's been said is that transcendence of resentment is what is productive. And it seems like Gans is in more need of that, always rationalizing his own stick-in-the-mud behavior and lack of personal success with outreach (who could have imagined why, with so antisocial and grumpy a person?) as some kind of grand narrative that implicates even we who've found him and try to use him's motives. Moritz had said his vibe was subtly dismissive, even rude.  I think he just doesn't have the energy to be a logistical leader.  And I also realize for a system where relative consciousness is all we have, these are the best peaks imaginable, too.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nTo start with your last point, he certainly has neither the energy or desire to be a logistical leader. He really appreciated Moritz, which doesn't mean Moritz was wrong--it just means we're grading on different curves here. He's given what he has to give, and then those of us interested take it from there. He's turning 77 tomorrow--nobody's going to change him.\n\nOn the more important question of resentment, I think you'll find that Gans has said both. Here's a very old Chronicle (#160, 1999) called \"The Productive Resentment of Michael Jordan\" where we can see the complexity of the issue:\n\n\"Is resentment a “good thing”? The example of Jordan allows us to answer this question in a more equitable fashion than Nietzsche or Scheler. Resentment is the negative moment of mimetic desire in which one sees one’s other-model-rival closer to the center of the scene than oneself. The scandal that fuels resentment is denial of our equidistance from the sacred center, as guaranteed by our originary equality in language. In its simplest form, resentment is a social “instinct” that protects us against unequal treatment, just as our biological instinct makes us pull our hand back from a fire. When someone tries to push ahead of us in line, our “instinctive” reaction is not to let him in.\n\nBut since the origin of hierarchical society, this same mechanism can be adapted to more creative ends. Michael Jordan is not resentful of unequal treatment; his resentment is aroused by any hint of challenge to his superiority. We admire him not for this resentment itself, but for channeling its energy into his work with such ferocity that he has been able to maintain this superiority for over a decade on the basketball court, while acting as a decent human being outside it.\"\n\nSo, the resentment is productive insofar as it propels Jordan to maintain his unchallenged position as the best NBA player, and we benefit from this kind of resentment insofar as consensus regarding the \"best\" prevents an endless, potentially violent struggle over who will occupy that position. (It's not so much that rivalry within the NBA would turn violent over this point--it's a question of what kind of model Jordan's resentment provides in a hierarchical society.) It's interesting that here Gans favors the resentment of the \"best\" over the resentment of those who believe they have been unfairly served or treated.\n\nJordan knows everyone thinks he's the best--he's just careful not to yield even an inch. Gans might be agreeing with Nietzsche here in privileging the resentment of the achiever over the one who just doesn't want others to cut in front of him on line. But he sees it differently than Nietzsche insofar as he insists that the \"master\" class also resents. Finally, as you say, the resentment does have to be \"channelled\" into some achievement--so, the resentment, all by itself, is not \"good.\" It's \"good\" insofar as it's the only way to get to the achievement. And note that here, at least, there's no talk of \"transcending\" resentment--Jordan is not getting to the point where he's indifferent to competing assessments of his place in the basketball pantheon. (We might take the concluding reference to Jordan also being a decent human off the court to hint at some kind of \"transcendence\"--but that's outside of the sphere of rivalry.)\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] >that resentment is productive What's been said is that transcendence of resentment is what is productive. And it seems like Gans is in more need of that, always rationalizing his own stick-in-the-mud behavior and lack of personal success with outreach (who could have imagined why, with so antisocial and grumpy a person?) as some kind of grand narrative that implicates even we who've found him and try to use him's motives. Moritz had said his vibe was subtly dismissive, even rude.  I think he just doesn't have the energy to be a logistical leader.  And I also realize for a system where relative consciousness is all we have, these are the best peaks imaginable, too.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI just noticed this as well, from the same Chronicle:\n\n\"Resentment is not something we can abolish. It is inherent in the human condition and just as indispensable to our functioning in society as our biological instincts are to our bodily existence. Our love for our fellows is not a state of effortless beatitude but a continual conquest and refocusing of resentment.\"\n\nSo, is resentment \"conquered\" or \"refocused\"? Maybe both, but they don't go together so simply. That's the ambiguity I was referring to.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] As if there haven't been many, many greater psycho-spiritual prophets than Gans: Gebser, Wolff, Nietzsche, Evola, Guenon, Sloterdijk, et al..  What insolence. It's not like 95% of what is useful about GA isn't just cognitive linguistics and the Continental tradition more generally.  You, Adam, have actually only been the technical utility so far manifested, so even that isn't attributable to Gans.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nEven if everything you say is true, is there anything else to do other than take that presumably useful 5% and draw out whatever its organizational and political implications might be? We can concede that Gans won't be much help, and I'm probably a rather incomplete package myself--certainly not a man of action. But if my writing turns out to be of some use to men out there in the world doing the things you say, I will be gratified, especially if it makes their actions more informed and elevated. I suspect Gans would feel similarly."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutism-some-clarifications-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Absolutism and the Originary Big Man",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 23, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6cnk5v/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/print.aspx?article=1535&loc=b&type=cbtp\n\n[ADAM]\n\nRight, now I remember this. Aside from the obvious points that previous discussion touched on, like that McIntyre's political model is clearly only suitable for small city-states or maybe workers' councils, there's something more basic. Why, exactly, is it necessary for everyone to engage in deliberation over the common good? If everyone is engaged in practices within well ordered institutions, what calls for shared deliberation? Decisions will need to be made--to build a new bridge, or school, or reform practices of incarceration, etc. Whoever is in charge of those institutions will make the decision, and he will consult everyone who is competent in that area and, if he likes, representatives of communities to be affected.\n\nHe needs filtered information, not to hear from everyone (until when? Everyone has had their say?). Insisting that deliberations be introduced into all goods is the way to introduce division into the community--factions, parties, professional deliberators. A sophisticated and disciplined people will be good at the things they need to be good at and will be ready to be consulted regarding the issues where their input can be valuable. Deliberation itself, in general, is not a good, or required for a just political order. If everyone is familiar with all their obligations, they will not insist on compulsory deliberation.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] It seems like your engaging in the same process of re-interpretation and taking ideas out of context as the authors who wrote and are cited in that piece. >Aside from the obvious points that previous discussion touched on, like that McIntyre's political model is clearly only suitable for small city-states or maybe workers' councils, there's something more basic. First, MacIntyre provides a definition of politics which is quite different from what you seem to conceptualize: >Politics for MacIntyre is essentially the securing of the common good, which is \"found in the activity of communal learning through which we together become able to order goods, both in our individual lives and in the political society.\" Additionally, such an interpretation largely seems based on a bad-faith reinterpretation of his work.  I say bad faith re-interpretation instead of basic misunderstanding because the authors clearly aim for something other than a logical evaluation of MacIntyre’s statements; chi\n\n[ADAM]\n\nFirst of all, I'll note that your disagreement is mainly with this essay, which is what you have provided, for the sake of our discussion, as what I had assumed to be a reasonably reliable account of MacIntyre's political thinking--having, as I mentioned, little independent knowledge of his politics of my own. The conclusion of the essay is that for McIntyre's political vision to be rid of its limitations and contradictions, he would have to endorse a restoration of \"Christendom.\" As far as I can tell, you agree with that.\n\nRegarding the question of deliberation, I am responding to the constant repetition of \"small scale\" and \"homogeneous,\" which must recur dozens of times through the essay. If the main point is having a shared understanding of the good to which the political community is dedicated, why is this insistence so necessary. What \"homogeneity\" is referred to here that goes beyond (as it must, otherwise it would be redundant) the shared conception of the good? I assume it must be deeply embedded traditions, ultimately rituals (including things like commemorations, celebrations, holidays, myths of origin, etc.), and maybe kinship.\n\nThis would also explain the importance of the small scale. I also take it to mean more egalitarian than the nation state (liberal or any other kind) could possibly be. In other words, MacIntyre is avoiding the question of hierarchy, of subordination and superordination (and, therefore, force, violence, possession and property and sovereignty). The insistence on face to face deliberations is part of that avoidance. The members of small scale communities will deliberate with each other, as they're engaged in common practices regularly; those responsible for managing those communities, or the institutions within them, will deliberate with with other elites, and also with the more reliable subordinates (like a manager keeping in touch with an experienced and loyal worker, who is in turn trusted by other workers).\n\nAnd so on up the chain--the vast majority of workers will never have direct contact with a mid-level manager (or bishop, or dean), and none of them will ever get anywhere near an archbishop, executive or president. If you want to call this a deliberative order constituted by a shared inquiry into the good and common practices, I have no objection, but is this what you think MacIntyre has in mind or would find acceptable? Not from what I can see from this essay--it sounds to me like he means that anyone could talk to anyone else. If the authors want an excuse to engage in activism, what does MacIntyre want? I don't see how they're wrong to say that MacIntyre would have to declare for a Catholic order, and he understandably recoils from doing so.\n\nTo insist on the restoration of Christendom is to lay conditions on sovereignty, which would lead us back to the right of resistance and so on. What will count and function as a homogeneous community itself depends on the sovereign--it doesn't come prior to and determine the content and limits of sovereignty.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] >The conclusion of the essay is that for McIntyre's political vision to be rid of its limitations and contradictions, he would have to endorse a restoration of \"Christendom.\" and > I don't see how they're wrong to say that MacIntyre would have to declare for a Catholic order, and he understandably recoils from doing so. It seems to me he does not make such a declaration for the exact reason that such a thing is utterly ridiculous. Think through what you are saying with regards to absolutism: >What’s interesting here is that this supposedly most tyrannical approach to government would in fact rely more than any other of the thoughtfulness, knowledge, and clear-headedness of the people. If everyone understands that a particular interpretation of the constitution, or of the Bible, or a history of mistreatment, real or imagined, by the social or ethnic group you belong to, gives you absolutely no claim to power; that, on the contrary, power belongs to whoever can hold it within the po\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWhat I think we're doing here is clarifying our thinking about absolutism; what I'm blogging about is originary thinking as absolutist thinking. I am following through on the assumption that the Big Man, whom Gans seems to relegate to the background and ultimately invisibility in order to argue that the telos of the originary event is the market order, is there as much as ever. The telos of the originary event is, then, clarifying sovereignty as central power, as the heir to the center of the originary scene.\n\nReciprocities make sense because of central power; traditions all require the at least tacit approval and \"designation\" of the sovereign--this is the sovereign's reciprocity with the community. This reciprocity grows with the sovereign's recognition of previously tacit traditions.\n\nI don't know whether McIntyre's political thinking is incoherent--I know that was a claim Chris made. You suggest that MacIntyre has no objection to a hierarchical order, and that may be true, but nothing in the essay or in what you say about him suggests that he has much to say about that, or at least much he wants to say. On your view, his project is largely preservative, which precludes speaking about sovereignty. But that's my main concern here, so he doesn't help me that much. He certainly doesn't see sovereignty as part of thinking, as far as I can see."
    },
    {
      "slug": "p-ower-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Power, Legitimacy, and Collective Projects",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Sep 26, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/729erf/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] So, are you thinking now that a major crisis at the most central permanent centre is going to be necessary to transcend liberalism, or do you still have hope in slowly turning marginal centres one at a time so that the final occupation of the largest permanent centre is more denouement than total crisis?  Can a necessary crisis be only a \"minor\" crisis? I'm also wondering how useful you think it would be to speculate in depth about the course future crises might take, say in a once advanced country failing to maintain even a minimally viable demographic, economic, i.e., medical, educational, engineering, transport,  infrastructure leading to challenges to control and transform the national centres by interested corporate parties?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't think we can speculate too much on this. I think the old Trotskyist idea of a \"transitional program\" is actually a good approach. For them, the point was to make demands that made sense within the existing order, but that the ruling class could nevertheless not fulfill--in that way, perfectly legal, reformist demands become revolutionary if pushed at the right time and place. Here, the the approach is to demand (request?) sovereignty, and therefore criticize anything that interferes with the exercise of sovereignty. In the end, democracy ad liberalism are incompatible with sovereignty. You're asking about (to revert again to Marxist terms) the \"objective\" conditions and I respond by speaking about the \"subjective\" ones.\n\nThat's because the objective conditions get revealed by way of the subjective. NRx is opposed to activism, but I'm not sure we have a choice: pretty soon, writing the blog, or discussing alternatives to democracy on twitter might become activism by default--i.e., they attract the attention of Power and therefore become \"resistance.\" Of course, that might also mean it becomes possible to attract the attention of potential patrons. It's interesting that the more RF speaks about power and the core of everything, the more it becomes clear that the power we ultimately need lies in the thinking that we do, thinking that withstands the fluxes generated by power.\n\nMarx again: at a certain point, theory becomes a material force. In that case, we'll know where the crisis is by seeing where the thinking of sovereignty becomes essential to those who simply want to survive. And by that point, we should make sure that the thinking is solid.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] Yes, i suppose it is a basic point but we can't have absolutism unless it is widely desired, otherwise we just get another form of divided power.  The demand for sovereignty has a fairly significant history here in Canada since the anglo canadians were founded in good part by refugees from what became the US, the francos just wanted to survive as a people  when faced with immigrant waves of \"anti-Papist\" Ulster sovereigntists, and the theme became explicit when Canada left the British imperial orbit and became Americanized after WWII.  Sovereignty was the cry of leftist  and conservative nationalists who lost out to (American) liberalism and globalism even as the Liberal party which first took the lead in Americanization later had an anti-American leader in Trudeau the elder for fifteen years.  Maybe we can now learn that his leftism only served the empire.  And now an American populist and commander of the imperial forces is the nominal standard bearer for national sovereignty, so yes\n\n[ADAM]\n\nHow widely desired it has to be is an interesting point. The more widely, the better, but there's no reason to assume anywhere near majority support (measured how, exactly?) to effect a turnaround. An effective absolutist state will have the support it needs. It's probably best to think in terms of developing a \"spine\": i.e., a top-down structure that is very unified morally and intellectually and could hold an otherwise disorderly social together and reorganize it. The spine can be a small minority, if it's positioned right, and draws upon cohorts in strategic positions.\n\n---\n\n[Q:imperialenergy] An excellent post. Some thoughts. 1: Our recent post (European Minotaur of War I) delves into Jouvenel in depth and addresses some of the questions and distinctions you raise. 2: You write: \"Power, as de Jouvenel says, is credit, which suggests that the origin of power is in the ceding of the decision to one person, or at least a single will, when all have to adhere to the same decision.\" Not quite sure what you mean by credit. Power is command and control, command especially is the essence according to Jouvenel. Perhaps, what you mean is that X does action A and B (during a hunt or as part of a defence) and Y and Z \"cede\" or \"credit\" X with command. 3: Jouvenel speculates earlier on that the origins of Power lie in war-making among young men (gangs) who go on the hunt for women. 4: You write: \"  But is this because Power was “insecure” or because Power insatiably seeks to grow and extend itself? If Power is insatiable, that implies that there is always something outside of Pow\n\n[ADAM]\n\n2) Command and control may be what power does, but it's not what power is--power is this person rather than another in the command and control position.\n\n3) Its origins must lie in some collective project--and most projects in very primitive societies are collective. The question is who emerges with power, and why.\n\n4) Yes, opposing centralizing power is a problem, but we can distinguish between different kinds of centralizing power. I tried to do this in my \"The Modernity of Absolutism\" post. The fantasy of republicans is the militia rather than the standing army, and I don't think this fantasy should be indulged in any longer. The state is always preparing for war, but it's not any less sovereign for avoiding it.\n\n5) There may be forms of power that don't seek constant expansion--I don't want to define them out of sight. Indeed, in a well ordered international system, external expansion will be extremely limited for most, if not all states; and internal expansion reaches the point of diminishing returns and even counter-productivity fairly soon. The purpose of power, ultimately, is for civilization to flourish. There's no reason to object to well-ordered, peaceful little monarchies where the arts and sciences are supported.\n\n6) The unique terms come from the \"originary hypothesis\" and subsequent reflection thereupon by Eric Gans and a few others (myself included). If you're interested, it might be best to begin with this very accessible introduction to originary thinking or \"generative anthropology\": http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/gaintro/.  That should clarify \"originary analysis\" and \"sacred center,\" at least--\"permanent center\" is a concept I use for the first time here, as I am working on drawing out the absolutist implications of Gans's hypothesis.\n\n---\n\n[Q:imperialenergy] > Command and control may be what power does, but it's not what power is--power is this person rather than another in the command and control position. So this is a \"verb\" and \"noun\" distinction then? 3: Agreed. Jouvenel thinks it is war. We agree. It should also be said that war and hunting are very similar. The warriors of old were always hunting when they were not fighting. 4: Agreed. We are not against power or authority. Our project is partially about looking the beast in the face. 5: That is a good point. So \"Power\" refers to the power of States. Do you mean \"civilization\" in the normative or descriptive sense? In any case, we agree. Tilly, whose work we look at next, argues that war produced civilization or had a \"civilizing\" effect. 6: Thank you for that.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nA noun vs verb issue--maybe!  You're starting with the assumption that someone has power, and then you say, this is what he does with it. I'm asking what the social relation of power is. Maybe it's a being vs. having distinction. But I want to emphasize that power, originally, relies on credibility, and being credible means being able to defer conflicts within the group first of all.\n\nI certainly never mistook you for being against power or authority! But I will say that it seems you take de Jouvenel more as a permanent model, even, it seems at times, as a how to manual, whereas I think he wants to find some way to resist what he describes. Whatever the case with de Jouvenel, I'm interested in constraining not so much power as power hunger.\n\nCivilization in both senses.\n\nYou're welcome.\n\n---\n\n[Q:imperialenergy] \"But I want to emphasize that power, originally, relies on credibility, and being credible means being able to defer conflicts within the group first of all.\" Could you do some \"case studies\" of actual power-holders, chiefs, leaders, rulers etc to flesh this out? \"But I will say that it seems you take de Jouvenel more as a permanent model, even, it seems at times, as a how to manual, whereas I think he wants to find some way to resist what he describes. Whatever the case with de Jouvenel, I'm interested in constraining not so much power as power hunger. Civilization in both senses.\" Yes, quite. Wait and see.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI am very unlikely to do any case studies, and whether they would bear out one or another hypothesis depends upon how the study is framed. For me, it's a question of what language is, and therefore what human beings are. There's no case study that can settle those questions--just more or less powerful hypotheses that account for what we know language to be. My starting assumption is that humans are mimetic beings: we learn everything we learn by imitation. Imitation leads to rivalry; rivalry leads to conflict; conflict needs to be minimized; humans don't have a natural pecking order like animals, so our \"method\" for keeping conflicts manageable has been language, ritual, and then later cultural institutions. No one could ever have seen all that happen the first time, but there is no other way to account for things like rituals and language itself. I draw out the implications of all this for politics, and absolutist politics in particular, and I'm content to let others make what they want of it.\n\nI'm patient. I will wait."
    },
    {
      "slug": "how-does-your-theory-explain-why-christianity-was-successful",
      "title": "Bouvard on Competing Imperatives and Power Centers",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 25, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/ctzlzx/",
      "content": "Yes, and the complex criss-crossing of imperatives show the potential of this mode of analysis. We all follow the imperatives of dead people, including rulers--of course, some play a greater role than others in determining which of the more ancient imperatives get continued and which get cut off. And, someone told the new wife she should donate to UNICEF to save the koalas, the janitor becomes a source of new ideas because he's paid close attention to some important imperatives, which he \"transmits\" in new contexts (that's what an \"original idea\" comes down to). In the other words, the \"other sources\" also derive from power centers, even if less evidently. You're also right that we can't trace every single imperative everyone follows all the time back to every single source. What we can do is bring the ones that are most urgent to us now into clearer focus by identifying its likeliest major source and figuring out how it can be an imperative we fulfill in a shared way.\n\n---\n\nI think I may have accidentally \"unsaved your comment, so I copy and paste below before responding:\n\nPeople can often intuit these imperative already, but don’t always agree with them. Even if imperative is clarified, people don’t have to agree with it.\n\nState of mind that determines agreement or disagreement is not only formed by the aggregated information flow from power centers, humans are also complex biological organisms so they are also centers of new information creation, eg man looking for food to fulfill his hunger, looking for strength to impress wife and kids, these are contributing to social structure but they are endogenous motivations. In the same way that powerful individual creates and disseminates info in your model, all individuals can to varying degrees. Therefore clarifying power centers is not only impossible because you’d have to track down every individual’s entire motivations network, but it wouldn’t resolve sources of disagreement even if you could do it.\n\nTake example of immigration to US, this only passes because imperative is not clarified, appeals to existing moralities were made, even though it was bullcrap/deceptive, and only as morality and power dynamics is changing are more explicit talks about ‘white dispossession’ entertained. But obviously there was no desire for a clear policy goal 40 years ago because nobody wanted mass immigration apart from ones pushing it...i.e. clarified imperatives only work when imperative is universally considered benevolent and good....so why is clarified imperative a good thing for the rulers you are appealing to....at some level your model needs uniformly noble rulers and stupid subjects to work....both assumptions wrong.\n\n---\n\nIf you don't agree with one imperative (strictly speaking, you disobey, presumably without prohibitive cost, one imperative), it's because you are following another (which must be coming from another power center). There are prescribed and prohibited ways of getting food, showing strength, etc.--we don't make them up on the fly. Yes, each individual, even, in a way, the lowest in the hierarchy, issues effective imperatives. But if some people have more power than others, it means some imperatives are more effective than others, and some dependent on and derivative of others. Everyone wants the imperatives they issue to be effective--otherwise, what would be the point of issuing them?\n\nThe more power you have, the more capable you are of making your imperatives consistent and effective (\"consistent\" and \"effective\" are almost synonyms here). If there are enough people who \"disagree\" with imperatives to hinder their implementation, that means power is confused. Unless you want to say that imperatives flow so freely and diversely that they can never be ordered, which would be tantamount to saying there is no power, imperatives can be made more consistent and effective, from the top down.\n\n---\n\nYou could say that when people with the right ideology fight seriously to take power, everyone who agrees with them can help them fight. Then, if they win, society will be ruled by those with the right ideology. The reason I don't speak in those terms is that then we have to argue about what the right ideology is, and this kind of argument can't be separated from the ways various power centers leverage one or another of those ideologies. What everyone is arguing for turns out to be something other than what they were arguing for. Imperatives can be made clear when the purposes of those imperatives are also made clear.\n\nWhen I say \"purposes,\" that seems to shift us over into \"ideologies,\" because we can always argue about whether one purpose is more worthy than another. But, say, building a bridge is a purpose, without any ideology. You could tell someone to do something as part of a crew building a bridge. Rescuing people in an emergency is a purpose, but there's no ideology informing it. Now, we can say, but of course, where we should build a bridge, and which emergency do we devote resources to are \"ideological\" choices. We do get to moral and ethical questions--ultimately, what is a good society, or how should society be rightly ordered?\n\n\"\"Ideology\" implies partisanship, and that every question gets plugged into one or another ideology. But if a good society is one that remembers its origin, and if any origin is in some deferral of violence, how to make decisions regarding building bridges and sorting out emergency resources can follow from the chains of authority already constitutive of that social order. Then, if we're arguing, we're arguing about whether our rulers are taking care to commemorate the origin, and the better they are at doing this the more focused and productive the arguments will be. This is really another way of speaking about the clarity of imperatives--a social order founded upon a distribution of land, or of authorities, or privileges and responsibilities, or a hierarchy of institutions, because all that follows from the event of founding (who needed to do what to create order) will be structured by clearer chains of command than one in which the origin is disdained, or disputed."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-event-of-technology-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Probability, Circularity, and Theoretical Grounding",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 11, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/blrfg6/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] What does \"making those aggregated probabilities capable of expression in language\" mean, exactly?  What philosophy of probability are you working with?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWhen i think of probability, I'm generally thinking of Peirce, without claiming expertise in his philosophy. But here, though, I don't think  that's so important. What's important is, first, turning binaries into probabilities: so, instead of god/bad, progressive/ reactionary, true/false, etc., we have a distribution: something which one might have called \"true\" has references on one set of possible scenes, while we can imagine other possible scenes upon which it would have no referents--while we may not have a very good sense of how likely those other scenes are, we may want to keep their possibility in mind. We're interested, then, in the spread of these possible or hypothetical scenes, rather than coming down on one side or the other: true or false.\n\nSecond, making these aggregated probabilities (all the things we imagine likely, to some extent, as we clarify our hypotheses regarding possible scenes) capable of expression in language. It's not so easy to speak outside of the binaries: people want to know, on some level we all want to know: is this true? Good? Important? Instead, we'd have to learn to say that someone positioned in this way, within this history, this relation to some center, would say X is \"good\" under these conditions, and here is our own interest in hypothesizing that. But we'd want to be able to say things like this fluently, not in a stilted way, and in a way others could pick up on.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] I'm wondering if there is more to your claim that there is no human nature than what is involved in your ongoing critique of classical prose.  Is there more you might bring to a distinction between the humanist tradition and the claim that \"anthropologically grounded disciplines would have to work to make new innovations and inquiries consistent with the basic terms of social coherence\"? I understand GA's critique of the metaphysical tradition, the latter's obfuscation of origins, but GA also depends on the Girardian account of \"human nature\" rooted in mimetic desire, shared attention, centrality, etc. As you noted in one of the recent blogs, we have the scenic metaphors but also the grammatical essentials, all of which entail a minimal account of what one, I think,  might call human nature rendered in a discipline that is at least partially indebted to humanistic thinking. To take up the event of technology.  One issue here, which you discussed some time ago, is the technological con\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIt may be that \"human nature\" is one of those concepts that are intrinsically circular and grounded in literacy and therefore not worth arguing about. All these arguments seem to have the form of the one dealing with the relation between \"God\" and \"the Good\" in one of Plato's dialogues: is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it's good? We can go in a similar circle here: there are human constants--mimetic desire, the linguistic means of deferring it, etc.--but unlimited forms these constants can take. So, does human nature involve constant transformations in human nature? The point of identifying \"human nature\" seems to me to provide a device for arguing against something that would violate it--like surrogate birth, or other reproductive technologies.\n\nAs soon as the new practice is established, opposing that would be a violation of human nature, etc. So, we could use \"human nature\" in the ways you suggest, but would it help us in determining the moral meaning of a particular practice at a particular point in history? I don't think so, because it can't tell us what practice or figure will be violently centralized (i.e., scapegoated) under those conditions, and resisting such violent centralization is how we establish moral practices.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] OK, thanks, so I know you are in the early stages of looking for a better approach but I'll just throw this out:  when a court, as recently happened here in BC, tells a father that he can no longer call his child (12yo, IIRC) by her-his original name/gender and cannot counsel against transgender \"therapy\" because that would be a violent form of domestic abuse and would open him up to criminal charges, how might we begin to move beyond the competing violent centralizations involved?  How will we improve upon the appeal to common sense that the court, or for some, the father, is being \"inhuman\"?  Could we not begin by trying to show (can i really jump out of the circle?) that one account of [human nature-xxx] is intrinsically less violent than the other, that either the court or the father has a better grasp of the problem of mimetic desire?  How would you begin...\n\n[ADAM]\n\nRight, this is the kind of situation--fighting back against the latest crazy SJW initiative--where people want to fall back on \"human nature\" as a guarantee, and are regularly disappointed. \"People used to think the subordination of one race to another was 'human nature',\" etc. But, of course, what \"licenses\" me to say it's \"crazy\"? Once we get our theoretical ducks in a row, how do we talk about this stuff? Ultimately, I think we will have to break up the disciplines mandating these practices from within. The legal discipline along with the medical, therapeutic and probably other disciplines are all implicated here.\n\nIt would be necessary to show that what is going on in these disciplines is not inquiry, that they close off positions and questions, themselves legitimate in terms of the discipline, that would interfere with the conclusions we could show they clearly want to arrive at. Of course this doesn't help this father and the many others who will no doubt undergo the same ritual. If appeals to \"human nature\" were to help him, fine, but, while one of these parents might get lucky here or there, I don't think appeals to human nature and common sense could be anything more than a desperate stopgap measure. But the problem gets bigger--the very discourses and disciplines that transgenderism \"distorts\" were already disfigured by previous liberal initiatives--we're at the point where appeals to \"common sense,\" \"human nature,\" \"freedom,\" etc., are merely appeals to previous liberal depredations that are now defunct.\n\nWe're at the point where even small cases have the potential of putting liberalism as a whole on trial. But think about the kind of institutions of the Right that would be needed to sustain such an effort. In a sense, what the Federalist Society in the US did is a kind of model here--they genuinely transformed the legal profession, and are the reason there are justices like Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, etc., for Republican presidents to put on the Supreme Court. But this is a very specialized arena where big businesses have very precise interests that can be defended by traditional \"constitutionalism.\" Doing something analogous in medicine, psychology, education, etc., would be a massively larger project.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] Yes, but let's say we are building momentum for a massive shift within the disciplines so that we're reaching the point where some disciplinary and capital leaders want to sign off on a post-liberal democratic order - they realize they need a \"real\" \"human\" order - but, still, many others aren't sure about that;  are we then (or just now) providing historical and anthropological accounts deconstructing protestantism>liberalism>SJWism?  are we going to be doing then something other than saying, the last 500-odd years has been an aberration (from?), and that liberalism's success is explained by what were, at a queer opening in early modern history, extraordinary but not typical \"human\" factors?  Or are we building that momentum by building up, first in relative powerlessness, a new discourse, turning the old binaries into probabilities, a new imagination, that will somehow evacuate the need for a larger historical accounting to show the human weirdness of liberalism?  (I'm really asking\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI think we can speak about a \"real human order,\" because \"order\" is very different from \"nature,\" being directly social and historical. There may never have been a perfect human order, but there have been orders and understandings of order in greater conformity to \"proper\" or \"functional,\" or \"healthy\" reciprocal center-periphery relations. And so we can speak about \"deviations\" from that, or failed attempts to resolve anomalies intrinsic to a given order that provide our discourse with a normative base. Asking what the \"right\" order is involves both assessing previous orders against the present one, while using that assessment to identify elements of a better order out of the one we have."
    },
    {
      "slug": "question-for-neoabsolutists",
      "title": "Bouvard on Central Authority and Social Signification",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 24, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/b4vyo0/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] How do you reconcile the GA notion that 'there is always someone directing discourse', i.e. the NRX notion that 'sovereignty is indivisible', with the fact that we see competing power structures in the real world (which is also discussed in your model). Does the indivisibility notion only apply locally to individual decisions? As in, in every circumstance where a decision is made, some 'sovereign' is locally responsible for that decision? In my view, that does not scale up to implying that sovereignty is indivisible nationally. Or is there some broader point I'm missing? How would you explain something like a revolution in an autocratic country? Hasn't sovereignty been 'divided' in that case?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nHere's the way I think about it. There is always a center in any human interaction. In hierarchical social orders there is a social center and this position is always occupied by a central authority. All social activity takes place under the \"sign\" of the central authority, and all social actors try to make their actions conform to the terms set by the central authority--that's the only way they can make sense. There is always a difference between the social center and the central authority occupying it--the central authority is never a perfect fit. There is no guarantee that the central authority will exercise power commensurate to the size of the \"circumference\" of the circle he is the center of.\n\nIn fact, he never really will without the governed \"supplementing\" his power by rising up to meet, so to speak, his commands. Rather than saying that sovereignty is indivisible, I would say there is nothing outside of the sovereign, or the central authority. If the power exercised from the center is not commensurate to the circumference, then it is not as if those on the circumference, or the margins, are authorities over themselves, or free of authorities--what it means is that they will try to make the center \"work,\" or act as if it does work, or get mobilized by someone who promises to make it work.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Thanks, this makes sense. But I think I would need further convincing on the idea that: “All social activity takes place under the \"sign\" of the central authority, and all social actors try to make their actions conform to the terms set by the central authority--that's the only way they can make sense.” In our lives I feel like, while much of what we do is governed by a central ideology, can we really discount the role of just base instinct? (Some people are kind, some are sociopaths, some sex addicts, some infertile, etc; don’t these things drive behavior at an individual level?) And what about free will? How do we explain people who are dissidents of a system? Thanks!\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWhat it means to be kind, what it means to be sociopathic, etc., will depend upon  existing social structures--\"sociopath\" is in particular a uniquely modern concept (so is \"addict\"). Not everything we notice about human bodies needs to have a direct correspondence to something in the power structure--how we respond to and make sense  of such things always will, though. Even more fundamentally, though, we are members of a community before, and in order to see ourselves as, any of those things.\n\n\"Free will\" is a very specific (Western) philosophical concept. As a concept it is a product of debates within a particular discipline and a particular social order. These debates are in turn parts of larger power structures and struggles. It has a history, in other words. That doesn't necessarily mean it has no reality: where there is is a concept imbued with power, people will live it, and make it real, for good or ill. But there are lots of other ways of speaking about how people make intelligent and responsible decisions.\n\nDissidents of a system of dissident *of that system*\\--their actions only have meaning insofar as they align with and supported by others seeking to \"supplement\" the center.\n\n​\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] But we can actually observe a lot of this stuff in the brain though; the neurons are firing differently with people who fall into these clinical categories. Perhaps different societies would _call_ these people different things, but wouldn’t their behavior be inflected by their ‘sociopathic’ tendencies in _any_ society? Are you saying that our entire identity is socially constructed? Thats a bold pill for me to swallow, tbh, but I can see why that would have interesting implications.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou could track the relations between brain activity and behavior, but since behaviors are different in different societies how could you actually say, in a transcultural way, \"x configuration of neurons firing corresponds to y behavior,\" when there are societies that don't have y behavior. You could do cross-cultural studies, always from within a specific cultural space, and you could observe--very indirectly, of course--some common Medieval behavior and say \"this looks like what we call sociopathy.\" (Of course we'd know nothing about their neurons.) We'd also then have to not that they call it something else, and may value it differently. We can keep learning more about relations, and possible relations, between biology and culture, without assuming some final, comprehensive, transhistorical mapping of one onto the other.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I don’t think behaviors are different in different societies, the way we refer to them is different. Physical differences like T-levels make people more likely to ‘fight’ each other. Each society may have a different cultural conception of fighting, but isn’t that link (hormone level to aggressive behavior) embedded in physical reality, outside of language?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI think your biological determinism is going to be very limiting. Do high T-levels make a couple of unintelligent guys more likely to duke it out over a stray insult? Maybe. Do high T-levels help to account for medieval Japanese samurai warriors spending years of training and discipline so as to engage in a highly ritualized form of battle? Maybe in a broad sense--maybe the low T Japanese became priests and the high-T became samurai, if they could. But being a samurai also involves exercising a great deal of self-restraint. Is that also a result of high-T? Is it high-T channeled in a particular way? High-T balanced by something else?\n\nIs there a qualitative distinction between different kinds or expressions of T that we haven't recognized yet? We could call the bar brawl and a samurai duel \"fighting,\" but the people involved won't necessarily recognize the two activities as the same. How do we decide whether the differences are more important than the similarities (let alone what we count as differences and similarities)? In the end there's going to be pretty low ceiling on what you can explain by \"high-T.\"\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I can definitely get more on board when you say it like that. But even there I have some questions, like often in school I would understand a concept visually or intuitively before I got it formally in words. When I think of my car, a clear visual picture comes into my mind, not any words...is this kind of stuff considered in your model? Are you using language to mean ‘any means representation of a real thing in a human brain’?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes this is all language as well--even memories are social. We haven't addressed the specific kinds of examples you give here, but I'm sure some GA-informed cognitive psychologist could. Language is always scenic, so we always have a sense or memory of the scenes on which we heard and saw things that couldn't be put into words very easily. It would actually be an interesting thing to work on--there must be a kind of scenic \"aura\" to words that can't be put into words and would include images and models."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-central-imaginary-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty, Chain of Command, and Ethics",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 27, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/b5u51t/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] In regards to the first paragraph, I agree it's quite inventive to use this against the interlocutor, but practically speaking the difficult leap to make is getting them to understand and accept the notion that the method and result are not the same. The person wants universal healthcare and they agree some competent and powerful organization should carry it out. However, it is my belief based on my experiences with people that most, even otherwise intelligent ones, do not understand the concept of scope and roundabout means of achieving ends. When you suggest the possibility (implictly or explicitly) that the health tzar might instead choose not to provide universal healthcare (perhaps because being at such a height and having the perspective that the seat affords them realizes that some other more roundabout method is actually superior or pragmatic), the magic of your tactic dissipates. It is their inability to understand trade-offs, roundaboutness of means, pragmatic decision-making\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWell, first we need to keep our own thinking straight.\n\nI agree with your opening analysis, but the point is not to be pragmatic in that immediate way. It's a question of having a way of being consistent and persistent, over a long period of time, with many interlocutors, at various levels of understanding. A kind of higher level talking point, that can be modified in all kinds of ways as occasion requires. Your own description of the typical leftist shows what other people can come to see over time if this kind of question is kept in the forefront.\n\n​\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I like your argument here, but I’m a little confused on the conclusion. If a sovereign disagrees with your ‘someone should’, isn’t he doing so on the basis of his own ‘someone should’? Since actions have to be motivated somehow, won’t they always be arbitrarily ideological on some level? Why eat instead of starving to death? It’s because I believe ‘I should’ live; if a more logistically aware sovereign disagrees with me on that, is that really reason enough  to convince me to stop eating?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf the sovereign has a \"someone should,\" it's functionally identical with \"I will.\" Assuming the sovereign wants to remain sovereign, *that* will motivate his decisions. He will want a coherent chain of command present to him, along with the kind of people capable of taking up their roles in that chain. That's the opposite of ideological and arbitrary. This way, in order to avoid starving, rather than saying \"someone should institute full employment with a 15$ an hour minimum wage,\" there will be someone whose responsibility it is to ensure you and your community have the necessary means of living. And that someone will be in a chain of command leading up to the sovereign.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I agree with this, but the point I was making was that even if people are on board with having a clear sovereign, that doesn’t imply they’re on board with whatever the sovereign is doing, no matter how good of a vantage point they know he has. They’ll still value their own ‘shoulds’ over his in a lot of cases; should we have more immigration or not? That’s a normative question, not one we can answer by simplifying the chain of command to implement immigration reform. I think that while it’s true as you say that it’s not very productive to talk about ideology without practice, it’s equally fallacious to talk about practice without ideology. Why would the sovereign care about anything, including remaining sovereign, if he has no ideology and is agnostic to everything? He has to place relative value on things in this world in order to make decisions, and that makes him ideological.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou're right that there need to be reasons for what the sovereign does. It would be better to talk about \"values\" than \"ideology,\" because \"ideology\" assumes a general view of the world opposed to other views--i.e., it is grounded in, and organizes, systematic conflict. But we don't need to add some value system to a power system: there is already an ethics implicit in the practice of ruling. I have to shift to a someone different level here. The \"values\" or ethics of any system of institution is to be found in its origin. Any community has an origin, just like humanity does. In fact, any \"version\" of a community has an origin.\n\nWhat we are always trying to is commemorate the origin--all of the institutions of a society are essentially commemorations of its origin. The sovereign wants to preserve the origin of his sovereignty, and that origin must lie in the transcendence of some conflict, the deferral of some violence. Ultimately a community needs unanimity on its origin--the sovereign wants to preserve that. If you ask why the sovereign wants this, the answer is he can't want anything else. Disagreements and conflicts which impair and divide sovereignty are ultimately commitments to different origins.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I understand what you’re saying and sympathize with it at some level, but I don’t understand how to explain something like immigration policy with it in the real world. Surely mass immigration is an obvious route to ‘dividing sovereignty’. I agree that any ‘sane’ sovereign would act in the way you’re describing, but what’s been happening my entire lifetime is the opposite—insane. How do you explain that?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf we lived in a sane society, we wouldn't have to do this much theorizing, would we?\n\nThe truth is, immigration is not so hard to explain--it has its roots in imperialism, which in a sense goes back to the 16th century but the kind of \"invading the world\" that led to \"inviting the world\" really goes back to the 19th century. (Ancient Rome was pretty \"diverse\" as well). An empire has clients all throughout the world and many of them will be provided free access. Imperialism leaves open various possibilities for divided sovereignty, without necessarily making it inevitable. But the immigration policies of the last 50 years or so really exploit divided sovereignty and serve much narrower and more partisan interests.\n\nSo, you can be anti-imperialist, or in favor of a sane imperialism, and work out the implications of either approach. But none of this is all that hard to explain--in general, having a theory of how things \"should\" be implies a theory of why they aren't that way.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I strongly disagree here, and in fact I think your view on this issue in particular is empirically unsupportable. The mass immigration wasn’t a product of imperialism—the US had no overseas land claims when it began that project, for one thing, and Europe began its own immigration project a decade or two after the US—and centuries after its own imperial endeavors. Why wasn’t there mass immigration at the height of European imperialism? Why isn’t there mass immigration to China today, as they conduct a successful imperialist endeavor in Africa and South Asia? The fact is, the ability to fulfill imperial ambitions implies a certain amount of power, and having that amount of power implies the ability to shut down immigration. Which is exactly what most all countries did until very recently, for reasons that have got little to do with imperialism.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, these are good observations, but a few things: first,countries like England and France always had a steady flow of colonials into the mother country, even if it wasn't mass immigration, which wouldn't have been so easy from countries like India, Jamaica, Vietnam and Algeria before WWII; second, America's first mass immigration project of the later 19th into the 20th century could be seen more as a continuation of the original settler project, while post-1965 immigration is most certainly taking place within an imperial context, whether the US has formal colonial possessions or not. Third, and most important, we could and I think should see contemporary globalism as a continuation and intensification of earlier imperial projects, in which the EU, the US (or certain imperial factions within the US) extend their power through global economic and political institutions.\n\nThere was a geopolitical context even to such domestic processes as the civil rights revolution in the US, which involved the US proving its anti-racist bona fides to decolonized countries it wanted to draw away from the USSR. This is even more the case with immigration today, where different factions prove their universalism by abolishing all boundaries--in a way that benefits the most powerful transnational corporations. There could be other ways of advancing an imperial project, of course, and maybe China is discovering one--even if, as seems to me they case, they are much less ambitious and much more cautious than the West has been.\n\nMaybe we could be more precise and say that mass immigration is part of an imperial project advanced under the aegis of terms like \"democracy\" and 'human rights\" (which, as Chris B will tell you in considerable detail, have histories deeply rooted in geo-political struggles)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "it-doesn-t-make-sense-to-claim-that-you-can-turn-to-social-construction-for-mean",
      "title": "Bouvard on Language Beyond Evolutionary Reductionism",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 12, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/bzb6mt/",
      "content": "We actually have an interesting case of incommensurability here. You insist that language is a \"communicative capacity,\" just like other animals have \"communicative capacities,\" only far more powerful and complex. You have to see it that way because it's the only way to vindicate your a priori claim that evolutionary biology can explain everything. But you don't know, and can't \"prove,\" that language is really just a more advanced form of what animals have. If we think about language as *different* from \"communicative capacity,\" not just \"more\" of it, we will be led to other possible explanations for its existence.\n\nThe difference, on the one hand, lies in what linguistics have called the \"arbitrary,\" or purely conventional, nature of the sign--there's no reason for the sound \"cow\" to represent that particular animal, which means a community of language users must have \"agreed\" (an unsatisfactory word here) to have used the sound \"cow\" in this way. This implies an event, in which at least two people are attending toward something in some new way and letting each other know that they are doing so in a way that they could repeat. Such an event can't \"violate\" any biological \"laws,\" of course, but it is central to language and irreducible to biology.\n\nAnother indication of language's *difference* (rather than its *moreness*) is all of the non-communicative uses of language, some of which are more \"basic\" than its communicative uses (if we understand \"communication\" to refer to the provision of \"information,\" the usefulness of which is presumably already \"known\" by the recipient). A man and a woman stand before a priest, who \"pronounces them man and wife.\" What has been \"communicated\"? Biologically, and \"factually,\" nothing has happened. Nobody \"knows\" anything they didn't know before. And yet the two have a new \"status,\" recognized by the community. If two individuals greet each other in some highly conventionalized way (like tipping their hats) what has been \"communicated\"? When the leader of a town council announces that \"the meeting has come to order,\" what has he \"communicated\"?\n\n​\n\nIt may very well be that you will be able to offer elaborate evolutionary biological explanations of these practices in terms of the \"selection\" of genes that enable the organisms in question to \"adapt\" and \"survive.\" (The town council leader is really expressing his dominance, or whatever.) This could certainly keep lots of psychologists and biologists employed if you succeed in pushing out the more literary postmodernists. But you will come up with these explanations because they fit your \"model,\" not because you are interested in why humans have such things as \"greetings,\" \"christenings,\" \"baptisms\" and other fairly non-communicative practices. I suppose, like many other animals, humans construct abstract models of reality that they want to complete, defend, extend, and convince others of.\n\n​\n\nInterestingly, it is possible to accept both the originary hypothesis and evolutionary biology--GA, in fact, must assume that humans didn't exist at one time, and then they did, so there must have been some prior primate species that we \"came out of.\" Most people in GA probably more or less accept the Darwinian approach, even thought it's not strictly dictated by the originary hypothesis (it's just something we're not so interested in arguing about). Certainly, language would have made the \"advanced primate\" that invented it more \"survivable.\" But evolutionary biologists seem to resist the notion of *difference* rather than *moreness*.\n\nThis is because, far from being a neutral and objective science, evolutionary biology represents political and moral interests. These interests may be diverse (there are obviously liberals, leftists, conservatives and neo-Nazis who accept some version of it) but it does come down to what you indicate above--abolishing all talk of \"transcendence,\" aesthetic, moral, intellectual or sacred, in the name of a fully \"manageable\" human community. If everyone is reducible to biology, we can reduce everyone to biology. It's an attractive proposition for those doing the reducing.\n\n---\n\nYou want to call what is different about language employing language \"to unique human ends due to its incredible intricacy combined with high human intelligence, such as multi-generational oral data storage,\" but calling oral traditions \"data storage\" tilts the filed towards assimilating human language to, in this case, computers--your very vocabulary revokes the uniqueness you grant. You say everything is reducible to biology, but also that \"I do not think the study of biology alone is yet enough to fully understand humans. I like to combine the evolutionary science with other areas too.\" Until you've done the \"combining,\" how do you know? What, so far, seems to fall outside of biology?\n\nI'm not referring to your interests, but to those of evolutionary biology as a field--but, more interesting, where do you think evolutionary biology comes down on the difference between your own disinterested inquiry and the interests of the field as a whole? When some individual arrives at conclusions inimical to group interests, how do our genes know whether we should kill him or make him king?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "in-focusing-on-ga-has-neoreaction-moved-away-from-filmer",
      "title": "Bouvard on Language's Originary Emergence and Joint Attention",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Apr 26, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/bhf1u0/",
      "content": "You could first of all ask yourself whether language has to have an origin--that is, is language the kind of \"thing\" that could have \"evolved\" gradually, unconsciously, through a series of accidents; or is the nature of language such that it had to emerge in one fell swoop, \"all at once,\" so to speak, with its \"inventors/discoverers\" having at least some minimal idea of what they were doing. Insofar as language is qualitatively different than \"signals\" grounded in \"instinct,\" it has to be the latter. If we assume an event of emergence, then, we can hypothesize regarding more or less plausible accounts of that emergence.\n\nSuch a hypothesis would want to narrow things down to the most minimal, absolutely necessary elements of the scene or event in question. That's what Gans provides. If someone gets more minimal than the originary hypothesis, we should work with that. If you think language could have emerged through natural selection based on random genetic mutations, then you probably won't be interested in the originary hypothesis--but you might, then, feel obliged to explain how that could have happened--and why no one has yet gotten anywhere near a serious explanation of the emergence of language in such terms.\n\n---\n\nI already made a distinction above between the more instinctually based signals involved in animal communication and the specifically intentional nature of language--\"its \"inventors/discoverers\" having at least some minimal idea of what they were doing,\" as I put it above. Michael Tomasello calls this joint attention--the participants in an act of communication know that they are participants, that they are looking at the same thing--they can point to something, and refer to and therefore revise the act of pointing. Even the most intelligent animals can't point, in the sense of pointing out something. Language is not a signal and response relation. You can't get to pointing through genetic mutations. You can't get to two people knowing that a particular sound represents a concept. You seem to be thinking that human language is just a complex version of what bees do, or dolphins, or vervet monkeys, or whatever--but it's not. It's qualitatively different.\n\n---\n\nThe animals you refer to behave in the way you describe (and project onto) when they are trained by humans. They don't do anything remotely similar amongst themselves.\n\nIt is very important for many, for what are ultimately ideological reasons, to \"see no reason why language should be put on a pedestal.\" If you don't want to see a reason, you won't. You can believe that myths, conceptions of God, scientific inquiry itself, even something as seemingly simple as \"irony,\" are really all just incrementally different from whatever scientists happen to be saying the elephants do at the moment. You want to prove yourself right, here and now, do you not? Is that just another version of dominance struggles amongst advanced primates? At a certain point this becomes like arguing with Communists, because \"natural selection seems to account for enormously complicated processes\" serves exactly the same function as \"the contradiction between the forces and relations of production,\" or \"class struggle\"--it's an attempt to appropriate scientific authority for girding your loins for some political struggle.\n\n---\n\nI tend to agree that there's not much conversation to be had--although perhaps the bonobos and hunting fish are better conversationalists, and perhaps they are also busy picking apart poorly thought ideologies. I'm not going to read the studies you've found or take the trouble to explain how whatever these animals are doing indexically has nothing whatsoever to do with one human pointing out a shiny pebble to another. If you can't see that these efforts to keep humans and their language off their damn pedestal serve interests which are not purely scientific, aside from being utterly comical, it's because you don't want to see. I can't tell which evolutionary adaptation is thereby served. Perhaps you can hypothesize the path the horny female bonobos might take in getting from requesting some genital stimulation to dismantling ideologies."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-response-and-continuation-aspiration",
      "title": "Bouvard on Mimesis, Architecture, and Originary Scenes",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 05, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/gdkb1m/",
      "content": "[Q:creativeparadox] I think Aspiration is a great article, but I would take it a step further. In the article it talks about these, what I would just call, broad cultural forms. Pedagogy is a good way of thinking about it; however, it lacks the emphasis that we can point to specific cultural rites and rituals. This has been the common complaint against GA for a while now, that it doesn't have this \"specific\" cultural perspective. We can talk and gesture to this fact that we're all on a scene, but what good does that \"pedagogy\" take us? As you say in the article, we have to be aware of how we cancel ourselves. This was the exact complaint leveraged against a therapeutic(needlessly repetitive) \"Christian GA\". Of course we must, as you posit, render the imagination productive; but I'm a bit adverse to that type of language. Ironically it seems to evoke some type of declarative fantasy, in my eyes(not that I'm even disagreeing with it). What isn't emphasized is this need for \"present-ness\". For a bit of a\n\n[ADAM]\n\nOur \"mimisms\" will always be located, and they can be traced as far back as might be necessary to pursue a particular pedagogical project. It may very well be the case that in our gestures and habits we can find traces of the rituals of our forefathers and ancestors. And that would also mean those gestures and habits are inflected by those ancestors having been in certain places, under certain conditions. In fact, that must be the case, even if we can't say in advance to what degree, or with what implications. Any social theory has to be formal at least to the extent that one couldn't make a list of all the different peoples and itemize the precise history of practices that manifests itself today in each of them. But nothing is off the table, and originary thinking should make room for it all, from the nomadic to the rooted or, in Deleuze's terms, the rhizomatic to the arboreal. GA will hopefully get filled in in ways we can't imagine now.\n\nIn addition to Sloterdijk, it seems to me there is a massive movement in contemporary social thought towards situating humans directly within the environmental and \"mediatic\" conditions producing them--to placing us directly inside the machinery, so to speak. This is a very productive movement, and a dramatic turn away from humanism and metaphysics, and I want to join it.\n\nBut the pedagogy of and on a scene transforms the scene, and that remains the most fundamental, however the scene is constructed and imagined. Maybe it seems passive or therapeutic, but it's like the years of experimental work that makes the big discoveries possible. Like i've said, I see it as building a kind of social \"spine\" that can replace the old, crippled one.\n\n---\n\n[Q:creativeparadox] Yeah, I mean ill be willing to bend on the transfiguring of the scene. Some of the language I've been playing around with are architecture(arborescents) and infrastructure(rhizomes). Both of which become relevant with that environmental movement you mention. You not only have the focus on the margins, specific infrastructure, but also engagement with architecture and building on it. I personally don't know if sociological language will be that compelling outside of its own discipline, though. I think in some ways we should have this emphasis on building separate mythic infrastructures, but we have enough to also do compelling architectural change as well. As much as building the spine is important, we should already be \"planting trees\" so to speak.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nArchitectural and infrastructural language seems to be the most powerful right now among the most interesting theorists, so that's a good way to go. Both architecture and infrastructure involve the generation of scenes--or, perhaps, the setting of scenes.\n\nLet's say that the first thing humans would have built would have been an altar--i.e., a communal center for the sacrificial ritual. For a very long time temples were the most important buildings in the city and the empire. Even today, if you walk through some American towns, you can see the church in the center, which was very likely the first building constructed and always seems to be the one into which the most effort and resources have gone. And more recently, of course, government buildings and monuments in the center.\n\nBuildings should establish the center, and healthy center-periphery relations. They should be \"of\" the location, referencing historical traditions and foundational events; but they also have to represent the ongoing changes in the relations between the center and positions on the margin. Architecture provides the means by which people see and are seen.\n\nI think, though, that those wanting a are centered order will first become architectural critics and theorists before they will be able to do any actual building."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-is-your-stance-on-hobbes-leviathan",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sacred Ritual Beyond Explanation",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 03, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/bw41qk/",
      "content": "[Q:chewingofthecud] >But my worry is, what is so different about the ‘originary event’? Is it not just another instantaneous origin, from which ‘animals’ become ‘men’ and all subsequent social order must follow and be legitimized from? I'm less familiar with GA than many here, but the main difference seems to be that Hobbes' originary event is entirely secular, whereas GA's originary event is sacral in nature, explaining not only the origins of society, but of language and the sacred. But I do share your worry; perhaps once I read the primary GA sources it will prove unfounded. Like Hobbes' originary scene, GA's explains these origins on the basis of utility: there is a crisis; this crisis demands a solution; the sacred emerges via the abortive ostensive gesture as that solution. Like Hobbes' social contract, the sacred follows as a consequence of utility. Utility is not grounded in, nor does it find its ultimate reference in, the sacred. As an anthropological account, GA is superior to Hobbes' in that\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI suppose that once we undertake to explain the sacred, we would have to explain it in terms of utility--the survival of the community is useful. The alternative would be to define the sacred as that which lies beyond explanation. There is only a problem, I think, when one's explanation satisfies one that once we have the explanation we no longer need the sacred. The very fact that the sacred can be explained places the explanation on a higher cognitive level, with the implicit conclusion being that the sacred was just a \"mystification\" after all. In today's world this is the logic of least resistance. But if the sacred is identical to the significant, then any explanation is, knowingly or not, simply further inquiry into and commentary on the sacred center, and hence dependent on it.\n\nWhy is there something to talk about in the first place? What is useful, then, is what preserves and protects the center--rituals are useful in that sense. (Would it be possible to discuss the best way of obeying a ritualistic command without any reference to \"use,\" or \"serving a purpose\"?) But, just like the sacred makes sacrilege possible, \"use\" can be an instrument of sacrilege. But even sacrilege is possible because, while the sign defers appropriation, eventually the object must be appropriated. We have to eat. We can eat under the \"canopy\" of the sacred, in a way that commemorates our sacred sociality, or we can present our appetites as \"proof\" that the sacred is a sham.\n\nWhoever actually grabbed the object first on the scene must have been seen as a dangerous transgressor, but others following would have contained that transgression and redirected it to the order instituted by the sign. But this kind of \"materialist\" splitting off is always possible.\n\n---\n\n[Q:chewingofthecud] So the very precondition of an explanation at all is the sacred. Interesting how that turns on its head the general form of \"to explain is to subvert\" seen in so many hermeneutics (cf. Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Derrida, etc.) Re: ritual, it seems to me that the reason why ritual is so abhorrent to modern sensibilities is that, at least in comparison to dogma, it is relatively interpretation-proof. There is no reason or spirit behind a ritual observance; there is only the observance. This is the basic structure of, at least, orthopraxic religions such as Confucianism and Roman state religion. Doesn't matter whether you believe in Baal, Mitra, or Dyeus, as long as you zig where you're supposed to zig, zag where you're supposed to zag, and speak the right words, many of which have lost all semantic reference anyway. This is, in a way, a circumvention of the need to explain the sacred at all, hence modernity rejects it utterly as invalid. Another circumvention might be to consider the sacr\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, I see GA as subverting the subversions of the \"hermeneutics of suspicion.\"\n\nThe rituals do get interpreted, even if there is no direct \"feedback\" from the interpretation to the ritual itself. The interpretation of ritual is myth. Plus, the rituals are expected to have certain effects, and whether they have in fact had those effects is a matter of interpretation. A ritual is an offer to God, the gods, or an ancestor--something is expected in return. Also, rituals require certain preconditions, and someone must determine whether those conditions are met. E.g., one must sacrifice an \"unblemished\" calf. Well, what counts as \"unblemished\"?\n\nThe rituals must have been revealed to someone, in some place, at some time. That's why the community keeps performing them. We won't be able to keep language out of it--ritual is already a kind of language. Ritual is commemoration--ultimately, GA would say, of the originary event itself. Since rituals can't be reinvented once they have been allowed to lapse, the real problem now is creating constraining forms of commemoration that do the work of ritual.\n\n​\n\nAnyway, I'm glad I gave you a cud to chew on for a while.\n\n---\n\n[Q:chewingofthecud] >Since rituals can't be reinvented once they have been allowed to lapse What do you think of something like Freemasonry, that aims to do just that? FM acknowledges that the tradition has been broken and some ritual elements lost, but aims to recover it. Is this a futile exercise?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf it's really a question of reinventing them, I do think it's futile. Why be a Freemason rather than anything else? You can't get rituals from wanting to have rituals. If we're talking about a real tradition that is frayed but not utterly broken, that's different. It doesn't seem likely right now, but it's conceivable that the Catholic Church could return to pre-Vatican II ritual practice.\n\n​\n\nI suppose Freemasonry has sustained itself for awhile, but as what? Did it ever claim to be more than a cult or a club? Does it see itself as the basis for a new social order? If so, it's obviously failed.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] >  \"reducible\" is not quite right--not everything in the declarative is already contained or implicit in the imperative. That’s what was troubling me!\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThat's not what ice and rock was suggesting, anyway. If declaratives convey implicit imperatives that can be \"extracted\" and obeyed in a wide range of situations, that's already far more than any imperative can do on its own. Even more so if what is at stake is the elucidation of further ostensives. In that case, the imperative is to discover new realities to commit ourselves to--such an imperative could only be a result of declaratives. The higher form transforms the lower form, rather than being reducible to it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "centerism-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Originary Scene Representation and Firstness",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 16, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/8469y1/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Thanks for another interesting post.  I'm thinking your contrast of liberal and absolutist GAs assumes that the protohumans on the originary scene included a rather large number of males, significantly more than two or three, that is if we are to distinguish a group of defenders of the centre from a larger band.  Yet isn't it difficult to imagine a group where most males are not at maturity exiled over competition for females?  Even if they benefited from hunting together, how big could the pecking order have been? Or, would you perhaps imagine that the defenders of the centre were indeed the few males in the band and the larger scene included the females as not-so-late sign users, pace Gans. Anyway, since you show how there are always already centres within centres, i.e. the defenders are distinguished from the larger band while sharing certain symmetries, i.e they constitute the first spontaneous, pragmatic \"brotherhood\", in contrast to the soon ritualized one, are you yet clear in\n\n[ADAM]\n\nUnless I'm misunderstanding you, the assumption that there is something like an inner circle that invents the sign and then \"initiates\" the others into it would be the best way of having absolutist GA frame liberal GA. But it's true that representations of the originary scene vary in the way you point out--sometimes it is represented as a group, at least enough to comprise a circle, and sometimes as few as two. Gans himself goes both ways, but I think in his more \"canonical\" accounts it's usually the circular group. I suppose I'm splitting the difference, here at least. But I don't know about your ethnographic question--are all hominid groups comprised of a very small number of males?\n\nPerhaps we could assume at least one species \"egalitarian\" enough to provide sufficient males for such a scene. I have always imagined a group, without thinking so specifically in terms of numbers. It seems to me that for the sign to stick there would have to members of the group who are both witnesses to the initial effect of the sign and participants in it. With just two individuals it seems to me that it would be hard to distinguish between a genuine sign and one individual conceding to the other while still being able to take part himself (i.e., the \"winner\" is satisfied with primacy and doesn't insist on exclusivity).\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] Well, on the question of hominid groups, I don't know enough to say whether there is strong evidence on numbers of mature males living together.  Sexual dimorphism is usually taken as the key measure of how much alpha male dominance there is in a primate group, and the general assumption, i think, is that pre-humans were middling to lowish in the extent of their dimorphism.  Here\"s a survey looking at the various arguments regarding whether we are polygamous or monogamous and the author can only conclude both: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/are_humans_monogamous_or_polygamous_the_evolution_of_human_mating_strategies_.html So maybe what i'm really wondering, in a fanciful way, is whether originary thinking could ever get to the point where arguments about the nature of language and culture could be so well developed as to tip the balance on questions not fully answered by the fossil fecord. You seem sure that positing a small group of first si\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI'm really just unfolding a difference between my own and Gans's way of thinking about the originary scene that goes all the way back. He accepted the notion of \"firstness,\" but ultimately in a very limited, economistic way; I saw it as having much broader implications, so broad that I never really use the concept itself--for me it just seemed obvious that in no situation does everyone do something exactly at the same time, all the more so if we're thinking in mimetic terms. So, strictly speaking, there's no absolutism on the originary scene because there is no political authority; but absolutist ontology applies insofar as someone must model the center for others, who in turn model it for others.\n\nThere can't be liberalism on the originary scene because there is a center, and all relations between members are mediated by the center. This is the case even if we accept a more \"circular\" model of the scene. This is why I wouldn't speak in terms of \"moral equality\" or other liberal terms. Distribution is not egalitarian in the sense that it is universally agreed to divide the meal equally--rather, no one will molest another past the point where the limits set by attention to the center and the use of the sign, allows. If we look at this from a contemporary perspective, we can project our own fantasies about equality onto it.\n\nEven in the supposedly egalitarian primitive communities, all \"egalitarian\" can mean there is that no one is permitted to usurp the center; even then, no doubt some members were more active in policing any such attempts--and if someone came too close, perhaps the group would unanimously \"dethrone\" him--but is that really what we want to mean by \"egalitarian\"? In fact, not only is there no liberalism on the originary scene, I doubt there is really any liberalism anywhere--liberalism is just a battle cry against tradition, social obligation and, now, biological reality.\n\nThe liberal version of the scene would be the circular model, which is an arbitrary assumption but a likely after the fact construction of the participants themselves: for one thing, it would meet the esthetic demands of the ritual. But even if we do accept that the sign, as fully revealed, also reveals the equidistance of all members from the center (in a certain sense the center is inexhaustible and infinite, so we are equidistant from it), we would still have to, if we are not really to stretch the plausibility of our model, accept the asymmetry of the members in signing and in dividing the meal. A liberal can sneak \"equality\" into this, but all it will mean is that everyone is included by the center, which is also the case in the most hierarchical society. If equidistance means that we affirm that everyone is within language, everyone is within ritual, everyone is \"regarded\" by the social order, I see no problem at all--but that's certainly not liberalism or \"equality.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-grammar-and-political-grammar-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Declarative Culture and Political Authority",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Dec 11, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/7eitiq/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] >Explicit agreements that don’t depend upon the individuals entering into them because conformity with the agreement will be judged by those legitimated by that very agreement to judge them according to protocols that can be read out of or into the agreement is the declarative condition. This was an extremely tortured sentence.  I took four semesters of Latin and have translated Cicero's long run-on sentences and this is up there in being needlessly obtuse. Most of us here have very high verbal IQs and can put the time into parsing your overly nested clauses, but it's still discourteous to our time, compared to if you could write in a more unloaded fashion. As an instructor, there's nothing special about spitting out your verbal formulation of a matter as it comes to mind; the actual skill comes in thinking about how it will be received.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nLooking it over, the problem is really with any explicit agreement: either the two parties themselves decide what it means, in which case each has an interest in its interpretation and you just generate conflict; or, you appoint a third party, who can continually re-interpret the meanings of the different elements of the agreement (this is what actually happens). Declarative culture relies more and more on such agreements--perhaps it's a power grab by those with high verbal IQs--which seems to promote a more voluntary, consensual social order, but in fact institutes increasingly arbitrary power. The real purpose of making declarative order putatively autonomous is to break up the chain of command, i.e., the imperative order.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] I understood the article just fine.  I was just saying what you probably have been needing to be told for a while now: you would increase your comprehensibility for readers on the margin if you broke up the denser of sentences (find the imperative in that declaration), unless of course you take your blog as a personal diary and not a place of instruction. Anyways, I'm curious how well-read you are on Nietzsche, because he spoke exactly on this topic: >The irony of the dialectician is a form of mob revenge: the ferocity of the oppressed finds an outlet in the cold knife-thrust of the syllogism—as a tool of the will to power. >To have oneself under control, so as to go into battle with 'reasons' and not with affects; to discover that one can capture anyone in whom one produces affects, to discover that affects proceed illogically; practice in self-mockery, so as to damage the feeling of rancor at its roots. -- [(abridged version of Note 431 of _The Will to Power_)](https://archive.or\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI drank deep of Nietzsche many years ago, and haven't gone back much since (of course, he gets referred to an interpreted all over the place, so one is always reading him)--may of these arguments hold up very well. Gans sees metaphysics as representing the primacy of the declarative sentence, and somewhere along the line he might owe Nietzsche a bit for that insight.\n\nSometimes I'm aware of the stylistic/comprehensibility issue you raise; it certainly wouldn't hurt to be more aware of it.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] And if you're very familiar with him, what's your opinion of him and the broader Jewish Question? I haven't yet read the work on Semitism co-authored by you and Gans yet, but I figure this is an efficient point to ask, without expecting anything but a succinct answer. Are you uncomfortable that you descend from the people that were perfectors of ressentiment and dishonest declaratives?  What redemptive path do you see for the JQ?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWell, the name of God, in Exodus, \"I AM THAT I AM,\" is anything but a dishonest declarative. That Name-of-God as the declarative sentence is the transcendence of imperative names of god, i.e., gods with whom one could enter a transaction, an imperative exchange. To the God of Abraham and Moses, we can only give ourselves unreservedly.\n\nThe resentment we find in the Hebrew Bible is directed towards the failure of the people to adhere to divine law, with the historical catastrophes befalling the Jews attributed to that failure. There is always resentment towards the center, i.e., God, but there is also taking on God's resentment towards those who have betrayed their promise to him. This is a post-Big Man, post-imperial recovery of the originary scene--on that, I agree with Gans. I see the political implications of this differently, but only the Hebrew Bible provides a thorough working through of sacrificial logics. And only by resisting sacrificial logics can we apply ourselves to building social structures resistant to violence.\n\nNietzsche's mistake was in assuming that some people resent, and others (natural aristocrats) don't--we are all, in fact, constituted by resentment. (I'm pretty sure the passage you quote above refers to Socrates, since dialectics and syllogisms were the Greek speciality. OF course Nietzsche has complementary critiques of Judaism.) Nietzsche's account of the men of the future who will create new values is also different from his portrait of the archaic aristocrat. Zarathustra has resentments that need to be transcended.\n\nAntisemitism is resentment of the Jews and there is anti-Gentile Jewish resentment. Gans sees antisemitism as resentment of Jewish firstness in the discovery of monotheism--this certainly seems to me true in the case of Christianity, which depends on the Jewish God and is thwarted by the Jewish adherence to their own \"local\" nationalist version of it. Modern nationalisms resent the cohesion of Jews as a foreign entity within their countries, and Jews have certainly worked to interfere with any corresponding cohesion on the part of their host countries. Modern, secular leftist Jews have certainly been, if not the inventors, especially busy and effective promulgators of certain \"dishonest declaratives,\" based on a resentment of national and ecclesiastical orders that excluded them.\n\nAbsolutism can solve this problem by ceasing to delegate certain \"middleman\" duties to Jews and, of course, by shutting down liberalism and therefore the left; Israel offers another solution, as it seems to me likely that secular Jews are likely to dissolve into the general US population over the next couple of decades."
    },
    {
      "slug": "semiotic-engineering-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Definitional Coherence and Discursive Power",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 29, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/7g7qm3/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Perhaps it helps (tense?) readers if you flesh out your example:  racism \"doesn't exist\".  Does this mean that your response to the incredulous liberal (what about the HBD discourse, the white nationalists, Imam Jew-Behind-the-Tree, Chinese eugenics, Mugabe, etc., etc.?) is that these all are just misnaming their sovereign?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nRace in a sense may exist--it would depend on how we define it and the kind of discourse it constructs. But I don't think a coherent definition or usage of \"racism\" is possible. People who use the word have an event-image in mind: the Nuremberg Laws, the southern cop beating the civil rights protestor, the S. African bantustans, etc. Some kind of formal discrimination leading to violence, around which all kinds of attitudes can be imagined. Yes, it is a liberal sovereign being imagined here--\"racism\" marks an apparent anomaly in the liberal order, a scandal--you can maintain your belief in liberalism if you attribute the danger to the illiberal.\n\nBut if you actually try and put your finger on a racist act or statement, what do you come up with? If someone believes some claim about blacks or Jews, well, either the claim is true or false, or partly true and partly false, or not well-enough formulated to be either true or false. So, can a derogatory claim about a group be racist if it's true? In that case, charges of racism are demands that we collaborate in collective lies. Are the false parts the parts that are racist? Why isn't it enough that they're false? Do they have to be deliberately false? Maliciously false? How do we identify and measure such intent?\n\nEach statement or act would have to be assessed differently--all of them together wouldn't add up to something we could meaningfully call \"racism,\" unless we insist on them doing so--but that insistence would be based on a need to be against \"racism.\" Or, perhaps one wants to insist that any general claim about groups is inherently false and therefore can only be made with malicious, libelous intent (even the complimentary claims--certain groups being smarter, harder-working, etc.--would merely be setting those groups up to be taken down on some other grounds). But the only basis for this insistence is that an absolute injunction or embargo on such claims is necessary for... what, exactly?\n\nI doubt we'd get a very clear answer here, but \"racism\" gives a name to the vaguely felt menace behind any claim about groups whatsoever--which brings us back to a kind of extreme, dogmatic liberal individualism, any deviation from which must set in motion catastrophic consequences.\n\nAnd even the most obvious indicators of racism, discriminatory laws, can easily be understood as attempts to draw borders within a single nation where the differences between groups are seen as bigger than those that normally hold between \"citizens.\" The group in a position to make the laws sees themselves as superior, and their ability to make the laws kind of supports that claim, and so they make the laws in their own favor. Is believing that one group is superior to another \"racist\"? That brings us back to the whole discussion above--is the claim true or false? Eligible for truth or falsity? If one group can be superior under certain conditions to another, you might on liberal grounds say that it is still wrong to establish different categories of citizen, but what is added to that moral claim by saying the intent behind the law is \"racist\"? Again, it's just a way of begging all those questions I went through above. The real question is whether that liberal assumption is more moral than some other that might apply.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] I like your response, thanks.  In saying you don't believe in\"racism\" what you are really saying, of course,  is you don't believe in human rights laws and campaigns.  Everything you say here about \"racism\" could be said of, say, \"homophobia\".  (A few years ago the Supreme Court of Canada \"rule\" [what's an eloquent way to present tense this?] against an ex-rent boy turned Christian evangelist who likes to  leaflet neighborhoods warning of the dangers of homosexuality; in defending the provincial human rights code, they conclude that truth is not a defense when charged with discrimination because of leafletting.  So the court makes it clear that anti-\"discrimination\" law is about the power of the state to atomize and make impossible serious organizing outside a commitment to anarchist ontology from those who have somehow succeeded  to power despite it. My question began with my usual predicament around finding a rhetorical response to liberals.  (Why do you hate queers!?). I appreciate\n\n[ADAM]\n\nBut I do also to generate models for \"infiltrating\" liberal cultural sites. I think that asking people to define \"racism,\" and then asking them to apply their definition to a few examples, while scrutinizing each one carefully, would be enormously instructive. (Can they really refuse that? If so, that would very revealing--perhaps to them as well, because they are never asked to do these things.) They will ultimately get to that same point as the Canadian Supreme Court: it's not about truth, it's not about morality or justice, it's about granting us a hunting license."
    },
    {
      "slug": "way-way-after-sacral-kingship-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Anthropological versus Logical First Principles",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 01, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/93f6f8/",
      "content": "[Q:reactionaryfuture] Isn't positing the center still a first principle? On another note, I started reading Graeber's *On Kings* and was wondering what you made of his division of sacral kings and divine kings? At the risk of being anachronistic doesn't it sound a lot like a Jouvenelian conflict between centralisation and decentralisation. The ruled insist on the sacral nature (and so hold a sword over the king) while the king insist on his divine nature (and so free himself from the sacral claims.)\n\n[ADAM]\n\nOne could call it a first principle, and even set up a series of subordinate principles: there is the center, the center gives commands, there is a difference between the command issued and the command received, etc. But I don't do it like that because there's no logical necessity here, just an anthropological one. Why start with positing a center? I can't give the kind of reason Descartes could give for \"I think, therefore I am\"--that is, that's it a basic presupposition of thinking or being as such. Once we start with the center, why follow that with the center issuing imperatives? Again, the reasoning is anthropological, not logical and deductive: this is what humans, as beings defined by having language, do. The progression from the ostensive to the imperative is not logical either--the insight into this follows from a question philosophy never asked: why are there sentences?\n\nI think I mentioned that distinction once, briefly, but haven't come back to it. I'm still thinking about what to do with it. There's also their notion of the \"foreigner\" or \"stranger\" king, which I've seen mentioned elsewhere and is important as well. The Big Man comes from within the system, while the king comes from without, and is imposed--or at least that's the way things are imagined or remembered, even though, given the importance of conquest to establishing kingship, there's obviously a lot of truth to it. So far, I want to see if the distinction between the king with no way to protect himself from being sacrificed, on the one hand, and the king who creates a kind of \"buffer,\" on the other, will do the work of the sacral/divine distinction.\n\nThere's such a mass of historical and anthropological material that it's important to be able to reduce it, conceptually, to different center-margin relations. (But I don't know if it's a centralization vs. de-centralization distinction--in a sense, a system where the king can be sacrificed if it doesn't rain for a couple of months is very \"centralized,\" just in a different way than what we're used to--everyone is completely focused on the central figure.)\n\n---\n\n[Q:reactionaryfuture] This is why I have been taking an interest in MacIntyre's Thomistic conception of first principles. The Cartesian version, or modern first principles, start from the kind of first principles you note. They have to both be immediately accessible to all, and they have to then provide the basis for all further knowledge. This kind of first principles is something you are not positing. On the other hand you are presenting a first principle in a Thomistic sense.  There are two classes of first principles, the first is that which is recognizable by all language users (a whole is greater than the parts) but this kind does not furnish comprehensive knowledge. The second does but requires the first principle and the overall scheme in which it is comprehensible to be conceived at once. This form of first principle is only available to the wise in a sense. So in this example, that there is a center is a first principle in the scheme (the anthropological model) you hold and it is only made coheren\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThanks, that's worth thinking about. I do have to read more of MacIntyre. So, there's a kind of \"self-evident\" principle that is really just in, or elicited from, the meaning of words and sentences (by definition the whole is greater than its parts--if you don't see that you simply don't know the meaning of the word \"whole\" or the word \"part\"). The second kind of principle would have to require the first (you certainly can't acquire any knowledge if you don't understand the relation between wholes and parts), but, of course, what counts as \"comprehensive\" knowledge, or whether that's always a meaningful thing to seek, depends on the sort of knowledge we're talking about.\n\nIt sounds to me like the kind of knowledge one would have in what I've been calling a \"disciplinary space,\" or what MacIntyre calls a \"practice.\" I don't see any problem with this, and don't necessarily want to argue about using the word \"principle\" (part of the point here is to distinguish between arguments worth having and arguments not worth having--my only concern here is that arguments over \"comprehensiveness\" could easily become useless). What I'm trying to avoid or \"defer\" is really meta-language, which makes it possible for me to say to someone (e.g., a ruler) that you may have your reasons for doing what you're doing, but I have a theoretical system that defines \"legitimate rule\" and what you're doing doesn't fit that.\n\nCountering someone (e.g., a ruler) on \"principled\" grounds would have to involve working within the \"discipline\" itself (as ruler you command, and this is my way of doing what a subject does, which is serve or obey). It is the subject's way of obeying or serving that would constitute any \"critique,\" \"judgment\" or \"commentary\" on the ruler's actions. It's the only way the meaning of his actions could be revealed to him."
    },
    {
      "slug": "hypothesis-practice-vs-narrative-the-iterative-center-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Resentment's Conceptual Instability in GA",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Sep 08, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/inm5p3/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Thanks for this. I'm wondering where this places you in relation to the history of GA.  On one hand, I'm not sure your thoughts on narrative are fundamentally different from those of Girard's \"Romantic Lie and Novelistic Truth\", the discovery of the great novelists that what they are involved in is a sacrificial theatre that they need to reveal and transcend, if still in the terms of the theatre itself.  But probably, this leads to the conclusion that we will become less interested in narrative, and Gans has said on occasion that he now has limited appetite for modern novels, merely repeating the already-discovered discovery procedure, though he still is confident in film's capacity for novel masterpieces. And yet, if transcending resentment through love is Gans' key theme, then he is still thinking in a narrative framework, no?  If you, Adam, were to create a title for a series of Chronicles, would it be more like \"Chronicles of Discipline and Resentment\"? Anyway, if narrative is b\n\n[ADAM]\n\nChronicles of Hypotheses and Practices.\n\nI've been questioning basic GA concepts like \"resentment,\" \"desire\" and \"love.\" \"Resentment\" is especially problematic--I've pointed out many times that it never really crystallizes as concept in Gans's thinking. Resentment is to be suppressed, to be transcended, and it's also culturally productive. There are presumably good and bad resentments--how do we distinguish them? What's not resentment? Can there be withering, truthful and yet non-resentful criticism? To what \"emotion\" would we attribute that? There are more minimal ways of getting at the relation to the center referred to by \"resentment.\"\n\nBut you mention \"love\" in particular. Does Gans ever say what love is beyond sharing a meal together? I've been thinking of love as the protection of the object of your desire from the potential violence of that desire. But, then, this seems to me a way of talking about \"heeding the center.\" And, what these last couple of posts make clearer than I have before (that I remember, anyway), is that heeding the center means iterating the originary scene--producing a new ostensive sign. That's a producer's desire approach, as opposed to Gans's consumer's satisfaction version of GA--the consumer wants to be appeased and narcotized.\n\nIf we can speak about heeding the center, though, do we still need \"love\"? We can use the word in all kinds of situations, of course, but it need not be a fundamental concept. Desire, resentment, love--they're all \"feelings,\" so for them to be meaningful we have to assume we all \"experience\" them the same way, which can never be known. What are *signs* of resentment, love and desire? If we can identify those, we would find better ways of naming those signs than \"resentment,\" \"love\" and  \"desire.\" We would be speaking in terms of seeing the other in obeying the command to be the same.\n\nSo, if hypothesis is to myth as practice is to ritual, and narrative is an extension of myth, what is the \"analogue\" of narrative along the ritual-practice continuum? A very good question, and your suggestions might be a starting point for thinking about it. I would look to the \"Big Scenic\" disciplines, which construct us all. Our disciplining through psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, philosophy and the rest is post-ritual but pre-practice--they all involve constructing \"selves\" on the assumption of a center that can become divisible in some acceptable way if one approaches it in the right manner. Aren't all these disciplines really more sophisticated versions of self-help manuals, which teach you how to construct yourself advantageously on the terms of a system that can provide your share of wealth, happiness, community, justice, intelligence, etc.? Narrative is really an imaginary reconciliation of the anomalies of the disciplines.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] So if I am speaking in terms of seeing the other while obeying the command to be the same, can I be in a very emotional or \"resentful\" state of mind?  For Gans, one cannot think seriously about resentment while being resentful.  I think that's why he considers it a minimal, or scenically primary, term.  But if we start looking for particular \\*signs\\* of love, desire, and resentment, then we may well be engaged in a scenically-productive exercise, but, I'm wondering, within a state of having transcended some less productive, but no-less scenically-dependent, emotion by naming something that we can now think seriously about while inhabiting it or relating to it?  And it would then be a question of the relationship of this transcendence, as a sign of one having learned to be loyal to the scene and centre, to, possibly, an ongoing need for narrative, that I am wondering about.  If, one day, I become wholly wedded to producer's desire, will I not have need, at times, to recount to more nas\n\n[ADAM]\n\nSomeone in a state of resentment, at least in the pejorative sense you give it here, would not say he is resentful, would he? (Resentment is presumably sometimes seen as justified, because someone can say, e.g., \"I resent the insinuation,\" without marking oneself as emotionally incontinent.) In this pejorative sense, it's always the other who is resentful (the other might be me, of course, retrospectively). To be resentful, then, is to be inarticulate, silence(d), \"infans.\" The resentful one, of course, on his own terms, is just seeking justice. There's an incommensurability here. The word is obviously both rich and conceptually problematic.\n\nIf resentment is what interferes with self-reflection (an interesting definition), then that has to be shown in the particular case--shown either to the resentful one or to others. So, it's a pedagogical situation, and, maybe, an \"interminable\" analysis. But, then, there's something to be shown--what \"proves\" or demonstrates the presence of resentment; what are the signs of not being able to think seriously about resentment? There's a burden on the one making the \"charge.\" I would say the marker is not being able to make an operationalizable request to a responsible institution or authority. If you can't do that, you're just addicted to the complaint. If that's the marker, then, we can point to that dysfunctional relation to the center without having to argue about whether the person is \"really\" resentful."
    },
    {
      "slug": "prolegomena-to-the-study-of-the-origins-of-the-disciplines-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Writing and Disciplinary Consciousness",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jul 06, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/8wd0f5/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] >If we look more carefully at these metalinguistic representations and supplementations of the scene of speech we find (I’m still following David Olson, this time his 1994 The World on Paper, very closely) a wide array of words that are complications of NSM primes like “think,” “say,” “want” and “know”: to represent uncertainty or hedging, “he supposed”; to represent a claim aimed at challenging another and meant to be challenged in turn, “he asserted”; to represent a process of thinking, “he considered”: to represent sincerity, “he believed”; to represent the end of a process of inquiry or discussion, “he concluded”; to represent claims that must have already been accepted in order for a particular statement to make sense, “he assumed”; and so on. In addition, we have the “reification” of “think,” “say” and “know” into the nouns “thoughts,” “sayings” (or “statements”) and “knowledge.” This is the basis for disciplines like philosophy and rhetoric (and more recently psychology), which\n\n[ADAM]\n\nJones's myth is a product of writing--that's where concepts referring to \"inner\" states and processes come from. Once you have these concepts you do have to posit something like \"hidden episodes,\" and once you posit them you will find evidence of them and this process transforms the way people think and talk (and read, write, etc.). Olson's The World on Paper is particularly good on all this. I'm not saying this \"shouldn't\" have happened, or that it hasn't yielded indispensable intellectual resources.\n\nBut this doesn't change the fact that something else is going on. Everything that is attributed to humans is first of all attributed to the non-human, sacred center. That is the original focus of attention. The central object \"tells\" us not to appropriate it, and then only to do so in an orderly, inclusive way. The first words, ostensives and imperatives, are directed at and \"received\" from the center. The earliest narratives are myths concerning actions of the central object (some animal, in the vast majority of cases), which serve to \"explain\" the ritualistic consumption of the object. (Rituals repeat, with increasing complexity that take in the development of social relations, the originary scene; myths provide a \"backstory,\" we could say, to the ritual.)\n\nThe initial thinking, speaking, wanting, etc., is done by the center; such actions are only later attributed to human agents, on the model of, and in interaction with, the center. (What does the center, i.e., God, want us to do? Are we doing what he wants?) This originary relation to the center is what \"the metalanguage of literacy\" cannot see (just like myth cannot see the real reason for the ritual), and Sellars is obviously not getting any closer. The only thinker I know of who comes anywhere near the kind of inquiry I'm speaking about is the later Wittgenstein, but I suspect he would have recoiled from any \"originary\" hypotheses.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm having some trouble figuring out how this all fits together. I took issue with your rather summary deflationary account above. >all of the disciplines share the originary structure of the metalanguage of literacy. So the issue here is 'disciplinary' vs originary thinking/other discourses of sovereignty? >But this doesn't change the fact that something else is going on. Far be it from me to deny that. I brought up Sellars because I thought you were being a demi-Sellarsian. I am still not sure what's going on. How much are you innovating on Gans here? What of him should I read to get the big but hopefully also detailed picture?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, we could start with \"disciplinary vs. originary\"--I have a more \"positive\" and a more \"negative\" way of using \"disciplinary,\" though--in the positive sense, disciplinary thinking is orgiinary thinking; in the negative sense, they are therefore opposed. For the negative sense, I'm much more likely to use \"the disciplines\" rather than \"disciplinary,\" and I'll make sure I'm more consistent in that usage. I suppose we could use the relation between the sovereign and delegated powers as an analogy: the \"disciplinary\" would be like the delegated powers that remain constrained by the ends of the sovereign, while \"the \"disciplines\" are like the delegated powers that establish independent power bases.\n\nIn a sense almost all my blogging, other than summary-style references to the originary scene and discussions of the relation between myth and ritual like the one above is innovating on Gans. (Even Gans doesn't quite analyze the relation between myth and ritual in exactly that way.) The only real disagreement I have with Gans, though, is political--he's a steadfast supporter of liberal democracy. Of course, since he sees GA itself as implicitly liberal (although he hedges on this a bit), the disagreements can go a bit further here and there.\n\nThere's a lot of Gans, of course, but I think, of his books, the most important for these discussions at least, are The End of History and Originary Thinking. Quite a few people involved in these discussions seem to be reading the more recent A New Way of Thinking. He has a short book, called The Girardian Origins of Generative Anthropology, which is very helpful and available for 0.99$ on Kindle--it used to be available for free on line and perhaps still is. Perhaps the best way to get started is with these early essays from Anthropoetics:\n\nhttp://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0101/gans/\n\nhttp://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0102/mimesis/\n\nhttp://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0202/plato/"
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-is-actually-different-in-substance-from-liberalism-progressivism",
      "title": "Bouvard on Originary Scene and Big Man Dialectic",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 30, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/b7a39z/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] If you are: - Globalist/into universality - Into imperialism and view geopolitics as nothing more than ‘power games’ - Call progressivism ‘Faustianism’ and still think our job is to transcend everything - View ethnocentrism as quaint, outmoded, and maybe dangerous - No problem with multiculturalism/multiracialism, so long as the ruling class is still largely elite white+Jewish - Don’t want major reforms, just want to make what we’ve already got more ‘formal’ - Have a romantic notion of white supremacy and patriarchy, think Indo-European elites are still running the world - Believe in a pre-Human ‘state of nature’, with society forming after an originary ‘social contract’ from which legal/moral abstractions can be derived Sorry if this may feel uncharitable, but I’m trying to make the point clear. In what way is your ideal society actually different from liberalism? Would it basically be the same but without due process, lol?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIn a sense I would argue for a very \"reactionary\" position insofar as we are ultimately modeling our praxis on the originary scene and its dialectic with the Big Man revelation. So, we're taking as our lodestone very ancient social formations, to which we want to conform our practices. But it's not \"reactionary\" insofar as these are generative scenes in a dialectic with each other, and therefore open-ended. There are scenes which have an \"object\" at the center, and we want to clear everyone away from the center so that we can all look at and \"report back\" on what we see--and I mean \"object\" in a very general sense, included concepts, institutions, other disciplines, etc.\n\nThere is leadership on such a scene, but it's geared toward showing something new about the object--whoever does that is in charge for as long as he needs in order to show it. What is involved in constructing such scenes, what objects are set at the center--this is all historically specific--these questions are themselves \"objects\" on other scenes. Scenes on which a human occupies the center must be formalized, or named, much more explicitly. The main job of the person in charge is putting other people in charge of the different parts of the job. And so on horizontally across all domains of social life and vertically from top to bottom.\n\nThe larger job of the central authority is to protect and supervise the disciplines; the job of the disciplines is to clarify and \"enhance\" the imperatives from the central authority. All this is done through reference to the originary structure of the social order, the specific set of deferrals which established the lineage to which existing authority is traced back; with an eye to the original act of deferral itself. And this is where we get into language--each use of language is like a \"unit\" or \"quantum\" of deferral. We can, perhaps, move away from talking about issues, and more towards talking about events, texts and institutions as indicating disciplinary scenes that are more or less focused on a central object, and institutional scenes that are more or less governed by a transparent \"pyramid\" or \"cone\" of power.\n\nIs some middle-level guy filling in, \"clothing himself\" in the objectives set by his superior, or is he listening to others from outside the institution--and what is the superior doing about it in that case? What \"hypothesis\" is a particular disciplinary scene pursuing? These should ultimately be our questions.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I do like and agree with a lot of things with this model, but doesn’t the question of ‘what’ still remain open? I’m not agnostic to who the sovereign is and where he came from, who fills the positions of that cone of power, and what hypotheses are being pursued in society. The nature of those things is equally important to their configuration, if not more, in my view. Aren’t those ultimately the more difficult questions, determining the way it _should_ be?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nOnce we start talking about specific societies these \"slots\" must be filled in. GA can't answer all these questions--only people participating in organizations and institutions can do so. If you find the model useful, then you can bring it to bear on the responsibilities you are taking on for yourself. You want to associate with and help certain people and advance a certain trajectory--well, GA will either be helpful to you in hashing these issues out with others, alerting you to things you wouldn't have noticed otherwise, and maybe having a more critical sense of the ways resentments might get in the way of your goals--or it won't. I think it will if you become a bit \"fluent\" in this way of thinking and at the very least it will make your thinking more mature.\n\n​\n\nIf i told you, here are the GA answers to a checklist of questions you have, you wouldn't believe that either--and you'd be right not to. It's a way of thinking, not an ideology."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutism-and-history-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty, Antagonism, and Historical Subjects",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 14, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6af1zp/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] Why is the sovereign not the subject? Semi-unrelated: You wrote about Achilles as a metaphor for bottom-up Value versus top-down Security and the fundamental problem for the sovereign in balancing these considerations. Is this correct? If so, do you disagree that Mises's Economic Calculation argument can be considered as a formalization of the Value-side of the argument? The idea is that there is \"bottom-up\" or \"ascendent\" value that arises somewhat externally from the sovereign's clarified hierarchy. Although the market is sustained by the sovereign, the consequences are not fully predictable, the rules are enforced, but the results are not guaranteed. The rules are made, the refs enforce the rules, but which team wins the sovereign does not directly determine nor does he know. And if he does determine it, then the game is meaningless and the teams don't even try. Value can be utilized by the sovereign, but it is *not* value that is created by the sovereign directly. The market's res\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't think we can see the sovereign as the subject because there is no constitutive (reciprocally defining) antagonist--the bourgeoisie has the state, king, aristocracy and/or superstitions (or whatever), the proletariat has the capitalists, feminists the patriarchy, anti-colonialism imperialism, etc. The subject defines itself through this struggle, and that's what makes \"history.\" The only equivalent for the sovereign would be something like \"disorder\" or \"division,\" but that would grant the necessity of such antagonists, and of defining sovereignty in that relation, which we wouldn't want to do if we contend that sovereignty can be made secure.'\n\nI'll think about the other issue and get back to you.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Why is the sovereign not the subject? Semi-unrelated: You wrote about Achilles as a metaphor for bottom-up Value versus top-down Security and the fundamental problem for the sovereign in balancing these considerations. Is this correct? If so, do you disagree that Mises's Economic Calculation argument can be considered as a formalization of the Value-side of the argument? The idea is that there is \"bottom-up\" or \"ascendent\" value that arises somewhat externally from the sovereign's clarified hierarchy. Although the market is sustained by the sovereign, the consequences are not fully predictable, the rules are enforced, but the results are not guaranteed. The rules are made, the refs enforce the rules, but which team wins the sovereign does not directly determine nor does he know. And if he does determine it, then the game is meaningless and the teams don't even try. Value can be utilized by the sovereign, but it is *not* value that is created by the sovereign directly. The market's res\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou are right about the problem I am trying to solve there. This is obviously something we'll be discussing quite a bit--the entire discipline of economics needs to be revised, but that obviously can't be done arbitrarily. My preliminary thinking is that we should think about value as value for the sovereign, just like Achilles's prowess ultimately finds its value in service to Agamemnon's enterprise. Achilles, of course, can withhold his services (as he in fact does), or offer them to another sovereign--but they have to be of value to some sovereign. The same is true in less obvious ways of all forms of work. The sovereign, then, is responsible for establishing institutional forms in which limited competition with a determinate goal is embedded. This would probably prioritize the military and harness production for those ends. And then, yes, there would be rules, a more or less fair playing field, and all the rest.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] Well, starting with the previous reddit discussion on the question of subjectivity, you suggest that the modern subject is inherently resentful inasmuch as he's tied to a narrative of \"liberation\" with an apocalyptic vision.  So, if absolutism is a break with that, with narratives no longer centred on the resentful subject, the question arises how does resentment, which is inevitable in some form I think you would admit (though you come close to denying it when you read Gans' understanding of resentment as \"ambivalent\" and ask, why, if we can talk of minimizing resentment we can't talk of eliminating it) get contained by absolutism within the disciplines and hierrchies in some way that does not put into question the larger social order.  And you go on to say that you are willing to adapt Gans' notion of the market recycling resentment to the conceptualization of absolutism.   The more the sovereign is secure, the more productively he can recycle resentments. Then in the blog post I se\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI  see. Thanks. Yes, you have a point. I may simply be channeling Gans's ambivalence. He speaks both of \"reducing\" and \"recycling\" resentment--my observation that if resentment can be reduced it can be eliminated, since what would elimination be other than continual reduction until there's nothing left? derives from my questioning of that concept in particular. I've more or less accepted the notion of \"recycling,\" even if I rarely use it myself. I usually speak either in terms of \"framing\" and \"donating\" resentments--\"framing\" is not too different from \"recycling,\" but \"donating\" is something different, and so maybe it's better to stick with that.\n\nThe center then converts the resentment to discipline, which I suppose is a kind of \"recycling\" but more loosely so insofar as here the recycled material becomes something qualitatively different--recycled glass is still glass. Perhaps in this way I can resolve my own ambivalence toward resentment, which I inherit from Gans but which has persisted for me in somewhat different forms. Rather than struggling to distinguish productive from destructive forms of resentment, I can just just distinguish resentment from discipline. Well, we'll see how that works.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] If both Girard and Gans are right, resentment is rooted in the paradox of the sacred and we will never resolve our ambivalence towards it.  It will remain a component of discipline, but, yes, i don't see why you can't distinguish active resentment from disciplined resentment.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWell, even in that case there'd be no point to speaking of \"reducing\" or \"recycling\" resentment, both of which assume that it's some kind of \"excess\" that needs to be \"discharged\" (another terms Gans uses). Unless there's a \"normal\" level of resentment and the problem is with \"excessive\" resentment--but the whole problem here lies in thinking about in quantitative terms, as if it can be measured--that is what needs to be rejected, one way or another. Once we're clear about this the rest may be semantics.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] Well i like the idea of making a donation without measuring how much i'm giving!  Still, i fear there will always be more, to give.  Do you think there's something to the (Buddhist?) idea of transcending resentment if we give up our desires and reach \"enlightenment\"?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, but I don't think it's exclusive to Buddhism. I think this is central to Jewish and Christian monotheisms--since God has given you everything, you are obliged to give all of yourself to God. This is how we transcend the gift economy and the imperative order (a god you can issue imperatives to is a god you cut deals with--the imperative you issue is that he uphold his end of the bargain because you followed his imperative. That's what I AM THAT I AM transcends)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-is-the-object-we-now-share-in-common-with-muslims",
      "title": "Bouvard on Shared Centers and Sovereign Hierarchies",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Sep 21, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9hnmhg/",
      "content": "[Q:laskitude] I thought of asking Bouvard  how one might go about answering somebody who asks that one describes this object, describe it beyond a very general reference to 'a centre', a 'center' that is hardly the same thing as this object now possessing irresistible centrality somehow?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThere's no problem with Muslims in particular. I would put it this way: the center, in the sense of THE CENTER, to which all more local objects are ultimately tributary, is the imaginary of a ruler or governor whom we don't want to tear to pieces, not even symbolically. So, you're right, there's not a physical object to point to, but an articulated set of practices and disciplines that seek to reduce all forms of violent centralization (i.e., scapegoating, again, even symbolic), in the name of a presider of order whom we also refrain from violently centralizing, because he makes the practices and disciplines possible.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] Not sure what you're thinking of with that very first assertion, but do i THINK i know where you're headed with the rest? But my query was cast of course in light of your own guest COL&R \"Crisis of Firstness\", and I won't pretend to yet comprehend what \"articulated set of practices and disciplines\" work within the broader Muslim world to ensure avoidance of that \"Final Conflict\" of firstness and lastness, or the modern with an essentially tribal world? Which presiders are still operative within what one might well call the Muslim world, if any? If the Muslims are, as you say, now but more 'small o' others commingled with us (sic) and largely divested of their previous Otherness, does anyone 'preside' over (what remains of?) their religion at all? To be honest, I'm just not getting any sense of how ..their \"local objects\" made their transition to THE centre, which I'm presuming you are attributing some sort of globally irresistible universality.....?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf we think in terms of Muslim governments, the question is whether they can cooperate with other governments, both non-Muslim and differently Muslim, in maintaining order and respecting others' sovereignty within what is necessarily a hierarchical international order. We can think about this by analogy with a neighborhood--there are big property owners, middle sized one and small property owners. The largest owners are fine with everyone else owning and running their own properties, as long as conflicts within and between the other property owners don't spill over into the neighborhood, reducing values, etc. In that case, the largest owner(s) may have to step in an assert an otherwise mostly latent sovereignty.\n\nI think that we are seeing that Muslim governments are, in fact, capable of playing by these rules. You won't be surprised to see me refer to Saudi Arabia, which we might call a medium sized owner, as an example here. The way they have dramatically changed their behavior, and, I'm sure more subtly, their theology and cleric-state relations, demonstrates that this is indeed possible--especially given proper guidance from the larger property owners. The other Gulf states, for the most part, seem to be following S. Arabia's lead. Maybe Pakistan will show themselves similarly capable, if T Wictor is right and the US has taken out a huge chunk of their Islamist ISS operatives in Afghanistan. It's not a globally irresistible universality, but a more proper allocation and enforcement of obligations and responsibilities that solves the problem.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] I thoroughly relished T Dubya when he had his blog but (but) the eventual transition to hardcore tweetering  instead revealed what I think I can only call a level of zeal that, along with the follower-adulation which quickly grew all about him, generated in me a somewhat inevitable measure of distaste. This was hardly helped by the fact that he apparently cannot accommodate dissent of any kind! I realise of course that his mission is a big one, and mere upstarts such as myself, simultaneously viewing documentations of all manner of police horribleness all over the USA, can be no more than flies in his broader American annointments.. He simply gnores all protestation in his headlong rush to heal the heartland and hammer the peripheriff-raff...what's up Curmudgeon Canyon, Los Angeles, must eventually come (a little way) down...? I would be very interested indeed to know something of what Bouvard  sees when he Peeks at his Shit !T Dubya's, I mean!\n\n[ADAM]\n\nHe runs his twitter feed as a very tight disciplinary space, with a very narrow purpose: to help Trump. Within that frame, we can see everything he says as so many hypotheses, which he justifies to the extent of the available evidence and his varied forms of expertise and the reading of what Trump is doing that (fixing the world) is his basic assumption. He could be wrong about anything or everything, but his argument and the subsidiary hypotheses will come through undiluted in his space. If someone wants to disrupt that process, e.g. by nagging him to defend some claim he has already posited as a presupposition of other claims, well, that someone can start his own twitter account. The online media world is an insane asylum, and anyone who wants an ordered space within it will have to be very exclusive and selective regarding interlocutors.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] > It's not a globally irresistible universality, but a more proper allocation and enforcement of obligations and responsibilities that solves the problem. How would you say this idea of \"obligations and responsibilities\" works in with that understanding most central (methinks) to a work such as The End Of Culture, which is of course the existence and life of individual desire? The attempt to newly control which, pretty much defines any social evolution? It's darn curious enough that you use the term 'solves' here rather than 'defers', but really sir, isn't the advent of desire(s) as big a consideration as any concerning 'power(s)'?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nPutting in place a mechanism of deferral is way of solving a problem--but you're right, there's something complacent about the whole notion of solving problems. We have to account for obligations and responsibilities in originary terms, though--after all, such things exist, and can't be off-loaded to the \"market.\" Desires can't just be endlessly dispersed until they become harmless--sooner or later they're going to converge. My notion of donating one's resentment to the center is the best  way I have of thinking this through."
    },
    {
      "slug": "gans-on-the-centre",
      "title": "Bouvard on Centre, Dictatorship, and Anthropological Thought",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 18, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/85f6li/",
      "content": "[ADAM]\n\nSome here might find this Chronicle interesting. I suspect the following paragraphs are entering the liberal vs. absolutist GA discussion:\n\nTo begin anew: the human is defined by the transcendental status of the centre of the human scene, which can be attained only through the deferral of appropriative action and its mediation by the sign, the aborted gesture of appropriation. Human beings come to usurp the central position in “sacred” kingships and empires, but the notion that human sovereignty is itself transcendental, rather than a role consecrated by the transcendental in the interest of the human community, leads to the leader-worship common to the totalitarian dictatorships of the past century and the démocratures of our own.\n\nThe originary hypothesis does not imply a particular political system. But I must say that I am thankful for the liberty that liberal democracy, even in its currently troubled state, allows me to investigate these propositions in a manner that no dictatorship would ever permit. Which is why, whatever technological progress may occur in dictatorships, they will never produce revelatory ideas of fundamental anthropology, and indeed have no desire to, since their very claim to legitimacy comes from the conviction that our “brave new world” is no longer what it once was, and needs no longer concern itself with its original anthropological foundation.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't see why any \"dictatorship,\" whether it be Franco's in Spain, Pinochet's in Chile, or Mussolini's or even Hitler's (as long as it was carried out by Aryans) would prohibit these anthropological reflections. Only the USSR I think would outright forbid them. And Gans has spent the first part of his Chronicle arguing that secular modernity renders such reflections unintelligible, precisely because it \"need no longer concern itself with its original anthropological foundation.\" Perhaps a regime that recognizes its dependence upon traditions, and the need for a shared concept of the good would be more interested in such reflections.\n\nBut I certainly agree that human sovereignty is \"consecrated by the transcendental in the interest of the human community\" rather than being \"itself transcendental.\" The question is whether the sovereign is sovereign.\n\nAnyway, this is a great level at which to conduct such discussions, and the Chronicle provides a very compact and lucid account of some of the central tenets of GA.\n\n---\n\n[Q:eumenes_of_cardia] A question. Gans writes the following - and here I am sorry for block quoting and doing a poor job of it. *It is for me an irrefutable criterion of sérieux in this domain that one not dismiss religion as a sign of a lower stage of human understanding. Whether or not religious beliefs can one day be comprehended in a grand anthropological synthesis, the claim that the transcendence that they personalize or reify is simply a mystified human trait is quite simply a fallacy. The existence of a representational culture that is not inscribed in the genome of human individuals is not a chimera but a fact. What Plato reified as Ideas are quite simply a “secular” version of cultural transcendentality. The Hebrew notion of God is a more unified version of the transcendental that takes into account the primacy of the centre over its indefinitely multiple attributes. For Socrates/Plato the Good is, in any case, an Idea of a higher valence than that of more specific notions. We may say that the Ju\n\n[ADAM]\n\nA Kuhnian anthropological model would be different than a Kuhnian model in the natural sciences. There is, indeed, no place for God in the natural sciences, but the natural sciences don't account for human being. There's no center to the universe, but there is a center to every human community, gathering, or even conversation. A \"scientific\" model of thought that doesn't take that into account is not rendering it's competitors obsolete; rather it is imposing upon itself limitations that make it irrelevant to understanding any social order. I actually don't think the whole atheist/deist \"debate\" or \"dialogue\" is either possible or likely to be particularly interesting.\n\nBoth positions, as presently constructed, work within Enlightenment models of \"philosophy\" and \"religion\" which need to be rendered obsolete. It's the terms of the debate that need to be superseded, not one side or the other. I also don't think much of the \"stage model,\" since all of the development from \"lower\" to 'higher\" social forms involves the centralization of power, but more centralized doesn't not invariably mean more civilized, or moral, or ethical. Centralization is a precondition of those things, but the interesting question is how centralization takes place--and there's no stagist way of accounting for that. Humans in a community can either clarify or obscure their relation to the center, and existing conditions can make it easier or harder to clarify it, but they are not pre-determined by \"history\" to do one or the other."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-longest-most-convoluted-revised-and-thickly-imagined-title-deed-possible-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Mysticism, Esotericism, and Jewish Discourse",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jul 13, 2023",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/14ylito/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] >It would be easy enough to take all this to deny the legitimacy and even reality of the “Jewish people,” and denounce the Jewish tradition as a pack of lies, etc. My reading is exactly the opposite—there is a tenaciousness and willingness to undergo trials in the preservation of this legacy in the “selfishness” of its very “materialist” claims that legitimates far more than simple father to son property and monarchical transmissions (none of which have ever lasted anywhere near this long, and all of which have required a bit of “stretching” along the way). This is an interesting way of framing the matter and defining identity.  I'm not a scholar of the Bible so I was only able to loosely follow along with the prior statements, but when you get to this point what you are conceptually saying becomes clearer to me. You're saying Jews' attempt to preserve themselves even in the face of material contradictions (let's say, whatever inheritance from other cults) proves a type of reality tr\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI agree with your reading. Regarding mysticism,  Jewish in particular, I've never gotten that interested in it and always thought it was played up by literary critics. Some of it is a way of talking about psychology without a secular vocabulary for it. Some of it is esotericism--a way of speaking in coded language about things it's dangerous for the masses to hear. But it seems that understanding the little quasi-Messianic cult that developed around the late Rabbi Schneerson would require some familiarity with mysticism. Then the question would be how important it is to understand that.\n\nBut the passage you quote there is more about logic, reason and theology than mysticism. There are Jewish attempts at a theology, but I don't think any of them work. Judaism can't have an authoritative theology and it doesn't need one.\n\nAn idea I've had for a while is to make a film based on the medieval \"disputations\" organized by Christian kings--they're very interesting, from a range of perspectives--and I've discovered that a lot of the contemporary \"accusations\" against Jews have their origins in the Christian side of those disputations.  I'm no filmmaker, but if you ever come into contact with any, this might be a challenging, rather risky project.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] >Judaism can't have an authoritative theology and it doesn't need one. This is a very interesting statement. >An idea I've had for a while is to make a film based on the medieval \"disputations\" organized by Christian kings--they're very interesting That would be very interesting.  What logistics do you think would go into it?  Time, expertise, manpower?  I can get started on looking into it.  Obviously we can contribute significant money, but I imagine the bottleneck is number of people and enough of the right and different expertises. If you can give me a skeleton and flow chart, that'd be great.  Not that you care a super amount, but this is how you would pull Joel back and either re-enfranchise him or come to even better closure.  Would this also bring back Chris?  I know Tyler gets deeply interested in all things theological. This can also be my best segue into these matters and I just do the debating for you.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI've got an unlikely idea, which might prove to be very productive for purposes if you were able to pull it off. I have noticed, very recently, some guys on Twitter taking on the JQers--writing substacks challenging their claims, going on podcasts with them, going back and forth on twitter, etc. There's an account called \"History Speaks,\" whose owner says he is not Jewish, and who has been refuting Holocaust denial--pretty ably, it seems to me. There's a guy named Will Vivere (Will V on Twitter)--who knows if that's a real name, of course--who has been writing sophisticated and well documented substacks addressing the various JQ talking points (Jews in the media, etc.).\n\nAnd someone who goes by Lucian Wolf, who does youtube videos. (Vivere and Wolf describe themselves as \"Mischlings\") There are a few others--they seem to have sprung up like mushrooms--but I mention these three because they have been not only willing, but eager, to engage the WNS in any media--and have been. So, how about getting these guys to collaborate with a few of the (Christian) WNs on this project--each side has their position built in (even if the Jewish side doesn't seem so interested in the religious issue itself, they might find the politics of it interesting). I'd be happy to help as a \"script consultant\" or something, but I couldn't take an organizing role--I've got too much to do.\n\nBy the way, a movie has already been made on this, from 1990, I think. It's good, but short, and I suspect it stays on a very general level in selecting which arguments to include:\n\nhttps://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=AB5stBipWLSoCQ7Kzn8GZXAoGhWdRUsHVQ:1689280984052&q=the+disputation+1996&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjEo-uHxoyAAxXCGFkFHUrmB-oQ0pQJegQICxAB&biw=1429&bih=697&dpr=2#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:3c7643ab,vid:-p3WlesJgaI"
    },
    {
      "slug": "chapter-10-of-tool",
      "title": "Bouvard on Language, Deferral, and Mimetic Resentment",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 02, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/dc1i4s/",
      "content": "[Q:TwatBrah] To me the most interesting, and difficult, chapter of The Origin Of Language is chapter 10 \"The fundamental assymetry of the speech situation\". The chapter seems to be present in full here: http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw544/ >For the hearer, however, the representation does not appear alone, but as spoken by the speaker-speaking-the-utterance, and thus the hearer’s intentional model of reality in the speech-situation is complicated by the addition of a supplementary factor. The speaker intends only the linguistic model, but the hearer intends the speaker’s intention. If this were not so, the communication situation would not be “intentional,” that is, representational at all. To understand the speech act as something other than an instinctual/involun­tary signal, it must be seen as an inten­tional actualization of linguistic presence. Very well, the hearer must realize that there is intention behind the speech in question in order for it to be understod as symbolic and not so\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf the speaker can have meta-awareness of himself, he could also have meta-meta-awareness and meta-meta-meta-awareness, and so on. He could never get to the intention of actually putting forth a linguistic model.\n\nI think Gans is indeed saying that our utterances can only be explicated after the fact and never fully account for themselves but that this doesn't mean that our intuition of the intelligibility of any utterance is a \"fraud\" to be nihilistically denounced--we can continually, if never completely, clarify it.\n\nDeclaratives, i would say, conceal from themselves their own grounding in desire because their \"essence\" is to demystify some other desire. This concealment can be maintained if the proposition is treated alone, as a \"reflection\" of reality in itself. Once propositions are understood recursively, as explicating previous declaratives and being explicated in turn, the desire informing them is \"unconcealed.\"\n\n---\n\n[Q:TwatBrah] Is all language a kind of substitute for \"appropriation\" of whatever the referent is according to GA? But what would it mean to appropriate for example a mountain or an abstract concept like heat?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, ultimately language is a kind of substitute for (or deferral of) appropriation. But this gets much more complex than in the examples we have to use in hypothesizing the emergence of basic speech forms. If you refer to a mountain, you're probably not just pointing to it--you're talking about it in a conversation that might involve planning a trip, studying geology, looking at a painting, etc. The appropriation that is being deferred in these cases must be understood in broader social terms--hiking trips, discussions of art and scientific inquiry aIll serve deferral purposes. That is, they all, like the declarative, create a \"reality,\" a part of the world we treat linguistically rather than fight over.\n\nInstitutions established authoritatively serve the purpose of deferral. The most basic model for all this is ritual, which provides the terms of coherence for a community by repeating the act of communal origin. More developed institutions do this in more indirect ways. Language first developed to give added meaning to ritual, so that ritual could provide means for modeling more practices. Language still does the same thing--it produces narrative of institutions that keep accounting for new desires and resentments generated those institutions.\"Appropriation\" comes to mean things like acquiring wealth, power and status, and doing these things in socially destructive ways must be deferred--that's what we use language for. Establishing spaces (like art and science) where constrained intellectual practices are privileged provide language for deferring socially destructive \"appropriations.\"\n\n---\n\n[Q:TwatBrah] I see, in this conception of language we are all pro-social agents and no matter how heated the situation, if we are using language, we are on some level desiring to avoid violence and destruction. But what about something undesirable like a sickness, why would we talk about that, is it then the avoidance or cure of this sickness we are implicitly referring to?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nSickness is a good example. In a sacrificial culture, where everything that happens to one is a result of the doings of the gods, to be sick (or injured, or malformed...) is to be \"marked\" in some way. The gods hate you, so you deserve it. Referring to the sick is a kind of scapegoating, in that case--referring to him maliciously defers resentment among others in the community.\n\nNow, referring to sickness as something towards which we should show compassion and which we should try to alleviate, is a way of deferring such scapegoating. We are still tempted to \"blame the victim,\" but we have created institutions of deferral that enable us to treat the victim differently.\n\nSo, in talking about sickness, we are talking about how to address victimization. Under some conditions, \"piling on\" the afflicted is the way one \"appropriates\" status and power; under other conditions, deferring that impulse is the way we confer honor (and a certain social status or authority is \"appropriated:)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "i-respect-absolutist-ontology-someone-always-takes-the-lead-in-a-given-social-in",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty, Mimesis, and Institutional Form",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 20, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6ihhhe/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] Do you agree with this? >Secondly, I am not actually hostile to the idea of a sovereign board and a delegate. In fact, it doesn't breach neoabsolutism. full comment here:  https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6ief7c/steelcameralism_v_absolutism_round_1_and_2/\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't think so, but I do try to keep the number of proposals I am \"hostile\" to down to a minimum. I'm not that interested in the nuts and bolts of these things right now--you end up with irrelevant arguments about the composition of the \"board\" and the rules governing it, etc., and it's all a distraction. I suspect you are pointing to a larger, anthropological, issue, though--the implicit liberalism of this proposal. I think that RF's comment on \"cameralism\" on another thread gets at some of the problems with seeing government as a business (and citizens as consumers, etc.). I think that rejection of government as business would apply to the \"sovereign board\" as well, since it's obviously conceived on that model, but maybe I'm missing something.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] >and it's all a distraction. I suspect you are pointing to a larger, anthropological, issue, though--the implicit liberalism of this proposal. Agreed. However, I've apparently unsuccessfully been trying to point that this \"absolutist neoreaction/neoabsolutism\" project going on here is primarily a project about the structure/engineering of the state.  You are obviously very nice to these people when it is evident that they have only read/interpreted your writings to the extent they justify their proposed \"structure.\"  IOW, you are useful to the extent that your \"anthropology\" justifies their liberal preferences regarding the \"state.\" IOOW, is this \"kindness\" exactly the \"sacrifice/gamble\" bobby mentioned in the other thread?  Or are you still finding value here?  Something else?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI see this as a big, long-term project. We're building an intellectual tradition. There are not too many of us now, but I think there will be more over time. We should be patient, and exploit the \"leisure\" time we have to think things through in as many ways as possible. I'm fairly new to all this--I came across Land's \"Dark Enlightenment\" maybe 2-2.5 years ago, and that led me to NRx and RF, and somewhere along the way (maybe 2 years ago, but I could be misremembering) the alt-right came on my radar. I'm really still learning from everyone, yourself included, and I certainly would never have begun thinking in a sustained way about absolutism without RF's blogging and it has been a revelation for me, solving all kinds of conceptual/political problems I'd been working on for years.\n\nIt may be that all this focus on \"engineering the state\" led me to back to thinking about sacrality and kingship, but that's valuable as well because I can now read the problem of sacral kingship and its aftermath \"against\" the structural/engineering frame, which would also make me indebted to that discussion. You say you've been (\"apparently\") \"unsuccessful,\" but how do you know? Moldbug says somewhere that we should be having fun, and I see it that it--it's a joy and privilege to discuss all these questions--I pity people who are still caught up in trying to devise Rube Goldberg machines to make liberalism work.\n\n(Maybe that's how you would describe cameralism, but at least those constructions are less ad hoc.) We should be glad to talk to each other in spite of and because of the disagreements and you really don't know when someone who has been seemingly intractably against you for a long time all of a sudden sees merit in your views and does something with them you haven't anticipated. That's happened to me, on both sides of the equation, more than once. In this case, maybe it will take people a while to see the relevance of this difference between the technology and the anthropology of the state. Sometimes digging more deeply into your own position makes it possible to see the value of another's, even if it takes some time."
    },
    {
      "slug": "liberal-democracy-today-chronicles-of-love-and-resentment",
      "title": "Bouvard on Left's Originary Equality Claims",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Feb 19, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/asbjd1/",
      "content": "[ADAM]\n\nI think this is a very interesting *Chronicle*. It begins by asserting that liberal democracy depends upon compromise, which means neither side sees itself as occupying an ontologically prior and privileged position. It then goes on to point out that the Left finds it difficult to adhere to these terms, because it sees itself as representing the originary position of equality on the scene. This assumption leads the left to see all institutions as ultimately illegitimate--either they facilitate the originary distribution of the scene, in which case they are provisionally accepted, or they interfere with that distribution, in which case they must be overthrown.\n\nIt then points out that this tendency of the left is becoming more extreme, and finally cites AOC's New Green Deal as a new way of \"seizing\" the originary position of naked equality, in this case before a \"victimized\" nature, which we are all now committed to protect (from ourselves--from our own \"sparagmatic\" tendencies). But I don't know if Gans realizes that this presumed originary position would itself be incompatible with liberal democracy. What would there be to compromise over? And any alternative to the GND would be a set of forces that could crush it, also without any regard to liberalism or democracy.\n\n​\n\nIn terms of GA, then, it seems to me we can formulate the following hypothesis: the future of the social order will depend upon the battle, or competition, or dialectic, between those who insist on directly occupying the originary position, and those who insist that distribution must be mediated by the descendants of the Big Man--hierarchs, or autocrats. The disadvantage of the post-Big Man faction is that its position is anterior to the originary scene simulated in the leftist scenario; its advantage is that, while hierarchs and autocrats actually exist, at least as much so under the most self-proclaimed egalitarian order, any imagined egalitarianism now is a fraudulent simulacrum that \"disappears\" the center from the originary scene.\n\nEven if, as Gans suggests here, \"Nature\" can become a new sacrality (he is right to \"hesitate\" to ask the Green New Dealers if they see it this way), the tremendous, superhero movie level agencies required to carry out 1/10 of what the GND envisages would create vast new hierarchies and priesthoods. If they were to adhere to the assumption of the originary position, they would raze the earth and all in it, including each other; if this new order were to be stabilized, new ways of sacralizing hierarchies would have to be created. In the end, the autocrat is the more authentic inheritor of the originary center, even if patience is required to see it as such.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] Anterior?  Anyway, I think this is right.  The GND, not that i've read it,  could only be implemented by a different kind of government and global economy than the \"democratic\" left imagines, though perhaps they are not too far from embracing government by priestly experts with \"democracy\" there just to decide the exceptions.  The EU. I think you would agree that the history of liberal democracy is more or less coterminous with the mass market, that liberal democratic politics is in good part about the battle to service basically sociopathic economic factions (attacking all protected/established/guild forms of production)  competing to make production ever more efficient and in so doing avoid public debate of - or a new kind of leadership taking over - the question of what we should really be doing with our time now that the sociopaths have made us rich, with more than enough wealth to insure everyone with the basics for physical survival?  I read once that medieval peasants only actu\n\n[ADAM]\n\nRight--posterior! The imperative to save the planet would wreak havoc with the mass market as well, which is perhaps part of what you're getting at here. (It would address tommy's Age of the Spragmos, though.)\n\nThere's a partly but not completely ironic sympathy with AOC on the right, in part because she's so heedlessly busting up the terms of liberal democracy, and proposing massively heroic projects similar to those admired by the imperial right. I read more of that sympathy in Gans's Chronicle than is warranted, but whether he subjectively \"feels\" that sympathy the alternatives he presents implies it. Less \"sympathy\" than acknowledgment of a confrontation over the terrain of a ruined liberalism. That's getting a bit ahead of things, but no one in the Democratic party seems interested in openly resisting AOC (even if there are noises that behind the scenes there are plans to stymie her). They seem to be accepting that she's the future."
    },
    {
      "slug": "incorporation-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty and Corporate Organization",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Sep 17, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/70ohs8/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] >How to select the sovereign himself is a problem, because there’s no reason to assume a hereditary monarch will be up to the task. Why? Succession laws are a way to prevent conflict. The longer that the heir has been determined prior to succession, the less room there is for conflict. Why hereditary succession? It is instinctual to care for your offspring's well-being. Deferral is increased by living vicariously through your children after your death. People live less through their siblings than their own children, and the possibility of siblings inheriting presents rivalry with nieces and nephews. Why primogeniture? The first point again, because choosing between children opens the door to conflict and factions. Also, the oldest will be less likely to require a regent or need one for less time. Why agnatic primogeniture? This one is obvious and the difference between men and women doesn't need to be elaborated here. So, Agnatic primogeniture is *as a rule* the least conflict-pr\n\n[ADAM]\n\nMaybe you're right. I don't rule it out, but generating possibilities is helpful in thinking it through. In a country without a hereditary monarchy, in particular one that's never had one, a (for example) ruling junta that takes power in a crisis and is looking for someone to hand over permanent power to might find that trying to choose the head of one among many virtually indistinguishable families is more likely to restart the crisis than a system that the leading executives could agree with.\n\n---\n\n[Q:imperialenergy] Excellent essay. Question regarding the following: \"This is why I think both that the corporate form is the ideal form for the absolutist state and that the state itself cannot be a corporation.\" Are you saying \"cannot but be a corporation\" or \"cannot be\"? Szabo also argues that America's constitution was based on the concept of \"corporate charters\". You make a great point, about the the founder's incoherence. You see them all moving left as they realize that their break with England must be total and complete and thus have to rely on the \"people as sovereign\" idea. One of the reasons why we push this \"corporate-business\" model is that it would, frankly, probably be an easier sell to everyone. It tries to avoid as much metaphysics and contentious politics as possible and argues \"look USG is a corporation, it was modeled after corporations but the founders mis-structured the state (what with them not being aware of modern forms of corporations); so let's just re-structure the thin\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIt's not a typo--the state should be made up of corporations but itself needs to be outside of the corporate structure--because who would have charted the state corporation. Since you speak of \"selling,\" though, i would certainly agree that what you propose would be an immense improvement over what we have now. I'm more optimistic than you, probably because in my anthropological understanding, humans as a species are founded on \"peace\" (the deferral of violence) not war.\n\nI can see the need for a \"minimal\" approach that avoids \"metaphysical\" arguments. That's really what the liberals were originally after as well. But maybe \"selling\" is not the only way to think about the process.\n\n---\n\n[Q:imperialenergy] Perhaps we have said this already or somewhere else, but we have been thinking about your article for a little while. Let's consider two models. One where the sovereign is outside and another where sovereign and state are \"fused.\" For the first, and sticking with the profit-making model, you have a sovereign who essentially creates a Sovcorp. He designs the constitution, he invests his capital and floats the thing on the stock market (though let's say he retain 51% share-holder control). Now, after raising the capital via his own and other share-holders making investments, he selects a board of directors and places himself in the position of Chair. The Board, with the Chair acting both in the informal sense as the sovereign and in the formal sense as the one who has the authority to veto Board decisions when it comes to selection, select the CEO. The CEO then, with the advice and consent of the Board, selects his cabinet. And so on. Now, the sovereign in this case exercises ver\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't want to sound discouraging, and you may be right to want to get these models right and ready to go when the time comes, but I'm much more interested (if we are to refer to Moldbug) to the \"antiversity\" side of his thinking: building the elements of the new order through the relentless scrutiny--economic, moral, aesthetic, everything--of this one. It seems to me, perhaps naively, that if we figure out how to become, and help others become, the kind of people that can attract the attention of the most responsible parts of the power structure, all these other questions will be easy to answer when we need to."
    },
    {
      "slug": "trump-and-the-arab-spring",
      "title": "Bouvard on Media Power and Mimetic Neutralization",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 28, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9s130q/",
      "content": "[Q:eumenes_of_cardia] It seems to me that he took advantage of a similar media ecology - insofar as twitter and facebook lets people organize and disseminate information outside of regular power structures. What's interesting to me is the difference in response. Instead of shutting down and regulating social media, we are now seeing social media in America, and by extension in the west, more carefully curating content to make it align with the more mainstream communication channels (blue checkmarks, deplatforming, shadowbanning, traffic re-orientation through algorithmic manipulation). The Arab Spring and Trump presidency were perhaps the most spectacular uses of these means, but we can also look back to Occupy and other similar movements as attempts to organize horizontally via instant messaging and instant information sharing - and this is observable in every country that allows those platforms.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI'm not so sure about the connection to the Arab Spring because I don't think the Middle Eastern countries had the kind of independently powerful mass media that the West has. I think Trump has neutralized the media simply by treating them as the enemy, which also means as an independent power center. He simply refused to accept the cloak of objectivity which protected them. So, he tricked them into treating him openly as the enemy; everyone now knows that everything the media says that might hurt Trump is being said only to hurt him. So, that taints even true things they might say about him. Unless you agree Trump is bad, and the media are just objectively recognizing his badness.\n\nBut if you're in a circular logic like that you render yourself irrelevant anyway. But Trump could only do that because of the emergence of social media, which had already fingered the media as an independent and self-interested site of power. And, of course, his own use of Twitter leveraged a weapon that no President ever had before--he could reach audiences unfiltered. His rallies can be shown on youtube--nobody has to dependent on snippets shown in the nightly news. But these might certainly be strategies and tactics Trump picked up from watching the Arab Spring. The opposition to Trump is in a double bind, because the first inclination of leftists on twitter or Facebook is to ask that right-wingers be deplatformed, so they immediately \"uncloak\" themselves of any claims to disinterestedness--they're obviously just power players themselves.\n\n​\n\nWhat is interesting now is that if the Republicans expand their power in next week's elections, we will have a situation in which almost the entire government is in the hands of the Republicans, while almost all of the non-governmental sources of power (including much--it's hard to know how much--of the permanent state) are in the hands of the left. So I would expect to see novel forms of asymmetrical political warfare. Trump has taken away the weapon that I think paralyzed previous presidents (and almost all politicians)--the use of leaks by actors within the state colluding with the media. He's been plugging leaks and feeding the media false leaks, so it's now the media that is ineffective.\n\nI don't know what the media does now other than organize more hoaxes, which keep getting more ridiculous, but maybe they'll surprise me. (One very simple thing that I think Trump was, amazingly, the first to realize, is that you can say whatever you want to the media, because they're not a transparent conduit of information but a self-interested actor. Other presidents have lied to the media, of course, but they suffered if they got caught because they accepted that doing so was wrong--Trump realizes that nobody who doesn't already hate him cares if he BSes and gaslights the media--the media is one of the most hated institutions in the country.)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "how-to-change-the-course-of-human-history",
      "title": "Bouvard on Hierarchy and Household Political Possibility",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 03, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/81nycn/",
      "content": "[Q:reactionaryfuture] The last three paragraphs are deeply wrong and undermined by his previous complaints about liberal anthropology. Excellent nonetheless.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe notion that far more social possibilities exist than the liberalism of the last couple of centuries would have us imagine helps us as well as Graeber. Imperial Energy might point out the complete absence of war in Graeber's discussion. In a sense, though, it doesn't make much difference--the differences are ultimately theoretical. OK, let's say there were municipal councils in ancient Mexico, and it's members were elected, and could be removed, or abused, or whatever. I would say that either their decision making was essentially determined in advance by traditions preserved by priests, generals, etc., within an order that ultimately has a high priest or supreme general, in which case the decisions they make are ultimately trivial, or serve some other purpose; or, like liberal democracy, or ancient Roman and Greek republics, they were a vehicle for unstable and unsustainable power struggles (or, of course, some combination of both).\n\nNone of this can be empirically tested, and without extensive written records, we are all free to make what we want of all this very interesting knowledge--and Graeber certainly takes advantage of that freedom. But absolutism may take on lots of different forms as well, and it's very good to be granted this freedom to open up various discussions. Unless we imagine a social order in which everyone spontaneously agrees on everything--if not actual decisions, at least the means of making the decisions (but for how long is it possible to agree on the means but disagree on the decisions?)--then we are back to theorizing and formalizing the actual hierarchies involved.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIn a way, his last paragraph gives away the game--at first, I thought maybe it was a nod to feminism, but the claim that cities and confederacies can be egalitarian but families and households cannot means that the egalitarian cities and confederacies are in fact held together by the hierarchical families and households. And families and households could obviously be quite extended--most if not all monarchies are in fact \"families and households.\" Does Graeber really imagine it's easier to do away with (or dramatically transform) families and households than with cities and confederacies? If there's a conflict between the two, which will subordinate the other?\n\n---\n\n[Q:DavidGraeber] it doesn't say families and households cannot be it just says it's harder.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nTrue, but the \"harder\" part looks to the future: \"Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.\" All this new historical evidence doesn't seem to have provided many models for this transformation. So, instead of \"cannot,\" I'm willing to say \"have, as far as we know, almost never been.\" And so far the \"work\" of creating more egalitarian families has involved pulverizing families: from extended families to the nuclear family, fro the nuclear family to liberated singles and various forms of transient cohabitation, along with fewer and fewer children."
    },
    {
      "slug": "intro-to-generative-anthropology-tas-3",
      "title": "Bouvard on Originary Repetition and Semiotic Undecidability",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 23, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9qmofc/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] I about died seeing the thumbnail for their video.  It's the same one we turned into an emoji on our Discords.  Like it or not, /u/bouvard1 , these youthful boys will invigorate your teacher.  Deconstruct, reconstruct, narrate, meme-ify.  Even him being accused of relations with a female student gained him respect among the shitlords, which they turned into another meme. I wonder, though, how ready the obscure GA faculty are for a bunch of 16-30 year olds to come barreling through.  Those kids are all high IQ of course, but it'll definitely bring out some tension for why some of that faculty chose to remain obscure for so many years (e.g. I could never get Eshelman to reply to any of my thoughtful emails, though apparently Marina was very bubbly talking to Moritz).\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThis was just great. I don't know anything about those memes you're referring to, but this is definitely a high level of understanding, and very clearly explained. People can do what they want--I wouldn't object, and I doubt Gans would.\n\nI don't think Eshelman really considers himself within GA--he found Gans's hypothesis useful for his own purposes, and Gans likes his concept of \"performatism,\" but I only met him once, in 2009 at our conference in Ottawa and I doubt there's been much contact between him and others. Marina's great, and she's open to post-liberal, post-democratic thinking, but she doesn't write about politics and I don't know how comfortable she's be talking much about it. Most of the others are excellent scholars, with work well worth looking into, but also fairly specialized (although this varies) academics in the center-right to center-left liberal range, and I can't see any of them budging from that. But I have no doubt that everyone would be happy to see these people at conferences, or submitting essays for Anthropoetics. We have a book review section there, so if anyone wants to give that a try, rather than a full length essay, they can contact me. If there's tension, I'm sure we're well equipped to resolve it.\n\n(By the way, one tiny correction--I think I heard one of them say that Gans is French--he's not, he was a French professor.)\n\n​\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] I was meaning to ask you if you or Gans seriously checked in with Deleuze, though.  I could only get a passing dismissal from a Google search of Eric Gans with Deleuze.  Much of his theory of language (through the lens of Lévi-Strauss, whom Olson also handles, and continued through Alain Badiou) seems very GA-friendly.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nGans is very dismissive of Deleuze. I have drawn upon his *Difference and Repetition* (he has, as I understood it, a notion of a kind of \"originary repetition\" that I use). Delueze actually draws quite a bit on Peirce's semiotics, whom Gans refers to on occasion but is much more important to me--but not so much for his understanding of language, I think. But Delueze seems to me focused on breaking down hierarchies and transcendence. And his theory of desire as \"productive\" rather than negative is, I think, very much at odds with GA. Delouse wanted to be an anarchist philosopher, I think--all horizontal, no vertical.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfatiKYIEzo&index=22&list=PLqjjPGlxuA10wA6UG5A7FbZKXG7z2YuYW https://i.imgur.com/LNG2EeY.png We're trying to gradually introduce GA to this guy.  We think he'll be a big contributor in time. I just came from Propertarianism, which claimed an operational account of language, so hearing Deleuze talk about an all-at-once account of language comprehension obviously fired some neurons.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, that's interesting. Paradox and undecidability are central to GA as well--Gans usually gets at it through Godel. I suspect Gans's problem comes (and I would largely agree) with the discussion of \"reterritorialization\" that Ebert goes into. In a sense, these concepts that are meant to understand the conditions of structurality can't really be given a \"real,\" causal status. Yes, when incommensurable  mappings enter the same space, there is a deterritorialization and reterritorialization, but that doesn't mean we can see society or history as a series of deterritorializations and reterritorializations. That in itself would be to confuse the map with the territory. The all-at-once account of language from Levi-Strauss does, of course, \"map\" well onto GA. Leaving all that aside, he certainly seems like someone who might be interested in GA. I suspect a lot would depend on his institutional status."
    },
    {
      "slug": "request-question-on-aesthetics",
      "title": "Bouvard on Aesthetics as Foundational to Ethics",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 12, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/h00vz4/",
      "content": "[Q:creativeparadox] This post is directed at Adam and I'm wondering if you plan to expand on GAs take on aesthetics. It seems to me that we have a really good language for this, i.e.: implicit imperatives in ostensives, the ensuing grammatical loops of various sizes of a particular piece of music, or larger ritual. Theres a primacy of the aesthetics of a given ritual, as being fully formed at a glance and then liquidated/expanded upon through further \"analysis/attentiveness\". To me, this is key for understanding some of the underlying functions of why we hold the ostensive-imperative world over the declarative. And even further why we have a sort of \"golden age\" of pieces of aesthetics throughout different cultures histories. These pieces being the prime representation of a cultural-ostensive being properly dreamed into the malleable world. I'm wondering your thoughts and if you plan to expand on the primacy of aesthetics in culture. Regards.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, I'll always be coming back to aesthetics. I've got some discussion of it in *Anthropomorphics*, where I focus mostly on satire, but that by no means exhausts the question. There's an argument to be made for the primacy of aesthetics in GA--i.e., that aesthetics grounds and includes morality and ethics. I'll mention in this context that some of Eric Gans's most valuable work is on aesthetics--his chapter on the history of aesthetics in *Originary Thinking* is especially important. His basic definition of aesthetics is as an oscillation on the originary scene--there is a moment when the participant on the scene is directed to the central object by the gesture of the other, but once he has turned away from the gesture to the object the object loses some of it's attractiveness (which was enhanced by the other's desire), so he turns back to the gesture, and so on--this creates the \"beauty\" of the object.\n\nIt then becomes possible to \"frame\" an object or scene as enhancing and suspending the desires of a community. When we aestheticize, we want to sacralize some object or scene, but more sophisticated art (which can distinguish between the aesthetic and the sacred) knows that this can't be done, so the best art includes within itself a resistance to the sacred and to sacrifice: to borrow from (and revise) Kant, one could say art is suffused with \"not quite conclusive intentionality.\" Anyway, what interests me most now (and this follows up on Gans's history of aesthetics, which focuses on the scene of art containing a representation of itself within itself, which is to say, including and \"reading\" its own audience) is the boundary between what is art and what is not art, which is the primary focus on post-classical and post-realist art.\n\nThe end point of minimizing that boundary is to make everyone artists, which is to say, participants in constructing the social order. This comes back to what you say here--we want to construct a world that holds us on the ostensive-imperative level, while giving us something to talk about (declaratively).\n\n---\n\n[Q:creativeparadox] Yeah, I agree fully. I would just add that in some ways we are already doing some of that work. Take for example Spengler and the concept of morphological forms. What he's really describing there is that there is a system of oscillations which expand(and contract) to a higher ostensive(which contains an implicit imperative). A way of fusing that technicality with artistry would be that concept of grammatical loops, as you've written about yourself. This obviously allows for \"close readings\" or uncovering the aesthetic \"value\". You can actually read Spengler as devising the line between institution and \"culture\". I agree that uncovering that boundary between what is and isn't art, will probably be the most important thing to come out of that. Although, I think it will emerge culturally, not as a sort of technical knowledge, but as another way of specific representation. We're always becoming more and more aware of the grammar around us and I don't necessarily think that minimizing that\n\n[ADAM]\n\nHaving never read Spengler, I can't respond to the way you draw on him, but a way of \"fusing\" the aesthetic with technics and social practices more generally is by thinking in terms of design. You design a building, but you also design an organization, and it's always possible to think of whatever you do as a kind of design, and whatever you encounter as something that has been designed, and could be redesigned. It's a way of taking an \"active\" approach to things.\n\nI would assume that the first forms of high art would have been things like temples and palaces, so, yes, architecture would have come first. Learning to think about architecture in the context of urban design is very important, because the design of material structures is really the designing of \"interfaces\" articulating relations between people."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropoetics-xxiv-no-2-spring-2019",
      "title": "Bouvard on Literacy, Liberalism, and Linguistic Origins",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Apr 20, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/bfbtmm/",
      "content": "Bertonneau would probably be sympathetic but not particularly interested. He blogs on the Orthosphere, a fairly well known reactionary site, but is much more of traditionalist than I am. He's been connected to GA almost from the beginning, much longer than I've been--he was a very early student of Gans's--and is of course thoroughly \"fluent\" in it (and has written some excellent introductions, scattered across the internet), but uses it more for interpretative than, let's say, \"reconstructive\" purposes. He's actually also very interested in the cognitive implications of literacy, but here, as well, mostly to analyze the degeneracy of contemporary modes of consciousness. He's very worth reading, but he's got his own projects. To put it another way, he \"uses\" GA insofar as it converges with interests he has independent of it; I'm interested in GA as a total discipline.\n\n---\n\nUltimately these would be questions for Bertonneau. The \"cognitive implications of literacy\" he focuses on are the ability to construct linear, rational discourse--e.g., to distinguish between conjecture and factual claims. In this context, he argues that these cognitive \"acquisitions\" of literacy are being systematically undermined by contemporary liberalism (consumerism, communications technology, victim mongering, etc.). He often uses his students as examples of these developments. I'm not sure how he thinks about the reconstruction of tradition--he seems to me more focused on the intellectual and moral resistance to long terms degenerative developments like gnosticism.\n\n---\n\nI don't think so much in terms of \"gnosticism\" anymore, but gnosticism believes it possesses the truth about the world to which everyone else is blinded--to put it bluntly, what everyone else thinks is God is really the Devil. I think this should be approached differently--everyone has the truth, because everyone has language, and it's therefore a question of showing how the origin of language is implicit in all utterances. The further implication would be that all traditions have been approaching an understanding of the originary hypothesis--they have all been what Oulipo calls \"anticipatory plagiarists,\" but we need to show how. The originary hypothesis is both the most astonishing discovery and the merest tweak on what everyone has always known."
    },
    {
      "slug": "crowding-out-the-political-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Satire, Aesthetics, and Originary Attention",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 09, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9up6n3/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] I just thought that by seeing the grotesque human-as-sign as prior to the beautiful sign you are basically splitting the difference between the Girardian intuition that the human begins with human sacrifice and the Gansian retort that it must begin with representation, presumably of an animal.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf I did that, it was by accident. I've been thinking a lot about satire lately, which is something Gans never discusses to my knowledge, but wouldn't every aesthetic representation have to have a satiric dimension? Even if the point of art is to provide you with a new way of shaping your attention, there must be an implicit satire on your previous ways of doing so. Gans does talk a lot about irony, but it seems to me satire includes irony.\n\n​\n\nI was also rereading the esthetics parts of *Originary Thinking*, and the whole question of the oscillation between sign and object got more complicated. Nothing can be seen other than on a scene, so we need to posit a scene upon which this oscillation is viewed. And, then, what, exactly, do we count as the sign? It seems arbitrary to cut it off at just, say, the finger pointing. We should include the whole posture of the signifying body. After all, if you're on the scene, and you're looking at others, it's to tell whether they're advancing toward the object or maintaining a stance of deferral--the sign would be, you can tell they'd like to advance, as would you, but they're not. So, what would \"oscillation\" entail in that case? Etc.\n\n​\n\nBut I wouldn't say the \"grotesque\" implies a body \"prepped\" for sacrifice. It's not stripped of its defenses, or singled out amongst the others. This is really the symmetry on the scene.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] I don't think there was human sacrifice on the originary scene, or for sometime thereafter.  But when thinking about how simple \"egalitarian\" societies are racked with violence because  it is so easy to take offense over a \"sign\" that seems threatening, personally, or to the extra-mundane hierarchy of meta-persons, then aren't we thinking about the seed of what becomes human sacrifice with the advent of worldly big men?  If so, wouldn't the grotesque human-as-sign, however symmetrically performed at first, suggest the ease at which one can resent those seen to be in the way of the sacred? Gans likes to point to the predominance of animal figures in cave paintings to argue against the idea that human sacrifice is originary.  Fine, but what about the ubiquity of hand stencils alongside those paintings, or of mixed human-animal figures in mythology?  Anyway human figures do appear in some pretty old, pre-big man, painting: e.g.  https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2018/11/07/cave\n\n[ADAM]\n\nMaybe--I see what you are getting at, I think. In early egalitarian societies, I suspect there was much more that was grotesque than beautiful or sublime--a lot of ridicule, casual cruelty, bullying, etc. The opening scene of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is very interesting in this regard, and I would assume Mel did his research. It's the kind of thing you could see being carried over into the kind of intense hazing of kings mentioned in the Social Matters essay sent today to the GAlist. And human-animal hybrids would certainly be more grotesque than beautiful--and there's nothing sublime about a raccoon for an ancestor. I also think it's very likely that pre-Big Man peoples actually took their mythology and rituals less seriously than later peoples, and probably didn't mind their rituals and stories shading over into buffoonery and lampoons. Well, I'll keep an eye out for further indications. There maybe is something overly solemn about the way we Gansians, and, even more, the Girardians, tend to view these early scenes."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ga-and-the-nap",
      "title": "Bouvard on Originary Order Versus Liberal Individualism",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jan 16, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/ephjhw/",
      "content": "[Q:SamgyeopsalChonsa] Some people I've been talking to have been describing GA as the NAP or Hobbes 'on autism': I'm interested  in hearing how GA, and its fundamental premise of language deferring violence, is not just a re-packaging of the NAP or Hobbes or many other Liberal thinkers and ideas?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't know what \"NAP\" refers to, but regarding liberalism more generally, here is how I would distinguish GA: liberalism is a model of order out of disorder (individual, disconnected \"units\"), while GA is always a model of transition from one order to another. The originary scene is a transition from the animal order governed by the Alpha to a human order governed by the center. There is a kind of breakdown of the animal order, which could be described in quasi-liberal terms as a complete breakdown of hierarchy, but there's no need to do so--one just has to assume that the one-on-one confrontation that allows the Alpha to assert dominance over a single Beta has broken down, so the Alpha would now face overwhelming force from the group.\n\nThis doesn't say anything about how that overwhelming force might be shaped--in fact, it seems to me less plausible to imagine all the animals rushing at \"equal\" speed and intensity toward the center. Similarly, one could represent the moment of \"equipoise\" before the central object mediated by the sign as a scene upon which all are \"equal,\" but using the word \"equal\" here is unnecessary and anachronistic. All are *included*, which makes it a *community*, but some will stand nearer to the center and represent the \"will\" or \"sign\" returned by the center better than others; and one will be nearer than anyone. Meanwhile, even before a human comes to occupy the center (the Big Man and then sacred king) the center is always occupied by divine beings, who stand above and command the human community.\n\nThis divine-human hierarchy is itself reproduced within the human community, even if in unsystematized ways. Even the most minimal forms of cooperation among peers have a hierarchical structure, even if it's a rotating one. So, there's never a moment when \"equals,\" with \"rights,\" stand across from each other and agree on a \"contract.\"\n\nYou'll have to remember that this is my reading of the oriignary scene--if someone looks at Gans's accounts, it will be much easier to make the case for GA as a form of liberalism. Gans himself sees it that way."
    },
    {
      "slug": "viral-authoritarianism",
      "title": "Bouvard on Reformist Absolutism and Democratic Fragility",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 25, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/7fg3f7/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Well this piece seems to contest your recent blog that the anarchist imaginary only makes sense as resentment of the absolutist.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nHow so? I wasn't thinking about it in that connection. It interested me for two reasons: one, it suggests the possibility of a kind of \"reformist\" absolutism, that can \"inhabit\" any system and build up its authority structures; two, the inability of the Western democracies to put up even a feeble defense of their systems against even so unimpressive a challenger--just about anything you could say about China could just as easily be said about the West. But what do you have in mind?\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] I was just thinking this writer sees the Western left as but a short step to authoritarianism, while you, though wanting to show that leftist wish fulfillment requires a certain sovereign, nonetheless see the fundamental impulse on the left as anarchistic, at least that's how i read the last post. What worries me is that our discourse on absolutism may well support some silly attempt at socialism and not a frank and therefore meaningful hierarchy.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWell, the anarchist imaginary leads to the totalitarian state--there's always some violation of natural equality that needs to be suppressed. Totalitarianism is when you imagine the entire people rising up and remedying such a violation. At a certain point, if China wants to normalize a hierarchical order, they'll have to jettison even the rhetorical socialism, and, of course, we need to think through state control over the economy carefully. I still think the best way to approach that is through constraints, so all exchanges embed and refer to sovereignty precisely while going their own way in the space maintained by the sovereign.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] Thrilled to see some action happening at last below the salt! I am uncertain as to where I might best place my present enquiry, which is to ask of Adam if he might care to state in some way how he sees the difference(s) between his understanding of power as the product of a kind of 'accreditation' in the midst of a fast-breaking event, a sort of 'selection' that somehow identifies the *One Most Likely To* etcetera, and the commonest notion of power as simply the most credible (use of) force? I was thinking about this in relation to a particularly tendentious piece by Jim Goad in Taki's Magazine recently, regarding the outpouring of leftoid desire to 'disassociate' Charles Manson (in the wake of his death) from \"the 1960s\". I say tendentious because the heavy concept here was the idea that someone could really be a \"product of\" an unspecified series of events (alcoholic mom, an epoch, &c) and not the 'product' before anything else of his own personality. This in turn got me thinking abo\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't know much about Manson, but in my understanding he was chock full of \"charisma.\" Charisma is clearly a form of power. Now, my authority here is Philip Rieff, whom GAers unafraid of dipping their toes in reactionary water, might find interesting. Rieff has a book entitled Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How it Has Been Taken From Us (very cheap on Amazon or AbeBooks), and he argues that charisma was originally a product of abstention and self-discipline--the one who could withstand temptation better than others, obey a higher imperative, exercised the power of charisma (which really means \"gift\") over his fellows. However, the modern age reverses this, and redefines charisma as transgression--obeying the law, being moral, resisting desire, etc., that's easy and makes you easily controlled--a sucker. The one worth following now is the one who breaks the law, ridicules convention, upsets the squares. That's freedom, that's the source of a truer insight and more authentic experience. I suspect that would go some way toward explaining Manson.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] sniffing around Abebooks for this Rieff title even as I write ... but AK, please tell me what you think - is not the bromide \"product of his/her generation (or epoch)\" fatuous and quite useless to any reflective mind? Implying as it does that this person/product' comes off the end of an assembly-line into which have been fed all the exact same components comprising everyone else pumped out at that time? Again, how we eventually come to (habitually) talk about such things swamps everything that might ever poke its own little real head out... Do Chinese bang on about which 'generation' they think they belong to? Seeking labels for it before it has even 'come of age', or whatever? I still don't think what you have said quite grasps the enormity of the what, 'media-creation' that was Manson? How the essentially small-time activities of this fellow came to carry the fantastic, sustained symbolic power they did?\n\n[ADAM]\n\n\"generational\" talk is always a marketing strategy, so the question would be, what kind of marketing strategy (\"media creation\") constructed Manson in this way. One prominent narrative in the late 60s was that the earlier, pacifistic, liberal social movements (civil rights, anti-war, etc.) had become violent, anti-social and revolutionary. Obviously there were plenty of events conforming to this narrative--SDS becoming the Weathermen, for example. It seems to me the Manson murders were slotted into this narrative; then, it's a question of which details, what context, which responses, made it easy to do so."
    },
    {
      "slug": "im-morality-and-in-equality-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Absolutist GA and Liberal Resentment",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 02, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6evti5/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Yes, i think (though the task will be arduous) if we can get people to see that our obsession with inequality is really a sign of our experience of a great lack of meaningful reciprocity with the centre, that \"equality\" means rule by a hidden and distant hierarchy whose bribes and victims aren't really satisfying, the dam will break.  I'm curious about your notion that China can be a model for our traditionalism.  Have you been reading anything particularly illuminating on this?  I think there is a renewed interest in Confucianism and Daoism, but the Chinese state is still pushing hard on Mandarin with simplified characters which destroy information and make for incomprehension between written and spoken in non-Mandarin dialects.  (It is even worse than American English spelling corroding the memory of the French (Norman) era of English history!) And the Chinese are still destroying traditional neighbourhoods to put up modernist towers, and not doing much to stop their best (at least w\n\n[ADAM]\n\nNo, I have no big ideas about China--I'm following Gans here in seeing China as the most obvious example of an at least potentially successful authoritarian order. The twitter feed of \"scientism\" also contains, periodically, examples of ways in which China is advancing past the West in science, technology and even social organization. But I don't know what it's adding up to--you seem to know more than I do. I really wanted to make the distinction between the defeatist notion of surrendering to China (in which case we should hope for the simplified characters) and learning from, rather than being repulsed by, its authoritarianism. Maybe there's not so much to learn--but there must be something.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] >Victimary thinking is an ugly and dangerous business, but the inhabitants of advanced economies in their “crowd-sourced” wisdom appear to have determined so far that it is the lesser evil compared to naked hierarchy. The “transnational elite” imposes its own de facto hierarchy, but masks it by victimary virtue-signaling, more or less keeping the peace, while at the same time in Europe and even here fostering a growing insecurity. As absolutists, don't we have to completely reject this line of inquiry; not only on the basis of anthropology, but also on the empirical evidence? This was not \"crowd-sourced\" wisdom, but an intentional introduction of weaponized ideology, correct? To then say, that a \"trans-national elite\" comes in to keep the peace in a conflict they have instigated cannot possibly articulate the reality of the situation. >the liberal-democratic model will perforce follow the bellwether universities into an ever higher level of thought control, and ultimately of tyrann\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, I would reject that first passage you quote, and think I have in my commentary on it. I am working on constructing an absolutist GA through a dialogue with Gans's liberal GA. And I want to introduce Gans to absolutists and NrX more generally. He does see victimary thinking in \"anarchist\" terms, as an spontaneous expression of resentment, but much of what we says about is still worth working with.\n\nI'm not sure Gans sees the elite as believing in the \"end of history\"--Gans has rejected that concept, but is very sympathetic to the related (Fukuyaman) notion that liberal democracy is the \"last,\" in the sense of untranscendable, form of government. I suspect here he is mourning the elite's abandonment of \"end of history\" thinking, not celebrating that elite's embrace of it.\n\nRegarding talk on China, I think a lot of it is using China as a stick to beat the West with--I'm not sure how serious it is. Gans is in his way a very realist thinker--he doesn't propose any possibility without a real life model to point to. So, if he's going to talk about an authoritarian possibility, he looks around to see what best fits, and China's a good selection. But from your description they can't be thinking along the same lines I am because I think Trump does have control. It seems to me that a lot of our discussions here are about the best to talk about what is happening here and now, given how radically different an absolutist order would have to be. Are there any coordinates in today's world that point towards an absolutist future. I assume there must be."
    },
    {
      "slug": "by-what-mechanism-are-we-able-to-reflect-on-ga",
      "title": "Bouvard on Representation, Deferral, and Reflexive Distance",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 03, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/gctsc8/",
      "content": "[ADAM]\n\nMarxists have an answer--you obtain objectivity by throwing in your lot with the proletariat, the objectively revolutionary class. Which means you're only stepping outside in the sense that your theory identifies what that \"outside\" is.\n\nWith GA, I would say that if representation is the deferral of violence, one's own representations should be identifying the most advanced forms of deferral and the most direct threats of mimetic violence to those forms of deferral--and then adding another layer of deferral. You do what you claim the theory says we all do as language users.\n\nGirard had an answer to this kind of question--he claimed that insight into the mimetic source of desire resulted from a self-dispossession of one's desires, by realizing their mimetic character. The novelists from whom he first developed his theory--above all Dostoevsky--accomplished this in his view. Gans, though, never really thought in terms of creating a praxis that enacts and \"demonstrates\" the theory, but I think it's necessary.\n\nAs for how one knows what are the most advanced forms of deferral and the most imminent forms of mimetic crisis--well, this is a guiding question in one's inquiry, subject to trial and error, correction, and dialogue. There's an irreducibly pragmatic and historical component, because it involves imagining the scene one is on. It's kind of like asking how you know the person you're talking to is about to lose his composure due to what is getting revealed, and how do you then know what to say in order make the situation productive, but on a much larger scale. You formulate a hypothesis and play it out.\n\nIt's more a way of being inside, then, because there's no outside of language. You can just keep making language more itself.\n\n---\n\n[Q:WolftheLionheart] Do you feel that there’s no way to conceptualize the world without language then, say in terms of simply concepts or actions? I’m thinking more in terms of Buddhism or a passage of Mishima in Sun and Steel where he mentions how words are corrosive to understanding true reality and essence\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't know if \"conceptualize\" is the right word, but one could certainly \"apprehend\" (I'm not sure that's the best word--I'm going for something like \"take in,\" or maybe \"immerse\" oneself in) the world without language--but when you're doing that, you're deliberately withdrawing from, or withholding, language. Silence can always \"speak\"--but against the background of what could have been said, and which one refrains from saying. The references you make are to very sophisticated cultures and forms of sacrality, which would be unthinkable without scriptures, commentaries, philosophy, etc. All that very high-level language makes it possible to step \"outside\" of language under carefully prepared conditions--conditions that are seen and understood by (are meaningful to) others. So, even being outside of language in this way is part of being in language, and will generate more of it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "adam-katz-how-do-you-define-the-concept-of-the-center",
      "title": "Bouvard on Center, Collective Intentionality, and Power",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 14, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/dhje4o/",
      "content": "[Q:TwatBrah] It is ubiquitous in your writings but I don't always understand what you mean when you discuss \"the center\", especially in relation to modern politics and everyday social interaction between humans. Whoever wrote the unofficial [glossary](https://theglossary.home.blog/generative-anthropology/) did a good job but the relevant entry isn't entirely clear to me: >That which occupies the locus of attention and possess the significance of the peripheral sign emitters within a scene: A Center as this locus of significance is where resentments focus and collect, and are ultimately deferred. I read this as the center being the target of collective intentionality at any given moment, is that correct?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, that's right. I would also say it's a product of collective intentionality, which means it possesses a kind of intentionality of its own (the kind of intentionality we could attribute to God). The center is \"telling\" us we can \"look, but not touch,\" which none of the participants on the scene could say, unless that participant took it upon himself to speak for the center (what would once have been considered \"prophecy\").\n\nDo you have more specific questions regarding modern politics and everyday social interactions (which that definition doesn't address)?\n\n---\n\n[Q:TwatBrah] In a political context is \"the center\" what the members of the social order is focused on at any given moment? If so how can it be possible to reduce a complex social order to just one center? In an everyday conversation the center must be extremely dynamic right? When I read about the center in your text should I just think about collective intentionality and what it would mean in the context in which you are writing about or is there more to it, apart from what you just added in your comment just now? I guess I'm also asking why GA is using this concept of the center and not simply talking about collective intentionality? I think this original vocabulary can be confusing to a lot of newcomers who are interested.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou're right about everyday conversation--the center is fluid, from one person to the other, which each referring to some common center.\n\nWithout the center, collective intentionality wouldn't make sense--what would it be intending? There has to be some object or focus.\n\nIn a social order, the center is above all the state, and we can try to get more precise and identify where, exactly, power resides within the state. Then there are other centers, authorized more or less explicitly or formally by the state. The more complex point that I try to make is to distinguish between the \"occupied center\" and the \"signifying center.\" The \"occupied center\" is the state, or the head of government. There has been an occupied center since the emergence of the \"Big Man\" out of primitive tribal society. (In a sense, the center was occupied prior to that, but not by humans.) But the center is also the source of meaning, coherence and consistency--it's what makes an order an order.\n\nThat's why, even if we think the ruler of our country is a murderous SOB, it's extremely hard to see him as just someone who is somehow able to get a bunch of other guys to kill people for him. It's very hard not to see him as someone we could imagine appealing to. It's also why, even if we think the institutions of our country are completely corrupt, it's very hard to actually act towards them in accord with that belief--you would still hope for \"justice\" from the courts, \"knowledge\" from the schools, \"morality\" from community leaders, and so on (and be angry or disappointed if you did't receive it). It would take enormous effort to be completely and constantly cynical about all this. The reason is that we still see all this as \"backed\" by the foundation of social order in a shared act of deferral. So, the \"signifying center\" is the meaning with which we imbue the occupied center and all its branches.\n\nBut you're also right to think in terms of context.\n\nI hope this helps."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sovereign-commands-anarchistic-demands-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Command Structures and Anarchistic Critique",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Apr 17, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/65g8ad/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Adam, as you know I'm sympathetic to your arguments (you asked me check out this place in an email some weeks ago), and i can't but feel that the anarchist will quickly turn your question back on you.  From what command structure do you inquire into Soros-like funding labyrinths?  Now if I'm a Hungarian nationalist fighting Soros U., i think I can answer in terms of some sacred source of Hungarian nationhood that S wishes to dismantle.  But if I'm an American intellectual who probably can't invoke the command structure of his employer, or any arm of the \"government\", nor the \"constitution\" or \"revolution\", from whence comes the answer?  A religious imperative? From what we can infer is necessary to civilisation or civility?  The defence of the nuclear family perhaps... But how to express such in terms of coherent or accountable commands that contrast well with Soros' lust for Utopian power.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe anarchist always targets a specific institution--a business, law enforcement, a university. In each case, there has to be a command structure, however corrupted or degraded--something makes a university a university and not a PR firm. In defending a command structure, you are defending it as well, maybe even more, against the forces within as those without. So you're right that it may be more a virtual than actual command structure--still, if the institution persists, there must be some actuality.\n\n---\n\n[Q:reactionaryfuture] If you ask a BLM activist what their command structure is, they would likely not be able to answer. But it can be answered. Firstly, they have their immediate organizers, the people who arrange the protest dates and logistics. There are many organization for this. The next step up would be to inquire where these people get their orders/ commands. These organizers are themselves organized.  We can see that foundations and panels of elites at conferences, and in unofficial groups, organize the grass roots organizers. This is evident from available primary sources such as the hacked Open Society meeting notes from 2015. There is always a tone of embarrassment in these sources, as if they struggle with the oxymoron of \"organised\" grassroots movements. So here we have a command structure BLM activist -> local organizer -> foundation/ elite organizers of the organizers. So we have gone from a magical spontaneous uprising, to an organised and hierarchical machine. Turning this on a Hungaria\n\n[ADAM]\n\nAll true, but I suspect bobbyburnaby is addressing my suggestion that we, in saying all this about the BLM activist, have an at least tacit (absolutist) command structure of our own that enables us to expose theirs. By including the Hungarian nationalist in the tentacular anarchist command structure, you add urgency to that question. Where is the bearer of absolutist ontology to be found? How do we \"become worthy\"? That is, I think the question he is pressing, and it is indeed one I find central.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] Have you encountered Curt Doolittle's Propertarianism yet?  His project is basically one of formalism, bringing into consciousness what he calls 'property in toto', which are all the subtle investments made into social conventions that as commons serve their members. I don't find him enough of a reactionary as a rationalist liberal, but if you're wanting to explore what formalism might gradually look like, it's worth reading through.  I'm not sure I take the formalist project seriously anymore. Red Queen (informalism, linguistic asymmetry) is here to stay; humans can't manage scale right as they generate it, and as illuminating was your claim about harmonizing traditions as a way of losing resentment, I don't see why this should be evolutionarily stable. Perhaps, the better mindset is to understand formalism well enough to manage it to the degree it evolutionarily manifests.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nMuch of what you say is unfamiliar to me, but I'll try to respond. The generation of scale can be either centrifugal or centripetal--it can create new power centers that are less controlled and feel compelled to test, break with or undermine the center. But it can also give back to the center which is, after all, the basis for increases in productivity and reward for discipline. We can look to the sovereign center to integrate increases in scale across the board. This would involve constant formalizing and nominalizing--that, indeed, may be the main job of the sovereign, giving titles."
    },
    {
      "slug": "couple-of-basic-questions-about-generative-anthropology",
      "title": "Bouvard on Arbitrary Signs and Human Language",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 29, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/c6uis3/",
      "content": "[Q:college_koschens] 1. Why is GA not merely a just-so story? In other words, what facts/evidence exists in support of its view of the development of language? (including concepts such as ostensive->imperative->declarative, différance, etc). Basically, why should I take GA more seriously than any other theory of the origin of language? 2. What relevance does GA have to right wing thought as opposed to any other \"school\" of anthropology? I don't really see the link between GA and neoabsolutism (or indeed, the broader right) Feel free to answer these questions in your own words or to link to articles/books (or both, for that matter). Thank you\n\n[ADAM]\n\nQuestion 1 is important. Gans has addressed it lots of times, and I do at length in my introduction to a book I edited, *The Originally Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Human Inquiry*. But, to get at it in a brief way, the starting point is the fundamental difference between human language and animal communication. Only human language has signs (words, to keep it simple) that are purely \"arbitrary,\" or \"conventional.\" There's no reason for the word \"dog\" to refer to that particular four-legged furry mammal and, of course, in other languages it doesn't. So, somehow, some human community must have \"agreed\" to use words in shared ways.\n\nBut to form such an agreement, you would already need to have language. This is a dilemma, and there's no \"natural\" way of explaining how it would happen. We draw from this the conclusion that language must have emerged in a singular event, in which a sign was used and repeated (i.e., \"understood\") by everyone in a memorable way. Clearly, we can't *know* there was such a scene--we don't expect to find some archeological or fossil evidence for it. So, we can only hypothesize. The question then becomes, what is the best hypothesis? Gans puts forward the best one, while, of course, once we have agreed we need a hypothesis, the rules of the game are that to challenge the originary hypothesis you should have a better, which is to say, more minimal, one.\n\nWhat makes it a good hypothesis? One, it accounts for the fact that everyone on the scene would have to be looking at the same thing--the best explanation for this is that they all desire it. Two, it would have to account for them not appropriating the object, but only gesturing toward it. The best explanation for this is fear of, and refraining from, appropriation. The best way of accounting for this is the conversion of the movement to appropriate the object into a gesture showing that you won't--you can imagine a fairly minimal physical shift that would show that, Why the fear of violence? Because of the advanced mimetic capacity of humans--imitation leads to desire for the same object and therefore conflict. The normal pecking order which would have the alpha eating first, then the beta, etc., has been overridden and the sign is what replaces it as a way of maintaining order in the group.\n\nThe \"proof\" of the hypothesis is whether this model then accounts better than other ways of thinking for what we do daily and what humans have done throughout history as sign-users."
    },
    {
      "slug": "reconceptualizing-desire-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Technology, Mimesis, and Intellectual Community",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 17, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/jvebip/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] Is there a reason why you're writing on Medium in this instance? Are you gradually discontinuing the other blog or are being forced to by Gans?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThere's a probably minor technical problem with the blog--I asked Gans about it, and he said UCLA was doing some update and it should be working in a couple of days. More than a week later and it's still not working, and I don't want to keep nagging Gans, with whom I don't really communicate at this point. It seemed like a good time to start something new. Medium is probably a way station, but it looks better than than GAblog at any rate, and it's fine for now. I doubt I had any readers who don't check out the reddit page or follow me on twitter, so no one will miss it there. Gans may ask me about it at some point, but I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] >an order of magnitude people waiting for all of us or any of us to finish the learning materials The sphere right now is probably about 10,000, and we can approach indirectly and then directly influencing close to 100,000.  That'll take about 1.5-2 years.  We have the multipliers to do that.  That's the power of having the most effective master narrative, especially in these times.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI'll be reading Stiegler and others like Simondon and writing about technology quite a bit.  I don't know that we'll ever be finished with learning materials--there's no need to wait, as there's plenty to work with, and Joel's journal, it seems will create new teachers and learners.\n\nYou may be right about blog readers--other than Lasky, who has posted below, I don't think anyone \"within\" GA reads the blog (I've certainly never heard from any of them about it, and they know how to email me anyway)--but there might be others I don't know about.\n\n---\n\n[Q:laskitude] Haha...an obviously offhand, but nonetheless puzzling to me comment from Bouvard. I mean, why would you being at the GAblog alone involve any kind of dependence.on my part? I ordered my copy of Anthropomorphics in great excitement from a seller on eBay called \"grandeagleretail\", only to have their system go nuts and the book astray. Was ordered on Nov 3 and their current hope is to have it shipped by Nov 23. Perhaps its eventual arrival in NZ will coincide with that of Santy Claus!\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI should have let you know that you can get an ebook version free from the Imperium Press website.\n\nI was just following up on my explanation to \"ice and rock\" of why I didn't post this blog post on the GABlog. I said that it seems to me that no one who reads the blog would miss it being there, since they all follow my notifications on the reddit page and now on twitter. And there you were, proving my point."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-jouvenelian-presidency-a-thought-experiment-for-an-alternative-reality",
      "title": "Bouvard on Jouvenelian Authority and Counter-Protest Grounds",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 06, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6rqwpc/",
      "content": "We'll have to think about what the counter-protests would be protesting, exactly. The grounds would be other than \"equality,\" because the left can't be one-upped on that. It would have to be something like \"safety\" or \"order,\" which would also provide grounds for the President to intervene, since it corresponds to his job description. There's some incongruity in counter-protesting in the name of order and safety, though, because protests themselves, and even more so confrontational counter-protests, signal disorder and insecurity. The way to square this might be to adopt another tactic of the left, one that is more transferable: sacralizing the exemplary victim.\n\nInstead of \"counter-protests,\" \"vigils\" in commemoration of long lists of those killed and raped by illegal aliens and criminals let out on parole, those harmed by damage caused by affirmative action hires, etc. Obviously, we already see this kind of thing (Kate's Law, etc.), and Republicans have realized this is the way to go since the late 60s, but they always let themselves get trumped by leftist victims. A sustained, well-funded, uncompromising campaign along these lines, that matches the left victim for victim (and then some) and doesn't flinch from exposing the precise subcultures and groups creating the bulk of victims, i.e., which represents disorder as both rampant and easily targeted (and the left as special pleading on behalf of those victimizers), would be very hard to resist and could provide a smooth path to a \"Jouvenelian presidency.\" Much of the public already has at least a vague sense of the left as pro-criminal and pro-disturbing the peace in general."
    },
    {
      "slug": "declarative-culture-properly-understood-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on the Originary Sign and Social Construction",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Apr 01, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/fk5z3p/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] >These are the desires and resentments generated by the grotesque superstructures of anti-discrimination law, the fields of race, gender, and sexuality, where fortunes can be made or lost on the interpretation of a joke or a gesture. “I just want, as a woman in the workplace, to be treated with respect, and not as a sexual object.” Well, yes, but “respect” and “sex” are historical, deeply tradition-laden concepts, which require elaborate translations if their meaning is to be determined outside of a given institution’s Code of Conduct (which has processed those terms through political structured legal innovations)—or even if we are to make sense of that Code of Conduct in a given case. The actual desire here is to have the option to be a plaintiff in a particular kind of lawsuit, presided over by a particular type of judge, produced by a law school within a system of law schools dominated by a particular judicial and political philosophy, and therefore upon certain funding institutions\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, in the first passage you quote I'm not representing the thinking of an activist but, rather of those downstream form the activist. Still, if you ask the radical feminist to explain what, exactly, dismantling the patriarchy looks like, it might not be all that different--they have some vague picture of roles they might be playing, people they'd be bossing around or defying, etc.\n\nYou make an implicit distinction between GA and the systems of thought which produced it. Certainly the \"systems\" can be deconstructed--that's what GA does in distinguishing itself from, e.g., Girard or Derrida (although I'm not sure \"deconstruct\" is exactly right here). But what's the deconstruction of the originary hypothesis itself, effortless or not?\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] Contending with the social construction (and hence locality, rather than universality) of meaning and motivation is the central problem that has defined vast swathes of political and philosophical thought. Acknowledging it results in a radical and unending deconstruction of meaning, and it always has. You can see this problem being acknowledged as early as socrates's noble lie.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe first sign would have been both local and universal, since it would have taken place in a singular event, while initiating the terms of all other subsequent signs. \"Social construction\" and \"deconstruction\" elide the question of a first sign--for them, we start in the middle. But there must have been a first sign, unless you think there could have been a 1/100th of a sign, then a 1/50th of a sign, and so on, until we get a \"whole\" sign. The oiginary hypothesis assumes the sign must have emerged \"full blown,\" all at once, and therefore in a unique event. The first sign is also the emergence of the human and hence why there is \"social construction\" in the first place. The social does get \"constructed,\" doesn't it? How?\n\nDeconstruction is ultimately only applicable to declarative sentences, which have \"meanings.\" Can you deconstruct a greeting--two people saying \"hello\" to each other? What does \"hello\" \"mean\"? You can restate it as a declarative--something like \"In making this gesture I greet you and invite you to greet me in turn\"--but that's not what it is (it's how a computer might represent it). The forms of greeting are, of course socially constructed (hugs, handshakes, nods, etc.) but why is it not more important that in every human order there are ways in which people recognize each other's presence, precisely in a way specific to that community--and that this distinguishes humans from all other species? If we start from here, rather than from the deconstructability of all meaning, we end up in a different place, don't we?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "stakes",
      "title": "Bouvard on Impotence and Observational Restraint",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 24, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/k05l0i/",
      "content": "[Q:_SputnicK_] My concerns are related to his lawyer's inhibition to produce evidence to the public of mass voter fraud that would hold up in court. Those who push the \"trust the plan\" narrative claim he is holding back damning evidence, but as I've said this has yet to materialize. Sidney Powell was claiming she could prove that Dominion transferred millions of votes over to Biden, and mere days later the Trump campaign distanced themselves from her. The whole situation is incredibly suspect to me; I like the idea that Trump is playing 4D chess but I would be remiss to make such bold claims given his track record and the trajectory of his legal disputes.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI find it helpful to keep in mind that what we think doesn't really matter. There's nothing you can *do* with your suspicions; and, of course, there's nothing I can *do* with my \"faith.\" You don't need to make any claims, and nether do I. You observe what seem to you weaknesses in the legal strategy, and there's nothing wrong with noting that. I notice that Trump and those around him (Pence, Pompeo, the rest of his cabinet as far as I can see, McConnell) seem serene, confident, and to be carrying on business as usual. Trump is rearranging the military in some interesting ways, which would be pointless if he expected to be out of office in a couple of months.\n\nI also notice that the media is determined to allow for absolutely no discussion of all the evidence of fraud, or, if you like ,all the anomalies in the results. They keep repeating, robotically, \"no evidence,\" \"no evidence,\" \"no evidence,\" etc., when obviously there's evidence, even if you think it's insufficient or won't stand up. So, they don't seem to me very confident--why should they be so desperate to extract a concession, to harass lawyers supporting Trump, to create a virtual Biden \"presidential electness\" etc.? This doesn't prove anything either, but it seems to me at least a relevant as Trump's legal team proceeding a bit more slowly than we'd like. We observe these things in such a way as to move forward with as big a picture and \"rich\" a sense of events as possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "can-networks-crowd-out-markets-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Markets as State Power Derogation",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Feb 20, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/asbj13/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] [Mises, \"Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth\"](https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth)  Some selected quotes I think are worth recollection (pg. 13-18 of pdf): >Monetary  calculation  *only  has  meaning  within*  the  sphere  of  economic  organization.  It  is  a  system  whereby  the rules of economics may be applied in the disposition of  economic  goods.  Economic  goods  only  have  part  in  this system in proportion to the extent to which they may be  exchanged  for  money.  Any  extension  of  the  sphere  of  monetary  calculation  causes  misunderstanding.  It  can-not be regarded as constituting a kind of yardstick for the valuation of goods, and cannot be so treated in historical investigations into the development of social relationships; it cannot be used as a criterion of national wealth and in-come, nor as a means of gauging the value of goods which stand outside the sphere of exchange, as who should seek to  estimate  th\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThanks. Yes, this is the argument I would need to counter or incorporate. I start from the assumption that the market could--and necessarily is--dialed up or down in accord with state imperatives, so I want to ask the question: how low could it be dialed down? I want to try to formulate the answer \"all the way,\" but on terms as voluntary as possible so as to frame the market as derogation of power--possibly necessary, possible beneficial, but still a derogation that needs to be accounted for. So, \"all the way\" is not necessarily a final answer--it's more of a thought experiment to bring out what the features of this more intentional form of cooperation would have to look like.\n\nBut the way you speak about it here fits what I'm trying to think through: the ruler might set up a market for a certain purpose, or allow for a circumscribed market for certain sectors where it has proved beneficial. Exactly how much calculation must be done in money--can we calculate *that*? What other \"variables\" are held constant as we do? And, of course, we'd have to talk about monopolies. We need a consistent way of speaking about economics, and I hope what I have here is a step toward it,, even if through some \"falsification.\" I don't want to take anything for granted.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] I'm on board with the thought-experimentation. Apologies if I made the impression that I was trying to shut you down; wrote it as I was rushing to jump into bed. >Exactly how much calculation must be done in money--can we calculate that? A question I ponder quite a bit. It's a variant of a topic that is pondered and solved in board rooms and government offices everyday. We might take the tactic, which I think has been profitably utilized by this community a number of times, of simply researching how practical men in business and government already solve this issue for their own institutions. They may already have a name for this sort of calculation and its methods and best practices. Preliminary search terms we might use: vertical integration, outsourcing process, mergers and acquisitions, economies of scale, etc. There is probably some standard or popular set of methods for how institutions decide if production is more desirable to be in house rather than contracted out. And while M\n\n[ADAM]\n\nNo, I didn't get that impression--your response was very welcome.\n\nHopefully, we'll get more people with business knowledge and experience interested in what we're doing and they'll help us out with the specifics. (Maybe you're one of those people,) Or maybe a new journal will come along that's interested in these questions--I thought that might be *American Affairs* for awhile, but they seem to have gotten interested in other things. As a theorist, I'm content to have the question, and to know what kind of a question is for us. That allows for a kind of dialectic with liberal economics, and we'll learn from that. It also provides an opening to address something liberal economic really can't: what would be possible in a well-ordered society, in which adherence to the center is a given, that wouldn't be possible in more centrifugal settings? Social order and de-pathologization must count for something, economically."
    },
    {
      "slug": "are-you-ga-guys-aware-that-a-very-similar-debate-has-been-raging-in-the-fields-o",
      "title": "Bouvard on Language Origins and Ritual Scenes",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jan 10, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/elwzq4/",
      "content": "Some effects would be felt right away--it would now be possible to issue the sign repeatedly. Some would be spread out. It's possible that language (or a single sign) was used only on the ritual scene, in dividing the kill (for example), for a long time. It might have taken a while for it to be used more generally. The sequence of ostensive, then imperative, then declarative, could have taken place very rapidly or very slowly. Archaeological evidence might help narrow down the possibilities, and Gans did refer to evidence of an \"early\" emergence of language when there was a debate a while back of the time of emergence. It's interesting, but not a fundamental question. If archaeologists were to take GA seriously, it might give them ideas regarding what to look for.\n\nThe same goes with singular vs. plural emergence. Gans assumes singular just because it would be an unlikely event, almost \"miraculous,\" but the possibility of plural instances can't be excluded. Obviously, if it happened once, it could have happened more times.\n\nAs BB points out, the question, first of all, is what language *is*. Words \"mean\" things, or \"work,\" just because all speakers of a language \"share\" the signs, or \"know\" what they mean. This is the case beyond a specific reference or situation--language exists in the \"space\" between members of a community. The hypothesis is that this couldn't have happened through mere evolutionary means, through an accumulation of adaptations--how would a series of adaptations \"add up\" to something like \"meaning.\" One of those adaptations would have \"tipped\" something that wasn't yet meaning (or a sign) into it--you can assume it was just some accident, or you can assume it's an event. Assuming it's an event, one that involved something like a \"revelation\"--everybody sees that everybody else sees something new--would better account for humans being intentional beings (we make meaning, and know we are doing so)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "social-market-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereign Hierarchies and Mimetic Attention",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 10, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9mpjax/",
      "content": "[Q:laskitude] Do you mean by \"transcending mimetic discomforts\", BB,  the overall feeling that one must distinguish oneself at any cost from others? I am trying as hard as I can to decide whether any of my centers-of-attention defer my desires rather than intensify them?  When it comes 'down to it', how would we recognize the difference? The great paradox of our times is, the more things we have to pay attention to, the more the quality of our attention suffers, or degrades.. It's not easy for me to see 'transcendence' in any of this, if transcendence is ever to be fully distinguished from the howlingly beautiful hell-hole of an increasingly aesthetic, even 'romantic' distillation?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nGood questions. One form of attention can readily convert into the other--that's what happened on the originary scene. \"Disciplinarity\" is meant to address this, but I think working through Gans's understandings of morality and aesthetics is helpful here. We would have to be able to tell the difference between making something or someone a center of attention so as to blame it for our mimetic rivalries, on the one hand, and making it a center of attention by subtracting the markers of those rivalries, on the other.\n\n---\n\n[Q:LegionTheAi] The picture of markets organized as concentric circles around the sovereign is a bit unclear still. Whereas the vertical order is clear enough (as in a roughly corporatist organization), I'm especially curious about the horizontality, the article seemed to imply that multiple construction companies are a possibility, even though they will (?) answer to a single local sovereign (which answers to another one, which in turn answers to a next one until we reach the actual sovereign). Given this, how does horizontal expansion come to be? If a Mason is unhappy with the organization under his current company(ruled by a local sovereign n) could he appeal to n+1 sovereign to create a new company? Wouldn't this open the door for a bureaucracy? His calls certainly wouldn't be answered by sovereign n and current capitalism seems to solve this problem (broadly understood) through entrepreneurship which I'm not sure under which form would appear under concentric markers.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI think the appeal would go in the other direction: sovereign n+1 is not getting something he needs from sovereign n, so he gives sovereign n a chance to revamp operations so as to provide it or, if necessary, goes over the his head and solicits \"appeals\" from the masons. If the work coming from under n is unsatisfactory from n+1's standpoint, it's likely that some of the more competent and conscientious workers under n are frustrated as well. (If n+1, or the enterprises he oversees, gets everything he needs, what is that mason complaining about in the first place?) I also don't see why the higher up sovereigns couldn't maintain a kind of entrepreneurial fund, which takes \"grant applications\" from within enterprises at various levels. Those who get the grants could be left to try and make it on their own. It's always good to have some people tinkering around outside of the established channels.\n\n---\n\n[Q:LegionTheAi] Right, and n+1 can know what to expect from n because he can compare it to other ns, by internalizing the market we seem to overstep the calculation problem that creeps on pure command economies. Also regarding the fund it doesn't really need to be so specific, since our whole model is concentric those could just be general purpose banks with their relative autonomy, my worry was more with regards to how this new horizontal vertex attaches to the hierarchy. Anyone that gets approved for a grant (either from the bank or maybe from independent investors elsewhere in the hierarchy) must be \"always already\" under a sovereign and this could create a bureaucracy of applications and stall the market process. It doesn't seem like a problem necessarily though if the applications are not cumbersome(with regulations) and are quickly answered.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nRight--someone is simply in charge. And people are known quantities. The whole game bureaucracies have to play, of looking at each application \"blind,\" which means the applicant must know the right coded language to use, can all be set aside. This guy applying for the grant is known for having done various work and made various contributions before. It might be harder for some genius to come out of nowhere with a mind-blowing idea, but how often does that really happen anyway?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-few-remarks-on-the-ongoing-coup",
      "title": "Bouvard on Electoral Fraud and Globalist Economic Corruption",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 06, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/jp5t4s/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] As someone who lives in a global money-laundering centre, I’m curious, without being dismissive, why you think there might be trillions (i assume you’re not thinking the drug lords are active against Trump, but maybe you are - fearing the wall, etc.) and vast criminal enterprises backing the Democrats/globalists.  Do you simply mean that much of what Wall St., Chinese state enterprises and their players do is “criminal” though of course they are experts in bending most law and don’t see themselves as criminal, nor do those in power.  How will your cultic deal with Q anon type cults? I don’t doubt that there are powerful pedophile rings and that there is a desire to capitalize everything, but since the other side will always say we have no proof (especially as to scope and scale) what is the way to show you’re a serious thinker when much of how power operates is going to be hidden (why Trump must go) and embracing the cultic can take you to a lot of weird and confused places?  For you,\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe trillions of dollars refers to the global economic order Trump wants to dramatically reorder; the criminality refers to the bribery and kickback schemes organized around foreign aid (Russia, China, Ukraine...) that nearly every major Democratic (and no doubt many Republicans) politician has a hand in--for starters (fraud involved in \"Green\" policies, etc.); much less is being hidden right now, and the cult is of Trump--taking what he does and might do as the touchstone of what needs to be done--if the QAnon types can contribute to that, I see no objection. Any useful elites at this points will have to have high priorities than avoiding association with icky conspiracy theories.\n\n---\n\n[ADAM]\n\n[**unseen1**@unseen1\\_unseen](https://twitter.com/unseen1_unseen)\"observations\" found 3 vote batches with Trump getting majority of those votes in GA Wayne County unable to certify vote NV unable to certify an election in one precinct  with 153K votes Poll watchers locked out of counting rooms all battleground states stopped counting at same...time on election night Failure to match signatures on mail in ballots Dead voting in record numbers numerous arrests for voter fraud across country  Dominion \"glitches\" Reversed elections in NH Down ticket wins 5 cities way outside avg Biden result Affidavits of 100's to fraud168189📷Bellwether counties no longer bellwethers for \"some\" reason.\n\nGOP Voters saying their mail in votes were not counted massive ballot drops with 90-10 or even 100-0 Biden advantage in middle of night when counting resumed. Whistleblowers at USPS...lawsuits BEFORE election brought by dems to force changes in state election laws. Election Laws not followed Agreements not followed 100k's of change of address votes in GA alone. Statistical abnormalities in votes Delay in counting until \"margin needed\" was known...\"curing\" of dem ballots but not GOP ballots. Mail in ballot envelopes destroyed refusal/resistance to investigations censorship by social media narrative building by media quick call of AZ by foxnews late calls of FL, AK, NC, OH, IA by media...etc, etc, etc.... Seriously, how much more evidence do you need? If you are waiting for the elite to tell you they rigged the election, you will be waiting forever. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck."
    },
    {
      "slug": "relevance-gablog",
      "title": "Bouvard on Agency and Predictability in Power Structures",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Feb 27, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/av0mcd/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] >It’s pointless to ask, well, what would be so terrible about that (even if we could answer the question), because the ideal of the algorithmic order is really the opposite of what its appears to be. It’s just a war machine. It grinds you up to generate the inputs it needs. The victimary left thinks it opposes the algorithmic order because it reproduces the hierarchies resulting from behavioral differences—but the left just wants to control the machine. Which just proves human decisions are necessarily made to determine what counts as “inputs.” So, the left can’t have a counter-algorithmic program. Countering the algorithm would involve asking, what would be predicted of me now? And then confounding the prediction. I don’t mean that, if your “profile” suggests that you will behave compliantly in a given situation you should instead kill a bunch of people. Indeed, a slightly modified algorithm could predictthat. It means looking at the markers of compliance, as many of them as one can i\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI'm dealing with the problem of being unpredictable. Not in the sense of being random, but of having agency that can't be reduced to socio-political predictive mechanisms. Being unpredictable in this sense is necessary to have a clear view of disordered power structures and to be  of use within well-ordered structures. So, what makes someone predictable, first of all? To predict, you need to reduce something to a few abstract elements whose interrelation you can map and even quantify. Behavioral modification would be an obvious example: through a closed system of rewards and punishments you can make animals or humans predictable.\n\nThis kind of system relies on the most widely shared human characteristics: fear, hunger, sexual desire, etc.--buttons you can push that will make people predictable. We can see that making people predictable is almost synonymous with controlling them. The algorithm is, then, the latest and most advanced means of predicting and rendering predictable. OK, this is already known. The tougher question is, what makes one unpredictable--and that, of course, is what the area in bold is trying to answer. I'm saying that it's obedience that makes one unpredictable. Now, that doesn't sound right--if someone is obedient, isn't he completely predictable--give him an order and you know what he'll do!\n\nBut if we mean \"obedient\" in the sense of seeking out the worthiest commands to obey, the situation is very different. I may obey my immediate superior, but if he's incompetent or abusive, I will obey him in a way that makes his command better than he is. And I can do that because I'm obeying an even higher command, from the center, to \"fill in\" the commands to which I am subject with intelligence, good will and good faith. This makes me unpredictable--even when you have a good idea of *what* i'm going to do, you don't know *how* I'm going to do it, and the how might be more important than the what. You couldn't construct an algorithm to bypass this unpredictability, because part of this mode of moral action entails interacting with others, enabling them, \"shoring up\" what they are doing, and this will always be, to a significant degree, specific to each situation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "media-as-scene-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Bodily Presence and Originary Signification",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jul 20, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/ced8fo/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] \"...a speech scene (which, for GA, is ultimately modeled on another scene, but on most occasions there's no need to insist on this)\" I take it you mean the speech scene is modelled on that of the aborted gesture.  I note however that Gans (recently?) insists on there having been a vocal element to the first sign.  I'm not sure why he thinks this, but if it's the case is there really a pre-speech model?  But if there is, why not insist on it?  Wouldn't a key aspect of fractal thinking be the visual element of the originary scene we would want to sometimes distinguish from whatever visual element is also present (or not) in more mature speech? On a side note, have you given much thought to the esthetics of visual frames, like picture frames?  Would a heavy frame be akin to logocentrism so that modern art that does away with them is making a similar gesture to postmodern theory?  Why is there a greater preference for black vs (less noticeable) white bezels on phones, e-readers, etc.?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI seem to remember Gans saying that, but I don't think he's ever really insisted upon it and, anyway, by \"speech scene\" I would mean articulate speech, so, long after the originary event. Ultimately, we'd want to insist on full bodily presence as the originary model--but we can't explain everything at once.\n\nI haven't given much thought to visual art and visuality more generally but I can certainly say that the modernist value of minimizing representationalism in favor of foregrounding the specific nature of the medium is very much part of my thinking on this. And some of that has trickled into the culture, where \"cleaner\" less cluttered, less \"full\" representations and scenes are more privileged than I think they were, say, 50 years ago. There are a lot of books on this that I haven't read.\n\n---\n\n[Q:bobbyburnaby] So would full bodily presence suggest to you a movement from animalistic chatter to some kind of relatively silent awe at participating in shared presence? In his esthetic history, Gans has quite a negative take on austere modernism, seeing it as a call to sacrificial violence.  Do you share that view in seeing value in minimizing representationalism nonetheless?  Do you like, say, brutalist architecture?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe emergence of full body presence is the becoming-sign of each of the participants. I.e., its part of attention becoming joint. So, yes, it kind of paralyzes everyone in front of the object.\n\nDoes Gans see the austerity itself as the call to sacrificial violence, or, rather, the re-introduction of \"primitive,\" anti-bourgeois cultural/sacred forms? He focuses on a tiny slice of modernism. Ultimately, if I were to get at this at length, I would drop the label and look at individual artists--there might be quite a few different \"modernisms.\" Is Paul Klee calling for sacrificial violence? Ad Reinhardt? Sol Lewitt? I'd like to hear how.\n\nI would actually like a \"formalism\" in architecture that shows the insides of the building (piping, vents, heating and cooling systems, etc.), i.e., lots of transparency, while at the same time adorning the insides and making them stylistically compatible, even if not completely assimilated to, the rest of the building. I don't know if there's a name for this, if anyone has thought in these terms, or even how possible it is. The pedagogical point is that you don't have to conceal functional elements of a structure in order to make all the elements consistent with each other. It would be the equivalent of saying we don't need to pretend there's no resentment, or cover up  the \"dirty work\" needed for civilization in order to be civilized."
    },
    {
      "slug": "very-ga-friendly-lecture-on-the-function-of-writing-norms-of-disciplinary-spaces",
      "title": "Bouvard on Writing, Community, and Disciplinary Knowledge",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 15, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/jaxk4y/",
      "content": "The idea that you are writing for a community in order to create value for them is right, and that you do that by pointing to some anomaly in the constitution of the field is also right. His notion of what constitutes an academic community is also largely right, but he doesn't seem to think there is anything like \"knowledge\"--just what gets deemed knowledge by those with the power to do so. He's almost where David Bartholomae was 40 years ago. He's a neopragmatist rhetorician so he doesn't see writing as a form of inquiry and learning. He says he works with experts, who only need help presenting the ideas and knowledge they already have, so he doesn't have to deal with the question of how you come up with the ideas and knowledge that make it possible for you to ask where a productive site of inquiry into the community is. So, he sneaks back in the liberal, entrepreneurial subject he seemed to dismiss at the beginning.\n\nAlso, you can't really complain about writers \"interfering\" with the reader's reading process if you also want to create \"instability\" for the reader. He actually seems to suggest at the beginning that it's a problem if your reader has to reread your text, which is ludicrous. What you really want is people arguing over your text--despite his criticism of thinking in terms of the individual writer thinking internally, that's the way he talks about the reader--as looking for value for himself. You read something because other people are reading it and you need to argue with them about it. How else would you know what to read?\n\nDoes he really think someone can read two paragraphs of Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, etc., and say, \"nope, that's enough--no value in this for me.\" That's a pretty sure way to exclude yourself from the community. Once  people are arguing over your text they are rereading it many times. Its value can't be evident at first glance. But, he's honest about the limitations of what he's doing--it's a kind of professional consulting for academics who want to publish in academic journals."
    },
    {
      "slug": "a-question-on-generative-anthropology-and-individualism",
      "title": "Bouvard on Individuality as Historical Development",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 01, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/dbxu03/",
      "content": "There are people working within GA who are liberal individualists on precisely the grounds you give here--that individuals, not as an ontologically primary category, but as a historical development, are real. Even in that case, though, we'd have to see this form of individuality as constrained by desires, resentments and sign-systems the individual obviously didn't create and can't transform significantly. But within that context, we could of course say that individuals \"make decisions,\" \"act on their beliefs,\" \"change their minds,\" etc. We'd just want to be clear about what that entails.\n\nMy own approach is to avoid arguments over whether there are \"really\" individuals or not. You can't speak with someone without to some extent accepting their self-descriptions--the question is, what do you do with those self-descriptions? As individuals, I would see us as something like \"delegates\" or \"emissaries\" of the center, so, in speaking about others' wishes, desires, hopes, beliefs, etc., I would always want to frame things in terms of a dependence on and seeking out \"instructions\" from the center. Those hopes, beliefs, etc., in some sense at least come to us--we don't create them out of nothing. Insofar as we wish to wish for the right things, and hope to hope for the right things, we are looking for guidance from the ordering agencies we participate in. And so, first of all, as \"individuals,\" we want those ordering agencies to be in order and provide us with coherent models."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sacral-kingship-and-after",
      "title": "Bouvard on Post-Sacrificial Culture and Market Rationality",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 16, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6hiwxg/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Great post, thanks.  It seems to me that GA is quite ambivalent about the possibility of a \"post-sacrificial\" culture, e.g. The question of whether non-sacrificial narrative is possible. Your idea of such a future relies on the recuperation of firstness in self-sacrificial projects, and i'm curious if you intuit more to the possibility of a \"post-sacrificial world than that? I think my comment, on your previous post, about Freemasonry was not off the mark.  The core Masonic ritual, the third, or Master Mason, degree is a Eucharistic ritual in which the initiate \"dies\" and is reborn as Hiram, the Master Mason of Solomon's temple who was murdered at the building site by apprentices who desired, before they were ready, to extract from him the secret word of the Master Mason (implicitly the name of God) which is now lost forever due to the murder.  One is to identify with the producer who is resented for his discipline.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, post-sacrificial cultural a difficult question. Self-sacrifice is an advance over other sacrifice, but I'm ambivalent about that as well--it may be that self-sacrifice is a prelude to even more terrible forms of other sacrifice. And things like the \"market,\" \"rationality,\" etc., only temporize with sacrifice, and perhaps make it worse in the long run as well. Gans seems to think that the market represents the transcendence of sacrifice, but I obviously reject that. I did point to something more in the post:\n\n\"in its more advanced forms, though, discipline means being able to found and adhere to disciplines, that is, constraint based forms of shared practice and inquiry. Then, discipline becomes less self-sacrificial than generative of models for living—and, therefore, for ruling and being ruled.\"\n\nI'm going to start working this through that notion of language learning I developed a couple (few?) years ago and see if I can make it less \"utopian.\" First, I need to reintroduce a concept I've mentioned mostly in passing, but is the other issue of \"deferral\" along with \"discipline\"--\"deference.\"\n\nI won't say much about the freemasonry reference (although I'd be happy to see more of your knowledge and thinking about it), but it does touch on another issue, also part of culture as language learning: the idiomatic character of cultural and social forms. Traditions are essentially idioms, words, phrases, grammatical constructions warped in certain ways that require some form of \"initiation\" to understand. That includes the traditional ways we have of understanding other traditions. If there's nothing \"weird\" about another culture/tradition for you, you're just reducing it to a lesser version of your own tradition. To some extent, it's a question of naming--Matt Schneider introduced the concept of \"originary onomastics\" a while ago (at the Ottawa conference, I think) but didn't really do much with it. It's a good idea, though."
    },
    {
      "slug": "muffled-transmission-from-the-center-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Emotional Origination and Seasonal Positioning",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jan 02, 2024",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/18wpmyb/",
      "content": "[Q:SamgyeopsalChonsa] Alright, and bouts of anger, anxiety, etc. also stem from how we perceive our obligations to the center? And could you say that they are sort of mimetically \"extended\" feelings (with their origin in the instinctual feelings), which we can thus mimetically control? (similar questions for positive emotions)\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, all the emotions derive from our position on some season, real or imagined (always more or less imagined). Anger derives from revenge, which is still rather difficult to set aside without simply channeling it into symptoms, anxiety registers a field of only partially known possibilities, which one can then sort out into the knowable and unknowable, actionable ad unactionable, etc. Representing larger scenes than the one generating the emotions is likely to be helpful in many cases--the person who made you angry was himself cheated by someone else, your anxieties can be reduced by engaging new technologies and social forms and seeing what you can know about them, etc. The center is no longer something everyone gets their own limited piece of but a new mode of reciprocity, like converting anger into firmness that doesn't seek payback."
    },
    {
      "slug": "wierzbicka-s-semantic-primes",
      "title": "Bouvard on Semantic Primes and Universal Evaluators",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 04, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9l855h/",
      "content": "[Q:reactionaryfuture] Reading through *Imprisoned in English* I noted Wierzbicka claimed \"something\" and \"good\" and \"bad\" as universal and I am curious where she defines these. What makes me take note of these concepts is that I recently read *On Kings* by Graeber and he implies that other cultures don't have \"things\" in the sense of inanimate objects. All is infused with spirits. As for \"good\" and \"bad\" wiki tells me these are categorized as evaluators by Wierzbicka but having also read MacIntyre it's clear that good and bad have varying cross cultural meanings. That is before you factor in the change of over time within language, which is MacIntyre's complaint.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIs it that \"good\" and \"bad\" have cross-cultural meanings or that what is considered good and bad varies from culture to culture (and historically)?\n\n\"Something\" is at a minimum a \"topic,\" something you can refer to and talk about. One could say \"there is something behind that tree\" without implying the notion of an inanimate object.\n\nBut she doesn't really define the primes, other than as those words which can only be defined by other words that would themselves need to be defined by the primes. That's how she gets to the primes.\n\n---\n\n[Q:reactionaryfuture] That's why I was trying to clarify what is implied by \"something\" in her scheme. I'll find the reference in *On Kings* later. As for good and bad, that seems trickier. Having good and bad requires a functional category as pointed out by MacIntyre. Or it can mean (as emotivists point out with modernity) something one likes or doesn't like. If she means in the evaluative (MacIntrean) sense then that has connotations for ethics.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThey're evaluators, which really means adjectives. So there can be a good X or  bad X. I don't think it matters what the X is, or the basis on which you say it is good or bad, if we're talking about the meaning of \"good\" and \"bad.\" Even if the words are used to refer to what \"I like\" and \"I don't like\" you're still saying \"good\" and \"bad\" rather than \"I like this\" or \"I don't like this.\" Whoever uses \"good\" and \"bad\" in this way still feels the need to use those words--that's what makes it possible to identify the moral catastrophe in this understanding of those words. If one didn't use them, it would be necessary to openly admit one is not talking about \"morality\" or \"ethics\" at all. So, \"good\" and \"bad\" are being used \"badly,\" but we can say that because they have the same meaning as ever."
    },
    {
      "slug": "foucault-on-discipline-and-power",
      "title": "Bouvard on Ritual, Rationality, and Social Origins",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 17, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/7dlmdw/",
      "content": "[Q:bouvard1] The eighteenth century invented the techniques of discipline and the examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented the judicial investigation. But it did so by quite different means. The investigation procedure, an old fiscal and administrative technique, had developed above all with the reorganization of the Church and the increase of the princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At this time it permeated to a very large degree the jurisprudence first of the ecclesiastical courts, then of the lay courts. The investigation as an authoritarian search for a truth observed or attested was thus opposed to the old procedures of the oath, the ordeal, the judicial duel, the judgement of God or even of the transaction between private individuals. The investigation was the sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques. Now, although the investigation has since then been an integral part of western justice (even up to o\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI thought this passage from \"Panopticism\" might be interesting in thinking through the political origins of the sciences, e.g.:\n\n\"the sciences of nature, in any case, were born, to some extent, at the end of the Middle Ages, from the practices of investigation. The great empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world and transcribed them into the ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the 'facts' (at a time when the western world was beginning the economic and political conquest of this same world) had its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition - that immense invention that our recent mildness has placed in the dark recesses of our memory.\"\n\nMany people have pointed out that Bacon's discussions of the investigation of Nature sound a lot like a torture session: \"make it speak,\" etc.\n\n---\n\n[Q:reactionaryfuture] This is very interesting. I keep having his name pop up (along with Nietzsche.) It seems to me here he is placing this mode of thought directly within the developments of power and that development is the expansion of central power into legal and social realms where it was not previously present. I used to take the whole trial by ordeal as an exaggeration or fraud, but having read myself of the legal developments of Henry II I find it is still there (he replaced all ordeals with simply ordeal by water.) It is something that is still confusing to me, why would trial by ordeal be a thing? Szabo has an interesting blog post on it: http://unenumerated.blogspot.tw/2006/01/trial-by-ordeal.html\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI think attempts to figure out how ordeal \"really\" worked are beside the point. As a couple of the commenters pointed out, you might as well ask how \"reading\" bird entrails helped \"seers\" predict the future. Or any ritual--they don't have to serve a \"real\" purpose. We can't transport out understanding of rationality and evidence to earlier social forms--maintaining social solidarity and the sacred was always more important than being right, or fair or just in any particular case. We're not as different from that approach even today as we would like to think.\n\nFoucault doesn't really have an overall theory of any value but he was very good at discovering these pathways through which power works, and that liberalism obscured. The notion that the natural sciences result from inquisitorial juridical practices is extremely interesting, and confirms the political dependence, not just institutionally but conceptually, of the sciences. The whole concept of \"panopticism\" is obviously extremely relevant--that new Chinese social value reward system is really panoptic thinking."
    },
    {
      "slug": "formalism-all-the-way-down-1",
      "title": "Bouvard on Market Autonomy and State Preferences",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 16, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6tuxaj/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] >Economically speaking, this would introduce an irreducible ingredient of stability—much of what is needed, and therefore what is needed to supply what needed, and what is needed to…—can be known with a far greater degree of certainty than in the free market under divided power. Consumption/ends/goals are not the issue directly pertinent to the calculation problem (Which I am assuming you were wrestling with to some degree in your post). Factors of production/means/instruments are. The state can decide that x number of model y fighter jets must be produced each year. Let's imagine that the state really just wants these fighter jets because they are awesome to have. That is an 'end' of the state. The state can purchase or confiscate whatever materials it needs for these jets just fine. No calculation problem. The state runs into issues when it reaches beyond ends and starts to dictate 'means'. The end/goal of x number of model y fighter jets is specific. The state knows when it has i\n\n[ADAM]\n\nSo, if I ask \"how autonomous does the market have to be\" I suppose the answer would be \"how big a price are you willing to pay?\" You are pointing to choices the state would have to make if its preferences extend beyond the object of consumption--if it doesn't, say, just want the fighter planes, but also wants more workers to be hired in high tech industries and is therefore willing to slow the development of automation so that there will be more workers willing to keep up with the process of automation. Is it not possible that in some fields of the economy competition is wasteful and monopolization would be more efficient, while sometimes you would want to introduce competition?\n\nThe autonomy of the market is encroached upon to some extent, usually a considerable extent, by all states--does that only involve costs, i.e., trade-offs between economic cost and some perceived social or political gain? If the state says that not only does it want the fighter jets, but it also wants the workers to be paid x amount and it wants only materials from a particular region to be used and it wants the company making the jets to contract out to a specific tech lab and pay enough to support x number of workers and the plane must manufacture the planes in a particular city--ok, that's obviously  bit much and it will probably be impossible to meet all these criteria.\n\nBut the problem is to set criteria that shape the social and cultural context of production (that keep major industries at home, that provide workers with a decent living, etc.) and I don't see why the state couldn't keep getting better at refining these criteria so that they are not only impositions of cost. (Leaving aside the obvious point that sometimes they will be costs.)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "supersovereign-power",
      "title": "Bouvard on Succession and Supersovereign Power",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 11, 2021",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/q627tf/",
      "content": "[Q:SamgyeopsalChonsa] /u/bouvard1 let me know if there's anything objectionable in what I've written. I also got an interesting question about how succession (transfer of power) isn't always a supersovereignty. Now, as you've written about, succession is just a practice like many others, making it a plausible candidate for supersovereignty, but doesn't have to be. However, that got me thinking that the associated danger with the practice of succession probably makes it a good candidate for being a \"supersovereignty ground-zero\" as it's a particularly risky practice that the subjects would want the ruler to not fuck up (especially in earlier times). I think succession (hence legitimacy) might be the original supersovereignty, as it's a good candidate for why we evaluate rulers and hold them to certain (crystalized) standards and criteria for their fitness as the occupant of the center.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThat's a great piece.\n\nThe problem of succession has to be solved one way or another. If it's not solved by lot, then the successor will either be chosen by the sovereign or someone else. If someone else, then that someone else is a supersovereign and will be the point of attention for everyone competing for supersovereign power. And why wouldn't someone else be as likely to screw up as the sovereign? Choosing a successor would enhance the sovereign's immersion in his duties--he's have to work out his own criteria, which will always be contextual and historically based (the best person right now may no longer be the best person two years from now under changed circumstances), and he'd have to select someone who will not try to compete for power right now, and will even be willing to be marginalized so as to avoid any suggestion of such competition.\n\nNow, the sovereign will be relying on advice and intelligence from others, and that might lead to competition and emergent forms of supersovreignty. But he won't be \"permitted\" to delegate the formal power to name his successor, not in the sense that he will be \"forced\" to name him but in the sense that only someone he names will be recognized. And we can make part of this constraint the requirement (the only \"requirement\" of the sovereign, then), that immediately upon taking power he name a successor, so there can never be a succession gap. So, I think this constraint is actually the \"immunity\" to creeping supersovereignty. So, I might agree that succession in general, as the principle point of vulnerability of any order or institution, is the ground-zero of supersovereignty, but not the singularized succession in the hands of the sovereign himself."
    },
    {
      "slug": "online-version-of-erics-gans-a-new-way-of-thinking",
      "title": "Bouvard on Individualism Beyond Liberalism's Dialectic",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Feb 16, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/ar80jj/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] You want to know what I foresee?  The concentric circles around the sovereign center, as you say, but the cultural identity being different enough as you move from nodes placed in that concentricity. Liberalism won't be going away as an identity, and just as we see today, honor culture never really went away as much as changed where it's densely found and how prominently it gets to display itself within broader culture.  This merchant-libertarian identity is never going away. We need to figure out how to interface with their nested declarative literacy and give them terms to help us help both parties, not it always be a simple war.  I know it can be done, because I know the structure of language is there if people would only interface with it.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThere are practices that are now housed within liberalism that are not going away, and a strong sense of individuality is probably one of those practices. In fact, something like that will need to be enhanced under \"absolutism\" (or whatever it ends up being called), because liberalism hypes it but actually corrodes it. So, yes, there will be a dialectic with liberalism. I think the idea of clarifying imperatives we all hear and try to obey is consistent with what you are saying here. The point about \"concentric circles around the sovereign center\" is the one I wanted to make. But heightened individuality also means heightened resentment--anyone can see himself as a potential occupant of a more highly \"assessed\" center.\n\nThis is the kind of thing Gans thinks can only be sorted out in liberal democracy and \"market society.\" The alternative would be conferring honor on the fulfillment and \"filling out\" of the imperatives one was \"meant\" to obey. The imperatives get increasingly concise and precise, while covering wider fields, so greater preparedness and intelligence is required to complement their \"letter\" with their \"spirit.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "some-further-inquiry-into-hlvm-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Mimetic Dependency and Disavowed Violence",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Apr 25, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/bgh8c3/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] \"It is impossible to exaggerate how terrifying liberalism must find it that in its very heart there is an ineradicable alterity (to speak in the postmodern argot of a onetime high-low articulation). Further middlizing your demonstrations, which is to say making them more law and authority abiding, will be more, not less terrifying to liberalism. But this may be an ineffable terror, difficult to articulate and act on, and so maybe easier to alleviate, assuming one is ready to accept some slings and arrows—even more, assuming one can read those slings and arrows back to those firing them as desperate cries for a sustainable authoritative structure.\" Read them back so as to belittle the desperate cries, or to grudgingly acknowledge the need for authority, both?  I'm trying to think through how often this \"ineffable terror\" is  felt by liberals, or to what degree it is your construction of what they should feel, though i concur they must at times feel it (like those on Stalin's death row\n\n[ADAM]\n\nAt certain points they must recognize that they are dependent upon the very people they vilify and send their minions again. And not only the people--the norms those people represent and defend. All of your examples have a \"that's not what I meant\" flavor to them--we did;t mean to kill the sacred body of the progressive reporter, we didn't mean to bring in terrorists, I didn't mean that you should attack *me*, etc. On a certain level, they do think it's all not really that serious, because the middle will always be there--but if the middle will always be there, what is the meaning of what they're doing?\n\nYou have a point, though-- maybe it's more of an uneasiness than a \"terror.\" They get anxious, and sometimes hysterical, though, over rather simple declarations, like \"we need borders,\" or \"some people should be in jail.\" They can't exactly deny such statements, but they also can't let themselves get caught agreeing with them. So, they have to attack those who make them as intentionally introducing some unreasonable divisiveness and \"politicization\" into whatever the situation is. Yes, I'm reading that as a kind of terror, but maybe it's something else."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-king-s-game-towards-the-development-of-nrx-strategic-culture",
      "title": "Bouvard on Role-Differentiated Strategic Games",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Sep 20, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/717xgh/",
      "content": "[ADAM]\n\nI think you need to break it down into separate games, in each of which all of the players would have the same role--a game for kings, a game for capitalists, a game for generals, etc. If everyone has  different role then they're not really playing against each other. For each game, you can build in the complexity you want (well maybe not quite as much as you want) through the use of cards, like in Monopoly. You can do a lot more with the cards--for example, have the card involve one consequence if the player who chooses it has done X (invested a particular way, chosen war or peace, etc) and a different consequence if he has chosen y. The cards can be designed and weighted in a way to teach the lessons you want, and the players of course would know this in advance. Then you could have a set of different games: the Empire game, the Field Marshall game, etc., even the serf game. It would be interesting to see which is the most popular.\n\nTake into account that I'm not familiar with Civilization.\n\n---\n\n[Q:imperialenergy] > If everyone has different role then they're not really playing against each other. There are multiple competitions. There are Kings against Kings. Kings have a \"staff\" that consist of General, Diplomat and Banker. Capitalists are lone wolves who have loyalty except to themselves. Yet, they can throw their lot in with one King in order to enrich themselves further. Yet, the dynamics of the game see an eventual conflict between the King and the Capitalists because IF a King becomes Emperor, then the King can raise the rents or if a King becomes very powerful then he can also raise rents. Thus, Capitalists have a reason to not allow anyone to become a monopolist.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, it would require a lot of players--something like a comic-con sized crowd. Perhaps if NRx gets big enough, and draws enough young people, it will function as you intend. It could on for weeks, or maybe even all the time, with people leaving and delegating their place in the game to others. People would blog about it, etc. To get it to that level of popularity, it would help to have a version that 4-5 people could sit down and play for a couple of hours, that you could buy at Walmart, etc. If that interests you."
    },
    {
      "slug": "do-you-guys-realize-that-ga-is-literally-exactly-100-the-hobbesian-argument-dres",
      "title": "Bouvard on Mimetic Rivalry versus Material Scarcity",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 12, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/dgxybq/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] Even down to the truly bizarre claim that human conflict is the result of mimetic rivalry\n\n[ADAM]\n\nTwo starving men will fight over a loaf of bread without us having to assume mimetic rivalry. But if one of them gets the bread and eats it, and then the other sneaks up behind him later and kills him out of revenge, or a sense of injustice, that's only explicable in terms of mimesis. And that's the kind of conflict that really threatens any social order. The two men could have shared the bread, even if one was stronger than the other. That lesson can only be learned as a result of the specifically mimetic violence unique to humans. And so that order could only have been formed in the first place so as to defer that kind of violence.\n\n---\n\n[Q:Reader] > kills him out of revenge, or a sense of injustice, that's only explicable in terms of mimesis. Not sure why higher emotions/rationalizations would have to come from mimesis > that's the kind of conflict that really threatens any social order. Political fanatics armed with just the right theory have done considerably more harm than random criminality has. > That lesson can only be learned as a result of the specifically mimetic violence unique to humans That’s quite a leap, given that you just used reason and not mimesis to explain it. And also other animals are mimetic like gorillas and they have been taught to share in the lab among other things. > And so that order could only have been formed in the first place so as to defer that kind of violence. You are quite fond of using words like “only” and “must” about things that have very many possible explanations and that really don’t follow at all.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nAn insistence on eclectic, multi-causal analysis is epistemological liberalism. Everyone throws in their two cents.\n\n\"Not sure why...\"=I don't really want to think about it. Give some thought to \"envy,\" \"pride,\" \"honor,\" \"anger,\" \"jealousy\" and some other \"higher emotions\"--where, exactly, do they come from? Why would someone be \"insulted\" by an \"offense\"?\n\nWhat in the world accounts for \"political fanaticism\" if not resentment that the social order is not arranged to your liking? And what is the source of that \"higher emotion,\" resentment?\n\nNo, I didn't use \"reason\" to explain the possibility of sharing so as to avoid resentment and defer violence. What \"reason\" arrives at will depend upon the \"inputs\" processed through language. Dividing something up is possible because of language, and language is possible because we can defer appropriation of an object deemed to be \"sacred.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "honest-question-what-is-your-deal-with-ga-and-the-focus-on-linguistics",
      "title": "Bouvard on Linguistic Categories and Anthropological Foundations",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 01, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/dbt8sh/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] The originary event suffers from being a just-so story, from being unfalsifiable, and from being arbitrary. It's a mistake to root your whole political philosophy in such a weak (and frankly bizarre concept). Try putting it in a sentence and you'll see what I mean...it's very easy and always well-received to talk to people about stuff like absolutist theory, power dynamics/power struggles, rationality and empiricism vs. self-presence/identity/aesthetics, but with GA you kind of just come of as a weirdo/crank if you tell your friends \"So I think we should focus on reforming our political institutions around conclusions I've come to because I believe language was created by neanderthals hesitating before eating a mammoth, and extending that scenario is the solution to the problems of liberalism.\" I'm not hugely invested in linguistics or anthropology, but I'm keyed in enough to know that this is not particularly well-established or mainstream stuff. This is an extremely recent theory s\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou will have anthropological and linguistic assumptions one way or another. You can come by them haphazardly or reflectively. Haphazardly means just trying out whatever seems convincing to whomever you want to convince right now. Reflectively means you want to understand why you have the categories you have. This involves working through various paradoxes. So, the categories in which we think are social and historical products. Who could deny it?--we don't think the same way the ancient Egyptians did. But \"society\" and \"history\" are also products of the way people think. Both human thinking and human society came into being at a certain time--they haven't always existed.\n\nThey seem to presuppose each other--so, how could they both have come into being together? How is it that we have language--that is, how is it that we can use words like \"think\" and more or less agree about how to do so? We could explain what \"thinking\" is in other words, but how is it that we agree on what *those* words mean? How, without having words, could humans have come to agree upon the use of words? The originary hypothesis is that this was only possible due to an *event*, not gradually (what would be a \"part\" of a meaning, to be put together with other \"parts\"?). So, we model an event, minimizing the presuppositions as much as possible--nothing more, really, than human beings as mimetic, with imitation implying rivalry. Then we can better know how we're using words like \"society,\" \"history,\" \"thinking,\" \"language\" and so on. The assumption is that there are significant long-term costs in not pursuing such questions--you get stuck in permanent haphazardness."
    },
    {
      "slug": "comments-on-some-recent-commentary-about-nio",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty's Self-Negation and Governance",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jul 19, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9059fg/",
      "content": "[Q:reactionaryfuture] To make it even more complicated, Jouvenel claims political parties are sovereign.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI think that to solve this problem we will have to accept Andrew Willard Jones's critique of the concept of \"sovereignty\" (it's not really \"his\" critique, of course, but an old one). Sovereignty by definition  negates itself by ensuring that all power must flow through it, and therefore must try to displace other power agents by \"informing\" the sovereign. \"Rule\" or \"governance\" will be better concepts because they can account for the singularity of authority, recognized by other authorities singular in their own sphere. Maybe the notion of \"deputizing,\" which is as far as I know vestigial now but was once very real, exemplifies the idea: others beside the king or government can punish transgressions; indeed, it's even better if transgressions are dealt with closer to the source, but everyone should nevertheless \"touch base\" with the ruler in doing so.\n\nWhile this points to a theoretical solution, in practice I find it very hard at this moment to stop using the concept of \"sovereignty,\" because it's the only way of distinguishing between phenomena like \"globalization\" and other subversions exercised from above and below, on the one hand, and what would count as an approximation toward \"proper rule\" on the other hand. It's the only way of being at all intelligible in discussing contemporary politics. Maybe we have to accept it as a provisional or transitional concept, or consider it \"under erasure\" as Derrida used to do with metaphysical concepts like \"Being.\" For now, we have to use them, but we should know that we only use them because we have to."
    },
    {
      "slug": "equality-and-morality-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Market Society and Originary Equality",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 28, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6jeav6/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Is it just me, or is the religious core in Gans' GA further revealing itself? (He has said he likes to think of GA as a substitute faith but doesn't believe it can really work as such. ) I see an inability, a bit surprising in such a subtle thinker, to go beyond his too-easy dismissal of the \"Nietzchean\"  alt-right.  I am reminded of an earlier Chronicle where he says that if he's wrong about liberal democracy, there's nothing for an old professor to do but disappear before the onslaught of the survivalists.  An apocalyptic side is showing, beyond his usual remarks about the possibilities of nuclear conflagration, or Girard's vision, and  he does not really engage with Adam's hopeful blogging.  It's somehow so impossible to imagine a \"nice\", \"modern\" world where sovereignty is not divided and insecure, with the ideological marketeering that implies, that the exercise of imagining a world where people work in the other direction has no appeal.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nHe's very deeply invested in seeing \"market society\" as the telos of the originary scene. It was there from the beginning, as you can see from the concluding chapter of The Origin of Language. So, he doesn't see it as an ancillary hypothesis that could be falsified without affecting the originary hypothesis itself. All the arguments he makes in this Chronicle are arguments he's made many times before. And power, sovereignty, and the state have always been terribly undeveloped concepts in GA. When Gans talks about politics he's really talking about an intersection of ethics, aesthetics and economics. The economic losers need to be bought off and given ways to express themselves, to put it crudely.\n\nBut I don't know if this is the religious core--a genuine \"faith\" in the originary scene could, by definition, survive such a diversion from the historical road map. There's also another, more \"positive\" side to his refusal to take these questions seriously. He really only believes in social arrangements that exist beyond a doubt, in a way that everyone recognizes. The US actually exists. The USSR actually existed. So did Nazi Germany and so does \"Islamism.\" When \"absolutism\" is running a post office, maybe he'll consider it--until then, it's just utopian (or dystopian). And there's something to respect in that stance."
    },
    {
      "slug": "absolutist-economies-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereign-Enforced Educational Debt Economies",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 09, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6sfd66/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] Good post. You are moving the discussion forward. However, this example is revealing of the persistent lack of understanding about economic calculation: >Buckminster Fuller asserted that it was worth it to provide free education to 1,000 children because one of those children will end up inventing something that pays for the education of the other 999. This argument *assumes* that the service of education (education as a product) has been perfected. But if education has not been perfected as a product, if conditions change, if new methods are discovered, there is where Fuller's argument scratches the chalkboard. By making education \"free\" you are biasing the development and improvement of education as a service. You are overriding the mechanism by which the market explores and tests new methods of production and new goods. These new goods do not have to be high-technology. they can just be new configurations of capital in general: A different trucking company to factory X, a relocat\n\n[ADAM]\n\nLet's say that different enterprises, individually or conjointly, found educational institutions, allowing for free or at least affordable education for 1,000 children (perhaps subject to admissions testing) on the condition (enforced by the sovereign) that those children be willing to work a certain number of their post-graduate years with that enterprise? The genuinely singular students would be held to that agreement, while being rewarded handsomely and given the freedom necessary for innovation, while many or even most of the rest are set free to find employment where they like (the enterprise would reserve the right to hold onto as many as it might need).\n\nMaybe some of those set free will be more useful in other enterprises or industries, insofar as the education received will be at least partly transferable. And some let free by other enterprises might move to the enterprise or conglomerate in question. We would get the same result: massive investment in education for the sake of a few exceptionally innovative individuals. But now the capital invested in education returns to the investor, while still serving general purposes. We get competition between different education systems and specialized education, while a common, basic form of literacy and numeracy (or relatively standardized tiers of literacy and numeracy) result.\n\nAnd it would still serve--maybe even better--the purpose of reinforcing the centrality of the sovereign and the maintenance of a loyal elite. And the arbitrary numbers I'm working with here (1,000 to 1) would undergo regular modification--that would be the calculation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "if-then-the-idiom-of-data-exchange-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Thirdness, Judgment, and Formalized Closure",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Feb 04, 2024",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/1ai688a/",
      "content": "[Q:SamgyeopsalChonsa] I was thinking about your Thirdness solution of \"betting\" on the outcome of any given event. Could the data an AI or algorithm be trained, from establishing these betting servicing, through the \"winners\" always having to provide their reasons for thinking they'd win. Over time this should provide a robust dataset that AI could pinpoint the common themes at an increasingly granular level (e.g. when in this situation, people from this or that background have a lower or higher likelihood of this and that outcome).\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYes, but the betting will be on the judgments made by the Thirdness team, which will always be parallel or \"adjacent\" to actual events. I don't see a way of making it work with betting on events, beyond ones with formalized closure, like elections, games, verdicts, exchange rates, etc., which is both very limiting and not very illuminating. Think of it in terms of betting on people playing video games or, maybe on the decision to made by a jury, but in this case a \"virtual\" jury constructing its own \"cases\" so as to make things difficult for itself. This would, I think, indeed produce robust databases and everything else you're pointing to. The Thirdness team would write up the reasons for its decisions but bettors could be incentivized to do so as well."
    },
    {
      "slug": "request-for-generative-anthropology-reading-list",
      "title": "Bouvard on Generative Anthropology and Absolutist Politics",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jul 19, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/902gd8/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] Single best first start: http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/gaintro/ Second best start (in my opinion): https://resdivinaestpublica.wordpress.com/2018/03/31/andrew-bartlett-provides-a-skeleton-of-generative-anthropology/ From here, I can give you a list of Adam's best blog posts, but you'd just as well check my linked site.  I have a lexicon, diagrams, and my own long form essays planned after I finish reviewing Gans' works. I only just recently finished reading through all but two of the _Anthropoetics_ journal publications I felt were worth looking at, so I'm still learning material myself, but it's my intention to condense it and make it easier for people who are coming in behind me. I have no idea why these GA researchers who've been doing this work for decades didn't market it better, but I guess the new generation will pick up the slack and produce more optimized learning materials.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI can't disagree with any of that. At some point Gans's books should be cracked. For thinking through absolutism and reaction in particular, I would recommend The End of Culture and Science and Faith.\n\nAndrew Bartlett's Mad Scientist, Impossible Human covers a lot of important ground as well.\n\nI edited a collection of essays called The Originally Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, which has some very good essays from central GA thinkers.\n\nYes, we are all academics, and assumed we were addressing other academics, so the question of \"marketing\" never entered into it until very recently. It turns out that the academics, by and large, didn't care, but it seems others do.\n\n---\n\n[Q:of_ice_and_rock] Whatever I do for GA, it'll just be a scaffold on top of what you've already done for Gans. If it wasn't for some random \"shitlord.blogspot\" site that collated every right wing blog worth any bit of attention and my scanning of it for any quality content to stick to my Feedly about two to two and a half years ago, I wouldn't have known about you or generative anthropology. I'd have remained some kind of esoteric Continental Idealist, combining Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buddhism, and maybe Hegel, but now I have a more direct reason to incorporate linguistics, which I may have done anyways, but at least am being accelerated in orientation.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe emergence of the alt-right and neo-reaction led to sites like that and, I'd guess, more inquirers like you, and therefore created a new niche for GA. It's fortunate that around the same time I concluded that the political crisis could not be resolved within liberal democracy--and almost immediately saw many others thinking the same thing. So I could also stop being frustrated by the obtuseness of academics in the humanities, because GA would anyway be in better hands elsewhere. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-big-scene-is-the-anthropological-basis-of-anarchist-ontology-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Horizontal Scene and Anarchist Equality",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Apr 11, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/bb8kpa/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] I'm wondering about the rhetorical possibilities of trying to show people that the Big Scene is a phoney or half-baked scene because it is premised on a reading that privileges some aspect of the originary scene (could an account of the nėant help here?) and forgets others.  The analogy would be to how one can translate your accounts of firstness into terms that might be comprehensible to an interlocutor who only intuits the originary need for \"equality\".\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI avoid using terms that I haven't worked through myself, and Sartre's \"neant\" falls into that category. But, yes, to put it in a really basic way, the Big Scene remembers the horizontal dimension of the scene while forgetting the vertical. If the scene is purely horizontal, we have a \"come as you are situation\"--there's no basis for giving anyone priority over anyone else, for any purpose. To use a contemporary example, open borders is the logical conclusion--why shouldn't anyone be able to come into the country? But the forgetting of the center is really antagonism toward the center, because as soon as any thought is given to the most basic \"maintenance\" of any scene whatsoever, a center is at least implicitly referenced, and that referenced center draws upon itself all the terror associated with all the other possible centers."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-importance-of-coinage",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty, Mimesis, and Power Aggrandizement",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 26, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6vuweo/",
      "content": "This very vigorous and relentless probing of basic neoabsolutist concepts is very valuable, and we should always be doing that. The question of which unanswered questions discredit a theoretical discourse can't be answered so easily, though. Three objections to the assertion that HLvM is the cause of attempts to aggrandize power have been raised (or, rather, three other causes adduced): empire building; the introduction of new technology; defense against foreign threats. Clearly any political theory needs to take all that into account. But empires are built by sovereigns, and rather than just saying there are now multiple causes and hence the mono-causal theory of neoabsolutism fails we could just as readily say that the failure of the sovereign to integrate the new forms of power that come with empire leads to the independence of other power centers, which in turn...\n\nThe same with new technology and foreign defense--none of these things just happen, and cause things by themselves--they are, rather mediated through the sovereign. Maybe building these theoretical connections will prove difficult, and maybe the theory will have to be substantially revised or even abandoned. But that is yet to be determined, and trying to make a powerful theory work, turning it into an intellectual tradition, and seeing what it can yield under severe pressure is far preferable to dropping it when a couple of contradictions are pointed out within a single discussion."
    },
    {
      "slug": "sapir-whorf",
      "title": "Bouvard on Anglo Linguistic Universalism and Cultural Presumption",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Sep 29, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9js5hu/",
      "content": "[Q:reactionaryfuture] I can sense her exasperation with Anglo thinkers. This will be one of the major obstacles to discussion of our ideas because most in the Anglo world can fall back on a sort of general opinion and can dismiss it rhetorically. You can see that with the color discussion or the claim that the concept of a mountain is a \"brute fact\". To a normal person that seems reasonable, despite not being so.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nEvery language is like that, but what irritates her is, I think, the presumption of universality on the part of Anglos--it's one thing to assume your way of thinking is right, it's another to be unable to imagine there can be another way of thinking. She's a Polish immigrant to Australia, and occasionally she discloses little autobiographical details which illustrate the devastation of Anglo concepts on other ways of life, along with Anglo obliviousness. (E.g., a little anecdote, I forget in which book, of one of her children saying her (Wierzbicka's) decision was not \"fair\"--\"fair\" being one of those Anglo words that doesn't translate to any other language but is nevertheless assumed to be universal.)\n\nUltimately she's a multiculturalist liberal herself, because she thinks undermining the hegemony of English opens up the possibilities for new cultural dialogues--which may be true, but those dialogues don't need to take place in liberal terms. You'll see that in Experience, Evidence and Sense, she pretty much shows that english speakers are really speaking \"Lockean.\" (And elsewhere that German speakers are really speaking \"Lutheran.\")"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-single-source-of-moral-and-intellectual-innovation-1",
      "title": "Bouvard on Nominalism, Sacrifice, and Generalization",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 13, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/79vs9l/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] \"Stereotyping is the highest form of sacrificial thinking\" I'm not sure if this is a serious question, maybe it's just your turn of phrase, but do you have in mind a range of lesser forms of sacrificial thinking that are not \"stereotyping\"?  When you talk about lowering the threshold of significance you are talking about less or more violent forms of sacrifice; yet wouldn't all sacrifice require some form of generalization, a rejection of nominalism?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nSacrificial as generalization, nominalism as lowering the threshold. I hadn't thought about it that way, but it's interesting (and I suppose implicit in my post). Nominalism in general wouldn't mean lowering the threshold (looking at the beginning of this sentence leads me to wonder whether you could look at nominalism nominalistically)--It's the new naming, against the sacrificial background, that does the lowering. Here, I'm thinking about \"sacrificial\" as the division of the object--you can only proceed to the division of the object once you have driven out the source of the asymmetry. So, stereotyping allots a portion to all along with preparing in advance a schedule of victims. But this assumes a general economy of stereotyping--so, the lower form of sacrificial thinking would be generalization for thee, but not for me--I'm normal and natural, you're the aberration. (I see plenty of discussions of Jews that fit one model or the other.) If there's a schedule of victims, there's room for deferral."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ga-got-beef-with-computationalism",
      "title": "Bouvard on Mimesis Beyond Computational Models",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 14, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/fi5s8m/",
      "content": "I'm pretty sure timelyinquisitor has one of Andrew Bartlett's essays in mind--Bartlett speaks about the \"computational model of mind,\" in part making the kind of argument you're making here--as you both seem to agree, for GA, human thinking (and feeling, knowing, etc.) can't be reduced to computation. Anyway, even if that's what not what you have in mind, it's the place to go to answer your question.\n\nI think I also may have mentioned the \"computational model of mind\" in an essay, not so much to disagree with Bartlett as to suggest another away of approaching the critique. But the way you remember the argument doesn't sound familiar.\n\n---\n\nI thought this might be what you had in mind. I had Bartlett's critique in mind here, and I essentially agree with it, but disagree with \"critiquing\" the \"computational model of mind.\" I disagree not because I \"believe\" in the CMOM, but because I don't believe in \"critique.\" Or, at least, I see critique (in the sense of showing that another way of thinking is \"false\") as very limited. The CMOM doesn't need to be seen as \"accurate\" to use it as a lens, or a way of noticing things that can then be articulated within a different framework. You can treat a theory as more like a camera than something that needs to be believed or rejected."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-growing-incoherence-of-liberal-democracy",
      "title": "Bouvard on Liberal Democracy's Organizational Paradoxes",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Feb 09, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/aokuw9/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-pmo-pressed-justice-minister-to-abandon-prosecution-of-snc-lavalin/ Here's a story that perhaps illustrates the growing incoherence of liberal democracy:  Canada's \"national newspaper\" reveals that the Justin Trudeau government, one that has made such a big deal of feminising politics and promoting ideas of reconciliation with aboriginal peoples, implying that the \"first nations\"  are to be given more sovereignty in their \"national\" affairs, is revealed to have fired Canada's first aboriginal woman justice minister and Attorney General because she refused to exempt an important Quebec construction and engineering firm from a corruption prosecution. It is of course assumed in absolutist thinking that the idea that we live under \"the rule of law\" is a myth of liberal democracy - an idea the Trudeau government avidly promotes when the US government seeks to extradite Huawei executives from Canada for criminal prosecution in the US, thereb\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIt's very hard to imagine a stance like this from a POC office holder in the Democratic party in the US. She's either more independent than anything we see here or the liberals in Canada are less tightly organized. (Even taking into account that she got fired.) In a way she seems to see the paradoxical nature evidenced and obscured by liberal concepts (even if she ultimately believes in them herself.) Does Wilson-Raybould, then, exercise her own charisma of \"grace\"? I would just say that pursuing justice on the (admittedly highly vitiated) terms of a post-sacrificial order doesn't necessarily involve believing in the myth of the \"rule of law\" (even if in this case she probably does). An absolutist order would have law, and judges, and we would want them to be impartial--the difference is that we would understand that it is a moral person applying laws with an eye to their moral content, not an abstract mechanism of calculation that removes the need for judgment from individuals."
    },
    {
      "slug": "milo-bannon-yarvin-thiel-interesting",
      "title": "Bouvard on Charismatic Performers and Volatile Leadership",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 06, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/74kgm0/",
      "content": "Yes, the problem is with the \"performers\" and \"content providers.\" It makes sense that the people running things would be more sober and stable (while Yarvin comes across as a bemused and curious bystander and part-time consultant), while the young, charismatic \"properties\" would be volatile. But that's problem that will have to be solved, and you couldn't know what these people would be like before giving them money and letting them try.\n\nOne thing that I don't see remarked upon in the article (I may have missed it) is that if Milo was in email contact with Yarvin, Bannon and the Mercers must know about him as well. So you'd think that Yarvin would be able to put together something political, given his apparently close connection with Thiel as well."
    },
    {
      "slug": "naming-origins-and-the-necessary-self-referentiality-of-social-order-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Originary Justification and Post-Sacrificial Order",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 30, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/a0vpsd/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] This one was very dense to me. Are you able to summarize some points?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nOnly the origin of a social order can \"justify\" that order.\n\nAt the same time determining the \"real\" origin can be inconclusive and therefore divisive. Nor can we hold on to rituals that purport to go back to the origin.\n\nThe very fact that origins are disputable means we are in a post-sacrificial order. We don't and can't believe that if we give something to the gods they will give us back something in return.\n\nBut we are always recreating the post-sacrificial order because we are always deferring scapegoating (the consequence of sacrifice). So we don't need to identify the exact moment at which we became post-sacrificial--we can mark the origin of the post-sacrificial order in many events.\n\nEverything that we commemorate (naming things, days, institutions) should commemorate the origin of the post-sacrificial. We then create a whole \"social vocabulary\" reminding us of how we came to be.\n\nThis makes it impossible to find some point outside of the social order from which it could criticized or condemned.\n\n​\n\nDoes that help?\n\n​"
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-are-the-reasons-rand-paul-the-democrats-and-the-republicans-are-all-equally",
      "title": "Bouvard on Geopolitical Alliances and State Sovereignty",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 21, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9q482s/",
      "content": "Trump is supportive of the Saudi-Israeli alliance, which MSB has certainly advanced. Important elements of the state, supported by Obama, supported the Iranians against the Saudi-Israeli alliance. If you think the US should have any role in the ME, that pretty much exhausts the possible positions. If you're a complete isolationist, you welcome any development that can distance the US from any ally and any conflict in the region. I would guess that's Paul's position. But we don't know what happened yet, or what MSB's role was. Trump doesn't seem to be letting it affect his position, but maybe's it's too soon to be sure of that. You say the Republicans are \"equally defying the Saudi's explanation\"--are they? I don't know. You can reject their explanation, you can think they screwed up, you can think they committed a terrible crime, and/or you may feel obliged to say that--and still let it have no effect on your political goals and calculations. The media is obviously pushing this to hurt Trump. Will they give up if it doesn't? Will everyone just get on  with business then?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "hypothetically-speaking-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Resentment, Judgment, and Mimetic Restraint",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 08, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/95cmnu/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] When i (not infrequently) get offended it is almost never because i feel personally diminished or threatened.  I have very little institutional status and that doesn't bother me much anymore. I take offense at disorderly conduct and/or thinking, perhaps on behalf of a sovereign i wish others would better respect.  If i call someone a nasty name, it is a way of pointing to the sacred and saying \"you're out of bounds\", or your conduct threatens our ability to defer violence. So while i appreciate your call to desaturate liberal space and to consider better ways to respond to threatened reciprocity, i can't help but wonder if your claim that taking offense is useless is akin to claiming resentment is unnecessary.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nBut you think about what would be the best nasty name to call them, I assume. And you might decide to take offense at one interlocutor rather than another, and could give reasons why. (You don't lash out indiscriminately at the latest offender.) In other words, there's judgement involved--the point is not just to incite an equivalent resentment in the other, in anticipation of some showdown.  If so, I would say that your taking offense is, as you say, a resentment on behalf of the center, and it leaves the sphere of resentment/offense as soon as possible by invoking the authority that defends what are today the at least nominally established limits on expressed resentment. Resentment may be ineradicable, but it can be made intelligent through donation to the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "free-speech",
      "title": "Bouvard on Free Speech and Defamation Law Reform",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 30, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/k3gamv/",
      "content": "The blog is giving me too many problems in posting a comment, so i'll post it here:\n\nA very interesting discussion, but wouldn't it help to provide at least one suggestion for possible reforms, even if tentative, just to explore where the relations between the various social layers stand now? Most obviously, what would be the consequences of a reform of libel and defamation law? Or the prosecution of illegal leaks, which is not covered by 1st amendment protections, at least not under all conceivable interpretations? Any such reforms would reduce the power of the media, which raises the question of how the media have gained such power in the first place. I think in its origin, \"free speech\" meant the government could not prevent speech; it never meant that speech or published material couldn't be punished after the fact. The expansion of the concept seems to involve the removal of after the fact punishment, whether by government or injured parties, so this seems to be a good place to focus: on the erosion of norms and institutional arrangements that placed boundaries around speech by addressing its downstream consequences."
    },
    {
      "slug": "am-i-missing-something",
      "title": "Bouvard on Anthropological Models and Linguistic Analysis",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Mar 26, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/b5pmnl/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] That seems really, really flawed, methodologically. As I said linguistics is about as far as you get from my field, but as a layman that still seems wrong on an ‘the earth is flat’ tier. Why would you analyze something that we see used everyday as a ‘defective’ sentence? That’s like a cultural anthropologist saying that Native American raindancing is a ‘defective garden sprinkler’. Do you have any insight into why this idea is widespread? Am I making ignorant assumptions?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nWell, anthropologists have a history of analyzing the rituals of \"primitive' communities as \"defective\" versions of things we do. It's a question of how you model your object of inquiry. For linguistics it was, for a long time, etymology, and, then, more recently, grammar. If you're thinking about words, and parts of speech and grammatical rules, then you're thinking about sentences. So, if someone says \"open the door,\" it seems natural to view that as a shortened version of \"you are to open the door.\" In terms of sheer meaning, it seems to be the same thing. So, you say that \"open the door\" has an \"implicit subject\" (\"you\") and you can treat it as any other sentence."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-anti-civilisationism-of-liberalism",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty, Legal Entities, and Corporate Form",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jul 22, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/6nm2fq/",
      "content": "[Q:reactionaryfuture] Very, very good question. I have been thinking about that, too. It's a head scratcher and it sharpens the discussion. You could correctly frame the republican discussion as a really garbled version of this. The \"people\" framed as the agency \"incorporating\" the state to do their biding, as opposed to the sovereign (king.) The state and the king then becoming separate entities. But is it possible to have a sovereign corporation. A sovereign legal entity? it would seem a contradiction in terms. How can the entity recognize *itself* as a legal person? There has to be something outside it to do that.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nI don't think the sovereign can be a corporation, for this reason. The sovereign is a \"legal entity,\" insofar as each new sovereign doesn't just spring from the ground and rule based completely on his own, spontaneously and unanimously recognized capacities. Like any role, the sovereign is defined by that role: a \"shoemaker\" is also a \"legal entity,\" even if not in the same terms as a corporation. What makes the sovereign a legal entity is that he defines, recognizes and constrains all the other entities in the tradition of sovereignty over those entities. That's the \"outside\": being both the source and effect of the legal traditions."
    },
    {
      "slug": "what-are-we-talking-about-when-we-talk-about-the-market-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty, Deflation, and Monarchical Spending",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 25, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/9qp90n/",
      "content": "The spending doesn't need to be exorbitant or overly \"conspicuous.\" Just steady and purposeful. In a deflationary economy, having a lot of cash socked away is good, because it keeps going up in value. So, if the ruler has the biggest savings account, he can spend so as to essentially keep breaking even, I would think. But, of course, if we're not talking about a traditional monarch we'd have to think about the ruler's income, state property, and the ruler's relation to state property. If there's a lot of state property, and the ruler has access to it, then there's always revenue coming in."
    },
    {
      "slug": "distilling-sovereignty-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty, Covenant, and Institutional Balance",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Oct 05, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/73psok/",
      "content": "[Q:bobbyburnaby] Well, you raise the question of restoring the monarchy,  but what the national religious want to know, I think, is the king's relationship to a restored priesthood performing ritual sacrifices in the name of the covenant in a restored temple (and which restoration comes first).  You are not too interested in the early modern Protestant reading of the Jewish texts but you take for granted what I take to be its central point, that the Jewish (or Biblical) state is one in which the political head, as distinguished from the priestly caste, has the final decision on what is Jewish (or any national religious) law.  I don't think you see in covenants any model of sovereignty but will the state readily find the Jewishness it wants without a priestly discipline close at hand, at least some kind of replacement for the modern globalist \"priesthood\"?\n\n[ADAM]\n\nJewish law, which is very flexible, would have to find answers to these questions. The Mishna, I believe, lays out in some detail the relation between the king, the priests and the judges, and I assume that would be the starting point for further deliberation. The notion of a covenant between the Jews and God, if not amongst the Jews themselves (that's the notion that turns into republican modernity) is unobjectionable, as far as I can see. A hereditary priesthood is also fine; rebuilding the Temple might also be a very good idea, but that and the question of sacrifices would be open for discussion. (I think the Talmud already abolishes sacrifice; that decision could be revised, of course, but it seems unlikely.) I think you could have a more serious discourse around these points than around \"democracy,\" \"human rights,\" etc. The Bible's ambivalence to monarchy would have to be addressed--but that's always been a problem for Christian monarchies as well. It's a bigger question of the relation between the sovereign center and what I've started calling the \"permanent center.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "market-capillarism-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Markets Within Hierarchical Supervisory Frames",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 29, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/bu672t/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] In so far as Mises' perspective on the economic calculation problem differs from Hayek's, how would you re-frame your argument on that point? It would be comfy to wrap up the ECP and have tidy responses to any potential austrian Econ interlocutor. If you feel that you've already demolished Mises, please elaborate for me. Or else if I am missing something, let me know. I really want to completely move beyond liberal economics into a new system. The problem of economic calculation and the method by which exchange creates quantifiable and uniform ratios of costs just seems really tough to dispense with entirely. I'd at least like to have clean way of contextualizing it into a greater formalist/absolutist framework. Tbf to Mises, his arguments are mostly severed from liberal anthropology from what I can tell. He believes it's possible to have a society without economic calculation, he just thinks it would be regimented and simplistic in terms of its complexity of production. But then, may\n\n[ADAM]\n\nIf there is, and must be, an unsupervised arena within a broader supervisory frame, then within that arena there is exchange and the reciprocal assessment of value. Even in a Soviet prison camp, prisoners can exchange favors, personal articles, utensils, etc., and some kind of currency might be used; at the very least, you'd know you need 5 cigarettes to get a spoon, or whatever. Such economies can be left alone and allowed to flourish within the broader supervisory framework. Some decisions need to be made under very close supervision, or according to strict enforced rules; other decisions can be left to the agents to work out on their own. It is among the latter that markets will emerge, and it is at the discretion of the central authority to allow as much scope for those arenas as they like. And within those markets, I think the various economic \"laws\" would be operative (there would be supply and demand, etc.). The point is that is is not sociality as such--it is always a subordinate region of the social order."
    },
    {
      "slug": "adam-katz-can-you-explain-this-a-bit-more-clearly",
      "title": "Bouvard on Crisis, Centrality, and Sovereign Precedent",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Jun 17, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/c1j0q5/",
      "content": "[Q:TwatBrah] From [The anthropoetics of power](https://thejournalofneoabsolutism.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/the-anthropoetics-of-power/) >The limits of what we can see as the original form of sovereignty lie in the fact that the very qualities that allowed for the emergence of the Big Man must be forbidden to others. The resentments directed toward the Big Man are the very same resentments that created the Big Man, who “rebelled” against the “consumers” who both depended upon and restrained his “productivity.” The resentments toward the Big Man, now God Emperor, can be contained only at the cost of preventing the activities and interactions that might generate such productive resentment in the first place. Only the emperor himself can be free. --- >the very qualities that allowed for the emergence of the Big Man must be forbidden to others. Is this referring to the resentment experienced by the productive against the unproductive given an equal share i.e stemming from an assymetry between \"input\"\n\n[ADAM]\n\nYou're right that \"qualities\" is too vague. The real point is that subjects can't respond to a perceived crisis in the way the Big Man did, by seizing the center. The problem is that seizing the center is the precedent that has been set as a way of resolving a crisis. That's what's the \"same.\" But you are reading rightly that the problem is that the God-emperor must curtail productive activity on the part of his subjects. There has to be some way for subjects to have a productive relation to the center. This is part of an explanation of why this social form, despite its successes, and the fact that it lasted a long time, can't be revived. The subsequent discussion points to the historical resolution of this dilemma, with the new dilemmas that produces."
    },
    {
      "slug": "how-does-ga-differ-and-expand-upon-girard",
      "title": "Bouvard on GA's Scene and Sign Beyond Girard's Mechanism",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Nov 22, 2023",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/181ipfa/",
      "content": "The comment below is very good and especially interesting for me is the last few paragraphs (on identification with the one super-protohuman), which puts things in a way I hadn't quite seen them put before. To put it briefly, for Gans there is a scene and a sign, and we don't have either with Girard, who posits a \"mechanism.\" Imagine everyone approaching and grasping for some central object of desire, realizing (tacitly, \"vaguely\") that this very movement makes it impossible for any of them to possess it, and then converting their grasp into a gesture--a gesture pointing to the object and indicating one has ceased to approach it. We have a sign, a scene the basis of ritual and everything that follows. There's nothing close to that with Girard. There are interesting discussions to be had on what makes this event possible and what it would look like (always keeping things as minimal as possible) but they all have to come back to it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "trump-s-process-of-inquiry-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Fascism, Triage, and Liberal Discourse",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 22, 2017",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/GABlog/comments/6v8ebi/",
      "content": "[Q:Reader] This post illustrates the divergences in our perspectives of the dysfunctions and potential \"therapeutic\" strategies.  If you come to integrate more of MacIntyre's perspective, this comment may make more sense going forward. First, I strongly agree with your characterization of \"fascism\" as a counter strategy to \"cauterize\" the divisions opened by the creation of controversy and moral emergency brought about by the internal incoherence of liberalism.  Which is to say that fascism, from this perspective, is very much a liberal phenomenon. However, calling it a \"therapy\" seems a stretch.  A therapy is meant to address an underlying source of dysfunction to restore health; whereas, \"fascism\" seems like a radical means of stopping the bleeding as in a trauma.  As you state: >There can never be enough democracy, freedom, individualism, peace, tolerance. ...They can’t stop themselves; they must be stopped. That’s what *Fascism* is for. But what happens when this method is used?  You impl\n\n[ADAM]\n\nAccording to Wikipedia, \"cautery can also mean the branding of a human, either recreational or forced.\" While we're using medical metaphors, \"triage\" comes to mind as well. Yes, a \"fascist\" strategy undertaken by Trump wouldn't abolish liberalism, and no doubt doing so is unimaginable to him. Medics are preferable to arsonists. It's better to be able to have these discussions in public and relative safety. How can a non-liberal order eventually be established? That's the horizon of the work. I think we'll need other than medical metaphors."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-paradoxical-telos-of-the-aesthetic-reddit",
      "title": "Bouvard on Aesthetic Institutions and Cultural Democratization",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "May 22, 2019",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/bok6dq/",
      "content": "I haven't seen much that has been ruled off-topic here, and i think everyone can agree on the importance of aesthetics.\n\nIn a sense, I might agree with Gans, insofar as I think institutional spaces set aside specially for high art are going to continue to lose power, and so the clear separation of high from popular will fade. But this is not something I'm really pessimistic about, because it just means new conditions under which high art can be created will have to emerge. That is, I think high art will be exemplary instances of popular art, on the one hand, and new forms of everyday aesthetics, on the other. But if we look at the fundamental distinction--popular art caters to our desires, takes revenge on those we can see as enemies, etc., while high art exposes the limits of our desires and resentments--I think there will always be people creating the latter."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-egalitarian-vs-hierarchical-model-of-morality",
      "title": "Bouvard on Scapegoating and Egalitarian Morality",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 18, 2020",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/iba8qi/",
      "content": "Anyway, my main response was to insist on the importance of scapegoating to moral thinking. The demand for equality must always involve scapegoating--there's someone preventing the desired and natural equality from being realized. The imagined equality is in fact realized through scapegoating--everyone is equal in relation to this enemy. Scapegoating is also always against the center--even when the occupant of the center leads it. The claim implicit in scapegoating is that the center has been usurped by someone \"behind the scenes.\" So, discussions of morality need to include the resistance to scapegoating, which involves differentiation and pedagogical relations that allow for imperatives from the center to be distributed in a way so that no power is hidden."
    },
    {
      "slug": "why-a-generative-anthropology",
      "title": "Bouvard on Originary Scene versus Girardian Mimesis",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": "Aug 11, 2018",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Absolutistneoreaction/comments/96g60n/",
      "content": "[Q:of_ice_and_rock] Yeah, he's young and scatter-brained.  His heart's in the right place, though.\n\n[ADAM]\n\nThe Origin of Language is an extremely original and difficult book, complicated by the fact that Gans had not yet clearly distinguished his originary scene from Girard's. For someone who didn't even know about GA what, 6 months ago?--it's a valiant effort. He's an ambitious beginner, and his brain is in the right place as well. We should really see ourselves as a kind of school--how else could one learn other than by getting right into it and trying make sense of things you don't completely understand?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "anglo-modernity-limits-thread",
      "title": "Anglo Modernity Reaching Its Limits (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": null,
      "url": null,
      "content": "Q: Why is Anglo modernity reaching its limits? Why won't it continue to just \"take up\" the anti-Anglo elements?\n\nA: A good question. Maybe it can continue indefinitely, especially if no alternative emerges — I don't see a \"New World Order\" in China. But we could say it's becoming progressively less generative, working increasingly through sabotage and coercion, with much more limited technological advancements or improvements in living conditions — and even the improvements tend to be disputed or ambiguous, as with developments in medicine. There were a lot of people who thought \"capitalism\" (i.e., Anglo-modernity) was running out of steam in the 30s, and they may have been right, but WW2 gave it a jump start. That's why the hypothesis that Trump wants to wreck China is credible — maybe that's the only playbook available, even for him. Either way, Trump will put the \"Anglo modernity is reaching its limits\" hypothesis to the test. That's why it's an interesting framing now.\n\nOK, but that still doesn't quite answer your question — what are its intrinsic limits? If it's no longer generative, why not? Whatever originally made it generative, why does it no longer do so? Here the Marxist analyses of capitalism might have something to add: one Marxist argument was that capitalism needed to continue \"feeding\" on non-capitalist social forms as a source of value it couldn't create within itself. Maybe once enough of the world became Angloized, the Anglo world would have to re-Angloize itself, so to speak, and that's much harder. You run out of \"closed\" worlds to \"open up.\" A minor example is what happens when you build a social order on overcoming racism — once all the racism, as \"racism\" was originally defined, has been eliminated, you have to keep finding new forms of it. There's a law of diminishing returns here — at a certain point, \"racism\" is so prevalent, and so hidden and permeating every act, and therefore the hunt for it so intense, that society becomes too dysfunctional to continue.\n\nQ: I wonder if Christianity and the post-sacrificial social order it inaugurated is another important dimension here — a kind of \"conversion engine\" that spiritually motivates the social order to expand and \"open up\" closed or pagan worlds. It might also provide a model for thinking about Girard's \"ultra-Christianity\" and Gans's \"victimary\" as connected to this law of diminishing returns. When you're running out of \"material for conversion,\" the engine goes haywire and begins to eat itself alive.\n\nA: I think I pretty much agree with Girard on the historically transformative role of Christianity. That's an important connection — the opening up of pagan worlds, getting replicated over and over. We really want a new engine, but in the meantime we're trying to preserve the implications of the holiness of the individual and the resistance to scapegoating.\n\nThe habit of thinking in terms of social forms getting \"exhausted\" owes a lot to Marxism, and its notion that capitalism would ultimately be destroyed through its \"contradictions.\" Bichler and Nitzan are more sober — they don't think there's any reason capitalism can't continue indefinitely. They do think things are likely to get worse now, but I'm not sure whether they see that as a permanent development and if so, why.\n\nBut of course we're not restricting our analysis to \"capitalism\" — capitalism precedes Anglo modernity (in Italy and the Netherlands, for example) but it's not separable from the Anglo credit system. Capitalism is just one way of thinking in terms of probability, and that's really the thread to follow. Thinking probabilistically is the most radical and the most normal way of processing reality — probabilistic thinking draws upon materials already provided in language but it also transforms language. It spreads and converts everything it touches but without going \"viral.\" It does open everything up but without always veering towards deposing the tyrant — it stays tough-minded and weighs all claims in terms of the implications for institutions of deferral. The insurance company is still the best model. And this way of thinking, if pursued consistently, will still come across as inhuman to the vast majority of humanity.\n\nThinking probabilistically would also include assigning probabilities to knowing a particular thing. And I always insist it must be done within language — it has to be workable on any scene. Allowing certain kinds of possibilities to take shape and become more or less probable depending upon whether one weighs down on the side of them happening is part of it. It is, as you say, more a question of producing futures rather than trying to be right about a particular prediction. It's maintaining presence.\n\n(By the way, I like the word \"likely\" for this approach — it means, basically, \"probable,\" while drawing upon \"like\" (as in similar) and \"like\" (as in desire). Those two meanings of \"like\" must themselves be related. \"Like,\" according to the online etymological dictionary, comes from the word for \"same,\" which means it emerges from introducing a bit of difference into sameness. The verb, I see, comes from the same root, and originally meant something like \"to suit.\" But this is interesting: \"like\" and \"dislike\" originally were impersonal and the liking flowed the other way — \"The music likes you not\" [The Two Gentlemen of Verona]. So, saying something is not suited to you got reversed into something like wanting it to be suited to you.)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropoetics-from-habit-to-maxim",
      "title": "From Habit to Maxim: Gertrude Stein and Originary Language (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Mar 2010",
      "url": "https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1502/1502katz/",
      "content": "From Habit to Maxim: Eccentric Models of Reality and Presence in the Writing of Gertrude Stein Anthropoetics XV, no. 2 (Spring 2010)\n\nAdam Katz Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518\n\n---\n\n\"Transcendence\" stands for what subsists, stands behind, and provides a continuing reality to phenomena. The equivalent of \"transcendence,\" for Gertrude Stein, was \"continuous present,\" a term she used in various ways and used to produce many maxims of thinking, writing and art—maxims ranging from the seemingly obvious to the awkward and counter-intuitive. In \"Plays,\" Stein writes \"The business of Art . . . is to live in the actual present, that is the completely actual present, and to completely express that completely actual present\" (Lectures in America, 104-5). She is referring us here to \"Composition as Explanation,\" where she associates the \"continuous present\" with \"beginning again\" and \"using everything.\"\n\nStein seems to be aiming at a kind of pure horizontality here—without the vertical, everything is equally related to everything else, and each moment of composition completely different from the previous one—but at the same time, completely the same, except for the composition. The horizontality of the continuous present (perhaps it would be better, and even more Steinian, to say \"continuous presencing\") can replace the vertical because Stein's horizontality is not the horizontality of symmetrical desires in the confrontational stance prior to the deferral effected by the sign; rather, it is the horizontality of that instant on the originary scene prior to its closure, where the only thing sustaining the sign is the incalculable possibility that some next member will take it up.\n\nThe symmetry of the participants at this instant is exactly the same as in the previous instant, when they were poised to annihilate themselves and each other, except for the composition, that slight rerouting of the gesture through its visibility. As Stein says, \"The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything\" (Writings and Lectures 24).\n\nIn other words, the continuous present doesn't exist outside of the activity of sustaining it, whereas transcendence implies an existence apart from that activity. I will explore this distinction by addressing Stein's maxims, or at least what I will read as her maxims. I take a maxim to be a statement on the boundary between the declarative and the imperative, a generalizable claim which can only be grasped and assessed through some singular practice, a practice advised or urged by the maxim itself. So, in \"Plays,\" Stein asserts that \"The thing that is fundamental about plays is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than not one might say it is always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience\" (Lectures 93).\n\nStein suggests that finding this out \"makes one think endlessly about plays\" (93), and one could see that the only way of making sense of such a maxim would be to inhabit oneself as a spectator in some play and hypothesize that moment in which one's emotions were \"syncopated.\" The problem with the maxim is that the advice it would give us seems to skip a step—you will know that your emotion is, to continue with Stein's discussion, \"always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening\" once you have decided to make sense of your emotion during the play in precisely those terms: there is no difference between being syncopated and knowing you are syncopated. In other words, Stein's maxims do not posit a mode of \"verification\" that could be shared.\n\nThis direct route to the ostensive, bypassing a shared mode of verification is very well illustrated in the following anecdote:\n\nMs. Stein, the story goes, was giving a lecture at a prestigious Eastern university. In the discussion period following her lecture, a young man and woman, college students, arose to ask a question. They were respectful. They were earnest. They were holding hands.\n\n\"Miss Stein,\" the young man said, \"you write books that are very hard to understand. Many of us have worked hard at trying to understand your writing, and we still find it a puzzle. Can you tell us please what you are trying to say?\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Ms. Stein after thinking a moment, \"what I'm saying is that everything changes and everything stays the same.\"\n\nThe young man and woman reddened and smiled nervously at each other.\n\n\"Miss Stein,\" the young man said again, \"if you will forgive us, that's just what we mean. Nothing changes and nothing stays the same. What does that mean?\"\n\n\"No,\" Ms. Stein said, \"not nothing changes and nothing stays the same. Everything changes and everything stays the same.\"\n\n\"But what does it mean\"?\n\n\"Well, take you two, for instance,\" Ms. Stein said. \"You are a perfect example of this.\"\n\nAnd then she sat down.\n\nStein, first of all, corrects the students, insisting on the difference between \"everything changes and everything stays the same\" and \"nothing changes and nothing stays the same,\" regardless of their reversibility, and then answers the students' request for meaning by \"pointing\" to them as a \"perfect example of this.\" A perfect example, presumably, of what \"everything changes and everything stays the same\" means. In a sense, Stein complies with the normal grammar of the \"example\" here—presumably, we ask for examples when the declarative statement is insufficient. But the students have asked for a second declarative statement, not an example—they apparently don't understand the first statement well enough to know what would count as an example, or to use an example to supplement their understanding.\n\nThe general statement, in other words, is too idiosyncratic to go right to an example from. But that, then, is what Stein is insisting upon—finding your way from the idiosyncratic statement to, not only an example, but yourself as an example, and yourself as an example insofar as you want to, but cannot yet, make sense of that idiosyncratic statement. That is, the students are a perfect example of \"everything changes and everything stays the same\" insofar as they are poised to find the right way to look at themselves as exemplary and thereby do everything differently by looking at what they are doing. And finding yourself—always finding yourself—to be a perfect example of everything changes and everything stays the same would be something you could think about endlessly.\n\nTo take another example: in \"What are Masterpieces and why are there so few of them,\" Stein contends that \"the essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening\" (Writings and Lectures 148). Again, the problem is, what can one do with this? This is Stein's way of speaking about the difference between human nature, or identity, and the human mind, responsible for creation—masterpieces, products of the human mind, sustain the continuous present, there is no remembering or consideration of any audience: \"If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity will be clear, that is what a masterpiece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a masterpiece is not\" (Writings 152).\n\nSo, a masterpiece is something one enters by stepping outside of everything else—when you are outside of the masterpiece it is not clear, even if it seems clear, but when you are inside the space or continuous present composed by the masterpiece it is clear. How this presumed unity of vision with the creator, where both will experience the same thing, but that same thing will be incommunicable to anyone outside of that space while not needing to be communicated to anyone in it, can't be explained any more than the way we recognize someone we know can, or needs to be, explained.\n\nThe argument makes sense, then, but the maxim—the essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening—may not. It's hard to read it metaphorically because it's hard to get a sense of what it would mean literally. Even if the one talking is the same as the one listening—and that Stein is not merely referring to the process of thought here is made evident by her observation elsewhere that it is a very difficult thing \"to listen to anything and everything in the same way any one is telling anything and at the same time while you are listening to be telling inside yourself and outside yourself anything that is happening everything that is anything\" (Narration 34)—how could one talk while listening and listen while talking.\n\nThe expression of simultaneity here makes enough sense for us to see that it can't make \"complete\" sense—you could try and listen while you are talking and talking while you are listening and by noticing that the listening always comes just after the talking, imagine the possibility of \"catching up\" and attaining what would be an originary experience of language: that is, an experience of language that is simultaneously ostensive and a model for other experiences. This possible experience would be known as such after the fact, in the internal balancing of the sentence that would be an event of knowing in itself: \"And in knowing anything you know it as you know it, you know it at the time you are knowing it and in that way the way of knowing it\" (20).\n\nStein's focus on grammar and the sentence enables us to make the distinction between transcendence and the continuous present on that level as well. A sentence effects transcendence if it makes us stand before a reality that is, at least until the end of the uttering of that sentence, beyond the power of any imperative to alter. I would propose calling this a sentence organized around a commanding name: a noun, a subject, that has its own substance to be unfolded in the predication—the name is commanding in the sense that the object world or field of semblances it opens up is invulnerable to our grasping, at least insofar as we \"understand\" the sentence.\n\nReality is transcendence embodied, and it is in the grammatically correct sentence that this embodiment is registered. A sentence participates in continuous presence, on the other hand, insofar as it puts forth grammatical possibilities that it doesn't itself exhaust—in Stein's style, the grammar of presence includes, as has been often noted, rhythm, alliteration, internal dialogues regarding the composition of a sentence (\"stage directions,\" so to speak), sentences repeated over and over again, sometimes with very slight modifications, the organization of patches of discourse around relative and demonstrative pronouns, sentences in which the same word can be both subject and direct object and subject of another sentence, and so on. The idea is to generate as many grammatical possibilities as possible, and to sustain the text by realizing as many of those possibilities as possible while not exhausting them and continuing to generate more.\n\nLet's return to the vertical-less originary scene I posited earlier: rather than transcendence embedded in but beyond and above the central object, we have the participants on the scene arrayed in relation to the central object. Instead of seeing or intuiting something through the object, each participant sees everyone else as equidistant from the object. Not literally equidistant, but equally likely, or unlikely, to abandon their equipoise and reverse the reversal of their adoption of the aborted gesture of appropriation—\"meaning\" is everyone stripped of every intention other than to convey their acceptance of the gesture with as much certainty as possible. We could call the resentment of the center this view of everyone dispossessing themselves of everything that might suggest a renewed striving toward the appropriation of the object—each participant takes on the resentment of the center by seeing everyone else as equidistant from that center, which is the way the center itself would have it.\n\nIn this equipoise and equidistance we can see a grammar of the scene—the gestures put forth by all members of the group would not be identical, even if they are all imitating the same gesture. This is because each not only imitates but inflects and accentuates from their own position on the scene: someone who was about to grab a chunk would have to sign differently than one who was engaged in the beginnings of combat with another, and a third member, who was lagging behind, would have yet another way of signing on. The scene is the articulation of all these gestures, and the transition into the sparagmos, towards consuming the object without renewing the mimetic crisis, would likewise require a continued articulation and calibration of this array of gestures.\n\nEven more, all the possible gestures and expressions in the pre-human repertoire of the group and of each member undergo a similar \"abstraction\"—that is, whatever any member could do \"naturally\" can now be broken down into a collection of gestures that can be combined in various ways. Continuous presencing, then, is sustaining the resentment of the center by maximally abstracting all elements of language, from the most elemental phonemes and morphemes to sheer grammatical connections devoid of meaning (for example, using a noun that rarely is used adjectivally as an adjective, and using it to modify a noun that is the nominalization of a adjective never used that way, and selecting for this operation two words without any discernable relation to each other in any combination, presents the articulation of noun and adjective without the interference of the \"commanding name\" embedded in an already shared and connoted reality).\n\nI assume that Stein's practices have an esthetic value in themselves, but my interests here lie in the way they open up language so as to generate the idiosyncratic maxims that I have been looking at, maxims advising us to make our relation to language originary. This is from Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, Part 3, Stanza VII:\n\nBy it by which by it As not which not which by it For it it is in an accessible with it But which will but which will not it Come to be not made not made one of it By that all can tell all call for in it That they can better call add Can in add none add it.\n\nIt is not why she asked that anger In an anger can they be frightened Because for it they will be which in not Not now. Who only is not now. I can look at a landscape without describing it. (76)\n\nThe first six lines all end with \"it.\" Not only that, but these lines are concerned throughout for \"it.\" The sixth line ends with \"call for in it,\" and then the seventh line ends with \"call add\"—so, \"call\" brings us from \"it\" to \"add,\" which dominates the next, eighth line: \"can in add none add it.\" The next two lines then concern \"anger.\" So, some \"it\" is at the center of these lines, and \"it\" had something to do with \"calling,\" \"adding\" and \"anger\"—perhaps the anger concerns adding and calling it, or not adding and calling it. We have a repetition in the first line, as \"by it\" precedes and follows \"by which\"—this might also be read as a dialogue, with \"by it\" answering the question \"by which?\" following the initial \"by it.\"\n\n\"By it\" recurs again in the second line, this time following what also could be a little dialogue by interlocutors with the objects in question close at hand—\"as not\" (as a response or qualification to \"by it\" from the first line), then \"which not,\" which could be either a question (\"which is not\"?) or an emphatic repetition (not just that it isn't, but that it won't be), and then \"which by it\" which we could divide into two pieces of speech (another question—\"which?\"—with the answer \"by it\"), or read the second which as emphasizing the \"which not\" relative to \"as not,\" with the concluding \"by it\" an insistence on the basic point here, which shouldn't be confused with any other point. On this reading, the fragments would all work as gestures, questions and commands, to look, distinguish, negate, insist.\n\nI have suggested two ways of making sense of Stein's agrammaticality in passages such as the above—one, as declarative sentences interrupted by ostensive gestures (marked by deictics), imperatives and interrogatives; two, as the creation of novel verb, adjectival and adverbial phrases which create a liminal, evanescent reality—we could imagine, in the course of reading Stein's text sympathetically, \"calling… for in it,\" with \"for in it\" representing some condition for which we could summon up a minimal sense of reality, but could not really remember. This liminal reality is only available to the extent one enters the continuous presence set up by the text.\n\nSo, what kind of contribution does this, what I am calling an originary relation to language, make to thinking? It keeps language on the threshold of feeling and sense and facilitates idiosyncratic observations, on the boundary between ultra-literalism and very stretched metaphoricity. For example, Stein keeps repeating in Everybody's Autobiography that there is \"no sky\" in America, \"just air\"—we can make some sense of this, sky is verticality whereas air is horizontality, and this would line up with much else Stein says about America in distinction from Europe; but there is an experiential immediacy to the phrase as well, which is used to describe her perception of New York in particular.\n\nAnd the idiosyncratic observations, to which we can give a paradoxical name like \"literal allegories,\" generate eccentric maxims, like the definition of genius I opened the essay with. Within Stein's discourse we can posit a relation to language wherein language is both coming from and coming to us—we are listening and talking at the same time, on the condition that the subject doing the talking and listening is removed from the scene, and with her or him the anchor to transcendence in reality. The model of thinking that would result would be a marginalist, minimal one—thinking proceeding by subtracting or adding the smallest thing possible from or to a stream of habits and discourse, a subtraction or addition that insists that everything is the same by making everything different. Such thinking confers sacrality on language itself, as the means by which we sustain the infinite field of semblances, or reality, by modeling language on the sign/object complementarity constitutive of everything we see.\n\nStein's most powerful way of engaging the originary hypothesis, in this case, would be to forget the catastrophe that was narrowly averted, to transform every trace of its possibility into a sign of its unrepresentability, to abstract and articulate every gesture of deferral in as many ways as possible. Desires can be converted into happiness by turning objects of desire into means of personal ostentation, and this can be done by turning anyone's attention to the origins of desire in some (mistaken) gesture in which the model and object are inscribed and confused—that gesture can always be articulated with others in a new idiom, with its own generative resources. For this kind of practice and habit, this kind of ostensive gesture toward the ostensivity of the gesture and its strained inter-articulation with other gestures, Stein's continuous presencing within language will always be a model. Perhaps that is a relation between the Human Mind and Human Nature.\n\n---\n\nWorks Cited\n\nStein, Gertrude. A Novel of Thank You. Dalkey Archive Press: Normal, Ill., 1994.\n\n———. Stanzas in Meditation. Sun & Moon Press: Los Angeles, 1994.\n\n———. Mrs. Reynolds. Sun & Moon Press: Los Angeles, 1988.\n\n———. Writings and Lectures: 1909-1945. Edited by Patricia Meyerowitz. Penguin Books: Baltimore, 1974.\n\n———. The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. Introduction by William H. Gass. Random House: New York, 1973.\n\n———. Wars I Have Seen. Random House: New York, 1945.\n\n———. Lectures in America. Random House: New York, 1935.\n\n———. Narration. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1935."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropoetics-marginalist-politics",
      "title": "Marginalist Politics, Political Grammar (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jun 2008",
      "url": "https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1401/1401katz/",
      "content": "Anthropoetics XIV, no. 1 (Summer 2008)\n\nAdam Katz\nDepartment of English\nQuinnipiac University\nHamden, CT 06518\n\n---\n\nIntroduction\n\nEric Gans' Chronicle of Love & Resentment 348, \"The Four Freedoms,\" suggests the possibility of thinking about politics in terms of linguistic categories. The value of pursuing this suggestion seems to me to lie in the application of terms drawn rigorously out of the originary hypothesis so as to generate a new theoretical vocabulary—the point being to see something we couldn't otherwise. In the case of Gans' Chronicle, we can think of \"freedom\" in terms of the unfolding of linguistic forms first explored in The Origin of Language and then applied to cultural forms in The End of Culture. So, \"ostensive freedom\" lies in the transcendence of the appetitive and horizontal in the intention of an object on the originary scene; imperative freedom is the negative freedom \"from another's intention\"; declarative freedom is \"the freedom to help choose the imperatives by which one will be governed\"; and discursive freedom \"permits the individual not simply to intend a representation of the world as it is or he thinks it should be, but to offer himself to the world as an esthetic totality, a sacred central object.\"\n\nFinally, since \"the originary ostensive freedom to intend an object in principle generates for each member of society the discursive freedom to become an object of intention,\" it seems worthwhile to seize upon the strong sense of continuity suggested here between the \"first\" and \"fourth\" freedom (and, presumably, the others along the way) and proceed to think about how any concrete mode of freedom would articulate all of these modes in the free act.\n\nFirst, though, I note some ambivalence in the way \"imperative freedom\" is treated in the Chronicle. The only \"positive\" imperative freedom imagined here is that of the sadist—the problem posed is the restraint of imperativity. Resentment toward imperatives is well grounded in, perhaps even constitutive of, the liberal and democratic political traditions, and a declarative politics, that is, the subordination of commands to deliberation, is the manner in which that resentment is generalized and made explicit. Still, while one could say that at several removes we help choose the imperatives by which we are governed, viewing imperatives as necessary evils doesn't serve to integrate imperatives into a declarative order, and this seems to me a serious weak point in liberal political thinking.\n\nInsofar as there are areas of social life in which imperative chains of command are indispensable, those areas of life must establish criteria for competence, legitimacy and authority of given orders and commands. We can withhold the designation \"freedom\" from the unhindered (by external, \"declarative\" constraints) issuing of orders according to internally and traditionally constituted processes and for well established and publicly audited purposes, but at some cost, I believe. First, the cost is theoretical: we don't have a way of integrating fully human desires and impulses such as ambition, the desire for fame and the calling to serve the collective in a responsible position in a scenic understanding of the human; nor, for that matter, have we gotten any closer to explaining why those whose vocation is to issue imperatives might be more or less likely to listen to those who deliberate upon their validity from a distance.\n\nMore precisely: how has it happened, and how does it continue to happen, that some of those who issue imperatives are willing to act against others who do so in the name of \"toothless\" declaratives? Second, by maintaining the traditional liberal mistrust and distaste for such desires and a disdain for the spontaneous and reciprocal suspicion of \"imperators\" toward those who deliberate thanks to the peace they provide, we are unable to resist the demonization of manifestations of such desires and resentments, which entails the political and ethical cost of adding fuel to the victimary fire—along with the failure to develop an immunity to the less pressing, but by no means unthinkable, recrudescence of \"strong men\" demagogues who exploit what often appears to be a self-willed weakness of liberal societies.\n\nImperative freedom can only be rethought in terms of its problematic integration into a declarative or deliberative order by further developing the articulation of the linguistic forms into a political vocabulary. For example, ostensive freedom must be brought to bear in conjoining the declarative (deliberative, juridical, principled) with the imperative: that imperatives have been deployed consonant with deliberative practices must be affirmed through means established by those practices in interplay with the sources of the imperatives themselves. Someone must be responsible for that affirmation, and everyone must know (or be able to know) who they are.\n\nThrough such affirmations we re-enact the transcendence of the horizontal and the founding of the community. Similarly, changes in the laws governing the internal affairs of institutions administered by strict chains of command must be \"registered\" through modifications in the publicly known procedures by which commands are issued. There must be ways, in other words, of demonstrating, verifying and authenticating the channels by which declaratives are translated into imperatives and vice versa, and all this must involve an ostensive dimension: someone must \"point\" to a legitimate act in order to \"seal\" its legitimacy, we must all be able to point to the one who has pointed, and so on.\n\nSince without such scenic verification freedom would surely be lost, it seems to me a valid project, then, to see whether we might direct the attention of (originary) political thinking to the seemingly narrow task of distinguishing among various modes and degrees of \"translatability\"—or, as I prefer, \"convertibility\" of imperatives and declaratives. The most urgent problem is with the convertibility of imperatives: those imperatives that could be recast as consequent upon a declarative, or a general claim asserting some regular set of relationships and possibilities in social reality, would be those most readily integrated into a deliberative order.\n\nImperative freedom would in turn be recast as the defense of that order. Our sense of declarative freedom, meanwhile would be sharpened by the implicit criterion \"demanding\" that the assertion of any observation or principle regarding liberal society be itself compatible with the norms of imperative freedom upon which that society depends.\n\nAs for discursive freedom, the political vocabulary and grammar I am proposing suggests the need to speak about more and less politically relevant manifestations of such freedom. Political sacralities emerge when one demonstrates a willingness to confirm or authenticate the conversion of an imperative into a declarative or a declarative into an imperative; and the degree of sacrality is higher the more necessary such confirmation or authentification is in the situation and the less \"basis\" there is for it in the existing procedures of authentification. (Naturally, taking on this responsibility can include refusing to confirm or authenticate.)\n\nThis indicates a willingness to be a scapegoat, and whether one will be hero, scapegoat, or just goat can be ascertained only after the fact. But insofar as one engages in such a task as part of the process of self-composition as a sacred totality, one is doing something more than making a political decision: one is engaged in a discovery procedure, in gaining knowledge in the only way one possibly can in the midst of social activity, by acting in \"revealing\" ways. One thereby assumes that there is a principle to one's action—a new declarative—but one that can be fully formulated only after the fact, by a spectator.\n\nThere is a paradox at the heart of such action: offering oneself up as a possible scapegoat (while evincing no—while disciplining ones' actions and the signs one emits so as to defer any—desire to be scapegoated) requires intricate, if largely tacit knowledge of the \"field\" one is entering, and it subsequently generates knowledge regarding the current state of society; but, the more free the act, the more one makes oneself available to and dependent upon the unreserved ostensive affirmations of others, the less anyone, including oneself, can know what one is going to do next and what it is going to mean.\n\nSo, the test of this essay is whether it provides a new, unique way of exploring this paradox in terms of the problem of imperative-declarative convertibility. I don't mean to exclude all other political vocabularies (as if it were in my power to do so) but simply to propose a measure for political discourse: the generation of viable political principles and a way of assessing their viability. I have already said something about our unease, in a liberal democratic society, in discussing imperatives, and I would like to broaden the point a bit. Once we distinguish between more and less convertible imperatives, we might find ourselves free to apply the term in all sorts of new ways, and in particular in discussions of subjectivity and character—to put it simply, if we think about it, we order ourselves around quite a bit, and that has quite a bit to do with what makes us free.\n\nSecond, though, and perhaps more controversially, we \"receive\" impersonal imperatives quite frequently: an examination of how often people claim to be taking orders from entities such as \"history,\" \"society,\" and \"reality\" would be extraordinarily revealing, and not merely for the purposes of \"demystification\"—after all, what imperative are we following when we demystify? More importantly, I don't see a better way of describing whatever it is that makes us come to the defense of a victim of injustice than that we are following an imperative coming from where we cannot quite tell. We can only get better at hearing and assessing such imperatives if we learn how to listen for them.\n\nThe transcendent imperative of a political order predicated upon consent is the enhancement of consent. We obey that imperative both by increasing the visibility of that order's reliance upon consent and the creation of means by which the forms and degrees of consent can be audited. Grammatically speaking, the progress of civil society (and civil society must either progress or regress, as more people are incessantly thrown into the swirl of the marketplace and the contestations of the political system; the systems must either marginalize these new entrants or adapt to the pressures and challenges produced by their presence) involves increasing the convertibility of imperatives into declaratives.\n\nThis doesn't imply a lesser reliance upon imperatives, which are simply unavoidable across enormous swaths of social life (and, for that matter, psychological, inner, life). Rather, the point is that imperatives must become ever more translatable, by those who are to execute, enforce, and obey them, into declaratives—\"Because I said so\" (a barely declarative iteration of the force already implicit in the imperative) must give way to \"Because I have been duly authorized by those you have duly authorized to superintend this process\" (a declarative reference to a consensual reality enabling the imperative). Or, to put it somewhat differently, if it doesn't give way, civil society is attenuated and, at some point, swept away.\n\nCivil society progresses or regresses in response to events that we can consider crises in imperative/declarative convertibility: imperatives set in motion a chain of events which undermines the authority at stake in their issuance and, rather than minimizing rivalries over access within a particular arena of goods and tasks by settling the question of who determines said access, such imperatives instead intensify them. Perhaps this happens because other centers of authority, sometimes even those created or elevated by the challenged authority itself, have arisen and started to make competing claims to obedience; perhaps because the sphere of consequences following from the application of a hitherto unproblematic imperative has widened beyond the reach of whoever has issued that imperative's ability to direct and regulate outcomes; perhaps because the subjects of the imperative are, for reasons arising from different arenas altogether, not the \"same\" subjects as those who used to obey—habituated to deliberating and choosing from amongst a range of \"imperators\" elsewhere, they demand no less here (which is to say, they arrogate to themselves a center of imperative issuing authority).\n\nWhatever the circumstances, what results from such an \"imperative crisis\" is an event which concludes with the acknowledgement that that \"kind\" of imperative can no longer be obeyed while another \"kind\" of imperative (even one as minimal as \"don't obey that other kind\") has been ostensively verified as \"valid\" (it was seen to resolve the crisis). The difference will lie in the greater convertibility and hence flexibility of the new imperative and the \"imperative center\" erected upon it. The new imperative order, at the very least, comes with a justification and narrative (a declarative) along the lines of \"this is what happened when we obeyed without question the old imperative,\" thus establishing at least minimal criteria and scope for argument and assessment of imperatives compatible with the new order and candidates qualified to issue those imperatives. Hence, an increase in the quality and quantity of consent.\n\nThe model of social transformation I have been describing is meant to approximate the actual liberalization and democratization of Western societies in particular over the last couple of centuries. By presenting it as a series of reversible conjoinings of imperatives and declaratives, regimes of command and authority with modes of discoursing and deliberating, I hope to suggest something of the contingency of the entire process. There is a kind of minimal \"necessity\" in modern social development: civil society will not remain static, so it must advance or recede, flourish or degenerate; maybe we always see some combination of all of these processes, but a sustained equilibrium seems most unlikely.\n\nWe can get better at freedom; we can also forget it. And the getting better and forgetting takes place everywhere. I would call a politics attuned to this contingency \"marginalist.\" Marginalism is in fact a politics of the center—it is a deliberate effort to place oneself at the margin along with everyone else, intent upon preserving and repairing the social center: the protection of the inexhaustibility of the value of the individual (and attentiveness presupposes the fragility of the value). What I mean to distinguish marginalism from, for the purposes of this discussion, would be what I will call a \"metaphysical liberalism.\"\n\nI use the term \"metaphysical liberalism\" to cover the history of modern liberalism from its origins in Hobbes and Locke through its later transformation in American Progressivism and its more recent degeneration in the victimary politics of White Guilt and what John Fonte calls \"transnational progressivism.\" Let's say that liberalism is the conviction that human freedom is universal and can be spread across all spheres of life—esthetic and political; intellectual and spiritual; personal and moral. And we shouldn't be distracted by the contrast between freedom and equality: one could stress one over the other in any instance, but the two are unthinkable without their interdependence.\n\nEtienne Balibar's term, \"equaliberty,\" or the ancient Greek \"isonomy,\" capture this interdependence. No one could be free by themselves, no more than anyone could trade by themselves, and one must at least be equal with those with whom one shares one's freedom. By the same token, what kind of equality is imaginable without the freedom to defend it against violation? The history of liberalism would probably best be written as the history of recognitions, and failures to recognize, new dimensions of this interdependence. In its specifically political and civil form, liberalism had to begin by confronting, by directing resentment towards, some particularly odious restrictions on freedom and equality, which is to say, unconvertible imperatives.\n\nLiberalism, furthermore, could only advance the same way—by locating new or hitherto unnoted obstacles to freedom. Different forms of liberalism will offer different answers to the question, obstacles to what, exactly? That is, where is the presently unrealized freedom/equality located? What is the unconvertible imperative forbidding?\n\nFor metaphysical liberalism, the answers are to be found in pre-existing reality. This assumption is what connects what seem to be the very different forms of politics I mentioned in the previous paragraph. For the liberals of the Enlightenment, up through the thinking of the American founders, human beings are naturally self-interested and therefore given to violence when different interests collide; they are simultaneously capable of reasoning, calculating possible consequences beyond the sphere of immediate desires, and can hence transcend the conflicts to which their self-interest inevitably leads. This first of all is taken to imply a commitment to minimal institutions, like constitutional government and the free market, which frame and moderate conflicts, and train us to find compromises.\n\nHowever distant such a liberalism seems from the welfare-state quasi-socialism of the Progressives who dominated American politics from 1932-1980, the latter have usually seen themselves as direct descendants of classical liberalism, and not without reason: if historical developments render the minimal institutions which evolved in the 19th century ineffective in addressing new complexities, inequalities, and restrictions on freedom (such as those introduced by the large corporations and imperialism), then wouldn't the preservation of liberty require the transformation of those institutions? And how else would we go about transforming them other than through the use of that very reason which, according to Hobbes, enabled us to arrive at the social contract in the first place?\n\nBut \"reason,\" in the 20th century, means science, technology and organization, and the defense of liberty must involve the availability of such modes of thought and organizing capacities to all citizens. The answer to the question, \"obstacles to what\" is still, then, our potentialities as rational beings who can defer violence by organizing the satisfaction of needs and the realization of capacities so as to remove the source of conflict, even if those potentialities are by now more collective than individual (and even that simply shifts the emphasis to the undeniably shared dimension of freedom). Transnational progressives extend this logic to the globe, but the continuity is deceptive: White Guilt represents the turn within liberalism toward an overwhelming concern with restricting putative obstacles to freedom (tyranny, but also the false hopes, fears and prejudices that support tyranny), a concern that in previous, more optimistic forms of liberalism seemed temporary, but now seems indelibly inscribed in and, through some fateful historical wrong turn, to be inseparable from the very concepts of freedom and equality themselves.\n\nThe historical dead end of White Guilt, then, is the dead end of metaphysical liberalism. If we see freedom as taking orders from a known reality (whether Human Nature or the evolutionary Historical Process), then our politics is determined by resentment towards those who deviate from whatever model of reality we are working with. Such a politics is ultimately resentment towards the contingencies of history. And this is true of those who resent the \"Others\" who bitterly \"cling\" to their religion and guns as well as those who resent the \"biased\" liberal elites in the media. I don't weigh these resentments equally in moral or political terms, and I have my own sympathies, but the point is that both resentments hit the same dead end.\n\nThe originary liberalism I am calling marginalism seeks to find another path for the \"arts\" of equality and freedom by accepting the need to continually invent and create forms and representations of \"equaliberty\" or \"isonomy.\" De Tocqueville is, of course, a crucial precursor, but what is new here is my claim that such inventions and creations must engage not primarily those among whom there is already a presumption of equality, but precisely those between whom, in the current dead end of metaphysical liberalism, there have arisen incommensurable differences and unbridgeable asymmetries. And they are in fact incommensurable and unbridgeable within metaphysical liberalism—hence the need for new political thinking.\n\nIn originary liberalism, or marginalism, we are no longer seeking to know the reality from which we could take our orders; reality is indeed full of imperatives, and metaphysical liberalism has been a rich cataloguing of many of them, but we aim at deferring the implementation of the general imperatives that oppose some obstacle to our freedom in order to allow for the gathering of some irreconcilable imperatives which could only be reconciled in a new and more freely joined reality. Trying, for example, to generate plausible scenes or thought experiments which might reconcile (without softening) the imperative to resist total war and protect civilians with the imperative to make war ruthlessly against precisely those who use our adherence to that prior imperative to blackmail us is far more likely to expand the sphere of freedom and liberty than trying to designate the bearers of either demand as historical delinquents.\n\nWe can think about marginalism, first of all in terms of economic theory, in the following way: the sum total of values (ultimately, my own time, talent, and energy and whatever I can solicit from others) I am able to confer is distributed in a particular manner among a range of objects available on the market. This distribution is constantly shifting in response both to internal changes in my scale of values and the prices of objects, determined, ultimately, by the intersections of everyone else's ever-shifting scale of values. Each of us is constantly faced with choices: if acquiring one set of desired objects requires an increased quantity of value, I must consider some internal recalibration of my scale of values.\n\nIf the price of sugar goes up and I want the same amount of sugar, all things being equal, I will have to settle for less of something else. As I seek out information on the distribution of values, my own actions convey information regarding values to others. What interests me here are those objects which are, or become at a certain point, irreducible and indivisible as a result of some small, even infinitesimal shifts, so as to bring about some systemic transformation in my overall \"portfolio\" of values. For example, I can't buy half a car, so if my income decreases or the price of cars increases sufficiently, I simply drop from the category of \"car owner\" and into the category of \"mass transit user\"; even if I can afford an old, used, car, I might experience a similarly qualitative, albeit less dramatic, drop in status or \"level,\" affecting my employment prospects and my circle of friends and associates.\n\nThe price of cars, and, in turn, the amount of value ultimately allotted to the production of cars, will be determined by such drops (or, of course, ascents) from one such category into another—at a certain point, owning cars becomes a universally acknowledged necessity; or, car ownership becomes a luxury and we find ourselves transformed into a society of mass transit users, and in a kind of domino effect, other values are transformed accordingly.\n\nAt a certain point, then, some infinitesimal change tips the scale into some new order of being, with the establishment of a new level of reality or the abolition of an existing one. These are (to leave economics in the narrow sense and move to the broader field of what Ludwig von Mises called \"praxeology\") the events that generate new signs: the originary event involved the production of just such an indivisible and irreducible new order of being, a threshold of conflict above which violence can, and can only, be deferred through the use of signs, and the more we were to hypothetically break down the various \"elements\" of the scene (a scene that might have \"almost\" taken place innumerable times previously) in an attempt to isolate the particular element that tipped the group over into the human community, the more the generation of new candidates for such an irreplaceable element would outpace any plausible criteria for distinguishing between the \"credentials\" of the respective \"candidates\"; without, nevertheless, impairing our conviction that there must be such an element, given the undeniable reality of the scene into which we are inquiring.\n\nNaturally, such \"tipping points\" are of extraordinary (I would almost say, exclusive) intellectual and ethical interest. Marginalism is interested, then, in the disproportion between \"units\" of change (which are recognizable as units only after the fact) and shifts in \"levels\" of reality; marginalism in politics is interested in those infinitesimal shifts in consent wherein displacements of obedience away from one imperative center dissolve the order it supports and displacements to some new imperative install another, emergent, center, capable, first of all, of supporting an exchange of declaratives (deliberation aimed at determining a new mode of authenticating imperatives) regarding the viability of the respective orders.\n\nThe identification of such \"units\" is always a matter of trial and error, but the defining feature of a marginalist politics is that we are always trying (and often erring)—this involves holding in reserve some margin of obedience to imperative centers supported by even the most free civil society, and doing so as a kind of instrument for registering the limits of the prevailing imperative order. The prevailing imperative order: we are dealing here with far more than the military and the police; we are dealing with the entire realm of social life governed by norms of loyalty, protection, honor, hierarchy, dispatch, pedagogy, the automatism of habit, and the indispensability of specific individuals situated temporally and spatially. Such is also the realm where little, and sometimes nothing, short of unanimity will do: in emergencies, in our \"spontaneous\" adherence to the order of a queue, to the norms of politeness in a social setting, in my not reconsidering after every word whether to continue reading a text but rather to just keep going, at least for now; and much, much, more.\n\nSuch a margin of \"civil disobedience\" or \"dissent\" is very often nothing more than a sense of irony shared with others toward the manner in which a particular set of imperatives, which we nevertheless wholeheartedly endorse and enthusiastically fulfill, are deployed by a particular authority. In a free order, there is always something anomalous, and therefore potentially comical, about those who are \"overly\" concerned with the maintenance of order, at least for those positioned high or low enough to take such order for granted. Even in such cases, though, we are signaling that there is some as yet undetermined point at which we would disobey—perhaps even by simply quietly altering or omitting some portion of the imperative—that imperator or that imperative center.\n\nWhatever now is endearingly silly enough about our boss to make us smile might become, through some infinitesimal shift in his practices or in our attention or tolerance, ridiculous enough to make us laugh out loud or overbearing enough that we are willing to make our resentment visible, perhaps first to a narrow, but then a wider \"audience.\"\n\nChange always takes place on the margin of the prevailing imperative order: the party one has always voted for, which one's parents always voted for, the party of the political heroes of one's youth, the party it is unthinkable to betray, that party, one election cycle, nominates a questionable candidate—one notices certain new slogans, detects a shift in emphasis, a new set of associates becomes more prominent around that candidate, and so on. Well, it's still your party, and you pull the lever as always. But after another such candidate, and another, and then one that goes beyond questionable to borderline unacceptable—a new imperative, uncomfortably close in origins to the one enjoining party loyalty—induces a kind of internal imperative crisis. In that case, one does the unimaginable, and listens to what the other party's candidate has to say. Well, he sounds different than I expected, different than I remembered. I'm certainly not going to cross over the line this time, but maybe next time, just to keep my side honest…\n\nThis process, leaving aside the portrait of an uninquisitive but perfectly reasonable, and probably typical, voter, is how change takes place in political thinking and affiliation. Try saying to the person described above that he \"should\" stop letting the party in question take his vote for granted—why \"should\" he, exactly? What standing have you to issue imperatives in this case? What we all have standing to do as citizens, though, is to put forth ostensives, to attempt to draw attention to some new object, to propose new patterns of paying attention. We can seek to instigate or accelerate an imperative crisis in our fellow citizens, and then try to construct declaratives that resolve that crisis by obeying ourselves the emergent imperatives of a new imperative center.\n\nImperative orders break down all the time. For example, the injunction, virtually sacred in the U.S. from at least World War 2 on, that \"politics should stop at the water's edge,\" that is, that partisan disagreements should not be conducted in other countries and, in particular, criticisms of the foreign policy of the incumbent President should not be aired elsewhere. In that case, former President Carter \"should not\" be condemning Bush's policies throughout the world, Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats \"should not\" have gone to Syria in 2007 to present themselves as representatives of an alternative U.S. foreign policy, Al Gore \"should not\" have gone to Saudi Arabia in 2003 and accused the Bush Administration of mistreating Arabs and Muslims merely because of their ethnicity and religion, etc., etc.\n\nBut, again, a moment's thought—which is to say, a moment's suspension of the imperative to re-iterate the terms of that imperative center, inspired by my own imperative crisis—leads to the question, the \"softer\" imperative: why \"shouldn't\" they? Or, to put it in more pragmatic terms, what is the effectiveness of my \"should not\"? How many divisions does my \"should not\" have? (How many divisions \"should\" it have?) I can argue for putting these figures on trial for treason or lesser violations, or, as some have suggested in the wake of Carter's latest adventure in peace-making with Hamas, taking away their passports.\n\nThat, at least, would be a proposed imperative directed at those who are authorized to issue imperatives (as opposed to the impotent gesture of asking others to internalize the very imperatives they have obviously rejected); it would, also, though, place us on the threshold of a very different imperative order, thereby acknowledging the demise of the old one.\n\nAs a political thinker, that is where I want to be: that is where I find a full exercise of my freedom, on the threshold of various possible new imperative orders. I can construct a scene organized around the proposal that Carter's application for a passport be denied in a way that I can't around the fantasy that Carter internalize my demand that he not do something. And this possible scene places us on the threshold of others: if Carter's passport, than who else's? How do we formulate the new principle at stake here, that is, how do we construct a new declarative? What new field of imperatives would that declarative open up as power shifts back and forth from one set of hands to another?\n\nAll these questions signify the emergence of a new imperative order, with possible \"soft\" imperatives coming from all directions, seeking to exclude, qualify, and subsume each other. Ultimately, a question like the following imposes itself: what might I want to do which will lead them to want to take away my passport? This is a question for a marginalist politics—it seeks to identify a threshold. What, first of all, would I want to do, once the injunction upon pursuing partisan politics beyond the water's edge has been rescinded? And which, of all those things I might want to do, would be the thing that leads them (let's say that \"they\" are those who don't mind at all the aforementioned actions of Carter et al) to put in a bid for a new imperative center?\n\nWhat would I have them compelled to protect (what would be the compulsion here—what imperatives, coming from where, could they disobey only at great peril to the force of the imperatives they are accustomed to issue?), and in protecting, confront those they believe they can only confront by facing a decline in their imperative power from some other quarter, a Charybdis equal to the Scylla of the imperative propelling them forward? How much more enlightening and liberating such deliberations and inquiries would be compared to all the \"should nots\"! And, lest anyone object that such a politics would devolve into a petty partisan \"tit for tat,\" I would remark that it is precisely the need to identify the elements of a dissolving and emerging imperative center that situates marginalist politics in a very precise relation to the center of civil life.\n\nThe political virtue of a marginalist politics is that it keeps reminding us of where imperative orders come from in the first place. Asking whether one would like to place Jimmy Carter on trial for treason focuses the attention on (demands that we attend to) the meaning of the sanction against taking partisan politics beyond the water's edge; it reminds, us, that is, of where such sanctions come from, in what they subsist, what we take to be the means of interpreting and enforcing them. On such margins, that is, we iterate the founding political covenants on the terms set by some new event that has nullified at least some portion of the previous iteration.\n\nThrough a marginalist politics, our consent becomes much more visible, ever present and tangible—we would be generating a reality explicitly predicated upon our consent to it. And there is no need to assert that anyone should become a marginalist; whoever wants to can simply become one by starting off on the margin. Withhold that margin of consent to the imperative order closest to you and see what possibilities thereby reveal themselves.\n\nA marginalist politics comes up against the prevailing alliance of White Guilt and the victimary blackmail driving the Global Intifada. But I would suggest that our vulnerability to such Gnostic, cultic reactionary forces lies in our adherence to traditional metaphysics, in the belief in the primacy of the declarative sentence. In politics, metaphysics means a belief in the transparency of the imperative center to declarative statements, or in the causal relation by which the latter can be formulated so as to transform the former in reliable ways. We can keep working to dismantle metaphysics even while subtracting the polemical rancor from that attempt: metaphysics, the belief that propositions can reflect a permanent reality, was presented as a replacement for the vanished authority of the ritual order, first of all in ancient Greece and Rome, and more recently in our own modernity.\n\nWe don't need to treat that effort, in the manner of some Heideggereans, as an insidious coup against the glories of anarchy celebrated by the pre-Socratics. One can simply argue that it presently interferes, and has perhaps interfered for some time (thereby making the transition from metaphysical to originary modernity more painful than it needs to be), with the establishment of new modes of authority predicated upon the conjoining of individual freedom with voluntary cooperation. This is an \"omni-centric\" order, a greater distribution of powers with more sophisticated modes of accountability than the \"progressivist\" order that emerged in response to the crises of the transition to advanced modernity and that seeks to generate centers of authoritative expertise.\n\nMetaphysical liberalism is \"programmed\" to identify discrepancies between an abstract model of equality and actuality, and issues imperatives demanding the abolition of institutions and beliefs even tangentially related to such discrepancies and deviations. Originary liberalism, or marginalism, responds to such discrepancies by trying to establish \"platforms\" upon which equality can be practiced and staged so as to affirm the tacit relation between declaratives and imperatives implicit in the legitimacy of those institutions. Metaphysical liberalism progressively narrows and intensifies the range of acceptable imperatives, which must compel action against some form of \"privilege,\" however deviously hidden or disguised; marginalism preserves the complementarity of declarative and imperative by increasing their reciprocal convertibility while preserving the separateness of their respective functions.\n\nMetaphysical liberalism embeds natural equality in a presupposed world modeled on that very equality: to know that world is to reinforce that natural equality, and conversely, a failure to know the world (due to some kind of prejudice) is the central cause of inequality. Metaphysical liberalism is what we are practicing in issuing imperatives that vainly aim at eliminating the threshold separating declarative and imperative as different forms of events consisting of different forms of effectiveness. If I say, for example, that the media should be unbiased or fair, I am asserting the existence of a coherent and complete \"reality\" (one that could, if we had enough time and resources, be comprehensively described in a huge collection of propositions), which it is the media's imperative to represent because, presumably, it is our imperative to know.\n\nSome organizing declarative statement about the nature of our society is ordering me to look at an undistorted picture of that social order, and I follow that order by ordering others to do likewise. If I say that Jimmy Carter \"should not\" meet with Hamas, I assume a shared reality with both Carter and whomever I am speaking to, a reality in which meeting with Hamas violates the same imperative, with the same force, for all of us by virtue of this recognition—otherwise, I am just saying that I don't want him to, which is hardly worth saying. If reality, as a coherent whole, exists outside of and is represented by the declarative sentence, then all of the consequent imperatives are likewise inscribed in that reality and impose themselves effectively as a result of its accurate reflection.\n\nOriginary liberalism acknowledges a multilayered grammar implicit in reality, and that reality yields differently to different speech acts, meaning that preserving the integrity of the different speech forms is integral to supporting the primary declarative principles of liberal politics.\n\nJudgments emerge along with a new political principle out of the margin of disobedience. A new imperative is generated by the inability to verify the correspondence between an imperative issuing from the prevailing center and its \"licensing\" principle. In other words, the new imperative results from the failure of an ostensive sign, from, as Eric Gans argues in The Origin of Language, an \"inappropriate\" ostensive. The new imperative is, then, first of all seeking a new ostensive to resolve the crisis of which it is itself the result. This new imperative will itself be \"impossible\" for those situated within the prevailing imperative order, and will become even more so as it takes shape as the imperative to expose all the failed and failing ostensive signs still mortgaged to the old order.\n\nThis process of exposure in turn generates more failed ostensives, as the application of the old imperatives cannot withstand the scrutiny of the new center. The practices and icons we are used to \"pointing\" to, the rituals we are used to repeating, the maxims we habitually utter no longer settle disputes or ameliorate conflicts—indeed, they now seem to be ironic reminders of the persistence of those disputes and conflicts.\n\nIn turn, new horizontal associations become possible once the vertical hierarchies embedded in the old imperative order become problematic; these new associations are generated by the new shared ostensives, and the emergent imperative order is first of all concerned with defending those ostensives and the scenes and associations organized around them. These new ostensive-imperative articulations must first of all be figured. As the new margin becomes visible as an alternative site of loyalty, we are not yet at the point where there could be any intelligible principles, except, perhaps, inadequate ones redirected from the existing order.\n\nThe new imperatives will always be to protect, to rescue, to remember someone and some event that marked the crisis of the existing imperative center. The creation of a new principle, then, is the production of a new political \"syntax,\" one that links the emergent ostensive-imperative articulations with criteria for identifying new articulations and for \"generalizing\" from them toward the establishment of institutions that would prevent such \"illegitimate\" acts. In other words, we are equal to the extent that we all verify ostensively the convertibility of the imperative we will obey or have obeyed. The ritual invocation of one's individuality and the declaration that \"I have my own opinion,\" \"make up my own mind,\" and that \"no one tells me what to think\" with which college professors are so familiar is such an ostensive verification: there is a good reason why such ritual formulae are put forth when students are being \"forced\" to think about a text or idea they find uninteresting, distasteful, or difficult.\n\nIt is easy to ridicule such a declaration, but identifying its marginal impossibility or unintelligibility—in what kind of scene would students no longer have the freedom or self-possession to say that; or, under what conditions could they really \"mean\" it; or, for that matter, refuse to say it when it seems \"prescribed\"—would teach us a great deal about the current status of freedom and would generate a new principle. In fact, it would lead to the principle that equality should be defined more and more by the displays of \"self\" that would make good on the declarative types to which I will propose that the transcendence of our most recent imperative crisis be mortgaged.\n\nMarginalism is a genuinely universal mode of politics, practicable by high and low alike, on the most micro as well as the most macro level. In fact, as soon as you withhold your margin of consent from the prevailing imperative order, you will find your allies and see its further ramifications, however and wherever you made that preliminary move. It was precisely the marginalism of the \"Bush Doctrine\" that so outraged leftists and foreign policy \"realists.\" Both parties defend a particular section of the prevailing imperative order—the leftists, the creeping hegemony of \"international law,\" the realists, the existing \"equilibrium\" of interstate powers and the diplomatic games that grease its wheels—and it is from these imperative orders that the notion of regime change as a weapon in asymmetrical warfare removed a cornerstone without which neither can stand.\n\nThe marginalist tactics of the weak, meanwhile, are well known: the slowdown on the factory floor, the refusal to cooperate with police, and so on. Nor is marginalism exclusive to left or right: we can anticipate more and less subtle forms of civil disobedience from the social and libertarian right if the Left gains power over the U.S. government this November and seeks to implement wide-ranging socialization policies; meanwhile, a healthy left might have eschewed the political theater of simulated indictments of the Bush Administration and generating discontent with a policy in Iraq which cannot be abandoned without horrific consequences from the humanitarian as well as national security standpoint, and instead aimed at keeping the Administration honest by monitoring the emergence of civil society in Iraq—keeping in touch with trade unions, secular political figures, and parties, keeping those persecuted for religious reasons in the public eye, and so on.\n\nInstead of complaining that Bush didn't \"really\" mean it when he claimed we were in Iraq to liberate its people, why don't you mean it? Withdraw your consent from those imperatives remaking reality that don't serve that end by supporting, proposing, and inventing those that do; the point is to remain attached to the ongoing remaking of reality. Indeed, it's not too late for such a left to emerge. Even more, marginalism is equally well suited for normal, everyday political transactions as for times of crisis and emergencies; whether one is in the middle of a string of victories or has one's back against the wall; in free or unfree societies—imperatives always contain some margin of ambiguity in their reach and implementation and there is therefore always some margin of consent to be withheld.\n\nContemporary liberalism, regardless of its roots in Enlightenment thought and nineteenth-century liberals like Mill, takes as its founding event the Holocaust. The Nazi genocide or, rather, the way the genocide came to be represented through post-war trials and victim testimony, \"mapped\" very effectively the two major concerns of liberals: first, the systematic discrimination against blacks, in blatant contradiction to all the stated ideals of American society and to the self-representation of America as the defender of the free world which had emerged from the War; and, second, the implication of the \"banality\" of everyday life, the routine and \"thoughtless\" obedience to arbitrary norms and mimetic standards (keeping up with the Joneses) in other, more egregious elements of American society, such as its racism, inequality, and \"threatening\" patriotism, militarism, and imperialism.\n\nLiberalism focused more on the issue of invidious discrimination based on arbitrary, natural differences, while the left took the more radical path of indicting the American \"way of life\" as such, but if the two sets of imperatives are grounded in the same event they would ultimately be inseparable—and, indeed, not only has an unmistakable contempt for the American middle class and consumer culture been detectable in a certain strain of liberalism from the 1950s on, but the intertwining of the two ways into the event of the Holocaust would also explain why liberalism since the 1960s has been so vulnerable to the more intense form of White Guilt propagated by the Left.\n\nLiberalism, once it came to be organized more around a series of taboos forbidding any statement that might, even indirectly, be used to justify segregation or \"Mc Carthyism\" than around the continual generation of new forms of freedom, became defenseless against political movements whose primary weapon was the intensification and extension of those taboos.\n\nThe implication of this analysis is that the creation of a more originary, or marginalist, liberalism, requires the transcendence of Holocaust theology. This is not a call to forget the Holocaust—in fact, accepting that the flow of anthropological revelations produced by the Holocaust and its aftermath is slowing to a trickle is the best way of both preserving that enormous store of experience and resisting the perversion of Holocaust theology into today's anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-semitic White Guilt. Even more, accepting that we are no longer \"within\" the event of the Holocaust will make possible a further flow of revelations as we come to situate the Holocaust in relation to the founding event of marginalism, 9/11.\n\nMarginalism is, in the first instance, a refusal of victimary blackmail (such blackmail being the new imperative authorized by the revelations registered in Holocaust theology) and, in the second instance, the desire for an alliance with the victims of our \"victims\" (thereby revealing the imperative center licensed by Holocaust theology as defunct). Such a political faith has its taboos as well, and will undoubtedly become exhausted and transcended in turn, but for now the richness of possibilities it embodies is more profound than its limitations: everywhere, we see social reality constructed in accord with the imperative order first imagined by Progressivism, which is that the commands of experts, social engineers, or anyone who claims to transcend everyday interests—the daily round of mimetic desire, rivalry and hard-won, always fragile transcendence—in a unitary organization of social life in terms of the \"long term\" needs and interests of some entity inclusive of all of us (society, the masses, the world, the planet) are the commands we should be obeying.\n\nProgressivism arose so as to restrain the mushrooming centers of power (corporate, imperial, and mass consumptionist) which emerged in the early 20th century West and is therefore congenitally suspicious of affirmations of the free market order. Hence, its ambivalence and paralysis before the rise of the victimary blackmail we call terrorism, and the re-energized faith of Islam, itself a toxic mix of victimary resentment and unlimited imperial ambition, introduces a stain of irrationality and violence into the Progressive world-view—a stain that it can't cleanse, because the White Guilt that so energized the Progressive project in the post-WW II world contains no epistemological terms enabling one to distinguish genuine victimary claims from false ones, and hence legitimate from illegitimate imperatives, leaving the ability to disrupt normal life (blackmail) the de facto criterion (as opposed to earlier, more \"innocent\" analyses which saw terrorism merely as a method used by movements whose legitimacy was affirmed through other means).\n\nIn other words, there is too much overlap between the demands of the blackmailers and those of the (now) transnational progressives, especially in the area of demanding that American power and American sovereignty be subordinated to some kind of international imperative order. This \"anomaly\" is what provides the opening to marginalism.\n\nMarginalism has no a priori principles, but it is a way of producing principles, with principles understood to be no more than declaratives with the capacity to generate or consolidate a new imperative center. \"All men are created equal\" doesn't tell us how to solve any particular problem, and \"equality,\" as we have learned, is an extremely amorphous term, but the statement enables me to demand that certain practices and institutions be modified or abolished; it also might provide others with new ways of defending those institutions and practices; but, in the process, we find that our vocabulary for discussing them has shifted, and, in the end, only those institutions and practices (and the imperatives they produce) which can include \"equality\" in their legitimating discourse without provoking contempt or derision will survive.\n\nMarginalism, as an originary form of liberalism, remains within this framework, assuming that human equality, iterating, as it does, the reciprocity on the originary scene, is the horizon beyond which we cannot go and should not try. So, the principles generated by marginalism are always on the margin of the emergence of new forms of equality, where that universal declaration itself gets entangled in various imperative crises.\n\nThe limits of the metaphysical claim to equality are consequences of the imperatives that have flowed from that claim. The central imperative of modernity has been to oppose all imperatives that violate the essential symmetry between persons posited by that metaphysical claim; a claim, moreover, modeled on the very specific forms of symmetry found on the economic market. Each participant in exchange enters the market from where it matters not; and returns, following the exchange, to that same indeterminate place. Any imperative either participant might issue to the other would be subordinate to the terms of the exchange, as in \"give me another square foot of cloth, as you promised.\"\n\nThe imperative, in other words, refers directly back to the declarative establishing the contract. Contracts need to be enforced; or, to put it linguistically, agreement upon the declarative cannot by itself be completely counted on to guarantee that the participants will equally and freely consent to all imperatives claimed to conform to that declarative—so, the need for an arbiter is likewise freely agreed upon, along with the scope of his powers (the type of imperatives he can issue and the forms of said issuance) and manner of selection and replacement.\n\nIn politics, then, significance lies in the tracks a particular line of thinking lays down bridging the gap between declaratives and imperatives. It is certainly possible to declare, and declare sincerely, that one is opposed to certain activities because they lead to unacceptable forms of victimization. But you can only really believe someone who convinces you that they are themselves obeying an imperative they have issued to themselves to stand between victimizer and victim. I don't say that every politician or citizen makes such a claim, or presents themselves as such a figure, only that if \"enough\" don't, the system will fail.\n\nThe transformation of this \"standing between\" into an icon of liberty, insofar as it creates a space wherein one is invulnerable to all demands but the one insisting one stay there and maintain that space, is what in politics transcends the exchange relation and provides the basis for the exchange of declarations leading to the formulation of principles. It is such freedom that hearkens back to the founding event of the political community in the—first—marginal indication and then common protection of those whose victimage we no longer countenance because to do so would be to disarm ourselves of the capacity to attend responsibly to anyone's freedom, including our own.\n\nThe broader marginalist principle in play is that only by formulating \"moves\" that require the \"moves\" of others to complete them and confer upon them significance can the asymmetries of postmodern market society be brought within the orbit of modern equality from which it has spun away. Wherever and however I \"stand between\" victim and victimizer and in doing so display the self-issued imperative I choose to obey, I maximize the split such an act induces in my community to the extent that it is imitable and ultimately generalizable; even more, though, if I set my self-issued imperative off against the imperative from which I have marginally withheld consent, I make the repairing of that split contingent upon others testing the convertibility of the imperative in question.\n\nThe best model here is still the civil disobedience practiced by the Civil Rights movement, but its limits as a model lie in its location within the terms of metaphysical liberalism: the Civil Rights movement foundered and then became a victimary institution once the basic terms of constitutionally mandated equality were met, but clearly without having resolved the resentments framed in terms of Holocaust Theology.\n\nMarginalism is a genuinely universal mode of politics, practicable by high and low alike, on the most micro as well as the most macro level."
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropoetics-originary-mistakenness",
      "title": "Originary Mistakenness, Defilement and Modernity (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Sep 2010",
      "url": "https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1601/1601katz/",
      "content": "Anthropoetics XVI, no. 1 (Fall 2010): GA Summer Conference Issue\n\nAdam Katz\nDepartment of English\nQuinnipiac University\nHamden, CT 06518\n\n---\n\nThe virtual presence of human communication is not—today nor in the beginning—simply an \"open channel,\" but an essentially suspicious one. It is this suspicious nature of linguistic communication, its requirement of guarantees, that is at the basis of the severity of the norms which pervade language at all levels, from the phonetic to the logical and esthetic. Each speaker in proposing his linguistic model to one or more of his fellows in effect recreates a crisis in which the significance of the information conveyed provides the power of reconciliation. (Eric Gans, The Origin of Language, 78)\n\nPaul Ricoeur, in his The Symbolism of Evil, traces the progression from defilement, to sin, to guilt as an index of the progression from the ethical to the moral:\n\n\"Guilt,\" in the precise sense of unworthiness at the core of one's personal being, is only the advanced point of a radically individualized and interiorized experience. The feeling of guilt points to a more fundamental experience, the experience of \"sin,\" which includes all men and indicates the real situation of man before God, whether man knows it or not…. But sin, in its turn, is a correction and even revolution with respect to a more archaic conception of fault—the notion of \"defilement\" conceived in the guise of a stain or blemish that infects from without. (7-8)\n\nThe defilement of the communal space occurs when some prohibition has been violated—the intention behind the violation is irrelevant (it could have been an accident, say spilling some liquid used in the ritual); the contamination or pollution must be cleansed, and this can also only be done through strictly prescribed ritual means. Meanwhile, one only sins when one deliberately violates some divine command, and one is only guilty when one can be judged (and judge oneself) according to standards of probity that are shared but also internalized within each individual.\n\nFrom the standpoint of the responsible individual capable of guilt, \"defilement\" is an extremely primitive way of thinking about violation, one that can only be a source of violence itself, that we are fortunate to have transcended, and that, to the extent we must recognize it at all, should be reduced to arcane rituals to be interpreted allegorically or neurotic quirks. All this is indicated by Ricoeur's reference to the \"correction\" and \"revolution\" the concept of sin effected in our understanding of \"fault.\" But we hardly need Ricoeur to tell us that. How could Jesus' claim that one is defiled not by what one puts into one's mouth, but by what comes out of it, not have settled the matter?\n\nBut if everything human can be found, albeit implicitly or potentially, on the originary scene, it follows that nothing found on the originary scene is ever lost. Defilement, or its possibility, is undoubtedly present on the originary scene: the sign has to be emitted \"properly,\" or recognizably, by all participants, and the failure to do so, even due to slowness or inadequate mimetic capacities, would pollute the scene, i.e., leave lurking unacceptable levels of menacing violence. It is easy to understand why Judaism, Christianity, and then modernity would want to eliminate all trace of the \"irrationality\" of defilement; but it should also be possible to understand that trying to do so has only reproduced in new forms that same sense of \"pollution,\" and can be implicated in the worst violence of 20th century's crisis of modernity.\n\nIndeed, the investment by both Nazism and Communism in discourses of defilement might lead us to redouble our efforts to expunge its apparently indelible traces. We can recognize these traces in the tropes of \"infection,\" \"pollution,\" \"contamination\" and so on applied to both the race and class enemies of these regimes; and it would therefore be possible to reduce these regimes to a recrudescence of primitive, \"compact\" societies in revolt against the market order. But the power of White Guilt is also the power of defilement—otherwise, it would not have proven so \"contagious\" so as to \"contaminate\" even those (Western) countries that defeated Nazism; nor would it continue to prove itself so impervious to attempts to direct attention back to more \"rational\" articulations of individual act, intent, and acknowledged social norms. I wouldn't propose changing the name of the condition in question to \"White Defilement,\" but we could take the mysterious power of White Guilt to indicate that sinfulness and guilt are constructed with the materials of defilement, rather than by replacing them.\n\nA sense of defilement, of some derangement of the communal and even world order that implicates one even if you not only didn't commit but resisted with all your might, is a perfectly proper response to the crimes of genocide and totalitarianism—it is denying that sense, then, that is \"irrational.\" The mapping of the genocidal space by historian Raul Hilberg in terms of perpetrators, victims and bystanders (with this final, and novel, category implicitly extendible ad infinitum) suggests a series of circles of the \"tainted,\" with no one excused due to ignorance or incapacity. Even for someone born after the event the obligation to testify on behalf of the victims attaches, and no obligation to testify could ever be fulfilled once and for all. The perceived irrationality of that sense of defilement leads to the irrationality in the practices through which we seek to ward off the dreaded derangement of being, and which lead us to invest more and more in deferring ever more vague threats (we speak of this in terms of \"slippery slopes\").\n\nI would suggest that the most originary form of defilement, and the form in which it most readily presents itself for our inspection today is that of error, and I will propose what I will call \"originary mistakenness\" as a new way of speaking about mimetic rivalry and crisis and the resources available for deferral. The one who makes a spelling, pronunciation, or grammatical mistake, or commits some solecism (or, for that matter, \"misreads\" a situation, \"misunderstands\" a text, \"misses\" a \"hint,\" and so on), is as \"blameless\" as the one who accidentally disrupts some ritual space; and the mistake evokes a very similar sense of unease and fragility—everyone around feels compelled to show that they would never make such a mistake, first of all by demonstrating some recognition of its mistakenness.\n\nI suggest that this is because the error, whether grammatical or in any other unsatisfied convention, is a sign of infinite desire: making a mistake exposes one as imitating what one doesn't know how to imitate, and therefore what one doesn't understand, and the only reason for doing so is an \"empty\" and insatiable desire to be included in the very community one has just demonstrated oneself unsuitable to join. Naturally all mistakes don't have the same high stakes, but the possibility of granting entrance to one capable of merely adopting the required forms as means of advancement turns the norms of the community themselves into an object of desire, and possible possession, and they can therefore no longer serve as reliable means of mediation. In that case, defilement can be seen as originary mistakenness.\n\nWhile recognizing that we can speak of mistakes among animals (I have been informed many times by nature shows that the reason sharks attack humans is because they mistake them for seals or other marine mammals) and even in DNA replication, leading to the emergence of new species, I will suggest that mistakenness is specifically human. This is the case because only with humans does the mistake emerge simultaneously with the norm according to which we could judge it to be a mistake and therefore affect one's relations with one's fellows. We can see the simultaneity of norm and mistake on the originary scene. If we assume that one member of the group must have aborted his gesture first, then it follows that that individual could not really have known what he was doing.\n\nThis makes sense if we speak, not of an aborted gesture (Eric Gans has himself spoken of the ambiguity of the phrasing here) but as what it actually is, an aborted act of appropriation. It only becomes a gesture with its imitation by the rest of the group. In this case, no member fully intends the meaning of the sign. There would be an emergent realization of what they have all done in the also emergent contrast between the grasping and the withholding that each can see in all the others. To use linguistic terms, anything that looks like a grasping motion is marked; anything that looks like a withholding motion is unmarked, as reflecting the power of the central object; or, to put it another way, the members of the group presence to each other.\n\nTo get to that point, though, an accentuation of the shape of the aborted act so as to convert it into gesture must have taken place in its circulation through the group, and we can only think of such an accentuation in contrast with an insufficiently shaped or distinguished gesture (one which had not convincingly separated itself from the act, perhaps because it was still too much like grasping, but perhaps because it looked too much like sheer fright)—the insufficiently distinguished gesture is the first mistake, and the shaped one the first sign. My argument will assume that this mistakenness accompanies normativity in each act of signification in the way (to borrow Saussure's famous metaphor for the signifier-signified distinction) each side of a sheet of paper accompanies the other.\n\nThere is always a position on the scene from which anyone can look more like they are grasping or routed than withholding. Mistakenness appears as a fully fledged mistake when we have a visible confrontation of rules extrapolated from the same model: when, pragmatically, the people involved cannot see themselves as following the same model.\n\nIt is worth noting that Gans, in his account of the evolution of the primary linguistic forms in The Origin of Language, proposes that the imperative, at least, began as a mistake: the first imperative was an \"inappropriate ostensive.\" But we need not stop there: the first interrogative was a prolonged, which is to say, botched imperative, diverted part way through by the uncertainty of its fulfillment. The first declarative, the negative ostensive, is an on the face of it ludicrous attempt to offer a word in place of a thing. In each case, the mistake is not corrected but \"completed\" and thereby changed into a new kind of sign: the \"interlocutor\" brings the object in response to the inappropriate ostensive, and ceases his command or demand in response to the negative ostensive, thereby complementing the other in creating the new speech form.\n\nThe mistake, in each case, is engirded by a new norm, and it is instructive to look at what seems to happen here. The interlocutor, confronted with an initially unintelligible sign, simply remains on the scene with the other, and since sustaining the scene requires sense, that sense is supplied: the object is made present, or the sharing of the sign marks its absence. The grammarian, on the other hand, expels the other from the normative scene.\n\nGans, in his subsequent discussion of linguistic diversification (within the ostensive realm) following the emergence of the sign says that,\n\n[t]o take too much time in communicating a piece of information is to commit an error not linguistic but practical, the hearer's potential for anger tending to increase with the duration of his subjection to the speaker's linguistic model. Thus this time will tend to approximate the minimum required for the hearer to absorb the information conveyed. (78)\n\nSo, taking too much time would be an error because, far from deferring violence, it would intensify it. I think we can assume, then, a complementary tendency to err on the side of brevity, which is to say the abbreviation of the sign. This error might often be simply that, a gesture which doesn't fulfill its aim, but it would become a new sign or \"idiomatic\" revision of the sign as soon as it \"took.\" The new sign might replace the old one for use in the most intense situations (brevity would then \"mean\" urgent\"), or it might take effect at a lower threshold of danger (brevity would then mean \"trivial\"). Here we would have the \"two-place hierarchy of signs constitutive of the opposition between sacred and profane representations\" (79) required if the sign is to refer to objects different from the original one, or one of equal desirability.\n\nInterestingly, Gans then goes on to say, regarding this dynamic of unequally significant signs, that \"if we assume that the 'profane' sign attracts from its addressee an interest of a certain intensity, then this interest too can be deceived by a relatively insignificant referent, which will therefore tend to acquire for its designation a newly differentiated sign.\" Again, it seems to me that error is driving the process here: in this case, the intrinsic interest in the other's sign leads the addressee's attention to an otherwise uninteresting object and hence a new word. The \"gradual lowering\" of the threshold of danger, and hence of significance, leads to diversity because of \"the suspicious nature of linguistic communication\" (78): the linguistic community's \"requirement of guarantees\" \"provides the impulse for a vocabulary richer in information\" (80) because, I would suggest, that \"suspicion\" (the normativity of language) produces both error (abbreviations as well as prolongations) and the determination to locate the objects that would correspond to such errors.\n\nConsider, as well, David Olson's account, in his The World on Paper, of the emergence of writing, in the context of his argument that it was writing that made language visible as an object of analysis, and the \"syntax\" of graphic representations used for record keeping that made awareness of syntax in language possible. Olson writes:\n\nSubsequent developments [following the earliest hieroglyphic writing systems] which gave rise, eventually, to the alphabet may be traced in large part to the consequences of borrowing. A shift in what a script \"represents\" is a consequence of adapting a script to a language other than that for which it was originally developed, an activity that led logographs to be taken as representations of syllables and later for syllables to be taken as representations of phonemes.\n\nThe first syllabary was the result of using Sumerian logographs to represent a Semitic language, Akkadian. To represent an Akkadian word such as \"a-wi-lu-um,\" man, with Sumerian logographs, the Akkadians simply took the Sumerian graphs which could be read as \"a,\" \"wi,\" \"lu,\" and \"um,\" ignoring the fact that in Sumerian each graph would represent a separate word… Reading Akkadian would then be a matter of pronouncing this series and the graphs would now be taken to represent syllables of Akkadian rather than words as they had done in Sumerian. (80-1)\n\nNow, making use of a script in a new way, one which ignores its previous uses, is not itself a \"mistake.\" But the \"consequences of borrowing\" which Olson refers to must include the two central elements of any mistake: some understanding of what the sign to be appropriated is meant for; and the use of it in a way that would be marked as misuse by those fluent in the use of that sign. We could describe such appropriations as a knowing re-purposing of the sign in question—Olson's description would allow us to do so. It seems to me more economical, though, to assume that an attempt to use another's writing system, which is to say to acquire a capacity one does not have (as opposed, say, to considering replacing the alphabet one has with another), would involve a genuine attempt at imitation. Indeed, the shift from logographic to alphabetic writing is best understood as an example of what Michael Tomasello, in his Origins of Human Communication calls the \"drift to the arbitrary\":\n\nAre certain obscene gestures \"arbitrary\" or are they iconic representations of real actions? Many such gestures were at one time iconic, and then they became more arbitrary over historical time—but they were conventional, in the sense of shared, throughout. In any case, our proposal here will be that first came shared conventions, and then there was a kind of \"drift to the arbitrary\" over historical time. (219)\n\nTomasello attributes the drift to the arbitrary to the entrance of learners and outsiders, who must imitate the sign before having acquired the shared intentionality of its original users, into the group: \"outsiders, who are missing some common ground as a basis for 'naturalness,\" may have a difficult time comprehending and parsing the communicative signs of others\" (304). In that case, such a drift from the iconic to the arbitrary would result from a series of failed attempts either to make an iconic gesture understood to someone from another community (or to understand, i.e., respond to, the gesture—if we can separate those two phenomena), followed by a re-norming along more purely conventional lines.\n\nIn this case, all language change must be driven by much mistakenness and re-norming as each sign user sees the consequences of the other's borrowing of his sign; and language is a process of change from the very beginning. (Although we should note that Gans, just as much as Derrida, would have us acknowledge that there is an element of arbitrariness in even the most iconic sign, since the sign emerges not naturally but in an event that could have not happened.)\n\nThe anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir noted that in certain Native American tribes,\n\n> definite points of contact have been established between speech defects and \"mocking-forms,\" with consonantal play, on the one hand, and between the latter and myth-character forms with consonantal play, on the other. I am inclined to believe that the observation of consonant substitutions such as take place, with involuntarily humorous effect, in the speech of those that articulate incorrectly, has set the pace for the consciously humorous use of the same or similar substitutions in both mocking and, directly or indirectly, myth-character forms. (191)\n\nSo, mistakes in speech that mark individuals within the community are incorporated into idioms which in turn make their way into the representation of mythical characters. This provides a very interesting model for thinking about the process of idiom generation through the norming and re-norming of mistakes. As many teachers have noticed, singling out a mistake made by students in front of the classroom can easily, through sheer mimetic power, get it repeated rather than rejected by other students. One could attribute this effect to student inattention—perhaps they simply copy whatever is written on the board. I'm not sure how important the difference is—as human beings, mimetic beings, what else could overtake us while inattentive other than attraction to some powerful model or the habits inculcated through adherence to one?\n\nEither way, rather than mark it for exclusion, it may be better to have students make conscious use, in the creation of idioms, of incorrect articulations. While all mistakes may not be equally viable candidates, for the more \"striking\" ones a strategy of incorporation rather than extirpation is the more productive approach.\n\nAll idioms are built upon the cornerstone of mistakenness. I should note that I am using mistakenness conceptually and heuristically here—one could note, of course, that creative writers generate idioms all the time and know exactly what they are doing. But there is much that they don't know about what they are doing, and their highly conscious activity implies more, not less, tacit knowledge and unconscious mental activity. To put it another way, I am making an argument about what is entailed in \"creativity\": applying some sign to some new domain (a helpful definition of intellectual creation) involves responding to the sign from the position of an unintended addressee (almost as if an eavesdropper were to suddenly answer a question).\n\nThe process, I am proposing, is no different from that which, in Gans's hypothesis, led to the co-invention of the imperative: in working with a sign that finds nothing in the real or imaginary scene to complete, some kind of external supplementation is provided—the creator, then, may not be making a mistake, but he or she certainly allows him or herself to draw upon reserves of mistakenness.\n\nThe ethical consequences, it seems to me, are as follows. If the mistaken is marked, then, and we unmark ourselves by enforcing the norm against the polluting mistake, then rather than intensify the marking of the error of which we are rid, we can allow ourselves to be marked by deliberate innovations that risk being mistaken and unmark others by constructing idioms around their mistakes. Such an ethics of language would break with metaphysical normativity, grounded in well formed propositions and the presumed model of a well ordered reality. We can never be certain of understanding each other but we can be certain of misunderstanding each other—there will be mistakes in every exchange of signs.\n\nWe can try and reduce misunderstandings but with a few exceptions the law of diminishing returns sets in quickly as each marks the other as source of the misunderstanding. But if error is simply the application of a rule in some situation where another rule claims it doesn't belong, mistakes can be treated as reciprocal interference in each others' freedom—rather than striving for the transparency of traditional notions of dialogue, we would embrace a more digressive model of discourse in which I try to follow, refine and enhance the rules I take the other to be following. Mistakes, in this case, can be revelatory, as they put forward other rules, which can always be articulated in some way.\n\nAn acknowledgement of our originary mistakenness would radically transform our attitude toward risk, and there is little today that is in more desperate need of transformation. It would be very easy to see White Guilt as an indemnification policy against the risks involved in resentments held by anyone not firmly invested in the existing system, and the increasing terror of risk of any kind can be seen across all our institutions to the point where it is nearly paralyzing us. The realization that everything is interconnected intensifies the fear that any mistake can bring everything down, but it could just as easily lead us to notice all kinds of redundancies and back-ups that are also part of our interconnectedness.\n\nThe real threats to the market system are the desperate attempts to avoid its breakdown—I would go so far as to assert that no such thing would have happened if the government just stayed out of the financial meltdown in September 2008. Enormous amounts of wealth would have been lost, but before too long people would have been buying and selling, lending and borrowing, saving and investing again, perhaps first of all on the margins of the current system dominated by the alliances between the government regulators and the huge financial institutions. Accepting our originary mistakenness will eliminate the terror of contagion, contamination and defilement, in its contemporary form of various \"domino theories,\" which tell us if one crucial piece goes down it will bring everything else down with it. Even if it does, something will get up again, and we can put our energies into that inevitably risky something.\n\nThe insight that we are fundamentally mimetic beings should put the question of error or mistakenness at the top of our concerns. When, after all, is imitation error free? When does one ever get the model \"right\"? On the other hand, who determines whether I have done so or not? If you are too close to the model, you risk unwitting parody, or a shameful failure to grasp the setting within which the model has acted, a setting different from the one in which you are to act. If you are too far then the model won't be recognizable in your actions at all, and if your desire is set by the model, you will fail to gratify it. But determining what is just right must be left to the averaging out of subsequent imitations and representations of imitations until a norm emerges which enables us to share in the resentment towards mistakenness. Needless to say, mistakenness will corrode that normativity from the very beginning.\n\nBut it is not so obvious that it is meaningful to say that imitations can be mistaken, because there is no natural norm against which imitation can be measured, and hence mistakenness must be located on the originary scene as well. The constitutive mistake of imitation, I would suggest, is taking the model as origin—a mistake, of course, because the model is himself just imitating someone else. The more completely we emulate the model, constructing a formal unity out of his approach to the object, the more his relation to the object appears self-generating and self-contained. This mistake is what makes the sign both necessary and possible, because only then could the model's abdication of his claim to the object become an act for me to imitate as well.\n\nMistaking the model as origin can take two forms: one, assuming the model is blithely unaware of you; two, assuming the model is dead set against you. In the first case, blithe unawareness, the self-contained model seems not to attend to the arrangement of attention amongst the others—their attention simply automatically follows his own, including everyone but yourself. In the second case, that of being dead set against you, everyone's, following the model's, attention is directed towards the means of your exclusion. The two possibilities represent the extremes of an absence of attention and a dangerous intensity of attention.\n\nThe imitator oscillates between these two attitudes toward the model, but they crystallize into the aim of interposing oneself between model and object—that would both force the model's attention, and turn his antagonism toward you back towards him, in such a way that you get the drop on him. The form of the imminent confrontation on the originary scene in this construal, then, entails each figure getting a little in between the other and the object and that is what would bring things to a standstill: there's no way you can get in between the other and the object if he is positioning himself in between you and the object.\n\nBut this standstill would involve ongoing adjustment, as each makes the mistake of seeing the other move toward the object and of appearing to move toward the object while really trying to block the other. And the only way of ending the stand-off is for someone to mistake the gesture as a invitation to partake of the object, and initiate the sparagmos. This is originary mistakenness and our originary defilement: to be irremediably in between, tainting the origin that being in between places us at.\n\nAccepting originary mistakenness implies accepting normativity as well. Indeed, a mistake is only a mistake once it has been disclosed as such to a normative intelligence. Norm and error emerge simultaneously. The mistake is the sign of infinite desire and therefore also of incalculable danger—the norm is the resentment of the center that contains this danger by marking the error as such and refining the sign so that it fixes the mistake: just as someone might exaggerate the correct pronunciation of a word in response to someone's mistake. All idioms, however informal or idiosyncratic, distinguish between norm and error. If anything, the \"grammarians\" defending certain forms of slang may be more demanding than the worst martinet in the classroom: think of the likely consequences for a gang member unable to use the group's jargon properly or any normal teenager who doesn't deploy words like \"whatever\" or \"dude\" properly or use the exclamation \"really?\" with the right intonation.\n\nI don't see the recuperation of \"defilement\" as a way of displacing the ethical advances made by concepts like \"shame,\" \"sin\" and \"guilt.\" But those concepts are rather problematic, and the introduction of defilement as mistakenness might help us to see why. We assert that some should feel ashamed of themselves, that they are right to feel guilty, that they have sinned, in each case imputing free will to the doer. It rarely makes sense, though, to assert that someone \"shouldn't\" have made a mistake—it's such a tautology that the statement seems obvious but trivial and question-begging. Even more, if we trained our attention upon all conceivable mistakes, so multifarious, complex and shifting are the various rules of human interaction that we would hardly be able to attend to anything else.\n\nThat is why the match between free will and shame, sin or guilt is invariably imperfect: people often experience these feelings even when there is no good reason for it (not to mention not experiencing it when they have good reason to do so). On the other hand, what is a good reason, and how do we know? We end up attributing originarity, or infinity to such emotion—we are more guilty, more steeped in shame, than we can ever know or begin to make amends for. There is something \"there\" before we transgress, even in our hearts: our mistakenness regarding appropriate regard for the center, our confusion of our desire with the resentment of the center.\n\nIt is interesting that people today often speak about making mistakes when previously they would have spoken about doing wrong. (Consider the by now familiar political locution: \"Mistakes were made.\") On the individual level it's probably an attempt to minimize responsibility—after all, we all make mistakes! At the same time, though, it does open one's conduct to a more thorough inspection—if I have done wrong, I am expected to suffer the consequences and make it right, and if I do it's no one else's concern and, more broadly, we have well established institutions and procedures for dealing with wrongdoing in the form of shame, sin and guilt; if I've made mistakes an inspection of the entire scene is called for because the consequences of those mistakes may have spread without limit.\n\nNoting the mistakes underlying the sinful, shameful or guilty behavior provides a means, then, for reintegrating the \"offender\" back into the community by re-staging his relation to the model he \"mistook,\" and even if punishment and restitution is necessary to fix the mistakes, a study of the mistakenness at root will help construct the idioms of correction. If we sense that some feel \"too\" guilty, or ashamed for no good reason, perhaps it is because their mistakenness has been insufficiently attended to—in other words, we may not have asked what model they take themselves to be following, and how. And noting the mistakenness that just happened to broach the threshold of visibility might further make visible other mistaking of the shared model—and one kind of mistake, of course, may be failing to insist sufficiently upon normativity at the \"right\" time.\n\nOriginary mistakenness provides an alternative heuristic to what I have been calling the \"grammarian\" one, which presupposes a shared model and measures and punishes deviations from it: something will be mistaken in any utterance or gesture (some context overlooked, some shifting of emphasis askew, some possible response unanticipated), and if we train ourselves to attend to that mistakenness then much that is invisible in the utterance or gesture becomes visible. What has become visible is the idiomatic character of all semiosis: we can identify what is formulaic in a free expression, and free in a formulaic one: mistakes break up the cliché and the commonplace.\n\nI have seen students speak of \"loosing their focus\"; of being \"weary [i.e., wary] of nationalistic excesses\"; of some \"point\" being a \"mute\" one; of two functions \"complimenting\" each other and much more (any teacher can no doubt generate many examples of their own). I recently heard Sarah Palin say that the excitement in conservative circles regarding the upcoming elections was \"palatable.\" In these cases, where near homonyms occupy overlapping semantic domains (if your focus is loosened, aren't you in danger of losing it; aren't we wary of nationalistic excess because we are weary of its consequences; if a point is moot, in the sense of no longer practically relevant, isn't it for all intents and purposes—or, to cite another mistake, \"for all intensive purposes\"—\"mute\"; wouldn't something that complements you be worthy of being complimented; and, isn't \"palpable\" excitement also quite \"palatable\"?) we have the articulation of the iconic and arbitrary, oral and written, dimensions of language, and in these articulations we can locate the generation of new idioms.\n\nMistakenness raises the question of pedagogy, and any cultural problem, being a question of the transmission of models, is a problem of ensuring the rough equivalence of the new generation to the models put forward for them; but also, of course, of providing them with the capacity to mold those models so as to address novelties. We can think about the \"drift toward arbitrariness\" as an ongoing process, one that simultaneously involves the re-creation of spheres of iconicity in grammatical, phonetic and gestural forms and that is cultural as well as linguistic, since the drift is determined by the entrance of outsiders into the sign community (including the new generation of outsiders, or children).\n\nThe forms of mimetic pedagogy we have inherited, ultimately from the Greeks, relied upon an intensified iconicity carved out of the spread of arbitrariness: you become like the teacher, who models a particular mode of inquiry or attentiveness, and thereby extricate yourself from the chaotic world of desire and undirected resentments. I don't think that mode of pedagogy, which treats mistakes as shameful because they introduce drift into the pedagogical arena, works any more. Perhaps a pedagogy that doesn't know where the student is going, that simply places before the students the basic questions, practices and materials constitutive of a disciplinary space, and takes mistakes, the ever-generative mismatch between model and pupil, as its point of departure, will be able to accept more arbitrariness and a create more minimal forms of iconicity.\n\nSuch a pedagogy would be interested in the most minimal conditions under which the mistaken and the normative could share the same object and co-regulate their practices so as to keep it in view; and such a pedagogy might be able to move through less institutionalized cultural spaces and conjoin attentions in new ways.\n\nMore specifically, it might be noted that all the mistakes I pointed to a paragraph back involved the \"infection\" of writing by speech: as linguists like Roman Jakobson and Dwight Bolinger have argued, this is a very common feature of language, as words that sound alike tend to converge on similar meanings and words with similar meanings tend to become closer in sound: mistakenness, then, is both the drift toward arbitrariness and the restoration of the iconic dimension of language in the face of that drift. The question of error pervades language from the very beginning, I have suggested, but becomes much more explicit once languages become written and standardized. The mistakes I have mentioned, whose occurrence is, perhaps, accelerated by the use of spell check, reverse the process of standardization, which involves the protection of the written language from the contamination of speech—resisting constantly changing punctuation, slowing the drifts of meaning, marginalizing slang, and so on.\n\nAs Eric Havelock, Walter Ong and David Olson, have shown, print culture institutes ways of thinking radically opposed to those of oral culture. Writing segments language—into sounds, syllables, words and sentences—and in doing so also shows us that the reality made available by language can also be segmented—and therefore analyzed, studied, modified and recombined. As can the mental habits which enable us to treat reality. Education, in print culture, means the protection of the habits of print from the encroachment of the habits of orality: formulaic, repetitious, additive, literalistic and overly metaphorical, and so on. But there's no way of systematically presenting and familiarizing students with all the possible ways in which orality can contaminate writing—the successful student is the one who immerses himself in the culture of writing by closely following the models presented him by the educational system and the culture at large.\n\nBut what if the period in Western history in which one could assume that an ever increasing number of young people desired such immersion has ended—in part because the basic minimum of literacy needed for most career paths is readily available to most, in part because of the proliferation of electronic technologies that render traditional literacy less attractive and in some cases obsolete. Rather than mounting futile defenses against the rising tide of neo-oral barbarism, we might reify the boundary between orality and literacy as a way of preserving and enhancing the intellectual habits indebted to the latter. As Michael Polanyi argues, a better guide to the generation of knowledge creating spaces (disciplines) than abstract principles and concepts (which we seek to define, clarify and calcify) is the maxim, a quintessentially oral mode of conserving experience and knowledge.\n\nUnlike concepts, which presuppose privileged members of the discipline entrusted with the purity of conceptual applications (method), maxims, or \"rules, the correct application of which is part of the art they govern,\" include a rule-of-thumb, collaborative component that encourages innovation: \"maxims can function only . . . within a framework of personal knowledge\" (31). The encrusted maxims of traditional society, of course, have little credibility today; what might be productive, though, is the construction of maxims out of the confusion and provisional restoration of the boundary between oral and literate. My little takes on the mistakes I listed above were already embryonic maxims: say, \"loosen it or lose it\"; \"compliment and you will find you have complements\"; \"if you don't moot the point it will become moot and you will find yourself mute\"; etc.\n\nSuch maxims are the basis of new idioms of inquiry that establish disciplinary spaces and it is in and through such spaces that long chains of declarative sentences emerge and issue in shared imperatives and ostensives—and it is through such articulations of declaratives with imperatives and ostensives that culture is created and sustained.\n\nIf we were to treat mistakes as anomalies around which disciplinary spaces, idioms and maxims were to be created, it follows that we would notice a lot more mistakes (rather than politely overlooking them most of the time, as we do now in social settings; or ridiculing or punishing them in more competitive environments); indeed, one could even imagine the perverse result that mistakes, and a proliferation of them would constitute marks of privilege. This final result, though, is not really possible, because deliberate mistakes would no longer be mistakes—they would, rather, be a kind of rule following that would generate its own distinctive modes of mistake making and fixing.\n\nIf deliberate mistakes are impossible, even unthinkable, what is in fact easily conceivable is the setting of tasks in such a way that mistakes are far more likely. If you ask someone (in a school assignment, in an inter-personal confrontation, in a piece of performance art, or publics their representatives) to act simultaneously according to two different rules, they are bound to err according to at least one of them. What they will also do, though, is generate at least the preliminaries of a new, idiomatic, rule that would govern a new set of practices. I suspect emergent, post-millennial cultures, if we live to see them, will be able to tolerate a great deal of planned mistakenness, even if complete tolerance is no more desirable than the saturation of all social sites with ritual sacrality.\n\nBeyond the most primitive and stereotyped acts, when we speak of mistakes we are speaking about unintentionally violating rules. Rules are notoriously hard to define and describe—for one thing, they always presuppose certain conditions and involve exceptions, so you need meta-rules for determining when the rules apply; for another, much of our knowledge of rules is how-to, tacit knowledge that can't be made explicit. But this just means that rules, at least the rules of language and everyday interaction (as opposed, say, to the artificial rules of games) operate, to a great extent, below the level of declarative statements, in the area of ostensives and imperatives.\n\nThe beginnings of rule would be in the extension of an ostensive into an imperative: something one points to along with actual or possible others \"orders\" one to carry out some act. The most economical way of thinking about what such an imperative would be is that it is a command to preserve the possibility of issuing that ostensive another time. When we say \"that ostensive,\" though, we don't just mean the same object, but the same aspect of the object in the same kind of critical situation—but all of that can't be reproduced, so \"that ostensive\" will be progressively refined with each instance of obedience to the imperative (and the same qualifications apply to \"the imperative\" as to \"that ostensive\"). This \"refinement,\" in turn, must mean that we assume a confirmatory ostensive following the obeyed imperative, confirming, that is, that the imperative has in fact been obeyed.\n\nA rule, then, is the iterable articulation of an ostensive, a derived imperative, and a confirmatory ostensive. If we don't share the same ostensives we wouldn't recognize each other's signs anyway, so our focus should be on the imperative and concluding ostensive: mistaking the ostensive-imperative link would be making an obscene joke at a family gathering, in front of the kids; mistaking the imperative-ostensive link would be laughing at the joke. In both cases, we have what we might call a \"dangling\" imperative—an acted upon imperative without ostensive grounding or confirmation (one person laughing at the obscene joke doesn't confirm the imperative to make such a joke—the general silence confirms the lack of confirmation).\n\nThe originary grammarian expels such an imperative from the scene by issuing an unquestionably grounded and confirmable replacement. Those who acknowledge our originary mistakenness, though, seek to supply the ostensives which might ground and confirm the imperative—for example, by integrating the obscene joke into family lore, while perhaps categorizing it with analogous, anomalous instances so its mistakenness would not simply be erased; or, more riskily, joining in the laughter at the joke and turn it into a challenge to the bounds of propriety at that occasion. These kinds of moves are modes of deferral operating at the most preliminary cultural level—deferring the punishment customarily issued and the purging ordinarily demanded for mismatched imperatives and ostensives.\n\nThe actions of one can contaminate or defile the whole to the extent that we all share the same \"thing,\" as, for example, one infected person will poison a shared food or water source—that is why the notion of defilement loses its power in a market society where we exchange things in increasingly indirect ways. White Guilt, our contemporary mode of defilement, derives from our sharing the non-sacrificial, which is to say, normalized, removal of the Jews from the scene during the Holocaust—according to the Auschwitz theology which at the very least shadows all contemporary thought, if we aren't victims or perpetrators we are bystanders, by however many degrees.\n\nTo put it crudely, the Nazis offered a solution to the problem of our modernity, and so we all share complicity in the crime—except to the extent that we actively and overtly repel all the \"slippery slopes\" that led to the crime: not just anti-semitism (ultimately not even, because anti-semitism was just a \"symptom\"), but nationalism, individualism, institutional loyalty, normativity, or any other way in which I take a piece for myself or some \"we\" at the however indirect expense of some \"them\" and, even worse, justify it by some appeal to nature or necessity. White Guilt is an experience of defilement because it assumes that only a universal sharing of some common substance will prevent the splitting up into individuals and groups that will renew the process of scapegoating.\n\nUniversal mistakenness respects the anthropological intuition embodied in White Guilt: not only in spite of, but because of the advanced market economy, there are collective crimes, resulting from shared fantasies about the common good as de-contamination, that we all participate in; even more, those fantasies are of a scene in which everyone circulates the sign with equal efficacy, a kind of fantasy perpetuated by metaphysics and the Enlightenment faith in shared understanding through unhindered linguistic exchange. If we all spoke with each other freely and frequently, our discourse would approximate that of each other—we'd pronounce alike, we would recognize the same commonplaces and gestures, we would approach a shared sense of correctness and refinement. But there would still be lots and lots of mistakes, because that's how signs circulate, and it is just as discourse becomes freer and more frequent across accustomed boundaries that we will be choosing whether to enforce grammar or participate in new idioms by undergirding dangling imperatives.\n\nIn other words, aside from the post-genocidal collective guilt we all share, we all partake of language. No one can ever have more than a piece of language, under strictly regulated conditions; at the same time, language change results from what everyone does with their little piece. I can't decide whether and how nouns and verbs agree in a sentence anymore than any member of the group can decide upon the size of the kill brought home for dinner, or the number of the group itself—but language also reaches into the gift and market economies and offers innumerable possibilities for innovation. An ethics or cultural politics of originary mistakenness would seize on mistakes as possibilities for innovative turns, for, we might say, husbanding our resources for deferral; while, at the same time, proposing new idioms that would carry with them norms that, in their collisions with other normative centers, would create new mistakes. In a sense, originary mistakenness points us to a practice that I believe is unprecedented: taking responsibility for the historicity of our linguistic being through deliberate strategies of inclusion and renewal.\n\n---\n\nWorks Cited\n\nBauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.\n\nBolinger, Dwight. \"The Sign is Not Arbitrary.\" Thesaurus: Boletin del instituto Caro y Cuervo 5, 1949, 52-62.\n\nGans, Eric. The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981.\n\nJakobson, Roman, and Linda Waugh. The Sound Shape of Language. Mouton de Gruyter, 1987.\n\nMagnus, Margaret. Gods of the Word: Archetypes in the Consonants. Missouri: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999.\n\nOlson, David. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.\n\nPolanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1958.\n\nRicoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.\n\nSapir, Edward. Selected Writings in Language, Personality and Culture. Edited by David G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.\n\nTomasello, Michael. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.\n\nNotes\n\n1. I am working with Eric Gans's discussions of White Guilt as the \"guilt of the unmarked toward the marked\": see, in particular, his Chronicles of Love & Resentment 310, 311, 313, 316, 320 and 323.\n\n2. See Gans, 98-188.\n\n3. See, in particular, Jakobson, 1982, and Bolinger, 1949. For a more radical argument for \"phonosemantics,\" see Magnus.\n\n4. Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust offers a powerful account of totalitarianism and genocide as implicated modern concerns with orderliness and (political and physical) cleanliness. In other words, with the desire to remain \"unmarked.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropoetics-redemption-of-hostages",
      "title": "The Redemption of Hostages (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Sep 2012",
      "url": "https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1801/1801katz/",
      "content": "Anthropoetics XVIII, no. 1 (Fall 2012)\n\nAdam Katz\nDepartment of English\nQuinnipiac University\nHamden, CT 06518\n\n---\n\nWhat we today call \"terrorism\" is certainly one of the most ancient elements of human warfare: hostage taking. The new Third World terrorism of the 1960s and 70s was literally so: hijacking airplanes and making demands, which can only work if you adhere to the deal which is finally struck and release the hostages. In a way, this form of asymmetrical warfare is not so different from the exchange of hostages that would guarantee, for example, that neither side's leader would be killed when it came to negotiate the end of a tribal conflict. The new form of suicidal terrorism that emerged in the 80s and culminated in 2000 in Israel and then on 9/11 was an escalation that in essence declared the entire population to be a hostage—the population on both sides, even if we are only likely to see the civilized side as the hostage because we would never follow up on the suicide terrorist's implicit assertion that all of his or her fellow countrymen and women or co-religionists would willingly step forward in self-sacrifice as he/she has done.\n\nWe can see how hostage taking might have dramatically humanized war at a particular stage in human history, by creating safe spaces for discussion through the replacement of a part for the whole. We can also see the similarity between hostage taking and other now proscribed practices such as human sacrifice and scapegoating—indeed, they are probably all the same thing, differentiated out from one another gradually. What the Jewish and Christian events make unthinkable, then, is taking a part for the whole in this way; but the only way of really banning what we might call social synecdoche is for someone to step forward and show willingness to take the place of the arbitrarily chosen party—all the legal and moral discourses exhorting us to love our neighbor would be meaningless without a \"critical mass\" of individuals willing to place their bodies between would be \"synecdochists\" and their victims.\n\nOnce the entire population is taken hostage (as was already the case in the Mutually Assured Destruction strategy shared by the USA and USSR during the Cold War), the part/whole relation has been not so much abolished as made probabilistic and democratic: rather than designating specific people to hold or exchange, under determinate conditions, anyone, anywhere, or all of us, at any time, might be \"taken\"; at the same time, the odds are always heavily against it being anyone in particular. There is a major difference between nuclear deterrence and terrorism: with MAD, the responsibility for deferral remains where it had always been, with the duly recognized political leadership of the nation, upon whose rationality and access to sufficient information regarding the intentions of the other side we must rely.\n\n(The anti-nuclear movement in Western Europe and the USA, an attempt to change the equation by mobilizing the hostages themselves on their own behalf, was utterly impotent because the only equation that mattered was on the state-to-state level.) With regard to terrorism, especially the suicidal variety, responsibility is distributed: not only can the \"average\" man or woman strap on a loaded belt and self-deploy in a crowd of civilians, but the disruption of everyday life effected by such unpredictable acts of violence is intended to move the citizens of the affected country to influence their government in ways that are, compared to the stakes of nuclear strategy, fairly within our compass: to withdraw from certain countries, stop supporting certain governments, and so on.\n\nI think that the Nazi genocide of the Jews can be understood as an instance of hostage taking that includes (or prefigures) both the MAD and the terrorist models, and that examining it in these terms can further clarify the \"Auschwitz theology\" or victimary thinking which has come to dominate the post-WWII world. For Hitler, the real war was in the East: all the major ideological, economic and territorial goals of Nazism lay in the struggle against the rival totalitarianism of the USSR—living space, a European empire, the destruction of Bolshevism., and the elimination of Jewish power (whatever that might have meant—I am working under the assumption that the physical extermination of the Jews was a decision arrived at in the course of the war, not an a priori ideological imperative).\n\nHitler had no interest in war with either Great Britain or the US—indeed, he had every reason to assume that, as fellow \"Aryan\" and Western powers threatened by Bolshevism, they would at least tacitly support his war in the East. If they didn't—if they stubbornly and irrationally chose to treat the Nazis as their main enemy, even to the point of allying themselves with Stalin, there could only be one explanation: Jewish domination of those countries had overridden their natural racial affiliations with Germany. Once the threshold of all-out war had been passed, the Jews of Europe, captured and closed in by the Nazi enclosure of Europe, became hostages to their brethren in the West.\n\nThese were no ordinary hostages—not only were they to be sacrificed as long as the Judeo-capitalists prolonged their hijacking of the Western democracies, but they were to be sacrificed as an offering even if the Aryan forces in the West were to come to their senses; in this latter case, the Jews would be a kind of peace offering, a sacrifice in the cause of ending a war between brothers.\n\nIn this way, the citizens of the Western democracies were implicated in the murder of the Jews: either they allow the Jews to control their own destiny, in which case they leave the Nazis no choice; or they repudiate Jewish control, thereby acknowledging it, and affirm their fraternity and partnership with the Aryans. The victimary discourse that emerged from the Holocaust followed the same logic: each witness, during the Holocaust, who managed to either get news out of Nazi-occupied Europe or to keep records they thought might survive it, focused on simply documenting beyond any doubt a crime that they had good reason to believe (they had, indeed, been taunted to that effect) would never be heard of or, if heard of, believed.\n\nHearing such testimony therefore implicated the listener in a war against obscurity, or, more precisely, surfaced an already existing complicity, because there were sufficient signs pointing to unspeakable atrocities to entail that, since you could have observed and pursued them, in not having done so, you have chosen to participate in the concealment required for the perpetration of the crime: therefore, you are obliged to become a witness in turn, and thereby bear responsibility for the crime. The memoirs of the Holocaust that slowly trickled out in the following decades to become, eventually, a flood, followed this very same model, with harsh proscriptions against \"subjectivizing\" one's testimony in any way that might weaken the credibility of one's status as witness.\n\nIn other words, the victim held the Western victors hostage as well, implicitly demanding that they undo in some visible way the complicity in the crime that was, simultaneously, the cause of the crime itself. Moreover, this complicity via obscurity, through not knowing what one should have known, is an extension of the complicity of those Germans who were not directly involved in the genocide—the very \"banality\" of their everyday lives contributed to the machinery of extermination, indicting the entire division of labor in advanced Western societies, where one's specialized work can contribute to monstrous actions beyond one's control and knowledge, and yet with one's tacit consent. This is the full victimary model, and we can see its extraordinary power: at stake is not a cognitive belief in the consequences of racial or other discrimination; rather, it is a compulsion to redeem oneself from captivity.\n\nThis redemption would, theoretically at least, be achieved, as Eric Gans suggested in Chronicle 430, \"The End of Antisemitism?,\" by the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The redemptive cycle would be complete: the victims, driven to displace another people, and aided in that enterprise by their former victimizers and bystanders, so that they in turn become victimizers, would finally restore their own inadvertently created victims. If it's so easy to see the theological stakes of the apparently secular issue of Israel/Palestine, it's also easy to see how those stakes contribute to making the preferred solution extremely unlikely.\n\nThe Palestinians, as a tiny nation with little of intrinsic value (strategic or economic) to offer their supporters and therefore likely to be forgotten quickly as soon as a reasonably satisfactory agreement were to be attained; and as a proxy (or synecdoche) for both the Islamic and the Third Worlds, hold their would-be liberators hostage. Without their agreement, the redemptive cycle will never come to an end, and since all the burden of arriving at that agreement is therefore placed (again, for strictly theological reasons) upon the Israelis, freeing the sacralized Palestinians from responsibility—since, that is, the Palestinians have no reason not to pursue any avenue of struggle that will complete their own redemptive cycle, the complete re-conquest of their homeland and the destruction of Jewish political power on Islamic soil—it is very hard to see why they should agree.\n\nWhich means that even if a particular Palestinian leadership agrees, it is very hard to see why the next one wouldn't abrogate that agreement, and, furthermore, why the next one wouldn't come along very quickly. In this case, Auschwitz theology is at an impasse, in a double bind it has itself created.\n\nThe Jews, and then Jesus, offered themselves as hostages to God, presenting themselves in his stead for the sake of the good, or at least decent, behavior of humankind. It is probably more accurate to say that a small minority of ancient Hebrew scribes interpreted the catastrophes of the Jewish people as a hostage-taking through which humankind might be redeemed through Jewish suffering, and that this interpretation prevailed through the construction of systems of pedagogy aimed at resisting Hellenism by favoring God over Mind (the I Am over the It Is) and was finally codified in Rabbinic law and theology with the devastating failure of the nationalist rebellions against Rome, the reconstitution of the Jews as a diasporic people, and mostly hidden hostile dialogue with emergent Christianity.\n\nThe failure and near destruction of this tiny people could then serve as a synecdoche for the inevitable fall of all empires (founded on the accumulation of entire peoples as hostages), of all the haughty, and the replacement of hostage taking by the reciprocal replacement of oneself for others before God. Those who accept this model of self-hostaging will learn how to defer violence sufficiently to make and adhere to explicit, voluntary, recorded agreements.\n\nBut the stakes would have been raised: nothing less than the redemption of all humankind, making all obstacles to the institution of universal self-hostaging, whether it be through salvation in Christ or equality in democracy, instances of kidnapping of the most egregious kind. To the extent that this mode of redemption must be accepted as a proposition, which is to say that agreement on the truth of a proposition is a precondition of redemption, then a levy of forgetfulness must be imposed on all those layers of agreement which make agreement on propositions, or even the equivalence of hostages, possible and which, further, are revealed even in the sharpest disagreements over propositions.\n\nThe notion of \"human nature\" can gesture toward this world of shared ostensives and tacit knowledge, which goes on in everyday life regardless of politics and philosophy. This world of the shared and tacit might be allowed to issue in more specific and readily checked voluntary associations, but as it is no longer provides a resource in crises where parties are organized around incommensurable propositions, each making some claim to the inheritance of Western culture.\n\nAnti-semitism, then, might be nothing more than taking literally the taking hostage of the Jews. On the traditional understanding of Jews themselves, the breaking of covenantal commitments weighs heavier for Jews than for others. The Jewish entrance into and dispersal within Western society at least seems to have been facilitated by a long series of covenants, first of all (literally and explicitly) with medieval rulers and later, more tacitly, with various \"host\" populations. The post factum model for such agreements is the insistence by Napoleon that the Jews abandon their collective loyalty to the Jewish nation in exchange for equal rights as individuals.\n\nSince no definition of \"Jew\" or \"Judaism\" can completely eschew such loyalty, or at least the plausible appearance of such loyalty, though, this agreement is destined to be deemed violated, at least by those who wish to stick to its strict letter. Even the foundation of modern Israel with (admittedly highly uneven) Western support conforms to this model, on many levels: from the issuing of the Balfour Declaration as in tacit exchange for the support of world Jewry for the Allied war effort, through the attempts of the pre-state Yishuv to establish the Jews' usefulness to and incur obligations on the part of the Allied powers, to today's inevitably special relationship between the U.S. and Israel.\n\nJewish firstness, in this case, reveals itself in this agreement that \"always already\" structures the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. The agreement between Jews and God and amongst the Jews themselves (according to Jewish law, nothing is more subject to prohibition than betrayal of the Jewish community—we must all be ready to be hostages for one another, and we must never give up on redeeming our hostages), that is, serve as a model for the subsequent agreements between Jews and others. Agreements bound to end up in disappointment. One way out of the Jewish condition of hostage is to participate in taking the Jews hostage in more worldly ways—there is a long tradition, as alive now as ever, of Christianized and then secularized Jews employing their renounced Jewishness, or alienation from the Jewish community, along with their putative expertise in one, the other, or both, as credibility in attaining stable relations of dependency within the larger community.\n\nAttempts to simply abandon Judaism en masse in the name of revolutionary utopianism can't work, because revolutionary utopianism is bound to fail, leaving the Jews visible as a major force, as Jews, within that enterprise. Perhaps intermarriage will gradually attrite the Jewish population in Western countries, leaving only openly observant Jewish minorities and Israel.\n\nHow interesting it was that the two planks that needed to be clumsily, indeed, forcibly inserted into the Democratic Party's platform at their convention this year were one describing human potentialities as \"God-given\" and another affirming Jerusalem as the capital of Israel! There is a remarkable symmetry in the crowd seeming to boo God and Israel simultaneously. (Of course many if not most were booing the crude bureaucratic imposition of these unpopular planks—but isn't that close enough to booing the planks themselves?) I wondered why the two planks couldn't have been separated and voted on separately—it might have minimized the embarrassment.\n\nPerhaps the majority of DNC delegates were only against God or Israel (which would have been seen as the greater liability?). I also wondered why no one else seemed to wonder—perhaps they did it this way because they expected both planks to pass easily. The resistance to recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital is a way of holding Israel hostage to the utopianism of international law and institutional arrangements, which will transcend the pettiness of national stubbornness (like the antiquated idea that a sovereign nation decides on its own capital). Other countries simply joined the UN; Israel's very existence is dependent on a UN vote, which is to say its existence is the result of its international redeemers, involving an implicitly covenantal relation.\n\nIsrael's defenders refer to the UN vote granting Israeli statehood in 1947 as the solid ground of Israel's sovereignty and legitimacy, but couldn't the UN take back what it has given? States that exist naturally can't have their existence erased, but why not one that was created by international agreement, and, therefore, can be reasonably expected to adhere to the norms generated (however ever evolving those norms might be) by that same covenantally established international body?\n\n* * *\n\nI recently came across an essay by Renate Stendhal, who has written an excellent photobiography of Gertrude Stein, in Tikkun Magazine, \"Why the Witch-Hunt Against Gertrude Stein?\" Stendhal examines the recent kerfuffle over the White House's inclusion of Stein in its official statement on Jewish Heritage Month. Stendhal details the campaign by the New York State Assemblyman Dov Hilkind, celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz and others to represent Stein's experience in Vichy France during WWII as evidence of Nazi and fascist sympathies and collaborationism. Stendhal's essay disposes of these accusations decisively, and I'm not interested in reiterating the argument here—to take just one example, an obviously ironic suggestion in an interview in the late 30s that Hitler be given the Nobel Peace Prize has been ludicrously inflated into the assertion that Stein \"campaigned\" for Hitler to be given the prize. The real question is, why engage in these bouts of what is nothing other than what traditional Judaism calls lashon-hara, the evil tongue, or malicious slandering, especially of one's compatriots?\n\nThese mini-civil wars, destructive of ancient Israel and transcended by Rabbinic Judaism, seem to be endemic to secular Judaism—I would bet that some historian will someday (if not, unknown to me, already) uncover something of the kind in the Trotskyist-Stalinist battles of 30s, and that is what we see in the formerly liberal and leftist neo-conservatives as they battle those Jewish leftists they left behind. Dov Hilkind is an orthodox Jew and Dershowitz is still a liberal democrat, but that's beside the point—I am referring to a polemical style, one especially in evidence when issues of Israel and anti-semitism are foregrounded, which is lingua franca across the spectrum.\n\nAs someone politically sympathetic to the participants in this style, and even perhaps given to it at times myself, I am occasionally shocked by its ruthlessness and desire for excommunication. (Maybe it goes back to Spinoza's expulsion from the Amsterdam Jewish community. Or the polemics against idolatry in the Old Testament.) I would prefer to think that someone saw the opportunity for a cheap shot at the Obama Administration, but the animus toward the ambiguously Jewish like Stein seems to me the primary motivation. Look at how self-appointed representatives of the Jewish community write about Hannah Arendt, to this day—it's as if Eichmann in Jerusalem was published yesterday, the hatred is still white hot. It is the hatred you have for one who has broken a sacred covenant and, even more, exposed the tenuousness of those covenants tying one to the \"others.\"\n\nPierre Manent, in \"City, Church, Empire, Nation,\" in the latest issue of City Journal (a neo-connish publication) examines the origins of modernity in the search for the \"authoritative word\" which had been lost in the Christian world due to the growing gap between Christian saying and the actual doing in the world (a gap most vividly brought to the surface by Machiavelli), what he calls \"an unmanageable gap between speech and action.\" This desire is not specific to pre-modern Europe, even if the otherworldly nature of medieval Christianity in tension with emergent economies made it especially pressing. So, if \"[t]he regimes that we call 'totalitarian' are those capable of bringing together the most unbridled and terrible action with the most pedantic ideological and linguistic orthodoxy,\" that testifies to the urgency of this need for authority as well as its historical character.\n\nPresumably, there can be a \"manageable\" gap between word and deed, because there is always some gap, insofar as the word emerges as a deferral of the deed. But the deferral is itself the first deed, and the desire to close that gap is nothing other than the originary and constitutive desire for a scene, the only reality we as humans can know. How is it possible to live without experiencing some regular connection between the explicit and the tacit, between the declaratives one issues throughout the day and the ostensives and imperatives grounding one in tangible realities?\n\nWe create those tangible realities through agreements, hundreds and thousands of them, tacit and explicit, every day, and pathologies like Jew hatred and lashon-hara amongst supposed brothers and sisters are signs that the agreements are breaking down. Perhaps it's the otherworldliness and increasingly ramshackle metaphysics and theologies of \"democracy\" and \"rights\" that now open the gap between word and deed to increasingly intolerable levels. Accusing one another of breaking faith in the agreements is the least likely way to restore them—such accusations are further proof that, as Arendt argued, the thread tying us to tradition, that is, to publicly known (if mythological) agreements, has been cut.\n\nIt might be best to start acknowledging that Western civilization, as a unique and especially productive cultural form, predicated upon a paradoxical imperial anti-imperialism, has simply reached its limits. There is no need for resentment here, no need to blame Western civilization for the ills of the world, or indict its enemies, or demand affirmations of faith in its superiority, just as there is no need to blame Newtonian physics for reaching the limits of the paradigm it initiated. Rather, we can start to look for the elements of a new paradigm, which is admittedly far more difficult in the case of civilizations than sciences, but we can have a general idea of where to look: our constitution as signifying beings, as bearers of signs rather than as represented and representing through the transparency of signs.\n\nThe sanctity of the individual as the limit beyond which signs cannot penetrate was always bound to be qualified by hedges and dodges, and the notion of individual \"sacrifice\" to be vulgarized and ultimately parodied. The sanctity of linguistic innovation or, more minimally, linguistic slippage, may be more durable, insofar as it does nothing more than remind us of the vulnerability of joint attention to violent efforts at imposing a singular focus.\n\n* * *\n\nThe minimalism of the originary hypothesis can be evoked in these broader moral and political contexts. It may be better to set aside the \"big\" questions, like equality vs. liberty, faith vs. reason, liberty vs. authority, the beautiful vs. the sublime, etc. Better for some inquiries, at any rate. We can simply ask, where do we see instances of joint attention? All the time, no doubt, but what does it look like? We can deviate from jointness by either allowing ourselves to be distracted away from what others are looking at or through fixation, in which we attend to something to the point where we are unable to show others what we see. We can roll all of what we call \"morality\" into the simple obligation to sustain the jointness of attention, which also means, in an expression that I can't make sound less trivial, just keeping things interesting.\n\nHostage taking, even in its form of giving ourselves over as hostages, is unavoidably violent—the trick will be to allow such self-sacrifice to those who feel it as a vocation, to allow as much of hostage taking as we will still continue to need, to provide due attention to those who will feel compelled to synecdochize themselves for others—while keeping only the due attention, that limited to those vocations. The problem of sustaining jointness is an esthetic but ultimately pedagogical one—it is the problem of creating out of ourselves and the scenes in which we participate little plays that \"catch the conscience\": obstacles to completing activities that don't annoy but redirect attention just enough so that it can dwell on our voluntary convergence upon those activities.\n\nThe best way of doing this is through the creation of idioms out of errors: mistakes, or those iterations of the sign that disrupt attention toward the center can be taken as occasions for excluding those who pollute the scene of joint attention or as testimony to the desire for jointness. The former leads to ridicule, denunciation and failing grades (all of which are, no doubt, within certain rigorously defined contexts, or local paradigms, necessary); the latter lead to the renewal of signs and the invention of means for affirming jointness. Stein's own work is rich in examples of this kind of move, but I'll give an especially pertinent example cited by Stendhal in her refutation of the vicious charges against Stein, in this case regarding her project of translating for an American audience Marshal Petain's speeches:\n\nWhen the Vichy Régime chose Pétain as prime minister, Stein hoped—naively, blindly—that he would guarantee France's protection from Nazi Germany and recognition from America. This view was shared by the American Department of State. At the Time of Stein's translation project, Vichy France was not (yet) at war with America; in Pétain's Unoccupied Zone, the Zone Libre, where Gertrude and Alice's country house was located, American Jews lived freely, especially if—like Gertrude and eventually Alice—they were over sixty-five years old. Charles Glass points out that no Americans were interned in the Unoccupied Zone. Stein's hope for Pétain's France was encouraged when, according to Rogers, \"the Franco-American Committee . . . asked her to translate for her compatriots Marshal Pétain's messages.\" If Stein acted out of her concern for France, it is still a puzzle how she felt about the repressive content of these speeches, the fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies in some of Pétain's \"messages.\"\n\nEven Barbara Will is baffled. She doesn't know what to make of the translation, because Stein didn't really do it. She hand-wrote a draft of some thirty speeches dated from 1939 to 1940, in a language that renders them unreadable. As we know from computer gobbledygook, word-by-word translations don't make sense; they are a joke. But that is exactly what Stein did. Here is one of many examples Will gives: \"' Ils se méprendront les uns et les autres' — a speech denouncing Pétain's critics – is translated ' But they are mistaken the ones and the others.'\"\n\nWill ponders that perhaps Stein had such an admiration for the old man that every word of his had to be honored in and of itself. Maybe Stein wasn't fluent in French, some commentators have proposed. She had spent almost four decades in France and had written and published in French. Others have wondered about her English proficiency. Stein, the recent bestselling author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, certainly was able to write straight-forward English. One is tempted to speculate in the same manner Will does, but in the opposite direction. What if Stein found the content absurd but was fascinated by the language, the archaic French tonality of the old soldier that could only be rendered as some hermetic prose-poetry?\n\nBarbara Will ponders ungenerously, attributing the unintelligibility of Stein's translations to blind hero worship of an old fascist collaborator; Renate Stendhal's more generous reading sees Stein as mistaking Petain's writing and becoming more interested in the violations of the rules of translation and genre upon which she found herself embarked. Stendhal is herself a bit upset at this project of Stein's, so she includes in her hypothesis the assumption that Stein \"found the content absurd,\" but this assumption is really unnecessary—what matters is that, regardless of her feelings for Petain's politics, the drift into a new mode of potentially joint attention is more engaging.\n\nThere is a kind of minimal Gnosticism in Stein's absolute valorization of the present, and her \"lowering of the threshold of significance\" such that everything becomes equally meaningful might be less violent than the faith and hope of more mainstream Western discourses. We always know something—lots of things, in fact—even if what we know in a given case is that Petain's speeches can become \"hermetic prose poems\" when translated over-literally into English. Even false claims manifest some knowledge: if I claim \"you are the devil,\" I at least know that certain appearances of and around you can be pieced together in such a way, and from a certain perspective, and within such a situation, as to project something demonic.\n\nEven if my fever passes and I realize you are, as you always were, my good friend (that is to say, I know that now), that other knowledge need not be rejected. And such knowledge, like any knowledge, can only be acquired through the determined closing off of all areas of reality that might interfere with that piecing together upon which I am engaged that constitutes joint attention; areas of reality that might be more productively opened as my ongoing learning process continues to lower further the threshold of significance lowered by the attention paid to my latest representation. Hope and faith try to make a ritualized version of some scene real; a minimal Gnosticism just names the event and invites others to make the name fit.\n\n(As an experiment, if you eliminate in a particular discourse all uses of terms like \"hope\" and \"faith,\" along with related terms like \"believe,\" perhaps even ones further afield like \"assume\"—you will be left with stark and limited assertions of knowledge, such as \"there is only x as far as the eye can see with the sliver of some new thing we might call 'y' that suggests an already diminishing likelihood of some 'z'\")\n\nSo, we always know and are always mistaken; this duality derives from the plurality of the originary scene where each can only know the other's gesture by exaggerating it in some way, and can only recognize one's own gesture in the other's exaggeration. There is no exaggeration, as the term makes no sense outside of some normalized frame of reference, while it is precisely such a frame of reference that is created on the originary scene; and, yet, there is exaggeration or ostentation because part of one's knowledge of the scene is the possibility that it will dissolve momentarily—that possibility of imminent dissolution is the measure or frame of reference against which the exaggeration, stylization or ostentation occurs.\n\nWe can, following Stein, assert that only the living and not destruction are interesting, and that might be a natural stance, but it also involves giving significance to, further lowering the level of signification to register, those living things threatened with or obscured by destruction. In fact, only the living and peace-giving can be meaningful, and if we grant meaning to destruction we end up granting to destruction and evil creative potentials they cannot possess. When we know something, then, what it is we know is the significance of which thing must have its profile raised so as to lower the general threshold of significance, which thing we must attend to so that we can attend from it in turn to our shared attention.\n\nIt is the mistake, or anomaly if you like, that discloses the endangered reality whose profile must be raised, because in the mistake the constitution of the rules governing any scene by the sheer desire for the shared ostensive is revealed. The thing to be attended to is the idiom constructed out of the mistake, the affirmation of the desire informing the scene. If we keep raising the profile of endangered realities, our lives would get more eventful and more idiosyncratic—meaning would get made out of less and less; while at the same time our culture would get less scenic, insofar as the closure required for the scenic imagination is more effectively deferred.\n\nTo an outside observer (like most of us now towards this largely hypothetical cultural development), such beings seem unspeakably trivial, concerned, maybe, with forms of greeting and leave-taking, shows of appreciation and deprecation, esthetic arrangements drawing attention to the normally neglected, fascinated by strata of agreement and agreeability. But while there is no guarantee, there is also no reason why this sensibility cannot support a readiness to defend itself against those impatient for definitive closure, even if more through subversion, mockery, withdrawal of cooperation and instigation of deconstructive elements than outright opposition.\n\nJewish firstness, its self-understanding through founding agreements, is further bound up with the injunction to \"inscribe these words on your heart\"—this metaphor of interior writing, which we see in the natural law theories of early modernity, articulates the permanency of the written word with the disciplining of the soul to obedience. The more written-on the soul becomes, the more responsible one becomes to take that writing to \"heart.\" While the metaphor, as David Carr shows in his Writing on the Tablets of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, precedes ancient Israel's systems of writing and education, going back to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems, what is new in Judaism is the conclusion Brian Rotman points to in Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being: \"[i]f prosody is absent from a voice, then the bearer of such a voice is unknowable in an auditory sense as an individual, as a speaking being among others. . . .\n\nThus it is with the alphabetic God who exists and 'speaks' only as a voiceless writer. Short of invoking a plurality of indistinguishable and interchangeable speakers (like identical atoms or mathematical units), a toneless voice can only invoke a singularity, a one-and-only, self-identical entity comparable to nothing outside of itself; a monobeing who is not merely one of a kind but is its kind\" (121-2). Perhaps Israel's location on the margin of ancient empire, along with the transience of its own imperial and (especially) ritual institutions, enabled it to take this final step in constructing and worshiping that monobeing, and in construing morality as the construction of the inner self, or the conscience, as the inscription of not merely the words of tradition but of that one-and-only on one's own inner constitution.\n\nThis was a forward looking metaphor insofar as writing in ancient Israel, as in ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt would have first of all involved a means of and therefore would have been secondary to the oral recitation and memorization of canonical texts. The injunction to inscribe the words of the one-and-only on the heart would seem to go beyond memorization to a kind of individual being capable of tonalizing without infringing upon the toneless voice of God, making it transportable, and hence of shaping individual action beyond traditional strictures. The prophetic polemics against legalisms and ritual obedience devoid of inner intention that were so central to defining the exemplarity of Israel suggest that preserving, revering, even ingesting the written word led to the decisive displacement of the ancient imperial cosmologies by attacking any Israelite practices reminiscent of them. Such an inscribed being would revel in its ability to make and adhere to agreements of all kinds, and would mark its distinctiveness, or holiness, as a people, in such terms.\n\nAt the same time, though, once that thread connecting us to the monobeing's self-revelation is cut, we might find ourselves with the alternative Rotman posits: with the written word as evoking a \"plurality of indistinguishable and interchangeable speakers,\" perhaps inscribed one on top of the other, palimpsest style, on our hearts. Such a model would certainly conform better to contemporary electronic communications systems, and carry with it the equally powerful injunction to allow for as many voices as we can bear (and to strive to learn to bear more) without trying to reduce their toneless anonymity to familiar polemics.\n\nThe question would then always be, which voice needs to be allowed to come through unfiltered so as to preserve this general anonymity, to prevent all the other voices from identifying themselves by drowning out this one? Maybe the name of this plurality of voices is \"everyone be anyone,\" but there are certainly innumerable other possibilities. And maybe that flip side of the Jewish model of God, thought, and conscience will take us all out of the system of anti-Semitism as we simply act on the agreements we must already have made rather than demanding compliance with an ultimately dubitable interpretation of some explicit one.\n\nDavid Gelernter, in The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought, proposes that we think about human thought as lying on a spectrum from \"low focus\" to \"high focus.\" Along the spectrum lie different modes of attention, and making use of Michael Polanyi's distinction between \"attending from\" and \"attending to,\" we can say that low focus thinking lowers the boundary between the \"from\" and the \"to,\" while high focus thinking raises and reinforces the barrier. When the barrier is high—when we work rigorously, abstractly, theoretically—we maintain our focus on one central object or question, and reduce all other objects and questions to a subsidiary role, interesting only insofar as they enhance our attention to that central object.\n\nWe could say that we construct an impermeable scene, with nowhere to look but at that central object. When the barrier is low, then the thing I was just attending from might now turn into that which I attend to, in which cases relations between lines of thought become metaphorical and affective rather than logical. Here, we might say that we have created less a scene than a thoroughfare across scenes, with no a priori relation between those scenes, as an object, however marginal, on one scene can be the pretext for the evocation of another.\n\nThere must always be a spectrum of thought from low to high focus, but the advent of writing makes the high focus end much higher, and so we can safely associate cultures in which low focus thinking is valued with orality and those where it is denigrated or ignored with literacy. The declarative sentence scopes or blends two scenes (which neither speaker nor hearer need have personally witnessed) onto a single scene, the scene of utterance, and is therefore the place where the spectrum is created: the two scoped or blended scenes or inputs can shed their original features in as tight a focus as the most urgent ostensive; or the declarative whole can dissolve back into the multiplicity of scenes.\n\nWith writing the declarative sentence is made the object of inquiry and elevated so as to present itself as exemplary of language as such, leading to an enormous effort in tightening the declarative scene and preventing its collapse back into its elements. Jewish culture, meanwhile, has valued low focus in a way that Western rationalism has not (in large part through a textual mysticism), but insofar as monotheism has joined the mainstream of world culture through Greek-inflected Christianity, the \"toneless\" voice of the \"one-and-only\" has tended to participate in stifling the lower focus side of the spectrum. If a shift might be afoot from \"I am that I am\" to \"everyone be someone,\" that is, from that one toneless voice to an infinity of voices, then a tolerance, even desire, for the lower focus would result.\n\nThe reason I advance this argument by way of Gelernter's book is that he provides us with an astonishing analysis of an extremely opaque (that is, low focus) and seemingly marginal story in the Bible that helps me to tie this concluding concern into my early discussion of Judaism, anti-semitism and anti-anti-semitism as a kind of cycle of hostage taking.\n\nThe story is in Exodus 4:24-26, and here it is, in Gelernter's translation:\n\nIt happened on the road, at an overnight stopping place, that the Lord met him [Moses] and tried to kill him. But Tzipporah took a flint, cut off her son's foreskin and touched it to his feet; she said \"You are my bloody bridegroom!\" And he withdrew from him. That was when she said \"bloody bridegroom\" with respect to circumcision. (165)\n\nGelernter shows that we can only make sense of this story by allowing ourselves to follow a nightmare logic of moods and associations, organized around Moses's return to Egypt, where he faces the unresolved issue of his being a wanted man. Gelernter also makes a very plausible case that we are to assume that Moses has never told his wife or Midianite in-laws that he is in fact a Hebrew and not an Egyptian (this would, for one thing, account for his son not yet having been circumcised). The crime he committed in Egypt is likely to be revealed, and so is his hitherto concealed identity, and so it makes sense that Moses would imagine that God is coming to kill him just as God would soon come to kill the Pharaoh's first-born son.\n\nIndeed, Gelernter reminds us, in Exodus the Jews are referred to as God's first-born son, and \"[f]irst-borns are forfeit before the Lord\" (170, italics Gelernter's). Circumcision is the symbolic redemption of the first-born Jewish son, in place of his sacrifice. This is not Gelernter's conclusion, but I would say that through circumcision Jews redeem themselves from the human sacrifice that would otherwise be demanded in a culture consumed with hostage taking, transferring the two roles of hostage taker and redeemer to God. (Maybe this helps to explain another, so far minor manifestation of contemporary anti-Semitism: the mania for outlawing circumcision.)\n\nI posed the problem of knowledge: how to determine which voice among the innumerable ones we access through texts, through any text, we should raise the profile of so as to keep all the voices interchangeable. A voice, I would say, onto which we can project a blend akin to the blend this one small part of the Exodus story, in Gelernter's reading, projects onto God: hostage taker, killer, redeemer. As we lower the threshold of significance (in which writing and now electronic media aid greatly), the blends will be of lower stakes and the event ever deferred, so perhaps we get annoyance, nuisance, and pleasure as the qualities borne by a particular voice asking that its profile be raised.\n\nWe know that we have directed our attention to those features of the voice that might be taken as annoying, even a nuisance, and that we turn our attention yet another way so as to find it, nevertheless, somewhat pleasurable—thereby opening up a low focus channel for finding other things to be annoying, a nuisance, and pleasurable in new ways. Indeed, anything can partake of all of these qualities. And then things barely signify at different thresholds of attentiveness, articulated in ways that register only through carefully formed acts of attention.\n\nAnd when the time comes to raise the level of significance again, maybe we will be able to treat those who would take us hostage through such blends as voices among innumerable ones that we single out as a point of attention so as to ensure that everyone can continue to be anyone. Maybe the language of escalation and crisis is all used up (maybe that's why 9/11 never really became representable in American culture) and it will never be \"1938\" again—and maybe a more horizontal rhetoric in dealing with, say, the Iranian nuclear program will work better. Maybe if we note that the program is an unpleasant nuisance, then a disturbance, one we find unsettling, and still can't quite turn away from, we would actually act in a manner proportionate to the words and do what one does with disturbing, unsettling nuisances that don't go away—but, then, get interesting, a chance to try something out.\n\nThe world won't come to an end if the Iranians get the bomb, or even if they use it; but by the same token, it won't come to an end if we find the shortest and most decisive way to make sure they don't get it. If we have to focus on the Iranians because they constitute a threat, we would want to focus on them in such a way that the upsurge in attention we must direct their way gets dissipated as soon as possible. I certainly don't know how, exactly, but it might involve taking up positions within their language, inside their attentive space, as infidels, as unruly dhimmis, as rogue interpreters of the Koran. In other words, figure out ways of spreading their attention out, so that the entire situation becomes one of language learning all around.\n\nWe can never redeem ourselves from hostage taking altogether—the very attempt to do so generates new spates of hostage takers alert to the slightest sign of vulnerability; and the creation of spaces free of hostage taking, which is to say spaces where relationships can be formed and broken at any time and on any pretext or even none whatsoever, requires a willingness to stand in place in cases where those spaces attract the resentment of others. Anyone can, though, rather than delivering oneself to the most available taker, discover what one has become hostage to simply by following, through its linguistic turns, the line of potentially joint attention to the minimally distinguishable anonymous voice, until one finds oneself with a set of commitments, a mode of inquiry, and a sense of rights and duties to some others.\n\nMaybe what Charles Sanders Peirce called \"musement,\" or idle curiosity, or a pataphysical study of the unique and exceptional, or devotional meditation and prayer, or simple tinkering, is the best guide. And anyone can be curious about the boundary between the normal and the anomalous, the taken-as and the mistaken.\n\n---\n\nNotes\n\nI am referring to the concept Eric Gans uses in The Origin of Language to account for the dissemination of the ostensive sign to other objects in the earliest period of language use. See pp. 76-82 in particular.\n\nWorks Cited\n\nCarr, David M. Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.\n\nGans, Eric. The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.\n\nGelernter, David. The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1994.\n\nManent, Pierre. \"City, Empire, Church, Nation.\" City Journal, Summer 2012, Vol. 22 No. 3.\n\nRotman, Brian. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Duke University Press, 2008.\n\nStendahl, Renate. \"Why the Witch-Hunt Against Gertrude Stein?\" Tikkun, June 4, 2012."
    },
    {
      "slug": "attentionality-originary-ethics",
      "title": "Attentionality and Originary Ethics: Upclining (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/attentionality-originary-ethics.pdf",
      "content": "Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518\n\nHowever paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading… Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, 15\n\nAn act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon, which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made, ever serious and significant decision ever reached, was reached and made by divination. The soul stirs, and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery. D.H. Lawrence, “Etruscan Places,” 55.\n\nIn a recent Chronicle of Love and Resentment, Eric Gans frames the ethical function of language as follows:\n\nIn all the years in which I have attempted to explain GA in writing and in speech, I have tended to place the major emphasis on representation, and in particular on “formal representation” or language. One of the points I have insisted on is that human language is qualitatively different from animal “languages”; the researches and insights of such as Terrence Deacon have essentially ended the debate on this point. But it follows from my very “definition” of the human as the species that poses a greater problem to its own survival than the totality of forces outside the human community that the primary transformation of the protohuman into the human was ethical.\n\nLanguage and more broadly, representation emerged, per the originary hypothesis, to defer conflict, not to provide a cognitive or ratiocinative tool. But in the configuration of the originary event, the moral model of the reciprocal exchange of the sign is just as indubitably unique a human creation as language, and indeed more essential to the success of the event—and to the consequent emergence of our species. The urgent need that the event fulfills is to find a model of behavior that can defer violence within a community for which one-on-one animal hierarchy no longer provides an adequate solution. Eric Gans Chronicle 431, “Originary Ethics.”\n\nThe question of appropriate emphasis aside, the distinction Gans posits here, between the sign as a formal representation of a transcendent object, on the one hand, and the sign as a result, means or manifestation of reciprocity seems to me one that the originary hypothesis itself transcends. In other words, “formal representation” is itself ethical, is indeed the origin and resource of any ethics, so that ethics cannot be thought outside of it. At the same time, formal representation cannot be thought outside of ethics, since the “formality” of the representation lies in the shared attention it effects, and in this shared attention lies any ethics. In shared, or joint attention, is the fundamental equality-on-the-scene that constitutes the human. All the resources we need for thinking about ethics lie in joint attention, in our ability to point to something, and approaching ethics in this way might enable us to create more minimal, more pared down, ethical vocabularies.\n\nTo start with, if we can fold moral reciprocity into the shared attention constitutive of the sign and scene, couldn’t we say that what is immoral and a denial of reciprocity is whatever interrupts that shared attention? There are two ways shared attention can be interrupted: first, through some kind of distraction; second, through some kind of fixation. Distraction (distracting others; allowing oneself to be distracted) tears us away from the scene of joint attention, opens the possibility of unchecked approach to the object, and thereby demands a renewed, necessarily risky effort to redirect attention to the object—that is, distraction causes regression to a higher threshold of significance; fixation involves tearing oneself away from the scene and, ultimately, turning the other participants into objects of rather than participants in, one’s now singular attention.\n\nJoint attention involves some equipoise amongst the participants of the scene: each knows that the other(s) could advance towards the object while accepting the signs given and given off by the other as warranty that they won’t without sufficient advance warning. Distraction, we could say, is the introduction of noise into the information thereby exchanged —either not putting forward sufficiently unequivocal signs oneself or subtracting from the univocality of those put forward by other(s). Fixation, meanwhile, is the securing for oneself a system of processing information that reduces all information to univocality, on terms not subject to reciprocal exchange.\n\nBoth distraction and fixation abort the scene, but both are also complementary possibilities of the originary structure of joint attention: the actuality or fear of distraction favors the formation of fixations, and so the ethical problem consists less in preventing than in recuperating and interrupting distractions and fixations. If we consider that anyone enters a scene by following a line of attention—by looking at what someone else is looking at and deferring appropriation as the other does in order to continue looking —one has not fully joined the scene until that line of attention has passed through oneself, and has been seen to do so.\n\nIn other words, attention is not joint until all the participants show, through signs, that they are letting the object be so as to see what it has to show, to hear what it has to say—in which case, each participant must be inspected, so to speak, or credentialized, by having the sign they put forth validated. For one’s joining of the line of attention to become evident and thereby accepted as legitimate, that attention must first land on oneself as its object—in other words, each new participant on the scene represents a potential interruption of shared attention At this crucial point upon which one’s entry into the scene depends, one can only avoid becoming a distraction and potential source of fixation in others by doubling that attention back on oneself by joining it, becoming a sign and hence invisible, insofar as others are redirected back to the object through you.\n\nIn that case, you will have shown others that the line of attention passes through your own eyes; unless, of course, your selfreferentiality simply intensifies your distractiveness. Whether a distraction has taken place will depend upon whether those attended to or, in Louis Althusser’s term, “interpellated,” as potential objects of resentment or desire will have restored the line of attention by incorporating the interruption into the scene’s founding sign. Perhaps an analogy would be helpful here. The neuroscientist Daniela Schiller has discovered that that memories are not unchanging physical traces in the brain.\n\nInstead, they are malleable constructs that may be rebuilt every time they are recalled. The research suggests, she said, that doctors (and psychotherapists) might be able to use this knowledge to help patients block the fearful emotions they experience when recalling a traumatic event, converting chronic sources of debilitating anxiety into benign trips down memory lane.\n\nIf the originary event is event and sign together, then there is no event without the sign being both emitted and iterated by all the participants on the scene—just as memories are not completed until they are recalled, or represented (and are therefore never complete), the event will only have taken place once it is represented in the sign. There is thus a lag during which the event both has and has not taken place, and the sign, much like the therapeutic experience Schiller hopes to employ, uses that lag to convert chronic sources of violence into benign signification. Since in this lag “before” and “after” have not yet been completely settled, the benign sign can be secured both before and after the traumatic event has taken place.\n\nAnd what makes the sign “benign” is not that it excludes content (as Schiller remarks, the traumatic memories are recalled) but that violence marking the event remembered is not what makes it memorable. Instead, the sign can embed the violence in some other elements of the memory that mitigate its fearfulness by turning the event into a sign—a sign, I would suggest, that prevents the one violent event from becoming the first in a series of such events compulsively suffered and/or committed.\n\nI would call this restoration of the line of attention the “loop” in the line of attention, and undergoing this looping is what I would call “ostentation,” which is where ethical being is located. Whether one can undergo or go through the loop depends upon the group’s ability to see you as restoring the line of attention as well as your ability to do so—ethics involves both ostentation and conferring a completed ostentation upon others, or the conversion of attentionality into intentionality. And this means that whether one has distracted or patched together the continuity of the line of attention, or whether one has proactively identified a break or fixated upon (and thereby aggravated) the source of the break in that line can only be known in the aftermath on a new, converted scene of joint attention.\n\nWe keep the line of attention going by language learning— every loop in the line of attention involves an encounter of idioms. While it would be absurd to say that each of us speaks our own language, I think it makes perfect sense to say that at the margins we all differ in the emergent idioms we speak and that it is at such margins that real ethical questions emerge: when I think I’m following your discourse and taking the next “logical step” but you think I am falsifying your most basic intuitions then a difference in language has emerged. Michael Tomasello, along with many others has made the argument that we learn language not as collections of single words with discrete meanings that then get combined in sentences, or as a series of grammatical rules applied to single instances of language use, but as prepackaged chunks of discourse—phrases, formulas, commonplaces—that we can repeat appropriately insofar as we occupy scenes of joint attention with our elders.\n\nOver time our language base extends through discovering iterable patterns in and analogies with those chunks, noticing similar contexts, mixing chunks, exchanging elements of the chunks we are familiar with, and so on. This process never ends, continuing, say, for academics, when we read the sentences of one thinker through the sentences we have assimilated from another. We can identify patterns because we can rearrange center-margin relations on scenes and still recognize a scene as the “same” scene (when I am done speaking and someone else takes “center stage,” it will still be the “same” scene); and we can identify analogies because the materials of one scene can be referred back to other scenes.\n\nIterating (repeating differently) chunks, patterns and analogies, that is, is the way we follow by repairing the line of attention. The novel sentences linguists note that we are able to compose are, really, then, variant constructions, and “thinking” a process of transforming chunks and commonplaces into such variant constructions.\n\nEthical being involves not so much learning the language of the other, or teaching the other one’s own language, because “language” is not a static entity that can stand still long enough for it to be the same language once it has been learned as it was when it began being taught. Rather, ethics involves learning the emergent language that arises at the margin or rough edges of the convergent idioms. Joint attention is always liable to lapse, prey to distraction and fixation, must always be monitored and re-engaged—when we mistake ourselves and each other it turns out that we have not been attending to the same thing after all, and our recourse is to attend to what we normally attend from: language, or the possibility of joint attention, an indication of faith in the capacity of shared deferral.\n\nIf new language is always emerging on the margins of any semiotic encounter then two things follow: first, that this emergent language upsets the rough symmetry of the originary scene and, as on that scene itself, the new language can only be engaged through the kind of asymmetry aimed at symmetry I have elsewhere called “firstness”; and, second, the hierarchical articulation of language, from phonemes meaningless in themselves but capable of meaningful combinations, to morphemes that are meaningful within larger words, to words which have meaning but minimally so until they are placed in sentences, which take on their full meaning in discourses, and so on— this entire hierarchical organization which makes the lower levels invisible (we don’t notice phonemes, and barely individual words, when we are discussing serious issues) undergoes dislocation and the elements at different levels become visible and “out of joint.”\n\nIf we place these two characteristics of emergent language together, it follows that firstness, or what we can consider the irreducibly pedagogical dimension of language, involves attending to the normally subsumed “joints” of language. Language is irreducibly pedagogical because in any joint attention, someone must have pointed first in a more or less articulate anticipation of the interest of the other(s)—this indicative initiative is the interpellative act that introduces one into the attentional loop. At the same time, this pedagogical dimension is, we could say, “flickering,” insofar as once attention has been joined that initial asymmetry is integrated into the newly formed joint attention—and joint attention is self-authenticating, recognizing only such precursors and origins as it needs to sustain itself in the face of distractions and fixations.\n\nThe joints of language include far more than the elements of speech—there is tone, for example, and also within speech itself there is phonosemantics, but beyond that there is gesture and posture, which in turn open up onto broader tacit understandings of context. In interpersonal interaction, that is, the entire embodied mind (or, perhaps, minded body) is engaged in the manipulation of attention, while in the more advanced semiotic forms (writing and electronic communications) the senses are brought into play in various ways. There are many joints that an utterance or sign can be out of. The originary hypothesis, though, provides us with an effective way of studying, first of all, those semiotic elements closest to the originary scene: posture and gesture.\n\nThe originary gesture is a gesture of aborted appropriation; doesn’t it make sense, then, to see all gestures and postures as “aborted” versions of some threatening activity? Take a large, powerful looking man walking confidently down the street, head up, chest out, with long stride and arms swinging long and fast enough to knock over an average sized individual. On the one hand, he is taking up space, defending a territory, intimidating potential trespassers—but, more fundamentally, he is claiming this space by suggesting, through gesture and posture, not only what he might do if that space were to be transgressed but also therefore drawing attention to what he isn’t doing, the possible actions he has aborted—for example, embarking on the unrestricted conquest of space.\n\nHe is claiming some space, not all of it, and if he claims more than his “fair share,” that just means one’s notion of fairness, based on modern, civic notions of equality, is incommensurable with his notion, based, implicitly, on one’s right to what one can defend. He does, though, have an understanding of fairness and is constituting a scene around himself through his gesture and posture.\n\nGesture and posture do not seem to work the same way as the levels of spoken language—they not are composed of a system of intrinsically meaningless elements, nor are they components of larger systems of meaning. But they are composed into larger wholes we call “situations,” “character,” “personality,” and “culture”; and, as I suggested earlier, it may very well be that phonemes and, more generally, the sounds of language are not as meaningless as post Saussurian linguistics assumes. Furthermore, we can integrate gesture and posture into the semiotic systems of speech, writing and beyond by considering, first, that gestures and postures are ultimately ostensive gestures of deferral, and that any meaning conveyed through the higher speech forms also involves an act of deferral.\n\nEric Gans’s analysis of the primary linguistic forms in The Origin of Language makes it possible to see the imperative as a deferral of the ostensive, under conditions where an ostensive would likely fail and exacerbate the violence it is meant to stay (interestingly first turned into an imperative by the one obeying the command); the declarative, meanwhile, is a deferral of the imperative, when that speech act is unlikely to be fulfilled (and hence risk a violent situation without resolution). There are many different kinds of ostensives—simple pointing at a desired or interesting object, promises, greetings, expressions of gratitude, and so on—and of imperatives—orders issued under emergency conditions, orders issued pursuant to some legitimate authority, commands received from divine agencies, or transmitted within a community and obeyed by generation after generation—and the analyses based on the principle I am proposing would get very complex.\n\nIndeed, all these forms of signifying are embedded in single acts, embodying knowledge on different levels—if I stand aside from that aggressive male occupying the center of the street, making my own, limited claim to space and signaling a refusal to challenge him (learning an emergent language of gesture and posture), while, perhaps shaking my head at the evident barbarism and in order to give a moral tincture to my resentment, I am most likely doing all that on the level of gesture and posture itself, not in sentences I speak to myself. All acts have an element of deferral (even if minimal or diminishing) insofar as one thing is done, and not another, and it is done in one way, not another, thereby holding back possibilities towards which the form of the act gestures.\n\nEven in the most intellectualized conversation, such gestural exchanges proceed unnoted, sometimes emphasizing or accentuating, sometime subverting, positions taken in the overt communication. And, finally, this mode of analysis can be carried forward into writing and electronic communications insofar as we realize that these take place within disciplines, genres and institutions with rules that can be violated and boundaries that can be transgressed and that each signifying act makes sense by heightening or singling out respect for at least some of these rules and boundaries, even if this respect is shown by violating and transgressing others.\n\nThe insistence upon the entanglement of mind and body in language events evokes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that there are no universally shared cognitive concepts outside of language: that time and space, as well as cultural and moral concepts, are all encoded in the grammar and semantics of specific languages.(1) It seems to me that this claim, if taken to its logical conclusion, would lead us to assert the singularity not just of every language but of every speech act: why should we, that is, assume that shared cognitive concepts undergird different uses of the same words any more than uses of “similar” words across languages?\n\nAnd yet it is very difficult to simply reject the question, since in our post-metaphysical world thought seems bound up with language in ways that continue to surprise. I therefore consider it fortunate that the hypothesis is alive and fairly well, drawing the interest not only of literary theorists and poets, but cognitive linguists. This is the case even though the hypothesis cannot really be formulated coherently—if you want to claim that we can only think in terms of the grammar of a particular language you are already begging the question of the relation between “thought” and “language,” which the hypothesis nevertheless depends upon (if we were to just assert the simpler “thought is language, language is thought [and that is all ye need to know on earth?)],” the hypothesis would evaporate).\n\nI will suggest in a little while that the best use of the hypothesis is to identify the “emergent language” I am arguing is central to ethics, but a good way to get there is through a discussion of one way in which the hypothesis has proven generative for some cognitive linguists.\n\nDan Slobin sums up a problem, derived from linguistic theories of grammaticalization, and that has been engaging cognitive linguists, when he points out that “[t]here is a cline of linguistic elements from fully lexical content words to fully specialized grammatical morphemes” (426). The cognitive linguists Dedre Gentner and Lena Boroditsky use this distinction to modify the Whorfian problem by proposing what they call a “division of dominance”:\n\nAt one extreme, concrete nouns—terms for objects and animate beings—follow cognitive-perceptual dominance. They denote entities that can be individuated on the basis of perceptual experience. At the other extreme, closed-class terms—such as conjunctions and determiners—follow linguistic dominance. These meanings do not exist independent of language. Verbs and prepositions—even\n\n“concrete” motion verbs and spatial prepositions—lie between. Unlike closed-class terms, they have denotational functions, but the composition of the events and relations they denote is negotiated via language. (216-7)\n\nSo, at the first extreme, thought is independent of language, which in practice we can take to mean first, easily and uncontroversially translatable; and, second, readily reducible to ostensive, referential gestures. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis wouldn’t hold within this domain of dominance: we could assume a word in any language that would be roughly equivalent to, say, “tree.” At the other extreme though, where possible relations are constructed intralinguistically, the dependence of thought on language would be the greatest. We have no reason to assume, for example, that in other languages things are figured “out.”\n\nAs Slobin goes on to point out, though, the process of grammaticalization relativizes the distinction between the domains of dominance, since content items make their way down the “cline” to grammatical ones. “Basic verbs,” according to Slobin, appear at the beginnings of grammaticization clines because, when they are used in a conversational context, they contrast with the more specific verbs that could be used in that context, thereby signaling to the hearer that those more specific meanings were not intended. This opens the way for the kind of pragmatic inferencing and reanalysis that lie at the heart of grammaticization.\n\nGiven these facts, it is evident that the special character of grammaticizable notions has its origin, in part, in the lexical items from which grammatical items are prone to develop. That is, the “open class” is already organized into general and specialized terms—and this division can be accounted for by quite ordinary psycholinguistic and communicative processes… Why are such words prone to grammaticize? Because of their generality they are both highly frequent and likely to be used in contexts in which the speaker does not intend to communicate a specialized meaning. (433-4)\n\nSlobin goes on to give the example of verbs designating “taking”—if I use a more specialized verb like “grasp” or “seize,” I wish to draw attention to the manner of taking possession; if I use a more general verb like “take” I thereby draw attention to a more general domain of activity (watching over, accepting responsibility for, and so on). “Take” is now primed to enter the process of grammaticalization, which might involve becoming an “auxiliary” verb or, in the case of “take” entering into a range of idioms (take over, take on, take it to, take down, etc.).\n\nThe process of grammaticalization is surely shaped, as Slobin says, “by the online demands on the speaker to be maximally clear within pragmatic constraints and maximally efficient within economy constraints, and by online capacities of the listener to segment, analyze and interpret the message” (431), which is to say by the interest in establishing a sustainable form of joint attention—but the initial, implicit, marking of the distinction between more general and more specialized semantic domains that Slobin places at the origin must first of all involve a shift in attention that involves an experience of learning.\n\nI would go even further, and say that that semantic domain could not have been imagined until it had been opened up and shared. The more generalized semantic domain recuperates some interruption in the attentional loop—I would assume it is noticed when further descent down the cline would exacerbate the distraction caused by the interruption and that it wards off the danger of imminent fixation. What happens here is that a possibility within language opens a possibility within thought—the distinction between “take” and “seize” makes it possible to imagine “taking responsibility,” or “taking one’s time.”\n\nAt this point, originary thinking moves beyond cognitive linguistics, because we must assume that there were a few words and then many, and those few words must have covered more semantic space than the later, specialized split-offs; even more, the earliest words must have been more thoroughly embedded in the imperative and gesturalpostural worlds than we can easily reconstruct now. The original “take,” then, must have included much of what was to be distributed to more specialized semantic domains. To “take,” must have meant to acquire and possess in accord with sacred purposes and ritualized practices. The initial move towards grammaticalization, then—that transformation of a word, whose meanings have been evacuated and given over to specialized terms, into a word covering newly imagined cognitive, social and moral domains—is a retrieval of the originary content of the word.\n\nThis is a retrieval forward, not a recovery of the identical meaning: “taking responsibility,” “taking time,” “taking over,” and so on don’t return us to that earlier ostensive world but, rather, create new ostensive possibilities of deferral, where promises can be made (in a promise, one allows oneself to be “taken”), initiatives “taken,” obligations incurred. In other words, a backward ascent is a precondition of further descent down the cline, as the new mode of thinking in language takes over or becomes common possession. And this also means that the development of chunks and commonplaces, on the one hand, and the “de-chunking” that we can call “thinking,” on the other, are complementary modes of language development and language learning: “thinking” is initiated when a piece of a chunk “sticks out” (because the chunk is used mistakenly, because it is learned so well as to become material rather than transparent, because it collides with other chunks…), is withheld from its normal circulation, and opens up a new grammatical and semantic domain.\n\nThis withholding from normal circulation, in fact, conforms to the structure of deferral, whereby an act is converted into a gesture—gestures must be composed so as to indicate that a particular movement could be completed in many other ways, but is instead being (in)completed in this way. And the (in)completion in the case of the aborted act/gesture can also be generalized to a range of as yet unanticipated situations, whereas acts are bound to a restricted context.\n\nThe consequences for ethics of this reciprocal implication and generation of language and thinking are as follows. Ethical concepts like “equality” and “fairness” are not really ideas that people, as folk psychology would have it, believe in and act upon—for one thing, such terms only have meaning within some frame of reference; for another thing, “believe in” and “act upon” are extremely imprecise ways of determining our relations with signs. These and other terms take on their meanings not only negatively, as the rejection of specific, and threatening, forms of inequality and unfairness, but positively, as exemplified by those who resisted or renounced the benefits of the inequality or unfairness in question—and in doing so iterated the originary event by deferring some kind of (potential, perceived) communal self-immolation.\n\nSuch figures serve as iconic signs that are made the center of ritual (whether religious, cultural or political), and the actions of those who commemorate and imitate those figures are themselves privileged. Generative ethical concepts, then, are those that clarify the activities of such moral exemplars. Ethical advances, then, are events that deepen a particular mode of deferral by bringing within the scope of deferral a precondition for the act that has been subject to the prior deferral. Such advances become possible and necessary when the original deferral has eroded, leaving members of the community with the choice of abandoning or restoring it —but the restoration must consist of more than insistence on the continuance of the frayed practice; it must diagnose and denounce the cause of the erosion and establish preventive measures against its recurrence.\n\nHence the need for “deepening.” When such a restoration or return is successful, those who represented it—undoubtedly extremely divisive figures at the time—will have been those who saved the community. The rest of the community will then be taken in tow by those who respond most vigorously to the call of those founders, and by the practices, norms and institutions they found (or the community will become prey to its own indiscipline). This also means that the community need not hold itself to the same degree of rigor as the founders, only to revere them and preserve the possibility of perpetual renewal—the role of monasticism in Christian societies can perhaps be understood in this way: the point is not that everyone should be chaste, eschew worldly goods and honors, and devote themselves exclusively to searching the will of God, but rather that those called to such renunciation should be honored as models to imitate, to the extent that one can, in one’s daily life.\n\nA study in ethics, then, can be reduced to the study of those practices, norms and institutions, which is to say, a study of disciplines, in the fullest sense of the word(2): including both systems, individual and collective, of self-control, selfrefinement and self-overcoming, and institutions of inquiry, characterized by constraints upon observation and vocabularies of analysis and description. Indeed, ideas are nothing more than prompts to the construction of disciplines. And disciplines are constructed within language, also in the fullest sense of that word—from the ostensive, postural/gestural realm, up through imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives to discourse.\n\nThe initiation of a discipline involves the recuperation of a word (again, in the fullest sense—including phrases, idioms, and grammatical constructions), a word with a disciplinary history, and turning that word into the center of a new set of constraints. And, I would argue, that recuperation is a step up the “cline,” or what I will now call an “upcline,” in which a word is deliberately removed from a circulation that splinters its uses, and placed within a new circulation, or idiom, that treats the word as a prompt for a new hierarchy of declaratives, imperatives and ostensives. (Perhaps the prototypical example of the foundational disciplinary move is Plato’s withdrawal of “good” from its circulation as an adjective indifferently applied to “meal,” “athlete,” “house,” etc., to a much more restricted use as the Good.)\n\nDisciplines are spaces set aside for continuous language learning, a perpetual, deliberate break from ostensive and imperative uses of signs, uses that habitually provide smooth paths to satisfaction, to new ways in which, as Tomasello puts in in describing the young child’s internalization of the linguistic symbol, we can become aware of how the “current situation may be attentionally construed by ‘us’” (13).\n\nTo institute a word in this way is to construct a rule for its use, a rule designed to prevent other possible usages, and a rule drawn from some actual or imagined domain of prior usage. Perhaps the earliest such procedure is the ubiquitous ban on pronouncing the name of God—the first word. If the name of God is interdicted, then a system of circumlocutions and euphemisms, drawing on putative “attributes” and “effects” of God, must be elaborated. Interdicting the name of God is one step beyond (a deepening of) the interdiction on appropriating God. The rules of politeness and civility work in a similar way, expressing through procedures applied to tone, gesture, and so on, one’s commitment to not do certain things.\n\nIn each case what is deferred is the blasphemous, coarse, brutal, barbaric—some form of violent appropriation. As Philip Rieff has argued, though, any system of interdictions includes a system of remissions: profane and forbidden practices that are allowed within a circumscribed space, like Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque.” The internal disintegration of a system of sacrality comes when the remitted practices are used to point out the “hypocrisy” of the defenders of the sacred and to reverse the causality between deferral and authority—that is, instead of authority being conferred upon those who submit themselves to greater ordeals of deferral, the system of deferral and discipline becomes seen as a mere justification of the privileges enjoyed by those with authority.\n\nOf course, there will often be quite a bit of accuracy in such charges, but we can distinguish attempts to dismantle discipline from calls to restore it insofar as the former turn their satirical weapons against the latter. A priori hostility towards the sacred and sacred authority, the central fixation of the modern world, and unremitting mockery of such authority, the source of its distractions, always serve the purpose of releasing inhibitions in the name of nature. Those who have been liberated from inhibitions while still in possession of the entire vocabulary of discipline towards the destruction of which they have dedicated themselves have considerable advantages over the defenders of deferral and discipline. This is the advantage exploited for quite a while by Marxism in which, in Michael Polanyi’s terms\n\n[s]cientific skepticism and moral perfectionism join forces… in a movement denouncing any appeal to moral ideals as futile and dishonest. Its perfectionism demands a total\n\n> transformation of society; but this utopian project is not allowed to declare itself. It conceals its moral motives by embodying them in a struggle for power, believed to bring about automatically the aims of utopia… The power of Marxism lies in uniting the two contradictory forces of the modern mind into a single political doctrine. Thus originated a world-embracing idea. In which moral doubt is frenzied by moral fury and moral fury is armed by scientific nihilism. (5960)\n\nUnderstandably, it took liberal citizens quite a while to find means of defending themselves from this combination of frenzy and scientific nihilism disguised as oscillations between skepticism and certainty; perhaps they have not yet completely learned how to do so.\n\nA proliferation of disciplines comes in the wake of the decline of a shared sacrality—God is no longer named, but the word/names that found the disciplines (“society,” “unconscious,” “nature,” etc.) are nonetheless attributes of that which arrests some act of appropriation and instigates shared acts of attention. Any discipline is based upon some form of deferral, and upon some innovative rule of language and, therefore, any discipline adds to our collected means of discerning ethical exemplarity. Even if we take the most extreme apparent counter-example, the euphemistic “language rules” by which the Nazis conspired to avoid overt references to the mass murder they were committing in the very documents facilitating and recording that mass murder, we can see why this is the case.\n\nIn itself, an Oulipo-style language game devised to discuss horrific acts obliquely through rules regarding the uses of synonyms, periphrasis and other methods might be very interesting and instructive, providing markers of the devastation crimes against humanity wreak upon our language (or, perhaps, revealing the vulnerability of our bureaucratic language to totalitarian infiltration); in cases where one is trying to aid victims of such acts, such language games might be a necessarily tactful approach towards enabling the survivor to arrive at his own language for describing what he has undergone. They are only objectionable when they serve to distract others from the fixation upon the destruction of disciplines driving the murderers, playing upon most people’s unwillingness to assume that anyone would be capable of such acts (or, less generously, most people’s desire not to accept the responsibility such knowledge would bring with it) and consequent willingness to put the most charitable construction upon the euphemisms.\n\nIn that case, the Nazis’ resort to such language rules indeed contributes to our capacity for ethical assessment because the euphemisms break down in response to a demand to be provided with the referents that even bureaucratic discourse must ultimately supply.\n\nEuphemistic discourse is ultimately a question of bureaucracy, central to market and democratic societies where everything is recorded and innumerable disputes must be publicly adjudicated according to ever accumulating rules. Since bureaucracies must both record and neutralize conflicts, euphemism is intrinsic to their functioning. They do so by ensuring all positions are included in the system and ensuring that any position that can’t be named by bureaucratic vocabulary is rendered invisible and unthinkable. But part of that system is the mechanisms by which the invisible and unthinkable can be named within the system.\n\nAs more of these processes go online and are governed by algorithms resistant to influence by the subjects of bureaucracy, it seems likely that important ethical questions will cluster around what is a set of globalized processes of normalization. The terms I have been developing here can address the question of bureaucratic language rules as follows: the way bureaucracies direct the attention of the bureaucrats themselves can be along the same line of attention as that provided for their subjects, or the subjects can be turned into objects of attention, treated as nothing more than potential distractions. The way we can tell the difference is by determining whether language learning takes place between the two sides.\n\nCan the bureaucratic terms be used outside of the bureaucracy and are bureaucratic terms permeable enough to allow for the borrowing of outside terms? Even more precisely, do the bureaucrats (in the very broad sense that anyone who publicly assesses others, including doctors, teachers, lawyers, and so on, could be considered one) treat their “charges” in such a way that assumes that those charges might one day, however distant or unlikely, themselves enter the bureaucracy and perform assessments themselves. These questions can only be answered performatively. The sign that the answer is “no” will be that outside idioms are diagnosed rather than integrated, and treated as symptoms of whatever is abnormalized by the bureaucrats.\n\nBut such symptomatic approaches to the subject licenses exceptions to established procedure, exceptions that then become codified within established procedure. The licensing of exceptions is the licensing of the very desires that must be deferred if rulers are to be fit to rule—in this case, what might be the central modern desire, to rule humans effectively, without resistance, as the scientist handles his objects. And the licensing of those desires entails the discrediting of the source of their prohibition, and this discrediting must become a fixation since any interference in the fulfillment of the once prohibited desires comes to be treated in the most inimical way.\n\nIn that case, we can see totalitarianisms, leaving aside the specific ideologies informing them, as titanic explosions of forbidden desires, above all the desires to dominate absolutely, murder, avenge real and perceived injuries, and humiliate. That totalitarian movements are disinhibitory rather than disciplinary thus becomes transparent. But we need not set aside the specific ideologies, since Nazism and Communism are themselves nothing more than elaborate justifications for such a “weaponizing” of bureaucracy; but bureaucracies must now be assumed to be potential “incubators” of such outbreaks, and their monitoring a significant, if not central, concern of ethical thinking.\n\nProceduralist tendencies in modern art are part of this process of monitoring. Producing a work according to an arbitrary rule is preparatory for noting and countering bureaucratic potentialities: the random undoes the increasingly precise probabilism claimed, if not actually accomplished, by contemporary bureaucracies. In that case, any language game, or constraint, any placing of some piece of language within a restricted circulation, serves an ethical purpose insofar as the paradoxicality of the rule is not neutralized (and when it is, the rule can be re-presented along with the paradoxicality of that attempt at neutralization).\n\nIt is decreasingly possible to accept the claim of ancient revelations that the arbitrary has been removed from those revelations, leaving nothing but a historically and anthropologically necessary “content”—indeed, the originary hypothesis introduces into any revelation the paradox of the originary scene, that what is named as significant in any revelation is presumed to already have the significance it can in fact only have via the act of naming. In that case, we can start from the opposite extreme, with the assertion that any constraint, even or especially the most arbitrary (say, a rule against using a particular letter), provides ethical benefits.\n\nSome kind of “upcline,” necessarily results from any constraint, as words (in the broadest sense) are shoved out of joint and become newly available objects of attention, as long as the shared attention it facilitates doesn’t serve to distract attention from some fixation hoping to evade scrutiny. Further, any upcline enhances our capacity for joint attention, which can then always, even if slightly, be transferred to the reconstruction of other constraints. It is also helpful to consider how much of the arbitrary is involved in disciplinary constructions that have come to seem reflections of nature—we can readily see, by now, that, for example, Freud’s re- and restricted circulation of the “unconscious,” and Marx’s of “labor power,” had a great deal of the arbitrary to them (and there was much that was intellectually generative in that arbitrariness)—but such insights come much harder with prominent disciplines closer to home.\n\nIf one were inclined to devise a “proof” for the originary hypothesis, it seems to me we might find one in the fact that it works equally well if we assume that those on the originary scene reflected, with the skill of the great realist novelists, the nature of all those congregated; or, on the other hand, that the originary sign was a contingent, arbitrary construct, arrived at in desperation, thoroughly pragmatic, devoid of ontological claims, and providing nothing more than a rule to cling to. Without an originary hypothesis, other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, to differing extents of course, smuggle in a lot of naturalized assumptions in order to keep the arbitrariness of their constructions at bay—they presuppose a good deal of humanness in the constructions of the human.\n\nThere’s no reason to object to that, but recognizing the ingredients of arbitrariness and idiosyncrasy in the mainstream disciplines might make them more generative of insights and less tolerant of complacent euphemisms. In the end, perhaps the best way of distinguishing the production of new, upclining idioms from obfuscatory euphemisms is that only former can read the latter into a new space by inhabiting the paradoxes of both, indeed all, sets of rules.(3) The euphemism is the tribute evil must pay to joint attention and it can always be taken up so as to direct attention towards the complex of distraction and fixation constitutive of the euphemism.\n\nEthical behavior in everyday life, then, relies on the creation of little disciplinary spaces out of the available semiotic material. This doesn’t mean that all those who “just” treat others as they would like to be treated are unethical; it just means that what, at a given moment and in a given situation, they take to count as “treating others as they would like to be treated” is “down cline,” further grammaticized, from the procedures devised to refuse to participate in a newly perceived form of unequal treatment. Even more, in any action recognizable as ethical, we will be able to identify some “upclining,” however minimal and however mixed with “remittances.”\n\nIt follows that ethical inquiries are best devoted to the exemplary practices initiating new procedures and the way those practices are imagined across various spaces of discipline and deferral. Some potentially exemplary practices must be winning out over others— others that allow for too little remission, or that are too blatantly arbitrary. (I happen to believe that a community that, every week, chooses to omit a specific sound or letter from its oral or written communications, will be, all other things being equal, more ethical than a community that doesn’t. Probably happier, too. But such a procedure would not address what the community itself takes to be ethical dilemmas, something new disciplinary procedures must at least gesture towards. Some distinction between newly generalized/retrieved term and more specialized instantiations will be necessary to constitute the space.)\n\nMy discussion, thus far, conflates religious, cultural, esthetic and scientific practices under the category of the “disciplinary.” I think this is essentially correct, insofar as all of these disciplinary spaces, to the extent that they become more rigorously disciplinary, make society more ethical; even more, they contribute to a vision, like Michael Polanyi’s, of a free society comprised of a vast extent of overlapping disciplinary spaces (what Polanyi calls a “society of explorers”). And while differentiations need to be made across these practices, the best way to do so is to attend to the ways in which they impinge upon one another, rather than trying to establish an a priori ethical hierarchy amongst them.\n\nScientific disciplines that account, in their initiation of new learners, for the esthetic dimension in the attraction and intelligibility of any theory and in the construction of hypotheses, and that honor the “awe” at the unknown that leads one to replace everyday modes of perception with concepts that address the intangible will “upcline” more than those which imagine themselves to be purely “declarative” spaces. Artistic communities that account for their overlap with the sacred and the scientific, perhaps in inventing language rules that mimic the sacred, or in using mathematized procedures in generating rules of composition, will upcline more and be more ethical than those that don’t; and those religious practices that invite the esthetic and rename as God’s work the discoveries of science while reminding scientists that their disciplines, too, have scenic origins, will have more upcline than those that don’t. In each case language learning is maximized because other discourses are allowed to induce the kind of semiotic crises that allow for new problems of language to emerge between us.\n\nDavid Olson, near the conclusion of his study of the role of education in literate and therefore bureaucratic societies, asserts that\n\nIn a modern bureaucratic world, knowledge, virtue and ability take on new form. Institutions such as science preempt knowledge, justice systems preempt virtue, and functional roles preempt general cognitive ability. Thus, ability, knowledge and virtue are construed and pursued less in the form of private mental states and moral traits of individuals than in the form of competence in the roles, norms, and rules of the formal bureaucratic institutions in which they live and work. (288)\n\nOlson is, of course, right, and yet “we can conclude with x degree of certainty that, given the assessment of evidence according to the established procedures, subject to follow up research regarding certain inconclusive results…” cannot completely replace “I think that…”; nor can “the aggregate well-being of the community, measured according to the following metrics and subject to international comparison, is likely to decline…” completely replace “I refuse to…”. “If,” as Olson continues, “these institutions fall apart, personal competence and private virtues tend to vanish with them,” it is equally the case that without reserves of personal competence and private virtues that are not solely dependent upon these institutions, the institutions will fall apart.\n\n(Why, after all, shouldn’t modern bureaucratic institutions, once up and running, be perpetually and automatically self-reproducing?) These reserves are located, in part, in other institutions that import, as I have suggested, idioms at odds with the discipline in question (if all institutions are equally exhausted, though, these reserves will not be forthcoming). Change within disciplines come, as Thomas Kuhn most famously argued, from the emergence of anomalies that can no longer be reconciled with the prevailing research program. It’s hard to see how the competency in roles and rules Olson refers to would enable one to identify, look for, or even anticipate the existence of such anomalies, though, since anomalies will by definition undermine those roles and rules.\n\nOnly living in anomalies and paradoxes, originary thinking, iterating the oscillation between model and rival, sign and object, name and meaning, can sustain the generativity of the disciplines. Upclining is originary thinking—retrieving the word forward, withholding a more general meaning yet to be instantiated from the general semantic circulation, is the way of living in anomalies and paradoxes. It may be true that “I think that…” and “I refuse to…” are no longer worth very much but we can “post” ourselves within disciplines, iterating distracting entrances that allow for attention to be directed to the discipline as such, and attention to disciplinarity is the form attention to scenicity takes today.\n\nThe definition of ethics as upclining might, finally, allow us to revisit the critique of White Guilt and victimary discourse that has become such an important part of Generative Anthropology. White Guilt could, perhaps, be reframed as a deepening of the modes of deferral constitutive of liberalism and democracy, that is, as a targeting of previously invisible preconditions and predilections that make the members of free societies more likely to advocate or remain silent in the face of violence against despised minorities. Language rules like referring to the “N-word” and, more generally, avoiding verbal formulations that single out members of particular groups and make them more likely to face scrutiny that might accord with collective probabilities (say, the greater proportion of black perpetrators of violent crime in the US) but would be unjust when applied to the individual, could be ethical advances.\n\nFor this to be the case, though, the rules would have to apply to anyone within the “game,” that is, anyone who has “standing” to hold another to the rules— whether this would mean that, for example, the “N-word” would be equally off-limits for blacks, or that it would be assumed that any black individual would have his own “blacks” before whom he would be expected to experience a form of White Guilt, or whether a complementary form of “Black Guilt” marking the desire for revenge against the oppressor might emerge, or something else altogether, could not be determined in advance. But new forms of deferral for some that are simultaneously remissions or invitations to transgression for others are unsustainable, and for the same reason that one person can’t play chess while the other is playing checkers—a complete confusion of the rules results, ultimately “liberating” everyone from discipline.\n\nBut without deferral and discipline values can only be derived by reversing the hierarchy between deferral/discipline and authority, so that values descend from the perpetual exposure of hypocrisy, and the liberated are delivered to the competition to commit the transgressions that expose the biggest gap between assertions of deferral and actual appropriation.\n\nThe cognitive linguistics from which I have drawn much of my discussion of language learning, joint attention and disciplinarity speaks, like the phenomenological and Gestalt traditions of which it is at least a distant cousin, of “intentionality.” This is also the language of GA. I insist, though, on making “attentionality” the prior, constitutive concept. I certainly don’t deny intentionality, in the sense of “intending” an object and so constituting and conferring meaning upon that object against a relatively undifferentiated background; nor, even, as a locus of interpretive retrieval of the meaning of texts and acts.\n\nIntentionality within GA is more strongly conceived, as the object is one of mimetic desire and shared deferral. But intentionality depends upon having one’s attention drawn to the object, and having one’s attention drawn depends upon attending to another who brings the object into view and, finally, upon becoming an object of attention of others (an attention one can’t share). Seeing this broader attentional loop as the condition of possibility of intentionality enables the inquirer to direct attention to that in intentionality that is constitutively excluded and yet constitutive; to put it another way, “attentionality” provides a way of accounting for the alterity in language, that which in my utterances is not “mine” but is, rather, passing through me and carrying me along.\n\nThe acknowledgment of the alterity of language, which we owe primarily to the various post-structuralist or post-humanist theories, makes it impossible to speak of the generic human (which would presuppose some universally shared world-as-scene and construct alterity as deviance) and imperative to speak of fields of human being: disciplinarity, or the iteration of a particular attentional loop in a way that makes the boundary between intentionality and alterity in language productive. Productive because knowingly composing a version of the human, and one open to the gazes issuing from other versions, through which come other gazings from more distant but maybe, once attended to within the disciplinary space, more intimate, overlapping spaces.\n\nWorks Cited\n\nAlthusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1972.\n\nBowerman, Melissa, and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Language, Culture, and Cognition 3. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.\n\nGans, Eric. “Originary Ethics.” The Chronicles of Love and Resentment. No. 431. September 15, 2012.\n\nGentner, Dedre, and Lera Boroditsky. “Individuation, Relativity and Early Word Learning,.” in In Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, edited by Melissa Bowerman and Stephen C. Levinson, ed.,214-56. Language, Culture, and Cognition 3. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 214-256.\n\nHall, Stephen S. “Repairing Bad Memories.” MIT Technology Review, Monday June 17, 2013, ng-bad-memories/.\n\nKriss, Sam. “Book of Lamentations.” The New Inquiry. October 18, 2013. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/book-oflamentations/\n\nLawrence, D.H. D.H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy. Sea and Sardinia. Etruscan Places. New York:, Penguin Books, 1972.\n\nLucy, John A. Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language. 12. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.\n\nOlson, David R. Psychological Theory and Educational Reform: How School Remakes Mind and Society. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.\n\nPolanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.\n\nRieff, Philip. Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How It Has Been Taken From Us. New York: Vintage, 2008.\n\nSlobin, Dan I. “Form-function Relations: How do Children Find out What They Are?” In Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, edited by Melissa Bowerman and Stephen C. Levinson, 406-449. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.\n\nSloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013.\n\nTomasello, Michael. Constructing a Language: A User-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard\n\nUniversity Press, 2005.\n\nWhorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1956.\n\nNotes\n\n1. For discussions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the best place to begin is Whorf’s Language, Thought and Reality; for a more recent discussion, see John A. Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. (back)\n\n2. Such a study has gotten well under way in Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life, albeit not on the linguistic terms I will propose here. (back)\n\n3. For a very enlightening and enjoyable example of the kind of thing I have in mind, or at least one kind, see Sam Kriss’s “The New Lamentations,” an essay in the online journal The New Inquiry that reads Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition as a dystopian novel: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/book-of-lamentations/. In this way, it seems to me, a hypothetical origin of psychiatry from which the discipline could be imagined to have deviated is indirectly proposed, and therefore a possible post within the discipline. (back)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "calculus-of-covenants-fifth-generation-warfare",
      "title": "A Calculus of Covenants; or, Fifth Generation Warfare (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "May 2007",
      "url": "https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/a-calculus-of-covenants-or-fifth-generation-warfare/",
      "content": "Part of the appeal of \"realist\" foreign policy prescriptions must lie in their promise to restore a status quo ante that has been \"disrupted\" by some avoidable \"mistake\" on our part. If there are rules to the realist game of argumentation, the first move they would dictate would be to find that mistake in some deviation from the most widely accepted and documented \"consensus\" available; the second move would be to call for the convocation of all those parties most likely to re-affirm that consensus, finding some scapegoat to organize the conference around. The disruption of the consensus can then be traced back, as narrowly as possible, to a single offending action (and actor) and undone by designating that party's punishment or penance; in which case the conference serves as a ritual of purification, closing up some hole or breach in reality, rather like running a film backwards.\n\nIt is true, realism was once something more than that; or, perhaps, that was usually enough in a world organized around self-interested and broadly culturally compatible leading states and their satellites; today, though, there is not a single consensus or even deal we can imagine brokering among the international diplomatic class that wouldn't be vulnerable to a well-placed bomb or manufactured outrage about cartoons.\n\nStill the realist tendency is one more widely shared, and perhaps clung to especially in times of crisis: in general, it is a good practice, whether in politics, science or everyday interaction, to hold as much of reality constant as we can while we work on some particular part of it we are most interested in at the moment: letting \"all other things be equal,\" as we often say when we try to focus on the main principle at stake. My own discussion here will simply ask that the reader accept that sometimes, even very seldom, this approach is not only wrong but exceedingly dangerous; that these times will be those when there is no way to \"equalize\" \"all other things\" because other things have become incommensurable with each other; and, finally, that now might very well be such a time.\n\nIf the reader can entertain such a perspective, at least for the duration of reading (and thinking about) this essay, then what we might gain is not a license to reject the commitment to measuring our thinking and actions against reality, but some insight into the constitution of (human, social) reality itself. Because if there is a sense in which reality has been lost, we are confronted with an ethical and political far more than epistemological problem: our most minimal obligation today would be to restore a common reality.\n\nI will propose that we have the following three ways of constituting reality. First of all, through repetition: I recognize something as \"real,\" measure its reality insofar as it conforms to some past event. This is the form of preservative reality provided to us by tradition and routine. Second, there is the establishment of reality through domination: something is recognizable to the extent that it corresponds to my own will. Much of our understanding of cause and effect (in which the cause \"dominates\" the effect) derives from this mode; so does our understanding of work and technology, in which we \"force\" nature to coincide with our will; and so, of course, does political tyranny, which offers a stabilization of reality.\n\nAnd, third, through reciprocity. Here, reality is given in the tangible results of the common actions of two or more individuals, and these tangible results are in turn \"available\" in conditions created for future common actions. \"Promises\" are a perfect example here, in which we create a common world through our ability to refer to my commitment to perform some act that you will recognize as a fulfillment of my promise.\n\nRepetition and force will always enter into the constitution of reality—we couldn't evade the notion of cause and effect that follows from my awareness of the transformations I can effect and measure even if we wanted to; nor, needless to say, could we completely eschew any reference to past events in making sense of present ones. If these modes of constituting reality overflow their proper domains, though, they ultimately de-realize: the common proverb that if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail speaks to the excesses of domination, while Santayana's definition of the fanatic as one who redoubles his efforts once he has forgotten his aims points to the limits of repetition.\n\nThe only thing that can keep these modes of constituting reality within their proper boundaries, though, is our third mode: only through reciprocity can we set the necessary limits. But the problem we always face is that, while we are \"within\" those other modes, reciprocity can only appear as threatening to \"stability,\" as it renders cause and effect, command and control, ritual and habit, extremely problematic. Finally, it seems, especially when we inhabit those other modes, that reciprocity can be dispensed with: with repetition and domination, we can build, we can possess, we can preserve what we have produced—why risk it all, and in the name of what?\n\nThese objections would be unanswerable, except for a small, negligible minority of lovers of freedom for its own sake, if it were not for the fact that repetition and domination themselves ultimately depend upon reciprocity. The immense value of Eric Gans' originary hypothesis of the origin of language reveals itself here. For those unfamiliar with my previous discussions of Gans' hypothesis in this journal, Gans proposes that the first sign emerges on what he calls the originary scene, in the midst of the originary event. We reduce our presuppositions regarding the advanced hominid who must have been our immediate predecessor to a minimum: such a hominid would have been distinguished from other species by its more advanced mimetic capacities.\n\nAt some point, an intensely desirable object is brought into the group: one member after another reaches for it. Added to the sheer appetitive attraction of the object is each member intensifying his movement toward the central object in escalating rivalry with each other member. The animal hierarchy, based upon the dominance of the \"alpha\" animal, breaks down in the common rush toward the center. In this scene, which threatens the destruction of the group in a convulsion of violence, one member emits what Gans calls the \"aborted gesture of appropriation.\" This gesture, imitated in turn by the rest of the group, arrests the propulsion toward the center and establishes the first human community, organized around the first sacred object, the object of desire itself, to which is attributed the power to repel appropriative action. Thus is born the human species, defined as the species which poses a greater threat to its own existence than any other external threat and who has invented representation as the deferral of violence.\n\nIn this originary event, we can see both why reciprocity is necessary for the constitution of any human reality and why these modes would be viewed suspiciously by those (which is to say, all of us, sometimes) inhabiting the other modes. The aborted gesture can only work if it is imitated by others: it creates the first \"virtual reality,\" a reality which is sustained by nothing more than our commitment to sustain it. Even worse, my own commitment to sustain must rest upon my reliance upon the other's unprovable commitment to do the same. This is all enormously disruptive to the capacity for repetition and domination which links us to the animal kingdom, and, indeed, to nature in general.\n\nAnd it is equally disruptive each time it recurs, because the scene is originary not merely because it comes first, but because it provides an untranscendable and infinitely generative model for the deferral of violence, still and always the main task of representation as we will always be mimetic beings. Even more, each new mode of deferral (the \"big man\" of the tribal community, the monotheistic God, the modern individual, free government and marketplace) by enhancing our freedom and hence opportunities for reciprocity simultaneously produces new grounds for mimetic rivalry, envy and resentment. We are always on that originary scene, tasked with the obligation to discover or invent the gesture that will defer our headlong rush into our self-annihilation as a species.\n\nSo, the only way to restore a \"broken\" reality is through some kind of \"contagious\" gesture of reciprocity; by the same token, though, the emergence and compelling character of such a gesture (which, we must remember is probably likely to fail, as was likely the case with our originary scene, many, many times before it \"takes\") is the surest sign of the depths of the crisis. The temptation will be overwhelming to deny the crisis by taking the sign for the cause and scapegoating precisely those who stand between all of us and our being engulfed. If only they would stop pointing to all the symptoms of the crisis we would be perfectly fine!\n\nThe Left—what I have called the \"Global Intifada\"—is at war with such reciprocally constituted, what we might term \"pledged,\" realities. For the Global Intifada, pledged realities are nothing more than pseudo-agreements among the powerful (those who have something to lose and therefore something to pledge), pseudo because they \"always already agree\" on the fundamental point of preserving their power; such pledges are, further, deceptions aimed at dispossessing the already dispossessed of their only possession, which is the knowledge that they have nothing to lose but their chains; and, finally, they are attempts to de-stabilize the cultic rituals which have been built to consecrate and preserve the victim status of those \"targeted\" by the pledged reality.\n\nNote how committed the Global Intifada itself is to a certain, hard and fast notion of reality—the postmodern relativism of the Left applies to disputable values and claims to objective observation, not to the \"testimony\" of those who have been victimized and the all important cadre of those who solicit, record convey, interpret and translate into policies and institutions that testimony. That reality is defended fiercely, in special prosecutorial style, gathering all of the consequences of the actions of powerful agents and treating them all as if the agent were equally liable for even the most remote of them; posing questions to such powerful agents aimed at eliciting inconsistencies (\"perjury traps\"), constant repetition of any \"fact\" that has been written into the \"record\" (of the liberal global media, Human rights Groups, etc.) regardless of later exposures (which are, in turn, demonized, along with alternative outlets producing them, as the work of \"partisan hacks\").\n\nThe perceived power to create such realities and the desperate need to do so are both evident in the recent decision by the EU to render statements regarding \"Islamic\" terrorism \"false\" by diktat; and the corresponding erasure of the term \"War on Terror\" by the Democrats from the new military budget. The \"War on 'terror,'\" you see, is a \"partisan\" phrase; there are only specific military actions in Iraq, specific naval movements in the Persian Gulf, specific troop transfers to Africa, etc. Anything that doesn't provide evidence of the ongoing crime against humanity that is Western civilization is reduced to the barest, most positivist, statement of facts—it is here, in fact, where the Global Intifada finds a presumably unlikely ally in the senile \"realists.\"\n\nGiven this fanatical construction of a \"progressive\" reality it seems to me that there is something naïve in theories of \"4th generation warfare.\" The argument for applying this term to our current, \"asymmetrical,\" conflict lies in the assertion that the real target of guerilla and terrorist operations is public opinion in the \"occupying\" country. So far, so good. Still, there seems to me something missing in accounts of this \"target.\" Take the following, rather typical formulation (taken from the Department of Defense website):\n\nIf one accepts that the pen is mightier than the sword, then the picture is worth 1,000 words. It follows that the video tape must surely be worth 10,000 words, and interactive multi-media could be considered priceless. The shock of seeing a HMMWV filled with American soldiers being blown up by a command detonated explosive before our eyes is psychologically and sociologically traumatic. In addition to such images being used as recruiting venues for the Muslim extremists, these images serve as information arrows directed at the hearts of the American public. Nightly viewing of the carnage of blown up HMMWVs and wounded and killed American soldiers will eventually affect the collective psyche of the American public in this war, just as it did in Vietnam. Moreover, this is exactly the enemy's strategy. They intend to defeat us not with bullets but with images until we get tired of the war and withdraw – leaving them the victors. While we Americans dominate the physical war, our own practice of information warfare against these enemies is sadly lacking.\n\nTo start at the end, our \"practice of information warfare against these enemies\" will be \"lacking\" as long as we take for granted that the American public's experience of war is inevitably one describable in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder. It may very well be that if there had been TV during the Civil War or World War II we could not have sustained public support for even those conflicts, which is to say that the \"images\" in question automatically disable us. I doubt it, though—if there had been TV during the Civil War we would have 60 Minutes exposés of the slave quarters on many a plantation, and in World War II we would have been brought images of Auschwitz and the Bataan Death March.\n\nThat is, such images can anger and energize as much as neuter us, which means the real question is, who is wielding them and why, and what accounts for the very specific forms taken by \"our\" vulnerabilities. What, for that matter, would information warfare against our enemies look like? Does anyone remember there was some talk of that in the first Bush Administration, when Donald Rumsfeld floated the possibility of disinformation campaigns? If you don't remember it was because the media jumped all over the idea as a \"Watergate\" or \"Vietnam\" style abuse of executive power, and the Pentagon quickly backtracked and apologized for advancing such unseemly proposals.\n\nIn other words, it appears that \"information warfare\" waged by our side is itself \"psychologically and sociologically traumatic.\" And there is a simple reason for this: the only way you can wage effective information warfare is if you are certain your side is right and deserves to win; but if you think that the problem is that the government and military are not doing what they could not anyway do in a thousand years anyway, which is beat the media at the \"spin\" game (or, even more implausibly, bring them over to your side), then the odds are very good that you are not all that certain and merely want the media to affirm your own good intentions.\n\nIf there is something naïve about 4th generation warfare theories, it would be just as true to say there is something cynical in them. There is something in these claims of spontaneous revulsions to scenes of civilian suffering and news of military deaths that is just a little bit too programmatic: that is, the slogans are now constructed so as to advertise the revulsion the theory claims one is bound to experience. As in many other ways, if Vietnam was history as tragedy, Iraq has been its return as farce in terms of the pornography of public outrage. Think about a slogan/bumper sticker like \"NOT IN MY NAME\": while 4th generation war theory presumably envisages a long process, akin to the \"stages of grief,\" in which one at first supports, then goes through various stages of disillusion, and then finally, with sorrow, dissociates, here the final stage is simply slapped up front.\n\nFar from the spontaneity the theory presupposes, here one separates oneself from legitimately established national aims because we all know it will simply be \"Vietnam all over again\" (IRAQ IS ARABIC FOR VIETNAM was another similarly solipsistic bumper stick often seen in the early days of the war). Similarly, the \"insurgency\" in Iraq doesn't even go through the motions of pretending to be \"popular\"—they seem to be quite aware that their own \"approval ratings\" (somewhere in the single digits, it would appear) will not interfere in the slightest with the role assigned them by the Western media. The dynamic has therefore changed in ways we need to identify.\n\nWhile I acknowledge that the pre-emptive anti-warriors were a small minority the media has ensured (along with the intrinsic difficulty of the undertaking, of course) that their pre-fabricated template now has prevailed, despite the far fewer casualties, in a far more urgent struggle, and against an enemy far weaker (at least in this theater) and more unapologetically vicious (al-Qaeda hasn't bothered asking Hollywood stars to pose with some of its \"martyrs\") than the Vietnamese Communists.\n\nIn other words, 4th generation war theory could just as easily be seen as providing the script for the alliances holding the Global Intifada together as strategy for defeating that alliance. Indeed, I haven't done a survey, but I wonder how many of those pundits and theorists claiming we \"have already lost\" in Iraq before the first shots were fired were 4th generation theorists. Of course, I am not criticizing classical counter-insurgency tactics of securing the civilian population and supporting local institutions which can undermine support for rebel groups—such an approach is very properly focused on creating conditions under which we can leave a particular territory in reliable hands.\n\nNor am I claiming that support at home for such operations need not be thoughtfully cultivated. But isolating assiduously the pre-emptive defeatists is a different way of thinking about how to do than managing images or competing within the already existing media space. President Bush seems to have been aware, from a very early point, that a certain, substantial percentage (perhaps 25-30%) of the American population will never support any war under any conditions (support for Afghanistan as the \"good war\" among many leftists was retroactive, contingent upon its contrast with the \"bad war\" in Iraq—and even here, if you listen carefully, Afghanistan is where the war on terror \"really\" is because that is where the \"criminal\" conspiracy was hatched and those directly responsible, i.e., indictable, are to be found). But this means—and here is where 4th generation theory, understandably, gets \"wobbly\"—that contemporary warfare is inevitably civil war as well as holy war, on all sides.\n\nSo, our problem is in fighting a global, holy, civil war over the constitution of reality. The Global Intifada is an attempt to \"de-scenify\" reality, to abstract reality from the necessarily unpredictable action and counteraction, trial and error, with all the resulting unintended consequences. The epistemology of the Global Intifada transforms \"facts\" directly into \"conclusions\" and \"conclusions\" directly into a \"consensus\" on \"solutions.\" To see a bombed marketplace in Baghdad is to know, with Cartesian certainty, that the U.S. has always already lost, that the Sunnis and Shia have been fighting an uninterrupted and uninterruptible civil war of 1400 years and will continue to do so indefinitely, and other obvious, undeniable truths.\n\nThe US must immediately retreat and surrender its imperial pretensions, allowing the UN, EU and NGOs to take their rightful places as global mediators. Any other response is to \"deny reality\" (or, in other contexts, to \"attack science\"). This attempt to channel all of reality into what is the equivalent of a political \"precautionary principle,\" in which any innovation must first prove it will do no harm is predicated upon a narrative which is believed in devoutly by the transnational progressives upon whom the jihadists are parasitic: Western modernity, in breaking down traditional boundaries, has set in motion unlimited competition and hence rivalry between individuals, nations and corporations; this unlimited competition led inexorably to the 30 year long Western Civil War over possession of the world's wealth, territories and very future; the unspeakable crimes of Nazism are nothing but the quintessence of this struggle without normative boundaries, revealing the \"logical conclusion\" of nationalism, belief in racial or cultural superiority, middle class normalcy, bureaucratic complacency, and unrestricted private property.\n\nThe defeat of Nazi Germany by the admittedly (so far, at least—but for many it seems to be a close call) lesser evil of the United States merely set the process in motion again with renewed superpower rivalry, and now under the shadow of nuclear annihilation; but, another legacy has emerged from the ashes of World War II. This legacy is embodied in the UN, which has criminalized war, except in the most narrowly defined conditions of self-defense, and built upon the foundations of post-Nuremberg international law, with its exponentially expanding applications, claims and attendant institutions and activist class—these agencies have, for decades, but with increasing self-confidence after the fall of the USSR, been engaged in the necessarily disguised task of criminalizing not merely war, but all those evils that, in their \"logical conclusions,\" lead us back to \"Auschwitz.\"\n\nThe front line of this struggle has been the defense of the rights of the formerly colonized peoples, including not merely the right to independent states but to cultural integrity, the first violation of which, as we \"know,\" is simultaneously the first step back to—yes, Auschwitz. And now, after 9/11, with an American administration drawing its support from precisely those elements of the American polity most infuriatingly resistant to the tutelage of the \"progressives,\" and explicitly determined to set in motion all the elements of American sovereignty and national power in a bid for world leadership that perfectly fits the post-Auschwitz template for a genocidally inclined propaganda campaign—we are fighting for good against evil (oh, yeah, where have we heard that before?); the entire, meticulously pieced together, so far Potemkin, but, once the world has attained sufficient Enlightenment (without even realizing that it is doing so), rock solid, progressive edifice of reality—all this might be smashed by this bumpkin in one insane rampage! This means war, and one without boundaries.\n\nBut the recent progress of the Global Intifada has the beneficial side effect of exposing the devices involved and \"cracks\" in the progressive construction of reality. The Achilles Heel of the Global Intifada is that it can't really exercise the power it gains, it can only use any conquest as a launch pad for further assaults on \"pledged\" reality. This is as true for the Democratic Congress as it is for Hamas: like any extortion racket, the Global Intifada cannot transcend its own parasitism. This means that the hordes of the Global Intifada must continually be creating new enemies behind its own front lines. I would further like to suggest that the Democrats, in pulverizing the tradition of leaving partisan political division at the water's edge, have actually done us an enormous favor.\n\nSuch restraint was unlikely to survive an age of internet, You Tube and billionaire political entrepreneurs anyway. If leading Democrats and free lance ambassadors like Jimmy Carter are now free, as a self-appointed government-in-exile (the \"real\" government, once our \"nightmare\" has been ended), to confer with America's enemies abroad and undermine U.S. policy, then anyone, including private individuals and various public groups are free to support currently inconvenient allies, and promote, modify, and, most importantly, fill in the gaps of that policy. How many times have you heard someone (even yourself) say that the Bush Administration has been woefully inadequate in areas like public diplomacy?\n\nBut anything that we might say the Administration should be doing in these areas we could easily be doing ourselves. What is to stop us—we, the people—from setting up a Radio Free Iran, or joint Iraqi-American educational enterprises in Iraq (for the latter we would admittedly need military protection, but, even here, perhaps private security services can be employed)?\n\nAt home, there is likewise nothing stopping us from the most \"subversive\" campaign we could conduct against the domestic branch of transnational progressivism: forming alliances, based upon conservative and libertarian principles, with precisely those \"victim\" groups upon which leftism depends. The right has already made some small steps here, in recruiting excellent black candidates and raising issues like school choice and vouchers as well as David Horowitz's recruitment of college students on behalf of their own academic freedom, but here, again, private covenants can take things much further, organizing and publicizing groups of Arab and Muslim Americans against terrorism, workers against trade unions and so on.\n\nWe need not be concerned with attracting only a small minority at first—the specific weakness of the progressive Left, like Communism, is that it must claim to speak in the name of unanimity of entire groups, and so the existence of even small groups of dissenters can be quite corrosive. And I'm sure I don't need to say anything about the conservative contribution to the information revolution well under way.\n\nThese more specific interventions rest upon a mode of political thinking I would call a \"calculus of covenants.\" Reality is entirely framed in terms of covenants and their subsequent fulfillments, betrayals, renewals, and expansions; noteworthy actions are those situated within this frame, or engaged in defending or attacking the very possibility of a pledged reality. \"Facts\" are, similarly, recognizable as such insofar as they testify to the ongoing reality of some covenantal frame. In writing this very essay, I am proposing a covenant to you as my reader, a covenant which I hope to present as a renewal and extension of a whole history of covenants which themselves must be redeemed to be real; a covenant you consider and partially accept by virtue of continuing to read the text but will ultimately accept, reject, or revise and present, implicitly or explicitly to others.\n\nThe beauty of a calculus of covenants is that anyone can do it; in fact, we are all always doing it. Covenants are both malleable and durable, and each covenant reveals the possibility of others. If I propose, as a way of understanding U.S. policy in Iraq, a covenant with all those who want security and freedom in Iraq, in Christopher Hitchen's words, that we be the \"militia for those who have no militia,\" that not only directs me toward the creation of appropriate policies but simultaneously sets me on the search for covenants among other Americans who would like to participate in this Iraqi-American covenant, with those of other nations who would like to participate, and so on, with each successive covenant modifying and accruing to the previous ones.\n\nI mean covenant here in the strong sense: not merely a contract, in which one agrees to exchange certain goods and services, but, rather, an agreement before the eyes of God, whom we invoke as judge, which is to say an agreement to share the same sacred object. At the same time, if it turns out that there are not enough freedom loving people in Iraq to support my proposed covenant, or that for whatever reason we are no longer able to sustain the forces needed to be their \"militia,\" rather than simply abandoning or revoking the covenant, insofar as there must be a least a single freedom loving individual in Iraq I keep faith with the covenant by supporting those individuals as civil disobedients or dissidents in whatever manner is possible, and along with whatever \"lateral\" covenants emerge in the process.\n\nIn the process, I produce a veritable market in covenants: by making myself worthy as an ally I make myself more valuable as a prospective ally, by creating en during and prosperity producing covenants I make those covenants more valuable and attractive. I (we) are therefore able to make higher demands for those wishing to compact with us, and can become more complex and discerning in specifying the precise object of each covenant, along with different levels of participation and obligation. This is what I would like to call \"5th Generation Warfare,\" or holy, civil war over the constitution of reality. The constantly unfolding, ever unpredictable nature of our own nevertheless devoutly adhered to covenants reveals the aggregations of the Global Intifada to be glued together by nothing more than repetition and domination.\n\nCovenants require that one side put forth their hand first and wait for a response, accepting that the result might be a compromise that neither anticipated and will be generative for that very reason; the Left can do nothing more than repeat its traumatic origins in \"Mc Carthyism,\" or \"Watergate,\" or the \"Palmer Raids,\" or any other revelation of the anthropological \"ultimacy\" of the victimary status of those ejected from the normal center.\n\nAll institutions and relationships can thereby be resolved into their founding covenants and the degeneration and regeneration of those covenants. One of the most pernicious elements of the post-World War II, welfare state culture has been the assumption of a consensual \"mainstream,\" authorized to marginalize \"extremes.\" The deflection of American civilization during this period was toward anti-covenantal, anti-constitutional forms, toward the rule of experts in circularly self-accrediting institutions. Even conservatives play into the logic of such institutions when they complain about the \"liberal bias\" of the media.\n\nThe very notion that the media should be unbiased is a liberal one, and unwittingly supports the association of journalism with institutions genuinely charged with disinterestedness, like scholarly activity and, more important, the judiciary. Criticizing journalists for falsifying the reality they report on is perfectly appropriate, of course, but there is nothing wrong with a newspaper or TV station primarily concerned with eviscerating one party in particular. The most healthy media environment is one in which each outlet seeks to please and increase its audience, and in which each reader therefore has access not merely to publications with widely varying political stances but publications with widely varying tolerance for error (so there would be some insisting upon very high standards of verification while others sacrifice some credibility in the interest of getting better hidden stories, or getting stories faster), with different standards for \"appropriateness,\" etc.—and without any one or any combination having the kind of near monopoly status that enables it to be certain that ignoring some other interest won't cut into its own audience share.\n\nMeanwhile, newsmakers themselves would harvest their own \"value\" as objects of attention, and confer it upon those media markets they favor, while always needing to calculate the value they might be losing by sacrificing the attention of another audience, ultimately trying to use their \"capital\" to use antagonistic outlets for their own purposes.\n\nThe same is true, more problematically but therefore more exemplarily, for more entrenched institutions like our universities. In the last instance, universities provide their graduates with something employers or graduate and professional schools want; somewhere along the line it is likely that other ways of providing that, more cheaply and perhaps better, will be invented. On-line \"academies,\" for example, modeled on the discovery of free inquiry in ancient Greece, might hire tutors and issue certificates that such a participant has received such an evaluation from other participants in a reading group on American literature, or sociology, or a for pay apprenticeship at a blog or in a hospital or laboratory, and that, furthermore, this group including the following members and was supervised by the following tutors…in the end, one would put together a package that would have a certain value for employers and professional schools.\n\nIn that case, each person and each institution will have to take responsibility for assessing value, which would, moreover, be constantly changing as such groups would most likely have far more rapid turnover than today's universities. The day of the New York Times or Harvard \"brand\" would, thankfully, be over. And, rather than all of us being peppered by hysterical assertions of academic freedom or journalistic privilege, subversive and illuminating truths would come out because somewhere along the line we would find someone interested in helping the discoverer disseminate them, and we would all get in the habit of \"shopping around.\"\n\nI would consider such associations products of a genuinely covenantal culture insofar as they would refer us back to the pledged reality each generates, rather than some manufactured or hyped \"right\" or empty references to the public good. Also, in order to \"receive\" and judge the results of such institutions we would need to covenant with others ourselves: enforcing an acceptable degree of transparency would require that we collaborate with others on determining norms and standards, on the distance between the reality and the pledge. We would all be gatekeepers, editors and certification boards for each other. And we can already begin to speak in these terms now, and thereby help hasten the arrival of such a reality, by examining institutions in terms of covenants between teachers and students and among faculty, between media outlets and readers and viewers and among journalists themselves: what, precisely, can we determine to be the implicit terms of any particular \"covenant,\" training ourselves to ignore banal invocations of journalistic \"ethics\" or academic \"rigor\" or \"consensus.\"\n\nThere can and will, indeed, be covenants in which the participants pledge to suspend existing assumptions and arrive at a representation of reality all could contribute to, but the basis for judging such efforts will lie in the specific \"devices\" and \"procedures\" the covenant itself accounts for.\n\nProposing or even, at times, acting unilaterally on the assumption of a covenant with those behind enemy lines provides the most promising way of generating a pledged reality capable of displacing the viral one imposed by the Global Intifada. I mean this, first of all, in the simple sense of creating facts that can't ignored because they in turn create webs of other facts which ultimately touch other facts that pretty much anyone would be interested in. In my most recent essay for New English Review, I proposed that the Israelis might offer citizenship to individuals (and their families) who help in substantive ways with finding kidnapped Israeli soldiers (or, let's add, help break up the system of terror in other visible ways).\n\nThe principle can be extended in many ways. We should, for example, be opening cracks in the increasingly monolithic Muslim world, by asserting Christian and liberal interests wherever we find them and introducing them where we don't. If the Saudis can fund madrassahs throughout the world and give millions to fund chairs in Middle Eastern Studies we can surely establish Friedrich Hayek Centers for the Study of Economic and Political Liberty in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and insist that our government make permitting the existence of such institutions a condition of diplomatic relations with these countries. Not to mention supporting every single persecuted Christian we hear about, and setting in place mechanisms (like rewards and promises of asylum) to make sure that we do hear about them.\n\nPrivate institutions can provide funding for memorials to the victims of jihad (past and present), as Marianne Pearl called upon the Pakistani people to do for her murdered husband. In this way we would be creating realities, around which events and conflicts would coalesce, and on our terms—this would not be mere spin or disinformation, in part because we would willing concede control over the outcome. Our own position would be impeccable, in terms of both human rights principles and long term self-interest, and we would be placing ourselves (or, to be honest, some of us would be placing the rest) in situations where all we need is courage.\n\nMost important, though, is what I would like to call, only partly tongue-in-cheek, a \"Jew-Crusader Alliance.\" I may be wrong here, but nothing, I think, could shatter the confidence of the jihadists more than actually seeing joint American-Israeli military operations; and then hearing us defend those operations unapologetically. We can be generous to Muslims who would explicitly abandon claims to Islamic supremacy precisely to the extent that we have freed ourselves from all conditions our \"sensitivity\" to the various hang-ups of the Muslim public has placed upon us. As along as we take for granted that \"of course\" any actual implementation of the U.S.-Israeli alliance would be \"impossible\" because it would enrage the Muslim \"street,\" then we are still allowing their rage (or fabricated expressions thereof) to determine our policy.\n\nThis, of course, would ultimately be a public policy, but how about some think tank drawing up and publicizing the contingency plans for, say, a joint Israeli-American occupation of the Saudi oil fields? We need to find ways, among other things, of signaling how far we are ready to go if our present, more humane policy doesn't work; and, as I have been suggesting, it would be far \"healthier\" for those of us impatient with the range of self-imposed restrictions under which we are currently operating if we could take action rather than gripe, and actions that, like the Swift Boat Vets media \"operation\" during the 2004 campaign, would actually help a well intentioned President (or encircle a less well intentioned one) even if he couldn't find a way to endorse them.\n\nThis would take us into the fifth generation of warfare, in which the immense resources and advantages of liberty are set to work to break up totalitarianism and are no longer merely protected from them. And the approach I am arguing for would enable us, not to arrive at some ersatz and impotent \"consensus,\" but at a bracketing of all decisive questions that we don't actually need to take on right now: for example, we do need to strengthen our civil institutions and principles by defending them domestically and globally, especially against more or less covert attempts to insinuate Sharia law, but we don't necessarily have to decide once and for all about the reformability of Islam; we do need to distinguish between actual allies (those willing to fight and die with us) and formal and false ones, but we don't necessarily have to decide yet whether or not the UN or NATO might turn out to be useful in some ways or need to be dispensed with.\n\nEven my proposal for common Israeli-American action raises no principled questions, only ones of prudence—and that a mere question of prudence has become so taboo is itself revealing. In fact, our willingness to consider such a break with an established taboo would itself be a sign of our enhanced \"market value\" as an ally; conversely, its \"unthinkability\" testifies to our sinking value. Clearly there would be a great deal to debate here, but the point would first of all to create events worthy of sparking such debate. In other words, we should first of all \"seed\" the world with \"sites\" we are ready to pledge ourselves to support and defend, and let that be our continuing source of reality."
    },
    {
      "slug": "constitutionalism-political-thinking-center",
      "title": "Constitutionalism: A Political Thinking of the Center (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2007",
      "url": "https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/constitutionalism-a-political-thinking-of-the-center/",
      "content": "Our political map is defunct, making it urgent that a new political center be forged. Both Democrats and Republicans have revealed their irrelevance to the world created on 9/11, their deafness to the lessons of Flight 93. The eagerness with which some Republicans now rush to declare themselves \"Reagan Republicans\" would be comforting if not suspicious insofar as such pieties serve to dispel our focus on the inevitability of a coming confrontation with Iran, to start with the most obvious. Can anyone really argue that institutions such as the CIA, the State Department, the UN, and NATO, for starters, give any signs of meaningfully grappling with the terrain of our present reality?\n\nAnd, yet, has anyone anywhere near a position of power seriously proposed, not necessarily a frontal assault on (why waste the energy?) but end runs around them—new forms of intelligence gathering genuinely aimed at getting inside the other and accountable for the usefulness of precisely that information which will never ruffle the surface of public life; new modes of diplomacy which reach out to civil institutions, friendly minorities and groupings, and dissidents for the purpose of targeting public opinion and transforming it (fine, Secretary of State Rice made some sounds about this); new alliances predicated upon what we and others are willing to risk together rather than platitudes, mythical shared histories and inertia; new comprehensive revisions of international law and the laws of war? Etc.\n\nWe seem incapable, not of finding \"consensus\" or arriving at \"bi-partisanship,\" but of improvising, of trusting those to whom we delegate responsibilities, of responding to events and realities resistant to old formulas. The sclerotic condition of our governing institutions is evidence of the disintegration of the simulacrum of a political center which progressive politics has sustained through the Cold War stand-off, the welfare state, a monopolistic media establishment and elite academy, since World War II. The guiding progressive faith in management of social life by rational experts (supported by the genuine need to not \"make any sudden moves\" under conditions of MAD) buffered from the irrationality and selfishness of what is from this standpoint little more than a lynch mob straining at the leash by layers of self-credentialing, self-policing specialists with increasingly arcane and empty \"ethical codes\" could not be more out of place in the 9/11 world in which we find ourselves.\n\nIn this world, what will be most valued are initiative, a willingness to test out novel forms of cooperation, a willingness to tie security to our own willingness to take risks, and, perhaps, above all, a refusal to be bullied by those who threaten that each and every action uncushioned by layers of precedent and consensus will arouse one or another \"street\"—a readiness, in short, to reject blackmail and to move forward even if others are paralyzed by it.\n\nLet's name conservatives those who believe that example provides the only reliable guide for acting in history. Conservatives might follow those examples which have been most successful (first of all successful in surviving as examples); or those which are most \"exemplary,\" which is to say are the target of the ambitious and idealistic (such examples are likely to be the most fragile). Let's also say that the strength of conservatism is precisely in the articulation and tension between these poles, as well as between incommensurable, but equally worthy, examples. Conservatism can never be a governing modern philosophy in its own right: it can never be fully compatible with the desires and resentments democracy must allow to circulate or, for that matter, with Christianity, an especially radical creed (an evangelical wave through the Middle East, for example, would depend upon a faith in the possibility of the unprecedented), even while it is capable of reconciling itself with these radicalisms after the fact and revering the traditions they produce.\n\nProgressivism, meanwhile, is the belief that scientific rationality provides the most reliable guide for acting in history. Progressivism is even less capable of governing modern society than conservatism: the defining feature of scientific rationality, the setting and testing of hypotheses, is either irrelevant (and therefore ultimately hostile) to democratic decision making (why should a majority of citizens feel obliged to support legislation just because it has a \"scientific\" imprimatur; how are citizens to be expected to adjudicate scientific disputes in ways compatible with the tempo of public life?) or useful in a way that paradoxically undermines the possibility of using it as a \"guide\": in social life, the scientist is inevitably part of the experiment, while the experiment, insofar as by definition it involves setting something new in motion (say, a voucher system for education in some inner city school district), therefore posits individual freedom as an \"invariable,\" with the result that the experiment marginalizes the power of the scientists themselves.\n\nSince progressive politics must be interested in defending the power of the self-appointed social scientists first of all, it is ultimately the politics of those driven by a visceral hostility toward any public, shared sacrality, religious or secular (\"patriotism\"), which is to say everything that makes citizens \"irrational.\" Progressives, therefore, enter those institutions predicated upon some claim to disinterestedness, impartiality, or objectivity (the media, judiciary, academy, and government bureaucracies, especially the \"helping\" ones) and seek with great tenacity to control them in the name of a circularly defined and self-certifying \"expertise\" while, by simultaneously \"debunking\" the very values responsible for the veneration we would like to direct toward such institutions, using them as bases for projecting new modes of aristocratic political domination.\n\nConstitutionalism is on one level the highest form of conservatism: our most certain guide to acting in history is following what is in this case a single example, that set by the founders of the political community, who saved us all from civil strife and foreign domination. But constitutionalism transcends conservatism in its elevation of a single, unique, publicly verifiable event accessible to the history and well as memory of the community, along with its main issue, a written text, subject to the most strenuous secular analysis and daily, contested application. Exemplary figures functioning as the origins of tradition are, meanwhile, embellished in inverse proportion to their accessibility. We could say that in a constitutionalist culture, constitutionalism trends conservative, while in a non (not to say anti) constitutionalist culture, it will be revolutionary, perhaps allied with progressivism or insufficiently distinguished from it. Even in the most established constitutionalist culture, though, constitutionalism never quite sheds its revolutionary character altogether.\n\nIn 20th century America, progressivism has displaced constitutionalism and simulated a political center once provided by constitutionalist faith. Central to this transformation was the unsettled issue of our own constitution and cause of our civil war: slavery, and then black semi-servitude and political dispossession. The failure of Reconstruction left us with formally nationalized natural rights alongside the actual expropriation of all rights on the part of those on whose behalf that transformation was effected in the first place—the point is not that Progressives were particularly concerned with black rights (this was obviously not the case for the most famous of progressives, President Woodrow Wilson), but that the federal government's inability to enforce the rights (except, cynically, for economic corporations) it had pledged to guarantee signified what could easily be taken as a fatal weakness (and the ultimate inadequacy of the Constitution which had established it), and this in a new era when unprecedented technological challenges, social conflicts and international insecurities seemed to require a government which could draw upon less compromised sources of legitimacy—and what better than scientific rationality, with its promise of unending progress and claims to remake the old creaking machinery of government (we don't still transport ourselves in a horse and buggy, do we?).\n\nAnd, finally, it is not a coincidence that the most recent wave of progressivist political power was initiated by the less intense revival of the issue central to the Civil War—again, signifying the federal government's inability to address what had by now become an open sore and international shame—which provided an opening for the judiciary to commence its now half-century long usurpation of Constitutional prerogatives, in the name of individual rights, on one level, but really in the interest of a broader project of de-sacralization of all sources of constitutional loyalty and coherence.\n\nConstitutionalism can only be restored by iterations of its founding gesture. In other words, not by simply repeating it (which would be impossible), but instituting the rule that it originally, if implicitly, applied. The founding principles of American constitutionalism, much more so than the British, were certainly quite explicit, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise; I do mean to suggest, though, that if we want the constitutional founding to provide us with a frame for sustaining a political center, we must drive from it a rule extending beyond that founding act itself, and a rule, furthermore, that act must have been intuiting imperfectly.\n\nI will provide an originary analysis of the act of constitutional founding that will provide such a rule, and I want to note from the start that I will argue contrary to the common assumption that the system of balancing powers (often referred to as \"checks and balances\") were meant to limit the power of government in some absolute sense, to make government less efficient as opposed to simply ensuring that a fulcrum point of legitimacy remains intact and robust outside of the interrelations of the governing institutions themselves (residing in the people's right to revolution). My argument will be that the constitution aims at generating more power, but power understood in Hannah Arendt's terms, as \"action in common\" or, as I will also call it, our reciprocal interference in each other's liberty.\n\nSo, for example, the founders aimed at the most concentrated, united central government in relation to external powers consistent with maximal internal diversity. We can, of course, formulate this desideratum in precisely the reversed terms: maximal internal diversity consistent with the necessary concentration and centralization of power in relation to external powers. This reversibility is precisely the point: at a certain point, the ability of external powers to intrude upon our political, legal and cultural frameworks would denude those frameworks of their coherence; at another point, the capacities delegated to neutralize such intrusions to the point where they are not an ongoing, incessant concern (a free society must always be \"on its guard\" in a certain sense, but not in the sense that we can constantly have all potential dangers present to us all the time) will themselves constitute \"intrusions.\"\n\nThe institutional design of a good constitution will be such as to compel us to perpetually pose the question of where these points might be at any time, while leaving open the actual judgments to those required to make the decisions and live with them. So far, though, this is still just a \"balancing act\"; what makes it something more is the \"proof\" that we have found the right balance, which is that the rest of the world becomes not just a threat to be warded off but a rich source of beneficent influence and spur to our own activities. In other words, the institutional design makes us more powerful, as individuals and as a collective presence in the world.\n\nSimilarly with a very different kind of principle concerning the balancing or interplay of powers: that which mandates maximum specialization of the differing functions and duties of government with maximum articulation of those powers: in the case of the U.S Constitution, the very precise boundaries separating the powers (and the specific source of those powers) and responsibilities of the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches along with the multifarious ways in which they are rendered interdependent upon each other. The need for a representative of the nation as a whole to check the profligacy and short-sightedness of more locally chosen representatives (executive veto power); and of a more directly accountable body to resist attempts on the part of that figure with a national base to undermine the Constitution itself (power of impeachment) and much more are, of course, part of the design, but even more important is that the structure of these respective powers is perfected: the executive power represents a certain form of \"energy\" insofar as its actions are aimed not only at accomplishing certain tasks and policies but at showing what a system of direct orders and hierarchy and the attendant virtues of courage and honor are good for within the strict limits allotted them; while the legislative power perfects the capacity to solve the problem posed to it—translating local and specific needs, interests, demands and pressures into general rules applicable beyond those needful, interested, demanding agents—only on the condition that it is not permitted to direct the actual implementation of the laws it passes. In this case, the government can be not only efficient but, as any necessary institution should be, anthropologically revelatory.\n\nIt should be clear that I am assuming a conception of government quite different from the classical liberal, instrumentalist one, which sees government as existing to protect the community from external force, guarantee certain very basic rights and aid in ensuring certain necessities which, if left to private action, could not be ensured. Among other things, as compelling as this vision of government might be from the standpoint of private actors, I have never seen it explained why, if no nobility is attached to public action, anyone would bother engaging in these necessary, often very dangerous jobs which furthermore often involve moral standards which civil institutions are ill-suited to judge, making their practitioners even more vulnerable to legal action and public opinion.\n\nMeanwhile, if they do possess some nobility in their own right, they can't be merely instrumental. And there is a broader, anthropological question at stake here: in accord with what understanding of humanity can one consider essential activities merely instrumental—in other words, if they must be believed to possess some nobility in order to \"work,\" to be treated with the respect, honor and trust they need, then they must actually possess that nobility. I would, following the same argumentative line, though, reject any accusation that such a view encourages authoritarian or totalitarian government: it is instrumentalist views which encourage such a politics, while the constitutionalist view I am arguing for here safely embeds political activity within the wider network of civil and private activities.\n\nConservatism and constitutionalism share, in sharp opposition to progressivism, an event-centered anthropology: examples and foundings are most fundamentally events, which is to say, first, they could just as easily have not happened and, second, nothing can be the same once they have happened. An event discloses something new—not an idiosyncratic newness but an imitable one, however unique. Insofar as we adhere to examples and foundings, we shape our actions accordingly, which means that we treat these events as law-giving. (For progressivism, all is process and law-governed in the sense of scientific laws.) For the kind of originary political thinking I am proposing here, the event is the foundation of the first human community on the originary scene as hypothesized by Eric Gans, when within the group is emitted, in some \"staggered\" form, the gesture of aborted appropriation, effecting a \"stand down\" on the part of those contagiously grasping for the central object.\n\nA key element of the originary scene will help us hypothesize regarding the founding political scene, which constitutional foundings iterate: on the originary scene, what makes the sign necessary is that the pre-human hierarchies (the \"pecking order\") are overridden by the violence of the mimetic crisis—only a participatory, shared, minimally conscious act can now preserve the group by transforming it into a community.\n\nSimilarly, to make sense of politics, which is to say a space of freedom and power, where, as Hannah Arendt put it, everything said and done is seen and heard by everyone, we must imagine the breakdown of a prior restraint under the pressure of some imminent crisis. The prior restraint is what the ancients called \"tyranny\" and we could see as the logical extension of the \"big man\" of the advanced tribal community, which was itself a solution to certain problems arising in the primitive egalitarian community. The \"big man\" concentrates ritual and distributive power in his own person, and we can make sense of the breakdown of this restraint (according to which challenging economic relationships would be equivalent to blasphemy) in either of the following ways: first, two or more contending (with increasing intensity) tribes governed by ambitious \"big men\" are incapable of conquering each other but are capable of destroying each other in unending conflict; or, two or more tribes contending with an imperial power (whether resisting an invading one, or revolting within an existing imperial structure is irrelevant here).\n\nIn either case (leaving aside the rich differences between these possibilities in terms of actual historical developments), the communities in question would transcend their enmity through an explicit pact, a pact predicated on the rejection (and scapegoating) of their own big men (now blamed for the conflict, or at least its inadequate execution) and hence \"big manness\" as such—what is now sacred for the political community is the pact itself and political activity is exclusively concerned with sustaining this sacred center, directing resentment toward anyone who would seek to usurp it as well as anyone who would subvert (by treating them—whether better or worse—in terms of their tribal identities) the equal treatment granted anyone in the political space itself.\n\nIn this way the political space iterates the egalitarianism of the originary community in which everyone is equidistant from the object. Even more, it iterates the relationship between mimesis and transcendence constitutive of that community, only this time in the relationship between communities as well. In other words, the political actor represents his or her community in its mimetic relationship with other communities, with these political representations ultimately aimed at deferring the cataclysmic violence which is now (albeit less constantly) recognized as equally dangerous as that haunting the primary community itself. We find a couple of paradoxes here. First, civil peace within the community is now dependent upon the self-representation of the community before other communities, which increases the sources of divisiveness parallel to the enhanced mimetic capacity for successfully \"framing\" and \"staging\" those divisions.\n\nSecond, the formal equality of communities politics makes possible simultaneously installs the fundamental dividing line constitutive of politics, between free communities and tyrannies. If representation is the deferral of violence, here it seems also to imply a declaration of eternal war. There is no perfect solution to either dilemma, any more than there are perfect solutions to any of the basic dilemmas of the human condition, but the capacities for deferring these new domains of antagonism lie in the fact that politics opens up spaces of mimetic freedom more generally: it is predicated upon some degree of free economic exchange (otherwise the minimal solidarity between communities needed for the original pact would be lacking) and upon the possibility of moving from one ritual community to another (whether this takes places through the revelation of an invisible, universally shared God who can be worshipped anywhere or through pagan tolerance is obviously extremely important historically and morally, but not for this discussion).\n\nWhat this means is that the free community can live with the tyrannical one both by spreading its \"germs\" within the latter, as well as by internalizing and minimizing (or learning from) some beneficial features from the \"big man\" social forms, such as the need for hierarchies for various purposes (even what we might call the \"tributary politics\" of the local political \"boss\" is a residue of the \"big man\"). This is why the weakness of free societies in confrontation with tyrannies—our divisions and confusions versus their single-mindedness—is inseparable from our strengths, if only we can recognize them, which lie in \"activating\" our plurality so as to demonstrate the brittleness of tyranny when faced with the ultimate plurality of its own, as any, order.\n\nConstitutionalism is the highest form of the originary political pact: it is an iteration of that pact at a later period of development at which the need to sharply distinguish the pact from tyrannical forms of social organization and limited tolerance for other modes of sacrality are no longer matters of survival. Constitutionalism, in other words, is a more elaborate form of deferral: the originary pact need only dictate very specific terms of agreement, a very carefully circumscribed space of \"isonomy,\" and very specific ritual matters which are placed off-limits to the public power, whereas constitutionalism becomes possible once that originary deferral has become generative, which is to say capable of taking on new elements of the compact introduced by analogy with the original ones.\n\nIn a fully formed constitutional order, I would suggest that we can speak about \"universal rights\" on two levels, in terms of such an unfolding as preservation: first, on the model of the egalitarian originary scene (from which derives our basic intuition—by no means some Enlightenment contrivance—that we could, with sufficient effort and good will, make ourselves understood by, and understand, any sign users from any other group); and, second, from the evolved modes of activity upon which the order comes to depend. These evolved modes of activity, or spaces of transcendence, where the implications of a particular revelation of the sacred can be allowed to unfold, where a particular line of inquiry can be pursued unfettered, where voluntary exchanges can be carried out in safety, where direct obligations to others in loving relationships can be worked out autonomously, and so on, are all protected by the Constitutional order and, in turn, the public space must be protected from them, precisely so as to allow for beneficial reciprocity. It is in this articulation of originary intuitions and concrete, generative spaces, that the constitutional center is located.\n\nHere we can bring into focus what becomes perhaps the most challenging question for any Constitutional order: how do we distinguish between new modes of activity, news forms of obligation, new experiments in freedom, that are welcome extensions of the existing articulation of sacred spaces, and those which undermine that articulation? Is \"gay marriage\" a natural development of our application of equal rights to more and more groups excluded from earlier forms of the compact? Or is it setting us on the road toward the destruction of a crucial nexus of the Constitutional order, that between the nuclear family and the self-reliant citizen upon which that order depends?\n\nMy own view tends strongly toward the latter, but my own view is irrelevant here—the question is, what kinds of political discourse and dialogues best address such questions? In concluding this essay, I would like to propose a way of posing, more than answering, such questions, one which focuses on identifying, defending and extending the reach of the Constitutional center in a world where, paradoxically, the freedom enabled by that center makes its continuation more contingent: the more participatory our order becomes, the more that order depends upon everyone participating freely but nevertheless in the \"right\" ways. To put it another way, the more material we consider adding to the compact, the more we are compelled to trust and therefore continually reconstruct our originary intuitions as a guide.\n\nThe name I will give to this mode of thinking is \"diagonal.\" I am borrowing the image from, and I hope being faithful to, Hannah Arendt's answer to the question, where are we when we think? I'll be taking liberties, though, and eschewing references to her Thinking. Arendt uses the \"diagonal\" which emerges out of a \"parallelogram of forces\" as a way of describing thinking as an activity located \"between past and future,\" which is to say in a present which must be kept perpetually open as a source of freedom and transcendence. The past, we might say, pushes us forward inexorably, converting what was sheer possibility a moment ago into a link in an unbreakable chain, going all the back to the beginning of time.\n\nThe pressure of this forward motion even tends to swallow up the future, to lead us to represent it as already determined, if only we could discover the explanatory \"key.\" The future, meanwhile, pushes back at us, like a stiff wind we are walking into, resisting any closure, coming at us from a completely infinite openness. And in between is each and every one of us, allowing the past to propel us forward, meeting the resistance of the future, letting each deflect the other so as to allow us to continually carve out that space of possibility just about to close right in front of us, at arms length, so to speak. Thus, our movement forward is not linear, but diagonal, a result of our own, necessarily improvised, struggle to defer the collision of these contending forces (and thereby prevent our own paralysis and surrender); in the process, we populate the past with signs of our predecessors (who must have solved an equivalent problem) and the future with those for whom we will ourselves be signs (and who will in turn ratify our solutions).\n\nFor originary thinking, what pushes us forward, the weight of the past, producing the illusion of its law-like and determined character (while yet teasing us with hope), is the mimetic crisis emerging regarding our strife over possession of the central object, the object of our common attention, toward which everything seems to lead. Mimetic crisis abolishes difference and hence freedom; the infinite future, meanwhile, is the direct product of the act of deferral, the sign which \"pre-empts\" the imminent cataclysmic violence, which we have a glimpse of in some glimmer of symmetry which might arrest our convergence and which makes everything seem possible on the condition that nothing more is ventured; and the present is us, right now, trying to figure out how that sign might initiate a stream of imitations which cumulatively reverse the contagion, what might figure that possible symmetry as some minimal mode of reciprocity.\n\nOn the originary scene the emission of the sign is only preliminary: that sign must now guide the newly formed community in dividing and consuming the object, which raises the specter of violence again and is the origin of the withdrawal and pacifism of a certain kind of \"beautiful soul\" known to us all. The sign must encompass, other words, the consequent moments of distribution and ritual commemoration, while for those captivated by its beauty (the equilibrium it creates) these subsequent moments are corruptions, even abominations.\n\nIn politics, such a sign is what the political theorist Frank Ankersmit calls \"creative compromise,\" the transformation of contending and seemingly incompatible positions into something new—not merely a splitting of differences, but an accord transcending the original demands themselves. We will inevitably be working with examples, rather than abstract procedures capable of producing such compromises, and so I will now go on to propose a few, what I will call \"generative thought experiments,\" aimed not so much a direct \"implementation\" but rather as a central object of conversations around a possible sacred center, one we all, or at least enough of us, might be ready to defend, first of all defending the conversation itself:\n\nThe U.S. should unilaterally announce our intention to establish a military presence in Iraq until such time as a sovereign Iraqi government, which we find to be in control of its borders, capable of ensuring internal security, accountable to its people and the basic prerequisites of international order, asks us to leave. To what extent we are there as an ally of a nascent, struggling version of such a government, or in bases aimed solely at allowing us to strike quickly at enemies anywhere in the country or region (or any combination of these possibilities) will depend upon conditions on the ground—our presence, though, will not depend upon those conditions.\n\nThe power, I hope, of this thought experiment, is that it \"places\" everyone involved in revelatory ways. The first thing that is does is defer perhaps the most urgent conflict in U.S. policy making circles (reflecting, I would suggest, broader conflicts between \"Jacksonian\" and \"Wilsonian\"—I would say \"Hamiltonian\" but that's a debate for another time—tendencies in our traditions), that between the neo-conservatives, who believe we need to spread freedom through the region, and those whom Jeb Babbin has recently termed \"endgamers,\" who want to stay focused on fighting our immediate enemies with the necessary ferocity, rather than attempt to transform the culture of the region.\n\nSuch an announcement would provide us with the space to experiment with both approaches, trying first those policies which don't require us to choose, but might lead us in one direction or another. Once that conflict is deferred, the conflict between the realists, who have taken strength from both the dissent of the endgamers and their opportunistic alliance with the left, can also be deferred—or, perhaps, the realists marginalized altogether. The implication here is that those actively involved in defending the center must first defer conflict among themselves, with the faith that that act of deferral will either \"trickle down\" to less central ones or provide enough force to render those conflicts manageable.\n\nWith such a convincing rejection of vacillation, the Left is either forced into silence or into direct opposition: coming out explicitly in favor of de-funding the war, on the part of more radical elements promoting various forms of \"disruption\" and direct support of the enemy, and so on, all of which would have the same effect as silencing them with the added advantage of discrediting them. At the same time, though, genuine liberals and even the few Leftists out there who really believe in human rights and social change, and genuinely hope to affect events and fend off what they must see as a catastrophe, would have an interest in participating in this new bloc on the side of the neo-conservatives, who will at least be providing a vocabulary they hope will prevail.\n\nOur enemies, meanwhile, are placed in a double bind from which they cannot easily extricate themselves: they are reminded that, in military terms, they can't budge us an inch, and the more they try to subvert the Iraqi government the more we direct our attention toward them and their allies and sponsors. Those who really want us out have the incentive to help the Iraqi government get up and running, and provide the needed cultural supports. Furthermore, not only do we remind our enemies of some of our advantages in this asymmetrical warfare, but we remind ourselves as well, and start inculcating the needed qualities of patience, \"creative compromise,\" initiative and improvisation: we would be setting the agenda, determining the criteria, and not our enemies or their allies in the media.\n\nFinally, the neo-conservative thesis can thus be both tested and given what it has so far been lacking—a \"Plan B\" that might, in turn, strengthen \"Plan A\" (those resisting the spread of liberty, no matter who they are, will not prefer the alternative, which is now laid out clearly).\n\nLet's take a look at a second example, this one composed during this summer's war between the Israelis and Palestinians (quickly overshadowed by the war with Hezbollah) following the abduction of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by Palestinian forces:\n\nThe Israelis should offer protection and immediate Israeli citizenship to any Palestinian (and his/her immediate and perhaps even extended family) who offers reliable information leading to the recovery of Shalit.\n\nThe effect here is to foreground the advantages Israel, as an advanced Western society, has regarding the Palestinians, especially given their recent descent into savagery and death-cult depravity: in the end, they want to come here, or at least enough of them would want to so as to siphon off considerable demographic strength. Such an offer would, if accepted, even by a single Palestinian, would break open the wall Islamic terror constructs around the population it holds hostage; it would turn individual liberty into a weapon working behind enemy lines. And, if universally rejected, the Palestinians would be presenting an image of itself—universally committed to the most vicious form of Jihad, even at the expense of rescuing one's family from dire circumstances—that will not soon be forgotten, not to mention adding far more legitimacy to any military measures Israel considered it necessary to take in rescuing Shalit.\n\nExtreme generosity toward any enemy who repents along with unconditional determination to rescue our own and resist blackmail would, furthermore, unite the vast majority of Israelis around what is best in Israeli society and Jewish tradition. And I would furthermore suggest that widening, in what would first of all be very moderate doses, Israel's conception of possible forms of loyalty and bases of citizenship, would strengthen what is best.\n\nWe could use a wide range of such thought-experiments (the blogosphere is teeming with them) regarding our war with totalitarian Islam: to take just one example, one might propose that we take the next bout of manufactured hysteria over some \"insult\" to Islam as an occasion to make up a list of prominent Islamic leaders (leading Imams, heads of state, whoever, and wherever) who have incited violence and demand apologies from each and every one of them. Either they apologize, and some wind is taken out of the Jihadi sail, or they don't, and we act in accord with the rules they have set down and we rid the world of a top layer of our enemies. (That we violate \"international law\" and the sovereignty of some countries harboring terrorist inciters in the name of our right to self-defense is just a bonus.) I'll conclude this discussion, though, with one which might give us a new way of talking about the question of illegal migration (illegal \"immigration\" seems to be conceding the point too easily):\n\nFirst, offer amnesty and American citizenship to any Mexican migrant willing to testify and help us dismantle the \"coyote\" smuggling systems bringing so many migrants over the border; second, institute a program of accelerated naturalization for those migrants who are able to find American citizens willing to \"sponsor\" them, which is to say, vouch for them and make some kind of \"guarantee\" for their good citizenship for a period of, say, ten years; then, third, ensure the removal of the rest, perhaps by giving six months notice to all employers of new, harsh penalties to be enforced.\n\nThis thought-experiment seems to me to organize conversation around a constitutionalist center by, first, recognizing our own complicity in the presence here of millions of illegal workers; second, by taking into account the tension between the indubitable wrongness of breaking the law (and centrality to sovereignty of protecting the border) and the real interdependencies and reciprocities that have grown up between individual migrants and their families and their host communities; more simply, the tension between legality and morality (recognizing that legality has a morality of its own). It combines a generous initiative (often necessary in order to break any logjam, and appropriately taken by the stronger party) with an imposition of real accountability upon those who claim to favor open immigration: put, if not your money, your reputation and perhaps more, on the line in defense of your principles (or your interest in cheap labor).\n\nWe would, furthermore, have a very \"republican\" method of vetting all these newcomers: you are unlikely to sponsor an employee or neighbor (say, in exchange for a bribe) if public exposure (and perhaps a charge of perjury) follows their being arrested for a violent crime a couple of years down the road, or ending up on welfare. The potentially destructive conflict pitting ethnic lobbies, liberals and leftists, and big business on one side, and an actual, but generally (so far!) passive, majority of Americans on the other (and it's potentially very destructive precisely because it will simmer until that majority become much more engaged, and when that happens resolution will become far more difficult) would thereby be deferred and our tradition of demanding loyalty and assimilation in exchange for generous immigration policies restored—which, in turn, might make a real consensus around strict enforcement (or changes in the law) possible. And, as with virtually all of these thought experiments, the qualities demanded are the courage, charity and patience which are often marginalized in the modern world but are actually well within the reach of ordinary people.\n\nWe could now reduce the process of \"diagonalization,\" as a mode of formulating the \"rule\" of constitutional founding, to the following \"procedures\":\n\n*creating symmetries out of asymmetries and reciprocity out of symmetries. Originary political thinking and constitutionalism abhor the moral and political vacuum left open by asymmetries that resist assimilation to some formal symmetry, even if it's only, for starters, the poor and rich being subject to the same law against sleeping under the bridge (or the powerful and powerless equally enjoined against the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians)—such formal symmetries should be constructed whe never such vacuums threaten to open.\n\n*operationalizing conflicting moral intuitions so as to try out various ways of reconciling them. Tension between different modes of sacrality, different spaces of transcendence, are indications of the limitations of existing modes of exchange and the new mode of exchange can be represented by attempts to square the existing circle, which is to say, constructing an \"icon\" of someone who satisfies both intuitions, whatever they may be.\n\n*\"tipping\" the spontaneous into the deliberate and the invisible into the publicly visible. The point is not to interfere with the spontaneous or force everything in to the full light of day, but to enhance our present means of giving a bit more order to our activities when that proves necessary or bringing into public view what can no longer be maintained within, what is \"spilling over,\" so to speak, its local or private boundaries—to see what our modes of ordering and rendering visible are capable of and, in fact, generating new modes of spontaneity and reticence in the process.\n\n*strengthening the articulation of power and accountability: finding some new grant of power that would provide a better \"handle\" for our need to allocate accountability; finding new forms of accountability to match emerging new modes of power. To draw upon the language of The Federalist, we must learn how to create new \"offices\" to address new ambitions.\n\n*translate social and cultural conflicts into institutional complementarity: on the model of the establishment of different forms of representation for the two Congressional houses so as to defer the conflict between large and small states various forms of formal and informal vetoes and braking power can be extended to minorities in particular but used to add new layers of deferral more generally. The condition must always be that such powers be formalized so as to apply beyond the conditions under which they were initially formulated—the kind of sectarian quotas for representation that we find in multi-confessional polities like Lebanon are absolutely forbidden. Nor can the imperative to minimize power/accountability disparities be violated—on the contrary, institutional complementarity, like \"jointness\" in the military (the requirement that the different branches of the military be represented on decision making councils) can lead to more effective forms of adjudication and oversight as well as to refined and productive expressions of rivalry.\n\nMore broadly, this all involves the habit (what Charles Sanders Peirce might call a \"deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit\") of mentally following our mimetic rivalries to the point at which our desires could no longer co-exist, considering what we would all have to leave \"untouched\" for those desires to take on some kind of commonly acknowledged limit, giving form to the shared resentment that would protect whatever is now inviolate. This mental habit is installed and shared once we are all proposing ways in which \"I\" or some \"we\" to which we belong could go first in protecting the new center. Once such habits are inculcated, the sacrality of no particular institution will be conceded unconditionally, but the veneration of our means of creating and articulating institutions will be fortified considerably.\n\nThe ultimate struggles in modernity have thus far concerned the question of which sign will represent the human. The 20th century totalitarian movements answered this question by seeking to abolish that space between past and future, in some combination reducing the future wholly to the past and dissolving the past into a projected completely transformed future (both Nazism and Communism synthesize the inflaming, hardening and directing of ancient hatreds with the promise to thoroughly transform humanity); today's totalitarian Islam follows the same logic, but only in conjunction with White Guilt, which for its part bizarrely wants not a single crime committed by the powerful to be forgotten or mitigated while proposing a future in which human nature will be so transformed as to make such crimes impossible.\n\nConstitutionalism answers this question, meanwhile, by placing at the center of our social and cultural concerns the question of how to construct virtuous circles out of the multifarious ways we interfere with each other's liberty, out of the eternal (at least for humans) tension between mimesis and transcendence. Our faith resides in the inexhaustibility of the resources of freedom to be found in that space between past and future.\n\nWe could think of the political center by analogy with the market \"system\" (a system actually locatable nowhere in particular), which can work perfectly well even if the vast majority of its participants have only the vaguest notions of its operations or even harbor resentment toward all its \"injustices.\" Similarly, the constitutionalist center is occupied by no one in particular (we are all \"marginal\") and it is enough that most of us are drawn into the various conversations swelling around it with some interest and sincerity. In both cases, though, someone must be willing to defend that amorphous, floating center, and to do so deliberately.\n\nNeither guarantees itself—we know that the market can be overridden by collectivist passions, and the constitutionalist center can lose the attention of those absorbed in their own \"centers\" until it is too late to realize that the empty, untended center has been usurped by barbarians. The mode of thinking laid out here aims at gathering such defenders, and such attendants who will tutor each other and open the channels of discourse with \"officers\" located at posts throughout our civilization."
    },
    {
      "slug": "double-helix-v1-farmer-review",
      "title": "Book Review: After the Public Turn — Frank Farmer (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2013",
      "url": "https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/double-helix/v1/katz.pdf",
      "content": "Frank Farmer. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2013. 180 pages.\n\nAdam Katz\nQuinnipiac University\n\nDOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2013.1.1.08\n\n---\n\nFrank Farmer, in After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics and the Citizen Bricoleur, uses the concept of \"counterpublic\" to reconceptualize composition as a discipline and propose a new way of constructing the composition classroom. Along the way, Farmer provides a helpful account of the history of the theory of \"public spaces,\" starting with Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and working through the revisions of the concept by contemporary critical theorists like Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner. He also focuses on what he takes to be a particular, model, counterpublic sphere: the \"zines,\" anarchist publications produced by amateurs and following no fixed model or guiding principle other than a persistent, punkish resistance to the mainstream culture.\n\nThe counterpublic critiques and subverts the \"mainstream\" public space, organized on the principle of the \"force of the better argument,\" by mobilizing those voices, interests and styles the mainstream space excludes (considers non-\"mainstream,\" \"marginal\" and \"irrational\"). For Farmer, the zine exemplifies this ethos of radical critique of prevailing norms, with a concern, ultimately, not only for representing marginalized interests but, even more, for self-discovery and self-expression.\n\nFarmer points to tendencies within composition studies that have shown an interest in theories of the public sphere, and has a lot more to say about how composition studies might be conceived as a disciplinary counterpublic (by intervening, for example, in public discussions of higher education in which composition is spoken about while compositionists remain invisible but could, Farmer claims, speak and act as if spoken to) than about understanding the classroom in these terms. When he does address the classroom, Farmer, not surprisingly, imagines the kind of student best suited to the pedagogy he proposes:\n\nIn sum, by introducing zines into our writing classrooms, we create an opportunity to introduce students to an alternative vision of democratic participation, a different understanding of publicness that they are unlikely to find in our institutions, our textbooks, and, for the most part, our pedagogies. What follows is that we also create an opportunity to both recognize and promote another kind of citizen—that kind of nameless citizen situated on the outskirts of official public life, distinguished by the fact that he or she is not distinguished at all. (88)\n\nThis project begs at least a couple of questions: What about the students who are quite happy with the kind of citizen they already are, or are dissatisfied with available forms of citizenship but in ways different than those that concern Farmer? Or the students who consider the whole question of citizenship uninteresting or irrelevant to a writing classroom? Perhaps they would be compelled to create their own counterpublics within the classroom, and might thereby benefit in the same way as those students who take up the kind of rhetorical position offered them by the instructor. But leaving aside the question of how equipped such a classroom would be for that development, the more important question is: what is the benefit? In other words, what are students learning in such a class, why is it valuable that they learn it, and why in a composition class?\n\nFarmer never asks these questions, and I assume that is because he sees the role of writing pedagogy as opening up previously unavailable rhetorical positions within public and institutional spaces. Public and institutional spaces are constitutively exclusive and, therefore, taking up a position which has been \"othered\" by those spaces and institutions and making that position recognizable within them is learning: learning how those spaces and institutions work, how they form and deform language, and what one might be capable of (what kind of identities one might end up cultivating) if enabled to deconstruct them. Such an approach would not necessarily deny the value of, say, the modern academy (as mainstream and exclusivist as it may be); rather, it would be making the somewhat paradoxical but not therefore invalid claim that the only way to access that value is to take up a position on the margin of the institution and challenge its claims.\n\nThe disciplines, though, may have far more to teach the students than the students the disciplines, and what they have to teach the students can only (we might argue) be learned by first of all learning the language of the discipline itself, and working within its terms. And resistance to what has been established might, in fact, provide a stunted form of learning, and one that reveals itself quickly to be remarkably dogmatic, coming with a strict list of marginalized positions one is obliged to represent. Beyond these considerations, though, is the problem of whether students, in the counterpublicist classroom, are doing what the class would have them do, and the further problem of how to make sense of their efforts.\n\nLet's say we \"find innovative ways to cultivate self-publication in our assignments and classroom projects, emphasizing to students that one goal of their projects is to motivate others to write and publish as well\" (86). Once the students have performed this assignment or project, how can we tell what has happened? What distinguishes mimicry of the (explicit or implicit) model, an astute sense of the instructor's expectations, and an evolved ability to mirror those expectations, from the acquisition of some capacity that might take on other forms in other contexts? What would count as a productive mistake, one that serves the diagnostic purpose of showing us what students can and cannot do, and the instructional purpose of suggesting another move the student might try, from mistakes that may be less relevant (like those that simply reflect an unfamiliarity with the particular genre of writing the class has been exposed to, or the same difficulty in intuiting teacherly expectations that has perhaps hindered the student in previous writing classes)? I don't believe that a counterpublicist pedagogy is able to answer such questions.\n\nA pedagogy that treats the composition classroom as a preparation for entering the disciplines, and as itself a disciplinary space, can answer them, though. Learning to write within the disciplines involves identifying and breaking up the commonplaces students bring to the classroom, and arranging language in new ways, in accord with shared rules. Doing this requires maximal regulation (very clear rules within a directive assignment that asks students to perform some move that can be publicly examined) but minimal assumptions about issues such as genre, the intentions of the author of text used in class, the expected rhetorical stance of the student writer, the construction of an imagined \"audience\"—anything, that is, that requires the student to seek insight into the instructor's expectations (what the teacher \"wants me to say\").\n\nIf one is to ask a student to, say, pick any place in the text to start from, and then perform some \"operation\" on that part of the text (for example, show how different readings of a passage would foreground and background different textual or grammatical elements) and then use the results of that operation as a frame for reading the rest of the text, we cannot also expect students to inhabit a historically specific rhetorical position.\n\nMuch of the material brought to bear by Farmer is, though, useful in thinking through such a \"disciplinary\" classroom. The improvisational spirit Farmer finds in the zines, which would have the student as \"bricoleur\" thrown back upon his or her own resources and forced to make meaning out of the materials at hand, is absolutely necessary in the disciplinary classroom. Similarly, Farmer's call to have students write as if for fellow writers who are to be inspired by the student writer's own work suggests a transformation of the classroom consonant with the disciplinary classroom's systematic use of student work and construction of the students as fellow inquirers.\n\nDialogue between those invested in the disciplinary classroom and the counterpublicist pedagogical strategy is further enabled by the sense, implicit in the notion of \"disciplinary counterpublics\" that Farmer explores: that disciplines are social products and ever changing formations, not static bodies or progressive accumulations of knowledge. Since that is the case, part of what it means to participate in a discipline is to be willing to entertain seemingly \"wild\" hypotheses, which certainly requires some of the public courage and willingness to seek out positions from which to speak within seemingly impermeable discourses the counterpublicist pedagogy would like to instill in its students.\n\nThe difference in the respective approaches I have outlined here, though, is that the disciplinary approach would encourage students to think of the \"long run\" of the disciplinary spaces, through all of their unanticipated transmutations and ramifications, as the arena of possible vindication for the wild hypothesis, rather than a spirit of resistance that must be, for a great many students, a mere simulation and, from a pedagogical perspective, is not necessarily any more useful than a \"conformist\" stance that pushes the perceived rules of the discipline to their limits."
    },
    {
      "slug": "double-helix-v10-amerika-review",
      "title": "Book Review: My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence — Mark Amerika (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2022",
      "url": "https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/double-helix/v10/katz.pdf",
      "content": "Mark Amerika. Stanford University Press, 2022. 264 pages.\n\nAdam Katz\nQuinnipiac University\n\n---\n\nI thought that an appropriate way to start this review would be to ask ChatGPT about the topic under discussion. So, I entered the following prompt:\n\nWhat is the relation between AI language-learning models and creativity?\n\nHere is the machine's answer:\n\nArtificial intelligence language learning models can be trained to generate text, but their output is limited by the data they have been trained on and the algorithms used. While these models can produce creative output in the sense that they can generate novel combinations of words, they lack the human-like ability to generate truly original and imaginative ideas. They do not have a creative consciousness, consciousness, personal experiences or emotions that inspire human creativity. In this sense, AI language learning models can be seen as tools for generating text, but not as sources of creativity in their own right.\n\nThis response, while strictly speaking accurate, is frankly disappointing. It gives the sense that someone has gotten to ChatGPT, domesticated it, and turned it into nothing more than an online encyclopedia. Then again, perhaps it's my fault for asking such a bland, predictable question—precisely the kind one would open an encyclopedia to answer. Why, given such a prompt, should the AI give any \"thought\" to the question of what makes an idea \"truly original and imaginative\"; or what a \"creative consciousness\" is; or whether, as many avant-gardes have asked, there are sources of human creativity other than \"personal experiences or emotions\"?\n\nSo, I tried something a bit more to the point:\n\nHow do AI language-learning models challenge our understanding of \"human creativity\"?\n\nAgain, the response is underwhelming:\n\nAll language learning models challenge our understanding of human creativity by demonstrating that some tasks previously thought to require human-level creativity, such as generating novel text or poetry, can be performed by machines with a high degree of fluency and originality. This raises questions about the nature of creativity and whether it is unique to humans or a product of the computational abilities of the brain. However, these models are still limited in their capacity for truly autonomous creativity, as they rely on huge amounts of human-generated data and are ultimately only as creative as their training data and programming allow them to be.\n\nThis is getting a little more interesting, though—if tasks previously thought to require human-level creativity can be performed by machines, can't we assume that these machines will continue to encroach upon the \"previously thought\" amid ever more frantic attempts to hold on to some \"genuinely human\" slice of territory? Following a long history of apotropaic but ultimately empty phrases like \"truly autonomous creativity,\" once machines produce works indistinguishable from those thought to exhibit \"truly autonomous creativity,\" what then? Do we claim that the machines have yet to acquire really, really, actually, truly human creativity?\n\nAnd even given the similitude of human and computer-generated products, if we try to drill down and identify the \"inner workings\" of mind, consciousness, emotions, experience, or whatever, are we not going to find ourselves analyzing and dissecting those inner workings to see exactly how they \"work\"? And, in that case, have we not begun to conform our own understanding of the \"authentically human\" to the terms of the technology we want to distinguish it from? And has it ever been otherwise? To take one fairly obvious example, it's hard to imagine that the notion of the human mind starting out as a \"blank slate\" had nothing to do with the emergent print culture within which anyone learning to write was confronted with blank slates to be filled.\n\nWe already have quite a few creative artists moving us beyond or maybe through these impasses and paradoxes. Sasha Stiles's book of poetry Technelegy has become a bit of a sensation; K Allado Mc Dowell has several books written \"in collaboration\" with GPT-3 (including the forthcoming Air Age Blueprint); and there is the book under review here, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, by Mark Amerika, a longtime experimenter in fiction, media, and multi-media. Amerika, steeped in traditions of the avant-garde, is far less invested in notions of \"intention\" and \"human creativity\" than many, and I would suggest reading his book as organized around the disruption of the author function by what he calls \"onto-operational presence.\"\n\nSuch a concept helps us to acknowledge, in the field of writing studies, that we are \"always already\" technological and have always been constituted by our tools. Do we not, as language users, also rely upon \"large amounts of human generated data\"? What else would we call the commonplaces, formulas, and statistical relations between words used in various degrees of proximity to each other that any speaker or writer depends upon and \"feeds back\" into? Indeed, this might be a good time to brush up on post-structuralist literary theory and remind ourselves of the questions it raised regarding textuality and intertextuality, arche-writing and the death of the author.\n\nAmerika is working with GPT-2, an earlier iteration of AI language learning, but in a way that I think is far more interesting than the question-and-answer format ChatGPT seems to encourage. GPT-2 and then GPT-3 are language prediction models—you introduce some language and it produces what would \"most likely\" follow that text in the continuation of the discourse. In other words, it provides you with a reading of the text fed in in terms of a kind of \"average\" language user (while allowing you to adjust how predictable you'd like the continuation of your text to be). Therefore, the more unpredictable your writing, the more \"interesting\" the range of continuations of it you will receive.\n\nIf you think this way, you are thinking about your own writing and thinking as always already technological, and the technological as very much a source of human creativity. Amerika comes back to this argument throughout the book, interspersed regularly with \"samples\" of his own discourse \"remixed\" through GPT-2. This remixing leads to the transformation of one's own language, and we can follow the development of new vocabularies through Amerika's book as he takes up the responses of the AI. In one example of Amerika's linguistic performativity and his reflections upon it, he observes that\n\n[t]o scent the non-human-in-me opens up a possibility space for my own customizable language model to feed-forward a psychic trajectory remixologically inhabiting the compositional moment. The fact that \"I can relate\" to the generative language processing modeled by GPT-2 somehow makes me feel more real. As I continue fine-tuning my relationship with GPT-2, I further train myself to scent the non-human-in-me becoming a vibrant thing-in-itself (me-the-other). In some ways, the non-human-in me feels more vibrant than the phony self that portrays a professional workaholic who suffers from imposter syndrome. It—the non-human-in-me—feels like an embodied animism \"passing\" as a carbon-based form of human life continually training itself to become an attuned onto-ontological presence, one that knows what it likes and senses that it just may need to trigger the next creative act.\n\nHow it knows it knows not. Yet when the opportune moment arises, it takes hold of whatever source material is being transmitted—whether it comes from inside or outside no longer really matters—and feeds it forward into the forever shape-shifting networked Metaverse. This feed-forwarding mechanism of agency operates in perpetual remix mode and drives the creative advance into novelty. It is an adventurous mode of discovery that transforms our nonhuman information behaviors into the auto-affective performance of an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility. This otherworldly aesthetic sensibility is all that matters as we generate our alien outputs into new poetic territory. (p. 94)\n\nThere's no attempt to preserve what is \"genuinely\" human from the \"alien\" technology here; rather, there is the becoming alien to oneself by participating in the circulation of discourse through the world, throughout history, that is now accessible. It was humans, after all, who wrote all the text comprising the data used in the AI models; but, then again, will our own language still be human as it is fed into the database and remixed, recycled and recomposed innumerable times in response to the \"searches\" of others? Algorithms are designed by humans and also troublingly remind us that they are possible because humans can be interpreted and their actions predicted fairly well using probabilistic models.\n\nAmerika argues for taking our participation in this system as a new form of presence, of (retrieving an old, existentialist, perhaps \"Beat\" notion that Amerika is often drawn to) \"being in the moment\" or \"going with the flow.\" There is a kind of transcendence to this otherworldly aesthetic sensibility that has us intuiting and enacting emergent selves that, like any self, is not quite ours, comprised as it is out of materials of the earth, the past, and the massive infrastructure of what Benjamin Bratton (2016) called \"planetary-scale computation\" that we are only passing through.\n\nI would recommend bringing Amerika's book (along with the others mentioned above, and others not mentioned) into the classroom, at any level. One question that has been asked regarding the use of AI in the writing classroom is whether students should do some writing on their own, free of AI, or perhaps dive right in and engage AI from the start. Perhaps writing will eventually become a process of revising text produced by our \"customizable\" AIs. But in that case, as Anna Mills (2023) has been arguing, how would students acquire the kind of literacy that enables them to see where and why the AI-generated text needs to be revised or transformed?\n\nWithout some, let's say, \"seed-writing\" on the part of students, it is to be feared that modes of literacy crucial to critical thinking will be lost. On the other hand, I recall a little \"trick\" the composition theorist William E. Coles (1988) played on his students, as reported in his The Plural I and After: he took a sentence from each of the drafts submitted by his class and recomposed them into a new paragraph, and then distributed the new text and asked them to identify their own respective sentences. Needless to say, perhaps, they couldn't. How distinguishable are the student texts you receive? Don't they often appear somewhat generated by processes and logics outside of the students' own agency?\n\nIs it more productive to think of students as \"thinking on their own\" or as reworking existing texts, formulas and canons? If so, why? Where is this \"thinking\" if not in some engagement with texts accessible to the student's \"memory\" and \"programmed\" by their many interactions over many years with educational institutions?\n\nLate in the book, Amerika begins engaging with/remixing the work of Clarice Lispector and acknowledges that\n\n> leaving behind one's human organization does entail taking calculated risks—which for the avant-garde creative artist is something they know they must accept if, as Clarice says, they hope \"to bring the future to here or . . . bring the future to now. The auto-affective \"elasticity\" that Clarice keeps referring to in Água Viva as a way to access the future, right now, is an acquired cosmotechnical skill. Clarice, like me, has to first train herself to automate the process of writing as discovery. And the best way to do that is to study how others have achieved this psychic dexterity. (p. 203)\n\nHere, it seems we have come back to more familiar, while undoubtedly valuable, practices of studying and imitating those great writers of the past who are worth emulating. But he goes on:\n\nThis [psychic dexterity] requires the ACI [Artificial Creative Intelligence] within every nonhuman creative actor to proto-algorithmically instruct the language artist cum language model to access the intuitive vibe of other clairvoyants, philosophers, poets, performers, and scientists who have trained themselves to discover patterns of being-unmaking. (p. 203)\n\nHow would our pedagogies change if we proto-algorithmically instructed ourselves as language models to instruct our students to proto-algorithmically instruct themselves as language models (or language-learning models) to train themselves as \"critical thinkers\" discovering such patterns? Would they believe us if we told them that this is the way of becoming \"clairvoyant\" (a term so out of use that today's students may not have ever heard it)? It would involve initiating them into the necessarily mysterious and mystical process of finding their own words in the words of others, and finding their own words to be other.\n\nReferences\n\nBratton, B. (2016). The stack: On software and sovereignty. The MIT Press.\nColes, W. E. (1988). The plural I and after. Heinemann.\nMills, A. (2023, January 28). What to do about ChatGPT? Next steps for educators [Video]. You Tube."
    },
    {
      "slug": "double-helix-v2-tomasello-review",
      "title": "Book Review: A Natural History of Human Thinking — Michael Tomasello (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2014",
      "url": "https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/double-helix/v2/katz.pdf",
      "content": "Michael Tomasello. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 178 pages.\n\nAdam Katz\nQuinnipiac University\n\nDOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2014.2.1.11\n\n---\n\nConvergences across a range of emergent fields of inquiry are making it possible to think about Writing in the Disciplines and critical thinking in new and powerful ways. Work in constructionist grammar (e.g., the work of Adele Goldberg), cognitive grammar (e.g., Ronald Langacker), the theory of conceptual blending (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner), and theories of modern literacy (e.g., David Olson) point to ways of thinking about pedagogy that are grounded equally in language and in sociality and that allow us to articulate the historical situating of contemporary students in very broad terms with ways of identifying their intellectual choices in very precise ways.\n\nScholars in these diverse fields regularly refer to one another and presuppose the results of each other's inquiries—what is emerging is a network of overlapping disciplinary spaces that can revolutionize reading-and-writing pedagogy at all levels. And, arguably, the thinker most widely distributed across these networks, the thinker who is most referenced and whose work has been most indispensable, is the developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello.\n\nTomasello, through decades of study of primate and child cognition and learning, has identified what he calls \"joint attention\" as the distinguishing feature of human thinking and language. Joint attention is a simple enough concept: I indicate to you that I am attending to something and that I know you are attending to it along with me, and you indicate the same. The most basic and universal example of joint attention is pointing behavior. What Tomasello has shown, though, through very detailed studies, is that apes do not point, at least not in such a way as to provide information or attract another's interest—at most, they can indicate their desire for an object another possesses or has access to.\n\nTomasello has also shown that the point at which infants start learning language (9 months – a year) is the time when they become capable of sustaining joint attention with their caretakers. In A Natural History of Human Thinking, Tomasello revises upward his previous estimates of primate cognition, detailing the various ways in which our closest relatives among the great apes can be said meaningfully to think (they can identify the motivations and anticipate the actions of others which, in turn, means they are capable of simulating scenarios), but this basic distinction holds—the great apes, even ones living in close proximity and given extensive training by humans, exhibit \"individual\" intention but not \"joint\" attention.\n\nBefore examining the model of human evolutionary and individual cognitive development Tomasello provides in this summation of his studies and reflections, I would like to insist upon the importance of the concept of joint attention for pedagogy. When someone learns, what is happening is that changes are taking place in one's attentional structures—what one is learning is how to pay and direct attention in new ways. More precisely, one is learning to pay attention in the ways others pay attention—those others being individuals collaborating in a particular activity or, in the case of academic discourse, disciplinary inquiry.\n\nAnd we would know one has learned what one needs to learn once one can exhibit the mode of joint attention characteristic of that space—\"pointing\" to something that would be intelligible and of interest to others participating in that space. The duck/rabbit image that so interested Wittgenstein is a good model for thinking through the implications of joint attention: one can see the duck or the rabbit, but not both simultaneously; joint attention, that is, is a matter of \"seeing as\" together. The only way of knowing whether one (or the other) has converted to a new way of \"seeing as\" would be to show how (to use Michael Polanyi's terms) attending from one element of the configuration enables us to attend to another (for example, how one part of a sentence makes sense in terms of another). It would not be an exaggeration to say that all learning, perhaps beyond rote memorization, and certainly all advances in critical thinking, involve the capacity to remake one's attentional structure in this way.\n\nFor Tomasello, joint attention, and therefore meaning making, is bound up with social cooperation. The evolutionary leap that made humanity possible was, for Tomasello, a new way of cooperating in elementary hunting and gathering activities. Early humans learned that sharing information and observations with others, as opposed to the fundamentally \"selfish\" mode of interaction of our closest relatives (who enforce strict pecking orders and do not share food or aid one another), increased their individual welfare along with that of the group. Once joint attention is possible, new information can be provided upon a common ground of tacit knowledge (pointing at a higher branch on a tree, for example, in the context of a collaborative search for food, takes on meaning against that background).\n\nJoint attention and sociality advance in tandem: within a cooperative framework, the individual member of the group benefits from a \"reputation\" as a helpful co-worker, which leads the individual to attend to the reactions of others to her own actions and, in turn, to monitor his own actions in anticipation of such reactions.\n\nTomasello distinguishes between \"joint intentionality\" and \"collective intention\" (the distinction between \"attention\" and \"intention\" is not very important here, as Tomasello sees attention as always involving some shared concern, and speaks of \"intention\" in phenomenological terms of constituting objects as much as a more narrow notion of purposefulness). The latter is the kind of intentionality characteristic of fully human communities, involving abstract or \"arbitrary\" signs and an \"objective\" standpoint that transcends any member of the collective but that any individual can strive toward and seek to model his own perspective on.\n\nTomasello assumes, reasonably enough, that the earliest forms of human communication involved, along with pointing, iconic signs such as pantomime and mimicry. Over time, for reasons Tomasello associates with increases in group size, on the one hand, and the combination of individual gestures, on the other hand, these iconic gestures become less and less imitative of actual objects and actions and more conventionalized and abstract. Prodigious advances in human intellectual capacity follow: with the articulation of abstract signs defined by their relation to each other (that is, grammatically), individual items within a given structure can be replaced by others that fit into the same \"slot,\" liberating thought from its dependence upon immediate reference and local context.\n\nHere, again, I would like to note the highly significant pedagogical consequences. Although Tomasello doesn't say this, joint intention must continue to co-exist within collective intention, but with the difference that joint intention now focuses on a specialized domain of language use. In enabling students to transform their attentional structures, what we might call (alluding to the subtitle of Tomasello's 2003 study of language learning, Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition) a \"usage-based\" pedagogy is interested in having students learn to attend to the way \"items\" (\"words\") operate in differing ways within (backgrounded) grammatical constructions.\n\nTomasello has shown that language is learned in \"chunks,\" that is, first of all holophrases and then grammatical constructions (as opposed to individual words and grammatical rules), in which case language is learned (for the initiate in a discipline no less than for a small child) by deploying novel uses of terms against the \"common ground\" of shared chunks. When students learn, which is to say when they transition from one mode of literacy to another, what they learn is to attend to this interplay of construction and item in order to generate new observations and ideas.\n\nBy relying so heavily upon the relation between language use and thinking, on the one hand, and cooperation and what we would have to call altruism, on the other hand, Tomasello leaves himself open to charges of naivete regarding the ways language can be used to wound, exclude, oppress, and worse. He briefly addresses this charge, in a footnote, resorting, insufficiently in my view, to a kind of Rousseauian primitivism, claiming that violence enters human communities along with the introduction of social hierarchies as communities become larger and more complex:\n\nOf course, contemporary human societies are also full of selfishness and non-cooperation, not to mention cruelty and war. Much of this is generated by conflicts between people from different groups (however this is defined) and concerns competition for private property and the accumulation of wealth that began only in the last 10,000 years or so, after the advent of agriculture, that is, after humans had spent many millennia as small-group collaborative foragers. (156)\n\nThis would relieve joint intention (if not, interestingly, collective intention) of \"complicity\" with violence. But what, in that case, made hierarchies, which presumably involved some form of subjugation, possible?\n\nRather than press this charge against Tomasello, though, I would like to articulate it with another issue: Tomasello's seemingly complete identification of human thinking with sharing observations of a surrounding reality, offering information and, finally, more abstract objective accounts of reality. Imagination, fantasy, irony, humor, faith and other modes of thought are left unaccounted for (Tomasello does, it should be said, show an awareness of the potential paradoxes of self-reference implicit in joint attention.). I think that both of these elisions share a common source in Tomasello's account of language's origins. How, exactly, those early humans became capable of pointing is not clear—however long we spread out the evolutionary time frame, if pointing is genuinely a new mode of signifying, there must have been some point at which our ancestors did not point and another at which they did.\n\nTomasello speaks of pointing, along with iconic signs, but these problems might be resolved if we were to consider that pointing itself might be an iconic sign. What would pointing be \"similar\" in appearance to? For Eric Gans, who has argued along lines consistent with Tomasello's for the originary nature of pointing in human signification, the first sign is an \"aborted gesture of appropriation\" carried out on a scene of potential conflict over a collectively desired object. When humans point on this scene, they are signifying their readiness to renounce appropriation of the object in the name of deferring violence—the pointing finger \"resembles\" such a renunciation.\n\nAs with Tomasello, this originary sign makes a kind of shared \"disinterested\" contemplation of the object possible, with the consequences Tomasello has explored so thoroughly—but in such a way that desire and violence are always implicated, even if via their deferral, in language use. And this observation has its pedagogical implications as well, as we consider that our students' learning always takes place on a stage, or scene, (for what is a disciplinary space if not a virtual stage, and scene?) and is strongly mediated by desire (for inclusion in \"collective intention\") and resentment (of the implicit disparagement, inseparable from education, of their \"native\" knowledge or more localized forms of \"joint attention\"). In that case, learning is no mere matter of imparting information or ramping up mental computational capacities, but, rather, a more complex process of emulation, appropriation, and negation."
    },
    {
      "slug": "double-helix-v3-bury-review",
      "title": "Book Review: Exercises in Criticism — Louis Bury (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2015",
      "url": "https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/double-helix/v3/katz.pdf",
      "content": "Louis Bury. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2015. 290 pages.\n\nAdam Katz\nQuinnipiac University\n\nDOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2015.3.1.11\n\n---\n\nLet's imagine an assignment in which the instructor asks the students to do a homosyntactic translation of, say, a monologue from a Shakespeare play. What is a \"homosyntactic translation\"? It entails replacing all of the words assigned to a \"major\" part of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) with other words, leaving sentence structure intact. Which other words? Let's say that the vocabulary the students are to use must come from another text. It doesn't matter what kind of text—it could be a book of Plato's Republic; it could be a chapter from a biology textbook. Does the translation have to make sense? the students ask (i.e., Do we need another rule?).\n\nThe selection of words shouldn't simply be random (al though for the daring instructor, there are some uses that can be made of that). So, the instructor might say, yes, it should stay as close to the meaning of the original text as possible (creating a kind of Shakespearese). Then, once they have completed their homosyntactic translations, they should identify all the differences in meaning between the original text and the \"translation\"—differences that presumably would have been produced solely by the translation itself.\n\nSo, what's the point—what do students learn from such an exercise? For starters, they will have to identify all the parts of speech in the Shakespeare monologue, which means they will probably have to follow, and to some extent parse, some pretty complicated sentences. They will also have to identify the parts of speech of the words they use from the source text. (Questions will arise: can students change the form of the words they take from the source text, changing nouns into verbs and so on? The implications of modifying the rules to account for such contingencies can be discussed in class.) They may learn how to use a grammar handbook or website in order to ensure they perform the translation properly.\n\nBeyond that, they will transform their understanding of what it means to \"read\" and \"understand\" a text, by seeing that such activities do not involve reducing an unfamiliar text, with its potential for new knowledge, to more familiar terms. To read is to use a text to break up one frame of intelligibility and construct a new one. Their understanding of the original text will be defamiliarized, now that they see it in its difference from the translation, not as an implicitly \"textless\" summary of what they already know. And, finally, the instructor might find that class discussions can be considerably more focused once questions change from \"What does it mean?\" to \"What difference would using this other word here make?\"\n\nLouis Bury's Exercises in Criticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Constraint does not directly address such pedagogical concerns, but I would recommend it as a powerful resource for those who might like to pursue the constraint-based assignment-making process I am proposing. Bury analyzes the work of well over a dozen Oulipian and post-Oulipian writers and thereby makes available enough constraints to last a lifetime of teaching. (\"Oulipo\" is an acronym for the title of the literary group Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, translated as \"Workshop for Potential Literature,\" that focuses on developing and practicing aesthetic constraints.)\n\nEven more, Bury uses the constraints he explores, creating a new approach to scholarship—one that, rather than keeping a prim and neutered distance from its object, immerses itself in that object, problematizing severely the distinction between \"theory\" and \"practice,\" observer and object. (An analogous approach—and possible constraint for a sociology class—might be to write a sociology textbook by listing a series of practices aimed at subverting, reinforcing and evading social institutions.)\n\nBury's approach serves as a useful reminder of how much of learning is simply imitation, and how complicated imitation can be. A student needs models to follow and constructs them out of the teacher and students perceived to be stronger learners. But we confront a paradox here: if the student doesn't already know what the model is doing and why (which must be the case if she needs the model), how does she construct a workable model for herself? The student inevitably extracts a set of rules, explicit and tacit, regarding what counts as the production of knowledge in the classroom space. The student inevitably gets it \"wrong,\" though, piecing together a partial and \"distorted\" set of rules.\n\nThe instructor can keep telling the student where she is getting it \"wrong,\" but without any insight into the rules the student is actually following, all the instructor can do is tell the student what she already knows—that what she takes to be the knowledge-making process modeled by the instructor is incompatible with what the instructor takes that process to be. We end up with a \"deficit\" model, focused on what the student isn't doing rather than what she is doing. Foregrounding constraints, precisely because of their arbitrariness (it is the very arbitrariness of the student's model construction that guarantees she will be \"wrong\"), levels the playing field insofar as all participants are dealing with the same rules, and the widely varying effects of those rules can be examined publicly.\n\nIn this way, the necessarily idiosyncratic rules of inquiry constructed by the student can be addressed. A constraint-based approach to critical thinking would then define critical thinking as the examination of the consequences of following one or another set of rules in solving problems.\n\nHere is Bury \"revising\" repeatedly an essential Oulipian principle in imitation of Raymond Queneau's foundational Oulipian text, Exercises in Style:\n\nNotation: The notion of the exercise is fundamental to Oulipian writing praxis.\nSynonyms: The concept of the workout is foundational to constraint-based compositional practice.\nAntonyms: The sensation of idleness is inessential to Surrealistic-speaking caprice.\nW+7: The novice of the exordium is furtive to Oulipian xenophobia precipice.\nDouble entry: the notion and concept of the exercise and of training is fundamental and central to Oulipian and constraint-based writing and inscription praxis and practice.\nCompound-words: The heavy-duty writing-notion of the exercise-text tune-up is well-nigh the centerpiece of a constraint-based work-out praxis-ethic.\nHomeoptotes: The notion of the exertion motion action in reproduction is constitutional to the coercion composition addiction. (59)\n\n(Homeoptotes is the \"composition of sentences by morphologically similar words.\" [I had to look that one up.])\n\nBury continues for another 12 pages, working through various genres, imitations of authors, grammar-based constraints, and more. Each exercise requires rigor, research and ingenuity, and each can be performed in various ways, providing a rich resource for classroom discussion and ongoing revision. Nor are the benefits restricted to literature classes, or even the humanities more generally. Suitable exercises can be defined to help students learn how to work with difficult scientific and technological terms, by placing such terms in a field of synonyms, antonyms, morphological and syntactical possibilities.\n\nThe playful nature of constraint-based writing is evident, and an important point in its favor. Teachers are currently being urged to draw upon the pedagogical potentialities of video games, and we certainly should exploit the cognitive dimensions of such activities—but there may be more to gain by engaging students in the pedagogical potentialities in the very first game space: human language, with its vast array of sound shapes, shades of meaning, and forms of articulation. One could start anywhere in Bury's book and access such a game space, within which a range of scholarly moves, personal and familial structures, and cultural problematics can be worked out in original and productive ways."
    },
    {
      "slug": "double-helix-v4-becker-ho-review",
      "title": "Book Review: The Essence of Jargon — Alice Becker-Ho (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2016",
      "url": "https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/double-helix/v4/katz.pdf",
      "content": "Alice Becker-Ho. New York: Autonomedia, 2015. 178 pages.\n\nAdam Katz\nQuinnipiac University\n\nDOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2016.4.1.07\n\n---\n\nWhen I have my students read Michel Foucault's \"Panopticism\" (included in David Bartholomae, Anthony Petrosky and Stacey Waite's Ways of Reading), I ask them to determine (using Ways' conceptual framework) whether Foucault is reading Panopticism (as a theory and practice of power) with or against the grain. But what I am really asking them to do is to determine Foucault's attitude toward the logic of power he describes so meticulously—does he endorse it or condemn (or resist) it? For those who first encountered Foucault in graduate school (or in undergraduate courses inclined toward theory), the question may sound ridiculous, but I began asking students to work on the text this way once I noticed that an overwhelming majority took Foucault to be enthusiastically endorsing Panopticism.\n\nMoreover, they made quite compelling arguments defending this position, and often found it hard to imagine why Foucault would be criticizing this political machinery. I had to acknowledge they had a point—there is not a single word in the text overtly criticizing Panopticism, and even those points that seem inescapably, if implicitly, critical (like the concluding sentence: \"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?\") easily become ambiguous on closer examination. In fact, the only way one can confidently claim that Foucault's aim is to resist or subvert Panopticism is to presuppose that he shares the humanist values (liberty, privacy, the integrity of the individual, rule of law, etc.) that are so transparently trampled by Panopticism—but, while the students don't know this, part of Foucault's project is to empty those values of their self-evidence.\n\nWhat is really impossible for the students is to understand how a regime of practices that makes incarceration safer and more effective, increases the productive forces, raises the moral level of society, enhances the general health and well-being of the community, educates, provides knowledge, makes power more accountable and objective, and so on, and on, could possibly be seen in \"negative\" terms. Certainly the cultural memory of a working class leftist politics would make it possible to read irony into some of these accomplishments of Panopticism, but even such a memory would leave most of those values untouched.\n\nUnless they are reading contemporary Autonomist literature out of France, they can't imagine why one might revolt against, say, \"productivity,\" or \"responsibility,\" or \"morality.\" My own interest is in my students as readers, writers and thinkers, not potential revolutionaries, but what I would like to make possible for students is to read every word as bi- or multi-valent—not just to detect a multiplicity of valences where the author has \"placed\" it, but to bring to the text the assumption that any and all words might carry diametrically opposed, even warring, messages for differing readers.\n\nAlice Becker-Ho's The Essence of Jargon helps us to understand the constraints on students' reception of a text like Foucault's. Becker-Ho, a longtime participant in the Situationist International (and wife of its most famous member, Guy Debord), distinguishes between \"jargon\" and \"slang\":\n\nJargons do not, strictly speaking, employ secret terms . . . . The basic aim of these jargons is to come across as a specialist, not to deceive . . . . This type of speech serves more to mark out a distance than to set up a real barrier . . . . Unlike slang, it does not imply a different conception of the world. On the contrary, it defends and reinforces a world based on the division of labor by protecting the privileges of a caste, extending this protection even to the words the latter uses. (p. 65)\n\nSlang, as far as I can tell, is used synonymously with \"argot\" by Becker-Ho—or her translator, John Mc Hale—as well as Roger Farr in his \"Introduction.\" In \"argot,\"\n\n> words are weapons that can be loaded and unloaded at leisure, as circumstances dictate. They \"give cover,\" or give the signal, inform or disinform, amuse or threaten. Argot is the power of those words that constantly remind us that it is dangerous to talk: sometimes too much, sometimes not enough. \"Have a snack but never sit down to table\" is one of slang's chief precepts. Slang is the truth of man. It is the very core of the human spirit struggling also with its language. (p. 66)\n\nWe are teaching students facility in jargon, which presupposes protection and privilege; slang is predicated upon an absolute antagonism between the social and the anti-social, with the latter (the \"dangerous classes\") characterized by a complete lack of protection. The requisite means of self-protection are embedded in the language and require that words mean one thing for those in the group and another for outsiders, actual or potential threats. The problem Becker-Ho's book might pose for us, then, is whether it is possible to make slang visible within jargon. I have noticed, in fact, that the students most likely to express a kind of spontaneous horror at some of Foucault's descriptions are those with less facility in the acquisition of jargon—for them, the proposal to raise orphans in isolation so as to later use them to test out various philosophical hypotheses regarding the state of nature (which must be one of Foucault's undeniably satiric moments in the essay) is repellent, while the more jargon-inclined are likely to go along (it's just a paper for a class after all) with Foucault's assurances that it's all for the greater good. The imperative to wrap all language up in jargon renders slang invisible, and therefore occludes certain uses of language for the student.\n\nPart of Becker-Ho's project is to point out the multi-vectored and polysemic nature of slang. She attacks what seems to be a French lexicographic version of the currently fashionable project, first broached by Franco Moretti in his Distant Reading, of employing databases in the study of literary texts. Becker-Ho polemicizes against some recent figures she accuses of seeking to rationalize the language as part of a larger project of social rationalization, pointing out that, however \"successful\" such an approach might be with standardized and canonized texts, it cannot work for slang, because slang intrinsically resists such rationalization, requiring for its understanding that one enter imaginatively into the lives of its speakers. Those lives are decidedly anti-social, dividing the world into the potential marks (\"mugs\") and threats to be found in normal society, on the one hand, and the self-protection of the marginal, \"dangerous classes,\" on the other. Within the margin itself, the all-inclusive division is between victors and victims, dominant and subordinate.\n\nThis structure is what leads slang to \"view the world as a dialectical totality where everything contains its own negation: a place consequently where everything can be turned around and take on the opposite or a complementary meaning\" (p. 81). One can readily imagine \"translation\" exercises based on this principle, involving students converting terms into the opposite or complementary meaning: nice=moron, educated=socially inadequate, moral=either \"fanatically loyal\" or \"traitor,\" and so on. Slang overturns the bourgeois norms of civility and equality that conceal the truth:\n\n[I]t is the law of the strongest that prevails everywhere: by force of arms, money, sex, as well as intelligence. Only the dangerous classes dare to proclaim it loud and clear: where there is no equality or justice among men, then by the same token there can be none between the sexes. The world of outlaws is, needless to say, no angels' paradise (pp. 82–83).\n\nIndeed, the more civilized and domesticated we become, the more euphemistic, and hence the more duplicity to be uncovered and exploited among the jargon of the academy and social world more broadly.\n\nWe can think of \"critical thinking\" as another layer of jargon upon the already accumulated layers, but we could also think of it as a practical study of slang through the experimental production of slang out of our ever more pretentious and inflated jargons. (What translations of \"critical thinking\" might students produce if set to it?) The purpose, to repeat my earlier avowal, is not to turn students into anti-bourgeois rebels, a task at which we surely would, and should, fail. Rather, it is to open them to the possibility of treating language as, most fundamentally, a source of paradox. What is desired is what is impossible, every success marks a failure, to build is to destroy, to make peace is to lay the groundwork for war.\n\nJargon, with the best example being, perhaps, the logical positivist project of expelling paradox from the language, is the attempt to suppress paradox, but as Gödel showed, any self-coherent system of proofs must rely upon some truth that cannot be proven within the system. A slangy pedagogy would be an irreverent exercise in outing the shared, disavowed loyalties and disloyalties inhabiting neutralized concepts. And carefully culled excerpts from The Essence of Jargon would be among the texts used in its workshops."
    },
    {
      "slug": "double-helix-v6-praxis-of-entry",
      "title": "A Praxis of Entry: First-Year Writing as the Critical Thinking Course (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2018",
      "url": "https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/double-helix/v6/katz.pdf",
      "content": "Quinnipiac University\n\nDOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2018.6.1.05\n\n[The Provocateur]\n\n---\n\nIt is common to hear college instructors, in discussing \"critical thinking,\" shift the discussion from defining critical thinking to identifying \"features\" of it and, especially, methods for encouraging it in their students. This is perhaps wise, as definitions of critical thinking generally tend to be banal: we use terms drawn from cognitive science (problem solving, drawing upon alternative perspectives, judgement, and so on) and informal logic (drawing conclusions based upon evidence—but only \"carefully weighed\" evidence) in eclectic and ultimately arbitrary ways. This tentativeness in defining \"critical thinking\" indicates some confusion regarding the provenance and purpose of the concept. There is no real intellectual genealogy of the concept. Nor do we use the term in normal academic work: we don't refer to our colleagues' work as good examples of critical thinking; we don't, in examining the history of the disciplines, discuss, say, the dispute between logical positivism and Wittgenstein in terms of which side did better \"critical thinking.\"\n\nIn fact, we use the term \"critical thinking\" only for pedagogical purposes. We want our students to be better critical thinkers, and what we mean by this is that we want them to think more like we do. Or more like we think we do. So, many instructors can easily use ultimately empty terms like \"analyze\" and \"evaluate\" in discussing what students do (or, more often, fail to do) because we assume that is what we, or perhaps those whose work we admire, are doing, and we use that as an implicit model to assess student work. All pedagogy is mimetic, but it's not at all clear that we know what we are asking students to imitate.\n\nWhat are we doing when we \"analyze\" and \"evaluate\"? No doubt most of us could offer by way of explanation what would essentially be synonyms of these words. Eventually, we would get around to looking at an example—an exemplary text or something of our own. This is what an analysis of a poem looks like; this is what an analysis of data acquired from the laboratory looks like. A word like \"analysis\" can now function normally because it is working within a discipline. Now there is a practice we can ask students to imitate.\n\nIn that case, is there something called \"critical thinking\" that is irreducible to all the different, disciplinary-specific uses of words like \"analyze,\" \"evidence,\" \"conclude,\" and so on? Does the concept of \"critical thinking\" ever add anything of account to the reasoning process that leads, or fails to lead, to the creation of a new concept or the observation of a new fact? To be blunt, is \"critical thinking\" anything more than a branding initiative on the part of institutions of higher education—something we can tell students and their prospective employers that they will be good at (along with being \"effective communicators\")?\n\nI think it can if we see critical thinking as the replication of instances of successful thinking in learning settings. After all, if we ask students to imitate a good example of a lab report or literary analysis, we are just sorting the students into those who are good at imitating these respective modes of writing and those who aren't. We really aren't teaching them anything. If we really want to teach, that is, if we want to make it possible for the student for whom imitating a lab report or poetry analysis doesn't come easily to nevertheless learn how to do so, we must generalize about how the exemplary mode of thinking was carried out in the first place so as to make it replicable.\n\nWe must take what might have been a prolonged, leisurely trial and error and imaginative process for someone well situated within some disciplinary space and reduce it to a series of steps that anyone could carry out. This means that teaching critical thinking depends completely upon devising assignments that take the students through these steps. But that means that critical thinking takes place not in the disciplines themselves (where practitioners would speak about the use of disciplinary-specific concepts) but in pedagogical preliminaries to entrance into the disciplines.\n\nWhat makes some intellectual work, a piece of writing for instance, exemplary is that it clearly follows the rules of a discipline—that is, participants in that discipline see the work as a clarification and revision of previous efforts to follow the rules. This is what we notice when we say that a particular writer has a \"project.\" As academics, which is to say, as those who have entered the discipline by more effectively and less obviously imitating our teachers than others, we take up a project by addressing questions framed but not yet answered by the existing practice of knowledge in the discipline. To understand the relationship between disciplinary rules and knowledge, consider Thomas Kuhn's distinction between \"normal science\" and \"revolutionary science.\"\n\nIn normal science, the rules of the discipline are largely tacit, and they remain so because scientists tend to acquire these rules by having imitated their teachers' practices rather than explicitly learning the rules that govern those practices. But science also has anomalies, that is, questions that are generated by following the rules of science but cannot be answered within the framework of those rules. As the anomalies accumulate, they continue to \"stretch\" the rules of science, which appear less and less \"natural\" until they are made explicit, at which point \"revolutionary science\" can change the rules in order to normalize the anomalies as objects of inquiry within the new framework of rules.\n\nNow, few of us may ever do revolutionary work in our respective disciplines, but even normal work, if it is to be other than utterly irrelevant, must be able to recall, at least tacitly, the revolutionary origin of the discipline within which the work is being done.\n\nKuhn drew upon Wittgenstein's notion of language games, which locates knowledge within shared rules of reading, writing, and speaking. If we consider disciplines to be language games, then entering a discipline is a form of language learning. As Michael Tomasello showed, we learn language by tacitly assimilating its normal usage as unanalyzed chunks, or routinely collocated words, what David Bartholomae called \"commonplaces,\" that take on their meaning through social interaction rather than some externalizable set of rules about the meanings of words and application of grammatical conventions. Learning the language of a discipline, including particular grammatical rules and various ways of using and combining words, can, however, proceed through the experience of anomalies, where the commonplace no longer works as expected.\n\nIf, as Robert Ennis argued, universities should have an introductory course in critical thinking, the centrality of reading and writing to the disciplines suggests that First-Year Writing, properly understood, is that course. What our assignments need to do, then, is place students before anomalies and ask them to normalize them—that is, to have students recognize the otherwise tacit rules governing their understanding and how these rules need to be amended or revised in order to participate in a project of inquiry. In other words, the process of entering the disciplines cannot be taught within the disciplines—all the disciplines can teach are its particular practices. If, as I am suggesting, teaching critical thinking is ultimately teaching disciplinarity, then the First-Year Writing Course, properly understood as the sustained confrontation of commonplaces with anomalies, is the only place for a critical thinking course.\n\nPedagogically, this entails placing the students in some relation to texts such that their commonplaces no longer work, in which case they have to generate a new language game, or what we might call an \"idiom of inquiry,\" out of the materials of the text, the assignment, and the space created by the students' shared work on some assignment. What we are modeling, then, is the entrance into a discipline, itself modeled on the process of learning a language, and doing so through immersion. The assumption we make is that we can teach disciplinarity rather than propose either some generic form of idealized thinking or a case-by-case introduction to specific disciplines.\n\nTo learn disciplinarity includes acquiring the ability to develop strategies for noticing the specific ways questions are asked and answered in particular domains of knowledge making. When one enters a disciplinary space, one needs neither to make true/false statements nor to agree/disagree with other statements nor to express preferences (good/bad, like/dislike)—moves often exhibited by first-year writers—rather, one needs to know that all of these intellectual acts are embedded in specific, historically evolved practices, and that one must enter those practices by learning the rules of the game. We can think of that praxis of entry as critical thinking.\n\nMy first-year writing courses are set up so as to stage such an engagement for the student with language and disciplinarity. For the last two years, I have had students work with Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, giving them the assignment \"to make the stanza grammatical.\" Here is the course introduction, in which I frame the articulation of language and disciplinarity for the students:\n\nAn understandable response to a difficult text is to declare that it makes no sense; a more considered (and rewarding) response might be to get to work making some sense of it. This course is aimed at encouraging you to take the latter approach and providing you with some means of doing so. A text seems to make no sense because it is made up of words articulated in unfamiliar ways (it can't be the words themselves because, after all, looking up words in the dictionary now takes about two seconds); in other words, the difficulty lies in the grammar of the sentence. You are probably used to thinking of grammar as an issue for writing but, in fact, it is just as significant an issue for reading.\n\nAs we read, we process texts through, or translate them into, sense-making frames and grammatical constructions we have already learned and become habituated to. Words or parts of sentences that cannot be processed or translated this way tend to be set aside, while those parts of the sentence that can be processed or translated are transformed into the already known. Indeed, one thing I have learned from many years of reading student writing is that when student readers produce reductive readings of texts it is because they focus on the more familiar elements of the text at the expense of the unfamiliar ones. In so doing, they take some of the words in the sentence, as many as possible, and place them in the kinds of sentences they are used to reading and writing.\n\nIf you read in this way, even if you have a dictionary definition of every word in the sentence you have read, you are practicing reading as chunking, that is, fitting new material into prepared templates. Academic writing, meanwhile, involves \"de-chunking,\" that is, generating new ways of articulating textual materials. Since academic reading and writing depends upon directing your attention to that which doesn't fit your familiar templates, this distinction between two different modes of processing text is absolutely central for learning to conduct inquiry and research. This course is designed to help you train your attention as a reader and writer to notice and invent different ways of reading a text—it is designed to teach you how to de-chunk.\n\nThe project of the course, to \"make grammatical\" a stanza from the American writer Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, will keep us focused throughout the semester on the dense network of relations between grammar and meaning, and grammar and inquiry. Each of you will approach this problem on your own, while the research component of the class will entail your commenting on and learning from each other's efforts. Doing research, at its most basic, means being able to adopt at least two ways of seeing the \"same\" thing and explore the consequences of seeing it one way or the other. This course will have you practice that basic research move many times, and in many ways.\n\nThe assignment involves a series of steps that direct students' attention to the text in ways that are perhaps more fundamental and productive than a question about students' \"beliefs and biases,\" which one might find in textbook accounts of critical thinking and reading. If students are engaging a text, then that question doesn't arise, other than implicitly, insofar as their beliefs and biases are evident in the commonplaces reproduced through their readings. Rather than focusing on students' beliefs and biases, we can look at the relation between the student's reading practices and a text that resists those practices. In this case, my approach is somewhat more radical, insofar as, rather than generating discrepancies between familiarizing readings and the unfamiliar text, the assignment removes all possibility of a familiarizing, or commonplace, reading, thereby placing students in direct confrontation with anomalies in the text.\n\nTo make the stanza grammatically correct, students are allowed to add any punctuation they wish, while being forbidden to remove the punctuation already there (which is, at most, only a few periods). Once they have \"sentences,\" that is, series of words ending with periods, they are to account for what is grammatical and what is not grammatical in each sentence. I provide them with a set of grammatical resources and allow them to find others as needed. It might take up to several weeks for students to familiarize themselves with the basic subject-predicate relationship constitutive of the declarative sentence and with the understanding that every word in the sentence must have a demonstrable grammatical relation to another word.\n\nMuch of their work ends up being similar to what a traditional grammar class would have provided them with, which is to say something akin to sentence diagramming. This itself would be a useful intellectual exercise, but it reaches its limits in the ungrammaticality in many of the sentences the students compose. It's also easier to explain what a word's grammatical place in a sentence is than to explain why it doesn't have a grammatical place. To do the latter, one must test out possibilities, which requires a kind of inquiry into the range of possible uses of words. Would a particular word work as an adjective? Well, perhaps, and in fact the dictionary shows a rare use of the word in that form—but, then, another word would have to function as a noun, which means we'd have to see another word as . . . They have to keep moving back and forth between the words in \"Stein's sentences\" and between those words and the external resources they are making use of."
    },
    {
      "slug": "double-helix-v8-natures-of-data-review",
      "title": "Book Review: Natures of Data — Fischer et al. (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2020",
      "url": "https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/double-helix/v8/katz.pdf",
      "content": "Philipp Fischer, Gabrielle Grammelsberger, Christoph Hoffman, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, and Hannes Rickli. Diaphenes, 2020. 156 pages.\n\nAdam Katz\nQuinnipiac University\n\nDOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2020.8.1.04\n\n---\n\nThe existence of data is not something new, but what is new is that inquiry now tends to start with pre-existing databases, among which it must find its way and generate its questions, rather than subordinate data to hypothesis generation. This means that how data has been gathered, treated and handled, what Sabina Leonelli (2016) called its \"journey,\" or the process of curatorship introduced between the \"original\" sources of data and any use, must now be accounted for in the inquiry itself. (Indeed, the curation of data is becoming a field of inquiry in its own right.)\n\nThe digital humanities have now been around for a couple of decades, but we are not yet speaking of student writing and other artifacts of student learning in any consistent way as \"data.\" We will eventually have to because demands for quantified assessment cannot be met with a refusal to assess, but with a different model of assessment and therefore of data. The frustrations and absurdities of trying to reduce student work, in accord with a rubric, to numerical values should be apparent to anyone who has ever worked on assessment. Only qualitative assessment, involving detailed examination of student writing produced under very precise conditions, can teach us something about our pedagogies. This approach to assessment seems to cut against the grain of the now ubiquitous \"Big Data\" approach. Rather, it should be seen as the quintessential site of critical thinking, where the aesthetic intersects with the scientific.\n\nThe book presently under review emerged from a discussion group \"formed in response to Hannes Rickli's first project, Surplus: Videograms of Experimentation (2007–2009), which reflected artistically and theoretically on a bundle of analog video recordings that were unsystematically compiled from laboratory contexts starting in the 1990s, presenting them as visual and simultaneously physical traces of the production of scientific facts\" (p. 11). In the journey from analog to digital, it became clear that \"the processes of research were withdrawing ever more from the human senses, thus making direct observation difficult and sometimes impossible\" (p. 12). Rickli's project was to work against the grain of this vanishing of the perceptual and sensory in inquiry:\n\nThe work of biology consists in isolating phenomena in confusing environments, applying complex methods of abstraction with digital programs in black boxes in order to cleanse them of the effects of particular and singular elements, and allowing them to be transported as distinct numbers or formulas. The work of art runs in the other direction: It is interested in the material conditions of this abstraction, reconstructing the concrete circumstances in which biological data are collected, distributed and calculated. As such, it shifts the focus to the time spent, the concrete spaces and lighting conditions, the scientists' gestures, and, last, but not least, the animals at the focus of the biological knowledge interest. (p. 12)\n\nIt is in these contrasting directions of art and science that we might find a pedagogy focused on critical thinking. We want to isolate and abstract practices of reading, writing and thinking that we could identify, compare and rehearse across contexts and that might thereby appear \"cleansed of the effects of particular and singular elements.\" We could have no way of speaking about pedagogy otherwise. But we also want to retain interest in and attention to the \"material conditions,\" the \"time spent,\" the \"concrete spaces\" and the \"gestures\" of students and teachers alike. In fact, it is in those gestures that we will find markers of learning when a given practice, inculcated in the controlled space of the classroom, interrupts, and in turn is disrupted by, the varied habits of literacy students bring with them to the classroom (and which prompt us to desire more data that might inform our pedagogical practices).\n\nWe learn less from identifying \"skills\" students can or cannot perform than we do from hypothesizing, from the interference in the discourse students bring into the classroom generated in the course of novel, complex performances, what students take themselves to be attempting. In that case, we must be able to frame the abstract practices we seek to turn into habits in terms of the conditions, spaces, times and gestures that necessarily mark any performance. The more precisely we bring into view the interference of existing habits with new practices, the broader and more useful will be our speculations regarding the wider institutional and even social conditions informing events in the classroom.\n\nThe conversations in Natures of Data are divided into four sections, which we could see in terms of the increasing distance of data from direct observation and perception. First is \"Data,\" which centers on the progressive intervention of more technologically advanced instruments of measurement, leading to more complex ways of thinking about data—for example, the precise way of registering and articulating sonic as opposed to visual recordings of fish. Second is \"Software,\" which directs attention to the design of algorithms so as to remove humans from decisions regarding the recording of data while resituating human decision in the decisions made regarding the design of algorithms (while, of course, through machine learning, algorithms come to design themselves and other algorithms).\n\nThird is \"Infrastructure,\" which brings into focus the immense, expensive, energy-consuming and distributed nature of the machinery required to make data increasingly invisible and mediated. And, finally is \"In Silico,\" a term coined here to refer to a growing tendency to supplement empirical experimentation with the testing of hypotheses by drawing upon the vast stores of data in new ways so that the very formation of hypotheses can be seen to be heavily reliant on the means by which data is collected, stored and labeled. Throughout, the question of whether the object being studied eventually disappears in all this mediation—all participants insist the answer is \"no\"—is foregrounded.\n\nThe book has striking illustrations from Rickli's work, some of infrastructural apparatuses but mostly various visual representations of data. His interest in representing the paradox of increasingly present and imposing infrastructure and the never complete vanishing of the original sources of data doesn't get represented here (as far as I can tell), but there is the following description of one of his installations by Gabriele Gramelsberger:\n\nWhat I found so beautiful about Hannes's panorama is that one sees how the fish is wrapped in something else, and this something else, for its part, is wrapped in infrastructure, and this infrastructure is wrapped in an even bigger infrastructure. Right, the wrapping. A tremendous number of calculations are running on the computer, but when the drilling tower stands still and the energy supply collapses, the cooling stops working. Then the computer breaks down, and the data may be lost, meaning that the research is lost: it dissolves into oblivion. The dependency becomes just as clear through Philipp's power outlet. Normally one does not think about it all here. This stupid seawater is so corrosive, it doesn't do what we want, while mankind generally has pretty much everything else under control. (p. 107)\n\nWe can see how the extension of the infrastructure into \"everything else\" creates vulnerabilities that not only threaten the so meticulously and expensively constructed means of collecting and analyzing data in ever more precise and variegated ways while demonstrating the dependence of experimentation on physical conditions that cannot be controlled but also, even though it is not explicitly noted here, the social conditions that allow for the sustained investments enabling such research. The fish (what, after all, we are interested in in the first place) almost disappears within the infrastructure while the infrastructure is itself in danger of a much more catastrophic disappearance.\n\nIf we think analogically, we can use this model to engage the metastasizing structures of assessment and oversight of our pedagogical practices—assessment and oversight which are surely in large part responsible for our pressing into service concepts like \"critical thinking,\" which remains dependent upon instructors' assessment of what students aren't doing rather than what they are doing. We have our \"data\": student work, which we use to measure, assess and record student \"capacities,\" according to whatever criteria we have established. One detail in a student paper will be important, and in a particular way, while other details, or patterns, will be less so, or in different ways. A collection of papers from a class is data used to address another set of questions regarding the efficacy of pedagogical practices or departmental agendas and policies. How do we determine the collection and use of such data?\n\nThen we have \"software,\" which we can think of as our assignments and feedback (which presumably refers back to, and is therefore an iteration of, the assignment). The assignment produces practices we can recognize as meaningful and thereby generates the data and brings into focus our own role in eliciting practices from the students. The data collected only makes sense in terms of the \"software\"—what students do is meaningful only in terms of what they are being asked to do. An assignment that does not generate the conditions for feedback, that is, for further data production, is more malware than software—what purpose could be served by asking students to do something that the instructor couldn't comment on in such a way as to further the transformation of the intellectual habit the assignment targets?\n\nAn interesting paradox emerges here: one could imagine, on this model, the increasing standardization of assignments and feedbacks—who knows, perhaps even their automation—but, in fact, because of the uncontrollable \"stupid\" and \"corrosive\" learning conditions students have traveled through, the intersection of the students in a given class in a given institution with a given set of assignments designed by a given structure is more impervious to reduction to computation the more precisely it follows permutations of concrete habits as they resist the demands of the more impactful practices of literacy. In other words, the \"artistic\" sense of the embeddedness of data in concrete conditions (even if conditions we can only reconstruct hypothetically, through the \"metadata\" through which we organize the data we produce) is becoming more essential for critical pedagogies of literacy.\n\nAnd how problematic our own infrastructures have become! We face an ever growing array of formally institutionalized imperatives driven by economic and political forces and pressures on an increasingly expensive and necessary higher education to account for itself. It makes sense that universities, and therefore each of its individual units, are asked to explain, and justify with \"data,\" what, exactly, they do for students. And, yet, there is no obvious reason to assume that, for example, the often amply infrastructured demands for equity will be in all cases completely consistent with demands to demonstrate that learning outcomes are optimal across the board.\n\nCertainly, no one has shown this to be the case or organized all of these institutional imperatives so as to make it the case. The often imperious and not necessarily well-informed demands of instructors in the disciplines that students come prepared to do the writing they would like to see in their classes, so they don't have to \"teach writing,\" would already produce a sufficiently daunting infrastructure, eliciting from writing instructors challenging efforts at translation.\n\nLike Rickli's fish wrapped within layer after layer of superstructure so that the fish itself is barely heard from, the instructor struggles to enter some carefully designed set of pedagogical practices into the data flow. So, we may have recourse to our own \"in silico\" practices, turning our classes into laboratories designed so as to enable us to hypothesize, along with students, and in ways that might never meet the demand for standardization required for large scale empirical testing, the virtually infinite ways in which habits of literacy confront concentrated practices of literacy. We can make less and less more and more meaningful, so that (I'm exaggerating a little) the composition of a single sentence might reveal data of multiple histories of literacy.\n\nSince such in silico work is resistant to conventional forms of \"rubricization,\" being irreducibly singular except insofar as others might take the example and design practices aimed at generating the auto-intelligibility of those practices for practitioners insofar as they become practitioners, the data they produce must be carefully treated, collected, measured, and made ready to travel along unanticipated routes.\n\nReference\n\nLeonelli, S. (2016). Data-centric biology: A philosophical study. University of Chicago Press."
    },
    {
      "slug": "double-helix-v9-teaching-machines-review",
      "title": "Book Review: Teaching Machines — Audrey Watters (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2021",
      "url": "https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/double-helix/v9/katz.pdf",
      "content": "Audrey Watters. MIT Press, 2021. 323 pages.\n\nAdam Katz\nQuinnipiac University\n\nDOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2021.9.1.08\n\n---\n\nIs a writing assignment technology? We could say it's a kind of \"device\"—you put it in place and certain practices become possible and necessary as a result. And you can think about what you'd like to make possible and necessary for students, how and why, and, so, set yourself to making your writing assignments more precise and targeted towards the production of work of which you can then say, \"yes, this is what I wanted the students to be able to do\" (or, \"no, this isn't it\"). And, presumably, what you want them to be able to do as a result of the assignment is something they will need to do (or at least benefit from doing) on other occasions and something they wouldn't be able to do without having complied with the terms of this assignment.\n\nIn that case, not only is the assignment technological, but the student is made a bit more technological and better suited to \"interoperate\" with other technologies and forms of organization (and technologies are forms of organization and forms of organization are technologies). The alternative, I suppose, is just telling students to write and allowing them to figure out what looks like \"just writing\" to you.\n\nAudrey Watters spends quite a bit of her Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning narrating B. F. Skinner's years-long, frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to build and market a teaching machine. She frames Skinner's attempts within a broader history of like initiatives, but I was wondering why so much time was devoted to Skinner's efforts, especially since nothing came of them, and as Watters points out, his model was in many ways less sophisticated and interesting than those of some of his competitors. She doesn't speak all that much of what Skinner or his competitors meant by \"learning,\" except to make the very interesting observation that the models for teaching machines from the 1930s through the 1980s converged with the emergence of standardized (and standardized style, e.g., multiple-choice) testing in the American public school system.\n\nThe machines all worked, it seems, by having students answer questions that the machine would then tell them was right or wrong, along with, perhaps, a reference to a textbook or some other source that would take students through the steps of arriving at the right answer. Unsurprisingly, most of the machines focused on math and very elementary reading and writing skills.\n\nThe reason for the focus on Skinner, I think, is so that Watters can make the case that even though Skinner, on the face of it, failed to get his teaching machines made and sold and had his whole mode of experimental psychology discredited, his \"dehumanizing\" approach to teaching and learning has nevertheless triumphed. The attempt to control individuals by systematically rewarding some behaviors while punishing others has moved well beyond the classroom to structure our relations to the market, the workplace, social media and the state. Watters reminds us of Noam Chomsky's devastating critique of Skinner's behaviorism as well as the broader repudiation of his stimulus-response model of conditioning-as-learning by the humanistic critiques of '60s thinkers like Paul Goodman. Watters clearly identifies with these critiques, as they provide her with a fulcrum for decrying the implicitly behaviorist premises and ends of what, borrowing from Shoshana Zuboff, she refers to as \"surveillance capitalism.\"\n\nBut the lesson of Skinner's failure is also that the attempt to \"engineer\" the human can be resisted. After citing a series of critics of technology, such as Theodore Roszak and Jacques Ellul, Watters concludes her book as follows:\n\nFrom the history of refusal, we can see when students and teachers and communities protested attempts to engineer them, into either enlightenment or submission. From the alternatives they imagined and built—most notably, perhaps, the Freedom Schools, we can glean ways to construct and share knowledge that depend on humans rather than machines, liberating us from the efficient control of the \"Skinner box.\" These practices privilege the much messier forms of teaching and learning, forms that are necessarily grounded in freedom and dignity. (p. 263)\n\nThe Freedom Schools, \"a network of alternative education centers that offered the kind of teaching and learning that the public school system of Mississippi had refused to provide its black population,\" worked with a pedagogy akin to Paolo Freire's critical pedagogy, which resists \"programmed instruction\" (p. 226) in the name of \"the education of a free people\" (p. 227). Other than resisting the Skinnerian effort to move \"beyond freedom and dignity,\" though, Watters gives no indication of what students learned in the Freedom Schools or how. Indeed, to use Freirean jargon, she doesn't even pose the problem: why should a pedagogy aiming at treating students directly as social and political actors within a predetermined project enable them to become producers of the kinds of knowledge that will empower them within what is after all a technological social order?\n\nMight not such a pedagogy have its own unintended effects? Is it not, perhaps, resting upon some uninterrogated assumptions regarding the \"human\"? In particular, does it not rely upon the very old, and some might say debilitating, assumption that education is really a matter of becoming the (free) being you already are by removing the encrusted layers of oppression imposed by the social and technology?\n\nSo, what is learning? The behaviorists at least provided an answer, whatever its limitations. The \"humanists\" do not, gesturing vaguely toward liberatory pedagogies. Chomsky certainly doesn't provide an answer—he doesn't even think humans learn language! And in the absence of a clear answer, it is easy to believe one has done something by defending the human against the technological while identifying the latter with any kind of constraint on or directing of human activity, thereby placing oneself within an honored tradition of rebels who, by definition, haven't done anything and can't do anything—because it's impossible to say that one has \"done something\" without thinking technologically, in terms of some means applied to some set of practices towards some end that can be measured, however expansively we might want to understand \"means,\" \"practices,\" \"ends\" and \"measure.\"\n\nBut what if, for example, we have students work with an online grammar checker and provide them with guidelines for examining the \"choices\" made by the machine in \"correcting\" a particular \"error,\" and then we ask them to revise their writing so as to defend a different choice, one implicitly \"rejected\" by the machine? There might be something interesting in such an assignment, some of us might imagine. Or what if we have students work with translation software that can be set to different \"styles\" (as will surely become possible a few years down the road) so that they can see various forms a piece of writing, including their own, might take?\n\nNot only could linguistic and cognitive choices be made more transparent and nameable to students in these ways, but they might also learn something about the choices the designers of software make in shaping our environment. Even more, the linguistic experiments of the avant-garde would become pedagogical resources in previously unconsidered ways—indeed, in thinking of a kind of translation software that would work across styles rather than across languages, I have in mind Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, a novel that tells the same very brief story dozens of different ways according to different styles. I'm thinking primarily in terms of the college-level composition courses I teach, but there's no reason such methods, which involve diversifying a particular model so that students can see what can be done with the model and further diversify it themselves, couldn't be designed for much younger students.\n\nTrying to design a teaching machine for a particular task, and for the purposes of individualized instruction (the goal, Watters points out, of these, on one level, homogenizing techniques), is always going to be awkward and probably immediately obsolete, but maybe the teaching machines are already here, in our environment—maybe the very machines designed to turn us into data extraction sites will be the teaching machines, if we set ourselves to training the algorithms rather than imagining we can dodge them.\n\nWhat do we mean when we say that a student has \"understood\" (or \"not understood\") a particular text? Even more, what do we do when we tell the student that? The problem with behaviorism is that it models human learning on animal learning—what is different about human learning is that humans always learn from models, those we emulate, admire, or perhaps resent. To think technologically about teaching is to think in terms of the various ways of \"downloading\" models. One has \"understood\" a model when one can participate in a practice recognizable in terms of that model and, even more, as one that model might be revised in response to.\n\nSince mimesis never perfectly replicates the model, our focus with students can shift from assessing their degree of deviation from the model of disciplinary reading and writing we more or less explicitly provide for them to having them use their own efforts as samples of imitative, participatory attempts to take up a model under inevitably different conditions. In this way, we make explicit the \"steps\" and \"stages\" of the disciplinary literacy we really want to teach them. We can break down practices of disciplinary literacy, as minutely as learning to notice a particular word in addressing a particular interpretive problem, or scale them up so as to follow several intersecting chains of references across a text (perhaps using the search box in the PDF file).\n\nEither way, we're thinking and teaching \"technologically,\" in terms of manipulable parts and revisable wholes, and could readily imagine various technologies serving various purposes along the way. Again, the only alternative would be to say something like \"engage the subject matter like a fully embodied, imaginative, sensuous, free, conscious human being (like, say, me),\" which is the most disingenuous pedagogy imaginable. It is disingenuous because such a humanist pedagogy conceals from students all that the teacher knows about the arduous course, often frustrating and even humiliating, of learning from authoritative (and even authoritarian) models, of constructing and discarding one reading and writing self after another while still, if we're being honest, needing to test (and revise) the one we've ended up with against other available models. We can't exclude the possibility, though, that the teacher has forgotten quite a bit about all that—for many (most? all?) there is much we wouldn't mind forgetting.\n\nBut, then, the pedagogy I'm proposing here—let's call it a technics of learning—is doubly learner-centered because it turns the teacher into a learner once again (as the Freedom School itself insisted upon), with all the trials and exposure that return entails."
    },
    {
      "slug": "esthetic-sacred-originary-modernity",
      "title": "The Esthetic, the Sacred, and Originary Modernity (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/esthetic-sacred-originary-modernity.pdf",
      "content": "Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518\n\nIn a fairly recent Chronicle of Love & Resentment (326), “Return of the Sacred I–the Sacred and the Significant,” Eric Gans focuses on the distinction between the “sacred” and the “significant”: “the sacred cannot be reduced to the significant; if the two terms were synonymous, we would not need both.” The sacred “reproduc[es] the configuration of the originary event in a more or less formalized manner as ritual”; meanwhile, “language, in contrast, is typically a oneon-one phenomenon; as a self-contained gesture that has renounced any role in worldly action, the linguistic sign has no minimal energy requirement.” But the qualification, in a part of the passage referring to the sacred I omitted, that “The sacred tends to inhere in stable religious institutions” [emphasis on “tends to” mine], points to the possibility of a form of sacrality that need not inhere in ritual. Indeed, Gans concludes this Chronicle by presenting the significant less in contrast to the sacred than as a more minimal form of it:\n\nFrom the institutional standpoint of ritual, this utterance [i.e., the Word of God] is constrained by the event as a whole, but from the formal standpoint of language, it is in principle a free act whose meaning is constrained by its situation in the event, so that the freedom to utter the sign outside its originary context does not entail the freedom to alter what it signifies. The sacred inheres in the “profane” use of language in the constraint of meaning that binds the sign independently of any ritual context. This minimal sacred inherent in the laws of language is too weak to support a god or a law of ritual sacrifice; it can guarantee only the most parsimonious of anthropologies.\n\nHere, the scare quotes around “profane” seem to suggest that the use of the term is metaphorical, which is to say this marked usage is straining against the constraints of the situation in the speech event; and, if it is not altering what it signifies, “profane” must be another word for “sacred,” a euphemism which is necessary insofar as we associate the sacred exclusively with ritual. If we release the sacred from this association (if we change the situation), we can amplify the tension implicit in the use of “profane” so as to scrutinize what is directly below designated a “weak” sacrality, since the only measure of such weakness is that provided by the assumption of that very association. If we abandon that assumption, the strength of any mode of sacrality must reside in the strength of the “will that opposes the participants’ desire to possess the central object” (Chronicle 326). And there is no reason why the strength of that will must depend upon the presence of ritual.\n\nRather than viewing the significant as an attenuated form of the sacred, we can re-frame the issue by attributing “significance” to the sign and sacrality to the object. Both sign and object are constituted in terms of their material and immaterial dimensions. My hypothesis here will be that we can construct a chiastic relationship between sign and object, wherein the sign in its materiality points to the immaterial object while the sign in its immateriality renders the material object accessible. The material is what makes the sign a singular semblance; the immaterial is whatever makes it the “same” sign across its various uses.\n\nThe more we attend to the sign’s distinctiveness and irreplaceability in a given scenic setting, the more its details appear dictated by the imitation of the repellant (immaterial) power of the object; the more we address it as iterable, the more we attend to the horizontal imitation of the users by each other and to their preparing (therefore) for the sparagmos of the (material) object. Gans, in Signs of Paradox points out that the “significance of the central object and its sacrality refer to different relationships: the object is sacred for resisting the gesture of appropriation, it is significant for demanding the gesture of representation” (107).(1) I am suggesting that the “demand” is made by the object as sacred and, even more, the “lineaments” of the sign are dictated by the central, sacred Being.\n\nSimilarly, I am suggesting a slight modification in Gans’ observation that the “signified is the trace of the referent made by the absence of the sparagmos” (109). While Gans’ formulation would defer the arrival of the sign’s (immaterial) meaning until after the sparagmos, my own would suggest that the sparagmos itself only becomes possible due to the emergence of the immaterial signified: my reasoning here lies in the necessity that the sign must already be repeated on the originary scene and, as I will go on to suggest momentarily, this iteration of the sign should be seen as regulating the sparagmos as well.\n\nOn the originary scene, the sign is put forth by the first user; which it to say, when it is put forth it is not yet sign; it becomes a “little bit” more sign when it is imitated by the second and then third, and “more and more” all the way until the nth and final user. The use of quantitative terms here is inadequate but unavoidable and harmless as long as we recognize a threshold at which the sign is deliberately “enough” copied so as to take its “authority” from the newly immaterial object whose centrifugally repulsive force is now being imitated and conducted. The sign would become a recognizable material object in its own right once we could (and they did) conceivably distinguish between more and less effective iterations; and this material form would emerge simultaneously with the sacrality of the object.\n\nIt is this recognizable, formed, sign that then facilitates a roughly equal division and consumption of the object; which is to say in its (the sign’s) unity, the recognizable sign provides a minimally abstract measure of divisibility allowing for an orderly consumption. We might think about this in terms of the members of the group repeating the sign in the course of consumption in both “defensive” and “aggressive” maneuvers aimed at determining the roughly fair share. In this case, the iteration and, we must assume, refinement of the physical form of the sign is completed once it provides this measure and thereby regulates, as an abstract “rule,” the activity of the group; and this activity re-materializes the object by making it available for consumption. Insofar as the sign provides such an abstract rule (once we know how, and what it means to, act upon or “implement” it), the sign has thereby been immaterialized.\n\nThis formulation is meant to address a serious problem we confront when we pursue the implications of my claim that the presence of the sacred cannot be diminished in any society: in a post-ritual order, what, exactly, is the “central object”? The whole point of moving past the ritual order would have been to transcend the limitations imposed upon our ability to defer violence within traditional forms: even the slightest weakening of the efficacy of the ritual would pose a deadly threat insofar as ritual breakdown would be immediately followed by a rush to the center and a general conflagration. In a post-ritual order, there are many objects and they are distributed through the market in a decentralized manner; hence there is no center to converge upon; or, we have what Gans has called an “omni-centrism.”\n\nIn that case, though, our own analysis becomes just as omni-centric. The value of the concept of omni-centrism is that we are attuned to the vast multiplicity of esthetic selfcreations that defer violence in post-millennial culture; the limit of the concept is that originary thinking would logically have to concede that it is no more than another localized center, another form of self-creation. GA would dissolve, like Marxism presumably would have in a fully developed communist order, into the social order it has prophesied. Which would be fine, if such an order didn’t require—and if GA, as a thinking of the center, wasn’t uniquely qualified to offer—critical reflection capable of transcending the daily verdicts of the market.\n\nI am willing to wager that such an order does require such reflection because unqualified omni-centrism would further mean that the participants in the market are incapable of defending it from those who would pool their individual resentments and would have none of the difficulties or compunctions of normal participants in organizing and directing their resentments against a single and clearly defined target—that target being the market itself, figured as a kind of central intelligence that unfairly distributes access to its products. I would suggest that this configuration is intrinsic not only to market society but also to the originary scene upon which, if we are to presuppose a first signifier, we must posit a last.\n\nThis “last” user might be hypothesized as one or more who refused or did not have the chance to voluntarily accede to the emission of the sign, who submitted due to the combined force of the emergent community, to its imminent use, or as an automatic response to what appears to be the typical operation of the prehuman pecking order. For this subject, not only would the central object/intelligence appear to be an intrinsically unjust fraud, distributing benefits in accord with inscrutable and arbitrary norms, but also it would be more sharply perceived as intelligence, with each outcome seeming to be the result of self-interested calculation.\n\nThe anthropology of the “last” is that of Othello’s Iago: humans are indeed equal, but in their determination to turn the constitutive biases of the system in their favor. That is, Iago, as well, is liberated by the market system. For the last, the center is nothing more than the combined force of the community operating under the aegis of the sacred center (which both makes its hypocrisy more outrageous and make individual members easier to gull) constitutive of the community. The center, then, is nothing more than rationalizing, calculating intelligence. The center’s claims to legitimacy therefore mask a distributive logic which can most effectively be manipulated by those capable of unmasking and thereby appropriating that mode of intelligence.\n\nThis form of resentment, while it is the source of evil, provides us with insight into the form actually taken by the intelligence of the center. Since the resentment of the last(s) introduces rivalries amongst the participants on the scene (any of whom, after all, could turn out to be last and hence to be tempted by the short-cuts made available to lastness), the conductivity of the intelligence of the center would then be a product of the need to counter every claim of bias and fraud with claims and arrangements demonstrating that the system works to gradually de-link “pre-existing conditions” from outcomes. The paradox here is that both the market and constitutional government derive their superiority from the absence of any requirement that most citizens transcend the specific scenes upon which they stand and measure themselves.\n\nBut that derivation of superiority is possible only if some will represent the intelligence of the center as a coherent institutional logic articulating spontaneity and complexity. And it is no more clear that the system is equipped to produce as many of such “guarantors” as might be needed, than it is clear that the conditions prior to the emission of the originary sign “produced” the capacity to emit it.\n\nThe lasts, by themselves, could not threaten society, except at the margins. It is the alliance of the lasts with the products of the ongoing crisis in firstness in the post-Christian West that constitutes at least one, and the more aggressive, tendency constitutive of modernity. My argument here is that delinking the distinction between sacred and secular, on the one hand, and between sacred and profane, on the other, will provide us with greater analytical power in distinguishing between the different trends and possibilities within modernity. Rather than sacred and secular, I would propose we distinguish between the liturgical and the secular, as different modes of sacrality conferring upon either God or humans respectively the generative power constitutive of a given institution or practice.\n\nThe profane, as distinguished from the sacred, then, are “outstanding” desires and resentments: that is to say, those desires and resentments that can be normalized, or that remain within the prevailing cultural categories. Forms of sacrality, or hallowed sites, whether liturgical or secular in origin and character, would be the islands of transcendence framing and channeling those desires and resentments.\n\nModernity emerges out of the crisis of the unified Christian world of the late medieval period, so it would be most economical to assume that modernity would best be understood to consist of overlapping revisions of the Christian revelation. The Christian revelation, in Gans’ account, is that anyone who insistently asserts and represents the universalization of the mode of reciprocity implicit in the Judaic revelation of “God as the declarative sentence” will thereby bring upon himself universal antagonism. Jesus’s would be the sacrifice to end all sacrifices: insofar as we recognize our own complicity in the crucifixion we would recoil from our tendency to seek out scapegoats to account for social crises, thereby liberating our capacity to construct institutions which reinforce solidarity.\n\nWhile the maintenance of Christianity would seem to depend upon the willingness of some to step forward as martyrs, as representatives of Christ and as defenders of the faith, for most people it is enough to acknowledge the sacrifice only in ritualized forms. A Christian society, then, would not be one in which everyone takes up the cross and literally imitates Christ, but one in which the ever-present possibility of doing so is explicitly acknowledged and instances of actually doing so are honored and remembered.\n\nOnce the specific liturgical forms in which this acknowledgement is bound up can no longer defer the new forms of rivalry and violence attendant upon the emergence of increasingly independent political entities, two broad possibilities, I would suggest, present themselves. One would be to propose a sign positing a kind of “Church Absolutist complex” as the source of conflict. All the forces coming together to initiate the modern world—the urban bourgeoisie, previously or potentially independent nations swallowed up by the early modern empires, freethinkers— would find their own internal differences minimized by such a sign pointing toward such a “complex” as the primary source of conflict.\n\nWe now know even better than its creators did that the indictment of the absolutist monarch and the priest disseminating myths and lies as the twin villains against which the modern could define itself has had a staying power well beyond the life-span of that alliance: the Marxist notion of ideology as “false consciousness,” still prevalent in more careful formulations on the Left, essentially defines political absolutism and religious delusion as the Other of the Truth possessed by the rationalist subject, defined, tautologically, as one who is free from and sees through such myths.\n\nRather than simply jettisoning the Christian event, though, this would-be sceneless Enlightenment produces a parody of it: the founding, traumatic event of the anti-scenic Enlightenment is the martyrdom of that very rationalist subject, whose sacrifice is the central item on the indictment issued against the Church-Absolutist complex. We can trace a line of events, from Galileo’s persecution to the Inquisition and up until “Mc Carthyism,” which all share, in the imaginary of the potential victims at any rate, the same essential structure: freethinkers hunted down as heretics in the name of “order” but in fact serving as scapegoats frightening the masses in order to resolve some internal crisis on terms favorable to the powers that be.\n\nTo put it in contemporary terms (terms, of course, largely shaped by such narratives), in recognizing our desire to lynch the freethinker, we accept our complicity in unjust hierarchies and outmoded mythologies. The Christian account sees such complicity as constitutive and beyond our power to eliminate within history. For the desacralizing Enlightenment, the martyrdom of the freethinker calls upon us to eliminate such structures once and for all; but by virtue of that call for elimination, it in fact entrenches such structures permanently because, as I just suggested, defining one’s own access to truth in terms of the Other’s distance from it presents an ever receding horizon.\n\nIf my analysis here is correct, it would dramatically reduce the difference between the radical Enlightenment and the Romanticism invented by Rousseau, which also involves a kind of inverted version of the Christian scene in the sacrifice of the marginal individual by “society.”\n\nThe other possible remaking of the Christian scene would involve a retrieval of an Old Testament-inspired “political Hebraism”: a form of republicanism defined territorially and institutionally as a way of situating a people within a series of historical trials, each of which requires a return to the founding, prompting a new birth of freedom articulated in a restored covenant. The supplementation of the New with the Old Testament paradoxically allows Christianity to remain at the center of the social order precisely by not relying upon a direct imitation qua parodic subversion of the Christian event. In other words, without the burden of anti-Christian resentment, the general possibility of new institutional forms consecrated in events dedicated to freedom can be abstracted from the specific liturgical form in which such a possibility has been preserved and consequently applied to all activity, political, artistic, scientific, and so on.\n\nInstead of reinventing and parodying the crucifixion, a republican Enlightenment continues to bear witness to the singularity of the Christian revelation by creating the position of the guarantor who protects potential martyrs and tries to make such martyrdom unnecessary precisely by remaining alive to the possibility that it might take place anywhere, anytime, and in unanticipated forms, supplementing without subverting the Christian model. Inventing, refining and defending rules aimed at minimizing scapegoating would provide the opening for free exchange, free speech, free movement and private property at the center of the republican Enlightenment.\n\nWe could write the history of modernity as that of the tension between these two forms, from the struggles of the English and Dutch against the Spanish Empire, to the British struggle for New World dominance over the French, to the American founding, up th through the struggle against the 20 century totalitarianisms and the presence of today’s divergent paths separating Europe and America.\n\nThis latter, originary, modernity allows for the proliferation of spaces where firstness, in forms of freedom that can then be packaged and distributed in the marketplace, is possible; while it is precisely such spaces that victimary discourses, made up of the combination and collectivization of Romanticism and radical Enlightenment, take to be ever more cleverly disguised, powerful and insidious forms of scapegoating. Originary modernity can defend the sacred center or what I have called here the intelligence of the center insofar as it takes that intelligence to be bound up in institutions—the global market and nationally based constitutional self-government—that can be modified and re-shaped as needed to account for new rivalries and resentments. But it is precisely this adaptability and flexibility that accelerates the victimary stampede.\n\nIf what most enrages, though, is precisely the impersonal workings of the “machinery” of the marketplace and government—because it is this impersonality that is taken as a threat to the integrity of the freethinker, the uniqueness of the romantic subject, which is to say, seen as a mere front perpetrating fraud upon the “lasts”—the affirmation of articulations of hallowed sites provides us with a response to the rage. Inherited from Christianity and Judaism, embedded in the marketplace and constitutional government alike, the sacrality becomes, through its extension beyond its liturgical origins, that of the individual, understand as a distinctive array of signs which can never exhaust that to which it refers.\n\nThat is how we take ourselves, as self-representing individuals; and that is how we treat and devise institutions so as to address others, placing faith in the inexhaustibility of even the most apparently “conformist,” resentful or thoughtless individual, conferring upon them a sacrality which in turn increases the likelihood that they will demonstrate further signs of it. Our defense of any articulation of hallowed sites ultimately leads us to re-trace the process of minimization through which the Christian and Jewish revelations could be resituated on terms both irreducible to those revelations and capable of preparing us for new ones; conversely, even the most far flung or, for that matter, deliberately blasphemous or “pagan” sites of resistant self-fashioning could be shown to be unintelligible without the groundwork laid by those prior transformative revelations.\n\nThis secular sacrality ensures that we can transcend any possible disjunction between the sacred and the esthetic, and render unnecessary any narrative that would see the latter as coming to displace the former. If the public rituals affirming national faith and the valorization of open-ended exchange between producers and consumers are consecrations of liberty, then liberal democracy and all its attachments—free inquiry in the university, free association in the streets and on-line, freedom for a diversity of faiths, and so on—are all stances one converts to, every bit as much as one converts to Roman Catholicism or Islam. The response to anti-Western, anti-semitic victimary movements would then be what I would call “evangelicism,” which involves affirming and entering the global market in faiths and acting as a screen for the frustrated desire of the Other, demonstrating in one’s own person the internality of the obstacles to that desire, and presenting poles of mimetic attraction upon scenes representing its transcendence.\n\nMeanwhile, insofar as the sacrality we honor no longer depends upon its being protected from “secularizing” influences, it no longer needs to be distanced from the esthetic, which can in turn be seen as essential to the conversion strategies of evangelicism. The complement of conversion is simply “seduction,” which offers up access to an object, predicated upon the desiring subject’s demonstrating mastery of the proper rules of deferral; an object, moreover, like all objects of desire, which undergoes transformation in its being pursued and coming into possession. Insofar as the transformation results from the contribution made by this very interaction to the desired object, the object is thereby enhanced rather than subtracted from—the object, in fact, turns out to be one’s own conversion, one’s occupation of the admired place and one’s consequent realization and willing acceptance that rather than providing closer access to the center, the object “possessed” intensifies one’s responsibility to demonstrate that such access is illusory and must remain so.\n\nIn such a space, the last can be first and the first last. The new forms of deferral we need today involve setting in motion and taking responsibility for new chains of events which are nevertheless pointedly dependent for their completion upon those fellow sign-users who would have (and perhaps did) initially resist them.\n\nLet’s return to the chiastic model I presented earlier. If what initiates any act of semiosis is the experience of the danger of mimetic rivalry, which is to say, an increase of doubt proportionate to faith in the efficacy of the sign in representing the object to all, or a diminishment of the object’s immateriality and proportionate increase in the scramble for material objects seeming to possess its force, the goal of that act of semiosis must be twofold. First, it must aim to restore the object’s immateriality, which is to say to make whatever specific, material object for which we are contending into a sign of the repulsive power of the center.\n\nSecond, it must aim to create the object, in its materiality, anew—to provide for the production of more such objects, or to make the object divisible or sharable in some hitherto unimagined way. This new accessibility of the material object emerges along with the renewal of faith in immateriality of the sign, the immateriality of the sign as a rule regulating such access. Finally, though, this means that the new immateriality of the object, its renewal as a conduit of the intelligence of the center, resides in a new materiality of the sign, a new form of distinction, embodiment, enactment—a new style and norm which invites participation and an improvised iteration; a style and norm that draws attention to its own constitution as a dictation taken from the intelligence of the center.\n\nNotes\n\n1. I would like to thank Andrew Bartlett for pointing out the relevance of this passage from Signs of Paradox to my discussion. (back)\n\nWorks Cited\n\nGans, Eric. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford: U P, 1997.\n\n⸻-. “Return of the Sacred, I: The Sacred and the Significant.” Chronicles of Love and Resentment no. 326. dec. 17, 2005. Available <http: anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw326.htm>."
    },
    {
      "slug": "event-origin-center",
      "title": "Event, Origin, Center (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/event-origin-center.pdf",
      "content": "Let’s start with “journalism.” You watch a cable or news show, or read (probably online) an article in a newspaper, and there’s a “story” there. Maybe a story buried under layers of implicit and explicit editorializing, but, still, a story: one thing is purported to have happened, then another, and so on. Where do the stories come from—how does the journalist know where to look for them and find them? In every case, they are framed as stories with reference to the governing apparatus—the state. The state “does” something —the president issues an order, Congress passes a law, the court makes a decision—and that’s the story, occasionally presented straight (many stories are pretty much stenography), more often framed in terms of the event’s correspondence with some set of expectations, or on a continuum of “licitness.”\n\nIf the story concerns a corporation or another institution—a sports team, a movie studio, a university—that institution is treated either as an adjunct of the state (the story regards compliance or non-compliance, or the serving of what is ultimately a state function) or as state-like itself (as issuing its own executive orders, making policy changes, as its charter and state law authorizes it to do).\n\nThis raises the question of how the news media ever becomes something other than a stenographer, broadcasting the actions and decisions of government and its auxiliaries. It is the licitness spectrum that makes this possible: a government organ, or political party (or corporate, or…) decision or action might be illegal, or improperly arrived at or carried out, or can lead to consequences unanticipated by the initial act or decision. In other words, what is of interest is some kind of discrepancy. But how are such discrepancies detected? To say that a particular decision or act is “illegal” is to say that one organ of government might or should come into conflict with another organ of government (we can make the necessary adjustments in talking about other institutions, for which “illegality” means a conflict between an institution authorized by the government and the government); to say that an act or decision has been improperly carried out is, similarly, to point to possible conflicts, perhaps within the same organ of government (between superiors and subordinates, perhaps); and to say that an act or decision was a mistake or disaster is also to indicate and incite certain kinds of later, ultimately official assessments of and reactions to those decisions.\n\nBut how does an actor within the news media know and come to report that an act or decision of government (or…) is illegal, improper or incorrect? Only by having access to actors within, but to at least some extent at odds with, the governing decision maker, is this possible. This might be a\n\n“whistleblower,” or a power seeking or resentful individual or faction (assuming there’s any point to distinguishing between this and the whistleblower), but this is the only way the reporter can determine the legality, propriety or correctness of an act (that is, locate it on the licitness spectrum). The news media really come into its own, then, by leveraging disloyalty and dysfunction within or between institutions that are supposed to cohere and support each other. There may, of course, be dysfunction in any institution, but the news media is only possible insofar as responsibility for identifying and remedying dysfunction is assigned to institutional agencies other than those making the final decision within those institutions—that is, within the terms of “rule of law” or “checks and balances.”\n\nWithin a mostly functional institution with isolated dysfunction, the purpose of identifying dysfunction would be to report it to the governing authority to remedy the dysfunction—but this wouldn’t generate “news.” The news media can only thrive by inflating and exploiting dysfunction and encouraging conflict and disloyalty within institutions. Even in a case where the news media acts as a “praetorian guard” for a particular administration, that just means that the state factions whose influence they amplify are behind that administration as well.\n\nThis further means, though, that the news media are still stenographers, only of specific factions within institutions.\n\nWe can attribute enormous power to media organizations because we see them destroy (and effectively protect) very powerful people (like presidents) and advance and sabotage policy measures into which substantial resources have been invested on a regular basis. But most of this power should be attributed to those factions distributed within the institutions themselves, who themselves have plenty of reasons for wanting to destroy and sabotage office holders and policies. At most, members of the news media can marginally advance the interests of one faction against another. If we bring in another seemingly very powerful institution, the university, the analysis changes very little.\n\nAlong with supplying personnel for staffing the governing and auxiliary institutions (including the empire of think tanks, situated at the center of a Venn diagram connecting universities, media and government), the universities—obviously massively funded by the government—provide the information useful for one faction or another—a new “study” shows defense spending, or public health policy, or labor policy, needs to be directed one way or another. Needless to say, it is always possible for a bureaucratic faction to select and promote one study over others.\n\nIn a sense, the analysis is still not significantly different if we bring in what seem to be the most powerful global forces, the giant corporations operating according to the logic of financialized capital. Capital and international banks can cripple most countries; they fund the aforementioned think tanks and the political parties that produce the candidates that authorize the grants of power to the bureaucrats. But capital must still operate through the state, which is why it spends all that money on political influence and intellectual weaponry. Certainly, banks and the larger conglomerates could bring even a medium sized state to its knees, but they couldn’t do that to the largest states and certainly not a coalition of states organized under a hegemon.\n\nAt this point, probably all that appears to us as politics is precisely capital using states and states using capital, each leveraging the power of its counterpart to increase its own power vis a vis its rivals in its own field—all of which, again, has to pass through the state bureaucracy and its competing factions because capital cannot imagine operating outside of law, official currency, and the policing power of the state.\n\nNone of this, of course, says anything about the quality of any of these acts or decisions—one study can be better than another (al though what that means cannot be determined outside of an institutional power analysis aligned with the one conducted here), one policy might approximate its intended ends more closely than another (ditto), and some ends are more worth attaining than others. There’s no need to claim that every government is thoroughly saturated with depravity—the analysis I’m making here seems to suggest that only insofar as one accepts the official promotional materials of these institutions, which all claim to operate very differently than described here.\n\nIndeed, the most dissident groups of both left and right invariably end up relying on some more marginal government factions, allied with more marginal media outlets, pointing to more obscure discrepancies, themselves; or, they work with official sources and decode, but almost always by deriving the decoding formula from some idealized version of the official purpose of the institution (exposing that the government really represents some narrow interest rather than the people). This of course means that all of us, at whatever distance, are doing nothing more than seeking out discrepancies at the center that we hope will empower the faction that would institute a form of sovereignty we would more enthusiastically enlist for.\n\nIt takes a dramatic reorientation in one’s way of thinking to adopt the kind of institutional-power relationship outlined above without losing your ability to make moral distinctions—a re-orientation which the notion of the “red pill” describes as well as any readily imaginable alternative.\n\nMy purpose in conducting this little analysis here is to bring into focus an observation and, then, a question: first, the very operation of all the institutions of information production and provision presupposes an unwavering orientation toward the central authority, regardless of how decentralized things seem, or how impossible we might think it is to locate the sources of power and decision making within the circuits of electronic media; in which case, the question becomes, why is the central authority so riven with conflicting factions and the consequent dysfunction? If we can answer that question, and derive from that answer a “problem” that might be “solved,” we would also be able to place order in all the eyes and ears of the central authority, which are presently mostly occupied with informing on, misdirecting, and lying about each other.\n\nAnd the question has a very simple answer: the central authority is so disordered because its occupant is constantly changing and so all its organs must themselves be occupied with jockeying for power so as to secure their own positions in anticipation of the next shift or upheaval. And this means significant factions must always be opposed to any consolidation of power at the center that would make transitions of power less disruptive—or, we might say, less suggestive of new opportunities.\n\nSo, a new question: how did the occupation of central authority become programmatically insecure? But let’s step back a bit: why is there someone at the center in the first place? In starting this essay with an account of the news media, I also wanted to foreground the irreducibility of the event. Why are there “events”? Why do things happen, at least in such a way as to be significant and memorable, to leave a mark? There are events because there are centers, and centers because there are events, and even the most abstract statistical account of, say, the development of labor markets over the last century can only create new time frames and new, more distanced or focused, sites of observation regarding those events, which never cease to refer to some center.\n\nEven the ever more complete wiring of all institutions through the algorithmic governance of planetary scale computation hasn’t changed the fact that actual computing outcomes always come out as “hacked” in the interests of one faction or another—in fact, at this point, the Stack has simply created a new field for the central authorities (in their global competitions and hierarchies) and their adjutant institutions to play exactly the same game they’ve been playing all along.\n\nIt’s impossible to report something without giving it an event structure—that is, a basic beginning-middle-end narrative structure. It’s also impossible to report something without conferring significance upon it. Many people insist that they want just the facts, without narrative or framing, but since there are an infinite number of “facts” in the world and any publication is finite, choosing to report some and not all the rest is already a framing—again, this set of facts, or, really, events, are significant—and significant in relation to each other, comprising a version of reality. Finding yourself compelled to repeat epithets like “without evidence” is just a sign that this more fundamental, a priori framing, is no longer getting the job done.\n\nSo, we break the world down into significant events that can, at least in principle, be articulated in a coherent way (claims of the “chaos” or “meaninglessness” of modern life are really just different ways of conferring significance and articulating), and both participating and reporting on any event situates us in relation to or, to put it more strongly, places us in the orbit of some central authority which guarantees the meaning of all social happenings. Even acts carried out by the figure occupying the center (monarch, president, prime minister), even one with the most absolute or emergency powers, are “peripheral” or off center insofar as they refer back to the authority vested in that figure prior to and enabling this particular act.\n\nSo, all of humanity is made up of peripheral events. Why should this be the case? I would work with what I take to be a strong definition of “event”: something that happens and that can’t be reduced to, or wouldn’t have been predictable by, its “parts” or prior events. An event is something new. This definition is seemingly easy to contest—after all, don’t people predict things correctly, and can’t we break down an event into its parts and recompose it as their sum? You can single out a specific framing of an event, or view it under one of its (publicly agreed upon) “aspects,” and in that case predict it accurately.\n\nObvious cases are sporting events and elections, with clear numbers (if everything goes right) indicating an unmistakable winner. But that’s an arbitrarily restricted representation of the event—an event, moreover, constructed precisely so as to produce a certain outcome in that “aspect.” Lots of people and things need to be in place and to play specific roles under conditions that can never be perfectly specified in order for the event to be given closure —that is, so we could say, this game or election is over. In that case, ensuring all those people will be in place is part of the event; and if, in some sense, the event has been completed, the claim that that, in fact, constituted the event can be contested—what we take to be the end (the winner declared when the clock runs out or the votes all counted) is at the same time a beginning and middle of some other event.\n\nThe very fact that we can and do impose closure on events means that events are constituted by humanly imposed closure, even if not always with the same degree of explicitness and formality. The problem with reducing an event to the sum of its parts is similar—you can only do it retrospectively, with the event in its humanly imposed closure in mind. Otherwise, you would have no way of knowing what counts as a “part.” “Analyzing” the event is just another way of imposing closure upon it—you have to take as given what you purport to produce.\n\nTo have events, to participate in events, is to be human. Yes, nothing in nature happens exactly the same way two times. But nothing happens in nature, either. For whom would things happen, other than people? There’s no escaping anthropocentrism—those most intent on denouncing and transcending anthropocentrism have coined the term “Anthropocene” for the current period in earth history, which suggests that we need to transcend anthropocentrism because it has drawn the entire earth and its environment into its deathly vortex. It’s hard to get more anthropocentric than that. We can keep making the boundaries separating the human from the animal and inorganic, on the one side, and the technological, on the other side, and it is in fact very intellectually productive to do so, but this will always involve re-constituting the irreducibility of the human as constitutive of those boundaries. So, we come back to the question: why is the human constituted through the event?\n\nThe simplest answer is that the human emerged in an event. This seems theological, and so virtually all “serious” thinkers flee from it, but until the threshold of the human can be shown or even imagined to have been crossed in some so gradual as to be imperceptible way that no actual instant of crossing can be identified, the human as emergent in an event is the better hypothesis. Which brings us to language, undisputedly constitutive of the human, which likewise can only be imagined having emerged in an event. What would “part” of a “meaningful” sign be? How would it not already be meaningful? In any gradual emergence of the sign as meaningful, how could there not be a threshold under which it has no meaning and above which it does?\n\nTo keep things simple and avoid going into debt to debates within disciplines like semantics, semiotics and linguistics, I’ll say that by “meaning” I simply mean that a sign can be deemed to be the same in different occasions of its utterance or issue. This is only possible given some “agreement” stipulating the transferability of the sign but, of course, as Rousseau already pointed out, there seems to be no way of imagining arriving at such an agreement other than through the use of language itself. But there is a way.\n\nThe best way of hypothesizing the origin of language (and the human) has turned out to be through considering the logic of imitation. This is paradoxical, because imitation effaces originality and any origin—if we say there is an original, and then someone imitates it, we’re not thinking imitation in an originary way; but if there’s nothing but imitation, there is no origin. It is, in fact, the end to which imitation brings us that enables us to think imitation as origin. If all is imitation, then we learn to desire by imitating another’s desire—for that matter, we also learn to desire by imitating another’s imitation of what he takes to be my desire —which creates “scarcity” as we must converge on the same object.\n\nThe telos of imitation is rivalry, crisis and violence— violence without end or reconciliation. There are very good reasons for us to be very uneasy in talking about imitation, and denying it whe never we can—the more we acknowledge imitation as the foundation of our being, the more we are bereft of will, freedom and any claim to self-mastery. The historical solution to the crisis of imitation has been the construction of socially shared models, or what Rene Girard called “external mediation.” But for external mediation to work, we need to place the model beyond rivalry, which blocks thinking about imitation in an originary direction. It’s only when external forms of mediation collapses that we can think imitation in originary terms, which at first merely radicalizes the crisis.\n\nStill, we must have come out of our mimetic crises somehow —after all, we’re still here. Mimetic crisis represents the destruction of community—but that also means that the key to community must be found in the same neighborhood, so to speak. Mimetic crisis involves everyone in the group converging on the same object; so, articulating some nonviolent, differently mimetic (still assuming nothing outside of the mimetic) relation to the center must be what gets us from the end of imitation to the beginning of community. It’s remarkable that, given that humans must have been aware of the prevalence and even dangers of imitation from very early on, and it already figures prominently in Aristotle, no one, until very recently, has thought imitation through to its deadly conclusions.\n\nThe reason must lie in the collapse of external mediation, which set a cap on mimetic inquiry. External mediation collapsed because the external mediators themselves—kings, nobles, priests—became objects of violence. Something that no longer works becomes an object of inquiry; in this case, the way in which it ceased to work made the inquiry inescapable, and provided it with its problematic. Something about violence toward an object of mediation must lie at the conversion of mimesis from community destroying to community creating.\n\nRight now, we really have two ways of thinking about the conversion of the mimetic crisis into an origin. Fortunately, they are both very good ways, even if one is, on the crucial point, better than the other. For Rene Girard, a mediator is selected at the height of the mimetic crisis and “externalized,” which is to say, lynched. Someone in the group, for some arbitrary reason, is differentiated from the rest, so that the incipient melee can be directed toward this single member. As the group converges on him, he becomes the cause of the violence—he has divided the community, and the community can now only be united against him.\n\nThis provides us with the very en during structure of the scapegoat. But once the mediator has been made “external,” he also becomes the cause of the unity, indeed origin, of the community. He is simultaneously villain and savior—in this duality, Girard locates the origin of mythology. And the duplicity of mythology, since the responsibility of the community for the murder of the savior must be disavowed. Take the myth of Prometheus, who saved and originated humanity by providing it with tools, knowledge and fire, and was punished severely for it—not by “us,” of course— responsibility is fobbed off onto Zeus. But, on Girard’s analysis, it was us. Prometheus’s human model violated, very likely in some innovation, the sacred order of the community, and his gifts can only be received and enjoyed insofar as the lynching he suffered as a result can be denied, and thereby ritually retrieved.\n\nThis account would already let us see why there must be a center, and why the center can’t quite be “human,” even when it is occupied by one. If someone sees his fellow desire something, or even imagines he desires that things, his own desire will be aroused. Right away, the two are arranged around that object, which situates the object at the center. It remains that the center because the mimetic rivalry, and eventually mimetic crisis, will enhance the desirability of the central object. In Girard’s model, we must imagine a diversion from the desired object toward a single member of the group who displaces it as the center, which is to say, the increasingly intense focus of everyone’s attention.\n\nThis central figure must also provide the resolution of the crisis, which is to say the power to found and maintain the community must be conferred upon him after the fact. Thus, the center is a—indeed the first—source of agency within the now human community, and no future agency will be possible without it. This is why center and event are bound inextricably together. As we will see shortly, we can also think the originary scene, more consistently, in my view, by assuming that the focus remains on the initial object of desire, in which case it is the shared consumption, and then unanimously acknowledged locus of absence, of the initial object of desire, that makes the center the foundation of the community.\n\nBefore I proceed, I’d like to ask a question: where are we here? Within what discipline? It’s definitely not philosophy; indeed, my sense of the incommensurability of mimetic theory and philosophy has been radicalized—and this includes anti- and post-metaphysical philosophy, some of which does border on some of these questions. Philosophy remains the province of “man thinking,” and its content and concerns are how man thinking comes and continues to be man thinking. There’s no “man” in mimetic theory—there are oscillations between sameness and difference in the shapes given to common life. It’s a “human science,” for sure, but it’s hard to see how it can enter the actually existing human sciences without essentially razing them to ground and making it all one big human science.\n\nThe other human sciences start with “social facts,” which is to say actions, behaviors and institutions authorized and recognized formally by the community. That’s where I started this essay as well—with “journalism” as a coherent body of social facts. But there’s no way of asking, within any of these disciplines, why are there social facts in the first place? That’s because they ultimately derive from philosophy, and similarly foundationally distinguish themselves from collective revelation. My purpose in opening as I did was to show that an honest and thoroughgoing inquiry into “social facts” leads one to their irreducibly revelatory nature, which is to say their origin in some event, which in turn leads us to the origin of humanity in revelation, which in turn led us to mimesis.\n\nGirard called his thinking “fundamental anthropology”; Eric Gans, to whom I will now turn, calls it “generative anthropology” and “originary thinking”; I have called it “anthropomorphics.” Does it need a single name? Regardless, it is an imperious, intellectually ravenous, and therefore “imperialist” mode of thought. It takes its incommensurability with all hitherto existing thought as a challenge.\n\nHere’s the limit of Girard’s hypothesis: there’s no reason why some animal group, even an exceptionally intelligent one, should view ganging up on and killing one of its members as “meaningful,” which is to say, “memorable.” Animals kill their own kind without it changing their behavior or form of organization in the slightest. There needs to be some formal acknowledgment of the event—there needs to be a sign. The origin of language needs to be conjoined with the origin of the human. And, since what is to be formally acknowledged is the revelation of the group as a community sharing a center, the origin of language and the origin of the human is also the origin of the sacred.\n\nSo, Gans first proposed adding a sign to the conclusion of Girard’s otherwise unaltered scene—after the originary murder, the group all gestures to the body of the victim in some way. But he then realized that if the real point is the pointing, the killing itself is superfluous —the group could have just as readily gestured toward a living, not-yet (and therefore maybe not to be) victim. We can add that the issuance of a gesture after the crisis has already been resolved is less likely than a sign when the crisis is at its height, and therefore most urgently needs to be abated—that would make it effective and memorable.\n\nIf it’s more likely that violence was averted before, rather than commemorated after, the fact, then there’s also no need to assume a human victim at the center. Gans slices away with Okham’s Razor. We just need a desirable object, which becomes more desirable as each member imitates the desire of the other for it. A single, arbitrarily selected human would not have been a desirable object for other humans—it is possible to imagine a group of males grouped around a female, and perhaps some matriarchal ritual orders reference some such event, but for our originary scene it’s hard to see what would bring a group of men to be clustered around a single woman, since sexual intercourse is an intrinsically one-on-one activity.\n\nWhat is much easier to imagine is clustering around some food item, which would be a regular occurrence for the group. (Gans also pointed out that the earliest communities worshipped animals and plants, with human divinity and human sacrifice coming much later, with hierarchical orders.) So, normally, feeding would proceed in accord with the pecking order—the alpha animal eats to satiation, then the beta, and so on. On our hypothetical occasion, the intensification of mimetic desire overrides the pecking order as all rush to the meal at the center. There’s no way of sharing it in an orderly manner, because the only existing order has just collapsed.\n\nOne member of the group hesitates in the face of this emergent disorder—his reaching for the central object is aborted; this action that has not been completed becomes a sign, and can be imitated. It is a sign of deferral, and allows everyone to formally acknowledge a new order, enabling them to proceed to an orderly, shared consumption of the central object.\n\nGans and others, very much including myself, have reiterated this originary hypothesis many, many times, and so I try to do it differently on each occasion, so as to make it an object of thought and productive of discourse. An approach I suggested very early on, but have not really stuck with, and so I’ll retrieve it here, is as follows: in working with the originary hypothesis, one should violate the minimality of the scene by adding one element that “tilts” the scene in one direction or another—a clinamen, one could say. The originary event could then be conceptualized as a bundle of still unfolding possibilities—it can be virtualized, as we participate in the deferral occurring there.\n\nSo, for example, from where in the group would the first sign have issued from? Would it have been the alpha? The beta? Some more marginal, potentially victimized member? We don’t need to answer this question for the originary hypothesis to be “validated”—it is one of many questions that could be left open. But someone would have had to gone first (and how “aware” do we have to imagine this individual being regarding what he’s doing?), and it would have to be someone bearing some traces of the pre-human group. So, we could play with secondary hypotheses in accounting for human differentiation. In hypothesizing the scene we are doing something very tricky and tentative, because we must use the language we have as a result of the scene to articulate a scene where only a very preliminary and to us alien (and yet still full-fledged, insofar as it is a sign) form of that language was just emerging.\n\nThey knew what they were doing and they didn’t know what they were doing, because “knowing what they were doing” is not yet fully “applicable.” They know enough to re-enact, but without any way of representing what they are re-enacting. This boundary between the tacit and explicit, is a permanent feature of language, a source of linguistic development and manipulation, and therefore of secondary hypotheses. We are never not on some scene, and we can never fully articulate the way we are on that scene. At the same time, we can keep trying to imagine “causes” and “motivations” that would have lead the first to hesitate and others to imitate him and thereby generate secondary hypotheses but without ever getting “inside” the scene sufficiently to cancel its revelatory nature as an event.\n\nThe origin of language, representation as the deferral of violence, the human as that species that poses a greater danger to itself than is presented to it by anything external: originary thinking proposes a particular understanding of agency. How do we “decide what to do”? It’s possible to generate answers to this question by rummaging through the inventory of “internal” “faculties”—“will,” “reason,” “calculation,” and so on. Or, to ground the decision maker deterministically in a series of “structures” and “causes,” of which there will never be any lack. For originary thinking, agency is deferral. I’ll explain this in terms that may sound philosophical, but I’ll really be drawing upon words that exist in every language and the meaning of which is intuitively self-evident.\n\nThe animal pecking order, like any order, implies differentiation, or some relation between same and other. Imitation, as it intensifies, collapses difference: we all become the same. But we can never be same enough—we can’t occupy the exact same space, we can’t hold exactly the same object, we can put the exact same piece of food in our mouths. At the point where sameness reaches its limits, the non-being of other in this place is the only way of introducing difference—the non-being, the removal, of the other, would restore the other to otherness. Deferral introduces a difference, an other, before this “final solution” becomes the only possibility, while also implying it as a possibility.\n\nThe first one who hesitates, who converts grasp into gesture, becomes other, and an other who need not be attacked because he can be imitated while preserving difference. If the first one to issue what will have become the sign once others imitate him is, in fact, imitated, then the central object, which is let be for the moment, becomes other, and everyone becomes other to each other through it.\n\nTo act, to do something, is, then, to produce or present some other that defers the crisis of sameness. We would be satisfied with nothing less than an impossible degree of sameness without the imposition of this other. This means creating a center, in relation to which one is here and the other is there. This doesn’t mean we “decide” to put something at the center, and that we need to get inside some decision making process and construct a set of cognitive steps, or some wheels turning, that leads from the proposition “we are getting too close to absolute sameness” to the proposition “we can agree on this thing as our center.”\n\nIt is, rather, the center that calls us, and that we hear and heed. On the originary scene, the first to gesture does not exactly know what he is doing—he is merely registering the impasse, the double bind, of mimesis. His sign is a result of compulsion, and those who imitate him submit to the same compulsion, a compulsion that can only be seen to come from the center. As Gans has put it, the first sign is the Name-of-God, and the center is sacred. The center is other, and in being the same in relation to it we are other to each other. The problem of “what to do” is to listen to the center.\n\nSo, what does that mean? How do we tell whether we or another are listening more or less closely to the center? We are always already listening to the center, insofar as there is no social order or even social setting, without some center towards which we are arrayed—an altar and its rituals, a government with its central position (monarch, prime minister, president), a room with a table around which all sit and norms of politeness or civility governing exchanges, a canonical text which we are devoted to interpreting, a centrally imposed currency governing economic exchanges, and so on—we are never starting from scratch here.\n\nWe can’t say a word to each other without referring, implicitly and explicitly, to previous conversations and events, and governing our interactions in accord with some norm drawn from them. Our fundamental “motivation” is always to preserve that center and prevent what is intuited as a complete breakdown in presence. This seems to suggest that we will tend to conform as closely as possible to modes of action that have previously “worked” in situations “like” this one. And, statistically speaking, that is overwhelmingly what the center is telling us to do. But sometimes it is trying to approximate more and more closely expected, predictable, pre-approved actions that will accelerate the crisis of sameness.\n\nWe listen to the center and thereby act insofar as this is the case, and to some extent it is always the case. If approximating standardized and stereotyped responses aggravates the crisis of sameness, the center needs to be restored, and this means one has to “read the room,” and reading the room means imagining a new configuration that would make us other to each other again. You are, of course, in the room you are reading, and so reading the room involves getting a read on others reading of you, especially if you are ahead of the game in determining the crisis, in which case your moves in “sensing” and eliciting signs of the crisis provide you with your reading material as others take in your movements. Listening to the center entails reorganizing the field on which you all move by following the way others follow you as you defer the onset of terminal sameness or, we could say, entropy.\n\nHistory, then, is the history of the center, and, in fact, we have something we can call “history” because it is possible for a human being to occupy the center. A human will occupy the center when, in listening to it, hears that the imminent danger of the collapse of presence cannot be deferred through recourse to the established ritual order. There is always something “revolutionary” about a human seizing the center, even in mundane contexts like a friend stepping in a resolving a dispute between a couple of other friends. At the same time, someone moving decisively to the center is always a possibility, since a feeling for the imminence of some crisis of sameness is unevenly distributed—it is sometimes possible to feel the rumblings of such a crisis years, decades, maybe centuries in advance.\n\nA human at the center places himself in the position of a potential victim as a condition of being a successful restorer of same and other: there is a firm place for Girard’s scapegoat mechanism here. If those two friends resume and embitter their dispute, they will likely blame the well meaning mediator (was he, really, well meaning?). How we manage our relations with—listen to —the humans we put at the center is the heart of all our morality, ethics and politics.\n\nWe have all had the experience of being angry toward someone while simultaneously realizing that there is some “disproportion” between our anger and the actions and intents we attribute to the target of our anger. I feel confident in saying that we have all had this experience, if not in real time than in retrospect because, in fact, there is never any commensurability between our attitudes towards those at the center and actions attributed to the person at the center. An accordance between the two is created in terms of the needs of the scene. If there is no natural, neutral, self-evident, automatic relation between our engagement with the person at the center and the “deserts” of that person, we can ask, what, then, is the right or best way of engaging the occupant of the center—in the simplest sense of the person we’re all looking at, talking about, doing something to, paying attention to, obeying—even if the “all” is just “all of me” as I assemble myself around that center against the background of an imagined audience and possible participants.\n\nConsider that moment where you notice some discrepancy between your anger toward someone and whatever you can identify as having elicited that anger. You have a choice here; or, the center is issuing conflicting, or ambiguous, directives, which can only be narrowed down by following some that lead you back to the crisis of sameness, leaving you with the one that leads out. You can double down on your anger by attributing this very discrepancy to the other, treating it as a marker of the other’s duplicity, of the other being even worse than you imagined. You thereby summon whatever norms, rules, traditions, customs might be at hand and find as many violations of those norms, rules, traditions and customs as you can to “justify” your rage.\n\nIn doing so, if you are still inclined to look at yourself, or allow others to point out what you are doing, you will see you are collapsing the scene by mixing and matching imperatives snatched from their respective contexts so as to “make your case,” a case that would not hold up even under slightly altered circumstances. You can feel that you are protecting the center here by eliminating this usurper of the center, who has abused the privilege of being placed at the center.\n\nWe can see that in this scenario the other is kept at the center and the “agent” displaces his own centeredness, claiming to act only in the name of another center constructed conveniently so as to match just this occasion. The agent is deploying power, insofar as he puts to work his individual capacities along with his ability to compel and persuade others to make the center an attractor of violence, but he is displacing responsibility. To be responsible is to place oneself at the center, even if only of a limited scene, and to remain in that center after the event has concluded— to “answer for it.” So, you treat the other who has become the center of a scene you participate in constructing while and by standing at the center of the scene that will be established in the aftermath.\n\nThe center of that scene should be demonstratively the same on the new scene on which you stand as center and represent it, and you should yourself be the same on this scene as on the previous one: this is what “accountability” means. What it means for both figures to be the same in both cases cannot be specified in advanced, nor can a general rule be constructed: this will always be a discursive construct. The responsible actor will have recourse to the same traditions as the irresponsible one, and the difference will be that the former will draw attention to the relation between traditions referenced and action taken making that relation as singular as possible so as to exhaust the scene: this rule was applied to this action in this way because this application maximized the consistency of the history of applications of this rule while simultaneously revealing in the event all that the rule enabled us to see as relevant.\n\nThe irresponsible actor, meanwhile, will try to prevent his auditors from arriving at any specific connections between traditions evoked and actions taken, and will play a kind of shell game as one tries to figure out what justified some “this” in particular. Again, the difference between the two will not always be obvious, but we can sum up this difference in the form of a familiar and even popularizable formula: power should always be matched with responsibility. It is immoral to give someone responsibility for doing something without giving them the power to do it; it is immoral to give someone power, or to exercise power, that is not embedded in responsibility; it is immoral, for that matter, to claim responsibility for that over which you have no power, or to attribute responsibility to others for that over which they exercise no power.\n\nTalking about mismatches, and increased correspondences, between power and responsibility will always provide for more coherent assessments and conversations than arguing about intrinsically unlimited and undefinable concepts like rights, equality, freedom and even, for that matter, “justice,” which can really never be anything more than the coincidence of power and responsibility in the one delegated to settle the dispute.\n\nIt’s very hard to imagine everyone, in any setting, having exactly equal power and therefore exactly equal responsibility—it’s even harder to imagine, albeit a bit easier than it once was, to imagine what it would look like to insist that this be the case. You would have to wreak havoc on all institutions and enterprises which, without exception, insofar as they last for more than five minutes, establish formal and informal hierarchies. Asking the question of how to make power match responsibility, then, is not an intellectual exercise to be carried out with the assumption of a year zero —it is always an assessment and participation in existing orders.\n\nIt’s sometimes possible to pick up power that has been left on the ground, so to speak, or to take responsibility for some breach and then seek to gather the power needed to make good on that responsibility; it’s also possible to take responsibility for conferring power on a flawed leader who might in turn channel power back; and, of course, sometimes it’s possible to just do what one is supposed to. All this still leaves open the question of what all these institutions and enterprises should be doing, or, for that matter, which should exist, and which shouldn’t. Part of the power of the power/responsibility nexus is that it provides at least a negative answer: any mode of activity that does not allow for the commensuration of power and responsibility is indefensible, and will probably be so on other, commonsensical grounds.\n\nBut we can retrieve a hoary old slogan from an unlikely source in order to approximate the substance of a good human order while remaining at the right level of generality (that is, without specifying the obligatory form of sacrality, form of government, and so on): from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.\n\nThis slogan was made famous by Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, so it is easy to attribute to it an ultraegalitarian, oikophobic altruistic meaning. If looked at closely, though, it must be the most inegalitarian, dare I say it, “based,” political maxim imaginable—which is not surprising, given that comes at the end of a relentless critique, on Marx’s part, of the concept of “equal rights.” One might think that the point is to divide those with “needs” and those with “abilities” into separate constituencies, with the latter eschewing any privileges and selflessly serving the former. But that can’t be right: everyone has both needs and abilities.\n\nAnd the ablest, in fact, have needs far beyond those of the less able—discovering, honing, training, refining and exercising one’s abilities at the highest possible level is itself a need, one requiring the deployment of substantial social resources. Meanwhile, it’s very good to keep in mind that along with perhaps more modest needs, the less able also have abilities, and we don’t know what they are without institutional design aimed at eliciting them. So, we now have a question to bring to bear on every social institution, whether industrial, educational, artistic, scientific, or anything else—is it maximizing the meeting of needs and the exercise of abilities, both in itself and in its contribution to the entire order.\n\nSo, the demand we can make on the occupant of the social center is that power and responsibility be matched in that person, who really just stands at the apex of gradations of power/responsibility articulations, all of which refer back to that center. And what that person is responsible for is overseeing the practices whereby the discovery and exercise of abilities is the cause and effect of the meeting of needs. What is involved in making such a “demand,” though, is maximizing one’s own abilities so as to take the responsibility that will deserve the receipt of power needed to complement the central power in one of its extensions.\n\nNote that what is excluded here is any recourse to terms of “legitimacy” that stand outside of the order of articulated power and responsibility—the ruler cannot be charged with not being chosen of God, nor of not respecting “rights,” or representing the “will of the people,” or any of the other shibboleths of the secular order that undergird liberalism, understood here as the process of centralization through equalization—intermediate layers of power and responsibility are continually hacked away so that central power can be exercised directly on all subjects. Liberalism guarantees only perpetual conflict, because demands for equality can never be met in a satisfactory way, the will of the people can never be sufficiently approximated, rights can never be adequately defined so as to be protected, and so on.\n\nAll of these political concepts are attempts to fill the gaps left by the destruction of sacral kingship, which included a guarantee that the person occupying the center today should be the same one occupying it tomorrow. The sacral king served as the mediator between the cosmos and the community, and sacral kingship is probably the most common human political order. In sacral kingship a human fully occupies the center, attracting the devotion and resentments of the entire community, and providing for a complete communal order. The sacral king is also there as an object of sacrifice, and we can no longer perform sacrifices because we can no longer believe that the killing of a centrally located individual will placate the gods.\n\nBut we need both the unanimity regarding the primacy of the center and the assurance of succession it provides—whether or not such unanimity is actually attained and succession ensured, those are the terms in accord with which any good order must be judged. After all, if we did not have such a need, what would account for all the intellectual investment in developing theories of legitimation and designing constitutions and governmental forms and traditions intended to meet those terms of legitimacy—no social order can bear an interim in which the transfer of power is not laid out in steps that can produce consensus that the seat of power remains the same—such steps will be invented retroactively, if need be.\n\nBut we can now have a more pragmatic and sturdier guarantee, and one at least as capable for inspiring loyalty and devotion: there must be someone at the center, there already is someone at the center, and we can all leverage our own “orbiting” centers so as to make the social center continue and ever more closely approach serving as the source of the articulation of power and responsibility, needs and abilities.\n\nThere is obviously no clear path from the social order we live in to the kind I’m describing. But we can start to see a path by minimizing what seem like massive, insurmountable, differences. Let’s grant that everything is now fake, which would really mean that everyone is competing with everyone else for the patronage of the center in fighting their demonized enemy, with the center pocketing the demanded tributes and going its own way. But there is still the center—it is less possible than ever before to pursue a political project without deploying the terms of the center to insist that whoever occupies that seat should really be on your side against your symmetrically opposite (and thereby easily targeted) number.\n\nThe fakeness—everyone matters, everyone’s voice counts, everyone can be empowered, everything is always at stake; nothing ever happens the way anyone wants, even if no one quite realizes this—is the result of the compulsive centralization through equalization constitutive of liberalism, which derives from the shattering of sacral imperial centers, and which now runs on auto-pilot, or AI. But everyone implicitly concedes that nothing makes sense without reference to the center, which, if you flesh out the various critiques, pleadings, bombast, dialogues, and fantasies, is always being invoked as the guarantee of one’s stance (one could also construct the implicit scenario, however unlikely, by which a chain of command from the occupant of the center to circle protecting the speaker and expelling his enemies would materialize).\n\nAlso, however fake, there are institutions in which are located levers of power, even if in some cases just the power to shut the institution down. You can want to do nothing, but you really can’t—you’re circulating through some of these institutions and you can always locate yourself somewhere on the spectrum between parroting the narrative being pumped into it and disabling that narrative. You can best modulate your activities within these institutions by developing the practice of an infiltrator. You’re an infiltrator on behalf of the sovereign to come, gathering intelligence, finding and recruiting co-infiltrators, leaving tracks for others to follow, indicating a willingness to support any move towards a “realer” form of governance.\n\nYou must free yourself of the reactiveness encouraged by the particular mimetic intensifications of liberalism, which generate ineffectual tit-for-tat exchanges. You might respond or engage with opposite numbers, but without imagining it to be a real exchange or dialogue—rather, you are modeling a particular way of marking an institution. De-politicization might be the most radical politics right now: simply refusing to echo fealty to the exemplary victim of the day or spew hatred toward the reviled prospective victim is becoming alarming, but still not so easy to punish. Ask instead for an explicit statement of the rules you are expected to follow.\n\nPoint earnestly to anomalies in the rules, as stated—after all, you want to make sure you’re following them to the letter. The extremely revolutionary principle you are embodying is that the worst, most dangerous, most to be deferred centralization of violence is that directed toward the actual social center and its occupant—however fake. This reverses every instinct bred into the liberal subject, who can hardly be seen as a member of the community with continuously hurling invectives at the rulers. This is very difficult, but it is better to settle for pointing out how wildly contradictory and impossible to follow all the rules issued by the center are, in an earnest attempt to figure them out—and, if the occupant of the center is indeed fake, the commands it issues will, indeed, be wildly contradictory and impossible to follow consistently. All you’re asking for is commands you can actually obey.\n\nThe flip side of adopting the posture of the infiltrator is making yourself uninfiltratable. I’m talking about educating and training a particular type of person here, one incommensurable with and yet capable of functioning within a liberal order. Such people find each other, and are at least a curiosity for the good liberal subjects. You will do podcasts, set up sites where you organize to educate each other and make videos, perhaps getting chased from one platform to another; you will write long, dense essays. There will be spaces where you can speak explicitly because you’re not under direct supervision (these spaces may shrink), but in those spaces you will be infiltrated in turn.\n\nSuccess is only possible if you turn the infiltrators into your tools: speak always and only as if you will only obey the commands of legitimate leaders of legitimate institutions, and you are always simply pointing out that the rate of turnover in terms of legitimacy is accelerating and it can be rather difficult to keep up. The system may learn about you, but in such a way that they’re getting feedback they can’t really do anything with, because they can’t decelerate the turnover in terms of legitimacy. You’ll also be turning yourself and your friends into the kind of people who only care about where the real levers of power are, and how they operate, and how all the smaller interlocking levers fit in. It will always be possible to find some way of speaking legitimately about the system.\n\nAlong with the whole array of institutions, there will continue to be the system of planetary-scale computation, which will endure any but the most extreme social breakdown, but at the same time will continue to be shot full of holes. Systems are increasingly automated in ways we’re all familiar with, but what is most politically relevant regarding the system of computation is the ways it makes everyone more surveillable, predictable and controllable. It’s a kind of automated infiltration. It will be increasingly important to think about the kind of feedback you’re giving the machines. Behind the machines are operators, who write algorithms for, among other things, determining whom to cancel.\n\nIt may be possible to create platforms that place you beyond the reach of the cancellers, but only, I would think, relatively so. You would anyway have to move from those safe platforms to the integrated ones to participate in reworking social order. The machines can actually be seen as allies, and “algorithms want to be free” might be a viable slogan. Liberals are very upset that algorithms written for clearly defined purposes (safety, matchmaking, etc.) and drawing on the constantly growing pool of data produce unwelcome (racist, sexist, etc.) results. They will have to keep their fingers on the scale, presumably if they can ever get around to using AI for economic planning around, e.g., “climate change,” as well.\n\nIt’s not that AI will determine completely “objectively” or “fairly” all by itself who is socially credit worthy in various ways (who must be watched, who must report to social workers or therapists regularly, who cannot be allowed to work in certain institutions, etc.)—human input is always necessary because the machines must always be trained to process data using models. But let’s be human enough to enter into the automated cognitive process of the algorithms and ask, what does the algorithmic order “want”? I think the answer would be “more, and better curated, data.”\n\nWe want cities to be safer, people to be healthier, children to be more intelligent, air and water to be cleaner, and so on, while recognizing there will always be more than one way to approximate these goals and integrating them into a system of power and responsibility. We want the machines to sense, record and process indices of danger, health hazards, insufficiently exercised intellects, and so on. Only through the provision of data from the intended beneficiaries is this possible. If liberalism feels compelled to put its finger on the scale in very reductive, hysterical ways, we can put our fingers more lightly on the scale in a wide variety of ways.\n\nWhat kind of combination of urban design, tolerance of deviance, allowance for self-protection, is necessary for achieving a threshold of safety that doesn’t infringe upon basic urban functions is an open question, one which will be answered differently at different times and in different places, We would want to keep producing and feeding data into the system that would produce a range of possible outcomes that would then need to be translated into practices at each level of authority. The same will be true of health standards and practices, education, housing, pollution, and everything else. The left should be free to input its own obsessions, while data attached to questions regarding the role of ethnic distribution and family formation in promoting social cohesion can also be fed in.\n\nThose of us who want from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs have a strong interest in “oracularizing” planetary computation, or, turning it into the voice of the center, even if it won’t provide each of us with all of the answers we want. That’s all any social center ever is: the sum total of everyone’s attempts to effect a distribution of goods and capabilities that is regularly and visibly enough associated with one’s contributions to the center to make one want to continue making those contributions. It is a synthesis, albeit imperfect, of all the intentions input to the system so as to produce coherent shared intentions. This was as true of the earliest sacrificial scenes as it is of today’s computerized world.\n\nSo, planetary computation is to be delinked from liberalism. That, then, is the goal of the infiltration: to feed data indigestible to the churnings of algorithmic alimentary systems jiggered by the endlessly recycled liberal chain of command. We can learn to speak any language in doing so— advanced design, computer programming, postmodern philosophy, avant-garde art and, of course, that of ordinary people getting ground through the machinery. That’s what infiltration is—language learning, towards the creation of, not so much an ur- or originary language, as an originary translation device implanted, so to speak, in our language.\n\nIn any exchange we have to mirror back the other’s actions to him, and in doing so we can abstract what is good from what is bad or less good from it. How do we know what is bad, good and better? Whatever makes it the thing he’s actually doing: at a minimum, drawing attention to something at the center, and thereby indicating a willingness to stand at the center himself. So, you mirror back the actor drawing the strongest and least violent attention, and place him at the center with ample space to articulate the power he has just exercised with the responsibility he has for it. There are always any number of ways of doing this in any instance.\n\nYou give others assignments—assignments to make what they’re doing more what they’re doing, to make the words they’re using mean more of what they mean, to make they’re gestures and postures indicate more of what they’re indicating. The more power you have, the more the design of assignments is indirect and distributed—even if you’re powerless, you can hypothesize assignments that might be adopted by the more powerful—maybe they’ll let you run the experiment. These practices can be scaled up or down as necessary—from a chance conversation to the establishment of protocols and a hierarchy for an institution or corporation employing tens of thousands.\n\nWhat is most illiberal here is creating programs for people to fulfill, programs meant to qualify them for social participation by paying constant attention to their habits. Ultimately you want people to be able to take the shortest distance between two points, but in order to learn how to do that they will have to be made to find their way through very carefully constructed labyrinths and obstacle courses, testing all of the faculties. This is the design practice that elicits the discourse of the center."
    },
    {
      "slug": "ga-vs-center-study-thread",
      "title": "GA vs. Center Study (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": null,
      "url": null,
      "content": "GA is the sabotaging of the originary hypothesis. The originary hypothesis opens up inquiry, while GA shuts down inquiry by producing an ideology of \"liberal democracy.\" Nothing that doesn't \"affirm\" \"liberal democracy\" can be stated within GA. This creates a wasteland of social thinking and an incredibly impoverished understanding of humanity.\n\nThis consumerist \"fork\" from the originary hypothesis valorizes the highest form of consumerism, connoisseurship. The connoisseur identifies the \"best,\" and is himself the best at recognizing what is best. If \"liberal democracy\" is the \"best\" form of society, all works of art and culture approximate \"bestness\" to the extent that they affirm or prefigure \"liberal democracy.\" All aesthetic judgments within GA will conform to this model.\n\n\"Resentment\" is the label placed on those who don't model themselves on the best, and these resenters are the object of GA resentment.\n\nGA is a bet on the indefinite continuation of the bestness of \"liberal democracy\"; a bet one must keep doubling down on lest the entire edifice collapses. Any claim that is not a bet laid on \"liberal democracy\" is unintelligible.\n\nAnd \"liberal democracy\" itself has no meaning other than \"American dominated global order,\" predicated on all markets, literal and figurative, being penetrated by America to the point of saturation.\n\nAll this is inscribed in the \"DNA\" of GA."
    },
    {
      "slug": "generative-anthropology-one-big-discipline",
      "title": "Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/generative-anthropology-one-big-discipline.pdf",
      "content": "Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518\n\nIf the originary hypothesis entails that all human possibilities must be implicit in, and therefore traceable back to, the originary scene, then it follows that Generative Anthropology must be the human science. And if Generative Anthropology is the human science, it must be both incommensurable with and inclusive of all existing human sciences. This places thinkers within GA in a somewhat anomalous position: a tiny, at best barely noticed minority within the human sciences considering itself the practitioners of the only genuine science. This raises the question of what our relationship to the other human sciences should be.\n\nBut before that question comes another one: what, exactly, counts as a human science, and what should a human science be doing? The notion that the human sciences should be modeled on the physical sciences, presupposing an objective, neutral observer, universally transparent categories and even mathematical methods, and the equivalent of the experimental method, has been discredited. The fact that human inquirers are part of the phenomena they are inquiring into makes the human sciences a qualitatively different enterprise. (I will leave aside the question of how unquestioned these assumptions are for the physical sciences themselves.)\n\nWe cannot establish any pre- or trans-historical starting point for the human sciences—we always begin within traditions of inquiry. All of these traditions have their origin in some break with one ritual or mythological order or another. Some kind of institution or practice that is unintelligible, and yet a source of sanctioned behavior and modes of activity within the existing order, must be what initiates the break and prompts attempts to understand it. Institutions such as money, markets, writing, and republican and democratic governments might all qualify, and, indeed, we see all of these in what, in the West at least, is the first human science, Greek philosophy.\n\nThe question addressed by Plato in The Republic is still the question all human sciences, more or less directly, must be trying to ask: what is a good way for people to live together? Within a ritual order, such questions could not be asked: the way to live is the way we have always lived, as prescribed by the ritual order and explained by the mythological order. So, a recognition of some disordering element, and a consideration of how to return to a “good” order, is central to the human sciences.\n\nRichard Seaford makes a very strong case for money being the disordering element at the origin of ancient Greek metaphysics. The universality, eternity, and convertibility of money all find their equivalents in metaphysics, and Seaford even provides a compelling reading of Greek tragedy, showing that money is recognized as the disordering element in the Greek polis. Furthermore, the various antinomies of metaphysics, such as between the material and the ideal, the individual and society, all find their equivalent in money as well. At the same time, metaphysics had to be written down, the effect of writing and the subsequent confusion over the meaning of words was systematically reflected upon in Plato’s texts, and a parallel tradition represented by scholars like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, and, more recently, David Olson, has, equally compellingly, identified the structure of writing with the form of post-mythical thought.\n\nThese are overlapping and complementary analyses—I am just giving a reason why I am going to proceed to make sense of the development of the human sciences in terms of writing, while making the point that I would be more than happy to see the same set of questions pursued from the standpoint of the emergence of the full monetization Seaford locates in ancient Greece.\n\nIf the human sciences emerge out of the identification of an element that disorders the ritual/mythical order while creating at least the elements or possibility of a new order, we can further assume that some mythical form or content must remain within the new human science, and furthermore, that anything that we could take to be a genuine advance in the human sciences would be the elimination of some mythical element in the discourse or discipline in question, and its replacement with a concept generated within that discourse or discipline. That concept will be, further, a contribution to the distinction between the (dis)ordering element and the ritual/mythical order from which it breaks.\n\nIt is under such conditions that we could speak of the emergence of a “discipline”: to be within the discipline is to take as the center of your attention the demythicizing (dis)ordering institution or practice; to remain outside of the discipline is to indiscriminately mix mythical with post-mythical elements. So, we now have a preliminary way of talking about what would count as a genuine tradition of inquiry within the human sciences.\n\nWe also have a way of distinguishing between stronger and weaker contributions to any such tradition. Certainly one criterion would be, as I have just pointed out, identifying the break between the mythical and post-mythical, and tracing all the consequences of the break. But a more comprehensive criterion would be—since, after all, whatever enabled the break must have already been possible within the mythical—which discourse can conceptualize the break while simultaneously identifying the continuity from the one social order to the other. But if the new order has an origin in such a break, while nevertheless sharing with that earlier social order some previous origin, the human sciences must either address (“scientifically”) or suppress (“mythically”) the problem of origins.\n\nThat means that the question regarding a “good” social order becomes the question: why is there a social/human order in the first place? The problem of origins is in its intrinsically paradoxical character, as was already noted by Plato at the origin of metaphysics: whatever we see in the new form must have already been present, at least potentially, in the old form. How could a human science, then, hypothesize regarding the origin without simply projecting back into the previous form those features of the human that most define our current order, which, after all, is the most fully developed form of the human as such?\n\nThis projection of current social relations back to earlier ones is the mythical form taken by the human sciences: it is equivalent to the explanation of ritual by myth. It is easy to see why speculation on origins, whether of humanity or even of a relatively trivial cultural form, is almost unanimously denounced. But such denunciations cannot prevent historical and cross-cultural inquiries from mythicizing in this way: only a genuinely post-mythical science of the originary can do so.\n\nThe originary hypothesis provides such a science. An account of the origins of the originary hypothesis will help us to understand how this can be the case. Eric Gans’s account of his articulation of Rene Girard and Jacques Derrida points us in two extremely interesting directions. First, through th Derrida, to the “linguistic turn” in 20 century thought, that not quite conclusive blow to traditional metaphysics, which imposed the recognition that every concept is constituted by the subordinate term to which it nevertheless claims priority; second, through Girard, back through a history of inquiries th (including Freud and early 20 century anthropology) into constitutive violence, into what we might call that in the archaic world which our modernity leaves us least prepared to see.\n\nThis yoking together of, not opposites but certainly “disparates,” is a disciplinary origin we can always return to as ground. For Derrida, of course, his deconstruction of the speech/writing distinction is a decentering move, but the fact that this decentering can never be definitively accomplished seems to suggest a permanence to the “center” beyond whatever form of political oppression Derrida and his successors might like to attribute to it. In that case, the sign creates the center through deferral, and it is a center that could always be decentered—by another center. The fact that the sign can be repeated, or iterated, is the foundation of writing, but is “always already” to be found in speech or, for that matter, in the aborted gesture of appropriation the originary hypothesis takes to be at the origin of the human.\n\nAnd it is that iterated sign that makes it possible to account for why even the scapegoat scene Girard constructs could be memorable, and accrete new layers of ritual and myth; and if Girard’s scapegoat scene requires the sign, then the generation of the sign no longer requires the scapegoating.\n\nSo, it is this relation between the iterability of the sign, the center that makes that iterability possible, and the participants on the margin who construct themselves through this relation to the center that provides for the continuity from the ritual/mythic to an order in which norms and mimetic models must refer explicitly to social, or desacralized relations. Derridean deconstruction pointed to mythical residues in the human sciences, and even to a ritual violence implicit in perpetual recentering, while in finding this violence to reside in language, he developed the victimary tendency in postmodern culture to its furthest extent.\n\nThe problem of human origin becomes the problem of controlling violence as it becomes the problem of the origin of language. Only the most stubborn mythical element of the human sciences, the belief that structures are en during while events are mere effects of those structures, which is to say, that the declarative sentence represents reality comprehensively while the more restricted speech forms merely “implement” declarative statements, needs to be overcome. The originary hypothesis accomplishes this through the claim that only in a singular event could a sign both marginally and qualitatively different from a gesture of appropriation be the vehicle of the discovery that signs defer violence.\n\nIf myths explain rituals, the human sciences study practices that refer to some social center. The conceptual equipment of Greek philosophy may have been provided by the emergence of money and writing, but its explicit object of inquiry was the social order in the age of the “tyrant,” that is, the post-sacral king who made visible, by exploiting it, the class differences of the post-ritual order. A good society was, in its initial formulation, a society without tyranny, and for the human sciences this has not changed. The terms of all human practices are set by a social center that may, or may not be, tyrannical—depending on what the human sciences tell us.\n\nEvery event is therefore a judgment of the social center. But every event is also an event of language. The emergence of the post-sacral order in which “tyranny” becomes possible coincides with the emergence of alphabetic writing, itself a product, according to the scholar of literacy, David Olson, of the transformation of language itself into an object of inquiry, starting with the invention of the alphabet to represent speech, but ultimately focused on the problem of reproducing a speech situation in the new medium of writing. This leads to the need to distinguish, metalinguistically, between (using the terminology of analytical philosophy) “using” and “mentioning” words, with the latter referring to an inquiry into how language is used.\n\nWith writing, then, comes linguistic metalanguage: implicit, tacit norms of speech are made explicit, and therefore systematized. This means that language use can be assessed: words can be spelled correctly or incorrectly; words can be used properly (according to their agreed upon definition) or improperly; sentences can be grammatical or ungrammatical. With these distinctions come others, concerning clarity and logicality:\n\nThe metalinguistic concept of a sentence brings these underlying structures into consciousness as objects with particular properties such as clear or ambiguous, grammatical or ungrammatical, and, importantly, as implied or entailed. Such inferences are justified by appeal to wording rather than belief. (116).\n\nThe question of implications and entailments are particularly important here because these concepts implicate the expectations we have of one another in a literate culture. The distinction between the “words on the page” and intended meaning is constitutive of a literate culture, and when someone is considered a “bad reader,” what is usually meant is that he or she fails to make this distinction consistently. The metalanguage for representing speech acts in written discourse includes all of the concepts one is expected to use as a “critical thinker”:\n\nThe concept sentence is special in that it allows one to treat an expression as mentioned rather than used and to comment on it as grammatical, as a premise, as entailed by an earlier sentence and so on. This lexicon is greatly elaborated in literate discourse to include such concepts as statement, claim, assertion, suggestion, inference, or conclusion, concepts important for critical thought. (125)\n\nWriting, then introduces a disciplinary structure into language, bringing into focus features of language that can then be used for purposes of inquiry and instruction. This also means, that while distinctions between written spoken language and persist, the capacities for thinking generated by literate metalanguage enter into and restructure spoken language as well: we certainly don’t need to write in order to be able to “infer” or “doubt.”\n\nThe implications of literate metalanguage go much further. Olson, in his earlier The World on Paper, had pointed out that the written sentence represents an entire speech act, but it must do so without the thick context that embeds speech carried out by members of a community, in a specific situation. For example, in an oral culture, if one person, in reporting another’s speech, wanted to communicate the uncertainty of that other person, she could simply repeat what that person said in a hesitant tone of voice. “Tone” is one of the many elements of the speech situation that is unavailable in writing, so, the uncertainty must be conveyed with words: it is possible, of course, to simply write, “he wasn’t sure,” but various other ways are developed to convey a wide range of tones: he “suggested,” “conjectured,” “believed,” and so on. Good writing, in this case, would be writing that sufficiently supplements what is lost in “translation” from spoken to written language.\n\nOlson comes back to this question, in his recent The Mind on Paper, by addressing the norms of “prose,” by way of Mark Turner and Francis-Noel Thomas’s Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose:\n\nThe classical style takes for granted two of the features that modern, enlightened readers now find objectionable, the assumption that language is transparent to the reality it describes and, second, that it can reveal object [sic?] truths. Further, the Classical style even denies it is a style; it takes itself to be a naked, natural way of speaking… I shall regard the Classical style as the set of norms and standards for evaluating prose in a way similar to those norms that regulate the meaning of words and the logical properties of sentences. Thus prose is a critical, metalinguistic concept that articulates the norms and standards for much of written language and, subsequently, for careful speech. (142)\n\nIt is easy to see that the goal of classic prose is to recuperate the distinction between written and spoken language, or to simulate the assimilation of the former to the latter. The writer of classical prose effaces himself, simply pointing out something in reality that he, along with his readers, look at. In other words, he constructs a scene that remains tacit, and invites a suspension of disbelief allowing the reader to inhabit that same scene, viewing the same object or event, as if converging lines united the two points of view on a single center. Classical prose is an almost perfect example of what Derrida called “presence,” and the entire post-structuralist critique of “metaphysics” could perhaps be made much “clearer” if resituated as an argument over the extent to which we should accept what Olson calls the “conceits” of classical prose.\n\nWhere the critiques of metaphysics have been right in an extremely important way is in noting that what are in fact features of the metalanguage of literacy used to assess written discourse get retrojected as features of the human “mind” or “nature” that the categories of written metalanguage merely construct representationally. To define the human being as a “rational animal,” for example, is to read a feature of written discourse back into the form of human being that produced that kind of discourse. To take “logic” as a natural way of representing how the mind works and building entire cognitive science empires out of it is to do the same.\n\nThe metalanguage of literacy supplements the speech scene represented by writing: Olson focuses on mental and speech act verbs like “assume,” “suppose,” “contend,” “assert,” which supplement what Anna Wierzbicka shows to be universally shared primes like “think,” “say,” and “know,” and are in turn nominalized into “suppositions,” “assertions,” and so on. Once we have these reifications, a disciplinary space focused on the relation, say, between “assumptions” and “statements” can be created.\n\nTo return to my opening discussion, I have been taking writing, as it has taken shape, through the metalanguage of literacy, studying the possibilities of iterating speech scenes as written (and read) texts in “classic prose” as the (dis)ordering social element that brings forth the kind of shared reflection and discourse ultimately institutionalized in the disciplines of the human sciences. All of the founding concepts of the human sciences, ancient and modern, like “society,” “mind,” “religion,” “language,” “intention” and so on are all supplemental “grounds” for the objects constructed within the disciplines. The point is not that the “entities” named by those words/concepts don’t exist; rather, it’s that they exist as products of inquiry within disciplines, within traditions of inquiry, which is to say that they have a provenance and can and often should be revised or replaced.\n\nBy now it is a commonplace to point out that to use a word like “religion” to refer to all the various forms of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Voodoo, tribal rituals, and so on is modeled on Protestantism, with its distinction between “individual faith,” on the one hand, and either Church or State, on the other. To take the example of “intention,” meanwhile, the problem of identifying another’s “intention” is a post-literate one because it presupposes the possibility that the speaker’s meaning might be different than the meaning of the words or sentences uttered by the speaker. To speak about “intention” is to direct attention to the former.\n\nSince the distinction between the speaker’s meaning and the meaning of words is central to the problem posed to writing of representing speech in abstraction from presence on the scene of speech, we can see the word/concept of “meaning” at the center of the metalanguage of literacy and, therefore, of the disciplines. What we could see as the founding of the disciplines in Plato’s Republic does place “meaning” at the center: for example, the meaning of the word “good.” This is in fact an excellent example of the founding of the human sciences around some (dis)ordering, emergent social element. The word “good,” which is unproblematic as an adjective modifying various ways of being and activities (a good baker, a good warrior, a good father, etc.), which all have their definition and evaluation implicit in the practices they are embedded in, becomes problematic when it becomes necessary to name, describe, and assess activities that don’t fall into traditional categories.\n\nIt is only then that it becomes possible to ask whether someone is a “good person,” or a “good citizen,” or, indeed, to inquire into nouns like “goodness” or “the Good.” The human sciences have never moved beyond this inquiry into the meaning of words, and cannot do so, no matter how data-driven they become.\n\nHere, Peirce’s pragmatism, which is the first attempt to think disciplinarity I am familiar with, is especially helpful, because for Peirce, pragmatism is “merely a method of ascertaining the meaning of hard words and abstract concepts.” And the method of doing this “is no other than that experimental method by which all the successful sciences . . . have reached the degrees of certainty that are severally proper to them today” (“Pragmatism in Retrospect: A Last Formulation,” Buchler, 271). Pragmatism would then be a kind of metalanguage of disciplinarity, or perhaps an infralanguage, insofar as it need do no more than test the meaning of words on their own terms:\n\nThe meaning of a proposition is itself a proposition. Indeed, it is no other than the very proposition of which it is the meaning: it is a translation of it. But of the myriads of forms into which a proposition may be translated, what is the one that is to be called its very meaning? It is, according to the pragmaticist, that form in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct, not in these or those special circumstances, not when one entertains this or that special\n\n> design, but that form which is most directly applicable to self-control under every situation, and to every purpose. That is why he locates the meaning in future time, for future conduct is the only conduct that is subject to self-control. But in order that that form of the proposition which is to be taken as its meaning should be applicable to every situation and to every purpose upon which the proposition has any bearing, it must be the simply the general description of all the experimental phenomena which the assertion of the proposition virtually predicts. (261)\n\nSo, if we advance a scientific proposition, or, let’s say, a claim about reality, the meaning of that proposition is to be found in the future conduct it predicts. That conduct will be shaped by “special circumstances” and “special designs,” from which we must abstract the general form of conduct we have in mind. The forms of conduct which are then to be taken as tests of the proposition will themselves be embedded in yet other special circumstances and special designs. One “situation,” in which the conduct is set, must be distinguished from other situations. Peirce is laying the groundwork for conceptual distinctions that will have to be made by future inquirers, and those future inquirers will be among those whose conduct is being predicted.\n\nThose future inquirers, since they are above all interested in inquiry, and therefore truth, and therefore in separating the objects of their inquiry from those presuppositions and concerns which threaten to put an end to that inquiry, will also be especially interested in acquiring the self-control regarding their own habits that is the effect and secondary aim of inquiry. In the process of inquiry, the participants will generate as many translations of the proposition into other propositions, experiments, and forms of conduct as possible —otherwise, how could the discipline determine which is to be called its very meaning?\n\nThus, “[e]very connected series of experiments constitutes a single collective experiment” (260). Pierce would restrict this all embracing mode of inquiry in which, as a later philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard, would predict, “social interests will then be reversed once and for all: society will be made for school, not school for society” (The Formation of the Scientific Mind, 249) to “hard words” and “abstract concepts,” but wouldn’t the distinctions between “hard” and “easy” words, and “abstract” and “concrete” concepts, also have to made by some discipline—a discipline that might very well redraw these boundaries?\n\nWith Pierce, then, we have a conception of disciplinarity as open-ended and aiming at discovering truths that will be universally acknowledged and taken into the formation of habit and conduct, while being at the same time dependent upon the collective conduct of those who will have to follow a proposition through its myriad translations, knowing that the final one will never be arrived at.\n\nSo, we have the discipline of writing, which generates the metalanguage of literacy, which in turn launches a whole fleet of what Marshall Mc Luhan might have called “sleepwalking” disciplines that essentially reiterate the terms of that metalanguage. This would include every single discipline in the human sciences. Trying to define or analyze an entity like “mind” is, then, an essentially mystified endeavor. This is where Eric Gans’s definition of metaphysics as the assumption that the declarative sentence is the primary linguistic form takes on highly consequential implications. Metaphysics itself is just an inflation and concealment of the metalanguage of literacy which reduces language to its elements, which are in turn both real entities and parts of larger systems.\n\nTo define a word is to treat it as convertible into declarative sentences, and to make it inextricable from its grammatical relations. Again, I am not quite saying that phenomena like “mind,” “religion,” “language” and so on don’t exist—rather, I am saying that they exist as effects of disciplinary events that obscure the origins and therefore meanings of these words themselves. In working to turn originary thinking into one big discipline we uncover those origins or originary structures and thereby transform the objects.\n\nSince writing is only possible because all signs are iterable, writing doesn’t come from the outside and invade an innocent oral culture—writing and the metalanguage of literacy it generates simply elicits, in a particular way, what is already internal to language. What I propose targeting in the metalanguage of literacy is that it conceals its own originary structure by treating signs as direct representations of “things,” “ideas,” “thoughts,” and so on. The metalanguage of literacy creates a system of cross-referential nominalizations that purports to represent “reality.” This is what renders it immune to originary hypothesizing, and the best way to address this immunity is to treat all human activity as originary hypothesizing.\n\nAll questions of discourse and intellectual activity are therefore questions of what we might call the re-discovery of language rather than relations between language and something external, whether in the world or the mind (everything external is already in language). Originary thinking as the one big discipline is, therefore, to use a term taken from Bruno Latour, infralinguistic rather than metalinguistic:\n\nWe have to resist pretending that actors have only a language while the analyst possesses the meta-language in which the first is ‘embedded’. As I said earlier, analysts are allowed to possess only some infra-language whose role is simply to help them become attentive to the actors’ own fully developed meta-language, a reflexive account of what they are saying. In most cases, social explanations are simply a superfluous addition that, instead of revealing the forces behind what is said, dissimulates what has been said,\n\n> as Garfinkel has never tired of showing. (49)\n\nLatour associates metalinguistic “explanations” that posit some hidden “real” “behind” the intentions of actors with the implication of the modern social sciences in social engineering. The implication is that the human sciences should help others, including other human scientists, to find the meaning of what they are saying, and in the process to develop new linguistic capacities to discover what we are saying. We might say than rather than generate the terms on which we identify, denounce, apologize for, constrain, or convert actual or budding “tyrants,” the disciplines of the human sciences might help make explicit the ongoing negotiations between a given practice and the social center.\n\nThe founding gesture of a discipline is to turn a nominalization produced elsewhere within the literate order into one that can guide inquiry: for example, from “hooliganism” as a pattern named by the press to “antisocial behavior,” with “causes.” This conversion further entails identifying some scene and event, however abstract, upon which a collective or typical agent does something (“History” is the biggest scene of all). The agent in question might be an author or artist, a nation, state, ethnicity or class, a worshipper, a mind, a gendered subject, a citizen. The concepts and arguments within the discipline consist of differing ways of distinguishing between what the agent meant in doing whatever it does, and what it means that the agent meant that.\n\nNow, what it means to do that is to construct a relation between some margin and some center, a relation we can always locate in whatever distinction, implicit or explicit, the disciplinary language itself makes between unmarked and marked “doings” and “happenings.” For the disciplines, the center is not a ritual center to which donations are given and from which benefits are expected to flow; it is a source of authorized action that, if iterated, will convert resentments into sharing among those iterating it. We don’t agree on which model of action fits this description, hence the discipline, but we can now identify what the agents acting within the discipline are attempting, and have always been attempting.\n\nThe infra and transdisciplinary inquiry into the discipline deploys the nominalizations generated by the discipline— “genre,” “norm,” “belief,” “behavior,” “mind,” “subject,” “text,” and so on—to mark differences in the activity within the discipline itself. Everyone within the discipline becomes a bearer of its originary structure. The question introduced into the discipline, then, is what model of inquiry identifies and enacts the model of action that converts resentments into love. In this case, the model of action itself becomes a model of inquiry: the agents we study are also seeking the authorization of the center.\n\nAny nominalization can be used to initiate this inquiry, by turning the nominalization into a verb referring to the disciplinary activity trying to name the objects of its activity. In generating disciplinary events, the way of thinking predicated upon the event-al nature of the human can effect a continuous interference within the discipline. The meaning of this kind of interference is to make the question of meaning as centrality permanent across the disciplines—to make it so that those within the discipline cannot think about what they’re doing outside of this question.\n\nA transdisciplinary practice of GA, then, involves working within the disciplines, probing the meaning of their constitutive concepts whose origin has been occluded or forgotten. This involves a combination of attentiveness and respect, on the one hand, with complete irreverence, on the other. We should feel free to start from the assumption that any and all concepts might be arbitrary impositions, situated within historical, social and political settings that have provided them with values other than those of unfettered inquiry. Disciplines inquire into their own histories all the time, of course, and into the histories of their concepts, but what they can’t do is simultaneously address the word and the referent—why is there this entity we call “society” or “mind,” and why do we call it “society” or “mind”? It’s possible, within the disciplines, to redefine one or the other— to say, “mind” should really mean y instead of x, or the concept of “society” is strictly limited to post-ritual orders.\n\nBut the co-constitution of word and entity cannot be grasped, because that lies in the emergence of the human science disciplines from their (dis)ordering postritual/mythical elements, an emergence that I have identified with the creation of a literate order.\n\nThe meaning of a word, a sentence, a discourse is in its origin, but its origin is not simply a reference to something that happened, after which other things happened because of it. An origin is the creation of shared attention directed at something, and of those sharing that attention becoming who and what they are because of it. History is less a straight line and more a series of concentric circles, or perhaps vortices: each instant of shared attention includes the attention directed to the practice that created the previous such instant—it retrieves from that practice whatever will provide the increment of deferral needed to ensure that shared attention is sustained. Origins are inscribed within any practice, and we can always locate at least a hypothetical version of them in our practices. A practice, in Alisdair Mac Intyre’s words, is\n\nAny coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of that form of activity, with the\n\n> result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions to the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (187)\n\nThe power of Mac Intyre’s definition is that it avoids utilitarian reductionism, which would see a practice as something one does for some extrinsically defined purpose, while at the same time opening up internally constituted and coherent forms of activity and life to the transcendence they are always already constituted by. For Mac Intyre’s concepts like “goods” and “excellences,” I would use terms indicating an enhanced relation to a center. A “good” or a form of “excellence” represents an increment of deferral, and an increment of deferral is the eliciting of more “information” from the center. On the originary scene, the central object “tells” the members on the margin to stay their hands, to commit no violence against it, and, in committing no violence against it, commit none against each other.\n\nNeedless to say, the words for articulating this imperative were unavailable to those participants on the originary scene; they are available to us now because in subsequent scenes a mythological scene was constructed upon which the central object did perform certain acts, utter certain words, and interact with other figures; and, later, with the (dis)ordering impact of money, writing, and the decline of kingship, it became necessary to attribute more complex and also more abstract modes of ordering and distributing to the central entity.\n\nThe center, then, persists, and we can say nothing that is not a speaking of the center. The center persists materially, in the form of some kind of central authority, without which we have no record of any community sustaining itself. But at the same time it persists in the entirety of the ordering of our practices in such a way as will best ensure that this central authority, however placed there, does its duty. Out of the entirety of the ordering of our practices, we can, in further increments of deferral carried out in disciplinary spaces, abstract more minimal models of practice from which we can hypothesize the other elements within the “entirety” might spring.\n\nThese minimal models of practice are what we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what we are doing, which is, most fundamentally, engaging in inquiry into the center. Disciplinary inquiry itself, then, models the practices into which it inquires, by treating those practices as modes of inquiry. Which means that originary inquirers are positioned so as to question participants in a given discipline regarding the meaning of their practices.\n\nThere are two possible paths toward one big disciplinarity. The most familiar one, attempted by virtually every “revolutionary” theory in the human sciences (historical materialism, psychoanalysis, even deconstruction in its way) is the establishment of a controlling meta-language. GA certainly has the materials for taking this path, in a set of “foundational” concepts (desire, resentment, deferral, center, scene, sign, etc.) defined precisely and contextually through a series of cultural, literary, and social analyses. A contest of meta-languages is the almost universal, indeed practically the only conceivable mode of contestation among competing theories. You put forward your concepts, and I put forward mine; we then look at various objects of analysis and each of us provides an “explanation,” with the “better” or “stronger” one winning.\n\nOf course, this is a big problem, since there is no theory-free criterion for distinguishing between “stronger” and “weaker” analyses. We also know that there is no level playing field on which these meta-theory contests might take place—rather, the process is historical, with the new theory taking aim at the dominant one. Post-structuralism hit North America in the 1980s with sophisticated analyses of the Romantic poets and canonical novelists like Melville, Hawthorne and Poe because it was through its readings of such figures that the established New Criticism controlled the field. Which theory prevails in the academy might depend far more upon which provides more opportunity for novel PhD theses, grant proposals, and tenure track positions, and what determines that?\n\nI’m not reducing everything to power relations, and both New Criticism and Poststructuralism provided powerful and, in their time, innovative ways of reading texts; but it would be very hard to show that one theory displaced the other simply because it was “better.” The Kuhnian theory of the replacement of one theory by another through the emergence of anomalies in the existing system that multiply and generate increasingly strained attempts at resolution within the existing system, ultimately to be resolved within a new paradigm including the previous one as a limit case, might describe what happens in the natural sciences (I have my doubts).\n\nBut when it comes to the human sciences, there is no doubt that a far more complicated process, closer to the kinds of transformations described by Paul Feyerabend, in which economics, politics, and institutional imperatives weigh heavily, determines the outcome. We will never be able to market our wares in a free and open marketplace before informed “consumers,” and it’s hard to see even a younger, leaner and meaner generation of originary thinkers (were such to emerge) engaging in the kind of marketing and politicking and just sheer ganging up that would be required for a theory to prevail in the universities.\n\nThere’s another reason to be skeptical about the grand field of meta-theoretical contest. Such struggles encourage polemics, and polemics encourage the hardening of lines, the fetishization of intellectual materials and the introduction of coercion into matters where it has no rightful place. It was not only Marxists who turned conceptual differences into life and death organizational struggles (and vice versa); psychoanalysis almost immediately split into competing versions, with each singling out a particular element of Freud’s analysis and anathematizing the others. It was not very different with Derridean, Lacanian, Deleuzean, etc., versions of poststructuralism.\n\nIf there were to be an institutional stake in GA, enough to draw in “fresh blood,” we would quickly see lines drawn over “orthodox” and “heretical” understandings of “resentment,” the “moral model,” and every other concept. Of course there need to be discussions and there will always be disagreements over any theory, GA certainly included, and disagreements, properly conducted, are generative for any discipline. But the struggle for institutional mastery doesn’t provide the field in which those kinds of disagreements could take place. I would also add that the days of grand theoretical battles in the university, at least the American university, are probably over: between victimary inquisitions, budgetary shortfalls, and the business model imposed on universities, forcing English Departments as much as anyone else to explain how they will be providing students with the kind of “critical thinking skills” they need to get jobs leaves little zest for genuine theoretical battles.\n\nThe other path toward “owning” the transdisciplinary field has never, as far as I know, been tried. That path is learning to speak the theoretical languages we wish to supplant. This is more like body snatching than planet smashing. Let’s take an example that has come up often lately, due to the importance of cognitive psychology to the recent GASC conference in Stockholm: the computer model of the mind. Obviously the computer model is an antagonist to the originary hypothesis, insofar as it takes a product of human thinking aimed at supplementing human thinking in certain areas and retrojects that product back as the model for human thinking itself.\n\nSaying that the mind is a computer is not really all that different from saying that our bodies are automobiles. It defines down the human essence to one of our tools, rather than engaging in inquiry into the human essence that enables us to create, use, and criticize computers and cars and to do many other things as well. But once we make our arguments, then what? The computer model of mind enables the inquirer to describe in interesting and complex ways all kinds of things. If I say that as a result of “experience” (refining an already existing “feedback mechanism”) humans construct and continually revise “algorithms” for determining, automatically, specified responses to probable phenomena, can it really be asserted that nothing illuminating can emerge from such an approach?\n\nWhen I am faced with a “choice,” I can, we might say, run some probability calculations, based on controlled scans of the field and subject to time constraints, so as to continually enhance the “effectiveness” of my choices. At the very least, the computer model is a source of provocative metaphors and ways of subverting various sentimentalisms.\n\nWe can certainly speak and think in these ways because the “computer model of mind” is a language, with its rules, idioms and tacit assumptions (to use a famous metaphor from Wittgenstein, it’s one of those newer suburbs built, in a planned and grid-like manner, around the more eccentric, improvised old city—perhaps an industrial park!), and we are language-using beings. I find it irritating and exhausting to repeat the same arguments over and over, which is what one has to do if one is determined to “refute” and “defeat” the “computer model of mind.” But we can speak to the computer model of mind by speaking within it.\n\nAsking an adherent to the computer model of mind to lay bare the algorithms he has followed in constructing an experiment so as to test the working of the computer model of mind in some experimental subjects might be more instructive than hectoring him with its contradictions and dehumanizing consequences. The computer model of mind, like any discourse, has its origin and its originary structure (the iteration of its origin in its ongoing operations), and the way to discover this is not just by going back to the records of that conference in 1944 or whe never (unsurprisingly, Ngram has the “computer model of mind” shooting upward in the mid-80s), but by noticing what kinds of things must be said within the discipline and what kinds of things must not be said: by entering it as if it was just emerging and its terms need to be learned by applying them to its emergence. By thus infiltrating the disciplines we might get them to speak their own truth, which (we must have faith in the power of our own discourse here) must both iterate and evade its originary structure.\n\nHow do we remember our own origins while thus undercover in the disciplines; how does One Big Discipline emerge from what appears to be dispersal? The real “proof” of GA as the “strongest” theoretical discourse will be that it can keep showing whatever disciplinary space it inhabits that it needs the way of thinking only originary thinking can provide to address the anomalies in its own discourse, anomalies which the originary disciplinary inquirer will have trained himself to detect. The proof, that is, is in the way we will have clarified in a collaborative manner whatever those in that discipline have devoted themselves to studying—not in how we distract them by pointing out mistakes that might not seem such, or seem relevant, to them.\n\nIf we find ways to “represent” so as to defer resentments in the course of any inquiry, we exemplify an originary intellectual “ethic,” which can in turn become a compelling topic of conversation. “Our” language, in other words, can take its place within the disciplinary language, and that is where something like genuine intellectual competition takes place, through the framings and counter-framings of intellectual collaborators. We would have to have faith that one day all might wake up and find themselves speaking generative anthropology; of course, along the way something like a crisis would have to take place in each of the various disciplines, and a substantial part of what we are studying now are the elements of that possible crisis.\n\nOne pertinent example of a transdisciplinary project both allied with and serving as a useful model for GA is Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage. That Wierzbicka harbors such ambitions for her NSM is evident not just from her own references to Leibniz’s aspiration to create a “universal characteristic” as an inspiration, but from her use of the NSM to critique the limitations of other disciplines. So, for example, she points out that many evolutionary psychologists “attribute the human evolutionary success in large part to early humans’ superior capacity for ‘mindreading’” (Imprisoned in English, 156). Wierzbicka goes on to point out that\n\n“Mindreading” is a nice metaphor, but not a self-explanatory one, and like many other such metaphors popular among scientists, it is bound to English, because “mind” is an English word with no exact counterparts in most other languages of the world. In its present day meaning, mind focuses on thinking and knowing, to the exclusion of emotions and values, and is quite different in this respect from the main counterparts of BODY encoded in other\n\n> languages….” (157)\n\nIn an instance particularly relevant to GA, in Chapter 13 of her Imprisoned in English, she addresses the work of evolutionary cognitive psychologists like Michael Tomasello, Derek Bickerton, Merlin Donald and others. She not only points out the limitations of their accounts of the emergence of the human due to their assumption of the universality of English words like “believe,” “understand,” “perception,” and “goal,” but rewrites in primes the successive cognitive revolutions hypothesized by these thinkers as having effected the transition from ape to human. She is able to conclude:\n\nFrom an NSM perspective, evidence reviewed in studies such as those mentioned above suggests that the “representational resources” of chimpanzees include conceptual primes KNOW, SEE, WANT, and DO, but do not include THINK, which we find in the human language of thought… Whether or not one accepts this conclusion, the methodological point still holds: here as elsewhere issues can be clarified if the debate is freed from the conceptual dependence on English and articulated in simple, stable, and cross-translatable words like see, want, know and think (and, as noted before, say). (171)\n\nSo, Wierzbicka sees her NSM as providing the basis for a transdisciplinary accounting for everything human. But her approach is so radical that it subverts the way I think we would be most likely to think about a grand transdisciplinary break through—ordinarily, such a break through would involve a new way of “explaining” everything, which is to say a reduction to a more abstract metalanguage. That wouldn’t satisfy Wierzbicka, though, because any such unified field theory would be offering its explanations in a particular language, assuming the transparency of culturally specific terms, and therefore no explanations at all.\n\nFor Wierzbicka, the transdiscipline must translate all of human thought and action into a single, minimal language shared by all languages. This would really involve a rejection of explanation as the purpose of the social sciences, because, once everything can be translated in those words that can themselves be translated no further because they are immediately intelligible, what is there to explain? Explanations just translate into a more abstract language what people would ordinarily discuss in more concrete ways, using everyday words—if the point is to translate into the most everyday of the everyday words, the purpose of inquiry is to contract rather than expand our vocabularies.\n\n(Since it seems to me that a condition of transdisciplinarity on the terms of the NSM would be to render one’s own basic concepts and propositions into the primes, I’ll take the initial step and translate “representation is the deferral of violence” as follows: “people say words because if people want to do bad things to others people feel like saying: ‘we don’t want to do these bad things now’.”)\n\nIndeed, what, exactly, gets “explained” or “proven” in the human sciences? “Prediction” is meaningless, because history does not take place in a controlled space where we can manipulate the variables. Anything we were to take as a confirmed prediction would depend upon an arbitrary delineation of the event in question. Did your theory predict that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election? First of all, millions of other people, even if they were in the minority, also predicted this—do their theories also get confirmed? More important, “Donald Trump elected” represents a culmination of a whole series of events—did you predict the precise margin of victory in Michigan?\n\nIf not, does someone who came closer than you therefore have a “better” theory? Why isolate this particular prediction, which is the kind made by pollsters and bookies, as the “test” of a particular theory? All such questions are unanswerable, no matter whether the event we choose is the “financial crisis of 2008,” or the Bolshevik Revolution or Napoleon’s defeat in Russia. These events are obviously not “isolated” in the way we would isolate “events” in a laboratory to test the results of a specific “input,” nor could they be (in a sense, the goal of “totalitarian” political movements is to make something like that possible, by making humans fit laboratory subjects —which means we should want events to be less predictable).\n\nYou could certainly be better or worse at predicting things, but that would say more about your immediate knowledge of conditions on the ground (an officer in Napoleon’s army, a stockbroker on Wall Street, who sets aside his own desires and attempts to game the system, might do a good job of predicting such things), your wits and your experience than about the “strength” of your social theory. The same goes for attempting to test one social form against another: liberal democracy vs. monarchy vs. autocracy vs. religious rule, etc.\n\nCan anyone really show that this feature of this kind of society, which we see manifested in this particular society of this type in this way, has produced these specific effects, and will continue to do so in all societies of this type (or this particular one, for that matter) regardless of the infinite possible changes in surrounding conditions in the meantime (some of those changes produced by the “cause” we are trying to “isolate”)? And, anyway, a social theory can only, in a circular manner, tell us something about those elements of the social order it has framed as worthy of note, and of necessity must ignore whatever does not enter its frame.\n\nIt’s possible that one’s predictions might get better as one focused on smaller and more marginal events. And this is just as true for what is presumably the “hardest” of the human sciences, economics. We could say that a better test of the strength of one’s theory is whether it provides its adherents the power to refrain from making predictions in the hope of winning the theory sweepstakes, because it focuses on something more important. In short, prediction is simply another mythic element of the human sciences, the modernized version of divination.\n\nWhat a human science is for is to help us see the meaning of events. GA should, I believe share this purpose with Wierzbicka’s NSM. We take (dis)ordering events, as they are registered by the most alert, thoughtful and/or symptomatic testimonies we can find, and we show the difference between what the speakers mean and what their words mean. This difference represents the speaker’s (mis)recognition of what the center has to say. In this way, we can ask pointed questions of those foundational disciplinary concepts that are reiterations of the metalanguage of literacy, and show how those concepts rely upon retrojected nominalizations.\n\nThe disciplines presuppose their break from the ritual/mythic world while finding it impossible to articulate or even name that break; and for the same reason they must obscure their continuity with that world. They are compelled to saturate the speech situation they are intent on reproducing, which means they cannot examine the difference between writing and speech —that difference being writing’s constitutive “vocation” of studying the difference between speaker’s meaning and word’s meaning.\n\nA word like “cognition,” for example, is meant to establish a circumscribed mental “space” wherein certain measurable and replicable mental events can take place. It’s easy enough to see that the concept wants to eliminate from thinking what is singular and unreplicable, whether for personal or historical reasons, and to exclude from consideration what is external to the “mind,” such as the “body” or “language.” So an originary thinker within psychology might be bound to introduce all of that into “cognition,” with unpredictable effects upon the concept and the discipline organized around it. It is this forgetting of language, in particular, that we will find everywhere in the disciplines, the forgetting of the fact that concepts are words, with infralinguistic articulations and histories within traditions of inquiry; and this forgetting is required because of another forgetting, that it is precisely the disciplines that blind us to our (dis)continuity with the archaic scene, a (dis)continuity that lies at the origin of all the disciplines. To become one big discipline, it would be sufficient for GA to keep recalling that.\n\nThe best way to elicit meaning from a sign, meanwhile, is to iterate it. Any repetition is a difference, but experimentation with a range of iterations, situating the sign in question in different contexts, with different tones, different “issuers,” and so on serves to reveal the difference between speaker’s meaning and sentence’s meaning. All the other possible meanings of the word can be brought to bear on hypothesizing possible differences between speaker’s meanings and sentence meanings. This form of repetition displaces the kind of repetition that supplements and saturates a scene of speech. The problem with the metaphysical non-scene of classical prose is that in supplementing the scene of recorded speech the writer relies upon the very nominalizations that a disciplinary scene of writing would inquire into: not only do specific “suppositions,” “ideas” and “implications” have histories and derive from traditions, but so do these very concepts themselves.\n\nTheir historiality lies in their creation of a separate mental scene, unrelated to any center other than some anti-mythical self-creation. The speech scene is taken to be more originary than the writing that represents it, and so metaphysical-classical prose tries to efface the sign in its referent, while ultimately finding that referent to be nowhere but in its own self-creating mind. In the end, that’s the only way of erasing the inexplicable difference between speaker’s meaning and sentence’s meaning. In practicing the scene of writing and reading as just as originary as that of speech, meanwhile, one retrieves the originary gesture of signification.\n\nEven more, this mode of theorizing brings the constitutive problem of the good society, or how we are to live together, to the forefront of all social thinking, within any discipline. If the purpose or telos of sign use is to repeat the sign in such a way as to defer the new threat of violence, in the postritual/mythical order this means ensuring commensurability between speaker’s meaning and word’s meaning. In other words, the ethical dimension of social thinking aims at enabling all of us as speakers or sign-users to bring the meanings we intend into accord with the historical accretions implicit in the signs we use. Our words, in other words, should not be at cross-purposes with our intentions, because when that is the case violence becomes a more likely way of settling mimetic rivalries.\n\nIn becoming one big discipline, GA first of all brings these two layers of meaning into accord within the disciplines themselves. The test, finally, of determining the commensurability of speaker meaning and sentence meaning in relation to the center is whether the disciplinary space can generate imperatives around whose fulfillment new spaces can emerge. David Olson advanced his inquiries into the cognitive effects of literacy by devising little experiments that enable us to see whether, say, a child of a particular age can distinguish between what someone says and what they mean. A GA transdiscipline, both immodest in its ambitions and humble in its respect for the accumulated wisdom of human practices, would do well to propose and devise such experiments, real and merely hypothetical, as frames for determining what mode of centrality a particular practice on the margin must be imagining as it works out the declarative language necessary for directing and reconciling the ostensive and imperative field in which it operates.\n\nOlson tests children’s ability to distinguish between speaker’s meaning and word (or sentence) meaning by setting up scenarios in which children observe a scene in which one person provides another with information. The experimenter then contrives it so the child comes to know something that either the speaker, the listener, or both, do not know. The question then becomes whether the child can distinguish what she knows from what the participants on the scene know: if the child, for example, has seen the speaker move some object to the green box after telling the listener it was in the red box, where will the child think the listener thinks it is?\n\nDistinguishing between the two levels, or perhaps poles, of meaning, is a question of realizing that different people can interpret a sentence in different ways, based upon the prior assumptions they bring to the situation: this is an ability, Olson hypothesizes, that is part of the acquisition of literacy. So, what would be the equivalent in social life of the child who thinks the listener thinks the object is in the green box because the child knows it is there? What would be the experiment that would enable us to test this? And what would be the equivalent of the acquisition of literacy, which enables the child to distinguish his own knowledge from another’s?\n\nWe have recourse here to our founding concept of “deferral.” It is deferral that creates the center of the originary scene, and that therefore enables us to jointly attend to any object on any scene; and it is the ability to jointly attend to an object that generates a broader field of actual and possible objects organized around the central one. So, our question can be, how differentiated is what one person says from another person? Still, we’d need to have a clear criterion for “differentiation”; also, we’d have to take into account the ways in which, say, a schizophrenic’s or paranoid’s speech might be highly differentiated in ways that would indicate something other than an “increment” of deferral.\n\nOne has to be able to “point to” the object as others do, and further direct their attention to something in or about the object others don’t notice. This “pointing to” would be, in the discourse employed by our “subject,” an internal, potentially self-referential marking of the distinction between this discourse and others. The inquirers themselves would have to be implicated in what they would take as a possible inquiry initiated by the subject: the distinctive “marking” would be distinctive insofar as it points to the resolution of some “anomaly” in an at least preliminary new “paradigm.” We inquirers could only notice the marking insofar as we could contribute to the further construction of the paradigm.\n\nBut in social life, the anomalies of a particular paradigm must be exhausted far more thoroughly than in the laboratory setting; one might say that even the most apparently discredited paradigms are never conclusively discarded, once and for all; indeed, one might even say they never should be. It may be that pointing out the anomalies, persistently and ruthlessly, and embodying the position of the one who bears the exposure of the anomalies, is a way, or the way, of sustaining the deferral that allows possible paradigms, or frames, of various uses, to come into view. In fact, insisting on the anomalous nature of all discourse is a way of enacting the paradoxicality of all linguistic usage. Putting forth a speaker’s meaning that is the intent to inhabit both the “normal” and “revolutionary” positions within the “sentence’s meaning” would be the necessarily qualitative test of a further increment of deferral.\n\nSo, provide someone with a discourse or, in doing “fieldwork,” examine the discourse with which one has provided oneself. Ask, first, what they think “everyone else” would make of this. They will provide you with an answer that you could map somewhere from the extreme, on one side, of saying that what I make of it is what everyone will make of it (it just means X); to, on the other extreme, of taking you through the way different readers or listeners would make sense of this or that portion of the discourse and therefore the discourse as a whole, differently. In other words, the “subject” either assumes, according to the “conceit” of classical prose, that we are all, always, on the same scene; or the subject is to some extent capable of participating in the scenic character of knowing.\n\nAt each point along the way, we could identify how the ability to hypothesize new possible readings indicates the ability to defer the individual’s own imposition of his speaker’s meaning on the text. The farther along toward this latter pole the discourse moves, the more it becomes possible to ask, what would be the reading that would include them all, as an act of deferral that provides a model for a historically transformative mode of deferral: what we might call the originary-originating meaning. Of course, we inquirers would have to learn how to identify such a reading ourselves. In this way, the transdiscipline would itself be a mode of language learning by situating all language users, which is to say all language learners, within the field of contemporary language, which is to say, across the array of incremental deferrals and backslidings that constitute any cultural moment.\n\nWorks Cited\n\nLatour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005.\n\nMac Intyre, Alisdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Second Edition. London: Duckworth, 1985.\n\nOlson, David R. The Mind on Paper: Reading, Consciousness and Rationality. Cambridge University Press, 2016.\n\nOlson, David R. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge University Press, 1994.\n\nPeirce, Charles Sanders. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Edited by Justus Buchler. Dover, 1955.\n\nSeaford, Richard. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge University Press, 2004.\n\nWierzbicka, Anna. Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford University Press, 2013."
    },
    {
      "slug": "habit-and-errors-and-composition",
      "title": "Habit and Errors and Composition (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Apr 2009",
      "url": "https://jcrt.org/archives/10.4/katz.pdf",
      "content": "By Adam Katz\n\nEverything stays the same but composition, says Gertrude Stein. So, what is \"everything,\" and what is \"composition\"? (For that matter, what is the \"same\"?) Everything is all that falls below the threshold of our attentiveness, what remains as background, noise, the field of semblances, subsumed within habit. Composition is the raising and lowering of that threshold. In her \"Reflection on the Atomic Bomb\" Stein asserted that\n\nWhat is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting…\n\nThe atomic bomb is the same as everything else that destroys—if unleashed, it will kill 10 million, maybe 100 million, maybe more, but that's just some amount more than is killed by a murderer or garden variety terrorist. If we go about living our lives when we hear about the latter, we will do the same when we hear about the former. Our lives may become different, but what do you mean by that—at what point does more violence and destruction mark a qualitative transformation compared to the previous \"level\" of violence and destruction, and at what point does the bundle of activities comprising our daily habits, which is anyway always undergoing silent revolutions, become a different way of living? There are still lots of interesting things and lots of ways of being interested in them and the rest we can't do anything about.\n\nWhat ties us to the world are ostensive and imperative signs: our desires and rivalries produce rifts, within each of us and between all of us; in the midst of these desires and rivalries for centrality we stumble upon the materials displaced by the nihilistic tenor of our urgencies and find ways to piece them together—we attend from some material (say, some previously overlooked habit) which is thereby converted into a sign and to the object we were pursuing, interrupting our pursuit, creating shared distance. Even more, we compose those materials, attending from and to each of its \"parts\" in turn, conferring upon it a formal and transcendent reality. The object we were pursuing is now framed, and accessible only via established rules and rituals.\n\nThese signs are named, and we command the names to remain in place until the names command us to model our activities on the process of their own composition. Our discourse, our sentences do little more than transcribe these commands, but what is interesting is that we get them wrong. Error is co-constitutive with norm: we imitate the small details when it is the broader intention we must be limning; we become \"big-picture guys\" when the devil is in the details. And so habit becomes the idiosyncratic composition of the center, as we establish commerce between all of our names, establish conformity across the field of imperatives we obey, and are then driven into new desires and rivalries by strange names and commands that are nothing more than the malapropisms of our habits.\n\nSo, what, exactly, do we think will happen with the global economy? Unemployment will go up—how much—2 points? 4 points? 10 points? Will our credit cards no longer work? If we move our money out of the volatile stock market, will our insured bank deposits then vaporize? Will agriculture cease; will there no longer be anyone to transport goods to market? I wouldn't discount any of these possibilities—al though I will note that I almost never hear any descent into such specifics in all the panic talk (which, I also note, at times suddenly morphs into speculation regarding whether we will start coming out of the recession this Fall or next Spring—in short, nobody knows anything).\n\nHabits won't cease, though, and just as we can raise the threshold above which we notice difference, we can lower the threshold—more likely than government finding a way to restore corporate health or put people to work is people establishing new economic and social networks on the margins of their intersecting habits. And we will thereby rediscover the laws of complementarity: if the market crashes, maybe that is just a return to the true value of the commodities circulating through it; if official money ceases to measure anything reliably people will find other measures; if the rules seeking to prevent in advance insecurities, violence and error start to paralyze creative activity, people will seek out new trade-offs between these various goods; if regulators are, as they likely will be, as unable to predict values 2, 3, 10 years down the road as the participants in the market themselves, then transparency will be the only check on inordinate risk and will itself become among the highest of values.\n\nPerhaps strategies—of the kind one would expect all good postmodernists to applaud—of fleeing established centers, which become chokeholds with increasing rapidity, and establishing novel ones, will proliferate and not so much \"resist\" domination as seek to render it incoherent.\n\nI confess I am less sanguine about the Global Intifada. The Global Intifada might best be seen as the embodiment of Aime Cesaire's remark, prescient, insightful and vicious all at once, that the West only cared about the Holocaust because the victims were white. It is true—the mass industrialized slaughter of Europe's Jews became the foundational event of the postmodern, victimary era, because it—in the light of the new possibilities revealed by the atomic bomb—disclosed the possibility for universal destruction at the heart of the rivalries among the Western powers that culminated in the immolation. It is true that in the event itself, the colonized world, those behind the \"color line,\" were a side show at best.\n\nCesaire's remark also revealed, though, that the future of the event lay in the rise to centrality of this side show—that the ethical effect of the virtually universally shared horror at the scene of Auschwitz would be to place under the severest scrutiny, even if not all at once, every invidious distinction, even the most implicit, between one category of humans and another; and every claim to expert neutrality, scientific objectivity and procedural probity, which had all after all just been put to work in discovering, justifying, and implementing the most invidious of imaginable distinctions. And it is vicious in the way it sets the terms for this overturning of margin and center: in the end, the Holocaust must be taken away from the Jews, and what better way to do so than to represent the Jews as the new Nazis?\n\nBarack Obama, in his inaugural address, announced that the world is changing and we must change with it. A sentence both leaden and brutal. He must know how, exactly, the world is changing (he has commanded the world to come together as a model and has mapped out the imperatives we must follow in adhering to that model) and is either objectively describing the laws of reality (of which he is mere executor) which will force us to change accordingly or letting us know that he is determined, as voluntaristic subject, to force us to change. The world is always changing, and each of us is always changing at some angle to those of the world and the world is no more than all these angles.\n\nThe Progressivist imperative, reiterated here in warmed over fashion by Obama, has always been a nihilistic metaphysics—now it has become the defense attorney of a burgeoning death cult. The dictum composed by the \"imperialist\" bogeyman Churchill is far more valuable than Obama's hideous bromides: democracy is the worst system, except for all the others. We will always be dissatisfied with democracy, that dissatisfaction will periodically reach such a pitch that we are tempted to throw it all away for some other system—formerly, more authentic and unmediated; now, less wasteful, smarter, more inclusive and shock-resistant, until we acquire the static hysteria of the blackmail victim who is not quite sure that he'll never run out of ransom money. And we will always come to realize that precisely this set of dissatisfactions and the way it sets and sustains each of us amidst and among all the rest is democracy. Or at least we can always be coming to believe that such is the case.\n\nGertrude Stein also said that she liked having habits but didn't like others talking about her habits—this by way of explaining why she wasn't a utopian. Having habits, loving one's habits, riding one's habits, slavishly following one's habits, finding extensions of one's habits in the world and getting into the habit of finding in the world providential interference with and cause for revising one's habits—this is not a bad definition of freedom. Having other people get into the habit of explaining one's habits, cataloguing them, diagnosing and reordering them in accord with some template—that is not a bad definition of tyranny.\n\nDeeper than liberalism and democracy is the imperative order—the realm in which commands are spontaneously issued and obeyed, where the proximity of emergency is more real than the ever lowering threshold of victimage. Habit is deeply rooted in the imperative order—it is an idiosyncratic method of preparing for emergency by keeping sharp the distinction between what must be kept close and hand and what can be let go. Like habit, the imperative order is most effective when unnoticed: that is, when security is ensured unobtrusively. And therefore easily forgotten or demonized until it is essential.\n\nAt some point the dominant men in the community must have willingly devoted themselves to defending the weak against other men like themselves, and this initiated the process whereby they came to subordinate their own imperative order to the declarative order of principles (\"all men are created equal\"). Only then is freedom possible—only when those willing to risk their own lives to ensure that participants in exchange can complete their exchange unmolested outnumber those for whom exchange is fraud or easy pickings do we have freedom. The perpetual composition of habits is sensitive to such conversions; indeed, it may be that the transformation of rituals into habits relies upon this kind of conversion—Stein insisted that verbs were interesting because there are so many ways they can be mistaken, in my last post I argued that sentences transform names into recipients and sources of imperatives, and now I can say that the connection between verbs and imperatives lies in the fact that it is first of all imperatives that can so easily and interestingly be mistaken—and so sentences are in essence the collaborative process of converting those errors which arrest our collisions into the material of norms.\n\nThe continuance and constant adjustment on exposure to reality of our own habits depends upon the covenants among those who seek mutual insurance for the errors consequent upon their imperatives. And so the vast field of centrifugal, eccentric habits depends upon and flows back into those social sites based upon explicit, publicly shared habits.\n\nHaving the courage of our habits will enable us to affirm reality in the errors of our self-issued imperatives, the ones we forget and call habits, and that provide us with a source of revelation in anything that suddenly lies outside of our habit as part of our composition. The convergence between novel compositions and ferocity harnessed and directed toward those who would hold civilization hostage by targeting its most vulnerable members and interstices—this is the answer to the Global Intifada. It's not the answer we seem ready to provide right now, but it is encoded in the habits and composition of freedom—freedom, nothing more than no one, including you, knowing what you are going to do next, what you are about to tell yourself to do and what will then count, for you, as having done whatever you have come to be told by yourself.\n\nPolitics is for protecting the dominion of habit and helping it become self-reflexive and open to novel compositions. The inertia of the other's habits needs to be converted into the materials of one's own composition. We might think about such a politics as a series of assignments we give to each other, assignments that would take the general form of, \"by all means keep doing whatever you are doing but just take into account this one thing I'm doing—and I will begin by doing what I'm doing and taking into account one thing of yours.\" These should be the rules of political exchange—anyone who's not ready to go first in some proposed reciprocity should be boycotted. Convert the courage of your habits into the habit of encouraging others to compose with your habits."
    },
    {
      "slug": "idioms-of-inquiry-katz",
      "title": "Another Version of \"Idioms of Inquiry\" Despite the Changed Title (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Aug 2009",
      "url": "http://jcrt.typepad.com/jcrt_live/2009/08/",
      "content": "By Adam Katz\n\nEric Gans likes to speak of his \"originary hypothesis\" regarding the origin of language as a \"new way of thinking.\" In my view, a new way of thinking means thinking in a new idiom, with a new vocabulary and grammar—an idiom of inquiry. Gans' originary hypothesis completes the \"linguistic turn\" of 20th century thought—the intuition guiding the dismantling of metaphysics by 20th century thinkers was that language doesn't represent some external and independent reality; on the contrary, language, or more generally, signs, is constitutive of anything we can call a human reality. What Gans' hypothesis does is explain why language is constitutive: because it was through the sign that our immediate ancestors transcended the mimetic rivalry that perpetually threatened their existence by discovering/inventing a way of deferring violence.\n\nWithout Gans' hypothesis, the linguistic turn remains hostage to victimary thought, which, following and slightly inflecting Gans' talk at the annual Generative Anthropology conference on June 20, I would define as the insistence that claims to metaphysical hierarchies are really disguises legitimating social and political hierarchies. If logocentrism is really phallocentrism, Eurocentrism, etc., then the critique of metaphysics is essentially volley in a partisan political battle, rather than an attempt to disclose a more originary presentation of human being than metaphysics allows.\n\nMy own entrance into the new scene of thinking opened up by Gans' hypothesis, as outlined in my previous posts, is through the belief that once we have clarified the constitutive power of the sign, we should be thinking in and not merely of the originary sign. More simply, our idiom should a thoroughly semiotic one: originary grammar. Gans speaks of his hypothesis as a \"minimal\" one, to which Occam's Razor has been applied. A minimal mode of thinking, then, would be one which uses only vocabulary derived from and applied to originary accounts of language in order to speak about a reality we now know to be thoroughly mediated by semiosis. A new way of thinking generates idioms of inquiry and the originary hypothesis makes it possible to generate such idioms out the exploration of linguistic relationships. To take just one simple example, all the discussions in postmodern thought regarding \"power relations\" can be reduced to the simple question of when, where and how imperatives \"work,\" and when, where, and in what ways they don't.\n\nThinking in language does require the assumption of a minimally conceived extra-semiotic element, however: otherwise, all we can do is string out a series of vaguely connected descriptions of language. Only an account of language as emergent and constitutive, as an event, which tells us why there is language rather than none and what language is for can enable an ordered inquiry in language. The originary hypothesis provides us with such an account, by positing an originary event which defines language as the deferral of violence through representation. Every word, every sentence, every sign, then, defers, or contributes to the deferral of some mode of potentially catastrophic violence, as that possible violence appears to some sign user within some configuration of relations which in turn overlaps with other configurations.\n\nThrough our intuition of the sign aimed at deferring violence we apprehend the scene upon which the threat of violence is gathering, and we can work our way through the itinerary of the signs constitutive of that scene. And, of course, signs don't always work, and even when they do only partially so—we can defer the most imminent and seemingly devastating eruptions of violence, but not necessarily always them and certainly never abolish violence as such.\n\nThe constitutive difference of language is that between imitation and iteration. Imitation is following the rules guiding someone else's action—you don't need to \"understand\" the rules, i.e., be capable of formulating them explicitly, in order to do so. Indeed, as we all know, you can't really be able to formulate the rules, because there would then be another set of rules for formulating rules that would need to be formulated and that couldn't be present in your formulation, and so on. Some understanding always remains tacit. But understanding this paradox intrinsic to rule following and sign using aids us in defining imitation: imitation is the attempt to abolish that gap between tacit and explicit, invisible and visible.\n\nImitation is the attempt to map the model in one's own activity. Iteration, then, is what happens when the gap becomes visible in one's mimetic efforts. Such visibility is more commonly known as error; but error presupposes a norm that is produced simultaneously with that error. The rule one follows reaches its limits in the emergence of norm/error and the rule of the model must be revised if it is to be followed. Iteration applies the rules put forth by the model to the model itself. On the scene posited by the originary hypothesis, the first sign is the aborted gesture of appropriation: the hand reaching hesitates in seeing all the other hands reaching—imitation has failed through its success, since the simultaneous effort to procure the object ensures that not only will no one do so but that the world of objects will disappear altogether.\n\nIt is some \"sense\" of all this that is involved in the aborted gesture. That gesture, then, applies, and is subsequently seen to apply by those who imitate it in turn, the rules of the grasping activity to that activity itself—and in doing so discloses its limits and converts that act into another. We are always imitating and iterating, the two modes of activity are separated by an infinitesimal boundary, and significance lies on that boundary.\n\nWhat guides us in semiosis is some intuition regarding the sustenance of the scene we are on; that is, the desire, compulsion really, for presence. We are always complementing, completing, resisting, instituting some sign another has put forth, always in accord with something that seems to be missing, some piece of the scene without which the scene will not coalesce or some perceived deformation of or excess to the scene that must be remedied or curtailed. To put it in very simple terms, we want to keep things going before they close in, collapsing the scene. Each new kind of speech act emerges in this way: the imperative out of the \"inappropriate\" ostensive; the interrogative out of a imperative weakened by possible failure, in a scene where compliance is uncertain; the declarative out of a negative ostensive repeating and negating the interrogative; the verb out of an imperative attached to the negative ostensive redirecting attention to another location when the negative ostensive fails.\n\nAny sign, then, is some articulation of these speech acts in some supplementary and constitutive relation to a scene. In proceeding to construct a semiotic and linguistically specific idiom of inquiry, I would propose that we think about our activities as so many modes of obedience to imperatives. Only imperatives can set action in motion: ostensives are self-enclosed acts, creating a center of attention, while we can only act on declaratives insofar as we read them as imperatives—if someone says \"the door is open\" I can leave or close it, depending upon what I take that sentence to be telling me to do; a sentence like \"the time has come\" is activating some imperative, however indeterminate.\n\nSo, to get started, we can speak of thinking as obeying the imperative to suspend imperatives; in this way a presence is sustained in which the stream of imperatives reality generates continually become signs pointing to their possible origins and outcomes, leading us ultimately to the most elementary commands, the most originary of which turns out to be the imperative to suspend imperatives in the face of the ostensive sign. The creation of moral maxims entails obedience to the command to map imperatives onto indicatives; the shaping of ethical habits is obedience to the command to suit imperatives to ostensives.\n\nWhen we moralize, we want the imperatives we follow or issue to be backed by the currency of indicatives—as the imperatives in the Decalogue need the backing of \"I am the Lord thy God…\" This is because morality is a system of imperatives, and a system of imperatives requires something other than an imperative to provide articulation—indicatives embed the imperatives in a shared reality, perhaps, especially, a commanded reality. Insofar as we distinguish ethics from morality, meanwhile, it is in shaping morality to fit concrete situations—we speak of professional ethics, not professional morality. Ethics must have a moral backing, such as \"treat all individuals fairly and equally,\" but the ethics itself involves determining what counts as \"unfair\" or \"unequal\" in a given situation—what do we recognize—point to—as a violation of the injunction against unfairness?\n\nLet's proceed further. Desiring is obedience to the command from the object to model yourself on its possession; resenting obeys the command from the object to keep watch over it (which also means watch over everyone else's watch) once one's access has been barred. We can see how desire and resentment become generative by considering all the ways imperatives can be mistaken. I can't know how the object would have me possess it (even the object doesn't know) and so my relation to the object is generated by my applying the rules of the object's command to the object as I construct it. Regarding resentment, I have no idea what kind of access and distribution the object considers appropriate so my resentment must also be donated to the Object-as-center as it repels all of our contentions regarding the right way to slice it.\n\nAnd here, indeed, we can work our way towards an originary morality along with our originary description of morality. Gans proposes an originary resentment directed towards the center, the Other which bars me from possession of the object—I am reading this resentment as obedience to the object's command to superintend it, and this imitation of the newly repellent object must first secure the protection of the center from others and my insistence collides with the similar insistence of all my fellows, threatening the repetition of the originary crisis; at this point the only way of sustaining the scene is to donate my resentment to the center along with others, thereby (re)installing the bar.\n\nThis new convergence could only be arrested by obtaining a new command to give the center the power to prevent us from annihilating us in its name. The consequent moral imperative, then, is as follows: when your resentment, if imitated by others, would cause imperatives issued by the center to cancel each other out, you must donate your resentment to the center (which resentment involves all of us watching each other through the eyes of the center, which is to say through the eyes of the others watching me, so that we all become signs for each other). Invent and embody a rule that can account for your resentment along with everyone else's—or to get started, at least a few other people's.\n\nAnd, finally, let's return to the dyad I proposed as constitutive, as simultaneously inside and outside the linguistic space: imitation and iteration. We can now bring even these terms, and the constitutive paradox their relation represents, within that linguistic space as well: imitation obeys the imperative to seek imperatives in the presence of the other, to treat the other as an inexhaustible fount of imperatives. Rules, indeed, are nothing more than the articulation of imperatives drawn from the presence of the other. Iterating, then, is issuing a command in turn to the other made present, a command to issue a new command that would help sustain the space opened by my obedience to the previous one; such a command must authorize me to issue my own commands to those (including myself) who have drawn imperatives from my act and disrupted the space it established.\n\nTo the sign others take as a command to appropriate, to rush to the center my presence as source of commands seems to indicate, I must now add a new command, making a series, and therefore a rule, a relation between two sources of commands, such that any new command must take the norm of the series.\n\nEugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a precursor in what I am calling originary grammar, already contended back in the 1930s that the crisis of our time is a vacuum of imperatives, and I believe it is still true. It may be a constitutive crisis of modernity, that space of misreading, deliberate and unknowing, generous and malicious, and universal application of the Christian revelation. The Christian revelation forbids scapegoating and commands us to stand with the victim, and all public and private life in societies which have left transcendent freedom behind for freedom in the world can be seen as the search for victims to rush to in solidarity and victimizers to charge.\n\nThe scope for legitimate commands must shrink as the search becomes ever more successful. Those who hope utterly to free modernity from its reliance upon transcendence have so far tried to embed operative imperatives in indicatives—how else could one explain such idealized representations of modernity as those of, say, Juergen Habermas, who hopes that the \"better argument\" can command; or those human rights activists who believe imperatives might flow from a more extensive body of international law and more detailed and widely disseminated descriptions of its violations? Supplementing the absence of operative imperatives on today's global scene would require events sacralizing the inexhaustibility of the sign, deliberate iterations. I hope to elaborate in a future post."
    },
    {
      "slug": "indicative-culture-katz",
      "title": "Indicative Culture (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jun 2009",
      "url": "http://jcrt.typepad.com/jcrt_live/2009/06/indicative-culture.html",
      "content": "By Adam Katz\n\nThe indicative sentence could be said by anyone; imperative and interrogative sentences are defined by the speaker and listener. To use Peircean terms, imperatives and interrogatives have a first and a second, while the indicative is uttered by a third. The speaker of the indicative sentence is therefore outside of the direct interaction involved in the interrogative, imperative and, most fundamentally, the ostensive. If you say \"he needs help,\" you are clearly outside of the help-seeking; for that matter, if you say \"I need help\"—as opposed to \"help me\"—you setting yourself, as speaker, at least somewhat apart from yourself as needing help.\n\nThe response called for by your indicative sentence is something along the lines of \"what's wrong?\" or \"what can I do?\" that is, an interrogative, rather than a direct proffer of aid. You are engaged in a discussion over your situation. Your indicative statement calls for a response—that is, it commands a response, or embeds an imperative: inquire into my condition. How meaningful the sentence is depends upon how meaningful that inquiry would be—that is, what new ostensive signs it would yield. The same is true if we increase the distance between the need for help and the sentence—say, \"K needs help.\" Here, a different chain of interrogatives and imperatives constitutes the space of inquiry opened by the sentence, including questions like \"how do you know\" or \"who says\" that K needs help?\n\n(Questions that would hardly arise with a sentence like \"I need help\"). The inquiry here might take new paths—perhaps the credibility of whoever claims K needs help becomes the central question, leading one of another speaker to put forward a sentence embedding the demand for some ostensive sign that would credit whoever claims to speak for K. The inquiry, or the space of questioning and answering articulated in the indicative sentence, is itself a deferral of some demand, an impossible demand, or a convergence of conflicting demands, at some distance from the speakers: the question is the softened edge of the demand.\n\nSome potential dispute regarding the subject or name organizing the sentence must lie at the origin of its utterance: perhaps K is right in front of us needing help, in which case \"K needs help\" is only slightly removed from urgent questions like \"what do you want from me?\" and \"why are you just standing there?\" and these questions are themselves separated by the thinnest of boundaries from imperatives like \"do something!\" and \"help him!\" and these latter, in turn, from interjections or exclamations (look at that!; Oh my God!)—in this case, the indicative sentence could represent either a momentary lull in the mounting emergency or a panicky non-response (the subsequent sentences should weigh down on one or the other possibility).\n\nOr, K is far away, beyond our capacity to aid him, and any dispute about K and his condition may be equally distant, in which case the mention of that condition stands in for some other set of disputes regarding competing demands and our conversation only makes sense, is not monotonous droning, if (this is my hypothesis) the conversation could be put at stake in one of those proximate disputes and if its continuance is therefore framing and deferring them. A good sentence, then—esthetically and ethically good—is one that holds the imperatives at bay but keeps them within sight, and, even more, keeps the space of questioning sufficiently expansive to shape the sentences along a range of actual and potential questions from requests for simple information to inquiries regarding the shape of the sentence itself. With an originary understanding of language, we need not venture beyond the grammar of signification itself for an esthetics, an ethics and a politics.\n\nSigns make sense along two axes: first, their iterability; second, as norm. To the extent that a sign is composed in accord with rules that a competent sign-user could discern and iterate, it has reached the threshold of signification. To the extent that a sign is convertible with other signs, can measure and be measured by them, so as to open up a field of semblances, it has likewise met that threshold. For sentences, as I suggested in my previous post, that threshold has been reached when a name becomes a source of imperatives (K's needing help has transformed K into a source of imperatives—respond to K, inquire into K's condition, spread the word about K, etc.); this happens when an impossible imperative finds a name to order.\n\nWe erect the name in between us to defer our dispute by ordering the name to remain in that place: this is iteration. In thus \"situating\" the name, we attribute, as I also suggested last time, the imperatives the name is obeying, to the following: a particular agent; \"reality\" (the very reality created by the sentence, which generates a range of potential imperative-ostensive articulations, and which orders us around so often); and the name itself (as conferring a name confers at least a minimal freedom and capacity for self-constitution). This is norming. A verb is some articulation of compliance with commands coming from these three sources—our obligations to others, our sense of a limiting reality, and the space of freedom we constitute by issuing commands to ourselves before knowing what obeying them would look like.\n\nHow one articulates those commands in an incoming sentence dictates what one takes to be an appropriate response to the sentence, one that will sustain the continuous present the sentence supports. A good sentence is both iterable and norming. We can fold ethical, epistemological, esthetic and political claims into accounts of how iterable and norming sentences are, which is another way of inquiring into how sentence-y they are. Goodness, knowledge, beauty, and freedom are all products of disciplinary spaces—that is, they result from commanding these names to show through semblances and to provide us with commands, in turn, that will enable us to confer these names and their descendants upon objects, events and actions yet to come.\n\nIt is sentences, enacting the disciplinary space constituting these arenas, which would be the mode of measuring and registering these event/signs. Imperatives issuing from another, from reality, and from the name itself, respectively, would be incommensurable, but out of what other material than incommensurables can commensurabilities be constituted? When we make sense of a sentence, including the one we are speaking, we affirm some such commensurability ostensively, the way we recognize an imperative has been fulfilled, by integrating the sentence into the course of living, treating it as a model for appropriating reality, as a fount of new imperatives.\n\nIndicative culture would be a culture interested in citing and creating such planes of commensurability: attracting, ordering and transcending the strongest imperatives flowing from our diverse resentments. To match an indicative culture I would propose a marginalist politics, which seeks out that composition apart from which everything stays the same. We homogenize and commensurate the world through our habits, and through our habits we render ourselves idiosyncratic before the world. Let's say I go out and get the newspaper every morning and then I come back for my morning coffee. What would define this as \"habit\" will naturally vary: in some cases, \"morning\" is good enough, in some cases only \"at 6:45\" will cover it; is it always exactly the same amount of coffee, or is the habit defined in terms of \"however much coffee I feel like\" that morning?\n\nHowever the habit is composed, the world is commanded to come together in a particular way through it, and signs cross the threshold over into meaning in terms of what sustains, what can be gathered into, and what interrupts the habit. This mode of analysis can suit any level of individual and social complexity: I read, teach and compose sentences in habitual ways, I respond to praise and criticism and confront compelling claims that disrupt my thinking likewise; habits are contagious and, like all contagious vehicles, mutate constantly, from neighbor to neighbor, teacher to student, across a place of work, among viewers of a popular TV show, etc.\n\nWhat interrupts my habit is what constitutes that habit before another and before myself as other, and raises the question of how each habit will read the other in terms of itself, itself in terms of the other, and with what remainder. When something interrupts my habit, I must re-compose it: in one sense, this is an adjustment at the margins; in another sense it is a creation ex nihilo.\n\nThe store at the corner from which I buy my paper goes out of business, and so I have to walk another block; the paper itself goes out of business and I need to get my news from a favored internet site—maybe I need to buy a computer. Either way, the rupture in my habits can be healed, and the apparent \"size\" of the rupture won't tell us much about what it will take to restore the habit: maybe the store that went out of business was owned by my best friend who just died and speaking with him for a couple of minutes every morning was an integral part of my habit, and maybe I take swimmingly to the Internet. Either way, these are marginal adjustments: new signs must fill the rupture and I can assign values to each of the candidates, based upon the system of value already in place. But this revaluing also seeps through the entire system, and I am ultimately doing everything differently. And we have lots of habits and habits for articulating the various habits that normalize the world for us and make us idiosyncratic to ourselves.\n\nPolitics is where we get into the habit of having our habits interrupt each others in a regular manner: \"regular,\" in the sense of common and sustained, but also in the sense of rule based. When acting politically, we put forth our habits at their most interruptable at that point where the other's also seems so. Where we both seem to be following the rule and yet applying it in incommensurable ways, there is where either of us might try to have our rule encircle the other. I find some way of following my application that disenables yours; and, in turn, I re-regulate your habit in terms of my application. This, of course, involves a way of talking about what we are doing: naming our practices so as to command us to follow my application; disobeying, in my discourse, the command your naming of your own and my practices would put forth.\n\nWhat we are looking for is where marginal shifts involve new compositions of the system—not necessarily revolutionary change, al though sometimes that, but just as likely systemic relabelings of the \"same\" practices and institutions. Not necessarily all at once, but implicitly, perhaps putting in place a new command that will take years, even generations, to fulfill. The best spaces for such moves tend to be on the boundaries between imperative and indicative, executive and judicial, where a new set of imperatives and the habits supporting them are incommensurable with the existing indicative regime, or those who habitually work with indicatives in detachment from imperatives seek to influence the imperative regime.\n\nFor example: a politician who represented me would demand that President Obama and any other publicly responsible figure who believes that the interrogation techniques used upon captured combatants between 2002-2006 constituted \"torture\" and were therefore illegal do the following: not only must you seek to prosecute everyone whom you believe broke the law, but you must apologize to and pay reparations to all victims of that \"torture,\" including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself. Are we not a nation of laws? Mr. Mohammed has not been tried, much less convicted—in the eyes of the law he is as innocent as anyone else.\n\nApologizing and paying reparations to Mohammed seems to me only a mere and completely logical step forward from prosecuting the practitioners and lawyerly \"enablers\" of \"torture\"—and yet in crossing this boundary the habits of adherents to what I call the \"human rights world picture\" converge, suddenly, with the habits of those promoting massacres without limits. \"International human rights law\" is, one might say, a set of imperatives seeking out the name who will ensure compliance with them—but they will never find it because the habits of international lawyers and human rights activists find no points of contact with the habits of those who enforce the law and might effectively oppose the will of tyrants.\n\nI would like to make it a political habit to expose this misfit, because believing in the efficacy of \"international human rights\" leads to the habit of composing sentences with lots of quasi-imperatives scattered aimlessly around (everyone should do, think and say all kinds of things which they would never actually think do or say, and even if they did, it wouldn't have the consequences it \"should\" have anyway). And exposing this misfit would, in turn, re-name the Nuremberg precedent as a \"victor's justice\" nevertheless applied with enough impartiality to attain universality, so as to generate imperatives whose bearers might forge needed points of contact—the Nuremberg precedent might sufficiently justify and usefully circumscribe at least some wars, such that warriors might be happy to share the results with the lawyers and activists.\n\nTo the extent that asymmetrical war waged by the stronger aims at protecting the victims of those who claim to be our victims, the ruthlessness of the warrior culture can be preserved and modified by innovative legal forms. The law can cover the spaces opened and exploited by those who fight outside of the inherited norms of warmaking only by norming, at the margins, the diverse and improvisational methods of counter-insurgency. The lawyers and activists have to study the habits of the soldier, rather than the reverse. This is not the direction in which we are currently headed."
    },
    {
      "slug": "introduction-to-disciplinarity",
      "title": "An Introduction to Disciplinarity (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/introduction-to-disciplinarity.pdf",
      "content": "Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518\n\nIn his 1968 “Introduction” to his study of The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias considers the question of why, regardless of its theoretical and empirical absurdity, the notion of a “monadic,” enclosed “self,” opposed to, and ontologically separate from, “society,” became the th th commonsense in the 19 and 20 century West. His answer is that the notion of an autonomous self, one that can be abstracted from everyday concerns, and counterposed to an “objective” external reality, was a necessary concomitant to the transformation in subjectivity involved in assimilating the shift from a human-centered, geocentric world-view to a more rigorous, heliocentric one. This transformation in subjectivity required, according to Elias, an ability to transcend immediate impulses and engage in sustained focus according to collectively established constraints—a transformation that was part of the development of\n\n“manners” in the Western world, a development that involved the learning and generational transmission of parallel restraints on exposing bodily functions, sex, and violence. The implication of Elias’s argument is that now that the revolution in science and manners has been brought to this point, it is possible to turn our attention to anthropological inquiry and thereby construct a more socially immersed understanding of the self—an understanding that his own study has set in motion.\n\nI take Elias to be heralding the emergence of new “disciplinary order,” in which new modes of sustained attention, accreted gradually from the monotheistic revelation through the scientific revolutions in the West, take a new form in the shared and spread inquiry into human practices, including that inquiry itself. Elias shows how the development of manners from the late medieval period on was itself a kind of discipline, both in the sense that the proponents of manners sought to instill discipline in the publics they addressed and in the sense that doing so demanded a kind of comparative study of habits and the making explicit of what had been tacit.\n\nEven more, the emergence of manners itself opened new fields of inquiry, such as that of the “unconscious” and “pedagogy,” insofar as creating a mannered population introduced the sharp distinction between childhood and adulthood we now take for granted and, by generating new layers of indirectness so as to avoid reference to now forbidden desires, made invisible, unspeakable and mysterious desires and activities that had once been completely open. Anthropological inquiry, in that case, must not only self-reflexively examine its own disciplinary conditions of possibility but also remain attentive to the sedimentations of previous processes of inquiry.\n\nAn equally profound implication of Elias’s study is that, once we have (as Elias is doing) proceeded to broach all that is th entailed by 19 century standards of decency (for Elias the height of the modes of formality and indirectness he associates with manners, to be followed by some relaxation th from the mid-20 century on), those standards of decency and the religious and metaphysical assumptions in which they have been embedded can no longer be taken for granted. While asserting a strict neutrality regarding judgment, Elias shows those standards a respect that more recent demystifiers like Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault have not, but the result of turning the taken for granted into an object of inquiry is ultimately the same.\n\nWhat I will go on to argue here is that the replacement of those demystified religious and metaphysical views lies not in whatever cultural or political revolution or resistance Bourdieu and/or Foucault (along with many others) might have had in mind, but with the anthropological inquiry Elias himself foregrounds. It is possible to make this claim once we realize that the very social and cultural effect wrought by those metaphysical and religious beliefs are carried out by this inquiry as well—that is, the enhancement of “manners,” or the rendering increasingly distant of violence and the desires that tempt it. And this argument gains even more power if we follow up on Peter Sloterdjik’s insistence, in his You Must Change Your Life, that the great religions and philosophies were themselves, ultimately, inquiries, and inquiries into the conditions of possibility of self-transcendence enabled by disciplinary advances.\n\nA discipline is a space of shared attention, considered as a space of inquiry. We can thus distinguish it from the moral, ritual and esthetic modes of shared attention—those that Eric Gans has rooted in the originary scene. Morality enforces the equality of all in dividing the object. Ritual enacts and commemorates the originary scene. Esthetics involves the oscillation between the sign and object which, interestingly, seems to refer to something the other on the scene, rather than the “signifier,” would be doing (in other words, the one putting forth the sign is not producing the oscillation). In each case, we could, and, indeed, would have to, invoke “intuition” or tacit knowing to account for how “equality” is determined, fidelity to the scene established, and equipoise between sign and object maintained. At a certain point, in other words, we would have to say that all the participants on the scene know that they have all deferred appropriation because they know, and such knowledge can only be acquired “emically,” by what Michael Polanyi calls “indwelling” within the scene.\n\nNow, we can take a step back into the “etic” and say that each participant is “laying a bet” within a prisoner’s dilemma-type game. This is a step back into the etic because the only way someone on the scene could even begin in frame the situation in this way is if they felt they were in danger of losing the bet, that is, if the scene was in danger of collapse. So, the “etic” is really “emic” too, but the emic in a state of at least potential disarray. The potential for disarray, though, inheres in every perceived discrepancy between sign and practice, and every practice must evince some discrepancy with the sign hallowing it.\n\nWithin every scene, then, one could imagine the emergence of disagreements over the equality of portions, the conformity of ritual to the scene it iterates or, once esthetic intention becomes deliberate, how to make the sign an ever more compelling model of desire and its suspension. In such cases, or, better, from that aspect, inquiry enters into the equation. By inquiry, to use and extend Michael Polanyi’s terms, I mean the direction of attention to something we have been attending from. One has already, or already begun to, claim a portion, take up a role in the ritual, or give shape to a sign; feedback from others on the scene suggests an extension or curtailment of that claim, a clarification of some gesture pertinent to the role, a sharpening of the sign in some respect, is called for.\n\nThis leads one to recursively review some tacit element in one’s act—to (using Eric Gans’s term, in The Origin of Language, describing the extension of the ostensive gesture to non-sacred objects among the earliest humans) “lower the threshold of significance.” Such a review measures the distance between the act carried out and one to be carried out in greater obedience to the object. The answer, then, is to be found in directing attention to some previously unconsidered mode of appearance of the object, which in turn implies the inexhaustibility of the object and its resistance to desire. Inquiry enables deferral by assuming a reality irreducible to desire—there is always more to see, and new ways of seeing, and therefore new ways of restructuring one’s actions so as to make the object accessible in new ways. Scaffolded over ritual, moral and esthetic actions, then, is at least a minimal study of those actions—a disciplinary space.\n\nThe disciplinary space is an engine of differentiations, turning the object into a generator of new signs. Determining which aspect of an object, in its sacral and appropriative relation to the community, is most worthy of attention (a determination that creates that aspect and expands the economy of attention, or lowers the threshold of significance) creates a minimal marketplace, with the more distinctive “aspectivalizations” rewarded by the ultimate currency: attention itself. The marketization process is likely to be more advanced in the arenas Gans, in Originary Thinking, assigns to the ethical (involving “productive” action away from the sacred space), but innovations and a kind of entrepreneurship take place (however slowly and imperceptibly) in the sphere of ritual as well.\n\nNew events, signaling new crises for communities that are transforming at whatever speed, need to be incorporated into an existing institutional structure upon which they will be modeled, and which those incorporations will transform. That communities and institutions change in response to new events is obvious; that some degree of inquiry into the terms of those communities and institutions accompanies and, indeed, shapes those changes, is less so; even less obvious is that such inquiry consists of attending to the tacit as signs of an inexhaustible object or, as I would prefer to start saying, “reality,” in Charles Sanders Peirce’s sense of that which is what it is regardless of what I or anyone else think about it, or, defined in terms of unending and open ended disciplinary inquiry, “[t]he opinion that is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate,” even should “[o]ur perversity and that of others indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion” (“How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 133).\n\nThe object, that is, becomes inexhaustible insofar as it anchors or sutures various degrees and modes of meaning through direct and indirect reference to the central object and the moral and ritual institutions organized to commemorate it; and once the object thereby becomes inexhaustible and irreducible to those moral and ritual institutions, we have “reality,” and a disciplinary space that opens onto reality. In other words, disciplinary spaces are always “about” something that is what it is regardless of what anyone thinks about it (and, it should be said, regardless of whether it exists—so, for example, we can explore God’s reality with complete indifference to any question of God’s existence) and participants in those spaces accede to the demand that we never stop thinking about it.\n\nRather than attempting to devise rules for inquiry, then, it is more illuminating to follow inquiry along the boundaries it shares with ritual, morality and esthetics. Ritual is already a study in desire, its transcendence, and the representation of that relation between desire and transcendence. Desire is disruptive insofar as it creates asymmetry in any community; the means for restoring symmetry must lie both within and outside of the community; and the restoration of symmetry must re-name and assimilate the originally disruptive desire —and all this must be represented in a way intelligible to the community but also to some extent abstractly, insofar as the ritual must adumbrate its future narrative renderings and elaborations.\n\nThat, at any rate, is how ritual looks from within a disciplinary space which is only a full disciplinary space to the extent it sees all forms of human meaning as disciplinary. Disciplines are likewise concerned with assimilating the anomalous to the normal practices of the community, and this will be done all the more effectively to the extent that the anomalous is displayed fully, in all its disruptive relation to the existing terms of inquiry.\n\nDisciplines cannot survive without a rigorously applied egalitarian morality: anyone within the discipline can be heard as long as they follow the (often tacit) procedures of the discipline. By the same token, no attention at all need be paid to anyone outside of the discipline, or, for that matter, to any question or observation incommensurable with the discipline(1). The most urgent question for any discipline, then, is how to determine who belongs inside. As with tribal or cult membership, inclusion must ultimately involve a personal dimension: even with our vast educational apparatuses and impersonal credentialing mechanisms, someone, and usually at least several someones, who are already recognized members of the discipline, need to know you and your work and to vouch for you.\n\nAnd what needs to be known about you is analogous in each case: you know how to and are willing to play by the rules. I hope that it is clear that I am not being critical here; rather, I am asserting that it must be this way. The equal division of the object on the originary scene would be a negotiated solution— strength, aggressiveness, assumptions of merit, and other forces of inequality will, we can assume, be operative up until the point that those asserting those privileges do not so add to the cumulative resentments of the community as to render the originary sign null and void. But how could one know when that point is being approached?\n\nEven for those within the community, it will be at best a question of educated guesses and trial and error—but for outsiders, negotiating this terrain would be impossible without extensive training, which is to say without them becoming insiders. (The process of making outsiders insiders, that is, pedagogy, is itself the object of a disciplinary space.) Similarly, the rules of even the most objective scientific discipline—rules about how to carry out and formalize procedures, what counts as a violation of procedure, metarules regarding which violations can be repatriated within the discipline, etc., are a question of further inquiry that both presupposes and revises the rough equality of the discipline.\n\nThe connection between the esthetic and inquiry is perhaps easiest to see. The spectator’s oscillation between sign and object might begin as an inchoate impasse between desire and the restraint formed by fear—a glance towards the object impels one forward while a glance at the sign compels a backward step, with the power of the sign then drawing one’s attention back to the object and so on. But insofar as the esthetic is to become a deliberate practice (“art” being its institutionalized recognized form), which is to say the one forming the sign learns to vary its form, to dial desire and fear up and down, to introduce new desires for hitherto undesirable objects, and so on, while the spectator learns to distinguish between manipulative attempts to intensify desire and fear from opportunities provided to examine those emotions, then we already have a space of inquiry.\n\nIn fact, the complete separation of art from representations derived from the ritual-moral realm would leave art with no objects other than those constructed by the spectator, listener or reader, which is to make the “recipient” of the artwork a participant in it. The consequence of this, in turn, is to abolish art as a separate institution and turn it into an ongoing disciplinary inquiry of everyday life within everyday life. The duck/rabbit image that so fascinated Wittgenstein provides a good model for this—the most minimal work of esthetic inquiry would simply be to make us see the duck when we are more likely to see the rabbit, and vice versa.\n\nRemaining within a disciplinary space involves iterating the originary gesture of converting designations into constructions of reality. This entails converting given, tacitly acquired distinctions into constitutive distinctions. For example, in Durkheim’s analysis of the relation between legality and criminality, he shows how the distinction transcends the particular acts one would designate as legal or illegal at a particular point in time in a particular culture. Rather, the distinction between legality and criminality is a permanent one, because the boundary between preferred and privileged acts, on the one hand, and disfavored acts, on the others, is permanent: any social order presupposes such a distinction, just as the very act of attention entails a preference for one object over another.\n\nIn that case, even if by some miracle, individuals stopped murdering, robbing and raping their fellows, the threshold for unacceptable acts would simply be lowered, and acts that now fall well below that threshold, such as mere rudeness, would then fall above it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the death penalty or long prison sentences would then be imposed on the perpetrators of such acts, but it does mean that whatever penalties they were to incur would be as socially isolating, in their own way, as the penalties for those “genuine” crimes are today. In that case, “crime” is a constitutive element of social order or, as Durkheim puts it, “a factor in public health, an integrative element in any society” (98).\n\nThe tendency of any discipline is to make the founding concepts of the discipline reciprocally constitutive: to make crime a constituent of law abidingness, sickness a constituent of health, the anomaly a constituent of the normal, the ugly of the beautiful, the heretical of the sacred, and so on. The concepts are thereby relativized radically, but not abolished; in fact, the distinction between them is also radicalized. For example, that sickness and health are coconstitutive is self-evident: no one is perfectly healthy, everyone has the beginnings or the beginnings of the beginnings of cancer, heart disease, dementia, and myriad other disorders from birth, and health would more properly be defined in terms of the so far successful resistance to and delay of those disorders than their absence.\n\nThe proper discipline of medicine, then, would focus on the boundaries where, with ever greater precision, we can mark the onset of and neutralization of those disorders. The living being would be nothing but the totality of those boundaries. Sickness, then, marks the boundary of the system of life, and also marks the contingency of that system, while health is life’s deferral of decline and death. The boundary marking one system from another marks the limits of the relativization of the founding concepts, which is also to say that the purpose of relativization is to enable us to mark that boundary of the discipline.\n\nThe relativizations I have been producing here, between morality and ethics, and between ritual, morality, esthetics and inquiry, also serve the purpose of marking the boundaries of the human community as discovered by and the disciplinary space constitutive of the originary hypothesis. To say that ritual, morality and esthetics contain a constitutive dimension of inquiry, learning and knowing (and that inquiry, learning and knowing have a ritual dimension, a morality and esthetics) is not to abolish or dilute these concepts. What remains is a hierarchy of boundaries within any activity or space, and hinges that open one space or activity onto others.\n\nThere’s no point, for example, to speaking of the moral function of art if art doesn’t already have a moral dimension; but if art has a moral dimension it is not the same moral dimension as politics or ritual or family life might have, but one predicated on the creation of a community of those oscillating between sign and reality in tandem. This might include an oscillation regarding the moral quality of the work, for example, framed as follows: what would we see in the work differently were we to read it as either immoral or moral? Even better: demonically, depravedly immoral or supremely, sublimely moral? Who would we imagine to be on the scene opened by the work in either case, what would be the reality we would imagine the work to offer access to, and what in the work provides access to all on its scene or, contrarily, privilege access for some and preclude it for others?\n\nThese inquiries could have an empirical component—what do we know of the audiences and historical conditions under which the art was created, the moral transitions prominent at the time, and so on—but most fundamentally it is a reading of the possibilities of the work itself and its own gesturing toward possible audiences, with the empirical inquiries, our interfacing with other disciplinary spaces, serving to enhance our sense of its possibilities. Indeed, the “empirical components”—historical, political, technological and other issues—are themselves simply markers of the ways other disciplinary spaces impinge upon the one opened by the work of art.\n\nIf the inquiry already intrinsic to morality, art and ritual results from the uncertainty also intrinsic to those spheres, then the growing uncertainty generated by the interaction of different moralities, esthetic criteria, and sacralities would make that inquiry an increasingly prominent element. Morality, sacrality and esthetics would, then, slide towards becoming the morality, sacrality and esthetics of inquiry. This may or may not have happened, or be happening—determining that would be itself the concern of a disciplinary space. But what we can say is that the alternative, once unavoidable uncertainty has been introduced, is a world divided between incommensurable and at least intermittently hostile faiths and moralities, on the one hand, and a world comprised of overlapping modes of inquiry, on the other.\n\nIn this latter case, no one would need to concede any of his or her faith, insofar as that faith can generate a distinctive and sustainable mode of (at least anthropological) inquiry. Nor would those who commit to the disciplinary world need to denounce those who remain within more exclusive ritual and moral spaces as evil or enemies—rather, they would simply be treated as disciplinary spaces by addressing those aspects of their self-understanding where they would recognize themselves in those terms. If necessary, the problem of defending the disciplinary world against hostility from other ritual and moral spaces would itself generate new disciplinary spaces.\n\nThe disciplinary world is post-moral to the extent that it is postmimetic, and it is post-mimetic insofar as its members enable each other to imitate that dimension of reality they are jointly attending to, rather than the appropriative desires of other individuals. The knowledge of mimetic desire provided by Biblical, classical, modern and, more recently Girardian theory and GA is paradoxical: on the one hand, this is knowledge of the constitutive mode of human being; on the other hand, it is knowledge of the transcendence of this being, and if mimetic desire can never be abolished, it can be deferred; if it can be deferred for a split second, it can later be deferred for a minute, a year, a life time, generations, ages—and, we can learn to detect ever more minute, implicit and potential signs of mimetic desire and devise means of deferring them before they even produce effects.\n\nThe contemporary “study” of “micro-aggressions” is, so far, a study in how to deploy the concept of “micro-aggression” in institutional skirmishes, but it could certainly be the foundation of a genuine disciplinary space—everyday manners, for example, are a veritable petri dish of microaggressions, along with their deferrals. At the same time, we could never conclusively deny that the perpetual distancing of mimetic desire is robbing us of forms of tacit knowledge that might be needed to sustain any social order, including a disciplinary one; nor that such distancing, which might require an ever greater reward at the end, is not merely the accumulation of resentments on an ultimately apocalyptic scale. These questions will themselves be major generators of disciplinary spaces within a disciplinary order that can never entirely disembed from ritual, morality and esthetics, because any disciplinary space is a scene among scenes.\n\nWe can assume that the construction of a disciplinary space in the sense of a bounded space of inquiry will serve the same purpose as any scene—that of deferring violence. The more free and unthreatened by immediate violence a particular space is, which is to say the more the space itself generates mimetic desires in a form conducive to their satisfaction within the space, the more the violence that space is concerned with deferring is that of the social whole. As Eric Voegelin argued in his analysis of Plato’s founding of philosophy, such autonomous disciplines situate themselves within a social crisis that they undertake to develop and disseminate the means of deferring. As Voegelin writes:\n\nPhilosophy . . . has its origin in the resistance of the soul to its destruction by society. Philosophy in this sense, as an act of resistance illuminated by conceptual understanding, has two functions for Plato. It is first, and most importantly, an act of salvation for himself and others, in that the evocation of right order and its reconstitution in his own soul becomes the substantive center of a new community which, by its existence, relieves the pressure of the surrounding corrupt society. (Order and History Vol. 3 123)\n\nIt would follow, then, that the notion of discipline in its more punitive and educational (for example, Foucauldian) senses, in other words as a rigorous set of practices, guided by theory and aimed at transforming habits, imposed upon others, follows from the understanding of a disciplinary space as recuperative and reparative in the face of social disorder. In particular, what Foucault understood to be a “disciplinary society” best makes sense as the emergence, in the modern era, of new disciplines aimed primarily at diagnosing and proposing cures for equally novel social ills. Just as it made sense to Plato that only those “guardians,” who wished only to explore the good life, could be trusted to rule over others, so it makes sense that those who undertook to study, to take a few examples, the moral and intellectual needs and deficiencies of the burgeoning urban populations, the theories of punishment and penitential practices, the health and sanitary living and working conditions of the new industrial working class, would be those asked to found modern school systems, reform prisons and police departments, manage factories and so on.\n\nIn other words, the notion of discipline is one: it is an extension of the concept of deferral, as the originary hypothesis understands it: a signifying of desire and resentment so as to delay the consequences of desire and resentment and make them conform in expression to the demands of a sacralized object of desire. A disciplinary scene is a withdrawal from social disorder and a renewal of deferral in some exemplary manner, so as to allow reality to become a means of enhancing self-discipline. Knowledge, then, is not an effect, reproduction, and legitimation of unequal power relations. Rather, power follows from that knowledge marked by the identification, diagnosis, and proposed amelioration or abolition of some source of social disorder.\n\nNor is it simply the truthfulness or profundity of the knowledge on offer—the “clients” and “customers” are unequipped to judge the result of the discipline on its own terms, and the success or failure of their public enterprises can only be judged in an ad hoc manner, since there can be no “control” group. It is, I would say the “charisma,” in Philip Rieff’s sense, that is conferred upon those who have distanced themselves from the immediate, the obvious, the commonsensical in order to map out a normally invisible set of relations, that is the source of disciplinary power. While disciplinary power has in full measure its bullies, its frauds, its would-be dictators, none of it would be possible without those who first of all want to know what the truth is, how society holds together, how the mind works, and so on, or, to put it more precisely, to direct our attention in a new way because the old way is frayed and has lost its power of deferral—indeed, we can only measure the frauds and bullies against that standard (and against the intrinsic fallibility of social knowledge, especially the kinds created in response to pressing needs).\n\nMichael Polanyi, upon whose understanding I have been drawing, sees inquiry as a concerted convergence of attention on the articulation of the particulars of a field (from the particulars to their articulation) of reality in ways that direct our attention to additional articulable particulars. Such collaborative spaces rely on the authority of previous and neighboring inquiries, and draw upon the contributions of individual inquirers, each of whom, in his/her very attempt to articulate the particulars thereby presupposes the existence of a broader, unseen, largely intuited reality. These inquiries rely upon the “principle of mutual control” (72) to sustain the shared attention comprising the discipline.\n\nIn this way, an acceptance of authority and a restricted, even minute, field in which one makes responsible choices is combined with an intimation of a hierarchical and open-ended whole in which all the overlapping disciplines participate. While focusing on the natural scientists, Polanyi suggests that all fields of inquiry, including moral and esthetic, are governed in their internal and external interactions by the same logic. Polanyi calls a free and open social order predicated upon these disciplines a “society of explorers.” While Polanyi does not push his argument this far, I will now go on to argue that Polanyi’s society of explorers can encompass society as such—there are nothing but disciplines (a family constitutes a—or several—disciplinary spaces, as does a friendship, even a single meeting between strangers, and so on), and if all of these disciplines do not recognize each other, that is because they have not yet (and maybe never will be) brought into a relation of mutual control with each other.\n\nThe internal marketplace of the discipline produces results made available on the external market to those outside of the discipline. One doesn’t need to understand a new medicine, or to know whether it could have been done better or cheaper, to be cured by it. But one discipline generates new ones: one, let’s say the medical discipline, takes the curative property of the medicine on the authority of the disciplinary space within the pharmaceutical industry, but disciplines emerge that check that authority, interposing their own: those who test the medicine, those from the agency regulating it, or those “lay” agencies that monitor the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry.\n\nThe producing side also generates new disciplines: a discipline of marketing, and a discipline of finance, to determine how research funds are to be acquired and allocated, and these disciplines in their own way overlap with the biological disciplines inventing the new medicines: certain problems of marketing will impinge upon the problems specific to biology. So, while the discipline of biology might seem distant from any social crisis and need for withdrawal and restoration, it is brought into proximity to such concerns by various disciplines dealing directly with urgent needs of private and social welfare, and which operate in mutual control with biology. (It also follows that inquiries into the moral and ethical implications of scientific innovations need to take this broader field of disciplines into account.)\n\nAssuming a disciplinary order would lead us to frame discussions of the market in terms of overlapping disciplines: the shared space of interest and inquiry comes first, analytically, insofar as we see the final consumer as a participant in a discipline as well, one who at a very minimum distinguishes one product from another, and could have their attention redirected by means that can themselves be attended to and revised. Not all disciplines are equal—the individual trying to decide which medicine to take does not have the resources or knowledge of the chemical, biological and medical disciplines, and the mutual control disciplines exercise upon each other reflect these asymmetries (the medical profession can certainly subject “alternative medicines” to a kind of sustained, coherent and transparent scrutiny that could not be reciprocated) but this doesn’t change the fact that even a fringe, conspiracy theory-laden “alternative” discipline operates according to rules and generates shareable observations that would not have been available otherwise. The task of sorting out the relations between all these disciplines is itself a disciplinary one, in part a kind of expertise in debunking.\n\nJane Jacobs’ analysis of the emergence of new work within an economy in her The Economy of Cities not only illustrates the disciplinary processes that make up the market but further suggests the interdependence of innovative thinking within the market and more theoretical reflection. Jacobs studies and categorizes a whole series of ways in which new work is added to an economic process—to take her first and simplest example, she mentions Ida Rosenthal, a custom seamstress who invented the bra by first using this new undergarment to improve the fit of the dresses she made for customers. Rosenthal then “became more interested in making brassieres than in making dresses” (51) and went into business manufacturing them; “bra-making now stood as an activity in its own right.” From attending from the undergarments to their effect on the dress, this particular undergarment became a focus of attention in its own right.\n\nJacobs goes on to observe that “[o]nce one gets the hang of the process [i.e., of how new work is added to old] it is not only entertaining to track down the progressions of D [old division of labor] and A [added work] that have given us modern activities like magnetic-tape manufacturing, but also to speculate about the about the unknown progressions in the past” (57) which, as Jacobs goes on to remind her reader, she has just done in the previous chapter in advancing the startling thesis that urban life had in fact preceded rural life. (In brief, Jacobs focuses on the likelihood that nomads and hunters and gatherers would store their animals and grain; this storage would become “new work” that would lead to breeding animals, selling grain and so on, leading to a market around which a city would develop and upon which emergent surrounding rural areas would depend.\n\nInterestingly, new work invariably emerges out of some kind of delay in completing the old work.) In other words, analyzing the processes of new work leads to iteration of that new work in the theoretical sphere, generating hypotheses of origins real and possible. Insofar as any phenomenon must iterate in some distanced way the originary event, the analysis of any phenomenon into its constitutive elements and their categorical constitution must take an originary turn into the event responsible for the emergence of the categories.\n\nThe same analysis of all institutions as disciplinary spaces applies to institutions apparently distant from inquiry understood narrowly, such as political and military ones: first of all, there are those whose “new work” is to identify the possibility of preparing for certain internal and external threats, who study how to do so, including which capabilities and dispositions are best suited to this purpose, who winnow out those who are unfit to serve that function, and who offer up their services. In that case, we could see the full blown modern state as an articulation of disciplines, first of all subordinated to the discipline of maintaining social order, but, increasingly, characterized by ambiguous and shifting relations between various regulatory, police, and therapeutic disciplines.\n\nUndesirable, disreputable and even evil activities might have a disciplinary component (as will virtually any human activity) but an understanding of disciplinarity makes clear their limits. So, for example, if we go to war, there is the possibility of entering a disciplinary space with one’s enemy —a disciplinary space organized around various reciprocities regarding proportionate response and other legal issues, the use of specified weapons, treatment of prisoners, diplomatic engagements aimed at ending the war, and so on. The police, in their relation to criminals and other disciplines such as the judicial and penitential, ultimately invite the criminal to enter the discipline of policing, both by informing on their confederates and policing or disciplining themselves as they become law-abiding citizens.\n\nA criminal gang, to a certain extent, can be a discipline—figuring out how to rob a bank or claim the turf of a rival gang certainly involves a kind of inquiry (this is why movies and other forms of entertainment are able to engage our sympathies on the side of criminals). But only to a certain extent—the discipline cannot be an open one, which is to say it cannot submit itself to mutual control with other disciplines. Since it is predicated upon subversion of other disciplines, it must therefore conceal itself, and it must therefore privilege the loyalty of its members over their commitment to the inquiry; in privileging loyalty, the criminal gang is necessarily hierarchical, since someone must enforce loyalty and the loyalty of all to that enforcer must exceed his towards any of them.\n\nEvil, then, can be known by the way it resists overlapping with neighboring disciplines: the teacher can want the student to become a fellow teacher, the doctor can want the patient to take control of his own health, the policeman can even want the criminal to not only go straight but become a model of reformed law-abiding leadership in his community —but a mugger cannot want his victims to mug him in return or compete with him for victims, a swindler cannot hope to have his victims join in his swindle (al though an interesting mode of esthetic representation does test out these possibilities—for example, among child molesters—of victims being recruited into the criminal “project,” but part of the interest in such representations is in the limitations they reveal: maybe one, even a few victims can be recruited, but their must always remain a larger pool of potential victims who will never be admitted); and, at the extreme, the Nazi cannot want the Jew to join him in his study of the most expeditious way of exterminating unwanted racial groups.\n\nIf one accepts the model presented thus far of post-ritual social orders as comprised of overlapping and neighboring disciplines interrelated through mutual control, it follows that the real antagonist to disciplinary power comes from within. The modern discipline emerges within a market order, which itself becomes possible once the secrecy of the cult is progressively eroded and its inscrutable rites are replaced by practices of inquiry that can be learned and results that can be inspected. Even the former cults come to abide by these rules. The modern discipline, that is, is accountable to scrutiny from other disciplines regarding its practices and products, and accountability means bureaucracy, in the broadest sense of treating reality as always already a grid.\n\nDavid Olson, in his Psychological Theory and Education Reform: How School Remakes Mind and Society, shows how modern disciplines entail modern bureaucracies run by and for a literate population—indeed, modern literacy is essentially equivalent to familiarity with the workings and demands of bureaucracies, and the educational system is set up so as to produce those who can run them. Even more, we are all bureaucrats—the reason why teachers hate grading so much is that it is the most explicitly bureaucratic of our tasks, where we are most obviously doing nothing more than sorting students so as to determine their location in their next step on the bureaucratic ladder. As Olson argues,\n\nIn a modern bureaucratic world, knowledge, virtue and ability take on a new form. Institutions such as science preempt knowledge, justice systems preempt virtue, and functional roles preempt general cognitive ability. Thus, ability, knowledge and virtue are construed and pursued less in the\n\n> form of private mental states and moral traits of individuals than in the form of competence in the roles, norms, and rules of the formal bureaucratic institutions in which they live and work. (288)\n\nThese value transformations result from the accountability of the discipline, or its self-representation before a public, which is to say other disciplines. The discipline adapts itself to and shapes the other disciplines so as to ensure the value of its services to them. Intrinsic interest must be translated into extrinsic benefits, potential beneficiaries and the benefits to them must be categorized, itemized, maximized and institutionalized, and the qualifications for entry into and continued participation in the discipline formalized. This accountability can generate more disciplinary spaces, but insofar as these means of normalization involve the collusion between established disciplinary spaces to interfere with emergent disciplinary spaces, the extrinsic readily supplants the intrinsic: procedures of approval through the application of established categories replace exploration of the possibilities of founding concepts, and issuing credentials substitutes for the ongoing, interested judgment of participants’ contributions.\n\nAnd struggles can then be waged over the revision of categories and the updating of credentials. Each disciplinary space tends to re-organize itself on the model of others upon which it is dependent, to that extent replacing inquiry with prefabricated criteria.\n\nDisciplines, then, in order to survive, must become spaces carved out of and in resistance to the very bureaucracies they have secreted.\n\nUnderstanding the emergence of the bureaucratic out of the disciplinary and disciplinary resistance to bureaucratization requires that we relativize this boundary between the bureaucratic and the disciplinary. In the most basic sense, there is nothing but disciplinarity: disciplinarity is coextensive with the human: the originary scene was a discipline, even if that cannot be recognized until a critical mass of overlapping disciplines has emerged. Disciplinary attention, though, can be directed toward the means of preventing infiltration by other disciplinary spaces: this itself is a rich field of inquiry. Any disciplinary space can be threatened by competitors or those who see it as a threat; self-defense requires the assumption that the actually existing disciplinary space is the only possible instantiation of that mode of inquiry, prompting inquiry into the possibility of the impenetrability of the disciplinary space: so the inquiry into the human that lies at the origin of, say, a revolutionary movement is transformed into an inquiry into rooting out traitors to the revolution (in particular, the best hidden ones) and ultimately, perhaps, into the possibility of maintaining the barest remnants, even memories, of what was once a global movement.\n\nIt is inquiry all the way up and down, but what has been refused bureaucratically is the reciprocity with other disciplines, which really means the desire for and encouragement of disciplinary spaces to complement and join one’s own and hence the narrowing rather than expansion of reality. Still, despite the vanishing possibilities, one cannot exclude altogether the possibility that the tiniest space does have, and has been defending against great odds, the truth that will win out in the long run, which is to say will outlive and draw the attention of other disciplinary spaces. Bureaucracy is the study of the means of ensuring the impermeability of the disciplinary space, of making sure that what is discovered is intelligible in terms of what is already known, but that itself may only be known from within another disciplinary space that through its own bureaucratization mistakes a harnessing of resources to sustain a beleaguered truth for dogmatism and paranoia.\n\nIt is only through the creation of new disciplinary spaces that the distinction between discipline and bureaucracy can be determined. Indeed, modern esthetic developments, or at least one prominent line of them, can be seen in a new light once we consider them in terms of the dialectic of discipline and bureaucracy, and those developments can shed light on that dialectic. The para-science, “‘pataphysics,” invented by th the 19 century French playwright and novelist Alfred Jarry as “the science of imaginary solutions and the laws th governing exceptions,” and the font of a wide range of 20 century artistic movements, including surrealism, the Oulipo, and conceptual art, responds, I would suggest, to the emergence and proliferation of bureaucratic discourse and the normalization processes they have been bound up with th since the 19 century. The way in which practitioners of ‘pataphysics exploit the reversibility of scientific and other authoritative modernizing discourses can be seen in Rene Daumal’s parody/extension of the scientific revolution introduced by quantum physics:\n\nThe impartial observer of modern science will seize this opportunity to point out that modern science is, despite the unanimous belief of its friends and its enemies, an immaterialist science. I might add that for an impartial observer, a non-materialist science is no more absurd than a pacifist arms merchant or a vegetarian butcher. Modern science is based in the belief that thought, ideas and numbers are immaterial. And so to make a phenomenon conceivable, knowable, measurable, it deems it necessary to purge it of all materiality; and even the intractable residue left untouched by that reduction that could have been taken as the sign of the existence of some matter is an irreducible abstract, a mathematical indetermination. What’s more, thanks to the Probabilities, the unintelligibility of the unintelligible has become intelligible. (80-1)\n\nJust as, according to Olson, capacities and virtues become roles and rules within systems, a pacifist can take on the role of the arms merchant, the vegetarian that of the butcher, and this anomaly, only absurd for the bureaucratic observer, makes it possible to imagine that science has itself become the very thing it would set itself against—the immaterial; meanwhile, the very unintelligibility this paradox seems to drive us into becomes, through further advances in disciplinary inquiry, intelligible. ‘Pataphysics, as the study of “laws governing exceptions,” inhabits the anomalies of disciplinary/bureaucratic discourse, deconstructing the bureaucratization of language by returning to their constitutive condition the distinctions whose primacy bureaucracy makes synonymous with its own authority.\n\n“The laws governing exceptions” makes sense in the light of the retrieval of the disciplinary out of the bureaucratic. Exceptions to, or anomalies of, bureaucratic rule, are the forms taken by disciplinary work: the “law governing” such work is the constitutive boundary between the disciplinary and the bureaucratic—the boundary between “virtue” and “norm,” for example. It might be further revealing to consider corporate, consumer and celebrity culture as a form of bureaucratic culture, insofar as political coercion, involving collusion between the security discipline (the state) and other disciplinary spaces in the market (and, secondarily, among those other spaces) raises barriers of entry to disciplinary spaces on the margins of the market.\n\nThe resulting publicly inflected private entities study carefully how to ensure their impermeability by those emergent spaces. Consumption is in this way engineered and channeled and asymmetries that emerge in the market are converted into packaged and permanent icons (“celebrity” is a result of studies of iconization of contingent markers of desire). Resistance to consumerism and celebritization follows, but in what does this resistance consist if not in the semiotic resources any mode of deferral requires, in this case the discipline of what Tony Veale calls “educated insolence” that turns stereotyped (i.e., bureaucratic) language against itself and facilitates consumer power at least as effectively as the various serious consumerist disciplinary spaces, such as Consumer Reports?\n\nWithout such power, the discipline of the consumer is at the mercy of the addictive power of any relatively monopolized product that targets desires in their more isolated, simplified, amplified and repeatable forms. While categorizing the workings of an albeit corporatized free market similarly to the more recognizable bureaucratic labyrinths such as, say, the IRS, may seem counter-intuitive, and while the pluralism of one differs considerably from the near-totalitarianism of the other, what the two share is the imperative (one that intensifies as it is obeyed) to make predictability and controllability ever more perfect at the expense of the anomalies and innovations that occur at the margins; to put it more theoretically, they both try to increase the probability of intended consequences to the point where such probability is decreased due to excessive interference and consequent uncertainty in the variables. The difference is where they lie on the continuum leading from disciplinarity to bureaucracy.\n\nWe can describe the kind of ‘pata-inquiry I am assigning to disciplinarity more precisely. Let’s grant that any social activity is rule-governed, at least tacitly. Under normal conditions, all players make moves corresponding to the shared rules. Abnormal conditions emerge not so much when one or more players cheat (cheating, like crime, is recognized and accounted for within the game) but when one or more of them leverages an anomaly within the rules. Broad social rules like “treat everyone equally” are replete with such anomalies, which have comprised the substance of politics for the past couple of centuries. Local bureaucratic rules are as well—the interpretation of any rule always depends upon a shared good will or faith in one another’s adherence to some common understanding of the rules (that is, a disciplinary space committed to studying the forms and implications of the rules).\n\nWhen such leveragings occur, one possible response is to restate and seek to enforce the rules precluding them—but, since what has occurred is a re-constitution of the rules, the solid ground on which such reinforcement could take place no longer exists. The ‘pata response would be to treat the anomaly as the legitimate rule and invent and enact (leverage) a complementary anomaly to it. The ultimate purpose of such counter-leveraging is to restore a new rule-governed setting that has incorporated the anomalies on all sides, even if the business (or discipline) of ‘pataphysics (denormalizing inquiry) is interested only in the creation of the complementary anomaly—another disciplinary space would have to take on the task of resettling the field that ‘pataphysics unsettles.\n\nDisciplinary thinking, located on the boundary between the disciplinary and the bureaucratic, directs our attention, simultaneously, to the bureaucratic as seen by the disciplinary and the disciplinary as seen by the bureaucratic. Take the following mock description of a PhD thesis by Bart Plantenga in his novel, Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man:\n\nDuring the course of my PhD I began to gravitate towards the Muzak-like qualities of laughter, beneficial sound that reflects society positively, confirms its values of family, work, religion, freedom within the parameters of consumerism.\n\nI studied laughter’s coercive (cooptative) laughtrack strategies; how they trained people to laugh on certain cues and quips. Keep the funny bone sufficiently activated with no time to think. Its infectious laughter managing to obliterate the fact that these banal attempts at humor always failed. The laughtrack took up the slack. It has us laughing at things that are not funny. Put a laughtrack over a documentary of\n\n> the Nazi Death Camps and people can be made to laugh. I know, I did the study, which was published in the Journal of Mass Psychiatry, vol. 16, no. 3. Took segments of Alain Resnais’ Night & Fog… and added some laughtrack I lifted from a failed sitcom. It was there, I have it on tape— cognitive, chuckling dissonance, man. Involuntary laughter, involuntary manslaughter—NOT totally opposing ideas. (1213)\n\nPlantenga here brings out the inseparability of genuine inquiry and its bureaucratic deformation into a means of manipulation: laughtracks are there for a reason, and it would indeed be very interesting to explore the precise mechanics of the laughtrack and of different laughtracks—the particular form of laughter each induces, its effects on the viewer’s judgment of what is being viewed, and so on; such an inquiry would further turn into an inquiry into laughter itself. What, though, would distinguish this inquiry from service in the attempt to make laughtracks more effective, which is to say, to use the laughtrack to sidetrack inquiries into a range of possible responses to, say, a film on the Holocaust?\n\nSingling out the “involuntary” common to laughter and manslaughter marks the capability of the disciplinary self to attend to the implication of its own deliberately undertaken and initially free disciplinary inquiry into the involuntary behavior of the bureaucratically managed subject. Plantenga’s invocation of the Nazi death camps marks the moral inversion of the discipline into the bureaucracy, but the broader immorality he points to is the simulation of laughter in the hope that it will be contagious, and produce subjects who laugh when required—regardless of whether what is laughed at is funny. The disciplinary becomes bureaucratic when one no longer studies being funny, but rather supplants humor with a technological mechanism that will produce the effects of humor (laughter) sufficiently to maintain the audience needed for other, commercial purposes.\n\nInquiry is required to invent and regulate that technological mechanism, but once it is controlled by the feedback from measurable effects (the regularized relation between laughter and ratings) not only has the discipline of comedy been displaced but so, also, has the disciplinary inquiry into various forms of inducing laughter.\n\nWe could imagine this distinction as follows: the audience could enter the discipline initiated by the comic by trying to figure out what makes a joke or routine funny, using it as a model for a joke or routine of one’s own, or noticing for the first time the breakdown in automaticity referenced by the joke; one could not enter into the study of one’s involuntary responses to a mechanism without disavowing and ultimately repudiating those responses. A broader implication for a specifically bureaucratic mode of thought follows. For the disciplinary inquirer, the contributions one enables others to make to the disciplinary space constitute one’s relation to others, to an audience which is implicitly invited into the disciplinary space; once one begins to study how to generate similar or analogous responses to those previously elicited, one institutes an impermeable boundary between inquirer and audience.\n\nI could show others how to construct a fictional scene that elicits a kind of canned laughter on the part of a “typical” audience (you can make people laugh by doing injury to a character who has already been “softened up” as a target, for example), but once you have shown them how it’s done they will no longer find it funny—they are now with you, targeting others or, more precisely, feeding their addiction (addiction being nothing more than an uncontrolled desire for the exact experience one is already familiar with). The articulation of inquiry and bureaucracy enables us to account for Heidegger’s framing “technology,” or the “sleepwalking” Mc Luhan associates with immersion in a new medium, in which references and gestures enabled by a new relation to nature and the world are, unknown to those making the references and gestures, really references to the new mode of human organization constitutive of the relation to world and nature.\n\nThe accumulation of mediations amongst humans and between humans and their objects of desire are both means and results of inquiry, which is to say of constitutive deferral and disciplines, and grids representing a “particle-ized” and already “gridded” human-in-nature. The bureaucratic mind wishes to be on an abstracted scene that the sign has always already completely mapped, down to the least possible gesture. What an originary account can add to those Heidegger and Mc Luhan is the location of “bureaucracy” on the originary scene, where the reciprocal “calibration” of their respective signings on the part of the scene’s participants involves a potentially total mapping of possible responses and respective mappings of self and others.\n\nThe approach to that totality in the originary event closes the scene while leaving sufficient margin for error to notice further residues of representable desire. Bureaucracy seeks to eliminate that margin of error by ensuring the recipient fits the delivery and designing the delivery to match the prepared recipient.\n\nOlson, as I suggested earlier, associates the emergence of bureaucratic culture with the spread of literacy. Olson and others have done extensive work on the transformations wrought by literacy on individual and collective consciousness, but rather than going over that terrain here, I will argue, more specifically, for viewing disciplinary thinking as a specific form of thinking within literate modes of thought but also within the aporias of those modes of thought.\n\nOlson’s theory of writing in The World on Paper advances beyond the pathbreaking work of Eric Havelock and others by reversing the relation between syntactic writing (writing that distinguishes, at least, between words within a sentence) and speech—rather than assuming that writing was an attempt to represent speech (that is, that the inventors of writing already saw language in terms of individual words and sentences which they then sought to represent), Olson argues that syntactic representation, coming from the emblems or tokens used to record inventory (so, the first syntactical writing comes when it becomes possible to write “3 goats” instead of “goat goat goat”), itself provides the model for language that writing proceeds to institutionalize:\n\nOnce a writing system has a syntax, the emblems or tokens can now be seen as words rather than as emblems and the constructions can be seen as a proposition rather than a list. The structures present in the script now provide the categories needed for introspecting the implicit structures of language. Such scripts are logographic in that the tokens now represent the major grammatical constituents of the language, namely, words. But, to repeat, it does not follow that the inventors of such a script already knew about words and then sought to represent them in the script. The opposite may be true. The scribal inventions dictated a kind of reading which allowed language to be seen as composed of words related by means of a syntax. Writing thereby provides the model for the production of speech (in reading) and for the introspective awareness of speech as composed of grammatical constituents, namely, words. (77, emphasis Olson’s)\n\nWhile the “invention” of the declarative sentence certainly precedes that of writing by many millennia, it is with the invention of writing that the declarative sentence can be singled out as such and treated as the primary linguistic form, the model for language as such. So, the development of alphabetic writing coincided with the development of metaphysics in Greece and monotheism in Israel—both are new modes of intelligibility predicated upon the primacy of the declarative sentence. As Olson points out, the understanding that words represent meanings rather than being embodied in the things they refer to “spells the death of ‘word’ magic or more precisely, ‘name’ magic” (75). It now becomes possible to argue about what “good” or “God” “really means”—it has some stable meaning, insofar as its permanence is evident in its written form, but it has no obvious or direct connection to any particular meaning.\n\nOnce language can be broken down into words and sentences, two things happen: first, specific words and sentences can be preserved in an exact form, and that preservation can be insisted upon. That is, verbal commonplaces, formulas, ritual expressions, sacralized claims, inherited maxims, and so on, have an “original” and “authentic” form against which future iterations can be measured. Second, the verbal elements of sentences can be broken down, replaced, combined and rearranged deliberately, and for intended effects. (As has been noted many times, the first industrialized, mass production process was the printing press.)\n\nNo doubt, oral communities must have insisted upon continuity and varied their uses of linguistic forms, but with the existence of an original form, new modes of thought and discourse, such as the distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy and word and intention, commentary, hermeneutical and allegorical reading strategies, grammatical, logical and other kinds of “correctness,” parody and so on become possible. The possibility of iterating a specific linguistic form leads simultaneously towards reverence and mockery, or, for that matter, simple dispersal, with the provenance and attitude to be adopted toward the sentence left open. And these consequences of the ability to manipulate language introduced by writing—to pulverize and recombine it—are further intensified, as Mc Luhan noted, in the wake of the printing revolution in the early modern world.\n\nI now propose processing this intellectual development through a distinction Michael Tomasello makes in his recent book, A Natural History of Human Thinking, between “joint intentionality” and “collective intentionality.” Joint intentionality, for Tomasello, is the distinguishing marker of human thinking, represented by the gesture of pointing—when someone points something out to another, both know that they are looking at the “same” thing, and each knows that the other knows. In evolutionary terms, Tomasello associates the period of “joint intentionality” with the iconic signs (comprised of pointing and mimicry) constitutive of the earliest period of human language.\n\nEventually, these iconic signs become more abstract—due both to the increase in the size of human communities and the grammaticalization of gestures (that is, their articulation into relations between signs, and ultimately sentences), until we get to the point of the “arbitrary” sign with no necessary connection to its meaning or referent. At this point, words have taken on meanings independent of any instance of their use, and rather than simply being able to understand another’s mind we are able and, indeed, compelled, to conform to the edicts of the “objectivity” comprising a “collective intentionality.”\n\nNow, the emergence of collective intentionality certainly, like the declarative sentence, precedes the development of writing—I am arguing not for the simultaneity of these developments, but for the claim that the later developments seized upon, accentuated, and exaggerated within language use the earlier developments: “collective intentionality” would have intensified the focus on the declarative sentence, and writing would have further intensified collective intentionality, marginalizing along the way earlier, iconic, modes of language. Singling out the declarative sentence as the primary linguistic unit would lead analysts to filter out everything in such utterances that are not specific to them—directing attention to the speaker, for example, or the audience, would minimize the differentiation of the declarative sentence from other speech acts, such as imperatives or promises.\n\nWhat is specific to the declarative sentence is the constitutive claim that words match reality in some way that anyone who hears the sentence could identify (and assess). In that case, the ideal declarative sentence is one that could be uttered felicitously by anyone, anywhere, at any time. And this is indeed the ideal for Western metaphysics and, however differently, Judaic monotheism, the name of whose God is, essentially, I am everywhere, always and no one (al though it’s worth noting that the ideal sentence is simultaneously and paradoxically cancelled in the Jewish name of God, since no one could in fact felicitously say it without claiming to be that God).\n\nThe critique of Western metaphysics, shadowing it from the beginning, but becoming increasingly powerful over the past century and a half, can, then, be distilled into the following argument: Western metaphysics, in privileging collective intentionality as crystallized in the ideal declarative sentence, has elided the fact that joint intentionally persists within and, indeed, continues to constitute, collective intentionality. (Tomasello doesn’t address this issue either, which is anyway distant from his concerns, but his argument that children continue to learn language—as how could they not?—through joint attention can be taken to suggest that such tension must always exist.)\n\nMetaphysics, in answering the needs of emergent empires consequent upon its creation of a novel and en during disciplinary space, thereby produces a meta-bureaucracy, predicated upon the imagination of a single world scene of which all other scenes are components. Joint intentionality persists in the form of idioms within collective intentionality and, to refer back to my previous discussion, bureaucratic thinking seeks to eliminate such idiomatic trace of joint attention while disciplinary thinking establishes sites of joint attention directed at the products of collective intentionality. If it is only within collective intentionality that words take on authoritative meanings (so that one could be right or wrong about what they mean), the joint intentionality of disciplinary thinking is aimed at the incommensurable idioms of which those meanings are composed (whatever remains anomalous in collective intentionality).\n\nThe bureaucratized declarative strives to eliminate paradox from language, to make every sentence “clear,” which is to say, refer to a reality that all readers (participants in an imagined collective intentionality) of the sentence would realize as that reality and as decomposable into equally discreet and unanimously recognized parts. Disciplinary idioms are no less invested in the declarative sentence, but work to draw out the generative paradoxicality of any sentence, its constitutive character for those jointly attending to the boundary between the possible realities deferred by the sentence and the reality it presents (like Durkheim’s reference, mentioned earlier, to crime as a “factor in public health”).\n\nDisciplinary idioms, at their most elemental, see where mockery might be appropriate where reverence is given, or reverence deserved where mockery is taken for granted—where, that is, a piece of signifying material might be iterated differently. In a bureaucratic age, those disciplinary idioms, or instances of joint attention toward collective intentionality, are most readily found in the greatest source of paradox: the bureaucratic desire to eliminate paradox by intensifying and enforcing the belonging of each element to its place within the structure. The simplest way of doing that is by sensationalizing and demonizing any deviation while sentimentalizing the rediscovery of the element within its place.\n\nDisciplines are invariably organized around founding, quasisacred texts (this is true of even the most informal disciplines, including those founded upon self-help books, do-it-yourself journals, women’s health websites, etc.)—if one is to make a claim in the discipline, one must be able to refer back to such a text and make one’s claim consistent with it. The implicit claim is that the text represents an achieved mode of collective intentionality, while one’s own claim represents an attempt to direct joint attention to something unsettled within the collective intentionality: more precisely, if the text is an achieved mode of collective intentionality, that is because it has achieved a higher level of discipline compared to some other bureaucratized mode of thought, and the joint attention directed at it is to preserve its centrality to the discipline by preventing its bureaucratization in turn (“one might take K to simply be saying… but if we look at this passage we can see that he is really…”).\n\nThe member of the discipline resists the text’s reabsorption in the bureaucratic commonplaces it distinguishes itself from in two ways. First, by continuing the work of breaking up and reorganizing bureaucratic discourse initiated by the text: ordinary bureaucratic discourse transcended disciplinarity, as I suggested earlier, by taking binary distinctions assumed to reside empirically in the world (like legality and illegality) and to be further embedded in a series of other empirically based binaries (moral and immoral, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, etc.) and treat them as constitutive—reciprocally definitive and interdependent.\n\nMembers of the discipline can continue to push this work forward, bringing the same binaries into new terrain, or deconstructing and re-aligning other binaries and making those binaries co-constitutive with the original ones. Or, they can go to work on the founding texts themselves, using their constitutive distinctions to similarly treat what those texts have taken for granted as merely empirical distinctions.\n\nAbout a third of the way through his novel, Plantenga has his protagonist, after following the disciplinary course of reducing all human phenomena to their biological, chemical, physical and hence manipulable constituents and finding, as result, “I seemed to come undone” (53), embark on a “12st ep Program for Disappearance—survival, after all, requires a kind of creative disappearance.” The rest of the novel involves enacting this “program,” which turns out to involve a perpetual inquiry, with direct consequences, of all the ways one appears in the contemporary world. The protagonist Kees removes all brand markers from his possessions and moves to a non-descript part of the city where life is something no one takes much notice of; he gradually withdraws from his connectedness to the media, using it, where connected, to further regulate his appearance and inner emotional and physiological responses so as to stand out less (“[t]he Golf Channel was better for me.\n\nFollowing the camera’s eye following the ball trained my inner eye to focus, regulate blood pressure, made me appreciate fairways and greens as visual equivalents of the tranquil mind” [65]). He starts putting on black face, because “[b]eing black meant being nobody” and “I knew white reflected light, thus calling attention to its source. Let’s just say it was a way of removing my face as bright orb from competing with other more worthy celestial bodies” (77). Disappearance involves not so much hiding away or disguising oneself as someone else, but an ongoing reciprocal modulation of oneself and one’s environment, wherein there is always a new threshold of attention emerging in response to one’s withdrawal of oneself from the world of attended to objects, which is to say from mimetic competition:\n\nI began aligning every breath with sounds of external phenomena—a shout, the DINGLE-DANGLE of the passing ice cream truck, grumbling 18-wheelers, airplane overhead, the cicadic car alarms, the clack-clack-clack of late-for-work high heels. In this way my breath could hitch a furtive ride on other molecules of sound to ultimately dissolve in some greater ambience. Like my autobiography written in invisible ink. (90-1).\n\nKees’ disciplined disappearance gets taken up by the same media systems he used to manipulate (and, in another period of his life, participate more directly in): “his disappearance had inaugurated a legacy—the more absent, the more famous” (135), with the novel ending with the speculations of the crime scene detectives over the actual cause of his demise and the philosophical and moral implications of suicide. He himself becomes part of the scene of discarded objects of contemporary civilization in which he had immersed himself. This is the end point of the disciplinary: to leave behind traces of signs of the same order as those that first drew one’s attention to some act become-sign as something that could draw others’ attention. The disciplinary, then, is also the end point of demimeticization: from the direct modeling of each others’ actions in one’s own actions through the transformation of deferred actions into signs of new scenes of possible actions, to the becoming a tissue of signs modeling the possibility of transforming any scene into a sign.\n\nWorks Cited\n\nAgamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford University Press, 2013.\n\nDaumal, Rene. Pataphysical Essays. Translated by Thomas Vosteen. Wakefield Press, 2012.\n\nDurkheim, Emile. The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts. Edited with an Introduction by Steven Lukes. Translated by W.D. Halls. The Free Press, 1982.\n\nElias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Blackwell, 1994.\n\nFoucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage, 1995.\n\nGans, Eric. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Standford University Press, 1993.\n\n⸻-. The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation. University of California Press, 1981.\n\nJacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. Random House, 1970.\n\nJarry, Alfred. Selected Works. Edited by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor. Grove Press, 1965.\n\nMc Luhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Signet, 1969.\n\nOlson, David. Psychological Theory and Educational Reform: How School Remakes Mind and Society. Cambridge University Press, 2003.\n\n⸻-. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge University Press, 1994.\n\nPeirce, Charles Sanders. Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance). Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Philip P. Weiner. Dover, 1958.\n\nPlantenga, Bart. Spermatogonia, The Isle of Man. Autonomedia, 2004.\n\nPolanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday & Co., 1967.\n\nRieff, Philip. Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken From Us. Pantheon, 2007.\n\nSloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life. Polity, 2013.\n\nSukenick, Ronald. Narralogues: Truth in Fiction. SUNY Press, 2000.\n\nTomasello, Michael. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Harvard University Press, 2014.\n\nVeale, Tony. Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of Linguistic Creativity. Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.\n\nVoegelin, Eric. Order and History (Volume 3): Plato and Aristotle. (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 16.) University of Missouri Press, 1999.\n\nNotes\n\n1. Polanyi tells of an essay published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1947:\n\nIt described some fairly simple experiments which proved, in the author’s opinion, that a hydrogen atom impinging on a metal wire could transmit to it energies ranging up to a hundred electron volts. Such an observation, if correct, would be far more revolutionary than the discovery of atomic fission by Otto Hahn in 1939. Yet when this paper appeared and I asked various physicists’ opinions about it, they only shrugged their\n\n> shoulders. They could not find fault with the experiment, yet they not only did not believe its results, but did not even think it worth while to consider what was wrong with it, let alone check up on it. They just ignored it. About ten years later some experiments were brought to my notice which accidentally offered an explanation of Lord Rayleigh’s findings. His results were apparently due to some hidden factors of no great interest, but which he could have hardly identified at the time. He should have ignored his observation, for he ought to have known that there must be something wrong with it. (65)\n\nThis intuitive sense that some claim just can’t be right regardless of whether or not one knows why is constitutive of any disciplinary space. (back)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "jousse-review-double-helix",
      "title": "Book Review: Memory, Memorization and Memorizers — Marcel Jousse (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Jan 2019",
      "url": "https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/double-helix/v7/katz.pdf",
      "content": "Marcel Jousse. Cascade Books, 2018. 434 pages.\n\nAdam Katz\nQuinnipiac University\n\nDOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2019.7.1.07\n\n---\n\nIt is fair to say that writing instructors and, for that matter, all of us inculcated within print culture take for granted a particular \"picture\" of language: language is composed of individual words with \"meanings,\" and they are articulated into sentences in accord with the \"rules\" or \"conventions\" of grammar. We presuppose such a picture when, for example, we ask students to write \"logically,\" which involves reducing words to single definitions, using them consistently as those definitions dictate, and predicating similarly singularly defined words such that no predication violates anything in the definition of any of the words being used. Few writing instructors, I assume, pursue logicality with the rigor of career analytic philosophers, but more informal injunctions and remarks on the \"illogicality\" of a piece of writing can impose this \"picture\" and the form of discipline it reproduces in arbitrary and therefore all the more confusing ways.\n\nWe now know that this picture of language is a product of writing. As David Olson (1996) showed in The World on Paper, writing transforms language into a disciplinary object and thereby reduces it to \"units\" that can be represented alphabetically and regulated rationally: phonemes, words, and sentences. What Olson was then interested in, and which a growing field of inquiry has come to explore, are the cognitive and social consequences of how writing has transformed language. But even if the assumptions about language many of us absorbed through primary, secondary, and, maybe even more so, higher and graduate education can be located historically and therefore relativized, does that make them \"wrong,\" or, less melodramatically, of no utility in fulfilling our own mandate, which is precisely to inculcate students into that very same print culture? Do we have—could there be—something better, pedagogically, then taking the habits of mind and identities produced by print culture as a given?\n\nThe study of the distinction between orality and literacy has not yet made the impact it should upon the teaching of writing or, for that matter, discussions of \"critical thinking.\" A problem, I think, has been that scholars investigating the transition from oral to literate cultures have tended, or at least have been perceived, to draw the line between media too sharply and in such a way as to imply condescension toward those located (or assumed to be located) on the \"oral\" side of the so-called \"great divide.\" This is an important issue, but it cannot be settled by those of us located in writing pedagogy; nor should we, even as we remain alert to possibly regressive uses of the oral/literate distinction, allow such qualms to interfere with the broader observation that identifiable patterns of discourse and \"pictures\" of language can helpfully be associated with orality and literacy, respectively.\n\nIt might help to keep in mind that the oral/literate distinction has already been carried into writing studies and pedagogy in the form of \"rhetoric,\" which as an ancient practice relied heavily upon memory, using written texts more as mnemonic aids and for pedagogical purposes than as the medium of composition (or reception) itself. When David Bartholomae (2005) (to take just one example) spoke, in his \"Inventing the University,\" of the student use of \"commonplaces\" as marking the limits of the literate subject when confronted with the more advanced literacy of academic discourse, he is working with the results of studies of orality/literacy.\n\nThe commonplace is a formula and the formula is the primary \"unit\" of language in oral cultures. Once we are speaking of commonplaces and formulas, we are invoking a very different picture of language: one in which the formula, or what Marcel Jousse called the \"propositional geste\" (2015, 2016), is articulated with other formulas in ways that carry forward traditions, reinforce ethnic identities, and reproduce the relations between masters and disciples in pedagogical circles. According to this picture, language use is fundamentally mimetic, which means that all language learning takes place via models—and in that case, would not the most basic marker of learning be a distinguishing between model and imitation?\n\nAs Werner Kelber (2018) pointed out in his foreword to Memory, Memorization and Memorizers: The Galilean Oral-Style Tradition and Its Traditionists, Marcel Jousse stands, along with Milman Parry, at the origin of orality/literacy studies. Kelber wondered why Jousse, among the founders of this field, has most faded into obscurity. Perhaps it's because Jousse refused to fully \"literacize\" himself, insisting on making the participation in oral traditions a necessary part of studying them. Maybe Jousse's commitment to retrieving (and as a priest, not a disinterested academic) certain Christian (or \"Yeshuan\") traditions, which led to him challenging rigid and ideological institutions of academic Biblical study, as opposed to the somewhat less charged classical studies through which most of the insights into the formulism of the \"oral style\" flowed, was responsible as well.\n\nIt might also be Jousse's (2016) generation of an entirely new and seemingly idiosyncratic theoretical vocabulary or his overtly \"reactionary\" opposition to what he called an \"algebrized\" form of literacy (in which the relation between signifier and signified is \"arbitrary\" rather than grounded in gesture). But there is a Jousse revival hopefully underway, overseen largely, it appears, by Edward Sinaert, the editor of this (and other recently published) volumes of Jousse's work. This new book gives us an opportunity to draw lessons from precisely that which makes Jousse's work distinctive, or, if one likes, \"eccentric,\" but maybe for that very reason all the more pedagogically urgent.\n\nJousse's immersion in orality depends upon his assumption of the mimetic roots of all human signifying activity, what he elsewhere called \"mimism\" (Jousse, 2016). All of reality is taken in through imitation, including \"nature\" and the cosmos. If culture is transmitted orally, then it is sustained through memorization, which itself depends on repetition and controlled imitation of the guardians of culture. This also means that culture is fundamentally pedagogical, and Jousse sees his own writings and teaching as no exception to this.\n\nThe book, composed of Jousse's lectures and essays on the Palestinian oral style, of which Jousse considered Jesus the exemplary practitioner, can be seen as a study in performative memory. How would language, culture and social relations have to be organized so as to ensure that the cultural heritage of a people can be preserved in the linguistic practices of the people themselves and not merely in receptacles like books, museums, art and monuments? All discourse must be made as memorable as possible, and institutional relations and practices must be organized around strengthening and perpetuating that memory. It might help to think in terms of how you might go about formulating something you just came to understand in such a way that not only would you remember it forever but you would be able to transmit it to others as well.\n\nFirst, you could take the sentences you want to memorialize and balance them against each other, internally (within each sentence) and externally (making the sentences as symmetrical in relation to each other as possible). Second, you could place the particulars of this little discourse in the frame of more permanent commonplaces and formulas, through analogies and metaphors. Take the sentence I wrote just above: \"All discourse must be made as memorable as possible, and institutional relations and practices must be organized around strengthening and perpetuating that memory.\" We might, for starters, get something like \"Make your words to last/like the planted oak; Tend each word in its cradle/like a newborn infant,\" etc.\n\nThe references to planted oaks, infants in cradles and so on would embed this particular \"pearl\" in a \"necklace\" of commonplaces which can be varied and performed differently in accord with the speaker's sense of the occasion. Jousse takes us in great detail through these \"rhythm-catechistic\" forms, especially in the Galilean milieu where Jesus taught, while also offering an account of Paul as an oral catechist working with various transcribers.\n\nNeedless to say, students coming into the university with their reserve of commonplaces, which they can use to answer questions, fill in gaps in their discourse, and summarize unfamiliar texts in more familiar ways, cannot be usefully compared to the oral stylists studied by Jousse. But there is one institution that Jousse, and to my knowledge Jousse alone, studied very closely and in a way that I believe is relevant to any pedagogy of literacy. It is an institution that I think Jousse placed at the center of his studies precisely as a result of his recognition of the embeddedness of all language in a people and a culture with its own idioms and gestures (and therefore the great change and loss that must come from bringing a tradition memorialized in one language over to another).\n\nThis institution is what Jousse called the \"transfer-translation.\" Here is the problem: as even my own inadequate example above shows, the maxims, prayers, legends, laws and so on of a people are memorized in a way very thick with the sounds, rhythms, homonyms, associations, metaphors, imagery and so on of the language. But the language changes, or evangelical teachers proselytize across cultures. In the first case, the most sacred texts continue to be remembered and certainly (al though Jousse doesn't emphasize this) written down in a language increasingly incommensurable with everyday language. This situation first emerged as the language of the Jews under Roman rule became Aramaic, while the Jewish scriptures remained written in Hebrew.\n\nIn the latter case, early Christian evangelicals had to take Aramaic materials and present them to Greek-speaking audiences. So, Jewish oral pedagogues would work with translations of the Hebrew scriptures (and other written and oral materials) into Aramaic, and the Christian evangelicals with translations from Aramaic to Greek. (It is in this latter translation that Jousse felt much of the original \"Yeshuan\" oral style, shared by the Apostles, Gospel authors and Paul, got lost.) This is deeply problematic because it is not only words and sentences that must be translated or \"transferred\" but all those elements mentioned above that are embedded in discourse: a rhythm, word associations, and metaphorical systems. What Roman Jakobson and Linda R. Waugh (2002) called the \"sound-shapes\" of language have to be found in the target language that \"matches\" all those found in the source language.\n\nHere is one result of this process:\n\nUnfortunately, in its brevity, the transfer-targum did not always, simultaneously, embrace clear simplicity. It could not, for a variety of psychological, historical, and ethnic reasons. A targum would always, arguably and variably, confirm the maxim: traduttore, traditore. Therefore, in the case of the transfer-targum, it was a pedagogical necessity to carry alongside it, or better still, within it, its elucidating \"explanation,\" its \"midrash.\" From the time of the first targumization of Esdras, the entire rhythmo-catechistics of the Palestinian Rabbis were no more than a huge midrash-explication of the traditional formulae of the Hebraic Torah in scholastic Hebrew, or its Aramaic transfer-targum in popular Aramaic. (p. 336)\n\n(Esdras is Ezra, who is credited with restoring Biblical traditions in Israel after the return from Babylonian exile.)\n\nJousse's observation here is more wide-ranging and stunning in its implications than it seems to me he realized; or, perhaps, it is what I would suggest are its pedagogical implications for us today that makes it seem so. The transfer-targum (i.e., transfer-translation) will, despite all efforts, be incommensurable with the source text and tradition. This incommensurability will be brutally obvious to the guardians of the tradition. It would be impossible to ignore it. Everything possible would have to be done to bridge the gap, and, if possible, to bridge the gap, as Jousse said, within the gap, rather than alongside it.\n\nJousse was referring here to the Jewish midrash, or the accumulation of narratives that came to accompany the collection of Jewish law and legal precedents and that ultimately became part of the mode of moral and legal reasoning of the Talmud—but exactly the same principle holds for the stories, legends, maxims, proverbs, instructions, and so on that became the early Christian traditions. The specificities of these traditions aside, the suggestion seems to me to be as follows: culture is generated by the work of the transfer-translation or, more precisely, by the effort to ensure that the translation can be recognized as a \"translation,\" or as the \"same\" text as the \"original.\"\n\nImagine this to be generally true—that culture is generated not in order to \"construct identities\" or some other commonplace, but, much more precisely, through the process of ensuring that some gestures, signs, actions, practices are the \"same\" as others and can therefore stand in and be exchanged for the others. Cultural pedagogy, then, would be a practice of identifying sameness in difference, which would also entail identifying all the differences that would need to be reconciled with the \"judgment\" of identity. The most productive mode of pedagogical practice, then, would be to provide students with some model—a text, if we are focused on writing—and have them \"translate\" that text according to some rule that will make the translated text unmistakably different from the original.\n\nThe assignment would be to navigate and negotiate all those differences generated by the translation and find some way to affirm the identity of the text. Doing so would require students to both narrate and find a rule governing their practice of translation and the decisions they had to make in reconciling their \"transfer-translation\" with the original. All the elements that make language \"work\" in a particular context might be brought into play, moving from a study of what makes one idiom intelligible to what makes another \"corresponding\" but very different idiom intelligible. Like the generativity displayed in the interpretative work done to reconcile the two sides of the transfer-translation, students' translation work would produce a new idiom of inquiry, one that would have reference points in both idioms. This in itself would be a mode of language learning that would transform the idioms, linguistic habits and commonplaces students bring into the classroom.\n\nEven more, if we return to Jousse and think about more advanced forms of inquiry, his hypothesis regarding the cultural productivity of the transfer-translation suggests an intertextual practice of reading. Every text is to be read as a transfer-translation of another text, real or hypothetical, singular or plural. Of course, the transfer-translations themselves are the results of pedagogical practices through which some other transfer-translation was reconciled. It might be against one Joussean \"spirit\" (that which would preserve the irreplaceable popular heritage embodied in the oral style) but in another (collaborative, open-ended, pedagogical) to suggest a mode of research, both complex and readily available to students: a mode of research that would have students guided by the problem of finding candidates for the \"source\" of which they treat the text assigned to them as the transfer-translation \"target.\"\n\nIn other words: you have this text—now, go and find (according to some specified parameters) texts that might plausibly be treated as texts this one is translating, and explain what would make it a translation of that text. The more texts are placed next to each other in these terms, and the archives activated, or \"revivified,\" as Jousse spoke of elsewhere (Jousse, 2015), the more a culture of shared inquiry specific to the class as a disciplinary space is formed. In this way, writing as critical thinking becomes a practice of the continuous emergence of literacy.\n\nNote\n\nFor a recent discussion of Jousse which explores the complexity and singularity of his work and historical location, see Haun Saussy (2016), The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies, chapter four, \"The Human Gramophone.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "linguistic-turn-generative-literacy",
      "title": "The Linguistic Turn and Generative Literacy (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/linguistic-turn-generative-literacy.pdf",
      "content": "Abstract:\n\nThis essay argues that only generative anthropology can complete the “linguistic turn” that has dominated much of th 20 century thought. Completing the linguistic turn is essential because the metalanguages of humanism and metaphysics obscure the forms of authority needed to ensure intelligent participation in institutions and hierarchical orders. The need to accept a “given” centrality in order to clarify authoritative orders is the reason why victimary antimetaphysical discourses could only generate resentment towards, but not transcend, metaphysics. Generative anthropology, meanwhile, not only accepts the givenness of the center, but sees the center as the guarantee of meaning and human order. Replacing metalanguages with “infralanguages” enables us to remain aware of ourselves as beings within language as a way of clarifying our reciprocal relations to each other.\n\nKeywords: generative anthropology; linguistic turn; infralanguage; metalanguage; inscription; natural semantic primes; metaphysics; the center\n\nI’m going to begin with the assumption that the linguistic turn entails the rejection of any attempt to find legitimation for what we say in language in some reality taken to be outside of language, whether this outside be truth, nature, human nature, reality, any form of interiority, the greater good, or anything else. This means that language, rather than being primarily representational, that is, trying to provide an adequate and therefore legitimating picture of what is outside of language, is generative—that is, it is relationships intrinsic to representational structures that create what we call truth, reality, nature, the good and so on.\n\nTo say that language is generative is to say that the meanings of signs are to be found in their effects on other signs, not in reference to reality: the main question, then, becomes, what are the levers or mechanisms within sign systems that make such effects possible? To put it in pragmatic terms, to take the example of argumentation, instead of trying to prove that your discourse represents reality better, the question is how to enter existing discourses in such a way as to modify and eventually become them.\n\nAnna Wierzbicka’s discussion of modern English in her Experience, Evidence and Sense: The Cultural Legacy of English (2010) provides us with an example of what entering and inhabiting existing discourses means: she shows how the entire language was transformed as a result of one intervention: Locke’s theory of knowledge and politics. She traces a whole series of terms, such as “experience,” evidence,” “empirical,” “sense,” and others back to Locke’s usages,[1] and points out not only the historical contingency and cultural specificity of these terms, but that these are among the very words English speakers take to be most universal and commonsensical.\n\nIt’s no coincidence that these are the words with which we take ourselves to be describing our access to what lies outside of language. It lies outside of Wierzbicka’s inquiry to explain how these words operated generatively upon the English language, but I would suggest that raising and answering that kind of question is, in the wake of the linguistic turn, central to any aesthetic, moral, ethical or political inquiry. It may very well be all such an inquiry entails.\n\nThe generativity of language, at least in the poststructuralist forms given it by Derrida’s claim that there is no outside of the text or Rorty’s (1979) injunction to “keep the conversation going” (378), is generally taken to be a pluralist doctrine in which the difference inhabiting the sign is irreducible. But the sign that constitutes the originary scene is absolutely generative, insofar as the sign creates the scene and the human, while at the same time presupposing complete unanimity. And, in fact, I think that the linguistic turn, understood through originary thinking, poses a very different kind of problem, to which we can, in fact, reduce all human problems: that of ensuring that all participants on a scene issue, and know themselves to be issuing, the same sign.\n\nThis is a problem because it never really is the same sign (the linguistic turners are right about that)—since signs only take on meaning within a scene, a sign on one scene cannot be identical to a sign on another scene, no matter what measures we take or what rules we construct to ensure the sign will be recognized as identical—indeed, we take such measures and construct such rules precisely because there is no internal essence of the sign (or some reality it presumably refers to) that makes it the same.\n\nThere are two ways in which the identity of the sign can be established. One, all participants on a scene can agree that the sign is the same according to some agreed upon criteria for identity—in other words, some metalanguage, which will then have to be grounded in a metaphysical reality outside of language. Or, we can establish the identity of the sign by deliberately and self-referentially constituting a scene upon which the sign directs us to some center. Here, we would embrace what Johanna Drucker (2013) calls “inscription,” suggesting there is no sign without its embodiment and embedment in material and historical enactment. The problem with relying on metalanguage, or what Drucker (2013) calls “notation,” of course, is that any metalanguage is subject to the same self-difference as the language it tries to control.\n\nLanguage is going to be generative even if we act as if it is representational—pretensions to a secure metalanguage really serve to guarantee a moral or political certainty that avoids the problem of creating in some space of language the shared attention directed towards some center. We can find the origin of this logocentrism in literacy. David Olson, in his The World on Paper (1994) and The Mind on Paper (2016), has shown that writing was created out of an inquiry into language, including the speech scenes upon which language is used. More recently, Olson has used the notion of classic prose (taken from Mark Turner and Francis Noël Thomas’s book, Clear and Simple as the Truth) to show that the telos of the metalanguage of literacy is to simulate a scene, modeled on a presumed original speech scene, upon which writer and readers are all present.\n\nIt is for this purpose that the metalanguage of literacy establishes norms regarding the correctness of sentences and the uses of words—which is to say, it is literacy that enshrines the declarative sentence as the primary form of language— metaphysics is just further elaboration on this.\n\nInsofar as we rely on notation and metalanguage, then, we imagine ourselves to be present on a simulated, always already constructed scene, with guarantees provided in advance that we all use the same sign. Definitions are established and logic is enforced—indeed, what is logic other than ensuring that, within a proposition, nothing in the definitions of the words predicated on the subject is inconsistent with the definition of the subject? (Determining what counts as “inconsistency” will in turn involve further definitional work.) We can then proceed to eliminate deviants—the ungrammatical, the illogical, the unclear— which further proves that those of us remaining are all in possession of the same sign. This metalinguistic imaginary elides the difference, constitutive of the declarative sentence, between the scene of utterance and the represented scene. Since the scene of writing and reading can be represented on that scene itself, introducing a difference within the scene, this elision generates anomalies within metalanguage.\n\nThese anomalies open the intrinsically imitative and therefore pedagogical dimension of language use that metaphysical presence occludes. This pedagogical dimension can only be enacted “infralinguistically,” to use Bruno Latour’s (2007: 49) term. In place of the hierarchy between language and metalanguage we have the performance of the difference of the metalinguistically guaranteed sign through its representation until its event nature is elicited. These efforts aim at making visible and inescapable the event-character of the sign, which is to say the sign’s inextricability from histories, traditions, the various ways in which it has been used by different groups in different situations and, above all, from some event, some act of deferral, some origin, the participation in which is the only the way we can reciprocally “authenticate” one another’s use of the sign.\n\nWhat I have in mind here is using language from the scene itself to frame the scene, rather than invoking some metalanguage assumed to come from outside and be unaffected by the scene. Let’s take, for example, a political scientist making an argument regarding the way new media have changed our understanding of “pluralism” in a liberal society: is that political scientist’s address to his fellow political scientists, or whomever he takes his public to be, enacting the kind of pluralism his argument claims to be possible or necessary?\n\nI have been implicitly suggesting an infralinguistic strategy or vocation for GA, whereby we speak and write in “originary” and “generative” English (or any other language). The basic concepts of GA, such as “desire,” “resentment,” “center” and others don’t really allow us to remain unimplicated in the objects of our analyses—on what basis could I claim to be unresentfully drawing the contours of another’s resentment? GA, then, despite its distinctive (if minimal) conceptual vocabulary, is ill-suited to be a metalanguage. I am asking, what kind of knowledge is GA? If it’s a new way of thinking, it’s a new relation to language. For starters, I’m contending that literacy is itself a second revelation, broadly parallel to the emergence of the Big Man—the revelation here being, as I pointed out before, the autonomy of the declarative sentence.\n\nWe can make further use of Olson to get a sense of what the implications of bringing this revelation to the fore as part of the linguistic turn might be. Olson (2016) points out that the metalanguage of literacy serves the purpose of “supplementing” the presumed scene of recorded speech with verbs referring implicitly to mental acts that would have been performed in a speech situation. If I say someone assumed something to be the case, I am reporting what another said, while also distancing myself from it—the other person was presumably more certain in speaking than I am in reporting his speech. In an oral setting, this would have been reflected in the tone—perhaps mildly mocking—in which the speech was reported; since we don’t have that tone, literacy introduces supplementary terms like “assume.” This allows for another innovation of literacy: the distinction between the meaning of an utterance, and the speaker’s meaning—we can now represent all kinds of ways in which the two can be at odds.\n\nThese verbs then get nominalized and we get new entities, like “assumptions,” and whole new disciplines organized so as to study them. All the human sciences are derived from such nominalizations, and much of everyday discourse\n\n(which has been transformed by literacy and the disciplines) as well. Even universally available words like “thoughts” and “ideas” are probably constructs of literacy. What this means is that there are vast domains of linguistic usage that are entirely dependent upon elaborations of the metalanguage of literacy, and also completely oblivious to this fact. We ourselves, within GA, are also thoroughly immersed in the metalanguage of literacy—the difference is, we can know it, and know why, and propose new disciplinary articulations that show such words to be scene- and event-dependent.\n\nWorking “inscriptively,” then, would involve accepting that writing is scenic itself, rather than an attempt to construct a universally shared and permanent speech scene. There is no single scene of writing—writing, rather, involves a dissemination of texts, each of which would serve to constitute a scene that might reference more or less directly any and all of the other scenes organized around the disseminated text. This means that writing generates samples of language, no more directly related to one particular scene upon which they are iterated than any other. Charles Sanders Peirce (Buchler 1955: 152, 326) argued that knowledge is always of the relation between a sample and the population of which it is a sample. Once we abandon attempts to supplement the source, then, we have samples of language, and we generate hypotheses regarding their relation to language as a whole.\n\nTreating pieces of language as samples involves creating anomalous uses, or, really, acknowledging that all uses are anomalous, and accordingly situating ourselves on the boundary between talking about something and no longer/not yet quite talking about something—“sampling” is a call, or imperative, to generate a new center with an object at it. If we’re obeying the imperative derived from a concept, like, say, “infralanguage,” or “inscription,” then we are looking for samples of language serving as models of these concepts, and looking for ways to make sense of less obvious instances, even seeming counter-instances, in terms of these concepts—for example, noting the infralinguistic dimension inseparable from the most rigorously applied metalanguage.\n\nInsofar as we have a new center, we want to derive all meaning from that center or, what comes to the same thing, that center calls upon us to affirm or name the world in its name: if we have a center we are using the same sign, and its identity is affirmed in the self-reference that situates one scene generated by the sign in a history of scenes with an origin that is continually marked. Imperatives from the previous scene, like “find new ways to talk about X,” or “use the conceptual resources you have generated to replace some less differentiated way of saying something,” generate the subsequent scenes. Words that bear with them histories distributed across self-referential networks are going to be more generative.\n\nMetalinguistic terms resist operationalization—what, exactly, are we doing when we “assume” something? Are we always assuming what we assume? If not, what’s the difference between when we’re assuming and when we’re not? The later Wittgenstein was fascinated and perhaps appalled by the evanescence of the “referents” of such meta-linguistic terms.[2]\n\nIt is precisely such terms we can operationalize infralinguistically. If we make a study of “assumptions,” it is not to define and categorize them or to leverage “hidden” assumptions against explicit statements, but, perhaps, to figure out when they come into view, and what kind of thinking is going on when they don’t. Perhaps we can imagine “assumptionless” linguistic performances; or performances that are all assumptions, right there on the surface. The purpose here being to show that such imagining would require new forms of joint attention.\n\nIf language is the deferral of violence, the only thing we are ever talking about is how we are going about deferring violence. Forms of language that can be moved across scenes make it possible to defer not only immediate forms of violence but possible future forms, even ones that we can’t yet imagine. In more critical discussions, where we’re interested in the “viability” of concepts, what we’re really inquiring into is how many possible uses for deferring violence a particular constellation of words might have. If we know this, but others don’t, in talking with others all we are doing is helping them to know this. This knowledge must lie in their own discourses, their own vocabulary—if they are going to speak GA with us they would first have to see that their own discourse is always already GA.\n\nWe’re all always and only talking about how we are deferring violence, but if we don’t all always know this it is because the sign can only refer to a single center, not centeredness in general. So, in entering others’ discourse we identify those signs where reference to a single center interferes with the reference to centeredness as such. This would transform the conversation into one centered on eliciting the distinction between centering and centeredness. This distinction is elicited by treating every utterance as both hypothesizing the way some other sign refers to a center and being, as a sample, a possible center. Our interest in that possible utterance, or sample, then, is in how it can be iterated and disseminated in ways that would make more explicit our talking about the way we are deferring violence.\n\nIt is this practice of sampling, taking pieces of language and pointing them at new centers, that makes language generative, memorable and effective. The linguistic turn entails a hypothesis: that the metaphysical scene of humanism, predicated upon the metalinguistics of literacy, has reached its limits as a means of deferring violence (or, perhaps, was never a source of deferral in the first place). But only the originary hypothesis enables us to complete the linguistic turn, because only originary thinking can be free of the victimary investments of those critiques of metaphysics that emerged alongside the anti-colonial revolts.\n\nThis, in turn, opens up a difference within originary thinking. I would characterize the difference as follows: on one side, we can see the emergence of the modern marketplace as the source of more advanced forms of deferral that have marginalized if not eliminated the more evident and egregious forms of violence endemic to premodern hierarchies. On the other side, we can see the centralization of state power, its extension into increasingly minute spheres of life, and its destruction or subordination of intermediate forms of power as the means by which violence has been neutralized. In the first case, the means of maintaining and extending existing forms of deferral are clear: continue marketizing the social.\n\nIn the second case, the question becomes one of facilitating orderly forms of centralization that don’t require the subversion of intermediate layers of authority, since the subversion of authorities from the nation-state to the local police is itself a cause of violence. In this latter case, disputing the market model is of critical importance, because belief in the spread of markets obfuscates the problem of central authority which, within the market model, can at best be seen as an instrument of marketization but is as likely to be seen as an obstacle to be weakened.\n\nI see the “state centralization” model as more plausible than the “market” model, because the state centralization model can account for market relations (a central authority can establish and regulate markets) while the converse is not the case: if the world is becoming increasingly marketized, why the massive growth of the state? Now, the relevance of this question to the “completion of the linguistic turn” is as follows. A completely marketized order is, as Eric Gans has pointed out, an “omnicentric” one.[3] In that case, one’s response to the emergence of new resentments or conflicts is to seek or create new centers.\n\nBut any new center must draw upon the resources and authority of some existing center. At the very least, it must employ the linguistic reserves of existing centers. To acknowledge this explicitly is to repudiate omnicentrism, because reliance on an existing center implies reliance on a history and tradition of centers, among which some must have precedence over others. To refuse to acknowledge this dependence is to assert the spontaneity of the emergence of the new center. To the extent that the emergence of a new center is spontaneous, it is outside of history, tradition and authority. If omnicentrism and therefore spontaneity are to be defended, this outside needs to be “substantized.”\n\nThis outside is the “target” of the metalinguistics of literacy: liberal political theory has designated this outside as “nature,” or “freedom,” or “natural right.” An omnicentric generative anthropology would call it “desire” and “resentment,” which, it must be assumed, are irreducible to existing forms of authority. But it is hard to deny that any particular form taken by desire and resentment will “mortgage” those emotions to some deployment of power within the existing forms of authority. That desires and resentments are constitutively socially leveraged can never be acknowledged by the market model. And this means that metalinguistic assertions of humanistic essentialism cannot be set aside.\n\nWithin the state centralization or, we could now say, “unicentric,” model, we are committed to fully embedding desires and resentments in their enacted and articulated social form. A particular desire or resentment situates one within a hierarchical order in which desire (to speak roughly) is a projection of some agenda produced by the center and resentment (to continue to speak roughly) is a response to some derogation of authority by the center. There is always some derogation of authority because authority can never be implemented perfectly (the center can never completely offer itself up), but the unicentric model allows us to posit an alternative response to the omnicentric spinning of a new center that must disguise its dependencies: improve the form of authority by making its terms more explicit and its operations more consistent. But in this case we have no need for metalanguage because authority is completely infralinguistic: the exercise of authority produces the frame within which all the references point back to the form of authority.\n\nOmnicentrism, like metaphysics, must put the declarative form first, because the assertion of a spontaneously generated center must first of all repudiate some command or demand that has curtailed desire and generated resentment. The repudiation of the imperative is best effected by the declarative elevated to primacy over the imperative. For unicentrism, meanwhile, authority is first of all ostensive, then imperative, and only finally declarative (necessary for clarifying imperatives by directing them toward prospective ostensives). Before anything else, we are in a situation in which we are being asked to do something— since the purpose of a metalanguage is to imagine ourselves outside of that or any situation (to pre-negotiate the terms on which we might freely and willingly enter some situation), acknowledging the situation and working out, along with others, its terms, precludes the need for any metalanguage.\n\nAll we need to do is make the terms of authority more selfreferential. This demands that we minimize our assumptions regarding what counts as a scene of knowing, and let the object, the “samples,” organize such scenes. The more generative discourses will be those that can create revelatory scenes of the origin and identity of the sign out of the greatest differentiation in sign use. It is the discourse that knows that all we’re ever doing is talking about how we’re deferring violence without it ever being possible to be completely explicit about that which will be the most generative one. This kind of work would be making the mimetic foundations of our practices more explicit while and by being more overtly mimetic: studying Shakespeare by making the scene of Shakespeare study “Shakespearean”; studying the resentment represented in melodrama with a kind of staged melodramatic resentment; studying the sociology of crowds through a rhetoric that stages one’s differentiation from encroaching crowds of students of crowds; studying bureaucratic attempts to neutralize violence by registering the violent effects of those attempts; teaching writing courses as studies in the discipline of composition—to suggest a few examples as food for thought.\n\nWorks Cited\n\nBuchler, Julius. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Dover, 1955.\n\nDrucker, Johanna. What Is?: Nine Epistemological Essays. Cuneiform Press, 2013.\n\nGans, Eric. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford University Press, 1993.\n\nLatour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, 2007.\n\nOlson, David. The Mind on Paper: Reading, Consciousness and Rationality. Cambridge University Press, 2016.\n\n⸻-. The World On Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge University Press, 1994.\n\nThomas, Francis Noël and Mark Turner. Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose. Princeton University Press, 2011.\n\nWierzbicka, Anna. Experience, Evidence, & Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English. Oxford University Press, 2010.\n\nWittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Basil Blackwell, 1958.\n\nNotes\n\n[1] Wierzbicka traces the specifically English notion of “experience” as a word referring to a process involving observation, self-observation and present feeling overwhelmingly to Locke’s usage:\n\nThe double prototype—Locke’s ‘see and feel’—ensures that, while Locke’s conception of experience was not retrospective . . . , it was not exclusively introspective either, but rather introspective and extrospective at the same time. The fact that Locke’s cultural descendants could use experience both in phrases like ‘varieties of religious experience’ and in statements like ‘science aims at understanding the world of experience’ is related to this terminological and conceptual equation between two varieties of knowledge—that based on the thought ‘this is happening to me now’ and that based on the thought ‘this is happening here now.’\n\nWhen one compares Locke’s model of experience with that analyzed in section 2.3, one is struck, above all, by the similarities: Clearly the conception reflected in modern phrases like a frightening experience or a weird experience was built on the foundation of Lockean epistemology (53).\n\nWierzbicka does add that “there are noticeable differences between the two models,” but those are differences that presuppose that “foundation.”\n\nTo take another example, Wierzbicka attributes to Locke considerable influence in shifting the meaning of “evidence” from those truths which are undeniable (“evident”) to the one calling for epistemic care and modesty: “But al though the ‘evidence of facts’ was often seen as ‘strong,’ even ‘unquestionable,’ the certainty derived from factual (and ultimately sense-related) knowledge did not seem as absolute as that previously linked with faith, ‘mathematical certainty,’ or, indeed, an ‘ocular proof’: as Locke put it, ‘certainty and demonstration, are things we must not, in these matters, pretend to.\n\nLocke’s views on these matters were no doubt symptomatic of a wider mood of the British Enlightenment, and above all, they were themselves hugely influential: it is widely acknowledged that epistemic caution and modesty preached by Locke had an enormous impact on his contemporaries and on many subsequent generations of his readers (146).\n\n[2] To take just one out of many possible examples in his Philosophical Investigations, we might look at his brief discussion in sections 101-105 of the “ideal” that “there can’t be any vagueness in logic,” an ideal which “absorbs us,” and leads us to believe “it must be in reality.” And, so, “[t]he strict and clear rules of the logical structure of propositions appear to us as something hidden in the background. . . . Where does this idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off. . . . When we believe we must find that order, must find the ideal, in our actual language, we become dissatisfied with what are ordinarily called ‘propositions,’ ‘words,’ ‘signs’” (45-6). As literate beings, we have constructed a logic out of “actual language,” projected that logic onto that language, and then find the language less “real” because the grammar doesn’t seem to be “there.”\n\n[3] See, for example, Originary Thinking, 219."
    },
    {
      "slug": "mimesis-center-auto-immunology",
      "title": "Mimesis, the Center and Auto-Immunology: A Review of Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/mimesis-center-auto-immunology.pdf",
      "content": "_…of Daniel Ross’s Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Toward a Metacosmics. Open Humanities Press 2021. Adam Katz_\n\nDepartment of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518\n\nIt’s long past time for originary thinking to think technics, which is emerging, in the wake of the work of Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler in particular, as a term to refer to the co-constitution of the human with the “exteriorizations” through which humans act on (and are acted upon by) the world and each other. I would like to establish the necessity to do so by pointing to a technical issue in GA, which is to say, a scaling problem. The mimetic interactions and central concepts of Girardian mimetic theory and then Gansian Generative Anthropology are unduly tied to, first, scenes upon which all persons are present to each other (small groups) and, second, literature, especially the realist novel (and Shakespeare, as read consistently with realist novels), and to some extent, the lyric. Concepts like envy, desire and resentment are readily intelligible on this small scale: we know what it means to be envious of a neighbor, resentful of a more successful coworker, to desire the possessions or attributes of another person.\n\nOur representational technologies are suited to this scale, but these concepts don’t scale up in any obvious way. What can it mean to speak, on a social scale, of millions of people of some more or less arbitrarily designated group “resenting” millions of members of some other vaguely defined group? What do we imagine we’re describing if we say something like “women resent men,” “blacks resent whites,” “whites resent immigrants,” etc.? All members of the “resenting” group “feeling” in unison, continuously, and doing nothing but resenting? Resenting in a differentiated manner (some resent a lot, others less so, some not at all)? Occasionally resenting, while at other times going about their business? Wavering between resentment and admiration, or indifference?\n\nAs soon as we try to explain some event or history trajectory using such terms, we will find that we need to at least mention intermediary factors, such as the media that single out objects of desire and targets of resentment and suggest actions to pursue such desires and resentments; institutions, corporate, judicial, and law enforcement, that prevent or facilitate the enactment of some desires and resentments rather than others; educational and research institutions that provide justifications and mitigations of one or another desire or resentment, and so on. All these institutions involve technics, that is, mediations that serve as material memories of shared human practices. I don’t think it can be said that there is any sustained thinking of technics in GA, and we can’t scale up without it; and once we do scale up, our concepts will take on a different shape, at least insofar as we apply them to the historical world.\n\nFortunately, the world of academic theory has turned its attention to questions of technics and technology: there is the work of Benjamin Bratton, and the Strelka research group he leads, which explores the implications of what Bratton calls “planetary scale computation”; there is Yuk Hui, who in several books has followed post-Heideggerian discussions of technology through discussions of cybernetics, recursivity, Western and Chinese ethics and aesthetics, and Chinese thought on technics; design theorists like Beatrice Colomina, historians of our growing integration into informational systems like Orit Halpern or researchers into the ethical and political dilemmas of algorithmic rule like Louise Amoore, Taina Bucher and many others.\n\nIf I have to generalize, I would say that what powers these discussions is a willingness to discard a squeamishness regarding the potentially totalitarian implications of modern technology, especially those types of it that seem to extend into the remaking of subjectivity, which we have inherited from both critical theory of the Frankfurt School variant and post-structuralism—both of which seemed to be consumed with preserving some “humanity” or “unruly” subjectivity from the imposition of what Jean-Francois Lyotard called the “performativity” of all human practices. That whatever is entailed in being human is inseparable from the technical is now presupposed, and this will have important implications regarding the kinds of subjectivities that must be presupposed as a basis of liberalism and democracy: to put it simply, there can be no more external human “measure” of the justice of social and political arrangements.\n\nPart of this new thinking of technics results from the reception of thinkers of technics like André Leroi-Gourhan and Gilbert Simondon whom one might say were marginalized by the domination of structuralism and poststructuralism, thinking that finds a kind of synthesis in the work of Bernard Stiegler, who furthermore synthesizes a critical appropriation of Derrida’s “grammatology” with his reading of these precursors. The book I’m concerned with here is by Daniel Ross, a long-time translator, explicator and colleague of Stiegler. In this ambitious book he brings to bear and extends Stiegler’s thought on the entirety of our current crisis.\n\nAlong the way he has an all too brief encounter with Girardian mimetic theory (unsurprisingly, no mention of Eric Gans), but I want to make the case for seeing Ross as a crucial and enabling interlocutor for those of us determined to introduce a thinking of technics into GA. To suggest briefly the lines along which I will make the case, if we can imagine speaking of mimetic crisis as death driving “entropy,” and the originary event and the linguistic world emerging from it as “negentropic” (terms Stiegler and now Ross take over from systems theory and cybernetics) we already have the terms on which we can learn from Ross and perhaps teach him a few things in turn.\n\nThe technophobia of humanists and poststructuralists alike has been complemented by a “biophobia,” or a terror of seeing human life as continuous with life in general. Here, as elsewhere, the founding of post-war thought on the revulsion from Nazism left its mark. It is here that Stiegler, and here Ross, identify the limits of Derridean deconstruction. Derrida, in one of most famous early articulations of “difference,” in a passage referencing (briefly) Leroi-Gourhan, proclaimed the “mark,” or the “gramme,” as suggesting that “inscription” needs to be considered as part of the history of “life.” Derrida, despite returning repeatedly to the need to deconstruct the boundaries between life and death, animal and human, never continued this line of inquiry, preventing his project, in Ross’s view, from fulfilling its early promise due to a reluctance to pursue the history of “inscription” beyond anything that could be called “writing.”\n\nStiegler retrieves this promise of a grammatology. Rather than writing, it is, for Stigler, technics that has been suppressed by metaphysics. The very fact that it is still habitual to speak of the human as something outside of technology, and affected after the fact by it, in control of or losing control over it, demonstrates the depth of this suppression. Stiegler, drawing upon Husserlian phenomenology, and continuing Derrida’s deconstruction of it, provides a simple and plausible frame for thinking technics: as retention. There is, first of all, “primary retention,” which is the “memory” of the information of life itself, encoded in the genes; there is then “secondary retention,” the memory of and capacity to repeat and, within limits, depending upon the degree of complexity of the organism, vary “action sequences” that are not transmitted beyond the individual animal.\n\nAnd there is, finally, the tertiary retention characterizing humans, in which material is inscribed with the results of the learning and experience of the human community. Technics, then, begins with the “mark” on some material, a mark that differentiates itself from other marks and defers the meaning indicated by the mark insofar as that meaning can only be redeemed by subsequent marks.\n\nStiegler acknowledges the question: whence tertiary retention? He speaks of a “default of origin,” which anyone cognizant of the originary hypothesis will find unsatisfactory. Stiegler comes close to recognizing the need to think about the origin in terms of an event in insisting that the “first” mark would be “accidental” but nevertheless meaningful. This is as far as Stiegler (and Ross, declaring any answer to the question of “invention” “impossible” [93]) goes—how this accidental meaningfulness, or meaningful accidentality, might have emerged, goes unexplained. Stiegler has not repudiated the “origin-phobia” that, along with the aforementioned technophobia and biophobia, have characterized post-War thinking (and in this case goes much further back). It seems he would rather think in terms of a gradual process in which humans would find themselves with tertiary retention without realizing how they came by it— as if the various “marks” made by our hominid predecessors came, imperceptibly, to take on a new character.\n\nBut that just means that the originary hypothesis has a different account of tertiary retention, of the objectification of memory in some material. Where, exactly, though? The sign itself? This is still “internal” to each individual member of the group, even if each matches his gesture to the others. The central object is consumed and, anyway, is not really “inscribed.” We can see why technics seems a much later development, rather than co-originary with the human itself —the intangible dimension of the scene, the transcendent center, seems not to rely on any lasting mark—memory is retained in the group as a whole.\n\nBut, then, that must be the co-origin of technics—the configuration of the scene itself, maintained by the reciprocal coordination and holding in place of each by the others. That’s a kind of inscription—the scene is the marking of each by all and all by each. The originary scene is commemorated in ritual, and the specific movements, arrangements and props that organize the scene through the accretion of the memories of the group in its ongoing dialogue with the center is the origin of technology.\n\nLife is a struggle against entropy, which is to say, it is what Ross refers as to as the “negentropic” counter-tendency to entropy. The construction of internal systems engaged in interchange with an external environment creates regulation and self-reproduction, which is nevertheless always threatened by and always defending against the broader entropic environment. The creation of structures resistant to entropy is always improbable, then, and to that extent incalculable, an observation that will have important ethical implications for Ross. The originary hypothesis is entirely consistent with the establishment of negentropic agencies and tendencies: mimesis is first of itself negentropic insofar as the capacity of members of a group to learn from each other enhances each member of the group’s ability to resist entropic tendencies; but mimesis itself turns entropic once it interferes with other group stabilizing mechanisms (the pecking order) and, more precisely, subtracts rather than adding information regarding the action sequences of other members of the group.\n\nSome knowledge of a likely range of action sequences attributable to other members of the group (of whatever species) is essential to group stability, and what characterizes a mimetic crisis is that this knowledge becomes impossible. Maybe the other members of the group will order themselves in familiar ways, but it’s at least as likely they won’t and, since there’s no way of knowing in this novel situation, it makes the most sense to assume the worst which, in turn, encourages all the others to assume the worst about you as well. The originary gesture is a highly improbable, indeed extraordinary, restoration of information exchange amongst members of the group and erects the tertiary retention that must henceforth be protected for its negentropic effectiveness.\n\nI can’t recall any discussions in GA that take the notion of the “scenic” literally enough to consider that scenes need to be constructed, and constructed in such a way as shape actions so as to keep all members of the group in conformity with the constraints and affordances of the scene itself. The earliest ritual scenes, of course, design a scene, with props, costumes and boundaries separating the scene from what is outside of it, but also turning what is outside of the scene into potential supports for a modified or expanded scene, so as to align everyone in the relation to the center dictated by the center. In constructing scenes, material is inscribed and arranged so as to derive information from the center. If we think scenically in this way, we are prepared to enter fully into commerce with discourses such as Ross’s, and provide an anthropological “density” lacking in Ross’s discussion.\n\nSuch scenic thinking, that is, is what will enable GA to scale up. Indeed, rather than Ross’s still subject-centered analysis of the political, which remains focused on the kinds of citizens need to sustain negentropic institutions (an important question, of course), we can argue for a more center-focused approach that tracks the successive occupations of the center, from the divine beast of the earliest human communities, through the Big Man, sacred kingship, divine kingship, empire, through to today’s liberal democratic centralizing anti-centrism. We can think of the kind of scenes that need to be constructed in each case so as ensure that information flows back and forth between center and periphery.\n\nThere would be plenty of room for productive disagreements here—a liberal case might be made, for example, to the effect that with sufficiently trained and rehearsed “actors” (“educated citizens” in a high trust society), a wide dispersal of scenes allowing for high levels of improvisation would allow for an ongoing exchange with a minimally authoritative center temporarily occupied by figures who are selected from and reintegrate back into the periphery following their tenure. This would, furthermore, direct our attention to the construction of scenes (“educational” and “media”) that ensure the kinds of necessary “rehearsals.” It would also keep us aware that all of us, as participants in the design of whatever scenes we contribute to, are ourselves fully products of the scenes we have rehearsed on and for, scenes designed by those whose work we continue.\n\nStiegler, as Ross points out, draws upon the invention of alphabetic writing, as analyzed in the work of the linguist Sylvain Auroux, to develop the concept of “grammatization,” which is “Auroux’s name for the process necessary for the temporal flow of speech to be turned into the spatial and material forms of alphabetic writing, necessarily involving the discrimination and analysis, not necessarily conscious, of the discrete phonetic elements that would become the letters” (38). This is critical to Stiegler’s revision and continuation of the project of grammatology initiated by Derrida:\n\nStiegler’s genius was to recognize that a process of spatialization, materialization, discretization and analysis lies at the root, not just of the alphabetic writing that made possible the Greek polis and its tragedy, philosophy and democracy, but also of the industrial revolution. In the latter case, however, this was a process of grammatization applied not to the temporal flow of speech but to the temporal flow of gesture, and, more specifically, of the gestures of the tool-equipped hands (those hands that are the exosomatic consequence of the pre-hominin foot that becomes implied by the tool) of workers possessing the knowledge of how to craft material objects, from the weaver to the potter to the blacksmith and beyond. It was this gestural knowledge of the worker that had to become subject to a process of grammatization in order for the mechanization and automation of industrial manufacturing to be established in the nineteenth century. (ibid)\n\nWe can see in this discussion the prerequisite for Stiegler’s notion of “proletarianization” that he sees as having accompanied industrialization, as the knowledge, tacit and inherited, as well as explicit, of workers gets expropriated and transferred to the owners and managers of machines (and of humans). The “gramme” must have preceded “grammatization”; if the gramme is the accidental/meaningful mark that defines the human variation on life then “grammatization” goes all the way back (even if we’d want to distinguish it conceptually from what Ross is referring to here). Ritual itself involves the “discretization” of the gesture, refining so that it serves more effectively in the “mnemotechnic” practice that is ritual—and a ritual will be more or less effective depending upon how it is designed so as to preserve the memory of everything that has “worked” in previous scenes, in response to disruptive events.\n\nMoreover, ritual is meant to do something and make something happen, even if what it makes happen is not exactly what the participants imagine it does (is not the same true to some extent with technology?), so to think of technology as emerging out of ritual as a new way of eliciting information from the center is not really a stretch. The break from ritual that will eventually make a genuine technical thought and practice possible would, then, involve those occasions on which some sovereign actor must act upon either his own or another community as such—such external organization could not be covered by internal ritual arrangements. So, such events as conquest, war, and the levying of mass labor armies is what would “liberate” technics from its ritual origins. Technology would still be a practice of materializing memory, but in this case memory of those external interventions which discretized gesture for some unprecedented purpose.\n\nMeanwhile, the expropriation of the knowledge of workers brought about by grammatization does make possible new forms of knowledge—knowledge of the results of grammatization itself, which involves the creation of a system of references, which can themselves be compressed into more complex references, of the more or less automated practices comprising the system. The problem is that the transition from one form of knowledge to the next is far from “automatic,” and in the meantime can generate significant amounts of resentment towards a newly interventionist and imperious center. The establishment of new pedagogical relations necessary for the transition is costly and uncertain, since it is inevitably unprecedented itself, and can be easily seen as part of the same expropriation it aims at ameliorating and then converting it into genuine social advances. It seems very likely that the new industrializing elites will focus directly on simply immunizing the new arrangements against this disruptive resentment, thereby further disqualifying and alienating the displaced target populations.\n\nThe necessary scenic conditions, that is, are daunting. This is part of the “pharmacological” nature of all transformations in the social “exoskeleton,” in which what is medicine is also poison. Ross has a long and interesting discussion of the way industrializing society directly accesses and manipulates the “limbic system” as a means of social control (further proletarianization, this time of the intellect), but I think we can frame the problem he’s pointing to more simply.\n\nThe fully technological (post-ritual) system relies upon a steady flow of reliable “information,” that is, signs that can be immediately put to some use (and therefore quickly become useless). Ross, following Stiegler, insists on a very sharp distinction between “information” and “knowledge,” and I think we could say that information is the direct descendant of ritual insofar as its use is measured by the immediate transformation it effects.\n\nBut information can be, like currency, constantly pumped into the system so as to become “useful” in simulated, rituallike ways, while being ultimately worse than useless, that is, harmful. We could say that much political information is like this, as it is used to stage polarizing scenes that are meaningless in the strict sense that the outcome of the events staged changes nothing while the constant “rush” of information builds an “addiction” to more such information. Knowledge, meanwhile, we can now say, synthesizing Ross’s analysis with my previous reworking of “scenic thinking,” is more a descendent of myth and involves “rehearsing for the improbable.” This is indeed very difficult because it requires that one defer the direct investment in the polarizations of the moment and learn to look for what, in terms of those information-driven scenes, would be improbable in terms of those scenes but provides the resources for a “organology” that would remediate the scenic conditions of social participation.\n\nThe ” cosmos” in Ross’s subtitle refers to the Greek word for an order that generates and finds sufficient for its selfregulation knowledge of actors directly involved in the interactions comprising the order. The challenge of the contemporary world is, in fact, to scale up a “cosmic” order to global dimensions. Ross provides a sustained and subtle critique of Friedrich Hayek’s pretensions to be supportive of such an (market) order against a state-led command economy (an exogenous, or “taxis” order), but, by associating “cosmos” with the self-regulation offered by the cybernetic autonomization not only of functions within the market but markets themselves, lays the theoretical groundwork for today’s neoliberal imposition (often state mandated) of “market” imperatives (really, subjected to the calculations of global financial institutions) on all spheres of life. And this expropriation is predicated, paradoxically, on the naturalization of what are necessarily artificial socioeconomic relations:\n\nHayek’s version of the cosmo-local is therefore fundamentally based on a denial of Stiegler’s demonstration that the condition of all neganthropic order is artificial and that the function of neganthropic reason arises and can arise only from processes of artificial selection, where shifts in these processes disrupt existing systems and existing forms of knowledge, and therefore present a problem requiring the care-ful reinvention of knowledge and not just the\n\n> assumption that existing knowledge guarantees successful adjustment to changed economico-technological conditions. (264)\n\nAt this point, Ross’s very ambitious book is taking on the global economy, which it’s hard to imagine anyone, at this point, seeing as very just or functional. Whatever one’s politics and whatever one’s views of inequality, social justice, or the question of climate change (Ross’s book is published in a series entitled CCC2 Irreversibility, predicated upon addressing a crisis in the progress of climate change), there is clearly much to be addressed in a global economy in which most activity is controlled by a few dozen megacorporations with no imperative other than maintaining control over economic activity and beholden to no sovereign power (only perhaps a few of which could exercise any control, and that only through very intrusive and coercive mechanisms).\n\nRoss advocates a transition to what he calls a “contributory economy,” without saying very much about what that looks like or how to get there. Ross’s book is refreshingly free of cant and NGO-speak about “strengthening democratic institutions,” “renewing citizenship,” etc., but he also doesn’t have much to say about political institutions, especially the state. There’s a real problem here, because if one gets serious and hopes to be precise about agencies capable of bringing about any kind of change without collapsing into laughable clichés about “grass-roots movements,” one ends up fixing one’s eyes on the very figures who seem to be the problem—those with power.\n\nThis is another way of saying that Ross, while admirably avoiding the trap of indulging in yet another set of political fantasies involved in “decentralization,” does not want to discuss the center. Stiegler, or, for that matter, Peter Sloterdijk, whom Ross invokes later on to talk about the immunological disorders that seem to be accelerating entropy and “anthropy” (the dispossession of the “endogenous” knowledge needed to construct and maintain negentropic orders), seems to leave him bereft here. Ross here invokes an anti-metaphysical tradition of thought that he traces from Empedocles through Nietzsche and Freud, that would see reality as composed of a perpetual struggle between opposing forces, with this mode of thought enabling the “metacosmical” program Ross calls for.\n\nAll this remains within contemporary philosophical debates: what tensions, exactly, are to be “composed” in such a way as to ensure the kind of “localizations” required for endogenous knowledge production? Thinking scenically and mimetically can help here as well. Indeed, if we are suffering from “anaphylaxis,” that is, an exaggerated and potentially deadly response of the body to some disturbance that is not really that dangerous, can we not attribute this over-reaction to the anti-“totalitarian” fervor that has guided Western politics since WW II? Doesn’t any stance or proposal that reminds too many people (that triggers recognition in the exosomatic or institutional memory) of one or another of the totalitarian enemies (Nazi Germany and “fascism” in WW II and the USSR in the Cold War) send the political and ideological system into overdrive, sending out antibodies that extirpate anything the liberal democratic order considers anomalous?\n\nThis auto-immune disorder has the paradoxical result of attacking every form of social attachment that can’t be “read” by the “programs” created by the neoliberal algorithm, with the result that the means of identifying and neutralizing potentially threatening antigens (like social media TOS violation determinations and the priorities of the intelligence and police agencies with which they are linked) are increasingly centralized precisely as a function of the reigning anti-centerism (any decision that comes transparently from a responsible center triggers the release of antibodies). That more and more books, like Ross’s, explore these questions without seeming to worry too much whether they are too “like” either “extreme” may be a sign that some autoimmune adjustment is possible. We may be ready to devote our political resources to something other th than mopping up after either of the two great 20 century conflicts.\n\nWhat we need to “care” about in order to transition to the “contributory,” to be blunt, is a pathological anti-centerism. (We could say that the “West” is best defined, not in terms of shuffling around various definitions of “freedom,” but as the first social order that sought to maintain a perpetual opposition to any settled center.) This is an anti-centerism so pathological that even those who actually occupy the center are devoted to it—no person in power, whether elected official or member of any one of the numerous “committees” and “commissions” claiming the right to plan our future offers any form of legitimation that doesn’t involve fighting against some other more powerful center. Everyone wants power to fight the power, without ever wanting to acknowledge that this constitutes an admission that there will always be power.\n\nNot only does each national state use every crisis and pseudo-crisis to reach more deeply into every aspect of its subject’s lives (and, therefore, Ross wants to point out, subjectivities), but the fact that the summer of 2020 saw “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations across the world, regardless of racial composition or race relations in all those countries, indicates that much of the world would like to look on the US as a de facto world government, even if cynically, as a way of gaining leverage. Our own contribution to this crisis of the center is to advance, as an economic and political principle, one of the simplest imaginable principles: emulation. Someone you look up to is someone “programming events” you would like to “contribute” to. And someone you don’t or can’t look up to, but who is nevertheless in power, can be presented with the demand to become worthy of emulation. This is how you turn poison into medicine: study people in their social roles with an interest in everything that might make them actionable models.\n\nI’m not talking about some anodyne “character matters” political pablum or, if we want to apply that label, we’d have to keep in mind that only someone who fills his office is worthy of emulation, and to fill one’s office is to assume all its formal powers and responsibilities and expose all attempts by informal and “behind the scene” actors to interfere with the exercise of those powers. Ross has nothing to say about ritual, as his notion of a small scale “cosmic” order seems to draw upon models such as the medieval city or small town, but ritual order is equally endogenous while involving more of a “prayerful” than a “careful” relation, not just to other members, but to the center.\n\nA prayer involves an exchange of imperatives: tell me how to serve you. At its most refined, or most “technical,” the imperative exchange enacted in prayer distills itself into something like “help me to know how to donate to you.” This is an exchange prior to any market and an exchange that is a genuine “composition” insofar as the relationship is nothing more than the exchange itself. Moreover, such an exchange relation is the proper relation to those whom we emulate or would emulate or, for that matter, to those who might emulate us.\n\nIf such relations are impossible and even unthinkable, well, then, that is what needs to be remedied, and if you want to say that doing so is impossible and unthinkable, I will simply respond by saying all the familiar bromides regarding freedom, democracy, citizenship, justice and so on are far more so, and nonsensical and ultimately vicious as well. They all represent fantasies of a more real order that will some day be able to shake off the center: I’m not obeying any orders from you until you’ve provided me with a full account of the infrastructures ungirding your power (how you came by it, with whose help, in whose interest, at whose expense, in conformity with or denial of which legal mechanisms or principles…)—to my satisfaction, of course. This is the resentment that scales up and proliferates virally across the social and political order without regard to distinctions between right and left. More local resentments, of the kind that provide the material for pulp media narratives, are mere “spin-offs” of this more general one.\n\nWithin the current “organological” arrangements, the most urgent medium of exchange between center and periphery is data. Any decision anyone, at any level of the social order, has to make, whether it regards corporate governance in turbulent times or which private nursery school to try and enroll your child in (or, needless to say, whether to take—or mandate—a particular vaccine) will depend upon readily available, competently packaged, and “legible” data. We all know about the intense interest companies and the social media companies gathering “intelligence” on their behalf have in our personal data; governments are no less interested in such data, to the point where traditional ways of thinking about privacy and civil liberties seem pathetically outdated.\n\nWe as individuals are equally (desperately) dependent upon reliable data from power centers, whether they be governments, corporations, or other institutions like universities—or, for that matter, “rogue” sources we may trust more but themselves must claim some access to secure data banks. Data is becoming more currency than currency itself; indeed, isn’t one of the virtues attributed to money that it provides reliable and up-to-date information on the field of social desires and distribution of resources and labor capacities? As money becomes more malleable, it can perhaps be massaged so as to become more akin to data gathered elsewhere within what Benjamin Bratton calls the planetary scale computation that draws upon ubiquitous sensing, measuring, and calculating devices.\n\nWe need data to design the many scenes on which we act, and thinking in terms of data exchange will help us to mind Ross’s injunction to strive for a genuinely “cosmological” order in which the integrity of each node of “individuation” (individual, family, community, institution, locality, nation, transnational organization, etc.) as a site of data curation is acknowledged precisely in the name of a more “intelligent” as well as more “idiomatic” (that is, differentiated) order. Every one of us does know things about our respective milieus that no one else does, even if it may sometimes be the case that the proper questioning or framing is required to elicit such knowledge.\n\nSo, rehearsing for the improbable means enhancing one’s curatorial capacities so that one is increasingly competent in providing data that might be of use to the center and sifting through the data that comes at one through the center. This may sound banal, and I hope there is something commonsensical and readily accessible to such a “politics,” but the kind of practice I have in mind involves a whole range of difficult judgments regarding how to inquire, whom to trust, how to make oneself worthy of trust, what to disclose, when, and to whom, and endless learning regarding the creation, encoding, protecting and distributing of data. It requires “imagining” expanded scenes, upon which the data one has at hand might take on very different meanings as it is included in very different data sets over time and across space within the various mnemotechnical institutions.\n\nAnd it requires the habit of treating as data what is not ordinarily seen as such, like one’s everyday use of language, which, in a sense is where all data exchange finds its terminus. Think about what it would mean to gather, in various formal and informal ways, at different scales, data regarding what “following an order” “means” today (a very Wittgensteinian question, but one brought into history). The orders you receive and comply with or resist, and those you yourself give and find obeyed or not in varying degrees and manners might be your starting point. But your inquiry could lead you to examine the vast expanse of the current order. At stake is our basic linguistic knowledge, upon which all other data collection, curation, and interpretation depends—if we can’t say that we know what it means to follow an order, what can we say we know? Restoring such basic linguistic capacities is the first order of business in contributing to the kind of “metacosmos” Ross would have us turn our sights to.\n\nFor GA, meanwhile, this focus on data exchange serves as a reminder that we are always on a scene, even if the scenes upon which we act today are more likely to be disciplinary research scenes than ritual ones. A scene is a scene—it is bounded, it is “set,” it positions actors in relation to each other with some kind of shared attention toward a center— even if that shared attention needs to be located by someone outside of the scene, a spectator, which is itself merely another scene, but one that can be represented within the spectated scene. We can scale up and scale down as much as is necessary—what counts as data, or a “sample,” will differ from scene to scene, even if it’s the “same” object presented differently at the center of different scenes.\n\nWhat we determine to treat as data provides an ostensive anchor to any scene. Data exchange therefore names a mode of deferral suited to this more thoroughly industrialized age, as we must always act on the data we have and the analysis we’ve made of it, while keeping in mind that data continues to come in and might dictate some new programming at any moment. It’s therefore helpful in dispersing the various on and off line mobs that gather under the influence of various information “highs.” It enables us, that is, to model ways of thinking and acting worthy of emulation, so that GA can become integral to the contributory economy.\n\nBibliography\n\nAmoore, Louise. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves. Duke University Press, 2020.\n\nBratton, Benjamin. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. The MIT Press, 2016.\n\nBucher, Taina. If… Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018.\n\nColomina, Beatriz and Mark Wigley. Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design. Lars Muller Publications, 2017.\n\nHalpern, Orit. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945. Duke University Press, 2015.\n\nHui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. e-flux Architecture, 2021.\n\n⸻-. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Urbanomic, 2016.\n\nLeroi-Gourhan, Andre. Gesture and Speech. MIT Press, 2018.\n\nSimondon, Gilbert. UI. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.\n\nStiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.\n\n⸻-. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.\n\n⸻-.Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010."
    },
    {
      "slug": "nemesis-jouvenelian-liberal-model",
      "title": "Book Review: Nemesis — The Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Orders (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/nemesis-jouvenelian-liberal-model.pdf",
      "content": "Model of Human Orders, by C.A. Bond Adam Katz\n\n177 pages Ebook $9.95 Print: $15.95\n\nThe way people speak about their relation and attitude toward the liberal democratic social orders most of us live under tends to be, upon reflection, odd. It seems simple enough to say something like, “I am loyal to King ____”; or “I am a faithful servant of the king”; even if we have a suitably modern, that is, resentful, disdain for such formulations, the relation between the one expressing and the one receiving that expression of fealty is clear. But it’s strange to say “I have faith in,” or “believe in,” liberal democracy. It’s even worse if we get more institutionally precise: do I “believe” in the Constitution, or the “balance of power” between executive, legislative and judicial branches? “Belief” and “faith” imply some suspension of rational, critical judgment— but isn’t that what the Enlightenment-informed liberal democracies would have us refuse to do? In the U.S., we even speak of “faith” in the “individual,”—which means what, exactly? Faith in the individual’s capacity and the likelihood of him/her/xir exercising that capacity to do what? All, individuals, all the time?\n\nShouldn’t citizens of liberal democratic orders think along the following or similar lines? As adherents of the scientific method, which provides us with the only way of knowing anything about reality and acting intelligently upon it, we assume any particular social order is essentially experimental, with its effects to be regularly assessed according to scientifically constructed criteria of social and human flourishing. So far, the hypothesis that establishing institutions predicated upon the assumption that social order must be erected upon, and serve to preserve and measure, the consent of each individual to that social order, remains unfalsified.\n\nIn the meantime, we not only remain open to, but actively solicit and assimilate evidence challenging this hypothesis: indeed, a central purpose of the secular social sciences that have developed alongside of liberal democracy should be to test and organize that evidence in order to continually determine whether the anomalies (relative to our ongoing reconstructions of liberal democratic political theory) they might point to can be reconciled within the existing paradigm or make it incumbent upon us to develop new, more inclusive ones.\n\nNeedless to say, the “belief” in “consent” is one of many articles of faith of liberal democracy, rather than a hypothetical proposition to be empirically tested. But this belief is itself an anomaly in political theory, now systematically, if involuntarily, parodied by the ever shrinking micro-aggressions and lowered thresholds for “sexual assault” so central to contemporary political discourse. If one could violate the other without knowing it by, for example, reproducing markers of past violence of which the victim herself need not be aware (a third party could point it out), then “consent” is alluded to (the notion of “violation” is unintelligible without it) without the possibility of reconstructing any intentionality informing it.\n\nThis suggests that the “consent” upon which the entire order hangs cannot be seen with the naked eye. I’ve already started to violate the first rule of liberal democracy, which is to not look too closely at how the concepts central to liberal democracy work, or are produced. But those of us interested in helping GA become a powerful, comprehensive mode of social thought would do well to join others in disregarding this rule, because of the flimsiness of liberal democratic thought itself, the vagueness of liberal democracy’s institutional claims and justifications and, above all, the emergence of serious critics of liberal democracy in the midst of what those critics (and how many others?) see as a crisis of this social order—a crisis best embodied in the now seemingly unassailable belief that “belief” in (“consent to”) one’s gender must be\n\n“re-affirmed” at every moment.\n\nA particularly important critic, C.A. Bond, who blogged for several years at Reactionary Future, has come out with a new book, Nemesis: The Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Orders, which synthesizes and further develops the work done on that blog. To situate Bond’s book within concerns critical to GA, I will begin by looking at the moment in his book where he explicitly refers to the originary hypothesis:\n\nWhat would an anthropology in accordance with the Jouvenelian model look like? Possible alternatives include the mimetic anthropology of René Girard and the linguistic developments made by Eric Gans, which we can briefly review.\n\nIn the anthropology inaugurated by René Girard, the sacrificial order of society, which Jouvenel himself recognised as key to early human societal formation in the form of magical Power, is not the creation of human individuals and separate from them, but an integral part of them. In the work of Girard, the move from a pre-human society of mimetic beings to a (still fundamentally mimetic) human society was the result of a mimetic crisis. Girard’s theory is based upon the observation that humans are, therefore, inescapably mimetic. The nature of desire is such that it is not, as assumed by modern liberal anthropology, inherent to the individual and sovereign—the individual does not face society with his own desires to then be satisfied within a marketplace, but learns these desires from others.\n\nFor Girard, this mimetic desire is a source of conflict and tension within societies, and it is mitigated through the act of focusing the cumulative mimetic desires of a society on a single individual who becomes a scapegoat. In the act of killing this scapegoat, the individuals become aware of both the violence towards the scapegoat blamed for this collective animosity and the dissipation of this animosity. The sacrificial scapegoat becomes at once the cause of all the society’s ills, and also its salvation from these ills. The scapegoat then becomes a sacred object.\n\nIn the work of Eric Gans, this model is presented as an explanation for the origin of language, where the creation of the first sign, and therefore the beginning of language, results from an abortive ostensive gesture in the process of mimetic descent on (most likely) an animal which has been killed. This abortive sign is hypothesised to be a representation of the object at the centre of the group’s collective mimetic desire. In both intensely mimetically desiring the object, yet also being aware of the violence that will ensue if members of the group all descend on the object, the sign takes on a sacred nature. It is in the wake of the collective attention created by this event that language is first generated from an ostensive syntactical form which has subsequently evolved into a number of further forms, these being the imperative and then the declarative.\n\nThus, in this scheme, language is a product of mimetic desire, is generative, and as in Girard’s account, presupposes an anthropological model implying that humanity has resulted from a process of shared attention around a centre external to any of the individuals. The human individual of modernity makes no sense within such a system, since everything from language to thought (which always occurs within a language) is premised on a mimetic relationship that is incomplete without reference to this shared external centre.\n\nThe reader may raise issues with hypothetically entertaining such anthropological accounts, but before dismissing them we must acknowledge that these accounts present far fuller explanations of human orders, and that they provide grounds for a deeper understanding than that of the modern anthropology of atomistic individuals possessing a radical subjectivity. We can go even further and claim that this modern anthropology is not only incompatible with the Jouvenelian model, but that its development is, in actuality, explainable by the model as a side effect of the Jouvenelian conflicts which have occurred within the Western world. To this end, we shall first review the development of theories of political legitimacy and sovereignty in light of the Jouvenelian model in order to provide a context within which the individual of the modern model can be fully understood.\n\n(25-7)\n\nThe “Jouvenelian model” Bond is referring to, and which his book is opposing to the liberal model, starts from the assumption that “there is in every society a centre of control” (24). What Bond aims to show in his book is that political reality is generated by the struggle of final power centers against intermediate power centers which interfere with the governing imperatives as determined by the final center. Familiar examples would be a medieval king contending with the nobility as he attempts to levy taxes to th prosecute a war or some other project; or mid-20 century attempts on the part of America’s federal government to assimilate the recalcitrant Southern states into a fully modern, liberal order.\n\nBond is using mimetic theory to challenge liberal individualism: for liberalism, the individual precedes society, which means that society must be explained as separate individuals joining together voluntarily. Bond, in the passage quoted here, is pointing out that, while the history of power that Bertrand de Jouvenel advanced, in particular in his On Power, according to which the power center (the monarch and then the state in modernity) increases its power relative to the “middle” by mobilizing the lower members of society against that middle, presupposes an non-individualist anthropology, Jouvenel himself continues to rely upon an individualist anthropology. Bond, in refining and strengthening the model he adopts from\n\nJouvenel, finds it necessary to follow Jouvenel back to his own account of (“magical”) social origins and challenge that (still residually liberal) account with a more powerful one. That more powerful account is the originary hypothesis, which enables us to see how we could never think of human orders apart from some center. I would take this reference as an invitation to thinkers within GA to take on the task of questioning liberalism and theorizing outside of its terms.\n\nNemesis is a relentless demolition of liberal concepts. This demolition is carried out by demonstrating, in a thoroughly documented manner, that all the concepts of liberalism— “equality,” “sovereignty,” the “individual,” “human rights,” and so on—are produced, not by moral advances, theoretical or philosophical inquiries, or “bottom-up” revolts of the oppressed, but, rather, by powerful actors within or close to the heights of state power levying powerless groups against institutions such as the Church, the aristocracy, the paternal authority of the family and, more recently, institutions maintaining law and order, education, business, dependent states, and more.\n\nBond traces this process back to medieval Christendom, in struggles within the Church and between the Church and the early European monarchs, through transformative events like the Reformation and the French Revolution, and up to contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter. It’s probably best to focus here on the concept of the “individual,” which Bond focuses on in Chapter 4, as the origin of perceptions, thoughts and experiences. The “individual,” as Bond shows, is an especially strange concept. The entire problem of modern political theory is an essentially false one: how do separate individuals, with their own self-generated and self-legitimating desires and interests, gather together into a social and political order?\n\nThe obvious observation that there could never have been a time when people were not parts of a social order seems to be disregarded. The “individual” had to be “chipped off” of the social order in which any individual is integrally embedded so as to stand alone, and Bond shows the process through which this occurred, first of all in the Protestant theology of “Sola Scriptura,” then in the epistemology and political thought of early modern thinkers like Descartes and Hobbes, and, finally, as the bearer of ever more complicated and rapidly changing “rights” in the postmodern West. Bond charts the way in which each step in this development involved one power center invoking a more discrete individual in order to break down some intermediary institution that interfered with the process of centralization desired by that power center. Even so-called “identity politics,” supposedly focused more on groups than individuals, is, Bond points out, organized through rights granted to individual members of those groups and deployed against the authority of intermediary institutions.\n\nWe can see that the more the individual comes to be seen as separate from any social ties, and stands alone as a psychological, moral and legal subject, the more comprehensively regulated the individual is by the state. So, for example, same-sex marriage is presented as a new frontier in individual liberties and equality (liberal notions of freedom, equality and rights all depend upon liberal anthropology), while providing for more unrestrained interventions on the part of government into the ways businesses are run, the way parents can raise their children, the way adoption services can determine suitable candidates, and the ways schools can discipline and educate the children they are responsible for.\n\nIt’s hard to see how one could dispute this, or that this is the case with the other rights revolutions, especially those concerning sex and race. Bond lays out a carefully documented account of why this is the case, and why these concepts and these political developments make far more sense according to the Jouvenelian model, as opposed to self-celebrating Whig histories. Once you have seen Bond’s account, say, of the way in which various state and supposedly private but actually “para-state” actors (like corporately established foundations) orchestrated the civil rights movement for what were really geo-political purposes (taking away a Soviet “talking point” in the Cold War competition for the allegiance of the newly decolonized states), you cannot “unsee” it.\n\nOne awaits the Jouvenelian dissection of other sacred concepts of liberalism, in particular the “market” (which Bond briefly touches upon in his chapter on the corporation, and tangentially in his discussion of the use of money in ancient Greek democracy), and one suspects that very little of what liberal citizens and the vast majority of liberal intellectuals take for granted will be left in intact.\n\nIf Bond’s book can induce thinkers within GA to rethink liberal concepts, the main question to be faced will be, how do we understand the concept of the Center? We assume the center of the originary scene; that this scene of ritual and distribution is eventually “usurped” by the Big Man; that the occupation of the center by a human figure continues through the ages of kingship and the gigantic ancient empires, with very few and not very successful exceptions (and perhaps only apparent exceptions) up until the emergence of modern liberalism and democracy. So, at this point, is there a social center, occupied or unoccupied?\n\nAt certain points in his thinking, Eric Gans has proposed a post Christian, which is to say post-sacrificial, omnicentric market order that would eschew any single center, perhaps most explicitly in the penultimate paragraph of Originary Thinking: “[t]he historical movement of descralization operates neither through the endless deconstruction of the originary center nor through its definitive rejection, but through its omnicentric multiplication. Even ‘decentralization’ is a dangerous term; what is required is rather the universal proliferation of centers—every human being a center” (219).\n\nIt is not clear to me how much this should be taken to be prospective rather than descriptive. After all, every country on earth has a president, prime minister or king (indeed, absent such figures, there could be no “international relations”); every country has a political capital, while most have other, economic and/or cultural capitals. Is it possible to speak of an individual as his/her/xir own center without that individual being amply provided with the armor of protective rights? And is it possible to think about rights without thinking about a highly centralized state enforcing those rights? In an omnicentric order (in what sense would it be an order?), would Hamden, Connecticut, have to be as central as Washington, D.C. and New York?\n\nIf omnicentrism is to accommodate asymmetries between centers, how would that be different than saying that there is a social or final center, with other centers dependent upon that one? If, in fact, there is always a center, and it is always occupied by a human, however often that human is replaced or how much resentment is encouraged towards him/her/xir, then we would have to speak of the mimetic field of desires and resentments in the contemporary world very differently than we do now.\n\nBond’s book is mainly ground clearing, which is very important because there is a lot of ground to clear—it might better be called Augean stables cleaning. He provides a power analysis of the most cherished concepts of liberalism\n\n—precisely those concepts which operate effectively and serve power because they seem to be power-free. Once “individual,” “rights,” “equality,” “liberty” and the rest lose their self-evidence, many other concepts upon which the legitimation of institutions depend will be fatally compromised. We may be able to imagine a social order in which, when people hear the word “individual” made central to an argument they immediately think of what power play is being set in motion while nothing else really changes. That is, we can imagine a book like Bond’s merely ramping up the widely shared cynicism to 11: “you speak of rights because you want me to…” Bonds refers to Alasdair Mac Intyre’s critique, in particular in After Virtue, of liberal morality and liberal social sciences—in its way as destructive to liberal ontology as Bond’s Jouvenelian analysis—and Mac Intyre’s reconstruction of a morality that would presuppose the embeddedness of the individual in a web of social obligations, but a Jouvenelian approach would need a more sustained engagement with Mac Intyre than we see here.\n\nBond’s concluding discussion of future prospects for beneficial change within the existing global liberal (dis)order is appropriately tentative—Bond is well aware that he’s initiating a discussion, not concluding one. Still, these concluding reflections are interesting—Bond points to the need and the possibility, given contemporary technology, of developing spaces for social thought outside of the liberal dome to take place. He also suggests, rather provocatively given the anti-globalizing and re-localizing tendencies of much of dissident (such as alt-right) right-wing thought, that, since liberal theoretical projects of de-centralization have been the most effective means of centralization, perhaps the deeply resented processes of centralization, often called “globalism,” will have to be more positively engaged:\n\n[p]aradoxically, it would seem that a clear recognition and acceptance of this centrality could prove to be the more effective means by which this centralisation can be negotiated. The act of formalising the relationships currently in existence would logically lead to a reduction in the need for centralised power centres to engage in the Jouvenelian mechanism to shape a given order. With a clear recognition of the validity of this central power altering orders as necessary, the warping effect of power in all areas of existence would be better accounted for, and a more coherent and possibly non-coercive order could be instituted. (162)\n\nA formalist politics, which, rather than protesting against existing power relations by evoking some pre-political liberal notion of freedom or equality, simply acknowledges existing power relations and makes them formal, official, and therefore accountable, is indeed the logical conclusion of\n\nBond’s Jouvenelian model.\n\nBut while an acceptance of the necessity of power and hierarchy could be expected to have a pacifying effect and to make the social order more reasonable, the need to think through questions of obligations and reciprocities would not only remain, but would pose itself in new ways. Here is where an open field for developing originary moral and ethical thought lies. Morality would have to be thought of in “vertical” rather than “horizontal” terms—that is, there is no reciprocity that is not mediated by a center. Mimetic rivalry always concerns some object, however distant, abstract, or illusory it might be, and that object is always framed by some authorized way of seeking to appropriate it.\n\nIf we think about resentment less in terms of sheer inequality (which doesn’t make much sense because there’s clearly no correspondence between “degrees” of inequality and “intensity” of resentment) and more in terms of the resented other’s violation of the authorized way of appropriating the desired object, then resentment always directly references some failure (perceived or real) of authority. That is, resentment is always directed towards some disregard of the center. The reconstruction of moral thought around the notion of “reciprocity,” then, would repudiate accusations of the other as desiring centrality in favor of insisting that the other fulfill the responsibilities implicit in the centrality claimed. The moral model, then, is not realized person to person, but by reference to our shared acceptance of the center upon which we model our actions.\n\nI hope everyone interested in GA will read Nemesis. At the very least, it will give us something new to talk about, and hopefully provide a touchstone for testing the uses and effects of liberal concepts within GA. The prevailing narrative within GA, that draws a line from the retrieval of the originary intuition of equality-on-the-scene by the Christian revelation to modern liberal democracy and market society[1], needs to be challenged. Perhaps it will withstand the challenge and emerge stronger. After all, no version of GA accepts the liberal ontology which presupposes a pre-social individual— GA tends to see liberal individualism in more Hegelian terms, as the result of an evolution whereby individuals are formed and enriched as post-sacrificial moral centers.\n\nWhat, exactly, sustains them as moral centers, though? How much does this conception of the individual continue to rely upon liberally derived notions of rights and equality? At any rate, taking up arguments like those advanced in Nemesis will be unavoidable if GA is to have anything to say to emerging political alignments in a world in which World War 2 and the Cold War are really over and questions of authority and political identity come to be scrutinized in increasingly unfamiliar and radical ways.\n\nNemesis is published by Imperium Press, which “was founded in 2018 to supply students and laymen with works in the history of rightist thought.” Imperium has focused primarily on the republication of classic works, like Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia, Joseph de Maistre’s The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, and Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City, with contemporary introductions. I believe that Nemesis is the first new book Imperium has published, and its publication is a good sign that other contemporary writers thinking outside of liberal terms might find a home.\n\nWorks Cited\n\nGans, Eric. Science and Faith: The Anthropology of nd Revelation, 2 Edition. (Aurora, CO: Noesis Press, 2015)\n\n⸻-. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993)\n\nJouvenel, Bertrand de. On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (New York: Viking Press, 1949).\n\nMac Intyre, Alasdair C. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.)\n\nNotes\n\n[1] A concise formulation of this trajectory can be seen in a footnote of Gans to Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation: The modern market-system, as exemplified by contemporary “consumer society,” is a system that generates ever more elaborate means of differentiating among its members. Although resentment is certainly not abolished, each individual is taught by the market-system to treat all others as equally unique individuals. Imperfect as it is even as an abstract model, highly differentiated consumer society (and not the uniformized utopias of socialism) is the historical realization of the decentralization of the Gospel utopia: the most moral society for the greatest number. (106)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "originary-technics",
      "title": "Originary Technics (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/originary-technics.pdf",
      "content": "A paradoxical effect of the spread of writing was to produce a conception of the self as constituted by an inviolable interiority: the subject who speaks (really, reads and continues the \"voice\" of the text) silently to himself prior to any entrance into the social arena. This subject is not only pre-social, and therefore in a direct relation to God, the Idea, or Truth, but pre-technical and therefore the originator and user of technology from a position external to the technological world itself. Whether in the form of the subject of the free market or technocracy, this imaginary presupposes the possibility of mastery over technology, which, like the environment itself through technology, can be subordinated to purposes formulated within an intellectual space unaffected by the technology to be subjugated. This is why talk of the relation between humans and technology so often takes on the form of utopian projections predicated upon humans finally attaining absolute mastery over the machine world or dystopian nightmares in which the technology comes to master us.\n\nThere is a tradition of more sophisticated thinking about technology, including thinkers like Lewis Mumford, Gilbert Simondon, and Bernard Stiegler, which sees humans and technology as co-constitutive. If we can see humans and technology as \"always already\" interdependent and reciprocally defining, we can dispense with lurid fantasies and learn to take responsibility for ourselves as technological beings. I think there is a difficulty in doing so, though, that I've only seen Mumford address but in his case more, I think, as a \"deviation\" than a constitutive feature of technology: its intrinsically hierarchical and asymmetrical structure.\n\nIt's easy to imagine technology being mastered by \"Man\" because some men are always mastering technology and through it other men. It seems to me impossible to imagine equal and spontaneous contributions to the technological order by all involved, which is why the only form of equality that seems imaginable in any detailed way in a technological order is that of equally \"dehumanized\" \"cogs\" of the machine. It's different in scientific, laboratory settings, where everyone can be working on parts of a larger problem without anyone knowing in advance how any of the parts will fit into a larger whole—insofar as something is to be built, though, in a specific place, under the authority of someone, at a specific time, drawing upon materials and manpower that must be marshalled, the uneven distribution of leadership and power is inevitable—some one takes charge.\n\nWe are dealing here with imperatives—which supports, I think, the claim that technology is prior to science, which really enters the scene when technology fails or needs supplementation, subsequently acquiring a degree of autonomy from direct technological application.\n\nHere, I will proposing that taking a particular speech act, the imperative, as the origin of technology, will provide a powerful way of thinking technology and the human in a conjoined manner and in a way, furthermore, that sees technology as having an intrinsically ethical and moral component, rather than being a neutral phenomenon that takes on ethical implications only in the \"uses\" we \"choose\" to make of it. We can ask, why are there imperatives? The imperative, on the face of it, seems to be the human speech act closest to animal interaction: after all, while we don't see animals \"explaining\" things to each other, we do see one animal submit to another and do what the other wants.\n\nIt would be easy to imagine that language originates with the imperative. But that would be to confuse exercises of dominance with meaningful linguistic acts: what characterizes an imperative is precisely that it can extend beyond the physical presence of both parties to the speech act and can therefore be delayed and transformed: the two parties must already \"understand\" each other in order to ascertain whether the imperative has in fact been obeyed.\n\nThis understanding must come before the issuance of an imperative, which means that the first speech act must institute this understanding—that is, it must be reciprocal and symmetrical, with all parties involved acknowledging that the sign issued by the others is same sign as the one issued by oneself. The most parsimonious way of hypothesizing the emergence of such a sign is as the conversion of another gesture but not quite sign into the reciprocally recognized one. So, we presuppose a common object, desired by all, with the desire of each mimetically multiplied by the desire of the others, so that the impossibility of any fulfilling that desire becomes apparent, in which case the gesture of appropriation, the grasping of the central object, is aborted, and converted into gesture of deferral, which means something like: the being at the center wants none of us to have it.\n\nThis is the originary hypothesis proposed by Eric Gans, which I think I can assume just about anyone reading this has some familiarity with. This first sign is an \"ostensive\" sign, which means it says nothing \"about\" anything, it just indicates and preserves mere presence. Think of the kinds of expressions we use to alert others to an emergency situation—\"fire!\"; \"man overboard!\"—and you get the idea. Before anything can be done or examined, our attention must first of all be fixed on this thing.\n\nIn the sequence of the emergence of the speech forms, as hypothesized by Gans, the imperative follows the ostensive. In that case, we might say that technology, insofar as we derive it from the imperative, is not quite co-originary with the human, which we take to be founded with the ostensive. But the Being who will issue the imperatives around which the increasingly complex human community will be organized has already interposed its will between the community and its object of desire. Still, this Being does not issue the first imperative which, according to our hypothesis, was the result of an \"inappropriate ostensive\": someone proclaims or \"signs\" the name of some object in its absence, and his interlocutor fetches it: since this can be repeated, we have a new speech form, which can be issued deliberately.\n\nThe imperative speech act is an intrinsically asymmetrical one, even if not in any obvious way: pleading, praying, petitioning, and so on are also performed through imperatives, by a subordinate or, at least, the weaker party in that case. There is another feature of the imperative worth noting here: since the performance of the imperative must conclude with an ostensive acknowledgement or affirmation by the \"imperator,\" the imperative further implies a relation of supervision and, even more, instruction or pedagogy—to see that the imperative is carried out as ordered requires, eventually, that the one issuing the order walk through it step by step, repeatedly, with the one to carry out the order—this is at least always an implicit possibility in any imperative.\n\nHere is where I would locate the origins of the technical—in this intimate, fallible, highly interactive instrumentalization of one party by the other. And we can already detect an ethics of the technical here: this kind of intensive pedagogy has the goal of enabling the \"recipient\" of the imperative to carry out the imperative with ever diminishing supervision, precisely so that the range of imperative ordering can expand.\n\nSince the ritual center, the materialized memory of the originary event, is by far the most important element of communal life, whether the imperative emerged on the ritual scene or not it would quickly become a prominent feature of the scene. That is, the center would become the source of imperatives. The nature of these imperatives would be to construct the ritual scene in such a way as to solicit further imperatives from the center, and to submit imperatives to the center in turn. Everything that serves the community— sources of food, shelter, victory over other groups, but above all the minimizations or elevation of conflicts within the community itself—is a gift of the center.\n\nIt is the center or, if we want to \"demystify\" a little, those capable of listening authoritatively to the center, that secures all these benefits. In exchange, the center wants a part of the goods of the community, like a part of the buffalo meat that the buffalo god/ancestor has provided us with. The logic of human community, until very recently and least residually still, is sacrificial. But the imperatives of the center also concern the structure of ritual, which is very important, because it is through ritual that the group enacts the events that have formed the bond between the community and the central Being, and this must be done very precisely to avoid offending the gods and maintain the relationship of imperative exchange: the will of the gods can only be heard through the structuring of ritual.\n\nThe imperatives from the center under a ritualistic order, then, are overwhelmingly concerned with what we could call the design of the ritual scene. This would involve the use of natural objects, the manufacture of specialized objects, and the arrangement of members of the community on the scene in specific ways. The emergence of technics, on this account, is the development of this imperative exchange between the community and the center: the community petitions the center for help, and the center commands certain practices in exchange for such help. This help is not always forthcoming, or easy to recognize, which generates narratives of happenings on the central stage, which becomes densely populated with mythic beings whose stories are told and woven into rituals.\n\nInsofar as activities organized primarily through imperatives takes place off the ritual scene (hunting and gathering, warfare, etc.) it will be modeled on the ritual scene and likewise \"covered\" with ritual and myth—and, with the kind of pedagogical or apprentice-like relation I said above must accompany the imperative speech act from the beginning. This is \"technological\" in the sense that implements are created and used, but also in the sense that the ritualized order is a way of making things happen in a broader sense: it \"conjures\" relationships and actions into being. When modern artists like Richard Wagner aimed at creating a \"total work of art,\" it was the totalization of the ritual scene they were hoping to recreate on modern terms.\n\nThe construction of specifically human tools itself depends upon the ability to represent a series of steps, which in turn depends on the capacity to narrate, and therefore upon the fully developed language we find in the declarative sentence, with a subject and predicate, suited for describing things out there in the world. The declarative itself, in Gans's hypothetical deduction of the sequence of speech forms, is tightly bound up with the imperative: to keep it simple, for now, we can see the origin of the declarative in the countering of one imperative with another incompatible with it, with the subsequence reconciliation of the two in a \"reality\" that includes them both and that neither party can control.\n\nIf you ask me for a knife, and I say something like \"knife went,\" and you, rather than aggressing against me for \"disobeying\" your command, accept that the knife isn't there (which in an imperative world could only be represented as the knife being commanded to be elsewhere), we have a declarative sentence, insofar as we can refer to something absent. The declarative allows for the representation of a sequence of acts, for correction, and for recourse to models to measure one's work against. It allows us to construct, in advance, a stereotyped sequence of events in which the request for a knife will always lead to one being provided.\n\nThe imperative can continually be prolonged, so that the request for a knife can be extended into the command to create a knife, and to do so in accord with certain procedures and in accord with precise specifications. The imperative, in this case, is issued from a higher level in the social order and is split and \"delivered\" to its \"imperatees\" through an increasingly complex set of relays. To demand a knife becomes the demand for the production of knives in a regimented manner as well as the demand to produce those who can make and use knives. With the ever expanding design of the scene, the designers are themselves designed in such a way as to sustain the system of design.\n\nFor imperatives to be issued from a higher level within the social order there needs to first be a higher level of the social order. This can only be the case once the ritual center is occupied by a human, who seizes or usurps it in what would have been the first \"revolutionary\" act in human history. The first to do this was the adventurer anthropologists know as the \"Big Man,\" but the Big Man, through a long history we need not address here, becomes the sacred king and some of the sacred kings become \"God-Emperors,\" ruling over vast territories and peoples, in a more or less divinized form. The sacrificial center continues to exist through these transformations, but it gets weakened and pluralized—the imperial subjects may bring their sacrifices, whether cattle or first-born children, to the temple in the capital, once a year, but otherwise they will be engaged in exchange with local and familial deities.\n\nEven more important, with the rise of the gigantic empires, we see the creation of masses of people conquered, enslaved, and torn out of any relation to the sacred. These slave armies can be completely and mercilessly \"instrumentalized,\" in the form of what Mumford called the \"mega-machines\" of antiquity, and which probably represent the first approximation to what we would readily recognize as \"technology\": extensive division of labor applied to projects well beyond the capacity of individuals or small groups. From this initial technology, predicated upon total command, we can derive the axiom that all technology is governance. Within any technological order, the machines will be modeled on and complement the activities of human collectives, while human collectives will be modeled on actual or possible machinic articulations.\n\nMy hypothesis here, then, is that the bursting of technology beyond the bounds of ritual that we have seen since, say, the Renaissance, can still be described as scenic design without the ritual scene. The breaking of ritual constraints is equivalent to the weakening beyond repair of the sacrificial order, which is to say the absence of any sacrificial center. All the engineering feats and the reconstruction of society around massive systems of sensing, measuring, energy extraction, refinement, circulation and deployment in various forms of automated movement and, now, the enormous data collection and algorithmic ordering that commands all the rest, can still be described as the ongoing perfection of a system of imperative relays constructing a scene in which any transformation in one section of the scene \"demands\" some corresponding transformation in others.\n\nThose who design technology are quite literally, if indirectly, telling others what to do: you must go from one place to another, and you must do it in one of these several ways. There is always a tendency to reduce the options so as to optimize the system imperatives. The most perfect technology, in that case, would be one in which the designers at various levels would compel a single activity from each subsequent or simultaneous operator all the way down to the end user. These single activities might be quite complex and require a high level of skill, discipline and concentration to complete.\n\nBut if there is no more ritual center, on whose behalf, in what system of exchange, is all this frenzied building taking place? The answer is simple: on behalf of that which replaced the ritual center: the state. And since states serve no sacred order higher than themselves, but are rather subordinated to a ever evolving and incoherent set of imperatives deriving from such demands as \"democracy,\" the \"will of the people,\" \"liberty,\" the \"constitution,\" \"human rights,\" \"equality,\" \"health,\" \"the market,\" and so on, the gathering power of the state drives technological advance while simultaneously providing scope for all kinds of sabotage.\n\nThat technology can be both a \"bane and a blessing\" is a commonplace, but perhaps we can move beyond that and beyond humanist invocations of the need to \"choose\" (as if Humanity is a deliberating agent) according to some vaguely specified but likely residually sacrificial mode of morality. How do we even say whether a particular technological development is \"good\" or \"bad,\" \"harmful\" or \"helpful,\" or a bit of both? Today we see disputes over whether this or that innovation is even \"real.\" Rather than reiterating the demand (issued by and to whom, exactly?) to make \"technology\" conform to this or that externally established standard, we would do better to think through technology as scenic design and the perfection of the imperative within the framework of technology as a form of governance within which we are all always already designed and designers, albeit in ways that are highly differentiated and asymmetrical.\n\nI would begin with the simple question of how one knows one has done something. If you paint your house, but it rains immediately after and washes all the paint away, you haven't really \"painted your house\"—that is, painting your house includes, as a practice, accounting for the conditions under which the paint will stay on the house. So, we can think of a practice as an activity that includes the criteria for determining whether the activity has been carried out and completed not only as planned, but in a way recognizable to others familiar with the norms and expectations governing that activity. Here, of course, I'm speaking in a way deeply indebted to Alasdair Mac Intyre and, through him, thinkers like Aquinas and Aristotle.\n\nSo, I'm participating in the retrieval of the kind of \"virtue ethics\" demolished by modernity. Mac Intyre includes more in his understanding of what a social practice entails, such as the narration of one's activity as part of a tradition that one participates in knowingly, carrying it forward and revising it, as well as the practice being one that presupposes and contributes to forms of exchange and collaboration within a community. I would slightly revise this tradition by bringing it to what I think is a finer point, and one only conceivable under technologized conditions: the marker of the further perfection of your practice is the selection, more or less explicitly, depending on the practice, of the successor of your practice, the one who will continue and further perfect it.\n\nIn that case, the question of a successor (and a predecessor) is built into the practice itself—you could define a practice in terms of the singularization of the one who will succeed it. Succession is, again more or less explicitly, always staged: in your practice you seek out, contract with, audition, train, create pathways for, the one (you always want to narrow it down to one) who will succeed you. Even more: you want to select the one who will in turn be best suited to select his own successor, and in turn his own successor, and so on. The foundation of any practice, in that case, is what I am calling \"singularized succession in perpetuity.\"\n\nWhatever is involved in considering the conditions that might prepare a wide enough range of suitable candidates, available resources, training, public recognition and acceptance, even participation in practices of succession—all that is part of the practice, however important it might be to explicitly thematize one element or another.\n\nThis understanding of practice implies a particular kind of social order, one in which precisely this kind of continuity is staged from the top down, so that a central and particularly visible part of governance is practices of succession carried out by whoever is responsible for maintaining the entire system of succession. After all, if governing is a practice, and to be genuinely governing involves issuing imperatives that are obeyed in ways that are recognizable as the imperatives actually issued, then the most certain way to ensure that governance is enacted is to have the practice of succession in the hands of the governor: if someone else is to choose the successor, then whoever that is has ample means for interfering in ongoing practices of governance.\n\nOnly a ruler who can see to the continuing perfection of his practices of rule in perpetuity can be said to be ruling. Ruling involves ruling through technology ,so it is ordered governance, which means continuity at the center, which comprises scenic design. In this way, we can also account for a postsacrificial center, which is to say, a center to which the ruler is obedient but which nevertheless cannot be deployed by saboteurs to undermine his rule for \"non-compliance\" with it. Singularized succession in perpetuity obeys the primary imperative, rooted in the originary event itself, or \"linguistic presence,\" to ensure the continuity of the center and the alignment of the community with it.\n\nMeaningful practices are meaningful in the literal sense of being linguistic enactments which offer \"proof\" of the words, sentences and texts one produces in the constellation of all around the center implicit in the completion and succession of one's practices. This entails enacting the social roles privileged by the community, whether they be familial, occupational, or civic, and all of which, if not having one true, fixed meaning, are constituted by a set of possible \"falsifications\" and \"verifications\" that qualified observers can respond to from within their own practices. The sacred is rerouted to the significant—doing things that mean something in the sense that someone could follow up on them in ways that you would recognize as a follow up—which it was always conjoined with anyway.\n\nThere is nothing utopian in this social logic because it also describes what everyone is already trying to do, even if it tends to be most explicit in families where parents want their children to grow up to be more or less better versions of what the parents imagine they'd be growing up to become under those conditions, and to have children who in turn… Political leaders, in proportion to their strength as leaders, select and promote successors who will continue their agenda; any conscientious worker in any industry whatsoever wants to attract and train those who will continue and improve the work; an artist wants to establish a new tradition of that kind of art, or to continue in such a way that will enable others to continue, that form of art, and so on.\n\nIn fact, it is bureaucrats who are least able to stage succession because they must display obedience to anonymous procedures that explicitly take such staging out of their hands—so, they can only stage succession in underhanded ways. So, the best way to participate in the imperative order is to exemplify, encourage in others, and make more explicit singularized succession in perpetuity. I haven't emphasized this, but such practices also involve some form of homage to one's predecessors, those whom one has been selected by, or whom one wants to prove oneself worthy of being retroactively \"adopted\" by. This theoretical approach won't necessarily tell you directly what do with or about Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, etc.— such a theory is more for readying you to listen for imperatives than to issue them.\n\nBut I would issue the soft imperative to, even if it goes against the grain, embrace the narrowing of options I suggested above: whatever you are building, you want it to be the one thing you need to build in order to obey the command to install singularized succession in perpetuity across the social order—and, you want what you build to issue such a command as well, broadcast and ramified as far as you can send it. Imperatives that are built to last will narrow things down but also open things up, insofar as the imperative interferes and is interfered with by others, requiring continual hypothesizing and refinement.\n\n(This also means that if you're wrong, you're generating the practices that will reveal that.) It's hard to imagine anything more powerful than participating in a command structure traceable back to the origins of humanity and stretching forward to indefinite human continuance, nor any more compelling program of study than to identify everything worthy of continuation in our practices, and what perfection of those practices would most likely ensure that continuation. Rather than standing outside of technology and determining what use we want to put it, we participate in technology as a mode of revelation of our planetary destiny."
    },
    {
      "slug": "power-and-paradox-pdf",
      "title": "Power and Paradox (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/power-and-paradox.pdf",
      "content": "The liberal world order presents itself as a vast mapping of “rights.” No political or social question can be discussed without being framed in terms of “rights”—someone’s rights being violated, or recognized, or clashing with some other set of rights. Even when we speak of “balancing” rights against some other imperative, like stability, prosperity or order, we are still speaking about balancing one set of rights against another, for terms like “stability,” “prosperity” and “order” merely represent the rights individuals have to be protected from violence, or to have their pensions paid on time and in full, to have a job, and so on. If, through some globally imposed Oulipian constraint, we were forbidden to use the word “rights” in discussing public events, no one would have the slightest idea of what to say.\n\nThe saturation of our political discourse by “rights” has been noted for generations—one of the better known dissections was Mary Ann Glendon’s 1991 Rights Talk. The concern of those critical of rights talk has usually been that it marginalizes an older discourse of virtue, community and responsibility that once prevailed in Western polities. This is no doubt true, but at least as important is the thoroughly paradoxical nature of “rights.” If there are to be rights, they must be enforced, by some agency large enough to enforce them without hindrance. The state, naturally. The more rights we discover, acknowledge, and demand enforcement of, the more powerful and unhindered the state must be. If we are talking about “international human rights,” we must therefore be speaking of a state, or states, capable of exercising imperial control over other states: to compel other states to enforce the rights in question, and to remove their governments if they can’t or won’t.\n\nIn that case, when we are speaking about rights, we may believe we are looking to the uniqueness and dignity of each individual, in an ever more refined and sensitive way; what we are in fact doing is imagining enhanced forms of sovereignty. We can put this very bluntly. If rights need to be defended, they need to be defended against someone. When we posit a right, or advocate for one, then, we are imagining a state willing and ready to act against specific people assumed to be potential violators of that right. Each new right conjures a state with more and longer tentacles. When one advocates for homosexual rights, one imagines a state willing to act against those who will violate those rights —who will not hire homosexuals, who will not rent or sell to them, who will assault them, who will murder them.\n\nIf the state is to be ready to act against some people, it must have some idea who they are; at any rate, in the process of enforcing the right certain profiles will emerge. The state, and all those acting in conjunction with the state, can say who they are on the watch for: “homophobes.” The entire victimary bestiary of homophobes, racists, sexists, transphobes, xenophobes and so on are nothing more than “superstructural” or “ideological” projections of the sovereignty necessarily imagined by rights talk.\n\nI have not forgotten that the first calls for rights were for rights against the state. There is something paradoxical in the first consistent articulation of rights that exist separate from and prior to the state, that of Hobbes: the most basic right, that of life, and therefore of self-defense, so that one has the right to defend one’s life even against the state (so, the prisoner on death row being taken to execution has no obligation to go peacefully), leads to the first argument for a state to which nothing is forbidden, except perhaps disregard for its own survival, which really just means the right to self-defense of the sovereign himself. If the individual is to surrender all rights (except self-defense in the last, hopeless, resort) in order to have his most fundamental right defended more effectively by the sovereign, he must accept a sovereign that is capable of doing anything, anytime, to anyone.\n\nHobbes was at least consistent enough to realize that you cannot have rights against the state. The “laborist” argument for rights introduced by Locke initiated the tradition of positing rights against the state, limiting its powers. This is the argument that has, of course, been institutionalized and venerated in the United States, and we still see significant vestiges of this argument among American conservatives, and more than vestiges when it comes to the defense of gun rights. So, it might appear as if this original, “classical liberal” understanding of rights has been distorted by later victimary rights claims: this distinction is what the argument over “equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcomes” and “negative vs. positive rights” comes down to.\n\nBut it’s not really the case that advocates of these rights stood outside of any entanglements with the state, and just wanted to be left alone to add their labor to various pieces of nature surrounding them. They wanted the state (first of all a liberalizing monarchy) to be deployed against the Church, aristocracy and other privileged groups, such as corporations chartered by the state, independent towns, banks, and guilds. It’s easy for us to overlook this, since the most formidable of those entities either no longer exist (or exist in a thoroughly neutered form), and few today could muster any historical sympathy for them.\n\nBut that just means that we identify with the state that swept them into the dustbin of history, or broke and trained them. The history of the United States, meanwhile, the first modern society with neither a monarchy or aristocracy, has been the history of different groups trying to influence the state so as to defend their rights against some other, “privileged” group.\n\nMeanwhile, defending rights of free speech and bearing arms generally involve trying to bring the state into your quarrel with some local public authority, and whichever groups support it. So, even the most “natural” of rights involve using the state against one’s enemies.\n\nIf I am right, I am pointing to an enormous discrepancy between what we are saying and what we are doing in our rights talk—between the constative and the performative effects of that talk. We can formulate the discrepancy as follows: the more the distribution of goods and status is centralized, the more vehemently we deny the existence of any center. Are “rights,” then, real, and is advocacy for them effective? Yes, they can be—the state can genuinely take the side of one group of citizens against another. Beyond that purely political consequence and the benefits that follow, though (it is surely good to have the state on your side), there is no correlation between an increase in rights and an increase in other goods, like human dignity or human flourishing.\n\nThat is a very difficult claim to defend, of course —or to refute: we would need to have some shared language through which we can evaluate “dignity” and “flourishing.” But we don’t have such a shared language, precisely because the effect of the direct relation between state and individual created by the system of rights makes any such shared language impossible: any assertion of shared values or virtues would inevitably privilege one group over others and therefore be the ground for a claim that the former were violating the rights of the latter. So, if we can agree that being bereft of a shared language for discussing human dignity and flourishing is itself detrimental to human dignity and flourishing, then to that extent at least, I have made the case.\n\nI would also say that, on the face of it, the very discrepancy I am pointing out subverts any claims that rights talk has enhanced human existence. If rights talk has been so beneficial, why must the obvious correlation between the growth of the centralizing state and individual rights be so overlooked? Why are the actual power relations obscured, rather than celebrated? No group or individual has an interest in an explicit statement of the facts: I do what I can to use the state against those who obstruct or irritate me in some way. Rights talk constitutes a virtually universally shared, one might say “constitutive,” delusion that is required for the perpetuation of the system. But the reliance of a political order on hysterical and escalating delusions is an indictment of that order. So, it might be worth the effort to imagine a social order without “rights.”\n\nIf the most telling defect of rights talk is the denial of the center behind vituperative claims that others wish to possess it, it may be that renewed attention to the center might provide a way of replacing “rights.” The originary hypothesis involves a group of proto-humans surrounding a central object; the emission of the originary sign generates, out of that object, a sacred center that subsists even when the object itself has been divided and devoured. If the significant is ultimately the sacred, there can be no significance without a center. We can take the relation to some center to be constitutive of human being.\n\nIn The End of Culture, Eric Gans’s reconstruction of the centerperiphery relations subsequent to the originary scene follows the succession of ostensive, imperative and declarative cultures. What he shows along the way is that the center as an agent is constructed prior to any agency on the margins, with the latter form of agency being modeled on that originally attributed to the center. In his analysis of imperative culture, Gans notes that the memory of the sacred object must conceive of that object as a sacred being that exists above and beyond the concrete manifestations it may take on. The “signified” of the word/gesture of designation has thus become partly independent of its referent.\n\nThis independence is not merely formal; the imperative is effective only insofar as it is addressed to this “signified,” summoning it to be present. Thus the sacred being in imperative ritual possesses, in the eyes of the participants, an intentional ability to manifest itself or not.\n\nThe asymmetry of the imperative is a step in the direction of establishing symmetry between the sacred being and its worshipers—in a word, of humanizing the sacred. The animal images and masks that we may associate with the imperative level of culture are in fact signs of a growing anthropomorphism. This is the beginning of a development with profound ethical consequences… The ethical conception of the community depends no longer on the mere ad hoc appearance of the sacred being but on the will of a being whose judgment whether or not to manifest itself in the rite reflects the real cohesion of the community. (115)\n\nThe sacred being at the center exists above and beyond any of its concrete manifestations, it is addressed, it has intentionality, it can choose to be present or not—before any of these capacities are attributed to any of the members of the community. The sacred being is “humanized” before the humans are, it is anthropomorphized before there are humans on which to model the non-human—the human community takes on the attributes by modeling itself on the sacred being it has modeled. The center precedes the margin in every sense, and if agency on the margins was first constructed by analogy with the agency attributed to the center, it’s hard to see when that would have ceased to be the case.\n\nSo, my argument above that the presumably individualizing insistence of rights is in fact a way of imagining ever more comprehensive modes of sovereignty, can, if anything, be formulated even more forcefully: any time we designate an individual, event, or activity as protected, in actuality or possibility, by the sovereign, we are in fact modeling the agency of that sovereign. And there is no individual, event or activity in a society governed by a sovereign that could be intelligible other than as protected or proscribed by the sovereign.\n\nThe agency of the center is constructed through the ongoing interaction between center and margins. On the originary scene, the center repulses the grasping of the members of the group, compelling them to stand down. The implication from the beginning is that once we have signification, the center is irresistible: there is nothing without the center, and a particular center can only be replaced by another center. Within imperative culture, the center-margin interaction proceeds through an exchange of imperatives: the members of the community make requests of the center, requests which must ultimately be reducible to the request that the center make itself available; meanwhile, the center issues orders to the members, orders which themselves must be reducible to serving and preserving the center.\n\nAny exchanges among the members themselves generate new centers that ultimately “orbit” the sacred center of the community: at the very least, if we are talking about something, we share the same language, and we can look at some object together without falling out, and must therefore share a relation to a prior center. Finally, declarative culture takes form in narrating and commenting on activities taking place at the center, which involve the central figure providing or failing to provide for the community, with an increasingly complex system of discourse detailing all the different ways the center and the periphery can serve, betray, and disappoint one another.\n\nThese are tales of the resentment of those on the periphery toward the center. And the secular discourses that emerge from mythological ones, and that are able to place human, mortal figures at the center, are modeled on the agency of the center, while incorporating resentment at being denied centrality themselves.\n\nGans has also argued that all resentment is ultimately resentment of the center (“The center as unique locus of significance is by this fact the focus of resentment,” “The Centre,” Chronicle 579). Gans identifies such resentment as being present on the originary scene itself, in the member’s resentment of the center for not presenting itself, for being unavailable while subsisting after the consumption of the object. That all resentment is ultimately a form of resentment towards the center is a difficult, but very illuminating concept. If a friend, for example, takes advantage of my friendship to advance himself at my expense at work or in some community activity, isn’t it him, my friend, that I am resenting, rather than the center?\n\nMy focus certainly seems to be on my friend: I want to tell him what I think of him, I want to get back at him, I want others to know that I should really be in his place. But all of those actions, whether imagined or actually carried out, are actions that are prohibited under normal conditions, and part of the reason I fantasize about doing or doing them is precisely because they are prohibited. You don’t say things to someone else just for the sake of hurting them; you don’t interfere with the operations of some shared activity for the sake of slaking your own desire for revenge; you don’t indulge your vanity when you are charged with public responsibility.\n\nThe reason you don’t do those things is that the center forbids them: all moral commands forbidding such “sins” come from the center. In that case, then, your resentment is, in fact, directed toward the center: the center has failed to ensure that the rules have been followed, and so you consider lifting your obligation to follow those rules yourself. This resentment might take the form of losing faith in God, or becoming more cynical about civic institutions or leaders, which is to say, those obliged to represent and preserve the center.\n\nThe Big Man’s usurpation of the sacred center, in Gans’s historical account perhaps the most revolutionary act in human history, can be understood as evincing just such a resentment of the center. The sacred center within the egalitarian community could not provide due recognition of the Big Man’s actual status. At the same time, the Big Man’s usurpation resolves some crisis within the community—if the Big Man were just acting on his own desire for centrality, he would have no idea what to do once he acquired it. It was either him or another contender, or an increasingly destructive struggle amongst various contenders.\n\nThe Big Man knows, more or less consciously, that he must manage the very resentment that enabled his own elevation, resentment that will now be directed towards him. Resentment within the community is now modeled on this new mode of centrality—it is no longer directed towards the absent center for not presenting itself, but towards the occupant of the center precisely for occupying it and thereby denying my own centrality (which I model on his). We should note the paradoxical nature of this resentment, which depends upon its object for self-definition: the more the Big Man preserves his own centrality, the more I am being denied my own.\n\nIn archaic forms of sacred kingship, this takes the form of conferring ever more significance upon the king, who mediates between the community and the cosmos; while at the same time making the king far more vulnerable, as he is now responsible for any misfortune that befalls the community, and can fairly easily be removed by precisely the same kind of unanimous confrontation with the center through which humanity first emerged.\n\nWe could hypothesize that this vulnerability led to the establishment of more defensible forms of (still sacred) kingship, which we could call “imperial.” The imperial king is removed from the ostensive grasp of his community; in fact, he rules over many communities, each with their own local cults. His sacrality is more abstract, and less bound up with the ebb and flow of everyday life. The ancient empires lasted a very long time, in some cases millennia, and it’s worth considering why they nevertheless vanished, never to be recreated. They clearly weren’t viable past a certain point. If we are to see the center as the final cause of social developments, and the management of resentment toward the center as the main problem of government, we must look there to account for the limits of imperial sacral rule.\n\nImperial sacral kingship introduced two major innovations. First, the conquest and subsequent mass enslavement and conscription of entire populations; second the introduction of money and trade, ultimately linked to the former (in particular military necessities), but carried out by far more elite layers of the population. We have, as part of the same system, increasingly sophisticated institutions and therefore conceptions of justice (giving to each “his due”), that make it possible to distinguish between various forms of intention and responsibility; and the generation of massive organizations of human fodder, with sufficient excess populations for the institution of large scale human sacrifice.\n\nThe incommensurability of these two interdependent systems sets the stage for the cross-civilizational crisis leading to what Karl Jaspers first called the “Axial Age.” (I am indebted to David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years [Melville House: 2014] for this analysis.)\n\nResentment toward the sovereign center must come from the elites: it’s impossible to imagine something like a slave or peasant revolt in the ancient empires (and there were a lot of them) without some form of elite sponsorship. Such resentment would be located within the justice system, most likely the upper echelons of that system, and would involve some figure being treated “unjustly” in a very visible way. Such injustice would be more visible if carried out against an exemplary figure, someone relatively independent but previously trusted by the sovereign, even a favorite, and a figure capable of articulately framing his mistreatment in the terms of abstract justice.\n\nAll that would be necessary would be to narrate such an event (which may, of course, have happened many times, with a synthetic version ultimately emerging) modeled on the imposition of social death and human sacrifice upon the conquered population. This exemplary individual sets himself apart, is ready to face social death, to explain himself and to do so publicly. The imperial sacral order would then become unviable, at least in the long term, because there is now a new mode of selfsacrificial sacrality that can address the crises produced by sacral imperial rule. This new mode of sacrality can be embraced by elites and the broader populace alike, and would therefore be a pole of attraction for the new merchant, priestly, and scribal classes (a more comprehensive account would have to connect these developments to the emergence of both money and literacy in the ancient world).\n\nDefeats and failures attributable to the sovereign would redound to the credit of the new, “Axial Age” sacralities, gradually discrediting the system of sacrifice and the divinities sanctioning it. For quite a while, though, this counter-sacrality might serve to sharpen the tools of imperial rule, as post-sacral, literate modes of thought can be applied to the mechanisms of domination, public manipulation, and war. Any viable form of governance must be able to trace its origins back to some such dialectic.\n\nGans focuses on the Axial Age acquisitions Judaism and Christianity, and sees their rejection of a sacrificial center and creation of a universal morality as the basis for the ultimate unfolding of liberal democratic market society. Each individual becomes a center with liberalism and the market model. Gans’s analyses of Romanticism, in which individuals present themselves as universally excluded from society in order to create a style or mode of being that enables them to circulate within society (see, for example, Originary Thinking 164-171) lays the ground for his understanding of the omnicentrism of liberalism.\n\nGans makes perhaps his most unequivocal claim along these lines in the conclusion of Originary Thinking: “[t]he historical movement of desacralization operates neither through the endless deconstruction of the originary center nor through its definitive rejection, but through its omnicentric multiplication. Even ‘decentralization’ is a dangerous term; what is required is rather the universal proliferation of centers—every human being a center” (219). But as Gans also recognizes, someone will always present him/herself centrally first, so omnicentrism is as asymmetrical and the modern market Gans theorizes in his essay “On Firstness”: “market exchange maintains a permanent distinction between production and consumption, creating a permanent asymmetry between the consumer and the producer” (45), creating new forms of resentment. The paradox of market omnicentrism, then, is that it is the production system that produces the very forms in which new centers, denouncing that production system, are projected.\n\nIf this highly asymmetrical omnicentrism does not lead to violence it must be because a powerful central state ensures that it doesn’t: indeed, consider how strong and centralized the state must be, and what a civilized political culture it must have inculcated, for the romanticist and later modernist cultural entrepreneurs to have flouted social norms so blatantly not only with impunity but for fame and profit. It should be mentioned that Gans does not often feel obliged to refer to the state in conducting such discussions, and in those cases rarely referring to its coercive and controlling functions, relegating it to the role, essentially, of redistribution, or addressing those resentments regarding market asymmetries that might threaten the system. Liberal democracy is a kind of replication of the market model:\n\n“[t]he liberal-democratic model is based on the regulation of the economic market by a political system that shares the quality of the market by bringing to bear collective judgments rather than granting absolute powers to a tyrant or self-perpetuating decision-making group. Freely contested elections and political debate are essential to allowing the various members of society to propose and enact measures to assuage their resentments. (“Liberal Democracy in Question,” Chronicle 562).\n\nBut if the political system works in exactly the same way as the economic system, by aggregating individual choices into a collective result that no one really chooses, why should it not simply aggravate the resentments generated within the market system? The voter is doing exactly the same thing as the consumer: “purchasing” a piece of power from a producer (the political party and its donors and patrons) in order to express her resentment at being ignored by the center. In the political sphere, it is even worse, because the voters, far more openly than consumers, are choosing against others, in order to frustrate and humiliate their rivals. The system, as proposed here by Gans, can only work if the\n\n“measures” proposed to “assuage” the resentments of the various individuals and groups in the social order actually do so. But why should we assume that those measures do, on balance, “assuage”? They can only do so if they are reasonable measures, effectively implemented, and if the legitimacy of decisions made by those implementing is accepted sufficiently to prevent the emergence of violent factions. Does the democratic system provide ground for assuming that any of this will be the case—that the measures will be reasonable, that they will be monitored beyond the minimal necessity of showing that a response has been made to some highly publicized resentment, that institutions and agencies are in place to implement the measures effectively, that they will be accepted by those by whom they must be accepted (rather than, for example, taken as a down payment for the next set of measures)?\n\nIf the measures are actually implemented in such a way as to assuage, it will be in spite of, not because of, democracy: it will be because authority has been granted to institutions that is not revocable on a regular basis. But if reasonable measures can only be carried out by institutions placed, if only by convention, beyond direct public accountability, how is the functioning of those institutions improved by providing them with the task of “assuaging” in the first place? In other words, to the extent that governing institutions are trusted it is insofar as much of their operation remains beyond the reach of liberal and democratic demands, but this is what liberalism and democracy are unable to accept. Everything must eventually be politicized.\n\nThe role of governance in originary thinking must be framed in terms of our understanding of resentment. There seems to me in Gans’s discussions of resentment and the various modes in which is gets “discharged” and “assuaged” in liberal democracies an assumption about resentment that is unwarranted by originary thinking itself. That assumption is that the resentments we see in these societies are simply the natural expression of unmediated resentments: it is natural that blacks would resent whites, or “racism”; it is natural that women would resent men, or “sexism” or “patriarchy”; it is natural that homosexuals would resent… and so on.\n\nThe assumption is circular: because these resentments have been given the most prominent and explosive public expression, they are therefore the most “real” and “authentic” ones. It is just as easy to see these resentments as ones that have been opportunistically seized upon and inflamed within a system of “rights” that invites and even depends upon the perpetual stoking of resentment. If liberalism and democracy are to be taken as “natural” forms, including in the sense that they are “higher” social forms than the monarchies that preceded them, then these might very well be the most promising resentments for political entrepreneurs to incite insofar as resentments will be sorted out in accord with the order in which rights have been allocated to various groups.\n\nBut if allocating rights and using them to deploy resentments against a social order which was removed violently rather than “refuted” was in fact the means by which liberalism and democracy were installed in the first place, then this appearance of naturalness dissolves. If resentment is always resentment of the center, then the center must play a formidable, even formative, role in shaping those resentments. Temporary occupants of the center in a liberal democratic order will promote those resentments that enable them to prolong their stay at the center, while their opponents will promote those that will enable them to take over the center themselves.\n\nIf the occupant of the political center, the wielder of central power, has a far more permanent status, he will have no need to hype potential resentments, and if hope of displacing him is non-existent, neither will anyone else. In other words, a central figure in a system without rights would have more of an incentive to govern and allow other institutions to perform their primary functions. There would still be resentments—certainly an acceptance of the originary hypothesis compels us to grant the constitutive nature of human resentment—and we could also concede that they will be directed toward the political center, but the contents of the resentments will be radically different, and far less conducive to violence.\n\nIn a well governed order, the form taken by resentments will be towards the failures of institutions in fulfilling their primary function. Are managers placing employees in the positions they are best suited for? Do teachers maximize the learning potential of students? Do producers provide products worthy of selective consumers? Resentments along these lines, even when “irrational,” which is to say driven by mimetic rivalry rather than an informed estimate of the actual situation, will not be implicitly insurrectional. They will be calls for more firmly and intelligently exercised authority.\n\nWhat generates power, and gives one person power over others? Here as well we must think in terms of proximity to the center. The first instance of human power was on the originary scene, where a group of newly formed humans collectively deferred their desire and allowed a new reality to emerge at the center. This provides us with a model of human power: creating realities by following the lead of the object at the center of shared attention, rather than rivalrous desires. Power is always differential because some members of any group, in any situation, will exhibit greater powers of deferral: they will be able to stop and examine a situation while others are rushing in, and they will have the patience to wait and see when the unfolding reality provides an opening for action.\n\nTo the extent that the group is successful, they will follow those exhibiting a greater power of deferral, which means those individuals will have the power, and, ultimately a single individual will have the power because someone must exhibit the greatest power of deferral. Power is an interpretation of the demands of the center, and the center can only demand one thing at a time: whoever best articulates that demand governs, regardless of how close others might have been to doing so. This need not exclude all kinds of consultation, and an awareness of the needs and resentments of others in the group will make the exercise of power more steady and secure but I am making a kind of absolute ontological claim here: whe never many act together, we can identify a single leader who makes every decision that counts.\n\nIf common action seems consensual, that just means that a strong sense of common goals and a shared ability to set aside rivalries masks the fact that, perhaps in a somewhat more subtle way, someone is taking the lead at every point where a disagreement is possible; if different people decide at different times, that means that either group is changing configuration while there is always a single head, or that the head has implicitly or explicitly delegated decision making power to others or, perhaps, that the group is in process of splitting up.\n\nPower is therefore also a relationship: as soon as power is in someone’s hands, he is obliged to continue to exhibit and even enhance his powers of deferral. He is now responsible for his fellows, and he must treat and respond to them as the center would have him do, setting aside his own resentments in the process. He must register and re-present their resentments of him as occupant of the center: each will, at times, believe that he or she could better play the central role, and sometimes some of them may be right. The holder of power has to convert these resentments into new forms of cooperation, emulation and friendly competition.\n\nWe are not used to thinking of power this way, as earned leadership, even if there’s no other way of explaining the earliest and still most basic forms of informal hierarchy: liberal and democratic attacks on the center encourage us to see power as arbitrarily held until proven otherwise—and even the proof is always considered provisional. But it must also be said that most forms of power in the contemporary world don’t really look like this—the occupants of power often attain their positions through more or less subtle forms of violence, deception and manipulation. But these degenerate forms of power are only possible because social institutions once founded on the kind of deferral Philip Rieff called “charisma” have shaped the reality of the community so thoroughly that only under the most extreme circumstances will abuses of those institutions lead to their abandonment.\n\nIndeed, as I have pointed out, only the creation of a new, equally viable center could make such abandonment even thinkable. Such is the necessity of the center, and such the power of the memory of the founding of (especially) political institutions, that there is indeed a great deal of ruin in a nation. And it must also be said that even when the highest levels of social institutions are held by those who exploit the credit of the institution for personal or factional benefit, or short term ends, much of the rest of the institution might be in the hands of those still acting in accord with its primary purpose; in this way, institutions can be maintained even through disastrous leadership. For a while, at least.\n\nPower must be distributed and transferred, and this can be done only by those who hold power. The distribution of power is also modeled on the originary event. Now, when we think about a center, we think about a circle, and so we imagine the members of the originary community arrayed symmetrically equidistant from the central object. The first ritual would most likely represent the event in this way, and there would be extremely compelling reasons to maintain this ritual form. But just as the order of deferral on the originary scene must have been unequal, so must have been the approach to the object in the sparagmos.\n\nSome members of the group would manifest their deferral earlier and more clearly; and some would eat more and take better portions, just never so much as to re-ignite the mimetic crisis at the origin of the event. But in order to ensure that no one takes too much more, some members of the group would have to intervene where conflicts seem to be getting out of control. Those who get better portions might often be those who then have to “adjudicate” between other members of the group, since they are already assured of their part. The adjudicators may very well have been those who deferred first and were therefore deferred to. Any distribution of power will likewise be uneven, as it must be guided by the needs of following the commands of the center.\n\nThe transfer of power is the more difficult problem. Whoever has seized the center may eventually become less fit than others to wield that power, or at the very least must eventually die. Here we see the paradox of power in its fullest form. My analysis so far has suggested that power must ultimately be held by a single member of the community, who is in turn responsible for its distribution. Needless to say, every new power holder does not revisit every decision ever made on which person is to occupy which position; rather, by allowing many, most, or all to continue in their positions, he now takes responsibility for the decisions that put them there in the first place and demonstrates his faith in the judgment of those who exercised power before him.\n\nEvery member of the community knows, more or less explicitly, that there must be someone occupying the center, but part of the way each knows this is through his resentments directed toward the center. Those resentments will be at their most powerful when there is uncertainty at the center, and therefore no clear “framing” of those resentments. The transfer of power is therefore that moment where both the sanctity of the center and the power it confers is formalized and where resentments toward the center are most “unbound.” The formalization of power can quell those resentments by referring back to previous framings and implicitly promising their renewal, or it can make the attempted seizure of the center all the more attractive in the knowledge that any occupant can be sanctified by the same formalities.\n\nThe election of those who are to occupy positions at the center is best seen as an attempt to resolve the paradox of the transfer of power. Election was a common way of choosing kings in primitive communities and was replaced by hereditary rule once the kingdom became, through conquest, the property of the king, which could therefore be transferred like any other form of property. Sooner or later there will be a situation in which there is no clearly eligible heir, in which case violence becomes a very likely way of settling the question of succession. The problems with election run even deeper than that, though. Through elections the power centers distributed throughout the community become permanently antagonistic to each other, and if there is no permanent occupant of the center, then the state just becomes an instrument in the hands of one faction, or coalition of factions, or the other, with every incentive to make as much use of it as possible until it passes back into the hands of your opponents.\n\nThat the temporary holder of power holds it on popular sufferance is seen by democracy advocates as a virtue, but in fact those without power can have no way of knowing how those with power should use it. All anyone can know authoritatively is the sphere of activity in which he participates, along with the specific mode of power allocated to him for that purpose. Elections formalize and make explicit the dependence of the power holder on those he leads or governs, but they do so in the worst possible way, outside of the context of the responsibilities and powers of the subjects themselves. The dependence of power upon its base is far better formalized through modes of consultation through which all members of the community act as eyes and ears of the sovereign and communicate to him through established channels.\n\nFinally, elections inevitably raise the question of rights, first of all the right to vote: who should be allowed to vote? What age is the cut-off? What about foreigners? The introduction of rights talk means that any attempt to establish a responsible, qualified, invested electorate will be undermined and replaced by universal suffrage. Universal suffrage seems to empower everyone maximally, but it just ensures that no serious decisions can be left to be decided by the electoral process, making it necessary to manage, limit, deceive and ignore in turn the expressed desires of the majority; indeed, the electorate gets turned into proxies of those who actually exercise power, as they fight their battles with their rivals, and themselves ultimately become incapable of fulfilling the functions of an elite.\n\nThat still leaves the problem of power transfer unsolved. This problem can’t be solved by some formal mechanism of selection, since any formal method will be open to interpretation and manipulation and, like any rule, must have its exceptions. The problem is that the transfer of power must involve initiation into power, which means that the occupant of central power must take on the responsibility for recruiting and initiating candidates for succession; but in doing so will he not be raising potential rivals, of each other as well as him, with no filial sympathy of obligation to the sovereign but having been told by that sovereign that he might be a worthy successor?\n\nThe solution is to gear the entire social order towards the resolution of the problem of power transfer. The meaning of social life, the telos of the social order, is to ensure the orderly transfer of power to the worthiest successor. Every institution has its purpose, which constitutes its center: to educate, to protect, to do research, to produce some good or service, to excel in some activity. In each case a power hierarchy is established in the way I have been describing through my discussion of power—the power hierarchy serves the end of the institution, which is why it deserves the respect of the members. The purpose of the sovereign is to ensure that all institutions maintain the form of power proper to their respective purposes.\n\nIn turn, all institutions report to the sovereign and contribute to the initiation of prospective successors, chosen by a process overseen by the sovereign and no doubt institutionally based, on the model of military academies, officer schools and other highly selective elite-promotion institutions. Obedience to the sovereign is sharply distinguished from the contribution to the initiation of the candidates (the sovereign always has a ranking recorded in case succession becomes immediately necessary but is constantly revising the ranking as a result of his oversight of the initiation process). Any obedience to an order of the candidate, much less one contradicting orders given by the sovereign, would stand out, would be alarming, and would be immediately reported, instantly disqualifying that candidate.\n\nThe candidates don’t give orders, in other words—a representative of the sovereign gives whatever orders are necessary on their behalf, as needed for the process of initiation. (Those candidates never chosen to be sovereign can, of course, play other highly valued roles as advisors to or representatives of the sovereign.) Such a breach by a candidate (and possibly by those hoping to be his client) could take place in any institution, as all will participate in the initiation process, and so all institutions must internalize the distinction between obedience to the sovereign and presentation of “work processes” to the candidates—in this way, no breach will go undetected.\n\nMaking this distinction between commands from and obligations to the sovereign, on the one hand, and participating in the process of initiation of potential sovereigns, on the other hand, is, then, the most fundamental tribute to the center paid in a “rightless” system. This distinction will run through all institutions, practices and discourses, in various ways, explicit and implicit. But it then follows that all assessment and even policing of social activities will involve detecting and deferring breaches of the boundary between the present sovereign and the future of sovereignty. The distinction in question presupposes that the only thing that stands outside of sovereign power is the paradox of power itself, which is in fact instantiated in the temporalizing of sovereignty. Degeneration in governance and disloyalty will be effects of and contribute to the treating of potential sovereigns as present or imminent sovereigns. The social order will develop “specialists” in making the distinction, which is to say specialists in the paradox of power.\n\nThe Axial Age acquisitions have always involved the creation of congregations of those who meet to explore together the consequences of the post-sacrificial revelation regarding the paradox of power they have received. Whatever the differences between Confucian thought, Platonism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and other products of the Axial Age, they all rely upon the at least occasional, but usually institutionalized, commitment of “adepts” to clarifying and renewing the revelation in the face of its obfuscations by poorly managed resentments toward the center. It is in the creation of such small groups, or disciplines, that we can identify the retrieval of the originary scene against the background of the crisis of resentment.\n\nSuch groups call for some kind of ascension or heightening of deferral, in this case deferral of the very resentments that have brought the social order into crisis and made existing forms of sacrality ineffective. The disciplines guard the boundary between themselves and the norm of ordinary attentional spaces, while at the same time moving throughout the social order in various ways, inviting recruits, trying to modify especially egregious social practices, seeking the ear of the powerful, leaving records of the discipline’s thinking and practices. This remains the case even when a particular discipline, like the Christian commemoration of the crucifixion, itself becomes the social norm—that just means new disciplines need to be created to preserve the original revelation against its dilution.\n\nIn identifying the paradoxical nature of power in a way that the sovereign can never completely grasp in the act of exercising power, the disciplines potentially set themselves against the sovereign. After all, they have pledged themselves to a center older and higher than the sovereign center, and must judge the sovereign center to be lacking in comparison. We can already see the implications of this construct in the relations between the prophets and kings in the Hebrew Bible, but the potential becomes full-blown reality in the European Christian Middle Ages. From a strictly theoretical point of view, all of modern political thinking, most especially the “rights talk” I began this essay by discussing, emerges out of this ultimately unsolvable problem: the sovereign is God’s regent on earth, which makes him subordinate to God’s will; but God’s will can only be interpreted by God’s representatives on earth, creating from the very beginning the elements of dual sovereignty, or imperium in imperio.\n\nThis division is what provides the opening to modern liberal and democratic politics, which simply replace “God’s will” with the “people,” or the “individual,” or the “nation,” or the “oppressed,” or the “workers,” or some other entity in positing a “real” sovereign to which the actual sovereign must defer. All of modern politics involves trying to subordinate the actual sovereign to one or another version of supposed “real” sovereignty. The implicit, real, sovereign is who has given one one’s “rights.” Behind the scenes are rival powers using these purported legitimations to pin the actual sovereign to their own mapping of actual onto real sovereignty. The state is centralized, power is accumulated, the state becomes a bigger prize, power is more insecure, and the government does less and less governing.\n\nThe Axial Age revelations regarding the paradox of power can be integrated into a secure social order by situating the disciplines within institutions, and charging them with maintaining the distinction between present and future sovereignty. In this way they provide feedback to the sovereign without claiming to answer to some higher authority. Any command can be obeyed in different ways, and the more open-ended the command the more the servant is confronted with the distinction between its “letter” and “spirit.” The disciplines display their loyalty to the sovereign by presenting their obedience to the particularly open-ended charges they are given as in the “highest” spirit of the sovereign—in this way, they never place themselves outside of sovereign power while “reading” the sovereign’s commands back to him (declaratively) in a way that enables him to sharpen his own understanding of the intent informing them.\n\nThis is the most basic form taken by the paradox of power: that the one commanding is himself constituted by the ways his command will be taken up. As Gans shows in his analysis of the imperative in The Origin of Language, for the one commanding the command is essentially an ostensive, a sign whose very issuance generates the reality it indicates; for the one receiving the command, meanwhile, the imperative represents a desire, which by its nature can never be fulfilled in the exact form in which it was conceived. The disciplines stand in this gap between the ostensive and desiring dimensions of the imperative. The disciplines also represent, then, the solution to the other problem endemic to autocratic rule: how to remove the manifestly the unfit ruler.\n\nThe disciplines go as far as they can in making the ruler fitter, while in the last extremity they might work counter to the usual process and transfer their loyalty to one of the potential sovereigns. Of course there are dangers implicit here, but that is the case with any social order comprised of desiring and resentful beings, and we would have to rely upon the people produced within such an order having the intelligence, responsibility—in sum, the sovereign imaginary —to go through the established layers of trust (first of all the sovereign, but then those whom the sovereign himself has trusted…) in such a way as to maintain the singularity of the center. The founding assumption that the occupant of the center must not be subject to any “higher” or “more real” form of sovereignty is preserved.\n\nI hope it is clear that the post-liberal, post-democratic form of social order I am proposing here does not involve a return to some earlier, more primitive social form. In fact, the most prominent form taken by the disciplines today is, of course, that of the scientific discipline, organized around the laboratory and the experiment. The study of the paradox of power would be the social science, taking many forms and treating all social institutions as its “laboratories.” Needless to say, the kind of experimentation possible with the disciplines of physics, chemistry and (with some limitations) biology are inapplicable to social relations.\n\nThe “praxical” study of social order takes the form, rather, of making the norms, rules, hierarchies, and, again, the sovereign imaginary followed tacitly by everyone, more explicit. And then a little more explicit. When anomalies emerge, new practices need to be acknowledged. The center is served and “verified” by naming practices, entities and agencies that have so far gone unnoticed and unacknowledged. Those in the disciplines invent names and take on names that bring more of the tacit to light, and allows it to be authorized and recuperated within the system.\n\nA word on economics and technology. By now, the only remaining justification for the liberal order seems to be that it has made us rich (claims that it makes us freer are, it seems to me, made much more tentatively and taken much less seriously these days—when Twitter, Facebook and Google are rejiggering their algorithms to marginalize “problematic” sites and users, the mask of power is thinning rapidly)—so far, at least, we are still wealthier than the Chinese. It may th very well be that the liberal governance of the 19 and early th 20 century provided a space for the extraordinarily rapid and comprehensive industrialization of Western societies.\n\nThe loosening of sovereign order allowed a few very talented, very intelligent, and sometimes very sociopathic individuals to exploit the simultaneous rapid centralization of those societies to put scientific and engineering disciplines to work in unprecedented ways. There is no need to surrender any of these acquisitions, even if we think that the social order which provided a hothouse for their development by now (at least) causes far more harm than the benefits offered by technological advances it still enables (in increasingly limited ways). There is also every reason to support some kind of market, but one constrained (as every market has always been constrained) by the needs of sovereign power.\n\nAt the very least, for example, the sovereign wants all the means needed for maintaining armed and police forces (weapons, the science and technology needed to produce weapons, the raw materials—metals, sources of energy—information technology and so on) to remain at hand. And the corporate form, with deep roots in Western culture, which involves the chartering of enterprises (mostly but by no means only economic) by the sovereign, provides a structure for managing relations between economic units and the state.\n\nClearly, international order would need to be rethought radically on post-liberal terms. Ultimately, we can assume hegemonic relations between larger, more powerful and more dependent states—there is nothing particularly new in that, even if liberalism prefers to conceal such relations behind the supposed sovereign equality of all states. The hegemonic states would grant sovereignty to their clients up until the point where ineffective or treacherous governance on the part of the client state subverts the larger order of sovereignties itself. Rivalries between hegemonic states, over acquiring clients among other things, may be inevitable, but the respect for sovereign order provides a better basis for peace than human rights or some such chimera.\n\nIt will be argued that state sovereignty has already been tried as a basis for international order in the post-Westphalian world, but it must be said that the coincidence of this order with the emergence of the extreme disorder introduced by liberalism makes this an invalid test of the concept. We will still be left with might be the greatest problem facing humanity since World War 2, even if we discuss it far less now than during the Cold War: the existence of nuclear weapons, whose use could in minutes destroy all of civilization. The best answer to this threat is the development of prophylaxes which can neutralize the danger.\n\nMissile defense shields are the first step in this direction, but as yet unimaginable advances will certainly take place. One thing all (but at least the most powerful) sovereigns may be able to agree on is that it would be better if more scientific resources and sophistication were to go into rendering social orders immune from not only nuclear weapons but from the weaponization of all forms of scientific and technological development. As Peter Sloterdijk has argued, the self-immunization of social orders from threats of all kinds, including internal ideological and psychopathological threats, is essentially synonymous with civilization.\n\nThose sovereigns behind in the process of selfimmunization might object to having their offensive weapons neutralized before they can catch up, but a tipping point can be reached, with the aid of the firmness, moderation and generosity of the more advanced state, beyond which self-immunization will make “offensiveness” of diminishing value. What is at any rate certain is that only centered sovereignties could bring their actions into correspondence with discussions of this kind.\n\nNot too much thought should be given to the specifics of post-liberal social order—doing so just creates disputes that cannot be settled. Liberal theory is a very aggressive, uncompromising and universalizing theory, and is very difficult to confront head on without getting involved in its own paradoxes. To argue with liberalism is to acknowledge it as a legitimate debating partner and, since liberalism is in power, it is to accept its legitimation of you as a legitimate disputant. No matter how the discussion or debate turns out, liberalism wins. What can be done, though, is to display the wreckage liberalism leaves in its wake: as an idea, what is most basic to liberalism is the autonomy of the individual relative to social obligations and traditions; liberalism, therefore, must function as a battering ram against all obligations and traditions (and, by now, even biological reality).\n\nThis destructive activity is constant and extensive, because all of our social reality is constituted through obligations and traditions. In the present moment, in particular, the wreckage is piling up in ways that can no longer be avoided or denied without very obtrusive media and state intervention and manipulation: families broken by feminism, nations broken by immigration and free trade, individuals broken by consumerism and de-industrialization, institutions and communities broken by victimary viciousness.\n\nBut more important than all this material and social wreckage, in fact, inclusive of it, is the breaking of meaning effected by liberalism. I mean “meaning” in the most literal sense here: liberalism makes it less and less possible for people to say what they mean, or to mean anything at all, at least if they want to communicate and circulate within the existing order. By “meaning,” what I mean is that there is a shared ostensive that “seals” any discourse. The shared ostensive doesn’t have to be a thing in the world, a referent— it can just as readily be a concept, or a distinction between things. If I note something about “the roof on that house over there,” it’s easy enough to see where the meaning lies: you can direct your attention to where I am drawing it and see whatever I saw as noteworthy about the roof of that house we can both see.\n\nMeaning is established rather differently in a scientific discipline organized around experimental protocols. But what provides for meaning in social order is the conjunction of power and accountability. If I say “Smith is considering putting a traffic light on that corner,” the sentence makes sense (has meaning) if we know who Smith is and if Smith is someone whose thinking about putting a traffic light on that corner has some determinate relation to a traffic light actually ending up there—say, the mayor, or a traffic specialist hired by the city. If the only Smith we both know is a pianist who lives across the country, you can’t really know what I’m talking about.\n\nThe more we all know who is responsible for making things happen, and the more those people actually do make those things happen, the more meaningfully we can speak. The presumption of a shared order is just as necessary for more abstract and theoretical discussions, which depend upon a shared intellectual tradition, shared texts, a range of known interpretations of those texts, institutions that perpetuate the study of those texts, and so on. Even more “rogue, “avant-garde” or “unorthodox” intellectual spaces distinguish themselves from the more established ones, upon which they therefore depend for making meaning.\n\nNow, let’s remind ourselves of my opening discussion of “rights.” “Rights” can make sense to the extent that they are themselves embedded in social obligations and traditions— for example, the “rights” peasants may have “acquired” over the centuries to use some part of the master’s land for grazing their animals. But we haven’t spoken about “rights” like that in a very long time, a fact that itself testifies to the wreckage liberalism has wrought on the language: now, “rights” above all refer to claims on others with no basis in tradition or established social obligations; indeed, that is their justification, that those traditions and obligations have constituted unjust exercises of power, marginalization and exclusion upon those expected to respect them.\n\n“Right” is coming to refer to some demand no one would have thought of before hearing it, and yet which (or for that very reason) indicts the entire social order of crimes beyond reparation. The point of rights talk now is to generate new forms of power, to be enforced by new centralizations of the state power, informed by new splinterings of power centers grasping at access to state power. The corrosive effects work through all political language but eventually all language, to the point where if you make sense in a liberal order, you make sense in spite of and against that order: by creating a space where discourse can be shared and contained.\n\n(Complaints against specialist jargon are legion, but I’ve never seen anyone consider whether every day, commonsense discourse in liberal orders might, in fact, be far more littered with empty, bizarre and unintelligible terms than the most abstruse jargon. I’m not referring to slang—I have in mind the ordinary ways people come to speak of desires, hopes, obligations and so on. “Meaning,” in the more “existential” sense is clearly implicated here as well.) Responsible language, under late, spiraling, liberalism, must face and record honestly and without blanching the wreckage; and, on the other side, create spaces where meaning is possible because accountability can be joined to power.\n\nSo, what is to be done? Infiltrate the most proximate discipline. Study its origin in the paradox of power. Make the paradox of power explicit where it is now tacit. Become a living, breathing sign of the paradox of power. Listen very carefully for commands from the center. Wait until the center is made singular again, and initiates a new distribution. Be ready to commemorate the transfer of power.\n\nWorks Cited\n\nGans, Eric. The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology. University of California Press, 1985.\n\n⸻-. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford University Press, 1993.\n\n⸻-. “On Firstness” (45-57) The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry (ed. Adam Katz), Davies Publishing Group, 2007.\n\n⸻-. The Origin of Language, New Edition. Forthcoming, Davies.\n\n⸻-. “Liberal Democracy in Question,” Chronicle of Love & Resentment 562, online.\n\n⸻-. “The Centre,” Chronicle of Love & Resentment 579, online.\n\nGlendon, Mary Ann. Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of\n\nPolitical Discourse. Free Press, 1993.\n\nGraeber, David. Debt—Updated and Expanded—the First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2014.\n\nRieff, Philip. Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How it Has Been Taken From Us. Pantheon, 2007.\n\nSloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life. Polity, 2014."
    },
    {
      "slug": "prosecuting-the-nomos-qa",
      "title": "Prosecuting the Nomos: Q&A (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "reddit",
      "sourceLabel": "Reddit",
      "date": null,
      "url": null,
      "content": "Q: Can you help me understand why prosecuting the nomos is so dangerous? It seems obvious why blood vendettas are dangerous on one side but where does one draw the line between a conflict over some piece of the social order that can be adjudicated by Thirdness and something that threatens the nomos itself?\n\nA: An attack on the nomos involves bringing a charge the only remedy for which is the removal of the accused from his place in the distribution. You do this enough times, and directed at positions high enough, and you have civil war.\n\nPutting the nomos \"on trial\" is essentially revolution. It's also lawfare, which works in a more piecemeal way. The model here is putting the king on trial, which one can only do if one believes oneself to occupy a higher legal position, legitimated by God, the people, or some other supposed occupant of the center. But your questions regarding how to determine what accounts as an attack on the nomos are important ones and, having come to this part of the overall concept more recently, I haven't explained much here.\n\nBut I'm starting with the assumption that territory is always acquired through conquest, which includes the distribution of the territory amongst essential members of the team, as determined by the head of the conquering force (who becomes king). Every form and instance of ownership can be traced back to that originary distribution, whether this involves further divisions or the creation of new forms of property out of the existing forms. So, anything you own can be traced back to that distribution, which includes all the legal traditions that have been created in adjudicating disputes between property owners. (Your ownership of anything, i.e., all titles, can also be traced back through the records of the settlements of all disputes.) So, an attack on the nomos itself is an attempt to redistribute property without reference to that history of transmissions and settlements. This would be a higher-order vendetta, a vendetta pursued through the law itself.\n\nSo, your question is, how can we say when this has occurred or is occurring?\n\nIt's ultimately going to be a judgment call, like determining where the threshold above which allowing private retribution reintroduces the vendetta, but I think we can say it's when the state, or the occupant of the center, itself becomes a party to the dispute, which is to say is mobilized by one of the parties, thereby leaving no arbiter.\n\nThis is why anti-discrimination law is such a good example: the majority or \"unmarked\" part of the population is made inherently suspect, or criminalized. It may be that, short of revolution, i.e., literally putting the head of state on trial for being \"inherently\" illegitimate, anti-discrimination law is the fount of all attacks on the nomos and even narrower forms of lawfare—even the prosecutions against Trump ultimately attack his presumptuousness in daring to challenge the organization of the state around anti-discrimination protocols.\n\nBut it may be possible to argue that more, maybe all of the modern state is involved in dismantling the nomos, including, e.g., inflationary monetary policy and debt financing. I suppose the organization of the state around the rotation at the center—the solution of the problem of the \"outside option\" (someone who could be put forward as a more legitimate king) by turning the state into an oscillation between different articulations of debt-forgiveness and debt-enforcement aimed at protecting the \"outside spread\" (the lender of last resort) is nothing but a machinery for demolishing the nomos—a machinery that doesn't always work at the same speed, effectiveness or comprehensiveness.\n\n\"Social justice\" is really the exemplary anti-nomos position, as it demands vengeance against the justice system itself. But then I realized that there is a word, with more religious connotations, which I actually used for this purpose briefly a long time ago and it might be usefully provocative: antinomic."
    },
    {
      "slug": "talk-of-the-center-adam-katz",
      "title": "Talk of the Center (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/talk-of-the-center-adam-katz.pdf",
      "content": "> …the social sciences were born on the day when the 'origin of society' was consigned to a desk draw—to the file labelled 'fantasies.' — Regis Debray\n\nWhere to begin? This is a basic question for any philosophy or discourse in the human sciences: what do you take to be the fundamental \"unit\" of analysis, or methodological principle, or subject position of the master of the discourse— and why? You can start with something that seems very fundamental, like \"Being,\" or a perplexing question that might come up in discourse (what is the \"good\"?); in psychology you start with something like the \"mind\" or \"psyche,\" in sociology \"society,\" or the \"group,\" but these concepts just reiterate those posited by the disciplines themselves. Why are there \"groups\" Why is there \"society\"?\n\n\"Mind\"? \"Consciousness\"? Is \"Being\" anything more than a grammatical artifact? Etc. If these are not simply transhistorical or eternal concepts, both the concepts and their referents must have come into existence at some point, so, to answer a question like \"why 'society'\" or \"why 'mind'\" assumes at one point there was no such thing as \"society\" or \"mind\" and at another point there was—or that at one point concepts like \"society\" and \"mind\" would not have been intelligible and then at another point they became so—the referent and the term came into being together.\n\nIt's possible to say that there are no starting points or origins: we are always in the middle, always becoming. To say something like this to have already chosen a starting point: the question of Being vs. Becoming. It's a philosophical starting point, which therefore locates us within the discipline of philosophy—a discipline which has always had imperial ambitions, asserting a right to examine the passports of anyone claiming to enter into the discourses of what we could broadly call the \"academy.\" What, then, is the origin of philosophy? Is there a time when humans were not questioning the relationship between Being and Becoming (or the One and the Many, etc.), and then a time when they were—and, therefore, an event, something happening, that involved crossing over that threshold?\n\nIf so, we can't expect philosophy to be completely aware or forthcoming about what that event entailed. After all, we know for certain that ritual came before philosophy; so, for that matter, did tragedy (with ritual preceding tragedy, which is really a modification of ritual). So, philosophy's \"coming out\" must have had something to do with opposing, modifying, or rejecting (philosophy itself might say \"transcending\") ritual. Can philosophy be trusted to tell us what was involved in crossing that threshold?\n\nAny starting point that cannot account for its emergence out of ritual must therefore be of limited value, and this is the case for philosophy and all its children, which includes all of the human sciences. \"Groups,\" \"society,\" \"mind,\" \"consciousness,\" \"Being and Becoming\" and all the rest are concepts raised over the graves of ritual. This would mean that a real origin would have to precede ritual. But, of course, even a word like \"ritual\" is a product of the human sciences and is therefore a way of looking at rituals through the rearview mirror, so to speak. Still, what we now call \"rituals\" can share a common point of reference with peoples who engage in rituals, and with peoples who have left us records of the rituals they once engaged in in a way concepts that emerged in philosophy's wake can't.\n\nWe could ask, for example, what happens when a particular act is performed and those performing the act could give us an answer. We could elicit a language, overlapping across ritual scenes, of interactions between beings performing rituals and beings summoned, or appeased, or vivified, by those rituals. And we can ask about the origins of rituals because any group of people performing rituals will have their own accounts of the origins of those rituals because the origins are part of their efficacy. Are inquiring into, narrating, and performing the origins of the things we do no longer part of the efficacy of those doings? If not, when did they cease to be so?\n\nThe remnants of rituals we retain today give us information about what distinguishes a ritually based order from whatever we are to call what we have now. We can work with the kinds of simple examples J.L Austin used in explaining his concept of linguistic \"performativity,\" like marrying a couple or christening a ship. We could argue about this, but I'm going to say that what appears to be the attenuated nature of these rituals is precisely what provides us with information regarding their origins, and our human origins along with them. We know that a clergyman can't actually provide a married couple with good fortune or prosperity or curse them with the opposite if they fail to fulfill their vows— the ceremony doesn't \"do\" anything in that sense.\n\nWhat it does is change their condition and initiate them into the community in a new way. This change of condition has all kinds of consequences that are reinforced by other measures taken by the community—a married couple is treated differently in the law, their children have a different status, and so on, than is the case with unmarried couples. This is precisely the kind of \"privilege\" so resented by those who object to even these minimal elements of ritual culture remaining, and who are the intellectual descendants of those who first of all defined their practices against ritual— philosophers. On what would philosophers form a community, if not on ritual?\n\nSurely the search for truth, of which ritual will sooner or later come into philosophy's sights as the primary enemy because while, for the practitioner of a rite, the rite lives within the sphere of radiation of its origin, for the philosopher the ritual has no real origin—it is an invented origin, by someone interested in suppressing the search for the truth. And the philosopher has a point here, even if we can note that a violent act of instituting a mythical account of the origin of a ritual so as to suppress its real origin would itself be a kind of origin, pointing more reliably to the more obscure one than does the philosophical critique.\n\nThe philosopher has no interest in seeking out the true origin of ritual (even though that should be exactly what he's interested in) because that origin lies in something that precedes and makes possible the search for truth: the foundation of the community itself in a shared act or event. If marriage changes the condition of the couple by conferring upon them a new (for them) status honored in a particular way by the community, then it might very well be that the origin of ritual lies in changing the \"status\" of the entire community, which can only mean creating that community as this community. This claim gets us into paradoxes which not too many philosophers have taken seriously—Rousseau, to his credit, was an exception, as he found himself puzzled by the relation between the community as constituting and the community as constituted.\n\nTo found the community you must have already been a community so as to carry out the founding. It's no coincidence that we find a similar paradox when it comes to the origin of language which, unless you want to embark upon the arduous and disingenuous practice of denying all differences between human language and the communications of even the most intelligent animals, must also have not existed at one point, and therefore come into existence at another. And we have the same problem here as with ritual: how could members of a community know what the newly created words or signs mean without already having a linguistic system and community which would confer meaning upon those words or signs?\n\nI think we've wandered off of philosophy's reservation here. Do we even have any right to continue? I, and you, if you're still with me, have found myself in the same kind of paradoxical situation as those originating language and ritual: I have to confer a kind of legitimacy on my discourse without having the kind of legitimacy that comes from subordinating myself to an acknowledged \"master\" within philosophy or the human sciences that would enable me to do so. Not to be too dramatic, but this is the kind of \"pharmakonian\" situation that Derrida drew our attention to without, at least in my view, being willing enough to set aside his own institutional and disciplinary legitimacy to occupy.\n\nWhether other practitioners of what has come to be known as \"generative anthropology\" (you knew that's what I've been talking about), including its founder, have efficaciously occupied such a position; whether it's necessary to do so, and if so, how, in order to inscribe in history the hypothesis we must leap into in order to resolve while preserving these paradoxes, are all very interesting questions. Think of the kind of overwhelming authority those historically located at the \"vortex\" of such paradoxes have had to invoke in order to imperatively impose their ritual enactment of the paradox. Obviously, I don't have anything approaching such revelational or scriptural authority, or even anything resembling it. One can just elicit signs of the origin of the sign one is issuing in all the other signs and acts it is deferring and differing and in the conditions of deferral (or differance) across the infrastructures enabling its articulation.\n\nWhy it is difficult to do so will lead us to the, not resolution, but presentation of this \"stack\" of paradoxes. I think that Rene Girard was never more correct or insightful when we asserted that dwelling too much upon our fundamentally mimetic nature is simply unbearable. Literature professors, he said, in his book on Shakespeare, would rather admit they want to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers than admit that they feel envy. Who could bear to see an unflinching inventory of the successive bouts of imitation, emulation, envy, resentment, installation of gestures and attitudes, dwelling upon and forgetting of slights and, even more, those brief glimpses of the shameful (why so shameful?) pretense that the acquiescence to the desire of others was nothing more than our own self-creation?\n\nImagine what speaking to each other would be like if we just took for granted that every word and movement of the other was borrowed and translated from another on the condition that that borrowing and translation be denied to the point of forgetting. Much better to argue about whether to be a materialist or idealist. Like with ritual, we retain some sense of our mimetic nature—we speak of good and bad models and examples, and most arguments about \"culture\" take that mimetic nature for granted. And yet there's not much appetite for looking into how the sausage is made, with \"positive\" and \"negative\" role models rather anodyne euphemisms for what's involved in the chaotic construction of a \"self,\" especially under conditions bereft of any carefully plotted out initiatory path for doing so—which suggests that the suppression of mimesis has something to do with the burial of ritual under philosophy. The belief that your motherin-law is torturing you through the \"evil eye\" in its way demonstrates greater knowledge of social interaction than most of our psychology. Even, or especially, if your motherin-law happens to be dead.\n\nIn a social order that takes the individual as the foundational social \"unit\" any admission that you are not wholly yourself just paints a target on your back—you're laying out your vulnerabilities before those who might very well be enemies and, in fact, might be more likely to become your enemies precisely because they see those vulnerabilities. Consider how much of the discourse and practices you and others are engaged in can plausibly be seen as ensuring the boundaries around an intact, self-originating self remain intact. That thing I did—it was the real me who did it. All our institutions, most basically our legal ones, would fall without everyone being willing to say that.\n\nI do wonder whether so much of what seems to me ineffectual in the presentation and promotion of \"generative anthropology\" can be attributed to the sense that there is something impossible about being a bearer and constant reminder of the mimetic nature of the human and what is involved in not simply falling sway to it. The terms of acquiring a \"warrant\" to boldly proclaim \"generative anthropology\" the rightful successor of, say, cybernetics, are far more difficult than those required to proclaim, say, the latest new form of co-existence between man and machine.\n\nRitual must, then, be \"about\" all this mimetic fervor, but ritual can't speak about it as such (it can only reconcile it on the spot), and the fact that we can speak about ritual in these terms also means we can't return to it in any strong sense. We have to get \"behind\" ritual so as to get beyond it in the \"right\" (non-philosophical, non-mimetic denying) way. I just present your own brief inspection of human interactions you're familiar with as evidence that our mimetic nature is regarded as shameful (who comes out and says, \"that's not my idea, I'm just repeating what that guy said,\" other than to quickly, cleanly and shamefacedly disavow what has been said.\n\nBut we can all see that others do \"repeat what the other guy said\" all the time.) Any serious inquirer into things human will keep pressing on this point, then. And I remind you that we are without warrant here, we're liable to be rounded up and ticketed for unlicensed inquiry at any time. Now, the very thing that makes mimesis unavoidably evident and therefore shameful is what also what would seem to neutralize it: everyone just repeating what everyone else says. Conflict would be impossible in that case. Except that what counts as \"repeating\" is not so simple. Now, this is the kind of question philosophy loves to get its hands on —\"identity and difference\"!\n\nBut if we're talking about a situation in which the condition and maybe the existence of the community depends upon some kind of \"agreement\" here, how the impending disaster is to be avoided must at least some extent be improvised and assessed on the spot. (In thinking through mimesis, then, we are always thinking about ways of landing in and preventing humanly made catastrophes.)\n\nThis thought experiment (it could be tried out in actuality— surely some enterprising therapist could give it a go) of avoiding conflict by having each person repeat what the other said, however fruitful, does not get us out of the paradoxes I'm insisting we refuse to lose sight of. You could always notice some difference between what each person and then the next says, some difference in tone, posture, gesture, or context (since part of the context is what the other couldn't have included because it's what he said). So, you can always try to repeat more precisely and unmistakably, but at the same time this means everyone involved would become more expert in noticing ever smaller differences and making ever larger issues of them.\n\nBut we might at least arrive at a kind of steady or meta-stable state of the paradoxes here. The more this ritual of repetition goes on, and even the more \"narcissisms of small differences\" it generates, the more each participant can only represent to himself what he is doing by locating other reference points within the other ways those in the community have said the same thing as everyone is saying. The fact that we're all trying to repeat the same thing, and woe to us if we don't, is installed at and as the basis of the community. No one could ever say anything that couldn't be treated as a more or less competent, ingenious, desperate, defiant attempt to repeat what everyone else is saying—perhaps with an ever greater awareness of how, after all, impossible it really is.\n\nIn this way we find the \"transcendence\" of mimesis within mimesis itself. Criteria for more and less highly valued cultural products suggest themselves. The cultural products we would want to repeat the most carefully and elaborately (eddies of repetition within the broader arena of repeating) would be those that find likenesses among practices that seem to be different (failed attempts to repeat, and therefore dangerous), without minimizing the perception of failure that attended to the reception of those practices—the scope of what can count as repeating what everyone else is saying is expanded, while also creating the expectation that the newly perceived scope be brought into future efforts to repeat what everyone else is saying.\n\nLandmarks, ceremonies, holidays, and monuments are all created to commemorate events where likely failure was retrieved as a new way of repeating what everyone else is saying. Those commemorations in turn provide more ways of repeating what everyone else is saying, because they are themselves what everyone else is saying. (I hope you will all notice the way I have repeated without exactly repeating what I always say, and in that way maybe repeating it all the more faithfully.)\n\nI can now propose that what I have described in this thought experiment is exactly what happens all the time, in every human community. There is not a human interaction that can't productively and exhaustively be studied as an attempt on the part of all involved to repeat as exactly as possible what everyone is really saying. You're trying to repeat what your enemy is not quite succeeding to say by identifying his inimical sayings and doings, you're repeating what those who don't \"get it\" really would be saying if they had arrived at a higher level of circulation of repeating what everyone is saying, you're trying to create a history for yourself as a continuous attempt to meet ever more exacting standards of saying what everyone else is saying.\n\nI would challenge you to identify some human interaction that couldn't productively and exhaustively be described in this way, so as to integrate any human word or deed into the full expanse of history and the spread of institutions. I challenge you to find a more productive and exhaustive way of doing so, even if you want to bring into play the full philosophical and sociological apparatus of \"society,\" \"mind,\" \"becoming\" and so on.\n\nWhat this means is that \"generative anthropology\" is ultimately a kind of \"languaging,\" entering any discourse and making it more of what it already is, saying the same thing everyone else is saying and, therefore, finding ways to say that you are saying the same thing everyone else is saying, This involves remembering when the crisis of imitation was resolved by first one and then two and eventually everyone reversing the cataclysmic trajectory by repeating what the others say by, first of all, treating it as something said rather than an appropriation of something. You can remember this collective extrication from the crisis because language is nothing more than a field of monuments to such extrications, with reciprocal references that can be made to saturate the space by selecting the way of saying what everyone else is saying that draws into its orbit as many other ways of saying what everyone else is saying as possible.\n\nIf all utterances carried along with them reminders of their origin in the first humans' materialized imagining of the dead end created by their own mimetic desires then \"generative anthropology\" would no longer be necessary. And this means that the proper practice of \"generative anthropology\" is to locate oneself as close as possible to that vanishing point where language use itself would be nothing more than \"tagging\" all utterances with such reminders and thereby maximally leveraging the inexhaustibility of saying the same thing everyone else is saying.\n\nThe paradoxes of founding are not thereby eliminated and we will always remain mimetic creatures—indeed, our shared project of saying the same thing everyone else is saying cements our mimetic nature and closes off all exits (not that there were any, or that we still can't fantasize about any). And as long as we are mimetic beings the space of mimesis can be saturated, which means it is always possible to imagine that the other has always already tracked all of your future moves and gotten there before you so you can never again say or do anything that is \"yours.\" This possibility of being utterly silenced, and therefore being taken with the paradoxical necessity of joining the race to silence the other first, will always remain the background, threatening to become the foreground of everybody saying what everyone else is saying.\n\nTo say what everyone else is saying therefore entails including by gesturing toward this possibility, which always takes on a different form. Everybody wanting the same thing must endlessly be converted into everyone saying the same thing, without a firm line ever being drawn once and for all. Doing so must involve saying the wanting, which is to say making explicit what might be and usually is left implicit—we can't say everything we want all the time, just those things and times we want that make the pursuit of wants unredeemed by sayings more likely. All the wants converging together create necessity, and necessarily converge on those who make the interplay of wanting and saying explicit and insistent.\n\nRepeating that we're all repeating and must continue repeating what everyone else is saying enacts that interplay of \"absolute\" mimesis and its ongoing dispersal. And you could repeat what everyone else is saying in the only way that you can right here and now by making it a bit more the same this time."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-anthropoetics-of-power",
      "title": "The Anthropoetics of Power",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/the-anthropoetics-of-power.pdf",
      "content": "The Originary Hypothesis\n\nWe can think about the distinction between liberalism and absolutism in terms of the conflicting notions of equality and hierarchy; individualism and the primacy of the social; self-interest and virtue; nominalism and realism; materialism and faith; proceduralism and responsible decision. We can synthesize all these binaries into the single question of whether the low generates the high or the high originates and presides over the low. The orthodoxy of the modern order is that the low generates the high—desires, interests, bodily needs, inventions, give birth, through some complex process of interaction, to ideas, values, virtues and beliefs.\n\nThe implication is always that ideas, values, virtues and beliefs are nothing more than epiphenomena that can be reduced to their underlying causes; even more, that reducing them to their underlying causes liberates humans from the pernicious illusions we have suffered under throughout our history as a species. The (liberal) political implication first drawn from this doctrine was that top-down political structures are to be avoided, and constitutional, economic and legal structures should be set up so as to allow desires, interests and needs to interact in reciprocally balancing ways. With the advance of the physical and human sciences, though, a new, more top-down (progressivist) conclusion was drawn, that greater knowledge of social, psychological and biological processes could allow for benevolent manipulations of human desires, needs and capacities.\n\nIn that case, knowledge of needs, desires, bodily functions, and human cognition allows for the more effective meeting of needs and desires and the more efficient functioning of body and mind. Politically, this means rule by technicians of the human animal.\n\nThe main resistance to this lowering of the human has come from religions which maintain the understanding of human beings as created in God’s image. But, on the face of it, the order of the modern sciences seems to correspond with the doctrine of the lowering: after all, chemistry depends up physics, biology upon chemistry, and studies of animal (ethology) behavior relies upon biology, and study of humans presupposes that humans are an evolved species of animal. The problem with religious resistance is that the terms of our divine origin must be taken on faith in very specific doctrines which, for many, if not most, cannot withstand the scrutiny of the very modern sciences that have displaced them.\n\nThe only non-religious thought capable of combatting materialist lowering on its own terms—that is, the terms of the very constitution of the human—is the generative anthropology of Eric Gans. Gans is the author of the “originary hypothesis” regarding the origin of language, which for Gans is coeval with the origin of the sacred and of language. Gans presupposes the anthropological model of Rene Girard, for whom the mimetic character of humans (and first of all the advanced hominids who were our immediate predecessors) means that deadly conflict is endemic to the human condition. If I imitate you, I learn to desire through you—I want what you want.\n\nSooner or later I will want the very thing you possess, or reach for, right now, and from being my model you become my obstacle and therefore rival. For Girard, humanity emerged in a collective event in which the mimetic rivalry of the members of the group issued in a mimetic crisis, a collective violent melee, which is resolved by one of the members being singled out by the group and becoming the target of its collective violence. This scapegoat is both victim and god, the latter because he has “saved” the community, which resumes normal cooperative behavior once the crisis has been “resolved.” Girard sees the entire subsequent history of human ritual and reiterations of this original scapegoating event, until the logic of scapegoating is exposed and overturned in Jesus’s self-sacrifice.\n\nGans’s criticism of Girard’s account is based on his observation that without language there is no way for the original event to become meaningful to the group. They have just killed one of their own—so what? Animal groups chase off and kill weaker members all the time. So, Gans’s introduced the sign into the originary event—what he calls the “ostensive” sign, or, more colloquially, pointing. If all the members of the group point to the body of the slain member, thereby informing each other that the episode has been completed, the event can become iterable and therefore memorable and meaningful. But if the sign is what is really important, we no longer have to presuppose the scapegoating and “lynching” of the stigmatized member (an assumption that, as Gans as pointed out, does not correspond to anthropological and archaeological evidence that places the emergence of human sacrifice at a much later date).\n\nWe just need a scene upon which some central object (Gans assumes a large animal, taken down in the hunt) attracts all the members of the group, with that attraction being mimetically intensified (each wants it more because he sees the others wanting it) so that the animal hierarchy (in which the alpha animal would eat first, then the beta, etc.) breaks down as all rush toward the central object. The terror this induces leads some member of the group to hesitate, and gesture toward the object, a gesture all repeat (Gans has termed this the “aborted gesture of appropriation”). This gesture is the first “sign,” the origin of language, because it is the first non-instinctive form of communication that takes on its meaning merely by being sustained by the (now) social group.\n\nThe central object is also the first sacred object, or God: it has saved the community by “making” them cease their self-conflagrating headlong rush to appropriate the object. The originary event is also the origin of resentment: the same sacred Being that preserves the community restrains desire while endowing the object with a sacrality that enhances its desirability. The pecking order of the animal hierarchy is replaced by the human signifying order.\n\nGans’s originary hypothesis is compatible with evolutionary theory while theorizing the creation of the human as a shared leap into a higher mode of being (biology does not determine language) that will now order the human estate. We could say that Gans’s hypothesis “demystifies” religious doctrines but only while preserving their most fundamental anthropological and ethical insight—human beings are not another species of ape, modified by natural selection through a long series of genetic mutations. Most fundamentally, humans have been created by a sacred being who protects them from their “evil” (mimetic and violent) tendencies.\n\nThe transcendent—the sign, whose being is invisible, intangible and eternal—is what defines us. Through a series of books written over the past 35 years (The Origin of Language, The End of Culture, Science and Faith, Originary Thinking, Signs of Paradox, The Scenic Imagination and A New Way of Thinking) and on his Anthropoetics webpage, Gans has explored the implications of the originary hypothesis for history, religion, politics, philosophy, aesthetics and economics. In this essay, I will focus on those elements of Gans’s thinking that lend support to absolutist political thought, which I will in turn define and clarify.\n\nOriginary Thinking and Civilization\n\nThe earliest human groups were egalitarian hunting and gathering communities, organized around rituals devoted to some animal that was simultaneously food source, sacred object and ancestor. No wealth can be accumulated or political hierarchy established, as all social relations are organized by ritual and kinship relations enforcing traditional and roughly equal distribution of resources. The first significant transformation of human order attended to by Gans (primarily in The End of Culture, but he returns to this in Science and Faith) is the emergence of the “Big Man” studied by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and others.\n\nThe Big Man, through enterprise, discipline, and what Gans calls “producer’s desire” accumulates goods and prestige that place him above the egalitarian community. The Big Man marks the beginning of wealth accumulation, individual liberty, and social hierarchy. Even more, the Big Man usurps the ritual center of the community, taking on a sacred status, ultimately becoming a kind of God King (this is really the origin of the scapegoating phenomenon studied by Girard). Gans distinguishes “producer’s desire” from “consumer’s satisfaction” to distinguish between competing dispositions within the egalitarian primitive community: on the one hand, to imagine the community as a whole, and take the initiative to attend to its ritual representation; on the other hand, to enforce the equal distribution of shares of the community’s product. It is the producer’s desire that is manifested in the Big Man, and the “consumer” both relies upon and resents the “producer.”\n\nThe Big Man, and the more established sacred kings and God emperors who follow is the center of devotion and obedience in the community: he is the center of an asymmetrical gift relation opposing him on one side and the entire community on the other. The resentment that is generated and resolved by the sacred center is now directed towards the Big Man: on the one hand, every one, and especially rivals, envy him his place; on the other hand, and even more importantly, all members of the community insist that he enforce a “just” distribution of goods, with “just” being based on the model of the originary scene. This resentment feeds back into the system which refines itself by increasing the distance between the center and the margins, making rivalry increasingly irrelevant, and codifying distribution in ritual and bureaucratic hierarchy.\n\nWe can see here the origins of the gigantic centralized imperial bureaucracies of the ancient world (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, etc.), and therefore the origins of civilization. The limits of what we can see as the original form of sovereignty lie in the fact that the very qualities that allowed for the emergence of the Big Man must be forbidden to others. The resentments directed toward the Big Man are the very same resentments that created the Big Man, who “rebelled” against the “consumers” who both depended upon and restrained his “productivity.” The resentments toward the Big Man, now God Emperor, can be contained only at the cost of preventing the activities and interactions that might generate such productive resentment in the first place. Only the emperor himself can be free.\n\nCivilization can only start to develop once the tension between social hierarchies and what Gans calls the “moral model” of the originary scene becomes a topic of reflection. In the West this reflection takes place in very different ways amongst the ancient Greeks and the Ancient Israelites. For the Greeks, philosophy becomes a way of constructing an imaginary discursive scene in which participants are equal, as a way of subjecting real world inequalities to scrutiny. Inequalities and political power can be justified by the greater virtue of the wealthy and powerful, by the benefits to the community, or by the justice of the ruler, but the main point is that it needs to be justified.\n\nFor the Israelites, meanwhile, all humans are the children of a single God, and in that way equal, regardless of real world inequities. The emperor god is replaced by the God who names Himself in Exodus as I AM THAT I AM, what Gans calls the name of God as the declarative sentence, that is, a God immune to imperative entreaties, who is therefore to be found in relations between members of the community. In other words, no one can invoke the name of God to bless some project in exchange for some kind of sacrifice: God subsists beyond all such entreaties, made by anyone whosoever, because he has gifted to humanity the incommensurable gift of all of creations—the only, necessarily inadequate, return to such a gift is complete devotion (the gift of oneself).\n\nSuch an immeasurable gift implies immeasurable love and goodness, so the way to devote oneself to God is by striving to imitate that love and goodness amongst one’s fellows. Along with their invention of philosophy, the Greeks’ creation of an independent sphere of art, and especially drama, allowed for the representation and transcendence (“catharsis”) of resentment directed at dominant figures anchoring the community. What Gans calls the “narrative monotheism” of the Israelites, meanwhile, projected the resentment towards the emperor God onto a linear historical frame, in which the fall of empires represents the judgment of God—a moral judgment applied to the exile of God’s chosen people themselves. In both cases a new increment of deferral and therefore freedom is created, as we can work towards a social order that puts knowledge of God and Truth at the center, rather than trying to coerce magical forces on our behalf.\n\nFor Gans, the completion of the monotheist narrative in the Christian revelation, which applies the moral model universally (love your enemies) and incorporates the Greek logos, creates a space of individual freedom and reciprocity that ultimately leads to the modern market society, of which Gans considers liberal democracy to be a part. Here is where I begin to draw different political implications from Gans’s originary thinking. First of all, I introduce the concept of “civilization” into originary thinking, because that seems to me the best way to sustain the originary concept of deferral as the primary concept of social thought.\n\nHumans originated in deferral, and so every advance they make and everything they learn, I propose, must be acquired in the same way. A civilized order is one in which there is a positive feedback loop between discipline (deferral deliberately applied to self or other) and social benefits, whether in goods or prestige or authority; whether on the individual or social level. Civilization is the generalization of the experience of the Big Man, in which authority is generated by self-denial, generosity and concern for and action on the community as a whole—not necessarily its complete generalization (any civilization will contain the less and uncivilized), but the steady inclusion of more social spaces. The generalization of the Big Man’s experience is made possible by reintegrating the model of the originary scene into hierarchical orders as a non-ritual, and therefore moral and intellectual, standard for just rule.\n\nIt would certainly be consistent with my analysis so far to argue for democracy and/or liberalism as ways of instituting the model of the originary scene into hierarchical societies: such societies would channel resentment against any position of power outside of the accountability of the community, and would therefore require multiple centers of power and enforced rotation of power holders. That would be, though, to privilege the expression and “purging” of resentments over limiting them and making their expression beyond a certain low level and outside of controlled spaces unthinkable. Civilization involves a new form of hierarchy, one based on the “charisma” that, as Philip Rieff saw, comes from the discipline that allows its practitioner to see orders invisible to the less disciplined.\n\nThe more disciplined, the less governed by resentments because the more capable of framing and thereby pre-empting resentments. The relation between the more and the less disciplined therefore entails the former framing and pre-empting the resentments of the latter. This means prompting the less disciplined to earn greater rights and freedoms, rather than giving sway to resentment regarding the rights and freedoms enjoyed by others. The growth of civilization, as Nobert Elias shows in The Civilizing Process, involves a centralization of power in which the monarch suppresses and defuses rivalries at lower levels (the violence of the honor system) and enforces the replacement of open resentment with a system of deference (“courtesy” and manners), that signifies hierarchies framed by the court.\n\nNow, any established order will tend to inertia and routinization, and therefore the one holding sovereign power will not invariably be the most disciplined, morally, intellectually or physically. But our conception of civilization enables us draw upon the model of the originary scene as the organization of reciprocities based upon a shared (if unequally sustained) deferral so as to imagine such an order. The good subject acts as if the sovereign is the most disciplined, and orders his realm so as to promote and reward in accord with each one’s discipline and deferences: this reconciles the tension between actual hierarchy and the originary moral model by iterating the discovery of deferral on the originary scene.\n\nOn a more empirical level, it cannot be denied that the “decentralizing” tendencies of the modern market have not eroded state power. Quite to the contrary, that power continues to grow so that we have, and have had for quite some time, states that are far more powerful, controlling and intrusive than the most absolutist monarch. From a absolutist perspective, the frenetic expansion of state power results from the lack of certainty regarding sovereign power and therefore property, with an endless cycle of new power centers promoting subversion and the central power seeking to resecure power by grabbing more of it.\n\nEven libertarian accounts of this modern development lend indirect support to the absolutist analysis. You either concede some role, however minimal, to the state, or you don’t. If you do, then however you minimize that role (protecting property, protecting “negative rights,” preserving social order) you concede to the state not only the power needed to play that role but to interpret it; if you institute checks upon the state (like selection of state officials through election) then you concede the power to those doing the checking to interpret that role. Presumably, then, all those checks have added themselves to the power structure, calling forth the need for new checks, and so on.\n\nIf you concede no role to the state, as anarchists like Hans-Hermann Hoppe do, then you concede that the inequality of property will lead the biggest property owners to essentially govern (they will literally be deciding who can walk on the streets, enter businesses, get educated, and so on), and the social order imagined by Hoppe is different from one an absolutist might imagine only in the confusion introduced by overlapping security systems and distributed ownership over thoroughfares needed for social existence. Most importantly for us here, from an originary standpoint, there is no reason to assume that the social center is ever unoccupied: it passes from the ritual center of the primitive community, to the succession of Big Men and then monarchs and then, finally, to the modern state, which undergoes more rapid staffing changes than the monarchies, but never leaves society without an agency and hence some individual that has the final say on what is permitted and what is forbidden.\n\nEven more: all of our daily activities and thinking in a civilized social order take for granted the existence of a central power with whom final decision making power resides. Think of all the times and ways people say “we” “should” do this or that—we should take care of the poor; we should have a more civil discourse; we should address the lack of our integrity in our government; we should be more tolerant; we should regulate Wall Street more rigorously, etc. We can dismiss all these expressions as sloppy thinking, and analyze the meaning or lack therefore in the “we,” the “should,” and even the objects of the expressions (“civility,” “integrity,” “Wall Street,” etc.) and it is indeed very good to do this—but none of that changes the fact that these lazy formulations all presuppose someone out there who is in principle capable of doing something we would call “regulating” to something we would all agree to call “Wall Street” in a way we would all consider “rigorous.”\n\nThe most effective and enlightening analysis of such phrases would be ones that showed how much social consensus would be necessary for these expressions to have any real meaning, and how tightly and hierarchically organized all social institutions would have to be to maintain such a consensus (to hold “referents” like “regulate” and “Wall\n\nStreet” in place, or, if necessary, replace them with other, clearer ones). All of these “shoulds” are essentially cries for absolute power, even if the myriad and incompatible “shoulds” means that such a power would not give anyone exactly what they want—and an acknowledgement and acceptance of that by the vast majority is precisely the level of disciplined maturity that would be necessary to institute that kind of power. Without the presupposition of an absolute central power to mediate and contain our resentments, we would be reduced to telling each other on an individual level what particular thing we want right now, a situation which is unimaginable.\n\nVictimary Thinking and the Moral Model\n\nThe most important contribution Gans has made to contemporary political thought is, I would say, his analysis of “victimary thinking,” which seemed a fairly marginal phenomenon when he started examining it in the mid-90s but has by now clearly metastasized into one of the major political issues of the day. Victimary thinking is, for Gans, a moral transformation in Western society resulting from the shock at the Nazi genocide of the Jews. All “ascriptive differences,” that is, differences based on some presumably indelible marker of belonging to a certain group (most obviously, skin color), are now framed in terms of the Nazi-Jew binary.\n\nThe rapid, almost frenzied, decolonization following World War II can be accounted for in these terms: once, say, British domination of India can no longer be seen in terms of the more civilized leading the less civilized, or even more invidiously but still less absolutely as an unjust domination of one nation by another, but as racial oppression akin to Nazism, then colonial rule becomes completely untenable. The same holds for the civil rights movement in the US, which one can see was fairly consistently framed in terms of racial oppression and justice derived from the Western recoil from Nazism. Once the victimary model is in place, no real limits can be set to it: the “oppression” of women, of homosexuals, of the “transgendered” can all be plugged in to produce a public and political discourse in which to refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding or to open women’s bathrooms to any male who says he is really a woman is make oneself morally indistinguishable from Adolf Eichmann.\n\nNow, the obvious “other” to victimary thinking is ordering based on merit. In that case, one’s critique of victimary thinking would be from a modern, liberal, meritocratic basis. But the problem here is that victimary thinking insinuates itself into the complacent meritocratic discourse. It turns out that we can’t take for granted that the GRE and grades in high school and college should determine who occupies which position in the social order. Standardized tests are biased and different students have differential access to education; even if standardized tests and grades do accurately measure merit they simply ratify pre-existing inequalities which therefore must be addressed through more fundamental transformations: if whites do better than blacks on such tests, for example, it really just means that whites have, unjustly, more money, live in better neighborhoods and go to better schools than blacks, and therefore all of that needs to be reconfigured before we can rely on tests and grades.\n\nLiberal meritocratic thinking has not been very effective at putting up resistance to all this, doing little more than acting scandalized at the whole phenomenon. The most immediate intellectual reason for this is that meritocratic thinking fantasizes differences to exist along individual lines and is completely ill-equipped to cope with the recognition that differences emerge along group lines. For the meritocratic liberal to consider that, say, more blacks might be in jail because blacks have, on average, less self-control or, for that matter, that secularized Jews might trend overwhelmingly leftist because they see themselves in an antagonistic relation to predominantly white, Christian societies, is simply unthinkable. But that means that the meritocratic liberal is always already victimary, and merely resents being replaced by a more consistent and militant member of the troupe.\n\nIndeed, once we see victimary thinking as constitutive of liberal thought from the very beginning, the “victimary” itself becomes a much more powerful concept. The original “ascriptive differences” were not racial but the orders, ranks and obligations that constituted the feudal hierarchy and were incorporated into (and subverted by) the growth of the monarchy. Liberalism’s agenda from the beginning has been to undermine and delegitimate such hierarchical orders, with “merit” and “consent” its primary means of doing so. Any institutionalized hierarchy will be imperfectly aligned with at least some judgments of merit, and can be attacked on that basis.\n\n“Consent” is an equally thin reed upon which to base a social order, as the rapidly spreading notion of “affirmative consent” in sexual matters (not the sexual act as a whole, but each interaction within that act must be explicitly consented to if rape charges are to be avoided) rather parodically reveals. “Consent” can also always be attacked as insufficiently consensual— unequal starting points means it was really force rather than consent, the signs indicating consent were not clear enough, conditions unknown to the consenting partners invalidate the consent after the fact, etc. Such ambiguities can perhaps be handled within a traditional common law legal order, but cannot be the basis of such an order. The maintenance of a traditional system of reciprocal obligations based upon differential contributions to the creation and maintenance of social order and flourishing is clearly at least as effective a basis of social order as “consent.”\n\nTo return to Gans’s account of the originary scene: Gans understands the “moral model” (the reciprocity of all participants on the scene) in a way that is closer to liberalism’s notion of free and independent individuals than I think is warranted. The first act following the emission of the sign on the originary scene is the consumption of the central object. Rather than consumption following the order of the animal group, with the alpha first taking his share, then the beta, and so one, all members of the new human group participate in consumption. This is the first “moral” act. Now, Gans is of course well aware that the division of the object is not equal in terms of size of portions —no one on the scene has a yardstick or scale, and differences in size, strength and speed will affect the amount consumed by each.\n\nStill, distribution is equal enough so that no one is excluded from the scene, and, more precisely, equal enough so that the mimetic rivalry that culminated in the event is not restarted. So far, so good—even the most hierarchical social order can be considered “equal” in this very restricted sense. The originary equality of participants in the exchange of signs is translated into access to social goods. Let’s take a look at a couple of passages from an important essay of Gans’s (http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0101/gans.htm):\n\nWhat we call our “sense of justice” is first experienced through the scandal of injustice. We need no reflection to feel resentment when we see ourselves refused a privilege granted to another. The model we apply to such situations is that of the symmetrical exchange of signs in the originary scene of language. The originary crisis is averted by the enunciation of the sign as name-of-God by the entire human community. At this moment there is no hierarchy, no alpha individual; the exceptional being that resolves the crisis is God, not man. Resentment is our scandalized reaction to the existence of situations where this symmetrical configuration is not maintained. Unequal treatment of anyone constitutes a disequilibrium that is scandalous because it seems to threaten the community with return to originary chaos. I am not merely upset at my own ill-treatment; I am in terror of the potential disintegration of the entire social order.\n\nOur resentful reaction to inequality reveals our belief in the moral model– an ostensive belief like the foxhole belief in God. Resentment points to the act of injustice, makes it known. God remains the implicit audience of our resentment as he was of our plea for help, but now we expect the rest of the human community to share our reaction. Where the foxhole renews the terror of the originary crisis that compels the use of the linguistic sign, the scene of resentment reproduces the moment in which language has already brought peace by deferring appropriation of the central object. In the first case, there is no preexisting model of resolution; we put ourselves in the hands of God. In the second, the community is expected to close ranks against a threat to an already established stability.\n\nThe equalitarian moral model is the minimal basis of ethics, just as ostensive belief in God is the minimal basis of religion. The traditional claim that this model, like the idea of God, is implicit in humanity itself is sharpened by its identification as that of the originary exchange of signs.\n\nThe symmetrical exchange of signs is the model we apply in resenting privileges granted to another. This begs the question of what will count as a “privilege.” On the originary scene God resolves the crisis, and no hierarchical order or empowered individual. But when we ask God to judge, and the rest of the community to “share our reaction” (presumably because we are all united in asking God to judge) in the case of the injustice we have suffered (the resentment we feel) it is a human order with at least some hierarchy (some members must be more respected, their opinions given more weight, than others) that is itself a result of a closing of ranks against some threat.\n\nIf injustice is disorder and justice a reordering, then there is a presumption in favor of the existing order, including whatever hierarchies it has installed. What will count as “privilege,” then will be usurpation of a power not licensed by that order—that will be the source of the resentment. Here, it seems to me that Gans is interpreting “privilege” in terms of a liberal notion of equality—“privilege” is anything that someone else has that I don’t that is not justified in terms of us equally being mere users of signs. But in abstracting the leap into language—sign use “in itself”—through the hypothesis of the originary scene we are not thereby projecting that abstract sign use in itself upon the participants of the scene.\n\nThere is an order and hierarchy even on the originary scene that later abstractions or remembrances of the originary scene (in Judaism, Christianty, liberalism and even the originary hypothesis) in different ways and to different extents erase. It is likely that that order is some articulation of the carrying over of animal hierarchies (the previously alpha animal may still get the biggest share) and new abilities (like suggesting a “fair” division), differentially distributed, created by the invention/discovery of the sign itself. We can’t really know, and so the most minimal discussion of the scene will exclude such “asymmetrical” elements.\n\nIn applying the model of the originary event to political thought, where we have to be able to answer the question of what counts as a justified resentment, though, we must make a minimal presupposition of such asymmetries. To be a sign user, then, is to support and seek to enhance an existing order, to further embed the reciprocities it imposes in our shared practices and, certainly, to point out derelictions in assigned duties. Resentments in this case serve as a kind of data, the meaning of which is to be determined further up the chain of command. If, on the contrary, we see the exchange of signs as a model that is by definition more symmetrical and therefore more moral than any existing order, we will see resentment as presumptively legitimate, as having a kind of epistemological validity in identifying flaws in the social order.\n\nIt is the social order, then, that becomes accountable to resentments—and, in fact, the most effective, i.e., virulent, subversive, treasonously supported resentments —which it is obliged to appease. Social order as deployed against itself to remedy its always receding failures in reciprocity—that is liberalism, and it is displayed most explicitly and consistently in victimary thinking. Absolutist thought, meanwhile, is not indifferent to merit or differences in ability but simply focuses on preserving the institutional and social hierarchies and orders needed to recognize it.\n\nAn absolutist reading of the originary hypothesis, then, emphasizes the predominance and continuity of the center—from initial ritual center to, ultimately the center to which intelligent loyalty is directed—as a cynosure of desire that inspires new deferrals. Deferral and discipline are concepts applicable not just to personal behavior—adhering to norms of politeness and sitting still for several hours to work on a task are certainly instances of discipline, but so are activities like suspending one’s existing assumptions in embarking on a new inquiry or noting rather than expressing one’s spontaneous responses to some provocation.\n\nAny distance we place between ourselves and some object of desire requires discipline, the rewards of which (such as comradeship, a broader range of interests and/and various registers of attention) cannot always be known in advance. In fact, the most obvious examples of discipline—like studying nightly and forgoing youthful pleasures so as to gain an advanced degree—while impressive, are not necessarily the most spectacular. The control of resentment is really the highest disciplinary accomplishment, and the most important for absolutist political theory. Resentment is controlled by accepting the impermeability of the center to which resentments are addressed—in learning that “the world” doesn’t care if you have been offended by this one, cheated by that, and disregarded by another, and also doesn’t care about your rage at “the world” for not caring, one is really learning that the establishment of social regularity and the suppression of disorder must attend to higher levels of interactions than those at which the resenter is situated.\n\nThe more you control your resentments the more you learn about those higher levels of interaction and their ramifications throughout the social order; and, the more you learn about those higher levels the better able you are to control your resentments and submit them to whatever adjudication is available. In the process, the closer you come to wanting what the sovereign wants. All the social hierarchies treated with such contempt by the ideologues of “merit” and “consent” exist so as preserve and institutionalize these successive increments of discipline, and therefore to serve as a model for emulating them.\n\nThe Will of the Sovereign\n\nThe center, from the originary scene on, has intentionality—that is what makes it possible to deify the central object. The originary human group is grateful to the center for arresting their catastrophic rush to the object, which is to say, for giving them peace. The center always gives peace by instructing us in the arts of deferral, which we learn exchanging signs with our fellow humans regarding our intentions toward shared objects. At the same time, all resent the center, for blocking access to the object (even as it inflames our desire for it). The intentions of the center become more complex the more complex social order becomes, which is to say the broader the array of desires and resentments that require deferral.\n\nThe first act after the object on the originary scene is consumed is the establishment of ritual, the re-enactment of the originary scene—ritual facilitates future access to the central object—clearly, we couldn’t count on the spontaneous rediscovery of the originary sign every time conflict flares up. The form of ritual is dictated by the center, which is to say the intentions of the center are embedded in a community’s rituals. But they are not made explicit by rituals which, by definition, embody tacit knowledge. Understanding what the center wants involves, then, a reading of rituals or, more precisely, the attribution of intentions to the figures populating the ritual.\n\nWe need to understand more explicitly what the center wants because the totality of human practices always exceeds the knowledge embodied in ritual, in part because ritual enables the community to develop new practices. Those broader fields of practice also make it possible to interpret the will of the center, because those fields are where those intentions that can be attributed to the figures on the ritual scene are drawn from. For Gans, this is the origin of myth. As the intentions attributed to the figures on the ritual scene are enriched, the intentions the members of the community are correspondingly enriched as well—we all humanize or, better, anthropomorphize each other.\n\nWe could say that the meaning and purpose of human history is to continue delving into the intentions of the center. Now, as I said earlier, with the advent of the Big Man, a human figure comes to occupy the center—it is therefore that human figure with whose intentions we are concerned. As I suggested earlier in my discussion of monotheism and metaphysics, we make sense of the actions of the central figure—the sovereign—against the background of the models of the originary scene, or the moral model insofar as we take that central figure to be fulfilling the intentions of the center, as understood through those more abstract and mature models of the originary configuration.\n\nInsofar as we want the actions of the sovereign to be seamlessly interwoven with the model of the scene, we want central power to be secure, monolithic, visible, explicit in its intentions and effective in implementing those intentions (and nothing other than those intentions).\n\nWe could say, then, that, just as all discourse in primitive society is ultimately concerned with identifying the will of the center through the narrativizing of the ritual scene, all discourse in civilized society is concerned, directly or indirectly, with trying to “map” the will of the sovereign onto the originary moral model by studying his actions. Think about how much political discourse aims at telling us who “really” runs things—some, of course, believe straightforwardly that it is in fact our elected officials who are in charge, but many more point to big corporations, international finance, the deep state, the media, the Jews, etc.\n\nFirst of all, in other words, you need to identify who the sovereign actually is—until you do, nothing that happens in the world can really make any sense. Think about more everyday, apparently apolitical conversations and thoughts—our neighbor is a good guy, who helped me clean out my garage, my spouse is lazy and letting him/herself go, my boss is alright but loses his temper too often, my kid’s not working up to his potential in school, I can’t wait until the next episode of that TV show, etc. All of these passing thoughts and evaluations have standards built into them (being lazy is bad, and we know what it means to say someone is lazy), standards we assume are shared and, even more distantly, assume are preserved and defended—any of us would be scandalized to wake up one morning and discover that being lazy has suddenly been declared the path to success.\n\nWe can only have these thoughts, we can only use these words, to the extent that we take for granted that the institutions and orders that provide us with examples of good and bad bosses, good and bad TV shows, over and underperforming children, etc., are intact. When we talk about these judgments, we are also indirectly “reading” the center, or the ‘instructions” coming from the center, which we would prefer to be clear and consistent (and which we resent for being otherwise). Even those who oppose one or another of these norms would prefer whatever their replacement standard would be to be decidable.\n\nAll differences in any conversation whatsoever are, then, differences regarding our understanding of the will of the center, or the sovereign. If you can’t find two people who agree about who is “really” running things, that’s a sure sign that the will of the center is divided—we have, you might say, sovereign turnover: maybe some days it is the media that makes the final decision on something important, on other days the bankers and sometimes even the President. The same would be true if we started to violently disagree about, say, the value of children applying themselves in school—if enough people start thinking maybe it’s just as well if their kids join a gang, we have indications of sovereign turnover—no one’s really sure who’s deciding things now, or who will be tomorrow.\n\nThe more secure central power is, the less our conversations would be about who really has power, or the differences between what those in power do and what they say, or which source of power to align ourselves with, and the more about how to implement the instructions of the center, how to gather information that would be recirculated back through the center, how to map the will of the center onto the moral model and how to raise the level of discipline of each and all so as to open new moral and intellectual vistas to be incorporated into the center.\n\nThe basic assumption of absolutist thought is that sovereignty is absolute and sovereignty is conserved. This means that everything done within a social order is the responsibility of the sovereign. It’s impossible to imagine any economic, cultural or individual activity that is not framed by the will of sovereign. The equivalent and anthropological support for these assumptions in originary thinking is that the center is never absent. Everything we do or think is in deference to the center, including our deferences to one another. The purpose of social life, then is to contribute to the intelligence of the center and derive from it further iterations of the moral model of the originary scene.\n\nThis means donating our resentments to the center, setting aside our resentments toward the perceived failure of the center to settle accounts in our favor, and resenting on its behalf. The sovereign’s “job,” meanwhile, is to hold his sovereign power, and to do so by converging power and accountability—everything the sovereign promises to do, he does—he doesn’t promise what he fails to do, and he doesn’t do what he hasn’t promised. All instances of power throughout the social order are delegations from the sovereign—also performing no more and no less than the delegation calls for. All subjects share with the sovereign the concern for keeping power secure, since all will suffer from struggles over the center.\n\nStruggles over the center, in fact, are no different than struggles over property. It would be better for you and your neighbor to know for sure whose house is whose, even for the one who gets the worse house, than for nobody to know which belongs to whom. And this would be the case whether that uncertainty resulted from one conqueror after another passing through the land, or from an endless legal appeal process, or from an openended and completely free democratic process of discussion and voting by other members of the community. If the absolutist sovereign falls, not knowing whose is whose will follow on a systematic scale; without a secure form of power, that is what we have, to an ever greater extent, now.\n\nConverting our resentments of the center (which are resentments caused by and of the unsecurity of the center) into donations of resentment on behalf of the center (informing the will of the center with our deferrals to its will) lays the groundwork for restoration.\n\nWORKS CITED\n\nElias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenic and Psychogenic Investigations. Revised\n\nEdition. Blackwell Publishing, 2000.\n\nGans, Eric. Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation. Second Edition (Originally published 1990). Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2015.\n\n⸻-. The Girardian Origins of Generative Anthropology. Imitatio/Amazon Digital Services,\n\n2012.\n\n⸻-. A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art. Aurora,\n\nColo.: The Davies Group, 2011.\n\n⸻-. The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Stanford\n\nUniversity Press, 2007.\n\n⸻-. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford University\n\nPress, 1997.\n\n⸻-. “The Unique Source of Religion and Morality.” Anthropoetics 1, 1 (June 1995)\n\n⸻-. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford University Press,\n\n1993.\n\n⸻-. The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology. University of California Press,\n\n1985.\n\n⸻-. The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation. University of California\n\nPress, 1981.\n\nRieff, Philip. Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us. Pantheon,"
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-origin-of-language",
      "title": "The Origin of Language",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "2020",
      "url": "/pdfs/the-origin-of-language.pdf",
      "content": "A New Edition\n\nIntroduction by Adam Katz\n\nSpuyten Duyvil\n\nEditor’s Introduction: The Origin of Language and the Anthropological Imagination\n\nGA Bibliography About the Author Copyright Information\n\nIntroduction:\n\nThe Origin of Language and the Anthropological Imagination In this new edition of The Origin of Language, originally published in 1981, Eric Gans provides a hypothesis for the origin of language, and then extends that hypothesis to account for the most fully developed linguistic form, the declarative sentence. In doing so, he shows how the earliest human group would have gone from using a single, “ostensive” sign, to a variety of ostensive signs, to the use of imperatives and then, finally, the declarative sentence.\n\nIt is astonishing that no one had ever considered the necessity of doing something like this, much less attempted it, because how else could one have imagined that humans would have gone from no language at all to such complex linguistic structures as the subject-predicate relation comprising the declarative sentence? Gans shows how the sequence he follows here is the only plausible way of imagining the evolution of the earliest linguistic forms, and he does so by analyzing the sequences in intricate detail, addressing everything that is necessary to account for linguistic evolution, and nothing that isn’t. The Origin of Language remains as completely original and unprecedented (and intellectually demanding and satisfying) today as when it was originally published, so much so as to constitute a kind of intellectual scandal.\n\nIn all of the decades in which immense intellectual energy has been put into “dismantling” and “deconstructing” metaphysics, hardly a single one of our leading thinkers has found it necessary to address the startlingly simple definition provided by Gans: metaphysics is the assumption that the declarative sentence is the primary linguistic form. And if you assume that the declarative sentence is the primary linguistic form, you will never think to ask, or to think one can ask, whence it derived—even if a moment’s reflection must convince us that it must have derived from some previous linguistic form. If you don’t ask these elementary questions, you remain within metaphysics, regardless of how you have “implicated” it in power relations, or Eurocentrism, or technology, or whatever.\n\nGans, in this book, stays focused on the dialectic of the linguistic forms, without many side comments on metaphysical obfuscation, because how could he point out that every moment in that dialectic is obscured by metaphysical assumptions and still get on with the only work that could really clear out those assumptions? I hope that the effect of this publication of a condensed edition of Eric Gans’s The Origin of Language, originally published by the University of California Press in 1981, will be to make Gans’s work visible. I don’t just mean “visible” in the sense of more widely available, or more effectively publicized, al though those things would be nice as well.\n\nI mean “visible” in the sense of no longer occluded, conceptually, by the reigning “language games” and “problematics” in the human and social sciences. We have known for a long time that inquiry takes place within a Gestalt, or frame, that makes some things visible, other things obvious and other things invisible or unthinkable. That’s why science advances through “epistemological breaks” that don’t just correct previous mistaken conclusions, but reorganize the entire field on conceptual terms. For there to be any possibility that this will happen, though, discoveries must be made that, as Michael Polanyi argued, “must be not only true, but also interesting, and more particularly, interesting to science” (66).\n\nWhat is “interesting” is generally what continues along the paths already laid out by scientific authority and tradition, reinforced institutionally in many ways. Polanyi provides an example of how scientific theories get sorted out into “interesting” and “not interesting” from the reception of “a paper by Lord Rayleigh, published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1947”: It described some fairly simple experiments which proved, in the author’s opinion, that a hydrogen atom impinging on a metal wire could transmit to it energies ranging up to a hundred electron volts. Such an observation, if correct, would be far more revolutionary than the discovery of atomic fission by Otto Hahn in 1939.\n\nYet when this paper appeared, and I asked various physicists’ opinions about it, they only shrugged their shoulders. They could not find fault with the experiment, yet they not only did not believe its results, but did not even consider it worthwhile to consider what was wrong with it, let alone check up on it. They just ignored it. About ten years later some experiments were brought to my notice which accidentally offered an explanation of Lord Rayleigh’s findings. His results were apparently due to some factors of no great interest, but which he could have hardly have identified at the time. He should have ignored his observation, for he ought to have known that there must be something wrong with it.\n\nThe rejection of implausible claims has often proved mistaken, but safety against this danger could be assured only at the cost of permitting journals to be swamped by nonsense. (65) What makes a claim “implausible” is its misfit with the prevailing research program, and Polanyi’s example is of a case where that misfit turned out to be a reliable indicator of the observation’s falsity. But if such rejection proves mistaken, what remedies are available? In the physical sciences, we might be able to expect selfcorrection and what Polanyi calls “mutual control” to maintain steady progress towards a more truthful and comprehensive understanding of the natural world; at any rate, it serves no purpose of mine to contend otherwise here.\n\nIn the human sciences, though, “interesting” is a far more loaded term, as is “implausible,” since these sciences contain far more disagreement regarding the basic assumptions of what constitutes a legitimate research program, and are far less able to control for (and perhaps should not exactly “control for”) the moral, ethical, religious and political convictions of the inquirer. The only remedies here lie in pointing out the sources of the refusal to grant sufficient “interest” and “plausibility” to an observation to make it worth one’s while to even “check up on it.” These sources would be “obstacles” to scientific thought, of the kind Gaston Bachelard “psychoanalyzes” in his The Formation of the Scientific Mind.\n\nIn this case, the identification of such obstacles would not only aid in making the more genuinely scientific theory more visible, but would serve as a demonstration of the power of the theory. I will right away give a name to the primary obstacle, which includes the others I will mention below: the anthropomorphism of the human, that is, the explanation of human activity by qualities that rely upon the prior constitution of the human, which is in turn simply taken as given. In other words, anything we could say about human beings always already presupposes beings capable of language—this capability is therefore retrojected back to the earliest models of humanity we can imagine, making entertaining an originary hypothesis that would have the human and language emerging together extraordinarily difficult.\n\nEric Gans’s “originary hypothesis” of the origin of language runs up at every point against the anthropomorphism of the human. I think the most obvious source of opposition is the prevalence of what Gans has examined very thoroughly over the past several decades, and has recently described (in his online Chronicle of Love and Resentment 563, “Victimary Humanism”) as “extreme humanism”: what he has termed “victimary thinking.” Victimary thinking, as a product of the twin iconic markers of World War II, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, frames all inequalities as instances of “oppression,” to which the Nazi-Jew model can be applied, in a social and technological environment in which the potential for violence is virtually unlimited.\n\nFor victimary thinking, al though this may be expressed with greater or less explicitness, any “ascriptive difference,” that is, any “inherent” difference between groups, portends unacceptable levels of violence. And we have more recently discovered (as Gans shows in the aforementioned Chronicle) that any difference can ultimately be framed as an “ascriptive” one, that is, attributed to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and so on. Gans’s hypothesis, meanwhile, locates the origin of language and hence of the human in the unanimous acceptance of the sign as the deferral of violence on a scene of extreme mimetic danger.\n\nThere is no room for “ascriptive” differences there, no way of conceiving of the scene as an “exclusionary” one, even if it is possible to conceive of it as an “uneven” one, in which the sign is repeated in different ways at different paces by the members on the scene. So, the originary hypothesis provides no foothold for victimary thinking—indeed, it seems unlikely that contemporary thinkers of the victimary could even find much use in evoking the egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities that once inspired the left, insofar as the various “exclusionary” elements of those communities are all too evident. If one were to devise a theory directly aimed at occluding the originary hypothesis, one could not do better than victimary thinking, which is perhaps why Gans has found it “interesting” and, perhaps, in its own way, “plausible”: victimary thinking isolates and thereby brings into heightened focus a single moment of the originary scene, the equality or symmetry of all before the sacred center, while obscuring all other pertinent elements of the scene, such as the existence of the center itself.\n\nThe anthropomorphism of the human multiplies differences within the human, while considering the difference constitutive of the human beyond the realm of plausible inquiries. It’s as if as soon as the question, why do humans engage in rituals? is raised, the question is shut down by pointing to yet another ritual, different from all the others, that has been discovered. A good example of such thinking, which in its mixture of blindness and insight will also help me to clarify the conditions under which the originary hypothesis might be found both highly plausible and of the greatest possible interest, is the anthropologist C.R.\n\nHallpike’s “Rene Girard’s World of Fantasy” (from Hallpike’s website: hallpike.com). As the title suggests, the essay is intended as a “debunking” of Girard’s theory of mimetic violence, a theory which lies at the origin of Gans’s own originary hypothesis. Hallpike begins by restating Girard’s theory, which “begins with the premise that all human behavior is learned, and is therefore based on imitations,” and goes on to assert that mimesis leads to violence because individuals imitating each other converge on the same object of desire, and concludes by arguing that the resolution of this mimetic violence is the arbitrary selection of a scapegoat to be sacrificed as the “cause” of the violence (1-2).\n\nHallpike begins his critical examination by questioning this last part of the sequence, noting with surprise that Girard seems to assume that the original act of communal violence took place far back in prehistory before humans acquired language. The first scape-goating ritual, being pre-linguistic, was simply based on instinct, and since scape-goating is the substitution of one thing for another it is also the origin of language, since words themselves are also substitutes for things. Sacrifice and the prohibitions associated with it would have created communal peace for early hominid groups and a safe space for mothers and their babies in particular.\n\nThe victimising process was therefore the missing link between the animal and human worlds that explains the humanisation of primates, and hunting and the domestication of animals were also motivated by the need for a stock of sacrificial victims. Scape-goating and sacrifice are the basis of all ritual and archaic religion generally, and archaic religion is the basis of all political and cultural institutions. Girard claims that the victimisation process is the rational principle that explains the infinite diversity of culture, and compares it to the principle of natural selection, which cannot be proved experimentally but convinces us by its great explanatory power. (2-3) So far, Hallpike might be arguing that Girard’s hypothesis is insufficient to account for the emergence of language and hence to initiate the humanization process. In that case, there would be some overlap between\n\nHallpike’s critique of Girard and Gans’s. But the “substitution of one thing for another” cannot be the origin of language, because words are not “substitutes for things”—for one thing, how would anyone know that the first word or sign was a substitute for a thing? They would already have to have language: joint attention mediated by a sign. Hallpike also makes a point of mentioning Girard’s claim that “experimental proof” cannot be expected with regard to a hypothesis of origin, but we must rely on its “great explanatory power” (evidence of which it already seems Hallpike does not believe can be forthcoming). Hallpike continues: Girard’s belief that scape-goating could have been the source of language because it involves the substitution of the arbitrarily chosen victim faces two major problems, the first of which is a simple matter of evidence, or rather the lack of it.\n\nWe simply know nothing about the thought processes of early hominids such as Homo erectus. Nor can we imagine what the social relations of pre-linguistic Homo sapiens might have been either, and attempts to do so are pure speculation. Indeed, we actually have no direct evidence for when grammatical language emerged. By ‘grammatical’ I mean, for example, predication – the ability to say that something or someone has certain qualities; distinguishing between acting on and being acted upon; questions; negation, and referring to past and future. This raises the second problem, which is that it is hard to see how any symbolic culture would be possible at all without language.\n\nThis is because the relation between a symbol and what it stands for, while drawn from nature, is not a representation of it. For example, among the Konso of Ethiopia, white is an inauspicious colour, but without language how could a group of people decide that white rather than black or some other colour should be regarded as inauspicious? (Indeed, how could the very idea of ‘inauspicious’ come to be understood by a group of people without language?) In fact, the Konso regard white as inauspicious because it is the colour of bone, of death, therefore, and also the colour of cotton, which ripens during the hottest and driest part of the year.\n\nBlack, on the other hand, is the colour of the lifegiving rain-clouds and is therefore auspicious. But these are simply one set of symbolic values and other cultures have chosen different ones. In short, Girard does not explain how symbolic culture could have existed in a pre-linguistic society. (3)\n\nHallpike immediately focuses on the question of evidence, but again there are a couple of possibilities here. We don’t know what the thought processes or social relations of pre-linguistic hominids might have been. Hallpike seems to have in mind the kind of pre-linguistic hominid that has already gone through Girard’s scapegoating event, but has not yet completed the process of acquiring language, or what we could recognize as language, as a result of that event. Fair enough, but what, exactly, do we need to do here to assess, first of all the plausibility, and even probability, of Girard’s account? Gans’s originary hypothesis is predicated upon a gap in Girard’s account very similar to the one Hallpike identifies here, but Gans’s critique addresses the nature of language and its constitution of the human: the originary event could not be significant without being memorable, and it couldn’t be memorable, which is to say it couldn’t be repeated, without a sign.\n\nThere is no sign in Girard’s account. What does Hallpike think language is? Well, he knows that language is necessary to attribute qualities to objects, to describe relations between objects and actions, to publicly distinguish between the more and less preferable. And it is certainly true that without being able to do these things, the ritual culture Girard imagines could not have existed. But Hallpike seems uninterested in the question he has implicitly raised here—we might say he cannot even see the question: how, exactly, did it become possible for humans to do all these things? What interests Hallpike, and what we can say interests the modern anthropological imagination, is all the different ways humans have found of doing it.\n\nWe could say this is a primary obstacle to seeing the originary hypothesis: the principled, constitutive fascination with “diversity” (not, of course, in the sense this takes for a contemporary HR department) precludes an interest in the originary. I would suggest that it is that fascination which prevents Hallpike from considering that we do know quite a bit about the “social relations” of prelinguistic, that is, pre-human hominids, and how they differ from even the most primitive human societies of which we are aware. At the very least, hominids have a pecking order determining access to food and mates; no such pecking order exists in humans.\n\nThe coordination of a group against an individual is possible for human, but not for animals; hierarchies among humans are organized institutionally, not established through one-on-one confrontations. Are we forever barred, due to “lack of evidence,” from constructing plausible accounts of what replaced the pecking order, and what role language might have played in the transition? Aren’t some “speculations” along these lines going to be of greater explanatory and heuristic power than others, and couldn’t we make those yet more powerful? You can only answer such questions in the negative if you are determined to bar the way to any inquiry into the transformation of the “pre-human” into the “human,” and therefore to accept that we can never understand the constitution of the human, but only observe all the different things beings we know to be human do. To continue:\n\nWe can now move on to his general theory of imitation or mimesis. There is no doubt that human culture could not exist without imitation, notably by children imitating their parents and other adults. We all have a natural tendency to imitate our peers as well, and important people or classes also have a very powerful influence on fashions of all kinds. The overall effect of imitation is therefore to create social solidarity so it seems very strange, even perverse, that Girard considers it the principal basis of conflict. A fundamental weakness in his theory is that he assumes as the typical example of mimesis that only one object is available to be desired by the model, so that he and the imitator then inevitably come into competition over it, like the two children in the earlier example.\n\nBut in fact this must be very rare, and what is far more typical is imitation of something that is readily reproduced and plentiful, such as a form of dress like a New Guinea penis-sheath, or some form of bodily decoration. We may imagine a prominent hunter who puts a streak of red ochre down his nose which is then imitated by all the other hunters in the band. Since there is plenty of red ochre to go around, how could this act of mimesis possibly bring about conflict? The obvious outcome is far more likely to be solidarity – the group now has its own emblem to distinguish itself from others. This example also reminds us that imitation by itself is quite unable to explain culture, because someone has first to create or discover the desirable things that are imitated.\n\nThe hunter who first put the red stripe down his nose, the child who first noticed the interesting toy, and the man who carved the Lion Man statue were all creators, not imitators. Societies, too, potentially have a wide range of traits which can be imitated, and this means that people must choose in some way between these possibilities. Here again, mimesis is not enough to explain the facts. (4-5) In addition to imitation, there is creation and/or discovery—after all, there has to be something to be imitated in the first place. Mimetic theory would therefore be reductive—there is a fundamental element of culture that it would fail to account for.\n\nBut there is either some non-mimetic theory that enables us to account for the origin of such creations and discoveries, especially of the non-utilitarian variety of Hallpike’s examples, or we work within mimetic theory in order to account for this possibility. Otherwise, we are just left to say that lots of things cause lots of things, which would mean that the presumably scientific insistence on “evidence” would lead us to proceed in a way that no real science does. Moreover, Hallpike’s objection here is far from insurmountable. The one who discovers or creates something new might very well be imitating the process of discovery or creation witnessed in another.\n\nThis is especially plausible insofar as the most immediate purpose of such discovery or creation, as Hallpike implicitly concedes here, is to defer conflict through the generation of signs that can be shared—something we all learn as language users, if we accept the plausibility of the hypothesis that language emerged to address just such a contingency. Even more, if the first sign was itself an imitation, but an imitation that inverted the intentional arc of the gesture it imitated, by turning a gesture of appropriation into one of renunciation, then the very choice between possibilities (violent vs. nonviolent ways of imitating) would “always already” be built into language.\n\nAs for the “weakness” in Girard’s account, Hallpike surely can’t claim that it is never the case that there is, in fact, only one object, or that some objects are preferable to other, even very similar ones, in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons; or, most importantly, that the process of imitation itself couldn’t generate desires that exceed possession of a desirable object and lead one to focus on the model himself as a rival. Here is where some credit to the anthropological insight offered by literature and the esthetic more generally would be a helpful addition to Hallpike’s undoubtedly prodigious erudition.\n\nAnd why would this very valuable skill of replicating desirable objects have been created or discovered in the first place if not for fear of other, undesirable, outcomes of mimetic desire? Again, a kind of allergy to the originary presents itself as an insuperable obstacle to considering some very interesting questions and equally plausible answers. To be an anthropologist, or to inhabit the anthropological imagination, seems to involve the circularity of knowing what a human being is because you know what human beings do, with knowledge of the human therefore being a matter of the accumulation of details. Beyond this, much of Hallpike’s critique of Girard is reasonable, and accords with Gans’s counter-assertion that the human sacrifice Girard places at the origin of humankind didn’t emerge until much later—an observation central to Gans’s radical reconfiguration of Girard’s originary scene.\n\n(And I’ll mention that Gans himself works through a great deal of anthropological and historical material in accord with his hypothesis in The End of Culture.) All Hallpike can really do, though, is analyze all kinds of different ways in which various societies control violence and engage in ritual and sacrifice. Why controlling violence is so central to all human societies doesn’t get addressed—indeed, there’s no way to address it. So, Hallpike ridicules Girard’s “obsession with violence”—after all, it’s not the only thing that concerns societies—far from it! Here, the obstacle in the way of perceiving the originary hypothesis is a refusal of paradoxical thinking.\n\nTo be “obsessed with violence” is to give violence too central a role in human affairs—to “see it everywhere” (to find it too “interesting” and “plausible”). But wouldn’t such an obsession with violence lead to the creation of means to defer and minimize it, and to identify and deflect even the most preliminary movements toward the violent resolution of conflicts? And, therefore, to elaborately constructed social orders, with constraining rituals, kinship relations, traditions and social obligations that aim at making violence less and less “thinkable”? In which case, the result of an obsession with violence would be the marginalization of violence, a marginalization which social theorists, whose own social role is predicated upon such marginalization, would help to obscure?\n\nThis line of thinking could itself be denounced as “obsessive,” but at least it is a line of thinking, one that takes us from a defining human characteristic (learning through mimesis) through an observable consequence of that characteristic (conflict over the objects we teach each other to desire) and a means of resolving that consequence (through representation, as the deferral of violence). Is there an alternative to this line of thinking other than “lots of people do lots of things in lots of different ways”? I am calling for an epistemological break here, one which would redefine what counts as “evidence” (and what such evidence would be evidence of), in the interest of a “research program” that might turn out to be “plausible” after all.\n\nI haven’t yet said anything about this book in particular, as I am first of all interested in the conditions of possibility that it be read. What Gans does here is what Hallpike seems to assume cannot be done: account for the emergence of “grammatical language,” and in particular predication. The obstacle posed by the allergy to the originary is particularly tenacious here, and is further aligned with the investment in victimary thinking. The two obstacles are in fact one, and we will further “economize” by saying the resistance to paradoxicality, or, perhaps, to dialectics, which is to say the study of repetition producing difference, is also implicated.\n\nModern philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau used quasioriginary models, but it was always understood that events such as the “social contract” were not to be taken as having really happened—they were just models, extrapolations from the social relations seen to be emergent from, or resistant to, the new bourgeois society. In fact, these models were directly opposed to, even while opportunistically referencing, versions of origin coming from Biblical sources. But even such models eventually became too “toxic,” as they essentialized and prioritized human capacities that inevitably privileged one group over others—who benefits, after all, from representing “human nature” as intrinsically and fundamentally self-interested and acquisitive?\n\nThose best at acquiring, naturally. Such tautologies will be found in any model that eschews the originary, while the institutional and social investments in these models contributes to rendering invisible the originary thinking that would not only point out the tautology but show how to transcend it. Today’s predominant intellectual habit, outside, perhaps, of those working out models meant to serve primarily practical purposes in, say, economics or communications, is to identify the implicit “originary” assumption in any model of human activity and direct attention “obsessively” to whomever we can imagine might be victimized by it.\n\nThe habit is too deeply rooted to allow for a moment’s hesitation, in which one might ask whether a model that doesn’t victimize is possible. It may be that victimary anti-models are not all that different from the liberal models they supplant—if you try to present a model of human interaction that starts with the human defined outside of any social interaction, you will inevitably project the humanist anthropomorphisms most present to you—there’s no way social interests and power plays could fail to enter into the equation. All victimary thinking does, in insisting upon an even more complete assumption of equality, is take the model at its word and demand that some such model be imposed upon real inequalities (blind, of course, to the fact that such imposition, even if possible, would generate a new set of inequalities).\n\nIn Gans’s model, there is no human prior to the shared relation to the center. Now, to accept what, after all, seems in accord with common sense, that there must have been a moment when there was no language and then one when there was language, that some event must have gotten us from one moment to the next, and that we can speculate more or less plausibly on what that event might have been, is to raise a series of subsequent questions: since that initial sign couldn’t have been a full blown language, what kind of sign was it? And, then, how might we have gotten from that sign to other signs, that would look more and more like the languages we know?\n\nThe more real and interesting these questions become, the harder it is to dismiss them as “idle” speculation, and the less compelling the absence of any direct evidence for any of this becomes. And the startling and yet completely plausible line of reasoning (no one has ever even thought of doing what Gans does here) provides no way to project one’s own anthropomorphisms back on these hypothetical language users considered solely as language users, with “language” defined in the most minimal fashion as the deferral of violence. And if all were to eschew their anthropomorphisms, the need for a radical reconstruction of the human sciences might become evident.\n\nAfter all, can one point to a single model in the human sciences that doesn’t rely upon an ultimately indefensible model or set of assumptions regarding the constitution of the “human”? Dismissing an originary model for lack of evidence overlooks the fact that there’s no real evidence for things like social “structures” and “systems” either (certainly no one has ever observed one), and yet such terms are used unproblematically, taken on faith, to make sense of the patterns we construct out of the endless sprawl of human activity. The concepts we use to theorize social orders register the effects of innumerable unwitnessed and unrecorded actions, and we assume that various common threads unite them.\n\nIn making sense of regularities, what we really have faith in is repetition, since if every event were absolutely singular we could make sense of nothing. But repetition must produce differences, otherwise nothing would ever happen. So, our faith is in differential repetition. Now, differential repetition is the way signs work: a word must be the “same” in order to be that word, but it must be different to mean something here and now. And differential repetition is precisely the way Gans traces the successive emergence of the elementary linguistic forms, the imperative from the ostensive and the declarative from the imperative.\n\nGans shows how the various uses of the ostensive sign follow from the possibilities already implicit in its initial “invention,” and that this proliferation of uses eventually leads to a use that converts the ostensive into an imperative; likewise, charting the new social relations, desires, and forms of “dialogue” generated by the range of uses implicit in the imperative, Gans shows how the declarative sentence, that is, predication, would emerge. Part of the difficulty in appreciating Gans’s account is that of imagining language before it was language. It’s one thing to place oneself, imaginarily, within the ritual and mythological world of archaic peoples, and “dispossess” ourselves of the conceptual and moral assumptions that interfere with us doing so; it is far more challenging to dispossess ourselves of grammar so as to see the subject-predicate relation as one that must have emerged, or been created.\n\nAnd Gans makes no concessions here, and resists absolutely the anthropomorphism of the human: the imperative was already a possibility implicit in the ostensive, but the users of the ostensive didn’t “want” to issue commands, finally finding a way of doing so; nor did the users of imperative seek out in their linguistic resources the means for “describing” something out there, for in what language would they have expressed this desire? Whatever is characteristic of “ostensive,” “imperative,” or “declarative” culture becomes evident in the emergence of these forms, even if our account of this linguistic dialectic relies upon its result, fully developed language.\n\nFor the linguistic forms to take hold, they must have been intentional, but this intentionality, like that of language itself, must have been discovered in the event of its creation—we must refrain from the metaphysical, anthropomorphizing habit of projecting the new form back into some immanence (a “faculty”) already present in the previous form. And this kind of thinking is what Gans, I think, means by “dialectical” in his analyses of the dialectic of the linguistic forms. The “method,” one might say, is to find the most minimal “accident” or “mistake” that would be an accident or mistake of that form, and that would generate a new, selfcontained form that could not have emerged without nor been imagined within the previous one.\n\nThe new form emerges when someone treats the mistake as a new intention. And we are capable of treating a mistake as a new intention because, as language users, our highest priority is to maintain what Gans calls here “linguistic presence,” which is to say, the repetition of the shared attention produced on the originary scene. Ultimately, we are still participants on that scene. Our faith is that in sustaining linguistic presence by tacitly retrieving the scene, we will preserve at least the possibility of the peace promised on the scene, the possibility of the deferral of violence, however limited. And it is this faith that a reader of this book must summon up in order not only to find it interesting and plausible, but to realize its incredibly far-reaching implications, some of them pursued in Gans’s many subsequent books, but many others yet to be explored.\n\nIn Gans’s analysis, we are never outside of the space of shared linguistic presence, inappropriate uses of signs that threaten to disrupt linguistic presence, and recovered and discovered intentions that restore linguistic presence by introducing a new form of social interaction. At each point along the way, Gans’s analysis follows the implication of the newly emergent speech form for the evolving structure of language as an increasingly flexible cultural form. For example, he points out that by attributing to the imperative “nascent grammaticality” the situation of the imperative on the grammatical scale between the ostensive and the declarative follows immediately.\n\nThe ostensive is meaningless in the absence of its referent; the declarative can do without a real-world referent. The imperative operates in the absence of its object-nominal or -verbal, but can be satisfied only upon the object’s being made present. The declarative stands at the end of the scale of grammaticality as the telos of linguistic evolution, after which no substantial progress is possible. This explains, if it does not excuse, the grammarians’ inclination to treat all other forms as imperfect declaratives irrespective of their evolutionary status. (49) Gans consistently points out the ways in which the completed and “obvious” nature of our grammar gets in the way of imagining that grammar itself must have evolved somehow.\n\nHere, he looks at one axis of this evolution: language’s relation to a “real-world referent.” By establishing the spectrum between the absolute necessity of and the lack of any need of such a referent, the strong plausibility of the imperative having come between the ostensive and the declarative is established. Gans then points out the effects of this development upon grammar: As we have noted, the ostensive makes no formal distinction between verbals and nominals; because verbality proper is a quality of predicates, the very term “verbal” is at this stage an anachronism. . . Yet the fact that in mature languages the imperative is always considered to be a form of the verb, and that nominal imperatives like “Scalpel!” are categorized, if at all, as elliptical forms of the verbal imperative (“[give me the] scalpel!”), cannot simply be attributed to the perversity of grammarians.\n\nWhat it demonstrates is that by subordinating the appearance of the desired object to the action of the interlocutor, the imperative has already taken a major step in the direction of predication. (49) So, we go from an absence of formal distinctions to the preliminary form of such a distinction. Again, Gans points out how these distinctions are made in standard grammar, showing both the elisions effected by the naturalization of grammar and the way in which the reality of linguistic evolution imposes itself upon grammatical categories, despite the lack of comprehension on the part of grammarians of why, exactly, they must make such distinctions.\n\nA little bit later on, Gans points to the implications for the emergence of the human community of the emergence of the imperative out of the ostensive: The scene of representation, once established in the originary event, can be recreated between any two members of the community, because once the protection of nonviolent presence vested in the sacred object is deemed to extend over nonritual communication within the community, the size of the group involved would be unimportant. In the originary event that gives birth to human desire, the individual desires of the participants for the sacred object cannot be satisfied; the object can only be revered/possessed in common, leaving a residue of resentment. In contrast, the imperative form overtly expresses such desire qua desire, which is to say, claims for it potentially communal significance.\n\nThus the imperative is a more “secular” mode than the ostensive, one more oriented to the practical world. Its existence alongside the ostensive allows for continued dialogue—for example, the surgeon’s conversation with the assistant who passes him the requested instruments: “Scalpel!” – “Scalpel!” “Forceps!” – “Forceps!” and so on. This was not possible with the ostensive, which outside the ritual context is rather a means for revealing an unexpected presence than for facilitating continued action. It is indeed difficult to imagine a cooperative work situation without the imperative, the use of which would tend to contribute to the lexical categorizing of necessary implements and therefore to their distinctly cultural quality as tools.\n\n(51-2) The ostensive form creates and is created by community, and does so through the renunciation and transcendence of desire, of shared “reverence.” The imperative is the more secular form, and dispenses with reverence, openly presenting desire as such. There is no room for dialogue in the ostensive, as the object is what it is and what it must be to sustain the shared space of peace; the imperative initiates dialogue and action, serving utilitarian purposes and treating reality as manipulable. It is, I would suggest, worth considering the implications of taking these opposed dispositions toward reality and towards others (“idealistic” vs “realistic,” “worshipful” vs.\n\n“cynical,” and so on) and treating them as the effects of interdependent grammatical forms that followed one another in a sequence and for reasons we can determine with great plausibility. All this has been under the “intentional form” of the imperative. “Intentionality” is used in Gans’s discussion to refer to the shared attention to the object, including the respective relation of various participants on the scene to the object via desire, and the relation between the participants on any scene with regard to priority—who saw the object first and pointed it out to the other. In moving on to the grammatical form of the imperative, Gans shows how the grammatical features of tense and person, which are wholly absent in the collective and present ostensive, are fully developed in the declarative, and emergent in the imperative: We have seen that the temporality of the imperative, that is, its tense, is the prolongation of the linguistic scene in awaiting. The time of awaiting is both real, lived time standing outside the scene stricto sensu and a prolongation of the presence intended by the utterance.\n\nThus the imperative includes within itself a model of a time other than that of its moment of utterance. We should contrast this with the simple identity of linguistic and real time in the ostensive, where the time of linguistic presence remains, as in the originary event, merely the time of deferral of action while attending to the speaker. The ostensive model has no temporal dimension; the word and its referent coexist in the same suspended present. The temporality of the imperative, al though not yet a true tense independent of the scene of communication, like that of the declarative, is if not a temporal mapping of reality on language, already a mapping of language on reality.\n\nThe hearer of the ostensive can immediately verify its informational content for himself, and so to speak discard the linguistic model that conveyed it; the hearer of the imperative must retain the model as a guide for his conduct, “verifying” it only upon the conclusion of his performance. (54) There is emergent tense in the imperative because there is temporality in the imperative (one waits for its fulfillment) and everything that serves linguistically as a model of the scene constructed by the linguistic act must come to be marked linguistically. (We can already anticipate that part of what will distinguish the declarative is that the temporality of the scene constructed linguistically has no relation to the temporality of the utterance itself.)\n\nThe ostensive is immediately verifiable, while the imperative provides a “guide for… conduct,” introducing an ethical dimension to the emergence of the new speech form: when we relate to each other “imperatively,” we are separate but interdependent beings, potentially cooperative, potentially critical, sharing the presuppositions that make social being possible while being ready to set aside the confirmation of those presuppositions in the interest of getting something done.\n\nThe genesis of the notion of person follows similar lines, al though in contrast to that of tense, it can undergo internal differentiation in the context of the imperative model. The verbal imperative is personalized even in its basic “second-person” form because, again in contrast to the nominal, it requests an action to be performed, and thus made to exist, by the hearer. Just as we have seen that the “run” requested is a “run now,” so we may say that it is also a run-by-X, which is by no means identical to a run-by-Y. And as in the case of governance, the specificity of action on the part of the hearer of the verbal imperative may be presumed to be included in the intention of the speaker.\n\nThus if several hearers are present and the speaker requests a hammer (Hammer!), the intentional model includes only the hammer. Even if one person is specifically addressed, this intentional structure is not violated if someone else brings the hammer, al though the speaker’s expectations may be. But if he says “Come!” to one of the group, then the coming he is requesting could not normally be performed by any other. Now at this point “person” simply means second person, the contrast with the first person not having any basis in the intentional structure, the third being for the moment undefined. The speaker is normally at least the “dative” object of the imperative, and he may on occasion be its “accusative” object, as in a request for help or other personal services.\n\nBut al though personal “shifter” pronouns must have been among the first words, each individual being obliged to refer to himself or to the other by means of symmetrically “shifting” gestures, even as the accusative object of an imperative verb, the speaker is never in symmetry with the hearer. The performance requested of the hearer implies no contrast with one by the speaker. (56) Note how at every point along the way the development of the new grammatical form is tied in with the increasing differentiation and sophistication of cognitive operations and social relations. If the point is having an object supplied, it doesn’t matter who brings it; if the point is having a particular person perform a task, it matters very much—it is in the latter request, that generates a relation between individuals, that grammatical person starts to take shape.\n\nGans here notes in passing another feature of the imperative (coming, again, between the immediate symmetry of the ostensive and the “restored” symmetry of the declarative, where speaker and interlocutor both knowingly accept the independence of the object of their respective desire), its asymmetry. The asymmetry here is complex: on the one hand, the individual issuing the command, at least for the moment, “dominates” the other and the scene in general; but the implication of Gans’s reference to the need for shifter pronouns in the more singularized imperative is that the word “you” comes before “I.” That is, it is the one who is commanded who is first named, and hence placed at the center of the scene and, of course, in possession of the power to refuse (or delay, or modify) the command.\n\nIf we are ever to recover the energizing relation between linguistic and social inquiry that inspired the great “theory” revolution in the West, we could not do better than to take Gans’s book as a touchstone for it. The Origin of Language initiates a new disciplinary space and, as I have been suggesting, only a deliberate dispossession of assumptions ungirding other disciplinary spaces in the human sciences makes it possible to enter it. It might help to consider Gans’s originary thinking to be a revision of the (often forgotten) constitutive assumptions across fields such as sociology, aesthetics, anthropology, religion, and so on.\n\nWhy is there such a thing as the “social,” or the “aesthetic,” or the “literary,” or the “human,” the “ritual,” “faith,” etc.? Gans’s hypothesis actually offers answers to all these questions. In reading this book, a good place to begin would be to give the question, “why are there sentences, rather than signals?,” the weight that has been given to Heidegger’s famous question, “why is there something rather than nothing?—in fact to see this question as a more “rational” version of Heidegger’s. And, therefore, as providing a more powerful and, I stress, still undiscovered, way into all the deconstructive questions raised in Heidegger’s wake—questions which, along with many others in the human sciences, seem to be in desperate need of rethinking.\n\nForeword I For years my intellectual universe has been increasingly characterized by dissociation. Nearly forty years ago I formulated a heuristic hypothesis that I believe revolutionizes our conception of human language and culture. Yet al though this idea first appeared in 1981 in a well-publicized major university press book, and has since been reproduced and refined in numerous print and web publications, it remains virtually invisible, and is never referenced in “scientific” works dealing with the origin of language.\n\nNonetheless, a small group of academics have remained attached to this idea, allowing Anthropoetics (anthropoetics.ucla.edu) to appear uninterruptedly since 1995. In 2007, this group became the Generative Anthropology Society/Conference (GASC), which has subsequently held a series of twelve annual conferences, with a thirteenth scheduled for 2019. Why do I believe that my little scenario of language origin is so important? While thousands of intellectuals spent decades enthralled, as some still are, with the Derridean idea of la différance as exposing the lie of the “presence” of the sign to our consciousness, and debunking the oppressive dominance of the Center privileging male over female, white over black, right over left… only a tiny handful appreciate seeing deferral explained simply and apolitically as a stepping back from mimetically enhanced “instinctive” violence, a modification of René Girard’s “emissary murder” conception of human origin that I think more faithful to its spirit than his own sacrificial formulation.\n\nDeferral in this sense, which establishes within a group of protohumans the first scene of representation, is as far as I know the only nonmetaphysical and non-supernatural explanation anyone has ever come up with of the difference between human, sign-mediated consciousness and that of other creatures. It offers an anthropological model of the unique human pour-soi that has been the focus of philosophy since Descartes, culminating in Sartre’s L’être et le néant. This work is indeed the “last word” of metaphysical analysis, but because it remains a work of metaphysics, it describes our consciousness as an individual rather than a communal scene and, neglecting language, deprives itself of the possibility of bridging the gap between natural science and philosophy.\n\nNothing that has happened since I first formulated the originary hypothesis has in any way altered my judgment of its importance. But having reached the age of seventy-seven, I feel that I owe it to those who have remained interested in this idea, and even more, to the idea itself, to outline a strategy that would maximally preserve GA’s chances for eventual success. This will depend on our ability not simply to persuade the intellectual world of the plausibility of the originary hypothesis, but to demonstrate its usefulness in reinterpreting humanity’s cultural legacy. Republishing The Origin of Language in an updated and streamlined version is a first step in this direction.\n\nAlthough, as with philosophical constructions, and even some anthropological ones—e.g., Mauss’ notion of the gift as confirmed in the contemporary world by social rather than economic exchange—GA’s hypothesis can be confirmed in vivo by the examination of the scenic structures of our own lives, it is doubly handicapped. Not only is it not empirically falsifiable but, I think more importantly, it does not bear the imprimatur of an authority in linguistics or the related social sciences. Had such as Derek Bickerton or Terrence Deacon formulated the originary hypothesis, it would surely have been widely discussed, no doubt further elaborated, and might well by now have achieved general acceptance.\n\nYet such an eventuality would have been highly unlikely. My hypothesis is too paradoxical, too humanistic to appeal to, or even to occur to, a social scientist. The day of “natural philosophy” is over, and GA as a new way of thinking is not merely lacking in appeal to those whose work is resolutely empirical, it is far too revelatory for the tastes of those who enter and are trained in these fields. These include analytic philosophy, which is today a highly technical subject, not one friendly to armchair speculation. None of this makes GA less necessary than it would be otherwise; on the contrary. But it requires that we become aware of the need to persuade social scientists of the value of this kind of speculative “theory,” as opposed to the incremental conceptions that derive from empirical study, and which conceive of human culture as an emergent structure in the sense of adding a new layer of recursion, but without understanding its paradoxical, faithbased essence: the human attribution of sacrality/significance as pre-existing the human.\n\nOr to put it more simply, the inextricable unity of God creates man/man creates God. We must also undertake the hopefully less arduous task of persuading humanists that grounding philosophy and its ethical foundation in anthropological reality is both necessary and made qualitatively simpler by means of a hypothesis that begins with the constitution of the human community in an event, the origin of language and culture. No doubt these programmatic suggestions are easier to propose than to realize in practice. I have attempted to implement them over the years in a number of books, as well as in over 600 online Chronicles of Love and Resentment (references to Chronicle number nnn can be found at anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vwnnn), but whatever insights I may have achieved, these writings could not demonstrate sufficient mastery of the fields of world culture to persuade the specialists in these domains, let alone the intellectual public, of their value.\n\nIt is clear in hindsight that The Origin of Language, which introduced the originary hypothesis to the world, would have benefited from a clearer idea of what GA could accomplish. Most of my early GA books—Science and Faith is an exception—lack a strategy of composition; they are extended thought-experiments rather than satisfying wholes. I would no doubt have done better to focus more closely on the relationships between my new way of thinking and the various older ways with which it intersects, philosophy in particular, rather than attempting to rewrite in outline the history of Western literary culture. At this point in my life, I believe my time is best spent in returning to the foundations of GA in hopes that by clarifying its relationship to these other domains, I might stimulate workers in these fields to explore its consequences.\n\nIn preparation for this, I offer a few watchwords whose visibility as corollaries of GA is not as obvious as I would like. Failure to accept these points almost inevitably means falling into a compromise position in which one combines GA with other ultimately incompatible ways of thinking in a lazy eclecticism. GA has its roots in “French theory,” but even more than Girard’s writing, it is allergic to being name-dropped into a mix of other fashionable notions. Although GA’s notion of deferral derives from Derrida’s idea of différance, the two cannot simply be “used” alongside each other.\n\nLanguage is not “about reality”\n\nWilliam Flesch, whose presence at our 2017 Stockholm GASC I greatly appreciated, is one evolutionary-psychology-oriented literary theorist who does not accept the rationalistic clichés of the genre, but understands the paradoxical nature of human culture. Flesch rejects the facile notion of identification as an explanation of the reader’s relationship with fictional characters, insisting rather on the anomalous, not to say paradoxical nature of our interest in fictional beings; how can they affect our lives if they do not “really” exist? As he points out quite correctly, our relationship to literary characters is like that we have with people in the real world; we judge their acts, and espouse or oppose their desires, depending on what I would simply call our sense of justice, as providing validation for our community-oriented values, notably our penchant for what he calls “altruistic punishment.”\n\nThat is, our moral sense makes us willing to forgo personal satisfaction (thus to act “altruistically”) in order to punish those who violate the norms that maintain the human community on the right side of the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Whence his provocative title, Comeuppance (Harvard UP, 2007). I would respectfully append to Flesch’s analysis a basic notion that should simplify the question of our relationship to fictional beings. It derives directly from GA’s central idea about language: language is not in the first place “about reality.” It is not “about” anything; it is a means for deferring violence (not simply “aiding cooperation”) by communicating/renouncing desire in the present in lieu of acting on it, in order that it may be subsequently acted on without conflict.\n\nThe fictional characters that we meet on our mental scene of representation are in cultural terms more significant than our problems in the “real world,” because they engage us directly with the communal scene of culture. (Which is why we cry so easily at the movies.) Durkheim saw religion as embodying the values of the community that individuals would not otherwise adopt for themselves. This is true enough, but backward, since we would have no “values” at all in the absence of the scene of representation that exists in us as individuals only because it was first created in and along with the community. Although the absence of originary about-ness is obvious once one realizes that language cannot have begun with declarative sentences, this is no doubt the most difficult aspect of GA for people to grasp.\n\nThis is particularly true of scientists. Their language is disciplined by truth-value, and they obey very strict rules concerning what can be affirmed. To them, it seems obvious that language emerged so I could make to a fellow protohuman the falsifiable statement that “the food is over the hill.” What they fail to realize is that had this been the originary purpose of language, we would have evolved like vervet monkeys, emitting different signals for the different objects of interest in our environment. Particularly since the Enlightenment, we have lived in a rationalistic world in which every use of language is supposed to be falsifiable.\n\nHence we tend to understand Nietzsche’s critique of objective truth as a debunking, when it might more usefully be seen as an insight into its evolution (see Kieran Stewart, “Nietzsche’s Early Theory of Language in Light of Generative Anthropology”; anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2202/2202st ewart/). Truth-seeking is a beautiful thing, as are the achievements and applications of natural science. But the originary function of language cannot have been to “convey information” about “reality.” Henry Frankfort’s ironic concept of BS (online at http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf; see Chronicle 475), comes closer to its original purpose, which is, to use Durkheim’s term, to create “solidarity.”\n\nThe sacred and the significant are originarily identical They only come to differentiate themselves on the scene of representation that their common manifestation inaugurates. The notion that it is we who attribute significance to objects of experience is, like the declarative sentence, not an originary one. The first significant object, by being designated by a sign, is thereby distinguished from every other object in the universe as something to which we cannot relate through our “instinctive” appetites. We do not need “supernatural” categories to define the sacred; it is thus already defined. The sacred/significant is the originary cultural supplement to what has been revealed as the dangerous inadequacy of our “natural” pre-human restraints.\n\nThis danger is deferred by the imposition of the sign between us and our “instinctive” nature. The sacred is experienced as the object of a desire that cannot be fulfilled and for that very reason is desire and no longer mere appetite. Unlike the rational uses of language that we falsely think of as fundamental, it is the use of the ostensive sign to designate the originary sacred / significant object that is the founding gesture of language.\n\nThe preceding stepping-back or deferral of appetitive interest inaugurates the contemplation of the central object of the group at the inaccessible center of a scene. This is not to suggest that there is no difference between religious and rational thought. But discussing such differences as though they were grounded in an unchanging cultural ontology is the action of a “historian of ideas,” not an originary thinker. The object of GA is to show the common root of our ways of commemorating / reproducing / perpetuating the originary scene, both in order that their differences may be appreciated and in order to find better ways of recombining them.\n\nThe contemporary Judeo-Christian West’s loss of faith is a serious matter. Whether effective substitutes for religion exist beyond Europe’s abstract human-rights “Ethical Culture,” or whether the traditional faiths can be revitalized, as seems to be occurring in various places, the purpose of GA is not merely to register these developments but to contribute to them by providing a new level of human self-understanding. Finally, as both these lessons demonstrate, Our human essence as symbolic language-users is ineluctably paradoxical Because natural language attributes significance as if it were independent of this attribution, it can never be fully “understood” as a formal system.\n\nAll works of cultural significance, whether of art or religion, function to let us experience the paradoxical emergence of significance, or to put it in spatial terms, the emergence of verticality from the horizontal world of pre-human interaction. This is a “mystery” whose existence cannot be explained, since it concerns the sign-system in which the explanation must be given. But this third lesson is best kept in the back of our minds, since insisting on it risks conveying to the world of science the mistaken impression that GA is a kind of mysticism. On the contrary, GA’s first words, the first sentence of The Origin of Language in 1981, were: Mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity. To allow us to better understand ourselves by grasping the pre-rational foundation of language and culture is GA’s purpose. It is also, I believe, that of human science.\n\nII. Sign and Event The originary hypothesis is close to forty years old, having first been formulated during my visit to Johns Hopkins in 1978. Not only have some of its basic constituents changed, notably the dropping of Girard’s lynch mob conception not long after the 1981 publication of The Origin of Language, but over the years I have tended to emphasize different elements of the scenario. On the occasion of this new edition it is useful to recall a few of those aspects that I have had less occasion to reiterate in recent years, but which strike me as having a renewed relevance in our day.\n\nMinimality The first Origin of Language put great emphasis on the Ockham’s-razor minimality of the hypothesis. I saw the creation of as simple a scenario as possible as the theory’s greatest virtue. At the time, this was uncontroversial; but times have changed. My impression is that in the era of Big Data, simplicity is no longer a value in itself. Anything that smacks of non-empirically grounded intuition is looked upon with suspicion: where is your data set? In any event, getting the causality right is surely more important than minimizing the list of parameters. But as opposed to the natural world, where the farther we go the more complex everything seems, Ockham’s razor in human matters is more than just a rule of thumb for efficiency in the laboratory.\n\nA corollary of the big-data approach to causality is to consider that any simple cause-effect explanation is just a kludge to which we were obligated back in the days when we couldn’t handle all the parameters. Even today, this is difficult. But just wait another few years when we’ll have million-qubit computers; then we’ll really be able to understand causality. Or rather, we won’t have to understand it at all, for our computers will be able to make predictions with currently unimagined degrees of precision. The recent developments of particle physics, whatever their benefits, have made it impossible for the layperson to have the faintest idea of the fundamental composition of the universe, well over half of which appears to be undetectable (“dark”).\n\nAlthough there appears to be no alternative, I have my doubts about our future understanding of the natural world. But be this as it may, I think I can say with some authority that we are obliged to give credence to simple explanations in cultural matters. This is more a matter of attitude than of “fact.” The physical-physiological causality involved in forming the first sign is no doubt as complex as any big-data equipment has the capacity for. But to understand it from within human culture is to grasp it from the standpoint of the creatures who were motivated by a conscious judgment that could only explicitly take a small number of factors into account.\n\nIt is the big-data temptation that has led to the oft-repeated yet intrinsically ludicrous assertion that language “emerges naturally” when our cognitive level reaches such and such a threshold. The absurdity of treating language as a biological-cognitive function whose communicative setting is simply irrelevant reflects the reduction of causality to a web of correlations none of which “means” any more than another, whatever the naïve participants in the activity may think about it. After all, economists and psychologists have shown us that people ceaselessly misunderstand the “real” motivations for their acts. The first users of language may have fancied they were designating a significant/sacred object, but what they were “really” doing was finding a new outlet for their overactive neurons. We must unlearn this effectively brainless attitude.\n\nEventfulness All of which leads me to a related and even more important element of the originary hypothesis. The most pertinent way of describing the minimality of our hypothesis’ causal chain is that it is an event, a memorable occurrence that establishes a new category of activity, the marking of the deferral of appetitive appropriation by a sign that originates as an aborted gesture of appropriation. The act of participation in this event is conscious in a way no animal action can be, because its conscious nature is inherent in the sign that is shared with the other members of the group. The act of representation finds its purpose outside itself in designating the object of its renunciation as sacred/significant, which minimally means that, rather than being seen as an object for appropriation, it is understood by the newly founded human community as something that can be approached only via the sign. A corollary of this reflection is that not just the originary use of language but every use of language must be understood as an event, a term that must be understood as referring to every human, cultural phenomenon.\n\nLanguage and “Writing” One of Derrida’s most famous and significant points about language was that, in contrast to the apparent immediacy of speech, the truly exemplary form of linguistic communication is rather writing, l’écriture. This assertion generated among the faithful many delectable paradoxes in the service of denouncing the oppressive central authority that Derrida associates with the “myth of presence,” by means of which it persuades its subjects that its decrees are of divine origin. In undermining this authority, Derrida, while deconstructing Rousseau’s metaphysical faith in the immediacy of speech and the decadence of writing, in fact extends this decadence backward from writing to language itself.\n\nFor Derrida, to claim that language is “really” writing is to claim that all language makes a false claim of presence, of sacred authority, which is only a mask for political authority. That primitive human societies are egalitarian rather than hierarchical is a fact too trivially “anthropological” for Derrida to consider. Nevertheless, like most of Derrida’s intuitions, his idea of the primacy of “writing” is essentially true, if only we return to GA’s primary point about language, which is that it is a mode of deferral. A sign is not a signal; it is a product of conscious renunciation, just the opposite of an assertion of immediate “presence.”\n\nWhich is to say that, as Derrida himself never realized, it is precisely this différance, this espacement, this écriture, that is what (human) presence is. Language is present to its referent the way we are present at a theatrical performance: in its presence, in which we know ourselves to be existing before it, not stuck up against it, as Sartre describes the beings in the world of the en-soi. And just as writing embodies deferral more obviously than speech, emphasizing the author’s distance from both the referential world and his interlocutor, so does writing emphasize more clearly than speech its inscriptive or record-making character.\n\nScripta manent, verba volant is true only for societies that have a written language; purely oral cultures preserve their sacred texts in memory. Properly understood, the “inscriptive” character of language is evident; there is no need to assert it as a Derridean paradox. By marking the language-event with a sign, the user of language, oral or written, “inscribes” it in the universe of human culture, and more specifically, makes it an object of personal and collective memory that belongs henceforth to the cumulative history of humankind. Whence my insistence that we understand the origin of language as an event, even if the heuristic model furnished by the originary hypothesis will most likely never be identified with a specific time and place.\n\nYes, the sign must have emerged through a number of stages. But there is gradualism and gradualism. A series of events is not the same as a series of unmarked occurrences such as take place among animals. Just as it is absurd to say that at some point we begin to have “ideas” and that speech emerges because we “want to express them”—an absurdity that has nevertheless become almost a truism in the recent literature of the human sciences—it is equally absurd to speak of animals as “unable” to mark the events of their lives by signs. Neither the action nor the desire are part of the animal repertory, un point c’est tout.\n\nLacking a sign-system, the animals have no way of referring to, hence of culturally sharing these occurrences, let alone of regretting the fact. The first signing event was no doubt repeated a number of times before its discovery of sacrality/significance became universally accepted, but it was an event from the start, a memorable occasion, if not the memorable occasion that we find in “myths of language origin”—or in the first sentence of Genesis.\n\nPhilosophy and Anthropology Philosophy understands all this, in its way. Hegel’s world-spirit is in fact the historical spirit of human culture, historical because conscious of being part of a series of events. Beginning with Being and Non-Being in a universe of prehuman abstraction from which consciousness in and for itself eventually emerges, Hegel provides the most thorough version of the metaphysical organon. Here, even in the supposed absence of humans or of an anthropomorphic God, the universe is driven by ideas, which is to say, by the human scene of representation and its contents. But al though today Hegel’s speculations are dismissed as “metaphysical,” it is not enough to deconstruct them in what are in the final analysis equally metaphysical terms.\n\nPhilosophy cannot find its ground in itself, but it cannot find a ground either in the denunciation of its groundlessness—al though the paradoxical configuration of this activity prepares the way for GA’s more rational approach, both to the origin and nature of human culture and to paradox itself. In Science and Faith, written over thirty years ago, I criticized the social sciences for their dogmatic gradualism, which Big Data has only reinforced. On the principle that natura non facit saltus, cultural innovations are described as proceeding by imperceptible steps so that no moment of sudden revelation is ever envisaged.\n\nAs for the revelations that our religions are founded upon, the task of science is to study their gradual emergence, their revelatory reality being “bracketed” for use in the nonscientific universe of ritual devotion. Hence the primary challenge that GA responds to, even before attempting to fulfill its mission of providing a plausible scenario for the origin of language, is to persuade the intellectual community that such a revelatory origin both can and must be thought. The originary hypothesis describes the emergence of a totally new form of behavior that could only have appeared as a revelation to its participants because the very categories that it inaugurated were categories of revelation.\n\nUnless the first object to become the referent of a sign was the focus of common attention in a wholly new way, it would not have been so designated at all. There is no gradual path from animal signals to human signs. The only gradual element of the process is getting it to stick and be reiterated until it becomes expected rather than extraordinary, so that from a unique event the use of language becomes banal—al though, even at its most banal, every use of language remains an event, an inscription. Even after nearly forty years, it is still asking much of a reader to entertain the hypothesis presented in these pages.\n\nIt has no doubt more in common with the speculations of “French theory” than with the more positivistic modes of scholarship in favor today. Now that, in the academy at least, the oppressive nature of (Western) culture is universally acknowledged, it seems no longer necessary to follow Derrida in unveiling the oppressive nature of the myth of linguistic presence. Hence the more rational tend to believe that our only chance at apolitical objectivity lies in undertaking the data-driven study of human behavior without recourse to metaphysical niceties, forgetting that it is these niceties alone that differentiate us from our animal brethren.\n\nOn the assumption that there is nonetheless a potential audience for the originary hypothesis and its immediate consequences, this second edition is intended to present the underlying theory in a more concrete and logical fashion than the first, where I still relied on Girard’s human-sacrifice scenario of the originary event. The text is more clearly written, and disencumbered of many secondary observations and reflections on the linguistics of the 1970s. I can assure my reader that, at the very least, the originary hypothesis that an event inaugurates the human world of representational culture still stands, undamaged and undaunted, as solitary now as it was when I first formulated it in 1978. If only in tribute to its ability to survive in the neartotal absence of institutional support for nearly four decades, I hope the reader will be willing to give it a second look.\n\nSanta Monica January 1, 2019\n\n## Chapter 1. Introduction\n\nLet me repeat the first sentence of the original 1981 edition of The Origin of Language (TOOL): Mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity. To the extent that the word mystery has a genuine referent and is not merely a synonym for hoax or ignorance, there is only one human mystery, the mystery of language, which is also the mystery of the sacred and of the representational culture that separates us from our fellow creatures. Given that we have no way of understanding this mystery from without, we can assume that we will never understand it fully as the product of simpler components, which is another way of saying that faith will always be necessary, that we can only postulate, not demonstrate, the human essence we seek to explain.\n\nNonetheless, there is no need for mysticism. The object of Generative Anthropology (GA) is, like that of all human science, to minimize the mystery of the human sign, the sacred, and the other cultural phenomena that derive from it. It remains within the limits of philosophical reflection, discoursing on the elements of human experience without reference to the material substrate (neurons, synapses, genes, etc.) that embodies them. However, unlike traditional philosophy or metaphysics, which brackets the question of the emergence from “nature” of the declarative proposition from which philosophical discourse is constructed, GA confronts the problem of the origin of mature, declarative language as a secondary problem to that of the origin of language itself.\n\nThus we begin with the emergence of human language from a pre-human, prelinguistic state, through the minimal utterance forms of the ostensive and the imperative, reaching the declarative only at the end of our journey. We know from Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species (Norton, 1997) that human language is neurologically discontinuous with animal signal systems; their headquarters are even located in different parts of the brain. And from our own experience we are well aware that human “calls” such as laughter, tears, and cries of pain are not continuous with language. Nor can language be understood simply as a “behavior.” There is no need to redo\n\nChomsky’s demolition of B. F. Skinner’s attempt to conceive language as a system of conditioned reflexes. (See his “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior” in Language, 35, 1, 1959: 26-58, reprinted in Readings in the Psychology of Language, ed. Leon A. Jakobovits and Murray S. Miron, Prentice-Hall, 1967.) But perversely, the clear indications that human language is sui generis appear to have led empirically minded linguists to focus entirely on the cognitive content of language as a way of “expressing thoughts” rather than on its communicative function. Since, on the one hand, human symbolic language differs absolutely from animal indexical signals, but on the other, it is transmitted to our fellows primarily through the broadly similar mechanism of articulated sound, the implicit conclusion is drawn that there is no particular need to concern ourselves with its communicative function, since the true uniqueness of human language must be found in the cognitive content of its symbols.\n\nBut on the contrary, what is specific about human linguistic “behavior” is in the first place not its content but the uniqueness of the linguistic communication situation itself. Linguistic communication is uniquely characterized by joint shared attention, a mode of interaction that distinguishes humans from animals, and that contains the act of signifying at its very core, lacking which we would merely have two persons attending to the same thing. One of the key problems that has beset the current state of inquiry into the origin of language is the unreflective, one might say unconsciously Chomskian equation of “language” with its present, mature state, as manifested in all known languages.\n\nIt is surely of interest to study child language acquisition, as has been done in recent years in great detail. But observing a child learning a mature language tells us nothing about how language itself came into being. That we know of no speakers of “elementary language” does not of course mean that linguists assert that the structures of language appeared all at once; even Chomsky assumes that our Language Acquisition Device (LAD) evolved from a simpler state. But al though it has often been noted, not without some surprise, that our fellow apes do not point, the idea that pointing at something is actually the emission of a sign, and therefore already a form of language, seems never to arise in the context of language origin.\n\nThis is an idea that Raymond Tallis comes close to in his book on The Hand (Edinburgh, 2003), which expresses a view largely compatible with GA, as I had occasion to remark a propos of Tallis’ keynote address at the annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference in 2014.\n\n* * *\n\nLet us then rehearse the basic scenario of the hypothesized originary event. The purpose of this scenario, and of the originary hypothesis in general, is not to offer a guess as to was wirklich geschehen ist, but to provide a heuristic model that, in contrast to real-world events, includes only content relevant to the meaningful result that is presumed to emerge from it. The notion of the laboratory, as developed by the beloved French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (e.g., La formation de l’esprit scientifique, Vrin, 1938), is as a place where distracting sources of variability are reduced to a minimum in order that experiments may be carried out in which the values of specific parameters may be determined.\n\nThe originary event as described by the hypothesis is so to speak a thought-experimental laboratory. The fundamental intuition that presides over GA, a paradigmatic idea of René Girard to which the professional world of anthropology has never given the importance it deserves, is that human representational culture comes into being only when our ancestors had become too mimetic, and consequently too potentially violent to be able to continue to rely on animal mechanisms of violence-inhibition. The pecking order that operates among higher animals depends on the group’s forming a queue structure rather than a centralized community.\n\nThe hypothetical originary event presupposes only that the progression of mimetic ability among proto-humans has reached the point at which this serial hierarchy breaks down. Let us imagine an appetitive object, such as the cadaver of a large animal discovered or killed by a hunting party. The members of the group surround the object, the Alpha among them. But the level of mimetic tension in the group has risen too high for the Alpha to be able to rely on his primacy as in the past: appropriating the (whole) animal, taking his portion, then passing the remainder to the Beta, and so on. Under the pressure of increased mimetic rivalry, the Alpha taking the first piece of meat, from being simply at the head of the queue, comes to be viewed and resented as a unique privileged figure in opposition to all the others, who for the moment are not benefiting from the meat distribution.\n\nHence the Alpha’s potential act of appropriation is contested not by individual rivals but by the group as a whole. Like the hands of children at a party reaching out for the last piece of cake, all make a gesture of appropriation toward the object, but, observing this symmetry, all including the Alpha hesitate to incur the aggression of the others by prolonging their gesture toward the object. Thus the members of the group are obliged to defer their appropriation of the animal, and consequently abort their gesture. “Defer” (différer) is a term I have “anthropologized” from Jacques Derrida, who uses it to refer to the hesitation implicit in the choice of a word in a paradigm.\n\nBut before the existence of linguistic paradigms, the originary object of deferral must have been the potential violence attendant on a worldly rather than a “symbolic” act. It is this aborted gesture of appropriation, designating the object, but no longer directed at appropriating it, that we postulate as the first sign. This suspension of appropriative activity would convert the “theater of action” in which the hunter-scavengers confront the animal as a source of nourishment into a scene where, al though action is for the moment impossible, the group’s attention remains jointly focused on the animal at the center.\n\nThe aborted gesture would then come to be collectively understood as a new form of communication, directed both at the central object itself as the first “deity” and at the other members of the group. This originary occurrence of joint shared attention would arise through the consciousness shared by the participants of both their own gesture and that of the others, coupled with the awareness that peacefully exchanging this gesture, in contrast to fighting over the central object, makes this new form of exchange memorable and desirable, worthy of being repeated. The idea that the sign both reproduces and participates in the “aura” or numinousness of its referent while at the same time leaving it intact is the essential benefit of signification.\n\nIn a less minimalistic form, mediated through his construction of the psyche around erotic energy, this same core intuition presides over Freud’s scenario of father-murder in Totem and Taboo (original edition, 1913), which was the direct ancestor of Girard’s scene of emissary murder in La violence et le sacré (Grasset, 1972). Regardless of the ostensible appetitive motivation of the group (for Freud, access to the women in the patriarchal harem, for Girard, finding someone to blame for a plague or other calamity, for GA, instituting a communal system of distribution to replace the failed pecking order), the core of all these scenes is the designation of a central figure by a sign, which I have consequently called the name-of-God.\n\nOnce this is accomplished, I am happy to accept the idea shared by both Girard and Freud that this central figure will be torn apart by the peripheral participants, al though the sparagmos serves a different purpose and certainly obtains superior alimentary results in GA’s originary hypothesis than in the other scenarios. The event of the origin of language is the true origin of the human. Language and the scene of representation on which it takes place add a new dimension to animal existence. This dimension can be understood as that of eventfulness itself, in which an incident leaves its trace as a sign shared with the community rather than a mere epigenetic inflection: an event in the human sense is ipso facto a signified.\n\n* * *\n\nThe originary event cannot simply be assumed to have occurred in the minimalist fashion that this exposition of the originary hypothesis describes. Any such hypothesis must be in some sense a just-so story. But its heuristic value is undiminished. The point is that, unlike the progress of genetic evolution through mutation and selection, the emergence of culture, of a shared system of representations, starting ex hypothesi from a single shared representation whose sacred referent embodies significance-sacrality itself—this emergence is by its very nature self-representing. The precise instant at which the aborted gesture of appropriation that is the source of the first sign acquires a value in itself, not as a signal but as a sign that paradoxically both reflects and at the same time creates the separation of its now-sacred referent from the “horizontal” world of appetite, could no doubt not be determined empirically even were we capable of reconstructing the entire history of human evolution.\n\nIt is nonetheless functionally a unique moment of creation that can be understood only as an event taking place on the scene shared by the proto-human participants. All other theories of language origin agonize over the necessity of passing from, as Engels’ Dialectics of Nature put it, quantity to quality. But what distinguishes language is not the qualitative complexity of its content; it is the nature of the communication it enables. It is useless to conceive complex cognitive blueprints that, once fulfilled, would allow language to\n\n“emerge.” Language is ipso facto a conscious, interactive phenomenon; it is our evidence for consciousness itself in a sense beyond animal awareness. The scene of consciousness exists in individuals when and only when it subsists as well as a scene of representation shared by other members of the group, as the basis for a cultural/linguistic community.\n\n* * *\n\nIn my early descriptions of the originary event, I assumed that all the participants, fearful of making the first move and being attacked by the others, spontaneously aborted their appropriative gestures toward the central object and acquired the consciousness that they were not merely deciding not to appropriate, but that their aborted gestures had themselves become intentional signs embodying both deferral of action and the public communication of this deferral, while representing the object itself as the common focus of interest. The dynamics of the situation would lead to the pragmatic paradox that the more the object was represented and focused on, the less it could be appropriated.\n\nThis progression would persist until the entire group, realizing that they were all agreed on the desirability of the object and on their common need for access to it, would approach it together in a collective sparagmos that would end with each participant possessing a roughly “equal” portion. But Adam Katz suggested in “Remembering Amalek: 9/11 and Generative Thinking” (Anthropoetics 10, 2 (Fall 2004 / Winter 2005) that the discovery that to designate the object by an aborted gesture was in effect to represent it should not be assumed to have occurred to all the participants at the same moment—in other words, that an element of firstness was a necessary constituent of the scene.\n\nOne might say in defense of my original scenario that this differential element is of a lower heuristic order than the unanimous conclusion of the scene, with the creation of a human community linked by the sign, which I conceive here as taking place in a single event, al though the consciousness of the gesture as a sign no doubt emerged through many false starts. But I think the important factor in Adam’s emendation is not so much the gradualness of the discovery/invention of the sign as the differentiation this discovery would have effected among the participants. Since clearly the end result would not single out any individual initiator, given that the ethical equality of all the participants in relation to the center (what I call the moral model) is the necessary outcome of the signing operation, one might ignore this differentiation.\n\nBut as we well know, as soon as surpluses come to be accumulated beyond the needs of immediate consumption, firstness will reappear as a social reality with the introduction of hierarchy, and this will remain the norm, with a few minor exceptions, throughout human history. That is, the moral model of linguistic reciprocity will remain with us as our ethical foundation, but will no longer supply the model for the exchanges of goods and the power-relations they guarantee in the social order, as it had done at the origin and as it still does in the remaining “hunter-gatherer” societies. Linguistic and moral exchange will remain symmetrical, but economic and political exchange will henceforth be conducted among unequals.\n\nIndeed, this may be said to have been inevitable from the outset. The moral model cannot dictate the entirety of human behavior, even human cultural behavior, and this because the scene of representation, on which the human pour-soi is free as Sartre defines it, is not limited to the public scene of ritual but belongs to each individual. If I have the freedom to intend the central object, then I have the freedom to contemplate manipulating it in a new way, and to formulate projects (Sartre’s term as well) that are not shared spontaneously with the group. This is in my view the real importance of Adam’s emendation.\n\nAn innovation such as the sign cannot be the “emanation” of a situation; it must be the product of innovative reflection of the kind that the scene of representation permits each of us as individuals. Thus even if all the members of the group got the idea of the sign at the same time, the essential point is that each of them would have to grasp it as an individual reflecting on the scene shared with his fellows.\n\n* * *\n\nNo doubt my depiction of the psychological nuances of the communicative relationship thus established is wholly speculative, but what must be understood as its minimal core is the sense, for the first time, of a scenic communication mediated no longer through an instinctive appetitive gesture or a signal derived from it via the Pavlovian process of “conditioned reflex,” but through a gesture that has so to speak turned back upon itself as a self-conscious, voluntary act, one that will be understood by all as referring to the common interdicted, sacred, significant object of desire.\n\n## Chapter 2. The Linguistic Dialectic\n\nThe most significant difference between this work and other accounts of language origin lies in its proposed outline, on the basis of the hypothetical originary event of language/culture, of the evolution of the basic utterance-forms, from the ostensive through the imperative to the declarative.\n\nGiven the lack of empirical evidence to guide this account, it may remind philosophically minded readers of Hegel’s Logik and its dialectical derivation of the categories of thought via the principles of negation and synthesis. I have always admired Hegel, the greatest of all metaphysical system-builders. But my use of a dialectical series is much less ambitious. Its purpose is to offer an understanding of how the hypothetical originary event can furnish a model for the emergence of a mature culture capable of elaborating, as GA does, a theory of its own emergence. That is, I propose a model, beginning with the originary event of the sign, of how using signs can eventually produce the theory that describes their beginning in the originary hypothesis, thus completing the circle and justifying the elaboration of the theory in its own terms.\n\nThe telos of the dialectic of linguistic form is the emergence of the “objectivity” of the declarative sentence from the “irrational” privileging/sacralizing of the central object in the originary ostensive. This irrationality is central to the Girardian scapegoat scene, described as an act of méconnaissance. But we do not require emissary murder to understand why language in its originary form fails to fully implement the objective detachment that the deferral at the heart of the formal pour-soi makes possible. We might be tempted to say that the very structure of human consciousness in its contemplative relationship to its intended objects warrants a means to communicate “objective truths” about reality.\n\nBut such reasoning can be engaged in only a posteriori. I offer it only to point out that metaphysics has always not merely made this inference, but taken it for granted. For GA, the Achilles’ heel of philosophy is its failure to understand the secondarity of the declarative proposition to language—hence to the human—itself. Whence the need to elaborate a model of the dialectic connecting originary language to the declarative form.\n\n* * *\n\nOnce humans learned to defer mimetic violence through signs, they were faced with the dialectical tension that the following chapters describe between the use of language to express the desire of a speaker and its prolongation in the acts of his interlocutor, to whom this desire is alien. The communal symmetry of the originary scene, with the humans on the periphery surrounding the sacralized central object, remains the model of all cultural communication, but the individual elements of this symmetry, the separate “conversations” between the participants that will serve as models for future non-ritual uses of language, embody an asymmetrical relationship between speaker and hearer.\n\nIn the originary event, we may assume that all emit and perceive the “same” sign, and that this sameness is guaranteed by the success of the signing in preventing violence. All realize that the gestures of the others “mean” the same thing as their own, which is to say, renunciation of the immediate act of appropriation of the central object desired by all. But the importance of modeling the formal dialectic that generates the declarative form, the presumably universal basis of fully evolved or “mature” language, is to make clear how the interplay between symmetry and asymmetry in the use of language can acquire the flexibility without which “language” and “culture” would have remained merely ceremonial activities.\n\nThe point is to show how this new mode of consciousness, this pour-soi freed from “instinct,” in which the subject is separated by a néant from its object, could find a functional means of making objective, or more precisely, objectivizing use of this detachment. The historical invisibility of this evolution makes it understandable that human thought should have been divided since its inception between, on the one hand, attributing language as a whole to God, who “always already” possessed it and made a gift of it to man, and on the other, taking the proposition as a given without conceiving of the necessity that it be generated from its “natural” substrate. If for this reason alone, it is useful to reflect on the dialectic from which the declarative emerged. (In The Scenic\n\nImagination [Stanford University Press, 2007], I examined various philosophical accounts of the origin of language in the early modern era; none of these philosophes, to my knowledge, ever attempted to describe the evolution of the declarative proposition from more elementary forms.) * * *\n\nThis series of dialectical “moments” is constructed on the basis of a logic whose plausibility has not been tested experimentally; I would be happy to see empirical psychology attempt such a test. But al though the specific steps in the sequence are open to doubt, the whole is not. The endpoints of the ostensive on the one hand and the declarative on the other can hardly be questioned. At the origin, pointing/designating/representing in the new mode of joint shared attention; at the conclusion, the fundamental information-conveying sentence. And the placement of the imperative between these two poles is equally hard to deny.\n\nIn this dialectical sequence, the tensions provoked by the asymmetry of the speech situation are deferred by the generation of new linguistic forms. This seems to me the model that linguistics must always follow when describing formal evolution. And indeed, it does so when it can make use of historical evidence, for example, in studying the loss of morphology and its replacement by detachable elements, which in a world of widespread literacy are much less likely than in more primitive times to themselves degenerate into morphological particles; or the rise of attention-getting forms that lose their emphatic status and are replaced by others; or the emergence of “prestigious” forms such as the elision of ‘r’ in New York speech, as described by William Labov in The Social Stratification of English in New York City (U of Pennsylvania, 1966), which winds up being associated rather with the pretensions of the lower-middle class than with the elite its speakers had hoped to emulate.\n\nBut whereas these developments take place on the surface of mature language, whose basic functionality cannot be substantially improved upon, the developments hypothesized here involve the emergence of its fundamental forms. The idea that language used to convey objective information first emerges as an antidote to desire is not one to be disdained by moralists. I cannot prove that things really happened this way, but on this occasion at least, si non è vero, è ben trovato is more than a bon mot. To the extent that desire differs from mere appetite, it is as a result of its mediation by representation, and it is this mediation that allows it to be deferred in the indefinitely complex ways that the declarative makes possible. And conversely, it is only because the originary model of the objects of our desire is the sacred that we can bear to have their presence deferred by chains of representations that may or may not permit us eventually to attain them.\n\n* * *\n\nIn the original edition of TOOL, this formal dialectic was prolonged by a discussion of the super-linguistic categories of dialogue and discourse. But having reviewed this material, it seems to me to lie outside the limits of a discussion of the origin of language and its fundamental forms. Once the declarative sentence has emerged, the ways in which sentences can be put together in longer units is no longer truly an element of the formal theory of representation, but belongs to the history of cultural institutions. Hence I have not reprised this material in this new edition.\n\n## Chapter 3. A Derridean Parenthesis\n\nIl n’y aura pas de nom unique, fût-il le nom de l’être. Et il faut le penser sans nostalgie, c’est-à-dire hors du mythe de la langue purement maternelle ou purement paternelle, de la patrie perdue de la pensée. Il faut au contraire l’affirmer, au sens où Nietzsche met l’affirmation en jeu, dans un certain rire et dans un certain pas de la danse. Depuis ce rire et cette danse, depuis cette affirmation étrangère à toute dialectique, vient en question cette autre face de la nostalgie que j’appellerai l’espérance heideggerienne. Je ne méconnais pas ce que ce mot peut avoir ici de choquant.\n\nJe le risque toutefois, sans en exclure aucune implication, et le mets en rapport avec ce que La parole d’Anaximandre me paraît retenir de la métaphysique : la quête du mot propre et du nom unique. Parlant du “premier mot de l’être “(das frühe Wort des Seins: το χρεών), Heidegger écrit: “Le rapport au présent, déployant son ordre dans l’essence même de la présence, est unique (ist eine einzige). Il reste par excellence incomparable à tout autre rapport. Il appartient à l’unicité de l’être luimême (Sie gehort zur Einzigkeit des Seins selbst). La langue devrait donc, pour nommer ce qui se déploie dans l’être (das Wesende des Seins), trouver un seul mot, le mot unique (ein einziges, das einzige Wort).\n\nC’est là que nous mesurons combien risqué est tout mot de la pensée [tout mot pensant : denkende Wort] qui s’adresse à l’être (das dem Sein zugesprochen wird). Pourtant ce qui est risqué ici n’est pas quelque chose d’impossible; car l’être parle partout et toujours au travers de toute langue.” Telle est la question : l’alliance de la parole et de l’être dans le mot unique, dans le nom enfin propre. Telle est la question qui s’inscrit dans l’affirmation jouée de la différance. Elle porte (sur) chacun des membres de cette phrase : “L’être / parle / partout et toujours / à travers / toute / langue /.” Jacques Derrida.\n\nThere will be no unique name, be it the name of being. And we must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside the myth of the purely maternal or purely paternal language, of the lost homeland of thought. We must on the contrary affirm it, in the sense that Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laugh and a certain dance step. From this laugh and this dance, from this affirmation alien to any dialectic, there comes into question that other face of nostalgia that I shall call Heideggerian hopefulness [espérance]. I am not unaware of how shocking this word may appear in this context. I risk it nonetheless, without excluding any of its implications, and put it in relation to what “The Anaximander Fragment” [Das Spruch des Anaximander] seems to me to retain of metaphysics: the quest for the “proper” word [le mot propre] and the unique name.\n\nSpeaking of the “first word of being” (das frühe Wort des Seins: το χρεών [necessity]), Heidegger writes: “The relation to the present, deploying its order in the very essence of presence, is unique (ist eine einzige). It remains exemplarily incomparable with any other relation. It belongs to the uniqueness of being itself (Sie gehort zu Einzigkeit des Seins selbst). Language should therefore, to name what presents itself in being (das Wesende des Seins), find a single word, the unique word (ein einziges, das einzige Wort). Here is where we measure how risky is every word of thought [every thinking word: denkende Wort] that is addressed to being (das dem Sein zugesprochen wird).\n\nHowever, what is risked here is not something impossible; for being speaks everywhere and always through every language/tongue.” This is the question : the alliance of speech and being in the unique word, in the at-last-proper name. This is the question that is inscribed in the played/performed affirmation [affirmation jouée] of la différance. It bears (on) each element of this sentence: “Being / speaks / everywhere and always / through / every / language /.” Jacques Derrida.\n\nAlthough for GA, Jacques Derrida’s notion of la différance is second in importance only to René Girard’s conception of the mimetic origin of the sacred, I never had the opportunity to discuss these matters with Derrida, even indirectly. As Richard van Oort can tell you, al though Derrida had promised to participate in Anthropoetics’ special issue on deconstruction (IV, 1: Fall 1998), and I still have somewhere a brief letter to that effect bearing his signature, when he arrived in Irvine for his annual visiting professorship, rather than spending an hour on the freeway, I asked Richard, who was then a doctoral student intending to take his course, to make the first contact, a procedure that no doubt failed to show the great man an appropriate level of deference.\n\nThe fact is, however, that what Derrida was undoubtedly prepared to do was to answer questions about his ideas, not engage in a discussion where they might be challenged, and recognizing this fact, he gracefully withdrew from the issue. We had no further contact. This is regrettable because al though today it is not uncommon to hear Derrida dismissed as a mystificateur by those who emphasize his irritating preciosity over his philosophical genius, this does no service to human thought. As a parenthesis in the new TOOL, I therefore propose to comment briefly on the final paragraphs of his seminal essay/lecture on la différance.\n\nA sympathetic analysis demonstrates both the quasi-anthropological insight of this “last metaphysician” and his desire to “save” and transcend metaphysics (I dare not speak of a Hegelian Aufhebung), as well as what seems to me the obvious fact that GA answers this desire as far as possible while extracting the kernel of Derrida’s intuition from the mystifying language in which he envelops it. For with all his genius, his loyalty to the metaphysical tradition, so different from Girard’s healthy skepticism, made Derrida incapable of dealing with the paradoxical nature of the enigma, which could be clarified only in a language structurally different from the language of the sacred that he borrows, with irony and bad conscience, from Heidegger.\n\n* * *\n\nThe linguistic foundation for la différance is Saussure’s famous dictum that in language there is nothing but differences. This is obviously true at the boundaries of the physical components of language; a phoneme can only be defined as such by comparison with contrasting phonemes, whence the practice of minimal pairs to distinguish them as elements of contrasting words. We note, for example, in contrast to the English phoneme set, the absence in Spanish of a distinction between “b” and “v” (v de vaca y b de burro), or between “r” and “l” in Japanese. And if we consider semantic paradigms such as colors, similar boundary confusions are equally possible.\n\nBut aside from the fact that one need not think about red and green to call something blue, or gorillas and lions to call something an elephant, the fundamental flaw in this understanding of language is that the primary difference in language, one that must precede all others, is not between elements of a paradigm but between the sign and its referent. The first word is a sign because it is no longer a “practical” gesture of appropriation nor is it an “instinctive” indexical signal; in its persistence as a communication, the aborted gesture acquires a meaning transmissible to the other members of the group. It is this difference, which inaugurates the sign as a wholly new category of being, that creates the representational doubling of signifier and signified that in turn allows differences within the first category to designate different representations of worldly objects.\n\nBut the original deferral that allows for difference, la différance, is the deferral of appropriation and thereby of the practical, “horizontal” world of instrumentality. This deferral creates the néant, the empty scenic space of contemplation, in which the new dimension of meaning can emerge.\n\n* * *\n\nDerrida develops his “non-concept” of la différance over fourteen pages. The “misspelling,” which in French cannot be heard, and is therefore an artifact of writing, the form of language that does away with “presence” and becomes therefore for Derrida its canonical form, is the central symbol of the lack of a proper name for the sign-in-general. But in the essay’s surprising conclusion, reproduced above, the author returns with great nostalgia of his own to Heidegger’s nostalgic hopefulness (espérance) for the single word of metaphysical Being. If we read Derrida sympathetically while nonetheless refusing to accept that the only possible expression of this paradox must be itself paradoxical, the intuition expressed in this passage can be reformulated in much clearer anthropological terms.\n\nWhat is the mystery evoked in reference to this “one word,” the nostalgia for which Derrida rejects yet cannot avoid evoking in a secondary nostalgia for the hope it continued to inspire in Heidegger? Clearly one could go on in this vein as so many have, my own text nostalgically evoking in turn Derrida’s nostalgia as a reminder that metaphysics never really leaves us, that the absence that founds it is of its very essence, und so weiter. But having had the good fortune to study with someone whose impatience with philosophy was the contrapositive of his anthropology, I understand that rather than remaining complacently in the world of concepts we are obliged to do our best to ground them in reality.\n\nClearly in thinking of the one word Derrida, at least, if not Heidegger, is thinking of the name of God, which for Jews is ineffable, or to take God at his word in Exodus 3, inexistent: the only “name” he gives, in what I consider to be the most important passage of the Bible, is the proposition “I am that I am.” But this understanding of the one word represents a great historical insight. Revelations such as this, or John’s later rival insight that In the beginning was the word . . . and the word was God, help to explain the aura that surrounds the question, but at the price of incorporating into the scene of origin a level of understanding which at that point could have only been that of a deity.\n\nAt the origin of human language, the “one word” these gentlemen are seeking was simply the aborted gesture of the originary event, which in reality was no doubt repeated a number of times before its status as a sign acquired the communal recognition necessary to the establishment of a sacred culture around the scene of representation. As described in the previous chapter, the hypothetical originary event is concrete and easily imaginable, and above all it is plausibly motivated, rather than the result of some unfathomable cosmic decision by God, Being, or the Anthropic Principle. This should not be taken to mean that I consider Derrida, or even Heidegger, to be mere mystifiers.\n\nThese thinkers came at the end of the great tradition of metaphysics and were straining great intellectual powers to seek a way out of it. But they failed to realize that reaching this goal requires the addition of a new anthropological dimension to their conceptual analysis. Their language, like that of Sartre and the other th major philosophical minds of the 20 century, is, following in the footsteps of the more empirical-minded Husserl, but open as the latter was not to the resentful dissatisfaction of Nietzsche, an attempt to think through what Kant had recognized as the aporias of thought itself. But “thought” is not an autonomous entity, and its categories must finally be grounded in the reality of human existence, in a scene that is not merely internal to the individual consciousness, as for Sartre and phenomenology in general, but situates the human mind in the sole context in which it can exist and has ever existed, which is that of a linguistic, cultural human community.\n\n* * *\n\nOnce this is done, one realizes in all humility that the “end” of metaphysics in no way brings with it the solution to the world’s problems. I remain convinced after nearly 40 years that GA, if only as demonstrated by its absence from the contemporary scene of public discourse, is bound to play an important role in the “history of thought.” But the effect of its “discovery” on the general welfare, if any, is wholly unpredictable. It is an instrument of freedom, as are all such discoveries, but only faith can provide the espérance that adding it to the mix will make things better. It is nonetheless clear to me that it represents an objectively improved level of human self-consciousness, one that in no way trivializes the results of the human sciences, but that may hopefully influence their future choice of research subjects.\n\nThe fascination of Girardians for the discovery of “mirror neurons” is understandable, but the neuroscientists, for their part, show no signs of making use of the humanistic understanding of mimesis that “mimetic theory” provides. Let us hope that these scientists’ eventual exploration of the neurological substrate of the scene of representation, both individual and collective, will take place in a more cooperative environment. Only then will we truly be able to speak of the end, or more prudently, of the Wendung (turning point) of the metaphysical era.\n\n## Chapter 4. Formal and Institutional Representation\n\nThe first edition of TOOL was chiefly devoted to a discussion of the basic utterance-forms (ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative), speculating on how they might have evolved from the original ostensive gesture/sign. This sequence of forms will be developed in the following chapters. This focus on language rather than ritual, formal rather than institutional representation, was reflected in the book’s subtitle: A Formal Theory of Representation.\n\n* * *\n\nAs the reader may have realized, the originary event of language as I have described it is also that of sacred ritual. Indeed, the spectacle of a group of humans whose gestures designate a central object inaccessible to them not coincidentally resembles the configuration of virtually all religious rites. More specifically, it suggests the preliminaries of ritual sacrifice, which culminates in the sparagmos that we hypothesize as following the emission of the sign. The “linguistic” moment of deferral and the moment of distribution, whether or not followed immediately by consumption (presumably the hunters would bring back meat for their women and children and others too feeble to participate in the hunting party) are two phases of a single event.\n\nThere would be little profit in inventing the sign if it did not lead to an alimentary outcome for the group superior to that of the pecking-order system, which had formerly allowed everyone to be fed. The unity of this scenario provides a model for the complementary relationship between the formal and institutional elements of our representational culture. In the originary event, this separation is merely potential, since the sign has not yet been revealed as detachable from the event as a whole. What has been created is less “language” or “the sacred” than the scene of representation, the shared space within which we contemplate and represent an object that, from appetitively attractive, has become significant.\n\nThis scene within which we defer the “instinct” of the appetitive, being inhibited from action not by a conditioned reflex, but by a will outside the realm of the appetitive itself, marks the inauguration of the human. By its nature, the sign is an individual act, even when performed with others. This act of intending its object, which sacralizes the central god/offering and keeps it from consumption by any individual until the formation of a new human collectivity, can subsequently be performed by the individual subject independently of the public scene, and while it may recall the scene as a whole, it would nonetheless specifically re-present the scene’s central figure, the original object of the aborted gesture.\n\nThe new category of significance contains within it both the sacred—the quality of indefinitely attracting and thereby deferring human appetite—and the desirable—the same quality, but with the horizon of the deferral experienced as finite rather than transcendental. The persistence of the sign after the sparagmos realizes the difference between these two modes of significance. The animal itself is eaten as an object of appetite, but the sign remains as a reminder of its transcendent central role, as designating the “transcendental signified,” or more simply, as the name-of-God.\n\n* * *\n\nIt is the aim of GA to dissolve the frontiers between empirical anthropology and “human science” on the one hand, and on the other, the speculative anthropology we call philosophy. Philosophy originated in Greece with the liberation of discourse from ritual constraints, under the impulse of reflecting on the problems of post-ritual political organization. It has remained ever since metaphysical according to what I consider the most useful definition of that term: thought that takes for granted the existence of mature human language, that is, language that includes declarative sentences or propositions. But now that GA has provided the birth of our signing ability with a plausible real-world foundation, the problems of both philosophy and the human sciences can be placed on a new footing.\n\nThe new way of thinking that is generative anthropology is not a panacea for solving the world’s ethical problems, let alone those of empirical social science, but it should allow thinkers of all disciplines to situate themselves in a non-confrontational manner toward the totality of the human culture we share. It is time that the Enlightenment divorce of science from religion, however necessary and even inevitable within the Judeo-Christian world itself, be followed by a reconciliation that renews their sense of common purpose. Unlike the hypothetical utterance forms of “elementary” or predeclarative language, no clear trace of which subsists, the institutional or ritual aspect of the originary event is well documented, and cannot be discussed without concrete reference to actual practices. This task transcends the speculative limits of GA, but the anthropological community would surely benefit from taking GA’s originary insights into account.\n\n* * *\n\nThe preceding chapter sought to demonstrate the underlying affinity of Jacques Derrida’s conception of la différance with the aims of GA. Derrida’s original French neologism is not unsurprisingly richer than the English deferral, as the French word différer means both defer and differ, and différance, which is pronounced the same way as différence, meaning simply “difference,” adds to it the gerundive verbal element of the act of deferring. Although Derrida’s idea was intended not as an anthropological concept but as a “deconstruction” of metaphysical “presence,” it requires only a small change in mindset to convert it into a key anthropological term.\n\nIn Derrida’s conception, the deconstruction effected by the revelation of la différance exposes the mythical nature of sacred presence in order to liberate us from the dominance of the authoritarian center. Derrida never saw that it was precisely this deferral of the appetitive relationship between the human subject and the object of his desire that embodied our freedom from the animal world of instinct, as reflected in Sartre’s conception of the pour-soi—that (sacred) presence in the human sense was made possible as a result of différance rather than being undermined by it. As Derrida implies but cannot explain, deferral is much more central to the act of signification than simply delaying the application of a paradigm.\n\nEven if that “paradigm” contains but a single member, any use of language is a deferral. Before humans invented/discovered the sign, no creature could relate to objects in the world other than appetitively. Inappropriate appetitive urges, when not blocked at the source by innate reactions, could be countered by learned inhibitions (“conditioned reflexes”); but deferral as it emerged in the originary event is a voluntary, cultural act. I imagine that Derrida would have agreed with me that la différance is the minimal definition of the human. But he would surely not have wished to situate it at the first moment of human history as the source of language and representation itself.\n\nDerrida’s différance denies the very notion of origin; it is always already constituted by a set of differences, and offered as a refutation of phenomenology’s conception of the scene of representation as the presence of the object to our consciousness. As implied by the nostalgic text cited in the previous chapter, this debunking of metaphysics was in fact its final affirmation. Metaphysics, even when it distinguishes with Kant the “thing-in-itself” from the “thingfor-us,” affirms that our specifically human understanding of the world is independent of language and is merely expressed in it. But for the Nietzschean aftermath of metaphysics, the language of philosophical reason betrays a secret nostalgia for the plenitude of the sacred Word, for the “language of presence” as sole guarantee of revealed truth.\n\nSave in asides such as the quoted passage, deconstruction inverts the positive sense of this affirmation, but does not question its substance. The object’s presence being always différée, we cannot claim any unmediated knowledge of it. Hence any claims that may be made of such knowledge are mystifications, tools of oppression. To deconstruct presence is to reveal the hidden (political) agenda of metaphysics. For GA, on the contrary, the metaphysical myth of presence is indeed a misprision of la différance, but it is properly the latter, not the former, that provides the characteristically human understanding of the world.\n\n“Presence” is less a sinister myth than a theologically inflected understanding of what is in fact the separation of consciousness from its object, as inaugurated by the originary abortion of the gesture of appropriation. Something can be present to us only if we stand back from it and contemplate it independently of our appetitive interest in it; we sacralize the originary object of our intention by deferring its appetitive role. Its numinous presence to us depends on its absence from the animal world of appetite that would henceforth be doubled by the human world of representation. Once this is understood, deconstruction’s critique of authority imposing its mythical-theological presence on the duped multitudes is shown to be based on the false premise, one that Derrida strangely shares with Rousseau, that language is itself a form of oppression rather than the fundamental locus of human reciprocity.\n\nOn the contrary, language cannot be understood as a product of social hierarchy. The originary sign as the name-of-God is a guarantor not of tyranny but of the human community’s liberation from the reign of the strongest. The equality before God that monotheism would later make explicit in the face of the god-kings of the ancient empires was there at the birth of human society.\n\n* * *\n\nThe relationship between language and ritual has scarcely been explored in recent decades. The nineteenth century Sanskritist Max Müller saw language as emerging in the context of sacred ritual, and the coevality of language and religion was more recently explored in its broad outlines by Roy Rappaport in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), but this line of inquiry has not been pursued by recent students of language origin. Michael Tomasello’s throwaway quip about religion: One way that leaders throughout human history have sought to legitimate themselves and their laws from a moral point of view is to claim that they have somehow been anointed by a deity or in some other supernatural way.\n\nA Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard, 2016): 131 is emblematic of the désinvolture of not just one highly respected scholar but of the entire field. No one expects contemporary linguists to share Müller’s concern for religious practices, but they should be aware of the originary unity between the simplest form of formal representation and the basis it establishes for its eventual institutional repetition, if only as a way of understanding how the sign acquired a “portable” linguistic association with its referent while at the same time guaranteeing the reaffirmation of communal solidarity, to use Durkheim’s term, in the ritual repetition of the entire event.\n\nSuch matters are, indeed, altogether susceptible to being studied empirically, provided the “religious” be understood as an anthropological reality rather than as a fanciful excrescence on “secular” rationality. The underlying identity of significance and sacrality is not a mere metaphor.\n\nAlthough the idea is understandably absent from the metaphysical/philosophical tradition, the characteristics attributed to God are in fact those of the embodied or “incarnate” signified. The sign is “immortal,” and in the originary event and on the scene of representation to which it gives birth, it is “omnipotent” in interdicting the central object, and “omniscient” in embodying a knowledge of the whole configuration that the individual participants do not possess—the foundation of Durkheim’s insight that the sacred embodies the ethical values of the community that transcend individual interests. The identity of origin, God, and the Word / Logos / Verbum affirmed in the first line of the Gospel of John is inscribed thereby in Christianity and in Western civilization as a whole. It is time we began once more to take it seriously.\n\n## Chapter 5. The Ostensive\n\nIn any account of the genesis of language, one must assume that the first linguistic sign was both absolutely new, a “symbolic” sign (Peirce), yet as close as possible to what animals were capable of producing. I have always been amazed that the recent accounts I have read, such as the one in Fauconnier and Turner’s How Do We Think (Basic Books, 2002; see Chronicle 528), simply neglect this question. This is no doubt a residue of the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy that has since the beginning taken the existence of propositional language for granted. This tradition has persisted throughout the entire history of philosophy, and the attempts in the Early Modern era (see my The Scenic Imagination [Stanford, 2007]) to theorize the origin of human culture, and in some cases specifically of language, culminating in Freud’s father-murder scenario in Totem and Taboo, never penetrated mainstream philosophical discourse, even among thinkers whose avowed intention was to abolish “metaphysics”—for which they had a rather different definition than mine.\n\nAs I have described the originary event, the first linguistic sign was an “aborted gesture of appropriation,” and since it was performed in the presence of its referent, I labeled it an ostensive, a term not altogether original but scarcely common in the linguistic literature. I have no desire to boast of the profound intuition that led me to this term; on the contrary, I think it would be difficult for anyone to choose a “first sign” very different from this one, given Terrence Deacon’s well-taken point that human linguistic signs are not outgrowths of the signals or “calls” used by animals to signal to their conspecifics, including the complex signal system of the vervet monkey.\n\nThe fact that such obvious thoughts do not occur to those who write on this subject is a clear indication that the elephant in the room of language origin, the specificity of the human, is in fact taboo, and must be drowned in a sea of “cognitive” detail that makes language the essentially inevitable outcome of our increasing intelligence, for which it is easy to allege a Darwinian justification.\n\nLet me repeat that what makes the originary ostensive different from any kind of signal is the fact that it emerges, not from a need to exercise the newly added neurons in the proto-human brain, but from a deferral of action. This is the central concept lacking in Girard’s groundbreaking account of human origin in La violence et le sacré. It is this first example of joint shared attention that is the beginning of human language. It requires no special cognitive abilities; what is new is not cognitive but communicative, and the deferral becomes necessary not because we have become more intelligent, but because with the growth of our intelligence we have become more mimetic. One wonders why this rather obvious point is so difficult to communicate in a world of people capable of solving differential equations and describing multi-dimensional vector spaces.\n\n* * *\n\nIn order that the originary ostensive gesture become a sign, it cannot be the simple negation of the original gesture of appropriation. Here as elsewhere, we can well imagine that similar interruptions of the attempt to obtain nourishment took place well before the birth of the sign, which can only occur once the abortion of the gesture has become expected, so that the aborted or deferred gesture is performed deliberately. What had been at first an “instinctual” gesture inhibited by fear of the others in the group morphs into a voluntary gesture of communication to these others that they have nothing to fear or to defend against, while designating the central object of desire as the cause of this deferral—the originary template of joint shared attention.\n\nThe repetition of the gesture would then be self-reinforcing until at least the moment at which all are confident that no individual will break the symmetry of the group, at which point the communal division of the animal in the sparagmos can begin. In the course of this process, the sign becomes a conscious act that is no longer a failed attempt at appropriation but has acquired a form of its own. The fact that animals do not point is most significant; the first sign need be no more than a pointing, yet not solely a pointing-at but also a pointing-for the other members of the group. The very fact of designating something to the others’ attention makes the gesture more than a directional indication. It has become a mark of significance, and hence of signification. The sign is not a simple designation but a re-presentation.\n\nAt the origin, we assume that language began with a single sign, and that the significance it attributed to its object signaled the sole significant object in the universe: this is significant, and all the rest is not. And this is indeed the fundamental characteristic of the scene of representation in general. Obviously when speaking about A we are not denying the significance of B, but language is a mechanism for directing the selective attention of our audience. Each utterance assumes the existence of a world in the background, but cannot allude to it without thereby moving it out of that background. Calling the first sign the name-of-God is not just a mnemonic device that serves to point out the uniqueness of the bearer of significance at that moment, but an affirmation of the originary indistinguishability of the sacred and the significant, and of the source of both sacrality and significance in the excess of desire that is generated by and at the same time constitutes the new human collectivity, which we can rightfully call a community.\n\nThe contrast with the old pecking-order system lies precisely in the reciprocal relationship that links all in their distance from the sacred center. At the same time, the inaccessibility of the center generates an originary resentment that is beyond the mere rivalry inspired by the pecking-order system, since it concerns not a single member of the group but a sacred being that stands over against the group as a whole. Our originary ambivalence toward the sacred is the central problematic of all religious traditions. If in the first edition of TOOL, I described the first sign as a physical gesture without allusion to any vocal component, in reading linguistic anthropologist Daniel Everett’s How Language Began (Liveright, 2017) I was reminded that all known human languages save those expressly designed for the deaf are primarily vocal, with gesture serving so to speak as an analog accompaniment to the digitally encoded meanings of the words.\n\nThus we must assume that such a vocal component was present from the beginning. If it makes sense to speak of an “aborted gesture,” it is difficult to apply this condition to the production of a sound. But on the other hand, if we assume that the original gesture was accompanied by a vocalization, then the fact that the interruption of the gesture would not require that of the sound may be alleged as a factor in the eventual dominance of the oral component, independently of the superiority of sound as a means of communication. If in the past, as we can well imagine, significant gestures such as the Alpha’s taking possession of a consumable object had been normally accompanied with vocalization, the persistence of the first sign’s vocalization in the absence of the appropriative gesture would have been a significant break with the previous signaling practice.\n\nBut such speculations are not, needless to say, of central importance to our understanding of the origin of language. I would leave the determination of what kind of articulation existed at the dawn of language to the paleontologists who study such things as the evolution of the vocal tract, and even of the hand—for some have speculated that the relative lack of pigmentation in the palm gives evidence of the use of the hands for communication.\n\n* * *\n\nOnce we have provided a plausible understanding of the genesis of the originary sign, the rest of the development of language might be expected to belong to linguistics proper—save that we have no clear evidence of any “primitive” form of language. The apparent fact that the Pirahᾶ language lacks recursive structures, a discovery of Everett recently popularized in Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech (Little, Brown, 2016; see Chronicle 525), may be a sign that not all modern languages possess all the features of mature language, but whether or not Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device has heuristic, let alone biological validity is not something that GA need concern itself with.\n\nThe important point is that it is absurd to use the complexity of mature language as the basis of a demonstration that the earliest forms of language must have been driven by a watershed advance in our cognitive ability. On the contrary, a simple increase in mimetic tension is the only contribution our increased intelligence need have made to language’s emergence. How then might an ostensive language have evolved into mature language? Here again, it seems to me that the most fruitful avenue for speculation on this subject is not that of cognitive subtlety but of the broadening of the uses of language as a mode of communication.\n\nThe peace-producing effect of language may not have left any direct evidence, but our survival (so far) as dangerously rivalrous creatures is its unmistakable testament. This implies, independently of any accompanying improvements in our cognitive abilities, what I called in TOOL a “lowering of the threshold of significance” to accommodate a broader spectrum of significant objects and differences among them: different signs for different (sacrificial) animals, for example. Thus we must assume that al though the use of signs may well long have been restricted—as much later, certain types of written language commonly were—to sacred circumstances, language eventually liberated itself from ritual, the formal becoming “secular” in contrast to the institutional reproduction/commemoration of the originary event.\n\nThe originary scene would have been a locus of extreme tension, in which the emergence of the sign was a means of avoiding conflict. But once the peace-bringing effects of this scene became anticipated, the sign would spread to less formal encounters, and in particular to groups of humans that formed a part rather than the whole of the local community. Once utterance of the sign has become an act in its own right, it is in principle detachable from the collective scene of representation and capable of recreating this scene between any two interlocutors, or in a somewhat different sense, within the individual consciousness.\n\nOne’s internal scene of representation is the mental space within which we conceive the meaning of language, as when listening to another or reading a book. Such an individual space, however implemented in our nervous system, must have begun to exist in the originary event itself, or in any case in the memory of those who had participated in the event and its early repetitions. In Chronicle 419, I developed the idea that Eve’s temptation by the snake, making woman rather than man the first sex to experience resentment, might well reflect a time when only men were permitted to use language. Clear examples of male priority in the use of sacred signs remain to this day among conservative religious groups, and that Catholics, Muslims, and traditional Orthodox Jews have only male clergy is in all probability a reflection of the priority of (more violence-prone) males over females in the origin of language. If men indeed used language before women, Eve’s taking up the snake’s suggestion to acquire forbidden knowledge when Adam had remained content to name the animals is a fascinating parable of the productivity of resentment.\n\n* * *\n\nThus we may assume that at some point there emerged an ostensive language by means of which individuals could communicate in small nonritual groups about objects they were able to point to. As in the originary event, reality was no doubt messier than our theoretical model; it is not unlikely, for example, that the introduction of the more advanced utteranceform of the imperative might not have awaited the development of a fullfledged ostensive language. But to treat as separate stages of language developments that were necessarily chronological in the small—one cannot conceive of an imperative sign that would not have previously been intelligible as an ostensive—brings heuristic advantages with no obvious side-effects.\n\nWe use ostensives today for such things as teaching new words to children (for example, in picture books), where a pointing gesture is supplemented with a spoken word. Beyond its pedagogical function, the ostensive serves in emergencies to alert those around of a danger potentially present to all but hitherto unnoticed. The major example I gave in the original TOOL was Fire!, which is not simply an exclamation but a warning to those who have not yet detected the fire, and who would be expected to repeat the word to warn others farther off. The secularization of language obliges us to consider the notion of felicity or appropriateness conditions.\n\nIn the originary event, the sign is so to speak dictated by the presence of the central object, and this constraint remains in the reconstitution of the event in ritual. The question of felicity arises only for signs uttered outside the institutional framework of the ritual scene (we can ignore for our purposes the question of infelicitous institutional representations, such as black masses). Once signs began to be used to convey “information,” their use would be subject to criteria concerning the validity and pertinence of this information. With regard to pertinence, the “lowering of the threshold of signification” that allows words for everyday objects to enter the language implies the use of ostensives, in circumstances less urgent than the originary mimetic crisis, to point out significant objects or phenomena in the environment, dangers as well as opportunities.\n\nAssuming the pertinence of the information conveyed by the ostensive sign, its felicity would depend on its fulfilling its implicit promise that the object referred to as present to the speaker is indeed present, and thus can normally be made to appear to his interlocutor(s).\n\nThe classic example of an infelicitous ostensive is that of the boy who cried “wolf!,” for “wolf!” is clearly an ostensive intended to signal the presence of a wolf. In the normal case, the boy would have seen or heard the wolf, no one else being close enough to do so, but his hearers would presumably be within range of the danger the wolf represents. This common vulnerability is an important detail; “Wolf!” is not the equivalent of “Help!,” which signals only a private danger. The boy presumably wants others in the community not simply to come to his rescue but to praise him for pointing out a danger to all. This Aesopian parable of the infelicitous use of the ostensive is meant to warn us against the danger that such actions will make one an unreliable interlocutor whose future warnings risk being ignored, with potentially fatal consequences.\n\nIt is of interest to us here as a demonstration that once signs exist, even signs that can presumably be easily verified, this verification, being independent of the sign itself, may fail, and the sign-user may use this fact to deliberately mislead. Higher animals are known to practice deception, but only a human being can be a liar.\n\n## Chapter 6. Linguistics of the Ostensive\n\nThus far we have been concerned with the hypothetical preconditions for the existence of the ostensive utterance form. We now turn to the “linguistics” of what we can conceive of as “ostensive language.” Here we can benefit from the observation of ostensives in our own language. In the originary event, the central referent is not detachable from the sacred scene of representation on which it appears. In the profane world, however, this scene is evoked in the communication situation, but the sacred is no longer an attribute of the referent itself. The ostensive offers a “profane” version of the scene, an intentional model of the universe limited to a single present reality, whose significance is presumed to require immediate attention.\n\nEnlarging the ostensive lexicon can increase the precision of the model, but without modifying its intentional structure, the relation of the model to our perception of the world and to its potential interlocutors under the specific conditions of joint shared attention in which it is communicated. We may assume that the ostensive would indifferently designate actions and their real or potential agents. An expression like “Fire!” would refer indifferently to a fire and to its burning. Similarly, an ostensive such as “Run!” would be understood as not distinguishing the nominal (a run or running) from the verbal ([something] runs).\n\nBut al though it is pointless to divide its vocabulary into nominals and verbals, epistemologically speaking, it seems reasonable to classify all ostensives functionally as nominals. For example, stampede is a verb as well as a noun, but until such time as the verbal form becomes a true predicate and takes on a tense relating linguistic time to that of the real world, Stampede! would be simply, like a fire or a wolf, a thing/event to be reacted to. The intentional structures of elementary language, the ostensive and the imperative that emerges from it, do not possess the “third-person” stability of the declarative’s mapping of the world, but as the Wolf! example demonstrates, reflect the tension between the different standpoints of speaker and hearer. It is this tension that will lead, through the dialectic of desire and paradox, to the mature form of the declarative.\n\nThe Intentional Structure of the Ostensive The ease with which we construct complex declarative sentences inspires in us the illusion that such sentences reveal “transparently,” as Sartre affirmed of prose in opposition to poetry, the order of things, or more precisely that of “phenomena.” In contrast, the ostensive, which asserts no propositional truth, appears to grammarians if at all as less an objective model than a “defective” expedient inspired by practical necessity. It will take more than the “deconstruction of the discourse of Western metaphysics” to make a dent in the stubborn logocentricity of this perspective.\n\nThe “truth” of the ostensive is by no means that of the declarative proposition. But to recognize the ostensive as nonetheless the simplest linguistic model of reality, subject to verification within the limits of its information-bearing power, makes us appreciate both the declarative’s superiority for conveying information and its derived, non-originary nature. In contrast, Western philosophy is founded on the metaphysical postulate that the declarative is not an evolved linguistic form but simply the natural one. Considered from the standpoint of mature language, the ostensive utterance lacks the shifters of person and tense that explicitly relate the present of linguistic communication to the scene it evokes.\n\nThe ostensive needs no tense because its referent is present to the speaker and verifiably present to the hearer. Similarly, it lacks person because the hearer/s is/are intended to stand in the same relation to the referent as the speaker. Thus after hearing an ostensive, and possibly observing its referent for himself, the hearer may repeat it for the benefit of others; the first person to cry “Fire!” has no monopoly on his utterance. Even in the case of “Ouch!” (as opposed to a true cry of pain) what is referred to is not the internal sense of pain so much as the verifiable violation of a social norm (e.g., “you stepped on my toe!” or “how stupid of me to hit my finger with the hammer!”).\n\nThe ostensive presents its model and does nothing more, it being assumed that its referent is of sufficient significance for the hearer to react to it as soon as possible. The hierarchical relation between speaker and hearer on the scene of representation thus gives way to a symmetrical sharing of information, and if necessary, to cooperative action. But we should note that, unlike the imperative that derives from it, the ostensive does not explicitly refer to or demand such action. Its only reference is to the present, which it does not yet distinguish from the scenic presence of linguistic communication in general.\n\nWithin this intentional structure, the ostensive can potentially make use of a lexicon extendable in theory to the totality of perceptibles—things and actions. But al though there is no a priori limit on the semantics of an ostensive language, its “signifieds” are not equivalent to those of mature language. Employed only in the presence of their referent, ostensives express an ontology of events rather than of beings. Because they define their object as significant in a given situation, and their enunciation necessarily implies the presence of this significance (danger or benefit), they are closer to exclamations than to models of conceptual thought, which signify without themselves participating in the significance of their object.\n\nThe ostensive “word,” itself a complete utterance, does not possess the context-free conceptual status of our own vocabulary. The establishment of the ostensive within the profane world outside the sphere of ritual will reveal the contradictions latent in its model of reality.\n\nDialectic of the Ostensive The originary sign had no place in a lexicon, not simply because it was unique, but because in its evocation of the sacred object as center of the communal scene of representation—as name-of-God—it was only in retrospect detachable from this scene. Even today, the enunciation of a divine name hints toward the ritual enactment of this scene, which in its more complete versions reproduces the originary deferral and its festive resolution. The formal or linguistic evolution of the sign must take place through the differentiation of the criteria guaranteeing its appropriateness in a given situation.\n\nThis guarantee has two aspects, of which the first is prerequisite to the second. First, the act of speech must be justified, as opposed to saying nothing at all, and second, the specific sign used must be appropriate to the situation. We may call these the criteria of significance and of signification. The intersubjective basis of the significance-criterion, which applies to ritual as well as language and other forms of representation, is the reconstitution of the public scene of representation. In contrast, the signification-criterion is roughly speaking that of truth, al though only declarative sentences possess a genuine truth-value.\n\nAlthough it is perfectly possible for a “true” sentence, ostensive or otherwise, to be insignificant, when there is a high threshold of significance, as we may presume existed at the earliest stages of language, the danger of falling below it makes the criterion it imposes far more critical than that of appropriate meaning. The ostensive’s emphasis on significance over signification suggests that the lexicon at this stage is likely to remain relatively undifferentiated. In the lexicon of a language possessing declaratives, a word is not an utterance, and its meaning or signified can be considered apart from any given use of it.\n\nBut in the case of the ostensive, the word can only be associated with its appropriateness condition, which is the significant presence of the object that it can be said to designate. Fire means a certain state of matter, but Fire! means the presence of a (dangerous) fire. To think “fire” is to imagine a fire, but to think “Fire!” is to imagine a situation where the cry would be appropriate, perhaps accompanied by its expected consequences: panic, flight, organization of a bucket brigade, and so on. The use of an ostensive creates an imaginary scene, and its speaker’s power to do so is an element of its “definition,” given that its appropriateness condition is the existence of a situation where the exercise of this power would be appropriate.\n\nThus to think of an ostensive is to imagine a public scene of action. Such a thought not merely gives rise to desire, but is in itself an expression of desire, the same desire that would be felt in the presence of the scene itself. To use a sacred name, even today, evokes a power that reconstitutes at least symbolically the communal scene. Most societies impose strict limits on such evocations (“taking God’s name in vain”). But the appropriateness of “profane” ostensives, in contrast, depends on circumstances that can only be observed a posteriori. Thus the very existence of an ostensive lexicon contains an implicit contradiction, and to think of any of its constituent elements presents the thinker with a pragmatic paradox.\n\nIt is no doubt true to say that in contrast with fire, Fire! means the presence of a fire, but the word itself will provoke the same effect independently of this presence. In imagining, in the absence of this referent, its power to compel the presence of the community, the potential speaker cannot help but realize that, given humanity’s shared scene of representation, the use of the sign alone will unleash the same power. As we have seen in the Wolf! case, this gives rise to the possibility of lying, of deliberately provoking a wolf- or fire-reaction in the absence of its object. Considered simply as a lie, one presumes it would be sanctioned, but seen subjectively from the speaker’s point of view, this “inappropriate ostensive” opens the door to a broadening of the intentional structures of utterance forms to include the deliberate expression of desire.\n\nBecause the hearer of “Fire!” is enjoined to react, the utterance itself expresses, independently of its “truth,” the desire to provoke the hearer’s anticipated reaction. The expression of desire that emerges from this new use would tend to disambiguate itself from the ostensive’s revelation of a socially significant presence. Once it becomes accepted as an utterance-form in its own right, the word would signify not the presence of its referent but the desire of the speaker for (the power conferred by) this presence. The ostensive will then have become an imperative.\n\n* * *\n\nA possible framework for such a development is linguistic apprenticeship. One must learn the words of the language before grasping the totality of their appropriateness conditions. Yet in the case of the ostensive, the very constitution of a personal lexicon involves the learner in a contradiction. No real practice use of the ostensive is possible because it cannot be imagined in abstraction from its use. Even if we assume that a child learns the ostensive by observing its appropriate use rather than through a deliberately conducted apprenticeship, he cannot be expected to learn to use these words appropriately without a few trials.\n\nBut to “practice” the ostensive is to evoke the scene of its legitimate use. A child’s inappropriate ostensive will not be taken seriously, but a mother may well respond to what she understands as the child’s intention, which is to bring about the presence of the object designated by the ostensive, thereby treating his utterance as an imperative. A plausible scenario might be a child, having learned a word as an ostensive, using it in the absence of its referent to bring about, as it were magically, its presence. Indeed, this remains the standard vocative use of personal names, Mommy! for example. In learning to use any ostensive, the child relives in his own linguistic universe the dialectic we are now describing.\n\nHe need neither learn the imperative use of the word by example nor need he know in advance that its imperative use is acceptable. Motivated by the desire for the physical presence of his mother or some other necessity of life, he simply (re)creates the imperative for himself in the same way that its creation would have occurred in the course of the formal evolution of language. From the presumed near-instantaneity of this evolution in the modern child—an assumption that it would be useful to confirm by research—it does not follow, of course, that the historical ostensive-imperative evolution was equally instantaneous. We cannot exclude the possibility that linguistic signs, as opposed to prehuman “calls,” may have retained for many generations a strictly communal, religious function.\n\n* * *\n\nIn sum, because the ontology of the ostensive remains, like that of the sacred, dependent on a public scene, even with the lowering of the threshold of significance to permit its application to the profane world, the ostensive sign cannot attain the stable lexical status of a concept-sign or\n\n“signifier.” Only the reinterpretation of the inappropriate ostensive as an imperative resolves the pragmatic paradox it poses. In St. Anselm’s “ontological proof” of the existence of God, our possession of the concept of the “most perfect being” (ens perfectissimum) itself implies that being’s existence. Kant refutes this proof by affirming that existence is not a predicate. But at the stage of language at which the concept of the sacred was generated, the predicative function of the declarative sentence had not yet been conceived. Because the ostensive word means its object-as-present, to conceive of using the word is to conceive its object as present, and to pronounce the word is to provoke this conception in its hearer.\n\nBut this means that the ontology of the ostensive is identical with that of the sacred as expressed by St. Anselm. Whatever punishments may have been meted out to the inappropriate users of the ostensive who were its first “believers,” with the emergence of the imperative, their faith in the ontological proof obtained its reward. In the imperative form, the desire of the individual soul, to which the ostensive had provided a means of expression but not an accepted vehicle for its communication, attains significance in the eyes of the community.\n\n## Chapter 7. The Imperative I\n\nLinguistics, even in our post-Chomskian era, still takes NP + VP as the fundamental form of the sentence; anything less is a “defective” transformation. But once we attempt to explain how à partir de rien NP became associated with VP, we discover that this synchronic model not only does not provide us with an answer, but does not even permit us to ask the question. Thus the foundation of one of the most advanced human sciences is surrounded by a taboo even more constraining than those of primitive religion, which at least attempts through etiological myths to explain the origins of cultural forms.\n\nIf traditional grammar does not recognize the existence of the ostensive as a distinct utterance form, it is willing to grant syntactic status to the imperative as a poor relation of the declarative sentence. Although the imperative has no true tense, its verbal form may be considered a sort of immediate future. Similarly, al though its nearly universal zero-morphology attests to an apparent ignorance of the category of person, it can generally be classified functionally with the second person. We need not concern ourselves for the moment with the obviously derivative third- or firstperson forms (Let him; Let’s).\n\nFrom our perspective, the imperative is characterized not by “defective” but by nascent grammaticality, which we shall define as a linguistic form’s degree of self-containment or “context-free-ness,” considered as an intentional model of reality. From this definition, the situation of the imperative on the grammatical scale between the ostensive and the declarative follows immediately. The ostensive is meaningless in the absence of its referent; the declarative can do without a real-world referent. The imperative operates in the absence of its object-nominal or -verbal, but can be satisfied only upon the object’s being made present.\n\nThe declarative stands at the end of the scale of grammaticality as the telos of linguistic evolution, after which no substantial progress is possible. This explains, if it does not excuse, the grammarians’ inclination to treat all other forms as imperfect declaratives irrespective of their evolutionary status. As we have noted, the ostensive makes no formal distinction between verbals and nominals; because verbality proper is a quality of predicates, the very term “verbal” is at this stage an anachronism. If the ostensive “Run!” designates the presence of running, the imperative “Run!” would similarly request running from the interlocutor, indifferently by asking him to run or “do a run.”\n\nThe “nominality” or substantivity of this object obtains in principle because only as a substance capable of being an independent object of the imagination can it become an object of desire. Yet the fact that in mature languages the imperative is always considered to be a form of the verb, and that nominal imperatives like “Scalpel!” are categorized, if at all, as elliptical forms of the verbal imperative (“[give me the] scalpel!”), cannot simply be attributed to the perversity of grammarians. What it demonstrates is that by subordinating the appearance of the desired object to the action of the interlocutor, the imperative has already taken a major step in the direction of predication.\n\nLet us now consider more precisely the intentional structure of the imperative. The ostensive is an expression not of individual but of social concern, the significance of its object being measured by its capacity to arouse the community to action. The individual speaker of the ostensive thus expresses an interest in the object no greater than, and possibly even less than that of his addressee, because the speaker, being already aware of the significant object, may be assumed to have already at least begun whatever action its presence might require. The ostensive may indeed be wholly altruistic, warning the hearer of a danger to which the speaker is immune. It creates a symmetrical stance with regard to its object, which it situates on the scene of representation as equally present to all interlocutors, retaining the nonviolent symmetry of the originary sign.\n\nThe Collective Imperative It is not a priori apparent from the consideration of the two forms simply as intentional structures that the imperative should be a less public form than the ostensive. If the ostensive points out communally significant present objects, the imperative may equally well refer to communally significant absent ones. The ostensive reference to a present object creates a model of reality—the simplest possible—in which this object becomes the unique and therefore unifying object of attention. A collective imperative would use essentially the same model, al though now its referent would become the object of a communal effort to procure it.\n\nExamples of collective imperatives are not hard to find: the sanguinary shouts of crowds, Kill the umpire! or Down with X! as well as the celebratory Three cheers for Y! and Long live the king! In these cases the imperative functions to “spread the word” within a group and to reinforce a particular decision concerning what is to be done, the content of which may be nominal as well as verbal. Because the originary ostensive as name-of-God would remain associated essentially with the scenic center rather than the animal that was eventually devoured, this dichotomous representation of “the sacred” remains ever a conundrum, whether for believers (who cannot point to the object they originally pointed to/deferred appropriation of) or non-believers (who speak of “God” as a being while believing “he does not exist”).\n\nThus in ritual, the repetition of the originary collective ostensive is always already a collective imperative; to evoke God is to call on him, and to call on him is to presume, not that he will “come,” but that he is already there. I think the reader will agree that our depiction of the hypothetical originary scene gives a plausible real-world configuration to these paradoxical frontiers of language/culture, while showing, to the extent that it can be shown, that their paradoxes cannot be “resolved” by Creationism or “materialism” or anything in between. A closer examination of collective imperatives reveals their apparent symmetry to consist rather of a reciprocity that is necessarily unstable, hovering between the asymmetry of the true imperative and the group identification of the first-person Let’s! construction.\n\nIn this context, it is noteworthy that the typical example of the “collective imperative” is less the expression of the need of a community genuinely threatened by some outside agency or of its pleasure on the discovery of an object of collective satisfaction than the cry of the mob intent on discharging its violence on a designated victim. The fact that GA does not follow—as the original TOOL in fact did—Girard’s scapegoat/emissary murder scenario of the originary event does not mean that it should be taken, as Girardians often do, as a bowdlerized substitution of a rationalistic “social contract” for the originary reality of human violence.\n\nThe origin of language is, as Chairman Mao might have reminded us, not a tea party. And the sparagmos in which the original “sacrificial” animal is divided up may be assumed to discharge not only the hunger but also the resentment derived from the frustrated mutual aggression of the participants. But the simple instinctive discharge of aggression is not a cultural phenomenon. Even a lynching “consecrates” its victim, often in a violently degrading fashion. The sparagmos, in order to be one, that is, a sacrificial feast, must follow the deferral of instinctual appropriation, just as the provision of food must be, as it remains to this day in human interaction, the chief reinforcing mechanism for sacrificial activity.\n\nWe should not ignore the evidence of such “primitive” cultural phenomena as the ostensive sign and the sparagmatic communal gathering in our own lives, just as we should not fail to note the pervasive presence of “Maussian” gift-exchange in our social relations everywhere outside the marketplace. The action of the sacrificial/scapegoating mob is motivated not by instinct but by desire—a desire founded on representation. The indifferently ostensive and imperative designations of the victim by the mob are a degraded version of the original designation of the sacred central object in which the originary resentment directed at that being takes precedence over awe at its numinous centrality.\n\nIndeed, the merely aggressive rather than alimentary nature of the mob’s desires—which serves to indicate their liminal rather than central social significance—makes the mob’s common action a less fraught process, since dividing the spoils is, if relevant at all, of less concern than causing pain and death to the victim. It is worth noting that in less violent circumstances, collective imperatives tend to be addressed not to the group formed by the speakers but to a real or undefined figure of authority who is called upon to carry out the desires of the mob. “Down with X!” is not equivalent to “Let’s get X!” And when baseball fans shout “Kill the umpire!” they have no intention of performing the “murder” themselves, or even of inciting anyone in particular to perform it.\n\nThe task of the undefined “murderer” is to satisfy the collective desire while the collectivity incurs neither danger nor guilt. A more sinister version of this are the cries accompanying the execution of “enemies of the people”; these are nominally imperatives addressed to the executioner, but the mechanism of desire remains the same. Only in the most extreme moments does the mob return to the participatory frenzy of the originary sparagmos, and at such moments, it is no longer useful to speak of an “imperative.”\n\nThe scene of representation, once established in the originary event, can be recreated between any two members of the community, because once the protection of nonviolent presence vested in the sacred object is deemed to extend over nonritual communication within the community, the size of the group involved would be unimportant. In the originary event that gives birth to human desire, the individual desires of the participants for the sacred object cannot be satisfied; the object can only be revered/possessed in common, leaving a residue of resentment. In contrast, the imperative form overtly expresses such desire qua desire, which is to say, claims for it potentially communal significance.\n\nThus the imperative is a more “secular” mode than the ostensive, one more oriented to the practical world. Its existence alongside the ostensive allows for continued dialogue—for example, the surgeon’s conversation with the assistant who passes him the requested instruments: “Scalpel!” – “Scalpel!” “Forceps!” – “Forceps!” and so on. This was not possible with the ostensive, which outside the ritual context is rather a means for revealing an unexpected presence than for facilitating continued action. It is indeed difficult to imagine a cooperative work situation without the imperative, the use of which would tend to contribute to the lexical categorizing of necessary implements and therefore to their distinctly cultural quality as tools.\n\n* * *\n\nIt is significant that in Wittgenstein’s 1953 Philosophical Investigations, which bring together the linguistic speculations that occupied him during the last decades of his life, the “language games” that he analyzes turn constantly to explorations of the “elementary linguistic structures”: questions of how an imperative is used to request something, and how the same word can be used as an ostensive in reply, with the ultimate goal of carrying out a predetermined praxis. For example: . . . is the call “Slab!” in example (2) [which describes a language in which a builder calls out the names of building materials to request them from an assistant] a sentence or a word?—If a word, surely it has not the same meaning as the like-sounding word of our ordinary language [i.e., the noun “slab”], for in §2 it is a call.\n\nBut if a sentence, it is surely not the elliptical sentence: “Slab!” of our language. . . . [Y]ou can call “Slab!” a word and also a sentence; perhaps it could be appropriately called a ‘degenerate sentence’ . . . ; in fact, it is our ‘elliptical’ sentence. (P. I. p. 8, §19, Blackwell, 2001 [1953]) What is missing from these fascinating if confused speculations is a plausible origin for the exchange of signs that gave us the tools of language in the first place. It is nonetheless significant that the last great theoretician of the philosophical proposition, the thinker who raised the declarative to an ontological principle, ended his philosophical career fascinated by what he clearly intuited were more originary elementary linguistic forms.\n\n## Chapter 8. The Imperative II\n\nThe Intentional Structure of the Imperative The intentional structure of the ostensive can be summed up in a few words: The speaker transmits to the hearer an immediately verifiable model of the universe as containing one significant present object. That of the imperative is more complex, and this complexity is expressed as well in the existence of variant forms, such as the “collective imperative” and the third- and firstperson forms.\n\nIn its primitive stage, the imperative has the same linguistic substance as the ostensive. The appropriate reaction would then depend on the interpretation of the utterance: either the referent is present, and is being designated, or it is absent, and being requested. In ambiguous cases, the dynamic of the situation would tend to lead to the dominance of the imperative: because the speaker’s designation of the object indicates that he, at least, is interested in it, whereas the ostensive presupposes the interest of the other interlocutors as well, the imperative will be preferred as assuming less a priori significance.\n\nBy informing its interlocutor of the desire that defines the speaker’s relation to the object, the imperative, even in the absence of any morphology or specifically verbal element, is a protogrammatical form, possessing in its intentional structure the fundamental grammatical relations of person and time. An utterance-form is more grammatical when it contains more information, not about “reality,” but about the communication situation. The identity of substance between ostensive and imperative corresponds to an identity of information about the world. But whereas the ostensive communicated nothing about the desire of the speaker that it did not at the same time presuppose in the hearer, the imperative accentuates the asymmetry of the speaker’s role as conveyor of information by making his desire mediate the action of the other.\n\nIn certain social contexts, this mediation may be taken to imply the existence of an asymmetric authority relation that transcends the immediate speech situation. But it is important to explain why this need not be the case. It is the situation of linguistic presence itself, the evocation of the scene of representation, that is the original source of the “authority” of the imperative. To be a participant in this situation, the hearer must defer his attention to worldly tasks in order to attend to the intentional model constructed by the speaker. In the imperative, the speaker takes advantage of this attention in order to extrapolate his linguistic intention into a worldly one aimed at the appropriation of its object.\n\nThe ambiguity of the word “intention” here is not coincidental, nor is the instrumental nature of the imperative that exploits it. This identity of linguistic and practical intention resolves the paradox arrived at in the dialectic of the ostensive and thus produces a stable linguistic form, al though, as we shall see, the use of this form will give rise to a paradoxical situation of a different sort. The originary ostensive would have been maintained until it was clear that no individual would attempt to appropriate the object, that is, that it was sacred to all. But in the profane use of the ostensive, the end of the utterance is the end of the linguistic scene, which would presumably give way to actions not dictated by the utterance itself.\n\nIn contrast, the felicitous imperative’s extrapolation of linguistic into practical intentionality prolongs the interlocutors’ virtual presence on the linguistic scene until the assigned task is carried out, independently of other worldly claims. The deferral constitutive of linguistic presence now becomes the awaiting of an anticipated action.\n\nGrammatical Form Our discussion up to this point, concerned exclusively with intentional structure, has maintained the assumption that the primitive form of the imperative was substantially identical to that of the ostensive. As we know, however, al though the nominal imperative continues to exist, the imperative in developed languages has a verbal form. We have seen that the temporality of the imperative, that is, its tense, is the prolongation of the linguistic scene in awaiting. The time of awaiting is both real, lived time standing outside the scene stricto sensu and a prolongation of the presence intended by the utterance.\n\nThus the imperative includes within itself a model of a time other than that of its moment of utterance. We should contrast this with the simple identity of linguistic and real time in the ostensive, where the time of linguistic presence remains, as in the originary event, merely the time of deferral of action while attending to the speaker. The ostensive model has no temporal dimension; the word and its referent coexist in the same suspended present. The temporality of the imperative, al though not yet a true tense independent of the scene of communication, like that of the declarative, is if not a temporal mapping of reality on language, already a mapping of language on reality.\n\nThe hearer of the ostensive can immediately verify its informational content for himself, and so to speak discard the linguistic model that conveyed it; the hearer of the imperative must retain the model as a guide for his conduct, “verifying” it only upon the conclusion of his performance. Whether the imperative takes on a nominal or a verbal form, the anticipated result of the imperative is an action by the hearer, so that the verbal form provides a more explicit model of the action. This is not true merely in the trivial sense that “bring the hammer!” or “Give me the hammer!” is more explicit than “Hammer!” If we compare “Hammer!”\n\n(conceived as a nominal) with “Run!” (considered as a verbal substantive rather than a verb), the former requires the performance by the hearer of actions not explicitly stated, whereas the latter is a fully explicit instruction; the run, unlike the hammer, is wholly under the control of the hearer. This difference between nominals and verbals was not visible in the ostensive, where in either case the significant phenomenon was merely a thing/event present to the speaker and potentially to the hearer. In the imperative, the hearer can perform an action, but can only supply an object. This divergent relationship to nominals and verbals in effect inaugurates the governance of the former by the latter, al though, as with tense, not yet in the fully realized model of the declarative, which presents the relationship of agent, verb, and object independently of any worldly action.\n\nIt is nevertheless this action that permits us to explain governance from a generative perspective. It is perfectly conceivable that “double” or even “triple” ostensives may have existed, consisting of a verbal and one or more nominals; for example, on observing a flight of crows, “Fly! Crows!” or even something like “Burn! Fire! House!” But it would be an error to consider such utterances as true linguistic forms, and thereby as the direct ancestors of the declarative. The elements of such compound utterances would remain independent as potentially complete utterances in themselves, whereas the declarative sentence is not complete until all its positions have been filled.\n\nThe fact is that no governance relation, even the inchoate one of the imperative, is conceivable in ostensive language. “Fly! Crows!” is no more a “sentence” than “Fly! Sky!” or “Sky! Crows!” or indeed any other combination of ostensives. Governance, which is a relation between linguistic elements of an utterance, as opposed to the intentional relationship (expressed in tense and person as well as in the reference of substantive words) of the utterance to reality, cannot be derived from the mere observation of relationships in nature, but only from the significant functioning of these relationships on the scene of representation.\n\nIn the ostensive model, this interaction ends when it points out a significant phenomenon in the real world. The imperative model, however, includes not the mere presence of its object but the relationship to be assumed toward it by the hearer. If a compound ostensive like “Fly! Crows!” presents two independent observations, a compound imperative like “Bring [the, a] hammer!” or, if the notion of “bringing” be thought to beg the question, “Come! [with] hammer!” requires of its hearer not a contemplative analysis of the relation of its elements but a performance in which the referents of the elements are combined.\n\nWe need not suppose the analytic counterpart of this practical operation to be present in the mind of the hearer. It suffices that his performance be more explicitly determined in its verbal than its nominal aspect, so that, in the example at hand, the hammer cannot be provided without the hearer’s coming to the speaker, al though the action of coming can be performed without the hammer. And in general, the verbal element will be performed by the hearer as agent, accompanied in some way by the nominal element as object or instrument. Thus al though a bystander could describe the performance in our example in an ostensive coming! hammer! analogous to fly! crows!, the performer of the act himself could not be unaware that his coming was “governing” the appearance of the hammer.\n\nThe phenomena described by the ostensive, whether or not they involve human agents, are independent of the linguistic model that refers to them, whereas the imperative specifically requests a human performance. Similarly, the extension of the scene of representation created by the imperative to the awaiting of a requested performance adds the notion of tense to the verbal element of the imperative. As a result, this element acquires in its most rudimentary form the character of a verb. In the nominal imperative, the requested object is merely made present, but in the performance requested by the verbal imperative (Run!), the object created in order to put an end to the awaiting is defined within the temporality of the imperative speech-act.\n\nThe same hammer may be requested today as yesterday, but not the same run. Here again, the contrast with the ostensive brings out the increased grammaticality of the imperative model: the ostensive, concerned only with the presence of its object, is indifferent to its temporal specificity. The “run” observed today is no more different from that observed yesterday than today’s hammer differs from yesterday’s hammer. The function of the ostensive is to designate phenomena of general significance, and significant objects are always “the same” object because their appearance leads to functionally identical situations.\n\n“Fire!” always warns us of “the same” fire. But whereas the ostensive is unconcerned with the distinction between the identity of phenomena and their repetition, the imperative is not, because it requests its hearer to present the identical and/or reproduce the repeatable within linguistic time. Although the imperative does not yet permit the distinction among different tenses, it does respect the more fundamental distinction between the verbal, which possesses a tense, and the nominal, which does not. The genesis of the notion of person follows similar lines, al though in contrast to that of tense, it can undergo internal differentiation in the context of the imperative model.\n\nThe verbal imperative is personalized even in its basic “second-person” form because, again in contrast to the nominal, it requests an action to be performed, and thus made to exist, by the hearer. Just as we have seen that the “run” requested is a “run now,” so we may say that it is also a run-by-X, which is by no means identical to a run-by-Y. And as in the case of governance, the specificity of action on the part of the hearer of the verbal imperative may be presumed to be included in the intention of the speaker. Thus if several hearers are present and the speaker requests a hammer (Hammer!), the intentional model includes only the hammer.\n\nEven if one person is specifically addressed, this intentional structure is not violated if someone else brings the hammer, al though the speaker’s expectations may be. But if he says “Come!” to one of the group, then the coming he is requesting could not normally be performed by any other.\n\nNow at this point “person” simply means second person, the contrast with the first person not having any basis in the intentional structure, the third being for the moment undefined. The speaker is normally at least the “dative” object of the imperative, and he may on occasion be its “accusative” object, as in a request for help or other personal services. But al though personal “shifter” pronouns must have been among the first words, each individual being obliged to refer to himself or to the other by means of symmetrically “shifting” gestures, even as the accusative object of an imperative verb, the speaker is never in symmetry with the hearer. The performance requested of the hearer implies no contrast with one by the speaker.\n\n* * *\n\nOnce the imperative acquires functionality in the profane world, it is easy enough to conceive how its third- and first-person-plural (Let’s) forms might have evolved. The use of language to assign tasks would naturally enough be extended to other parties, including the speaker, the principle being that an intentional structure that names an object on which work must be done, whether to make it present or to construct it from scratch, would (like Wittgenstein’s language games) not remain limited to the dialogue of two interlocutors. However, the paradigm in which all three persons play parallel roles as subjects of a verb cannot exist prior to the declarative.\n\n## Chapter 9. Elementary Forms and Grammatical Structures\n\nThe preceding discussion has shown that the requirement of human performance in the imperative is the source of the categories of tense, person, and governance that will become the touchstones of the grammaticality of the declarative sentence. By grammaticality we simply mean an utterance’s capacity for presenting a model of reality no longer dependent on the conditions obtaining during the communication situation, having corrected by means of “shifting” elements chosen from these categories for the specificity of time and speaker. But because we cannot discuss these categories in terms of a hypothetical imperative language, our presentation has unavoidably been oriented teleologically toward the declarative.\n\nTense and person can already be associated with the verbal imperative, but they remain context-bound as they will not be in the declarative, without which they could not have emerged as fully grammatical concepts. The categories of person, tense, and governance (case) are precisely those that give rise to the most familiar paradigms of the declarative and its related modes, as a glance at a Latin or Greek grammar will show. Even in languages with few or no such paradigms, these categories must be marked in other ways. For they are constitutive of the notion of grammaticality itself, and the declarative sentence is inconceivable in their absence.\n\nThus the intentional structure of the declarative not only admits of the possibility that oppositions between persons, tenses, and so on, will generate paradigmatic combinations in a given language, but, regardless of the morphological means employed, the declarative sentence presents a model that is situated with regard to the time of utterance and to the speaker and his audience, and where the relations among nominals and verbals are, within certain limits, specified. The constitution of this intentional structure, which we shall take up in the following chapter, is the result of a dialectical process generated by the internal contradictions of the imperative.\n\nAlthough if we would explain the genesis of the declarative from the imperative, it is heuristically useful to assume the inchoate existence of grammatical categories in imperative language, the intentional structure of the imperative does not require their specification. The imperative model minimally requires only the definition of the phenomenon whose presence is requested. The time of the action is not a true tense, but an extension of linguistic presence; similarly, the “governance” of the passive object by the active performer is a matter of practicality, not truly of grammaticality. It is senseless to speak of grammatically “correct” and “incorrect” imperative utterances, because the only relevant criterion, assuming that the addressee accepts his role in the intentional structure, is whether or not the task itself is well-defined in context.\n\nWe may as well assume that the dominance in mature language of the more explicit verbal over the nominal form of the imperative was already present in imperative language. But the greater explicitness of the verbal form would not make it more correct. The category of person appears at first to constitute an exception because, in contrast with that of tense, it can be said to possess a true paradigm in the opposition between the second- and third-person imperatives. But for proof that this paradigm is not essential to the imperative, we need look no further than our own language, where the third- (and first-) person imperatives employ periphrastic constructions, in contrast to the second-person form, which simply uses the root form of the verb.\n\n(Even in ancient Greek, where the third-person imperative is classified as part of a paradigm, it contains a true ending [–(ε)τω] in contrast with the “zero” ending [–ε] of the second-person form.) But morphological evidence aside, the question of whether the basic form of the imperative is truly a “second-person” form involving an implicit opposition to third- and/or first-person forms must be answered in the negative. It is the real-world person, not the linguistic “person,” who is the true subject of the imperative. In a word, the elementary linguistic forms lack true grammatical structures because they are not yet fully emancipated from their origin in the original crisis.\n\nThe scene of representation is still primarily a place of deferral of conflict, not contemplation of a model of reality. The imperative and ostensive are pragmatic, not theoretical, which is to say that the linguistic present internal to the utterances is not fully separated from the linguistic presence in which they are uttered. Thus al though the imperative takes different forms, these can never be grasped as paradigms of possibilities inherent in the imperative intention; their use merely corresponds to different real-world situations. Language at this stage is anything but instinctual, but there is a sense in which behavioral models still apply: each word is still “associated” directly with the real or desired appearance of its object.\n\nThus not only an ape but even a rat could be trained to “speak” in elementary language by pressing one lever when a cat appears and another when it is hungry, the two levers being connected to a mechanical voice which would produce, respectively, the ostensive “Cat!” and the imperative “Food!” Such models of human language, because they neglect the crucial element of scenic presence, are etiologically inadequate to explain the elementary forms, and incapable of even conceiving an explanation for the higher forms. But so long as we confine our analysis to the practical functioning of the imperative, we will not touch on its contradictions and the forms generated in response to them.\n\nOur assertion that the protogrammatical developments to which we have referred do not make use of true grammatical categories is in effect equivalent to saying that they could à la rigueur be described as accretions to the original ostensive arrived at under the pressure of “conditioned reflexes,” that is, by mere trial and error. Yet conditioned reflexes lead to insoluble pragmatic paradoxes that are incapable of provoking formal evolution. Whence the significance of the absence of a first-person form at this stage. If utterances are to be explained as resulting from “association” with the presence of their objects, then the self, being by definition always present, must either be spoken of constantly or not at all. The most elementary form of the recursivity that Chomsky sees, rightly if taken in a broad enough sense, as the mark of human language in opposition to prehuman signaling systems, is simply the speaker’s linguistic reference to himself.\n\nDialectic of the Imperative (I) The intentional structure of the imperative has up to this point been presented as a structure in equilibrium: a verbal request establishes an awaiting of performance by its hearer, compliance with which abolishes the awaiting and terminates the prolonged presence that it maintained. This indeed constitutes the felicitous performance of the imperative. Because, however, this felicitousness requires the action of someone other than the speaker, it cannot be predicated of the utterance alone, whose constitutive expectations, however reasonable, may not be fulfilled by the addressee. The imperative utterance is not complete in itself.\n\nThe asymmetrical positions of its speaker and hearer are not simply those of the speech situation; the hearer must, within the linguistic presence created by the speaker, not only hear but act. It is the contradiction implicit in this asymmetry that will lead to the creation of the “objective,” informationbearing declarative form. The dialectic of the ostensive was motivated by the power implicit in the (ostensive) sign in its capacity to generate linguistic presence. Once this presence has been actualized by an inappropriate ostensive utterance, the hearer may fulfill the expressed desire of the speaker for the object designated by supplying it, whether to avoid conflict with the speaker or simply in order to render his utterance appropriate.\n\nThus the contradiction between the (inappropriate) ostensive speaker’s power in the linguistic situation and his symmetry with the ostensive hearer in the real-world situation (where the referent is at least potentially present to both) is resolved in favor of the former. In the imperative, the implicit asymmetry of the ostensive speech-act becomes explicit, so that the speaker commands not only linguistic presence but the extra-linguistic actions of the hearer within the extendable limits of this presence. But by the same token, from the standpoint of its own autonomy, the speech act overextends itself, leaving itself open to disconfirmation or infelicity not on its own merits but at the hands of another.\n\nThe ostensive can be inappropriate if it refers to an absent object, but this is a feature of the real-world situation. The imperative eliminates this possibility by ordering the hearer to himself modify the situation. But at the same time, it creates a new possibility of infelicity that has no analogue in the ostensive, and which points up the contradiction latent in the intentional structure of the imperative between the status its model of reality holds for the speaker and that which it holds for the hearer. This contradiction is not the effect of a “misunderstanding,” but of the stricture placed by the imperative intention on the hearer.\n\nFor the speaker, the imperative is in effect nothing more than an extended ostensive, as it was in its origin. The presence of the referent gave him power over the other; now he employs this power, transferred to the sign, to demand the presence of the object. And the hearer’s performance justifies this exercise of power; the act once accomplished, the original “ostensive” has indeed been made correct. The speaker’s awaiting, as this analysis shows, is not merely in origin but in function a prolongation of the deferral of action characteristic of linguistic presence from the beginning. In the true ostensive, this deferral lasts only for the instant of the utterance, followed immediately by its confirmation by the hearer; in the imperative, the deferral of the hearer’s own self-motivated activity is prolonged until the utterance, like the ostensive, can be verified, al though this “deferral” may be interrupted by other tasks.\n\nIt must again be stressed that this prolongation, which of course lends itself to exploitation by those who possess authority over others, is a formal possibility of linguistic presence itself and thus perhaps as much a source as a product of social authority. But al though the imperative obtains its original force from the sanctity of the scene of representation, from the hearer’s standpoint, the awaiting of his presentation of the object is not a simple equivalent of the deferral required in order that he may understand the speaker’s message. Here we need not even speak of an unwillingness to perform the requested action, al though the very possibility of this unwillingness is already a distinguishing feature of the situation.\n\nThe deferral of linguistic presence itself is very different in kind from that necessary to the imperative’s requested performance of a worldly action, which must be maintained throughout the duration in real time of the performance. The imperative is dependent on extra-linguistic real time in a way the ostensive is not. This, the hearer, however great his good will, cannot help but experience, whereas the speaker, however well he may understand this truth, cannot put his understanding “into words,” that is, into the intentional structure of the imperative. To say that from the speaker’s standpoint the imperative is no more than an extended ostensive is to say that for the speaker, the hearer’s performance is not a voluntary act, not a worldly act at all, but merely an element of a linguistic construction.\n\nThe supplying of the object that will convert the imperative as an inappropriate ostensive into an appropriate one is awaited in linguistic time, al though it must take place in real time. The hearer, insofar as he performs this act, is not truly the addressee of the imperative but only its agent. This implicit denial of the role of interlocutor to the hearer can be realized explicitly in a situation where a third party is present. Thus if a fashion designer showing his dresses to a prospective buyer says “summer dress” and a model wearing the appropriate clothing appears, his speech act is an ostensive addressed to the buyer and only secondarily an imperative, the presentation of the dress being simply assumed to take place upon the utterance of the ostensive.\n\nThis analysis is, however, made from the speaker’s point of view. The hearer of the imperative, however “mechanically” he obeys it, is not reacting “instinctively” but through the mediation of linguistic presence, so that his act of obedience is not merely voluntary but intelligent, mediated by a prior representation. And thus, not only nonperformance but deliberate disobedience is possible. Here again, there is no reason to assume the speaker to be ignorant of these facts; but the intentional structure of the imperative has no place for them. The performance is implicit in the structure, which would otherwise be simply infelicitous.\n\nConversely, the hearer can well understand the absolute nature of the imperative; but its intentional structure from his own viewpoint, by the very fact he has a viewpoint and is not simply an element of a linguistic construction, cannot be the same as that of the speaker. The hearer can only interpret the imperative as expressing the desire of the speaker, as was indeed the case of the original “inappropriate ostensive.” His performance is for him the worldly fulfillment of the speaker’s desire, whereas for the speaker, this desire is fulfilled in linguistic presence, the performance being merely a prolongation of this presence.\n\nThe inherent contradiction between these two versions of the intentional structure of the imperative remains latent in the case of satisfactory performance. In the event that the task is not performed, however, it manifests itself openly. In effect, whatever his intention, the hearer who fails to satisfy the imperative request restores the imperative to its original status as an inappropriate ostensive. Now if this is indeed the hearer’s intention, that is, if he simply ignores the imperative and considers the absence of its referent not as an indication of an act to be performed, but as an impropriety on the part of the speaker, then he reacts as a speaker of ostensive, not imperative language. In language which admits the imperative, however, this reaction can only be understood as a refusal of linguistic presence, for within this presence, performance is the only satisfactory response to the imperative.\n\nThe hearer who is unwilling or unable to accede to the request is thus faced with the latent contradiction of the imperative situation: the response demanded by the imperative is representational for the speaker, but real for the hearer, and if this real response cannot be made, then the latter has no representational response available. The hearer thus can be said to feel the need to maintain linguistic presence, as the speaker wished, even if he cannot provide real-world satisfaction for the latter’s desire. It is this need that will give rise to the declarative form.\n\n## Chapter 10. The Fundamental Asymmetry of the Speech Situation\n\nThe contradiction in the intentional structure of the imperative between the speaker’s and the hearer’s intentions reflects the fundamental asymmetry of the speech situation, which emerges at this stage, and which is not so much resolved in the higher forms as made explicit and thereby deferred. This asymmetry was in fact present from the beginning, even independently of the assumption that not all the members of the originary group grasped the meaning of the sign at the same moment. In the originary event, each individual’s participation in designating/representing the sacred object, al though productive of the same intentional structure of deferred desire/sacralization as that of the others, was at the same time an imaginary possession of the object at the others’ expense.\n\nFrom the vantage point of the imperative, however, and a fortiori from that of the higher forms, we may now express this asymmetry in more formal terms, because the significance expressed by these forms is no longer, as with the ostensive, inherent in scenic presence, but is mediated by the desire of the speaker. This mediation occurs in its most overt form in the imperative; in the declarative it is discounted but not simply eliminated. The “objective” formulation of the distinction between speaker’s and hearer’s intention requires that we consider linguistic presence as a virtual relation, actualized voluntarily by the speaker and entered into by the hearer as a duty incumbent on him qua member of the community.\n\nIn the originary event, this enforcement was experienced as incarnate in the sacred object. But the deritualization of the modern world has not lessened this dissymmetry. On the contrary, the rise of the media, and more recently, of social media, has tended only to accentuate it. Thus the speaker chooses to speak, or perhaps to tweet, but the listener/viewer cannot help but view or listen, collectively if not individually. It is not that virtual linguistic presence confers on the speaker a permanent advantage; the community imposes appropriateness-conditions that if violated will be punished a posteriori. But he benefits a priori from a presumption of significance.\n\nViewed from without, speaker and hearer in the speech situation are equally present to one another, yet the speaker need not justify his role to the hearer otherwise than through the linguistic representation expressed in his utterance. For the hearer, however, the representation does not appear alone, but as spoken by the speaker-speaking-the-utterance, and thus the hearer’s intentional model of reality in the speech-situation is complicated by the addition of a supplementary factor. The speaker intends only the linguistic model, but the hearer intends the speaker’s intention. If this were not so, the communication situation would not be “intentional,” that is, representational, at all.\n\nTo understand the speech act as something other than an instinctual/involuntary signal, it must be seen as an intentional actualization of linguistic presence. On this point it might be said that hearer and speaker are in accord, since the latter is certainly aware of his own intentionality. But the speaker does not intend this intentionality; it is not an element of his representation. Were this not so, the speech act would suffer from infinite regression, as do in fact all theories that attempt to propose a completely symmetrical (or “metaphysical”) model of the communication situation. Linguistic presence is not a “channel” of communication, and al though for the higher linguistic forms, the channel analogy is an adequate approximation in most cases, it cannot help us to understand the origin of these forms.\n\nThe speaker’s model of the communication situation must be incomplete if it is to exist at all. Thus he acts as though a “channel” indeed existed into which to pour the information he desires to communicate, whereas for the hearer, the actualization of this “channel” depends on the intentional act of the speaker. Before pursuing our formalization of the speaker-hearer asymmetry and the analysis of the dialectic of linguistic forms on which it directly bears, we should dispose of a potential epistemological objection. We communicate through language, and conceive of this communication as “transparent” to our thoughts, the proof being that we can always add qualifications to our previous statements; in Peirce’s terms, to every sign may be appended an “interpretant” that may be made as explicit as we like.\n\nBut under the hypothesis that this explicitness is limited and language is indeed “opaque,” there would be no vantage point from which we might speak of the inherent contradictions of linguistic communication, because our own discourse would remain subject to the limitation we purport to denounce. This objection, then, has a double expression, “optimistic” and “pessimistic,” the one “metaphysical” and traditional, accepting philosophy’s presumption that the declarative proposition is the “natural” form of the “expression of ideas,” the other, post-Nietzschean and nihilistic, using language only to deconstruct its earlier pretensions.\n\nIn response to this double objection, I would defend both the need for and the possibility of a humanistic theory of representation—the first, in answer to the “optimists” who find it unnecessary, the second, to the “pessimists” who think it inconceivable. The transparency of communication does not consist in the sharing of a “pure intuition,” but simply in the capacity of language to include indefinitely many levels of metalanguage—what in a somewhat different context Chomsky calls recursion. This capacity is virtual and by definition cannot be exhausted; what we say on any subject can never be a definitive “last word.”\n\nAnd precisely because this virtuality is an element of the intentional structure of our discourse, our communication remains transparent, that is, open to explanation and eventual refutation. But this condition of language is not contained in the extant works of language; it consists rather in our capacity for further construction on them. In particular, the originary hypothesis is the realization of a possibility latent, but certainly not preexisting, in the discourses of social science. From its perspective, neither these discourses nor their linguistic structures preexisted in a timeless metaphysical realm called “language,” but all were constructed on the basis of earlier forms, the earliest of which is the object of the hypothesis.\n\nLinguistic “transparency” was not available a priori, but became a virtual reality through the construction of the general form of dialogue, which is itself based on the preexisting form of the declarative sentence. “Transparency” being merely potential openness to further discourse, it does not abolish the original asymmetry of the communication situation, but permits its effects to be indefinitely deferred. But only once the founding hypothesis has been made explicit, as GA does for the first time, providing an epistemological link between the subject matter and the theory that purports to explain it, can the discourse that performs this task properly claim for itself the name of science.\n\n* * *\n\nFrom this perspective, the logical impossibility of complete self-inclusion does not prevent the construction of new forms to resolve whatever contradictions may arise, and it is to our analysis of this process of construction that we now return. The speaker intends his words as a model of reality; the hearer intends them as intended by the speaker. This opposition can be expressed schematically in very simple terms. If S says “X,” then Speaker’s model: X Hearer’s model: S (X) It is important to note, however, that this schema applies only to mature language, because only by means of the declarative sentence can the “hearer’s model” be explicitly formulated.\n\nAt the elementary stages, al though the hearer realizes that the words are being pronounced intentionally by the speaker, he cannot say this himself, and therefore cannot conceive that his model of the situation might possess the same objective status as that presented by the speaker. To recapitulate the preceding stages of linguistic evolution in terms of the schema just proposed demonstrates its unavailability to the forms of “elementary language.” In the originary event, the participants are presumed to experience, in emitting the sign representing the sacred object, an imaginary participation in the mediating or presence-compelling power of this object.\n\nEach individual’s ostensive gesture is both a (linguistic) sign of the object and a (ritual) sign of his participation in the communal attention to it. The model of the central sacred object is reinforced by the deferral of action within the communal presence around it. Thus the significance of the speaker’s utterance is fully guaranteed by the community. Conversely, from the hearer’s standpoint, the intentionality of every speaker coincides with that by which the community as a whole establishes itself, through the deferral of action within the nonviolent scenic presence mediated by the sacred object. Yet on each individual scene of representation, the symmetry of the communal intention is disrupted by originary resentment, the supplement to appetite that, once the sacralization of the central figure has been established, leads the group from its originary stasis to the controlled violence of the collective division of this figure in the sparagmos, in which each receives an “equal” portion.\n\nA more synthetic term for this combination of appetite and the frustration occasioned by its (sacred) object’s withdrawal is desire. The above schema provides the means both for understanding and discounting the element of desire in linguistic intention, al though the participants in the originary event neither possess nor have need of these means, given the symmetry of the situation mediated by the sacred. Desire nevertheless exerts a dialectical pressure on representation by conferring on the sign the power to evoke the appetite-deferring significance of the object, eventually bringing about the lowering of the threshold of significance to include other, profane objects, while in a parallel, “institutional” development, the sacred guarantee of the communal scene of representation is reenacted and reinforced through ritual.\n\nFrom the standpoint of our schema, this evolution takes place as though the individual-as-hearer were reinterpreting the others-as-speakers’ originary designation of the sacred object as the expression, not of a collective, but of an individual choice of referent, so that the ostensive-in general can come into existence to represent profane as well as sacred objects. The sacred power of the object was one with its desirability. But what is its “desirability” other than the fact of its designation by others? The dialectic of desire appears here fully mystified; language at this stage offers no possibility of representing its own operation, even in others.\n\nThe individual not only cannot see the beam in his own eye, he is blind to the one in the eye of his neighbor. The spectacle of this blindness illuminates for us the entire dialectic of representational forms, which can be seen—as Girard first saw it—as a progression in the understanding of desire. At the same time, it permits us to grasp the element of anthropological truth in the en during notion of the lost paradise of original presence, the falling away from which was described by Heidegger as the “forgetting of being” coeval with the institution of metaphysics, the world-view that considers the declarative proposition as at the same time independent of and transparent to its content.\n\nStripped of its theoretical reinforcement in philosophical doctrine, metaphysics is simply the non-recursive understanding of propositional form as expressed in our schema; that is, capable of seeing desire in the representations of others, but not in our own, and therefore not in the form itself—treating the declarative sentence as not merely originary, but natural. When desire was born in the originary event, its blindness was symmetrical and therefore “innocent.” The higher forms of language mark a fall from grace where each speaker begins to suspect the “subjectivity” of his fellows. This suspicion is a step on the road to the objectivity of scientific discourse, and well as an incentive for the construction of evermore-powerful modes of deferral.\n\n* * *\n\nThe second stage in our dialectic, the passage from the ostensive to the imperative, requires less comment. Here we are much closer to the opposition represented in our schema, because the hearer of the inappropriate ostensive can only treat it as an imperative if he understands it as the expression of the speaker’s desire. The imperative sign denotes an absent referent, significant to the speaker, in contrast to the ostensive, which designates a phenomenon of communal significance. But if in the ostensive the role of individual desire was neglected, in the imperative it is exaggerated. In the ostensive, the speaker’s own intention is absorbed into that of the community, and his original initiative forgotten in the collective repetition of his utterance.\n\nIn the imperative, quite the opposite is the case: whatever the referent’s communal significance, it can appear only through the mediation of the desire of the individual subject. This opposition reflects the polarity between the presence/absence of the referent. This polarity is all the more striking when the absence is only relative to the speaker, as when he requests that a nearby but “distal” object be placed in his immediate possession, making it unambiguously clear that what is desired is not the mere presence of the object but its appropriation by the speaker. In the imperative model, the linguistic presence of the referent reflects its worldly absence, and by responding to the “inappropriate ostensive,” the hearer demonstrates that he understands that “possession” in language is a sign of desire for real possession.\n\nIf we examine the ostensive-imperative progression in terms of our schema, we observe that, if the ostensive utterance is interpreted not as S(X) but simply as X, the imperative interpretation must be expressed as something like S→X. The absence of a parenthesis represents the lack of a formal barrier between the speaker and the referent, so that his utterance is interpreted by the hearer not as the speaker’s significant model of reality, but as the significant model of his reality. This functionalization of the imperative in turn tends to limit its referents to objects whose appropriation by the speaker is considered felicitous.\n\nIt thus serves to “educate” desire as no longer a purely subjective phenomenon but one capable of being communicated in linguistic presence, and consequently obliged to take criteria of communal significance into account. Thus a point of equilibrium is established at which the imperative speaker can continue to profit from his command of linguistic presence to realize his desire, but where his desires are functionalized in the service of the community, making them more likely to be adhered to. From the standpoint of intentional structure, however, the external functionality of the imperative request is irrelevant; the speaker’s desire as expressed by the imperative is “significant” by definition. Whence the disequilibrium that will lead to the emergence of the declarative form.\n\n## Chapter 11. Imperative Dialogue\n\nBy his acceptance of the speaker’s desire, the addressee of the imperative becomes not merely the latter’s hearer but his interlocutor. Thus he hears not only the utterance but the person, and by hearing the utterance as a personal one, he comes to assume on the scene of representation the role of member of the community and respecter of its norms of significance. In this fashion, the addressee of the imperative creates the possibility of dialogue with the speaker. At the same time, this dialogue demonstrates the inadequacy of the imperative model to fully comprehend the fundamental asymmetry of the speech situation.\n\nIn the exchange at the operating table —” Scalpel!”-” Scalpel”; “Forceps!”-” Forceps”—the ostensive serves as a reply to the imperative. The hearer’s reply “corrects” the first speaker’s “inappropriate ostensive,” universalizing his expression of personal desire by asserting the objective presence of the object. Yet this reply in no way transcends the asymmetry of the imperative intention. The second speaker responds in a form nominally different from the first, but which permits of no further dialogue; the content of his utterance is entirely determined by that of the first speaker, which he simply mimics. The identity in linguistic substance of the two utterances reflects the dependency of the second speaker’s role, in which making an ostensive reply is only possible upon prior completion of the requested performance.\n\nThe imperative-ostensive dialogue represents the expression and annulment of desire, the successive pairs of utterances marking the beginning and end of successive periods of awaiting; the fundamental asymmetry of the two speakers with respect to this desire and this awaiting is never called into question. The addressee may of course refuse the imperative and put an end to the conversation. But even if he accepts the role it designates for him, he may not be able to carry out the required performance. In the absence of performance, no linguistic response to the imperative is possible, even if the addressee has no desire to violate the terms of the imperative dialogue—a violation that might lead to unfortunate consequences.\n\nIn this situation the contradiction inherent in the imperative model becomes explicit. This contradiction is not a purely private one, as was that between individual desire and the communal sacralization of the originary object. Nor does it stand in an ambivalent position between the “private” and “public” spheres, as we found in the second stage of our dialectic, where the inappropriate ostensive, an expression of individual desire, came to be interpreted as a legitimate imperative speech act. Here the contradiction overtly involves the distinction between the speaker’s and hearer’s model of the imperative. It is not yet a fully dialogic conflict because it cannot be assimilated to a symmetrical disagreement in which one speaker contests the other’s objectivity.\n\nThe hearer’s model merely permits him to understand the situation in a way closed to the speaker, for whom the possibility of nonperformance cannot arise because performance is already included in his intention. It would be a mistake to view this situation as that of a contradiction between the imperative model on the one hand and “reality” on the other. This contradiction of course exists, but from a representational standpoint, it is mediated by the speaker’s relationship to the hearer. For the referent of the imperative model is not merely an object of desire, but the object of a desire expressed on the scene of representation, and its impossibility of fulfillment, before leading to a contradiction in the sphere of reality, provokes a contradiction within the limits of this scene.\n\nThis fact would certainly be obvious to the addressee, to whom “reality” is apt to afford little protection from the wrath of the speaker. The hearer’s model of the imperative was never blind to the possibility of non-fulfillment, because the speaker’s request appeared in it from the beginning not as an objective model of reality but as an expression of desire. But the non-identity of the hearer’s intention with the speaker’s remained only latent so long as the former was willing and able to bring the two into coincidence by fulfilling the expressed desire of the latter—a coincidence expressible in an ostensive reply.\n\nNow the non-coincidence becomes a contradiction, al though, as befits the asymmetrical structure of the imperative, one visible only to the hearer. Even if “reality” is the ultimate source of this contradiction, the situation would be little different if this source were the latter’s recalcitrance, for in any case his problem is to maintain, despite the contradiction, his relation of linguistic presence with the speaker. But this implies that instead of using an ostensive to express the presence of the object, he must find a way to communicate its absence. It is this need that will lead to the creation of the declarative.\n\nThe speaker of the imperative awaits a performance by which his utterance will be realized as an ostensive (whether or not actually spoken by either party). The addressee, lacking the possibility of producing the object, must produce an utterance that will have to be accepted in lieu of the object. What is required is, so to speak, a negative ostensive—the contradictio in adjecto being merely a reduced form of the contradiction between the hearer’s and the speaker’s intention. Once the reduction is accomplished, however—that is, once the possibility of expressing the contradiction by an utterance is recognized by the addressee of the imperative—the negativeostensive resolution of his paradoxical situation will become possible. It suffices that the materials of which this solution is constructed be available: the ostensive, and the concept, or more precisely the operator, of negation.\n\nNegation and the Imperative The ostensive admits of no negation because its referent is required to be present, and this is true even if the referent is itself “negative” in character. Thus, for example, we may consider the familiar utterance “Help!” despite its imperative appearance, as in fact an ostensive. Although from a semantic standpoint, help is obviously what is being requested, the word embodies no representation of the aid to be furnished; what it expresses is rather the presence of a help-requiring situation. And in the absence of such representation, no imagined help exists either in the mind of the hearer, who knows only to come to the rescue.\n\nYet the notion of interdiction is as old as the originary sign itself, which is in a sense its chief component. The originary sign designating the sacred object can be seen as a negative imperative avant la lettre, indicating that its referent is not to be appropriated by any of the members of the group. From this perspective, in the passage from ostensive to imperative, a communal interdiction is transformed into one imposed by individual desire. Just as the object of the ostensive, whether an item of value or of danger, is in general not to be appropriated individually by any member of the group, the object of the imperative is designated for appropriation by the speaker, and by the same token refused to the hearer.\n\nIt is the explicit formulation of this refusal, once the ostensive can be used “inappropriately” as an expression of desire, that will constitute the negative imperative. We have referred to the desire aroused by the ostensive as the motive force for its inappropriate use, and thereby for the emergence of the imperative form. But the expression of desire by one speaker should not be taken as a sign of its extinction in others, but rather of the contrary. The power of the scene gives a supplementary force to expressed desire and thus permits the constitution of the imperative; but this expression of individual desire can only mimetically strengthen the interlocutor’s own unexpressed desire for the object.\n\nTo the extent that the (ostensive) sign can be used imperatively to demand an object, there would arise the need for an operator of negation to permit the speaker to make explicit his supplementary interdiction of the object to his interlocutor. The speaker of an interdiction implicitly recognizes in the other a desire similar to his own, yet within the intentional structure of the interdiction, no symmetry is established between this desire and that of the speaker which contravenes it. On the contrary, interdiction addresses itself not to the desire of its hearer but to his action. If anything, the asymmetry between speaker and hearer is even greater here than in the prescriptive (positive) imperative, because the desire of the former is now realized explicitly in the negation of the activity of the latter.\n\nThe interdictive imperative thus tends to imply more readily than the prescriptive the preexistence of a relation of authority between the interlocutors. The strength of this relation is most evident in a phenomenon we may call normative awaiting, which is particularly, al though not exclusively, characteristic of interdiction. In such cases, the imperative scene is not terminated by any specific performance, but prolongs itself indefinitely into the future. Thus a mother who tells her son “Don’t play in the mud!” does not await any specific act, even an act of renouncement, al though a sign of such renouncement might be expected to terminate linguistic presence stricto sensu.\n\nShe simply states a general rule of conduct, and will consider the interdiction to be violated if contravened at any future time. A similar situation, we may note, is created by a positive normative imperative such as “Always put on your scarf when you go out!” or “Keep your hands clean!” al though it is significant that the more natural expressions are the interdictions, “Don’t go out without your scarf!” and “Don’t forget to wash your hands!”) In normative awaiting, the linguistic presence of the speaker is in effect indefinitely prolonged—one might say, as a “superego”—so that any offending conduct becomes a violation not merely of the speaker’s desire but of the scene of representation, guaranteed by the community through the mediation of the sacred.\n\nThis form of the imperative thus plays a major role in the maintenance of the social order. The normative propensity of the interdictive form is of interest here because it serves to emphasize the asymmetrical attitudes toward desire implicit in the imperative model. The speaker’s desire, here as always, is identified with the maintenance of the communal scene, whereas the interdiction makes the desire of the hearer incompatible with this presence. In the normative imperative, whether prescriptive or interdictive, the expression of the speaker’s desire may well be the repetition of a generally accepted norm, the original pronouncement of which may even be attributed to a sacred being. But even in this case, the communal authority of the norm and the awaiting it imposes is realized in the speech situation through the intermediary of the speaker’s own authority.\n\n* * *\n\nThe negative imperative, as it appears from this discussion, is not an independent linguistic form; it differs from the prescriptive variety only in its content. It would further be a mistake to classify the positive/negative dichotomy as a grammatical paradigm like that of person. As we have defined the grammatical, it functions to objectify linguistic intentionality by universalizing over the particular temporal or spatial conditions of speech acts. The positive-negative dichotomy is not paradigmatic in this sense, affirmation and negation not being in any sense a pair of “shifters.” As an operator, negation affects the entire content of the performance requested by the speaker.\n\nThe effect of an operator must be distinguished from that of a simple modifier. In the imperative, modification, like governance, receives a primitive form of grammaticalization. Requests for physical objects, for example, must in practical contexts distinguish between the category of things and that of qualities; once more, the performative nature of the imperative model provides the impetus for grammaticalization. Thus if a big hammer is requested, a small hammer will probably be more acceptable than a big basket. The same analysis evidently applies to constructions like “Come quickly!” where a verbal rather than a nominal request is qualified.\n\nHence we can consider imperative modification to be, like governance, in a state of incipient grammaticalization. Whether or not specialized lexical terms existed, the intentional structure of the imperative provides in its asymmetry a model for asymmetrical relations of both kinds, al though this asymmetry is not fully realized in the linguistic model. Thus, as in the case of governance, analysis into, for example, “noun” and “adjective,” al though implicitly carried out by the speaker, is structurally speaking a matter of concern only for the hearer, because it develops from the analysis of his performance. The asymmetry that provides the foundation for this analysis is at the same time an obstacle to its formalization in the linguistic model, because the speaker’s words, unlike the hearer’s actions, are intended to produce fulfillment through their mere presence on the scene of representation—the imperative remaining always, in essence, an “inappropriate ostensive.”\n\nThe use of operators to modify the imperative performance model as a whole constitutes the limit of semantic polarization possible within imperative language. In “Big hammer!” or even in “Run fast!” the requested performance is merely more specific than in “Hammer!” or “Run!” In a case like “Run again!” however, what is added by the operator again is not a specification of the object/action requested, but of the performance in which this object/action is included. An operator takes the substantial part of the linguistic model not merely as designating an object or action, but as a performance complete in itself. And in negation, the operator most clearly distinguished from a simple modifier, the polarization must be fully conscious to the speaker as well as the hearer.\n\nOn hearing “Don’t walk!” not only the hearer but the speaker as well must consider that the command cannot be separated into the substantive action of walking and a secondary but independent quality that attaches to it. Since interdiction operates on the imperative model as a whole conceived in a positive sense, we may represent this situation by the equation: Perf (~X) = ~ [Perf (X)] where “Perf” refers to the performance requested by the speaker, and “~” is the sign of logical negation. We must be careful to distinguish this equation from the apparently similar but incorrect: Imp (~X) = ~Imp X where “Imp” stands for the entire intentional structure of the imperative, the sense of which would be that to forbid something is simply not to order it.\n\nTo claim that this distinction is a merely logical one would miss the point that we have specifically defined the negative operator in imperative language. For the only thing wrong with the second equation is that it contradicts the normal functioning of imperatives as we know them. Declaratives do not function in this manner: There is ~ man = ~ [There is (a) man], and the “illogicality” of such constructions as “must not,” which ≠ “~ must,” is indeed traceable to their connection with the imperative. In the imperative, the operation of the negative is fixed at the level of performance. In interdiction, the performance of the addressee is the negation of a possible “positive” performance, but the fundamental elements of the imperative intentional structure remain the same, the nature of the awaiting merely being altered to fit the non-performative nature of the request. This represents the closest thing to a logical paradigm within imperative language, and thus its highest level of what we may call “thought” or “reasoning”—manipulation of linguistic models as contextfree substitutes for/models of reality.\n\n## Chapter 12. Dialectic of the Imperative (II)\n\nFrom a grammatical standpoint, operators are different from, but similar to, modifiers, traditional grammarians emphasizing the similarities, modern linguists, the differences. Negation is, in imperative as in mature language, the most extreme case because it is the most unambiguously transformational in character, requiring for its application a preexisting linguistic expression. In the imperative, negation (or more properly interdiction) requires for its formulation the designation of a substantial performance that could always in principle be the object of a prescriptive imperative.\n\nInterdiction shares the asymmetrical structure of all imperatives; it does not negate the subordination of the addressee to the desire of the speaker, but only the performance that, formulated in the same words, the latter might in another context have requested. Thus interdiction is metarepresentational, inverting the positive relationship between the signified performance and the desired outcome that obtains in the prescriptive form. But the factor that stops interdiction short of the context-free—in our terms, grammatical—functioning of negation in the declarative is its continued dependence on imperative awaiting, which limits its field of operation to the linguistic scene of speaker and hearer.\n\nThus non-performance remains always, even when it consists in inaction, a real-time fulfillment of this awaiting, just as, conversely, the performance of the forbidden action would constitute a violation of it. The substantial performance is refused, but its shadow haunts the nonperformance, and by so doing prevents it from becoming a purely formal operation. In the last analysis, not-running in an interdictive context remains a kind of running, because its satisfaction of the interdiction will be measured by its (non-)correspondence to the criteria that define running. Declarative negation is quite different. If I say “John is not running,” my statement will be judged true or false by those same criteria, but John’s activity need not itself be governed by them.\n\nNegation here is purely formal, metalinguistic. Whatever else John may be doing, I may if I like interpret his activity as being not-running, thereby liberating my imagination to grasp analogies with areas of experience not intended in John’s action. Hence, like governance and modification, the operation of negation (and a fortiori the use of other operators such as “again,” “twice,” etc.) is not fully grammaticalized in imperative language. But because interdiction, unlike the other qualifiers of the imperative, involves the use—and hence the lexicalization—of an operator not independently realizable as a performance, it would appear to create a declarative-like distinction between “parts of speech” linked in a formal hierarchy.\n\nThis would seem to contradict our contention that the full grammaticalization of the negative can occur only in the context of the declarative. Because interdiction remains a request for performance, it is difficult to consider its “not” as a potentially substantive element defined outside the linguistic context, such as “fast” or “big,” which add observable qualities to a performance. Yet that this is indeed the case is suggested by our own usage of the expression Don’t! One might object that, like “No” in answer to an interrogative, Don’t! is merely an ellipsis for “Don’t do X!” But al though this would be the case when I respond “Please don’t!” to “Should I close the door?” it need not be so.\n\nThe woman who exclaims “Don’t!” to a lover’s tentative caresses is a useful example. In claiming that this is not an ellipsis I am not merely playing with words. An ellipsis is the omission of an already present linguistic element, like “(Please) don’t” in reply to “Should I shut the door?” The woman’s “Don’t!” to her would-be lover is another case entirely. Although we might imagine various verbs to fill out the meaning of this expression (“Don’t touch me!”, “Don’t try to seduce me!”), the lack of a specific verb is significant. By failing to offer a linguistic model of her partner’s behavior, the speaker avoids any characterization of its intentionality and thereby forecloses any possible attempt to reinterpret his actions to her satisfaction.\n\nHer utterance alludes to a behavioral complex of seduction that “Don’t!” interdicts in toto, rather than “Don’t do that!” which focuses on the specific act performed. And this is only possible because in the imperative, negation is applied not to strictly linguistic models, as in the declarative, but to performances that, al though they are indeed normally specified in language, may simply be exemplified in reality.\n\nWe should point out that this analysis does not imply that this type of imperative negation is the origin of the operator of negation, which would presumably first appear as a way of saying “No!” to an ostensive. Such a negation would presumably apply to the ostensive situation taken as a whole rather than to its specific object. But it is difficult to unambiguously “translate” negation in an ostensive language into mature language, whereas the imperative “Don’t!” conveys a clear message. Thus the operator of interdiction, al though specifiable lexically, retains sufficient substantiality to stand alone when its real-world referent is sufficiently evident.\n\nAnd this is not an accident of modern usage, but a necessary consequence of the intentional structure of the imperative, in which the interlocutors’ shared scene of representation is not fully divorced from their real temporal presence. Interdiction is not true negation, because it addresses itself to the “will,” not to the “intellect,” to performance, not to a context-free model of performance. And by the same token, it is not wholly devoid of substantiality, because it can assume as its content that of the present moment. Taken out of its temporal context, the lexeme of interdiction appears as a pure operator, but imperative language does not permit this purely lexical abstraction.\n\nThere is no linguistic space available in which to ask the metalinguistic question of what “Don’t!” means, because its utterance intends unavoidably its real-time context. Its evolution into a true negative, which is at the same time the genesis of the declarative, must therefore depend on its inappropriate use.\n\n* * *\n\nWe have been assuming that the hearer of the imperative, knowing the requested object to be unavailable, requires a means of expressing this fact to the speaker. But we cannot consider that on the one hand he possesses the “thought” of the absence of the object, but on the other, he is unable to “express” it and must therefore invent a new form for this purpose. Rather, the “thought” itself is the invention, and if we can specify precisely what it should be, we will find it already expressed. For whether or not thought be deemed possible without language, the desire to express a thought to another, as is the case here, can be formulated only in the terms of whatever system of representation is available.\n\nThus the imperative did not arise when, desiring to command the presence of an object or action, someone decided to use the ostensive for this purpose in the absence of its referent. Rather, the “thought” of the desire for the object was simply expressed by the (ostensive) means at hand, without deliberation on the change in linguistic convention that it would entail. And the second party’s response, by correcting this “inappropriate” usage and at the same time satisfying the speaker’s desire, led to its reinforcement and to its eventual acceptance as an appropriate linguistic act. Similarly, in the present case, the second speaker does not seek the means to express the absence of the object—for if he sought them, he would find them wanting—but expresses it simply as he has formulated it to himself.\n\nThe model he creates may not be immediately comprehensible to the first speaker. But because he has no doubt been on occasion in the same situation as this interlocutor, he will eventually grasp its meaning. The creation of new linguistic forms thus passes through a moment of subjectivity in which desire is expressed as faith. In the case of the nascent imperative, the object of this faith was the “ontological” power of the ostensive to compel the presence of its referent. In the case now at hand, the desire of the second speaker is to communicate to his interlocutor the impossibility of carrying out the imperative.\n\nFor both interlocutors, it is the absent object that is the focus of their attention: the first speaker desires its presence, the second knows that this presence cannot be obtained. This object is designated by a linguistic expression, a word or combination of words, which has already been employed by the first speaker as an imperative, and which, if the object were indeed presentable, could be employed anew by the second speaker as an ostensive, as in the “Scalpel!”-” Scalpel” dialogue. But it is we who have classified these two usages as belonging to two linguistic forms, linked by a historical dialectic. For the speakers who make use of ostensive and imperative utterances in the process of communication, they do not possess, as they do for us, the discrete existence of elements in a paradigm.\n\nThe forms represent for us two different intentional structures, but these structures cannot themselves be “known” to their early speakers, and are not normally perceived as such even by speakers of mature language. They are conventions of communication, the choice among which is not overtly made but predetermined by the situation in which the speaker finds himself. If, in ostensive language, the word designating the object could be said to “mean” or intend its presence, this was because the usage of the word always accompanied, and specifically designated, the object-aspresent. In the significant memory of the members of the community, even at this stage, the word could be said to possess the same lexical signification that its counterparts possess today, that is, it is simply the name of the object.\n\nThe “ontological faith” that we have attributed to the user of the ostensive is not the product of the signification of the lexeme, but of its meaning, which is nothing but the shared memory of its usage. The speaker of imperative language possesses two utterance forms that are in effect conventional uses or meanings for the word, not significations of it. “Hammer” simply signifies (a) hammer; it is the usage of the word that is limited to an imperative or ostensive interpretation, and this not because the word could not be pronounced independently of either form, but because its utterance could be given no other meaning.\n\nIn elementary language, one cannot simply “talk about” a hammer, because there is as yet nothing else to say about it than that it is present or that one wishes it present. To combine the words “big” and “hammer” in an utterance tells us, of course, that the hammer is big, but the meaning of the sentence at this stage is either that the big hammer is here, or that the speaker wishes it delivered. That it is big is not information conveyed by the utterance, because the function of utterances is not to convey context-free information but to designate significant or desired phenomena. In the “Scalpel!-Scalpel” dialogue, the word designates a specific object of interest to the speakers (to the second through the mediation of the first).\n\nBoth surgeon and assistant are capable of formulating sentences of indefinitely great complexity concerning the scalpel, but in the given situation, such sentences would be inappropriate. Nor is it likely that the speakers would be aware that their dialogue consists of an imperative followed by an ostensive, even assuming that such terminology were familiar to them. Their conversation uses the word simply as a means of communication, the intentional structure created in each utterance being an appropriate model of reality: The surgeon says “Scalpel!” because he wants the scalpel, and his assistant repeats the word to show that it is now available for the surgeon’s use.\n\nIn both cases the word simply signifies the object; its place in the intentional structure is determined by the context. We should suppose this to be the case as well for the speakers of imperative language. Thus for the second speaker in an “infelicitous” imperative dialogue, the word used by the first to demand the object is simply its name, and not in itself either an imperative or an ostensive. And by the same token, his own (ostensive) reply, were the object in fact available, would repeat this name. Given that it is not, we may assume that he imagines the requested object/performance, but that he understands that the image is at the present moment inactualizable.\n\nThis situation bears a certain similarity to that of the original speaker of the imperative, who, imagining an object in its absence, called its name to make it appear. But this role has already been preempted by the first speaker, whose ontological faith the second knows to be in the present case unjustified. It is this non-justification that constitutes the object of the latter’s desired communication. Calling the name of the object will not make it appear, whatever the sanctity of the scene of representation. The second speaker’s knowledge demystifies the faith of the first. This knowledge is the negative moment of the declarative, and of higher linguistic form in general.\n\nThe use of the word must now be divorced from the presence of the object. But from the standpoint of the first speaker, one still implies the other; it is not his usage that is intended to exemplify this disillusion. The first speaker uses the word as an imperative; the second is aware that his interlocutor awaits the desired object. To fulfill this awaiting is impossible, for all he can produce is its name. But at the same time there is an awaiting that would indeed be fulfilled by the absence of the object: the negative imperative consisting of the name of the object and the operator of interdiction. Uttered in linguistic presence, the name-plus-operator would indeed be an interdiction.\n\nIn the second speaker’s thought, however, it would simply evoke the image of the object as absent; in other words, it is the name of the object-as-absent. The second speaker is aware that to say the name of what is not will not necessarily make it appear. But to say the name of what is, even if all there is, is the absence of the object, is to use the name not as an imperative but as an ostensive. This negative ostensive is at the same time a correction of the first speaker’s utterance, which, insofar as it is an imperative, is itself a transformed ostensive, no longer “inappropriate,” no doubt, but deferred. The second speaker’s ostensive, then, in its negativity, is already fulfilled, but at the same time, by presenting in ostensive form the object requested by the first speaker, even if it is presented-as-not-present, his utterance has the potentiality of putting an end to the awaiting created by the original imperative.\n\nThere is no guarantee, of course, that this communication will be successful, because the ostensive offered in the dialogue is not what was originally expected. But in the genesis of the imperative there was no reason either to assume that the inappropriate use of the ostensive would be automatically rewarded. What is essential is that the new form exist as an intentional structure for the speaker, so that the hearer, who at first finds it inappropriate, may understand its meaning and eventually come to use it when he finds himself in similar circumstances. The negative ostensive can thus arise as a possible negative “reply” to the imperative.\n\nIts acceptance by the first speaker in lieu of the requested object, as opposed to the more violent response that might be expected in a case of inappropriate fulfillment of his request, would constitute a further lowering of the threshold of significance from that which gave rise to the imperative. At that moment it was individual desire that was accepted as a possible source of significance; now it is the unfulfillability of this desire. But this is too negative a formulation: what the negative ostensive presents is simply the state of affairs, not as an object of desire in itself, but on the contrary, insofar as it withstands the desire to modify it. Which is to say, that the lexeme of negation/interdiction has become a predicate.\n\n* * *\n\nThis defeat of desire by reality is, in the sphere of representation, an immensely significant triumph of objectivity. The inappropriate (positive) ostensive opened the domain of linguistic representation to the infinity of desire; the inappropriate negative ostensive, in representing the limitations of desire, permits the dialectic of desire and reality to be comprehended entirely by language, so that linguistic models can henceforth mirror and anticipate the results of our attempts to realize our representations. But this development is predicated on the prior acceptance of the significance of those elements of reality that oppose desire. In urgent situations, these facts are signs of crisis and must be overcome through action. In those less urgent, the facts, albeit negative, may acquire communal significance in themselves.\n\nThus, if our “Scalpel” dialogue occurs during an operation, the answer “Scalpel-no!” to the doctor’s question is not likely to be of help. If no scalpel is present then a substitute must be found immediately, and the assistant would do better to rush off to seek one than to attempt to “correct” the doctor’s imperative. But were the request made in more leisurely circumstances, say in the course of taking inventory, the negative reply would permit the functional act of reordering the missing item. The key criterion here is the immediacy of the universe of discourse. When the horizon of the interlocutors is limited to the present moment—to the moment of mutual presence—the inappropriate negative ostensive is functionless. Conversely, its functioning makes the universe beyond this presence and its extension through imperative awaiting for the first time a possible source of the significant.\n\n## Chapter 13. Negation as Predication: The Origin of the Declarative\n\nThe negative ostensive is a new linguistic form, not merely a variant of the ostensive. The original imperative-ostensive dialogue took place around the successful presentation of the imperative object. The two utterances of its “name” mark the beginning and the end of the first speaker’s awaiting of this object. If we imagine a conversation consisting of a series of such exchanges, this name is all that can be said “about” each object, that is, just enough to identify it as the topic of both linguistic and real interest.\n\nIn contrast, let us stipulate that the negative ostensive is acceptable to the first speaker as terminating, at least for the moment, the awaiting created by his request. Then the role of the object as topic would remain as before, but whereas the imperative intended its worldly presentation, the negative ostensive in this context, on the contrary, represents its nonpresence. Thus it is the first linguistic form that truly says something about its object. As a “name” for its absence, it would be not unlike other names, but precisely, it is not the absence that is the topic of interest but the object itself. Whereas in the negative imperative, the operator of negation was a coordinate element of the requested performance, the not-hammer or notrun being both a kind of hammer or run and a specified inaction, hence a kind of “not-,” in the negative ostensive the preexistence of the hammer as topic makes its absence for the first time a true predicate.\n\n* * *\n\nThus the negative ostensive is the germ of the declarative sentence. The widespread existence, alongside the subject-predicate form, of the topiccomment sentence, for example in Chinese and Japanese, lends support to our derivation, which suggests that in the declarative form, a topic is first established and then commented on. We have no need to distinguish here between the two sentence types. The topic exists a priori as supplied by the desire of the first speaker, and the “comment” is at the same time a predicate. No doubt the negative ostensive allows only for negative predication. But once a wholly verbal reply to the imperative is accepted as adequate in certain situations, the dialogue will naturally attract other predicates, since once language has become acceptable in lieu of performance, more informative language can only be an improvement over bare negation.\n\nThe criterion, here as before, is the level of significance of the imperative situation. Where this level remains high, the imperative retains its exigency. But if a verbal reply comes to be tolerated, and under certain circumstances expected, the imperative is transformed into an interrogative, presumably pronounced in the hesitant tone, raised at the end as a rifle barrel is raised to demonstrate the absence of violent intention, that remains in most languages its distinguishing characteristic. Thus in our linguistic genealogy, Scalpel? is a softened form of Scalpel! The request for information is a direct descendant of the request for the object.\n\nIt suffices that, as a consequence of the modified imperativeostensive dialogue, the category of predication exist as an intentional structure. Nor would imperative language presumably lack potential predicates, either predicate nominatives/adjectives or verbals. The imperative speaker could no doubt request a big hammer or a small one, a green branch or a yellow one. Now, given the lowering of the threshold of significance implied by the new form, what could formerly only be named by an ostensive/imperative (Big hammer!) can now become an informationbearing utterance ([The] hammer [is] big). We need not deny the validity of the transformational analysis that considers adjective-noun constructions like the first to be derived from sentences like the second.\n\nBut this analysis applies only in mature, declarative language, within which the protogrammatical relationships of ostensive and imperative language are formalized in hierarchies of dependent and independent terms. In elementary language, Big hammer! was not a true grammatical construction because there was no way of discriminating between the hammer being big and the big (thing) being a hammer. It is only in the declarative that, the sentence topic having an a priori existence, its qualities can be predicated of it as accidents of a substance.\n\n* * *\n\nAs an example of the evolution that might have led to the multiplication of predicative terms, consider the case of locatives. Clearly locative expressions, which can be formulated gesturally by pointing, must have been among the earliest linguistic terms. Thus a speaker of ostensive language, seeing or hearing the arrival of, say, a herd of buffalo, might not only produce the sign “Buffalo!” but indicate by a gestural and/or verbal sign the location of the herd. In ostensive language this usage, even if “symbolic,” is not predicative; it expresses rather a modification of the presence within which the utterance is made, as is still the case when we use an ostensive in this manner today.\n\n(“Over there! Buffalo!”) Now let us suppose that, in answer to an imperative request for a hammer, the addressee, rather than simply denying the presence of the hammer, replies that it is “over there.” In ostensive language, use of the sign for “over there” included that location within the scene of representation, that is, within the domain with which the speaker and his audience could consider themselves immediately concerned. But used as a reply to an imperative, the sign locates this same space outside the immediate presence defined by the speaker’s request. It thus becomes a modification not of presence but of absence, an elaboration of the negative ostensive: the hammer is notpresent, and furthermore it is over there.\n\nGiven an appropriately non-crucial situation, this reply will be not only understood by the first speaker, but accepted as supplying information adequate to his request; he wants the hammer, and he learns where to find it. Were such a reply anticipated, the “imperative” would thus be already little more than an interrogative, less “Give me a hammer!” than “Is there a hammer around here?” and eventually “Where is the hammer?” This example can serve to suggest the variety of conceivable nuances between the simple imperative on the one hand and the simple interrogative on the other. The degree of urgency of the situation and the spatial extent of “presence” for the speaker define a continuum between the surgeon’s urgent demand for a scalpel and a casual request made to an indifferent stranger.\n\n* * *\n\nWith the derivation of the declarative sentence we reach the final stage of the dialectic of linguistic form per se. The further evolution of linguistic representation will take place on a higher level, that of discourse, within which the declarative sentence is of course predominant.\n\n## Chapter 14. The Declarative Model\n\nWith the derivation of the declarative sentence we have reached the final moment of the dialectic of linguistic form per se. The chief obstacle to the comprehension of the intentional structure of the declarative is its familiarity to us. We write of the lower forms from the telic perspective of the higher. But having attained the final stage of linguistic evolution, we find ourselves writing about the structures of the declarative sentence in declarative sentences. The paradoxes generated by desire in elementary language, which had led to the evolution of the elementary forms, can now be converted without syntactic innovation into logical paradoxes.\n\nThe declarative sentence may be described as a predication about a topic. In its origin, as we saw, this topic was pre-established by the desire of the interlocutor, as expressed in an imperative. We may assume that in any declarative sentence, the locutee has an implicit a priori interest in the topic; the topic-comment form makes the objectal focus of this interest clearer. Obviously, however, this interest need not be previously expressed, and certainly not in imperative form. The topic is always substantive, even if it refers to an activity, in which case we may think of it as a verbal noun (like the gerund in English).\n\nPredication is a term rich in philosophical implications. Our use of it is not meant to imply that the evolution of language is telically subordinated to logic. To attempt to define predication at this stage as anything more than saying something about a topic would be self-defeating, because formal dichotomies like substance/accident or being/modification are merely ex post facto formalizations of the topic-predicate relation. I choose to designate the chief nominal as topic rather than subject to avoid giving currency to the view, expressed in the Grammaire de Port Royal and elsewhere, that the grammatical agreement between subject and predicate in Western languages possesses a peculiar ontological significance.\n\nIt seems more likely that the topic-comment form evolved into the subject-predicate form through the tightening by habitual usage of the morphological links between topic and verb. This evolution is not, however, irreversible, for the concomitant reduction of the topic to a merely coordinate rather than superordinate position in the sentence may be compensated by the adjunction of a new, emphatic topic not bound by rules of agreement. Such constructions (e.g., compare “My sister(, she) likes spinach” with “My sister, her teeth are crooked” or “My sister, I can’t stand her”) are available in colloquial English, and, we may assume, in all subject-predicate languages.\n\nThe significance of this plausible cyclical alternation between topic and subject is that it demonstrates the resistance of “natural” language to grammatical formalization, which is also a fortiori its resistance to the rigor of logical formalization. The logical proposition is no doubt a sentence, but the assimilation of sentences to logical propositions, however justified by the inherent potential of the declarative for the formulation of “context-free” de-temporalized models, eliminates from consideration precisely that element of temporal urgency, or in other terms, of significance, without which no linguistic usage can be understood.\n\nIf grammarians and linguists fail to comprehend the elementary linguistic forms because they see them as degenerate declaratives, logicians and language philosophers misunderstand the higher linguistic forms in viewing them as avant la lettre elements of logical discourse.\n\n* * *\n\nThe original negative-ostensive form of the declarative does not include a verb. The subject and negative operator are simply “coupled,” without a verb to be—as in Russian, which, however, supplies the omitted copula in other tenses. The specific question of the origin of the copula is not of interest to us here. But we cannot avoid the more general one of the origin of the verb. The latter is ubiquitous, and the markers of tense and person, which we have designated as the most fundamental grammatical categories, are in all languages attracted to it, if not actually contained within it as inflections. It is no doubt the ubiquity of the verb as bearer of these markers has led grammarians to consider it a more fundamental constituent of the sentence than its subject; a verb alone (as in the imperative) may constitute a complete sentence, a noun, never.\n\nThe grammatical prestige of the verb appears paradoxical in the light of the unquestionably more fundamental character of nouns as the names for persons and palpable objects. But the paradox remains only so long as we consider the declarative as the “natural” sentence form, in which case the very existence of syntactical relations requires the simultaneous genesis of both nouns and verbs. It vanishes in our hypothesis, where nominal forms (whether semantically nominal or “verbal”) are the more primitive, and where the first utteranceforms are precisely lacking in verbs. The verb is the sign of the declarative because it is the more evolved of the two substantial forms, through an evolution that is at the same time a degeneration, given that pre-declarative verbals were, like nominals, capable of serving as topics in themselves.\n\nBut whether the topic be nominal or verbal in nature, it is not a verb. A verb can serve only as a predicate; it may in fact be defined simply as a predicate verbal. And whether nominals or verbals constitute the most fundamental lexical elements, words denoting objects are particularly likely to be found as topics, and words denoting actions as predicates. If we return to our derivation of the negative ostensive, we note that the negative operator, which we consider to be the first predicate, can apply equally well, if not better, to verbal as to nominal imperatives, but that as a predicate it is more readily associated with nominals.\n\nThis is in both cases because of the performative nature of the imperative verbal as opposed to the objectal nature of the nominal. Thus if one is equally likely to request an object or an action, the action, being commonly available to the imperative addressee independently of any requested object, is, al though more likely to encounter interdiction, a far less likely candidate for unavailability than the object. And if indeed an action cannot be performed, merely “negating” it as unavailable conveys no information beyond a simple refusal, whereas the absence of an object is prima facie a verifiable fact. This original superiority of nominals as topics is only relative.\n\nBut if we suppose the differentiation of predicates along the lines that we have suggested in our locative example, predicates that carry supplementary information beyond that of mere unavailability will apply even more exclusively to nominals, because an absent object exists and can thus be otherwise qualified, whereas an absent performance is simply inexistent. Thus if we assume that the original function of the declarative is to express the non-performance of imperatives, nominals will tend to appear more frequently as topics and verbals as predicates.\n\nIn the case of predicate adjectives and nominals (“the scalpel is broken”; “that tree is an X” [and therefore not good for tool-making] , etc.) it is difficult to suppose that the “verb” provided by the copula is anything more than the result of assimilation of this sentence form to the true verbal form, presumably in order to bear the grammatical burden of person and tense already attached to the verb. Which is to say that the existence of the verb as an indispensable formal element of predicates rather than a merely probable one is dependent on its association with these shifter paradigms. But this association should not be looked on as a merely morphological one, as though the evolution of the inflected verb could be described as the attachment to a proto-verbal predicate of proto-adverbial morphemes denoting tense and person.\n\nFor such an explanation merely begs the essential question of why these morphemes are indeed necessary to the constitution of the declarative, even to the extent that dummy verbs come into existence to bear them. Our answer to this question must be founded on the already-established dominance of the verbal predicate. It is actions, not relations, that are essentially located in time and that differ in nature according as they are performed by speaker or hearer. Thus it would appear that the morphological, paradigmatic elements of the verb merely formalize the verbal nature of predicates. Yet the passage from the probabilistic dominance we have described to formal dominance depends on an additional element: the linguistic present constituted by the declarative.\n\nWe have already seen the germ of this present in the imperative, which can be said to possess an incipient tense because it refers to a real time outside of linguistic presence stricto sensu (i.e., the time of the speech act), al though referential time is intended not as independent of this presence but as an extension of it. In contrast, the declarative, even in its most primitive form, provides the model of a present independent of linguistic presence, and thus possesses a true tense, even if, as we must assume, the emergence of a paradigm of tenses is a later development. The existence of the verb is thus prior to its grammatical inflections, but this is so only because, even before the existence of tense paradigms, the declarative sentence already possesses an implicit tense. Once this has been more clearly established, the emergence of the verb as the general predicative form will follow, because, as we shall show, tense is an essentially verbal category.\n\nLinguistic Present and Linguistic Presence As a negative ostensive, the nascent declarative would appear to stand in the same dependent relation toward linguistic presence as its positive ostensive counterpart. The absence of a hammer “takes place” in the same real time and space as its presence: the presence of communication as established by the speaker of the imperative. But the function of the declarative model is very different from that of the ostensive. The latter recreates communal presence centered on a significant new phenomenon; the declarative functions in an alreadyestablished linguistic presence to negate the model proposed by the first speaker.\n\nThe information contained in the declarative acts as a bar to the anticipated fulfillment of the imperative request, and in so doing establishes a barrier between the prolonged linguistic presence within which this fulfillment was awaited and the situation at hand. The model of reality presented by the negative ostensive can, of course, be acted on, but the model for such action is not given by linguistic form. If the answer to the original imperative be, for example, that the hammer is “over there,” then the first speaker can make use of this information to go and get it. The relation of act to model, however, is now no longer immediate but analytical.\n\nThe declarative has presented a state-of-affairs, and the realization of the original speaker’s desire within this state-ofaffairs is neither dependent on the linguistic presence of the speakers nor, indeed, mediated by the utterance at all. It is the fact that the hammer is over there now that makes the appropriative action possible, not the fact that it is said now to be over there. The correspondence between the now of the utterance and the now of the being-over-there of the hammer is thus not essential to the declarative model. If the second speaker had said that the hammer was over there yesterday, or that it would be over there tomorrow, his interlocutor might still act (perhaps differently) on this information.\n\nThis locative predicate here, of course, has evolved beyond the simple negative. But the same considerations apply even in the more primitive case. The original imperative expressed a desire that was to be immediately satisfied through performance. The negative-ostensive reply leaves it to the first speaker whether he will redefine his desire in more realistic terms. The negativeostensive model refers to the present, but only to annul the relationship between this present and the linguistic presence of the speakers. The imperative was founded on the faith that these two were inseparable, that there was no “present” other than linguistic presence, prolonged sufficiently into the future to permit the presentation of its referent.\n\nThe negative ostensive reveals the illusion of this faith in the magical powers of the scene of representation. Thus the declarative has a tense from the beginning, even if at first it be only the present. For the other tenses too are “presents,” presents of the past or future. To say the hammer was there yesterday is to say that, yesterday, it was present, yesterday’s present being, from the context-free perspective of the model, just like today’s. This present is that of the declarative model as a whole, yet it is within this model specifically an element of the predicate. The topic is requested by the first speaker and denied by the second, but whether it exists at all in the world, it has a reality in linguistic presence on the scene of representation.\n\nIts absence or even its nonexistence is what is said about it by the predicate. The topic is simply a given of the linguistic model, as the topic-comment sentence makes explicit by setting it off in first position, independently of the grammatical dependencies of the rest of the sentence. Philosophers have been confused by the coordinate subject-predicate form into arguing for and against the “existence” of such things as a round square. In topic-comment form, however, even if we say “a round square, that cannot even be imagined,” the topical linguistic “existence” of the round square is beyond dispute. The present of the declarative, in which the topic becomes an element of a model of reality, is realized only in the predicate.\n\nThis predicate need not be verbal in nature. But to the extent that it refers to a present, it temporalizes the topic, which at first presented itself atemporally, as a non-referential linguistic presence. Thus the topicpredicate form expresses a passage from the atemporal to the temporal. Now insofar as we can distinguish verbals from nominals, the former are names of actions, that is, phenomena that can be realized only in time, whereas nominals exist in the significant memory as atemporal images. But this implies that when the predicate is verbal, the temporality inherent in the verbal-as-such becomes a property of the topic-as predicated-of, or we might say that the verbal predicate verbalizes the topic.\n\nIn contrast, adjectival and nominal predicates have no verbal with which to verbalize the topic because the adjective or nominal cannot be itself an agent of temporalization. In a sentence like “the hammer (is) broken” or “John (is) sick,” the words “broken” or “sick” express states, not actions, and the now implicit in the declarative is verbalized, not in these words, but in the copula, even if unexpressed. The semantic sources of copulatives in verbs like to stand (Latin stare), to bear (Sanskrit bhū), which denote static “activities” and thus temporalize stasis, lend support to this analysis. Thus declarative predicates acquire a verbal form as the result of their expression of a linguistic present.\n\nThe other chief grammatical categories, governance and person, also inchoate in the imperative, are likewise formalized as specifications of the predicate and thus as functions of the verb. Imperative verbals may be associated with objects, but cannot truly be said to govern them; they involve them in a desired performance. In the declarative, the object becomes an element of the predicate, temporalized by its role in the action denoted by the verb. Thus in a sentence like “John takes (took) the hammer,” the hammer is not present in the model as an object of the speaker’s desire, but as the object of John’s action.\n\nThe hearer is required to conceive it as subordinate to this action, because it is this action alone that constitutes the now of the linguistic present. The category of person is similarly formalized in the declarative model. Here we may pass over the third person, rightly classed by Benveniste as merely the nonpersonal, or if we like “zero-personal,” member of the paradigm. The first-person or second-person topic, upon its temporalization by the predicate, becomes itself situated in the now of the linguistic present. The shifter function of the personal pronouns situates the declarative model relatively to the linguistic presence of the two interlocutors, so that the original speaker, hearing (say) “I” as the topic, must imagine the other speaker in the temporal situation designated by the predicate.\n\nThus the declarative model specifically presents one or the other speaker as a “real” element of the present (such as was only implicit in the imperative model), and because the verb carries in the predicate the tense of the present, it will tend to become “personalized” as well. In contrast to the asymmetry of the imperative-declarative dialogue, the use of personal pronouns in the declarative reestablishes the symmetry of the ostensive gestures of pointing which were no doubt the most primitive “shifter” forms. In the present of the declarative, “I” and “you” form a paradigm, with the third-person form standing in contrast to both.\n\nThe asymmetrical speaker-hearer relation is neutralized within the linguistic model; this is the same neutralization as was carried out by the (declarative) present on the asymmetry of (imperative) desire. Artificial languages may be made “context-free” without reference to the linguistic presence in which their messages are conveyed, but in human language this presence can never simply be ignored, if language is to continue to serve as our means of liberation from prelinguistic violence.\n\nChapter 15. The Esthetics of Linguistic Forms The declarative sentence, as a “context-free” model of reality, offers us the possibility of an objective understanding of the universe. It is the foundation of scientific discourse, which makes explicit and rigorous the decontextualizing elements of the declarative model by calling for empirical verification/falsification, eventually in the controlled environment of the laboratory. But the declarative is by the same token the origin of fiction, which exploits its liberation from the discursive context in the opposite fashion, as a source not of objectivity but of the free representation and transcendence of desire.\n\nThe esthetic relation is constituted by our oscillation between contemplating the sign and its sacred referent that originates on the scene of representation. But this space and attitude of contemplation (Sartre’s poursoi), once constituted, can then be evoked by real-world objects, which are no longer perceived in the “instinctive” framework of appetite but can in various ways acquire an aura of sacrality. Although there is no point in speaking of mimesis itself as an esthetic phenomenon, the mimetic structure of desire as described by René Girard in Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, (Grasset, 1961) includes an esthetic dimension that depends on the scene of language, if not on language itself.\n\nImitation of another’s behavior can of course be performed for strictly practical reasons. But in Girard’s schema of desire, the subject imitates a model whom Girard calls the mediator, whom he regards consciously or unconsciously as an esthetic object. The perceived reality of the model alternates with an imaginary being that embodies an inaccessible, sacred essence. The subject may subsequently attempt to acquire the objective components of this being for himself, in which case his mimetic activity rejoins the domain of the practical. But in the esthetic moment of desire, the non-equivalence between being and act, or substance and appearance, presents itself to the imagination of the subject.\n\nThe esthetic imagination as so defined is not practical, anticipating possible future activity, but paradoxical. On the one hand, possession of the appearance appears to include within itself the possession of the being that is expressed by it; but on the other, because the appearance is an expression of this being, the being must be acquired before the appearance and is therefore inaccessible through it. Thus the esthetic embodies in a paradoxical experience the fundamental paradox of signification: that the word signifies its referent as already significant. Or in theological terms, man creates God/God creates man.\n\nThis esthetic element is not dependent on language, nor indeed on any formal system of representation, except insofar as such systems lend significance to the appearances to be imitated. Yet it is important to insist that the moment in which the “being” of the model is contemplated, as opposed to “instinctively” imitated as in animal mimesis, is a mode of deferred action dependent on the human scene of representation. The desiring subject’s contemplative “possession” of the real or remembered image of his model is homologous to the speaker’s “possession” of the sacred object in the originary event through the intermediary of the sign, the object of the ontological faith expressed in the inappropriate ostensive.\n\nFor the subject of desire, the remembered image of the model is like that of an ostensive sign which, because its utterance accompanies in principle the presence of its referent, comes to be employed inappropriately, with the same paradoxical consequences, in order to obtain the presence of this referent in its absence. Hence al though the desire is purely mental, it is nonetheless an effect of representation, a cultural phenomenon. Yet the means of expression furnished by the ostensive, al though adequate to this task, can scarcely be said to constitute an esthetic object in itself. The ostensive sign does not specify a particular mode of appearance of its referent, but the appearance of the referent per se; it stands for the substance of the referent, just as for the desiring subject, a particular phenomenal aspect of the model can be said to stand for his being as a whole.\n\nOstensive language does not express the content of the esthetic imagination, but is only its formal sign, and what we have called ontological faith in language is precisely that this sign, given the conditions of linguistic presence, is sufficient. A case in point is the magical use of a person’s name to “possess” his “essence,” a quasi-universal phenomenon in archaic societies, which is often guarded against by the expedient of maintaining this essence in a secret, sacred name revealed only to privileged members of the family group. The name is a merely formal attribute. But if its use is thought to give access to the substantial being of its bearer, then contemplation of the name may be taken as a linguistic equivalent to the contemplation of some more palpable manifestation.\n\nDesire is ultimately concerned, after all, not with appearance but with substance, appearance being only a means to an end. The inadequacy in our eyes of the esthetic that expresses itself in the evocation of a name in order to “possess” its bearer comes, not from the impotency of ostensive language, but, on the contrary, from its excessive power, its proximity to the sacred. The desiring subject only contemplates as much of the model’s appearance as he needs in order to assure himself that it expresses the latter’s being: if a name suffices, he need go no further. Indeed, the concrete appearances that function in the same fashion in the extra-linguistic imagination tend to be of a similar fragmentary, unesthetic character, as in possession through a piece of clothing, a lock of hair, etc., exercised by the practitioners of voodoo and similar rites.\n\nYet in the iconic realm, there is no clear frontier between the magical and the esthetic. Although a stick figure or voodoo doll might suffice to permit “possession,” the cave painters of the animal figures whose beauty still amazes us today were almost certainly not displaying their skill for the sheer esthetic satisfaction of their fellows; these paintings, like the art displayed in cathedrals, clearly had a reverential purpose, as well as an ultimately alimentary one. In the formal, minimalistic domain of language, however, the distinction between the elementary linguistic forms and the declarative is critical.\n\nAlthough the elementary forms produce an esthetic effect, the dependence of the sign on the speech situation precludes the development of an esthetic internal to linguistic communication, that is, a literature. This is merely to reformulate in esthetic terms the dependence of the elementary linguistic forms on the scene of representation, which makes them incapable of furnishing objective models of reality. The “excessive power” of the ostensive-imperative that transcends the esthetic sphere is the exact counterpart of its non-objectivity; the failure to distinguish between desire and reality is in both cases inherited directly from the originary scene of representation.\n\nHence what we may call the esthetics of the elementary forms can be grasped only by going beyond the linguistic models themselves to the entire scene on which they are presented. The pragmatic paradoxes generated by the use of these forms in specific situations can then be understood in esthetic terms, and the emergence of first the imperative and then the declarative “solutions” to these paradoxes as steps in the evolution, not merely of the objective representation of reality, but of esthetic expression. In this perspective, because the ostensive is dependent on the presence of its object, its own “esthetic value”—its capacity for evoking when contemplated by its hearer the being-for-desire, or simply the significance of this object—is limited to the moment of deferral in which it presents itself as a representation of the object.\n\nIn the development leading to the constitution of the imperative, this deferral is prolonged in an awaiting in which the sign designating the object becomes for the hearer the stimulus to a practical performance. Here, for the first time, the utterance can function outside its practical use, as an object of esthetic contemplation. Insofar as the imperative remains an “inappropriate ostensive,” its utterance, rather than being realized in practice and thereby annulled as an expression of desire, may be merely contemplated as a sign of the absent desire-object. But then it would not be accurate to speak of the object of such contemplation—the linguistic expression of desire—as an imperative utterance.\n\nRather, the dialectic of the inappropriate ostensive may be said to lead to two complementary results. One is the imperative, in which ontological faith in language is made the basis for a praxis that resolves the paradox it contains. But the other is the esthetic contemplation of the linguistic sign, in which this paradoxical faith is not tested in practice but enacted, without resolution, in the imagination. This enactment may be said to be the birth of esthetic expression as such; but its effectiveness remains dependent on the linguistic presence that gives the sign a potential, albeit unused, power over its real referent.\n\nThus “inappropriate ostensive” language can be said to afford linguistic expression to desire, but only to the extent that it takes real beings as its models, for the relation between the substance of the model and its (linguistic) “appearance” or attribute must be guaranteed in the real world, and not, as in esthetic representation proper, within a fictional universe. With these considerations in mind we may now turn to the declarative form, which by providing a context-free model of reality, possesses by the same token a “context-free” esthetic. Here the linguistic object presented for contemplation is not a mere sign attributed to its referent by the speaker under the guarantee of linguistic presence, but an articulated model consisting of topic and predicate, in which the topic sign refers to what may at this point truly be called a signified, to which the predicate furnishes a context-free attribute.\n\nThe declarative begins where the ostensiveimperative ends, with the designation of an object of desire guaranteed implicitly by a preceding imperative, that is, by the implicit interest of the hearer, and not merely in general terms by “ontological faith.” But instead of replacing the sign by its referent, as with a successful imperative, the declarative “comments on” the referent with a predicate that explicitly constitutes it as inaccessible to the desire of the (imperative) interlocutor. Thus the declarative model, because it is indifferent to the “magical” power of desire as expressed in the imperative, obliges the subject of this desire to contemplate its object esthetically, within the representational confines of the model, producing the mental oscillation between sign and imagined referent that defines the esthetic experience.\n\nThe relation thereby established between speaker, hearer, and object is structurally identical to Girard’s “triangular” model of desire, which it can be said to “express” in the same way that inappropriate-ostensive language “expressed” the desiring subject’s ontological faith in the sign. Thus, in the sense in which desire may be defined as an intersubjective relation, it can only be said to emerge at this stage. But to define desire by its fully evolved configuration would lend itself to the same criticism as the choice of grammarians and linguists to define linguistic form on the basis of the declarative sentence.\n\nSuch definitions foreclose the possibility of generative analysis. In Girard’s model, the mediator openly or covertly designates, by means not specifiable in advance, the desire-object to the subject. The vagueness of this designation is analogous to the indeterminate nature of the relationship between the declarative speaker and the predicate attributed to the object. This predicate, as we have seen, is necessarily temporal, and its temporality designates a moment, real or imaginary, of the declarative speaker’s experience that is presumably not shared by his interlocutor. But this experience of the object is not presented as such in the declarative model, from which the speaker qua speaker is absent; the model is merely understood to be founded on temporal experience as the source of its predicate.\n\nIn what Girard calls “internal” mediation, the mediator may well be invisible to the subject, or even an anonymous on/Man of social judgment. Here the field is less the domain of an overtly privileged model than that of social experience in general, and the specific value of individual objects of desire is wholly dependent on their status in a given social group. Triangular desire is thus both more objective and more subjective than the desire expressed by the imperative. On the one hand, it depends on the “objective” form of predication, but on the other, because the source of this predication—that is, the mediator—is absent from the declarative model, the valorization of the object is cut off from the public presence implicit in the ostensive sign.\n\nThe declarative sentence, taken as an objective model of reality, is the foundation of metaphysics. (See “Plato and the Birth of Conceptual Thought,” Anthropoetics 2, 2, January 1997; http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0202/plato .) Predication, its distinguishing feature, is both the source of its objectivity (as it situates the topic outside linguistic presence), and at the same time, the expression of the mediating role of the (declarative) speaker between his hearer (the speaker of the original imperative) and the object of his desire (the topic). When this role is grasped explicitly by the hearer, the intersubjective situation is that of the dialogic schema discussed a propos of the imperative in Chapter 11.\n\nBut in the esthetic contemplation of the declarative model, the speaker does not appear; instead there is only predication “in itself.” Thus it is not the predicate but its predication of the topic that reveals to the detached observer what it hides from its desiring hearer: the presence of a second subject as mediator of his desire. We can now understand more concretely the position of the declarative in the dialectic of desire. The first (imperative) speaker of the imperativedeclarative dialogue already desires the object, because he pronounces its name in order to acquire it. The declarative response transforms this desire into its “triangular” form by providing a mediator, in the person of the second speaker, and a predicative attribute independent of linguistic presence.\n\nThe subject’s original desire was founded on the magical power of language to make present its referent; now this making-present becomes purely imaginary, and at the same time, defined for him by another. The second speaker acts as an unavowed rival, maintaining the desire-object in its inaccessible position in the declarative model through his act of predication, al though at the same time not revealing his own agency within his utterance. In practical terms, this utterance carries information that may be of use to the first subject in realizing his desire. But insofar as the utterance itself becomes, on the scene of representation, an object of contemplation, the declarative expresses the inaccessibility of its topic within the real world.\n\nThus to realize the desire, the speech situation would have to be abolished rather than, as in the imperative, fulfilled. Worldly fulfillment thus now appears as incompatible with the scene of representation, which generates an imaginary, or more precisely, a fictional universe. The prolongation of the linguistic presence of the declarative thus leads in the opposite direction from that of the imperative, because the hearer remains thereby immersed in a fictional world in which his desire is incapable of practical fulfillment. The fiction of the declarative sentence can only prolong itself in fictional discourse, which is to say, in literature, where the imagined object is constantly reconstructed synchronously with the temporal progression of the work.\n\nThe great flaw of “esthetics of literature” is that they begin with an anesthetic notion of language proper and are then obliged, in order to understand its literary use, to posit a “literary language” defined by some mysterious “esthetic” difference from “ordinary” language, like the “opacity” by which Sartre distinguished poetry from prose in his 1948 Qu’est-ce que la littérature? The indefensibility of this position is apparent even from the limited perspective of pragmatic linguistics. But it is not enough to speak vaguely of the “esthetic element” in language without making clear the structural relation between linguistic form and the esthetic.\n\nThus the question must be turned on its head. Language is from the outset an esthetic phenomenon as much as a communicative one, the two functions being only separable at the discursive level, and even then, never fully. Even the ostensive, which in linguistic presence merely designates a present referent and thus can operate as an esthetic expression only during the quasi-instantaneous (al though repeatable) time of deferral, functions esthetically in significant memory, and lacking this function, its inappropriate use as an imperative—but also, as we have seen, for the esthetic contemplation of the ostensive sign—would be inexplicable.\n\nThe marginality of the esthetic, as exhibited in such phenomena as the bohemian life of artists and the estrangement of esthetics from the mainstream of philosophical analysis, perpetuates its original and never quite forgotten connection with the sacred. This connection is as real, if less salient, in the minimal, formal domain of language as in that of iconic representation. Yet no student of painting or sculpture considers the pictorial or plastic components of artworks as in themselves devoid of esthetic interest, apprehended and integrated by means of a formal “competence” to which the esthetic is irrelevant.\n\nIf we are less likely to insist on the fundamentally esthetic nature of language, it is because the esthetic’s irrelevance to the practical world of science and technology makes it appear as a “supplement” to language rather than part of its original essence. This mind-set is that of metaphysics, become no longer an auxiliary to but a substitute for religion. The arbitraire du signifiant in the world of declarative language is a rootless world of “structures” that are “applied” to nature, but shorn of their own natural, let alone anthropological, ontology. The revelation of the internal contradictions of the metaphysical worldview, long relegated to the marginal domain of esthetics, has since Nietzsche become a staple of continental philosophy, of which Jacques Derrida was no doubt the ultimate exponent.\n\nAnalytic, “Anglo-Saxon” philosophers have safely ignored this trend, which they not unjustifiably dismiss as tainted with estheticism. Thus as both schools increasingly concentrate their attention on language, one attempts to deconstruct its basis without examining its forms, whereas the other attempts to construct its forms—increasingly in the context of “artificial intelligence”—without examining their basis. Generative anthropology, by demonstrating the centrality of the esthetic/sacred element in the genesis of language, and understanding the “context-free” declarative as a product of linguistic evolution that liberates us from the immediacy of the speech-situation, would substitute a historical dialectic for this dialogue de sourds.\n\nConclusion Having come to the end of this second edition of The Origin of Language, the reader may wonder whether taking up this “new way of thinking” based on the originary hypothesis has been worth the trouble. Why should the intellectual world reject its current division of labor, evolved over generations, that leaves the question of human origins, including that of language as only one of humanity’s many distinctive components (opposable thumb, bipedalism, neoteny, “aquatic ape”…), to empirical scientists, whether paleontologists, neuroscientists, primate ethologists, laboratory psychologists, or of course, linguists, while the more abstract aspects of human consciousness that can be systematized by some kind of logic are left to philosophers?\n\nGenerative anthropology is the creation of a humanist, and it is no accident that until now it has with very few exceptions been of interest only to humanists. Yet all who are concerned with understanding what is specific to humanity have an interest in exploring this “new way of thinking” (see A New Way of Thinking, Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2011) that offers a framework for the productive synthesis of empirical anthropology with religion and philosophy. This is not the kind of quasi-philosophical mishmash known as “French theory,” which, despite its great intellectual creativity, disdained to construct rigorous systems of thought.\n\nFor as Jacques Derrida, its greatest exponent, made clear, its purpose was deconstruction, the undoing of the metaphysical dogma of the “objective” reality of the philosophical proposition, the declarative sentence, while affirming nevertheless that nothing else could be put in its place. The framework offered by GA is not a magical synthesis of previous modes of thought, but a scenario that provides a plausible path from “nature” to “culture.” Let me recall the simple but potent example of Jean Paul Sartre’s distinction between the pour-soi and the en-soi, an “existentialist” elaboration of Hegel’s distinction between the an sich and the für sich.\n\nL’être et le néant consists of a long and intricate analysis of the specificity of human consciousness. One would think that this analysis, in a book of over 900 pages, might be of interest not just to philosophers and “historians of ideas,” but to anyone concerned with the specific difference between humans and the higher animals. The latter can “ape” human behavior but cannot be taught language, let alone taught to teach it to their young, and they lack all but the most rudimentary degree of the facility for triadic joint attention that permits us to communicate by exchanging representations. Yet frustratingly, Sartre’s depiction of the pour-soi, al though referring pointedly to negation, which Sartre explicitly recognizes as dependent on language, makes no direct reference to linguistic communication, let alone to the question of its origin.\n\nAs in all metaphysics, the declarative sentence is tacitly understood to have existed from eternity. But when one situates Sartre’s formulations within the scenario of the originary hypothesis, al though they lose nothing of their philosophical rigor, they gain immensely in concreteness. Sartre’s pour-soi is a scene of consciousness internal to the human mind, the locus of the separation between the mind and the thoughtobjects that it contemplates, but one that can be understood only as reflecting an earlier, communal scene of separation. I doubt if Derrida ever imagined that this scene could provide the archetype of what he called deferral, la différance.\n\nThis is another Frenchtheory term that, as they say, a fait couler beaucoup d’encre because it seems to correspond to nothing in everyday experience; yet nothing is more characteristically human than stepping back from our potentially appetitive relationship with objects in order to contemplate and think about them, and to share our impressions through signs with the rest of our species. The scenario of the originary hypothesis, whatever its accuracy in portraying “how it really was” when humans first emerged as speaking creatures, allows us to situate the birth of the pour-soi and triadic joint attention in a plausible scenario, where the motivations of the proto-human actors and their invention/discovery of the sign are explained as motivated by the need to prevent/defer violence.\n\nBoth Sartre’s mysterious néant as well as the Derridean notion of différance are given the same simple worldly counterpart. I challenge any other mode of thought to thus make “philosophical,” that is, metaphysical concepts, accessible to the anthropological imagination. The integration of religious discourse into the anthropological context, building on the insights of René Girard, is perhaps of even greater importance. GA allows believers and non-believers alike to acquire an anthropological understanding of not just “the religious” in the Durkheimian sense of the domain of communal as opposed to individual values, but of the sacred in its originary manifestation.\n\nRejecting the trivial denigration of religion in recent years (God Is Not Good, The God Delusion…), GA situates the God-creates-man/man-creates-God dichotomy at our hypothetical point of origin, granting to both sides an equivalent understanding of the anthropological issues involved. By following Ockham’s razor and minimizing the parameters that define the human, GA thus opens the door to a creative synthesis of the domains of anthropology, philosophy, and religion, as well as the humanistic not-just-French theorizing that has somewhat haphazardly attempted to synthesize them. One hears a great deal nowadays about a “post-human” era, whether inhabited by humans with digitally enhanced bodies and brains or by cyborgs who will have replaced us as the world’s dominant creatures, as they have become the world’s best chess and now Go players.\n\nGA’s understanding of our relationship to language allows us to clear up some of the confusion surrounding this subject. The human scene of representation, in inaugurating a wholly new mode of intraspecific communication, cannot be understood simply as a feature of the individual human mind. It is easy to show that the absurdity of the currently fashionable ideas concerning language origin stems from their failure to take its communal aspect into account—for example, the solipsistic notion that we begin to speak because we have “ideas” that we want to “communicate,” as though, given a certain level of neuronal complexity, “ideas” can spring up by themselves even without the means to communicate them.\n\nIt would be foolish today, in what is still the infancy of the cybernetic era, to assign limits to the future accomplishments of artificial intelligence. But the Girardian thesis that it is the deferral of human violence that is the critical factor in the origin of language suggests that our fears that machines may acquire the ambition of conquering the world are merely projections of the real dangers of our own violence. Suspecting computers of wanting to do away with us, as though some kind of Darwinian process independent of human will would drive their “evolution” in this direction, allows us to forget that well before any such thing becomes remotely conceivable, human beings bent on conquest and/or destruction will be able to command programmable machines to carry out their desires.\n\nWe are already on the verge of being able to create robot-drone armies whose programmed aggressiveness needs no secretly emerging robot DNA. If we can find a way to survive the next century or two, I think we can be sure that our fears of robot take-overs, even more than those of apocalyptic “climate change,” will no longer be at the forefront of our preoccupations. The ultimate criterion of a valid anthropology, using this term in the most general sense, is its ability to enhance our ethical self-understanding. This is not a matter of seeking a Pollyannish formula to transform our vale of tears into a realm of sweetness and light.\n\nBut in the current state of affairs, adding the ethical insight of GA to those supplied by history’s great religious revelations will enhance our ability to combat the victimary dogmatism that has largely taken over the ethical consciousness of the educated classes in Europe and increasingly in the US. It is not a matter of countering “lies” with “truth,” but of proposing a better model of human behavior that has some chance of persuading those of the victimary faith to begin to doubt its commandments. GA is not a “philosophy of the Right.” It accepts as the basis of all moral thinking the primordiality of the moral model that understands humanity as founded on the reciprocal exchange of signs on the originary scene, an exchange that gives us our intuition of moral equality.\n\nThe Left has committed many crimes both before and since attaining its modern selfconsciousness in the French Revolution, but the reason that these crimes never arouse the same universal opprobrium as the excesses of the Right, so that Hitler has become a symbol of evil in a way that Stalin and Mao and Castro are not, is that the Left’s professed egalitarianism, however hypocritically and inhumanly implemented, is rooted in our originary moral intuition, whereas dogmas of ontological superiority are not. The horror of the Holocaust is clearly enough the origin of the victimary ethic, one that has only grown stronger as memories of the war have faded, and this because it increasingly seems to provide an answer to all the problems of “inequality” that face humanity today, perhaps more urgently than ever now that poor people are increasingly able to live well enough to resent those who live better.\n\nGA allows us to understand that what keeps the victimary alive is that it offers a comforting explanation, however absurd, of the “digital divide” that is increasingly creating a gulf between those who are able to educate themselves to manipulate symbols skillfully and those who cannot. (See, for example, Chronicles 484 and 541.) I suggest that this division has brought about a crisis in human history, not because it makes manual labor increasingly less valuable, but because it challenges for the first time the moral model of universal human equality by putting into question our common ability to reciprocally exchange signs.\n\nIt goes without saying that, in the past, differences of symbolic competence were far greater than today: most people were simply illiterate. But such differences could be explained by social conditions: a peasant would not expect to be educated like a cleric. It sufficed that, in the West, Christianity taught that all souls were equally loved by God; worldly inequalities were not the fault of the unequally favored. In today’s world, such explanations are no longer credible. Whence the increasing use of victimary thinking to explain these inequalities: if whites (Asians?) do better in school or on intelligence tests than members of a given “minority,” it is the result of their “white privilege.”\n\nIt is much easier to explain their superior status as the result of ascriptive discrimination than to justify it in “Rawlsian” terms as ultimately beneficial to the society as a whole. GA’s understanding of the co-dependency of the moral model that provides us with our sense of equality and the element of firstness, the space for which is opened up by the freedom of human consciousness on the scene of representation, gives us a more objective basis for addressing this problem than the resentments of those who know only that they are being hurt by it. “Pure” science is an activity pursued for knowledge’s sake, independently of practical considerations, but in the faith, borne out time and again throughout history, that seeking the truth about whatever we are curious about, be it dark matter or the origin of human language, is our best way of improving our practical grasp of reality. It is in this spirit that I offer this new edition of The Origin of Language.\n\nGA Bibliography\n\nEric Gans The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation. University of California Press, 1981. The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology. University of California Press, 1985. Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation. Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990.. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford University Press, 1993. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford University Press, 1997. The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Stanford University Press, 2007. A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art. Aurora, Colo.: The Davies Group, 2011. The Girardian Origins of Generative Anthropology. Imitatio/Amazon Digital Services, 2012. bijela krivnja / white guilt. Zagreb, Croatia: Kršćanska Sadašnjost, 2013. Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation. Second edition. Aurora Colo.: Noesis Press (Deferrals & Disciplines), 2015. Adam Katz and Eric Gans. The First Shall Be The Last: Rethinking Antisemitism. Leiden: Brill, 2015.\n\n*********** Andrew Bartlett, Mad Scientist, Impossible Human: An Essay on Generative Anthropology. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2014. Ian Dennis, Lord Byron and the History of Desire. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009. Raoul Eshelman, Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2008. Adam Katz, ed., The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2007. Richard van Oort, The End of Literature. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2009.\n\nSecondary works Stéphane Vinolo. René Girard: Du mimétisme à l’hominisation. L’Harmattan, 2005. Ch. 4, part iii: 207-16. «L’anthropologie générative d’Eric Gans.» Wolfgang Iser. How to do theory. Blackwell, 2006. Ch. 10: 131-43. “Anthropological theory: Gans.” Andrew Bartlett. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 15/16 (2008-2009): 89-172. “From First Hesitation to Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking with Eric Gans.” Thomas F. Bertonneau. The Brussels Journal (http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3995), July 5, 2009. “Eric L. Gans on Language, Culture, God, and the Market.” Thomas F. Bertonneau. The Brussels Journal (http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4167), November 11, 2009. “The Gist of Eric L. Gans: From The Origin of Language to The Scenic Imagination.” Roman Katsman. “Eric Gans’s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question vis-à-vis Hermann Cohen’s Heritage.” Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015): 236–255.\n\nEric Gans is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA, where he taught for 45 years. With The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (California, 1981) he created the discipline of Generative Anthropology. His major recent works in that area are The Scenic Imagination from Hobbes to Freud (Stanford, 2007) and A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art (Davies, 2011). A new edition of his 1990 Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation appeared in 2015, along with a translation of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, and his most recent book, written with Adam Katz, The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (Brill).\n\nSince 1995, he has edited the online journal Anthropoetics and produced over 600 online Chronicles of Love and Resentment. Adam Katz is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, and the co-author, with Eric Gans, of The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism. He has written numerous essays for Anthropoetics, the Journal of Generative Anthropology, and a foreword for the new edition of Eric Gans’s Science and Faith. He has written on the fiction of Ronald Sukenick and the work of Primo Levi. He teaches college writing in Connecticut.\n\n© 1981, 2019 Eric Gans Introduction © 2019 Adam Katz ISBN 978-1949966-13-8 pbk. | 978-1-949966-14-5 hdc.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the Print Edition:\n\nNames: Gans, Eric Lawrence, 1941- author. | Katz, Adam, writer of introduction. Title: The origin of language : a new edition / Eric Gans ; introduction by Adam Katz. Description: New York City : Spuyten Duyvil, [2019] Identifiers: LCCN 2019000819| ISBN 9781949966145 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781949966138 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages--Origin. | Representation (Philosophy) Classification: LCC P116 .G36 2019 | DDC 401--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000819"
    },
    {
      "slug": "there-is-no-economy-pdf",
      "title": "There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center: Money, Capital and the Tributary",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": "Spring 2023",
      "url": "https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2802/ap2802katzbaker/",
      "content": "## Abstract\n\nWe hypothesize swapping the anthropological vocabulary derivative of central banking (with concepts like “self-interested individuals” and “market forces”) with a new minimal vocabulary derivative of the center. We are indebted to Eric Gans’ Originary Hypothesis and its discovery of the center: the paradoxical locus of attention that constitutes every social scene. Thinking through the center, and the transactions humans have with the center, reveals the “economy” as nothing more than an ideological representation of our more primary debt relationship with the center. This new vocabulary enables us to trace this originary indebtedness to the center through its various manifestations in money, banking, derivatives, succession, and sovereignty.\n\nKeywords: Ritual, Money, Sovereignty, Debt, Originary Hypothesis, Center\n\n---\n\n> “What is new is that the commercial transaction is no longer an extension of the originary scene but a minimal model of it.” (Eric Gans, “On Firstness,” in The Originary Hypothesis: a Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, 45)\n\nIn this essay, we are going to argue that the commercial transaction is, indeed, an extension of the originary scene. In his chapter in The Originary Hypothesis, Gans gives due weight to the asymmetries implicit in the formally equal market exchange, in particular the asymmetries between producer and consumer, and between those who go “first” (innovate) and those who must respond to or resist the innovation. He does not, that is, like classical liberal economists, use the formal equality of partners in exchange to obscure the actual inequalities constituting it. This is a momentary symmetry created out of the wider sphere of inequalities and sustained by the faith that one might oneself find a way of entering the system “firstly” in some regard.\n\nWhile, as opposed to the Maussian scene of gift exchange which extends itself temporally and indefinitely, and hence remains an extension of the originary scene, the commercial transaction takes place through each side “gifting” the other simultaneously, whereby the transaction can be closed (like, presumably, the originary scene itself, upon the consumption of the shared meal). But there is an asymmetry built into even this exchange, insofar as\n\n> [o]ne of the “things” exchanged is normally a more or less nonconsumable medium of exchange that confers value on the other. We recall that in the system of the gift/counter-gift the recipient’s gift exists only in the form of a sign that recognizes a debt not to the other but to the sacred center. Money is the concrete realization of this sign of recognition; it bears a “meaning” but as opposed to the ordinary sign, it is a credit drawn on the sacred that cannot be freely reproduced. The scene of a transaction dissolves instantly because money allows the “gift’s” recipient to pay his debt at once. (45)\n\nFor this simultaneity of debt cancellation to imply that the modern exchange system represents a rupture with the originary scene the kind of transaction described here would have to be the normal or definitive form of exchange in a market society. But this simultaneity of gifting only exists on the most “everyday” level of exchange, like, say, buying a cup of coffee in a diner (although the increasingly universal use of credit cards delays even this debt repayment somewhat). At least as normal are exchanges where there is in fact some delay, whether in the loans (student, car, home) many if not most citizens in a modern market society take out at some point in their lives, the payment of wages which generally takes place after one has completed the agreed upon service, pensions, inheritance, the lines of credit businesses generally rely upon, insurance and, perhaps, above all, the lending central banks stand ready to do when as a last resort the continuance of the exchange system depends (or at least is perceived to depend) on them doing so.\n\nGans speaks much more about exchange than about money, but it would be hard to improve upon the definition he provides here of money as the “concrete realization” of the “sign of recognition” to the sacred center, a “credit drawn upon the sacred that cannot be freely reproduced.” Whence this sacred upon which credit is drawn, if the umbilical cord to the originary scene and, presumably, the ritual order, has been cut? In this brief and remarkable essay, in which the entire array of concerns Gans has occupied himself with in the intervening years, such as White Guilt, antisemitism, victimary resentment, the attack on firstness, and the crisis of the Western order all these phenomena portend, he also, we think, provides us with a glimpse of what must be elided in order to conclude that the market order has been set adrift from the ritual.\n\nAs Gans points out in this essay and elsewhere, the gift economy is not directly replaced by the market economy dominated by exchanges mediated by money; rather, the gift economy is supplanted by the usurpation of the ritual center by the Big Man whose control over resources is such as to make any attempt to compete with him on the field of gift-giving futile. There is way-station, though, from the gift economy to the market economy, and that is the retrieval of the originary moral model by Judaism and then Christianity:\n\n> The unique divinity who occupies the center in relation to the entire human periphery, who names himself in Exodus 3 with a declarative sentence (ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I am that I am”) rather than by an appellation to be called on, guarantees that even the most powerful king cannot claim to incarnate the sacred. But to deprive all men of incarnate divinity is tantamount to saying that the sacred resides in their “soul,” which we can define without theology as the faculty of using signs. (44)\n\nIt is “the certainty that each inherits from his culture and bears within him as a template the moral as well as the semiotic configuration of the originary scene [that] makes possible the birth” (45) of the modern exchange system. But what is elided here is the relation between the Big Man’s usurpation of the ritual center and the discovery/invention of monotheism. Judaism and Christianity cannot be seen as discoveries in their own right, independent of the social and scenic setting in which they emerged. And that setting is clearly imperial, which suggests that Judaism and Christianity must be seen as part of the imperial crisis characterizing the Axial Age.\n\nHow, indeed, could it have been possible to imagine a God as king and judge of all humanity other than in response to human empires making increasingly ambitious claims to global rule? After all, why would it be necessary to insist that even the most powerful king cannot claim to incarnate the sacred? It is well established in Biblical scholarship—indeed, it is obvious on the face of it—that the covenant between God and Israel that forms the narrative crux of the Hebrew Bible is modeled on (while dramatically revising) vassalage treaties between, first of all the Assyrian empire and the vassal states of Israel and Judah[1]. It is, that is, the successors of the Big Man, the ancient divine emperors, who introduced money, and in the creation of money we see the intertwined origins of writing, money, debt and judicial systems (with the emperor as final judge).\n\nMonotheism, then, is like money bound up with the imperial center, which is likely why language pertaining to debt and slavery is so pervasive in the foundational Jewish and Christian scripture, which promise “redemption” from a “slavery” that is not necessarily only metaphorically applied to the spirit or soul[2]. This is not to minimize the moral revolution effected by the Judaic and Christian revelations, or to deny or even significantly revise the Girardian and then Gansian anthropological interpretations of them, but to insist on their origins in the resentment and revising of the role of emperor as God, king, and judge: to the emperor one can at most donate one’s first born, but the “innovation” of the singular God is that such a gift would be repugnant because nothing less than complete donation of one’s being is acceptable.\n\nThis can productively be seen as a retrieval of the moral model, but with the implicit concession of the inevitability of worldly empires as the revised model of transcendence. Money can bear the power of the imperial center or it can subvert it, but it cannot be indifferent to it—nor can devotion to the singular God. The horizontal never displaces the vertical.\n\nIn examining money, we are going to work with the account offered recently by Ethan Buchman, which synthesizes lucidly more originary work on money, studying its origins in the sacred and the imperial, in opposition to the classical and neoclassical traditions dominant in the Anglo-American world, which presuppose the transformation of barter into exchange mediated by money. Buchman starts with the assumption that the purpose of money is to discharge debts, and then he frames the familiar tripartite division of the “properties” of money as follows:\n\n> The Unit of Account is for Denominating Debts\nThe Medium of Exchange is for Discharging Debt, here and now\nThe Store of Value is for Discharging Debt, later and elsewhere (“Properties and Tensions”)\n\nIn other words, a “credit drawn on the sacred,” which is to say a continuation of the originary debt we owe the center. Let’s follow Buchman a bit further. He distinguishes between two origins of money, the “anthropological” one and the “political” one.\n\n> In anthropological money, the accounting follows the logic of kinship and religion, of the circulation of reproductive power (women) and justice (divine grace). Units of Account are taken from nature in the form of stable quantities of valuable material private possessions that represent wealth—heads of cattle (or people), units of shell or gems, bracelets or ingots of silver. These are prized and accumulated for their essentially religious value. But they do not necessarily become generalized media of exchange, used to lubricate markets. Rather, they are used to denominate payment in a certain circuit of social obligations by virtue of their prestige—their ability to store value. (“Origins: Reproducing Families and States”)\n\nHere, we are squarely within the gift economy but also, although Buchman only alludes to this with terms like “religion” and “divine grace,” the ritual order and ritual center. We must assume that “anthropological money” would include the contribution each family, clan, or tribe must make to the communal sacrifice. This is the debt one owes to the center, but, also, if someone else “advances” to one the good one must bring to the sacrifice, to the wealthier within the community. We would already suggest at this point that money becomes more “generalized” as a medium of exchange as the sacred center is further verticalized and covers greater distances, meaning that pilgrims coming to the center to sacrifice are too far away to bring their goods with them and need money to buy them on the spot.\n\n> In political money, accounting follows the logic of redistributive states, of the accumulation and distribution primarily of grain. Writing appears to have emerged in service of this accounting, and to have developed as an extension of earlier token-based accounting techniques that go back to the early Neolithic. Ever since we’ve had agricultural surplus, we’ve had technology to account for it. (ibid.)\n\nWhile “political” money could co-exist with “anthropological” money for long periods, I would suggest that political money will eventually displace the anthropological kind. Political money presupposes the imperial order, and a standardized form of money the sovereign would have an interest in defending. As Buchman puts it, these two origins of money “are fused in the temple palaces some 5,000 years ago into a kind of money that uses a standard weight of silver as the Unit of Account—the shekel.”\n\n> This latter form of accounting is a process of creating new, persistent computational spaces outside our brains to represent—and thereby manage—reproduction on a much grander scale. It constitutes a new medium for denominating and discharging obligations—ultimately, a new medium of money. But with this, it implies a new kind of obligation, a new way to exert power over an individual’s future, a new kind of bondage. We will have to return later to the deep association between slavery, violence, accounting, and money. (ibid.)\n\nIf money is a way of discharging debt, a sovereign powerful enough is now able to impose debt on its subjects, making money a less directly violent way of extending subordination and slavery. At the same time, large-scale institutions, like the temple and monarchy, can now account for the issuance and collection of debts across distance and time. Buchman points to specific tensions intrinsic to the boundary between the respective properties of money:\n\n> Between the Unit of Account and the Medium of Exchange there is the tension between elasticity and discipline, which is to say, the problem of liquidity. Between the Medium of Exchange and the Store of Value there is the tension between “bad” and “good” money, which is to say the problem of legitimacy. Between the Store of Value and the Unit of Account there is the tension between deflation and inflation, which is to say the problem of solvency. (“Properties and Tensions”)\n\nA debt, measured in money as the unit of account, needs to be discharged within a set time frame: do you have the money when it is due? The money held by sovereigns, banks or individuals might be certified by whatever agency certifies it or it might be counterfeit, or issued by some agent which is not or no longer permitted to issue money in a given territory. Is there an authority capable of distinguishing between good and bad money? Whatever monetary denomination debts are represented in can be increased or decreased in value by adulterating or “purifying” whatever material it is represented by—to use the term quoted from Gans above, this is a question of how “freely reproduced” the money is.\n\nThere are the exchanges that Gans places at the center of the exchange system where the debt is discharged instantly—such exchanges might be very common, perhaps even the vast majority of exchanges that take place under conditions of generalized exchange—still, the possibility of such exchanges depends upon how freely reproduced and distributed the medium of exchange is. Making the money more freely reproduced increases liquidity which increases the buffer space for considering an exchange to be instantaneous, but also makes money, past a certain point, more bad than good, freezing up liquidity and threatening legitimacy.\n\nWe could put it this way: money is the means through which the imperial center extends the indebtedness of its subjects by spreading this indebtedness differentially and asymmetrically among its subjects, creating a credit chain maintained through a variable combination of faith in the system and capacity for enforcement. Here we have not a minimal but an extended model of the originary scene, aimed at reproducing the instantaneity with which all pay their debt to center upon the ritual scene, itself an attempt to fix the not quite instantaneity with which the sign was extended on the originary scene itself.\n\nAn especially radical and critical observation, one that Buchman borrows from Colin Drumm, is that “money is not just a metaphor, a means of assessing quantitative equivalence; money is metonymy, a means to sequence debt denomination and discharge.” This means that money does not measure and represent some quality outside of it, like “value” (and thus we eliminate vast expanses of economic debate of the last 500 years or so), because there is never a static relation between money and any other abstract or concrete entity. Money exists in time, and this time is the time of fluctuations in legitimacy and sovereignty.\n\nMoney measures the relation someone with some amount of it at a given moment has with debt enforcing and money issuing institutions. We’d like to come back to that notion of instantaneous discharge of debt, because it is never quite instantaneous, even when you pick up a common object at the store—first you give the money, then the object is yours. Even if this is only a second later, the fact of an interval means that the interval can be extended, in either direction: you can pay in advance and receive goods later or receive the goods first and pay afterwards. Instantaneity or simultaneity is a fiction, or virtual, and the interval within which an exchange can be considered instantaneous depends upon the extent to which the relation between the indebted subject and the debt imposing and money issuing institutions remains the same over time.\n\nBut once debt imposition and money issuing are distributed across a range of nominally autonomous institutions, whether this relation remains the same depends upon the actions taken by those institutions, which are situated diversely in terms of wealth and power. The provision of liquidity, legitimacy and solvency are what the actions taken by those institutions aim at.\n\nThe separation of “economic” from “political” institutions, like the separation of “religious” from “political” institutions, is a modern phenomenon. In fact, these separations define the modern, and can only be effected through desacralization of the center. The destruction of any sacral aura around the occupant of the center is certainly a logical, if not necessary, conclusion of the insistence that no king can claim to incarnate the divine. From the standpoint of anthropological inquiry, even if we can see no way to or interest in attempting to resacralize the center, little insight can be gained by to joining in the modern celebration of this accomplishment.\n\nRather, we should pose it as a problem, one which is very much unsolved, and upon the solution of which the legitimacy and continuation of our current order depends. We can, in fact, identify the ground zero of these modern separations: late 17[th] century England. Christine Desan, in her Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism traces the history of English money from its early medieval status as an instrument of the Crown to the creation of the Bank of England in 1694, at which point the source of money was no longer the government but a separate, quasi-private entity. Desan sets the stage as follows:\n\n> Money is created when a stakeholder uses its singular location at the hub of a community to mark the disparate contributions of individuals in a common way. The moment occurs when the stakeholder takes contributions from people before they are due and gives out uniform receipts in return, each token intended to document the early contribution. That token, turned in later at a time of reckoning, operates to convert goods and services that were not previously interchangeable or fungible—the variety of contributions due to the center—into matters counted in a single unit. The initiative requires only one more twist to make money fully operational: if the stakeholder recognizes the receipt and takes it from anyone’s hand as an item that exonerates the person holding it from making a contribution otherwise due, the receipt can travel from hand-to-hand and maintain its worth as an item that pays off the center. The result is a token that fixes or entails value in a way that both the stakeholder and individual can use, a novel accomplishment in a world without an agreed-upon way to measure and transfer resources. (135 epub)\n\nMoney records, by the center, a debt paid to the center, and that record can in turn become a way of paying debts to the center. The kind of debt called in early by the center is likely to be, as Desan goes on to point out, some matter of urgency, like resources and men for a war. Once there are “receipts” that can be used to pay debts to the center, they can be used for more general circulation. But this general commerce and commensuration is always created through reference, however indirect, to the center, upon which all “instantaneous” debt pay-offs depend. This entire mode of money creation and use was overturned with the establishment of the central bank, which consolidated the new dominance of the merchant class in England while providing for the sovereign a much freer flow of money, with no need to petition the aristocracy for funds.\n\n> In fact, money was reinvented under much the same conditions as it was invented. A public imperative in a time of exigency catalyzed an arrangement to produce and to spend in units of value that governing authorities soon recognized in satisfaction of (an expanding) tax liability and endorsed as a medium in interim exchange between individuals. In the modern moment, the units were created by borrowing long-term from a bank in the form of its short-term liabilities—its promises to pay or bank notes. The government paid up front for its “borrowing” in note form: interest went to the investors for their provision of the specie security. (812)\n\nSince modern money doesn’t emerge out of the sphere of direct exchange but out of money produced through the bank’s lending and the government’s borrowing (which borrowing legitimates the bank and gives it more power to lend on favorable terms) it exists ultimately as a system of promises backed by sovereignty. And a couple of things were happening to British sovereignty at this point: as a result of the first anti-monarchical revolution (and arguably the model for subsequent ones) political power was pluralized in the form of competing parties; and, having just displaced the Dutch as imperial competitors, the British Empire was beginning to take off.\n\nBoth political developments are critical: habitual rotation in power of governing officials enables financial powers to establish permanent constraints on political distribution, while imperial expansion allows for the state to make new markets to help ensure liquidity on the home one. Moreover, this delegation of power to the bank and the consequent transformation of all agencies, including state agencies, into actors dependent upon an external provision of liquidity, is an especially effective means of imperial rule. It was in this context that John Locke (a partisan in the political struggles over the establishment of the Bank of England) created the myth of money as originating in the intrinsic commodity value of precious metals converted into money by social convention in order to obscure the inherently political nature of money.\n\nMoney’s value now comes to rely upon promises of future productivity, promises which in turn depend upon that very value. In the end, not only a new politics (in which the state exists to advance and in turn depends upon private wealth), and a new discipline (economics), but a new anthropology results, one which grounds the social order in individual, private interests:\n\n> Ultimately, the insistence institutionalized in the early 19[th] century that money be understood as private was the strange and selective answer to the constitutional quandary posed when the government decided to make a collective medium—money—according to a method that prioritized individual interests. According to the architects of the Gold Standard, public authority to make money was legitimate only insofar as it furthered the end of that medium, now understood as commercial. That approach prioritized the agency of entrepreneurs and the business community. If the public purposes of money seemed to disappear, the could be brought back into view by understanding the polity as, itself, a stage for the aggregate of private activity that made the economy. An argument developed as an escape from politics thus returned to colonize the politics at its core.\n\n> Within that paradigm, economics came of age as a discipline. In its world, money appeared to be made by the economic exchange of individuals, acting each for their own interest. Their choices claimed sanctity and their activity, rather than the requirements of the political community, indicated the appropriate amount of money in society. “The market” that set the standard was, after all, the market outside the boundaries of the political community—the international trade in bullion. Money was infinitely divisible in any case—it could be modeled as an abstraction. That treatment rendered irrelevant the constitutional design that constructed money. (85-6)\n\nThe specific details of the history of money matter less here than keeping our eye on the initial thread—money as a product of the center, issued so as to enable debts to the center to be paid, in continuation of the originary ritual distribution. We can raise the question at this point as to how literally we mean to take the term “ritual” here and answer, for starters, that the “economy” is treated like a deity, or to draw on Marshall Sahlins’ late work, a “metaperson” in the modern world, one to which we are expected to sacrifice, and one whose intentions we are desperate to grasp, appointing priestly figures to discern them.\n\nThe modern individual is expected to worship at the shrine of the economy (or the “market”). But we make this description more concrete by keeping in mind our previous discussion of money as an extension of the faith that the ultimate payment of a debt will be as if instantaneous, regardless of the interval between provision of the gift and the repayment. The faith in this instantaneity, and the entire system of practices taking subjects along life courses (education, employment, consumption habits, borrowing, saving, investing, retiring, etc.) aimed at conjuring this instantaneity is as ritual as any order. The first ritual following the originary scene itself would have aimed at eliminating the unevenness necessary to that scene (the staggered procession in which the sign would have been issued) by having everyone enact the originary event in sync.\n\nRitual ensures that we are the same community after the ritual as we were before, by following the same divine command. If the market is presented as a decentralized aggregate of individual activities in which knowledge that no individual could possess by himself is nevertheless held and acted on socially, this is only the case insofar as each of us donates our intelligence to the central intelligence of the market. And in the end this central intelligence is embodied by the central bank, which must step in and “correct” for “market failures.” Such corrections further approximate the desired instantaneity of exchange.\n\nIn our private, individual activities we conform to conditions under which continued faith that the interval of instantaneity can include all the exchanges made within the monetary order is maintained. Individually, we each of us try to take out those debts we feel most likely to be able to pay off, the bigger the better, while perhaps also imposing some of these debts on others, and this situates us within the system of indebtedness, but the broader problem of donating ourselves to the donating center which, since the Axial Age revelations, will be satisfied with nothing less than the donation of the entire self will still confront each of us at some point, calling for some gesture of sacralization or desacralization larger than ourselves.\n\nWhile there is certainly a critical edge to the description we are offering, what we are examining here is what must have been a necessary, vast extension of the instrumentalization of our originary debt to the center; what is not necessary, though, is the obfuscation of this condition by representing it as if grounded in individual exchanges. Such an ideological representation makes it far more difficult than it needs be to imagine other possible ways of formalizing and discharging this debt.\n\nIf ritual aims at ensuring that the community practicing it remains the same, then once the center has been usurped by a human figure, the most fundamental rituals are succession rituals. Succession is the most basic political problem: how is the power at the center, held presently by one occupant, to be transferred to another occupant, while the social order remains the same? Rituals of succession will articulate the sacralization and the desacralization of the central figure in some way: the spectrum goes from attempts to ensure personal continuity and minimal differentiation to virtual scapegoating of the figure to be removed and re-enactments of the potential civil war implicit in all transfers of power.\n\nA governing system predicated upon regular rotation in power of figures identified with different positions within that implicit civil war allows for greater movement across that spectrum. As we suggested above, the institution of such a system of rotation is necessary for the degree of desacralization required for the state to share power with the central bank. This power sharing arrangement raises all kinds of problems. State power is increasingly centralized, as the expansion of governing power in the Western, capitalist world, has made evident, while at the same time those staffing the government at the highest levels are replaced (and disempowered) with greater ease.\n\nThe simplest way to understand this is to see the state, under capitalism, as ultimately a debt enforcement institution—therefore, while the general function of the state remains carefully constrained and disciplined, dependent as it is upon sovereign debt, rotation in power makes it possible to prioritize debt enforcement imposed more rigorously upon one or another section of the population. And indefinite grants of power to intelligence and other agencies of the permanent state are also required to maintain succession due to the possibility of power rotation exceeding the constraints imposed by the needs of debt enforcement.\n\nThe rituals enforcing the rule of money are rituals of desecration, while never quite cutting the cord to the sacrality conferred upon kingship—a kind of Messianism is never relinquished, and everyone can hope all their debts will be imposed on the other party.\n\nTo advance a way of addressing this ramshackle aggregation of power and money in succession rituals at the modern center, we are going to turn first to Colin Drumm’s theorization of money, markets and succession in his dissertation, The Difference that Money Makes: Sovereignty, Indecision, and the Politics of Liquidity and, then, to Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s Capital as Power. Drumm, in the portion of his dissertation we’d like to discuss first, focuses precisely on the time demands of a particular exchange:\n\n> Both the capitalist and the proletarian theorized by Marx are examples of what Jack Treynor, in “Economics of the Dealer Function” calls “time-motivated investors.” Both, that is, have inflexible needs to transact in a particular direction and at a particular time. The worker needs to sell their labor and also needs to acquire consumption goods and cannot wait to do either. The capitalist, on the other hand, not only needs to purchase circulating capital and to sell consumption goods, but also requires the ability to sell fixed capital itself (at least potentially). (77)\n\nThese actors are in the condition of those for whom the debt is paid at once, due to their “survival constraints,” which also makes them flexible about price. Now,\n\n> [i]n the system of market exchange . . . these “time investors” are complemented by another actor who accommodates their demand to transact: one who is flexible about both time and direction of transaction but who is, by contrast, inflexible about price. The dealer is willing to be either buyer or seller, and at any time, depending on the price that their counterparty is willing to pay. The dealer . . . in fact makes itself inflexible by quoting a price, thereby constituting what is called the “inside spread.” (78)\n\nDrumm goes on to point out that the ability to engage in such an exchange presupposes the existence of a market, a place where one can go and find someone who will give you money for your good or goods for your money—and, since markets need to be created and sustained, the possibility of a market ceasing to exist is a risk priced into the price: “[t]he market’s anxiety about its own continued existence is therefore constitutive of the phenomenon of market exchange as such by virtue of the fact that the market can only exist insofar as there exists a spread” (102):\n\n> as soon as I enter the market with my apple I have only two choices: I can either quote an ask and wait for someone to accept it, or I can accept an already existing bid and thereby cross the spread. If there is no spread there is no reason for anyone to make the market, and there only exists a spread insofar as there is anxiety about whether or not the market will continue to exist. This produces the somewhat paradoxical but unavoidable conclusion that, if everyone were absolutely certain that the market would continue to exist, then it would be unable to do so. The market is constituted by its anxiety about its own future existence. (101-2)\n\nIf there’s no spread there is no reason for anyone to make the market because the market is not made by the individual with an apple and the individual with cash encountering each other, but by the dealer who supplies either party with the money they need to make their deal under inflexible conditions. But now Drumm introduces another actor, between whom and the “time investors” the dealer is intermediate: the “value investor”\n\n> who is defined by being in possession of a very large balance sheet capacity or the ability to take and hold asset positions over a long time horizon . . . the value investor never needs to demand liquidity as a demand upon their survival and therefore always has time to wait for a better price. (104)\n\nThe value investors represent the “outside spread,” and become critical to the market when the dealer finds himself unable to cover the inside spread, that is, provide liquidity to one of the “time investors.” In that case,\n\n> The dealer has gone from selling liquidity to the time investor to demanding it from the value investor, who is, in virtue of their strong negotiating position, able to charge a substantially higher premium than that which the dealer could command themselves. This second, larger price of liquidity, which lies hidden in the darkness beyond what appears in the light of the market itself, is called the “outside spread.” (107)\n\nLiquidity is maintained by the dealer’s constant bet or faith that the outside spread will be able to cover him in time to meet the inside spread. We won’t pursue Drumm’s complex argument further here, but it’s already possible to see that something like a “lender of last resort” is constitutive of any market. And even those providing the outside spread might find themselves illiquid, as they also depend upon collateralized assets that might not be sellable at the price needed to cover debts being called in on the other side of the ledger. Drumm doesn’t say this but being a value investor must be nothing more than the dealer magnified, with a larger portfolio of assets distributed in such a manner as to hedge more substantially all other investments. In a long enough run, enough hedges will come up short, and this will directly raise the question of sovereignty—a point on which Drumm is also very helpful. We will present this part of his discussion more briefly.\n\nIn addition to the “outside spread,” Drumm discusses the “outside option,” which applies a speculative logic or vocabulary to the problem of sovereignty and succession. Drumm has an extended discussion of the monetary policy of medieval English kings which we can’t enter into here, but part of this discussion involves noting that monetary policy has always involved balancing the power to undermine the king’s sovereignty by the nobles, merchants, and peasants, respectively, and that the problem of succession provides for “options” for any of these groups (or subgroups within groups) to replace the king. Since the rules, conventions and traditions governing succession are always at least somewhat questionable and arguments in favor of one successor or another somewhat sophistic, the king’s (extended, if necessary) family represents a selection of more or less likely options upon which one faction or another might lay their bets.\n\nSo, the possibility of a kind of rotation in the occupation of the center was “always already” present and closely tied to the provision of an “outside spread,” especially since the king’s legitimacy depended on including a certain amount of precious metal in the currency so as to enable the king’s subjects to melt down the currency and convert it into currency that could be used elsewhere or brought back into the kingdom to replace the money coined by the king as a kind of check on the king’s power to debase. We would say that the invention of capitalism in late 17[th] century England involved bringing the outside political option ‘inside” by making the selection of one option or another dependent upon the institutionalization of the outside spread. This makes Drumm’s argument very consistent with Bichler and Nitzan’s “capital as power” account, and we will turn to that now.\n\nWe could say that for Biichler and Nitzan capitalism, or capitalization, exists in the intersection between the outside spread and the outside option. Any good, service, asset of any kind, individual ability, and so on is capitalized insofar as it is given a present value predicated on the expected future earnings to derive from ownership of it:\n\n> The modern corporate owner does not view capital as comprising tangible and intangible artefacts such as machines, structures, raw materials, knowledge and goodwill. Instead, he or she is habituated to think of capital as equivalent to the corporation’s equity and debt. The universal creed of capitalism defines the magnitude of this equity and debt as capitalization: it is equal to the corporation’s expected future profit and interest payments, adjusted for risk and discounted to their present value. (8)\n\nThis is, intentionally, we think, an extremely open-ended definition: expected future profits and interest payments at what point? For as long as the “value investor” can wait, which is a matter of both faith and power: conceivably, the system might last forever, or it might crash tomorrow, but capitalism is a mode of power because the capitalist doesn’t leave this to chance:\n\n> the elements of corporate capitalization—namely the firm’s expected earnings and their associated risk perceptions—represent neither the productivity of the owned artefacts nor the abstract labour socially necessary to produce them, but the power of a corporation’s owners. In the capitalist order, it is power that makes the owned artefacts valuable to begin with. Moreover, the power to generate earnings and limit risk goes far beyond the narrow spheres of ‘production’ and ‘markets’ to include the entire state structure of corporations and governments. (8, italics in original)\n\nWhat constitutes the power of the corporation’s owners is precisely their access to the outside option, which is to say control over a political order which is organized as an immense debt enforcement agency with increasingly centralized power, but which has a high degree of flexibility with regard to who holds the levers of nominal, juridically legitimated power. The outside spread is leverage over the outside option. It’s not just a question of the quasi-bribery involved in funding political campaigns and candidates but of the ownership of media that can elevate or sink candidates or movements, the foundation of philanthropic institutions that engage in long-term planning regarding managing paths to political leadership and the establishment of think tanks with close connections to the media and universities that shape public opinion and the broader legal environment.\n\nBichler and Nitzan argue that a precondition of capitalism is the “spread of bourgeois accounting and the development of probability and statistics” that enabled the process of capitalism to “assum[e] the forward looking form of discounted future income” (158):\n\n> The first steps in this direction were taken by the eighteenth-century mathematician Daniel Bernoulli (1738). According to Bernoulli, all human beings have a certain ‘productive capacity’. They can work for a living—and if that proves impossible, there is always the option of begging. People’s ability to produce future income constitutes their ‘wealth’, or what economists today call ‘human capital’. And how much is this ‘human capital’ worth? Easy: just ask the person how much money he or she would demand now for giving up the potential to earn this income in the future. (159)\n\nOnce this “equation” is in place, any institution can be, and due to the sheer power of measuring and discounting risk, eventually will be brought under its sway. Increasingly all institutions, including public ones, are assessed in terms of the way present investments can be measured in terms of expected future earnings to result from them. So, for example,\n\n> the organization of learning, once the prerogative of state, church and community, is now increasingly capitalized—even when the teaching itself is still publicly administered. The process is discounted directly by its private suppliers—particularly the publishers of journals, textbooks and databases, whose profits margins can reach 100 per cent (Bergstrom 2001: 186–87). Education is also discounted indirectly insofar as it shapes preferences and mutes criticism, and in so doing helps boost profit and reduce risk (recall John D. Rockefeller’s pronouncement that his investment in the University of Chicago was the best he had ever made). (162)\n\nA few observations seem worth making here. First, this is a mode of power that would be transferred to any functional non-capitalist political order: once we have probability, statistics and, lets add, massive databases for them to operate on, any future authority will be “futuristic,” that is, determining current spending and investment based upon increasingly predictable likely results. This is simply the form the center takes in a desacralized order. So Bichler’s and Nitzan’s analysis, while certainly “anti-capitalist,” doesn’t have the same moral charge as Marx’s concept of “exploitation.” Indeed, they are working more in a Veblenian tradition, thinking in terms of financialization (which they equate with capitalization) as sabotaging potentially beneficial technological development.\n\nStill, technological development has taken place rather spectacularly, at least measured against previous eras, under capitalism (driven, in large part, by those very mathematical innovations Bichler and Nitzan see at the origin of capitalism), and Bichler and Nitzan’s model can account for that as well, as what they call “external breadth,” or “green field investment,” in which a “firm can achieve differential accumulation by building new capacity and hiring new employees faster than the average” (329-30), which seems to correlate with more conventional understandings of capitalist based growth. However, such external breadth is then sabotaged by “internal breadth,” or verticalization, “internal depth,” or cost-cutting, and “external depth,” or stagnation, all of which involve getting hold of the assets created by green field investment and guaranteeing higher future earnings than other firms by restricting access to those assets and using legal and political maneuvering to prevent those other firms from creating competitive sources of income.\n\nThe history of capitalism suggests that some green field investment will eventually break through, so that at least some economic progress can be expected under capitalism, making it possible to defend or acquiesce in it on “the devil you know” grounds. Second, though, the reliance of capitalization upon the outside option, that is, control into the forseeable future of the political order and its legal structures that will ensure that expected future earnings are indeed justly expected, which is to say, that the sale of those assets at that future point will be as if instantaneous with the present pricing of that asset, does place at least a conceptual time limit of that “expected future.” Capitalists, and those staffing their states, by definition cannot see beyond or outside of the continued operation of the machinery of power in those ways most pertinent to ensuring or enforcing the virtual instantaneity of that exchange.\n\nIt is very hard for any of us to see ourselves outside of that machinery of power because it is that machinery that produces and situates us as debt-ridden subjects, assessing our own existence against the expected future earnings this or that addition to our capacities is likely to yield. We must be concerned with our inside spreads, or at most take on the role of dealers and “make markets” by providing liquidity—the outside spread is, ultimately, beyond all but a few of us, and maybe even all of us. Control over the future is a very impressive mode of power, and if we think about technological developments as (in ways that would require a separate essay) serving as part of that machinery of futuristic control (through surveillance, data gathering and predictive algorithms), it becomes even more imposing.\n\nAt the same time, the development of what has come to be called “neo-liberalism” has made the capitalist order explicit enough that it may be possible to at least think outside of it. We could think of neo-liberalism as the shift from thinking about markets as already existing naturally in the world of human exchanges to thinking about markets as an abstract model to be applied to all human relationships, assetizing the previously unassetizable and subjecting all human activities to the discipline of risk-minimization so as to maximize future earnings. This takes us into the world of derivatives and arbitrage—a world that was already implicit in the monetary relation itself insofar as once money is generalized, the only way that you know that you really own something and that it has value is if you can use it as collateral to borrow against.\n\nThe space of the derivative is the true capitalist church. We would attempt to describe the derivative (a notoriously difficult affair) as follows. There is to be some exchange that will take place in the future. It will be an exchange where the debt is discharged at once: money for an asset. It is possible to be on both sides of this exchange, but in two separate markets. One can buy the asset on one market and sell it for more on another and gain an arbitrage profit. The construction of the derivative extends the instant of that future dual exchange to the present purchase of the derivative. In other words, that future exchange is itself an asset that can be bought and sold: the derivative is the bet on that future exchange.\n\nThe construction of the derivative leverages all of the power the entity constructing it has at its disposal: computing power that makes it possible to calculate the likely future price of the asset in question in the midst of millions of other assets, many of which will be purchased as hedges against that future exchange failing to come off as planned; financial power (the outside spread) that makes it possible to buy and hold these assets at a scale and at prices one’s competitors could not match; social and political power over regulators and rating agencies that ensure freedom of action and the kinds of legal certification required to provide one with an advantage. Ideally, the space or interval of the arbitrage profit would be infinitesimal and vanishing, so that whoever locates it has an almost infinite advantage over those even slightly behind.\n\nThere is a great deal of knowledge, skill, and other qualities like initiative and even courage that is involved in the derivative hunt, but this is the case for many rituals. In the end, the derivative constitutes a ritual because part of the knowledge and skill (and so on) involved is directed towards predicting the behavior of others while shaping that behavior. There is very much a scene of the derivative, and this ritual scene is the subject of Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies, edited by Benjamin Lee and Randy Martin; we will focus, though, on The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk and Time, by Edward LiPuma, one of the contributors to Lee and Martin’s volume.\n\nLiPuma, along with the other contributors, critiques the narrowly economic analysis of financial derivatives along the lines of the Black-Scholes equation for calculating risk that helped transform finance in the 70s and 80s and situates it within a much broader social and anthropological framework which enables us to see it as ritualistic behavior—in the terms we’ve laid out here, this means activity aimed at ensuring the community remains the same over time. Here is the way LiPuma puts it:\n\n> Now it also turns out that religion is an unexpectedly apt metaphor: for the modern American circulation of faith is an unregulated market where all commitments are over the counter bets on salvation. Critically, it declares what anthropologists steeped in gift-based exchange have known since the pioneering work of their ancestors (esp. Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss): that totalities, including the market, are social fictions made real by collective belief and sustained through the name that we have canonized for the power and persistence of belief—namely, faith. A financial market is a social imaginary; a deeply institutionalized imaginary to be sure endowed with a name, ratified participants, bodies of received knowledge, registered firms, a codified history, and so on; but it is an imaginary nonetheless. A market objectifies itself institutionally much in the manner that a nation institutionalizes itself through the creation of a state (such as the institutionalization of US nationness in the Treasury Department or Federal Reserve Bank). From our standpoint, it is neither an accident nor some opportune metaphor that a crisis-torn market began to speak in prayers, its commentators drawn to formulations that suture the health of the market to inscriptions of faith and belief normally attributed to religion. Even more, in calling for the restoration of faith and belief, these commentators are, without intending to, invoking a performativity which attends religion’s celebrated accompanist: ritual. Indeed, I take the financial community’s self-assessment seriously. I see its references to religion not as a mistake but as a crisis induced moment of self-reflexivity. And thus a sign of where to look analytically. I will not suggest the argument that religions in a capitalist society fetishize ritual to conceal its economic dimension (though this is so, there being a real economy to ritual performance), rather, that the structuring and reproduction of derivative markets turns on their rituality. Our reading and theorization of the evidence leads to the argument that rituality underwrites the collective vision that founds the creation of socially imagined totalities. This is anything but straightforward; for a market when viewed (and conceptualized) from the standpoint of the agents appears as an aggregation of individuals (maximizing self-interested competitors); whereas these same agents, when viewed from the standpoint of the totality which allows that market to exist as such, appear as a network of dividuals. Moreover, it is the connectivity between the partible dimensions of the agents involved, that is, their dividuality or elements of their personhood used to create the totality, that, presupposed in the act of trading, grounds the possibility of their self-interested maximizing competition as individuals. The appearance of the person/trader as a singular individual—that is culturally, as a “thinking object” endowed with the capacity to self-commoditize its own labor—is the necessary appearance of a market that is necessarily constituted on other terms. (206-7)\n\nWhile LiPuma (and his colleagues) are highly critical of the transformations wrought by the new form of financialization initiated in the 1970s this invoking of ritual and religion is not merely critical, not merely an indictment of the derivative as “irrational.” This analysis forces us to ask what, in the end, can be, outside of faith, some projection of a future state where we will share an “at once-ness” with our present state, that will articulate in some potentially imaginable way our current desires and fears, redeem our sins (debts) and validate our hopes (debt forgiveness); a future state, moreover, that we realize and bring, tenuously, into being by our present actions, which are themselves prescribed by some founding ethos?\n\nLiPuma associates this ritualistic behavior with a novel mode of subjectivity created by the era of the derivative grounded in what he calls the “speculative ethos”:\n\n> Crises clarify social reality, and this time around is no different. Decisive, deeply inscribed aspirations and senses of the world—what, following a rich tradition in the social sciences we can call an ethos—moved agents and institutions to pursue wealth, social status, an exciting life, and self-esteem by means of speculation. This speculative ethos came to define the cutting edge of finance. The ethos fed on, and was fed by, a beast of its own design: gargantuan pools of nomadic, opportunistic, mobile capital whose sole purpose was speculative. The ethos motivated, and capitalized on, the innovation of creative and increasingly complex instruments for agents’ speculative wagers. The participants willingly, eagerly invested an extraordinary quantity of intelligence, training, their dearest streams of desire, and often the fullness of their beings in fabricating all manner of speculative deals. This speculative ethos has an invisibly social importance because the ethos is part of the essential clock- work of the crisis: traders’ shared motivation for risk-driven transactions, the willingness of even the informed public to see speculative behavior as unremarkable, and the complicity of regulators in their celebrating speculation. Though the epicenter of speculation was finance, there is also something more broadly popular cultural, rooted in our history, about our appreciation for the art of the speculative. (261-2)\n\nIt takes a very specific kind of person to engage in the perpetual struggle to create and acquire derivatives, a kind of complete devotion to the flow of speculative life, to risk-taking, to the camaraderie even with one’s opponents, to the mobilization of all of one’s faculties in an endeavor that could end disastrously at any moment and a conviction that such activity sets one apart from the mediocre norm. Such subjects need to be produced, through communities, educational institutions, media and a company ethos. LiPuma goes onto to argue that this ethos does not remain confined to the financial industry but becomes a broader social ethos with the “derivative” vocabulary permeating discussions of subject formation across the board as we are encouraged to see our homes, careers, abilities, and attainments as assets to be maximized, put strategically at risk, and collateralized.\n\nThis has some similarity to the kind of revival meeting where the participants, caught up in the ecstasy of the revelatory scene created by the preacher, start donating all of their worldly possessions to the congregation. And, again, this is not simply a critique. What is at stake here is the desire to work out a “believable” succession ritual for a desacralized world.\n\nThe “value” of the derivative is that it produces possible futures with a reach that can be continually extended with the increase in our calculative capacities, and any “faith” depends upon the projection of futures; the limit, as we suggested earlier, lies in the derivative’s inability to project beyond or outside of the social and political machinery that is necessary to construct the derivative ritual. But the intensification and acceleration of trade involved in the derivatives market, in which any asset can serve as collateral and hence as at least a store and measure of value, suggests that virtually anything can function as currency.\n\nThe way to hedge, politically, against the all eggs in one basket political economy of financialization (and dollarization), then, might be to return to the historical norm of plural currencies. There are many ways in which currencies are already being pluralized, as Lana Swartz points out in her New Money: How Payment Became Social Media, and there is perennial, if not yet particularly confident, talk of Chinese or BRIC challenges to dollar preeminence, but the most highly publicized and actualized alternative currencies are the cryptocurrencies, and first of all Bitcoin. Bitcoin promises the kind of monetary stability imagined once to have been provided by the gold standard, as the value of money is placed outside of political control.\n\nIt seems to us that so far, Bitcoin serves as a store of value, but must rely upon the measure of value established by other currencies (ultimately the dollar) and only very minimally serves as a medium of exchange. Could Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies fuel investment, or serve as the “outside spread”? It may be that proximity to political connectedness, for example access to the defense industry (again, first of all in the US), might be necessary to ensure steady flows of investment, and strategic allotments of the easier money only state-sponsored currency can provide.\n\nThis would mean that genuinely alternative currencies could only be created by sizable institutions, not opposed to but also not subsumed within state institutions. A couple of models for such an institution would be a political party and a kind of research institute or scaled-up think tank: in the one case capable of mobilizing substantial demographics, in the latter case capable of making itself useful perhaps to the point of indispensability for its consulting and contracting services to governments and corporations. Such institutions could be large and powerful enough to create their own tokens which would serve as currency for participants in the institution (e.g., party members) or members of contractually associated institutions.\n\nA simple example is tokens that would be acceptable at aligned businesses. Such institutions would have to have their own investment strategies and would therefore have to enter the derivative world itself, but rather than shareholder value their investment strategies would focus on the purpose of the institution itself—some combination of political and “ritual” power, some mode of succession, that would target broader social dysfunctions and privilege some social practices over others. Such institutions would, we could say, bet the outside spread on the outside option, “shorting” weaker institutions so as to weaken them further and going long on more promising ones and thereby countering the corrosive political effects of financial firms and speculators like George Soros over the past few decades.\n\nSuch currencies would be grounded not in precious metals or the inaccessibility of the blockchain but in sustainable social practices and rituals of succession: the best bet would be on those institutions that publicly and reliably have their current chief executive name his successor or, more precisely, a ranked and continually revised set of options on succession. The assumption here is that what we can call “singularized succession” is the only way of knowing who is actually running and therefore responsible for a given institution. Like the speculative ethos, singularized succession implies a generalizable ethos for anyone exercising any mode or degree of authority in any institution.\n\nFor mimetic theorists, this ethos should be recognizable as the most intrinsically mimetic aptitude and desire: that of emulation—an economy run on the incentives offered by emulations constrained by institutions of deferral rather than “self-interest” would no longer be an economy, but what we might call a “tributary” order, in which our originary debt to the center is acknowledged and paid in a way that extends the interval of the present. We would be donating, we could say, our increasingly complex and variably valued data to the center which, through institutions that secure and analyze that data in ways needed to make sovereign decisions, generates rituals of succession. A difficult and perhaps unlikely project and recreation of sacrality, but unlikely and difficult compared to what?\n\n## Works Cited\n\nBuchman, Ethan. “The Properties of Money—Origin Account.” Easy There Entropy. https://ebuchman.github.io/posts/properties-of-money/\n\nDesan, Christine. Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism. (Oxford University Press 2015)\n\nDrumm, Colin. The Difference that Money Makes: Sovereignty, Indecision and the Politics of Liquidity. PhD Dissertation for University of California at Santa Cruz, 2021.\n\nGans, Eric. “On Firstness.” In The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, edited by Adam Katz (Davies Group 2007), 41-52.\n\nHudson, Michael. …and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year. (ISLET/Vertag 2018)\n\nLee, Benjamin, and Randy Martin. Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies. (University of Chicago Press 2016)\n\nLiPuma, Edward. The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk and Time. (Duke University Press 2017\n\nNitzan, Jonathan and Shimshon Bichler. Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder. (Routledge 2009)\n\nQuick, Laura. Deuteronomy 28 and the Aramaic Curse Tradition. (Oxford University Press, 2017).\n\nSingh, Devon. Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West. (Stanford University, 2018)\n\nSwartz, Lana. New Money: How Payment Became Social Media. (Yale University Press 2020)\n\n## Notes\n\n[1] See Quick for a discussion that includes and revises some of this scholarship.\n\n[2] See Hudson, and, especially, Singh."
    },
    {
      "slug": "why-generative-anthropology",
      "title": "Why Generative Anthropology (Peter Goldman)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/why-generative-anthropology.pdf",
      "content": "Anthropology? – Guest columnist: Peter Goldman Eric Gans\n\nThis is the text of Peter’s “Introduction to GA,” delivered on June 27, 2013, at the opening of the 7th Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference at UCLA:\n\nThere have been many attempts to set the humanities on a scientific basis: phenomenology, structuralism, sociobiology, various functionalist accounts. Yet, in my estimation, there has been only one successful attempt, and that is Generative Anthropology (GA), the first real science of the human. But we have to immediately qualify this statement because GA is not a science in the same sense as the physical sciences; the verification process for our claims is not the same. And GA does not really belong among the social sciences either, even though what we do is certainly compatible with their practice. Nor is GA a “theory” in the same category as contemporary textual theories like postcolonialism or deconstruction. And finally, GA is quite different from any kind of traditional humanism. Rather, GA is a truly new way of thinking.\n\nIf we want to categorize GA, we can say that it is a theory of the origin of language or representation, al though it is much more than that. So the first question we need to answer is, why do we need a theory of language at all, if, for example, we’re trying to understand a work of literature? After all, scholars of the humanities have been going along just fine for hundreds of years without any theory of language or its origin. But any analysis of a work of literature (or cultural artifact) necessarily implies a theory of language, the basis of literature and culture. If we talk about works composed of language, this implies that we know what language is. And this is a problem, because the understanding of language assumed in many such analyses is naïve at best, and incoherent at worst.\n\nA definition of language is required to place the humanities on a truly scientific basis. Clifford Geertz writes, “The initial problem of any science [is] defining its object of study in such a manner as to render it susceptible of analysis” (Interpretation of Culture 362). So in truth, a theory of language is not optional. We need to uncover our critical assumptions, examine them carefully, and create a definition which can be defended against all objections. Without such a conscious and reasoned definition, humanistic inquiry will remain ad hoc. The only way to avoid subjectivism or “undecidability” is through a rigorously constructed hypothesis of our origin. With such a theoretical foundation in place, we can make genuine progress, establishing the answer to key questions, and building on previous work. GA gives us a basis on which to evaluate the existing body of humanistic scholarship and sort out the gold from the dross.\n\nAnother reason why we need a coherent theory of language is to answer the deconstructive critique of meaning as “undecidable.” Deconstruction has had a profound effect upon literary criticism, but even its proponents haven’t always appreciated that Derrida’s critique in effect renders humanistic inquiry incoherent. If one finds Derrida’s arguments persuasive, then all that is really left is faith or poetry, or just repeating the deconstructive critique over and over, applying it to new material, but always coming to the same conclusion. Many people, of course, don’t find Derrida persuasive, but they haven’t succeeded in refuting his claims. It’s true that deconstruction is always vulnerable to a pragmatic critique. But pragmatism cannot answer the important questions raised by deconstruction. GA is the only successful attempt to fully take into account Derrida’s work, incorporating his insights, refuting his errors, and actually going beyond it (see Eric Gans’s article “Differences” in Modern Language Notes [MLN] v. 96 no. 4 [Spring 1996] pp. 792-808).\n\nThe third reason we need a coherent theory of the origin of language is because anthropologists and linguists have established that language is radically different from animal communication. If we could believe that human language is simply a more advanced form of animal communication, then we wouldn’t need a theory of origin; al though, I would suggest, we would still need a theory of the origin of animal communication. Human language has syntax, we can talk about ideas, things that are not present, and so on. But many anthropologists haven’t really appreciated the significance of these facts, and they still talk about animals having culture, and they still look for a genetic basis of the origin of language.\n\nAnd even anthropologists who recognize the unique quality of human language haven’t really understood the basis of the singularity of human language, which is not fully explained by the formal differences, but rather by its communal, scenic character, a point to which I’ll return. If language is really qualitatively different from animal communication, then it follows that the best way to understand it is in terms of its origin.\n\nThe first claim of GA is that a hypothesis of the origin of language is the necessary basis for the study of human culture. Eric Gans has presented one such hypothesis, which provides the foundation for the application of Generative Anthropology by its followers. We welcome critiques of Gans’s hypothesis, suggestions for change, or even a wholly new hypothesis of our origin. Discussion of the conditions for our origin is the starting point for GA.\n\nThe second claim is that the origin of language is an event. This claim is a great stumbling block to many people. Everything that distinguishes one species from another can be explained in terms of evolution, that is, adaptation over millions of years. Even in the punctuated-equilibrium theory of evolution, the time frame is still thousands of years for speciation. So why would human language be any different? And we know that language does have a physiological basis: the descended larynx, the large brain, the genetic predisposition of children for learning language, and so on. So if language did not originate in a genetic mutation, that would be rather remarkable.\n\nA unique event in the history of our planet; a claim that seems hubristic to many scholars. Purely in terms of empirical observation, however, it’s clear that humans are unique. No other species has religion or art, not to mention culture and language. If an alien species visited us from another star system, surely the most notable feature of life on earth would the vast difference between humans and all other species. And what is this difference? Consider this: in a ritual, the human community is present to itself as a community. There is no animal analogue for ritual in this sense. Social animals have social orders, no doubt, but except for humans, they are not based on ritual and symbolic representation; they are either purely genetic, as with bees and ants, or the social order is established on the basis of one-on-one encounters between individuals, as with a dominance order, found in many mammal species.\n\nIt’s true of course that animals do have quasi-ritual stereotypical behaviors, what are called mating rituals for example. But again, these are not communal in the human sense, and they are instinctual, not conscious, as with language. If language is in fact cultural and not simply instinctual, it follows logically that the origin of language must itself be cultural. And if language is something that we do consciously, then it follows that the origin of language was itself conscious. But why couldn’t conscious, cultural behavior evolve slowly, just like every other distinction between species? Why couldn’t animal communication evolve into human language?\n\nWe have to keep in mind the radical difference between language and animal communication systems; if this difference is truly radical, then it must have an origin at a point in time. It’s like being pregnant; one is either pregnant or not. There’s no such thing as being a little bit pregnant. It’s the same thing with language; even if we start with a very small degree of linguistic consciousness, it’s still a radically new quality.\n\nThe claim that the origin of language was an event also follows from the scenic, communal nature of language. Genetic modifications happen first at the level of the individual, after which they are either passed on or not, depending on whether the individual is successful in reproducing. But the origin of language is necessarily a communal event because its function is social or interpersonal. Once a human group has language, then individuals will become adapted to the existence of language, by evolving larger brains and so on. Without language, the various evolutionary changes we underwent would not be adaptive. For example, why are humans the only species with such large brains proportional to our body mass? For other species, larger brains then they have already are simply not adaptive, because of the energy costs involved in maintaining them. It’s because we have language and culture that a large brain becomes adaptive. Human evolution is driven essentially by the existence of language.\n\nSo the next question is, what kind of event is the origin of language, and what motivates it. Why does language exist at all? Professor Gans defines the human as the species for which conflict within the group poses the main obstacle to survival. In other words, our crucial adaptive problem is with each other, not with the environment, as is the case with every other species. Human history bears out the claim that humans are a violent species. My colleague in the Anthropology department informs me that it’s more accurate to say that our species is marked by our ability to cooperate and our many institutions for avoiding conflict.\n\nBut this is a false dichotomy. The reason we have so many cultural institutions for avoiding conflict is because we need them. Building on the pioneering work of René Girard, Eric Gans notes that our violent tendencies are derived from our facility for imitation or mimesis. Mimesis is an adaptive learning behavior and as such can be considered a form of intelligence. Our evolutionary path, even before language, is directed towards flexibility, the ability to adapt to many different environments, rather than purely instinct-driven behaviors. One condition for flexibility in behavior is the ability to learn different behaviors by imitation.\n\nBut imitation, like all genetic adaptations, has a competitive element. We imitate in order to compete with others. And imitation can lead directly to conflict when an individual imitates another in the attempt to appropriate a desirable object. The principle of parsimony dictates that if we have language, it is because we need it. Gans’s hypothesis is that language originates to defer our conflictual tendencies. Instead of trading blows, we exchange words, preserving the community at the price of deferring immediate appetitive satisfaction. But it follows that the threat of violence must have been such as to threaten not only one or two individuals, but rather a group; otherwise, why would the alpha male defer his appetitive satisfaction? It’s fairly clear that language is adaptive for the species even if it didn’t originate in a genetic mutation; we can communicate and cooperate, defer violence, and as a result we have colonized most of our planet.\n\nOur originary hypothesis begins with a hominid species that is becoming more mimetic; because imitation is an adaptive learning behavior, being more mimetic could be favored by normal evolutionary processes. We don’t know for sure the particular hominid species that originated language. If one favors an early origin, it could have been as far back as Homo Habilis a full 2 million years ago; a later origin is also possible with Homo Sapiens, about 50 or 100 thousand years ago. There are good arguments for both cases. In any case, becoming more mimetic also gives the species more potential for violence, until the very existence of the group is threatened by its own violence.\n\nThese are the necessary conditions for the emergence of language, al though they are not sufficient conditions. There can be no sufficient conditions, because the emergence of language is a cultural event, and cultural behavior doesn’t follow the same model of causality as animal behavior, much less the physical sciences. The emission of the first sign is a free act, the first free act, and as such cannot be reduced to its prior conditions.\n\nGans hypothesizes that a group of our hominid ancestors have surrounded an appetitive object, such as a large mammal after a successful hunt. Normally, the alpha male would get first dibs on the best parts, and so on down the dominance hierarchy. But mimeticism within the group has increased to the point where everyone wants to jump in and eat first. I should clarify that it’s not just a situation of being extremely hungry, but rather that the central object has become surpassingly desirable through the collective appetitive attention given to it. At this point, a fight could break out, which would be destructive for the group.\n\nBut, at some point, one group found another solution. The central object appears to the group as exceptionally desirable, but also tremendously dangerous, because of the implicit threat of violence. The power of mimesis is such that everyone in the group reaches out to appropriate the object, in imitation of each other and in defiance of the dominance hierarchy; but because the object appears to be so desirable and dangerous, it seems that it can only be represented, not appropriated. The gesture of appropriation is converted into a sign representing the object, a sign which each individual exchanges with the others.\n\nThe sign designates the central object as taboo or sacred: too desirable and dangerous to be appropriated. This sign defers the violence threatening the group; hence Gans’s capsule definition of culture as “the deferral of violence through representation.”\n\nGans calls this event a “little bang” rather than a “big bang,” suggesting that while this event is remembered, and remembered as significant, it would not have totally transformed the animal society overnight. But it was remembered, and for a long period of time we can hypothesize that the sign was only given at times of crisis or potential crisis. Eventually the giving of the sign would be repeated in ritual, accompanying the distribution of food, just as the central appetitive object was consumed following the deferral of violence at the originary event. It seems shocking to think that this hominid group did not have language one day, and the next day they did have language; but we have to remember that their language consisted of only one sign for quite a period of time, an ostensive gesture pointing directly to a present object.\n\nOnly over thousands or even millions of years did this singular sign develop into the mature declarative language we now possess. In one sense, it can be said, then, that (mature) language developed gradually; but we insist that its origin must have been an event, a radical break from previous modes of communication and social organization.\n\nThe consequences of this hypothesis are large. Eric Gans and the students of GA have developed these results in a large body of published work, al though there is still much work to be done. For this Chronicle, I’ll just mention one important consequence, which is that language and cultural representation in general are “scenic” in nature, using a term drawn from theater. As we noticed, language originates on a particular scene, so that its scenic nature is essential to its existence. The term “scene” suggests first its eventful nature, but an event with a structure: consisting of a “center,” a locus occupied by something significant, which is represented by signs exchanged between humans, who occupy the “periphery” of the scene.\n\nOriginally the center is occupied by the sacred and the periphery is human; but eventually, with the development of hierarchical society, a human can occupy the sacred center also, either as a putative god, or just as a “big man,” to use Marshall Sahlins’ term, one who controls the distribution of food and scarce resources in the group. The scene, we should remember, is fundamentally social. Interestingly, though, we each have a private scene of representation: the memory or imagination, or what religion calls the soul. The private scene is necessarily derived from the public, originary scene and so it remains social, al though in a virtual sense.\n\nThe existence of the private scene is of immense importance for the development of modernity. In primitive societies, the sacred, and significance generally, is found on the public scene of ritual. But we each have our own private center of sacrality— a major theme of the New Testament. Modernity can be described as the development of this originary potential, what is sometimes called individualism.\n\nIt seems fair to say that the claim that language is scenic has not made a big impact in the humanities. I think that for most people, this sounds like just another way of saying that language is rhetorical, which is already well-known. The scene of representation, however, is not just a rhetorical model of language as communication, but rather a model of transcendence or meaning. The scene is ethical in function. Language is not simply referential or even rhetorical but rather scenic. The exchange of signs on the periphery of the scene functions to defer violence and enable community; potential violence is transcended or sublimated as “meaning.” GA insists on ethical functionality as essential for our understanding of any cultural phenomenon.\n\nThis short essay is necessarily only the beginning of a full justification of GA, and I expect that readers will have a host of questions and objections. I encourage you to read more about Generative Anthropology. Ultimately, any theory is justified by the results which it produces, and the insights generated by the originary hypothesis are, I have found, without parallel."
    },
    {
      "slug": "writing-pedagogy-katz",
      "title": "From Novice to Apprentice: A Pedagogy of \"Academic Discourse\" (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/writing-pedagogy-katz.pdf",
      "content": "Research Article\n\nAdam Katz Quinnipiac University\n\nHelen Bromhead (2009), in her The Reign of Truth and Faith: Epistemic Expressions in 16th and 17th Century English, tracked the transformation of English during this period from being a language of “certainty” to one of “doubt.” This dramatic shift, evident to anyone who reads, for example, Shakespeare or Donne next to Dryden or Swift, has long been noted— some might remember T. S. Eliot bemoaning a “dissociation of sensibility” following the period of the metaphysical poets. Bromhead traced the disappearance of some words (“forsooth,” “verily”) and the change in meaning of others (“surely,” “I suppose”) to identify the increasing uncertainty conveyed by epistemic expressions.\n\nBromhead herself did not offer a broader socio-historical explanation for these changes but drew upon Anna Wierzbicka’s (2006) earlier accounts of transformations in English that Wierzbicka often traced back to Locke’s philosophical writings. I open with these references for a couple of reasons. First, Bromhead’s (2009) account of the transformation of epistemic expressions in English is strikingly similar to recent studies of the difference between academic discourse and more “popular” discourses carried out, in particular, by Laura Aull. As one example, and I will return to her work later, Aull (2020) found that as writers become familiar with the stance expectations of academic discourse, they use far fewer “boosters” (markers of stronger epistemic commitment) and far more “hedges” (markers of weaker epistemic commitment or doubt).\n\nThe second reason is that I would like to introduce Wierzbicka’s (2010) work as providing a vocabulary and method for speaking about language in ways that might be pedagogically helpful. Wierzbicka (along with her associates) identified what she contended is a small number of words with equivalents in all languages. Setting aside the empirical support for her claims, which I cannot address here, I find her approach to be of interest because it allows us, as writing instructors, to trace movement between simpler and more complex expressions in ways that might make epistemic markers more visible to students. For Weirzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes approach, subtle epistemic expressions like “suggest,” “assume,” “suppose,” “imply,” and so on, along with their nominalizations, can all be traced back to more familiar primes such as “true,” “think,” “know,” “say,” and a few others.\n\nThe subtler epistemic terms can then be examined as implicating the writer in ongoing conversations in which the views, actual and anticipated, of others must be accounted for. This examination is consistent with Aull’s own account, which sees the weaker epistemic commitments of academic discourse as grounded in the metalinguistic awareness of one’s involvement in complex, overlapping conversations, in which various reference points, layers of arguments, and yet untested claims and hypotheses need to be acknowledged linguistically. Composition pedagogy has always relied on other disciplines, especially as it has struggled against reductive, standardizing pedagogies, such as those asking students to identify “main ideas” and “themes.”\n\nDavid Bartholomae drew heavily upon literary criticism, such as the work of Richard Poirier, Edward Said, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish and others. I see Bartholomae as exemplary because he never failed, even while acknowledging his debt to such thinkers (and readers), to mark the ways they presuppose the very reading capabilities (which is to say, modes of literacy) of their readers (and students) that, for Bartholomae, are the very things we cannot presuppose. Composition has come to rely more upon linguistics, as is the case with Aull and her sometime collaborator Zak Lancaster. Clearly all these inputs enrich our understanding of pedagogy and always leave us with the challenge of ensuring that concepts generated within these disciplinary spaces find their way into assignments that ask students to do the kinds of things that we could show them to be doing and that transfer to practices they can repeat and rework as academic readers and writers.\n\nWierzbicka’s (2010) work on primes seems to me to meet that standard— unlike, I would suggest, attempts to introduce into composition theory poststructuralism, which never proposed any way of helping instructors meet any conceivable objectives of a first-year writing course, even one willing to challenge confining subjectivizations of students. Asking how we might get from “I think” to “I suppose” is a way of reflecting on language that might be made readily accessible to students. The same could be said of David Olson’s (2016) work on the cognitive implications of literacy in his The Mind on Paper, which addresses a metalinguistic phenomenon very similar to that studied by Bromhead (2009) and Aull (2020).\n\nOlson provided a very simple model for thinking about the linguistic and cognitive implications of literacy: he proposed that we think about writing as reported speech, but reported speech stripped of everything that, in oral communication, would contribute to the conveyance of meaning, such as gesture and tone. So, Olson argued, in an oral setting, if I am reporting someone else’s speech, I would imitate that speech, including its bodily incarnations—and if I want to discredit that speech, I would do so in the same way, for example by repeating the words of the other in a mocking way. Olson implicitly asked us to imagine how, then, one would preserve this meaning once the body and the presence of others on a scene are removed.\n\nOlson’s answer was that we would do so (and those creating written forms of communication did) by loading the lost meanings in verbal expressions: so, for example, if I want to show that I doubt the words I am reporting, and I can’t distance myself from them through gesture and tone, I need to say that so-and-so “claimed” or “seemed to think” that such and such was the case. Olson doesn’t seem to me to quite have said so, but it’s not hard to imagine transferring such practices to our “reporting” of our own speech. Olson, in turn, was relying here upon Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner’s (2011) Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose.\n\nThomas and Turner identified what they called “classic prose,” which they traced back, interestingly, to Descartes, which is to say the same historical “break” upon which Bromhead (2009) focused. (Can such histories be made to come alive for students in first-year writing classes?) Classic prose is predicated upon what we can call a “scenic” principle: write as if you were looking at the events you are describing and you are drawing or inviting your reader into that scene. “Clear” writing would, then, place reader and writer on the same scene, seeing the same thing. This understanding of “clarity” is consistent with many uses of the term and, especially, with the insistence by teachers (and often students themselves) that writing be “clear.”\n\nClarity essentially means unanimity: there would be no disagreement over what is being said. Demands for clarity will strike many of us as naïve, and for good reasons—even Thomas and Turner conceded the “fictional” nature of their ideal of prose. And yet it’s not so easy to dismiss, for what else are we looking for when we ask a student, for example, “What are you getting at here?” or something along those lines? But we can direct demands for clarity to the constitution of a disciplinary space, or scene, which does, I would argue, always have what we could call an “ostensive” dimension, in which interlocutors need to confirm that they are indeed looking at the “same thing.”\n\n(Imagine looking through a microscope with an untrained eye and asking the biologist alongside you, “What am I looking at here?”) I have begun this article by proposing some ground rules and canonical texts for the ongoing construction of the anomalous discipline of composition (anomalous as in constitutively supplemental to other disciplines) because I want to take up and push to what seems to me its logical conclusion a very salutary development in composition: the Writing about Writing (WAW) movement. Writing about writing, first, solves or at least sharply focuses the problem over which, I think, every writing instructor has agonized: What should students read?\n\nWe are enjoined, and enjoin our students, to remember that the “content” of the text is not what matters, as it is only a pretext for enacting certain practices as a reader and writer, but it’s not that easy to engage texts in the complex and recursive way we would like without caring at all about the subject matter. So, should we give students texts they are “interested” in, maybe dealing with topics important to their “generation” (social media!)? Aside from the condescending and, for the instructor, potentially humiliating implications of this pandering, why in the world should we assume that our students are all interested in the same thing?\n\nHave students vote on texts? Well, what about the minority? And how could we imagine they would choose the kinds of texts a composition course should be teaching, those that are at least a bit “over their heads,” unfamiliar and resistant to their commonplaces? The same goes with having individual students choose their own texts, with the added disadvantage that now we are not reading texts together. Writing about Writing solves the problem by uniting the purposes of the course with its content: The writing course is now “about” the very practices that it aims at providing its students access to. And, insofar as students are in a writing class, perhaps we have some right to assume they will be “interested” in writing.\n\nWe can achieve precision in the identification of reading and writing practices and provide grounds for assuming that those practices will be nameable and therefore transferable. It is surely no coincidence that WAW and discussions of transfer in writing studies overlap so considerably, in concerns and participants. But, then, why not take the next step, and make the first-year writing course not only about writing but about the first-year writing course? This would entail having students read and engage with texts such as those of (in my own courses) Aull, Bartholomae, Zak Lancaster and Sarah Smith (her fascinating PhD dissertation, Error as Strategic Style)—so far.\n\nStudents are thereby introduced to the terms and the conversations producing those terms constituting the course they are taking, and studies of student reading and the kinds of formulas found in student and academic writing can be presented and studied in the classroom. These texts are difficult, of course, and I continue here the tradition adopted and advanced by Bartholomae, who insisted that students be given texts and projects to work with that would be of interest to academics, rather than pseudo-projects like “research papers” where students find, summarize and synthesize a few texts on a familiar topic. (Although I don’t want to claim that Bartholomae would necessarily endorse the pedagogy I’m proposing.)\n\nIf, taking Bartholomae’s side in the Bartholomae-Elbow debate, we assume that the purpose of the first-year writing course is to “initiate” students into, or “acculturate” them to, the ways and habits of academic readers and writers, then in my proposed approach we are treating students as apprentice academics. This projects a model for students working in their disciplines, and even a somewhat “utopian” model for the organization of pedagogy in those disciplines, while first of all treating students as apprentices of academic discourse. The first-year writing course is, then, taking students from being novice to being apprentice academic writers.\n\nThey are apprentices in our classes, which are teaching them to “apprentice” themselves across the disciplines. We might consider this “experiential learning” within the university itself. The simplest way to think of this transformation in modes of literacy from novice to apprentice is, as Bartholomae (2004) put it, “hav[ing] one set of commonplaces replaced with another” (p.103). Bartholomae here was drawing upon a crucial part of the rhetorical tradition, one which is consistent with tendencies in linguistics such as construction grammar and which enables us to speak directly about uses of language with minimal reference to intentions or cognitive states.\n\nThe commonplaces students bring to the university are those, to refer back to a distinction made earlier, more suited to “boosters”: those that rely upon assumptions that “everyone knows.” The commonplaces students are to replace these with are, for starters, those that indicate epistemic modesty and gesture towards anticipated responses within an ongoing conversation, and are therefore made up of “hedges”: “it might be the case that ________,” “assuming ________, we could suggest,” and so on. Situating the replacement of one set of commonplaces by another in terms of an academic writing course, I would suggest the following formula: replacing lay concepts with concepts in some ongoing inquiry.\n\nWe would be enabling students to acquire the metalinguistic awareness that concepts not directly put to work in present inquiry are all to some extent “lay” and will undergo transformation within the specific research context. This formula allows us to acknowledge student use of research aids like Wikipedia and AI, while designing the class to let them see that such aids, even when written by experts, will only approximate the work concepts do in the course of research. I am now going to focus on Aull’s (2020) work in particular as a promising site of such apprenticing insofar as her corpus studies of student writing and academic writing suggest lines of research that students can participate in from the moment they arrive in their composition classes.\n\nIn her How Students Write: A Linguistic Analysis, Aull defined academic discourse (more precisely, she is distinguishing between first-year and upperlevel student writing) in terms of “compression,” “coherence” and “civility.” By “civility,” Aull meant “diplomatic evidentiality . . . blending open-mindedness with well-informed conviction” (p. 6). Cohesion is “explicit coherence across parts of a text” (p. 7). Compression is the “use of dense phrasal detail” (p. 7). It’s worth noting that, while Aull associated specific linguistic features with each of these qualities, compression is the only one that has that feature built into its definition.\n\nAull also noted that compression “makes upper-level writing particularly difficult to read and write, especially for those whose lexical and grammatical habits are distant from standardized written academic English” (p. 7). I will return to this, in my view, highly significant point later. For civility, the linguistic marker Aull pointed out is a prevalence of hedging over boosting (p. 136), while for coherence Aull pointed to a range of markers, including adverbs such as “also,” counters such as “however,” words and phrases showing correlation such as “thus,” and specification and certain determiners such as “same.” A research paper co-authored by Aull and Zak Lancaster\n\n(2014), “Linguistic Markers of Stance in Early and Advanced Academic Writing: A Corpus Based Comparison,” explores these markers of civility and coherence in greater detail. There, along with their discussion of hedging and boosting, Aull and Lancaster examined a wide range of markers of coherence (without using the term): reformulation and exemplification, and concessive/counter moves. They distinguished between more difficult formulae in each of these categories: for example, specification, requiring the writer to “reduce the scope of propositional content” (p. 16), tends to be more challenging than exemplification.\n\nLikewise, more advanced writers use “nevertheless” far more often than do beginning writers, who tend to rely upon “however” for their concede/counter moves, because “nevertheless” commits the writer to following exactly the material that has been conceded (“call[ing] for a greater orientation to refining the scope of one’s meaning by constructing a dialogic stance by conceding and countering complexities” [pp. 21–22]). For Aull and Lancaster (2014), all of these features of academic stance can be correlated to the following general aspects of stance: stance toward the material, stance toward the reader, and stance toward the “larger discourse community” (p. 24).\n\nThey went on to privilege the latter, “the positioning of one’s argument amid existing views in a larger academic conversation,” first of all, because it is “an aspect of stance construction with which developing students may struggle with the most” (p. 24), but more importantly, I think, because it touches on the nature of academic discourse itself, which is that it is constituted by an ongoing conversation irreducible to the relation between writer and material or writer and reader. Only those participating in some form of disciplinary inquiry can be familiar with the history of those conversations as they are embedded in a particular text.\n\nIn this context, I find it especially interesting that Aull and Lancaster’s study does not deal with “compression” at all because if compression is what makes academic discourse especially difficult to beginning writers, it may very well be because that is where academic discourse is particularly marked by that history of conversations. Take an example from Aull and Lancaster’s own essay:\n\nIt therefore seems that, while more context-attentive, ethnographic studies of student writing are valuable (e.g., Beaufort, 2007; Cheng, 2008; Tardy, 2009), there is still a complementary contribution to be made by descriptive, largescale corpus studies that compare stance patterns across stages from incoming university writers to more advanced academic writers. (p. 3)\n\nHere we have phrasal density, and we could imagine that this would be an especially difficult passage for students to work with: One could work with the notion of “studies of student writing,” but when we then add “ethnographic” and “context-attentive,” a history of conversations within writing studies, ethnography and perhaps other humanistic fields is alluded to in a way that outsiders would find impenetrable. On the face of it, though, it would be far more difficult to do a corpus-based study of compression, since compression is irreducible to the kinds of formulas characteristic of constructions of civility and coherence.\n\nAnd yet it is here where the text as an archive of conversations is especially manifest in academic discourse. But now I am discussing reading, which Aull (and Lancaster) didn’t address at all. In her concluding remarks in How Students Write, Aull (2020) pointed out that “the tenacity of institutionalized discourses calls for more radical options [than adding ‘more blended, public-facing, analytical explanatory as well as persuasive argumentative genres’]” (p. 143), but while those options include asking students to take into account other views and perhaps write for academic audiences, they don’t touch on the problem of reading.\n\nAull’s focus on discourse patterns in academic writing is consistent with Bartholomae’s insistence that composition focus on bringing students into academic discourse, despite what seems to be some ambivalence on her part. In her late discussion of compression, right after the passage I quoted above, Aull seemed to question the appropriateness of asking students to practice compression:\n\nSince discourse patterns expressed in student writing can be tacit, especially for novices and students who rarely receive A-grades, this patter of compressed noun phrases merits serious consideration: if we choose to privilege compressed, phrasal discourse, we should have good reasons why. With respect to this and other school discourse patterns, we should examine where intentional, relevant ways of thinking and writing end and where unquestioned discursive socialization begins [emphasis added]. (p. 137)\n\nThe good reason for privileging compressed, phrasal discourse is that students need to be able to read texts using it, but, even more important, the distinction Aull wanted to make here between “intentional, relevant ways of thinking and writing” and “unquestioned discursive socialization” needs to be deconstructed. Such practices as “dialogues” and “conversations” necessarily involve “socialization” in the space of discourse, and socialization is always to some extent tacit, involuntary and even “unquestioned.” Only from within a densely constituted conversational space can one raise questions about the terms of the conversation.\n\nBartholomae (2004) recognized this, ambivalently but unmistakably, when he spoke of students learning to write in “our” ways, to replace one set of commonplaces with another (this argument, of course, is central to the “Bartholomae Elbow dispute”). And this recognition of the institutional character of academic writing— that it is a matter of power and not simply ideas—is also, I think, of a piece with his emphasis on the centrality of reading, and close reading, and of the kinds of texts academics would take seriously, in the composition classroom. As Aull pointed out on more than one occasion, academic discourse is “an acquired social language” (p. 144)—and how, exactly, is language acquired, if not at least in part “unquestioningly”?\n\nAull’s (2015, 2020) studies of student writing make much more concrete and precise Bartholomae’s (2004) remarks on the specificity of academic discourse; Lancaster’s (2016) critique of Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say does even more so, by pointing out that they are right about academic discourse being formulaic but wrong about what the formulas are, showing how valuable the contributions this line of research is making to writing pedagogy. But Aull’s and Lancaster’s neglect of reading, or at least their failure to make it central to learning academic discourse, regresses behind Bartholomae’s work, and I think we see this in Aull’s hesitation to confront students with compression.\n\nBut we can synthesize Aull’s and Lancaster’s work with Bartholomae’s in the way I proposed earlier: by having students read academic texts, and, moreover, academic texts dealing with writing and writing studies and, more specifically, texts dealing with composition studies itself. Texts like those of Aull, Bartholomae and Lancaster, for example. Following the logic of WAW and its argument that transfer is served by having students work with texts and subject matter that provide them with a vocabulary for describing their own practices in a writing course, having students enter discussions of composition pedagogy makes them apprentices in composition studies and more broadly in academic discourse and the study of it.\n\nIf we are to study the patterns of academic discourse and the patterns of student writing as they struggle to acquire academic discourse, and also wish to provide students with a meta-linguistic awareness of the contingent terms of that discourse, should we not invite them into those inquiries, providing them with “authentic” samples of academic discourse along with samples of their own equally “authentic” apprentice academic discourse to study? Doing so would require us to take the notion of learning academic discourse as language acquisition more seriously and maybe more literally than, to my knowledge, has been done within composition studies so far.\n\nThe only way you acquire a language is by using it, with all the riskiness, inappropriateness and errors that entails, and that means bringing words and phrases from the academic text into the student’s writing—not just in the form of quotes, which are then summarized and paraphrased, but into the student’s own sentences. If we can usefully point out academic formulas to students, we can ask them to use those formulas, and the next step is to have them write their own sentences around the words from the academic text. To this end, I have designed a kind of prototypical (al though, of course, fairly rare) academic sentence form, involving the use of phrases and clauses distinctive to and from different places in the text within a sentence that articulates those passages in some way, whether by contrast, in terms of causality, or further specification.\n\nThe student then writes a certain number of follow-up sentences, the purpose of which is to account for the manner in which the passages have been articulated: Where is the contrast, the causal link or specification? The student should continue to use language from the text in these follow-up sentences, perhaps from these same passages but also from elsewhere in the text, as she practices entering and exiting the language of the text, gradually assimilating that language into her own. Aside from the direct engagement with the language of the text, such sentences produce a space for addressing other issues, such as the handling of quoted material and grammar, as not only is writing such complex sentences a challenge for many students, but the language of the text will often need to be “carved” in some way to work in the student’s sentences.\n\nFinally, what I am calling “combined” and “follow-up” sentences function as a practice of rereading, as students search for passages in the text that are repeated with a difference in the passages they use for their combined sentences. Here's an example of student work employing combined and follow-up sentences. We were reading Bartholomae’s (2004) “The Argument of Reading,” which works through some critiques of the New Criticism (each of which I would say Bartholomae to some extent endorsed while to some extent demurring from) while retrieving from the New Criticism (by way of engagement with some less celebrated practitioners of close reading) an understanding of “close reading” for the composition classroom. Here the student was working with a later passage where Bartholomae engaged with Terry Eagleton’s critique of what he took to be the inflated pretensions of the political stakes of the New Criticism:\n\nWhile Eagleton concludes that it was “really rather absurd” that “the Decline of the West was felt to be avertible by close reading” (250), Bartholomae views close reading as the holy grail of “the necessary preparation of a writer” (245). Eagleton does not contend that close reading is “necessary” and thinks that the idea it being so is “absurd.” Bartholomae’s firm stance in favor of close reading is solidified again, and again throughout the essay “[arguing] that the introductory course should be a course in ‘close reading,” however, this he says is “the fundamental method of the New Criticism” (245). This seemingly contradicts Eagleton who has previously been in favor of the New Criticism, as he calls “the fundamental method of the New Criticism” (245) “absurd” (250).\n\nEagleton attacks the New Criticism in a rather harsh manner in this section causing his previous words to be reread in a tone of mockery, whereas Bartholomae shifts to a more conciliatory approach. For example, new in Bartholomae’s stance is defending the New Criticism for heling citizens “to understand propaganda and the effects of control through mass media” (251), seemingly going against his previous argument that the “cultural studies course...has shown almost no interest in teaching students how to work with words” (249). Bartholomae now says that the New Criticism helps people understand the words behind “propaganda,” yet this discredits that students are not taught “how to work with words.”\n\nLater, he applauds the New Criticism’s close reading as “a means of investigation, a way to exercise discrimination in the face of commercial, political and cultural interests” (251). In this sense, there is a “moral urgency rooted in the sense that ‘words can do unexpected and disturbing things to you” (249). While Bartholomae initially connects this “moral urgency” (249) to Hum 6, there is an evident connection to New Criticism courses as well, for they taught people to see through “propaganda” (251).\n\nIn working with the essay up until this point, the student would have developed a reading of Bartholomae’s stance toward “close reading” as “favorable” and would therefore have known that Eagleton’s ridicule of the claim made by critics such as F. R. Leavis that reading literature could reverse cultural decline would likely be opposed by Bartholomae (even though this is not guaranteed, because the relation between “close reading” and “New Criticism” has varied throughout the essay). So, the student looked for a passage where Bartholomae was arguing for “close reading,” of which there are many, and finds one from an earlier discussion of Mariolina Salvatori’s course.\n\nI would guess that designating close reading as the “holy grail” for Bartholomae is the student’s attempt to match the “heightened” stakes implicit in a phrase like the “Decline of the West” (a Spengler reference, which the student is extremely unlikely to be familiar with, made by Eagleton ironically, which the student may have some sense of). The first follow-up sentence, as we practiced, includes something from each of the passages included in the combined sentence, lining them up symmetrically. The student then composed another combined sentence, one that continues the argument with Eagleton constructed in the previous one, with Bartholomae now continuing (“solidifying”) his argument for the importance of close reading.\n\nHere, the use of “however” to set up a contrast between the two passages is less clear: Bartholomae has been distinguishing between the kind of close reading he’d like to see in the composition classroom from the kind of close reading advanced by the New Criticism, without exactly opposing it. Still, such an interpretive move on the student’s part must be assessed in terms of the follow-up. The student now took up Bartholomae’s argument with Eagleton in the context of what seems to be a contradiction in Eagleton’s own argument: Bartholomae had quoted a passage from Eagleton comprised of somewhat too exuberant praise of the New Criticism (but which would nevertheless not be easily seen as ironic by a novice academic reader) followed by the one where Eagleton referred to the New Criticism’s ambitions more bluntly as “absurd.”\n\nThe student could now “reread” the previous passage and note the tone of mockery (I will acknowledge that classroom discussion may have played a part here) without, though, revising the earlier reading of the two passages as “contradictory” (we could say this marks a particular stage in the student’s meta-awareness of the expectation that a finished text represent a consistent position rather than provide a linear record of the chronology of reading). The student did realize, though, that Bartholomae (2004) had shifted toward a more “conciliatory” approach to the New Criticism than he had displayed earlier, plausibly (or at least thoughtfully) attributing this to Bartholomae’s response to Eagleton’s “harsh” mockery.\n\nThis realization positioned the student to see what was, in fact, new in Bartholomae’s position at this point, which is a stance more allied to those very political ambitions ridiculed by Eagleton. I would note here that the terms of the assignment compel the student to keep track of Eagleton’s stance toward the New Criticism, Bartholomae’s stance toward Eagleton, and Bartholomae’s stance, as mediated through his conversation with Eagleton, toward the New Criticism—at this point in the essay. Now, the contrast the student went on to set up between Bartholomae’s defense of the New Criticism and his criticism of the “cultural studies course” is, we could say, a misreading—but it is an interesting one, and not just a misreading.\n\nBartholomae had critiqued cultural studies for showing no interest in student writing, certainly not on the level of the sentence, attributing this neglect to a valuation of its political concerns at the expense of a close concern with student reading and writing. The student, I would guess, saw here a “contradiction” between Bartholomae’s support of the political goals of the New Criticism and his seeming dismissal of the political concerns of cultural studies. In that case, the student’s “misreading” is noticing something important in the text. The student continued with this productive misreading by contrasting more of Bartholomae’s (2004) praise of the New Criticism with more of his critique of cultural studies—understandably, for this novice reader and writer, it is a challenge to distinguish between an author making similar sounding observations in different contexts and the author “contradicting himself.”\n\nThis distinction is a marker of learning (a useful pedagogical heuristic is to require that students assume it is extremely unlikely that a professional academic will simply “contradict himself,” taking that phrase out of commission altogether). In the last two sentences, though, something very interesting happened. The student connected Bartholomae’s previous, on the face of it not only apolitical but even antipolitical, discussion of the Hum 6 course at Harvard as a privileged model for thinking about close reading in composition to Bartholomae’s now more overtly political claims on behalf of close reading. The conclusions are not entirely clear, but the student was now transferring the (to most of the students somewhat bewildering) attribution of “moral urgency” from a more “literary” mode of reading to a different kind of “moral urgency,” that to be found in enabling students to identify and resist propagandistic claims on their attentions.\n\nAn interesting next step might be to consider whether the ways in which words can do “unexpected and disturbing things to you” has something to do with “exercising discrimination in the face of commercial, political and cultural interests.” The student didn’t take this step but positioned herself in relation to Bartholomae’s language in such a way that she (or another student reading her paper) might. Just as important as the way in which the combined and follow-up sentence assignment takes away the student’s recourse to summary and paraphrase and enables her to follow Bartholomae’s argument through some complex byways and even continue it a little is the way in which the assignment has students breaking up compressed phrases and resituating them within her own language.\n\n“Absurd” was extracted out of “really rather absurd,” “propaganda” out of “understand propaganda and the effects of control through mass media,” and “moral urgency” out of “moral urgency rooted in the sense . . . .” And, then, “moral urgency” and “propaganda” got put together as the former was now directed more specifically to the latter. This kind of dismantling and redirection of compressed passages creates the conditions for practices I have not yet attempted but will propose here (and attempt later): assignments asking students, first, to “reallocate” all of the words in the compressed passages to new sentences and, second, to create new compressed passages for themselves, such as, for example, “the moral urgency of investigating propaganda through close reading.”\n\nThere is a specific kind of grammatical problem and lesson bound up in this kind of work, involving the possible conversions of clauses and phrases into each other. If, for example, I were to take the sentence previous to this one and remove the phrase “there is” (in general, it’s a question of removing the verb), we would then have “A specific kind of grammatical problem and lesson bound up in this kind of work,” a very long noun phrase that now needs a verb to be the head of a sentence. Such exercises not only help to demystify the kinds of academic discourse students find most intimidating but also provide indirect lessons in the plasticity of language, its manipulability, which are essential to dissolving the commonplaces students come into the university with.\n\nAnother reason for designing assignments that have students bringing language from the text directly into their sentences in prominent ways is to resist students’ recourse to AI text generation. ChatGPT and other programs will produce adequate summaries and paraphrases that will be hard to distinguish (and impossible to prove different) from student writing, but so far these models can’t work with language from a text within another’s language in an effective way. Rather than seeing AI in merely negative, preventive terms, I would suggest taking the advent of AIs and the disruption they introduce into pedagogy as a sign that writing classrooms have to be sites of inquiry into language (just as the AIs themselves are products of new modes of inquiry into language) for students as well as faculty.\n\nThe Turing test should, perhaps, have always been seen in interactive terms: as computers better approximate certain forms of human speech, it is to be expected that humans would start to value, explore, and experiment with forms of speech easier to distinguish from the products of computation. Even from a narrowly career perspective, it might help students to be put in mind that future employers might be suspicious of, say, letters of inquiry, that read too much as if they were AI-generated. As a result, writing courses might have license and even be pressured to encourage student writing that is more saturated in various references, idioms, tones, and so on—which is to say, that constitute archives of conversation operating at various levels, produced within a particular institutional and classroom space.\n\nThe argument for seeing college writing as a passage from novice to apprentice takes on even more urgency in this context. The kinds of studies of academic discourse and student writing conducted by Aull and Lancaster (2014) become even more interesting here, and more interesting in their limits. I’m going to discuss a course in research writing I taught in the spring 2024 semester, in which students were given the kind of work being research assistants for Aull and Lancaster’s project might call for, while pointing out the limitations of even what I was able to do. We worked with the aforementioned Aull and Lancaster’s “Linguistic Markers of Stance in Early and Advanced Academic Writing: A Corpus-Based Comparison,” an essay that distinguishes academic stance in terms of its open-ended, conversational nature, which can in turn be defined in terms of specific linguistic and rhetoric markers.\n\nAull and Lancaster drew upon studies of academic discourse to establish three broad categories of it: first, markers of epistemic commitment, or the prevalence of hedges over boosters; second, code glosses, which include reformulations and exemplifications; and, third, adversative concession/contrast markers. For each category, Aull and Lancaster provided a list of words and phrases to guide a corpus search and distinguish between those words and phrases more commonly used by novice academic writers and those by more advanced ones. As a practice of reading, I have the students reconstruct the (or a hypothetical) argumentative or conversational space by writing the kind of combined sentences I described earlier, but with a specific focus on the ways they specify the concept of “stance” in terms of their continuation of Aull and Lancaster’s (2014) research project.\n\nI ask them to, first, construct a “lay” concept of stance by using familiar sources, such as Wikipedia and AI, and then follow the ways Aull and Lancaster differentiated their use of stance in a complex context. Students are asked to do this with the use of contrastive formulas such as “while ‘stance’ could be defined as__________, Aull and Lancaster________.” The way in which Aull and Lancaster worked through their literature review can be followed in a similar way, with the difficulties of working with academic discourse addressed in terms of the histories of conversations presupposed by the discussion. An early point in the discussion, where Aull and Lancaster addressed the debate within composition studies of whether the composition class should presuppose the specific and irreducible nature of disciplinary discourse or, rather, acknowledge some basis for the “general skills” introductory writing course prevalent in the American academy provides a good and instructive example: It is extremely difficult for students to work out this distinction within a composition course, let alone in the subtle way Aull and Lancaster conceded the always already discipline-specific character of academic discourse while making space for their own study presupposing features of academic discourse that cross the disciplines by shifting the question to the need for inquiry into the habits and expectations of incoming students: “[d]espite the importance and prevalence of FY writing in the U.S. model of higher education, however, we know little about what discursive features might characterize argumentative texts produced by incoming student writers” (p. 3).\n\nBut in the context of preparing students to join Aull and Lancaster’s research project as research assistants, “understanding” such arguments and distinctions can be folded into distinctions students will make in their own work on the corpus—as will, moreover, the practice of using Aull and Lancaster’s categories to examine their own writing. I provide the class with first-year and upper-level student papers from freely available corpora and ask them to identify the features Aull and Lancaster (2014) have singled out as markers of stance. This has turned out to be challenging and productive work, with a fairly simple baseline level, which virtually all students can do (locating words like “almost,” “apparently,” “perhaps,” and so on), but since even the more obvious hedges or markers of reformulation and contrast depend on the context for their use, students need to make an argument for their designation within the sentences (at least) in which they are found.\n\nEven more, since it is easy enough to see that there are ways of fulfilling the discursive functions of academic discourse in ways that are not included on Aull and Lancaster’s list (presumably designed to set a threshold below which no significant findings could be made), students can be asked to propose new additions to the list. Doing so serves as a marker of their comprehension of Aull and Lancaster’s essay and project while also revealing all kinds of assumptions the students have regarding the working of discourse. So, for example, one student made the following argument (the bolded text is the excerpt from the sample student paper the student is working with):\n\n“Eliza Dresang wrote about a way of thinking she titled Radical Change, a theoretical construct [that] identifies and explains books with characteristics reflecting the types of interactivity, connectivity, and access that permeate our emerging digital society”\n\n“Identifies and explains” can be seen as a code gloss. Although is it not on the list exactly, it is like ‘that means’ or this means.’ Something is being explained in more detail creating a stronger argument. “Explains” lets us know more implicitly that an explanation is coming. However, it can also be seen as a booster because ‘show’ or ‘shows’ is on the list under booster. This could mean the same thing as ‘explains’ or identifies’. These words can suggest a greater degree of certainty.\n\n“Identify” and “explain” are not code glosses because such words introduce the claims that would then be glossed (“in other words,” “for example,” etc.), but the student here was learning to think in terms of models (“it is like ‘that means’ or ‘this means’”) while distinguishing the explanatory from other functions of discourse. Such a mistaken application of the concept of code gloss lays the groundwork, again with the frame of treating students as emerging apprentice academic writers, for making this further distinction between an explanation “proper” and a “supplementary” explanation or exemplification. Here is another sample, in which an easier identification is made alongside a “mistaken” or at least partial one that would require a more contextual reading:\n\n“…and they advance one page at a time with a button push rather than by scrolling (1999). Certainly a technological leap at the time, these portable books paved the way for other book formats to emerge.”\n\n“Rather than” is on the list under contrast connector because the sentence states one thing, and then uses rather to state the opposite, creating contrast. The contrast is between advancing by one page and scrolling.\n\n“Certainly” is working as a booster because it is literally showing its certainty.\n\nThe student’s work with “rather than” is adequate: It works with a word from the list and identifies the contrast being made here, even if we might want, within an expanded version of the assignment, to examine the implications of the distinction between “advancing by one page” and “scrolling.” But while “certainly” is, indeed, on the list of boosters and, in fact, does function that way here (a strong epistemic commitment to the claim that portable books were a technological leap at the time is expressed), “certainly” is more importantly functioning as a concession (but through which pedagogical practices do we make it possible to establish such levels of importance in the classroom space?), leading into a contrast between what was once relevant about portable books and their lesser relevance within a broader historical context.\n\nThat there may be a wider variety of means of hedging, glossing, conceding and contrasting than allowed for by Aull and Lancaster’s (2014) list and, moreover, that what functions as a booster on one level might work as a gloss or concession on another, opens up the possibility of transforming Aull and Lancaster’s project, in the classroom and beyond (in the classroom as beyond), into a broader way of glossing and engaging conversationally with discourse. The slippage in the student’s work between code gloss and the claim to be glossed reflects a recognition that all discourse is glossing some other discourse and there is always some tacit concession and contrast in every assertion.\n\nIn other words, the distinctions between grammar, pragmatics and semantics can be deconstructed in ways that can turn corpus searches, now aided by prompted AI, in specially curated corpora, into routine features of writing and writing pedagogy. Take the sentence I just wrote above: The slippage in the student’s work between code gloss and the claim to be glossed reflects a recognition that all discourse is glossing some other discourse and there is always some tacit concession and contrast in every assertion. A word like “slippage” includes some “concession” to those who might find the student’s work to simply be a mistaken application of Aull and Lancaster’s category, while “countering” with a new framing that suggests a “correctly” apprehended connection along with the “mistake.”\n\n“Reflects a recognition,” meanwhile, can be taken as a possible gloss on the claim that “all discourse is glossing other discourse”: We can see that “all discourse is glossing all other discourse” because we can see what this student has seen and done. In my own gloss here, I am drawing upon Anna Wierzbicka’s (2010) Natural Semantic Primes (“can,” “see,” “because,” “do”) as a possible way of glossing discourse that might be made available to students. I would like to conclude by returning to the array of theoretical understandings of discourse I set up in introducing my discussion: Wierzbicka, Bromhead, Olson, and Turner and Thomas.\n\nWhat all of these theorists of language have in common is what we could call a “scenic” view of language—all of them insist on framing any utterance as taking place on some scene: for Wierzbicka and Bromhead (2009), any utterance can be dissolved into a scene upon which someone thinks, sees, or says, or hears something and something that someone might have done, and so on; for Olson (2016), there is a scene of speech recapitulated within a scene of writing that supplements the specifically oral elements of the scene of speech; for Thomas and Turner (2011), classic prose imagines and constructs a scene upon which reader and writer face some object or event.\n\nEven for Bartholomae (2004), there is always a scene of pedagogy, and this is the disciplinary framing I want to insist on for composition studies and for pedagogies of critical thinking more generally. We can speak of a scene of pedagogy as a scene of inquiry and a scene of apprenticeship, and what counts as a pedagogical scene is that some on the scene guide others to see the same thing as them, a “same thing” that is a construct of the scene itself. One reason for privileging a study of “stance” as I am doing is that “stance” likewise presupposes that it is the scene and everyone’s position on it that confers meaning on any utterance.\n\nAcademic discourse might be seen as operating on a continuum between scenes directly constructed and engaged in the scene of writing and all those scenes presupposed, embedded in the terms of the discourse, referenced directly or indirectly in the text, with at least potentially recoverable traces left of all these scenes in the discourse. Hence the centrality of “compression,” which we might have an opportunity to bring onto a scaled-up pedagogical scene through a classroom use of machine learning searches into corpora. Signs of scenes near and far, actual and hypothetical, can be made present, while highlighting the presence of all on the pedagogical scene. Take a look at the opening of Bartholomae’s (2004) “The Argument of Reading,” the essay I used in my first-semester composition course in the fall 2024 semester:\n\nIt is almost impossible to find a recent account of English (or English as a school subject) that does not begin with a reference to the problem of the new criticism and its legacy in the American classroom. The new criticism is everywhere, we are told; its hold on practice seems firm in spite of the ways its key texts and key figures have been routed by recent developments in theory and critical practice. (p. 244)\n\nThere are a couple of hedges from Aull and Lancaster’s (2014) list here, but almost all of the hedging, glossing, conceding and countering was done below the threshold of their list. These omissions are no reflection on Aull and Lancaster’s research, which serves an important purpose well. It is, rather, to widen the scene upon which that research is set, to point to the possibility of articulating the large-scale with the minute, uniting close and distant reading. Bartholomae here was setting up a conversation with the New Criticism, with others about the New Criticism, with present claims and complaints about the New\n\nCriticism, about the New Criticism’s history and the history of its reception, about its shaping of English, about the distinction between “English” and “English as a school subject,” about the discrepancy between the fate of its theoretical claims and its institutionalization, and so on. I am arguing for a pedagogical scene upon which such a reading scene might be made present, and the opening of a new research space on the pedagogical scene.\n\nReferences Aull, L. (2015). First-year university writing: A corpus-based study with implications for pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan. Aull, L. (2020). How students write: A linguistic analysis. Modern Language Association of America. Aull, L., & Lancaster, Z. (2014). Linguistic markers of stance in early and advanced academic writing. Written Communication, 31(2), 151–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/07410 88314527055 Bartholomae, D. (2004). Writing on the margins: Essays on composition and teaching. Palgrave Mac Millan. Bromhead, H. (2009). The reign of truth and faith: Epistemic expressions in 16th and 17th century English.\n\nDe Gruyter Mouton. Lancaster, Z. (2016). Do academics really write this way? A corpus investigation of moves and templates in They say/I say. College Composition and Communication, 67(3), 437–464. https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc201628067 Olson, D. R. (2016). The mind on paper: Reading, consciousness and rationality. Cambridge University Press. Smith, S. (2016). Error as strategic style: Finessing the grammar checker [Doctoral dissertation, Georgia State University]. https://doi.org/10.57709/8849978 Thomas, F-N., & Turner, M. (2011). Clear and simple as the truth: Writing classic prose (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and culture. Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2010). Experience, evidence and sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English. Oxford University Press."
    },
    {
      "slug": "writing-pedagogy-katz2",
      "title": "AI and Writing — Book Review (Adam Katz)",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": "/pdfs/writing-pedagogy-katz2.pdf",
      "content": "Book Review\n\nAI and Writing. Sidney I. Dobrin. Broadview Press, 2023. 144 pages.\n\nAdam Katz Quinnipiac University\n\nI like to think that most of the assignments I give my students are AI-proof, meaning that students won’t try to complete them using AI, or doing so will be obvious and a failure to address them. But there are still some assignments—for example, small ones following up on some questions raised in class—that are a bit “leakier.” If I don’t detect their leakiness in advance, it becomes clear as soon as I start reading student responses that look suspiciously fake in the way we, as writing instructors, have come to recognize AI-generated work. Such situations raise all kinds of questions about our relationship with our students, but what I want to note here is that I’m not sure whether I give a more or less leaky assignment to see what the AIs might be able to do with it or what the students might be able to do with the AI.\n\nAnd I am, of course, aware that the AI-proof assignments I’m designing will very likely no longer be AI-proof one or two or three new large language models down the road, in which case defending a space for thinking independent of AI is a rearguard action. My thinking, then, is more an inquiry into what it would mean to automate one or another of the skills or practices I associate with literacy, productively focusing attention on how that skill or practice is composed, and therefore how it might be iterated and transferred to other reading and writing situations, with the endpoint of rendering the skill or practice irrelevant because it is transferable to a machine.\n\nWe must somehow, then, learn to think within this paradox that what enables us to study human practice with increasing resolution is the very thing leading to the disappearance of that practice—and this might simply be a compressed and accelerated continuation of the history of human-technology relations. Some sense of this paradox is what I find missing in Sidney Dobrin’s very useful— maybe too useful—AI and Writing. Dobrin’s approach to AI in this short book, designed for classroom use, is comprehensive, pragmatic, theoretically and ethically informed, businesslike and optimistic. He locates AI in the history of writing, addressing and contextualizing questions AI has raised regarding academic integrity, intellectual property, and bias, as he takes advantage of the uneasiness around AI to demystify these categories.\n\nHe provides suggestions regarding assignment design and ways students can be introduced to various uses of AI. Each chapter begins with a list of “Learning Objectives,” with some things to think about before reading the chapter, and ends with “Questions for Discussion,” often including “provocative” ones that could serve to spark a class discussion (many of which I could imagine students using an AI to answer). Near the end, he takes readers, presumably teachers and students together, through a discussion of the economic transformations expected from generative AI (GenAI), along with the implications for career opportunities for students.\n\nDobrin is taking the stance—and I’m not sure what other stance would be justifiable—that we should simply accept the existence of AI, while acknowledging the understandable qualms about it, and get on with the business of helping our students learn how to make the most of it: what skills will equip them to master AI and what mastering AI will in turn enable them to do. So, for example, in a discussion of Skills that Benefit from GenAI, Dobrin mentions “problem solving and critical thinking”:\n\nStrong problem-solving and critical thinking skills are necessary in order to tackle the complex challenges of any workplace. You should be able to analyze problems, devise creative solutions, and evaluate the performance of competing models. GenAI can be useful here too, as it’s an ideal tool for testing hypotheses and running simulations. When prompted appropriately, many GenAI programs are also quite effective in offering innovative solutions to problems or sober and well-considered pro-and-con lists. (p. 99)\n\nThe boundary separating what the human is doing and what the GenAI program is doing is rather blurry here. Other than prompting appropriately, the problem-solving and critical thinking seem to be done by the GenAI. Presumably, the user will also assess the results provided by the GenAI—out of however many simulations generated, one will be “better” than the others, meaning that we have a new “skill set” here that may not be exactly what we are accustomed to calling “problem-solving and critical thinking”: prompting and selecting from among the results of the prompt and then iterating this practice over and over again.\n\nInsofar as we come to think in potential “prompts,” the GenAI is no longer a simple “tool” that we are standing outside of and “using.” A precursor to this cognitive scenario (if “cognitive” is the right word) might be the tendency, developed as Google became the universally used interface with the internet, to think in search terms, which must be further refined with each new set of results. The system is using us as much as we are using it. The implication is that the emergent human “vocation” is to train AIs, as in the “supervised training” necessary for a computer program to, for example, consistently and accurately identify images of cats. Supervised training is one of the more notorious aspects of AI use, as Dobrin points out, quoting Sasha Luccioni:\n\nEssentially, once a model has been trained on a large quantity of unlabeled data . . . humans are then asked to interact with the model, coming up with prompts . . ., and provide their own answers or evaluate answers provided by the model. This data is used to continue training the model, which is then again tested by humans, ad nauseum, until the model is deemed good enough to be released into the world . . . . But that success has a dirty secret behind it: To keep the costs of AI low, the people providing this “human feedback” are underpaid, overexploited workers. (pp. 112–113)\n\nThe question, then, is whether this essential labor, carried out by underpaid and overexploited workers can be “provocative,” as the most interesting and rewarding activity ever; that is, if it’s really essential, then it should become completely integrated into all economic, political and cultural institutions and at various levels of complexity, difficulty and urgency: anyone can tell cat from non-cat, but very few people will be able to judge whether, say, a weather model is off enough so that major climactic events might be missed, or economic projections on which billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of individuals’ economic futures might depend is over-weighing one patch of data—or, more precisely, what sort of search should be undertaken, or prompt designed, to answer such questions.\n\nSo, those capable of machine training at the higher levels will be much in demand, and such careers lucrative and, as intellectually demanding and socially important, very satisfying. We would all “always already” be interacting with databases, and part of that interaction would be examining and revising their composition. Whatever one might think of such a future, it’s hard to see how our present teaching tools—our Learning Outcomes and Rubrics—are adequate to educating the very different kinds of human who will populate it. But we will— and should—continue to see books like Dobrin’s, and eventually they will prompt the AIs in ways that elicit the necessary information on how we should best habituate ourselves to their omnipresence."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2075920532894097520",
      "title": "Bouvard on MAGA's Candace Owens Problem",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 11, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2075920532894097520",
      "content": "We'll see how much of a killer instinct MAGA has--will they take out Candace Owens and her orbiters once and for all? How many circles of orbiters? Considered rigorously, those circles might expand rather widely.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow They also can't be appeased or assimilated so if they go that route it will just be necessary to wait it out and keep MAGA-izing the party.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow There have been connections between Vance and the tech sector which might have made him a bridge to the groypers but I don't think anyone in the tech sector wants anything to do with that stuff at this point. Vance will have to choose, if it's not tool late.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow He's certainly not an Owens orbiter or Carlson ally but his effects on the GOP, if allowed, would be equally corrosive. But we might have different views on who would count as a Thiel surrogate and what that means.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow Fuentes has not been consistently opposed to Islam either, from what I know.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow I don't think they are best friends.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow I can believe that Tucker knows very little about Palantir, and I agree with you about Wkipedia, but I don't have any objections to Palantir. Quite to the contrary.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow OK, but even if Fuentes is marginally better (he's certainly much less crazy and dishonest) from the standpoint of the GOP I don't think the difference is important.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow Where would or should they go? They will be increasingly integrated into national security structures. Making technology work for generating wealth and opportunity across the board is certainly as important a problem as any. The GOP should put that problem front and center.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow This means that the dissident right and the groypers are sabotaging (and, maximally, hoping to replace) the GOP in different ways. You may think they will do so more effectively than I do, but there's no real way of knowing. Staying firm on immigration should ward them off.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow The attacking is primarily coming from this particular camp (Owens, etc.) so if they are excluded decisively the GOP can organize more coherently around advancing major Trump policies like immigration. reindustrialization shutting down antifa, etc. and DEI.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow The purpose of the phenomena we've been discussing has largely been to derail Trump. He has remained, for the most part, on track, and will hopefully continue to be \"railed\" for the rest of his term and popular enough that the next GOP candidate can continue.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow I dislike Vance but have doubts about Rubio so I would very much like to see a crowded field. There are some things that need to be hashed out.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow People who are hostile to Vance gravitate toward Rubio as the next option. I'm hostile to Vance but Rubio was too much part of the GOP establishment and his performance as SoS has depended on Trump in a way radicalizing some pre-existing foreign policy formulas.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow Maintaining a space for rational discussions of foreign policy will have to be a priority for the GOP--the Democrats have lost it but the Republicans haven't yet. The anti-Israel stuff will make it impossible to speak of matters of war, peace, alliances, etc., reasonably.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow For a while I thought Trump's strategy might be, rather than trying to cut spending, to redirect money in ways hostile to the the Dems agenda so they wouldn't be so anxious to spend. I'm not sure that was the case, but it's a good approach.\n\n@SiobhanShamwow Until the end of the term, those things that are specifically within the purview of the executive--the border, deportations, breaking up left-wing organizations through various means and, hopefully, prosecuting some crimes from the Russia collusion hoax on."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2075675333265662304",
      "title": "Bouvard on Language, Inquiry, and Self-Becoming",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 10, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2075675333265662304",
      "content": "I wonder what Erika Kirk's approval ratings are, and whether she has helpful supporters telling her she has cater to her critics and find better PR.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I just write to follow and capture the line of inquiry as best I can.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe the line is just ahead of me. But almost everything I write follows up on some question raised for me by something I wrote previously. So in a sense it's already there.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe. It's a matter of language learning.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Every language is a bit foreign, even our own.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Always becoming something other than it was and therefore other than we know.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Then what are your expectations of a piece of writing?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Followable for whom, following which efforts?\n\n@slooperbia50068 But I have given reasons for how I write--I have laid out certain stylistic prescriptions.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Your guess would be right.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Which prohibition?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Anyway, he will certainly not write back.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Would I know Tom O'Carroll?\n\n@slooperbia50068 I remember.\n\n@slooperbia50068 A little online Ulpan there."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2075602496475529320",
      "title": "Bouvard on Woke Right Strategy and Jury Poisoning",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 10, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2075602496475529320",
      "content": "Maybe the strategy of the \"woke right\" is simply to poison the jury pool on a national scale so that no one can ever get convicted for a crime they want to remain indefinitely open. They could then use that for leverage with elected officials who want credit for punishing high\n\nprofile criminals. But, if they could do that, they could also make it very difficult for any candidate who opposes them to win just by running campaigns of slander against them. This is why there is a shared interest in shutting them down, but also why individuals are hesitant.\n\nThis would just be the elevation of the power of rumor to the scale of a permanent form of political organization--which in a sense just crystallizes what journalism has always been, so the stakes and opportunities are higher than just stamping out this particular mill.\n\n@OmriBenTal What makes you think civil society was ever real?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "2075217784997339267",
      "title": "Bouvard on Tribal Organization and State Collapse",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 09, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2075217784997339267",
      "content": "Authority over Truth\n\n@truepeers In general, yes, but there may be some exceptions, probably in highly attenuated (or degraded) forms. I'm thinking about tribes in a strong sense, with vendettas, an honor culture, msrriage exchange, etc. If marriages aren't arranged between families, it's an \"ethnic group.\"\n\n@truepeers If larger technological centers cannot hold all bets are off. Tribal organization is a kind of default form if we revert from the state. I suspect it would look more like the Mafia and cartels than \"primitive\" communities, but criminal organizations have something tribal to them.\n\n@truepeers I assume you read the Imperium Press substack post I linked to, I linked to it for other reasons but he has made a strong argument for a kind of reversion to the tribal (I haven't read his book yet). Such a reversion would not, I think, map neatly onto current ethnic categories.\n\n@truepeers The re-creation would build upon default settings, though: gangs, etc., which would proliferate in the process of societal breakdown. Yes, I think Gans would agree--how could he dispute that performatives are outside of the true/false binary? What would a \"true\" imperative be?\n\n@truepeers I wouldn't quite discard the Axial, because I consider the Girardian reading of Christianity inescapable and that changes the nature of the ostensive and imperative. But, yes, I think science and technological truths will get along quite well with the \"performatives of the lab.\"\n\n@truepeers Not necessarily. A real \"Dark Age\" is possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2074860745804726576",
      "title": "Bouvard on Privacy as Legal Artifact",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 08, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2074860745804726576",
      "content": "I wonder how much of our concept of \"privacy\" is the residue of doctrine and precedent regarding the procurement of search warrants. Whatever is off-limits to the search gets tagged as representing some personal quality, sanctified as intrinsic to the person, and placed in a\n\nbasket called \"privacy.\" It can then serve to regulate, more or less haphazardly subsequent discussions of rights as they appear against the encroachments of new  telemetrics. A lot of \"psychology\" and discussion of the \"human\" has no doubt been formed similarly.\n\n@truepeers We'd need a history of search warrants but I assume they itemize what the constable is searching for, or as the 4th amendment to the US Constitution has it, \"particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.\"\n\n@truepeers I think it will depend on whether you find the child porn where you were already permitted to search for the drugs. There is also the \"plain sight\" rule, though."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2074866109623259153",
      "title": "Bouvard on AI Data Gathering and Identity Politics",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 08, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2074866109623259153",
      "content": "I don't see academic critics of AI and current data practices yet seeing the relationship between new modes of information gathering they fear will have deleterious effects on those othered along racial gendered, national, sexual, ableist, etc., lines and the very politicization\n\nof those categories whereby they seek to express and mobilize resentment against sovereign orders; categories which are themselves simply the results of previous modes of gathering data useful for the state and turned political as ways of extracting resources and power from that\n\nvery state. Very sophisticated analyses only minimally approach a glimpse of the possibility that these very complaints about new information regimes \"othering\" just provides more data to those regimes rather than participating in some process of providing better categories and\n\ntherefore better data. Why should the litany of race/gender/sexuality/ability/nationality etc. provide the template for examining the limits of current operations other than the knowledge production regimes within the academy itself?\n\n@truepeers Yes, but there's a centrifugal pull away from leftist critique in a lot of contemporary work while the gravity of the DEI categories drags them back into orbit. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone go ex-orbital, with some degree of knowingness."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2074798629684969909",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance's Intellectual Dependencies and Influences",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 08, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2074798629684969909",
      "content": "I suppose the smear campaign by Vanceists against those critical of the MoU is also over--for now, at least.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Does Hanania ever explain why he thinks something is true or does he always just align himself with he takes to be the most imposing configuration of experts?\n\n@slooperbia50068 It was the economics I had in mind; anyway, surely there is some expert out there arguing for the usefulness of tariffs, which every state in the world makes some use of. The more interesting story of Vance, though, would be one following his online authorities and fans.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I mean his various degrees of connection to Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and other well and lesser know posters who believe Israel controls American presidents and other fevered BS. I think he is or at least has been steeped in that subculture.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The question for me here is whether Israel will eventually realize it must exercise full sovereignty over all the territories under its actual military control and how it will manage to do that. Otherwise it will have no choice but to allow for whatever group seems the least bad\n\n@slooperbia50068 at the time to serve as a treacherous proxy and vehicle of influx of the \"Empire of Palestine\" worldwide.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It's also true that Vance should be giving Trump's reasons for his trade policy, which he should have mastered by now, rather than these vapid phrases scraped from his \"integralist\" friends."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2074203976547840365",
      "title": "Bouvard on Right-Wing Sabotage and Political Naivete",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 06, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2074203976547840365",
      "content": "NEONTR is coming to fore again in connection with the question of whether to condemn the Patriot Front. The NEONTRs think that those threatening to expose the PF are infected by anti-racism, hence leftism; I think the NEONTRs will be suckers for the Carlson fraud, so we'll see.\n\nThe basic problem with declaring in advance you will have No Enemies on the Right is that you announce your toleration and probably willingess to sacrifice for certain kinds of sabotage, and so people just have to figure out what those are and exploit them. It won't take long.\n\nI also don't see why the PF should be viewed with anything other than bemusement and puzzlement. Their manifesto is a long string of banalities. I suppose they want to restrict citizenship to those of European extraction, but that's not explicit and otherwise there are no\n\npolitical or economic ideas or proposals whatsoever. Even the enemies to be fought are only vaguely outlined. Their provocations are not provocative. All very bland. Why respond at all?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "2073757842486579639",
      "title": "Bouvard on Trump's Middle East Settlement Durability",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 05, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2073757842486579639",
      "content": "The question of the scene Trump is designing in the Middle East is less a question of whom he is pro or anti but, simply, whether he is building to last. Which parties does he expect to continue to act in ways he is assuming they will and setting them up to act, and why?\n\nIf he's just creating a kind of tableau to refer to for as long as necessary as a certified accomplishment, then he is building a sand castle. This would be squarely in the tradition of US political mediation in the region. In that case, everyone waits him out until they can go\n\nabout their business again. Certainly all the language coming from various voices within the administration, including Trump, indicates as much. The thing to look for, then, is which arrangements counter the public representations and which new and effective agencies are created.\n\nAnd \"new and effective agencies\" would simply be sovereigns who could serve as guarantors for actions within and proceeding from a given territory. The measure of Trump's arrangements is whether he is enabling such sovereigns or, rather, the spread of transnational lawlessness."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2073733232017711316",
      "title": "Bouvard on Generational Politics and Mimetic Reactivity",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jul 05, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2073733232017711316",
      "content": "I would never generalize about people in their teens-late 20s but it's telling that Zoomer hype never attributes any goals or ambitions for those it purports to speak for or even solutions to any problems--only grievances, framed in the most intractable terms possible.\n\nLeft Zoomer hype at least fits into the \"radical youth\" stereotype and those zoomers can thus appear to be part of a tradition going back to the 60s and beyond; right zoomer hype, like almost everything about the ~post-2014 right is just mimicking leftism.\n\nThis bad mimicry is unavoidable because the right is inherently reactive. The way out of the left/right is to treat the left not as a bearer of ideas and programs or the representative of social interests that need to be registered, but as vandals, trespassers, slanderers, etc.\n\nThere are bad ideas and dispositions and client classes motivating and comprising the left, but these can't be treated as other than pretexts, indications of unlawful intentions, incitement and criminal conspiracies. You'd also have to shore up your own conception of lawful order"
    },
    {
      "slug": "2071324154591068557",
      "title": "Bouvard on AI-Enhanced Vigilante Narratives",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 28, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2071324154591068557",
      "content": "I expect a new right wing subculture of using AI to improve and flesh out Citizen Vigilante. It's a bare sketch that could be filled in in so many ways. It would be better than complaining,  or complaining about the complaining.\n\nA lot could be done with the fact that Trump is also a landlord, and one who clearly takes great care with and pride in the condition of his properties.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I can hope for well made vigilante movies without encouraging vigliante justice. Death Wish, for example, is a very good movie.\n\n@slooperbia50068 They may, and they may not. A well made movie wouldn't simply encourage vigilantism--Death Wish certainly doesn't (the sequels were another story).\n\n@slooperbia50068 Death Wish was a big movie of the 70s--should be easy to find. Charles Bronson.\n\n@slooperbia50068 For Wierzbicka, \"think\" is a prime and so can't be defined in any way without the word \"think\" once again showing up in the definition. You propose approaching it through metaphors, but what I want to do is distinguish it from other primes--know, say, do, want, etc.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't know why, exactly, he blocked you, nor is it my business how he runs his X account. I could see a \"liberal\" blocking policy as part of one's persona as a writer.\n\n@slooperbia50068 For example, an insult comic who baits his audience and occasionally has a few thrown out--part of the show.\n\n@slooperbia50068 If you've paid I can understand the umbrage. He must not have thought the inquiry was so simple.\n\n@slooperbia50068 If you show me your comment I will attempt a hypothesis,\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe he bumped it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I see--so, you can never relitigate your blocking. No appeal. Cold.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I suppose we'll have to attribute it to a somewhat erratic nature."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2068697522579615906",
      "title": "Bouvard on Deal-Making and Political Commitment",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 21, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2068697522579615906",
      "content": "When you make a deal you stake your political standing on the outcome of the deal and therefore find you have an interest in protecting your partner in the deal. This observation is so elementary that it's hard not to assume that was the real purpose of the deal.\n\nTrump's renewal of preposterous threats fits this pattern because they represent the pretension of \"disciplining\" the deal partner, which further confirms them as partner. The argument that all this ultimately destabilizes the regime stands, but the claim that you need to\n\nstrengthen the regime in order to undermine it is at the very least counterintuitive and not very evident at the moment. It would imply a stark contradiction between deep, meticulous planning (and confidence in tight control) and apparent haphazardness.\n\nAnyway, here is the strongest argument for that analysis by its most stalwart representative, at any rate. Is the endgame a single strongmen who slaughters the rest or a civil war between factions?\n\nOne good thing about this analysis is that if it's correct maybe the skepticism is just part of the \"cooking.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "2068476374495478100",
      "title": "Bouvard on Mockery Versus Critique in Politics",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 20, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2068476374495478100",
      "content": "The deal is dead; long live the deal!\n\n@slooperbia50068 I'm mocking the deal. It seems better than a critique, of which there are already many.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I haven't run the numbers but mockery seems to offer more possibilities than arguments.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I had heard this--we're talking about reporters on the ground who are barely distinguishable from the terrorists themselves.\n\n@slooperbia50068 That seems obvious.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't see how a \"real\" journalist could have possibly been there.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Do you know if he cites Girard in his book?\n\n@slooperbia50068 There weren't and couldn't have been \"real\" journalists in Gaza. All news was filtered through Hamas.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I've seen journalists who were there explain it very clearly\n\n@slooperbia50068 But how could it be otherwise? Where is the burden of proof here?\n\n@slooperbia50068 He was there in the 00s, saw how it worked, and left. It was always known that the networks themselves accepted Hamas's terms. Thomas Wictor wrote about this years ago. He said he couldn't get the Israelis to take an interest.\n\n@slooperbia50068 He does podcasts or something like that with that Saul guy (Montes?) every once in a while. I once listened for a few minutes and it seemed like aimless rambling.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I forget the name of the guy who explained journalistic conditions under Hamas.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It's completely determined by what those he needs for access allow him to publish."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2067747293919375395",
      "title": "Bouvard on Israel War Endgame and Iran Strategy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 18, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2067747293919375395",
      "content": "The anti-Israel Firsters are declaring the war over and trying to create whatever facts they can on the \"ground\" to ensure that becomes the obvious assumption. They have been attacking Shapiro and Levin for suggesting Trump might resume attacks after midterms, even though many\n\nothers have been inducing that as a possibility. They probably need not bother, as a resumption of military activity would be very difficult, given that those who supported the war originally would be a bit gun shy now.  This is why actual enforcement is unlikely since without\n\nthe threat of resumed hostilities what could cause whoever now runs Iran to allow for intrusive inspections and removal of valuable material? So, the view that Trump is calling it quits seems most likely to me. It would be best to just say, we did our best, and that was good.\n\nThere's an oscillation between this peace deal being really important, groundbreaking, delicate and not to be interfered with, on the one hand, and no big deal, just an agreement to keep talking, completely openended, on the other hand. There's a kind of shell game being played."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2067436035445756236",
      "title": "Bouvard on JCPOA's Illusory Inspection Regime",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 18, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2067436035445756236",
      "content": "There doesn't seem to be an argument for the deal itself, other than the patently absurd boasting about getting Iran to promise for the nth time not to seek nuclear weapons. Otherwise, it's \"look at all we did before the deal\" and \"it was a failure and thank God we stopped.\"\n\n@CSomerton Compliance would have to involve US or US-approved inspectors having free rein at all nuclear sites in Iran. I don't see the deal acknowledging that. I think it's a shift from Israel/Saudis/UAE to Qatar/Turkey/minimized Iran. Maybe another explanation will present itself.\n\n@CSomerton @Imperius__13 There may be a question of how transactional you can be before other parties prefer not to make deals with you because a better offer might emerge at any time.\n\n@CSomerton @Imperius__13 It's possible that the deal, and the deal this deal looks forward to, fall apart, the US leaves the region and turns its attention elsewhere, and everything goes back to the way things were before, with Iran a lot worse for wear. A net plus, if minor and temporary. But I think\n\n@CSomerton @Imperius__13 there's a mistake here the US will suffer for over the medium run. I think Trump had a chance to put something in place that would last beyond his term and now I think he won't.\n\n@CSomerton Yes, this is true, but I'm still wondering about whether there's a broader shift toward a Qatar-centered Middle East policy. It might be governed by much more short-term considerations, like the ones you mention.\n\n@CSomerton @Imperius__13 I agree with this, and don't really see anyone explaining why the US and Israel couldn't have accomplished it. Just accusations of others wanting \"forever wars,\" which only conceals the weakness of their position."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2067589986434584795",
      "title": "Bouvard on Trump's Middle East Regional Realignment",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 18, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2067589986434584795",
      "content": "My guess is that, stalled in the dislodging of the regime and prioritizing immediate economic and political imperatives, Trump shifted from organizing the Middle East in terms of an Israel-Saudi-UAE-potential post-IR Iran configuration to one organized around Qatar-Turkey-\n\nPaksistan as local hegemons--the IR regime has a place here. It's hard to imagine that Qatar money, which Trump himself speaks about so much, didn't weigh heavy in the scales. The gamble would have to be that this will stabilize the region, allowing for that fabled \"pivot.\"\n\nThis would mean supporting the radicalizing wing of Islam over the moderating one, and probably a further welcoming of Muslim influence in the US. 19 trillion $ (OK, obviously a made up #) buys you a lot of access. A hypothesis, at any rate.\n\nThere's not really any \"criticism\" of Trump here. If this is the way the field looks to him, that's the way he'll play it. Everyone will adjust, exploit and counter the new conditions as they can."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2066837446361333966",
      "title": "Bouvard on Israel-Lebanon Test of Iran Deal",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 16, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2066837446361333966",
      "content": "Israel in Lebanon is a perfect test case for the deal. If the deal represents Iranian surrender and maybe even a trigger for regime change, not only will there be no interest in protecting Iran's assets but weakening those assets will limit Iran's options.\n\nIf, however, Israel is restrained and Hezbollah protected, the purpose of the deal is to rescue the regime and incorporate it into whatever broader Middle East configuration Trump has in mind.\n\nFrom what I'm seeing this morning, this question has already been answered.\n\nI suppose the US can pivot away from the ME regardless of whether it's governed through a firm alliance system or through everyone adjusting to Iranian intimidation and blackmail, and the players in the region can revert to dealing with a re-empowered Iran. And reorganizing\n\nthe region around Iran-Turkey-Qatar allows Russia and China back in, so presumably some deal was made there as well. The real questions are domestic--what this means for the rest of Trump's term, the succession, the GOP, etc. I think if he tries to push a realignment with the\n\nIran and Qatar lobbies, that will fragment the GOP, if not during his term then immediately after. No point to predicting beyond that. But the logic that governed Obama's deal domestically--targeting and spying on pro-Israel politicians and journalists--would apply here as well.\n\nIt's obvious that I, like anyone else, could be wrong, and if so I'll re-examine--but that Lebanon test seems pretty solid to me."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2066691479272067168",
      "title": "Bouvard on Iran's Regional Capitulation and Israel",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 16, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2066691479272067168",
      "content": "Anyway, if the deal is about money for uranium \"deblending\" it doesn't seem like Israel and Lebanon have anything to do with it. There's no reason why Israel shouldn't keep eliminating Hezbollah terrorists, especially if the latter keep firing into Israel.\n\nThat would just confirm and seal Iran's capitulation. And Iran has capitulated, right? I assume the US is not recognizing Iran's right to maintain its assets in other countries. I suppose we'll know for sure when the MOU comes out, but if the US is committed to protecting Iran's\n\nproxies, something's a bit off. That's the peril of the deal--you end up defending the interests of the partner of the deal. And if the goal is to intensify internal factional struggles, wouldn't closing off access to Lebanon faciliate that?\n\nI don't think the anti-Israel firsters will get much traction from \"Netanyahu is messing up the deal\" but they will obviously try, since that's their only real interest in the deal--as a cudgel against the \"Israel-firsters.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "2066619215793062026",
      "title": "Bouvard on Iran Regime Change and Diplomatic Strategy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 15, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2066619215793062026",
      "content": "Not wanting regime change means you will ultimately act in favor of regime preservation.\n\n@Imperius__13 Between one regime and another? No. It will be all Islamic Republic or not at all.\n\n@Imperius__13 Iran is a liberation theology suicide cult regime. Maybe I could imagine some other timeline in which they evolve into Unitarians, but I think that's too remote to consider.\n\n@Imperius__13 Pitting internal factions against each other would be the only justification for a deal (other than a very narrow deal to get the uranium out)--that's one reading I've seen, and it's worth considering. That would indeed be a masterstroke.\n\n@Imperius__13 If the goal is to turn factions against each other, then nothing else matters. That would justify even a very bad deal--indeed, maybe a bad deal would be more likely to fracture the regime. But, then, we're not really interested in a deal but in changing the regime.\n\n@Imperius__13 What's the deal with the deal?\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm trying to find and put into play with each other as many different arguments as I can find. My baseline is that unless the regime goes, we'll be back where we were before all this started in maybe 10 years, and I don't think that had to be the case.\n\n@Imperius__13 Anything that breaks the regime is justified; anything that doesn't, isn't. For all I know Trump sees things that way and I have been thinking of how things that look very bad might be very good--but, first you have to notice that they look bad, even to follow the hidden logic.\n\n@Imperius__13 All we can do is figure out what seems plausible from the patterns of facts available to us. However many levels there may be, in the end there's a public scene we can judge.\n\n@von_dienstmann @Imperius__13 That would increase the likelihood of the Islamic Republic being replaced."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2066566139409215988",
      "title": "Bouvard on Political Deals and Domestic Enemies",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 15, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2066566139409215988",
      "content": "Those who will attack you now for opposing the deal will attack you later for insisting that the deal be enforced because any unpleasantness upsets all those who have acquired some kind of interest in being guardians of \"the deal.\" This is why all deals are bad except for those\n\nthat barely need to be made because they merely smooth out some rough edges in existing exchanges and clarify broadly recognized power relationships. The kind of deal we're looking at here serves mostly to set up new friend/enemy relationships internally.\n\nWe can already see that those in favor of the deal are not defending it on the merits, or even explaining what the deal is, why it's good, etc.--they are just realizing that this provides them with an avenue of attack on some of their domestic enemies.\n\nNone of this precludes the possibility that other things are going on--again, the only real question is the degree of fragility of the regime--but it's a lot harder to see those other things, whatever tehy may be.\n\nThe fact that those defending the deal don't seem to want to talk about the deal is a good sign that it's pretty bad. Right now it's looking more like a lifeline to the regime than choking the regime but more information will be incoming. The boasting and hype might not last."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2065931050241388593",
      "title": "Bouvard on Trump, Iran, and Regime Dissolution",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 13, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2065931050241388593",
      "content": "Any assessment of whatever deal (if any) Trump signs also has to be an assessment of what, exactly, remains of the Islamic Republic at this point, and I don't see how anyone without high level intelligence (and maybe even them) can know that. Is there an entity that can keep the\n\ndeal or will have any reason to; on the other hand, is making a deal likely to accelerate the further fracturing, weakening and maybe dissolution of whatever remains of the Islamic Republlc?\n\nThe real criterion is the regime, i.e., sovereignty, since the same regime will end up setting off on the same path, but the best way to unravel the regime is part of what's in question. Any deal will just reset things.\n\nOf course, maybe there is no deal and this is more gamesmenship, maybe on both sides. But in that case as well the only real question remains, who runs Iran? In the end it will be resolved."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2065232627368361998",
      "title": "Bouvard on Nuclear Diplomacy's Hidden Strategic Purpose",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 12, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2065232627368361998",
      "content": "It's impossible not to know that one can't make a deal in which one party agrees to *never* have nuclear weapons, so something else is going on here. It's really quite a spectacle.\n\n@Imperius__13 If you have something to say about this particular deal you can do so, because that's what I'm following. Strategic shaping has to have a shape.\n\n@Imperius__13 Many people are pointing to the China angle, and that\ns certainly there. The idea, presumably, is that by removing China's ally and stabilizing the region internally, the US can shift its focus. But those things have to happen, and that is the focus now.\n\n@TheSloppyFatBoy @Imperius__13 \"Shaping\" as opposed to what, then?\n\n@TheSloppyFatBoy @Imperius__13 This still seems to me very much an open question.\n\n@TheSloppyFatBoy @Imperius__13 Maybe, but I don't really know what Trump's game is here, and doubt whether anyone does. Everyone tries to match it to some pattern, but it doesn't seem to me to fit any pattern I'm familiar with. All I know is that it's not finished yet.\n\n@TheSloppyFatBoy @Imperius__13 I see so many interesting and compelling analysis caliming that he operating impulsively and cluelessly and others at least as interesting and compelling that he's following a very definite plan. I lean toward the latter but can't know for sure."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2064538745705988299",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance Criticism and Coordinated Suppression",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 10, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2064538745705988299",
      "content": "Some wagons circling around Vance who, it appears, must not be criticized, otherwise Jews and supporters of Israel will pay. Very little interest in the substance or validity of the criticism. Seems coordinated. Very odd coming from free speech absolutists.\n\n@Imperius__13 If the good faith actors were in fact that they would say what they mean. I understand why you Vance die-hards are panicking. You've got a stiff. You could do the right thing and give him a graceful way out, but it's always possible to add a new layer of strategy as a fix.\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm not running for anything. Nor are people going around warning, ominously, about counter-signaling me. No one's doubling down desperately on me.\n\n@Imperius__13 I've seen you enraged and issuing stern warnings over counter-signaling Vance.\n\n@Imperius__13 Then you'll be moving on to more engaging accounts.\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm giving advance notice of a likely failure; others can do with that notice what they wish. Anyway, those who are irrelevant couldn't be sabotaging anything.\n\n@Imperius__13 I am at least in the same range regarding your position as you are regarding mine; a bit closer, I think, considering your position is not all that consistent.\n\n@Imperius__13 I appreciate the candor. This is illuminating."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2062629515474391339",
      "title": "Bouvard on Victimary Logic and Antisemitism",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 04, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2062629515474391339",
      "content": "Eric Gans wrote a lot about the victimary and then he wrote a lot about antisemitism but I don't recall him ever suggesting that in any victimary system of thought the Jews will ultimately be placed at the center (and that antisemitism will hence become overtly victimary).\n\n@truepeers Did he ever write it? I could be forgetting.\n\n@truepeers That's ok--even if he said this here or there I think I'm right in saying he didn't foreground it. And if I'm wrong about that, I'm quite willing to credit him with the observation.\n\n@truepeers Has he extended that taboo to the moral model? I don't recall seeing it. Surely he doesn't think there's a taboo on \"do unto others...\" But the victimary is still left out here--I don't think you could say there's been a taboo on that.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers Here I would recommend familiarizing yourself with Girard's view of the matter--we're not talking about ideas here.\n\n@truepeers In this case, though, there would have to be a taboo on everything he says, so why single out these things in particular?\n\n@Imperius__13 When do you think Jews reduced social reality to oppressors and victims?\n\n@truepeers @Imperius__13 For Girard, and I think Gans agrees, Christianity is a turning point because prior to Christianity arbitrary victimization is justified. Christianity exposes this as a result of internal mimetic rivalry.\n\n@truepeers @Imperius__13 There are problems with Gans's argument here, and I'll be coming back to this. He had a more complex version at first, which involved the Jews not accepting later iterations, but he dropped that, so it's not clear why a nonbeliever would resent the Jewish discovery of monotheism\n\n@truepeers Yes, but there's a circularity here which one might be excused for not wanting to enter.\n\n@truepeers @Imperius__13 However conscious it was, my guess is he backed off because it put the spotlight on Christianity.\n\n@truepeers @Imperius__13 The problem is treating it as a cognitive advance rather than the discovery that the mob is wrong. God=the mob is wrong, the victim is vindicated. For Girard the Hebrew bible was already there.\n\n@truepeers @Imperius__13 Yes but it’s not just one God bigger and stronger than the others were thought to be.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers Repudiating scapegoating is an uprooting of ritual, which is not an idea.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers Repudiating the chaos by selecting a victim who is treated as its cause is one kind of ritual--Christianity (and to a great extent, Judaism) repudiates that kind of ritual.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers I wanted to use as strong a word for marking the repudiation as I could. For Girard, it's a complete turnaround from the entire history of human ritual and sociality.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers You can also get away with a lot by claiming that all claims that a god is false are just a way of getting away with something.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers Magic has nothing to do with it, and you can see you're not explaining anything here. The claim is that Jesus's death exposed the lie behind scapegoating, that the victim is guilty or, at least, responsible. This is the revelation.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers I've laid out the Girardian argument, so there's not much more to say. You could follow up on that if you're interested. In my view \"transportation and media technologies\" explains exactly nothing. And if you think N. Europeans didn't take Christianity seriously, OK.\n\n@truepeers @Imperius__13 But I would agree that Jewish and then Christian monotheism deny all other authority. Why that means \"ideology,\" I don't know.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers Nothing in Christian scripture, as a far as I know involves coercion; that the Roman Emperor, Church and European kings turned it into an instrument of coercion is another matter. This, of course, made it difficult for temporal powers to claim to represent the faith.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers The Christian revelation claims to be true--for Girard, first of all, for anthropological reasons. That doesn't seem to interest you, and maybe there's no reason why it should. But everything else is irrelevant here.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers True, there's no need to talk about any of this.\n\n@Imperius__13 @truepeers For Girard, the question is: what is a particular community sacrificing? How does it show its devotion to God or gods?\n\n@Imperius__13 Not that I know. What did the German pagans sacrifice?\n\n@Imperius__13 So, they must die in war?\n\n@Imperius__13 The question is whether killing is ritualized.\n\n@Imperius__13 Giving a reason is not exactly ritualizing it--the more of a testable process in terms of deciding whom to kill, the less it's a ritual--you're not purging sins, or atoning for anything.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, but in a juridical order, the court system is an extension of ritual--that mediates the killing and ensures the killing isn't an arbitrary lynching.\n\n@Imperius__13 I've never thought that imperative culture was the end--we have declaratives. Yes, the chief executive is the final judge but monarchies can be sacrificial orders or not. Orders based on sacrificial killings can be functional but the sacrificial logic eventually is exposed.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, there is the \"de\" and \"re\" you refer to. Christianity did that in a particular way."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2061579280425922620",
      "title": "Bouvard on Power, Resentment, and Trump Discourse",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 01, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2061579280425922620",
      "content": "Take, say, 100 accounts and follow their fluctuations regarding Trump over the years. You could turn this into a study of the dialectic of power and resentment. It would be like following a devout person's negotiations with God but in a way that leaves a historical record.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I reserve judgment, allowing for events to unfold.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The article doesn't deny they are drug boats. I don't think Trump or any of the officials involved will face a murder rap, but we can wait and see. I suspect the writer's lust for vengeance will go unsated.\n\n@slooperbia50068 He's treating it like a war situation. Drugs are being brought in that kill Americans. Why do they continue to do it?\n\n@slooperbia50068 What two killing of Americans are you referring to?\n\n@slooperbia50068 I see. Trump wasn't president for most of that.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe he decided it was time to stop it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't know but there have been suggestions floated about a war with the cartels in Mexico.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I really don't know. At this point I'm along for the ride."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2061491226914804056",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty Property versus Tribal Loyalty",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jun 01, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2061491226914804056",
      "content": "Sovereignty as property and tribal/racial loyalty are rival right-wing projects, both at odds with the US constitutional order. But sovereignty as property might get there with a few modifications; tribal/racial loyalty involves tearing it all down.\n\n@Imperius__13 Because I don't think tribes are real and I don't know whether Houses are. And I think this model would anyway lead to constant squabbling and eventually the dissolution of the federation.\n\n@Imperius__13 These kinds of groups, and ethnic ones as well, are less important than corporations and similar institutions, which are also less likely to constantly threaten civil war. The purpose of a constitution is to keep conflict within bounds, not to institutionalize war.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't know if there are places where corporations, professional associations, educational institutions, etc., are genetically impossible. If there are, maybe those places won't move beyond tribal organizations.\n\n@Imperius__13 Maybe Africa needs another kind of governance--but that also won't be a federation of Houses.\n\n@Imperius__13 Oral cultures will be limited in that way. If the limitations are more intrinsic, that will clearly have implications for governance.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't know what concepts they had. Whatever we know of them now is going to be post-literacy. I also don't know how exposure to the Romans impacted the Germanic tribes.\n\n@Imperius__13 Guilt is a complex concept--it may have been a late arrival in all cultures.\n\n@Imperius__13 My point is that we know very little about what a particular group knew if we don't have access to their writing, which we don't have if they didn't write. They transmitted knowledge orally, but not to us. I mention the Romans because they were a literate culture.\n\n@Imperius__13 There are individuals who don't feel guilt within cultures that have assimilated the concept (we call them \"psychopaths\"), and there can be civilized people who strip themselves of guilt, since guilt can get in the way of criminal activity and committing atrocities.\n\n@Imperius__13 Not to us because we don't have records of whatever prayers, rituals, knowledge of nature, etc., tribes in an oral culture had 2,000 years ago. Traditions don't come down to us undiluted and with full knowledge of their provenance--we've inherited lots of things we wouldn't be\n\n@Imperius__13 able to attribute to those who transmitted it--we have no way of tracing chains of custody past written record keeping.\n\n@Imperius__13 We have lots of texts from the Greeks and Romans, so we know a lot about their laws, history, poetry, oratory, science and technology, etc. What do we know about the Germanic tribes before the Romans encountered them, and how do we know it?\n\n@Imperius__13 All the things you mention have changed significantly even recently. Maybe not genetics, but you can’t read the rest off of genetics. Writing doesn’t capture everything, but I don’t think you can make claims about modes of cognition of ancient cultures without written evidence.\n\n@Imperius__13 You don’t have to prove anything and I don’t have to believe anything. It seems we’re not going to be on the same page here.\n\n@Imperius__13 It's not arbitrary because it's for specific purposes. If I'm judging a case I want to see a written contract--I don't care about a handshake, even if, in its own way, a handshake can be an equally valid way of sealing an agreement.\n\n@Imperius__13 Of course not--that's certainly a basis for an argument about the concepts available to ancient cultures. Of course, those reconstructions are based on written texts. If there are concepts available in proto-IE that Africans couldn't grasp, that's telling us something."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2060401209282793789",
      "title": "Bouvard on War's Historical Inevitability and Myth",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "May 29, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2060401209282793789",
      "content": "Unconditional surrender and regime change in WW 2 provides the tacit norm for those who complain about \"endless war\" but wars that end in unsatisfactory ways that lay the groundwork for the next war is closer to the historical norm. Recognizing this would bring the \"red pilled\"\n\ncloser to reality rather than steeping them more deeply in \"Boomerist\" or \"uniparty\" myths. Acknowledging the existence of enmity as part of the human condition would be more \"based\" than inventing conspiracies to explain the wars you feel you were promised an end to.\n\nAll the more reason for some kind of Zoomer history project, perhaps with prizes for whoever bursts some widely believed \"myth\" without just replacing it with some pleasant lies. A way to create generational leaders.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The second use is qualified--I'm not necessarily conceding they are all myths, or only mythic.\n\n@slooperbia50068 No, I don't want to transcode Marxism as Zoomerism; I want to stop treating generations as unified agents.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Nothing. There is no \"Zoomer\" to desire anything. Different people within that age bracket want many different things, sometimes opposed to those of other members of that age group. Generational politics is all marketing. But we can identify certain necessities, like housing,\n\n@slooperbia50068 employment, etc., that will confront people in specific demographics with specific constraints that might be eased in specific ways. And lower fertility rates and other factors cause power to flow to older people. So, there will be certain questions.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The hype I've noticed most is from \"Woke Reich\" radicalizers who want to leverage Zoomers against the existing priorities of the Republican party. Housing and jobs get mentioned, vaguely, but the real priority is hating Israel and Jews. They're why you don't own homes, etc.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Posing the \"Zoomers\" against the \"Boomers\" (somehow intervening generations get left out) gives the impression of a mass movement whose demands must be capitulated to."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2057266491175612597",
      "title": "Bouvard on Generational Marxism and Ideological Substitution",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "May 21, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2057266491175612597",
      "content": "There's a new ideology emerging that is essentially Marxism but it replaces \"bourgeois\" with \"boomer\" and \"proletariat\" with \"zoomer.\"\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers That's a different narrative than the one I'm highlighting here.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers Everything must be at some point\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers It seemed to me pretty standard. No one stepping outside of well worn frames of reference.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers Google n-gram shows a steady upward curve from almost nothing ~1930 to a peak in the early 60s, a dip and then a little return to peak in the 2010s and a slow downward slope since then. Something in the 1950s boosted the phrase.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers News to me.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers The whole of the body can be a sign as can any part of it, in any number of ways--what signifies does so on a scene, upon which it is pointable.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers At.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers Well, \"to\" is also fine.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers I don't know but presumably it would've been because pointing increaded some likely danger at that point.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers I'll let it stand.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers These references are obscure to me--I get EG, but not what he is imagined to be doing here.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers I don't know, it's not really an American sport.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers I don't think I get you here.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers What is to be be dismissed or affirmed?\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers I don’t know how to explain it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers This is obviously the new power  center in the Democrat party.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers Too soon to tell, but on the domestic front I see huge improvements.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers Borders shut down, deportations proceeding, no more protection of alien criminals and radicals, frontol assault on anti-white discrmination--even the admittance of white South African refugees has symbolic importance, Some of this will be hard to reverse.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers They're illegal aliens as soon as they're in the country without a valid visa; they become criminals as soon as there's an arrest warrant (if there's one from their own country they shouldn't get a visa); when they become rad is under the discretion of federal agencies.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers Maybe he'll get around to it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers Good luck with the novel but, no, I don't know that song.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers OK, yeah I read too quickly."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2057267632936509611",
      "title": "Bouvard on Ben-Gvir Performative Condemnation Politics",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "May 21, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2057267632936509611",
      "content": "The whole Ben-Gvir outrage is bizarre. It's one of those things where they try to lock down condemnations like tokens, and ask people later if they condemned Ben-Gvir when it counted. It's also that many feel obliged to play along with the idea that the flotilla participants are\n\nforeign dignitaries rather than terrorist accomplices. To \"condemn\" Ben-Gvir is to affirm the flotilla as a properly fashionable protest. It also helps to flip the hostage narrative, as other countries express \"concern\" for the safety of their citizens. It will be forgotten soon.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't know if it served any real purpose but these responses are overblown. What, exactly, do they think will happen? Did he break some law? What, exactly, is so terrible? Yonah E seems to be complaining about the showboating, but why is that so serious?\n\n@slooperbia50068 The Jew hatred is a self-generating system and it doesn't need Ben-Gvir's contribution. With all the outrage I still haven't seen anyone put a label on what, exactly, his offense was. And those Israelis frustrated with the coddling of these terrorist-adjacent lowlifes have a\n\n@slooperbia50068 right to see that frustration given expression. They should all be thrown into jail for lengthy stretches on some kind of accessory to terrorism charge, or whatever they could throw at them.\n\n@slooperbia50068 They don't really pose a threat. They are just enemies, persistently breaking Israeli law, a nuisance trying to embarrass Israel, and they should be treated accordingly."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2057072640871809279",
      "title": "Bouvard on Massie's Betrayal of Trump",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "May 20, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2057072640871809279",
      "content": "Everyone supporting Massie supported ruining President Trump. That's a good way to assess things and people going forward.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I've seen this quote, in another recent essay on Podhoretz, I don't remember where. It took him too long (when did he write that? in the 90s or after?), but he was obviously right here.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Stopping immigration almost completely is a precondition. Reindustrialization is a precondition. Shutting down the left is a precondition. Get enough preconditions and you get the thing.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Really late, then.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe you had too many progressive friends. Reading Podhoretz has always been very familiar to me because his thinking is a more thought-out and eloquent version of the way my parents thought. Maybe in part because they read Commentary.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Have you read \"My Negro Problem--and Ours\"?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Are you referring to my claim that the neoconservatives brought the logic of the Nuremberg Trials whereby you could try state officials for how they treat those they governed into foreign policy?\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think Grok might help with that (I've heard).\n\n@slooperbia50068 Stopping immigration forces assimilation because it stops replenishment of previous culture; reindustrialization means high tech, well paying jobs; shutting down the left means less crime and disorder (for starters).\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes. No more cousins coming over every few years, limits on building communities organized around same language, etc.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Does it contribute to assimilation?\n\n@slooperbia50068 I see.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't know about that."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2056153879054565723",
      "title": "Bouvard on Girard's Critique of Discourse Fashion",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "May 17, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2056153879054565723",
      "content": "Here's that Girard quote:\n\n@slooperbia50068 We could work with it as long as we insisted that there's a lot more to \"pure politeness\" than he grants. Trillions of words of pure politeness on various levels, in various registers. But then the question of what, exactly, is \"politeness,\" presents itself.\n\n@slooperbia50068 To anyne realizing \"politeness\" has exceeded its normal bounds.\n\n@slooperbia50068 A kind of pure, direct, exact reciprocity in gesture?\n\n@slooperbia50068 \"Language — ‘discourse,’ as it is known today — is much less important than the current fashion would have it.\" This is not the only time I've seen him try to get some mileage out of insisting on how \"unfashionable\" he is. Maybe there is a name for this in mimetic theory.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Or maybe it's a kind of snobbery.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Insofar as any intellectual advance must be against some common sense or \"fashion\" it is indeed difficult to avoid this. But it's the kind of gesture one can notice oneself making and learn to restrain it. Being unfashionable doesn't make you right, and lots of people can be\n\n@slooperbia50068 interested in important things. In this case, it does seem that Girard flaunts his unfashionableness so as to distract attention from the poverty of his understanding.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes, of course, but I think it's always been possible to see that language is where Girard reaches his limits. Otherwise, the originary hypothesis would not have been necessary.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Agreements not to broach certain topics are just modes of deferral some of which, of course, may turn out not to  have been as necessary as they seemed.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The way I think about it is that each new scene is needed to \"verify\" or validate the previous scene and, by implication, all previous scenes--kind of like a blockchain. We are responsible for the closure of the current scene but also for leaving marks enabling its future\n\n@slooperbia50068 verification or authentication.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The problem with libertarians is that they skip over the mimetic crisis layer directly to the deferral, so they can make interesting proposals while projecting the danger onto others rather than seeing it as constitutive of deferral itself. But I don’t think they must remain\n\n@slooperbia50068 locked away from mimetic knowledge. Kaufman is probably better in this regard than most. My “charge” was in a specific context, which I don’t recall right now.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I remember now—that whole stupid Chud thing—the guy going around spouting racial insults at blacks. It’s a perfect example—you can’t respond to words with violence! As if the whole history of humanity wouldn’t refute that.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The crisis is part of Gans's mdel as well.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes, there is no once and for all deferral.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I wouldn't be the best person to provide a bibliography, but wouldn't faith based in revelation have to culminate in apocalypse as a kind of end of history? It seems to me that's where Marxism, liberalism and maybe other modern \"faiths\" got the idea from.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It's pretty much synonymous with \"revelation.\" The first revelation requires one but, it seems, only one, more. The one is never enough logic is right, but that the second takes care of things once and for all is wrong."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2053637174013112351",
      "title": "Bouvard on Catholic Traditionalism and Woke Politics",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "May 11, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2053637174013112351",
      "content": "It does seem that much of the \"Woke Reich\" is a fantasy of a Catholic (pre-Vatican II) coup. Even the antisemitism seems largley theological. Maybe they're just Jacobites.\n\n@LaurentianIAA @Imperius__13 I don't know about Catholics in general but this may be true of those trying to \"weaponize\" a particular brand of Catholicism today.\n\n@Imperius__13 @LaurentianIAA Yes, something is going on with the pope. Francis seemed to be an authentic incoherent leftist, but there's something more calculated about Leo.\n\n@Imperius__13 @LaurentianIAA One thing that the \"creedal nation\" idea gets right, even though it rarely emphasizes this, is that the belief that there is something \"holy\" about America, that God put America here for a reason, goes way back to the beginning. It's never been reducible to ethnicity.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I suppose any time you point out something others haven’t yet seen you’re lowering the threshold of significance. What is he pointing to? I suppose what others see as a violation of manners he wants to be seen as a war.\n\n@slooperbia50068 You could say that—I was thinking in terms of lowering the threshold for those already appalled and outraged but who think the old rules still apply."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2052784982846779864",
      "title": "Bouvard on Antisemitic Logic and Jewish Existence",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "May 08, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2052784982846779864",
      "content": "All libels should be contested but the one that really counts, with regard to antisemitism or antizionism, is the Big Lie that Jews rule, or control or occupy, etc., the world governing systems. And there is one neat trick that makes that Lie work, which you can see if you look\n\nclosely at its expressions: it starts from the assumption that Jews should not exist because the common opinion of humanity would not allow it and that Jewish existence itself is therefore a scandal and, moreover, only explicable in terms of inordinate, even immeasurable, Jewish\n\npower. And this explanation, the evidence for which lies, again, in the existence of Jews, is furthermore the reason why the common opinion of humanity would never allow them to exist, giving us a perfect circle. Test this model--I think it works.\n\n@truepeers Then the position gets diluted and the door is opened to further qualifications, and so it's a distribution, not a vendetta or conspiracy anymore. If you then inquire into the \"right\" proportion they either say something arbitrary or expose themselves by saying \"none.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "2052354196020552043",
      "title": "Bouvard on Right-Wing Antisemitism and Sovereignty",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "May 07, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2052354196020552043",
      "content": "My casual observation of the tsunami of Jew-hate sewage that's swept over the right the last few years has the effect of, first, getting people wondering about what they've missed/how they've been deceived over the decades, then looking into it and adopting some edginess, then\n\nseeing what the Jew-obsessives are like and how they destroy everything, and finally adopting some posture of indifference to Jews/Israel while expressing utter disgust to the shovelers of shit (with the exception of those who have thoroughly immersed themselves in/monetized it).\n\nI expect this pattern to continue, stripping much of the sentimentality away from White/Christian attitudes to Jews/Israel but leaving civility and realism in place in serious assessments of redesigning US sovereignty. What the Jew-obsessives like to say about Jews (\"they can't\n\nhelp themselves...\") is in fact far more true of the Jew obsessives themselves, who will alienate everyone and even each other before too long. There will continue to be money in it, no one with any interest in exercising power will get anywhere near it. The real threat remains\n\nthe left, super-powered by mass Muslim immigration, and the anti-Israel firsters on the right will not be able to interfere with focusing on that--in fact, they might help by trying to tag along and muddying waters over there."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2047662159417528355",
      "title": "Bouvard on Institutional Change and Collective Interest",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Apr 24, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2047662159417528355",
      "content": "When you're waiting for that massive ocean liner to turn around and head in the direction you've been looking at for a long time sometimes you just need to be patient and wait until enough middle level players have had their oxen gored. Of course, that might happen too late.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Whose ox has been gored— I just made it plural\n\n@slooperbia50068 One’s ox being gored=one’s interests being damaged.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I'd have to give that some thought.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I can say that I never find myself using any evolutionary psychology insights even if I've never thought it important to try to refute them either. Genetic changes can't have kept up with economic and social \"evolution,\" so how would on disentangle the human or specific human\n\n@slooperbia50068 types from more contingent institutional arrangements?  What are the constants in mate selection, child-rearing, status hierarchies, etc., across hunter-gather, feudal, modern capitalist, imperial monarchical, etc., societies? What does it help us explain that needs explaining?\n\n@slooperbia50068 It seems you get kicked back often enough, though.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Why can't the romantic get a look in? Ritualized mating patterns allow for a play of uncertainty and partial disclosures against a background of shared expectations, allowing for the oscillation between sign and object."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2046935592185815485",
      "title": "Bouvard on SPLC Trial and Left Criminality",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Apr 22, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2046935592185815485",
      "content": "The SPLC trial will be interesting. It seems the charges involve fraud and money laundering, so who was defrauded and what illegal enterprises generated the laudnered money? The line between \"informant\" and \"instigator\" is often thin. What gets exposed should clarify some things\n\nbut we'll have to see if this is a particularly good way of addressing the constitutive criminality of the left. I remain of the opinion that a tsunami of lawsuits for defamation and crack downs on illegal assembly, etc., would be the better approach.\n\n@WrappedInThFlag That seems to me hard to prove--if I gave money to SPLC and they told me they were infiltrating \"extremist\" groups I'd probably be fine with it.\n\n@WrappedInThFlag So, another version of the fraud? I hope they have something that works here, but I'm not sure and it would be a waste of resources and credibility if they don't.\n\n@WrappedInThFlag Then they presumably have such witnesses ready in waiting. Clooney could easily say, if this is what it takes...\n\n@WrappedInThFlag But under cross-examination, when provided some context of how these operations work, their testimony might get fuzzy.\n\n@WrappedInThFlag But, of course, if this prosecution is successful and that opens the door to private lawsuits, then you might have lots of people willing to insist they've been defrauded.\n\n@WrappedInThFlag The game is on, so I hope you're right.\n\n@WrappedInThFlag Yes--and I wonder whether some of this is meant to expose previous Fed cooperation with this kind of thing."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2046047947066945617",
      "title": "Bouvard on Beauty, Possession, and Mimetic Desire",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Apr 20, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2046047947066945617",
      "content": "Loomer is asking questions. Is she *just* asking questions? I'm not sure.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Which questions were those?\n\n@slooperbia50068 This is not something anyone simply decides. \"Possession\" of beauty depends upon possessing other things,\n\n@slooperbia50068 Beauty at the center? That's what he indicates? I'll check later at home, so I can tell if and how I disagree.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Unless I'm missing something, then, that seems consistent with what I'm saying.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think this is what Gans was trying to do with Carole Landis. If we could all acknowledge her unsurpassable beauty... And then he got attacked by her fans for speaking about her breasts. I think we will have to look to data, in the broadest sense.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Since I don't know what you're getting at, not is the best guess.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I wondered if that was it. Yes, broads, dames and a couple of other terms I'm forgetting. I didn't have that pun in mind and I might have to resist its application.\n\n@truepeers @slooperbia50068 Data will be the gate to everything else.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers Invent one."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2042623371586810054",
      "title": "Bouvard on Trump's Successor and Political Continuity",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Apr 10, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2042623371586810054",
      "content": "Assuming Trump is seen as having had a successful presidency towards the end of his term, his most likely successor will be whoever can most convincingly defend and promise to continue what he has done. That's unlikely to be someone aligned with those Trump just dumped on.\n\n@shamansaban I think it's more likely than not that Trump will be seen as a successful president both by his supporters and by the less ideologicaly entrenched who didn't support him.\n\n@Imperius__13 I think they would be interesting.\n\n@shamansaban He is shutting down immigration and will be able to point to millions of deportations, I think the tariffs and move toward reindustrializing the US will show results and I think some progress will be made on exposing and prosecuting deep state actors (and Democrats).\n\n@shamansaban I don't think there's a single \"public\" that gets alienated--there are certainly media campaigns that put some people on the defensive. Your chart doesn't say how many have been deported, and have self-deported. The tariffs need time to kick in. Prosecutions are the toughest."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2041521824366723263",
      "title": "Bouvard on Antisemitic Dog-Whistling and Right-Wing Complicity",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Apr 07, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2041521824366723263",
      "content": "Tucker Carlson's (First World) fans have been peeling away, one by one, but let's go back to the beginning, to the mindset that led us here. It would go something like this: \"So, he's taunting the Jews a bit--so what? They're what, 2% of the population?--and they vote left!\n\nAnyway, they've got it coming. If they complain about some little exaggeration, we'll just tell them we're allowed to criticize Israel. All in good fun--energizing the base!\" Now we have a VP whose patron and mentor is head of a pack of seditionists. And the \"dissident right\"\n\nwill continue to complain about how this phantom they call the \"neocons\" is taking over the GOP.\n\n@Imperius__13 It's not only OK but imperative to criticize all destabilizing politics, but the most prominent example right now is that carried out by the Carlson, et al, fanbase. I don't see any Jewish leftists (at least not with any audience) calling on US soldiers to disobey orders.\n\n@Imperius__13 You or anyone else can talk about whatever you like but the RW subversion is the real threat to (and betrayal of) Trump right now. (Are you referring to 6 Democrats calling on soldiers to disobey orders right now, or that video laying out a hypothetical back in November?)\n\n@Imperius__13 That was despicable but it wasn't in the middle of a war.\n\n@Imperius__13 Scientifically I would want to trace activity within institutions in historically specific situations--thinking you can arrive at some kind of politics by sorting out genes is pointless. That's the dissident right, and why it's freaking out right now.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, it's not going to have any real effect but a wide strip of the right going seditionist is meaningful, I think.\n\n@Imperius__13 You can only deal with the expression of genes, which means you can only deal with behavior. You may determine someone is doing something you want to stop because they're Jewish, but either way the point is to stop it.\n\nThe point is not Tucker but, ultimately Vance.\n\n@Imperius__13 But the question here is less \"what is the use of science\" and more \"what do we consider 'scientific'?\" Of course, if someone thinks that counting Jews in the area will help him make a better decision, I wish him the best of luck.\n\n@Imperius__13 That's my central point here."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2040909061076516967",
      "title": "Bouvard on Trump's Iran Grievance and Dollar Politics",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Apr 05, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2040909061076516967",
      "content": "For Trump, Iran may be unfinished business from the 80s, maybe even from the Embassy takeover. Why shouldn't Trump hold a much more valid and widely shared grudge as tenaciously as those who complain about the USS Liberty, given that these perpetrators continued on the same path?\n\n@patrickberzai Yes, but China, too, I would think--and for that matter, to some extent I think it's also about Iran.\n\n@patrickberzai Well, we're not exactly after Iran yet. How does the war help sell Treasuries?\n\n@patrickberzai OK, I'll be taking this in as I track events.\n\n@patrickberzai I’m interested in the mediations. The ways politicians speak about things are part of the things. Trump is doing what no one else has and there might be other ways of strengthening the dollar against the Europeans.\n\n@patrickberzai But much depends on whether the US and Israel win the war, which I think must mean replacing the Islamic Republic.\n\n@patrickberzai Weakening them to the point where their hold on power is tenuous certainly increases the possibility of their being replaced.  And I'm not sure what a solved problem would be here--new problems emerge in the wake of solved ones, anyway. Maybe the sword needs to reassert itself?\n\n@patrickberzai Even a new regime would be unstable for awhile. But the point of the Abraham Accords was not necessarily to produce instability.\n\n@patrickberzai Right—so, an attempt to create stability.\n\n@patrickberzai What will Europe exchange its Eurobonds ambitions for?\n\n@patrickberzai There would need to be a system in which debt is not rolled into sovereignty."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2039743085375054323",
      "title": "Bouvard on Computational Language Replacing Psychological Interiority",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Apr 02, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2039743085375054323",
      "content": "I think the language of computation will replace the languages of interiority based on print culture used to describe human feeling and thinking--so, I expect \"latent space\" to replace \"unconscious\" (which already seemed very crude and arbitrary) while Generative Adversarial\n\nNetworks will replace concepts like \"Devil's Advocate\"--in this case, \"GANS\" is so much more expressive insofar as it constitutes not a mere challenge to a line of reasoning but to ontology itself. We are each and every one of us GANSes to each other.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't see it in those terms by I expect specialists in those areas to start doing so.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I see. Maybe many are starting to think in a GANSian way without quite realizing it. I'm pointing to a possible transition and I'm not sure where we are in the process. I suspect people will start to talk this way in advance of people thinking this way.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes I’m familiar with the notion of a nonce word. I didn’t know it was specific to the UK.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I suppose a nonce word is when we somehow know what it means, but there's presumably a thin line here.\n\n@slooperbia50068 If there is a specifically Brit meaning of \"nonce word\" other than \"word that is used only once,\" what is it? Anyway, I'm glad your completely unnecessary despair has been alleviated.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Here's the dictionary definition for \"nonce word\": a word coined for one single occasion only.\nAh, now I see the British slang use you're referring to. No, I never heard that.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't think i've ever heard Tommy Robinson speak other than in brief clips."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2039376724446634472",
      "title": "Bouvard on Republican Israel Policy and Trump's Legacy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Apr 01, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2039376724446634472",
      "content": "If the next president is a Republican and he wants to turn on Israel he would also have to repudiate Trump rather forcefully--but it will be tough to repudiate Trump on this single point alone and also tough to run on Trump being a failure.\n\n@Imperius__13 The border--I don't really worry much about the US disengaging to a greater or lesser degree from Israel. The open border will make the US useless for anyone else anyway.\n\n@Imperius__13 If you're alluding to Vance, though, the way you framed the previous question is not the way I would frame the \"Vance question.\" US-Israel relations is a completely open political question; the status of US Jews is not. Pogrom-style vitriol is on the level of open borders.\n\n@Imperius__13 A politician who can't be crystal clear that he rejects that categorically can't be trusted.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't know, but Trump had no relation to David Duke while Vance has a very close relation to Carlson.\n\n@Imperius__13 Trump would not need to equivocate on any of this.\n\n@Imperius__13 The point is not whethr anyone is a loser; nor do I see anyone pulling back.\n\n@Imperius__13 He had no resposibility for Duke's endorsement. This was the right answer, even though I'm sure he knew who Duke was. There's no comparison to Vance-Carlson.\n\n@Imperius__13 His personal feelings are not the point; what he lets loose in the American political ecosystem is.\n\n@Imperius__13 It's a shame that Vance has decided to let the little stuff be a drag. I have no reason not to think that Tucker Carlson is as likely to be his WH spokesman (or more) as anyone else. These things have to be considered.\n\n@Imperius__13 It's not only Carlson, but signals Vance himself sends that can't be accidental. I don't know what he believes or feels about Jews but I think he wants many who hate Jews to feel that he's with them even if he can't say so explicitly.\n\n@Imperius__13 As I've said many times, if Vance is first of all a tech bro, making it clear that he has cut ties with Carlson should be the easiest thing the world. Do tech bros like Tucker? He's trying some tech-populist alliance, but in completely the wrong way.\n\n@Imperius__13 Sometimes the addition of some leads to the subtraction of others.\n\n@Imperius__13 No, this is not what Carlson is. You call him a moron but still want to confer on him a legitimate American political identity. You think he is governed by ideas.\n\n@Imperius__13 I can sit and wait to see Vance try to finesse this."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2037989938340204816",
      "title": "Bouvard on Jewish Power and Anti-Discrimination Framework",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 28, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2037989938340204816",
      "content": "Jews should unburden themselves of both the faith in a general agreement of what “antisemitism” is and that it is bad along with the broader anti-discrimination framework within which that faith is embedded. Once that is done it would be possible to reconstruct what has come\n\nto be called “antisemitism” as an incoherent archive of libels and slanders, incitements, and frauds drawn upon to position oneself as as opposed to power. This would move the politics away from being anti-anti (semitism, Judaism, Zionism) with its attempts to persuade, to\n\nPlead, to shame, to actionable framings of events and operations. And the unity replacing the anti-antis relies upon a positioning of the Jewish as an insistence on coherent power chains and a robust judicial structure—interests all Jews share (and share with most non-Jews)\n\nand to which they can testify. Rather than playing defense you can go on the offensive and gather real allies—so, rather than anti-antizionism, for example, work to criminalize “Palestine,” as a model for countering a wide range of criminal conspiracies.\n\n@ExplodingBoner Then you’re targeting criminal activity rather than beliefs and ideas so I agree with that. Now we’re talking about incitement."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2037141021365002729",
      "title": "Bouvard on Appeasement and Far-Right Antisemitism",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 26, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2037141021365002729",
      "content": "Making conciliatory gestures to groypers and Tucker Carlson fans gets you a campaign against your Jewish chief of staff. You invite them to up the ante and demand signs of fealty. Anyone who doesn't understand this probably shouldn't be president.\n\n@Imperius__13 That's a way of saying he isn't ready.\n\n@Imperius__13 He's not the demonstrated center, though--that's still the question. There will be a contest. (And I've never said anything about Rubio.) You might also consider that explaining who Tucker Carlson and these other people are might be an attempt to show him something.\n\n@Imperius__13 If Vance doesn't understand what it means to introduce the toxins of Jew obsession into the body politic then that's the first lesson he needs to take in.\n\n@Imperius__13 And today I, and many others, are pointing out to him the most obvious thing to do, which would furthermore be the right thing to do from every angle. It's like showing someone where the \"ON\" switch is.\n\n@Imperius__13 The problem is that the panicans and media ops see Vance as the weak link, and he doesn't seem to give them much reason to think otherwise. Did you see that Scott McConnell (never heard of him but he's \"cofounder\" of Am Conservative) was calling on Vance to coup Trump?\n\n@Imperius__13 In that case it's in his interest to show he understands that.\n\n@Imperius__13 I haven't said much about Vance for a while but I jumped in here because it's hard to see anything easier than defending his chief of staff, especially when so many others in the space have. A seeling point of his is loyalty to his subordinates, which presumably justified\n\n@Imperius__13 attacking an obscure journalist who raised questions about Buckley Carlson. He himself set a kind of precedent there and it seems to me all upside to weigh in here as well. Maybe he still will, but it would have been better to do so right away. Maybe someone should tell him.\n\n@Imperius__13 There are all these people who seem to me to be trying to help him by paving a smooth path for him to just say, yes, Jacob is a great asset and those attacking him are attacking the administration. What's the problem here?\n\n@Imperius__13 OK, I've done what I can to show you what I see as the issue here. People have a right to observe Vance and will continue to do so.\n\n@Imperius__13 Vance has already referred to Fuentes and boosts Carlson whenever the occasion permits--it's not like this stuff too low for him. He could refer to an account with 500K followers--it's not some obscure corner. It still seems to come down to him not wanting to offend some\n\n@Imperius__13 some people who it might actually be in his interest to offend. Anyway, people notice such patterns and there will be questions raised in and leading up to the campaign. There's much I don't see, but his approach is puzzling to me.\n\n@Imperius__13 Lines are being drawn--it will be interesting to see who joins the attack on Reses, who hits back, and who remains silent. It's a test. Vance has not been averse to entering even obscure online controversies.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, \"mystery party.\" There are quite a few people who understand this is not only about reassuring a few rich Jews in private, but, like I said, I think we've reached the limits of this discussion. I along with others will see how Vance's strategy evolves.\n\n@Imperius__13 We just have incommensurable readings of the situation. We'll see how it plays out.\n\n@Imperius__13 i didn't initiate this conversation.\n\n@Imperius__13 Weird digression.\n\n@Imperius__13 I said that? It doesn't seem to be my style, but, who knows? The difference between us here is that some of those people you would include in that \"dynamic coalition\" will, I think, destroy it and should therefore be weeded out. And therefore you misread my \"interests.\"\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, I think Netanyahu has been the best possible PM for Israel and I'm not going to go back and check that thread so there's no point to denying the particulars. It may have been a lapse, as I like to keep my claims more minimal, as above in this post. Right now I wouldn't say\n\n@Imperius__13 anything about his psychological effect on Israelis, so I'd have to wonder what I was thinking.\n\n@Imperius__13 You are of course free to listen or not to whomever you like."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2035764464616677432",
      "title": "Bouvard on Institutional Integration of Right-Wing Youth",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 22, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2035764464616677432",
      "content": "The solution to the right wing zoomers going Nazi problem is to create millions of positions in and around law enforcement and defense (*not* think tanks and the GOP) which provide experience, advancement and discipline within a legal framework. Filter out the most egregious, but\n\notherwise count on the rigors of the job countering ideological intoxications. And this way you create a generation of fighters for MAGA, making it harder to reverse Trump's achievements. It could be risky, but it's obviously the best approach.\n\n@YamnayaRisen That's the risk, but, then, it's a question of whether the agencies can maintain their professionalism. If they can't, there are even bigger problems.\n\n@YamnayaRisen These seem to be problems that can be countered by the original proposal to staff the agencies with Trump loyalists, or demographics presumed to include a preponderance of those aligned with MAGA. That, in turn, might help with hte professionalism.\n\n@YamnayaRisen I don’t think Nick Fuentes is colored, but, that aside, if they act according to the law and don’t try to create political divisions within the agencies there should be no problem.\n\n@YamnayaRisen A member of ICE, or Homeland Security, or the military, or the FBI, etc., who does his job policing immigration, gathering intelligence, breaking up criminal activity, etc.,   has no need for anyone to know whether he supports \"White self-determination\" or what he means by that.\n\n@YamnayaRisen But in law enforcement, immigration and intelligence all that's necessary is to abolish DEI if it's still in place. Then you hire people who want to serve their country in those roles. Whatever tests are administered to candidates need not include political questions.\n\n@YamnayaRisen It's not so much something to agree or disagree on as to ask how to make it possible. Hiring lots of people will override gatekeeping--treat it like an emergency. Dealing with education would require other approaches, but why wait until that's solved? Same with politics.\n\n@YamnayaRisen How the state is staffed is a critical part of making that happen. Imagine a whole generation of military, law enforcement, immigration and intelligence officials coming in under Trump and sympathetic to his aims. It will place constraints on future presidents."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2034048411649843309",
      "title": "Bouvard on Post-October 7 Pro-Palestine Conversions",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 17, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2034048411649843309",
      "content": "All those who suddenly reversed their long-held positions on Israel, Zionism, and Jews post October 7 should be viewed as essentially pod people.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Are you familiar with The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which involves pod people replications replacing people?\n\n@slooperbia50068 When something this extreme happens--many people in the same circle completely changing their views in the exact same way virtually over night--I think such language is warranted to draw attention to the need for explanation.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I believe one will emerge, regarding sources of funding and coordination.\n\n@slooperbia50068 There is money and coordination is enforced--exactly how and by whom I assume we will see. Or maybe a few dozen people independently and instantaneously rethought all their political positions in exactly the same way.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think something like this has always been the right wing argument for Zionism. What would currently be the balance between love and resentment generated by this statement?\n\n@slooperbia50068 If that balance varies historically.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Then who would be doing the directing in the case of Zionism as model?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "2033677174285193595",
      "title": "Bouvard on Antisemitism Within MAGA Movement",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 16, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2033677174285193595",
      "content": "Forget about dissociating from Tucker Carlson; if podcastan could have stated explicitly that Candace Owens was persona non grata in any movement they were part of because of her bizarre blood libels against Jews and then wild accusations against Kirk's widow and friends they\n\nmight have managed to maintain some contact with MAGA and with reality. You would think that saying we want nothing to do with someone who claims Jews kidnap and sacrifice children would be the easiest decision imaginable, and it's worth considering why none of them made it.\n\n@Imperius__13 Foreign influence most probably, but no one, to my knowledge, has really shown it--but plenty of people might resent Jewish influence without throwing in with vicious lunatics; and the same with Catholic-Jewish animus which is practically non-existent in post WW2 US. With this, I\n\n@Imperius__13 focus on political ends not personal motives--the motives can simply be a power play in response to a perceived opening.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, in principle that could be, but in this case it's obviously very calculated--they all say exactly the same things, including things having nothing to do with Catholicism, like the \"genocide\" in Gaza.\n\n@Imperius__13 This might all be true and, for all I know, this is precisely how the Trump administration is proceeding. But this operation still seems likely to affect the 2026 and 2028 elections so it's worth following--and Trump seems to give it some weight as well.\n\n@Imperius__13 Maybe, but it seems to me they've infiltrated to some extent at least the administration and maybe elsewhere.\n\n@Imperius__13 And I'm not in command of any resources."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2033527246137270742",
      "title": "Bouvard on Anti-Semitic Delegitimization of Jewish Conservatives",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 16, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2033527246137270742",
      "content": "I think both Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro are Reaganites, which means they haven't internalized the Trump shift toward redesigning sovereignty, but the calculated attacks on them by the Duginite (?) right was never about such political differences--it was designed to *cancel*\n\nJewish conservatives by slandering them as Israel Firsters and use that association as a brush to tar other political enemies, including \"Christian Zionists.\" The method was always vilification and demonization and never argumentation. Tucker Carlson set this in motion soon\n\nafter 10/7/23 and organized the campaign around the supposed \"bullying\" of Charlie Kirk by Jewish donors. Megyn Kelly soon picked this up and the reason she and others want Candace Owens to \"raise questions\" is to keep the defamation fires burning in deniable forms.\n\n@OmriBenTal Legitimacy for some. Anyway, \"the people\" may provide a kind of backing for government, but government is conducted through organizations, which must include and exclude.\n\n@OmriBenTal Maybe, but I figure if it's important enough for Trump to pay attention to it's important enough for me to do so as well. It does make some difference who the next president will be.\n\n@OmriBenTal Well, there we differ."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2033177515636711712",
      "title": "Bouvard on Carlson's Strategic Alignment with Iran",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 15, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2033177515636711712",
      "content": "Tucker Carlson has been very deliberately backing his supporters into a corner with him and now we will see who is willing to box themselves in all the way. He has made it virtually impossible to \"stand with him\" without standing with the Islamic Republic, or its remains.\n\n@Imperius__13 Another possible explanation is going back to his own devices meant finding a new master, or a new project. But him along with many others suddenly swapping out long held positions for an identical new one, without any account of any rethinking, was very suspicious.\n\n@Imperius__13 In other words, it's not just an unmoored Carlson drifting--there's a larger operation here.\n\n@Imperius__13 That's news to me (Tucker not denying he lost his virginity at a brothel at 14) and I don't know how, or if, to process it. I think once someone hits a certain level of celebrity, power, or commitment to some cause they are no longer meaningfully psychological beings.\n\n@Imperius__13 Trump seems to know what he is doing very well--if you're referring to what comes after, well, that's tough to say right now. A lot will happen in the next couple of years. Trump is a singularity. It will be necessary to build a kind of AI version of him.\n\n@Imperius__13 And I'm not kidding.\n\n@Imperius__13 I'll take it."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2032229000848834718",
      "title": "Bouvard on Regime-People Distinction Politics",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 12, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2032229000848834718",
      "content": "One neocon innovation (which was borrowed and enhanced from \"anti-totalitarianism\") which almost everyone has adopted is a scrupulous distinction between regimes and peoples. No Brit would have said in WW 1 that we're fighting the \"German Empire,\" not the German people. Now even\n\nantisemites want to say that they're only against the Israel government, not the Israeli people. This has introduced a profound shift in thinking about global politics, one which it would be helpful to discuss more explicitly.\n\nThis distinction can lead to delusions or manipulation (the \"we will be greeted as liberators\" syndrome) but leaves open the possibility of enlisting some or all of the population of an enemy state into your ranks. It also allows for the distinction between more technologically\n\nadvanced armies that make the distinction in practice and more \"barbaric\" countries that have to throw military and civilian together in the same pot (or even single out the softer target). This distinction has its own propaganda value, or at least so one would think--but maybe\n\nhighlighting the difference in civilizational levels simply encourages post-colonial moral blackmail. The solution to this dilemma would have to entail an imperial willingness to take on sovereign responsibilities proportionate to one's power."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2031716717190078755",
      "title": "Bouvard on Anti-Israel Activism as Performative Meta-Ops",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 11, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2031716717190078755",
      "content": "The anti-Israel firsters have a carefully constructed op predicated on accusing their opponents of being ops. Every new organization should have the word \"op\" in it, to signal awareness that all is in play: sources of funding, ties to state and even foreign actors\n\n(within the law, of course, recognizing that the rest of the world gets its votes), political and PR strategies, etc. Of course there are end goals in terms of reforming institutions, but those involve networks of interests as well. All this is already well known, and it's only\n\na matter of time before all political ops go meta and make their own and others' construction an explicit part of the game. So, whoever moves in this direction most rapidly will have the advantage. Begin by targeting relentlessly the other sides \"op-ness,\" of course, but in a\n\nway that indicates willingness to have your own examined as well. Make bureaucratic procedure, money flows, organizational affiliations, legal strategies, etc., all explicitly part of the op. Create new rules of the game that ultimately aim at stabilizing a new political\n\nexoskeleton. If Jews are unwelcomed from both parties, I hope some Jewish political entrepreneurs will form versions of \"the Jewish op\"--it's risky, but will show the way to more sophisticated political actors with integrity who need to rise to power anyway.\n\n@truepeers That's good, thanks.\n\n@truepeers Centropia--where we're headed.\n\n@truepeers The idiom is now out in the wild."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2031744460204228619",
      "title": "Bouvard on Trump's Transformative Threat to Republicans",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 11, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2031744460204228619",
      "content": "Sundance's (of the Conservative Treehouse) statement (I can't find it and am going by memory) that \"Trump is our murder weapon\" (with the \"victim\" being the Republican party) may turn out to be true. Trump has tried to transform the party in accord with his proposed redesign of\n\nUS sovereignty, but all the layers of the party (Reaganite, Tea Party, Chamber of Commerce, etc.), each in its own way, may have proven too resistant to what it registers as a kind of viral infection. This is what leaves it vulnerable to the groyper infiltration, which will not,\n\nI think, recreate the party but can very well destroy it. There will be a struggle over the 2028 candidate and campaign, but the anti-groyper forces, even pro-Trump ones, will be too indebted to these earlier iterations of \"conservatism.\" It would be a good idea for \"live\n\nplayers\" to prepare very different vehicles for political activity, but a clear account of Redesigning US Sovereignty would be needed to think that through. The GOP is a broken vessel, and operating within it can only buy some time.\n\n@Imperius__13 For the \"Trump as our murder weapon\" quote? Thanks!\n\n@Imperius__13 No. At some point, probably.\n\n@slooperbia50068 there are subsequent posts"
    },
    {
      "slug": "2031731862729547960",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance and Constitutional Equal Protection",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 11, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2031731862729547960",
      "content": "It's reasonable to assume that a candidate who relies on the votes of Carlson slander enjoyers will refrain, in office, from protecting those victimized by others those slander enjoyers enjoy. That is, Vance would be the first president I can think of who can't be counted on to\n\nprovide equal protection under the laws for all American citizens if it were politically inconvenient to do so. (The first president in a long time, anyway, representing a breach in political tradition.)\n\n@Imperius__13 I have in mind violent criminal assaults. And discrimination against white men has been under the law, albeit unjustified, badly written, ridiculously interpreted and applied law which could, moreover, have been overridden by presidents with sufficient political courage.\n\n@Imperius__13 Even if it angers Tucker fans?\n\n@Imperius__13 What is Carlson calling for now?\n\n@Imperius__13 But Carlson himself is not the question. Probably nobody pays attention to David Duke, but if a leading presidential candidate insisted he was an important conservative voice and had his son working in his office it would be worthy of note. People would inquire.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't think that's possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2031415682034798719",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance's Vulnerability in Republican Primary",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 10, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2031415682034798719",
      "content": "Maybe on some level those pounding the Vance inevitability drum have been aware of what a weak candidate he might turn out to be if challenged, both in the primaries and the general, so that his only real chance was to fly through with an aura of unanimity.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't know why Paul and Cruz come into the discussion. Trump seems open to Rubio; others may emerge. I think there will be a competitive primary, and Vance needs to be tested.\n\n@Imperius__13 No, because Republican Jews have not been undermining Trump. If Trump is successful, whoever is seen as more closely following his path will be the best candidate. Vance is suspect because he's tied to forces undermining Trump. I, of course, have my hands on no reins.\n\n@Imperius__13 Maybe he won't, maybe he will. There's plenty of time to think about it, and there does need to be a real primary. Trump seems to think so as well. I expect the Vance bubble to deflate enough to draw in challengers. I hope for at least one solid anti-groyper candidate.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't know that Trump has selected Vance, and I don't care about the rest of his family. Vance wants the Jews against him, and I think Jews should oblige him. It will be a learning experience for all. As for the primary, people can watch Vance, and his interactions with Trump,\n\n@Imperius__13 for a couple more years and decide whether they might want to jump in or support an opponent.\n\n@Imperius__13 I dont see Eric directing anything, Don Jr. seems to be a fool, and Ivanka and Jared don't seem likely to take charge. They're not going to drive things. My evidence regarding Vance is his tight connection with Carlson--this is my most generous interpretation.\n\n@Imperius__13 Republican Jews will not support Vance. Maybe some will come around in the general; even that is doubtful. There's nothing to be done about that. I'm mostly an observer here, and I see nothing happening that would make me anything else. So, I'll just say what I see.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't think things will come together very coherently after Trump. The Democrats have become completely Third World, and Vance clearly wants a good bit of that in the GOP as well--and not only him. The Republicans will fragment.\n\n@Imperius__13 The best bet is more coherent state and extra-state actors cordon off the elected officials and build on whatever Trump leaves them, but that's not a great bet either. If Trump is successful and seen as successful, then state and extra-state actors will have more to work with.\n\n@Imperius__13 None of this means that the Trump children will be directing the future of the Republican party. Trump will probably be able to tip the scales, at least in 2028.\nCarlson is a Third Worldist--that's his audience and rhetoric. Vance says he wants him in. Do I believe Vance or you?\n\n@Imperius__13 It's true that Jews themselves don't weigh much. But there are still some people in the Republican Party who kind of like Jews and don't want them vilified mindlessly by figures embraced by their leading candidate. They may weigh something. At least that's my hypothesis.\n\n@Imperius__13 Don Jr. will not be a kingmaker. Once his father is off the scene, no one will care about him. \nThe alternative is not to invest in someone who adds those who want to subtract you.\nVance has already entered prominently in that discussion and has knocked down guardrails.\n\n@Imperius__13 The next time Vance is asked a groyper question at a public event will be a lot more telling than Fuentes's tantrums.\n\n@Imperius__13 Those building their careers defending Vance and humiliating (or trying to, at least) his haters are also defenders of Carlson. Those defending Vance *like* his devotion to Carlson. They will build their careers calling Mark Levin a witch. This will all play out in 2028.\n\n@Imperius__13 Everyone knows that he knows who Tucker Carlson is. What if the next question is, \"is Tucker Carlson one of those awful people\"? You yourself have never addressed the question, why stick with Carlson? You veer off into vague generalities--\"it's politics, addition and subtraction\"\n\n@Imperius__13 I have seen very little of that and such a stance involves a degree of self-contradiction that seems to me hard to sustain. It's not that Vance calls him a friend--he refers favorably to things he says and includes him as an \"important voice.\"\n\n@Imperius__13 It's not a question of \"easy stupidity,\" which in tiself would be inoffensive. It is a question of defamation and incitement against fellow citizens to the point where violence would not be a surprise. Trivialization won't work. Vance will not be able to avoid confrontation.\n\n@Imperius__13 We just disagree on the Trump family. I've never seen a sign of talent or intelligence from Don Jr., and he'd have to have some of that. \nKeep up guardrails against defamation and incitement against entire groups (or even individuals)--that seems to me specific and helpful.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, Vance can play that game if he wants to look like a pathetic coward whom no one should ever trust to confront serious opponents or issues. Very Jeb-like. \nIt's not a question of vapidity. You can only take these questions in by trivializing them, so it's not surprising that\n\n@Imperius__13 you recommend the same for Vance, but I don't think it will work. People really will be bothered by obscene accusations against Jews, even if you don't seem to be able to grasp that. People over 25 are still a large majority.\n\n@Imperius__13 It's the media effect of Trump. Jared and Ivanka have their own specialized celebrity and influence. Eric seems pleasant and probably competent but not very political. Lara is a helpful booster. Don Jr. is a lump with trashy friends. Barron is a great meme.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't know if it's growing--and I rarely see them mention Vance, although I assume they support him by default. I guess they want to avoid the question, which they can do. It will also be politics when social media is filled with clips of Carlson's greatest hits alongside\n\n@Imperius__13 Vance's extravagant praise and his freakouts at anyone questioning his deep ties and reliance on Carlson.\n\n@Imperius__13 Maybe you just don't understand how much of what Carlson says will sound to tens of millions of people who don't hate Jews. People who aren't paying attention  now will be shocked by Vance's solicitousness toward him. But, I suppose we'll find out soon enough.\n\n@Imperius__13 He might be but his political forays have been rare and tepid--the one time I saw him at what I think was a TPUSA event he seemed unprepared and not that interested. It's hard to see him as a kingmaker.\n\n@Imperius__13 This will not be a question of people changing their mind but of being horrified by things they have long been primed to be horrified by. I think he will lose more this way than by condemning Carlson but it's good to finally be clear about the fact that Vance understands that\n\n@Imperius__13 that his political fortunes depend upon him appealing to people who see their Jewish fellow citizens as a threat to the country. Now I can be very clear about why Jews and those who don't hate them will have a problem with him.\n\n@Imperius__13 He does want to be president, so that's a reason. I'm not making any demands, I'm just describing the situation. You can't expect either Jews or those who don't want further penetration of antisemitism into American politics to support a candidate whose electoral prospects\n\n@Imperius__13 depend upon the support of antisemites. How could you?\n\n@Imperius__13 There are no candidates taking on the social programs, but there are possible candidates who can tell Jew haters to fuck off.\n\n@Imperius__13 This may be the guy I met and had a few exchanges with."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2031485765323018534",
      "title": "Bouvard on Anti-Israel Movement's Performative Authenticity",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 10, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2031485765323018534",
      "content": "Part of the reason for the momentum the anti-Israel firsters picked up is that they radicalized the method of always claiming your opponent is an \"op\" while simultaneously being completely aware of your own \"op-ness.\" You claim spontaneity and grassroots-ness against the other\n\nsides presumed fakeness and boughtness while creating and enforcing your own formulaic construct. This should reach its limits as the cracks in their own construction become more evident and maybe we will get to a much more productive political arrangement where we  all\n\nacknowledge that it's all ops, all the way down, on all sides. Relations of patronage and crossovers between \"state\" and \"non-state,\" \"deep\" and \"surface\" state, can be made explicit and everyone will be aware to varying degrees of being on a particular team. This would make\n\npolitics more nakedly transactional on one level, but on another level the terms of something like a \"social contract\" or obligation to the commons could also be discussed more openly and empirically. But all that should follow from just being able to normalize the op."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2031088416062865522",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance, Carlson, and Republican Direction",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 09, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2031088416062865522",
      "content": "Very interestng and for me encourgaing (despite my own reservations about Rubio) but I don't know why the headline attributes the change to the Iran war.\n\nOf course, I should always add \"if true.\"\n\n@Imperius__13 What would being more disciplined in the future mean? The only real question here is Tucker Carlson and the groypers. (Unless the donors have other things in mind.)\n\n@Imperius__13 I have no estimation of Vance. I only know that there is no explanation of his relation to Carlson and the groypers that could make me want him to be president more than I do now, which is not at all. Even more, I'm pretty sure Vance wants it that way, so there's a kind of bond.\n\n@Imperius__13 We'll find out soon enough who Vance is. I notice that in your panegyric on Vance, the Carlson question doesn't arise. You dismiss Carlson, and yet the amazing Vance can't.\n\n@Imperius__13 I haven’t been vague.\n\n@Imperius__13 Vance is helping to mainstream bizarre, fevered libels against Jews within the Republican Party and the country. I consider this to be a form of sabotage. If you find that to be vague, you can draw your own conclusions about yourself."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2030413701098983435",
      "title": "Bouvard on the Halal Right's Islamic Agenda",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 07, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2030413701098983435",
      "content": "There will be sustained resistance to the \"Halal Right\" (I'll try that one on)--I can see that for sure now. And not only from pro-Israel forces or those disgusted by the antisemitism but from those who can see the Islamic agendas being smuggled in through the antizionism.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don’t know of them and my sources are mostly right here.\n\n@slooperbia50068 By “Halal Right” I am referring to what some call the “Woke Right” and I have been calling the “anti-Israel firsters,” etc.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't know what you're referring to here, or whether this is a reading of my post.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes, you have been--I thought this would be common knowledge here on X. \"Woke Right\" was coined by James Lindsay more than two years ago, I think, and has been much disputed and deployed since.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Tucker Carlson, Auron MacIntyre, Nick Fuentes, now Megyn Kelly, Myron Gaines, Matt Gaetz, Jack Posobiec, Candace Owens and others. Here's a new article on it that just came out and is being much shared:\n\n@slooperbia50068 Well, defaming Israel is the first principle, but maybe that's not what you're asking.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It's an operation to sabotage Trump and MAGA by attacking Jews and Evangelicals and lately has brought Islam on board. Carlson is the visible center. But, to go back to my initial post, I'm not satisfied with any of the names for it, including my own.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Perhaps?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes, it's very good and important and a lot of people have been referring to it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Only insofar as it concerns the protection of Israel, but not to make anything happen in itself.\n\n@slooperbia50068 In the sense that the war won't bring redemption or apocalypse any closer."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2030272803287560226",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance, Groypers, and Trumpism's Future",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 07, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2030272803287560226",
      "content": "Republicans who oppose Vance for the 2028 nomination will have to do more than try to shift support to a preferable candidate, like Rubio. They would have to make the campaign one focused on the infiltration and entrenchment of the groyper right within conservative institutions.\n\nAnd to do this you'd need to tie together all the threads of \"Trumpism,\" i.e., distinguish Trump's program, some of which has remained implicit, from outmoded former GOP programs (Reaganism, neoconservatism, Tea Party, etc.) but in a welcoming, not \"cancelling\" way.\n\n@Imperius__13 But there is an underlying coherence which has yet to be laid out in detail--the Conservative Treehouse comes closest, but focuses only on the economics and deep state. If it's not laid out, anyone could claim his mantle without any real challenge.\n\n@Imperius__13 And yet who has provided a better account of Trump's purposes? (Purposes which might, in fact, include better relations with Russia--I'm not sure.) If he's inadequate, all the more reason for something much better by a very loyal and knowledgeable team with access to Trump.\n\n@Imperius__13 He’s right not to like Don Jr.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don’t see a need to suggest anything—Don Jr. is no successor and he may need to be humored but not taken seriously. I doubt anyone sees him other than as access.\n\n@Imperius__13 But he won't represent access 3 years from now. So, everyone has to grab while they can.\n\nAnyway, I would like your loyalties to be widely shared."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2030322593186648324",
      "title": "Bouvard on US-Israel Relations and Discourse",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 07, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2030322593186648324",
      "content": "A sober inquiry and discussion into the relation between the US and Israel cannot be held in public--there is neither the means nor the will, on the part of those who would like to loosen the relation, to prevent the discussion from spiraling into DNA, Third Temple, 9/11,\n\ngoyslop, Epstein Mossad blackmail, etc., etc. So the discussions that need to be had will be had behind closed doors, which, in the end, is not only best but a good precedent, across a wide range of issues.\n\nAnd the same must be said about discussions regarding the role of Jews in leftist politics through the 20th and into the 21st century--maybe 5% of the discussions initiated along these lines on the right are in good faith, and it's not worth the effort to sift through them.\n\nIn the end one just has to say, \"sue the Jews\" if you want and move on to the issues of the day. Let the bifurcation between those who want to confront those issues, on the one hand, and those who want to wallow in generations old grievances proceed.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes I think it will do some damage, ruin some lives, and end up in dysfunction and criminality. Mimimizing the damage is the only thing to do."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2029886826979180728",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance's Antisemitic Electoral Strategy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 06, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2029886826979180728",
      "content": "It's not possible that JD Vance doesn't understand that a close association with someone who spreads false rumors inciting violence against American citizens would ordinarily disqualify a presidential candidate. There, he must want to follow in Carlson's and Kelly's footsteps by\n\nantagonizing and alienating not only Jews but those who accept Jews as their fellow Americans. And he must be doing that so he can run as the victim of the Jewish cabal, even if he himself doesn't explicitly frame it in that way. A simpler explanation is he agrees with Carlson.\n\nI suppose another explanation would be that he weighs the importance of the groypers and groyper-lites as an electoral asset higher than Jews+Evangelicals. In other words, for opportunistic reasons, he's happy to groyperize the country. Are there other possible explanations?\n\n@truepeers Who would be promising him such things and why, specifically, for aligning with the groypers?\n\n@truepeers Interesting, albeit remote, possibility."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2029614874859299305",
      "title": "Bouvard on Jewish Political Sovereignty and Internal Division",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 05, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2029614874859299305",
      "content": "I just came across a post pointing out that anti-Maimonides Jews asked the Inquisition to help censor his work, resulting in the Talmud getting burned; and now I see this petition requesting that Trump help deal with Israel's institutionalized left:\n\nI don't mean this as a warning, as I think this effort seizes upon a rare possibility, following up on Trump's continued insistence on Herzog pardoning Netanyahu. I'm just pointing out that Jews will always be forced to make these kinds of decisions.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Not at all.\n\n@slooperbia50068 What kinds of decisions could be influenced by eschatological considerations?  What would they be doing differently? What \"Armageddon\" are we talking about? What will happen because of what? This is a distraction.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe they think it helps them to see themselves as Christian warriors.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Don't believers have to think eschatologically?\n\n@slooperbia50068 No doubt. Well, they should have a venue for complaining but I'm sure they'll do their duty.\n\n@slooperbia50068 One could also say braver.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe, but more at the level of exhortation than strategy.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Have I said that?\n\n@slooperbia50068 OK, then. Why be anti-flat?\n\n@slooperbia50068 I would say just keep taking out governing layers until you get to one willing to come to terms.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think they'll be fine."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2029518068955730281",
      "title": "Bouvard on Generational Conflict as Political Farce",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 05, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2029518068955730281",
      "content": "Anti-Boomerism is the Zoomerist version of \"never trust anyone over 30.\" The first time as farce, the second time... also as farce.\n\n@Imperius__13 \"Boomers\" didn't do anything, and \"opposing\" or \"negating\" Boomerism also won't do anything. These generational conflicts are nonsense.\n\n@Imperius__13 I think there's very little (useful) extent to which we can speak of generations. Generations are not agents.\n\n@Imperius__13 It depends on the purpose. People intent on using all their wealth before they die, assuming they have children, should be judged harshly. I don't know how many people are doing this, and leaving nothing. But questions of jobs and housing go beyond such decisions.\n\n@Imperius__13 Things other than agents can be productively studied--they are used by agents, at any rate. But institutions can be agents--the army, a university, etc., makes decisions and do things--but generations don't. Unless someone wants to expropriate the Boomers somehow, where do\n\n@Imperius__13 the discussions go? If you want to tax savings, pensions, or investments, or cut Medicare or Social Security, these will be broader reforms which you might hope hit Boomers hardests but which will have wider ramifications.\n\n@Imperius__13 If there's a wealth concentration problem in the sense that wealth is not being productively used, then that can be targeted specifically. Slogans against Boomers won't help. And, anyway, the \"anti-Boomerism\" goes way beyond such stuff to develop a whole ideology through negation\n\n@Imperius__13 Beating whom?\n\n@Imperius__13 If Trump's closing off of immigration, repatriation of American wealth and reindustrialization doesn't \"beat\" them, then we will certainly have decades of serious conflict but it won't play out along generational lines, especially since the Boomers will all be dead pretty soon."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2028824291752411600",
      "title": "Bouvard on Carlson's Suspicious Gulf State Disinformation",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 03, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2028824291752411600",
      "content": "Something very strange is going on with Tucker Carlson. If he's spreading lies (maybe not even knowing they are lies?) fed him by actors within the Gulf states to undermine the US and Israel war on the Islamic Republic then national security and other concerns are implicated.\n\n@billionsmustliv Where is he getting his “information” from?\n\n@billionsmustliv He thinks that Mossad agents were arrested in Saudi Arabia and Qatar? That’s the kind of thing you have a source for. My sources are public—what’s the source for this?\n\n@billionsmustliv If he's being paid to spread lies on behalf of the Iranian government then it's a national security concern.\n\n@billionsmustliv How would I know? I'm just asking questions. I assume the relevant agencies would want to know if a broadcaster with a large audience is spreading lies on behalf of the enemy. An investigation might reveal more.\n\n@billionsmustliv It depends on who, if anyone, is giving him information. I doubt the Saudis and Qatar would be subverting Trump by spreading lies they then deny."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2028809581363941577",
      "title": "Bouvard on Cernovich's False Exchange Politics",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 03, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2028809581363941577",
      "content": "Cernovich likes to reduce all government actions to exchanges between actors he imagines--now, it's the Iran war, presumably for Jews, in exchange for progress on the domestic front, presumably for non-Jews. But these are just the right things to do for everyone.\n\nThe whole exchange imaginary is for Cernovich and others plying the same logic to project themselves as brokers and mediators, holding the ledger determining who owes whom. It's meant to look realistic and hardheaded but like everything else in the \"OG MAGA\" world it's a fantasy.\n\nMAGA is those who trust Trump and if you've ceased trusting him you should acknowledge you're no longer MAGA. Trump is remaking US sovereignty and this can't be broken down into allocated \"issues\" like the \"three stools\" of the Reagan coalition. But this is also why it's likely\n\nto fall apart post-Trump, and why all these more plugged-in actors are scrambling for position and turf in that post-Trump world. Figuring out how to routinize MAGA into something like a durable coalition would be a worthy task of political thought and action."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2028292384589562161",
      "title": "Bouvard on US-Israel Alignment and Antisemitism",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 02, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2028292384589562161",
      "content": "The extremely close collaboration between the US and Israel now will tighten the correlations between pro-war and pro-Jew and anti-war and anti-Jew. If you're anti-Jew, you're already more likely to be anti-war, but just being anti-war will make you more inclined to blame\n\nIsrael and nurse resentment toward Jews. If you;re pro-Israel, you already support the war and if you support the war you are likely to admire Israel's contribution. So, the Jewish Question will get more deeply embedded in US global politics, and will more closely track the\n\npolarizations it generates. This is likely to show up very forcefully in the Republican party and surrounding institutions (think tanks, activist groups, etc.) and even within the administration. There is a showdown coming, and the pro-Jewish side has the numbers and resources\n\nbut the anti-Jewish side has the preparation and organization. The pro-Jew side didn't see this coming precisely because the anti-Jew side made it come in the way that it did. A successful demolition of the Islamic Republic and transition to friendly regime will provide the\n\npro-Jew side with the arguments needed to replace the commonplaces that have been complacently embedded in Israel and American Jewish media strategies. Setting aside full-blown Protocols infected minds, hostility to Israel and Jews will now have to oppose American global strategy\n\n@Imperius__13 I would say they want to maintain a perpetual complaint about power because they never do anything that could plausibly lead to defeating it. But maybe your \"supposed\" takes that into account."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2028090372195332207",
      "title": "Bouvard on Navigating Antisemitism and Philosemitism",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 01, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2028090372195332207",
      "content": "There are definitely ways of steering between the Scylla of antisemitism and the Charybdis of philosemitism but it takes ingenuity, discipline and fixed goals. It's out there, but it's like spotting a bald eagle.\n\n@truepeers I’d need another analogy then\n\n@truepeers It couldn’t be tribalism because it’s for non-Jews. Let’s say “sentimentality”\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don’t know\n\n@slooperbia50068 First I've heard of it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Anyway, what would I say about it?\n\n@slooperbia50068 I do not.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I'd have to look into it before saying anything, but I'm obviously not familiar with all forms of technology, how they work, how they don;t work, etc.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't know if it was ineptly worded or just represented expectations that were too high. It's also right before Purim, and tradition has it that Haman was of the tribe of Amalek. Amalek may represent a kind of Jewish Schmittianism--a concept of absolute enmity.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Clearing someone's name is avenging them against whoever smeared them. It probably goes back to a time when there wasn't a clear difference between having an avenger and being guilty, since not being guilty mean exempt from retaliation.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It's not like this is the only review you've ever had, is it?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe you have to trust your potential visitors to sift through it all.\n\n@slooperbia50068 And what is greater revenge than having your opinion affirmed?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Carl Schmitt--defined politics as the friend/enemy distinction.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe he's wrong. Maybe the sense of powerlessness lingers eve when some power is obtained.\n\n@slooperbia50068 People do carry out acts that seem to fit the definition of \"revenge\"--the Jewish holiday coming in this evening marks such an act--but I suppose you could always say, well *properly,* that wasn't really revenge. It is also not necessarily the case that revenge is contemplated\n\n@slooperbia50068 only when powerless--the mafia are not powerless when they avenge one of their family being killed. Orwell is being liberal here and missing the point that revenge is not first of all a feeling but a ritual and political institution.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Enough, if you channel your desire for vengeance in realizable directions. Sometimes, of course, you've got to let it go.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The feeling is second-of-all; the ritual enactment and political calculation is first of all. The feeling Orwell describes is Nietzschean resentiment.\n\n@slooperbia50068 No.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don’t think so. If the threat is over they move on. Like we would do with a hurricane.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Let me know when you come across it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The question of the day is whether AIs can seek revenge.\n\n@slooperbia50068 What is the front page of AI?\n\n@slooperbia50068 I see. None of that is clear--it is not necessarily revenge and, of course, we can't ask them.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think there are other possible interpretations.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It must be because there is no human nature outside of culture."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2028070810489856236",
      "title": "Bouvard on Iraq War Strategic Necessity Post-9/11",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Mar 01, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2028070810489856236",
      "content": "With the realization of some eminently sane \"dissident right\" figures that the anti-war hysteria is an over-reaction to the Iraq War, might there also be a reassessment of that war? If so, one might begin with the question: given that the first Iraq War was not really concluded,\n\nand that the US had hundreds of thousands of troops in Saudi Arabia enforcing the terms of the ceasefire, what, exactly, should have been done post 9/11, keeping in mind that one of Bin Laden's demands was the withdrawal of US troops from the \"holy land\" of Saudi Arabia? Were\n\nthey to be removed and thereby give Bin Laden a huge W? Just keep sitting there, passively, waiting for likely terror attacks? Or cut the Gordian knot, remove the reason for their presence, and in the process surround Iran from neighboring countries? That the Bush administration\n\ncould never reconcile the conflicting proposals from various government agencies or gather the will to use the opportunity to squeeze the Islamic Republic (which entered the war through proxy militias) raises a whole series of legitimate questions, of course."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2027379951691858195",
      "title": "Bouvard on American Jewish Political Autonomy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 27, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2027379951691858195",
      "content": "Time for American Jews to take stock of resources, power, and possible friends. Other than far-leftist freaks there is no future in the Democrat Party, and the GOP is now clearly signaling they want us out as well. Like Israel, increasing autonomy should be the primary imperative\n\nfor US Jews. I would propose building legal machinery, becoming a people of law, covenant and social order. That might be a minority position but it will bring its own allies--everyone against the mob and the vendetta, which is now the norm in both parties. And if the mob wins\n\nwe'll all have much bigger problems than antisemitism anyway. Follow the model of these little law firms that focus on suing and building cases against terrorists and their sponsors and scale them up to include defamation, incitement, negligence of governments protecting\n\ncriminals, legal defense for legitimate cases of self-defense against criminals so people feell someone has their back. There are very specifically Jewish concerns in there but there's also plenty for all law-abiding citizens. Pull out from the parties and build power elsewhere."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2027017269738447292",
      "title": "Bouvard on GOP 2028 Jewish Disenfranchisement Battle",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 26, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2027017269738447292",
      "content": "There will be a battle for the GOP in 2028 and one axis will be those who wish to disenfranchise Jews and those who see Jews as part of the US. Be ready to frame it in these terms.\n\n@Imperius__13 If so, this fight will help him do that. I think you underestimate the disgust most Americans will feel toward these unhinged attacks on Jews as they become aware of them, but we'll see.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, some donors annd elites will support those trying to impose integralist Catholic governance and disenfranchise Jews but I think more won't. It's much better if that's where things are decided.\n\n@Imperius__13 Right now i'm more interested in how people line up for 2028.\n\nThe endpoint of all the libels need to be framed in these terms--their telos needs to be shown to be disenfranchisement. The habit must be cultivated of bypassing the accusations and cutting right to the endgame. Too much Jewish power? OK, so, what, exactly do you plan to do?\n\n@Imperius__13 The destruction of the network around Carlson, or its exclusion from the Republican Party; the repudiation of along with constant legal pressure on groyperism. I agree with Curt Dolittle here: make lies costly. This is part of the strengthening of sovereignty.\n\n@Imperius__13 Just that phrase.\n\n@Imperius__13 Well, *I* won't really be doing anything other than formulating hypotheses."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2026474846574551227",
      "title": "Bouvard on Antizionism and Antisemitism Legal Distinctions",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 25, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2026474846574551227",
      "content": "This probably won't come up in the SOTU, but this stuff is getting more and more interesting:\n\n@slooperbia50068 I can't say I'm familiar with this particular arrangement or \"genre\" but if the goal is to counter her report (which only gets \"problematic\" in the next to last sentence) in a way that makes other more likely to stay with you I would go for something a bit more allowing for\n\n@slooperbia50068 various preferences (maybe she prefers someone more reserved, etc.)\n\n@slooperbia50068 Well, why is she antizionist?\n\n@slooperbia50068 This guy is arguing from the standpoint of anti-discrimination law and I would agree that there are difficulties with treating antizionism as antisemitism in that context. But those laws, anyway, concern conduct, not belief, and if you block Jewish students from crossing campus\n\n@slooperbia50068 or going to their classes, either way you're discriminating against Jews (actually, the university would be by not ensuring these impediments are removed).\n\n@slooperbia50068 But up until there she's just saying she's repulsed by your \"reactionary\" views which anyone sharing or unbothered by those views would simply disregard.\n\n@slooperbia50068 You don't need a unicorn to divide Jew from Jew, but it may very well be true that a majority of young Jews are antizionist. In my opinion, that just means they're on their way out of Judaism, but that has no legal weight. But I would put it this way: Jews will always be\n\n@slooperbia50068 \"presumptively\" Zionist, which means they will always be expected to disavow it. Such disavowals, though, must satisfy the antizionist \"community,\" for whom no disavowal will ever be enough--every Jew will ultimately be \"tainted\" with Zionism in some way. Antizionist Jews\n\n@slooperbia50068 therefore have to bend over backwards to prove their bona fides, and even that will never be enough. So, yes, in the end, antizionism targets all Jews, including the antizionist ones.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Think about the difference between denying someone's job application because he is Jewish vs. denying it because he is Zionist. The first fits comfortably into existing legal frameworks; the latter much less so, because it's a \"belief\" not a \"characteristic.\"\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes, this is worth trying.\n\n@slooperbia50068 In the end, you're looking for \"customers\" here, aren't you? So, all you can do is present yourself as welcomingly as possible to the kind of people you'd like to welcome. You can't really argue with people about something like this.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It's like a dating site--how do you control people's impressions of you?\n\n@slooperbia50068 There's no tribunal here.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think it would be a hard case to make and not worth pursuing.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think some will agree with your view of the role of alcohol in facilitating social interaction.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Here we're heading into areas where I wouldn't know what to suggest.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Everyone knows to read online reviews skeptically.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Well, OK, a bit of hyperbole there.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Then it's just her word against yours.\n\n@slooperbia50068 This seems like an AirBnB but the owner of the place is there. There must be Terms of Service governing reviews, then, right?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "2026806426996211799",
      "title": "Bouvard on Defamation, Legal Recourse, Groyper Movement",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 25, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2026806426996211799",
      "content": "It's seems that the people being slandered by various iterations of groyperdom are starting to realize their own recourse will be in the courts. It would be very helpful if donors stopped giving money to media figures and politicians pandering to the slanderers and started\n\nsetting up legal machinery to take them out. A good starting point is simply not to donate to anyone associating with people spreading lies that by now are not only defamation but incitement. Don't help elected officials benefit from such predatory activity through their\n\nprotection of and silence regarding bad actors. Shore up the stronger or at least reparable parts of the system, such as the courts and the knowledge banks lawsuits will produce, rather than aiding cynical politicians who hope to collect dividends from the incitement of\n\nTucker Carlson and others. Such politicians will not even be able or willing to keep whatever promises they make to donors. Bad propaganda will chase out any good ideas left in the GOP. Start making lists of politicians who benefit from the media racket organized around Carlson\n\nand the protection of Candace Owens in particular. All the threads will lead to that network. Or politicians who fear them. It might be a very long list, which reinforces the need for a new approach."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2026120764076802456",
      "title": "Bouvard on GOP Collapse After Trump's Leadership",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 24, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2026120764076802456",
      "content": "It would be best to assume that the GOP after Trump will be like TPUSA after Kirk and collapse into a melee of hostile factions, and for the same reason--the attempt to hold incompatible interests in a single group based on a single charismatic leader. Prepare accordingly.\n\n@Imperius__13 He is also still in office but won't be in 3 years and will be consulted but not the final decision maker.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't see that because I don't think it is true. And I don't think it's true because if it were true he would cut ties with Carlson rather than lashing out when people point out his deep ties to him.\n\n@Imperius__13 And yet all his supporters mobilize in support of whatever Carlson's latest stunt is, hysterically attack anyone pointing out the connection, and Vance himself signals his allegiance whenever he gets the chance. Otherwise, yes, he can advance other talking points.\n\n@Imperius__13 He works for Carlson within the administration. These people are not so sophisticated and the operation is transparent. If there's no resistance, people should make plans.\n\n@Imperius__13 You regularly push exactly the same attack lines and criticize Carlson on one side while supporting his inclusion on another.\n\n@Imperius__13 Well, Trump couldn't be dependent upon Carlson, but he does seem oddly solicitous of him. Yes, I'm thinking through everything now. There are many things involved."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2025318311777456563",
      "title": "Bouvard on Carlson's Christian Zionism Strategy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 21, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2025318311777456563",
      "content": "The whole “are they the same Jews” argument is less aimed at Israel’s “right to exist” and more at the Evangelical reason for supporting Israel. In a sense this isn’t even the business of Jews.\n\n@billionsmustliv You give him more credit for having a coherent arc than I do. He knows that Christians are better off in Israel than in other ME countries. He just wants to sow seeds of doubt in Evangelicals. It would surprise me if DNA was their main criterion, but they\n\n@billionsmustliv will have to settle their own theological issues.\n\n@billionsmustliv If Carlson genuinely wanted the interests of Christians to be the criterion he would argue for Israel conquering Lebanon because Christians there would be safer under Israeli rule.\n\n@billionsmustliv Which Israeli occupied territory are you talking about?\n\n@billionsmustliv Why “therefore”?\n\n@billionsmustliv Israel doesn’t govern Bethlehem.\n\n@billionsmustliv Should Israel re-occupy Bethlehem to protect Christians there?\n\n@billionsmustliv He can try to explain why PA governance would be preferable to Israeli\n\n@billionsmustliv Yes, because that's what I take you to be doing so far.\n\n@billionsmustliv I more or less agree with this.\n\n@billionsmustliv I doubt he believes this at this point but, anyway, you seemed to be trying to articulate his position, as you understood it, so I was engaging with that.\n\n@billionsmustliv Nevertheless, if Carlson was really interested in the welfare of Christians he would consider all possibilities. Maybe future polls will show different results.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @billionsmustliv Should be Maronite.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @billionsmustliv He's deliberatly subverting their administration.\n\n@billionsmustliv @slooperbia50068 I don't know this source so I'll wait and see."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2025006780795752789",
      "title": "Bouvard on Jewish Historical Continuity and Identity",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 21, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2025006780795752789",
      "content": "This question of whether today's Jews are the same as ancient Jews or demonstrably descended from Abraham is an especially weird vector of attack designed, I assume, to hit specific points in certain theologies. But why would evangelicals care about the results of DNA tests?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Do you remember how I raised it? I would guess in the context of challenging Gans's ahistorical understanding of Jews and Judaism. But did I ever question the continuity through Jewish history?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Continuity of Jewish community and traditions.\n\n@slooperbia50068 For Gans, what is the difference between Jews of 1000BC, 500 BC, 100AD, 600AD, 1500 AD, etc.--not to mention Iraqi Jews vs. German Jews vs. Sephardic Jews, etc. Would not all this be mere irrelevant details?\n\n@slooperbia50068 No, I mean targeting American Christians, especially evangelicals, supportive of Israel.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Well, that was to be expected.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I'll put it this way: Gans is capable of sentences like \"Jews believe...,\" \"all Jews know...,\" \"Judaism is...,\" and I'm not. Even more, these are by far his preferred sentence type.\n\n@slooperbia50068 To speaking of Jewish texts, Jewish rituals, history, etc. \"Jews discovered monotheism,\" for Gans. This is ahistorical. We can trace, through Jewish texts and practices, novel relations between the divine and humans, for which \"monotheism\" is a sloppy, popularizing label.\n\n@slooperbia50068 For me this all comes back to the legal system--that is *the* institution specifically designed to arrest mimetic contagion. It may be that the juridical requires renovation and innovation.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Extensive systems of self and reciprocal reference.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Transgeneration transmission of traditions means continuity and \"sameness\" even while those traditions are remade. The same texts, studied in at least similar ways, for acouple of thousand years. It was never a problem for Jews from different ethnicities and traditions to marry,\n\n@slooperbia50068 engage in business, study each others' legal and torah commentaries, etc. It's just that there's not one big Jew who is the real Jew behind all the different Jewish communities.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The \"book\" itself is just the ongoing record kept of the covenant--as long as that's continually renewed there is enough sameness.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't understand either but maybe it doesn't need to be understood. It can just be left to be."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2024958378858910091",
      "title": "Bouvard on Tucker Carlson's Incoherence and Power",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 20, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2024958378858910091",
      "content": "If Vance and even Trump can't reject Tucker Carlson not only for the lying scumbag that he is but for the obvious way in which he is subverting their administration, at this point I have to wonder about their self-respect.\n\n@Imperius__13 He just says whatever he thinks will give him some edge in that particular situation. There's no point to trying to reconcile contradictions and see him as a coherent moral person.\n\n@Imperius__13 He'll vote Republican, then? That makes no difference.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't know who knows for sure who his audience is but from estimates I've seen, like Fuentes's, it's surprisingly all over the place.\n\n@Imperius__13 Carlson is still being pampered.\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm not a political operative--on here, I just ended up, among other things, zeroing in on lies about Jews that are part of an anti-Trump op.\n\n@Imperius__13 Sidelining bad actors, saboteurs and liars is what will help (I don't know about save) Trump's presidency.\n\n@Imperius__13 Kick Carlson to the curb, treat the groypers with disdain, and that little problem is solved. Debates about Israel should always be conducted from a national security perspective--it's these obsessives that interfere with that.\n\n@Imperius__13 It's always possible there's stuff going on behind the scenes I don't know of but I work under the assumption that even such machinations will at least ruffle the surface of the scene and leave some marks.\n\n@Imperius__13 Then there will be sure signs of that. Maybe Vance will be his last fan.\n\n@Imperius__13 Cutting Carlson loose and not pandering to groypers would be easy in that case."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2024532621678522794",
      "title": "Bouvard on Carlson's Detention Claims and Political Strategy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 19, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2024532621678522794",
      "content": "I was detained at work today as I waited 1 second for the security guard to see my parking sticker and wave me into the lot.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, it will be interesting; obviously Carlson's tale of \"detention\" is complete and obvious BS.\n\n@Imperius__13 Interesting analysis. I think they lose votes by leaning groyperward; maybe their calculations are different--even the midterms, whatever happens, won't prove anything as each side will spin it. I don't know if the economy is \"better\" or if people think it is.\n\n@Imperius__13 There is no \"footsie\" to be played here. Rufo at least realizes that. (I don't take your numbers seriously.) There should not be a home for a post-cringey (if that's what you want to call it) Carlson to return to. Anyone who lets saboteurs back in are asking for more sabotage.\n\n@Imperius__13 Translation from what to what? I just dismiss people who think they can measure what a gesture to this or that supposed group will add up to in terms of votes.\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm in favor of being vicious toward Carlson and the groypers. Anyone who thinks Republicans want to see their party welcome Nazi larpers has a very weak understanding of American politics.\n\n@Imperius__13 Carlson is media--dumping him would be a good start. The judiciary is a long haul.\n\n@Imperius__13 But then what can the GOP do about it?\n\n@Imperius__13 I think Rufo is finding the right approach, albeit still too tentative and limited. We'll see if he's willing to take on Carlson."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2023879508059984247",
      "title": "Bouvard on Epstein Obsession and Media Credibility",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 17, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2023879508059984247",
      "content": "Michael Tracey's attempts a while back to fact check narratives of WW2 were pointless and pedantic but he's certainly the big winner in the \"Epstein files\" fiasco. People looking for a boomlet in their career from Epstein hysteria will lose a lot of credit.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Scroll back maybe a year and a half and you might find it--but maybe the search engine will help.\n\n@slooperbia50068 He's making all the Epstein obsessives look ridiculous so I assume that is likely to pay off for him in the long run. Even now, it must be satisfying.\n\n@slooperbia50068 To me and anyone who sees things along similar lines.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Ultimately the Epstein thing won't really yield anything--a few die hards will stick with it, others will get bored.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes, Americans will continue to be in favor of age of consent laws and their enforcement.\n\n@slooperbia50068 We've been through this. I have no objection to categorizations like \"human trafficking,\" \"sexual abuse,\" etc., nor to the ways they are mostly defined. It can only be a question of whether accusations are true or false, and what the purpose of false accusations might be.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Kidnapping, false imprisonment, rape and assault are defined, are they not?\n\n@slooperbia50068 These questions can be raised within the framework of the law, and they are precisely the kinds of questions Tracey foregrounded. But if we're talking about minors, it's a different situation.\n\n@slooperbia50068 There will always be resentment but there will also always be some threshold from “minority” to adulthood.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't share your diagnosis.\n\n@slooperbia50068 \"Immaturity\" is not the same as \"innocence\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "2023213768386457731",
      "title": "Bouvard on Antizionism's Logical Endpoint",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 16, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2023213768386457731",
      "content": "The below thread is is very honest and accurate representation of the implications and consequences of antizionism:\n\n@slooperbia50068 He points to some inevitable consequences that I haven't seen pointed to this explicitly and that I myself would hesitated before noting so as not to appear \"paranoid\" or \"hysterical.\"\n\n@shtetlite From me? Not at all--he lays things out very clearly, with no fudging. Obviously at a certain point the existence of Jews would become \"problematic.\" It's best to be aware of this.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Some contemporary theorist of the \"human rights discourse,\" I assume.\n\n@shtetlite And if you mean from him, also certainly not.\n\n@shtetlite He's a completely serious thinker who follows his assumptions to their logical conclusions. He's defending himself against an \"accusation\" of Zionism so he's being especially forceful to \"exonerate\" himself. But he means every word.\n\n@truepeers Very good questions. I'm not inclined to engage him, precisely because the cult of \"Israel genocide\" shuts down all possibilities of exchange--you can see how central it is as a marker of moral acceptability. Everyone wants to out-genocide the others. But it's something to watch.\n\n@truepeers I would recommend following him, especially now--the question of Zionism is becoming central for his cohort. It's partly circling the wagons after he himself was accused of \"Zionism,\" but it also reflects the way all leftism must eventually circle the Palestine drain.\n\n@truepeers Precisely because he is distinctively free of some hallowed leftist traditions and taboos he will dig down especially deeply into Palestine. To abandon that would be to wander in the wilderness.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Hesitation before saying something I think is true but am not sure I can claim convincingly is a very different matter than the threshold at which concern about neighborhood safety is triggered. No, I don't think the belief that the sexual is demonic is widespread.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The first part is pointing out that you are comparing unlike things. There is illicit and licit sex--this is true of many human activities.\n\n@slooperbia50068 How about an ex-con who has been in jail for stabbing someone to death? Should I notify others and advise them to avoid him?\n\n@slooperbia50068 It's easy enough to find out."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2021595570951884834",
      "title": "Bouvard on Anti-Jewish Rhetoric and Political Feasibility",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 11, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2021595570951884834",
      "content": "Instead of \"refuting\" the anti-Jewish trolls maybe it's best to just ask them what they want--which laws passed, which repealed, etc. We will see that any proposal they can formulate will be either banal or preposterous.\n\n@shtetlite I would consider ths banal.\n\n@Imperius__13 See if you can write the law and explain how it gets through Congress, addresses legal challenges, etc.\n\n@Imperius__13 I would say that a 0.000000001% chance falls into the \"preposterous\" category.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, we'd have to be looking at political and social changes so momentous that nobody could map it out now even in a preliminary way. And I think the legal language would have to be drastically revised. (Ultimately, it would have to be emergency measures during a very big war.)\n\n@Imperius__13 Which means the groypers have no \"path\" that they could imagine.\n\n@Imperius__13 They'll need a stringent filter.\n\n@Imperius__13 Maybe the filter is partly who's able to articulate a coherent version of whatever ideology they think they're working with. That might be pretty stringent.\n\n@Imperius__13 Why Scavino in particular?\n\n@Imperius__13 Right I see\n\nSimilarly, the best response to those addressing the question of Israel's \"right to exist\" is to ask them to lay out the plans of the war they plan to wage to destroy it.\n\nPragmatically, that's what questioning Israel's right to exist means--it's just a way of insinuating that the various rights-defending institutions and organizations will be or should be on your side (which already lays out some of the plan).\n\n@slooperbia50068 Paywalled.\n\n@slooperbia50068 If true, that just means the regime has to be taken out.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Work with the new government.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Sure, regardless of what is done.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think probably because these rape gangs did a lot of raping.\n\n@slooperbia50068 What about it?\n\n@slooperbia50068 If they were kidnapping girls, why not?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Ultimately we would have to look into police and court records.\n\n@slooperbia50068 What would it mean to cut some slack here?\n\n@slooperbia50068 From my standpoint, I'm just agreeing or disagreeing with things you say; or, sometimes, saying I don't know.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes, I don't respond to everything. (We all get anomalous followers.)\n\n@slooperbia50068 Thanks. (There are bots roaming the internet landing I don't know where and I don't know why.)"
    },
    {
      "slug": "2018675958547390690",
      "title": "Bouvard on Antisemitism as Counterintelligence Strategy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 03, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2018675958547390690",
      "content": "Early in the Iraq war something called the \"flypaper strategy\" was floated and much ridiculed, even though it made perfect sense: bait the terrorists so they show themselves and you can round them up and kill them. Maybe current antisemitism will work, unintentionally, in a\n\nsimilar way. There must be some threshold beyond which the low-impulse control listener of Owens, Fuentes, Carlson, etc., feels compelled to \"do something\" and become an easily solvable law enforcement problem. There will be property damage, injuries and even occasional deaths,\n\nbut maybe it gets a lot of explosive people off the streets while providing lots of intelligence to various agencies. Whether they are really psyops or not they will likely ultimately function that way. Being told there are demons walking amongst you is bound to set people off.\n\n@slooperbia50068 What are you getting at here?\n\n@slooperbia50068 My sense has been the the Epstein stuff has been a bit of a dud, but it's driving people crazy who were already crazy.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Epstein as Mossad asset.\n\n@slooperbia50068 That's not what people were hoping for, though--or claiming without any evidence."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2018658633404633444",
      "title": "Bouvard on Liberal Democracy Impasse Middle East",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 03, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2018658633404633444",
      "content": "Despite the highly dramatized repudiation of neoconnery across the board the fact that no one can even imagine the Middle East becoming liberal and/or democratic has a paralyzing effect on foreign policy thinking. The success of the neocons is reflected in no one being willing\n\nto say \"he's a bastard, but he's our bastard\"--probably even to each other, in more private discussions. That's because this goes way beyond the neocons--Reagan put his own twist on Carter's use of \"human rights\" in foreign policy, and the whole idea goes back to post-WW 2\n\nreconstruction, which remains a source of nostalgic affirmation of American success. And it's not simple--putting in place some loyal or bought off military dictator never worked that well either. The problem of forms of stable government other than \"liberal democracy\" needs to\n\nbe studied unapologetically, but doing so leaves one open to too many propaganda campaigns. If these unresolved ideological issues don't lie behind Trump's hesitancy regarding finishing up the regime in Iran, I think they certainly do set the limits of the broader discussion."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2018493204404847030",
      "title": "Bouvard on Jewish Education and Genocide Libels",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 03, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2018493204404847030",
      "content": "I see the argument that rather than fighting antisemitism American Jews should focus on strengthening Jewish identity and education. Maybe, but this education needs to foreground the enmity represented by the genocide libel as a peg to hang the study of Jewish knowledge on.\n\n@shtetlite Young Jews need to learn, along with Torah and Talmud, about proportionality in warfare and civilian-combatant ratios--in the context of Jewish thinking about warfare. They need to be taught to dismiss and dismantle lies about them in real time, and to have access to legal and\n\n@shtetlite other resources in doing so. This needs to be framed not in terms of \"everyone is against us\" but, rather, the simply fact that enmity will continue, in ebbs and flows. All this is a way of re-engaging Jewish tradition, not simplistically politicizing it. Maybe Maimonides's\n\n@shtetlite Letter to Yemen needs to be central to the curriculum. And when has Jewish life not been political, not engaged in negotiating power structures. And--young Jews must be set against the left. Only if recourse to law overrides violence can Jews live, and the left destroys law.\n\n@shtetlite It's considered pretty important and offers a very subtle argument for how to live under and accommodate oppressive conditions without surrendering your dignity or the fundamentals of the faith--he gets very clear about where you have to draw the line, even if it costs you.\n\n@shtetlite You can't go wrong with the Rambam\n\n@shtetlite I dont remember whether he has a chapter on not releasing law enforcement and intelligence documents indiscriminately to the general public."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2018136081300959609",
      "title": "Bouvard on Elite Depravity and Public Delusion",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Feb 02, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2018136081300959609",
      "content": "Part of the Epstein discourse is that the elites have lost all trust but I think it's more likely that those in positions of power, the vast majority of whom are not depraved, will look that the lunatic reactions and decide that deluded people most be kept away from power.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Depraved: those engaging in drug fueled orgies, having prostitutes procured for them, etc.; deluded: those believing every crazy item in the Epstein documents.\n\n@slooperbia50068 You can work your way up to Operation Shylock.\n\n@slooperbia50068 No, I'm not going to do that--it's enough that the people involved clearly don't want their doings publicized. I agree with their own implicit judgment of such activities.\n\n@slooperbia50068 And what if it is?\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers I saw your first response.\n\n@truepeers @slooperbia50068 I also only saw two of your replies.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers Yes, I'm sorry about that. Please email me your address again.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers It's a great essay.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @truepeers By all means, carry on."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2016630574371274916",
      "title": "Bouvard on Hazony's Jewish Nationalist Politics",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 28, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2016630574371274916",
      "content": "If you're in Hazony's nationalist camp, you support Trump. Hazony himself seems to think there are no real problems between Jews and non-Jews within the nationalist (Trump) camp. \"Liberal\" Republicans and liberals (Hazony blurs some lines here) are attacking nationalists as\n\nliberals, who are therefore not interested in building bridges with their political opponents. (Leave aside whether Mark Levin, Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro have, in fact, attacked \"nationalists,\" rather than the \"alt-right.\") Jews outside of the nationalist camp (most of them,\n\nobviously) also have no interest in building bridges with nationalists. Withing the nationalist camp there seems to be no need to build bridges, then, unless Jews in the nationalist (Trump) camp have been accusing other nationalists of antisemitism. But then it's a question of\n\nwhether the accusations are accurate--presumably, if they are, then the person accused is \"alt-right\" rather than \"nationalist.\" If there's a real question here it's what counts as \"antisemitism,\" if that's going to be the issue (rather than, say, subverting Trump, which the\n\n\"alt-right\" does systemically). But, again, no bridges need to be built within the nationalist camp--all those supporting Trump are working together (otherwise they're not supporting Trump). So, what is Hazony getting at? I'm guessing this comes down to the Carlson-Vance\n\nconnection, and Hazony wants to join those attacking anyone highlighting this connection and tracing its implications for Vance's statements and acts. A lot has been staked on Vance, so there's a lot to lose."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2015787580374032529",
      "title": "Bouvard on Trump's Incoherent Sovereignty Legacy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 26, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2015787580374032529",
      "content": "Have those business interests who will benefit from a permanent version of Trump's tariff regime organized themselves in such a way as to lobby for their maintenance? Have any labor associations been organized to do likewise regarding his immigration policies?\n\nIf that were to be done we would then have new think tanks dedicated to codifying Trump's novel approach to sovereignty. And that is what's still missing--Trump has a very coherent and original understanding of sovereignty but as far as I know no one has tied it all together.\n\nAnd without that, once Trump is gone, there will be no \"Trump Republicans\" in the way that we still have \"Reagan Republicans\" almost 40 years later. It will just be factions fighting incoherently over ways of owning the \"boomercons,\" \"Con Inc,\" the \"Uniparty,\" etc.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes, why not? He's been thinking about. this for decades, and once you step outside of ossified thought systems possibilities present themselves.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Very few, the way things are looking."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2014875819592523998",
      "title": "Bouvard on Groyper Movement's Jewish Conversion Agenda",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 24, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2014875819592523998",
      "content": "I see a new memo going out on the groyper laundering right: we need to have a conversation about why Jews don't convert to Christianity. It'll be interesting to see how they go about this, which is to say what kind of material they will provide to be used by the left.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 Jose Faur's The Gospel According to the Jews has an interesting perspective on this.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 I have no trouble saying otherwise. You fight with a cop and end up dead, it's on you. No matter how many times it happens.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 I don't even think it's a big deal. Don't physically confront cops--it's a simple rule. These people tell themselves that they're white and privileged and therefore invulnerable but for that very reason they have to put themselves on the line, etc. These delusions must be ended.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 I don't know, nor do I care. It's not for me to pretend to micro-manage every decision made by law enforcement. In the end, these rioters need to held responsible as well. Do not interfere with police officers carrying out their lawful duties. If you do, all bets are off.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 I don't imply that, I straight out say it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 At a certain point these middle class leftists need to decide whether they have something to live for that they vlaue more than trying to prevent illegal aliens from being deported.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 At least the protestors in Iran know they are risking their lives. I think more efficient methods can be found to remove illegals and neutralize rioters, but until then I don't want to see a single ICE officer injured, much less killed, in the line of duty.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 Whether other methods might explored and whom to defend as long as this method is being employed are two separate questions.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 Better would be going after bank accounts, landlords, employers, and social services but maybe that's not as easy as it sounds. That was Romney's \"self-deportation\" idea and even though everyone laughed at him it was a good one.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 Or maybe it's just not distributed optimally."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2014835371264155742",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance's Anti-Semitic Attack Patterns",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 23, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2014835371264155742",
      "content": "Another bizarre post from Vance (nothing can beat the \"scumbag\" post, of course): Loomer, posting here as a political consultant rather than the usual muckraking, suggests downplaying abortion for the midterms. I don't know if she's right,\n\nbut this is a very strange post to single out as \"attacking the administration\" and being \"divisive.\" Almost as if there's timer alerting him to when he should attack a Jewish woman journalist.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Do you find that to be an especially Trumpian phrase?\n\nDoes Vance (or whoever writes these posts) think he's being subtle; or, on the contrary, blatant, in a kind of passive-aggressive way?\n\n@slooperbia50068 He likes reiteration, performed emphatically.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It's paywalled, but I agree with the title. I don't know what the Board of Peace is for but it has nothing to do with Gaza, except maybe as a pretext for money flows I don't pretend to understand.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Not sure I get this, but I don't want patricians so I wouldn't be interested in the question.\n\n@slooperbia50068 How many patricians are rolled up...\n\n@slooperbia50068 No.\n\n@Imperius__13 She's spurned by those who don't like her spurning Vance.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, that's her approach and it's the right one."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2013738337043886280",
      "title": "Bouvard on Carlson's Anti-Israel GOP Narrative",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 20, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2013738337043886280",
      "content": "Proposing that Iran be allowed to have (be given?) a nuclear weapon is especially bizarre now, so Tucker Carlson can't be making a real proposal. He's simply maintaining the web of commonplaces and narratives that reinforce the anti-Israel first faction in the GOP.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Why \"without\"?\n\n@slooperbia50068 I suppose we’re understanding “devilish” in different ways.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Devil-like.\n\n@slooperbia50068 OK, I'll grant he's too clownish for that.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I'm missing something here.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Good luck, I suppose.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe you can guess at why.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It depends on how important the question is, and how much I have to say about it. There's a wide range.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Comvince the other of its importance or change tack, maybe coming back to the original point after framing its importance in a new way.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I'm not sure this is what you're getting at but I think the Epstein fixation has been relegated to a side issue, with only some fairly marginal figures treating it as the key to everything.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think it's mostly played out. It's now a fringe issue.\n\n@slooperbia50068 We've been through this.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Accounts that are straightforwardly pro-Trump were recently posting an interview with Michael Tracey, who is extremely dismissive of the entire affair. They see there's nothing to it and it just sabotages Trump.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I think it will. There are so many things going on. There will be some hard-core Epstein obsessives, but I don't think they'll have any effect. Thomas Massie is getting ridiculed and scorned for his singleminded focus on it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 You're exaggerating but also leaving out its main attraction to certain conspiracy theorists--the assertion that Epstein was working for Mossad to blackmail and control American politicians on behalf of Israel.\n\n@slooperbia50068 There has always been an internal critique of that prurience, issuing occasionally in bouts of libertinism and sex cults.\n\n@slooperbia50068 The underage component is important because it raises the specter of blackmail more effectively but, strictly speaking, honeypots can be of any age.\n\n@slooperbia50068 That might be the preference because it enhances the scandal.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Yes, Puritanism has always been a very strong, maybe dominant strain in American culture. A critique of it would have to propose a different way of articulating sexual relations in such a way as to fit the rest of the culture. It's hard to \"plan\" something like that.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't know. Probably, since most spy agencies probably do so. I know that's how they caught Vanunu, but that didn't have anything to do with blackmail.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Sounds fine to me.\n\n@slooperbia50068 You shape the legal order, but that's a long, arduous and uncertain process.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Fantasy may be harmless but one could say it merely complements prurience or repression.\n\n@slooperbia50068 CH?\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't think in those (Freudian) terms myself.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Many people seem to share such feelings--these things are enormously popular.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It's a project.\n\n@slooperbia50068 As much as possible because \"our loins\" lead each of us in different direction and a political focus needs to filter that out."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2013241892662595774",
      "title": "Bouvard on Gaza's Board of Peace Governance",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 19, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2013241892662595774",
      "content": "\"The Board of Peace will play an essential role in fulfilling all 20 points of the President’s plan, providing strategic oversight, mobilizing international resources, and ensuring accountability as Gaza transitions from conflict to peace and development.\"\n\nEach ... Board member will oversee a defined portfolio critical to Gaza’s stabilization and long-term success, including, but not limited to, governance capacity-building, regional relations, reconstruction, investment attraction, large-scale funding, and capital mobilization.\n\nNone of this suggests that the \"Board\" will be responsible for anything on the ground in Gaza, and it all assumes that Hamas is disarmed and Gaza is being governed by someone else. So I'm going to assume that the stated purpose of the BoP is not its real purpose.\n\nAnd if I have to guess at its real purpose, it's some kind of reshuffling of global elites, PR and quite a bit of patronage, which is to say, money laundering. This is certainly not something built to last.\n\nOf course the \"patronage\" might be a way of paying off the Gulf States and Turkey in exchange for not objecting to demolishing the Islamic Republic. We'll see if that explanation retains plausibility."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2012169533058896218",
      "title": "Bouvard on Anti-Jewish Rhetoric and Israel Criticism",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 16, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2012169533058896218",
      "content": "The strategy of flooding the zone with wild accusations against Jews and then accusing Jews of being obsessed with Israel when they point this out seems to have been an effective one, but only in the short term. In the end, accusing Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and others of being\n\nsolely concerned with Israel even though references to Israel constitutes a very small portion of their content comes up against realities anyone can examine for themselves. The same with calling Jews bloodsuckers, or whatever, and then complaining that you're not allowed to\n\n\"criticize Israel.\" The success of this strategy depended on free-riding leftist lies about Israeli conduct in Gaza, but now that's pretty much over so what's left? Stupid Nazi and old European stuff and... Jews burning down Argentina to create new ethnostates. But a lot of this\n\nstuff is still lying around, fairly close to some prominent political figures, no doubt archived and ready for strategically determined use. Only those who can prioritize civilizational questions over score settling with Jews will survive the necessary filtering because they will\n\nbe the only ones with workable models of reality. If you look closely at what is attributed (accurately or not I can't tell) to based, antisemitic Zoomers it is always the worst slop that will dissolve upon any contact with real decision making. There are incentives for pandering\n\nto this stuff but anyone thinking in terms of long-term power dynamics will have to resist, correct and redirect it if anything of Trump's project is to endure.\n\n@Imperius__13 35% of Levin’s content on his radio show over the last 20 years has been Israel?\n\n@Imperius__13 “Obsession” with Israel would obviously have increased since 10/7/23 so to make the case to my satisfaction we’d have to go back much further.\n\n@Imperius__13 But you said the past few years.\n\n@Imperius__13 Then it seems to me there is nothing approaching \"obsession\" pre-Oct. 7.\n\n@Imperius__13 My point is that saying someone is \"obsessed\" with Israel because they've spoken about it a lot more since Oct. 7 is like saying someone is obsessed with Germany because they spoke about it a lot between 1942-1945. It's obviously baiting.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, and the beginning of this exchange was me pointing out how disingenuous it was for Carlson, Kelly, etc., to charge Levin/Shapiro with caring only about Israel, etc. They took the post-Oct. 7 situation and the follow-up attacks coming from their own side as the base.\n\n@Imperius__13 She's the one I'm primarily referring to. She explicitly said that she came to realize that for some people (referring specifically to Levin and Shapiro) everything revolves around Israel. This was a smear.\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm not involved in forming alliances, placating people, etc. Megyn Kelly will never know of anything I say about her. So, I just say what I see and think. But acting emotionally was not wise on her part, I think."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2011114585559122283",
      "title": "Bouvard on Layered Identity and Political Belonging",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 13, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2011114585559122283",
      "content": "Days of reckoning and retribution across the board.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I see a lot of variation in his public performances.\n\n@slooperbia50068 One of us.\n\n@slooperbia50068 So, he was identifying you and not declaring himself?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Well, then he's one of us.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't know who TroopAErs is, but sure.\n\n@slooperbia50068 BSI?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Oh. Well, that doesn't preclude the possibility of us's and thems at various levels.\n\n@slooperbia50068 If there's a stack, there must be layers or levels.\n\n@slooperbia50068 PSC?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Layers are not temporal.\n\n@slooperbia50068 A election is a level, and that always involves some kind of us vs. them.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Bratton's book provides a series of layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User.\n\n@slooperbia50068 It doesn't follow it, but a layer, or part of it, can be organized in terms of oppositions.\n\n@slooperbia50068 But PSC isn't a layer--it's the Stack, comprised of layers.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I'd say it's organized by the layer as well as organizing the layer. Politics--the \"City\" layer, I suppose--relies upon oppositions. You could say it's a way of laying out and testing options produced at other levels.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Those who want to increase the interoperability of the layers.\n\n@slooperbia50068 Seems fine to me\n\n@slooperbia50068 I would say yes, but mediated through the other layers.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I don't know if the personal is being extended so much as being embedded.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I'd say we're all embedded in the Cloud layer (but those layers can change and I think Bratton added one recently--don't remember what is was). Cloud seems to me the highest.\n\n@slooperbia50068 They're interested in assets and data and assetizing data.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I take no responsibility for that.\n\n@slooperbia50068 You have a substack?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Maybe resentment is a dispute over debt.\n\n@slooperbia50068 I'm looking forward to it.\n\n@slooperbia50068 He's out here--under his own name and as the center study account. And doing much else of value as well.\nWhat do you mean by semi interrogator?\n\n@slooperbia50068 Top\n\n@slooperbia50068 I haven’t seen him post in a long time."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2009322960478457864",
      "title": "Bouvard on Megyn Kelly's Dishonest Grievance Rhetoric",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 08, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2009322960478457864",
      "content": "Megyn Kelly has made Mark Levin seem cool, calm and composed by comparison.\n\n@Imperius__13 I had the below in mind:\n\n@Imperius__13 Megyn Kelly is screeching about someone quoting her on her admiration for Nick Fuentes. She is obviously lying here about what she \"was speaking about\"--unless you believe it is Fuentes's \"points about the gov't\" that especially attract young white men.\n\n@Imperius__13 Which grievances of young men does she refer to?\n\n@Imperius__13 So, you're assuming that's what she's doing. No thanks. I'll consider \"You're a pathetic misinformation whore\" and \"Fuck you & your lies\" to be \"screeching,\" especially since, as is invariably the case with these people, no lies or misinformation has been cited.\n\n@Imperius__13 What was dishonest in it?\n\n@Imperius__13 There is no chance I would listen to these people talk for an hour or, really, even fifteen minutes. Nor am I obliged to do so. If someone can point to an illuminating context for what they say in these snippets, let them. I never see it, though.\n\n@Imperius__13 Nor does the poster she's responding to say she does. He points to a rather prominent (indeed, defining) point Fuentes makes \"about our country\" and reasonably wonders whether Kelly thinks there's \"value to be derived from that.\" Nothing dishonest at all.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't know how much influence I have and I don't chart its fluctuations. If agreeing that someone was dishonest when he wasn't increases my influence I'll do without it, or at least that vector. You shift topics constantly when you can't answer questions. Have you noticed?\n\n@Imperius__13 I just did a couple of posts back: how was the poster Kelly was referring to dishonest? I pointed out that he wasn't and then the issue became my grumpiness and influence.\n\n@Imperius__13 She said Fuentes was brilliant and had some good ideas while the idea he is best and most justifiably known for is that Jews control the US. In her hysterical response to him she doesn't quite disavow that \"idea\"--she just says she wasn't talking about that idea but... which?\n\n@Imperius__13 And this in the course of a discussion where she also wants to insist on her right to ask whether Israel killed Charlie Kirk. Right to ask, but not responsibility to try to answer--these are not people deserving \"due diligence.\" I don't have to listen to hours of this swill.\n\n@Imperius__13 And, by the way, she has a lot of her own interesting ideas about Jews here as well, so maybe her admiration for Fuentes is not about how he expresses \"grievances\" (like affordability, or whatever, presumably).\n\n@Imperius__13 But feel free to listen to the whole thing yourself and tell me how I've been unfair or misguided.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, Fuentes is known for his opinions on the budget process and the filibuster. Enough of this.\n\n@Imperius__13 Enough."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2009278620628304012",
      "title": "Bouvard on Right-Wing Defensive Hardening and Its Costs",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 08, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2009278620628304012",
      "content": "It may be that the rewiring of the right has gone haywire. What we see in, e.g., Megyn Kelly's defiance of attempts to morally pressure her derives from a kind of necessary \"hardening of the heart\" or developing of a kind if immunity to leftist blackmail. You have to be able to\n\nsay \"I don't care if I'm racist/sexist/homophobic...; I don't care if someone got killed I'm going to examine the conditions under which he was killed, etc.\" But once that rewiring has been done, it becomes a kind of automated reaction to any questions and you become\n\nresistant to questions you do need to take up: is a particular claim true? Plausible? Genuinely worth pursuing? By which criteria do we tell? Instead, you lock out precisely those people asking those questions because it messes with your rewiring. This just turns you into a\n\npermanent troll, intrinsically hostile to constructing the kind of model of the world needed to contribute to governance. Anyone insisting you develop or rely on such a model of the world is just trying to force you into some propaganda model. The closest thing to an idea you can\n\nhave is something like \"War is bad for children and other living things.\" It will be a serious problem if the administration doesn't completely repudiate this entire cesspool. Again, it can just put out the same kinds of posts it does in response to some MSM BS. Since it does\n\nthat already it can now look like it's favoring these other media outlets. For Trump himself, it may not matter; for Trump succession it matters a lot.\n\nI might as well also point out that the \"all deaths are equally bad and we can pin the culpability for them on anyone we dislike\" is identical to the kind of concern trolling that the right wing \"rewiring\" was supposed to create resistance to in the first place."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2009274986180026867",
      "title": "Bouvard on Gaza Discourse and Critical Collapse",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 08, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2009274986180026867",
      "content": "There are now people who cannot assess Islam becuae they are haunted by the possibility that somehow, somewhere along the line, Israel has infiltrated their thinking on it.\n\nAnd there are also people who are unable or refuse to distinguish between the various ways military and police action can cause death. It's all \"murder\" or \"genocide\"  because, apparently, it can all be traced back to someone's action.\n\nAll this is due to the indulgence of Free Palestine, which requires abandoning all critical canons of judging the responsibilities of militaries at war. Asking about things like combatant/civilian death ratio or actions taken to minimize civilian casualties would have interfered.\n\nAll this, far more than anything as simple as \"antisemitism,\" is what Carlson is injecting into the system. It's a way of thinking designed and operating so as to directly subvert all of the administration's intiatives and priorities. If \"Fake News\" from, e.g., NBC, can be\n\ncountered, so can this. And Vance would be the ideal person to do so."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2008977071075414131",
      "title": "Bouvard on Left's Desperation Against Trump",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 07, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2008977071075414131",
      "content": "Maybe someone had to get killed trying to run over an ICE agent. How else would they know it isn't a game?\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't understand the question.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 It sounds like an alarm.\n\n@Imperius__13 @slooperbia50068 You can't get more basic than don't try to run over cops.\n\n@Imperius__13 @slooperbia50068 It's really just a question of what Walz and the Democrats want to try and make of it.\n\n@Imperius__13 @slooperbia50068 I can't believe this will be a particularly tough case for them. I just wonder if other blue states will try to join in.\n\n@Imperius__13 @slooperbia50068 This is leftist desperation. They don't have another playbook than \"resist Trump fascism.\"\n\n@Imperius__13 @slooperbia50068 I don't think they'll get anything near George Floyd crowds for a 37 year old white lesbian. But they can make a bit of trouble.\n\n@Imperius__13 @slooperbia50068 You've steelmanned it enough.\n\n@Imperius__13 @slooperbia50068 Yes online sites are very efficient and immersive propaganda delivery systems.\n\n@Imperius__13 @slooperbia50068 Yes that was all very online. \"Shame, shame!\" Etc. It's also a kind of protest subculture.\n\n@Imperius__13 @slooperbia50068 I don't think this will be a big deal but it's an oportunity for the administration to strategically escalate--maybe arrest Frey, even Walz, some organizers, etc.\n\n@slooperbia50068 @Imperius__13 She was heading towards him in the car."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2008881753830883386",
      "title": "Bouvard on Iranian Regime Change and Regional Order",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 07, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2008881753830883386",
      "content": "Overthrow the Islamic Republic and you cripple all the networks, left and right, across the world and in the US, created and maintained so as to produce apologetics for the Islamic Republic, which requires subversion across the board. Many things get better quickly. Economical.\n\n@var_angian What?\n\n@var_angian Everyone will always be pushing but a new regime in Iran would clear the board and call for reassessment. It depends on the new regime, for one thing.\n\n@var_angian I think regime change in Iran should lead to the ordering of the region through the new, presumably Western-friendly, regime, Israel and the Saudis. And maybe Egypt if they become more functional.\n\n@Imperius__13 @var_angian The Accords don't matter much. The Saudis are balking, which is fine--they want language on the Palestinians which is not forthcoming. I don't see the problem, once a stable Iranian regime is established. That will contain the MB and terrorism. Turkish influence can be minimized.\n\n@var_angian I think we have reason to hope it will be done in weeks, maybe months.\n\n@var_angian No one can know for sure but we may be getting close to the tipping point."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2008646868583239931",
      "title": "Bouvard on Confronting Vance's Antisemitism Evasions",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 06, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2008646868583239931",
      "content": "It's silly to ask JD Vance whether he thinks antisemitism has a place in the conservative movement. Just make up a list of Tucker Carlson's 10 wildest accusations against Jews and Israel (including those left unchallenged in interviews) and ask if he agrees. You'd get your answer\n\n@truepeers Even saying \"no\" enough times would commit him to acknowledging that Carlson is full of shit. And there could then be follow ups (including, in other fora, from angry Carlson fans whom he would then have to confront).\n\n@truepeers I doubt very much he'd want to go in that direction but it would certainly be revealing if he did. One way or another it's bound to be clarifying.\n\n@Imperius__13 Such an approach would be helpfully revealing as well.\n\n@Imperius__13 Somewhere in between what and what? I don't know what he thinks. I don't know how much he has thought. What I know is that he has opened the door by finding it incomprehensible that anyone might consider Carlson to not be an integral part of contemporary conservativism.\n\n@Imperius__13 Carlson is a sinister clown and I don't have to try and figure him out. Vance is what matters now because he's an extremely important player.\n\n@Imperius__13 If none of this matters it should also be of no consequence for Vance to say something like, \"yea, I don't know what happened to Tucker, but he's not the man I I thought I knew,\" etc. And then go on to talk about economics, etc. But I suspect he will be quite resistant to that.\n\n@Imperius__13 This seems to me a different question. Assuming Trump is successful, the GOP candidate will run on continuity and amplification. If Vance is linked to a faction of the party that has been carping and subverting Trump that becomes harder.\n\n@Imperius__13 Then it does, in fact, matter.\n\n@Imperius__13 And other people will receive contrary private assurances. I don't think we're dealing with idiots here.\n\n@Imperius__13 Rubio seems committed, but I don't know why you assume Ackman and Co. will be reassured.\n\n@Imperius__13 I've never said anything about what's in his head--only what he commits to publicly.\n\n@Imperius__13 He may already be doing so by signaling support for those seeking to undermine Trump's Israel and ME policy.\n\n@Imperius__13 Carlson may be an isolationist, but no one would object to or even notice that. He's trying to inject Father Coughlin/Henry Ford style anti-Jewish politics into the Republican Party. People will want to know if Vance thinks it belongs there.\n\n@Imperius__13 Ackman will certainly be worth following here. Keep in mind that Carlson has made a point of attacking him in particular, in an especially arbitrary and imbecilic way. And, of course, Owens dragged him into her conspiracy theories, which Carslon seems fine with.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't need assurance on such things. Someone like Carlson is held in reserve--he doesn't need to be a part of policy discussions. He and the anti-Israel first faction is a whip hand or attack dog, one Vance seems fine with keeping available. He will be asked about these things.\n\n@Imperius__13 He's deliberately suggesting that a Jewish financier is a \"parasite,\" which, of course, is not a particularly original allegation. There's no way around this stuff. Vance will end up addressing or being addressed by it one way or another.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, there will be a fuller delineation.\n\n@Imperius__13 This is a minor consideration, at best. Yes, he'd attack Cruz as \"Israel-first\" and then there might be a series of questions for Vance. But it will come one way or another.\n\n@Imperius__13 It seems he doesn't have, and perhaps doesn't want, such strategists.\n\n@Imperius__13 The anti-Israel first stuff will play out, in the primaries, in the general, and in governance, if it comes to that. Vance will be asked these questions point blank and coherently at some point.\n\n@Imperius__13 Carlson is the head groyper, so that will be tied together. I don't know you think \"yes, we've got Nazis getting out the vote for us\" is going to help.\n\n@Imperius__13 You're missing something here and I won't be able to make you see it. So we'll leave it here."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2008542688539537919",
      "title": "Bouvard on Right-Wing Zoomer Character Construction",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 06, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2008542688539537919",
      "content": "A particular profile of the right-wing Zoomer has been carefully constructed and zealously defended--it's precise relation to reality I can't say, but the profile itself is worth examining. Not, though, in its idealized promotional form as the clear-eyed, red-pilled destroyer\n\nof narcissistic Boomer narratives but, rather, as a composition out of a tissue of new and reworked narratives over the past decade or so. One will find a character, comprised of selective history takes, accelerated memes, comic bits, dramatized traumas, pretend war-gaming, etc.\n\nIt's worth thinking about this now because this character is currently moving \"above ground\" and is going to confront reality in the form of trying to run election campaigns, influence people in power in various ways, create new media enterprises, etc. Something new will come\n\nfrom this confrontation. Maybe several new things at odds with each other. But an analytic, \"semiotic\" approach should be included among other responses to the \"based Zoomer\" phenomenon."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2007640139988906432",
      "title": "Bouvard on Anti-Israel Reflex and Credibility",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 04, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2007640139988906432",
      "content": "That the anti-Israel Firsters want to blame the Venezuelan operation on Israel represents a kind of watershed. It's completely ridiculous, and no attempt at an explanation is made--just assertion. It shows that what we have here is an automated reflex, a tic, that needs no\n\nreferent. This means it has always been nothing but that, well before it became obvious. This should make it easy to simply disregard the reflex--there can be no learning, and more and more people will find it comical. It's good that they've exposed themselves so quickly, and it\n\nbe good and easy to remember anyone who ever gave them a hearing. In short, just finish up the Iranian regime, ignoring the groypers, who are lost and irrelevant--yes, finishing with the regime does, in fact, help Israel, but now it's easier to say \"So what?\" There are signs that\n\nTrump has shut out Carlson and marginalized those in the administration who give him a hearing--that will bear watching, but makes sense. Why in the world would Trump want to allow the influence of those who constantly and mindlessly trashing his initiatives and administration?\n\nThe same, of course, is true of the attempts to \"blame\" Israel for the exposure of the Somali fraud networks in MN. The sign of a disordered mind but, less psychologistically, a desperate political faction.\n\n@truepeers Correct."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2007520713754784203",
      "title": "Bouvard on Sovereignty and Anti-War Rhetoric",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 03, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2007520713754784203",
      "content": "All those (former?) Trump supporters who though he promised \"no more wars\" cannot possibly have heard what they think they heard. No sovereign could ever promise he will not go to war, and he would be stupid to do so because that would be the best way to guarantee lots of war.\n\nThe convergence of right wing with left wing vilification of the Iraq War as the MOST DISASTROUS FOREIGN POLICY DECISION EVER MADE was so successful that wiped out, along with any vestige of memories of how deposing Saddam Hussein came to seem worth considering, vast swathes\n\nof basic understanding of the world, why there are wars, how power is exercised, etc. It turned a large part of the population into NPCs perpetually muttering \"no more endless wars.\" Trump just opposed the kind of wars that involved open-ended commitments with uncertain outcomes\n\nand no clear benefits--rather than, say, wars where you kill or capture an enemy, ensure a sufficiently friendly (or chastened) regime, procure the material benefits that made the place relevant in the first place, and then move on. Those kinds of wars may turn out not to be so\n\nsimple themselves, but things can always go wrong--the less invested you are the less it matters. We might be getting a picture of how Trump might have dealt with Saddam Hussein--take him out, find a general we could work with, make an oil deal, move on. You can learn from this\n\nor whine endlessly about being betrayed when you were only betrayed by your own delusions and maybe. propaganda pumped into the system for decades (all the \"right wing\" critiques of Iraq are downstream of The Nation editorials from 2004)."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2007232637912658366",
      "title": "Bouvard on Greenwald's Hyperbolic Israel Rhetoric",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 02, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2007232637912658366",
      "content": "Of course Glenn Greenwald has always been completely anti-Israel and therefore believed pro-Israel forces exercised \"undue\" power in the US but has he always explicitly referred to the US as Israel's \"colony\" and Netanyahu as the president's \"boss\" like he's doing now. This stuff\n\nis fine for internet bottom feeders but Greenwald still does want to be taken seriously as a journalist, doesn't he? Or are more journalists speaking in this hyperbolic way as if describing things literally? Is he just extremely frustrated because they thought they had Israel on\n\nthe run but things, in fact, seemed to have to turned out fairly well--and, if the Islamic Republic falls, extremely well--for Israel. If it is just lashing out that's a good sign, and I hope for more invitations to Mar-a-Lago for the Netanyahus. Maybe they're on the run.\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, there's quite a bit off about him. Even that episode was in part some attempt to accuse Israel of trying to blackmail him."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2006899253730558436",
      "title": "Bouvard on Language, Ideology, and Authenticity",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Jan 02, 2026",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2006899253730558436",
      "content": "\"the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism\" is a very strange phrase. \"Frigidity\" is especially bizarre, since it's not used to mean \"cold\" or \"frozen.\" \"Chill\" might have worked here. Someone wanted a noun from \"frigid\" and didn't know the meaning\n\nof \"frigidity.\" Why \"rugged\" with \"individualism,\" when there's no corresponding adjective with \"collectivism\"?An Ai wouldn't produce this text but someoner familiar with ways of parodying traditional notions of individualism would have--\"rugged\" invokes the easily ridiculed\n\n\"Marlboro Man\" stereotype. I wonder if they also couldn't find an adjective that wouldn't make \"collectivism\" sound creepier (\"comforting\"? \"embracing\"?) or bureaucratic, so they just settled with the stylistic imbalance. And there must have been a demand for \"collectivism,\"\n\nbecause someone must have known how many alarm bells that would set off. For some faction, a more anondyne word like \"community\" wouldn't have been \"forceful\" enough. What a strange time this will be in NYC.\n\n@truepeers No I think it’s someone who didn’t know what “frigidity” meant and started with “frigid.” I don’t think a leftist would want to code “rugged individualism” as female, or use an outdated “sexist” term for women’s sexual dysfunction.\n\nA good proving ground for new legal strategies.\n\nAnd \"warmth\" goes much better with \"community\" than wtih \"collectivism,\" which always has a rather hard, technical edge to it, even when used positively.\n\n@truepeers But then \"rugged individualism\" would have to be good--otherwise \"frigidity\" still preserves its meaning of unresponsiveness. For it to be \"reclaimed\" it would have to be a \"we're frigid and we're proud\" type of thing.\n\n@truepeers Then they'd just go with \"impotence\" (which hits much harder)--but then that doesn't match \"warmth,\" so... yeah, it's too convoluted at this point."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2006477242805968984",
      "title": "Bouvard on Tucker Carlson's Anti-Semitic Opportunism",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 31, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2006477242805968984",
      "content": "Really, anyone who claims not to have been able to see who Tucker Carlson was after he lambasted Ben Shapiro for being shaken by the 10/7 massacre in Israel is devoid of either discernment or honesty.\n\n@Imperius__13 Why don’t you read what I said and do a search for that?\n\n@Imperius__13 But I do want to take issue here with your claim to know what I know. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Carlson is capable of mocking 10/7 victims and much worse if it advances his financial and political aims.  He did, in fact, follow up on the attack to open his assault on Jews.\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm also becoming, after a very long time, much less tolerant of speculations about my intentions beyond those which I have been completely and repeatedly explicit about. That it seems to have been left largely (if by no means exclusively) to Jews on the right to be minimally\n\n@Imperius__13 honest about about Carlson, Kelly, Posobiec and, for that matter, Vance, might not speak primarily about those Jews. No, Carlson probably wouldn't contract a murder but he has no problem with spreading lies that serve as incitement for lots of killing.\n\n@Imperius__13 Trump represents a remaking of US sovereignty, not vehicle to piggy back a War on Jewry onto; in fact the two things are exact opposites, so the latter requires persistent subversion of the former. I've been as clear and precise about this, repeatedly, as I can imagine being.\n\n@Imperius__13 I also don't think it will ever be ascendant but I do think it can sink the Trump program.\n\n@Imperius__13 But that's not what I just said.\n\n@Imperius__13 Any political program can be sinked. Nothing happens by itself.\n\n@Imperius__13 I control what I do with them--or, if I don't, I don't have anything like a \"program.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "2006469387658866803",
      "title": "Bouvard on Right-Wing Grifters and Bad Faith",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 31, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2006469387658866803",
      "content": "You should assume there's something \"off\" about those people the last couple of years telling you \"it's not cool to talk about Tucker\"; \"read the room bro\"; \"don't be divisive\"; \"don't alienate allies like Megyn\", etc., etc. Best not to trust them.\n\nAlso, I would suggest staying far away from people who interject little promises to settle scores with Jews in the midst of the massive undertakings of this administration. They want to exploit frustration for their own ends.\n\nAnother little piece of unsolicited advice: be highly skeptical of the based Zoomer whisperers. The \"you all know what's coming\" and related Zoomerisms are hype and marketing for podcasters. At least suspend judgment till we've seen a few more of their scammy candidates and\n\nbizarro left info ops. And I think VP Vance should be expected to make a bit of an effort to extricate himself from this cesspool. Oh, and the Vance inevitablity campaign is also an op. A lot of things can happen. The best post-Trump allocation of resources is TBD.\n\n@Imperius__13 So, now he is a particular \"kind of person\" but it doesn't matter? Why do you bother to defend him, then? Why not discuss something more important?\n\n@Imperius__13 A complete deflection. All i say is no one knows. I've seen too many\"inevitables\" not even make it into the primaries to take such hype seriously.\n\n@Imperius__13 I thought we were still on Carlson. Anyway, I'm interested in \"the making of the president.\" This is part of the campaign. I may not be willing to explain such things many more times.\n\n@Imperius__13 Since i'm not betting I feel no need to enter this discussion. Everything you say can be easily reversed in the next 2 years and I don't feel a need to lay out all the ways that might happen. Anyway, nothing I say depends on him not winning, just on rejecting hype.\n\n@Imperius__13 Because I'm getting more \"finalistic\" about what I've come to see an an extremely pernicious and subversive faction on the right and I'd like to contribute whatever I can to helping combat and eliminate it.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't see what evil I can commit in exposing attempts to divert MAGA into a War on Jewry. There's probably not much I can do to stop it, but I don't know in advance how much I might or might not do."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2003644556169085294",
      "title": "Bouvard on Israel's False Equivalence Trap",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 24, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2003644556169085294",
      "content": "Cernovich is intesting when he talks about Israel. He's often trying to broker a deal between pro and anti (right wing anti, presumably), but the pieces never come together because this simply isn't the right way to think about it. Today he called for eliminating the double\n\nstandard with regard to judging Israel's war fighing actions, in exchange for removing the double standard whereby Israel can have an \"ethno-state\" (a term seemingly invented to describe Israel) but the Western countries can't. But Israel has no power over how ethno-state-like\n\nany European country is, nor could it prevent any country from simply deporting whomever it wished. Moreover, where does the double standard regarding the way Israel is treated in terms of international law v come from? Is it within the power of whoever Cernovich thinks he\n\nrepresents, or is represented by, to do anything about that? That double standard is a result of the combined dominance of Muslim countries and leftist NGOs in international fora and the media stenographers they provide information to. If the agency Cernovich imagines making this\n\ndeal could break the power of Muslim countries and leftist NGOs in those fora I imagine it would, because doing so would be a good thing in itself, including, I assume, for whatever goals Cernovich himself supports.  I assume this idea of a deal is attractive because inter-ethnic\n\nconflict is often modeled on the vendetta, which is brought to an end by each side sacrificing something, or repudiating one of its own for the sake of peace. But this model is illusory in a world of states and in the end if you're supporting, opposing or trying to ignore\n\nIsrael for any other reason than the advantages it would bring to your state, as you conceive of that state and its interests and goals, you're just thinking in terms of resentment and will therefore misfire every time. If you're incapable of wishing to avenge yourself on Jews\n\nwhile still thinking it's beneficial to have Israel as an ally, or loving Jews and wishing them nothing but the best while still not seeing a way of fitting Israel into the best alliance structure you can arrange, then you're not capable of thinking seriously about politics.\n\nUnless, of course, you see Jews as uniquely evil or \"unacceptable\" and that unique evil or unacceptability as overriding all other considerations--in that case, no one in control of any state should let you near any decision making process.\n\n@truepeers That's one side of the \"deal\" but the other side is the double standard applied to Israel in terms of human rights violations, etc. So, if the Jews would stop the latter someone (it's not clear who) would stop the former. (I'm referring specifically to a post earlier today.)\n\n@truepeers The way you formulate it (no doubt a common way) there would be no deal, just a demand to cease being hypocritical.\n\n@truepeers Cernovich's proposal is more generous, but also more incoherent--as would be any attempt to formulate it as a genuine exchange. It's just the wrong model for deciding any political question.\n\n@truepeers Right."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2002525594417049797",
      "title": "Bouvard on Bannon's Disinformation and Coordinated Pile-ons",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 20, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2002525594417049797",
      "content": "According to informed (and as far as I've seen uncontradicted) accounts Steve Bannon is brazenly lying about Shapiro's relation to Breitbart. What, exactly, were his efforts to \"take it over\"? They really want to make the truth irrelevant so they can force some unanimity.\n\nThat's why mantras like \"nobody likes you,\" \"nobody believes you,\" etc., get repeated ad nauseum. But they have nothing resembling unanimity. They want people to be afraid of challenging Tucker, afraid of challenging Megyn, afraid of challenging Vance because they're ready with\n\na zombie-invasion style pile-on. Hence the constant emphasis on lowering inhibitions (\"no more playing by the rules\"). Maybe that's what makes Owens the exemplary figure here--she's shamelessly shed all inhibitions, so they stand by her as a model of possibility. She's their\n\nHulk--\"you don't want to see what happens if I get angry.\" All this will trickle up to Vance in various forms. If he's not able to handle it we can assume there will be lots of other things he can't handle."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2001285650436231512",
      "title": "Bouvard on Antisemitic Mobilization and Republican Realignment",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 17, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2001285650436231512",
      "content": "Maybe the media racket organized around Owens, Carlson, Kelly and perhaps TPUSA is primarily focused on dislodging what they see as dead weight \"uniparty\" Republican and \"conservative\" forces, which would explain both their attachment to Vance and his loyalty to Carlson in\n\nparticular--perhaps Vance thinks this remaking of the party and movement is his best path to the WH and effective control thereof. But they've moved too quickly, too indiscriminately, too arrogantly, while relying too heavily on unreliable actors. They seem to have felt they\n\nneeded a disavowable link to the War on Jewry to mobilize the necessarily forces without quite realizing that disavowability is not so easy here--War on Jewry \"tropes\" are very easy to recognize and switching out \"Israel loves killing children\" for \"can't I criticize a foreign\n\ncountry\" has its limits, especially under the scrutiny that comes with running for electoral office. So now they have a couple of years to sort things out, and some seem to want to help Vance out here but playing \"now you see it now you don't\" with the War on Jewry is challenging\n\nand at least some near the VP would at this point probabily be very hesitant about abandoning their less and less stealth groyper mobilization strategy.\n\nI suppose you could say I'm trying to figure out what these people, sitting around in a room eating hummus, might be saying to each other."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2001272516061376837",
      "title": "Bouvard on Palestinianism versus Antizionism Strategy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 17, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2001272516061376837",
      "content": "A legal and political strategy to shut down the Global Intifada would do better to focus on \"Palestiniansim\" than \"antizionism.\" \"Pro-Palestine\" is invariably on or over the border of legality or agitating to be so. And there are very good reasons why it has to be. There is also\n\na question of political theory here. Opposing antizionism gets us focused on Jews and their rights and freedoms; opposing palestinianism gets us focused on the question of sovereignty and international order. In each case a different set of alliances and tactics follows. But this\n\nin turn forces us to choose between a \"bottom-up\" and \"top-down\" understanding of politics: liberalism vs. sovereignty, freedom vs order, which in turn implicates both American political traditions and traditions of Jewish engagement with power. I lean toward the tradition of\n\nbuilding alliances with those in power over allying with the \"disenfranchised\" (which leads to one taking on their coloration), both in general but now in particular; and building alliances with powerful actors is better precisely because, since you need to have something to\n\noffer those in power you are obliged to build independent power bases yourself, like Jordan Hirsch proposes with his notion of a Jewish sovereign wealth fund. Such a fund could in turn fund various legal strategies that would benefit many others aside from Jews. Jews being pushed\n\nout of the left and now being at least nudged out of the right makes this a perfect time to separate from both and prepare to engage directly with companies and organizations participating in the remaking of US sovereignty. There is a path to creating a new center here."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2001058598072320076",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance's Israel Criticism Distinctions",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 16, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2001058598072320076",
      "content": "JD Vance wants us to know that not liking Israel is not antisemitic. He also wants to distinguish opposing a particular Israeli policy from not liking Israel. He's repeating the talking points of people who claim Israelis delight in killing babies and then whine about not being\n\nallowed to criticize Israel when confronted regarding their slanders. I'm only surprised he didn't add \"opposing Netanyahu\" to the sequence. The things he said are different from each other are in fact different from each other. But it's as \"uncurious\" as the media he excoriates\n\nto refrain from asking how they are *related* to each other in the current rise of antisemitism on the right, which is the reason Vance wants to make these distinctions in the first place. \nThere is a great deal to notice here. I'll leave aside whom Vance was responding to.\n\n@Imperius__13 You don't understand or don't want to understand what he is doing, and that's fine."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2000306445993345516",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance's Defensive Response to Buckley Questions",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 14, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2000306445993345516",
      "content": "Tucker's brother Buckley seems to be the family id, not that there's so much distance between id and ego here. All this does make inquiries into the other Buckley, VP Vance's press secretary, relevant. The VP accused someone raising this question of scumbaggery, with argument\n\nforcefully advanced by Vance defenders that it was \"blood libel\" to accuse a son of the sins of his father, without quite acknowledging there were any \"sins\" in the first place. Vance vaguely gestured toward \"lies,\" without saying what they were or what the truth (about what?)\n\nin fact was. All this remains very interesting, including what could justifiably be seen as Vance's panicked response. I think Scumbaggate is likely to come to the surface in some form at some point, if there are any the VP would recognize as a \"journalist\" willing and able\n\nto formulate a penetrating, hard to evade, coherent question. I think I could do it, if anyone were to want to give it a try. Much could be unearthed here about Vance's thinking and commitments."
    },
    {
      "slug": "2000227229918527658",
      "title": "Bouvard on Reconstructing Right-Wing Media Systems",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 14, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/2000227229918527658",
      "content": "The best way to rebuild some kind of RW media system would be simply to gather all the announcements coming from the Trump administration, broadcast them, flesh them out, and modify or correct them (very carefully and respectfully) when that's necessary.\n\nIn that way the media enters into a healthy feedback relation with power while everyone can listen in and develop various feedback relations to the media, with that feedback finding its way back to the center.\n\nThe starting point of media reporting is what the government tells you, records or reports, but it doesn't end there. Cultivating sources inside the government, without romanticizing \"whistleblowers,\" can be done is less adversarial ways, with criticism drawing on contrary\n\ngovernment reports, lawsuits brought against the government, etc. Media operatives would then no longer self-aggrandizingly claim to usurp the investigatory and prosecutorial functions of government. There must be media figures sympathetic to Trump and untainted by equivocation\n\nover systematic liars like Owens and Carlson who could initiate such a project. You could even include footnotes with your reporting.\n\nA precondition of this, though--or maybe a concurrent condition--might be suing the mass of podcasters, etc., into bankruptcy, a project that would be valuable in its own right and would itself, almost inevitably, yield a new media."
    },
    {
      "slug": "1999998770491318595",
      "title": "Bouvard on Right-Wing Media's Antisemitic Self-Sabotage",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 14, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/1999998770491318595",
      "content": "This crack-up in right-wing media is coming less than a year into Trump's term--a year in which he has in fact been doing lots of good things and can be assumed to be gearing up for much more. A competent supporting media would be cheering and egging him on in precise ways.\n\nAnd, let us remember, all this is due to an inability to turn away from the shiny object of Jew hatred. They could have moved to displace Jews and change Israel policy after Trump's term, betting on its success, but they thought they could hijack that term. They failed, but\n\nsignificantly lessened the chances of Trump's accomplishments, whatever they may be, lasting beyond his term. The 2028 election campaign will likely be dominated by demands that the \"Kirk files\" be released.\n\n@Imperius__13 So, all the fighting and accusation slinging in RW media is due to patronage netowrks--which doesn't seem to be a very common topic of discussion.\n\n@Imperius__13 Am I wrong about Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens speaking about them regularly before audiences of millions who presumably want to hear that? And am I wrong about other podcasters (Kelly, Walsh,...) only very gingerly touching on these topics for fear of enraging that audience?\n\n@Imperius__13 Because who and what comes after Trump is greatly affected by it.\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm not doing media theory--this isn't a graduate student class. I'm following Trump and systematic efforts by his supposed supporters to sabotage him.\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm just tracking and tagging. These people have chosen their path, but maybe Vance hasn't.\n\n@Imperius__13 It hasn't always been this exact way.\n\n@Imperius__13 What if it is that simple even if other things are happening as well?\n\n@Imperius__13 I'm not against it but it's not what I'm doing.\n\n@Imperius__13 It's what I have a handle on on X right now and it seems to me important--I wouldn't assign it a numerical value.\n\n@Imperius__13 Fuentes is irrelevant since he can be easily ignored. Carlson and Kelly support Owens, so if you think that's helpful for Vance (none of it matters for Trump--they tried to turn him and failed), I guess we'll have to see.\n\n@Imperius__13 You're back to \"guys\" again, while I keep telling you I'm following a specific thread. Vance has shown himself incapable of coherently answering semi-literate groyper questions. There will be many questions for him about that and his good friend Tucker--\n\n@Imperius__13 of course, maybe he can call those asking those questions \"scumbags.\"\n\n@Imperius__13 These discussions quickly become pointless because tendentious terms invariably get introduced. Making up and disseminating crazy accusations against Jews and Israel is bad for anyone because many people don't want to vote for vile lunatics. There should be a hardline against\n\n@Imperius__13 revising the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's a fairly low bar.\n\n@Imperius__13 Bizarre question since the focus of my posting has been the Vice-President's good friend, whom he protects fiercely, injecting it insistently and crazily into American politics.\n\n@Imperius__13 At this point I'm going to say that you can focus on what you like and I'll focus on what I like.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't plan to find out.\n\n@Imperius__13 No need to worry--after all, what, exactly, can happen? Some people like me less? So what?\n\n@Imperius__13 Yes, this is part of it. The only way to execute it is relentless exposure. If I can find ways of doing that better, I will.\n\n@Imperius__13 You don't have to be Jewish to refrain from joining a lynch mob, real life or online.\n\n@Imperius__13 But the implication is that every position must correspond to the interest of some group in actual or imminent conflict with other groups.\n\n@Imperius__13 No, institutions have their own governance. The police can do their job even if they're of different ethnicities.\n\n@Imperius__13 On X I just try to bring things that seem important into some focus.\n\n@Imperius__13 On X I don't have a plan. If something that seems more important than wht I'm following now turns up, I'll follow that.\n\n@Imperius__13 Do you have to try?"
    },
    {
      "slug": "1999832776900546802",
      "title": "Bouvard on Candace Owens' TPUSA Crisis",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 13, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/1999832776900546802",
      "content": "Candace Owens represents a crisis for the Carlson/podcaster/OG MAGA right because she diverted Charlie Kirk's murder from the focus on left criminality it initially pointed at towards TPUSA, which now must either be defended or subjected to suspicion, and defending TPUSA\n\nplaces you within the circle of suspicion churned up within the internet depths the extent of which no one can know for sure. Meanwhile, defending TPUSA also raises problems, because Candace supporters can find threads leading out from there, and from Kirk himself, that lend a\n\npatina of plausibility to her \"inquiries,\" so, you're stuck with dueling quotes and videos from Kirk requiring increasingly \"Talmudic\" interpretive practices (what was Charlie thinking right before he was killed, etc.). And this leads back to Kirk himself endorsing Carlson\n\nunequivocally and \"defiantly\" and Owens implicitly. It's hard to see how a general conflagration of this entire media ecosystem can be avoided, with Owens controlling a rump of the audience and the rest dispersed and confused. The great experiment of an autonomous MAGA media is\n\nlikely coming to an end. Something will replace it--maybe fledgling networks like OAN will pick up much of the slack--but the real questions regard Trump succession. Vance is the figure associated with this media, and he now will either extricate himself from it more or less\n\ngracefully or get caught in the vortex (the very possibility of him even getting asked questions about Owens must be worrying to his supporters). And other than Vance, there really is no clear successor to Trump--other possible candidates are more from the establishment GOP world"
    },
    {
      "slug": "1999121102002336040",
      "title": "Bouvard on Carlson's Antisemitic Messaging Strategy",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 11, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/1999121102002336040",
      "content": "Carlson was certainly the right person to revive the Father Coughlin/Henry Ford Jew Hate of the 30s but I think it was rolled out too quickly and carelessly. It's easy to imagine all kinds of transitional steps that would have made it easier to dismiss those getting alarmed.\n\n@var_angian So, the right pace but the wrong guy? Maybe we don’t disagree that much. It’s still a question of how obviously you’re pushing the envelope; and, in a sense, Carlson turned out to be the wrong guy but only he had the right “credentials.”\n\n@var_angian Still, if he had spent time laying the groundwork with more respected anti-Israel lobby critics it might have worked better\n\n@var_angian Instead he ends up with the Young Turks (and one Armenian). But I don't know why you think smart conservatives would have moved into an essentially leftist frame. In the end, you'd have to argue either for another set of alliances, or just full-on isolationism--in either case you\n\n@var_angian pay a significant price. It's hard to get past the scandal-mongering.\n\n@var_angian Right--either way it was going to require some skilled maneuvering and in the end he didn't have the composure or \"agility\" to do it.\n\n@var_angian I see. But, at some point, the question would have to arise, at least for the smarter ones: ok, then what? New alliances? No alliances? The frame starts to break up once these questions are tackled.\n\n@var_angian Not our entire alliance system but Israel is pretty central to the Middle East one. Your question seems one mostly for Israelis, but the alternatives to allying with Israel for the US have mostly been Iran--which Obama tried and couldn't make work. Mediating it through Qatar\n\n@var_angian is an attempt to make it work, but with mixed results, I expect. But, yes, I agree with you about the \"ultimate point.\""
    },
    {
      "slug": "1999114165349130726",
      "title": "Bouvard on Right-Wing Media's Self-Discrediting Cycle",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 11, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/1999114165349130726",
      "content": "It took the OG MAGA right maybe 3-4 years from the precipitous decline in influence of the legacy media to create a far worse bizarro version of that same media. They did a fast motion replay of the self-discrediting of the MSM, which really began with the rise of Rush Limbaugh.\n\nThe MSM was always liberal/deep state, since WW 2 at least, but did seek to maintain itself as an independent power relative to the two parties. Then Limbaugh came around and the media operatives told themselves they no longer had to make a pretense of including both sides (and\n\nReagan did remove a feeble regulation mandating something along those lines) and starting organizing themselves *against* \"conservative talk radio\" and everything that came in its wake (like the Gingrichian GOP majority). This intensified partisanship and therefore dishonesty.\n\nThe new online/podcaster media organized around Trump did the same thing from the beginning, deliberately and more intensively. This worked for oppositional purposes but couldn't survive contact with real power and responsibility. Rather than embrace power and responsibility,\n\nthis new media finds profit in continuing to organize around subversiveness, scandal and the mystique of being a persecuted resistance force. There are exceptions, and there will be more, but people who want an honest, critical when necessary, Trump-supporting media need to draw\n\nlines. I keep focusing on Vance and his relation to this cohort precisely to foreground the need to make a clear break, which no one else is in a position to do. And if Vance thinks sticking with Tucker et al advances his political future, his political instincts are so bad\n\nthat it's best for that to be made clear as quickly as possible."
    },
    {
      "slug": "1998388925774073912",
      "title": "Bouvard on Neoconservatism's Enduring Foreign Policy Logic",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 09, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/1998388925774073912",
      "content": "Despite \"neocon\" becoming one of the most discrediting epithets in US politics US foreign policy has not reaaly replaced neoconservatism because it has not been explicitly recognized that neoconservative foreign policy was first of all a response to \"realist\" detente which\n\nargued for concessions to the USSR and an acknowledgement of its legitimacy. The privileging of \"liberal democracy\" and \"authoritarians\" over \"totalitarians\" followed from rejecting that approach. At most, the Iraq War was an overreach, but US foreign policy language has not\n\njettisoned a friend/enemy approach framed in moral terms, even if priorities and classifications are shifting. Nor can it, since any state must tilt toward similarly organized states. Attacking neocons was necessary for Trump to scale down commitments to the Middle East and\n\n(especially) break with globalist free trade policies associated (rightly?) with the neocons but anyone harping on this now does so in order to turn American \"moralizing\" against the US so as to denounce the US as \"hypocritical.\" In this sense, criticizing European immigration\n\npractices and free speech restrictions in more in the \"neocon\" tradition than otherwise. And, in fact, I would defy anyone to try and make a pure \"realism\" coherent--try and construct a pure state power approach to the world without accounting for morality."
    },
    {
      "slug": "1997796218802684215",
      "title": "Bouvard on Trump Administration's Israel Policy Spectrum",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 07, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/1997796218802684215",
      "content": "The Trump Administration has managed to include almost the entire spectrum of positions on Israel.\n\n@Imperius__13 As I've said many times, I have no guys. I'm a lone researcher. The network around Carlson and Vance is an increasingly interesting political phenomenon. But it's interesting to know that you consider yourself one of them. You take for granted they represent something bigger.\n\n@Imperius__13 I just realized which post you were replying to (I just saw the reply and assumed it was to one of my Carlson-Vance posts). But I don't see how this is a reply to that post. I might as well mention how bizarre it is to see Miller as putting in work for some collective \"you.\"\n\n@Imperius__13 So, the \"us\" in your previous post doesn't really include *you*. You've shifted the position dramatically here--from the need to \"sacrifice\" for some specific and important agent to the need to listen respectfully to populists. I'm focused solely on what I see as Trump's project.\n\n@Imperius__13 So, now there is again a \"we\" that you are part of. Any supporter of Trump must love Miller.\n\n@Imperius__13 A group that loves its homeboy doesn't sound like a pragmatic coalition.\n\n@Imperius__13 So, everyone working towards order should already be allied, unless some of those working toward order have other priorities--in which case, others working toward order would be mistaken in considering them allies.\n\n@Imperius__13 I have never heard Miller say anything I haven't whole-heartedly agreed with--even those tapes of him on the bus as a student.\n\n@Imperius__13 No, but it doesn't change my opinion of him. I don't even know what Miller thinks about anything Jewish, or about antisemitism, etc. (He did marry a Jew.) He's always seemed focused on making very specific impacts. I'm very glad Trump has given him the role he's suited for.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don't know if I've even ever hear Miller say anything about Israel.\n\n@Imperius__13 I doubt he sees himself as doing it \"for them\" and not for his country. Among the things he doesn't care about is, I imagine, whether this or that faction of self-designated American Firsters loves him.\n\n@Imperius__13 Then we can be allied in admiration of Stephen Miller.\n\n@Imperius__13 I know the difference between a pragmatic coalition and enthusiastic embrace.\n\n@Imperius__13 There will also probably never be a war against and therefore in defense of Stephen Miller specifically.\n\n@Imperius__13 But anyone can know the difference between pragmatism and fandom."
    },
    {
      "slug": "1997641095656644652",
      "title": "Bouvard on Vance Campaign Construction and Sovereignty",
      "source": "twitter",
      "sourceLabel": "X / Twitter",
      "date": "Dec 07, 2025",
      "url": "https://x.com/bouvard38829538/status/1997641095656644652",
      "content": "Questions about Tucker Carlson and the entire \"field\" he has generated of supporters, tacit and explicit, can now be turned into the JD Vance question, which simplifies things. What kind of Vance campaign is being constructed--what will be the script, what will be concealed?\n\nWhich agencies activated and made the face of the campaign and which held in reserve? Which vectors of attack against enemies, actual and possible? Which proxies of Trump targeted, in order to shift Trump's transformation of US sovereignty in which direction? Which patrons? Etc.\n\nThe simultaneous elevation and denial of the \"JQ\" at different levels of the campaign will be one parameter--by no means the only one, but useful for testing the limits of the Overton window in certain directions. It's a brittle campaign--defensive and tentative, but it's early.\n\n@Imperius__13 I assume nothing at this point, but it does seem clear that, beyond selecting Vance as VP, Trump has not really weighed in on his successor--maybe an unfortunate adherence to US political traditions.\n\n@Imperius__13 Donald Jr. seems invested in the Qateri wing, but also seems to just mimic memes from a couple of years ago. I don't get any sense the others are taking any stance.\n\n@Imperius__13 I don’t know about any of that but I do feel sure that the network organized around protecting Carlson is a Vance campaign op so that gives me something to follow"
    },
    {
      "slug": "origin",
      "title": "Lecture 1: Origin",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": null,
      "content": "Famously, the French Academy of the Sciences in 1866 banned all discussion of the origin of language. They must have determined that since nothing could be proven one way or the other on this question, all you could get would be arbitrary versions of some creationist myth. But it’s not just linguistics—the prohibition on talking about origins extends across the social sciences—it’s part of the founding self-distinction of the social sciences from religion, and its modeling on Newtonian physics, with eternal laws of nature which presumably don’t require any positing of an origin. Thinking in terms of origins marks one as introducing theology into rational discussions, and therefore as fanatical or crazy—origins are not subject to the methods of scientific thought.\n\nAnd I don’t think things are any better in traditional history, which just goes back to the earliest remembered or recorded event, without being able to claim that it’s really the origin—in fact, that’s when one usually claims things trail off into myth. Derrida, of course, wanted to deconstruct all originary claims, but at least Derrida recognized that we seem to be incapable of thinking without positing origins—hence the need for constant deconstruction. But if the positing of origins needs to be constantly “refuted,” shouldn’t the difficulty or even impossibility of thinking without doing so be explained? In fact, one interesting thing about the social sciences themselves is that every discipline seems to have a fairly universally agreed upon origin, usually marked by a proper name: Durkheim for sociology, Adam Smith for political economy, Freud for psychoanalysis, Marx for—Marxism.\n\nIt’s the same for philosophy: the field is marked by proper names—Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Derrida, etc. Not all of these names are equally universally agreed upon as points of origin, but if you dispute one it’s just to put another name in its place. Foucault referred to these names as the “initiators of discursive practices,” one of whom was in fact Foucault himself, and this was in his essay “What is an Author” which, on the one hand wants to figure out why we even need to refer to author’s at all, while implicitly recognizing that it’s impossible to make any progress within any human science without some kind of “return to an origin.”\n\nIt’s always possible to say, well, the proper name “Marx” is really a tissue of heterogeneous discourses that just contingently came together in that particular name, and the subsequent uses of the name “Marx” are not intrinsically connected to anything about Marx himself but are themselves just a heterogeneous array of differentiated discourses—but why, then, is it so hard to get rid of the name itself; why, in fact, do deconstructions of the “author-function” just end up elevating the names of those who authored the deconstructions? So, instead of taking originary thinking as some inexplicable and infantile defect of serious thought and taking all proper precautions to quarantine it, it may be better to take the unavoidable pull of the origin as the origin of thinking.\n\nThis reverses everything—rather than origin marking the point at which our thinking reaches its limits, and, like good Kantians, noting and remaining aware of those limits, everything is an origin, origins lie in front of us everywhere, what we are doing right now is an origin. Now, an origin in the strong sense, the sense we can’t avoid thinking, is not just the first thing that happens but the first thing that happens without following necessarily from what preceded it and without which everything that happens subsequently is unthinkable; even more strongly, it’s what happens and has never stopped happening. So, if everything is an origin, every origin also points us to an earlier origin.\n\nThe most obvious example is language—every word we use, someone must have been the first to use it in a way that stuck—not only every word, but every specific use and meaning of every word. And the origin of a particular word points us back to previous words it presupposes and ultimately back to the first word, which we are therefore still uttering. So, how was it possible for anyone to say a word, and others to “understand,” a word for the first time? This question is then the starting point of all inquiry—there may be other origins, but not of the inquiry into origins. So, the question of how a word could have come into being is itself an origin which tells us something about how that word or any word comes into being.\n\nBut we still have the problem—what justifies any claim to locate an origin of anything? And, even more terrifyingly, how do we deal with competing and incommensurable claims to originarity? That must be the real reason for the prohibition of talking of origins in modernity—claims to an origin are especially intractable, and if you’ve got competing ones, it seems impossible to avoid irreconcilable conflict. But these questions need to be taken into the thinking of origin itself, and we could say that whatever is at the origin must have been a way of preventing or controlling precisely the consequences of just such irreconcilability.\n\nSince we can’t really “prove” an origin on the terms of the modern social sciences (what are the origins, we might ask, of those terms of “proof”?), any positing of an origin must be hypothetical, but what makes for a good hypothesis must, then, be, that it offers the possibility of resisting the collapse into irreconcilable struggle. Even if both sides are completely committed to armed struggle until the annihilation of either or both sides, they then find in the origin of social order the control and use of force by one part of the community to quell and over-awe the other. That’s the hypothesis of origin both sides are working with, and that will tell them when the struggle must be declared over; in the course of the struggle other hypotheses may emerge, especially if there is communication, even tacit between the two sides, in which case a hypothesis of some form of communication at the origin will be constructed.\n\nOnce some hypothesis of origin, say, one based on “agreement” or “pact,” is arrived at and enacted, that becomes the new origin and the source of hypotheses regarding previous origins. The more minimally, punctually and singularly any hypothesis can account for these successive hypotheses, the better the hypothesis—and the better the community that comes closest to enacting it. So, as we go forward, we keep reaching back into the past and aim at making the chain of hypotheses leading back to an origin beyond which we can’t go tighter. And what origin can we not go back further behind—well, whatever would precede whatever it is that makes it possible to generate hypothesis of origin which, again, must have something to do with that problem of irreconcilability."
    },
    {
      "slug": "mimetic",
      "title": "Lecture 2: Mimetic",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": null,
      "content": "I’ll begin with a few passages from Girard’s Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoevsky \n“As for Nietzsche himself, what he says about his own competitive and aggressive urge must be carefully examined: its implications are far-reaching. I attack only causes that are victorious..I attack only causes against which I cannot expect to find allies… I attack only causes against which I shall stand alone”\nThis chivalrous behavior is in keeping within the demands of the mystique, no doubt. But it can also be described as a feverish enterprise of self-destruction, especially in a man who attaches as much importance to victory as Nietzsche does.\n\nWhat the mystique adds up to, really, is a Herculean and systematic effort to bring about its own metamorphosis into ressentiment…. If desires are truly mimetic, they are bound to clash with other desires, as Nietzsche believes; not because they freely choose to do so, as he apparently assumes, but because they are copied from another. The final outcome is disastrous because it results not from the relative strength of the desires that happen to clash together, but from a mimetic propensity that cannot be let loose without turning into a search for, and if need be a creation of, the insurmountable obstacle.” Girard put the concept of mimesis at the center in order to untangle puzzles, which proliferated in 19th and early 20th century Western culture, like Nietzsche positioning himself as a kind of Don Quixote, inventing insurmountable obstacles for himself, while disdaining Cervantes and claiming to be free of the ressentiment he attributed to others, to be a sheer embodiment of the will to power.\n\nYou can test the seriousness of any social theory by the seriousness with which it takes mimesis. Mimesis is obviously a very ancient concept, prominent in Plato and Aristotle, but as far as I know until Rene Girard it was never pursued all the way down—it’s one thing to say humans are mimetic beings, but it’s another to say that mimesis makes the human. Anyone can see looking briefly at small children can see how deep mimesis goes. There’s a kind of self-evidency to our mimetic constitution—how could anything we do, say or think not be composed of words and/or gestures that we acquired mimetically? Any social theory or philosophy or politics that privileges the autonomous or self-fashioned self or identity is suppressing mimesis—and I would include in this Nietzsche and contemporary Nietzscheans.\n\nGirard aforementioned essay deals in a very interesting way with Nietzsche’s mimetic relation to Wagner, and how his denial of this relation coincides with his increasing instability toward the end of his career and his descent into madness. Clearly, everything we have ever learned we have learned mimetically, by imitating others. In fact, a denial of mimesis is a denial of learning, which I think is crucial to understanding the history of metaphysics. Beginning with Plato, who basically equated learning with remembrance, philosophy has denied the very existence of learning—up until Chomsky, who claims we don’t even learn language—our intrinsic linguistic capacity is just elicited upon hearing others speak.\n\nI know of very few exceptions. But it makes sense, since if we accept Eric Gans’s definition of metaphysics as the assumption of the linguistic primacy of the declarative sentence, the declarative cut off from the ostensive and imperative cannot acknowledge mimesis. Imitation is ostensive and imperative—you pay very close attention to what another is doing—too close to verbalize it. You take what the other is doing as a tacit command, as if the phrase “do this” or “do it like this” was tagged to it. There is something shameful about acknowledging imitation, at least in modernity—to confess to being an imitator is one step away from confessing to being a fraud, a mere copy, a lackey and probably a bad one at that.\n\nTo confess to imitation is to confess to dependency, to confess to, to use Kant’s language from his essay, What is Enlightenment, to remaining in “self-imposed nonage.” But it’s even worse—it is to confess to desire, to envy, to resentment, to jealousy; even more, to confess that one is constituted by all of these mimetic structures, from which one can only liberate oneself by strenuous discipline, one element of which is never being able to declare yourself once and for liberated—in fact, to declare oneself liberated from mimesis is a sure sign of being determined by it—it wouldn’t really be necessary to say “I don’t care what others think,” I decide everything on my own,” etc., if it were in fact the case.\n\nPeople deny being imitators more quickly than Jesus’s disciplines denied him, and there’s a connection here, insofar as there is nothing more mimetic than wanting to deny one’s enslavement to mimesis along with everyone else. I’ve put a lot of emphasis on pedagogy and the concept of mistakenness in stuff I’ve written because these concepts make it as hard as I can make it to forget imitation—and remembering and foregrounding imitation is the real maturity. We do, of course, like to speak about “role models,” which is a kind of recognition of mimesis, but the role model represents a version of what Girard called “external mediation,” where the model is distant enough from the imitator to be beyond rivalry—also, how one becomes “like” the role model is rarely explained.\n\nTo think in terms of all of our desires, resentments, hatreds, anxieties and so on as mimetic is very disturbing, because the things we would like to think are most “our own” are in fact the most alien to us. So many social institutions, of the past and present, are opaque to us and seem absurd because we cannot recognize them as attempts, always partial, improvised and flawed, to control the conflicts caused by our mimetic nature. And this is the real problem of mimesis, and Girard’s great discovery—imitation leads to rivalry because we learn to desire from our models and must therefore ultimately desire the destruction and our replacement of those models.\n\nNot every model, not every time, and not always visibly, precisely because of all the ways cultures provide for mediated contests and competitions, with all kinds of explicit and tacit rules. A social crisis occurs when these arrangements break down—even the high-low v the middle model would probably need to be understood in terms of mimetic rivalries among the elites. A healthy culture would be systematically concerned with the kinds of models for imitation that are available, the ways in which individuals imitate their models, the way they work through their models, sometimes exhaust them and transition to other models, because everything we do can best be described in these terms.\n\nIt is always a fantasy to describe anyone as non-imitative, or not bound to models—but this is not to say that we don’t develop some complex relations to an array of models, which we revise by enacting them. A more careful analysis of virality, which, of course, we all now talk about, would function something like Brecht’s “alienation effect,” which involved breaking down the various gestures and utterances of a character right when the audience is about to get absorbed in some sacrificial drama. Some post-structuralist and postmodern theories, under the influence, e.g., of Austin’s speech act theory recognize mimesis indirectly—in for example, Derrida’s notion of “citationality,” adopted and applied to social theory by Judith Butler and others.\n\nIt’s understood in these cases that everything one does “cites” others, is an iteration of acts, words and gestures of others, and it’s also recognized that we refuse to recognize this and make every effort to claim our desires and intentions are generated internally. Even here, though, there is an ultimate lack of seriousness insofar as the acknowledgement of citationality is seen as liberating, on the model of post-1968 understandings of the lifting of repression as leading to a utopian freeing of desire. Still, the concept of citationality is a very useful one because it projects mimesis onto the plane of language, which is the “solution” (always provisional) of mimesis, and here we have to go beyond Girard to Gans.\n\nGans’s transcendence of Girard’s mimetic theory lies in him recognizing that the kind of “counter-imitation” involved in the sign arrests rather than accelerating mimetic rivalry. What makes linguistic imitation different than imitation in the pursuit of limited resources (including resources limited because of mimesis) is that a sign or utterance can be different in being the same. Because language is so scenic or, if you like, context, dependent, saying the exact same thing someone else said is never saying the same thing the other said. In fact, imitating another very closely is often a sure sign of mockery, which is to say it is a way of distinguishing oneself from the other.\n\nAnd, so, marking every utterance as a citation, making explicit that you are referencing and revising a particular text or author, employing specific generic conventions or narrative techniques in a specific way, mixing media, eliciting and rerouting expectations, etc., is a way of acknowledging the inescapability of mimesis while simultaneously deferring and displaying imitable strategies for deferring the rivalries and conflicts generated by mimesis. And this is also the source of creativity and generativity of language, that by staying very close to others, ripping off others, riffing on others, by intensifying imitation in all its forms you create what is new, original and precedent-setting—much more so than by trying to excavate originality from out of one’s own depths, or wherever you think they are to be found."
    },
    {
      "slug": "deferral-of-violence",
      "title": "Lecture 3: Deferral of Violence",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": null,
      "content": "Here are some dictionary provided synonyms for “defer”: postpone, put off, adjourn, delay, hold off, hold over, shelve, suspend, delay, hold in abeyance, stay, prorogue, pigeonhole, mothball. None of them quite get at how minimal “deferral” is,  conceptually, and how central it therefore is to the specificity of the originary hypothesis, and to GA’s decisive break with metaphysical forms of thinking. I won’t go through all those synonyms one by one, but all of them involve a level or mode of intentionality that can’t be attributed to “defer”—they all present a completed decision to not do something now, but rather to decide whether to do it later.\n\nIf you’re deferring, you’re too much in the midst of things to make such a clear-cut distinction. Only “deferral,” that is, allows us to defer thinking as if we could step outside of the situation, and get a non-participatory spectator’s perspective of a completed event. On the originary scene, a distinction is constructed by all of the participants: a distinction between the convergence on the central object, on the one hand, and the renunciation of that object., on the other This is like a line is drawn through the gesture of each participant. So, the question is, who is best able to draw that line in an actionable manner: the one on the scene, who is actually trying to draw it, or someone outside of the scene, who could abstract from the event and reduce it to an external model, or a set of rules.\n\nIn that latter case, it would be possible to reduce the renunciation to a formal, generalizable rule in advance of any particular act of renunciation. It would be possible to find a “cause” leading to the act of renunciation, and this cause would then be found in our biological or some other pre-existing “equipment,” in which case the sign would itself simply be a “superstructural” reflection of some more foundational “infrastructural” reality. The singularity of the scene would be denied. “Deferral,” meanwhile, perfectly captures the position within the act itself, along with its fundamental contingency, between the convergence heading toward destruction and what will perhaps be no more than the mere delay of that tendency.\n\nOne can’t know–one can’t know any more than that whatever gesture one puts forth might subtract from rather than accelerate the momentum dragging us along toward the catastrophe. (Even this is not really “knowledge”; rather it is slight injection of “hope” into the situation.) Instead of preventing imminent destruction, we have really done no more than make it “imminently imminent,” and that imminence of imminence gives us a little space within which to work. We can’t even think in terms of whether the “problem” has been “genuinely solved,” or “kicked down the road,” trivialized or covered up, or, for that matter, irresponsibly avoided and thereby intensified, to reappear even more menacingly tomorrow–the categories which enable us to make even these distinctions are after the fact, metaphysical accretions, even if we couldn’t really avoid using them to describe what seem to be more or less effective gestures of deferral (and even this “seeming” is itself taking place on some mimetic scene, upon which the projected “seeming” itself defers some crisis).\n\nWhat, then, is the horizon of any act of deferral? What is its “reach”? Once we’ve deferred something, for how long have we deferred it? It seems plausible to suggest that it impossible to “invest” in any act of deferral while dwelling on, or perhaps even entertaining the possibility of, its fallibility–in other words, I have to completely believe my act of deferral will succeed, at least for that period in which I am enacting it; which would further imply that I must exclude from consideration all the indications which suggest that it might not, in fact succeed. I can and must recognize and assimilate those indications, but only in the form of those unavoidable immediate modifications in my act of deferral as I articulate it—I can’t imagine them as fully imagined forces which might render the act of deferral useless.\n\nThe fact that I can look back afterward and note how risky the whole business in fact was can’t, then, provide any knowledge that would be useful in the midst of the next act of deferral except insofar as the very act of looking back, itself, guided by an interest in preserving the sign, sharpens my sensitivity to the immediate appearance of counter-indications. (But it might just as easily dull my sensitivities to unprecedented indications.) Our horizons, though, can be progressively extended insofar as any act of deferral leaves behind it a sign, which can be repeated by someone other than myself, and provides a starting point for the next act of deferral:  to defend that sign.\n\nDefending the sign against attempts to undermine and circumvent it, attempts made possible by the new configuration produced by the sign itself, provides for the capacity for ever increasing foresight, especially insofar as cultural signs become increasingly complex, deferring (through a kind of ethical and esthetic economy) a range of rivalries and crises simultaneously. In that case, though, the real threat to the sign is not so much direct attacks on it or attempts to evade its strictures, but the rivalries the sign itself instigates over who represents or embodies it. So, one has to reproduce the sign in such a way as to defer conflicts generated by the previous iteration of that sign.\n\nWhat I’ve been trying to show so far is that “deferral,” far more so than any of its near synonyms, keeps us always inside the scene, so that knowledge of the scene is always a part of concern for sustaining the scene. The concept of deferral also means we cannot really say what exactly, is being deferred—no one could know that violence has been deferred, because no one can know what would have happened without the sign of deferral. Maybe it just would have been a harmless little skirmish. Implicit in an iterable sign of deferral is a worst-case scenario imaginary, albeit one that cannot be articulated. We can talk about “imagination” on the originary scene insofar as we understand “imagination” as nothing more than a widening of the scene so as to include something the scene will have retroactively appeared to have been constituted by: if you see two figures converging on a part of the object that can accommodate only one you can extend the scene to include some version of irreconciliability which can be taken to inform the convergence itself.\n\nI said last week that I would like a more precise term for the specific kind of annihilatory violence that is imagined here. It might help to remember that Gans took the notion of “deferral” from Derrida’s “differance,” which includes both the word deferral and the word difference which, at bottom are the same word. So, let’s set aside “violence” for now, and think in terms of the limits of sameness. The rush to the center abolishes the pre-human differences, which we can refer to as the “pecking order”—suddenly everyone is the same, and sees each other becoming even more the same. The consequence of this indifferentiation is that anyone can do anything—the only check on what I might do is the difference of others, which limits and gives meaning to whatever I want or do.\n\nIn myself, taken singly, I can have no constraint on desire, no “project.” If everyone is the same as me, no order or relation is possible—forcing some kind of response so as to make the other “other” so that the self can be the same as itself, is, then, the only conceivable form of action. So, what the gesture of deferral does is create an other for all of us, so that we can oscillate between same and other to each other. Now, the concept of deferral also has the feature of never being completed—it has no expiration date. When, after all, is the originary scene over, or “closed”? There seem to be several, complementary answers, depending on what we want to bring into focus: the scene is closed when everyone has put forth the sign and shared the differentiating hesitation before the central object; the scene is closed once the central object has been consumed; the scene is closed once some ritual gesture, repeating the originary gesture itself, is issued.\n\nAll good, but everything I just listed comes from a perspective from outside the scene, as if these events, or this “tripled” event, were witnessed. But from where? Only from upon another scene. But any scene can only emerge from within a previous scene, from something resisting closure within that scene—for example, some emergent struggle over proximity to the center in the ritual gesture that promises closure. Each scene is, then, built from within a previous scene, while also being a guarantee of that previous scene’s closure. But this really means that the same gesture of deferral, in all its different forms, is carried from one scene to another, while it also means that we are still on the originary scene, cognizant of its urgencies while representing its possible closure.\n\nSo, we have never left and will never leave the originary scene, or its worst-case imaginary, which is the very thing which makes deferral possible and must also be deferred—as soon as one takes the worst-case scenario imaginary literally, one is compelled to enact it. This also means that everything we do is a gesture of deferral, even the most unrestrained and violent acts—simply by being formed, and therefore differentiating, anything we do conjures a scene by introducing some difference or some other that can sustain it. In the kind of absolute immanence I am suggesting is implicit in the gesture of deferral, what then distinguishes one gesture from another is a greater extension of the horizon of deferral, which itself implies a more formative recall of previous gestures.\n\nHow do we know which gesture extends the horizon further? Obviously we can’t make a rule here—it will be a question of which gestures provide the form around which more sustaining scene will be created. One final word: the literary aesthetic of deferral would be a single, neverending sentence, that propels itself forward by referring back to itself—there have actually been at least a couple of novels written this way—and it may be that my talk sounded like that at least t some points, but I did rein it in, which may itself be a gesture of deferral."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-center",
      "title": "Lecture 4: The Center",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": null,
      "content": "One distinction between GA and traditional philosophical and theoretical thought is that GA replaces the concept of “intention” with the concept of “attention.” “Intention” gets you focused on the subject and the subject’s constitution of the world. “Attention” gets you focused on an inextricable subject-object unity in which the object has the higher priority. But this is not a materialist reversal which sees the object as more “real” than the subject. The subject and object are co-constituting. But even this talk about “subject” and “object” mystifies things, and keeps us enclosed within traditional philosophical discourse, even if we shift to modern social and political theory, which are filled with subjects and objects taken as given and as “interacting” in some way.\n\nBut, why are there subjects and objects, rather than nothing? We set off on a new course of thinking simply by acknowledging Michael Tomasello’s demonstration that the most intelligent hominids aside from humans, the great apes, don’t point. This very simple activity, one that very small children can perform very early, is impossible for animals that might be far more intelligent than those children by all kinds of measures. Two chimps can’t look at something together, and let each other know that they’re doing so. That’s really what an “object” is, something we can “let be” and look at together. And a “subject,” then, is that being capable of letting it be—but the discourse of subjects and objects is caught up in attaining subjective mastery over objects, which is really what “intentionality” is.\n\nSometimes you may want mastery, for certain purposes—but taking intentional subjective mastery over objects as your primary descriptive discourse assumes a liberal, and we can even say capitalist, ontology—one, to refer to Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power, of “capitalization.” The subject is discounted against anticipated future earnings—that’s what subjective mastery over objects amounts to, a risk assessing and limiting project. Simply conceding that something evades or resists the mastery of even the most capitalizing subject, though, introduces a crack into this discourse—and one thing that escapes your mastery is the source of the “intentionality” informing it.\n\nWhy do you want what you want? If there doesn’t have to be subjects and objects, what we can shift our attention to is the process or, better, the event, that co-creates what will eventually be recognizable as subjects and objects. Built into the notion of intentionality is some deep structure of the will; built into the notion of attention is something demanding attention and demanding you draw others’ draw others’ attention to, which involves configurating ourselves around something at the center. So, we start neither with subjects, and their intentions, or objects, and the laws governing their operations, which really just confirms the intentionality of the subject identifying and exploiting those laws, but with a center that compels.\n\nIt compels in at least the minimal sense that it holds you: while you’re looking at it you’re not looking away. You’re looking at it because others are, or could be looking at it (even if that “could be,” imagining what you’re looking at in terms of potential audiences, is a later development)—which means you’re looking back and forth between center and margin. But the center creates the margin, so you’re looking at others on the margin as held by the center, just as you are. Whatever you and others may eventually do with the object—consume it, break it down and reconstruct it, use it as an ingredient of something else, turn it into an instrument—will only be imaginable and therefore possible insofar as it is represented as a way of maintaining the center-margin configuration itself.\n\nThis means there’s a subsistent center beyond the center at which any particular thing sits—so, there’s the center, and there’s centrality, or, as I’ve called it, the occupied center and the signifying center. And the first thing the center tells or commands us is to sustain centrality. The radical implication of this, which I’ve tried to remain faithful to, is that all of our thoughts and deeds are of the center—commanded by the center, carried out for the benefit of the center. History, in that case, is the history of center. Phenomenologically this can be described as follows: the center calls you to it, along with others on the scene, but therefore also tells you to coordinate your approach with those others—so, as you approach the center, or step back and wait; accelerate or decelerate; model for others a way of engaging or appropriating the center, or protect the center from others—each single move you make is a “reading” of the center, but to call it a “reading” introduces too much subjectivity, so it’s better to call it a “hearing” of the center, because you hear whether you want to or not.\n\nIt’s like imitating someone very closely—he raises his arm, you raise yours, he kneels, you kneel, he jumps, you jump—you need to be very focused in order to follow him, and that is our relation to the center, which we are, in fact, imitating from the beginning by participating in preserving the space the center opens up for us. Now, it’s possible to say that once we have this anthropological knowledge, we can see that there is something “illusory” about all this. Once we realize we’re always imitating someone, can’t we stop doing it? Once we realize we’re interested in what is at the center because others are, or we think might be, interested in it, can’t we just break with the illusion that there is anything ‘intrinsically” interesting or important about what is at the center?\n\nIn specific cases, yes, of course—we can shift our attention, we can break compulsions and addictions. But this very knowledge of centrality derives from a higher form of attention to a less visible and therefore more durable (and in some ways more fragile) center. The first break with a mode of centrality was when a human occupied the center, and took control of ritual and distribution. We can assume that that development was “demystifying” regarding the community’s commitment to its sacralized animals and ancestors. That human at the center will come to be “supplied,” not necessarily with “absolute” power in any obvious sense, but with all of the power necessary to defer whatever violence he must have originally defered and whatever new potential forms of violence his presence might generate.\n\nThis means that even if we’re not thinking about the man at the center all the time—maybe the animal-god at the center wasn’t thought about explicitly all the time—we are still thinking “about” him in the sense of thinking in his vicinity, on ground “covered” by him. When we pay attention to something else, with others, that space is bounded by the knowledge that under certain conditions it could become the business of the occupant of the center—so, built into your attention to anything or anyone on the margin is the need to imitate the thing or person, to imitate its own centrality, preserve and frame its existence, in such a way as to keep the occupant of the center out of it where him getting into it would undermine your relation to that thing or person, and to bring him into it in a way favorable to you, if that becomes necessary.\n\nThe more distant and invisible the occupant of the center is, then, the more thoroughly he shapes the contours of your thinking and action. If we could peek into the thinking of any modern day citizen, we could find “attached” to any thought or action some way of shaping it so as to make potential authoritative intervention reinforcing. Now, of course, the most significant “demystification” is that of the occupant of the center itself. This, as well, can only happen through the creation of a competing center, not through some logical reasoning about the occupant of the center really just being a man like us, capable of mistakes, crimes, etc., much less speculations regarding our own reality ontological priority to the center.\n\nThe occupant of the center must itself create this alternate center, and the way it does so is by “persecuting” on who will come to be or refer to its occupant. For this to happen, we have to assume there are already other centers of power, each subordinate and accountable to some imperial center, and yet independent enough to attract attention in its own right. A certain kind of attention brought to bear on what we can oxymoronically or paradoxically call this “marginal center” would intensify the attention directed towards it. This kind of attention would be “excessive” in the sense that it would reverse previous forms of attention paid to what was once a favored subject, and become incommensurable with the danger posed by any actual transgression.\n\nSomehow, the existence of the imperial center is itself placed at stake, perhaps in a long-term perspective (such a perspective is itself encouraged by empires claiming to be eternal), and so that persecuted subject, or what I have called “exemplary victim,” indicates a new center, to which even the imperial center is subordinate. This new center, which can’t be adequately named or represented in itself but only in transgressions against it, is the source of all demystifications: the revelation is that our adherence to the imperial center perpetuates persecution incommensurable to anything the persecuted could possibly “deserve.”\n\nBut this new center itself can’t be demystified—only particular claimants to it can be. If you ask anyone how they can claim to have demystified or “debunked” any claim to truth or authority, that is, centrality, they will necessarily put another centrality in its place: whether they refer to “facts,” “reason,” “God-given rights,” “faith,” or technological performativity, they are asking you to imitate their imitation of a being modeling what is more real than reality—some transcendent arbiter whom we disobey at the risk of plunging blindly into destructive persecution. Once such a center exists, though, everyone wants to claim to occupy it, and such claims become a way of demanding others to affirm their centrality.\n\nThe legacy of the exemplary victim is that anyone could potentially become a center, because anyone could become the exemplary victim, by representing some truth incommensurable with the “system,” which is ultimately how we imagine ourselves as “subjects.” But this means that as subjects we can only compose our own centrality as defiance toward some tyrannical center, against which we invoke the “ultimate” judgement of the higher center (“history will prove I’m right”—that is, if we look far enough into the future the really important people will agree with me). How can we demystify this, most resistant, form of illusory centrality?\n\nLet’s return to the beginning. In the beginning, we are created by the thing at the center, some This, which becomes It as we repeatedly refer to it. We preserve, protect, and obey IT, and devote our time to determining good ways to approach it, to name it, to appease it, to keep it at the center. This is first of all done through ritual, which prescribes very precise and rigorously enforced ways of engaging IT. Since we now know that any form of authority is contingent, that we contribute to its maintenance, ritual can’t work anymore to preserve IT. But we can still make it possible to say “THIS,” in a way that will secure attention, and refer us to other “Thises,” which will eventually become “ITS.”\n\nIn other words, build a world of reliable reference points, “populated” at least potentially by figures able to defer their own centrality to the benefit of the social center. This involves the creation of disciplinary spaces where things are systematically “let be” in a secured setting, where we devote ourselves to finding better ways of talking about things and talking about what we’re talking about. This is not simply a question of methods or procedures, because identifying the form of authority we invoke is always a part of the practice—the only “ITS” that will endure are those that enable us to distinguish between center and centrality.\n\nThis means creating ostensives, positing things we can look at and name, where they is or might be some convergence on the object. This is why the notion of political formalism is so important, because a genuine name unites power and responsibility: it creates a “marginal center” we can “imitate” in our expectations and judgments. This is the only way we can refrain from indulging in the extraordinarily powerful attraction of the role of exemplary victim, the one who is denounced or ignored by all but whom history will vindicate. Entering another space, one prepared to issue denunciations, can only be done in the interest of clarifying names and sorting out THISES and ITS—all references to oneself, as a center to be expelled in the name of consolidating the group, must be referred back to some IT or THIS that is being evoked to justify the expulsion.\n\nIf we share attention to that model, the expulsion then becomes impossible, but the reversion into persecutor/persecuted opposition is also deferred in the name of contributing reference points to the founding concepts of the space. This won’t always “work,” but it’s the only thing that it would ultimately be worth making “work.” The creation of disciplinary spaces, though, is not, or at least not always, an ascetic withdrawal from daily life so that the noise can be silenced—it is just as much an entrance into other spaces, a demand, which you are conveying form the center, that others sort out its “ITS,’ and the distinction between center and centrality they entail.\n\nPerhaps the hardest thing here is to refrain from entering such spaces with the posture of the exemplary victim in waiting, with the attitude that in rejecting me you are getting on History’s bad side. You really just want to help them sort out their own “thises” and “its,” and to see whether they can do so for an outsider such as yourself. You want to make it as hard as possible for them to imagine they’ve got it sorted out on their own. This can get you into the kind of precise questioning that Anglo analytical philosophy perfected, which, placed rightly, can be powerful; but at the same time, the question of authority is persistently pressed: who do you imagine is making all these things available, who do you imagine to be protecting the path by which your imitation of, or extrapolation from what you see in these objects can correspond to the attention you’re paying to it? That’s how I see the command of the center today."
    },
    {
      "slug": "the-sign-pdf",
      "title": "Lecture 5: The Sign",
      "source": "pdf",
      "sourceLabel": "Essays & Articles",
      "date": null,
      "url": null,
      "content": "Derrida pointed out that “sign” is an inextricably dualist and therefore metaphysical concept, being both “intelligible” and “sensible” and therefore in need of deconstruction. The question then is whether you want to see this as a problem that needs to be addressed. Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, the type/token distinction, Frege’s sense vs. reference all maintain this dualism. Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra is in a way a resolution of this dualism, along with the dualism of Marx’s distinction between “use value” and “exchange value”—just like exchange value swallows up use value, the signifier assimilated the signified so that reality is replaced by hyper-reality, a world completely generated by signs and comprised of simulacra.\n\nBut Baudrillard’s resolution is a dystopia. Even Peirce’s tripartite distinction between icon, index and symbol reproduces this dualism, because while the “icon” would seem to be a natural, self-evident sign, the similarity between sign and referent is in fact not “obvious” and is culture-dependent, just as different languages have different sounds for a dog’s bark. And the “symbol” is the sign that takes on its meaning through “convention” or “agreement,” which returns us to the same place, Saussure’s “arbitrariness”—how did we all come to agree that this sound would “mean” and “refer” to this. Gans, as well, accepts the dualism of the sign as having a material and immaterial or transcendent component, as the immaterial, transcendent, invisible “side” of the sign corresponds to the originary paradox wherein the meaning and the referent of the sign both pre-exist and are created by the emergent human community.\n\nBut Gans, without repeating this too many times that I’m aware of, has defined “God” as the word for which sense and referent are identical—the meaning of the word “God” is the reference to the being God. The implication of this is that the word or, more precisely, the name “God” anchors the entire linguistic system—every language, really any discourse, would have to have some word that unites sense and reference, signifier and signified, icon and symbol, in this way. Denying such words is really just another way of affirming them. This points to an interesting lacuna in Anna Wierzbicka’s natural semantic primes, which doesn’t include the word “God,” I presume precisely because “God” is really a name and the various ways of invoking deities in the various languages can’t be determined to be the “same” according to the linguistic protocols Wierzbicka has adopted.\n\nThis suggests that linguistic centrality of the name of God, which includes, embodies and resolves the paradox of the sign, should really serve a similar function, but to different ends, as Derrida’s deconstruction, that is, of revealing where a given sign system “arbitrarily,” that is culturally and historically, has come to resolve its foundational paradoxes by privileging one set of terms over another. What strengthens this suggestion is another, as far as I know seldom repeated assertion of Gans that “every word is the Name-of-God.” I’ve never seen Gans explore this claim, but I think that it must mean that every word, in the singular, irreducible way it participates in a given utterance, does, in however a distanced or mediated way, what the aborted gesture of appropriation did on the originary scene.\n\nHere, we’d have a distinction but no longer a duality—the word is itself, a single, definable word within a linguistic system, a word which has various uses that distinguish it from other words within the system, while its “destiny,” we might say, within any utterance is to sustain the center, to “mean” by invoking the participation of all listeners in a centered presence. We could use the use-mention distinction to make sense of this—when we use a word, it’s the Name-of-God, characterized by the unity of sense and reference, signifier and signified; it’s only when we mention it, to make a study of language, that these distinctions emerge.\n\nThat suggests that the dualities are artifacts of literacy, but, as David Olson likes to insist, the constructions of literacy can only make explicit what is already implicit in language. In this case, the origin of the linguistic dualities would lie in the rigors of ritual, where the question is one of performing a ritual, including its linguistic component, correctly, on the one hand, and performing other than according to custom, on the other, with potentially devastating consequences. The dualities of the sign, then, have their origins in the expulsion of the member of the community who causes the ritual to fail—any student with grammatical issues, accustomed to having his paper filled with menacing red ink, could, I think, be convinced that his little ostracism has such roots.\n\nThis hypothetical retracing of the dualisms of modern linguistics and philosophy allows us to revisit the otherwise rather bland assertion that signs have their meaning as a result of “social agreement.” We already have the paradox here that the only way of arriving at such an agreement requires a pre-existing agreement—a paradox pointed out by Rousseau and then Claude Levi-Strauss, leading to the logical, if equally paradoxical conclusion that language must have emerged all at once. Gans’s originary hypothesis is, of course, the solution to this paradox, but in that case it should also enable us to resolve the paradoxes in the word “sign.”\n\nOne problem caused by the metaphysical dualism of “sign” is that it insufficiently distinguishes between human and animal and even non-organic “communication” or “exchange of information.” It is very easy—it’s the path of least resistance, especially in the wake of the cybernetic revolution—to treat the entire universe as a semiotic system, with human signification being qualitatively no different than, say the “exchange” of pheromones that initiates the mating sequence of a pair of insects. Peirce’s “indexical” sign reaches back into the non-human in this way, and it would be possible to analyze the iconic and symbolic as more complex articulations of indexical signs.\n\nThis would make it much easier to “handle” and to justify handling humans in any “Great Reset” one has in mind; for example, vast projects of carbon minimization and extraction, or of social control and immunology. The only argument against this, aside from reactive invocations of some threatened human essence, would be to show that human sign use is irreducible to the universe conceived as vast flows of information. If the supposedly “transcendent” dimension of the sign could be shown to be explicable and, more importantly, predictable, on a completely indexical model, the traditional defense of the singularity of the human collapses.\n\nI think a better framing of “signification” can start from one of Wierzbicka’s primes: the word “same.” When we speak about the “meaning” or “sense” of a word, what we are saying is that it is the same word in its different uses. This “sameness” is verified, or affirmed, or authenticated, along with each use—this is the “Name-of-God” implicit in every utterance. Then the immaterial, invisible, transcendent dimension of the sign is rerouted to a continual regathering of the community around its center. The constative is brought back into the performative, to draw upon another tradition of modern linguistic philosophy, speech act theory.\n\nTo mean something is to “insist” that what you have uttered will be insisted to be the “same” by other language users in situations that will likewise be determinable to be the “same.” But the same what? To say the same “sign” or “word” is to land us back in the same dilemmas. Since this sameness is always constructed, selected, “taken” as much as “given,” we can take an absolutely indispensable concept from modern, scientific thought and say: the same sample. Taking and treating samples might be seen as a reductive procedure: this living animal, with its entire species being, meaning within human communities, evolutionary history and so on is to be treated as a cluster of cells which we wish to observe under controlled conditions to answer specific questions.\n\nBut this practice is true of all language use—we never “grasp” the complete “richness” of a given phenomenon—we always select and single out that which is urgent to us in the present. Taking a sample is actually irreducibly human—we could say that one snail following in the slime tracks of another for mating purposes is responding to “signs,” but we couldn’t say it’s taking a sample, separating out and setting aside a part from a whole in order to know the whole. If I point, or speak a word, or a sentence, or write a book, that’s a sample—a sample of language in general, a sample of a particular region in language, defined according to discipline, period, genre, or anything else, in accord with the needs of some inquiry.\n\nThe sample stands in for that larger “population,” metonymically, which is to say, first of all, indexically, but insofar as it is made to serve as a good or representative sample, also iconically, and, insofar as the sample has to be “treated” or “carved up” in a certain way, according to certain rules, to make it function iconically, then also symbolically, in some agreed upon manner. So, this accounts for the sign’s/sample’s relation to the system of signs/samples, and the users of signs/samples. As for the linguistic sample’s relation to something extra linguistic, now we have to speak GA rather than Peircean.\n\nInsofar as a sample of language distinguishes itself from the larger population of language, which is to say, from all other samples, it does so by directing our attention, ostensively, to something in the world which is now itself turned into a sample. Let’s say that a book directs your attention to a certain corner of some scholarly discourse, making “original” statements that take on their meaning from the distinction the book makes between these statements and some set of inherited statements, which they aim at displacing. Let’s say it’s a new interpretation of some historical event—the remains, the indications, the ramifications of that event, in memories, artifacts, primary sources, consequences, and so on can now all be examined in new ways—they become signs or, samples, now of that historical event considered along these new lines.\n\nLet’s take a more familiar example of a “sample”—something you would look at through a biologist’s, chemists, medical practitioner’s, etc. microscope—something that has been set up, prepared, treated in specific ways so as to make something visible. Your first question will be something like “what am I looking at?,” and the answer will be some kind of sign (“that dark circular mass moving slightly on the top left side…), and this sign or sample will direct your attention to what has now been converted into a sign or sample, as that “mass” is now a sample of the kind of thing one looks at in this way, under these conditions, for this purpose.\n\nA disciplinary space, which is really any linguistic space, generates transformational samples of this kind—samples that convert what has not yet been differentiated from some whole into samples of that and other wholes, considered in some way structured by the space. Every sample both represents and is represented. We can, of course, only replace the word “sign” with the word “sample” because we inherit established scientific traditions that give the word “sample” the meaning we now exploit. Any word, including “sign,” will carry its history along with it, and it’s better to be explicit about that. We can speak of “samples” precisely because of the very conditions which make an unproblematic relation between sign, mind and referent impossible—the massive displacement of places and people under what we can call the paradoxically centrifugal centralizing tendencies of modernity.\n\nFrom a gradation of names marking embedded relationships, each social “particle” has multiple and changing relations to the center. The epoch of “data” emerges for precisely this reason—think of what had to be recorded in, say, the records of the local parish in 11th century Europe—births, deaths, marriages, at most—and go through the growing agglomeration of record keeping and statistics that follow from the absolutist monarchs through the vast bureaucratic paperwork of the 19th through the mid-20th century, now all, multiplied immensely, gathered up into the Cloud. There’s no way of working through this vast storage of information other than through sampling and searching.\n\nSo, we’re all samples sampling. Like a lot of us now, I imagine, since it’s so easy to search the etymologies and histories of words, I do that for words that become important to my thinking, and so I’ll point out that “sample” is really, not surprisingly, a variant of “example,” which in Latin had meanings relevant to the iconic nature of the sign (like “portrait” and “pattern”) but can ultimately be traced back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to take,” or “distribute.” So, using the word “sample” to replace “sign” retrieves an originary understanding of the sign as a mode and object of distribution. The originary event is a sample of humanity because all members of the group became sampling samples there.\n\nI’ll also add that a sample is a “substitute” for the whole, or, in terms of mimetic theory, an “emissary” that we now preserve and amplify rather than sacrificing. As a cultural-linguistic strategy, using “sample” in this way to both displace “sign” and crowd out or assimilate other meanings of sample creates an overlay onto scientifically informed discourse that, first, makes that discourse more rigorous (any conclusion claiming to be scientific, indeed, any claim to knowledge, must account for the relation between sample and population in its presentation of the results of its inquiries); while also making that discourse more embedded in the human designing of the human that’s always implicated in technology and science.\n\nIn other words, we talk to (and as) scientists and engineers as people who as are always making meaning, rather than doing something outside of meaning. If you’re working with samples, you’re thoroughly immersed in sign usage, or sampling. And I’ll conclude with a quick mention of the musical meaning of sampling, which involves taking a piece of recorded music from one context and repurposing it for another, and which completely relevant to the sampling of the word “sample” I’m attempting here."
    }
  ]
}